To all the poor brave comma splices who died in the course of bettering this book. In some small part of my heart, I miss you.
Prologue
Hinewai fell with the rain. The patterns of drips and drops falling formed the outline of a girl, sketched her skin in silver; she had long, long hair, down past her waist, white as mist. She was a smudge, and then she was a shadow, and then she gathered her raindrop-self together and formed her old body again. It had been so long she’d nearly forgotten what it felt like to have hands, hair, to feel the touch of the world on bare skin and to smell smoke and salt and breathe it all in, breathe in the life of it. It smelled strange now, smelled of fabricated things that were far from familiar despite how she’d tried to learn of them: petrol-stink and damp concrete, and the filth that came of too many humans living too close together. Rain normally cleansed things, but here her rain did little.
She’d chosen the wind city because it was less ugly than the others, and because wind meant life, and breath, and spirit – and change. She wanted change more than she wanted anything else in all this world.
And at first no one saw her. At first she walked the straight-lined streets, a figure of clean white cold amongst all the hurrying humans, and they not a one of them knew she was there. She walked for a while, and grew worried, and entered one of their metal shell moving-things, a ‘bus’, gaudy yellow and many-wheeled. She sat and stared out the window at the humans passing by, and none looked back, and no one in the bus noticed her –
Except –
Yes, just there. The blond man on one of the seats across from hers had paused with his small plasticky black thing still held up to his ear. He looked away, and then looked at her again, frowning as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Hang on,” he said to the black thing, cheerfully, “won’t be a sec, I’m hallucinating.” He flipped it closed and stared at her some more. He squinted one eye shut and then the other. He glanced around the bus, uncertainly.
He was the first person in this human cityplace to notice her, and that, surely, meant…
“Hello,” she said, serious and formal. “You must be my true love.” It was good that she had learned the new human language. She liked the old one better; the words had ended in vowel-sounds always, so that long strings of words blended together, made a kind of rolling rhythm like the falling of rain. This ugly new language was all harsh sounds and strange rules – quite a lot like the world in general seemed to be, now – and there were more words than there had any need to be. But it was necessary.
He tilted his head to one side, then the other. Then he blinked a lot. Then he said, “As figments of my imagination go you’re not half bad. Better than that time when I had half a pack of aspirin by mistake and thought that the world was bright orange and my fingers were Tim Tams, anyway.”
“… What?”
“Well, you try trimming your nails when you think they’re made of biscuity deliciousness,” he said, absentmindedly. He shifted himself to sit closer to the aisle, craning across it to peer at her. He held out his hand as though to touch her to see if she was real, then pulled it back. “Heartbreaking, it really is.”
Perhaps she hadn’t learned this language well enough after all. “You,” she said slowly, carefully. “Are not. Making. Sense.”
“You really are quite naked, aren’t you,” he said distractedly. His window was cracked open as wide as it could go, and the wind stirred her hair even from where she was sitting; there were spirits in the wind, sometimes, ghostlings and dead things borrowing the wind’s breath in place of theirs that had gone, but if there were any in this breeze they were too small and weak for her to see. Or perhaps they were as deterred by this man’s nonsense as she was. She scowled at him.
He snorted. “You’re not in any position to point fingers, pet. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones if they happen to be naked, inhumanly beautiful women.” He looked around. “That no one else can see, apparently. With hair as white as snow!” he said, and laughed, only a little hysterically. “Not just normal snow. The extra-white kind. This stuff is bleached. It beat Hitler at the Whiteness Awards.”
“What?”
“Sorry, that metaphor didn’t quite manage to make sense – don’t blame me, blame my brain,” he said, and closed both his eyes this time, and then opened them and said, “I’m really not sure why I expected that to work,” amused. He wasn’t shifting around so much; his panic was fading, then. Regrettable that his nonsensical babble hadn’t stopped. “Just saying. Weird fae girl just casually taking the bus? Not really something I expected to see.”
He paused then. It was the first time he’d stopped talking.
