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I. The Burial of the Dead
All afternoon, Corvo has been talking. The light has shifted around the room. It has flared briefly upon the glassware littering the tables and prismed off in mad patterns. It has caught the edge of a scalpel left abandoned after some experiment and turned it, briefly, forge-fire gold. It has landed on the speaker of the audiograph player that opens like a flower; it has landed on the open mouths of the flowers in their beds, and the Pandyssian ones that are large and drooping and brilliant have tilted and followed it, compass-like, around the room.
Now the sun is low and the light is orange, and the sky glows. Sokolov can see hazy chimneys and hazier smoke through the warped glass of the greenhouse walls. Corvo’s head is bowed, and his gloves are off and his right hand cradles his left. His fingers have traced over the mark all the time he has been speaking. He’d mentioned a dream of broken streets and targets far below and falling and it had flared gold, once, and Sokolov had needed to catch himself not to lean forward; but apart from that the magic is still. Corvo is very still. Sokolov is attentively still, not taking notes, and the only movement in the room is the centimeter-by-centimeter movement of the mad Pandyssian flowers and the vibration of the air with the Lord Protector’s words and with the soft, mechanical whirring of the audiograph.
And now the sun is sinking over the rooftops and the light in the room is otherworldly as the Void of which Corvo has been speaking, and his voice peters out, and then there is no motion in the room at all.
The tape clicks. Stutters to a stop. It is the sixth time this has happened. Sokolov does not move to replace it.
He had thought to take notes on body language, idiosyncrasies the tape cannot catch, but the paper by his hand is blank. Corvo had spoken as if sleepwalking. He has spoken as someone who’s no longer quite there, no longer quite human.
Perhaps he isn’t.
Sokolov picks up the pen, spins it between his fingers. Caps it. Uncaps it. Caps it again.
“That’s it,” says Corvo, finally. His throat sounds like it must be sore. “I think. That’s… everything.”
“All your interactions with –”
“Yes.”
“Everything you can remember about his manifestations, his mannerisms, his –”
“Yes.”
Sokolov makes a small sound and gets up. His knees creak. He pads over and fills the watering can and waters the flowers, methodically. The Pandyssian ones come from an inland mountaintop where it rains three-hundred and twenty-days a year, and they require constant attention. They are hypersensitive to minute PH changes in the soil. He is using them to study the effects of different types of fertilizer. The bed nearest his desk is fed on cow excrement; the next, human; the next, human ash, procured from a crematorium on Bottle Street. Half plague-infected, half healthy. There has been no discernible difference. One bed is fertilized with human blood procured from the doctor’s office behind the crematorium, and the flowers in this bed are vibrant. Thriving. The last bed is being fertilized with dilute whale oil, and the flowers are large and paper-thin and glow, under blacklight, incandescent green-white.
Surely no one has thought of an experiment like this. Surely this is interesting.
“What would it take to get his attention?” he asks, conversationally. Trying to pretend his heart isn’t all caught up in his voice. “I’d need to be – what was it you said? Interesting."
Corvo makes a sound like a trod-upon rat. “Good luck.”
“Why?” The soil drinks the water dry. “My inventions have turned the Empire on its ear. I’ve cured the plague. His plague, Burrows be damned, look at the data and you’ll see it was started by a supernatural source. He ought to be angry about the whaling industry, shouldn’t he? And –”
“It’s not about what you’ve done. It’s about –”
Corvo cuts himself off as if he’s been struck. Sokolov glances over his shoulder. The Lord Protector is perfectly still, statue-carved, eyes dark and inscrutable and fixed on nothingness. It occurs to Sokolov that Corvo must be used to sitting so still, on rooftops, in a cell, at the whim of a deity that plays him like a fiddle-string. This is Corvo’s weakness; his motion and his want is all pointed toward a single thing. Predictable.
