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13

“Empy doesn’t like tears,” sung someone standing in the foyer of Nadia Jonas’ apartment building. Millennia jumped as soon as she slipped into the room; she had held onto the door when Nadia opened it and held it for a moment, just long enough for the girl to walk without realizing someone was following her. When Millennia entered the lights of the foyer blinked off and when they returned a moment later a woman stood watching her in front of the elevators, her hands folded naturally in front of her and her eyes on Millennia.
	 Something about the woman made Millennia jump and her heart start to race, and she paused where she was by the door. “…I’m sorry?”
	The playing of an organ drifted in lazily from far, far down the hall, all its notes uncomfortably off-key. “Empy doesn’t like tears,” the woman sung again, without moving. Was she singing along to the quiet organ’s wrong notes? Everything above her neck was shrouded in shadow, and her hands did not move. “Empy doesn’t like tears,” she repeated.
	Was this a resident of the apartment building? Did Nadia encounter this? Millennia drew her arms into her chest and watched the icons above the elevator for the floor it stopped on. Eight. Nadia must live on the eighth floor – no one else had walked in before or after them both, so no one else could have been going up a floor.
	With cautious, measured steps, Millennia stepped forward, her eyes unable to tear from the unmoving woman. “Empy doesn’t like tears,” she repeated in that awful, sing-song voice of hers. It was just as grating and off-key as the organ’s shrilling, which somehow grew in volume and speed as she approached the elevator. “Doesn’t like tears, tears, tears,” the woman repeated, just as slowly as before though the accompanying music had sped up. Somehow that made her all the more off-putting.
	Millennia darted forward suddenly, daring to press the up button for the elevator. The woman stopped singing, though the organ rose in volume even more. It threatened to drown out even her own thoughts. Suddenly silent, the woman’s eeriness became a mere curiosity; considering how still she was, it almost felt like she was a statue, and Millennia almost felt harmless for being afraid of her.
	Then she got a closer look at the woman, and jumped in fear once more. Her face was bordered by dark, wild hair, unbrushed and unkempt as a bird’s nest. Her skin was white as snow – too pale, too light that it looked almost translucent. Every vein around her black, dark-ringed eyes was visible, leading around her cheekbones and bridging her nose and trailing up to her forehead. She was extremely voluptuous, each breast easily as large as her head and almost spilling out of the odd dress-like burgundies she wore. This close, Millennia also noticed her much too-long neck and her hands, misplaced and swapped with each other. Her right hand’s thumb pointed out to Millennia, and her left hand’s thumb pointed left as well; her thumb was as long as her index finger, and every other digit was only a single knuckle’s length long.
	The elevator opened and the woman’s eyes darted to Millennia and she screamed. Millennia screamed, she thought, or the woman did – their voices were identical in that moment, the exact same shrill vocal vibrations. Millennia darted inside the elevator with her hand clenched around the handle of her knife and mashed the button to close its door, right after pressing the button for “eight”.
	“Fuck!” she cried out once the elevator started to rise. She was alone inside it, and had to look away from her reflection, too. “Fuck. Fuck! What is this?! When does this end?!” She covered her eyes with one hand pushed back her hair from her face. Her hand felt warm on the steel of the elevator door, as if someone else’s fist was touching her own. The knife was warm on her neck.
	“No,” she sighed, moving her hand from her eyes but keeping her gaze diverted from her shimmering reflection. The words of the Bride echoed in her mind as strongly as the memories of the pallbearers did. “Getting frustrated and emotional isn’t going to solve anything. I need to focus. Nadia.”
	The door opened, and Millennia stepped out gingerly, keeping her eyes open for any other uncanny singers like before. The floor was quiet and empty, though somehow she could just barely make out the ringing of the organ still, all the floors below. Cameras and speakers watched her attentively from every vertex.
	Every apartment door had the last name of its tenant on the door. It was convenient but she found it odd and unusual for an apartment building. Only when she saw the door labeled “Jonas” did she remember that Nadia lived in a dorm of her university.
