NADYA

Kaki has always hated the Purity Checkers. Devoted members of the Suns and the Temples visit on a weekly basis to make sure their Souls are healthy and that their number of fractures are lessening instead of increasing.

The Purity Checkers have their own cottage in the very back of the Fortress. They live a modest life to repay for the power that they were given. To become a Purity Checker, one has to give up nobility. One has to be nearly completely Pure but reject any other opportunities that will perhaps allow an ascension into Enlightenedhood, like the Sen-Fair. It is a noble pursuit, and they are regarded in a higher fashion than the Fathers and Mothers of the Temples.

The cottages are made of plain wood with no windows or anything decorating the lawns. There is often a very long line to have one’s Soul Checked, as there are not as many Purity Checkers as people who need to be Checked. When we go as a group, Walas or Ponnie will usually complain about it, which annoys me. How can they not see that the lines are a test in themselves? A test of patience?

The line is even longer tonight. After what Enlightened Everleigh did to Kaki, many must have felt the same enlightenment that I did in the Temple. We all want to know if, somehow, witnesses Enlightened Everleigh’s power affected our Souls.

I think that this is a selfish endeavor. After leaving Kaki, I debated over coming to the cottages. For one does not become Pure by being in the presence of someone Purer. That feels like cheating.

But I couldn’t resist. Just as I couldn’t resist taking that necklace, or nearly visiting Kaki’s Jeran in the City.

I wait in the line for a long, long time. By the time I make it into the actual cottage, the Moons have risen. I made sure to complete all my duties before coming, however, so that Missus Yarna would not have a reason to be angry with me.

Inside, the place is sparsely decorated and smells of nothing. I relish it.

The Purity checkers sit on weaved mats, keeping their gazes deliberately at our knees. Every part of their skin is covered by a drape of skin dyed pale blue, leading them to seem even less like people. There are five in total. No one is to remember their Old Names. Now they are simply known as the collective Checkers.

Those who have already been Checked file away, their faces blank. We are not to show satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

I sit about a hand away from the mat and close my eyes. No words are ever spoken during the Checking of one’s soul.

The Checkers are trained in the Temples, like Fathers and Mothers, but their training is not or will ever be known by the public. All we know is that they have to be of the Iya class, with less than a one percent fracture and are blessed with the ability to see a map of someone else’s Soul.

The Checker in front of me leans in to whisper. I am not sure how they do it, but they manage to whisper so softly that no one else but the person they speak to can hear.

“Dear Nadya,” the Checker says. I cannot even tell if they are male or female. “Your fractures have gotten worse. You are not here under the advisement of your patron, Missus Yarna, are you?”

How did you know? I want to ask, but I hold my tongue and simply shake my head.

“Nadya, if you cannot find a way to abide your own wants and surrender yourself completely to the Suns, you shall never be Pure,” the Checker says.

I know, I want to scream. I know.

“How can I be better?”

“I recommend you fast for three Suns and three Moons,” the Checker says. “To remind you how much fuller you feel without indulgent behavior. I sense that you have something to confess to me, Nadya. Is there something you want to say?”

I hesitate. “Yes,” I whisper. “I stole something previous.”

“Ah, Nadya. You are lucky that your Soul did not fracture any more. I cannot judge you, but I hope you understand that this is a setback. Be cautious, Nadya. You walk a fine line. For this, I recommend that you give up one of your prized possessions. Bring them here tomorrow.”

“I have so few,” I cannot help but protest.

“Nadya.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

“I understand, Nadya. I will always be here to aid you in your journey towards Purity.”

“Okay,” I say. “I have a question. It’s—”

“Questions are indulgent as well. You know this, Nadya. You want to be more than Ospry, don’t you? Appreciate what you have now. Do not ask, what can I be in this many cycles? What if I had this and that? Who can I meet in the future that will bring about my coming? This is all unnecessary.”

“Of course.”

“Goodbye, Nadya.”

“Goodbye. Thank you.” I press my palm to my forehead, then leave.

***

Ponnie and I wander through the courtyard, carrying our own respective baskets of laundry that we picked up from the washroom. Then we are to purchase a pack of feathers for Missus Yarna from a merchant named Genasis. He’s supposed to be pulled in a red carriage.

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“Did you see the new kitchen boy, Mikial? He is so handsome,” Ponnie says gleefully.

I just nod. “Sure.”

“He’s from Sal Gasve, Walas said so.”

Ponnie and I are around the same age, but she looks older than me. We wear the same frock and her braids are pulled back into a bun. We both grew up in the Fortress. Except, unlike me, both her parents were servants before her, working mainly with event setups than working personally with any noble children. They died of the plague last cycle in a brutal series of lashing outs, but Ponnie still looks back at them fondly. Black scales are already growing on Ponnie’s cheeks. Such early growth means she might follow in their footsteps. The thought of sweet Ponnie screaming animalistically, clawing at her loved ones and screaming incessantly does not correlate in my mind.

“You and I never get alone time like this,” Ponnie says. “It’s all work, work, work all the time. We need to have a girls day, with Chi-Chi and Lista and Quincy too.”

“We do not have the time for that,” I say.

“At night. A girl’s night. Wouldn’t that be so lovely?”

“It sounds nice.”

I smile politely at a few passing faces. Tourists, visiting merchants, members of the Industries, Mothers and Fathers, Storytellers, performers, more members of the Industries, as well as many high-class men and women simply conversing and drinking from small stone cups. Many of the tourists don lighter clothing, indicating they are from inner Mecraentos, where the weather is less extreme or the Islands, where it is warm constantly. I hear the stuttering roar of an engine from nearby. The red, steam-powered carriage stops a few legs away, in the corner of the yard.

“Is that the carriage?” Ponnie asks.

