The aisles at the grocery store are endless and I feel like I’m trapped in a tedious movie. Food pills, taffy-like and cheap. Face cream. A mutton roll. I pick things off the shelves and put them back. Savings will run out soon but I’m trying to get a flatmate to help with the rent. Maybe I can take an extra job on the weekends. I’m hungry and tired of living on soup. The past few weeks have been a blur of psychiatric checks at headquarters and the weight of days. I’ve been suspended from regular duties and put on minimal pay in a room of musty files where my limbs cramp. Intrusive thoughts come and go like old friends. I think of my body as a beast, a force to be leashed. I avoid people at HQ as much as they avoid me. Disgrace can be contagious.
The girl at the counter takes in my attire—shapeless pants and crumpled tunic—and smiles, her eyes full of pity. Glancing away has become second nature to me.
Outside, leaves russet the ground and the wind is high, swirling dust and objects in its wake. An empty juice box shudders toward the parking lot. Next to a broken tire on the sidewalk, a boy with hunger pinching his brows. I pin up my ratty note asking for a roommate, then drive home.
I don’t remember much from that day. I came to myself later, alone in a room. Noise and silence. Noise and silence. A door to the room opening and closing many times. Someone brought me food. Someone else helped me pee. This is how time passed. As Kild, I was a priority patient but even so, the intervals between nurse visits were long and the food greasy meat squiggles with watery cabbage.
Eniad was waiting in the lobby when they discharged me. I got in the car, wondering what had warranted the visit. Eniad took the winding road up the hills. “It’s being investigated,” she said, her tone more clipped than I’d ever heard it and that’s saying something. “You know we don’t tolerate Kild teaming up.”
I managed to make words despite the fear thumping in my chest like a wounded raccoon. “I don’t even know her. It must have been a collision, an accident.”
“You were asking for us to rescue her—and then this. What am I supposed to think?”
It started raining. We stopped at a cha vendor at the top of the hill and the city sprawled below us, glistening. “You’re disqualified from the Review. You’re on file duty with minimal stipend for now.”
“I didn’t mean to do anything.” I wanted to beg. Final pay would barely pay the rent.
She lit a cigar with a silver lighter. The city continued with its merciless churn of cement and desire. The wind prickled with dust. “My son, he can hear sounds from many miles away,” she said. “Amazing really. He works as a prison guard, spends most of his time underground.”
I’d heard about the boy. He used to be an officer, fell to the ground one evening, cowering, sat there, rocking himself, sobbing, as others stood by discomfited and helpless. Nobody was sure what to do. It was such an embarrassment to them, that volume of sorrow, the intensity of it. [12/20/22, 5:52 PM Osiris knows about the boy and helps him in many ways and has promised to get him out.]
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“He messed up during a case, let the guy go,” Eniad says. “I had to pull a lot of strings to keep him out of prison but that was the deal—that he spend his days down there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s talk after some time,” she said. “I like you Zaria. Let me see if I can find a way to help you.”
We drove down the hill and I got out at some point. The river was steel hard, the moon loud and full.
My tiny schufon is groaning under trash—empty packets, cans and bottles, and if I want a roommate, I should make it appealing. Maybe I should spend my last coins on a potted plant which will die in two days. A roach in the sink eyes me. Another appears at the drain opening. I can’t afford the expensive pesticide. I watch them while eating oats out of a can and wonder if there are roach eggs in my lungs, my heart, my head, if they flow through my bloodstream.
It would be easier if we found the girl.
If the investigation goes badly, I am looking at three years underground. They have to be convinced it was collision, an accident.
Bronze heads and slender legs. Creeping. Breaking into flakes, they cast their dust all over the apartment. I kill some roaches, sweep, mop.
Some evenings, I get in the truck and drive through the city, up and down freeways; trundle on the inner streets of central Raia where starlets stroll and junkies sprawl; roll down the window, breathe smoky air; pull up to sunset point and stare into the distance. The hills to the west stretch for miles, bathed in fog. Mustard flowers have created patches of brilliant yellow. Today I’m too tired to drive so I go for a run by the river, breath pummeling in and out, compelled by the heart’s need to continue.
Grasses ripple in breeze. White flowers gloam in moonlight like sprinkled powder. It is calming. I slow down when I get to the tunnel under Shi Bridge where bonfires cast their vivid glow. Men from the Bhulg tribe warm their hands and talk, their faces an amorphous mass of flesh with no distinguishable features, their energy a void I could fall into.
To my surprise, as I walk past, their faces sharpen, assume features where previously there were none. As if they’re sculptures emerging from rough-hewn stone. Austere and ethereal. [12/20/22, 6:07 PM Maybe this is something to do with her genetic inheritance / powers being stronger because the women are in town.]
One of them speaks. His manner is halting and I have to strain to hear him. “She gave it to you, didn’t she?” he says. “Passed it on.” His voice is barely above a whisper. He looks like a weakling but he scares me. “The girl. She gave it to you. You can’t start something like that and expect it to be contained.” He points at my cheek with a gnarly finger. “I can see the signs. You’ve seen them too? Ah, not yet. Not yet. But soon. Soon.”
“What signs?”
Others have started to pay attention. One of the men is rising to his feet. The tunnel feels smaller, suffocating. The second man is standing next to the first now, pulling at his arm. “Leave her alone,” he says.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Nothing ma’am. He gives warnings to people. We are not supposed to do that any more. It’s nothing. He misses our old profession. Some things stay in the blood longer than others.”
I search my mind frantically for what I know of the Bhulg. They used to be priests. That must be the old profession. They must have done some fortune-telling. “Tell me what he’s talking about and I won’t say anything.” My voice is stronger than I feel.
“I really don’t know. We don’t see the same portents, not at the same time. He thinks you are in some danger.” The man casts a furtive look around us and pulls himself back to the present. “But we don’t do that any more. We don’t have the skills. It’s been two generations since any of us practiced the old ways.”
The first man shakes off his hand and comes toward me. I freeze. Raising his hand, he touches my cheek, tracing a line down it. “I can see it,” he says, his eyes feverish, his breath on my face, stale and full of hunger. “So clearly. The tendrils.”