by K. Gorman
Mieshka reeled the balcony blinds back on their balled cord, slid the door open, and stepped over the sill. Their view was of the next apartment and the narrow alleyway between. Every week, the sanitation department emptied the dumpsters at the end.
A few dead plants welcomed her into the chill. The Balcony Garden Experiment had been short-lived. Plants couldn’t live with neglect.
She hunched on the rail and watched the light fade from the alley. It was a gradual process, and one that made her huddle more and more into her hoodie. Eventually, the alley’s lights switched on, beaming an industrial yellow-orange into the gritty shadows.
Behind her, the shuffle of socked feet announced her father’s arrival. He closed the door behind him and joined her. The railing wobbled as he leaned against it. Mieshka watched the flicker of a television set in the opposite building, one floor up. A car alarm went off, its sound muffled by distance. Eyes wandering to the dumpsters seven floors down, she thought of the pizza boxes. If she threw them, maybe she could get them in.
“Cold out.” Her dad’s breath rose in a mist, backlit by their sidelong neighbours. He wore an old, pale blue work shirt, the top two buttons undone. His sweatpants had food stains. The orange alley light glinted off the thin metal frame of his glasses.
She nodded, jaw tightening. She’d drawn her hood over the beanie long ago, though the chill still seeped in through the neck. Her cheeks had gone numb, and her nose. She did not shiver.
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Any homework?”
“Of course.” Her tone was snippy. She gritted her teeth as a lump slipped back into her throat. The cold pricked at new tears. She forced her voice to stay even. “Robin showed me the Fire Mage’s temple.”
“Temple?”
“Yeah. It was a memorial.” Her voice broke raw on the last vowel. She swallowed the lump, felt his eyes on her.
The quiet thickened between them for a moment. The railing trembled under her arm. Bitterness grew in her chest.
“Why did we come here?” Her question hung in the cold. She didn’t look at him, knowing what his answer would be. Bitterness quickly turned to anger, fuelled by an old rage that collected in her stomach like dead blood. Her nerves frayed like a bad firework.
“It’s safer here,” he said.
“I can’t visit Mom,” she said.
“She’s with us—”
“—in our hearts? There’s a lot of things in my heart right now and she ain’t one of them.”
“Mieshka—”
“No! What can you say? What can anyone say?” She was yelling now, not caring how her voice echoed through the alley. Above them, a neighbour closed a balcony door loudly.
“I’m sorry that—”
Rage flashed ahead of her thoughts. “Sorry? Sorry doesn’t help! Fuck!”
Her hand had smacked against the railing. The cold numbed the pain.
“Mieshka, calm down,” he whispered, hissing across the two feet that separated them. “We have to get through this. Remember what the doctor said. Count—”
“I’m sick of counting. It doesn’t help. Who are you to tell me what to do? You just hide in your room all fricking day. And order pizza. I can’t live on pizza!”
“Mieshka!” His voice rose. “Keep your voice down. I know it hurts. Believe me, I know. I lost her too.”
She choked, the alleyway blurred around her.
“I lost both of you.”
A sob hiccoughed through her as she turned away. She slammed the door back on its tracks. She sped into the dim, dark room, past the couch with its piles of laundry and junk mail. Past the stacked, mouldy pizza boxes on the coffee table.
Into her room.
She slammed the door behind her, breathing hard. Tears slid down, carving raw streaks into the cold of her cheeks. She ripped a Kleenex from her desk, nearly taking the box with it. Sinking onto her bed, she curled into the mess she’d left the quilt in this morning.
It was starting to smell too.
After a few minutes, she heard the balcony door again. Her dad shuffled in, pausing outside her door. She twisted around to stare at it.
He moved on. She listened as his bedroom door opened, closed.
She rested her head back into the quilt, eyes closing against its familiar softness. The cold had followed her in, and it numbed her skin for a long time afterwards.
CHAPTER 2
Meese had missed first period, and wasn’t responding to Robin’s texts.
