“…and so her wings were clipped, and down through the sky she tore. Fire and falling, the sun above and the world below.”
Tongues 5:13, Solarist Codex
Questions. Waves upon waves of questions. Ceaseless, damning, barging masses – slugs to the temple and then to the stomach that had no end in sight. Sana blinked through them, offered only water and rye bread since she was first dragged in and chained down. It could’ve been hours since she’d arrived, days maybe. She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t.
The room had a couch, frayed and older than her. A chain extended from her hand to the wall, and if she had a right arm, she could just reach a desk in the room’s centre. Beside it was a silver panel of glass, and above that the only light in the room, channelled down in a pallid, golden tower against the shimmering desk. A cell and an interrogation room all at once. Efficiency. In came another interviewer, then another, then another. Sana stayed on the leather, far in the corner. There was no point approaching the desk unless asked, they’d probably rush in and tase her. She hoped it was just tasers on their hips.
The Frame that had hauled and crushed her into the mud was another lifetime ago, having vanished into the blur of shackles, walls, and cages. She remembered the barest sheen of white on its armour, or maybe a light grey. It might’ve just been the colour of the snow, obscured by the night. Those three blue eyes, however, would go unforgotten.
“As a seventeen-year-old, Ms. Kelenov, you can be tried as an adult,” said one of the revolving set of interviewers. The space was hauntingly empty, yet oppressively crowded, with a stream of faceless figures breaking long stretches of isolation. Even those periods of silence felt loud, and despite her seclusion, the red blink of a camera, perched in the shadows like a watching crow, was presence enough. She played with the frayed edges of her hair, still muddy. She couldn’t smell anything but concrete anymore.
“As you know, being Khalaban prompts serious suspicion of your intentions and part in all this.”
“I’m Dulkatian.” She’d murmur. No windows. Was it daytime, or night? Hours passed, maybe, and in came more accusing voices, with boots thick for marching, and suits thin for conversation. The faces morphed from one to another. Some had moustaches, speckled grey hair. One had glasses that reflected in the harsh overheads. All men. All in suits. All Dulkatian, but not like she was Dulkatian, their scrutiny a constant reminder.
“Answer the questions, and we won’t have to consider such… serious charges, Miss Kelenov.”
“I didn’t mean to-“
There was no clock in the room. Time trickled out like water in a rat’s cage. One group left. An age and a day passed. Another pair trundled in. Some brought food, packaged and flavourless. Delicious things. She’d scarf down every morsel and then retreat into her corner. There was no heater in the room, and the concrete was cold.
“Why were you there in particular? On that road?” One asked.
“Did you have a target?” Said another. “It’s a busy highway.”
“Where did the Frame come from? If it was your parents, we can protect you from them, you know.”
“They endangered you, that’s all you need to say.”
“Your citizenship could be revoked for this.” And on and on and on.
What must’ve been the hundredth new face sat across from her with beady eyes and a clipped tie, twirling his pen between his fingers. Sana wanted to shut her eyes and drift off into a deep slumber, to sleep this nightmare through, but even if she let herself sleep, they wouldn’t for long. The pen rattled. The man sniffled. Every sound, a little personal hell.
“We can sit here all day, miss.” He started again. How many minutes ago had he last said that? Five? Ten? An hour? They could well have been sat there all day, all week, and she wouldn’t know. “Just answer the question, it’s very simple.”
“…I don’t know.” She mumbled.
“And yet you had access to it anyways.” The man sighed. Sana couldn’t tell if he was actually frustrated, or if this was another trick. “Miss Kelenov, your story is, frankly, riddled with holes. We’re really supposed to believe you just, what, stumbled across it when on a walk like a loose pebble in your shoe? Do you think that’d hold up in court? Before a jury?”
Mama found it, her thoughts recited. Tell him. The faster this is done, the sooner we get out of the cold. “It was in our barn.” She swallowed.
“Your barn?” The man looked with shock, and then calmed. A ploy, maybe? She couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t strategise, if there were a strategy to be had. “Well, of course, farmlands are well known for their errant Frames.”
