Eight

There was a party on a riverboat. The boat was strung with little lights, like fireflies on leashes. A triple-story boat, ornately carved from wood in the style of the little gazebo Shrines where Stellarine worshippers stood perfectly still to let their sovereign star, a living essential Virtue that rose above the world to guide and preside over it without besmirching itself with terrestrial baseness, to shine over them and fill them with its frothy metaphysical beams. Fancy ornamental lattice full of curls and splits. The party shouldn’t have been on the riverboat, because it overwhelmingly wasn’t a passenger vessel, it had the slope and girth of a cargo hauler, with pretty affectations to hold those few who had reason to go with their materials. The riverboat wasn’t made of ichorite. Past year, the subtle but palpable shift toward transporting sharply valuable goods on vessels that weren’t an ichorite shell on wheels was something my friends and I had noticed. I was making a mark.

Sisphe was on the riverboat. Harlow pointed her out. She served a tray of purple drinks in a stolen pleated dress to a small crowd of glistening merchants. Glistening luminously. Lustrously. Even from this distance, Harlow and I standing shadowed underneath a boardwalk that jutted over the Flip, up to our thighs in cold water, I could see the air bruise around their heads. It was like looking at the sun, the green-pinks they burned on my eyelids. The silhouettes laughing stiffly up above me were drenched in ichorite. Coated in it. Once I’d driven by an ichorite ore mine, not gotten near, too fucking dangerous what with the enforcers dripping off every twist in the chain link, but the workers I’d seen all sparkled with ichorite, sparkled darkly, every part of them. They’d swirled with made-up colors. It was like they’d been smeared with diamond dust. These merchants above me shone brighter than those miners had. It was hypnotic. A girl whose slim green dress hurt to look at leaned against the stern, accepted a drink from Sisphe, then poured the purple drink over the rails into the water.

I licked my gums, not hugely swollen yet, and felt horrible. I looked at Harlow. She had little moles scattered across her square brown face. Thin brows and a full bottom lip. Very handsome. I thought for a moment about kissing Harlow. I thought about pushing her down into the water. Harlow’s a boxer and stronger than me, she would’ve wrung me dry in a fair fight, but in my head I wanted to lose. I wanted my tongue in her mouth and her shirt collar in my fists. I wanted us to grab each other and scream until our throats tore. I wanted things I didn’t allow myself to want. She’d understand the mess inside me. I smiled at her. She flicked her gaze over to me and smiled back, lopsided and toothy, then without a word we both sprang forward.

The riverboat had swept near the boardwalk in the time I’d been staring at Harlow. We moved now, ducked under the algae-fuzzed beams that held up the structure above us, and seized the ropes that Sisphe had arranged for us. Wet boots on the wood. We climbed in lockstep to a loading dock, boarded. There were enforcers posted there. Armed but not brandishing. They spoke lightly and looked out over the water, almost wistful. One was younger, scruffy, and the other was older, salt and pepper with a thin jaw and tough mouth. His eyes were heavily bagged, his nose reddish, pored like a strawberry. Deep vertical lines on either side of his mouth. He was armed differently than most enforcers were, with a hunting rifle on his back fashioned with a bayonet as long as a femur. He scratched his chin. Spoke less than the younger enforcer, didn’t move his upper lip when he did. I knew this man. I knew this fucking man. I had seen this man on the backs of my eyelids when the misery got bad. I knew this man. I knew him.

Harlow climbed the rope at a studied angle, kept herself just past their periphery. She was silent and moved smoothly. The sound of her pant legs dripping was swallowed by the motor’s hum. She dipped out of sight, into the alcove where the server’s staircase joined the compact kitchen suite, as the plan mandated, and meanwhile I looked up at Baird.

Edna’s butcher stood at ease above me. Swaying. Breathing. So alive.

Gone was the Flip River. Gone the music, the distant chatter, the moan of the steam engine and the heavy turning wheel. Gone theft and glory. Gone obligations, gone priority, gone my head. Gone Honeycutt.

