Page 35 of Odder Still
With a shudder, I drop the sleeve back into place. I let my braids down after. They cascade over my shoulders, black as coal, their coppery beads too rough and resilient to be paired with such a plush garment. I wish I could discard the robe, pile back into my rugged browns and reds, and vanish through the steam of the lower districts.
“Rubem?” The sound of Tavish’s diamond voice slices through my contemplation, burying itself in my chest. Rubem, not Ruby, as though the intimacy he shares with Sheona has drawn the line between casual friend and more than. However close I am to Tavish, there are others who come first. And I understand why. But it still hurts.
“I’m here.” I tighten my robe around me, trying not to feel like a trespasser as I move back into the bedroom.
Tavish stands at the dresser. The smudge of dirt I left on the floor earlier rubs into his socks, forming the faintest line along one silvery-blue edge. He searches through a drawer—the one I took the whiskey glasses from earlier. The drink I poured still sits, homeless, off to one side. The coiling melancholy in my gut tells me to down it, to chase my vanishing happiness a little longer. But it won’t help now. Not after all that’s just happened.
Tavish pauses. “Did you touch something in here?”
“Only the glasses.” As I bumble back through my earlier actions, finding nothing but stained-glass images in a blur of black, I groan. “I think. Your whiskey is blinding.”
“Is it now?” It’s not quite flat, but not quite a joke, either, as though Tavish is still lost in his thoughts. Then, he shrugs, collects a fresh tie for his hair and a neatly folded pile of clothes, and heads for the bathroom.
The light seems dimmer without him. I tap Sheona’s light, making the little luminescent flecks move again. “These are from the lower city, aren’t they?”
“Aye.” She bounces her shoulders. “I find them more natural than ignation.”
“Were you born there, in the lower?”
The pound of the shower starts up behind the closed bathroom door. As it whines on and on, it seems she won’t answer. Finally, she shakes her head. “My family is, but the most inclined of us train from a young age, make ourselves indispensable to these rich diddies. I was the best. I got my top choice.” She tips her head toward the bathroom. The drop of her chin after that offers no room for further questions.
“I left your breather on the counter earlier,” I say instead.
Sheona shrugs again. “Keep it. It’s no good to me anymore.” The strength of her voice seems at odds with the draw of her features, so taut they might be a bowstring ready to snap.
I don’t ask about the spouse who once used it. I don’t ask if it was her fault that they left or theirs, or if there’s just certain people fated to be abandoned. I don’t ask, but her gaze snaps to mine, and we know, the way addicts know one another.
She makes me bolt the door behind her after she leaves. Her knock makes me jump a few minutes later, but between her gruff voice and the outer lock’s response to her brooch, I relax. She tosses me a pair of grey pajamas that actually fit my tall frame. They’re indulgent, but not quite the whisper of silk or the cloud of the robe, just a regular soft that feels good against my skin. I don’t take off my fishnet gloves when I put the new outfit on. Without the netting, the parasite’s crisscrossing lines on my arm would be undeniable, and I have so little of myself left that I can’t bear the thought of losing my fishnets too. If I do, there might cease to be a me altogether.
Sheona plants Tavish’s desk chair directly across from the door and roots herself to it, a pistol propped in her lap, as though she’s prepared for someone to break through the bolt just to get to us. Perhaps it should make me tenser to know how worried she is, but having someone to guard my sleep for the first time since Lilias took me from my pets feels comforting. I grab a pillow and blanket off the bed and flop onto the rug, just out of her way but near enough to wake if something happens. The moment my eyes close, the first waves of sleep creep in, turning my thoughts to a heavy smoke and blurring the edges between myself and the parasite. Its voice wiggles through my head, whispering urgently in words I can’t decipher. I turn, tossing the incoherent demand away, and knock straight into someone’s legs.
Tavish yelps. “Och! Ruby, are you sleeping on the floor?”
I groan, bundling my pillow into the side of my face. “The floor, yes. Sleeping? Not anymore.”
He prods me in the side with his slippered foot. “Have you felt the size of my bed? Get in it! In!”
“You could be a little less demanding,” I grumble, climbing up.
“And you could move a little faster.” There’s a warmth in his voice that means more than the words themselves.
I’m still trying to figure out what it all means—whether he’s implying anything, as a friend, as more, as neither—when he pulls the covers over us. Blue settles between our heads, and Lavender between our feet. Still, he’s so close. An arm’s reach, and I could grab him, touch him, pull him to me. Yet that gap feels like a longer expanse than the floor to the mattress. It feels like forever and a day, like the sight of him retreating into the distance when we part. It feels like a loss.
I turn away from him and tuck my arms over my head, a shield against the world. Even a shield can’t block out the soft sounds of Tavish’s breathing. If we had met in the Murk, him a colonist and me a nothing, would our paths have tangled? Maybe, with no ties forcing him to me, with no aurora in my neck and no destruction looming before me, he would have walked away the moment we met. I trace a finger over the parasite.Is this your fault, then?
It replies with the memory of a soft laugh, an eerie compilation of every piece of humor it can reach its ruthless tendrils into.
I drift off again, this time to worry and wanting. Darkness scoops me up, but it pitches me to and fro, as if warning me that each minute I lose rolls me closer to the edge of a cliff, the waves far below crashing against rocks like teeth, hungry to tear me apart. That’s when the dreams start.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Me, You, and Us
What does it mean to balance an ocean,
to give oneself up to become a foundation?
Then will every collision be an extinction?
