Yurui The Cursed One

I wake to the sound of tires humming over the road.

For a few seconds, I was confused. Then I hear it- the low purr of the engine. The faint tremble of the car body. The soft, irritating creak of the seat beneath me when the tires pass over rough patches in the road. That’s right, I was in the car. Against my will, I might add. Not that it matters.

My cheek is pressed against the window. The glass is cold enough to sting. I peel myself away from it slowly, leaving behind a fogged patch of breath that vanishes almost as soon as it appears. At first, I assumed we had already left Miracle City behind. We must have been driving for a while. Long enough for me to fall asleep, at least.

So when I open my eyes and see darkness, my heart skips a beat. At first, my brain tries to be reasonable. A tunnel, maybe. A blackout. A walled-off highway road leading between different cities. Then I look past my own reflection.

There is no city. There is no road I can see. There is only moonlight. A thin silver wash spreads across the land beyond the window. Sand. Rock. Low black shrubs bent by the wind. No buildings. No streetlights. No signs of civilization anywhere. Just open desert, stretching across the entire horizon.

Above it, the sky is full of stars. Not pretty stars. Not the soft, romantic kind people put over love confessions and childhood wishes. The exact kind that I hate. The so-called star vomit.

My mouth goes dry. “What the hell?”

The woman in the front seat glances at me through the mirror. She has barely moved since we left. Back straight. Hands resting neatly on the wheel. Her blonde hair falls in two long side tails, each one hanging neatly past her chest, resting on her lap, completely undisturbed by hours of travel. A Miracle Inc. woman through and through. The kind of person who could step over a bleeding child and complain about the stain on the pavement.

I sit up too fast. Pain sparks across my neck. “Are we still in the fucking desert?”

She adjusts the mirror until both her eyes meet mine in the reflection. “We are crossing an alternative route,” she says in the same flat, monotonous voice she has used for everything else.

“That’s not what I fucking asked.”

“Well, it is the answer you are getting.”

I stare at her. Then I laugh once. “Alternative route,” I repeat. “Is that Miracle Inc. speak for I fucked up?”

Her expression does not change. “For the record, we lost time because of your earlier lack of cooperation. The safest road after sundown was no longer available.”

“My lack of cooperation.”

“Yes.”

“You mean when I objected to being collected from my home like a package?”

“You were not collected like a package.”

“Right. Packages get tracking numbers.”

She rolls her eyes. A tiny annoyance appears on her face. I could be jumping from joy right now; it feels ecstatic to finally get to her, to make a dent in her impregnable armor. I haven’t felt this good in a very long time. Almost. I’m too scared to gloat out loud, as I’m very well aware that it would come back to bite me in my ass later. No need to make the already bad situation any worse.

“You are under our legal custody,” she says. “Your guardian signed the necessary documents. Miracle Inc. is acting within its full rights.”

“The only mistake I made was not handling you firmly enough from the start.” Her hands grip the wheel tighter. “Then we would still be on schedule, instead of taking an outer route through the desert after dark.”

Handle me “firmer.” Jesus. I wonder what my mom would think about that. Maybe she’d finally feel an ounce of guilt for leaving me with these psychopaths. I look at her seat.

My mother is sound asleep in front of me. Great. Not a care in the world. Sleeping like a baby while her own daughter gets taken away God knows where, to some mysterious facility. She sits with her face turned toward the opposite window, features dim in the moonlight. Earlier, in the morning, she had looked almost beautiful in that borrowed blouse and fitted jacket. Arranged. Smoothed over. Made to look acceptable for the stuck-up people that Miracle Inc. employed. Now she looks smaller. Older. All familiar and yet distant and alien-like at the same time.

I should say something to her. Maybe I should ask whether she actually read the contract, or just skimmed the first page and signed where they told her to. Instead, I look out the window again. Deep down, I know that it's pointless. Nothing I do or say can change the inevitable.

The desert keeps stretching on. My headache intensifies.

“Sorry. Next time I get kidnapped, I’ll try to be more considerate of the kidnappers’ schedule.”

“You are not being kidnapped. We are your legal—”

“Ah, forget it.” I wave her off and turn back to the window.

Talking to her feels like throwing rocks at a wall and waiting for it to apologize. She has that Miracle Inc. tone. Flat, official, bored by human misery. The kind of voice that could probably say, Your mother has signed the required transfer forms, and Please remain calm while we remove your organs, with the exact same amount of emotional investment.

The Miracle Inc. woman sighs. “Your sense of humor is not as charming as you think it is.”

“It was not designed to charm kidnappers.”

“You are not being kidnapped.”

“I know, I know already. Legal transfer. Package rights, am I right?”

She turns forward again. The car falls quiet.

As much as I hated her, the silence was unbearable. There are no city sounds to drown out my thoughts. And there is nothing I hate more than being stuck in my own head. It drives me crazy. I usually have my MP3 player for times like these; I let the song drown out the voices in my head. Usually, that is. Sadly, in their haste to “transfer” me, the scumbags didn’t even let me pack.

I get the Miracle Inc. woman. Nobody expects a rich snob to care about some poor slum girl, but mom? Even if she sold me out for a better life, I'd at least expect her to pack some absolute essentials like my MP3 player. She knows that I cannot live without it. Piece of shit scumbag. I hope she fucking dies in pain and misery. Maybe in hell she’ll finally realize what a worthless piece of shit mother she was to me.

I press my fingers into my skirt. My uniform is wrinkled. Dusty. Torn in places. The white blouse now looks more gray than white. The ribbon hangs crooked. Some part of me still hopes to fix it, as if it matters at this point. For all I know, I might not live till the end of the week.

