THE SERPENT'S TONGUE

THE SERPENT'S TONGUE
POV: Victor

Power is a table set so precisely the room forgets it is hungry. I have always loved the ritual of the setting: the slow placement of plates, the subtle choice of cutlery, the way a napkin can declare a man’s rank. People who understand ceremony learn to read an enemy by the salt shaker he uses.

My office is wood and low light, a place designed to make anyone who enters speak more carefully. Screens line one wall like loyal servants, each one tuned to a different city heartbeat; markets, feeds, influencer accounts, private channels. A hum under everything. A low hymn of what keeps a metropolis polite.

Tonight the hymn was a discordant thrum. Leon Blackwell had thrown a match. It was predictable, which irritated me, and satisfyingly theatrical, which I admired in him in spite of the fact that he is inconvenient. The man has a flair for spectacle. Half the world mistakes artistry for danger; I prefer the industry of ruin.

Valen had been useful, which is a phrase that covers a multitude of sins. He had the face people loved to see on camera: measured, mild, the kind of man you would trust with your child’s graduation speech. He hides teeth behind the gentility of a suit. We placed him where he could be seen because the Committee needed a smile that looked institutional. The irony of that arrangement always has a hint of cruelty, put a friendly face on poison and everyone swallows faster.

Our feed showed the fallout from Leon’s leak, an organized assault on my careful architecture. Noise, furor, popcorn outrage. People eat their narratives raw now. The city builds bonfires out of gossip and calls it civic ritual. That they believed Leon’s theatrics made me smile and made my jaw tighten. If we were to control the story, we would do so by manufacturing a counter-chorus loud enough to smother his tempo.

“You see it?” I asked the room, though the room was only screens and the man at my left, a director of operations who looked like a man perpetually on the edge of a scalp massage. “The thrashing?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir. Two narrative threads. One, Vorace’s leak has traction. The other; Avelianos Act threads - are amplifying through fringe influencers. They’re wounding sympathy towards Ms. Aveliano.”

“Good,” I said. Not good like a moral judgment. Good like a craftsman hearing a kiln reach temperature. “We will turn wound into opera.” Aveliano was a name I liked to call Ava back in the days while we used to date…. She reminded me of my granny…graceful but daring…. I laughed at the thought of how gullible Ava had always been from the start. Story for another day, today, we hunt.

My aides are reliable in their silence. They knew the next step without my having to spell it out because this is what we teach them: when the public’s appetite forks, feed both forks at once. The left-hand feed demands villains; the right-hand feed craves justice. We will supply both and choose which side to burn for effect.

“Stage one,” I said, leaning back so the leather creaked in a satisfied note. “We do not panic. We plant. We do not scold the media; we coo to them. We seed narratives that feel like citizen-sourced rage. Talk shows, pseudo-journalists with agendas, a few well-placed opinion pieces. Let them believe their moral righteousness is organic. It’s the oldest trick, give people the illusion that they are discovering truth for themselves, and they will defend it with teeth.”

“About Valen?” my director asked, because some men, even useful ones, need to know whether the hand that guides the puppet will also cut it down.

“Valen remains our face,” I said. “He speaks, he smiles, he plays the offended statesman. If it becomes necessary, he will step down and we will sanctify the cause with a sacrificial other. The public loves redemption stories if you script them; they love martyrs more if the martyr’s show is convincing.”

There was a pause, the moment in which a symphony waits for the conductor’s flick.

“And the militias?” someone else asked, voice low.

I let a small silence stretch. There are phrases that are better suggested than spoken aloud in the first instance. I prefer to be economical with indecent truths.

“Muscle is a currency,” I finally said. “When people believe they are cleansing their streets, they are easier to shepherd. We shall create the impetus for such sentiment. Feed them a story that paints Leon and Ms. Aveliano as the roots of rot, and soon men with hunger will find justification. We provide plausible deniability; they provide the boots.”

It is a tidy economy: an idea that justifies action, action that justifies accumulation. People will do things for reasons they invent, give them reason and you will never be short of actors.

My fingers traced the rim of my glass, absentminded, a private indulgence. I like my wine neat and my plans tighter. There is a delicious cruelty to watching people sign their own sentences because they preferred a story that differentiated them from the monsters. They feel righteous while they dig graves. Righteousness disguises conscience.

“Avelianos’ pregnancy?” the operational man asked. He asked it like a doctor asking about prognosis, not a philosopher asking ethics. Some men prefer to decouple the life in a womb from any tenderness; I think of it as leverage in the purest, most clinical sense. I hated the vice of that thought only when I pretended to be sentimental.

