Ever Winter by Hackshaw Peter

Author:Hackshaw, Peter [Hackshaw, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Systopian
Publisher: Monolith Books
Published: 2020-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Therapy?

Henry had never been vain. There was no need for it in the modern world. Only the king had seen fit to preen and groom. Henry had not understood it, but then he wasn’t a king, or a leader of any kind.

He realized that what the king was doing was making himself unlike the rest. Distinguishable from the citizens he had power over. It showed them that he was distinctive. Singular. It had worked with Henry. Never in a million years would he forget how the king had looked that day. The absence of hair and eyebrows and the little mustache. The man was an ogre. A tyrant. It made forgetting his ordeal all the harder, but holding onto his hate all the easier.

In contrast, Sissel had not done anything to alter her appearance. Henry hadn’t recognized her as the head of the salvagers when he’d first entered the bay. Yet she had earned her place at the helm of the crew and Henry could only imagine the things she had done over the years to get there.

He thought about how Sissel had been betrayed by Skindred, then Lanner and knew that her decision to help him had endangered her. He hoped that Yaxley and the others would protect her as best they could.

Hepburn had shown Henry his reflection by buffing a sphere of satellite wreckage until it shone back at them. Henry was shocked to see the change in him. He couldn’t stop looking at the lens that filled the void where his eye had been. The skin around it had healed well, but it still looked monstrous. The weirdest thing for Henry was that there were no eyelashes on that side of his face. They’d been burned during the operation to install the new tech into his socket. He marveled at the oddity. Such a simple detail with an unheralded function. Eyelashes.

He stared at his face for the longest time he had ever done so and studied all the details, uncertain when he’d next gaze upon his own face again. He let a few tears fall from his human eye and then he wiped them and his demeanor changed.

“I have to get used to the mess of it,” Henry grimaced, speaking to his reflection, “I’m alive, at least. I can’t undo his work.”

Henry wondered if his sisters would become accustomed to it and accept the way he’d altered..? Would they see past it and recognize him again as Henry, their brother? Or would they hate what he’d become?

Henry came to the realization then that his sisters might already assume him dead. If he saw them again, there was a chance they might cast him away. A ghost. Not Henry.

It pained him to think of Iris especially turning her back on him, or unable to look upon him without seeing only the modified remains of an eye and the act that had led to its ruin. When they looked upon Henry, would they only and always picture the king and their tormentors?

All of it was out of Henry’s control.

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