Twelve Days To Launch
In a way, the summons to Render’s penthouse came as a welcome relief: Gwenh had always been prone to following Mal around, hanging off of her shoulders like a judgemental shadow, but with nine years to make up for she had become almost impossible, snarling at anyone who dared come near and making it very difficult for Mal to smooth things over. When Claudia approached and told Mal she was needed upstairs, she followed without a fight, casting an apologetic look back; Gwenh scowled back in directionless frustration, one hand tugging roughly at a tangled lock of hair.
The elevator opened on a penthouse in chaos, bundles of fabric thrown over every surface and many more people than any photoshoot warranted, not including the team of at least six stylists crowding around a young woman dressed in a white gown, listening attentively as she laid down her orders. Mal picked her way across the room, taking care to step only on bare flooring: she had no way of knowing whether any of the mess was discarded trash or worth more than her life. By the window, there was a ten-by-ten-foot bit of floorspace that the mess didn’t touch — her own camera was already meticulously set up on a tripod.
Render was engaged in a loud argument with the bride’s father, and for all that the negotiation seemed to concern matters of life and death, he easily disengaged once he spotted Mal, barely pausing to soothe injured feelings as he crossed the room in long strides. His hand landed on her her shoulder, gripping tightly enough to bruise; she told herself not to flinch, even as the glittering green tones of his jewellery entered her periphery.
“The bride is a very important business associate of mine, Miss Y — I expect you to be polite, regardless of what offence you may perceive. Do not embarrass me.” His tight grip left her shoulder, and he moved past her to sit down in his armchair. “Do as you will.”
As unmanageable as the group appeared to be at first blush, they proved themselves just as eager to get things over with as Mal was, following the carefully-worded instructions she addressed to her own shoes with no complaints. She got through most of the roster before the stylists called a hold to touch up the bride’s makeup and adjust the hem of her dress, while Mal resisted the temptation to find a wall and do her best impression of a napping horse.
She sank into a squat, stretching out the ache in her neck and shoulders as she snuck furtive glances at the bride. Her gown had the longest train she had ever seen, beaded with thousands of gleaming gems in a gradient of green-to-orange-to-red like a tapestry of autumn foliage. She massaged her neck idly as they discussed various poses and veil-arrangements, wondering how lost she would be in a Midtowner’s nuptials; in the rest of the city, weddings could last anywhere between an hour and several days, depending on the cultures and traditions observed, but the core was always familiar — a union between two or more people for the betterment of all parties. It couldn’t be that different on this side of the bubble, underneath all the decorations and luxury, but as the bride and her team discussed the merits of swapping her gown out for one of ten almost-identical alternates, she found that she couldn’t even be sure of that.
She missed home fiercely: the last wedding she had attended was between friends-of-friends-of-friends Kit and Beena, who had invited the entirety of Akwesasne and were happy to shout their vows for the two-thirds that had shown up. They had served some of the best cake that she had ever tasted, and it turned out that being uncoordinated didn’t matter when it was late in the night and everyone was dancing in a circle, with Kaia on her left side and Murphy on her right to keep her upright when she tripped over her own and everyone else’s feet.
After coming to some kind of agreement with her team, the bride cleared her throat and turned to look at Mal. “Why don’t you style some sets for us, Miss Y?”
She dropped her hands and hurriedly straightened up, embarrassed to be caught resting. “Er— what did you have in mind?”
Render cleared his throat. “Address your betters properly, Miss Y.”
The bride scoffed, waving him off with a french-tipped hand. “Don’t be so stuffy, Mister Render — I like my workers to have a little personality.” She turned her encouraging smile back on Mal; the single pendant at her clavicle easily outclassed the whole of Render’s jewellery, a serpentinite moon roughly the diameter of a plum and polished to the same deep green as her eyes. “Dealer’s choice, love.”
She glanced back at Render for guidance; he nodded stiffly, looking mildly displeased but unwilling to start a fight over it. She stepped out from behind the camera and looked around the room, pondering her choices as she drifted toward one of the soft-lights. “I’d like some silhouette-shots, with the skyline in the background — can we adjust the tint on the window and make the light more orange?”
As the stylist and family rushed to find out, the bride gathered up her train and shuffled toward the window. “Facing you?” she called, almost tripping over a dragging corner of her hem; the soft orange light did wonderful things to her warm skin, the sparser gemstones dotting her high-necked bodice, the red tones of her hair. Her train was so voluminous that she had to throw her head back to keep it out of her mouth.
“Pick a spot on the horizon and focus on that,” Mal replied absently, setting up a light and a diffuser to illuminate the back of the dress and the tattoo on the bride’s shoulder.
The bride dropped her train in a loose spiral around her before turning to face the window, striking a pose for consideration. “Like this?”
Mal chewed her lip; it was almost right, but— “Turn your face a little farther to the left, and look down at the corner of the window.” Render cleared his throat, and she rushed to add, “Please.”
The bride rolled her eyes at Render, winked at Mal, and turned her head to the left. She held her smile perfectly through the different poses and the subtle changes in lighting: in one, which Mal decided then and there was her favourite, she was caught mid-laugh, her head thrown back with a wide grin, eyes squinted shut, her bouquet held against her cheek.
