The Pike by M.S. Hund

Author:M.S. Hund [Hund, M.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jebesyl Press

18

The darkness spoke to her of times past, of the girl behind the wall, of pain both physical and emotional. Names and faces floated there. Things she both longed to remember and knew she must forget, must deny ever having known. The mother who was no longer her mother. The forbidden names of friends and neighborhoods, the smell of the foods the Leopard would not allow because they reeked of poverty and desperation.

All these memories, pushed behind the wall the Leopard had constructed. Along with a name that had once belonged to her, but hadn’t been good enough for the Leopard. The Leopard had wanted a daughter named Fei, and so...

“I am Fei.”

She spoke the words into the darkness and knew both the truth and the lie wrapped up in those words.

Fei was the new girl, the one who had replaced the girl lost behind the wall, that benighted creature born into abject and punishing poverty but gifted with a mind bright enough to pave the passage for her escape. A mind bright enough to capture the attention of the Leopard.

There were tests in the government school. Every student had taken them. She remembered being bored with the questions but treating them with the reverence she normally reserved for fresh fruit and the days you could breathe the city air without a filter mask.

And that reverence had been rewarded.

In hindsight, she could identify the day the results had come. The students had not been told their scores, nor had their parents. But the change had been obvious. It was evident in the way the teachers treated her like a rare and precious flower, how the administrators suddenly knew her name.

Her old name. Before the Leopard had stolen it, had forbidden her from even thinking it. Before the Leopard had created Fei.

Fei could not help thinking of the woman as the Leopard, though she flinched every time she thought it, expecting punishment, even here in the confines of her own mind. The woman had insisted that Fei call her Mother, and Fei was always careful to do so. But in Fei’s mind, the woman was the Leopard, a name suggested by the fur lining of her favorite leather jacket and confirmed by experience.

Observant. Predatory. Deadly.

A replay of their first meeting, robbed of color because it was a pre-implant memory. The Leopard waiting in the head administrator’s office, a creature of porcelain and black ice. Cold fingers gripping her chin, prodding her cheeks, peeling back her lips to examine crooked teeth. The flush on her face and the cold on her back as she stripped to display her frail and stunted child’s body, bones projecting from skin, bruises blossoming on back and thighs and arms. Phone calls. Conferencing in surgeons and husband. The head administrator bowing and scraping, fetching tea, making promises.

Her mother—her first and real mother—ushered into the office, staring around, pale with fear.

The numbers, spoken in her hearing without shame, setting the cost of her body, of her life. The cost to make the old girl vanish behind the Leopard’s wall.

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