Chapter Text
On the evening of the third day, Siyra found his sister.
He was not the first. A probe team from the Northfall had identified her body that morning, but in adherence with regulation they had done nothing more than note it in their log. Even the messenger they had sent came to him outside of obligation, and for that he acknowledged their kindness. But the body had not been touched, and so if it was to be returned to Tharos, Siyra would be the one to do so.
That was not standard either, but it was allowed; chapter eight, section six, subheading one point one of the naval handbook allowed the retrieval and transport of bodies bearing personal significance to an individual sailor, under the condition that it was approved by the captain. Well, he was the captain. He had followed the proper protocol, filled out the request, logged its submission, signed and dated his approval and then logged that, too. He had reserved a freezer unit in Medical through a similarly redundant process, and then he had checked out a box with which to transport and store the remains.
Siyra held the box in his hands now. It was small, far too small to fit a body, but that was by design. Etik was no longer whole. Perhaps it would be more comfortable to bring a person-sized box. Perhaps then he might pretend she still had her dignity. But it would be a waste of space and energy, and more than that it would be a fiction. There was not enough left of Etik to fill a person-sized box, and whether or not he brought one would not change that fact. Siyra would not hide from it.
Per regulation, he had selected a team of six to accompany him onshore. They were five guards and one officer, the minimum number required. Now, all except one were gathered around him on the deck. The five sailors were silent, solemn, watching him with wide eyes. They did not want to come any more than Siyra wanted them to. This was a personal mission, and they had no place in it. Their presence was necessary, though, and so there was no use regretting it. They would learn to accept it as he had.
As they waited, Siyra looked out over the sea to the coast. The fires had moved farther inland, and now with the thickest smoke retreated and the rest dispersed over the water, the destruction stood naked and raw. No detail was visible at this distance, but the flattened tracks, gray masses of rubble and the empty, collapsed shells of buildings were enough.
Lieutenant Commander Kjida, second mate, emerged from a nearby door alongside Lieutenant Commander Eilan. He stopped and said something to her. She nodded briskly. He offered her the folder he had been carrying, and she took it and disappeared back into the ship. He approached their group.
“Commander Kjida,” Siyra greeted.
“Sir.”
The exchange hung awkwardly in the air. Six expectant pairs of eyes turned to Siyra. Their gazes were piercing and fraught with meaning, each one a blade, and they skewered him from six directions.
The party was assembled now, and so there was no longer reason to delay. It was late afternoon already, so they would need to be swift if they were to finish by nightfall. It was time, Siyra told himself.
“It is time,” he said aloud.
Even so, it was another four seconds before he was able to take the first step, and they passed like minutes. When he did, the rest of the party fell in behind him. Others on the deck stopped to watch as they passed. Some tried to disguise their interest, pretending to be engaged in work or conversation as they snuck surreptitious glances over their shoulders. Some stared openly. Siyra did not meet their eyes, but he felt their curiosity, their pity regardless.
The Celerity was anchored in the bay still, in the same place from where they had conducted the attack. That morning the wind had shifted, carrying the acrid smoke out over the water as a thin gray haze that engulfed the ship and permeated her halls, stung the eyes and nose and settled on the skin like dust. It was stronger nearer the water, and as they were lowered down into the craft that would take them ashore, Siyra found it growing increasingly difficult to breathe. None of the others seemed to be experiencing it, though, so with some effort he managed to ignore the feeling.
It was a long and silent ride to the docks. A tense, somber air had descended over their party, and even Siyra could recognize that it was because of him. No one spoke. Periodically, Kjida would offer him conflicted or sympathetic or searching looks, but he was the only one bold enough.
Siyra held the box lightly with both hands. It was painted black, metal on the outside but lined inside with synthetic material that would both sterilize and regulate temperature. Despite its composition, it was remarkably light.
For the briefest of moments, a memory surfaced. It was no more than a flash, a single frozen image from his childhood: Siyra at six years old, standing in the courtyard at Tharos and holding an infant Etik in his arms. She had been so small, so vibrant, warm like the sun at his back and the worn stones underfoot. Her little features, soft and smooth but with just enough character that he could see the face she would grow into—his father’s, his own—the intelligence in her eyes, the surprising strength with which her little hand gripped his own.
But as soon as it had come the memory was gone, and the smoky air grew colder and the sea grew deeper and the box turned to lead in his hands.
