Telsis was not a peaceful land. Its nations found every reason to war with their neighbors – religious, economic, and imperial – marking the decades with the blood of millions. They had created a brief peace through diplomacy. Through treaty after treaty, they formed labyrinthine defensive pacts with their neighbors, coalescing into two equal and opposite coalitions of allied nation-states transitively committed to each others' mutual defense. The supercontinent's geopolitics had turned into a mousetrap on a landmine. By the turn of the century, the smallest border skirmish would trigger the largest armed conflict in human history.
It was hoped, rather optimistically, that this would compel the nations of Telsis to make peace with their neighbors.
The major belligerents of the Continental War, as it came to be called, were the Northern Alliance and the Southern Union – or the 'Allies' and the 'Union,' respectively. The Allied nations sat in the northeast of Telsis; the Union sat to the southwest. Leidenschaftlich, a prosperous maritime state, was the Union's hegemon and
de facto leader, while its major adversaries in the Allied
entente were the Gardarik Empire and the Salbert Holy State.
The war's cause is of mostly academic interest. The scholarly consensus, formed over the next thirty years, was that steep tariffs levied by Leidenschaftlich's
Reichstag on exports to Allied nations had driven the Gardarik and Salbert economies into depression, conditions that facilitated the rise of ultranationalist hardliners who sought to equalize their nations' trade deficits with the Union, who would then use the Kingdom of Bociaccia's granting of city-state self-governance to the Holy Land of Intensa as a religious pretext to launch an invasion that they would try to steer towards the imposition of favorable trading terms upon Leidenschaftlich's mercantile cartel.
Soldiers of neither side knew why they were fighting.
The Union saw surprising success in the war's early years, pushing Allied forces out of Bociaccia and into the Salbertan border regions. There the war entered a stalemate, as both the Allied and Union forces dug the elaborate trenches that would define the Continental War. The Allies never achieved naval supremacy, and planned blockades of Leidenschaftlich's ports never materialized. After four years, with territory only changing hands in the hapless states that bordered the warring superpowers, it seemed that the war would end in the Union's favor.
Status quo ante bellum, with the Allies paying reparations to the Union for starting the conflict, driving their economies even further into ruin.
Until Salbertan engineers invented the battle tank.
Over a hundred days, Allied
blitzkrieg overran the Union's defensive lines, routing them from Salberta, Bociaccia, and Intensa. Leidenschaftlich's border defenses – an established line of trenches, forts, and concrete pillboxes with dense artillery coverage, incrementally assembled over centuries of historical conflict – prevented a full Allied breakout into Leidenschaftlich's flat agricultural plains, but the Union was still now fighting a defensive war. Leidenschaftlich's high command was desperate. Although new 'anti-tank rifles' had proved effective against Salbertan armor, the Allies now had numerical, material, and tactical superiority. Barring some battlefield miracle – the appearance of some inconquerable
wunderwaffe – a Union surrender seemed inevitable.
Until they found Violet.
Before Violet's battlefield debut, the Continental War killed around three thousand people per day.
She doubled that number.
This phase of the conflict would be called 'Violet's War.' Violet was the centerpiece of the Union war plan for nearly two years.
The Allies had dug hundreds of miles of trenches through the northern lowlands of Leidenschaftlich. On a given deployment, Violet would cross no man's land, enter the Allied trenches, and simply walk the length of the Allied line, from east-to-west and then west-to-east, for several weeks at a time. Union forces would assault the depopulated fortifications she left behind, forcing the Allies to commit reserves to fill the gaps in their line. The reinforcements would stay – pinned by Union troops – until Violet returned to make her second pass.
Bullets did not hurt her. Grenades would stun her for a moment or two. Once, they ambushed her with camouflaged artillery pieces operating in direct fire, which briefly incapacitated her. The Allies began shelling their own trenches with sulfur mustard, which gave her eczema. Union troops would enter Allied trenches and find corpse-strewn machine gun nests pointing the wrong way.
She did not need to rest, sleep, or relieve herself. She scavenged supplies from the men she killed. Troops entering the trenches behind her would find some bodies half-eaten, marred by teeth marks from a small jaw. Union spokesmen blamed scavenging wildlife.
The Allies' goal was to force Leidenschaftlich to the negotiating table, which was only possible from a position of strength. For them to retreat would be to sacrifice their leverage and effectively concede the war. The Union's goal, then, was not even to retake territory – it was simply to bleed the Allied armies until the war became unsustainable. The ports remained open. The Union would not run out of food, but eventually, the Allies would run out of men.
On an average day, Violet would kill more than four thousand, or around 120,000 per month.
Violet Evergarden has killed more than two million people.
After two years, draft riots and manpower shortages made the Allies' position untenable. They withdrew from their positions in northern Leidenschaftlich in the best order they could manage. Union troops liberated Bociaccia and Intensa. Members of the
Reichstag spoke of marching into Holmgard, turning all of Gardarik into a vassal state or tributary. The Union was ascendant.
The optics of the entire Allied coalition being routed by a single teenage girl made for an easy propaganda coup. In the Union, recruitment offices sang hymns of the Battle Maiden of Leidenschaftlich. In the Alliance, parents seeking to frighten their children whispered of the Butcher Fiend of the South.
By the war's end, the Allies'
only war goal was to kill Violet to prevent her deployment in any future conflict. They published her dossier – both as (truthful) propaganda and a desperate effort to convince some lone actor to assassinate her. These were suppressed within Leidenschaftlich by the Committee on Public Information, but her infamy had still spread wide enough that officials feared attempts on her life. As Violet reentered the public eye, starting her doll training with all her limbs replaced with adamant silver prosthetics, three Gardarik veterans tried to murder her in a bar. She was weaponless, save for a training workbook and a sharpened No. 2 pencil.
The wartime effort to kill Violet culminated in the Third Battle of Intensa, the last battle of the Continental War.
The Allies' order of battle called for troops, combat engineers, civilian miners, and gun cotton.
"I am sorry for the delay," said Violet, shutting the door behind her.
"That's quite alright," said Clemens.
"Are you alright, though? You needn't answer my question. I didn't mean to cause you any distress."
"I am fine," Violet repeated. She set the wastebasket under her desk as she sat down.
She glanced at the letter draft (mostly finished) and then the clock. Twenty-eight minutes since they'd sat down. She sighed. Metal fingers traveled to the home row and began to type.
"To answer your earlier question," said Violet, "I know what I'm capable of, and I know what I've done."
