Chapter 44: CH8: Useful Truths
The morning light in the textile workshop near Shiro Meda was thick with dust and silence. It fell in heavy, slanted columns through high, grimy windows, illuminating swirling motes and the rich colors of folded fabrics—emerald shemma, gold-trimmed netela, bolts of crimson velvet for ceremonial wear. The air smelled of machine oil, cotton, and the faint, sweet starch of new cloth.
Bila Emerta sat at a long wooden table, her back to the door, shoulders hunched over a half-finished tunic. Her hands moved with precise, practiced rhythm—needle dipping, thread pulling—but the work was a pantomime. She’d been re-sewing the same seam for twenty minutes. She’d known he would come. The notification on her battered phone had been a simple time and location, no explanation. The fear was a cold, heavy stone in her stomach. She kept stitching, the click-whirr of the other seamstresses’ machines a comforting, distant chorus from the main room. This was a smaller annex, storage and special projects. Isolated.
The door opened without a knock.
She didn’t startle. Her needle just paused, poised above the deep blue fabric. She’d been waiting for the sound.
Zoruk entered as if he were admiring a gallery, his footsteps quiet on the concrete floor. He wore simple, elegant human clothes—dark trousers, a cream linen shirt—but he moved through the space of spools and shears with an alien stillness. His eyes scanned the hanging garments, the baskets of thread, the dormant sewing machines draped in cloth, before settling on her.
“A sanctuary,” he observed, his voice a soft intrusion into the quiet. “Where things are repaired. Or hidden within new patterns.”
Bila finally looked up. Her eyes were cautious, guarded. “It’s just work.”
“Is it?” He pulled a stool from against the wall and sat, not across from her, but at an angle, reducing the confrontation. He looked at her hands, not her face. “You were skilled with costumes for the cultural shows, I read. The Addis Hearts finale was to have new outfits. You made them.”
She nodded once, going back to her stitching. Click, pull. Click, pull. “They weren’t used.”
“Because the event collapsed before the performance.” He let the statement hang. “Bad luck, as they say.”
Her needle slipped, pricking her finger. A single bead of blood welled on her fingertip. She didn’t flinch, just pressed it against the dark fabric, leaving a tiny, vanishing smear. “I already told you,” she said, her voice low and tight. “I didn’t create the leak. I didn’t record anyone.”
“I am not asking who created it, Bila.” His tone was patient, almost gentle. It was worse than accusation. “This is a cooperation test. Cooperation, for our purposes, means naming the moment you have been hiding behind bad luck. The moment of your own hesitation.”
She laughed, a short, brittle sound. “Hesitation? Everyone always expects the unlucky girl to confess first. To explain. To apologize for being in the wrong place when the disaster happened.” She finally met his gaze, defiance sparking in her dark eyes. “Kaleb shouted my innocence from the rooftops and made me look like a helpless child. Yafet was so busy planning his grand, public love declaration for Liyat he wouldn’t have noticed if the building was on fire. Kofi flirted with her right in front of everyone because it was fun, because he could. Arsemma… she pushed us all around like dolls on a stage, whispering advice that only made the mess worse. And I was just there. The quiet one. The one things happen to.”
Zoruk listened, his head slightly tilted. “You observed it all.”
“I hear things,” she whispered, looking back at her work. The blood had dried. “Quiet people do. I heard the audio before it spread. Before it blew everything apart.”
“What did you hear?”
She took a shaky breath. The click-whirr from the other room seemed to fade. “I heard Yafet in the storage room, talking to a friend. His voice was… possessive. Not loving. He was saying how the declaration would ‘prove’ his feelings, how it would ‘cement’ things. Like Liyat was a project to be completed beautifully.” Her fingers tightened on the needle. “I heard Kofi later, laughing by the coffee machine with one of the camera assistants. He said flirting with Liyat was ‘like tuning a delicate instrument—fun to see how she responded.’ He called it attention management.”
“And Arsemma?”
Bila’s mouth twisted. “She found me crying in the hallway once, after Kaleb had tried to ‘defend’ me to a producer and just made it sound like I was too fragile to tie my own shoes. She put her arm around me and said, ‘You have to understand, Bila, some people are main characters, and some are supporting cast. Your role is to be authentic in your pain. It makes their stories more real.’” Bila’s voice quivered with raw imitation. “She wasn’t comforting me. She was casting me.”
“And Kaleb’s defense?” Zoruk prompted, his voice a soft, irresistible probe.
