The eyes of the Submerged followed the seaver when they entered the cells. Reihan had found it disconcerting during her first few years in the Asylum. She had been convinced that the patients were aware of their surroundings, cursed to sit as prisoners within their bodies as they silently screamed at their seaver caretakers. She had cried herself to sleep at night, feeling trapped in this role she’d been assigned, confined to the same rooms in the bowels of the Asylum day after day after day.
Everything in her world was faded. White walls, steel chairs and desks, and rust trickling down from the pipes that rattled when the seaver upstairs were heating water. And everything was so quiet, especially on the lower floors of the Asylum. Until she re-emerged to the surface where things were suddenly loud, where a patient might inadvertently create a manifestation, where a seaver might collapse from poor maintenance, or where family members might pointlessly demand the seaver caretakers cure their relatives.
She didn’t think about it much these days, but when she entered one of the patients’ rooms, she still felt a little uncomfortable for the first few moments and found herself searching for movements in her charges’ eyes. She busied herself by flicking through the paper on her clipboard and dragging a chair over to Alexander.
Phillippe’s brother stared at her, his eyes bauble-like and flickering with the light from the wall sconces. He had been sitting in his chair since being placed there in the morning, and he would probably sit there until the night shift put him to bed.
One time, thirty years ago, all the Submerged had moved in anticipation of an earthquake that had almost torn the city’s rock face in two. They had risen in a single, horrifying motion and pressed their faces against the nearest exit. The earthquake had spared the Asylum but ripped many other houses into the depths beneath the cloud sea. Reihan had been so scared watching the patients suddenly move that she had cowered in the corner of the cell, content to die if only the squeezing in her chest came to rest.
But there was nothing unusual about Alexander, so Reihan relaxed after the moment it took for experience to become routine.
“I am your caretaker Reihan”, she introduced herself, the same as she did every time. It was protocol.
“I am going to perform a standard observation on you. Please shake your head now if you do not consent to this.”
No reaction, same as always.
“All right then.”
Health checks first. She took Alexander’s hand and felt for his pulse, feint but present.
She counted out a minute, then two. All within normal bounds.
She felt for fever, then felt for lumps. Nothing.
She filled out the relevant boxes on her clipboard and reached for her candle, normally strapped to her belt. She cursed when she realised that she had forgotten it, most likely in her room, half burned down after spending her allotted free time reading. She could walk up the four flights of stairs and get it. It would be no trouble at all and it wasn’t as if she had many appointments to keep. But still.
She narrowed her eyes and raised her right hand. A small white flame appeared between her fingers, blinding in its brightness. Reihan allowed herself a small smile.
Seaver couldn’t talk about their ability to manifest, not even to each other. The humans would almost certainly go on one of their famed killing sprees if they discovered that their peacekeepers, their carefully designed army of servants, had the same abilities they did. Even if their manifestations were a flicker in the dark compared to the inferno humans were capable of conjuring. And even if the seaver had lived in comfortable servitude for a long, long time, content to protect those that feared and hated them. Still, it wasn’t safe to talk about. Seamus had told her that time and time again.
Alexander’s pupils narrowed in response to the light, but the stimulus did not increase the rate at which he was blinking. He didn’t even focus on the flame, looking straight past it, straight at Reihan’s face.
“Are you dreaming in there?”, the seaver asked, feeling self-indulgent.
No response. Of course not.
“Do you know that your brother comes here to ask about you? He’s irregular, but he always returns, no matter how long it’s been.”
She smiled again.
“That’s pretty rare. Most people forget as soon as they can. So, Phillippe must force himself to come back even if it pains him. Or maybe he does it because it pains him.”
She shrugged.
“Maybe that’s just a stupid human thing. But in a city where you can have anything you want, it means something that he chooses you, don’t you think?”
She laughed.
“Look at me, talking to the walking dead.”
Alexander smiled in turn, and Reihan’s heart sank. It slid down her throat, dropped to the bottom of her stomach, then fell through the wood of the chair and shattered on the stone floor of the Asylum. Its ice-shaped pieces rose, light blue and sparkling, then fit themselves into the white crevices of the walls, now alight with new interest, twisting into a collage of smiling faces.
All were inhabitants of the asylum. Reihan recognised them from her daily rounds. Colours screamed in the in-between of eyes and mouths and noses, then the faces folded into paper dolls that began to encircle Reihan, edging closer with each step. She felt glued to her chair, spellbound by Alexander’s suddenly expressionate eyes, her hands iron-gripped around her clipboard.
The paper army wore high-heeled, clicking shoes whose rhythm echoed in the small room as if it were a hall with tall columns and high ceilings. And just as Reihan held the thought, just for a moment, the walls yawned, creaking with effort as space and time crawled with a lust for expansion. Stain-glass windows appeared on both sides of the hall, alight with the shine of a cold moon, soft piano music, and the twittering of birds that filled the stone-graven air.
