Never Knew Another (10 page)

Soon.

***

It was just horrible, Jona.

Sparrow looked over the woman in her crate. “You and him been together long?”

“Ever since I was born,” said Rachel. “He really is my brother. You don’t see the resemblance?”

Sparrow snorted. “No. The boys like him. He’s not like Turco. He’s not mean like them.”

“What was your husband’s name?” said Rachel.

“I don’t talk about the dead,” said Sparrow, scowling.

“Why not? What’s bad about remembering…?”

She shook her head. “Hurts me to talk about it. You see how my boys are growing without him around? You see them, don’t you?” She didn’t linger in her pain. She was numb to it. She was numb to all of it by now. “Can you teach me how to make ice? I could use that. Keep me cool on a hot day.”

“It doesn’t really work like that.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

Sparrow left to bathe in the river. Rachel washed herself as best she could with all her clothes on and a stone to scrape away the mud. It was better when Sparrow wasn’t around.

Rachel closed her eyes, searching the black center of her heart for the woman’s fate. She saw nothing at all. She wondered, in her heart, if this void was a kind of truth, too.

Turco came by every day, and so did Dog, and sometimes they brought someone new. Sparrow asked Rachel if she wanted to make a little extra money for something easy and quick.

Rachel could never do that, even if she needed the money enough, with her scales. Rachel left. She walked the city streets alone, wondering where Djoss was. She searched for him until she got tired of walking. If she had to run, he was nowhere to be found. She didn’t like that.

When she returned, Sparrow was sitting calmly like nothing had happened, staring at the river, a few more coins for her sons. Her boys brought food. Djoss came by with what he had bought with what he had earned.

Days passed slow as mud. Nothing was good. Nothing was beautiful. Rachel slept with her face to the walls of the crate, and both hands pressed up against her jaw. If her tongue spilled out of her mouth as she slept, even this miserable place would be no safe harbor for her and Djoss.

***

I was so glad to get off the streets. You’ve never lived like that. You’ll never understand it unless you do.

The third week, Djoss came back to the crate with a busted eye, and a large bag of oranges. He handed the oranges to Sparrow and her sons and gestured for Rachel to get up. Rachel touched his eye, gently. “What’s this?”

“Turco got me a job bouncing,” Djoss replied. “Already got a place to sleep tonight off the streets. It ain’t much, but it’s indoors. We could take a bath.” He looked over at the other people in the crate and dropped his voice. He had been so happy, and now he was ashamed of their fortune. “Get in out of the rain.”

Rachel looked over at Sparrow, who lay staring at the rotten walls of her crate, pretending not to notice them.

The boys’ faces were already smeared in orange juice. The youngest one had tried to eat the peel. They didn’t listen to a word.

Sparrow didn’t look away from her wall. “So that’s it, then?”

“Thanks,” said Djoss. “I’ll be around sometime.”

Sparrow was silent.

***

Jona, what do you do about the lost ones living in crates and alleys? Do you do anything?

No.

Does the king do anything?

Nothing. Why should we? What would we do if we could?

Down in the alley, past Turco and Dog, Djoss kicked a bucket of rainwater over. “Why do people just wait to die like that?”

Rachel shook her head. “We have to take care of us,” she said, and hugged him. “Come on, and let’s see this room you found. I can’t wait to take a bath.”

He led her to a bakery deep in the Pens District, where men and women walked to work every morning to the abattoirs. Rent was cheap, and the people lived their lives as best they could with closed windows.

To get to their room, Djoss and Rachel had to walk through the store. It smelled better than anything they’d smelled since they got to the Pens.

Djoss waved at the baker and pointed his thumb at Rachel. “This is my sister.”

The baker grunted at her. “Rent’s due again next week,” he said. “I leave stale bread for the tenants. First come, first gets it. Put some water on it, and it softens right up. Tastes bad, but costs you nothing.” He handed them the first of their bread, wrapped in old paper. It was heavy as a stone.

