Beneath Ceaseless Skies #227

by Wren Wallis

  “I’m Sere Guilliarme, and I want to help,” she said gently.

  The woman at the door promptly slammed it in Sere’s face. Faintly, Sere heard her yell, “Jeska! Jeska! Get out here, your daft editorials worked and the police commissioner is on the doorstep! She wants to help and it’s your problem!” Sere wasn’t police commissioner, not quite, but she appreciated the verbal promotion.

  Eventually Jeska opened the door, looking more than slightly drunk. He blanched when he recognized her. “Oh god,” he said. “Ynma wasn’t shitting me, you’re right here, shit.”

  Jeska was always more eloquent on the page.

  He shepherded her up two flights of stairs, past the ground floor with a circle of people speaking emphatically, past a hallway blocked by the disassembled parts of a printing press, to a bedroom. “I would entertain you in the sitting room, but it’s full of yelling people,” he said.

  “This is fine,” Sere said quickly. She stood in the middle of the floor, not sure if she should take off her boots, not sure if she should take the whiskey when Jeska offered it.

  “So, Sere Guilliarme, how do you want this to start?” Jeska asked, sitting down hard on the bed and staring determinedly at her face.

  “I thought,” Sere said slowly, “I would start by giving you the names of the informants who told me and the rest of the force how to find this place.”

  Jeska’s smile was hesitant but sincere. “Okay. Okay! We can make that work.”

  * * *

  Tashet sends a note to the almshouse with a list of requests. She needs tears, blood, and a drawing to map the scars that blemish Sere’s skin. There are new scars in shapes that Tashet does not know.

  “She can come and collect me herself,” Sere says to her guard.

  Tashet comes with a lancet.

  Sere sits on the floor, methodically tying and unpicking intricate knots in the thread that’s unraveling from her undershirt. When Tashet arrives she does not rise. If she stands her knees might buckle, and she doesn’t want Tashet to see.

  Tashet sits down next to her and unpacks her alchemy kit. She won’t look at Sere, even though they are close enough to touch. Instead she places items in a row: pen, ink, wood-pulp paper, lye-treated cloth, neatly stoppered vials.

  “Take off your shirt,” Tashet says dully, readying a pen and a sheet with a genderless human figure outlined on it.

  Sere stands, grimacing at the pain in her knees, and strips. They’ve given her a straw pallet, but it is full of invisible biting insects; she has been sleeping on the floor. Purple bruises bloom across the peaks of her hips and her shoulder blades.

  Tashet stares openly, her face wracked with pity. Slowly, she brings her pen to paper and begins to scratch out a drawing of Sere’s blemishes. Each pen stroke feels like it’s digging into Sere’s flesh.

  “I won’t let you,” Sere says convulsively. She kicks away Tashet’s tidy line of vials. “Can’t you see this is horrible?”

  The materials for alchemy must be given willingly. It’s an immutable law, as true as sugarcane is sweet and cyanide is bitter. Tashet reaches out to still a vial that’s rolling in wobbly circles next to her ankle. She stares at it, then shuts her eyes tight and says shakily, “Don’t be like this, Sere. You’re making everything harder.”

  “It should be hard!” Sere shouts. “You want to abandon me to die!”

  Tashet smacks an open palm against the floor. “You abandoned me first!” she says. “I’m never going to understand, I just—why where they more important than me, Sere?” She smacks the floor again, then yanks her hand away and peers at it, hurt and distracted. “I got a splinter. Ah, it’s bleeding, damn.”

  Without wondering if she is allowed, Sere kneels down and cradles Tashet’s hand in both of hers. Tashet lets her; lets her prod with both thumbnails at the meat of her palm until she finds the end of the splinter, lets her raise Tashet’s palm to her mouth and pull the splinter out with her teeth.

  “Thanks,” Tashet says, taking her hand back and rubbing at it. She looks up at Sere and suddenly her eyes fill with tears. Her mouth twists up in a sob. Sere rushes to fold her into her arms. Tashet’s embroidered shirt feels rough and strange against Sere’s bare skin and her tears are wet on Sere’s collarbone. Tashet hangs on.

  “Shhh, shhhh,” Sere says. “I couldn’t stay. I wanted to stay and I wanted everything to stay the same and I let that ruin everything. I didn’t want you to lose you position and your alchemy lab and your ridiculous colorful shirts. But if you let this happen it won’t stay the same, beloved. You can’t stay in a place knowing that killing someone put you there. It hurts too much. I won’t let you find that out for yourself.”

  * * *

  It had started with executions. She is here, jailed in an emptied almshouse, because of Jeska White. He had thrown a rock at her, a little less than two years ago, his fury directed at her uniform and her distant expression beside the gallows.

  It had knocked the skin from her cheekbone, which would heal with a dent like a permanent thumbprint under her eye. Sere rounded on the man who threw the rock, pistol drawn, cheek stinging. He stood protectively over a young man, collapsed on the brick, and did not cower, although there was dirt on his hands from the stone he had thrown. “This was my father,” he cried. “They were life-laced and you killed them both!”

  The man on the ground was dead, then. Sere held her neck straight and did not twist to look at the gallows. “The lacing certificate was a forgery,” she said. “The sentence was for counterfeit and tax evasion. All of her paperwork was suspect.” But the ages, even estimated roughly, failed to add up. The man shaking with anger and grief before her looked no older than the man on the ground. His mother, now dead by the state, had been similarly youthful. To be surpassed in age by their son, they could not be living solely their own lifespans.

  Sere thought of the additional lifespan ahead of her, thought what if that were Tashet. She was newly laced, the change so recent that it did not show in her face yet, filled to bursting with the secret, and the thought of Tashet dead on her account was freshly terrible. “What’s your name?” she asked, shoving her pistol away.