	She knocked on the door and waited for the footsteps within to grow louder. The organ playing had slowed down again. How was it that someone could be, in the middle of the night, openly playing the organ in a common room, or standing by the elevators, she wondered – could they not be seen by the cameras? Couldn’t she be seen by the Emperor, as well, by extension? Another shiver ran down Millennia’s spine, and her heart picked up again – it had not slowed by much the entire time, truth be told – but she held onto her knife and rebuked herself for such thoughts again. In such an enormous city, she was not going to be singled out for retreating to a room before even the first nightly appearance of the Emperor. She was not the sole dissenter.
		This world is not a prisoner. I am not a corpse.
	Nadia opened the door and looked at her like she was one, all horror and confusion. She was wearing nothing in preparation for bed. “Millennia? What are you doing here?”
	Millennia all but forced herself in, apologizing under her breath as she did. “I saw you at that… that thing, in the street. What was that all about? Sorry for intruding.”
	“I… What thing in the street?” Closing her door behind her, Nadia covered her breasts and her sex with her hands, looking down and biting her lip as she slipped past her guest to sit on her own bed. She was all legs, and seemed to have shed her cheerfulness. The room smelled like ginger and something incredibly old. It made Millennia’s nose scrunch up, but Nadia seemed not to notice it. “I don’t know what you’re…”
	“Don’t play around, Nadia. I saw you out there, when those… those things brought that coffin down the street, towards the Emperor. And I know you saw me.”
	“You mean the funeral? I mean… I thought I saw you, I think, but… I don’t know…”
	Millennia took a step forward and landed on an odd material. At some point long before the bed, the carpeting of Nadia’s room stopped and was replaced by silk bedsheets. There were no pictures on any of the room’s surfaces, and the walls were adorned only by an abundance of mirrors. “You were crying, Nadia. Why? What happened?”
	The girl looked up to her and back down. For a long minute she was silent. Then she pulled on the blankets of her bed and wrapped it around herself. “What do you mean, what happened? Didn’t you see inside? If you were there, you had to have seen it.” She pulled the blankets up to her chin and sniffed. Millennia noticed her eyes were still red from the tears. “You saw her… didn’t you?”
	Millennia gulped and let the knife warm her chest. She didn’t know whether to embrace Nadia or look away from her. At the same time, she felt as vulnerable as Nadia looked. She had not realized what the reality of other’s seeing her own dead body would be like until confronted with the present; somehow, this younger girl knowing the truth about her made her feel ashamed and small. She wanted nothing more than to be in her own bed again, even if it meant she could not cry anymore. Her reflections were just as violated as she was.
	“You saw her. You must have, if you were there,” Nadia continued when her guest did not answer. “My sister.”
	“What?”
	A siren rang through, the same as from before. The hour came. Nadia rushed up to her feet and almost bowled Millennia over in her efforts to get to the foyer of her small dorm room. She clicked off the light and rushed back to her bed, illuminated only by the faint glow of the outside night-fog coming in through her window, the blinds half-closed at an eighty-nine degree angle. The siren faded and Nadia pulled herself under the blankets of her too-big bed, almost disappearing beneath the white fur-like covering. She looked out and stared at Millennia, the whites of her eyes torches in the darkness.
	The orders of the Emperor echoed from the speakers in the hallway. “KILL…”
	“What are you doing?” Nadia whispered, eyebrows contorted up in fear. “Get in the bed, before they see you! Do you want to send the Guard right to my door, and get us both killed?”
	“MACHINE GIRL, AND…”
	She almost reached into the bed, but a ray of foglight cut across her dress, and she noticed the fading stain of blood on her dress. Sighing, she stripped quickly – keeping the knife around her neck on the chain of gold – and slid into the bed alongside Nadia. “FREEDOM AGAIN…” Millennia did not fail to notice Nadia intently watching her strip and get comfortable. Even when the two were beneath the same blankets and their shoulders were touching, Nadia stared, stared, stared. “WE WILL HAVE. WE WILL HAVE. WE WILL HAVE.”
