Page 98 of Odder Still
After wiping my cheeks, I work my way through the growing crowd to a tucked-away pub where I can still make out most of the central area. I drop into one of the patio seats and lean across the blue-and-green glass of the tabletop, surveying the pitch-black tendrils that cap my hand. Phantom sensations creep along their velvety exterior, but I feel nothing from them, not heat or pain, not even the rough skin of my calloused human palm.
It's not alone in that. Everything, I think, must be numbed right now: the deaths I’ve watched, contributed to, felt with my own being; the revelation of a bigger, more dangerous world beyond my own; the changes in my body; the loss of the better half of my human hand—my hand, a hand that cuts and caresses and pulls me up from the dirt, that I’ll never see or feel again, that will bonk bluntly as I reach for joy and comfort and protection. My gods-damned hand—
I close my eyes, and the human part of my mind pointedly refuses to think about it. I let the shock linger. Shock is all I can bear right now.
My drive slips from me, as though I am ending alongside my world, until I can barely hold myself in one piece, can barely even think. It chokes me. This shouldn’t happen anymore—not with the aurora—not to the human—not with us together. But the painful, jumbled impression of fear passes as soon as it comes.
Whomever I am now, I’m still me. I am still the man who craves the boost of a bottle of wine and the serenity of home. I am still the man who saiddepressionout loud and lived. And I am also more. My world will keep turning. No matter how many villains there are, I will keep fighting. I just need a nap first.
Desperately, need a nap.
I lay my head into my hands and stare at the patterned glass of the tabletop. Despite my detachment, I feel the little bundle of energy that lives inside my threads. It pulses gently, like an ignit. Or a heartbeat. It can’t fix the exhaustion I feel, or the pain and grief that will come after it, but it will keep me alive a little longer. Until the sickness comes for it.
This knowledge, like the deaths, is too much to handle right now.
My mind gropes for something more accessible.Tavish thinks someone pushed him out of the ignit blast. But there was only Elspeth.
The aurora half of me slips free, letting its own thoughts run in tandem to the human’s without quite syncing.‘Only Elspeth inthisworld. If the pulse of energy opened a doorway between them, then what’s to say this door only goes one way?’
Something curls between us: hope maybe.Then if Elspeth is alive still, they might find a way back.
‘I guess there are many things that get odder the more you know of them.’
I almost laugh, but I’m too tired to force the sound out of my lungs. It echoes eerily through my head instead.All the ignits and ignation, all this technology we’ve fueled using them: it’ll end, sooner or later. Sooner, if we want to not kill every aurora in the process.I remember the power that burst through me from the ignit and ignation I consumed.If we can convince people to break the ignits and feed them back to their auroras, we might be able to save them.
‘Few people will like that.’
I know.Just the thought of all the work it’ll entail to convince an entire world to send their precious energy back to where it came from makes me tired.
‘And if we can’t get ahold of enough ignits in the meantime, we might still die before it’s over.’
My insides prickle as though I can already feel where I will turn to ash first.If we die, then we die together, remember?I release a shaky breath and fight the urge to rub my face, because I know half the fingers I’d do it with won’t be there anymore.Why did you choose me? I was hardly the only one to hold you during that first day you were removed from your mangrove host.
It thinks within the confines of its own half of me, curled loosely through my mind, and I feel it picking each word with waves of emotion.‘I chose you because I know the way you feel inside, how you can get lost in that empty, echoing space within your own head. I chose you because I saw my sorrow in you, and that made me feel less alone.’It drenches me in the same sense of rejection and longing I had felt in my teenage years, things I’d bundled up and hidden, waiting for them to come true with each breath. Warm humor follows.‘And I appreciated your sense of fashion.’
I return its joy with a small spark of my own, but the feeling cuts out when something plunks against my table. I look up to find a full beer in front of me. Without a word, the rebel who delivered it wanders with their tray to the group of lower-district citizens who’ve come to lean against the café wall a little way off, not giving me so much as a backward glance. I feel as though I stand with one foot in this world and one foot out, a ghost drifting through its edges.
‘And that,’my aurora says.
I lift the beer to my lips, pausing to hum.And what, my rootlessness?
‘You’re disconnected from this dimension already. You make no sound as you move through it, leave less impact than you should.’It must sense my coming reply because it continues,‘Metaphorically, yes, but physically, too. You know this. Even for a child of the Murk, you’re too silent.’
I sip my beer. It goes down smooth, a deep amber that’s not as filling as the dark stuff Ivor serves, but far better than the finfolk’s light, crisp nothingness. I don’t have to ask it whether it knows why. It has only vague imprints of its memories from before the Murk, its past life more a feeling than a reality, but those are now integrated into me as potently as my own history. The aurora past and the human past meld so easily together, both wrought in loss and desperation, in being something the world wants no part of.
I don’t know how the human in me came to be not quite of the human world or why the aurora in me never felt quite fully aurora, either, but I think I prefer it like that. Together, we are simply a single vagabond from two different no-man’s lands. Perhaps that’s enough.
I lean back, a single-minded being again, and take another sip of my drink. From beneath the table, a small creature thunks into my lap. She curls herself in a circle and begins licking a matted spot of blood off her back. My shock holds me together for a moment. Then, it cracks.
I cry again, cry like I’m crying for the entire world, an impossible, incomprehensible, overwhelming sort of grief and joy all bundled together into sobs. My tears sink into her fur, making it easier to wipe away the gore. Beneath, Lavender is nearly unscathed, the small scrape already scabbed over.
I pet her gently, letting her rest her head in my halved hand.
And quietly we both watch the flow of the new Maraheem. The lower districts’ favorite cohosts crack jokes and banter flirtatiously between excited radio updates: the BA guards and grunts who turned on their superiors finished taking the BA’s main station for the rebellion; a maid snuck open the back door to the Callums’ estate; the O’Cain Fishery’s ecology laboratory staff preemptively offered up their building so long as they could continue their research under the new management. Other updates come with less flare, documenting skirmishes gone bad and wealthy families more willing to blow themselves and their home off Maraheem’s map than surrender. But as the city is proclaimed officially under the rebellion’s control, the deaths are ridden out with tired but genuine celebration, beer flowing and songs rising.
We killed the villains, we did. Lilias had been taken somewhere a while ago, but I can still see her influence in the square before me. We killed the villains.
But there will always be more. From this entire city unwittingly killing the auroras with their ignation to the greedier citizens of both districts who will find a way to use the upheaval to vault themselves to the top, to every selkie who will take their newfound freedom and use it to step on the finfolk or the pixies or the ocean itself. The lower’s songs of merriment sound like equal parts an exaltation and a dirge. Maybe all change is a type of death. Something always has to die for a new thing to live.
