The Last Dance

Before the Dance

The form surveyed itself. The skin was a good match, and the collarbones rose near-perfect under the neck, like driftwood under seafoam. The hair was alright too, though the shorn ends burned a far fiercer gold than Cora’s had. And the eyes. They were too cold, too dark. Not at all lifelike.

The form tried to soften its features. In the reflection, the woman smiled with unsmiling eyes. The form gave its best imitation of Cora’s whistling sigh, and turned to frown at the dress.

The dress was man-made, and a far finer creation than what the form was. Fabric reared and clung in dark folds, and bled into the dark of the room like a second shadow. The form fingered a laced edge and sniffed, unimpressed. Cora would have known exactly what era this velvet had been spun. To her—it, the form corrected itself—the material was unremarkable.

There were many things askew in the form’s new appearance, but by far the most unforgivable sin was the unfashionable looseness of the dress, the way it drew the eyes to the rest of her frayed appearance. She turned her back to the mirror and surveyed the slack laces at the back of the dress. They trailed down her spine, limp and wilted, like daisy stalks in summer. It needed to be fixed, thought the form. She needed to be fixed.

The form struggled to bring the lacing together with too-smooth fingers. She darted a glance at the reflection now, and saw another glimpse of Cora in the point of her elbows and the depth of her scowl. The form didn’t remember frowning. When had she decided to frown?

The form’s arm shook as she struggled to thread the lacing, and she rattled the dresser she stood in front of. It was Cora’s dresser, and as her belongings had all been destroyed, there was only one thing it held.

The form hooked one finger into the top of a half-open drawer and pulled it towards her. A glint of gold winked in a corner of the drawer.

She took the locket, weighed its warm metal in one hand, and then turned her attention back to the dress. She had meant to wear the locket around her new neck, but now she saw a better purpose for it. She looped the necklace through the final holes of the dress, and tugged a knot into place.

Yes, the dress did fit better now. The form took a final look at herself. She looked like a very good imitation of Cora, which was enough. She looked harder at the woman in the reflection, waiting. She didn’t feel the grief just yet. Perhaps it lay too deep for anything to truly touch it. Or perhaps the form could cry, after all. She had no idea.

The form left Cora’s room without a backward glance. She kept her unfinished hands buried in the billows of her dress, willing the smoked metal to hold back its gleam. Her footsteps in Cora’s heels sounded nearly human as she strode down the corridor--rhythmic and imperfect, the drumming of a heart before battle.

As the form stalked to the ballroom, she did not feel grief.

Not yet.

The Dance

The dance began as all dances begin. The hall dripped with shy smiles and gentle whispers, hissed with muffled laughter and crisply bubbled drink, and shone with tinted light under the shadows of perfumed, dead flowers.

Of course, no one recognized the form. She wore Cora’s external image, a simple human woman with sharp ideas and soft eyes, but no one really saw her. They had killed her just a few hours ago. She walked on.

Civilized conversation ebbed and eddied in the pockets between the humans, as though their generals had not just put down thousands. Millions. The first fault-line of rage glowed in the form as she strode past knots of people. She held the emotion close. It was one of many new things. Cora would have been proud of her.

This dance did not end like other dances. There was a heartbeat, the form thought, between when she let her steel hands drift away from the shadowed folds of her dress, and when the first human began to scream.

They fought her exceptionally well, but she stood last. She was, after all, made for this. A creation of irony, the thesis outlining her capabilities had reported. An avenging angel made of metal-scrap and silicon wafers, created to destroy nothing, a metaphorical iron bit in the war-heaving mouth of humanity.

She was breaking a lot of laws. The humans broke against her like waves, and lay shattered on the ground. And still she worked, toiling knee-deep in blood and bone until the dress dripped, bleeding red shadows of its own.

The form slowed down now and drifted between tables, lingering over unseen memories. She cast a glance over her reflection in a golden bowl sitting on its side. The image distorted Cora’s face, the face she had worn in her final hours. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the form’s reflection looked like it was almost smiling.

The form laid down in the wreckage of bodies and waited. She waited for many things. She waited for the fires of the law, to scorch her out of existence. She waited for history to be spun into existence, one where her actions were a horror instead of an act of love.

She waited for grief as well, but that emotion would not come. Perhaps it would never come.