Thiyo, oh God, Thiyo, I’m so sorry, I missed you so much, where is Ev, oh she’s alive, oh fuck, I didn’t know what to do, I thought you were both dead, I wanted to die…
Was this why she’d been so careful with her touches? Was it always this overwhelming to talk to someone else mind-to-mind? Maybe it was Alizhan herself, not the method. Thiyo couldn’t be sure. It was a barrage of jumbled thoughts and feelings, as chaotic as the crush of the crowd had been. He had no idea how to respond to Alizhan, or if he was responding without meaning to, and he felt dizzy, drunk, just on the edge of passing out. And happy. Alizhan was here, holding his hand and inside his mind and he wasn’t alone anymore. What did it matter if she made his head swim?
Are you judging me already? Don’t lie. I can feel it. I missed you so much, you asshole. And it’s not my fault you can’t keep up.
They were standing in front of the two collapsed houses. Even after hours of repair, the spaces weren’t livable. And Ev wasn’t there. She might be trapped with Iriyat right now. He and Alizhan should go back. They should be watching. Planning. What good was either of them without Ev?
You’re a mess, he informed Alizhan. But so am I.
I heard you were possessed of an astonishing generosity of spirit and great at masterminding escape plans, she said.
Who told you that? Were they as beautiful and talented and clever as they sound? The reply was a reflex as much as the satisfied smile that crossed his face. But underneath, he was stuck on something else. She remembered him saying that? She must have, since the thought was accompanied by a chill and a stale whiff of the prison cell where they’d met. Thiyo shivered. Could she feel or smell or see his thoughts? Alarming, but also fascinating. What would happen if he thought about—
Alizhan went up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
It was nothing like his long-awaited kiss with Ev in the cave, that delicate confection of tenderness and pent-up lust. It was fierce and decisive, an immediate pleasure that demanded to be taken on its own terms. He hadn’t expected the kiss, or wanted it with more than idle curiosity, but once it was offered, he indulged. It was over almost as soon as it began, and like everything about Alizhan, it left him confused, intrigued, and delighted.
“I didn’t know I was going to do that,” Alizhan said, switching to regular speech, her feet flat on the ground and one hand gingerly touching her mouth. Her other hand was wrapped around Thiyo’s arm, which must be why he could understand her speech. She didn’t seem to be addressing him. “I didn’t know I wanted to.”
I’m sorry, he said, offended. Was he so difficult to want? Are you lodging a complaint? You kissed me.
“I know,” Alizhan said with a note of irritation. Her face scrunched up.
It must be strange for Alizhan that so few people could surprise her, and yet she surprised herself. Thiyo felt sympathy, but couldn’t let go of her first question. He’d received plenty of complaints about his suitability as a romantic partner—he flirted and fell into bed with people he shouldn’t—but no one had ever been dissatisfied with a kiss or anything that came after.
“Calm down, your reputation is safe,” Alizhan said. “I want to talk about Ev. You think Iriyat has her.”
That’s what I understood, he said. My understanding is limited of late.
“Iriyat has been meeting with victims,” Alizhan said. “If Ev was caught in one of the collapses, Iriyat’s men would have collected her. I don’t know if Iriyat will include those people in the speech she’s about to make, but it’s a good guess.”
How can we get Ev out? If Alizhan was speaking normally to him and he could understand her, it stood to reason that if Thiyo spoke, she’d understand whatever came out of his mouth. But he was afraid to try it.
“I can’t think of a way to do it.”
Iriyat might touch Ev.
“I know,” Alizhan said. “But as long as we can get to her after, I can fix it. I know how. I can fix you, too, if you want.”
Of course I want! Why wouldn’t I want that?
“Not everybody wants to be fixed,” Alizhan said.
Is that what you were trying to do just now, he said, sly. Fix me?
“Shut up,” Alizhan said. “We’re not talking about that. Not until we find Ev. You know the two of us don’t stand a chance without her.”
