“Are you going to run off?” Red asked. She had finally dragged him back to ‘his’ pile of damp straw, and sat down next to him. One hand was tangled into his sleeve, so she’d feel if he got up.

“Yeah. Probably.”

“When?”

Dally tried to make out her face in the dark. When? Soon. Right now. Every muscle in his body was still tight coiled, like he was a cat bunched up to leap. As soon as they left him alone he’d tear up the doors and run through the woods until dawn, sleep in a ditch all day, run some more...

No. This was stupid. He still needed to wait until they went hunting - that was the biggest head start he could get.

“I’m glad you still have the eye,” he said, instead of answering. “I thought, you know. Because you uh... never open it...?”

It was a dumb thing to say; halfway through Red had gone stiff, glancing around.

“Yeah,” she said, “well, they don’t like it. Anyway if I open it it makes my head hurt, with all the colors? So I just don’t bother.”

“You see more colors?” he asked, surprised. For most people, their extra parts were just spares, not different from the regular ones.

“Mhm,” she said. “Like you, you’re all blue.”

“Oh.” Dally thought about it. “What’s that mean?”

She shrugged in the dark. “Hell if I know.”

The next day they all got marched back to the house like nothing had happened. When Dally went to get the paper Lyle was on the front page, along with Lane and the others who were gone. Lyle was smiling, and shaking the hand of a man in grey Department uniform. The dep's own thralls loitered around the edges of the group, dressed in the same grey except for the bright wyr bars on their shoulders. To Dally their blank faces looked bored and sullen. They were used to raids, not bland surrenders.

Lane and the others looked shocked.

Dally stared at the page for a long time before he brought it to the table, standing stiffly in the kitchen hall. When he handed it over Lyle smiled, appreciative.

"Governor Tannis Lyle commits his household guard to the war effort," he read, to Gita. "Didn't I tell you I’d handle it?"

Gita ground her cigarette out. "I suppose you did prove bribery works," she said, acid. Maybe she was happy she got to keep her spy, but she hadn't even glanced at Dally.

Lyle did, looking him up and down. "It's good you're back in the house," he said.

Gita excused herself.

With only silent homunculi, the house felt empty and cold. The few thralls left behind were too spread out to see each other during the day. Lyle didn't seem to notice. He lead Dally around like a shadow, holding the same one - sided conversation as usual. Dally for his part forced a smile, and answered the non-questions as cheerful as he could stand. The last thing he needed was Lyle comforting him.

The governor eventually went to his office, and Dally let out a faint breath of relief; he’d never been allowed in there. Not even the staffers were. Lyle pressed his signet ring to the steaming surface of the membrane-lock, and the door opened with a wet thunk of valves.

When he’d stepped through, he turned back to Dally. “Well? Come on.”

Dally went stiff, glancing around at the familiar hall.

“It’s alright.” Lyle smiled again, waving him through. When Dally had slunk across the threshold he slammed the door behind him. On this side of the door the live seals rippled over the frame, before sucking tight.

The office felt cramped, for this house, and dirty. The ceiling was stained with soot, and all five tables were overflowing with paper. A cage built into the window flashed and whirred, full of rat-size mirrorboys. The winged bugs shoved each other off a perch, struggling to be the one sitting closest to the cage door. Dally had only seen them at a distance before. Up close they were even more confusing, and with their twitching mandibles and slashing tails - hard to tell if they were lizards, insects or dead-machines, or all three.

There were other things he knew even less about. In abandoned corners glass jars full of murky liquid sat on shelves, surrounded by, crusts of dried powder. Metal arcs and gears curving round cores of oily-grey aurum, though the machines, whatever they were, sat still and idle. A homunculus stood in the corner under a thick coat of dust, its posture perfectly straight. There was something wrong with its skin, though, its damp clay smell. Dally didn’t have to ask to know it was dead.

“Excuse the mess,” Lyle said, “I keep forgetting to replace him. Here, sit down. You’ll have a drink, won’t you?”

By midday Dally was half drunk, staring dazed out the window. He hadn’t moved from the chair in the center of the room. There was nothing to do but watch Lyle, and Lyle was actually working. The governor didn’t touch the magic-looking stuff. He just wrote down words on bits of paper, then scribbled them out.

Finally he got up with the latest scrap, and stalked muttering to the window. In the cage all the mirrorboys suddenly scrabbled at the door. Lyle grabbed the closest one, before slamming the door on the rest. The chosen one vibrated in his fist. Lyle curled the paper into the mirrorboy’s mouth, and hunched, whispering. The bug shuddered, then sprung from his palm and out the open window. Mirror wings flashed in the sun, as it shot away.

Dally stared after it, feeling his muscles coil up again. If he jumped out after it, what would happen? Would Lyle grow wings on him, before he hit the ground?

