The Other Side

You know that the gods have come down in the world when the only job one can find is sweeping the floor.

That was all Chuva could think as she pushed the shit-stupid broom over the shit-stupid tiles of Moray’s Greasy Spoon. It was half-past ten already, she was late closing up shop because there was always that one customer who took their sweet-ass time getting out even when they noticed the employees starting to wash dishes and lock the windows, and now she was going to end up staying late again. She’d be lucky if that bitch Frannie Moray threw her even a few extra pennies for working overtime.

Actually, screw that. Chuva wouldn’t be lucky if that happened. When had anything about her life ever been lucky?

When people used to worship me, about a billion years ago. And I can’t even remember that.

“Come on!” shouted Frannie from the kitchen. “What, have you never swept with a broom before?! You’re so slow!”

Chuva kept her mouth shut, even as her teeth ground together like rocks in a tumbler. This was, by far, one of the worst jobs she’d worked over the past three years, and she’d worked a lot. Restaurant work plus a supreme bitch of a boss, her two least favorite things mashed into an unholy combination.

She heard Frannie huff in exasperation. “You can’t do anything right! Not even the simplest things!”

Without further ado, Chuva whirled around, her cape snapping, and hurled the broom straight at Frannie. Unfortunately, it didn’t strike any facial features or vital organs.

“Sweep the damn floor yourself,” growled Chuva. “I don’t have to put up with this shit.” Her fingers, swift with anger, were already untying the knots of her mandatory apron.

Frannie’s eyes widened. “Are you…are you quitting on me?!”

“Can’t you take a hint?!” Chuva shot back, leaving the apron crumbled on the ground like a piece of the garbage that she was supposed to be sweeping up. “I’ve got better things to do than to stand here listening to you critique my broom technique!”

“But you’ve only been working here for three weeks!” whined Frannie.

“Cry me a river. Maybe if you weren’t such a bitch, your employees wouldn’t keep quitting.” Chuva would have liked nothing better than to storm out the door right then, deserting this shrine to mediocrity with the echoes of her witty remark still in the air, but there was one more thing she had to take care of first. She thrust her hand towards Frannie. “I’ll take my final paycheck now.”

Frannie sniffed and turned up her nose challengingly. Both of them were well aware that the city government was too preoccupied with astronomical rates of crime and poverty to spend much time regulating the local businesses. Nobody was going to persecute Chuva for bailing out on her job so early, but at the same time, nobody was obligated to make sure that she got paid her dues. And Frannie wasn’t much for common courtesy without enforcement.

Luckily, Chuva was pretty good at enforcing things for herself.

“My paycheck,” she repeated, taking a step closer. Frannie was the taller of the two women, but Chuva was much wider and rarely hesitated to throw her weight around. She wasn’t lacking in muscles, either, unlike snot-nosed scrawny little Frannie, who spent her days sitting in the back counting cash and yelling at her workers. No hard labor for her.

Apparently she wasn’t completely stupid, because she took a good, hard look at Chuva and realized that any struggle between them would be ridiculously mismatched. “I’ll be right back,” she said at last.

She sauntered off to her office, all hoity-toity-high-and-mighty, and Chuva noticed for the first time that a gaggle of cooks and bussers had been watching the confrontation from the kitchen door. She saluted to them mockingly.

Frannie stomped back, carrying a jangling envelope that she proceeded to flick at Chuva. “Here.”

“Thanks.” It would be wise to count the envelope’s contents; Chuva needed money enough that being shortchanged should have mattered to her. But lately, her ability to care about finances had been at an all-time low. All she wanted right now was to get out of this shit-stupid place.

So that was exactly what she did.

“You’ll be sorry for the way you treated me!” called Frannie as Chuva walked out the door. “I’ll make sure that you never work in this city again!”

“Go ahead,” retorted Chuva. “See if I give a damn.”

The floor-sweeping job was completely superfluous anyway. She actually had goals. And those goals did not include being the janitor to the people that she’d helped create and whose lives, rather than their garbage, had once been in her hands.

At night, Noto City was a patchwork of yellow windows, lit from within by sickly-looking electricity. This had been one of the first cities in the world to implement a centralized electrical grid; now the power system was so unreliable that the sputtering lights often looked more like candles. Maybe the residents who’d switched back to old-fashioned lanterns had the right idea.

