An arm she did not remember ripping from a body. Murder control. Until the light and the subsiding in the dark bird of the impulse. Amnesia. Maniac. Dragging the broken wing in the stutter-start dance of the victim. Practice for the next time. Oracle of a future visited upon others. Dragging it as penance through the sweltering day. Under the stunning absence of judgment that was the eternal sky.

The buzz-buzz-listing motion of the Company’s commands, counterweight to the broken wing, arrived less and less. That sudden creep become a lunge breaching the dark bird’s skull. Some soft creature become armored once inside her brain. Trapped by bone, vocal to get out, to manifest in a wing that twists into blade. Swift sharp beak, the demons of twinned talons.

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7

3 3 3

10, 0

“We shall fight the 3, we shall live within the 7.”

“We shall be the Company in both the 0 and the 10.”

The battered journal with the numbers and so many words lay inside the dark bird’s nest, wherever it rested for the night. Nests hidden all over the City, and the comfort in that. But rest, not sleep. The dark bird never slept. The monster that lived inside the dark bird would never sleep. Would not let her sleep, and that stirred up rage.

Words that sounded like numbers, too. Coordinates launched at her, lodged in the flesh of another life, hidden inside her. Gave away its position, became her position. They spewed like soft pebbles or maggots, spilled out onto the sand. By that time they had turned liquid, spat, coagulating in the sun. Nothing but blood. No pattern to discern. No pattern to discern. No task to impart but blood.

10, 7, 3, 0.

If the dark bird lingered too long on the numbers, strayed from the relentless patrol, the preset directives, the monster rose from within and the broken wing turned and turned ever-more frantic.

To detect intruders. To be vigilant. To thwart the three whenever they might appear, encoded and included, a legion of want divined from need. For the Company building needed little now except to rest, to automate, to set boundaries, a sun perpetually setting. A shining scimitar. A beak dipped in gore.

Murder control.

Keeping the journal safe, but not knowing why, because no one knew why. Able to read from it without opening it. Because even a dark bird could be bored, waiting for the next murder control. Because the commands leaking out invisible from the Company came fewer and fewer, and the presets ground down in time, some of them nubs of suggestions for violence, so if she chose violence, she chose it. The dark bird chose it.