Chapter 36

CHAPTER 36

Calla eyes the metal chain they’ve secured around her ankle, the other end connected to an immovable loop in the corner of the room. If there is a god of fate, they must be laughing at her. To have thought herself smart for trapping Leida Miliu to an old radiator, only to suffer the same curse.

Midnight hangs heavy over Eigi’s security base. An old clock tolled from somewhere in the building a few minutes ago, announcing the time. They are using the same lodgings as they were when the delegation first set out, only this time their numbers have vastly decreased. The councilmembers already took three of the carriages back to San-Er. Only Weisannas remain with August, watching the base closely for any signs of disruption.

Calla bites down on her thumbnail, pacing another round of the room. The chain, at least, is long enough for her to walk to the windows. She should feel nervous, fearful of what August has in store for her, but that’s not what has her jittery.

August wants her to answer for betraying him. He wants her to repent for not raising the alarm during the coronation, but instead of a quick punishment where a sword strikes her neck, she will remain indefinitely at a security base removed from the kingdom. It won’t be her small apartment in San, where she hunkered down to prepare for a grand task. It will merely be the rest of her life in perpetual waiting. That is far worse than spilling blood.

So she’s not afraid of what August has in store for her, because it really can’t be that bad. Knowing him, knowing his patience, Calla might as well get very comfortable with this chain on her ankle.

The nerve-racking part is that she knows how she gets out of this, but once she begins, she cannot take it back.

Calla leans her head against the cool window, trying to ease the pounding around her skull. The pain is no longer a consequence of experimenting with qi, at least. She’s just tired, and cold, and likely dehydrated. In the corner of the room, the lamp is emitting a whine from the insulating cord to signal that something is broken inside the wires. Her brain is making that sound too. A flat screech as she scrambles to make sense of these ill-fitting pieces strewn across the past few days.

She keeps returning to her attempt to invade Otta during their fight. There is no science to qi. It is unpredictable, malleable, changeable just as the human spirit is. All the same, it can still be understood. It can be ordered by logic, such as: Calla invaded Galipei Weisanna, which should be impossible. Such as: Calla keeps jumping without moving her qi with her—properly, at least, or else her eyes wouldn’t be changing color. Such as: from the very, very beginning, the fact that Calla jumped at such a young age already puts her in an outlandish tier, and no matter how hard she thinks, she cannot summon proper memories of her time in Rincun. She knows she was born there. She feels how the years passed in that village. Yet she has no warmth of a mother, no impression of a father. No home, no recollection of anything other than the sensation of wandering and wandering and wandering in hunger.

Calla can accept that there is more to her identity than she’s been willing to acknowledge. But by that logic, there is no reason why Calla failed to invade Otta. Calla must be stronger. Surely she’s stronger.

Calla bites too hard on her nail, a sting traveling down her thumb. Just as she’s wincing, a soft knock comes on her door, and she freezes. Who would knock ?

“Calla, it’s me.”

“Anton?” she hisses. “Come in. I can’t reach the door.”

The handle turns slowly, and Anton pokes his head in first. He is not bound by any ropes or chains. His collar is rumpled, loose with half his buttons undone. Most of his hair is pushed in opposite directions, crisscrossing at the back. He looks like he’s been standing at the top of a mountain for hours, getting blown by furious winds.

“They didn’t lock you down?”

Anton slips into the room and inspects the hallway for a long moment before closing the door behind him.

“They did. I got out.”

Calla looks to her chain. She shakes her ankle. “Well, what am I doing wrong?”

“It’s not your fault. They put all the guards with me. I jumped through each of them before I fetched the keys.”

This journey through the provinces has been strange enough that such feats are sounding less and less bizarre. Still, Calla blinks, and says: “ What? ”

Anton shrugs. He tugs his sleeve up to show her the fabric bandaged around his lower arm, then the blood-smeared sigil drawn on his bicep. His birth body is pale from a lack of sun, his skin near-translucent at the inner flesh covered by clothing. Nevertheless, when he makes a fist, his arm flexes strong, the sigil glaring red and sharp.

“This works really well.”

“I thought you didn’t remember it when I showed you.”

“My memory is better than expected.”

Calla can’t believe this. “And your sacrifice?”

“I used myself at first, but I didn’t think a shallow cut would be enough for long. I left survivors.”

On second thought, Calla doesn’t want to ask further. She sighs, then points to her chain, and Anton retrieves the keys from his pocket.

“What is your plan with this?”

