Revolving Door: Volume 2
A Needle in a Haystack - II
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts graphic injury and trauma response.
The royal suite sinks gently back into silence. Orobelle retires to the queen bed, sipping liquid satiation under the rosy warm light. Dorian contemplates the room from the swivel chair, brow furrowed in thought.
“So…how about dinner?” Vesper ventures, standing. She can see Honourless gnawing on her fingernails.
Orobelle does not dignify her with an answer until she has drained her pink bottle. And even then, her answer is not to Vesper. “Dorian! Get these two some dinner,” she declares. “The money’s in the luggage.”
He clears his throat, lowering his head with such a deep bow that his long hair tumbles over his shoulder. “Of course, my duchess…and may I—purchase dinner for myself as well?” he asks.
“Oh. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, my duchess.” He is already at the door.
With his departure, Orobelle returns to the journal on her knee, and Honourless curls up on the couch.
Sighing, Vesper unbuckles her pack and sorts through its contents: packets of jerky, a can of luncheon meat, twenty pounds from the wrong decade, two water canteens, and a change of clothes. She pauses on the last finding: a shirt and a pair of mud-stained trouser.
“Anyone meaning to use the bathroom?” she says as she scoops them out, and pauses. “No? All right, excuse me for a minute.”
*
It is the most pristine bathing facility Vesper has ever set foot in: the floors are bright enough to see herself in, and the sink shows no stain.
It's hard to leave the balmy shower once it's running. For almost twenty minutes, she stands in the mist and washes and scrubs, scouring weeks of mud and soot from her body.
She towels herself dry on the mat in front of the sink. The spotless mirror reveals every tired line on her face, her hair briefly tamed by the water. The omnipresent odour of sweat has been replaced by the gentle fragrance of their liquid soap. She digs her fingers into the towel fibres—it is plusher than even the ones at home.
Home. She mulls over the thought as she dresses, running a hand over the scars on her arms. What has she gotten herself into? A bloody predicament is what—strong-armed into waiting on a child who thinks herself the queen of the universe.
Vesper breathes out a long sigh. Almost as soon as she starts scrubbing at her hair does it begin sticking out in unruly spikes, and she wonders how she will last on two changes of clothes.
*
When Vesper returns to the hotel room, Honourless has unfolded the couch into a double bed.
“Oh, wonderful,” she calls, walking the long way around the counter to avoid the luggage. The woman looks up, and Vesper’s smile seems to register, for she grins back with a few chuffed words and a pat of the seat’s edge.
Vesper drops onto the other end of the couch-bed. “Oi, Orobelle,” she says.
“What, knave?”
“We might need an interpreter ‘round here. I don’t think I could learn Honourless’ language without any words in common. Not quickly, at least.”
“Well, too bad!” Orobelle mutters, not looking up from her writing. “I don’t do the bidding of commoners. The Gift of the Light is not shared lightly.”
“The gift? Is that what translates your words before I hear them? Some form of magic?”
Orobelle does not reply. Vesper rolls her eyes.
This child is going to be the death of her, if this mission isn’t. She thought the English nobles were insufferable, but this is something else. Does Orobelle even eat? Or bleed? Or bathe?
*
The answer to the first question quickly turns out to be “no”: Dorian returns with three meals. The fragrance of the rice that blossoms through the room would more than rival ten British dinners combined. Vesper and Honourless dive upon the food, the latter somehow more eager than she, but not by much. Dorian, though measured as he always is, has a light in his eye for the first time she has seen.
The dish of rice, fried meats and plantains busies them for a good ten minutes. Now that Orobelle’s protector has returned, Vesper renews her determination for a translator. “Dorian,” she calls, “would you by any chance be willing to act as an interpreter, so that I may speak to Honourless?”
He swallows a mouthful. “Certainly. What shall I convey?”
Vesper almost blinks with surprise. She considers Honourless, who is shovelling rice into her mouth. “If you could tell her I said this: Thank you for bringing us here, and also figuring out how to do that with the couch.” She gestures at the upholstery. “And, I’m sorry you ferry us about so thankless; you deserve better.”
