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“Is there something I should know about?” he asked. “Are you … already experiencing something unusual?”
“No,” she said, certain she was lying, certain she wanted to be.
—Jonathan Lethem
To the hard edge of a dark sleep she advances and no further. The char-scent of burnt flesh, the copious coppery stink of blood—even the dusky ferment of his magic juice thickens the air, hours gone, heedless of the shelter’s overtaxed filter. His labored, ragged breathing a noise as thick, if not so troubling to her—he breathes, so he lives. So she owes him nothing else: to the man who has taken a life from her Cee has given back his own life.
Beneath her he breathes, and so he sleeps. So his breaths rising, falling, dragging more like through the fetid dark, sound with a particular, peculiar cadence to her ear, almost to words she could put it, simpler words and fewer than any he has aimed in persuading her, wrangling Cee to his own benefit. Rolling silently to the outer edge of the slat-strung bunk she dips her head downwards; silently she listens.
The Green, he rasps. Grating and effortful, the refrain he drags wordless from the dust-ravaged pit of himself—in the Green, in the Green, the Green—
She raises her head, rolls back to the center of the bunk. In that quick and forceful movement refrain becomes breath again, becomes noise thick as scent, becomes empty. Cee, lying unmoored and unsleeping, unwashed excepting her hands scrubbed raw, thinking—if she rises from this and so doing, somehow, rises eventually from the Green, to latch-queue, pickup, and slingback—if green and growth, dig and pull are lost—if all this she escapes, what then?
She, herself. A girl, as he said, a child alone. This man, prospector and Fringeling and killer beyond the murder of her father—Damon’s death being nothing to him, Cee realizes, her father’s death was a botch, a stupid and careless mistake—this man and the life she has given him.
What then?
Her lids heavy, her eyes beneath fiercely bright. She feels herself light. A shaft, a beam, separate yet unending, all a piece of herself and alone. Illumined, by her own glare she sees clearly the corners and furrows, the space and darkness of the shelter and the vaster living dark surrounding the shelter. Forest, fields, brew of the Sater encampment and tracery of abandoned digs, the Queen’s Lair an advancing shape not yet so clear to her, but linked. All this linked, all this tracery of the overgrown map a thread she must follow, threads already rooted and pulling to her. She sees herself. She sees what she’s joined with herself.
Beneath her he sleeps.
Cee had carved off the arm. Afterwards whatever she’d brought to his lips, water or pap, he’d brought back up. A spew caught in the same locker where she’d dropped the arm, his blood and bile and the rot of his excised flesh a slurry, a foulness she’d more stomach for than he.
“You need to drink.”
“A moment,” he said. His voice was not weak, had never been so to her hearing, but his face gaped paler than it had when she took the syrette to him. His skin where she touched gleamed waxy and cool.
Her hands to him, steady, spattered warm with his blood: “Drink,” Cee said. “If you don’t drink the pills won’t go down. You won’t sleep.”
The juice it was, the last of it, that brought him finally to the bunk, Cee then straightening, as much as she could or cared to, the flurry of the space, soiled rags and bloodied instruments, her bloodied hands wetted and scrubbed and shaken over the locker, now a trough of refuse. Beneath rags and spent syrette the arm rolled, draining like a cut of meat: his stump, Cee thought, draining but that she’d burnt and sponged and creamed it shut. What festered there? There were rots other than black, and a purulence she smelled seeping from his pores like sweat, a scent to be caught and tracked, a fear. What did he fear? What difference held his fear apart from hers?
Stepping back and shaking her hair loose, she considered the trough. No peace to come of it, she thought, thinking too of the shelter’s woven walls and what might come nosing in the night, blood and meat maybe a more potent scent than the rot they contained. But what was she to do, kit up and venture into the forest gone full dark now, trust to Kevva alone that she might drag the thing a far enough distance, leave it, find her way back without calling down some predator on herself? Her feet she kept steady, in orbit or on various earths, but for years’ cycles now Cee had been a child of the Black; she was no woodsman and no scavenger, without the knack to read the landscape itself as easily as she would its map.
“What will you do,” he said. She turned, thinking at first that he was talking of the trough, and realizing even as she turned that he was not. His eyes fixed to her. A glaze on them like glass; they were glass, both brittle and sharp, endlessly and needlessly clear. To Cee the man spoke like an equal, as he always had, though it was she who now towered above him, his life she had held to give and had given him by the edge of the syrette.
