Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

It’s not even the right season. The last time Calla heard this siren, she was still living in the Palace of Heavens. The Rubi Waterway had risen past its banks and sent a flash flood rippling five feet high. It wrought havoc for two weeks, her parents unwilling to handle the chaos. Civilians died, businesses closed, fresh food stalls went under because they couldn’t move anything from building to building and it was impossible to carry crates up fourteen flights of steps for the rooftop routes.

“I need to go,” Calla declares, pivoting fast for the couch in the living room and picking up her sword. It makes no sense, but she won’t take the chance. Chami and Yilas’s diner is on the ground level, and floods from the waterway come quick. Much as she would like her former attendants to stay safe, she is most concerned about keeping an eye on Chami, because if Chami needs to get to the hospital, then Calla’s false identity starts to crumble.

“Fifty-Seven, wait,” Anton calls after her. “There’s something shifty about this. It’s not the right month for tides to be rising. It could be a ruse—”

“I know.” Calla secures her sword onto her belt. “I just need to check on something. I’ll find you later.”

Then she’s gone, slipping through his front door and climbing up instead of down. With the siren whining, the ground of San-Er will be crowded with civilians trying to get their business in order, transporting what cannot be transported if the streets are soon to be flooded for days on end. Calla sticks close to the edge of the stairs, trying not to brush shoulders with the masses surging down, grimacing when she passes a man in scrubs reeking with the smell of blood. They’re all yelling at one another, drowned out by the wails of the siren, but Calla catches their confusion, snippets of doubt and their hypotheses that it could be the games drawing its players out for slaughter. It would be a nonsensical plan. Every soul in San-Er flocking down to the ground would only make it harder to find the players. And yet, Calla cannot imagine why else the alarm would be going off.

She emerges onto the rooftop, slapping her hands over her ears. The siren noises are coming from speakers installed alongside the television antennas atop each building. They are relentless, echoing off one another, sound waves bouncing back and forth. Calla has to grit her teeth hard when she breaks into a steady jog, finding a rhythm as she crosses the rooftops and jumps the gaps across buildings. She would have expected more movement here, but there are only pigeons and debris keeping her company.

“Hey!” Calla yells when she spots a child, but she cannot hear herself past the sirens. The child only keeps playing. When Calla glances down, squinting at the ground, she sees no water anyway, only a sea of heads pushing in movement. She swallows her warning, shaking her head.

She’s nearing the diner. Instead of risking the considerable jump to cross onto the next rooftop, Calla takes the door down. Once she’s back in an enclosed stairwell, she finally releases her clamped palms from her ears.

“I’m going to be pissed if this is a ruse,” Calla mutters, taking the stairs three at a time. “But I’m going to be pissed if it isn’t too.”

She winds through the residence floors, then clutches her nose at the factory floors. Even with the sirens blaring on, some people don’t care to move. They continue swinging their noodles out of raw dough, distributing such a thick layer of flour that Calla tracks white footsteps down two more levels.

She emerges from the building’s side door at last, finally glimpsing the diner up ahead. Chami and Yilas are already standing outside, nervously in conversation.

“Yilas!” Calla bellows. She steps around three men carrying a caged pig among them. On the ground, the sirens are fainter to her ear, muffled by the buildings.

The two turn at her call, relief flashing when they sight her in the crowd. Calla pushes closer, closer.

Then, as soon as she steps into the open space outside the diner, someone pulls her hair and sends her lurching back into the throng of people.

Calla barely finishes her gasp of surprise before she’s throwing weight onto her shoulder, rolling to avoid hitting the ground wrong. A knife strikes the gravel, a hairsbreadth from her ear, and her eyes bulge, latching on to the meaty hand around its blade. Calla is fast to recover, launching herself at the attacker—

Only then she’s thrown back by some invisible hand, a fist smacking her sternum and pushing all the air out of her. Calla lands hard on her side, gasping. Her whole chest prickles. For a very long second, she cannot move, not because she’s hurt to the point of being out of commission, but because her mind is reeling with disbelief. She wasn’t even touched —how did that happen?

There’s a sudden scream that sounds a lot like Chami. Calla scrambles up at the sound, but she’s too late. Chami is lunging forward to help, and the attacker has sighted her.