In the harbor now, Kjida maneuvered the craft slowly through the floating debris. Fragments of boats and houses, market stalls and crates and the docks themselves, shattered in the initial bombing, bobbed in the water. Most were wood; any stone had long since sunk. Occasionally, they passed a floating limb or even a full body, bloated and torn, staring sightlessly out into the gray sky. It was a young girl, Siyra realized. She had been deformed beyond recognition by the explosion and the water and the scavenging fish, but her flower-patterned dress still swirled bloody and waterlogged around her. Two of the sailors looked away. Siyra could not.
Kjida brought the tender to the stablest section of the dock. It knocked twice against a post, and then he cut the motor. Wordlessly, Siyra stood.
By tradition, he was the first to step out. He took the line with him. These smaller vessels were not equipped with sealock, and thus it would have to be tied up the traditional way. He did so while the others piled out behind him. Then he straightened and, for the first time since their arrival, allowed himself to look at the city.
The devastation had been clear from the Celerity. At this distance, it was personal. He could almost hear the screams, feel the explosions rocking the ground and the heat of the fires on his face, smell the rivers of blood. No, that last one was not entirely fiction. Smoke was still the strongest smell, but underneath was a thick, wet, metallic undercurrent of blood and death. The sea smelled different here, too, enclosed and stagnant and rotting.
Pleia had not been completely destroyed. Great swaths of the city were nothing more than rubble, but many buildings still stood. Some were even stable, though chipped and scorched and with gaping black holes for windows. But their plan had been thorough, and the destruction was immense. For every intact house ten more were flattened, ash and gravel underfoot. Ghost fire like wind curled around the ruins. A ship nearby had been torn in half, and its main mast lay splintered in three along one of the docks. Pieces of its sails, gray and brown now, melted in places and shredded in others, fluttered in the wind where they had snagged on the rubble.
This had been ordered of him, Siyra reminded himself. There could be no wrong in order. He had obeyed his queen, and none of these lives meant a thing in the face of that. He had done no wrong.
He had done no wrong.
From his pocket, Siyra retrieved the slip of paper given to him by Alin, and given to Alin by the messenger from the Northfall. On it were written the coordinates of Etik’s body. He had already memorized them, and now he offered the paper to Kjida. “This is our destination,” he said.
“It’s close,” Kjida said, surprised.
Siyra had already started walking. The others quickly caught up, and the five guards fell into formation around him and Kjida, swords drawn. Siyra left his own sheathed at his side.
A suffocating, deafening silence had fallen over the land. There was no life, no birds or rats or insects, nothing but the smoke-wind and the rubble and the dead ground beneath. Even their footsteps were muffled by a layer of ash. Siyra knew war, and he knew destruction. This was not unfamiliar. It was not shocking. And yet it was different, somehow, knowing that this time it was his doing, that this time buried somewhere among these ruins was a piece of his own life.
Bodies littered the streets. Though perhaps it was incorrect to call them bodies, because that word implied a certain integrity, a thing to which one could point and say this is a discrete unit, this is an object that has boundaries and a name and is knowable. Scattered throughout these streets was more like a pulp, a smeared mass of tissue and viscera and dried blood and ash. There were no boundaries, not between bodies nor between the bodies and the rubble. It was all one, flesh wiped onto rocks and rocks dragged through flesh.
Siyra could not estimate the number of dead. Some had been burned, and many of those were intact skeletons. He counted thirteen skulls on one street. But many more had been blown apart or crushed by falling debris, and those were harder to count. How much matter was in a body? Spread out, how much area would one cover?
A mother, the lower half of her body ripped from her spine and collected in a deformed mass several paces away, lay splayed out in the middle of the road. A jagged tear ran the length of her torso, and exposed organs spilled onto the ground. She might have died with her child in her arms, but a stray foot or a piece of falling rock had torn the boy away. He lay just out of reach now, his face caved in, his thin arms reaching eternally out for her. The empty cavity where his face had once been seemed almost like a new mouth, gaping in a soundless and expressionless scream. His blood had mixed with his mother’s on the ground until both now lay on the same red-black bed, and only in that were they united.
