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For a moment, Fu Hua was walking on the lawn outside St. Freya Academy. Students were laughing out of view. The mood was lighter than air.
She took a couple steps forward.
Her heels were now clicking on glass. An oppressive heat emanated from below her. Fu Hua was alone on the hellscape that was once Australia, Previous Era.
A few more steps forward.
Her line of vision dropped as her heels sank in snow. The hellscape had frozen over. No, she was somewhere in the Devastation of Siberia, Current Era.
In this manner, Fu Hua traveled across her past with only enough time to recognize the memory before it was replaced by another. It was as though her history had been made into a gallery of backdrops and someone else was swiping through them. Incidentally, that might accurately describe what the Herrscher of Sentience was doing.
Fu Hua knew Senti and the way she used her power for monotonous, childlike purposes. She loved producing spectacles, instead of saying what was on her mind.
This was all a flashy prelude to a big show. A walk down memory lane, leading to a surprise gut punch. And maybe a gratuitous action sequence. And if everything went Senti’s way, it would only be after the climax that she would reveal to Fu Hua why she kidnapped her and set this all up.
She continued through the past. Mount Taixuan. London. An urban warzone. Somewhere at night. Orange and gold splashes.
The scenes were accelerating. Her eyes couldn’t keep up anymore.
Fu Hua slowed her steps.
The memories continued flying past her.
As she came to a stop, all of her history flashed before her. Then, white.
And a door.
It was a flimsy plank the color of spoiled basil. The door was a bad fit for its frame, and it had been common for her to chip it as she moved furniture in and out.
She took a step back as the memory flooded in. Her head felt lighter.
She had thought herself numb to nostalgia, but this door made her feel like she was experiencing it for the first time. And how could she not? Her childhood bedroom was behind that door.
Her hand grabbed the doorknob. She turned it as she would a combination dial. The door swung inward on its own.
It was the scent that welcomed Fu Hua home.
Autumn. Salt Weavers District of Bohai City. Two bus stops to the north, 371 food stalls crowded on the Modestly Implausible Balcony were precooking entrées for rush hour. A 40-minute drive to the west, the tackgrum factory spewed violet into the sky. The wind blew constantly here, bringing these scents to her bedroom window.
Her room was compact. The bed took up a quarter of it. A tall mirror stood next to it. The reflection showed a walnut vertical dresser and some high shelves. Those objects filled up the other half of the room.
It had always bothered her how little space she had to exercise.
As Fu Hua stepped inside, her foot bumped into a hamper, a gift from the kind Gaos. They were the next-door couple who seemed to be as old as the ancient shack they lived in.
On the walls, there were martial arts posters, held up by a spiderweb of frayed tape. She didn’t thank her father enough for them.
Childhood mementos were scattered around the small room, containing long-buried memories she often forgot she still had.
She remembered her morning runs through the slums, long before she’d undergone training to be a soldier. Her body was more fragile then. As she thought of the chill before sunrise, her skin felt tender and thin.
Fu Hua approached her old bed. The blanket was a tropical ocean gradient perforated with black diamond shapes. They were linen imitations of the innumerable floating modules that made up Bohai City’s Aerostatic Tellucirus Climatic Network. The other tenants in her building had called them “Anti-Stars.”
She used to imagine she was flying among them when she lied down. And in those daydreams, she was admired just like them—the protagonist of songs, the subject of art. She would’ve liked to be noticed, at the very least.
The Fu Hua who had lived here had modest interests and dreams. She had sacrificed all of them for her lifelong mission. She had even burned most of the memories with Fenghuang Down.
They must have been happy ones.
Fu Hua breathed in the warm air. “Senti. Why are you showing me this?”
She wasn’t sure when her other self had entered the room. It was her own fault for getting distracted by the past.
In the mirror, the Herrscher of Sentience shifted onto one foot and leaned back but otherwise stayed silent.
“We can’t stay here. Kiana, Mei, and the others need us.” Fu Hua turned on her heel. “We can explore more of the past once we’re done out there. We’re so close now to finishing my… Our mission.”
For an instant, Senti’s face crumpled. But it immediately tightened into a glare.
Of course, she was still a child about these things. Fu Hua would have to be more delicate and patient to persuade her.
