certainty

There were moving pictures now, jerking little reels of grainy grey film on which engineers could record movement and sight just as a phonograph recorded music and sound. Myghal had, with difficulty, set up a projector for them in the featureless meeting room, one of their first days back, so that Khalore could see how it worked, could watch horses gallop in place and crowds of people wave awkwardly into the future. Ina had watched from the stairs, unwilling – unable – to come closer.

Ina had watched herself return to Irij a thousand times now. They'd filmed that, of course. She still couldn't read the expression on her own face, when she had stepped off again onto the familiar docks of Opona. Home. It ought to have been home. Each time, she stared: grainy film Ina stared back, eyes dark, mouth twisted. Was this a Warrior triumphant? Couldn't the crowds, pressed close, tell the difference? It was strange: watched thus, frozen on celluoid, she could believe for a few moments that everyone was stringless like Eero. If only, she thought. In thriving Opona, ever more so than the dying caged Illéa, she was eternally bound up in string, puppet more than puppetmaster.

She was bound for the border, where there was trouble to be stymied and revolt to be quashed. She would have preferred they had chosen another, but that would have condemned another. Of course, they had chosen her reluctantly. Inanna had the overwhelming impression, watching the brass chitter to one another in their gravelly tones each week at debriefing, that they had been despondent about the crop of Warriors that had returned. Where, indeed, was great broad Ghjuvan and his disappearing act, Azula and her barbed tongue, Kinga the monstrous? They had only these ephemeral curses left to them, and Khalore had selfishly, thoughtlessly, maliciously, crippled herself; she was being made useful again, but slowly, slowly. When Inanna arrived for their usual Wednesday apéritif, it was to find her sister with a new long wound on her face, pin-thin. They had pushed needles under her cheek, a whole set of them for the whole day long, and she displayed them now in a little white case, nestled in crushed grey velvet.

Ilja said, "so how are they different from before?"

"They are sanctified now," Khalore said in mocking, droning tones of great piety. "Washed in blood most unholy."

Ilja picked one up, and spun it between his fingers. It was like a tiny splinter of heaven; it gleamed as silver as an excubitor's blade. He said, "cursed needles, to do our cursed darning?"

Inanna said, "that's an embroidery needle, Iliusha."

He shot her a derisory look that softened rapidly into concern as she set the usual care package for Zuen on the pavement beside his chair. She smiled, and slid into the third seat at their usual table beneath the red canopy at Café Morozov. They had ordered without her; they had ordered for her. She took a sip without inspecting it, and found that it was bitter, like something sbagliato. The crushed petals of the blue flowers Hani cultivated on her windowsill – tears-of-Siarka – floated, melancholy, atop the drink.

They were playing a film-reel inside the café, projected upon the wall, men moving like malfunctioning automatons in greyscale and tintype. It caught Inanna's eye, like a bramble might catch at fabric, and it was with difficulty that she looked away, as though she had been caught watching something she should not. It was only the news: it was only the world in motion around them, even as Opona seemed to calcify and crystallise all about them, unyielding and forever-esque.

There were strikes at a mine in New Asia; they were beginning to be disruptive. Ilja would be despatched there shortly: he was the ingratiating sort, Inanna was coming to realise, though she had known him her life entire and had begun to wonder whether there was more to know. He had ingratiated himself quite thoroughly with her, but there were moments – he smiled white and wide like Ghjuvan now, and sipped his drink in precise synchronicity with Khalore, and smoothed his hair like he was Zoran – that Inanna wondered how much of her darling remained. What would be the tell? When would they be able to tell that he was gone, and only the habits borne forward from another remained?

Chariots, more than the rest, simply faded.

The Chariot said, "I have a meeting in the chancellery tomorrow, so I can't stay out too long tonight."

Famous last words, Inanna thought, and Khalore said, "gosh, the chancellery." She put a hand to her forehead as though in swoon. "Oh, I'll always say I knew you when you were just starting out."

Ilja shook off her idiocy with his usual good humour, focused on Ina. "So, when are you off?"

