dénouement

Starting over had, at first, sounded as sweet as a ripe orange – like shedding a skin. It offered the strange, tantalising appeal as a dramatic haircut or a new ostentatious coat: the idea that the self could be carved and crafted and sculpted and sewn together again seamlessly.

Ina, more than anyone else, had clung to it. It had dried her eyes. It had steadied her hands. She had a particular iron focus when she needed to. She liked to hold things together whenever she found herself on the cusp of falling apart. Ilja had always considered it her worst quality.

She could leave it behind now if she wanted to. She could choose to forget. The beauty of starting over again.

And sometimes, starting over was just… unwieldy. Like now: they were in temporary accommodation, assigned to a small set of rooms at the top of a curving, rotting, set of wooden stairs at the top of a crooked, rotting, wooden building on the edge of the city. Every time the wind moved across the spires of the town, Ilja thought that he could hear the entire structure groaning for respite and shifting beneath the enormous weight of its new cursed burden. The boys were in one room, and the girls were in another, and they gathered in a third for moments like this when the loneliness of their new position in the world threatened to devour them whole. He wasn't sure if any heed had been taken of their closeness, whether they should have feigned a dignified distance from one another, whether it would have made any difference at all.

Khalore said, "you could help, instead of staring."

"You're not helping either."

She had gestured angrily at the bandages wrapped around the stump of her arm, and Ilja had stared at her with faux-ignorance. She had bled through them three days ago; they were more brown than white now. There weren't enough supplies going around – there wasn't gauze to spare. Ina had pilfered this much; even Khalore, needy as she could be, was clearly loathe to ask her for more.

She said, "I have an excuse, Schovajsa."

Ilja chuckled. "You always do."

Ina made a soft sound of warning. She and Zoran had been poring together over Matthias's notes, the narrow table in front of them flowering with tiny scraps of paper upon which a spiderprint handwriting had crawled across every spare inch of space.

Khalore scowled at him. Her gaze was alive and angry and acrid. "What did you say?"

He smiled blithely at her, and then winced as a belt landed with a dull thwack on his shoulder – not too hard, but hard enough to chide. He rocked his head back, hair falling into his eyes, and spoke lazily: "I thought we agreed we wouldn't do that in public, lover."

Ghjuvan Mannazzu rolled his eyes. "Play nice. Please."

"Is it time already?" Ina had half-turned from her place by the window; Zoran was rubbing at his eyes, blearily; he looked exhausted. Did they all look so tired? There was something about the air in Illéa which stole the breath from your lungs. It starved you.

"Makes the most sense to go now," Ghjuvan was saying. His voice sounded very far away, dreamily tinny. "Kinga's just back, and she says –"

Kinga's voice cut in, brusque and lovely. "She says that the bread line is very short."

"Army," Ina said, "are we sure? The army?"

Ilja had smiled, even as he stood, even as he had wrenched the belt from Ghjuvan's hand and flashed a smirk back at his fellow Warrior's paternally admonishing look. "The more things change," he had said. "And here I'd hoped for a blank slate. A fresh start."

"No such thing," Ghjuvan had said, "as a fresh start."

Ilja Schovajsa had woken in the middle of the night, believing he had heard someone cry – Inanna, in the next room, or Khalore, in the room beyond that, or Zoran, in the room opposite – but there was nothing, nothing, nothing. If it had not been Ina, Ilja wondered, if it had not been Lore and it had not been Zor, perhaps he himself was weeping. He found his face, found a stranger's features beneath his fingertips, found that it was dry. Then he looked at the grey-slate window and thought: why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain; he had turned over, sadder still – was that possible? was there a depth to which he had yet to descend? – and fumbled about for his dripping sleep, and tried to slip it back on.

He did not succeed. He had been dreaming of Ghjuvan, he had been dreaming of Illéa, and now he had awoken long before the sunrise. He lay exhausted and wakeful on the hard cot, with his eyes closed, thinking of the years and years that they had dreamed of still living. As the dawn splintered across the window, there was a stirring in the room across the hall, barely audible; Zoran had awoken, and Zoran was pacing. His footsteps continued, feverishly, without abate; within itself, that was a comfort: even as they drew to the close, some things in this world were still familiar. Had they been good enough to remove the mirrors from his room, or was Zoran treading a deep trough through the future?

