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  “Deviation from your plan endangers the project even if the dangers cannot be immediately seen.” This voice came from General Jin-Soo Hale, the Hero of Harpers Ferry and innumerable other battles of a century long past. The projection of his mnemonic ghost appeared to stand ramrod straight on the other side of the shelter and wore a living chameleon-skin jump-suit that imitated its surroundings. His slicked-back hair was grayed at the temples with worry and middle-age, but his proud and shining pompadour was glossy blue-black, and it shone even in the helio bloom's half-light.

  “She was about to get torn apart and eaten by dogs,” Vora protested.

  “The life of one little girl is unimportant compared to the success of Sugar Music,” the General's construct said.

  “It's not too late to fix your mistake. Let her die,” the Fin Singh construct advised as he leaned, semi-transparent, against the wall next to the General. He wore an unwrinkled black suit that seemed to suck light from everywhere around him.

  “Sometimes,” Vora said, “I wish I hadn't taken you three with me.” She rose from the girl's side to pull a shot of water from the dowser weed's bladder.

  “The overlays you implemented on our mnemonic patterns have forced us to share your goals,” the General said. “We are as bound to your cause as you are. More, perhaps. Since you stole us from the Archive to counsel you, it would be foolish to disregard our advice because you find it distasteful.”

  “Yes, I did steal you to advise me,” Vora said, “I just didn't know that you were such cold-blooded sociopaths.”

  ”Sacrifices will have to be made, Vora,” the Mbuntu construct said. It made Vora sigh to hear her own construct say that because she clearly remembered thinking the very same thing herself as the Archive went mad and the Hale family's enclave ripped itself apart.

  Vora looked down at the body in front of her. The samples she'd taken told her what she already knew. The dead city's invisible poisons had already torn the girl apart from the inside.

  “Judging by the extent of the cellular damage, she must have entered the city from the West,” the Mbuntu construct said.

  “She's going to die,” the General predicted.

  “No,” Vora said, “she's not.” Vora dripped water over the girl's cracked lips and watched it seep into her parched mouth.

  “And why is that?” the Singh construct asked.

  “Because I'm going to heal her and modify her – protect her from the dangers of this place like I did to myself,” Vora said. “I've got what I need to do it.”

  “There is no rational need for this,” Fin Singh's construct said. “You're off balance and making emotionally based decisions. You plan to give this little girl her life because you are disappointed that you cannot yet make your Sugar Music City grow and remain standing. It is a substitution to compensate for your feelings of failure.”

  “Are you mocking me?” Vora asked.

  “I only point out your emotionally based motives. There is no rational need to save this girl.”

  “Yes there is,” Vora countered. “I need someone else to talk to besides my own cold-hearted construct, Vargas Hale's favorite poisonous snake, and the Hale family's greatest mass-murdering stratego. You three may be brilliant, but you're terrible company.”

  “If a mass-murdering stratego might make a suggestion,” the General said, “It would be wise for you to give the girl some more extensive modifications. Don't just save her; rewrite her for speed, like you did for the Hales. Make her a witch-sped blur. It's a brutal world; just look at her scars. If you're going to bother to save this girl, then why not ensure her long-term survival and give her what you gave the Hales? Are the gifts of the Stitchlife Witches only for the nobles?”

  Vora induced a coma so the girl could sleep through the weeks it would take to transform her. She placed her Stitchlife's wreath around the waif's head to regulate her brainwaves for the first week so that her new, witch-sped muscles and mind would be sure to grow and mesh properly. Vora suspended a makeshift yolk sack above the girl's head to drip nourishment into her veins, kissed her on the forehead, and returned to Sugar Music.

  *****

  “Why manipulate the Stitchlife into speeding the girl?”

  “Because now, we may be able to turn the girl from a liability into an asset that will save Sugar Music if Vora Mbuntu fails it.”

  “The Stitchlife will make the girl even faster than she made the Hales.”

  “We still don't know who she is or where she came from.”

