by Dave Rudden
“Light?” Denizen said, and she nodded, the briefest shine of white behind her teeth.
“I don’t like the idea of just being one thing. Light’s very difficult ... but that’s why I like it. A particle and a wave—constantly moving, never one thing or the other. I don’t want to be stuck, you know?”
Denizen nodded, though he wasn’t sure if he did. He had been nodding a lot lately—Mercy just talked, and he didn’t want to stop her flow just because she had delved into subjects he couldn’t possibly know about.
There were things they had in common—frightening parents, as Mercy had once said—and things that seemed to be true for every teenager, whichever universe you were from. A lot of what she said only made sense if you were a Tenebrous, things that she had to search for a human term for. That frustrated her, but Denizen was content to let her find her own words instead of suggesting his own. There was something so fragile and gossamer about the friendship they were building that he was afraid that if he stopped her it would break.
And that was before…
Hey. This is fun. Like really fun. But I think my superiors might be planning to assassinate you. But maybe not. Or maybe by accident on purpose. And I’m not sure your underlings aren’t planning to do the same to us.
Denizen ground his toes into the grass of their—of the garden—trying to find the words, any words to say.
“Where are we going?” She made eagerly for the wrought-iron gate and then blinked as he stepped in front of her.
“Wait,” Denizen said. “Not that I don’t think you’ve done a really good job with ...” He swallowed. “Everything. But we can’t go outside. It’s too dangerous.”
“Don’t worry,” she said brightly. “I’ll protect you.”
“It’s not that,” Denizen said. “What happens if you lose your human shape? If you get distracted, or if your ...” He waved his hands to indicate the reality-distorting aura each Tenebrous carried with them.
“Umbra,” she said. “That’s what I call it.”
“OK,” Denizen said. “If your umbra makes things go haywire…There are a lot of people in Dublin. With cameras. And phones that are cameras. And phones that are cameras that can phone people with cameras.”
“What exactly are you worried about?” she said, eyes narrowing like she was contemplating going through him instead.
“Gardaí,” Denizen said promptly. “Small children. Security cameras. Traffic stopping. The Knights. The Palatine. The Forever Court noticing you’re gone and deciding to come looking for you. My mother. So many things.”
She sighed. “I like children. Cameras are not fond of our kind. I will follow relevant traffic laws. The Knights and the Palatine are either in bed or trying to figure out what to do if things turn sour, which they won’t because the Court have been as quiet as mice since my father decreed they must follow me. And I don’t know what Gardaí are.”
“Police,” Denizen said. “It’s what Irish people call police.”
“Ah.”
“You left one out,” Denizen said. “The great and terrible Vivian Hardwick.”
Mercy gave a passable approximation of Frown No. 12—Here Is Some Sympathy I Am Not Sure You Deserve. They had spent a long, giggly hour with him giving her a tour of 1 to 27. “You’re angry with her.”
“It’s ... it’s not as simple as that,” Denizen said, one hundred percent afraid that it was. “She’s so ... compartmentalized. She let me in once, and that was only because I didn’t give her a choice. When I’m around her, she’ll talk about everything but what happened with my dad, but then she expects me to be honest with her about ...”
“About me?” Mercy said softly.
He squirmed a little. “We’re strangers to each other, and I just can’t bring myself to let her in when she won’t do the same.”
“I understand,” Mercy said, toying with an argent curl. “My mother was only ever a story to me.”
Silence then, until she took a breath and broke into a grin at the taste of air. “But, so far, all I’ve seen of your world has been two basements and a mountainside.” The wicked look she gave him nearly stopped his heart. “You’re being a terrible host. Come on. Show me a city.”
—
THEY AMBLED, AND THEY talked.
He was still getting over that. This was the eighth night they had met up, and Denizen was operating on roughly an hour’s sleep, but that didn’t matter, because every time he left her it was hard not to just float back to his room.
They talked. They actually talked. Denizen had lost track of how many words they had exchanged. The luxury of that astounded him. To be able to not value every word that they shared, every expression, every shift of light ...
They had been walking for nearly an hour before Denizen realized he’d totally forgotten to worry about Tenebraic ambushes or running into Greaves and Vivian out for a bag of chips.
Maybe I don’t have anything to worry about. Maybe I’m imagining things. This is ... this is fine.
Cars passed them without veering off the road in panic. The occasional pedestrian gave them no more of a glance than you would give a pair of normal teenagers—one with astonishingly bright hair, one with a haystack mess.
Besides, it was hard to worry when you were being asked so many questions.
“What period are those buildings from?”
“Georgian. Um. I think.”
“So they came after those ones we passed before?”
“Think so. The city just kind of spread over the centuries. We built all the new bits on the old bits. It’s sort of ... patchwork.”
“Interesting.”
The path they took was as meandering as their conversations. Mercy was easily distracted, and all it took was one red traffic light—she was scrupulously adhering to each—for her to change direction.
She seemed extremely curious as to what thirteen-year-olds in Dublin actually did, something that was right up there with architecture as a subject Denizen was singularly unqualified to discuss.
