The Strangeling Part XVII - (Freewrite # 152 - brand)

Greetings fellow Steemians! Here is my 22nd "5" minute* freewrite. The prompt is: "brand".

*Not 5 minute this time, 90 minute ;)

This piece is a continuation of my last freewrite, and the seventeenth installment in an ongoing story. Let's see how long I can keep this up, using the prompts provided!

Part I: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/freewrite-129-fingernail

Part II: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-ii-freewrite-130-wasps

Part III: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-iii-freewrite-131-solitude

Part IV: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-iv-freewrite-132-gardening

Part V: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-v-freewrite-132-the-attic

Part VI: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-vi-freewrite-132-plaid

Part VII: https://steemit.com/weekendfreewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-vii-weekend-freewrite-3-3-2018

Part VIII: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-viii-weekend-freewrite-3-3-2018-apricot

Part IX: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-ix-freewrite-137-witches

Part X: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-x-freewrite-138-syrup

Part XI: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xi-freewrite-139-artichoke

Part XII: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xii-freewrite-146-monkey

Part XIII: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xiii-freewrite-147-witch-with-apple

Part XIV: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xiv-weekend-freewrite-03-17-2018-crazy

Part XV: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xv-freewrite-150-sizzling

Part XVI: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-xvi-freewrite-150-medium

Freewriting is a daily practice for most poets and fiction writers, designed to loosen up and get things flowing, like stretching before exercise. Visual artists, especially those who draw or paint from life (figures, landscapes, still lives, etc) do something similar in "gesture drawings". After reading several of @poetrybyjeremy's freewrite posts, I got excited to try these again. Many thanks to @mariannewest for hosting this daily freewrite! https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-152-5-minute-freewrite-tuesday-prompt-brand

https://pixabay.com/en/medium-psychic-female-fantasy-woman-goth-1726601/

I woke then with a jolt, my eyes suddenly wide, the field of my vision blazing with more light than could possibly have come from the one small candle we had left burning. There were tears running down my face, and my breath came in ragged gasps. The victims had died so quickly, their nervous systems shattered by the exponential intensification of their own emotions, the agony of all that had gone so long unfelt, now hitting them with an intensity that precipitated physical disintegration. For these people, for all of us, life was like walking on hot coals. You could handle it, with a little mind-over-matter. But now the hot coals had blazed up into an inferno, consuming everything.

My thresholds had been set to "sleep mode", which was a function performed by the chip itself. This setting held levels at 90% as a default, allowing the mod to sleep, while the chip monitored for signs of danger, using complex and (mostly) accurate algorithms. If a threat were to be detected, the chip would automatically lower the thresholds to zero, waking the mod up. False alarms were common: the system was designed to err on the side of caution.

But tonight, even at 90%, I was overwhelmed, my consciousness awash in what seemed like an endless sea of information, far too much of it to even begin to process. My Senses registered the tunnels and chambers in the earth all around us. There were occupants in many of the Solitudes, some sleeping, a surprising number awake. There were one or two people in the hallways, on their ways to or from the restrooms, which were a bit of a walk. One was returning from a nighttime tryst, and in several other rooms were lovers who were making use of the Solitudes in ways for which they were clearly not intended. The other Witches who were awake were studying, or practicing arcane arts of one sort or another, or watching Netflix on their phones... apparently this place had WIFI. I could sense its field, could see where the routers were, the phones and laptops using it. I could tell whether or not each sleeper was dreaming, and if they were, I could guess what they were dreaming about with a high level of accuracy based on their movements, biomarkers, neural activity. I could feel the biological/experiential states of everyone within at least 20 or 25 blocks, and there were more of them down here than you would have thought, for a place that was essentially a retreat center for antisocial occultists. Up above, on the surface, I could sense every little movement and sound and biomarker of people in apartment buildings, on the street, sleeping, dreaming, awake. There were train tunnels nearby, and sewer tunnels as well, complete with actual reptiles. There was rodent and insect activity here and there, in the walls mostly, but more of it in the train and sewer tunnels than in the Solitudes.

I checked my thresholds again: they were set correctly. This wasn't me.

