IIIRubi

  Rubi keeps a firm grip on Astra’s hand as he leads them through the avenues, their footing made treacherous by broken stone and the detritus of civilization abandoned. In Rubi’s time Odrysae ran thick with foot traffic and the occasional carriage, the sky between its buildings crossed with rail works that ran well into the night.

  Bereft as it is now, stripped to its bones, quiet save for the hollow cut of the wind and their own footsteps. Despair wells at the sight. Rubi is certain he would need to stop and grieve if not for the way Astra looks upon the ruin of his old life. That she never knew this pce when it lived somehow keeps him from tumbling over the precipice.

  They arrive at the ghost of a boutique, operated long ago from the ground floor of a high-rise, a mannequin's head and arm flung haphazardly across its entrance. Rubi leads them inside in hopes of finding something more to keep the chill off. He’s methodical in his search, emptying cabinets or yanking drawers entirely. Every scrap he comes across rotted long ago.

  Astra lingers at a dispy that once housed trinkets and jewelry. That she seems to understand the purpose of this pce, long abandoned as it is, only mystifies Rubi. He leaves her opening the small drawers that line the back of the dispy.

  By the time Rubi returns, empty handed, she’s found a single earring, missing its twin. She holds it up to dangle between them, smiling wide. It’s a tear-drop of umber stone, opaque faces cut wide and even all around, a slender chain dropping to a garnet stone beneath.

  “Pretty,” he says as Astra allows it to fall into his palm. She repeats the word, admirably, as she pushes her hair out of the way to present her ear, unpierced.

  “Sorry,” he tugs at his elongated earlobe where he’d had it pierced, then points at her and shakes his head. Disappointment, but she nods and points at his ear, brimming with joy when Rubi slides the hook through. It’s lost in his hair, but Astra is pleased all the same.

  “Thank you,” he says solemnly, palm ft over his heart.

  “Ankyu,” she beams in return. It wasn’t the proper response, so he shook his head and had her go through ‘your welcome’. The words tumble out clumsy and dumb despite how her eyes sparkle. He has no doubt she’ll inscribe her memory with it as she has the rest. Though he cannot help but test her by pointing to the edge of the dispy and tilting his head in question.

  Astra alights her fingertips to the spot and speaks the word, clumsy but correct. She amazes him.

  By the hand she wonders with him, building to building. Everywhere Rubi believes there may be something of use they stop to search, but other than broken curiosities and new words for Astra their efforts glean nothing. It becomes such tedium that Rubi is pushed to his frayed edges again and has to stop for fear of turning another spark of rage on Astra.

  Rubi has never loathed himself before. It’s not a feeling he wants to feed.

  Day drags into evening. Undutus clouds cover half the sky, a bnket savaged by cws. Sunlight gone golden bathes the city with warmth, though Rubi knows the temperature is going to plummet, and soon.

  Astra is threadbare from exhaustion when they finally happen across the remains of a hostel. It’s a building shorter than most, only five stories, at its center a courtyard that must have been a common area. Only heavy stone tables remain. The lift is of course not operational, so Rubi drags Astra up all five flights and to a corner farthest from the stair.

  Most of the rooms have lost their doors, but thankfully the corner’s is intact. It grinds ominously. Astra has to cover her ears as Rubi forces it. Inside it’s musty, dark. What furniture remains of little use. Rubi has Astra sit on the rotted bed and expins the word stay with gestures. She understands, he suspects she is too tired to wander.

  He scours as many rooms as he can before the sun sets. His efforts yield a worn bnket that somehow escaped the rot of the storm seasons. Breaths are already clouding when he returns to Astra again. She’s curled on her side upon the rotten frame, a tight, shivering ball.

  Rubi chews his lip, considering. He can keep them both warm and comfortable through the night, but it will wear him. Astra’s blood is potent and will not be quickly spent, but it will not st forever.

