Two

Enforcers with ledgers crowded the front stoop of the tenement where my family had lived for all my life. I couldn’t go in. Didn’t try.

Ignavia City is the capitol. Forever ago the Bellonan empire tucked her on a hill between the Flip River and the Lueli River in the middle of the pines and in the centuries since, the swelling city has had no space to sprawl, so it built upwards. Every development plan here is a race to puncture the sun.

I climbed a rickety little staircase in an alley over some roof, then up an adjoining staircase, went five six seven stories high. The rails flinched when I stomped on them but they were old, so they weren’t ichorite. Iron or whatever. I could touch them without exacerbating things. Things were bad. I could throw the knife away and not have ichorite touch me awhile, sometimes that calms me faster, but I needed to be safe.

My fit carried on. The sun fuzzed and I could not make my teeth stop chattering. I could hardly see past my fingertips. The rails rippled under my boots. If I slipped, that’d be curtains for me, I’d crack on the street like an egg, but I couldn’t slow down, because if I did thinking and itinerant feeling would come and I would be destroyed. I went faster. Up another flight then over the street in a cage bridge meant for chimney sweeps and window washers. Perfect tube of knit iron rods. I could stand in it, but nobody much taller could. Flowering vines twined through the mesh. The flowers blurred together: unctuous, molten, purplish. I trampled them. Shouldered past a laborer with a kit over her shoulder. Her kit checked my chest and I reeled, knocked against the cage bridge’s wall. The whole structure wobbled in the breeze. The laborer shot her arms out to balance. She blinked at me and said, “Are you hurt?”

I ducked under her arm. I got off the cage bridge and scampered down a staircase, ran longwise across the worker’s walk that hugged the forum’s vaulted roof and frightened the starlings, tore down a second cage bridge, this one forked, took the left finger. Underneath me a crowd churned. Merchants carts and commuters shouting, their boars bellowing, brass music muffled by the purr of lurcher engines, on which enforcers rode. Enforcers everywhere. The scene sparkled between the cage bridge rods, a mirage of drooling bayonets.

Down a staircase, and I was in an alley. It was humid and dark. I could smell myself. The clarity was suddenly inescapable and I pawed at my chest, revolted and gasping, but my shirt was stiff and caked and blotched an awful rancid burgundy, enforcer uniform burgundy, and it kept sticking to my skin. Dried bits cracked and flaked. I wasn’t a woman yet and didn’t wear a bonnet, so when I touched my head, I felt my naked braids. I found a wet hunk. The Tull Shrine was beside me. It was a polished pink wall with a door. I took the iron ring knocker with my filthy wet hunk hand, but the door was heavy. I threw myself down, my weight screamed against my arm sockets and my hands burned and the door groaned and gave, just barely. I shouldered through the gap. It swung shut on my heels and the street sounds snuffed.

The Shrine theater was a square room. Horizon-facing windows, not that you get the horizon line in the city. Religion doesn’t work here. Sloped ceiling. No adornments, polished walls aside. The floor was vacant. Well past dawn scene, that made sense. Cushions had been arranged in concentric rings for kneeling around the Shrine table. At this hour, the Idol wasn’t out, so the table wore peonies and rye spikes and pale blue tapers that’d burn until sunset, when the Idol would be brought out for dusk bleed, after which these offerings would be swept and the Shrine would be dressed with black tapers and boletes and bread knots until dawn. The air smelled like pollen and dust. It was freezing.

I limped down an aisle and collapsed by the table and wept. I must’ve slept eventually. In dull flickers of wakefulness, the attendant Tull reverend stood over me with bread that I did not eat. He prayed aloud beside me.

I woke to pounding fists on the door that erupted and let in two enforcers on lurchers. They tore through the dark and seized the reverend by his smock. The squeal of rubber on tile was awful. From under the table where I was curled, I heard the reverend speak the bleed while the enforcers screamed nothing at him, they screamed wordlessly like animals, and I ran and crawled out a window and heard something shatter behind me but didn’t investigate and climbed up the frigid molding and threw myself down on the roof and retched. There was nothing in my stomach to give. I heard the enforcers screech out of the Shrine, the panting machinery of their lurchers fade to silence. Perhaps they took the reverend with them.

Quiet stretched. I spat and I dug my fingers in my ribs and collapsed on my back. My shoulder blades scraped the rough shingles. The air was gritty. I didn’t move. I watched lavender smokestack vapors choke the nearby moon. I couldn’t see the far one. When I went back down the Shrine was empty and the table had been turned on its side, the offerings scattered and nibbled by rats. I didn’t really sleep after that.