“It’s true.”
“It might be. Who’s to say? But it is wholly unhelpful, Oksana.” The man laid back in his seat. Notes scuffed on his pad. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard. “And that doesn’t even mention it is a federal offence not to report Frame sightings. There’s even a bounty just to encourage people to give them over – enough to pay for your college tuition, or a new car, anything you could want – and yet you held onto it, risking legal action every single day? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Sana shuffled in place. Wrong answer.
“We have enough witnesses to start a support group. Five of them are in hospital with lacerations. Lacerations! They were hit so fast, their wounds melted back shut. And that doesn’t even touch on the material damages. Then we find you, sitting in a Frame, barely a kilometre from the scene. We know what you did, Oksana. Now, we just need to figure out all the facts. Maybe you were coerced? Bribed? Perhaps by someone from back home?”
“…Dulkat?”
“You know where I mean.” The man stared. Sana wanted to fight, desperately, but even without the handcuff bruising her wrist, she couldn’t. Her legs still wouldn’t let her stand. She stayed slumped, and quiet, like a street dog dying in a back alley, hoping not to be noticed. “If you just tell us that someone was threatening you, Oksana, this can all blow over. A foreign actor, or some other malicious party. Maybe they were hurting you? I don’t know, only you can tell us. We can help you.”
“My home is Dulkat.” She whispered.
“Of course.”
No words occurred for several moments. Sana sat up, clambering out from her nook in the wall ever so slightly, squinting under the fluorescent white from above. If the man reacted, she didn’t see. She didn’t want him to.
“I want to go home.” She almost choked. “Let me go home.”
“You will, after you tell us if there was any organisation outside of Raelith influencing you or your decisions.”
“I. Am. Raelithan.”
“With familial ties to Khalaba, yes – blood is thick, Oksana. Look, we just want to help sort this all out, make things as easy for you as possible, and for that, you have to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but it, hm? That middle bit there is where we’re getting stuck, you’re not giving us everything.”
He continued on and on. Patience was no virtue, but rather a fine scalpel, delicately severing the tendons that held up a person’s walls. Leave a rat in a cage alone for long enough and it’ll scratch the bars till its claws bleed. The same could happen to a human, Sana understood then, as long as you treated it like a similarly small, cowering thing. Eventually she stopped replying.
The investigator’s wrist, covered by a small, wood-panelled device, buzzed abruptly. He checked it, sighed for a third time, picked up his coffee and gulped it down, before collecting his things.
“Well, I’m sorry to cut this short, Miss Kelenov. But, I do hope this brief pause will give you a chance to reconsider.” He stood from his seat, taking several clacking steps to the door. “The sooner you’re honest, the sooner this is over. Another investigator will be here soon. If you have a change of heart, tell them immediately, hm? Then we can get you home.”
‘Soon’ was a lie made up by those beholden to the clock. Hours might’ve passed, and to Sana, that was just as ‘soon’ as a minute, a second. Every instance she registered drilled into her skull all the same, but when looking back down the mountain of time since she’d arrived, she could see no base. No peak existed either, just her and the clouded, concrete room, engulfing her, filling her cheeks and gullet. Sana’s fingertips still hadn’t warmed all the way, maybe they were frostbitten? The interviewers hadn’t asked. She instinctively checked her right arm too – diagnostics of the self to stay sane – but upon rolling her shoulder, the memories flooded back in. They tore it off, her pride and joy, and crushed it like a can. I told them to stop and they wouldn’t listen. We told them.