Living together for so long had eroded any inclination in Khalore for asking permission to enter a room: around nine o'clock, she had shoved open the door and sat heavily on the end of Ilja's bed with a world-weary sigh. In the silver light of the early morning, she was paler than he had ever seen her, as though Irij had opened a new vein in her throat and bled her dry. She said, "I thought you might appreciate being woken."

One of Ilja's arms hung over the bed; his fingertips traced the grain in the wooden floorboards. "I might."

Khalore tipped sideways until she was lying beside him, just out of joint, her head lying beside his elbow, one leg thrown over one of his. He hadn't realised that he was cold until this warmth had arrived beside him. She said, "retirement doesn't suit me."

"I didn't expect that it would."

"Myghal looked..."

Ilja said nothing. He allowed her to find her words, though she took her time in doing so.

"Old," Khalore said at last, and Ilja could not find that he disagreed with her.

He turned his head towards her. The freckles on her nose looked practically black in the wan illumination of the faraway sun. She had closed her eyes; the shadows beneath looked like dark wounds. Ilja thought again about oranges and belts and creaking wood.

"Muster?" he murmured, and Khalore nodded tiredly into her arms.

The more things changed. The clocktower over the sacellum was tolling nine as he rose and readied for the day: there was a regulation uniform hanging lonely in the wardrobe of this borrowed room, the rough-spun cotton of the shirt's collar reminding him of the cadet uniform in which they had been stranded in Irij all those months ago. Those garments had been progressively shredded: some had been used as bandages for Khalore's arm and Kinga's eye, as rags, as slings, as patches for the new Illéan clothes that they had slowly started to accumulate, like so many bruises.

Ilja hadn't cared about that so much; he had, however, wanted to keep his boots, but those had been stolen during their time in the refugee camp in Nav District. There were a pair of boots waiting for him inside the wardrobe, polished to a silvery perfection; he pulled them on, and tested them across the room in a long stride. This room was small and irregularly shaped, more like an office than a bedroom; the floorboards had been warped over many years of cadet traffic, boot-shod as Ilja was now. Khalore was wearing the same uniform: a charcoal gray shirt with blood-red cuffs and a steel gray pair of trousers with red piping along the hem.

She held out a black piece of crepe. Ilja stared at it for a moment.

She said, "we're Warriors now."

"We always have been."

She twitched her fingers. He accepted it from her, and then realised the difficulty in tying it around his own arm; Khalore held in place as he did so, his fingers moving clumsy and slow as though still in deep sleep.

He looked down at it. They hadn't worn one before; they hadn't been given one on the way to the docks, that first day, when they had first departed for Illéa. It was a strange, stark symbol. It was like he was already in mourning for them: for his Warriors and for the Ilja that he had been.

Next door, there was a stutter in Zoran's pacing, like a heart murmur, as though he had lost his thread of thought, and then, as Khalore and Ilja left the room, it resumed once more with a passion.

Ilja said, "should we…?"

Khalore hesitated.

He nodded. She touched his hand, and moved ahead of him in the hallway. The day had dawned bright and damp; the air was crisp and cool with the memory of rain just fallen. The morning sun, too, seemed like so much liquid silver, spinning a spiderweb silhouette of the Warrior waiting for them on the stone steps leading up to the officer's hall.

Inanna Nirari was wearing the same uniform as they: a grey shirt and a long grey skirt. Her inky black hair hung damp around her shoulders and waist, shinier than Ilja could ever remember seeing it before. Her fingers were knotted in front of her; she was avoiding their eyes, her face cast downwards. In Irij, magic had always seemed somehow less credible: the dark scars running down Ina's face was a horrifically stark reminder of the place that they had been and the people that they had become. She still looked strange, and sad, and scornful; as Ilja and Khalore drew closer, she acknowledged them with a sharp nod, but said nothing.

The gold-fretted city spilled out before the stone steps on which they stood; Ilja turned his back on it, and examined his old friend with a critical eye. "Did you sleep at all, Na?"

"No," Ina said. Her voice creaked with exhaustion. She had wanted to spend the night at home with her family; the officers had refused her permission. It was a hideously weighty irritation, these new constraints. In Illéa, he thought, they had been their own masters. Warriors, not soldiers. "Not at all."

Ilja would never have told her how well the mourning band suited her.

Khalore said, "they'll probably let us go home after the debriefing. For a night, at least."