The next five days got cold. I wandered around. It got harsh out. Word was that the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry had been beset by violent riots; that laborers had amassed to steal and destroy the refinement devices inside those walls. Rumors that they foamed with loathing toward Mr. Industry Chauncey, and jealousy of his great work, and frustration with their own smallness and the constrictions of their stupidity, and that generally Ignavia City must be growing calloused and ought be buffed. To soothe the propertied and nervous, Ramtha thu Ramtha, the baron of Ignavia City, signed writ for expediated inquiry into this calamity that bade enforcers to snatch and wring out all suspected riot affiliates within the week, in public, with standard-issue cherrywood batons.

The Foundry reopened. A host of new workers replaced my gone family in brand-new unstained boilers, having materialized from nowhere. Traitors.

Snow fell thinly. It smeared blackish on the street. I drank from a mermaid fountain and ate smashed stone fruits under the stalls in Market Street, stole scraps from collared boars, stayed hungry. I slept under the awning of Tlesana’s Treasure, an expensive dress shop, and behind a butchery on Rake Street. The gore on my body faded brownish; perhaps people assumed I was caked with mud. Nobody looked at me. I made up my mind to leave.

Sixth dawn, I made for Flipcross Station. I’d never before had the means nor cause to go inside it. Not that I had the means as of now. I’d never been outside the city. Three generations of my family had moved to this city for work when the crops failed twenty years ago, a choice that had changed what it meant to be Tullian. If we had family in Glitslough or the smaller peasant baronies, I did not know them.

One thousand years ago, Flipcross Station was an imperial Bellonan forum. Presently it was a slab of marble and sleet. Few people milling about this hour. Trash dusted the gilded palm-and-knuckle-creased floors, and the air was sourcelessly breezy, lit by gas lamps that flickered like revenants. Knuckled columns dangled lacquered blackboards where departure times were marked in chalk. I could read numbers, but phrases were harder. I picked the platform that’d leave soonest with little care to its promised end. It was at the crown of a flight of stairs. I climbed them. The stairs had iridescent ichorite handrails that I could not suffer to touch. I walked in the middle and I kept my hands to myself. I chewed my tongue. At the top of the stairs, the floor stretched to a trench that held the waiting train. It was huge and wheezing. It looked like leashed-together rhinoceros beetles. I saw faces in the windows and felt a lunging horror that the train would leave without me. All of my bones chattered. I stumbled through the stragglers and up the little steps, and the warmth hit me, and I collapsed. I hit the floor.

The amber light was thick with pine resin and varnish. Molded mahogany ceilings and lush brocade curtains and brass hooks affixed with ichorite studs, from which dangled satchels, rolled over me, as did the backs of leather booths, the edges of skirts, a red rug that scraped my jaw as somebody lugged me upright. My arm was in a fist. I thought, enforcer. I sought my knife in my waistband before I blinked and saw properly the conductor, a broad and young Veltuni boy. His lip ring glinted. “Nasty spill,” he said. “Are you alright?”

On my breath’s edge I said, “Yessir.”

“Do you have a ticket?”

Lying came so quick to you. You would’ve told him a story and saved me. “I don’t,” I said.

He adjusted his grip. With dripping kindness, he told me, “If you don’t have a ticket, you cannot ride this train.”

I saw every vein and sun fleck on this boy’s face and divined in them that he was serious, that with ease he would guide me down the stairs and abandon me on the platform to wither. Futures unfurled in my head. I saw myself starve on the platform. I saw myself caught and killed. He was already forgetting my face. I could thrash and cut at him, but he would hail guards, and I had no saving charm nor rhetoric. I held my tongue.

“Young ma’am,” he prompted. He took a step toward the door and gave my arm a tug, like he’d leashed me.

I dug in my heel.

“Fare,” said a stranger. Molasses voice. A hand emerged from behind a leather booth and pinched between two long sharp nails was a crisp and gleaming bill. “For the girl.”

The conductor let out a sound. He released me, and with a bashful glance used that hand to collect the offered cash. He flinched as he took it, but thanked the stranger curtly, and turned back to me looking wan. “Enjoy your trip,” he said. Then he whisked himself down the carriage and was gone through a latched metal door.

There was an open booth diagonal to the one that housed my savior. I got myself there. The leather felt hot to the touch. There must be some heating apparatus beneath the cushion, and when I put my hands down the heat seeped up between my bones and revived the blood there, made it flow again. I thawed and regained needles of feeling. A sob bubbled but I mashed it. I could not risk making a fuss.