"End of the week," said Inanna.

The thread between them flexed and shook in an invisible breeze: the day was bright and the air exceptionally still, as though the very sky was frozen by the early winter chill. Would the air still like this when the Radiance was eventually unleashed? They had heard nothing more of it, though Belle was Ina's perpetual silent companion on her perennial pilgrimage to the Security Bureau's prison complex on the eastern side of the city.

"You'll be back before you know it."

Ilja shook his head. The humour had slipped from his mouth. "Don't jinx it, Khal."

Ina took another sip of her drink; tears-of-Siarka caught in her teeth, like she had torn the throat out of a flowery opponent, splitting tendrils and vines with her canines. She would travel over Siarka on her way to the border tomorrow. She had heard it described many a time, but she had never ventured so far from the city and the docks: it was the heartland of homeland, where the Warriors had first turned against empire and the first tears-of-Siarka had sprouted in the place where the first Lover had fallen and the dark magic had stained sky and grass unnatural colours, a miniature druj-world unto itself.

"Yeah," Khalore said, and then, quite pointedly, "you know, I'd really feel better about all of this if we had a steer."

It was an exceptionally cold day, and the wind did not stir even the flyaway hairs that had escaped from Khalore's twin braids. Inanna examined the crystal stem of her glass. A nearby waiter was taking an order from a patron in hushed tones, clearly anxious not to disturb his illustrious customers when they had grown, for the moment, so very quiet.

Ilja cleared his throat. "They're talking about bringing in an oracle," he said. "Like the old days."

"They should," Ina said, a little more sharply than she had intended. "We shouldn't have to stumble around in the dark like this. Only three years in. Four."

"Three," said Khalore, softly.

"Four," said Ina, and then, softening, conciliatory – "I'm rounding up."

Khalore set her hand on Ina's. "Oh," she said, rather airily, "you know what I'm like with arithmetic."

"Your deficiency does seem to flare up whenever we have to settle a tab," Inanna said.

Ilja coughed out a laugh like Kinga's. Khalore swung on him, and he smiled until she had relented and laughed as well. "I'm developing a reputation?"

"The reputation is developed," Ilja said. "Embrace it. Myghal is about to put a lien on your wages, mark me."

"I rather suspect they've been going to him in the first place," Khalore said. "I've barely seen a penny of it."

"Well," Ilja said, "have you been to Merchant's Quarter? There was a seamstress shop with suspiciously nice drapes last time I was there..."

"You do probably owe rent at this point," Ina said, at the same moment, so that their voices overlapped and tangled like the threads between them. "You know, Ilja's getting lonely in barracks."

"We should all be in barracks," Ilja said. "We're all still Warriors."

It was late in the afternoon, or early in the evening: the sun was hanging low and desultory in the sky, reluctant to sink for fear of what it might miss. There was a chill starting to sink into the cobbles – maybe she was alone in feeling it. Ilja had rolled up his sleeves like Pekka would have. Khalore was wearing a skirt that bared her knees, and the places that the Illéan harness had bitten into her skin during their escape.

Inanna said, "then we should all act like it."

Ilja shook his head, but could summon no argument.

Inanna saw it, and ran a finger around the edge of her drink, and bit back the words that tried to follow. All of her edges felt harsh and crystalline. There had been a Hanged Man like that in the ninth generation, with broken-glass skin slicing open any who had touched her. Inanna had always pitied her, backwards through the years, from her vantage point where her sympathy could leave no wounds.

She doused her lips in another drink, and said, "will you see me off on Friday?"

Ilja smiled. "Of course. For my own peace of mind. I'll have to make sure you're actually gone."

She rolled her eyes. "And keep an eye on Nanshe for me?"

Khal squeezed her hand. The purple thread that bound their wrists was metallic and solid, like the cable that would hold up a bridge, more a chain than string. It had darkened in colour until it was very nearly the same as the navy that tied Ilja to Inanna, and maybe there was no difference in the colour at all any more except that Inanna remembered what it had once been.