Meltdown

The tattooed angel's baby face was serene as he slept. Daria caressed a strand of hair back from his forehead, then swept both hands through her own spiky hair as she slipped away from the place in the bed next to him. Her dreams might be heavy, she reflected, but life was becoming addictive. A smile engraved the edges of her mouth.

Her face was set hard when she addressed her followers, later that wet afternoon. "I won't stand for it," she said. "Daria's house is inclusive, not exclusive. Anyone who renounces violence is welcome here. Violence is mine alone to use, and then to use only to protect you. Denigration and exclusion are violence, and I won't have them in my house. There are no heretics here because no ideas are heretical. Do I make myself clear?" She took the uneasy silence as assent.

Afterwards, Walter, Daria’s closest adviser, was not best pleased. "The movement has a momentum of its own,” he insisted. “You cannot chain a cyclone."

"You doubt my powers?" growled Daria, judging distances. Walter backed down, backed away.

Two days later, a breeze set the trees whispering in the copse beyond the house. Daria stared at blood that marred the smooth face of her lover. Fire battled ice in her heart. "We need a sacrifice," Davide whispered at her shoulder, his breath sour with curdled love. "You or him. We can still save his life. You decide." Temporarily, ice triumphed. "Save him," she said, "I'll be your sacrifice."

Daria came to her followers for the last time. She kept them waiting in darkness in the meeting hall, only the dais lit, softly, then very brightly when she appeared on it as if from nowhere.

"My house has been violated," she intoned. "Blood has been spilt in it. Only blood can cleanse it. I cannot take yours, therefore I shall give you mine." Dry-ice smoke crept into the room like broken surf. A thunderclap shattered the spotlights. A zigzag of concentrated light flashed from the ceiling to the dais. Confusion, then uproar engulfed the audience. The house lights came up. Where Daria had stood lay a pool of blood, an arrow quivering at its centre.

Daria had explained most of her tricks to them. She had wanted them to be under few illusions. They had reacted with awe: "What? You did all that without magic?" And they had worshipped her even more deeply. Now she needed to count on their credulity.

The news of her death reached her in Varkala, as did that of her sect's further rapid growth. The figurehead's self-sacrifice had propelled its fame and following far beyond the frontiers of Italy. She had hoped, instead, that a timely beheading would prevent her creation from growing into a monster. She set up a one-off e-mail account and let them know she was alive and laughing at their gullibility. She sent them postcards from Kerala's resorts to the same effect, with no discernable result. Finally, she shrugged her mind and turned her attention to spending their money.

While the west had eyes only for its own belly, India had grown rich, then skeptical and, consequently, richer still. It was now one of the least likely places for people to come in search of mysticism or mystification, and one of the most resistant to alien forms of such viruses. In contrast, decades of heavy investment in education and scientific research meant it was Daria's best bet for giving herself a complete makeover through psychotherapy, gene therapy and plastic surgery.

Even after several months of such treatment, there was enough of her former self left for Daria to become aware that she was being followed. She was reluctant to shed her new routines like a snake's skin just to shake off her pursuer. She hoped the stalker would make himself known, say his piece and disappear, satisfied. Instead, he caught her, for once unawares, as she walked meditatively along the otherwise deserted cliff in the fading twilight.

Daria felt considerable weight and strength behind the knee on her back that pressed her face into the red earth. The steel point of the knife dimpling her neck, in contrast, dug into her sense of self and loosened the restraints on an old delirium. "OK," she managed to spit out, "you know you want to: tell me who you are."

"With pleasure. Pino Servillo, former head of the secret police of the former Padania, lately escaped from the so-called maximum security gaol in Novara in so-called Italy. Currently unemployed but not unfunded, and enjoying serving up selected cold dishes of revenge."

The sensation of her skin being pierced cut through the layers of Daria's carefully constructed new identity. She arched her head backward to catch the man's face as her heel, thrust into his groin, propelled his body forward. His blood and her rage blinded them both. Daria's hand caught the knife that his ejected, and used it. His sundered heart enveloped her fingers on its handle. Rising and twisting, she shucked the once-powerful body off her back as she cut out the heart and lobbed it over the cliff as though there were some Aztec god in the Indian Ocean whom she might appease. Then her foot pushed the corpse over.

Exhausted, Daria sat on the cliff's edge, staring at the emerging stars reflecting in the dark waters that drew her old enemy away, while his blood trickled icily down her lower spine, letting her know that she had failed to renew either the world or herself. Some minutes later, she got to her feet and stumbled off to find a place where she could wash and change.