	They were closer than she would have liked, and the bed was not very warm at all, despite the comfort of it. The silk felt magnificent on Millennia’s bare skin, a comfort she had not experienced since waking after her flight. Her eyelids were far from heavy, but she knew that sleeping in such a bed would be wonderful. She wondered if she would dream again, here.
	The alarms faded and she could hear the organ music again, this time trailing into the room from the window. It had slowed down again.
	She wasted no time. “Your sister was in that coffin, you said…?”
	“…No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her tone was as if Millennia had grown a third head.
	“What?” Millennia turned on her side, her eyes narrowed and her knife dancing between her breasts. “What do you mean? You just said… about the funeral…”
	“Are the rumors true, Millennia?” Nadia looked at the older girl deeply, with an unyielding jaw. Her eyes very deliberately went from the eyes to the chest and seemed not to see the knife. “About you.”
	The staring was starting to make her as uncomfortable as the singer in the foyer. Millennia was not particularly well-endowed in her chest, but the way that Nadia stared at her body made her feel overflowing and almost revolting. The weird smell of the room did not help – it was almost like rotting fruit, or mold from within exposed electrical wiring. She moved her knife to cover and caress her nipples. The gold hugged her neck. “About what? What do you mean?”
	“About you taking people’s boyfriends. And… girlfriends, too, sometimes.”
	She couldn’t exactly remember, but the answer was absolutely no. “Why are you asking me that?”
	Nadia brought the blankets higher, to the bridge of her nose. “…Just wondering. You’re so pretty. I would kill for a body like yours.”
	Kill whom?, she wanted to ask. The Machine Girl? “What you said about your sister…”
	“She has a body like yours, Millennia. She told me that you guys met in a clothing store, because you wore the same size jeans. She’s so beautiful. I hope I can grow to look like her one day.” Nadia sighed and looked up to the ceiling. The red in her eyes from the tears had started to fade, but she still looked as sad as she had at the funeral. “I miss her. A lot.”
	It looked like she had little choice but to play along. Shivering, Millennia laid beneath the heavy cold blankets again. “Where is she? When was the last time you saw her?”
	“Seventy-five years ago,” Nadia sighed. “At least, I think it was. I might have lost count a little bit. She went studying abroad… She was supposed to come back a few days before I first heard the rumor about you going missing. All of a sudden she stopped calling and would never text me back. Probably living it up wherever she is, with some hot guy or something.” She shifted and half-turned to her side.
	Millennia wanted more than anything to know the older Jonas girl’s name, but dared not ask. The dark bowels of the room made her leery and on edge, and she did not trust Nadia enough to ask any questions that might end in another heartbreak. The knife beneath her collarbone was so light it could have been transparent. She felt no weight from it on her chest.
	Nadia turned back, the silk around her cheeks almost glowing purple and silver from the night-fog penetrating it. The material was the same that had buried the Bride. Was that common? Was that how every building’s windows were so bright?
	“Have you ever… you know…”
	“…What? Have I ever what?”
	Nadia blushed. “Slept with someone else.”
	“Yes.”
	“A woman?”
	“…”
	“So mature… You’re so mature, Millennia.” Nadia sported that pained look in her eyes again, and turned onto her back once more, eyes trained on the ventless ceiling. “I… I’m sorry for crying and running away from you earlier. Sometimes I can feel myself being stupid or immature, but I can’t stop myself from being that way. I hate it. My sister always used to call me immature for it. Sometimes stupid.”
	“It’s alright. I’ve run away from you a few times before, haven’t I? Think nothing of it.”
	“Yeah, but even then, you were running away to see your boyfriend, right?”
	“…”
	Millennia shivered under the sudden chilling of her necklace.
