NADYA

We venture through the streets. Each one is more horrific and dirt-ridden than the last. Kaki tries to describe Jeran to me, but I’m hardly listening. I cannot explain to him why my tongue now feels made of stone, or why my heart still beats so fast despite the fact that we are legs and legs away from the protest, or why I keep glancing over my shoulder into the darkness of the streets.

No, I can. I hate it here. And this is the Suns’ way of telling me to go back.

“Nadya,” he says for the twenty-thousandth time. “I’m sorry. You look so ill. Let’s go back.” I trudge on in response, my legs moving nearly against my will.

I do not even understand how he is able to speak against the smells of this place, the rotting decay.

Kaki’s mind is exceptional. he told me he would master the art of everything, once. I whole-heartedly believed him then, and I believe him now.

I see him mastering the art of knowledge that was never meant to be shared and understanding people that were never meant to be met. If I stay here, with him, if I really let him be predictable in this way, I wonder how long it will be before we’re just another body. There is no one to protect us here, no fortified stone walls.

And then what will my life have accomplished?

Despite my disgust, I want to pull away. But I know I can’t. I despise myself for being curious–perhaps even more curious than Kaki.

***

Jeran’s place is about the size of two closets placed side-by-side. There is no door, just a long sheet that Kaki pushes out of the way. It does not smell like the rancidly deceased but smoke–lit with flaming red candles instead of glowshrooms. This building makes the deserted Tyn Wing look just recently remodeled.

We enter without a word. It is hardly decorated. There is a stone slab in the corner covered with a blanket. Beside it, an assortment of miscellaneous things. Mostly pots and pans, hats, some interestingly carved stone statues about the size of my hand. Many are chipped. next to it, another vertical stone slab adorned with a set of chains and shackles.

Jeran himself is short, only a bit taller than Kaki. He has long hair that is thinning out. His skin his clear, but his bare feet are twisted, blackened things that’ve lost all their toes. He has no teeth. His eye bags are the worst I have ever seen, making his face look droopy. When the curtain opens, he leaps to his feet, eyes wide.

“Jeran!” Kaki greets, holding his arms out to hug the man. He visibly relaxes.

“Kaki!” Jeran says, embracing him. A part of me registers the unusualness of hearing someone use that name other than myself. “And who is this pretty lady? Are you Nadya?”

He has an accent. I don’t know where from.

“Yes,” I manage, my voice quieter and meeker than I would like. It hurts just to speak. I feel as though my throat is tightened. “How did you know?”

“Kaki speaks of you often,” Jeran says. He reaches out to touch me, and I flinch away. “I’m sorry! Sorry. I mean no harm to you, truly. You are gorgeous, sweetheart. Kaki, why did you not say so? Girls like to be called pretty?”

“Thank you,” I whisper.

He leans in closer. “Sweetheart, are you alright? You seem shaken.”

“It’s her first time in the City,” Kaki says.

Jeran’s eyes widen. “Oh, I see. I remember how shocking it was after I moved here from the Fortress. Oh, sweetheart, come sit. Come sit.”

“No, it’s okay,” I say. “It’s nothing really.”

“There was a protest,” Kaki says. He runs a hand through his hair and I notice the way it shakes. Maybe he was more startled by watching a man be shot than he let on. “At the Fyi Festival. The Boneheads were running it.”

“And you let her be there!” Jeran gasps. He forces me to sit down. “What happened? I haven’t heard of this protest. I thought the Boneheads were trying to keep a low profile these Moons.”

Kaki explains it. Jeran looks at me again, and it is clearly with pity. I hate that. They are the sort of looks that many of the other servants would give when times were rougher on Kaki. They thought it such a social burden to be ‘associated’ with him. They still give me such looks, believing very similarly to Missus Yarna that he holds me back in my Soul’s Purity.

Jeran must see my distress worsen, for he looks away quickly. “A tragic ordeal,” he murmurs.

“Who are the Boneheads?” I ask. I grip the edge of my skirt to hide the shaking. Sitting did help. It feels like my body is grounded.

“They call themselves a social movement,” Jeran says. “They were part of a larger group of revolutionaries. They have good intentions, good ideas. But they go about change by playing with fire. It is best not to be involved with anything of the sort.”

I stare at Kaki in accusation. Why would he let us stay there when he knew what would happen?

“I’m sorry,” he says. He sits down beside me. “I knew but I didn’t know.”

