Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
A droplet of water leaks from the ceiling. Then another. Calla Tuoleimi shoots a glare up, but it does nothing to stop the dripping on her neck. She can only shuffle an inch to the left, pressing closer to the dusty wall.
“What the fuck is taking so long?” Calla mutters under her breath.
She lingers at the bottom of her building’s stairwell, guarding the entranceway into the hall while her fingers weave three pieces of flax lily into a bracelet. Her apartment is at the other end of a long, winding corridor: a dingy ground-floor setup with cramped rooms and targets for crossbow practice plastered on the doors. Most days, she would hate to be outside of it, in these halls and stairwells where orphan children and homeless squatters sit in the corners to beg or yell nonsense. There’s no reason for anyone else to be hovering out here unless there is business to intercept at the entrance. Calla kicks her boot at a rock in the corner, dropping into a crouch.
Today, there is business to intercept. Everyone gets lost trying to find her apartment otherwise. And so she waits, weaving her bracelet to keep busy. Only a single light fixture mounted on the wall illuminates the muted afternoon, its flickering bulb set to go out at any moment. The electric grid is always past its capacity. Residents steal from the various lines and boxes, just as they steal water, attaching their homemade pipes wherever there is a pump belowground. San persistently smells of rot and theft—of muddy puddles stuffed with discarded trash bags, plastic water tubs discarded in the alleys for vagrants to leave their waste in. Lower floors will always feel the worst of it. Higher apartments that inch above the city skyline will, at the right time of the day, get a small fresh breeze floating in from the sea.
To suffer in San-Er is not a punishment, only a way of life. Any murmur from its inhabitants enmeshes immediately with the hum of its factories. The cities are perpetually covered with a blanket of noise, nothing in particular to be heard but nothing that can be drowned out.
Calla pauses her weaving, jerking her head up when she hears footsteps coming. There are plenty of other entrances into the building, either from the rooftop or from neighboring complexes that have bulldozed their exterior walls to share a more convenient corridor on certain floors. But the runners they send from the palace never know how to navigate these streets well: this cesspool of obscenities in the guise of a city, this living, breathing, heaving half of San-Er. They will walk the ground route, squinting at the faint markings outside the main doors of each apartment block before squeezing into the alleys and forging deeper. Eighty-eight packages are set to disperse across the twin cities today, carrying eighty-eight wristbands. One of them for Calla, even if that isn’t what’s on the official registry.
“What are you making?”
A kid pops his head out from underneath the stairs, and Calla glances over, her nose wrinkling. He’s covered in muck, trousers flaking with brown clumps. As he toddles closer, the approaching footsteps finally come through the doorway. Calla squints in the hazy light. Too old. Too many grocery bundles trailing after them. Not a messenger. She leans aside and lets them pass to get to their apartment on the ground floor.
“Don’t you know?” She peers at the kid again. “If you mind other people’s business too much, a god will rush into your nose and take your body.”
The kid frowns. “Who said?”
“You don’t believe me?” Calla asks, finishing the bracelet. “Out in the provinces, they’re so afraid of the gods that they won’t even look at each other. Ask one question that’s out of place, and it might be enough for a sneaky god to rush in and snuff out your qi.”
She ties a nice little bow onto the end of her bracelet. Weaving flax lily—or even keeping a flax lily plant—is a habit of rural children out in the provinces too. Her bracelet-making stands starkly incongruous with the rest of her cultivated appearance: the blunt-cut bangs falling into her eyes, the black curtain of hair growing to her waist, the black mask strapped across the lower half of her face, muffling her voice.
Princess Calla Tuoleimi looks vastly different these days, but she’s still wearing the same body, which is unexpected when she has wide pickings for an easy swap. She’s thinner without the rich palace meals—her face sharper, almost gaunt. She lost her round cheeks after that first month in hiding, and scared herself each time she glanced into the mirror with how much meaner she appeared. Then she figured she might as well embrace her new fugitive appearance and grabbed a pair of scissors to shear straight bangs across her forehead, just slightly too long, to obscure her eyes. She never trims them now until it’s an absolute menace to see. There’s always the possibility that someone will recognize her. A low chance, given how little attention people pay to faces in a city where faces are always changing, but a chance nonetheless.
