Page 71 of Vilest Things
Anton’s head snaps up. “What?”
“I think Otta performed some ritual to gain power, and now she’s gone after the crown herself.”
With such a wild claim, Calla expected chaos to erupt. It’s not entirely a lie: if Otta has gone missing, there’s only one reason.
You’ve already burned your palace down. This one is mine.Otta spoke those words herself. Why leave a map and then disappear? Otta wants to get there first.
Calla is met with stunned quiet. Several councilmembers have been roused by the commotion and have clambered out of their tents, yet there’s no uproar. They’re in unknown territory—wondering how Calla was attacked, how long Otta has been plotting rebellion, whether they’re in far more danger than they imagined. Through the gathering crowd, Joselie pushes forward, looking over Calla—the body—with mechanical inspection.
“Galipei, what are you saying?” Anton asks. He’s blinking fast.
“We have to go after—”
“Is she stillalive?”
The rest of Calla’s answer dies on her tongue. It is in the dark that Anton appears most like himself. That the purple tinge in his irises comes to life when he meets her gaze, gives him away to those who know how to look.
“She’s still alive,” she says, pivoting quickly. “Check her eyes.”
The moment she’s given the instruction, Anton’s hands move from her neck to her eyelids and push up lightly. Electric yellow, not replaced or dulled. Alive, undoubtedly, and stuck in there.
“Give her to me.”
Calla falters.
“I will help,” Joselie adds. They must think Galipei wants to be rid of this burden as soon as possible.
Recovering, Calla eases her body into Anton’s arms. She’s surprised that he receives the handover with care, that he tucks her head against his shoulder and adjusts for the sword hanging from her hip when he turns and walks. She hardly recognizes her own body when it’s made into something fragile. With her height, she’s never been small, yet somehow she’s rendered into the flat imitation of a person the moment her qi is removed.
Calla watches them take her body to the last carriage. Anton delivers some instruction, and Joselie helps him move her in by pushing around some of the items before he places her body down. From afar, Calla catches a brief glimpse of three stacked boxes before Joselie closes the carriage door again.
Anton, what on earth did you bring in that carriage?
“Galipei, what are we to do?”
The voice comes at her shoulder. She turns to find a close cousin of Galipei’s: Balen, or Bayen, or—
“We get to the borderlands as quickly as possible,” she answers. The map sits safely in her body’s pocket. “Even if we don’t know the exact location without Otta, we travel as far as we can until we spread out to hunt her down. This isn’t only about getting the crown to keep peace in San-Er anymore. It’s about stopping her possible coup.”
“And finding out what the fuck she did to Calla,” Anton adds, returning to join the gathering crowd and rolling his sleeves up. When the guards blinkat him, he claps his hands. “What are we waiting for? Break camp. Come on!”
Calla lets him issue the instructions. Lets him order around the guards and the other councilmembers, hurrying their mission. Quietly, she falls into line, joining their effort to gather up the campsite.
It would seem this has worked greatly in her favor.
CHAPTER 25
Yilas tossed the odd note in the office trash can the moment she returned from the palace. She didn’t think anything about it, writing it off as nonsense. It requires a certain brand of peculiar to work in an environment like the Palace of Union, so she wasn’t going to take it personally. She merely happened to be the person in view that day for the woman with black eyes to exercise her eccentricities on. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Baby, what is this?”
Until Chami walks into the apartment later that night with the note between her fingers.
“Don’t tell me you plucked that out from the trash,” Yilas groans, setting down her book. “I threw my orange peels in there afterward.”
Yilas has put on new pajamas, as promised. The air conditioner blows gently from the window corner, its cold blast mostly absorbed by the overgrown indoor plants that line the floor before drifting into the rest of the bedroom. Though the diner closed an hour ago, Chami was on cleanup, pulling the blinds and locking the doors while Yilas came up first to rest.
“It looked strange, so I reached my hand into the trash.” Chami raises a brow. Yilas’s darling girlfriend, who laces her shoes in the correct order, hasbeen wearing a fake piercing in her left eyebrow lately. She wants to branch out into new styles but needs to “try it out” before she “commits to a lifelong scar.” “You want to explain yourself to me?”
