Page 52 of Odder Still
Tavish must realize my confusion because he explains, “They’re the ruins of the original Maraheem, the one built by the finfolk. Now they’re only used for waste transport. The homeless congregate there, and the criminals.”
A stairway later, the road opens onto a balcony above the ancient city’s remains. The metal walls rise into thick domes that feel almost like the spacious glass ceilings of the upper districts, but for the stench and the decay. Crumbling stone structures make elaborate patterns on the ground four stories down, forming decrepit walls and archways, a wobbling current of smog and steam shifting in their cracks. The heat feels oppressive here, targeted and angry, so sweltering that the stink of sewage and chemicals becomes a part of the temperature. Vapor shoots in constant sprays from the massive forms of machinery that rise up nearly to our balcony.
We turn onto a new stairway that winds and drops through the old city’s clutter, a rickety railing on one side. Few people traverse these stairs, but through the gloom on the ground are hunched selkies, sleeping or huddling around cooking fires. In the distance, a series of red and blue canopies cover what sounds like a party but looks like half a war and half a funeral.
As we drop off the edge of the stairway onto hard-packed dirt, Malloch appears above us. They lean over their motorcycle and shoot. Dust stirs at our side.
Sheona returns fire, forcing Malloch to pull back. She reloads once, then again, but at the end of her second magazine, she curses. “I’m out.”
Malloch responds with a fresh bombardment of bullets. The cart rattles when they hit us, piercing along the dash. The tubing in the console cracks. Ignation spills into the center of our seat. My heart stutters as it douses Tavish.
“Dammit.” Sheona whips off her cloak and hands it to him.
He wipes himself down with a wrinkled nose and crunched lips, his unfocused eyes adding to the look of disdain. I wait in horror for the ignation to gash colorful lines into his hands, barely watching the road as I veer our cart into the maze of decrepit buildings. But Tavish’s freckled skin stays as smooth as ever, the silver shimmering harmlessly across the front of his blue-and-grey overcoat.
I grab his fingers just to be sure. “Why isn’t it mutating you?”
“Mutating? Ah.” Tavish pats my hand. “It’s harmless on the skin. The mutations only seem to occur now that animals have had long periods of internal exposure—ingestion, I assume, though Lachlan’s lab might be using injection. We wouldn’t have this stuff running through our walls if it changed us with one touch. And we wouldn’t be having this mutation problem now if we ken that it even did this at all.”
His explanation makes so much sense that I should have figured it out myself, but hearing it out loud clicks a switch in my mind, one the parasite is all too happy to nudge at excitedly. “You’ve had ignation for decades.”
“Nearly a century,” Tavish corrects.
“And you’ve never seen the mutations before? In all that time?”
Tavish’s brow shoots up, half of it burying beneath an overturned lock of his ridiculous curls. Sweat pastes the hair to his forehead. “You think something has changed?”
“Something must have, right?”
The parasite shoves against me, hot and frustrated, its indignation pooling in my bones. It growls, a mixture of all my pets’ anger combined into one atrocious sound that rattles my mind. Somethinghaschanged. I just have no way to uncover it right now.
The whirring of the cart turns to a sad sputter, and the vehicle chugs to a stop, the last of the ignation dripping from its console and pooling on the floor. The chemical-filled fog creeps in through the cart’s open sides. Sheona pulls Tavish out of the vehicle, leading him through the ruins at such a speed that I have to jog to catch up. Malloch’s motorcycle hums nearby. We duck under a low archway and run through a field of deteriorating pillars, almost falling over a cluster of vagabonds asleep in the low-lying haze. A beer bottle tumbles away from my foot, liquid still sloshing inside it. My anxiety and fatigue both bombard me with desire, but I’m far too sober to try whatever lies within the grimy glass.
“Why are we down here again?” Tavish wheezes, stumbling into Sheona when she stops us at the edge of an empty street that cuts along the side of the thick metal wall.
Lights flicker beyond a break in the stones to our right, and a pair of grey-uniformed workers pull themselves toward a landing three stories above using a hand-cranked elevator, but the world remains silent. Holding its breath. Or perhaps, in this place of toxins and sickness, the world doesn’t breathe, because it’s a corpse long gone cold.
Sheona leads us across the road and down a spacious metal tunnel. “We’re here because this is the only place besides the gates from which anything leaves the city.”
On one side, thick cables lower massive wastebins from a chute in the ceiling. The sorting station below it is empty, as are the containers marked the same as the massive, smog-spewing machine that rumbles a little way down. The tunnel ends in a pair of glass chambers with air locks that form a seal between the humid, chemical heat of the dredges and a patch of deep-blue seafloor, both open on our side. Food waste half fills one, while the other remains empty but for damp scraps coating the bottom.
Tavish balks. “No. I refuse. I will stay here and face my fate before I—”
Despite Tavish’s stocky form and Sheona’s slight one, she sweeps her arms under his legs and heaves him onto her shoulder. She lugs him to the mostly empty garbage chute and drops him, unceremoniously, inside.
Tavish grumbles under his breath. His entire face scrunches up as he removes the grey chef’s uniform in dramatic yet precise yanks, tossing it to the side and folding his scarf, coat, and shirt carefully for Sheona to tuck into a waterproof bag. He presses his brooch firmly against his bare collarbone, and it sticks there.
My gaze catches on his skin, finding the layers in his freckles, the transition between the heavy patterns across his face and the gentle spotting on his shoulders that turns near white across his chest, where his dual scars cut clean, silky lines below his nipples. I stop myself from accidentally following the rim of his pants as he draws them down, half out of respect and half because, despite our present situation, I’m still aching just a little with the desire to slide my hands along the curve where the bulk of his stomach and his gracious upper thigh meet. Imagining the sounds it might raise in him is the very last thing I need right now.
Swallowing the disastrous thoughts, I pull off my boots and add them to Tavish’s bag along with my vest and shirt. As Sheona seals the clothes up and lops the cord over my shoulders, I flip her breathing device between my fingers. It occurs to me, finally, that she’s removed none of her own outfit.
“You’re not coming?” I ask.
She smiles, a thing more sad than happy. “Someone needs to release the chute.”
My mouth opens, but I don’t know whether to object or thank her. If it were only Tavish and me, would I have stayed back? I glance at him, and I want to say yes, but the reply comes forced through a memory of home. The home I’m still just as many steps away from as I was when I caught him on the beach. I feel weak around the edges.
She grabs my chin between her fingers and thumb, the slight wrinkles around her eyes growing as she stares at me, fiercer than fire and older than stone. “If you return him with a single hair missing, I will make such fine slices of you that you’ll be mistaken for a pile of fleshy locks.”
