Page 5 of Immortal Longings
The wristband snaps easily onto her arm, its magnetic buckle pulling the two straps into place. Calla extends her arm, bracing for the loud beep that comes as soon as the screen turns on. After a minute of gray on the screen display, the wristband buzzes, and the gray gives way to a blinking cursor against a blue light, the numbers 1 to 9 appearing at the bottom.
“How did we get here?” Calla mutters to herself. “Playing in the games like a starving street urchin.”
It’s almost unfair. Other players in the games have not come of age surrounded by palace tactics and weaponry drills. They have not trained relentlessly for five years hiding in a small apartment, all to make a perfect killing strike. Fighting them will be like snuffing out insects. Fighting them is beyond the point. It’s the ultimate goal that her eyes are on: victory, and the person she will have access to when she is greeted as the winner of the games.
King Kasa, inside San’s palace. In these last five years, he has not left its grounds once. And if he will not come out for Calla to make her kill, then she will be welcomed in by his own hand.
She runs her finger along the top of the wristband. There’s an empty slot at the side for a chip, but those are distributed when the games begin. As soon as they’re inserted, the chips cannot be removed, and as far as San-Er is concerned, their removal is the most boring way to face elimination. Pluck the chip out or fail to check in every twenty-four hours—at least it’s a good method of withdrawal without losing your life.
Calla finds the buttons at last, though they are stubborn and difficult to trigger. The left one moves a yellow box around the numbers, and the one on the right makes a selection. Calla has watched enough of the games’ reels and observed the televised surveillance footage across the city to know that it is asking for her identity number, unique to every citizen in San-Er. Instead of locks and keys, the doors in San-Er open to identity numbers; instead of passwords, banks in San-Er are accessed with those same identity numbers. In a place where bodies can be taken over in the blink of an eye, it is easy to look like someone else, yet impossible to live long under a falsity. Nothing can stop Calla from jamming herself into the body of a rich councilmember, but the second she tries to get into his home, she is caught. The second someone looks at her and sees a different eye color, the jig is up.
Besides, long-term occupation of a doubled body is risky. If the invader has weaker qi and isn’t initially forced out by the vessel’s original occupant fighting back, it’s only a matter of time before things go wrong. Hallucinations, hearing voices, seeing ghosts. Memories melding together—two people merging into one. An ordinary civilian with the jumping gene would never hover long in someone else’s body in case they’re caught, but also because they don’t know whether that body will be their very death. It takes a superbly confident person to believe they’re too strong to be dragged down by anyone. And while Callaisdevastatingly confident, she hardly wants to test the theory out.
The wristband chimes again, finally accepting her number. It’s not her true number but, nonetheless, it is accepted. The screen flashes. Once. Twice. Three times.
12:00:02
12:00:01
12:00:00
Calla picks herself up, kicking the discarded package wrapping into the rest of the debris. She needs a shower. Might as well get clean before she walks right into a bloodbath.
Elsewhere in San-Er, Anton Makusa finally gets his wristband. It’s his own fault that he ended up chasing runners high and low through the twin cities, but he’s unjustifiably disgruntled anyway. They had found their way to the residence registered under his identity number, but his apartment in San is small and cramped and loud with the bass of the music from the brothel three floors down, so he’s rarely there. Those streets always reek with an unshakable stench, too close to the polluted Rubi Waterway that separates San and Er.
Anton kicks the door closed, releasing a breath and hitting the remote on the mantel at the same time. In the corner, the television flickers on and the walls start to hum. Safety at last, away from the palace runners, before they realize that this body is not his own. It’s rather illegal to be hijacking young bankers and keeping them from their jobs for days on end. Sooner or later, someone at the bank will suspect a takeover situation and the palace guards will be knocking down the door of this luxury apartment in Er.
But by then, Anton will be gone.
“Please, please, hold your applause,” he declares to the empty apartment. “I cannot handle so much adoration all at once.”
