Page 36 of Immortal Longings
Calla wakes with a scream in her throat, biting back the sound just before it can escape. She lurches upright, jostling Mao Mao, who was resting peacefully on her lap. Her hands are shaking. As she does each time a nightmare shakes her awake, she reaches out to pet her cat, burying her fingers in his fur. Seconds pass. Her heartbeat starts to stabilize.
Outside, it almost sounds like the screaming from her dream is still going,but the noise is only drunken glee from patrons of the nearby restaurant, as per usual. Calla shifts Mao Mao gently to the bed and shuffles onto her knees, moving her pillows aside so she can see out her window. She pulls a gap in the blinds, then wipes her fingers on the glass to clear the condensation. The blots of neon color immediately crystallize into real shapes, revealing a couple ambling along the alley outside her bedroom. The sight is a far cry from the images still pressed to the inside of her eyelids, to the fields burning and blood running.
Calla releases an exhale. The people inside the twin cities are suffering. But they cannot even imagine how much worse those in the provinces have it. And so long as it is a competition, the blame will only circle around and around instead of going to the top, where it belongs.
The blinds snap back, blocking out the stream of light. Calla pulls the blankets over her head, determined to finish her sleep.
Tonight is for rest. When morning comes, she’ll find Anton Makusa, and they’ll turn the games into a frenzy.
CHAPTER11
Yilas Nuwa has been to the Hollow Temple enough times that she can find her way in without trouble. Its entrance is artfully hidden, tucked inside what might have once been a courtyard, enclosed by four buildings pressed edge to edge. Yilas goes into one of the buildings, climbs up to a market level, then walks through another door and down a hidden set of stairs around the back, turning and turning at the stairwell’s landings.
She passes a window on the second floor, where there is no daylight to be seen, despite the morning hour. The temple’s green roof tiles are only illuminated by the few sparse rays that seep in through the trash and miscellaneous buildup collected on the metal grille above. The peak-shaped roofing with its stone edges and circular tiling was designed to keep rain and wind away from the temple walls, but urban conditions in San-Er have recast such desires. It is not rain that the temple has to worry about, but debris: broken photo frames, used shampoo bottles, and spoiled baby diapers that fall from windowsills and cometumbling down fourteen stories of apartments on all four sides. When Yilas hugs her bag to her chest and pokes her head through the window—though it is less a window than a rectangular shape cut into the stairwell’s outward facing wall—she might be convinced that this solid blot of color is not a metallic mesh grille above the temple but only a poorly installed ceiling.
Yilas hurries down the last set of stairs, exits the building, and walks toward the entrance of the Hollow Temple. She tries not to make eye contact with those outside doing breathing exercises. In her periphery, she catches sight of brass knuckles and chains, curved shapes inked on their necks—some in bloodred, some in regular black.
“I’m only dropping something off,” Yilas says to the woman at the door. She doesn’t bother with a greeting. The Crescent Societies would mark unnecessary politeness as a sign of weakness and terrorize her before she can scramble out of here.
The woman waves her onward. Yilas enters the temple, gritting her teeth. Matiyu couldn’t have chosen a nice job in the financial district. He had to go joining the Crescent Societies.
“Hey,” she barks, spotting her little brother at one of the tables. “Here’s your stupid lunch.”
She thumps the bag in front of Matiyu. He looks up with a start, blinking at her with the same pale-green eyes that she has and pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up his flat nose.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Matiyu says. Without waiting for her response, he grabs her wrist and starts to pull her toward the back of the temple. “I need you to come see this.”
“Your food—”
“It’s okay, no one will take it.” Matiyu tugs on her wrist again, hurrying her along. “Quick, quick, come on.”
“What’s the rush?” Yilas asks, but she quickens her pace anyway. “And since when did you need me for your little scholarly work?”
Yilas was always awful at school. She dropped out early to become a palace attendant, and then she hated attending too, even though Calla was the easiest person in the palace to wait on. After she met Chami, she didn’t care for climbing to high places or achieving grand things. She only wanted to water her plants every day in their apartment above the diner, to live quietly and softly.
Matiyu is not the same. He graduated top of his class last year, on a trajectory toward making something of himself. Then, to their parents’ horror, he took an accounting position for the Crescent Societies instead of a well-to-do bank.
It’s not like I’mactuallybuying into their religious cult,he had said.But they’re where the fast money is. I’ll work two years underground, then leave and take up something more comfortable.
People call them a cult for a reason,Yilas had leveled.What are you going to do when they start brainwashing you?
But Matiyu had only waved her off, unworried.
They’re coming around to the back of the temple. Matiyu leads them through without a second glance at the people nearby, but Yilas can’t help staring a little. One cluster is off in the corner doing qi exercises in synchrony. Another group prays with their foreheads pressed to the ground. When they straighten up again, there’s a strangeness seeped into their manner.
Yilas turns away, holding in a grimace.Magic, some call it. If that were the case, then jumping would be magic too. But jumping comes from qi, and the gods forged their qi. Everything about San-Er is merely the work of its gods—the true gods in the ether and the false gods ruling from the palace.
“I’ve been trying to organize the stock numbers coming in,” Matiyu explains, opening the door into a storage room. He blows at the thin layer of dust on the boxes stacked near the door, then removes one of them for access to the lightswitch. The thin bulb doesn’t do much for illumination. Yilas struggles to see what her brother is rummaging for when he pulls out a drawer of a filing cabinet and retrieves a thick stack of folders. “But some of these receipts don’t look right.”
“How am I supposed to help?” Yilas takes the folder offered to her. When she opens it, the papers look to be written logs—an export of heroin here, an import of opium there, some random sales of ephedra from smaller shops instead of the larger underground factories.
“Tell me if anything looks strange to you,” Matiyu says. “Run through the incoming numbers, then see what our outgoing prices are… it doesn’t fit, does it? I can’t see—”
The door slams open.
“Why is she in here?” Before Yilas can react, someone has hauled her out by the arm, their grip like iron. She barely has time to look up and see who is dragging her away—by the time she has glimpsed the crescent moon at their neck, she’s already been pushed through the temple’s doors, Matiyu’s footsteps plodding after them.
“Wait, wait, wait, that’s my sister—”