And she started to cry. It was the third or fourth time she had in that room. She wondered if a lot of people did that in custody, cry. To her credit, the last time had to have been hours before, when things were just beginning. She had been a wreck, even more so, near inconsolable. But sobs and shudders couldn’t last forever, no emotion that intense could. So now, too exhausted to even have a panic attack, the tears rolled down her motionless face, silent, escaping where she could not. In that stillness, the echoes of screams and cries for help threatened to creep out from her memory. She just wanted to go unnoticed, unseen and left to dissolve, despite the fact that deep down, she knew that she wouldn’t go unwatched for a single second. The camera light flickered again, a small red dot hidden by the harsh conical lamp fixed crudely to the ceiling, revealing the dust and fingerprints coating the room. The hundreds of fingerprints. How many had sat here before? What did they do to deserve this? Had anyone caused as much hurt as she did? More? Did they weep too?
She looked into the vacant lens. No facial expression, hair unkempt and still agonisingly matte. The uniform they had thrown her creaked like old wood and tingled unpleasantly against her skin. She stared down the glass eye, and whatever uniform sat watching behind it, until water blurred her vision again. Her wrist was raw and her hand was numb and her shoulders ached and…and…
A clunk came from the door, and passing swiftly through it came another new face. New faces were becoming inscrutable, and she couldn’t tell it apart from the last. Tall, though most were taller than her, and that was all she could discern with them engulfed in shadow. They had a briefcase, maybe? Sana’s eyes were exhausted before she’d even entered that room. She shuffled her feet on the mat, the new hello.
“Good evening, Miss Kelenov.” Evening. Okay. A day, maybe several, unless weeks had been stolen under her watch. She didn’t reply, the new investigator didn’t need it.
The figure stepped further in, still engulfed by shadow, save for wisps of reflected light travelling up their face on approach. The coat on their shoulders was long as they pulled it off, carefully hanging it on the chair. They sat, and dragged in with several awful scrapes across the floor, a sound she had grown numb to. Briefcase on the floor, letters being rifled through. The bag was a new addition, no other inspector had brought one. Something glinted on their collar.
“May I call you Oksana?” The figure asked, monotone, but soft, like a field of snow. “Saying ‘Oksana Kelenov’ is unwieldy.”
Sana blinked. She hadn’t been asked that once the entire time here. Her eyes darted across the man’s face. She didn’t want eye contact, but in her brief glimpse, she saw a large slash, horizontal across their nose, like the sun rising over a flat horizon. She looked up to the red light, and nodded.
“Good to meet you then, Oksana.” The silhouette sniffled, before pulling out several papers, and placing them on the desk. “I have some questions to ask of you about your experience, pertaining to these values I have here.”
Interesting new tactic. They scanned gently down with their pen, before tapping a particular column. Then, they approached her nook, growing taller in her vision every step, and showed her the clipboard directly. FraC reading, Seventy-six percent, she read internally. The words were in Hlaqua, the language of the Federation at large. Unusual. The whole encounter was.
“I assume you know what it says, literally. But do you understand what it means?”
Sana searched her mind for an answer, before shaking her head, too out of it for a test. The inspector nodded. “The FraC score is how we measure Frame compatibility. You might know it by a different name; Resonance. That’s the one we give to the press, and the one Pilots use.”
Sana’s attention finally snapped to focus, after unknown hours of haze and murmurs. In fact, she sat up at the words, tilting her head to the newcomer. “I-I know it.” She whispered her first words in hours. Why did they say ‘we’? The need to know, to question, drew more curiosity to the surface.
“I suspected. Now, I would like you to tell me what piloting this Frame of yours was like. When you Frameshifted, before your body fully connected, did you get any particular sights, sounds, smells – any sensations at all? List them, please.”
Sana blinked twice. She had been avoiding looking at the table for the glare, but now, at this stranger, she had a reason to look. “Uh.” Her head throbbed with a lingering ache, memories swirled and regurgitated. “I don’t…” “Anything at all.” Snow is warm if you pack it around yourself. An insulator, like a blanket. The words soothed her, enough that her reply couldn’t stay buried for long. It clawed out her throat to speak.
“I saw lights.” She mumbled. “Flickering lights.”
“I see.” The silhouette’s hand scribbled over paper. A vague pink tinted a clip on their tie. “Anything else of note?”
