Chapter 14 TESNI
FOURTEEN
TESNI
The pasta is overcooked. It sludges in my mouth, a paste over my tongue, flavoured with salt and jarred tomato sauce.
I should taste it, the explosion of cheap flavours blended together. Better than the protein bars that line my stomach. But I taste nothing more than sludge and the residue of cigarette ash.
Emily pushes the tub of parmesan cheese closer to me. It snags on the boucle placemat.
I consider it, the promise of more salt, the allure of a touch more flavour.
But I tear my gaze away from the temptation and stab my fork into the pasta again.
Bee’s murmur is low, “She’s vegan.”
Emily pauses for a beat before her fingers slip away from the cardboard tub. “Forgot.”
I chew mush, with half a mind to spit it out into the bin and burrow into a pile of blankets in any other room but this one.
Maybe I don’t have an appetite.
Or maybe I’m forcing myself to eat, because the next meal might be a while away.
There is no security in staying here.
At any moment, anything could happen, and we could be pushed out of the flat. Out there, in the blackout, exposed and vulnerable, our next meal is uncertain.
It’s always better to force down food when it’s available. So that’s what I do.
It’s slow, gruelling work.
The temptation of the parmesan cheese lingers with eat bite.
The sludge of pasta in my mouth is somewhere between wet mashed potato and slime.
My face twists with each roll of my jaw, chewing and chewing and chewing, until it’s soft enough to force a gulp.
I’m slowest at the table.
Emily finishes up first.
I’m surprised to see her bowl empty. Like me, I expected her to struggle, but she devoured the whole serving like a greedy child.
This world comes without dish washing. So she leaves the bowl on the dining table then, without a word, rustles back into the living room, her cape of blankets brushing over the linoleum as she goes.
Bee is next.
For a while, she sits in front of an empty bowl, as if waiting for me—to finish, to speak. Then she gives up and starts piling all the preserved food from the cupboards into a box to be sorted.
“Never thought I would be grateful for preservatives,” she murmurs, then kicks the box out of the kitchen and into the lounge.
I follow her, a quiet shadow, then plonk myself on the couch.
The stark white beam of the dropped and forgotten torch on the rug arches up the drawn curtains like spidery fingers.
Emily has stolen most of the blankets. I’m left with a single fleece throw, too small to even wrap around my shoulders. I drape it over my lap and pick at the threads.
Bee leaves the box of food on the floorboards, a chore to attend to later, then drags out a pillow and some sheets from the bedroom.
She joins me on the two-seater couch. It’s a tight fit, snug, and her thigh grazes mine.
Still, words evade me.
My mind has turned to static, like on the old brown television when I was little, and I would turn the dial over and over, searching for a channel, but it was grey, white and black fuzz that came with a hissing sound.
That’s what it feels like inside my head.
There are no words that I can string together, nothing coherent at least, not while my brain is being squished by all the wild shit Bee told me, stories and lore that I would’ve dismissed as nonsense—before the blackout… before I saw them.
Now, I sit in it, a truth too ugly to take.
Fae exist.
Fae are a species from another world.
I try not to think about Bee using a button to represent that other world, like it’s flat against the sphere of earth’s shape.
That’s a whole other thing for another day.
But through all she told me—that she is fae, but looks human, that she is considered an abomination, rejected by her own kind, and that the darkness comes from a whole other world, and that the warriors we saw are here to end us—I can only focus on one thing.
The bridges.
Even in all the fog wisping around the mush of my brain, my focus latches onto the most meaningful thread of information.
Bridges are a possible way out of all this.
I sit with it for so long that, by the time I’m lifting my gaze from the fleece throw, Emily is sound asleep on the armchair.
Her face pinches every other moment, eyebrows furrowing before faint murmurs come from her reddish mouth, then a whimper—and I suspect she’s deep in dreams about those warriors… or maybe Ramona’s death haunts her.
Emily was closer to Ramona than she is to us.
I mean, we only met Emily at quarantine. Not like she came with the group on the trip. But she and Ramona bonded—and stuck together over the months.
I would pity her if I wasn’t so consumed by my own shit. It’s one of my many faults. If I’m suffering, I just can’t extend the little energy I have to others.
I just… can’t.
I don’t know how others do it.
But I’ve always been a little off that way. Something Bee never seemed to care about, never judged me for.
I wonder now if that’s because she’s the same, or there are more like me in her realm, those who are a bit more self-absorbed than what’s really acceptable in this world.
I don’t play the part or wear the mask I’m expected to. I never fake laugh for a bad joke, I’ll shout my opinion in any man’s face, I throw snide looks at anyone who bothers me, who annoys me.
It’s not a choice to be this way. I can’t do it the way everyone else does. I tried so many times, over and over—and the best I could manage was a day of falsities, of pretence and tolerance. All these things I don’t have in me.
