In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  “What?” she asks. It takes her two tries. She has to moisten her lips. Her sense of wonder wars with the faint smells of sweat and urine that pervade the stale air. “There was only one door.” Her own words are sugared lye on her tongue—indeterminate as smog.

  “One and a half. This is the between.” Santiago gestures, palm up, a broad sweep that encompasses the expanse of the shadowed hall. “The space in the walls. Or what’s left of it.” He turns the wave into a pointing finger, indicating the way forward. “There.”

  Verity blinks, and thinks that perhaps one light is different from the others—a steadier glow, whiter, like the guiding twinkle of a distant star. “There,” she echoes; her fingers tighten in the dog’s fur. Santiago casts her a quick glance, but he doesn’t touch her as they move forward. Ouro, on the other hand, stays close.

  The hall remains inconveniently narrow. Between, she thinks, and tries to rectify the air she breathes with the sensation of brick dust weighting her lungs. As they pick their way forward, careful in the dark, Verity sees irregular shapes resolve into bits of piled furniture: an old wooden table, a pair of chairs, a rolled-up carpet. She sneezes and thinks of corner garage sales and dusty storage units. Twice, she has to press against the wall to slide by. The dog guides her.

  She registers the low hum of voices and the impression of shadows up ahead, human forms vanishing just at the edges of lantern light. The lanterns themselves are scattered—some hang from sconces, while others dangle from iron stands. They are spaced irregularly, at odd angles. Verity, Santiago, and the dog walk a straight path down the long hall, picking past piles of abandoned furniture, breathing dust, guided by guttering candles and the soft pale glow in the beckoning distance. Their footsteps make little sound—Ouro is silent, as always—and Verity swallows back the taste of desiccation and the sensation of scales drying and cracking in the back of her throat. She tugs at her scarf, pulling it looser. No one approaches them.

  Eventually, they pass a set of five chairs piled haphazardly, one on top of the other, wooden legs disjointed. Beyond this makeshift blockade, an empty area seems suddenly spacious, thick candles burning on stands in a loose ring around a well-swept floor. People are standing here, clustered in little groups; Verity doesn’t know what she was expecting, exactly, but they are just people. She sees jeans and t-shirts, and worn running shoes that could be her own. A boy with a spiked mohawk sits cross-legged next to an older woman whose long brown hair is in hundreds of matted braids. They are talking quietly. A bald man in a threadbare suit is reading a paperback book, squinting at the ragged pages; in the soft light cast from above, his head is pale as an egg.

  A man in a familiar ball cap leans against the wall, arms folded. He is glaring at Verity, and it takes her a moment to recognize him from the convenience store. He has no gun in his hand this time. When she shivers, the dog presses closer against her leg.

  Someone giggles. With a start, Verity realizes there are children in the hall; a small clay top spins into view. A young girl and a young boy are chasing it. Neither is older than four. The girl’s hair is in two blonde pigtails, held with yellow ribbons. The boy’s shirt sports a cartoon bear. They hold hands at the edge of the light, and their laughter paints the stillness with glittering shards.

  The bright glow is just ahead, and Verity looks there last, because she suspects the brilliance may blind her. The whiteness is not as sharp as she had thought, however; it resolves into a pale boy sprawled across a short, broken-down couch in an unfortunate shade of orange and brown plaid. Its cushions are worn and misshapen.

  Verity thinks the boy is dying.

  He is young, but not a child; he has the gangliness of adolescence and a frame like paper stretched over wire. He wears a white shirt and blue jeans. There is light under his skin; it spills from him in a soft, steady glow that illuminates his face and hands. His eyes glitter blue, lit from within by hidden constellations that shine through the thinness of his half-lowered lids. He is looking at nothing in particular. His hands are long-fingered and loose. Behind him, dark wings spread from his shoulders, pressed awkwardly into the couch and splayed raggedly across faded cushions.

  Ouro leaves Verity’s side and leaps gracefully up onto the couch, nosing at the boy.

