by Elliot Wake
Footsteps thumped in the hall. More voices.
“There’s no time for this,” Cressida said. “Untie me.”
“No.” I hauled her to her feet. “You’re coming with us.”
When I tugged, she resisted.
“You can’t leave this unfinished,” she said.
We both looked at the bleeding man.
I handed Cress off to Blythe. Knelt on the bed, took Crito’s jaw in my hand. From the hall, someone called, “The police are on their way.”
Weight hurled at the door. They were trying to break it down.
“Wake up, fuckboy.” I shook Crito till his eyes opened. On his shoulder was a wet red welt, fragrantly sweet. Burnt goose down and gunpowder tinged the air bitter. “Look at me.”
His eyes focused.
In the darkness, with his face bloodied and taped and distorted by fear, I hadn’t realized what I’d been seeing.
I knew him.
My body went cold. We stared at each other and in horror I waited for him to recognize me, but his fear remained solid, unwavering.
My mask, my voice. The stubble shading my jaw.
Of course. He wouldn’t know me like this.
I felt Cress’s gaze and swallowed. “You got lucky tonight.” The words grated from my throat, but in my mind I heard my old self narrating in her thin, fluting voice. “Time to make some life changes, buddy. You know what I’m talking about. If I ever see your face again, I’ll put a bullet in it. Clear?”
Another shake, for good measure. He groaned. It might’ve been yes.
A splintery crash from the front room.
“Cane, now,” Blythe called from the window.
Gauzy light drifted through the glass, setting the raindrops aglitter like sequins. I ducked beneath the sash as the door banged open behind me.
We fled down the fire escape, skidding on slick iron. Reached the alley just as police sirens sounded. Red and blue lights raced over rain-bright asphalt like jags of electricity. We dragged Cress between us and she fought and we stumbled and it kept coming back in flashes: The sting of her bullets piercing the air. Plumes of pale fire. The wet sound of blood slapping the wall.
She tried to kill him.
A man I knew. One I’d have killed to forget.
Rain needled the top of my head, stitching a chill all the way down my spine.
Ellis had the SUV running. We scrambled inside as the crunch of cruiser doors echoed, hustled Cress into the backseat between us. Ellis pumped the gas and drove with controlled franticness, and we all held our breath, staring through a veil of neon haze and falling diamonds, waiting for the sirens to catch up. They never did. We hit every green on the way back to Umbra, but all I saw was red.
———
The Little Wolf was waiting.
As we walked into the meeting chamber, her expression went from studiously blank—Laney’s version of furious—to bewildered. She touched Blythe’s mouth. Blood transferred to her fingertips.
“Please tell your thug to unhand me,” Cress said dryly.
Laney blinked. “Untie her, Ren.”
I slid my knife against Cress’s wrist and paused, touching cold carbon to her skin. Then I cut her loose.
If she made a wrong move, she’d regret it.
Laney regarded us each in turn and settled on me. Those big eyes were luminously blue, teal marbled with aqua, little schisms of sea light. They seemed innocent, artless, but she always stared too long until you felt your layers peeling, your tendernesses rising to the surface. She left you feeling soft and raw, exposed. Laney said she learned that look from her mother.
Ordinarily I would’ve thrown myself at her feet and begged for mercy. Now I faced her with reserve, picturing Crito’s face.
“I can explain,” Ellis began.
“Just tell me: Is Crito dead?”
“No,” Cress said, elongating the vowel. “But he is bleeding quite profusely, so it’s certainly a possibility.”
Ellis fidgeted. “This is all my fault. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s my fault,” Blythe said.
I said nothing.
Cressida raised her eyebrows, amused.
“I don’t care whose fault it is,” Laney said. “I care that you went behind my back. All three of you.”
Blythe crossed her arms. “Technically, you went behind our backs. Trusting an outsider, sending her out alone—”
“Blythe,” Armin said sharply.
