by Nina Varela
This human girl’s eyes were wide. Her grip shifted on Crier’s wounded wrist.
Crier realized that she had not yet been saved.
The girl’s breaths were coming fast. Her mouth twisted, her grip loosened—
A necklace fell out of her shirt and dangled between them. Crier’s gaze flicked from the girl’s face to her necklace, a split second of winking gold in the moonlight, a pendant carved with an eight-point star—the all-too-familiar symbol of the Makers—and then the girl gave a low wrenching noise and pulled Crier up up up, back over the edge of the bluff, and then they were both scrambling away from the edge, collapsing beneath a seaflower bush. Gasping. Shaking. Crier squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face into the dirt, which was illogical but felt like the only thing she would ever want to do for the rest of her life. The dirt smelled like rain and soft green things and not dying.
Four seconds. Five. She shoved herself upright. Her face was wet, dirt sticking to her cheeks, and she did not understand why. She tasted salt. Sea spray, but different.
The girl was already looking at her. Crier saw her own shock mirrored in those dark eyes. But why were they both shocked? Of course the girl had saved her. Crier had needed help. This girl was in Hesod’s command, and therefore also in Crier’s command. Why would she do anything else? Why was Crier’s vision blurring?
The girl reached forward and pressed her thumb to the soft skin below Crier’s left eye. Again they stared at each other. The girl’s eyes flicked between her hand and Crier’s face, as if she was confused by her own actions. Crier held very still, and when the girl’s thumb came away from her skin, she saw the way it glistened with something wet.
Tears.
Crier’s hands flew up to her cheeks. Her skin was grimy, almost sticky, damp with dirt and—tears. Water from her eyes, salt on her lips. Tears, like the strange wet that streaked down human faces, but these were her own. They were hot like blood. It felt like she was bleeding, like she was wounded. But Automae did not cry like humans did. Why would they.
The girl wiped her thumb on her shirt. My tears, Crier thought, staring at the damp spot. My salt.
Her eyes stung.
“Lady Crier!”
Six guards were heading toward them, dark figures in the gloom. Even when running, their strides were identical; they did not fall out of line; their uniforms were pristine. Six guards—Crier’s distress chime must have gone off. She scrubbed at her face, wiping away all evidence of the tears. Nobody could see. (Somebody already had.) It was bad enough that she had nearly died, doubly bad that she had been saved by a servant. A human.
What would her father think?
What would Kinok think?
Crier got to her feet and did her best to brush the dirt off her clothes, to fix her messy, wind-whipped hair. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the human girl doing the same. She watched the girl hide the gold necklace back beneath her shirt, avoiding Crier’s eyes.
So she had not imagined the Maker symbol carved into the small, coin-like pendant. Crier stared at the girl again, this time with a new shock.
A symbol written in a language that had been dead for a hundred years, the old language of the alchemists.
How did you get that? Crier thought, unable to tear her eyes away from the girl’s face. Who are you?
But already the guards had reached them and immediately fell upon the girl, wrestling her arms behind her back and shoving her head down, trapping her between them. Three on the girl, the other three pointing their swords at her throat, her stomach, the base of her neck. The girl did not struggle. There would be no point. It took six hundred and seventy pounds of force to snap a human’s neck. The guards could apply that pressure in half a second.
She stared at the guards. “What are you doing?”
“Was it the human?” one guard asked. “What was it doing here? Did it attack you?” He was the one holding the girl’s head down. Crier could not see her face.
The way her grip had shifted on Crier’s wrist. The fierce look in her eyes. The press of her thumb into Crier’s wound. How, for a moment, Crier had been absolutely sure the girl was going to let her drop. The shock on both their faces when the girl had pulled her up up up and over, back to solid ground.
Of course the girl had saved her.
But for a moment—for a moment—
“No,” Crier heard herself say. “No, it did not push me. I fell. The human saved my life.”
The girl’s head jerked beneath the guard’s hand. Like she had just tried to look up. At Crier.
