“Oh please, she’s basically a marionette working with invisible strings.”
“Zero expression. Zero personality. It’s like watching a mannequin do a plié.”
“At least mannequins don’t show up looking like they lost a fight with a garbage disposal.”
More laughter. Light, casual, the kind that doesn’t even register as cruelty to the people producing it because they’ve never had to learn the difference between humor and harm.
I don’t say anything.
The words pass through the void the way light passes through water—distorted, diminished, arriving at whatever’s left of my emotional core with so little force that the impact barely registers.Marionette. Zero expression. Mannequin.Descriptions I’ve heard in various configurations from various mouths for years, each one confirming that the mask I’ve constructed is working exactly as intended.
If they think I’m empty, they won’t look for what’s underneath.
If they think I’m nothing, they won’t realize I’m everything they should be afraid of.
I sigh—a small, controlled exhale that carries the weight of five years of mornings exactly like this one, different insults, same auditorium, same constellation of young faces who haven’t yet learned that the woman they’re mocking could dismantle their social hierarchies with a single phone call to the right people in the right shadows.
I work on getting up.
Slowly. The motion is deliberate, not because I’m performing difficulty but because my body genuinely requires a measured approach to vertical transition today. The stab wound protests as my abdominal muscles engage, the numbed area flaring with a sensation that’s more pressure than pain but still demandsacknowledgment. My left leg—the one with reduced sensation from the hip to the knee, the leg that taps when I’m nervous, the leg that never fully recovered from the fall—accepts weight with a microsecond delay that I compensate for automatically, shifting my center of gravity to the right before straightening fully.
I nod.
That’s it. A single nod, economical, devoid of enthusiasm or reluctance or any other emotional modifier that might give these people something to interpret. Agreement without investment. Compliance without surrender.
Miss Renard’s expression softens by a fraction—a change so subtle that only someone who has spent years reading microexpressions as a survival skill would catch it.
“Thank you, Victoria.” The words carry genuine warmth, which is either a kindness or a manipulation, and five years in Savage Knot have made me incapable of telling the difference without extensive analysis. “What song shall I play?”
I think about it.
The consideration takes approximately three seconds, during which my brain cycles through its catalogue of music with the efficiency of a search engine querying a database. Hundreds of songs, each one filed by tempo, emotional register, and choreographic compatibility. Most of them are classical—the traditional ballet repertoire that I trained on as a child, before the cliff, before the fall, before the version of Victoria who danced to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev was pushed off a precipice and replaced by something harder and less inclined toward beauty for beauty’s sake.
But the song that surfaces isn’t classical.
It’s the one I heard last night.
While fighting for my life.
The memory is absurd in its specificity: me, bleeding from a fresh stab wound, pinned against a concrete wall by an Alpha twice my weight, my left hand pressing a makeshift tourniquet against my ribs while my right hand—myright hand—pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and opened the music identification app because a song was playing from a speaker in the fight ring that I needed to know the name ofimmediatelydespite the fact that I was actively trying not to die.
Priorities.
Mine are objectively unhinged.
But the song was beautiful, and beautiful things deserve to be named, even when you’re hemorrhaging.
“Durand Bernarr,” I say, my voice carrying the flat, uninflected tone that the younger Omegas interpret as emptiness but is actually just efficiency. “‘Completed.’”
Miss Renard nods with the particular approval of a teacher who recognizes an unexpected but interesting choice.
“Excellent. I’ll set that up.” She pauses, gesturing toward the wings. “Get into costume if you wish.”
I look down at myself.
The black leather bodysuit fits like a second skin—matte, flexible, cut to allow full range of motion while maintaining the dark, minimal aesthetic that constitutes my entire approach to personal presentation. Beneath it, dark sparkling stockings catch the auditorium’s thin light and fragment it into tiny, scattered points of shimmer that move when I move, creating the impression of something alive beneath the surface. Like stars trapped under skin.
This is the costume.
