Page 35 of Immortal Longings
Before she can negotiate further, however, her wristband is trembling. Calla glances down at the screen, irritated with its poor timing.
August and Galipei are already exiting the alley. They do so casually, uncaring that Calla is no longer following them, the conversation having come to an end.
With a disgruntled mutter, Calla turns and runs the other way, drawing her sword.
One would think that the palace surveillance room of all places could afford to fix the broken air conditioner in the corner, yet there it sits with its front half missing, the room growing muggier and hotter around it.
Pampi squints at her monitor, fanning herself with her hand and following the players in her assigned area with keen eyes. Eighty-Six is fast, and two different dots on the screen blip out in rapid succession. Other players don’t have the same efficiency, though that’s through no fault of their own. San-Er is too dense, and the statistical probability of players naturally congregating in the same area is low. Of course, when location pings push two or three together within the same block, they’re already gearing up for a fight, and it’s either a fast battle where one ambushes the other, or there’s no battle at all because one player has slunk away and run out of range before they could come into contact with the other.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s this?”
Pampi draws away from her desk, glancing three cubicles over. A colleague jumps to her feet, hands held up.
“Hey! Hey, can someone look at this?”
Like everyone else nearby, hungry for some drama, Pampi hastens to the desk. Movement flashes on the screen. Pampi has to bite her lip to keep her smile down.
“What are we looking at?” someone else asks.
“Bottom left corner,” the woman answers. She points to the screen too, but as soon as she has directed their eyes down, it’s difficult to overlook what is happening.
Number Five, matched to the bright dot on the corresponding screen. But Five isn’t moving. Five stands there, surrounded by various garbage bags near the edge of a rooftop, drenched in rain as the downpour continues on. The footage is blurred, affected by the weather conditions, and the woman at the desk types commands into her keyboard in an effort to sharpen and enhance the image. It doesn’t do much. San-Er’s technology is prototypical to begin with, and sometimes signals do not connect to deliver its demands. Top-of-the-line companies with a councilmember on their board will always offer their products to the palacefirst and take royal investment, but even then, there is only so much these companies can manage when research moves slowly and advanced resources come in short.
“Did Five jump out?” another voice asks, leaning as close to the screen as he dares. “I didn’t see anyone nearby.”
“I suppose we can rewind the tape later,” the woman answers. “I was switching through cameras quite fast, but then I stopped here a few minutes ago… the scene has yet to change.”
The surveillance room fades to an eerie quiet. The other desks have noticed the crowd gathered at the back. Though they don’t know what so many of their colleagues are enraptured by, a sense of ill ease has creeped in.
“Someone’s coming,” Pampi says suddenly. She cannot help herself.
A figure has walked onto the screen. Given the camera’s high angle, their features are obscured by the deep hood over their head, but surveillance wouldn’t have picked out more than two pixels of a face anyway when the rain is pouring down. Pampi clears her throat, glancing at the adjacent smaller screen. She motions for those around her to look as well. No dots near Five. This is not another player.
“Call the palace guard,” she says evenly.
The woman hesitates. “I mean, we wouldn’t want to bother them for—”
Five crumples to the rooftop floor. A collective inhale travels through the surveillance room, and no one exhales as the hooded figure strides forward, pulling at Five’s limp arms. Though the rain pelts down at blurring speed, Five’s skin is visibly darkening to a gray shade. The cameras cannot pick up the light of jumping, but the decaying body tells them that it is being performed before their very eyes—again and again, in and out of Five at rapid speed.
“It’s another one,” someone in the room says breathlessly. Pampi does not know which of her colleagues it was. They blend together, each voice merging with the next.
“Another yaisu sickness kill?”
“But that’s not possible. There are only the two of them there. Why isn’t the killer burning up too? Where else can they jump to?”
“It must be some sort of foreign attack. We don’t know what they’re capable of.”
“Look! Look what they’re doing!”
The figure with the hood hauls Five’s arms all the way up. The Sican salute.
“Surely now,” Pampi says, “we call the palace guard.”
Calla dreams of invasion.
She dreams that she is stuck in the ground, buried up to her ankles. Though she struggles and strains, she is stationary while streams of villagers run past her, fleeing their province as it burns, soldiers moving in and taking position outside each stout house.
Help,she wants to scream, but no sound comes. She knows that she is somewhere near the mountains, that she has to leave, that she must move if she is to keep her life. The soldiers are coming, their clothing as black as the night and their swords as bright as the stars. They command her not to resist. They say that the throne of Talin has arrived. That this is salvation; this is the moment they have been waiting for, plucked out from the harsh rule of anarchy at the borderlands and welcomed into civilization—
