She is a dancer. A performer. An eclipse with a trick. She is whatever face wins on the coin that she flips.

  Roach isn’t the type of girl that just sits. If she sits at all. She’s not entirely sure that she does need sleep, and if her body demands it, then perhaps that is a fault that must be fixed.

  It feels much better to be moving, to curl new textures between her toes or the pads of her fingers. She likes the taste of dirt and batteries and all of the things that should make you scowl and most of the things that taste like blood or hurt.

  She likes bruises too because of the purple, and so she doesn’t mind the new one on her eye. Doesn’t mind all of the new things swelling up her world.

  The opposite, actually.

  She likes it.

  The chaos tastes good, but hope tastes better, and she wants her subjects to be fat on it.

  Hope, she has learned, is a valuable tool and resource. A pivotal foundation to a manipulation that will get her to the sun and not its ghostly echo.

  She is the performer, and today she will play hero because she’s so good at it and the discarded are so easy to convince. Perhaps they can convince her of herself. Perhaps she will get so good at it that one day she will sprout a cape and wings and really feel.

  Feel what?

  Good? Real? Human?

  Anything.

  She has to keep moving. Keep building. Keep scheming. Her world is an oyster, and she’ll grind her teeth on the shell and use the rest for jewellery. She can’t stop. Can’t stop. If she stops—she simply can’t.

  Keep moving, keep learning, keep breathing.

  Keep them fat. Keep them loyal.

  She likes Sen the most of the children she adopts, although she couldn't tell you why. Perhaps it's because he never cries when she fixes his wounds, or perhaps it's because she still hears his small voice in her head, creeping up the bone to hang down like a canopy.

  Never bow down..

  He clings to her, often glued to her side but never says much of anything outside of a complaint, outside of judgement.

  She's not used to having so many guests, but she'll be the perfect host she's read about, the one from the Halidom flyers with pretty ladies whose skin is tan and golden like honey and who drink from flutes of amber brew—she's fresh out of that, and so she mostly serves powdered milk with umbrellas or sparkles or something else that might render the fluid poisonous— but it's okay, it's okay, it's okay because everyone has relearned how to smile and to laugh, and the sound, oh god, this sound that Rivin spoke of, this sound that he missed and clawed his way back to— let it remain. Let the racket prosper and the noise grow and the colour bloom ever brighter, for a house is not a home until it’s filled, and Roach has never been home — not truly — if not for all the moments she stopped being alone.

  She will give them whatever they want. Whatever they need. She will teach them more than dancing; she will show them more than light. To want and to yearn. She will feed them ambition that looks like flexible fingers but grows into sharpened weapons. She will mould them into exactly what she needs, and they will not break, not break, not break because she is not in the business of breaking.

  Hope is a valuable resource, and she will teach them how to wield it.

  They start small, with the easiest. Surprisingly enough, that means the drowner child. Monet has found her voice, and Roach likes to think it sounds like drizzle or slow rain, and in that likeness is a promise to one day show her both.

  Show them all the rain, the sky that yields it.

  It's three days before she's well enough, plus a few more before the tunnels quieten down, and soon enough it's time to go.

  Another homecoming so quickly after the boy, and the flutter in the Queen’s stomach is quickly doused by the fear of silence, of people going. Monet’s eyes glow more brightly than Rivin’s had, yet relief is felt nonetheless. Bitter as it always is to say goodbye.

  It's only the two of them that depart. Safer that way.

  Roach holds the young girl's hand the entire way. It's a slow crawl this time, and they stop often to let the more injured rest.

  There is no need to hurry or strain. Not this time. This time there are other options bar the drop, and so they return to the skyfalls—the closest thing to a sheet of stars they'll likely ever see. The place she'd found the Pale Knights armour deep beneath the pools, glittering its secret hiding place. The slugs whisper softly overhead, echoing the chorus of its death.

  “We will not forget.”

  Neither will the Queen of Roaches.

  Like the whispers and the slugs, she seeks only to be an echo of it all, a jug to hold it. She's overflowing, as much a cave caught with voices as the one that they trek. To honour that, she scuffs her palm across the wet and dewy surface and speaks in the old man's voice—the one that lives in her gut.