  “The wreath has grown tendrils into her mind that will allow us to interrogate her origins. At the same time, I'll teach her a few lessons and see if I can't make her useful.”

  “She's a little girl, General.”

  “In a few weeks, she'll be much more than that. She'll be a witch-sped blade.”

  *****

  “Get up!” Hob shouted. Adolf tried to rise. “Get down!” The crowd of children around them laughed when Hob kicked Adolf down again.

  “Who is this ugly child, Molly?” the General asked. The General's suit was magic: it looked like whatever was behind him. That part was like a normal dream, Molly thought, but none of the rest of it was. It was more like reliving a memory with the General as her guest.

  “That's Hob,” Molly said. “He hurts people.”

  “And you let him?” the General asked with exaggerated astonishment.

  “I don't have any choice!” Molly pleaded. Hot waves of hopelessness washed over her because she knew what would happen if she acted and she knew what would continue if she didn't. “I don't have any choice,” she repeated.

  “Of course you have a choice,” the General said. “You can put a stop this.”

  Hob said, “Get up!” and when her brother moved to rise, Hob pushed him down again.

  “You should put an end to this,” the General advised. “Hob is dangerous.”

  “But he's too big for me to fight and... I don't want to kill him.” The General laughed at that.

  “Don't you? Are you sure?” he asked. “It's not such a bad idea if you ask me. Pick up the rock, Molly. Pick it up like you did before. When you killed him.”

  “I can't. I won't,” she said, but when Hob kicked her brother again, Molly felt the cold calm inside her. She bent to the blackstone and picked up a chunk of rock to smash Hob's skull. Molly winced because she knew how this would all end, but this time it was different. Before she could rise and strike, Hob turned to face her, and she saw his fat fingers curl into a fist.

  Then the world all but stopped.

  Hob was frozen. Deer flies floated in sanguine orbits around his head, and their wings were no longer a blur, but lazily beat the air. All the children looked like jeering statues. Birds and bugs hung in flight. Time trickled. Everything had slowed. Except her. And the General.

  “What happened?” Molly asked.

  “You're fast now, Molly. You're witch-sped like the nobles.”

  “Why isn't anybody moving?”

  “They're still moving, just much, much slower than you are.” Molly stared at the Hob statue in front of her. The General was right, he was moving, just barely. “Someone has to stop Hob, Molly. If you don't want to kill him like you did before, then strike him here instead.” The General pointed at a spot on Hob's side. “Strike him in the floating rib. There are many ribs, and all of them can be broken, but this one breaks the easiest.”

  “But...”

  “Do you want to let Hob hurt your brother?”

  “No, b-”

  “Will Hob ever stop hurting people?”

  “No.”

  “Then he must be stopped. I understand that you don't want to be a... monster. But not doing anything to stop Hob would be selfish, Molly. That's even worse. Are you a selfish little girl?” Molly shook her head. “Then strike him,” the General said. “In the floating rib.”

  Molly looked down at her tormented brother and up at Hob. She hated Hob for what he made her do to him and how it
made her mother and her brother and the whole town afraid of her. Molly landed the blow exactly where the General told her to, and Hob's bone cracked underneath the stone in her hand.

  The General smiled at her. “Good girl,” he said.

  Molly watched Hob roll on the ground in pain while her brother rose and ran away.

  The General made a game of it, and they played again and again. He showed Molly a dozen different ways to break Hob. It was fun. This is for hurting my brother, Hob. And this is for hurting me.

  When the General taught her how to break Hob's elbows and his knees using only her hands and her feet, the game was less fun, but she still played. When the General offered her a witch-bone knife, ornate, razor-edged, and deadly, she shook her head. Molly didn't want to play the General's game anymore.

  Then the General and Hob were gone, and Molly relived her worst memory over and over again, so many times she couldn't count.

  It was torture.

  Molly picked summer squashes in the fields with her mother and her brother and three dozen others. Just like before. Just like she remembered it. She shuddered because she knew what was about to happen. Again.

