The Wrong Time For a Conscience

Someone once said the first step in the end of the world was burning all didactic texts. They didn’t expect Lord of the Flies to become one of them. The world, After, was the sleaker, sharper, younger sibling to the world Before. If the baseline for the city before had been functional, now it was abusive.

The first year was a steep learning curve. The motto: nothing that isn’t needed. Everything was viciousness. Smiles with bared teeth. All sound edited to include aggression. The roadways had been some of the most monochromatic in the world, once. Strict laws and societal norms flooded road networks with Hyundais and Kias in all shades as long as they were shades of grey and silver and white. That was the first sign of the changing world. Cars as colourful as explosions, and the uselessness of the dashcam.

Everyone was watching for other signs.

In the first year, I wasn’t made for this city. It wasn’t the place for me anymore until the motto was destroyed, and we began to want again, instead of just need. I found that out when I was thinking of packing, leaving, looking for another place with a space for me.

Someone said my name.

“Theo Cole-York! Fuck me!” Someone tapped my elbow. I spun around. No one was supposed to touch me, ever. And no one usually did. A hand went to my skin; my and went to the switchblade in my pocket. The city was full of sharp people now. If you weren’t careful, you’d cut yourself on one. The guy didn’t look offended. His mouth wasn’t an O so much as a sideways D. I was about to tell him there was no way in hell I was going to take instruction from him when he kept babbling. “Jesus shit. Bro. I thought you were freaking dead. No one saw you. Theo Cole-York is alive and kicking. Do you still have your bass? Come on, tell me you have it.”

I put my hands in my pockets. The guy wasn’t much younger than me, but he was softer. Uncut hair, which was the style now, and tight blue jeans. He wasn’t wearing many colours, but he was still more colourful than me with my black pants and sweater and black hair. He smiled; he had the smile of a catholic cherub. It wasn’t for proof, it was just an ordinary smile. His teeth were white and even. I let go of the switchblade and slouched. “Okay. I have it.”

“Seriously? That’s awesome!”

“Not seriously. I lost it.”

He looked the way I thought a Disney woodland animal would look if you refused to befriend it. “That sucks. But dude, we can find you another one. You can come play at my place. The stages are opening again. Say yes. It’s exactly your scene. You’ve never played at a club like this, but it’s your kind of club. When was the last time you played? It’ll come back to you, whatever. Where’re the guys?”

There was a girl in the band as well, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t know where any of them were. I could guess. So I said, “Dead.”

He looked briefly disapproving, like I shouldn’t have said it so bluntly to someone as young and admiring as him. Then I saw it was disappointment, and a sort of snarl. He had vitriol in him, and no way to ignite it without burning himself up. Like the entire city. “We’ll get you a band. It’ll be good.”

One of the worst, undocumented symptoms of the virus was the anger left behind. It wasn’t a symptom of having a virus. It was just a symptom of being one of the survivors.

He pulled the band together from the sleek, young wreckage. A guitarist, a drummer, and a keyboardist, which I didn’t need or want. But the guitarist, Declan, said he was worth keeping, and I trusted Declan when I heard his first song. He took his time coming up with the simplest riffs, but once he had them, they shook the stage like a geological seizure. If there was ever going to be another Wikipedia article about the history of music, this would be a subsection called Aftermath. The sound was savage and starved, like everyone who fed it and ate it. It wasn’t music for people who wanted to escape. It was music for people who didn’t want to exist. Even people who didn’t know they didn’t want to exist.

Shows always had a quality of wet paint. They ran together, even separated by stages and cities and crowds. People still new the name Theo Cole-York, and they screamed it when I led the band onto the stage. The crowds were culled. Only the leanest and most feral attended. I pictured the rest of the crowd outside the door, waiting to come in, right until we left the stage again.

We went across the state, then across several more. Places that were unique when they were thriving were all the same now. Desperation, the great equalizer. The nights were weren’t on stage, I saw the changes in the world. Declan and I left the vans and equipment and went looking for food and new clubs. We took the cars with us sometimes. The more colourful they were, the more we were reminded of the conformity of Before, and the people who would have disliked us for them.

The streets were all the colour of sulfur. There were more empty houses than ever, but people preferred being outside of them to being inside. In the first year, empty cars had blocked roads all over the place. The new crowd had gotten loud about it, then productive, and they formed groups wherever one was needed to push an empty car over to the side of the road. The cars never went anywhere. Metal buckets on flat tires were a dime a dozen.

The people on the streets were the strong, the terrible, the rich, the ripped-jean crowd. Grey hair only came from a bottle now. Children were an endangered species, if they were even around anymore. I hadn’t heard of any in years.

And there were the profiteers. Beetles, they were called. They would die last, everyone joked. Or mocked. Or cursed. They lounged on the sidewalks. In the squares outside malls. Or they sat half out of the back of huge silver cars. With long, thin cases at their feet. Needles was their product, and their demand was high. Each Needle was a promise of extended life. That promise was enough to get someone’s attention a street away. Sometimes the cases were open, the Needles visible, and the barrels were dewed with condensation.

Declan refused to look. He didn’t desire them at all. He wasn’t like anyone else, and I didn’t want him to be. He was right. It was the worst kind of dirt to drag your robes in. But nobility had gone the way of grey hair. I counted the Needles, as many as I could see in the yellow pallor. Back in the vans, or in a rented apartment, I dug my pinkie nail into my arms. It didn’t feel like a Needle would have, but I felt less like a death clock on legs for doing it.

Declan saw it on my teeth first, before I even thought to check the mirror. During a gig, I turned away from the audience. They always wanted my face, and dismissing them was like dangling the rest of their lives in front of them. Looking away from them, I grinned at Declan. Or I bared my teeth. His cue was coming up. His fingers stopped. My bass riff waited. He watched me truly bare my teeth. His cue came and went.

I closed my mouth before I turned around again. I knew now, I was dying.

We had a room in the club for the night, for the equipment. Ben, keyboardist, grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. I swore at him before I saw what he was looking for, and saw that he had seen it. He didn’t leg go of my shoulder. “Why didn’t you fucking say you weren’t immune?”

I put my bass aside. He was going to dislocate something if he squeezed harder. “You didn’t say you were.”

Ben let go of my shoulder, just to throw the first punch. Once he’d decided to throw it, he had no regrets. He’d already weighed the consequences and benefits of the punch and found my unbruised face wanting. While I was running my tongue over my teeth to check for any sudden gaps, the drummer, Nico, said, “York, man. You need a Needle. ASAP.”

Ben took me to the wall with his forearm across my throat. My knee jostled my guitar. The strings rattled metallically. “Don’t be an idiot, Nico. Rich boy doesn’t have the funds he once did. Can buy yourself a million cigarettes, but not a Needle. But a knife doesn’t cost anything. Where’s the switchblade? Who’re you going to use it on?”

