Part II, Chapter I | Monotony & Squander

Aiden held out a syringe for me. The glass barrel was filled with a reddish-brown fluid, and there was already a needle attached to the end. I could barely hear myself think in the crashing and pounding music. The dark spat out lights in RGB too, in laser lights and disco balls. My heart pounded, harder than ever and harder still with each beat of the synth. “It’s totally safe,” he said. “We switch out needles and everything.”

Hesitantly, I took the syringe from him and examined it. The glass glinted like crystal, like pretty diamond. I turned my arm over to expose the crook of my elbow. I regretted wearing a sleeveless dress. It felt like I could already see the vein.

❧☙

There was a little needle I kept in the cuff of my favorite sweater. A sewing needle my mom gave to me. My mother by blood, I mean. Whenever I got scared, it was there to keep me safe. Whenever I was safe, it would prick my skin and draw my blood. It would remind me that my past hadn’t vanished.

In the days of my life in the Midtown, I found myself pricking myself with it just to remember. It seemed the work of a Midtown lackey never really ended. Every day, I came home to an empty place with the lights shut off to parents who wouldn’t return for several hours longer. It was tough, but it was the only way to keep our spot in Layer 3. And while my foster parents worked their lives away, I attended school like usual in a place like a concrete prison.

It was true that there was a sullen beauty to Pyraleia with lights that glowed when they wanted to, but the mornings were always foggy, and the fog stayed into the afternoon. And no matter how beautiful the cityscape appeared at night, students weren’t allowed out past curfew.

School itself felt monotone. There were sometimes class periods where no one spoke a word at all. Every morning, thirty kids crammed themselves into a cramped computer room, sat in their individual booths with a monitor and keyboard and a daily lesson. Clack, clack, clack. Talkative kids were seen as socially defective. Like they couldn’t read a room. Like they ruined the vibe. To be honest, I’d liked it at first. It was calming. Lucky Lilies used to burst with energy every day with all the children, so I’d felt like silence was good for me.

As the years passed into my first year of high school, I stopped feeling that way.

“You should try to live a little,” an old man said to me one day. I must’ve spent the hour nagging him with the mundanities of my life. It was the only time I ever spoke to him, but I still remember his name. An old name that wasn’t all too common anymore. John. He was a resident at the elder care facility that I worked at part-time on weekends. He looked young for his age, though he joked that he was almost already the age Finryd the Old had been back when he was born. John had a head full of hair, white though it was, and it gave him a glow that I didn’t often see in the other residents.

There was something about this place that I loved. It always seemed to be bathed in a warm evening glow, like a day about to set. Like a world about to end without a sound. There was an aroma to it as well. Some would call it a stench, that of a thousand old souls about to pass from this world into the next. This was my third year working at this place, and that stench became almost a comfort to me. I kept count of how many folks passed. I counted myself lucky. There had only been ten so far. The people who lived here were hardy. They may have had lost their homes and their families, but they kept their hearts. They kept their minds.

And John was no different. He almost had the energy of a man in his thirties, although parts of him would sometimes creak and groan to remind me otherwise. He regaled me with stories of his past, of the trouble he would often find himself in, the friends he lost, and the life he’d left behind. He had just been admitted, and we had just met, but he already felt like a close friend. Try to live a little, he told me.

And the next day, he passed away in his sleep.

I was a girl who could never forget how death loomed over all. Everyone feared it. Many chose to shelve that truth and forget. Others turned to religion. I did neither, really. I thought about it constantly and, after a great deal of time had passed, found that it no longer bothered me. Or so I told myself.

But John’s final words dug into the back of my head. When he left my world, everything seemed to go just a little duller. School a little greyer. The way the keyboards in my wordless classes clacked bugged me just that much more. Live a little. I sat in my room, alone in the dark, and muttered aloud to myself.

“Yeah. Why shouldn’t I?”

My name was Annamarie Areille, and although I had a few friends at school, there was no one I could call myself truly close with. I never went out with anyone or had fun with them. We never played games and although our conversations were sometimes funny, they were mostly dull. I think that’s why when Aiden Pitt pulled me out of class by the hand, I didn’t resist. I think it’s why when he asked if he could be my boyfriend, I said yes.

I liked Aiden. He was handsome and funny, and actually sweet. He wanted to live a little, too. I liked him a lot, but for some reason, when we first kissed, the only thing I could think about was someone else. My autumn girl, together with me beneath that tree so many years ago. A girl whose face I couldn’t even remember. But her lips were on my mind while his were on mine.

After that, I couldn’t bring myself to kiss him again.

He never complained. Maybe that was something admirable about him. Something about us did change, though. He made sure to walk me home every day after school. He brought me food after work on the weekends. Looking back, you could say that he was almost something of a perfect boyfriend. Maybe because he didn’t want to lose me. Maybe because he realized that he could at any moment.