Obviously I don’t have many friends. Never did. I always struggled with that.
But this one right here, next to me on the couch, is my ride or die. Literally, I will die for her if I need to.
I just hope that doesn’t happen.
Speak of the fae, Bee shifts out of the blankets draped over us—and the lift of the edge lets in a cold bite of air.
I toss a dark look her way.
She’s leaning over her folded-basket-legs for the duffel parked on the edge of the rug.
She reaches into the unzipped gap, then tugs out the plastic packaging that steals me back to the raid at Costco, when I so easily snared these off the hooks on the shelves, not knowing my entire reality was moments away from collapsing.
Bee brings the pair of CB radios to rest on her lap, then threads out a knife from the sheath on her belt.
I turn my cheek to her as she starts cutting through the packaging—and I watch Emily, eyes shifting behind her eyelids, deep in sleep.
“Can you make a deal?” I whisper.
Bee stills beside me for only a moment before she wrangles the CB radios out from the plastic sarcophagus.
“With the warriors,” I add, soft, as though to speak too loud will mean waking Emily up, but since she slept through the ruckus of the plastic packaging being cut up and warped, exhaustion must have too tight a grip on her. “Can’t you speak to them, and get them to take you back to that world?”
“Us.”
I swerve my blank gaze to Bee.
“Take us there,” she corrects.
“You won’t ditch me?”
Her grin is lopsided, lazy. “Not even on your deathbed.”
Her thumb flicks over the mini booklet, reading the instructions for the radios. Fair. Neither of us have a clue how to use them.
Emily murmurs on the armchair.
The frown on her brow has stretched all the way down to her twisted mouth, eyes still shut, and her legs are twitching beneath the pile of blankets.
Nightmares.
So many nightmares in this dead world.
Bee says, “I can’t bargain a way home with them.”
“Why not?”
“I told you how kintas are viewed by the fae. The dark ones are…” Strands of mousy hair fall into her face as she softly shakes her head. “They will kill me just for being what I am.”
Silence takes her for a moment.
Still, Emily’s eyelids flicker with the swerving of her eyeballs, a dream that has her as tight as the fever clutched us in quarantine.
I keep checking, just to make sure she doesn’t overhear anything that might put Bee in danger.
It takes Emily echoing this to the wrong person in the wrong moment, or the wrong person in the right moment, and that’s Bee’s death warrant.
One thing I have held true to my heart my whole life is how fucking ugly people are. That truth has really revealed itself in the dark.
“We need a plan,” Bee says. “And a lot of backups.”
I consider the radios on her lap. “Let’s start with what to do if we’re separated out there. We already use our last safehouse as a checkpoint if we’re separated, and we use codes… but I think we’re going to need more than that.”
Beside me, Bee nods, faint.
“We need strategy,” I add. “We need solutions for every possible way things can go wrong.”
The dark ones add a whole other problem to this world and how we survive it.
Before seeing them on the road like that, all our plans and schemes centred around basic survival, and maybe the threat of another group, or a wild animal.
None of it accounted for dark fae warriors.
Obviously.
But like I said, my mind is mush, mush in fog, and to think up strategy now is an impossibility.
My brain needs time to reset.
‘These spells’, as my mum used to say in her kind way, ‘just need time and patience.’
If I fight against it, I go further into dissociation and then it’s like I’m comatose, and every sound I hear is both an echo and static around me, and I’m delayed in mind and body.
Funny that I’ve always felt a bit alien here in this world, with my fellow humans, and now literal fucking aliens are invading us.
Even if they’re fae—they can still be considered aliens, right? Foreign, from another world, another species, really.
No, I push that down. A thought for another day. Not now, while my brain churns to keep up with the basics.
I should sleep.
But there’s an electricity in me, zapping and humming around my bones, and it keeps me too physically alert.
I shift around to my side, then lean my cheek on the spine of the couch.
I watch Bee fiddle with the radios.
“Will I like it there?”
The tip of a grown-out fringe brushes over her apple cheek. “It’s cruel. Whether it’s the light or the dark, it’s a cruel place. Humans don’t have rights—none at all, really.”
“But there are humans there.”
Her chin tugs to the side, and she considers me.
I add, “I won’t be that out of place then?”
“What do you really mean by that?”
Sometimes I love when she reads me so fluidly. Sometimes I hate it.
“You know,” I say with a bitter smile. “Most people don’t… take to me.” My shoulder lifts, lame. “I just… I might not be totally welcome.”
“Neither am I.”
That should soothe me, maybe a little, maybe more than that. Instead, I have a sickly pool of dread spilling through my insides.
To be unwanted, unwelcome is to be an intruder. That’s a feeling I’m used to, but in the face of the blackout and dark fae, maybe not one I should spare too much thought on.
“Get some sleep,” she says—and that cuts the conversation off.
With that, she shuts me down.
I don’t sleep.