Page 26 of Immortal Longings
He steps back, then somehow perfectly mimics Fifty-Seven’s sword maneuver—right down to the brief snap of his elbow before ducking to avoid the brunt of the imaginary blood spray. Anton blinks, shocked, but Felo’s attention has already been caught by something else, and he hurries off, skirting around the tables.
The Er massacre. At the time it happened, Anton had already washed his hands of San’s royal family. Exiled onto the streets with his birth body confiscated by the palace, he had heard the news from the television, same as everyone else. He still remembers the body he’d been invading at the time, a musician living in Er, his whole apartment going into lockdown when the broadcasters spoke of Princess Calla Tuoleimi going rogue, taking a sword to her parents and strewing their guts across the throne room. The footage, he has heard, is a cult hit among the Crescent Societies and their criminals. Most of them admire the princess.
Anton runs a new search in the browser. He never met the other city’s princess—always out of the palace by chance whenever there was a diplomatic visit from Er—though he knew August thought highly of her. He never sought out the footage after the incident either; the networks found it too inappropriateto show on the broadcasts. If they had played it—and only during the late-night segments when people were using their television screens for light against the heavy night—they would have censored it according to King Kasa’s wishes.
King Kasa, however, cannot control underground or virtual distribution. When the first frame fills the screen, Anton knows that this must be the uncensored version.
Because it’sbad.
Er’s throne room had been decorated with lavish details and gold trimmings. Creatures of legend lined the two thrones, a jade statue set between the chairs and silk curtains hanging directly behind. The footage is from a security camera placed in the uppermost corner of the throne room, so when the princess marches in, the angle makes her look impossibly fast, arm raised immediately, blade in hand.
One of the guards that had been standing out of frame rushes in. The princess moves rapidly, cutting through him and turning to face the three others. Anton pauses here. He clicks into Fifty-Seven’s footage again, rewinds and replays it, and Felo is absolutely right: the maneuver is near-identical. The way her arm arcs, the way her body moves.
Anton switches back to the Er massacre. As soon as the guards are down, the princess walks toward her parents. There are no more than two words exchanged. The king of Er holds his hands out, mouth open to say something. Calla isn’t listening. She has already lopped off his head, her blade striking clean.
Anton is not squeamish by any means, but he blanches nonetheless. It’s not the gore that he is bothered by. It’s the ease with which she made the cut. He might sound like a hypocrite when he was killing only some few hours ago… except those were strangers. Mere hurdles in his way toward victory. The princess of Er swings at her own parents with the very same indifference. As the footage continues, her mother’s head comes clean off too, landing by Calla’s feet. There hadn’t been any chance for the king and queen to consider jumpingin a last-ditch effort to escape. Calla had been sure to slaughter all the others in the room first.
The video is nearing its final few seconds. On-screen, Calla simply stands there, covered in blood, surveying the bodies on the floor, the walls dashed with red. For months after the incident, there were mutterings that perhaps the princess had been jumped and occupied, that it was an intruder who had committed the crime. But Kasa’s palace guard had chased Calla Tuoleimi out to the wall where she’d tried to flee, and the guard who’d fired the crossbow arrow that had landed between her eyes claimed that they’d undeniably been royal yellow. At the funeral—held separately from her parents’—Calla had been condemned as a treasonous renegade, not an innocent caught up in an invasion.
The footage cuts off. Slowly, Anton pulls up the other page, frozen on Fifty-Seven, putting it side by side with this still of Calla Tuoleimi. He zooms in on Fifty-Seven’s eyes, that feline stare. The color doesn’t show very well on grainy surveillance footage, but he remembers enough from their encounter to recall a flash of yellow.
If there was any doubt before, there is none now. Calla Tuoleimi is Number Fifty-Seven, and very much alive.
“Oh, Princess,” he says. “We’re about to make something very interesting of the games.”
CHAPTER8
There are reports of trouble in Eigi, the nearest province outside San’s wall, and so August is sent out with ten palace guards to run reconnaissance. The councilmember who oversees this territory—who holds rank over the two or three generals commanding the battalion of soldiers in each province—has neither reported to the palace nor answered communication in twenty-four hours. Ever since the Makusa family was massacred by a guerrilla group in Kelitu Province years ago, any silence from councilmembers is to be taken seriously. And since King Kasa won’t leave the palace, it’s up to August to be his eyes and ears.
