by May Peterson
Then what would be the change? What would cause that dragon to finally emerge, if anything could?
What would happen if I finally let myself hope?
Mother opened fire, shredding the quiet with a pistol in each hand. Two men fell, others scrambled into motion. Father barked a command, but the details were slipping away. I crouched at the side, unnoticed, and the needle at my arm felt absurdly pointless.
I dropped the syringe, its clang devoured by the noise.
Mother waded into the brawl, shouldering men aside. Some of them jumped her, tried to lock her into holds, but the calyx charm reduced their impact to annoyances. She swatted them off like oversized flies. The battle condensed into a knot of weird magic and violence, Father and Mother locked with their mirrored charms.
Everyone around me was stretching to their absolute limits, reaching heights few others could have achieved. The valiant beauty of their hope, which nevertheless would surely fail.
I stood, set apart from the fight and unable to change it. I had never believed I could help them save themselves. Only that I might make it easier to choose what they really wanted, if rescue never came.
The future sang within me, its tune ever the same. Perhaps all I needed was despair.
I stood where Mother had, in the center of the cellar, where the mixed light and shadow fell on me. Sucking in a breath, I shouted, “Stop!”
To my surprise, they listened. Mother muscled her way through, the men losing steam as they turned along with Father. He stared me down, a diamond in the dark, not a scratch on him.
Speak quickly, Violetta. “Think about what you truly want, Father. As your house comes down around your ears. Serafina could be back at any time.”
He surged toward me, only to be intercepted by Mother, and the two of them grappled for a moment like a pair of comets brought to life. She forced him to a pause halfway between me and his men, but they were at a standstill. Father’s voice reached through the dust, like cold fingers stroking my skin. “You could stop all of this, my child. It all began with you. I asked for peace.”
My position here was delicate. Father still wanted me alive, but that didn’t mean uninjured, and I may only have minutes. “You want me to be the Honored Child again. Sit in the prison of your choosing and spin your guarantee against eternity.”
“Not just mine, ours.” A flicker of passion moved through him, sincere and sickening. “You can be immune to time, too. Haven’t you asked yourself why the calyx charm no longer comes when you call? You have it to serve me and the future I am creating. The more you resist it, the more your power fights you. You can even have your mother. I’ll let Tibario live for as long as it suits you. We can all last forever, longer than any moon-soul that has set foot on this earth.”
It wasn’t tempting. He sketched a vision of the exact conditions we lived in under the war, only drawn on infinitely. I would be a bird in a cage, but worse still, I would be his engine of oppression. Whatever grace the calyx charm held, it would be mechanically ground into a resource for his will, only able to preserve the moment, not free anyone from it. It would make fate more inevitable, not less.
But his offer hit a soft place in my belly, where I used to feel the vibration of caterpillars praying for life.
It wasn’t that I secretly still loved my father, or that a part of me was afraid to see him die. No. I may be dreaming joyfully of his death for the rest of my life. No good thing yet lived within this man. For all of his crimes, not merely against me but against every oppressed person of Portia, he deserved swift destruction.
But magic was in the body. It wasn’t a feeling or a belief, it was part of who I was, my animal needs. The infant self that experienced my world directly. Only a dragon could liberate me fully from that self, the self written in bones and blood, in trauma and rape, in my belly that tuned to the future and encircled the whole country in its senses.
I hated my father and loved my mother. But hate or love, I had devoted this body to them. To their war, their cause, making that cause my own. At this very moment, my skin reacted with terror at my father’s presence. One of the roots of that terror was a sensation he had embedded in me very early: that I must be afraid of what he would do, because my body belonged to him. Rape was not the first tool with which he’d taught me this lesson. He’d done it with golden chains, forged with Mother’s reluctant permission. With an elaborate cage to house my on-command wonders.
Why I’d lost the calyx charm now seemed plain, in the animal flow of a child’s mind. They hadn’t stolen it.
I had given it to them.
Sorrow ached through me. “My terms haven’t changed, Father. You leave me be, or you kill me. You don’t want to do either, but those are all I will give you.”
I could not call the calyx charm, because I’d decided it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to the Honored Child, and I could be that person no longer.
“But they aren’t all I can take.” He shook his head with an air of pity, as though he were talking about events outside his control. “How much difference can your mother make, with the calyx charm but no country behind her, no one to give teeth to her opposition to me? I don’t have to kill you. I can dangle death over your friends at your sweet little tea house you don’t think I know about, at all the scared rats of this city you imagine yourself shielding from me. No elector in Vermagna is going to shed a tear over me purging it of cross-dressers, drug-sellers, and prostitutes.”
How good it would be to snap this man’s neck. I envisioned my last dream of him to calm down, binding him in my hair and ripping him to pieces. I wanted it so badly it brought tears to my eyes. The problem was the same, which was that it wasn’t his malice that made him dangerous, it was the simple normalcy of his power, the shape of the society that elevated him. How could even a dragon defeat that?
