Splintered Sight (Shattered World Book 3), page 16
She had never felt so helpless in water before. She had never before felt as though water was an enemy. And now she didn’t seem to be able to feel any other way.
She felt, Viv realised, standing very still so that she didn’t cry, as though she might actually have died. As though she wasn’t really alive—as though she might never be alive again in any way that really mattered.
“Viv,” said a voice, pulling her out of the fog of choking memory.
Her vision cleared, and she saw Jasper’s eyes gazing directly into hers, somehow warm and human in a way that probably wasn’t reflective of reality. She blinked, and it seemed to her that she could breathe again.
“It’s not helpful to dwell on memories that aren’t real,” he said.
She wasn’t sure if he swayed forwards, or if the ground moved under her feet, but Viv thought for a moment that Jasper might actually hug her. She put a hand out to steady herself against the wall, and a moment later knew it was ridiculous for her to have thought so.
“Get some sleep,” Jasper said briefly. His hand was already on the knob of his door. “I’ll try to see about making things safer in the Tea House now that we know our Nightmare has a mind and a purpose beyond feeding.”
He vanished abruptly, leaving Viv still trying to hold herself up against the wall and wondering if she would be able to make it back to her room. There was only one way to find out: Viv lurched away from the wall, found that she could still walk, and made her way towards her own door with the gait of a woman at sea.
She put out her hand to open her door, but it opened before she could quite touch it, and the chollima appeared in the gap.
“Is it gone?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to see if the coast is clear for the last ten minutes.”
“Yes,” she said, and cleared her throat although there was no water there to choke her. “Are you going now?”
“I can’t stay,” the chollima said, instead of answering her directly. “If I don’t make it back to Singapore tomorrow, I won’t get paid for the job I’ve been working.”
“I see,” said Viv, rather dryly. She stepped into her room and felt immediately warmer and almost normal, as though it had been waiting for her with the hug that Jasper hadn’t given. She drew in a breath, and could have cried to find that she could breathe properly again. “We’ll see you again in a few nights?”
“Of course,” said the chollima promptly, as though he hadn’t been absent for two weeks, closing the door behind her. Whatever he had seen in the hallway, it hadn’t been enough to worry him. He jerked his head back to the hallway and asked with stunning cheerfulness, “Does that happen often?”
“More often lately,” Viv said. She added, “We’re working to keep SooAh safe.”
“Yes, I saw that,” he said. “You have an interesting technique, but that’s pretty normal around here.”
He crossed the room and sat on the windowsill; behind him, the window was fully open and allowed a smooth flow of cool air to come into the room, though it didn’t disturb Viv’s warmth.
She looked around and saw that Kyma was still asleep on the couch where she’d laid him. SooAh was very nearly asleep on Viv’s bed with her eyes half-shut, though Viv didn’t think she was awake enough to make any sense of what she saw.
The chollima slid a look across at her that was far too calculating for her liking. He still had something he wanted to say.
“You’re in a den of dangerous…men,” he said at last, surprising her. She had expected it to be something about SooAh and her well-being. “And well-connected, I hear. I wouldn’t like to be living under the same roof as one of the previous king’s bastard sons. That’s the sort of thing that gets people killed and houses burned down.”
“Pardon?” Viv said, blankly.
The chollima, affably, continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “But I hear our current king is different that way,” he said, as if congratulating her. “Just as well for you, Miss Fist; they used to kill all the contenders to the throne and everyone around them.”
Then he dropped backwards off the window-ledge, the wind from his fall rippling his hair, and she heard the huge thwack thwack thwack of his massive wings beating the air a moment later, a momentary shadow flickering across the moon to mark his disappearance.
It wasn’t until Viv was tucking the sleeping SooAh properly into bed after closing the window that it occurred to her that if the chollima wouldn’t like to live under the same roof as one of the previous king’s bastard sons for safety reasons, then it was very odd of him to be happy to leave his daughter there—even if she didn’t account for what he must have seen tonight.
That left her with one of two options: either the chollima simply didn’t care as much for his daughter as he pretended, and didn’t know how much he was giving himself away in small things, or he had chosen this method of telling Viv something he thought she should know, for whatever reason.
Since she couldn’t imagine someone as flighty as the chollima going to the pains he had gone to in order to see SooAh not just once, but multiple times, and to engage Viv to see that he could continue to see his daughter on an ongoing basis, Viv came to the only possible conclusion—which was that the chollima had intended to tell her exactly what he had told her.
His reasons, she couldn’t make out. Nor could she decide exactly what it was that he had told her. The words had been clear enough, but what information had he been trying to confer on her?
Was he trying to tell her that Jasper was the bastard son of the previous king? What did that even mean? And if he was any kind of son of the king, wouldn’t Jasper be king right now? She knew that there was another king on the throne, and that king wasn’t Jasper’s father—and yet, it was still something that the chollima had thought he needed to mention.
Parentage, it would seem, was important when it came to Behindkind.
She repeated that thought late the next morning to Luca when she went up to free him from his taped circle and check on his collar before she released him into its sole custody.