“Delicate. Precious,” I said aloud, and the word “precious” tastes sweet when delivered in a passage meant for pain. “We will not harm. Not now. Violence creates martyrs, dangerous and inefficient. But we will make the pregnancy an instrument. Imagine the optics: fear, risk, innocence roped to danger. Make the city fear for the child and it will look to stability. Make the child precarious and the parentage becomes a bargaining chip.”

I saw my aides, their faces sharpening in the light. They are young enough that practicing cruelty feels like sport; they are old enough to know the consequences of empire. Useful companions.

“We will monitor,” I continued, “and when the moment calls for it, we will press the button that hurts the most, fear for the future. Threaten their ability to hold what they love. Not by blood, at least not until it is necessary. We will use dread as a lever.”

Dread is one of the Committee’s oldest tools. When you trade in the public’s morality you are selling them permission to be cruel. Let them believe they are protecting something and they will denounce anything that jeopardizes the safety they imagine.

But narrative and militia are only instruments. The real game is intimacy. Convince a man that the people he loves are fragile, and you can redirect his ferocity to whichever field you prefer.

“There is another asset,” I said. “The duplicate.”

A small intake of breath. The duplicate… Mira’s phantom was a deliciously modern thing: the manufactured woman with familiar lines and unfamiliar loyalties. I understood her value like a connoisseur knows wine. Where propaganda wears a mask, a face in the flesh destroys the possibility of certainty.

“You mean the doppelgänger?” Valen’s voice drifted from a corner, his tone practiced like cream poured over coffee. He leaned forward, palms folded. His position always has an air of measured shock, as if he is only hearing bad news today. Perhaps he is; playing the part of the shocked pillar in a collapsing house is his career.

“Yes,” I said. “She is the perfect blade: convincing enough to sow doubt, implacable enough to be useful. Let her be seen in the right place at the right time. A whispered conversation overheard; a flick of her photograph near a ledger; a security camera with footage ‘found’ at a convenient angle. She must not act like a weapon, she must look like an accident of truth. People will choose the simplest explanation for their discomfort.”

“We have the woman,” Valen offered. “The lab has the face, the voice. Our cosmetic division can make it work for a difference of not much.”

“Do it,” I said. “But keep it small. The point of her existence is to remain suspect-proof by virtue of ambiguity. She cannot be too perfect. Perfection invites skepticism.”

Valen smoothed the edge of his tone into a smile. There is a filthy satisfaction in watching someone with power understand how to use it. He likes this. He likes having threads to pull and men to command. He is a pillar who thinks his own foundation is immovable. It is useful. Pillars are always more brittle than their proprietors believe.

“And if Leon discovers the arrangement?” the director asked.

I let out a measured laugh, the kind that silkens apprehension. “Then he will burn the stage. Let him. He proves to the public he is dramatic, and they will applaud drama over proof. But we are not acting like amateurs. We will build a fallback: lawyers, a smear-cushion of pre-written defenses, ostensible witnesses who are not easily discredited. We give the audience a spectacle and then a ghost to hate. People prefer the simple story.”

This was the dance. Create the theatre, supply the chorus, and then let the people decide which tune to sing. Once the chorus takes hold, truth becomes a second, less appealing option.

“We will also use their fear of being seen as monstrous,” I said. “Leverage it. Make them believe that being exposed will make them small. They will then defend themselves in ways that reveal weakness: rash moves, sloppiness, desperation. Those are good things for us.”

I like the word “leverage.” It is neat, it makes the plan feel like accounting. Men with stewardship relish the idea of balance sheets: a person’s loyalty has a price; find the price and apply interest. I think I have always preferred arithmetic to sentiment.

“Director,” I said, looking at the man who had the most blood on his hands and the neatest hands in the room, “prepare a dossier. Minor leaks, make them plausible, not damning. One stacked photograph here, a staged witness there. But keep the doppelgänger’s presence subtle. Amplify the rumor that the Committee cannot be certain who to trust. Let Leon see the whisper and bite. Then close the net.”

He bowed as if the net were a holy thing. They all think of nets as protective. None of them appreciates the snare twining the hands that cast it.

There was still another pleasure to be had, a personal flourish I made no attempt to hide. Power, like all appetites, thrives on intimacy. The man at the far end of the room, a young liaison who oversaw operator outreach, had been flattering me with naïve admiration for weeks. I called him in.

He shivered when I closed the door behind him. “Yes, sir?”

“Bring me what you promised,” I said. I did not need to force him to do anything he did not want; terror is overrated when seduction is cheaper. He left with something in his pocket and something in his eyes he planned to keep.

I walked to the small private cabinet and drew out a photograph, Ava asleep, Leon’s hand on her abdomen. I had placed that photograph where I wanted it when I wanted to influence the night. It is a small thing, but small instruments have the advantage of intimate cruelty: they are personal, invasive, impossible to categorize as collateral damage. They linger.