[story] wings
author: kara (yumiyoshi)
Xu stumbled when her train came to a grinding halt. The door that she should not have been leaning against opened two seconds ahead of schedule, and when the train jerked again, she went flying.
She saw the cement coming at her, and then something strange: white wings spread before her, and two dark spindly arms enveloped her. She felt warm, protected, comfortable for half a second.
Then she landed, hard and ungracefully, on the platform of the service tunnel. It reeked of ancient oil and grease, along with a metallic scent that had built up over many years.
She remembered the wings, and looked around, but they were gone.
Spirits roamed the world, creatures of all sorts, more or less visible depending on how attuned the person was. Xu couldn't see enough of them to become a spirit medium, just the lowly Lares and Penantes. The real thing thought she was faking it, and the rest of the world thought she was crazy for walking out of the way of invisible obstacles.
"Thank you," she said aloud. The lights on the celing above her were buzzing, their copper metalwork bright and polished despite the conditions; she wondered who had climbed so high to do it. Low hissing was coming from some valve further down the tunnel. The composite material under her body was warm from the trains.
The steam tunnel worker thought Xu was addressing him. She didn't correct his mistake. She allowed him to help her up and across the platform, out of the service areas and into the bright, polished customer areas.
Xu stumbled around until she found an indoor version of a roadside shrine. The rail workers had fashioned a beautiful, stylized altar with the emblems of their guild out of a niche in the wall, and there actually was an offering inside: the remnants of recently burnt incense behind a bowl of three fruits.
There weren't many temples or worshippers these days, especially not in the large cities where people had traded the protection of the spirits for the ingenuity their brains cooked up -- coal, steam, iron, electricity, contraptions built to run the city and the robot automatons built to run them so that fewer and fewer would have to work in the dark and dangerous machine rooms that so many still died in.
Behind the next crop of commuters, she saw the Lare. He was small and slender, had white hair, black eyes, and skin the color of copper. He wore a loose, straight white tunic and no shoes. And out of his back came a large pair of wings that were, in fact, mechanical: bronze rods, gears, rotators and sprockets held it together, while the huge metal-gossamer feathers were what she had always imagined mithril would look like.
She met his stare. His eyes widened, then he smiled back, spread his wings, and took off down the tunnel.
She camped out by the Lare's shrine until it came back.
"I don't get a lot of visitors," he said happily, gobbling at a fruit that someone had left as an offering.
"You helped me," Xu said. "It's only decent to thank you."
"Ha! If only all humans thought that."
"Well, judging from what you're eating, someone else decided that a peach costs less than a visit to the Physician's Guild."
He laughed with a full mouth.
"I'm Xu. What's your name?"
He narrowed his eyes at her. "Why do you want to know?"
"All right," Xu said. "Your name is your name. Just tell me what to call you."
Passers-by were giving her strange looks now, for talking to the shrine. She got unpleasant chills and suddenly it was as if all eyes were on her, in a mixture of shame and disapproval and fear.
"My name is Sanaa."
She swallowed and forced a smile. "Sanaa. Thank you for saving me."
He smiled back. Then a train roared by, and Xu thought she saw a bronzed streak of some kind, and wings unfurling. When she blinked, Sanaa was gone, and so was the train.
Xu was a junior engineer in her Guild, and that meant being berated when the senior engineers made a mistake that she didn't realize to correct, being yelled at by senior engineers when the managers didn't realize a new specification had been laid out and that was why the blueprints had changed, having to dig around in the dusty archives for previous designs, and writing reports that were misfiled in the first place.
She liked her window seat that gave her a tall view of the streets and the courtyard below. She liked the maple leaves that brushed the latticed glass panes as if trying to glance into the workroom. She enjoyed the straight lines and measured curves on her workbench, and she delighted in visualizing the drawings into three dimensions, slotting the pieces into a machine in her head. Despite all the things she loved, Xu felt a restlessness in her fingers that made her hurry to finish her morning sketches, then walk out of the office so fast that her heels tapped on the wooden floors.
