Half of all the dead are children

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**Author:** [[*user whenwerewe]]
[*https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/whenwerewe Here's my page!]
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For too long you tried to convince yourself you could be hers. 

In those brief weeks after the duke, the fire, the dark:

Crawling out of the molt of your old life, into a world bursting with every half-deliberated impossibility ever dreamed by man. Still the same car, same girl, going to the same college but now each star and branch thrumming with possibility. The voice in your head described a world incomprehensible: aliens, demons, ghosts, gods. Men in black, rebels, terrorists, cultists. Every unseen thing real at last. So surely now out there someone like you, but moving with infectious purpose?

The genie told you the true shape of the world. It was self-contradictory nonsense, and it fell to you to glean the meaning from it. Only real advice she had, picked up from old runaway’s chatter, slow-spreading rumour:

//Find the Hand. I know where they are. They hide themselves from the cruel, but to us they will be welcoming. They will teach you everything I cannot.//

The first time you truly saw her soon after. Seeking out your rebels in the city. She crawled like smoke out of the icy chain about your neck that was her vessel. Still bound there, still obedient, if only you cared to give orders.

Zainab: the fragrant bloom. The idea of incandescence, deep gold and amber, drawn out and annealed. Given the solidity of steel but still somehow the certainty: here is a thing belonging one instant to the heart of some faraway star.

And she directed //you//. In interrogation, tracking, digging up rats. She found her Hand.

Let her be the thing they feared: fire that consumed, and you the calm beyond the light. Let your arm be her arm, and as she led the conversation feel yourself act on instinct. And the lure: that you could not be true to yourself, but you could be true to //her//. Be steered as a ship is steered, and what does cedar care if the captain changes her mind?

Recall this: that your own loves led you nowhere, along Escherian paths. So why not be her instrument, and be content to be wielded. Resolve this in the quiet alone, though you suspect she might guess at what changes in you that day.

Done with being the girl who ran from her own success. Now, you thought, you would be someone else’s trophy.

That faraway room would be empty forever.

> **From:** DTesta@site15.scp.int | **To:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> We aren’t totally clear about her relationship to the djinni. Witnesses describe her as the junior partner.

> **From:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int | **To:** DTesta@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> lol more like bottom

> **From:** DTesta@site15.scp.int | **To:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> Don’t be so crass, Christopher. That kind of casual harassment isn’t conducive to a safe working environment.

> **From:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int | **To:** DTesta@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> u are so fucking funny damien i could almost die

You remember being Adelaide Pages, normal girl, overachiever, nothing wrong to look at her. Clever, smirk when someone talks to you, diligent and quiet, but surprisingly fun when you get to know her. All those attempts at flattery over the years. As if any of them knew you. 

Feel what it was like being her, and become a girl who can live with other people again.

And at Zainab’s encouragement slot in soundlessly to a life at the university. Exactingly formed smiles, only a hint of teeth. The immensity of the place diluting your image such that you were just another woman. Except, unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. Because you: //are famous//. Prodigies are not exactly obscure; people have heard of you. In their minds images of you carefully chiselled. Idols to some other goddess, in your name. 

Nonetheless, you faithfully amalgamated with the greater student body. Literally: tempered yourself mind and soul until you became a placid lake. Indistinguishable in any way. Whoever you used to be lost like a skiff in still water. All who spoke to you saw a kindred soul. Best of all if you were never remembered at all. 

Which is not to say you do not effortlessly dominate whatever paltry challenges are thrown at you. There //is// such a thing as dignity.

Embedded in a peacock-fan of a social circle. Everyone clamouring to know the famous Ms. Pages, then cringing away from the carefully-crafted banality you showed them. Zainab teasingly insisting that you try better to live in the same world as your peers. Bite back whatever expression of disdain comes instinctually. With her encouragement insinuate yourself among actual human beings, speak and laugh and smile so charmingly they are smitten on the spot, and bask in her approval afterward.

Back home you find that your sisters have something to say. Words from a phantom town. Fiona picking up ballet. Hopefully not overshadowed by you to the point of resentment. It would be intolerable to spend nine years rearing her for your absence to unmake her perfect outlook. But looking lovelier already. The distance will be for the better.