	“Even then, you’re so mature. I’ve never had a boy be interested in me. Everyone else… everyone else, I’ve heard from all my friends… They don’t really care about sleeping with people or anything. It’s not like there are any births here, not anymore. So lots of people just have as much sex as possible, and they don’t really care to protect themselves or anything. It’s not like there are any deaths here, either. Only the dying. No one cares about anything like standards or purity or anything childish like that anymore. But me… I don’t know. I feel so left out sometimes. That’s why I do those tours you saw me on. I figure, maybe if I meet as many people as possible doing things like that, maybe I’ll find someone who likes me. Maybe someone will want to sleep with me. I’ve been alone for so long that I think, maybe I don’t even need someone to like me. Maybe I just need to…” She sighed suddenly, as if remembering or being incensed by something, and thrashed about in an attempt to get comfortable beneath her blankets. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m blabbering to you like this. I’m just tired, I think.”
	“…No, it’s alright…” Millennia frowned and trailed off. She didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t pinpoint the feeling of vague sadness she felt in her heart. Was it – sympathy? Pity? The answer, she concluded, must have been hidden behind her lost memories.
	“It’s just… My sister had one, you know, before the Emperor. An… one of those… Oh, I forget the word.”
	“Word for what?”
	“Well, she was with child… and then she wasn’t.”
	“…Oh.” Another shiver, and another whiff of the horrid smell wafting in the room. Not for the first time, Millennia was reminded of the stench of a corpse – and, for the first time, she wondered how she knew exactly what that smelled like.
	“It doesn’t matter. I was just trying to say that I think of that whenever I think of my sister. And I think of my sister whenever I hear about that happening to one of my friends. Of course, that doesn’t bother them, because there are no births anyways… but for her…”
	Millennia gulped and gripped her blankets tightly. She would have to be very careful this time. Now she risked an involuntary lashing out, and getting caught by the Guard of the night. Or was Nadia someone who had the capacity to lie to her?
	She turned to look at the young girl. Her youthfulness was not lost to Millennia. Outside of actual children, like the few Millennia had observed speaking that absurd language, Nadia was the youngest person she had ever seen – but if she went to the University, same as Millennia, then Nadia had to at least be of a certain age. Seventy-five years. By all logic, Nadia was the older of the two girls.
But she has lost her time, just as all the others. It’s pointless to wonder about how this happened – nothing makes sense to me anymore. But why? Why has time left everyone behind? And why different times for different people? Could the times mean something? Does it relate to what they have lost, maybe? If they were to somehow find what they’ve lost, or get closer to them… would they regain their time? Could this world of unending dreams change?
	She thought of the others she knew that had somehow lived for longer than seemed possible.
Braxton Ring – a cringe from Millennia, and another pulse from her still-bloodstained knife – had lost a thousand years when she flew. He said he had lost his dreams and his ambitions, and her… and he replaced them with his duty to the Guard.
	Andre – she did not know his last name, or how much time he had been out of normal time, but he had lost his business, his education, his desires, and any semblance of a normal body. That did not seem fixable… and she did not want to see him again, not particularly.
	Trystan Tzara – he had lost a month, and his birthday was lost to him… as was his will to live. She had helped him, or so she thought. Did her little encouragement actually change anything? Was he still alive?
	Berah Fairchild – had lost two hundred years. All she seemed to lose was Millennia’s presence… or was there more?
	There was no use. She just didn’t have enough information on anyone or anything. That meant she only had one option in front of her. Though she held a weapon around her neck, fear crept on her and darkened her with its shadow.
	“Nadia,” Millennia finally whispered, startling the girl enough for her eyes to gently flutter open and wide. “What about you? What happened to you before the Emperor?”
	“…Before the Emperor? What do you mean?”
	“You said… your sister, she lost a birth before the Emperor. Do you remember what you were doing, at that time?”
	“No, I don’t think so.”
	“Where were you?”
	“The city, of course. Though, I wasn’t admitted into the University yet.”
	“What was your sister doing?”
	“What do you mean? She was in school with you, of course. That’s how we first met.”
	Millennia bit her lip. This was getting her nowhere. She still had only fragments of her own memory before her flying, just like everyone else here she had questioned. But were they suffering from a loss of memory over a long length of time, or were they obliged by fear of the law not to cooperate?