“Hey, wait!”

The attacker pulls the blade up and slashes Chami’s throat.

“ Jump! ” Yilas screams.

A flash of light. Chami drops—or her body does, a gaping wound in its throat but no red to be seen. She left before any of her qi leaked, her body becoming an empty vessel. Calla shudders with a breath of relief, still half kneeling on the gravel, her palms cutting into the stones. Everyone else on the street is giving her a wide berth. No one stops to help or stare too long, in case they’re caught in the scrimmage.

“Are you okay?” It’s her attacker’s low voice, but Chami is asking the question. Chami extends her new, thick hand, and Calla takes it, getting to her feet.

“Let’s get inside,” she says in lieu of a reply. Yilas is visibly shaken, but she says nothing as she hooks her arms around Chami’s birth body. Calla grabs the legs. They file into the emptied diner, climbing over the turnstiles, and set Chami’s body onto one of the tables.

“Oh dear,” Chami says. In the attacker’s body, she ducks to avoid hitting her head on one of the dangling overhead lights, then examines the wound. “Let me stitch this up. I have some alcohol in the back.”

“Hold on.” Calla is frantically trying to think. “Are you wearing a wristband?”

Chami looks at the new body she’s occupying. It’s masculine, so she pats around the waist gingerly, a grimace on her face.

“I don’t see one.”

If Chami managed to jump in, then the body wasn’t doubled, so there was only one occupant before. But there’s no wristband, so this is not a player. Why would a stranger on the streets try to attack Calla? She reaches for the knife that Chami is still clutching, and Chami relinquishes it quickly, letting Calla examine the blade. It looks standard. Could have come from any one of the three weapons shops.

“Chami,” Calla says quietly. “Would you… mind jumping into Yilas for a second?”

Yilas straightens up, concern immediately marring her expression. “She can’t leave that body, he’ll come back and kill us—”

Calla draws her sword, getting into a battle stance. She doesn’t think she needs to, but she’ll do it to make Yilas feel better. “Trust me. I have a hunch. Can she, Yilas? Just for a few seconds?”

Chami turns a questioning glance to her girlfriend. When—after a few seconds of holding a tight grimace—Yilas finally nods, there’s another flash of light, arcing from the attacker’s body to Yilas. Yilas’s eyes turn from pale green to pink. And the attacker… drops right to the floor, not a fleck of color in his blank eyes as they stare up at the ceiling.

Calla puts her sword away.

“How is that possible?” Chami gasps in Yilas’s body. “This—this—did you see another light?”

“There was only yours,” Calla reports. Though she doesn’t visibly show it, she’s equally flabbergasted. She rubs at her nose, trying to ease an itch that won’t go away. “There isn’t even anyone around right now for him to have jumped into.”

A short scream pierces the streets outside, close enough in proximity to be heard over the sirens. Though Calla waits to see if it will come again, she doesn’t make any move to investigate the sound. For all she knows, it could be San-Er itself, screeching a dying call in response to the blaring sirens. Quick as they came, the sirens suddenly stop, and then the silence almost rings louder.

Chami jumps back into the attacker’s empty vessel. She rolls herself upright again with a cumbersome grunt. Meanwhile, Yilas blinks, returning to consciousness, and hastens to kneel down so she can help Chami.

“What happened?” Yilas asks.

“We’ve got a vessel,” Chami explains. “It’s vacant.” Her sweet voice transfers over even with such low vocal cords. Until the wound on her birth body heals, she cannot jump back in. She’ll have to stay as this body—this mysterious, hostless body.

Calla heads for the door, peering out through the glass. There’s no water to be seen. It really was a false alarm. Could it have been a trap, just for her? But then, why would the attacker jump away so quickly?

“If you can,” she calls to Chami and Yilas, “lock the doors and don’t open shop for a few days.” She pushes at the door, facing San-Er again. “I need to get to the bottom of this.”

Pampi plugs her portable desktop into the jack socket, watching the monitor feed. The sirens in San-Er are connected, and it was no trouble to trigger them all by sending a command into a single one. She almost craves more of a challenge, but it is what it is.

She’s turned the sirens off now. She only needs to input her last trigger, using a different feed that will erase the evidence of her remote interference. A low mist has started up on these rooftops, clouding her surroundings. Pampi’s hands fly over her keyboard, string after string of code that she reads only once before sending through.

