Page 55 of Odder Still
The ferocity of my indignation makes my jaw hurt. Fishnets are my aesthetic. This damn body thief can’t take them away from me. But it seems to think otherwise, flinging my resentment back at me. I scoff and yank on my shirt, turning up the collar and tugging the sleeves down to my knuckles. My parasite reacts by stealing the use of my right arm and rolling the left sleeve back up.
I roll it down again.
It protests loudly.
Before we can start a shirt war, I trudge us up the beach to where the grass stretches over moors of green and grey, wipe the sand from my feet, and shove on my—thankfully dry—boots. The seawater in my pants immediately seeps onto them. My parasite sighs with my lungs, and I can’t even object.
“At least we tried?” I grumble.
‘Wet ball of lint,’ it replies.
No beer for you.
And to my surprise, its borrowed laughter feels genuine. I shake my head, releasing another deep exhale for the both of us. Tavish joins us—me—on the hill. He slips on his shoes, arranges his scarf to precision, and plants his cane into the dirt.
“My clothes are donned. Now tell me, what utter shite was that back there? Why did those dolphins carry us here? What in the Trench is taking Sheona so long?” His expression remains dignified, but cracks ring through his voice, just as they appear at the corners of his too-tight lips and the unsteady squeeze of his fingers.
If this news breaks the fragile hold he’s gained on his grief, I don’t know if I can forgive myself. But that’s no excuse for keeping it from him. I rub my hands down the front of my face, one striped in black and the other clean brown beneath the damp, fraying fishnets.
And I tell him, expanding on every detail, my parasite pulling at the memories whenever I miss something. I end withShe’s deadandI saw it.
Tavish’s jawline quivers once. He lowers himself to the ground and collapses backward, his breathing so slow that he must be putting in great effort to control it.
“I knew…” His words come out strained, as though shoved through a grater. “I knew from the moment she was assigned to me, despite how young I was then, I knew that this could be how it ended. It was a hazard of the job. But she is—was so much more than a bodyguard.”
“She loved you like family.” I plop onto the grass beside him. Last night there was a moment like this, I recall, but I was on his other side, and we were safe, and Ailsa and Sheona were alive, and the world was, perhaps no more right, but at least a lot less wrong. “In my culture, we proclaim over the dead a series of blessings toward both them and the living. Do you mind if I…?”
“Please.”
I sign the words, but I speak them, too, low and heavy, nearly a chant, reciting the full proclamation as well as I can remember it, having given it only once and far too young. “We mourn for a life, both taken and given, for the dousing of a spark, unique, never to be replicated. We mourn for the loss, the tear it forms within the world, the rip in the heart of each who feels the absence. We mourn for the love that was to come, for the dances cut short, the relationships severed by an unbreachable divide. May you, Sheona—” I pause, realizing I’d never learned her last name.
Tavish rescues me. “Aris.”
“May you, Sheona Aris, provider of stability and strength, worthy protector, may you find peace as full as the quiet of the womb. May the tears of those who weep for you become one with the sea. May the fruition of your life, your love, and your loss carry those you left behind, guiding them into the future. We proclaim you ours, in life and in death. Be at rest.”
Tavish stares at the sky. Small, gleaming tears slip unhindered out of the corners of his eyes so quietly I don’t think he even realizes. He doesn’t move, even after my final sentence has rolled across the waves.
“We can’t stay here, you know.” I don’t add that Sheona died to bring him this far. That her loss literally carried us into our future. But he knows.
“Aye.” Tavish shoves both hands into his curls and scowls with more dramatics than true emotion, as though he’s covering up something too raw to let the air touch. “This is fucking shite. How do we prove my innocence now?” He releases a grunt that vanishes as quickly as it forms, eaten by the sea breeze and the rushing waves. “I suppose the Gayles of Sails and Co. bring their fleet in and out regularly. If we can flag one down before they can port, and they’ve not heard of my involvement yet—if they still believe I’m accepted as a Findlay—then perhaps we could—”
“I can’t.” The words hurt, bringing with them an echo of my last promise to Sheona:his safety will be my top priority.But as I rub at my parasite’s velvety blotch on my neck, failing to find where it ends and I begin, they’re too true to deny. “I have to focus on removing the aurora from my neck.”
Tavish jerks upright. “But Lilias—Maraheem—the rebellion!”
“Tavish.” I catch his hand, pressing his palm to the place where my parasite molds into my skin, its hide and my flesh so indistinguishable than it could be a natural part of me. “I’m so far gone, Tavish. I need to at least try to remove it while I still have a chance. Last hope, and everything.”
In reply, my parasite twists within my corrupted arm. It pokes me in the fleshy side of my neck, so reminiscent of what I did to it for our first day that I don’t need its wave of bitterness to piece together a meaning: Just as it was a thing in me for a time, I’m now becoming a thing in it. As it’s grown larger, I’ve grown smaller. Soon I’ll be nearly as small as it was the hour I first let it in.
“I want to help you return to your home,” I say, however much it kills me. And I find, against all odds, that it’s true. Thinking of those bullets aimed for him, of the streak of scarlet that dripped down his arm, of all the rest of the red in his life right now, I would have pulled his chute no matter what it meant for me, if the alternative was his death. But he’s not the one dying now. “If I assist you now, though, there might not be a meleft by the time we get there.”
“Trenches, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Tavish’s fingers slide across skin and parasite, leaving a warmth like whiskey in its wake. They settle beneath my jaw, his thumb fitting there perfectly.
I never want him to pull away. “It’s not your fault. You can’t see the way it’s crisscrossed through my muscles.”
“Fuck.” He lets go.
The lack of his touch sobers me. I draw out his ornamental knife and flip it, letting it twist in the air in front of my face before catching it again. My parasite’s arm always snatches it faster, stronger, more precisely than my own. If it would even let me attempt to cut it out of myself, I’d bleed to death before it was done. I try not to think about how little of me there will be left in the best of circumstances. Maybe too little to carry me home. Too little to help Tavish either. I’m no doctor, but I have the strangest feeling that a human can’t survive without their lungs.
