by Tessa Elwood
I hit the exit with my forearms. The long, horizontal handle flattening as I spill into the alley. I nearly slam into the wall opposite, elbow scraping stone as I skid a turn.
Fingers claw my back but slide off after a beat or three. A harsh grunt, a thud—maybe him hitting a wall. I don’t know, I don’t turn.
I run.
I collapse against the wall. A wall. Somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t know—
Stop, think.
I ran maybe four blocks, all toward home.
“East 5th.” My chest heaves air too hot to swallow. “I’m in East 5th.”
With no bracelet, few reds, and a highly pissed Decker—who now has motivation enough to get me before the Brinkers do.
I’ll have to go back.
I press my forehead into the ridged stone, hands flat on either side. My toes are numb. And my elbows, which is weird. I shouldn’t be awake right now, my whole body’s an exclamation to that point.
I can’t fight off a muscle man like this. Or Decker, who’s probably awake by now.
Which means he can tell me about the bracelet.
Without the bracelet, we’re all screwed.
I turn back. Push myself along the walkway, my sweaty hand streaking the windows of darkened storefronts.
“Kit?”
I spin and collapse into the glass.
Niles stands across the street, mouth open and staring. He’s still in his rumpled button-up, though he seems a bit more together. Must be the smoothed hair.
He jogs across the empty street. “God, I’ve been looking everywhere! Where the hell did you—Kit.”
Then he’s here, at my shoulder. A magically materialized being.
“You’re bleeding!” he says.
I lean into his chest and don’t say a word.
“Kit? Kit.” He pushes my hair off my shoulder, too busy checking my neck to hug me back.
Or kiss me. A kiss would be nice.
Niles raises his fingers. They’re bloody. Some of the blood is more blue than red. He sniffs them. Tastes one.
“Ew,” I say.
He stares like it’s the most incredible thing he’s ever heard. Or the most frightening. Incredibly frightening?
“How are you even standing right now?” he asks.
“Feet, toes, legs, bones.”
And all of them have places to be.
I bypass him, whole body sliding along the window. He fills the space ahead, so we’re leaning on the window together, and holds up his smeared hand. “This is avirimal.”
The one dosing agent even Greg wouldn’t deal in.
Well . . . shit.
“You don’t know that,” I say. “How can you know that?”
“It tastes like makieberris,” he says.
“Wait—you know what avirimal tastes like?”
“My dad told me.”
And his dad was into “appropriation.” Hell, he probably appropriated doses. Very dose appropriate.
I giggle.
Niles rubs my arms. “Can you feel your elbows?”
“Why would I want to?”
He snorts, grin flashing out before he bites it back. “God, only you. Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk.” I shake him off. “Go home.”
“Home? Home? I find you in East 5th—”
“One district over.”
“Dosed to hell—”
“I’m awake, aren’t I?”
“And bleeding.”
“Ran into a door.”
“And you want me to go home?”
“Our deal’s off, right? Since yesterday? You don’t have to keep me alive anymore.”
Niles closes his eyes, goes so still he outclasses the shadows. Then he steps in, arms sliding loose around my waist as his forehead rests against mine. My whole body relaxes without checking first with my brain.
“The deal’s still on.” He sounds exhausted and a little worn. “Tell me what happened.”
I fist my hands against his shirt to push him away. And I will, I have to, it’s just . . . he makes everything else intangible. Harder to hold, to care about. At least with his breath on my lips and his palms low on my back. “We need to have a fight or something, so they think you’re not important.”
He pulls back to see my face, so I let him see the truth of it.
“I’m going to get you killed,” I say.
His expression blanks out, an empty wall-screen with no emotion. Even his voice doesn’t comment. “Me? They threatened you with me?”
“Everyone. Anyone. You’re in my general radius—look.” I flatten my hand to his chest and work up the will to push. “Go home. I have stuff to do.”
“You think those Brink kids can take me?” He tries for a smile, but even its angles are flat.
“‘They crave life like water and drink death like wine,’” I say. Gilken understood courage. “They have everything to lose, and with that gone nothing to stop them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Their home world—Lady Galton’s going to gut it. I’ve seen the core-splitters. Their planet will die and nothing will matter. Don’t you see? Nothing will matter to them anymore. They’ll kill everyone to get back at me, they’ll—”
His kiss snatches the words off my tongue and swallows them whole.
“Please,” I whisper. “Just go. I don’t want you dead.”
“I won’t be,” he says against my lips, a kiss in itself. “Whose son do you think I am?”
“But—”
Except he steals that word, too, and the seconds after. Whole minutes. Maybe my soul.
“Even if your mom blew ten Archives,” he says into our breathy silence, “she couldn’t touch my dad.”
Holy hell.
“You’re . . . not serious,” I say.
He squeezes tighter, as if I’m the one stabilizing him. “Just tell me what the hell is going on.”
So I close my eyes and do.
Mom acts as my pillows. My head in her lap as I kneel on the cold clinic floor, Yonni’s bed high and tubed to our right. Mom smooths my hair. I taste blood. Mine, I think. She rubs red between her fingertips. “Oh, brightheart, what did you get into?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I need to get up, scoot away. Except under her hand, my forehead hurts less.
