Page 14 of Immortal Longings
The woman’s next strike comes viciously, and Calla jolts, her lips thinning. There is hardly reason to be this intense so early in the games. To expend all this energy on the first fights.
“Disgusting,” the woman sneers. “All of you putting yourself into the games when you do not care to play. Taking up the space and keeping us from our—”
Calla spins fast and cuts her sword across the woman’s stomach. There comes a pause, a moment when the other player gasps and searches around, looking for a civilian body to jump into.
There is no one. It’s always this moment when viewers find the most entertainment during the games. That gasp of shock, an overly assured player being proved wrong. No player would register unless they thought they had some chance of winning, and no player would think they had a chance of winning unless they were good at jumping. Being skilled at jumping creates a certain type of person that San-Er knows well: someone who cuts corners, someone who deserves to be taken down a notch. And in the games, it happens over and over again. The viewers lean close to their screens; their hearts leap to their throats.
“Disgusting,” the woman says again, a whisper this time, and Calla grits her teeth. One more strike—it’s so easy. A line of red appears across the woman’s throat, and when Calla lowers her sword, the woman falls too, dead on the wet ground.
The alley is humming. The lightbulbs mounted to the walls flicker on andoff, attracting small flying bugs that gather around the noise. Calla uses her boot to nudge the dead body, rolling its wrist over.66flashes on the screen, one more number to add to the first day’s casualty count playing later tonight.
One of the alley bulbs shorts out. Calla peers into the water puddles and catches her own distorted reflection right then, hazed in red by the blood seeping from the woman’s wounds. For a second, she wonders if there is another opponent looming over her, and she startles, whirling around.
Nothing. Just a camera installed on the wall. Just Calla—long hair tangled around her neck, face and clothes splattered with blood, her surroundings contorting around her as the surface of the puddle catches irregular light.
She doesn’t look like herself. She’s never really looked like herself.
Calla Tuoleimi, princess of Er. She could do nothing on a throne, but she can do everything with a sword in her hand.
CHAPTER5
After midnight, when the twin cities drop into darkness proper, San-Er’s facade glows with the light of its apartments. The wall at the north of San rises high, but not high enough to completely shield the buildings at the city’s edge, each window emitting light and puffing with its attached air conditioner unit, abuzz, too, with the sound of running stoves and television sets glitching in the corner.
Despite the jumble, no building in the capital climbs higher than fourteen floors. Any more, and these meandering structures might pitch sideways from their own weight and fall over.
Calla’s apartment is one of the few that sits relatively quiet. Already squashed and smothered below all the other floors, it is the final door at the end of a long, smoky hall filled with gambling parlors. The incessant clicking of mahjong tiles garners an echo different from other noises, creeping in under her door when she least expects it. Sometimes when she’s nodding off on the couch, she’ll wakewith a start, convinced that the sound is someone coming to summon her for training, hard shoes gliding across the palace floor.
Her television is on mute. From the bedroom, Calla takes a drag on her cigarette, watching the smoke waft up and curl around the molding ceiling paint. Light streams in through her window, a kaleidoscope of neon that bleeds from different sources outside: red and gold through the brothel on the neighboring building’s third floor, deep blue through the cybercafe on the sixth floor, flashes of everything pulsating off the restaurants dotting the nearby vicinity. How strange it is that San-Er glows brighter at night than during the day. Daytime here is dreary darkness, the streets repellant against sunlight. Nothing but the barest gray gloom, illuminating very little on its own.
Calla lifts onto her elbow. Now laughter drifts through her closed window, assailing the inside of her bedroom. By some instinct, she peers through the glass right while a group of teenagers meander past, drunk and happy, talking over one another and paying no heed to their volume.
She settles back onto her sheets, smoothing down a wrinkle. Calla has forgotten what it’s like to laugh in a crowd, what it’s like to talk to people at all, save for Chami and Yilas. These five years have been spent in as much solitude as she can bear, keeping her head down and her mask on. She takes the barest necessities from her former attendants to keep herself alive, but can risk no other work, no other participation in the twin cities. After all, she has a task far above the usual day-to-day business of a regular civilian in San-Er.