“Kaki is still quite ignorant of the workings of the City,” Jeran says. “We all are. Anyone who claims to know this City completely is a liar. It is a beautiful thing, to have so many conflicting views–a complicated web, if you will. In this way, I think we are freer than many other Cities.”

“Until people get hurt,” I say.

“Yes.” He nod. He rubs his left arm. A long, red scar hugs his shoulder to forearm. “Yes, until people get hurt. You Sergeants will be looking for you soon. As soon as you two have calmed down and recovered from such an eventful night. I am glad for the company, of course, but I would not want to risk you two getting in trouble, or being found by the lickers.”

I study Jeran. “You seem so nice.”

He laughs. “What did you expect of me? Has Kaki been telling ludicrous stories?”

“No, no,” I say. I glance around. I try to keep the words from tumbling out of my mouth, but they do anyways. “How is it that you can live like this?”

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He smiles. “Ah, sweetheart. You’ve not seen this City during the storms. Not the light rains, I don’t mean those. But true storms. This? I feel quite safe for now.” I replay how on-guard he was when we first entered. Without doors, how is it that anyone has a sense of privacy? Why do these Industry homes not have doors?

When I ask Jeran this, he says, “We do not own these places. Ah, but do not have that face, sweetheart. We make them our own, in our own little ways. I am particularly good at that.” He winks.

“How do you mean?”

Kaki leans toward me. “Jeran is an architect. He had many design propositions for the City based on the designs of the Fortress, enhancements. You should show her, Jeran.”

“I can’t read,” I say.

“Neither can I,” Jeran says. He gets up and walks to the vertical stone slab with the chains. He pulls at the edge and, with a horrid scrape! against the wood floor, the thing slowly rotates. It is a shelf, partially nailed into the wall, thickly carved of plague-ridden wood and painted with purple pigments. On its four shelves, dozens of skin scrolls and paper pages. I look away immediately.

“Do not worry,” Jeran says. “I am a Yevanian man. I would not have learned to read even if I wanted to.”

I recall that he is the one who gave Kaki the wordless books. Pages and scrolls are not even supposed to be in the possession of the lesser classes, the more fragmented Souls. I suppose he is still a good Yevanian man if he does not read any such letters, but he must understand that he plays with temptation with each scroll he touches.

With this thought, I chide myself for being such a hypocrite.

“Ah! Here they are.” He pulls out two of the scrolls. “My children.”

“What?”

“They’re drawn on skins,” Kaki says. The realization dawns upon me and I feel slightly less sick. At least he has an excuse for keeping these scrolls in his possession.

“Here we go, here we go,” he says cheerily. He sets the scrolls down on the floor, expanding them. They are not the crude drawings I expect. They are extraordinary. Complex designs with clear, intricate thought behind each one, drawn with a very steady hand. I’ve not seen any other such designs before, but these remind me of the murals the Enlighteneds and Lighteneds have on their chamber doors–it is that level of artistry.

“Suns,” I say. “This is beautiful.”

“Why thank you, gorgeous.”

I look over at the stone slab he had turned for this. “You built that?”

“Yes,” he says. “So the lickers do not catch me.”

“Look, Nadya,” Kaki says, pointing to one section of the scroll. “A complex system of pulleys so that our veterans who’ve lost their limbs or are paralyzed or the plague-ridden who can’t walk anymore can have an easier way into the apartments instead of climbing all those rusted ladders you saw outside. Isn’t that brilliant?”

I cannot wrap my mind about what this drawing actually means. “What is a pulley?”

“It’s how we used to get people out of the trenches during the war. See these wheels? The ropes around them—I’m not sure exactly how—but they manipulate how much… uh, energy, you put into lifting something and make it easier. If that makes sense.”

Jeran chuckles. “That is not quite how it works.”

Kaki and Jeran show me a few more designs–more efficient ways to transport water and a few renovated apartment ideas. Listening to them explain these designs keeps my mind off the horrors of the City, despite my lack of understanding. I understand why Kaki likes Jeran: he speaks of his designs with the same passion and grandeur which Kaki speaks of the conspiracies around Var-Nashi and his other wordless books.

“Are you part of the Industry of Scholars?” I ask. Those are the Researchers, the Innovators. There are many in the Fortress, but other Cities are more equipped with such Industry members. It is from the Industry within the City of Anulie that our steam-powered carriages were constructed. I do not know how Pure Jeran is, but one has to be of a certain Purity to join that Industry. I am not sure just how Pure that must be, but I figure that, if Jeran once lived in the Fortress, he must be Purer than he seems. Perhaps, despite the fact that he cannot read, it is alright for him to be handing Kaki illegal books and such.

