Chapter Text
Let's try a merciful playthrough:
Arise. The hiss of split-back sleeping silks, spine curved with curiosity. The rind of Colum's ear crackles an angry ombre, hot against her itchy hair in the cathedral silence of her room — their room. The perimeter is glass. Her phantom sits up, dimly touches cheek.
Above Colum's trundle, Silas sleeps with arms crossed, swags of velvet a yardstick's drop from holy brow. The investiture is tomorrow, the jewelry and handmaidens polished.
How many paces in this temperature-controlled room? Colum could rise shivering, mark twelve footfalls to the door, triggering all manner of sensors. Surveillance. There's no clock here, no electrical outlets, no nightstand bearing the detritus of a commoner's sleepy victuals: teacup with satchel of bee pollen or collagen, menthol-candy wrappers, lotion-tissue box, acetate-frame eyeglasses, modish headphones, dampened flimsies for furtive reading. Merely the oak, linen and metal four-poster bed stranded on bleached wood, the breathing of Colum's ward steeped in silk.
This room is devoted to rest, and prayer, which is rest. No window, but a face: In the east wall of glass, Colum's dim reflection shakes her head.
She yields to the duvet, pressing sateen weave to her cheek like a kiss. Outside this door is the dressing hallway, with its swirl-cream resin vanity, disgorging to the study.
Every day is a first day. Although her body is obviously seasoned, three decades of wear at the knee, her memory halts at, six months past? When training started. When she was brought to this study, kneeling at the bianco gioia marble table that took six tradespeople to assemble, her palms to the fixed shelves, Silas seated at the bone velvet chair on plated nickel feet, swivel-less. When Silas set out her childhood music box — wooden miniature of their city-state, square base, the width of an octave.
Fingertip pedagogy, box balanced on Silas's lap: here are the mangrove-fringed estuaries cutting inland, none of the soil remotely fertile. Here are the spires of our competitive advantage, our schools of worship and industry, our hospitals without peer even in the Sixth. Here is a slow loris, trotting in circles with the magnetized pull of the box. The tune rattles on unseen teeth; rain falls somewhere on the island every day of the year.
We will not speak of flowers. Gone are the artisans, their leather gloves scented with jasmine, violet, iris and orange blossom. The government has made advances in extraction, delivering clean, androgynous smells of ozone, healthful gourmands, vegetal bliss. As befits her station, Colum is permitted to wear distillations of brick, vinyl, lava, asphalt, rain, gunpowder and mushroom.
We have no space for prisons; we have deletions. The Eighth has attracted corporate investment for its manufacture of precision equipment and memory engineering, which yield a much higher added value to production. We have stock memories, violence-free, ready to implant in the penitent.
A newly laundered soul in a grown woman's pangs. Colum's history, in any case, does not signify a demerit; she has heard that this teenage Master Templar of the White Glass prefers a woman who arrives with an instruction manual.
The silks part. Silas swings down a pale-affronted leg, both legs. The trundle squeaks with their combined weight.
"This is irregular," Colum whispers at the dry clasp against her ribs. The waistband of her cotton undershorts is paved with rice-grain crystals. Fifth alternate, she wasn't anybody's first choice for a holdfast. Her genetics are, archival. Decanted from a reserve of inky hair texture, squeamish build, nose cut on the bias. She doesn't look like anyone else in their family.
Silas yawns into Colum's pink-infected ear. Her rinsed mouth smells of pink pepper, incense, saline water. "When I call you, how else would you know me?"
Here — a wiped/seeded memory, a child's arched foot in the dig of a thigh, turning feverish or simply warm in the moonish dark.