The summer Zora turns 25, she’s finally instructed to destroy her family’s livelihood. The order — it helps to call it an order — comes like most things from Maeda, not exactly a dream but simpler described as one. It’s time. And one does not argue with Maeda; no one sworn to any of the Whisperers argues. A few days later, the first letter arrives, half-coded in conspiracy. Zora does her part, schedules the time off of work, pays her third of the rent early, and writes to her family that she’s coming home. It’s the second occasion in seven years.
No one quite knows what to make of her, not that they ever did, but there are hugs and well-intentioned questions and a spot at a cousin-cluttered supper table. Her arrival is some excuse for celebration. Zora helps with the dishes and the children, none of whom remember her. Her eldest brother’s up to four. She used to quite object to children — she was always better friends with the dogs, growing up — but Maeda’s fond of young ones and it’s rubbed off a bit, and Zora’s gotten a lot more political. The current dogs are wary of her; they’re harder to fool than people.
That night, over games and humid-sticky cigar smoke, the evening conversation turns to work. The euphemisms haven’t changed, hidden under shipments and rates and contract batches. The last resupply from the farlands has been rowdy, injuries are up. Zora’s father and uncle and the woman who isn’t blood but has always been there are rehashing a fight about expanding: good staff’s impossible to find, the main building’s getting so crowded, the demand’s always there, they’d need a second set of processors and they just paid off the first ones. Zora sidles into their card game and, once she remembers the house rules, wins four straight hands. “When’d you get so ruthless?” her uncle asks, shaking his head.
“I’ve got to keep up. My roommate once won a sky balloon off an aviator,” Zora says, which is not the wildest of those stories but is a family-safe offering, and twinges over saying something true, about someone who matters.
The cousin closest in age starts to shuffle. “If you ever want to give up filing reports,” she says, based on Zora’s technically true but deeply misleading synopsis of her current life, “we always need floor managers. You’d keep everyone right on time.”
“I like where I’m at, thanks,” Zora says, and there’s a round of laughs.
“You never had the stomach for it,” her father says, in jovial reminiscence. “Too squeamish, you’d rather have papers and quiet. Can’t see where you got that from.”
Zora catches herself tracing the scar down her left leg, her mark from Maeda under the pants fabric. “Yeah,” she agrees, and looks down to the card dealing.
***
Her family tried to get Zora into the business in all kinds of ways, growing up. It’s good, honest work, she heard — Zora’s mother had fled from a central crime syndicate legacy, Zora learned late in her teens, hence the emphasis on “honest.” It’s not pretty, maybe, butchery for science, but it takes skill and coordination and it matters, for medicine and cursebreaking and study of fae intrusion. Personally, Zora’s been saved twice by fae derivatives. She had an expensive infection-breaker administered at age eight; she remembers the needles, thinner than the ones in the plant. The other was Maeda’s, clinging in the wound the night they carved her armpit to ankle and called her theirs — not that the Whisperers are clearly fae (it’s complicated), not that Maeda wasn’t the one to endanger her in the first place (they were). For now, Zora’s doubly alive, with a thick black scar that draws blood dark as ink and the certainty that gifts should not be taken.
***
It’s strange to be back. They’ve lived in this same house most of Zora’s life, an old place with a fenced garden and festival kitchen half-open to the temperamental seasons. A door’s been replaced here, furniture rearranged there; her old room is back to being a proper nursery, soft toys taken out of cedar-lined chests. Things are different, similar, painful. Her parents snip at each other, loving and complicated, and the chickens out back fight over burnt cheese grits from breakfast and are feral as ever, indifferent to Zora’s plotting sabotage. The salt’s kept in the same red pot, lid still cracked. Her father still keeps his keys in the bowl by the door. The older children get walked to a new school, much closer. Her girl-cousins and brother’s wife, frank now in comparison to adolescent gossip, try to ask her about men, and Zora spends an entertaining half-hour pretending that she doesn’t know any. The dirty laundry piling in the washcloset smells of bleach, fear, and that electric-blue musk she’s learned is magic going rancid.