Corvo is boring. He is a simple man with a simple job, and all the things he wants are simple, and he’s the one with magic quite literally at his fingertips, and it isn’t fair.
“It’s about what you are,” says the man finally, with effort.
Sokolov huffs and mutters something foreign and very foul under his breath. He waits, but there is nothing more forthcoming. Corvo has gone back to frowning at his left hand again. Sokolov takes a slow breath, and blows it out slowly between his teeth. “Thank you,” he says, grudgingly. A pause. “I owe you for this.”
Corvo makes a small sound of agreement. “For more than this.”
Sokolov frowns. They’ve had this conversation before – sidelong, abbreviated, awkwardly, but they’ve had it. They’ve never spoken alone like this, and never at such length, but Jessamine and Coldridge and Sokolov’s post and the six-month Fugue of Hiram’s rule should not be still floating between them. It should be buried under soil (waterlogged, ash-nourished soil). Sokolov sets the watering can down. “I thought we’d moved past that. Men like us –”
And when he next blinks Corvo is right there, and Sokolov hisses a swear and jumps back. Eyes the ten meters of empty floor between them. “What –“ His throat works. “What type of magic was that? Translocation or time or perhaps -?”
And when he next blinks Corvo is gone.
The door to the greenhouse swings. Back and forth. Creak of hinges (the maids oiled them the very morning before Corvo snuck in and kidnapped him, annoyingly, and at his instruction they have not oiled them since). It sends flashes of brighter, more brilliant light across the room. Sunset-orange. The greenhouse glows, and the glass ceiling glitters like the surface of the sea, and everything is red and copper and gold. It is a perfect inversion of the blues and purples and deep-sea shadows of the realm that Corvo has spent so long describing.
Idiotic, petty, impossible man.
Sokolov huffs and goes to clean up. He waters the rest of the flowers. He tidies his desk. He gathers the tapes. He puts the last one in to check the audio quality, and Corvo’s voice floats like a ghost around the room.
- something about you not being special. I can’t remember exactly. Something about you seeing the Tusked Leviathan as a trophy –
Sokolov punches the fast-forward button.
- It’s not about what you’ve done.
The tape crackles. Almost fizzes out. He turns up the volume.
- It’s about -
And there is a note, like a struck tuning fork, under the distortion from the boosted audio. Pure and gleaming.
- He will hear this – murmurs a voice. Soft and musical, utterly unconcerned, rippling around the edges like sunlight reflected through water. Say nothing.
II. A Game of Chess
It’s about, Corvo had said, strained and against the Outsider’s order, what you are.
Down in his office, Sokolov makes a list.
Royal Physician
Academy Chair
Natural Philosopher
Inventor
Painter
Anatomist (human, cetecian)
Biologist (Pandyssian flora)
Pathologist
Moderate skill in various scientific, pseudoscientific and mechanical fields, including the nonsecular (astronomy, astrology, etc)
It goes on.
It goes on for several pages.
He keeps an audiograph running while he works, and if the lights flicker or the ink blots or the water-wheels whir in the basement he pauses, gets up, and plays it back. There are no distortions. There are no voices. He does not expect them, but (as his lists proclaim at length) he is a scientist. It does not hurt to be thorough.
Making a list of what one is and is not is maddeningly subjective, however. Sokolov returns to what he has done. Lists of awards. Lists of women. Lists of inventions. Lists of paintings. Lists of subjects of paintings. Daud, Delilah Copperspoon, Morris Sullivan, Corvo Attano, Vera Moray –
He taps the pen against the table and watches the ink dry from blue to black.
It occurs to him that the Marked have been slipping through his fingers, year by year. Daud, who never took off his gloves. Delilah, the apprentice with the love of flowers and the mad eye for color – Corvo had rifled through the Whalers’ base in Rudshore, after it was emptied, found a buried safe containing a woman’s bloodstained gloves, a ship’s log, roses, marble dust, and a piece of bone that shuddered and sang in his hand. Delilah, then. Corvo himself.