Three girls littered the ground farther away. The youngest was no more than an infant. Brain mixed with fragments of skull and twisted flesh striped the side of the stone that had crushed her, and her neck hung open over her chest. One of her arms had been torn nearly off, attached to her shoulder at an awkward angle by a flap of skin. The oldest might have been seven or eight. She had died curled protectively around the third girl, and both were drenched in blood. One eye had been torn from its socket and lay buried in the ash. The other stared out blue and empty from her mangled face.
Pleia was a human city, and so the blood here was red. Dark, muddy red, the color of spoiled wine and crushed beetles and rot. Where it had congealed in larger quantities, it had darkened nearly to black and shrunk into stringy lumps. It stained clothing and dirt and the walls in sprays, all of it red. Red and rust-brown and black.
The guards kept their swords ready, slope position, but they encountered no one. Not even a shadow, not a distant scream nor a child’s eye peering out from the shadows. Empty. There might have been no person left at all in the whole city, and they would not have known the difference.
They walked, and the horrors unfolded one after another, bleeding together until they lost all identity and there was no knowing where one ended and the next began. At first the others had reacted to the carnage, grimacing or looking away or covering their noses against the stench, but it did not take long before even this became routine. One sailor walked straight through the scattered remains of a man, and the heel of her boot ground chunks of muscle and fat into the dirt. She did not seem to care. Even Kjida had stopped veering around the bodies, and now he simply stepped over them.
As they neared the coordinates, Siyra found that the ash underfoot was thickening. It clung to his boots and dragged his feet back and soon he was fighting to walk against the current. But none of the others appeared to be having any difficulty, and when he looked down he found the ground unchanged. Dust and blood, yes, and gravel and dirt poking through. But that was all.
For a brief moment, the group pulled ahead. Then they corrected their pace to his, and no observer would have noticed the error. Siyra tried and failed to quicken his steps.
Another memory fought its way through the smoke. This one was longer but less complete than the last. It played out before him like a projected image, faint and distorted. Etik, twelve years old, standing in the entrance to his chambers and leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded accusingly across her chest. Siyra, eighteen, a lieutenant on the Precision, home for five days’ leave. She said something he could not understand. He responded defensively. She stood straight and stepped toward him, unfolding her arms to jab him in the chest with her finger. Another accusation. He started to speak, but she interrupted him. Her hair was cut short, an act of rebellion against their father. In her eyes there was disgust.
Siyra gripped the box a little tighter. To his right, Kjida shot him a questioning look, but he ignored it. They were close now, he knew.
This area had been a commercial district, and some surviving pieces of storefronts and handmade wooden signs were still visible through the dust. Apothecary, one said. Children’s clothing, said another. Something cold and hard sank through his chest and into his stomach. They turned a corner.
There, at the edge of the street amid a heap of stone, was a smear of blue blood.
Siyra stopped. The others did too, and for a long moment they simply stood there, looking at it.
He did not want to approach it. He wanted to turn around now and walk back to the tender, return to the ship, disengage the sealock and sail as far away as he could. He wanted to leave that blue smear and everything it represented right here in this ruined city and never think about it again. But Siyra had a duty to his kingdom and its people, to his father and brother and sister and to his other sister, too, and duty was antithesis to want. No, duty was synonymous with want. Siyra did not have wants, and certainly none that differed from his duties.
Inconceivable. Forward, then.
The others allowed him to take the lead. It was not protocol, but strangely he found that he did not care enough to correct them. Each footstep was a lifetime. The first connection, heel to rock. The shifting of gravel underfoot, sharp stone and smooth dirt below, the completion of the contact and a newly created plane extended out to infinity. The plane broken. Another step.
Two paces beyond the first blue mark was another, this one larger. It had direction, it had been wiped, and so she had been moving. He imagined Etik stumbling blindly through the smoke, tripping on a chunk of wall and catching herself on another, her hand leaving a bloody streak behind. Between the two stains were drops of blood, many of them and in close proximity. He imagined the kind of wound that would bleed this much.
The wind stilled. Pieces of canvas, cloth, hair ribbons caught on the rubble fell limp against it. The air grew hotter.
At first, Siyra did not understand what he was looking at. Even after the Northfall’s report, even after what he knew of war and death and the scenes they had walked past not minutes ago, somehow he had still expected her to be comprehensible. Orderly, if not complete. He had expected to see his sister, recognizable pieces of her that he could connect through time to the freckle on the back of her hand, or the shape of her eyes or the small scar on her ankle.