A door bangs from the other side of the rooftop. Pampi inhales sharply through her nose, taking in the acrid scent of burning rubber. Her code finishes. With a quick glance at the screen, she lets it load for one second more, in case there are stray signals to be caught, then unplugs her monitor and shoves the wire back into the briefcase. Just before the footsteps come within range, she hauls the computer to her chest and scurries off, ducking behind a mound of rubbish and concealing herself against a broken washing machine.

She waits. The footsteps shuffle toward one of the antennas, and Pampi wonders if it’s the building’s maintenance, having entirely ridiculous timing. Then she peers out from her hiding space and sights a tall woman with long hair prodding at the siren speakers.

Not palace affiliated. Not a guard. But this woman looks like she knows what she’s doing, pulling at the wires and refiguring them into different slots.

Pampi carefully eases her briefcase open again, letting the computer monitor blink on. By some instinct, she swipes her fingers across the pad and remotely logs on to her games surveillance. She zooms in on the map, closer and closer until she is looking at surveillance footage of herself hidden on the rooftop, tucked a few feet away from the woman in the black jacket, who now straightens with a pensive expression on her face.

Yellow eyes, gloved hands. There’s an inherent power present in the way she is standing, or else Pampi wouldn’t be paying so much attention. If Pampi knows how to identify anything, it is those who hold power, so that she can squeeze them dry.

Pampi switches screens, pulling up the locational view of the players’ wristbands, and the number 57 flashes in a little dot right where she stands. Fifty-Seven, star of the scoreboards. Pampi supposes she shouldn’t be surprised it is this particular player who has shown up here.

Fifty-Seven turns around suddenly, as if she hears something, eyes flashing in the gray light. There’s smoke from the factory nearby turning the mist into a heavy smog, so she reaches up to take off her mask, revealing the rest of her face. For the first time, without the pixelation of the screens and the washed monochrome of San-Er’s footage, Pampi gets a proper look at Fifty-Seven, who starkly resembles…

“Princess Calla,” Pampi whispers under her breath in awe. “How fascinating. ”

The palace publicizes a statement. It takes Calla wholly by surprise, unable to believe what she’s hearing. She spent an hour trying to reach August’s phone line without success, and as soon as she gives up and comes home, she gets her answers on the news instead, where the broadcast is speaking about the sirens. Rather than brushing the matter under the rug and withholding an explanation, as Calla would have thought, the newscaster cleanly reads the lines she has been given.

“San-Er has been infiltrated by rural rebels. They have no identity numbers nor the legal right to be within city limits, but those without morals and rules will always try to disrupt what is flourishing.”

Calla peers into the fridge, sniffing at the empty shelves. The broadcast continues in the background while she shuffles around the kitchen, trying to find something to eat. She retrieves a single egg and cracks it into the heated pan.

“A few casualties in the games have been attributed to these rebels, and today was another attempt. Official instructions from the palace bid us to remain calm. There is no need to worry as the palace guard is working day and night to search for the perpetrators.”

The sun is setting. The evening outside turns from a sad, dingy gray to a dark, velvety one. When Calla flops the fried egg onto her plate and shuffles to the couch, Mao Mao trots after her, purring. Her living room falls dimmer and dimmer, but she makes no move for the overhead lights. She only pushes at the cushions absently to make space for her cat, then sets her plate down. Her apartment consists of the living space, her tiny bedroom, and the tiny bathroom, but there is an even tinier laundry room behind the cramped shower cubicle, perpetually illuminated in varying red and blue and green. The brothel that operates in the building next door directly faces the laundry room’s window, providing enough light for her to see what she is forking into her mouth.

The news broadcast continues. It decides that the troublemakers are only intent on killing players of the games to turn their nose up at the king, that they disrupt the cities’ affairs out of spite. Any civilian who sees suspicious activity should report to a palace guard immediately. Calla supposes there is no harm in feeding the civilians this story. If it’s solely the players of the games being targeted, then there is no safety threat across San-Er.

There is only King Kasa’s dignity at risk.

Mao Mao butts her hand.

“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” Calla asks.