He did know that. He hadn’t been able to kiss her without thinking of Ev, and he suspected the same was true for Alizhan. A flicker of jealousy went through him, but he couldn’t say who its object was. And he wasn’t a mainlander, obsessed with eternal, singular possession. Jealousy was a passing thing, a birdshit emotion, something embarrassing and beyond one’s control, meant to be wiped off as soon as it was noticed.
“Oh, that makes so much sense,” Alizhan said. Her eyes had gone round. “I think I always felt that way, but there was no one around to express it so well.”
Lucky for you, I’m here. Thiyo hadn’t intended to share the jealousy or the thoughts that followed, but he was easily placated by flattery.
“I’m glad you and Ev are in love,” Alizhan said. “But I’m also sad because I missed seeing so much of it. Is that… should I not be telling you that?”
At what point, in our brief but profoundly intimate acquaintance, did I ever give you the impression that I wouldn’t love to hear such a thing? he asked. If anything, you should tell me more. And you didn’t miss much. It was mostly me, pining.
“I know exactly what I missed.”
A lifetime without casual touch had left Alizhan without a good instinct for what constituted a nudge, and she bumped her shoulder against him hard. He rubbed his hand over the place she’d hit. Well, that will happen again. If we save Ev and live through what comes after, I mean. Can you handle going back into the crowd?
“Yes,” she said. “People here keep their thoughts to themselves, so it’s easier to stay conscious. It’s not awful and silent like Estva, but it’s not intrusively loud like home. It’s better than when you gave me the wai at Ilyr’s wedding, too. I feel like myself. Only… it turns out my self still hates crowds.”
That would explain the misery he’d seen on her face.
How much time do we have before the speech?
“About an hour,” Alizhan said. “Sit down. I can’t be expected to work in these conditions, with your head all the way up there on top of your neck.”
What? Thiyo asked, but he was already bending his knees in response to the pressure she exerted on his shoulders. They sat right there in the street, in front of the house he’d repaired, and Alizhan put her fingers on his temples. She closed her eyes and held her hands still, but he had a curious sensation of having the inside of his head massaged. Alizhan had repaired his mind once before, when they’d been trapped aboard Honesty, and it hadn’t felt anything like this.
“This is fascinating,” Alizhan said.
I do consider myself fascinating, Thiyo said. It took more time than it should have to put the thought together, like trying to take a deep breath while being tickled. But I assume you can sense something I can’t, since nothing about this experience has been fascinating. It’s been crushingly dull and lonely.
Alizhan shifted her hand so her palm lay against his cheek. “I’m sorry, Thiyo. I was lonely, too, when I thought you and Ev were dead. That’s how my life was before, but I couldn’t go back.” She let a silence well up between them, and then said, “But this would go a lot faster if you would sit still and stop squirming around. Stop trying to think, I mean. It’s already going to take hours we don’t have. What do you want most?”
So many things.
“Shut up, Thiyo, you know that’s not what I meant. I can’t fix you all at once. Narrow it down for me. What do you want?”
To not be totally lost every time someone says something to me.
She didn’t physically jerk back, but the touch in his mind changed in such a way that Thiyo knew he’d surprised her. “You’d rather listen than talk?”
; Of course not. I’d rather be exactly as I was. But you asked me to choose and I’m choosing.
“What language?”
Laalvuri.
That didn’t surprise her. Adpri might have been a more useful choice, since they were several triads’ journey from Laalvur, not to mention that they planned to attend a speech given in Adpri. But there were only two people Thiyo really wanted to listen to.
“You’d get there without me if you kept practicing,” she said. Her eyes moved like she was looking at something, but it wasn’t his face. “And I’m sure I would have understood you if you’d spoken, if Ilyr could. You didn’t need to be so afraid. Ev would have forgiven you for mistakes.”
The trouble with Alizhan was that she always knew more than he wanted her to. I have no qualms about taking the easy way out, he said. Everything else is hard enough.
And then he stopped thinking, like she’d told him to, and let her work. The next thing he was aware of was a crick in his neck, since he’d let his head loll forward. He didn’t remember falling asleep, and couldn’t say for sure that he had. But some time had passed. He stretched his neck. Alizhan had dark circles under her eyes, but she didn’t look as wrecked as she had last time. She was conscious, for one.
