Page 2 of Odder Still
It seizes up, and its temperature jumps between scorching and freezing, as though I’ve short-circuited it. I let it go. It calms, becoming a subtle warmth against my skin, its colors faded but not gone. I feel as worn as the creature looks, but I force my shoulders to relax, releasing the tension that has built in my collarbones.
“What do you need, hmm? How can I help?” I keep my voice composed, but my heart wants to scream until the windows of this small house shatter.
It brushes against my skin, a touch I feel all the way into my bones, as though it’s prodding the place where my despondency lives. No words come from it, nothing I can discern as speech, but there’s a twinge of desire I know from every creature I’ve saved, that aura of desperation, of hopeless, exhausted need. After everything I’ve been through, all the betrayal and abandonment, I should be skeptical of this creature, thisparasite. It’s no animal—I can’t apply to it the simple laws of trust that my pets follow. But if there’s a creature in need of my help, how can I say no?
As though the thought opens a chink in my defenses, the parasite leaps in. Its presence turns intimate, like a foreign tissue wrapping around my organs, a rock thrown into my river, an alien leaf in my canopy. My energy snaps and wanes. A rush of dizziness turns my vision blotchy, and the fever beneath the parasite rages again.
I scream.
The parasite unravels two tendrils from its body, long and flexible. They lunge for my wrist cuffs and take hold. I yank my hands toward my lap, but the parasite’s touch is like a vise.
“Now, now see here, we don’t even have a safe word.” I give a faint laugh, but the crude cover-up for my despair holds no humor.
The parasite’s tendril arms skulk along my cuffs, and it slides into the locks. A pulse runs through the creature’s entire body. The lock clicks open.
I stare at it, caught in the pounding of my heart and the slow retreat of the parasite’s tendrils back into its body. The flourish of color within it fades. My vision rights itself, my fatigue trickling away. The cuffs fall from my wrists and clatter on the floor. This time when I touch the parasite, there’s awe in my fingertips—awe in the proper sense: the kind of fear that blooms bright and settles like a blanket.
“I feel as though I should thank you, but really, we’re not at that point in our relationship yet,” I mutter, releasing some of my dread into the brittle words.
The parasite hasn’t left me. It hasn’t left my skin, and it hasn’t left my mind either. Its existence sits there like a shadow in my periphery.
An odd spark of frustration tickles my chest, followed by a memory three decades old, the voice of my mother whispering me away from danger:Go, Ruby. Run.
What the fuck.
But the recollection still springs me into motion. I set my chains to the side, pull my feet under me, and creep toward the door. My legs tingle from lack of use, but I move with the same uncanny silence that’s plagued me all my life. The wood doesn’t creak beneath me, and the beads ornamenting my braids slip soundlessly by each other. My dark clothes don’t even rustle.
I snatch Lilias’s discarded flask off the stool.
No hesitation: I down the whiskey in one go. It burns my mouth, and I cringe as it hits my throat, but it’s better than nothing. For a few minutes, the world will look a bit brighter, my future a bit kinder. I need that right now, with my nerves turning my melancholy into anxiety and back again, like some terrible cycle that digs deeper into my chest with each round.
Another tinge of foreign frustration fires me up to the front door. I smack the parasite, resulting only in a flicker of pain that runs down my entire spinal column. But it’s right: I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here and find someone who can pull the parasite out ofme. Cautiously, I slip outside.
My hooded trek here in the early morning couldn’t have prepared me for this. Lilias must have dragged me hundreds of miles north of the Murk—thousands, perhaps. This foreign sky stretches too wide and vacant and grey after my lifetime of thick, green canopies; of blazing sunlight and monsoon darkness. It stares down onto a tiered, cobblestoned town surrounded by green hills and a wide bay. The whole place looks entirely uninhabited. A sharp breeze blows a mud-matted flier past me and whips salt through my hair. The swish of the paper against the street devolves into a silence so deep I can taste it.
Four streets below, the steep hillside turns into a jetty. I spot Lilias there, far enough away that her body is a pale blur as she pulls off her clothing and dives into the bay. I stand, frozen. She fails to reappear. Maraheem, she’d said—she was going to a place called Maraheem. Maybe it’s some kind of afterlife for the drowned. But the idea that she might be able to hold her breath long enough to swim to the pair of fishing boats just off the coast is far less preposterous. And far less funny.
I follow the downward curve of the road, each step as quiet as the abandoned town. My path twists and turns toward the sea; elegant, cobblestoned bridges and tight, tunneling underpasses sprouting between the grey-stone buildings. The sign for the inn hangs lopsided. Stacked furniture huddles beneath sheets, some making piles so human I flinch at the sight.
My fingers ache with tension, and I flip Lilias’s empty flask into the air as I walk. It’s not as light as a coin nor as finely weighted as a pocketknife. On the fifth toss it slips between my fishnet-gloved palms and clatters across the empty street. Nothing else moves. No signs of life whatsoever.
I retrieve the flask and slip it in my pocket. Tucking my hands into my thin vest for warmth, I turn down an underpass. Papers hang on one side—advertisements, notices, a few warnings—but two specific fliers dominate them. The first must have once had vibrant colors, with the phraseMaraheem has never been brighterbolded across the top. The same Maraheem where Lilias is heading. The second flier is a symbol of a skull and crossbones behind a single word:contaminated.
It makes my wind-chilled skin feel sweaty. I rub my hands on my shirt in a vain attempt to relieve the sensation. As I keep moving, I pick out other contamination signs on the open streets, along with more faded-out fliers in the shape of the Maraheem one. Three distinct versions arise, each more aggressive than the last:Jobs with forward momentum for all, andDon’t miss out on the power of an ignation-fueled society, and finally,Come while you still can. That must have ended with the most hostile motivation for the townspeople to move—the threat of contamination. All of the fliers twist now on the ocean breeze, the only ghosts of this forgotten, corpseless town.
The parasite tingles eerily against my neck.
Deep in a stairwell, shielded from wind and rain, I find a brighter, cleaner version of the final Maraheem poster—one so fresh I can almost make out the full text. The wordauroracatches my eye, paired with an indication of research and a business named Findlay Incorporated. Someone in Maraheem knows about the auroras on a deeper level than I do. If I can avoid Lilias and find this Findlay Inc.—if she isn’t also looking for them—maybe they can help me.
I step out of the stairwell onto a boardwalk rimmed by abandoned shops and looking out at a little beach. A large seal bobs in the swallows, black spots pebbling its grey coat. It scuffles onto the sand. Its whiskers rustle and its head lifts, revealing a gleam of metal in the folds beneath its neck: a brooch like the one Lilias never takes off. A rainbow glow swirls through the brooch’s silver curves, almost identical to the way the parasite shines.
The parasite stirs against my neck, focusing on that rainbow light so firmly that I can’t look away. My body turns toward the seal. I fight the motion as soon as I make it, a twinge of panic coursing through me. But the parasite’s interest in the brooch overwhelms my alarm, spilling into me, through me, until I’m just as intrigued as it is.
Without meaning to, I leap from the boardwalk.
I cross the beach, each stir of the sand beneath my feet making no sound. The animal seems not to notice my approach. Up close, I can see the differences in its brooch’s design, a crown where Lilias’s curls like flower petals. It continues to radiate an aurora-like glow, casting a shifting spectrum of color against the seal’s fur.
I feel the parasite’s confusion well. It burns against my neck, and its desire sweeps through me. I have to see that brooch up close. I have to hold it. I have to—
