CHAPTER THREE

Drawn in Blood

Something unsettled Leta about her interaction with Clark. She was used to being in a position of power and he set her foul footed. No, he wasn’t the only sprout she’d met in the ‘Roc that had thought he’d known better than she. There were always those who would reach out with their mental hand to try to pull aside her tunic and spy what was underneath or call her “princess” with a wink and half-bow. Clark had none of that cocksure attitude, but he had seemed sure about something and before Leta knew everything there was to know about a thing, she distrusted it.

While her mind remained in The Nest, her weary feet carried her up the remaining four flights of stairs to her quarters. She was late returning, and she hoped her mother was still out from the night before. Seeing Bonne holding hands with Kallex turned Leta’s stomach. She’d been only twelve when they’d entered the Sljunroca and not quite fourteen the first time Bonne had tried tophra, but none of the math added up to Leta not feeling guilty every time she saw Bonne use.

Shortly after they’d arrived in the ‘Roc, Bonne had decided they’d settle on the seventh floor. Few people wanted to trek up six flights of stairs to the top floor, but for Leta and her mother, the distance from prying eyes was worth the walk. Their legs had grown strong carrying their weight up all the stairs, so it wasn’t muscle-soreness Leta felt now, but the deep bone weariness that came with carrying the weight of her nightly occupation.

By the time she reached the front door to their quarters, her legs dragged under her. From habit, she looked down at each end of the hall, to the neat rows of matching doors. They were mostly closed, and those that were open were those that were always open, except … her own.

She hadn’t noticed it right away, but the entry door to Leta’s own quarters was slightly ajar. She neared it, listening for the sounds of footsteps or hands rummaging, but heard nothing. She placed her hand on her door and listened to the quiet stillness from within. It wasn’t the still quiet of calm water, but of just-broken glass.

Had she been less tired, she might have been more cautious. She could have asked a watchman to check her room for an intruder or—more likely—asked Thorne to accompany her inside. His build tended to deter troublemakers quickly. But it had been a long night, and she was already a half-hour past when she usually got home. Her heart’s cage worked stoically to keep the bloody mess from pounding itself free. She leaned in towards the door and smelled must and an acrid human tang as she tried to peer in.

“Bonne?” she called, cracking the silence. She pushed open the door and peered inside. “Are you home?” Her mother considered herself a creature of the night and usually spent the days asleep in their quarters. She wouldn’t have left the door open, though. The tophra made her paranoid.

Leta looked around at the cramped room that reflected the two different souls that lived there. It was clean and well-maintained for the most part, but there were “Bonne-Piles,” as Leta thought of them, scattered throughout. Strewn-off pieces of clothing that were several wears past needing a wash, scattered needles, and mostly empty syringes. There were no dirty dishes, though. Leta always cleaned up after herself, and Bonne rarely ate.

Normally, after a long night of dealing, she’d make herself something to eat. But she found there was no hunger in her belly, just a pull. She felt it through the stillness. It was almost physical. It connected from Leta’s core to her mother’s room, maybe even to her mother herself. Though, had you asked her, she would have said that any connection between them had been severed long ago. Still, some part of her recognized the echo of a long-forgotten connection, while another railed against it. The connection stirred up her insides, her stomach roiled, her heart continued to beat its tattoo on the inside of her ribs, and Leta followed the beat into Bonne’s bedroom.

The door to her mother’s room was also open, but just enough not to be closed. Leta couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth to call her mother’s name again, so instead, she pushed.

The door squealed on its hinges, protesting the disturbance, trying to protect the stillness that emanated from within. Leta entered the tiny room like she’d been preparing for this moment for a lifetime, which, of course, she had. One did not live with an addict without also living with their ghost. Still, it took her breath away, like falling hard on your back. The air was crushed from her. Her ribs failed to protect her heart from the vacuum that tried to pull Leta apart. It took a second, then two, for her brain to remember not just that she should breathe but how and why.

Her mother was dead.

She needn’t check for breath or heartbeat. The half-lidded gaze told Leta all she needed to know. One hand reached for Leta’s mouth, to try to keep in whatever sanity remained, while the other trembled forward in jerky false starts towards her mother. There was no deciding what to do. That part of Leta’s brain—that which made the decisions—was still recovering from the blow. Instead, Leta simply found herself kneeling next to her mother’s bed, sobbing into sheets that smelled like smoke and mildew, and at the very far edges, the woman whose skirts had served as her very first tent.