	“Do you ever miss that time, Millennia?” Nadia rested her head on her crossed arms and sighed. Her eyes still scanned the black, ventless tiled sky. Her short, dark hair fled from the crown of her head like rain falling down a window. The sound of an organ tonelessly screeching below them made her look all the more wistful. “I do. I miss my sister. I miss those days where we were together. The nights. We were always together, and then… we weren’t. School didn’t get in the way back then. Sometimes it was just us, without anything to do, but we were never bored. It was peaceful. It was fun. Sometimes we slept together, like this… only, it wasn’t like… this…”
	“If everyone misses life before the Emperor so much,” Millennia whispered involuntarily, in a fleeting moment of frustration, “why hasn’t anyone made any effort to change things?”
	“It’s useless,” Nadia whispered, just as frustrated if a hundred times sadder. “No one can find the New Machine Girl, and she’s the only one who could do that.”
	“That name,” Millennia gasped, suddenly alert and awake. “What do you know about that? Who is she?”
	It was pointless. Nadia had fallen fast asleep, her mouth still open and one of her eyes still wet with an unfallen tear.
	The sirens of the hour played and commanded once again, and the despair-ridden frustration in Millennia’s throat dared her to face the Emperor again. What else did she have to lose? She played the idea off as foolish, stupid even, but the more she heard the demand to kill the very person she wanted to find in the endless city, the more the anger rose in her chest and heated her knife. Unable to bear it finally, she pushed herself out of Nadia’s bed – after closing the girl’s mouth and gently wiping away her teardrop – and dressed again in the dark.
	She didn’t make it outside before the end of the hourly alarm. Millennia cursed at the fact that she would have to wait an entire hour on the rooftop now before she would be able to see the Emperor. That was fine, though, she decided. It wasn’t like the night had any logical limit on the amount of hours and alarms that would play. Provided she could stay awake until the sunrise, perhaps she would be able to figure out some semblance of regularity to the time of the day by watching all of them.
	At the elevators, one was out of order and one was already rising when she pressed the button to go up. The elevator stopped on her floor and a man walked out on stunted, broken-looking legs.
	“Oh, well, if it isn’t you again, little lady,” Andre said, a smile on his too-big head. “How have you been?”
	Millennia suppressed the urge to scream only by telling herself that she was in the hallway to a dorm and that someone would surely hear her if she were to vocalize her fright… and by realizing the man in front of her was not the nightmarish abomination he was the last time she saw him. Unlike before, in the motor-bench, Andre was smartly dressed, with a dress suit a size too big in every fashion, but still somewhat impressive. The suit, Millennia realized, was the bottom half of the Guard uniform, but instead of a black dress shirt and military jacket, he wore only a starched white shirt with buttons and a vest over it. Beneath the baggy, pleated folds of his clothes, it was impossible to see the details of his body. She had no way of knowing if he was still as grotesquely wounded and disfigured as before. Even his hands were hidden in the folds of his shirt.
	“What are you doing here? How did you find me here?”
	“Hm? I didn’t know you were here. I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
	“You’re homeless.”
	“So are you, right? So what are you doing here, little lady?”
	“…I go to this University.”
	“Are these your dorms?”
	“…”
	He smiled knowingly, and his eyes wrinkled too thinly in the act. “Real fancy dress you’ve got on.”
	Did he not mention the knife on purpose, or did he simply not see it? Now that Millennia thought of it, Nadia hadn’t said anything about it, either, even when they were in bed next to each other. Was that another odd part of this reality? “You look quite charming, as well.”
	“Oh, this,” Andre said, waving a covered hand as the elevator dinged behind him. “I was just at a dinner party tonight. Nothing serious.”
	“…A party?” Her blood ran cold, and the knife colder.
	“Yes ma’am, with another friend I made when leaving it. Here he is now.” The elevator opened and Andre stepped forward, his movements less humanoid than the graceful pallbearers from earlier.
	Out of the elevator, alongside the rising tune of the organ from deep below, walked a tall, very thin man in a much better fitting uniform than Andre himself. He was dressed almost exactly the same as Andre was, but his clothes fit him much better, and he wore his incomplete uniform with an air of regality and comfort that was fundamentally different from the homeless man of illusory disfiguration. As he exited the elevator, he nodded at Andre and looked over to Millennia with one hand in his pocket and another fidgeting near the center of his chest.