Xu stayed out of her office for the remainder of her lunch hour. At a street stall she bought a fish-and-rice bowl with black beans, then walked to a small shrine on a residential street. A young man in school clothes was sweeping the smooth stones of the courtyard. He turned out to be the nephew of the shrine's Head Priestess. She bought some blessed incense from him, and that evening she went again to the station. She came to a stop at the shrine.
An old woman was there, head bowed, and a cluster of rose incense -- Xu could smell the fragrance from ten meters away -- was burning in the holder. The Lare was sitting cross-legged on the top of the shrine, basking in the perfume.
"Good evening," Xu said.
"Good evening," the woman said in a deep voice. "I don't see a lot of people here."
"Me neither," Xu said. "I almost had an accident the other day. So I'm here to... hope my luck holds, I suppose." She took a deep breath. "You?"
"My husband put up the shrine," she said with a smile.
"Oh?" Xu was curious now. "Well, it's very beautiful."
"We were some of the first workers. I was one, too. We were both conductors. It wasn't as safe as it is now. My husband wasn't very religious, you see. But I was. We were both so young. Sixteen. The trains weren't very safe back then, and people died. So I convinced the station owner to put up shrines."
"And?"
"Oh, they put up many shrines. I prayed at them every day, just as I do now. There were still accidents, but fewer and fewer throughout the years... so few now that some people would say we don't need shrines anymore. They don't believe in the spirits. But I do."
The Lare was looking away, now, wings wrapped around itself as if to hide. The old woman clearly could not see the Lare, who was hanging its head.
The woman bowed to the Protector of the Railway Station, blessed the shrine, then straightened painfully and smiled at Xu.
"I'm so glad there's someone younger who prays here, dear," she said warmly. "It makes me so happy. Do you believe in them?"
"Well," Xu started, her mouth dry. The Lare watched her with piercing eyes.
There had been a swing set at her school. She'd seen a small spirit sitting on it, and another girl went over and unknowingly knocked the spirit off the swing; Xu had protested, you shouldn't have been so rude to the fish-headed man, he was there first. That had lead to the entire class mocking her for months, until she learned to fade into the walls, quietly. The occasional dust-spirit showed up, but she refused to talk to them, blaming them and herself by turns.
Sanaa was the first one she had acknowledged being able to see in twenty years.
"They might exist, for all I know," Xu said.
"Ahh, well," the old woman said, and let out a long breath. She patted Xu on the shoulder with a soft, dry hand, then walked out of the station, as if she was carrying some sort of very fragile treasure in her hands.
The Lare looked at her. Xu could not read its expression -- its face was not human -- but she imagined that it was sad, and so her heart raced and every beat felt like a railway spike in her chest.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, then moved closer to the shrine. She remembered the incense in her bag, and added her offering to the shrine. But the Lare wasn't watching her anymore; it was watching the old woman, its eyes slanted and wings folded. She ran away before it could look at her.
The next morning Xu went early to the station, when only bleary-eyed morning commuters were there, and since the shrine was next to a bench, she sat down next to the Lare. She held up a peach. He smiled. She smirked and reached past his outstretched hands, dropping the fruit into his copper offertory bowl instead.
He scooped it up and tossed it a few times. "Afraid to be seen dealing with demons?"
"Humans can be worse than demons," she muttered and reached for her morning thermos of coffee. "And I'm not an idiot. You're a Lare, not a demon."
He took a bite of the peach.
"They'll think you're crazy if you talk with me, hmm?"
It hurt and she bit down on the emotion, covering one hurt with another. It wasn't his fault. "Are you asking me to leave?"
"Of course not," Sanaa said. "I'm lonely, too. Nobody can see me, and my responsibilities prevent me from leaving and seeing other spirits."
"Liar," she said. "This station has gone three years without a fatal accident."
"You fell!"
"That's true, and I might have broken a leg, but not my neck. Don't get me wrong. I'm not ungrateful. But this isn't eighty years ago, Sanaa. You're here not because you have to be, but because you like being here." She smiled.
