Chapter Text
𝑨𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒍 & 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒃
ONE
𝐈𝐯𝐲
Shane Waletzko sets Jas’s body down on the counter. “Please,” he says.
Jas is wearing a limp white dress, stained at the hem with what might look like rust, but Ivy knows better. The rough drab linen, gray-hued from too many washes, looks like the many
items that could be ordered off a Jojark online catalogue. The seams strain around her shoulders and elbows. Something from the back pages, cheap and mass-produced.
“No,” Ivy says firmly. “No way.”
“Please,” Shane says again. “She’s all I had.”
Strictly speaking, that isn’t true.
But he also had tons of debt.
Jas’s parents had already died the previous spring, another quiet casualty of the contaminated reservoir water. If they lived in Lower Cindersap like Ivy did, without indoor plumbing, they would have known to boil water before drinking it, but alas they're dead and left behind debts for little young Jas. Shane had an ammount of his own, and being a good (or guilt ridden) godfather Shane took her in. and with her the debt.
Debts linger longer than grief in this society. And now, even with Jas dead, he won’t be alone. She was twelve, old enough to accrue her own. All her Jojark Corporation debts, floating around the empty house like ghosts, wrapping their cold hands around his wrists and ankles, spectral manacles.
“I’m sorry,” Ivy says.
Jas’s hair is damp and tangled. If Ivy didn’t know better, she would say the girl had drowned. But no one drowns out here. In the outlying counties, children learn young how to read the ground, how to hear the warning in rising water tables and when the ground under their feet can't be trusted.
Ivy hadn’t watched her die. Unlike half the town, who had stared at their tablet screens until their eyes turned red and bloodshot. Because how can anyone sleep when they might miss the climax? The spectacle? The slaughter?
Her wet hair is all Ivy can bear to look at. If she looks at Jas’s face, or the stillness of her small rib cage beneath the fabric of the too-small dress, or the dark ring of bruises around her throat, she’ll have to duck under the counter and retch.
You wouldn’t expect someone in her line of work to have such a weak stomach.
Shane sets his jaw. “Is your brother here?”
Ivy’s eyes narrow. She hasn’t been hard enough on him.
“Leon would tell you the same thing,” she says. “No human corpses.”
Shane swallows.
“I can pay more,” he says, voice pitching higher. “Sixty-five credits.”
Their rate for white-tailed deer is sixty. And with the way they’ve been dying off lately, soon they’ll be able to charge twice that. Ivy is not going to butcher a dead twelve-year-old for five extra credits. Not even if it would make her mother proud.
Besides, Shane is lying. If he’d had the credits, Jas would still be alive. That makes it difficult to pity him. If he sinks any deeper into debt, there will be nothing left for Jojark to take but him. Jas had been the shield, a flimsy one. A fragile offering thrown between himself and
corporate collectors. Their cruel vengeance disguised as justice.
Shane’s lower lip quivers, and it makes the rest of his face look somehow gaunt and hollow. He’s from Upper Cindersap, which means he eats better than Ivy does, but not by much.
Though she knew it wasn’t food that racked up his debts. It never is.
Ivy lets her gaze fall to Jas again. Her eyes are half open, pale lashes resting against her cheeks like dandelion fluff.
One thing Ivy has learned in this job: it’s harder than people think to close a dead person’s eyes.
Death doesn’t make you soft. It makes you rigid.
Rigor mortis sets in quickly. Muscles lock. The body preserves itself in the exact shape of its final moment.
In a way, that makes her work easier.
She tries to think of it like that. That the dead are helping her as much as she helps them. Both parties clinging to something that resembles permanence, Both want to stay alive, or however close can get to it.
The thought sticks in her throat.
Not for Shane.
For Jas.
Because maybe this is better than an unmarked grave. Maybe being seen, even if like this, is better than being forgotten.
With a sharp inhale, Ivy reaches beneath the counter and pulls open a drawer. Shane’s brows leap hopefully.
She takes out a small glass bottle and holds it toward him.
“It’s alum and borax,” she says. “Desiccants. They draw moisture out of the tissue. Help preserve it longer.”
He grabs her hand and pries her fingers open.
“Thank you,” he mutters. “Thank you.”
Ivy sets her jaw and gives him the coldest look she can manage “I want seventy-five credits,”
He doesn’t argue. He presses his Jojark card against her cracked tablet. The machine beeps once.
Without another word, he lifts Jas from the counter.
