Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19

The curtains stir with a soft breeze, a humid warmth blowing through the open window where daylight won’t. When Calla blinks awake, that is what catches her eye first—the swirling of the curtain’s white lace hem, incongruous with the rest of the room, installed over the blinds and pushed to the side. She hadn’t noticed it the first time she was in here.

The next sensation that registers is a soft tugging on her hair. A steady, delicate brushing, smoothing the strands away from her face and along her temple.

Calla turns her head. The stranger pauses, his fingers halting as soon as he sees that she’s awake.

“Anton,” Calla greets, looking at his midnight-black eyes.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t even say our catchphrase yet.”

Despite her dry throat, she manages a croak of a laugh. “Go on. I’ll let you have your fun.”

Anton reaches for a glass of water, already prepared by his bedside table. “What fine daylight we have today,” he says, passing her the glass. “Careful not to—”

Calla lifts onto her elbow to reach for the glass, but then there’s a sudden searing pain at her chest, and her hand jerks up, her last memory flashing through her mind. Her wound needs immediate tending. It needs—

Calla peers down, her hand halting. It has already been tended to. Someone—Anton?—has sliced her shirt along its middle, stopping just before she is indecent, the exposed skin slathered with herbal leaves that cover her wound. All the blood on her chest has been wiped clean. Only her torn shirt shows the remnants of her torment, though it has long dried, the fabric dyed into a deep red brown.

A sense of weightlessness stirs in her stomach. The same suspended vertigo as peering over the edge of the tallest building in San-Er, except she’s looking at her own mended body.

“You should have let me die,” Calla says.

Anton rolls his eyes, pushing the glass into her hands. “And lose your help? That would be incredibly foolish.” He rises from his chair, stretching upright. There’s little space for him to move around, but still he pivots and starts to pace the length of his bedroom, rolling his neck left and right. “You’ve been out for almost a day. We’re down to fifteen players, maybe less since the last reels played when I was watching from a barbershop window. I took your wristband and ran around with it each time it went off.”

Anton digs into his pocket and, finding her wristband, tosses it back to her, the silver buckle landing with a heavy plop beside her hand. Calla peers at the screen. Nothing looks different. Anton could have smashed it up, pulled the chip out. He could have done anything in those hours she was gone to the world.

He could have let her die.

Calla struggles upright, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and setting the glass back down. Meanwhile, Anton returns to his chair, his lips thinning.

“I hope you recognize,” he says when she remains silent, “that you were being really fucking stupid at the temple.”

Her eyes snap up. She blinks once, her fingers twisting into the sheets. She can’t say anything to defend herself. She knows this. She watches him, and every little detail she has ever let slip unfurls between them, one after the other, culminating to here, to now, to her with a gouge in her chest because she refused to jump when she easily could have.

Anton draws closer. His hand lifts, brushing along her face, fingers burying into her hair. It’s not the same soft gesture as when she was asleep. He is not trying to soothe her; he is holding her in place to get a good look, like an investor putting his prize up to the light.

“You’re a wild, terrifying thing, do you know that?” he asks, a tremor in his voice.

“Have you worked it out?” Calla asks in return.

It is unbelievable enough to be beyond comprehension. Something that no one could have guessed before the Er massacre and no one considered after, though they speculated about every other possibility.

All except this one.

Anton lets out a long breath.

“This is Calla Tuoleimi’s body,” he whispers, “but you’re not Calla, are you?”

The girl hasn’t eaten in days.

The village has depleted its resources, and the crops have withered for the season. She hears the grown-ups whispering about how there’s something wrong with the soil, but she doesn’t know what that means. She only knows that there’s a gnawing in her body. That she is so tired all the time, and no amount of playing with the sticks and twigs under the browning trees can solve the problem.

When the invaders come, she’s one of the first to sight them. The riders on their horses, swords strapped to their belts. A battalion carrying torches, setting fire to the houses, letting the flames engulf every shop front, eat up each wooden pulley cart before anyone can think to escape.

The girl screams. She screams and screams, but no one hears her. Not until the flames have consumed everything, not until the village is surrounded by those declaring themselves agents of the palace, acting on behalf of the kingdom of Talin. Worry no longer , they declare, because everyone here is now a citizen of Talin, and they will be under the protection of two mighty kings.

The ash doesn’t settle for days. The ash clogs up the girl’s lungs, until she can’t even feel hunger anymore, because she has only burning pain crawling up her esophagus. If anyone asks, she can’t say whether she’s lost her parents, siblings, friends. Whether it was the palace invasion that took them or if they were already gone. Her memory is too hazy, her mind too young. All she remembers is before and after.

