ELISE: Maybe truth isn’t the right word. I’m talking about… [PAUSE] everything else. You’re more than just what happened in 1906, Cal.
CALAMITY: [LENGTHY PAUSE] That’s where you’re wrong.
* * *
Elise had interviewed many people in her career. She had, after all, started working as a journalist when she was ten — for her own newspaper, of course. The St. Francis Chronicle wasn’t the most prestigious paper of record, but it kept the neighborhood abreast of all the latest developments, like when Mrs. Manfredi put an illegal pool in her backyard or that time the neighborhood association tried to exterminate the pixies in the park’s shed, despite it being against the city’s environmental bylaws to do so. It’s reputation was helped by a ringing endorsement from San Francisco’s most celebrated crime writer, Bob Sasini, who lived on 113 Santa Clara Avenue, and happened to be the publisher’s amused father.
Hopping from her little paper to school journalism, then to The Light and her own books, Elise had more experience with interviewing than most journalists her age. She learned all the best tricks at her father’s knee, and she’d honed her skills on the rolling, bouncing San Francisco streets.
None of that helped her with Cal.
No matter how hard she tried to keep things straight, to stay in the cool, professional headspace that allowed for an objective interview, she just… couldn’t manage it.
Perhaps it was the memory of his kiss and the greedy, possessive hands that reached for her at every opportunity. Maybe it was the way he sat across her small kitchen table, his black on black eyes fixed to her face like he was the one trying to figure her out. Elise suspected it was a mix of both, as well as the fact that she struggled to stomach some of the things he told her.
Cal was stark in his honesty. He didn’t sugarcoat things, and he didn’t seem to understand social niceties. He was reluctant to talk about some things, but she didn’t think it was because he was trying to hide anything. Elise quickly realized that, like his heartbreaking inexperience with physical contact, Cal was similarly unfamiliar with talking to people.
And no wonder. The more she learned about his story, the more she tried to understand why he talked to anyone at all.
“Cal…” Elise’s voice trailed off into nothing, her words evaporating into so much dry air in her throat. She sat across from him, both of their grilled cheese sandwiches sitting cold and untouched on their plates, and tried to quell the urge to reach across the table to hold his hand.
That wasn’t what interviewers did. They let their subject say what they needed to with a patient detachment, guiding only when absolutely necessary. She wasn’t supposed to feel the prick of tears behind her eyelids when he explained, expressionless and without inflection, the circumstances of his birth to her.
“It was my fault,” he continued in his soft, deadpan voice. “Every one of those deaths is on my soul. All three thousand of them.”
Elise had to swallow twice before the lump in her throat shrank enough to allow her to speak. She shifted her weight in her chair. Fighting the urge to comfort him somehow, she tucked one leg under her and fisted her hands in her lap.
“Is that what the acolytes told you?” she asked, her tone brittle with outrage.
Cal inclined his head. His hair, starkly white against his black shirt and the glorious sunset streaming through the windows behind him, flowed in slow currents around his shoulders. “They took me in,” he explained, “and they taught me how to be with people. I didn’t understand what had happened to me for weeks afterward. I couldn’t understand them, the things they said, or why my form was different than it used to be. When I finally learned their language, all they ever talked about was my sin, and how Loft had given me to them so that they could teach me how to atone for it. They thought I was a test of their devotion.”
Elise knew it wasn’t helpful, but words spilled out of her anyway. “But.. But Cal, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t have any control over it. No one gets to control how or where they’re born.”
Cal’s fingers moved restlessly over the tabletop. Although his expression didn’t change, she could tell he was getting restless. His long hair had begun to dematerialize into wisps of fog, and she could feel the cool kiss of it along the skin of her arms and bare feet.
Remembering what he said about feeling confined, Elise eschewed the last of her tenuous control over her professionalism and reached across the table.
Cal’s eyes widened when her fingers curled around his. For a moment, he felt strange, almost not-quite-there, and Elise realized that he had barely managed to keep his physical form as he told his story.
As soon as their skin touched, he solidified. That hungry look gleamed in his eyes as he snatched at her hand, holding it like he thought she might try to rip it away from him.
Tracing the contours of her knuckles and short, clear-coated nails with his fingertips, he said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s my fault, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for all the death I caused.”
Elise’s fingers spasmed. His naked honesty hit her like a bolt to the chest. She expected him to be mysterious, not tortured. “Is that why you watch over the city? Because you feel like you have to atone for 1906?”
“Yes.”
Trying to make sense of the tangle he presented her with, she shifted subjects. It was much for his sake as hers. She wasn’t sure how much more sorrow she could withstand before she leaned over the table to take him into her arms. “You mentioned that you were imprisoned. How does that fit in with the Aerie?”
“Much of the Aerie was destroyed in the disaster. They needed to rebuild. I wasn’t locked away so much by the end of my first year, mostly because I didn’t know where to go or what to do with myself. I used to stay around the dock to be closer to the fog. One day, a builder caught me rematerializing and contacted Patrol.” He shrugged, but she could feel the tension in the hand that held hers. “The acolytes fought for custody of me, claiming it was their religious right, but the sovereign wanted me under his control.”
Elise paled. Although it was before her time, she knew there was no arguing with Thaddeus II. Even before he lost his mind, the man was legendarily autocratic. His word was law, and if he wanted something, he used any means to get it.
“How long were you imprisoned?” she dared to ask, her dread solidifying into a sickly weight in her stomach.
Cal lifted her hand up to his mouth almost experimentally. Slowly, he pressed his lips to the center of her palm. A zing of magic shocked her nerve endings and sent a wave of heat through her, adding to that possessive fire in her belly. She watched his eyelids flutter, white lashes brushing the tops of high, blade-like cheekbones with a breathless sort of hunger.
His whisper tickled the sensitive skin of her palm. “Four hundred and three days.”