"So do you."
"I do, and that's why I keep working for them. You too?"
He took a bite of the peach. She went back to her coffee. A loud whistle blasted from the tunnels as the Diamond Line pulled onto Platform Alpha.
"Why do you come here?" Sanaa asked, finished with the peach and tossing the pit between his hands. "You're a human. Shouldn't you talk with them?"
"I don't like to," she said.
"You prefer to talk to spirits?"
"No," she said, honestly. "That doesn't ever end well. Except for professionals, but I'm not one of them."
"So why are you talking to me now?"
She frowned. "Oh please. That woman you're always staring at -- you could make her know that something is there, even if she can't see you. And she already believes in you. You know these things even better than I do. But you don't do anything about it. So stop pretending you don't understand."
He sighed. Apparently Sanaa wasn't very good at holding anything to his chest. "You're right."
"Did you two know each other?"
He nodded. "I was in love with her. Ever since she was sixteen and just starting out as a ticket counter girl."
"Ah," Xu said, fighting disappointment; somehow it always surprised her, even when she saw it looming on the horizon, saw it approaching her, but the bite into her skin was never anticipated quite right.
"She seems to care a lot for you," Xu said, and smirked. "Don't tell me that just because she's gone old and gray ..."
Sanaa was quiet, not angry, not irritated, and she knew she had hit on something very wrong. "Forget I said that," she said. "I'm sorry. I'll leave you alone."
"She's a very good person," Sanaa said. "I still love her."
"Then tell her," Xu said.
Sanaa twitched a wing at her. "First, you tell someone that you see me."
She scowled. "Fine. I'll write in a piece to the newspaper describing the station as haunted by a really annoying ghost ..."
Sanaa threw the peach pit. His aim was terrible, and hit a man instead. The man jerked to a standstill and stared at the stone. Then at Xu, who was holding her coffee and clearly not the culprit.
"That was strange," he said, eyes darting around.
"Yes, well, people keep telling me that this station's haunted by a really annoying ghost," Xu called to the man, a wicked grin on her face. She dug up her guild badge, flashed it, and added, "The Railway Guild is investigating, if you'd like to file a report ..." the man laughed, waved at her, and started down the corridors.
Sanaa was glowering when she dared to look bat at him. But then he smiled a little too, and she heard, though nobody else probably did, the light sounds of his metallic wings shaking with gentle laughter. It sounded like wind chimes in a summer breeze.
She went to the shrine more often, with a stick of incense or a fruit for an offering, although she quickly learned that Sanaa liked noodles more. For the sake of appearances, she would leave it on the bench instead of the altar.
Xu found that Sanaa was, more often than not, waiting for her when she got off the train. Once or twice she managed to convince him to ride in the cars, at times of day or night when no others would be there.
She told him why she loved the trains. They were romantic to her, huge machines that were both wonderful and dangerous. She liked the notion of her hands turning the gears of the machine, she liked thinking of all the distance that her work carried people and other goods. Xu liked going on the trains that went to out of the way places: a single train on a long, lonesome track that shimmered over the blue water. It was dreamlike. She'd always wanted to go out there, off the continent. She wanted to see the airships that her uncle said they were testing on the machine islands in the ocean.
"I wonder if they have Lares," she said.
"If they build it, we will come," he said. "Maybe one who likes to fly."
She smiled at him, and then looked up see the old woman standing at the shrine.
"Hello, dear." The woman smiled. Her hands shook as she placed a stick of incense into the bronze holder. "I see you here a lot."
"I work for the Guild," she said.
The woman smiled. "The shrine ... I see you, sometimes, speaking. I think."
Out of the corner of Xu's field of vision, Sanaa was shaking his head and gesturing with his arms.
"I ... was praying," she said.
The woman nodded. "It's a beautiful shrine, isn't it? I got married here." She smiled at Xu's surprise. "The hall used to be much grander, and well, Guild members could reserve it for free."
Xu smiled back. "Do you celebrate your anniversary here, too?"
