by Stacia Kane
“How’s this, then? Let’s go ahead and pretend this is an actual investigation, and Mark is an actual suspect. You investigate him, okay? And I’ll oversee it. You report to me, and we’ll see if we can build some kind of case. I mean, we can’t, because it’s a ghost murder, but you know what I mean.”
This time Chess didn’t need to fake her excitement. “Really?”
“Yeah, sure. It’ll be fun, huh? And you’ll learn a lot, I bet.”
“Wow, that’s … thanks. Thanks, Jillian.”
Jillian laughed; her smile held a hint of smugness unrecognized, the self-deprecation of someone who knew self-deprecation was expected but didn’t really feel it. But then, Chess wouldn’t have expected anything else. For all of her I’m-your-cool-pal crap, Jillian was someone who did things in order to be admired and acclaimed. And not for any other reason.
Did it matter? Chess was going to actually investigate someone, and she was going to do it because of Jillian, so she needed to shut up and be grateful. This was a big deal; this was something that would go in Chess’s file. If she did a good job it could affect her placing after she graduated, could put her higher on the list for whatever job she ultimately decided she did want to do.
Goody Byers had encouraged her to go into Liaising after Chess scored pretty well on her Channeling and Reversion exams, but … well, she guessed she’d find out whether or not that was going to work now, because Jillian parked the car in the Church lot, and Chess was about to visit the City of Eternity for the first time.
Chapter Six
Jillian twisted a key in the lock of one of the half-size lockers lining the wall by the elevators. “Ordinarily I’d change into a robe, since I’d just be going to talk to the Liaisers. But I want to show you the City, so …”
Chess grasped at that slick, useless straw, even though she knew it was pointless. “Hey, I know how busy you are, so there’s really no need—”
“Will you stop?” Jillian’s smile was broad, but Chess saw the flash of irritation in her eyes. Right. Turning down Jillian’s gifts was probably not a great idea. “It’s not a waste of time and I’m happy to take you. But you do need to get those clothes off.”
Jillian had already started undressing herself, slipping off the navy blazer she wore and lifting her tailored white T-shirt over her head to reveal a lacy skin-tone bra Chess tried not to look at. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to see Jillian’s naked body. She especially didn’t want Jillian to see her own naked body, much less the two-dollar panties she’d tried to mend herself and the bra held together with a rubber band. Her scholarship covered living expenses, yeah, but there were expenses and then there were expenses. She needed to eat, she needed music and vodka. Who cared about nice underwear? She didn’t have anyone to impress.
But just the same, she wished the right bra cup’s seam hadn’t started to split so the thin layer of padding was visible, wished there wasn’t a string of elastic dangling from the plain cotton waistband of the panties.
“There aren’t any cameras here.” Jillian pulled off her shoes, pushed her navy trousers down to her ankles.
Chess glanced up. Yeah, she knew the cameras had been taken out, but still … shit. “I just …”
Oh, damn, where was she supposed to look now, because Jillian stood in front of her stark naked, and Chess’s skin felt too warm, her heart pounded too fast, and she tasted fear and pain bitter on her tongue.
As quickly as she could she shucked her clothing, keeping her gaze focused on the floor.
“You get used to it.” Jillian’s hand rested on Chess’s shoulder for a minute. A brief touch, almost not a touch at all, but somehow more invasive and creepy because there was no cloth covering Chess’s skin. It was just Jillian’s flesh against her flesh, bare skin touching hers when she didn’t want it, and there she stood naked and vulnerable in front of another person. Panic swam up from her stomach into her throat to choke her.
She stuffed her clothes into one of the lockers without really seeing what she was doing. Some part of her had left her body the second she’d unfastened her jeans; some part of her was used to leaving when her clothes came off, and the rest of her was resigned to just take whatever happened next and get it over with.
Yes, this was different. This was her choice. And yes, Jillian may have weirded her out a little, but Jillian wasn’t going to touch her anywhere else, wasn’t going to force her to do things she didn’t want to do. Chess knew all that.