This was not a person.
Etik had been partially burned. All that remained of the lower half of her body was bones, and there were very few of those left. Something, blood or water or an outside disturbance, had prevented the fire from consuming the rest of her, though that was no mercy. Her upper body might have been caught in an explosion. Parts of some organs were identifiable, but none were whole and certainly not all were present. Chunks of spine, a section of intestine, meat that might have been muscle. Of her face there was nothing. Siyra knew it was her face only by her hair, what little of it remained, which was tangled in the pulp. Blood drenched the scene. Most of it was dried on the stones, but some that coated the body itself was still bright blue and glistening. Flies swarmed around her.
She had died with another. Her companion was human, but that was all that could be determined from the remains. Their two bodies blended together, blue on red, the ultimate intimacy and the ultimate violation. Something metallic glistened amid the mess. He recognized Etik’s dagger.
Behind him, one of the sailors gasped.
Siyra knelt at her side and placed the box on the ground. For a moment, he could do nothing else. He looked at the pile of meat that had once been his sister and remembered Etik as a child, loud and lively and mischievous. Her hair had been so soft. When she had smiled, one of her front teeth had been crooked. They had grown up together. Born of the same woman, children of the same house, they had shared meals and secrets and sleepless nights. And now she was this.
Siyra would return only her body to Tharos, which meant that he would first have to separate her from the dead human. Some of it would be easy, in part by virtue of location and in part because Evíthian flesh had a subtly different tone than human flesh. These were the largest pieces, and so it was with them that he started.
He picked them up with painstaking care. Her body had already suffered the highest indignity; he would not add more by crudely handling what was left of it.
First were the few bones, fragments of pelvis and femur and smaller ones he could not name. These had been stripped of flesh by the fire, and so they were dry and relatively clean. Even the smallest pieces were heavy in his hands. When Siyra had retrieved them all, as a single layer they covered only half of the bottom of the box. He looked around in vain for the rest, but they were gone.
Next were the unburned parts. Siyra brushed the flies away. A second later they returned, and he brushed them away again. When they came staggering back again, fat and greedy, he ignored them. One landed on his hand, and he watched it jerkily walk the length as its legs prickled his skin. The smell of decomposition was overwhelming.
The piece of spine was wet and greasy to the touch, and when he lifted it fleshy strings trailed behind. One broke off, and he was forced to pinch it to gain enough purchase to pick it up. The chunks of flesh were no better. Muscle held its shape and thus was easier to handle, but fat and organs were slippery, and some had rotted enough to separate at his touch. There was no preserving her dignity anymore. He assembled scraps of tissue into a pile and then scoped it gently into the box. A layer was melted onto the stone, and as he used his nails to scrape it off he could feel pieces of it lodge underneath them.
It was wrong, it was a violation of everything he had ever known, all justice and meaning and truth. These were not parts of the body that could be touched by living hands. Atrocity, he thought. Dishonor.
A piece of hair fell over his shoulder and came to rest in the blood. Both of his hands were drenched in it already, and so he could do nothing without dirtying it more. It stayed.
He worked slowly, methodically, disentangling Etik from the human and arranging her as neatly as he could in the box. Rotting flesh had a unique texture, slimy and clingy, thin white films coating the exposed surfaces. Some of it fell apart in his hands, sections sloughing off entirely or hanging by strings.
This was an animal, he told himself. This was a forgotten fish he was cleaning off the docks at Tharos. It could not be a person.
An image: Etik, the last time they had spoken. Her hair whipped against her face in the wind, ink-black and chopped short at the chin. Her mouth was open in a shout. One arm gestured angrily, and the other clutched the two bags into which she had fit her life. Her eyes were the color of night and her skin was like sea-wrought stone. I’m leaving, and you can let me go or I can kick you until you do. I don’t hate you, Siyra, I never did. Not everything is about you. This is something I have to do, for me. Step aside.
Will I ever see you again?
She had been nineteen, and he twenty-five. That was ten years ago now. His father had told him not to look for her, and so he had not. His father had told him never to mention her filthy, traitorous, disgraceful name in these halls again, and so he had not. His father had told him this operation has a second purpose. There is a traitor and a Geseryn spy living in that city, and she must be eliminated. Her identity is stated in this document. Please, do not speak of this with Litra or Tharomin. And so he had not.
