Day 30, 1st District — Stellaire, The Private Dining Room
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The envelope was waiting on the record player.
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Maroon parchment, the comedy mask pressed into the wax. Yisheng had not let a living soul into this room in twenty-six days, and the door had been locked from the inside the entire time. He picked the envelope up between two fingers, the way he might have lifted something off a plate that hadn't yet decided whether it wanted to be eaten, and slit it open with his thumbnail.
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Final Task: Finish what you started.
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He read it once, smiled, and tucked it into his apron pocket.
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He was already very nearly done.
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For twenty-six days, the private dining room at Stellaire had been a secret, and the secret had a smell: lavender and white vinegar and cold marble, and beneath them, so faint that a stranger would have taken it for a trick of the imagination, the sweetness of a good ham left to hang. The refrigeration units along the far wall had hummed without pause since the night of the dinner. The windows were papered over. The great mahogany table had been pushed to the center of the floor, and on it, on a porcelain plate the size of a cartwheel, stood the thing he had been building.
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It stood twelve feet tall, and it was a rose.
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He had carved something over three thousand apples into that shape in his lifetime, and three thousand had been practice. It had taken six people to make the real one.
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The stem was the six spines. He had articulated them, one after another, each vertebra drilled and threaded on a core of braided steel, and wound them into a single ascending spiral, thick as a man's thigh at the base and tapering toward the bloom, the pale bone stained a delicate verdigris so that it read, at a distance, as living green. The thorns were teeth. One hundred and ninety-two of them, thirty-two from each of the six, set into the spiral at careful, alternating angles so that the light would catch them as a viewer walked around it. He had bothered, for the sake of the thing, to keep the gold fillings.
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The leaves were the shoulder blades, twelve of them, thinned on a wheel until they were nearly translucent and mounted in pairs along the stem like spread wings. The hair of six heads, dark and gray and one startling white, had been washed, oiled, and braided into a cord as fine as silk that wound between the thorns and hung in long, drooping tendrils from the outermost leaves. It swayed a little in the air from the vents. It looked, unnervingly, alive.
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The petals were the skin.
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That was the part he was proudest of, and the part that had cost him the most nights. One hundred and forty-one petals, each a single sheet of skin lifted whole and laid out, cured in a bath he had spent nine days developing, of reduced wine and clarified gelatin and a resin from a jar he declined to name even to himself, until it had gone as translucent as the window of a cathedral. He had tinted them by hand. A deep, dark burgundy at the heart, blushing outward through a hundred shades of rose to the pale, translucent pink of a petal's very edge. He had preserved the finest of the capillaries on purpose, in the thinnest sheets, so that when the light came through it revealed a delicate blue tracery, as of veins in a leaf. He was not a savage. He was an artist.
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And at the heart of it, coiled with the patience of a pastry chef piping the last rosette onto a cake, lay the center of the bloom: eleven meters of intestine, per person, slowly wound and lacquered to a glossy, glistening, rope-thick spiral of deep crimson, every coil tightening toward a single point like a bud not yet open. In the exact middle, set like a dewdrop, a ring glittered. And around it, in a fine, shimmering scatter across the innermost petals, the rest: the signet rings of the eldest, each in its own tiny cradle, catching the lamplight.
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A placard sat on a small brass stand at the foot of the plate. He had lettered it himself, in his small, fastidious hand.
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THE PREVAILING RATE
- Yisheng Wu -
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They had eaten so well, at the end. He thought of it, sometimes, with a real and abiding tenderness. He had watched the eldest man's face go through its whole silent symphony over the first course, horror, and confusion, and then that slow, helpless, disgusted pleasure, and had understood in that instant what the finished thing would look like, the way a sculptor sees the figure in the block. The eldest had asked for seconds. There had been a great deal of him to go around.
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Yisheng lowered the needle onto the record.
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It was a cello suite so old that the composer's name had worn off the sleeve, a slow, grave, unhurried thing of dark wood and long breath. The first low notes rose out of the brass horn and filled the room, and he closed his eyes for the length of a phrase and began to hum along, softly, a little flat, the way he always did when the work was going well.
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He took up the smallest brush. He dipped it in the last of the lacquer. And with a hand that didn't shake, he drew one final, delicate line along the outermost edge of the outermost petal, where the skin was thinnest, and the light went through it like light through the wing of a moth.
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Then he set the brush down, and stepped back, and back again, until his heels touched the wall.
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The cello climbed. The air from the vents slid through the hollowed finger bones he had strung among the petals like chimes, and the rose, very faintly, began to sing.
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He stood there in his stained apron with his hands hanging at his sides and his mouth a little open, and looked at it, and something rose in his chest that he had never felt in all his years in a kitchen. It was not pride. Pride was a small thing, a hard thing, a fist. This was enormous and soft and boundless, a great warm tide rolling up out of the deepest part of him, so pure and so total that for a long moment he could not remember his own name.
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Somewhere there ought to be a museum for this. There was not. He would have to build one.
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He looked down. On his left palm, the rainbow glow had begun to climb.
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It was not the slow tick he had grown used to. It ran. One hundred and forty. One hundred and eighty. Two hundred, two-twenty, two-sixty, the digits flickering past faster than he could follow, the light of it spilling up his wrist and warming the underside of his chin. The rose sang. The cello swelled. Yisheng Wu, laughing softly, tears running unnoticed down both cheeks, watched the number climb past every figure he had ever imagined it might reach and then settle, gently, like a bird coming to rest, on three hundred.
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Bethuel had two hundred and forty-seven.
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It was, he supposed, unfair. He intended to go to the duel anyway.
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He lifted the needle from the record, so that the last note hung in the silence, and went to change his shirt.
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Day 30, Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate — The Basement, Afternoon
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The basement of the Estate had not been swept in ten years, and Bethuel could tell, by the way the dust rose around his shoes, that nobody had come down here to grieve it either.
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It ran the whole length of the house, a long, low, vaulted cellar of gray stone, and it had been, once, the only room in the Estate where the seven children were allowed to be children. Training dummies stood in the corners, gone soft and gray with mildew. A rack of wooden swords leaned against the wall with the paint peeling off in strips. There was a long scratch across the flagstones where Ruruel had once dragged a bench to pin the door shut. He knew the exact spot where Malcuel had first learned what a broken rib felt like. He knew where Lenuel had learned, at nine, to make the older boys stop hitting her by smiling.
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"You're being slow on purpose," Duffuel said from the stairs.
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"I'm being thorough."
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"You're being slow."
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Duffuel had come down without being asked, without a word, with his arms folded and his shoulder against the doorframe, the way he'd once stood outside a training room while their father was inside. He wore the same gray shirt he'd worn in the garden. The strip of cloth was gone from his knuckles, but the bruises weren't.
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Bethuel crossed to the far corner, where a shape stood under a sheet.
