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She’s twenty-one when she first crouches down beside a body, whispering something stupid and meandering and sweet into its hollow ears. It’s an imperfect process, freelancing, and she’s never killed a person before; she’s never even worn a proper suit, and the starched shirt stretches tight over her back when she moves. She loses her limbs when she stands up. The body crumples. There is blood on the floor, blood on her shoes, blood in her mouth.
There is another body in the room.
“Quanxi,” a thin voice whispers, honey-sweet. Quanxi knows she’s behind her, footsteps feather-light, but she still flinches when Makima’s arms slip slowly around her waist, hands clasping between her ribs.
“Hey,” she says, throat dry.
“You’re perfect, you know,” Makima says sweetly. Her tongue brushes Quanxi’s ear. “So, so perfect. You know I love you, Quanxi.”
There’s a body on the floor and they both know it. Quanxi put it there. Makima planned for this. It’s a Tuesday, the sun is shining, and Quanxi hates herself.
“Yeah,” she says. Swallows. Clears her throat. Picks the dried blood out from under her fingernails. “Love you too.”
Introductions are a funny thing. Makima makes her wear the suit again, pulling her into the doorway of her hotel room to button her shirt up. Her knuckles press against Quanxi’s throat when she tightens the tie around her neck.
“There,” she says, stepping back. She claps her hands, grinning up at Quanxi. “You’re mine now.”
“Oh,” Quanxi says.
The tie is one of Makima’s.
“That’s Makima’s tie.”
“How do you know?”
“You just do.”
“It’s not hers.”
“That’s Makima’s tie.”
His name is Kishibe. He asks her out. She punches him.
“Quanxi,” Makima calls from the hotel bathroom, “have you seen my keys?”
Quanxi, spread out across her bed, pats the mattress. “Right here.”
Makima hadn’t insisted Quanxi wear a suit to come to see her. She’d shown up in one anyway, wrinkled shirt buttoned to the collar, tie crooked and loose around her neck. If she was going to do this, she’d do it properly, she’d thought, and she’d even bought a new pair of shoes, black with subtle burgundy accents. Makima had taken one look at her when she’d knocked on the door before pulling her inside, smiling serenely and mumbling something about irons.
“You’re beautiful, Makima,” Quanxi says to the ceiling.
“You think so?”
Makima shuts the bathroom door behind her. She’s barefoot, half-dressed, her crisp white shirt unbuttoned and hanging off one of her shoulders. Quanxi raises her head to get a look at her with her one good eye before slumping back down onto the bed, sighing loudly.
“I don’t just think. You ever take a good look in the mirror?”
“I don’t have a lot of time to spend worrying about appearances,” Makima says amusedly. She sits down next to Quanxi, her hand drifting towards Quanxi’s hair. Quanxi’s eye drifts to the clean line of her hip, how it melts into the white of her shirt. Longing is a funny thing. She wants to touch Makima, she realizes with a jolt that leaves her momentarily breathless. Lighter than a punch. Lighter than a kiss. She wants her hands over Makima’s, her tongue on her neck, her lips on her teeth.
“You should,” Quanxi says instead. “You’ve gotta have some money saved up. Go out over the weekend and buy a fancy-ass suit, and then show up to work in it on Monday. Public Safety’d go crazy.”
“People would like that?”
Makima acts so coy. What’s up with that? She isn’t fooling anyone. Quanxi can see right through the crop circles etched into her eyes, and she likes her anyway. In a dream you kiss a girl. She’s never even thought about anything besides being alive.
“People would love that.” Quanxi pauses. “Hey, Makima...do me a favor. Let me see it before anyone else does.”
“Of course, Quanxi,” Makima says sweetly, silk-soft.
Baby, she’d called Makima once. It had stuck to her tongue like sand, weighing her words down when she finally got it out. It had been after a job, when her hands were jittery and her heartbeat pulled itself up between her ears and sat there at the top of her spinal cord, choking her a little harder with each breath in. She hadn’t been good with blood yet, and she’d almost passed out on their way to the car. They’d sat in the back, shoulder-to-shoulder, the driver giving them only the most cursory of nods before turning the radio to a wavery sixties station. And her fingertips were buzzing, and the adrenaline was pressing all of her hard-earned secrets up her throat, and before she could say anything stupid, she cleared her throat and let her hand fall to Makima’s thigh and said directly to Makima’s side profile, “Baby, I—”
Makima had turned to face her then, and she was so, so startlingly close; their noses were pressed against each other, lips mere centimeters apart, and then Makima had leaned in a little closer and whispered lowly, “Do you need something?”
Her eyes were glowing in the night, and Quanxi had stared into those concentric circles and thought about dying. And the words had fallen straight out of her mouth, right into Makima’s remorseless hands. There would be no coming back from this place.
She’d shaken her head, pulling away from her. The seatbelt strained against her neck. Her right side felt cold, torn from Makima’s body heat and the eighth wonder of the universe.
“Quanxi.”
“Yeah?”
“Go out with me.”
Kishibe says this every time they meet. She usually punches him.
“If it was between me and Makima, who would you choose?” She asks instead, adjusting Makima’s tie around her neck.
“You, obviously.”
“Oh.”
“Why? What about you? Me or Makima?”
He’s chuckling, voice rich and low. Like he thinks it’s all a great fucking joke. Like she could never really love Makima—at least, not in the way he says he loves her. Like he’s a Disney prince or a hammer, and he’ll keep asking her until she finally falls to the floor in a moment of weakness and declares her undying love for him. It would all be very romantic, she supposes. But she was never one for romance—not in China, and certainly not here. Quanxi, the anvil; Kishibe, the prince who makes out with it until people surround him and point and laugh because what the hell, man, this guy’s making out with an anvil.