The girl is sleeping outside a small shop the night she hears of the royal family visiting soon. Her legs are scabbed over with bug bites, clothes fraying so terribly that the hems have turned into loose string. The shop’s owners come out to empty their buckets of water, dumping on the step without checking to see if there are vagrants first. The girl scrambles away in time to avoid being splattered, but the owners are engrossed in conversation anyway.

“Er’s royal family,” they say. “They want to bring us offerings, accept us into their rule.”

They scoff, but they will not look a gift horse in the mouth. When the shop doors slam closed after them, the girl doesn’t think much of it either, because when would an offering ever arrive for her; when has anything ever been for her?

The next time she hears about the royal family, they have arrived in the village. They have traveled for weeks by carriage to get here, the very outer boundaries of what is now the edge of Talin. The villagers still think of themselves as another part of the borderlands, as the nearest center one can stop in before the land blends with the rough mountains in the distance. If they voice it aloud, though, the soldiers will draw their swords, so they keep their mouths shut. They stay silent and discreetly turn their heads to the mountains any time they are asked about their allegiance.

Gifts flow through the crowd. Food and shoes and jewels. The people cheer, and it’s hard to say how much of it is pretend and how many are genuinely won over by so little when they had nothing to begin with.

The girl doesn’t join the crowds. She stands by a field one street away, prodding at a muddy puddle with a stick. That’s how she hears the rustle nearby. That’s how she is alone, with no other eyes to bear witness, when another girl joins her, well-dressed and prim in her steps, squinting at the puddle.

A princess, she thinks immediately.

“What are you looking for?” the princess asks. She’s wearing such beautiful items. Pink silk for her sleeves, trailing almost to the ground. A golden bodice, bright under the sun. The circular headpiece wrapped around her hair is studded with so many gems that it twinkles with every minute movement. “That’s a deep puddle. Be careful you don’t fall in.”

The girl doesn’t know how to reply. Even the princess’s speech is something different: each word enunciated in a way that this village has never heard before. The burning in her stomach has returned. Frantic and angry and inflamed. Bread is not enough. Small offerings once in a lifetime when they can bother making the trip out into the borderlands is not enough.

She wants more. She needs more.

The girl looks up.

She wants to be her .

Wind swirls in from the mountains. The girl drops her stick into the puddle, but she doesn’t notice it sink to the very bottom. In that moment, she can only feel her fists clenching tight, her spine tingling, a desperate tremble moving along every inch of her skin.

Her eyes snap open. Somehow, she is standing three paces away. A horrendous pain overwhelms every other function in her body—churning, roiling, tearing apart her very cells.

Then, slowly, the pain fades. Sensation returns: the silk under her fingers, the pinch of her shoes.

She blinks. Once, twice. Beside her lies a body, arms flopped onto the grass and legs splayed crooked.

When she kicks her own birth body into the puddle, the vessel sinks right down into the mud, buried perfectly under the water and out of sight.

Calla opens her eyes. She hadn’t realized she’d closed them. Sometimes, in her dreams, she still remembers the other language that was spoken in what is now Rincun Province. They switched between two—one for the people who came from all over Talin and another only for themselves. But just like her other memories, it moves and disfigures the moment she tries to grasp for it, and the knowledge slips away like water through a sieve.

“I was eight years old,” she rasps. She pulls back, lurches her body away until she has torn out of Anton’s grasp. “Now I am twenty-three. You must understand: I have had her longer than she had her. But if I leave this body…”

“She cannot possibly still be in there after fifteen years,” Anton says.

“She might. No one has been able to invade me in these fifteen years. Maybe it’s because I’m still doubled.”

Anton shakes his head, as if the very thought is preposterous. “It’s because you’re strong. No one could invade me in my birth body either.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do ,” Anton insists. “If you don’t lose your mind after invading a strong body, then you have won it as a vessel. Most dormant occupants fade off after five years. Forget ten. Forget fifteen .”

“ Most ,” Calla emphasizes. “But when we’re talking royal blood, anything goes.” If the real princess has remained after all this time, if the real princess takes her body back the moment that she leaves, then this Calla has nothing left. Because who is she, if not Calla? She doesn’t even remember what her name used to be. She remembers nothing of the life she was born into. She remembers only the princess that she stole.

“This body is all I have.” Calla rockets to her feet. Her wound throbs, but she swallows her wince, pulling her shirt higher to keep the leaves out of sight. “I was so young that I wasn’t even expected to remember my— Calla ’s identity number yet. The tutor recited it back to me when I said I had forgotten, because never could they have thought a child managed to jump at eight years old, much less take over their equally young princess.”