Yet somehow, we stayed together. For the rest of the school year until this single, vibrant moment on the cusp of summer, when he asked me a simple question. He asked if I wanted to go to a party with him.

❧☙

I danced until my muscles were sore. I sang until my voice cracked and crumbled. My body burned like a fever, like the everyday I spent in that bed, in that little place by the shore.

I moved in the dark and the light until I collapsed against the wall, soaked in sweat through and through until Aiden found me there and sat with me. He had a syringe. The kids had been passing it around the room, apparently. I hadn’t noticed. They called it happiness. “There’s gummies too, if you’d like. They’re not as fun, though.”

The drug he was offering to me had been outlawed recently. I knew that much. It was derived from a mysterious flower that only grew in Pyraleia. A flower that I once learned about in my dreams, but had since forgotten.

I could tell how my hand shook from the way the fluid sloshed in the barrel, so I took a deep breath and let my nerves settle. A little bit of the steadiness I boasted in my day-to-day started to return. There must’ve been procedures for this. I needed to disinfect somewhere with something, but I didn’t know what or how. Aiden didn’t say anything, so it was probably fine. Right? But the needle looked scarier the more I stared at it.

“Maybe the gummies…?”

Aiden bumped my shoulder and laughed. “Come on,” he said. “Live a little.”

John’s face flashed before my eyes, twice. The first as he lived, energetic and jovial. The last, as he died. His eyes were sunken into his skull and his skin was pale and cold. It had felt like wrinkled leather. It was almost too obvious that his life had abandoned him over the night. Maybe it was this memory of John, along with the fact that Aiden had never before urged me to do something that I didn’t want to, that gave me the push I needed to finally agree to it.

My hand was steadier than before, and I found the vein right away. “Okay, then.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

I felt my wrist yank upward before I could see who it was or even register what it was that they said. Their hand was large but soft, with slender fingers and a silver ring on their fourth finger.

“Hey, careful—” Aiden started to say, but he stopped hard when he saw the face. The stranger pulled back their hood, revealing the unique features that made them recognizable wherever they went.

She was white hair and gemstone eyes; a face framed by a messy pixie bob and cut with eyes cut from stone, eyes green like they glowed. A girl more than six feet tall with a jaw sharp enough to appear equal parts handsome and fall-in-love scary.

And I didn’t remember ever meeting her, yet she said, “Hi, little Anna. It’s been a while.”

“It’s Annamarie,” I corrected. There was always a visceral reaction I had when called that. Almost uncontrollable. “Who are you?”

“Jericho,” she said with a smile. She didn’t mention how I was supposed to have already known her, nor did she let it show on her face. She turned to Aiden, though. “Mind if I talk with your girly alone for a minute? And please, take that thing with you.”

He almost ripped the syringe from my hand as he rushed away, pale as a sheet.

Jericho sat down on the floor beside me, keeping my wrist in her grip as if she didn’t want me to run away. Then she glanced my way, and our eyes met. “I suppose I’ll go ahead and cut to the quick. Everyone here at this party will be expelled from their schools, and their Halls removed from the Midtown by the end of the week.”

I froze. My eyes wanted to peel away from hers, but its green captured me in them like vines tied tight. I opened my mouth to speak, but she placed a finger to her own lips to steal the voice from mine.

“Don’t cry. Unlike everyone else in this place, you have an out. You know why, don’t you?”

I did understand, deep down, but it was a truth I’d almost made myself forget. A truth that felt like fiction more than the dreams I lost myself in at night. But I spoke that truth nonetheless. “Because I’m the sole living heir to House Kavesta.”

“Pfft!” Jericho let go of my wrist and slung her arm over her belly and lost herself in laughter. She laughed so hard that tears formed in the corners of her eyes. The joyous sound changed the mood of the room to me, like an old drum banged its own beat over the loud synthetic sound from the hollow speakers around us. “Oh, you’re not that important.”

“Lady Jericho,” I said, my face hot. The rapture her laughter had left me with was gone. “I can’t be the reason my parents are sent down a layer. I just can’t. They’ve done so much for me—I couldn’t live with myself if I’m why their hard work is wasted. Punish me all you want, but leave them out of it. Please.”

I swiped a tear from my eye and Jericho held out an envelope for me. It was sealed with the crest of House Kavesta, a clock with two sets of hands, one red and the other white. The red one was meant to represent the past, and the white represented the future. With crimson hands, it pointed to 6:45. With white ones, they pointed to 4:20. “What’s this?”

Jericho hung her head, clearly smiling still. Then she pulled me into a tight embrace, one so sudden that the air in my lungs left me. She stroked my cheek, and her breath felt warm on my ear. “You were right to cling to that bloodline,” she said, almost whispering. “You’re covered all over in red; wear it on your sleeve too, and they’ll believe it. But a color is worthless on its own. Attend my Arys Academy, in Vergalis across the sea. Study there with me. Eat there with me. Sleep there with me. Live there with me.” Then in her head, she continued. “If you don’t, I’ll have to send your Hall Areille in the Ends to rot. Into the place they call the Hell of All Purily.” After all that, she finally released her tight embrace and pulled me away by the shoulders. “Think about it, okay?”