If the palace is to be believed, of course, Calla is dead. They caught her scaling the wall in an attempt to escape that night and dispensed justice, and San-Er can rest easy knowing no murderer princess hides in its streets. Certain members of the Crescent Societies have argued the contrary—they ask why a different dead body was brought back for Calla’s funeral ceremony, why King Kasa is still so afraid to leave his palace. But the Crescent Societies have always questioned how the Palace of Union runs its kingdom, and they are but a small majority.
The kid harrumphs. “You’re not very nice.”
“Did I look nice to begin with?” Calla kicks her boot again, nudging another stone across the gritty floor. In the past hour, most of the building’s residents have walked right past her without eye contact, catching a flash of her appearance in their periphery and deciding they would prefer not to get robbed. “Your parents ought to scold you for talking to strangers.”
“My parents are dead.”
His words are spoken dully. No fluctuation in tone, no twinge of emotion.
Calla sighs. She holds her arm out, offering the kid the bracelet she’s just completed, along with a coin from her coat pocket. “Here. A gift. Maybe I am nice, after all.”
The kid scampers forward and takes the bracelet and coin. As soon as his hand closes over the money, he turns and hurries out of the building door with a gleeful shriek, prepared to spend it at some shop stall or cybercafe. In his absence, there’s another set of footsteps outside, approaching from the far end of the alley. These are softer, lighter.
By some instinct, Calla hurries forward, leaning through the doorway to look. Just as she sticks her head out, a boy appears before her, coming to a halt with a package clutched in his arms. He’s tall, but no more than fifteen years old. The palace, hoping to prevent runners being jumped and their valuable devices stolen for the black market, will always send teenagers because they’re difficult to invade before reaching full maturity. But sending youth is hardly a foolproof plan when any dedicated thief could simply pull a knife on them and call it a day. No one ever said the palace was smart.
“Hello,” the runner says.
Calla grins. Her entire face shifts in that moment, her pencil-lined eyes crinkling into something predatory. She’s long learned that the harder she smiles, the easier it is to prevent scrutiny of her identity. The expression doesn’t have to carry any genuine warmth; it doesn’t even have to look happy. So long as it swallows up the yellow of her eyes, aglow like an overcharged lightbulb. There are enough shades of yellow scattered throughout San-Er to make the sight commonplace on an offhanded glance, but there is only one other person with an utterly identical hue to hers, and it is the king. For three generations, royal yellow has been the defining hereditary mark of the Shenzhis in San and the Tuoleimis in Er, tinted dark by a ring of burnt umber unfurling from the center. But now Kasa has an adopted son, August, and there’s no one left of Calla’s bloodline—not since her parents perished and the throne of Er crumbled.
“You’re a darling.” Calla holds her hand out for the package. “Apartment 117, building 3, north side?”
The boy looks down, reading the small print written on the outside of the packaging.
“What do you know?” he says. “That’s exactly right. Here you are.”
He offers the package. His arms extend, not quite closing the distance between them. The alley is as gray as any other day, but when Calla reaches for the package, her attention settles on the boy’s face, trying to pick out details in the gloom. It’s strange that he wouldn’t look directly at her. That he’s staring at his shoes instead.
Calla’s fingers skim right past the package and clamp onto his wrist.
The boy’s gaze jerks up. Though the light is terrible, it’s enough for his eyes to flash, for her to catch the silver of steel.
In San-Er, there’s another term for such eyes. Next to royal yellow, the second-most infamous hue is Weisanna silver.
Calla slams the package from his hands at once. It splashes into a nearby puddle. Before the boy can think to react, she has already shoved him hard enough to topple to the ground, the flat of her boot stamped on his chest and pinning him down.
“Who the hell are you?” Calla spits. This is not a teenage boy. This is a member of the Weisanna family, the only bloodline in the city—perhaps the whole kingdom—with their birth bodies inaccessible to all intruders.
“Me?” the boy—the Weisanna—wheezes. “Princess Calla, perhaps you should worry about yourself.”
Calla freezes. Her breath snags in her throat, turning her lungs as cold as ice.
She’s been caught. Someone knows.
