Six

A year or two later I was north with Brandegor’s gang. I was a Choir bandit now. Not a member of the gang, but a pupil of it. I endured their tutelage and glutted myself on their attention. It made missing the bluffs nearly bearable. I practiced my Cisran as we edged the gulches. The land rose, the air thinned. We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony’s legal edge, the place where land was and wasn’t Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter’s rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.

Roystonian claims that this land was theirs, or for some reason Ignavia’s, all felt flimsy, given that the Drustlands themselves recognized no borders, and championed free movement for all except their exiles. Traditionally, this land was Drustish. Drustish people lived here and spoke one of many Drustish dialects. A Drustish Hall was near. That’s what was relevant. It was why we traveled so defensively, and walked our lurchers half the time to obscure their snarling mechanical loudness. Mors Brandegor did not give a consistent story of her exile. She just kept it clear that she was not welcome back.

The night previous we’d held up a private bathhouse in upper Montrose. The ornate grayish edifice had been built over a natural hot spring, and was not nearly as old as Bellona, but tried hard to pretend otherwise. The bathhouse was a massive granite dome, carved with deep exaggerated lines to suggest the stone was cupped hands over the spring. The doorway was tucked beneath two fingertips. Inside the ceiling was decorated with the gilded creases of its palms. It was ghastly, shell-like, not my kind of lush. I felt like a caught bug. We’d cleared out the bathhouse of all its fine perfumes and linens, the coins from its safe, the best possessions patrons had brought, and the hatchet the squirrely attendant kept beneath the counter, which Uthste now wore on her hip. I conjugated stupid phrases, I loved her, I had loved her, I love her, I will love her, I’ve always loved her, I’ll always have loved her, and watched the dusk bleed glint off the hatchet’s crooked beak.

I was set to be Candor’s valet when she was young Baron Loveday, whenever that may be. Loveday’s valet would’ve spoken Cisran. She would’ve known all the names of the major baron families and all the names of the revolutionaries in the war that split Ignavia and Cisra out of Rasenna, and she would care about Rasenna, and its complicated legacy as the non-expansionist heir to the Bellonan empire. She would care about the proportion of baronies with political ambitions compared to those weaker baronies without strong enough economic or cultural output to care about much more than their relationships, who generally deferred opinion-making to their neighbors. She would care about the Senate and its continuation. The currents around Ignavia City, where a movement helmed by the young Chauncey heir argued that polities ought elect their own representatives, that baron blood as a pre-qualification for senatorship was tyrannical and antiquated, that the people clamor for industrial progress and its promises of individual freedom, rags to riches, grime to shine. It was difficult to imagine caring about these things. I’d figure out how. It was my duty to trick the wildly invested that I, the help, was competent and knowledgeable and wanted what was best for them. Help that wants to help is a cog that makes the right kind of ticking sound inside the machine and by harmony becomes invisible. I wanted to be invisible. How easy it’d be a shadow to gruesomely murder Yann Chauncey. We’d be grown up soon.

Valor sang. Her voice had a high clear quality, fluttered at the edges of each phrase. It was more fluid than either factory chants or stompy slurry Fingerbluffs dancing songs, intricate and intimidatingly delicate, the sort of song one had to be taught and keep pink lungs to sing. Like a hymn. Birds liked it. Big fat bald-headed birds with sickle beaks and hooks for toes. There were lots of them. They crowded the slouchy trees. We didn’t speak, mostly so as not to interrupt her. That and Brandegor’s queer mood. I understood it, I’d be tense like that if I’d been near Ignavia City. Didn’t like rubbing up with ghosts.

You’re from here. Or somewhere nearer here than home was. I wondered if you had family somewhere. I wondered if they knew what became of you. I hoped they didn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of explaining how inside of me you remained alive.

I threw my attention under the lurcher’s inexplicably ichorite treads. Chevron trenches in the sooty mud, displaced thumb-shaped gravel. Pleasant crunch accompanying Valor’s singing. I walked Brandegor’s lurcher and she walked ahead, didn’t look at us. Having destroyed them to come of age, I’d replaced these tires recently with my spoils. When we first left the Fingerbluffs we’d discussed money for it. I’d balked at the price. Month’s wages for just one! Thieves’ wage doesn’t exist, I was told, I should be clever. I should see what I need and take it. So I took it.

