A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 16

The Ravine

One thing was certain, I decided as I looked in the mirror before departing for my next trek into the city – I was no longer an Albino. Of course, I never started as one. It was a transformation that took place as the day went. But now, not even the thick powder of the city could override the vibrancy of my cuts and bruises. I was a smattering of blacks, blues, and crimson stripes.

“Tanen will go, minda,” Letta tried to convince me. She was recovered from her fever now, and only plagued by turmoil in her throat and lungs.

“Like the gates of hell, Tanen will go.”

“I've wrapped his hands from the glass. He is in far better shape than you. Please, Vant, let him take your place today.”

“Hasn't he already done enough, saving my life?” Take my place? I don't know why, but those words lodged. Like swallowing something sharp, they went down slowly, and, inwardly, I hunched.

“We would not want to see that wasted by sending you to your death because you are in no shape to handle yourself in the city.”

“He doesn't need to go.”

“Neither do you. And he's the better choice of the two of you.”

“I'll be fine.”

“You aren't fine. You are alive. Breathing. Not 'fine'.”

“As long as I'm alive and breathing, I can do my job.”

There was a blur of motion and the plunking of footsteps, then, and the next thing I knew I had been wrestled to the ground by a mass resembling Tanen Nysim and sat upon.

My first reaction: confusion.

My second: resistance. It was little use, though.

I was on my back, but my hips and legs twisted onto their side. Tanen had himself a seat on my hip, which saw the other one digging into the floor. It precisely upset one of my worse bruises. I wriggled in protest, trying to get my wits about me to voice a more vehement objection, but Letta was already objecting.

“Tanen Nysim!” she scolded, but in a tone that blamed it as being unnecessary, rather than anything truly unacceptable.

“You can't do your job,” Tanen countered my claim.

I had dreams of snapping him in two with a flick of the legs that he sat on, proving him wrong, but my crushed bruises would not allow my nerves more than a twitch. They were seared.

He stood, freeing me, but his point was made. “Or is the floor your throne too?” he taunted.

My eyes were hot on him as I pushed myself up from my place of disgrace. Curse him. Who had given him leave to come into our home and act like he not only had rights, but was some lord of authority? And Letta – she posed no relevant defense on my behalf. Had I lost favor with the people I thought were my family, to this..this...stranger? Lost it to this fresh new upstart? It didn't strike me with any sense.

It merely struck me.

What had I done to warrant this treatment, and what had he done to escape it?

“I'll bring back what you need,” Tanen told me reassuringly, as if to validate himself now that he had pointedly crushed me into the floorboards. In my mind, it was a little shabby in the ways of redemption. I was reassured of nothing except the fact that this man now knew he could manhandle me and get away with it.

I felt betrayed. Letta had no stance against it.

I set my shoulders, fiery with defiance. Fine. “Half a dozen lanterns,” I said, starting a list. “A dozen books. A shovel, clothespins... Chandelier crystals. A writing quill. Cloth. Tile. A new pair of boots.”

Although evidently a little overbearing as I meant it, as if he could just trot down to the corner store and request the specifics from inventory, the list did not faze him. He blinked knowingly before responding, seeing what I was doing, but resigned himself to it. Nodding, he accepted his fate. “So be it.”

“And – a bird's nest.”

“What do you need a bird's nest for?” came the objection at that.

I smiled smugly inside at having cracked him. Outwardly, however, I remained all business. “Just get it.”

I saw the slight grinding of his teeth. Bone on dust.

Good. Two could play this game.

“Fine,” he said.

I gave him a slight challenging nod, and then he was off.

Half amused, half disapproving, Letta turned to me after he was gone. But I raised an eyebrow at her, and perhaps she recalled Tanen taking a blow at me first, for she said nothing.

Let's see you come back with even half of those things, Tanen, I thought. I knew it would be better not to underestimate him, because he had already proven he was resourceful, but I could not help being smug with the list I had presented to him.