“I don’t have one.” The first key doesn’t work. Anton tries another. “I only wanted to get myself free. Surely you can understand that.”

An edge enters his tone. She holds herself very still, as though the grip of his hand over her ankle is a trap too.

“You’re not free. There is no path out of this base.”

Anton’s hand tightens. He hasn’t found the right key, but he’s still attempting this one.

“There is no path into San-Er at present,” he says. “There are plenty of paths out of this base. A wide terrain in fact, leading to any part of the provinces.”

Calla jerks her ankle, rattling her chain loudly. Anton clearly doesn’t expect the harsh motion, because he inhales sharply, leaning back to prevent being thrown off-balance. They both go still in the aftermath. Turn slightly, facing the door and preparing for intrusion, only it remains quiet outside. It is late, and August Shenzhi trusts himself too much. Lodgings at the base are located on different levels, and August has yet to understand that with this sigil, there don’t seem to be limits to how they can use their qi. No one will discover the guards who watched over Anton. Not until morning comes and the group doesn’t convene as expected.

“This is laughable,” Calla says. “You didn’t want to run when I offered to run. Then we hit the point of no return, and now the provinces are an option? There’s no use even trying. We don’t have connections. We don’t have money. We would be more comfortable being imprisoned here.”

“Fine.” Anton tries a new key. This one finally slots in smoothly, and he turns the mechanism. “I don’t like the sound of the provinces either. But that’s not the best course of action here anyway. The best course of action is entering San-Er by force.”

“And what force do we have?”

The cuff unlatches. Anton yanks the chain away. “You know very well, Calla.”

“Stop,” Calla says immediately.

“He can’t be allowed to go on like this. He organized multiple attacks on the provinces for the sole purpose of weakening some of the council. He would throw his own guards into the fire for the chance that a councilmember catches an arrow and dies easily and quietly.”

Rincun. Then Leysa. Calla hasn’t forgotten.

“We are no better,” she says. “We are murderers just the same—”

“When have we had the choice otherwise?” Anton returns.

“August could make the same argument.” Their back-and-forth will only go in circles. She’s been having this debate with herself since the moment she left Galipei’s body, the moment she understood why the delegation was being attacked by the Dovetail across the provinces. “He acts for the sake of the kingdom. King Kasa gave him no choice; the council’s restrictions forced him into a corner—”

“He is the king . He should order his councilmembers dead himself if he feels so strongly about it. Why murder hundreds of other innocents?”

Calla tilts her head. Anton hasn’t risen, so he remains crouched before her, his breath heaving. He looks upon her like he has never seen her before, and maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s never truly known Calla Tuoleimi at her most cowardly: the child who wants to rest, who doesn’t want to be told that her revenge isn’t finished until she has cut down every nameless soldier that marched into Rincun. Where does it end, then? Has she doomed herself to unending hunger?

“He’s fair,” Calla says quietly.

“His fairness agreed that my parents needed to die. He would have sat on it forever just so he could remain Kasa’s prized little heir. Calla, he knew .”

The scorching burn in her chest is sudden, and unexpected. At least he knows who is to blame for taking his family from him. Calla almost wishes she could trace it to August too, adopt unshakable reason to widen her razor net. She’s very good at holding personal grudges. Less so at being the judge of others and their grievances, others and the justice they should be granted, because Calla is neither a tolerable person nor an impartial judge.

Once she starts handing out penance, it will be hard to stop.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“Don’t be. I don’t need that from you.”

“What do you need, then?” The question comes out in a rasp. “You want me to wage war on him, is that it?”

Anton shifts onto his knees, rising higher. Though he brings his palms to either side of her hips, he doesn’t touch her. His hands hover in ritualistic prayer.

“You are the only person in this kingdom who can. San-Er will rally behind someone they believe was always in line for the throne. My mother and my father died attempting another way.” His voice hitches. “You understand the cities just as well as I do: if they were caught, it is because they failed to garner support outside of revolutionary groups and Crescent Society temples. The rest of the kingdom still believes there might be good in their royals. The rest of the kingdom believes the heavens had a reason to select the ruling bloodlines. If August is to have an adversary who might actually succeed, it is you. You would be saving the kingdom from him.”

Calla looks up. The lamplight wavers.

“I thought myself the kingdom’s savior during the games too,” she says. All those years spent training, tucked inside a ground-floor apartment swinging a blunt black-market sword. “Look at how that ended.”

Anton’s blood, running through the arena. The loudspeakers, luxuriating in his death.

“It doesn’t have to be the same. It was still August who pitted us against each other.”

