Ellisandre
Ellisandre shadowed Lisa into the kitchen.
The taller slave went through the cabinets, not speaking, finding a pan and filling it with drinking water from the fridge.
He played with the knobs on the stove until the gas caught, and swirled the water in the pan above the flames before setting it down to heat.
Ellisandre folded their arms and leaned against the archway leading into the kitchen space. “Has Rei done that before?”
“Not that I’ve seen.” Lisa spoke without turning around.
“But you’ve seen it before.”
“Yes.”
“When you were a medic?”
“No.” Lisa started opening cabinets, not selecting anything but taking stock of resources. “After.”
“Will it happen again?”
Lisa closed the last cabinet and gripped the counter, back still to them. “Are you concerned for him, or concerned that he won’t be able to play his part? Because he could play his part right now. The Merchari aren’t the problem. You are. You’re the variable.”
Variable. Ellisandre let that viewpoint settle inside and turned it over. “Explain.”
Lisa turned around, keeping a grip on the counter behind him. “You don’t understand. Just talking to you . . .” He lifted one hand and held it out, flat. It was trembling. “Just talking to you is making me want to run.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not Merchari. Because you know what I am.”
Lisa’s jaw flexed. The muscles in his forearms stood out in clear lines, moving in and out of sharp definition as he rocked against the cabinet, holding himself in place with his fingers wrapped around the edge of the counter.
“I can travel. I got strong enough to travel, to pass. If I slip through, doing the bare minimum to interact, they won’t see what I am.”
“Who won’t see?”
“Everyone who is not Merchari. Civilians. Normal people.” Lisa waved vaguely to the world beyond the flat. “The world that pretends to be sane.”
He looked away, breathing fast. “And then there’s you. Not Merchari. Not civilian. Dangerous. Without rules. Changing everything.”
“Why does it matter that I know?” Ellisandre said.
Lisa turned towards them. His eyes were red rimmed and brimming with tears that they knew wouldn’t fall.
“You think we’re not ashamed? We remember. We remember everything, even when we forget. You’ve killed criminals. You’ve destroyed blight. But we . . .”
Lisa lifted one of his hands, fingers curling inward like claws, “We destroyed ourselves. We know what we should be. And we know what we’ve become. You can’t tell me I’m still a man. I’m something else. Something I would have avoided, dropped my eyes not to see, found words not to name.
But it didn’t matter. And now you make it matter.”
Ellisandre opened their lips to say something. Anything. To deny that it mattered. And then closed them. Because it did matter.
“Rei is ashamed to belong to Sevastyan?”
“No.” Lisa turned around and grabbed a wooden spoon, stirring the water.
There was nothing in it, but he turned the liquid over as if it might burn.
“And now I know why. I never understood what they were, not until yesterday.”
Lisa lowered the spoon. “Rei isn’t ashamed of belonging to Sevastyan. But he is a slave. That is real.”
He turned around, still holding the spoon, struggling with his words, looking out the window and not at Ellisandre.
Ellisandre held their silence, letting Lisa speak in a way he had not likely ever spoken.
“It’s not a game,” Lisa finally said. “It wasn’t a choice. Except for breathing. But when you keep breathing, you own everything that comes with it. The shame, the degradation, the not being human. It becomes a choice.” His voice was half strangled.
Lisa waved towards Ellisandre. “You could destroy all that. You and your freedom. Your everything. The way you just . . . burn. The way you demand the world bend to you. But you don’t tell us how to bend. Are we also your slaves? Is that how you see us? You share a space with Sevastyan, a master.
But you touch us; you don’t respect his ownership. Or is everything that is his also yours? Should I give you what I give him? Should Rei kneel at your feet? How can he kneel for Sevastyan and see Sevastyan kneel for you and not kneel for you? And yet you set no expectation.
All the power and no rules. Everything out there is anathema. These walls are the only place Rei and I can exist in this moment. Every inch of which belongs to you. The air we breathe. But what is the price? Where do we find the edge of your grace and the edge of your blade?”
Ellisandre drew slow breaths into their chest.