And with unspoken nudges from your companion you shrug and read the other messages. Hannah putting her life together apparently. Waiting tables, tolerable wage. Still in that house. All the stars in the sky are called, inexorably, to a great attractor. Your sisters still bound to those four walls.

One nameless night: hacking down with your pals whisky and hideous flavoured vodkas Zainab snatched off unwary passersby. Brief impressions of juddering bass in your sinew and fitfully intermittent lighting. 

Followed around half the time by tall Michael, name a hasty anglicisation of something else entirely, Chinese sophomore not as funny as he thinks, but pretty smart in a dress shirt so why not let him lean into you, breath soft and stinking of star-anise, embrace you? Not even sure where your hands should go, his mouth sweet and bitter and sickly, awful first kiss. 

(Which you know makes no sense at all because obviously back in nowheretown you should have had the pick of the lot. Not exactly an inspiring cohort but certainly men to outmatch slumping Mr. Li here and surely you would have had your fun with some gentleman, nice photos at a prom in a swanning dress etcetera. Why didn’t that happen?)

And his hand pressing hard into your ass but he’s the wrong height, shape, smell. Fragrant with what might as well be sulphur.

Why can’t you just want what you want --

And you bite down hard and he jerks back pinwheeling to the floor. Taste of blood piquant on your own maimed tongue. Running over and out your lips and down your throat; inverse jugular. His own shirt looking like a murder scene. Floor spotted with sanguine down. About two dozen people see the whole thing. Presumably from here an appropriate distribution of gasps of horror, accusations, whole cycle of young adult social life accelerated into about five minutes. 

You decide now is a great moment to abscond. In your room burrow out of your outfit in the muggy air and for a moment sight outside the monistic starfield undimmed by uniform light. 

Once your sister lifted you to the roof of the world and you saw every star. To pick apples from a struggling tree in the dying autumn. Young enough words didn’t come easily. Sink into sleep and God willing that memory gone by morning. 

(In dreams, the Duke and his scissor-smile.)


> **From:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int | **To:** DTesta@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> ok cuts out the gifted kid act in college but look at this video
> I think she actually killed that guy jesus

> **From:** DTesta@site15.scp.int | **To:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> Please don’t use this email chain to alleviate your boredom, Chris.
> I am coming around to your view, however, so congratulations.

Sunlight screaming through your window, curtains hatefully dredged open by your spirit-attendant. Stood by the door, flesh that blazed. Brief shower to get the stink of actual blood off you, what stupidity. As you leave her smoky violinist’s fingers alighting briefly on your shoulder, arresting movement, whispering that: It gets better, Ada. 

Whatever did she mean? Hallucinating some other girl she could not save. Your body a substrate for her imaginings.

But if she thought you other than you were, that was only your failing. A good tool conforms to the intent of the wielder. 

So try to discern the shape of the thing she sees. And feel the weight that lingers on your shoulder. The hand rising to cup your face. Eyes almost tearful. She is -- your guidestar cannot be pathetic. Smother the thought and leave.

Outdoors you refused your body’s sudden antipathy to sunlight and basked in the amused reproachments Zainab paid you for the hangover. Returning to an appointment to meet the Hand, met by a ratty kid shuffling around suspicious. 

And in the back room of a dingy apartment he showed you a hole in the world. As if the entire rest of your life was a screen over some boudoir and now for the first time through it you glimpsed creation as it actually was. The heart is deceitful above all things, and you have known it.

(Here you will be redeemed at last.)

In the Library: perfectly ordinary shelves, stuffed with nonsense text, but quite beautiful. Giltwork of great colossi striding out of the sea, argent sea-mist rising about them in clouds. But no susurration of distant footfalls or studious petitioners whispering their lore just out of sight. Actual and resounding silence, deep as your tomb. 

And then ambushed out of exactly nowhere by half a hundred skeletal scuttling things. Robbed from catacombs but so many of the skulls so small. Clutching in their hands an assortment of atrocity from across centuries fifteenth through twenty-third: mace, pike, musket, some kind of ridiculous laser rifle. And behind this horde a girl with a face desynchronised, half-etched in twitching segments of brass. Others: a lanky punk with lizard scales, some kind of monstrous demon-thing whose head was a mass of interlocking keratinous horns, guy simply made of glass.

