In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  He is used to sharing these experiments with Verity. In the days when she starts to leave him, though—when she roams the city to places he cannot follow, and tells him stories he doesn’t understand—he finds himself sitting instead on the front steps, at some point a little bit just past lunch.

  The hour of lunch varies. That doesn’t seem to matter.

  He makes two mugs of tea and takes them outside. He sets one on the bottom step, and then he slouches down at the top of the stairs, brushing off snow if he has to, bundled against the cold. If he waits, the woman with the mirrored eyes will appear.

  He will spot her at first across the street, or half a block down. She isn’t there and then she is—loosely balanced, feet wide, hands at her sides. She has Verity’s scarf tied around her upper arm, stained with crusting remnants that might be better unidentified. Her pastel sweater is too large. She doesn’t wear a coat. She never puts her hands in her pockets.

  He makes no secret of watching her. On the good days, she comes closer, though he swears he never sees her move. He will blink, or cough, or watch a bird fly by, and then she will be standing on the sidewalk in front of him.

  He is used to Verity and her habit of looking over his shoulder, or at his hands, or his knees, or something only she can see. He does not know what to make of this woman who stares at him and through him at the same time.

  “Apparently, I have a thing for crazy,” he tells her. Then, immediately and with regret, “Sorry, that was stupid. I’m an ass.” She doesn’t seem to mind, or to hear. He isn’t entirely certain she understands him.

  He sits and sips his tea, while the mug he’s left for her sits untouched and cooling on the bottom step. He looks at her and sees himself reflected in her eyes; he sees her impassive face and the tiny images of his own stark, unexpected need.

  “You have a little line at the corner of your mouth,” he tells her. “Curved. Like you got it from smiling. And one just between your eyebrows, like maybe you frown sometimes when no one’s watching. You could scowl at me. I can take it. I’ll live. I feel like I might not, if you just stand there.”

  She doesn’t respond. He watches her as though he can hold her through the strength of his curiosity. Sometimes she will stay until the tea is cold. Other times, a car will come down the street, or a dog will bark, or a siren will peal in the distance, and she will be gone.

  Once—only once—he makes the mistake of getting up from his step and descending to greet her. He reaches for her hand. Then he is up against the banister with his arm twisted behind his back, sending hot spikes of pain to contrast with the ice cold breath at his throat. “Urgh,” he chokes, and then he is alone.

  He suspects that he should be afraid.

  Instead, he makes cups of tea and waits.

  DECEMBER

  Verity develops a pattern of sorts.

  It is, admittedly, difficult. Jacob wants her to come to cooking classes, and she tries it for a day, but she finds it hard to be a pastry chef when the flour whistles and the croissants turn blue in her hands. Then he wants to learn to skateboard, and she almost has the rhythm of that, but he’s bored (and he almost breaks his wrist falling off, and it snows), so they serve ice cream from a cart until they realize that almost no one wants ice cream on the border of winter, and Jacob tries to eat sixty banana splits by himself.

  Sometimes Jacob goes distant, quiet and untouchable as a photograph, and Verity knows there are things he isn’t asking. She works harder. Hot fudge stains her sleeves.

  When she has time, or when she sees a particular shadow move at the corner of her eye, she pulls on her coat and takes a bus to the train station looking for strays. Sometimes she goes to the bus station or the market and Santiago walks with her, his hands always busy, conjuring cards and buttons and coins. More often, it’s the dog waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. She finds she likes Ouroboros as a companion. The black beast is always soundless, golden-eyed and somehow laughing, but it doesn’t ask her for conversation or seem impatient if she stumbles over some hazy form only she can see.

  She thinks often about the old man and the little girl. She wants to ask about the girl—about where Alan found her, or whether he knows what it is to see words strobe in the air. She wants to see the angel and feel the crooked warmth of his smile on her skin. She walks past the theatre, though, and keeps walking, her hands in her pockets and Ouro’s cool gaze measuring her progress. “Jihan,” she explains once, and the dog lowers its head, tail slinking. The theatre holds darkness and a woman with knife eyes. Verity remembers the cold blade between her ribs; she remembers the hot metal taste and the blood in her mouth. She shivers. She is grateful for the dog.