About seven months before now, down in Kimball, an enforcer intervened in a raid of ours. He put a gun in my face. I put my hand on his gun, it went flaccid as taffy, I pushed it backwards toward his head. It folded like a goose’s neck. He spent a minute fussing with it while we ran, went red-faced trying to bend it straight. Huffing and growling and strangling the thing. He pulled the trigger for some fucking reason. It blew up. It cleaved the nose from his face. I spat up oily rainbow fluid and couldn’t see or stand touch for hours after but somewhere in that time, I crawled to his lurcher, and by grace of ancestral instinct I unscrewed the lug nuts and stole the dead man’s tires. I brought the tires to Brandegor. She considered us square and told me I was so smart, such a smart girl, I was so stupid. Could’ve just stolen the lurcher itself. Lurcher’s just as good.

I’d killed two men and a woman since leaving the Fingerbluffs. All enforcers. That first was an accident but the next two weren’t. Funny timing, I was assured. Usually it wasn’t so much so fast. Forgive me that I felt nothing about it. I felt nothing at all. I felt no rain and no chill. Just nausea. I bit my nails bloody and cringed from myself.

What a world I crawled across! I’d seen so much in the past months that it felt like my head had no edges. Images swam over me and I hardly parsed them. I drowned in texture and sound. I’d seen the backs of tangled serpents in the Flip River delta and the trunks of ancient redwoods, the spotted long-toothed tigers in the poppy fields, the beached skeleton of an old wrecked ship. I learned how to disassemble and reassemble a rifle. I stuffed candy in gas tanks and vats of raw concrete and memorized code phrases whose meanings evaded me. I’d seen the dull flat roof of a prison, inside which workers were made to weave rope from bleed ’til bleed without the removal of their manacles, and to dangle posts where a man squirmed alive from his ankles, bound in that rope of his labor, bare-chested, not Choir, half-insane. We cut him down and he slithered on his belly through the woods with the bread and gold we gave him. I learned how to string a bow. I learned the meanings of Choir tattoo patterns. I got MARNEY HONEYCUTT done under my collar bones. It itched like mad when it scabbed and flaked. I felt across my chest and became myself, committed to being the dead union’s daughter, the Torn-given crawly rat whom my dead community would’ve reviled if they’d been alive to see me, my role in this fatal work. I learned to read, which was torture. I bought my first cock in secret but didn’t dare wear it. I sometimes rubbed the leather straps against my cheek. I asked a girl in a parlor to snuff her cigarette on my wrist and she did; the scar shows like a cufflink. I learned arithmetic and more ways to gamble. I learned the Histories, which were Bellonan mythologies some roundabout bastard called Tarpeia wrote down to punish me. I slammed my hand in a door in a fit of sudden unstoppable anger and broke two knuckles, which healed poorly in shades of yellow and green. I got my menses. I stopped getting taller. For some reason my voice never dropped.

Alarming number of birds, now. Too many roosting all at once. The weight of their congregation bent the trees they flocked upon. I didn’t like the looks of them and Valor’s song was over. The tires and our boots crunched arrhythmically. The scratchy cloudy sky hung low. I buttoned the topmost button of Tita’s, my own, jacket. My pulse beat fast for no reason. My insides smashed together and my brain was electrified pulp. Looking at slumped trees and their meaty umbrella-shaped vultures hurt. I turned over conversations we’d had across my tutelage for something to say. The back of my skull gave me a fistful of words without order: pluperfect, artillery, cartilage, saltpeter, daffodil, bartering, lipstick. Nothing worth its own isolated utterance. I thought the word utterance. I thought about Tricksy and Candor. I considered doing a flip. Cartwheeling down the mountainside as a one-man avalanche. My body in smithereens across the forest floor, feasted on by foxes and minks. I said to nobody, for something to say: “What’s Hereafter mean exactly? I’ve said it all my life without knowing what it means.” My mentors kept walking. Valor held her skirts up in one fist. The ruffles stirred like gills.

Uthste said, “Who’re you asking, Marney?”

“You, ma’am,” I sniffed.

