Page 62 of Immortal Longings
Through the whole event, Calla watches quietly. Her mind is moving with the flurry of an electrical storm. She doesn’t rush to Anton’s defense, lest she waste an edge she has not yet identified. She only shifts the sword in her grip, feeling sweat build up in the lines of her palms. Pampi’s sleeves are rolled up.There’s a wristband sitting high up on her arm, alongside a canvas of puckered scars. When the screen turns in her direction, Calla catches a2on display.
“You,” Pampi says lightly. She’s addressing Calla now, ignoring Anton as he rattles off a chain of expletives. “Fifty-Seven. I was hoping you’d show up.”
Calla doesn’t say anything. How long has it been since Eno took Yilas? Has he left the temple yet?
“What’s the matter?” Pampi moves closer, seeing that she is receiving no response. “Can’t speak Talinese?”
Calla strikes hard, shoving her sword through Pampi’s gut.
In the palace, she had once asked what the point of a brute-force attack was if it achieved nothing in the forward march. The general training her that day had an easy answer. In the enemy, even a single shred of fear is better than nothing. A single cell of infection is how the fever starts.
“Howdareyou—”
Pampi tugs the sword out, letting it clatter to the floor. Without any light, her eyes turn from red to gray. She justjumped. Somehow, she jumped, and the body with the stab wound crumples to the floor, its original occupant clutching the wound and gasping with pain. A new red-eyed body steps over the old vessel from behind, looking down with disdain curling her lip.
Calla feels as though she is losing her mind. She is certainly losing her grasp on every rule in Talin she knew to be true.
The Crescents stir. They hurry to hold Calla in place, gripping her shoulders, her elbows, trying to keep her locked at every turn of a limb. But Calla does not struggle. When Pampi hisses a command, they force Calla to her knees too, pulling at her hair so that her chin tips up.
Pampi strides closer in her new body. The Crescents in the room look to her as if she is their leader, waiting for further instruction on what to do. Yet there was still someone who questioned her earlier, a conflict of authority. While each of the Crescent Society temples follows one cleric, the transitions of power areconstant and fast, switching without notice depending on who can promise the most at any point in time. Pampi must be new, still shakily established.
The body on the floor has stopped gasping. Their head lolls back, eyes dull, neck craned and exposed. In such a position, the collar of their shirt falls back to show the skin below, and there: two parallel lines of blood, smeared almost artfully.
Calla’s eyes flicker away. Pampi must have done that when she was still wearing the vessel. It doesn’t seem like an aesthetic choice.
“Let’s try that again,” Pampi says, her tone unchanged.
One of the Crescents yanks at Calla’s hair once more to keep her looking forward. She catches another glimpse of the bodies in the room, the ones with their hearts carved out. Despite the roar in her head, she thinks she might be putting something together.
“Try what?” Calla asks, speaking her first words to Pampi. She adopts her palace voice, glacial and haughty and a thousand feet above everyone else. Two steps away, Anton snorts. Though he is still blindfolded, he has stopped struggling. He is listening, head tilted toward Calla. “Your poor attempt at intimidation? Do you hope to loom over me like some divine conqueror? You will never be one. The desperate never are.”
She used to observe her parents very carefully. Mornings in the breakfast hall. Afternoons in the indoor garden. Nights in the recreation lounges. Though they were not the closest family in the world—far from it—Calla spent plenty of time with them, tailing them at their daily tasks and learning how the Tuoleimis ruled their palace. She watched how they treated the servants, the rural women who had abandoned their children to work in the kitchen, the rural men standing guard where numbers were needed. If there was ever the barest hint that something was wrong, palace servants prostrated first, then checked what mistake they made second. It never really mattered what it was, or whether there had been a mistake to begin with. As soon asthey heard a rise in volume from the king or queen of Er, submission was the only answer.
Those who hold power in their hands are the same. They want to walk through the world reminded over and over again of their might, and if they do not get that response, then they will force it.
Calla lifts her brow, inviting argument. Suddenly Pampi reaches out and tears Calla’s mask off, and Calla can’t help but grin, knowing she’s hit her mark. Whatever consequence is about to come, at least she has not lost.
“I know who you are.” Pampi crumples the fabric in her hands.
“Of course you do,” Calla replies. “You’ve seen me on the reels. I am the future victor of the games.”
Pampi lands an enraged slap across Calla’s face. When Calla rears back, she almost laughs, but then she sees one of the Crescents pass Pampi a knife. Calla’s eyes dart around the room as she runs through her escape options. The man holding her left shoulder has a weak grip. Her gaze drops down to his collared shirt. There’s only the barest glimpse under the red light as he jerks in movement, but Calla could swear he has the same two vertical lines of dried blood.
“I want her heart,” Pampi says. “It is a very special one.”
“Right now?” the man asks. “We have others about to expire—”
“Hold herstill!”
They’re doing something to the qi of the trafficked bodies on the floor. Using it to change the way they jump, altering the very properties of the physical world and how they interact with it.
Calla slams her left elbow out, catching the man in the jaw. She tips hard into that opening, moving so suddenly that her shoulder veers to the floor. She lasts two seconds, freed and winded, gasping for breath. But as soon as she’s rolled upright, there’s an invisible grip on her throat, and Calla feels the first real hint of panic setting into her bones. She stops, hands flying to grip at nothing, andthen they’ve got her again, nails and claws tearing her jacket off and digging into the softness of her skin.
The knife flashes. Pampi lifts it.
“A waste of power when it’s in you.”
“Fifty-Seven,” Anton shouts, alarm rising in his tone. He still can’t see. “Fifty-Seven,jump.”