“Okay, there’s something you wanted to show me, yes? Or… something I could show you? Please, I’d like to know what it is, Senti.”
Senti didn’t answer. Instead, she took slow steps toward Fu Hua. The latter reflexively assumed a defensive stance.
“█████.”
A name. That’s all Senti said. But it was one Fu Hua hadn’t heard since the catastrophe that erased her hometown.
The A-rank Valkyrie, the immortal guardian of China, the elite soldier of Fire Moth. Centuries of physical and mental training, combat experience, and drilled self-discipline. Her history. Her defenses. All of that was excised from Fu Hua by the mention of that name.
What remained was the inexperienced teenager who had once spoken it with near reverence.
The air felt heavy on her skin. Her breathing became uneven. Fu Hua was unable to keep her stance. The most severe fever of nostalgia had her in its grip.
Senti reached out and pushed her shoulder. It was gentle, more like the suggestion of a push. But that was enough to make Fu Hua stumble and fall onto the bed.
When her back touched the blanket, she thought of being enveloped by stuffed animals, her mother’s arms, and everything soft. All the tension evaporated from her muscles.
She was home.
But it was all wrong. Fu Hua wasn’t a small girl anymore. She should’ve crushed the tiny cot. But now, her hands couldn’t find the edges. The avenues of escape were nowhere in reach. The blanket had become the vast sky it imitated, and it swallowed her up.
Senti followed. She was on top of Fu Hua, using her arms and legs to cage her in. Her red eyes were dilated. Fu Hua saw herself clearly in them.
“She was the first person we ever did it to. Remember, old-timer?”
Fu Hua held her breath.
She couldn’t deny it when they both knew the truth. Senti would be able to recall every beat in this memory.
Fu Hua was immobilized. This was a vulnerability she hadn’t let herself know in millennia.
“It was the day of the last Fury of the Furloughed. Lambelters were screaming by the school all day. Even the teacher gave up on trying to calm things down.”
The responsibility of preventing panic and disorder in the classroom had fallen to the class rep: Fu Hua.
“She never talked to us before then. But that day, we had her attention. It was so hard to keep it together, while we felt her staring at us!”
Senti’s gloved hand hooked onto the hem of Fu Hua’s shirt and pulled it up.
“S-stop that.” The words came out so quietly, they might have been spoken only in Fu Hua’s head.
“We were driven mad by it. We had, I guess you can call them, the butterflies in our stomach. Like this.”
Senti’s other hand pressed firmly down on Fu Hua’s stomach. Just above the waistline. Fu Hua’s body nearly leaped up from the shock.
Fu Hua’s shirt was up to her collarbone. Her other self moved the bra aside without any resistance.
Senti broke eye contact momentarily to gaze downward. At first, Fu Hua wasn’t sure what Senti would find there. They had the same body after all. But as she listened, she heard Senti’s breaths. The rhythm followed the rise and fall of Fu Hua’s exposed chest.
Fu Hua began to shiver.
“This was a new feeling, but we weren’t that ignorant about what it was and what had to be done about it. We… tried it out… immediately when we got home from school.”
Senti’s hand lifted from Fu Hua’s stomach and hovered over a nipple. Then, a single finger rubbed it. Just a glancing gesture. Something done more out of curiosity than anything else. But it still lit up her nerves.
Her body recognized the texture of that touch. It should have been her own hand. Yet here it was acting out of her control, giving her pleasure. All her body knew was that Fu Hua was touching herself yet she wasn’t.
That hand rubbed a few circles, then applied a second finger. It began to massage the spot. This was still exploration.
Senti followed the memory of young Fu Hua’s inexperienced movements to the next beat. Her whole hand gripped the breast. Those fingers that were her own but also weren’t pinched Fu Hua’s nipple. All the while, the pressure steadily built up in her core. She wanted mo—
“We wanted more.”
Senti grabbed at Fu Hua’s shorts and underwear and yanked them down to her knees.
Fu Hua barely had time to flinch at the contact of open air and her wet entrance before Senti filled the space. Her finger made timid pokes at the opening, each one sending a ripple through Fu Hua.