“Can I see?” she begged, having composed herself from her laughter and shuffling around the tripod; she clicked her tongue in disappointment when she saw that there was no preview on an analog camera. “I don’t know how my smile looked, I didn’t realize you were taking a picture.”
“Candids are usually the favourites,” Mal reassured her, adjusting the shutter-speed. The bride wasn’t as tall as Gwenh, but she still had a few crucial inches over her, and she had to lean down for the stylist to touch up her foundation. “What else would you like to do?”
“Time to wrap things up, Miss Y,” Render called. “We can’t keep Nadine all day.”
“I thought you said she was the best, Mister Render?” The bride waved away the stylist, fixing Render with a hair-raising glare. Mal stepped out of the way, half-turning to keep them both in sight, as though she could dodge the crackling tension between the two powers.
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t employ anything less.”
“Seems to me that you ought to let her do her work, then.” Nadine reached back and adjusted her veil, the motion doing nothing to dispel the authority she naturally commanded over the room, Render included. She habitually pinched her bare ear lobes, having left her earrings off for the shoot to ward off bad luck. “Rest assured, Aris — myself and Remy have no reservations about withdrawing our endorsement to your little investment, especially on your thin ice.”
Render’s fingers were clenched around his armrests, but after a moment he nodded curtly, feigning nonchalance as he folded one leg over the other. “Of course, Miss Naloss. I’ll be right here, if you need me.”
“Of course you will.” Mal couldn’t let go of her held breath when Nadine dropped the threat: it was terrifying to witness how easily she tucked her fangs away and turned back to the camera, reassuming her cheery persona. “What do Untouchables do, for these things?”
“Uh — we don’t really do pictures.” She wasn’t sure how much she was allowed to say; she told herself not to look at Render for permission or guidance. “There isn’t enough film to go around.”
“Well, what’s something you’d like to have a picture of, for your own wedding?”
The question was a non-starter. She was never going to get married, and thinking about what she’d want to memorialize for her daughter’s wedding made her chest hurt like she was having a heart attack. She swallowed around the heartburn and instructed, “Go ahead and face me, with the skyline behind you.” Hopefully Nadine wouldn’t notice if she dodged answering the question.
Nadine nodded and gave the camera a small, subtle smile, her shoulders drawn back, head held high, bouquet poised at her chest with the light glaring off of the dozens of tiny silver bells hanging from the ribbon wrapped around the stems. The monarch butterfly on her shoulder was perfectly placed in the golden ratio, balanced by the asymmetrical styling of her hair, arranged in a wavy sheet over her opposite shoulder, her veil still hanging down her back. The clasp of her necklace was travelling down her clavicle. “How’s this?”
“Just a second.” Mal didn’t know what possessed her to step out from behind the camera and reach out to fix the clasp herself; maybe she was hallucinating from stress, finding herself back in Kit and Beena’s home as they posed for their wedding portrait, where everything had to be perfect for the single shot Mal could afford to give them. When she remembered where she was, it was too late: she had already lifted the clasp back into place, and she was rooted to the spot when met with the full force of Nadine’s piercing gaze.
“It’s Mal, right?”
She nodded, holding her breath — the many scents Nadine had dressed herself in were tickling her nose, and there probably wasn’t a power on this Earth that could save her if she sneezed on the gown.
“Short for something?” The bells jingled quietly as Nadine settled the bouquet in the crook of her elbow.
“Just my age.”
“Ha — you’re cute.” She reached out to adjust Mal’s necklace in turn, the bouquet tinkling gently; in her other hand, she held a business card just out of Render’s sight, behind the flowers. “If you ever get tired of the old man, give us a call — double the pay, complimentary off-site housing, and any other perks that might grease the wheels. No expenses spared.”
Mal tried to glance back at Render, looking for a guideline on how to react. Nadine clicked her tongue and wrapped her fingers around her chin, thumb pressing insistently on her bottom lip and manually turning her attention back on her.
“Haven’t you ever been poached before? Just take the card and promise you’ll think about it — you’ll be helping me stick it to the old man, after he cost me my last asset.”
She wasn’t letting go, and Mal finally slipped the card into her pocket just to appease her; Nadine released her with an appreciative noise and let her retreat back behind the camera.
“Much more to go?”
“Almost done — two more.”
Nadine smiled brilliantly; looking straight at her felt like staring down a rattlesnake that wouldn’t rattle. “Whenever you’re ready, Miss Mal.”
Render had stepped out with the bride and her entourage, obliging the last of the good host’s duties by escorting them to their car. After ten minutes of waiting for a guard to come and retrieve her, Mal decided that there were worse places to be alone with her thoughts, and took up residence in the chair that Render had vacated. She pulled out Gwenh’s cigarettes and thumbed open the carton, hoping to stave off the urge to indulge by scent alone as she propped her feet on the table.