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He'd known it was there. He'd known, in the way you know the location of a tooth you've stopped chewing on, for ten years. When he was eighteen, he had walked out through the front doors of this house with a single suitcase, and before he had done it he had sat across a desk from his father for four hours and made a bargain. He would pursue Euphoria, as he'd been raised to do, for the rest of his life, peacefully, in the open, without ever taking up a weapon for the family. No missions. No targets. Never again to be sent by Duncan mac Findlaech to go and take a life for the House. In exchange, Duncan would let him go. It was the only real thing he had ever won from that man, and he had never once been able to decide whether it had been a victory or a very careful piece of theater.
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He took hold of the sheet and pulled.
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The dust came off in a long gray sigh, and there she was.
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She was five and a half feet from butt to crown, a haft of black ash wound with cracked leather gone the color of old blood. Along the wood, in the crooked, enormous letters of a child who had wanted very badly to be taken seriously, someone had painted a name in red. LADY MACBETH. The letters had flaked. The head was steel, a great, dull, scarred slab of it, three feet across and three feet tall, blunt on every face, black in the seams, its surface dented and bright where it had met other things and won. It weighed very nearly two hundred pounds. He had been eleven years old when he first lifted it.
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He reached out and took the haft in one hand.
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It rose off the floor like a feather. The head swung clear of the dust in one slow, easy arc, and Bethuel turned his wrist, and the whole two hundred pounds of it spun once around his body, humming, the air peeling off its face in a low, wet rush, and came to rest against his shoulder as lightly as a walking stick.
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"Hello, old girl," he said quietly. "It's been a while. I'm so sorry I left you down here in the dark."
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Duffuel closed his eyes.
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"You're apologizing to a hammer."
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"She has feelings."
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"She is two hundred pounds of forged iron."
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"You've never been a romantic, brother." Bethuel ran his thumb along the flaking paint, gently, the way you smooth a child's hair. "Look. She's missing a bit of the L."
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"Why," Duffuel said, in the flat, exhausted voice of a man asking a question he had been carrying for seventeen years, "in the name of the Ring, did you call her that? Lady Macbeth. It's a stupid name. It's a genuinely stupid name."
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Bethuel didn't answer right away.
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He looked at the haft. He looked at the long dark cellar, at the mildewed dummies and the peeling swords, at the spot on the flagstones where he had once sat, aged seven, with his back against a wall and a wooden sword across his knees, and watched his brothers and sisters spar without him.
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"When I was small," he said, "I didn't feel close to any of you."
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The cellar was very quiet.
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"It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anyone's. You were all older, or angrier, or better at it, and every one of us was trying so hard not to be the one Father looked at that we didn't have anything left over for each other. And then Father gave me her." He patted the steel. "I was eleven. She was the first thing in this whole house that was ever mine. I talked to her. I told her every stupid, frightened thing I couldn't tell any of you. I named her for the woman in the play, because I thought it sounded strong and I wanted, more than anything, to be someone who wasn't afraid." His mouth twisted. "It only occurred to me much later that the lady in the play doesn't end well."
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"Bethuel—"
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"We got close later. When we were older. I know we did. I wouldn't trade it. It's just that all of us bonded over the same thing, in the end, and it wasn't a happy thing. It was him." He shrugged, and the great hammer rocked on his shoulder. "So for a long time, she was my only friend. That's all."
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Duffuel said nothing.
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He turned, after a moment, and went to the stairs. Bethuel watched his brother's back, broad and stiff and unhappy, climb the first step, and stop.
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"I'm not going to say this properly," Duffuel said, without turning around.
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"You don't have to."
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"Shut up. Listen." He had a hand on the rail. It was tight enough that the knuckles stood out white. "Once you're done with this duel, you're done with this reality. That's what winning is. That's what Father wants. You go up, and you don't come back down." He drew a breath. "So if you win... If you actually win... I hope you'll use it to make them happy. All of us. Even that idiot Lenuel. I hope you'll make it so we can forget every bad thing he ever did. All of it. Every last one." His voice cracked very slightly, and he cleared his throat, hard, as if he could push the thing back down. "You've got the gift for it. You always did."
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Bethuel opened his mouth.
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"And that was too much. Forget I said it." Duffuel's spine went rigid. "That was sentimental. It's beneath me."
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"Duffuel—"
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"If you lose, though," Duffuel said, in a different voice, a flat and level voice, the voice of a man reading out an entry in a ledger, "Father won't keep a fool who loses. You know that. If the day comes when he wants you put down, I'll be standing on his side of the room. I won't have a choice." The rail creaked. "I won't like it. But I won't have a choice."
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"I know."
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"Good."
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He went up the stairs without looking back. The door at the top opened, and light spilled down into the dust, and it closed. Bethuel stood alone in the long, low cellar with a hammer on his shoulder and the flaking red letters of a child's name under his thumb.
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"Well, my lady," he said softly. "One more time. Shall we?"
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She didn't answer. She never had. But he thought, as he carried her up into the failing light, that she had never once felt so heavy, or so glad to be picked up.
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Day 30, 3rd District — Cobbleworth Row, Dusk
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Nobody had told them. That was the strange thing. Nobody on Cobbleworth Row had ever been told anything, and yet by the time the sun began to lean toward the rooftops, the whole street knew.
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It had come in on the wind the way news always did, from the baker's wife's cousin, who had it from a man at the Sub-Train station, who had it from a Viscera clerk, who had it from a Brain analyst who couldn't keep a secret to save his life. Bethuel Mac Findlaech, the fool with the bread, the boy who recited sonnets to loaves, was going to fight a man from the Stomach tonight, at the ruins of Breach-9, for a prize nobody on the Row could fully explain and all of them understood was terrible.
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They gathered outside the bakery without anyone having called them. Old Henrik came down the stairs on his cane, one step at a time, and stood at the edge of the little crowd with his hands folded on the crook of it. The little girl who had laughed so hard she'd sat down on the curb, weeks ago, stood at the front holding her mother's skirt. The baker's wife had put a loaf on a small table in the middle of the street, and set a candle beside it, and lit it. Somebody, in the small hours, had chalked a single word on the paving stones in wobbly capital letters. BETHUEL.
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"He's a good boy," the baker's wife said, to no one in particular. Her voice wasn't steady. "He's been a good boy since he was small enough to steal a crust. Whatever it is he's got himself into, he's not the kind of boy who—" She stopped. She tried again. "He's not the kind who hurts people."
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"Then he'll be all right," someone said.
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"That's not how it works."
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"No." Old Henrik's voice was thin, but it carried. "It isn't."
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They stood in the failing light for a long time. A wind had come up, and the candle guttered, and the baker's wife put a hand around the flame. Nobody spoke. Nobody in the 3rd District, in all its history, had ever been particularly good at prayer. The Coalitions had taken most of the temples decades ago and made them into banks. But somebody reached out and took a neighbor's hand, and somebody else took that one, and it went down the line, thirty people, forty, joined in a ragged, uneven ring around a loaf of bread on a small table in the road.