  A sharp needle of fear stabs at him, for the trouble he would be in if there was anyone around to care. Everyone knows you don’t take from children, because of how badly it damages the pneuma, they cannot recover as the grown can. That he’d done it to save them both would spare him instant condemnation. For some it wouldn’t make a difference at all, it would be a stain on his character forever.

  “Rubi?”

  Astra grounds him. Cold is the threat now, not the possibility of his recrimination. He urges Astra from the frame. She clings to him, shivering, as he conjures a thin mattress upon the rot. It’s just rge enough for both of them to y side by side. They cling to each other, Astra pressed beneath his arm, shivering, both wrapped tight with the worn bnket. Night has fallen completely by the time she’s warmed enough to stop.

  Water and the mealy cakes are conjured next. Astra makes a face but eats without compint. He teaches her more words until her eyes can’t stay open. They stretch out back to back.

  Astra is asleep instantly. Rubi stares into the dark a long time before he can follow.

  Astra

  She wakes to an unsettling noise, a file on stone or a knife on a chalkboard. Countless. Rubi, a silhouette in the dark, is already pressed tight against the wall between the window overlooking the courtyard and the door when she sits up. Astra cannot see his eyes but imagines them staring back at her as they both listen.

  The bdes on stone noise is far below them, piercing in the night but not close, Rubi’s tension eases as he peels from the wall and shifts to look out the window. Astra squirms quietly from the bed to join him. A waxing moon hangs low beneath the cloud line, it’s redder than Astra has ever seen the moon she knows, the light it casts a faint pink.

  It’s difficult to see them at first, until her eyes can adjust; a horde of beetle-like shadows passing through the courtyard. Each is longer than Astra is tall, the joints of their overlong legs sit higher than their carapace bodies. The sound is coming from the gleaming bdes at the end of each, against the stone.

  There’s no reason such a creature would evolve that Astra can imagine. She has the how of them when she spots smokey shadow breaking their silhouettes; like the many-armed shadow-giant that chased them. One of them pauses, lifts its head into the moonlight. It’s got a person’s face with the jaws of a hunting insect protruding from its too-wide mouth.

  Both of them pull back from the window. Astra hugging her knees, terrified, below, Rubi at the wall. They listen like that, long after the horrible noise has passed into silence.

  “Rubi,” her voice lilts as they return to the bed.

  He’s expressionless in the dark, though she imagines him serious, just as afraid. The silhouette of his ears twitch in the dark before he speaks.

  “Umbra.”

  “Umbra,” she echoes, perfectly.

  Astra knows it’s all they can manage at the moment. The words he taught her are as clear and easily listed as before they went to sleep. She can see them in the mind’s eye, but Rubi has only begun to teach her. It will be a frustrating amount of time before he can do more than tell her what they are called.

  Rubi is asleep first this time. She ys facing him, as close as she can be without actually touching the boy. There are no insects chirping in the night, no noise of life whatsoever. Astra isn’t sure she sleeps at all before the sun rises.

  ?

  Days pass. Astra doesn’t know if the people scoured Odrysae before they left or others had returned ter to pick it clean. Sometimes they found a crap of textile that was not rotted, but the rest was useless or a broken curiosity. That they had anything to eat was thanks to Rubi’s magic.

  Astra wore the bnket tied at her shoulder during the day, the red shawl folded in half and tied around her waist. She’d gleaned an impressive amount of scrap fabric and other interesting items only a child would bother to keep, and it was there she stored them.

  Rubi would drag the two of them many flights up a stair of the tallest building he could find long before night fell, to avoid the Umbra. It rained often, some days so darkened by cloud cover that Rubi would not allow her to venture outside or remain on the bottom floor. No Umbra appeared in the daylight. That Rubi was this careful meant he wasn’t certain it was impossible, so Astra didn’t push it, even if it was terribly boring sometimes.

