good children get nothing
She has heard things about this girl. Copper-skinned, they call her, and say under their breath that she has eyes like blue opal. That her build is as sharp as the edge of a knife. Beautiful. Dangerous. Snakelike, in more ways than one. The stories vary in some ways, but not many. Is her necklace a branch or a bone?
Anyway, O wants to meet her.
It’s been a long time since she’s visited Denocte. A long, long time. Nothing about it feels familiar at first. It is far too hot, for one, not in the dry, seething way of the desert, but a humid, oppressive warmth built up from far too many bodies pressed far too close together. There are too many streetlights; this deep in the city, she can barely see the stars. The air is too heavily scented, thick with the perfumes of flowers and alcohol. There are too many people. Too many bustling crowds. Too much of this, and this, and this and this. Too much everything everywhere.
The moon is a thin sliver in the sky, like the curve of a scythe. O slinks through the crowded streets and counts the noises of her hooves on the cobblestone: one-two, one-two, one-two. She does not know quite where to look, does not know quite who to ask.
For the first time in a long time she thinks of her father, and how that smell that has so overtaken her is really the smell of him—jasmine, tobacco smoke, warmth not quite like the sun-warmth of the desert. And now she looks and realizes that he is everywhere: in the air strung with the songs of harps and violins, in the stained-glass windows, the happy, laughing eyes of the fire-breathers on the streets, the chest-deep drumbeats rumbling through the streets. The lantern-glitter on the cobblestone. The crackling energy in the air, almost but not quite electricity.
For the first time in a long time she thinks of her father, and her heart hurts.
Her mother is here, she knows. And Aghavni, hidden away somewhere in the alleys, silent and deadly like the spider she is. One of them must know something.
O does not knock on the door of the Scarab or wait to be let in. She has come by often enough that the patrons recognize her, that the guards at the door now look at her with uneasy recognition instead of complete and total suspicion. So she does not knock—just pushes her way through the narrow doors, squeezing through the muscled bodies of the men on the steps, choosing to disregard the way the watch her, like a pack of wolves following a limp deer.
Oh, she thinks—smirks—you have no idea.
As always, the ground-level room smells like smoke and expensively scented oils. It is dimly lit and full of sound—music, laughter, growls. As always, it is packed with gamblers and royals with their masks on and the servants in the sapphire blue suits, and O surveys them with one carless, half-narrowed eye as she climbs the carpeted steps to the second floor. Slowly, the patrons become smaller and smaller, until they could be quashed beneath her one foot. Slowly O leaves them behind and moves toward the lounges.
Through the doorway: music. Hoofsteps softened by plush velvet. There is the low murmur of voices, even more numerous than usual.
Perhaps, she thinks, today is the chosen day. Perhaps every sinner in Novus has chosen tonight to come and confess their lives to all the other sinners. Perhaps today she will be lucky enough to find the thing she wants to find.
Before entering the lounge, O carefully dons a set of sapphire blue robes. Covers her face with a blue silk mask. She wears a sharp, sweet smile, like a good girl. She keeps her axe tucked away at her hip.
She moves toward the copper-skinned girl at the edge of the room, and pretends not to be nauseated at the sight of Solterra’s ruination, sitting just across from her and shifting like quicksilver in the faint light.
