Tomokava inhaled deeply and unleashed an enormous grin. Her hands floated out to her sides as she entered the square of the ruined city, and she spoke, in a voice that tinkled and echoed around her form.
“I win, Mr. Kettle.”
In this darkness, the little amber lights tracking down streets and tracing the fragmented building faces were like a procession of fireflies. Large oval shapes of pale white shone in the distance, scattered around the far square, floating through the ruins of the streets like phantoms, and across the rooftops that surrounded her. The oval shapes bobbed and swayed, emitting harsh clicks and whooping bird calls that echoed across the large square.
The girl leapt one, two, then three great steps forward, waving her arms around her body, and her dress floated behind her. Her movement left a trail of vaporous afterimages, impressions of her limbs upon the air that followed her movement in a ripple of delayed motion.
Suddenly, she felt something pulling her attention towards it, far off ahead and high over many of the crumbling structures of the city.
“The observer,” she whispered in awe, eyes set towards Luinosa in her tower. “I am seen. O, to be seen. Hello little girl! Look at those adorable fox ears.” Tomo waved at the tiny being perched in the distance, who watched her back through a spyglass.
The glimmering shards that constituted Tomo’s face began to arrange themselves into positions relative to one another, obfuscating their edges as they settled. Her sparkling olive skin took on a firmer quality, from her cheeks down to her neck and collarbones; her arms, feet, fingers and toes. Her eyes, a rotating transfiguration of unknown colors, traveling round endlessly black pupils, caught the sight of the string of little caged lights along the city streets, and imbued themselves with its quality. Her hair, full of endless motion, as waves on a turbulent sea, rested on a deep fuschia from the crown, and faded out into its floating ends as an ethereal, cloudy pink.
The haze that surrounded and followed Tomo fell in towards her, and in joining with her body, gave her a quality of extra-corporeality.
“I feel so much more life here.”
The monsters that took notice of this strange luminous being haunched low to the ground, and began crawling tentatively towards her on all fours. Their movement was quiet and deliberate. Their faces floated curiously ahead of them, issuing a glow like moonlight, marred by their dark, joyless grins. After the first one of them caught sight of Tomo, another followed suit, then another. There were now five of them, skulking towards the girl, who turned with slow pirouettes near a shattered, empty fountain down some steps near the center of the city square.
“I see ghost faces,” she said, and stopped turning instantly. “Greetings, luminous beings of this mysterious city.” She held the frayed lace edges of her dress and curtsied before the closest of the bright-faces, who cocked its head nearly ninety degrees in scrutiny of Tomo.
“Do you like pets? Maybe you get a pit-pat on your beautiful glowing face,” she said, leaning over with her hands on her knees, coming closer to one of the creatures.
The bright-face chittered and recoiled with confusion. The sound was a series of metallic staccato chirps, issuing from behind the mask-like facade, deep inside of its sagging throat.
A sudden sound began soaring up and across the square. It was a siren, a wail that rose mournfully and then went diving down again, resonating from many hidden places all over the city. A voice followed, that crackled and faltered.
“Hmm, we’ve sounded the alarm,” Tomo said. “Have you ever been arrested before, sir?” She asked the bright-face. “Do you have any warrants? I warrant you don’t. I’m wanted in three universes. I’ve got a bounty on my head.”
The bright-faces stood on their hind quarters, lifting their enormous heads and scanning the open square with bright eyes. Upright and so close to Tomo, they towered over her. Tomo watched them with curiosity, as one by one the creatures returned their attention to her, shambling forward even closer.
“Do you not have your own thoughts? I can’t hear them. Maybe you keep them separate…” she wondered, scratching her chin with a finger. “Do you have your own thought-form?” she asked.
Another of the creatures appeared, and joined the pack surrounding Tomo. Then another. She was encircled by them, all dipping and tilting their heads while smiling their constructed smiles. The hinges on their jawlines creaked as they opened and closed their gaping mouths.
“You’re wearing a mask,” Tomo held out her small hand, and sought to lay it on the chin of the closest of the bright-faces that leered down upon her. “Underneath there is a binding of shadow-flesh. I see now. Whoever made you must be very creative.”
Almost in unison, the creatures ignited their eyes, blasting Tomo with many beams of haunting light. Tomo raised both of her hands to her cheeks and spread her fingers wide. The light that bathed her from so many sources seemed to burn out her own gentle luminescence. The form of Tomo became a diaphanous, two-dimensional projection, revealing a quivering of shadow shapes within her small body. The shadows were little winged things, fluttering across and around her chest, resting gently against the borders of her ribcage, and then taking flight again.
