Page 4 of Immortal Longings
Calla’s fingers skim right past the package and clamp onto his wrist.
The boy’s gaze jerks up. Though the light is terrible, it’s enough for his eyes to flash, for her to catch the silver of steel.
In San-Er, there’s another term for such eyes. Next to royal yellow, the second-most infamous hue is Weisanna silver.
Calla slams the package from his hands at once. It splashes into a nearby puddle. Before the boy can think to react, she has already shoved him hard enough to topple to the ground, the flat of her boot stamped on his chest and pinning him down.
“Who the hell are you?” Calla spits. This is not a teenage boy. This is a member of the Weisanna family, the only bloodline in the city—perhaps the whole kingdom—with their birth bodies inaccessible to all intruders.
“Me?” the boy—the Weisanna—wheezes. “Princess Calla, perhaps you should worry about yourself.”
Calla freezes. Her breath snags in her throat, turning her lungs as cold as ice.
She’s been caught. Someone knows.
“You better speak right now,” she demands. “Before I—”
Her fist is already scrunched, fingers clenched so hard that her knuckles scream in pain against the rough fabric of her gloves. Then a woman appears at the end of the alley and startles at the scene before her, shifting her shopping basket from one arm to another.
“What is going on—”
“Don’t!” Calla screams, holding her arm out.
It’s too late. The woman has stepped just close enough, and a flash of light brightens the dark day, beaming from the boy to the woman. Before Calla can clear her vision, blinking hard to rid the imprint burned into her retinas, the woman is already darting into the building and up the stairs, her shopping basket abandoned. Of all times for a do-gooder to appear, it justhadto be then.
“What happened?” the real runner asks from the floor. He blinks, his eyes magenta now.
Where other bodies are only impenetrable when they’re already invaded, the Weisannas are born as if they are doubled, though they have but one set of qi. While they can occupy others with ease, others cannot occupy them back,even if a Weisanna abandons their birth body entirely and leaves their vessel in stasis on the ground. The Weisannas make up the entirety of the royal guard and a good portion of the palace guard; that sort of protection has kept the royal family of San on the throne with ease, scaring off security threats before they can emerge.
Calla mutters a curse, scooping up the fallen package. “Buy more protective charms. You just got invaded,” she spits at the runner. Then she’s hurtling up the stairs too, catching the briefest flash of the Weisanna before they’ve disappeared down the second-floor corridor into a neighboring building. San is almost entirely interconnected by links and passageways, by walls that were once outward-facing but are now mere dividers between building spaces. When Calla pauses at an intersection, she spots the Weisanna again through one of the pointless windows scattered about every floor. Those windows are the only hint that there was once space between the buildings of the city, before they started to meld with one another.
“Hey!” Calla roars.
The Weisanna keeps running, and Calla gives chase, storming into a different floor of the building with the heavy thump of her boots. There are crowds here. Too many people perusing the shops, gathered to inspect meats hanging from the butchers. Calla presses closer to the shop fronts, hoping to move along the edges, but then she walks right into a discarded pile of hair outside the barber’s and nearly falls over. With tremendous disgust, Calla can only merge back into the center again, muttering a curse when she ducks to avoid being thwacked by a couple carrying a bulky personal computer for repair.
It would be so much faster if she jumps, but Calla does not—she will not. She merely keeps her steady pace, the damp package still clutched in her elbow, her eyes pinned on her target. It’s almost as if the Weisanna is toying with her. Every time she thinks she has lost the trail, mixed in with one too many shoppersor pushed behind a group of construction workers hauling giant planks between them, she catches a flash again—just enough to follow up a set of stairs or along another passageway. Her surroundings flip between commercial and residential, the cool stone walls on either side of her growing wide to accommodate the stores or shrinking close to hold more space for apartments. Up and up and up, she climbs too, until suddenly the Weisanna is in sight, and Calla lunges for the absurdly vertical set of stairs, taking three at a time with each stride and smashing through the door at the end.
The natural sunlight almost blinds her. Its rays are weak, but they’re a shock to adjust to nonetheless, and Calla throws a frantic hand over her face, fighting the wave of nausea before she spots her mark standing at the edge of the rooftop.
“You—”
She clamps a hand over their shoulder and spins them around, but it is no longer the Weisanna. The woman blinks, her eyes a faded red and muddled with confusion.Damn.The Weisanna jumped again without her notice. At some point in the pursuit, they set their sights on a new body and transferred over.
“What am I doing here?” the woman asks, her voice hitching.
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” Calla replies without sympathy. She points a finger to the door back into the building. “Go on.”
For the briefest moment, the woman scans Calla up and down, trying to place the half of her face left uncovered. When that fails, she tears her gaze away and hurries off, not needing to be warned twice. The door to the rooftop slams shut, its echo loud.
Calla rips her mask from her face, heaving in a gulp of air.
Princess Calla, perhaps you should worry about yourself.
Calla emits a loud scream. The pigeons that were perched on a nearby television antenna fly away in fright. If King Kasa has found her, then she’s dead. Forget the games. Forget justice. They’ll have the Weisannas drag her into a room and put her neck under a blade.
One lone remaining pigeon coos, sounding disgruntled at Calla when she kicks the debris littered across the rooftop. It’s filthy here, the premises used as a playground for children in the daylight hours and a hideout for drug addicts by nightfall. Discarded water kettles and half-broken ceramic toilet bowls decorate the middle like centerpieces; wooden construction slats and plastic chair legs scatter outward as the side arrangements. Calla drops into a crouch, but then her legs complain with exhaustion and she simply sits down, bothered more by her mood than whatever dirt will cling to her pants. Like half the city, she steals her water anyway: she’ll turn the taps on later and soak her pants in the sink until they’re clean, or until the pipelines in the hall shake a little too vigorously and the neighbors start to get suspicious.
For a long minute, she sits there fuming, her teeth gritted and her fists tight around the package. Then she curses under her breath and rips open a corner, shaking the plastic hard until a wristband falls out. The runner had been jumped by a Weisanna, but he really did come from the palace. So how many people know? Why give her access to the games?
