Page 68 of Decimation

A wave of anger crashes over me. I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste iron, the flavour a reminder of every moment I survived her. Ezra doesn’t speak.

The words echo in my mind, a reminder of everything he’s endured, everything he should never have had to witness. And now, he’s been uprooted again, forced to flee, and no doubt has been petrified the entire time, his small body a reliquary of fear. I imagine the dark of the plane, the rush of flight, the way the world keeps tearing him from any semblance of safety.

I take a deep breath, pushing my anger aside, folding it into the dark space behind my heart where I keep all the things that would destroy me if I let them breathe.

Now is not the time for it.

Now is the time to be strong, to be the protector Ezra needs, even if every cell in my body is screaming with the memory of how it felt to be powerless beneath someone who should have protected me.

I wrap my arm around his shoulders, pulling him close, and the heat of his small body against mine is a revelation and a wound. He is so warm, so alive, and every beat of his heart is a pulse of defiance against the forces that shaped him. His flesh against my flesh is a communion, the only kind I believe in now.

“You’re safe now,” I say, my voice steady as a blade. “You’re safe with me. No one will hurt you while I’m here.”

Ezra doesn’t respond, but I can feel his small frame trembling against my side. I want to consume his pain, to swallow it whole and let it burn in the furnace of my own. I want to peel back the silence and see the truth of what he carries, but I don’t. I just hold him, and the trembling becomes a shared secret between us, a pulse of recognition passing from his body to mine.

“If there’s anything I can do…” Mateus begins, his tone ingratiating, a damp hand extended where no touch is wanted.

“There’s nothing,” I interrupt, my voice cold now. “You’ve done enough.”

He flinches, but I don’t care. I don’t have the patience for his games today, not when my son is trembling against me, not when every instinct I possess is screaming that I must become the sanctuary he was never given.

I wave my hand at the driver, signalling for him to go, and the car pulls away from the airstrip with a hush that feels like sealing a tomb.

The drive is silent, the only sound the hum of the tyres against the road, a low drone that vibrates up through the seat and into my spine where it joins the other vibrations; the memory of being held down, the ghost of her weight, the way my body learned to dissociate until I floated above the scene, watching a man who looked like me be unmade over and over and over again. I let the memories flicker at the edges like candle flames in a crypt. I do not push them away because I have learned that survival means making room for the dead inside you.

Ezra sits beside me, his hands folded in his lap, his gaze fixed on the passing scenery like he’s trying to pretend I don’t exist.

There’s a part of me that should hate him. A part that whispers in Ines’s voice that he is a monument to my violation, a living scar that will never fade. That voice says I should abhor everything he is because of what his mother did to me, what she made me do, the pleasure she wrenched from my unwilling flesh until my body betrayed me and I learned to hate myself more than I hated her. But I don’t, I can’t. That voice is a relic. The truth is something stranger and more terrible: he is the only pure thing to come out of that defilement, a sacred fire born from the profanest of acts. To hate him would be to hate the only thing I have ever created. And yet he is born of violence, the most intimate kind. It is the paradox I will spend the rest of my life carrying, my own personal cross shaped like a child’s hand.

He’s just a boy.

A boy who’s seen too much, endured too much, his innocence stripped away before he could even name it. But he’s also the future of the Brethren. The weight of that responsibility rests heavily on my shoulders.

“Ezra,” I say after a while, my voice gentle. “Do you remember me?”

He doesn’t respond, but I see his fingers tighten slightly in his lap, a tiny convulsion of recognition. It’s a small movement, but it’s enough, it’s an opening. He remembers. He may not speak, but I know he remembers.

“It’s your Uncle Laz,” I whisper into his ear, the words so soft they barely stir the air, a confession meant for him alone.

I don’t want Mateus to hear it, to realise I am not in fact my brother.

His entire body language seems to change, like a thaw moving through him, and I can feel the subtle realignment of his small frame toward mine. He turns, staring at me, and I swear I see the ghost of a smile on his face, the barest curve of his lips, like the first light before dawn, fragile and terrifying.

In that smile I feel the whole weight of what she did to me, what was taken, what was made.

The horror and the beauty crash together in my chest, a wave of dark rapture that leaves me breathless. He is my pain made flesh, my shame transfigured into something sacred. The pure are not made, they are forged, and he is the purest thing I have ever witnessed, a soul annealed in the same fire that almost consumed me.

“You’re safe now,” I repeat, my voice breaking just enough to be true. “No matter what happens, I’ll protect you. I promise.”

I’m not her. I’m not her. I’m not her.

The words are a frayed rope I’m still clinging to, but my grip is slipping. They thud through my skull, not like a drumbeat anymore but like a dying pulse, wet and faltering. I sit on the edge of the bed, hands clasped so tight my knuckles ache, and I can feel the tremor starting in my thighs, the cold sweat tracing paths down my spine.

I’m so tired.

I’m so hollowed out that even fear feels distant, like a scream underwater.

It’s been days. Days that have bled into each other until time is just the space between his visits. The same awful torture, yes, but it’s worse now. It’s the way my body has learned to wait for him. The way my breath catches at the sound of the lock, not just in terror but in something more shameful, a sick, desperate relief that at least the waiting is over.