Click-click-click, click-click. (Dolls shouldn't try to talk and type simultaneously, Cattleya said: Multitasking hurts your speech and your prose. But Violet had already figured out what she would write and was literally going through the motions, so she could manage it this time.) "I have the power to destroy others, which has its uses. But you cannot build by tearing down. You cannot raise happiness from destruction. I want to build a life for myself. I want to be a part of everything around me. If I struck down another, I would shatter the floor beneath them, and all I've built for myself would plunge through that hole."
Violet knew that she still looked nauseous but tried not to let it show as weakness. The memories were just so
vivid. She kept stopping mid-sentence, silver fingers moving to wipe an invisible stickiness from the folds of a silver hand. She didn't look at Clemens because she would see his face, and seeing his face would make her see all the
other faces, too.
"I can still hurt people," Violet said quietly, "but I don't
want to. Not anymore."
"Not with weapons
or with words?" said Clemens.
Violet nodded. She heard Clemens' pen scribble.
"How would you like to sign the letter?" Violet asked.
"Just write 'Sincerely,' and leave the line underneath blank," said Clemens.
Violet twisted the cylinder knob and pushed the carriage to the left. Clemens heard ten soft 'clicks' tap against the letter paper.
"We've finished with the first draft," said Violet, tugging her typewriter's release lever and pulling the letter from between the rollers. She pinched it by the letterhead (being careful not to dent or mar the paper) and presented it to Clemens over the desk, text side facing up. Clemens accepted it and leaned back in his chair to read.
The letter read:
Dear
I sense a hollowness in you, having watched you from afar: the emptiness of lacking your own space to fill. The pit is cold and cavernous and yawns from inside you, and others dig it wider with clumsy shovels because they cannot see.
There may be no place for you here. You may have climbed too high in a past life to sit on the floor. The room is filled with souls, packed shoulder to shoulder, and there is no room for you. You must sit on other people and feel their restless waverings as they struggle to bear your weight. You think that they think that you don't care that you're a burden.
This is a lonely life and a sad one. That might be bearable if you could find another like yourself, just one, and greet one another from the same sparse level. But if such others exist, you cannot see them – only an ocean of the uncomprehending.
I cannot promise you that companionship. I can only promise that you are seen and that you are not alone. Become a beacon. Live well and true to yourself. Show others that you understand, and those who seek understanding will find you. I love you.
Sincerely,
It was a first draft, and imperfect. Violet thought some of the wording was clumsy, especially in the second paragraph; 'There may be no place for you here' might be too bleak and fatalistic, and 'just be yourself and others will find you' felt faintly cliché. But dolls had to be economical with their time, Cattleya had told her. The difference between 90 and 100 might be ten times as much effort as between 0 and 90, and the client probably wouldn't notice the difference. If she wrote letters for an embassy – as
very high-class dolls sometimes did – then that perfectionism might be warranted. But not for a common love letter. Even one that was important to the client.
(And Violet
had found that her clients didn't much mind. They would suggest line edits occasionally when a metaphor felt too forced or when a turn of phrase carried an unintended implication, but they rarely demanded substantial revisions. Violet was actually quite good at letter writing, Cattleya had said. Evocative writing uses concrete detail, drawing connections between the abstract and the tangible. Training school rarely taught this, Cattleya had grumbled, but Violet had shown surprising talent once Cattleya pointed her in the right direction.)
(Of course, given the letters she
usually wrote, Violet didn't much care if her writing conveyed the client's true feelings. She even hoped it wouldn't, that her words would slip through the recipient's comprehension like a fruit fly through a net. That would be merciful.)
"This is good," said Clemens, eyebrows raised. "You're very gifted."
"Thank you," said Violet. (That
did make her smile.) "Would you like to make any changes? We don't insist that clients accept first drafts if they're unsatisfactory."
"No, this is perfect," said Clemens. He set the paper on the desk behind Violet's typewriter, neatly creasing it into thirds, and picked up his paddle. "I think I'm ready to check out, now."
Violet nodded. "I will show you to the clerk. They will handle payment, and delivery of your letter, if you wish to mail it immediately. At CH Postal, doll letters postmarked on the day of composition receive half off the price of postage."
"Oh, that won't be necessary," Clemens said with a grin. "I'll deliver this one by hand."
"That would be a strong gesture. I admire your courage," Violet said as she held her door open. (She hoped that she didn't sound sarcastic.)
Violet led Clemens down the hallway, moving away from the lobby and toward a second staircase near the back of the building. She clasped her hands in front as she walked (as the Evergardens had taught her), her steps measured and deliberate. The floorboards still creaked under her weight, and Violet hated the sound, but she'd trained herself to ignore it, and she'd never had a client rude enough to point it out.
"Now, I know you said that you would only answer three questions," Clemens ventured, "but I feel guilty for ambushing you with my last and hoped to end our interview on a lighter note. If you don't mind, could I ask why you became an Auto Memories Doll?"
"That is fine," said Violet.
She might as well answer, Violet thought. The question was genuinely innocuous and insisting that she answer
exactly three questions and no more would seem weirdly pedantic.
But Violet still had to choose her words carefully. She'd almost said that she wasn't proud of what she had done during the war, that she wanted to put her military service behind her, but she knew she wasn't allowed to say that.
"At the end of the war," Violet began, "someone very important to me said–"
"I want you to think of what you'll do when the war is over," said Major Gilbert to the girl he had named 'Violet.'
(Gilbert had been careful never to tell her how he chose that name. If she ever asked, which she never did, he would spout some drivel about how her delicate features had reminded him of a flower. His actual thought process had been–)
('How do you name a girl?')
('You can just pick any flower for a name, right?')
('Okay, what's a random flower?')
('Uh, roses are red…')
"When the war is over," said Violet, "unless you are discharged, you will keep your commission and remain as my commanding officer. I will continue to follow your orders." Violet said this because it was true. She continued to stand at attention.
Major Gilbert was seated behind his desk in his officer's tent. He looked like a parent whose child had just said something very stupid and was trying not to look too disappointed.
"Violet," said Gilbert, then stopped. He sighed. "I know that you enjoy the military. I know that it gives you purpose, a place where you feel you belong. But we don't just want you to be a soldier. We want you to be a
person. To live and be free. And there's more to that than just following orders."
Dietfried had told him to treat Violet not as a girl but as a weapon. But Dietfried had been through
hell, and his experience had skewed his opinion. He gave the girl to Gilbert precisely because he couldn't trust himself to care for her. Whoever took charge of Violet would become her surrogate parent, and you couldn't parent a child you dreamt of drowning every day, or of them pulling your viscera from your still-living body. Gilbert had been trusted with Violet's care, and he would at least
try to be a dutiful guardian.