Too bad knowing it didn’t help.
The elevator doors slid open behind them, revealing the enormous interior. The car was designed for forty people or something like that, because ceremonies were sometimes held down there that required all the employees to attend. Another touch, this time an elbow grab, and Jillian smiled at her with her eyes fixed firmly on Chess’s own. Nice of her, but not really reassuring. “You ready?”
“I guess so.”
The elevator ride took six minutes. Six minutes of being naked next to a naked Jillian. Chess crossed her arms over her chest. Did that look like she was trying to cover up, like she was worried Jillian might be checking her out? Maybe she shouldn’t do that. Maybe she should drop her hands to her sides.
But doing that made her feel like she was sticking out her chest or something. Maybe she should—Shit, she had no idea what she should be doing. All she knew was that she shouldn’t be looking at Jillian. So she didn’t.
The elevator stopped; the doors opened onto a wide cement platform, like a regular train platform. And there was the train, low and sleek, pale blue lights glimmering faintly inside it. This was her last chance to escape, her last chance to tell Jillian that she didn’t really feel like doing this, pleading a hangover or whatever and escaping.
Except she couldn’t do any of that. Not unless she wanted to basically throw away any chance at actually being something one day.
Jillian spoke again once they’d gotten on the train. “It’s pretty cool, huh? That they built all of this so fast?”
Damn. If she’d had her bag with her, she could have had a drink. Of water. Of water, because her throat was dry. She only needed a drink of water, not anything else. “I thought the City was already here.”
“Well, yeah, the cavern was. But the train and everything, they had to ship all of that down specially. Pretty amazing, if you ask me.”
Chess opened her mouth to reply, but Jillian cut her off. “Shit! I need to mark you. Why didn’t you say something?”
“What? I—oh.”
“Oh” was right, because Jillian got up and reached for the bin full of black chalk molded into one of the train’s walls. The tattoos across her bare shoulders and down her arms shifted with the movement, so runes and sigils, hafurans and hex signs, planetary symbols and protective letters in ancient alphabets seemed to slide over her skin. Those symbols awarded her extra protection, extra power to keep her safe from the City’s ravenous dead.
But Chess didn’t have her tattoos yet; she wouldn’t until she’d graduated and was officially hired. Until then she was reliant on an employee to mark her, and Jillian was right. Entering the City was dangerous enough; entering it unmarked was not a good idea.
“Here. Look up.” Jillian leaned over; for an uncomfortable second or two her full breasts hung right before Chess’s eyes, before Chess obeyed with an inner squirm. Not comfortable. She was not comfortable and she was not happy, no no no.
The chalk slid over Chess’s forehead, a prickly tingly sort of feeling like a bug crawling across her face. Energy radiated from it, spreading from Chess’s head to her throat and down. Like a rash. Like sweat breaking out on her skin.
“Sorry I didn’t think of this sooner,” Jillian said. Her fingertips urged Chess’s head to the side, brushed Chess’s hair off her shoulder so her throat was visible. “Guess getting marked by a naked woman isn’t what you thought you’d be doing today.”
“It’s okay.” She tried to sound like it was okay. She was pretty sure she f
ailed. The rocking of the train beneath her and the energy slithering along her body, her own discomfort, made her queasy; she swallowed hard, swallowed again in an attempt not to be sick. Jillian wasn’t threatening her, wasn’t coming on to her, wasn’t trying to ask her to do anything or make her do anything … Swallow, swallow, swallow. Swallow the saliva, swallow the fear, swallow the memories.
And get it the fuck together. Chess cleared her throat—she barely heard the sound of it over the pounding of her heart, the blood rushing in her ears—and straightened her spine.
It didn’t help much. By the time Jillian finished a few minutes later Chess felt like she’d spent several hours jogging in a sauna, and all she wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Screw the Church, screw her potential job—she wanted out. Or at the very least she wanted a drink. Maybe even a cigarette. Something to help her calm down, help her move on. Why couldn’t she just move on?
