The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

And Nakota’s yell and her banshee laugh, too loud, much too loud and again that echo from the Funhole, twin to her voice, and I turned to see the door bowing inward, bending, like hot rubber and steam in my eyes, scrabbling to make the last few feet push that body, push that motherfucker to the limit, come on, and the mask crying out, “Come in! Come in!” and she there, coming at me, bending with a diver’s grace to insert herself, finally, into that big black hole, fuck it with her thin arrow of a body and her greedy smile and her dissatisfied grinning soul. Prey and predator, all in one; eat, and be eaten. “Look out,” she said, my last words but with an inflection I could never match, wide ferocious rapture and stepping onto me, it was deliberate, I know it was because it was her, all of her defined in that gesture and I grabbed her ankles right above her sneakers, sunk my hands, my strong new rotten hands into her flesh and squeezed, crying out as she did not, squeezing all the way to the bone. Feeling the pivot and gash of her tendons, the slippery juice of her blood, crippling her backward as the bones warped and. splintered and, finally, her shriek, as wet a cry as I had ever feared hearing, and I saw the bright betrayal in her eyes, more monstrous even than the pain, the certain hatred that I was as she was and always had been, had been hiding my evil under the thinnest, strongest veil: of weakness. Nicholas Wiener. Cutting her off, literally, at the ankles.