“I’m… not at all sure that I understand you,” she told him.
“Well that makes two of us, pet. I’m rather inclined to think the blame rests squarely on your petite, elegantly pale shoulders. You should do something about the whole naked thing, by the way.”
“I’m lost,” she said. He was her true love – what did it matter that she didn’t understand him? “I’m lost here, and I don’t understand anything. I thought this would be easier.”
“Oh gods, you sound so much like me when I first came here,” he said, laughing. “Okay, here’s a tip: when you get a flat make sure it’s not next to a P lab. Looking back that was my first big mistake. Also, uh, general advice, right. Avoid murderers. Don’t feed pigeons or hipsters.”
This man was very irritating and strange. “I don’t think you’re my true love,” she told him.
“Well, that’s a relief. I was afraid we’d burst into song, and I really don’t think my coat would work well in happy Disney 2D. What exactly –”
She did not much want him remembering this encounter, in case he thought to wonder who and what she was, later; so she made him forget.
She had better things to do, so she perhaps didn’t weave the magic as neatly as she would ordinarily have done, not that it mattered. She stood up and walked away down the bus’s aisle, leaving him sitting there confused and disoriented, starting to bleed from his nose and ears, and the corners of his eyes, a little; his eyes were glazed and he was hunched over and making a frantic little sound in the back of his throat, not quite a whimper, not quite a whine. This was alarming, but a glance around was enough to show that still no one else had seen her. She left the bus and watched it drive away with him still curled up inside it – watched it a little wistfully, really. It would’ve been so much easier if he had been her true love. In a minute or two he’d be back to his normal blabbering self, unfortunately.
Well. Maybe not. He did seem to have taken it badly.
He’d be fine in a year or two, at the very most. It was no cause for concern. She dismissed it from her mind. He had been right, about no one seeing her – that would change in time, perhaps, as her tapu nature was worn away by exposure to heat and to people, but she should, perhaps, find clothes. And then a true love. Also, a flat.
1
Saint had shortish blond hair with a slight curl in it and a shiny charming smile like someone from an ad for toothpaste. He had a dashing coat and a friendly laugh. He had far more pride than an unemployed twentysomething really ought to.
He’d spent the last few days roaming around town, trying quite insistently to get any sort of job, any other place to live – he’d nearly spent a night in the refuge centre, but his pride wouldn’t let him. Also it was a little hard to explain. Hey, I need a place to live. No, actually I do already have one – a near-stranger took me in and feeds me square meals and hasn’t asked for anything in return. Do I have any actual reason to distrust him? Well, he’s… nice…
So here he was again, same old place same old flatmate, and it felt enough like a prison to set hi
s teeth on edge.
So, there wasn’t really any reason not to just spend the whole day sleeping, he figured.
If there’s somethin’ strange in the neighbourhood… his phone jangled at him, obscenely cheerful. He snatched it up before it could ring out his sneaky stealthy geekery to all and sundry, and then fumbled it, and swore a bit and picked it up again. He wasn’t a morning person.
“Hey,” he said, totally not yawning.
There was a pause. Then Steffan said, “Are you awake?”
“Me?” Saint said, rolling over on his back and looking at the ceiling with a thoughtful frown. It was quite a nice ceiling. He hated it. “Nope. Look at me, sleeptalking away. Damn I’m eloquent.”
“Saint,” Steff said, slowly and carefully. Saint hated it when his voice got like that, all patient and methodical. That was a voice that belonged to the kind of man who would sit down and redo any maths homework he’d gotten bad marks on, just because he felt he should. You could practically hear his glasses when he spoke like that. “Please don’t tell me you were sleeping at four p.m.”
“You woke me up,” Saint said lazily, “that’s the more important aspect of this. I’m the wronged party here. Hanging up is now in process! Please leave a message after the whatever.”
Hanging up consisted of letting the phone drop from his hand to the floor. Then he rolled over, burying his face in mattress and flat pillow, letting sleep take him. Except it didn’t, for some reason. There was something jangling at the corner of his mind, something making unease scrape at his spine like little metal spiders. Oh, right, that dream –
Oh, God, oh God oh God oh so very very God.