Chuva had come here near the beginning of Ripesmonth, and it had taken her over a week to find a job, even though there was almost no entry-level career or unskilled labor that she didn’t know how to do: construction, home repair, dishwashing, street vending, gardening, shoe shining, and waiting tables had all been added to her work experience in the past three years. Even for someone as versatile as her, jobs were hard to come by, and a lot of employers raised eyebrows at the fact that she’d never worked anywhere for longer than four months.

Plus, some were also turned off by the always-having-to-wear-a-cape thing.

Nevertheless, she’d eventually been offered a couple of jobs and had chosen the higher-paying one – also the wrong one, evidently. She didn’t enjoy any of the menial jobs that were open to her, of course; she forced herself into working strictly for the money. But it was always nice if her stay in a town didn’t have to be spent in a sludge of tedium and exhaustion.

Right now, Chuva’s spirits were higher than they’d been since she’d arrived in Noto City, merely because she’d hated this place and it felt so good to be leaving it. She made a quick stop at the cheap boardinghouse where she’d been living, to pay the rent and pack up her travel bag, and then she was on her way out. Even if her boss hadn’t been such a bitch, she knew that she couldn’t have brought herself to stay here much longer. The place was filthy and labyrinthine and smelled like burning chemicals, the legacy of a few still-operational factories within the city limits (one of the only careers that she considered to be definitively beneath her).

She’d heard that it wasn’t wise to walk alone at night in Noto City, but she’d never had any problems before, so it was a complete surprise when three thugs stepped out of a side street to block her passage.

Chuva narrowed her eyes, which were yellow and had a tendency to glow in dark places. “Excuse me,” she said stiffly. “I’m trying to get through here.”

The thugs didn’t move. There were two men and one woman, all bigger than her, and she was beginning to suspect that this was a mugging. Everyone always said that money wasn’t worth your life, but Chuva needed money in order to have a life. Then one of the men grunted, “You were pretty rude to our sister tonight.”

“Your…sister?” she repeated incredulously. The thugs all had similar enough features to be siblings, but… “Oh, no. Don’t tell me that Frannie Moray is your sister!”

“You were rude to her,” the man said, like it was new information. “She said you called her a bitch.”

“More importantly,” the woman interjected, “you threatened her. You bullied her into giving you money.”

“It was my paycheck!” exclaimed Chuva.

The thug woman shook her head. “The kind of person who’d turn on their employer – someone kind enough to give you a job! – with swearing and violence…well, you really don’t deserve that money, plain and simple! It’s practically theft for you to take it!”

The second man, by far the burliest of the trio, snatched for Chuva’s bag while she was distracted by the conversation. He yanked sharply, and the strap broke like a single taut thread.

“HEY!” Chuva drew herself up to her full height, baring her teeth as close to his face as she could get. “That’s mine!”

He sneered down at her, not in the least intimidated by her fury. She was outnumbered, after all, and the Moray siblings shared Frannie’s height without any of her scrawniness. No wonder she had coerced them into helping; she must have figured that a wall of muscle and self-righteousness would stop Chuva dead in her tracks.

Well, Frannie didn’t know shit. Chuva had plenty of combat experience under her belt, gained against things that were much more formidable than mortal thugs. Gods could take care of themselves.

The first guy started pawing through Chuva’s bag while his brother held it, his dirty fingers searching for money – her hard-earned money! Her temper flared, and she let the rage consume her, flooding her body with heat and power.

Only the woman was still looking at her, so Chuva stomped on her foot, then kneed between the legs of the guy holding her bag while his sister was still howling with surprise. He doubled over, and Chuva clocked him under the chin, forcefully enough to make his teeth clatter together like castanets. He emitted a keening whine, and she smirked with satisfaction knowing that he must have bitten his tongue.

The other brother, who was less burly and more agile, rushed at her. He was fast, but so was Chuva, and it wasn’t just her body that made her that way. She barreled forward to meet him, headbutting him in the stomach, then grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt and hurling him to the ground. He writhed there, and in the split second that she took to admire her handiwork, the sister’s fingers sank into her shoulder.

“Dirty fighter!” growled the sister.

“You have no idea,” answered Chuva, before grabbing the woman’s wrist and biting down.

She didn’t bite hard, probably hadn’t even broken the skin, but her assailant shrieked and recoiled. That opened up an opportunity for Chuva to collect her bag, which dangled in her hand by the broken strap, and reach up to the brooch that secured her cape around her neck.