The girl, hilariously: No fuckin’ words, get that bloody chain on the ground right now, nice and slow, or I blow your head off. Odd Cockney twang, only ever heard on TV. 

If you died, it would be fast. But you couldn’t die to such morons. So, fine, lay down Zainab’s chain.

They draw in poured oil of all things a mandala around it and call her out again, muscled frame, shoulders like an ox, and their indignance she meets with anger. They thought you some kind of gloating slavedriver, and back off panicked when they see the truth.

When they hear what you did to that duke the scaled guy actually breaks down crying. Diplomatic mishaps easy to pile as snow apparently. But no, he throws himself into a fullforce hug speaking some alien tongue and the rest of them pull him off you sheepishly. He’s just been through some stuff. And incapable of handling it. Every organisation has it dregs.

Now finally, finally, time for explanations. Since Zainab’s time the world has grown stern and strange and new. She recounted halfremembered tales of the Jailors, who she promised would leave you curled in a concrete cask for all time. But these runaways and rebels painted a much clearer picture: Great world-spanning conspiracy. Empires built in the dark. Your whole life and everyone else’s collated by numberless eyes, ears, hands. Everything sieved and sifted, weevils plucked from grain, all breath given a rigid order. What were those wistful young mornings? They were only a dream.

Zainab’s Hand not a battalion of unsmiling legionnaires. Incoherent cells, guided only by vague principle. This one unmerry band scampered like rats beneath feet. Nipping briefly at the heels of their enemy and occasionally snatching glimpses of the larder. But vermin die when men wake from their stupor. So these few flee and fall and never look back. 

But this apparition, this genie, gave them and you a new life. Where in you there was once fire now there must be stone. A cenotaph on which Zainab will carve your cause.

They were filled with grandiose dreams of raid and sabotage that she methodically dissected: even she feared those that moved unseen. Learn to love, she said, the good time of the smaller things. Live truly like mice, and in the cracks of the world find your joy. I will lead you in this, and give you slivers of your revenge.

And that was your life for nearly three years. Learning to forget you were ever that misericorde girl. Shaping yourself to love a cause, if it was commanded of you. Till in you it blossomed and some part of you even learned to motion that you could //feel// the injustice of the fetid order that choked you all. Cages and chains and charters perhaps had a certain frigid beauty, but to be under that shadow all your life, whip-hand over you: something in your blood refuted it. And constraining your thinking you chose to see in the Hand your only escape, and the constancy you so needed.

That necklace, Zainab’s chain, heavy with woven malice, would not break under any hammer you could find. And still in truth Zainab was yours by its enchantment, very nearly part of your flesh. But never did you exercise that will, and she trusted you not to. She had reached some understanding of who you were. Or at least who you had made yourself. Coyly purred, You are mine, and what you want is what I want, so what should I fear that your desire constrains mine? The words sat thick on her tongue.

[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/unusual-incidents-unit-hub Blacksuited men] set to flight. Glittering [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/anderson-robotics-hub mechanical beasts] left for scrap by your ambushes. For this brief moment together you made your corner of the world free, as she desired of you. But it was not enough for her. Something else was gravid in her heart.

Alone with you she smiles sad smiles, sings sad songs, fount of remorse for God knows what. When you lie alone with coruscating strokes she brushes out your hair. Always the soft eyes, the little touches, the whispered promises, You are safe here. 

What does she see in you, victim or damsel or pleading wretch? Dreaming of saving you from nothing at all. A sculpture of you in her mind, by now rococoed with false detail. How you wish to smash it.

Your sisters grew old with you. Visited home a few times. Returning find the place exorcised of all its significance. Was this really the thing you ran so far from: only a dusting of buildings planted haphazardly across the plain, with no smiling princes haunting it.

Fiona doing well enough for herself. Can’t be you of course but hasn’t got a complex about it. Teeth missing in her latest photo, unbearably cute. Her whole life will be a gilded cage. Better that she stay inside the bounds of the box they built around her. She is of the world as it is, not the world you strive to make. 