“The human saved me,” Crier repeated. She glanced toward the spot where she had heard her father and Kinok speaking, but they were long gone. They must have been heading back toward the palace when she fell. “I sustained a minor injury. I require medical assistance. Escort me to the physician immediately. And please keep this between us—my father is quite busy with our guest and he does not need any added stress.”
“Yes, Lady Crier.” They let go of the girl and she stumbled forward a little, straightened up. She glanced at Crier just long enough for Crier to see that her face was blank, her emotions tamped down, but her eyes: they were anything but blank. They were shocked and confused and furious (at the guards? at Crier?) and dark, and when the moonlight hit them at just the right angle they stayed dark and heated and terribly, impossibly human.
What was she doing out here, all alone in the dark?
Crier supposed she could be asked the same question.
“Now, please.”
Crier was escorted back to the palace.
The girl stayed behind, her silhouette melting into the night. Crier looked back at her once and then did not look again.
When the guards delivered her to the physician, Crier paused in the doorway and said, “Wait.”
Crier really should report her.
“The human from the bluffs,” she said. “Get me her name.”
Ayla.
Ayla.
Crier let the name turn over inside her mind, studying every angle and curve of it, as she sat on the window seat of her bedchamber early the next morning, a book in her lap, watching the sun break from the horizon with a flash of gold.
Her hands ached. There were nasty scrapes on her fingertips, the skin peeled raw. Marks from where she had scrabbled desperately at the rocks yesterday, searching for a handhold as she fell. After Crier had been released from the physician, her handmaiden Malwin had drawn her a long, soothing bath; together they had watched the dirt and blood stream off Crier’s body and disappear, hidden by the swirls of soap and steam. The physician had given her a salve that would have fixed the imperfections on her skin just as easily as it closed up the gash on her wrist. Within hours, Crier would be left with unblemished fingertips and one less physical reminder that she had, in fact, fallen. That she had been saved.
She had not yet applied the salve.
Instead, she picked at the wounds, keeping the scrapes open. Tiny beads of blood welled up on her skin like jewels. Automa blood was not so dissimilar to human blood, except that the color was different. Where human blood was red, Automa blood was darker, bluer, almost violet. Crier stared at her own blood now, shining in the light, and let out a breath. Violet. Inhuman. Flawless.
And yet.
The first blush pinks of dawn filtered through the window, coloring the stacks of books and maps upon Crier’s writing desk and canopied bed. There was a silk tapestry on the far wall of her bedchamber. Tiny, interwoven threads of silver and gold shone brightly in the sunlight, standing out against the deep, colorful background.
Unlike most tapestries in the palace, this one was very simple. There were no Automa hunters chasing a wild boar on foot, their human servants trailing behind with the dogs. No depiction of the Iron Heart, no jewel-studded castle, no ships tossed on a blue-silk ocean. There was only a woman. Dark-haired, brown-skinned, beautiful, she stared out at Crier’s bedchamber from her place on the wall. Her dress was s
affron yellow, her mouth madder-root red. Her eyes were stitched with gold.
Kiera.
The first of their Kind.
In the sunlight, her eyes almost glowed.
When the knock came at the door, Crier sat up straighter, her book shifting against her thighs. She shoved it aside.
“Enter,” she said, and Ayla (Ayla) stumbled into her bedchamber.
She looked the same as last night—red uniform, messy dark braid, big brown eyes. She carried the same intensity about her, like heat waves rising from her skin, even though she was just standing in the doorway and not currently in the middle of saving Crier’s life.
Like she was more than a human girl.
Like she was a summer storm made flesh.
Ayla’s arms hung at her sides, her fingers twisted in the hidden folds of her uniform. Crier felt like she had managed to capture a butterfly in her cupped hands, and now it was frantically beating its wings.
“You summoned me?” said Ayla.
Her voice was low, a little raspy.
Perhaps the butterfly was actually a wasp.
Crier had been stung by one, once. She grasped at the memory, suddenly longing to remember how it felt.
“Ayla,” said Crier, the name slipping between her lips. “I summoned you here because I must ask you something.”
