Chapter 6: Chapter Six: Ai

The Under-City rushed up to meet me. The support beams that acted as protective measures against the chance of a Sachi explosion were put to the test as the tower, and the screaming beast inside, crumbled.

Another intense blast of heat at my back propelled me forward, out over the Twelve Meeks. Ten towers left. I wasn’t so sure I’d make it to the next one.

Shun’s face filled my head. That terrified look before I fell. The smell of strawberries. Just earlier that night. I struggled to look up and see the tower as the rushing air assaulted my eyes. The crumbling had reached the Under-City, and the tower was coming down fast.

Shun … I wanted to see her again. I didn’t get to be with her, re-experience her for one night, just to be ripped away again.

But permeating everything, even the fear that I’d land down there in the trash on a metal spike, was the scream of the tusked beast, like a siren to Morfran.

A support beam was maybe thirty feet away from me, with quite a lot of ductwork, fans, and vents running alongside it all the way to the bottom. Yellow-peach Sachi gas surrounded me, and the wind howled. My skin stretched across my face like it would rip at a touch.

The ground was one hundred feet below, and I thought of Hinote and his fear of falling into the Sachi. Fear threatened again to grip me and frustrate my nerves, but I got a quick hold on them with an old Chudo trick called the watcher.

“You are a savannah,” Morfran had said in his deep voice. “Your thoughts and feelings are the lion and the gazelle that forever toil. Do not seek to rip them apart. Watch them. And learn.”

Morfran was full of these. I watched the fear, the cortisol spike in my stomach, the wind burning my face, and the force of fire and explosion at my back. It was happening, and I was trying, trying to be somewhere in the back, watching.

Watch them. Watch the thoughts. Don’t get involved. See what happens.

I closed my eyes as a presence pushed through between the watcher and the panic, and I pictured it as a black sun, though I knew its name was Peace.

I opened my eyes to see Meek Pox, all of the pale, yellow, Sachi-lit homes and businesses like fireflies below. It was dark otherwise, ever dark in the Twelve Meeks. The crumbling of the tower not so far from me was a deafening crunch and crash of glass and metal. Occasionally, there was another explosion. And yet, there was quiet. The black sun called Peace.

My suit adjusted, preparing for a last attempt to keep me alive, I supposed. I closed my eyes and let the black sun eat me away.

I hit with a thud—somehow softer than I expected, though—and as the breath violently left my body, everything went red the moment before I lost consciousness and the black sun disappeared.

It will be here soon.

What will?

You’ll see. The Dead God stirs. He calls to you, puppet.

Dead God? What do you mean, puppet?

You’ll see. I’ll help you. We’ve been together for a long time, Judas.

Who are you?

I’m—

A woman stood above me, a beautiful—no, gorgeous woman—with long red hair tucked haphazardly into a black hood. She had ashen-grey skin. Her eyes were slanted, a ruby red color, and they took me in, not in the way that Shun’s swallowed me whole and arrested me, but in a more giving way, but also a more … taking way. She had an almost reptilian nose that only added a mystical kind of beauty, mysterious and full of wonder, to her face. It’s difficult for me to formulate the words in my mind to describe the difference. She was just … ethereal—something I’d never seen before, something …

Fuck, what was I thinking? And why?

She looked frightened, this woman, this—no … this was no human woman. She was Sallis-Faint. No wonder she was so beautiful to me. They are enchanted. I couldn’t believe I was seeing one in person after all of the propaganda following the end of the Great Northern Sachi War twenty years ago. Andalaf Inc. came out of it victorious, claiming the northern lands as their own, and then they launched a strange hunt for any and all Sallis-Faint. And here was one before me, exposed.

She quickly pulled a mask down over her face from under the hood: a member of the Silence.

“You’re Sallis-Faint,” I said. “I thought you were all gone. Or hidden.”

“Shh!” she said, her mask muffling the sound. The mask was white, with a face drawn in black paint. Members of the Silence weren’t supposed to talk, yet here she was shushing me. “Can you move?”

I rolled a bit from side to side and noticed I felt no pain at all. My eyes grew wide.

“I healed you,” she said. “Yes, I’m … what you said I am. But please don’t say it again.”