Orobelle hisses at these words. Dorian repeats them with slightly different phrasing.
As he speaks, Honourless begins to smile lopsidedly, licking rice grains off her lips. She utters something back in a gravelly voice. “She says,” Dorian addresses Vesper this time, “‘A shame about this language barrier. I like you, you are a good one.’”
“Hah, even I am not sure of that some days,” Vesper answers, and Dorian echoes her words to Honourless. “So I appreciate your kind words.”
Honourless wrinkles her brow and speaks again, in those curling, lisping syllables. “‘What do you mean?’” Dorian translates. “‘You are compassionate and responsible. No?’”
“If you had found me just a day sooner, you wouldn’t think me such a good person.” She props her head up on her elbow, now looking the woman in the eye. “I’ve killed more people than you would meet in a year.”
Honourless chuckles as Dorian repeats her words. Her reply—and his—is: “So you’ve killed five people? You overestimate how many people I’d see.”
“Ah, sorry, I forgot about that. You’re helping that little brat over there in exchange for freedom, aren’t you?”
“Shut up!” Orobelle screams, and Vesper hears a pillow thud on the floor behind her. “I am the Duchess of Diamonds! I am the One Around Whom The Worlds Spin!”
Honourless is guffawing as Dorian translates, increasingly flustered with each word. She slaps the tabletop where the wrapper of her meal sits. “‘Exactly right,’” is the reply he interprets back. “‘And she knows she cannot do without us, so she must put up with all we say, too. Let’s make…’ I’m sorry, I cannot say that of my liege.”
Vesper has to pause to register that Dorian is no longer translating. He glances away, eyes cast down with poorly-obscured remorse. Honourless sighs and mutters something to him, which slackens his shoulders. Her eyes meet Vesper’s once more, and the next words she speaks are directed clearly at her.
“She says, ‘Are you alright sharing the couch tonight? It may not be as comfortable as you are used to.’”
“Hah, I’ve slept in conditions that would make a duchess hurl,” Vesper replies. “A shared couch is a luxury.”
Dorian sighs as he translates.
“‘Us both.’” Honourless gives a satisfied nod, grinning with broken teeth. “‘How is the bathing room?’”
“Also a luxury.” Dorian raises his eyebrow at this. He repeats the words for Honourless.
And with just a smirk, the woman rises from her seat and disappears through the doorway into that plush lavatory, slamming the door shut behind her. There are a number of clattering sounds from within, and the intermittent splash of jetting water, amid furious laughter. Dorian and Vesper look at each other.
“So, for tomorrow,” she says then, “what are our plans?”
“Well, my duchess has raised the need for a map of this world,” he replies. “If you are able to help us locate one, then it would be invaluable to us. I know too little about where such things are found in this world; you seem more familiar with its ways.”
She nods. “I might be able to. Never had to ask a stranger for a world map, but it’s nothing too rare, I’m sure.” With her belly full, she feels the first of pull of sleep on her eyelids. “For now, however, it may be bedtime.”
Vesper is creeping through misty forests, but she is not alone. Marlowe, Weston and Rajan walk at her side, following her silent lead. She knows she is meant to be somewhere, but the place eludes her. Somewhere in Hungary, somewhere that isn’t here.
Far above, there is a scream of planes. Her eyes flick to the sky. She watches the propellor aircraft pass, but no telltale specks of bombs fall from their bays.
A shout her cleaves her attention. As her eyes return to the ground she finds, all at once, that soldiers in the Nazi colours are tiding out from behind the trees, rifles glinting, sharp as death.
Vesper yells as she dives behind a tree. A rat-a-tat of gunfire. A rain of bullets. All miss her. Then she hears the keening, and her head whips around: not two feet away, Marlowe has stumbled to his knees, telltale red blossoming from his side. He reaches a trembling hand towards her, calling weakly before a bullet splits his shoulder and he screams, spattering blood on the leaf litter. She whirls around to see Weston dashing towards her—but a round the size of an EMPW electrode blurs from the trees, blowing his head off before he can clear the tree line, and Rajan shrieks, “Captain! Captain Lovelace—”
He only manages that many words. Convulsing like a puppet, he tumbles to the leaves in a puddle of red, an electrode round in his back with its wire tangled around the nearest tree.
