Bitter (Pet #0.5)

by Akwaeke Emezi

“Show the monsters what’s going to happen to them. Strike terror into their hearts.” She looked up at them. “Have you ever seen what an angel does when it wants you to be afraid?” For not the first time that morning, Bitter wondered how Miss Virtue knew the things she seemed to know. “Have you seen this happen before?” she asked the woman, her voice tentative. Miss Virtue looked into a nowhere that was floating in the air. “A time too many,” she replied. “History is so repetitive, you know.”

“Hey, listen,” he said. “There is no shame in having anxiety around this. You don’t have to force yourself through trauma just to prove something to us or yourself. We’re trained to handle this. We just need to get you close to the angel, and we’ll figure it out from there.”

“We are each other’s harvest,” he said, and the others joined their voices to his, raising goose bumps along Bitter’s arms. They sounded like they were remembering a prophecy, like they were making a world, reciting a prayer. “We

are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” They repeated the lines two more times, then broke apart. Bitter’s sobs had stilled into a tearful silence, and her friends were holding her hands. She couldn’t muster up the words to thank the Assata kids, but they gave her small smiles and nods and everyone started walking again. “Gwendolyn Brooks,” Miss Virtue said to Ube as they moved forward. “You still speak those lines. She has been dead for many decades.” “Her words will never die,” he replied. “They remind us that we are all in service to one another, we are not separate.”

But we moving with love, and I figure that can’t be wrong.”

Don’t trust any movement that’s tryna make martyrs out of kids, man.

There wasn’t a Lucille without Mr. Nelson. He was there with his truck parked in front of the library every summer, posted up on a folding chair with a book while a wealth of watermelons stood stacked next to him. Just like in his house, a few minutes with him could turn Lucille into a place that was hopeful and beautiful, where you could almost forget what it was turning into.

The ache in her stomach intensified, and for a second Bitter could almost feel Vengeance’s awareness of her, even from blocks away. “Please come,” she whispered. “I need your help.”

“His spirit is not coming back.” Vengeance watched them, tilting its head slowly to one side. “Why do you continue?”

“Heal him,” Bitter insisted, refusing to look over at the old man or Aloe’s desperate attempts. Mr. Nelson could not die. Her voice rose in a hiss. “I know you can heal him. He was alive just a moment ago!” “Now he is not.” Vengeance looked down at her. “This is the way of mortality, little gate. He has crossed over.” Bitter felt a loud madness seeping into her head. “Then bring him back!” she screamed at the angel. He had fed her pie. Eddie loved him. “Bring him back!”

Vengeance stretched its dark mouth. “Angels cannot resurrect.”

It raised its head and looked off into the distance. “Worlds burn when we return. There is always blood.” Rage was blurring Bitter’s vision, thickening her veins, cutting the bottom of her tongue. “He was innocent! You’re supposed to protect the innocent!” The angel glanced back at her. “Blood is blood,” it said. “There are no new worlds without sacrifice.” Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, Vengeance vanished, and the four of the...

Bitter didn’t care. “I hate Vengeance,” she spat out. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! How could it say all of that? It could have saved him!”

Vengeance looked at Theron with its unforgiving yellow eyes, and Theron whimpered, cowering away from the angel. He didn’t look like a monster to Bitter then, even though she knew what he was, what he’d done. He just looked like a weak man, his expensive pants wet where he’d pissed himself, humiliated in front of the whole of Lucille.

Miss Virtue stopped short with a gasp, whirling around just as Vengeance grasped Theron’s head. Bitter’s vision was suddenly enveloped in the cool white of Miss Virtue’s suit as the woman pressed her close, blocking her view. “Don’t look, baby girl.”

Miss Virtue’s presence was still an anchor—nothing bad could happen to Bitter when she was with the woman, although now she was learning that Miss Virtue couldn’t stop other terrible things from happening.

The very air of Lucille had changed, and it smelled like a different kind of death.

There was blood, and she didn’t know how much of it was on her hands, because she had started this, she had called the angel through with her terrible wants. She had wanted to be a monster, to summon something monstrous to get rid of Lucille’s monsters, and now Bitter didn’t know who was the monster or where the lines that described it started or stopped. Did those lines reach into her? Was Vengeance still carrying out her wants or its own? Had she wanted Theron to become inanimate flesh, sudden meat slapping against the floor? Blessing had seemed to agree with the angels that monsters needed to die, and yet here she was, sobbing while Alex held her. Bitter stared at them through her tears. Alex was dry-eyed, but her skin was drawn. Maybe none of them knew what they wanted. Miss Virtue led them to the edge of the park and was about to turn down a street when Ube stopped her. “There’s Hibiscus,” he said.