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"Whoever's listening," Old Henrik said, into the hush. "Keep the boy safe. Keep him laughing. That's all we're asking."
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"Keep him laughing," they said.
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The candle flickered and held.
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Day 30, 8th District — The Breach, Sunset
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They came to the wall from opposite sides.
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Bethuel came down the long slope of rubble from the 8th, with the last of the sun behind him and Lady Macbeth on his shoulder, her great black head dragging a faint line in the dust. He had washed his face and brushed his good coat and combed his hair, and there was a small yellow flower tucked into the buttonhole, because a man could not be expected to walk toward his own death without a flower. He was smiling. He had been smiling since the Sub-Train, an easy, gentle, entirely practiced smile, and it didn't once reach the corners of his eyes.
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Yisheng came up the slope from the 9th. He wore his chef's whites, pressed and immaculate and bleached to a blinding glare in the low light, and around his waist he had buckled a wide leather belt with eleven slim sheaths, each holding the handle of a different knife. A long, thin slicer. A curved carving blade. A row of skewers no thicker than knitting needles. A boning knife, a cleaver, a paring knife with an edge like the memory of a paper cut. Under his other arm, he carried a bottle of wine and two glasses, held carefully.
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They both stopped at the edge of the ruin.
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It had been a week since the wall came down, and the ground had not forgiven it. The gap was a long, jagged canyon of rubble, slabs the size of houses heaved up at drunken angles, the rebar bristling from them in thick, rusted clumps like a giant's hair. In places the dust had been swept away and there were dark stains beneath. Along its edges ran a fence of yellow caution tape, snapping in the wind. Cranes stood at either end, dead and dark, waiting for a reconstruction that had not yet been funded.
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The Lungs were there. A dozen of them, in their respirator masks and gray coats, scattered along the tape in twos and threes, hands on their canisters, faces unreadable behind the glass. They had been told to expect the Stomach's chef. They had, in the last few hours, been told a few more things, and the word had moved along their line in a dry, papery whisper: that the chef had let it be known, quietly, through channels, that the site was his until dawn. That anyone who interfered would be welcome to see, personally, what he had been working on lately.
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Nobody had interfered. A Lungs captain, an older man with a gray beard stuffed into his mask, had watched them both arrive and very carefully looked at the sky.
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And beyond them, on both sides of the fallen wall, as far as the eye could see along the slopes of the 8th and the 9th, stood the people.
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They hadn't been invited. They had come anyway, the way people come to the edge of a fire, in ones and twos at first and then in hundreds. Refugees in blankets. Shopkeepers from the 8th with their aprons still on. Old women with candles. Children on their fathers' shoulders. They stood at a careful, silent distance, packed shoulder to shoulder along both rims of the ruin, and watched the two men walk into the middle of the place where their families had died.
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Bethuel felt them like a weight on his back.
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They met in the center, on a long, flat slab of concrete that had once been part of the wall's crown, its top lined with a faded mural of children holding hands. Yisheng set the wine on the stone. He unstoppered it, slowly, and poured two glasses, the red catching the last of the light like a slow, dark flame.
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"I did say I'd bring the wine," he said.
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Bethuel looked at the glass. "The letter wasn't mine."
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"I know."
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"My father wrote it. I begged him not to send it. I'm sorry."
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"I know that as well." Yisheng held out a glass. "I spent a moment with it, the morning it arrived. I do not think you would have written that sentence for any price. 'Let the dead be our audience.' It has the wrong seasoning, if you'll forgive a cook's vocabulary." A faint smile. "I came anyway. I wanted to meet the man who would never have said it."
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Bethuel took the glass. It was an old vintage, from before the Season of Folly, dark and almost bitter on his tongue, and tasted of something he had never known he was missing. He drank it all.
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"It's very good."
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"It ought to be. It's older than both of us." Yisheng drank his own, set the glass down on the stone, and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Now. I believe I ought to tell you where we stand, before we begin, since I'd rather not have it said I took advantage."
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"Where we stand."
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"I passed you at four o'clock this morning." He held up his left hand, palm outward, and the light that poured from it turned the falling dusk to gold. Three zeroes, and a three. "Three hundred. You have two hundred and forty-seven, I believe. The rule is clear. The highest Resonance at dawn will be the Overseer. And a man who kills another player takes half of what he holds."
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Bethuel stared at the number.
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"Half of three hundred," he said slowly, "is a hundred and fifty."
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"And a hundred and fifty added to two hundred and forty-seven is three hundred and ninety-seven." Yisheng lowered his hand. "So you understand your position. You must kill me. I need only see the sun."
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The wind moved through the wreckage. Somewhere on the far slope, a child had started to cry, and someone had begun, gently, to hush it.
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"I didn't want it to come to this," Bethuel said. His voice was not the voice of the fool on Cobbleworth Row. It was low and level and older than his face. "I want you to know that. I never wanted anything like this. But I know this is the only way the game will end."
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Yisheng laughed.
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It was a delighted, surprisingly gentle laugh, and it went on for a moment longer than it should have. "Oh, you are a dear man. You truly are." He set a hand on his belt. The knives whispered in their sheaths. "Are you ready to begin?"
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Bethuel lifted Lady Macbeth off his shoulder with one hand, let the great steel head rest against the stone, and nodded.
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Yisheng moved first.
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He didn't rush. That was the first thing Bethuel noticed, and the thing that frightened him. A man like Ruruel came at you like a train. A man like Duffuel came like a grudge. Yisheng Wu simply began to walk, hands loose, humming a low, tuneless snatch of something slow, and somewhere in the middle of the third bar he was three feet away, and the knife was already gone from his belt.
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Bethuel swung.
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It was a huge, honest, terrible arc, the whole two hundred pounds of Lady Macbeth coming around from the left in a long whistling curve that could have taken the front off a house. The air shrieked. The slab under his boots shuddered. Yisheng wasn't there. He had stepped inside the arc, precisely, unhurriedly, the way a man steps around a puddle, and something cool touched the inside of Bethuel's right forearm, and drew a thin line, and was gone.
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"You swing like you're apologizing," Yisheng said, somewhere behind him.
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"I am apologizing!"
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Bethuel turned, and the hammer came with him. It struck the edge of the slab in a spray of gravel and sparks, and a chunk of concrete the size of a wheelbarrow lifted off and tumbled end over end toward a startled Lungs officer, who dropped flat. A gasp went up along the rims. Yisheng was already on the far side of the crater, and there was blood on the tip of his knife, and it was Bethuel's.
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He looked at his arm. A long, shallow, perfect cut ran from wrist to elbow, hair-fine, so clean it didn't hurt. It welled slowly. It didn't stop.
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He's not trying to kill me, Bethuel thought, with a cold and distant clarity. He's not trying to hurt me. He's trying to make me stop.
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"Slicing," Yisheng said, holding up the thin, long blade, bright and cruel in the light, "is an act of patience. A poor cook cuts through a thing. A good cook cuts along it." He flicked his wrist, and the blood on the steel whirled away in a ragged red arc. "Time is an ingredient. I have nothing but time."