That just seemed wise, even pragmatic. Violet didn't seem to bear grudges, but it seemed
obvious that using her as a disposable attack dog would backfire. To
neglect the unkillable apex predator would fill her with vengeance, and vengeance would probably mean depopulating Leidenschaftlich. The older Violet grew, the better she would contextualize how others had treated her. The only
safe proposition was to ensure that hindsight's every revelation would reinforce that she was loved and cherished.
Violet had almost violated one of Gilbert's earliest orders while meeting with a brigadier general in the Special Offense Force. He had asked Violet to sit on his lap, which Violet obliged, because that didn't
quite touch the body parts she had been ordered not to touch. He then put his hands on Violet's stomach, dragging them slowly toward her chest, but Violet grabbed them before they reached all the way and explained that the Major had ordered her not to let people do that. The general tried to countermand Gilbert's order, but Violet explained that she was still to refuse him, which made the general very frustrated. Violet left soon after because the meeting had stopped being productive, and she told Major Gilbert what had happened like he'd ordered her to.
Gilbert's face had turned ashen, almost as pale as Violet. He lauded her for her fastidiousness; told her to avoid the brigadier general from then on; and (Violet thought this was odd) told her to approach other officers, explain what had happened, and ask what they thought she should do. Gilbert stressed that she was
not to say that she'd been ordered to do this, which Violet also thought was odd, but she complied.
She asked more than a dozen officers over the next two days. They had all been very flustered, and their answers weren't very clear. On the third day, a group of MPs escorted the general to a waiting truck; a new brigadier general replaced him; and Violet was assigned an adjutant, a scarred and stern faced woman named Lieutenant Schafer, who would accompany her to all future officer meetings while she was on base.
Lieutenant Schafer was actually in the tent with them right now. She stood in a corner, stolid as a stack of crates, watching them.
"Am I to train to be a person like I trained to be a soldier?" asked Violet.
(Schafer was not a soft woman. She was
weathered, like an old tree trunk. But she would look sad, sometimes, when she heard Violet speak. She was rarely in Violet's line of sight, but Violet still noticed this when she was and wondered if she was doing something wrong.)
Gilbert was giving her a sad look that she couldn't recognize. "Yes, Violet," said Gilbert.
"Will I receive training from specialists, like I did when training to be a soldier?"
"Yes, Violet," said Gilbert. (He sighed inaudibly.) "We will provide that for you."
"You said there's 'more to being a person than just following orders.' What other skills must a person possess?"
Gilbert took a moment to think about this. "That's a tough question, Violet," said Gilbert. "A person has many skills, too many for me to list, and most aren't learned on a battlefield. A person wants to do things with their life because they want to, and not just because they've been ordered to."
"What does it mean 'to do something with one's life'?" asked Violet.
This made Gilbert look
very sad, which stung. Violet's instructors had that look sometimes when she'd tried a new skill and flubbed it
really badly, the look that meant she had done something
embarrassingly wrong. Violet frowned. She liked following orders because they were clear and unambiguous. But with conversations like this – it always felt like there were things she was
supposed to say, but she could never figure out what they were. Gilbert was disappointed with her, and she didn't like disappointing the Major.
Gilbert rubbed his forehead with a knuckle, looking like he'd just stopped himself from palming his face. "Violet," he said, "if you were free to do anything with your time, anything at all, what would you like to do?" Then, as if to preempt her, he added, "Like writing, or traveling, or meeting new people–"
"I would want to follow the Major's orders and do whatever he told me to," said Violet.
Gilbert had asked Violet about her early childhood – what she recalled of the time before Dietfried's crew had shipwrecked on her island. Violet honestly couldn't remember. Her earliest memories were of the island, and her only pastime was to hunt. Dietfried's surviving crew had found her island mostly devoid of wildlife save for insects, reptiles, and small rodents. They found the bones of larger animals.
She didn't know if hunting made her 'happy,' but she enjoyed her current work more than anything else she'd done. People were more interesting than animals.
But her answer only seemed to make Gilbert
sadder. She couldn't understand this. People liked devotion, Violet had found, and there was no person to whom she was more devoted than Major Gilbert. But he didn't seem to like this anymore. Was he dissatisfied with Violet's commitment? Did he expect more from her?
"I would kill whomever the Major desired!" added Violet. "Immediately and without hesitation."
Gilbert stood up and walked around his desk. Violet kept eye contact, her head tracking his movement as he knelt in front of her. She felt her heart beat faster. Was the Major giving her a medal?
Gilbert hugged her. It was awkward, as hugs went: His chin went on her shoulder, his arms went loosely around the small of her back, and he was being careful
not to press his body to Violet's front to avoid touching the parts of her body that she wasn't to let other people touch.
"Oh, Violet," he whispered, "I wish you wanted more than that."
Violet stiffened. Gilbert had never done this before, and she wasn't sure of how to react.
Then he said something she had never heard before, words whose meaning she did not know.
"I love you," said Major Gilbert.
"–and I wanted to do something that would help me learn what that meant," said Violet.
She hadn't turned around to face Clemens, but she could
feel his look of pity boring into her skull.
(Violet
had looked up the definition of the word 'love,' but she wanted to see what it looked like in practice. She had been worried that people would mock her, as if she
hadn't thought simply to check a dictionary, but nobody had needed further explanation. They seemed to understand what she meant implicitly.)
"Has it?" asked Clemens. "This job?"
Violet bit her lip. They went halfway down the hall in silence, but Clemens was gracious enough not to interject. (This was also the fifth question, but Violet didn't care at this point.)
"It has taught me by teaching me what it
doesn't mean," said Violet. "When you love somebody, you want for them not to hurt. You want them to feel safe and happy. My clients," Violet's voice hitched, "they don't write to people they love."
A pause, just long enough for Clemens to have nodded. "That must be painful."
"I
hate it," Violet whispered. She was speaking recklessly, now, but she had to. She couldn't repress this any longer. "I want to stop, more than anything. I know that– that love is a way of
living, and I wanted to know how it felt. When I was training, when I started work, it always felt so close, just within arm's reach. But every day now, I can feel it slipping, further and further away–"
Like sinking in water, fingers stretched toward the surface–
"I don't– I don't want to
hurt people anymore–"
"Miss Violet?"
She had stopped in the middle of the hallway. Cattleya would be disappointed in her. She was crying in front of a client, as she had done so many times once clients started coming to see
her. She'd learned to bury the feelings – at least for half an hour until she could visit the crying room – but now she'd broken her streak.
