Page 11 of Immortal Longings
Just as he is taking in the last of his glass, he feels fingers glide along his shoulder.
Anton freezes. He turns around in the darkness of the bar, squinting into the smudges of color and grayscale blurs.
“Buy me a drink?” the woman asks. She has a red mask strapped over her face, but that’s more fabric than she’s wearing anywhere else.
“Maybe another time.” Anton sets down his glass, then points to the corner of the bar where a raucous group has been increasing in volume. “I think they might be interested.”
Graciously, the woman inclines her head and backs away. The other prostitutes by the door watch the exchange and mark Anton off as a potential customer.He has stayed long enough, gotten his degeneracy out of his system. For the next few weeks or months or however long the games go on, he’ll have to be on guard at every moment. He’s already pulling his jacket tight and undoing his wristband, eyes scouring the bodies he passes on his way out.
A drink spills on the floor in front of him. Anton skirts around the puddle smoothly, grimacing at the teetering man who spilled it. His moral compass is on the more delicate side compared to others with similar abilities in the twin cities, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping around frivolously. In Talin, people are not attached to their bodies. Or rather, bodies are merely another asset to take ownership of—to rob, to borrow, to care for, like apartments and clothes.
Anton rams into one of the prostitutes at the door, pretending to stumble. As soon as the prostitute holds his arms out in aid, Anton pushes his wristband into his waiting hands, then jumps. Light flashes through the bar, drawing a few nearby cries, but Anton is already leaving through the front, closing his new fingers around his wristband and wiping a slight sheen off his forehead. When he steps into the night, he looks like any other man strolling the city before the games begin.
The palace has always declared jumping illegal. But having the gene is like being given a sense of taste: people couldn’t be expected not to seek good food. Those who are caught jumping are fined and imprisoned, but that doesn’t stop the thousands who do it every year. Those who commit crimes in other bodies—or claim that they had been taken over before a crime—end up in legal spirals that go on for so long the jury eventually gives up trying to pinpoint the true culprit and shoves every slightly guilty party into a cell for a year or two to answer for the technicality.
San-Er is defined by its mess, by its confusions and its blur of people meshing and tangling with one another. A birth body is not one’s own. Bodies can be shed, removed from the self. Bodies belong to everyone but the one who was birthed into it, though if you’re powerful, you might have a greater say on how long you can hold on to it.
Anton hasn’t had contact with his birth body since his exile, but it matters little to him. Every miserable event, every bit of trauma that San-Er gifts him, comes through his memory, stays with him because of his memory. What good is attachment to one body?
As the alleyway narrows, Anton takes the next turn onto a wider route, heading in the direction of the coliseum. His head is clear now, thoughts flying at a thousand miles per hour. There’s a pulsation underneath his feet, thethump-thump-thumpof San’s heartbeat thrumming just under the narrow, crumbling sidewalks and the muddy unpaved alleys. At the coliseum, the players will show up in various appearances because they know the body they enter with won’t last long if they want to play to their best advantage. When he bites down on the inside of his cheeks, he doesn’t realize how sharp his teeth are, and it almost cuts through before he tastes the first hint of blood and eases his jaw. He checks his wristband. The countdown is approaching five minutes.
The city’s pulsating has grown louder. Accompanying the stomps of its spectators, who trickle through its sinuous routes and flood into its central blot, to the coliseum, standing tall beside the palace. Though there are no boundaries or ropes for spectators around the sides, they mingle a good distance away from the center, making it immediately clear who is a player and who is not.
Better for the audience to keep their distance than get accidentally impaled. This way, they can also pretend that everything is just a show, forgetting that the players entering the coliseum are readying to tear each other apart.
Anton’s gaze shifts up once he makes his way to the center, observing one of the palace balconies at the south of the coliseum. The throne room. Prince August is up there somewhere, his eye on the games. Anton can feel it. It’s hard to say whether his former best friend has discerned his participation, but once the players are drawn, there is no taking it back. He wouldn’t put it past August to try nonetheless. In those years they had together in the palace, there was nothing Prince August was unwilling to do, so long as it would achieve hisgoals. He was at once Anton’s best friend and biggest fear, the one he trusted most and could never let his guard down around. When he spent time with August, he never knew if he would get the sensible student who wanted some help with his history homework or the cold, calculating boy who once poured acid on Anton’s hand because they needed to be near the infirmary while a councilmember was sick too.
“What’s wrong with you?” Anton remembers hissing. His birth body would bear the scar for months afterward. “Why would you do that to me?”
“It’s for a greater purpose,” August replied plainly, with no room for argument. “I have to get into King Kasa’s good graces. Or we can forget about our plan to leave.”
“Hey! That’s my spot!”
At the angry shout, Anton flinches back into the present, his unfamiliar body rippling with tension. He turns, then releases a quick breath, finding that the voice was directed not at him, but at another player standing in the distance. Sound carries well in the coliseum, placing the argument closer than it was. One of the arguing players shoves the other, and though they are far enough that Anton cannot make out their features under the coliseum’s golden lights, their yelling echoes cleanly.
“Do you own the land now? Go stand elsewhere.”
“I—”
The player raises his arm. The spectators near the entrance freeze, preparing to witness a premature fight, but then three other players nearby shout in warning, and the two separate from one another with vicious glares, finding their own spots in the arena to stand. When the Daqun starts, there is nothing that says the players need to hurt each other. But it’s the opening event, the first moment when the killing can begin, and if there can be only one victor, who would lose the opportunity to take out their competitors at the earliest possible convenience?
Anton looks down. His wristband starts to flash the seconds of the final minute. He expected to feel more: to be nervous, delirious, frantic. Instead, a deadly calm settles over him, floods his fingertips and turns his lips cold. The purpose of the Daqun is to distribute chips for their wristbands, assigning a number to each of the eighty-eight. It’s the easiest way to log who is killing who, to report on players in the reels without having to remember names and identities and histories.Number Fourteen leads the charts today with expert axe-throwing,the reels might croon, orNumber Thirty-Two is especially one to watch with their performance in the bloodbath. The surveillance cameras see everything, and even if the footage quality is piss-poor, the tapes are available upon request for the television networks, so long as Leida Miliu has cleared them in the palace security room first. Every channel scrambles to air their report, working their producers to the bone while splicing together a unique tale out of the extensive raw footage they get from the palace every night. It’s an annual show that the residents of San-Er will always watch, a show that the players will make grand by ensuring their kills are in view of a camera.
We are wretched,Anton thinks. But there is nothing to be done.
Another argument starts up to his left. This time, when Anton turns toward the noise, he finds too many standing in the general direction to even decipher where the voices are coming from, save that it’s wafting into the darkness. He starts to count. Runs a quick perusal of the groups near and far. When there are three seconds left on his wristband, there’s not enough time to do another count, but he doesn’t think he was mistaken either.
Eighty-seven players, including himself.
Who would be stupid enough to skip out on the first event? Failing to secure a chip means immediate disqualification.
His wristband trembles. From the palace, the guards make their appearance on the throne room balcony. In unison, they toss down the bags in their arms, letting the eighty-eight identically colored beige sacks drop like deadweights on the coliseum ground.
And everything around him turns to mayhem.
The players rush for the bags. Reckless and uncaring and coming from every which direction, filling the spaces they can and shoving where they cannot. The only point of stillness is Anton.
He doesn’t move. He watches.