  She grows to recognize the looks of the people who don’t belong. They have a certain worry in their eyes, and a hesitance that tastes faintly of an ocean breeze. She doesn’t encounter many. She sees a pudgy thirty-something man with blue hair and a worn denim jacket with a The Between patch on the sleeve; he’s already picked a concert flyer off the bus station wall by the time she has a chance to explain. He borrows five dollars. She doesn’t expect to get it back.

  Not all the lost people know they’re lost. Verity sees three teenagers in ratty sweaters gathered around a young man with a guitar; his songs are like wine poured over her skin, but she homes in on a girl with an unfortunately blurry neck tattoo and fingernails bitten to the quick. The girl keeps her brown hair in two braids, and she’s never heard of The Between; she gnaws at the tip of her pinkie finger and backs away when Verity asks about invisible doors. Verity tells Santiago, but she doesn’t see the girl again.

  The ones wearing concert t-shirts and pins are grateful when Verity meets them. She tells them to go to McLuhan’s and look for the angel. She shrugs at their thanks and feels helpless.

  Some days, she wanders for hours and sees no one who smells of forgotten secrets and salt wind. She stares at the odd dragon or rainbow roach. When she goes home, Jacob is exasperated at the latest phone she’s left behind, but he doesn’t ask her where she’s been, or why she has started taking cash in small but steady increments—the price of toilet paper, the cost of ten cans of soup. He puts more money in the drawer. In return, she doesn’t ask him why he looks out the window, or whom he is thinking about when his smile is wistful but his gaze is somewhere else. He has stopped making her coffee when he gets up, though he still sleeps with an arm thrown across her and his breath in her hair.

  One morning, Verity stands alone in the market by a light post decorated with plastic poinsettias and garlands of ivy. The air is cold and heavy with the promise of more snow; Christmas music plays tinnily from speakers on the wall of the low brown building that shelters the year-round craft stalls.

  “Time flies, eh?”

  The voice comes from behind her. Verity turns to see the girl Privya, who is wearing a puffy blue vest and holding two cardboard cups. Her black hair is pulled into a loose bun and her brown eyes are on Verity.

  Verity pauses, uncertain, so the girl continues: “Seen you around. Where’s the dog today?”

  “Not here.” It’s the best response Verity can offer. She accompanies it with a slight shrug.

  Privya laughs, which has more truth in it than the guileless youth of her face. Verity tastes winter sweetness at the back of her throat. Privya says, “Got that. Thanks. Guess they put you to work, huh? Here.” She holds out one of the cups.

  Verity takes it; the bitter-warm scent of coffee ripples across her skin. “Thank you. I try to show people the way. You aren’t there? At the theatre.”

  “Not my thing.” Privya sips her drink and stands with her free hand cupped under the opposite elbow. She regards Verity for a long moment. “It kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”

  The word seems to hover in the air for a breath before wafting. Verity tilts her head.

  “My people live in a world where they don’t quite fit,” explains Privya. “Their credit cards fritz or their phones don’t work. Computers give t
hem headaches. They’re miserable and don’t know why. Some end up on the street. Some manage jobs or families. Always with that niggling sensation that something’s off—that the world is flat and mean. But there’s the fantasy, most of the time. That idea that they’re someone special and something’s gone wrong and all they need is that magic moment where someone else swoops in and explains. They dream that they’re lost princesses or maybe wizards. You ever one of those?”

  Verity hesitates, studying the waves of hair springing half-tamed from the nape of the girl’s neck. “Maybe,” she murmurs. “When I was very young. But I know both of these things are true: that I see things others don’t. And that the world is, um ... grey. And mean.”

  “And how,” agrees Privya, equably. “Yeah. You’re on the line. Those other kids, they grow up sad, maybe fending off parents or cops or shrinks. But they dream. Then one day, maybe they discover it really is true and they really are special. Except in this case, ‘special’ means their lives were screwed before they were born, and they’re going to die young. You’re sending them to the angel, right? He’s an idiot. He means well. All he’s doing is running triage, though.”