At least she was doing it quietly.
Violet
hated her job. She hadn't expected to. Writing letters for people seemed like an escape from her past life, a way to leave the death and misery behind her. The vividness of her memory made that difficult enough
without constant reminders. But as much as she wanted to move on, her clients wouldn't let her. They didn't want
Violet Evergarden to write their letters. They wanted the Murder Witch.
(She heard Clemens sigh discreetly. He said he'd wanted to end on a lighter note.)
She
couldn't leave. For her own sake and the sake of CH Postal, she was trapped. She
could quit, but Hodgins' insurance wouldn't pay out forever. It would only give him time – enough to cut wages and then payroll at a slow and measured pace. And even ignoring that, what else would she do? Veterans Affairs and Public Information had spent
months preparing her for this position. Would they go through all that trouble again just so that Violet could stack boxes or deliver mail?
They had given her housing with a live-in staff of personal assistants to feed and clothe her. Violet had
tried living by herself, only to find that her past obsession with following orders was more than just slavish devotion to Major Gilbert. She
couldn't function without them. She depended on government assistance just to
pretend to be a person, and that assistance was contingent on her remaining employed. What would she do without it? Go feral? Start eating pedestrians?
It was torture. It was
hell.
Violet wished, once again, that she hadn't survived the war – that she could have died blissfully at Intensa, ignorant of her legacy, still driven by untainted purpose. It was the only order from Major Gilbert that she
wanted to disobey: 'Live and be free.'
That wasn't an order for someone like her. It was an order for a
human being.
This is a long digression to discuss Violet's soldier kit and biology.
Shortly after taking charge of her, Major Gilbert brought Violet to be examined by a team of university evolutionists.
Her hair was ordinary and unremarkable. Her skin was cold and clammy, but they could draw few conclusions about its anatomy without a more detailed assay. Gilbert would not allow them to make incisions, for they had found that Violet could not be anesthetized, which precluded analysis of her subdermal exoskeleton. They hypothesized that it was made of the same material as her fingernails, which they called 'superkeratin.' Tissue samples extracted with tin snips had the hardness of aluminum and the rigidity of quenched steel.
Sharp though they were, her full-length claws interfered with weapon handling. Violet would trim her nails with a tungsten-alloyed metal rasp. She would file them to a shallow point – still sharp enough to break skin in an emergency but short enough not to get in the way.
Violet's dietary needs were bizarrely conventional. The evolutionists had expected a voracious appetite, but she seemed to eat no more than a typical girl of her apparent age. They could not explain her lack of an excretory system. Gilbert privately suspected that Violet was a magical creature, but the evolutionists hadn't been briefed on supernatural phenomena. There were no tests for it, anyhow.
They confirmed that the exoskeletal sheathing on her limbs was softer than that of her torso – or at least, more flexible. Gilbert refused to permit live-fire weapons testing on Violet herself, so it was conservatively assumed that her limbs were not as bulletproof as her torso. They did dose the skin of her forearm with a drop of sulfur mustard, which produced only minor skin irritation.
Because there were no major rivers in the occupied north of Leidenschaftlich, they did not worry about Violet drowning. It was expected that her only plausible weakness was artillery, with or without poison gas. Targeting her was presumed to be impractically difficult, as she could run at ninety kilometers an hour.
They made a full cast of Violet's body, which they used to produce model forms for her armorers. Violet could easily wear metal plates more than six millimeters thick – roughly twice the thickness of that worn by medieval knights – both because she was strong enough and because the plates were relatively small, given her stature.
The plates were made to fit flush against her body and were glued to her bare skin with liquid latex. (The adhesive was applied liberally, except for the plates armoring Violet's groin.) The flush fit allowed Violet's exoskeleton to act as a backing plate to the steel, enhancing its bullet resistance. Her joints could not be encased, as this would hinder her mobility, so the plates came with wide flanges to cover her knees and elbows. Tests found that Violet could wear her battle dress without discomfort for days at a time. Artillery shells would not doff her armor, but she could still remove it with a long, soapy bath.
It was found during Violet's first deployment that she needed a way to replace the bulletproof glass of her visor when it inevitably shattered. Her new helmet fully enclosed her head and was forged from titanium. Its faceplate was made peculiarly thick to accommodate replaceable lenses of bulletproof glass. These were made five centimeters deep, which testing found was sufficient to stop the 13.2 mm bullet of a
Tankgewehr at point-blank range. Moreover, while ordinary bulletproof glass consists of alternating layers of glass and plastic, the lenses of Violet's helmet substituted the glass with synthetic sapphire. She carried spares in an armored pouch.
Having failed to explain earlier that cuts and abrasions caused her negligible pain, Violet made sure to mention that she could heal major injuries within minutes just by eating. To facilitate this, her helmet's mouthguard was retractable.
As Violet soon became the keystone of the Union war plan, Leidenschaftlich devoted enormous resources to supporting and equipping her, contracting nearly every firearms designer in the Union to engineer her equipment. The Special Offense Force would even classify Violet
herself as a weapon, mostly for administrative reasons, as she could then use her 'budget' for living expenses.
It was quickly understood that Violet was best equipped with weapons that could fire quickly, operate reliably when dirty, and use enemy ammunition. Attempts to equip her with bleeding edge self-loading rifles were unsuccessful: They often broke when used as melee weapons and would malfunction when covered in dirt or pig blood. Eventually, the Special Offense Force's contract gunsmiths would shorten a captured Lee-Enfield rifle to carbine-length – retrofitting it with a pump action and detachable box magazines – which Violet would use as her primary weapon. She would carry hand-tooled Lugers for sidearms, ruggedized and chambered to fire .455 Webley from hand-reloadable magazines.
Allied troops eventually learned to shoot Violet's
weapons rather than Violet herself. The SOF's gunsmiths would replace the wooden stock of her Lee-Enfield with solid steel, which
tripled the rifle's weight but made it essentially bulletproof. The new furniture came with a pistol grip and a buttstock that doubled as a pistol brace, to facilitate one-handed use of the bayonet, whose lug they relocated to the metal foregrip to keep from bending the barrel. Violet's bayonet was more ax blade than knife, and she used it frequently and viciously. Owing to her
nom de guerre among Allied troops, the gunsmiths named the weapon 'Witchcraft.'
At the start of a deployment, all of Violet's rifle ammunition consisted of wildcat cartridges hand-loaded with tungsten-cored armor penetrators. She was to use scavenged .303 rounds against infantry wherever possible: The tungsten rounds would
work on soft targets, but they were meant for tanks.