The town’s grown since she left, new industry and slapped-up housing in what used to be fields. It wasn’t small before, but it’s resembling the overflowing central cities more by the year. There’s a proper market square now, with a fountain, and fresh-cobbled paths lined with sunbaked shrubbery. Zora wanders, hat shoved awkwardly over her crown-braids, out of place for her complete disregard to central fashions. The houses of old classmates are gone, the dance hall twice the size, the bookshop that sourced her revelations subsumed into the temple next door.
“Excuse me, miss!” someone calls, behind her as she moves into a random sidestreet. Zora turns with an apology at her throat, and feels it wither as her habitual personality, not her childhood discomfort, finds something to latch onto. The older man is leaning against a shaded wall, something metallic wound in his fingers, and he’s marked. Zora can’t tell immediately by who, but she’s certain. He grins, crinkling between his eyes. They have the same automatic glance to the passerby oblivious to something so obvious. This close to the Divide, the public doesn’t tend to suspect at all.
She sidles back, and takes her own lean on the wall. “I beg your pardon, have we met?”
“I believe you’ve corresponded with a young colleague of mine,” he says, and the context helps with the specific: a slight sheen to the fine hairs of his skin, the dark at his gums. He’s sworn to Kalanthen.
“Jem’s been excellent,” Zora says. “I’d swear they’ve planned for everything.”
“Eager to be trusted, I’d say,” he replies, and gestures to her with what she’s finally identified as a pocketwatch on a chain. Age doesn’t always match with how long someone’s been marked, but he’s probably been with Kalanthen for decades; they’ve aged him sharp and songlike. “We’ll see what you’re made of tomorrow, though.”
“Right.”
He regards her, and she turns it into a staring contest. He raises his eyebrows, and blinks first. He doesn’t need her child’s games. “Oh, what is your name, Maeda?”
“Zora Hirundon,” she replies, a bit surprised to be asked. In the dance of their orders, her allegiance is all he needs to know.
“I did have the family name.”
“Right.” That’s bitter, strange, to be expected. Kalanthen’s been planning this diligently — Jem made clear in their letters they had the building plans, schedules, all kinds of insider information. Zora’s quite certain Kalanthen doesn’t actually need her to pull this off, but Maeda volunteered her help (or bargained with it). Dramatic family betrayal appeals to the Whisperers, who got so intrigued by human stories they started to interfere with them.
The man checks his watch, and taps twice on the brick between them. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, Maeda,” he says. And then he’s gone, in that slippery way of people who’ve been marked too long to care about normal rules anymore.
Zora walks, caught in thought. She does believe that her family’s sort of work shouldn’t exist, not as it is, and things won’t get better without challenge. Zora’s known, even from the strange months in the order before her marking, that this background was one of her assets. She has others, mostly skills: quick tongue, great with spreadsheets, deep curiosity about the world, a rare steadiness in emergencies. But when it came to connections, Maeda’s real interest, she had access to something abominable. Maeda on their own is only somewhat concerned with fae autonomy, but someday one of the more wildlands orders would have reason to take down the operations. Part of the reason — maybe a third, if she’s calculating — she’s kept in touch with her family is to keep open this possibility. Zora believes that if you think something should be done, you should have no objection to doing it yourself. As a person who’s been fed and housed and grown on this harm, she has a responsibility to the dead.
And yet. There are all the humans who didn’t die because the fae did, not that accounting that simple holds. Beyond that, the expectations and demands will not be easily or neatly replaced. This might not really matter, either, a blow to a too-stubborn system. It will matter to her family, and she doesn’t, on average, want them to suffer. She was more vengeful, once, but it’s mellowed. Her parents and elders did what they thought was best, with her and with industry, and the young ones haven’t done anything yet.
She eventually finds her way home, over-sunned and sweaty. Her mother, already busy with supper, offers water and fusses with her until she changes clothes. Zora does, shutting the door to the parlor she’s been sleeping in, and traces the numb skin down her side. “Puppet slit,” a friend once called her marking. Zora protested, but the phrase stuck. She tucks her shirt in. Ultimately, it’s not a choice. Zora sought out a marked order because of their relationships to autonomy, when she was lost and hurting and desperate for something to commit to. It’s better than religion, to be a sprout of a massive root system, to be breathing for two. She makes decisions all the time, about friends, jobs, where to reach for, but she is making herself useful to her collective and her Whisperer, and always at their disposal.