“Wait!” Ivy manages. “You have to get it under the skin and...” then trails off, unable to bring herself to give him step-by-step instructions about how to butcher and stuff his dead goddaughter.
“Thank you Ivy,” he says, “you’re one of the good ones.”
Ivy isn't sure if means one of the good residents of Lower Cindersap , the ones who don’t complain when the denizens of Upper Cindersap flood their houses six times a year by keeping the reservoir too high; or one of the good taxidermists, the ones who don’t charge for every stitch of thread or droplet of glycerin; or one of the good Soulises, maybe. With how much everyone in Cindersap Creek hates her Mom, that’s not a hard title to win. Or maybe he means one of the people who doesn’t judge him for what he’s done. For paying off his debts with his goddaughter’s life. But he would be wrong about that. Ivy might hate him less for it than everyone else in town, but it’s not something she can forgive. Or forget.
He carries her carefully.
Like she might wake.
The door groans on its hinges when he pushes it open with his shoulder. When it slams shut behind him, the little wooden SOULIS TAXIDERMY SHOP sign rattles like a cheap wind chime.
Ivy leans forward and presses her palms against her eyes.
She breathes.
And breathes.
And waits for the image of Jas’s face to fade.
When her heartbeat finally steadies, she sinks to the floor behind the counter.
The desiccant she gave him was worth at least ninety credits.
Leon is going to kill her.
——— ✦ ———
Ivy finds out quickly enough why Jas had been wet: it’s raining.
It hasn’t rained in a couple of days, which counts as a small miracle in Cindersap Creek. She has to dig her raft out from the clutter behind the counter. The sky is a bruised purple, streaked pink where pollutants slice through the heavy cloud cover. By the time she finishes closing up the shop, the water is already knee-high and soaking through her boots.
It’s one of those fast, violent storms that arrives without warning., the kind that raises the water table high enough to lick at the legs of their couch.
At home, Leon is probably already stacking sandbags.
She shoves the raft into the rising water and tests the depth with her pole. The surface reaches the nine-inch notch carved into the wood.
Then she pushes off.
Main Street has turned into a river, murky brown water rushing downhill from Upper Cindersap into the Shallows below. It’s after six; the evening commute has begun.
Shopkeepers pole themselves home toward higher ground.
Across the flooded road, Mrs. Prinslew is on her hands and knees on her porch, stuffing old rags beneath the doorframe of her shop. All four of her sons moved south to the City years ago. Now she runs the black-market goods store alone.
She wipes rain from her wrinkled brow and catches Ivy’s eye.
The question rises instinctively:
Do you need help?
But instinct pushes it back down.
In the outlying Counties, help is never free. Assistance becomes gratitude. Gratitude becomes debt.
Jojark taught them that lesson slowly, and then all at once, when the credits ran dry and collectors arrived.
The most Ivy can offer is a nod.
Mrs. Prinslew nods back.
Ivy poles on.
Punters crowd the water now, hawking rides to those who can’t navigate the flood on their own. Their boats are narrow and sleek, proper vessels with carved seats and raised platforms. Fifteen credits to reach the residential district. Ten if you live in the Shallows.
On the rare occasions her mother leaves the house, she hires one. Claims she doesn’t trust Ivy’s arm.
The town’s streets stripe the hillside like scars. The divide between Upper Cindersap and Lower Cindersap is impossible to ignore.
Lower Cindersap houses are tin-roofed and sagging, paint long stripped away by storm after storm. They stand on thin cinder-block stilts, porches drooping toward the floodwaters.
Upper Cindersap homes are smooth and white, rounded like insect eggs. Durable plastic shells. Rain slides right off them. Glass windows, retractable porches, sealed seams. Jojark pod houses. Airlifted from the City. Dropped neatly into place.
Her mother calls them sterile. Leon says that’s projection.
Their own house sits at the end of Little Schoharie Lane -the lowest street of the Shallows. There used to be a school there, back when learning required desks instead of screens and learning went all virtual. The neighbors like to claim their homes stand on former classroom soil.
Ivy and Leon never bothered pretending their house had any sort of noble pedigree..
She poles into the yard and ties off the raft at the foot of the stairs. Climbing up is slow work; her boots slip on wet concrete. Rain soaks her hair even through her hood and drips down her spine.
Inside, sandbags line the floor.
And she smells blood as soon as she steps through the door.
She shrugs off her jacket and hangs it beside Leon’s. Hers is green, darkened nearly black by rain. His is black, darkened further by something thicker. Today’s kill must have been messy.