My only regret was that, in hindsight, I ought to have made him wear the armored corset.

*

It was almost twilight when he came, laden with clinking odds and ends. In the sinking quiet, we could hear him from inside, coming down the road: the faint sound of wind-chimes in a time of no such thing.

Drawn by the off-key music, I abandoned my station at the sink, forgetting my wet hands. They were dried unconventionally on my hair as I absently smoothed it out of my face. Onto the porch and around the side of the house, and there he was:

A drifter and his wares, wandering down our road.

I blinked against the smearing gray of the hour, ascertaining that it was indeed Tanen. For a moment it didn't look like him, but in the end – who else?

He neared like a boat on lapping waves, something summery about him in his laden slowness. I recognized it a moment later:

The summery feeling of cheer at the end of the day, of relief, relaxation – triumph.

He had done it.

He can't have done it.

I narrowed my eyes at his load, attempting to discern the things he carried for what they were. Lanterns, I saw, strung on a pole that he carried over one shoulder. That was all I could make out, as the rest was a jumble under his arm or in the sack that crossed his chest and hung at his waist lapping his leg – all except...

The bird cage.

I didn't see it at first, strung on the end of the pole in line with the lanterns. In truth, from a distance, it resembled them. But I caught wind of a flutter within its boundaries as the contraptions all swayed from side to side, and disbelief shuffled a deck of pure face cards inside me.

Impossible.

He sauntered up, weary but buttered with cheer.

I looked at him. I had no other greeting.

He shucked his armload to the ground, then let the pole slide off his shoulder – but caught it before it could join the pile with a clatter. The lanterns swayed. The bird cage swung.

My eyes stung the path of the bird as it ruffled from one side of its cage to the other.

“It's not a nest,” Tanen spoke. “But I thought it might do. I found the cage. The bird, I caught.”

My skepticism flew in bigot fashion to his face, all too ready to denounce him. This joker could not play me, would not find his way into my deck of cards. But his eyes were sincere as any blue sky, graced by the sun, open and pure, and I choked on the idea of my doubt, unable to fling it at him. One didn't challenge the sky that way. It was intimidating.

“How about it, Lady Siren?” he perked a proposal at me. I wondered when he had dreamed up that likeness. “As worthy as any nest? Maybe, even, a little bit better?”

My response, when it came, was somewhat of a compromise. “You can catch a bird but you can't find one mangy nest?” I sent back, as unimpressed as I could manage.

His eyes were knowing at this response – a knowing sky. Like an umbrella of knowing that hovered over me, bearing down on me, to all corners of the earth, even as I turned and walked away. Cloudless and all-seeing.

It was there, reading over my shoulder as I trudged. I couldn't shake it.

You can't shake the sky.

*

I sulked. Though my eyes would wander without my permission to the bird and its cage hanging like an ornament of cheer by the window, I ultimately sulked.

I sulked clear through the week, as that charming token of redemption tweeted like fingernails on a chalk board in the house, winning me over as it grated on my nerves.

It was a terrible reminder.

And a lovely gift.

*

Needless to say, when I ought to have been donning my Albino skin for my recovered debut a week later, I was in no state to win Letta's approval.

She had taken my sulking for incompetency.

She thought I was still ailing.

The irony smacked me in the face, but instead of sweeping it aside, I let it hang there with the stray locks of my hair. I'd done this myself.

I could have groaned, but I wouldn't allow Tanen that victory. He had already been entirely too victorious.

And I had the pet bird to show for it.

“This is silly,” I said instead, to Letta. It did not sound like a protest. I wouldn't let it. It sounded like a fact.

The fact that it was.

“We can't afford any more pets, Letta,” I tried to reason with her practically, pointedly.

“I don't imagine he'll come back with any horses, Vant. I wouldn't worry. There is not much out there.”

My dream of elephants came back to me, distracting in its clarity, for I hadn't thought about it in awhile.