She had been twenty-nine when she died. He wondered what the years had done to her, if at last the sharpening touch of adulthood had come to her face. Perhaps she had changed her hair or earned a new scar.
Siyra did not know how much time had passed, but eventually his hands began to slow. He had collected all of the pieces that he was certain were Etik. There were more that might have been, but they also might have been the human, and he could return only her to Tharos. Better to leave some behind than to contaminate the rest. There was ash, too, but that was even harder to identify, and he did not attempt it. He scraped the last string from a chunk of stone and laid it in the box. Then he sat for a while, watching flies swarm the human’s body, watching his shadow creep farther and farther over the ash as the sky reddened.
For the first time since they found her, Kjida spoke. “Captain?”
“Yes,” Siyra said. “We are finished here.”
The air was coppery and acidic and sickly sweet. Fitting the lid over the box did nothing to alleviate the stench. It was in the stones now, in the ground and the sky and the deepest, purest essence of the city. It would always be there. Long after the ash had been cleared and the shops rebuilt and the memories lost to time, the smell would remain.
Siyra stood, box in hand, and faced the group. They were making a commendable effort at stoicity, but many of them were young. One looked as if she had been crying.
For the last time he looked at the place where Etik had died. In the fading light the red became black and the blue became red, and the crumbled ruins cast sharp, unnatural shadows over the gore. He would never forget this, he knew. This image would follow him for the rest of his life, burned into the darkness, waiting to rise and meet him every time he closed his eyes. There would be no more rest, no more peace for him. But there would be no peace for Etik, either, and in that it was perfectly fitting.
It was not going to change, so there was no use watching it. Time to move.
Siyra started back in the direction of the docks. He said nothing to the others, but instantly they fell in around him. For a long time there was no sound but their footsteps and the wind, returned now, whistling through the crooked shells of burned-out houses.
The sun kissed the water. The sea sank her claws in and dragged it down, and when its light met her waves it scattered like blood, like oil over her surface. It fought. In the eastern sky came night.
Siyra thought of his other siblings. Litra and Tharomin knew nothing of the attack, and certainly nothing of Etik’s death. But word would spread fast, and by the time he returned home with her body they would be waiting for it. Already he could see the betrayal in their eyes, the horror and the fury and the hatred. He doubted he would ever speak to them again, either.
They walked. Their path was the same by which they had come, and so too were the bodies, but he did not recognize a single one. It was all the same. Flesh like paste, bone and brain and viscera, hair. Blood. Swords mangled by falling stones, charred wood and dirty, cracked children’s toys. The same note again and again and again, and the composition his own. His foot caught on something, and he almost tripped. The others pretended not to notice.
Siyra closed his eyes for an instant and found his sister’s body burned into his eyelids. His hands were sticky with blood and fluid. Chunks of flesh were trapped beneath his nails. In that moment, he could have cut off his own hands to escape that feeling. Instead, he tightened his grip on the box. He would wash them on the ship. Get back to the ship, that was all he had to do, and then he could wash his hands.
It was too hot. The more they walked the hotter it grew, until Siyra could feel a thin sheen of sweat developing on his face.
Once, many years ago, Etik had learned to knit. She hated the activity, but it was Tharomin’s favorite, and Etik had been angry at her and decided to take revenge by upstaging her at it. In his rooms at Tharos, Siyra still had the lumpy scarves and too-small hats she had gifted him.
Etik had died alone and in pain. She had died confused, trampled in the dust-choked streets, chaos and agony and fear swirling above her. Her blood and bits of her insides stained his hands.
Siyra stopped abruptly. “Commander,” he said.
Kjida looked over, startled. “Sir?”
Siyra held out the box. “Would you hold this for a moment, please?”
Kjida took it, eyebrows drawn together in confusion. The edges were wet, and he could not fully disguise a wince when he touched them.
Siyra stumbled away from the group. He made it only a few steps before he fell to his knees in the dirt and vomited.
It was violent. It burned his chest and throat and the back of his mouth, and he could not breathe. He could not think. Someone said something behind him, but their words were drowned by the ringing in his ears. It hurt. It would not stop. Every time he thought it was over, the image of Etik’s ruined body returned and he felt the pieces of flesh lodged under his nails, and another uncontrollable surge of nausea gripped him.
