And Together We Fell

Part 1 Through 6

Part 1: 04.12.3222

The silent courts of Civitas Perfectus has a judge and three jurors. The judge looks up at Sepia, a once-quiet girl from a twelve-member family. Half of them had been sentenced to Archival Mutism, and the other half to more. And then they’d been killed by Caesar the Second, fresh off a combined blindness, deafness, and mutism sentence of twenty years, and newly released back into the too-quiet household, and near many of his victims. This is why they make the sentences so long in the first place. The judge sighs to himself. Because of Caesar the Second’s lack of control, he now has to hand down yet another sentence to yet another victim. Why couldn’t people just behave like people?

“Although the courts thank you for handling this dangerous criminal for us, your tragedy cannot be allowed to stir the masses. Therefore, I am sentencing you to ten years of Archival Mutism. You will be escorted to a long-term group home, assigned a caseworker, a therapist, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist. You will have all the support you need to thrive, but you must choose to thrive. Do you understand?”

Sepia nods, eyes closing slowly as she contains the deep feeling of loss inside her chest. She had only wanted to live, but now she wonders if she shouldn’t have just died from that original gunshot to the leg. Is there even a life after this?

“Remember, with excellent obedience, you may be allowed to downgrade to selective mutism, but you must convince a jury that you are responsible enough for this favor. Do you understand?” Sepia nods again.

“Good. Do well, and thank the State of Civitas Perfectus for your wellbeing, always. Dismissed.” At a touch of her elbow, Sepia nods once more and turns to allow an officer in a shiny black faceguard and riot gear to slide her hood back over her head. Properly blind now, she is led out of the courtroom.

She trails silently behind the first guard, and another brings up the rear. From there, she’s led down a hallway, where she can hear the sounds of briefcases and paperwork to her left, and the rattle of chains and the occasional knock of a body to the right. Heavy footfalls move up and down the center of the floor. Sepia wonders how many are in this room, and how many could have possibly earned this fate.

The air changes to a much cooler temperature, and she shivers. A touch on her shoulder stops her, and she’s moved up by about two feet until her feet touch back down on a textured floor. She’s moved to her right, and a push on her shoulder directs her to sit down on a bench. The click of a D-ring and the twist of a lock are the only sounds. Then, there is a knock somewhere to her right, and the seat and floor begin to vibrate. An invisible force moves her to her left, and she braces her feet against the floor to stop herself from toppling over.

After several turns and brakes, some of which are sharp enough to nearly unseat her, the changing forces slow, then stop. Doors open to her left, and she hears the lock and D-ring again. She’s guided up, down and out of the vehicle, and escorted so quickly up the steps that she trips. Her arm is grabbed tightly, and she’s lifted clean over the steps and likely into a building, judging by the sudden warmness.

Unceremoniously, she’s dropped onto her knees.

“Feisty?” a voice asks. Sepia doesn’t get up, knowing better than to move unless directed.

“No, just clumsy,” an electronic-sounding voice responds. Try as she might, Sepia cannot control her shivering. It had been a cold day. She’d sworn up and down it’d be a cold day in hell before she lost her voice, and yet, here she was.

“The clumsy ones don’t last long,” the first voice muses.

“See that she does. She got ten years of Archival Mutism.”

“I see.” Something about the voice has gone hard, and Sepia feels fresh fear file in on top of twenty-three years of old anxiety and cautious living. f**k you, Caesar. She’d only had her voice back for five years, and now it’s gone again. “Well, our nurses will take it from here. Thank you for your service, gentlemen.”

The sound of heavy boots heralds their leaving, and new hands haul Sepia up.

“The rules here are simple. You belong to me now, and you will do what I or any of my subordinates say, when we say, and how we say. Mistakes will be punished, and only continuous perfection will be rewarded. Do you understand?”

Sepia nods.

“You may think of me as Matron Fairwood, and I run this group home. Obey, and your life will be bearable. Disobey, and I have the power to take your senses one by one until you learn to obey.”

Sepia’s hood is removed, and she gets her first look at Matron Fairwood. She is a short woman in a white skirt suit and kitten heels. Her French nails are perfectly manicured, and her gaze is cool and emotionless behind her square black glasses. Sepia drops her eyes.

“Good. Now look up there.” Above the double doors is the house motto:

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Commit No Crime. Sepia nods and schools her emotions together. She’d been in a place like this before, with a woman like this before, and played this game before. She can do this. She has to.