In the darkness were crates lashed with heavy chains. Ichorite alloy chains, I could smell it. Thought of briars and railroad spikes. I thought prick prick prick prick prick. I twisted my hands on the rope. Distantly, the chains stirred. The links crawled like worms. The sound caught the younger one’s attention. He turned his head. He watched then as the chains streamed forward hard and fast and sharp like needles, sharp like sea urchin spines, across the bodiless gap of shadow, then an inch deep in his back. He jumped away, tumbled forward, fell past me with a yelp, splashed into the water. Catfish teemed around him. He clapped his hands through the water, and the big whiskered mouths opened and shut in the murk around his weeping back.

The wet red tips of ichorite dripped. They glittered in midair where the young one had been. Baird held still. They had punctured all the way through Baird. They were nudging against the front of his jacket, tenting the fabric. It looked like he’d been gored by some elk.

Baird watched me. He could see me on the rope now. I wept, but not tears. I leaked from my nose and my ears, it was slippery and thin, like rubbing alcohol. I was dripping serum down to my collarbone. I looked up at him looking down at me. I had questions for him. Screaming accusations and vinegar. I wanted to beat my fists into him and holler in his ears. I wanted to break his teeth under my boots. I wanted him to hold me. My grip got slack on the rope. I wasn’t sure what kept me upright.

Baird said wetly, “Whip Spider.”

He wriggled the fingers of his bloody hand. There was a spike through that wrist, but the spikes were slackening. It didn’t hurt to hold the ichorite taut like this, it barely felt like anything at all. It was like a summer storm under the surface of my skin. My blood washed around and overwhelmed all other sensation. I got the sense that this could kill me. This was killing me. I didn’t stop.

I opened my mouth and out came with a spill of iridescent sweetsour drool, “Where did you put my pa?”

He curled his lip. He had dog teeth, long and yellow. His lungs must be a mess. “No fucking idea.”

“The Yann Chauncey Ichorite Foundry massacre. Ten years ago. Where did you put the bodies?” I was shocked at my voice. I sounded so small. I recoiled from myself and spat serum on the boat’s side.

Baird looked at me blankly, then laughed. He laughed deep in his belly, and it rumbled through all of him, rumbled above the motor. It drove the spikes through the fabric in his enforcer’s jacket. He knocked his head back and bellowed, pulled one wrist off its spike to scrub his hand over his face. He was crying, he laughed so hard. He spat up thick black pudding. “That’s rich,” he said. “That’s precious. Lustertouched factory brat, huh? No, sweet girl. I don’t know where they put your pa. Some hole with the rest. Nobody bothered to write it down.”

The hand on his face slid behind him. He touched his gun.

I screamed.

The spikes fanned out, went rigid.

Baird made a horrible sound. His chest rattled. I’d ripped something inside there. He held his rifle, its barrel brushed the curls at the top of my head. I twisted my hands on the rope. The spikes twisted above me. Then I let go, hugged my body flush against the hull, and felt the spikes soften. They sloughed off like mercury. They splattered the floor, and they released Baird, and he fell. He fell into the gaping catfish. They slopped over him, flopped and tangled across his body, and I felt like there was nothing inside me at all.

I climbed into the cargo hold.

Big blocks in the shadow. Bolts of luxury fabric waited, crammed like fish in a tin, inside those shapes. I lurched past them. I felt enormously dizzy, I felt around my face and was horrified by how much I dripped. I wasn’t sure what I was bleeding. I looked at my hands, at the oil-on-water prismatic rainbow ugliness I’d been leaking. It’d never been this bad. I scrubbed my hands on my thighs. I pulled on my lace mask halfway, kept my mouth free. I thought I’d hyperventilate otherwise. I felt around for a door, gripped a handle, twisted. I stumbled into the music and light.

We had a plan at some point. We had a good plan.

The plan went like, Harlow and I apprehend the captain, we kill the motor, we wait for the others—Brandegor’s gang, Brandegor was nearby, she and Uthste and Valor, or maybe it was just her and Uthste right now—to help us move product off this vessel onto the one they’d snaked for us. When I killed Baird there’d been nobody behind us. Where were they? Was Harlow with the captain?

Heads turned toward the sound. Casually then sharply. Sisphe poured a glass of bubbly. She looked over her shoulder at me. Her eyes flashed, a manic smile flickered at the corner of her mouth, a question mark.

I moved.

I seized Sisphe around the waist and hauled her backwards, and she shouted, dropped the tray with dramatic flourish. The elegant little glasses smashed to glitter. Liquor glistened across the polished blond wood floor. I hauled her backwards, found my dummy gun, fit it under her jaw. In her ear I slurred, wherezarlow?

