ᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔ
"Pay the man," Marlowe said. "And gave us some space."
Bruegel smiled. It was a sickening expression on such a greasy man; it widened, like an opening wound, as Shion pulled the wallet from his pocket and started to count out dishevelled curled-edge bills, pushing them from one hand to the other with the seasoned speed of a teenager with more experience on the black market than he was willing to admit. "No cash."
"No cash?" Shion exasperated. "For fuck's sake, Att–"
"Space," Marlowe said again, his voice low. It brokered naught but obedience; it was a tone of voice that Shion had not heard from him since his retirement. Even Bruegel, the bastard, acquiesed, though – of course – he managed to make it seem as though it had been his own idea, meandering towards the edge of the study and hauling open the doors at the threshold.
"Tea," the commander added, almost as an afterthought, catching Shion half-way through his retreat. "Tea as well."
"Space," Shion repeated. "And tea."
"And pay the man."
He would, if he could find out how. Grumbling under his breath, Shion trailed Bruegel back into the cramped hallway through which they had entered, and further into the depths of his enormous penthouse. Bruegel was relentless with the frequency of his redecoration; even doors in this place appeared to change place between visits. Shion could have sworn that the kitchen was behind the sixth door, but Bruegel today led him through the eighth, where they found a space largely indistinguishable from any of his libraries provided one could mentally replace book with dirty mug. Teacups, Shion despaired, teacups everywhere. Did Bruegel survive on theaflavins alone? It was the academic's version of the intoxicant-fuelled diets of near-starvation that so many scabs had pursued with a telling hunger; Shion was no stranger to it, particularly in the days after Eteri had been taken.
Marlowe had started cooking him dinners.
Bruegel said, again, "no cash."
Shion slapped the faded piles of cotton bills onto the clearest space he could find in the kitchen and said, "tender is tender."
He had made the immortal mistake of trying to sound like Marlowe; that was easy to see through, that was an easy veil to pierce. Shion Tsuji was not the finest negotiator, but a decent incarnation was better than a perfect impression, and this impression was very far from perfect. He could tell it was so, by the way that Bruegel's smile curled around a dimple, like the corner of a burning page, and simply turned around to find a teapot amongst the clutter. There was nothing more insulting, Shion thought, than a fencer who refused to fence.
Shion ran a finger over the curling edge of a bill, noting the little splatters of blood that marked its corners. It might have belonged to Mavronéri; he couldn't say for sure. He said, in his own voice, "I'm surprised she's still here."
Bruegel eyed him.
"She belonged to the Labyrinth," Shion said. "By rights." Whatever that meant. "You've condemned more to worse for less, so –"
"Careful," Bruegel said. "Careful what you say."
The Labyrinth had to be fed. That was what Bruegel always said. The Labyrinth demanded flesh.
Shion was very tired of being careful around this monster. His fingers itched for the handle of the roscoe that he had concealed in his waistband, but he managed to resist. By the very tip of his teeth, he managed to resist – what would Marlowe say? He would never forgive Shion if the young soldier's temper lost them this, their last and best chance, at ending this whole rotten business.
"You had best," Bruegel said, "have a good plan."
He had found a teapot, and he filled it now with the kind of clean water about which Shion had spent many nights dreaming. It came boiling from the faucet, sparkling and transparent – was that a fragrance, or was Shion merely dreaming that it might have been? Eteri had made a religion of tea-making and tea-drinking and tea-hoarding, box upon box piled upon the bookshelf over her bed. Shion had always thought that she might have liked to surround them with books as well, but those were precious – too rareified for a soldier's salary. Instead, there had been the records on the floor and ticket stubs on the wall and unravelling maps of the city on the vanity, where another, prettier, cleaner, girl might have kept her poetry.
Shion said, "we have a plan."
He purposefully avoided the g word; to what small credit he was due, Bruegel did not push. He said, "Odenkirk has been asking around about the Labryinth as well. He pretends that he isn't, but I've seen that man more this month than in five years of working with him."
"Is that so?" Shion watched Bruegel prepare the tea. He was doing it out of order; he was adding the tea leaves first, heaps of schreave and dunin and iriji blends, and pouring the water on top of them lazily. Eteri would have choked. "Out of his own interest?"
"Siegfried," Bruegel said dismissively, "doesn't have interests of his own."
That wasn't quite fair but it wasn't quite untrue either. Ziggy sold girls to Bruegel and information to Marlowe – Shion had never figured out whose side the fixer was on. My own, he'd probably say, in that self-satisfied, rogueish way that scabs had, as though they were saying anything that hadn't been said before by a thousand renegades with brighter hair and braver hearts. Fucking deplorables, Shion thought, and ran a hand across his pink-stained skull, thinking again that a scalping was in order.