Part 2: 05.20.3222

“How does Caesar the Second’s crimes make you feel? I know it can be hard to be sentenced to Archival Mutism as a child, only to return to it as a young adult, with your only fault being your decision not to protect yourself,” Ms. Hill, her therapist, asks her.

Sepia has played this game before too. She lets a brief, faint expression of sadness slide across her face before picking up her short, flexible ballpoint and writing in careful cursive on a sticky note.

While his crimes make me sad, and mine sadder still, it is for the best that I be quiet. There is no need to upset anyone.

Ms. Hill reads the note and offers Sepia the barest smile in return.

“Very good. If a journalist were to ask you about your experiences, what would you say?”

There is no need to stir up trouble by bringing up the past.

“Excellent. If you were offered materials hazardous to your health, how would you handle it?”

I would give it to the nearest nurse. There is no need to harm myself when all is said and done.

“Good. If you were to be kidnapped, how would you react?”

I would maintain uselessness until released.

“Well done, Sepia. You know, I had my doubts about you. Your casefile says some of your family members were alive when you were all found, and I doubted you would be able to adjust well to their deaths, knowing they could have lived.” Sepia’s heart stops. She hadn’t known that.

If they did not live, then they were not useful enough to society to be saved.

“This is very true. Twelve people in one house, all predating on each other and dragging even you down. It’s a wonder you didn’t go mad, living with them. There were rumors that your mother knew sign language, even.”

If they died and I lived, then they experienced the consequences of their own decisions.

“Do you think you are suffering the consequences of your decisions?”

My consequences are meant to hone me into a better tool of Civitas Perfectus. Therefore, I am not suffering, I am growing into what I was meant to be. And oh, it hurts to write. It hurts to lock away the many memories of fluid, rapid signing, to pretend she cannot speak physically when her voice is gone. But it must be done. It all must be done.

“Is that why you cry at night? Because you are growing? It is odd that anyone would cry over being useful.” How did she know Sepia cries at night? It must be the sniffling, because if not they would have called her out on comforting Samson.

When I lay in bed at night, I think of all the jobs I could work when I have paid my dues. I want to be perfect for Civitas Perfectus, and that begins with being perfect while in this group home. I apologize for experiencing so much emotion, and I will stop.

“See that you do. We can’t have a grown woman crying over spilt milk or future prospects, can we?”

No, we cannot. It is unseemly, at my age.

“Very good, Sepia. If the crying does not stop, I will have a camera placed in your room to aid you. Other than that, I suppose you’ve improved enough from intake to go to the library.”

Thank you for your graciousness, Ms. Hill. I understand that I deserve nothing and am gifted everything.

The evening buzzer goes off just then, and Sepia returns her gaze to Ms. Hill’s feet.

“Go to bed then, Sepia. May the grace of Civitas Perfectus always guide your way.” Sepia nods, stands, and quietly walks out the door with even measured steps.

Later that night, when Samson’s heavy breathing begins to hitch, Sepia silently slides out of bed and approaches her. She reaches out a small hand and grasps Samson’s large one, and their eyes find each other in the dark.

Sepia lays a finger against her lip, her mouth fully open to contain the noise of her own tears. Samson shakes her head and looks at Sepia, desperation in her eyes. A palm presses flat to Samson’s chest, then it transforms into a thumbs up and rubs twice against her jaw. I am a girl.

Sepia points up towards her jaw and twists her hand rapidly, before raising her hand, crooking it to bend all four fingers horizontally, and tapping it against her forehead. I know. They repeat these motions until their breathing has calmed down again, and Sepia slips silently back into bed, the pain in her heart not just for her own loss, anymore. She had seen Samson signing girl on other nights, but so far she’d managed to hold in the noise.

If Samson is to survive, she needs to be quiet. Dead quiet. Quiet like there’s nothing going on behind her eyes at all.

Part 3: 05.27.3222

“Inmates! Rollcall for the library!” Sepia looks up from her daily meal shake and swallows the last, flavorless portion of it. When her name is called, she gets up and deposits the plastic container in the square bin with a hole in the top. She hears the rattle of the container as it slides down the short tube and she turns to line up against the wall, nose just barely touching the ceramic tile.

“Step back,” one of the nurses orders. A hood is slid over her head, and she stands still until she hears the call to move left. One by one, she and the nine other inmates who’d yet to screw up this week are chained together, then led out of the building and into a van. The ride to the library is quiet as always, and all that can be heard is the rattle of chains as they are led into the Grand Library and up to the second floor. Individually, they are left at tables by themselves in the afternoon sun. She shivers as the light hits her arms and takes a moment to relax in the alien heat before a book is deposited in front of her.

