The alarm didn’t ring. Or maybe it did, but Cristy didn’t hear it, sunk in a black, comatose sleep.

  What woke her wasn’t an electronic trill. It was the sound of heels.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

  Slow. Rhythmic. A countdown on the parquet.

  ?The door opened. Not with violence, but with a calculated slowness that triggered Cristy’s survival instinct before she even opened her eyes.

  The aseptic light of the hallway sliced through the room's gloom.

  ?Cristy groaned, trying to hide under the duvet. Her room was her shelter, an organized chaos circa 2014: MacBook Pro open amidst tangled cables, a tower of empty soda cans, Nirvana posters hanging crooked.

  ?"Christina."

  ?Victoria Ashcroft’s voice needed no volume to freeze the air. It was low, steady, devoid of maternal inflection. The voice of a judge reading a death sentence while sipping tea.

  "It is seven-fourteen. The driver has been waiting for nine minutes."

  ?Cristy opened one sticky eye. Her mother was there, motionless on the threshold.

  Victoria was, as always, a vision of terrifying perfection. Charcoal suit that looked like armor, bun so tight it pulled the skin of her face. Not a hair out of place. No warmth. Just absolute control.

  ?"Mom..." Cristy’s voice was a croak. "I didn't hear it. Five minutes."

  ?Victoria didn’t move.

  "Do you think you’re special, Christina? Do you think the world stops to wait for you to decide to grace us with your presence?"

  She entered the room. Her pungent perfume invaded the air, choking the smell of sleep.

  "Look at you. You are the portrait of weakness. Your father has been in the office since five. I am managing an international merger while you drool on your pillow."

  ?"I'm just tired. I studied late," Cristy lied, sitting up. She felt the bruises from the fall throbbing under her pajamas.

  ?Victoria gave a thin smile, devoid of joy. "Tired? No. You are spoiled. And the worst thing is that you are mediocre."

  She approached the bed, looming over her.

  "We invest a fortune in your education. We give you the Harrington and Ashcroft names, a legacy others would kill for. And how do you repay us? With laziness. With this..." she pointed at the room with disgust, "...pigsty. If we ran our companies the way you run your life, we’d be bankrupt already."

  ?Cristy lowered her gaze, hands trembling on the sheets. Tears pressed at her eyes, but she knew crying would only make it worse. Victoria hated tears.

  ?"Get up," her mother ordered. "Immediately."

  ?Victoria turned to leave, but her hawk-like gaze locked onto the floor at the foot of the bed.

  The silence that followed was a pneumatic void. Sudden. Lethal.

  Poking out from the blankets were the toes of Cristy’s Dr. Martens.

  They weren't just shoes. They were caked in black, fresh mud. And there was that gray dust, that greasy mine graphite shining sinisterly in the light.

  ?Victoria stared at the boots as if they were a corpse. Then, very slowly, she raised her eyes to her daughter.

  The mask of detachment fell for an instant, revealing a lucid fury.

  ?"You went out."

  The voice was a hissing whisper.

  "You violated curfew. Again."

  ?Cristy stopped breathing. "No, Mom, they're old, I just..."

  ?"Don't you dare," Victoria interrupted. She bent down and grabbed a boot with two fingers, as if it were contaminated. She lifted it. A chunk of dry mud fell onto the pristine carpet.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Victoria looked at the stain, then at Cristy. Black eyes. Slits.

  "You lied. You stole our time. And you went rolling in the dirt like a stray."

  She dropped the boot. The thud echoed like a gunshot.

  ?"Mom, please..."

  ?Victoria leaned into Cristy’s face. So close the girl could see the perfect pores under the foundation.

  "Explain? There is nothing to explain. There is only shame. You are an ingrate, Christina. An ingrate."

  She straightened up, smoothing her jacket with a neurotic gesture.

  "Tonight I will speak with your father. He wants to know where his money goes? I will tell him. I will tell him it goes into the mud."

  ?"Don't tell Dad..." Cristy whispered, terrified.

  ?"Oh, he will know," Victoria promised, with icy cruelty. "And until then, consider yourself under financial seizure. I’ve cut the taps. No more coding courses. No servers. No magazines."

  ?Cristy’s eyes widened. "No! Coding is the only thing I'm good at! It's my life!"

  ?"Then find another way to pay for it," Victoria hissed, heading for the door. She stopped on the threshold without turning back. "Because we have stopped funding your failures. And Christina? Take a shower. You smell of dirt and lies. You disgust me."

  ?She left, closing the door with a delicate click. Final.

  Cristy remained petrified. She looked at her posters, her computer: suddenly they no longer seemed like a refuge, but a cell.

  She brought her hands to her face and stifled a sob.