“He talked about me like I was a sick bird he’d found,” she said, the pain old but vivid. “He told people, ‘Don’t blame Bila, she’s had enough sadness.’ He said it with love, I think. But it felt like he was nailing my name to a certificate of weakness and hanging it on the wall for everyone to see.” She wiped at her eye with the back of her wrist, angry at the tear. “It was kindness that humiliated me. It was the worst kind.”
Zoruk was silent for a long moment, allowing the dust to settle in the shafts of light. “Which part of it all hurt the most?”
“It wasn’t one sentence,” Bila said, her defiance crumbling into exhaustion. “It was realizing… everyone had a role. Yafet was the tragic romantic. Kofi was the charming villain. Arsemma was the director. Kaleb was the noble protector. Liyat was the precious innocent. Even the ones who messed up had a part.” She looked at him, her face open in its hurt. “I didn’t have one. I was the scenery. The unlucky atmosphere. And the one person who tried to give me a role… made me the victim. It made me feel small. Invisible, but in the worst way.”
Zoruk leaned forward slightly. The morning light caught the unnatural stillness in his human eyes. “When you realized the audio file was in the group chat, that it was about to spread like a fire… you saw the names, the voices. You understood what it would do. In that second before the chaos… did you want them exposed?”
The workshop was utterly silent. The machines in the other room had stopped.
Bila’s breath hitched. She stared at the tiny bloodstain on the blue fabric. A long, slow tear traced a path down her cheek. She nodded, a barely perceptible movement. “For one second,” she whispered, the confession torn from a deep, shameful place. “Yes. I wanted them all to feel it. The beautiful people. The loud people. I wanted them to lose their control, their perfect stories, for just one minute.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Then I hated myself for it. I tried to message the group admin to delete it. But it was too late. And then… then it was just another piece of my bad luck.”
Zoruk nodded slowly, as if she’d just handed him a crucial piece of a puzzle. “Lord Olmer values observers. Those who see the truth of a system. But The Dream Chaser Season Five will not reward a silence that only waits for other people’s pain to become useful. Your inaction was not empty, Bila. It was a choice. Your bad luck is not a passive force. It is a story you have accepted because it was easier than admitting you wanted, for a moment, to burn it all down.”
She was crying openly now, silent tears dripping onto the unfinished tunic. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. “What do you want from me? An apology? I am sorry. I was small and jealous and hurt.”
“I don’t want an apology,” Zoruk said. He extended a hand, palm up, on the table between them. Not threatening. Expectant. “Cooperation is currency. You have some. The original message chain. The metadata you never showed anyone that proves who first circulated the audio file. You have it. You kept it. As insurance, or as a scar. Give it to me.”
Bila stared at his hand. It looked human. It wasn’t.
After a lifetime of seconds, she let go of the needle and fabric. She reached into the pocket of her simple dress and pulled out an old, cracked-screen phone. Her hands trembled as she unlocked it, swiped, tapped. She held it out, not placing it in his hand, but showing him the screen. A chain of messages, a file transfer, a time stamp from minutes before the public collapse.
“It was the assistant producer,” she said, her voice hollow. “The one Yafet had confided in about his declaration plans. He was angry Yafet didn’t thank him properly. He wanted to sabotage the moment. So he leaked the audio where he knew it would cause maximum damage.” She swiped again, showing a saved screenshot of a private chat log. “I found this weeks later, digging through old backups on the studio server. I never told anyone.”
“Why?”
“Because saying it wouldn’t have given me my role back,” she said, the bitterness like ash on her tongue. “It would just have been more drama about them. More of their story. My silence… it was the only power I had left. Even if it was just the power to be misunderstood.”
Zoruk took the phone from her gently. He scanned the screen, his expression unreadable. Then he placed it carefully on the table. “That is the truth I wanted. Not the scapegoat. Not the victim. The moment you chose to be neither. The moment you saw the flame and, for a heartbeat, wished to fan it.”
He stood. Bila didn’t look up. She felt emptied out, a shell.
“The currency,” he said, his voice returning to its calm, professional tone, “is accepted. Your cooperation is noted.”
He walked to the door. As his hand touched the handle, he paused, half-turning. The dusty light framed him from behind.
“One question remains, Bila. Now that you’ve admitted you wanted them to lose control… what role will you choose for yourself when the fire starts this time?”
He left, closing the door softly behind him.