By the war's end, this had grown ineffective. The armor of the Mark VIII was sixteen millimeters thick, which the tungsten rounds could not reliably penetrate even at point-blank range. By now, all of the Union's frontline units had been equipped with
Tankgewehr anti-tank rifles, but these were crewed weapons that were longer than Violet was tall.
Violet and the Special Offense Force were last deployed in the Third Battle of Intensa, the last engagement of the war. As with other recent deployments, her role would be purely defensive.
The SOF did not realize that the Allies did not want to recapture Intensa. They wanted Violet
dead.
Violet rubbed the cloth in circles over her helmet's eyepiece. She would not replace them, for they had not been
damaged, but they had been splattered with blood. Glops of crimson stuck to her vision like strawberry jelly.
Four men sat on either side of the compartment, peering out the firing slits. Corporal Dunn, Sergeant Foley, and Private Amsel. Each carried an MP 18 on a leather sling, stick magazines loaded with .455 Webley; and Lee-Enfield carbines slung on their back, each mounting telescopic sights. PFC Steiner worked the radio.
The armored car jolted underneath them, one of its wheels popping in and out of a shell crater. Violet's helmet clattered against the ceiling's storage cage. The jostling was a mere annoyance. It would disrupt her squadmates' aim, but they weren't expected to engage the enemy from
inside the car. They took safe routes along friendly lines wherever possible.
The fighting men of the Special Offense Force were all volunteers, including Violet's attendant
Sturmtruppen. Most had distinguished themselves in regular service. To ride with Violet was a coveted assignment, and a dangerous one – Violet had to mercy-kill her last crew when an Allied tank targeted them with gas shells. The men carried gas masks, and the
Volkswagen engineers had tried to seal the car hermetically, but sulfur mustard remained a key vulnerability.
"One minute out!" shouted the driver. The car bucked.
Violet had cleaned the jelly off her right lens and switched to the left. Foley had soaked the cloth in alcohol beforehand, so Violet was actually cleaning the sapphire, not just smearing the blood around.
"Is the task clear?" Steiner asked.
"Twenty-plus Mark Eights, advancing toward map grid three-five-K, W-S, four-three-one, five-five-zero," said Violet, her voice muffled by her helmet. The report had come over the radio from an airborne artillery spotter. "Neutralize from distance with
Maschinentankgewehr."
"Affirmative," said Foley.
She would perfectly memorize orders after hearing them once, but they still had to check for miscommunication. More time spent on foot meant more opportunity for a tank to blast them.
Foley, Dunn, and Amsel were double-checking their ammo pouches. Along with ammunition for their MP 18s and Lee-Enfields, each carried eighty rounds of 13.2 mm Mauser split between four magazines, which they would replace from ammo crates stowed beneath the seats. Violet's
Sturmtruppen were
technically meant to act as bodyguards, but in practice, they were mostly ammo carriers. There was a practical limit to how much Violet could carry: She wouldn't get tired, but too much equipment would unbalance her.
"Fifteen seconds!" said the driver.
Violet finished polishing her left lens. She tossed the rag onto the bench and moved to the compartment's rear, opening the door at the back of the storage cage.
The car jerked to a stop.
"Disembark!" said the driver.
Violet unlatched the doors and kicked them open.
They were just behind the crest of a hill. The earth was still grassy, not yet barren from shelling. Violet could hear gunfire, the bursting of shells, and a distant mechanical rumbling.
Violet reached into the cage. Grabbing the pistol grip, she slid backward out of the car, drawing forth the hulking hundred-twenty centimeters of a twenty kilogram
Maschinentankgewehr.
An anti-tank machine gun.
Underneath them, seven meters beneath the holy soil of Intensa, there ran a tunnel. Wooden beams braced its ceiling. Strung together by wire, electric lamps lit the tunnel at five meter intervals. Rails ran along the floor as if to carry a minecart, but the tunnel was empty of people. Of equipment, too, save for a shovel and a pickaxe absently discarded midway down the track.
The tunnel's far end rose to the surface, a secret and protected entranceway three hundred meters behind the Nor'eastern battle line. From that entrance, a thick cord with green braided wrapping ran the entire length of the tunnel, which opened into a large chamber. The cord didn't look like it would carry electricity.
The chamber was full.
The
Maschinentankgewehr was a prototype, hand-machined by the SOF's gunsmiths. Leidenschaftlich had started tooling up for its mass production, but the assembly line would take several months to construct, and they needed weapons
now.
It was built around a standard
Tankgewehr, a hundred-seventy centimeter bolt-action rifle chambered to fire Mauser's 13.2 mm
Tank und Flieger armor-piercing cartridge. It could penetrate two centimeters of steel armor at five hundred meters. The weapon weighed sixteen kilos, was fired from a bipod, and was operated by a two-man crew.
It was too long for Violet to carry. The gunsmiths turned it into a bullpup – cutting off the buttstock, attaching a new pistol grip and trigger assembly forty centimeters down the weapon's receiver. The weapon was now thirty centimeters shorter.
They cut twenty centimeters off the end of the barrel. Bullets fly more slowly out of a shorter barrel, making the weapon less powerful. So the gunsmiths modified the 13.2mm Mauser TuF round with more potent gunpowder. The weapon was now a hundred-twenty centimeters long, slightly longer than a Lee-Enfield.
(The hotter powder load would place greater stress on the weapon's components,
just under its maximum rated pressure. It was feared that overuse would fatigue the weapon's components, weakening them enough for the rifle to explode on firing, but a sample survived firing a thousand rounds in an endurance test with no visible damage. Still, a safety margin that small meant that some rifles
would fail catastrophically just from natural variation in material quality – maybe a fraction of one percent – but for small batches, that wasn't an immediate concern.)
Shortening the weapon put its ejection port just in front of the (new) buttstock. When fired left-handed, empty shell casings would eject up into the shooter's face. So they flipped the
Tankgewehr upside down to eject casings straight toward the earth.
Now, when looking down the 'top' of the weapon, the (now top-mounted) magazine would obstruct the shooter's sight line. The gunsmiths added two sets of iron sights, one offset to the left (to be used by a right-handed shooter) and one offset to the right (to be used by a left-handed shooter). These sights would have to be independently zeroed, but this was deemed acceptable, as exactly one person would use the weapon ambidextrously.
Being bolt action, it fired too slowly – about two seconds per shot. It could take every round from the weapon's five-round magazine to fully neutralize the crew of a Salbertan tank: The typical spall from each bullet would kill two men, and a typical tank had ten crewmen.