“That so?” Uthste made a sound in her throat. She felt along her head. It’d been weeks since she shaved it, and a dark fuzz blurred the usually showy seams between her bones. “Why did Yann Industry Chauncey commission the slaughter of your friends and loved ones?”

My guts slugged with poison. I gnawed my tongue so hard it bled.

“The why’s twofold. Intertwined and simultaneous. The first why is that Yann the man is evil. He claims ownership of the tools and the fruits of other people’s work and smashes those who ask for scraps beneath his heel. His actions stain the earth. The remedy to this is your little knife. You kill him, he’ll butcher no more workers. Second reason why,” Uthste said, “is why the first emperor of Bellona sacked the patchwork city-states before he sewed them together into one imperial outfit, and why the kings of Rasenna always executed the village elders in the serfdom over from where the peasant revolt took place. When few rule the many, they must use force to take what they want, and demonstrate force not just to keep it, but to snuff the fires of contradiction from the collective. People above must do this. This is a quality of being above. Someone must be below, and to be below is to be bereft and suffer.

“The scripts of history show the above how to remake what’s been made, and the way to do that’s violence. Killing Yann will not prevent the ascent of his successor. It must be done to rid the world of Yann, but it is one piece to the solution. Hereafterists are champions of faith in all. We know that this evil is a machine made of history, it is created, it can be dismantled. We can try something else. We can make a way to be together without being above each other. Everyone can use everything. No one can keep the devices used to make the world to themselves. No borders, no punishment for movement. No wage clock, no work as a method for managing the masses ’til they’re too exhausted to rise up and kill you. No enforcers. No rules besides the Choir’s one.

“Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard. Hereafterists raid prisons and free prisoners. Hereafterists kill bosses and hierophants and the hereditary rulers of the world. Hereafterists farm and teach and dance and die often. We have revolutions all the time. They fail. My brother and my father, they are Cisran Hereafterist partisans, they are in the ancestral congress and guide me toward that better future. They were put against the wall when the last Cisran uprising failed. That was decades ago now. Across the Amandine sea, there’s a Hereafterist revolution in Delphinia, they’ve held their victory for three months and have collectivized all industries in their capital city. They’re distributing food rations and have carried the grand oil paintings out of the royal palace, filled the public houses with that art. So long as the whispers that Tasmudan has armed the royalists are wrong, they might hold this glimpse of Hereafter for a good long while. We’ve held ours in the Fingerbluffs for over a decade and a half. When we are found out, we will call other Hereafterists to us, and together we will fight to defend our nearness to the future until we are dead.”

“Thank you ma’am,” I said. It was beautiful, the pursuit of Hereafter. It was beautiful knowing that my work would aid the bigger project of future-making. It was horrible to think of Yann in sequence. It was horrible, wonderful, unthinkable that I wanted to be closer to Uthste because her family had been killed. I wanted to embrace her. I wanted to slip underneath her skin. I wanted to vomit. Honor, real honor. I rubbed my hands together. Picked my chapped knuckles. Night had fallen, and with it cold. Brandegor struck a match against her boot and lit a lantern. She held it by her jaw. The birds beat their slashed-umbrella wings against the orange light but didn’t fly off. Shadows flickered across the trail. No insect song. There was a smell in the darkness that I recognized, sweet and vile. The air tasted like the smell. I thought for a moment the smell might be wafting off my own nerves, an elaboration of my bad memories, but I saw Valor’s painted lip twist. She peered over my head. Utshte touched the hatchet.

Brandegor stopped.

All of us stopped with her.

“Slow,” said Brandegor.

I took a step nearer to her, spied under the crook of her elbow.

The lantern light fell in fingers over a depression in the trail. Scorched plants leaned away from it. Trees had been stripped of their lowermost rungs of branches. They looked plucked. The depression opened, and revealed within the exposed hollow were the burned out shells of low, sprawling wooden structures. The beams had fallen. Doors torn down, the frames still standing, veiling nothing from nothing. Long tables blackened, broken. Parts of a chair.

Horror. I sank my wrist in my teeth to blunt the scream.