But Tanen was looking at me.

“Go on,” I bade with a sweep of my hand in exasperation. He took his cue and took his leave. I was not going to sit there and argue like a slighted child.

But this wasn't about candy.

It was about lanterns and chandelier crystals and birds.

Much more serious stuff.

So he hadn't seen the last of me.

*

I, on the other hand, had seemingly seen somewhat of the last of him. It came to my attention late the next day, when I realized he had been a bit reclusive since the morning. Not wanting to seem interested, I resisted asking around.

But his presence, or lack thereof, was like a bite taken out of the day.

Where are you hiding? I thought in mild frustration.

I went about my chores, but found myself gazing in at the bird in its cage by the evening. He needed a name, but I had hoped not to be the one to give him one. I did not want to be attached.

He was a mix of bright blues and yellows tempered by overlaying patches of more ashen feathers. He zipped from one wall of his cage to the other, making it swing on its hook, spilling seed shells as he chittered at me. He was lovely – there was no denying it – but as always, I tripped down my biased slant with this thought:

How cruel of him to trap you this way. That Tanen is no good, is he? I ought to set you free...

But I couldn't bring myself to.

There was no logical explanation for it. I simply...didn't. I meant to, but I didn't. I left him there, and then fed him later on. I caught myself gazing at him again, too. He was very nice to look at, a blaze of animation in the room.

“Her name is Modesta,” Tanen announced, striding in.

He had a knack for appearing at certain times.

I turned, startled and annoyed. “It's a he,” I corrected him to hide my startlement.

“Oh?” he challenged

“He's too brightly colored to be a girl.”

“Well, for the record, if you were adorned in fancy bright colors, I would still think you were a girl.”

“Thank you,” I said dryly. There was an itch on my back, nagging at me to ask where he had been. I scrunched the muscles around it, resisting. I did comb him for clues, though, as he had a seat and took his boots off his seemingly aching feet. There was nothing on him that gave off any hints, but he had clearly been abroad.

“Modesto, then?” he proposed. “Or perhaps something generic? You decide; he's yours.”

The itch abruptly transferred to my fingertips, and now it wanted to touch is boots.

It was the first time an urge like that had ever taken me. What on earth did I want with his boots?

His words filtered distantly into my head. He's yours. The way he said it, like a reminder. A reminder that he had been a gift.

“Modo,” I said. It came out without any thought, for I was in a place where I didn't want to apply any.

And, well, that's what happens when things are said without any thought.

Tanen made a face halfway between sour and considerate, but it was entirely geared to humor me. “As the Lady Siren wishes.”

My thoughts came out of his boots (a ridiculous notion in and of itself). “Stop with that.”

He cocked an all too reasonably mocking brow at me as he stood to take his boots to the door. “If you can call the bird Modo, I can call you Lady Siren.”

“Am I supposed to say 'oh, yes, of course you can'?” I shot at his back. “'It's a deal'?”

“Or seal my lips,” he offered without sympathy, flashing me a smirk before disappearing into the other room.

And I, being the mindless oddity that I was these days, thought of no retort better than 'his boots are unattended on the porch'.

*

There was no justification that granted me the mission, but it seemed I didn't require any. Minutes later, I had shirked witness and sought out his boots. I sat on the porch, and ran them through my fingers.

It was mindless. I don't know what I would have done if someone had caught me. How I would have explained it.

But it was no longer one fingerprint that bore the insignia of spider silk. It was all of them.

My webbed fingerprints sifted through the particles that dusted the leather. They sorted them, mixed them, tasted them. A puff of the stuff stirred up into my face, and I choked on a vision of a dusty road, obscure from being kicked up. It faded from my mind, but there was still dust in my eyes, and as I blinked I saw snippets of other things. A slab of stone covered in powder. A pillar caked in dry mud. A doorway, traipsed by footprints.

Then it was gone.

I set the boot aside. Thank goodness no one had seen that.