“You don’t need to worry about me using it on any of you,” I said, “because you won’t get that far if you don’t let go of me.”

Ben didn’t know enough about me to know whether I meant it or not. I watched his face change, as though he wasn’t sure what he was looking at anymore. Then I realized my mouth was open, my jaw clenched, my grimace at a warning angle. I could be dangerous without meaning to be, now. Ben took several steps back, as quickly as he could while looking deliberate and in control. “Even Theo Cole-York isn’t good for anything if he’s dead. Go get some functional organs. But if you touch me, I’ll take the rest out of you.”

Nico tried to exchange a look with me as he went after Ben. I ignored it. Declan put his guitar away and looked up. I allowed the look, then went to look in the mirror. The lichen was a little too thick on my tongue to get rid of with excessive swallowing. It wasn’t near thick enough to choke me yet. But it tickled in my throat where it crept up from my heart.

It came from an animal. All diseases came from birds or bats or rats when scientists didn’t really any clue where they came from. In three weeks, over two hundred thousands people that had been completely healthy at the beginning of those weeks had dropped dead. Sick before the news stations could properly report the illnesses. Cases rose. Hospitals overflowed. Freezer trucks stopped at hundreds of houses a day, then returned to those houses a few days later for the ones that had come into contact with the first. All of it the same symptoms. Choking. Vomiting. Lichen growing across the tongue. Similar to a species that grew in North America. Fingers were pointed. But what did it matter? The whole world was sick.

Francesca had played for four days after the vomiting started. She didn’t stop until she stopped breathing on stage. We hadn’t been sharing a bed on that tour, but I’d been exposed. The disease didn’t need touch. It didn’t need close quarters. It hardly needed air. It was everywhere. We were all just waiting to see who would be the last one, the one without anyone else to call for a truck to come pick up the body when they were gone.

There would be no vaccine. There weren’t enough healthy people to develop one.

But a cure. It was an old story, in a lot of cultures. A belief that to become even stronger, you needed not just to defeat your enemy, but to eat him. Then you would absorb your strength. It was beyond belief now. The philosopher’s stone grew in the human heart and lungs, and it wasn’t a perennial crop. The cure was as finite as the population.

But for fifty percent of the population, things were looking up.

I threw up a week later. And every night after that. On the third night, I saw it wasn’t only me. Declan had just decided to do it in a trash bin outside a club instead of in the washroom. His vomit still smelled of vomit, regular sick and acidic. I could tasty the leafy sick in my own mouth.

Declan leaned away from the bin. He spat out a clump of wet lichen.

“Manners,” I said.

Declan snorted. He didn’t get up. His lean looked less like a lean every second, and more like a magician’s trick of levitating over magnets. “Where’d you hear a fancy word like that?”

“I know you’re trying to get me to feel all right, but I’m onto you,” I said. “You’re worse off than me.” Some people just went faster than others.

Declan lolled his head. Then he shook it properly. “York, go get a Needle. What are you waiting for?”

I searched for a moment before I found my voice. Declan never looked at the Needles. “You said your sister was in one of those. Kids. Parents.”

“Yeah, and they’re all dead already.” Declan spat into the bin again. He let his eyes close. “You’re not.”

“I’m not rich either. It’s not in my income bracket.” I sat on the edge of another bin. The alleyway smelled like the inside of a freezer truck. The smell of exposure. My stomach roiled again; I don’t know what with. My tongue was so thick with lichen I’d hardly eaten. “Between the two of us, if one of us was going to survive, it should be you.”

Declan leaned his head against the bin. He didn’t open his eyes. “This is the wrong time to have a conscience, York.”

I’d swallowed enough alcohol to drown a rat. It was the only rebuke the nausea listened to. I wouldn’t be on a stage again after this. I could feel it. Once you felt it in your chest, they said, you were on your last legs. Almost dead. I had a hand on my chest, like I could touch it from outside, and a hand on my bass, which was half holding me up.

Ben and Nico, and a few guys who worked in the club, watched me in between setting up and getting their own drinks. I smelled the disease on myself.

No one touched the guitar case. “Who’s seen Declan?” I asked.

Ben moved jerkily, like he’d been the one drinking. He kicked open the guitar case to pull something out of it. His voice was dark, unrecognizable. “He left this for you.”

I just caught it when he tossed it at me. Inside the silver case was a Needle, wet with condensation, heavy with Declan’s heart.  

Art by Alisha/asmeesh

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Crow and the Feather

I was unafraid. It isn’t the same as not being unafraid. I had never considered all the time I had spent, not being afraid, until I nearly sweated with the effort of being unafraid. If fear were scarlet fever, I had only now gotten it, and I walked and shuddered to contain the coughing. I my mind, two narratives played out: in one, I walked past the ditches near the river, and one day they were filled with plants, or water, or impossibly coloured fish, and my fate was not tied to them. In the other, I was remembered as a promising, young man, and the ditches filled with water, which slowly siphoned my skin from my bones.

If fear were infectious, it would have struck down all the animals of the Delta before they beat the first drum in their nightly dancing on the banks.

“You worry too much,” Crow said to me. “All your kind is good for. Even your memory is lacking. You don’t have the vocabulary for eternal promises in your kind’s language, do you? That’s why you’ve forgotten that I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” She tapped the bracelet around her wrist. It was nearly invisible, except that her hair was ink black, and mine red as cliff grass, and wound around one another, they drew the eye. I disliked looking at it. It seemed improbable and destroyable, though it had never given any hint of coming undone, or being torn or tugged apart. “No one would touch this. And no one will have the chance.” She climbed onto the branch above me and tousled my hair with her dust-orange foot.

 Crow looked as feral and venomous as the rest of the animals in the Delta, but she was fine-boned and had eyes like a deep sea creature, all pupil, or else all black, so it was difficult to tell if she was looking at you if she did not face you head on. There were other fine-boned animals, but none that looked like a thing to fear between the trees at night. There were thick-boned, brutish beasts as well, who kept their distance from Crow. Some parties just didn’t associate with others. Some parties were safer to associate, recreationally, with than others. When Crow’s feathers began to veil her, there was another animal there to pluck them out. Some feathers came easily. Others drew blood from their roots.

No other animals plucked their feathers, pulled their scales, tore out their fur, or scrubbed their skin. I didn’t know why Crow accepted the pulling of the feathers, and she wouldn’t say. She was the only one who bothered to speak to me in my language. Their language was a mess of sounds. It soundd to me like whatever sound each animal might make in death, they used to speak to one another. I wasn’t certain of the specifics, only that death wasn’t involved, or if it ever were, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between it and the hissy, growling, howling accents I’d heard all my life.