  “Jeska White,” the man said. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “No,” Sere said, after a long silence. She could, if she wanted to, for the blood running down her face. “Can you lift him? May I call someone?”

  Jeska was a slight man, but he didn’t trust her, and it was not her place to carry his dead. Later, after she had dragged him dripping from the canal, twice, both times while scolding him for picking fights with her fellow officers, she would help him write the words for funeral speeches. After she abandoned her uniform, they were bound together by their secrets, by each knowing too much about the other, and by their casualties. Still, she would have helped him on that first day, if he had allowed.

  Before her cheek had fully healed, Sere saw Jeska’s name on a confiscated pamphlet. She stole it to read by lamplight while Tashet slept.

  * * *

  Tashet leaves without picking up the scattered pieces of her alchemy kit, wiping her face dry on her sleeves. Sere watches her go, heart churning.

  It is cruel to ransom Tashet’s life against her own, and Sere cannot convince herself it isn’t selfish.

  Tashet has been given three options, painted into a corner by Sere’s actions. She may do nothing and let them both die, out of stubbornness or spite or romantic gesture. She can leverage all of her political weight and convince the court of their lacing, providing birth certificates and fine alchemical reference diagrams of faces as they age naturally. It will destroy her career, to be laced to a seditionist, and Sere will spend two lifetimes in prison. Or she can unlace them, destroy their unbreakable bond, and Sere will die while Tashet lives on, unchanged.

  Sere hangs in the balance like a plumb line, swinging in ever-smaller arcs around an absolute end.

  Tashet is choosing to sever them, the same way Sere chose to leave eight m
onths ago. Ideals supersede love, twice in awful symmetry. It is a terrible choice, but it is Tashet’s.

  This thought hurts more than the lancet piercing her arm. It hurts more than the burn of the lye-soaked cloth on the tender skin under her eyes as she soaks up her angry tears with it. When she twists to see the scars on her back, jarring the bruises there, it is nothing.

  Sere packs the materials for unlacing safely in a box lined with waxed paper. A chance for Tashet to live on, her career unmarred.

  The police had caught her on a beautiful early spring day, when the streets next to the canal were dusted ochre with pollen from early-blooming trees. It had almost been her birthday, and she’d wandered too far into the main quarter, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tashet at the open farmer’s market or the mineral-seller. Jeska trailed behind her, looking sharply from side to side and jotting down lyrical details of the setting.

  They stopped by a narrow table selling tidy bunches of mint, rhubarb, and small hard apricots. The wicker chair behind the table was empty, and Sere imagined stepping behind the table and out of her life to become someone who sold fruit. She would walk through the orchards with Tashet, between them a basket of taut-skinned peaches and plums. Tashet’s fussy shoes would sink into the dirt and she would laugh and lean on Sere, all the restless parts of her unwinding in the whispering shade.

  “I met her near here,” Sere told Jeska. “I was walking through the park and caught her hammering little metal tags into all the trees. I stopped her to ask what she was doing and she led me around the park, showing me how she wanted to life-lace the trees together so they could grow tall.”

  Sere picked up an apricot. It was heavier than she expected.

  “You miss her,” Jeska said.

  “Like a limb,” Sere said, and then blushed because it was such an obvious thing to say.

  A constable eyed her from the street corner, checking that she was not stealing fruit. Sere put the apricot back. Her face had changed enough that he would surely dismiss her, too young to be Sere Guilliarme of the long arrest record and the firm gaze.

  The constable stepped toward them, signaling to his partner across the street with his right hand to follow. Sere realized, like pit caught in her throat, that Jeska had picked too many fights to be forgettable.

  Jeska had cried for help as they hauled Sere away.

  Sere wakes in the dark to the smell of gunpowder and believes in a panic that she is before a firing squad, too soon, too soon, there had been no time. How unfair.

  But instead of gunshots she hears a rasp of a match striking and sees the faint outline of Tashet’s face. The acrid smell that woke Sere resolves into the burnt-spice reek of hastily done alchemy. Tashet’s fingers touch, feather-light, again and again against Sere’s shoulder, as if she is checking that Sere is not a ghost. “If I get you out, do you know where we can go?” she asks.

  Tashet is shaking so hard the matchlight quavers. Her fingers are sooty and her skirt smells singed.

  “Did you melt the lock?” Sere asks, distracted by practicalities, unable to process that perhaps Tashet chose a fourth option and is saving her.

  Tashet plucks at her burnt skirt with her free hand. “I’m afraid I made a hash of it. I thought it would be fine but this place uses tin in their locks, of all things.”

  “Cheap bastards,” Sere agrees.

  Down the hall someone coughs, freezing them both.

  “Do you know a safe place?” Tashet asks, urgent now.

  Sere thinks of Tashet’s bright gold shirts and expensive equipment in the second floor of a row house, cramped and vibrant as she laces the spies together, so their senses may be sharper, so they may be caught less often.

  “I do,” Sere says.

  Copyright © 2017 Allison Jamieson-Lucy

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Allison Jamieson-Lucy holds degrees in biochemistry and studio art and is a graduate of the Alpha Writer’s Workshop. She’s currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the eggs of tiny fish. Her byline appears in both PLOS Biology and Daily Science Fiction. Outside of the lab she writes, illustrates, and fosters sick shelter cats.

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  COVER ART

  “Monument,” by Jeff Brown

  Jeff Brown is a professional freelance artist from Saskatoon, SK, Canada, living in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In the world of book cover design and illustration, he has worked with over ninety book authors on more than two-hundred fifty covers. In the world of games, he has worked for companies such as Fantasy Flight Games, Pelgrane Press, and Logic Artists as a concept artist & illustrator. He currently does freelance work and long term projects. To see more of his work, visit jeffbrowngraphics.com.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

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