Sometimes, though, she feels the weight of loneliness shift and settle inside her rib cage. Like cold tendrils curling softly around her insides. Not enough to hurt, not enough to draw protest from her. But enough to serve as an ever-constant reminder:Here I am, here I shall stay, you can never pull me away.
Calla clambers up from her bed, tapping ash off her cigarette and drawing a meow of protest from her cat for the disruption. When she walks into the small living room, Mao Mao leaps off the edge of the mattress and pads after her witha growl. She doesn’t bother with the overhead lights, so she navigates the living room by the glow of the television. Shadows draw long on every object nearby: the sword propped by the door, the oranges and bananas sitting upon the glass shelves built into a hollow in the wall. The moment Calla sits herself down in front of the bulky screen, the news program still on mute, Mao Mao curls around her ankles, preventing her from further movement.
Calla sighs, reaching down to scratch his furry head with her free hand. The longer the games go on, the less safe it’ll be to come home. She’s fine for the next few days while the players feel out a routine, but then the daily location pings will begin, and as they happen more and more often, it would be suicidal to be here when one goes off. Once another player knows where she lives, even if she escapes the first encounter, she can’t come back to get some rest without risking an ambush.
The clock turns to three in the morning. The reels don’t usually run through the night, but this is a special occasion. All the newscasters look enlivened as they switch cue cards, mouths moving much faster than their usual dull monotone. Calla leans forward again for the volume, turning it up just in time to hear “and Fifty-Seven, our leading player thus far.”
“I beg your pardon?” Calla says, exhaling smoke. She stops scratching, and Mao Mao butts his head into her palm to protest. His face and ears are a sensible dark gray while the rest of his fur is an off-white, always molting clumps around the apartment because he enjoys following her to be petted. She picked him off the streets as a kitten when she first went into hiding, a companion while she spent hours upon hours throwing knives at the wall, and years later, as a consequence, her cat has attachment issues.
“Yes, indeed,” the second newscaster says, as if he heard Calla’s exclamation.“With the opening event’s conclusion and the players dispersed throughout the cities, the palace has reported our first numbers. It is absolutely thrilling to see twenty-three total hits, with ten attributed to Fifty-Seven.”
Calla chokes on her next inhale, cigarette smoke rushing out from her nostrils.
“For fuck’s sake,” she coughs. “Good job, August.”
“It is absolutely thrilling to see twenty-three total hits, with ten attributed to Fifty-Seven.”
Though the night grows exceedingly late, there remains a flock of spectators outside a barbershop at the southern end of San, watching the outward-facing television screen. Anton no longer has access to the apartment with the fancy television—which, anyway, is shattered now, and would be even if he were still in that body—so he joins them, hovering at the periphery and smoothing his sleeve over his wristband.
The reels continue to play surveillance footage of the games. The palace guard tries its very best to regulate San-Er with these cameras, but they have one very fatal flaw: cameras can’t pick up the light of body-jumping. When the Crescent Societies are responsible for most of San-Er’s crime and their networks of people are the cities’ most persistent jumpers, it’s easy to understand why so many cases of trafficking and murder keep slipping under the palace’s radar.
Why the palace has never bothered to address this loophole is beyond Anton’s grasp. At the very least, the surveillance reels finally have their use during the games as a constant feed of the killing action. The television networks don’t need to put film crews on the ground when there are already cameras installed at every corner. Proper film crews might even cause the Palace of Union to bristle, if networks were to share footage of the games that hadn’t first crossed Leida’s inspection. The people aren’t ready for close-ups, in any case; they need those grainy high angles that render each player into a little avatar of themselves.That way, San-Er doesn’t have to see how far it has decayed. Slaughter as an accepted entertainment track. Slaughter as a shortcut to wealth.
Anton frowns, pushing closer to the barbershop screen. They’re replaying Fifty-Seven’s first kill inside the weapons shop. He dropped into the same one earlier, acquiring the crescent moon knives that now hide under his jacket. By the time he was there, the bloodstain he sees on screen was already long gone.