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Bethuel didn't answer. He set his feet, dragged the hammer out of the rubble, and charged.
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It went on like that for a while. He would swing, and the hammer would miss, and something small and cold would kiss his skin. Forearm. Calf. The outside of the thigh, where the cloth of his good trousers parted without a sound. Each cut a hair's breadth deep, each one perfect, each one placed with the flat, terrible precision of a butcher who knows exactly where a joint will give. The blood ran down his wrists and into his palms and made the leather haft slick. The crowd on the slopes had gone dead silent. Somewhere, very far away, he thought he could hear a bell.
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He caught the first opening he'd seen in ten minutes and took it. Yisheng had stepped in for the fourth cut, the long one, and Bethuel dropped the hammer and drove his open left hand straight at the man's chest.
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It landed. He felt the warmth of it go out of his palm the way it always did, the great bright, helpless rush of joy that had flattened Xi Wanrou on the floor of his father's hall and sent her weeping onto her knees. He poured it all in. Everything he had. Every warm loaf of bread, every old man at a doorway, every child laughing on a curb.
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Yisheng smiled.
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"How kind," he said. He looked down at the hand on his chest. "But you can't pour water into a cup that's already full."
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Bethuel stared.
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"I finished my work at four o'clock this morning. I have not stopped smiling since." Yisheng's eyes were very dark and very bright, and they didn't blink. "There's simply no room left in me. I'm so terribly happy, Mr. Findlaech. You couldn't possibly make me happier if you tried."
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The knife came up from below.
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Bethuel threw himself backward, and it split his coat from hip to breastbone, leaving a line of burning cold across his ribs. He hit the stone, rolled, and came up on one knee with the hammer clutched across his chest. Blood was running freely down his side now. He was panting.
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"Then I'm just a man with a very large hammer," he said.
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"A very large, very slow hammer," Yisheng agreed.
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They moved into the ruin as the light died.
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It was Bethuel's idea, if you could call it that. He couldn't reach the man across open ground. In the open, Yisheng was a fish in a stream. But the wall was a maze of fallen slabs and jagged holes and forests of rusted rebar, and in a maze, a heavy thing had a certain advantage. He backed into it, step by step, dragging Lady Macbeth over the stones, and Yisheng followed, softly humming, his white coat a pale ghost in the gathering dark.
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The first time Bethuel got a slab between them, he put his shoulder against it and shoved. It was a wall of concrete eight feet across, leaning on a broken pillar, and it went over like a door. It came down on the space where Yisheng had been standing in a roar of dust that rolled out across the slopes. A dozen of the watchers cried out. The Lungs ran.
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Yisheng came out of the dust twenty feet to the left with his hair full of grit and a cheerful expression.
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"Very good!" he called. "That's the spirit!"
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He was running along the top of a fallen beam, light on his feet, and a skewer flashed in his hand and struck sparks from the concrete a hand's breadth from Bethuel's eye. Another. Bethuel knocked the third out of the air with the haft, felt the fourth pass through his sleeve and pin the cloth to the stone, and yanked free with a ripping sound. He grabbed a length of rebar from the rubble, hauled on it, and the whole rusted tangle came away with a shriek. He hurled it. Yisheng vaulted over it, one hand on a jutting spike of iron, and landed in a crouch on the beam above, and looked down at him with an expression of pure, glowing delight.
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"Splendid," he said. "You're better than I'd been told."
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"I had four hours of training a day between the ages of eleven and eighteen." Bethuel spat blood. "My sister's very thorough."
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"I can see that."
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He came down off the beam like a falling leaf.
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The crane was Yisheng's idea, and it was a cruel one.
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There were two of them still standing at the ends of the ruin, dead and dark, great skeletal machines with their booms reaching out over the wreck like the arms of gallows. Yisheng went up the nearest one hand over hand, light as a cat, and by the time Bethuel had followed him as far as the foot of the mast he was already forty feet up and crouched at the joint of the boom, sawing thoughtfully at a steel cable with the paring knife.
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"What are you doing?!" Bethuel shouted.
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"Cooking!"
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The cable parted with a crack like a rifle shot. The boom swung. It came round in a great, slow, terrible arc, a hundred feet of rusted steel, and it didn't swing toward Bethuel. It swung toward the rim of the ruin, toward the packed dark rows of the 8th District's watchers, who had not yet realized what was happening. Somebody screamed. A Lungs captain bawled an order that no one heard.
⠀
Bethuel didn't think. He had never once in his life thought, in the moment that mattered. He ran.
⠀
He hit the boom's path a second before the boom did, planted both feet on the stone, and swung Lady Macbeth up over his head with both hands as if he were trying to catch the sky. The tip of the boom met the hammer's face with a sound like the end of a world. The whole ruin shook. Bethuel's knees went. His spine drove down into his hips and a rib went somewhere in his side with a small, private crack. But the boom stopped. It hung, shuddering, three feet above the nearest row of terrified faces, and then, groaning, it slid off the steel and crashed down into the rubble on the wrong side of the tape, and lay there.
⠀
Silence.
⠀
Bethuel stayed where he was, bent double, gasping, his arms trembling under the weight of the hammer. He could taste blood.
⠀
"Oh, you dear, dreadful man," said Yisheng.
⠀
He was standing on top of the fallen boom, fifteen feet away, brushing rust off his sleeves with an air of enormous satisfaction.
⠀
"You nearly killed the audience," he said.
⠀
"I wasn't aiming at them!"
⠀
"I know. I was." He tipped his head. "I wanted to see what you would do. I have been curious, all night, whether you were a man who would flinch from the crowd or a man who would throw himself in front of it." His smile deepened. "That, Mr. Findlaech, is precisely why you are going to lose."
⠀
Bethuel straightened, slowly. The rib grated. He wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his wrist.
⠀
"I'd rather lose that way," he said, "than win the other."
⠀
"Yes," said Yisheng. "I was afraid you'd say that."
⠀
He stepped down off the boom, and the knife came out again.
⠀
They fought through the first hours of the night among the broken teeth of the wall, and the crowd on the slopes lit a fire, and then another, and then a hundred small ones, candle by candle, until the ruin was ringed with slowly moving light. Nobody spoke. Nobody, in that great, silent, shining ring, so much as coughed.
⠀
The cuts mounted. There were thirty of them now, forty, Bethuel had stopped counting. He wore them like a coat. They'd gone deeper than the first ones, the little ones, and were less careful; there was a wide, wet gash across his left shoulder that made the arm swing wrong, and another across his thigh, and each step left a small dark print on the stone. His breath came short. His vision had begun to narrow at the edges, going gray and soft and slow.
⠀
He was not the only one bleeding, though he had to look to see it. There was a long, ragged tear in Yisheng's whites, and a smear of dust and blood across his cheek. The man had been nicked twice by flying stone. But Bethuel could not get close enough to do anything that mattered.