That thing in the box was not an animal. It was Etik, and Siyra had peeled his little sister off the ground in this meaningless city for a meaningless war, and now she was rotting in a box, defiled, desecrated, and it was his fault.
Someone knelt beside him and pulled his hair back from his face.
No. This could not happen here, not in front of people. Control. He gasped for breath. A bead of sweat traced a line from his temple to his jaw. Again the carnage began to play out before him, but with great effort he managed to fight it away. A minute passed, and then another.
He wiped his mouth with the cleanest part of his hand and then stood clumsily, and he would have stumbled if not for Kjida’s steadying hand on his arm. The others were hovering behind them. Siyra could not meet their eyes. Childishly, he spoke to their uniform vests.
“My apologies,” he said. His throat felt raw, and the taste of vomit was thick in his mouth.
“It’s all right,” Kjida replied. From the others there was a hurried chorus of it’s fine, sir and don’t worry.
Siyra took the box back from Kjida. In the distance, a vulture screamed.
His pace might have been slower than before. The sailors tightened their formation. Every step was as if through water, every breath pure smoke. A deep, throbbing pain developed behind his eyes. It was unbearably hot. And then a gust of wind swept by, lifting their hair and scattering pebbles across the street, and suddenly it was unbearably cold.
The tender was tied up where they’d left it, bobbing gently in the harbor. Farther out, the great black shadow of the Celerity loomed. Flanking her were the Tenacity and the Northfall, beasts of ships built for ruin, boxy and forbidding.
One of the younger sailors took the helm this time. He was less adept than Kjida at navigating the debris, and more than once a piece of wood knocked against the hull. The body of the girl had been pulled closer to shore, and as they passed her she turned a silent and knowing eye. Judgment: a question, an impossibility, and the sorrow in her tiny smile. Her dress shifted. She had no neck.
A spray of water arced over the boat and left a line of droplets across the lid of the box. They stood still for a moment, and then the next pitch dragged them back and off the edge. Siyra imagined them expanded to the size of the sea, the sky drowned and himself pulled down to the silt below. A world of water, formless and faceless. A woman reached out her hand and it fell apart, seawater on seawater, and she was swept away into nothing. A man dove into the seafloor, digging deeper and deeper into the sediment, and there was no rock beneath but he could not stop searching.
A wave as tall as the sky rose until it drowned the sun, and then it rose higher and broader and never crested, never fell, and its base became the world. Air fell like water, water froze into rock, and inside everything was silent. A dead child hung suspended in the nothing, her flowered dress billowing around her like sails in the wind, her hair reaching out in thin gold tendrils for something that would never come. A crushed boy lay next to her, his face caved in and the hollow where his brain had once been washed out by the pulsing water, his mother a cloud of blood that dissipated in an instant. The queen and the Empress, the sea and the sun, consumed each other far above.
Notes: D, E flat, E, and time pulled back through itself until they played simultaneously.
No. These things were not real, and Siyra would not hide behind them. He would face this as it was, no pretty veils or metaphors or fantasies of victimhood; there was no ocean the size of the world, and this was not bigger than him. The responsibility was his alone.
A scream, sourceless and endless. No, the wind, and the sucking of waves against the hull. Siyra looked back at the city and understood.
When they reached the Celerity, no one was waiting for them. They clipped the tender to the ship themselves and let the mechanism hoist it aboard.
The sun had disappeared under the water, and night was quickly approaching. With it came a dull gray wash that leached all color from the sky and turned the sea black. What little light remained was dull blue and pasted carelessly across the horizon like flaps of skin on shattered stone. Stronger, sharper, the wind cut parallel across the water. It was colder now.
Siyra dismissed the others back to their shifts. Presumptuously, Kjida thought the order did not apply to him. He waited until they had dispersed before speaking.
“Is there anything I can—”
“No. Thank you, Commander. You may return to your shift.”
“Yes, sir.” Appropriately chastened, Kjida followed the others into the ship.
Siyra watched the last strokes of blue fall behind the western horizon. The sealock stuttered, and a faint vibration traveled through the ship. When it reached his feet it seemed to shake them loose from the wood, and as it spread through his body it unraveled him, strings to the wind and the shattered waves. He imagined himself falling liquid to the ground, butchered like his sister, a nameless and thoughtless pile of meat. Symmetry.