  The one that hurts most recently.

  The one that should now belong to Rivin.

  She catches water in her hand as she grumbles, “The sky falls even way down here, kid.”

  Monet looks up, eyes damp. They're always damp. Like her skin and her soul. “Who speaks?”

  Roach quirks a smile. “Dead men.”

  “Who calls this sky?”

  “Skyfall”.

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  “More drool.”

  “Skydrool…” Roach ponders. “I like it. We're keeping it.” She taps her chin thoughtfully before her eyes return to the child and her features soften. “Can't keep you though.” She tries not to mean it.

  Monet smiles. “No. You cannot.”

  She really has gotten good at this part.

  Children are a rare thing in the dark. Not because they are precious but because they are not wanted. Not by mothers and not by life. The rot infects all seeds. Even rooted ones. It will come and it will take and it will snatch, and if it doesn't, then your mother will not want you anyway, and you might as well wish you were dead — and that is how she might find you.

  If you're lucky.

  There is only one other such mother who will walk you home. Who might even offer it? And her price, oh her price, is a hand in her hand and a flame in your heart. A flame that she will one day fan. A flame that she will one day use to burn a hole through the earth. A rival to the sun.

  If that's what it takes.

  Roach looks to the ember at her side. Flickering. Weak. She squeezes her hand to watch it flare.

  They continue past the glowing falls and into the tangle of tunnels that only she knows best. The ones printed on the backs of eyelids. The ones she'd also inherited, not from man but from woman. Not Mother; she never did deserve that name.

  Like the ghost and the warriors and the burden, it had all been passed down. She owns both now, one kingdom of a violent past and the other of a present pestilence.

  The future, however, lives in her head.

  She'd like to think she lords over all admirably, though the cat may argue—no, she can't anymore.

  Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned in the blood and the fur she still feels beneath her fingertips. It's not a loss if she learns, and maybe she doesn't even miss that stupid old thing and its scratchy yowl or the way that it used to pur like it had a cold or a cancer, and maybe she doesn't even miss the fact that it was the only thing keeping her from being entirely, utterly alone.

  It's not a loss if she learns.

  What did she learn?

  She learned that Rivin sleeps in the cleanest sheets she's ever seen, and she learned that noise doesn't need to be manufactured nor built in a home where love lives. He's proving to be something more. Something else. A queen cannot name it yet, but she will. She will. But not yet.

  Right now, Monet must go home.

  An hour in, and the child begins to lead the way. They’re both barefoot when the stony crag has turned to a soft pattering of moss dotted with violet flowers. Roach stretches out her toes and presses her soles deeper into the softness. Monet is patient; she picks a flower to thumb between her fingers.

  The Queen can hear running water in the distance, in the walls, and can see it gathering in fat drops upon the ceiling. There's a soft halo of light clinging to everything wet, and it bounces about a narrow opening sheathed in a canopy of white-feathered leaves. Roach catches one in her palm, smoothing her fingers over soft plumes that fold into her touch.

  “You won't forget me, yeah?”

  She only asks because she’ll need her one day.

  Need them all.

  It's not because she's terrified of being forgotten.

  Terrified of being nothing.

  I want to exist.

  Monet’s lips curl. The cuts on her face are healing so well, and a royal would like to kiss them. She is proud of her work. Proud of that smile. Proud when the little one says, “It is impossible.”

  They join hands again to step beneath the draping wreath and step into a clearing lit by an effervescent pool. The water shimmers, moved only by quietly churning turbines fixed to distant places.

  Rocks of salted ore and sacred idols rise from the glittering ponds, reaching towards a ceiling dense with gleaming stalactites nearly completely translucent save for a cool malachite at their cores. The water that falls from their precipice looks more like a jewel than a fluid.

  Like the scenery, Roach’s eyes glimmer, shining and enraptured.

  This is Drowner Territory.

  Sacred territory.

  Her pride and awe are only swelling further, pulsing around her body in place of her blood. She made this happen. She made this—

  ‘You’re on your own, Queen of Rot.’

