Chapter 21 #2
“Officially, this is a storage and distribution center for metal parts constructed lower down. Below us there’s a few foundries and factories, the standard set.
Unofficially, the whole platform’s belonged to the Brimstones for ages, and we’ve cleared out the main warehouse to use as a dance floor.
” They spread their arms grandly. “Welcome to Partytown, Io.”
Kelli looked around and tried to translate this information into terms she understood.
It made more sense to think of this as the lair of a group of villains.
A terrible cave, where tube-worms writhed in the corners; where every stalactite leered and growled with a gargoyle’s face.
What would Orlando do if his mermaid led him into a cave like that?
He’d keep his head. New things had always fascinated Orlando more than they repelled him.
Who knew what sort of creatures might live in a place like this, what kinds of stories they’d have to tell?
Kelli tried to find that fascination in herself, but mostly she felt queasy and overwhelmed.
“Does it ever stop smelling like eggs?” she asked, with a hand over her nose.
“Not really. You learn to tune it out.” Ting tilted their head at her. “So, you’re really the script supervisor for Ship of Fools?”
“Yeah,” said Kelli.
“And you’re really Rowan’s autistic ex-girlfriend from school? Orlando the pirate is really some kind of elementary school creation you two used to have.”
“Yeah.” She wondered why Ting felt that they had to ask. Did they think Rowan had made it all up?
“You really just dropped what you were doing and came out here with him of your own free will?”
“More or less.” Kelli scratched her head. She could have just said yes, but that didn’t feel right. “I mean, he asked me, but I could have turned him down. He said it would help him pay off his debts, and I don’t know if we really have a lot in common anymore, but I wanted to help.”
She also had been angry. And frightened, and eager to face her fear bravely, the way Orlando would.
If criminals wanted to do something awful to Kelli then she wanted to catch the criminals—but of course she couldn’t say that to Ting.
Kelli wanted a lot of things, and she was starting to feel how they jangled around, contradicting each other.
“What is that?” she added, changing the subject, as they turned the corner and came up against a bewildering mural.
The colors in this one were light, and less headache inducing than most of Io’s colors, but Kelli couldn’t make sense of the forms that they added up to.
They looked almost like human shapes, but all wrong, angular and jagged in the wrong ways.
“A mural,” said Ting, sounding baffled that she didn’t know. They paused, and then they tilted their head, considering. “You’ve never seen a cartoon that isn’t in the Inspiration style, huh?”
“Uh . . . no?” said Kelli, squinting at the mural.
Ting pointed to the weird, jagged, disproportionate human forms on the wall. “Two astronauts holding hands at the edge of a volcano. You can see the resemblance if you squint, right?”
Kelli squinted. “Why would you go to all the trouble of drawing a cartoon and do it wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Ting said blithely. “I like this style. But I’m not an artist. Didn’t they teach you about style or whatever at university?”
Of course they had told Kelli about style.
Style was the way AdventureVerse looked, which was different from how things looked in real life, brightly colored and easy to understand.
Style was what she did when she wrote a good sentence so it could be clearly and easily spoken. Looking bad on purpose wasn’t style.
Except. . . . We’re Okay Now had looked different from how AdventureVerse looked.
And there had seemed to be a purpose to that difference.
A feeling that it carried, like the viewers were spying on something that might actually have happened in real life.
Other movies in Rowan’s files had looked other ways, and the books had been written in different ways, too—some with way too many big, elaborate sentences, others choppy and slangy or strange in countless other ways.
At the time, overwhelmed by all the variety and all the weird sex, Kelli had classified this as bad writing, but .
. . what if it wasn’t? What if those different ways of writing a sentence had a purpose, too?
“There’s more than one style?” she asked, furrowing her brow.
Ting suppressed a laugh.
Kelli wanted to pepper them with more questions, indignant and urgent, needing to know. But that’s not what Orlando would have done, or what the nice version of Kelli would do, either. She should keep her cool.
“What was that about, earlier, Rowan and Zhaleh?” she asked, to change the subject. “He sounded mad at her.”