But what had I seen?

The theory was that it had been wherever Tanen had been. But a dusty road, slab of stone, muddy pillar and sullied doorstep were going to be no fast indication. Those symbols were common ground in Dar'on.

I sat back, frustrated. There was a restless feeling alive in me that itched for another fix.

I shrugged it away, and pried myself up from the porch. It still hummed in my fingertips, but I flexed my fingers and took myself back inside.

Then, feeling suddenly repulsed, I headed for the kitchen and washed my hands most vigorously, feeling irrevocably scarred from the task of being so readily immersed in a man's well-used boots.

*

Tanen melted into the countryside again the next day, and then the following day as well. Each time he returned, my fingers itched. I resisted handling his boots again, but that did not mean the urge wasn't there.

Finally, since I seemed set on not simply asking him, I hatched a grand alternative notion; I would follow him. He had no business begging our sustained hospitality only to spend the days disappearing on secret errands rather than lending a hand around his newfound refuge. He owed us here at Manor Dorn. I could not rest letting him dally about his own devices without confrontation.

I awoke early, my boots already laced on, and kept my sensory graces peeled for signs of Tanen stirring. When it was clear he wasn't going to sneak away before anyone else woke, I rose to fix breakfast. It was ready by the time the others joined the living, and I was free to position myself for my treachery.

When Tanen slipped around back and made his escape from the premises, I took up the painstaking chase.

*

It was a wide, open road, silent as the night, a taut line between my quarry and me – as if we both walked the same tight rope, and me, trying to be stealthy about it behind him. Surely he could feel my vibrations. My only hope was to stand still at a distance and watch, until he had nearly disappeared, before trailing after him.

When he reached the city, I ran.

I came to the gates too late to track his exact whereabouts, but all it took was recovering my breath to its normal capacity before I heard him.

What I could only hope was him.

At first, when I quieted, I was faced only with the packed emptiness. A great breath of powder whispered back at me, from where it coated everything like petrified snow in the heat. Then the whisper was cracked:

A crumb of rubble spilled down a gulley. The hairs on my body pointed toward it.

I moved.

Tanen's grace among the rubble was decidedly decent for an amateur, I decided as I listened and trailed his crumbling scent. He could not match my silence, but he would not wake the dead, either. He would not be fooling any wardogs, but during the day he would avoid the most important hazard: causing a shift with clumsy feet.

I was a little slower than he, ascertaining my silence in his wake, but I was confident I wouldn't lose him. He wasn't graceful enough for that.

We were well into the jungle of city when my stealth was nearly sabotaged; climbing a steep ascension, I propelled my knee up next to my body to give me a nice hoist, and the fold sent a sharp pain into my gut. A sound halfway between a yelp and a gasp fled my lips like a bat from a cave.

I cut it short, still wincing, and the pain written on my face doubled at the silence beyond my niche. I cursed myself, thinking I had just alerted Tanen to my presence.

But I cursed him when I identified the source of my pain; one of the metal pieces lining my protective corset, jutting into my ribs from the position.

Probably his plan all along, I grumbled to myself, always so pessimistic about his intentions. To skewer me.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the slight chafe of Tanen's passage resumed on the other side, and carefully unfolded myself.

Practical indeed, I muttered inwardly about the garment. More like sinister. Grotesque. I am wearing a contraption.

Never mind.

Sweat trickled down my neck as I pulled myself upward and onward. It was sticky beneath my corset, and I did not look forward to peeling the article off at the end of the day.

I huffed a piece of hair out of my face, my hands busy. Over my shoulder, I stole a glance at the sprawling mess of city below. It was quite a landscape from here, a sea of architecture. Pieces of it glistened, playing with my eyes. It seemed to go on forever. There were no edges, at this point; only haphazard boundaries. One of which: a shadowy ravine that snaked through it all, at the base of the slope that rose into this bluff. The rubble dropped off like a waterfall of shadow into that cracked void.