Leon sits at the kitchen table, his hair drying into stiff spikes. When he sees her, he asks immediately.
“Did you board up the windows at the shop?”
“I never took them down after the last storm,” Ivy says. She tries a small huff of laughter. “Didn’t see the point.”
Leon gives her a grim smile and returns to his tablet, flicking between a game app and the news feed.
They were both circling each other’s real questions:
How much did you make? How many did you kill?
Ivy asks first. “How many?”
“Two rabbits and a white-tailed deer,” Leon says without hesitation. Pride edges his voice. “I was going to bring them down to the shop, but the rain hit.”
“I’ll take them tomorrow.” She swallows. “We should start charging more for the deer. I had a City buyer today, wanted four mounted heads. Four. I told him it’d be at least a month.”
“Bucks with antlers?”
She nods. “Made him leave a nonrefundable deposit. Two hundred credits.”
She had been proud of that.
Until Shane.
She never feels bad about bleeding the City buyers dry. They arrive in polished boots and jewel-toned slickers. When they peel back their hoods, their hair is perfectly dry. They smile at the quaintness of her shop and politely ignore the leaking ceiling and the buckets catching stale rainwater. They never flinch at her prices. Sometimes they even apologized to her when their Jojark cards need three tries against her cracked tablet before the payment processes.
They want stag heads for their dining rooms and dens-rooms Ivy has only seen on old television reruns. Stuffed rabbits for children’s bedrooms. Birds mounted mid-flight, wings stretched wide, chests puffed proudly, gifts for wives who will never know the smell of rot or blood.
It’s the Outlier customers she feels for. The ones from other towns in Zuzy County.
Sometimes even as far as Prairie County or Castle Village. The ones who save for months just to afford the scrawniest rabbit or a tiny field mouse for twenty credits.
Taxidermy is a luxury. No one needs it.
But there’s a logic to buying one that City people would never understand.
When you’re calculating the worth of your entire life, a beautiful cheery decoration,,permanent, can feel more valuable than a sack of half-rotted black-market apples.
At least, that’s the logic her mother lives by.
Ivy hears said woman shifting in her room, the bedsprings creaking softly.
“Good,” Leon says slowly. “So… how much did you make?”
He leans into the question carefully, like someone easing a door open to check if the person on the other side is decent.
Ivy draws a breath. The stag deposit had been good. Two hundred credits. But losing the desiccant wiped out nearly half of it. And worse than that was the humiliation of the whole situation.
She tells Leon about Shane with as much composure as she can manage.
As she speaks, Leon’s expression darkens. By the time she finishes, he’s standing. His jaw is clenched so tightly she can see the muscle jumping in his throat.
“Ivy,” he says, “you can’t keep pulling this shit.”
Leon only swears when he’s furious. And when he’s furious, she sometimes forgets he’s younger. She's the one who used to tell him stories during storms, when rain hammered through the roof and thunder rattled the windows.
Now he stands over six feet tall and rarely misses a shot with his hunting rifle.
“I’ll make it up,” she says, looking up at him through strands of wet hair. “I can finish the rabbits in two hours. And Shane was grateful. He’ll tell people in Upper Cindersap—”
Leon scoffs. “You cannot be that naive.”
“It’s naive not to automatically assume the worst of everyone?”
“No,” he says quietly. “It’s naive to think anyone’s going to look Shane in the eye again. Anyone but you, apparently.”
Her stomach drops.
She’d seen Jas stretched across the counter. Two, maybe three days dead. Dead to pay off her godfather’s debt. What right did Shane even have to mourn her? And what business had Ivy had to ease even a fraction of his guilt? What she’d thought was mercy now feels like complicity. or a cruel sort of apathy.
Shane will be marked for the rest of his life. A pariah in the Outlying Counties, for what they see as the most abhorrent and unforgivable crime. By doing so much as speaking to him, Ivy had marked herself, too. She hadn't helped their reputation, she had hurt it.
They really, really cannot afford that.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
The words sound thin even to her.
Leon studies her. His eyes, brown-green like hers, are hard and unrelenting.
“Maybe you should watch them,” he says at last. “Maybe then you’d understand.”
Anger sparks before she can stop it. “Don’t you think Mom watches enough for all of us?” The words slip out.
Her mother is too far away to hear, but the rule between Ivy and Leonis clear. They do not talk about what their mother does. or doesn’t do, and she had just broken it.