“You’re evaluating me because you’re too scared to evaluate yourself,” she said. She put both hands in the air, level with her face, palms out, and wiggled her fingers. He stared, trying to interpret the gesture. Then it came to him.
She hadn’t been touching him.
His heart was going to burst. He’d understood. Those last words hadn’t been a garble of sound followed by an echo in his mind. He’d heard them with his ears. He’d known what they meant. The usual way. It wasn’t magic, and yet it was. Thiyo ought to say something witty, his first real comment in weeks, but instead what came out was “I fucking love you.”
One corner of her mouth pulled to the side and she wrinkled her nose. Then she tried to shape a word. “Li… lilahei something? Well, I got the sentiment, if not the words. You’ll get there. I’ll do more later, I promise.”
Oh, right. She’d only repaired one tiny crack in his shattered self. His shoulders slumped.
Alizhan stood up, offering him her hand. “You’ll be able to understand other people, though. Or not people here, but Ev. We both know she’s the most important.”
They did agree on that. Alizhan laced her fingers through his as they walked back toward the central hall.
“I’m still thinking about that thing you said—thought—about jealousy. Not everyone is like us,” Alizhan said, as if Thiyo weren’t already well aware. He’d broken Ilyr’s heart. Or maybe it had been a mutual heartbreak. They’d been ill-suited to each other, Ilyr wanting Thiyo to be his one and only and Thiyo knowing he wasn’t made for that.
The thought made him sad, so he changed the tone of the conversation. No one is like us, he told Alizhan loftily.
“Actually, plenty of other pe—oh, you were joking, ‘no one is like us because we’re so great,’” Alizhan said. Thiyo hadn’t been joking, exactly. “I’d feel a lot more sure of that if we rescued Ev.”
It only took a few minutes to reach the street that ringed the central hall, but people were packed from the balcony railing to the opposite edge of the street. They were there to watch a famous foreigner give a speech, so their dedication to saving their spots paled in comparison to Thiyo’s drive to catch sight of Ev. He pushed past, dragging Alizhan along until they were both at the waist-high stone railing, looking down at the empty circular stage. The hall was brilliant with light from the glass ceiling four stories above them, tinged blue by the fabric stretched underneath the dome. The bottom level was full of people everywhere except the raised stage and the space where the floor was diagonally cut by the river. The murmur of the crowd went silent for a moment as a man in Lampgreen uniform carried a chair up on the stage, but it rose again once the man left. Where was Iriyat ha-Varensi? Where was Ev?
A terrible awareness descended on Ev: the smooth sheets rumpled under her legs, the tender bruises dotting her back and shoulders, the little intake of breath from Sanno on the couch, and Iriyat’s sweet, unfamiliar floral perfume so close. Iriyat was going to kill her. These were the last things she’d ever sense. Time had expanded, giving Ev a leisurely instant to study Iriyat’s features, the bow of her upper lip shaped just like Alizhan’s, her dainty nose so wrong between those grey eyes.
Ev pulled her arm back and punched Iriyat in the face.
She flew backward, one blond braid coming unpinned from her head, her body folding as it fell. Ev jumped to her feet and said, “Sanno, I know you’re awake.”
Ev tore the sheet off the bed and bent over Iriyat. She tied Iriyat’s hands behind her back with the fabric in as many layers as possible.
Sanno got up from the couch, limber and easy. His eyes were wide open and alert. He casually lifted and rearranged his braids, drawing them over his shoulder. Had he ever been asleep? He eyed Ev tying up the most powerful woman in Laalvur, evincing no surprise. “How long will someone be out, after a punch like that?”
“Not long enough,” Ev said in Laalvuri. Sanno had spoken in Adpri, but after her long conversation in Laalvuri with Iriyat, Ev couldn’t be bothered to switch back. She had too much to think about. “You understand Laalvuri, right? You can keep speaking Adpri if you want. I need to think.”
“I do,” Sanno said. Ev took that as an admission that he’d been awake the whole time Iriyat had been in the room. She was glad she’d punched Iriyat—for so many reasons, one of which was that Sanno would never have left the room with his memory intact if she hadn’t.