Robin cradled her forehead in her palm, fingers edging under her beanie. Around her, a steady, hushed conversation filled the room. The classroom’s fluorescents strained her eyes. Robin sat sideways at the too-small desk, feeling the chair’s wooden back jab into her ribs. Her phone rested on her thigh, safely hidden behind the desktop. Staring absently at its screen, Robin overheard a few snippets of gossip:
“—Really? Ben and Jessica? Have they, y’know, done it?”
“—got her wallet stolen.”
“Devil Bitch Murphy is on phone-conquest again.”
She looked up at the last, spotting Mrs. Murphy at the front of class, erasing the chalkboard. Robin's hand curled protectively over her phone. The teacher’s confiscating habit had earned her a few nasty nicknames over the years.
Robin rubbed at her eyes. They felt dry and itchy.
By the front window, Mrs. Murphy’s taxidermic Cooper’s hawk reeled on its wire, dead wings outstretched. It lorded over a shelving unit filled with animal skulls, textbooks, and wilted plants. Robin watched as the bird slowed its spiral, pausing for a second to consider escaping through the window. Drafts pushed it into an opposite spin.
She swiped her phone’s screen before it timed out.
Meese was a lot more fragile than she let on. Robin had learned that yesterday, though she’d long suspected it. Perhaps both of them had been content to pretend that wasn’t the case. Pretending was good. There had been some good times.
But pretending was a thin way to live. Something grated in Robin’s head. She suspected things might not be all right.
How could she have been so stupid? Of course the ‘temple’ was a memorial. How hadn’t she seen that? After Meese had pointed it out, it seemed obvious.
Of course it was a memorial. All those burning words on the wall? Those were names. A lot of names.
Meese had seemed oddly at ease with it. Yesterday, they’d parted ways on good terms, with a promise of eating lunch together today. Meese had even smiled.
Missing class was very un-Meese-like.
Had something happened?
Robin’s eyes wandered away from her phone again, sliding along the projects and posters that crammed the classroom. The periodic table curled away from the wall behind a TV set that was probably older than her dad.
“Oh great, career day.”
Robin jerked her attention back to the front.
On Meese’s behalf, she stiffened.
A woman had entered in full military dress uniform, although she had elected for the pencil skirt as opposed to the slacks. Medals glinted on her left breast. Her bright blonde hair was pulled back into a tight bun under the black-rimmed red beret she wore. She carried a large, long bag in one hand, clutching a small purse in the other. As Robin watched, she put both on the front table and, laughing with Mrs. Murphy, began to set up for a presentation.
Quickly, Robin turned back to her phone and opened a new message. Meese hadn’t replied to her other messages, but there was no harm in trying.
Don’t come to class.
She hit send, sliding the phone further up her thigh. Glancing between the officer and the classroom’s door, tension gripped her shoulders. The room felt colder. The hawk slipped to a stop for another moment, its glass eyes on her. Then its gyre moved on. She huddled further into her hoodie—the same one from yesterday—and sank into the seat.
The bell rang. On its tail, Meese walked into the room.
; She faltered a few strides in, locking on the officer. For a moment, Meese froze. It took visible effort to thaw and walk to her seat. Meese slid her backpack down to the floor. Robin relaxed as Meese sat and began to unpack her binder and textbooks. Her fingers were still red with cold.
The officer pulled a large rifle out of the bag.
Meese’s hand froze in mid-air. As the officer propped the rifle in a stand, that hand went to the edge of the desk. Tendons tightened over Meese’s knuckles, turning the skin white. A few seconds passed. Then, with another great effort, Meese relaxed enough to release the desk.
She began to repack her bag.
The officer turned around with a bright smile and a salute.
“How’s everyone today?”
The smile faltered as Meese stood up, drew her hood over her orange hair, shrugged on her pack, and turned toward the classroom’s back. For the first time that day, Robin saw her face. Meese’s skin was blotchy. Robin met her eyes for a moment. They were dry and dark. Meese’s mouth was a hard line.
The moment passed as Meese walked by the last of the desks. The class heard the back door open, then close.
