Revenge14 min read
I refused to be someone else's prize
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I smelled rot and iron and the small, ridiculous sweetness of a cake at the same time.
"Who is she?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer before the car door shut.
"Forrest's concern," came the cold voice.
"He has no right," I said. "I'm his affianced."
"Forrest doesn't owe explanations." The voice was short; Forrest King didn't say more.
She looked at me then—Luz Powell—tilted her head, smiled like a girl who had never been to a war, and the whole base went quiet as if someone had dropped crystal.
"I am not your concern," I told myself, but I heard the old line from childhood nag at my ribs. "We grew up together," I said aloud. "We promised."
Forrest's jaw did a small thing I had seen a hundred times: the fraction of a loosening. "Jin—" he started once, but I cut him off.
"Harriet," I corrected, breathing in the copper scent of yesterday's fight.
"Don't make trouble," he said.
And that was our first argument in a long series of small knives and unreadable looks. I smelled zombie blood on my sleeve, the sticky paste of brains along my arm, and Luz smelled like something I had not smelled in months—clean water and garden soil.
"Why are you with him?" I asked Luz once when the base had finished cheering and the moon was pale and far.
"I help," she whispered. "My space... it keeps things safe. I can heal, too."
"You save him, but not me," I said.
She blinked, embarrassed. The world was divided into those who fought and bled and those who gathered miracles inside pockets of nothing. Luz was the latter. Forrest liked miracles.
"Don't fight me, Harriet," Forrest said later at the door. "Not here."
"Then don't treat me like I don't exist," I told him.
"You are being unreasonable." Forrest put the cake on the table and left a note: Don't be angry. Signed: F.
I held the note for a long time and thought of cotton fields and the kid who once gave up his seat so I could take the front row in elementary school. "We were never the same," he said finally.
"If you don't love me, say it," I said.
"I protect you." It was his answer, old and flat. "That is enough."
"Protection isn't a substitute for love," I said. "If you want my power, ask. Don't steal it like you take someone's bread."
He looked at me as if the world were a math puzzle he could solve. "You're being dramatic."
I laughed until I cried.
"You will lose me if you keep treating me like this."
He stayed cold. I left.
*
"You helped him," Todd Ziegler said to me later, the scientist smiling like a knife tuck into ham.
"Who asked you," I snapped, and the memory of being strapped to a metal table flashed like lightning.
Todd's hands were clean, his lab coat white, his eyes bright with someone who loves broken sciences more than people. "I can make you stronger," he cooed once. "Strength for the new world."
"You experimented on me," I said.
"I studied you. You are unique." He turned the glass vial in his fingers like a ribbon.
"You hurt me." The words scraped.
"It was necessary." Todd smiled. "We needed to know the price of power."
"For who?" I asked.
"For all of us," he said. "And for him."
"Forrest?"
"Forrest and I may share an interest."
I remembered the machines and the needles. I remembered the hours wired to a bed while pain took my language. I tasted metal. I had been the small animal inside a jar for them to peer at, to dissect, to hope could be turned into a weapon.
"You will regret this," I whispered.
"Regret?" Todd laughed. "No, Harriet. You'll become a weapon. Or you'll die trying."
When the lab lights went out and I vomited and took what remained of my pride, there was a small boy who had been turned and yet kept some soft, bright thing.
He followed me from the ruins.
He was a zombie who could be called nothing so easily. I named him Efrain because his eyes reminded me of a winter river.
"You can't take him," Luz told me once, worried.
"He is not a monster in my eyes," I said. "He is my friend."
Efrain learned to be small and clumsy like a child learning to speak. He learned to be human in the margins I could give him. He was covered in wounds that did not kill him—wounds that made him softer. He carried crystals we called kinks of energy, and he gave them to me like a dog bringing home a found coin. One day he did something no one else could. He bowed in front of me in a way that meant: I stay.
"You'll call him your little flower?" Luz asked.
"Stupid flower," I said, but my voice cracked. He smiled the shyest smile in the world and then smashed a zombie skull with a pipe.
We left the bright base and built the first bones of our place: a school turned camp, a place with a wall and small signs that said: Starfire—Zombies do work; people do the rest.
"Zombies as labor?" someone asked when we opened the gate.
"They follow orders," I said. "And they have little hearts for the sun when they sleep. They beg for it, in their own way."
"Harriet, you can't keep that many alive," someone warned.
"I can," I said, and my voice shook as much as my hands.
I took to using my power in a way no one had tried before. The crystals buzzed in my head and brought sharp, jagged pain with every move. My ability wasn't clean elements; it was inside the mind—if I pictured something, things moved. If I wanted a door open, the hinges answered. If I wanted a wall to crumble, the mortar unlatched. If I thought of Efrain safe, the world bent. But every use sent a spike in my temple, a scream that left me drained and trembling.
