Skyglass: Chapter 9

Fire, Fire, Fire

PHOENIX

“Doesn’t it piss you off?” I asked, as I crawled through the window into Zinn’s apartment. “Being a slave and all?”

He was balanced in a handstand, eyes peacefully shut as he meditated with needles in his face. He hadn’t even wavered when I’d blood-melted the bioplast windowpane to let myself in.

“No,” he said.

I sniffed. “I don’t believe you.”

His fingers shifted and flexed, but he didn’t move otherwise. The tiny needles were bound to silver threads so thin they drifted through the air, attached to a seed tray full of damp soil and brilliant seedlings. They were quivering slightly, surely reveling in the taste of his brain juice.

“I’m not asking you to believe me,” he said. “Meditation is mine. I’ve been doing it a long time–long before coming to Raith. If their mistreatment of elves bothered me, I never would have moved here. Anyway, the BBP gives me money–not much, but if I’m gonna meditate anyway I might as well get paid.”

I sat and hunched over to rest my chin in my palm. “You don’t feel like a slave if you choose it,” I muttered, musing, then added, “not that I care.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “And not that I care.”

I wrinkled my nose, wondering just how true that was. “You know what I’m going to do to my father?” I asked. It was the best bait I had.

“I have a guess, but go on,” he said.

“Kill him.”

“Ah. I thought so.” Zinn lowered himself gently to his moss-carpeted floor and pulled out the needles. He held out a bowl of withered leaf matter that still managed to smell salty and divine. “Kale chip?” he asked.

I took a handful and munched. “You seem…surprisingly unperturbed by this revelation. For a human. Elf. Whatever you are.”

He shrugged. “I trust you have your reasons. As long as you don’t drag Skyglass into it, I truly couldn’t care less.”

“Well, I can’t promise things won’t get messy, but I’m certainly doing it for the right reasons.” I gnawed at my cheek until blood flowed; I let a little dribble out of the corner of my mouth. “But I’m surprised at your bland attitude–you’re usually so sweetly peaceful. You drink tea!”

He ate another chip. “I’m not ‘peaceful,’ actually. I’m just an apath with a proclivity for quiet.”

“So that’s why you weren’t at the party?”

“Sure. That, and I was trying out a little experiment.”

“Oh? And was it successful?”

He smirked, just barely. “Well, you’re here. So, yes, it was.”

He lifted his chin and smiled faintly. “I like you, Phoenix. You threaten my calm and I find that very…attractive.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Who are you, Zinn? You’re always going around, hinting at a mysterious past. But do you even have one?”

“I do. Darker times,” he said simply. “But that was years ago. Neither here nor there.”

Darker times. How vague.

“But the past is like rocket fuel, sweetest Zinn.” I eyed him, because I knew there was more–he’d been giving me tender morsel hints for weeks now. Zinn smirked at me again, like he knew exactly what was going through my head, a thought I found utterly vile and squicky–no one was allowed inside my skull but me. But then he broke into soft, musical laughter, which was utterly not vile and squicky.

“I used to play with some other people before Skyglass. My bandmates and I all worked…questionable occupations. We played the Star-Dusted Ventriloquist quite often. Things happened. People died. Music and danger sort of went hand in hand at Mister Quist’s back then. Might still be that way.”

I tapped my chin thoughtfully, wondering what other murderous questions I could nag him with. “And you don’t like to talk about it?” I finally asked. “The memories are too bad? You have nightmares?”

His face went peaceful as pond water. “All the time. But I like them. Death, life, happiness, terror. Somehow it’s always felt…the same to me. What about you? Do you have nightmares, Phoenix?”

“I do,” I said. “But I think it’s just my bitterly persistent homesickness. At night, when I shut my stupid human eyes, I get stuck in recurring memories. It’s been especially nasty these past couple days. Since now I know for sure that I’m never getting any of that back, ever.”

“Sad,” he murmured, though he didn’t really sound sad.

“To be true,” I said, “I’m not really sure anymore. Something’s changed.” I pinched up my face, not quite sure how to voice this. It was only something I’d started thinking about after father number two’s escape. “Sure, I’m still gonna kill the rotting piss-sucker, but…he’s not my purpose anymore.”

“Then what is?”

“I’ve got no idea.” I cocked my head. “Do I have to have one?”

He lifted and dropped his shoulders. “Your decision.”

Next, he asked me to meditate with him.