It looked so deliciously cool down there, I thought for a moment at that strained, wistful height. I couldn't see another drink of shade for what seemed like miles.

Then I was climbing again, drinking my sweat instead. Luxuries were only myth or illusion. Grit and sweat were real. They were my true lifeblood.

My nails took on a dirty white as I went, packed with the sullied cake flour of the baking land. There was scarcely any grip on the powder-sleeted surfaces. I found myself being grateful for my spider-silk fingertips, for they seemed to reinforce my traction where it threatened instability.

I paused for a moment at the spectacle of a striped, tube-like length of cloth protruding from the cliffside. Securing myself, I tugged at it. It was positively saturated with dust, but a majority of it rained away as I fussed with it, until it stretched and popped free into my grasp, and I found myself in possession of a single, wholly functional stocking. Shaking off some additional dust, I peeked around for the matching article. It was in the hollow next to where the first had been, intact as well.

A refreshing bout of luck, I thought as I stowed the pair of stockings for later. One never knew what he would find out here.

It was only another few meters to the top. Feeling optimistic, I pressed on. Foot- and handholds accommodated me like stairs now. I was almost there.

At the crest, I pulled myself cautiously aloft. My gaze flitted past a quick flank of rubble and then was flung wide over the top, where the world opened up into a new arrangement.

That's when I saw him. He was across the depression that lay on this other side, poking about the base of an erupting tower.

The tower was like blackened, coppery bark and splashes of glowing, worn mahogany, serrated with texture and burnt with age, but polished by sun. It rose like a beast, and stood like an enduring tree next to its felled kin. It was miraculously unbroken. It's time had not yet come. But of course, it would.

I made myself comfortable, settling in to watch what this fool young man did with his time there. After some more poking about, he did something I had not expected at all.

He began to climb.

Scaling the bluff of a crude heap of rubble was one thing, but Tanen had seemingly now moved onto a much greater challenge.

What on earth does he think he's doing? I shifted to get more comfortable without noticing, my brow creased in wonder. This was going to be a very interesting show.

After a few initial, failed attempts, Tanen found purchase. Painstakingly, he ascended past the first window. Respect pricked me like an annoying needle, but I still felt most comfortably warranted to label him a fool for the stunt.

He seemed to get bottled up at one point, simply staying in one spot for a time, looking helpless. Only after a good few minutes of procrastination did he cast himself back down, resolving to start over.

I found a place for my feet to stand, so that I was pressed in a fairly natural upright position against the bluff, where I could rest my forearms on the uneven ledge and prop my chin on my hands. It would have been an amusing position, I decided, if anyone had occupied the distance behind me: someone standing on the side of a cliff and peering over as casually and intently as a child peering over a countertop.

Tanen made it a little farther the next time, and once he reached the second line of windows, their sills gave quite a boost and doubled his progress.

I began a grueling guessing game, trying to dream up his possible goal. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine. Perhaps men simply got something out of climbing a tower with their bare hands. I had heard similar things. But surely this could not be that pointless.

If he could climb a tower, he had better be matching the effort in the interests of Manor Dorn, and his new benefactors.

My eyes swept up the tower, a wondering survey. Walls. Windows. Craftsmanship. Ledges. Gargoyles. A roof.

Back down again.

A roof. Gargoyles. Ledges. Windows. Walls.

I was beginning to grow antsy, but this mystery wouldn't let my curiosity rest. I saw nothing of interest, but I couldn't believe that Tanen had been coming out here for three days simply to climb the thing, disappearing like some secretive gentleman on shady business just for a thrill that looked more miserable than anything.

It was only after the fourth or fifth survey of the place that I saw it: something I wouldn't even have noticed if not for a terribly grasping sense of frustration and the tiny inkling of reference that remained lodged in my mind like one dusty piece of glass.

