Page 52 of Vilest Things
Councilmember Mugo strides out of the meeting room, already pulling his cellular phone from his pocket. The rest of the councilmembers exchange glances. In the lull, Anton pushes his chair in and brushes dust off his sleeves.
“Meeting dismissed,” he announces. “We will continue onward in the morning. Let’s not waste time.”
Without looking in Calla’s direction, he exits the room too.
The councilmembers slowly follow suit. When Councilmember Farua walks past Calla, who remains rooted at the edge of the table, she offers a small nod.
The room clears.
“I can’t believe this,” Calla says aloud.
Her head twinges. She winces. Maybe she’s losing it. Maybe this is a paranoia of her own making. The room rustles with sound, and then Calla hears a whisper.
Sinoa.
She swivels fast, but there’s no one present but her.
That sigil she copied from Leida is doing this to her. There’s no denying its effect: something peculiar is happening to her qi, something beyond unlocking the abilities that the Crescent Society experiments sought. She has been displaced anew. Out in the provinces, qi might behave differently from how it does in the cities—farmers might sense the seasons before they turn; villagers might move in tune with the crops and gauge the needs of the animals they keep. But they don’t hear whispers that aren’t there. They don’t start phasing in and out of consciousness with their eyes wide open.
Calla allows herself a second of recovery, blinking frantically to get rid of the blots of yellow crowding into her vision. Before anyone can notice her delay, she hurries out of the room too, grumbling about the council’s uselessness.
There’s an arcade at the security base.
Heavens knows how Anton stumbled onto it while walking around. Thebase comprises three buildings connected by multiple skywalks. Still, when he slipped out the window of his assigned room after failing to sleep, moving quietly to avoid notice from the guards in the adjacent lodgings, it seemed the base was easily made for ground movement too. The first door he opened ushered him into a laboratory of sleeping computers. He trawled deeper, picking up notepads and keyboards and a half-finished apple core that someone hadn’t thrown out. Everywhere he went, a faint shroud of cigarette smoke hung in the air. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he found cabinet shelves and data drives. Third floor, where a faint beeping struck his ears, though he couldn’t identify it quite yet while investigating the resting couches and teapots.
Now, on the fourth floor, he registers the sound as video monitors that have been left on through the night. Coins dropping and swords swinging, piped through the make-believe of a speaker. It’s so jarring that he almost turns back on the stairwell and returns to his bed.
Then he spots her in the corner, sitting by the claw machines.
Anton approaches from behind. Drops silently into the velvet chair facing her, a low round table separating the space between them.
“Didn’t like your bed either?” Calla asks.
Anton kicks a shoe up onto the edge of the table. “I’m only sleepwalking right now. Don’t mind me.”
She doesn’t react. Despite the hour, she’s wearing a dress that seems to have been torn in half to go with her leather trousers. Red bundles of fabric resembling flowers bloom at her shoulders, and her long sleeves run past her wrists in a wide bell shape, falling backward when she props her arm up to lean on her fist. Though there’s a length of fabric covering her collar—and the sigil she’s drawn onto herself—the rest of her neckline is absent in a thin triangular cutout, taunting past her heart and ending just above her navel.
Maybe it’s the forsaken hour, but Anton has an urge to lick that exposed swath of skin.
He gestures forward. “I haven’t seen you in much palace clothing.”
“This old thing?” Calla shifts in her chair. “I repurposed a few pieces before we left. I was starting to get the impression no one would take me seriously as an advisor if I kept dressing like a street urchin.”
Anton quirks a brow. “I’m not sure ifthatis why you’re having trouble being taken seriously.”
“As Mugo helpfully pointed out earlier, I am aware that being both the spare to the throne and a patricidal maniac is also not good for my reputation.”
Anton almost laughs. But he gets ahold of himself before anything shows, because that is a slippery slope toward forgetting who she is, and who they are, and why they’re here. For a moment, Anton and Calla merely stare at each other to the sound of the arcade. A machine nearby beeps incessantly, cawing “Winner! Winner! Winner!” without care for the fact that no one stands before it.
“What are you doing here?” Calla finally asks. “Why are you… being pleasant to me?”
He’s not. Or he supposes he’s eased off trying to provoke a reaction out of her, and in contrast, he almost seems kind. It’s hard for him to pinpoint how he’s coming across. This whole time, how hefeelsabout her hasn’t changed. It has never changed, whether from before he entered that arena or after that performance of a coronation. His impulse is still to reach forward, touch her mouth, cradle her hair. At every up-and-down flicker of her eyes, he begs for attention, craves that relish when her expression changes in reaction to something unexpected he’s done.
There’s only a stronger ache that has forced him to alter his behavior. Self-preservation, knowing that he will splay his arms open and allow her to kill him yet again if he forgets how she unstitched him with the blade of betrayal.
He won’t come back from death a second time. Calla Tuoleimi has ruined him, so he’ll have to ruin everything in return.
“I have something to discuss with you.”