“I don’t know what real teenagers do,” he said. “At Seraphim Row we train a lot. Running. Weapons—I’m not very good at weapons—and hand-to-hand stuff. And the Cants, obviously, though I don’t have to work as hard ...”
Except at controlling them.
Mercy looked thoughtful. “How do they feel in your head?”
Denizen shrugged. “Honestly? They feel alive. Sometimes they move in sync and I can almost see a shape. Like they’re components of something bigger. You taught me how to use them, but I don’t know if I understand them. Does that make sense?”
No, he thought, just as Mercy nodded.
“I don’t know if Father quite understands them either,” she said. “I think he once had dreams of commanding the fire himself, but we’re not ... solid enough to wield it.”
“Sometimes it feels like we’re not either,” Denizen said, tracing a finger over the cold iron in his palms.
“That’s what the Cants were for,” she said. “A language of control, of manipulation, crafted to shape the fire like a blacksmith’s mold. He never got them to work, though—for him anyway.” She glanced at Denizen. “Do they make having the fire easier?”
Denizen shrugged. “Sort of. It’s strange. They make it easier and safer—much safer—to channel the fire, but making it easier also makes it harder not to do it.” What she had said at their second meeting hadn’t left Denizen’s head. “You said the fire came from the Tenebrae.”
She frowned. “You don’t know? The Order, I mean. It isn’t something you were taught?”
“No,” Denizen said. “We kind of just get the basics.”
Like how to kill you, mostly. That thought led him right back to worrying about Greaves, and the false sense of peace he had been feeling began to drain away.
But he couldn’t say anything. He didn’t even know if his fears were justified. Maybe Greaves really did want peace. And, if Denizen told Mercy he suspected the Pala
tine might not be entirely trustworthy, would the Court spring a preemptive trap of their own? Plus, Denizen was learning valuable information about where the Cants came from. That was good, right? Right?
“I see,” Mercy said. If she noticed Denizen’s sudden tension, she gave no sign. There was a phrase Denizen had heard in an old TV show the orphanage director had liked—Don’t mention the war. It loomed over everything they said, reflected in the sodium of the streetlights and the shineless black of Denizen’s palms ... but then she smiled, and they could just have been two kids out for a walk, having the weirdest conversation ever.
They were coming to the city center now. The streets were bright with taxis, crowded with adults laughing and chatting outside pubs.
“I don’t know where the fire came from originally,” Mercy said. She had spent the last five minutes trying to coax an alley cat from under a trash can, and now they ambled down a side street, the shops dark and shuttered for the night.
“Father sometimes speaks of his travels before he took his crown, the things he brought back.” Something like a smile touched her face. “I think he stole the fire. Which, perhaps, makes it right that it was stolen from him.”
It sounded like a myth, a thing so lost in time that any truth in it had been obscured, like layers of pearl coating a grain of sand. But it wasn’t a myth, was it? Denizen rarely stopped to think about how his life had changed, because usually bits of it were trying to kill him, but this was the world he lived in now—thieves flitting between universes, inhuman kings guarding the hearts of suns….
When she talked about it, the danger became almost beautiful.
“Who took it?” he asked. Denizen had a bit of a soft spot for the stories where the hero was a thief. They usually weren’t three meters tall and lantern-jawed; they were small and quick and, if they saved the day, it was usually while they were just trying to get out alive.
Heroism by accident. Denizen could relate.
She smiled coyly. “We’re a little special, Denizen Hardwick. Did you know that?”
“Guh,” said Denizen. “Ahem. I mean—what?”
“It’s a rare thing, a human and a Tenebrous working together. Almost unheard of. Your kind and mine were never meant to share the same universe. Every time it’s happened, it’s ended in pain and death. Until us.”
The world was ending, Denizen wanted to say. I wasn’t being noble or anything, I was just extremely stressed. I should really be telling you about a possible assassination attempt, but if I do, this moment might end. And I really, really don’t want this moment to end.
“Oh,” he said, instead of all that. “Cool.”
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go a little farther.”
—
THE MAN BEHIND THE counter of the corner shop looked older than Seraphim Row. His heavy-lidded eyes flicked to Mercy, as she peered at the magazines in the rack, and then to Denizen, who was trying to make himself look as unsuspicious as he possibly could.
Mercy had been watching the displays in clothes shops like a hawk, and her copy of Denizen’s outfit had been upgraded several times. Now she was wearing a silk blouse and trousers under a black, high-collared coat marked with gold and silver curlicues. Her hair—now a bob—gleamed silver in the beige of the lights overhead.
She tapped a plum-painted fingernail—she’d seen a scarf that color and liked it immensely—against her lip, moving to examine the rainbow spread of sweets in their displays.
“Just pick one,” Denizen said from the doorway. It was as far as he’d wanted to come into the shop. “Seriously.”
“I’m looking,” she said, shooting him the most perfect annoyed glance Denizen had ever seen. “I don’t know which one I want yet.”
Overhead, the hum of the fluorescent light deepened to a tinny snarl. One of the fridges let out a coughing burble. The shopkeeper looked up in surprise.