The train stopped. Jillian stood up and stepped back, admiring her handiwork. Her hand brushed Chess’s cheek. “Okay. You should be good now.”
“Thanks.”
Jillian acknowledged her with a nod and put the chalk back. “You know the rules?”
“Don’t look them in the eye. Don’t talk to them. Don’t make any moves toward them, they’ll see it as a challenge. Don’t try to touch them. Don’t raise your arms above your shoulders, they’ll think it’s an attack. Don’t run. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t show any emotion, but especially not fear.”
Jillian’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been studying.”
Chess shrugged. Of course she’d been studying. Did she ever do anything else?
Jillian bent over slightly in front of the lock to look at it as she did whatever she was doing to it. Chess turned away, examining the ceiling and the blank walls around her like the unwilling witness she was, ostentatiously not looking at Jillian. The procedure to enter the City was privileged to full Church employees only, and Chess wasn’t one of those yet.
Maybe Jillian would forget the procedure, maybe it wouldn’t work … maybe they could just turn around and leave. Those silent dark walls, musty and cold, looming over her to the ceiling she could barely see … Chess felt the weight of the earth above, all six hundred feet or whatever it was that could fall at any second, felt that heaviness like a block of ice sitting on her heart. So far underground, they were, so far that help couldn’t possibly reach them in time if something went wrong. So far that no one would hear them scream.
She heard, though, when the lock gave. Felt it, too, like a snap inside her, a click as the energy shifted. Jillian glanced back at her, smiling, and opened the door to the City of Eternity. The city of the dead.
It wasn’t a city. Not at all. No buildings, no roads, no trees or—well, no anything. Nothing but blank space as far as Chess could see. Nothing but the pale blue glow of the magic sigils covering every inch of the craggy ceiling, every inch of the rough-hewn stone-and-dirt walls, shiny-bright lines of magic through solid rock like veins of silver in a mine.
Pale blue light, too, from the ghosts.
Iron chains hung over the doorway as added protection to keep the ghosts in the City; iron hurt them, burned them, made them lose their shape, and iron was essential to controlling them. The last of the chains slipped from Chess’s shoulder as she pushed herself through them to stand, barefoot and naked, inside the only world the dead were allowed to inhabit.
She thought she was going to be sick.
To her left were a few iron cages, leaking dim yellow light through iron-gridded windows. The Liaisers’ booths, where they sat all day allowing the dead to possess their bodies for the benefit of paying citizens. Through the tiny crisscrosses over the bulletproof glass Chess managed to see Bruce Wickman, one of the Liaisers, his face blank and expressionless as he spoke in the direction of the caged camera and monitor mounted high on the ceiling, while a female Liaiser Chess didn’t know stood ready with herbs and iron should anything go wrong.
How did they do it? How did they visit this place every day, spend all day on Thursdays in this horrible, cold cave of misery and death?
She could see them. The dead. The ghosts, their forms glowy and smeared, as if she was viewing them through a Vaseline-covered lens. They appeared like a strip of shifting light on the horizon, an aurora borealis of death. She saw them, and they saw her; their hate radiated across the empty space—she guessed they were at least a couple of hundred yards away at that point—to scrape at her bare skin.
Jillian touched her; she jumped.
“Sorry.” Jillian appeared to be smiling, but it was hard to tell in the shifting semi-darkness. “You okay? I know it’s a bit intimidating the first time. But listen, hear how quiet it is? How calm? And all that space, and the magic—it’s just so soothing, isn’t it? When you really think about it.”
Chess managed to nod. Soothing? Was Jillian fucking kidding?
No. No, of course she wasn’t, because everyone thought the City was peaceful. Chess had been raised to believe it was peaceful. Every Saturday of her life she’d been taken to Church—no matter that it was simply a ploy, that whatever foster family she was forced to serve at any given time only took her so they could get credit for going—and told how she would live forever under the earth, in the quiet happy peace there. She’d been told how the ghosts that aboveground were driven to kill were in the City full of joy.
And she’d believed it. Because it was Truth. Everyone knew that.