Eyeing her through his hair from his lackadaisical seat on the truckle bed, Luca said, “That’s true. Everyone is worried about bloodlines.”
“Then why is everyone sleeping with random human women?” Viv demanded, rather tartly. “Because Behindkind don’t seem to think very highly of them, but there are a lot of half-human children running around in the world Behind, from what I’ve heard!”
“I don’t sleep with random human women,” Luca said, tipping his chin up to display the collar for her to check.
“Yes, but you’re not behindkind,” pointed out Viv, tugging perfunctorily at the collar. Though, to be fair, behindkind males weren’t the only males who took advantage of women.
Luca fairly beamed. “Yes, I’m not!” he said. “I am the humanest human!”
“Now you’re making it sound like you’re not,” said Viv, laughing.
She let the collar read her fingerprint and heartbeat before she removed her hand from the taped circle, stepping back away from it. Luca followed her over the line, his pale eyes flickering with pale yellow light from the nearest window, his feet stepping exactly where she had stepped in a backwards pantomime of a dance. He stopped only when Viv did, just a few inches away from her.
“You’re the only woman I’ve slept with,” he said.
“That’s…that’s not the same,” Viv said, trying not to clear her throat to get rid of the sudden obstruction there. But even before Luca replied, she had already realised that, for him, it very nearly was. “I was talking about sex.”
“Sex is sex,” he said. “It’s usually an even exchange, at least. But it’s not as dangerous as letting someone sleep next to you—and it’s definitely not as dangerous as falling asleep beside someone else.”
Luca was almost terrifyingly vulnerable sometimes. Viv couldn’t help wondering if it was, in its own way, a trap of sorts. It was certainly dangerous, she now realised, to have a small, intense man radiating vulnerability in front of her while telling her that she was the only woman he had slept with.
Perhaps that was why she said, with a careful kind of brevity, “Sex is dangerous if you only think of it as an exchange, too.”
“Yes, that’s why I never accepted any invitations,” Luca said. “Do you mean that someone wanted to exchange with you when you wanted something else?”
“Turn around,” Viv said, even more shortly. “I need to check the back.”
When he had turned around, she added, “I had a boyfriend a while ago. He said he was happy to wait for me, and he was very good at waiting—but he still left as soon as he had what he wanted. I think he enjoyed the whole process, and then when it got to the point of sex, he didn’t know there was anything else to a relationship beyond that, so it was over for him.”
He had been her first serious relationship; what she hadn’t realised was that he wasn’t as serious about her. Mum had said that she just needed to be there for him, and grateful that he was waiting for her; and that every now and then, men just needed to be looked after. And at that stage, in her early twenties, Viv hadn’t yet learned that Mum and Dad’s relationship wasn’t exactly the healthiest—or that, consequently, Mum’s advice about men and relationships wasn’t the healthiest, either. What Mum and Dad’s relationship hadn’t taught her, her own first relationship did: Sex wasn’t love, and you couldn’t fix someone who didn’t want to be fixed—nor could you love someone into loving you when all they knew how to do was use you. They had to learn how to love somewhere else.
Viv finally cleared her throat and said, “You never told me why so many behindkind are sleeping with random human women.”
The collar looked fine, she told herself. Surely she didn’t need to physically check the back as well as the front? She felt, suddenly, that it was too close to touching Luca himself, and she was reluctant to do that.
“There are two reasons that behindkind sleep with humans,” Luca said.
His head pulled forwards very slightly, as if making it easier for her to access the back of the collar, and Viv, pulling in a silent breath, reached out to check the jointed piece there, as well. The fluffy golden hair at the nape of his neck brushed against her fingers, adding to her unease; it was very unfortunate to find that the first thought in her mind was that she would like to run her fingers up through that hair. A small, chaotic part of her wanted to know what he would do if she did.
“What reasons?”
“Well, there’s love, if you’re stupid,” Luca said, standing very still. “Lots of behindkind get soft about humans—or at least, one specific human—for a little while. It doesn’t usually last very long, though—and don’t ask me about hyperbole, because it’s the plain truth.”
Viv stood back in relief, collar checked and tight, and asked as Luca turned around again, “What’s the other thing?”
“That?” Luca’s lip curled very slightly; it was the most openly contemptuous expression she had seen on him. Luca tended to feral dislike rather than contempt. “There’s that funny little bit of behindkind lore that says you can’t be the king of Behind unless you’ve got at least a speck of human blood in you. And everyone wants the chance to be the father or mother of the next King of Behind.”
“What does the human blood do?”
Luca shrugged. “What does Behindkind blood do? Apart from melt through the floorboards sometimes, I suppose. Some people think it’s because you need pieces from both worlds to be a viable king: the old, old lore says that the Between world can’t exist the way it does unless both worlds exist in their fullest form.”
“You need representation from both sides?”
“Something like that,” Luca said. “Don’t get too excited about it, though: they make sure that there’s at least a bit of human blood in all their kings—the magic of it does that—but that doesn’t mean you get real representation.”
“I heard that the new king is different,” Viv said mildly. She had no dog in the race, but it had occurred to her that knowledge was very important. Perhaps she should start writing a notebook to turn into her memoirs in later life; in the meantime, perhaps a notebook would help her keep together some of the things she had learnt lately.