Brandegor lowered her lantern arm to keep me back. The light swung, and illuminated the ruptured shapes on the salted ground. Hands, just hands. Nails, knuckles. Hands without their bodies, then the bodies. It must’ve been weeks. It’d rained since. I could not remember in that moment how to do anything else but pray. I prayed like a child, without form or coherence. Please sky, please night, enough. I watched but did not follow Mors Brandegor as she walked down along the corpses in the rubble of this Hall. I watched her count aloud the people, and examine the burn marks on the fragments of what had once been grand. There were sixty-four people here, fourteen bodies small. Bullets glinted on the ground but they were lead. I could not move them.

A bayonet had punctured the skull of someone’s hog, and the blade had lodged in the bone, so the wielder had abandoned their gun inside its body. Brandegor wrapped the weapon in a kerchief and put her boot against the pig’s soft purple back, which seeped and crawled with little life. She snarled, yanked, and the bayonet screeched loose. Its blade spiraled like a unicorn horn. Brandegor carried it with her as she walked through the next structure, smaller, a cottage. There was less of it left. She used the bayonet to shift through debris.

As Brandegor turned her back to us, I looked at the body nearest me, the embroidery on his tunic. Neat thread flowers and slanting geese. I looked at the patches in the knees of his trousers. I looked at the braid in his hair, the cord still tied by the nape of his neck. I looked at the gun in his hand. Ancient. Hadn’t never seen one like that before, but I could guess that it wasn’t Ignavian. All our shit is mixed with ichorite now. At his waist was a ring of keys, a silvery bell instrument, a small neat utility knife, and spare ammunition. He looked well-fed. Youngish. There were many people around him. They’d fallen close together. Or they’d been arranged. Their feet, stripped of boots, lay all in a line.

Brandegor waded through the rubble. She walked slowly, swiveled her head back and forth, and the lantern bobbed. The ruins and the incomprehensible totality of what had been done here slipped in and out of the light she carried. The people revealed by lantern light were flat past bloat and teemed with fleck-sized animals. Some were bone. Birds worked fast. In the cottages they did not lay in even rows. I assumed they had collapsed where they had been killed. The quick lantern-light flashes in which I witnessed them showed me nothing about who the people had been to each other and what lives they’d been leading. The fact of their bodies had been undone, the personal effects that marked them had loosened and faded with sun and rain and scavenger hunger. Just dead. I failed them as a witness. Nothing here was ichorite and I could ask the debris nothing. The scene was inert. Whoever had done this and whomever had survived this had moved on.

Brandegor knelt. She gathered something in her lantern hand, stood up. She turned back to us. I had never seen her cry. It was unfathomable. She was the vitality and bravado of our calling made manifest. Here she was, a mortal woman weeping. She looked older. Her eyes burned, she spat at the mud. She trudged back through the nothing and stood in front of us. Her breathing made no sound, nor did her footsteps. She looked down at me, with that look cut through me, then over my head at her companions.

“It was Laith Hall,” she said eventually. She closed her fist on whatever evidence she’d chosen then shook the putrid weapon. “This is a Roystonian gun.”

Nobody spoke. Nobody dared break the vigil.

“We should go. Pick up the fucking lurcher, Marney.”

I must’ve dropped it. I jolted, I knelt, I could not feel my hands as I fit my fists around the lurcher’s body and heaved it upright. I saw, I smelled, the pattern in the air. I did not breathe as Brandegor jerked the lurcher from my hands, hit the ignition and revved it, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me across the machine in front of her. She put the Roystonian rifle across my thighs. I felt her ribs flutter behind me, I felt her choke and wheeze. I replaced her hands with mine, and behind me Valor and Uthste must’ve mounted, I heard a pair of engines roar. I kicked off, I turned us around, and I led us past Laith Hall.

Grief changed Brandegor after that. It made her mean. She got thinner, the bones showed in her face. She took Uthste as a lover, or maybe they’d always been lovers, and quarreled with Valor for sport. Her molasses voice harshened. She spoke less to me, but she looked at me with a surety that I understood. We had something new in common. She smoked perpetually, a poisonous cloud wreathed her brow, and she and I would spend hours drinking then tying up the empty glass bottles with twine, taking fifty paces back, and shooting them to dust. She didn’t talk to me about Laith Hall.