“You better speak right now,” she demands. “Before I—”
Her fist is already scrunched, fingers clenched so hard that her knuckles scream in pain against the rough fabric of her gloves. Then a woman appears at the end of the alley and startles at the scene before her, shifting her shopping basket from one arm to another.
“What is going on—”
“Don’t!” Calla screams, holding her arm out.
It’s too late. The woman has stepped just close enough, and a flash of light brightens the dark day, beaming from the boy to the woman. Before Calla can clear her vision, blinking hard to rid the imprint burned into her retinas, the woman is already darting into the building and up the stairs, her shopping basket abandoned. Of all times for a do-gooder to appear, it just had to be then.
“What happened?” the real runner asks from the floor. He blinks, his eyes magenta now.
Where other bodies are only impenetrable when they’re already invaded, the Weisannas are born as if they are doubled, though they have but one set of qi. While they can occupy others with ease, others cannot occupy them back, even if a Weisanna abandons their birth body entirely and leaves their vessel in stasis on the ground. The Weisannas make up the entirety of the royal guard and a good portion of the palace guard; that sort of protection has kept the royal family of San on the throne with ease, scaring off security threats before they can emerge.
Calla mutters a curse, scooping up the fallen package. “Buy more protective charms. You just got invaded,” she spits at the runner. Then she’s hurtling up the stairs too, catching the briefest flash of the Weisanna before they’ve disappeared down the second-floor corridor into a neighboring building. San is almost entirely interconnected by links and passageways, by walls that were once outward-facing but are now mere dividers between building spaces. When Calla pauses at an intersection, she spots the Weisanna again through one of the pointless windows scattered about every floor. Those windows are the only hint that there was once space between the buildings of the city, before they started to meld with one another.
“Hey!” Calla roars.
The Weisanna keeps running, and Calla gives chase, storming into a different floor of the building with the heavy thump of her boots. There are crowds here. Too many people perusing the shops, gathered to inspect meats hanging from the butchers. Calla presses closer to the shop fronts, hoping to move along the edges, but then she walks right into a discarded pile of hair outside the barber’s and nearly falls over. With tremendous disgust, Calla can only merge back into the center again, muttering a curse when she ducks to avoid being thwacked by a couple carrying a bulky personal computer for repair.
It would be so much faster if she jumps, but Calla does not—she will not. She merely keeps her steady pace, the damp package still clutched in her elbow, her eyes pinned on her target. It’s almost as if the Weisanna is toying with her. Every time she thinks she has lost the trail, mixed in with one too many shoppers or pushed behind a group of construction workers hauling giant planks between them, she catches a flash again—just enough to follow up a set of stairs or along another passageway. Her surroundings flip between commercial and residential, the cool stone walls on either side of her growing wide to accommodate the stores or shrinking close to hold more space for apartments. Up and up and up, she climbs too, until suddenly the Weisanna is in sight, and Calla lunges for the absurdly vertical set of stairs, taking three at a time with each stride and smashing through the door at the end.
The natural sunlight almost blinds her. Its rays are weak, but they’re a shock to adjust to nonetheless, and Calla throws a frantic hand over her face, fighting the wave of nausea before she spots her mark standing at the edge of the rooftop.
“You—”
She clamps a hand over their shoulder and spins them around, but it is no longer the Weisanna. The woman blinks, her eyes a faded red and muddled with confusion. Damn. The Weisanna jumped again without her notice. At some point in the pursuit, they set their sights on a new body and transferred over.
“What am I doing here?” the woman asks, her voice hitching.
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” Calla replies without sympathy. She points a finger to the door back into the building. “Go on.”
For the briefest moment, the woman scans Calla up and down, trying to place the half of her face left uncovered. When that fails, she tears her gaze away and hurries off, not needing to be warned twice. The door to the rooftop slams shut, its echo loud.
Calla rips her mask from her face, heaving in a gulp of air.
Princess Calla, perhaps you should worry about yourself.
Calla emits a loud scream. The pigeons that were perched on a nearby television antenna fly away in fright. If King Kasa has found her, then she’s dead. Forget the games. Forget justice. They’ll have the Weisannas drag her into a room and put her neck under a blade.