⠀
And then, in the dark, at the bottom of a long trench of rubble, he did.
⠀
Yisheng had pressed too far. He had come in low along a fallen girder for the long cut, the one to the back of the knee, and Bethuel, more by luck than skill, had spun with the hammer trailing and swung it backhanded, without aiming, with everything he had left.
⠀
It took Yisheng full on the left forearm.
⠀
The sound was like a branch breaking. Yisheng went sideways, off the girder, and rolled through the dust, and came up on his knees with his left arm hanging from the elbow in a shape that arms are not supposed to make.
⠀
He looked at it.
⠀
Then, to the horror of every person on both slopes of the ruin, he began to laugh.
⠀
"Oh," he breathed. "Oh, that's wonderful. Do you know, I haven't felt anything like that in years." He turned the ruined limb over in his good hand, wonderingly, like a chef examining a strange vegetable. "It's the smallest bone. Do you know? It's all in the smallest bone. It makes it so terribly interesting."
⠀
Bethuel stood over him, swaying. The hammer trembled in his grip.
⠀
Yisheng rose slowly. He drew a knife with his right hand, a short, heavy one, a cleaver, and settled it in his palm, and the crooked, gleeful smile did not move an inch from his face.
⠀
"Again?" he said.
⠀
They stopped, in the end, because they had to.
⠀
Somewhere past midnight, when the fires on the slopes had burned down to embers and the moon stood high and hard above the broken teeth of the wall, both men sagged against the same fallen slab, back to back, gasping. They were three feet apart. It was the first time either of them had allowed the other so near without something in his hand.
⠀
For a long while, they said nothing.
⠀
"You're a dreadful fighter," Yisheng said, at last.
⠀
"Thank you."
⠀
"It wasn't a compliment. You're all instinct. You throw the whole of yourself into everything. It's very inefficient, and it's very nearly effective." He had wrapped his ruined arm in a strip of his own coat. His voice was thin, but perfectly steady. "May I ask you something?"
⠀
"Please."
⠀
"You could have killed me twice. Once at the beginning, with that first swing. I saw your face. Your arm was already going down toward my shoulder, and you pulled it. And once again, just now, when I fell. Your hammer was above my head."
⠀
Bethuel said nothing. He was looking at the dark.
⠀
"You've been aiming at my arms and legs," Yisheng said. "The whole night. You've never once tried for my head."
⠀
"I can't."
⠀
"You must, if you are to win."
⠀
"I know." Bethuel let his head fall back against the stone. "I wrote a sonnet for you, you know. The night the letter went out. I was lying on the floor of my father's study. It seemed the only thing left that was mine."
⠀
Yisheng was quiet. "May I hear it?"
⠀
"It doesn't finish. I never found the ending."
⠀
"Then I shall look forward to it."
⠀
The silence that followed was strange. It wasn't warm. It wasn't peaceful. But there was something in it, the way there is something in the pause between two people who have said the true thing and can't yet think what to say next.
⠀
"I carved a rose," Yisheng said suddenly, "for a man who died in the 5th District a fortnight ago. A man I never really knew. I left it on the ground where he used to sit. It seemed the only thing I had."
⠀
"That was kind."
⠀
"It was not. It was selfish. It was for me." He drew a long breath. "I've been thinking, all night, that you and I are much the same. Two men with a talent for making people feel a thing, and no idea what to do with the parts of ourselves that don't."
⠀
"Perhaps," said Bethuel. "But I would never make a rose from a person."
⠀
Yisheng laughed. It was a soft, real, entirely sincere laugh, a little sad.
⠀
"No," he said. "You wouldn't."
⠀
The moon slid across the sky. Somewhere along the slope, the small, quiet sound of someone praying rose and fell, rose and fell, like a tide.
⠀
Then Yisheng pushed himself to his feet, gently, with his good hand, and drew the long knife from his belt.
⠀
"Shall we?"
⠀
Bethuel took up the hammer.
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
The middle of the night was the worst.
⠀
There was very little grace in it. They had both begun to fail, and it showed. Bethuel's swings had gone slow and heavy and wide, and Yisheng, with one arm dead and his cleaver clutched in the other, had stopped bothering to dance. He fought with a plain, flat, murderous economy. Cut, and step, and cut, and step. He had begun to go for the deep places now, the long muscles, the tendons at the back of the knee, the crook of the arm where the artery ran close under the skin. The great slow bloom of red spread across Bethuel's trousers and would not stop.
⠀
He couldn't feel his left hand. He couldn't feel his feet.
⠀
And he could still swing.
⠀
That was the strange thing, the thing that Yisheng, in his careful arithmetic, hadn't accounted for. The man was dying on his feet, and yet the hammer came around and around and around like a great slow pendulum, and every fifth swing or sixth, when Yisheng was too tired or too proud to move, it found him.
⠀
At two o'clock, Yisheng changed his grip.
⠀
The skewers came out. All five of them, fanned between his fingers like a gambler's hand, long and thin and bright, and he flicked his wrist and Bethuel saw the flash before he felt anything. Then his right hand was fixed to the leather of the haft by a needle of steel, straight through the meat of the palm between two bones, neat as a butterfly on a card. He didn't scream. He looked at it with faint, distant interest.
⠀
"Piercing," Yisheng said gently, "is for when a thing wants to leave."
⠀
He was already coming in. The skewers were gone; in their place was the curved carving blade, the one with the belly like a hunter's moon, and Bethuel understood exactly what it was for, a moment before it went to work. A carving knife is not for cutting through. It is for separating. It is for taking the meat off the bone at the joint, clean and quick and sweet, the way you take a leg from a bird.
⠀
He heard a voice in his head, then. He hadn't heard it in ten years.
⠀
Take the first cut, Bethuel. Spend it well.
⠀
Ruruel. Eleven years old, in the cellar, with a wooden sword in her fists and her jaw set like a door. Every one of them had heard it, a hundred times. A cut is a currency. You don't fight it. You don't fear it. You pay it, deliberately, in exchange for the one thing you actually need, and if you are clever, it is a bargain.
⠀
He didn't move.
⠀
The blade came in along the back of his thigh, low and slow and deep, and parted the great hamstring like a string of wet twine. It hurt more than anything had. His leg gave, and he let it, and the fall carried him forward and down, and the hammer, pinned to his hand, came with him, swinging low along the ground in the biggest, ugliest, least dignified arc of the entire night.
⠀
It caught Yisheng across the right knee.
⠀
There was no scream. Yisheng simply folded, all at once, like a paper doll, and went down on the stones with his leg bent under him in a way that made half the watchers look away. For a long moment he did not move. Then his shoulders began to shake, and Bethuel realized, with a kind of dull horror, that the man was laughing again.
⠀
"Marvelous," Yisheng gasped. "Oh, marvelous."
⠀
He got up.