She looked nervously around. A field of flowers surrounded us, the low light of the Upper-Plateau’s dawn shining down on it. I sat up and looked around, seeing the field went on for thirty feet in every direction. I noticed a dark figure standing just outside of the field. In a suit and tie.

We both stared at him for a moment.

“One of the Jonnys,” I said.

“You know how to use that Sachiblade?” she asked, still looking at the Jonny. “Unless you’re with him—”

“I’m not with him, not anymore,” I said. “Thanks for healing me.”

“What rank are you?”

The Jonny started walking toward us.

“Not in Chudo anymore. I was second to Morfran.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Then you know how to use it. If you can get me home, I’ll give you healing Sachi,” she whispered. I hadn’t had healing Sachi since I was in Chudo, and only very rarely then. I remember her ruby-red eyes and the feeling they gave me. God, what was wrong with me? It had to be because she was Sallis-Faint and enchanted. Still, I felt the need to protect her, like she was something precious. And, well—she was. Andy Andalaf would have traded his left nut for her. Morfran would too, but I didn’t want to admit this to myself: that even through this strange need—almost a compulsion, really—to protect her, a small part of me said, “You could use her. To draw him.”

Also, the healing Sachi would come in handy when Morfran came. Evading or disabling a half-human would be a small price to get my hands on it.

“We need to go before that Jonny sends the video feed to all the other Jonnys through his eye cams,” I said. “For now, let’s let him to tail us.”

“Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm with her exposed hand. She wore no gloves. I turned around and followed, picking my Sachiblade up off the ground three paces away. We ran out of the field full of sunlight and flowers into the cold metal scrap of Meek Pox.

The road was dirt, holes and cracks everywhere, and to either side was the familiar trash of my childhood, metal piled on discarded brick and aluminum, old paneling from the bottom of the Upper-City or the ring around the support beams. There were old cars, copper wires, and I even saw an old, rusted endorphincopter that could have been salvaged if one was adept at fixing such things. Probably Suzume.

I peeked behind us to make sure the Jonny was still following along this path just as we hit a curve.

“Follow me,” I said to her, climbing into some loose trash bordering the left side of the path. We climbed through, and she was quick and coordinated, and I guessed this wasn’t her first time.

The trash was something Andalaf blamed us for as well, saying we could clean it up at any time, but we chose not to.

Hiding in a rust-eaten car, I watched the Jonny round the curve in the road. I took a snort from my bag of Sachi powder, feeling invigorated in spite of the overuse of my body the night before. I didn’t kill the Jonny; he’d done nothing but his job, and I had enough blood on my hands. I pounced on him, driving the pommel of my Sachiblade into his nose, knocking him unconscious.

“That should do it for now,” I said. She was close behind, jumping down out of the trash to meet me. “Any Jonnys following his eye cam trail will come here. They can probably hear us now, so let’s move.” After moving down the road for about five minutes, I asked, “Is there a back way we can take?”

“That’s where I’m taking you. It’s just up ahead,” she said. I always thought the Silence masks were unsettling, but seeing her wearing the white thing and speaking behind it continued to throw me off, and my stomach did a little flip every time she did.

Twenty paces ahead, there was a very old box with chipped glass windows and what looked like an ancient telephone hanging from a wire within. A woman made of mostly metal sat within, some of the organic matter still attached to the artificial pieces of her. Her face was frozen in a smile, and her eyes looked in different directions. The head had been ripped down the middle. The Sallis-Faint walked through this strange box with the metal woman and the old phone, but I stopped, the ringing filling my head once again, my vision darkening around the edges. I looked up to see that the Sallis-Faint had pulled her mask back and was calling to me, though I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I blinked my eyes as a voice said: Judas. Somehow, the ringing stopped along with the blackening of my vision.

“What are you doing? Come on!” she said. I nodded my head and followed her through the box and into the sea of scrap metal, trying not to look at the metal woman with the torn head.

When we were a safe distance from the road, I asked, “Your name?”

“What about it?” she said, not rudely.

“You have one? Unless it is—” I smiled and dropped my head. “Never mind.”

“No, say it. Unless it is—”

“I’m not saying it.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Unless it is a tradition of the Sallis-Faint to refrain from naming their young?”