His hair was too long. Soon the black would be visible again, and he'd lose any credibility. Who would respect a man in anything but hot-pink?
ᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔ
The first thing Valentine Marlowe did, once his twitchy apprentice had departed with Atticus, was cross the library in long, confident strides and throw open the curtains which had stained the light dapple-dark with shade and gloom. She did not withdraw from the light, as she had half-expected herself to do, but moved towards it like a sunflower unfurling in search of sunshine. To his credit, Valentine Marlowe moved not a single muscle as she came to his side slowly, reluctantly, and stared through the windows that Atticus had been careful to keep hidden from her since the very day that she had awoken, hurting and confused, in her bed here.
The city unfurled before them, more immense than anything she had dared to dream of, more gorgeous and decadent than anything she could remember glimpsing even in her nightmares. It was all glass and metal, gleaming with the kind of wonderful sheen that could only shiner so brightly for the grit below. The building opposite Atticus's looked as though someone had hammered out the sun on a blacksmith's anvil – it was all glimmering copper-coloured struts and stained glass: a cathedral to luxury itself.
She hated it.
And he knew that she did.
Did he really trust her? Did he really believe that she had survived the Elimination? Did he really think that she had escaped the Labryinth?
She didn't dare to ask. Her back still ached from its butchery, where the lines and slashes and notches had been deeply carved into some semblance of communication. Atticus had purposefully given her a shirt which dipped low in the back, so that they would be on full display; she was too torn between gratitude for the garment and resentfulness at the strange vulnerability that it forced upon her. Valentine Marlowe had made a point of not looking; she rather wished that he would. Just to get it over with. It would feel like a justification for why it had happened.
It would make her feel like it had mattered.
But no. He was watching the city. There was a screen hanging at the periphery of their shared field of vision, its edge out of view. The new Selection. A new crop of girls. How many of them had Atticus sent to their deaths?
Valentine Marlowe said, "you can't remember your name?"
"I don't remember anything," she said. That wasn't true, but she ignored the little voice in her skull telling her so. Was that the ghost of the girl she had been, still haunting her sinews? "I don't have a name."
"Would you like one?"
She blinked. Of all the ways that Atticus had scripted this exchange for her – all of the directions in which she thought that it could have spiralled – this was most unexpected. She said, "did you have one in mind?"
"I'll think of one," he said. In his deep baritone, individual words were almost difficult to pick out; it all seemed to meld into a single rumble, like listening to the skycar roll overhead. That was something she could remember, very vividly: how the lightbulb would sway with the rhythms of the tram above the building. "You can say no to it. If you want. But I'll think of one."
"Given your speech," she said. She was surprised by her own voice: it rasped, as though she had not spoken for years, as though she was trying to sieve her words out through her own sharpened teeth. "I thought you would have more important things to think about."
"I have people to think for me," he said. He said that earlier – we have people. Who did he think would be able to get into – and get out of – the Labryinth alive? He didn't seem delusional, but…. "And I can multitask."
She said, "I really can't remember anything about it, you know."
"That's alright."
She doubted very much that it was.
"Your daughter," she said. "Eteri Tsulukidze." She rolled the word over her tongue, veritably savouring it. It was all hiss and flick – tsu-lu-ki-dze. "She's probably dead now, you know."
"It's been three years since she was Eliminated," he said. "I think it would be preferable if she was."
What an odd thing to say, in a voice so soft and gentle, more the impression of words than anything properly enunciated.
She could not help the tension which crept along her shoulders when he said that. She could not help tensing. There was something savage in her – something which was not reasoned, something which did not, in particular, respond to prompting or to stimulus, but which nonetheless saw an opportunity to rear its head and snarl. Did her parents – wherever they were – think the same of her? She could no longer even imagine their faces, but the thought nonetheless ached in the way that heartbreak must: was someone out there, wishing that she was dead, pretending it was love to hope so?
Neither looked at the other. They were both still staring out over the city, watching the skytrain worm its way around the walls of the Districts, gleaming like a silver bullet fired from some helpful hidden revolver.
After a moment, Valentine Marlowe said, "Neith."
"Hmm?"
"A name."
"Neith."
"You don't have to take it."
"Like the goddess?"
"I wouldn't pretend to know."
She eyed him from beneath her hair, and hid a smile. As the door re-opened behind them, and Atticus and the boy with the baggy jacket and the pink buzz-cut came back into the room, she brought one hand out of her pocket and extended to Valentine Marlowe.
"Alright," Neith said. "Consider me one of your people."
ᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔᚄᚑᚏᚏᚔᚃᚑᚏᚈᚆᚓᚇᚓᚂᚐᚔ