by Varsha Ravi
“Nearly every single word in that sentence was incorrect,” Dhaasan said scornfully. “As I said previously, constitution of an infant.”
The ceiling of the cavern rumbled. Stalactites of crimson crystal struck the ground beside Kiran at odd angles, pointing outward from him. As if he were a point of impact, a splatter of blood.
“Calm yourself,” Avya said, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. There was something so terribly ironic about that, Kiran thought. He had gifted him this fire, this decorated wrath.
But when he spoke, his voice was so steady it amused him. As if this anger was something so easily controlled. “If I am not dead, then why am I here?”
“Oh, you’re certainly dead,” Dhaasan answered, tapping a soul. It shimmered and disappeared, sent to the world above. “Gods die too, though our deaths are few and far between, and we always return before long. But your soul is drained. If you returned to the mortal world in this form, you would be little more than a sentient wraith.”
He felt like a sentient wraith, but kept silent. Avya said, “I wanted to let you know of what happened before you left for the river. I hope you do not resent me overmuch.”
His blood felt caustic in his veins, corrosive with fury, and yet he could not resent the god. Only himself, for dooming the city. For condemning them with his last breath.
Kiran nodded at the river. “How long must I spend there?”
Dhaasan grinned, an eerie sliver of white against his cool, dark skin. “As long as you would like to spend, godling. A thousand years or a thousand seconds. It is up to you entirely.” He lifted his shoulders in a faint shrug. “Though you may as well consider the chaos the human world will return to without your presence. They have offered you such beautiful titles, such broad domains.”
An odd, jagged shard of anger cut through him, but he steadied himself, reaching out to press the palm of his hand to the closest stalactite. It seemed to pulse under his fingers, warm to the touch. Quietly, he asked, “What do you mean?”
The god of death ticked off names on the fingers of his free hand while using the other to mediate the souls of the river. “God of wrath, god of fire, god of war—”
The titles sickened him, and yet they fit. They fit the cold, insatiable hunger, the utter lack of feeling that roared through him even now. If this was how gods felt all the time, he thought, it was no wonder they looked to humans for entertainment.
Or perhaps that was just him, borne by flame and tempered by wrath.
“It is your choice,” Avya finished. There had been a moment, when the stalactites had fallen, when his warmth had been subsumed by a kind of thoughtful wariness. But now it had dissipated—there was a sadness in his gaze, a deep sympathy. Yet still no regret. “You may spend as long as you want in the waters of the Asakhi. I will not come to retrieve you. Neither will Dhaasan, nor any of the other gods. My only request is that you return when you are ready. There is work yet to be done.”
He slipped between the stalactites, sending a last wary glance toward the two gods. In his head, he struggled to grasp at the names of the dead. As he approached the waters, he strung them together, a hymn for those he had hurt. Perhaps immortality would give him the chance to atone; perhaps it would simply be a kind of eternal agony.
—Isa, Kita, Lucius, Viro, Suri.
Kiran stepped into the darkness and let it swallow him whole.
28
Lyne
The inner seal wasn’t broken, not yet. Suri could still hear the words in his mouth, soft and sour, twisting his lips sharply. Not yet.
He left, but he returned late that night. Because he had to, because the seal would not let him disappear. He made no attempts at indulging in locks, in doors—she heard the quiet thud of footsteps against the cement of the balcony, and the glass doors screeched open. The footsteps continued down the hallway, lingering outside her door for a moment before returning back.
He had never planned to stay, not ever. And she had always known that, even if she’d sometimes hoped otherwise, but even if she couldn’t change his mind, it didn’t mean she had to keep close and hurt herself even more. She was a creature created by and damned by hope, but she wasn’t self-destructive. She wouldn’t let herself become self-destructive.
The rest of the year passed in a silent, awkward blur—she wasn’t sure whether she was avoiding him or he was avoiding her, or whether they were tripping over themselves pressing their bodies into shadows the moment they realized the room wasn’t empty. She only ever heard the soft thrum of his footsteps in the late night, before the moon fell.