Vera Moray and her eel-toothed smile - he’d long suspected. The Royal Executioner, he’d known. Morris Sullivan wasn’t marked, but rumor said he was close enough. Sokolov tried to interview him but the man had been given his position for a reason, and could neither speak nor write. Each time he or one of his spies had descended to the dungeons they’d been spotless, clean and spare, no heresy in sight.
He wonders if the Outsider warned the Executioner whenever he was coming.
He wonders if the being did it on purpose.
Alone in his office, as a half-finished portrait of Corvo eyes him from the corner, Sokolov continues making lists.
Genius
Tyvian
Appropriately selfish
Tasteful
Moderately and deliberately hedonistic
Deliberately crude
(Of course it’s deliberate; deliberate eccentricities mask worrisome ones; everything he does is deliberate, genius is at the top of the list for a reason)
Conceited
(He crosses this out, writes ‘proud,’ crosses that out and re-writes it again.)
Ambitious
Scientifically-minded
Attempting to gather data in a field that has never before been scientifically studied
Therefore:
Interesting.
He rips through the paper on the hook of the g, splatters blue ink across his nose, curses. Glances to the glass doors and the half-finished portrait of Corvo beside them, but there’s no one to see when he furiously scrubs the ink away.
Sokolov takes a break from making lists, and he paints.
He does not finish the painting of Corvo. The man’s existence, the existence of the tattoo on the back of his hand, seems like a deliberate slight. Corvo is a single-minded and predictable and boring soul, and he has no ambition for the magic that’s writ in his very flesh, and Sokolov drags the portrait away from the light and toward the southernmost corner and preps a fresh canvas.
(Corvo has no ambition for the magic writ in his very flesh, and Sokolov makes a list of what he would do as he mixes the blue and the violet and the white: attempt to mass-produce translocation on a military scale. Use time magic to develop a precise calendar that does not require astronomy. Study the weight of the soul; experiment to see what the Philosopher Röntgen’s new radiation machine could divine about a possessed person. Attempt to see if more useful creatures besides plague rats could be summoned; revolutionize agriculture. Revolutionize everything)
He paints, from memory. Vera Moray, as he had last seen her, the shadows hinting at how she had been in Corvo’s description. Her dress is fine and falling away into tatters. Her eyes are clear and focused beyond the frame. There is unnatural blue in them. There is blue in the light behind her, and blue in the shadows behind her, blue in the drape of her shawl and the black of her hair; there is blue in the Outsider mark he paints on her ungloved hand. He is meticulous about its dimensions, its proportions. He cross-checks three different references just to sure.
He hauls the painting into the empty southernmost corner and begins anew.
Daud, again from memory, feral and wild with a burning city at his back. The man is shaky; the city in sharp relief. Sokolov dislikes painting without a live model – it was something he would chide Delilah about, as he’d chide her about her mad brushstrokes and excess paint that dripped down the canvas and utter disregard for color asthetics, her boyish hair, her boyish figure, her everything.
He paints her, imperious and cold and surrounded by salt-rimed roses, the mark on her hand picked out in frost. He moves the painting of Corvo from above his worktable to the northern corner, and the painting of Vera from the shadowed western corner to the southern, and he sets Daud and Delilah to form the points of a compass. He is surrounded by the Marked, once again. As always. He has always been so close.
(He considers sketching another self-portrait and setting it in the center of the room, to complete the image, but that would be melodramatic. If Sokolov is melodramatic, it only ever serves a purpose)
He paints the Royal Executioner, dead, on the wreckage of a ruined shrine he never saw. The painting is unfinished. The man did not have a mark. He was, like (unlike) Sokolov, not interesting enough.
He leaves the paintings, for a while. He visits the Tower, and Joplin’s workshop across the street from the Academy, checks on the experiments with the remaining Weeper population. He visits his contacts along the waterfront and replenishes his supplies of indigo and carmine ink, phosphorous, opiates, thrice-filtered whale oil. He waters his Pandyssian flowers.