Now she stood in the middle of the terrifying cavern of the City and felt the hatred emanating from the dead, felt the cold against her skin, saw that the gentle future she’d been promised was really like the worst hell the old religions could come up with, and something deep inside her broke.
The Church wasn’t wrong. Couldn’t be wrong. They told the Truth, and they’d proved that over and over again. They’d found her in the Corey Home and given her … given her this, this new life she was living, this chance to be someone for real. They’d saved her, just like they promised they would.
Which meant it wasn’t the Church lying to her. It was her … not getting it, not seeing it. Her fault.
Everyone in the world saw the joy of the City. Except her.
Another way she was broken, another way she was wrong. Shit, what was she even doing there if she couldn’t see something as basic as the beauty of the City? She didn’t deserve to be there if she couldn’t see it. She’d failed. This was a test, and she’d failed. And if they found out, they’d expel her. They’d see they’d made a mistake letting her come train there, and she’d be on her own again.
She could never, ever let anyone know.
So she swallowed the bile and tears threatening to clog her throat and forced her lips to stretch into the closest approximation of a smile she could muster. “It’s just—overwhelming, I mean, they said it was peaceful, but this is so much more.”
Her eyes had adjusted to the dim underwater-like light enough to see Jillian’s answering smile, wide and genuine. “I thought you’d like it. Aren’t you glad you came now?”
“Yeah.” Liar liar liar. “This is great.”
Jillian looked like she was about to hug her; Chess braced herself, already clenching her jaw hard enough for her teeth to squeak against each other. Hugging was bad enough normally, but in her current state Chess thought she might scream if Jillian tried to embrace her without any clothes on.
“How big is it?” she asked, taking a quick step away that she hoped looked like she was just wanting to explore.
“They haven’t told you yet?”
“Wha—oh, um, right, of course. Duh. I’m just—this part, this anteroom part, is like two hundred and fifty yards, right? And then it goes on for miles and miles beyond it.”
Jillian nodded. “It’s almost as big as—oh, there’s Anna and Bruce.”
Anna? Oh, right, the female Liaiser who’d been in the booth with Bruce. Yes. There was all of Anna and Bruce, smiling as they crossed t
he hard-packed dirt. But why wouldn’t they be? They did this every day. They liked it there. Chess was the one who didn’t belong.
“We think we might have something for you,” Bruce said when they got close enough. He was a decent-looking guy, kind of a hippie type but not bad just the same. Not that it mattered, because Chess wasn’t interested in anyone she’d have to see again after she finished, but still.
And he might have information, which was awesome, because that would mean she could leave.
“We got a few names,” Anna said. “It took some work, but we identified a few missing. And they were here at the beginning of the month, and we haven’t had any leaks—not that we can identify, and we’re very certain that means there weren’t any.”
“Which means they were Summoned.” Jillian glanced at Chess as she spoke.
“Right.” Anna also looked at Chess. “Someone performed a Summoning ritual and pulled these specific spirits from the City.”
Chess smiled, hoping she’d managed to keep the no-shit-really? off her face. She wasn’t a fucking child; she knew what a fucking Summoning was and what it meant.
She also knew that this could be a major break in the case. Which was awesome. But which also kind of sucked, because if the case ended, so would her chance to actually investigate Uncle Mark.
“So who were they? Did you write them down for us?”
Anna and Bruce exchanged looks, the quick conspiratorial glances of people who were doing something besides working together. Uh-huh. Oh well. Not her business. She shifted her weight and looked away, back toward the dead inching ever closer. Coming for her.
Never had she been more grateful that her fear of failure—and the resulting punishment she’d get—had kept her from actually using that razor blade on her wrists, from jumping off the Old Home Bridge, from overdosing on anything and everything she could get her hands on. The day she’d moved into her little room in the Church dorms she’d been grateful, the day she’d really realized what a chance this was for her she’d been grateful, but this … this was gratitude unlike any other, so strong and pure it stung her eyes. Because to kill herself would have been to send herself here, and instead of the peace and beauty she’d always been led to expect, she’d have been trapped in that—