In the room, Djoss bathed while Rachel stood facing the wall, waiting her turn. There wasn’t a chair to sit in and she was tired of sitting on the ground. Using a clump of soap he had stolen, Djoss washed his only clothes as best he could in the bathwater. He put them on wet and left the apartment so Rachel could take her bath in peace.

Rachel bathed in the same, cold, dirty water, running her hands over the scales down her stomach and legs. She barely needed soap to keep clean. She just needed to shed the dead scales and burn them every now and then. When she was done, she poured the water out in a corner of the room, careful to keep it from splashing. The mud floor had no foundation, and the bad water melted into the black as she sat naked on the countertop, waiting for the poison to seep into the ground. Her Senta clothes stretched over the space beside her to dry a while. She couldn’t risk using a koan to dry them with fire, tainted with her stain as they were.

She let her tongue stretch out from her mouth for the first time since the journey on the boat. Her tongue fell down past her chin. Her face tasted like dirty soap. She pulled her tongue back down her throat, where it coiled up like a spring. Some of her earliest memories were of her mother teaching her to talk without revealing herself, her long tongue coiled up in her throat, using just the tip of it to sound out words.

A rainstorm swept the streets outside. She was inside, and her clothes were drying, and she was dry next to them. Djoss was at work, earning money to pay the rent and buy food instead of stealing for once, or working for Turco doing who knew what.

It was a home.

***

What’s it like, changing towns like that all the time?

I’m scared everyday of my life, Jona. Every single day, I’m terrified. It’s like a bad song in the back of my head that’s always playing. I don’t even bathe naked if I can avoid it. I keep a towel or my clothes or something over the tub that’s big enough to cover me if someone walks in.

You’re naked now.

I’ve got a blanket. I’ve got you. What’s it like for you?

I don’t know. I guess I’m not afraid. I don’t look different from other people. I run for it if someone makes me bleed. I try not to let people notice that I can’t sleep. People don’t really notice if you don’t talk about it. They’re too busy sleeping. I guess I’m not afraid.

I wish I knew what that was like.

What what’s like?

To live without fear, Jona. I’m terrified.

You don’t act afraid.

The seed of my life’s flower has landed here. It is my responsibility to bloom. I’m always afraid, but I try to bloom. I live with it, so I get used to it, and I ignore it as much as I can. I just stay careful, and I never let fear rule my life.

You’re scared right now, here with me in a locked room?

I’m terrified, Jona. And I’m happy. Why does everyone talk about only feeling one thing? Nobody ever feels only one thing at a time. I feel lots of things, all at once.

Just because you don’t, that doesn’t mean nobody does. I only feel one thing.

What’s that?

I have to go soon. There’s someone I have to see.

That’s not a feeling.

The feeling is I hate him. I’d kill him if I thought I could.

Don’t kill anyone. Don’t even joke about it.

I can’t kill him. I’ll see you tomorrow.

CHAPTER VI

J
ona looked out the window past his mother’s shoulder. He let his fork linger in mid-air, half a piece of chicken hanging like a wilted crescent moon.

“Are you all right, dear?” She had eaten her small portion already. She always said that she really wasn’t hungry. Jona didn’t fight her about it. “Jona, dear,” she repeated. “Are you all right?”

“Hm?” Jona set his fork down, and glanced away from the window. “Oh, just thinking about tonight.”

“Any big plans?”

He lied. “I was trying to make some in my mind.”

“Well, be careful out there,” she said.

“I will, Ma.” Outside, people were walking like they were going somewhere important.

“You could just stay home and read a book.”

Jona looked back at his mother. “We can’t afford that many candles, Ma.”

She winced. She had spoken from a different time in her life, long lost to her. “Still, you could just stay home,” she said. “There’s always something to do around the house, even in the dark. You could go to the roof. There’s plenty moonlight most nights. Don’t need light to hang laundry.”

Jona shook his head. “Not if it rains.”