Saint sat bolt upright so fast he cracked his head against the wall, fumbling for the phone, jabbing at buttons. “Awake yet?” Steff said. “You –”
“There was a naked girl,” Saint said.
“That’s… not exactly unusual for you. Congratulations, I suppose? Huzzah? Now –”
“Not like that, pet.” Saint rubbed at his eyes and squinted at the walls of his room – he hated it, but it was still better to look at than nightmares. “It was… It was terrifying,” and he had to swallow to keep hysteria from his voice. He swallowed again, forced a grin and said, “It was horrifically traumatising, you have no idea. Her breasts.” He widened his eyes for bonus theatrics and stretched out his free hand. “They were just that big.”
“Saint, this is really not the kind of thing I need to hear about,” Steff said, fast and flustered.
“Like mountains. Shapely mountains.”
“Saint.”
“I’ll take pity on you just this once, as I’m such a good friend,” Saint said brightly. It was hard to keep up his normal chatter right now anyway. Coffee. Coffee would be good. Or whiskey. Actually, both. “What’s up?”
“Just wanted to know if you were free tonight, but if you have company –”
“Well I don’t now,” Saint drawled, pulling on his dashing handsome coat of dashingness.
“Anyway. I just.” There was a longish pause, long enough for Saint to remember that, oh yes, actually wearing shirts under coats, that was a thing that people did. Screw it, it was four in the afternoon. He had pants, and that was plenty. “I just wanted to be sure to keep in contact with you,” Steff said eventually.
“Mission accomplished, then,” Saint said. “All’s well on the Saintward front. Hang on a sec.” He hadn’t eaten much while he was jobseeking, and his stomach was informing him of that in no uncertain terms. He headed into the lounge, which would have been quietly pleasant if it weren’t for the presence of the Flatmate. Instead it was more sort of… loudly unpleasant.
The hirsute mass was sprawled on the sofa, hopefully asleep. Good, that meant he could ignore him. Saint poked around the kitchen and sighed. Not exactly vast depositories of food going on, here. Cockroaches scuttled from the light. The pile of dishes by the sink was becoming alarming.
“What’s wrong?” Steff asked.
Saint had never quite gotten around to telling his friend exactly how embarrassingly broke he was. If he did, Steff would do that stupid-looking frowny thing he did, he just knew it. Not that he could really remember what Steff’s frown looked like any more. Huh. It had been a while.
“My flatmate broke my waffle iron,” Saint said. “Guess it’s just, uh, Greek yoghurt for me today.” Was Greek yoghurt what rich people ate? It totally was. That and caviar, though hopefully not at once. “And baguettes,” he added, in a stroke of inspiration.
“What,” said his flatmate from the sofa, indignantly. Saint turned to look at him, a little reluctantly; the Flatmate wasn’t really the kind of person Saint would’ve chosen to associate with if he’d been given the choice. He just… hung out all day venting his anger by playing the same Xbox games over and over again, killing endless NPCs, the controller cradled in his unnervingly huge hands. Plus he’d hooked up with at least three women in the time Saint had been here, and Saint hadn’t hooked up with any. “We don’t have a waffle iron.” The Flatmate paused. “Do you want a waffle iron?” he said, simpering a little. “You’re under my roof, I need to make sure you’re treated hospitable.”
Saint rested his phone against his shoulder for a second. “Shh, sane people are talking,” he said, and held it back up to his ear, turning his back on the Flatmate’s irritated grimace. Never irritated enough, though – Saint could annoy him endlessly and the Flatmate was never irritated enough and it creeped Saint out a little, not that he’d ever admit that.
“Saint,” Steff said, in that sanctimonious preachy voice he used nowadays, ugh. “Are you being a jerk to your flatmate again?”