Sometimes, her grandmother would drop by, or a few of her friends. She gave them all the same answer when they saw the empty living room, noticed the stale air. Oh, he’s sick, so he’s sleeping in my bed, and I’m taking the floor. I’ll tell him you dropped by. I’m… busy right now? Let’s hang out another time.
She wouldn’t be able to sell it if she went out with them. Cabin fever was beginning to set in, so much so that she nearly missed school, but she knew it was a fragile sort of thing. It would only take the barest allusion to him for the anger to shine through on her face, and then it would all fall apart, a house of cards or petals.
Are you two fighting? Well. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a good talk—
Suri didn’t want to talk. Suri wanted to forget every kind thing he had ever done and every kind thing he had ever been, until she could let him go without it searing hard, caustic lines into her skin and bones. It was cowardice, but there were no gods left to judge her for it and deem her soul unworthy.
She threw herself into searching for the sigil. It was another kind of insanity—she hadn’t ever been able to find it, and neither had Kiran—but it felt fitting that this was what she would return to, in the midst of all of this. To something that would never yield answers, slamming her body against a locked door just to feel the edge of blood.
Two days before the new year broke, she found something on one of the forums. A single post, with a photo of the symbol and a link. She clicked on it and waited, hollow.
This site can’t be reached, her laptop told her. The server’s IP address could not be found.
It didn’t surprise her all that much, the clear white screen, the heavy black text politely informing her she was destroying herself looking for things that wouldn’t exist and people that wouldn’t stay.
Give it up, a voice whispered, low and quiet in the back of her head. Strangely, it was her own, if dispirited and desolate. It would not let her go. Give it up.
So she did. There was no point in living a life founded on crumbling, mossy gravestones. The mystery still allured her, even now, but she was tired of chasing it. She was tired of burning scarred flesh on prayer flames. She was tired.
She shut the laptop, and it felt a little like a betrayal, a rueful hesitation running through her. This can’t be the end. It was. There had never been anything to find, after all. She was digging through dry, black soil to find smooth bedrock. No gold, no treasure, no magic underneath. Only stone and magma.
The next morning, her eyes snapped open suddenly, winter sunlight casting the entire room in shades of blue. Wariness threaded through her like dread—part of her felt like something would’ve changed, should’ve changed as a result of her decision. But nothing had. It was all the same life, the same silence. In the end, it didn’t matter.
The realization washed the trepidation from her heart, but when she left her room to find breakfast, the living room was empty. He’d already left or he’d never returned; there was no way to know which one.
She felt shivery with fatigue. She poured a cup of orange juice, drained it, and went right back to bed. Maybe, all this time she had been the one who’d gotten sick, and she’d never noticed.
Suri awoke to the sound of someone breaking down her door. Choppy, coarse sounds, destruction in a single note. She was out of her bed before she had the chance to examine the possibility of who it was.
Instinctually, she knew it wasn’t Kiran—if he’d wanted to enter without a trace, he would have. This was either a thief or an unwanted visitor.
She opened the door to find Miya leaned against the edge of the stairwell, Aza perched on the rail with her collar up. Give it up—she could try all she wanted, but suspicion would always be carved into her bones.
“Get out of my house, Santana,” she said, supporting herself against the doorjamb.
Miya’s dark eyebrows flicked upward, scornful and concerned. She slipped past Suri into the apartment, taking a seat on the couch and crossing her legs. “Where the hell have you been? It’s New Year’s Eve and you look like a pigeon crapped on your will to live.”
She was clad in a slippery, diaphanous dress that came down to the middle of her thighs, with tall black boots. It was a party outfit, and Suri, drenched as she was in pigeon shit and nihilism, felt her heart sink. “I’m—sick. I can’t go out.”
