ODDER STILL

CHAPTER ONE
The Other Voice

 We are all a complement of things:
of wants, of needs, of memories.
Past and future built into a single moment.
We are many made one.

THE PARASITE FUSED TO my neck appears dormant.

Parasite.

That’s the best word for the immortal, fungal creature my homeland calls ancients. When Lilias chained me here, she rattled off her own name for it—an aurora. The pretty term slips in and out of her conversation as she sits at the wall phone beside this little house’s curtained window, absently tapping the knife at her hip. Her gaze bounces to me, eyes fixing on the parasite like she’s imagining what it might look like severed from my neck. Or perhaps what my neck might look like severed from my body.

But I fear the mess of black that clings to me like a second skin more than I fear my old blackmailer turned kidnapper. She’s mortal, predictable: all anger and impulse and ambition. This parasite, on the other hand, has already defied everything known of its kind. When Lilias first claimed it as her pet, weeks ago and hundreds of miles south, it should have done as every other aurora has and latched to a nonsentient host to quietly begin producing the ignits our societies use as fuel. Instead, it decided to cling to me: a human. And for now, it only clings, not trying to wind itself into my body and seize control of it the way the creatures do to their usual hosts. Not yet, anyway.

I just have to remove it before then.

Somehow.

I give my chain an experimental tug. The hearth it’s locked to holds firm, and my cuffs slide across the raw spot where they’ve rubbed through my fishnet gloves. The red sores make the skin around them look a dustier brown by contrast, as though the warm undertones of my mother’s Murk heritage are being drawn out. There will be no orchid on her grave this year, no wine lifted in her memory. No wine at all. After the nauseous, anxious hell that was my first week in Lilias’s brig, maybe I should be glad to be rid of the built-up alcohol in my system, but right now I would eagerly trade my health for the joyous release of a drink.

Lilias glances up from her lopsided stool. The frizz of her bright orange hair swirls a little, barely visible in the gloomy morning light. She twirls the telephone cord around one finger like she might yank it in frustration.

“I don’t care if we have to kill him in order to remove it,” she hisses into the box. “I did not spend a whole damn year traipsing across the South to abandon this just because you’re squeamish. Besides, he’s a worthless recluse I set up as a cartel figurehead in Manduka when I realized he knew the region well enough to find me an aurora, and even they didn’t want him. You’re the one who said a single decent life is nothing if the population suffers, and this fool’s life was, at best, a wreck of his own making.”

My own making, my ass.

My mother’s early death was not my own making. The way her homeland, the Murk, rejected me was not my own making. Neither was Lilias bursting in, making me work for her by threatening the humble, rural life I had scrounged for myself just beyond the Murk’s edges, nor the chaos and betrayal that followed. The way I tore the parasite from its home as a bargaining chip to let me return to mine . . . that was my fault, even if it had been on Lilias’s orders.

A lot of good it did, now that the very thing Lilias wanted from me is stuck to my neck.

The rap, rap, rap of her nails fills the quiet.

“Fine, I’ll come to Maraheem,” she snaps. “But I’m leaving him in Falcre for now—he’s safer here at my brother’s house. I’ll return for him once everything’s arranged.” She slams the receiver down so hard the whole phone box creaks, her cheeks aflame beneath her freckles.

I give her a smile that’s all teeth. “Trouble?”

Lilias curls her lip. “Fuck yourself, Rubem.”

“This is your brother’s house, then? Shame he’ll never be coming back for it.” It’s a terrible sort of consolation, knowing that if I have no one, at least she’s in a similar boat.

She storms toward me. Her fist rises. If I dodge, she’ll throw two in its place. I take the punch across my cheekbone. Beneath the aching black and white stars, the door opens and shuts again.

I let my pain stoke the tiny fire in my chest, making it sharp and bright: get rid of the parasite, get home, never get mixed up in anything ever again. The thought seems to pulse through my face along with the throbbing. My neck twitches.

The parasite warms, its rock-hard exterior going soft as silk. My heart slams into my throat, and I twist my head, peeling back the dirty fabric of my collar. A rainbow gleams across the parasite’s black form.

It brings a flicker of hope. If the creature is finally awake, then maybe, just maybe, I can nudge it free of my skin. Maybe what I’ve been calling a parasite has been as trapped as I, awaiting its chance to escape with no Lilias to claim it. I prod it gently, trying to push the lip of it up.