“Sorryaboutthatthereyougothanks,” Mercy said in one long breath, dropping a packet of sweets and a coin on the counter. It landed on its edge and didn’t roll away.
“Mercy.”
The man swept up his coin and favored Mercy with a wide smile—that turned into a frown when he looked at Denizen.
Why am I getting frowned at?
“No manners,” the shopkeeper muttered, and winked. “Don’t know what you see in him.”
“Tell me about it,” Mercy said, with exaggerated slowness. “Breaks my heart.”
She tossed the sweets at Denizen, beaming widely. “See?” she whispered as they stepped back onto the street. “I can totally be human.”
Every light in the shop went out with a crackling bang. Each fridge coughed to a halt, and the cash register flew open so violently the shopkeeper fell off his chair.
Mercy and Denizen were already running.
—
THEY BARELY STOPPED UNTIL they came back to the garden. Denizen’s chest was heaving, despite his training. Mercy wasn’t out of breath at all, though the same flush that permeated Denizen’s cheeks colored hers.
“That was ridiculous,” he said, gasping.
“I know,” she said, and their eyes met. Suddenly all Denizen’s postponed awkwardness returned in full force.
“I ... I should get back,” he said. Tell her. Say something. It had turned out there was no good time to be a species traitor. And possible assassination just wasn’t the kind of thing that came up in conversation—even theirs.
Even as that thought went through Denizen’s head, he knew it was a lie. He wasn’t not telling her out of loyalty to the Order, or Greaves, or to the human race. He wasn’t telling her because he didn’t want her to stop talking to him.
“I, um ...”
“Denizen,” she said, looking down so that her hair fell across her face in an unearthly cascade. Her voice was quiet, and he found himself leaning close to hear her.
To hear her. Yep.
A trace of luminescence moved behind her eyes, spilling the faintest curls of blue and white down her cheeks. Denizen’s stomach churned, and, as always, he couldn’t tell whether it was down to the reality-warping umbra of a Tenebrous or ... because he really, really liked her.
Denizen knew there were words to say. There absolutely were, but they retreated every time he tried to grasp them.
“Mmrmph?” he managed, and suddenly realized Mercy was standing directly in front of him. Light danced behind her pupils. He felt the chill of it on his face. Her voice was soft.
“I’ve heard about kissing.”
“Oh,” Denizen said, in a sort of strangled whisper. There wasn’t room between them for anything else.
They had been this close once before, in Crosscaper, when Denizen had broken the circle holding Mercy and she had swept him up in her storm. He felt that same sort of weightlessness now.
“What’s it like?” she whispered.
Denizen couldn’t lie. “I have absolutely no idea.”
He closed his eyes—
“DENIZEN HARDWICK!”
MERCY EXPLODED.
Light speared through Denizen’s eyelids as he was flung backward in a wash of pressure, displaced air, and gritty, painful heat. He hit the grass with every part of his body at once.
Denizen would really have liked to lie there, cataloging his aches, but his training screamed that when attacked you did not stay still. Staying still was death.
Flames filled his body. He managed a sort of wobbling jump, that at least put him back on his feet, and saw that Mercy had shed her human form, becoming once more a shifting sculpture of light.
She was staring at the entrance to the garden. She was staring at—
“Oh no.”
The words slipped, cartoonish, from Denizen’s mouth before he even realized he’d said them aloud. Then his brain shut down. His mouth stopped working. Even the fire in his stomach fled.
Vivian Hardwick stood at the gate to the garden, the streetlight stretching her shadow ogre-large. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes w
ere narrow slits.
“What. Are. You. Doing?”
“Oh no,” Denizen said again, and then clamped his hands over his mouth. His vocabulary was deserting him, like rats leaving a sinking ship.
Say something. Say something. SAY SOMETHING. He just needed a word. A justification. A reason why he had been about to kiss the princess of a race of extra-dimensional predators his mother had spent her entire life fighting.
Any minute now ...
Malleus Hardwick, Mercy said, in the same smooth, diplomatic tone with which she had juggled a room full of voracious Tenebrous and adrenaline-jacked Knights. Her glow was fading as though she was trying to appear less unworldly. It is a pleasure to see you again.
Vivian was actually vibrating with rage.
I know this looks ... Mercy drifted forward. We can talk about this.
All Denizen could do was nod fervently.
Vivian’s voice was gravel thrown into a furnace. “I fear you would not enjoy my choice of words.”
Denizen’s voice finally kicked in, atonal with panic. “Hang on—”
Mercy cut him off. Now her eyes were narrowed too. Was that a threat?
“No, no, of course not—” Denizen began, but Mercy’s luminescence had already sharpened, glaciers of deeper blue slipping down her arms like armor, her eyes polar stars. Her voice had the deceptive calm of ice about to crack.
You forget yourself. I am not some runt starveling or lower beast. I am royalty.
“Listen, seriously—”
“Really?” Denizen’s mother purred through her clenched teeth. “Shall we see if my hammer knows the difference?”
“Listen!” Denizen half shouted, and enough fire laced the words that Malleus and Tenebrous turned to stare at him. “Could we all just calm down?”
I am very calm, Mercy hissed.