He paces his workshop. The Outsider does not appear.
The portrait of Corvo is in the easternmost corner where the sun rises; the portrait of Daud in the westernmost, where the light from the setting sun redoubles the blaze of the city behind him. Vera gazes south toward Pandyssia and Delilah north toward things that are frozen and dead and home. Sokolov scowls at them all. Locks the door.
That night, he dreams of nothing; and when he awakes and pads down to his workshop he finds that each painting has shifted one turn clockwise.
Conceited, reads the note on his desk in dry, black ink.
Ambitious
Scientifically-minded
Attempting to gather data in a field that has never before been scientifically studied
Therefore:
Predictable.
III. The Fire Sermon
“Why you?” he asks.
The woman stares at him in disbelief. Licks her lips. They are dry. There’s red behind him. They’ve broken her teeth, which is a shame. She had a very pretty face, behind the tears and blossoming bruising, but a mouth of broken teeth will ruin her. If she survives this, he will offer her a position in his lab on the wrong side of a cell door.
(He’s known Prudence to take a girl without teeth, now and again, but it’s been hard for him to find subjects with so much of the city alive these days)
He hopes the Overseers will leave her alive after this.
They called her a witch. She isn’t. Sokolov has known precisely four witches in his life, apparently, and she isn’t. They have broken her teeth and she has not blown them back with a tempest wind. They have bound her to a chair and she has not melted into rats and skittered away. They have played the music boxes, the ones with the modified mechanism that he’d designed for them, and she’d only cringed instead of bleeding from the nose and the ears and the eyes. She has no power. She is ordinary.
“Why you?” he repeats. His voice is calm, and soothing. The audiograph player whirs in the corner.
“I don’t know.” The words are mushy.
“But you spoke with him. He must have given you a reason.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
Sokolov laces his hands together and leans forward. “I’m going to stick to yes-or-no questions. Did he ever mention or allude to why he appeared to you?”
But the woman who isn’t quite a witch can only continue to shake her head.
The Overseer on his left makes an annoyed sound. It’s faintly resonant behind his mask. “Which rituals did you perform?”
“I –”
(Sokolov pinches the bride of his nose and makes a low, eloquent noise of despair)
“Did you sew the bones of fish into the seams of your husbands clothing? Did you go down to the banks of the river and draw signs in the mud to summon the rain?”
“This is occult stuff,” Sokolov complains.
“This is occult business.”
“This is science.”
“Did you dip a knife in the blood of a rat and slip it under your husband’s pillow?” asks the Overseer on Sokolov’s right shoulder; and it takes all the Royal Physician’s self-control and self-preservation not to throttle the man right there.
“Shut up,” he snaps.
“But she’s –”
“Shut up or I’ll tell the Empress to order you transferred to Pandyssian missionary duty.”
They shut up. He can feel them glaring at him, but that’s of little consequence. The whale-oil light glitters on the gold of their masks. It glitters on the metal of the chair, the water and blood on the floor, the tears on the not-witch’s face. They are far below the Abbey and the room is small and unfurnished and dimly lit. The lamps buzz. They flicker blue.
This would be a good setting for a summoning. Sokolov decides that the present company will not appreciate this observation.
He reaches out and wipes the woman’s tears with a handkerchief.
“Tell me everything why you think he showed himself to you,” he says, gently.
Her eyes flick to the gold masks and back to Sokolov’s face. “He appeared to my mother.”
Sokolov can see in the fearful cast of her eyes that her mother must still be alive. He considers. “What did your mother do for a living?”
“She’s – was a washerwoman.”
“And you?”
“A washerwoman.”
His nose wrinkles. “You’re ordinary.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“You’re common and lowborn and ordinary. You’re predictable. What makes you special?”
