by K. M. Szpara
“You’re mocking me.” But this too is said listlessly, the annoyance perfunctory.
“No, I think fervor is admirable. Passion is its own virtue. It animates. It can give an otherwise ordinary thing a terrible magnetism, an ensnaring brilliance…” She unties the streamer and casts it forward, where it catches on an updraft, snapping toward the sky-that-is-not. “Oh, that’s why. All this time, you’ve been so weakened but there’s been this—fire? This gravity, this pull. I think that’s why ey decided on you.”
Sujatha’s head rises a fraction. “Decided like a calculation, the way you say it.”
“It probably was. But not an exact thing, no, eir variables were more organic than numbers. Perhaps it had to do with how you moved, the way you sang, how your face was limned in profile at sunset. And always the fire that burns within you, visible between your teeth, behind your eyes.” She helps them to their feet. “Do you want to see the gardens? Ey loved those.”
Twoseret continues sketching in her head, drawing points of like and unlike. A framework of contrast and potential markers for synaptic joints. In the swaying garden with its inverted field, she picks clusters of edible hydrangea, mangosteens the size of her thumb, syrup oranges with thin ripe peel about to burst. These and more she puts in Sujatha’s lap, absent the assassin’s interest. As the pile grows they pick at it, a bite here, a lick there. Inevitably they have juices running down their fingers, their chin, sticky and fragrant.
She thinks of kissing them away, drop by drop. In the end she unthinks it. Not the right person, not the right time. As of now they are both in love with an idea.
Twoseret stirs to the city quaking and Sujatha’s shadow lying across her like whip-scars. “I know you’re awake,” the assassin says in that fractured, devoured voice. “We’re under attack.”
She peers up at them through her eyelashes. “From whom?”
“Must you ask?”
“But they’ll kill you too,” she points out calmly as she pushes to her elbows, dislodging sheets, baring shoulders and breasts. Baring, too, the places on her ribcage and waist where the incisions were made and implants seeded so she would be able to receive the petals each morning.
Sujatha’s gaze snags on those places and the cartography of their features shifts, sideways, to that region between disgust and fascination. It makes Twoseret want to say that the scars are quite all right: she chose to keep them when they could have been operated away to smoothness, leaving skin unmarred. Of course their horror is really for Umaiyal’s sake, the thought that Umaiyal once lived like this, bore these same scars. Still Sujatha is nearly tender, as though she’s a small child prone to spooking. “Are you in shock?”
“Oh, no.” Her bed trembles as though a beast shaking itself from hibernation, sloughing off sleep and matted grass, or whatever it is that animals coming out of hibernation do. Paper moths flutter from their shelves. “I’m in full command of myself.” She doesn’t say that the petals came early today, and they did not instruct either Twoseret or the city to die. No doubt pointing that out will only distress the assassin.
Twoseret stands all the way up, knows as she turns her back that Sujatha stares at the tiger-stripes up her spine that culminate at the top—below her nape—in a dainty port, flourished in nacre and tiny citrines. “You believed I’m incapable of love because I have never experienced its prerequisites. Is it so hard to believe I’m not panicking because I’ve had no experience of terror, of illness or fear of dying?”
“Even a creature like you must retain her survival instinct.”
“How wrong you are.” Twoseret shrugs into her dress of suede cuffs and amethyst whorls, the fabric whispering like origami in fire as it molds to her. “Umaiyal used to help me dress, pick my clothes. Ey had—still has, I should think—these long fingers, with calluses from the wood-carving ey used to do as a hobby. Ey wasn’t much good at it, though ey tried to make me birds.” The calluses would be different now. Imprints from wielding a chisel and from wielding a gun are nothing alike, she imagines.
“Who?”
“The person you and I love. Pretending further is obscene, isn’t it? I don’t know if ey ever gave you eir birth name.” She slides her shoes on, lavender gray, texture almost petal-like.