Her younger self had been almost fearful how good she would feel if she touched herself there. Fu Hua was scared even now of what would happen as she experienced both her memory of the pleasure and the pleasure Senti was giving her.
“Near the end of the day, that’s when she spoke to us. She said hi. We said hello. Fuck, we were muttering the whole time!”
Senti thrusted in up to the first knuckle. Fu Hua hissed.
“Then, there was a bit of awkward talk. I’m fine if you want to erase that part of the memory. But before she left, she said… and don’t you dare forget the exact words… She said, ‘The way you took charge was kind of cool, class rep. See you.’”
Her finger sank deeper and Fu Hua’s back arched up.
“‘Cool.’ She said we were ‘cool.’” Senti spoke the word in a quieter voice with all the gravitas of scripture.
Senti added another finger. Her fingers stretched Fu Hua’s walls.
“We tried so hard to keep her pretty face in our mind as we picked up the pace. Our fingers went faster. We wanted to go as deep as we could.”
Both fingers receded and thrusted in. Fu Hua bucked toward them. She needed them to stay in her.
“This was the closest we’d get to flying and we didn’t know how high we could go.”
Their fingers curled and Fu Hua cried out. She couldn’t spare a thought for confusion or shame.
She needed to have more. She needed to be filled.
“What we did here ruined that relationship. It was so bad, we can’t even recreate her eyes now. You remember why, old-timer? We stopped looking at her eyes because this feeling”—Both of their fingers spread out and lightning surged up the plates of Fu Hua’s spine—“would come back whenever we did. That’s not befitting a morally upstanding person like Fu Hua.”
Fu Hua’s eyes were watering as the mounting pleasure became overwhelming.
“We were always bad at acting. So at St. Freya, it made sense to play a role we understood well.”
She remembered the distant memory of and experienced for the first time the imminent crescendo of release, all at once.
“Who would’ve known Fu Hua really was an honor student at her core?”
Their middle finger reached frantically further inside, desperate to discover whether an even better pleasure might be drawn out.
But their finger had reached its limit.
So had Fu Hua.
She came undone, the final wave of ecstasy taking with it whatever strength and senses she had left in her limbs. Fu Hua could barely feel the blanket underneath her.
The tears came free. She felt each one rolling over her cheeks. Fat and heavy.
Senti fixed her gaze on them for a while.
She suddenly brought her face close to Fu Hua’s. All Fu Hua could see was the woman in Senti’s eyes. Her limbs strewn across the bed. Her face fixed in the moment of release.
Could that woman in the reflection really be her?
Something warm and wet pressed against her right cheek. It drew a long stripe up and stopped below her eyelashes.
It was her own tongue. No, it was Senti’s tongue.
After spending a moment there to collect the last teardrop, Senti drew back.
Fu Hua let go of the breath she’d been holding.
Senti silently stewed on the flavor. Her smile stretched their shared face to its physical extremes. And it was genuine.
“This taste will be my memory alone, old-timer.”
The cold shock drew Fu Hua back into herself. As she came down from her high, she remembered where she was trapped.
“Stay with me,” Senti said, stroking Fu Hua’s thigh. “Let’s enjoy all of our memories just like this. Let’s take our time with them.”
Senti buried her face in Fu Hua’s shoulder. She could barely hear her mumbling, “Please.”
Fu Hua’s eyes welled up with more tears. She couldn’t raise her arms to wrap around her other self.
She couldn’t comfort her.
Fu Hua couldn’t.
“I can’t, Senti.”
Senti’s grip on her thigh became a vise. Fu Hua took the pain.
It lasted only a moment. Senti got off Fu Hua and the bed and was heading for the exit before Fu Hua could raise her head.
“Senti…” she whispered.
Her other self hesitated at the door. She was trembling.
Senti breathed in. Fu Hua was ready for an insult or a tantrum. But it never came.
The Herrscher of Sentience just shook her head and walked out.
Her steps receded into unknown parts of the illusion. Once Fu Hua couldn’t hear them anymore, she dropped her head back onto the bed.
The afterglow was already a feeble memory. The feeling of emptiness was all she could feel in her core now. Self-loathing made ashes where there had been fire.
She relived her first experience of guilt alone.