  She had faced an alien tower and a sonic weapon, but nothing, not even the darkness of the mine, scared her as much as the void she had just seen in her mother's eyes.

  ?You disgust me.

  ?The words had gone under her skin like needles of ice.

  It wasn't anger. It was worse: the repulsion one feels for a defective object.

  Cristy looked at her hands. They were shaking.

  Not from the cold.

  They were shaking because her body remembered that sensation. That look.

  Suddenly, the sterile smell of her mother's perfume saturated the room, and the floor beneath her feet stopped being parquet.

  ?New York, Plaza Hotel. Seven years ago.

  ?It was Christmas Eve. The Harrington suite was a blaze of golden lights.

  Cristy was nine years old and wearing a crimson velvet dress that itched. She had to sit composed on the sofa.

  She hadn't felt well for hours. A weight on her stomach, but she was afraid to say it. The evening was important. Partners, investors were there.

  "Smile, Christina," Victoria had whispered passing by with a glass of champagne. "Posture."

  ?Cristy had tried to straighten her back, but the nausea hit her like a punch.

  She couldn't run to the bathroom.

  It all happened there, on the Persian rug, in front of the fireplace.

  Vomit spilled from her mouth, acidic, staining the dress, the shoes, the precious carpet.

  ?The party buzz died.

  Cristy stayed on her knees, gasping, terrified. She looked for the only figure who was supposed to protect her.

  "Mommy..." she whimpered, reaching a dirty hand toward the silk dress.

  ?Victoria didn't bend down.

  Victoria took a step back.

  Quick, sharp, pulling back her skirt as if her daughter were an infected animal.

  ?Cristy looked up. She expected a hand on her forehead.

  Instead, she saw her mother's face twisted in a grimace of pure aesthetic disgust.

  She wasn't looking at her daughter. She was looking at the stain on the rug.

  ?"Take her away," Victoria said to a maid. Voice icy, impersonal.

  Then she leaned slightly toward the child, whispering a phrase meant only for her.

  "You are repulsive."

  ?Cristy was carried away bodily, while in the background she heard her mother's voice resuming conversation, apologizing for "the little domestic incident."

  ?Present.

  ?Cristy blinked, and the reflection of the sick child vanished, replaced by the hardened face of a seventeen-year-old.

  Bile rose in her throat again, but she swallowed it down.

  ?She looked in the mirror.

  "Repulsive," she whispered.

  Then she looked at the dirty boots.

  Her mother was right. She was a failed investment. An asset generating losses.

  But there was a perverse freedom in that failure.

  If she was damaged goods to them, she had nothing left to lose. She didn't have to try to be perfect anymore.

  ?She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. A rough gesture, devoid of grace.

  They had taken the money. They had taken the approval.

  But they couldn't take what she had seen in the mine.

  Down there, Tony had looked at her with hope. Alex had looked at her as an equal. No one had asked her to be a piece of furniture.

  She no longer felt like the Harrington daughter. She was an orphan with living parents. And that was okay.

  ?She locked herself in the master bathroom, turning the key with an angry snap. It was the only lock her mother couldn't open.

  She stripped off the hoodie, the pants.

  She stood naked before the mirror, under the clinical light.

  Victoria saw a defective asset. The mirror returned a cruder truth.

  ?Cristy observed her reflection. Pale skin, almost translucent, stained by the mine's dirt. A nervous body, sculpted by restlessness.

  She ran her fingers along her right side, up to her hip.

  There, on the milky skin, bloomed a vast, purplish bruise. The elevator's kiss.

  She pressed against the flesh, throbbing. It didn't seem like a defect. It seemed like the only true thing in that house of lies. A geographic map of pain proving she was alive.

  ?She turned on the shower. Steam began to rise, turning her into a ghost of flesh.

  She was about to step in when her phone, resting on the marble, vibrated.

  Long. Insistent.

  The screen lit up in the fog.

  ?Cristy froze. She felt a grip in her stomach that erased every thought about her mother.

  She grabbed the cell.

  A message on Closed System.

  Alex.

  ?[A]: Not coming to school.

  ?Cristy’s heart skipped a beat. Alex didn't skip school. Ever.

  ?[A]: My mom found Argo in the garden ten minutes ago.

  [A]: He's dead.

  ?Cristy brought a hand to her mouth, feeling the cold marble against her naked back. Argo. The dog that licked her face when she cried in their backyard.

  ?[C]: Oh God Alex... I'm so sorry. What happened?

  ?The answer came immediately, freezing the steam in the room.

  ?[A]: No. He's lying on the grass. Looks like he's sleeping. He's intact, Cristy.

  [A]: Like someone flipped a switch.

  ?Cristy felt her legs give way. She leaned against the sink.

  Intact.

  Like Mr. Grant.

  Author’s Note ??