Chapter V | Sister City

In the Lucky Lilies Institute for Abandoned Children, I often found myself stuck in an empty white room, alone for at least an hour before I could leave again. Day after day, gripped by the hand of the Woman and thrown in like a cat. Expected to land on my feet, but I never did.

It was difficult trying to make friends in this place. Most of the children were far younger than us, and cycled in and out before we could get to know each other. Save for a few exceptions, the only constant for me was Autumn, and for her, there was me. At eight, I had just reached the age where orphans were no longer desirable to adopt, and Autumn had reached that age already when I met her.

Of course, my dreams of the capital persisted. Three years had passed without much incident, but now there were so many whispers of things so horrible that they clung to my skin and waking mind until I could no longer bear it. One night, when I felt particularly in control of my head, I decided that I would try to remember the details of these dreams. My eyelids closed and the night took me in a flood of color and foreign voices.

Rugged voices of men and women, vile and poisonous in whispers and notes. Tucked away behind corners where they couldn’t be seen under the sun. They spoke of plots to assassinate, plots to kill, and plots to overthrow. They revealed important truths that I could barely wrap my head around. Truths that were like a fantasy. Truths I only just managed to jot into my dream journal the moment I woke, thrown awake in the middle of the night from the fire of what I’d learned. At eight years old, I understood nearly none of it. But at eight years old, I understood enough. I understood that I could make things better.

When the clocks all chimed to indicate dawn, I had only just finished writing down everything I needed to. In Lucky Lilies, the children all slept together in the same room in rows of tightly packed and padded metal compartments. They could fit forty children at once in this room, although there was a brief stretch of time where several had to share beds. Autumn was only three corridors down and a ladder’s climb away. While the Woman and the white room made it difficult to spend my free time with Autumn, I still managed to make time in the evening and after the lights were out to see her. At dawn now, I made that same short trek to her compartment to wake her.

The eyes of her mask crinkled open to greet me, and she managed a tired smile. “Good morning,” she said, but I already had my hands on her shoulders and tried to shake the rest of her exhaustion away.

“Hey. Do you still want to run away from this place?”

“Yes,” she said. The dark chasms that replaced the eyes I couldn’t remember were wide open now. And almost paradoxically, there was something unforgettable about that look she gave me.

There was already a plan she had. It was a plan that she’d been thinking about for a very long time. For so long, she’d wanted to run. Run far away. Out through the door and up the layers, high up until we could look at the sky and the sun and find a place to live together. And over those years she’s waited, she collected bits and pieces of the things she’d need to survive. Clothes, food, water, and even some compressed bedding that she’d managed to steal from the storage room. Resources that all fit neatly inside two suitcases that she’d also stolen. The same suitcases that they sent children off with when they were adopted.

On Saturdays, the children were all granted many hours of independent study time. In these hours, not even the live-in staff bothered to manage what we were up to, so we used that to make our escape. Up until the very last second before we passed through the front doors, I worried that the Woman would find me and take me away to the white room before I could escape with my autumn girl. It made me more scared than anything else. More than when the bridge collapsed in the capital, and boulders of concrete and rebar crashed around me, with gunpowder, rust, and blood in the air. I worried that my autumn girl would leave without me and forget.

But the Woman never came that day, and we walked straight out those doors without anyone ever noticing. It was the first time I’d stepped outside in three years, and nearly the only time I could remember ever going outside at that point.

There in the Undersea District, it was known that the air either ran too wet or too dry. The maintenance foreman would only ever send a crew’s veteran or its runt to crank the aquatuner; the veterans always preferred it bone dry, so they must’ve sent a newbie on that day. It was so humid that our fingertips began to wrinkle in the first half hour.

Still we wandered with wonder, through the corridors of glass aquariums where schools of fish cast shadows against us in ocean blue. It took us until early evening before we finally reached Layer 4, where sunlight touched us for real against our skin as the star drifted down to dusk. We thought it was the sun that somehow made our stomachs growl, not even thinking of how hungry we were or how our feet ached, so we kept on, dancing and laughing in the crowded streets and evening light.

Then we reached the train station. Five minutes before the departure for Pyraleia, Capital of the Nine Cities. The station was crowded and the ticketmasters could scarcely keep up. It was the perfect environment to sneak on in, so I simply took Autumn’s hand and walked straight for an open door. No one stopped us.

Unfortunately, while the entering happened to be easy, there was apparently no unoccupied seats to be found, which made sense all things considered. Her sweat and mine mixed in our palms, hearts racing as the seconds passed and nowhere could be found for us. No place in the world for us to go. Then a raised voice of warning, and all the way down the aisle where we’d entered also entered a pair of greycaps. JANITORs. One younger and one older. A mentor and mentee. They had pistols on their hips and looked around like they were watching for something in particular. Or in our worst case scenario, us.

“Go, go!” Autumn whispered to me, and she almost shoved me onward past the curtain and into the next section, where instead of public seats, there were doors to private booths for the wealthy to stay. “They have to have one room unoccupied,” she said. “There’s only so many rich people.”