There was no space for me among the animals. There were hundreds of acres of land in the Delta, and never an empty spot of dirt to claim when the animals sat. Never a foot of ground on the riverbank for me. I had seen the other humans, before I had ever seen my own reflection in the river. Following the latter event, I knew I looked nothing like them. The beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed, berry-brown children stolen from cradles and hammocks and basinets. No one had hair like ground tigernuts, or eyes like grey grass seed. Then I grew, and no one had features like broken china, or hands like spindly weed roots. Had I been born to an animal, Crow had once told me, I would have been left for a large bird to take away, while my siblings flourished. She did not say runt, but the other animals said it for her, when they turned away while Crow braided my light hair or touched my gold eyelashes, or pinched my eternally red cheeks. My skin did not believe we were in the Delta. Those from the Delta wore dark freckles over dark skin, roasted by the sun since birth. My cheeks thought I had taken fever, or the wind had chapped them over the course of years.

“Crow, why wouldn’t you change me?” I asked her once, lying on the riverbank, keeping my feet out of the water. Crow, the trickster she was, would let the current take me if it got a hold of my feet. She would let it take me long enough to amuse herself, no matter whether my heart would collapse from the terror or endure it. “Give me eyes and hair like yours. Or skin that doesn’t burn in moonlight.”

“How dull,” Crow said. “Little feather, I worked so hard to make you lighter and brighter, don’t you remember?”

Time had turned the memory into an ordeal that had happened to someone else. My mind worked had to destroy any memory of the world as it appeared from eight eyes, from the middle of the web had made when my brother cursed me with spider form. I remembered Crow, how she had taken me into her mouth and put me in her nest rather than eat me. Enchanted, when the curse broke, I believed she had known of my true form somehow. I had since learned that she had refrained from eating me only because she didn’t know if Spider was watching her and would be offended by her appetite.

I had been a side effect of the manners.

“I think they would prefer me as a spider,” I said. I had seen tricksters and their magic. Spinning grass into gold, rain into jewels, weeping into music. And Crow was one of the most gifted tricksters of all. “They don’t ever come near me.”

Crow turned toward me. In the nighttime, her eyes were pinholes. The night without them was false, the night within them true. “You? The problem here is not you.”

The ditches next to the river were larger the next night. The berth the animals gave them wider. Crow’s arms blacker and silkier. Feather by feather, she was plucked. Black river lines ran down her arms. She held them still, braced, for each jerk and release. The feathers were never left on the ground, but I also could never see where they went. They vanished into the darkness.

The animals danced on the riverbanks, then. The music was red and hot, like the deadliest part of a summer. The river simmered. Rocks bleached beneath the surface. The soil grew warm closest to the river. I stepped backward, avoiding, as always, wingspans and tails. And to stand on cooler ground. The bottoms of my feet ached with the heat. The music spun small glamours. From the corner of one eye I saw tigers hunting across a green plane. Shimmering like a mirage over the water, I saw salmon run, and the rocks that dashed the golden-lit rapids to shreds. Stories came and went, never begun or ended, just the middles.

Crow’s arms had smeared and dried when she stopped dancing. She sucked in each breath. She tilted her head, a habit she had when she was too tired to notice, or drunk on the music. On the other side of her, and the river, I saw one of the holes was larger than the others.

Crow did not always do well with answers. She did not like to give them out, for fear she would run out of them someday and have no more for herself. Instead of asking about the ditch, I asked, “What is the dancing for?”

She ran a hand down my hair, my neck, to my shoulders. I was sweating. Her fingertips stuck to me a little. “This river will grow one day and destroy part of the Delta. Then, perhaps, the whole thing, eventually. For now, we dance to keep the river from taking more than it already has, and to keep the dead from dancing with us. Why? Frightened?”

“Of the ditches. Those don’t look like things of the past.” I gave the animals digging the ditches a look, something as fierce as Hyena, as much as I could manage. “That one is for me, isn’t it? I can already taste the dirt in my mouth, I think.”

Crow flipped over my wrist and held it. My fingers tangled in the bracelet of our hair. Her wrist was flaky with dry blood under it. She said, “I have you life. I already told you, no one will be throwing you into a hole in the ground.”

I let Crow go, into the dancing. Some nights she tried persuasion. Others, she left me here. I plaited my own hair together into a meaningless knot, then unbound it and broke all of the strands. I kept an eye on the ditch, and the animals that dug it. It was too large for any of them.

In the wet days, the Delta tasted of dirt. Now, in the dry days, I tasted dirt. It was on my tongue, in my teeth, in my throat, at the edges of my vision when I woke from nightmares of the ditches. In my dreams I conjured up a scene of a burial from beneath. I saw nothing but the sky very far away, the walls of the ditch much higher than they truly were. My fear grew. In each dream, my fear was as potent as the dirt choking me. How fear grew away from the sunlight. When I woke, I reached for Crow, beneath the low branches of a bush tree, lying next to me. I said, softly, “I dreamed of my dying.”

Crow opened her eyes. She did not sleep, but her eyes did. Now she stretches, and as she did, I noticed her feathers returning already, sparse and course and so deeply black they looked purple. Her hands went above her head. Small birds left the higher branches to stroke her palms. She lowered her hands to her stomach and rolled over to look at me. She held up her wrist. “What is this worth to you?” She bit our hairs and pulled them taut away from her wrist.

I wasn’t sure how valuable something I didn’t want to own could be. I said, “If you want a gift, I already made one.” I showed her the circlet of flowers and grasses I had made while the animals danced. It had flowers from the riverbank that grew so low they were impossible to pluck without entering the water unless the river was running low on a night. Crow kissed the centre of one star-petalled flower before she slipped it over her head. It looked like an array of flowers that had got lost, and grown at night where they should have grown during the day.

Crow plucked one of the flowers from the circlet, so that one side began to fall into her hair, released. She put it in her mouth and smiled with her teeth. “Crowns are for royalty,” she said. “They will all have to love me now, won’t they? Queen of the Delta.”

I put my finger on the petals of the flower, right where it curved over her lips. She smelled of the other animals, and grass seed.

She stayed the same. Her black eyes could have been looking anywhere else. “What’s this, little feather?” She snapped at my finger, then gave it back to me. “You lie with me here and think you can lie with me like a woman? I’m not a girl. I am Crow. What would your people say to know you’ve lain with a Crow?”

“My people wouldn’t even think me a man, I think,” I replied, and took her hand. “And I’ve been away from them too long to care. About what they think, or whether or not you’re a woman.”

“You care. A condition of your kind,” Crow said, slowly and sadly, like she had handed me something that used to be living. But she stayed with me and didn’t stop me when I touched her.