His voice echoes. The living room before him is three times the size of his real residence, and even fitted with a balcony to the side. It’s one of the largest living spaces in the entirety of the twin cities, which Anton knows because he’s done his research—he scoured what was available of San-Er’s architectural blueprints in the brief stint where he considered robbing the rich. That didn’t last long; he doesn’t have it in him to negotiate on the black market after he swipes valuables. Now he just mooches around, flitting across San-Er. When he wins the games, he can have something like this too. When he wins the games, there’ll be no more lurking around corners and chasing after runners to get a measly little package.
Anton pushes the balcony doors open. The heat outside is palpable despite the rapidly falling dusk. It itches at his skin, dampening his desire for enjoyment. He wants to breathe in from the very top of San-Er, pretend that this is all his, but if it were that easy to fool himself, then Anton would be long dead from sheer stupidity.
“Bow before me,” he calls out into the open. His voice tapers off, the charade losing amusement. It is hard to imagine an adoring crowd spread out before him when the view is only the neighboring building’s dirty rooftop, littered with garbage. In Er, the streets run with less riffraff, and the buildings are given more breathing room. Here lie the financial districts, the banks, the schools, the businesses with employees who have some sway on the council or some ability to whisper into the king’s ear. Five years ago, when the throne of Er fell and San-Er was merged into the one, the residents here complained the loudest about their streets growing rowdier with San’s miscreants, but there was nothing they could do, not when their own royals had been slaughtered and San’s king had the divine right to swallow up his brother’s half. The Palace of Heavens was torn down after losing its rulers, replaced with residential complexes. Absent its matching half, the Palace of Earth was renamed the Palace of Union.
On the other rooftop, Anton’s make-believe shouting has caught theattention of three men, squatting around a low plastic table with playing cards clutched in their hands and cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They stare at him for a second before brushing him off, two going back to their beer bottles while the third, who looks younger, spits out his cigarette and pulls a rude gesture.
The victors have never chosen to live like kings anyway. They take their immeasurable earnings and slink out into one of the Talinese provinces, away from prying eyes and desperate acquaintances, trying their best to forget everything they did in the games and get some fucking peace and quiet. While farmers move in the other direction—flee the provinces and flock toward San-Er to avoid starvation—a rich victor worries about nothing except the blood on their hands and the voices of the dead that haunt them late into the night.
“And now, for… report… tonight…”
Inside, the television has faded to static. Anton turns around, a frown already on his lips, but the static clears quickly, picking up a different signal and switching to a news broadcast. His confusion turns to rage in a single blink. King Kasa appears, adorned in jewels and seated at his throne. He smiles, his yellow eyes bright, but then Anton picks up a potted plant on the balcony and hurls it into the living room with all his strength, shattering the screen. King Kasa’s oversaturated face blinks out of sight.
The apartment falls into silence. Night wraps fully around the balcony. With the television broken, his main light source and the background hum of noise disappears too.
Anton nudges his black hair out of his eyes. It will be a nuisance to get that fixed, but it’s not his anyway. It was easy to get into this apartment: into this body and its assets. All he had to do was stand around the hallway and pretend to fix his shoe, once while the banker typed his identity number into the door and again the next day to catch any numbers he missed the first time. If Anton wanted, he could go dig into the banker’s accounts right this moment, maybe call up a few of hisfriends and ask for loans. But that’s too many layers to go through, too many people to talk to and risk exposing himself to the council’s wrath. Better to laze around, eat up all the man’s food, then bounce. He can find money a different way.
Anton looks at his wrist.
06:43:12
Six hours until the first event. Enough time to obtain another body before it starts. This one is on the frailer side, even if the face is pretty. Anton Makusa is picky when it comes to the bodies he occupies, and his narcissism takes first priority. He’ll gravitate toward the masculine ones, same as the body he was born into, but he’s not fussed if that isn’t an option. What matters most is that they look good. Under the terms of his exile, his birth body was taken by the palace. The least he can do now is find worthy replacements.
A beep comes from his belt. He glances down, angling the screen of his pager up.
“For fuck’s sake.”