“It was us, Anton,” Calla says. Since the arena, she’s lost track of how wholehearted her anger used to be. She wanted a righteous ending. The kings responsible for her hurt needed to die, and that had to be enough.

But she has no name, no history, no anything except the knowledge that one day she was lost on the streets of a far-flung province. Of course the blood of three royals is only an arbitrary payment.

“Calla—”

“I chose anger,” she hisses. “And you chose Otta. There is no balance here.”

“Is that all?” Anton demands. Now his hands come down and make contact. Though her stomach drops, she doesn’t let it show on her face. “Needs change. I chose wrong. I am choosing again.”

The words don’t convince her. Calla grits her teeth and pushes a hand into his hair, grabbing the tufts roughly enough to pull his head back. A surge of satisfaction thrums down her spine. She likes seeing him wince. She likes that flash of pain darkening his eyes. She’s seen Anton in so many different bodies, yet never has she seen his expressions reflecting exactly what he is thinking, as they do now.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” she asks. “At this point, you would say anything if it meant avoiding the punishment that August has in store for us.”

Anton Makusa knows who he is. Calla can’t remember the first thing about herself.

“I wouldn’t lie.” He lets her pull his hair. He bares his throat for her, the surface smooth and unmarred in the lamplight. “I will swear myself to you here, if that’s what it takes. From this moment onward, I am your follower. Your acolyte. Whatever it is you need, as my ruler or my deity.”

The utterance sinks heavily into the room, like ingots in water. What a terrible promise. What a beautiful promise.

“You shouldn’t offer that,” Calla replies mildly. “I’ll never be able to grant all your prayers.”

“It doesn’t need to be all of them. One is enough.”

Anton moves to stand. As soon as he is shifting his balance, she pushes him hard, sending him back down. Either Anton is caught by surprise, or he lets her take her suppressed rage out on him. Either he freezes because he is ill-prepared when she crawls to the floor alongside him, or he wittingly stays put.

Calla can’t decide what response she’s trying to invoke from him. Her hands reach for his face, gentle despite herself. On each movement, her hair swings as curtains on either side of them. Anton gazes up at her. Hunger stirs plainly in his stare, but she cannot say whether it is for her or for power.

Maybe those are one and the same.

“Calla,” he whispers. Slowly, ever slowly, his mouth presses to her neck. She sighs. “I know you can do it.” The hollow of her collar. “Challenge August.” Lower, into her neckline.

“Do you know what you call for?” she asks. His hands have found their way to the buttons of her shirt. One after the other, he commences her undoing. “It will be war.”

“Maybe it’s high time someone waged a war against the Shenzhis.”

He tugs the zip at the front of her trousers. The leather fabric doesn’t budge much, and Calla pulls back, drawing onto her knees. Anton tries to follow, but she keeps him down. Holds his gaze.

“The last civil war,” she says, nudging the zips down the sides instead, nudging until the fabric dissolves into two pieces that she throws aside, “devastated this kingdom. Sinoa Tuoleimi ended up erased from history.”

“And yet”—Anton catches her hands before she can press down on his torso—“she survived into a new time. You look identical. She was reborn.”

Calla laughs once. “She was reborn, only to be replaced by a child in the provinces. Some great queen she was.”

“Then don’t you want to be better?” When Anton sits up, he has her arms trapped between them. He says her name again, again. “Don’t you want to break every piece of the kingdom until it is nothing of the one that made you?”

Calla breathes out, and Anton finally kisses her. His skin is hot upon contact, near-feverish in temperature. His arms tighten to bring her closer, slot her exactly right, and their lips collide with a barely restrained frenzy. Her hands curl to grip his rumpled shirt, and Anton draws away for an exhale to pull it off, before he’s right back where he was.

Every push and pull between them exists as a promise of mutual destruction. They’re in no rush—not as they have been every previous time they’ve found themselves like this—yet there’s always something thrumming under Calla’s skin, something that tells her to grasp him with the panic of committing theft. Her nerves scream with sensation. Her entire counterfeit body, calling for some release.

“Please,” Anton gasps, breathes into her mouth, her neck, her skin. It could be for the kingdom. It could be her. “Please, Calla.”

She pulls at his waistband. Rather than breaking their proximity, she merely pushes everything in the way aside until she’s sinking onto him, gasping into the crook of his shoulder.

“Promise me,” she says. She moves, slowly. “Promise me you’ll fight on my side. Don’t give me a repeat of the arena.”

“I promise,” Anton says. He’s barely holding himself back. The cords of muscle in his arms are strained, keeping himself still for her. “I will be your first soldier.”

