The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

of a giant, to pierce the ceiling of the tower, to stand up into the sky and never stop standing up until his standing up encompassed everything that was. His indignation, this colossus, demanded it.

‘No,’ he said. His voice was flat and final. ‘No, no, no.’

Without meaning to do it, he had rounded on Navy. He hated her. She stood up from the bed, bewildered.

‘Maybe I don’t know how you fit in, but you do. And anyway Dina said –’ Navy stopped.

‘Dina said what?’ Fitz demanded.

‘The Heresy is a family business, Fitz.’

‘If the Rack gave you hemlock, and told you to take it to the Master, then I think you have no choice but to take it to the Master,’ said Fitz. ‘Now I’d like you to leave.’

‘But –’ She had more to say.

Navy stood before him, close. She was just his height, and her eyes – catching the weak light from the window – looked right into his like all the windows in the world. They didn’t bore into him; they didn’t pierce; nor did they rebuff, or refuse him. They invited him, as if Navy had thrown open every sash of her soul, as far as the eye could see, or the heart could know.

‘Leave.’

She put her hand to his elbow, and touched it lightly, once.

‘I’m sorry, Fitz,’ she said. She turned, and was gone.

Fitz stared at the wall in front of him.

Little brother.

He put his fingers to his eyes. He rubbed his eyelids gently with the backs of his knuckles. Then he rubbed them harder, increasing the pressure until it began to hurt, to ache where he was pressing into the sockets, pushing the tender balls of his eyes into his skull.

Her love for you is just a story that she tells herself. Love is not a work of the hands, little brother. It’s a fact in the blood.

How could I not have seen this.

Fitz turned his hands and began to probe his eyes with his fingers. His eyelids still closed, he felt for the firm but delicate curve of his eyes beneath the skin. He squeezed a little, taking the meat of them between his thumbs and forefingers. He didn’t want these eyes, this blood.

My hands before my eyes.

His eyes ached in his head. He saw pools of red so deep that they were black. Still he pushed into the corners of his sockets; still he squeezed with the tips of his fingers, pinching the balls of his eyes, imagining them as grapes ready for plucking, as little purses of jelly, as ink, as melting ice. He pressed them, willing them to break.

‘Stop it.’

No.

‘I said, stop it.’

It wasn’t a voice in his head, and the bright light in his eyes came, instead, from the doorway. Someone was standing before him, but – his eyes throbbing from the pain he had caused them, and from the brightness of the light shining on them – he couldn’t see who. He held up his hand against the flickering candle.

‘Whatever you’re going through,’ Navy said, ‘I won’t leave you like this. You don’t have to do it by yourself.’

Fitz almost laughed.

‘There is only myself.’

‘No, that’s not right.’

‘Navy,’ Fitz snapped. He tried to control his voice. ‘I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Not now. Last night – the Jack and the Keeper – they said a lot of crazy things. Terrible things. I spent the whole night and day in the Sensorium, seeing things that – half of them I remember, and half of them I’m sure never happened. I can’t tell a dream from my hand in front of my face any more. And they gave me so much stack at Feeding last night – well, for all I know you and everything about you is a figment of my imagination, a delusion as flimsy as a will-o’-the-wisp, as fleeting as that candle.’

The candle was flickering wildly in the draught that ran up the tower stairs.

‘It’s not the stack, Fitz. I’m here,’ she said. Her voice was quiet, hushed, like a bruise.

‘How do you know,’ he spat.

‘Because when I saw the Bellman in the hall, at Second Feeding, I switched your plate with Russ’s. He’s been raving ever since. He asked me to marry him forty times, and that was only on the first night.’

Fitz felt a peal of laughter spasm out of his throat, but not in happiness. It was followed by a warm gurgle, a choking pain, a listlessness or numbness that stroked through him like an electric charge.

It was true. There was no stack. Everything the Jack said, everything I remembered him saying, all of it. And the Rack, and the Sensorium, and the Riddler, and –

‘Wait,’ said Fitz. ‘You said, “the first night”. What do you mean, the first night?’

Navy sighed.

‘You weren’t in the Sensorium, if that’s where you were, for only a night. You’ve been gone for a week. We were frantic. Until the Black Wedding finally began, well, we thought maybe that you –’

A week.

‘Fitz,’ said Navy. Her arms were on him. Round him. They were under him, and he was on the bed and the bed was falling through the air.

‘Fitz.’

Navy had him.

‘You’re safe.’

I’m cold.

‘I remembered my mother,’ Fitz said.

‘What is she like?’ asked Navy.

‘She isn’t like anything. She died. She died bringing me to this place.’

‘To the Heresy?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Much further back. My real mother. She – I don’t know. No place. She didn’t bring me anywhere. We were trying to find a new home. I just remembered that she is gone. I let her go. I remembered the white of her arms.’

Now they were standing in front of the window. Navy’s candle stood in its stick disregarded near the door. One hand on his near shoulder, the other on his back, she stood beside him as they looked out at the dark landscape that lay, lit with fires, beyond the Heresy walls.

Fires.

‘There’s more, Fitz,’ said Navy, quietly. ‘Some of the Offs – they’re gone. Nobody knows where. And