Halfway through The Girl Who Disobeyed, she stills in her reading, then reads the surrounding paragraph again. And yet, the phrase is still there. It still doesn’t belong. It still says Wouldn’t you like to scream? An hour later, she sees the nurses begin to hood the inmates again, and she quietly closes the book and sits still, waiting for her turn.

Instead of being taken back down to the van, though, a nurse escorts her to a different elevator than the one she’d come in. She’s led into a room filled with sound. The tap of heels on marble, muffled thrashing off to the right, quiet conversation, papers, machines beeping.

“Slot D27,” a stranger calls out, and Sepia is led to, presumably, slot D27. She’s left without being chained to anything, and she wonders at the freedom, even as she hears a pneumatic door close behind her. She hears the click of a speaker turning on.

“Inmate Sepia Hawthorne, your identification number for the duration of this visit is SH062. You will be put through a number of tests to gauge the strength of our technology. Obey, and you will be returned to your current life with no repercussions.” Sepia nods.

“Take your hood off, step up to the mic, and scream.”

Her scream, as predicted is silent, and she stops.

“As hard as you can, as long as you can.”

Sepia follows directions. She can feel the vibration, and she thinks about everything that happened to bring her to this point. Caesar Hawthorne the Second’s original crimes, how the discovery of those crimes had landed her in a group home the first time around. The requirement of utter obedience, the panic attacks that led to being medicated so much that she didn’t know up from down, the-

A rapid triple beat upsets her throughs, and she suddenly experiences an intense pain in her throat. She chokes and hacks, trying to relieve it. Her knees buckle under her as the pain in her hip returns with a vengeance. She knew she was being medicated for it, but from the way it hurts now, she must not have been treating it right.

Eventually, she just lays there, exhausted, shivering, sweating, and nauseous from the pain. The floor is cold against her cheek, and she can see the holes in the floor. It feels like they swallow her up for a long moment before she retches up the remains of her meal shake, and the watery vomit disappears down the giant drain.

The speaker cuts on again.

“Stand up.” She leaves sweaty palmprints against the glass walls, and it takes her nearly three full minutes to stand, and she can’t put weight on her leg, but she makes it upright and looks at the floor near the feet of the man directing her. His shoes are black and shiny, and his dress pants are perfectly pressed. She hates him.

“Put your hood on and move towards the back of the stall.”

Sepia tries, she swears she does, but as she reaches down to get the hood, the dizziness overtakes her, and she falls over, insensate.

She wakes up back in the medical wing of the group home, and Matron Fairwood is writing on a tablet. She slides the pen into her breast pocket with a twirl of her fingers.

“What happened?” She points to a small pad of sticky notes and a bendy pen. Sepia only has a moment to think of what she should write, before carefully inscribing the words I obeyed with shaky hands.

“Well, if that’s all that happened, there’s no need to take you off the list,” Matron Fordshire says with a shrug. She turns and leaves, and Sepia’s eyes close before she can even think of getting up.

Part 4: 07.09.3222

Matron Fairwood is pissed beyond belief, and Sepia knows it, but there’s nothing she can do, except keep her eyes down. She grabs Sepia’s jaw and rips her head up to make eye contact.

“I don’t care what they’re doing to you, if you fall behind in your studies, you will be punished, got it?” Sepia nods, scared. They said there would be no repercussions, but they must have meant “none that they would be handing out”.

“f*****g useless. You should be dead, not rewarded with extra time outside this group home.” Matron Fairwood pulls her hand back with a jerk, and Sepia’s jaw slides painfully sideways. She does not react. Her whole body has been in a world of pain since her trips to the library started ending with tests of the equipment she both had installed in her previously, and new stuff they put in afterwards. As long as she obeys, though, only the mutism stays.

She sees Caesar the Second move out of the corner of her eye, but carefully doesn’t look away. She doesn’t need to give away the fact that her brain is running excess checks. She will only punish herself by doing that.

Matron Fairwood pauses, then smacks Sepia as hard as she can across the face. Her body goes sideways, and her shoulder jars painfully.

“There. That should get them to pick someone else, preferably not from my group home.”

