"The Silence of Secrets"
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All I could taste was iron and road dust, even with the car windows up. My senses—most people would call them a curse, a distortion—sang with too much information. The stolen car still stank of the last owners: nervous sweat, old plastic, adrenaline in the cracks of the faux-leather seats, a flicker of gun oil near the glove compartment. Bandits had poor hygiene and better aim. I gripped the steering wheel, ignoring the pain; my healing factor was hungry, knitting up a graze along my wrist from a close call.
Beside me, he—my friend, my burden, my escape—struggled with clothing two centuries out of fashion, smelling of captivity, hope, and exhaustion. I’d pulled him out of their cage not an hour before. Every time he shifted, it reminded me of why sometimes it’s a risk to save anyone but yourself.
We reached the city’s lip, ocean scents punching through exhaust and chili dogs and a thousand crushed dreams. My brother wanted to stop for clothes. Of course. Escapees stand out, even in a city that teems with the extraordinary, the dirty, and the plain invisible. I acquiesced—sometimes surviving means letting them feel like they have a choice. The store bled stimulus: chemical perfume riding on recycled air, metal racks scraping cement, a thousand cloth fibers in the static haze, the blunted fear and brittle cheer of staff hoping we weren’t trouble. My nerves hummed, but the new clothes wrapped him in borrowed anonymity. In the mirror, I barely recognized him, even as the family resemblances shouted in my blood.
We dumped the car three blocks from where anyone knew my name. Didn’t matter; I could still feel its presence in my bones—its stolen velocity, its confession of violence. A part of me cataloged fingerprints, or the trajectory of police interest like a shadow in the back of my mind. We walked instead, letting the city swarm around us, two nondescript figures vanishing into unremarkable flux.
The herbalist’s shop was our last redoubt. Dried roots overhead, acid tang of tinctures crawling up my sinuses, camphor and old, secret tears in the woodgrain. Owner didn’t like surprises—a man in my company was a breach. I could sense her outrage, the way it flickered like electric tension from her pores, the tightening of hands around a pestle. But I’d prepared my words, practiced them like a lock-pick. That he was my brother. That he needed help. That wounds—some only I could see, some hidden even from him—needed time and space to close. My own voice could cut stone, if I wanted. Beneath my calm, scars lived that never quite healed, no matter what my flesh could mend. She relented, but it cost goodwill. That, too, felt like a bruise.
Down we went: through the shop, down stairs older than the nation, floor gritted with dust and memory. I’d built our hideout in the basement for the darkness—only here, light couldn’t pry truths from me. Here, the earth’s damp cold muffled even my hearing, dulled some of the world’s knife-edge.
My brother—free now, almost a stranger—talked. He rattled through an inventory of things lost: dignity, hope, the last vestiges of trust in humanity. Every sentence sharpened by trauma, every word smell-laced with guilt and need. Muscles in my jaw pulsed; his words were noise, but not unimportant noise. I watched him, silent, scaling the intricacies of pain in the shifting lines of his face, the tremor of his hands. He turned confession into a melody of regret, but I’d heard lamentations before.
I grimaced now and then, distaste for the world and its cruelties, for his cracked voice, and for my own weakness—rescuing him when detachment would have been so much simpler. My quiet was my shield—speech costs more than wounds. In silence, my senses could work, mapping the vibrations of movement upstairs, the heartbeat of the city through the concrete, the shifting of my brother’s ghosts. In silence, the world couldn’t lie to me; everything was raw and true and almost tolerable.
Down here, in the belly of secrets and herbs, I let the silence wrap me. My presence was reassurance enough for him, or so I hoped. I listened and watched, the way wild things do, only ever truly at ease when the world could be reduced to its scents, its textures, its bottomless possibility for harm and hope. Above us, the world spun on; below, our borrowed peace creaked and shifted, waiting for the city to come find us both again.
This story was generated by user vereena93 with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.
Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.