“The Whip Spider’s gang!” Sisphe yelped. She writhed against my hand, exerting no force. She was holding us both up. Without moving her lips she breathed, “Marney, you look fucking awful.”

“I am,” I said. Little voice again. I ground my molars and adjusted my grip on her, clutched her like a plush toy.

The music hadn’t stopped playing. We weren’t in the band’s eyeline. The scattered patrons held very still, took calculated steps backwards, or held their ground. They had been mingling around an oil portrait of a severe and androgynous ginger girl who wore furs over her tailored suit and a cane across her lap. The oil-portrait girl leered at us. Unimpressed, maybe a little bit into it. The patrons were exquisitely dressed, mostly older than me, stone-faced with wide stances. Not combatants but not delicate. Someone showed me their hands. Lots of skinny rings stacked on their thumbs and pinky fingers. Someone else deliberately finished their drink.

“Everyone to the bow!” Harlow barked from a balcony above us. She sounded winded, less cocksure than usual. I felt with disgusting confidence that Brandegor the Rancid wasn’t here. I wondered if she would be. Could’ve gotten got. “Move, now!”

I shoved Sisphe away from me, toward the group. She was good at herding. She looked over her shoulder at me, looked livid for a moment, then fell into a long stride, grabbed the two men ahead of us as she went and dragged them with her around the displayed oil-portrait ginger toward the bow. She clung to the men, gasped something scarcely coherent about everyone joining them, about her safety, oh she was sooo frightened, and the men peeled their focus off me, looked at her in her polished hysteria with awe and pity. People came when called. The band stopped playing, stood, and they and the staff wandered toward her, hunched around her in semicircles. She pulled them to her with the might of her big pearly tears.

I limped back into the cargo hold. Felt the portrait’s flat eyes follow me, but I ignored that. Beyond the crates I saw the second boat and could’ve wept. Brandegor’s, certainly. I felt so woozy. The ichorite ooze gummed against my boots and pulled like strings of taffy, and I felt sticky with it. The cargo wasn’t lashed in place with chains anymore, and the crates themselves were fixed to dull wheels, I unlocked one with a kick. I heaved, it moved, splinters drove under my nails and I winced and shoved harder. Moving hurt. Everything hurt. Everything was glowing and lovely. I pushed the crate to the edge of the loading dock, pawed the open air for a hook, and found one. I hooked the strap across the top of the crate.

Mors Brandegor the Rancid stood on the bow with her cigar in her teeth. She waved the crate down with her big purple nails. Smoke coiled around her head. I took the rope that held the hook, marveled that every new object in my line of sight felt like it’d condensed out of breath and shadow and could melt and be gone, nothing was heavy or permanent, and lowered the crate. I was not nearly fucking strong enough to do this on my own. Harlow, probably. Candor, without a doubt.

The crate fell in ugly jerks, but Brandegor caught it, lugged it aboard.

I let go of the rope. My hands stung. I winced, stuck my most aching finger in my mouth and sucked a splinter loose. I spat it out. I worked my jaw. I turned around to fetch another and behind me was a passenger. The girl in the slim green dress.

She was a tall, lean girl. Hair blacker than the shadows surrounding swayed around her hip bones and was slicked back from a sharp face, all bone and diagonal angles save for her watery downturned eyes, long-lashed and burning, and her full painted lips twisted in a horrible smile, or grimace, or leer, I didn’t know. I watched her move her lips soundlessly. She walked like she was Veltuni but wore no lip ring. She held a keen clip-point knife. The girl didn’t blink. She looked like she might cry. She toed off her delicate high-heeled shoes, stood barefoot on the luster-splattered floor, widened her stance. I saw the tension in her thighs and core and shoulders through the dress, saw it release. She pounced knife-first.