Bila sat in the sudden, profound quiet. The hum of the sewing machines in the next room started up again, a distant, mechanical heartbeat. She looked at her hands, at the half-finished tunic, at the tiny brownish-red dot of her own blood. She picked up the needle again.
But she didn’t start sewing. She just held it, point aimed toward the fabric, considering the weight of the weapon in her hand, and the different kinds of silence.
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She just held it, point aimed toward the fabric, considering the weight of the weapon in her hand, and the different kinds of silence.
The needle stayed in her pocket.
The day passed in a blur of thread and mechanical noise, her mind a closed loop replaying his words. What role will you choose? By nightfall, the workshop was a tomb of shadows, the vibrant fabrics now muted shapes in the dark. She was the last to leave, her footsteps echoing in the empty alley behind Shiro Meda. The city’s night sounds felt distant, insulated by the high walls.
A figure detached itself from a deeper pool of shadow near a stack of wooden crates.
“You walk like someone who expects to be followed,” Zoruk’s voice cut through the damp air. He leaned against the wall, illuminated by the sickly yellow glow of a single overhead bulb. “Or perhaps like someone hoping she is.”
Bila stopped, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. “What more could you possibly want? I gave you the truth. I gave you the file.”
“You gave me a piece of evidence,” he corrected, pushing off the wall. He moved into the light, his human face all calm angles. “I want to see the witness. Without the costume of quiet.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your silence is a performance, Bila. A very good one. But I need to see what’s underneath the performance.” His gaze held hers, and the air between them seemed to thicken, to hum. “I need to calibrate my instruments.”
Something shifted in his eyes. The rich, human brown seemed to deepen, to swirl with a subtle, impossible light. It wasn’t a glow, but a pull, a vortex that drew her in and dissolved her will. His voice wrapped around her, a velvet chain. “Look at me. Listen. You want to show me. You need to be seen. Truly seen. All of you.”
A warm, syrupy wave washed through her mind. The fear, the resistance, the tightly-wound control—it all unraveled, leaving behind a serene, empty openness. Her shoulders relaxed. A soft, placid smile touched her lips. “I want to show you,” she echoed, her voice dreamy.
“Good girl. Now, take off your clothes. Show me everything you hide.”
Her hands moved without hesitation, without shame. The simple dress, the practical underthings, all were shed with smooth, obedient motions and dropped to the dusty ground. The night air kissed her skin, raising goosebumps on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. She stood naked under the yellow light, arms at her sides, utterly exposed and utterly accepting.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, his own hands moving to his clothes. He revealed himself to her, and her dreamy gaze widened at the sight. He was fully, shockingly erect, his cock thick and impressive, but it was the subtle movement at the base that held her transfixed. Several sinuous, prehensile tendrils, the color of bruised twilight, unfurled from his flesh, lazily exploring the air.
“Come here,” he commanded.
She stepped forward, her body already swaying toward his heat. He grabbed her by the hair, not cruel, but firmly possessive, and pulled her mouth to his. The kiss was deep, devouring, his tongue claiming hers. One hand cupped her breast, pinching her nipple until she moaned into his mouth. He broke the kiss, trailing his lips down her neck.
“Such a good, quiet slut for me,” he breathed against her skin, his voice a filthy whisper. “All that watching, all that noticing. Did you ever touch yourself at night, thinking about being the center of attention? About being used?”
“Yes,” she sighed, the truth spilling out in her trance.
He pushed her back against the rough wooden crates. The splinters bit into her bare skin, a sharp counterpoint to the heat of his body. He dropped to his knees, his face level with her cunt. “So wet already. Dripping for me. You’ve been empty for so long, haven’t you? A vessel waiting to be filled.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He buried his face between her legs, his tongue a broad, relentless stroke over her clit. But it was the tendrils that made her scream. Two of them, cool and impossibly slick, slid into her at once—one plunging deep into her cunt, the other spearing into her tight asshole. They moved independently, curling and pulsing inside her, finding places no human touch could reach.
“Oh God! Oh fuck!” she babbled, her head thrashing back against the wood. Her hands scrabbled at his shoulders, nails digging in.
He lapped at her, sucking her clit as the tentacles fucked her with a rhythmic, deep undulation. An orgasm ripped through her almost immediately, a blinding white seizure of pleasure that made her thighs shake. He didn’t stop. The tentacles writhed, milking the convulsions, extending them into a endless, shuddering plateau.
“That’s it, come on my face, you silent little whore,” he growled, his voice muffled against her flesh. “Let me taste all that pent-up jealousy.”