I felt it in the soil before I heard it through the trees. They grew so thickly together, I did not even know the hoofbeats for what they were until they were almost upon us. I sat up. “Someone is coming.”

Crow said, “Yes. Your brother among them.”

She let me rise, then watched me crouch on the side of the river. On the opposite side, horsemen approached. They wore boots that might have never seen the ground, and hands that had never seen the rough end of a chore. They did not belong in the forest so much, they could have been put there by a badly done glamour. My brother was as fair and golden and despicable as I was, the most improbable person among them. He slid off his horse and stood next to the ditches. It did not seem to have crossed his mind that he was close enough to be tossed into one. He grinned a viper’s grin. He had a voice like charred wood. “We didn’t even have to call, and here they come to us. Animals.”

The horsemen laughed. The forest hated their voices. I did not think that they sounded very much like several crows hollering together from a distance. I did not think of how the fear had returned. I was unafraid, and busy at it while my brother mountain again and led them all back the way they came.

Crow rose. The circlet of flowers was a chain that limped over her crown and draped over her shoulder. “This is so dear to me. I’ll wear it all the rest of me life.” She touched one of the crinkled flowers.

“Why were they here?” I asked.

“To undo the dancing,” she said. “To encourage the river to grow. But they can never undo what we’ve done.”

The sun fell behind the mountains. The riverbanks cupped the water like dark iron. There was no music, no happiness or history turned to stone, except for one melody sung by Spider, briefly, where I glimpsed, blurrily, a trickle of water that grew into a river, swallowing woodland and everything that lived in it. The animals didn’t dance, nor did they dig. Instead, they sewed. Grass seed, tubers, still living roots. Every kind of potential life they tossed at the soil on either side of the river. Acres away, something keened. In the way of dreams, and somehow in the way of this night, I knew that the keening meant mourning.

Crow pushed her fingers between mine. The feathers on her arms were still stocky, as small as a baby’s, as stiff as if they’d grown out of her skin years before. “No more hiding as a little spider now. Understand, little feather?”

She would not let me cross the river with her. I stood on the opposite bank as tiger extended his claw and pierced Crow’s throat, too quickly for me to speak. I jumped into the water and began to wade across as they tossed her into the grave. For months I had dreamt of what she must be seeing. Dirt falling and falling over her, until it was just darkness and weight. Her face was uncovered still when I reached her. Dirt covered the wrist around which my life was tied.

I lurched forward, as if to fall into the grave with her. My legs froze. There was too much terror to help her. Where had I learned to be this frightened? I didn’t think I’d ever learned it.

Next to me, Snake nudged my elbow.

“Let him try to drown us now,” he said to me, in the language of my kind.

Crow rolled her head to the side, as she did when she slept next to me, preparing to close her eyes.

“Now, little feather,” Snake said, “kill your brother.”

Art by Alisha/asmeesh

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Sleep Again

There had not been a storm like this in recent memory, and my recent memory stretched back generations. It was as near disaster as a storm could be without ending cities full of lives. It was a wind-spiked rainstorm, a lightning-seeking-earth storm, a storm that wet the ground so thoroughly that every once green avenue had a chance of forever remaining a river. For a week after it ended, rain dripped from trees and eaves and moss onto the ground, and onto the graves.

As though the storm were a bump in the night, they woke.

The sky was pewter for days after, as if the storm had taken all its energy and it couldn’t recall total light. Dark nights turned into dim mornings, fatigued into murky afternoons, and became dark nights again. I heard them on a gloomy morning. It had been so long since I had heard anything from them that I leapt off one of the headstones, onto the ground, hands up, knees bent. I didn’t have the thought to know what I needed to do, if anything needed to be done. I was too surprised to do anything; I knew only that I had to be ready to do anything.

But nothing rose. There was no knocking on coffin lids. No fingers thrusting up through the dirt. Only wakeful sounds from the dead. Sighing and a deep vacuous noise where some of them recalled breathing even while their bodies forgot. It was sonorous and languid, and it only lasted a few hours.

When the ill-lit afternoon arrived, the graves were silent again.

There was nothing to do. Heat returned to the city. The memory of the storm gave way to a nearly blue sky. The lichen on the headstones dried enough to crackle under me. I felt ancient in a strange way, like someone who had recently become too old to remember their childhood. I couldn’t remember my childhood, or my adulthood. Tourists and local runners and devoted rememberers tooled through the graveyard. There were colours among them that the graveyard would never have known otherwise. They were all hummingbird colours. A fantastical narrative trotted into mind, of my own hummingbird-hued life before I’d come here. Perhaps I had walked past these graves before. And past the one that used to perch where I did now, without seeing, like the tourists.

Tourists and rememberers visited graves, took photographs of charming cherubs and haunting angels, and named aesthetically crusted with moss. They spoke quietly, and sometimes laughed while looking abashed. They did not look at me. They did not stop by my grave.

Mine was not a grave to stop by.

None of ours’ were. We were not meant to be remembered. Only to inherit, and, eventually, to pass on.

Evening crept subtly in, tugging along sun and rain. The sunshower looked joyful and improbable. Birds sang apocalyptically until the rain became too heavy and they dove beneath the brambles for shelter. I waited as the rain chased away everything but the small animals. I shook water from my wings when the feathers felt heavy with droplets.

A hiss of restlessness washed through the graveyard. What were the sounds of the dead becoming restless? Fingers searching along coffin lid seams? Fingers bones finding ribs and noticing the bareness? Scull turning against decrepit pillows?

I had the impression of hair against a pillowcase. Not in a coffin. In a room, dulled by the rain on the outside of it, and sleepiness. I put my hand to my ribs and tried to remember, but the morning I tried to handle the memory, the more it thinned, like paper that had been in the sun too long.

Something hissed, like a length of fabric against a floor. Or loam churning against loam.

I nearly unbalanced myself as I rose, fluttering my wings, looking from headstone to headstone. The light was fading. Naphtha colours bled into wren-black on the horizon. In the dusk, the graveyard was a confusing landscape of black shadows against blacker crests and dips. My fingers moved on the headstone. My body seemed to know change before my mind did.

But I couldn’t see it. I closed my eyes and faded to nothing but listening. The sunshower slowing to restless fingertip movement. Leaves disturbing leaves. Timid creatures arguing appetite with safety. Owls- always owls- blearily preparing to hunt. Distantly as to sound like a monotone surf, cars on the roadway.

I let the sounds turn me.

She was only a few feet away, awake and wide-eyed, when I opened my eyes. I had been braced for a rotten face, for gore or empty sockets or missing appendages or bone. Not for her.