⠀
He did it on one leg, with the good hand braced against a jut of rebar, one shaking inch at a time, and stood swaying with his ruined arm hanging and his broken knee held clear of the ground. There was blood on his face. There was blood all down his whites, and none of it made a difference to the smile.
⠀
The cleaver came up.
⠀
"You have not," he said, "been listening. I told you. I have nothing but time."
⠀
He came at Bethuel on one leg.
⠀
It should have been impossible. It wasn't. He hopped, and hurled himself in a low, ugly lunge, and the cleaver took Bethuel across the outside of the thigh, a deep bright bite that turned his leg to water. Bethuel went down on one knee. The hammer dropped out of his hand and rang against the stone.
⠀
Yisheng stood over him.
⠀
The cleaver rose, and Bethuel, looking up, saw it against the moon.
⠀
And he saw the throat.
⠀
It was right there. It was three feet away, bare and white above the torn collar of a chef's coat, the pulse jumping in it, with nothing at all between it and the fist that Bethuel could have lifted. Lady Macbeth lay at his knee, and both his hands, ruined and slippery with blood, still remembered the haft. He had the strength, he thought, for one more swing.
⠀
He had all the reasons. He had a hundred and fifty points. He had his brothers and sisters, and a promise Duffuel had made, and a man in a study with a candle and a smile. He had every single reason in the world to do it. He looked at Yisheng Wu, one-legged and blood-soaked and smiling, and thought of a rose on the ground in the 5th District, and a bottle of wine older than either of them, and he could not.
⠀
He swung at the shoulder.
⠀
The great hammer struck the man's left shoulder, and Yisheng's whole frame lurched sideways. Something in it came apart with a wet crunch. The cleaver flew out of his hand. He staggered back, choking, both arms dead, and dropped to one knee among the rubble.
⠀
"You had it," he said, when he could speak. He was staring at Bethuel with something near to awe. "You had my throat."
⠀
"I know," Bethuel said.
⠀
"Why?"
⠀
"I'd rather lose," said Bethuel, "than win it that way."
⠀
Yisheng closed his eyes. When he opened them again, something in them had gone very old and very tired. He reached his right hand, the one that still worked, to his belt.
⠀
"That," he said, "is going to be very expensive."
⠀
————————————————
⠀
At four in the morning, they stopped again, because neither of them could do anything else.
⠀
Yisheng lowered himself onto a broken slab with his back against a fragment of the old mural, one leg stuck out in front of him at a wrong angle and the dead arm cradled in his lap. Bethuel sat against the opposite slab, six feet away, with Lady Macbeth across his knees and the skewer he had drawn out of his palm with his teeth lying at his side in a small dark puddle. Neither of them said anything for a while. The candles on the slopes had burned low. The crowd had not gone. It had simply gone quiet in the way a very large animal goes quiet, in the dark, breathing.
⠀
Yisheng reached into his coat with his good hand and took out a peach.
⠀
It was a little bruised. He held it against his thigh, took out the paring knife, and began, one-handed, in the moonlight, to peel it. The skin came away in a single unbroken ribbon, curling down over his wrist, and Bethuel watched, with the peculiar, floating attention of a man who has lost a great deal of blood, and thought it the most beautiful thing he had seen all night.
⠀
"It's a nervous habit," Yisheng said.
⠀
"You're nervous?"
⠀
"I have been terrified since the wall came down, Mr. Findlaech. It isn't a thing I'm accustomed to. I find I rather dislike it." He split the peach with his thumb, and held out half. "Please."
⠀
Bethuel took it. It was sweeter than anything he'd ever eaten, and he ate every bite, juice running down his wrist and mixing with the blood.
⠀
"What will you do," he said, "if you win?"
⠀
"I haven't the faintest idea." Yisheng was smiling at the peach stone, turning it over in his fingers. "I had a very tidy plan, and it ended on the word 'win.' I suspect that was the flaw in it." He glanced up. "And you? If you did?"
⠀
"Make them forget."
⠀
"Your brothers and sisters."
⠀
"All of it. Every last thing he ever did to us." Bethuel looked at his hands. "I don't know if a wish can reach back that far. But it's the only one I've got."
⠀
"That is a very great deal to ask of a wish."
⠀
"It's a very great deal of thing to forget."
⠀
Yisheng was quiet. Then, with the ribbon of peach skin still curled on his knee, he began to fold it. One-handed, awkwardly, his fingers sliding, and it took him three tries. When he had finished, he set it down on the stone between them.
⠀
It was a small, crooked, slightly lopsided bird, with a long neck and folded wings.
⠀
"For luck," he said.
⠀
"Whose?"
⠀
"I haven't decided." He pushed himself to his feet on the good leg, with a grunt, and reached for his belt. "Shall we finish this, before the sun gets ideas?"
⠀
Bethuel got the hammer under him, and rose.
⠀
————————————————
⠀
The last hour was not a fight so much as a slow, mutual disassembly.
⠀
Yisheng cut, one-handed, patient, and every cut was a little slower than the one before it. Bethuel swung, and every swing was a little wider. Somewhere in the gray hours before dawn, one of those swings, blind and enormous, drove into the slab beside Yisheng's head and turned it to gravel, and for the first time all night the man flinched, his whole body jerking sideways, his black eyes wide, a stripe of stone dust across his lips. The crowd made a sound that was not quite a cheer. Yisheng touched his cheek, looked at the blood on his fingers, and laughed, shakily, and stepped in and opened the back of Bethuel's other leg from knee to heel.
⠀
That was the one that ended it, though neither of them knew it yet.
⠀
It was five o'clock, or something near it, when the last of Bethuel's strength went out of him.
⠀
It didn't feel like falling. That was what surprised him. It felt like something had loosened, all at once, some thread in the very center of him that had been holding taut through the night. The blood had stopped hurting a long time ago. The cold had begun in his fingers, and moved up, quiet and patient, and taken his forearms, and his elbows, and the great slow weight of his shoulders.
⠀
He was on his knees. He didn't remember kneeling. He was in the dust of the wall's broken crown, with Lady Macbeth's haft in both hands, and he was trying, with every last scrap of will he had, to lift her.
⠀
She wouldn't come.
⠀
She had been so light. She had been so light in the cellar, in the afternoon, a feather on the end of his wrist. Now she was two hundred pounds of dead iron, and his arms shook, and the steel head rose an inch from the ground, and sank.
⠀
"Come on, old girl," he whispered. "Come on."
⠀
Yisheng stood in front of him.
⠀
He had lost a great deal since the night began. One arm hung from the shoulder like a rope. One leg would not bear weight, and he stood on the other with the crooked, listing grace of a man who has learned to be a tripod. His whites were no longer white. His face was a mask of dust and dried blood, and his hair hung in wet black ropes around it, and the dawn, the very first faint gray thread of it, lay along the ridge of the eastern slope behind his shoulder, and cast the whole front of him into shadow.
⠀
Only the eyes showed. Deep black. Bottomless. No white to them, in that light, nothing at all.
