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Ivan cradled a bouquet of asphodels and nightshade and tapped his knuckles against the dressing room door.
“Please come in,” called a sweet voice.
The room was pristine and sparse. Mizi’s had been a chaos of burst-open drawers full of vibrant fabrics, golden bracelets, scarves of every length and shade. Gems flashed on the counter, sea-blue, turquoise, magenta, fixed into torsades and pendants and dangly charm necklaces. He’d arrived to the sight of her wiggling into a white boot, hair falling down her shoulders and over her arms as she sleeved it up her ankle. She had run up and embraced him, which caused the large bow across her chest to bunch against his jacket. She didn’t seem to notice the new wrinkles.
I’ll look for you in the audience—if you see a wink, that’s for you! she’d said, with all the joy of innocence.
Focus on Sua, he said kindly. She’d prefer that.
In this room, Sua sat at a counter facing a wall of spotless silver mirrors applying a dewey serum to her cheeks. Overhead bulbs lit the room with thin fluorescent light, and she glowed like moonlight on a snowfield.
“I know preparations are underway, so please excuse the intrusion,” Ivan said. She had mere days to make ready for the fall of the curtain.
Sua turned toward him and narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here?” she asked, and her voice was no longer air-light and soft, but dark and low, glacial as a Uranian winter.
“You haven’t heard? I’m Q’s most recent ambassador,” Ivan replied, sweeping his hand down from his chin to his knees. He was dark and sleek and branded from tip to toe in corporate emblems, a walking advertisement. There was luxury in the richness of his hair, the tailored hug of his belt, his pristine black gloves without a mite of dirt or dust. He presented the flowers. They were swaddled in white wrapping paper imprinted with the brand’s logo and tied off at the neck with a blue cotton bow. When she gave no reaction, he placed them on the dresser beside the door and folded his hands in front of him. “I’ve come to offer a gift on their behalf, and to express my faith in you. You’re an excellent singer. I have no doubt in your ability to succeed.”
“You doubt my will to,” Sua replied.
“Your intentions are obvious.” Ivan shrugged. “If we’re speaking plainly now, you were always less clever than you thought. Your recent participation in marketing campaigns has been half-hearted at best. If anyone were to look closely, they’d see your career is absent of definitive long term plans.”
Sua turned to her vanity and snapped shut a tube of serum. “Thank you for the flowers,” she said.
“Still, Q anticipates your victory against Mizi,” Ivan continued. He rocked on his heels so the soles of his boots clicked against the tile in snicking percussion. He laid his eyes above the knuckles of her spine and watched for a throb of muscle, or the abrupt cut of her profile as she turned to sneer at him. Neither came. “They’re preparing for your potential victory against even me. They want to work with contestants with blinding star power. Winners. It’s a prudent financial measure to build relations with you, as you’re quite a formidable opponent.” He put his hands up, as if in surrender. “I’m not offended, even as their representative.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you took offense or not,” Sua replied. She was right, of course; this exchange came at no social or economic cost to Ivan. His corporate sponsor’s intentions to court her would amount to nothing. She was a walking dead woman by her own design. She retrieved a pair of black stud earrings from a drawer beside the counter and pinned them into place. She squinted at them in the mirror and turned her head from side to side.
Ivan stopped rocking on his feet. “They brought up our interview with Andromeda Media when they signed me,” he said. He stepped toward the counter and leaned his weight against it. “The one to commemorate our achievements as Outstanding Students—do you remember? They said we were charming, even as children.”
They stood on the synthetic grass of Anakt Garden in front of the cameras in their starch white uniform shirts, Ivan with his practiced smile and Sua looking glass-eyed and solemn, as if she was made of plastic and fabric and resin. He had leaned down and said, You should try a pleasant face, Sua. It will win you more favors. Feigning congeniality was a trade secret of assimilation—really, he had intended the advice to be helpful. She merely looked at him with unconcealed contempt and said, They put makeup on corpses for them to look pleasant, but it won’t help yours, and he realized, against his will, that he had grown fond of her.
“You’ve given me your flowers,” Sua replied. “You can go now.” She tightened the band around her waist and swept a black tuck of hair behind her ear.
Ivan had seen corpses in the slums, though none of them had been done up with powder or smeared with lipstick. They were grayish, bloated things. From them he stole coins that sat in small pouches above the waist or at the neckline. If he was lucky, he’d find some sophisticated tech on their wrist or in a pocket somewhere, blinking, silvery, which he’d fidget with for a while before stuffing it beneath his shirt to sell, or to trade for crackers and ham blocks and ladles of slate-gray stew. Sugar, if the day was good to him. The corpses had always—mostly—been etiolated flesh empty of any spirit he knew. He did not watch them clasp glamorous belts around their waists, and he did not think about how their brows crouched darkly above their eyes, and he’d never brushed their bangs out from their face.