The smell was unlike any other cigarette she had ever encountered, a strain of tobacco she didn’t recognize with some sort of added herb. She pulled one out, rolling it between her fingers, and frowned at the fine white particulate collecting on her skin, coagulating with the oils on her fingertips. She longed to light one up and see if Gwenh was right to be territorial over these special cigarettes reserved just for her — just thinking about it had her squeezing the carton between her fingers in base temptation. But no matter how fervently she whispered otherwise into the bathroom mirror, she still had her milk to think about; she stuffed the cigarettes back into her pocket and scrubbed her hands over her thighs, trying to distract herself with the selection of reading materials sitting under her feet.
One of the magazines was old enough that the date on the cover was rendered in an unfamiliar calendar — in the issue of a month called October in a year called 2079, the front page had been devoted to Proxima Centauri B. She traced her fingers over the rusty red planet, flipping to the relevant page. Reading was slow, but realizing how little had changed was fast: even with decades of research, all humanity could know for certain were the facts observable from four lightyears away. The planet was tidally locked, posing challenges to atmospheric stability. There was water, potentially covering the entire surface in an endless ocean, potentially frozen in vast deserts, potentially deep under the crust and necessitating a robust mining operation. The sun was a red dwarf, offering a different spectrum of visible light, and any flora was more likely to be uniformly black rather than any shade of green. The idea that Earth might hold the last greenery she would ever see made her stomach turn over restlessly, and she quickly put the magazine aside.
A door behind her closed, and Render touched her shoulder with far more kindness than earlier. “I hope you weren’t put off by how forward Nadine can be. I stepped on her toes recently, and she’s been sour about it ever since.”
She couldn’t imagine stepping on the toes of a person like that, accidentally or otherwise. “What did you do?”
“Ah, who remembers?” He circled the armchair and glanced pointedly at her propped-up feet; once they were back on the floor, he handed her a parcel. “Here.”
After a moment’s hesitation she pulled apart the brown paper wrappings, unravelling a pair of black rectangular shapes, one plastic with a collapsed antenna, the other a hollow, felt case. She picked up the plastic thing first, stretching out the antenna to its full length; the light caught on the fine mesh of the speaker. “A radio?”
“Indeed.” He reached over and turned one of the dials, bringing forth the familiar tone of static, and then the faint strains of music. “It gets awfully quiet in that studio of yours — I thought you might like to listen to something when you work. We have several excellent radio stations in the area, or beyond the city, if you’d prefer: I’m told that shortwave is rather far-reaching.”
Her heart skipped, no matter how transparently he was trying to buy back her goodwill. If she could tune it correctly, maybe she could punch through the noise that the artificial atmospheres put out, and contact someone on the outside. She smoothed over her eagerness and turned to the second parcel, fingers finding the perimeter-long seam and cracking it open. Inside, she found a pair of glasses — an exact copy of the ones she wore on her head.
“I’ve noticed that you don’t use those ones you came in with; I realized that they might be out of date, so I had some optometrists take a guess at your current prescription — Mister and Missus Porter, you remember them — and make you a new pair.” He reached out to tap the case. “Try them on, will you?”
She did as she was told, excited despite herself. When she slid them up her nose she was almost immediately confused, eyes trying to see past scratches and imperfections that weren’t there, straining themselves almost by default: for the first time in her life, her eyes weren’t struggling between two different focal points, just the rainbow sheen flashing across the lenses as they caught the light. Once she got used to that, she could pick apart individual buildings in the skyline instead of the blurry, jumping line; the details on the cover of the discarded magazine were as clear as though she were pressing her nose to glossy paper.
“I know we’ll never get you in the chair for a proper check-up, but if it’s not right I can have them tweak the prescription—“
“They’re fine.” Relinquishing them for an adjustment would give him time to decide that she wasn’t worth the effort, and her vision was good: everything was as clear as it had been when Gwenh had first lent her the glasses. She took them off and rubbed her overstimulated eyes, which stung as though coated in grit — she’d have to build back up to wearing them full-time. “I— thank you. This— this means a lot to me.” She stopped and cleared her throat, forcing some tears into her voice. “I never realized how much I was missing.”
He awkwardly hummed at her vulnerability, waiting patiently for her to compose herself and leaving himself open for her next approach:
“Have you found Tai-Song?”
His mouth pinched shut and he rocked back, regarding her with surprise and suspicion. After a long stretch of silence where he waited for her to back down and she firmly refused to, he finally joked, “I was hoping you had written him off.”
“He’s the father of my child.”
“Right, of course.” He cleared his throat and sat down on the ottoman, eyes fixed on the carpet. “I do have some news, but it isn’t terribly happy — it seems that his information has fallen through the cracks.”
“You’ve lost him?” Some of Nadine had crept into her voice, tone turning sharp rather than plaintive.
He gave her a warning look, and she obediently shrank back. “I’ll be the first to admit that my record-keeping leaves something to be desired. People get shuffled around between these operations so frequently, it’s common to lose track of things like this. But he’s not here, not anymore.”
She looked down and rubbed her eyes again, hiding the frustration twisting her expression. “Thank you for looking.” The false gratitude tasted like ash in her mouth.
“I wish I had better news for you.” He held out a hand. “Come. Dinner’s waiting in the studio.”