And Hannah, God, Hannah. Still that smile, always. Asking after you every so often. Let her remember you fondly. Make your pleasantries at her, stilling your face. And when she says that at her job she found someone --

Good. Let it be done. Let her dedicate herself to someone else and vanish from your life at last. Happy in her own way, bailed out of a deadend job. By a guy in a pressed shirt, ironed pants, ridiculous half-rounded glasses that even now looking back across the years you stifle laughter at. Kind of chubby, ugly beard, lazy eyes listing toward something outside the photo. Of course she couldn’t do better. Who picks up the waitresses at coffee shops these days anyway?

Occurs to you that this sister too might live her life not knowing the true shape of her world. A butterfly who dreamed she was a girl. The thought clotting in your throat, your lungs, your heart. Sarin ideogram. 

(Forget it.)

What else? When a tree rots, for a long time, the bark can remain unbroken, and foresters passing by will think it whole. But then some unfortunate brings it crashing down and with bitter imprecations declares it dead. 

Thus recall a frosted morning, and therein: you and a surly demonette and a glass man, distorting the view beyond like a lens left in the furnace too long. The three of you at the peak of your ambition. It had been a good year, and the enemy was running scared (you forced yourself to think). So now you aimed for a higher target. 

A Coalition facility hidden beyond the hills outside the city awaited your liberation. Together, fifteen of you positioned in a compass-rose around it prepared to strike your first real blow against the hated Bookburners, having wheedled Zainab into it. She begged them to relent, but their hearts were fixed on it.

Hardly needs to be clarified how it went.

Inside four sparse walls a tiny compound dug into the earth, and crawling out of it the moment one of yours first stepped over the threshold: a manylimbed titan of orichalcum and woven adamant. It bore in it the aurora, the secret light at the end of the world, for you. And you cannot recall what happened next, but a great weight passed over you, and a sensation that you were vivisected: all your steps upon the earth accounted for. And voiceless the words, //priusquam te formarem in utero novi te//, and when next you woke you were back at your camp and half the band were dead.

> **From:** DTesta@site15.scp.int | **To:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> We have her on record engaging a Prognosticator unit outside San Francisco.

> **From:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int | **To:** DTesta@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> Those things fucking suuuuuck.
> weird it kept her though
> normally they can’t catch long-tail events like that

> **From:** DTesta@site15.scp.int | **To:** CBurroughs@site15.scp.int
> **Subject:** re: New special acquisitions
> 
> I’m feeling rather glad we signed that accord with the UN. If we’d lost her to //that//…

Dejection hung clear over them, and the seven that fell were arranged in a line for their funereal rites. Their faces were still, their skin unblemished, their tongues swollen till they burrowed out their throats like rats. 

The ceremony did nothing to dispel the grief that flourished in the camp. And you knew, These are the first, and God, how many more? How many hours of these rituals, how many nonsense speeches to make, how many sobbing reprobates for you to console? A sculptress was limited by her materials. You could not crown yourself with this common clay.

At last the implacable sense: it was //not enough//, not Zainab’s perfect art, nor your small part in it as her instrument, her component, her lever toward some greater victory. Why?

One moment struck dumb by your own stupidity.

Because it was nonsense. Because it contradicted itself. Because you //could not be// her perfect tool and her perfect rebel. Even searching for consistency outside yourself led to that same incoherence. Nothing new under the sun. And these thoughts you had not had, had not //let yourself have//, because it would be contrary to the spirit of submission. How worthless was obedience! 

But there was another Adelaide, somewhere, who would remake herself to fit that niche. If you could be Zainab’s Adelaide, truly become the girl she sought to save, then you would be done with this. Whatever came next. When came [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-high-court-with-the-magic-army the high court with their magic army], you’d face the fire an unmarred whole.

So for the sake of symmetry you came back to her on another black night in spring, outside your room the orchids choked with weeds. Let yourself be one of the things made anew by the season. And let this shroud of self-deception fall away. At last clear what shape she expects you to take. The looks, the gentle hands, her voice in the dark. Call her up from her resting-place and fall weeping into her arms. She gives one last time her watery smile, you’re so brave, you’re going to be fine, it’s alright. Become her Adelaide.