She was young, but old enough to know it, and resent it. She had been young. The pulled on the sleeves of her grave dress, though it destroyed their whiteness, made them as grimy as her fingernails. She was wearing half of her grave on her hands, and more on her feet. Her legs swayed as her knees juddered. Her body had forgotten walking, and remembering was exhausting it. She could not look at me for long. Her eyes were fragile and strange, with eyelashes the colour of dust. She looked like something unearthed- not like a corpse, but like a buried teacup or glass bottle.

She looked at the eyes on my wings. I looked back. There had been no lessons, no instructions; instinct lifted my hand and pointed it to her. Made me say, in a voice she could not not listen to, “Return to sleep. It is the night. It is time to rest.”

She pushed mud off one foot with the other. Clumps rolled away, leaving dark streaks. Grass stuck to her toes. She glanced at the empty path, then the plunging sun. She did not know it wasn’t time to rise. If she slept again soon, then when she did rise, with the others, as they did once every year, this night would seem like nothing but a short lucid dream in an otherwise dreamless sleep. She said, “I don’t want to go back to sleep.”

I said, “It’s your job to sleep. There’s nothing for you here.”

This was obvious. Not because her family might have died, or because even if they hadn’t, they would likely struggle with her sudden return more than they had her death. There was nothing for any of them here until one of them came to replace me.

“There’s nothing here for you, though, is there?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I saw that while she had been watching me, and I her, she had been puzzling her sleep, and my presence. She had enjoyed the puzzle of it. I saw the girl she had been when she was alive. “Sleep again, and forget this.” I thought, in a moment I was ashamed of immediately, that I would have been delighted if it were her. If she were anything but another soul wanting a warm body, or a pool of water to soak into, or a mirror to appear in, or an ear to whisper in. If she could perch here where I had been.

Her hands cupped her elbows. Her chest rose and fell without breath. She remembered cold, air. She remembered too much.

I did not know what to do, so I allowed my hands to reach for her, my feet to guide us to her grave. She closed her eyes. Her expression was strained and streaky. Weak, her knees shook as she walked. She nearly buckled over a rise in the ground, sinking just slowly enough to catch herself and rise again. The sunshower had nearly stopped. Two drops fell on her shoulder and forehead. In the soil, the dead hissed and sighed again, full of nebulous desire.

We stopped at her grave. She was older than I thought. Her death was earlier as well. There would be no family to frighten if she returned to them. She frowned at the dates on her headstones, as if she had not realized until now that she felt robbed, or that she ought to care. It seemed unfair to tell her that I was never going to experience the things she had not.

She stood on the grave’s edge and looked up at me. The light pooled in her collarbone. I saw there was dirt smeared on her cheeks where I had thought she was just gaunt. Everywhere she was the colour of dirt.

I held her elbow as she sat on the edge. She hesitated, sagging suddenly as if her strings had been cut. She put a hand to her breastbone. Perhaps she had just felt the absence of any beating. She shook her head. Her hair swung like a lace curtain around her. Then she leaned back, into my hands, against my crouching knees.

For all the memories I did not have, I knew this: I had not been here long enough. There might be no one to take over for me until I had forgotten the possibility of it. It would not be her. I had nothing to promise her. I could never do anything for any of them. And they could do nothing for me.

She turned her head against my leg and whispered through her hair, “I want to live forever.”

I sighed. Her eyes shut. I felt her full weight on me.

I said, “This isn’t living.”

Art by Jenna Barton

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Reason and the Sun

The house was secluded. The kind of lonesome that forces lonesome people together. You would think that, stuck together, miles from the nearest town, and many more miles from the nearest metropolitan city, and on the inside of a fence that had been made to impale birds or zombies or teenagers on top of it, that the residents would discover camaraderie among them. But lonesome people are crown shy, growing near together, never touching, living without reaching. When there was no entertainment to be had elsewhere, they turned to one another. The residents were as thrilling and disposable entertainment as the internet.

There was Arcturus, who could never get a moment alone. He was impossible to hide, not because of any physical abnormalities, or a loud booming voice. If anyone wanted to find him, he was found. Arcturus was a formality for the House Advisors. Elsewise, he was GPS. Then there was Tucana, with the body of a vestel virgin, and a similar inability to be left alone. Mostly male residents followed her about; occasionally females as well. She has eyes like a silent movie star, and a smile unfairly like a sphinx. She is reluctantly magnetic, loving when she doesn’t want to be, loved when it was nothing but painful. And then Pisces, with the head of a lion, and a lion’s tale. When he tries to eat as daintily as he can, to avoid stains in his mane, other residents ask if they can ride him, or ask to hear his mighty roar, though the mightiest roar his human throat has ever produced happened when he stubbed his toe on a door jamb.

There is no collective noun for us. “Herd”, or “flock”, or “parliament” don’t quite cut it. There is no precedent requiring a collective noun for out kind. No one who is qualified to name us knows us. Crows are called a murder; it is the most accurate title I can think of.

I’m one of the few who doesn’t expect entertainment from the residents, not because I am one of the most normal, not because I’m distant either. I’ve heard it all. “Where’s Icarus? Too far to get to in a day.” I have never called down a storm of lightning when I’ve gotten angry. I’ve never changed forms for the sake of a prank. I’ve never had to regrow an organ, or tuck a tail into my bottoms, or tailor my clothing to allow for an appendage no one else has to allow for. There is nothing to indicate what my purpose is, what I was meant to do, why I bear this name. Many residents have a guess; many don’t. Know one truly knows the answers for certain. They know only the house.

It used to bother me a little. Now it bothers me a lot.

There are hazards, boxing our kind together in the same room. Always the chance we could kill a visiting tutor, a visiting tailor, any kind of visitor, an advisor, a cook. Or, the worst possibility, each other. Our kind does not go quietly.

The hazards used to bother me a lot. Now they are background noise, as indistinguishable as the days.

The house is a cobbled together cornucopia. It is always what we need, no more and no less. When there are more residents, there are more rooms. When the weather is fine, there are more open walls and large windows. When the weather is cruel and inconsiderate, the walls are thicker, the windows smaller. There are whole sections of the house decorated with leaf patterns everywhere. Within, the baseboards are carved with leaves. Without, the lintels are carved with curling ivy. The red brick glows autumnal when the sun is out. Other sections of the house are paper thin, the walls nothing more than removable screens on rails, some decorated with gruesome and fine pictures of dragons or beheaded maidens or flowering plum trees. The nightingale floors in these parts of the house make it nearly impossible to walk through without playing a groaning symphony. Then there are the domed rooms, or the slating rooms, the ones decorated with devotional stained glass windows. They are dreary and grey, except for the ceiling, which is azure, interrupted by ribs covered in gold leaf. The windows are slender, intricate, glass painting kaleidoscopic patterns on the floors. These rooms, filled only with dim coloured light, make me think of tombs, the kind where goddesses are found sleeping, or kings are buried to never be found.