  The two of them had to bundle up together every night to manage the cold. Each morning and evening Rubi would conjure for them mealy bricks to eat. Astra hadn’t been any sort of gourmand in her previous life, but the tastelessness of it would wear on anyone given enough time. It kept them going, but Astra could see they were both losing weight.

  Language lessons were a bright spot in their fruitless efforts, though her mouth and throat still tired easily. Astra supposed that her new body must have never developed speech as it should have, so the automatic movements of the muscles, taken for granted, had to be worked to strength with conscious effort. It frustrated her terribly.

  The secret of her parts remained so, as far as she could tell. In any case Rubi respected her privacy and always took care of his business out of her sight, after teaching her the word she thought meant something like ‘go to the bathroom’.

  One evening after the two settled in a room, as Rubi was bathing himself in a pool of rainwater, Astra found a comb lying on the floor of a bedroom. It was a dark, transparent yellow, probably because it was terribly old, but it was so finely made and featured such an intricate bird design that whoever had owned it before must have treasured it.

  “Rubi!” She called as she ran back to him, forgetting in her delight that he might be naked and yell at her, luckily he was not. She found him ying her collection of scraps in a loose pile. He knelt over it, hands resting atop, he acknowledged her with a gnce.

  Astra watched as his eyes glowed. The scraps lost their edges, there was light, Rubi worked his hands into the pile as if shaping something. She approached a step more, curious, a careful grasp on the treasured comb. He was nearly finished when she realized what he’d done. The scraps she’d collected over the st week transformed into a multicolored patchwork satchel, though its closure sat loose because Rubi hadn’t any metal.

  She knelt beside him as he looped it around his shoulder. Closer now, Astra could see that it had no sewed seam, the scraps had been simply joined, as if they’d always been that way.

  “Good… Rubi,” she smiled at him. Together they gathered their meager possessions and pced them in the satchel. She shook her red shawl out, humming, as Rubi found the comb she’d set down.

  “What… this… please…. Rubi!” she sounded out, doing her absolute best even though her mouth felt as if it were full of stones. It’d been a little while since she’d seen him do any magic, so she was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet with excitement.

  “It is a comb,” he said, slowly, emphasizing the words as clearly as he could. He tapped the treasure with a paraffin fingertip, “comb,” he repeated, ying it across her open palms.

  “Combe” Astra tried, frowning at the difficulty as she looked down on the treasure, “is comb,” she breathed.

  “Comb, it is a comb,” he replied again, smiling encouragingly. Hand reaching to smooth a bit of hair behind one of her rounded ears.

  “It… is… comb,” was all she could manage, it would have to do, her mouth hurt.

  She spun from him and ran to what was once a couch. Astra patted the seat emphatically with her free hand, looking back to squeak out the words, “here… sit.”

  He seemed surprised that she knew what it was for, sitting as she squeezed between the wall and the couch to get behind him. The fading light was making it tough to see, but the idea of combing out his white tresses and tying them back with a bit of cloth she’d kept around her wrist for safekeeping possessed.

  Rubi’s hair wasn’t that difficult to work with, but anyone would have knots after this long without a proper wash. She was careful, starting at the ends and moving up, keeping at it until the sun gave way to night. Rubi conjured a firefly sized light for them, the first time he’d made light since the underground.

  Astra loosened the cloth at her wrist then pulled the longest tresses back and tied them neatly. It was startling how transformed Rubi looked this way; regal instead of only pretty.

  He was so pretty in fact that Astra found the impulse to touch his dramatic Elf ears irresistible. It’d been barely conscious on her part. Impulse to action to the moment of frozen realization. A naturally occurring route to embarrassing herself.

  She yanked her hand back, stammering, face hot, “Sorry! Rubi… sorry!”

  Rubi seemed amused as he plucked the comb from her sck grip and turned sideways on the crumbling couch. He pointed at the spot in front of him.

  “Sit. I will use the comb,” he said, with slow emphasis, that same way he said anything to her now. Rubi was always so carefully deliberate with word and deed in a way that she simply wasn’t capable of mustering no matter how hard she tried. Astra did not believe that in her previous life her personality had not been so. It was more evidence that the child-body was having an effect on her.

