Page 8 of Of Monsters Of Kings

His eyes were too much, which should be impossible, I knew. I heard my gasp as if from a great distance. I felt my body and mind give up the battle to stay conscious as Ox’s irises drowned me.

This was my End.

Chapter Three

Five soldiers rode across the plains,

At a cave they arrived.

Iopened my eyes and gazed at the outside of my apartment building.

How curious that I was here and that I’d just opened my eyes. That meant they’d been closed. I remembered Ox’s eyes on mine. Their terrible void and nothingness.

I shivered, and though the cold hadn’t caused me to shake, a chill crept over me. Many strange things had happened already today.

“You okay, girl?”

I glanced down the fairway. Mother said cars used to drive in the spaces between apartment buildings. Now, plants, whether flower or grain, carpeted the roads from door to door. Lupins currently grew here, but in other places, buckwheat or mustard were used at this time of year. A garden team toiled at the task of harvesting the lupins with their sickles, loading the chopped flowers onto a wagon afterward. The lupins would be used to build soil for food crops in the garden centers. I might’ve chosen to specialize in that skill in another version of my life.

A gardener had paused in the middle of the harvesting row, sickle by her side as she awaited my reply.

Nodding once, I forced my focus back to my apartment building.

The memory of Ox’s gaze swam behind my eyes again. My mind had squeezed so painfully at what I hadn’t seen in their depths. He’d had no trace of person in him. His eyes had lacked hopes and dreams and fears and experience. I didn’t want to think about them.

So maybe I wouldn’t.

What else had happened this morning? I recalled in a rush that Ox, Stag, and Sand Cat had closed Hotel Vitale. I had three days of medicine for my mother and two days of food. No money for rent tomorrow. Of all the misfortune that Hotel Vitale should close on payday. I should have asked the daydreaming skull for my pay. As it was, I’d need to track down Frank and hope the skeleton crew hadn’t put him in a ditch. Dead people couldn’t pay their previous employees. Maybe Frank had another venture he could employ me for.

The woman called again, “You sure you’re okay, lady?”

Was I? I couldn’t tell.

I glanced at the sun, nearly straight above. Midday.

“Drat,” I murmured.

Only pausing to pick up two handfuls of my sage linen dress and hotel apron, I darted to the entrance of my apartment building. Yanking a rusty key from under the high neckline of my dress, I unlocked the building door and took the stairs in twos and threes until arriving at the third floor.

Panting, I fitted a different and equally rusted key into the lock of our apartment.

“Rent due tomorrow,” the landlady rasped through her cracked doorway down the hall. She coughed her wet cough.

I nodded like I did every week at this same time and during the same conversation. “Yes. Tomorrow.”

Pushing inside, I shut and locked the door again. I didn’t have the luxury of sliding down the door to sink into a heap, though I’d rather like to. Striding through a short hall to the cool room instead, I crouched to reach into the depths of the corner cupboard and pulled out a small vial, one of three.

I half-ran past the front door again and through to my bedroom, where I heaved aside a small trunk against the wall to reveal a smaller hole behind.

I wiggled through the hole into darkness, with the vial clutched tight in my hand.

Flat on my stomach, I reached back through to drag the trunk over the hole once more.

Pitch-black.

This space was once an elevator shaft, an ancient contraption invented so tired people didn’t need to climb stairs. I’d long since moved past the ridiculousness of such an invention to feel deeply grateful to the person who’d wondered them into existence.

The day of Mother’s stroke, which marked the start of her withering disease, she’d become illegal per the laws of Vitale that demanded resources go to the fit and able only. Those laws gave an invalid the choice of death by needle or death over the wall, and neither had appealed to Mother. And so, from a tiny hiding place in our last apartment, she’d bid me hunt down the few buildings that remained with elevator shafts. These were the crumbliest buildings in the city, and no one wanted to live in them, so securing an apartment hadn’t been any trouble, even for an unskilled nineteen-year-old.

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