Chapter 8 | Ethan | Summons

It’s been three hours since the party started. Groups have formed, and conversations are hushed and tired. People have stopped singing and have sat down, drinking juice or eating egg sandwiches. Bambaata has gone to sleep already. All the lights are on, and it’s still strange for Ethan to be able to see so clearly at night. They did have lanterns in the human district, but the lights are incomparable. Ethan sits on a chair, and next to him, Iris sits on a bed. Zelmira and Lola have attended the party despite their fight, but neither of them is talking to anyone.

Umida is the only person full of energy, and she moves between groups, talking to everyone. She’s reached Ethan and Iris now. She’s exchanged her pants in favor of a skirt for the party but has kept her grey blouse. “Something is wrong with Zelmira,” she says, looking at Iris. Her shoulders droop. “She insulted me before I could speak today.”

“She’s not worth your time,” Iris says, keeping the glass that used to contain orange juice on the desk next to her. She’s changed into a short green wrap dress. “You know how she talked to me on the first day itself? I gave up talking to her then. You should give up, too.”

Ethan narrows his eyes. “What did she do?”

Iris turns to him. She’s also ditched her ponytail and released her ginger hair. “Just a rude hag. You would know if you were there in the girls’ dorms. But even if she was nice, I wouldn’t want to associate myself with anyone from the 23rd district anyway.” The half-rebellious district, Ethan thinks. “Why they picked people from that shithole is beyond me,” Iris continues.

“I don’t know if she’s a rebel though, even if she’s from the 23rd,” Umida says, glancing at Zelmira, who is glaring at Lola from across the room.

“She is a rebel scum for sure,” Iris says. Ethan flinches as Iris continues talking, “I keep telling Lola to ignore her too but she doesn’t listen. She wouldn’t have had that fight with Zelmira if she just ignored her--that’s the best way to deal with idiots like her.”

Umida walks away and Ethan looks at her trajectory. She’s going to Eric and Gu Lei. They’re having an arm-wrestling showdown on a desk and Verve stands in front of it. Charlotte sits on the bed next to them, examining her nails—she’s still in the pink hoodie.

Ethan gets off his chair and walks up to her. She looks up at him, and moves to the left side of the bed, clearing some space for Ethan to sit. She crosses her legs, and says, “So, uh, what’s this about?”

“I’m sorry for getting angry at you in the evening,” Ethan says.

She looks at him. “It’s OK. I don’t, uh, really care.”

Ethan feels his stomach sink. “...But I still wanted to apologize. I was wrong when I blamed you for not taking the simulation seriously. You were doing whatever you could. Umida and Verve were already destroyed and there was little chance that the two of us could beat eight sentinels. Using us as a decoy to accomplish the mission was the best possible action.”

“It’s OK,” Charlotte says. She zips her hoodie up, hugging herself. “I, uh, expected it, so I wasn’t bothered. You put five strangers in a group and I’d say the chances of a dispute are like, pretty high, I think. It’s not your fault. We just, uh, had different ideas.”

He looks down at the floor. “Yes, but I was still rude for no reason. I shouldn’t have shouted at you like that. All of us were trying our best...and that included you. In future...I will do my best to control my temper.”

She smiles and goes back to examining her nails. “It, uh, made for some good drama if that makes you happy. It was entertaining.” Ethan sighs. He will never understand Charlotte, but at least he no longer thinks of her as an enemy. “Besides, I was wrong too,” she continues. “You guys, uh, put up a good fight. We might have made it through with, like, all three of us alive if I fought as well.”

“Noooo!” Gu Lei shouts, both of his hands grabbing his short brown hair. “How could this happen? This is impossible!”

“The old man’s hiding some serious power,” Verve says, pushing his glasses up. “I declare Eric to be the winner for the fifth time.”

“Again!” Umida says, clapping. “I want to watch it from the start this time! Again! Again! Again!”

“You couldn’t have expected Iris to take down so many of them,” Ethan says after the commotion wears down and Gu Lei and Eric restart their showdown. He looks at Iris. “She fought eight of them head-on—I wish I had a way of showing you guys what happened in there. She’s amazing.”

“She’s married, you know,” Charlotte says, and Ethan scowls.

“That’s not what I—”

“Relax,” Charlotte says, then stretches her legs forward. She keeps her hands behind her neck, lying against the bed. “I’m just, uh, what's it called? Craving? Yes, craving for drama.” There’s a scream from the other side, and she jumps off the bed. Ethan follows her gaze. Zelmira and Lola are exchanging slaps and punches again. “Uh, I hate repeats,” Charlotte says, but she’s beaming.