“You,” he said, “where will you go, girl, what will you do. A child,” he said, “like none I have seen, though—” here he made a sound as if to laugh, whether at her or himself she couldn’t tell, a stifled sound cut quickly short “—I must admit I’ve seen no great share. And you a kip. A passager if no fledgling. Where will you go.”
Again Cee touched his face. His coolness held a fever in it. Infection beneath the ice of shock.
“Sleep,” she said.
“Little bird.” There was no guilt in him, as yet there had never been. “Where will you go?”
And so drifting into delirium and noise he slept.
And so Cee, drifting to the edge of a dark sleep, unsleeping considers the shape of the dreams which would wake her. A landscape as thick and unforgiving as the Green surrounding, but one she may yet keep at a distance—so it creeps, that she may never leave, may, the last of the filters spent, sicken off the ill air, sicken to starve, to fall hungry or by scavengers’ vengeance—merc or Fringeling, Sater—but this is the solid possibility, more truth than dream.
That he would leave, leaving her—but this Cee thinks a true dream, where would he go? What he asked of her he bears himself; its wings clipped, any bird, passager or no, remains tethered to its perch, to the falconer’s glove…or so Cee thinks, having only read of such things, and not widely, but thinking—no, she does not believe he will leave her, that he is capable, so—
That her life and the spending of it is this alone. That she is what her father made of her, what he saw in her, and Damon gone the vision, too, rots in murk and dust beneath the trees—she is gone to dust, there is nothing, nor yet any time, for Cee to build a vision of herself.
But that itself is nothing. That is thought only now, and useless to her, the scattered hoard of all her thoughts. She—again the light, the clarity, comes, fills her—she is movement, Cee understands, she is the doing, the shot too wide, the bolt on thoughtless, shaking legs into the thick of the forest, and farther, farther, still farther—she is progress and must be no more now. She must live and not think. She must live, so she must cling to chance and to whatever choice presents itself. To the root and dark, the shelter in the forest: to this man restless below her in the dark.
In restlessness and pain he sleeps. In the shuttered hours, sun-cycle approaching, Cee clambers from above him, sets her feet steady beneath her. Kitting up, she makes a count of filters, provisions, the dwindling supply of drugs; the easements for infection, for pain and sleeplessness. She makes a count, and in the drone of the filter and the stink of his bile and blood she seats herself beside his bed. His breath the same refrain, again she follows it.
In the Green—
He is hot, damp with sweat if not burning. The fever breaking the surface. His face she touches, the stump she only studies, making nothing of it but that it is her work, by the work of her hands she’s undone her own doing: the shot gone wide, deep enough still to spoil and sicken.
Her shot, her bite. For it Cee feels no guilt, as he feels none. She thinks, unflinching, of the brace and shudder of his body while she carved the arm loose. She thinks how she held to him, her free hand squeezed steady to his shoulder, how he had steadied her though he himself was far from steady, How are you so calm, the question put to her almost in wonder, but he had trusted her—he trusted her, Cee saw, and for his trust she’d felt, still feels, a particular and peculiar tenderness, his weakness so freely shown, not like her father’s, plain to the eye but never an honesty Damon had given her.
Damon. In a dawn dusky beneath the shelter’s thick canopy she finds his name means little to her. “Dad,” Cee murmurs, quiet, whispering in the dim, pressing to a pain raw enough that it, too, must mean little to her.
But— “Girl,” at her ear, and there is relief, in Cee that same tenderness, or else that same rawness—there is a kernel within her, bright and hard, that thrills to him, to his weary voice, rough, sleep-bleared and still yet a voice, a body mindful she may tether to, in all his slyness and sickness and dissembling words, in all his murder a voice, fluid in motion in the Green.
“Your cycler,” he says. With a groan ragged yet fulsome, good-natured, almost, the man makes to rise. His shape asserts itself over her watchful darkness, a shape apart from but not unlike her father’s, and not unlike her father does he wake, purposeful, determined despite all, pushing her to action. “Our time, what do we have?"
He knows, still he asks. To her he leaves the answer.
“Half a cycle left. Time to go.”
The man nods, reaches for her. “Give me your hand.”
Towards him Cee rises; night and sleep fall from her.