After some time, a second sense returned to Leta, and she heard herself gasping over and over: “Mommy, I’m sorry.” Mommy, a word she hadn’t heard from her own lips in twenty years. The room shifted to a vantage point that was only barely Leta’s. She could see herself weeping for a woman who had created her, even if it was somewhat reluctantly, then burned their whole life down. How was it that she was fighting the urge to return to the earth beside her? No. She would not throw herself on her mother’s funeral pyre of dirty sheets and needles. She would carry on like she had each day of these past twelve years. Because if she stopped and closed her eyes and listened to the secret place behind her heart, she might be pulled into the mire of grief and sorrow and guilt and shame, and Leta would not die in the mud.

She looked around the room, not admitting to herself what she was looking for until she didn’t find it. She was sure never to find it in their quarters: a bag of Leta’s own homegrown tophra. It wasn’t Leta’s fault that Bonne was a punter, but she didn’t think she could live with herself if her product had killed her mother.

For now, she would dry her tears with the clean sleeve of her hard-earned tunic and cry no more. Any remaining tears would be trapped on the inside to water the place that grew wildflowers or poisoned berries. Leta suspected she would make no sunflowers to decorate her mother’s memory.

The racking convulsions had slowed enough for Leta to sit up on her knees and then back on her haunches to take in the scene before her. Bonne was sprawled on the bed atop dirty clothes and unmade sheets. Despite the prior night’s warmth, Bonne had wrapped herself in heavy bedding, a swaddled babe mourning the lost safety of her mother’s womb.

Leta took in her mother’s still face. She was fine boned with a girlish, sloped nose. Her full lips were thinning, and the lines in her face had formed into true wrinkles. She had grown so used to seeing Bonne either full of rage or on the nod that seeing her look at peace was strange. She had not lived the past six years, but something about the expression on her face reminded Leta of her mother as she’d once known her, and Bonne again looked misplaced here in the cramped prison room: a little less tophra addict and a little more the queen she once was.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

A small voice spoke from the back of Leta’s mind, the place where truth lay, untouched by the mask we create for other people: maybe this is for the best. Bonne had crossed the point of no return, and despite Leta’s half-hearted plans to get her mother clean, she knew it was only a matter of time.

Besides, it was Bonne’s fault they were here, not Leta’s. Life was for the surviving, and if Bonne couldn’t do it anymore, Leta couldn’t have helped her. There was also the terrible relief of no longer being forced to clean up the needles or deal with the angry, snarling tirades. She could pretend, for good now, that her mother had died with her father, that this woman in front of her was a stranger. Or maybe that there never was a woman, just a strange fever dream that went on and on, growing darker and darker.

Leta ran her hands through her hair; both her and her mother’s hair were now streaked with a brassy blonde, Leta’s more, from the cooking. The tophra fumes bleached out the pure blackness, leaving their mark. We were here, and you’ll carry us with you. Bonne was here, too. What mark would Bonne leave upon her?

It was time for Leta to leave Bonne—to tell The Order so they could remove the body before it started to rot. But first—the rites. It would be the second time today Leta would break one of the only three rules of the Sjlunroca, and the first time she’d ever broke this one. As The Order put it: All your gods are dead. But Leta would pray to the dead gods, anyway. For a second, she wished Clark was with her; he would be able to do this properly, but she would never let him see her shame, or worse, her final vestiges of belief.

One of Bonne’s great secrets, and the only one that Leta knew of, though she suspected many more, was that much like Leta’s new friend, Clarkson, Bonnelle Javaria Tallum worshiped the Cattoleiri as gods. Most people gave up the religion when the Cattoleiri left the people alone in a dying world, but shortly after Leta was born, Bonnelle found them. Leta took a breath in and braced herself. She knew her mother would want this, at least the woman she had been would.

Leta closed her eyes and again felt for the connection within her belly and let it reach out back to her mother. It was fading.

All things come to rest.

She remembered her mother as she was, Queen Bonnelle Javaria Tallum, a descendant of the Arpeggio Archipelagos and ruler of Umara. She’d have wanted a royal burial that Leta could not give her, but she could give her at least a piece.

Getting up was difficult; her knees crackled as she rose. Apparently, they were feeling as old as Leta herself. It’s almost done now. Even in the few minutes since Leta had entered, Bonne was looking paler. A ringing echo of her mother’s voice, Get on with it before I fade away entirely. Very well.

