Page 66 of Immortal Longings
“He can help me more than you can,” Calla says.
Finally, Anton releases his hold on her arm, his whole face going blank. As soon as she’s free to move, Calla is walking out of his apartment and securing her wristband. She doesn’t spare a glance back or a single moment of pause as she hurries down the stairs and through Snowfall. If she stops, it will set in. The vulnerability will scrape at her insides; his unguarded eyes will return to the forefront of her mind. August was right. She never should have agreed to this alliance. She signed on to play a game and kill a king, nothing else.
“Get it together,” Calla tells herself. It’s good that she’s not really going directly to August, because he would immediately read the oddness in her face and scold her—rightfully so, because Prince August is perfect and has never made a mistake, unlike everyone else in San-Er.
Calla ducks her head as she moves through the city’s evening bustle, weaving by shop fronts and climbing shortcuts as they appear before her. She barges into the Magnolia Diner promptly, leaping over the turnstile, and though she has no attachment to her former attendants and oversees their safety for selfish, self-protecting reasons, a rush of warm relief floods her the moment she sights Chami in her restored body, fussing over Yilas at the counter.
Calla’s knees go weak. She barely manages to catch herself on the corner of one of the tables. The motion draws half the diner’s attention, and when Chami spins around, she yelps at the sight. Yilas, too, makes a loud noise, lunging forward and sweeping in front of Calla.
“Oh, you’re okay. You’re okay, you’re okay, thank goodness—”
For someone who rarely expresses an iota of emotion, those few exclamations from Yilas are the equivalent of a heartfelt speech.
“Was there ever any doubt?” Calla asks. She grins, but her head is spinning. She starts to see Yilas and Chami in doubles, then triples.
“Yes!” Yilas snaps. “Last I saw, you were surrounded. I couldn’t get back inside.”
“A boy brought her back here,” Chami adds. “I asked him to stick around until you arrived, but then it got too late into the night, and I had to send him on his way with some food. Whathappened?”
Bright white is edging into Calla’s vision. It starts to hurt, a sharp sting spreading from the base of her head to the front, and when she lifts her other hand to her forehead, she can feel herself burning up.
“Yilas didn’t tell you?” she asks, tightening her grip on the table. If she pushes through, it should go away. If she holds still, this feeling must surely fade. “The Crescents at the Hollow Temple are experimenting with qi. Funny business. Don’t go anywhere near them.”
“My brother came to find me just then—” Yilas grabs Calla’s shoulder. “Shit. You’re bleeding.”
Her ears are ringing even louder than before, drowning out the noise of the diner. Calla takes a deep inhale, trying to clear her senses, but nothing feels like it is going in. She grips the table so fiercely that she might snap the edge right off, trying to seek sensation across her body. It’s not working. Her body is shutting down.
“Get a piece of paper,” Calla slurs, “paper… and pen. Get a pen.”
Rustling. It could be Chami rushing off to fetch the materials, or it could be her own imagination, her senses finally detaching from the world.
“Hey—hey—are you—”
Nothing is coming in through her ears; nothing is visible in her eyes. Calla lets go of the table, and she gives it one, two, three seconds, swaying on her feet. She feels her mouth move. She feels her tongue curl to recite a string of numbers, to croak: “Call August. Ask him… ask him… shut down my location pings—”
She finally collapses to her knees, and her instructions fall short. Before Chami and Yilas can loom over her in concern, before they can so much as confirm they received her instructions, Calla pitches onto her side and closes her eyes to rest.
CHAPTER20
August gives her ten days. Though Calla was unsure whether he would help, he shuts down her wristband—or at least puts it into stasis mode so that she is kept in the games without pings every few hours, sent on a chase across San-Er like the other players. The reels have noted her absence. The newscasters have remarked on Fifty-Seven’s idle number, unmoving while the rest of the players catch up and overtake her, with Eighty-Six now in the lead, running his own battles across the city, always in direct line of the surveillance cameras. They gather that she must be hiding out of view. If someone knew their way around San-Er well enough, the newscasters muse, perhaps they could stay free of the pings, keeping away from the other players. They hypothesize. A sick mother. A mental break. A fight with Eighty-Six—who’s swinging harder and faster day by day, which doesn’t help dispel the rumors that the two had a lovers’ spat. It doesn’t matter. So long as Calla’s wristband is still active, there’s no reason to eliminate her from the games.