The paper people still encircled Reihan, edging closer as the hall continued to stretch outwards. She somehow knew what would happen if they touched her, so she cowered further into herself, shaking on her chair.
“Don’t move.”
The voice was disembodied, fluttering above her like a moth. Reihan recognised it as Phillippe’s voice, and part of her relaxed, even as madness threatened to pull her under.
“No problem”, she pressed out between gritted teeth, “Now what?”
“Let me handle it.”
She turned her head just a little. An androgynous young man hung from the ceiling, suspended on a strip of moonlight. Straight, black hair grazed the tops of his shoulders, and his bright yellow eyes were coated in shimmering silver. He wore an open suit jacket that resembled peacock feathers, revealing skin that was coated in goosebumps. Something about his expression, both strained and vulnerable, was so familiar to Reihan that she wanted to jump up and run to him.
She didn’t, of course. That would be idiotic.
A small flame started near the circle’s edge, and the stink of burning paper shot into Reihan’s nose. She inhaled sharply.
“Stop!”, she called, “These might be the actual patients. Your fire could kill them.”
The fire grew smaller, but it didn’t entirely disappear.
“If they touch you, you’ll die”, Phillippe’s voice said softly, and the sound felt so close to her ear that her skin prickled.
“Not necessarily. I’m immune to manifestations.”
“It’s not worth the risk. If they don’t kill you, they’ll kill my brother.”
“You wouldn’t say that if Alexander was one of them.”
Alexander, who still sat opposite her, still with that strange smile on his face.
Phillippe cursed quietly, and the fire fell to embers. A few endless seconds stretched between them, and Reihan felt a breeze as the paper came closer and closer. One of the figures stretched his paper hand towards her and tried to bury itself inside her skin. The attack was repelled by her resistance to manifestations, and the dancer returned to the circle for now, but its touch left a streak of blood on her cheek. She whimpered and muttered words she later couldn’t remember. Phillippe raced across the ceiling to get a different view of the paper army, and she could see his glass shoes reflecting the glowing mosaic dome growing above them.
“Try to contain them within something”, she said, breathless, feeling unable to release any more air, any more loudness into this cursed hall.
She heard Phillippe mutter an affirmation, then a sudden gust of wind picked up and ripped the paper dolls upwards as if the hand of a resurrected god had commanded them to follow. One of them almost grazed her cheek once more, and she could feel her skin peel in response, threatening to slice itself open in mere anticipation.
The dolls were far above now, dancing beneath a chandelier that sparkled like the sun, each marvelling at their reflection and smiling so brightly that she almost believed they were real.
Then, a gigantic leather folder appeared and snatched the dolls up. As quickly as it had arisen, the paper became a memory of its dancing self.
The folder fell, fast and large, towards Reihan and Alexander, but before reaching either of them, it shifted into smallness and grew feathery, white wings. It fluttered, disoriented momentarily, then flew into Phillippe’s arms, who lowered himself onto the stone floor.
“Close your eyes”, Phillippe warned, and Reihan obeyed without question.
She felt him step closer, and his fingers almost came to rest on her cheek, where her skin felt irritated with the echo of the paper’s touch. But the closer Phillippe’s fingers came to her wound, the less painful were its remnants.
“Fascinating”, he whispered and wiped away the blood.
“Can I open my eyes again?”, Reihan snapped, despite the gratitude she felt.
“Hm? Oh, yes.”
Reihan did so and found herself inside Alexander’s cell once more. It was largely the same as before, bar some inconsistencies in the wall structure that she knew her own manifestations would soon rearrange.
Alexander’s strange smile had disappeared. Reihan ran her hands through her thick, white braids and groaned.
“These visitors, I swear. We always tell them to get their emotions under control when they come here. All the psych evals we run before letting them into the cells, and still.”
“Well, staying calm can be rather difficult when –”
“Yes, yes, yes, everything is difficult for you lot. If I catch whoever caused this bloody manifestation, I’ll throw them from the city bannisters with my own two hands. That’ll give them a reason to be scared of the seaver.”
Phillippe chuckled at her outburst, but his eyes remained serious.
“Is that why the dolls were so focused on you? Because their manifester is scared of seaver?”
“Scared, obsessed, hateful… who knows. These things always go for us.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“And it’s a serious offence each and every time.”
“What if it was my manifestation?”, Phillippe asked, his voice extremely soft, “What if I lost control?”
His hair was even shinier than usual, Reihan thought, and the silver on his eyelids looked as beautiful as starlight. She wondered if he had teleported here from a job.
“It wasn’t. Your freak-outs would be more imaginative, I reckon.”