By the time she’s brought down to the lab, the scratches left by Matron Fairwood have solidified into ugly brown streaks surrounded by reddened, bruised flesh. When Doctor Lewis sees it, he grabs her jaw to take a look. Then, he lets her go with a sigh.

“I can’t have my experiments taking on more pain. It’ll screw with my results. Install her in a permanent chamber and arrange for her custody to be transferred to me,” he says to one of his assistants, a mousy woman with eyes as downcast as Sepia’s. At her demure nod, Sepia realizes this woman must be mute like her.

Sepia trails quietly behind her to a brightly lit room, no bigger than a closet, with a real and comfortable bed taking up the entire backside from wall to wall, a toilet a foot away from it, and a floor that is, once again, just a giant drain. The woman scribbles on a sticky note and holds it out to her.

Get some rest. You will scream for real, soon.

But not today. Today, Sepia is made to try until the technology cuts her off four separate times.

Part 5: 07.30.3222

Externally, Sepia does not react to the small piece of paper soaked in the juice from her eggs, but internally, her heart begins beating as fast as it did when she was awaiting her sentencing. Then, like a good subject, she scoops up another forkful of the fluffy yellow food and eats the warning within it.

Don’t fall asleep.

Twelve hours later, long after she’d been left alone by Doctor Lewis to recover, a small cubby in the back of her enclosure opens. For a long moment, Sepia stares into the black hole yawning before her, before she rolls onto her stomach and crawls quietly through the darkness. When she gets to the other side, she comes face to face with the nose of the mousy assistant’s gun.

“You breathe a word of this, you die.”

Sepia nods, and in the next moment, the young woman steps forward and shocks her. Sepia sucks in a pained gasp, but the noise she’s able to make is surprise music to her ears.

“Oh my god,” she whispers. She hadn’t heard her own voice in over three months. She hadn’t been tricked. She was really, truly hearing herself. Maybe… maybe she would get to scream and cry and tell somebody- anybody- about what happened to her without putting it down in painstakingly careful writing or omitting the worst parts so that she couldn’t be considered unstable or worth watching by her care team.

“Put these on and follow me.” The warm, black pants, turtleneck, and soft-soled shoes are comforting after the too-light feel of knitted hospital scrubs. The mask that covers up the lower half of her face feels like freedom. The cap she tucks her cropped-short curls under feels like anonymity. The gloves warm her ever-frozen knuckles, and she feels a well of gratefulness rise up for the assistant, but she quashes it quickly. Who knows what this woman’s purpose is? Sepia pretends not to see when the woman takes a sip out of a metal container and slips it back into the pocket of her jacket.

“Next time, you’ll be able to drink the remedy. A shock is necessary for the first go round.”

The two of them steal through what must be the inner electrical and plumbing systems that run the lab on this floor of the Grand Library without a sound. Eventually, the woman brings them to another hidden panel, and they slip out of the library altogether. The fresh air is freezing at this time of night (it always is, no matter what time of the year) but they ignore it. Safe under the darkness of the alley, they haul up a manhole cover after the assistant unlocks it and slip down into a hitherto unexplored world.

The assistant picks up to a trot, and Sepia follows for as long as she is able before her chest begins to hurt, and every breath burns in and out of her lungs. Her leg gives out, and she clenches down hard on the noise.

“s**t. Okay. We’ll rest here for a few minutes. I’m sorry. I thought your leg was a punishment.”

Sepia shakes her head.

“Bullet.”

“Ah. Who gave it to you?”

“My great-uncle.”

The assistant c***s her head in curiosity.

“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?”

Sepia just stares mutely at her.

“Right. I’m Lily. Is your name actually Sepia?”

“Yes.”

Lily nods. “You ready?” Sepia nods back. This may be the last time she sees the outside world for a long time. Her limp is bad, and getting worse by the minute, but eventually, Lily stops in front of a bare patch of stone. She knocks three times, then recites:

“Vide omne melum, omnia muta loquere.”

The patch of stone retracts, and slides away, and Sepia is led into what looks like one of those bars from the stories. She’d never been in one before, but the many descriptions she read always pointed out a long counter with at least one person moving between it and a shelf of bottles and glassware. Sepia opens her mouth and finds she can’t speak anymore.

“Hang on. Gabriel! This is Sepia. Doctor Lewis put her through the ringer.”

“Heard!” Gabriel calls. Sepia is led to the bar and Lily helps her up onto a stool. He picks up two metal containers and reaches for a triangular glass. After throwing a handful of ingredients into the containers and smacking them together, shaking them, then straining them, he pushes the now icy glass across to Sepia.