I got the sense from Uthste and Valor’s hushed conversations that border skirmishes between Royston and the Drustlands were habitual, but they were skirmishes, soldiers beating soldiers to death in the badlands further east. Laith Hall’s desolation was not that. Laith Hall was burned-out nothing. Many Drustish people didn’t have permanent settlements, from what I gathered. Only a few religious sites were constant. Most traveled with their livestock in summertime, built a Hall in autumn where they lived in winter, which they set ablaze in spring as an offering to the harvest cycle. A burnt Hall had a standard presentation. The wood was raked, scattered. The frames were scraped down, and the once-interior was seeded with grasses and moss. There was a deliberate wrongness, a cultural desecration in what had been inflicted on Laith Hall. Raw contempt. This was a stanza in a declaration of war.

I didn’t know if Ignavia had a standing army. There hadn’t been war on this continent since the Ignavian barons’ revolution centuries ago. So far as I knew, our enforcement was strictly domestic. Ignavia only carved up carnage like this at home. Perhaps it’d extend elsewhere, if Royston successfully escalated the conflict from scraps to battles. I couldn’t fathom why. The pattern was clear, but not its aim. Nobody fucking cared about Royston. Royston was a land of chalk-faced aged aristocrats with fluffy cows and lousy industrialization. Rich in rotting palaces, poor in usable cash. It’d been part of Bellona once, a point of pride quickly dampened by having not been a part of its successor, Rasenna. I thought of ample-bosomed pastel milkmaids with bayonetted rifles pushing a whole village populace into a town hall, bolting the doors, and torching the thatch. But then, that was not fair. The ample-bosomed pastel milkmaids who appeared in novels and pornography were often rural Hereafterist bands, who’d defend with their brothers their commons against the king, and be executed en masse for treason. Our fight was with the above and those below who’d betray their comrades to get higher.

It’d been months since the Hall, much longer since we’d left the Fingerbluffs. Rest never felt like rest out on raids. Eventually, we pretended to sleep in a dusty loft above a bar in the rye seas of Glitslough. I shook out my hands. Brandegor and Uthste lay in one bed, Valor in another, and I did push-ups on the floor. I worked myself until I was worn and drenched, and I collapsed, held my cheek against the chilly tavern floor. We were homeward bound, now. We had one last stop along the way.

I sat outside Beauty’s brothel with the oxen for a while. One of the workers must have had an otter who must’ve had pups. They squealed in a basin on the back doorstep, splashing over the corrugated tin sides. I watched them nip each other. I wrung out my hands. Brandegor and Uthste and Valor had been inside for a while already. Music bled through the door, and laughter, jagged drunken chatting, the occasional heave like someone was moving furniture. I hadn’t been back here since joining the Choir. I worried abstractly about having grown out past little fawn into something gruesome and lanky with horns. I worried about whether it’d been too long since I’d seen Sunny, if she’d remember me at all, or if she scorned my long absence. It’d been years. I was something like seventeen.

The door opened. Gathered violet skirts flowed through the gap. Then came the grasping hand, the ankle and buckled shoe, the narrow shoulders, the deep sleeves drifting, full at the elbows and cinched at the wrists, and the mass of unbound straight black hair. It fell around her thighs. She wore a ribbon around her neck and dappled rouge. She walked into the courtyard, frowning. She peered around, her earrings jingled, and then she saw me. Brooding crease between her eyebrows melted. Liquid black eyes fixed.

“Hi, Sunny,” I got out. But she wasn’t Sunny now. She wore a thin gold lip ring. She was an adult, she’d have an immortal Veltuni name. Calling her Sunny was an intimacy I might not be afforded.

“Are you avoiding me? Are you going to sleep in the stables like a cow? You’ll catch your death out here.” She balled her hands up, pressed them against her waist. Dramatic boning on her bodice. I examined a trampled dandelion in the mud. Above me, nearer to me, she said, “Marney Honeycutt, I’m talking to you.”

“I’ve missed you.” I tried for a smile. “You look well.”

She put a hand in front of my face. Lots of rings, nails buffed to pearliness. No scars. “Come on. This is ridiculous. It’s been forever. Greet me properly.”

I took her hand with care not to smudge it and held her knuckles to my brow. “It’s good to see you. What’s your name now?”

“Teriasa zel Cerca.” She frowned again. Rubbed her thumb against mine. “What’s wrong?”