Ilja wondered what she, of all people, meant by home.

"They want to see Zoran separately," Ina said.

Khalore sounded nervous. "Does that mean they want to see us together?"

Ilja hoped so.

There were Irij people passing in the street below; they stared up at the gathered Warriors, unapologetically, their gazes fixed upon their armbands and their faces. They wanted to see their curses; they wanted to see their devilry. Ilja imagined that they were the only Kur permitted to stand about in this neighbourhood thus, without clear objective, without clear purpose. Kur, he thought again. There had been no point drawing that distinction in Illéa: they had been devils among devils.

Their monstrousness was again apparent.

They were slow as they moved down the steps, as though dragging out the inevitable, as though by proscrastinating thus they could hold back the inevitable. Ilja found the tips of his fingertips buzzing slightly, alive with uncertainty. Were they really walking to a discussion on their own imminent butchery? They had been away for less than a year; they had nearly a decade to go. The Irij war machine could not possibly have ground out another set of candidates in such a short timeframe.

They were not stopped as they crossed the street and moved down the wide, broad avenue towards the bureau office. That was, Ilja thought, to be expected: where would they go? Who would stop them? They were xrafstars. There could be no good answer to either question.

Orfeas Halkias was waiting for them outside the office of the Security Bureau. It was an enormous grey stone building, practically cube-shaped, set a little higher in the road than the other buildings so that it seemed to survey all that fell within its realm. The windows in its face were tinted obsidian black, so that one could not look inside; banners bearing the Irij coat of arms hung from the ceiling, shining red and yellow in the warming day.

The chancellor's maven was a strangely familiar figure: unlike the Commandant or the Instructor, the third Champion had arrived only annually to view the candidates from afar during the yearly inspection, hawk-like in countenance and demeanour alike. He was wearing a long black coat. Ilja could not help but feel a little smug to see that he bore no red cuffs. A small solace, he thought, in a world that had taken so much from them.

"Please," Orfeas said. The last time Ilja had seen him, he had thrown them to the druj. He looked so much older now: there were new lines engraved beside his narrowed eyes, beside his perpetually downturned mouth. "Let's not tarry."

He was chiding them into the bureau's building: the walls and floor were all sterile white, partially covered with enormous Nawian rugs. There were photographs hanging in the foyer, and typewriters sitting on the desks, and guards with guns standing beside the door. There was a black phone with a silver dial-wheel sitting on a table beside the doorway towards which they were being herded; Ilja found himself staring at it, without quite knowing why.

Khalore nudged him. He glanced at her. She smiled, and nodded at the phone. When she spoke, it was with a conspiratorial air: "would have put Ghju out of a job in Illéa."

Ilja could not help but laugh.

The door was pulled open; an Irij commander in their customary brown uniform stood before them. Behind him, Ilja could see a long grey table, behind which sat a panel of Irij officers, similarly garbed. They had faces like granite: it permitted no softness, no humanity. The man at the door regarded the teenagers as he might have regarded a new set of rifles.

"Thank you, Halkias. That will be all."

Ilja was still peering around him, searching the room for the Commandant, for the Instructor, for Frida or for Preacher. Ina was speaking, her voice was wondrously soft. "How long do you think this should take, Mr. Halkias?"

Orfeas shot her a dark look. "As long as it needs to."

"The mission was a success," Ina said. Was she testing the threads again? Her voice had that honeyed texture to it, which suggested she was.

"So this shouldn't take much longer than a day," the Irij commander said. "But much can change in three years. Every detail you can share about the Kur remnant could greatly assist our future offensives."

Khalore reflexively smiled. "Three years," she repeated. She was on the verge of laughing, or maybe crying, and before the authoritative gaze of the Irij commander, Ilja could not even bring himself to reach out to touch her shoulder as he might have at home.

The commander stepped back, and indicated that they should follow him into the room. Orfeas Halkias retreated back, looking irritated at his exclusion. Ilja inched forward, his curse searching for something to latch onto as it had once latched onto the palace. Ina strode forward, her long skirt whipping about her legs, looking every inch the irritated Warrior.

Khalore stood at the threshold of the interrogation room. She looked at Ilja, and she looked at Ina, and she said, again, "three years."

Ilja could practically taste ripe oranges on the tip of his tongue.

Ina spoke, hollow. "I barely felt it go by."