The gunsmiths converted the weapon's bolt action to a straight pull. Pulling straight back on the bolt handle would unlock the bolt (rotating it anticlockwise) and cycle it backward (ejecting an empty shell casing); pushing straight forward would chamber a round and lock the bolt (rotating it clockwise), putting the weapon into battery. Working the bolt by hand would still take about two seconds, but now with a simple backward-forward motion.
Then the gunsmiths drilled a small gas port midway down the barrel and attached a gas piston, which they attached to an operating rod connected to the straight pull bolt. When the weapon fired, propellant gas from burning gunpowder would vent into the gas piston, pushing the operating rod and bolt backward like the cylinder cranks of a steam engine, opening the bolt and ejecting the spent shell casing. A mainspring (newly installed into the receiver) would then push the bolt forward, chambering a new round and locking into battery. The rifle was now self-loading: After firing, the weapon would automatically eject the spent casing and chamber a new round.
(Being a large metal assembly, the gas mechanism added significant weight to the weapon. It now weighed twenty kilos. A typical Lee-Enfield weighed four kilos, and Violet's
Witchcraft weighed thirteen.)
Self-loading rifles typically include a mechanism to ensure that each pull of the trigger fires exactly one round. Without this mechanism, holding down the trigger fires bullets 'fully automatically' as quickly as the bolt can cycle, usually several hundred times per minute. The gunsmiths omitted this mechanism.
Holding down the trigger, the weapon would fire five rounds in less than a second. The gunsmiths replaced the magazine with one that held twenty.
The recoil of firing a single shot from a
Tankgewehr is physically painful. Firing several shots rapidly would be harrowing and uselessly inaccurate. A human being would need to fire it from a tripod.
They called it the
Maschinentankgewehr, the anti-tank machine gun. Used by humans, it would still need a two-man crew – one to carry the weapon and one to carry ammunition and the tripod.
Violet was not a human being.
Violet crested the hill and crouched down on one knee. She could see the tanks in the distance, hulking metal beasts that sailed the earth like boats. Their arrival was well-timed: The tanks were about a half-kilometer away, just within the
Maschinentankgewehr's maximum effective range.
(Five hundred meters is a long shot. A normal human would make this shot from a prone position, off of a mount, through the crosshairs of a telescopic sight.)
She raised the rifle to her left shoulder – having grabbed the weapon with her
left hand when leaving the armored car – and peered through the right-side iron sights, which she adjusted to a five hundred meter hold. She pushed
out on the weapon with her right hand and pulled it
in with her left, stabilizing it with isometric tension. The front sight blade slid into the rear notch and stopped wiggling. Violet centered the picture over the first tank.
Violet exhaled and began to squeeze the trigger. The trigger blade crept backward, feeling spongy beneath her finger.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
Violet's ears rang. The first tank kept moving but began to creep subtly to the right, as if the driver had fallen dead at the wheel.
She aimed at the next tank over.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
This tank began creeping to the left.
Next tank over.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-click.
This tank ground to a halt. Violet saw a ripple in the formation, the vehicles behind flowing around the one stricken.
Violet's right hand pulled a fresh magazine, a sheet metal box the size of a novel. She held it lips down, bullets forward, and struck the front of the empty magazine in her rifle. The lower half of the new mag tripped the release tab at the front of the mag well – the upper half rocked the old magazine free, tipping it backward like a domino. Rocking in the new magazine, she fingered the operating rod, tugged it back, then yanked it forward.
Ker-chick. Magazine loaded, bolt closed, round chambered.
(The supporting
Sturmtruppen took up positions ten paces to Violet's left, right, and back. They also knelt on the grass, MP 18s stowed and Lee-Enfields ready. The Nor'easter infantry weren't close enough to assault them – the squad's purpose was to suppress any riflemen taking potshots at them and to watch for artillery. It was unlikely that a Nor'easter battery would strike them with its first shot, but when shells began landing nearby, it was time to move.)
Violet neutralized three more tanks, reloading her
Maschinentankgewehr with her last magazine.
(As she aimed, Dunn slid forward. Kneeling to Violet's side, his rifle and submachine gun slung over his back, he drew two magazines of 13.2 mm from his chest rig and stuffed them into pouches on the front of Violet's uniform. He withdrew to his old position.)
Two more tanks.
"Spotter plane, up high," said Amsel.
It was a beige-green biplane, its wings painted with tricolor roundels. It might not have spotted them yet.
One more tank. Reload. Three more tanks. Reload. (Dunn, again, with two more magazines.)
"It's circling us," said Amsel.
Three more tanks. Reload. Three more tanks.
(They were soldiers, so they
all had hearing damage save Violet. The report of Violet's
Maschinentankgewehr still shook their stomachs like close thunder.)
Reload. (Foley, with two magazines.) Three more tanks. Reload.
An artillery shell exploded sixty meters to their left, erupting a geyser of dirt and stone.
Three more tanks, reload. (Foley, with his last two magazines.)
"Think we'll use it all?" asked Dunn.
The next artillery shell fountained fifty meters to their right.
Three more tanks, reload. Three more tanks, reload. (Amsel, now.)
This artillery shell landed thirty meters behind them.
"One more magazine, then relocate. They're getting too close," said Foley.
Three more tanks, reload.
"Let's move," said Foley.
Violet followed the squad back to the armored car,
Witchcraft magnetized to her back, and her rifle pressed tightly into her chest. She let the others board first, slid the
Maschinentankgewehr into the storage cage (next to the two spares), and shut the doors behind her.
The next shell struck five meters shy of their old position, plowing a plantless crater the size of a swimming pool.
The tunnel chamber lay just in front of Intensa's citadel, the stone heart of the Union defensive line and the holiest site in all of Telsis. They needed Violet
directly overhead, if at all possible.
Three hundred thousand Allied troops and fifty Mark VIIIs broke
straight toward the citadel, wholly ignoring the trenches dug around its flanks.
They needed Violet to defend the citadel, but not in an anti-tank role. The SOF had mounted two MG 18s in stone-roofed gunholes on the front wall. These were
true anti-tank machine guns, still firing 13.2 mm Mauser, but belt-fed, tripod-mounted, and water-cooled. Violet was far more mobile, but the MG 18s had more firepower.