For a moment she hesitated, like she always did before breaking the rule that she’d lived with for most of her life. But she knew that it didn’t really matter. It was dark out, and she’d been about to leave Noto City anyway, and what did she care if anyone saw her now? Nobody would believe their own eyes, and even if they did, they wouldn’t risk telling a non-witness. They never did.

So she unpinned the brooch and swept off her cape.

Her wings unfurled, springing out from her sides, and she instinctively maneuvered them so that they’d have space to move between the narrow streets and skyscrapers. They arched high above her as she stretched the muscles that she’d kept cramped up for too long. The sudden addition of so much weight to her back always caught her by surprise at first, but she always got used to it quickly. The thugs, who’d been just barely starting to recover, had stopped preparing for round two of the brawl and were staring at her, openmouthed.

“Bye,” said Chuva.

She clutched her bag and cape in a bundle against her chest and took off.

Her wings did all the work; the rest of her body was mostly coming along for the ride. She could feel her muscles flexing, wings beating at the air as they struggled to attain more lift, and it was difficult but it felt good, too, like she was accomplishing some exhausting yet rewarding task. Up and over, the windows of upper stories marking her progress, until she’d passed the roof level of the highest buildings. It was difficult to go much higher while she was carrying something, so she held her altitude, soaring past like a streak of night that had attained a life of its own.

She supposed that anyone on the ground who saw her would assume that she was a demon. Showed how much they knew.

After rolling her eyes at the thought, she directed her gaze to the grid of sickly yellow lights below her and waited for it to end.

One thing about flying that no mortal could ever appreciate: it was a lot of hard work.

That wasn’t to say that Chuva didn’t enjoy it – it was liberating, it cleared her mind, but it burned energy like running a triathlon. Still, she enjoyed the flight while she could, until she found a clear spot about twenty minutes after leaving the city behind and swooped down for a landing.

These were the gray lands, and the grass was as stiff as wood splinters beneath her worn-out shoes. She was used to passing through numbed-out areas, and they didn’t unnerve her anymore, but the light quality still irritated her eyes; the balanced, dreamlike illumination reminded her of dusk, when her vision was at its worst, and the planet apparently couldn’t decide whether it wanted to favor light or darkness. Sometimes she felt like screaming at the world, just pick one!

She plopped down under a tree to minimize the risk of unyielding plants jabbing her in the ass, letting her wings droop down at her sides. Now would be a good time to go through her bag and see if the thugs had actually taken anything, plus repair the strap, assuming that her sewing kit was still in there. But first…

Shifting away from the tree trunk, she draped her cape around her shoulders, and it flattened slowly against her back. By the time she’d refastened the brooch, her wings were impossible to see and barely even able to be felt. It was easier that way. She’d seen depictions of winged gods in art, but the painters or sculptors always gave them dinky little wings, just a decoration to separate the mortals from their makers. Her wings were huge – had to be, in order to get a full-grown woman off of the ground. They were so big, in fact, that they interfered with many basic everyday activities, which had been the original function of her enchanted cape: an object of convenience. Nowadays it was more of a disguise, or a hiding place; only a handful of people in the world knew what had really become of the gods, and it was not advisable to go about increasing that number.

Speaking of hiding places, she should have gotten one for her money, because as she sifted through her bag it became apparent that her most recent paycheck was gone. In fact, about half of her savings also appeared to be missing. She didn’t have much else worth taking, just secondhand travel supplies and raggedy clothes, but her money…! She’d been busting her ass for three years to earn it, and now she barely had enough to scrape by!

Chuva sat there, gazing into the bag dully, like her lost funds might rematerialize if she just stared hard enough. Anger towards herself and anger at that bitch Frannie Moray struggled for dominance in her mind, the latter eventually winning out. She’d quit plenty of jobs before, and any employer should know that it was just an inevitability of hiring workers. It wasn’t her fault that Frannie had completely overreacted!

Her rage was short-lived, though, killed off by despair. She tossed her bag to the ground halfheartedly, pressing her palms hard against her eyes. Was this really happening? Was she really going to be set back another six months or more, stuck in an endless chain of menial jobs, under the thumb of a dozen more Frannies, humiliating herself again and again until her very skin crawled with revulsion? Now, of all times, when she was so close…?!