“Did he get you sick?” she asked, leaning forward. Her dark eyes shone. “You don’t look feverish.”
“What do I look like?”
“Like you need a drink,” she said, lips twisting in a grin. Suri glared at her, but her smile was impenetrable, a mask of rouge and glitter.
Aza slid off the rail and followed her in, gently shutting the door behind her. She stared up at Suri for a moment, pinching her cheeks and stretching them outward before huffing and letting go. “You’re not eating enough. Maybe you are sick.”
“Not anymore,” she assured her, the words tasting stale and strange in her mouth. “You sound like my grandmother.”
“She’s smart,” Aza pointed out, leaning over the back of the armchair. “The party’s across town—if we want to get there in time, we should leave soon.”
Suri bit back a groan. “I told you, I’m not coming. I have plans.”
“What plans?” Miya challenged, eyes narrowed. “Sleeping through the new year?”
“I’m allowed to rest.”
“’Rest’ ended several days ago,” she said, sauntering toward the hallway. “Now, you’re just moping.”
“Over what?” She had never told them about her conversation with Kiran, and she didn’t plan to. There was no way to simplify it without taking every single salient detail out of the issue.
Miya shrugged over her shoulder. “Hell if I know. I’d ask, but I know you’ll just lie. Wouldn’t want to scare you off.”
Reluctantly, she followed her and Aza into the mess of her bedroom. Miya let out a melodramatic moan at the state of it—clothes hung over furniture, empty water bottles on the windowsill, rumpled covers—and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “How am I going to dress you from this? I can’t even tell where your clothes are supposed to be.”
“You’ve performed stranger miracles,” Suri said, taking a seat on the edge of the mattress and curling her feet into the carpet. She felt threadbare, ephemeral. “Do I really have to come?”
Aza held her gaze. “Do you really not want to?”
Did she? Even now, she wasn’t sure. At the very least, it was a change of scenery. She could feel the walls of the apartment beginning to press in around her, relentless and cruel. Suri inclined her head.
Miya’s mouth curled in triumph, but she couldn’t be sure about whether it was due to her acquiescence or the fact that she’d uncovered the closet door. “Finally. Now we’re talking.”
Casually, she updated her on what she’d missed while cooped up in the apartment. Rifling through the glittering, dark clothes, Miya explained how Ellis’s moods had stabilized of late. Shyly, he’d let them know that Annabel was improving rapidly—even though she still spent the majority of the day sleeping, when she was awake, she was willing to talk to him, willing to eat and laugh. It was a startling transformation, according to him.
Suri couldn’t hear it without remembering how it had come about. The memory burned through her, even now. Miya tossed something at her, and she startled, catching it late. It nearly slid through her hands as she held it up to the light, glancing over at herself in the mirror. A satin camisole, rose gold and shining in the low light. She couldn’t remember when she’d bought it, but she suspected Miya had roped her into the decision.
“This, too,” the girl added, handing her a black leather miniskirt and a matching jacket. Her smile was sharp and warm. “Don’t look at me like that. It’ll look good on you.”
She didn’t look away. “This feels like a trap. It’s thirty degrees outside.”
Aza snapped her gum, but didn’t disagree. “Wear it with the jacket and spare yourself. It’s better than arguing with her.”
It was, and they both knew it. Arguing with Miya was like lighting a fire in a hurricane—maybe you’d keep it burning for a bit, but you’d always end up hurting yourself more than the rain and wind ever could. The girl in question beamed at them both in turn, and Suri reluctantly went to wash her face and change into the clothes.
The party was hosted on the far side of town, either by a senior or an alumnus. She suspected there would be people like her there, too—dragged there by friends, utterly unfamiliar with the host, disinterested in the societal institution of New Year’s Eve but unwilling to spend the night on their couches alone.
Miya knocked at the door, and it opened moments later, revealing neon noise she could feel in her bones and the smell of sugar and alcohol. Suri’s stomach turned, but she followed them inside reluctantly. Aza leaned in close and whispered, “Do you want a drink?”
