Face-Slapping15 min read
I Died Twice, I Took the Jade, I Broke Their World
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I died under gray snow and rotten teeth, and then I sat up in a bed that smelled of perfume and starch and sleep, and I decided I would not die for anyone's plot again.
"Don't leave me, don't leave me," a voice had screamed when I was still flesh and torn, and men with clean collars had smiled down at me and walked away. I remember the smell of blood on my own ankles, the water-slick of the blade that had cut me open. I remember a man—tall, a government of charm—carrying another woman like a wrapped bird and saying, "I never loved you. I thought you were my sister." He was gentle with her. He was cruel to me.
"I won't let them have that story," I said in the dark where a soft, mechanical voice watched me and laughed like fingers on glass.
"Name?" the voice asked.
"Call me what you must. Let me live."
"One condition," the voice said. "You will have a chance to change an ending. You must produce a conclusion for the main pair. Either forever or never."
"Give me my brother back," I said.
"Not needed," the voice answered. "You may have the chance."
I opened my eyes in morning light. My body was whole. My skin felt like thrifted silk—smooth, used. I touched my face. No scar. No mud. Clean teeth. A week before the sky turned sour.
"Morning, Miss Corinna," the system said in a polite tone that pretended to be my servant and not my jailer.
"Who are you?" I asked the empty air and my fingers found the edge of the blanket with a grip that tasted like hunger.
"An engine, a monitor," it said. "I will call myself 136."
"Fine," I said. "136, you owe me three favors."
"Recorded," 136 hummed. "Condition: you must steer the story to a proper finish."
"I will steer," I said. "And if the story needs breaking, I'll break it."
I dressed like a woman who owned the world and wasn't trying to ask anyone's permission to do it. I had money. I had resources left by people who thought a thin, awkward heiress would not know how to spend them. I went to the market and to the bank and to a jewelry auction. I set the world on a course that would wake it up and teach it to bleed from its own hubris.
"You're buying everything?" my assistant asked, voice trembling with the size of the orders we'd placed.
"Yes," I said. "Buy every generator, every box of antibiotics, every flask of ethanol, every blade that catches the light. Ship them to West Ridge. Lock the codes. Move them to the cellar. No questions."
"Corinna, why—"
"—because I died once," I said. "And I will not die like a footnote this time."
I drove to the university where my brother studied. Aiden Contreras looked up at me with a face that belonged to someone who had never been allowed to keep a dog that bit in public. He grinned like a choked thing, walked over, and hugged me in a way that made something like a clean place in my chest unclench.
"Corinna," he said, "you came."
"Of course." I felt ridiculous being domestic in a world that wanted to ask questions. "We leave now."
We took Eldridge Morris with us—Aiden's friend, half-angel and half-stubborn, bleeding from a leg he claimed he would never rest. He would be useful. People without families make the best allies. He kept his face honest and his words fewer than mine; that is why I liked him at once.
On the day I saw her up close, Arianna Blevins held a plush rabbit and looked like a light that had never learned to be anything but kind. Men in better coats hovered like moths. She smiled to the floor and they smiled back as if the world had never offered anything but soft corners. I felt disgust, and the disgust was a blade I liked to run across my tongue.
"She looks like a painting," Eldridge said beside me.
"Paintings are only good until you paint over them," I said.
The auction smelled of polished wood and older money. I watched a jade pendant—green as old promises—cross the stage. I lifted my paddle without much thought and said: "Four hundred thousand."
"Miss?" the clerk asked, surprised.
"Four hundred thousand," I said again. "And the rest of you can watch."
They thought I was showing off. They thought they could catch me. They did not know I had counted their breaths and bought their silence well in advance. The jade came home in a velvet box. It warmed my palm like a bad luck charm and a new god. I put it next to my heart and laughed alone in my car.
"You buy the story," 136 said. "You spent four hundred thousand for a narrative anchor."
"I bought a ledger," I told the voice. "For Arianna's future if she ever needed it."
"Intriguing."
That night, I made a list. Men who had smiled while I bled. A woman in a red dress of my last life. A family that thought me a neat investment. Names were caskets and I would open them.
