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City of stars
Are you shining just for me?
The 94th floor is just this: thousands and thousands of birds in starlit cages, hanging from the open air. Some are hundreds of feet high, others just low enough for him to reach up and brush with his fingertips.
Rachel has told him about birds. They live in cages, and are only found close to the sky.
Glass shards crunch strangely under his feet, like eggshells. Passersby are wearing office clothes, suspendium shining on their wrists, and they pay the birds no attention.
Khun has told him about birds, too, though only briefly, and only once.
This is the first time he’s seen any, and it gives him an uneasy sense of déjà vu, looking up to the space above him crowded with metal bars and feathers where there shouldn’t be anything at all.
“Shibisu’s sending his coordinates in a minute,” Khun says from beside him. “We should go.”
He looks exhausted, and Bam gets it. The past few floors were battlegrounds. They don’t have the blood, nor the time, to spare on trivial things like this, but Khun is never impatient, not with him, and so he can’t resist asking—
“Have you ever seen birds before?”
Khun stiffens. “Why?”
Bam hesitates. “It’s—I don’t know. It’s nothing.”
There’s a pause, and then Khun smiles at him, distant, like he’s replaying a memory. “I have, actually. But not nearly as many, and not caged.”
“Not caged?” Bam echoes. He tries to imagine all these birds, wings outstretched, colours smudging out the sun. “How would they all fit?”
Khun considers it for a moment, sees his expression, and laughs.
“They’re meant to fly,” he says gently, and Bam follows his gaze up. “Look at this one. Its wingspan must be two metres at least—does it look like it wants to sit in a cage?”
The bird glances back, eyes dark like an oil spill, but he is too acutely aware of Khun looking at him to really care; a long, curious stare.
FUG’s training has taught him to hide his pain. It has not taught him how to hide the sound of his heartbeats, which, he thinks, is easily the most important thing.
“The sky doesn’t end,” Khun continues. “You could bring all the birds in the Tower to this one floor and they’d all fit. I’ll show you.”
He watches as Khun steps forward, drags his fingers across the base of a cage. After all these years, he has never managed to figure out how Khun moves so silently—it sounds like he is walking across sand instead of broken glass.
“How?” Bam asks, unsure why.
Rachel hadn’t told him this, and now he wonders if there’s really no limit to how high birds can go—he’s never tried with his own wings, but he doesn’t like the possibility of falling from the edge of the sky, and isn’t willing to burn the souls he needs to reach it.
“We’ll free them,” Khun promises, eyes fixed on his lighthouse, on the birds, anything but him. “Before we pass the test. Then you’ll see.”
A sudden chill rushes down his spine, like all the warmth in his body is being leached out by the moon and sand around them.
Because Khun has promised him a lot of things. Because most of them are made in half-hearted moments like these that he wants so desperately to believe in—but when it comes to Khun, he doesn’t remember a single time he has been right.
“I...” Bam starts to protest, then falters. He’s doing it again, arguing for things he doesn’t care about and doesn’t believe in, just so Khun will look at him.
He hates this.
He hates how he thinks even Rachel would be satisfied with all these stars, and doesn’t know whether this is a good thing.
City of stars
There’s so much that I can’t see
The next day, he finds out that the night never ends.
It is morning now, but a half-moon is still frozen in the sky, like the world around them is holding its breath. It reminds him of a frozen lake, somehow, where it’s so cold it hurts to move, and a single step could send him falling.
Bam has started losing track of the hours spilling by, and he is sick of birds already. He doesn’t know what exactly they mean on this floor, or why there are so many.
He rounds the corner, and then—
“Hey,” Khun says lightly, his grin too dagger-sharp for a quiet morning. “What are you doing up so early?”
—his heart stops. There is blood on Khun’s clothes, his hair, red seeping across the blue like slow poison, suspendium floating like empty halos above him. Bam tries to inhale. The scent of copper is heavy on his tongue, and his vision tunnels in.
Khun is meant to be scouting the other side of the city. He isn’t meant to get injured.
“What did you do?” Bam manages, feeling sick.
“Don’t you ever get tired of asking me that?” Khun tilts his head. Bam notices, suddenly, that his earrings are missing; the skin looks too empty there, too vulnerable. “Look, I’m perfectly fine. It’s not my blood.”
Bam stares at him, stunned. The alternative is just as bad, and he’s not sure what to make of it.
“Did you kill someone?” he asks, only half joking.
Khun considers it for a moment, silhouetted by floatstone and street lights, like he has brought dawn behind him.
And then: “I did.”
Sometimes, he sits so close to Khun that he can hear the quiet sync of their heartbeats, and watch the way cold light collects around him in a slow orbit.
He forgets that they are murderers, and that they have taken countless lives to get here. This, he realises, is his biggest mistake.