I stood up. Kept her hand in mine, held it aloft to the side, like I’d seen Candor practice for her baby Loveday charade. “We should go in. I worry about mud on your shoes.”

She smiled, remembered she was mad, then frowned again.

We went inside through the parlor’s impossible grandeur and pushed aside the manticore tapestry. Teriasa was a pretty choice, an uncommon one. We were grown up. She was taller than me. Older, probably. Her complexion was warm and clear, her stride so practiced it looked like gliding. Her dress shimmered around her body like a fit without the pain. Her flowing skirts as she climbed the stairs ahead of me had the hypnotic effect of high tide.

She still had her attic room. Deep blue linens on the bed and a cream lace canopy, tall tapered candles on her dresser, a mirror on the far wall with a woven wicker frame. I took off my boots where I had when they’d been gore-mucked. I sat on the floor.

Teriasa sat across from me. She took a brush off her nightstand, smoothed her hair. “You’re a proper bandit now.”

I nodded, pulled my shirt’s neckline down enough to show the edges of my tattoo. “Yes ma’am.” I fought for something to say that wouldn’t have been hasty. “Are you working?”

She blinked. “Not tonight.”

Stupid. I gnawed the skin off of my bottom lip. “Have you been happy?”

Teriasa put her hairbrush down. She pat the bed beside her.

Obediently, I rose and joined her on the bed’s edge. I kept my hands in my lap. The angles of this room were different now. Maybe it was the lighting more than my height. In my daydreams the wallpaper was a bluer shade. The music downstairs was hazy through the floorboards. I tapped my toe.

“I’ve fallen in love,” she said.

She turned toward me slightly. Her calf brushed mine. There was intricate stitching along the hem, which was bunched in her hands above her knees, she worried the little thread diamonds under her nail.

“You don’t sound happy.”

“I am,” she said. “His name is Colton Gallantry. He writes partisan pamphlets about renewing the commons and village gardens. Illustrates them too. There’s one on the mantle, see?” Yes, and on the windowsill as well. Flimsy folded paper and dark green ink. “Lovely prose.”

Copper. My tongue stung, I jammed the bleeding tip in my cheek. Uselessly, I nodded. The illustrated edge of a rye spike fluttered gently with the window’s draft.

“We’re saving money to leave. We want to start a family,” she said. “I’ve only been working for a few months, and the lumber mill where he works gives him dust for a wage. He wants to quit. I can’t support us both and he doesn’t want to work here.”

“In the Fingerbluffs you wouldn’t have to save to have a family,” I said. “Lots of Hereafterists shelter there.”

“We want to go to Cisra.”

I stared at her floorboards until I saw faces in the wood grain. I looked up at her. Her cheek was turned, attention on the pamphlets across the room. I said, “Do Beauty and Prumathe—”

“They think I’m too young to make these kinds of decisions for myself.”

“Tell me about Colton.”

“He’s tall. Beautiful hands,” she said. “He’s not built to be a laborer. He’s not so rough as that. He lives by the mill with his comrades, they run the press together. You can see the fountain in the square from his room. He’s sweet to me, Marney.”

Belly breaths. I lay back on her bed, looked up through the lace at her ceiling. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too,” she said. She lay on the bed beside me. She stretched her arms above her and looked at the backs of her hands.

Wandered through four dark houses before I found the right one.

Shabby gabled three-story wedged between the square and the temple of the bird-foot garland Virtue. The mill groaned in earshot. The waterwheel spun round. I scaled the building’s edge along the gutter, pack and prybar on my back, but didn’t need to snake the window open. It was cracked. Curtains danced inside with the breeze. I put my hands through the gap, pulled upwards. The glass lifted with a whisper. I slipped my body through the gap.

Dim room. A willowy sad-eyed boy hunched at a low desk with a beaded lamp. Ink stained his palms and forearms. His nose hovered over the paper, his hair hung in his face. He didn’t notice me, so engrossed was he in his linework. His pen nib barely scratched the paper. His bed was unmade, pillows strewn across the floor, mattress askew from its frame. Above his bed he’d nailed a dry thyme-and-peony bouquet. Symbolic of something Stellarine, wasn’t sure what. A gramophone played in the corner. The needle skipped; it’d reached the leather record’s end, and repeated a faint concluding breath, the sound of instruments fading.