“I – nothing. Milord. Nothing.” Her eyes flick up. Mask, mask, his face and back. “He – mentioned you.”
Sokolov goes still. He’s sure that his eyes go very wide. The Overseers lean forward like their hounds. The whale-oil lights hum and flare, and he spares a glance at the darkness behind her, but there is no shadowy form, there are none of the classic signs of distorted whalesong or sudden floods or inverted gravity – just this woman who isn’t a witch, and the you slopping out of her mouth. His throat works. “What -?” He has to try again. The oil lights keen. “What did he say?”
“That you’re – ”
A high and insect-like whine is the only warning.
There’s a flash of white light, a storm of shattering glass. Fire bursts behind his eyelids. Sokolov yells and flattens himself down, arm thrown up against the blaze as the whale-oil lamps on the wall behind the woman explode.
He hears a body hit the ground on his right, heavy, another body on his left. Faint ding of a metal mask on the concrete floor. Overseers. When he opens his eyes, all Sokolov can are spots of white and black. Afterimages. He gropes his way over, shattered glass cutting the palms of his hands, and finds the first Overseer’s pulse.
Passed out; still alive.
Good.
The world slowly resolves back into focus. The room is a mess of scorch marks and soot. It reeks of burning oil and burning cloth and burnt hair. The woman is dead. Her back had taken the brunt of the concussive wave, the fire, the flying glass. The Overseers had been standing and had taken the rest. Sokolov had been sitting, in front of her, shielded by her body; he’s got something like a sunburn on his face and his hands and his suit is a mess and will never be the same, but he’s fine.
He’s far too old for this.
He runs a hand through his beard, cursing. And his beard is burnt and brittle. And most of it disintegrates to ash at his touch.
IV. Death By Water
It grows back slowly.
After a fortnight of self-imposed scarcity, of holing himself up in his workshop and his greenhouse and having Piero bring by research and shouting at the maids, Sokolov’s beard is presentable enough for him to rejoin society.
He winds up glaring at people a lot.
A fortnight of glaring at the walls (in practice) and glaring at his notes (in frustration at the predictable written there, in script that is not quite his own), and he’s come up with a new theory.
The Outsider is clearly displeased with him. He already has the being’s attention, or he would not be beardless and sulking and watching the taps in his home drip water sideways. The Outsider clearly considers his so called predictability to be a failure, or else he would have properly appeared.
Sokolov has been predictable in hunting for the Outsider.
He will be unpredictable by ceasing to do so.
(Sokolov runs the theory by Piero, the next time the man visits; but Piero has never wanted anything to do with the Outsider, and he mumbles something vague about tempting fate and his right eye twitches. Sokolov reminds himself that Piero suffers from an inflammation of the brain and thinks nothing more of it).
He resolves to think nothing more of it.
He does not visit witches in the Abbey, or witches in their homes in Rushore where they offer him money to leave or money to stay and write their story. He does not paint, and his paintings cease shifting around when he’s not watching. His taps do not drip in the night. Corvo stumbles upon a true heretic, a man who can walk through mirrors as if they are doors, and Sokolov does nothing. He goes about his life. He lets it lie.
He goes to visit the Ramsay Slaughterhouse. It’s cleaner than he remembers. Bundy Rothwild had been many things, but neat was not one of them. Ramsay’s production is slower and his methods are more humane, for the workers if not for the whales. He does not allow anyone to be alone on the slaughterhouse floor, for one, not with the vats of chemicals and the machinery and the magic that drips from up above; and this is why he’s called Sokolov here today, to sit in his office and drink and listen to muffled bellowing through the door.
“One of my butchers has been causing quite a stir,” says Ramsay, conversationally, refilling Sokolov’s glass. “You know how the whales sing at night?”
“They sing all the time,” Sokolov corrects. “They get more melodious at night. The singing becomes more complex.”
“Mmm.” It’s clear he doesn’t care. “It seems this butcher has been singing back.”