It’s strange. He’s more worried about Khun, here and alive, than the people he’s killed.
“Why?” Bam asks, anger colouring his vision gray. “Why would you get into a fight without the rest of us? You could’ve been hurt, or—“
Your fatal flaw? Khun had told him, all those nights ago, had whispered it like an oath. You can only see what’s in front of you, and you can’t let go.
“I’ve died five times now,” Khun smiles humorlessly. “And I have the fire fish.”
“But—“ his voice dies in his throat. “What if you don’t come back? What would I do?”
“Well, you’d bury me face down, and move on.” Khun tells him, like he’s picturing a battle plan, then adds: “Write me an elegy if you’re feeling generous.”
He’s not taking this seriously. Bam looks into his eyes, a dizzying shade of calm, and he realises with a sickening certainty that it’s not anger he’s feeling—it’s fear.
Above them, moonlight reflects off metal and wings, and he doesn’t answer.
“It’s fine,” Khun says again. “Nothing happened. I just traded some suspendium, that’s all.”
Not even a day in, and Khun is already making plans without them. He can’t bring himself to feel surprised, because it has always been this way.
Khun’s hand comes up between them, a touch on Bam’s shoulder that burns achingly cold on his skin in ways he can’t begin to explain.
So he just stands there, breathless, as Khun smiles at him—draped in starlight, crowned in blood, with the face of someone who has nothing left to lose.
But I do, Bam thinks, stricken. He thinks of all the confessions he has saved up over the years, tucked away for when there’s nothing more than sun and broken glass between them.
“How much did you make?” Bam asks, and he feels strangely feverish, like he is staring into the face of friendly fire. He focuses on the shine of sand under his feet, waits until their two heartbeats blend into one, until he’s sure he won’t forget how to breathe.
“A few hundred thousand,” Khun shrugs in response, too casual for someone with blood in his hair and knives in his smile. “It’s not enough.”
“But… it doesn’t need to be. You’ve already lost your earrings,” Bam says, uncertainly, and hopes Khun gets it. Don’t lose me too, don’t leave me behind—
He doesn’t.
“Sold,” Khun corrects him coolly, and it’s this one word that terrifies him, inexplicably, more than anything else.
City of stars
Just one thing everybody wants
“Khun,” Bam says, carefully. “What’s going on?”
Usually, it would be Rak asking, or Endorsi, depending on who lost their cool first. Even so, it’s been a long time since he has heard the words, because by now they have learned not to question him.
Tonight, in a stroke of luck, he finds Khun in his room, watching the city rise and fall. The windows have been flung open, and cold air tickles the back of his neck.
Khun glances at him, then says: “I’m making money.”
Essentially, no explanation.
Bam stops, frustrated. Words die in his throat, and then his heart follows with a series of lopsided beats, though he doesn’t understand why.
But if there’s one thing he’s learned from all this, it’s to pretend he does.
“Ah,” he nods, feeling more helpless than he’s ever been. “What is that?”
“This?” Khun frowns at him sideways, then gestures back to his lighthouse.
The suspendium from yesterday is still floating lazily around the room, drifting above him like toxic debris, and it annoys him for some reason. Bam has the sudden urge to knock them down. “Yeah.”
“Oh,” Khun laughs. “These are my shares.”
Bam nods, though he doesn’t really care. He tracks the shape of Khun’s lips, his eyes, and a shiver runs over him. He is too distracted, can’t think of anything but the fact that Khun never shares.
“This floor has some big shot companies,” Khun explains. “Everyone here is obsessed with making money, so I thought I might as well start investing.”
I know, he thinks, but doesn’t say aloud. In the span of a few days, Khun has raked in too many points to count, pulled strings so far they are on the verge of snapping.
But Khun hasn’t confided in anyone: not even Shibisu, not even him.
Bam stares at the lighthouse screens. There are all sorts of numbers and shapes and lines, things he knows Khun grew up with, and things he wants to understand but knows he can’t.
Something rears inside him, hot and sharp, like melting glass. It is always like this with Khun—he is so far away, an apex predator at the top of the food chain, and to reach him means to be devoured.
To tell the truth, Bam has never liked chasing things. He has made two exceptions, one of which he regrets.
“Do you expect us to understand?” Bam asks, and Khun’s eyes widen, startled.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at this,” he says tightly, pointing at all the things Khun has gathered alone—objects worth more than both of them, the numbers climbing up in their bank account. “All of this.”
Bam feels like he‘s back in the cave, suffocating under the stone. He wonders, briefly, if homesickness means being sick of what used to be home.
“You don’t tell us any of your plans, we can’t do anything to help,” he says. “We’re all trying our best.”