***
The next night, after the house has gone quiet and cool, Zora leaves her blanket nest. She dresses, reties her hair wrap, snags her father’s keys, and slips outside. It’s still drizzling from the evening’s storm. As much as the town’s changed, the path to the plant hasn’t. She finds the others moving into place, a few figures quick to meet her at the back entrance and divert her to a cluttered alley. They’ve got pieces in place, carts in motion. The plant usually moves shipments at night, so the neighbors are used to it, Jem tells the gathering group. The outbound is scheduled for two days out, something Zora already knew from her family’s complaints. Jem’s not really what she expected, more stern than their letters and pale and freckled even in the dark. Eventually, there’s a trade of signals, and Zora, fumbling through the keys, unlocks the many-latched door.
It’s been a long time since she’s been in here, and never like this. Kalanthen’s extremely efficient about it, though. Zora sticks with Jem, lighting little lanterns in the entry office, which is big enough to handle shift change. People file in and split into neat teams: most go to the loading bay to start getting carts in, some to cold storage, more to live storage. They’re almost all Kalanthen, more marked individuals in one place than Zora’s seen since her initiation. Someone’s with Azj, with their brass-yellow eyes. There’s also a woman who Zora recognizes instantly as fellow Maeda, a left hand to Zora’s right. She waves cheerfully to Zora but stays in low conversation with her cluster, clearly more in the loop.
“Isn’t there a night watchman?” a curly-haired, middle-aged woman asks, taking a lantern from the cluster forming on Zora’s commandeered table. They’re a cheap kind, the explosive warning slapped on the crate.
“There was,” the person marked by Azj says, and about half the current occupants of the room pause. “Oh, what? He’ll be fine, and he’s out of the way.”
Eventually, they do need Zora in the rest of the plant, more for her hands than her poorly recollected pieces, in all the rooms that have haunted her. She has some bitter satisfaction in how fully it guts the others, seeing and smelling something they only knew, and also how they swallow it and keep right on. The most animal ones are the worst, flashing eyes in crammed dark. Others are slow-churned inwards, browning fragile edges, things that should be insubstantial flashes but are bound solid by iron, fungal masses dripping sticky. Kalanthen’s team is efficient, prepared with wirecutters and sra mint sachets and the promise of escape. A lot of the people are channeling in a way that’ll take weeks to recover from, drawing the Whisperer in to lull hundreds of desperate fae. Some of the beings, when their bonds snap, dissolve into the air. The rest are hustled, urged into tighter boxes, charmed quiet.
Zora ends up squeezed in a room of what she always called puddlers, terrapin-like and disturbingly soft, moving them into flat crates lined in damp grass and mint. Some are more scab than skin, at this point. They glisten bruise-green in the gloom and slop over each other, unsettling in their compliance to Kalanthen’s half-sung lullaby edged as lightning. None even attempt to bite. Over the rottenness and the sting of bleach, the space starts to smell of what Zora presumes is Kalanthen, more honeysuckle and wet clay than Maeda. Then the first set of crates are full, lurching heavy, and as Zora and one of the others manage to get one out of the room there’s a trolley-cart waiting. Marked groups work well together, parts of a whole. Things go in batches, down to the bay and the carts. Zora helps take some at some point, and finds the designated cart team to be extremely smart about loading, keeping track of weight and moisture and strapping everything in with great care to its contents. Most of them are marked Kalanthen, too, but a few aren’t, or aren’t yet — there is a solemnity and a thrill to this initiation test, Zora supposes. The carts file out as they fill, to be well on their way by dawn. Zora aches from heavy, careful movement. A lot of the charmers start to burn out, hands and voices shaking, but someone made a smart call to move the most unruly fae early. Zora spots the man she met the previous day going to the limp cages and tanks. He lingers, starlight-intense, then either gestures for someone else to take out the being, or takes out his knife. Jem redirects Zora to the processing rooms, where their team is systematically stealing or sabotaging everything of value. The other woman sworn to Maeda is here, grease to her armpits and mechanisms in tatters around her. Her name is Lyric, she says, and this is the first real thing she’s done since she had her second baby. She’s clearly enjoying herself, despite the circumstances.