Sujatha presses their lips into a hard line and leads her by the hand. Twoseret is startled at the force of their grip, the limber grace of their stride, their familiarity with the puzzle-paths. An assassin would of course be able to map a place from memory, with speed and attention. Even so the unerring way with which they negotiate the city fills her heart, and their recovered strength makes her glad.
“My superiors have given me up for dead,” Sujatha says as they emerge into artificial morning under the sky that is not. “So have I. For all intents and purposes I’m no longer alive; my presence makes no difference.”
“But we’re running somewhere rubble can’t fall on us. A corpse doesn’t run.” Though ultimately the city’s swarm-bounds can shatter; the ceiling of Twoseret’s world is an unbearable weight, upheld by a thread of synaptic aegis. If it falls there will be no escaping it.
“My sense of self-preservation hasn’t deserted me. Flight or fight.” But their expression creases as though they’d said something different, a thing of ache and thorn cupped on their tongue.
A sudden ruthlessness seizes Twoseret. “This city holds the memory of the only person you’ve ever loved. While you breathe you won’t permit its destruction.”
Sujatha doesn’t meet her eyes. “I need a node I can broadcast from. This isn’t a full assault—a veilship or two, not much more. Just scouts.”
Other memorialists have poured into the streets, as calm as Twoseret, intrigued by this new development. A few crèche-parents lead their charges by the hand, clear-eyed children from five to nine in various stages of wiring. By twelve they will be tested, and on success granted the petals. The sight of them draws a smile from her, reflexive and uncomplicated.
“There are consoles we use for supply drops.” Routine communications for assigning and dividing up the items. There’s always abundance and most memorialists can have their pick, tools and luxuries and raw material with which to feed fabricators: steel for hair-ribbons, glass for skirts, a hundred type of gemstones for belts and bedspreads. Everyone wears jewels, is sheathed in it until skin and facets are one.
Twin shadows press against the unsky, each the shape of a hornbill’s head. Another tremor sweeps through like a racking cough, or so Twoseret imagines, never having seen hypothermia in action. There are defenses, but she supposes absently that those must have been breached: they are automated, and while some memorialists know them well—Umaiyal did—most of them never train themselves to battle. The nearest military outpost is too far to make it in time. The city’s greatest protection has always been in its secrecy and location rather than firepower. She finds a wall and activates the console, feeding it a cluster of authentications like grapes, and steps aside.
Sujatha bends close, their breath fogging the obsidian curlicues that frame the console. Twoseret watches with avid interest as they connect to the Cotillion channel with a lover’s intimacy. “Veilship couplet, identify yourselves.”
The shaking pauses. From the console comes a low note, strain of music made by sighing woods and running currents.
“Remotely piloted,” Sujatha murmurs, “as I thought. That’ll be easier.”
“Yes?”
The assassin straightens and inhales. More affectation than any real need for oxygen, Twoseret expects. And they sing.
Sujatha’s voice makes a dirge for extinguished suns and singularistic contractions that kill worlds, for defeat in empty reaches that will go unknown and uncommemorated. It jolts Twoseret’s nerves, constricts her throat, pries at the seams of her flesh.
When it ends Sujatha turns away, trembling slightly. “They will leave. It’s the only command override I can access now, with my voice the way it—in any case it won’t work a sec
ond time.”
“It was exquisite.”
“It was nothing of the sort.” The assassin sags, as though the song has leeched their arteries dry and drained their limbs of strength.
Up above the shadows have disappeared. Twoseret catches the assassin. “You’re exhausted. Let’s get you somewhere to rest.”
Sujatha doesn’t resist or push her away. “I’ve been sleeping on grass, under trees.”
“Then come to my bed. I’ll tuck you in.”
In the street, the crowd thins, memorialists returning to their duties and routines now that the excitement is past. Riam nods to Twoseret, perhaps guessing at her intent, giving tacit approval or merely mute indifference.