  The journey around the couch was simply too long considering how she could feel every moment of Rubi’s gaze following her. It didn’t help that the thought of sitting there wasn’t eliminating any of the heat from her face. It made little sense to her considering how they bundled together every night. It was different somehow.

  She hesitated at the st step, fingers worrying the tips of her long tresses, gaze downcast. Rubi tilted his head just so as he spoke again, “Sit, I will not hurt you.”

  He set to work at her ends first, just as she’d started with him. There were moments of slight pain as he struggled through a series of knots, but the otherwise gentle rake of the comb, particurly when it touched the nape of her neck, eased all the tension and embarrassment away. It wasn’t long before the hands in her p stilled from anxious wringing, and by the time Rubi began working the comb through her scalp she’d long ago began courting the edge of dozing.

  The comfort wasn’t meant to st. A sharp, intrusive memory, like a bde in the back of the eyes. When she’d been little, in her previous life, and had long hair just as she did now, but the hands working the knots out were impatient, insistently angry, and only brought to action with the intent to cut all that treasured hair off, to get it short enough for the harsh bite of the electric trimmer that would leave it not even an inch in length from her scalp. They hadn’t beat the fight out of her yet so she struggled with all of her might to get out of that chair, her reward was a series of sps so hard that a baby tooth flew free to the back of her throat where she swallowed it automatically. The memory was so vivid, so awful. It left Astra trembling with silent tears.

  Rubi didn’t notice until he’d bent to get a better look at how he was combing around her ear, there he stopped what he was doing, brow knit and mouth down-turned at the edges. With careful patience he set the comb down on the couch beside them and turned her to face him. A few days ago he’d found a square of mostly white cloth, suitable for a kerchief, that he’d painstakingly wrung out with rainwater to suitable cleanliness, this is what he used to dab the tears on her face with all the care of a doting elder sibling.

  “I hurt you?” Rubi asked. Astra was shaking her head emphatically before the words fully left his mouth. Rubi didn’t press her, she knew from experience he was waiting for her to form her words.

  “Before… all gone away… all…” she didn’t have the right words to begin to expin the intrusive memory, so it was this she repeated a few times as Rubi’s expression changed from worry to confusion. She stopped. Huffed ragged, then pantomimed a pair of scissors going at her hair, close to the scalp, the motions even accompanied with a snip snip noise, though it came out more like chip chip thanks to her clumsy mouth.

  “Cut,” Rubi’s tone held the upturn of epiphany, then with a bit of arm and anger, “cut off your hair? All? Who has done this?”

  Her inability to eborate was well understood by both of them, so Rubi was forced to reign in his questions, though that frown and knit brow returned with a fury that did nothing to detract from his beauty, of course.

  Rubi started again, calm and expnatory, “Cut. Someone cut off your hair.”

  She nodded, tears threatening again as she focused on the lesson he’d graciously presented, “Cuut. Someone cu-ut off your hair. All.”

  That fury, though it wasn’t directed at her and she knew it, didn’t leave Rubi’s face as he corrected her, kerchief dabbing at those threatening tears as the lesson continued, “Cut. Someone cut off all of my hair.”

  “Someone cuut… cut… someone cut off all of my hair,” her voice wavered, but she repeated herself again, to show that she was grasping it, even though the sight of him had blurred considerably in the st few moments, “Someone cut off all of my hair.”

  The dam broke. She wailed loudly and freely. There was an admonishing voice inside demanding that she stop clinging to his robe and sobbing snot-nosed grief into his chest, but she simply could not stop.

  Rubi was at a loss. His hands hovered inches from her little form, one still clutching that kerchief he’d salvaged, until finally he embraced her and spoke soft reassurances that were not the slow and deliberate teaching tone he’d used with her all the time now. This was comforting and certain, and she barely understood a word of it.