Leon inhales, there's a brief spasm of pain flit across his face before he schools his expression into impassiveness again, The rule isn’t just for their mother’s sake. It’s structural. Like the shaky foundation under their house. Push it too hard, and everything collapses. Neither of them wants to defend her. And neither wants to hear the other try.
Finally, Leon mutters, “Whatever, Ivy. Everyone watches. I don’t know what point you think you’re making by tuning out.”
Ivy doesn’t answer.
The curtain jerks aside. and its almost a relief.
Their mother steps into the room.
She makes sure they hear her before they see her; soft, dainty coughs designed to sound subtle.
She’s wrapped in the old knitted blanket they’ve had since childhood. But her hair is immaculate, sleek, black, perfectly dyed. Any fledgling strand of silver has been smothered by noxious (and expensive) dye.
“Can you two lower your voices, please?” she says. “I’ve had a pounding headache all day. A migraine. It’s been terrible.”
“Sorry,” Leon says.
“Sorry,” Ivy echoes.
Their mother presses a hand to her temple and closes her eyes.
“Ivy, you didn’t patch the roof like I asked. The dripping water probably caused this. It might even be an ice pick headache.”
It has only just started raining. But there is no point arguing. There’s also no point explaining that Ivy can’t reach the roof. not without balancing precariously on one of our tottery kitchen chairs. Leon can. But their mother would never ask him.
“I’ll fix it tonight,” Ivy says. “Just rest on the couch for now.”
Their mother sighs dramatically and makes her way to the couch, nursing a sprained ankle she claimed to have gotten from tripping up the front stairs. Although Ivy hasn’t seen her outside in weeks.
“People die from ice pick headaches,you know.” she says before collapsing onto the couch in a heap. “It’s not the headache itself. It’s the pain. Dr. Harvey had a patient who hanged
himself.”
“Did you see Dr. Harvey today?” Leon asks.
Technically Jojark is the only institution that grants medical licenses. They do virtual appointments, and airlift patients to City hospitals for more complex procedures or surgeries. You can get Dr. Cortell down on Main
Street to set your bone or cure your cold for fifty credits (or a skillful barter), but their Mom doesn’t trust uncertified doctors. She shells out who knows how many credits a week to video chat with her Jojark doctor.
“Yes,” she says. “I explained everything to him. He sent another prescription. It needs to be taken with food.”
Ivy swallows the question about cost.
“I’ll make something.”
“I don’t want that instant garbage,” her mother snaps. “Dr. Harvey says fresh produce. For my immune system.”
Ivy holds back again about telliing her that she doesn’t have to worry, because they can’t afford to have the power turned on right now, so the microwave isn’t going to work anyway.
“We might have some apples,” Leon offers. “Let me check.”
“No,” their mother says. “Let Ivy. You work hard all day. She just sits behind a counter. Come here and watch with me.”
Her tablet is propped against the arm of the couch. Ivy glances at it. And wishes she
hadn’t. The screen shows the paused VOD of the Gauntlet live-stream. Jas is frozen mid-leap. White dress blurred against dark trees.
Ivy looks away. nausea pooling in the pit of her stomach.
She knows her mother watched it live. She’s one of the millions of citizens who caught the Gauntlet live, eyes trained unblinkingly on their tablets so they didn’t miss a moment of it.
Ivy wonders if, in her rewatch, her Mom is focusing on different things. Little things she might have missed, like The tremor in Jas’s hands, or the way Jas’s tears mingled with the rainwater until they were the same rivulets that ran down her face.
The thought jolts her. While Leon settles down on the couch, she goes into the kitchen. whole body feeling strangely
shaky, the way it does when she'd gone a while without eating. But she's definitely not hungry now.
The bruises around her throat—
Ivy shakes her head and blinks, clearing the memory, and open the icebox. There are a few mealy-looking apples, but Mom won’t want those. Instead, she lights the stove and boil water for potatoes. they only have the powdered
kind, but potatoes are a vegetable. She thinks.
Fixing Mom a meal she won’t complain too much about is a supreme feat. The potatoes are reconstituting, bubbling like a witch’s brew. Ivy takes down two cups from the cabinet, filling them with water from the five-gallon
bucket, and open a new packet of decon-tabs, peeling off the generic Jojark wrapping. Cherry-flavored, Mom’s second favorite. they're out of peach.
The water in Cindersap Creek, and in most of the outlying Counties, is far too polluted to risk drinking. Jojark’s solution is decontamination tablets, chalky little pills that we drop into every glass. Ivy watches the tablet sizzle and
dissolve, dyeing the water a pale pink. The carbonation always makes her nose burn.