Hibiscus shook his head, his voice tangled with confusion, an uncertain wildness flickering in his eyes. “I didn’t know it would feel like this,” he said. “Like, we’ve seen people die before, but this? This shit ain’t the same. It doesn’t…it don’t feel right.”

Miss Virtue gently stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. Bitter looked up at her. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I have to handle Vengeance.” Miss Virtue didn’t even look at her. “Not this time,” she replied, and there was something eerie about her voice. It was layered now, like the words were slipping and rasping against each other. Vengeance swiveled its scaled head in Miss Virtue’s direction, the eggshells along its spine clacking together in rattling succession.

Miss Virtue didn’t even blink. Vengeance let out a low growl, filled with more malevolence than Bitter had ever heard from the angel since she’d called it out of the painting. “Traitor,” it hissed, and its voice was a thousand knives scraping over taut glass, forcing everyone in the atrium to clap their hands over their ears, collectively wincing as the sound bled into their skulls. Miss Virtue gave it an empty smile. “It’s good to see you again, sib.”

“Do not call me sibling,” Vengeance snarled. “You have lost that privilege.” The principal shrugged. “What we call a thing does not change what it is.” “I’m sorry,” Bitter interrupted. “Miss Virtue? What’s happening?” “Virtue?” The angel reared its scaly head in contempt, bringing

its size back down. “That is the name you chose?” “You call yourself Vengeance,” Miss Virtue replied. “It’s hardly subtle.” “I am here hunting. Your only task was to watch the gates, and you have failed woefully at that.” Nothing about their conversation was making any sense to Bitter. She looked up at Miss Virtue. “Watch the gates?” she asked. “What’s it talking about?” Miss Virtue didn’t take her eyes off Vengeance. “I was watching the gates. You changed the timelines, veiled things from me.” Vengeance growled and its smoke rippled. “Because we knew your allegiance had shifted!”

“Wait,” Bitter interrupted again. “Aren’t we the gates?” Vengeance glanced at her. “Yes, child. The gates have always been gates. It was important to collect them...

She was staring at Miss Virtue, flashes of memory burning across her mind. The social worker. The pattern of rescue. Eucalyptus. It all coalesced into a sharp picture that cut across her heart. “You were collecting us?” Everything Vengeance had been saying to Miss Virtue was falling into place, making a terrible sense. “You…you knew this would

happen? That they would come through our work?” Miss Virtue sighed impatiently. Her shirt was slightly wrinkled, but she still managed to look immaculate, a sliver too perfect. “It was hardly a hobby, Bitter.” Bitter was still struggling to reconcile the implications, the long arm they had, the way they reached into her life, her own past. “But that would mean you been working with the angels this whole time?”

It had all been a lie, every brick in every wall of the school had been a lie from the beginning. Bitter took a gasping step away from Miss Virtue, betrayal flowering in her chest like a wildfire. She felt Aloe grab her hand, his palm cool and textured against hers, a new anchor as she spun adrift. “How could you?” she asked, her voice splintering. “You told us we were safe.”

“I used to work with them,” Miss Virtue admitted slowly, taking in the faces of her students as if it had just occurred to her that they would be upset at the news. “And then I stopped.” Vengeance made a rotten and rattling sound in the back of its throat. “Traitor,” it spat. “You lie to the child even in the truths you tell.”

Maybe this whole life wouldn’t turn out to be a lie, like every other home before it.

Miss Virtue’s eyes softened, the gray going from a battling steel to a soft rain cloud. “I met all of you,” she said, emotion thickening her voice. “And you were not gates, you were entire little worlds. You were more important than the use they had planned for you. They don’t understand humans, they never have. I thought—” She shook her head and bit her lip, slicing a sharp look in Vengeance’s direction. “I thought I had more time before they would come. They gave me no warning.” “You thought you could keep us out,” Vengeance snarled. “You fool. We are inevitable.”

Vengeance snaked its head to one side and blinked at her slowly, each of its yellow eyes scaling down, then back up. “The world always ends,” it said. “It is of no consequence. Never place your loyalty with flesh.” The angel was beginning to sound like it was running out of patience. There was a horrifying indifference coating all its words, and

“Humans don’t care about humans in general,” Vengeance spat, animosity dripping from its voice. “We are restoring what your people already contaminated. It is a cycle, it is a ritual, and yes, it is bloody. But a new world springs up in the clots of it.”

