Chapter V | Sister City

Year 693 a.S., Autumn | City Vergalis, the Center of Culture & Entertainment

In the Lucky Lilies Institute for Abandoned Children, I often found myself stuck in an empty white room, alone for at least an hour before I could leave again. Day after day, gripped by the hand of the Woman and thrown in like a cat. Expected to land on my feet, but I never did.

It was difficult trying to make friends in this place. Most of the children were far younger than us, and cycled in and out before we could get to know each other. Save for a few exceptions, the only constant for me was Autumn, and for her, there was me. At eight, I had just reached the age where orphans were no longer desirable to adopt, and Autumn had reached that age already when I met her.

Of course, my dreams of the capital persisted. Three years had passed without much incident, but now there were so many whispers of things so horrible that they clung to my skin and waking mind until I could no longer bear it. One night, when I felt particularly in control of my head, I decided that I would try to remember the details of these dreams. My eyelids closed and the night took me in a flood of color and foreign voices.

Rugged voices of men and women, vile and poisonous in whispers and notes. Tucked away behind corners where they couldn’t be seen under the sun. They spoke of plots to assassinate, plots to kill, and plots to overthrow. They revealed important truths that I could barely wrap my head around. Truths that were like a fantasy. Truths I only just managed to jot into my dream journal the moment I woke, thrown awake in the middle of the night from the fire of what I’d learned. At eight years old, I understood nearly none of it. But at eight years old, I understood enough. I understood that I could make things better.

When the clocks all chimed to indicate dawn, I had only just finished writing down everything I needed to. In Lucky Lilies, the children all slept together in the same room in rows of tightly packed and padded metal compartments. They could fit forty children at once in this room, although there was a brief stretch of time where several had to share beds. Autumn was only three corridors down and a ladder’s climb away. While the Woman and the white room made it difficult to spend my free time with Autumn, I still managed to make time in the evening and after the lights were out to see her. At dawn now, I made that same short trek to her compartment to wake her.

The eyes of her mask crinkled open to greet me, and she managed a tired smile. “Good morning,” she said, but I already had my hands on her shoulders and tried to shake the rest of her exhaustion away. 

“Hey. Do you still want to run away from this place?”

“Yes,” she said. The dark chasms that replaced the eyes I couldn’t remember were wide open now. And almost paradoxically, there was something unforgettable about that look she gave me.

There was already a plan she had. It was a plan that she’d been thinking about for a very long time. For so long, she’d wanted to run. Run far away. Out through the door and up the layers, high up until we could look at the sky and the sun and find a place to live together. And over those years she’s waited, she collected bits and pieces of the things she’d need to survive. Clothes, food, water, and even some compressed bedding that she’d managed to steal from the storage room. Resources that all fit neatly inside two suitcases that she’d also stolen. The same suitcases that they sent children off with when they were adopted.

On Saturdays, the children were all granted many hours of independent study time. In these hours, not even the live-in staff bothered to manage what we were up to, so we used that to make our escape. Up until the very last second before we passed through the front doors, I worried that the Woman would find me and take me away to the white room before I could escape with my autumn girl. It made me more scared than anything else. More than when the bridge collapsed in the capital, and boulders of concrete and rebar crashed around me, with gunpowder, rust, and blood in the air. I worried that my autumn girl would leave without me and forget. 

But the Woman never came that day, and we walked straight out those doors without anyone ever noticing. It was the first time I’d stepped outside in three years, and nearly the only time I could remember ever going outside at that point.

There in the Undersea District, it was known that the air either ran too wet or too dry. The maintenance foreman would only ever send a crew’s veteran or its runt to crank the aquatuner; the veterans always preferred it bone dry, so they must’ve sent a newbie on that day. It was so humid that our fingertips began to wrinkle in the first half hour.

Still we wandered with wonder, through the corridors of glass aquariums where schools of fish cast shadows against us in ocean blue. It took us until early evening before we finally reached Layer 4, where sunlight touched us for real against our skin as the star drifted down to dusk. We thought it was the sun that somehow made our stomachs growl, not even thinking of how hungry we were or how our feet ached, so we kept on, dancing and laughing in the crowded streets and evening light. 

Then we reached the train station. Five minutes before the departure for Pyraleia, Capital of the Nine Cities. The station was crowded and the ticketmasters could scarcely keep up. It was the perfect environment to sneak on in, so I simply took Autumn’s hand and walked straight for an open door. No one stopped us.

Unfortunately, while the entering happened to be easy, there was apparently no unoccupied seats to be found, which made sense all things considered. Her sweat and mine mixed in our palms, hearts racing as the seconds passed and nowhere could be found for us. No place in the world for us to go. Then a raised voice of warning, and all the way down the aisle where we’d entered also entered a pair of greycaps. JANITORs. One younger and one older. A mentor and mentee. They had pistols on their hips and looked around like they were watching for something in particular. Or in our worst case scenario, us.

“Go, go!” Autumn whispered to me, and she almost shoved me onward past the curtain and into the next section, where instead of public seats, there were doors to private booths for the wealthy to stay. “They have to have one room unoccupied,” she said. “There’s only so many rich people.”

Each booth had a digital display outside of the door that displayed the name of the occupants. Whether hall or house, it seemed to turn out after all that there were no unoccupied booths. Or so it seemed until we reached one labelled Hall Areille.

“Areille means ‘empty’ in Luri,” Autumn said. It was a booth all the way at the end, and we found it just as the pair of JANITORs moved past the curtain themselves. We threw the door open and tumbled inside without caution, and quickly found ourselves face to face with a newlywed couple on the way back from their honeymoon.

Sarah and Adam of Hall Areille. They stared at us, a pair of little sweaty girls in way past their head from deep down under with clothes far bigger than their bodies. And we stared back until the silence stayed too long, and my mouth flew open to replace it.

“Do you mind if we stay here for a bit?”