“Yes, well… ” Anyone who saw him this low and desperate bloody well deserved him being a bastard to them, even if they were actually weirdly nice guys that took him in when he didn’t deserve it and – pride demanded it, okay? “What can I say. Seeing a stricken kitchen appliance wounds me right to the core!” He struck his chest. “That tragic caterwauling you hear? It is my heart, rending in two. My very cardiac muscles are weeping as we speak.”
“Operating under the admittedly viable theory that if I let you keep talking, you’ll never stop,” Steff said, “let’s meet up later, okay, yes, done –”
“Traffic!” Saint said promptly. “Can’t. Traffic. Braving the streets at fiveish is insane.” Not that he had a car.
“Take a bus, idiot.”
A bus…
“Saint,” Steff was saying, and then more urgently, “Saint,” and Saint forced himself to pay attention, blearily. He was swaying, the room too big, somehow, too strange, black spots swarming at the edge of his vision. He reached out and gripped the counter, hard, hard enough to make his knuckles white with the strain.
“Sorry,” he rasped. Just. Buses. What the hell? Why would Steff just mentioning buses make him feel that terrified and broken and lost? That happened with people who’d suffered trauma – they’d be triggered by something reminding them of the traumatic incident, but – nothing traumatic had happened to him lately –
A hand rested heavily on his shoulder. “Are you okay?” the Flatmate asked, head far too close, and Saint jerked away.
“Leave me alone!”
He yelled it far too loud, nearly screamed it. It echoed around the room. The Flatmate took a step back with his hands held up peaceably, and heaved a sigh. He looked… disappointed. Disappointed in an annoying, douchebaggy way, of course, but it still gave Saint a pang of guilt, remembering the disapproval in Steff’s voice. Saint had… difficulty trusting people, sometimes. He should probably apologise.
“Are you okay?” the Flatmate asked again, eyes wide with concern.
“Shut up,” Saint snapped at him. “… By which I mean sorry, yeah, I’m fine, sorry. Sorry, mate,” he said again, to his phone this time. He wondered if Steff had heard him yell. Probably.
“Yes, you said. What’s wrong?”
“Just… ” Buses. And that really shouldn’t have been terrif
ying, buses were the least terrifying thing in the world, but… “I just remembered my nightmare, that’s all.” His hands were shaking, a little.
“You had a nightmare?”
“Obviously!” He winced at how that came out, which must have been a lot more angrily and a lot less laconically than he meant it to, because Steff went all quiet. The Flatmate lumbered back into the lounge. Saint gripped the counter harder and took calming breaths. “Yeahhhh, suppose I owe you an explanation after that lack of composure there.”
“Mmmm,” Steff said. “Yes, quite. You very nearly showed signs of actual emotions. For shame. Do better next time.”
“There wasn’t a girl, this morning.”
“What? But… ” It was weird how Steff could still sound so lost sometimes, even all grown up and clever and insufferable. “But you said there was.”
“Well, you can’t rely on what I say, pet, I’m as shifty as a Shift key that’s decided on a life of crime. There was a girl and she – she was beautiful but beautiful in… ” How to describe it? “In strange ways.”
A pause. “Eh?”
“It was… There was something about the way she stood – I mean, sat, mainly. Uh, we were on a bus… ” The girl sitting across the aisle from him like she belonged there, staring at him with her wide dark eyes like pools of night and – gods, that was the most overdramatic description in the world but it fit, that was the problem. She’d been all sharp-angled, too much so, all the over-exaggerated beauty of a supermodel but taken even further, past the point of still looking human. Still far too captivating, all the same. He searched for words. “It was a dream, okay? You know how things work in dreams. She was just wrong.”
“Okay, following so far. Wrong naked girl.”
Saint grinned. “In any other context a rather pleasant-sounding scenario,” he said. “She was… she had all this long white hair, and that was fine, but then I looked into her eyes and they had black in them.”
The Flatmate made a surprised little grunting sound. Saint ignored him. From Steff there was nothing but a confused pause, and then, “Most people’s eyes have –”
The Wind City Page 1