“What? I’m saying what we’re all thinking. Right?” Blythe cocked her chin at Cress and I. “You sent her when you should have sent him.”
Laney’s mouth tightened. “He was drunk.”
“Off his arse,” Cress said cheerfully.
“But he’s one of us,” Blythe said. “And he deserved to be a part of it. Drunk or not.”
I suddenly had the uncanny sense that two conversations were occurring: one I understood, and one lying beneath that, full of allusions and riddles.
“What are you—” I began.
“Don’t.” Laney stared stonily at Blythe. “Don’t question me, either of you. That’s not how this works. I run the show.”
“You deliberately withheld information from him.”
“I did what needed to be done to protect us all, Blythe.”
“You’re keeping secrets from us. From your friends.”
“For good reason. Because otherwise you’ll fly off the handle and do something stupid, like you did tonight.”
“Oh, sure. Blame it on good old manic Blythe, and hothead Ren, and tagalong Ellis.”
Ellis winced. Blythe could be brutally blunt, especially when pissed.
I shifted my weight and Laney looked at me, and I almost said, So when were you going to tell me I know Crito? That you’re going after someone from my past?
But something stayed my tongue. Some inarticulable misgiving. The air pulled taut around me, thickening like a web.
He deserved to be a part of it.
Armin spread his hands. “Let’s not character-assassinate each other, okay? Laney knows what she’s doing. Tonight was our window of opportunity. We had to take action.”
“Besides,” Cress said crisply, “I needn’t have shot him if you bumbling twits hadn’t cocked the whole thing up. You weren’t supposed to be there.”
My jaw tensed. “If you hadn’t tried so hard to prove you’re better than me, it might’ve gone smoother.”
“If you weren’t so butthurt about losing to a girl, perhaps it might have.”
“I didn’t lose. And it makes no difference that you’re a girl.”
“You certainly seem to resent the comparison.”
“Stop putting words in my mouth.”
Cress merely gave me that cool, sardonic look.
Hothead Ren indeed. I made myself unclench my fists.
No comment from Laney, but her expression silenced us. A bar ran along the back of the room and Blythe stomped over and sifted through bottles, tossing empties. Shards burst across the floor, amber, tourmaline, crystal, a jagged jewel puzzle. Eventually I realized she didn’t want a drink but simply to break stuff. No one stopped her. That was Blythe: her emotions manifested physically, whirling around her like debris in a cyclone.
“Where does this leave us?” I said.
Armin answered calmly over the shattering glass. “It depends. Gunshot wounds have to be reported to the police. He might seek discreet care to stay off their radar. Last thing he wants is police attention.”
“So we lay low,” I said. “See how it plays out.”
Laney wrapped her small hands around a wooden chair. “And tell all the people we’ve promised to help that we can’t help them now.”
She stood very still for a moment. Then she flipped the chair over.
Everyone froze. Blythe clutched a bottle in her fist, light skittering over it as she trembled.
“This is on you,” Laney said, not looking at anyone. “You tell them that we can’t help. Tha
t we got their hopes up for nothing. That we lied to them.”
If that misgiving hadn’t taken root in me, I would’ve stayed silent. Cowed.
But now I said, “You lied to me.”
Her head swiveled slowly.
“You knew,” I said, trying to steel my voice. “You knew that I knew Crito.”
The others watched us, tense.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Laney?”
“Why do you think?” No rise in her tone. Totally calm. “Because I didn’t want you to worry. Not until I knew what he was up to.”
“So you sent this—this outsider after him.” Blythe’s word fit well. “You didn’t trust me to handle him.”
“I didn’t trust you not to make it personal. I didn’t trust you not to get emotional. Like you are right now.”
Her words stung like a slap.
“I’m not emotional,” I said, my voice quavering.
Perfect.
Laney shrugged. “This is what I mean. I’m sorry, Ren, but you’re off the Crito case. Cressida will take your place.”
“Laney—”
“Take some time to unwind. Clear your head.”