It is in one of the rooms decorated with ivy where we are allowed to lounge. It is meant for relaxation in the winter, though the walls radiate so much cold that no one sits near them, and as a result the room is functionally smaller. In the summer we congregate in the screen rooms, where we can remove the walls and look into the garden as the jasmine blossoms or the wisteria curls. In the ivy room, I can see the wind push the dead trees outside so fiercely that lesser roots unearth themselves and toss dirt clods into the wind currents. Residents eat, chuckle, frolic, and curse benignly in this room. They might be birds here. Rushing, pretty birds. A shimmer of hummingbirds.

Tojil straddled a bench several tables away, flicking a flame between his hands, cupping it in his palms when it began to waver, tossing it with a little showmanship when it blazed again. His eyes followed it, because they were disconnected from his thoughts. He looked bored, which meant he was thinking. He snapped his fingers. The fire ravaged his hand. He leaned his chin on his other hand and looked through the fire to my table. A brief and furious rain extinguished the fire in his palm; he stood up. Someone at his table made a grab for him as he left, but even his minions, who would follow him into trouble, would not follow him to my table. He straddled the bench on the opposite side of the table and looked at me sideways.

“Evenin’, Icarus,” he said in a tone like sunshine. He always managed to make sunshine sound damning, like it was exclusively for displaying a person’s rough edges or faults.

I looked at his dark face, his full-lipped smile, his heavy eyes and dark brow like he had never seen a single shadow in his life. “Evening, Tojil.”

“You look lonely.” He tapped his fingers on the table beneath us. It was some kind of fake marble that did not singe under his touch. Deliberately installed by the House Advisors when the old tables were too covered with black handprints to be used as decent flat surfaces. His fingertips left small silver puddles on the fake marble instead. He tilted his head toward the trail he left behind. “There’s space.”

“Thanks, but not my thing. I like the quiet,” I said. I popped an olive in my mouth. It wasn’t olive season, I thought, but there were olives anyway, as ripe as if they never went out of season. It was one of the house’s beneficent mysteries.

“I can tell,” Tojil replied. “That’s why I asked. It’s getting rowdy, because we were just talking about how rowdy we can get, and how bad that is for everyone out there. We could use some of that quiet.”

I leaned back. Tojil was so determinedly ebullient that it required physical distance to see that he wasn’t doing anything different from the average person. There should have been no reason for him to seem as immediate as he did. It made me uneasy, like he was polished and a real person, and I was as transparent as a book that had been left in the sun too long. “I’m just here for the olives,” I said.

“Freak,” he said, smiling blithely. “I asked one of the cooks if they come from Greece or if they’re homegrown somehow. If they are imported, it’s the closest we’ll ever be to Greece. I was going to mention it to Professor Lima, get his take on it. See if he thinks we’d be able to even go to a store to get our own.”

“A store,” I said. “Off school grounds. Which isn’t going to happen. Are you really going to ask him if you can leave?”

“What’s he going to say no for?” Tojil said. “A few students at a time, supervised. We can’t do anything. We keep a lid on the funny business.” He tapped a finger on the marble and it flared like a candle briefly. “As long as no one dies, should be fine.”

I spat a pit into an ashtray. “I don’t think it’s the dying they’re worried about. I think they’re more worried we’ll sneeze and roast a parking lot full of people with the lightning that comes out our noses. Then it’s the government or something, we get killed, and then civilians are really fucked.”

Tojil’s smile stayed put. It was interesting. I thought all of his real expressions must be taking place underneath it. Perhaps that was why he seemed so alive. “Do you believe that theory that if more than three of us die at one time, we’d blow up the world? Come to the table, Icarus, and discuss.”

“I don’t. That’s the discussion,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of olives here to finish.”

He made a small gesture at his chest like he had finished performing an impressive trick and turned back to his table. Ten minutes later, Xihe lost his temper during a game of mancala and briefly flared, setting the books at the surrounding tables alight and temporarily blinding several residents. As I waited for my vision to return, I thought I had been exactly right.

Our rooms were divided. Larger rooms hosted more residents. It might have been unfair, but those of us who shared a room to only two or three had to navigate our way around beds one at a time to keep from brushing up against one another constantly. I shared a room with two other people, and if someone was standing rather than sitting on their bed, I had to leap frog over two beds to get to the door. The room once had screens for walls before a resident pointed out that shining a light through the screens rendered them all but transparent. Not it is wood-paneled, and it reminds me of a library. The door is unlocked, and when I am in the room, it is open by a few inches. I am no senior to the other residents of the house, but I have been here for years, and the advisors trust me enough to take care of the other residents’ lesser problems. Most of them would rather deal with their issues themselves than discuss them with the wind off the glacier, but even with my roommates gone, the room is usually occupied by someone other than myself.

Zarauk twisted his hands together as he sat on the end of the bed beside mine. He is young, but his eyes are permanently squinted, as though he’s spent years in the sun. He has beautiful freckles across his nose and hands, and chapped lips and red cheeks. On most days, you can smell salt on him. He looked at the wall opposite the bed.

“How long are we in the house?” he asked. “We can’t live here forever. There’s no one old here. We have to leave at some point. Where to?”

“I have no idea,” I said. I sat on my own bed and offered him tea I knew he would turn down. He didn’t like sweet drinks, or sweet anything. I put the tea on the floor at the end of my bed, because the table between my bed and my roommate’s was only large enough for the lamp on it. “Are you scared to leave, or do you want to?”

Zarauk stared at the wall. He squinted at it, even though it was dim in here with just the lamps on, and there was nothing to see. His cheeks looked particularly slapped today. He licked his chapped lips. They always looked uncomfortably painful to me. He breathed in, but it sounded shallow, like this air was the wrong sort for him. “I keep having this feeling,” he said, finally, “like I’m not supposed to be here. Icarus, I think I’m meant to be there.”

He was looking at the photo of the ocean. Not a photo- just a drawing. Of a dark sea beneath a miniscule boat. His mouth hesitated, so I was silent.

“Out there,” he said. “On that boat. I think that’s exactly where I’m meant to be.”

“Za-za.” I avoided kicking over my tea and took a smell step to the next bed. I sat down and bumped his shoulder with mine. He was brawny under his knit sweater. I could never tell if he did something differently from the rest of us, or if he just grew that way. I didn’t tell him he would be on a boat like that one day. I didn’t tell him he would be leaving the house soon, and that waited for him on the outside of it. “Play a round of Spit?”

Zarauk tilted his head, then nodded. “Yeah, all right.” As we drifted toward the lounge for a pack of cards, other residents, bored or fighting or bored of fighting, or wanting and recognizing someone else who wanted, were caught up in our current and drifted after us. One game turned into several, then turned into a Due South marathon, before I decided it was too late and we couldn’t stay up all night.