  Molly tried to tug on her mother's skirt and warn her, but her hands kept picking squashes.

  She heard the deep rumble-thump hoof-beats and saw terror on her mother's face. Like a thousand times before, they ran through the mud that sucked at their feet and slowed them down. Her mother pulled Adolf's arm from its socket as she tried to move him along faster so they could get to the gates in time. Molly wished her mother would grab her arm too, but she didn't.

  They made it out of the muddy fields and onto the blackstone fringe just in time to see the heavy timber gates closing tight. They were caught out in the open with nowhere to hide.

  Her mother's head whipped left and right, looking for the best direction to run. Then Molly saw her shoulders slump in defeat. Hope left Molly too when she saw what her mother had seen: the raiders were coming from all sides.

  Their mounted saber charge shot across the blackstone, and Molly could see the Red-Cloaked Rider that led them. His pale, beet-colored cloak whip-snapped in the air behind him, and even though he was so far away that she could barely see his face, she could see he meant murder. Atop every fur-skin and leather-clad raider was a face burning with murderous cold-fire coals for eyes.

  Some ran to the gate and pounded on the thick timber with their fists, but Molly knew the people inside wouldn't open up. Once the gates were closed, they didn't open. Not when raiders and bandits came.

  Sabers held high as they rode, the raiders whooped and shouted blood-curdle cries. The hooves on the blackstone were near-deafening.

  A trio of horsemen rode straight to the gate with torches in hand. They set small barrels at the base of the gate, touched torch to them, and rode away hard. Seconds later, there was a clapping thunder wind that rang her ears. And smoke. And fire. And the town's gate was open.

  Molly turned from the stunning sight when she heard the reports of hoof on stone close behind her. It was a wall of horseflesh, an inescapable wave, and it when it broke over her, it knocked the wind from her lungs, and the violent world spun, and the blackstone threw itself up at her.

  She saw Adolf's broken body lying on his back. Clouds floated across the pool of deep purple that spread from the back of his head. Her mother was already on her feet again, half-running, half-limping to him, but Molly saw another wave of heavy muscled horseflesh and saber-slash raider was about to crash over her.

  Molly couldn't bear to see it again.

  Instead of running, ducking, and dodging through the sabers and the pounding hooves and the crushing horseflesh, instead of selfishly running across the cracked blackstone and into the fields and the woods and abandoning them as she had before, Molly stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs, “NO!”

  The terrible world slowed and then it stopped.

  The raiders and their shiny sabers and their horses stood perched in mid-strike and mid-stride, impossibly balanced in the air. Molly's mother was posed near her brother with her arms over her face and her mouth open, drawing her last breath.

  The General appeared beside Molly. His magic suit was covered with the bloody tableau, and he held the little bone blade in his open palm for her to take.

  “Are you ready to be a monster now?” the General asked.

  Molly nodded and reached for the knife.

  “Good girl,” he said. “The first artery I will teach you about is called the femoral.”

  Chapter Five

  The City From A Seed

  Molly awoke weeks later in a hammock, and the first thing she saw was a veined sack like a sheep's stomach suspended above her. Clear liquid dripped from it down through thin, hollow tendrils grown into her arm. She turned her head to the side, glanced around the dim, and saw the water bladder and the queer pulsing weeds growing from it into the cracked stone floor. Vines snaked in from cracks pried in the walls, and their blossoms softly lit the room.

  She wasn't alone. A dark-skinned woman sat cross-legged on the floor a few yards away with her back to Molly. She wore a leaf-covered, half-crown wreath on her head, and it was all the color of sun-bleached bone. She seemed so calm that Molly was sure she hadn't seen the wasps perched on the wall. When Molly opened her mouth to warn her, all that came out were screams.

  *****

  Vora didn't know what else to do but sedate her, but when she got close enough to administer the same tranquilizer the wasps had used, the little girl stopped screaming and looked up at her with a shock-numbed, blank face. She hadn't moved for weeks, but she sprung up from where she'd lay with a blurred, lightning quickness, wrapped herself around Vora, and sobbed and heaved and clung.