"Stop overusing it," Luz said.
"I can't," I said. "I won't watch another camp burn because I'm too weak to try."
We grew. Starfire took in refugees, rebuilt a field. People worked side by side with the controlled dead, and sometimes it felt like the world had tilted back up onto its feet.
"You're a strange leader," said Gerardo Carpenter, my grandfather. "You never wanted command."
"I wanted to live," I said.
"And you've done both," he said. "You taught yourself how."
But power attracts men. It always had.
Forrest came back one gray morning with the air of a man who had built a city in his pockets. He had friends who answered, commanders who bowed. He had Luz in a newborn's shadow and a way to make people laugh at his jokes.
"You built this," he said to me in the dining hall, hands soft with old habit. "You did well."
"Thank you," I said, but my mouth didn't mean the words.
"You are mine," he said once during a surge of closeness, and then: "You confuse me by leaving doors open."
"Doors aren't for you to decide," I said.
He smiled like someone who had won a chessboard without telling the pieces I would be used.
"You would be useful with me," he said. "Think of what we could do together."
I spat on the floor.
"There are ways to demand," he said, oddly gentle. "Give me your mind, Harriet. Let me lead. People will follow."
"You would steal me," I said. "You tied me to men like Todd because you thought it easier."
He opened and closed his hands, the movement like a lock.
"People underestimate sacrifice," he said. "Sacrifice is power. You could be remembered."
"And you will remember me when I am broken," I said. "You will put flowers on a name and then move on."
Forrest's face hardened.
"You will be praised," he whispered. "When the dust settles, they'll sing of me and my choices."
"You will fail," I said. "Because you don't understand what a promise is."
And then the world betrayed him as surely as he had betrayed me.
*
The first public undoing was for Todd Ziegler.
I had been the star the scientists wanted to study. I had been the thing torn apart in test tubes and cold light. Todd had been the small god who preened and called it "progress."
We gave him a trial the way you give a fox a day in a coop.
"This is not a courthouse," I said when we dragged him into the square in front of Starfire's rebuilt auditorium. "This is a reckoning."
He looked at the gathered faces and smiled. "Harriet," he said. "How poetic."
"You're going to answer," I said.
They had wired up a stage, not for spectacle but to hold the instruments he had used. They were all there—the glass vials, the arc-drills, the electrodes. People had painted words on their shirts: Remember, Never Again.
Todd's grin was small and brittle when he saw the devices. "You brought my tools," he said.
"We brought your crimes," I said.
"Harriet, you dramatize." He had the arrogance of a man who believed himself above history.
"Tell them," I said. "Tell them why you took my nights."
He opened his mouth. For a moment he tried the old charm. "Ethics require sacrifices—"
"Stop," Luz called from the crowd, her voice small but steady.
"Why did you cut them?" someone from the back shouted. "Why make a child a test subject?"
I stepped forward. "You tied me like a chess piece. You used my pain to feed your name."
He laughed. "You were an anomaly."
"You were a sadist," I said. "Own it."
Todd's face shifted when video played—smug lab footage of me screaming, electrodes lighting my skull. The crowd saw the faces of those who had been injected, the charts of rising and falling, the names of those who had disappeared. The square shifted from curiosity to revulsion.
When they demanded punishment, it began with his instruments.
"Destroy it," someone yelled.
"Yes," the crowd repeated. "Destroy it."
They chained his equipment and burned it. Flames ate the cold metal, and Todd's words fell into the heat and went silent. His face went through stages: disbelief, anger, denial. He tried to joke. "You fools," he spat. "Science is the only path."
"You're a butcher," a woman cried, the memory of a lost sister in her voice.
His defenses broke when Gerardo—my grandfather—walked to the stage and held up a small recorder. "You recorded your patients," he said. "You catalogued screams like butterflies. You pinned them down." Gerardo's voice trembled. "We recorded everything."
Todd's lips worked. "These are falsehoods," he said.
A man at the back held up the first of his own scars, the brand of experimental burn, and the sound that ran through the square was not pity but a slow, building anger that felt like breaking glass. Phones were out, faces recorded, mouths moved. They took pictures and shouted and called for names and for justice.
By the end, Todd was unmasked in more ways than one. They had him stand beneath a tarp of banners that listed the names of his victims. Teenagers spat on the lab coat as a boy threw the coat into the fire. Todd's reactions convulsed—"I didn't—" then "You don't understand—" then the last small, animal plea: "Please."
He knelt. For the first time he looked like a man, and not a scientist.
"No," I said, though my voice was small. "You will not die in the dark. You will live and watch what you built burn."
They forced him to stand and to speak to each of the victims. He had to apologize on camera, to explain his choices and to listen to the names that had been stolen from him. He trembled through it. People recorded his every break. There were moments when he tried to reclaim authority—his hands went to his pockets for a pen—but the crowd hissed. A woman spat again at the ground near his shoes.