"He died many years ago," the woman said quietly.
"I'm so sorry," Xu said.
"It's all right, dear," she said, staring fixedly at the shrine.
Xu didn't have anything to say to that, but she noticed that Sanaa had walked up to the woman, and he was standing behind her, perfectly still. He had a hand stretched out, but it could never touch her; he mouthed her name and Xu heard it but the woman never did.
She left them, and went to buy a coffee. When she came back, fifteen minutes later, there was a commotion, crowds of people, the noise of an ambulance at the station door. She saw a man and a woman taking the old woman away.
Sanaa was standing in front of his shrine, and at first Xu thought he was shaking or shivering. Then she realized that he was standing perfectly still, but his form was glimmering. She could see, through his slowly dissipating form, the floor tiles and the people and the sunlight.
"Xu," Sanaa said, "she's dying. And when she dies, I'm going to go, too."
"No," she breathed, not caring at last who saw or heard her. "Why!"
"No one else needs me here," he said. There was no self-pity in his voice, clear as a bell. His words were a matter of fact. "And that's the only thing that keeps us Lares alive, you know: human will."
"I believe!" She shouted, like when she was at that play, and they'd asked the entire audience, clap your hands if you want the fairy to live. She'd known it was so unfair at the time, that seeing fairies was all right in make-believe, so she hadn't clapped, and her friends made fun of her for weeks afterwards. "Sanaa! I believe in you! Who do you need me to tell?"
"It doesn't work like that," he said gently. "I didn't say believe. I said need. You believe in the safety you've made, which is a good thing. I'm glad I've lived this long to see it. And besides, I don't want to live that much anymore. She said that her husband died in a train wreck. What she doesn't know is that I was there. I was in love with her, so the first thing I did was to pull her from the wreck, and by the time I had her to safety, her husband and daughter were already burnt to death."
The sunshine of the afternoon washed through Sanaa's silvery wings. He closed his eyes and she saw through them.
"And yet she still came to me, day after day, week after week ... she never stopped coming. She never stopped praying to me. Speaking to me. She couldn't ever see me, but she went on believing in me. For all these years I haven't dared face her. But if I die with her, now, then I suppose we could talk. She will be able to see me, and then I can finally tell her that I love her, and that I'm so sorry ..."
His wings opened, and then he was gone.
The next morning a guildmate waved at Xu, who startled and realized that it was no longer evening.
"Hey, Engineer Xu? Is that you?"
Xu looked up and squinted through strands of unkempt hair. "Oh -- Drafter Rin, right?"
"That's me. I finished your rotor design last month." Rin smiled, hands in her uniform pockets. "You looked busy, but shift starts in thirty minutes, and I was wondering if you wanted to get going, maybe get some rolls from the dining car ..."
"Oh," Xu said, blinking sleepy eyes, "sure. Just let me --" with a swish, all the drafting papers that she had piled up on the bench over the last nine hours fell to the mosaic floor.
"I'll help." Rin stooped down and helped gather up the wide pieces of paper, her black eyes widening when she realized that she was holding hand-drawn blueprints. Xu blushed and took them back.
"What are ... were you here all night? You know, Director said you worked really hard, I guess he was right."
"No, this isn't work. I had this wild dream, and I thought I'd design an airship," Xu said with a smile. "See ... here's the propeller, I'm still working out the engine ..."
"What's this?" Rin asked, pointing to a squat structure, with strange, feathery projections coming from it. "They look like ..."
"It's a shrine. To a Lare. So they can watch over the ship."
"It's a nice design touch." Rin touched the lines with a single finger, running it over the design. "But I thought Lares are supposed to protect buildings and people. Not airships."
"Not today," Xu said as she tied up the diagrams with a thin strip of leather. "But maybe one will tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, maybe the day after that."
"Hm," Rin said, but she was smiling and still looking at the roll of blueprints. "I really like this. Maybe I could join in."
"If I build it, you can come," Xu said.
She allowed her heart to flutter for a beat, and then she stood up and they walked together towards the morning train.