She frees the assassin from their shoes and vest, and eases them down between the sheets. She holds them until they fall limp and asleep, and very gently kisses their brow, their eyelids, the tip of their nose. Sujatha smells so right.
When she is sure they are deep in dreams, she gathers up her composition and resumes her work. Making a person—an identity—is delicate labor, but it is a labor of love. She thinks she will keep the singing, to retain the best of both worlds, and sends out a request for the casket.
Twoseret watches the sky for silhouettes of insects, vast, their wings enveloping half the city, their antennae slashing the horizon to segments. The outpost has become more attentive and sent them guardians since the attack. She never sees any of the soldiers, though she can imagine them helmeted and carapaced, animated statues of lustrous absence. Faceless, voiceless, nameless. She wonders if, far away, there is a war going on. A real one, sparked off by the assault here. On that the petals are silent.
The weather is getting warm, though never humid or uncomfortable. She’s taken to seed-pearl sandals and lighter dresses with skirts that snap like prayer flags in an assassin’s memory.
She kneels. A casket on the pavement, surrounded by mosaic pieces. The person in it has been sleeping a long time, nested in dreams of being reared by crèche-parents and of being wired; of pride when the first petals came. The casket is like the tank, incubating, preparing a sacred genesis.
Twoseret begins to unlatch the lid. A fetus must push through eventually or be stillborn. That is rare, but she’s seen it happen. The locks and puzzles fall away quickly this time, decorative more than protective.
Eir hair has grown to eir waist. Thick frosted lashes twitch in sleep. A curl of cool breath, body temperature artificially lowered, rises to meet the thick air. Crossed wrists coiled in origami vipers. She runs her palm over eir forehead; she imagines to em the contact must feel like a flame tickling candlewax. In this way she thaws her dreamer, waking em with her own warmth. No fluid to drain, no instrument to detach—this was, almost, a simple and natural sleep.
Ey turns on eir side as though wishing to rest a little longer. Twoseret brushes eir hair, her fingertips grazing the side of eir neck. When eir eyes open, they are terribly clear: irises deeply brown, circumference gilded in amber. The scent of eir favorite perfume wafts, the angular folds of eir favorite vest rises and falls to eir breathing.
“You always slept so heavily.” Twoseret takes em into her arms, helping them out of the casket. “Do I call you Oridel now? Captain Oridel Nehetis. It sounds all grand.”
Ey rubs at eir eyes, groggy, one of those slightly childish gestures—she’s never been able to break eir habit. “No, of course not. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? When did we have hornet fliers guarding our sky? God, I miss piloting those.”
“Recent addition. I find their silhouette very charming. There’s so much to tell you.” She pecks em on the lips. “Welcome back, Umaiyal.”
And Umaiyal laughs, in what is nearly eir voice, straightening to eir feet and taking her hand in that light-firm way that belongs to Umaiyal alone. “I’m home.”
At the moment of her birth, Twoseret learned three things: that her life will be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy. These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.
As she walks arm in arm with Umaiyal up the puzzle-paths, her tragedy falls away like pale chrysalis, dissipating on the mosaic tiles and dispersing in the low salted wind.
When her next petals come she reads them and smiles, and casts them aside.
He peers into the rough hole, dabbing at his brow with a damp handkerchief. The shovel has found every large stone in this three-square-foot area. Beating down on the two of them is the early summer sun, but he, much older than his companion, feels it a lot more, especially in his knees and the middle of his back.
She squats down easily, inspecting the rough sides of what looks like an overgrown divot in the grass. At only twelve years old, she has much experience with the central New Jersey soil and rock in her mother’s backyard. With nimble, dirty fingers she retrieves a stone, rolling it over as if it signals some clue they need.
“You haven’t gotten very far,” she tells him, brushing dregs of red clay onto her jeans before standing up. She is only about six inches shorter than him.
“I realize that.” He takes care not to sound sharp with her.
