by A. E. Shaw
Ali and Kit throw their arms about each other and yell, and then they both grab Alej, and squeeze him the way that he held onto the Caracaras. The hug does not last long, for Alej is wooden and unresponsive to their touch, and they’re both surprised and embarrassed by his incessant peculiarity.
“But this is wonderful!” Kit yells, his creased and tired face folding into relief and gratitude, shedding years in moments. “We can move on! Thank you, thank you…” and he descends into speech too garbled for Alej to catch.
“Move on?” Alej repeats, instead of listening, his voice low, and uncertain.
Ali shoves Kit a bit and clears her throat. “We do have other lives, Alej.”
“But you live here.”
On the face of it, this is true enough, indeed, they have stopped here, but they have never actually lived here. Only existed. Survived. Survived, that’s the word.
“Alej, we really don’t have time to explain it all. Thank you so much for your help.”
“I didn’t do…I only fixed it.” It doesn’t seem a lot like help to him, but everything they’re saying is on the side of overwhelming. Are they truly to leave him, too? So soon after Selina has disappeared? Who will he serve? The remaining old man and the child are far from his understanding, and appear to need nothing he can provide.
The memory of the ground stretching away, the endlessness of the horizon, the horror of the thought of being alone in nothing…Alej tries to switch his mind off, to walk away, but he’s stuck, with Kit and Ali staring at him, and his not moving…
“We could always take you with us?” Kit ventures. Ali gives him a heck of a look, but Alej doesn’t notice that.
“With you? Where?”
These people are pleasant, certainly, but they have no need of him. Then again, he has no need to be alone. How can this be squared?
“Alej, we could take you to the Northlands: maybe you have relatives there?”
“Relatives?” He truly doesn’t understand the word as well as he might. But, as far as he’s concerned, he has no relatives at all.
“Yeah, you know. You look a bit like…with the hair…”
Alej narrows his eyes, and shivers. “When are you leaving?”
“Soon,” Ali says, “as soon as we can. If you’re sure she’ll fly well enough.”
Alej wonders if he ought to lie to them, if he ought to tell them there are complex things about their Caracaras that they don’t know. If he should tell them there’s been some kind of damage, that the Pulse didn’t generate everything it - but even as he attempts the concept of lying, he finds it confusing and impossible. No, he must stay honest with them. And he must, it seems, pull a decision from his own insides.
“Take me to Selina,” he says, with a strength and decisiveness that matches nothing Alej has known of himself before.
Kit takes a step backwards, and coughs in nervous punctuation. “I…er…”
“We can’t do anything now,” Ali says. “It’s late in the day. Soon the sun will be gone. We don’t have any way of seeing where we’re going, and where we’d land. It isn’t as if there are torches lining the roads any more. And, Alej…Eliza didn’t tell us which way they were going, and none of us know what’s happened. If you knew Eliza the way we do, you’d not expect to leap into her plans, and have it end well.”
Alej has no idea what she’s talking about; he understands only that that sounded like a ‘no’.
“You don’t understand,” he tries again. “I won’t stay here alone. I ought never to have left her. It is my…we are meant to be together. And Aiden, too. We were chosen. They will have work for me.”
“I think…” Ali says, trying her best to keep her focus on Alej and moderate her joy at the idea that she could be right out of this place, out of the dust and the heat and the sleeping in a dark dry hole like a sand animal, “I think we should take this back inside. We’ve enough for a meal, and we can’t do anything until first light. Let’s think this through. Properly.”
Forget the torches, let’s just get out of here, Kit wants to say, but he doesn’t, because, well, he knows it wouldn’t get him anywhere.
The three of them walk their way back, and Alej realises only as he’s finally sitting down and chewing on a handful of deeply green moss, that he hasn’t eaten a thing since before the Pulse came.
“She flies fast, Alej,” Kit chips in. “Don’t worry. Soon as the light comes up we’ll get out of here. But first, you need to sleep. We all need to sleep.”
Alej nods. They’re right. Before you can do your duty for others, you must first take care of yourself. A good rule of Michael’s that hasn’t yet let him down. He wonders, as the fact that he hasn’t slept since two sunrises ago weighs heavy on his head, if Selina has eaten recently.
Selina, as it happens, is about to face the most ludicrously-sized meal of her life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Preparation
In his quarters once more (the sense of being shuttled from one room to another strikes him as strangely comforting) Aiden is struggling with having seen Selina again. Inside, he feels a viciously strong pull, the memories of the same days, over and over, flooding around him, the old scents and textures of the castle plaguing his mind and his fingertips.
Selina still shows all the scars of fire; he does not see her new determination and strength for what it is - the part of her that castle life had no place for - he sees it only as change, and therefore as something even more unwelcome than her presence itself.
Aside from that simple fact that this is his, he had already made his peace with the concept of the liar - she was nothing, she was not supposed to recur again, she was…past. Lesson learned in matters of trust and so on. Why, then, is she back in his life, why is she showing up at the point of his life?