They were little moths.
“Oooh,” she said, closing her eyes, with her mouth slightly agape. “Free recharge station. It feels warm. You’ve made the little ones in my heart happy. What kind of light is that?”
Tomo opened her eyes, alerted once again to a presence.
“Observers. More hidden watchers are watching us!” she proclaimed to the bright-faces. “Should we put on a show? We should get on each other's shoulders. But… I have to go on top, because I’m much littler than you all. I don’t think I can hold one of you on mine.”
One of the bright-faces leering at Tomo from behind the first, burst violently forward with its mouth agape, exposing an abyss rimmed with rows of crowded black teeth, tiny and sharp. It knocked the leading creature to the side as it lunged at Tomo, who stood gripping the sides of her lace-layered dress. In that moment, one of the other bright-faces crouching closer nearby responded to the movement of its kind, desperate to reach her first. The two came down upon Tomo with their hungry mouths, simultaneously.
The first to reach her was the closer, and its gaping maw snapped shut upon the top half of Tomo’s body. As it lifted its face up and opened its jaws to swallow her whole, another of the creatures darted near, bit down hard on one of Tomo’s bare legs, and tore her out of the mouth of the first. Her body was whipped back and forth twice, before another ravenous creature in the pack bullied its way close and caught her top half in its jaws down to her chest. One of Tomo’s legs dangled free, which was quickly snatched by another bright-face mouth, and the three monsters fought to win their piece by tearing it away.
Tomo burst and the stomach, and a cloud of black moths scattered at the spot where she was divided. They fluttered in a circle, and then into the darkness of the night. The two that fought over her lower half tore viciously in opposite directions, as the remaining bright-faces desperately jockeyed for a better position to take part. She split again, and each of her legs was devoured quickly. The floating remnants of her dress slowly found their way to the cracked ground before the ruined fountain, where they turned to cinder, and vanished.
The victorious bright-faces tilted their ghastly visages towards the sky as their throats illuminated in digestion. They let out their haunting cry, a mimicry of the city siren, to the red sun that had dimmed into a sphere of dead stone.
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Luinosa pulled her face away from the longscope. “Turn it off,” she whispered to Alto. “She’s gone.”
“Give me the scope. Maybe there’s someone else…”
“There’s no one else. Turn off the siren,” Luinosa whined, hugging the scope close to her chest.
Alto turned a key near his control port, and the alarm siren died away.
“We’ll have to make a report about this. I’ll have to make a report. You need to hurry back to mom’s and throw yourself into bed. And you need to pretend you weren’t - are you crying?”
Luinosa turned herself away from Alto, staring out over the city. She hid her face, but her voice betrayed her with a quiver.
“She was an angel. And they ripped her apart.”
“A dirty angel? There aren’t any humans left in the world, Lu. Not for a long time now.”
“No, I said an angel.”
Alto pressed his lips together and breathed deeply, then held his hand out for the scope.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Lu. I’ve only seen them once before, during my first dimming. This is why we’ve built all of this, I hope you understand now that-”
“This is why we are trapped here you mean?”
“Well, the Casiq has been laying out a plan, we’ve got to follow each-”
“Are we being punished?” she asked, furrowing her brow in thought.
“What, Lu? What?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Luinosa said, and whipped out the scope. She aimed it at the square again, and found that pack of bright-faces that swayed in the darkness near the fountain. “We’re gonna find a way out of this place. And live in a different way.”
“Don’t talk like that, Lu.”
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“I’m going to, at least. I can’t be here anymore”
“Luinosa.”
“You can stay. But one day, I’m going to leave.”
Just then, from the midst of those entranced monsters down in the city, Luinosa witnessed a strange spectacle. The bright-faces’ throats shook, and their bodies were ignited from within like lightning passing through storm clouds.
“They’re lighting up…”
“Yea. They do that, after they… after they eat.”
Streams of light snaked out from the bodies of a handful of the gathered monsters, spiraling over their tilted faces, and joining into a single vortex of gleaming mist just above them. The spiral condensed further, and consolidated into a fierce pinpoint of light; a small glowing orb, that began to float higher over the pack of bright-faces.
“There’s a little star… it came out of them.”
“They have bright eyes, Lu.” Alto was becoming anxious. He stepped forward and put his hand over the scope. “Give me the scope and go home. I have to go down and report.”