Ev pushed the table and chairs out of the way and propped Iriyat against the wall. Her head lolled to the side as if her unpinned braid were weighing it down. “I wish she’d been wearing gloves. Having her hands tied will make it harder for her to attack us after she wakes, but not impossible. Lacemakers work their craft with any part of their bodies if they’re forced. Don’t touch her bare skin.”
Sanno had come to stand behind Ev. “Why would I be touching her at all?”
“She was supposed to give a speech soon.” Ev went through the pockets of Iriyat’s trousers, trying not to think too hard about what she was doing. One was empty. Iriyat probably had an attendant carry her money and other affairs. The second had a piece of paper, which Ev pulled out and unfolded with a quiet flick of triumph. “Here we go.”
She handed it to Sanno, who read it.
“‘We will rebuild,’” he quoted, unimpressed. “Who’s this ‘we’ she’s talking about? She doesn’t live here or know this place.”
“Worse than that, she’s responsible for the damage.”
“The next sentence is ‘I will rebuild.’ Then she talks about using her fortune to reconstruct the city and make it safe again. I guess she wasn’t planning to abandon this place, at least. Just kill however many citizens she had to in order to take over.” Sanno’s gaze tracked back and forth across the page. “This is a pile of ash, but she’s got a few nice turns of phrase. Is she a good speaker?”
“Yes,” Ev said, hating to admit it.
“She could win people to her cause with this, and then we’ll never convince anyone that she’s a fiery fucking murderer,” Sanno said. “We can’t let her give this speech.”
“We’re not going to,” Ev said. The opportunity had taken shape in her mind. A stage in the Sun Hall and a crowd of thousands waiting for answers. She went back to the bed and pulled the case off the pillow, twisting it into a gag. She pressed it into Iriyat’s mouth, then arranged her hair and her veil so the wad of fabric wasn’t too obvious. “You’re going to give one instead.”
Sanno was so shocked he took a step back. “How will we get up on stage? It’s probably a solid wall of Iriyat’s guards and Lampgreen mercenaries, not mention Buriyewon Ichinek and a few of his underlings. They’re expecting Iriyat. No one will let us close. And I don’t have a speech prepared. What would I
even say? Why don’t you give the speech?”
Ev shook her head. “My Adpri’s not good enough. And people know you. You live here. And you’re—what’s the word? You know, you write pamphlets.”
Sanno didn’t correct her, but he let out a huff that told her what he thought of that translation. “People would know you if you introduced yourself. You’re an Umarsad.”
“And what this city really needs is more trouble from my family,” Ev said dryly. “No. No more Umarsads, no more interference from foreign agents. I did the punching, you’re doing the talking. Start thinking about what you want to say.”
“You didn’t address my other concerns!”
“You’re right: they’re expecting Iriyat,” Ev said. She crouched and put her hands under Iriyat’s armpits, then stood them both up. “We have Iriyat. Here, take her arm.”
“This isn’t going to work,” Sanno said.
“My lady ha-Varensi is delicate and suffered a fainting spell,” Ev said primly. It was easy to think of the right words and the right attitude when she imagined what Thiyo might do in this situation. “She’ll require a chair on stage.”
Sanno stared. He didn’t know that Vatik would help Ev, and she didn’t have time to explain. Iriyat’s eyes were blinking open. It was time to move. But Vatik wasn’t standing guard outside the door like Ev expected, so she had to try her obsequious act on two unassuming strangers, both large men whose uniforms marked them as mercenaries. They didn’t question her, and by the time Iriyat was fully awake, the three of them had been ushered to the stage.
25
Letters from Another World, No. 5
How can we feel safe in this new world of people who can learn the deepest secrets of our hearts and change our memories without us knowing? Readers, I hear your concerns. But this is already the world we live in, even if we are only now awakened to its possibilities. If anything, we are safer now than before, but I will not deal in false promises. Just as we reassured ourselves that magic did not exist, safety is a comforting tale we tell ourselves. We have had to confront how wrong we were about magic, and so it will be with the notion of safety.
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