He locates the little bag of jewels he’d hastily shoved under his pillow, and takes each one out carefully, lining them up on the mantelpiece. The satisfying growl each makes as it rests its weight on the polished wood is calming and reassuring as a hug. He pokes at them, gently, a sense of order returning. He tests thinking about Selina again, and she is inconsequential next to the beauty of the gems. There is nothing to miss about the past. The best of it is right here with him still. And in him, it’s there too. All that he’s learned, all that he knows, more than everyone here, certainly.
He counts his breaths and waits. Chaos is to be avoided. But that the mess of the last cycle’s worth of time appears to finally be coming together is, whilst irritating and bizarrely provocative, a reassuring sign that the stars have not, after all, forsaken him.
Far away from Aiden, at least, as far away as one can be whilst still being under the same roof, Eliza is wrestling with Nishan, for that’s the name of the sizeable man tasked with getting her away, pushing her to wash and change and to be calm. He holds her upper arms in a grip precisely only as firm as required, and is amazed at the force with which she tries to escape his grasp. She doesn’t even think of speaking at this point, so furious is she to be held like this.
The complex is the first ‘proper’ building she’s been in for years, so, even with its high ceilings and broad windows it adds to the obvious feeling of being trapped, arousing a sense she hasn’t felt in a very, very long time. A memory buried deep, the ache of whipping her head from side to side looking for escape, the pull in her lungs from a lack of air, the glistening point of knowing she must be quick and she must be strong and she must be fast, and the shrouding of a fear so real that she will wear it like a cloak. She hasn’t the resources right now to pull out what it is she’s thinking of, and that’s likely just as well because if she puts any more things together whilst she’s in this state, she’ll combust. And if that happens, she can’t ever play her part in this story.
Nishan is still talking gently to her, parrying her jabs and stifling her dives, trying to calm and contain her. His voice is kind, very kind, confusingly kind for Eliza’s perception of someone restraining h
er so.
It takes an age for her to run out of her own fury to the point where all she can do is listen to him. She has to tune into him, so different is his accent from that of Kit and Ali and those who’ve accompanied her through the last couple of years of waiting. He sounds like a place she’s been at some point, but she couldn’t put a pin in it.
“It will be easier if you take deep breaths,” he says, and “it’ll be a fine evening for you all if you will only let it. You’re fortunate to dine with His Excellency: it is a kindness he extends to most of us but once a year. I am sure you’ll never have eaten so well. I know they say the food is equal for us all in these days, but the love and attention given to it at these affairs, oh, it will be an evening to remember. One, I am sure, which will help take this cruelty out of you.”
Nishan is both right and wrong about this.
“Look,” he’s saying, “here are silks for you to wear, you’ll feel much better in them. You’re dressed for a war that hasn’t been fought in forever.”
“Your memories seem so short,” Eliza says, now, saying, not shouting, so surprised is she by his calmness. He lets go of her, too, when she speaks - is that a reward, or is that another technique? Eliza’s suspicions are complex, and wary.
“Did you see the bodies? Did you see the people spilling out over the ground, their bodies helpless, flesh melting from their bones, bones disintegrating before your eyes? Did you hear their screams as they died?”
Nishan pulls his hands across his face, as if smoothing out the horrified expression that was beginning to form there. He shudders. “No, no. No such thing. And…yourself?” It is a strange response, but he has no frame of reference for such discussions, and knows only how to be polite.
Eliza fixes her eyes, green and brown and furied, upon his, dark, dark brown and quiet as his demeanour. “I did.”
He meets and examines her gaze, reading it, looking for confirmation, and finding it right at the forefront of her look. If these things were as her few words state, then they would explain the way she behaves now.
Nishan has no reason to disbelieve Eliza, and it is truly only as she is talking with him that it occurs to him how little he knows of the war. It has been explained to them that Outside is barren, regenerating, recovering, that one day it can be home to them all again, but the methods used to accomplish this are known only to those who were there. Curiosity is not quite as about here as it was from Aiden’s upbringing, where it exists, but it is small.
“Why do you have a soldier’s uniform?” he asks, trying to deflect from the unpleasantries to something more revealing, but Eliza’s immediately putting her hands up, backing away from him.
“No!” she shouts. “If you think you’re going to get any more from me, no. I’m not going to let you brief them on the way I’ve lived my life because this is not about me, no, not like the way that this world is all about him, stop that, you be quiet with your eyes!”
Eliza is unable to temper herself amidst the feel of oppression and nerves, and very unsure as to whether or not she ought to. When she has lived so long by her wits and instincts, not having to make judgements past ‘stay or go’, then it is troublesome to be thrown into something which requires all her understanding at once.
Selina finds Tabatha - an immediate volunteer when the servants were selected - to be charming and sweet and kind, someone she wishes she’d been able to have in her life all this time. Better now than never at all, though.