Iris and Eric diffuse the fight, and Iris takes Zelmira outside the boys’ dorms. She returns alone after a few minutes, during which Lola sits on a chair, looking down and avoiding the gaze of every onlooker. Her shoulders move as she weeps. Eric has his arms crossed, and Ethan isn’t sure what to say. He has no idea what goes on in the girls’ dorms. He doesn’t understand why they fight, and so interrupting doesn’t feel right.

Iris returns after a few minutes and crouches down to match the sitting Lola’s eye level. “You need to either ignore her or stand up to her,” Iris says. “You can’t stoop down to her level and react by calling her stupid names and then go cry in a corner. Please trust me and just ignore her.” She gets up and keeps her hands on Lola’s shoulders. “She bothers you because you react like this. Your time is better spent on better people, no?”

Lola grabs the ends of her skirt, looking down. “But...she keeps pestering me! I couldn’t even sleep yesterday!”

Iris says, “Let’s swap places. I don’t mind being next to her.”

Lola takes a deep breath, wiping her tears. “But...but...no, she said so many mean things to you as well. Not you...”

Umida raises her hand. “Me, me! Swap with me, Lola! I can handle her! I don’t want you to be around her, Iris. She is extra nasty to you.”

Charlotte leans forward. “Oooh, nasty stuff? What? I wasn’t around! What did she say? What did she say?”

Umida and Lola don’t speak. They look at Iris, and Ethan can see her lip quivering as she says, “It happened on the first night when I didn’t know what she was like. I told her that I had a five-year-old boy, and she just started rambling on about how I was an awful mother who abandoned him for the Numen, or how she pities my son for having a failure of a mother and how I’ve ruined his life and how I might as well—” she stops herself, looking away. “You get the point. She was just trying to pick a fight, saying whatever she wanted.”

Charlotte gasps. “Oh my God. That’s, uh, horrible. I shouldn’t have asked.” She has a hand in front of her mouth as if horrified. Because Ethan sits beside her, he can see that she’s hiding a grin behind her hand.

“She’s so childish for her age,” Eric says. “Isn’t she in her forties?”

Ethan bares his teeth. “Why can’t we get her removed if she’s being rude to everyone like this? She’s never going to cooperate with us like that, is she? I doubt she’ll be useful to Gorons if she’s that uncooperative. If we all complain to Exalted Bhilzal...”

“No,” Eric says. “It’s not a good look. Imagine how incompetent we must look if only after one phase, we complain and prove that we are unable to cooperate with each other, let alone with other species.”

Iris looks at everyone, shifting her gaze. It rests at Ethan after a few seconds. “I agree. I’m sure there’s a lot of eyes on us as the first batch of humans allowed to take the Numen. It’s our responsibility to give our best impressions to the...to them.”

Iris continues, walking to Ethan. “I want your generation and future generations to be able to explore the world as this is their only way of getting out of those cramped districts. When my son grows up, I want him to have a choice. A way of going outside. So we must solve this without complaining.”

Ethan looks down, his face flushed. He didn’t even think of the consequences, while Eric and Iris have already thought so far ahead. They’re thinking of the future. He remembers what he had told Della on the night she left. “If I can make Gorons realize that we’re useful, we might get treated similar to Krots—or even Kix,” he had said.

He looks around the large dormitory. He’s not alone. Like Iris, there must be many people here with goals like his. People that want humanity to have a better future. These are not his enemies, he thinks. These are the people he will represent humanity with.

He says, “Everyone! Let’s give them no choice but to accept us all. Let’s all pass the Numen! I’m sure if we help each other, we can all make it through!” Everyone cheers and he waits for them to dissipate. “I know a path which merely has eight sentinels in the simu—”

He hears loud footsteps in the corridor and everything quiets down. He holds his breath, his eyes widened. What’s it doing here? He has heard those footsteps before. It’s the large Krot that guided them to the dormitory when they arrived at the spaceship. It knocks, and Eric runs to the door, opening it. The large Krot looks inside, both its head and the two guns on its shoulder pointed towards them. “Exalted Bhilzal summons Ethan Gray and Zelmira Neri.”

Chapter 8 | Della | Hostage

Della stares at the spot where Coraline succumbed to her death and finds nothing but short grass. The Kix have taken her body away and all the bloodstains have been cleaned. A child runs along that spot, flying a kite. It’s been two days but no trace of Coraline remains anymore. That doesn’t stop her from showing up in Della’s nightmares, though.

“So what do we have for today’s breakfast?” Della asks, not turning around from the window as the door to her room gets unlocked. “Keep me locked for a day more and I’ll—”

She hears Gandharva say, “Didn’t I tell you? I like to be sure. Here.” She hears a plate being kept down and turns around to see a plate with slices of cut-up apple, a banana, and mashed potatoes. This she has expected, but he also carries a green cloth bag with him. “I got your dress tailored,” he says and opens the bag. “Angel Adelia, you can now make appearances in front of others.”

