Page 13 of Odder Still
“Sheona?” I call after her, but the din swallows my voice, sweeping it away in the pound of feet and the thud of my own heart. “Tavish!” I make it barely three strides toward him before one of the armed guards blocks my path.
“Back to the lower,” he barks, waving his electric stick at me.
“Tavish!” I call over the guard’s shoulder.
Tavish turns in my direction, but his unfocused gaze slides right over me. In the blaring alarms and oscillating lights, the group that surrounds him seems to come out of nowhere: five soldiers wearing BA pins on their grey-and-white uniforms and a pair of suited officials. They wrap around Tavish like a shield, the soldiers with their weapons pointed out and the officials placing a hand on his back, another on his waist. He flinches and tucks his arms in, as though he might slide through their grips.
“Retreat to the lower districtsimmediately,foreigner, or you will be detained!” the guard repeats, stepping toward me, his chin level with mine.
“I’m with Tavish Findlay!”
The guard grunts. “And I’m personal friends with the head of the BA.”
I could fight him. If I made it past his electric stick, I could shove through the guards and scream Tavish’s name close enough for him to hear over the din. He is my best chance at removing the parasite. But everything this day—this week—this life—has brought seems to crash into me at once, like a metal blanket over my shoulders and a clamp around my lungs, and I can’t. Or maybe I simply don’t.
As the suited officials speak to Tavish—speak over him, by the looks of it—his expression goes wide. Then it empties, filling slowly, painfully, with the kind of grief born of shattered shock, like his anguish comes through a broken mirror, the pieces not quite fitting together. The drinks slip from his hand. No one heeds them as they crash into the floor, a mug cracking and coffee spilling across the marble. Tavish grabs onto one of the suits, steadying himself. They guide him hurriedly back up the path, away from me. He doesn’t protest, whatever they’ve told him clearly more important than confirming whether Sheona’s brought me with her.
My hand goes to the parasite. If I had done anything but give in with Lilias, then maybe I wouldn’t have this damn creature stealing my existence. Maybe I’d be nothing but me, sitting on my porch with a bottle of wine and three living caimans at my feet, watching one of the Murk spiders spin a web the size of my house between the massive swamp mangroves. Maybe I’d be half-depressed and half-drunk instead of this mess of terrible emotions that feeds the exhaustion and turns it into a monster.
But when the guard smacks the back of his stick into my chest and two others grab my arms, dragging me toward the lower districts, I don’t have the energy to protest, my goal already too far away. They toss me out the dull, low archways to the lower city. A gate closes behind me, its thick bars coated in spikes. I grasp one, pressing my thumb to the tip. A bead of blood wells around the metal. Between these lower-district bars and the ones they’ve pulled down over the gilded upper city, I can’t make out Tavish’s group any longer.
The shouts of the disgruntled lower-city populace burst to life as the alarm bells fade away, the lights returning to normal. The guards offer them an array of replies, from compassionate to hostile:
“I’m sorry, laddie, there’s just naught I can do.”
“Go about your business!”
“You can check your radios for the reopening, but it probably won’t be till the morning, I’d wager.”
“Get your damn arses lower, you fucking bampots.” This one rattles their stick along the gates.
I yank my hand back as electricity sparks through it, a jolt running up my arm only to be cut short when the parasite warms. The other people touching the metal shudder and drop, groaning in puddles on the ground. But I still stand, barely a tingle lingering in my muscles.
The crowd disperses down the stairs away from the gate. No matter how much I need Tavish’s aid, there’s no getting through to him now. And at the moment, the thing I need far more desperately than his help is a drink. These lower districts better have alcohol. I draw a breath and follow the crowd. My still-wet feet slide in my boots with each step.
At the bottom of the stairs, the ceiling rises, turning into melded plates of green brown that loom over the windowless hallway. Shops built from the same off-colored metal line both sides, their garage fronts gaping and their keeps guarding and hawking in the heavy din of crowds and chaos. Every corner and crevasse hides twisting machines and rattling pipes that shoot steam into the already sultry air. It smells poorly filtered, of sweat and salt and the tang of mixed waste.
The whole affair is the opposite of the wide grey sky. I love it with a backward, upside-down kind of affection that burns. The way this place flows around me, dense and hot and oblivious, it feels just enough like home to tug at my wanting without satisfying it.
I take a few more sloshing steps. Fuck it.
Plopping down on a crate beside a trinket shop, I manage to yank off my boots before the owner shouts me away. I tie them together and wrap them over my shoulders, continuing down the road in my wet socks. They pick up a thick layer of grime and dust from the filthy metal floor. They don’t make a sound.
The parasite flings up my earlier words to Tavish, pairing them with my dirty soles and silent feet: ‘I get odder the more you know of me.’
That wasn’t meant for you, I shoot back.
It goes silent as I work my way through the crowd, keeping to the sides as best I can on the chance that Lilias might still be here. My now wrinkled and ragged clothing blends with the thin, dulled fabric of the bustling populace, and my damp state doesn’t seem to draw much attention. A few people give my freckles-free skin and dark hair a second look, but down in these lower halls, I’m not the only nonselkie among them, and no one dodges my presence. No one seems to have the energy. I have none to spare them either.
Neither do I have a direction, a destination, just the need for a stiff drink and a place to wait out the gate’s closure. I scan the tiny, cluttered shop fronts for the combination of alcohol and a distracted merchant. Between a garage of produce in O’Cain Fishery cartons and one of frostbitten meat whose ice chests bear the same brand name, I find a woman lounged across a barrel with her own wares on her lips. I snatch a bottle as I slip by her, my presence a fog in an already vapor-strewn world of disorder and clatter.
I dive past a clunking, steam-powered trolley with a massive Sails and Co. logo across its side and disappear down a tight metal tunnel before uncorking my prize and guzzling. The wine tastes of vinegar and brine, and each swallow tears a layer off the back of my throat. I down half of it in one go. With my last meal hours gone, it forms a gentle buzz in my head and forces my strained neck joints to finally relax around the parasite.
My next priority should involve food of the free variety or information on the gate’s reopening, but both options feel detached, and without a heading, my best bet for either is to wander until something useful presents itself. I keep drinking as I walk, trying to ignore the Findlay Inc. poster nailed behind cracked glass.Ignation is a privilegescreams thick text that might have once been a silvery iridescent, the edge of a few letters still glimmering in the bulbous, green light that swings above the tunnel exit. I poke at the light. Its insides swirl, almost ignit-like, but lumpier, more irregular. Some kind of bioluminescent algae, maybe.
I search the main street chaos with purpose as I reenter, looking for any of the popularly advertised ignation among the throngs. Brooches peek out of most coats, but otherwise I find only steam power marked by Sails and Co. logos, more of the uneven lighting, and another Findlay Inc. poster across the side of a building that reads,Keep your cloak on you—lost ignation costs us all!It displays the fee for its loss at the bottom, the number of zeros at the end so outrageous compared to even the highest prices I’ve seen listed around the shops that Findlay Inc. might as well be charging for a chest’s worth of ignits.
It seems the jewel of the world only shines for those viewing it from the top.