On the shoulder of one gargoyle, between the snarling head and its erect wing, was a small disfigurement that didn't match the profile of the others. I could not see it for what it was, but a wayward string of logic clamored together a possible image:

A nest.

No.

It couldn't be.

Sense stuttered into dead beetles in my mind.

Yet... I didn't know Tanen, so it very well could be, if possibility was truly weighed.

That's when I allowed the first trickle of a very important thought to spell itself out in my head, letters and all:

I don't know you, Tanen.

Fact.

Disgruntling fact.

But then my distraction was warped the other way into focus, as the foolish young man reached a height that I could not ignore. He had reached that point between ground and sky that didn't look natural on a human, that made onlookers queasy in calculation. If he fell now...

Sweat lined my throat, but I couldn't tell if it was outside or in. I watched, perched and uneasy, cheering him on and willing him down. It was a sour taste, stuck between those two.

I realized too late that being queasy on his behalf did neither of us any good, and indeed was a kind of sabotage on mine. When I realized that my blood felt sick in suspense, I wisely decided to move up onto the ledge where I could sit, whether he could see me or not. It would be more stable than clinging to the bluff.

But I was already compromised.

I creaked upward on wobbly limbs, and the folly of not being able to take my eyes off of him at this point took its toll; I slipped.

My breath was reeled out of me as I plunged into the rush of emptiness where my foot landed, any exclamation swallowed back down my throat, and as rubble buckled beneath me, I flailed off my perch and was caught immediately in the tide of a crumbling avalanche. The broken hillside fell away, dragging me down. A breathless shriek murmured from me, cold as water stuck in my lungs, as the world fell away.

Somewhere, the tide of debris steadied, but I bounced on down the descent. When I reached the bottom of the bluff and the beginning of the milder slope, the dizzy craze slowed, but, disoriented, I could do nothing to stop my progress entirely.

A shadowed drop loomed in all directions as I spun; the ravine, unable to be pinpointed amidst my revolutions. No sooner had I glimpsed its gaping form ahead of me than my attempts to hold it at bay did the opposite and spurred me on, for I had turned. The ravine was left, right, up and down – always looming, dodging my efforts to distinguish it.

It grew alarmingly from a crack to a maw, and in a field of panic, I skidded right up to the edge to shake its hand at last, and flailed over that edge through a ripped web of clutching, raked spider-silk fingers.

It had a killer handshake.

Streams of dirt rained down around me, gouged from the sides by my hands. I shredded that wall. And then I hit level ground. My body glanced across the surface, and I was hustled across the ground like a leaf tumbled by the wind, a tangle of skirts.

I came to rest in the middle of the ravine, stunned. Walls rose up around me. It was blessedly cool. Chillingly cool. The sky was a taunting ribbon above me, farther away than it should be.

Shaken, I propped myself up. My fingers stirred through a residue much different than the powder I was used to. I regarded the layer of sullied, decayed leaves that saturated the regular dirt. It was like foreign land, right there beneath me. I had not seen trees in Dar'on for quite some time; but the rustle against my fingertips told me... this concoction had come in on the current that had carved the ravine. A deposit passing through on the season's Northbound Express. The river was a train for this sort of thing, a pollinating device, exchanging one spell of territory for another.

It was just another way that the Great Butterfly was in motion.

On top, the leaves were dry, crushed and light as ashes, spilling through my fingers like feathers. Airy and silent. Deeper down, they were compressed and moist, a cake of decay. I sifted, then dug through it, my fingers absently tasting the memory of the river as I scanned the rest of the ravine. The walls were not overbearingly high, but high enough that a simple hoist would get me nowhere. They were also craggy, but only in a way that would graze; nothing to provide foot- and handholds.

The ravine narrowed a ways down, like the neck of a bottle. Not something that tempted one to try to slip past. It was well wide enough, I could argue, but it gave off a strangling air. For even at its widest, the ravine was trapping.

I drew myself to my feet, leaf remnants falling away and clinging to my skirt. The shadows tasted me, branding my sun-beaten shoulders with cold and seeping up my legs. The dust on my face cowered in my pores.