Its dark, rainbow-strewn body peels back. It feels weak beneath my touch, each action shaky. The colors dancing along its body flicker.

“Hold on there, little friend. You can do this,” I mutter at the parasite, employing the offhanded tone I take with my pet crocodile, and apply more pressure, trying to tug it away by force.

It seizes up, and its temperature jumps between scorching and freezing, as though I’ve short-circuited it. I let it go. It calms, becoming a subtle warmth against my skin, its colors faded but not gone. I feel as worn as the creature looks, but I force my shoulders to relax, releasing the tension that has built in my collarbones.

“What do you need, hmm? How can I help?” I keep my voice composed, but my heart wants to scream until the windows of this small house shatter.

It brushes against my skin, a touch I feel all the way into my bones, as though it’s prodding the place where my despondency lives. No words come from it, nothing I can discern as speech, but there’s a twinge of desire I know from every creature I’ve saved, that aura of desperation, of hopeless, exhausted need. After everything I’ve been through, all the betrayal and abandonment, I should be skeptical of this creature, this parasite. It’s no animal—I can’t apply to it the simple laws of trust that my pets follow. But if there’s a creature in need of my help, how can I say no?

As though the thought opens a chink in my defenses, the parasite leaps in. Its presence turns intimate, like a foreign tissue wrapping around my organs, a rock thrown into my river, an alien leaf in my canopy. My energy snaps and wanes. A rush of dizziness turns my vision blotchy, and the fever beneath the parasite rages again.

I scream.

The parasite unravels two tendrils from its body, long and flexible. They lunge for my wrist cuffs and take hold. I yank my hands toward my lap, but the parasite’s touch is like a vise.

“Now, now see here, we don’t even have a safe word.” I give a faint laugh, but the crude cover-up for my despair holds no humor.

The parasite’s tendril arms skulk along my cuffs, and it slides into the locks. A pulse runs through the creature’s entire body. The lock clicks open.

I stare at it, caught in the pounding of my heart and the slow retreat of the parasite’s tendrils back into its body. The flourish of color within it fades. My vision rights itself, my fatigue trickling away. The cuffs fall from my wrists and clatter on the floor. This time when I touch the parasite, there’s awe in my fingertips—awe in the proper sense: the kind of fear that blooms bright and settles like a blanket.

“I feel as though I should thank you, but really, we’re not at that point in our relationship yet,” I mutter, releasing some of my dread into the brittle words.

The parasite hasn’t left me. It hasn’t left my skin, and it hasn’t left my mind either. Its existence sits there like a shadow in my periphery.

An odd spark of frustration tickles my chest, followed by a memory three decades old, the voice of my mother whispering me away from danger: Go, Ruby. Run.

What the fuck.

But the recollection still springs me into motion. I set my chains to the side, pull my feet under me, and creep toward the door. My legs tingle from lack of use, but I move with the same uncanny silence that’s plagued me all my life. The wood doesn’t creak beneath me, and the beads ornamenting my braids slip soundlessly by each other. My dark clothes don’t even rustle.

I snatch Lilias’s discarded flask off the stool.

No hesitation: I down the whiskey in one go. It burns my mouth, and I cringe as it hits my throat, but it’s better than nothing. For a few minutes, the world will look a bit brighter, my future a bit kinder. I need that right now, with my nerves turning my melancholy into anxiety and back again, like some terrible cycle that digs deeper into my chest with each round.

Another tinge of foreign frustration fires me up to the front door. I smack the parasite, resulting only in a flicker of pain that runs down my entire spinal column. But it’s right: I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here and find someone who can pull the parasite out of me. Cautiously, I slip outside.

My hooded trek here in the early morning couldn’t have prepared me for this. Lilias must have dragged me hundreds of miles north of the Murk—thousands, perhaps. This foreign sky stretches too wide and vacant and grey after my lifetime of thick, green canopies; of blazing sunlight and monsoon darkness. It stares down onto a tiered, cobblestoned town surrounded by green hills and a wide bay. The whole place looks entirely uninhabited. A sharp breeze blows a mud-matted flier past me and whips salt through my hair. The swish of the paper against the street devolves into a silence so deep I can taste it.