- end
Xu stumbled when her train came to a grinding halt. The door that she should not have been leaning against opened two seconds ahead of schedule, and when the train jerked again, she went flying.
She saw the cement coming at her, and then something strange: white wings spread before her, and two dark spindly arms enveloped her. She felt warm, protected, comfortable for half a second.
Then she landed, hard and ungracefully, on the platform of the service tunnel. It reeked of ancient oil and grease, along with a metallic scent that had built up over many years.
She remembered the wings, and looked around, but they were gone.
Spirits roamed the world, creatures of all sorts, more or less visible depending on how attuned the person was. Xu couldn't see enough of them to become a spirit medium, just the lowly Lares and Penantes. The real thing thought she was faking it, and the rest of the world thought she was crazy for walking out of the way of invisible obstacles.
"Thank you," she said aloud. The lights on the celing above her were buzzing, their copper metalwork bright and polished despite the conditions; she wondered who had climbed so high to do it. Low hissing was coming from some valve further down the tunnel. The composite material under her body was warm from the trains.
The steam tunnel worker thought Xu was addressing him. She didn't correct his mistake. She allowed him to help her up and across the platform, out of the service areas and into the bright, polished customer areas.
Xu stumbled around until she found an indoor version of a roadside shrine. The rail workers had fashioned a beautiful, stylized altar with the emblems of their guild out of a niche in the wall, and there actually was an offering inside: the remnants of recently burnt incense behind a bowl of three fruits.
There weren't many temples or worshippers these days, especially not in the large cities where people had traded the protection of the spirits for the ingenuity their brains cooked up -- coal, steam, iron, electricity, contraptions built to run the city and the robot automatons built to run them so that fewer and fewer would have to work in the dark and dangerous machine rooms that so many still died in.
Behind the next crop of commuters, she saw the Lare. He was small and slender, had white hair, black eyes, and skin the color of copper. He wore a loose, straight white tunic and no shoes. And out of his back came a large pair of wings that were, in fact, mechanical: bronze rods, gears, rotators and sprockets held it together, while the huge metal-gossamer feathers were what she had always imagined mithril would look like.
She met his stare. His eyes widened, then he smiled back, spread his wings, and took off down the tunnel.
She camped out by the Lare's shrine until it came back.
"I don't get a lot of visitors," he said happily, gobbling at a fruit that someone had left as an offering.
"You helped me," Xu said. "It's only decent to thank you."
"Ha! If only all humans thought that."
"Well, judging from what you're eating, someone else decided that a peach costs less than a visit to the Physician's Guild."
He laughed with a full mouth.
"I'm Xu. What's your name?"
He narrowed his eyes at her. "Why do you want to know?"
"All right," Xu said. "Your name is your name. Just tell me what to call you."
Passers-by were giving her strange looks now, for talking to the shrine. She got unpleasant chills and suddenly it was as if all eyes were on her, in a mixture of shame and disapproval and fear.
"My name is Sanaa."
She swallowed and forced a smile. "Sanaa. Thank you for saving me."
He smiled back. Then a train roared by, and Xu thought she saw a bronzed streak of some kind, and wings unfurling. When she blinked, Sanaa was gone, and so was the train.
Xu was a junior engineer in her Guild, and that meant being berated when the senior engineers made a mistake that she didn't realize to correct, being yelled at by senior engineers when the managers didn't realize a new specification had been laid out and that was why the blueprints had changed, having to dig around in the dusty archives for previous designs, and writing reports that were misfiled in the first place.
She liked her window seat that gave her a tall view of the streets and the courtyard below. She liked the maple leaves that brushed the latticed glass panes as if trying to glance into the workroom. She enjoyed the straight lines and measured curves on her workbench, and she delighted in visualizing the drawings into three dimensions, slotting the pieces into a machine in her head. Despite all the things she loved, Xu felt a restlessness in her fingers that made her hurry to finish her morning sketches, then walk out of the office so fast that her heels tapped on the wooden floors.
