Page 29 of As You Wake, Break the Shell

“We are going to get the game,” Lydia said, speaking the words like she was writing law.

“Okay, c’mon,” Smokey said, setting the bowl on the table and getting to their feet. “Lemme take a look.”

“I got it,” Lydia snapped.

“Just lemme look!” Smokey returned.

Cora stayed out of it. She absently continued to rub her temple as she glanced out one of the tall windows bubbled around the common room. The view of the city always looked so fucked in this kind of weather, and so distant, too. Flytown wasn’t connected to the Berth the same way the rafts were. It was built on a barge that could reposition itself around the lake as needed, no tugboats necessary. On rainy days, the dome that kept Flytown safe made the world beyond melt. City lights became distorted in the falling sheets of water, rendering them blurry and dreamlike. At night, the effect was even more surreal. It almost seemed like Flytown was all there was and the rest of the Berth was made up.

I’ve never met one of you before, Signy had said. Cora hadn’t known how to explain that the feeling was mutual. People always said I’ve never met one of you before to rorqual pilots, but it was true in the opposite direction, too. Cora had never met anybody who worked with plants, and she wanted to know more about the person who was maybe—maybe, she reminded herself sternly—maybe going to save her hide. But she also didn’t want to annoy Signy with too many questions, or get on her bad side. Signy seemed easy to rub the wrong way.

Cora reached for a bowl of spud chips—you could only eat so many peanuts in one go—and continued to think. Maybe that was the wrong take on Signy. Maybe it was more that she knew exactly what she was about, and if you didn’t fit into that, too bad for you. Or maybe she just didn’t like people much. Maybe she didn’t want to be chummy with strangers, which was understandable for somebody trading in illegal shit. Or, more likely, Cora was guessing and was totally wrong, because she didn’t know Signy at all.

She wanted to know her, though. She was surprised, a little, by how much she wanted that.

A shout from across the room broke her reverie. “Hey, Cora?”

She turned and saw Simon standing by the landline booth, holding the phone against his chest. “For me?” she called back. Had the phone been ringing? She hadn’t noticed.

Simon nodded. “Yeah, it’s Red.”

There were several admin staff who worked the front desk at the Flytown gatehouse, but Red was the king of that particular castle. He’d had that job since the beginning of time—he was forty, tops—and without him taking deliveries and manning the phones, the entire barge would instantly sink. Cora got to her feet and went over to the phone booth, a tad confused. She wasn’t expecting mail or visitors, and she couldn’t think of why else the gatehouse would call. She took the phone from Simon with a nod, pulling the coiled cord in with her as she stepped into the booth. “Hello?” she said.

“Cora,” Red replied in greeting. He had an incredible knack for sounding chipper and exhausted at the same time. “Your sister is here.”

A spike of adrenaline. A scramble as she pulled her cell phone from her pocket. She didn’t have any missed calls, but she also didn’t have signal. Shit. There weren’t many good reasons for Twig to be outside on a night like this. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” Red assured her. “Says she’s here for a visit.” He cleared his throat and spoke more quietly. “She does have a lot of stuff with her, though.”

In the span of a blink, her panic transformed. Cora craned her head back and closed her eyes. If Twig had gotten herself kicked out yet a-fucking-gain—“Okay,” Cora said, her eyes still closed. “Okay. I’ll come sign her in.”

She hung up the phone. She stared at it, steeled herself, then sighed as she walked to the elevator.

Chapter 15 Signy, Fortune

Barrier pants, barrier jacket, barrier gloves, breathing mask, boots. An awful lot of fuss to simply cross the street, but so it went.

Signy entered the shop’s closing code into the keypad, exited the airlock, and bisected the sopping walkway with head down and a quick stride. She entered another airlock—Mountain Hearth Family Apartments, the sign read. Once the machines inside rinsed away the full-body slick of toxic rain that had accumulated in the span of thirty seconds, she removed her mask, removed her outer gear, removed her boots, tucked all of these into a guest cubby, and headed up the stairs. (There was an elevator, but she knew better than to trust it.) The paint on the walls was peeling; the light from a ceiling lamp spasmed as the bulb burned low. Signy’s destination was the antidote to these depressing mundanities, as well as to the rain and the ferry she’d have to take later. Every Friday evening, she climbed these stairs, and with every step, she felt a little lighter.

Signy was halfway down the hall when the door to Otto’s apartment opened, but the person who exited wasn’t the one she had come to meet. It was Darcy, one of Otto’s flatmates, who was, as per usual, in both a fit of pique and full drag. Or, well, mostly full drag. His wig wouldn’t fit under the hood of his jacket, and you couldn’t wear heels in barrier boots, so these he carried in waterproof boxes beneath a sequined arm.

“Can’t chat, I’m so fucking late.” The man beneath the makeup was in his fifties, but the woman he was on his way to conjure—Cherry Cordial, when she took the stage—was an ageless spectacle. “I’m not supposed to be hosting tonight,” he bemoaned while in motion. “Jude’s sick.”

“You’ll be fine,” Signy said, stepping aside to let him pass. The cabarets at the Sugar Fix were not her thing—so loud, so packed, so drunk—but on occasion, she accompanied Otto there to cheer their friend on. Her confidence in that evening’s unplanned performance was genuine; Darcy was very, very good at making the crowd believe that for a few hours, they were in a venue far more glamorous than one of the oldest, most busted bars in Midtown. “You’re a better emcee anyway.”

Darcy tapped Signy on the nose with the tip of one of his sparkly nails as he hurried by. “This is why I like you,” he said. “Goddamn right I am.”

With that, Darcy blustered off into his night, and Signy continued on into her own.

The door to the apartment was unlocked, so she let herself in, as she often did. “Hello!” she called to announce herself.

A rich, weathered voice answered from the kitchen, accompanied by the smells of chopped herbs and simmering savories. “Come on in,” came the reply.

Signy did so. And with that, all the grime of the week washed away.

Apartment 206 was a masterwork, crammed with art from ceiling to floor. Every room was painted joyfully. Every shelf overflowed with ephemera. Paper garlands hung from the ceiling, concert flyers decked the wall above the glorious radio cabinet, colorful blankets rested in heaps on the sagging-yet-spotless furniture. There were plants filling the windowsills, cheap good luck charms dangling from the tops of doorways, little curios made from scrap fabric and trash tucked into every conceivable nook. It was a monument to its inhabitants, a collection of people who would not, could not surrender to the gloom outside.

Signy knew how Otto would greet her, for the script was always the same. The old man stood in front of the stove, stirring a pot with one hand, leaning on his cane with the other. He leaned his head toward her as she approached him, and he flashed a wrinkled smile. “Hello, honey,” he said, leaning in and kissing the air beside where his cheek touched hers. She returned the gesture simultaneously. She did this with nobody but Otto, and she’d never seen anyone but him do it at all. Like so many things Otto knew and did and talked about, it was a habit he’d picked up from a movie, and he’d adopted it purely because he thought it was cute.