Déjà vu hit Leta as her arm extended from the safety of her side to the covers covering Bonne’s body. It was the same feeling she had each time she walked from the front door of their quarters to Bonne’s room, that Bonne was certainly dead. The sensation only leaving her with the rise of Bonne’s bony ribs and hollow belly. But that was over. Bonnelle Javaria Tallum was well and truly dead this time. Perhaps it was just the emotion’s death throes.

Never mind. Bonnelle’s body needed to be made clean and ready for burial. The blanket was thick but no longer warm. Heavier than Leta had remembered. Perhaps Leta would even try to braid Bonne’s hair like she used—

Blood. So much blood. Too much to have come from one person. The blanket was soaked with it, and the thin, dark red strings clung between the body and blanket as Leta pulled it away from her mother. She screamed and dropped the bedding back down on her mother; a sound like spit hitting mud fell with it. Her hands rocked with tremors and climbed to her mouth, a mouth still screaming. She pressed hand over hand against the scream, stifling it until something wet and metallic brushed across her lips. The scream became a moan so feral she’d never heard the likes of it outside of a birthing barn. But this was no whelping, and Leta was no blood-drenched colt.

Her hands palsied back down to her sides, and she wrenched her mouth shut. Her nostrils flared, and her mouth trembled with the effort of keeping in the horror before her. She would have to look again. It wasn’t the first time, but Leta had never wished so badly that her mother had died of a tophra overdose.

Leta lifted the blanket again; its disproportionate weight now held a sickening new meaning. Her teeth ground together, tensing her jaw to the point where something within her would surely snap. But she would keep the panic down if she had to rip its head off.

All her self-protective worries prepared her not at all for what lay beneath the blanket. Dozens, hundreds, of slashes covered her mother’s naked body from her shoulders towards her feet. Bile rose in Leta’s chest, warring with the lightheadedness of blood-fear. She choked both down. Blood drained from the front of her body down her sides, coming to rest in pools beneath her. All things come to rest.

The scene before her vibrated until Leta realized it was her, shaking her head in a negation strong enough to move the world. She threw the blanket over the body. She wished she could wash out her eyes, erase the past minutes, undo the past years. The shaking slowly came to a stop as the speed of her thoughts picked up. What—who—had performed this horror? And where were they now?

Fear rose sharply from her gut. Leta had to force down the panic enough to allow movement. She couldn’t be here. Even if she weren’t in for the same fate as her mother, if discovered within the quarters, surely, she would be the main suspect in her mother’s death. Who else could have such a grievance against the woman who could hardly craft a complete sentence anymore? The sentence was meant to be rhetorical, but it echoed through Leta’s head without response from the cavern beyond. WHO…Who…who…

Run.

The thought replaced all others and forced Leta into movement. She turned her back on her mother and began her evacuation. Good-bye. The thought was as small as a child’s hand wrapped around her father’s finger, and then it was gone.

Once Leta started moving, the routine fell into place. She headed towards her own room, dumping the contents of her satchels on the floor without stopping. She briefly thought of just running straight out of their quarters for safety. What if someone was hiding in her room, lying in wait for her? But she was a young woman alone in her quarters on the nearly vacant top floor of the Sjlunroca. She’d been nearly catatonic with grief and shock; if someone wanted her killed, she’d already be dead. Maybe I am dead and unable to differentiate this underworld from the next. But self-pity wouldn’t help her now.

Leta pulled all her emotions into herself with one steadying breath. It was an exercise at which she was well practiced. Once they were well settled and out of the way, her brain began to tick as she piled necessities into her satchels. Her thoughts never swirled nor raced, she had taught them to stand neatly in line, allowing them through one at a time, as the grains through an hourglass.

She pulled up the floorboard at the base of the bed and grabbed the fist-sized leather coin pouch. The coins were packed so tightly, the bag made not a jingle.

Her mother had been murdered. But by who? Tick.

She didn’t bother replacing the floorboards as she raced to her closet to grab an extra pair of undergarments. She wouldn’t be returning to this place.

It didn’t matter who had killed Bonne. She was a tophra addict one wrong dose from Kallex’s lap. There would be no reason to kill her in such a messy way unless they wanted to frame Leta or… or… information? Tick.

The hard tack Leta had freshened weekly went in next.

She should have finished her breakfast. Tick.

Then, like the final funnel of grains rushing towards the bottom of the hourglass, her thoughts and next steps crystalized in a final thought: You need to become a ghost before someone else does it for you.

Tick.