Page 82 of Odder Still
you were merely a ship
that I should have let go.
Fist empty, barrel smoking.
One shot too late.
Once my waters are calm, might I still change this fate?
TAVISH ABSCONDS FROM MY life without flourish or tarnish, there one moment and absent the next. Raghnaid follows him down. The bodyguards advance, electricity crackling along their sticks. They say something and wave me threateningly toward a set of double doors at the far end of the hall—the opposite direction from where Tavish has vanished—but their words seem to bounce off my ears in a sea of static.
Tavish left me.
I take a step back, my legs weak and my head light. My silent feet seem to not quite touch the ground. One of my heels hits the cane Tavish set down when he took his knife back. He must have forgotten it.
But when have I ever seen Tavish forget something, much less his aid?
The guards’ incoherent demands grow louder, reverberating with the roar inside my head. I grab the cane. Its blade slips out with a quick twist. The rapier feels unfamiliar in my hands, but it makes no difference—the guards are too shocked to block my first few frantic lunges.
I cut through the outside of the nearest one’s leg and twirl to slash the back of another’s arm. The blade slices so clean I can almost believe I didn’t make contact until the blood spurts forth, pulsing like a heartbeat. The last guard swipes her electric stick against the sword cane, but her expression pinches as the current never reaches me. My parasite cradles around me, our desperation melding into something nearly feral. We grab the stick, eating up its power, and shove our blade straight through her shoulder. It sticks there as she stumbles to her knees. We let it go.
I’m certainly not one to lie drunk in the grass.
Tavish hadn’t simply contradicted my statement but referenced the garden beneath the glass-bottomed pool, even the key above the doorframe. A key which could hide me in a room known to none of the other Findlays, where I could wait in peace. Wait to see if Tavish returns for me before the rebellion flips this estate upside down with their yellow ignit. If I had let him go when he asked, if I had told him all that Lilias and Ivor were planning so he knew the scope of their threat, if I had considered his desires as real options so I could have helped him better help himself—if I had put my trust in him then—maybe I could also put my trust in him now. But even his best intentions will be ruined by the things I didn’t tell him.
There will be no lying drunk in the grass for me tonight, at least not here.
I could run back to the coast, find a bottle of something amber and a lush, green lawn. I could let the auroras in Lachlan’s lab suffer until their final breath and hope my parasite and I live long enough for us to find the energy it needs somewhere else—back in the Murk, perhaps. Maybe the person Lilias dragged across the sea wouldn’t have. Maybe, after so much failure, he would have finally given in, been happy just to spend his final days drinking on his porch, knowing the creature consuming him would die sooner or later, too. But that same creature roars through me, all adrenaline and rage and love. Behind those ballroom doors is something it wants. Something we want.
Fuck it all?
My parasite reflects the feeling in undiluted agreement.
Two of the guards struggle to right themselves, calling for aid. I dash past them, down the hall, and through the dramatic double doors that must lead to Lachlan’s lab. I take the stairs beyond in tremendous, perfectly silent bounds. Lavender speeds past me. Each of her leaps lands in a clunk.
The steps twist, leading beneath the tower proper. They end in an air lock. My parasite and I slip through it, slamming the locking mechanism the moment the door seals.
An elegant hallway extends ten strides before me. Gilded arches line its peaked ceiling, its frosted-glass floor carved with patterns that twist and turn like a sea breeze. A set of hanging tarps block the far end behind a cluttered supply of building materials and brassy helmets, itsclosed for renovationssign hanging crooked. The sounds that echo from beyond the screens are too pointed to be construction: the clink of glass and calm, almost hushed voices.
I crouch behind the makeshift walls. Lavender curls so tightly around my calves I think she means to become my second parasite. Carefully, I peek through the gap in the screens to survey the main room.
The original ballroom still lurks beneath the laboratory’s transformed surface. Chandeliers of pointed diamonds dangle from the ceiling, though most of the lighting comes from clinical overbright bulbs on stands. Behind shelves of vials and chemicals, the wallpaper boasts silver-and-gold inlay swirling in majestic waves, and where a band might play atop a polished marble dais now sits a series of monitors that resemble those from the security booth in the main lab. Glass sheets form huge tiles of the floor, revealing the upper city sprawled below, its towers and tunnels and domes all gleaming in the night. We are so near to the giant channel where submersibles descend to the central gate that I feel I should be able to spot the war currently happening there.
The Findlays’ careless waste of all this wealth prickles along my skin, but it’s nothing compared to the fury that burns through me at the sight of the ignation mutants imprisoned in glass cells near the ballroom’s giant viewing windows to my left. They pace within: Cats striped in vibrant colors, and dogs with splotches lined by sapphire and emerald and ruby. A family of wolves howls across a barrier, even the pups covered in the rainbow gashes. Their vocalizations agitate two walruses with lacerations of red and orange cutting up their tusks and into their eyes. A white bear lies in a heap in the cell beside them, its side barely rising beneath wide tears of color that seem to extend into its bones.
My parasite rattles within my rib cage, our anger shaking its way through us as we fix our gaze on the final cell. The conspiracy theorist from my dream sits at its center, her already ragged lower-city garb torn and sullied. Jean, her name was. But she’s not Jean anymore.
The colorful gashes line her skin, cutting up her exposed limbs and across her face. They sear up her cheeks and through her irises, slicing open a hole that seems to extend eternally. Those terrible eyes track through the lab, furious and fascinated, and when she moves, she does so in mangled twitches, as though she hasn’t quite the measure of her own body.
I have to smother the pure fury my parasite and I share before it can overwhelm us. Despite how bound our emotions are, this wrath feels a hair different from mine, almost religious in nature. Where I see a horror that defies ethics, my parasite finds a trespass on all that it stands for, all that it is, all that it holds dear. It feels like the heel of Lilias’s boot hitting Blossom’s side over and over and over again.
It takes every leftover part of me to shush us, gently containing the rage until it’s directable.We’ll fix this, whatever it is. We’ll make it right.
Not-Jean focuses on the other side of the ballroom-lab, cocking her head in sharp motions, and I shift the tarp screen slightly to follow her gaze.
Twenty feet to my right, a couple white-coated researchers stand by an enormous tank set against the wall, a small stairway allowing them to reach inside the top. Two dying auroras lie within, their stalks attached to broken pieces of the trench rock. Their greying forms are more ash than velvet, lashed and maimed, their glowing veins of blues and greens and reds pulsing between strains of grey.
A shudder runs down my spine, peeling off in waves through my parasite. We almost can’t watch as a researcher heats a blade edged in the dark, rainbow-strewn eruptstone that Elspeth used to detonate their ignit. Her gloved hands reach into the tank. We tremble with shared misery when she cuts into the aurora’s velvety exterior, searing a chunk free from the already mutilated creature. The aurora’s feathery tendrils jerk and writhe. Beneath my parasite’s anger comes a sob, and I barely hold back the whimper that rises in our throat.