She nodded, scanning the crowd for anybody she recognized. In the dim light, the faces were shadowed, slipping away from her like skin under oil. Her gaze caught, knotted on a group at the far wall, near the hallway. She could feel her mouth drop open, a visceral response. “Fuck—you two planned this, didn’t you?”
“You never asked,” Miya pointed out smugly, her voice nearly drowned out by the music. “If you’d asked where the boys had gone, maybe I would’ve told you.”
“I’m leaving,” she said, ignoring another shove from the crowd, using it as momentum and leaning back toward the door. Terror and sharp, avoidant displeasure felt hot in her veins. “I’m going home.”
“Well,” Aza said under her breath, audible only because she was so close. “That answers the question of whether you two are fighting.”
Suri turned her cold gaze onto her, and the other girl shifted uncomfortably under it. “How did you even know? I never told you and he—” she waved a hand, dismissive and unwilling to talk about him, even in vague terms. “He wasn’t around.”
“Exactly,” Miya cut in, leaning against the doorjamb. A couple came in, arms slung over one another, and walked around her. She barely registered their presence. “You two are best friends, attached at the hip. I’ve never seen you without one another for more than a couple of hours, classes barred. And suddenly, he’s nowhere to be seen? Sick? Like disease could pull one over his eyes. The apartment doesn’t even smell like incense smoke anymore, so I know he hasn’t been with you.”
Attached at the hip. The sentiment sent a low, warm throb through her before she realized the only reason they ever spent so much time around one another was because the sankhili wouldn’t let him leave. In the early days, it had hurt if they were in separate rooms. The notion of them being friends was a casual lie of his to explain his presence. There was nothing maudlin about it—their relationship had always been something of reason, of needs before desires. Either he stays with me, or we move back into the shop, so I guess I’ll put up with him.
“We’re not fighting,” she said reflexively.
Aza and Miya traded amused glances. “Really,” the latter said. “Well then, why don’t you go over there and say hi?”
She gave them the coldest, sharpest glare she could manage, but they didn’t budge under the weight of it. She’d learned it from them, after all. “We’re not fighting, it’s just that—I don’t want to talk about this right now. How did you even get him to come?”
Parties didn’t seem like his scene, at least not these kinds of parties. The chaos of it seemed like something he might enjoy, but not the crude glamor, the artifice and shine. He was more likely to observe it from a rooftop a few blocks away, mocking it in that mild, faintly warm tone of his while she tuned his words out.
Rotted with desire. She felt the echo of it, again and again. How she wished she could let go of this love, scrape it off her heart with knives and acid.
Aza shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t even know if Ellis and Dai could convince him. Miya said it was above their pay grade. But they must’ve broken through, since he’s here, and you’re losing your shit. Careful, fish tank.”
Suri glanced to the side, and removed her elbow from where it was leaned against the side of the tank, slowly applying pressure and pushing outwards. “Fine. Fine. You got us both here. So what? What’s the big plan? Were you just going to shove us in an empty bedroom and lock it until we made up? He’d just climb out the window.”
“Probably,” Miya agreed, but her indomitable smile was beginning to fade. “Listen, we didn’t think this through that much—”
“Do you ever?”
“And,” she continued, frowning at her, “I don’t really know what’s going down between you two, so… Sorry for meddling. If you want to go home, you can. We won’t stop you.”
Aza held out a plastic cup and she grudgingly took it, making a face at the flavor. They both looked faintly apologetic, a novelty.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said firmly, and realized it was true. Their expressions brightened slightly, as if they were afraid to be obvious about it. “But. I don’t want to talk to him, not now. And I’m still angry with all of you.”
“Fair,” Aza conceded. “I’ll go over and talk to Dai—so we can try and keep you apart. Did—” she hesitated, then shook her head and continued, “Did he hurt you? Should we kick his ass?”