Zora turns out to be alright at this, less from her childhood than from knowledge she’s picked up since: metal and crystal types and prices, which charm-filters resell, identifying crucial pieces in an apparatus. Anything too large or heavy gets destroyed, to prioritize transporting what they came for. Jem also raids the offices for intelligence purposes, and tinder. It’s getting into the numb night hours, now, and the last carts of living beings and their teams are leaving, one cart for materials and only a skeleton crew still behind. A few people are building firetraps in strategic places. Jem gets Lyric, Zora, and the person from Azj together in the now mostly empty loading bay, where another one of Kalanthen’s is dribbling a bucket of paint along the floor, drawing their emblem six paces across. The orders all came up with similar-enough emblems a few decades ago for just these occasions. “Are you signing this?” Jem asks. “It might not last either way.”
“Of course, if you’re offering,” the one from Azj says. Zora looks at Lyric. Maeda plays it restrained, but they’re not elusive, and they stand by their promises.
“I think we are,” Lyric says. “We were here, so long as Kalanthen says we were.”
Zora nods, and feels more certain for it having been said. “But much smaller, I think.” The Kalanthen person, at that, hands her the yellow-dripping can. Zora’s never done anything for Maeda that took signing before, and she spills out the curving lines with care.
Then, at the very end, there’s the map and the exit plan. Zora asks for her assignment right after Lyric’s is listed, and Jem informs her that she wasn’t given one. “You’ve done a lot already,” they say, and the whole group pauses in this, the half-acknowledgement. But Lyric got an assignment, and tonight Zora is Maeda, a right hand out in the world, and she is a child making right in her family’s hollowed-out factory.
“I’m already complicit,” Zora says, touching paint- and blood-stained knuckles to the hot glass of her lantern. “I’d rather have a match and no compromises.”
Jem gives her one of the spots in a storage hall, and she keeps the count, breaks her lantern over paper and oil and split barrels of a derivative known for its volatility. The fire catches, and she doesn’t wait. Outside, back in the alley, Jem checks off that she made it out, Lyric makes a terrible joke and offers to catch up if Zora’s ever nearby again, and Zora runs. She used to run a lot, but her marking gave her a limp she still fights to retrain, and she’s desperately out of breath when she returns to her family’s house. And then it’s fast, quiet cleanup, hands scrubbed raw in a rain barrel, sweat off her neck, filthy clothes hidden in her bag, her father’s keys returned. Zora’s back in her bed with her heart fast, imagining she can smell the smoke.
***
The next day is an incredulous jumble. Zora’s exhausted, but everyone else is too distracted to really register her. By the time she gets up, it’s already chaos, and the building is ablaze. The neighboring textile depot also caught, but it probably won’t be a total loss, her brother says. They’re not sure about the plant, yet, though Zora is, having seen Jem’s preparations. Everyone’s desperate, especially the adults she’s never seen this pressed. Her mother’s in shock, her father’s in denial, and her basically-aunt keeps coming around and trying to plan. Zora thinks of the Kalanthen carts, still on their way, probably full of increasingly rowdy fae and burnt-raw people trying to finish it out, and matches their busyness. Because no one is remembering about food, she makes cornbread and okra stew to feed twenty. She’s learned to handle shock and tragedy; a lot of her day job consists of visiting sites of it, doing interviews on it, walking alongside people’s catastrophes and keeping herself that step apart that lets her think critically, pick out the magic, and move on at the end.
It’s the day after, when the report comes in that at least three other similar factories and a research center all the way in Fahartad are smoldering, that it suddenly becomes arson. The scale is news to Zora, as well, and she’s deeply impressed at how strong of an assertion Kalanthen just made. She didn’t realize they had the people and the power to pull off simultaneous heists deep in the midlands, or the humility to ask for that much help. The speculation in town is angry and fierce, and very off the mark. Zora’s not good at self-loathing; at this point, she finds the situation bitterly funny. She cooks, again, and goes to the market and watches the smoke rise. That night, her mother cries when Zora cleans up. “It’s so good you’re here,” she says. She never says that about Zora.