Dawn spilled through the window, red and vital, and I mouthed the words to the bleed. In my mind, I arranged wheat spikes on a square table. On either side of me, my sisters daubed their eyelids with morning paint and understood what I said; they were adults and had studied Tull scripts, they understood the necessity of our work and dutifully refused to let me in on the secret. Still, we knelt together. We folded our hands over the table’s edge and wriggled our fingertips. The Idol of the Torn Child remained motionless, placated by our rigor and precision. I drifted in and out.

Outside, Ignavia City fell away from me. Dense conifers blurred into a shivering whirr of color, unbroken by streets or tall buildings. Executed criminals dangled shirtless from their ankles occasionally, tattoos sprawling, but they thinned out and vanished the further we got. I felt the numbness where my horror at the sight of them should be. I had no idea where we were going. I imagined some snowcapped lodge in Montrose Barony or a stone fruit orchard in Glitslough. Another country, maybe. Hallowed Cisra or chalky hungry Royston. The swamps of ancient Tasmudan, where everyone was rich, and nobody was allowed to leave. The Drustlands. You’d told me once you’d never go back. I felt a shock of anger that you’d been robbed the chance to change your mind.

The train sound was good on my nerves. I liked the engine’s grind and purr. It occurred to me that this was the longest I’d gone since I could recall without a shift at the foundry. I’d never been left idle. Too much room for wandering thought. The mechanized constancy felt like home and I sank into the vibration, imagined the fast-churning marriage of gears that propelled the train forward, the slag burning in the furnace, the exhaust fumes twirling toward the sky. I had some vague sense that the rails beneath this train were cast ichorite, as with the bolts that held the windows and the doors in frame, but I pushed that away. I had to plan.

When I left this train, I needed to find a Tull Shrine and plead sanctuary long enough to scrub myself clean and orient myself to the new air. Then I’d find work and throw myself into it. Of course, I could commit myself to a mill, I’d done factory work all my life, but there were other options that might take me. I could become a miner. I could serve some farmer, a proper Tullian vocation, pick fruit or drive livestock, or I could apprentice myself to a cart driver, join a company of sailors. I could learn some trade. I’m good with my hands. I thought to myself, I have survived every fit I’ve suffered. I should have endured life at Yann Chauncey Ichorite Foundry without complaint. It would have spared my family the sympathy that’d spurred their deaths if I had just shut up. The magnitude of what I’d done dangled over me. I felt its breath on my neck. I stared out the window. I let my eyes go soft.

A warm sweet smell brought me back. A fruit tart had appeared on the cushion beside me. Hot dark cherries and azurine marmalade glimmering in a golden crust. My attention snapped toward the aisle but whomever had given it was gone. My gut twisted. I’m meticulous except where feeling good is concerned. I gathered the tart in my hands and drank in the smell and wolfed it in one swallow, sucked my fingers clean. Rich and bright and soursweet. It thawed something in me. Heat bloomed in my diaphragm and at once I was crying and I couldn’t do anything about it. Tears dripped off my chin. I blinked until my eyes weren’t blurry and I looked at my hands, shimmery with butter, then at the cushion where the tart had been left. There was a note scrawled on a ticket stub.

I picked it up, dully sorry for how my thumbs smeared on the paper. It’d been written with a quick, light hand. I could scarcely read it. I held it to my nose and sounded the letters aloud. Chewed over sounds for longer than it should’ve took, strung them together, tried to make words from the pieces. I stumbled with a vowel, made it too small and properly round, then gave up and let it hang low in my mouth and then understanding struck me. I read the whole note to myself with dire certainty:

KEEP TO THE WINDOW. YOU WILL BE JUST FINE.

Gunshots blasted across from me.

I dropped the note and skittered back, flattened myself against the narrow plate windowsill. I seized my knife from my waistband and clutched it beside my thigh. My heart beat my breastbone, my pulse banged my teeth. The train screamed down the rails with impossible speed, there was nowhere to go, surely if I jumped, I’d splatter. My knife squirmed against my palm. I squeezed it harder. The edges of my vision smeared pinkish. I glanced around without moving my head.

A woman stood diagonally from me. Big frame in black suede, brimmed hat tipped low so that just her red mouth showed. She held a rifle in her bejeweled magician’s hands. I remembered her hands. She’d given the fare that saved me. She was not standing alone. A short slim bald woman stood at the car’s far end, revolver in one hand, open satchel in the other. She walked down the aisle toward my savior and me. As she passed, she whistled, and stricken well-to-dos in seersucker suits dropped their wallets and their watches in the bag. It was quick, compulsive, like their valuables were hot to the touch. I saw a man shiver as he surrendered his golden rings and prayer pearls, but he didn’t protest, didn’t so much as blink. Nobody breathed. Hands floated beside stretched faces, palms empty, helplessness fully displayed. They acted like this woman was a revenant. Surely, she would suffer no lip.