Ayla’s chin jutted out. “Whatever my punishment is, I’ll take it with my head up.”
“Punishment?” Crier peered at her. “Come. Walk with me.”
“Walk with you?”
“Yes. Did you misunderstand?”
“No, I understood you,” Ayla said, and then added, “my lady,” like she had only just then remembered that she was supposed to use Crier’s title at all times. And she stood there, holding very still as Crier unfolded herself from the window seat and joined Ayla in the doorway, the space seeming to constrict with a shudder as Crier passed her.
She led her through the winding corridors of the palace, walking in silence a few steps ahead, as was proper, though with every single step she wanted to turn around and look back at Ayla’s face, to try and read her expression, to puzzle out what she was thinking. Ayla’s face was fascinating. Crier had seen her barely twice and she already knew this like she knew the constellations.
It was like the tapestry of Kiera: with the first glance, you saw the deepest colors, her skin and eyebrows and the pink of her mouth. With the second glance, you saw the threads of gold, the spark in her eyes and the tiny scar on her left cheekbone, her perpetual frown—and you were captivated.
Crier’s skin felt too tight.
She led Ayla out of the palace, into the gardens, wet with the last of morning’s dew, and then onto the bluffs. The cool sea air was a relief.
They only stopped walking once they reached the very edge of the bluffs. The exact spot where, last night, Crier had fallen and Ayla had pulled her back up. Crier rubbed at her wrist. There were marks of her fall on the cliff itself: dark spots where Crier had clutched at handfuls of seagrass, jagged broken rock. Eight sets of footprints pressed into the soft mud. Crier, Ayla, and the guards.
“This,” said Crier, “is where I fell.”
A pause. “Yes, my lady.”
“Why did you save me?” Crier asked.
For the first time, Ayla’s eyes flicked up to meet Crier’s, sending a sensation of shock through her. “It’s my job,” she said slowly. “It’s my job to—to serve the house of Sovereign Hesod. That includes you.”
It was exactly the answer she should have given.
It was not at all what Crier had wanted to hear.
“Is there no other reason?” she asked, resisting the urge to lean closer, fearing she might. “No other reason to preserve my life?”
Have you ever observed me before? Have you seen me in the gardens? Did you see something in me?
Can you tell that I am different? Flawed?
Look at me again.
Ayla’s mouth twisted, but she did not look—and this, too, was a relief.
Still: Was there a redness in her cheeks, beneath the brown of her skin, beneath the freckles? Or was that a trick of the morning sun, which had risen like a gasp, like the burst of saltpeter bombs exploding in the night sky, color and fire and light? Crier now felt something burst open inside herself, too. Did you see something in me?
She wanted to ask. She did not.
Instead of an answer, Ayla responded with a question. “Why did you fall?”
What a curious question to ask. Then again, why did she fall? How had it happened?
“I have been occupied lately,” Crier said, putting the words together like layers of starched silk—covering herself with them. “Tomorrow I—I will be officially engaged to Scyre Kinok, there will be a celebration—and three days after that, I will be attending a council meeting for the very first time, as daughter of the sovereign. Hopefully, the first meeting of many. There is so much to do—I was occupied. Preoccupied. I required fresh air, and I walked too close to the edge of the cliff.”
Ayla nodded. And then she looked up, meeting Crier’s gaze dead on. “Why didn’t you report me?”
Ayla reached up and touched a spot on her own chest, over her sternum. Where her forbidden necklace must lie beneath her work shirt, cool against her warm skin. Ayla’s jaw was tight, her chin jutting out again.
Crier swallowed, though she didn’t need to. It was a good question. There were too many questions without answers. Those were the kind Crier hated.
“Because you saved my life,” she replied, but haltingly.
Ayla shook her head. “Your guards arrived quick enough. You would’ve been all right even if I hadn’t been there.”
“That is true,” Crier admitted, because it was. Had always been. She was well protected. “Father Designed me with a chime,” she said, suddenly wishing to convey to Ayla why this mattered, wanting her to understand. “If my heart rate rises too quickly, the device sends out a silent distress signal to the guards. Even we can’t hear it, but they can.”