Each booth had a digital display outside of the door that displayed the name of the occupants. Whether hall or house, it seemed to turn out after all that there were no unoccupied booths. Or so it seemed until we reached one labelled Hall Areille.

“Areille means ‘empty’ in Luri,” Autumn said. It was a booth all the way at the end, and we found it just as the pair of JANITORs moved past the curtain themselves. We threw the door open and tumbled inside without caution, and quickly found ourselves face to face with a newlywed couple on the way back from their honeymoon.

Sarah and Adam of Hall Areille. They stared at us, a pair of little sweaty girls in way past their head from deep down under with clothes far bigger than their bodies. And we stared back until the silence stayed too long, and my mouth flew open to replace it.

“Do you mind if we stay here for a bit?”

“It’s been a year, and we’ve accomplished nearly nothing at all,” Morris Morsylis fretted. The Throne Hall was empty of its ministers, leaving only the king and his uncle there with half the RINGKNIGHTs standing just outside the door and the other half patrolling the Great Spire. “If only you would name me as King’s Carnation—!”

“I will not,” Claude maintained. “Stop asking.”

Morris collapsed on the steps to the throne and sighed. “Half my advice you won’t listen to, and the other half you’re too busy to see to yourself. You need a Carnation, Claude, or nothing will get done. At this rate, name your lejindir! Name the Baron Kavesta! Name your gofer!”

“You told me the Church would be my greatest obstacle, uncle, but they’re not. These endwolves… they prey on our supply chain and murder our men in the night. Lilya is far too busy dealing with them to be useful to me as Carnation. As for the Baron, I would sooner trust a thief than that Lord Kavesta. His lowborn wife is killed in the Collapse of Highway Babylonia, an incident of which we haven’t a clue as to the perpetrator, and he shows not the faintest hint of grief. We hear rumors of how he sneers at the common people. We hear how he abandons his lady daughter to a foreign city.”

“Oh don’t tell me,” Morris sighed, suddenly aware of his nephew. “Are you saving the position for that endtowner you’ve been seeing? What was her name again?”

Claude rose from his throne. “How do you know about her?”

“What do you mean, how do I know? It’s the talk of the town! You were seen exchanging ribbons at Fallryn, seen drinking together at the Café Négliger, seen walking the Midtown in casual clothing. You deprave yourself, Claude.”

Anger bristling in his lip, the Kid King unsheathed the rootsteel knife at his belt and pointed it at his uncle. “It is not your right to belittle the king, or decide what is capable of depraving him, my lord of nothing. You’re just an old man with tiny words to say, clinging at the scraps of power left to him. You have not a single augment in your skin, and a whisper from my lips could shiver your heart to death. Do not again presume to—”

There was a knock at the door, and the frightened Morris clambered back to his feet, straightening his waistcoat and scrubbing the sweat on his brow away to greet the visitor. The door opened to reveal Lilya Caecilius, dressed in official uniform, ghost-white from her neck to her toes, with a willowing sash and cape trailing her every motion like a windfish. The title of High Lejindir brought with it a sternness that even the once-gentle Lilya had come to inherit.

The other door had opened in tandem with the first, this one by her second-in-command. The Peach RINGKNIGHT, Lily Yukina of House Chiyoda, dressed the same but in her own colors, the gentle white and ice-blue of her sigil. As Lilya had to be the first lady knight in the history of Purily, a title was made in her honor, and so the Countess Yukina Chiyoda, named as the second lady knight in history by the incumbent High Lejindir, became Lily Yukina.

Neither had yet lived to their second decade, but Claude imagined them to suit his purposes fine enough despite their youth. Either way, the reason they entered now had nothing to do with their knighting, but with the people that followed through the doors. He counted as they entered, five in total. A mother and four children, the children aged from seventeen to six-years-old and arranged by those ages, heads bowed in subservience to… Morris, he could tell. And they were dressed well, but it took the mother lifting her head for him to recognize them.

House Porter, of City Vergalis. Indeed they were dressed well, but strangely. Not of their official garb and in the colors of their sigil, but in greens and blues, in capes and cloaks and hoods and stars. Like forest folk, wealthy by nature and in craft, pure and clean and untouched by the greed of their metal cities. Yet still, each of them, led by the mother, took a knee in his presence.

“What business have you here?” he asked.

“We’ve been instructed by Lord Morris to pledge our loyalty, Your Grace,” said the mother. The Lady Margaret, if memory served him correct. And the first daughter, Lady Isadora, age 17. The first son, Lord Alvis, age 10. The others, he could not bother to remember.

But the statement confused him. “Your loyalty was already assumed to be had as a noble house of Purily.”

“Let me explain, nephew,” said Morris. “This family is unique in their position, though I admit my neglect to inform you. I will inform you now. Do you recall what study House Porter specializes in?”

“Archaeology. Famous for uncovering several old sites and texts.”

“And yet it is their greatest discovery that was never made public, by my hand and the hand of your predecessor.”

The Kid King wrinkled his brow. “What is it then?”