“Do you now? Do we know each other so very well?”
He winked.
“Go on, then, seaver. What would my despair manifestation look like?”
Reihan shrugged.
“It would be even more grand and striking than this, all colours and sparkles, and oh so terribly overwhelming. But its centre would be hollow because you’re not angry at me or anyone else. You’re angry at yourself. So, the manifestation would collapse in on itself, and every shining image would crumble into dust.”
Her voice turned a little wistful.
“And, of course, even the dust you leave behind would be beautiful. Stardust that tears the world apart, and we’d all be too enraptured to notice.”
She coughed, embarrassed, as Phillippe’s eyes measured her intensely.
“Or something like that.”
“That is horrifyingly astute. Well done”, Phillippe responded, his voice strained.
“Don’t take it personally. I don’t really get people. It’s just that you humans are all the same.”
“Hard not to take that personally, Reihan.”
“Well, try harder then.”
She grumbled and finally made herself get up from her chair. Her legs shook, but she stayed upright by holding on to the backrest.
“Also, you came here to save your brother. You’d hardly be lucid enough to do that if you were the one to cause the despair manifestation.”
“A compelling point”, Phillippe replied, smoothing out the skin around his mouth.
“Speaking of, how did you know to come here? Not to appear ungrateful or anything.”
“Of course not.”
Phillippe’s voice betrayed some amusement, and he winked.
“On the outside, this has been happening for the best part of a day. I was informed by the Enforcers, as were all the relatives of the other inmates. Given that, I’d say your shift is well and truly over, seaver.”
“A day? Ugh, I hate it when they mess with time.”
“Oh yes. Gives me the worst stomachache. One time a client of mine insisted that we spend the best part of a week –”
He interrupted himself.
“Never mind.”
The seaver cleared her throat.
“So, you decided to swoop in here, the grand saviour?”
“Well, the Enforcers certainly weren’t about to. They said the manifestations needed to quieten down before they were willing to step in.”
“Ah. How reassuring.”
The Enforcers had a division of experts at ‘fixing’ manifestations, that is, to scale them back to a level of perceived normality. If those guys hadn’t wanted to enter the Asylum, Reihan shuddered to think of the chaos the manifestation had caused. She reckoned they’d be fishing winged tortoises out of the privies for weeks.
“What a bloody mess”, she repeated instead of thanking Phillippe, then gestured at the folder that still sat on his shoulder, its winds flapping uselessly, “How the hell are we going to get our patients out of there?”
“I can try to restore them”, Phillippe offered. He probably could, Reihan thought for a moment. The way he had entered and transformed the manifestation in Alexander’s room was nothing short of brilliant, becoming one with the shifting realities as if he was a grain in a sandstorm. But instead of scaling back the manifestation, he had manipulated it from within, marking him as a creator and not a deconstructer. Reihan started to understand why he had been employed at the Brothel of Transformative Curiosities and not as an Enforcer or a Government official.
Reihan shook her head.
“No. If you get something wrong, we’ll be in real trouble with the relatives, should they deign to show up here.”
She sighed.
“I suppose we could try to get an Enforcer and show them old pictures. Or we could ask someone from the victims’ families to counter the transformation and hope their manifestation abilities hold up to the test.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then it’ll be their fault, not ours.”
He huffed.
“I have visited this place often enough to know the patients here by heart. I could restore them better than anyone else, Reihan, and you know that. Don’t you think it would be good practice for –”
“Yes”, she agreed, “I do.”
Phillippe gave her a haughty look.
“Humour me then, seaver. Why should I not make use of the immense powers I obtained? Do you really think the patients need protection from me when they’d all be dead without my interference?”
Reihan sighed.
“This rule doesn’t just exist to protect the patients. It exists to protect you.”
“But –”
“No. I know you’d do a good job. You might even do a perfect job. But people invariably look for mistakes in restorations, and they might even subconsciously create flaws where they didn’t exist before. And this is especially true with the restoration of someone they love. Now, if you were an Enforcer, they couldn’t do anything to you, but with you volunteering –”
She sighed.
“Rules like these exist to save us from humanity’s worst impulses. And believe me, you don’t want to get caught up in those.”
Phillippe opened his mouth to retort, but Reihan interrupted him.
“Phillippe, please. You just saved my life, and I don’t want to see you punished for it.”
Phillippe stared at her.
“I can take care of myself”, he replied, his voice strained now.
Reihan nodded, and before he could flinch with surprise, she wrapped her arms around him in a quick embrace.
“Thank you for saving me”, she whispered, “I won’t forget it.”
“I won’t either”, Phillippe said, equally quiet, then pressed his face into her shoulder, “Reihan.”
You can pre-order The Travelling City here. Release date: April 21st.
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