❧☙

That night, I sat in the dining room alone in the dark to wait for my parents to come home from work. The hours ticked by on the clock, a clock that reminded me of a home lost. A home regained. And a home lost again.

Even in Layer 3, where we lived, many people on the outskirts still lived in steelhouse bunches. Hall Areille was one such people. We planned on moving a little closer to the center and get ourselves a small house in a proper suburb within the next five years, but… That life wasn’t for me anymore. The interior of our home was nice and large enough. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen attachment and a little living and dining room. The clay tiled floor of the kitchen melted into the hardwood of the dining room into the beige frieze carpet of the living area. The walls were draped with patterned paper, but the way the whole home creaked in the wind reminded us what we were.

I waited in the dining room for many hours, past midnight when I could scarcely keep my eyes pried open. It had been a long day. Only the errant rhythm of my heart kept me awake. It was only a few hours before dawn when that heavy metal door scraped open, and they walked in.

“Annamarie,” Sarah said, surprised to see me there. She dropped her bags and rushed to me and put my hands in hers. “What are you still doing up?”

Her hands felt so cold, so large and rough, and unlike mine in every way. And the woman herself was a light brunette with bright eyes. Little streaks of grey started from her scalp and down to the edges of her bob, where the grey began again in the wrinkles of her cheeks. It felt like it’d been so long since I saw her so close like this. Oh no, I thought. I think I’m going to cry again.

My voice wouldn’t come out, so I gestured to the envelope I left on the table instead. I’d ripped it open so messily, but the wax seal was still mostly intact.

It told them everything they needed to know, a truth they probably already suspected of me. Why else would they have found a girl with scarlet eyes in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere?

“You’re leaving us?” Adam said. He put a hand on his wife’s head, who was already beginning to cry. His face did not let show whatever emotions he held inside. It rarely ever did. But his lip trembled, ever so slightly, and the wrinkles in his eyes crinkled more as Sarah’s cries rose just that tiny bit in volume.

“Mom,” I said. “Dad.” My voice cracked and my vision started to blur. It was the first time I’d ever called them by those names. “You’ve done so much for me, and… I’ll never forget this home you’ve given me. I have to go now, but—” I felt a tear stream down my cheek and rushed to brush it away, but there were many more than I expected. I must’ve looked a mess. “However long it takes, I’ll make sure that my better life will mean a better life for you too. And no matter what happens—” Whatever semblance of sentences I had left disintegrated into sobs. My tears mixed with snot. Gross, uncomfortable, and burning hot. And no matter how hard I scrubbed them away, they kept coming back. It felt like so long before I could manage to choke out the rest of what I wanted to say. “No matter what happens, I’ll always love you both.”

❧☙

They took the next day off work to see me off. None of us got a lick of sleep, and our eyes were red from all the crying. Mornings in Vergalis were always foggy, and the fog stayed into the afternoon. But this morning, the fog was gone. I waited at the edge of the parking lot while Sarah and Adam watched me in the distance. We had already said our goodbyes. It would be awkward for us to stick too close after that.

I felt my pocket vibrate, so I dug my phone out and found a text there from Aiden. “I don’t know what you did,” he wrote, “But thanks.”

I smiled a little, but I knew there could only be one answer to that. “Goodbye.” And I blocked him.

The rest of the wait was short there in the cold. The roads were mostly empty in this area, so that obsidian-color car that barreled down the road in the distance caught my attention right away. It peeled into the parking lot beside me and gave a heavy sigh and clunk as it parked. The driver’s door popped open, and a young lady emerged. She wore a black a-line dress with a full skirt, sewn with white thread and trimmed with white linen ruffles.

“Lady Kavesta,” she said. Her short black moto boots gave a rhythmic concrete clack as she curtsied. “I will be serving as your personal attendant for the time being.” She glanced about me. “Do you not have any belongings you wish to bring with you?”

I tugged on the cuff of the old favorite sweater I wore. It was such a shade of pinkish-red that the little drops of fresh blood I would leave on it at times were scarcely visible until they dried brown there. That sewing needle pinned to the inside of it didn’t prick me this time. Or if it did, I didn’t notice.

My thoughts were too captured already by the woman in front of me. There was something about her, this nostalgic glow that emanated from her that reminded me of the girl whose face I couldn’t remember. Whose name I’d forgotten. My autumn girl. My imagination had conjured a porcelain mask for her to wear in those vague memories I kept of her, so I was sure that if we ever met by chance on the streets, there would be no way I could recognize her. But for some reason, I felt like she would look something like this.

Suddenly, despite how it had just felt like my life was submerged in grief, I already felt my new life begin to take shape.