“I heard a voice. Voices. But, I don’t think it was an actual voice. More like- like a memory. Or the sound a thought makes.” Her parched throat scraped the words out through bitter air, whistling with every strained note.
“I see.” They repeated, still scribbling. “Did these adverse effects increase in potency during your…incident?”
“I didn’t-” she started, then caught herself. Of all the truths, these weren’t the ones she expected to be saying. “Yes. I think they did. I- I didn’t mean to-“
“Well, that would line up with the numbers we’ve logged.” The interviewer ignored her plea, leaning back in the seat. The voice bounced around the room less than all the others. Reserved. She recognised it, but not that face, curtained by shadow.
“Numbers?” Sana asked, before they tapped the page again, further down. She skimmed. The number kept increasing, further and further, until a sharp peak at ninety-two percent. “Ninety-two.”
“This was the first time you have ever Frameshifted with this Frame, or any other for that matter, am I correct?”
This had to be a ploy. Sana just wanted to see her parents, was that too much to ask? She had to do something, anything. She wanted home, with its cocoa and tiny bed and warm sheets and her tools and her arm, fixed and waiting for her.
Nothing but a fantasy, like a warm winter morning. There was nothing to be done, no great game to be played. So, finally, she nodded.
The figure in shadow moved with strict precision, lifting the page away and returning it neatly to their bag. Then, they leant in, the light finally reaching their face. Olive skin, with that mountain range of pink scarring across their nose and cheeks. She could not meet their eyes, but the gaze was stern “I have a proposal for you, Oksana.”
“What kind of proposal?” She mumbled, pulling muddy dust from the strands of her fringe, pretending not to hear. Pretending not to be desperately interested in anything anyone could offer her.
“You applied to join the RFI Pilot programme, but were rejected. Practical scores were good, but your theory was lacking in places. Add onto that your disability, and the RFI deemed you unworthy of a spot.”
“That- that was why…” Sana tried quietly, the man across from her folded their hands.
“It was. You then went on a rampage, and nearly killed five people.” Sana’s lip quivered. “Am I correct?”
The whole truth, they already knew this part. Maybe the bastards behind the red-lit camera lens just wanted to see her say it. She swallowed, unmoving for several, agonising moments, and then slowly nodded. “I’m-” She kept her eyes on the ceiling. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t want any of this, I just- I had nothing else. I have nothing else. I’m sorry.” The barricades, so recently rebuilt, overflowed once more. Not in a tsunami, but a trickle. More would come, she knew it.
“You should be, Oksana. You will carry this weight forever.” The figure said, staring her down as she collapsed into her hand. “Which is why I stopped you from being turned into a red puddle in those woods. And, more crucially, why I suspect that you would make an excellent pilot.”
Sana immediately jerked her head from her hands, and stared. Who was this insane person that had made their way into her cell? Their words and her position didn’t exist in the same universe.
Bullshit. Bullshit, it had to be. It was the only thing that could escape through her mental block. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. She inhaled once, then let go a thousand breaths that had been held in, suffocating her over hours like carbon monoxide. She gently lowered her eyes, hand far from her face, as her gaze crossed the table.
“What- what are you talking about?” She choked, the flow starting anew. She breathed rapidly into her palm, lashes crashing against each other. Her sight blurred, but she still saw a tissue extend her way. She snatched it, wiping herself down. “Who are you?”
“You have a great debt to your country now, Oksana. Our country. A debt that you will pay back, one way or another. But, for what you lack in caution, you more than make up for in foundational skill, and in the Raelithan Frame Infantry, your kind is rare. As such, we are willing to take on your debt.”
She was glad to be crying properly again, emotions flooding back in. But after everything, the whole day battering her against the rocks, she’d begun to be sick of them. The intensity was drowning, and swimming against the current had exhausted her. The tears flowed whether she wanted it or not.
“I don’t deserve this.” She tried to voice the cocktail of guilt and self-pity. “I hurt people! I’m- I’m a monster. I shouldn’t be rewarded for that, it’s- it’s-“
“Luck.”