“I think so,” I say.

The carriage is of an older model, but the sort designed just for merchants, with bigger doors that stay extending, displaying a traveling merchants’ goods. The man setting up shop has a hunch so bad it seems as though he is hump-backed. I can see the fingers of his hands have already melded into one bone, the skin hardly covering it. His ears are folding into his skull and his hair is so thin he is nearly bald. It makes sense for his face tells me he is probably in his early twenties, nearing his end.

“What did she want us to buy again?”

“Feathers,” I say. “I think someone requested a cloak to be made.”

“Hello!” Ponnie says to the seller gleefully. We tell him what we’re looking for—I remember what Missus Yarna said better than Ponnie. She wanted black feathers specifically. We look through his collection, settling on some that are tucked in the very back of the carriage doors, wrapped in a gold twine.

The fixed price for a pound of feathers is twenty coin, decided by the Industry last week. Since this man clearly has a small business, however, there is also some leeway for trades, but the fixed prices help ensure that no one has a monopoly on any one industry and destroy our economy.

We offer him the twenty coin. He hesitates, staring at the feathers. “They was my wife’s.”

“Oh,” Ponnie and I say in unison.

“Well, if they aren’t for sale—” I start.

“No, no. Take good care of them, little girls. They are new.” He starts to take them off the shelf, using his mouth to undo the twine instead of his nonexistent hands.

“New?” Ponnie repeats. “I’m so sorry.”

He laughs. It takes me a second to realize it is bitter. “Y’all should be. She was sent to the Slaughter House right over there. Right over there.” His gaze lingers, and that’s when I notice there is something odd about his face. The white part of his eyes are darker than the usual person’s, and his fingers twitch in a weird way. Perhaps it is the plague.

“Sent to the Slaughter House?” Ponnie repeats.

He hands me the bag of feathers. “Are you deaf, girl?”

“That means the plague was making her unmanageable and she had to be put down,” I whisper into Ponnie’s ear. She can be a little ignorant.

Being sent to a Slaughter House is supposed to be more common in the City. Here, once someone is rabid, their families or a loved one typically chains them up and then they are given a special poison to have their passing be less aggressively distraught. This is what happened to Ponnie’s parents.

But the man turns toward me at an uncanny speed. It surprises me, makes me stumble back a little.

“Unmanageable? No, no, no. Not Giselle, no. Never.” He tilts his head. “You two seem nice. See, my Giselle, she was raisin fundin for a festival for the orphan kids on Fyi Streets, alls four of them. You two, you should come. Here, here. It’s fun, for kids. Very fun. It’d mean so much to my Giselle, if the kids make it and they get to talk to you fancy rich kids. It’d mean so much. Wait, wait one second.”

He reaches into the driver’s seat of the carriage, using both stumps to hand Ponnie and I a stack of papers.

They’re covered with words and drawings, drawn crudely with blood. I cannot read them, but I know the drawing is some sort of map.

“My Giselle, her festival on the Fyi Streets,” the man says. “Please, spread the word. It—”

“Your wife wrote this?” I say.

“Yes, she—”

“She learned to write?”

The man just winks at me and makes a shooing motion.

A light horror runs through me. Ponnie glances at me, her mouth agape.

We hurry away from this man. Ponnie leans in towards me. “Nadya! Nadya, that man is certainly not Pure enough to—”

“I know,” I say.

“We’re going to be smited just touching these things!”

“Ponnie—”

“We should burn them,” she says frantically. “We have to burn them before anyone else can read them, okay? Come on, let’s go over to the furnaces in the Kitchens. Suns, we have to tell Missus Yarna. What was his name again? Genesis? She has to tell the authorities, doesn’t she? This is illegal. Nadya, this is like those stories in the plays. About the criminals.”

She speaks so fast I can hardly comprehend it at all.

“Yes,” I say. “We’ll burn them.”

We head to the Kitchens, Ponnie rambling all the way, but I have tuned her out.

We were given a stack of about thirty papers, made of crudely printed bark, black specks dotted throughout the material because of the plague.

Ponnie wastes no time getting the fire going.

Her back is turned to me. I glance over at the stack, thrown messily on the stone counter. I pick one up, my fingers trembling.

When I first realized what they were, my first thought was, Kaki would want to attend this.

I clench my jaw tight. This situation is so eerily similar to the moment with Lightened Roe’s necklace.

We believe in working towards our own Purity because of Enlightenment, to escape the plague, but also because it is a set of moral good, a set of moral obligations that we agreed to meet when Kirill and Gerasim blessed us with life in their domain. To live life in appreciation but with that comes various hurdles to jump. For the Ospry, indulgent behavior. Overexcitement. A lack of understanding of the nuances in life. Too fast of a pace. For the Genai, they often have a problem with superiority. For the Tyn, the most fractured of all the classes, it is a lack of faith—giving up on both our makers and one’s self.

As long as we work towards Purity and goodness, even if none of us reach Enlightenedhood and we succumb to the plague, we know we have served our Suns just as they served us. This is why simply having a job is seen as a step towards Purity—we are serving the society that has given us life just as much as the Suns’ have.

But if we actively do not, we do not simply succumb to the plague. Our physical body may die, but our minds will not. We will be in a hell of our own making.

It is not as though I am trying to read these fliers. I want to help out a friend, who was born Pure enough and is clearly favored by the Suns. But when does one’s sins become the sins of others? We can’t control other people. When Kaki buys books from those like Genesis’ wife, does that make him as bad as her? If I were to pocket this flier as I pocketed that necklace, would I be as bad as he?

There is a reason why his wife succumbed to the plague. It was most likely the Suns’ retribution for her direct refusal to follow a simple rule of life.

I stare at the fliers on the counter.