An idea burst through her, flushing the bad adrenaline from her veins. Close. Maybe that was the key here…

She reached out for her map, which had been left partially dangling from the bag, and spread it across her thighs. It was a standardized printed map, dating back to when cartographers still made those, but with hand-drawn additions delineating the gray lands and marking which towns had been completely destroyed by demons. Rubbing her hands together, Chuva muttered a quick and dirty spell, the kind that practically anyone used to be able to do but was now the sole domain of a few special people who had enough magic to pull it off. People like her.

A blip appeared on the map, a spark burning without fire, displaying her current location. It hovered just past the circle labeled NOTO CITY, drifting a few inches away from the coast.

The coast. The sea. And in that sea, Atlas Isle…

It was just two days’ journey away from here. Less, if she walked all night. She could be at the sea by tomorrow evening. And once she was there…well, maybe she wouldn’t have to get another job. Maybe her remaining money would be just enough to hire charter to the island. She’d be broke once she got there, but it wouldn’t matter anymore, because she’d finally be able to find Silas…

She was so close. So, so close.

Chuva let the magic fade from her concentration and began to carefully pack away her possessions. The strap of her bag was still broken, but she was far too impatient to sew it up properly right now, so she merely twisted the frayed ends into a knot before slinging it over her shoulder. It was time to get moving. Way past time, actually.

She began heading west, and as she did, her fingers trailed over her brooch absently. No one seemed to know what kind of stone it held, but she called it her starstone. It was a deep blue, flecked with pinpricks of silver glitter, and as smooth as glass…and evidently as fragile as glass, too, as the crack underneath her fingertips reminded her.

I hope you appreciate the things I do for you, Silas.

She was still walking, but her mind was no longer in the gray countryside around her. Instead it was slipping backwards in time, to when her problems were all the opposite of what they were now, when she’d been sick of staying in one place and had wanted to be left alone.

When flying was something that she only did in her dreams…

Chuva woke up to a pain in her back and the sound of her parents arguing.

The pain was a dull ache straining between her shoulder blades, probably the result of a muscle pull. The argument, whatever it was about, sounded exactly the same as it always did: her father was lazy, selfish, inconsiderate, et cetera, et cetera. All those common insults that her mother adored. She could hear her mother’s voice, gratingly screaming criticisms, and it made Chuva stiffen instinctively; even when she wasn’t the current target, hearing those shrieks always incited an urge to get out, flee now and you might escape, like the Saint Valdez emergency siren.

It wasn’t like her father never raised his voice, but when he did, it always just sounded like a feeble attempt to prove to his wife that he wasn’t completely submissive to her. Either way, in all her nine years of life, Chuva had never heard him win an argument.

The spat ended quickly enough, with her father stomping out the door to go sulk in the village, her mother shouting a few last scathing comments after him. Chuva listened to the uneasy silence outside her bedroom and finally dared to shift in bed, seeking a position that wouldn’t agitate her back so much. The pain only seemed to be getting worse as she awakened, still dull but now vaguely nauseating, too. What a perfect start to the day. She’d have to go out there and ask her sure-to-be-short-tempered mother for some ointment or pain elixir, and who knew if her innocuous request would end up provoking another screaming fit or not. All of this on a Lightsday, during what was supposed to be her weekly reprieve from school!

Why did things have to be this way?

She lingered for as long as she could, but it soon became clear that the pain would not abate on its own, and she was starting to get uncomfortable. So she slunk out of bed and through the little door that bordered on the kitchen.

And there was her mother. Saría Maldonna glowered as she swept the floor, not cleaning because she was angry, as some people did, but angry because she cleaned. She liked for the cottage to be neat and resented the amount of time that she spent keeping it that way; perhaps the argument earlier had been about her husband’s inadequate tidying abilities. Even when she heard the sound of tiny feet whisking across the clay-tiled floor, she barely slowed her movements.

“Chuva. Good morning.”

“Good morning, Mama,” repeated Chuva. “Um. My back is hurting me.”

“Oh? You must have sprained it.” Saría was distinctly uninterested.

“I guess so. But it really hurts…” And the ache intensified even as Chuva spoke.

Saría stilled the broom and sighed. “Go wait for me in the washroom. I’ll be there in a moment.” She seemed miffed, as if her daughter had summoned an injury for the sole purpose of inconveniencing her.