  The boy is holding a beer bottle in his right hand. He lifts it out of the way without protest, then sips at it and says, “You’re back.” A sleepy tenor, stretched thin. “So she’s the one? Hi there.”

  Verity feels tears, shocking and unbidden, welling in the corners of her eyes. She wants to throw herself down in front of the boy. She wants to take his hand and run her fingers through his hair. She does neither of those things—she would never; she only blinks the moisture from her lashes—but the effort trembles from her spine to the tips of her fingers.

  There is a pause, during which Verity realizes that a small group of the people they’ve passed has assembled behind her and Santiago and the dog. Their presence is a static tingle between her shoulder blades. Their silence is reverent. She drops her gaze to the floor, and the last drift of the boy’s words. “Hi,” she says, uncertainly.

  “Hi,” repeats the boy unnecessarily. “Thanks for coming. This is all pretty weird. I didn’t even know she could write.”

  Verity must look blank, because the boy adds to Santiago, “You didn’t tell her.” It’s not a question, though concern brushes the edges of his tone. His white lashes lower over the glitter of his gaze, a slow blink, then lift again. The light he casts illuminates the couch cushions, limning his skeletal fingers in an even paler white. The edges of his feathers gleam a little. Nothing of his halo touches Ouroboros, who remains an enigma of solid black.

  The dog lowers an ear and Santiago shrugs one shoulder. “She came with Ouro. But no, it wasn’t my most convincing argument.” Even the magician speaks more gently to the boy; there’s deference in the set of his jaw. Verity turns her head, casting a quick look toward his face, and he quirks the corner of his lips in what might be apology. It tastes like rosemary and the warm embers of a fire. He picks up a lantern stand, holding it like a staff, and swings it to the side.

  The lantern sways, casting its dim glow across the block letters that have been crudely smeared across the wall. VERITY, they spell, where they haven’t begun to drip down in clotting rivulets. Verity had thought the smell of blood was the boy and the boy’s incandescent decay; she realizes she was wrong.

  “Like I said,” notes the boy, not unkindly. “It’s a new one on me.” He takes a pull of his beer and tilts his head, studying Verity with dazed, amiable curiosity. He sits slumped. His pale hair falls tangled in his eyes; she wants, again, to brush it aside, and doesn’t. When he shifts on the couch, the lines of his wings pull behind him, long shapes with strange bones beneath. “What are we doing with you, then?”

  Santiago continues to stand, holding the lantern stand quite still so the light can fall against the smeared wall. Verity only knows he is looking at her because the dog turns its head to do the same, golden eyes impassive. Behind her, the small group whispers.

  She divides her attention between the boy’s blue eyes and the sea-glass glimmer of his words, sliding along the worn floorboards. “I don’t know,” she says, honestly, and hears her own voice waver. “I want to ask you about this—about spaces between walls. About your wings. About a dog being a snake. But also, um … whose blood is that?”

  The boy’s smile is bright but sad—the last flutter of a butterfly in winter. “Jihan’s. So we guessed maybe she meant it.” He turns his head, then, and calls to the blackness behind him, where the hall extends well past the fall of any tiny flame. “Hey! Your friend’s here.”

  There are no footsteps.

  The lamplight glimmers first on a long, thin kitchen knife, and then on the tall figure of the woman who emerges from the shadows. At first, Verity can’t tell the difference between the woman and the knife she holds; both are cold, spare, precisely honed. The woman’s eyes are a purer
steel, lacking the old blade’s spots of rust. Her hair falls in a single grey braid down her right shoulder, but her face is unlined. Her skin is dusky, her nose aquiline and sharp, though not quite straight; it might have been broken once. She wears a pale lavender cardigan, half-buttoned and too large; a grey shirt; a pair of torn jeans. One of her sneakers is untied. She doesn’t appear to care.

  The boy’s fingers are tight around his bottle. Verity registers the sudden silence behind her, and the way the dog has gone stiff.

  She stands quite motionless, and she tries her best to look at the woman who walks like a sword, but she cannot focus past the sense of burning coals scorching her spine, or the sweep of Ouroboros as it slides down off the couch cushions and crosses the floor to return to her side. She touches the dog’s head and it ignores her, crouching slightly on its front paws as it stares up at the approaching woman.