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He drained his glass instead, watching the remaining bugs crawl back to their feed tray. There was something weird going on in his head, like an idea. Except he was done with ideas, right?

Except, if he could get one of the mirrorboys, he could tell people that Lyle hid thralls from the Requisition. Too bad Dally couldn’t get into this office without Lyle. Too bad he couldn’t write.

The next day he took the paper to hand to Lyle at breakfast, and listened a little better than normal.

“Thrall reinforcement shortage extends into fourth month,” Gita read aloud. “They have what they wanted, but they’re still complaining.”

“You know the generals,” Lyle said, “always in crisis, aren’t they? How else do they get any money out of us.”

Dally tore the page off, as he cleared the table. Thrall was the first word. That was convenient. The next few probably weren’t useful, but he mumbled the whole phrase to himself a couple of times to make it stick. Compared to remembering a song this wasn’t hard. The writing was hard, though, the tiny little curls and dots seeming to squirm as he squinted at them. Where did the words start and end?

“What’s that for?” Red asked, as he slid the page under his mattress.

“I like the picture on it,” he said, pulling it back out to show her. The back of the page had an occuloscope drawing of a racehorse. Then he got distracted, looking at it. The picture was actually pretty good; clear enough to see the flying mane, and dirt flicking up from the hooves.

“Um,” she said, hiding a smile. “Okay? Actually I got something else for you, if you want.”

While he waited, swaying in place, Red stood on her bunk and stretched to feel around on top of the wyrlight cages in the ceiling. He wasn’t ready when she flung the gift down at him. The bundles bounced off his chest as he scrambled to catch them; two rolls of cigarettes.

“I thought you smoked them all,” he said, feeling stupid.

“Yeah, well. Like you said, I don’t even like them.”

By the end of the week Dally had papers for ‘thrall’, ‘requisition’, ‘Governor Tannis Lyle’, and a lot more junk words. Staring at the writing in the middle of the night wasn’t making it come any clearer, but he figured now that the long tails on some letters might be where the word stopped. Whatever - Dally didn’t need to read. He needed to copy.

Hannock didn’t even glance up, when Dally slunk to his desk that night. It was only a couple hours before dawn. He’d been flicking through a war novel, holding the book up close a dying wyr lamp.

“Off to the mistress?” Hannock said.

“Not tonight, boss. Listen, I figure you’ve got pens and paper, for your records?”

That stopped him. Hannock tilted his head back, to look at him with narrowed eyes. “I do.”

“I figure... maybe you can spare some.”

“Spare-?”

Dally put both bundles of smokes down on the desk, carefully lining them up with the edge. “That’s all I got left.”

Hannock stared, but didn’t reach for them. “What do you even want with a pens, boy?”

“There’s all those pictures, up in the house? I think I want to try that. You know, drawing.”

Hannock got done laughing, eventually. He looked Dally up and down. “Drawing.”

“Yeah. Like in the house.” Though it was a lie, Dally was starting to get embarrassed for real. He squirmed in place, glanced back over his shoulder at the sleeping barracks. What, couldn’t thralls do drawings?

When he looked back, Hannock had reached across the desk for the cigarettes. Then Dally had to wait, teeth grit, while he lit one. Finally Hannock sighed a cloud of smoke, smiling. After rummaging in one of the desk drawers, he pulled out a few sheets of thin grey paper, and a cheap pen. It looked like a hollow bone, with ink sloshing in a thin membrane chamber.

Even knowing it was nothing special, Dally’s stomach flipped over.

“Now,” Hannock said, “you know this isn’t the dangerous kind of pen. There’s no aurum in here at all.”

“Sure, boss. Just a pen. That’s what I want.” Still it took him a long second to even touch it, and then he shoved it quick in his sleeve, out of sight. The skin touching it start to itch, like cold ink was leaking down his arm.

“Hide that properly on the other shifts,” Hannock was saying, “do you hear me? If it ever comes back to me I’ll say that you stole it.”

“No problem.”

“Off with you, then.” He snorted. “Do some art, I suppose.”

Dally pulled out the pen once he was huddled in his bunk, as dawn light started to creep in the windows. First he looked at it for a long time, then picked it up like something that would sting him. It didn’t, and eventually the swirl in his guts slowed down enough for him to hold it properly. On one corner of a sheet of paper he scratched a tiny line.

The line did nothing, sitting there. It was weak and blobby from the bad dry ink on the nib. Dally carefully drew another one next to it, then accidentally a small arc like a mouth. He filled the mouth with sharp teeth, and drew two eyes over it. The tiny face stared at him angrily. Dally paused, then drew a third eye in the middle, like Red’s.

“Do some art,” he muttered.

The little picture wasn’t good, but it was definitely a drawing. Satisfied, he took out his scraps of newspaper, and started practicing.