Chuva padded around the corner, scrunching up her face in a private display of disgust. She was only just reaching the age where children cease to view their parents as infallible beacons of wisdom, but so far, she’d kept her rebellious desires to herself. Saría didn’t need another reason to whine when she could already turn any of her daughter’s innocent actions into a personal affront.

By the time she reached the washroom, the pain between her shoulder blades had been compounded by a prickling itch, which was more concentrated to one or two spots. It put her in mind of an insect bite, except bigger and even more uncomfortable. She pictured a giant spider sinking its fangs into her while she’d been sleeping.

Positioning herself in front of the looking-glass on the wall, she tugged down the cap sleeves of her nightgown, then turned around and craned her head over her shoulder to try and get a glimpse of her upper back.

She screamed.

Bad mood or not, Saría could not ignored her child shrieking in terror, and she barely paused to throw down her broom before lunging for the washroom. What she found was Chuva with her mouth stretched open wide, hands clapped to either side of her face like a dramatic actress’s portrayal of shock, her bodice tumbling off her shoulders.

“Chuva?! What’s wrong?!” cried Saría.

“Look! Look!” screeched Chuva, bunching her hands in her hair as she whirled around.

Just below her dangling blonde tresses, protruding from her tender flesh, were two enflamed bumps about the size of an adult’s fist. The reddened skin straining across them became a taut-stretched white at the tips, as if something were struggling to push out from beneath the surface. They were like egg sacs, or the ghastly chrysalises of some malevolent, parasitic insect.

“Oh, gods!” uttered Saría. “What is this?!”

“I think something bit me!” cried Chuva.

“Those are not bites! They can’t be – there’s nothing with teeth big enough to do this!” Although they were evenly spaced and about the same size, as bite marks would be… “And they don’t look like punctures…are they oozing?!”

Chuva’s face puckered. “They hurt! And itch!”

“Let me see them!” commanded her mother, grabbing her by the shoulders.

Almost as soon as her hands made contact, fresh pain spurted through the – wounds? sores? pustules? – and made Chuva gasp hoarsely. She was afraid now. It wasn’t the intensity of the pain that scared her (she’d had worse, like the time she broke her wrist playing soldier with some school friends) but the strange quality of this pain, a yawning, gaping, maddening quality, as if she had a twin pair of marks in her brain to match the ones on her back. She’d never experienced anything like it before; well, of course she hadn’t. She was only nine years old.

“D-don’t touch them!” she stammered, her face washed pale.

Saría remained adamant. “Chuva, I need to see!”

Chuva ground her teeth together. It was no longer just the pain, or the itching, or the feeling of lingering insanity. Something else was happening. “Ow, ow, ow…!”

“I know it hurts,” said Saría, who really didn’t know, in a shaken attempt at being soothing, “but we can get this taken care of. We’ll go to the doctor, find out what could possibly–”

A violent convulsion suddenly wracked Chuva’s body. “Let go of me!”

Saría’s eyes widened. “Are they…are they growing?!”

Chuva tore away from her grasp, stumbling a couple of steps forward before sprawling on her knees. Her fingers coiled tightly against the clay-tiled floor; her back arched up.

What happened next reminded her, more than anything, of vomiting. It was the involuntary ejection of something from her body, and while it didn’t exactly hurt, it was far from pleasant. Something – or rather, two somethings – erupted from her back in a series of muscle spasms, and now she was no longer thinking about bugs, or foreign objects of any kind. Whatever was coming had come from inside of her.

At last, she lifted her head, the tears of effort that had been squeezed from her eyes beginning to dry on her cheeks.

Her wings, crumpled and creased, hung partially folded between her shoulders, so new and sensitive that she could feel barely tangible currents of air playing across them. They lacked the plumage of a bird’s wings, and looked as if they could have belonged to a bat, or possibly a dragon. They felt like wet leather. She instinctively tried to spread them open to help them dry, but they were still so weak that they barely fluttered.

The pain was gone. The fear was gone. The madness had been replaced by wonder, because for the first time in her life, Chuva had felt a huge and boundless kind of magic that she never knew existed before. She had no idea where her wings had come from, but she knew without knowing that they were a tiny slice of the universe’s infinite grandeur. And having them seemed, somehow, right.

Now her mother was staring, and saying something, and Chuva found that her ears were ringing too badly for her to hear what it was, and she also found that she didn’t care. A faint, mysterious smile had made its way to her face.

“I guess they weren’t bites,” she said.