“They are called Memory Slicers. They would hold me in the air as a snake bit me. I would retreat to my thoughts, and they would follow. They sorted my mind like how a doctor would sort through herbs until they found a precious memory of Teo and me. Then they would… shred it. Twist it. The memories hurt—burn. And they aren’t real anymore.”
My throat feels so raw that I can hardly breathe.
She tilts her head to the side. “Then why do you still love him if all the memories where that love blossomed are now ruined?”
I swallow and tap the gem on my chest.
“Rholker miscalculated. Teo is still my mate—a divine gift. That’s magic that is more powerful than whatever those women possess.”
“But they broke you,” she insists, studying the way my clothes hang off my shoulders despite being fed often. “Aren’t you at least angry they did it?”
I let out a mirthless laugh. “Me siento jodidamente furiosa.”?1
Her expression changes, and she nods, pleased.
Melisa is familiar to me in an almost uncanny way. I recognize the masks she wears for different people and understand her soul, which is worn down to a blunt. She’s angry, numb, lashing at whatever she can without getting punished.
My mother dealt with all the whispered words of other women, the verbal and literal lashings from those who were angry that someone with power gave her morsels of privilege.
“How dare she?”they would say openly. She was a human woman. Aslave.
When Teo took me, I was angry and afraid. I was barely surviving. I realized just how much of that was my anticipation to experience everything my mother went through.
My mother’s mother was dead before I was born, but she was cruel and everything my mother didn’t want to be.
I’ve wondered about my grandmother. Her family. Her friends.
I look around the room as if I could see the generations of slaves past, standing at different corners. It is as if I can feel the angry spirit of all those who came before—the ones who watched my every move and felt justified every time I lashed out.
Anger will pass down from person to person, demanding to be felt until someone finally feels it—and fixes it.
“What are you thinking about now?” Melisa asks, drawing me out of my thoughts.
She seems insecure, as if she’s trying hard not to let on how much it irritates her that I got lost in myself.
I frown.
“I’m still thinking about how angry I am.”
She lets out a hearty, unexpected laugh, turns from the tub, and kneels in front of the cage. “Fuck yes. Tell me why.”
My eyebrows draw together, but I can’t help but smile.
There isn’t a friendship between Melisa and me, not yet, but there is an understanding. “You know about my brother, Mikal. When my mother died, we were all each other had. I raised him like my own child. He’s sixteen now, and they have him somewhere, torturing him.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” she asks carefully.
“When I was left in Enduvida, maybe… five months ago. It kills me to walk around the lumber yards, scanning for his tall frame, and never catch a glimpse. It’s like there’s this ball of fire churning in my belly, waiting to explode and burn Zlosa down.We shouldn’t be here.”
A heartbeat passes, then another. I feel my heart crack open a little wider as I swallow hard. “It doesn’t matter to me that he’s half-giant; I raised him. I fed him while he shot up like a weed, taught him to walk, and mended all his wounds. Caring for someone else is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but the love that I experienced was also one of the purest things I’ve ever felt. That kind of love doesn’t blossom in Zlosa, and it is horrible.Tragic.”
A hot tear splatters on my cheek when she reaches through the bars and grabs my shoulder, forcing me to look at her. Her dark brown eyes are glowing in the dim lighting. She’s never looked at me so intently.
“Good for you. I mean it. I…” Her throat bobs. “Anger gets me up in the morning, pushes me to walk through the snow in barely adequate clothes, and forces me to lie flat on my back when Eneko decides he deserves a release. It fuels every smile, every flirtatious quip. Anger keeps me safe and warm at night when I hear the lashes of other slaves outside the doors.” She keeps going, and I feel the weight of every word. She says it like a joke, but I know the reality of her words.
“You’re right—anger is not evil, but it is dangerous. Anger is what will give us the tenacity to get out of this place, but if you let it burn too hard and hot for too long, it will burn away everything inside of you.”
Every stony layer guarding her true thoughts and feelings falls away, and the grief turns her tanned skin ashen.