“No! No, no, no! Rajan!” she yells hoarsely, as if his name might bring him back. When she dives to check for a pulse, a volley of bullets tears her hands from his corpse—
Vesper jolts awake with a yell, and feels her hand connect with a face.
Beside her, a stranger, too, springs awake—and with no more than a beastly snarl, lunges for her neck with hooked fingers.
Terror seizing her, Vesper winds up her legs to kick.
As those hands connect with her throat, their eyes meet, and she suddenly recognises the stranger: Honourless.
More memories resolve from the glaze of confusion. The room. The past day. She's not on the battlefield anymore.
Recognition seems to dawn on Honourless in the same moment. She retracts her hands with a jerk. They sit there, gasping for breath for many seconds.
Then the woman chuckles. She says something that Vesper can only assume is an apology, shaking her head.
“No, no, I'm sorry,” she answers listlessly. The dawn light seeps through the curtains, silhouetting her.
When her eyes sweep over to the queen bed, the young duchess is still snoring soundly. But Dorian lies awake in a bedroll beside it, propped up on one elbow. His eyes glitter in the early dawn light. “What's the matter?” he whispers, just loud enough for them to hear.
“Nightmares,” Vesper replies. “The usual.”
Honourless says something.
“Nightmares,” Dorian repeats for her.
Turning to Vesper, Honourless awkwardly reaches out to pat her forearm, an odd smile—maybe concern or pity—crossing her scar-furrowed face. Then she withdraws it again, and, mumbling one last thing to Dorian, slumps back down into her sleeping spot.
“She says she's sorry for attacking you. It's an old habit.”
“That's all right. I—I started it.”
While the rest of the room settles back into slumber, Vesper finds she cannot. She rises to her feet and shuffles to the bathroom, splashing her face at the sink. Then she steals quietly away with the keycard in hand, the hotel door creaking shut behind her.
As she descends the polished stairs, tree shadows rustle on the hallway below in the first light of morning. The last of her panic washes away with the sound. Clinking cutlery draws her gaze: she ducks over to the cafe, and finds a catered breakfast waiting, two other guests dining with her. Buttered bread with jam, a comforting classic.
Then, she figures, it is time for business. It may as well be.
The reception desk opens at an astounding hour of day—a different clerk sits in attendance now, with a shaven head under his cylindrical cap, polishing the countertop.
She reads the badge on his chest. “Good morning, Mister Ibrahim,” she says with a wave.
He lifts his head from his polishing. “Ah, good morning! I hope you are having an excellent stay,” he answers, smiling toothily.
“It’s been excellent so far, thank you,” she replies. “If I may, sir, I’d like your advice on the matter of…travel.”
Dropping his cloth, Ibrahim folds his palms on the countertop with a curious smile, a quirking of eyebrows. “Of course. I’m not an expert, but maybe I can help. What do you want to know?”
“Two things,” she says. “Firstly, I'm wondering where I may find a map of the world.”
“You can look for a bookshop, there are a few if you walk...” He trails off. “Hrm. Actually, maybe we have a spare, there used to be maps on the wall. I can check for you.”
“That would be very kind, thank you.”
He nods once. “No problems at all. What is the second thing you want to ask?”
“Oh, yes. What is the price of a trip by airplane these days? We came by…not by airplane, you see. In fact, would you tell me more about flying in general?”
He chuckles. “You walked all the way from England?”
She can’t help a grin. “Something like that. I haven’t seen England in…years.” It’s the truth in more ways than one.
“Oho, travelling so long. Do you miss home?”
“I miss my parents,” she replies.
He nods. “I hope you can return soon, then. Air tickets to England, I can help you check, but it will definitely be more than eighty thousand naira.”