They already hit one bump in the road before they could leave San-Er. A film crew tried following them past the wall when the guards were raising the gates, sticking too close to the royal procession for comfort. The lesser television networks always grow desperate during the games. Without contacts in the palace, they can’t get good surveillance footage fast enough; then without new and interesting observations about the reels, no one wants to watch theirprogramming. They begin entertaining bizarre ideas like producing documentaries about rural Talin, thinking it’ll somehow boost their viewership by showing something entirely outside the games. Leida was forced to shoo the crew away, warning that another infraction near the wall would be met with legal consequences. Casual travel in and out of San-Er is, after all, forbidden. Once someone becomes a citizen of the twin cities by birth or by lottery, there they remain, unless they are granted a formal departure permit. King Kasa is too afraid of what might happen if people are allowed free travel. Frequent movement on the border could allow rural occupants to slip into San-Er illegally, and San-Er cannot possibly strain its resources to care for illegal city residents.
Even though it was San-Er’s throne that swallowed them and their lands into the kingdom’s borders in the first place. Even though San-Er can put its citizen taxes on them just fine.
August breathes deep, taking in the fresh air as they travel through Eigi Province. His riding skills are terribly neglected, as are the city horses. They’re seldom taken out for exercise, housed in small stables along the wall for the rare occasion that San-Er’s forces need to leave the perimeter. When he is king, he will care for them. He will pave glorious roads throughout the provinces, funnel money outward to advance infrastructure. They will build transport, too, to get around—every type of advanced vehicle that the provinces currently use in prototypical form—and civilians inside the wall will come and go as they please, with the whole kingdom available to their every whim.
People will be happy. No one will say otherwise.
“Look at this.” King Kasa was watching the reels this morning. Hands clasped behind his back, letting the servants tailor his collar while he stood before a screen that stretched to take up half the entertainment hall. There’s something about the decoration in Kasa’s wing of the palace that has always bothered August, and last year, he finally figured out why. Kasa persistently installs new technology without first getting rid of what lies underneath. Television screenshang side by side with wood carvings; speakers jut out from expensive bamboo screens that aren’t produced anymore because their construction requires raw materials from Gaiyu Province. The other wings in the Palace of Union have modernized with the decades, have taken down most of their scroll paintings in favor of wires. Kasa’s personal quarters have not.
“What am I looking at?” August replied politely. He had only entered the entertainment hall to receive his task. Even with time of the essence out in Eigi, King Kasa had not dismissed him immediately. He kept his adopted son waiting so he could point at the screen, showing a woman sinking to her knees as she screamed at someone out of the camera’s view.
“What a pitiful sight,” Kasa remarked. “She really ought to get up.”
As if hearing his command, the woman on the screen hurried back onto her feet with renewed energy. Her wristband flashed on her arm. She disappeared from view just as another player entered the camera’s frame, grinning like a maniac.
“They seem to be enjoying themselves,” August said dryly.
King Kasa nodded in agreement. “Of course they are,” he said. “I offer them more than they could dare imagine possessing. I am this kingdom’s greatest benefactor.”
Eigi stretches wide in front of August now, endless fields and open grounds sprawling until they hit the horizon. King Kasa tells the truth: heisthe greatest benefactor of this kingdom. It is not the vast holdings in the royal vault that matter most, but the continued generation of such wealth, and who is the one holding this all together, clutching onto these provinces so that everything funnels in the direction of the palace? The games, at their core, are Kasa’s way of telling his subjects to know their place. No matter what, everything in Talin flows back to him. There is nothing that can compete with his wealth, but stay in line, and he might just break off a piece and offer it generously. A gift; a consolation prize.
August tugs on his horse’s reins, pulling their procession to a stop.
A stout building comes into view. They have arrived.
He waves at the guards to stop beating on the palace drums, eyeing the province’s capital yamen. For people coming out of San-Er, the building is a sight that takes some getting used to. It serves as the administrative entrance into the village, rising one mere story with a wide roof that curls up at the edges to prevent rain from collecting. One entranceway opens into the courtyard, where all four sides are surrounded by the yamen, and beyond that, another exit at the back leads into the village. Some of the temples in San-Er still look like this, but they’re buried in the shadows of the high-rises around them, washing out the rustic stone walls and intricate wooden detailing.
Keeping his distance, August climbs off his horse, then passes the reins to Galipei. Leida, meanwhile, maneuvers her horse from the back of the guard, approaching August’s side.