Four streets below, the steep hillside turns into a jetty. I spot Lilias there, far enough away that her body is a pale blur as she pulls off her clothing and dives into the bay. I stand, frozen. She fails to reappear. Maraheem, she’d said—she was going to a place called Maraheem. Maybe it’s some kind of afterlife for the drowned. But the idea that she might be able to hold her breath long enough to swim to the pair of fishing boats just off the coast is far less preposterous. And far less funny.

I follow the downward curve of the road, each step as quiet as the abandoned town. My path twists and turns toward the sea; elegant, cobblestoned bridges and tight, tunneling underpasses sprouting between the grey-stone buildings. The sign for the inn hangs lopsided. Stacked furniture huddles beneath sheets, some making piles so human I flinch at the sight.

My fingers ache with tension, and I flip Lilias’s empty flask into the air as I walk. It’s not as light as a coin nor as finely weighted as a pocketknife. On the fifth toss it slips between my fishnet-gloved palms and clatters across the empty street. Nothing else moves. No signs of life whatsoever.

I retrieve the flask and slip it in my pocket. Tucking my hands into my thin vest for warmth, I turn down an underpass. Papers hang on one side—advertisements, notices, a few warnings—but two specific fliers dominate them. The first must have once had vibrant colors, with the phrase Maraheem has never been brighter bolded across the top. The same Maraheem where Lilias is heading. The second flier is a symbol of a skull and crossbones behind a single word: contaminated.

It makes my wind-chilled skin feel sweaty. I rub my hands on my shirt in a vain attempt to relieve the sensation. As I keep moving, I pick out other contamination signs on the open streets, along with more faded-out fliers in the shape of the Maraheem one. Three distinct versions arise, each more aggressive than the last: Jobs with forward momentum for all, and Don’t miss out on the power of an ignation-fueled society, and finally, Come while you still can. That must have ended with the most hostile motivation for the townspeople to move—the threat of contamination. All of the fliers twist now on the ocean breeze, the only ghosts of this forgotten, corpseless town.

The parasite tingles eerily against my neck.

Deep in a stairwell, shielded from wind and rain, I find a brighter, cleaner version of the final Maraheem poster—one so fresh I can almost make out the full text. The word aurora catches my eye, paired with an indication of research and a business named Findlay Incorporated. Someone in Maraheem knows about the auroras on a deeper level than I do. If I can avoid Lilias and find this Findlay Inc.—if she isn’t also looking for them—maybe they can help me.

I step out of the stairwell onto a boardwalk rimmed by abandoned shops and looking out at a little beach. A large seal bobs in the swallows, black spots pebbling its grey coat. It scuffles onto the sand. Its whiskers rustle and its head lifts, revealing a gleam of metal in the folds beneath its neck: a brooch like the one Lilias never takes off. A rainbow glow swirls through the brooch’s silver curves, almost identical to the way the parasite shines.

The parasite stirs against my neck, focusing on that rainbow light so firmly that I can’t look away. My body turns toward the seal. I fight the motion as soon as I make it, a twinge of panic coursing through me. But the parasite’s interest in the brooch overwhelms my alarm, spilling into me, through me, until I’m just as intrigued as it is.

Without meaning to, I leap from the boardwalk.

I cross the beach, each stir of the sand beneath my feet making no sound. The animal seems not to notice my approach. Up close, I can see the differences in its brooch’s design, a crown where Lilias’s curls like flower petals. It continues to radiate an aurora-like glow, casting a shifting spectrum of color against the seal’s fur.

I feel the parasite’s confusion well. It burns against my neck, and its desire sweeps through me. I have to see that brooch up close. I have to hold it. I have to—

No, no I don’t.

But before I can stop myself, I’m tackling the seal, snatching its brooch away. With the gleaming jewelry in my hands, the odd emotions fade. My arms shake and my stomach turns. Did I just—did the parasite just—

The seal releases a startled bark, and ripples of color shoot along the brooch like an electric shock, mirrored by a similar storm that rolls over the animal. Fur swirls off it, skin sinking inward and legs spilling out, until there’s a chubby human in its place. Or, perhaps more accurately, the seal is a human. A stunned human staring vaguely toward me with cloud-grey eyes that don’t quite focus. Freckles coat his face, and his red hair flares back from his forehead in waves that curl up around his ears.

“Well.” I swallow. “That wasn’t what I expected.”