Something has occurred to her then. “And…I’ll need a passport to fly, wouldn’t I?”
At this, Ibrahim chuckles. “Yes. You must have a passport, just like any other border. There are other things…they allow no liquid in your bag. And no scissors and no nail clippers. They are strict these days.”
“Huh. That's good to know.”
Vesper does not have a passport. Her father is the sole bearer of the family’s travel documents. And there is no way the others are in any better standing than she is.
While she ponders the implications of this fact, Ibrahim busies himself with unlatching the counter door. “I can check for your map now, one minute.” Then he steps out from behind the counter and vanishes into the corridor to the right.
It turns out that there is a world map in the stores, one that used to hang on the wall for years. Vesper returns to the hotel room with the rolled poster under her arm, and as she pushes the door open, she declares, “I found one.”
Amid their stares, she spreads the map on the hardwood dining table, where Orobelle is polishing off her pink vial of breakfast. Each country on the map is coloured differently from its neighbours, forming a rainbow quilt. Though faded, the city names have yet to disappear, printed in stark black.
Orobelle places the empty vial next to the map. “Alright, let us see.” She lays her translation glass on the tabletop.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Vesper murmurs as she squints at the city names through the lens. “Does your compass account for the curvature of the earth?”
“The corefinder does, thank you very much. Do your instruments not?” she replies. “Primitive.”
“Sorry that we don’t have magic, I guess.”
“Alas for you. The Light flows weak through these worlds.”
They pore over the map for a minute, Orobelle uncapping a stick of graphite in a metal holder. “This city is…” She reaches for her lens, but Vesper quickly points out the capital of Nigeria, nestled in the Gulf of Guinea.
Orobelle marks it with a circle. “Do you have a magnetic compass?” she asks.
“Do you not?” Vesper replies.
Orobelle glares at her for five full seconds. “Bring it here.”
With the patience of a hundred saints, Vesper opens her pack. Sure enough, it is right where it has always been, hanging on a keyring from an inner zip in her pack. She teases it off the zip and brings it to Orobelle.
The duchess lays the two instruments side by side, the compass and the corefinder, and begins to draw straight, ruled lines with her graphite.
Vesper cannot help noticing the steadiness of Orobelle’s hand. She draws without a ruler, and yet the line, marking the trajectory from Lagos to their unknown mark, is so clean as to be severe, like a knifestroke. It curves to match the map projection—it is unclear if she can perceive the distortions, or if it is by rote, but the markings appear sound.
When she is done, she squints at her handiwork. The line extends northwest, across the Atlantic, bisecting North America, and then halfway across the Pacific Ocean. It passes through no labelled cities. “Well, hmph, that’s my closest guess,” she says. “Without a globe nor the right instruments, I cannot say for sure.”
Then she peers over the map, and her pencil comes slowly to rest over the city of Lima. She waves her glass over it, and circles it with her pencil. “Our target is almost certainly in this half of the world,” she says, waving at the Americas. “And this city here ought to be the ideal first staging point. Honourless, fetch me some funds.”
Hong Yi’s phone starts to explode with texts about a week before he’s slated to return to the States. It wasn't two hours ago that the entire Marine Bio gang declared a video call—for the sole purpose of catching up with him. That's what they say, anyway.
“Hey, Hong Yi, my man!” It’s Jake who's first to pipe up, then he's joined by a chorus of exclamations from Tana, Andrea, Berrigan. Berrigan looks like he might burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he replies, breaking into a grin despite himself, at his friends' faces filling the laptop screen. “What's up?”
“Not much, man. You're back in town the day after tomorrow, right? You got an ETA on that?”
Hong Yi squints. “Are you planning something?”
“Wha—nah, literally why would we plan anything just ‘cause you’re coming back? We barely even missed you, lol.”
“Jake, shut up! Hong Yi, we love you and we’re not asking for any reasoning in particular.”