"You took the night from her," someone said, pointing at me.
He bowed his head. "I was wrong," he murmured. "Forgive me."
"Forgiveness is not yours to ask," Luz said. "You must live with what you did and be remembered for what you did."
Todd's collapse was not cinematic. It was quiet at first—his face grew pale, and then he tried bargaining, promising research, promising cures. "I can reverse—"
"Reverse?" someone laughed. "You made a ledger of people who won't be whole again."
He ended up employed under guard in the medical wing where he would no longer have tools that could hurt. He became a living stain that people came to peer at, to touch only with gloved hands as if they looked at a lesson.
When he walked past our gate months later, men spat as he went by. Children pointed. He had become a cautionary tale: be careful what you look for, because looking can make you blind.
The punishment worked because it was public. It showed the stages—arrogance, denial, panic, collapse, pleading—and made sure people did not forget.
But it was not the end.
*
Forrest King was a different animal. He had friends. He had troops. He had promises that came true as if from a command line.
He came with a smile and a plan to make Starfire a vassal. "Join me," he said. "We will rebuild a city together."
"You already took my nights," I told him in the garden one evening. "Why take my future?"
"Forrest," Luz said softly, "you don't have to."
He had thought he could play politician and lover in the same suit. Power was a language he spoke with careful syllables. He had allies who promised him a podium, and he believed it.
When his betrayal became public—not by a leak but by the slow flip of allegiance—people's reaction was volcanic.
We organized a hearing in the ruined amphitheater, where the city used to watch plays. I insisted it was public. I insisted the men who had gathered for him should hear the truth.
"Forrest," I said into the open mic, my mouth steady though my heart thudded. "You chose ambition over truth."
"I made choices," he answered, voice steady at first. "I did what I thought best."
"You sent me to Todd to be studied without asking my consent," I said. "You arranged for power to be taken as if a man could own a mind."
He looked at me, searching. "You exaggerate."
"Then tell them why you did it," I said, and the amphitheater went quiet.
He tried the old charm with the crowd. "She is rash," he started. "Power demands sacrifice."
"She was your fiancée," someone shouted. "How do you call that sacrifice?"
The hearing turned to a performance of human reaction. Forrest began with disbelief. "I would never hurt Harriet," he said. He shifted to denial. "I acted for the good—"
"No," I said. "You acted for you."
You could see the corrosion of certainty. Men who had once stood at his back stepped forward one by one and placed small, precise accusations. There was a commander who had accepted a promotion under Forrest's wing and now told of nights when Forrest made decisions alone, of patrols sent with orders the men didn't ask to understand, of food stocks moved without vote. A woman from another base read a letter where Forrest had written of "useless sentimentalities" and "hard necessities."
"This is not a show," Forrest said. His defense became an attempt at a political argument. "You cannot rule with sentiment."
"Ruling," I said, "is not owning people."
Then the stage changed. I had prepared. Starfire had allies: bases that had seen Forrest's taking and resented it. We had evidence—ledgers, communications, the name lists he had used to coerce support. They were laid out like a map of betrayal on the floor.
Forrest's face went through his usual ladder: shock, then rage, then denial. "You're lying," he spat. "You always wanted more."
I had expected him to be proud. I was not prepared for the violence of his unraveling when the crowd turned.
"Say sorry," someone sneered.
He tried that. He said his apology like a man practicing a script. It didn't land.
"How many must you use for your towers?" an old woman asked, and Forrest could not answer.
Then there was the slow, merciless undoing. He was stripped of rank in a public rite. Not just demoted—his ornaments were taken piece by piece. The medals that had once looked like promises were removed with careful hands. A boy took his command baton and snapped it. The public did not shout for blood. They shouted for accountability. They demanded restitution.
"You made us follow you by fear," someone cried. "Now you will see fear in yourself."
Forrest tried to bargain. He stepped to the edge of the amphitheater and attempted a speech about unity, about a future together.
"You chose your future over others," I said. "You told yourself necessary lies."
He went from rigidity to pleading. "Harriet—" he began. "Please—"
"Please what? Keep me in your pocket?" I asked.
He crumpled. For a long time he sat on the ground with his head in his hands while his former supporters turned their backs.
Eyes I had loved once hardened. "You wanted a man who leads," I said. "You found a man who takes."
The crowd's reaction was complicated. People had loved Forrest—not all of them—but the spectacle of his fall made them taste both betrayal and a kind of vindication. Many recorded the moment. There were jeers, yes, but also the soft, rousing sound of applause when those who had suffered saw their grievances acknowledged. Phones flashed in the ruins like a swarm of caught fireflies.
He begged. "Please," he said at last, the word raw. "We were supposed to be friends. You owe me—"
"No," Gerardo said from the front row. "You owe everyone who trusted you a truth."
