I have set my scientists to generate these oversoul masks in copious quantity and in wondrous variety.
This must work.
All is well. The activities of my children are once more in accord with my desiring, and eternity’s river holds no more uncertainties.
There was a minor dilemma, but I have solved even that. It seems that I am not immune to the effect of the masks. I thought my royal will would safeguard my identity, but it is becoming a strain, sorting reality from fabrication.
I have had an oversoul commissioned. It will be a lasting record of all the tribulations I have confronted and my efforts to remedy them. This mask shall be sealed beneath my palace in a chamber secured by steel, and my blood shall be the only key that unlocks it.
I take off the mask of diamonds. Pena watches me, her lips parted.
I tumble out of the chair and fall to my knees. “I am your servant, First Queen.”
Pena’s eyes widen, and she laughs. “Oh, no, no.” She is at my side and hauls me up. “I’m not the First Queen.”
“But your blood opened the door.”
“Don’t you get it? We’re all of her blood, each of us descended from the First Queen. Some joke on her, huh?”
I stay silent.
“Come,” she says. “We need to get back before the hour of unmasking. If we’re seen on the streets after, the gendarmes will take us.”
I straggle after her, lost in my thoughts. I don’t try to keep track of the red-lit corridors and notice only when we are among the fabrics and dyes of the storage room.
“Hsst.” Pena gestures.
“What is it?”
Without warning, she shoves me, and I tumble into a closeted hole. Bolts of velvet and felt topple upon me. She flings an oversized bottle of jasmine oil after, engulfing me in cloying sweetness.
Then there is confusion. The red light extinguishes, and white beams flash in the darkness. They catch and glint off white metal — glittering eyes, gleaming brows — the silver masks of the gendarmes.
Hidden in my cubby, my scent as obscured as my body, they do not detect me. They converge on a single spot, Pena, huddled between shelves.
“By order of the queen, you are hereby accused and convicted of treason,” one gendarme says.
I cannot smell anything over the sickening jasmine, but I can see the terror on her face. She glances at me, and there is a beseeching in her eyes, and a question, but she looks away before I can understand it.
“The penalty for treason is death, citizen,” a gendarme, perhaps the same one, says. “Do you wish to repent? Identify your co-conspirators, and we will allow you to return to the way of the mask.”
Pena lifts her head. “Never.”
They don’t ask again. They activate their loops, and I’m reminded of the day of the saffron mask. I’m ashamed of the gladness I felt then.
They don’t skin her, but this is as gruesome, if swifter. A gendarme kneels over her as she is pinioned on her back by bands of blue. Bracing himself, he staves in her face with his fist. I want to look away. It is an obscene violation, a perverse defilement to damage a citizen
He strikes again and again until there is nothing left of the front of her head but a wreckage of bone and pulped wetness.
9. The Last Mask
The gendarmes are as efficient in disposing of Pena’s body as they were in dispatching her. When they have gone, the red light comes on, and I dare to creep out. As I untangle myself from a length of burgundy velvet, my hand falls upon an unmistakable shape — Pena’s green and toffee mask. The sight of it, so soon after the atrocity of her execution, unhinges me. I start crying and I cannot stop. But it doesn’t matter, because her mask will hide my tears.
Somehow, I make it to Center at Corridor and the familiar confines of my quarters. Safe.
But I am
I tear off her mask. It’s not the unmasking hour, but I don’t care. I’m weary of masks, even a blameless one without an oversoul. Pena’s death burdens me with shame and guilt — like being flayed again, but with the pain inside.
I am surrounded by masks. Each is a player in some fabricated theater — artist, victim, rake, entrepreneur, lover, spouse, friend. None of them is real, but I can put them on and escape these feelings.
But I won’t.
One after the other, I destroy my masks. The ones that shatter are the easiest. I hurl them at the floor and shards spill across the tile. The ones that burn, I commit to fire. But the metal ones I must work at, smashing one upon another until they are twisted out of all recognition.
I save the sable mask for last out of a sense of propriety. Although it is metal, it is oddly malleable, and it crumbles between my hands. The lenses fall out of the eyeholes and tumble among the broken bits of ceramic and glass on my floor.
I stand amidst the debris that was my life and don the only mask I spared, Pena’s green and toffee one.
My lover glances at me in her cerulean-with-voile mask and lets me in. She thinks I am her servant girl.
“Where did you go?” she demands. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? And where is my suitor?”
Her quarters are much like mine, much like every citizen’s. There is a mask room, a kitchen, and a bedchamber. I brush past her and she follows, continuing to scold as we enter her kitchen. I find what I need in one of the drawers: a tenderizer mallet, heavy and solid. Even when I turn with it upraised, she doesn’t relent.
“Are you ignoring me, you slut?” she shouts. “How dare you!”
Only when I yank off her mask does she become afraid, and by then, it’s too late.
I smash the mallet into her face. She stumbles, and I ride her as she goes down, hammering the metal tool into her face over and over. Bones and flesh mash together into pulp, and still I persist. I must be thorough.
Pena did not have time to teach me the secrets of her league of named. But through her, I have learned enough. I have seen how the gendarmes kill. I do not have their loops or their strength, but I know how to murder so that my victims will not wake.
Pena also taught me to know who I am.
I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen’s eternal river.
Eugie Foster calls home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew. After receiving her master’s degree in psychology, she retired from academia to pen flights of fancy. She also edits legislation for the Georgia General Assembly, which from time to time she suspects is another venture into flights of fancy.
In addition to receiving the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, she was named the 2009 Author of the Year by Bards and Sages. Her fiction has also received the 2002 Phobos Award; been translated into seven languages;