The officer stood at the front, her mouth open. Her beret had a coquettish tilt. She stared at the door, blinked once, and refocused on the class.
“I guess she won’t be joining the army then, eh?”
No one laughed. The silence was a stoicism Robin had learned early on in school: shut up, keep your head down, and you’ll get through till the final bell.
Unfazed, the officer continued:
“Did everyone see that bomb yesterday?”
Yeah. It was probably a good thing Meese had left.
Robin’s phone buzzed loudly against her thigh. Some of her peers looked around as she clamped it against her jeans, hurriedly swiping at the screen. The hawk swept its gaze past her. Mrs. Murphy had gotten up to turn off the lights.
She looked at the message.
Thanks. Why is she here?
She glanced at the officer again, who had reeled the TV set to the middle of the classroom.
‘Career Presentation’, Robin replied, careful to put the quotation marks in. Meese would appreciate that.
A small, polite cough made her look up. Mrs. Murphy’s keen eyes looked down on her.
“Your phone, Ms. Smith.”
***
The outside air was crisp, and it settled over Mieshka like a cool blanket. Her cheeks were already numb, and the cold bit into the corners of her eyes.
Pressing a Kleenex to her nose, she turned up the volume in her headphones until a heavy techno drowned out the world. She didn’t want to think just now, instead keeping a quixotic tilt toward Uptown’s skyscrapers. Soon she was among the giants.
The streets remained shadowed, though the sun glinted white gold on the tops of the buildings. Where Mieshka walked, frost still covered parts of the concrete. Some cars, likely coming from the mountainside, drove by with a capping of snow on their roofs. She paused at a corner, watching a magpie flit onto the traffic light. A second one joined it.
It occurred to her that she was skipping school. She was strangely okay with it.
Shivering, she jammed her hands into her pockets. Her breath misted in front of her. She had a lot of time to kill.
The light changed, and she resumed her walk. No one gave her a second glance. She didn’t stop again until the subway stair opened in the sidewalk—the same spot she and Robin had stopped yesterday. Pausing at the lip of the stair, she looked at Lyarne’s valley down the street’s eastern slope.
There was no bomb today. The Sisters stretched up in the background, their rugged slopes skirted by a translucent haze. A third of the valley was still in shadow.
She wasn’t really seeing the view. Her thoughts had caught up with her.
What’s the worst that could happen? The school wouldn’t expel her. This was her first time. Nothing ever happened to the other students who skipped. Except for a few episodes, Mieshka had a stellar record.
Her dad would get a call, though. There was an automated system for that.
Her jaw had tightened. The cold numbed the anger, but it brewed at the top of her mind.
She checked her phone. Robin hadn’t replied to her last text.
The wind pulled her into the tunnel. She followed it down the stairs, her knees stiff and hard with cold. In a minute, she paused, considering the first gate.
She couldn’t go home. Her father would be home. There would be difficult questions.
She moved on. Other gates opened on the left side, some leading to other tunnels. Pop music briefly overpowered her techno as she passed a stairwell leading up. Overhead was a mall. On the floor, coloured lines organized each destination.
Mieshka ignored them all.
Her eyes landed on a newspaper stand. Yesterday’s bomb took the front page in mid-explosion. A small flare had been caught, illuminating the shield’s outline. Magic. Her jaw tightened again, and she forced herself past it. The track changed on her player, the subway’s boom rising in the interlude. She kept walking.
By the time she stopped, the gates were gone, along with the mid-morning crowd. The stores on either side were closed, their advertisements six months expired. She took her headphones off, hearing the tail end of a far-off announcement snake up the tunnel. Music blasted from her neck. One foot rested on the first stair to the Mages’ memorial.
The stone sides of the archway matched the inner pillars, carved to look like thick, twisted rope. A hundred threads marked their surface. At the top, the cross-piece was formed of carved branches, stemming across the arch.
The dim light danced. She saw the first of the monsters.