Xu stayed out of her office for the remainder of her lunch hour. At a street stall she bought a fish-and-rice bowl with black beans, then walked to a small shrine on a residential street. A young man in school clothes was sweeping the smooth stones of the courtyard. He turned out to be the nephew of the shrine's Head Priestess. She bought some blessed incense from him, and that evening she went again to the station. She came to a stop at the shrine.
An old woman was there, head bowed, and a cluster of rose incense -- Xu could smell the fragrance from ten meters away -- was burning in the holder. The Lare was sitting cross-legged on the top of the shrine, basking in the perfume.
"Good evening," Xu said.
"Good evening," the woman said in a deep voice. "I don't see a lot of people here."
"Me neither," Xu said. "I almost had an accident the other day. So I'm here to... hope my luck holds, I suppose." She took a deep breath. "You?"
"My husband put up the shrine," she said with a smile.
"Oh?" Xu was curious now. "Well, it's very beautiful."
"We were some of the first workers. I was one, too. We were both conductors. It wasn't as safe as it is now. My husband wasn't very religious, you see. But I was. We were both so young. Sixteen. The trains weren't very safe back then, and people died. So I convinced the station owner to put up shrines."
"And?"
"Oh, they put up many shrines. I prayed at them every day, just as I do now. There were still accidents, but fewer and fewer throughout the years... so few now that some people would say we don't need shrines anymore. They don't believe in the spirits. But I do."
The Lare was looking away, now, wings wrapped around itself as if to hide. The old woman clearly could not see the Lare, who was hanging its head.
The woman bowed to the Protector of the Railway Station, blessed the shrine, then straightened painfully and smiled at Xu.
"I'm so glad there's someone younger who prays here, dear," she said warmly. "It makes me so happy. Do you believe in them?"
"Well," Xu started, her mouth dry. The Lare watched her with piercing eyes.
There had been a swing set at her school. She'd seen a small spirit sitting on it, and another girl went over and unknowingly knocked the spirit off the swing; Xu had protested, you shouldn't have been so rude to the fish-headed man, he was there first. That had lead to the entire class mocking her for months, until she learned to fade into the walls, quietly. The occasional dust-spirit showed up, but she refused to talk to them, blaming them and herself by turns.
Sanaa was the first one she had acknowledged being able to see in twenty years.
"They might exist, for all I know," Xu said.
"Ahh, well," the old woman said, and let out a long breath. She patted Xu on the shoulder with a soft, dry hand, then walked out of the station, as if she was carrying some sort of very fragile treasure in her hands.
The Lare looked at her. Xu could not read its expression -- its face was not human -- but she imagined that it was sad, and so her heart raced and every beat felt like a railway spike in her chest.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, then moved closer to the shrine. She remembered the incense in her bag, and added her offering to the shrine. But the Lare wasn't watching her anymore; it was watching the old woman, its eyes slanted and wings folded. She ran away before it could look at her.
The next morning Xu went early to the station, when only bleary-eyed morning commuters were there, and since the shrine was next to a bench, she sat down next to the Lare. She held up a peach. He smiled. She smirked and reached past his outstretched hands, dropping the fruit into his copper offertory bowl instead.
He scooped it up and tossed it a few times. "Afraid to be seen dealing with demons?"
"Humans can be worse than demons," she muttered and reached for her morning thermos of coffee. "And I'm not an idiot. You're a Lare, not a demon."
He took a bite of the peach.
"They'll think you're crazy if you talk with me, hmm?"
It hurt and she bit down on the emotion, covering one hurt with another. It wasn't his fault. "Are you asking me to leave?"
"Of course not," Sanaa said. "I'm lonely, too. Nobody can see me, and my responsibilities prevent me from leaving and seeing other spirits."
"Liar," she said. "This station has gone three years without a fatal accident."
"You fell!"
"That's true, and I might have broken a leg, but not my neck. Don't get me wrong. I'm not ungrateful. But this isn't eighty years ago, Sanaa. You're here not because you have to be, but because you like being here." She smiled.
