“Oh, thank goodness.” Eileen threw her arms around Hwa. She hugged tight. A twang of pain resounded up Hwa’s right arm; she yelped and some of the other mourners turned in their pews to give her a ssh! face.
“Sorry!” Eileen slackened her grip somewhat. She pulled back a little and held Hwa’s hands. “That’s great news! Are you going to come back to work with us?”
Hwa glanced around the sanctuary. Mistress Séverine was sitting in the second row back, with Rusty and Nail on either side of her. “Yeah, I’ll probably try to, after the funeral.” She winced. “Japrisot really wanted me to stay in school, though. She’ll be pissed.”
“Hwa, you got shot,” Eileen said. “I think she’ll understand if you tell her you bit off more than you could chew.”
Hwa caught herself frowning. She sat up a little straighter in the pew. She smoothed the sleeve over the valve in her wounded arm. “More than I could chew?”
“Of course! They had completely unreasonable expectations of you!”
Hearing someone else make the same excuses for her that she’d made to Joel made them sound even worse, and made her sound even weaker. The real problem was the fact that they’d lied to her, that Daniel Fucking Síofra, her boss, had lied to her, that they were all manipulative bastards who couldn’t even keep track of their own goddamn bullets.
“Well, I could do the job. If I wanted to. But I don’t want to.”
“Damn right you don’t.” Eileen crossed her legs primly. “You’re much safer with us.”
Hwa nodded at the coffin. “Tell that to Calliope.”
Music rose. So did the congregation. Father Herlihy proceeded up the aisle swinging a censer and singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” off-key. As they watched, he circled Calliope’s coffin, swinging and singing under the occasional twinkle of botflies whose lights strobed across the fragrant smoke. He turned to face the congregation, and he met Hwa’s gaze and quickly looked away. Like her, Father Herlihy was one of the last few unaugmented people on the rig, and that meant he saw her true face. He had always looked away from it, ever since she was little, when Sunny forced her to go to his Sunday school. Sunny only let Hwa stop going after her First Communion, once the chance to tease her about how stupid she looked in her dumb white dress had passed. That was the only explanation Hwa could think of for her mother’s insistence on Sunday school. It wasn’t like their family believed.
The song ended, and the congregation sat. The pews creaked like real wood. You could get anything fabbed, these days.
“Calliope’s was a beautiful soul,” Father Herlihy said. “And her relationship with this parish—and the Church itself—was a long and fruitful one. Her parents, who can only attend via telepresence—gave up everything to bring her to Canada from Greece. They escaped the Golden Dawn with a single hard drive. It had a few documents, but mostly it was just photos. Photos and video, from many generations of her family. Every birthday, every wedding, every baptism. I saw them, when she married Andrea. She brought them to their marriage workshop, after they were engaged.”
Beside her, Eileen bent over and appeared to stare at her shoes. It took Hwa a minute to realize she was crying. Hwa patted her carefully on the shoulder. Looking at her hand making its awkward motions made her feel like the coach of a losing team.
“I’m sorry,” Eileen whispered. “I know you don’t like this kind of thing.…”
“Huh?” Hwa let her arm rest around Eileen’s shoulders. “It’s okay. You can cry. Just because I don’t cry doesn’t mean you can’t.”
Eileen looked up and wiped her eyes. “You can cry, too, Hwa. It’s okay. I won’t tell.”
Hwa shook her head. “No, I mean I can’t. I literally can’t. Not out of this eye. So you have to go twice as hard for both of us.”
Eileen smiled and sat up. She leaned on Hwa. “You’re so tough.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Not anymore,” Eileen said. She dug her head deeper into Hwa’s shoulder. Hwa watched Calliope’s friends queue up for Communion. They were all tattooed. Just like Calliope. Dragons. Crosses. Roses. Mecha. Kaiju. Skulls. Butterflies. Ripples of blue and black and red and pink across the flesh.
Oh, Jesus. How could she have forgotten?
*
Síofra lived on 5-15, nineteen floors down from the place where Joel and Zachariah lived. Hwa’s sinuses flared up as the elevator climbed. The pain threatened to spike into a real headache.
The doors to 5-15 peeled back. Hwa stepped through. The hallway came awake as she stepped silently onto thick blue moss. On either side were more doors, each spaced a fair distance apart. Wreaths grew from their damp, thick surfaces. The walls were all indoor ivy and night-blooming jasmine. At any other time, it might have been pleasant. Pretty. Now it just smelled like failure.