  Privya’s words are building together now into a cloud that hovers over the sidewalk. Verity blinks, trying to parse one syllable from the other. “I’m, um, not sure I follow.”

  “I mean he’s prolonging the inevitable. Maybe he’ll buy someone a few weeks or months. Maybe someone else will get a sandwich out of it. Don’t get me wrong; it’s nice that they have somewhere safe and warm. It doesn’t change the fact that we’re a dying minority. Killing time. Treading water. Pick your metaphor, I guess. But you see it, don’t you?”

  “I see ... dragons less often than I used to. And the last three were dead.” Verity picks her words with care, letting her eyes drift to the velvet-festooned lamppost just behind Privya’s right shoulder. Her voice is soft. “People kick at them like pigeons, or rats. People kick at them and they are pigeons or rats.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But ... they don’t know. They can’t. I could say ‘that’s a dragon,’ but it doesn’t help.”

  “No. You’d say ‘Hey, there’s a dragon,’ and someone would look over, and the second they set their eyes on it, the poor thing would sprout feathers or fur. How many things have you spoiled by accident, trying to show your partner, your parents, your friends?”

  Verity swallows, then shakes her head. “I ... I don’t tell people. Usually. Sometimes Jacob. Mostly it’s too hard. I tried when I was little.”

  “Yeah. Most of us do. There are consequences.” Privya’s voice is a ribbon, smooth and winding tighter. “To us or to them. Look up there.” She takes a sip of her coffee and gestures with the other hand, pointing toward a streetlight just down the block.

  Verity looks up, peering against the sun; the city dips and whirls around her, but she draws a breath and lets the urban morass flow through. Above a cheerful green banner, she sees what might be a bird, only it clings to the slender metal pole as though it were a newborn butterfly, wings shivering. She sees both ragged grey feathers and iridescent scales—the snub of an orange beak and the glint of a reptilian eye. The little creature’s body is twisted around itself, jointed with bones that don’t fit its skin. The sight tastes faintly of curdled milk and jagged glass edges that weep abandoned in the ozone of the city air.

  Verity’s lips part, but she only stands until her hesitation is marked with Privya’s puff of a sigh. The dark-haired girl turns and flashes a sweetly curving smile at the next pedestrian to pass. He is a goateed man in a tan trench coat and a cheap suit. He has already averted his eyes, shaking his head, but Privya says, “Excuse me, sir. Do you notice anything strange about that bird?”

  The man pauses in his spare-change denial and slides a look to Privya, startled. He takes her in, following her pointing finger, then shields his eyes with his left hand as he squints up to the lamppost. “What, up there?” His briefcase brushes his leg.

  Verity blurts, “No.” She finds herself taking half a step, as though she might jump or wave her arms—anything to seize the stranger’s attention, to take the weight of his gaze from the little half-dragon’s fragile, hunched form.

  She doesn’t even feel the world change. Maybe there’s the slightest hint of peppermint leached from the air.

  “It’s a crow,” harrumphs the man. “Are you—” He jerks his hand suddenly to the pocket of his coat, clapping his palm to what is presumably the lump of his wallet before he glares at Privya, whose expression of innocent curiosity has not wavered in the slightest. He rakes disdain across Verity, already distancing himself, and strides onward, case swinging.

  Verity knows what she will see when she looks up: a crow, sickly and half-feathered, but a crow nonetheless, clinging now to its perch with thin gnarled feet. Its beak opens and closes; if it makes a sound, she can’t hear it over the auburn rush of its executioner’s departure. It flaps one wing and almost falls. Its trapped panic shines with the same desperate glint she’s seen gliding behind Colin’s starlit eyes. The thought makes her swallow bile.

  “You didn’t have to,” she says. “I know what happens.”

  “That wasn’t for you.” Privya’s regret is true, tinged with something like rosemary. She has moved closer; her arm brushes Verity’s, but she too is looking up at the bird. “I hope the poor thing doesn’t live,” she muses. “Sometimes they do, for a while.”

