Silas
I shovethe back door open and the night air hits me like a damp towel. A shiver riots over my skin and I keep moving, walking fast. I feel like I’m made of ten thousand sirens. I feel like my spine has grown thorns and they’re wrenching into my chest with every step. I feel like every person in a ten-block radius is watching me right now and the second I turn my back, they’ll strike.
I walk past the knot of people smoking in the alleyway behind the bar and keep walking until there’s a stretch of brick wall bare enough to lean against, and I do. My heart stutters. I force my fists unclenched and I keep my eyes open because I can’t close them, not now.
Blood trickles over my lips, and I let it. I splay my fingers on the rough wall behind me, digging the tips into the masonry and dragging them until it hurts because I need the pain to anchor me here, now, to the brick and the alley and the orange streetlight above, the dumpster casting a shadow below. The people standing around the door and hopefully thinking I’m just drunk.
It doesn’t take long for people to come outside after me. I don’t know how long because my brain is retreating no matter how I fight it and time is the first thing to go, but they come out of the door and look around and spot me, standing there, and they make concerned noises and hustle over to me while I grit my teeth and pray I don’t do anything I can’t take back.
“My goodness, you’re bleeding,” says the first one. She’s tall and weathered and a little unsteady on her feet. “You okay, honey? That looked like it—”
“Don’t touch me,” I grit out, and her hand stops halfway to my shoulder and feels a million miles away, like I’m watching her on a black-and-white TV underwater.
“You poor thing,” pipes up another voice. “Let’s get you back inside and put some ice on that.”
Another woman, less wobbly. Prickles wash over my body in waves, the sense that the air itself is watching me and waiting to strike. My skin feels nauseous.
“Please,” I say, out of somewhere. “I’m fine.”
“Sweetheart, you’re not fine,” the first woman says, and then her hand is on my shoulder and I scrape my fingertips against the wall, wishing they’d bleed. I need to leave but I’m afraid if I move at all it’ll be violent and I can’t. I can’t. She steps closer. I feel like a fuse, burning low. “Don’t worry, I’m a nurse. We need to—”
“He said don’t touch him, are you fucking deaf?”
Kat’s voice plunges through the air like a knife, serrated with anger, and then there she is, suddenly at the other woman’s side with her wrist in her hand, yanking it from my shoulder. Right there and a million miles away, on some other planet.
“Excuse me,” the woman says. “I’m a medical professional, and this man clearly needs care.”
“He needs you to back up and fuck off and he has made that abundantly clear,” Kat says, the word abundantly loud and slow and pronounced with total, drunk precision. “So how about you abundantly do that?”
“It sounds like you’ve—”
“Shoo!” Kat says. “Go! Begone! Farewell!”
Now she’s pointing dramatically at the door, and even in my state I can see the way the light glints off her glasses, the line of her bare arm, the way her hair settles around her shoulders like a cloak. Kat crackles. She fizzes. The women look at each other and walk back for the door, past the group of smokers now unabashedly staring in my direction.
“LOOK SOMEWHERE ELSE!” Kat shouts, and they all turn away with a shrug.
She doesn’t look any gentler when she swings her attention to me, but she doesn’t come closer, either. Kat examines me. She sways a little. She pushes her glasses up with one knuckle, which makes her sway more.
The kernel of my brain that’s in this alleyway and not far away on the moon notes that Kat is drunk.
“Would it help you to tell me five things you can hear?” she finally asks, and I take my eyes off her. I look at the line of the rooftops, at the light, at the few scattered stars visible above. It doesn’t feel like a question that needs an answer so I don’t.
“Okay,” she says after a minute, and now her voice is less sharp, like it’s been sheathed.
Little by little, the adrenaline filters out of my body, leaving me empty. I stop feeling like a cornered animal, all claws and teeth, but when that sensation drains from me it leaves me hollow.
There’s a noise to my right. It’s Kat. Leaning against the wall. Three feet away, her eyes on me, her expression unreadable.
“Talk to me,” I hear myself say.
“About what?”
“Anything. Just talk. Keep me here.”
There’s a long silence and I think she won’t, and the part of my brain that can think again points out that I asked Kat Nakamura, of all damn people, to talk, and then she clears her throat.
“In the fourteenth year of the reign of the Psychopomp Fargrath, he issued an edict that made it illegal for anyone but the Designate himself to own any metal but tin,” she starts, her eyes far away, her voice… different. “Needless to say, there was unrest.”