I watched her walk to the door. The air in her wake seemed to scintillate with cold. Before she left she paused, glancing back at me.
“And tell your roommate to be careful. Because you woke a sleeping dog. Now he’s hurt, and pissed off. And he’ll want blood.”
—3—
It was dawn by the time I got home. Soft lilac shadow filled the apartment, vines of sunlight curling through the pastel gloom as the city woke. Ingrid’s cat wove infinity symbols around my feet.
I washed the dishes in the sink. Took out the garbage. Fed the cat. Kept moving, moving. There was a rabid energy in me, an anxiety I hadn’t felt in ages. It wasn’t only the fact that I had twelve dollars in my bank account and owed seven hundred for this month’s rent. It wasn’t that I started recording a vlog and stopped it three, four times before finally giving up. It wasn’t that I’d fucked up Laney’s plans, got myself put on involuntary hiatus from Black Iris.
It was him.
That face from my past. A link to all I’d left behind.
To the girl I was.
I stood in the living room and stared at a painting hanging in a pool of pale sun. Vada and I used to geek out over myths, and one time I told her the legend of Caeneus. Weeks later I came home to a canvas wrapped in brown paper leaning against the front door. The note read For when it’s hard to keep your head above water. My hands shook as they tore the wrapping. In the painting a boy stood at the edge of the ocean, his back to a towering tsunami wave. Water slammed against him and sprayed outward in a halo of foam and salt, but he held strong. In the froth above him was a face, Poseidon screaming, dissolving, powerless. I cried for the first time in a year on T.
She’d titled it He’s Still Breathing.
The painting blurred.
Sunlight filled my tears, blinded me with liquid gold. Morning. Time for my daily dose.
I fumbled a packet of T gel out of the medicine cabinet, stripped my shirt off. Stared at the man in the mirror. Sometimes I still saw her—the girl I’d been born from, the body I broke through like a chrysalis. At my lowest, in my ugliest moments of sorrow and fear, she’d bleed through and I’d see the skinny chest crammed into a binder, the smooth cheeks flocked with fuzz. Not a girl. Barely a boy. Mostly a child, full of terror.
Still there, beneath the hard muscle and coarse skin. Still haunting me.
I unzipped my jeans. Cupped the bulge in my boxer briefs.
After all this time, part of me was still her. Part of me could still be hurt the way men hurt women.
You mean you never put it in? Crito had said. IRL, his name was Jay. I was standing in a hallway, hidden, listening to him talk. Her blowjob is that good, huh?
So?
So I’m just saying, it’s kind of gay. All she does is suck your dick and jerk you off. That’s so faggy.
Shut up, Jay.
C’mon, man. Look at her. She looks like a dude. You’re fucking a dude.
I said shut the hell up.
It always came down to this. This fucking broken part of me.
I sank to the edge of the bathtub. Water, all over my face. Couldn’t breathe.
“Hey, you.”
A hand fell on my shoulder.
Ingrid, my roommate. Touching me. Touching the wet testosterone gel on my shoulder.
I shoved her away, too hard. Then I was on my feet, turning the tap to hot. “Wash it off. Immediately.”
Her arm rose, as if she feared I’d hit her.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Inge? Wash it off.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I made myself inhale, exhale, counting each. “Please rinse it off before it’s absorbed. It’s highly potent. You don’t want it in you.”
“I know. But you’re kind of freaking me the fuck out. Will you calm down?”
I gave her space at the sink and an imploring look. She eyed me strangely.
“Uh, dude.”
My fucking pants, halfway down my thighs.
I zipped up as she washed the gel off.
“What is going on?” she said, toweling her hands. “Were you crying?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened? You woke me up with all that noise.”
“Sorry. Anxiety cleaning.”
Ingrid leaned on the counter. “You are being totally weird. Talk to me, caveman.”
You can’t hide shit from your best friend. Even if she’s not really your best friend anymore.