I scanned the walls for a section that might humor a climb, molding my eyes to each jut and crevice. I felt strangely compelled to keep my distance from the narrowing of the passage, and so turned to weigh my options in the other direction.

Contrary to the bottled-up tendency now at my back, this new perspective yawned into a more respectable canyon. There was even a bridge, or half a bridge, that arched over it before breaking off mid-air. Its rubble lay beneath it.

A bridge will do you no good up there, I thought to myself as I cast about for other options. I shuffled slowly out of place, changing feet, feeling for perspective.

My heel bumped something concealed in the leaves. Curious, I sought it out, nudging away its cover with my toe. A rusty chain took form first, which led quickly to the discovery of the shackle at its end. The shackle was empty, but what I found on the other end was a bit more disturbing. I weeded the chain out of the leaves, following its length until an anchor halted my progress. Brushing away the leaves, I beheld a most interesting substitute for the ball-and-chain method: a piece of rubble from the city.

There in my fingers, the chain sparked.

I dropped it.

And watched the spark thread its way quickly along the pattern of my silken fingerprints. It left them singed, looking faintly tattooed.

Alarmed, as if I had grown fond of the cursed digits, I flexed my fingers, feeling for the slightly prickly strain of web.

It was still there, but raw.

I eyed the chain on the ground with distrust, and moved slowly away from it.

There was a vision in my head now – very faint, for it had been brief – but I could see it, flickering weakly. A man who had worn that shackle.

The purpose of the piece of rubble was clear enough, though I didn't welcome the realization: it was an anchor, which performed the duty all anchors were meant to perform.

It kept something down.

Or in this case, someone.

Why anyone would be anchored to the bottom of this gulley was beyond me. I didn't let myself think too hard over it, if only for the sake of my own composure. I simply moved on, intent on finding a way out.

There was an area up ahead that boasted good texture in the ravine wall. I grew optimistic seeing it, thinking this was not an irrevocable death trap after all. It was just a ravine, and I could climb out. There would be plenty of places that I could. After all, no one would need to be chained down unless climbing was an option.

Still, I picked my way carefully toward the place of interest, keeping to the edges. And I could not help it, there next to the wall; I trailed my singed fingers over the face of earth at my flank.

At first, the visions were dead. They were black. I tasted ash, as the caress only grazed my fingers. But I swallowed the acrid sensation and gentled my touch, and the veil of scored nerves lifted. It rippled over the visions, still, but I could see outlines.

People. The people that wandered this ravine. Whiteskins, starved until they were surely as pale as they could ever desire. Bloodied ankles, dragging the pieces of debris that anchored them to this chasm.

“You want to be beautiful?” I heard a voice question them, an overbearing murmur crowded into their ears. “Pure? Then you will welcome the vampires, and they will make you as white as you have ever dreamed.”

I heard moaning. Distant wailing. Sounds of hysteria.

Human phantoms wandering the ravine, united in the rhythm of dragging one mutilated foot behind them.

Then a flicker much more radiant, right there before me. A darkskin woman, dressed in gold, lounging beneath the bridge.

There was a utensil in her hand, a shaft like a long, thick needle. She drew it to her mouth, breathed in, and let out a breath swarming with termites.

They billowed out, and then shifted like a flock of birds and screeched into the air like bats, and I jerked my hand away from the gulley wall in surprise as they rushed me, breaking the vision.

The area beneath the bridge was vacant.

It was suddenly very important to me that I leave this place to its business. But it was going to prove decidedly tricky, for I no longer wanted to touch the walls to climb out.

I was rooted in this place by my own chains, my own demons.

And this place had enough of its own.

The prisoners.

The voice.

The golden smoker.

And, in hindsight, I saw as I brushed together a vision in the ashes on my fingers – the one who had starved until his ankle was free.

The one who had gotten away.