Kiss her and she melts into you. How long did she wait for this? Trite bitch. 

Just let it work. God, let it work. 

Her fingers clammy like worms on your skin. Lips like brands burning where they lie. Pawing at you clumsy as any drunken boy off the street. This was what she held coiled for you beneath the pity? You would rather --

No. You realise the recollection is coloured by an intervening animosity. This was not what you felt then. The true hatred you feel is a gentle thing, advancing insensibly in silence until it surrounds your apathy. 

So let yourself feel the thing that burned in your breast then and sank beneath your belly, which you called //hate// laughing. 

Remember the sight of her above you, slightly waxen skin of something not wholly human. To whom every breath was a performance. Her hair like smoke shrouding you. Forget the world that is not her mouth, her fingers sweetly curled, her teeth at your throat and ears and breasts. And the thundering in your ears, her hands like God’s cleaving you, and in an instant all reason leaves you. Beneath her ecstatic in epiphany.

Coming down trembling to her leaning so close you can feel her breath across your face. Saccharine like honey, no mortal sourness to it, repulsive beyond belief. She drags your hands above your head, and you abhor that binding, wrong, wrong, awful, but still all things and let yourself be hers.

You will be the doll she thinks you, and be done. Your struggle like a caged bird in your heart, and you would make yourself see the beauty in it. The memory does bring some warmth to your blood. 

Clasping your head in her hand, feel your skull thin under strength born of no woman. Legs make the twin points of a compass straddling your mouth. And she writhes above you. Undulating like a snake, hastily fashioned muscle spasming unearthly, you lapping at her cunt.

Those sharp soft breaths an affectation. Just for you. 

What does she think of you: that you have taken what you want. So let her know it. You whimpering as she comes, or at least her body warping in its imitation. And that look down at you after you will never forget, breath frozen in your lungs at the warmth of it. Abominable.

And later you lie in her arms and she says what she thinks are soothing things to you. In your mind all passion is stifled. Whatever grail you searched for lost. All this theatre, and still not enough. The Adelaide that was hers is dead.

And finally the end of the road. Time to do the obvious thing.

Your travails with the Hand taught you things: marksmanship, espionage, first aid; tradecraft as known by scared teenagers. And it also taught you the true names of your enemies. GOC, UIU, Pentagram. Foundation.

It is not a hard thing to learn how to contact them. They put a lot of thought into making sure people are scared of them. When Zainab sees what you’re doing, she appears, more puzzled than angry. And you say:

“Take no volitional action.”

Her face twists into a withdrawn expression, and you think: it didn’t work. She has broken the binding, and I am dead after all. But she makes no other move and you realise this is an expression of instinctual and genuine terror. And that teases from your lips the first genuine smile in all the time you’ve known her. Let’s see who’s the doll now.

It takes some time laying down the commands you need, so she can move and act in your name, but not warn the Hand, or fight, or do anything. Except beg. The begging is comforting, somehow.

And you come to them in the early morning, when they are gathered in some warehouse, meeting for an all-hands. Ha.

Through one door burst the kevlared and rifled men of the Foundation. From inside gunfire and bisected prayer. Out the back come that same dead horde you remember, equal parts whole and half-sized. Behind them brass-face girl panicking. And a lash of flame engulfs them. The girl’s face runs down the side of her head. The skeletons blacken and shatter and fall hyaloid to the tarpit floor. Acrid fumes choke everything. For a moment you are alone, and the snow that was your comrades falls around you.

Above floats Zainab, her face still as marble, her soul smooth like glass, and simple like despair. What she learnt from her time with the Duke: she will not let you have her care. A spear’s rebellion.

Outside they have six of them in various stages of dying. Lined up and bagged kneeling on the pavement. If they knelt you beside them and shot you all it would not be an unfair punishment for your sin. But they promised otherwise. For you amnesty, and an interview. In return you gave them these: a cell of terrorists, and a stray genie who thought herself in control. A lesson she will take to heart a thousand years more.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart but yours. And the Foundation is the thing that swallows up all the evil. Where better can there be?

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