The prospect didn’t exactly thrill me, but I knew that if I ever wanted “in his pants” as Devin had so innocently put it, I was going to have to give a little. Sitting still with an empty head wasn’t so torturous a sacrifice, was it?

It was. I growled as Zinn began describing some supposedly serene scene of rainy meadows and graceful waterfalls. I think he was intentionally pissing on me and my heat, dampening and irking my spirit; even my lips got bored, and I interjected when the first string of drool made its way to freedom. I opened my eyes.

“Zinn, this story of yours makes me want to stab myself in the bladder with a flaccid goat dick.”

He smiled sneakily, like that had been his plot all along.

“Why not let me do the calming,” I suggested, creeping toward him, making grabby motions toward his crotch.

“Right. With your hands.”

“Ha,” I scoffed. “Maybe. But wouldn’t your cock prefer to be soothed with this?” I gestured between my legs in a delightfully sexy and obscene manner.

“Right. You’re fire, Phoenix. I can’t imagine anything more calming than melted dick.”

I crept closer. “I’ve got special condoms for that. Keep ’em on me at all times.” I wasn’t even kidding.

He nudged me back with a foot. “Shoo, shoo. I’m actually curious to see how you do.” I gave him a look–a rather steamy, irresistible one–and he added, “You know what I meant.”

I sniffed. “Fine. My mother’s the sun. You humans used to worship her–before you blotted her from the sky, that is. Anyway, as her daughter, failure is against my nature.”

“Indeed,” he said, and settled back with his eyes shut.

I leaned against my elbows and closed my own eyes, letting memory take me.

“Death,” I began. “For a human like you, that death is synonymous with my mother. In the crinkly silver of a spacezip, you drift toward your end–a matchless end, because nothing else can consume you the way she can. And what’s more peaceful than that? Utter assimilation.

“Before she combusts you, this is what you see–” I hesitated before going on. I was just speaking in a stream, not sure where I was headed–but I felt pain, and thus heat, because it was the good kind of pain. So I knew I was headed the right way.

Maybe this meditation, this flow, wasn’t so bad. I didn’t think about my family often; our fire was the undying kind, which meant my loss got no easier with time. Such fire would consume me if I remembered it too much–and yet something had broken off in me, and I could feel its obnoxious free-float rising in my gullet. I was unlocking, prying myself open, eyes wide to a face full of boiling salt water. So I kept talking.

“You see girls. Well, you wouldn’t, Zinn–you’re human, and stupid, and have no taste for the obvious. But they are girls, shiny and agile as blazing dolphins, slick as ripples and ribbons. We whip out from our mother and hug you tight–to deliver you to her and to ourselves.”

My hands scrabbled together, gripping and kneading one another. I wasn’t sure what they were doing–imitating my lost heat-thrust, maybe? They were throbbing, that I knew; the jolt was familiar.

“We take you apart, we burn you. Then we take what’s been burned, and burn that, too. You are nothing now–we’ve rubbed you away with heat and friction, for, in the sun, we are seamless.” I shuddered and my voice dropped. “I was seamless. I was a million-billion ever-rotting trillion sisters, and one mother, and we were that one.”

I slammed my burning, beating hands into the floor. The focus and flow had touched something. Awakened it. I breathed deep and heavy through my nose.

Zinn said something, but I didn’t hear it because he wasn’t really there–not to me. The hurried blip-blip-blip of my chest’s heart coiled tight, the red muscle coiled tighter, then unspun. Unspooled.

I staggered up and crashed into a wall. I opened my eyes to slits: my reflection was warped in the window, but I could see my molten volcanic throat, the drifting ash of my clothing, mercury milking from my breasts, nebula haze between my legs.

My marrow went molten and my bones cobwebbed into liquid. Sulfur and ozone and meatchar and hot hot gunmetal were my perfumes, my vapor-sweat, my radiation. I wrecked myself against the wall, heard the fizzle of biomass. I coughed and screamed and cried, but there was no pain–only bliss and fire.

And then the world cracked and I slid, my heat and my girl-body overlapping, skidding apart and together in all dimensions, spinning in a sickle-cycle around a star-bright core until I stopped spinning and started thrumming. I was still, but still in the way only fire can be: never.

Flesh and fat and bone still contained me, but I was more now. I’d found me again–I’d reclaimed my fire-self.

Continued in Chapter 10.

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