  But the crow spasms—once, twice—and Privya breathes, “Ahhh,” low and drawn out, as though all the air is leaving her in a single groan. Verity wants to fling her hands forward to catch the bird as it teeters from its perch, but she is too far, and it doesn’t fall straight; it lurches in the air, wings flapping wildly, and careens drunkenly in the breeze before dropping to the sidewalk where it flops, exhausted, to its back. Its needle claws clutch at nothing. Verity sees its eye go wide—bold and wild, a dragon’s eye—and then the creature shivers and goes finally, terribly stiff, its wings splayed and its beak clamped tight.

  They are both quiet, watching, until Privya says, “Even that death is better for it than to be trapped halfway. I see them less and less over the years.” She sighs; when Verity looks back to her, she waves a small hand, encompassing the city street. “These people—their way of knowing the world is more powerful than ours. There’s no room left for us to exist, the moment anyone notices us trying. It wasn’t always that way. Now speaking up’s just a good way to ruin what’s left.”

  Verity meets Privya’s grave brown eyes for an instant before dropping her attention to the flicker of a broken dream on the sidewalk. “I’m not sure,” she says, mildly, “what you’re getting at. I mean ... Colin, or Santiago, or the theatre ... it, um, won’t save anyone in the long run. But it helps. Should no one help?”

  “There are other ways.”

  “You’re the one who put up the new concert posters.” Verity can taste the silver when she says it. She doesn’t need Privya’s shrug to confirm.

  Privya does shrug, though—the slightest, unconcerned movement of one shoulder—and replies, “Sure. I started the whole Between thing in the first place. In Denver, not that it matters. For a while, it was a good signal. Now I’m mostly entertained by how willing people are to argue about the merits of a band that doesn’t actually exist.”

  “Why, though? Why don’t your posters say ‘cancelled’? Won’t people try to come? People who don’t know, I mean.”

  “I’m sure they will,” says Privya mildly. “It’s the best signal we have. It’s time for everyone to start gathering.”

  “Why?” Verity asks again.

  “It’s just time. Call it an equinox, or an alignment, or—there are times and places where the shades of what used to be are stronger. Where we’re stronger. It’s coming. You’ll notice it, too. All those little phantom creatures are burning themselves out just to get here.” Privya sips her coffee, turning her head to watch a passing bus as it splashes grey slush agains
t the curb. She adds, casually, “Jihan knows. I hear she came at you with a knife.”

  Verity finds herself abruptly cold. Only the thin cardboard cup is warm in her hand; she stands in the winter chill and stares at Privya’s sneakers—blue, laced with white. The girl has a hole above her left big toe where a blue woollen sock is poking through.

  “I’m guessing it was revenge,” says Privya, when Verity doesn’t respond. “Not personal, really, as weird as that sounds. But I knew a woman like you, once, and she got that witch pretty nicely between the ribs. Maybe turnabout is fair play.”

  “A woman like me,” echoes Verity, and she shakes her head. “When we met ... you asked me what colour your voice was. You knew.”

  “It’s the way you hesitate at things I can’t see. You remind me of her. She used to say my voice was like polished metal.”

  “Silver.”

  “Yeah.” There is something in Privya’s smile that tastes of cool tears and a particularly wistful shade of orange. When it fades, the expression lingers like its own ghost. “Then you pulled out a phone, and I figured you weren’t one of us. I should’ve remembered the way Alethea always walked the line. She liked electricity. I caught her in a bare room once, a long time ago, just turning a light bulb off and on. Light bulbs were new, then. She said they tasted like lime peel. The bulb fried itself when I walked in; electricity was still fragile. I saw the look on her face. I was almost sorry.”

  “She was like me?” Verity thinks of a little girl skipping in a dingy bus station—a little girl who stepped over trickles of doubt on the floor—but she is not entirely certain why the mention dies on her lips.

  “She was always ... seeing, hearing, touching things I couldn’t. Telling me the world tasted like spring apples and abandoned wishes. She twitched like you do. I always thought she was permanently between, one foot here, one there. She had a theory she tried to explain to me once, that there were so many ways of being in the world and she couldn’t perceive them all at once, but her body tried. It tried all the time. Sometimes it seemed like every blade of grass was screaming at her.”