I threw my body to the side but the knife clipped my collar. Bright slippery pain flowered under the bone. She cut forward again, I stepped back, I closed my hand and found my knife inside it. Behind my eyes pink bubbled. I slashed back, she drove a cut upwards, would’ve knocked my knife from my hand if its metal hadn’t seeped into my skin. This girl was—better. She moved with a viciousness just past efficiency, a studied meanness. Sport dueler, though this—she slashed my upper arm, the cut flowed thickly—was not the restraint and acclaimed elegance of an aristocratic knife duel. She was a cat and I was a finch whose wing she’d already torn. Lots of light cuts to watch me bleed because she could. And she could. I chanted in my head, kneaded the ichorite pools underfoot into wires into snares to trip her, but she tore through them like they were nothing before they solidified. The ichorite strings snapped and drooped and became solid again. She seized a fistful of my jacket, fit her knife under my chin, and leaned me over the cargo bay’s edge, balls of my feet on the floor, heels in open air above the drop to the whirling catfish.

“You wretch,” she purred through her teeth. “You slime. You’re a carnival barker. You’re a road magician. You’re not a devil, you lack the dignity demanded by a symbol so rich. You’re nothing and nobody. How dare you frighten that girl like that? How dare you interrupt us?”

I panted. I didn’t dare move.

“You are a stain on our age. You are a blemish on progress.” She leaned over me. Her hair swayed against my slit jacket. Strands clung to where I bled. I felt her breath on my cheek, the sweet liquor on her snarl. Her eyes were enormous. I saw my horror mirrored across the little pink veins there. “You little freak. You little sadist. The look on that server’s face. The disruption you’ve caused, the disrespect you’ve showed my staff, is repulsive. You don’t deserve the air in your lungs. You don’t deserve the blood in your body.”

I willed the ichorite off the ground and felt my vision flicker. The world bruised. It bubbled, I saw the metal effervescing in my periphery, but I couldn’t will it to shape. Yann Chauncey lived. I could not die while Industry lived. That man didn’t even know where my father was. I couldn’t die. I looked into the eyes of this girl, her liquid black eyes, and did not know how to kill her.

“Drop the knife,” said Sisphe thu Ecapa, her gun nestled at the nape of the stranger’s neck. “This is my little freak.”

The stranger’s face rippled. She looked furious, then exasperated, then fell into a sullen humor. Her eyebrows danced under her fringe. Her lip twitched. She threw down the knife. It thwunked into the scuffed plank floor. I breathed in sharply. She released me.

I felt gravity win.

The sky flew up in pink and orange slashes, and the Flip River slapped me, grabbed me with a thousand flapping catfish mouths. My head slipped under. The writhing fish bodies covered the boat above me. They whirred around my body, slimy and muscular, and I clawed at the nothing between their bodies. I saw long algae like hair and a limp, drifting hand.

Then fists closed around my upper arms and pulled me upright. I gasped, the evening burned against the lining of my throat and I spat up murky water, and collapsed against Brandegor the Rancid, who clapped me firmly between the shoulder blades so hard that something knocked loose. I shivered. I coughed up a laugh, I laughed so hard I cried, I sobbed into Brandegor’s shoulder. She mussed my curls. The orange darkness behind my eyelids spasmed with luster luster luster.

Sometime later we triumphed around the Fingerbluffs. We leaned off our lurchers and gave luxurious silks and fine jewels to everyone who gathered to watch us pass, and the crooked teeth they showed us were beautiful, and the air was perfumed with marmalade and tobacco flowers, and Harlow and Sisphe and I reclined on the cliffs like natural princes, eating fruit and sunning ourselves, adorned with scrapes and bruises. We looked at the place where Candor should be lying and I told Sisphe and Harlow about you. That time you stole raspberries for us. The day I made that ring for you. Pinched it from conveyor belt scraps and kneaded it for your littlest finger. I contemplated and then forbade the contemplation of whether your body wore that ring in whatever unmarked grave Chauncey’s goons had planted you in. Was your body dissolved into my family’s body? Had you fused with Edna and Poesy and the boys who chased you when you were smaller? Were you dissolved into flora? Had you been transformed into endless flying things? I thought about cicadas, underfoot for ages until maturity comes. Screaming flight.

It’s easy when it’s hazy to imagine that there is something moving underneath these rocks. Moving gently, breathing. Something deep asleep. It’s easy to imagine a watchful slumber. My old religion has its merits. I rolled my cheek to the side, pressed it flush against the basalt and the forget-me-not sprays, and listened to a heartbeat I could not explain to my friends. My tongue itched. I scraped it with my teeth. I was eager again to eat the guts of Industry Chauncey. I gnashed my molars and yearned.