Mao Mao makes a noise of agreement. August said the dead bodies were being placed with the Sican salute. There is no reason for rural troublemakers to do that.

Unless the rural rebels are somehow linked to Sica. Could Sica be recruiting out of rural Talin?

Mao Mao’s head suddenly lifts. His feline gaze has turned sharply to the bathroom, and Calla reaches for the remote, putting her television on mute. The apartment falls quiet, leaving only faint conversation in the hallways and music from the apartment upstairs. Then: a rustle from the laundry room.

Calla bolts to her feet, scooping up her plate. It’s the nearest thing that will serve as a weapon, and she doesn’t hesitate to throw when the stranger steps out from her bathroom, putting as much gusto into her arm as she can manage.

“Fine daylight!” the stranger shouts in a rush, swerving away. The plate smacks the doorframe, shattering into a hundred pieces on the bathroom tiles. “What fine daylight we have today!”

Anton. Calla exhales in a huff. Her heart is still clamoring against her ribs when she flops back onto the couch, putting a hand to her chest.

“The whole point of a code phrase is that you say it first .”

Anton runs a hand through his short hair, a collection of rings glimmering on his fingers. Red light illuminates him from behind, making him look like the type to be working at a brothel rather than just living above one.

“How did you find me?” Calla demands when Anton remains silent. “Did you climb through the window?”

Anton shows her something in his hands. The tracker that August gave her, linked to Anton’s wristband.

“You left this at my apartment,” Anton replies. “I took it to a shop and reversed it. Tracked your wristband here. And yes, you have a pipe directly outside your window that gave me a boost up. Your place isn’t very secure.”

Clearly. “I suppose we’re even now.”

Anton strides closer, tossing the tracker up and down. “We’re not even until I get to keep this— what is that?”

Calla starts. It takes a prolonged second, searching the living room while it’s lit up with silent ads running on the television, before she realizes that he’s talking about her cat.

“This is Mao Mao.” She scoops up the bundle of fur and holds him out. Anton flinches back. Mao Mao goes limp like a child’s rag doll. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of cats.”

“I’m not afraid,” he insists, and Calla leaps to her feet. She adds blatant dishonesty to the list of expressions she has collected from him.

“He won’t bite,” she says. Anton takes a step away. He collides with the wall, trying to put distance between himself and the cat, but Calla follows him anyway. “Here, hold him.”

Calla plops Mao Mao into his arms. She walks off before he can toss the cat back, heading toward the light switch on the other wall.

“They finally admitted to it.”

The room flares white-blue, no longer bathed in darkness. When Calla returns to the couch, Anton is still standing where he was before, Mao Mao resting comfortably in his stiff arms. He looks too nervous to move.

“Foreign invaders?” he guesses, eyes swiveling to the muted television.

“Almost. Rural invaders. Still Talinese.”

A whine echoes from upstairs, drawing a thump against Calla’s ceiling. Mao Mao leaps out of Anton’s arms to follow the sound, and Anton sighs in relief, putting his hands in his jacket pockets. The apartment falls into an eerie hush again. Though there is no true silence in San-Er, one learns how to tune out the sounds beyond their four walls, to keep the machines and voices pushed to the back of their mind until it almost, almost fades out. This is as close to noiselessness as San-Er will ever reach. And without anything to fill it, Calla feels the hairs at the back of her neck prickle, watching Anton regard her from the other side of the living room. This is different from their silences on the streets, from when they prowl the alleys for a sign of the games’ scuffles. This is silence without a purpose. Something that might settle between a soft shoulder brush, a meeting of hands.

It has no place here.

“I came to check on your safety, like a good ally,” Anton says after the long moment. He has provided an explanation without Calla asking, clearly sensing the oddness just as she does. “You ran off in a frenzy.”

“ San-Er was in a frenzy.” Calla puts her finger to her mouth and bites on a nail. It’s an old habit that she’s long kicked, so the moment her teeth make contact, the move feels foreign and she removes her hand, grimacing at herself. She reaches for the plant by her couch instead, pulling off a strip of the flax lily. “Someone came after me again. Same as last time. Lightless jumping. Empty body.”

Anton frowns. He walks over. Takes a seat right atop the coffee table, although the couch is directly beside it. “You sure you haven’t pissed anyone off recently, Fifty-Seven? This is starting to sound personal.”