If we stayed up all night this night, we would want to stay awake all nights, the way it seemed we were all made. The House Advisors had been teaching us to sleep at night for years. I wouldn’t ruin their efforts in one night.

“Ow, fuck.”

I sat up and blinked. Then blinked again. The room was blackness and the muted green glow of my digital alarm clock. At three in the morning, that’s all it should have been. But there was a voice as well.

“Icarus. God’s sake. I thought you would have a bigger room. I hit my knee twice getting to your bed.”

It was a miracle he hadn’t woken my roommates. I sat up and went to push off the covers at the same moment someone touched my foot over the blanket. If the voice wasn’t familiar, it would have shocked all the daylight of the rest of my days out of me.

“I’m not turning on the light,” I said. “So move, so we can both leave.”

A flame flickered mid-air. A moment later, when my eyes adjusted, I saw it wasn’t midair. It hovered above Tojil’s dark hand. He leaned over the end of my bed, holding the flame like it was a bird that had landed fortuitously in his palm.

“Light’s not the only problem. You’re a loud talker. Get rid of it before you burn your face off,” I said.

“Kind of you to be worried,” he replied.

I pushed at his leg with my toes, which was easy because the bed was very nearly too short. If I shuffled down a couple inches, my heels hung off the end of it. He extinguished the flame only when I’d gotten out of bed. The darkness was darker now that there had been light in it, but we moved carefully along the wall to the doorway, and from there to one of the lounges.

I turned on a lamp. Tojil’s face was all shadows, from darkness and his furrowed brows.

“This is where I tell you that you’re committing a double offense,” I said. “For being out of your bed, and for being in my bedroom, past curfew.”

“You don’t care.”

“Not right now. Right now, I care about sleep. So what’s so important that you had to come disrupt mine instead of some other advisors’?”

 Tojil looked around the lounge. Someone had gone to the trouble of decorating it with photographs and paintings so it wasn’t just another room of carved leaves. The House Advisors hadn’t approved at first, but for every photo they’d taken down, two more appeared, and eventually they conceded. There was a picture every twelve inches along the wall. Of white-capped purple mountains far away in a snow-spun landscape. Buttercup-coloured fruit in trees on a bush-dense hillside. A forest so red and orange with autumn it looked like a raging, smoke-less fire. A tangerine temple peering through a dense cloud of white jasmine and yellow gingko trees.

“You like the quiet, Icarus,” he said, still watching the wall, chin tilted up to make a long strained line of his neck. He looked so immediate now it was as though he’d been sleeping through our conversation earlier. He was taking apart the photograph of the red and orange trees. “And the rest of us like to pretend evolution for us ended before we could be bothered to grow brains.”

He lifted a hand to the picture to touch it. I made an aborted movement, wondering if he meant to singe it or if it was about to be covered by a water stain in the shape of his hand. He touched the corner of it, then dropped his hand. It was unmarked. “You always come to this room, when you’re reading or drawing or anything. Because of the pictures, right? Which one do you want to visit?”

“Hm, this doesn’t sound like a conversation about you,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Tojil said. He still hadn’t looked at me. He tucked his hands into his jean pockets and rocked back on his heels.

“So you bumped your knee twice in my room to not talk about you?”

Tojil’s expression was streaky in the partial light, but it struck me suddenly that he wasn’t pretending to be troubled just to be awake at night. I hadn’t know he’d had it in him to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t think of another word for it. The softness in him made my voice softer as well. “It’s a pretty bad punishment to be out of your bed past curfew, Tojil. I don’t think you did it just to play twenty questions.”

When he turned to, throwing half his face in shadow, he looked strange and dangerous. I wondered who he was, quickly, before he became familiar again. “I want to know why I’m here.”

I had nothing to say to that. There was nothing constructive to say, nothing helpful. He knew all the answers I could possibly have for that.

“We’re stuck here, that’s obvious,” he said. “I think that means we deserve to know why we’re here. Why we are, or what we are, at least. This is our life, the house. I thought life was like that for a while, just living in a house forever, following the rules, but that’s only our lives. We should have this, at least. To know why. Where we came from.”

“What are you asking of me?” I asked.

“I’m asking for you to tell me you like the quiet too much to let me do anything stupid. Tell me that it won’t solve anything. It’ll likely just make more problems. If we don’t know why we’re here then there’s a good reason for it. I don’t have any reasonable in me, Icarus, so it has to be you.”

I had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but now that I was grasping for words, opening my mouth, and they weren’t coming, I had to concede that it was possible to be speechless. I hadn’t know he would rely on me for that. I took stock of what I felt. Surprise that I was a wet blanket. Dimly hopeful I wasn’t a wet blanket, just reliable. I didn’t know if his saying it that way prompted me to respond the way I did, or it if was what I truly thought. The whole moment was too mixed up to untangle. “You can’t ask that of me,” I said. “’Cause I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to ask. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to just ask a question.”

Tojil sat on the table and leaned forward. This way, he was hardly taller than me. The longer he looked at me, the more I was sure he could see how much I, too, wanted the answer to that question. Why I wanted to know why I was here when I didn’t shape shift or catch fire or blind people or do anything but give people hope or take it away.

“Well then, I guess I’ll ask,” he said. Half his mouth smiled, a smile that came from smiling alone. “Good talk, Icarus.”

He leaned back. Something flickered across his face as he did, or it might have been the shadows, shifting over his jaw and nose. “I’ll ask,” he said again.

I made a small flourish at my chest, to tell him I’d worked my magic and he was welcome. “Great, now back to bed,” I told him.

Tojil and I didn’t have many classes together. I didn’t see him until the end of the next day, during evening meal, when he took his place at his usual table. He didn’t venture over. He didn’t foray anywhere, including into the conversation of his minions. They allowed him his solitude, probably thinking he was just in a mood. He might have been, except Tojil’s temper didn’t look like this. He touched the tip of each finger to his thumb, one after the other, in a way that wouldn’t have been threatening had it been anyone else, but the way he did it suggested he was using the gesture to make a decision, and at the end of that decision, someone would get hurt.

He’d asked.

Guilt lanced through my throat. I should have advised him to forget about it. An answer wouldn’t make him happy. I should have said what I’d said to Zarauk.

I should have gotten up, gone over there, shook him into his usual expression, but several residents at my table were complaining about having a television in the same room as a foosball table, because competitions got too loud to actually hear the television. By the time I’d settled them all, Tojil had vanished. I pictured his fingers on the corner of the photograph of red trees, his face striped with the dark.

The bed was so small I rolled right into my roommate’s feet. He’d leapt onto my bed from his and was bouncing up and down. My head lolled as I struggled to wake up fully. I was still caught in a dream, it seemed. When Pollux shouted at me, I realized the screaming was not a thread of a dream I hadn’t forgotten yet. The screaming came from the hallway.