  Santiago sets the lantern stand down on the floor. It makes a small scraping sound, startling in the stillness. The glowing boy drinks his beer, slouching deeper into the couch as his wings stretch and fold awkwardly across furniture that wasn’t meant to fit them. He is the only one not watching the woman as she passes; he is studying Verity, and stars glitter in his eyes.

  Verity says, “Hi,” again, because that seems appropriate. She adds, helpfully, “I’m Verity,” and she gestures toward the smears on the wall with one uncertain hand. She hears her own tone turn up a little at the end, like a question, and thinks Jacob would poke fun (can hear him ask, Are you?).

  It occurs to her that the strange woman is very close.

  The boy’s wings rustle as he leans forward to set the bottle down, struggling to rise. “Hey now, what are you doing with—”

  He cuts off with a gasp, and Verity would look to see why, but there’s a stinging pressure above her hip and she’s staring straight into a pair of blank steel eyes. The woman’s irises are reflective as a cracked mirror. Verity sees her own face pale and shocked, a thousand times repeated. In the broken gaps she sees something more, something cavernous and desperate, and for that yawning chasm, she has no words.

  Jihan, she thinks. And, She’s afraid most of all.

  Fire twists in her gut; her hands close reflexively around the woman’s, just where Jihan still grips the hilt of the knife that has slid seamlessly into the flesh between Verity’s lowest ribs. She feels smooth skin, iron fingers, and the sticky heat of her own blood. She is frozen. Jihan’s expression is stone.

  They do not breathe.

  Time resumes. Someone is yelling.

  “It’s okay,” says Verity softly—she doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t feel like a lie. “It’s just a knife.” She doesn’t know why she says that, either.

  Jihan’s grey brows twitch together in the moment before she steps back. Verity’s hands clench around the knife’s wooden hilt, and Jihan turns away, her smooth braid draping down like a whip as she walks soundlessly back into the dark.

  Verity wonders if this blade in her organs should hurt more, but abruptly it does. She tries to gulp a breath and chokes on blood. The blood tastes of copper and salt but rings in her ears like a gong, and she cannot see at all because her late-flowering fear is blooming like poppies, red petals around the lantern lights.

  She would fall, but there are arms around her—the scent of coal and lilac. It’s a garden in a mine shaft.

  She thinks Santiago is swearing.

  The boy is there, then, mouthing something she can’t hear; his eyes are a furious sapphire. The light that shines from within him turns his flesh to something alien and glows incandescent through the thin white fabric of his shirt. At his shoulders, the black wings spread slow and broad to block the light.

  He is perfect. Verity would be stunned if she were not trying very hard to live.

  The angel touches her, and the world goes white.

  [IMAGE: Jihan and Verity, in the dark. They are close together, each leaning into the other, and Jihan is driving a knife between Verity’s lower ribs. Verity is shocked. Jihan is expressionless. They are staring into each other’s eyes.]

  youre leaving it there?

  Why?

  its a break stop cliffhanger but i didnt die, anyone reading knows i didnt die its obvious from the way you started

  It seemed like an appropriately dramatic break.

  you should finish

  All right, but I know part of it’s not accurate, because you’ve never said.

  none of its right the more you add the harder it is to read, words on words

  What did you see when she looked at you?

  fear hope a vicious sorrow nothing

  everything

  sous ratûre

  You are a very irritating person.

  Verity doesn’t die.

  She expects to; there is a long period where she loses track of time. The boy’s palm rests just in the hollow beneath her throat, and his touch is effervescent—a light that brings with it a soothing warmth that goes beyond the flesh. He makes Verity think of safety and home and the feeling she gets when she wakes in the night and can hear Jacob breathing beside her. The boy is sunbeams; he is the scent and taste of honey, and each of these sensations is simple and perfectly pure.