He stabs at the ground, and again the spade bangs against stone, making a sound that irritates him. Without meaning to, he grunts as he digs. Now the sweat and humidity have wilted his shirt collar. This is not the way he envisioned the afternoon would proceed, but he’s not sure what he should have expected, really.
He asks her if she’s sure this is the spot, making sure he’s quiet about it because he knows her feelings are easily hurt.
“Yes, I’m sure.” She pulls a wrinkled map out of her back pocket.
Faded blue lines streak across the paper, with broad brown writing upstaging the rules where she was supposed to practice her penmanship. Instead she’d gotten excited by an episode of Mr. Wizard’s World and as soon as she’d learned she could draw a treasure map in lemon juice, she put off her math homework and attempted to fashion directions to something terrific. Except she didn’t have anything important to bury, and for sure she’d need to sneak this project under her mother’s radar. Danielle looks at the number of paces again, using her index finger to keep focus as she calculates. Steps are drawn off to the side, in clumps of five hash marks, an inch or so above a simple compass guide. She should not have tried to draw a dragon in lemon juice with a toothpick, because it looks horrible blurry and not at all like a dragon.
“It should be right here,” she says, pointing to the disturbed earth at their feet, but lacking the confidence she had just a moment earlier.
“May I see it?”
She wonders when he got so mannerly, because she couldn’t be less interested in that Dear Abby nonsense.
She passes it to him and stifles a grumble because she knows how to read her own map.
“So this is the tree here?” He tries to remember if this was always the way the backyard met up with the woods. It’s been so long.
Danielle leans in, and they study the slip of paper together. Everything has become so absurd, but she has put in too much energy now to back down from locating the box. Filled with something like a hundred Susan B. Anthony dollars and whatever else she can’t recall, he’s apparently desperate for it.
“Come to think of it, maybe it’s this tree.” She walks back to her starting point, sixty yards away, where the uneven bricks of the patio end and sod picks up. He tries not to stare at her gait or watch for any tell-tale signs from her. Soon enough Danielle is back across the lawn, now standing about thirty feet further west from his location.
“Try over here, Derrick,” she yells. His name feels funny in her mouth, unreal.
He hurries over, worrying about how all of this activity must look to whatever neighbors are around.
This time the shovel sinks easily through the grass and he tilts the long handle back, bringing up a good measure of earth. Finally a smile breaks across Derrick’s face.
“I think this may be it,” he s
ays, as sweat rolls past his temples. It’s not long before he feels the lunch pail, and gets on his knees, creaky as they are, ignoring that it’s time to take his pills. The green and orange picture of the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine van peeks out at them.
“Yay,” Danielle says, grabbing the handle of the lunch pail. It hangs on by only one side, the other end having dissolved away into the ground. She catches her breath. What if what he said is true?
“Don’t be scared,” says Derrick, brushing black dirt out from between the seams of the lid and box. “We can put this back in a couple of minutes.” He walks over toward a tree near them and sits under it, noticing that the cancer inside him is pushing on his bladder. Danielle walks up and sits beside him, feeling the rough bark through her t-shirt. It’s a new shirt that she got at the mall, having selected the Ghostbusters logo from the lineup of emblems on the wall at the small store. But she didn’t actually believe in ghosts or magic before today.
“I still think it’s weird that you did this,” she says, unable to refrain from bringing up the subject again.
“I know.” He opens the box, a rough prospect after so much of the hinge has rusted shut. Wrapped in newspaper are the coins they expected, and he brushes past them, still looking. Guatemalan worry dolls, far from where they could provide any help. They’re supposed to be placed where they can resolve problems.
“I don’t remember putting it in there, you know,” she says.
Danielle has told him this already, but he knows it’s here. He sees a corner of plastic. It found its way to the farthest corner of the box. He holds the clump of baby hair up to the light—delicate, thin brown hairs wrapped in cellophane.
Danielle wants to hold it, but Derrick says she can see it from where she is. He gives her a sideways glance and asks if she’s nervous. She nods.
