Chapter Text
Five days would have begun in peaceful silence, had Rossiu not heard the Father’s voice as soon as he opened his eyes. The first couple of days, he’d thought he’d actually heard it. It bounced off the dark, rocky walls of Adai Village, muffled. But he awoke and remembered he was in a cave. Sunlight crept in as pinkish tendrils to tease his eyelids, alone and outcast. Now, by the fifth day, he knew better. He shut his eyes. Defy the light, he commanded himself, and sleep some more.
Ever since his last allotted night in Adai, resting while the other villagers prepared him for his departure, sleep hadn’t come easily. His legs threw tantrums. Whenever he happened to doze, he dreamt of his mother. They’d banished her to the surface, as well, but even Rossiu’s unconscious knew better than to think he’d meet her again. Every dream was the same. The last image he had of her, blurred with time, would flash: a pale, willowy woman with long, free-flowing chestnut hair, turning her dark eyes to him without a word. The Father awoke him and told him to get ready, it was time. Rossiu didn’t bother tying his hair into its neat, slicked ponytail. His shoulders slumped. He trudged toward the exit. The villagers gave him a rolled-up blanket and a backpack filled with a secondhand knife and fork and a small supply of food and water. The Father placed his hand on Rossiu’s shoulder just before he walked out. Rossiu looked up at him to find his mouth stretched wide and tight, a stifled frown, and a dull glint in the very centers of his dark eyes.
“You’re going to Heaven, Rossiu,” the Father told him.
Rossiu’s first glimpse of the surface was darker than Adai had ever been, even when all the candles blew out. He stood on the sand and gazed upward at an infinite sheet of dark blue, pockmarked with twinkling, tiny lights, millions of them, billions. A silver sphere hovered in an odd corner of the sky like a stranger waiting for another stranger. Rossiu studied them all. He wondered what they were. When he felt himself suddenly exhausted, eyes dragging the rest of his face down, he yawned and hiked until the fatigue made him shudder. He didn’t stop until he reached a looming tower of stone, glimmering in the lights above. He spotted an opening in the rock and headed inside. He fell asleep wondering, still, what this place was, and if his mother had gotten to see it.
He stopped kidding himself and sat up. Heat had already started to surge into the cave. Rossiu backed himself up against the wall so the shadowy rocks could cool his bare shoulderblades. On his first day, he’d removed his thick white poncho, and hadn’t put it back on since; his green bolero came off shortly after. He gazed at the pile of discarded clothes across from him. They sat to the side of his patchy, unfurled blanket, his backpack sitting on top of them. Rossiu hiked the skinny, slipping strap of his black shirt back up onto his shoulder and crawled over to the backpack. His stomach growled. In the morning, he supposed, he should be eating. He unzipped the bag and peered inside.
He’d run out of food. He remembered making a note to himself about it the night before, when he ate the last mushroom in his reserves. The village woman who had packed it for him had told him to conserve his rations, but it wasn’t like there had ever been much to Adai cuisine to tempt him to overeat. Potatoes grew deep in the soil, and the few men who called themselves farmers dug with their bare hands to retrieve them for the twice-daily communal meals; they scaled footstools and stepladders to pluck mushrooms from the walls. A sort of bitter weed grew in the stagnant lake in which the face-god stood. The chefs, all the women of Adai, wrapped them around the heavily salted potatoes, or the mushrooms, whichever they had less of on a given day, and one each was distributed to each villager. That was Adai food; bare staples played up with salt, lots of salt. No meat, ever. Animals were sacred, untouchable. To cook even one of the hundreds of bats that fluttered about the corridors was a sin. Rossiu’s stomach growled. He missed the salt, the bitter blandness of starch that would have kept him satiated nonetheless.
Pushing himself to his feet, Rossiu acquiesced to the fact that he’d have to find food eventually. He’d been in the cave long enough to know there was nothing in it. Outside was no better. He’d only ventured out of the cave once since he’d arrived: the morning after he’d settled there. He stepped out of the mouth of it and peered left, then right, then left again. He ducked back inside in an instant, bored with the vast, quartz emptiness of it all. Nothing to see for miles in every direction but yellow sand and blue sky, broken in the distance by a brown jutting mesa and the entrance to Adai, huge, endless, barren. Rossiu saw nothing he could consider calling food. Today he stood in the entrance of the cave and again glanced in the same pattern around the desert. Nothing had changed.
Rossiu plunked down and sighed. He’d die in Heaven. For the first time since he left his home, he opened his mouth and heard his voice, withered to a dry whisper. “Mother.”
In an instant, a shadow draped over him. Rossiu shut his eyes and fell back at the rumble of the earth below and the wave of dust and air his way. Stunned, he held his arm before his eyes and squinted through the sand at the darkness blocking the cave’s entrance.