They just can’t comprehend why she would hide.
She stays in Chami and Yilas’s living quarters above the diner, sheets drawn up to her neck and sweating out her fever. The clacking of plates, the snippets of elderly gossip, the hiss of cigarette butts stubbed out in the teacups—they all drift up, harmonizing with her delirious dreams. By the fourth day, her fever has broken, and she can move without pulling at her wound. By the sixth day, it’s scabbed over, no more blood seeping down her side. Her qi is strong—it helps her heal more quickly than the ordinary civilian. Still, she stays hidden under the blankets, legs pulled up to her chest and her chin pressed to her knees. Yilas comes up every few hours to talk, and though Calla is too exhausted to reply, she knows that Calla is listening. She talks about the games, about how they’re progressing. She talks about what she was looking at just before she was kidnapped in the Hollow Temple, how she had stumbled onto screen printouts that indicated someone in the Crescent Societies was tracking the locations of the players. Yilas says that Matiyu has since left the Hollow Temple. It’s certain that there’s something peculiar going on there, and he’s smart enough not to mess around with that, no matter how much money he earned working for them.
On the eighth night, after Chami and Yilas have already retired into their bedroom, the reels are playing on the television box in the kitchen. Calla wanders over, a blanket pulled around her head and a cup of tea in her hands that she’s been nursing for so long it’s gone cold. When Yilas isn’t giving a straightforward report into Calla’s ear, Chami tries to care for Calla like the attendant she used to be. For as long as Calla is willing to sit still, Chami brushes her stick-straight hair—falling back to their old routines in the palace—but Calla usually shakes her hair loose and messy again in minutes, waving Chami off to go tend to the diner. Chami brings up plates decorated with food and piping-hot teacups perfect for drinking too, except each time, Calla doesn’t pick them up until hours have passed. She needs to make her food and drink more suited for the body she’s putting them into: icy and miserable.
The reels are moving through the day’s footage. Her feet bare and the night dark around her, Calla walks closer and closer until she is directly in front of the clunky box. She kneels before the counter. Her nose is a hairsbreadth away from the thick screen. The television is muted, but she can hear every image, pair up the clang of metal and the high-pitched shouts outside the window with the screen as it flashes and glows, white and blue light casting shadows inside the silent apartment, white and blue light caressing down her face.
Her hand lifts for the screen. Before she can touch it, the reels change to show an alley fight between two players, and her fingers move to her chest instead, circling around the wound, now freed of bandages and allowed to air past her thin cotton shirt.
“Anton,” she whispers, recognizing his movements. His knife slashes a straight line down, throat to stomach. It’s so quick that the other player doesn’t seem to feel a thing before falling in pieces to the ground.
It’s possible that she is still delirious from the remnants of her fever. That her brain is rotting from the inside out as a result of this idle behavior, waiting for her body to stitch back into commission. While her head burned and her heart bled, she could think of nothing save the pain. Somehow, it was worst when the injury started to get better, because then her mindcouldwander, and wander it did, to that basement in the temple, to the knife in her chest, to Pampi standing over her. That shouldn’t have happened. No one shouldeverstand over her. What lesson slipped from the palace? What practice did she forget in those years hiding out? For the first time since she became Calla Tuoleimi, she feltpowerless,and that isn’t allowed.
The reels change to a display screen of the kill numbers. Nine players remain in the games. Calla’s numbers have sunk down to be ranked fourth. It doesn’t matter, she supposes. First or fourth, it is still the final survivor who is crowned victor, who gets to shake hands with the king. The numbers are a different partof the games, mere entertainment for the masses who tune in every year and watch the blood run.
Forget the renown and the rankings. She’s playing to win. What matters except making sure every person in her way dies?
