Sister Cities

Part 38: Jinx

Living with demons I've mistaken for saints

If you keep it between us

I think they're the same

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 I don't know what day or time it is when the guard comes down. Me and everybody have just been hanging out; Silco won't shut up, so I keep scuttling up and down the walls so I have something else to focus on, and my nails are worn down to my fingertips and there are holes in the toes of my socks. I got some food earlier, but no one took the gag out of my mouth, so I couldn't eat it.

The guard doesn't have food this time, and she doesn't open the little flap on the door. She opens the door itself, backs me into a corner, unlocks the gag, and removes the ring around my waist.

"You're free," she says flatly.

"What?"

"You're free. All your crimes have been pardoned, so you don't have to be here anymore."

I blink. "The coup..."

"Yeah. Your shithead friend won. Lucky you. Now start walking."

Ekko's still alive. Why would he want to pardon me? He knows what I've done.

"Go, Jinx," Silco says. "You can finish what you started."

"Of course," Mylo says. "Of course the first thing you think of is to destroy something."

"I'm not going," I tell the guard.

Her eyebrows fly into her hair. "What?"

"I'm not leaving. I'm staying at Stillwater."

"You're fucking insane. But yeah, I don't give a shit. You belong here."

She click-clacks away down the aisle, leaving my door open. I climb the bars this time, then look to make sure the guard is far away and swing over onto the bars of Sevika's cell. She whips her head around, swearing.

"You're free, and you're choosing to stay in prison," she says, even flatter than the guard.

I cling with my fingers and toes, feeling very high above her. "Are you gonna get freed, dum-dum?"

"Haven't heard anything to suggest it."

"If you got freed, would you try your rebellion again?"

"Depends what your little buddy won for us," she says. "I don't have much faith in him."

"Ekko's plan was better than yours."

"Let me guess— hurt no one, kindly talk things out with the oppressors, watch things go back to the way they were within the year?"

I stick my foot through the bars into her face. "You're just mad that you failed and he didn't."

Sevika snorts. She looks like a squeezed-out balloon and it makes me happy. "I suppose it's good you're hanging around. Your Firelights aren't gonna take you back, no matter how loud you sing their praises. They only pardoned you because, in here, you get meals and a ceiling, and they want you starving in the streets."

"Because it's what you deserve," Vi says.

"For once, Sevika is correct," Silco says. "Why not go show them exactly how you feel about that?"

"Shut up." I'm not happy anymore. I jump down to the floor, stick my tongue out, and go back to my own cell to eat my slop from earlier.

This is what it was like for Vi, only she lived it for seven years. Concrete under her head and light always in her eyes, and I know they hurt her too. I wonder if she feels like she paid off her sins.

I wonder when I'll feel like I've paid off mine.

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Intro lyrics from "Claws in Your Back" by Julien Baker.

oohoohoooo 

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