  He says things, but Verity doesn’t remember later what they were. She remembers that his smile was broken and sweet. He crouches with his hand on her skin and his wings spread wide, sheltering them both in a cloak of jagged feathers. Some of the feathers are snapped short, or crooked; Verity is very close, so she looks at those wings for a long while. They are not completely black; they shine green and purple in the light, a sheen like oil or the feathers of a mallard duck. They flex as the boy keeps his balance.

  He knits things back together inside her using nothing but his fingertips at the base of her throat, his glow spilling quiet joy. She only lies there, basking, while time passes and feathers spread for her amusement.

  When he lifts his hand away, she could weep.

  He leaves her with an indescribable clarity. Verity and the boy look at each other, and she sees the lights die in his eyes, leaving a colour like the night sky just past the horizon. The absence of his touch leaves her chilled, and she reaches for him, but he is already folding, dark wings and pale arms crumpling like crushed origami.

  Over his shoulder, she sees the steel cold eyes of the woman Jihan, and Jihan’s arms—sleeved in lumpy violet yarn—wrap around the boy’s chest, a trap snapping shut from behind. For an instant, Verity expects the other woman will drag the boy away as though she is a cat with a toy or a dead mouse, but Jihan lifts him carefully enough, for all that her face is an empty mirror. The boy is slack, his eyes unseeing, when the woman carries him into the darkness. She doesn’t turn her back. The last Verity sees is the gleam of her dispassionate gaze.

  Verity takes a breath, and the last touch of the boy’s purity has left her wonderfully, precisely at peace. It is the first time in her life that the world is not shouting at her; it takes her a moment to adjust to stillness as clear as a raindrop. She props herself on her elbows and knows without turning that there are exactly nine people clustered at the edges of the light behind her—she knows that the light is light, without any muddle of sound or taste, and she knows that the two children from before are huddled and frightened.

  She is between walls. It is and is not possible.

  She lies with her shirt covered in blood and no gash in her skin. The world around her hangs in perfect balance.

  She reaches one hand to the side and buries her fingers in the dog’s fur.

  “Sorry about that,” says Santiago. He is sitting on Ouro’s other side, his elbow crooked around his upraised knee. Verity doesn’t quite look at him; she savours her peace while she has it. She touches her free hand to her sticky, stiff shirt, and wiggles the fingers through the gash in the torn cotton.

  “She would have killed me,” she says. She is enchanted by the easy simplicity of her own voice.

  “Apparently.”


  “Why?”

  Frustration marks the line of Santiago’s shoulders and the way he gestures—sharply, palm up. Verity suspects the stains on his hands would be blood in better lighting. “Who knows? Like the kid said, we didn’t even know she could write.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  “She won’t hurt him.”

  Something vibrates in his tone, a hint of crimson that creeps back into the world as the first of the boy’s perfection fades. It makes Verity sigh. “There are different kinds of hurt,” she says. She realizes her hand is still resting on the dog, and takes it back, adding, “Sorry.” Ouro’s ears perk forward, yellow eyes watching.

  Verity stands, and Santiago moves with her. The small crowd behind has melted away by the time she turns, though she catches the glitter of a child’s gaze by lamplight. “My jacket,” she says, but the magician is shaking his head.

  “It’s a mess.”

  “Oh.” Verity folds her arms, gripping her elbows, and she looks at the floor, where the spreading stain of her own life has dried now. The world is still mostly clear, and without echoes in her ears or on her skin she can trace the edges of each smear that has soaked into the scuffed wood.

  She should say something—what or how or even how long—but ‘why’ and ‘where’ have accomplished very little, and there are traces of vibrant fog creeping back at the edges of her senses. She closes her eyes instead.

  Santiago says, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” answers Verity, with wonder and regret. “But it won’t last.” Even the sound of her own words is new to her—without colour, not scraping at the inside of her throat. She rubs her palm across the back of her neck, feeling the brush of her hair.

  “I’ll take you home.” Santiago’s tone is cool, though Verity thinks there’s a hint of apology there. She feels the dog nudge against her thigh. When she looks at the hall again, she sees lamplight and the empty couch. The boy’s abandoned bottle is sitting on the floor.