Mother regained control of the grapple, spun Father so she was positioned between him and me. Two men put hands on her, but they may as well have been trying to budge a mountain. She managed to gnarl her fingers around his throat. “Oh, god, Casilio, send your fucking army against me. I fought dozens of Colombi and lived to tell it, do you think I’m intimidated by your political threats? Enough blood shed, and it will come down to you and me. How many centuries do you think it will be, before one of us cracks?”
I used to imagine reaching out my hands to protect those I blessed, the charm like my fingers gently cupping caterpillars. In some way, my hands were still closed around my parents, out of fear if not out of love. Because it all might fall apart if I let the Honored Child go. Violetta had never had a chance to possess what belonged to the Honored Child. She was a rebel self, the self I’d grown into, and this country neither needed nor knew her.
If I didn’t let go, Mother and Father might end up the only two people left in a blasted world, empty generations in which only their battle remained.
This was why I’d stopped hoping. Hope was too much like fear. The more you needed a certain future to come, the more it hurt when it didn’t. And I had a direct line to all the possible futures that terrified me.
Mother and Father were in a deadlock. I stared in the contradiction of my despair, and no one seemed able to move.
Then, as if my revelation had caused it, something changed.
The glow of the calyx charm flickered once. Around each of my parents, like flames buffered by wind. Petal-shaped sparks of purple broke from them.
A groan oozed out of Father, his eyes widening. The charm flickered again, and he took a step back.
No.
Mother was right. The charm could break. Not because of force, but...because of hope?
“Shoot her.” Father’s breaths were ragged, his eyes bulging. “Kill her. Kill her.”
The men responded as if part of Father’s body, rapid-firing on Mother. The aura of the charm bucked, fluctuated like water, but th
e pang of shells continued bouncing off her. She held her ground. I couldn’t think. Nothing felt different, no surge of power returning, no renewed sense of control. Was it simply wearing out, at last?
Then a bullet lodged in the space around Mother, as if gripped by the air. Ripples bled across the sheath of light.
And it broke through. Then another, two shots puncturing her abdomen. They tore a gasp from Mother, and she pitched backward.
No, no, no no no. I was moving before my mind reacted, catching her. Surely the bullets couldn’t have hit with full force. One more round broke through, the boundary of violet energy resembling a tattered blanket now. Still present, but flickering more quickly. The soldiers had stopped, as if stunned that it could actually work. I threw myself over her, praying that Father’s desire to take me alive might spare her.
It was broken. She stared with eyes like wounds, pale and stricken. Heavy breaths rocked her chest.
She wasn’t dead. Two spots of blood bloomed through her coat, one in her side and one under the bottom of her ribs. She clasped on to me, sucking in air. The entire world rang with shock, as if the calyx charm breaking had torn something essential out of it.
“Liliana?” Father’s voice sounded bizarrely small, surprised. He’d been the one commanding her fucking death.
Sobs made their way up my chest, breaking out in damp heaves. I pressed down on her, tried to cover Mother with my own back as much as I could. One of Mother’s shaking hands wound around my neck, pulling me closer. This only rattled my tears out faster.
The bite of gunfire seemed like the next logical step in this nightmare. Let them kill me. God of every heaven, whatever fates governed the stars, I was ready for it to be done. Tibario was gone, perhaps on the other side of the world with Serafina exploding into apocalypse.
All paths seemed to have one thing in common: they would have been better had I never been in them.
Father spoke now, his voice more cool and sure. “Seems it won’t take centuries for us to find out who wears out first. You had a lifetime of chances, Lily. I gave you everything you could have wanted, and had the door open for you to return to me. This is a choice you made.”
Mother coughed, the blood expanding like flowers. “Of course it is. It’s a choice I would make again and again.” She stroked my hair, made a soothing noise between her coughs. “My girl. I wanted you to stop protecting me. It’s not your job to spare me. Spare yourself. For the love of whatever world might yet endure, spare yourself.”
How I wanted to hold on. Holding on against the gravity of time, pulling all things into the void. This wasn’t finished yet. Weifan and Rosalina still had a chance. I turned tremblingly toward Father, his shimmering outline hazy through my tears. “You said you’d let her live.”
“I will.” Casilio sounded sickeningly gentle, a poisonous rush of fatherly affection filling his demeanor. How could I have ever loved this man, for even a moment? “But you know what I want. You and me, together. Against time. Against death.”
He was still trying to claim me again, his lucky charm that even the fates could not take from him. I breathed, felt the situation around me. A peculiar, velvety calm enveloped me.
My dragon-soul was nevertheless not here. The vibration within was not shifting toward fire or flood, the kind of erosion of self that Serafina had begun. How could it be, that we’d reached the lowest point and the end was not yet here?
There was nothing else my hope could expose me to. I was drowning in fear, fear suffusing every particle of my body. I couldn’t escape it now, and hope had already done all the damage available to it.
I sat there caught between hope and fear, and a different sensation moved within me. A sensation I had not felt for a very long time.
The feeling of someone invoking me, touching one of my talismans or a shorn lock of my hair.