Behind her came the echoes of people, the screech and bang and howl of arriving trains, the loudspeakers that coordinated them. Ahead of her, the memorial was quiet.
She climbed the stairs. Past the arch, the dark fell around her like a curtain. The air thickened, the stone walls close. Quiet closed in on her with each step. Soon, she heard the sound of water.
Her music jarred with the peace. She turned it off, taking her time. She had lots of it.
Orange light shone on the wall up ahead, and she paused. What was she doing? Shouldn’t she be avoiding places like memorials?
Her hand clenched in her pocket.
Avoiding things hadn’t worked so far.
She turned the music off and followed the curve into the main room. There she paused, feeling her mouth tighten into a grim line.
There were a lot of names.
Emotion dragged at her eyes. The room burned into a bright orange haze. A few blinks brought it back into focus.
It had to be magic. The words burned like neon, except they weren’t confined to a tube. As she watched, the characters fluctuated, moving through shades of red-yellow-orange like glowing embers. One briefly combusted before returning into a spider-thread-thin line of text.
Their Cyrillic shape was familiar. Her mother had tried to teach her the Russian alphabet. Then she’d run out of time.
Her throat closed on the memory. She pulled out another Kleenex, brought it to her face, and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her eyes squeezed shut, and her jaw gritted closed. The tissue dampened silently.
A minute passed. It took a couple of tries to get the room in clear focus again. Her right hand followed the wall, feeling the stone mythology bump underneath her touch. The wall glowed above her.
There were a lot of names.
She had been to Terremain’s memorial, where her mother’s name was carved into black marble and inlaid with gold. Her mother hadn’t been the last on the list. There were others below her, and a lot of blank space. Mieshka remembered staring at that blank space, seeing her reflection in the polished stone. Her father had stood to her left, a tense hand on her shoulder. Her uncle to her right. They all looked dead in the marble.
She closed her eyes, counted to ten. Afterwards, she leaned against the wall. A monster dug int
o her side. Her backpack dug into her shoulders. She pinched the Kleenex to her nose. When she blew, its echo snotted about the room.
She almost laughed, but the burning light was sobering.
There were a lot of names. None she knew. None she could even read. These people had died in another world, two years before she had been born. They were not the ghosts she was looking for.
She shrugged her backpack off her shoulders, slid it down her arm, and slumped it next to a pillar. The light of ten thousand burning names moved across her skin. She joined the backpack, stretching her feet down the steps that led to the pit. Pulling out another Kleenex, she leaned against the pillar’s smooth, square base.
Her head ached. Memories swarmed within it. She closed her eyes. Through her eyelids, she saw the glow. She crumpled the tissue in her hand and put it on the floor next to her.
She had a lot of time to kill.
***
After a while, Mieshka began to hear beeps. A headache settled into her left temple with a slow throb. Her breath was ragged, nose stuffed, eyes dry and itchy. She rested her forehead on her knee, hoping the sound would go away.
Instead, it grew louder. She heard footsteps.
Ignoring her headache, she lifted her chin and strained to hear over the fountain.
A woman’s voice called up the entranceway. Mieshka’s eyes shifted to follow it.
“Buck, what the hell? In here?”
She stiffened. A faint shadow spread out on the entrance’s floor. It was a large shadow. The beeping sound grew louder.
“That’s what it says.” The man’s voice—Buck, she assumed—was much closer. Mieshka edged closer to her backpack, sliding her hand around its straps just as he walked through the door.
He was big. That was the first thing she noticed. The gun at his shoulder was the second. Her fingernails dug into a Kleenex.
As he stepped in line with the pillars at the edge of the shallow pit, she took a breath and forced herself to relax. Hadn’t she decided to face her fears?
She looked again, trying to ignore the gun. He was cast in silhouette on the wall behind him, though she recognized the military crew-cut she’d become familiar with among her mom’s friends. He paused by a pillar, hunched over something in his hands. After a moment, he looked up and searched the room. Mieshka cringed as he found her by the pillar.
Stomps sounded in the hallway. Where Buck had been subtle, the next person was not.