“Interesting.” Sokolov takes a second to process this. “With words?”
“Yes, which is why I thought it was noteworthy. None of the workers can figure out what language. Of course, none of them are particularly well traveled, and I thought –”
An alarm sounds, outside. Ramsay sighs and throws open the door, pokes his head out and shouts over the bellowing of the whale. “What’s happened this time?”
“Sir!”
“What?!”
“Sir – look –”
Another alarm begins to go off, and the whale screams, a long and dragging sound like ships’ hulls cracking together. Sokolov gets to his feet and goes to look.
The worker down below is standing in a sea of blood. And he’s pointing at the drain, and he doesn’t have to point. The blood has risen past his shins. It’s slopped out over the drains, thick, viscous, with a layer of half-dried black on top, and it’s rising, and it’s not draining, and the whale continues to bleed, and it keeps rising.
Ramsay rolls his eyes. “There goes the rest of the day,” he sighs. “We’ll have to shut the whole place down to clear this up.”
The blood rises.
The whale bleeds.
Sokolov studies the whale, and studies the rate of red sheeting from the whale to join the (knee-high) sea of red on the floor, and does some very quick math. “This is backed up from the drainage system,” he murmurs. “How many gallons are we looking at?”
“None.”
“What?”
“None, it doesn’t even go to the sewer, it dumps directly into the Wrenhaven – this can’t be from the drains.”
“Ah.” Sokolov nods, faintly. “Not from every whale you’ve ever slaughtered?”
Ramsay gives him a disgusted look and turns on his heel.
The blood is up to the workers’ waists. Lunchboxes and tools and papers float by. A half-empty whale oil tank bobs along, filling and sinking as Sokolov watches. A still-running bonesaw left abandoned on a table whirs and throws up an angry froth of blood until it’s overtaken, flooded, silenced. The men wade for the exit. The blood rises above the exit door.
Carefully, slowly, Sokolov climbs up to a catwalk above Ramsay’s office. He can hear yelling from deeper within the building that there’s blood on the floor, the doors are locked.
Some of the workers can swim.
Some can’t.
The smell is overpowering. Sokolov tries to get above it. There are skylights in the ceiling; someone will eventually hear the blaring alarms and the yelling and try to get in, or look through a window, and this will be the way out. When the red begins to lap at his shoes and stain the hem of his pants, he clambers up to a second catwalk. Then a third.
The alarms blare.
The men are treading water, or clinging to girders, or no longer in a position to yell. He has lost sight and sound of Ramsay. Sokolov’s hands curl tight around a metal rail. They shake. His gaze skips over the surface of the sea on the floor, tries to catalogue it in scientific terms, but his hands are shaking and he can only clutch the railing tighter and wait.
The Void is supposed to be blue, he thinks, nonsensically, not red.
When the blood covers it up to the eyes, the whale begins to sing.
V. What The Thunder Said
“No,” sighs Corvo, glaring at him from the shadow of the doorway. It’s almost inaudible over the sound of the rain outside.
“No, what?”
“Emily, shush.”
“I’m your Empress,” comes a very put-upon voice from somewhere under Sokolov’s lab table. “So, no what?”
“I thought you were taking a break from being an Empress,” says Sokolov offhandedly, trimming the flame under the vial of blood. “I thought you were a pirate hiding in a cave, waiting for an innocent merchant ship full of cakes.”
“Oh,” Emily concedes after a moment. “Right.”
Corvo smiles faintly at Emily. Or, rather, in Emily’s direction; she’s draped blankets all over the table, under his work, insisting that she make a proper fort. Sokolov glances at Corvo’s marked hand and wonders if he’s just looking through the blankets. Corvo catches the look and the smile is gone. “I’m not asking him,” he sighs.
“You don’t need to ask. I doubt he’d be responsive if you did. Just… hint.”
“I’m no good at hinting.”
Sokolov waves the tongs at him. “Try.”