Forrest stammered, his face a torn map. He tried to invoke earlier kindnesses, then was interrupted by a mother with a child who pointed at him and said, "He took food." The crowd's mood swung to measured fury.
Finally, the verdict: Forrest would be exiled from the network he'd built. He would lose claim to any of the bases he'd tried to subdue. He would stand in the square and watch as those bases signed charters of independence. He would be made to witness the dismantlement of the power he had tried to harvest.
They made him walk through the camp he had once commanded, barefoot and with a ribbon around his neck. They made him watch the animals he bred moved away, the walls he ordered torn down. Men spat at his feet. Women turned their faces so they would not look at the man who had thought himself above such things.
Forrest moved through stages: cold calculation, visible confusion, then fear. He begged, bargaining for small mercies—food, a place to sleep, a guard. I watched the change: his denial giving way to horror as he realized his name no longer opened doors; then to bargaining—"I will make amends"—then to pleading on his knees, then to a quiet collapse into tears.
People had different reactions. Some laughed. Some cried. A few filmed him on old devices, not for cruelty but to save a record. People who had once been silent lifted their voices and told him what he had done. The amphitheater listened and weighed him.
When he finally fell to his knees and held out both hands as if asking for mercy, the crowd's response was a complicated chorus: some turned away, some murmured "Enough," some clapped, and the loudest noise was the thud of a gavel I had borrowed from a judge who had helped us: justice replaced spectacle.
His reaction changed in the span of those hours: pride melted to panic, panic to visible pleading, pleading to collapse. He cried, not the tailored sorrow he had practiced, but a raw, animal unravel. His polished face was dirt-streaked. It was, in the end, a human fall.
Forrest's punishment was not to be executed. That would have been easy and clean. The punishment that fit was humiliation that forced introspection and the slow, social rot of losing power. He had to be watched, to feel the eyes of the people he had hurt, to carry the weight of being the subject of the very public script he had once written for others.
He left the amphitheater a different man. People who had answered his orders turned their shirts inside out and walked different paths. His allies made deals to keep their own skins safe, but they no longer wore his emblem. The political map shuffled.
When, months later, a courier found him at the edge of a ruined bridge and handed him a letter listing the charters of the new alliances, he looked at it like a man realizing the language of contracts had been stripped of its power. "What have I become?" he asked no one.
A girl with dirt under her fingernails, my friend Luz, said simply: "A man who chose wrong."
He had been a monster in his greed, yes, but he was punished in public, fully, with the spectacle of loss rather than the finality of death. The crowd's reaction—a mixture of scorn, pity, applause, and silence—was the real punishment. He was reduced from whether the leader whose commands were obeyed without thought to a man who had to ask for forgiveness and watch as people either gave it or not.
I watched him go.
*
We rebuilt. Starfire grew into something both strange and strong. Efrain learned to say simple things. He learned kindness in small rituals: he would bring me crude flowers from the compost heap and stand proudly when I praised him. He stayed young and mute, and his devotion was the most human thing I had ever been given. He learned "I love you" wrong and sweetly, and I learned it back.
In the end, I am older. My hair silvered quickly because of the cost of using my gift. The world called me a madwoman once for letting zombies do work, and later, historians would call me something else like "the builder." I never wanted statues.
Before I used the last of my power, I told Efrain to sleep. "When I'm gone," I said, "you must remember the sun."
He put his cold head against my palm and made a small sound that meant yes.
"Promise me," I rasped in a voice barely louder than a wind.
He put his hand in mine. It was cold and warm. He was Efrain, always.
I walked to the central plaza, where the city of controlled dead worked in peace. I closed my eyes and imagined a sleep for them. I thought of the first boy who had stared at me tenderly the way only winter can stare. I thought of Luz's little gardens, of Gerardo's steady hands, of the time Forrest had once tied my laces when I could not reach them.
The last time I used my power it was not to dominate. It was not to take. I made the dead rest like the sea going down. I told the city to sleep. The pain was a bright, clean thing.
When the light eased from me I felt Efrain press his head into my chest, the same patient weight he had always been. "I love you," he said in his simple way.
"Be happy," I said.
He blinked his gray eyes and offered that half-smile he always wore.
They buried us, not as conquerors but as two halves of a quiet truth. People whispered about Deerhill—the ruined lab where the plague had been born—and about the college where I had tried to learn to be small. They told of the two who climbed to a tower and watched the last sunset together. The story traveled a long way: a woman who refused to be someone's trophy, a boy who learned to speak, and two people who chose each other.
I left something behind: a city that could both fight and sleep, and a record that people use as a lesson. They say I died keeping my promise: not to those who used me, but to the people I loved.
"Don't let them be monsters," I said once.
Efrain pressed his forehead to mine.
"I won't," he whispered.
And under the red sun over Deerhill, we lay down and listened to the world find its breath again.
The End
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