A pair of metallic legs, glinting in the sunlight behind them, stood like pillars to block the view. Rossiu froze. Some groaning squeal, the creaking of old iron, sounded out as the legs began to bend. Rossiu saw teeth, sharp ones, metal ones, on the trunk of whatever this thing happened to be. His shoulder rocked to try to make the rest of him follow and crawl away, but he couldn’t move. Glued in place, he watched a hand the size of a man reach inside the cave. The fingers flexed to reach for him.
“Human filth,” came a distorted voice, as tinny as the screeching legs. “What do you think you’re doing up here?”
He didn’t even scream. His eyes widened with the speed of his retracting pupils. The hand closed around his body and squeezed. Rossiu tried to suck in his already gaunt stomach to retreat from the grip, but his lungs could only hold so much before he risked bursting. He gasped. All his carefully-stored oxygen rushed out through his mouth, and he flopped halfway forward. The thing, the creature, the devil, whatever it was, pulled him out of the cave and into the sunlight.
Olive-green, a sneer on its midsection, sunbeams bouncing off the smooth surface of what Rossiu wasn’t sure he could call a head or a stomach, the thing, he decided, was some kind of monster. Naturally. He could take only glimpses of it, as his eyes only opened as slits for shaking seconds. Forfeiting a true look at the whole of the thing, Rossiu shut his eyes and gulped. His air depleted and his head took a nosedive into vertigo. He didn’t want to look at it anymore.
“When will you learn? This is not your place,” the monster growled, fingers tightening around his ribcage.
He didn’t want to look at anything, come to think of it. Not anymore. He caught one last peek at the endless yellow-orange aridity around him, high in the air, higher than he’d ever been. Off in the distance, four black dots bounded in some direction he’d grown too dizzy to identify; now he even fell too exhausted to care what they could even be.
He’d bruise soon. He closed his eyes, ready to fall asleep before any bones broke.
But after a flicker of ephemeral swirls before his eyes and a cacophony of shrill hollers all around him, he came to on the ground, free of the creature’s grip. A grunt forced its way out of his lungs when he bounced against the sand. Gasping for air, he rolled over and tried to shake the remaining faintness from his head. His eyes shot open to the fullest before he realized he’d even opened them.
There were people. Two of them, that he could see immediately, women, but Rossiu was sure he heard more than two voices. He backed himself against the wall of the cliff, and he watched as the two girls darted around the feet of the creature.
One of them, a skinny young girl in far, far too little clothing—Rossiu asked himself if it was underwear she had on, but admonished himself for thinking anybody could even be so indecent—jammed a long stick into the gut-teeth of the monster. A fang shattered, and the girl pulled the stick back and repeated the process, her long violet hair swirling around her like a cape, and then again, and again, and again, until she’d knocked out all but a couple.
The girl with the stick had to keep up with the monster, running around it in a sort-of-circle, as the other girl, a blonde clad in black like her companion—again, showing far too much skin, Rossiu noted—had sent some kind of disc on a long string out to let it wrap around the monster’s legs. It looped and tied them together. The blonde yanked her arm up into the air and the string followed; the toothless creature fell onto its face with a shatter.
Rossiu saw the creature in full now. Its coating certainly was of metal; he couldn’t tell whether it was some kind of shell or if the whole thing had to be some kind of artificial construct. Its face sat in the center of its torso. Legs shot out instead of a neck, arms on the sides in place of ears. It glared at the girls, confused, almost, as it writhed on the ground wrapped in the string. A pathetic, powerful thing, downed by the immodesty of the two of them, probably, and Rossiu couldn’t even move to get closer.
And then from the sky, a third girl, a much more modest brunette in a white scarf, joined the first two on some kind of flying device Rossiu couldn’t describe if he were forced. As the third girl zoomed forward, Rossiu could determine a pair of glasses on her face, glaring in the sun. She circled back and hurled a fist-sized black orb down onto the creature. It exploded on contact. An airstrike.
Rossiu sat and blinked, gape-mouthed. Before he could wonder if he had license to move at all, the blonde girl shot her ball-on-a-string out again and picked the monster back up. It wobbled on its feet. Rossiu ducked when the flying machine swooped back down and slammed sideways into the creature to knock it back against the cliff. He closed his eyes. Dust and pebbles shimmered down onto his head. His neck tickled. He heard the slice of the air as the flying machine zoomed by overhead.
Before he could even open his eyes amid the scattering debris, Rossiu heard a voice, a new one, at a distance. “Get out.” A man. For a second, Rossiu wondered if it was directed at him. He heard the flying machine land several yards away. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peeked out.