My savior grinned. Her teeth were long and yellow. Another gunshot sounded, distant, the carriage behind ours. I wondered if it was another warning shot. The big woman plucked a slug from thin air, rolled her wrist, made a show of loading her gun. She curved her mouth. “Good morning! What educated stock we’ve got. Good little pigeons give and live to see tomorrow.” Her molasses voice echoed off the walls. She could’ve been an opera diva with those lungs.

Slowly, with fluid ease, she dipped her rifle over the booth before her and kissed its muzzle to a weeping woman’s head. The metal glinted in the woman’s ringlets. I felt a phantom chill on my scalp.

The short slim bald woman whistled past me. I didn’t dare move but watched her, tried to memorize her. Furrowed brow over hooded eyes, gaunt cheeks, thin pierced mouth pinched around her ringing note. She didn’t look at me, stopped beside my savior. They stood side by side. The weeping woman covered her face with one gloved hand. She was Stellarine, wore a dozen pearl bracelets that clacked when her shoulders heaved. Then she went still. I feared for her mortality.

My savior flicked her tongue between her teeth. Her big red grin flipped.

Something was wrong.

The latched metal door swung wide, and snow gusted shrilly inwards as an enforcer jumped the gap. His shoulders filled the threshold. He snapped his weapon shut and took aim at the bandits, barked an order that nobody heard. I tore my eyes off the enforcer to watch my savior die, but caught the weeping woman, whose fingers had suddenly splayed. Between her knuckles her eyes were dry and burning. A gunshot smacked and my ears whined, and I saw the pistol hooked in the weeping woman’s free hand, saw smoke drift from its barrel. She brought it to her lips and blew.

The enforcer howled as he fell.

The spell broke. Passengers screamed and lurched and hurled themselves against the windows or dove for the thrumming floor. A man scrambled from his booth and threw himself across the gap, but the train lurched, his ankle twisted, he slipped and was caught just before gravity stole him by a second enforcer, who tossed him down in the second car, strode across him as she advanced on the bandits, but she’d lowered her weapon to catch him and had no time to ready it again. The shot cracked. Her shoulder opened, her maroon jacket soaked black, she collapsed against the wall and panted. It was like the shot had nailed her in place. She writhed without falling and her good arm dangled limply. Her fingers loosed and her gun clattered to the floor. She spat blood at the bandits. She said, “There are more of us coming, Rancid. You aren’t getting off this train.”

The short slim bald woman went rigid. She stopped whistling. Her eyes fixed. “Tita,” she said.

The far latched metal door swung. It banged against its frame, then rattled inwards, knocked the wood paneled wall where the shot enforcer leaned. The next carriage’s door had been propped open. I could see inside it. There was a woman on the ground. Edna. She could not have been Edna but she was Edna, the dead woman was Edna. I saw her yellow hair. My bones vibrated under my skin. I squeezed my knife and the ichorite warmed and swelled between my fingers, that citric zing coated my tongue. It cloyed down my throat. My gums and lips felt puffy. I put my boots on the booth and crouched, fighting some impossible animal desire to scurry up the wall. Blood foamed in my temples. I was going to bust out of my skin.

The three bandits sprang apart from each other. The short slim bald woman sprinted across the carriage, cleared the first enforcer’s body with one stride, and booked over the gap into the second carriage. The weeping woman sprang after her. The big woman spat something in a language I didn’t recognize and whirled around, seized the near door’s painted latch. She heaved and the metal squealed but didn’t budge. She snarled, harsh and dripping sweet, “Open up, Etule! Open this door or widow your wife! Don’t cross the Choir! We’ve taken care of you!”

The weeping woman shouted, “That’s the fork, the bridge’s nearing—Uthste, Tita is dead, you have to get up—”

Uthste gathered dead Tita to her chest. She cradled her neck like a baby’s.

The big woman slammed her fist against the slim frosted window. She called, “Etule zel Alchumena! Open the fucking door!”

The bleeding enforcer laughed.

The weeping woman took her hands off Uthste’s shoulders and faced the second carriage’s far door. Aimed from her hip as it opened.