“Look, I’m sorry. Conditioning and all—”

“We aren’t savages. That I know of, that is. My name is Ai. What’s yours?”

I shook my head. “I’m Ningyo. Or Nin for short.”

“So when you’re short …”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I said, unsure how to react. She bursted out laughing.

“I’m fucking with you!” she said. “I was playing on the whole ‘savage’ narrative that is so popular down here. You should see your face! You wanted to laugh, but you—”

“Alright,” I said, a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth.

“Ok, Nin. Why aren’t you in Chudo anymore? Oo—watch your step there,” Ai said.

I looked down to see that my next step would have taken me down into a thirty-foot drop with many jagged pieces of metal sticking out on the way down. I jumped across the gap onto an old billboard that Ai was standing on. It was an advertisement for some kind of Sachi cooking oil, from back before anyone knew the shit was killing the unventilated Under-City populous. My, how far we’d come.

“Thanks,” I said. She had her mask off, and the ruby-red eyes took me in again. A knowing smile danced across her lips. They were thinner lips than Shun’s. But Shun didn’t smile like that. I liked it. And I didn’t like that I liked it. “I, uh … had a bit of a falling out with Andalaf.”

“Ah!” she says. “I’m a bit of a secret myself, you see, so we’ll probably get along.”

I climbed up a stairway of stereos and speakers to the top of an old oil-powered thing. We were pretty high up in the trash, and I could see the Meek Pox drill tower burning as I turned around.

“Did you fall because of that?” Ai asked, coming to stand next to me.

The ringing almost returned to my ears, but I stopped it before it got out of control.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away from the job I’d just done and the people I’d killed doing it. “You might see me on the endorphinscreen tonight. They got me on camera.”

“I try not to watch my endorphinscreen. I find that it … mucks things up. Plus, it’s much more entertaining out here,” she said, holding her arms out to the trash and spinning.

“Are you fucking with me again?”

She laughed. It was musical, healing laughter. “No, I mean it. It’s beautiful. And if you get really quiet, you can hear the rhythm … of everything.”

I gave her a sideways look. “Really!” she said. “Ok, try. Quiet down. And listen. Close your eyes.”

I hesitated, then obliged, closing my eyes. “Listen for the rhythm of the city, the seething of the vents, the stubbornness of cold metal. The hunger in your belly. The sorrow in your heart. Listen for the children drawing their last breaths and the pumping of poison into their homes. Listen to my voice, here with you, dancing around a throat full of vibrations, to try and show you how I see. Now, I ask you. Is it not heartbreakingly beautiful?”

Asahi filled my mind and I collapsed to my knees, hitting something hard and unyielding, but I didn’t care. The presence of him, swimming within me, seeming to speak to me, to tell me what to do. Stay with her, he seemed to say. I felt the wet coating my eyelashes. How did she do that? Bring that out in me? The last person who could do that was … Asahi. And before that, only Morfran.

I turned away from Ai, wiping my eyes on my leather gloves and opening them.

“What … did you just do?” I turned back to her. I felt … violated and overwhelmed. And well.

“You did that. See what happens when you listen? Anyone can do it,” Ai said.

“No,” I said, pointing a finger and waving it in the air at her. “You did something. What was it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You hear someone?”

Her eyes were too bright for my comfort.

“No,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘hear someone’?”

“You’d know what I meant if you did. I think you did,” Ai said, sporting a grin and nodding her head.

I did know what she meant. And I did hear someone.

Her smile waned, and she looked off into the trash. “I hear them all the time. You must be in touch with them to hear them on your first try,” Ai said. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

It wasn’t my first time—just the only time a stranger had pulled it out of me.

We walked over mounds of metal, hitting a patch of piled wire for a time, our steps springy and light. An entire trailer was down there underneath the wire, seeming to grow the wire like a bulb in spring. I was relieved when we were through that patch, back in the amalgamation of trash, tires, cardboard corners, old vehicles, and traffic signs.

“It’s downhill from here,” Ai said, pulling her mask back down over her face, but not before her eyes met mine once more. I tried, and failed, to remember the scent of strawberries in Shun’s hair.