The orb of light rose ruther, and meandered its way toward the buildings at the outer edge of the city square. Lu followed it with her bare, wide eyes, and the scope passed gently from her hands to Alto’s. She pointed, and looked with amazement at Alto.
“Did you see?!”
“Go!” he snarled at her. “I’m not kidding around anymore!”
“Okay! Okay.” she said, distracted. She dashed over to the ladder that descended down to the upper hallways of the watchtower circuit.
“Straight to bed, and for your sake, I hope that mother hasn’t gotten up!”
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Through the labyrinthian passages of the overcity’s unprotected buildings, Luinosa moved low, with her hood pulled snugly over her head. She found a window on the second floor of a building that immediately disintegrated into an open, crumbling alley. From this vantage point, she could see some of the watchtowers. She angled herself as much as she could, attempting to find Alto’s tower.
“This should be it,” she said. “I think.”
Luinosa could go no further. The building tumbled into ruin, opening into an alley not far from the exposed overcity. She put her hands inside of the opposite sleeves of her old industrial coat, and quietly explored the second floor of the building; dusty rooms and shadowy corridors, all empty save for the broken remnants of the furnishings of the city before its death. Eventually she came to a set of winding, descending stairs.
Lu followed them down, and as she nearly got to the bottom, there was a sound of grinding metal upon metal. She froze in her tracks. After a pause, she continued on, and found another set of windows on the first floor, facing the open center of the city. She stood on her toes to look out of them, and from her peeking she saw through the filthy glass, only yards ahead, one of the bright-faces crawling over a large pile of iron scrap. It swayed its head out toward the city and back, then stopped as it was nearly facing the windows of the room in which Luinosa stood.
“Shit,” she exhaled and backed away with slow steps, until she was at the center of the room. As she did, she bumped her back against something, and it swayed. She instinctively turned and grasped at it, wrapping her hands around what seemed to be a figure.
She gasped.
In this enormous, high-ceiling room, Luinosa was surrounded by the posing forms of tall humanoid beings. Each loomed over her by two or three heads, in positions of reflection, hands on hips, or in gestures of causal salutation. They were mostly naked, with no faces or other distinguishable features. Some of their fingers were missing.
She released the one she clutched, which wobbled a bit as she stepped away from it.
“Sorry,” she said quietly.
Passing through this forest of inanimate figures, Luinosa noticed that some of them were wearing strange, worn garments. A few of them wore wide, droopy hats. These pieces of dress disintegrated from their bodies in tatters, and their colors seemed drained from the ages.
One figure wore a scarf that seemed fairly intact. Luinosa gently removed it and examined it. It was pale green, with a darker green pattern stitched in. She shook it softly, ridding it of the dust that collected upon it, and then brought it to her cheek.
She removed her hood, and draped it around her neck.
Luinosa continued on, beyond the figures, and was met with a door that stood ajar. From the narrow space between the metal frame and the open door, there was a brief movement of light.
She went toward the door, and opened it, which sounded off with a rusted moan.
The passage opened immediately into an immense hall, flanked by a series of dark stalls. As she went stealthily among them, she saw that each was filled with a different assortment of alien objects. Large metal storage boxes, glass displays; pairs of circular tables and chairs, or counters with stools bolted to the ground before them; strange machines and tools from a time in the city Luinosa heard only hints of. She crept further, overwhelmed by the number and variety of all she saw, until another bright flicker of lights called her attention to an open space at the end of the great hall.
Each step she took was carefully placed, and she shrank within her coat. Every breath was measured, and the time it took to cross the long hall was like an eternity.
As she got closer, the source of the light became apparent.
Standing before a large, rectangular machine, with her back to Luinosa, was the bright being she had spied in the longscope; the girl who she had seen torn apart by the bright-faces. She was whole, on her toes, examining the contents of the glass facade of the tall machine.
“Oh wow,” she said. “I wish I had a quarter.”
Luinosa froze, some ten steps behind her. Her lips trembled as she tried to form words. She reached out with her hand, and stuttered silently over what she might say. Her eyes were saucers, reflecting the faint glow of the being standing before her.
The being’s hair moved on its own, as if submerged water. Luinosa took another step forward, nearly hobbling now, unsure if what she was seeing was real.
The being turned suddenly and looked straight at Luinosa, smiling as she bit down on her thick lower lip.
“Come. Look at all these snacks in the machine.”
Luinosa, as if in a trance, crept solemnly forward towards her.