We’d been thick as thieves in high school. Girls’ basketball, all four years—I was the one to her two, running point for the Nordic queen with the glacier-blue eyes. Svensson and Khoury, the demon duo. No one fucked with us on or off the court. In college things changed. I started my transition, and the tightness between us unraveled. All you ever talk about is hormones, she said, and we just finished being teenagers. Inge was witheringly sarcastic, but one night she looked at me with abject sincerity and said, It’s like we’re not on the same team anymore. We stayed together to save rent. Exchanged inanities, like hostel guests. Is it raining today? I bought milk. It’s your turn to clean the shower. I didn’t know who she was dating, what her plans were. What she thought of the man I’d become. It was too painful to part ways and too painful to keep up with each other’s ephemera, so we fell into friendship purgatory. Ghosting in and out of rooms, starting sentences with Do you remember when and then trailing off, grieved. Once, when a Black Iris escapade made the news—we exposed a date-rape drug ring in a notorious frat by drugging the ringleaders with their own product and tying them up, naked, on the campus common—Inge watched, and said, “Social fucking justice.”
She was still my sister-in-arms. If only she knew.
“I’m broke,” I said, and more words followed, in a flood. “I’m broke, and I can’t record a video for shit, and I fucked up this . . . big project a friend was working on, and I almost—” I caught myself, laughed.
“You almost what?”
“I almost feel like I’m PMSing again. How crazy is that?”
Ingrid studied my face. Same age, but I looked years older now. T carved the softness off. “Are you seriously broke?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll have rent, just a little late.”
She sighed. “Again.”
“I can probably borrow it from Ar—”
“What about this?” Inge jabbed a hand at my shoulder. “You have the money to pay for this shit, but not the roof over our heads.”
“Ingrid. This is a medical necessity for me.”
“Give me a fucking break. You won’t die without testosterone. You might even be tolerable to be around.”
At first I hardened. It was always like this now: All emotions started as resistance. A fight inside me. Flare of acid in my throat, a chemical fuse between gut and mouth. Brace against it. Ho
ld it back. This is why men are quick to anger—everything we feel is an assault.
In the past, my dead self would have taken her words right into the soft pulp of my heart. I would have let them hurt me. I would have felt them.
Now my mind filled with cruelties like Sorry that you don’t like me now that I like myself and You’ve kinda been a cunt these days, too. Words I used to say to her with impunity. I couldn’t say them now, in a man’s voice. It was different. Everything was different.
“I’ll have the money on the first,” I said.
“Oh, come on.” She flung her hands up. “I’ll cover you. Just pay me back when you can.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“It’s not charity, asshole. It’s having your back.”
Neither of us quite looked at the other. Silence stretched, twisted. Then, simultaneously, we both made fists and bumped them: one-two, switch sides, three-four. In the back of my head I heard the crowd chant our names. Svens-SON. Khou-RY. Sneakers squeaking on glazed hardwood. The buzzer blaring as my feet left the floor.
Something knotted unpleasantly in my chest.
“I’m making breakfast,” Ingrid said. “Want some?”
“I’m good.”
“Gonna stop by your parents’ this week.”
“Okay.”
“Any presents for the princesses?”
“I really am broke, Inge.”
“Then I’ll pick something up. Say it’s from you.”
Water welled in my throat.
When I didn’t respond she shrugged, turned to go. My hand half rose. I wanted those fingertips back on my skin, dangerous or not. I wanted human contact. Her contact.
“Ingrid.”
“Yeah?”
There were a million things I wanted to ask. Are you happy? Do you miss what we had? Do you miss me? Instead what left my mouth was “Are you still writing for that site?”
“Which?”
“That feminist one. Where you talk about toxic masculinity and shit.”
“ ‘And shit,’ ” she echoed drolly. “I write for lots of feminist sites. How else do you think I pay rent, meathead?”
Half-truth. Ingrid sat on a very cozy trust fund. “Could you maybe . . . take a break? At least from your more incendiary pieces. It’s dangerous to associate your real name with that stuff right now.”