Home > Daughter of the Burning City(7)

Daughter of the Burning City(7)
Author: Amanda Foody

The official stares at me, his face contorted in disgust. The centipede drops from my arm into the grass, but I don’t dare move to search for it. After a few tense moments, the official passes. I let out a sigh of relief.

I head back inside my tent, thinking I’ll just cut through the stage area to the back. It’s safer to be out of sight. And clearly Jiafu isn’t coming.

The show tent is empty, all the audience chairs vacant and the ground littered with kettle-corn kernels. I squint in the darkness. There’s something on the stage, but I can’t tell what it is.

“Hello?” I say, in case it’s a person. No one answers.

I creep closer to the stage and then climb up the steps. Something cracks under my sandal. The floor glistens. I’m standing in a mess of water and glass.

A figure lies on the floor, unmoving and limp. My eyes slowly adjust, so I can tell it’s a man lying facedown. He lies on a bed of broken glass and a puddle of water in the dead center of the stage.

I scream and then root around my pockets for a match, my hands trembling. I find one, strike it and bend down to the man’s body, bracing myself for my worst suspicions to be confirmed. I instantly recognize his dark hair, the grooves on both sides of his neck and his webbed hands.

It’s Gill.

I scream his name and then drop to the floor and roll him over. The back of his shirt is covered in blood. I shake him a few times, but he never responds. I rest his head on my lap, and blood dribbles from his mouth down his chin. “Gill. Gill,” I plead. I check his pulse, but find none.

None.

“No. No. No.” This is impossible. Gill can’t be dead. He’s my illusion. His body, though it feels solid, is only a figment of my imagination. No one can kill him, because he doesn’t truly exist.

Hesitantly, I lean him on his side and lift up his shirt, exposing the half dozen stab wounds across his back. They are a jagged, messy and oozing contrast to the smooth and translucent silver of his skin. My stomach wretches. I roll him onto his back once more and hug him closer.

I’m struck with a sudden inspiration; a flicker of hope. I can fix this. I can make him disappear. I can make him disappear and he’ll come back, just like before.

I grasp for my Strings and find Gill’s tethered among them. I gather them into a ball and toss them into his Trunk, a section of my mind I rarely visit except to make the illusions disappear. His Strings are lighter than usual, as if strands of hair rather than proper threads. Though the Trunk is open and full of Gill’s Strings, he doesn’t vanish from the stage as he should. I cry out in frustration. Why won’t he disappear?

His body remains in my arms, dead.

None of this makes sense.

I run my hands down his limp arm to his fingertips, to a shard of glass on the stage floor. The wheeled platform of the tank lies a few feet away. This glass couldn’t have broken by accident—it’s thick, made especially for Gill’s act during the show. Someone shattered it on purpose and then, afterward, stabbed him while he suffocated.

Someone, somehow, murdered him.

CHAPTER THREE

The dampness of the salt water and Gill’s blood seeps into my clothes. The sleeves of my robes. The knees of my thin pants. I tremble from the coldness against my skin, from the idea of kneeling in a pool of blood, from the image of Gill dying in this very spot. Of him gasping for oxygen, staring at the face of his killer, writhing on the stage floor among the broken glass, with no breath to call for help.

Gill’s body is heavy, pressing my kneecaps and ankle bones against the hard wood of the stage. All I register is what’s here. The slimy, sardine-like feeling of Gill’s corpse. The dead weight of it. The smells of blood, salt and my own sweat.

My body trembles. His Strings slip out of his Trunk and fall back at my feet, one end of them tied to my ankle and the other tied to Gill’s. I squeeze them until my knuckles whiten and gather them into my lap, resting them against Gill’s stomach.

He’s dead. He can’t be dead, but he is. He won’t disappear.

He’s more real in death than he was alive.

Suddenly panicked, I whip my head around. What if Gill’s killer is still lurking in the darkness? I don’t see anyone, but someone could be behind me, watching me. I can almost feel their breath on my neck.

Panic simmers in my gut, and the sobs burst out of me like a dam collapsing. He’s dead. This is a body. Sickened and petrified, I push him off my lap and then wipe my hands on my robes.

I’ll never have a chance to apologize for worrying him earlier.

Footsteps thump toward stage right, and Nicoleta emerges, carrying a torch. “What’s wrong?” she asks and then freezes when she reaches me and Gill. I feel like one of the rare, taxidermied animals displayed at the entrance of the Menagerie, frozen and surrounded by expressions of horror.

She doesn’t scream like I did at first, but she shudders. She inches forward, growing slower with each step, as if she doesn’t want her torchlight to fully illuminate the scene in front of her. “Is he dead?” she whispers, her eyes locked on Gill’s body.

“Yes. I came in here and found him like this. His blood...his blood is all over me,” I choke out, my voice cracking. I scrub my hands over and over with my cloak, desperate to remove the sticky red stains on my palms, desperate to feel clean even after they’ve been wiped away. My lungs don’t feel like they’re stretching properly, like walls are crushing them from both sides. Each of my inhales grows shorter, faster. My heart pounds.

This was no accident.

“Someone killed him,” I say. I sound as though I’m being strangled.

She looks at me gravely. “Get up. Come over here.” As I get to my feet, she adds, “No, no, shut his eyes first.” With trembling hands, I bend down and close his eyes. The feeling of his clammy skin makes me feel like vomiting. I remind myself that this is Gill. My bossy but well-meaning uncle. My family.

I hurry to Nicoleta and bury my face in her shoulder. “Take that off,” she says, nodding at my cloak. “You’re covered in blood. If an official comes in, what will they think? We need to clean you up and move him. Now.”

“Someone killed him,” I blubber. “He has stab wounds all over his back. Someone smashed his tank. Someone wheeled his tank here—”

Nicoleta grabs my shoulders and rips off my cloak. Despite everything, her voice is steady but sharpened by a terseness that I imagine is shock. “Did you see anyone? Hear anything?”

“No. It was so loud outside. I was just talking to him a little while ago. Then I went in to talk to you and the others, and when I came back, he was gone—”

“Can you make the body disappear?”

“No.” And even if I could, the thought of keeping Gill locked away like this inside my mind unnerves me.

“Then we need to clean all this up, hide his body.”

“I need to tell Villiam. We need to find out who did this.”

She bundles my cloak in her arms. “The officials—”

“I braved the officials for some coins. You think I won’t do it for Gill?” Again, I feel the urge to wipe my bloodstained hands, and Nicoleta holds my cloak out for me like a towel. My stomach flips. This is Gill’s blood covering me. Blood from the wounds that killed him.

“Then go, and be careful,” she says. “I’ll talk to Venera and Crown.”

I race out of the tent, half to put distance between me and the body and half in my urgency to find Villiam. As I leave, I faintly hear Nicoleta cry out, now that she’s alone with her own grief.

Outside, a few silhouettes clothed in the white glow of the torches and encased in smoke wander through the paths that wind across Gomorrah like veins. Many of them are patrons, judging by their taffeta dresses and patent shoes. They pause at each fork in the path and waver in between the hundreds of tents. The paths do not follow any logic, as they change each time Gomorrah travels to a new city.

No matter how fast I run, I cannot escape from the scene of Gill’s murder berating my mind. I try to calm myself, to prepare for speaking with Villiam. I know my father, and, despite the horror of these events, he will want facts, logic and composure in order to help. I’m not certain if I am capable of that now, but, still, I prepare my case.

   
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