“What are a few lives for the greater good?” Vengeance replied, its yellow eyes unmoving. “We executed a monster.” It glanced toward the mayor. “We will execute another. And another, until Lucille is cleansed, until the purge is complete.” “You want to drown the streets in endless blood.” Miss Virtue curled her lip. “You call that justice?” “Yes,” the angel hissed. “You have watched the humans for decades! Their world is corrupt. What else but blood can wash it clean?” Its smoke pulsed and rippled, bulging out from its body. “You interrupt the hunt, traitor. Leave us now.”

“You doh understand,” Bitter said, her voice thin. “It won’t let anything stand in its way.” She was beginning to understand how single-minded Vengeance was, how little it mattered what any of them said to it, why it had been unmoved when she’d begged for Mr. Nelson’s life in the alley. The angel simply did not care. It could not be convinced or debated with. “Step aside, traitor,” Vengeance said coldly. “Or you will be gutted like the humans you betrayed us for.”

“Impossible,” it said. “You were stripped.” The smoke cauterized its wounds, leaving a stump where its claws used to be. Miss Virtue’s body was flaring out, expanding into an unfamiliar shape, stone groaning as her bones gave way to something else, something very loudly not of this world. “It was a terrible fall,” she concurred, her deadened eyes fixed on Vengeance. “No other angels to sacrifice a piece of themselves so I might regain a memory of what I used to be.”

All they had now were broken worlds and shattered stories.

Specks of light seemed to float deep within them as Sunflower leaned down to whisper in her ear. “You can close the gate,” Sunflower said, then she straightened and glanced up through the roof of the atrium. “I have to go

tend to my shields.” She gave Bitter an easy smile before releasing her shoulder. “Good luck, little one.” As Bitter stared in confusion, Sunflower turned and left in a flurry of crisp black.

Bitter closed her eyes and stopped thinking of Vengeance as an angel. It was a painting. It was a smash of smoke trapped inside a piece of wood. It was something she had made, it was hers, to make alive and to make…unalive. It was eggshell and ash, casein and chalk, wax and blood. It had taken this form because she painted it that way, had climbed out of the panel because she told it to. A small suspicion began to blossom in Bitter’s mind. Back in the alley, as she’d knelt weeping beside Mr. Nelson, Vengeance had been with the rest of the angels. It clearly didn’t care about Mr. Nelson, but it had come when she’d called for it. That was the rule with the things Bitter made. They came when they were called. They obeyed. A wild epiphany shot through Bitter. That was it; that was the key she had been missing. Her creatures obeyed her. Vengeance had come to that alley because she had told it to. She was not just a gate; she was the gatekeeper.

Bitter wasn’t afraid anymore. If there had been a miracle in any of this, then surely that had to be it, that she wasn’t afraid anymore. All the terrors Lucille held, they were nothing compared to what she had pulled out from her heart, what she had brought to life with her monster blood, her father’s stain, her mother’s legacy. Vengeance was a part of her, born from her wants, just like it had said. But she wasn’t trapped. There was always a choice, there was always time to realize that you had been so very wrong, and yes, there would always be costs. Next summer, there would be no Mr. Nelson handing her a carefully grown watermelon like it was a precious secret. Time was strange that way. There could be time and it could be too late, all at the same time. Bitter knew what she had to do.

She could sense tangible energy from Vengeance, dangerous tendrils that just wanted to hunt and hunt, all reaching into Lucille and connected to the other angels that were out there. “Maybe we don’t need you to save us,” she told it. “Maybe we can save ourselves.” Vengeance made a high-pitched clicking sound that managed to be full of derision. “Your own history proves otherwise, child.” Bitter shrugged. “Then we will make another history.”

Maybe there was only so much pain a heart could process at once, and now she was too numb to fight for her friend.

Making Assata a part of Lucille’s governance was an enormous leap, but then again, inhuman progress could be made on the backs of angels.

“They’re all Assata. They all know what needs to be done for Lucille to move on. As far as anyone’s concerned, the angels never happened, Bitter.” Even though it was a lie, a fantasy, the sound of it still sent a wave of relief through her. It must have shown in her face, because Ube took her hand and held it firmly in his. “It’s over, Bitter. Try to put all this behind you, and if you’re gonna remember anything, remember that at the end, you made a real difference.”