The Industries are the only places for specialized work. All others who do not have the mental capacity to do so–because of Purity, like myself–are given jobs assigned by the Industries.

However, to my horrors, Jeran laughs and shakes his head. “Me! The Industry of Scholars! No, no, sweetheart. How I wish, but no.”

“Then… what are these designs for?”

“Myself,” he says. “A personal interest. I had a few friends that became a part of the Industry of Scholars, and so they taught me about architecture and other subjects. They would read to me passages about maths, so I can even do a few simple sums. Even if I were a part of the Industry, I am quite sure the Court would reject my designs.”

Kaki wraps up one scroll and undoes the other. “The Court is convoluted.”

“Why would they reject these?” I ask. “They would benefit so many people.”

“It is very hard to actually have anybody work well in construction,” Jeran answers. “We all end up fighting for the same dead bodies on the street for meat. Actually, the book I gave Kaki is from one of those Scholar friends. Her name is Lucy. She is quite a dear.”

“Did Lucy have more books?”

“Oh, plenty. She is quite the collector, actually, but do not let the bug lickers know.”

“Are they all wordless?”

“No, plenty have words.”

I cannot keep the distress from my face, I’m sure. “That’s wrong, is it not?”

“Perhaps,” Jeran says. “Perhaps not. I suspect that, before long, these books will be in Kaki’s possession. He has more use for them than Lucy and I ever will.”

“I finally finished that journal, by the way. All of it, back to back. And–I was telling Nadya about this–but I think it has secrets about the plague and its origins, but there is not enough textual evidence to actually derive any sort of conclusions.” He explains his idea of the ‘prototype plague’ and the voltaisa, but Jeran agrees that these are more assumption than fact. “I did learn that the Shenai found us to be a lot more advanced than we are now–that is textually supported and sound. Var-Nashi described our City to be something of a miracle. I think, at some point, almost every building in Mecraentos City was fortified like the Fortress currently is. You know how you can see all those decimated rocks in the roads? Those might be the remnants.”

Jeran frowns. “I am not quite sure that is how our dear Nature buries human creation with the passage of time. You know how long the Fortress has stood against the test of time.”

“Oh,” Kaki says. His shoulders deflate a little. “I see.”

“That is curious, however,” he says. “Do you know when this journal was written?”

Kaki shakes his head. “I don’t know. It could be a hundred cycles ago, it could be a thousand.”

“I recommend you take a visit to Lucy.”

“I thought you said–”

“Yes, I know. She may not want your company, but she enjoys the presence of other intellectual minds.”

I do not know the context of this previous conversation, but I stiffen at the thought of meeting this Lucy, despite knowing how hypocritical it is. I scoff at this woman because she reads, and yet I coerced myself into attending a Festival by an illegally written invitation. But I do not hand out these invitations to other Souls, no. I do not give them to suseptible minds, like Kaki’s. If I were to ignore the rules of the Suns and teach myself the art of letters, I would do so in a solitary fashion. At least, then, I would be praying for my own downfall and taking no others with me.

Perhaps there was some part of me that wanted to speak to Jeran to know if his life were miserable, if he was being punished for taking part in blasphemy.

A part of me hates his easy smile, and I repeat the question to myself that I asked him earlier: how can he live like this?

And how can it feel so much as though I am not living in the Fortress, when I likely would die living here?

I want to scream at these thoughts which plague me. I wish to be a simple-minded creature, a simple-minded girl. For these are not important thoughts. They do not benefit my work, they do not benefit myself. They are not questions to the Suns nor Prayers of any sort.

I grab one of the scrolls on the floor and unravel it. This one is not an architectural design, but instead a statue. It is much more like a portrait than anything else. A beautiful carving of a man and women held in an interlocked embrace, with clear care for each other. But the man holds a knife to the woman’s head, and she holds a gun to his chest. They are old, hunched and wrinkled. Beside the woman, a patch of flowers are wilted. Beside the man, fires blaze.

Is this another sign? I wonder.

“I would like to learn to create designs like this,” Kaki says. “After I learn the histories of them.”

Jeran laughs. “Ah. Have you not considered joining the Industry of Scholars, Kaki?”

He shakes his head. “No, the Industries are even worse than the Court.”

I purse my lips. He always says this, and such claims seem so baseless.

Until a cold wind blows through, and Jeran’s make-shift door flies open. He shivers audible, clutching at his thin, veiny skin, his stubbed foot quivering.

***