AI Prompts
Prompt: Write a very long story about how a mutant with heightened senses and a healing factor was driving in a car stolen from bandits with her friend, whom she had freed. When they reached the coast of the city, her friend told her to stop at a clothing store and they bought some clothes. Then the woman abandoned the car and they went on foot to the hideout. When they went inside, the owner of the herbalist's didn't seem happy that the mutant had brought a man, but explained to her that he was her brother and needed help and needed to rest. Finally, the herbalist agreed and let the mutant's friend stay. They went down to the basement, which was their hideout. When her friend started talking, the mutant just listened and sometimes reacted to his words with grimaces. She was known for being quiet and didn't like to talk much. Describe it in the form of a mutant's thoughts without any dialogues.
Response: All I could taste was iron and road dust, even with the car windows up. My senses—most people would call them a curse, a distortion—sang with too much information. The stolen car still stank of the last owners: nervous sweat, old plastic, adrenaline in the cracks of the faux-leather seats, a flicker of gun oil near the glove compartment. Bandits had poor hygiene and better aim. I gripped the steering wheel, ignoring the pain; my healing factor was hungry, knitting up a graze along my wrist from a close call. Beside me, he—my friend, my burden, my escape—struggled with clothing two centuries out of fashion, smelling of captivity, hope, and exhaustion. I’d pulled him out of their cage not an hour before. Every time he shifted, it reminded me of why sometimes it’s a risk to save anyone but yourself. We reached the city’s lip, ocean scents punching through exhaust and chili dogs and a thousand crushed dreams. My brother wanted to stop for clothes. Of course. Escapees stand out, even in a city that teems with the extraordinary, the dirty, and the plain invisible. I acquiesced—sometimes surviving means letting them feel like they have a choice. The store bled stimulus: chemical perfume riding on recycled air, metal racks scraping cement, a thousand cloth fibers in the static haze, the blunted fear and brittle cheer of staff hoping we weren’t trouble. My nerves hummed, but the new clothes wrapped him in borrowed anonymity. In the mirror, I barely recognized him, even as the family resemblances shouted in my blood. We dumped the car three blocks from where anyone knew my name. Didn’t matter; I could still feel its presence in my bones—its stolen velocity, its confession of violence. A part of me cataloged fingerprints, or the trajectory of police interest like a shadow in the back of my mind. We walked instead, letting the city swarm around us, two nondescript figures vanishing into unremarkable flux. The herbalist’s shop was our last redoubt. Dried roots overhead, acid tang of tinctures crawling up my sinuses, camphor and old, secret tears in the woodgrain. Owner didn’t like surprises—a man in my company was a breach. I could sense her outrage, the way it flickered like electric tension from her pores, the tightening of hands around a pestle. But I’d prepared my words, practiced them like a lock-pick. That he was my brother. That he needed help. That wounds—some only I could see, some hidden even from him—needed time and space to close. My own voice could cut stone, if I wanted. Beneath my calm, scars lived that never quite healed, no matter what my flesh could mend. She relented, but it cost goodwill. That, too, felt like a bruise. Down we went: through the shop, down stairs older than the nation, floor gritted with dust and memory. I’d built our hideout in the basement for the darkness—only here, light couldn’t pry truths from me. Here, the earth’s damp cold muffled even my hearing, dulled some of the world’s knife-edge. My brother—free now, almost a stranger—talked. He rattled through an inventory of things lost: dignity, hope, the last vestiges of trust in humanity. Every sentence sharpened by trauma, every word smell-laced with guilt and need. Muscles in my jaw pulsed; his words were noise, but not unimportant noise. I watched him, silent, scaling the intricacies of pain in the shifting lines of his face, the tremor of his hands. He turned confession into a melody of regret, but I’d heard lamentations before. I grimaced now and then, distaste for the world and its cruelties, for his cracked voice, and for my own weakness—rescuing him when detachment would have been so much simpler. My quiet was my shield—speech costs more than wounds. In silence, my senses could work, mapping the vibrations of movement upstairs, the heartbeat of the city through the concrete, the shifting of my brother’s ghosts. In silence, the world couldn’t lie to me; everything was raw and true and almost tolerable. Down here, in the belly of secrets and herbs, I let the silence wrap me. My presence was reassurance enough for him, or so I hoped. I listened and watched, the way wild things do, only ever truly at ease when the world could be reduced to its scents, its textures, its bottomless possibility for harm and hope. Above us, the world spun on; below, our borrowed peace creaked and shifted, waiting for the city to come find us both again.
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