I put my hand on my jacket that rests on the seat next to me. The car hums on. The headlights carve out only a thin strip of road before the dark closes in again, consuming us whole.

There was no warning. No screeching brakes. No shouts. No sudden flash of headlights.

Just the impact.

Something enormous slams into the side of the car with enough force to turn the entire world sideways. The window beside me explodes inward. Glass sprays across my face. The seat belt bites into my ribs. My body snaps sideways, then back, then up. Metal screams around me. The car lifts off the ground like a toy flung by an angry child.

For one impossible second, the gravity disappears. I can see the moon shining directly above me. Then the shower of glass shards raining down on my face forces me to close my eyes.

A second impact rocks the car. From the feel of it, we’ve just hit the ground. The roof caves inward. Then, still carried by the momentum, the car springs back up and flips over. Once. Twice. Again.

It feels as if I was thrust into a washing machine all of a sudden. Something tears loose with a shriek. The window becomes sky, then sand, then sky, then metal. My body jerks against the seat belt hard enough to steal the breath out of me. My shoulder wrenches. My teeth click together. Light flashes white behind my eyes.

Then everything goes dark.

When I come back to it, I am hanging upside down. I know because… my hair dangles in front of my face. My arms float strangely beneath me. The seat belt holds me suspended, cutting deep into my stomach and chest.

For a moment, I stare at the roof below me. It has now become the floor. Shattered glass lies across it like crushed stars, and blood is dripping from my forehead on all the wreckage like a leaky pipe. Somewhere nearby, a wheel spins. Slow. Squeaking. Again and again and again.

God. I hate that sound.

I break into a small coughing fit. Great. I am alive. The realization does not bring any relief.

I fumble for the seat belt latch. My fingers slip the first time. The second time, I cannot feel the button at all. My hands are shaking too hard. “Come on,” I whisper. My voice was so weak it sounded distant.

The latch releases. I drop onto the crushed roof with a hard, breathless thud. Pain sparks through my shoulder and down my side. Glass bites into my palm when I try to push myself up. I do not scream. There is no room for it yet.

The car smells like blood, hot metal, dust, and the sharp chemical stink of burst safety foam. The airbag hangs limp from the front like dead skin. One door has been ripped half off. The windshield is gone.

The Miracle Inc. woman is no longer in the driver’s seat. Or not fully. Her body is twisted sideways, half trapped beneath the collapsed frame, but she is moving. Barely. One hand claws at the bent metal near her hip. Her lips are pulled back from her teeth. Alive. Of course. Scumbags never die. Or so I’ve heard.

I twist toward my mother. “Mom?”

She is still strapped in beside me. She’s mostly covered by the shadows, and I can’t really make out any details other than the fact that she wasn't moving. Her head hangs slumped forward, and her hair covers part of her face. One of her hands rests open near her lap, palm up, fingers slightly curled, as if she has just let go of something.

A tiny, absurd memory rises in me. That same hand pulling a blanket over my shoulder when I was small. I hate that memory. I hate that I still care about her.

“Mom,” I say again.

Nothing.

I crawl toward her. Thin beams of moonlight cut through the car, catching the dust as it drifts in the air. The roof buckles under my weight. Glass grinds into my knees. My shoulder burns every time I move, but I move anyway because my body is apparently very stupid and has not received the message that I hate her now.

I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.

I grab her sleeve. “Wake up.”

She does not move.

“Mom, wake up.”

My voice cracks the second time. That makes me angry. So angry I almost slapped her. I want to. I want to shake her until her teeth rattle. I want to scream at her that she does not get to do this. She does not get to sell me and then sit there silently like she’s the victim. She does not get to abandon me twice in one day.

Instead, I pull at the seat belt. It is jammed. “Of course,” I whisper. “Of course it is.”

I lean closer, searching for the latch. My hand slips on something wet. At first, I think it is just blood from my own palm.

That is when her head shifts. Just slightly. Moonlight slips through the broken side window and touches her face.

No.

My brain refuses to register what’s in front of me. No. There is blood smeared all across her cheek. Blood in her hair. Blood running down her neck and soaking into the neat collar of the fancy blouse she did not own yesterday.

The top of her skull is gone.

Not wounded. Gone.

Her brain drips from the broken bowl of her skull, sliding down her temple in pale, trembling strings before pattering onto the floor. Beneath it, her mouth hangs open, slack and empty, as if death caught her halfway through a word. Behind her, a jagged piece of metal has punched through the seat and into her body, holding her upright like some trophy pinned for display.

My hand is still on her sleeve. I stare at it. At my fingers touching her. At the blood creeping toward my knuckles.

I let go.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no…

A sound tears out of me. A raw animalistic sound. It tears up my throat and out of my mouth with enough force to burn my throat. I scramble backward. My heel slips in blood. My palm lands on glass. I do not feel the cuts until I am already moving, crawling toward the broken window, toward open air, toward anywhere that is not inside this car with her body.

Outside, the desert is freezing. I fall onto my side in the sand and suck in a breath so hard it hurts. The cold hits my wet face. I gasp like a fish out of the water. I do not remember crying. Maybe I am not. Maybe this is just what happens when a head gets knocked around too much.

Behind me, the wreck ticks and groans as it settles into place. The car lies on its side, crushed almost beyond recognition. One headlight still works, pointing uselessly into the empty desert. Its beam cuts across sand, dust, and scattered pieces of metal.

A large shadow slips across the faint light and disappears so quickly that, for a second, I am not sure whether I saw anything at all.

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