“Makima.” She swallows. “I’d choose Makima.”
“Oh.”
He’s not laughing anymore. She doesn’t look at him. Not out of shame, or even pity; but because he had probably deserved a better letdown, even if he is an asshole.
“Sorry,” she says shortly. “Told you I wasn’t interested.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And I—I’m older than you, too. So it probably wouldn’t work out.”
“Alright.”
She nods. “Okay. I...I’m gonna get going. Makima’s probably looking for me.”
“She is, huh.”
“Yeah.” She swallows, feeling suddenly guilty. “I’ll see you around.”
She makes to leave, but Kishibe stops her after a few short steps with a hand around her wrist.
“Quanxi,” he says, hammer-soft, metal-sweet. “Go out with me.”
“Fuck you,” she says, wrenching her arm out of his grasp.
“Oh, c’mon. You’re really gonna choose Makima over me? She doesn’t care about you!”
“And what would you know about that, huh?”
He snorts, shaking his head, and she stalks off, hands balled into tight fists in her pockets. Quanxi, the anvil. Cold steel. Forged in fire.
“Call me, baby!” he leers at her back, and she spits on the sidewalk.
“What was China like?” Makima asks her one evening. She has a new hotel room with north-facing windows and two beds instead of one. Makima does not insist she uses the other, so she doesn’t.
“I dunno. What about it?”
“Life?”
“Same as here. Same as everywhere else.”
Makima’s curled around her, and she has one of Quanxi’s hands in her own. She’s fully dressed; Quanxi is not. Carefully, with the sort of attention one gives to a small child, she picks flecks of dried blood out from under Quanxi’s fingernails.
“Did you like it there?”
“I liked it fine.” She squeezes Makima’s hand. “I like it here too.”
“Are you going to move back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want you to move,” Makima says, matter-of-fact even now. She smiles at Quanxi’s nails, digging her thumbnail under Quanxi’s. “Does that make me a selfish person?”
“I don’t think so,” Quanxi whispers numbly.
“Good.”
Makima sighs against her ear, lips brushing her earlobe. Quanxi thinks she might love her. But Makima seems to love this, the endless tease of something more without ever having to deliver. At least Kishibe wants something from Quanxi. Makima’s never seemed to want anything.
“Hey,” she whispers, pulling her hands away. She curls them gently around Makima’s arms instead, breath hitching when Makima’s hands clasp around her bare stomach. “I love you, you know.”
“Yeah.” Makima moves closer. “Love you too.”
“No, I mean—” She sighs. “You know what I mean, Makima.”
“Of course I do,” Makima says, voice soft and lilting. “Why do you think we’re here, Quanxi? Do you think I usually take my subordinates to bed with me?”
“We haven’t—”
“And I haven’t either. Quanxi, look at me.”
She turns around in Makima’s arms, coming nose-to-nose with her. Her hair is sunset-orange, spilling down her shoulders. Her eyes are glowing again.
“I’m not scared of you,” Quanxi mumbles petulantly, almost childlike, to the space between Makima’s neck and shoulder.
“You don’t need to be,” Makima whispers.
There is a body in the driveway. Quanxi put it there. This is no longer surprising to either her or Makima. They leave the motel before anyone sees the mess.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a devil hunter?” Quanxi asks her on the drive back to Public Safety’s headquarters.
“Yes,” Makima says primly, smoothing down the front of her shirt. She catches Quanxi staring when she tilts her head and reaches out, taking her hands gently between her own. “But you aren’t supposed to be anything, are you?”
Quanxi, Makima breathes down her neck, eyes held delicately shut.
Nobody has ever touched Quanxi like this. She is used to the rough edges of the world, fingernails caught in doorframes until the whole building comes collapsing to the ground. But Makima—beautiful, all-knowing Makima—holds her close and strokes her hair when she presses herself against her. She touches her like she’s something to be held gently. Like she could be remade, if Makima so desired.
Quanxi, Makima sighs into the curve of her jaw, voice breathy and high. Quanxi. Baby. Contract with me.
Makima’s hands in her hair. Makima’s lips on her teeth. Makima above her, backlit in the setting sun, her body a limitless vessel of oblivion.
Quanxi, honey, I know what you want. And I can give it to you. Contract with me, Quanxi.
Makima. Makima, omnipresent. Makima in the light and the shadow and the bottled water on the nightstand and the stained shag carpet and the—
Quanxi.
—honey everywhere, and she’s dripping with it, a prelude to another dimension, yet another way to be useful—
Quanxi.
—and she is a monument, this darling of hell; she is everything the world watches for, with open eyes and open palms and tiny, tiny pinpricks of extinction—
Baby.
—red everywhere, hands and knees and shoulder blades, and she’s kissing her with crimson caught between her teeth—
Honey.
—IF I MET YOU BEFORE THE SKY COLLAPSED INTO A POOL OF BLOOD I KNOW WE WOULDN’T BE LIKE THIS! I LOVED YOU BEFORE I KNEW YOU BUT I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU DIDN’T BRING AN UMBRELLA—
Quanxi, baby, this is an order. Say you’ll make a contract.
“Okay,” she whispers, her voice trembling.
And she feels nothing. And then Makima presses herself against her, teeth catching on her bottom lip. She kisses Quanxi and pulls her name right out of her mouth, pressing her blissfully into oblivion. And Quanxi’s last thought is: I will love her until the day I die.