“We discovered an island,” the eldest daughter spoke. She lifted her head and stared him right in the eye, unafraid. Those eyes without fear made him realize that all the others, even the mother, trembled in place. In fear, but of what? Fear of him? Or his uncle? With his burning questions unanswered, the girl continued on. “And no matter how the tides rose, and through the flooding of all the old land, it remained unchanged. Within its borders stood an ancient academy, with texts no one could read but us. And when we did, Your Grace, we found a truth lost to all but fiction: the truth that magic is real, and it was there we found its dormancy.”

“And oh our parents were overjoyed when we got married but then the economy took a turn for the worse, and we had to put off our honeymoon for so long. How many years has it been already? Five, six? It’s already been so long that we’ve lost track. We really have been so busy, just trying to keep our home in Layer 3. Our parents spent their whole lives to get to where we are now, and I’d feel so bad to betray all that effort just to fall back down to Layer 4, or the lady forbid, down into the Undersea District. We’re in a decent spot now, enough to have finally gone on this honeymoon at least, but once we get back home, it’s back to work. If this booth hadn’t opened up at the last minute, we’d be sitting out there with the rest. At the very least, I thank the lady for this timing. Five years ago, there was no train to Pyraleia. That Tristan the Train! He’s lowborn for sure, like us or even lower. I don’t think he even has a hall to call his own. But he can certainly get things done. Duke March has been talking about leaving the decision of ministerial positions to the popular vote in the future. Whenever that happens, you can bet your right tush that I’ll be voting for him to keep his seat.”

Sarah Areille was the kind of woman who could never really seem to shut up. I could tell it bothered Autumn a fair deal, but I liked to listen. She had a somewhat high-pitched voice with a cracking trill between her sentences that wore on the senses as the time passed. Still, there was a spontaneous genuity to it that I enjoyed about it. And her speaking so much made it easier for us to keep silent. For us to avoid talking about where we were from or where we were going.

As expected, it took about twelve hours to reach Pyraleia. Twelve hours of hours of listening to Sarah talk on and on about her life or about a show she’d started to watch. The rest, spent in bits of sleep we managed until we finally made it to the shore of this foreign city. A foreign city for Autumn, at least. For me, it was the place I’d been born. It was the place my mother died. And it was the place my family decided to forget about me.

“Come with us,” Adam Areille said. He hadn’t spoken much for the entire trip, but he spoke up now. Autumn and I had just started to wave them goodbye as we walked onto the platform, but they made sure to stop us. “You have nowhere else to go, right?”

For a startling moment, the two of us felt we could we could see a holy light shine from them. From this family that could be ours. A dream we’d had for so long, with us as sisters until death did us apart.

“Will you adopt us?” Autumn said. And the pair of JANITORs emerged from the train behind us, and time wore thin. Were they even here to capture us? We had no way of knowing. But the newlyweds of Hall Areille took too long to answer, so Autumn took my hand as I had taken hers and led us away from them. This was something about Autumn that I knew very well. Even though I couldn’t remember any details of her face—and if asked, I would only be able to describe her voice with nonsense like how I thought it sounded like cowbells in gentle storms—I still remembered this: Autumn had spent so long hoping, wishing, and scrambling for something like a real family, that she became too familiar with feeling those hopes and wishes evaporate in front of her. Too frightened of watching her hope turn to despair again for the millionth time.

So it took only that one moment of hesitation for her to abandon that hope, and the sight of Hall Areille quickly disappeared into the distance as she took us somewhere to the far edge of town.

Autumn was both older and smarter than I was. She spent most of her time in Lucky Lilies reading books and books with words and words I didn’t understand. Of course, now as an adult, I’m decently adept and consider myself something of a writer at the very least, but back then I could scarcely even read. But because she was so smart and because she read so much, she knew about the decommissioned safe rooms that maintenance crews could escape to during storms. It took us the whole day, running on nothing but snacks and a few hours of sleep, to finally find one.

It was a little room by an open sewage pipe with a heavy door we could barely pull open with our strength combined. It smelled like ass and the windows were busted open, but the fringe generators ran hot nearby, and kept us warm through the winter nights. The pantries were cleared out and empty, and the locks were long gone. It was not a very safe place for us to stay, but stayed we did. For months as autumn became winter. Winter in the early days of the new year, 694 a.S.

Every morning, Autumn would set off into the town to scrape together scraps of food. Those scraps turned out to be just enough for us to live off of. To bathe, we waited for the rainstorms. They came in short and powerful bursts, more than powerful enough to wash a week’s worth of grime off of us in a couple minutes.

I got sick often. Autumn often worried for me, and she almost never let me venture out into the main parts of town with her. Because of that, I rarely got to see her face. She left in the morning and came back in the night, when there were no lights to shine on us. I do remember how warm she felt as we slept together. There were two beds and it rarely got cold enough to need it, but we always huddled up close together to fall asleep for the night. Was it out of affection? Or loneliness?

Regardless, Autumn eventually managed to find a couple spare notebooks and pencils for me to make copies of my dream journal. Then between crippling weeks of heavy fever, I finally finished them.

“It took a long time,” I said. “But after we drop these off, we can finally go back together.”

“Back?” Autumn sat beside me on the bed. It was those cowbells. It was that gentle storm. She didn’t even look at me when she said it. “I’m never going back to that place.”