The Last Page (10 page)

Sena watches Megan dig inside a gloomy paisley corduroy bag for her hand mirror. “The only femininity I have left is melting.” She powders her cheeks and pulls her cowl forward. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

“My things . . .”

“Pshh—” Megan’s finger taps her temple. “Anything you need should already be up here. We don’t have time to dawdle.”

Sena subdues her glare. “Yes, Mother.”

“Don’t be crabby with me. It’s bad enough you wasted eight years of your own life in this trash heap of positivist thinkers. You won’t be wasting what little time I have left. We’ll get you all new things in Skellum. Come along.”

Sena is whisked away clutching only her gown and her diploma. She goes back to the familiar shadowed buildings that released her nine years ago as an adolescent spy, to the socket vaults of old parliament made strange by Shr
dnae Witchocracy.

As Megan’s sh
e-s
n,
⁴
Sena retains access to Deep Cloister and the archives. But the privilege costs her. She must work for the Sisterhood.

Summer begins with warm arguments between Sena and Megan. As usual, Sena gets her way. She is assigned to Sandren and leaves parliament behind, supported by authentic government papers identifying her with a list of verfiable lies. In an attaché, she carries an array of pad-paradschas rationed from the Sisterhood’s vaults. When she reaches the city state, she liquidates them at the most affluent jewelry shop she can find. It is enough to live well for a year and it gets her a footing in local
circles without turning her into a celebrity. She begins donating to Emolus, the most popular church in town, and thereby makes Bishop Wilhelm’s acquaintance. He is a man on everyone’s guest list and seizes each opportunity to take her to parties where he introduces her to Sandren’s powerful elite.

At Megan’s request, Sena sleeps with three of them, diplomats out of Iycestoke and Pandragor. It is easy work. They are reasonably attractive, clean shaven and rich enough to make it seem more like a first date than what it really is.

The information she collects goes to a half-sister named Clea who runs a potion shop near Litten Street.

It is tiring. Compartmentalizing Clea from Tynan, Tynan from Wilhelm from the diplomats she has fucked. There is an embarrassing moment at a fund-raiser when Tynan’s father sees her. She knows instantly that despite her best efforts, rumors have reached him. Sandren’s influential circles are small and Tynan’s father is in all of them. He crosses the room calmly and whispers three sentences into her ear. “You look lovely tonight. Amazing what jewelry can do. Stay away from my son.”

Tynan never mentions the incident. He remains loyal, funding her cottage off the books
.

A graduation present.

As the cottage begins to form, blueprints to foundation to framework, Sena realizes it is more than a building. Not only is it a delightful way to exact her pound of flesh from Tynan’s father, but it is also her first real stab at independence—sort of. It is definitely her first act of outright defiance against the Sisterhood.

She is supposed to stay in Sandren, seduce men and gather information. That’s what the Sisterhood is paying her for. But she builds her cottage in the countryside, well away from the city state.

A gleaming padparadscha comes in a nondescript envelope every month to her box on Goorin Street. The stipend allows for plenty of luxuries when combined with Tynan’s allowance. She meets him on weekends, risking death out of spite.

For those that marry in the name of the Witchocracy, Sena suspects the lines sometimes blur, but for field agents such as her, pår
n
⁵
—
the duty—
is rigorously enforced.

When Tynan and she stay at Sandren’s posh hotels she tries to revel in it, but anger leaves her empty. For a while, at college, sex had very nearly slipped from being a political tool to a pastime. Now, with Megan’s influence enveloping her again, all of that is gone.

She is back. Deeper than ever. An Ascendant of the Seventh House. Apart from that there is the undeniable sense of family she attaches to the organization. She buries it. She ridicules it internally as an affectation but the feelings persist, a vague sense of belonging. Unable to verbalize such a grotesquery, Sena sums it as crassly as she can in her journal,
“They still have a use.”

She moves out of Sandren even before her cottage is complete and begins skipping social functions, fading from Sandrenese galas, shrugging her duties to focus on her project. Megan’s letters become persistent. The cottage secret slips.

“The Highlands of Tue? Within eyeshot of the Porch of S
th? Are you mad?”

Sena doesn’t argue. Megan is right.

She still remembers her first journey below the Walls of Tue, looking up at the grim dark circle perched on the brink of cliff and sky; she had seen something in the air, transparent ommatophorous images, like light trapped in ancient glass.

Sena won’t admit that the monument frightens her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Her goal, her search, wins out. The Stones are linked to something abstruse and awful, something that can protect her if she actually finds the
C
srym T
.

Much different than the modernists in Sandren, Sena sees herself as a believer in sweet black secrets, rich as chocolate cake, visceral and bloody with cosmic truths learned and lost on the tides of other civilizations.
In the cities, in the gleaming dirty bustle and rush,
Sena thinks,
we are on the edge of something . . . not the future. Something so old it only feels new . . .

Sena keeps working for the Sisterhood even after her cottage is finished. She fudges on her hours. And then, after nearly two years, everything pays off.

“
New electroplate angel on my altarpiece,” Bishop Wilhelm murmurs. Sena says nothing as they pass a pharmacopolist. “God-jarring marvel pales in comparison to you.”

The bishop is smoldering. He swings himself around her like a censer. Cologne and wealth pour off him like smoke.

Lines of sight intersticed by momentary objects and rushing people
allow others to glimpse their eastward passage along the Avenue of Lights. They catch snippets of Sena. The fleeting blond tantrum in the wind. The gem-blue eyes italicized in mascara. The movement of her hips caroms sunlight, sets the black jewel fastened in her navel flashing. It is a chronotropic spell. Some of her gawkers collide with city things, remembering their places in the street on impact.

Sena slices east between the buildings with purpose.

At the outlet to Rum Street she and the bishop say good-bye. His questionable eloquence fades into city sound as she pays for teagle fare and enters one of the gondolas blackened by a century of weather. In her hand is a colorful shopping bag, stretched by something heavy
. . .