Zora keeps stacking plates. “I’ve got two weeks,” she says. “I’ll stay as long as I’m useful.” She means it as an apology, of sorts. She did the breaking, but she can help keep the rest together.
That becomes harder to do as the week goes on. The fire’s the talk of the town, of course. It starts to be about money, debts and contracts. The little kids are picking up on the worry and the apologies, the stream of neighbors, and acting scared and angry. The scale of the wide disruptions is unclear, but it’s something fierce, and the newspapers say hospitals are desperately stockpiling. Once the building cools and it becomes clear that the fae aren’t in the wreckage, the blame turns occult — because no rational human would have any incentive or capacity to take them. The normal police are also in charge of the fae investigations, this near to the Divide, and they’re useless at it. The day Zora follows a few cousins to the ruins, there’s a huge argument happening over the paint signatures, which survived pretty intact under a fallen sheet roof, and whether they’re accidental. Someone figures it out at one of the other sites first, and eventually word gets back. Kalanthen’s name becomes familiar in the mouths of her cousins and the workers who don’t know how they’re going to eat next month. Zora won’t join in. She dreams often of the night she was marked. The house tracks with ash, clinging in the floor crevices. The trappers in the farlands are in correspondence to replace the lost inventory, Zora’s aunt says, and Zora knows with Maeda’s certainty that they will find that more difficult than before: many Whisperers made a collective decision, and the marked orders will act accordingly. Not all of the marked are human, either.
There’s a day where, over laundry, her sister-in-law catches Zora in a moment low in sympathy, and then mentions it during preparations for a big supper. Zora, who felt like it was also a moment high in appreciating the value of life and suffering, tries to shrug it off. Her mother escalates, drawing up all of Zora’s past dislike and recent steadiness, and eventually snaps, “You’re happy for this!”
“I think it’s complicated,” Zora replies, and is hit hard with a wooden spoon.
The slap breaks on Zora’s face, and suddenly everything in Zora is Maeda — are you alright, what’s happening, little one of mine take what you need — sticky black with a totality almost back to that night. Zora finds her gravity, again, curled in, hand over an eye squeezed shut and a cheekbone hot and sticky with rice, finds her breath, and thinks in a flash, I’m fine, and with that, I deserved it. Someone’s talking — her mother, too fast, apology and reaching but not touching. Zora stands up straight and pulls Maeda with her, the massiveness she’s normally threaded within urgent to this moment like an oncoming tornado. The being, who is usually subtle and smooth, is enormous and protective when they want to be. If you kill someone marked, the rumor goes, their Whisperer will tear you apart, and in this moment Zora believes it.
Her mother and sister-in-law step back, unnerved to their animal instinct in a way they don’t have the cultural vocabulary for. “I’m fine,” Zora says, blinking her eye open. It’ll swell, but she’s fine, and she breathes and slowly, strangely, she settles, and the electric air calms. She’s tipped her hand. She retreats to chopping greens and Maeda, still thick in her chest. The conversation resumes eventually, stuttering and without her. There’s no point to excuses.
Supper’s kind of excruciating. Zora brushes off concerns from the extended group about the forming bruise and plays from vindictive cheer, Maeda’s black steel certainty. Then, as her mother pulls her father aside, she hugs the youngest children headed to bathtime and goes to pack her bags. Her middle brother is the one who finds her, stuffing smelly shirts down the side of her pack. They’ve barely said anything to each other, which is how he is and how she used to be, but he watches. He works with the large animal vet, not often with the family, and a horse bit off one of his fingers since her last visit. He’s tracing the stump now.
“You going?” he says, and she knows, the way she understands when talking to fellow Maeda, that he means forever.
“I think so,” she says. Now that Maeda’s made use of this connection, there’s not much reason to come back. She smiles ruefully up at him, feels it in her face. They weren’t hit much as kids, so the ache’s more a flashback to a weird late-teens series of misadventures. Now, she’s got more direction. “I hope you have people who love you, too.”
He nods. The evening storm’s started, more slate-blue bluster than rain today. It’s too late to catch a ride headed out to her city, but she’ll find somewhere, an inn, or maybe follow her instincts to Lyric’s and impose for the night. She’ll figure it out. Zora’s resourceful, and she’s not alone.