Gegenes

In the deep calm of the night, Kanna paced the roof of the barracks where she dwelled. She slid her feet over the debris on the roof, kicking aside small stones and listening as they clattered in the quiet.

The slight night breeze caught in the windtower that rose from the center of the flat roof, and she turned and shut her eyes, listening as it whistled softly through the vents and was carried into the building below before silence overtook the night once more.

A tuft of grass had managed to lodge itself into the dirt on the roof and grow in spite of the conditions, and she squatted near it. A long stalk grew from the center of the array, its end bristling with soft seeds that the wind was meant to carry.

She kneeled on the rough ground and tipped a broken tile nearby up and over, but there wasn’t anything beneath it.

Kanna shifted back to her heels and looked around her. She crawled to the short barrier walls at the outsides of the roof and squinted to get a closer look. She drew one of her knives and ran the tip of it down a long crack that had formed in the wall, then tried to peer closer into it. With a breath she attempted to clear the dust but it blew back into her face.

Kanna sat back, rubbing her eyes to clear the grit from her lashes.

The seeking was nothing more than habit at this point, but one that she couldn’t shake. She didn’t know what she was looking for, didn’t know if she wanted to find it, but she couldn’t stop even if she tried.

Kanna was both relieved and disappointed that she hadn’t found anything, and she wasn’t sure how those things existed inside of her at the same time but they did.

After blinking the last of the sand from her eyes, she looked up.

The dark of night was never pure. It was littered with lights, burning somewhere so far away that she couldn’t wrap her mind around the distance. For all she knew, the hearts of them could have long gone out. The light was still a constant, a reminder that something is always left behind.

Kanna sighed, then leveraged herself up from the ground. She dusted off the palms of her hands and paced the roof until she found a clear space.

Here, she set her feet. She shut her eyes, and let out her breath before inhaling again, deep, feeling the air in her lungs and the night in her veins. Properly settled, she began.

Her body moved through the motions of the routine, knew each step to take. She reached out her hand and her weight shifted forward then back as she withdrew and turned.

The Governor’s invitation was the first thought to return to her mind. It nagged at her, even as she tried to clear herself from the distraction. There was too much pull to him, too much champing for acknowledgement from the world. Hautman’s greed was simple, which made it dangerous. He wanted power, wealth, things to fill his home and wear on his neck and wrists to show everyone that he was someone important, someone who should be revered.

Kanna was a prize he could stand before proudly, an anomaly of the universe that he could parade for favor.

The heavy familiarity of it caused a sour taste in the back of her throat.

People were always taking from others. Always desperate to fill some yawning ache inside of them. She’d seen it over and over again, and what she had learned from the world she had woken to was that everyone was rotting for the want of something.

She wasn’t so different from them in that way.

Her foot lifted from the heel. She stepped and set it forward, shifting her weight to her toes and then back. Her muscles burned with the slow restraint. They wanted to move faster, to strike hard and true.

Even in the quiet, her body wanted to fight. It wanted to attack. It was as greedy as Hautman, but it knew what it wanted, and it terrified her. The scars on her body weren’t from a life well lived, she knew. There had to be a reason why her instinct was to hurt, why the single moment she had that was anything like a memory was of violence.

She didn’t want to know the reason.

Her hands swept through the air and she felt the breeze traveling between her fingers, sensed the shadows as they curled and bent around her form.

Kanna didn’t know what she wanted except everything, anything, something her hands could grasp and hold and not break. Since she couldn’t have that, she would take peace. But she couldn’t have that, either.

Her hands cut through the air, her feet turned, and her thoughts slowly cleared. There was nothing left but her, in this place, in this body that moved confidently, precisely, knew without knowing where each step she took would lead, how her hands would follow, when her lungs should breathe.

When her first routine ended, her body found another. It moved quicker, turned sharper. Her heels dug into the ground and the debris scraped against the roof.

She finished breathless, her muscles burning. She listened to the rasp of her lungs in the dark, felt the slight tremor of her fingers and her heart beating and knew she was alive.

She opened her eyes to the world again and turned them skyward.

The stars clustered in long sweeps. Those branching arms of galaxies reached across infinity, but in the vastness of the sky there was a gaping distance between all of them. They were beautiful, and they were alone.

She wondered if they knew the light of each other, or if they, too, were lost in the black.