A boy, definitely older than Rossiu, but by how much, he couldn’t be sure, scaled the immobilized monster like a ladder. Clad, like the girls, in black from his boots to his shirt, he kept his fierce eyes on the jagged gap between the broken teeth. Rossiu winced away when he saw his eyebrows, these thick dark things pointing downward like he’d never had a millisecond of his life filled with joy, the color of the close-cropped hair all on the sides of his head. But he leaned forward when he saw the boy’s ponytail, this odd blond thing like he’d saved a stripe of long hair at the top of his head just for special, with one loose tendril striking forward from his hairline like a blade. Rossiu remembered when he used to wear his own hair in a tight ponytail. It did the same thing. The Father would have probably told the boy to keep trying to slick it back. It’s not obeying.
“Get out,” the boy snarled again. He had no idea Rossiu even watched him. “Get out and quit being a pussy!”
Rossiu watched him grab onto the edge of a shattered tooth and pull himself the last half foot up. He reached inside the mouth and pulled.
Another person emerged from the mouth, held by the boy’s fist. It fell forward and sent the boy back down to the ground as well, and crumpled on top of him. The creature’s foot blocked Rossiu’s view. He craned his neck to try to get a better look.
Whatever the boy with the ponytail had drawn from the maw was not human. Rossiu’s brows knitted. The…Person, he supposed, was roughly the size of the boy, but covered in thick, dark, matted hair. Three-fingered hands pushed it up to its feet, and the boy swiped his leg to trip it back to the ground. It wiped its ruddy face, bald in the front, apelike. Rossiu covered his mouth. Even in Adai, they wouldn’t have called this type of animal sacred.
The boy with the ponytail had gotten to his feet now, and he shoved his boot in the ape-creature’s face. With a distinct trill to his r’s, he snarled something to it, asked it where something was, possibly someone. Rossiu couldn’t make it out. The hairy thing shook its head, frantic and trembling, and waving its hands to gesture that it didn’t know. The boy rubbed his boot farther into its face. It still didn’t know.
The boy removed his boot from the hairy thing’s face and whistled to signal the blonde girl. Nigh-psychic, she lifted her string device to the air and wound it around the creature, jerked it back, whipped her arm in the air, and sent the creature flying off into the horizon. Somewhere against the sandy expanse, it shrank to a dot, and then into nothing. Gone. Over. Rossiu fell back against the face of the cliff and closed his eyes. Shoulders shrugged and still in his hands, he decided to allow himself the privilege of a second to breathe before thanking the three girls and the boy. He could spoil himself with life.
Rossiu realized then that he had regained his breath, at last. He clutched his chest and remembered, strangely, that he’d left his poncho, even his bolero, inside the cave. Left in only his thin black sleeveless top, these people could look over at him at any moment and see his shoulders, his collarbones, his arms, pale and lewd. What a traitor to his home village he was! Adai focused so much effort on keeping things pristine and unknowable, and he stood here exposing nearly as much skin as these girls. Custom kept the ponchos on; custom kept interactions terse but chaste; custom elevated modesty to the holiest of virtues. Rossiu held his shoulders. He had to play the envoy.
But a shadow zipped up before him and forced his eyes open. Rossiu saw the drape of violet hair before the expanse of skin.
“Bro, he’s alright!” the girl squealed.
“Y-you shouldn’t jump to conclusions like that, Kiyal…” Behind her, the girl who had piloted the flying machine stepped forward. She seemed to shrink into herself, stuttering. “…H-he could still be hurt, internally.”
The blonde girl followed close behind and pushed past when she reached Rossiu. She glanced at the brunette and nodded in not-quite-total-but-good-enough agreement. She clutched her hands before her ample chest, thankfully shielding it from view a bit, and offered him a ready, sympathetic, blue-eyed gaze. “How are you feeling, darling?”
And then, “Ahh, lemme take a look.”
A pair of rough, dirt-covered hands slipped into the gap between the blonde and the brunette and parted them like jungle brush. The boy stepped between them. He stared down at Rossiu, his ferocious eyebrows unchanged from before, always pointing downward. Silent, he let his steel-blue eyes study Rossiu from the top down and back up again. Rossiu shivered.
But he stared back. Somehow he’d managed to get his eyes to peer right up into the boy’s, and after a moment, he realized they were staring each other down. Rossiu of course hadn’t offered a challenge. It didn’t seem the boy had either. Rather, Rossiu gazed at the sneer across his lips, the teeth shining out behind them. His eyes had a bit of a sunken darkness to them, but Rossiu couldn’t immediately attribute it to sleep deprivation or genetics. The faintest breeze blew the stray blonde hair at the boy’s hairline. It fell right back into place, tickling his cheek. Cavern winds had always done the same to Rossiu back in Adai.
Study. That was all it was.
The boy knelt down before Rossiu, eyes never as much as jittering away from the dead lock they shared on one another. Softly, as if desperate to avoid furthering some kind of potential injury, he swept his fingertips across Rossiu’s knuckles. His look softened, melted, and evaporated, like butter into boiling water.
“You okay, kid?”
He hadn’t noticed Rossiu’s shoulders. “I’m fine.”