Now she was speaking just to fill the silence, and so she stopped.
Ayla’s eyebrows arched, ever so slightly. The breeze was a trailing finger, lifting the little tendrils of hair that had come loose from Crier’s plait. Automa hair was thick and glossy, usually worn high up on the head, a braid twisted into a tight crown. Crier felt very exposed all of a sudden, hyperaware of the tiny, wispy curls at her temples and the nape of her neck. She felt improper before Ayla’s gaze. In disarray.
“Is it because I saw you cry?” Ayla said, and then bit down hard on her bottom lip.
“I did not cry,” Crier said stiffly.
“Yes, you did. I saw it. I touched it. Seawater isn’t warm like that.”
They glared at each other a little.
“Fine,” Crier said. “But I am your lady. And you are not the only one who saw something not meant for your eyes last night.” She looked pointedly at the spot where the necklace must be. “Your Kind are not supposed to wear trinkets like that.”
Ayla’s hands jerked as if she was suppressing an impulse to reach for her necklace. “It’s not a trinket.”
“Whatever it is, it is forbidden.” She cocked her head. “Is it true that humans collect shiny objects? Like magpies do?” She’d seen how the black-feathered birds lingered in high branches and swooped down to investigate fallen coins; she’d even heard once about a crow that had nearly taken out a lady’s eye in an attempt to inspect her jeweled tiara. Sometimes, during meals in the great hall, she thought of that story and had to hide a smile behind her sleeve.
“You live in a palace of white marble and gold,” Ayla said incredulously. “There are pearls in your hair. And you’re calling me the magpie?”
“I am a lady,” Crier snapped. “You are not.”
“Well, my necklace isn’t a trinket,” Ayla snapped right back. “It’s not just something shiny. It contains histories.”
“Oh,” said Crier. “Really? Wha
t kind of histories? What do you mean, contains?” She peered at Ayla’s sternum as if she would somehow be able to see the necklace’s mysterious properties. “Is there a coded message inside? Is the necklace a key to a secret library? Is it an ancient relic?”
“No, no, and no,” said Ayla, eyes wide. “No, I . . . well, I don’t actually know.”
“That is disappointing.”
Ayla’s mouth twitched. Bitterness, maybe.
Looking at her, Crier felt dizzy. Off-balance. This close to the cliff’s edge, she was in danger of falling all over again—it was as if the rush of sea below them was calling out to her, beckoning. Ayla’s eyes were so dark.
Crier thought suddenly of the gardens. All that color—kept bright by human servants. Inside the palace, there was color only in her bedchamber, her tapestry of Kiera. Who had woven that tapestry? An Automa? Crier had studied fourteen languages, twenty-nine branches of science and mathematics, one thousand years of history for every formally recognized kingdom and territory, but she had never woven a single thread. Never painted, never written anything but essays. She looked at Ayla, who was looking back. Ayla’s hair was limp in the ocean breeze, sticking to her temples.
“Have you ever taken any lessons?” She hadn’t meant to ask that.
Ayla’s nose scrunched up. She did that a lot. “No. I don’t . . .”
“Don’t what?”
“Read, my lady. I can’t.”
Crier paused, taking that in. She couldn’t imagine not knowing how to read. It seemed somehow very cruel. “Is there anything you wish to learn?”
What she meant was: What do you find interesting? Were there certain words or ideas that made Ayla’s frown smooth out, that made her eyes brighten? Crier wanted to study her like a map. Draw an easy path between all the specific yet scattered points of her.
Ayla shrugged. “Maybe?”
Crier waited.
Ayla looked out over the ocean. “A very long time ago, I knew someone who liked to study nature. The natural laws. Once, I asked him why, and he told me that he liked knowing there’s certain laws in the universe. He said you can’t count on much, can’t trust most things to stay solid, but, you know, there’s always some sort of force at work. Even way out there past the sky, so far away that we can’t even imagine it, things work the same. Everything’s just bodies in orbit, like here. Pushing and pulling. They call it the law of falling, I think.”