“Wear a jacket,” she said, her voice quavering slightly.

“I will, Ma.”

She pointed her finger at him, sternly. “Be home before dawn. I hate going to work not knowing where you are,” she said, “It worries me.”

He laughed. “I might not make it home tonight, Ma. I might go straight to work if I’m near and out for muster.” He stood up and stretched his arms. He hadn’t taken off his uniform since the last time he washed it. The sleeves were spotted with brown blood stains, and the whole thing reeked of sweat and rain.

He would need to change clothes before he left, if only because the smell might give him away from the shadows.

Killing people was easier than shadowing them. He didn’t have to change his clothes when he was killing people, and it was over quicker. He simply found his man, did the job, and went off into the night.

***

Jona stopped below his mother’s window and listened to her breathing in the dark. She didn’t snore when she slept, but her breathing was hard enough to hear outside her open window. She breathed in dyes and the floating remnants of threads all day long with the dressmaker’s. Her lungs were heavy from the work, she had said, but none of her fellows were that bad.

Jona looked up past the eaves of his ancestral manor. It wasn’t particularly impressive these days, but it was larger than any of his fellow guardsmen’s houses. He wondered why his mother never rented out any rooms, like in the house where Salvatore lived. He wondered if it was because of him.

The laundry lines nearby fluttered with clothes. One nice thing about keeping the house empty was that the laundry could dry up on the roof, where no one could see his clothes slowly fraying due to his tainted sweat.

Jona left his mother’s window.

He had a mask, but it was too early for it, and it was too hot until the stones let go of the sun’s heat. Tonight was going to be hot, too. It would only be worse underground.

Good, decent people were still walking in the late twilight. Women kissed men beneath parasols. Horses pulled carriages over cobblestones. All of this had been the Joni Estates, once.

A light drizzle strolled with him. It sounded like polite applause on the brim of Jona’s hat. Rain kept people’s eyes down. That was good. Jona made his way to a sewer grate out beyond his father’s lost lands, where the underground waterways were older than the buildings, and dropped down into the darkness. There were plenty of grates along this line, and he could see well enough to move from one patch of moonlight to another, counting his path between the grates along the walkway beside the flow of putrid water. It had rained most of the day, and the water was high, sometimes splashing under his boots where it rose over the lip of the walkway. Mice, clumped together in the dark, looked like a living carpet scurrying away from Jona’s boots.

Jona hated the sewers.

When he had counted five grates, he turned. He counted out another seven and turned again. The lines broke at the rivers, but there was always a way for city workers to cross the rivers without paying a toll. The sewer lines spit out rowboats left for workmen piled pell-mell just inside the mouth of a grate where it spit into the water.

The sound of the underground drums reverberated from the deep edge of the underground, then faded out as Jona walked on. He had to stop and check the numbers on his map. He miscounted once, and had to retrace his steps until he could hear the drums again. Up out of the sewers in an alley, Jona walked with a crowd of net-weavers to the edges of the decent neighborhoods, where buildings bowed a little and alleys smelled a little better than where Jona was coming from, and the cobblestones emerged like islands from a black sea of mud.

It would have been so much easier if he could have just crossed a bridge, paid a toll, or ridden ferries across. The first night, he hadn’t even bothered changing out of his uniform.

***

“Salvatore,” the man had said. A carpenter with tools in his belt and sawdust all over his sleeves walked Jona into a half-finished room, where he had pulled out instructions from the bottom of a tool box: maps through the sewer lines, places to stand. All of it mapped out, moment-by-moment and late into the night. “This hard working fellow like Salvatore’s gone crazy over a girl. He needs someone to scare him off, but it isn’t as simple as killing a man.”

“How can you map his life out like this? Doesn’t he get sick of doing the same thing every day?”

“Yeah, but…” The carpenter pursed his lips. “He’s… well, he’s not exactly like you, but he is kind of like you. He’s been living a while. Too long, maybe. It’s a mess. Heard we’re sending you on it.”