But there was nothing productive in standing here. Feet now unstuck, Siyra, too, made for the door. As he walked, a chunk of bone rolled around inside the box.
Medical was located on the lowest level. Siyra took the stairs. They were empty, and each footstep echoed loud and metallic against the walls. The only light was the pale, sickly yellow glow from the wall-strips. The smoke could not penetrate this deep into the ship, and in its absence the smell of death clinging to his clothes and hands grew stronger.
Once again he imagined himself deconstructed, and this time he imagined making it real. His knife would not be enough. His sword had the strength to cut bone, but it was too long and would be awkward to use on himself. An explosive device would be the most effective, but it would kill him far too quickly. Perhaps if Siyra could position himself so that it would only injure him…but he did not know what that position was. The ship, too, would be a problem. He would have to do it in such a way that neither she nor any of the crew were harmed. No explosives, then. Cutting through the bone was not necessary, he decided; a knife would be sufficient to remove flesh and to separate bones at the joint, and the effect would be largely the same. The challenge would be remaining conscious long enough to complete the job.
Then there was the question of location. His quarters? They were private, and this was a thing that could be done only in private. But his successor would be assigned to those quarters, and they would not wish to sleep in a room in which such a thing had happened. Likely the captaincy would pass to Alin, and Alin would certainly be made uncomfortable. Not his office either, then. Medical? The rooms were intended for similar messes, and they were already equipped with the necessary cleaning supplies. But locking himself in a room without raising suspicion for long enough to do it would be impossible. He would have to return to the city. And yes, that was proper, that was the source and then the echo, the form and its shadow. How could Siyra ever have considered anywhere else?
He would never do it, of course. But there was a certain satisfaction in the planning. It was easier to accept what he had done when he could pretend its punishment awaited him, when he could meet Etik’s eyes and say soon it will not matter. Soon we will be equal once more.
The stairwell ended in an unmarked metal door. Siyra used his elbow on the handle so as not to dirty it with his hands.
Medical comprised two parallel hallways, one that housed patient rooms and one that led to labs and faculty offices. At the far end of the second were the freezer units, and they pulled him in like an outbound wave.
The Celerity had been in service for only eleven years. Siyra was her first captain, the only one she had ever known, and when he’d stepped foot on her deck for the first time he’d promised her dignity. She would know nothing but grace, success, honor for as long as she was his. No loss, no sin. This body was not the first to be stored in her freezers, but it was the first to violate his promise. Ships were not sentient, so there was no use apologizing to her. And yet he could not quell the creeping shame. It followed him down the hall, it dripped from his hands, it blinked up at him from a young girl’s wide and reproachful eyes.
Miroð was waiting for him in the doorway. Her gaze lingered on his hands, but she made no comment. Behind her, standing units banded the room from floor to ceiling, and deeper, embedded ones lined all four walls. The overhead lighting was cold and harsh, and its faint whine overlaid the gentle whir of the freezers’ machinery.
“This way,” Miroð said, leading him down one of the aisles. It was unnecessary, as Siyra was familiar with the layout of the room and had reserved the unit himself, but he allowed it because the thought of being left alone here was deeply unnerving. Coward. No, he allowed it because it was not worth the effort to correct her.
When they reached the unit, number sixty-four, Siyra stopped before it and for a long time could do nothing else. In his hands she was ice. He did not want to let her go, did not want to leave her alone in the cold and dark. He could not walk away from her, alive and free, whole, while she was pieces in a box.
Miroð reached over and opened the door for him. Inside it was plain metal, faintly blue, uniform and interrupted only by the seams at its corners. It was too empty, too sterile.
“Would you like me to do it?” she asked. In her eyes there was an uncharacteristic sadness.
“No, thank you.” But still he could not move. The ship screamed, the floor was water beneath his feet, the city burned for a lifetime, he clawed his own skin off. It was not real.
Move.
Forgive me, sister.
Siyra slid the box gently into the freezer. When he closed the door it severed something deep and irreversible inside him, and then Etik was gone. Something almost like a scream started to build in his chest. He crushed it.
Perhaps he said something to Miroð, perhaps she said something back, perhaps he ignored her prying and tore himself away from the freezers and ran as fast as he could away from it all, or perhaps he walked slowly, deliberately, each step another betrayal, another knife in his little sister’s back.
Either way, he left a smudge of her blood on the door to his quarters.