One lone remaining pigeon coos, sounding disgruntled at Calla when she kicks the debris littered across the rooftop. It’s filthy here, the premises used as a playground for children in the daylight hours and a hideout for drug addicts by nightfall. Discarded water kettles and half-broken ceramic toilet bowls decorate the middle like centerpieces; wooden construction slats and plastic chair legs scatter outward as the side arrangements. Calla drops into a crouch, but then her legs complain with exhaustion and she simply sits down, bothered more by her mood than whatever dirt will cling to her pants. Like half the city, she steals her water anyway: she’ll turn the taps on later and soak her pants in the sink until they’re clean, or until the pipelines in the hall shake a little too vigorously and the neighbors start to get suspicious.
For a long minute, she sits there fuming, her teeth gritted and her fists tight around the package. Then she curses under her breath and rips open a corner, shaking the plastic hard until a wristband falls out. The runner had been jumped by a Weisanna, but he really did come from the palace. So how many people know? Why give her access to the games?
The wristband snaps easily onto her arm, its magnetic buckle pulling the two straps into place. Calla extends her arm, bracing for the loud beep that comes as soon as the screen turns on. After a minute of gray on the screen display, the wristband buzzes, and the gray gives way to a blinking cursor against a blue light, the numbers 1 to 9 appearing at the bottom.
“How did we get here?” Calla mutters to herself. “Playing in the games like a starving street urchin.”
It’s almost unfair. Other players in the games have not come of age surrounded by palace tactics and weaponry drills. They have not trained relentlessly for five years hiding in a small apartment, all to make a perfect killing strike. Fighting them will be like snuffing out insects. Fighting them is beyond the point. It’s the ultimate goal that her eyes are on: victory, and the person she will have access to when she is greeted as the winner of the games.
King Kasa, inside San’s palace. In these last five years, he has not left its grounds once. And if he will not come out for Calla to make her kill, then she will be welcomed in by his own hand.
She runs her finger along the top of the wristband. There’s an empty slot at the side for a chip, but those are distributed when the games begin. As soon as they’re inserted, the chips cannot be removed, and as far as San-Er is concerned, their removal is the most boring way to face elimination. Pluck the chip out or fail to check in every twenty-four hours—at least it’s a good method of withdrawal without losing your life.
Calla finds the buttons at last, though they are stubborn and difficult to trigger. The left one moves a yellow box around the numbers, and the one on the right makes a selection. Calla has watched enough of the games’ reels and observed the televised surveillance footage across the city to know that it is asking for her identity number, unique to every citizen in San-Er. Instead of locks and keys, the doors in San-Er open to identity numbers; instead of passwords, banks in San-Er are accessed with those same identity numbers. In a place where bodies can be taken over in the blink of an eye, it is easy to look like someone else, yet impossible to live long under a falsity. Nothing can stop Calla from jamming herself into the body of a rich councilmember, but the second she tries to get into his home, she is caught. The second someone looks at her and sees a different eye color, the jig is up.
Besides, long-term occupation of a doubled body is risky. If the invader has weaker qi and isn’t initially forced out by the vessel’s original occupant fighting back, it’s only a matter of time before things go wrong. Hallucinations, hearing voices, seeing ghosts. Memories melding together—two people merging into one. An ordinary civilian with the jumping gene would never hover long in someone else’s body in case they’re caught, but also because they don’t know whether that body will be their very death. It takes a superbly confident person to believe they’re too strong to be dragged down by anyone. And while Calla is devastatingly confident, she hardly wants to test the theory out.
The wristband chimes again, finally accepting her number. It’s not her true number but, nonetheless, it is accepted. The screen flashes. Once. Twice. Three times.
12:00:02
12:00:01
12:00:00
Calla picks herself up, kicking the discarded package wrapping into the rest of the debris. She needs a shower. Might as well get clean before she walks right into a bloodbath.
Elsewhere in San-Er, Anton Makusa finally gets his wristband. It’s his own fault that he ended up chasing runners high and low through the twin cities, but he’s unjustifiably disgruntled anyway. They had found their way to the residence registered under his identity number, but his apartment in San is small and cramped and loud with the bass of the music from the brothel three floors down, so he’s rarely there. Those streets always reek with an unshakable stench, too close to the polluted Rubi Waterway that separates San and Er.