“Don’t lie.” Lisa’s eyes flared with internal indignation. “Don’t tell me you’ll give me my freedom. Don’t pretend it’s that easy. Don’t tell me I have choices. I am what I am.”
“I won’t lie,” Ellisandre said, voice soft. “What is your role with Rei and Sevastyan?”
“The fuckup.” Lisa lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “My master is Sevastyan’s mentor. He lets me run. I always go back. This time I ran to Rei.” He turned back to the stove, stirring the now simmering water. He opened one of the cabinets and pulled out tea. He set it aside.
He turned off the stove and crossed his arms. “Alexi wants me to love him the way Rei loves Sevastyan. The damn thing is that I almost do.”
He grew silent.
“In the pits, you always knew who was going next. They would start fading. Even if they were strong. Even if they were being given food.”
Lisa waved his hand in the air as if he were cradling a light bulb in his fingers.
“That thing inside, it would start to go out. The rest of us, we’d start to pull away. That’s when you knew it was over. When you knew to stay away. We would always know.”
The hair on Ellisandre’s arms and the back of their neck rose. They both needed to hear and did not want to hear what Lisa was going to say next.
“I looked in the mirror at the end of my lease in Morocco. I thought about going back to Alexi in Russia, Germany, wherever he was. And I saw that look in my eyes. And I thought about anything that would make the look disappear.
The only time I didn’t look like the next one to go was when I thought of Rei. So I asked where Rei was. Alexi told me. Told me to take my time. He knows I always have to run back. But he and Sevastyan have a deal. A new deal. I’m to stay with Sevastyan.
Alexi thinks Sevastyan is getting through to me in a way he cannot.”
“Is he?”
“No,” Lisa said. “It’s Rei. I won’t make him watch the light go out.”
“You’re in love with him.”
“Not everything is romance,” Lisa sneered.
“It’s not some great story. The first time I saw him, he was tied on his back on this table. Alexi and Sevastyan had been edging him for hours. He was covered in sweat, burning with it all. But he turned his head and smiled. I didn’t know what was going to happen,
but he looked at me and smiled and told me it was going to be okay. I didn’t want to be trained. I didn’t want to be where he was, but he looked at me . . . like I wasn’t something shameful. He showed me how to give them just enough and not lose myself. And when I escaped later and ran to his room,
he put plasters on my hands and held me. He didn’t make me human, and he didn’t treat me like a dog. He touched me like I was me. He didn’t need a word. Rei has never needed words.”
“To see him disappear today—” Ellisandre cut off their words. They weren’t a therapist. And they had no right to ask Lisa to satisfy a curiosity. They were out of their depth.
“He’s a slave and he’s Sevastyan’s perfect . . . companion.”
Lisa answered. “He can do things you can’t. I don’t wish to be as strong as he is. I don’t want the consequences of that kind of strength. I’d rather break. But to bend as far as he has, he removed bones. He sold pieces of himself to buy others.”
Lisa dropped his gaze to the floor. He wasn’t trembling any longer but that could have been as much from exhaustion as calm.
“Don’t take Sevastyan from him. Don’t make them choose,” Lisa whispered.
Ellisandre waited for the unspoken threat.
It never came. Lisa looked out the window again.
It was like he knew his strength was so far below theirs that there was no point.
But he had made it all the same, in ways he might not have realized.
Remove Rei from the world, and this man wouldn’t have a reason not to embody the full manifestation of what the darker world had guided him into becoming.
He might think he was without power, but he had changed the course of history, protecting Rei and the evidence of Sevastyan’s betrayal of the Merchari. He had the words, and perhaps the memory of a life outside of the dark that Rei and Sevastyan lacked.
“If you could have anything, after the Merchari are destroyed, what would you want?” Ellisandre asked.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Lisa said. “Hope is the ultimate weapon. You already have my truth.” He reached for a mug and poured the cooling water into it. He left the kitchen. A moment later the door to the bedroom opened and shut again.
Ellisandre stood and went to the living room, touching the leaves of the plants in the corner window and staring through the glass without seeing the outside.
They started taking off their jewelry, beginning with the arm garters and moving to the metal plates sitting on their shoulders.
They unlaced the corset, every eyelet, one by one.