Sending three hundred thousand men straight into the most heavily defended part of the enemy line seemed wasteful and foolhardy, but so many men would still overwhelm them by sheer force of numbers. They had conventional machine guns, too – MG 08s chambered in regular 8 mm Mauser – but the Nor'easters were effective in suppressing them. Sharpshooters sniped from behind the tanks. The tanks themselves fired on the nests with their sponson cannons, vaporizing entire gun crews when their shells struck home. The stone gunholes better protected the MG 18s, but there were only the two – all the other gunholes had been blasted open in the last two battles for Intensa. Beyond this, the Nor'easters shelled the citadel incessantly with long-range artillery. The Union lost numerous troops to blast concussions.
For some reason, the Allies weren't launching gas.
Even under withering fire, Nor'easter troops reached the citadel by the score. The Special Offense Force was not especially large. The
Sturmtruppen submachine gunners that defended from the parapets were deadly, but few.
Violet strode into battle from the citadel's front gate,
Witchcraft in hand, and her bayonet fluttered.
–into one man's chest and Violet fires from point-blank range, spraying herself with gore. She racks the action, kicking the bayonet free–
(A rain of bullets dribbles over every centimeter of Violet's body. .303, shotgun pellets, .30-06 from heavy automatic rifles. Her chest and stomach buzz like limbs fallen asleep. Hailstones jostle her arms, and her helmet rings like cymbals.)
–shoot, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump–
(There is a small mountain of corpses at Violet's feet. Several times, her boots slip. Her helmet drips with jelly. The blood soaks the dirt into mud.)
–shoot, pump, shoot, pump,
click. Finger the magazine release,
twist the gun like a doorknob to flick the old magazine free–
(A buckshot pellet slips between her plates and slams into her patella. It doesn't penetrate, but stuns Violet's leg like a hammer blow.)
–lunges at her with a bayonet, which Violet parries, letting the man impale himself onto
Witchcraft, but there's a
second man coming, so Violet draws a Luger with her off hand and shoots him twice in the chest–
Major Gilbert Bougainvillea is in a war room in the citadel's basement. Every few seconds, dust shudders from the ceiling stone. The lamps wobble on their chains.
Gilbert leans on a stout wooden table that bears a map of Intensa. It is covered with small colored blocks, each the size of a thumb. The lime green blocks arrayed in and around the citadel are arranged neatly. The blue blocks that stream over no man's land are manifold and haphazard.
Two men sit in chairs at the side of the room, shouting into telephone handsets. The room rumbles again, and the lights flicker–
–the man slides off her bayonet as her Luger's magazine runs empty. She holsters it, backpedaling, and slaps a new box magazine into her rifle–
(She hopes that the
Sturmtruppen on the parapets will hose the space around her with their MP 18s, but their full attention is held by the
new Nor'easters still advancing. Violet's foes are the surviving filtrate –
she is the only one to stop the overflow.)
–
pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump, shoot, pump–
(Violet's hands nearly slip on
Witchcraft, her grip saved only by the textured knurling on the handle. Every cycle of the action flicks blood onto Violet's chest. She is infinitely grateful that her magazines hold twenty rounds.)
–shoot, pump, shoot, pump–
(A rifle round shatters Violet's left eyepiece. The breakage affects only the outermost layer of the laminate, but spiderweb cracks still cloud half of her vision.)
–
stagger backward, dodge, parry, guillotine the man's neck horizontally above the collar, slam the buttstock into the next man's sternum like a butter churn–
(Buckshot furrows into the back of Violet's left hand.
Witchcraft is blasted from her grip, slopping into the mud, butt-first. Violet didn't see any dirt go into the muzzle, she
thinks–)
–draw her second Luger, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot,
click–
(Violet holsters the Luger and dives for
Witchcraft in a single motion. Her fingers close around the weapon as a man's arm goes around her throat.)
–dig the shallow claws of her left hand into the offending forearm and
squeeze, impaling it like fork tines into sausage, scraping bone and popping tendons as the man screams–
Violet Evergarden presses her forehead against the hallway wall, covering her mouth with a gloved hand. She gags, her cheeks ballooning. (Confound it, not
again.)
Clemens stands a short distance behind, folded letter in hand, waiting.
Violet fights for forty-eight minutes, exhausting
all of her ammunition. Having no time to reload her magazines or resupply from the citadel's armory, she wields
Witchcraft's ax-bayonet with one hand and a combat knife in the other, painting the clouds with crimson crescents.
More than five hundred bodies lie at her feet, many still breathing.
One man staggers
away from the melee before the citadel gates, his uniform wet and heavy. He lifts a flare pistol to the sky and launches a white comet.
Seeing this, the surviving tanks shift into reverse gear.
The Nor'easters begin to withdraw, all except the men in Violet's melee. They circle her, shooting her uselessly, sidestepping vainly to avoid the spiraling bayonet. They press her against the closed citadel gates, where the parapet gunmen can't see them.
Fifty men buy time for their comrades to retreat.
"They're falling back! They're retreating!" an aide shouts.
"And the gate?" says Gilbert.
"Still defending!"
"Send men around to relieve her," says Gilbert.
Thirty-nine men are left. They aim for Violet's eyes and hands and mostly miss.
Two squads of
Sturmtruppen emerge from the citadel walls, dashing beneath raised portcullises, MP 18s in hand.
Twelve men on the melee's periphery step away and kneel, rifles pointing outward. They spot the
Sturmtruppen and open fire.
The retreating Nor'easters are three hundred meters away at their closest.
An officer, lying wounded atop a trundling Mark VIII, raises a flare pistol to the sky. A red comet shoots toward the sun.
The Nor'easters have bolt rifles. The
Sturmtruppen have submachine guns. One takes a rifle bullet to the stomach. The Nor'easters are perforated by a swarm of bees.
Fifteen men left, immediately surrounding Violet. They try to dogpile her, clumping around her like a malevolent group hug, but Violet is
still too strong.
Major Gilbert listens to the aide. The relief squads are in position and engaging. The remaining Nor'easters have fully withdrawn.
He lets out a breath.
The battle has culminated.
The battle is over.
Violet disembowels three men with her claws. The rattling MP 18s of the relieving
Sturmtruppen sing to her like wind chimes.
They've won. They've
won.
On a distant hill, deep behind Nor'eastern lines, three men see a white flare. They wait. Minutes later, a red flare follows.
At the tunnel's entranceway, one of the men pushes a detonation plunger.
The green-braided detcord running the length of the tunnel explodes faster than six kilometers per second. The linear explosion reaches the chamber at the tunnel's end, just before and underneath the citadel's front gate, which is filled with five hundred metric tons of gun cotton and ammonal blasting powder.
The dust cloud from the explosion climbs three hundred meters into the sky, rolling itself into a knotted mushroom.