Anton kicks the door closed, releasing a breath and hitting the remote on the mantel at the same time. In the corner, the television flickers on and the walls start to hum. Safety at last, away from the palace runners, before they realize that this body is not his own. It’s rather illegal to be hijacking young bankers and keeping them from their jobs for days on end. Sooner or later, someone at the bank will suspect a takeover situation and the palace guards will be knocking down the door of this luxury apartment in Er.
But by then, Anton will be gone.
“Please, please, hold your applause,” he declares to the empty apartment. “I cannot handle so much adoration all at once.”
His voice echoes. The living room before him is three times the size of his real residence, and even fitted with a balcony to the side. It’s one of the largest living spaces in the entirety of the twin cities, which Anton knows because he’s done his research—he scoured what was available of San-Er’s architectural blueprints in the brief stint where he considered robbing the rich. That didn’t last long; he doesn’t have it in him to negotiate on the black market after he swipes valuables. Now he just mooches around, flitting across San-Er. When he wins the games, he can have something like this too. When he wins the games, there’ll be no more lurking around corners and chasing after runners to get a measly little package.
Anton pushes the balcony doors open. The heat outside is palpable despite the rapidly falling dusk. It itches at his skin, dampening his desire for enjoyment. He wants to breathe in from the very top of San-Er, pretend that this is all his, but if it were that easy to fool himself, then Anton would be long dead from sheer stupidity.
“Bow before me,” he calls out into the open. His voice tapers off, the charade losing amusement. It is hard to imagine an adoring crowd spread out before him when the view is only the neighboring building’s dirty rooftop, littered with garbage. In Er, the streets run with less riffraff, and the buildings are given more breathing room. Here lie the financial districts, the banks, the schools, the businesses with employees who have some sway on the council or some ability to whisper into the king’s ear. Five years ago, when the throne of Er fell and San-Er was merged into the one, the residents here complained the loudest about their streets growing rowdier with San’s miscreants, but there was nothing they could do, not when their own royals had been slaughtered and San’s king had the divine right to swallow up his brother’s half. The Palace of Heavens was torn down after losing its rulers, replaced with residential complexes. Absent its matching half, the Palace of Earth was renamed the Palace of Union.
On the other rooftop, Anton’s make-believe shouting has caught the attention of three men, squatting around a low plastic table with playing cards clutched in their hands and cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They stare at him for a second before brushing him off, two going back to their beer bottles while the third, who looks younger, spits out his cigarette and pulls a rude gesture.
The victors have never chosen to live like kings anyway. They take their immeasurable earnings and slink out into one of the Talinese provinces, away from prying eyes and desperate acquaintances, trying their best to forget everything they did in the games and get some fucking peace and quiet. While farmers move in the other direction—flee the provinces and flock toward San-Er to avoid starvation—a rich victor worries about nothing except the blood on their hands and the voices of the dead that haunt them late into the night.
“And now, for… report… tonight…”
Inside, the television has faded to static. Anton turns around, a frown already on his lips, but the static clears quickly, picking up a different signal and switching to a news broadcast. His confusion turns to rage in a single blink. King Kasa appears, adorned in jewels and seated at his throne. He smiles, his yellow eyes bright, but then Anton picks up a potted plant on the balcony and hurls it into the living room with all his strength, shattering the screen. King Kasa’s oversaturated face blinks out of sight.
The apartment falls into silence. Night wraps fully around the balcony. With the television broken, his main light source and the background hum of noise disappears too.
Anton nudges his black hair out of his eyes. It will be a nuisance to get that fixed, but it’s not his anyway. It was easy to get into this apartment: into this body and its assets. All he had to do was stand around the hallway and pretend to fix his shoe, once while the banker typed his identity number into the door and again the next day to catch any numbers he missed the first time. If Anton wanted, he could go dig into the banker’s accounts right this moment, maybe call up a few of his friends and ask for loans. But that’s too many layers to go through, too many people to talk to and risk exposing himself to the council’s wrath. Better to laze around, eat up all the man’s food, then bounce. He can find money a different way.