Uthste came and found me. She looked older, her eyebrows were dusted with gray. She stood over us on the rocks, where we passed a bottle between us, some rosy fizzy tonic edged with coca leaves, and her shadow interrupted our murmuring. The sun behind her shaved head looked crownlike. She frowned gently. Her boots glistened by my ear. She said, “It’s the end. Marney. Come along with me, please. Amon’s asked for you.”

“Just Marney?” Sisphe put her elbows under her.

“Never just Marney,” said Harlow, dragging a comb through her glossy black hair.

Uthste nodded curtly. “Marney by name. Come as you’d like. Be quick.”

I found my feet. Harlow followed me, and we both took one of Sisphe’s clever faux-limp hands, hauled her upright, whisked her off to Loveday Mansion. I felt small following Uthste. I wondered if she knew what she symbolized to me, herself and Valor and Brandegor, my saviors and bandit-makers. The thought of telling her seemed a repulsive imposition. I reckon she’d know when I showed her. I’d have to demonstrate it in deed.

The four of us gathered in the ballroom. Settees and wingback armchairs had been dragged in and arranged around the broad room’s perimeter, and Choir-goers, not full membership but more than I usually saw in one place, flocked among the velvet furniture in corduroy and rough leather, features hard against the plushness. Younger kids lay on animal-pelt rugs and pulled the tufts of fur. A boy near me braided down a dead bear’s back. He looked eight, maybe. Truly eight. He’d never seen hard labor and it kept him babyish. The abundance that the bandits brought humbled me. I felt grateful and young, but tired.

Uthste went and sat on the floor in front of Brandegor’s chair, leaned back against her shin. Valor perched on the chair’s arm, one of Brandegor’s big arms around her waist. I scarcely knew what to do with myself. I looked back to Harlow and Sisphe, ached for Candor, then Sisphe turned my chin with her knuckles and pointed my attention at the room’s far end. Amon sat on the floor with letters and telegrams and newspaper clippings fanned in front of him. Behind him, the Veltuni ancestral congress’s cast hands kneaded and stretched. I leaned my cheek against Sisphe’s hand, felt an old flicker of something I couldn’t entertain, then crossed the cream-and-amber room and knelt beside Amon.

Amon smiled but did not look at me. He moved his hands, I moved mine back, an acknowledgement of our mutual faith.

Amon said, to the room itself, “Thank you, assembly. I’ll be brief. Our masquerade has always been finite. Twenty years in glorious harmony will imminently meet its abrupt end. I believe this because the heir to Loveday Mansion is of age, and has been summoned to Yann Industry Chauncey’s estate. His ward has a debutante showing. The Loveday heir has been invited by three separate parties, the Montrose barony, the Glitslough barony, and the Chauncey family itself. If we decline, our only option, they will come here. They will send their emissaries. Lately, we had plans for this. But our sweet girl Candor is dead.

“The barons of Ignavia alone supposedly own land. Before my friends killed him, Horace Veracity Loveday claimed to own this land. All the people who worked this land rented their homes from him, owed him the fruits of their labor, and the tools with which it was performed, and were subjected to his whim as law. The Baron’s Senate is firm about land ownership remaining in their few fists, but the Baron’s Senate is poor, and the money is in Industry Chauncey’s industry. Chauncey can’t own land. All ichorite refinement centers are clustered around IC, as Baron Ramtha has been enormously lenient with allowing Chauncey’s growth, but Chauncey wants to expand his enterprise. He needs land and lots of it, land for mining, land for processing plants, land for the workers who labor in those pits to sleep on.

“Chauncey is asking after us because he wants a baron-class spouse for his ward. He wants this because he wants to mine here, or thinks he can. We can refuse. We can put it off. But the emissaries to be sent won’t only ask after the Loveday heir, they’ll scout the Fingerbluffs for mining. The blurring between the capitalists and the barons is already happening. This marriage, whatever it might be, will mean that Chauncey will come to conquer us. He funds the Enforcer Corps. They will come with force and we will battle until we are dead, and then our home will be maimed and stripped for parts.”

Gray faces around the room. Nobody blinked. Murmurs rumbled but I caught no words. I put my hands on the floor. I looked at my hands. My fingers were blurring.

“We prepare for the war,” said Brandegor. Valor beside her looked stricken but sure. They’d go down blazing.

