Page 3 of Immortal Longings
“Oh, cousin,” August says to the photograph. “You can hide no longer.”
Princess Calla Tuoleimi, found at last.
CHAPTER2
A droplet of water leaks from the ceiling. Then another. Calla Tuoleimi shoots a glare up, but it does nothing to stop the dripping on her neck. She can only shuffle an inch to the left, pressing closer to the dusty wall.
“What the fuck is taking so long?” Calla mutters under her breath.
She lingers at the bottom of her building’s stairwell, guarding the entranceway into the hall while her fingers weave three pieces of flax lily into a bracelet. Her apartment is at the other end of a long, winding corridor: a dingy ground-floor setup with cramped rooms and targets for crossbow practice plastered on the doors. Most days, she would hate to be outside of it, in these halls and stairwells where orphan children and homeless squatters sit in the corners to beg or yell nonsense. There’s no reason for anyone else to be hovering out here unless there is business to intercept at the entrance. Calla kicks her boot at a rock in the corner, dropping into a crouch.
Today, there is business to intercept. Everyone gets lost trying to find herapartment otherwise. And so she waits, weaving her bracelet to keep busy. Only a single light fixture mounted on the wall illuminates the muted afternoon, its flickering bulb set to go out at any moment. The electric grid is always past its capacity. Residents steal from the various lines and boxes, just as they steal water, attaching their homemade pipes wherever there is a pump belowground. San persistently smells of rot and theft—of muddy puddles stuffed with discarded trash bags, plastic water tubs discarded in the alleys for vagrants to leave their waste in. Lower floors will always feel the worst of it. Higher apartments that inch above the city skyline will, at the right time of the day, get a small fresh breeze floating in from the sea.
To suffer in San-Er is not a punishment, only a way of life. Any murmur from its inhabitants enmeshes immediately with the hum of its factories. The cities are perpetually covered with a blanket of noise, nothing in particular to be heard but nothing that can be drowned out.
Calla pauses her weaving, jerking her head up when she hears footsteps coming. There are plenty of other entrances into the building, either from the rooftop or from neighboring complexes that have bulldozed their exterior walls to share a more convenient corridor on certain floors. But the runners they send from the palace never know how to navigate these streets well: this cesspool of obscenities in the guise of a city, this living, breathing, heaving half of San-Er. They will walk the ground route, squinting at the faint markings outside the main doors of each apartment block before squeezing into the alleys and forging deeper. Eighty-eight packages are set to disperse across the twin cities today, carrying eighty-eight wristbands. One of them for Calla, even if that isn’t what’s on the official registry.
“What are you making?”
A kid pops his head out from underneath the stairs, and Calla glances over, her nose wrinkling. He’s covered in muck, trousers flaking with brown clumps. As he toddles closer, the approaching footsteps finally come throughthe doorway. Calla squints in the hazy light. Too old. Too many grocery bundles trailing after them. Not a messenger. She leans aside and lets them pass to get to their apartment on the ground floor.
“Don’t you know?” She peers at the kid again. “If you mind other people’s business too much, a god will rush into your nose and take your body.”
The kid frowns. “Who said?”
“You don’t believe me?” Calla asks, finishing the bracelet. “Out in the provinces, they’re so afraid of the gods that they won’t even look at each other. Ask one question that’s out of place, and it might be enough for a sneaky god to rush in and snuff out your qi.”
She ties a nice little bow onto the end of her bracelet. Weaving flax lily—or even keeping a flax lily plant—is a habit of rural children out in the provinces too. Her bracelet-making stands starkly incongruous with the rest of her cultivated appearance: the blunt-cut bangs falling into her eyes, the black curtain of hair growing to her waist, the black mask strapped across the lower half of her face, muffling her voice.
Princess Calla Tuoleimi looks vastly different these days, but she’s still wearing the same body, which is unexpected when she has wide pickings for an easy swap. She’s thinner without the rich palace meals—her face sharper, almost gaunt. She lost her round cheeks after that first month in hiding, and scared herself each time she glanced into the mirror with how much meaner she appeared. Then she figured she might as well embrace her new fugitive appearance and grabbed a pair of scissors to shear straight bangs across her forehead,justslightly too long, to obscure her eyes. She never trims them now until it’s an absolute menace to see. There’s always the possibility that someone will recognize her. A low chance, given how little attention people pay to faces in a city where faces are always changing, but a chance nonetheless.
If the palace is to be believed, of course, Calla is dead. They caught her scaling the wall in an attempt to escape that night and dispensed justice, and San-Ercan rest easy knowing no murderer princess hides in its streets. Certain members of the Crescent Societies have argued the contrary—they ask why a different dead body was brought back for Calla’s funeral ceremony, why King Kasa is still so afraid to leave his palace. But the Crescent Societies have always questioned how the Palace of Union runs its kingdom, and they are but a small majority.
The kid harrumphs. “You’re not very nice.”
“Did I look nice to begin with?” Calla kicks her boot again, nudging another stone across the gritty floor. In the past hour, most of the building’s residents have walked right past her without eye contact, catching a flash of her appearance in their periphery and deciding they would prefer not to get robbed. “Your parents ought to scold you for talking to strangers.”
“My parents are dead.”
His words are spoken dully. No fluctuation in tone, no twinge of emotion.
Calla sighs. She holds her arm out, offering the kid the bracelet she’s just completed, along with a coin from her coat pocket. “Here. A gift. Maybe Iamnice, after all.”
The kid scampers forward and takes the bracelet and coin. As soon as his hand closes over the money, he turns and hurries out of the building door with a gleeful shriek, prepared to spend it at some shop stall or cybercafe. In his absence, there’s another set of footsteps outside, approaching from the far end of the alley. These are softer, lighter.
By some instinct, Calla hurries forward, leaning through the doorway to look. Just as she sticks her head out, a boy appears before her, coming to a halt with a package clutched in his arms. He’s tall, but no more than fifteen years old. The palace, hoping to prevent runners being jumped and their valuable devices stolen for the black market, will always send teenagers because they’re difficult to invade before reaching full maturity. But sending youth is hardly a foolproof plan when any dedicated thief could simply pull a knife on them and call it a day. No one ever said the palace was smart.
“Hello,” the runner says.
Calla grins. Her entire face shifts in that moment, her pencil-lined eyes crinkling into something predatory. She’s long learned that the harder she smiles, the easier it is to prevent scrutiny of her identity. The expression doesn’t have to carry any genuine warmth; it doesn’t even have to look happy. So long as it swallows up the yellow of her eyes, aglow like an overcharged lightbulb. There are enough shades of yellow scattered throughout San-Er to make the sight commonplace on an offhanded glance, but there is only one other person with an utterly identical hue to hers, and it is the king. For three generations, royal yellow has been the defining hereditary mark of the Shenzhis in San and the Tuoleimis in Er, tinted dark by a ring of burnt umber unfurling from the center. But now Kasa has an adopted son, August, and there’s no one left of Calla’s bloodline—not since her parents perished and the throne of Er crumbled.
“You’re a darling.” Calla holds her hand out for the package. “Apartment 117, building 3, north side?”
The boy looks down, reading the small print written on the outside of the packaging.
“What do you know?” he says. “That’s exactly right. Here you are.”
He offers the package. His arms extend, not quite closing the distance between them. The alley is as gray as any other day, but when Calla reaches for the package, her attention settles on the boy’s face, trying to pick out details in the gloom. It’s strange that he wouldn’t look directly at her. That he’s staring at his shoes instead.
