Page 16 of Odder Still
I take another drink, trying to pluck four more logos from my memories. The parasite flashes me a helpful image of the gate. “Your guards have BA pins?”
Ivor nods. “Battery Arms. Provides the man power for every kind of law enforcement here—only the head family’s personal bodyguards aren’t connected to them.”
“Those two on the radio mentioned a Bubble Entertainment.”
“They run all the media and art since buying out Falcre’s publishing house five years back. Been a real battle just keeping a few lower-district announcers these days.” He takes over for me, lifting six fingers. “Next you got Druiminn Health running our hospitals—or in the lower, you could saynotrunning them, since most’ve been closed up for about a decade. And finally…” His seventh finger comes up, only for both his fists to curl.
“Findlay Incorporated?” I guess.
“Findlay fucking Incorporated. They’ve got all the auroras, all the fuel, everything we need to flourish under the sea.” He stands enough to tap a fading algae light about us, and the gentle stir brings the bioluminescence back to life. “From us downtrodden in the lower to the heads of the other six companies, we all breathe the air they clean and shift with the ignation they rent us.”
“Well, fuck. So they controleverything?”
“Everything of value. Except my bar, of course.” He tosses another wink over the edge of his glass, but it dwindles amidst his wrinkles.
Too many wrinkles for his age, I think. “There’s no ignation production or aurora-related research or anything like that happening in the lower? Or in these other Mara cities?” My dwindling hope sinks out of me at the mixture of anger and pain that crosses Ivor’s face.
“Nothing even close. Everything fancy like that’s been moved to Maraheem’s upper districts, to the corporation’s main headquarters. Big seven gotta have it all right under their noses.”
The upper. Where I’ll be fighting to reach tomorrow. Only this time, the process will be harder than simply shoving past a few guards to shout in Tavish’s face. Maybe this has all been one long mistake.
“Of course,” Ivor continues, “some of the wealthier folks pretend to do their own thing—boutiques under the bigger conglomerates, brands in the underwater sister cities you don’t ken are the big seven until you look closer, some stuff in the selkie-dominated coastal villages that comes from the humans. And the seven are so scared of each other getting the leg up, they still let the assembly make the occasional impartial decision, long as it benefits the upper city. Things like the gates—gotta keep us filthy lowers from sullying up their pearly streets.”
I take another sip of my beer, trying to hide my grimace. “Maybe this is rude or ignorant, but why does no one just leave?”
“And abandon what little we got? We own nothing but our food and our clothes—everything of worth we gotta rent. You think Eyrr or Lindfel would be happy with a bunch of ragged selkies making slums outside their cities? Would that even be any better than what we’ve got here? At least here’s family. Here’s home.” The anger drains from his voice, replaced by a fatigue so heavy it’s almost endless. “Somehaveleft though. About four generations ago, back when things were first getting bad, one of the Gayle kids—the family who owns Sails and Co.—they went off their head about the corruption, took three ships, and sailed south to the siren seas, let on anyone who wanted to come. Every now and again, that cycle repeats.”
“How did it all get so bad?”
Ivor sighs, taking a gulp from his drink. “Most of the company heads were powerful families even before this land was turned from the old finfolk city into Maraheem proper. They’ve always tried to influence the assembly as much as they could, but it wasn’t until my ma was a wee bairn that they started digging their claws in proper. Everyone knew it was happening, they’d say, or else no one did, but I think it was really that no one thought it’d get this bad, or that if it did, they’d have time to stop it. They’d closed their eyes, and suddenly their elected government weren’t theirs anymore. Most realized it’d be damn hard to fix without help, so they gave up.”
Without help. My mind jumps back to Tavish. “No one from the upper does anything for you? What about that youngest Findlay?” I try to speak around the dread clutching at my throat.
“Tavish?” Ivor snorts. “He provides some aid if that’s what you’re getting at. He and Dr. Keavy Druiminn—the new Druiminn head, since her sister died a few years back—they keep trying to reopen the lower-district hospitals Keavy’s sister boarded up, but…” His gaze wanders to the soup kitchen line, and his voice caves with frustration. “They got no real clue what’s going on down here. They use their charities to feel better about themselves, but they’ve never set a solid foot inside our world. When’s the last time they ate at a soup kitchen? Waited in a gate line that would never move? Brought shite wine to a funeral for a wee bairn who could’ve been saved with the medical tech they’ve got three levels up? Never. They go home to their mansions and pat themselves on the back for not letting us all die out.”
I don’t know what to say to that—perhaps there is nothing I have the right to say. My memories flutter again, the parasite wiggling around in my mind. It finds my nights of hunger and scavenging, my mother’s last words and my nine-year-old sobs, the Murk shouting me away for being too muddy, and the river towns flinging me right back for having mist in my blood.
That’s not the same, I protest.
It returns my earlier line once more, ‘I get odder the more you know of me,’but this time I swear there’s sarcasm in the way it speeds up my voice, my own words going squeaky. A bundle of emotions springs forth, mine and the parasite’s mixed together, but I purge them, stuffing them away with all the other feelings that are too large and confusing to deal with. I need a lot more alcohol before I can evaluate any of them.
“I’m sorry,” I finally say.
“Aye. You and me both.” Ivor takes a much larger gulp from his beer this time. Before he can finish, the bartender waves for his help. He departs with a friendly slap on my shoulder, taking the rest of his drink with him.
I nurse mine, slower and slower as I near the bottom. As I do, I watch the way Ivor moves through the bar, track the easy manner in which he interacts with the customers and the places where it gives way to a sincerity far deeper and stronger. For all of Ivor’s friendliness toward me, a dark lump still sits somewhere between my throat and my stomach. I am just a passing breeze here, a foreigner for a kind soul to take pity on; a day to be made, not a life to align with. And even if I could be that, me with my ghost feet, with my Murk-tinged skin and silty-river blood that means nothing to these people, so long as I still have the parasite in my neck, they could never see me without the taint of its presence.
The radio announces the gate’s limited reopening and Alasdair Findlay’s death again, but they have nothing new to add except for long descriptions of the upper city’s advanced security measures and repeated bantering about how the other company heads must be handling the murder.
“Do you think Greer O’Cain will sleep with a fishhook next to their pillow now, MacNair?”
“I know I already do,” MacNair replies. “How else am I supposed to reel you back into bed?” The laughter that follows is so fake it could be made of cardboard, but I can’t tell if it’s the joke they don’t find funny or simply its existence in their current, otherwise harrowing program.
I take the last sips of my drink to the most shadowy part of the room, where I lounge in the noise of the cardplayers and try to forget that terrible look on Tavish’s face. I can’t make myself plan, much less move, as though some tiny, melancholic monster in my chest is stealing away my agency little by little. At some point I must’ve drifted off, because the lights are dim and the crowd has dwindled to a few ragged adults at the counter. Ivor progresses around the room with a step stool, dumping packets of powder into each light without moving them. Feeding the algae, maybe.
He bumps his boot against my leg as he passes. “There’s a cot in the back room if you want it. One night only.”
One night only. The story of my life.