⠀
He smiled.
⠀
It was the most terrible smile Bethuel had ever seen, wide and wet and slow, a smile of enormous, shining, luminous cruelty, the smile of something that had come up out of the deep places of the earth with its mouth already open. It spread across the black mask of his face like a wound opening. There was nothing human in it. There was only appetite.
⠀
He is a monster, Bethuel thought, quite calmly. He is a lovely, gentle, lonely monster, and I like him very much.
⠀
Yisheng bent. He drew a slim knife from his belt with his right hand, the long one, the thin one, and set the point of it to the hollow of Bethuel's throat.
⠀
"Well," he said, softly. "Here we are."
⠀
The point pricked. A single bright bead of blood ran down into Bethuel's collar.
⠀
"You never finished your sonnet," Bethuel murmured. His head had begun to swim. "Yours. The one I said I'd write."
⠀
"You said it didn't finish."
⠀
"It doesn't. I only found the last line just now." He was smiling, he realized. He couldn't seem to stop. "It's a bad one. It doesn't rhyme."
⠀
"Let me hear it."
⠀
"'Let dawn decide what neither of us would,'" Bethuel said, in a small, cracked whisper, "'and let the sky be kinder than we've been.'"
⠀
For a long time Yisheng didn't speak.
⠀
The point of the knife trembled, very slightly, in the hollow of his throat.
⠀
"It doesn't rhyme," he said.
⠀
"No. I never found the rhyme."
⠀
The wind moved through the broken wall. Along both slopes, ten thousand pale faces stood turned to the east, motionless, holding their breath. The candles guttered. The gray thread on the horizon widened and paled to rose.
⠀
Yisheng lowered his hand.
⠀
The knife slid out of his fingers and rang against the stone.
⠀
"You fought well," he said. His voice had lost the smile entirely. It had gone almost gentle. "Better than I was told. I want you to know that, before the sun comes up." He tipped his head back and looked at the sky. "But it doesn't matter anymore."
⠀
The light came over the ridge.
⠀
It didn't come the way a normal dawn comes. It came all at once, a great gold flood pouring down the slopes of the 8th and the 9th and spilling into the crater of the broken wall, and every face in the crowd went bright with it. Bethuel felt it on his skin like warm water. He felt his left hand begin to tingle.
⠀
He looked down. The rainbow glow in his palm had begun to come apart.
⠀
It was breaking into golden particles, very fine, no larger than grains of pollen, and they lifted off his skin in a slow, bright drift and floated up into the air. Beside him, Yisheng's palm was doing the same, a great glittering plume of it streaming from his hand. Up they went, hundreds and thousands of them, and then tens of thousands, pouring up out of the ruin of the wall in a river of shimmering gold, up over the heads of the crowd, up into the pale pink sky, where they gathered and swirled and slowly, slowly, took shape.
⠀
The first one burst with a soft thump, like a great heart beating.
⠀
Red. Then blue, then green, then a vast blossoming wheel of violet and white. The second went, and the third. Then they were bursting everywhere, all across the sky above Breach-9, hundreds of them, blooming and falling in long, glittering trails, filling the whole heaven with light and color and slow, thunderous sound, and beneath them, on both slopes of the fallen wall, ten thousand people who had not looked up in a week lifted their faces to the sky and gasped.
⠀
Somewhere in the crowd, a child began to laugh.
⠀
It spread. It ran down the slopes like a fire, a low, cracked, astonished murmur of laughter, of weeping, of women calling out their children's names, and for the first time in a week the air above the ruins of Breach-9 was not full of smoke.
⠀
"HA!" Yisheng shrieked. "HAHAHAHAHA!"
⠀
He had flung both arms wide, the broken one and the whole one alike, and he stood in the middle of the shining ruin with his head thrown back and the fireworks reflected in his black eyes. He was laughing. He was laughing so hard he was choking on it, howling, the sound cracking and skidding and rising into something shrill and wild and unhinged, the laughter of a man who has just been handed the entire world on a plate and has not the smallest idea what to do with his hands. Tears ran down his face. He was no longer standing on one leg. He was not standing at all. His feet had lifted clear of the stone.
⠀
Bethuel, on his knees in the dust, tipped back his head and watched the sky.
⠀
The rest of it was so beautiful. He hadn't known it could be. He thought of the baker's wife, and Old Henrik, and the child on the curb, and a small yellow flower still crushed in the buttonhole of a ruined coat, and he smiled, wholly and finally, without any trouble at all, and let his eyes fall shut.
⠀
Yisheng's form had begun to glow.
⠀
It came up from the inside, like a lamp being turned up in a dark room. His bloodied whites went bright, then brighter, then gold, and the glow spread along his arms and his hair and the black and ruined line of his face until he stood at the center of the wall as a single, blazing, burnished figure, more light than man. His laughter went on. It had lost its edges. It rose and thinned and rang out across the ruin like a struck bell.
⠀
He rose.
⠀
Slowly. Gently. His feet left the stone, and he floated up through the drifting gold, up past the crowd, past the broken teeth of the wall, past the cranes, up into the dawn. The fireworks bloomed around him. He grew smaller. He grew brighter. For a moment he was a sun in the middle of the sky, and then he was a star, and then, quite simply, there was nothing there at all.
⠀
Yisheng Wu was now the Overseer of Euphoria.
⠀
⠀
Viscoso Coalition Hospital, 4th District — Some Days Later
⠀
The first thing Bethuel saw was a white ceiling tile with a small brown water stain shaped, if you squinted, rather like a duck.
⠀
He lay and looked at it for some time. He was warm. He was very clean. Something in his arm was itching, and when he turned his head, slowly, to see what, he found a tube taped into the crook of it, and a bag of something clear hanging on a hook. His whole body felt like a house that had been taken down to the studs and put carefully back together.
⠀
"You're awake."
⠀
The voice was level, dry, unhurried. Bethuel turned his head the other way.
⠀
A man sat in the chair beside the bed, with a dark coat folded over his knees and a sheathed sword propped against the wall behind him. Lean, still, unremarkable in every way except the eyes, which were dark and calm and looked as if they'd been watching a long time. Bethuel knew that face. He had seen it once in a dark room in the sewers, beside a ceiling lamp, snapping a pocket watch shut. And once again in a bakery doorway, out of place.
⠀
"You," he said. His voice was a croak. "From the sewer..."
⠀
"Gieffrin Melisanbeque."
⠀
"You told me about Aristio."
⠀
"I did."
⠀
Bethuel let his head fall back on the pillow. It was, he found, an enormous relief to lie there and let the room turn slowly around him. "What happened?"
⠀
"If you're referring to your duel, you lost." No unkindness in it. Gieffrin turned his hat over in his hands. "Wu survived until sunrise. He held the highest Resonance in the Ring, and he became the Overseer of Euphoria. It happened in front of about ten thousand witnesses. You've been out for six days."
⠀
"Where did he go?"