“I’m not even sure. They’ve been dating on and off, but they had some huge fight a few days ago. I wouldn’t read too much into it. Everybody’s dated everybody else and had fights with everybody else, in a community like this. You need an app just to keep track of who isn’t talking to who.”
Kelli frowned. She’d already imagined that Rowan must have dated a lot of people, but now she had a specific, very beautiful face and a set of slinky, figure-hugging clothes to imagine and that was worse than what she’d imagined before.
Kelli had never dated anybody else besides Rowan, and she felt very inadequate all of a sudden.
“What, everybody?” she blurted. “Has he dated you?”
“Nah. I don’t really date, and he’s more into women mostly. We’re friends, though. Even in a place like this, there’s not too many out trans people, so I figure we all gotta stick together.”
That was a little funny. Did nonbinary people really count as trans?
Kelli remembered reading whole long scholarly debates about that, back in the day, and accounts of all sorts of different trans people who’d gotten into disagreements and hadn’t stuck together at all.
But she supposed that, if Ting counted themselves a certain way, then that was the important part.
She tried to imagine Rowan having trans friends, binary or otherwise.
A whole gaggle of them, fearless and open about who they were, staying up all night talking about trans things.
This shouldn’t have made Kelli jealous, not in the same way as imagining him with girlfriends, but it did.
She wondered if the young women of Io, not as prudish as Callisto Basic Elementary’s girls, had started to follow Rowan around like a line of ducklings again.
Ting turned another corner into in a big atrium.
The walls were shiny and stark, rising in a paneled vault, with panels alternating dark metallic blue and green.
Below them was a chrome floor with a lot of empty space for people to mill around in, and a circle of benches in the center of the room, with a big plaque in between them, commemorating the people who’d built this place.
Beyond it, big doorways led into what was clearly a bigger room, slightly more enclosed.
Music filtered out from that room, a thumping beat that must have been impossibly loud to the people on the inside; colored lights pulsed in time with it.
Kelli came to an uncomfortable halt.
“That’s the party,” said Ting with a little shrug. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want.”
“I don’t?”
“Not yet. When Conchita wants you, she’ll send for you. I think we’ve got a few minutes.” Kelli didn’t move toward the big, loud doors; Ting gave her an appraising glance. “What’s it like working for Inspiration?”
“Well, it’s a profession,” said Kelli. “I’m lucky to have it. And it’s lovely, really. You get to spend your whole day immersed in a story.”
She barely listened to what she was saying. She was too busy staring at the colored lights through the door. Even from out here, the beat was entrancing, if intimidating. What were people doing in there, exactly?
“What did you mean,” she said, thinking of it suddenly, “when you said it was good to finally meet me? Has Rowan been talking about me a lot?”
“Oh, yeah, for ages. Since way before Ship of Fools. He always talks about you when he’s drunk.
How you used to have a companion robot and he learned prompt injection that way.
How you used to share pirated books and hide in trees and make up stories together.
You’re the one that got away. I’ve seen that dynamic before. ”
Kelli hugged herself, a chill stealing over her despite the warm and sulfurous air. Everything Ting listed was innocent, more or less—but, if Rowan wanted to, there were a lot of much worse true things he could have said about her. Things she did not want anyone to ever say.
She probably should have thought of that earlier. She felt stupid for not thinking of it. When Rowan said he knew someone who wanted to meet Kelli, she should have asked him, what do they know?
“Did he say. . . .” She hesitated. “Did he say anything about why we broke up?”
“Yeah, a little. He said he realized he was a boy, and you weren’t into boys, so that was that.”
Kelli’s fingers dug into her upper arm as she stared at the colored lights.
She felt relief, but she shouldn’t have.
It felt like too much indulgence, going to a dance party after what she’d done.
The dance floor was close enough for the sound to distract her, but it also somehow felt very far away.
Real people went to parties like this. Kelli never did.
“That isn’t really the whole story,” she said.
“Usually isn’t. None of my business, though.” Ting tilted their head in the direction of the dance floor. “You’re looking kind of entranced. You want to stay out here where it’s quiet, or you want to try going in?”