"So do you."
"I do, and that's why I keep working for them. You too?"
He took a bite of the peach. She went back to her coffee. A loud whistle blasted from the tunnels as the Diamond Line pulled onto Platform Alpha.
"Why do you come here?" Sanaa asked, finished with the peach and tossing the pit between his hands. "You're a human. Shouldn't you talk with them?"
"I don't like to," she said.
"You prefer to talk to spirits?"
"No," she said, honestly. "That doesn't ever end well. Except for professionals, but I'm not one of them."
"So why are you talking to me now?"
She frowned. "Oh please. That woman you're always staring at -- you could make her know that something is there, even if she can't see you. And she already believes in you. You know these things even better than I do. But you don't do anything about it. So stop pretending you don't understand."
He sighed. Apparently Sanaa wasn't very good at holding anything to his chest. "You're right."
"Did you two know each other?"
He nodded. "I was in love with her. Ever since she was sixteen and just starting out as a ticket counter girl."
"Ah," Xu said, fighting disappointment; somehow it always surprised her, even when she saw it looming on the horizon, saw it approaching her, but the bite into her skin was never anticipated quite right.
"She seems to care a lot for you," Xu said, and smirked. "Don't tell me that just because she's gone old and gray ..."
Sanaa was quiet, not angry, not irritated, and she knew she had hit on something very wrong. "Forget I said that," she said. "I'm sorry. I'll leave you alone."
"She's a very good person," Sanaa said. "I still love her."
"Then tell her," Xu said.
Sanaa twitched a wing at her. "First, you tell someone that you see me."
She scowled. "Fine. I'll write in a piece to the newspaper describing the station as haunted by a really annoying ghost ..."
Sanaa threw the peach pit. His aim was terrible, and hit a man instead. The man jerked to a standstill and stared at the stone. Then at Xu, who was holding her coffee and clearly not the culprit.
"That was strange," he said, eyes darting around.
"Yes, well, people keep telling me that this station's haunted by a really annoying ghost," Xu called to the man, a wicked grin on her face. She dug up her guild badge, flashed it, and added, "The Railway Guild is investigating, if you'd like to file a report ..." the man laughed, waved at her, and started down the corridors.
Sanaa was glowering when she dared to look bat at him. But then he smiled a little too, and she heard, though nobody else probably did, the light sounds of his metallic wings shaking with gentle laughter. It sounded like wind chimes in a summer breeze.
She went to the shrine more often, with a stick of incense or a fruit for an offering, although she quickly learned that Sanaa liked noodles more. For the sake of appearances, she would leave it on the bench instead of the altar.
Xu found that Sanaa was, more often than not, waiting for her when she got off the train. Once or twice she managed to convince him to ride in the cars, at times of day or night when no others would be there.
She told him why she loved the trains. They were romantic to her, huge machines that were both wonderful and dangerous. She liked the notion of her hands turning the gears of the machine, she liked thinking of all the distance that her work carried people and other goods. Xu liked going on the trains that went to out of the way places: a single train on a long, lonesome track that shimmered over the blue water. It was dreamlike. She'd always wanted to go out there, off the continent. She wanted to see the airships that her uncle said they were testing on the machine islands in the ocean.
"I wonder if they have Lares," she said.
"If they build it, we will come," he said. "Maybe one who likes to fly."
She smiled at him, and then looked up see the old woman standing at the shrine.
"Hello, dear." The woman smiled. Her hands shook as she placed a stick of incense into the bronze holder. "I see you here a lot."
"I work for the Guild," she said.
The woman smiled. "The shrine ... I see you, sometimes, speaking. I think."
Out of the corner of Xu's field of vision, Sanaa was shaking his head and gesturing with his arms.
"I ... was praying," she said.
The woman nodded. "It's a beautiful shrine, isn't it? I got married here." She smiled at Xu's surprise. "The hall used to be much grander, and well, Guild members could reserve it for free."
Xu smiled back. "Do you celebrate your anniversary here, too?"