⠀
"You, of all people, should know that I don't know." Gieffrin's mouth twisted slightly. "Nobody ever has. They go up, and that's all. Nobody has ever come down and said what it was like."
⠀
The ceiling tile was still shaped like a duck.
⠀
"So we can only hope he makes good decisions with what he's got," Gieffrin said quietly. "He is, by my own observation, not an unkind man. He isn't a kind one either. I suppose that's the best we can ask."
⠀
Bethuel was quiet for a long time. Then, very slowly, he said, "So many people died."
⠀
Gieffrin didn't answer.
⠀
"It was a game. That's all it was. Somebody's idea of a game..." He stopped. His eyes had begun to sting. "I juggled bread. I recited poetry. I thought I was helping. And all the while, behind every one of us, there were—"
⠀
"When the points went up," Gieffrin said, "something happened."
⠀
Bethuel turned his head.
⠀
"When the numbers came off of our hands and went up into the sky. I was standing on the eastern slope with about ten thousand others, watching the sky. Something else happened that morning, a long way from that wall." He was looking at the window now. "I only heard about it afterward. It's better if I... let you see."
⠀
The room went dim, and the window filled with light.
⠀
⠀
5th District — The Ashwell Underpass, Dawn
⠀
The fireworks came down over the Ring like slow, glittering rain.
⠀
They were still bursting high above the rooftops, fat gold shells of them, and the sparks drifted down through the gray morning and settled on the awnings and the laundry lines and the cracked concrete of the Ashwell Underpass, thin as pollen, bright as lost coins. A hawker stopped his cart in the middle of the street and stared up with his mouth open. A woman leaned out of a window.
⠀
In the mouth of the underpass, beside an overturned crate, the glitter had begun to gather.
⠀
It came in a slow drift, from every direction at once, from the sky and from the rooftops, out of the air itself, and collected in the shape of something sitting on the crate. A pair of boots. A worn coat. A man's long, slouching back, and a head bowed forward, and a cigarette hanging, unlit, from a pair of fingers. The gold swirled, and thickened, and took color, and took weight, and a single grain of it fell from a chin and struck the concrete with a tiny bright chime.
⠀
Aristio Newbeck opened his eyes.
⠀
He looked around. He looked at the crate under him, and the cracked concrete, and the fading chalk circle scratched into the ground. He looked at his own two hands, turning them over in the gray light, and flexed them, one finger at a time. They were steady. There was no tremor in them anywhere.
⠀
"Well," he said, slowly, in a voice rough with disuse. "That's a hell of a thing."
⠀
He looked up.
⠀
The sky was on fire. Colors he didn't have names for went blooming across it in great slow wheels, red and blue and green and gold, lighting the whole low gray ceiling of the underpass from above. The sound of them thudded in his chest. He watched one burst directly overhead in a great shining chrysanthemum and come raining down in long slow strands, and he found that his mouth had fallen a little open, like a boy's.
⠀
"Huh," said Aristio.
⠀
He stood. It was strange. It took no effort at all. He had not stood without effort in what felt like a very long time. He turned, still looking at the sky, and his eye fell on the ground beside the crate.
⠀
There was a rose there. A carved one, an apple's worth of it, folded and petaled and perfect. It had once gone brown at the edges, curled and dry. Now it lay fresh and pale in the morning light, every petal whole. Under it, weighted with a chip of concrete, lay a folded piece of paper.
⠀
He knelt and picked it up.
⠀
The sunburst crest of the Vitalität, gold and gaudy. The engraved line of script. Account 5-4417-N. And across the whole face of it, over the figures, in small, careful, clerkly letters, in a hand he'd have known anywhere: CLOSED. — G.M.
⠀
Aristio read it three times.
⠀
Then he sat down on the crate, and put his face in his hand, and laughed. It was a helpless, rusty, disbelieving laugh, and it went on for some time. When he lifted his head, his eyes were wet, and the sky above him was still full of light. He lit the cigarette he had been holding onto, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted in a long time.
⠀
"Well," he said, to the underpass, to the sky, to nobody. "I'll be damned."
⠀
⠀
The light drained out of the window.
⠀
Bethuel lay very still on the hospital pillow, and in the silence, he found that he'd been holding his breath.
⠀
"Everyone who had Apathy Syndrome," Gieffrin said quietly, "...was cured. Everyone who'd died of it came back. Newbeck. The six from the last game. Every name on that list. The disease simply stopped. As if it had never touched them." He smoothed the folded coat on his knees. "I'm told the hospitals in the 5th were quite busy that morning."
⠀
"Then it's—" Bethuel stopped. His throat was thick. "...It's all right?"
⠀
"It's over. That's all I can say."
⠀
Bethuel turned his eyes back to the ceiling and thought about it for a long moment. Then he said, in a careful voice, "And Guy? Bertillon? ...Henrique?"
⠀
Gieffrin didn't answer.
⠀
The silence went on. It was not the quiet of a man who has no answer. Gieffrin's gaze had dropped to his lap, and his hand had settled very lightly on the hilt of the sheathed sword against the chair, and from somewhere inside the scabbard, so faint that Bethuel thought at first it was the drone of the ward's ventilation, came a small, patient, muffled voice, asking, for the thousandth time, what time it was.
⠀
"Fifteen-forty-two," Gieffrin murmured to the sheath. Then, to Bethuel, in the same low even tone: "Nothing could be done for them. They were killed by means that didn't concern the game. It reached what belonged to it. It couldn't reach what didn't."
⠀
Bethuel was quiet. He thought of a highway he'd never seen. He thought of a man in a rose-red tie, whom he'd never met, who had wanted to make a great many people happy but had not known how. He felt the grief of it settle in him, slow, heavy, and entirely unavoidable, and didn't try to argue with it.
⠀
"I'm sorry," he said.
⠀
"So am I."
⠀
He was silent for a while and looked at the duck.
⠀
Something on the bedside table caught his eye. A small canvas sack, sitting in a shallow puddle of its own meltwater, with a strip of torn gray shirt knotted around the neck. It was an ice pack. It had been full once and was almost gone.
⠀
"That was here when I came," Gieffrin said, following his gaze. "I didn't touch it. There wasn't a card."
⠀
Bethuel looked at it for a long time.
⠀
And then, without meaning to, without quite knowing when it had started, he found that he was smiling. It was not the smile he wore on Cobbleworth Row, the easy, practiced one, the one that lived on the surface of his face and cost him something every time. It was smaller than that, and stranger, and it came up from somewhere much deeper. It was warm. It was his own. He couldn't remember when he'd last felt it.
⠀
"You're smiling," said Gieffrin, with faint surprise.
⠀
"I am, aren't I?"
⠀
"May I ask why?"
⠀
Bethuel tipped his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes, and let them stay.
⠀
"I'm just happy," he said, "that the game is over now."
⠀
END OF PART FIVE
⠀
AND THE END... OF THE FLAVOR OF EUPHORIA