Khun doesn’t react for a moment, just smiles like the idea is hilarious. Bam doesn’t know what he’s missing, but it’s not funny, none of this is.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do,” Bam says numbly, and in the space of a heartbeat, he realises what the suspendium reminds him of. “You’re leaving us all behind.”
Khun goes silent, suddenly.
But instead of a response, there is a touch of fingers through his hair, painfully gentle in a way that he can’t quite remember. He goes still under the sudden warmth, tries to breathe, and can’t.
Khun just smiles at him, a quiet apology, blue stone drifting around him like a cage.
“I’m not,” he says. “But are you?”
Everyone in this Tower is trapped by destiny, after all.
There in the bars,
And through the smokescreen of the crowded restaurants
Every night, Endorsi takes it upon herself to set the dinner table.
“I did this a lot as a kid,” she had said the first time, looking down at the cutlery, a strange set to her mouth. Bam doesn’t miss how her hands shake.
They eat in silence. Khun hasn’t bothered to show up.
Rooms for regulars on this Floor aren’t free, unlike the norm. But because of Khun, they can afford the biggest suites in this hotel for years on end, the best dishes this floor has to offer.
Shibisu drops his spoon, his eyes wide. “I’ve got it.”
“What?” Endorsi scowls. “How to use chopsticks?”
Bam pokes at his food half-heartedly. Even Shibisu, who used to exchange notes and plans with Khun all the time, has long since given up, and now researches floors alone.
He appreciates it, but having to follow orders of separate strategists is more than a little difficult; just the first night, one had told them to scout the city, and the other had murdered somebody on the way.
“No!” Shibisu exclaims, exasperated. “This Floor. We haven’t been able to get into the office buildings, but I bet Khun has—“
“Of course,” Hatz mutters.
“—the test must have something to do with all of this; the money, the birds, everything Khun’s been doing without us.”
When Bam puts two and two together, it snicks gently into place beside the promises, the suspendium, the confessions, the touch.
He can’t believe he didn’t realise sooner.
A voice that says
I’ll be here, and you’ll be alright
[“No one’s passed in hundreds of years, I’m just warning you—the birds here are trapped, they can’t fly, so you need to free them, no one knows why. Just offer money, as much as you can get—”
Khun watches the man struggle against his grip. He wonders if he was once like this, desperate to own things he cannot have, and it takes all his willpower not to kill him on the spot.
Pathetic.
“If I sell all your suspendium, will it be enough?”
The man coughs, and blood sprays across the side of Khun’s face. “Of course not,” he wheezes, fighting for air. “Everyone here knows that.”
Khun decides to drop the formalities.
“Really?” he grins, and leans forward. “Then you would also know that blood doesn’t come off pure suspendium, and I really fucking liked these earrings.”
Khun slits the man’s throat, lets his body slide to the ground, and drops the earrings over his ruined neck.]
I think I wanted to stay.
Bam stands with his team, and watches the sky fall.
The 94th floor is just this: thousands and thousands of birds in starlit cages. He can feel the thrum of shinsu under his feet as the cages splinter to pieces, and birds stretch into the open air.
They really do look like they are meant to fly.
Bam stares. His heart is full with something he doesn’t recognise. Maybe they’re all like these birds, waiting for someone to break them free.
Suddenly, he realises he doesn’t care about the plans—he cares about his friends, and Khun, and if it means he gets to stay with them, he will kill a king, overturn the Tower, or lay his soul at their feet.
Both Khun and Rachel have told him that people never change. He smiles at the thought, but keeps this information secret.
Khun shifts nearer to him, and the closeness sends a shudder through his entire body.
“See?” he whispers. “I always keep my promises.”
Bam watches the colours flock away with a sound like the earth tearing, like gravity has lost its hold on the world, and Khun right beside him.
“Thank you,” he says, honest.
When he looks up again, he sees a fading moon, a city of broken stars that stretches on forever around them. Something quiet soars inside him when he looks for the edge of the sky, and can’t find it.
Maybe he’s known for a long time now, that he doesn’t want anything except this.
“Wait,” Bam frowns. “Why hasn’t anyone passed before us in the last…”
“Few hundred years?”
Bam nods. “Yeah.”
“Well,” the corner of Khun’s mouth tugs up, “I guess it’s too easy to make a living here. They start off building up money to pass the test, eventually decide they’re fine with being rich, and just live on this floor.”
“Oh.” That makes a lot of sense, actually. Then he wonders, uncertainly, if Khun had had this thought, if he would’ve chosen riches here over the top of the Tower.
“But why birds, of all things?”
Khun looks at him, then smiles. “You tell me.”
He considers for a moment, but comes up with nothing. As the world fades to black, Bam just thinks birds are meant to be free, and Khun is meant to be his.
City of stars,
You never shined so brightly.