It’s a full-sleeved white dress with golden embroidery on the sleeves, back, and just below the neckline. The shoulders of the dress have a small silver wing attached to them on each side. There are also silver gloves and socks, and a pair of silver heels, both with a small wing to the sides. It’s so impossibly small...but the tailor did take her measurements in front of her. It has to be the right size.

Della remembers the time she was in the abandoned house right before walking to the fifth district. Thank God, she had thought, that the mirror in that house was dusty and she could not see herself. But it’s time she faces reality, and so she limps to a full-length mirror near the closet and looks at herself.

She has spent so much time without having proper food— in the hole, in the abandoned house, in the forest, and having fainted for multiple days—but it still surprises her when she sees how scrawny she has become. Her blue smock isn’t full-sleeved, and she can see part of her exposed arms and legs. It’s either black and burnt up from the airship or brown and bruised from spending time in the forest. The bruises might heal soon but the burns . . .

“Gun, this won’t work,” Della says, gasping. “How is anyone supposed to think I’m the so-called angel?”

“It’s fine,” Gandharva says, “your face is passable. That’s all we need.” Della turns away from the mirror to glare at him, and he shrugs. “What? I’m just being truthful. This dress will cover everything else. Why do you think I got you gloves and socks? Just take care of your face.”

He throws a key at Della. She catches it with her right uninjured arm and he whistles. “This is the key to your room. I won’t be locking you up anymore, and after tonight’s address, you are free to roam the district as long as you wear this dress. I’ll also make a few spares of this dress and give them to you soon.”

“Speaking of tonight’s address, I will be speaking my mind,” Della says, looking at the large brown key. There’s also another small silver key linked to it by a thread. “I neither want nor need a script.”

He nods. “Sure, I told you, didn’t I? I don’t want you to be a mere figurehead. Just don’t say anything stupid.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, limping away from the mirror.

Gandharva removes the dress from the bed so Della can sit. Once she’s seated, he says, “I’m assigning Cinzia as your maid so you don’t spend too much time wearing your dresses. She’ll make your food, do your laundry, help you bathe, and I don’t know—sing songs if you like. I’ve assigned her a room downstairs so that she’s always within your reach.”

“Is the other key for that room, then?” Della asks, holding the silver key in her hand.

“Yes, that’s her key. She has a nasty habit of running away in the night,” he says. “I advise you to just lock her up after her chores are done for the day. It’s a pain finding her when she hides.”

Della remembers what Gandharva had said when she first broached the topic of ghosts. “There’s another ghost girl of thirteen, but I need her as a hostage. And then there's a boy of four…but even the stupidest Krot won’t believe that he could kill two young Krots,” he had said.

She attempts to untangle the silver key from her own room’s key with just her right hand. Her broken nails—thanks to all the digging—add to the challenge. “So she’s the hostage ghost girl you were talking about earlier.”

“Right. She’s very important.” He shrinks his legs to make a path for Della as she gets up and hops to the window on only her uninjured left leg.

“Is she here?” she asks, then uses her mouth and her right hand to separate the silver key while looking down the window. It’s difficult to make out exact features from this far up, but she can’t see anyone who looks like a thirteen-year-old girl outside. This part of the district has little crowd, no doubt the work of Gandharva limiting the number of people entering the area.

“No, I’ll have her shifted today.”

She throws the silver key outside the window as far as she can and turns around. “I will not have anyone innocent live a caged life. We are not like them.”

Gandharva huffs out a deep breath. “Great. No doubt she will try to escape, be caught, and have to be starved until she’s learned her lesson again.”

Her mind goes blank, and once she is back to her senses, she sees a red sting on Gandharva’s cheek. She looks down at her aching right palm. “Don’t you dare!”

“It’s better than beating her up and deters her for longer,” Gandharva says, touching his cheek. He gives a lopsided smile, his tone mocking. “Beating people is just the worst, isn’t it?”

Della ignores his taunt and sits down on the bed, taking a banana off her plate. She needs to cool down. “Why’s she a hostage?” Gandharva doesn’t answer as she unpeels the banana. She kicks his left knee with her uninjured leg. “Answer me!”

He rubs the nape of his neck. “Well, let’s just say that the fate of humanity depends on her.”

“Isn’t she thirteen?” Della asks, eating the banana.

“It’s not about her. It’s about her insane mother who wants to murder thousands of them. One day she’s going to do it, and the rest of us will have to pay for the consequences.”

Della tries to stifle her laugh and fails, shaking on the bed. “Sorry, I just think it’s funny that you are calling someone insane.” She controls her laugh after a few seconds. “I’m sure there’s a lot of people that want to do that though.”

“Right...but this woman is the smartest person I know,” he says, getting up. “Well, no point in worrying about that right now. You should—”

“Smartest? Really? What has she done?”

He looks outside the window. “For starters, she started the most successful human rebellion in Goron history.”