Cairo Dickinson was the man who had walked away. He had a face that could be charity and a jaw that could empty a room. He had been my fiancé in a story written to feed others' soft hearts. I had fed him too long; I had fed him funds and favors and a name. He owed me survival. He gave me betrayal.
The plan was precise because my temper could be pretty and the world so easy to plan against.
"Stage one," I told Eldridge while we packed boxes in my underground—space that now glittered with rows of tin and medicine. "Break Cairo financially. Stage two: test the world. Stage three: keep Aiden safe. Stage four: make sure Arianna does not burn the world with her light."
"You want to kill them?" Eldridge asked plainly, because plain is the only useful thing in the face of fire.
"Not kill," I corrected. "Make them ache where they hid their arrogance. Publicly."
They were the kind who took cleanliness for granted. The kind who thought decency fit them like wedding day gloves. They had never met the kind of cruelty that arranges itself like a single perfect knot.
"You're going to hit his company?" Eldridge said.
"Yes," I said. "And hit his pride. Pride is always loud. That is where the crowd gathers."
We moved faster than I had expected. My money is a courteous thing: it obeys orders if you speak plainly. I bought stocks short and anonymized transfers. I contracted a leak in the supply chain. Cairo's name began to blight on trades. Overnight, his empire cracked like a bowl with heat under it.
"He's calling," Eldridge said the first morning the exchanges bled. "Answer it."
"On speaker," I said. He sounded like a man who had lost an echo.
"Cairo," I said, the word simple as a throw.
"Corinna," he breathed. "What have you done?"
"You took my time," I said. "I took my time back."
"You can't—"
"I already did," I said.
He screamed a cursed string of reasons and excuses. I listened to him unravel. Later he would try to explain the shape of his choices on live feeds and press rooms, but the press only loved a spectacle. He had given them one.
Public humiliation is an art. It must be staged so that the villain goes through the four familiar acts: smugness, confusion, denial, collapse. They will try to kneel. They will beg. They will learn what sound comes from the throat when no one is listening with love.
But before the gala that would become Cairo’s great public lesson, I drew a line.
"You can't touch my mother," he said on the phone.
"I didn't ever need to," I told him. "But I did correct a lie."
I went to his mother's charity brunch and left two bruises in the world. She was loud and floral and called herself maternal and kissed me like I had once been soft.
"Open the door," she demanded when she found me in her hallway.
"I did," I answered like someone reading from the only script that matters. "You were loud when people were dying last time."
"How dare you," she said.
I smiled and I pulled a glove from my pocket. "Calm down," I said. "This is not for you to die in shame. It's for you to learn."
That night, every gossip app took pictures. The video of the woman in a floral dress on the marble floor with dirt in her hair ricocheted across networks. She cried and then she called the police and then everyone had an opinion.
"She's a monster," one woman typed.
"Good," I thought.
But the story needed the crowd and the crowd needed the spectacle of a man who had lived on other people's breathing to be shown what hunger smells like. So I planned the shareholders' event where his candle burn would be lit and I would be the match.
The hall was full of men in expensive shoes and women with names that cost more than three months' wages. The chandelier hung like a god that had been bribed into silence.
I walked in with Aiden at my side. Eldridge followed like a good omen. I was a calculation in a dress. When they saw me, some thought I came to beg or to play the broken heiress. It is bliss to watch expectations collapse.
"Good evening," someone called, a city anchor perhaps, the kind of voice that sounds like money.
"Good evening," I said. "I have a short speech."
The screens went dark. Good.
"People," I said. "You like endings that are neat. You like love that cleans up after itself. You like the brave boy and the gentle girl and the bitter woman who dies to make the plot pretty."
"Hear, hear," a man clapped, because applause is still the easiest language for a crowd.
"Tonight," I said, "I offer you a new chapter."
I tapped my phone. The room watched the stage as a single field. On the big screen, a cascade of messages unfolded like a wet rope. Private texts, voice memos, receipts—Cairo's softness with the other woman, the way he called the quiet girl "a handy warmth," the way he referred to me as "a stepping stone." His name withered on the screen while a thousand phones lifted to capture it.