“You haven’t that option. We’ve reached the third and are nearing the fourth. Besides, the elevator’s stopped on your floor.”
I sit up, palms scraping the cold tile. I see the bed, the empty sterile walls, but I can also see the elevator. Duel images my brain takes in stride.
The lift doors open and men pour out.
Mom watches them, too. Her dress shimmers like the city haze as she sniffs her red fingers. A little sweet, a little burnt.
Everything clicks.
“Scent maps,” I say. “You’re mapping me. Planting suggestions in my brain.”
She smiles and traces my cheek. “Good girl. I pressed a receptor patch to your arm when you came to visit me. Fast dissolving and untraceable, but brief. It’ll last two weeks, then I’ll fade out.”
She put something on me? In me?
Of course she did.
I wait for the anger to kick in. It’d be so much easier to be angry. “But you’re already dead.”
I know she’s dead. Know it so deep it weaves through my blood.
“Yes,” she says. “It was necessary.”
The men march down the hall now, five total, and Dee’s with them.
“Then how is this happening?”
She scrunches her nose at me. “You’re a smart girl, it’s not hard. Ask the right questions. It’s a matter of heart.”
One of the men pounds the door.
/> I sit bolt upright on the couch—my couch—the pounding not just in my head but my ears. A sheet slips off my legs to puddle in the sun spots from the windows. Bright sun, pre-afternoon but well into morning. The air’s thick, almost metallic.
“Kit Franks.” A door-splitting knock. “This is the Records Office. If you refuse us entry, then under the authority of Record 269A–495, we will enter unaided.”
Wait, they’re real?
I sniff the air, taste the burned and the sweet.
Mom mapped me. She planted a patch and mapped me.
Pound pound pound.
“Coming, I’m coming!” I call.
I swing my feet to the floor, scrub my face. Can still feel the echo of Mom’s fingers. Now that wasn’t real. I don’t think. My shoulder burns up to my neck. I rub the ache and find gauze—a thin, neat strip.
Niles. Niles patched me up then said he’d be back.
The pounding worsens. Any more and they’ll bust it in. “This is not a game, Miss Franks.”
No shit.
“Okay, okay.” I haul myself onto mostly steady legs and walk to the door. I barely get it open before a hand forces it wide. They barrel in, five men in dark blue suits with the dark purple and green cuffs of Recorders. Four large hoverdiscs bob along behind them—digiloaders certified to carry a street-hover’s worth of weight—each stacked with folded boxes.
The men are all of a height and spread out on a mission, each marching into a different room.
My hands tighten at my sides. “What’s going on?”
The only man without a digiloader at his heels steps forward. He looks just like the others. A little blonder maybe, broader-shouldered, but the same flat expression. Same dead eyes.
He’d happily rend me to ash and dance on my grave.
The man thrusts a thin digisheet contract under my nose, transparent except for the text. “Under Record 782-H of the Rights of Inheritance, upon death all possessions of the deceased will transfer to his or her eldest child.”
“No, the suite’s mine.” I grab the sheet before it smashes my nose. “Yonni made a will; it’s recorded.”
And so far, no one’s mentioned Dad.
“Yes,” says a different voice. Dee’s voice. “But the will only specifies the suite itself. It didn’t mention the things in the suite.”
She leans against my doorframe and looks . . . pretty. Hair smoothed into a professional bun, white blouse airy and feminine. Stark skirt and heels. No jangling bracelets, no blaring jacket or studs. She could be a lordling.
She could be Yonni.
All around, the Recorders flutter. Open boxes and fill them. A suited storm of feet and hands.
But here, it’s quiet. Calm.
“You’re stealing my stuff.” I sound almost disinterested.
“No, my stuff.” She flicks the digisheet from my hand and highlights a passage with a smooth swipe. “You’re lucky I don’t press charges, keeping me from my inheritance for so long.”
The text agrees. Perfect legal sentences, tidy and above board. How did I not know this? How did Dee not know this? She fought like hell when the will was read, but all of that discussion hinged on the suite. We never talked much about things, especially since I gave Dee most everything she wanted.
She never cared about Yonni’s stuff, except for resale value. There’s nothing left worth selling.
But then, this isn’t about Yonni.
I search Dee’s face for something to hate, wait for the anger to hit. It doesn’t.
Two of the men brush by, carrying Yonni’s bed. Even cracked, it’s nicer than anything else in Dee’s suite.
The lead Recorder waits, itching for a scene. Begging for it. He’d love to take down Millie Oen’s daughter on a technicality. Who wouldn’t? Dee sees it, too, and her eyes hold the dare. Go ahead, cause a scene. Be that stupid.
But I’m not into hopeless battles. Most survivors aren’t, as a rule.
I hand the digisheet back. “That must have taken some digging.”
She leans close with wide burgundy lips. “You touch my son again, and you’ll lose more than this.”
“He’s the one who dosed me, remember?”
“And he’s facing Feverfed,” she whispers in my ear. “What have you ever faced?”
“Today?” I bite. “You.”
She grins, the mirror image of Yonni. “And don’t you forget it.”