On television, in front of all the universe, Sua would become a corpse. A bullet to her lovely neck. The red drench. Blood, pooling.
As children, he’d tuck her neck beneath his arm and hold her there, because he had just come out from the underworld and hadn’t known how to say anything, how to flutter his lashes or make his mouth a bright half-moon, how to subdue the hungry part of him that acted on impulse, out of need. Before the days of schoolyard scraps, of Sua closing her fist and beating it against his head like she really, truly wanted him gone— and maybe she did—she would go limp in his hold like a prey animal in thanatosis. He didn’t know why. Maybe she hoped he’d think she was dead and let her go. She smelled like almonds and clean laundry and clementines, too, at the fingertips and the rims of her mouth when her and Mizi would unwrap and eat them on the riverbank, and he never let her go.
“Mizi is ignorant to pain,” Ivan said, and there it was, the thin quiver of muscle at the base of Sua’s neck. He smiled as she turned to face him fully. He never felt closer to her than when she was piercing him with those vibrant, scornful eyes, or cutting her own precious cheek on her molars as she gnashed them. “She knows Shine’s cool embrace and the petals of the flowers in the garden. There’s the joy that comes from singing, and the sprightly tickle she talks about when she makes a new friend—there’s all of that. Then there’s you.” Sua looked up at him and her eyes shone with hate, or tears, a wet membrane that magnified the iris and made the jellies of her eyes tremble in the light. “You’re her bliss. The greatest thing that’s ever happened. But as soon as you do this, you ruin everything. Your carcass poisons the river of memory. You become an early winter over the harvest, putting every living thing to sleep. You’ll be the dream of sugar and buttercream that dissolves into nightmare. Mizi doesn’t know pain yet because you’ll teach it to her. That will be your last lesson, and she’ll remember it forever.” He delivered the news with cheery affect, then looked down and shook his head, as if it were a shame. “Honestly, Sua, I have half a mind to spare her the cruelty and tell her myself.”
Sua stood, rolled her glove off her fingers, and struck him across the face.
The hit shunted his head to the left. “Ah,” he gasped, his breath going out of him. He saw his cheek in the mirror stinging red like the bulb of a centipede’s head. The skin pulsed and throbbed. Sua’s hand hung there in the air, pale as a star, much smaller than the force she moved it with. She’d shot it across his face with the accelerative energy of a comet shredding miles of deep space, and his stomach roiled to know he could coax her to this point. They really were mirror images, connected in this private way; she wouldn’t have been so volatile if they weren’t. He found comfort in that. The ring on her finger—a piece of jewelry bequeathed to her by Mizi, which she wore like a wedding band—bit into his flesh.
Sua didn’t afford him the dignity of wiping its imprint from his face. She pinched his chin between her thumb and forefinger and brought him down to her. Her naked hand was manicured, soft and delicate. He outsized her as a man would a child’s dolly toy, but he found he couldn’t move even to turn his head. “If you scar Mizi with such unforgettable pain,” she said with real, palpable hate, “I will never forgive you.”
He looked at her with soft eyes and smiled. It was not his lakeside smile, the one he practiced by tugging at the edges of his mouth in the reflection of the water, or the corrective smile made tight by the cold headgear of Anakt’s labs, or the billboard smile he wore for audiences. It was his own. “You want to do it, don’t you? You want it to be you,” he said, with awe and disgust and deep understanding. “You really are despicable, Sua.”
“Why would I care what you think of me?” she asked, relinquishing him with a harshness that twisted his head sideways. “You don’t know a thing about love. You can’t even say his name without coming apart, so you hold it in your mouth like a coward.”
“You’re going to ruin her,” Ivan said. His grin bulged, and he was vaguely aware that his expression was inappropriate—that it didn’t match the feeling it was guarding. “She’ll never forget it. She’ll always think of you in pain.”
“It makes my skin crawl,” Sua said, “To hear you so jealous.”
She cracked her black glove in the air once, twice, then snugged it around her hand. Her eyes went dull again, and he burned where she’d touched him bare. This would be the last he saw of her before she appeared on stage, clad in Mizi’s white dress, sparkling like fresh fallen snow. He’d laugh to himself about it. Dressed like an angel, she’d create Mizi’s hell.
“Since we know how this ends, I wanted to confess something.” Ivan straightened his collar. “Unsha took others in, but I alone held his attention. You grew up in—a collection. I’ve always felt a kinship with you, and I wanted to know. Is this what it’s like?”
Sua said nothing for a while. She was quiet for so long Ivan thought she must be dismissing him with just her silence. It was how he'd expected it to end, but not how he hoped it would.
Then Sua said, “No.” And, “Goodbye, Ivan.”