I crawled to the booth’s edge and slipped into the aisle. Quick little steps. I trod so lightly that even the train couldn’t feel me as I crossed it, and I made for the woman who’d saved me, no thoughts in my whirring rattling head. I put my twitching knife back in my waistband and held up my empty hands. My blood was froth and brine and spun sugar. My tongue was dry, it hurt when I spoke.

Soft I said, “Pardon, ma’am.” She paid me no mind. She pounded harder. Her great shoulders worked under her black suede coat.

Louder I said, “Pardon me, ma’am.”

She slammed her fist against the door and held it still, like she’d pinned a fly. She turned her head. She glowered down at me. It felt like sunlight through a curved lens on paper. If there was anything left in me to burn it would’ve caught. I averted my eyes and bowed my head and made my movements as obvious as I could muster. I tucked myself beside the metal door and I flattened my hands over the ichorite bolts in the hinges. I mouthed, prayed, loose loose loose loose loose. My eyes buzzed beneath the lids. I saw iridescent double. My gums were throbbing and I wondered vaguely if they’d surrender my teeth. The cast ichorite got pinker. It yielded to my touch. The hinges sloughed off the wall that’d held them and oozed between my fingers, dripped thickly like honey or tar, and the metal puddles on the floor stiffened into awful little drizzled coins. In my head I huffed furnace fumes and felt my hammer hand go raw. I heard the hammer slam. I felt it pull in my back. The hingeless door went slack in its frame. With a scrape, it fell. It clattered into the bright cold and crunched under the train’s wheels. The vibration felt sick in my shins.

My savior stared at me in a new way. Hatred melted down to bewilderment.

Gunshot in the second carriage.

She snapped out of it. The big woman crossed the gap, kicked open the opposing door in that same stride. The carriage we’d opened was the engine room. The engine driver, young Etule, the man who had nearly thrown me off this train, looked back at us with dread. Us! The bandit stood over him. She took him by his lapels and shook him hard, then shoved him aside, took up the steering levers herself.

I looked over my shoulder and moved before I comprehended. I saw the weeping woman holding the second carriage’s far door shut with the strength of her back; I saw it buck against her. I had wet ichorite in my hands. I crossed the carriage and didn’t look at the panicking passengers, I stepped over the enforcer and shouldered open the flapping door, swallowed a sour lump of uncertainty about the gap and jumped it.

Ache flowered up my calves as I landed. It was a grounding sting. I dashed past limp Edna in the bandit’s arms and I sidled up to the weeping woman, who watched me coming and did nothing to stop me, and I smeared my gooey hand down the seam of the door and the frame. I felt delirious. My mouth itched. I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly and I thought, solder solder solder solder solder, and opened my eyes to see the ichorite slime drip off my fingers and slither into place. It glued the door in crazy strings. My hand tingled. It was going numb.

The weeping woman said, “What are you doing?”

I swayed in my boots. I suddenly felt extremely unwell. I shouldn’t be upright. I scrubbed my hand on my thigh, but the ichorite feeling wouldn’t come off. I imagined the enforcer still battering the door was Baird and that he was here to bottle my blood. I imagined him with a monstrous face, a bestial face. I imagined him with a snout and horns. I tried to look the weeping woman in the eye, but her face swam, her features blurred, the whole of her shimmered lusterlike. Her prayer beads sizzled. “Take me with you,” I said. “I’ll be useful. Please.”

The train lurched. I fell, the weeping woman caught me. She held my shoulders in her hands. The sides of her pistols pressed against the meat of my upper arms. Steel felt like nothing at all. The train was slowing down, I think. My blood rushed like it wasn’t, but I was aware of the pine trees individuating outside the frosty windows. Needles came into focus. It was so cold. I saw my breath. I rolled with sour sweat.

“She’ll ride with me,” said the big woman, who emerged in the second carriage with us to the passengers’ chagrin. Someone cried nearby, someone grown. Someone whispered, Rancid, Rancid. I wanted to retch. The big woman ghosted her talons over Uthste’s scalp, and Uthste stood, held Edna in her arms like a bride. My savior then reached toward me. She smiled again, red and wide.

I took her hand. I couldn’t breathe. The weeping woman holstered her weapons and slung the loot satchel over her shoulder. She stood before the sliding passenger doors and pried them apart with her hands, prayer beads clicking, held them wide to reveal ancient conifers rolling slow. Without a backwards glance at us, she stepped into the morning. Uthste followed wordlessly, Edna nodding in her arms, and then my savior brought me to the carriage’s edge. The wind scraped my face. She pushed me square in the back. My boots touched nothing and briefly, I flew.