The Recorders take everything. Furniture, dishes, curtains. My clothes, my shoes. If it’s not nailed down or on my person, if I can’t prove I bought it with my own money, it’s gone.
Dee knows how to make a point.
Yonni’s favorite heels with the blue spikes. The box of patterned fabric for the quilt she promised to make someday. Her kitschy cat figurines with the purple skin and big eyes. Even my Gilken quotepad from the fridge—all boxed up and hauled out.
I follow the Recorders with their digiloaders down to the tower lobby. Stand, arms folded, atop the outer steps as they load boxes in a hauler-bus too big for the occasion.
Dee preens. Blows me a kiss as the hauler’s rear door slams. Smiles at the Recorder who opens the smaller door of a high-end streethover. The rest of the group splits between the hauler and hover, loads up and ships out. The engines purr down the street. Turn a corner four blocks down, and disappear.
Everything Yonni was, everything she loved, everything that mattered—is gone. All gone.
I didn’t fight. I didn’t kick or scream or stop them. I let Dee walk into Yonni’s place, which I promised to never do, and walk out with the whole of Yonni’s life—which Yonni also would have extracted a promise for, if she’d had any idea that’d be on the table.
The street’s empty, the engines’ whirring long since gone. The sun’s high, harsh and blinding.
I don’t move, have nowhere to go. The suite’s empty. I’m empty.
Behind me, the lobby door opens and closes. A withered hand finds my arm.
“It wasn’t me,” Mrs. Divs says. “I didn’t tell anyone about your dad.”
“I know.” It cracks, stuck to my tongue.
Her hand rubs up and down, back and forth. “Come on in, now. The heat’s gettin’ worse.”
My legs are locked, feet rooted. Here, on the steps, I’m calm, firm, and collected.
I don’t know what will happen if I move. If the calmness will stick.
Mrs. Divs tugs. “You can’t stay out here forever.”
Really? Watch me.
“Kit.” She imbues my name with power, like a charm. “We’ve lost much worse than this. You come on inside.”
Yonni. She means Yonni.
My heels shift and move. I don’t fall over or melt into screams. I don’t lose any composure at all.
Apparently, I’m fine.
Go me.
Mrs. Divs props the door with her hip and I push it open farther so she can step through. The entryway is unnaturally quiet, post the Recorders’ determined tread. No inquisitive neighbors stick their heads out. I guess the potential trouble isn’t worth the curiosity. Only Mrs. Divs’s door hangs open, her thumping cane setting our pace.
“Can I have a cookie?” I ask. If I close my eyes I can smell them, even out here in the hall. Except, in my head the cookie jar sits on a table outside a pastry shop, amid a garden of green. And it isn’t even a jar, but a fat sticky roll piled with enough frosting to put me in a coma.
I could use a coma.
“Have you had breakfast?” Mrs. Divs asks.
Well, that answers that question.
“Never mind,” I say.
Niles plied me with a sandwich last night after bringing me home, so it’s not like I need the food.
Mrs. Divs pats my arm. “You eat breakfast, we’ll talk.”
We reach her suite.
Her wall-screen runs unmuted today, voices filtering through the cracked door. Or rather, a voice.
Mom’s.
I throw the door wide and skid to a stop before the screen.
Mom wears the same airy purple blouse as before, hair swept in a knot. Her eyes are half-closed, lips moving through a lullaby. Reciting verses that, long ago, she used to sing.
“You see us broken? We’ll see you dead. A mask behind where stars aligned and ate regret.”
She sways with the cadence, hinting at melody. Notes just under the surface, trapped, unheard.
I let them out, sing them in a whisper to accompany her words.
“You see us broken? We’ll watch you fall. A kiss away from the trick that played us all for false.”
Mom closes her eyes like she can hear.
Or maybe she’s remembering how Dad used to ball her out about it. You know that’s a shitty song to sing to a kid, right?
But Mom only shook her head. It’s her heritage, she’d say and sing it anyway. So I would, too.
Like I am, now.
And like then, I’m singing in tandem—and not just with Mom.
“Close your eyes against the blood,” joins Mrs. Divs. “Promise yourself it was all for love.”
“And understand ours for you.” Mom raises a thin silver remote with a single button and doesn’t quite smile.
“Account closed,” she says and presses down.
The wall-screen blinks out and sparks at the corners. The suite lights flick on, burn white, then pop. A battery of pops that end in absence. Chained echoes bolting from fixture to socket, living room to kitchen.
Entryway to street.
I run to the lobby and bang through the outer door. All down the thoroughfare, streetlights hiss and spit despite being dark. The tower across the way burns bright from a hundred windows and blacks out. The one beside it follows suit, then the one behind that. On and on. An orchestrated light circus, with movements and beats and synchronicity.
And once the blast hits, light disappears.
Thirty seconds, less, and our whole block’s down. Everything’s down that I can see from street level.
The roof. I could see more from the roof.
I swing back my tower’s door. Through the glass Mrs. Divs stands in the entryway, just outside her suite. Both hands clasped on the cane firmly set in front of her, back straighter than I’ve ever seen.