Jojark probably realized that they’d lose half the population in a matter of weeks if they didn’t make the decon-tabs cheap, so theycan almost always afford them, at least the unflavored ones. But Mom hates those, and since she’s already in a bad mood, cherry it is.
When Ivy brings out the potatoes, her Mom thins her lip.
“Sorry,” Ivy says. “We don’t have much else. I’ll go down to Mrs. Prinslew’s tomorrow and see what she’s got.”
The VOD is paused again, thankfully. Ivy doesn’t risk so much as a glance toward the screen.
“Do you really think this is enough for your brother?” her mother protests. “He spends the whole day hunting in the wet and cold. I’m not asking for me. But for Leon—”
“It’s fine, Mom,” Leon cuts in, his voice muffled around a mouthful of potatoes. He’s already wolfed down half the plate.
Ivy doesn’t take her own meals in front of her mother anymore. It’s too much of an ordeal. Her mother likes to pinch the bit of fat above her elbow, holding it between her fingers as
proof that she could stand to eat far less than she does.
Her mother eats in small, reluctant bites. Between mouthfuls, she gives theatrical, full-body shudders.
“It’s so cold in here,” she says. “Is the heat off?”
The question isn’t innocent. She knows the heat is off. They can’t afford it right now, and it’s become too humiliating for Ivy and Leon to keep begging coal from the Mulders next door.
If Ivy weren’t so tired, so shaken by her encounter with Shane, she might stay quiet and let Leon answer. But he’s still shoveling potatoes into his mouth, and his finger hovers dangerously close to the play button on the tablet, threatening to resume the video.
So she says it.
“Yes. It’s too expensive right now.”
She can’t make herself add sorry.
The regret is immediate.
She’s awakened the worst version of her mother. Maybe the ugliest.
“Ivy,” her mother says, voice rising, thin and sharp, “I cannot deal with your selfishness right now.”
Perhaps it is selfish, if seen the way Jojark prefers.
That’s the genius of their credit system. Everything is affordable...if you’re willing to go into the red.
There’s probably not a single person in Cindersap Creek who isn’t at least a thousand credits in debt to Jojark. You keep buying. The ledger sinks deeper into scarlet. Collection alerts begin appearing. And if you sink far enough, they send Masks.
Then you work in one of their packaging plants until the debt is cleared. But sometimes there’s too much debt to clear.
Five hundred thousand credits.
That’s what Shane owed.
Unlike their neighbors, Ivy and Leon refuse to go into the red. For Leon, it has everything to do with their father.
For Ivy, it’s simpler.
She’s afraid.
Afraid constantly.
And maybe that’s why she refuses to watch the Gauntlets. She doesn’t want it to feel real. She wants it to remain a spectacle. A show.
But it’s difficult to pretend when she’s seen Jas’s body stretched across her counter.
So she lets her mother rage.
She absorbs the accusations; laziness, selfishness, lack of compassion. Her mother continues long enough that Leon finally pushes back from the table and retreats to his room in silence.
He probably believes he’s the protector now that their father is gone. That’s certainly how it
appears to the rest of Cindersap Creek. But behind closed doors, it’s still Ivy who absorbs the impact. She takes the blows every time.
Eventually she manages to escape to her room.
It’s barely a room, just a cot shoved against the east wall, separated from Leon’s side of the house by a hanging bedsheet. They can see each other’s shadows move behind it. Hear the faint murmur of each other’s voices, though they both wear headphones most nights.
She doesn’t know what he does on his tablet.
And she’s relieved he doesn’t know what she does on hers.
Ivy forces herself to choke down some leftover pasta, out of her mother’s sight, then sets the empty plate on the floor and props her tablet against her pillow.
From the other side of the curtain, she hears Leon roll over on his cot.
She slips on her headphones and opens the $ponsor app, checking to see how many
subscribers are online. After dinner is usually the best time. Everyone is home from work, with a few hours to kill before bed.
The small counter in the top right corner reads 72.
Good enough.
She switches on her front camera and taps the red button labeled STREAM.
“Hi everyone,” she whispers. “Sorry I have to be quiet. My mom and brother are asleep.”
Her subscribers know more about her life than anyone else. They pay to listen. To ask questions. at first, she wondered what they could possibly get out of it. And sure, there are a fair number of men with shudder-inducing intentions. But if they say anything too creepy in the chat, there's a block button special for that. They’re all anonymous, a string of random numbers. Jojark account numbers, with no picture attached.. But she recognizes their typing styles.