Alone now, Siyra left his gore-caked boots by the door and pulled off his uniform vest, draping it carelessly over the back of a chair. He fumbled in the dark to light a lantern, but he could not find the matches and then could not keep his hand steady, and so he returned to the overheads. Dense and oppressive, the silence grew until it strained the edges of the room and pushed in on his ears, and when he took a breath it grew inside him, too.
He needed to wash his hands. He could feel her still, lodged beneath his nails and drying between his fingers, sticky on his palms. Contamination. It sank deep into his hands and crept up through his arms, across his chest, and then down into his stomach where it sat cold and heavy. Too late. It was in him now, and he would never be free of it. He needed to cut his hands off, quickly, before it spread any farther.
The bathroom. Too-cold light. Wall. Covered mirror. Siyra unclasped his arm coverings and let them fall to the floor, and then he used the edge of the counter to push his sleeves past his elbows.
The seawater on his hands was freedom, and for a long time he stood there unmoving and let it numb his fingers. Take it. Take it all. He had turned the faucet to its highest setting, and the water was as solid as a column of ice. It stung. Siyra could not bring himself to look, but he could feel the blood and ash stripped from his skin.
What was he doing? This was his sister. How could he wash her off like dirt, scatter her to the sea, how could he waste a single piece of her? He should keep these pieces, collect them into a jar and put them in the freezer and return them to Tharos where they belonged.
Then something snapped and Siyra’s hands were no longer locked in place. He scrubbed them furiously, leaving deep gouges in the skin, tearing ruthlessly and indiscriminately until his own blood mixed with hers. He scraped under his nails and felt the chunks of meat break apart, lifted his nails themselves until they burned and let the ice water flush them out. His jar of soap was half full. Ten minutes later it was nearing empty. His hands were raw and stinging, and still he scraped them clean, and the more blood that welled up the harder he scrubbed it away. He could not breathe. No, he could breathe too easily.
He turned off the water. She was still there. He turned it on again and scraped more skin from his fingers, but she was still there. The clawing traveled up his arms. He tore at the rune as hard as he had when they’d carved it on him, but it would not leave either. No escape. No escape.
He turned off the water again. He dug the nails of his right hand deep into the ruined skin of his left and tore vicious lines down the back. He did not need his sword, nor even his knife. He could rip himself apart just like this, nails to skin until there was nothing left, until he had known justice.
The sting pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Without the water to wash them away, bloody tracks developed and then grew and then spilled over, spotting the white-tiled floor and streaking his hands horizontally in ragged blue grids. Siyra watched the lines run into each other, and as the minutes passed they lost all order.
No escape.
Fragments of memories: Litra wrestling Etik in the field, Etik pulling Tharomin’s hair loose from its tie, blood dripping dark and terrible down Mother’s leg, the doctor guiding him forward to the bed—come, meet your sister—the first and only letter she’d ever written to him at sea. A night like death. The blind faith in Alin’s eyes, Father’s hand like iron, a city alight. Storm waves broke tall and violent over black rocks, and he was drowning.
Siyra stepped back until he felt the wall and then sat against it. Something was lodged beneath his nail, but when he examined it he found nothing.
Well, it was over now. He had done what had been ordered of him. There could be no regretting that, there could be no questioning that, there could be no thought at all lest he risk disobedience. The only course was forward. Siyra looked ahead and saw it laid out before him, a hundred Pleias, a million deaths. He would not run from it. This was his duty, his place in the structure, and he would kill Etik as many times as it demanded. The flesh forever trapped under his nails, the smell of death that would never wash out, the drowned girl and the boy with no face were the price of that duty. Siyra would pay it willingly.
Right and wrong did not matter. Want did not matter. There was nothing in the world but order, and order stood over all.
Siyra thought of Etik, alone now in the cold. He thought of the rotting city littered with corpses, the children and the men alike. Someday he would answer for it. It would come for him, their revenge, and they would bring the world to balance once more. He would fight this war as his queen commanded, he would raze and slaughter without compunction and when it returned to him he would meet it with open arms. Stability and symmetry, beauty, the circle closed once more.
Perhaps, he thought, there might have been a sliver of comfort in that.
Above, a drop of seawater budded from the faucet head and hung there, trembling, until it collapsed under its own weight and fell out of sight. Blood spattered the floor.