The room Tabatha takes her to is five times the size of the one she had at the castle, and it makes her shiver, as if something unpleasant had happened in it just before she arrived. It has a smooth metal basin behind the headrest of a grand armchair, and it has a bath, vast and smoother than clay. There is no bed in here, but there are great soft cushions piled up in one corner. Selina wishes for a moment that she could fling herself into them and sink and rest and stop. But instead, she smiles, and says, “This is lovely.”
Tabatha ignores this, and asks her, quietly, if she would like her hair tended to. Selina laughs, and asks what on earth can be done with something so fused and damaged, but Tabatha holds out her two cupped hands and shows her a twist of waxed fabric so much like that which they carried fire in in the castle. This is filled with a white, lumpy substance. “I think it’ll help,” she offers, confident and timid all at once.
What harm can it do? She acquiesces, leaning forwards, letting Tabatha rub the substance across her head and massage it into her scalp in such a way that both hurts immensely, and is a relief. A silent relief.
Tabatha she doesn’t ask one single thing. And Selina is wiser than to offer information she’s not specifically asked for. And yet, and yet, for the first time she finds she wishes Tabatha would ask her something, because she appears to be the kind of person that could help her make sense of the tangle of contrasts that have brought her to this point in life.
“Were you born here?” she asks Tabatha, finally deciding on that as the question that will be the easiest to answer and the most telling.
Tabatha nods, and then Selina is quiet, for she doesn’t know in that case how much the girl knows at all. She so wants to understand here, as much as she would like to understand herself. It feels as if Tabatha is someone she’s known for a lifetime. But she isn’t. And she isn’t like her. But she rather wishes that they were in this moment, when she could use someone to help her order herself and prepare herself properly. Sure, dressing and washing and the reduction of pain is welcome, as is the magical balm, but more welcome still would be to be reassured. To feel she’s made the right decision.
And already Selina forgets that this was Eliza’s decision, Eliza’s mission. Already Selina is taking upon herself things no-one has asked her to. And she won’t notice that yet but one day she might find this time here, this time she’s spending half-talking with Tabatha, this waiting and hoping and experiencing such distance and wishing for closeness, for betterness, might be significant, in the great scheme of things.
Even now, it feels to them both as if it’s a part of the great scheme of things. For Tabatha’s part, she’s never known life to feel anything less than as if it were all meant to be so. Life’s only been good and kind to her, a blissful sphere of good food and good people and pleasantry.
She’s lucky to have always been here, in the complex. She’s heard that the last few who were brought in from Outside have sad stories of the way things were - dirty and crowded and sad and full of awful people who had nothing. That she knows how lucky she is is even better, of course. But Selina, well, Tabatha looks at her and sees someone who has had something altogether different.
Of course she knew Ai Den was in the castle - everyone who grew up here knew of him, and looked forward to that day when he would come down from the castle and be amongst them, take his rightful place alongside His Excellency, and they would welcome him into their world and share everything that they had made for him proudly. But she did not know that others had been there with him. She suspects that it was not the experience for Selina that it was for the boy himself, for she does not have the look of someone who has been ravished with care and affection.
Her assumptions are so convoluted, coloured, oriented only around her own understanding that it’s difficult to assess them at all, and Selina’s thoughts end up about the same, so the pair of them are left with only the need for Selina to be clean and well-presented for this dinner.
She shows Selina long, long navy silks, unlike anything Selina has ever seen before, flowing and so comfortable as to be like swimming in water. She thinks how nice it would be to dance in these, and poses once, twice, third position, the sleek and weighty material skimming deliciously across her skin.
“What are your movements?” Tabatha asks, because she hasn’t seen anything that looks quite like that before.
“Oh, just something I remember.” Selina says, stopping, abruptly. It doesn’t seem right to emphasise her skills, not when she isn’t yet sure
if those are all that have set her apart and landed her here in the first place. It occurs to her that she hasn’t truly danced since the day before the fire, and there is a pull and a drain somewhere in her gut as she tries to assess time and space. Nothing makes sense.
“Your memory must be very interesting,” Tabatha says, but she continues to fix and pull and rearrange at Selina’s clothes as if that were a courtesy speech, rather than a truth.
Eliza’s quarters are not as grand as Aiden’s or Selina’s, but they are still better-furnished than anything she’s seen. This is far from a bare and empty room. It has curious wooden statues lining a grand shelf that sits at shoulder height, running all the way about the room, pausing only to allow the door to exist.
A vast bath sits before her. Filled with water hot enough to steam, its surface is rippled with an oily substance Eliza is automatically wary of - is this torture, or kindness? Yet as she imagines slipping into it, she finds herself less and less worried about what it might be, focusing only on how it might feel: it might be relief. She starts to ignore Nishan’s words, interested as she was in his excuses for living on the inside when such horror existed outside. She is increasingly focused upon the idea of immersing herself in warmth. The uniform is stiff and slimy in turns, and in here, if nothing else, at least she won’t experience the Pulse. At least she can drop that guard, and, in doing so, she realises how hard she’s held that, solid and cumbersome as an iron bar across her shoulders.