“Who are you talking about?” comes a voice under the table.
“Pirate.”
“…Sorry.”
“I’m not asking him about you,” Corvo mutters, retreating. “If you did something to make him angry, it’s your fault.”
“That’s exactly my point. I have no idea what I did. My best shoes will never be the same again. My beard will never be the same again.”
“Maybe he thought you needed to be taken down a notch.”
Corvo’s voice is very level, and Sokolov catches himself and glances down, deliberately, at the blanket-draped table and the tiny pirate-empress who is intently listening. “Really.”
Corvo gives a stiff-shouldered shrug and vanishes from the doorway. Sokolov watches him stutter-stop translocate down the halls toward the Tower library, around the corner, out of sight.
Sokolov sighs. Checks the timer, carefully moves the blood from the flame and adds the coloring agent. The samples taken from the Ramsay Slaughterhouse have turned out normal under six different kinds of tests so far, but he’s got at least eight to go. “Lady Emily,” he begins –
“I’m not Emily,” comes a very amused giggle under the table. “I’m… Lizzy Stride.”
“Are you now.”
“And river pirates don’t have a bedtime.”
“True.” A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he adds the reagent, watches the blood fizz. The rain on the windowpanes casts shifting shadows on the table. The smile fades. “You know what they do have? Outsider’s marks.” He jots down a few notes. “So you can make all the whales and the fish do what you want. Your empire wouldn’t stop at the surface of the sea. Sound fun?”
He hears a foot knock against the leg of the table. It’s very much the little Empress’s foot, not Lizzy Stride’s. “Corvo doesn’t think it’s fun,” Emily mutters.
“Corvo is…” He bites his lip a moment. Damaged. Unimaginative. Safe. “Unambitious.” Petty. “Predictable.”
Emily makes a small sound. “What would you do if you could…” He imagines her waving a hand in the gesture he’s seen Corvo make, when he shivers from one place to another. “Would you make all the fish do what you want?”
“Yes.” He thinks. “No.”
“Use it for more inventions?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“I think you’d want to study it.” Emily sounds pleased with herself, younger than she is and pretending to be older, and Sokolov busies himself with getting the next test going as she goes on. “You’d take notes on everything, ‘cause that’s what you’d do. You’d write it down and you’d figure it out and you’d give it to everyone.”
“You know me very well. You’re becoming a very observant young lady.”
“No I’m not.”
“Oh?”
The little Empress squirms out from under the table and sits on the chair next to him. Sokolov catches sight of her out of the corner of his eye – and leaps back.
Her eyes are black, and when she speaks there are rows of teeth in her mouth, tiny and sharp, dozens of them like a sharks’.
“A ten-year-old child can predict your intentions,” she says calmly. Sokolov stumbles back until his feet knock against the baseboards. “Oh – she’s not marked. I’m just borrowing her. You’ve had my attention all this time, but never my interest. Even now you are making lists. You are categorizing and comparing. You are hypothesizing ways to bind me in nets, throw me in cages, break me apart and put me in your rattling machines. You criticize this entire world for its narrow and single-minded ambition. Do you have any idea how boring you are?”
There are questions scurrying all around Sokolov’s mind, but he cannot catch his breath for long enough to ask any of them. When this moment came, he would have thought – he thought he’d – he thought he’d –
“Of course you thought,” the thing in Emily’s skin murmurs. “The great scientist. The man whose theories have never been wrong, who has never heard no a day in his life.” It shrugs Emily’s shoulders, gathers up the blankets and pillows from the fort in Emily’s arms, pads to the door.
“Wait –” he manages –
(He is not thinking of gears or paints or slaughtered whales or machinery, or fame; he is only thinking of – wait -!)
The rain laps at the windowpanes. The light shivers, pale and washed-out blue. Empty, empty, empty. The Void, the empty, the answer not given. The being does not spare him a second glance.
“No.”