“Do you have a quarter? If we have a quarter we can put it in the slot, and then we press one of the buttons. But it has to be the same symbol as it says under the snack that you want, so that you can get that snack. I want to get the one that says Chocoloot. That’s the same kind that a Heart’s Grave got out of the machine, at the waystation with Fuser. Before the shootout.”
Luinosa stared into the eyes of the angel, as the color and light came up to its surface, circled her pupils, and dove back into the depths of her being. Her skin sparkled as if it held a view of a thousand distant stars, each vying for her attention, and then hiding when she gave it. She saw the shimmering fragments of her face drifting slowly, their edges only barely perceptible. Luinosa slowly raised her hand, as if to touch her, and then lowered it.
“You…”
“Tomokava Blue Stellar. One thousand pleasures to meet you, Luinosa.” Tomo curtsied, and held out one of her hands.
“Luinosa,” Luinosa repeated mindlessly, and gripped one of Tomo’s fingers.
Tomo snickered.
“That’s a beautiful scarf, and it looks nice on you, because you have ears like a fox. There are leaves on it, and foxes come from the forest. It suits you.”
“You died,” Luinosa stammered. Despite herself, tears welled in her lower eyelids. “The bright-faces…”
“They ate me. But only because I was perceived. Oh, wait.”
Tomo put her hand on the machine, and it came to life. A light on the inside made all of the contents of the box visible.
“Can I have my finger?”
“Oh,” Luinosa said, letting Tomo’s finger free.
Tomo flicked a slot on the far side of the machine with her finger. A symbol appeared over it. When she flicked it again, the symbol changed to another.
“I knew it! Look! Press the squiggly line button! Under Chocoloot!” Tomo said to Luinosa and clasped her hands together.
Luinosa stepped forward, and pressed the button.
A coil turned, and released one of the little treasures.
“Again!”
Luinosa pressed it again, and the coil moved once more.
Tomo put her hands under the display, and from a little trap door, retrieved two of the gifts wrapped tightly in a strange material. She held them in her hands and brought them close under their faces between them.
“Yes,” Tomo grunted in satisfaction. “We did it.”
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In Luinosa’s tiny room, the two enjoyed their prizes while sitting face to face on her narrow bed. Luinosa watched Tomo, absorbing every detail of her being. As Tomo ate, she stared intently back at Luinosa, a smile ready to bloom for every moment that passed between them.
Luinosa gathered her hole-ridden blanket into a bunch, and wrapped herself around it.
“I don’t understand,” Luinosa said. “I saw you get torn apart by the bright-faces.”
“I know,” Tomo nodded, with chocolate smudged on the corners of her lips. “I saw you on the tower with Alto. I waved at you.”
“How do you… how did you survive?”
“I didn’t. But you can’t make it stick. They only thought they ate me.” Tomo laughed a silent laughter, nodding her head, and waving her fingers in the air.
Luinosa nodded too, stuffing her mouth with the rest of her snack, unsure of how to respond.
“You’re afraid of those bright-faces,” Tomo said, gently. “It’s okay. A certain amount of fear is healthy. Did you know that someone made them? Out of shadow-flesh, no less. The lore about shadow-flesh is so deep.”
“We have to tell someone. Alto. We have to tell the Casiq too. You really are an angel. Maybe there is a way out of this place,” Luinsa said with resolve.
“Oh, yea. I’m sure there is. Don’t worry,” Tomo said, licking the inside of the Chocoloot wrapping. “There’s always a way away.”
Luinosa leaned forward, and stared intensely at Tomo. “You’ll save us?”
Tomo shook her head. “No, no. I can’t do anything like that.”
Luinosa was confused, and furrowed her brow. “But… you’ve come here. There has to be a reason you’re here. There is some meaning behind it. I believe that!”
Tomo nodded absently.
“I only got here first, because I was in a walking race. And I obviously won, by a lot. So you will have to wait till tomorrow for anything like that to happen.”
“Till tomorrow?” Luinosa asked breathlessly. “What will happen tomorrow?”
“He walks so slow. But he’s coming, don’t worry, and he knows where I am. Tomorrow, Black Kettle will be here.”
Luinosa thought about Tomo’s words, confused.
Suddenly, the door to Luinosa’s room swung open. The amber light from the hall splashed the width of her tiny room, and both Luinosa and Tomo turned with squinted eyes toward the two who stood in the doorway.
“Luinosa!” her aunt barked, standing with her large arms crossed, and an incredulous look spear across her face. Alto stood just behind her.
“Tomokava Blue Stellar,” Tomo said, standing for a curtsy. “A glorious morning, this morning, Aunt Madreena.