NESS
For the past couple days, I’ve been reading scripts, but not for anything I’m excited to star in. The campaign manager, Roslyn Fox, thought it would be a great strategy to counter Brighton’s Spell Walkers of New York series with videos of our own. The Senator and Bishop have signed off on the scripts that will paint celestials as walking weapons that need to be controlled—all thanks to the shifting power that was supposed to help me reboot my life.
I’ve been propped in front of the camera for over twelve hours filming anti-celestial videos. I’m locked away in the attic that’s been converted into a studio with only Roslyn for company. She looks murderous as she reviews our most recent take.
She has the same tight black bun she’s been wearing since she was brought onto the Senator’s staff one year after Mom was killed. Black eyeliner she probably put on for the Senator is smudging around her icy-blue eyes. She curses under her breath.
I don’t have to be good at reading people to know she hates me.
We worked closely together back when I was more compliant because she wrote some of the speeches I delivered at the youth conferences she would book for me. One night I thanked her for giving me all these stages to release my anger and grief. Then she overstepped by inviting me to always talk to her about my feelings like I would’ve with Mom. I had the Senator shut that down immediately because no one was ever going to replace my mother. It was all business from there on out with Roslyn.
I’m sure she was thrilled when she thought I actually died in the Blackout. My resurrection has probably been really hard on her. I wish I’d been around when the Senator broke the news.
The difference between working with Roslyn now from before is that this time I know all the lines she’s feeding me are lies. I won’t be surprised if she keeps me going past midnight. I’ve been fed twice, but during those breaks I had to watch footage of Congresswoman Sunstar’s staff to study their behavior and appearances so I can pose as them. But mostly I’ve been shifting into people who don’t even exist. I’m given faces of randoms around the country and build a look. Someone’s yellow teeth with someone else’s lips with someone else’s button nose with someone else’s brown eyes with someone else’s red buzz cut.
Then I lie about how celestials have ruined my life.
I’ve appeared as a teenager whose invisible high school coach spied on me in the locker room. The assistant to a boss who threatened to burn me from the inside out if I kept refusing dates with him. A victim who gave away my car keys because of “some young punk’s mind control,” which isn’t even a known power in our world; it’s something that’s ripped out of science-fiction movies. A child who bullied a boy at school, so his mother blinded me with her blazing light—a power not-so-strikingly similar to Sunstar.
No one will use the word, but it’s all propaganda.
“Again,” Roslyn says from behind the camera. “Sell it to me.”
“The young celestial threatened me if I didn’t give him all the money,” I say as an older bank teller with welling tears brought on by how tired I am. I don’t want to say this last part, but I do. “He told me that the money was going to be donated to the Spell Walkers so they can build better defenses against the enforcers. His eyes were glowing as bright as the lightning in his hands. . . .”
The thing is, if anyone does the bare minimum to fact-check these stories, they won’t be able to come up with anything to support it. But the problem is no one tries anymore. Headlines are read, articles are skimmed, and the reader passes that on to someone else, and they accept it as truth. Then that person tells someone else and it spreads like poison. By the time someone senses something is off and does their own research, it’s too late. The damage has been done.
This is only one of the twenty-four stories I’ve filmed so far to further paint the Spell Walkers as villains. To make sure Sunstar never catches up in the polls. To limit the rights of celestials and increase demands for more enforcers.
The world is worse off because of me and my infinite faces.