When she drinks it, her throat warms, and the liquid burns on its way down to her stomach. She coughs hard, then nearly flinches herself off the stool when she hears the beeping.

“As long as you keep drinking that, you’ll be able to speak.” Sepia takes another, smaller sip, and the liquid goes down a little smoother. The pain in her body gets a bit distant. She drinks a little more, and before she notices it, she’s sniffling, then a tear rolls down her cheek. Try as she might, she can’t stop the tears and then she can’t stop the sobbing, and then she can’t stop anything at all. She doesn’t even realize the words that are coming out of her mouth until a warm blanket is wrapped around her shoulders, and Lily has an arm wrapped around her.

“It’s alright, Sepia. You’re safe as long as you’re here. Hey,” she says, and offers her own glass. Sepia looks in confusion until Lily gently taps their rims together, then drinks.

“You’re here because you’re exceptionally good at self-control, and we’ve been stealing those like you for a while now. To put it simply: we’re planning a revolution, and we need folks like you, on the inside, to pull it off.” Sepia nods.

Maybe before her second sentencing, she would have denied any involvement in something like this in hopes of living a normal life one day, but she will never not be the victim of a crime, and so she will never not receive a victim’s sentencing. If there’s any chance of having a will of her own again, she has to take it. To live like this is madness.

To die like this is inevitable. She may as well go out how she pleases.

She sees Caesar the Second in the corner of her eye, and she can’t stop her head around from whipping around and looking.

“How long have you been hiding that?” Gabriel asks.

“Months.”

“Jesus,” Gabriel says.

“Told you she was good.”

“And I believed you, but damn. Not many people can hide seeing s**t out of the corner of their eyes.”

“It was that or be moved to someplace where I couldn’t at least go to the library,” Sepia answers.

“I know that’s right. What questions do you have?”

“I’ve never seen anyone as dark as you,” Sepia blurts out. She slaps a hand over her mouth, and Gabriel chuckles.

“That’s because there aren’t any. Not really. We’re disappeared soon after birth. I’ve been legally dead for thirty-four years now. If you’d been any darker, you’d have been the same way. Let me guess: your whole family couldn’t seem to get out the ghetto no matter how you tried?” Sepia nods mutely, suddenly aware that no matter what she had been through, she could preach to the choir here and be heard.

“f**k that,” Sepia says. Gabriel picks up his own drink and tips his glass to her.

“f**k that.”

“f**k absolutely all of it,” Lily chimes in with a laugh. The three of them drink to their proclamations, and Gabriel sets about making another round. Sepia is a bit dizzy now, and finally feeling some semblance of okay.

“So. You in or out?” Lily asks.

“In. This seems a better way to go than most.”

Part 6: 10.21.3222

Sepia is awakened from sleep by a massive explosion somewhere in the lab. She takes a gulp out of her flask and slides out of bed and touches the invisible button that lets her access the panel.

“Accommodare vel mori.” The panel opens, and Sepia slides through and into the lab’s innards. She shimmies into her black uniform and slings an innocuous book bag over her shoulder. She darts down the hallways and finds her way into the service stairwell. Like a rat out of its cage, she slinks up the stairs using both her hands and her feet to take the pressure off her hip until she reaches the highest level.

From there, she wriggles and climbs her way through the inside of the top floor of the building until she gets to a narrow ladder. Going straight up is harder than the stairs, but she muscles through it until she finds the hidden hatch she’d been directed to. Directly below her is the smooth metal of the city’s largest computer. It controls the technology that has sentenced her and millions like her to Archival Mutism. She hopes blowing it up will make a difference.

She crawls on her stomach towards the end of the computer and turns her body around before taking small metal cubes and leaving them six feet apart from each other. Then, she’s gone, back into the hatch. She finds the one to the rooftop, and presses the small detonator left in the bag.

More explosions rock the building as the bombs go off. A beep in her throat signals her ability to talk. Others are still detonating below, destabilizing the lower floors of the library and starting fires that no amount of city employees and emergency systems can hope to extinguish.

In the frozen night air, she takes one last look out over the city. Other buildings are crumbling as she looks, and the satisfaction, guilt, and anger at the situation combines into a sick combination in her stomach. After another couple gulps out of her flask, she takes a running leap and jumps out over the edge and into empty air. She’s never jumped buildings before, and she hopes she makes it, but honestly, she really doesn’t care.

Life has been cruel enough.