The Past
Two blocks west of the Hellshouse, in a tea shop called—no joke—the Cup of Tea, Oren washed down his first tablet with a swallow of cold white tea. The tablet was a little ball of stale bread dough mixed with potent things that would make him quicker, at least for a little while—something he had bought off of one of Nadi’s girls. The Cup was walled with cloudy mirrors framed in red varnished wood. He knew better than to look too closely at his reflection with one of those tablets heading down to his gut.
At first, finding himself alone in his hometown, with little money and less hope of a safe haven, he had gone into a sort of manic rush, hustling fresh coin with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he had killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Having no allies in this city wore him down until the street itself came to seem a projection of a death wish, some secret poison he hadn’t known had been in his blood all along.
The neighborhood he found himself in was like a deranged experiment in the idea of survival of the fittest, designed by some bored god of time who kept things running at ridiculous speeds. Stop hustling and you sank down without a trace, but move a little too quickly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the waters that were the black market. Either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of some fixture like Maus, though parts of you might survive in the glass jars of some necromancer.
Business here was a constant hum in the blood, in the air, and in the human traffic, and death was accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, or the failure to hed the demands of an intricate protocol.
It didn’t matter who his father was; a lord of the underground couldn’t afford to show weakness, and love was a weakness. Mercy was a weakness. It was quite possible this half-life was worse than death. It seemed that way sometimes.
Alone at a table in the Cup of Tea, with the tablet’s effects coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms and suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Oren knew that at some point he had started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions that had been beaten into him since he could walk. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on these streets, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of “his girl.”
He had found her one night in an arcade, her back to the stalls like most others present, eyes on the fireworks blooming over the river. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Dett’s dreaming drugs on its way downriver and the gold already in his hidden pouch. He had come out into the warm rain that sizzled across the paving stones, then stayed as the rain ceased and the fireworks began. Somehow his eyes singled her out, one face out of the dozens peering out from the arches, lost in the dance of light that seemed magical, but was merely alchemical. The expression on her face then had been the one he had seen hours later on her sleeping face against his pillow, her upper lip reminding him of how he had drawn birds in flight when he was small enough to draw.
Climbing up to the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he had made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes all smoky with smudged kohl, like the eyes of a prey animal frozen and hoping the predator would pass.
Their night together stretched into the morning, into a ferry to nicer boroughs than he had seen since his disgrace. The rain had returned while he lounged in the afterglow and then kept up, beading on their faces, passing famous boutiques and inns, until she had stood with him in the midnight clatter of a casino and held his hand.
It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tensions he moved through to turn her perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He had watched her personality crack and come apart like a block of ice in the summer heat, splinters of the precious stuff slipping away, and finally, he had seen the raw need, the hunger of addiction. He had watched her track her next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along the river, beside tanks of mist-warped catfish and crickets in little cages.
He stared at the brown ring of detritus at the bottom of his empty cup. It was vibrating now the tablet’s blessings had gone from his gut to his blood. The brown varnish of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the rush of his blood seeming to climb up his spine, he could imagine all the various and sundry impacts that had created that table’s rough landscape. The Cup was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of traditional Cathena and pale things from further inland, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a thousand customers had somehow clouded those mirrors and the once glossy tables, leaving each surface foggy with something that needed to be wiped away.
“Hey, Oren…”
He looked up and met gray eyes ringed with kohl. She was wearing faded fatigues cast off by some city guard, and shoes that had once been white. They almost made him laugh, like what sort of pie-in-the-sky naive hope had led anyone to make white shoes.
“I’ve been looking for you.” She took a seat opposite him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of blue had been ripped out at the shoulders. He automatically checked her arms for signs of the drugs she had left him for, the sort that required piercing one’s very skin to inject them. “Want a smoke?”
She dug a battered case from her sock and offered him a hand-rolled cigarillo.
“Are you sleeping all right, Oren? You look tired.” Her dialect was local, though it had been stories of opportunity that had brought her downriver to Cathena City. She was not of this place in the beginning, but now she was. The skin below her eyes was pale, unhealthy, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was his age, an adult due to necessity. New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The abstract pattern almost drew him in.
“Not if I remember to take my tablets,” he said, as a wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding the beat of his blood, rushed by the drugs. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of his bed near the harbor, her fingers locked across the small of his back.
All that flesh, he thought, and all that it wants.
“Dett,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “He wants to see you bleeding out in the gutter.” She lit her own cigarillo.
“Who told you that?” he asked. “Maus? Have you been talking to Maus?”
“No. Ilona. Her new man is one of Dett’s boys.”
“I don’t owe him enough,” he scoffed. “If he kills me, he’s out of the money anyway.” He shrugged, part bravado and part certainty.
“Too many people owe him now, Oren. Perhaps you get to be the lucky example. You had seriously better watch yourself.”
“Of course. How about you, Jamila? Have you got somewhere to sleep?”
“Sleep.” She shook her head. “Sure, Oren.” She shivered and hunched forward, her face filmed with sweat.
“Here,” he said, fishing a silver coin out of a pocket and passing it to her.
“You need that, honey. You had better give it to Dett.” There was something in her gray eyes now that he couldn’t read, something new that hadn’t been there before.
“I owe Dett a lot more than that. Take it. I’ve got more coming.” It was a lie, as he watched his silver disappear from view.
“You find your money, Oren, and you find Dett quick.”
“I’ll see you, Jamila,” he said, getting up.
“Of course.” A thin sliver of white shone beneath each of her irises, the telltale sclera. “You watch your back.”
He nodded, anxious to be gone. He looked back as the door shut behind him, saw her ghostly through the cloudy window.
The Present
Aurin woke up to piss, then came back to bed. Torin had moved, taking up the exact space Aurin had left behind—the space and the heat. It was summer now, but the night was still cool enough to be close. He paused and brushed golden hair back from the younger man’s face and considered him.
His younger self had known his onetime lover would betray him. Addiction strangled love. His current self knew his boy would never betray him. If Torin was addicted to anything, it was Aurin. He still didn’t know how to make a lasting peace with Arry, to find a way for the people he most keenly looked out for to coexist and not feel neglect.
Perhaps sooner or later he could have enough of an interest in the theater to offer Arry work that made his heart sing. Perhaps that peace offering would be enough.
Arry knew the world could be cruel, perhaps not so keenly as Jamila. Aurin had tried to buffer him from it when he managed to get himself to Kalzasi. Torin wasn’t stupid, but he had been largely sheltered from harsher realities by good fortune. Aurin tried to ease him into a realism that left room for optimism and joy. It was a delicate task.
Finally, he nudged him, firmly but gently, murmuring until Torin made space for him in the bed. He allowed himself to be tender without waking eyes upon him. His body lined up with Torin’s, and the sleeping man pushed his back into Aurin’s chest, his body a furnace, and the older man elected not to pull the bedding over him.
He was fashioning Torin into an informant, into a tool that he could use. It would also serve him better in his own life and endeavors if he was keener of eye and ear, paying attention to the flow of life around him. Aurin was aiming for win-win situations these days.
Burying his nose in golden hair, he let sleep come back to claim him and dreams of a change in fortunes that Torin’s ear had tipped him off to.
