The Deal (Chaliez)
The pain was gone now. Now her legs were just numb. Which was fitting. And preferable.
Sumiru kept saying that once she got to a lorist, they could fix her right up and back to normal. But she knew they were lying at this point. They didn't even believe what they were saying. It was obvious on their face. They were a terrible liar.
Her legs were done. She had maybe four inches of uninjured thigh left, and everything else...gone. She'd never dance, twirl, jump on her own two feet ever again. No one would ever clap for her performances again.
Everyone had quieted down. Sirafin was wedged into the back corner and was crying quietly. Probably mourning her twin. Shay, Annily, and Koris had thrown themselves into linking a bunch of desks together to make a stronger barrier. Probably trying to avoid doing exactly what Sirafin was doing. Delo and Railin were poking around at the cephalon’s terminal, trying to see if they could use the battery packs from some of the handheld globe lights to get it some power.
There were so many people taking shelter here in B-19. She stopped counting at thirty. The room still wasn't jam packed, but there were too many people she didn't know.
So when someone gently tapped her on the shoulder, she didn't think much of it.
“Go away, I'm thinking about all the ways we’re going to die,” she muttered.
Whoever it was didn't say anything, and after a moment they tapped her again. Three times, each slow and distinct.
“Go away.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Chaliez rolled over angrily, opening her eyes. “I said go–”
She was looking right at her own face. Her brown eyes surrounded by pitch black sclera. Her own Zariman jumpsuit with the little blue and white flowers she had stitched along the wrists by hand. The colorful silks mom had woven into the lower third of her braids, clean, unlike the ones in her hair right now. Her own understated, circular oculus.
“Hey little lady,” her own voice said, using the stupid nickname her dad still sometimes called her. “I lost my light. Mind if I take yours? You're not using it anyway.”
She stared.
The almost perfect copy of herself grinned, showing all her own teeth. “Listen up.” She leaned forward, looming over her. “I can save them.”
They swept their hand around the room, gesturing to everyone else. Shay, Annily and Koris still stacking chairs and desks. Sirafin crying in the corner and now being comforted by some people she didn't know. Delo and Railin fiddling with the cephalon terminal. Sumiru and a few others doing something with a tablet.
“All of them,” the mirror image went on. “But you. Have. To want it.”
She did want it. She was only still alive because of Shay and Sumiru and Delo and Therine, and Sharabi and Saurlin were dead because they tried to save her. Because they were kind to her. They had no reason to be, none of them knew her and she barely knew them. Therine was from Lua, from a family of factory workers, she in particular had every reason to despise Chaliez just because she was a member of Lua's low elite. Shay, Sharabi, and Delo were from Zinruil City on Earth, a city of poverty and crime that existed mostly to pump out luxuries and information and manpower for those on Lua. Sumiru's family was in honest-to-stars debt slavery to one of her distant relatives (which she had always thought never actually happened and was just low-caste propaganda to make Karissh look bad). Saurlin was from a Plutonian underground mining community that she knew was worked to the bone to provide ore for the Executors.
They all had reason to hate her. Instead they carried her broken body through hell because they wanted to help her. Two of them died for that.
The mirror image grinned even wider, its face distorting. “Let's say we shake on it, eh?”
They were dead because they tried to save her legs. Shay was working herself past her breaking point because her little sister was dead because she went with them trying to take Chaliez to the lorist. Sirafin was sobbing in the corner because her twin brother agreed to help carry Chaliez to the lorist. She hadn't bled out only because Sumiru had kept calm long enough to put the tourniquets on her legs.
She had spent enough time with her head buried in her hands, ignoring what the higher castes did, or choosing not to know. Now those people had faces. Now those people had suffered and bled for her sake.
“Yes,” she said, and held out her hand.