Page 14 of Vilest Things
Yilas texts back instantly.
Oh fab. Matiyu says turn back and follow coliseum on right. keep going until you see wires
Wires?
Despite her confusion, Calla quickly follows instructions. She’s loitered for long enough, and the guards have noticed her. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if shedidwalk right in through the palace entrance, but she doesn’t want them declaring her presence. She doesn’t want news of her arrival to reach the king’s ear, at least not until she makes a stop first. If Anton’s been sitting here simmering in his anger, maybe he’ll throw her in prison the moment she returns.
“Over here, Calla!”
Calla stops. She’s paced too hastily past an alley and slowly reverses back two steps, peering into what she thought was a dead end blocked off by the coliseum’s exterior. To her surprise, Matiyu is waving at her from the end of the alley, standing by a large tangle of electric wires.Ah.
“I didn’t know there was another entrance,” Calla remarks, entering the alley. On the left side, there are two back doors that lead into restaurants on the upper floors, surrounded by trash cans overspilling with food scraps. If she weren’t looking, she wouldn’t see the other door hiding behind the wires that feed out of the ground and into the top of the coliseum.
“It’s an emergency passage,” Matiyu says brightly, turning to pull the door. When it doesn’t move, he sighs, patting around the wires until he clears a tangle to reveal an electric panel. Calla watches him input what must be his identity number. A puff of air emits from the wall as the door unseals. Quickly, Matiyu grabs a corner to haul it open and waves her in first.
“I’m impressed. You’ve been here less than two weeks, and you’ve already discovered an unused entrance.”
Matiyu dabs his sleeve against his nose to try to stop it from running—either a result of the night chill or his rapid dash across the palace to meet her here. He and Yilas look startlingly alike, down to the exact same mannerisms when they want to be polite. “Don’t think I don’t know why you got me this job. I registered my identity number for access through every emergency entrance on my third day.”
“Good work. Now take me to the surveillance room, would you?”
“I’d better get a good year-end bonus for this.”
Calla rolls her eyes and starts to walk. Before she can make an arbitary right turn, Matiyu reaches to steer her shoulders left. She pivots. Even when she made diplomatic visits here with the king and queen of Er, she never spent more than a few days in the Palace of Union—then named the Palace of Earth. Heaven overshadows Earth: the Tuoleimis were the ones who played host more often. In keeping with its name, the Palace of Earth was supposed to be the grounded one, satisfied with its portion of Talin claimed below the Jinzi River. The Palace of Heavens, meanwhile, stretched the kingdom’s ambition north, higher and higher until the kingdom was complete at twenty-eight provinces, having conquered Rincun and each bite of uncharted territory up to the borderlands.
“This way,” Matiyu says, pointing at the stairs. The moment they start to ascend, a rumble of voices floats from the top, signaling their impending descent. Matiyu grimaces, waving Calla off the first step and down the next corridor instead.
Though this is a different palace from the one she grew up in, Calla can almost fool herself into thinking she knows the way. When San and Er merged, when King Kasa took over the latter and his council grew from twelve seats to twenty-eight, any illusion of difference between the two palaces snapped away. Somewhere nearby, the throne room glitters coldly, its half-circle entryway decorated with ostentatious carvings, words and symbols of immortality for Talin’s rulers.
“Servants’ passages,” Matiyu explains when they descend three steps and the plush red carpet suddenly turns thin and gray. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“How dare you. Fetch me a palanquin right now.”
Matiyu snorts. Though Calla hasn’t seen Yilas’s little brother since the Palace of Heavens—when Yilas was her attendant and Matiyu visited on weekends to steal palace food—she feels the same sort of ease with him as she feels with Yilas. They may not know her truly, but they don’t fuss about wanting to know the princess either. That’s more than she can really ask for.
Three staircases up, two staircases down, and five sharp hallway pivots later, they’re finally approaching the surveillance room with Matiyu huffing for breath. Calla follows closely on his heels, ever casual as Matiyu drops into his cubicle. The two people on either side of him glance over curiously before snapping their attention back to their monitors, pretending they don’t see Calla Tuoleimi hovering over his shoulder.
“Show me the palace prison,” Calla says.
“Which one?”
Which… one?Calla thinks back to the cell she was kept in after the victor’s banquet. The chipping walls, somehow both water-damaged and charred with electric burns. The thin, threadbare blanket on the creaky bed. She only spentone night in there, believing Anton dead, believing that she had done everything she needed to in this kingdom and that it was time for rest.
She almost wishes she had been right.
“How many are there?”
“Two.” Matiyu clicks around on his screen. A camera feed appears on the left side, showing the row of prison cells she remembers. Surveillance for the rest of the cities is nowhere near as sharp as this. During the king’s games, sometimes the reels were too pixelated to see a player’s limb being severed off. The light in certain alleyways made fights appear as clumps of shadow on-screen. Inside the palace, meanwhile, the quality of the footage is almost better than what Calla sees with her own eyes.
Matiyu clicks again. Another display appears on the right side of the screen, showing only one cell and one prisoner, her head lolled against the wall.
“Stop. Zoom in on that one,” Calla says.
Matiyu follows instructions. He inches closer and closer, until the live surveillance is focused entirely on the prisoner.
So Leida Miliu is still locked up. There is no trick here, no possibility that the reality is anything otherwise. Yet something happened out in Rincun, with the same echoes of the events that unfolded in San-Er during the games. Calla rushed back in a fit because she was sure she would find an escaped prisoner. A part of her hoped for an empty cell, because that would mean she knew who to hunt; it would mean Leida was the adversary to best.
If Leida Miliu remains in the palace cells, then trouble has sprung from somewhere else.