“Suuure… So, my flight lands at eleven in the evening in NYC day after tomorrow, but I'm holidaying there for a couple days. I'm back in Boston on, like, evening of the 20th.”
“Twentieth August?” “Twentieth evening.” “Gotcha!” Hong Yi chuckles.
“So, how’s it going, man? How are the parents?“
Hong Yi feels a twinge at this, though he doesn’t suppose they can see his ambivalence through the webcam. “Oh, you know, same old parents, same old house, same old invalidation…”
“Hey, Hong, can we set them on fire?” this time it’s Tana who pipes up.
“Yeah, like, parents, man,” Berrigan mutters. “If they ever visit us here, boy am I giving them a piece of my mind.”
He glances over his shoulder at his bedroom door. “Chill out, guys. They’re still people, you know. I mean…” He sighs again. “My dad had cancer while I was away. He’s almost better now, but…”
“Goddamn.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry, Hong.”
“Hey, Hong Yi,” Tana interjects, “when you get back, I am gonna give you a hug at the party—that totally isn’t happening!”
“Tana!” gasps Jacob.
He chuckles, shaking his head. His luggage lies half packed at the foot of his bed. He’ll have to put it all away soon—his hopes and sorrows, and the half-written dreams of his past, so intricately bound to this tiny house that he cannot take them along with him.
But it’s about time he wrapped up this month-long ordeal, anyway.
The flight from Beijing to New York is like every other flight before. Twenty hours across the Pacific, cold dry air and tongue-burning food, barely a drop of sleep. He lands in the only city on the East Coast that sees direct flights from China, the signs above the baggage claim welcoming him back like it has every year since he began flying.
Sleeplessly, Hong Yi boards the MTA to his lodging by Central Park. Even at one in the morning, he sees people milling in the dark—smokers, guards, retail workers on tired feet. Reaching the door of the hostel, his eyes ache with drowziness. He piles his luggage into the room with the others, takes his tag and toiletries, and goes straight up the curving stairs to his room.
For a three-day stay, it’s not too bad, despite the moldy blankets and the uneven paint. Even the snoring of his temporary roommates is not unwelcome. The light is rickety and white, and he is here on his own financing. All this looks and smells to him like…relief.
Honourless has no qualms, when asked, about theft. By the time Vesper returns with three people's lunch, the exile is the only one there, and littered across the table are stacks of notes, of which she is sorting through one, grinning. She waves Vesper over, and then holds them up for her, saying something: “Ko’the i?”
The woman has handed her the rainbow stack of bills in her three-fingered hand. Vesper starts counting them, each with faces of famous figures. The man said eighty thousand would buy a person a flight to London, and if she knows anything about flying, it’s that the fuel costs a fortune.
When she passes the eighty thousand mark, and notices that she hasn’t gotten through even a tenth of the money strewn here, she meets Honourless’ eye and says, “This is a proper fortune, blight me.”
“Fortune?” Honourless repeats the word back, phonetically. She makes two gestures—sweeping a hand upwards towards her face, and then downward to the table.
Vesper thinks for a moment. Picking it up or putting it down? “Yes,” she says, imitating the gesture of lifting her hand towards herself.
“Ah!” Honourless grins, and then starts to sweep the stacks of notes across the tabletop towards her.
Vesper stares in horror at the hundreds of thousands of naira gathering before her in a tangle of colours. She starts stacking the notes in roughly hand-sized lots, then glimpses the red rubber band pile she has gathered on the other side of the mountain of funds.
“Now you're just mocking me,” she mutters, taking the first rubber band.
An hour before the jump, Orobelle makes Vesper teach Honourless about the city of Lima: the name, the geography, everything she remembers. “I've never been there,” she quickly admits, “but here's what I remember from my mother…”
It is a coastal city not far from mountains—the capital city of Peru. It was an old settlement, then it was colonised, and it is at least half a millennium old.
“And,” she adds, closing her eyes as if to uncover her memory of the city, “it’s where the raw fish dish called ceviche comes from.”
Orobelle turns to Honourless. “And is that enough to get you there?” she asks.
