SSCS 03: Installment 9 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 9 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“Have you dreamed what it’s meant to be already?” she asked.
I paused, feeling the weight of it behind me, then I shook my head, managing not to shudder. “Not…yet.” I didn’t tell her about the building-sinking Fish I could now picture so clearly, lurking half-done behind my left shoulder. Maybe they’d want to kill us all for this bell no matter what. Or maybe a gate facing the river could only be expected to welcome horrors.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 9: 19.1026
***
Jack turned out to be very nice when he arrived. At the same time, Lily said she had to get back to her work, and she left us to sort out getting the salve on my hands. By some mutual decision, we ended up out on the rail deck, where the sky was smudged and dirty, but we could see it and it cast a comfortable light. Overlaid with the smog, there was the taste of salt in the air today.
I perched in the corner of the rail-deck wall, a crumbled section there just right for an awkward seat, and Jack sat on the wall beside me with the pot of salve, dabbing it onto my blisters and cuts. I should have been wondering where some water and a rag were to clean them off first, or at least if he had any bandages with him or if I was just going to be standing around with goopy hands today. But instead I was closely watching his long, narrow fingers working gently around my shorter, blunter ones, staring at the cuts in my hands so that I wouldn’t stare at him.
He had straight, angular shoulders on a spare, articulate frame. That’s what I’d seen first when he’d come around the screen into my area. And that seemed to match his hands, which looked both delicate and iron strong at the same time. When I let my eyes stray an inch, I saw forearms that were thin, but ropey with muscle. When he’d greeted me, his teeth had – briefly – flashed very white in his dark face, and his eyelashes had looked very long when he’d frowned down at the state of my hands. I thought I’d gotten too old to blush in the presence of a pretty man, but apparently not. I wanted desperately to know if he was single, and knew just as well that I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“You’re working on the gate-bell,” he asked, screwing the lid on the salve and reaching into his tunic pocket for a roll of bandages.
I nodded my head, then, feeling stupid, cleared my throat. “Yes.”
“I knew the last girl who worked on it. Sometimes we both had our tea out here together. She liked adzuki bean dumplings, and sometimes she was late getting to the workshop because she said she had to ride the bus to the next stop where the shop that sold them was.”
“Maia?”
A rustling and he shifted, and I realized this time he’d nodded.
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No, but she seemed afraid of something. I don’t know if it was out there,” the nod I saw this time took in the whole city, “or with the work here. We’re all afraid sometimes, but… Lily says it was the same thing with the girl before her.”
Yet so little of the bell’s template was even started, was barely more than a dusty blank tablet, smooth and daunting. And I thought Elka had said she’d been the third. I pulled my hands away from Jack’s – he’d finished knotting the bandages – and tucked them in my lap awkwardly.
“Please don’t be afraid, too,” he said, though my head was down again so I only had his voice to guess what he was thinking when he said it. “You’ve already started. That’s the most important part.” Then after a moment. “Sorry, I have to get back to my work, too.” There was the scrape of his footsteps, and then he was gone.
A wind was on my face, blowing like a hot breath, and I scraped an ankle on the wall scooting back down. I hissed at the pain, but then smiled to see a bright dandelion poking out just next to my calf.
Suddenly, a fog of weariness wrapped itself around me, and I put a hand – still awkward – up to my breast, feeling my heart seem to go too slow for a moment, and I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was to the night.
I was still on the rail-deck, standing just as I had been, although my hands now were throbbing, and my lips felt cracked and dry. The breath of wind still blew against my cheek, but it was cooler now, and the taste of salt had grown thick and sharp, and been joined by a hard tang of copper. I’d drawn a deep, startled breath, and now gagged on it.
Forcing shallow breaths, I looked out over the wall, across the mostly dark city. Then used an unbandaged bit of the back of one hand to rub a single, small grit of sleep from the corner of one eye. I could see the canyons of the buildings even in the dark, could see the brighter strips where the smudged, under-lit sky shown through, in the city always a hazier indigo than true night.
But there was something faintly brighter on the street just beyond the factory wall, too. First it just seemed a paler shadow, but then as my eyes grew used to the night it seemed to glow a ghostly white. It passed in front of where I thought the door was, and then it turned a corner, and I saw it was a lion. I could even hear, very faintly, a rumbling growl.