Red Sister

Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour: it has, for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow. It cannot be evaded, it cannot be bargained with, deflected or placated. All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch.

she knew enough to know it didn’t matter how fast you went if they knew where to find you.

‘Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules, step-on-a-crack-break-your-back, but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route.’

He smiled but with more worry in it than joy, as if the world made no more sense and offered no more comfort to bigs than littles.

The red work of killing carried on. At some point in the midst of it Nona took the arrow from her belt and stuck it into the eye of the man who had fired it at her. Nona had hidden her secret so long, worked so hard to be … normal, but the truth lay all around her in crimson arcs of gore written out across the rocks. She had come to Sweet Mercy bearing the title ‘murderer’ and come to that deed from a cage where her first act of slaughter had placed her. Even before that the children of the village had seen her for what she was, a fox among hens. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me – she had said – this was inside him. She must have been all of three or four years old.

Nona shook her head, rising smoothly into a crouch. The rage she had needed now filled her from toe to head, her body vibrating with it. ‘I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin.’ She batted aside an arrow and snatched another from the air before it reached Jula’s neck. She tucked it into her belt.

he memory held her. Her mother, in the dimness of their hut, noticing the blood on her hands for the first time. What’s that? Did they hurt you? Nona had hung her head and shook it. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me. This was inside him.

The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will some day do to you.