Honourless hmphs. “It should be. It may not be. But even names have anchoring power.”
“Then let's find out,” the girl answers, holding the Corefinder close as she is swallowed in pink light, to be replaced by her card-form. She watches Honourless pick the map up with one hand, and her with the other. “Alright, let's get moving.”
Vesper steps back. From within the card, Orobelle feels the distortions of spacetime in a muted way—they are almost no different from feeling her card bend or flutter in wind, but all at once she sees the world streak away in a vortex, and swirl, ripple, stretch.
It is an unnameable time later that the streaks snap back into steadiness, and the cold swallows them. The wind tears with its teeth and flecks of snow sting their faces.
“End me!” Honourless spits, steadying herself on her feet. Far beneath the peak, an endless blanket of clouds unrolls.
“Hurry on with it,” Orobelle answers.
“Shut up, girl,” she answers.
“What did you just call me?” In her white hot rage, she begins to glow and vibrate, but then remembers the blizzard and stops short of materialising.
“What should I call you, prissy pants?”
“Insolent wretch! My name is Orobelle Brilliant, Duchess of Diamonds, Bearer of the Knot of Worlds!”
“Oh, perfect, that's what I was forgetting! Let's get out of here.” Then, as the cliffs and crags start rippling again, Honourless mutters the name of Orobelle Brilliant while she screeches to unhearing ears.
Honourless lands back in Lagos almost an hour later, atop the coffee table at the precise midpoint between Dorian and Vesper. The two are sipping tea in the armchairs, and apparently discussing the Second World, when she crashes onto the furniture piece and tumbles onto the floor.
Orobelle rematerialises with arms akimbo, while Honourless lies sprawled on the carpet, the map several creases rougher in her fist.
“What in the Light's name was that?” screams the duchess.
The exile’s eyes are squeezed shut. “I told you it wasn't precise. I told you the names may not be enough.”
“You disappoint me, exile.”
“You infuriate me, child.”
“Oh! Oh! You've gone and done it again! I will scratch my name into your eyes if you do it one more time!”
“I didn't spend your name, Orobelle Brilliant, Duchess of Diamonds, Bearer of the Knot of Worlds. I just don't care to call you by your name when you’re calling me exile.”
“You, you—”
Orobelle sputters and points and before her next word can exit her mouth, Dorian puts his tea down and steps between them. “My duchess,” he says, bowing low with a hand to his heart. “Please, what may I get you, if anything at all?”
“Tranquillity!” she snarls, holding out a hand, and he dashes to her luggage, while she turns away with a sniff and walks after him.
Vesper massages the bridge of her nose and shakes her head. She bends over to pick up the crumpled map where Honourless left it, and unrolls it to find a matrix of arcing graphite lines scrawled across it, all intersecting near the north-eastern corner of the United States.
The markings sequester a large triangle on the map, overlapping the northeastern coastline of North America. It encompasses multiple cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Providence, Newport.
The quarry of their search, it seems, resides in one of the most densely populated corners of the northern hemisphere.
“Hm. Well, if we were to choose a landing city,” Vesper says, after a prolonged pause of ponderance, “I daresay New York City gives us our best chances.”
By now, Vesper has explained the particulars of air travel that make it—at present—a useless option. “But that begs the question—Honourless—” she motions at Dorian across the room— “can you ghost twice with all of us in tow again?”
As he translates, Honourless meets his eye, then hers, grumbles out a reply, and shrugs.
“She says, ‘I’d hate to. But if it is the only way, then, sure, we may as well try.’”
At a bank on Oba Akran Avenue, Orobelle switches a hundred thousand naira for six hundred and twenty-eight United States dollars. Then, ducking into a dusty carpark nestled between two shop houses, they link hands in a circle on the concrete, amid the blaring of horns and the patter of pedestrian feet, closing their eyes to the grimy walls.
As the world starts to warp, Honourless yells out—but to all others in the vicinity, they only hear her voice. Her last cry echoes across the compound, long after they have disappeared.