41. FORTY-ONE #2
Velinquash nodded vigorously.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“Shadows. And brightness, so splendid I could drown in it. Everywhere. Even now. Everywhere. They murdered them. Murdered. Then I started floating… I never came back down. That’s how I know it’s not real. If it were real, I’d still be on the ground.”
The question was, had Tessel lost his own mind, or had it been taken from him? “What kind of work you do for Limtush before you have this episode?”
“None of it happened!” he snarled.
“You might have mention that already.” She sighed.
Ask Tessel Velinquash. Roskaad hadn’t needed to be more specific, because Velinquash would start spilling conspiracies to any person who walked in the room.
“I believe you, Mesu Velinquash. Is not real. But for research purposes, I must know what it is.”
“I… he…” Tessel scrunched his grey-strung brow as though it was a challenge to recall. He paused, eyes drooping as if disappointed in his answer. “We changed the moss.”
“The moss?”
In Nelfindar, the same substance that her people honored for its mental clarity and restorative properties had different effects—hallucinations and insurmountable addiction the best among them.
The death toll inflicted by the Nelfinden moss trade only bittered the taste most had of Azadonians: a filthy, disease-ridden people, proliferating deadly substances in the streets.
“How?”
“Alchemy.”
Limtush Pharmaceutical. “Why?”
“Sow obedience. Create discord. Finish off the Azadonians.”
“Finish off?” Said like he’d done something to harm them to begin with.
“Got them all sick.”
“Sick—” On cue, nausea crept up her esophagus and her throat tightened around it.
“Made them sick. Wanted them all to die. Made them sick.” He resumed rocking. “I didn’t want them to die. Didn’t even know why they died until after the moss project.”
“By they, you mean Azadonians?”
“If you make the moss bad, it makes the Azadonians bad, too. At least what’s left of them. No one cares when bad people die. Murderers. Underdwellers. They turn the other way, see?” He sighed and turned to look out at the ocean. “Too loud. Too quiet.”
Attilatia clutched at the hems of her pink sleeves. “Lieutenant Limtush initiated the Strikapa?”
“Put it in the water.”
“Why?”
“War.”
“I don’t understand. Tell me how?”
Velinquash shook his head. “None of it ever really happened. I see things. Hear things. I can’t even touch the ground anymore.
” He sat with his feet planted neatly on the floor beneath him.
“I can’t remember. I can’t. But I know it can’t be true.
Because if it were, you wouldn’t be here, now, would you? You’re one of them? The Azadonians?”
After a long while without her answer, he turned back to the window. “But you are so lovely. And I am so lonely. Will you stay?” he asked as she backpedaled toward the door.
The impulse to run from an old man in a chair had never been so strong. “No.”
“Wait,” he wheezed. “None of it really—”
In the unlikely instance that Velinquash had chosen a different ending to his catch-phase, Attilatia did not hear it.
The door slammed behind her. She nearly expected someone to be waiting for her on the other side, prepared to place a bag over her head or stick a needle in her neck or slide a dagger between her ribs.
Nothing was there. Just an empty-shell hallway.
She made it twenty steps before her back found a wall. She sank to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. Her breath caught and hissed slowly through her teeth. Her eyes welled.
Calm, Atti. Her heart beat in her throat and she tried to choke it down. An Aetech lamp whirred in a sconce on the wall overhead, casting an indigo hue over the hall. It was a calming shade—probably by design, in a mental health facility—that didn’t seem to work for her.
She sat in the cold crook between wall and floor for countless minutes, unable to move.
Roskaad’s closest associate had brought down Jenolavia’s dynasty…
or would have, if she hadn’t stood in his way.
Why would Roskaad have her ask Velinquash?
Was it a psychotic game? Was he a pawn of Limtush’s, working against her all this time, who liked to play with his food before swallowing?
Or was he helping her? No sooner had she thought it than she was sure of her answer.
How could she be so sure of something so foolhardy? What could have instilled so much faith in a man she knew nothing about—especially when what she did know was no good?
An ethereal voice pulled her from her trance. “There, there. It will all be alright.”
She looked up. The speaker bore the garb of the facility’s patients. Her short, wiry hair seemed to float around her head like an ebony aura. There was a birdishness to her face, and she gazed down at Attilatia as if she were a worm she’d been asked to empathize with.
Attilatia sniffed and pulled herself up to standing. She nodded at the young woman. “Thank you.”
The woman didn’t reply but meandered down the hall, humming softly.
The front desk was vacant as Attilatia passed by to drop off the key. She looked at the ledger, displaying the list of visitors from that day. Her name sat at the bottom. She ripped the sheet free and crumpled it into a ball small enough to slip into her pocket.
The rain came again, and Attilatia caught a coach home. She had left Pinto a key. A part of her hoped he might be there. A part of her hoped she could be alone.
When she opened the door, there was a note on her table, stark white against the settling darkness. She opened it.
‘What do you make of this?’
Pinto’s handwriting accompanied a political report, ripped and yellowed with age. The date penned in its upper corner read 697 post-cataclysm. Her eyes scanned the report. Her hand found her throat.
Limtush’s father had been a diplomat. When visiting Azadonia before the Grey Period, Jenolavia’s mother had had him beheaded. It didn’t say why.
At least she had an understanding for Limtush’s motivation… If only she could say the same for Roskaad. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply and wishing she had just a pinch of moss for tea—or perhaps a few porcelain dolls to smash.
She could make it through this. Stress was easy.
Stress was mathematical. It was the same as force, and force could be divided across a calculable surface area.
Too much stress, and a system would fracture.
So she had two options: find a way to lessen the stress…
or find a better perspective to deal with it.
Things were far superior to what they could be.
She could be dead. She could have been sold to the Kovathians, not Aetech, all those years ago.
She could be trapped in this Fated country without Pinto.
She could have ignored Roskaad’s advances and lost the protection he’d given her from Hashod and his Tera’thian friends.
Roskaad had been the one to make the advance, hadn’t he? Or had she come on to him first?
Thinking about him made everything suddenly seem alright. Like it was all a part of the plan. Like there was a warm gooey center buried beneath her cold, misanthropic—Kretch. She couldn’t possibly be interested in this subversive maniac. Could she?
Attilatia sucked at her teeth. Clenched and unclenched her hands. Tried to think about anything—quite literally anything—else.
She was just using him. Nothing more. The situation with Roskaad Thyatira had been damn near perfect. Her best manipulation to date.
But then he had had to ruin it: pretend to murder her, send her encryptions only she could ever solve, and lead her to the man responsible for the strategic collapse of her homeland and extermination of her people.
Why was that the most romantic fucking thing imaginable?