“Icarus!” Pollux reached down and shook my shoulder. Castor was behind him in a hoodie, looking like he wanted to pull Pollux away. “Get up. There’s a fire in the house! From the garden!”

My body wasn’t entirely mine, so when I lurched out of bed, I nearly fell over. There was too much light in the room for the middle of the night. The lamps were off. Red light bled pressed against the window.

On the other side of it, the courtyard blazed. Embers helixed high above the fire. It was so large and bright that the trees it had swallowed were just shadowy impressions. They would soon be gone completely in the flames. Smoke bruised the dark sky and tripped over the roof of the house where it turned a corner and curled back toward the other end of the house. Some of the House Advisors had gathered, holding their sleeves or collars over their mouths. They’re recruited some residents- Belel, Axólotl, Pincoya- to begin putting it out. They held their arms out- water flowed into the courtyard, rained down through the smoke, pinwheeled from Pincoya’s hands, even as the flames leaped higher. They all tumbled back as the flames skipped over an azalea bush. Residents stood at the far end of the courtyard, evacuated. I couldn’t see the part of the house that was on fire, but that only meant it was too close to us.

I pulled on a sweater and told the boys to followed the House Advisor’s instructions in the evacuation, then tore into the hallway. Residents ran in one direction; I ran in the other.

“Icarus, wrong direction, I think,” Professor Lima said. He stood in the hallway, between myself and a closed door where smoke was beginning to curl out from under it.

“The fire,” I said. I didn’t know what I was saying, just that I had to say something.

“Will be put out. It’s all being handled,” he said. He had a voice like glacier water. “Please assist the younger residents in the evacuation.”

I bit down on his name, which took more effort and felt like I had actually bitten down on my tongue. “Did anyone get hurt?”

“It’s being handled, Icarus,” Professor Lima repeated. He uncrossed his arms and made a shoo-ing motion at me, expression wry. “It’s got nothing to do with you, Icarus. Your calm can be a help right now, if you please.”

That was a lie. I was anything but calm.

In the morning, one end of the house was covered in tarps. I walked down the hallway I had been stopped in during the night. It was like walking out of the house and into a battlefield. The remains of the house were blackened, all charred bones and strange sculptures where plastic had melted, and pits where something especially flammable had hit the ground. Something that might have been a support beam lay on its side. Only one side of it had suffered. The other side was smooth wood, with two singe marks about the size of a finger and thumb. Other bits and pieces were marooned in the blackened ground. Ashes scudded over everything like black dust.

The dread was an awful feeling, as bad as if I’d witnessed the beginning of the fire. My nostrils stung with the acrid, charred scent. I could almost feel the rage that had ignited the flames, looking at the piles of glass next to smashed window frames, the painting frames that glinted dully with fake gold paint. It wasn’t just fire. The house had never had a fire like this.

I walked away from the house, toward the mess of the courtyard.

Professor Lima stood at the edge of the damage. It was impossible to tell from his face if he was considering the trees that had stood before him, or if he was already planning the trees that would grow in their stead, once the top layer of soil had been replaced. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

“I want to talk to him,” I said. “Can I?”

“What makes you think that’s a good idea?” Lima asked.

Quiet, I thought. I tried to project whatever calm it was that Tojil saw in me. “It can’t do any harm. I might be able to help. That’s why I’m the unofficial resident advisor, isn’t it?”

Lima sighed, as though I’d already done it and he was glad to have it over and done with. “I don’t think it’ll do you any good.”

But he led me back into the house, to the solitary room, where I had never been. I didn’t know what a solitary room might look like. I’d seen rooms in the house without other residents in them, but always there was the promise of another resident coming by soon. There wasn’t any space to be truly alone for long here. I had imagined the solitary room as a closet, or a white room devoid of furniture, or a very plain bedroom without any books or cards or a television. It looked like one of the screened-in rooms, all white, with one picture in it of several clouds floating above a tranquil green meadow, and a single window too high up to look through. There was a very small table in one corner, and a thin blanket in the middle of the room. On it, back to me, head bent, sat Tojil.

Lima waited until I was inside, then shut the door behind me. There was no lock. There was nothing to keep Tojil in here. There was nothing to keep Tojil doing anything, but he was here, doing nothing, anyway. I walked up behind Tojil and sat down, facing his back. He must have heard me, but it took him a full minute to turn and face me.

I recoiled. His dark eyes had been swallowed by fire. I knew where he was looking only because his pinhole pupils were pointed at me, through the orange gold haze of them. He looked like something ancient, something that wasn’t to be touched. The eyes warned that this variety of person was not safe to approach.

“Reliable. Knew you’d visit,” he said.

“Then you knew as well I’d tell you that this isn’t the best way to stop being angry,” I said.

He grinned, pleased as a viper.

“What’s your theory, Icarus? Tell me why we’re here,” Tojil said.

“To not burn ordinary people to crisps?” I suggested. “To not drown them with rain, or accidentally make their husbands fall in love with us, or bring a lightning storm down on their houses?”

“I don’t think they’re trying to keep us from the normal people so we don’t kill them,” Tojil said. “I think they’re trying to keep us from the normal people because what are they striving for if they can never do what we do? Because now they’ve kept us in here too long and they’re worried about what we’ll do when we find out we’ve been kept here all this time because they’re jealous.”

I waited. There was more breath in him. His eyes flickered.

“Let’s get out,” he said. “Head for some waves. Or sun. Whichever you want, Icarus.”

I bit my tongue.

“Be reasonable, Icarus. For me. Say no.”

I leaned in, until our foreheads nearly touched. I put my hand on his knee, next to his. His fingers were pinkened, as though the fire had gotten to be too much at some point, even for him.

“It’s completely unreasonable,” I told him. “It’s a bad idea.”

“Say no,” Tojil said.

“Did it tell you why you’re this way?” I asked him.

He shook his head. I was close enough to feel his hair against my brows. “I saw your file in Lima’s office. I know why you’re here, Icarus. And I’m saying we should head for the sea.”

“A really bad idea,” I repeated. Soon, everyone would have realized what had happened, when they noticed Tojil missing. There would be questions, suspicious looks. He wouldn’t be soon forgiven.

Something outside hollered. A raven. When I glanced at the tiny window, several ravens soared past it. An unkindness. That was the name for a bunch of ravens.

Tojil put his mouth to my ear as I squeezed his knee. “Or do you prefer the sun?”

“They’re both bad ideas,” I said, then I stood up, pulling him with me, and to the door. His hand in mine was fire-hot. As if it were contagious, I felt as vital as he was.

Art by Syd Mills

Text by Lucie MacAulay