Anton catches her arm; she looks at him dully.

“Stop,” he instructs. “Sit down.”

“I have to go.”

“Go where? You’re injured.”

Anywhere but here , she thinks. No weapon in her hands, only her bare skin, needing to brave harsh elements like the sweltering heat outside and Anton’s sympathy inside.

“Release my arm,” she commands.

Anton frowns. “You’re being stubborn.”

Stubborn . As if this is only a trifling disagreement, debating whether they should change the television channel, instead of her whole life undone.

“And what about it?” Calla snaps. “Why do you care?”

For several seconds, Anton is silent. Then:

“Have you lost your mind?” he fires back. “I am only mortal, Calla. Clearly I care about you .”

A terrifying whine begins in Calla’s ears. Maybe it’s her injury, shutting her down. Or maybe it’s the existing fault line in her heart, triggering every alarm bell whenever the risk of harm arrives.

“Release me immediately,” she says again. “I need to report to August. You won’t stop me from that, will you?”

“August can’t help you.” There’s a plea in Anton’s eyes. “He is as powerless as the rest of us.”

Another breeze swirls into the room. The curtain dances up and down.

“He can help me more than you can,” Calla says.

Finally, Anton releases his hold on her arm, his whole face going blank. As soon as she’s free to move, Calla is walking out of his apartment and securing her wristband. She doesn’t spare a glance back or a single moment of pause as she hurries down the stairs and through Snowfall. If she stops, it will set in. The vulnerability will scrape at her insides; his unguarded eyes will return to the forefront of her mind. August was right. She never should have agreed to this alliance. She signed on to play a game and kill a king, nothing else.

“Get it together,” Calla tells herself. It’s good that she’s not really going directly to August, because he would immediately read the oddness in her face and scold her—rightfully so, because Prince August is perfect and has never made a mistake, unlike everyone else in San-Er.

Calla ducks her head as she moves through the city’s evening bustle, weaving by shop fronts and climbing shortcuts as they appear before her. She barges into the Magnolia Diner promptly, leaping over the turnstile, and though she has no attachment to her former attendants and oversees their safety for selfish, self-protecting reasons, a rush of warm relief floods her the moment she sights Chami in her restored body, fussing over Yilas at the counter.

Calla’s knees go weak. She barely manages to catch herself on the corner of one of the tables. The motion draws half the diner’s attention, and when Chami spins around, she yelps at the sight. Yilas, too, makes a loud noise, lunging forward and sweeping in front of Calla.

“ Oh , you’re okay. You’re okay, you’re okay, thank goodness—”

For someone who rarely expresses an iota of emotion, those few exclamations from Yilas are the equivalent of a heartfelt speech.

“Was there ever any doubt?” Calla asks. She grins, but her head is spinning. She starts to see Yilas and Chami in doubles, then triples.

“Yes!” Yilas snaps. “Last I saw, you were surrounded. I couldn’t get back inside.”

“A boy brought her back here,” Chami adds. “I asked him to stick around until you arrived, but then it got too late into the night, and I had to send him on his way with some food. What happened ?”

Bright white is edging into Calla’s vision. It starts to hurt, a sharp sting spreading from the base of her head to the front, and when she lifts her other hand to her forehead, she can feel herself burning up.

“Yilas didn’t tell you?” she asks, tightening her grip on the table. If she pushes through, it should go away. If she holds still, this feeling must surely fade. “The Crescents at the Hollow Temple are experimenting with qi. Funny business. Don’t go anywhere near them.”

“My brother came to find me just then—” Yilas grabs Calla’s shoulder. “ Shit . You’re bleeding.”

Her ears are ringing even louder than before, drowning out the noise of the diner. Calla takes a deep inhale, trying to clear her senses, but nothing feels like it is going in. She grips the table so fiercely that she might snap the edge right off, trying to seek sensation across her body. It’s not working. Her body is shutting down.

“Get a piece of paper,” Calla slurs, “paper… and pen. Get a pen.”

Rustling. It could be Chami rushing off to fetch the materials, or it could be her own imagination, her senses finally detaching from the world.

“Hey—hey—are you—”

Nothing is coming in through her ears; nothing is visible in her eyes. Calla lets go of the table, and she gives it one, two, three seconds, swaying on her feet. She feels her mouth move. She feels her tongue curl to recite a string of numbers, to croak: “Call August. Ask him… ask him… shut down my location pings—”

She finally collapses to her knees, and her instructions fall short. Before Chami and Yilas can loom over her in concern, before they can so much as confirm they received her instructions, Calla pitches onto her side and closes her eyes to rest.