Page 16 of Immortal Longings
“Excuseme,” Galipei protests.
They ignore him. August ties the blindfold over his forehead, fixing it just loose enough to fall into the body’s eyes after he gets the last glimpse he needs to trigger the jump. When he opens his eyes from his own body, Galipei is already reaching for the one he vacated, a rapid grip around their neck to knock them out before they can grow fully conscious again. In a quick swoop, he throws thebody over his shoulder, then takes the stranger from the study and out of the palace without being asked.
“Did something happen?” August asks when only Leida remains. He rises from the chair, working out the crooks and knots in his birth body. Now his shoes are clean, polished with wax and nary a speck of dust on them. His footsteps echo while he walks a slow circle of the room, trailing his finger over the desk and bookshelves. There is space—more space than necessary—up here, in the tallest turret of the palace.
“We picked up all the casualties.” Leida puts her hands in her pockets, rustling her black nylon coat. She dresses in dark colors to blend in with San-Er, as does the rest of the guard, but contrary to the very purpose of dressing for concealment, Leida Miliu also wears dark-blue glitter around her dark-blue eyes regardless of which body she is in. When they were sixteen, August very narrowly escaped being her experiment because Leida had noticed his eyes carried that ring of blue in them and wanted to see whether glitter would bring out the color more.
Since her mother passed away last year and she was promoted, Leida no longer has time for the nonsense of tricking August into putting glitter on his eyes. Neither does August, really, but he has never had the time. Leida merely possesses the magnetic pull to demand anything she wants, even if her closest schoolmate was also the crown prince of San. She’s only twenty-one years old, the same age as August, but given their peers used to joke that Leida Miliu came out of the womb giving orders, it’s easy to see how the palace guards fell in line before her without the slightest muttering of dissent. Other units outside of San-Er are led by generals, slow-moving armies dispersed across Talin to maintain peace. San-Er’s streets and buildings are not suited for large formations and order. They suit quick thinking and dirty tricks, and Leida has plenty of both. The palace guard runs entirely under her command, dispersed in little groups and reporting back to her a whole image of San-Er to piece together how the twin cities fare.
The cities are not thriving. But that’s less Leida’s fault and more the all-powerful incompetence that sits on the throne.
“Did you hear the report we gave out? Twenty-three hits since midnight.”
August perches on the side of his desk, hands braced to either side of him. Galipei returns too, but instead of coming into the study again, he hovers at the circular doorway, picking at the whorls carved into the wood there.
“You phrased that as if we gave false information,” August says plainly. “Did we?”
“No,” Leida answers. “Twenty-three eliminations is correct.” She pauses. “But if you paid attention to the count that the newscasters gave, only twenty-one were attributed to the players. You think anyone will notice the math?”
“Did they leave the games voluntarily?” Galipei asks from the doorway.
Leida reaches into her coat. She brings out a set of photographs, and though it was Galipei who made the suggestion, she doesn’t spare him a glance, continuing to address only August.
“We can hope that the rest of San-Er assumes so, but we found the two other bodies. Both happened out of sight from any camera. Yaisu sickness.”
August frowns. He gestures for the photographs.The yaisu sickness.Jumping, at the end of the day, is still a dangerous matter. Fail too many attempts to invade another body, and your own will start to burn from the inside out, unable to handle the barrage of exit and re-entry each time you’re kicked back. He hasn’t heard of a case in so long. Not since Otta. There have been other instances, surely, but no one is bringing them to the palace’s attention when jumping is forbidden in the first place. They merely take the loss. If his palace-raised half sister couldn’t be saved, there’s little chance that anyone else in San-Er can survive the burning once it starts.
“Murder?” Galipei suggests, his voice booming from the door again. “The yaisu sickness can be brought on by another culprit.”
If the murderer moves fast enough. In and out and in and out, using differentbodies nearby to make landings but returning into the same victim. Then the body burns up, trapping the original occupant’s qi and condemning them to death.
Leida finally turns to face Galipei, mouth pinched. “Murder, yes,” she says. “But…”
“But why do the bodies look like this?” August says, finishing her thought. He crooks a single finger at his bodyguard, and Galipei bounds in quickly. When Galipei comes to his side to peer at the photographs too, his silver eyes widen, swallowing the light in the room.
“This is—”
“The Sican salute,” Leida confirms. “Which is incomprehensible. How could Sicans have gotten into San-Er?”
Both elbows outward, fingers pressed together and thumbs cast straight to make a triangular shape. Flip open any textbook about Talin’s war with Sica, and the Sican salute is the first image to be printed as an introduction: the proud gesture of a conquering, warmongering nation. Except here, it’s awkward and stiff on both bodies, because their arms were certainly forced into the salute after death. The first photograph shows a burned corpse at the back of a shop. The walls stand sparse and bare, but the floors are littered with aluminum foil, blackened with the stains of heroin vapor. Depending on their priorities, some players will take their coins to these sorts of places first, pump themselves as high as the clouds before going to gather weaponry.
The second photograph is a similar scene. A burned corpse at… a factory, August guesses. There are machine pieces scattered near the body, misshapen springs and broken levers that were likely shoved into a back room as the quickest method of discarding unwanted objects.
“Even if they made it past the city wall,” August muses, “how did they get an identity number?”
Leida stays silent. Galipei’s frown deepens. Since their war with Sica, Talin’s regulations have stayed the same. No identity number, no entry into San-Er.The only reason why San-Er has a wall surrounding it in the first place is because it was the last stronghold before Talin finally won the war. The twin cities, located in the kingdom’s southeast like a little tail, were the nation’s last salvation at a time of need and their enemies’ defeat, now the beating heart of Talin even while situated at its very, very corner. There used to be other cities inland, but they never recovered from being turned into battlegrounds, their deterioration exacerbated by heavy casualties and negligent bureaucrats. As time went on, it became easier for the countryside to migrate to the new capital rather than rebuild and tend to its problems; while San-Er advanced and built new factories, invented new technology and installed better signal towers, the rest of the provinces seemed to move backward, unable to put a plug in their drain of labor. Too many councilmembers have already complained about the ghost cities in their assigned provinces, a waste when those buildings could be torn down and the land used as farm plots more suited for the rural skill sets that remain prevalent past the wall of San-Er.
Despite the palace’s preparedness for war, Sica has not posed a problem since its defeat. The border holds steady, cutting a line down the middle of the near-uninhabitable borderlands between the two nations. Talin minds its own, with most of its conquest energy on its rural provinces; Sica started expanding in the other direction, nursing its wounds after wasting so many resources failing to invade Talin.
If these deaths are truly a message from Sica, it is hard to imagine what could have prompted such a change in the air.
“Either way,” Leida says suddenly, taking the photographs from August and gathering them up in her hands, “I’ll keep an eye on the situation. Someone or other will report to the king once we’ve gauged the foreign threat—”
A series of drums play through the palace wing. August, Leida, and Galipei all freeze, running an immediate sweep of their eyes through the study, making the quickest catalog of what is currently out in the open. With that herald, acommotion of activity follows before two royal guards push through into the study, yelling an all-clear.
King Kasa follows closely.
August breathes out. He levels his expression: pleasant, jovial, always at the ready to accommodate his king.