"What is this?" he shouted.
"It is your face," I said. "It's everything you said when you thought no one would see."
He laughed first. The laugh was not brave. It was a laugh that heard the echo the world would give it back.
"Fake," he said. "This is forged."
"Do you deny your voice?" I asked.
"No—no. They can fake it. They can plant—"
I walked down the steps. "People," I said, leaning into their warmth like a hungry thing. "If someone told you your child would be fine because of a check, would you hand them your house? Would you tell the world your life belongs to someone's ledger? We do this all the time."
"Stop!" he barked. His eyes bulged. He tried to stride toward me, but the crowd had begun to record with the intensity of a public crucible.
"Shut up," I said softly, the quiet that hurts louder than the telephone call. "Listen."
There is a rhythm to humiliation: first, denial and red; then, a search for a mistake; then, the opening of the body into apology. The villain will try all instruments.
He did everything. He denied. He tried to laugh. He accused the screen. He hissed for security. He said my name like a poison. Then he slammed his hands on the podium. He became small.
"Please," he said finally, and it was the sound I had waited to hear, the sound of a man offering the soft part of his voice on the pavement like a stolen coin. "Please—this was not how—"
The room changed as if someone had cast a net. Some shifted in chairs, some pretended to read their programs, others circled with the curiosity of predators.
"Get down," I said.
He went to his knees the way someone might drop to salt. It was pitiful. He had no words left that would buy him more than a few seconds of tenderness. He shook and tried to plead.
"Speak," I said. "Tell them why you left. Tell them who you used as a stair."
"Corinna," he croaked, "I—"
"Say it," I told him.
"My friends," he whimpered. "I was lonely. I thought—"
"Say it louder."
"I thought I did not love you. I thought—" he choked. His face crumpled like paper in water. "I thought I could be happy without you. I thought I could choose her. I'm sorry."
"Too late for sorry, Cairo," a woman said from the back, voice clear. "Too late for your sorry when you see how you made other people bleed to buy your comfort."
The guests buzzed. Phones flashed. The men who had nodded at his previous plans looked away, tolerant only of success, not of humiliation. Cameras ate his face and gave it back to the world.
He slid further to the floor. His speech dissolved into a string of apologies that were not enough. He begged and clawed and then he begged more, asking our bartered mercy with the same hands that had built a ledger out of me.
People recorded. They laughed. Others cried. A few, quietly, felt their stomachs twist. There were shouts. "Shame." "Kneel longer." "Say her name."
I watched the progression as if it were a lesson. This man had been a kingdom. He had thought himself clean. I had only opened a window.
"You wanted an ending," I said later when the cameras had left and his name still trended. "You wanted to see what it means to be remembered for what you did."
"What will you do now?" Eldridge asked me in the dark as we left.
"Protect Aiden," I answered. "Make sure this world remembers something besides their pretty feelings."
He was not the only one punished. The crowd had applauded more than a thousand tiny judgments at once; what is a thousand small rebellions if not a revolution? The video of him begging made the front page. Suppliers pulled contracts. He spent the week calling for bailouts he had no right to.
A public punishment is not only satisfying; it re-teaches the world its own edges. I had taught them that bargains make brittle things.
After the gala, I shut the cellar door and counted the rows of canned corn and the boxes of aspirin. I checked Aiden's breathing at midnight and pressed a kiss to his forehead like a promise.
"Will they come for us?" he asked once.
"We made ourselves a little island," I said. "We paid for the boat."
Four days later, the sky opened as a bad wound.
It began with rumors in a forum and then a seed of an actual fever caught between two towns. People took to buses and left their children like paintings on mantels. The hospitals filled like waves against a cliff and then the news broke: the infections were not like ordinary fevers. The infected fought with a feral patience and a rote hunger.
"Get the generators," I told the driver when the first official bulletin landed. "Bring everyone we can move."
We moved like ants with a queen to protect. People saw me in the street and thought a little girl with powerful shoulders was the last civility they could require. They offered bread and said I should be honored.