  Rivin's voice is not so often unwelcome, and yet it sputters out her ego like the fires she's tried to light and failed. Guilt, shame too, and all other emotions not befitting of her character. Like sleep. Like mistakes. Like staying still for long enough to sit in the weight of it all.

  She does not want them, not these ones.

  She has not had them before, and can she survive when living means this? Means regret?

  It will bite them all in the ass too. It will. She can count on it, can feel it burying deep within her sinew, like it lives there. She knows what's coming. She knows, oh she knows, oh she knows—

  But it's time to know something else, and so she lets it fold away, lets it fill up her pockets for later.

  Monet guides them deeper into Drowner lands, skirting around magnificent pools to descend a steep climb to the base of an enormous dam. Unlike the basin of glittering light, the dam's water is black and deep, an ocean of fresh water trapped behind a fortified wall of steel, torrents dropping from huge mechanical spillways. A stone bridge hugs the top, connected to two tall towers, completely closed in save for small iron-barred windows every few paces.

  From this distance, she can see a slew of people stationed at the closest entrance, guarding the first spire. They all bear thick lengths of complex braids threaded with silver wires and hooks, their lithe, albeit muscular, forms draped in the rope and oiled fabric she's come to associate with the Drowner people—a bendy people. You have to be to navigate the underwater tunnels such as they do. Few are equipped with tridents — pure titanium encrusted with three ebony, deadly sharp points — while others wield spears, hand-carved and silver-dipped.

  Monet is breathing heavily besides her now, before she clicks her tongue three times, eyes widening with desperation. Roach can feel the joy in her fingers, rattling through their knuckles. She knows what's coming, and so she lets her go. Drops her hand to her side and watches as Monet begins to run.

  The girl clicks her tongue again, whoops a high-pitched sound and begins to rapidly beat her right hand against her chest, extending the other in a fist. She grunts, moans, and exhales high-pitched.

  Her people turn. The weapons rise, hands twitch, before steel hits the ground, tossed aside.

  The tallest summons a torturously beautiful sound and begins to rush up the climb. He too starts to beat a hand upon his heart and fists the other towards her. The rest follow.

  ThumpThump.

  ThumpThump.

  Roach can hear their heartbeats, the sound pulsing louder with every step closer. Monet trips up, toppling a few feet down the dirt before the distance is closed and arms that hold hearts and thrust air suddenly converge to embrace her, and the child disappears into love.

  Inconsolable, rapturous love.

  It’s a family reunited, a rare thing in these dark lands. It’s the sound of perhaps a father — she's never met one of those before — sobbing over his child, of cupping her fingers, kissing her scars, holding her face and staring into wide eyes, willing them to be true, to be permanent.

  It feels too intimate. Too painful to watch, but the Queen can’t look away.

  It’s beautiful.

  They are beautiful.

  Something burns behind her eyes. Behind her heart. She only moves closer once it becomes unbearable.

  Monet is smiling freely now as her body is held and rejoiced. She looks newly freed — brought back to life. Her people kiss and celebrate her, united by the tear tracks down their cheeks. The girl gestures her over, connecting the queen's hands with the tallest. His palms are rough with calluses but warm, and they squeeze her gently. His eyes are earnest and glowing more brightly than the pools ever could when he beholds her.

  “You brought her home.” His voice catches on gratitude, and his words are said slowly. Felt deeply.

  A queen glances away. Shy again. Like she was when Rivin looked at her like this. Like she always is when the gratitude is too real.

  Don't look at me like that. She thinks. You don't know what it costs yet.

  “Yeah, well… Don't blame me. You lost her.”

  His smile falters, but his eyes do not. “No, no,” he laughs, “this is a good thing.”

  Monet nudges tenderly into Roach’s shoulder. “You must let us thank you; it is customary.”

  “It is customary,” the maybe-father emphasises, bowing his head several times. These fearless warriors look closer to gentle dragons now. All smiles and embrace. It's—

  Roach tilts up her chin. Doesn’t pull away.

  His hand is so warm.

  Is that what a father's hand feels like?

  “I suppose I could hang around a while.”

  She certainly can. She certainly will.

  If that's what it costs.