None of this was me. It was the Strangeling, her emotional field, her memories... our bodies had been entwined in sleep. I was still holding her, the echoes of her experience registering in vivid detail. Her sleeping face was wet with tears. Little spasms shook her as she cried out, softly, in pain and recognition.

Again. The neural overload. The blood bursting from the body. The smoking remains. And every detail of it was hers to feel, because she was the only one who could feel it and survive. Her victims certainly couldn't...

I wanted to comfort her, to support her, to help her feel it, so that she wouldn't be alone. I held her close, my body wrapped around hers and my hand on her heart.

And the monsters came. A rush of faces, experiences... the war... my single mom, a swollen shiner over her left eye, the string of men who had hated and abused both her and me, her only child... the kids dancing in a circle around me on the playground, jeering at me as the school bully chased me down, punched me in the stomach until I puked... Jeni with a stranger in our bed... her broken face when I'd finally left her, so many long and painful months later... hearing my cat jinxie get taken by an owl at twilight, just outside my bedroom window as a small child, before my dad left us... the horrors inflicted at The Basement...

Too many, too much. I was carried away by the flood... it was like a bad trip on one of The Company's Drugs, only I knew that this was for real, life or death. It was coming on much too fast... not instantaneously, but building... grief terror rage doubt lust guilt heartbreak joy excitement hatred desolation panic...

I screamed in agony. I was being incinerated.

I threw my thresholds all the way up, called on every ounce of training, all the power of my mods, to wall myself off. My breathing slowed, my heartbeat steadied. I was coming back to myself.

She was still there of course, lost in sleep and helpless nightmares. A maelstrom, a savage storm of emotional charge, a monstrous magnetic vortex roiling around us. And then, all of a sudden, she was awake, and halfway across the room, hand on the doorknob. She stopped, turned slowly back to stare at me, the light of the candle flickering liquidly in her eyes. Her long hair stood on end, moving as if it were alive. She walked to me, reached for me, whispered my name. I saw her lips move, but it was as if she were speaking from a long way away, or from behind thick glass, like a mermaid on display in an aquarium.

Then her voice came into my head, faintly. The fact that she could get a telepathic signal through at all, with the thresholds turned up to 100%, betrayed the almost incomprehensible power she wielded without even trying.

"Turn the thresholds down."

I stared at her, not even trying to conceal the fear, naked in my eyes. I shook my head.

She lifted a hand, batting at the air as if it were solid, as if there were an actual physical barrier between us. Her swollen eyes filled with tears.

"Please."

I held her gaze, shook my head again.

"Just a little... Just enough to..."

I looked away.

Her hand dropped to her side. "Then you're not the one."

It was a whisper this time, barely audible, heavy with grief. I looked up. Our eyes met: my nondescript brownish/hazel ones and her otherworldly silver-and-emptiness ones.

"I need you to see this", she said, again with her lips in the usual way. She lifted her shirt slightly to reveal a small square just above her left hipbone, featuring a pattern that I recognized at once as code, drawn somehow into her skin. It looked like a bio chip, only it was more like a tattoo of one than the real thing. I looked at her again, a question.

"It's a brand", she said, speaking directly into my head again. "They can't chip us, so they brand us. Brands don't do anything except act as permanent tracking devices. Which means the Company always knows where I am. They could be here at any time. They're just too scared to face me. That's why they sent you."

Her eyes closed, and she leaned forward and brushed her lips against mine. Delicately, as if I were a fragile creature, an invalid. For a moment I wished that my thresholds weren't set so high, so that I might have been able to experience her kiss. At 100%, the chip induced a kind of numbness in me, a dissociative abstraction. I could barely Sense anything.

There were many sources of light in that Solitude, many more than just the one burning candle, offering its scant illumination. The storm of energies swirling around us gave off a kind of light. The subtle glow that seemed to be emanating from her skin, her eyes, her hair was a kind of light. Her unearthly eyes held their own sweet, precious light that drew me, almost irresistibly, to her. And then there were the lights that danced in front of my own eyes, the ones I couldn't be sure weren't mere hallucinations, reflections of the light of consciousness, of sensation, of feeling within me, stirred to feverish delusion. The room was filled with lights.

Her lips touched mine.

And the lights - all the lights - went out.

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