Lizzie never found it, the fork he hurled into the yard in pie-sick fury, until her next boyfriend’s riding mower spat it quivering an inch deep into the outside doorframe. If she’d been bringing him lemonade like a dutiful whatever it could have killed her, but she was cool in the basement, smoking the cloves she’d told him she quit. Someone once told her that cloves are to your lungs like ground glass to your stomach. She sucked hard, needing the smell, needing the scent memory to summon his exquisite face when she told him she’d pissed in the pie.
She holds Millicent’s body and passes her hand over the kitten’s eyes, closing them on blackness, opening them again.
She reaches up to her own eyes, then: feels them hard and dry, cold as glass, faceted. Ommatidia. So many pictures of the same thing.
She runs her hand over Millicent’s flank and feels how thin the kitten is, how flat, how her fur really feels like vellum. She listens for the endless chuckle. She begins to count back, from ten thousand, the number of steps she’s taken from the door of the train platform. She sniffs the air.
There’s water here.
“I’m not checking him, you check him.”
“I checked the other guy!”
“You’re on check duty.”
“You invented check duty! Yesterday! And I had it then too!”
“It’s a weekly rotation!”
“God! Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Fine!” A mutual glare, and the scruffier centurion steps up to the base of the cross.
“Hey, man, you okay?” he asks, and pokes his crappy dull twice-mended spear gently–gently, he will swear so many times in the years to come that it was gently–at the guy’s side.
He gets a face full of blood and water for his trouble.
“Oh GROSS,” Longinus sputters.
Barda and Kabe have reached the age when their bodies have no bright new rooms to discover: familiarity breeds clarity, and the cracks under the plaster show through the paint. The temples of that old metaphor are filling up with moneylenders, starting to hock their gilt.
It’s not even a very old age.
So they swing. They’re the youngest in this particular club, and that’s good for a sort of cruel elation. Two dozen eyes snap to when they enter. Eleven hearts gnaw when they pick and leave.
In other people’s beds they lie waking, watching their ceilings start to flake.
The Heavenly armada’s icebreakers shriek and boom, furnace-heated bronze hydrofoils throwing gouts of steam, but they’re not fast enough to reach the Mjish Binn base: that’s what their cargo is for. The noise of the war-saddled mammoths charging matches even the ships.
See Me straps into his snowsled while Scoop Dozen runs up the sail. “Feeling all right, sir?” Scoop calls.
“Just like new, Scoop. How about you?”
“Right now I feel I could take on the Heavens myself!”
“I know what you mean,” murmurs See Me, his blood hot and thrilling with the memory of his Princess’s skin.
“Go over them again, Davey,” says Bongo McTweedlepants warningly.
Profoctor Davey sighs. “Fine. No cussing, although I never cuss and if I did they’d bleep it.”
“Keep going!”
Davey pulls the list from his wallet. “No reading from my dissertation on eugenics. No putting the kids’ names in limericks. No giggling when I quote Balzac. No discussing forced sterilization for Kentuckians. Okay? I promise!”
“Okay,” says Bongo, still edgy. “Terry, are we almost live? Okay, cue music.”
Theme soooong!
“But I can talk about euthanasia for the colorblind, right?” says Davey, as soon as it fades.
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST,” says Bongo.
Nimbus riding normally requires thick gloves and a steam suit, but Olivette didn’t have time to find hers. She lashes the reins yet again with one hand, just to break the ice continually mounting them, but her cloud takes it as a cue to surge ahead even faster.
To her left, Perreau whoops and kicks with his etheric spurs to keep up: it’s always a game, as long as you’re not the one gambling. Their mounts spiral like sea snakes through the bronze-pink air of sunset. Olivette’s hands are numb.
Behind them, darkly gathering, the iron bellies of the storm.
But Ernestine doesn’t really listen, which is why she hasn’t locked her wrist when she punches Iala’s mouth. The fight goes quickly floorwards, and ends more quickly still, as teachers wade into Iala’s piled-on entourage: clammers deep in shrieking surf. When they finish prying, everyone’s silent about who hit whom; but there are twenty-six vengeful eyes on one side of the hallway, and one hurt wrist on the other.
Proserpina hears only later, thirdhand. Leaving her dorm to investigate, she finds Iala in her way.
“I need you to teach us some things,” Iala says, fat-lipped, bright-eyed.
Acid, Annamarie decides eventually, slipped into her first beer of the evening. Or peyote or something. She’s never tried any of them on purpose.
“Are you okay?”
The boy with floppy hair eyeing her, whose pink shirt has begun to pulse and race in her vision, may or may not be the one who dosed her. Not that it would avail him much–in fact, it’s almost unfair to let him so gravely misunderstand the situation. She tries to warn him, as obliquely as she can manage.
“Everyone I touch will die,” she says.
“Everything I touch,” says Remy agreeably, “explodes.”
Jake shouldn’t have worn the attempt at a necklace, converted from one pair in a string of broken headphones, which effectively makes him look like he’s trying to DJ backwards. His pants do nothing to contradict this. He’s lost her in the thick blind dance crowd, which shortly squeezes him out like an oil blob in a novelty egg timer.
Out back on the patio they’re playing a different song, and their instruments are bottles hurled down and out toward the basketball court. “Break shit,” advises a Phi Tau named Ogre sagely, handing him an empty tallboy. Jake concurs, and obeys.