"How will the world repay you?" a passerby said, eyes shiny with disbelief.
"We don't accept repayment," I said. "We accept survival."
We barricaded doors. The night the sirens began, I sat with my brother and Eldridge and a boy named "Marcelo"—a supplier's son who had fastened himself to us for reasons that were none of my concern.
"Will she be safe?" Arianna asked me when she arrived, face pale and wind-wet.
"Yes," I said. "If she isn't, it will not be because of me."
She looked at me with a gratitude that tasted like sugar. "Thank you."
I had no idea then that saving Arianna would be as complicated as burning down someone's altar. But she had a space amulet and a softness the world loved. People would come for her. That is how stories grow teeth: the crowd chooses a favorite and then the world rearranges itself around that light.
On the third day, we sat in the small supermarket we had built inside the space using the jade as a key and watched the outer city collapse in the distance like a bad painting. The dead walked in the streets, the infected ate everything they found. The vehicles stalled and the sky looked wrong, the way old photographs look when someone rubbed an edge too hard.
"How did you know?" Aiden asked, fingers curling around a spoon.
"Because I was allowed to see the end once," I said. "And now because I see it again, I plan differently."
Arianna cried once and then laughed. She was a woman with a light but not a blade. She asked the quiet question that always comes to the people who have never had to hold a weapon: "Can you forgive someone who used you as a plot?"
"Forgiveness is not a service," I told her. "It is a tax you pay with who you become."
Days blurred into a labor of moving, surviving, watching. We lost people. We watched neighbors become angry and small with fear. But we were alive. That was all that mattered when the world narrowed to the size of a breath and a meal and the shape of the one you trusted.
One afternoon, as the city burned like a slow confession, word came that Cairo would be brought to the main square—this time not as a man of wealth but as a man in cuffs. His pride had not only collapsed in the market; allies had turned and his own supply chain had gnawed him from the inside out. The same cameras that loved his clothes hunted him for blood now.
I went to the square with nothing but Aiden and Eldridge and a small plan.
"Are you going to finish him?" Eldridge asked, half joking, half not.
"Finish?" I turned my face to him. "I am going to give him the longest lesson I can afford."
The crowd had gathered. There were new faces and old faces. People held up their phones like lanterns. He was seated on a wooden crate, dusty and unshaven, eyes hollow.
"Corinna," he said, as if the syllables still fit between them. "Please."
"Please what?" I asked.
"Please—" He faltered. He had the shame of a man who had eaten the fruit of his own design and found it sour.
I climbed the steps of the platform. "Do you remember the exact words you used the night you left me?" I asked.
He pressed his palms to his face, then wept like a man who had never practiced this humility. "I thought… I didn't know…"
"Everyone who asks whether the story is cruel says it should be tested against a person's true desire," I said. "So I am giving you one more demonstration. I have a list of everyone you betrayed. I have a ledger that counts favors. We will make you stand and name them."
His face went white as paper. He had become a man whose past was a ledger and whose future was a blank page others filled with curses.
"Start," I told him.
"Ladies and gentlemen—" I addressed the crowd. "This is a public accounting."
He tried to deny; he tried to shift blame. He tried to find the old words that had purchased him favors. But the crowd had a new appetite. People began to shout names of the poor and the ignored and the women he had used. Someone threw an old shoe. Others told stories of nights when they had been turned away.
He began the sequence: Smugness, confusion, denial, collapse. I made sure of it.
"Say their names," I urged.
He listed a few—clumsy, human names who had bankrolled his early dreams and been left behind. Each false smile he had worn had been recorded and stored. He had nothing left but the shape of apology.
I made him kneel. The crowd's phones clattered like rain. I told him to stand and recount one by one where he had cut people out. He wept and then he blasphemed and then he begged for forgiveness in the only currency he still had: his voice.
"Please," he said, voice tearing like cheap fabric. "Please, I will— I will do anything."
"Great," I said. "Then begin by building what you tore down. Begin by telling the truth. Begin by telling everyone you hurt how you hurt them."
