Page 91 of Vilest Things
A soft knock on the door. One of the yamen workers brings papers to themayor, murmuring softly under his breath. The conversation is largely inaudible, though Calla figures it can’t be anything relevant to the situation.
The screen in front of Venus switches to a video player.
“Here we are.”
Calla peers over the councilmember’s shoulder. The rectangle of footage shows West Capital’s yamen, two statues of lions placed on either side of the front entrance. The only indication that this is live footage and not a still image comes from the dusty, unpaved ground, where every gust of wind blows small pieces of dirt and grit off the surface.
“You said the coldcrawled.” Calla ensures she’s using Venus’s exact wording. “What exactly did you see happen to the civilians left behind?”
There’s something in the far distance, appearing in the corner of the camera by the barest smidgen. Try as Calla does to turn her own head this way and that, she can’t get a better angle on what it is.
“They stopped moving,” Venus says. “When the cold caught up, it froze them.”
Calla thinks about the first descent of cold in Rincun. How it seized down from the heavens, and the qi was stolen from the barracks, and the cold faded. “The cold is some aftereffect of qi, though. It’s not literal ice. That doesn’t make sense.”
“As I keep saying,” Anton mutters by the window.
Calla leans closer to the screen. The slight movement in the distance is getting closer. She swears it is larger than the quarter of a pixel it was before. While Venus Hailira starts hypothesizing about other times they’ve seen strange feats of nature in Rincun—I’ve been reading about it, you see, and it occurs more often than you’d think—Calla taps the keys. The video rewinds. It confirms her suspicion, and she exits the screen.
The people in Rincun aren’t frozen. They’re moving really, really slowly. In fact, the person captured on the footage must be in the midst of trying to make it to the yamen as the closest place of shelter.
Out of the corner of her eye, Calla notices Anton turn, a brow raised. She’sseen him in battle enough times to read his movements, the way his muscles stiffen. He’s gauged a threat, and other than Venus Hailira, there’s only the mayor in the room and the boy he’s speaking to. Calla doesn’t make a fuss by asking what he’s noticed. Just as she would in battle, she syncs with his movements, switches her focal point of attention to tune out Venus and into the mayor’s conversation instead.
In that initial second, she thinks she’s hallucinating again. Since she jumped out of Galipei, she hasn’t heard voices nor felt flashes of other people’s memories. This, though, has nothing to do with her recent sigils and everything to do with her first jump. The girl she was.
“—is the work of the gods. The city folk will make it worse.”
“Maybe they’ll find the junndi and put a stop to it. I trust an official force more than I trust a criminal killer.”
Actia almost entirely shares a dialect with Rincun. Calla understands their words.
“Nevertheless, it is their business. None of them are our people. Remember what the throne did to Eigi.”
“Mayor,” Anton says loudly. “What are we talking about?”
He doesn’t understand them. But he can discern that it’s something suspicious.Junndi,Calla rolls over her tongue, squashing the two syllables against the back of her front teeth. What does that mean? She’s never heard the word before. Her vocabulary is too stunted, capped at the year she left Rincun in a golden carriage.
“Low numbers for grain, sir,” the mayor replies. In Talinese, he’s bright and accommodating. No indication whatsoever that he was slamming them seconds ago as callous city folk, her as a criminal killer. “Lucin, why don’t you close up around the yamen? It’ll be an early day today.”
The employee, Lucin, nods. He steps out through the door, and Calla pushes away from the computer desk too.
“I have to use the washroom,” Calla says. “Please excuse me.”
The mayor thinks little of her exit. Venus doesn’t turn either. When Anton makes eye contact, Calla signals a simple up-down with her finger, then nods her head at the door and mouths,Thanks!She’s not sure whether he understands what she’s trying to say, but Calla has already stepped out, running her palm against the door hinge.
She slashes her hand hard against the metal. A jagged cut blooms to life, beads of blood pressing through the broken skin. Calla squeezes her palm tightly while she follows after the boy.
She jumps, the movement so smooth that Lucin raises his foot in one step and she’s the one to put it down. A soft thump sounds behind her, but she doesn’t turn her head back, wanting the benefit of the doubt if anyone is to ask why Princess Calla Tuoleimi suddenly fainted. She pushes through to a different set of rooms. The chatter doesn’t stop when she enters. It is as ordinary as anything for her to walk toward the one desk that is unoccupied—Lucin’s, surely—and scan through the contents, looking for some reason why he was whispering to Mayor Policola about city folk making matters worse.
“Hey,” Calla calls aloud, directing the question at anyone in the vicinity, “anyone have any new thoughts about the junndi?”
“Are you on about that again?” someone across the tables replies. Interesting tone. “Better be quiet. They’ll think we know more than we actually do.”
What does thatmean?Calla thinks frantically. She starts to rummage through the papers on the desk. She should get back in a few minutes, or else the mayor will wonder where she’s gotten to, and she doesn’t want to leave Councilmember Hailira to make the decisions…
Calla lifts one sheet of paper.
KEEP THEM THERE.