“Pure, stupid, bullshit luck. This isn’t fair, I should be- I should…” She jittered into the tissue, crumpling below lines of spit and tears. Then, she crumpled backwards into the seat, blowing strongly into the tissue as she tried to collect herself. “So I hurt people, and what? I get a pat on the back? ’cause it turns out I was so damn good at it? Is that what you need from me? A killer?”
“You had unnaturally high compatibility scores for the first flight. Did you know that most people who try to plug into a Frame for the first time, outside of a controlled environment, die? It’s usually seizures that get them, but there are plenty of other ways. Historically, some prospective recruits would plug into a Frame Core, and then five seconds later Mount Killian would have one less Pilot, one less Frame, and a whole new crater. And yet, you plugged yourself in, alone, in a barn in the middle of rural Dulkat. Not only did you survive apparently unscathed and unexploded, but you also managed to get your bearings in record time. And then, not content with such a feat alone, you also reached compatibility scores usually reserved on the charts for Pilots at the height of their careers. They lasted for a brief, flittering second, but that is still some immense potential, Ms. Kelenov.”
“You can’t just- come here and clean up this mess,” she said. “I hurt people- I nearly killed people! I don’t understand. I don’t deserve this.”
“If I had wanted a clean up crew, I would’ve let that Frame that found you do its job. I would’ve helped sweep away the corpse, even.” Their face returned to the shadows, the chair beneath them eerily silent. “But I didn’t. Because I – or rather, someone above my station – is willing to take a gamble on you. This is your one and only alternative, Oksana. If you so choose, we can let you go back to civilian hands. At your age, you will be tried in Federal court, and will likely spend the rest of your early adult life in prison. Prisoner rehabilitation rates in Dulkat remain some of the lowest in the Federation, so in all likelihood, this would be the complete destruction of your life path and livelihood. Not to mention, a Dulkatian who looks like you would be an instant target. You have no record before this, no outstanding complaints from any other organisation. I understand wanting to pay the tithe for what you have done, Oksana. But, I promise you this, repenting through action is in every way superior. If you take this option to join the RFI, survive our training process, and come out the other side a full-fledged Pilot, such amends will be infinitely better than you being thrown in some hole to toil away your days.”
“I’m a bad hand to bet on,” Sana mumbled. She had never played cards with any betting involved. Nothing serious, anyways, no lives at stake.
“Then maybe we’re bad players.” A twinge of understanding bled through their monotone voice. “If I could rescue every single person before you to be sent down this route just to stave off your guilt, Oksana, I would. But I am afraid this is the best we can offer. A lifeline.”
She breathed into her hand more, before placing the tissue on the desk. “Who even are you? You’re RFI but, why help me then, and now? Why stop the others from just ending me? Why even bother?”
Their hands propelled them to a loose standing position, face in shadow and form looming. “I am Colonel Reo Amestine of the Raelithan Frame Infantry. They/Them. You appear to be useful in a way that others in our organisation weren’t immediately willing to see. But this is not a gift, Oksana.” Out across the gap between them, a palm extended towards her. “This is a chance; do not turn it into a mistake.”
Sana swallowed a deep knot, a barricade of worms that had built larger and larger in her throat. This wasn’t okay. She’d hurt people. She was getting an out, and was being lauded for her actions, and yet people, other human beings, living, breathing, loving, could have died. She had failed them.
But isn’t this what she always wanted? Said a deeper voice, and Sana bit at her lip. Maybe it would bleed. And this Colonel might be right. Penance through action; it must be better than rotting away like an old tree stump, and what about her parents? She may never get to see them again if she doesn’t accept this. We have so much to live for, Oksana, and so much to lose, even if we don’t know it yet. Of all times, after so long of being walked over and going unheard, let’s make people listen.
After a moment more, she lifted her head, rested her plimsolls against the concrete, and stood – a foreign feeling in this place. The chain rattled as her hand, still branded with burgundy bruises, carefully extended forwards, towards the invisible threshold.
“I accept.”
Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.
Frameshift 