He tried. He faltered. He turned his pleas toward me, a man asking for the last mercy onstage.
"Beg for your mother," someone shouted, and the irony of the request was delicious. Hadn't he left me because of someone else's "softness"? Now he was asked to beg them all.
He did what most men in his place do: he offered his public collapse as a show of reform without actual currency. The crowd ate it. For a moment there was a hunger in their eyes.
That night, videos of him pleading were on every feed. Some cheered. Some mocked. Some sent praise. He had been publicly squeezed until his pride welled like an aperture and something had to give.
And yet, as long as he breathed, he could redraw the map of his life. I had taught him to name his wrongs in public. That is a kind of education. How he used it would say more about who he was than his begging.
I watched him from the edges and knew something hard: punishment is not justice, only a very public mirror.
Weeks passed with the world infected and tired. We protected the people who trusted us. We taught Aiden to bandage wounds. Eldridge learned to keep his eyes open at night. Arianna learned to hold a spoon like a sword. I taught them how to shut doors.
One night, when the city settled into a sleep of survivors, I sat with the jade and touched it with a trembling hand.
"Will you be the woman who forgives?" Arianna asked, suddenly near like a ghost.
"I will be the woman who remembers why she needs to survive," I said. "I will not be a footnote."
She nodded, understanding the difference.
"Do you ever miss being the one who died?" Eldridge asked, blunt as a blade.
"No," I answered. "I miss who I could have been if the script were kinder. But I do not miss my own smallness."
He laughed. "What will you do now?"
"Make sure the next chapters belong to the living," I said.
And I did. I kept the pantry stocked. I kept the space sealed. I visited the ruins to watch the world tremble at its own vanity. People learned to barter with more honesty. They learned that money buys survival only until the first two nights of hunger. They learned that generosity is the salt in a slow stew, not the garnish.
One morning in the shelter, Aiden came to me with a small bundle.
"Corinna," he said. "You gave me a second life."
"You gave yourself one," I told him. "You chose to run instead of remain small."
He smiled like a boy who had found a courage shaped like a coin. That was all that mattered.
When the feeds finally quieted down and the world began to rebuild in slow honest hands, I stood on a hill near the river and watched a child pick at the grass like someone listening for a tune.
"Did we win?" Aiden asked at my shoulder.
"We survived," I said. "Survival is a kind of victory now."
He leaned in. "What about them? Cairo? The rest?"
"They got lessons," I said. "The world taught them. If they rebuilt from shame, they will be better. If they rebuild from greed, they will fall again. Either way, it's not my work."
Arianna walked up the hill with a jar of fruit preserves she had learned to make in the bunker.
"Do you forgive me?" she asked suddenly, shy.
"For what?" I asked.
"For being soft and still beloved," she said, with the small earnestness of a saint who had never thought herself dangerous.
"It is not your fault to be adored," I said. "Just be careful how you burn your own light."
She smiled, and the smile was a small island.
I slid the jade into my palm, and it warmed like an old promise. I pressed it to my chest and remembered the woman who had died under gray sky and rotten teeth and how she had learned to laugh in the face of narrative.
"You were a wonder," 136 said once from the thin blue line that trembled at the edge of my life. "You bent a script."
"I bent it," I said. "I smoked the edges. I rethreaded the seams. I kept my brother. I didn't let them write my smallness."
In the end, we tilled a small garden and kept one another alive. The world learned a crueler kindness. The men who had pretended were known for their shame. The women were fed and the children played in fields that had not known them.
On the last day of winter before anything like peace, I sat with Arianna and Aiden, and Eldridge, and watched the city wash itself in rain. A boy we had sheltered called me name like a new word of affection.
"Corinna," he said, "you look like peace."
"I am not peace," I answered, "but I learned to protect it."
We ate jam and bread. The jade lay on the table, green and odd. It hummed like a small planet.
"Will you ever go back?" someone asked.
"Back to what?" I asked.
"Back to being small."
"No," I said. "I will not play the part they wrote for me. I will write my pages."
We laughed and drank and the light came like apology.
The End
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