He stood, his cock jutting against her stomach. The tendrils retracted, leaving her hollow and clenching. He turned her around, bending her over the crate. “Now for the main event. You’re going to take every inch. You’re going to scream how much you love it.”
He pushed into her cunt in one brutal, stretching thrust. She cried out, a sound of pure, overwhelmed sensation. He was huge, and the strange texture of him, along with the residual sensation of the tendrils, made her feel utterly full, utterly split open. He set a punishing pace, his hips slamming into her ass with wet, meaty slaps.
“Whose cunt is this?” he demanded, gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
“Yours! It’s yours, Zoruk!” she wailed.
“And what are you?”
“Your slut! Your quiet, watching slut!” The words tumbled out, fueled by the neural feedback looping from his body into her mind, amplifying every nerve ending.
One of the tendrils snaked around her hip and found her clit again, applying a vibrating, insistent pressure. Another curled up to play with her nipple, twisting and pulling. He fucked her like an animal, his own breath coming in harsh grunts. “I can feel everything you feel,” he hissed, leaning over her back, his mouth at her ear. “I can feel how much you love being ruined. How much your pretty, observant brain just wants to turn off and be a fuckhole.”
She came again, a deeper, more wrenching orgasm that felt like her spine was liquefying. Her screams were raw, ragged things. He fucked her through it, his pace never faltering. He was everywhere, in every part of her, owning her completely.
“I’m gonna fill you up,” he grunted, his rhythm becoming jagged, frantic. “Gonna pump this infertile human womb so full of me you’ll taste it for weeks.”
With a final, driving thrust, he buried himself to the hilt and roared. His cock pulsed, and she felt the hot, gushing flood of his release filling her, an astonishing volume that leaked out around the edges almost immediately. But he wasn’t done. He pulled out, his cum streaming down her thighs, and spun her around.
“Open your mouth. Swallow.”
Dazed, she dropped to her knees, mouth open. He gripped his cock, and another thick jet, then another, erupted onto her tongue, her cheeks, her chin. It was salty, musky, and impossibly copious. She gagged but swallowed, letting it coat her throat. He kept coming, painting her face, her hair, her breasts with streaks of pearlescent white until she was glazed and dripping.
The final pulse subsided. He stepped back, breathing heavily.
The fog in Bila’s mind lifted like a curtain ripped away. One second she was in ecstatic submission, the next she was on her knees in a filthy alley, naked, covered in cooling semen, her body throbbing with deep, used aches. She gasped, a sound of pure, shocked horror. Her hands flew to her face, coming away sticky.
“Wha… what did you…” Her voice was a broken whisper. She scrambled back, hitting the crates, grabbing her dress to cover herself.
Zoruk, already pulling on his trousers, watched her with detached interest. “Calibration complete,” he said, his voice back to its polished, neutral tone.
“You… you bastard! You fucking monster!” She trembled, tears of shame and rage mixing with the mess on her face.
“The monster was already there, Bila. I just opened the cage.” He fastened his shirt. “You were magnificent. A perfect, screaming slut. You embraced the role completely.”
“Shut up! It wasn’t me! You made me!”
“Did I?” He tilted his head. “I opened the door. You walked through. Your body’s responses were entirely your own. The volume of your orgasms. The filth you begged for. That was all you, my dear observer. That was the raw material beneath the silence.”
She sobbed, clutching the dirty fabric to her chest. “Why?”
“To measure the depth of your sacrifice potential,” he said clinically, as if reviewing data. “To see if the woman who silently wished for fire could herself be burned. And to see what she’d do after.” He stepped closer, and she flinched. “You have two choices now. You can run from this, let the shame define you, let it be another piece of ‘bad luck’ that happened to the poor, quiet girl.”
He leaned down, his face close to hers. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Or you can understand the power of what just happened. You were the center. You were loud. You were desired. You were used, yes. But you were necessary. You can carry that knowledge forward. You can decide that being seen, even in the most degrading light, is better than being scenery.”
He straightened up, adjusting his cuff. “The mind control is gone. The memory, the physical sensations, they are yours to keep. A new piece of currency. What will you trade it for?”
He turned and walked away, his footsteps fading into the hum of the city.
Bila huddled on the ground, covered in his scent, her body screaming with the echoes of pleasure and violation. The needle was still in her pocket. The silence of the alley pressed in, but it was a different silence now. It was no longer empty. It was full of the echo of her own screams, and the chilling, liberating question he had left behind.