I took the needle off.

Colton twitched. He straightened, his ridiculous height made suddenly evident. He turned his head. He saw me in the corner of his eye. I saw my reflection grow as he peeled his eyelids back.

I clapped my hand over his nose and mouth. I pinched. He gasped, he squeezed his pen like he intended to brandish it, I held him still. “Easy, Gallantry,” I said against his hair. “Be smart.”

His face went red. His eyes popped. I let my hand go slack on his face, and he sucked in, panted, was good enough not to scream. His rib bones poked through even his vest. I didn’t try to understand. He kept his eyes forward now, did his best imitation of a brave face. He adjusted his posture. He must have had head and shoulders on me. He was too long for this chair.

“I’ll renounce nothing. I’ll bear the torch of a better tomorrow until I die. Unalone toward dawn we go.” His voice trembled. He looked like such a kid. Colton said, “Are you an enforcer?”

“No. Choir.”

“Choir?” A vein kicked in his jaw. “I have nothing of value to offer the Choir and what I have I’d give freely to—”

“I ain’t robbing you.” I walked around him, looked at his wet pamphlets. He’d been drawing an azurine tree. Careful crosshatching along the twiglets. I picked them up, took care not to smudge them, set them to the side. I sat on the desk. I faced him. I searched his face. He was trying to figure this out. He lifted and lowered his eyebrows like they were the pump on the engine of his brains. He made no move to fight me but he strangled that pen like he could. He was delicate, I guessed. His snappable wrists made him precious. He was not coarse. He was not reactive. He was ready for political martyrdom and had a steady hand, though I failed to see their particular beauty. They were uncalloused. Bitten nails and of course, all that acrid green. I tried, for the first and only time of my life, to feel something below my navel for a man. I imagined him on his back. I imagined his skinny thighs against his chest. I imagined his eyes from above.

“If I scream, my comrades will come.” He tilted his head back. “There are enough of us to overpower you.”

I lifted my shirt and showed him my gun. He made the right face. I dropped the fabric and flexed my hand. Pawed at the bag beside me, heaved it onto his lap. I picked up one of his pamphlets while he collected himself. He looked inside the bag, mouth dangling, and I blew on the ink to dry it faster.

“This is—”

“If you do wrong by Teriasa zel Cerca, I’ll kill you. I will carry you to the train tracks and bind you to the rails, and I will stand beside you and wait with you until the freight train comes. I will watch you get ripped asunder.” I sniffed. “Be good to her.”

He stirred my spoils with his hands. I heard the rivery sound of coins sliding over each other, cold and bright. He just sat there, churning gold. He seemed unsure how to turn the feeling into thought. He pulled up his hands, watched the coins roll between his fingers. “I would never let harm come to Sunny,” he managed at last. “She is the love of my life.”

Sunny panged. My tongue hurt again. I left the bigger half with her. She’d see it when she woke up. It was my portion of our gains, I could give it how I’d like. My tithe to my home had been made. I gathered myself and I said to this man, “Thrive and be happy. If things fall apart, come to the Choir. We’ll take care of you so long as you’ve taken care of her. You can make a press at home and us bandits will go around and tack your pamphlets to every post in the world.”

“I won’t feed my bride and children with stolen money,” he started, but we both knew he was lying, and he dropped whatever clause he’d meant to append to his point. His brows were going up and down again. Thoughts flickering. He’d get eaten alive at a gambling table. He’d get eaten alive by woodpeckers if he didn’t watch himself. He touched the gold again. He studied its intaglio texture against his palm. So many little ridges.

“Remember,” I said, and got up. I imagined myself putting a hand on his thin shoulder, the lightest touch through his shirt bruising his unbroken skin. My breath could dissolve him like foam. Eyes down, hands to myself. I took one of his pamphlets, I wasn’t sure if he noticed, I tucked it into my breast pocket. It moved in the night breeze as I climbed out of his window. I never saw the man again. This was the day before we got word that the Hereafterist revolution in Delphinia was over. The royalist insurgents had crushed the partisans and installed a brand-new King. Glory to the day after tomorrow, prophesied by our brief yesterday. Glory, glory. We stagger under the hilarity of grief.