The tail of the retreating Nor'easter attack force, three hundred meters from ground zero, is caught within the blast radius.
A Mark VIII battle tank weighs nearly forty tons. Five such tanks fly thirty meters into the air, flipping end over end like bolas. The gutted wreckages of several more follow, in pieces.
Violet's episodic memory abruptly
stops, like a film reel cut with garden shears.
Major Gilbert Bougainvillea is killed in action.
The Special Offense Force is annihilated as a fighting force. In the coming years, the Leidenschaftlich
Heer will reconstitute the unit from scratch.
Satisfied that the Murder Witch is finally dead, with its armies on the verge of collapse, the Allies sue for peace.
The total obliteration of the holiest site on supercontinental Telsis has political repercussions.
Three weeks after the Third Battle of Intensa, a Bociaccian farmer finds a mangled corpse lying in a wheat field. The body is hairless, limbless, eyeless, and burnt like cheap leather. It lies on its back on a bed of amber stalks, its arm stumps stretched to either side.
A Union retrieval team identifies the body as Violet's because it is still breathing.
Violet woke in a hospital months later.
She removed a feeding tube, tugging the spit-slimed plastic out of her mouth and esophagus. The bag from which the tube dangled is large and empty.
Blinking her eyes into focus, Violet saw a twin flash of silver.
Her arms were silver, skeletal, and made of clockwork.
She flung off her covers and saw that her legs were the same. She touched the metal of her thighs, feeling the sensation in phantom limbs.
The adamant silver of her new prosthetics hummed inaudibly, knitted to nerve endings in Violet's limb stumps by eldritch magic.
Violet saw a bell at her bedside. She yanked its pull cord.
The man introduced himself as Claudia Hodgins. He was handsome, his red hair tied in a curt ponytail, his chin pebbled with stubble. Now honorably discharged, he had been a Lieutenant Colonel and one of Major Gilbert's closest friends during the war. Violet would later ask him why he had the name of a woman.
"Tell me," said Violet, leaning into a hospital pillow propped against her headboard. "Is the Major actually… alive?"
"No," said Hodgins. "He's dead."
Violet's brain processed the opposite of the spoken syllables.
"So, then, that means he's fine," said Violet. "When will I be able to join him?"
Hodgins shook his head. "No, Violet, you were the only body to be recovered from the citadel, living
or dead. The next closest human remains were found nearly half a kilometer away." He sighed. "There's nothing even left to bury. I'm sorry, Violet, but Gilbert is gone."
Violet absorbed this.
Her life's purpose was to follow Gilbert's orders. His absence left a hole. She felt like she had felt on the island: aimless, listless, bored. And now, empty.
"They were out to get you, that's for sure. They set off
thirty-eight mines at Intensa, including the one beneath the citadel," said Hodgins. He leaned back in his stool, staring out the window. "We lost thirty thousand men in the blink of an eye, and the world just watched."
"The doctor told me that we won the war," said Violet.
Hodgins scowled. Then his face went neutral, as if forcibly restored to factory mint. "Nobody won the war, Violet. Some just lost less than others."
Violet stared at him.
"Do you know what you want to do now that the war is over?" asked Hodgins.
Violet thought. Unable to clasp her hands behind her, she held them in her lap. "Major Gilbert once asked me that question. All I could think of was to continue following the Major's orders."
"Well, that's not possible anymore, I'm sorry to say." Hodgins' mouth quirked. "Unless he gave you a
standing order to execute, even after his departure?"
"He did, I think." Violet bit her lip. "He told me to 'live and be free.'"
Hodgins nodded, his expression thoughtful. "That's as good a task as any. Do you know what it means?"
"No," said Violet, truthfully.
"Well, we'll work it out. We've got people to help you," said Hodgins.
There was a small bag at the foot of Hodgins' stool. He lifted it by its strap, rummaging in one of its pockets, and produced an emerald green brooch.
"Major Gilbert wanted me to give this to you," said Hodgins.
Clemens gave his paddle to the clerk, counting out fifty papiermarks from his wallet. Violet watched, managing to plaster a polite fake smile. (You were always supposed to escort the client to the checkout area to make sure that they didn't leave without paying.)
He had asked her to stay until after he'd paid. He had something more to say to her – probably an apology for Violet's emotional rollercoaster. Violet obliged. That was probably a mistake, but she felt drained. She doubted that Clemens could make her retch or cry
again.
Clemens led her to the side of the room, clearing the space at the checkout counter.
"I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I feel like an ass. It seems like I forced you to relive all your worst memories in the span of half an hour, just for article material."
"It's alright," said Violet, because she was hardly going to say it wasn't. "I hope that you're satisfied with your letter."
Clemens held out the letter, as if offering it to her, but halted mid-motion. He saw that Violet was about to say something.
"Mister Moreau," Violet began, "I hope I don't trespass by asking, but I feel I ought to know. Will your article portray me in a
sympathetic light?" She sighed. "Or have you just been
using me, gathering material to write an exploitative 'hit piece' about Leiden's resident Murder Witch?"
"That's fair of you to ask," said Clemens. He straightened his collar with his free hand. "But I was being forthright. Of course, as a journalist, I'm meant to be neutral and objective, but an honest representation of our conversation will simply show that you're a
person. It
is a human interest piece about a famous public figure, which is how we'll make money off it, but the point isn't to gawk at you. I do think that the public sees you one-dimensionally, and my honest hope is to change that."
Violet nodded. She wouldn't know for sure until it was printed, but Clemens at least
sounded truthful. Besides, if the article truly was a hit piece, then Public Information would likely censor it. There wasn't much to worry about, relatively speaking.
"And the letter, then?" Violet asked, full of apprehension. "Is it truly meant for someone, or was it just a convenient excuse to talk to me?"
Was it just a tool, for the purpose of flattering me?
Will anyone even read it?
"That's actually why I wanted to talk to you before I left. It
is meant for someone," said Clemens. He pulled a business card from his pocket, sliding it between the letter's folds.
He offered the letter to Violet.
"It's meant for you," he said.
They stood for several seconds, unmoving, until Violet took the letter with hesitant fingers.
Clemens tipped an invisible hat and smiled. He left through the side exit, stepping into the golden flame of the searing summer sun.
Violet stood there for five minutes, long enough that the clerk asked if she was okay. She mumbled that she was fine, snapped out of reverie.
Then she left. She stepped through a door marked 'Employees Only' and marched to an unfinished gray stairwell. This one led to the basement.
She needed the crying room.
A musical inspiration for this story is the song
"Human" by The Killers.