“The new king is different, but I doubt he’ll be that different,” Luca said, his eyebrows rising. “Who have you been talking to about Behind politics? Don’t tell me you’ve been charming Jasper into talking about things he wouldn’t normally talk about?”
Viv laughed involuntarily. “I don’t think Jasper knows how to be charmed,” she said. “Why, does he know much about Behindkind politics?”
Luca barked a short, explosive laugh. “Oh yes, he knows a lot about Behind politics! Every slippery way up, and out, and around. He had the best training you can get, and he knows how to use it.”
That, thought Viv, fit with what she thought was the chollima’s suggestion that Jasper was the previous king’s son.
She couldn’t help asking, when they were outside strolling towards the nearest tram stop, “Where does Ann Kelly fit in the grand scheme of things? If the three worlds are supposed to join together for the good of all when it comes to kings, why is the sponsor’s disappearance falling through cracks? She could belong to either side, but neither side really wants to help.”
“I didn’t say I don’t want to help,” Luca said.
“Neither did Jasper,” Viv said. “Not out loud. Not completely. But he’s still not really helping.”
“He sent you,” pointed out Luca. “And I’m here right now, helping.”
“You’re only helping because you’ll get time off your sentence,” Viv said, hardening her heart.
“I have other reasons,” Luca said, shooting a look across at her.
“Yes; you wanted to annoy Jasper, too.”
Luca grinned. “That was a bonus. I have other reasons, Viv.” He paused, then added, “I have one other reason. A very small reason.”
It was wisest to leave that series of remarks alone, Viv thought. She stepped into the tram that pulled into the stop with a ding-ding, arranging herself in the nearest seat and stretching out her hips to lessen the tightness there as Luca sat beside her. She was grateful to be able to pass her tablet to Luca with a clip from a security camera on it for him to watch, because she didn’t particularly want to talk.
Last night, while trying to stop herself from remembering sensations that she would rather not remember, Viv had gone over the security footage that Marazul had sent her from Sponsor Kelly’s house, fast-forwarding it as quickly as she could manage while still following what was happening, and in the feed from last night, she had spotted the colourful blip that Luca was now watching at the correct speed, her tablet held far too close to his face.
Last night, about the time that the Nightmare had appeared in the elevator, a small group of teens had shown up outside Sponsor Kelly’s house with two fat back-packs amongst them. They had stopped at the open door and, unlike Viv and Luca earlier, had not all gone inside regardless of safety or sense. One of them had crouched beside the door and spraypainted a small red and yellow tag beside the monsteras there while the others waited for the one who had gone inside.
“It’s a gang!” said Luca over the sound of the tram’s passage, in the same sort of satisfied delight as Viv might have said, “It’s the Eiffel Tower!” had she gone all the way to France. “A teen gang! Look at them spraying things and putting their thumbs in their pockets and wearing beanies! Don’t tell BoRa, she’ll want one, too.”
“BoRa wouldn’t be seen dead in an Aussie beanie,” Viv said flatly. “She has far better taste than that.”
“Are we tracking down the little gang?”
“Yes,” she said. “They obviously know Sponsor Kelly, and as far as I can tell, they brought something for her. BoRa is going to be delighted to know that the sponsor was involved in something probably not exactly legal.”
She found that Luca was looking at her. He said, “Did you get information from the merman in the computer? I thought you depended on me to find people.”
“I depend on you for knowing where I can find murderers and unpleasant people,” Viv told him. “For kids, I have my own ways. I didn’t need to ask Marazul.”
There was silence for a moment before Luca spoke again.
“I was there,” he said, startling her by changing the subject entirely. “In the dream, I mean—in the water. It kicked me out after you pulled us into your watery little nightmare.”
“That wasn’t my nightmare,” said Viv, without being able to prevent herself from shivering. “I’ve never had problems with water in my life.”
He glanced across at her, then said, “What happened after that? You didn’t come to find me afterwards, but Seffy said that you were in bed later.”
“It wore your face for a bit,” she told him. She didn’t want to talk about the watery bit of the nightmare. “But I knew it wasn’t you. It’s got to have something to do with Kyma, doesn’t it? It only started coming into the Tea House after Kyma got there.”
“The timing is suspicious.”
“It’s more than the timing that’s suspicious,” Viv said.
“Yes, it’s the Nightmare having a brain that’s the most suspicious,” agreed Luca. “Don’t be fierce with me, Viv; I agree with you. Also, you could have come to me for a hug if you needed one.”
Viv found herself perilously close to tears, and that was both annoying and worrisome. “I didn’t need a hug,” she said rather stiffly. “Jasper said that it was a bad thing that it had a brain behind it, too.”
“Of course he said that instead of hugging you,” said Luca under his breath. “Well, he’s not wrong: those sorts of things aren’t usually people. They’re usually ideas, fog, meaningless nightmare all bundled together.”
“Then who caught a nightmare and made it do what they want it to do? And why did they try to get to Kyma first? He hasn’t even got his pelt.”