During the war, it had felt like fingers playing an instrument inside me, setting off notes I felt rather than heard, calling my prescient attention to the spot of the world from which it was played.
This one came from Rosalina. With the talisman I’d given her, invoking me from the Fragrant Rose.
The note ran through me again. Mother. I once had felt everything that happened to her, as if our bodies were joined. Her burning wounds thrummed with alarm inside me.
And one more. From so far away it may as well be infinite distance, calling my name in the dark. Tibario. The locket I had made for him, reaching out to me now.
They were all still part of my body, the pieces of me that never faded away, no matter how long I’d been separate from them.
I stared at my father, his falsely comforting smile wearing down the longer I remained silent. Perhaps he understood what was happening in me.
Magic was in my body, the body I’d wrestled with, feared, hated, tried to love. The body that belonged more to the Honored Child than to me. But somewhere between now and then, the disowning of my being, a quiet miracle had been growing in the seedbed of time.
I had begun creating a new body.
The me with this body I named Violetta. She lived with her friends Rosalina and Weifan. She had a tiny flat above the flower district with a lovely view of the bay. She had a simple but satisfying life. She wore her favorite colors, let her hair flow free without it having to be cut for anyone else. The pieces of herself she shared weren’t bits of magic shorn off, but the pieces others also shared with her. Affection and care and laughter and tears, the substances that made up the moments of her life. She did not have to pretend to be a boy. She had people who loved her, and let her believe she deserved to live.
Perhaps because of that, the transformative magic of that love, she had taken a chance. A chance she hadn’t thought she’d have the courage for. When her childhood sweetheart, Tibario, had come back into her life, she had finally given herself permission to love him. To let him close enough to love her. And the beautiful dream they wove together became real, the next new part of the body she was creating.
In that body shone a new power. A power that wasn’t mine alone, a power I didn’t have to squeeze out of myself. The power came from them. When I had run out of spirit, those people who loved me poured strength into me. Leo, Rosalina and the others, Weifan and my beloved mother. Tibario.
Their strength reverberated in me, the strength of a body, a self, shared with others, as I had once shared the Honored Child with the country. I was not separate from them. And piece by piece, they had given me the future I needed.
I looked at my father, heard my mother and friend gasping at my back. I reached within me to the places where my loved ones were calling out to me, and did something I had once done as naturally as breathing.
I closed my hands around them.
And hoped.
Chapter Nineteen
Tibario
I had nowhere to go with her.
We should go home. But even if immortality spared me, Mamma as a dragon-soul would swiftly vaporize anything we might still think of as a home. Martina would be in danger. If Mio or Papa ever returned, it would be to rubble. The same lightning-fast consideration happened for all the other places I imagined that might be of significance to her.
I imagined deserted places, plains with nothing but snow or sand, areas that minimized exposure to local life. But that left another problem—if I defused her explosion, but was close to death because of it, we’d be without help and she could simply start burning again.
This all flashed through my mind in the fraction of a beat it took to shift out of the material world and into the Deep. Darkness enclosed us. True darkness, substance rather than absence, the darkness from which all form arose. In that dark, nothing lived to be harmed by a dragon-soul blazing out like a renegade star.
The choice was made for me. We were stuck in the Deep, hurtling with our arms around each other, because the earth itself was
not safe for this. I was alone with Mamma, in the place I’d died. Memento mori. This was where our lives would always end.
Mamma gripped like I was trying to get away from her. Gasps of desperation rocked her chest. Her wild, traumatizing light was the only illumination in the abyss.
Panic reduced my sense to goo. There wasn’t air here. I clamped down, held my breath. I’d learned I could hold my breath for a long time, longer than any living creature. Eventually I would pass out, but immortal bodies could mimic death without harm for hours.
Mamma, on the other hand, could die. And her dragon could flame into more grandiose life before it extinguished, threatened by the sensation of her body losing strength.
She sobbed against my neck. The waves of force around her seemed to have taken some air with us, creating a protective bubble of heat and breath. It couldn’t last. Oh god, there was nowhere to go and it couldn’t last. Nothing lasted. Everything was the illusion of the Deep forever, every precious thing a mirage of the dreaming depths.
I’m sorry, Mamma.
“Take me to Gino!” she cried, her voice vibrating like a choir.
“I can’t!” The gulf of the Deep was oddly deafening, sound slipping away into nothing. “I don’t know where he is!”
“Take me!” She bellowed on, begging, imploring. The sudden vulnerability was shocking. “Take me to Lily! You don’t understand, I have to tell Lily that I’m sorry! Lily deserves that from me!”
Back to Liliana, from whence we’d come. “I’m not going to do that, Mamma. Liliana will die.”
“Take me to Tibario!”
It wasn’t until she said this that I understood. She didn’t realize anymore that I was me. Her mind was already losing coherence. The dragon was already wiping her away, transforming her back into a creature of instinct, and eventually pure energy without form.
Alone with my dying mother in the infinite void, I began to cry.