“We leave. Be reasonable,” said a bandit called Alcstei zel Prisis.

Alcstei’s man, whose name I did not know, said, “The Choir can claim a new home. This place has served us for twenty good years, but the Choir must be preserved. We find a new stronghold.”

“We serve this place. Not the reverse. Have pride,” snapped a bandit called Artumica thu Artumica Tanner. “Do you imagine we will take with us the community who has defended us and nurtured us for decades? Beg the displacement of thousands upon thousands? Tell them to carry with them their histories on their backs and be dispossessed of all else, we’ve surrendered their home to the slaughterhouse? Or do you suppose we abandon them?”

“I was born on the Bluffs,” said Valor. “Here’s where I’ll die.”

“We will not suffer the indignity of surrender. We won’t show belly, we won’t scurry under some rock. Be righteous, Alcstei.” Brangedor pulled attention like gravity. She strained against her clothes, against her skin. She held Valor’s waist and Utshte’s shoulder to keep herself seated. I thought she’d kill Alcstei with her hands. “We lost five this month. Five of us. Young Thomas Fortitude shot off the roof of a train, his body caught and brought home by his boys, buried by hand in the fruit grove. Cristhia’s twins, gone. Dash Mercer, dangling up in Geistmouth. Wyatt Piety Stytt, dangling down in the Achrum prairies. We commit ourselves to death when we mark our names across our breasts. We will die for this. I am the last bull rider of Mors Hall. I will die for this place.”

Alcstei’s man stood up.

“Be fierce and proud for our Hereafter. To die for tomorrow is to die for our children’s rich harvest,” Harlow said.

“You don’t have children,” said Alcstei’s man. “We do.”

I stood up. My hands shook, I rooted them in my hair. My ribs beat against my jacket. I spread my elbows, looked across the room at nobody in particular, at everybody, at Sisphe. She gave me a sharp nod. Her eyes flashed. I looked down at the papers fanned around Amon, the array of bluish and cream off-whites. I couldn’t read the sinuous handwriting. The ink on the pages still looked wet. “The Loveday heir should say yes. I’ll be the Loveday heir. I’m not Stellarine but I can fake it. I studied to be Candor’s valet.”

Amon looked up at me. He looked relieved. At last, I’d said it.

“Pardon,” I said. I looked to my peers and fixed my tone. “Gentle Choir. I propose that I go feign being Loveday heir.”

A bandit whose name I didn’t know said, “Would the charade be worth it? It pushes back war only so far.”

“It’s worth it because I’m gonna kill Yann Industry Chauncey,” I said.

“That’s true,” said Brandegor the Rancid. “She is gonna kill Yann Industry Chauncey.”

“If Marney takes up the role,” Sisphe said, vibrating with such glee that I thought her hairpins might fall, “and I accompanied her as her secretary or her valet, think of the recon! I could squirrel away as many documents as I can. Muddle things up for them. If we’re to have a war, killing Chauncey is a triumphant first blow. Let’s not be passive. Let’s not wait like lambs.”

“When Marney takes up the role,” said Harlow, “we’ll have bought ourselves another month or two to strategize. We’ll know what their plans are, we could maybe even shape them, arrange the conditions of our discovery on our own terms. Be keen and ruthless against them, having studied their intentions and so on. Let her take on Candor’s work. Let her be our girl’s remembrance.”

“Yes, and it’d be funny,” said Magnanimity, the oldest bandit in the room, who’d served the Choir for forty-seven years, and been present for Horace Veracity Loveday’s execution. She rolled her wrist, clanged her bangles together, and smiled at me. “That’s as good a reason as any.”

“Marney deserves to kill Chauncey,” said Uthste. “And we deserve him dead for the threat he poses.”

Magnanimity clapped her hands. “Those who want to flee, flee. Take a civilian’s portion of treasure and be gone from our graces. Show of hands. Marney as Loveday heir to kill Yann Industry Chauncey?” Hands drifted up. The ancestral congress stretched their fingers behind my head. It felt like dusk bleed when I was small, all the floating palms. Such pride I had for the whole world. Such pride I had in my own survival. Such love for the Fingerbluffs, for the Choir, for my families, for you. My blood was thick and vibrant. Cut me and find grenadine. Cut me and find white hot light.