“My general.”

His eyes look wholly black in the light. Anton can’t keep still anymore. His hands lock on her hips.

“Your general,” he confirms. “Rise for me, Princess.”

Calla shifts with a soft exhale, her legs propped on either side of him, knees on the floor. The moment her arms slide around his shoulders, he’s thrusting up, deeper and deeper. She moves with him until she can’t, until her core entirely unravels, and then Anton breathes a self-satisfied laugh, pushing her onto her back so that he can continue, so that he can kiss her until she’s barely able to string together two thoughts.

“Calla, Calla,” he says, nudging his nose into her hair.

“Look at me,” she commands. “Swear your devotion when you come.”

Anton makes a ragged inhale. A strand of hair falls into his face; he’s entirely uninhibited. Calla could reach through his rib cage, and in this moment, she knows he’d let her take whatever she wants.

“I swear it,” Anton says. “You are my only place of worship. I swear it.”

Lucky for him, she won’t take a thing. If she reaches into his heart, she’s only trying to leave herself there.

Anton stills with a shudder, and Calla gasps in, her every cell humming with life. For a moment, he stays unmoving, his forehead pressed into her neck, and Calla brushes his hair softly.

“Dearest Anton,” she whispers, “I hope you keep your word.”

“I am a man of my word,” he returns, his voice alert even while the rest of him remains relaxed. “And if I break it, you may strike me down.”

Calla leaves Anton sleeping, slipping out from underneath his arm. If she asks him how to go about a plan, he will complicate it. Calla wants to proceed as straightforwardly as possible. She is no revolutionary. She is just the most furious orphan in the world.

Eigi has warmed in the days they’ve been away. The security base beckons in the smolder of an almost sunrise. When Calla exits the lodgings and approaches the main building, she sights two guards watching the door. She doesn’t give them time to see her. She throws her hand out, her teeth gritted, and a beam of light slashes through the air. There is no need to knock them out for long. One doesn’t even fall properly, but Calla only needs the opening to get past, shut the door, and pick up a standing lamp with a long pole to shove between the handles.

When August confiscated the crown, she knew he wouldn’t keep it close to his person. Royal protocol says sacred people and sacred objects shouldn’t stay together while there is the threat of danger, or else it splits the guards’ attention.

“Your Highness,” the guard exclaims when Calla slides open the next door inside. Cigarette smoke wafts around the space in plumes. He’s been tearing through a pack.

“Very sorry for this,” Calla says. She moves like a viper, arms grasped around his neck and held tight until the guard drops, unconscious.

The crown has been placed on a pillow in the middle of an office table. Calla wanders over. Picks it up.

She felt it in the borderlands too. An instant hum travels through her palm and along her arm, vibrating through her chest. With this, she needs no sigil. The screaming presence of qi is as blatant as a waving red flag, unfurling in her bones. Much more qi than a mortal body should be capable of. Enough qi to make her a god.

“Calla.”

Calla turns over her shoulder and finds August at the door. The guards must have raised the alarm fast: he looks as though he was pulled from sleep. It’s very unlike August. There’s already the fact that Anton messed with his hair and dyed it black, taking him away from that golden appearance he’s so carefully cultivated over the years.

“Yes?” Calla holds the crown up. Inspects it under the electric lights, letting its sharp edges glint bright.

She will be good. She promises she will serve the kingdom well, even if it means burning it down. This is how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? This is how they all convince themselves they are deserving of total power.

“Put that down.”

Agitation quivers through his voice. For the first time since she has known him, August might be panicking, recognizing what is spiraling into place. He made an assumption that the Calla before him is the same Calla who agreed to help him at the start of the games.

“No,” Calla says, “I don’t think I will.”

She sets the crown on her head.

It is nothing but the heavy weight of metal on first contact, the hum of qi moving from her chest to her head. Then, to her shock, the crown begins to melt . She feels it turn liquid, feels the metal trailing down her forehead. She blinks rapidly, trying to keep it from entering her eyes, but she shouldn’t have worried. The droplets stop right above her lashes. The crown solidifies back into gold the moment it finishes fusing with her hair, her skin.

August stares, bewildered, as though he might be misunderstanding, as though she might be playing in jest. He has forgotten so easily. From the moment he found her before the king’s games, it has always been him who seeks her help. She does not answer to him.

“What are you doing?” August demands.

“I thought it was obvious.” Calla lifts her arm, and the room pulses with her. “This is a coup. I am your king now.”