	The stark shadowed hollow-cheeked stranger was silent, and he stared at Milennia’s neck as if he could see directly to her carotid. Something about his striking figure frightened her; at the same time, she found herself immediately aroused and interested by his presence.
	“My friend Vaalh here said he’d rather sleep in his dorm than his other home tonight, so I walked him home, you see.” With Andre’s voice came Millennia’s nerves jumping. She had forgotten he was there among them, and that the organ was somehow still playing. “Would you like to sleep on the roof with me?”
	She felt relieved somehow that he did not use her name when addressing her. “No – I won’t be going to sleep anytime soon. Thank you, though.” Even when she let herself glance at Andre’s form, Millennia could see nothing of his body beneath the over-abundant folds of his clothing. The uncanny illusion of stillness amidst movement reminded her of the Bride. Was this man among the two of them another one of those “expatriates” that Varana had spoken of? He must have been, if he was still awake in the night, and one of the hourly signals had only just finished. Did she dare to ask outright?
	“Be careful outside,” Andre half-sung as he passed by her. Something about the way Andre spoke to her – something which she could not name, could not identify – made her freeze up with fear and instant revulsion. He smiled that hideous smile of his as he passed by, and his eyes crinkled up with amusement as they usually did, but the few visible parts of his body did not portray a language of joy. “I won’t be around to help you hide from the Guard, this time.” As he and his shadow passed her she realized that the facet of his speaking that made her skin crawl was the singing of it. It was exactly identical to the crooning of the hideous, terrifying woman downstairs, and seemed to speak only of chaos and nonsense, even as he confirmed one of her worst fears.
	The Guard. What she had seen that night was the Guard. The exact same shadows that matched the pallbearers from hours earlier were the ones that drove her to sleep in Andre’s presence. Those beautiful, inhuman figures were the Guard.
	And that meant…
	A throat being cleared drew her attention out of her fearful reverie. Millennia realized she had been fingering the knife frantically, and that the golden chain around her neck was leaving a tight imprint on her skin. She relented the grip and looked up to Vaalh, who was still staring at her, even after the door to the staircase audibly closed behind her.
	“You’re going outside?” he asked.
	She swallowed. The invitation was out there in the open, now. This man did not mince words. “I planned to,” she replied.
	“There’s nothing out there to do,” Vaalh said. That took her by surprise, that he cared more for what was available to do in the outdoors rather than the illegality of it all. “The trains aren’t running, either. Do you live close?”
	“No. I’m on 116.”
	“That’s far. You’re going to walk that?”
	“I’ve done it before.”
	He shrugged. It was an odd gesture for one who gave off an image of vicious rigidity and strength standing at a contrast to the careless movement of a shrug. The knife grew colder as Millennia realized how over-conscious she was of everything this Vaalh did. Foolishly, though she had been let down so many times before, she hoped he did not have a last name. “Did you enjoy the dinner?”
	“No. I didn’t even eat.”
	“Me either. I came to it late, and seemed to have missed the most important part of it.” He startled her with the intensity of his gaze, right to the knife at the crux of her throat. He saw it, she did not doubt – but why did everyone dance and dodge around it, like some pointless jig of death or expiring? Everything, everything was pointless.
	“And what would that be?” she asked, refusing to be led onward any further.
	“The stain on your dress,” Vaalh said, relenting his gaze and looking down. “Is that from the wine?”
	“No.”
	“You know the Guard are attracted to blood, don’t you?”
	She blinked. “…No. I did not.”
	“Well, they are. They’ll find you and they’ll rip you apart for being out in these hours.” He spoke in terms of facts, not his opinions on them. “You had better come inside with me, then. I can lend you something to wear, so you’ll at least be able to get home safely.” And with that, the dance was finished, and the two followed each other breathlessly until Vaalh’s door closed behind them both. She kept her eyes closed and did not see whether his door had a label for a last name or not.