Anton looks at his wrist.
06:43:12
Six hours until the first event. Enough time to obtain another body before it starts. This one is on the frailer side, even if the face is pretty. Anton Makusa is picky when it comes to the bodies he occupies, and his narcissism takes first priority. He’ll gravitate toward the masculine ones, same as the body he was born into, but he’s not fussed if that isn’t an option. What matters most is that they look good. Under the terms of his exile, his birth body was taken by the palace. The least he can do now is find worthy replacements.
A beep comes from his belt. He glances down, angling the screen of his pager up.
“For fuck’s sake.”
Patient bill overdue. Must pay in full by next week.
The message is from Northeast Hospital. It’s also far from the first warning they have sent.
His arm is suddenly rock heavy as he unclips his pager, clutching it tight in his fist. A week. It should be enough for Anton to put something together for the person he’s saving. In San-Er, whole lifetimes can pass in a week.
Still, he should drop by the hospital, find the attending doctor, and talk his way around pushing the bills off for just a bit longer. Hospitals in San-Er are known to act rashly, pull the plug and toss patients out the back door the moment their accounts stack up.
“Goddamn,” he mutters. “Dammit, dammit, dammit—” He marches out to the balcony again, undoing the wristband on his arm too. As hard as he can, Anton hurls the wristband and pager onto the neighboring rooftop, stirring the attention of the three men from before.
“What gives?” one of them yells. The man stands. Drops his cigarette and strides to the edge of the rooftop to pick up the wristband. A breeze blows through the night, shaking the bulbs that hang from the electric wires and stirring the light that flashes across the stranger’s face. His hair ruffles, thick crops of black falling into his eyes as soon as he straightens up.
Anton jumps. It is a risk: the roof edge is almost ten feet from him already, the distance stretched further by where the man stands. But Anton has always been a natural, has never stumbled where other people panic. To him, jumping feels like running, like sprinting through the air with his qi and halting to a stop wherever he pleases.
He opens his eyes. There’s a grin on his lips—maybe it was already there when he arrived, maybe it’s his own doing. The two others around the table call out, having seen the flash of light, and mutter complaints about invasion. Anton waves pleasantly before securing his wristband tightly around his new wrist and clipping the pager back on. His muscles feel strong, steady. When he breathes in and pushes through the rooftop door to take the stairs down, his lungs expand like he could keep inhaling and inhaling with no end.
“Spare some coins?”
At the end of the stairs, Anton reaches into his pockets without stopping in his stride. Beggars never hide out in the main buildings, not when palace guards patrol the markets and civilians report lurkers in the residential levels. The streets outside, meanwhile, are so narrow that no one would be able to walk by the moment someone sits down in a corner. So for those without anywhere else to go, stairwells and obscure corridors it is.
“Here.” Anton scoops up every coin in his trouser pockets and tosses them down at the beggar’s feet. “Take all of it.”
He pushes through the main doors. The bustle of the shops invades his ears, the whine of dentist drills almost drowning out the “Thank you!” from the stairwell. Anton doesn’t stop walking, his hands shoved into his now-empty pockets.
Finally, finally .
This is the first time he’s been drawn in King Kasa’s annual games. He has been tossing stolen identity numbers into the draw ever since he went into exile, chancing his life to save what— who —he lost. She remains on that hospital bed, still lying in sleep after seven years. The palace has the power to help, but August pretends he doesn’t receive any of Anton’s communications. King Kasa has the power to help, but he will not. He lets them suffer in their filth and misery instead, even those who once lived under his very roof.
Anton swipes an apple from a nearby stall, takes a bite, then throws it hard into a shop, hitting a wall calendar at the perfect angle to knock it off its hanging nail. The shop owner yells after him angrily, demanding to know what his problem is, but Anton is already moving away, searching for the next semblance of order to ruin. Prince August has tried his very best to squash Anton into the darkest depths of the city, make him slip away like another face in San-Er as if he did not once hold a piece of it.
But Anton is a Makusa. A family line of palace nobles that goes as far back as the Shenzhis have been royal.
He won’t be tossed aside so easily. In fact, he’ll destroy anyone who tries.