A lot of them tell her about themselves, too. There’s the same thread that runs through every story, whether it be a negligent spouse, grown-up children moved far away, a luckless love life, a failed marriage. Their loneliness pulses through the screen.
She also wonders why they choose to watch her when there are thousands of other streamers out there. many of them far more, well, forthcoming than she is.
As she streams, she studies her own face on the screen, slightly warped by the cracks spidering across her tablet. Her skin is olive-toned, and she suspects it would be nearly as dark as her father’s if she didn’t live in Cindersap Creek, where the sun only breaks through the clouds once every three days. Her hair is the same muted ash brown as his. Her eyes are a wavering hazel, her brows arched and thick, her lips full.
It’s difficult to look at herself without hearing what her mother would say; that she resembles her father too much.
“Leon takes after me,” her mother always says proudly, one of her more egregious delusions.
Ivy and Leon are mirror images of each other. Some people still mistake them for twins. It’s strange how the same features can look so different on different people.
The streams are something Ivy keeps secret from her mother, and even from Leon. They don’t judge each other for what they do to survive; whether that’s swiping coal from the Mulders’ shed or sucking marrow from rabbit bones while their mother turns away in disgust.
In that sense, they are a team. Just like they are in the shop. Leon hunting, Ivy mounting.
But streaming feels different.
It’s another kind of desperation. One that embarrasses her too much to admit.
“It’s raining so hard today,” she tells her chat. “And I had this one client come into my shop, you won’t believe what he wanted me to do…”
She keeps talking into the fuzzy tablet screen. She answers questions. Listens to stories in return. With her longtime subscribers, she knows what they’ll ask and how they expect her to respond.
Five credits per question. Five more for the robotic voice.
Some nights, she makes more in an hour than she earns in an entire week at the shop.
She talks about the storm. About the shop. Carefully omits Shane’s name.
Hours pass. It’s easy to lose track of time when she’s streaming. At first it had been awkward, but now she can talk almost nonstop for hours. The things she finds impossible to say to Leon are somehow simple to confess to strangers. Her subscribers know about her mother and her dramatically exaggerated ailments. About how long it took Ivy to understand that when their father disappeared, he was never coming back. Subjects she and Leon have silently agreed never to touch.
Seven turns into ten. Ten into midnight.
When she finally switches off her camera, exhaustion weighs on her so heavily she can barely keep her eyes open. Some subscribers linger after she logs off, their unanswered questions hanging in the chat.
She thinks that might be why they watch her.
They recognize their own loneliness in hers.
While her voice and face fill their empty houses, their questions stack up like a seawall ,a fragile barrier against the bleak, indifferent silence that would crush her if she allowed it.
She scrolls through the remaining messages.
One comment stands out.
A username she doesn’t recognize.
A new subscriber.
<have u seen it??
Then they post a link.
She recognizes it. It’s the same one at the top of her Mom’s browser screen.
Jojark.gov/Gauntlet.
Leon’s voice echoes in her memory. Maybe you should watch. Maybe then you’d understand.
She thinks of her humiliating encounter with Shane, how she damaged their reputation, all because she's too
much of a coward to so much as peek at what everyone watches greedily, eagerly, or with a repulsed sense of obligation.
She clicks.
The page loads slowly.
She braces herself to see Jas again.
But when the video resolves, it’s not Jas on the screen.
It’s a helicopter hovering over forest canopy. she hears the deafening whir of its blades. It
hovers a few feet above the ground, stirring up dead leaves, mud flecking its sleek black hull.
Then—
Her.
A close-up. A sheet of blond hair, pin-straight and shimmering. An oval face, equally pale, as pristine as the snow that hasn’t fallen over their town in decades. Angular cheekbones and
lips set in a impassive line. A girl,
No older than Ivy. And she looks... almost familiar, but she couldn't be.
For a moment, Ivy almost thinks she’s beautiful. Then she remembers. That isn’t a girl, not really. She’s a cold creature that was crafted in the Jojark labs, starting with a human body and then adding or subtracting whatever they need to turn her into their perfect weapon. She wears a girl’s face, and maybe it is an exceptionally lovely one. But inside, she’s wires and hardware, alloys and electrical circuits threaded around flesh and bone.
Jojark calls them Angels, the name fitting in its cruel irony. And yet—
She's captivated, sickeningly, just like everyone else in the creek, by the coldly beautiful face of Jas’s killer.