"He died many years ago," the woman said quietly.
"I'm so sorry," Xu said.
"It's all right, dear," she said, staring fixedly at the shrine.
Xu didn't have anything to say to that, but she noticed that Sanaa had walked up to the woman, and he was standing behind her, perfectly still. He had a hand stretched out, but it could never touch her; he mouthed her name and Xu heard it but the woman never did.
She left them, and went to buy a coffee. When she came back, fifteen minutes later, there was a commotion, crowds of people, the noise of an ambulance at the station door. She saw a man and a woman taking the old woman away.
Sanaa was standing in front of his shrine, and at first Xu thought he was shaking or shivering. Then she realized that he was standing perfectly still, but his form was glimmering. She could see, through his slowly dissipating form, the floor tiles and the people and the sunlight.
"Xu," Sanaa said, "she's dying. And when she dies, I'm going to go, too."
"No," she breathed, not caring at last who saw or heard her. "Why!"
"No one else needs me here," he said. There was no self-pity in his voice, clear as a bell. His words were a matter of fact. "And that's the only thing that keeps us Lares alive, you know: human will."
"I believe!" She shouted, like when she was at that play, and they'd asked the entire audience, clap your hands if you want the fairy to live. She'd known it was so unfair at the time, that seeing fairies was all right in make-believe, so she hadn't clapped, and her friends made fun of her for weeks afterwards. "Sanaa! I believe in you! Who do you need me to tell?"
"It doesn't work like that," he said gently. "I didn't say believe. I said need. You believe in the safety you've made, which is a good thing. I'm glad I've lived this long to see it. And besides, I don't want to live that much anymore. She said that her husband died in a train wreck. What she doesn't know is that I was there. I was in love with her, so the first thing I did was to pull her from the wreck, and by the time I had her to safety, her husband and daughter were already burnt to death."
The sunshine of the afternoon washed through Sanaa's silvery wings. He closed his eyes and she saw through them.
"And yet she still came to me, day after day, week after week ... she never stopped coming. She never stopped praying to me. Speaking to me. She couldn't ever see me, but she went on believing in me. For all these years I haven't dared face her. But if I die with her, now, then I suppose we could talk. She will be able to see me, and then I can finally tell her that I love her, and that I'm so sorry ..."
His wings opened, and then he was gone.
The next morning a guildmate waved at Xu, who startled and realized that it was no longer evening.
"Hey, Engineer Xu? Is that you?"
Xu looked up and squinted through strands of unkempt hair. "Oh -- Drafter Rin, right?"
"That's me. I finished your rotor design last month." Rin smiled, hands in her uniform pockets. "You looked busy, but shift starts in thirty minutes, and I was wondering if you wanted to get going, maybe get some rolls from the dining car ..."
"Oh," Xu said, blinking sleepy eyes, "sure. Just let me --" with a swish, all the drafting papers that she had piled up on the bench over the last nine hours fell to the mosaic floor.
"I'll help." Rin stooped down and helped gather up the wide pieces of paper, her black eyes widening when she realized that she was holding hand-drawn blueprints. Xu blushed and took them back.
"What are ... were you here all night? You know, Director said you worked really hard, I guess he was right."
"No, this isn't work. I had this wild dream, and I thought I'd design an airship," Xu said with a smile. "See ... here's the propeller, I'm still working out the engine ..."
"What's this?" Rin asked, pointing to a squat structure, with strange, feathery projections coming from it. "They look like ..."
"It's a shrine. To a Lare. So they can watch over the ship."
"It's a nice design touch." Rin touched the lines with a single finger, running it over the design. "But I thought Lares are supposed to protect buildings and people. Not airships."
"Not today," Xu said as she tied up the diagrams with a thin strip of leather. "But maybe one will tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, maybe the day after that."
"Hm," Rin said, but she was smiling and still looking at the roll of blueprints. "I really like this. Maybe I could join in."
"If I build it, you can come," Xu said.
She allowed her heart to flutter for a beat, and then she stood up and they walked together towards the morning train.
- end