  Vora Mbuntu had never once consoled a child in her unnaturally long life, but she'd seen other people do it, so she did what they did. She wrapped her arms around the shaking child, let her sob, and told her a lie. “Everything's going to be fine,” she said. “Everything's going to be alright.”

  *****

  “What's your name?” Vora asked. The girl took a chip of stone from the floor of the shelter and scratched her name on the wall before she said it.

  “Molly.”

  “Are you hungry, Molly?”

  Vora didn't find the yeast culture and the synthetic protein gruel the least bit palatable, but Molly had an appetite for it. “That's a good sign,” Vora said.

  “What's a good sign?” Molly asked.

  “That you're hungry,” Vora said. “It means the rewrites are taking nicely.” When Vora offered her more of the gruel, she took it eagerly. Vora asked, “Do you want to tell me where you came from... what happened to you?” Molly shook her head and kept eating. “Mother? Father?” She didn't respond. “Do you have any questions for me, Molly?” Molly's head bobbed up and down.

  “Are you a witch?”

  “I'm a Stitchlife Witch.”

  “Do you turn people into pigs?” Molly asked.

  “No. Well, sometimes. Where did you hear that?”

  “Do you know the man with the magic suit? I saw him when I dreamed. He taught me things.”

  “I'm surprised you dreamed,” Vora said. “I put you in a coma.”

  “What's that?”

  “It's like sleeping, but much deeper.”

  “Why?”

  “You were sick when you I found you, and I had to make you better,” Vora said, “and to do that you had to stay asleep.”

  Molly reached up and touched her nose. “The blood,” she said.

  “And the bruises. Yes. Symptoms of severe cellular damage. You passed through some very dangerous parts of the city. You were a terribly sick little girl,” Vora said. With some pride, she added, “I fixed you.”

  “Is it safe here?”

  “Not entirely. But it's safe for me. And for you, too. Now.”

  “Now?” Molly asked, “What's different about me now?”

  “I changed you,” the
Stitchlife said. “While you were asleep, I rewrote you. That's something witches do, but usually just for the nobles.”

  “Like the Hales?” Molly asked. Vora nodded.

  “You're a very special little girl now, Molly.”

  “What kind of special?” Molly asked, grinning widely and enjoying the witch's attention.

  “This kind,” Vora said. She walked to the side of the room and picked up three simple cups that her wasps had spun from the sands of the crumbling city. She held these in one hand while she picked up three spoons they'd made in the other. “Catch,” Vora said. Then she lobbed the three cups to Molly so that they spread out in the air. When the cups were at the apex of their arc, Vora threw the spoons, launching them at the little girl's head as hard and as fast as she could.

  For the next half-heartbeat, all Vora saw was motion, as the girl became a blur-armed Shiva. Then Vora saw she held the cups pressed against the palm of one hand with a finger inside each, and the spoons were between the fingers of the other hand.

  Molly laughed and chirped, “Do it again! Do it again!”

  Vora thought the girl might even be faster than the Hales, and the renegade Stitchlife congratulated herself on her only recent success.

  *****

  Molly awoke to see Vora sitting cross-legged, weeping over tiny piles of sand everywhere on the floor. Vora brushed it all aside and buried her face in her hands. Then she watched the wasps suck sap from the vines on the wall as she reached up, touched her wreath, and said, “Sugar Music automata version #435 lost coordination and cohesion. Evidence to suggest entropic quantum decoherance during the coding phase of self-replication.”

  Molly got up from the hammock, walked across the indoor garden shelter, and sat next to Vora on the cool, stone floor. She began to ask what Vora was doing, but Vora cut her off and said, “It'll be easier to show you.”

  Vora rose and walked to a bed of six rough-shelled oysters that grew on the floor near the wall and fed off the vines. She caressed the shell of one with her fingertips until it opened. Then, she used a pair of tweezers to take something from inside it. It didn't look like Vora was holding anything at all until she held it up in front of Molly's face for her to see.