They pulled off the black turtleneck and unbuckled the parachute pants, removing their socks.
They were left in smooth black compression shorts and a bandeau.
They smoothed their hands over the scars on their skin, the ones they’d gained on the day they let Sevastyan believe they had died and the ones they’d earned before and after.
Purple marks. Raised abrasions. Faded, indented valleys.
The places the surgeons had gone in to save their life that first uncertain month when they’d lingered between true death and possible life alone.
Their hands drifted away over their hips and hung motionless.
Air moved in and out of their lungs. Their shoulders loosened by degrees.
On silent feet they turned and padded towards the bedroom. They opened the door. Sevastyan was holding Rei while Lisa held the water up for Rei to drink.
Rei’s eyes met Ellisandre’s. Then dropped their gaze immediately.
He’s a slave. Lisa’s words came back to Ellisandre with new clarity.
It wasn’t a classification. Or a victim designation. It wasn’t something that could just be removed. Nor, for the time being, was it something to be healed.
Nor was it a problem. If anything, it was a solution, one Rei had already created.
When the Merchari were gone . . . Ellisandre blinked slowly, thoughts sliding back in time.
When the Merchari were gone, there would be things to grieve, pieces that didn’t fit, walls that had been built to keep out enemies that would impede trade.
Like the ending of a war, when factories that had once made bullets no longer had work.
Ellisandre sat down on the end of the bed.
Now was not the time to think back to the aching hole that killing their own father had left, how the world had drifted without meaning, empty and cold on what they had thought would be the most beautiful day of their life.
They’d put years into that goal, crafted themselves into a weapon that could accomplish it, and then found themselves on the other side, a used-up weapon without a purpose.
They gripped the covers. That was what was coming for Sevastyan.
For Rei. For even Lisa. The danger of leaning into a mission without hope of something on the other side.
Lisa had made it clear, so clear. None of these three men had hopes or dreams of their own.
They were so much deeper in hell, so much further gone than Ellisandre had ever been.
Defeating the Merchari was only going to be the beginning.
If they wanted Sevastyan in their life, then Rei would also be in their life. And possibly Lisa. The man seemed to have nothing else tethering him to the land of the living, except for perhaps a master who belonged to the ranks of the Merchari elite. A master he seemed to both love and loathe.
“Elli,” Sevastyan said.
Ellisandre blinked. They’d gone into their head and into the future.
“I’m here.” Ellisandre turned to Sevastyan.
“You were frozen. Did something happen?”
“Planning,” Ellisandre said. “We should all rest. Even if it’s afternoon. We can eat the baked goods for dinner around nine with the antibiotics.”
“You’re . . . not dressed.” Sevastyan’s face was wrinkled with concern.
“My house, my rules.” Ellisandre shrugged. “Though I’m revisiting those rules.” They took Sevastyan’s free hand in theirs and stroked the back of it. How did one make ethical rules in a situation lacking in ethics?
“I don’t know what rules we need now.” Ellisandre found themselves speaking without planning for it. “Lisa made me aware of dynamics that had not been considered.”
Sevastyan’s eyes widened and then his brow furrowed. “There’s no book.”
Rei sat up, pulling his legs under him so that he was on his knees. He said nothing and still Sevastyan turned to him. Rei kept his eyes down and his hands on his thighs, his knees parted.
The hair on the back of Ellisandre’s neck rose. Rei was offering something, without speaking. The what was not readable to them, but that there was an offer was clear.
Sevastyan laid his hand on Rei’s shoulder and stroked his back. Ellisandre watched. Again, a language for which they had no dictionary, only the supposition of context.
“If you’re going to continue to pierce the heart of the Merchari, you will all have to maintain the mental state necessary to pass as part of that world,” Ellisandre said.
“Moving between roles is difficult. Sevastyan, you should consider yourself in this matter. I cannot merely disappear, and yet you must all maintain equilibrium until the war is finished.”
Sevastyan looked between Ellisandre and Rei, and then to Lisa. Unlike Rei, Lisa was upright and alert. He met Sevastyan's eyes. Again, there was an exchange Ellisandre could not pierce. They could make deductions, but those deductions carried no certainty or detail.