“Perhaps it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t jump without light.”

The overhead bulb flickers, as if it wants to weigh in on the subject. It is only the electric lines being overexerted, but Anton glances up in concern, the line of his jaw tightening. Calla doesn’t pay the lights any heed. She starts to braid the flax lily into a bracelet, wondering if she needs to get a new plant from the markets. The stalls that sell these don’t last long, but there are always new ones popping up. Smaller vendors buy from big companies, and big companies have the permission to funnel them through the wall in bulk from the farmers outside. The plant threads will stiffen in mere days and become impossible to wear without rubbing her wrist raw, but it’s soothing to build them, to create something even if it is all to be thrown away in the end. Her body itself has memory: it remembers each flax lily bracelet that has dug in and left a little notch behind. Most others in San-Er refuse to think of their body as their own. They let their selves and their bodies stand separate, so that their mind is the only thing that follows them around as wholly theirs. Calla refuses to do the same. Each scar on her arm is hers. Every inch of puckered skin speaks to the knives she took during palace training, to the sparring matches where she defeated her tutors and rose above them in skill. What are memories if not stories told repeatedly to oneself? Her whole body is the very narrative of her existence.

“I tried jumping without light, when I was invading this one,” Anton says, interrupting Calla’s thoughts. When she looks up at him, he flicks the inside of his elbow, indicating the body he’s wearing. “After you mentioned the idea earlier, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

Calla wants to roll her eyes. Of course he thinks that an impossible thing is merely a matter of trying. That rules can be overwriten by belief alone.

“And you failed.”

“I failed,” Anton confirms. “But it felt like I was a fraction of a second away. If only I could cross that last hurdle more quickly, it would be manageable.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Calla says plainly. “It’s not a matter of speed.”

But Anton doesn’t seem to hear her. The idea has grown wings in his head and flown right toward the skies. He props his palms on the table, looking contemplative.

“It’s always bothered me, you know. There’s not a body that I can’t intrude on, so long as it’s not already hosting another intruder. I could probably occupy the king himself if I got close enough. Prince August too.”

Calla says nothing in response, focused on braiding her bracelet.

“But it’s just not possible to be discreet about it,” he continues. “I can’t move fast enough for the light not to flash.”

Calla finally completes the bracelet. She holds out her hand, and Anton blinks. A few seconds later, he offers his wrist to her hesitantly. Calla hauls his entire arm closer, ignoring his startled, suspicious wince.

“I jumped for the first time when I was eight.”

She doesn’t look up when she speaks. She doesn’t know why she is speaking at all, except maybe to test whether Anton Makusa will see what no one else does.

“Everyone always describes it like wading through something solid,” she goes on. Her concentration is fixed on the miniature knot, maneuvering its ends carefully so they do not slip from her fingers and ruin the whole bracelet. Anton is equally careful in his stillness, though he has no knot to make. If anything, he is watching one unravel before him.

“But I was yanked in. I couldn’t control how I was moving, I just was , and it felt terrifying. One second I was in my body, and the next I was in another. When I opened my eyes, I could still feel my qi settling. I thought I was dying. I never wanted to move so fast again.”

“You were only eight years old,” Anton counters, his voice low. Maybe this body of his really was plucked straight from a cabaret stage: one of its singers, crooning into the microphone. “It would be different if you jumped today.”

Calla shakes her head. She is finished securing the bracelet and finished with this conversation. Her fingers graze Anton’s wrist before she draws back, and his hand twitches, like he’s about to reach out and stop her.

“It’s not the speed. You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

He watches her stand, stride across the living room.

“Fifty-Seven.”

Calla stops. If he is smart, he will have caught it. If he is smart, he will say—

“When you jump once…” Anton pauses, like he is doubting whether he should even ask. A beat passes, then he continues, and Calla almost laughs, because she shouldn’t be shocked at all that Anton Makusa was really listening. “… you still have to jump back out. Wasn’t the second time better?”

She’s smiling when she looks over her shoulder. But there is nothing nice about the expression. It is bitter and jagged and everything she is.

“You can show yourself out, I’m sure,” she says, before walking into her bedroom and shutting the door behind her.