Folding the Sky

-8-

He loosened his grip on the knife. "I see," he said.

The man let out a shaky sigh. "I-If you'd like to take a look at it—"

With a swift flick of his wrist, Sorin sliced the knife across the man's throat. The rest of his sentence devolved into a hacking, wet cough, and then, finally, silence.

Sorin stood, frowning at his now blood-soaked shirt—he would have a hard time explaining the stains away to Liesel—and approached the tapestry. He returned his knife to his belt, and reached out a hand, tracing the fibers. His fingers outlined a storm cloud, strikes of lightning woven in yellow and white yarn, a roaring black sea underneath. The sky behind it all was a deep and violent red.

Sorin shuddered as his fingers found the two letters stitched into the tapestry's corner in fine gold thread: V.S.

By the time he slipped back into the rug shop—a tapered, two-story tall yellow-bricked building with a slanted roof and circular windows—the sun was peeking up above the horizon, shimmering in a blaze of pink and orange across the surface of the Muwa River.

Inside, Sorin meandered through the maze of hanging rugs and blankets, made out of everything from rustic burlap to colorful fabrics to silken panther furs. At the back of the shop sat a desk cluttered with a cash register and a myriad of invoices and bills. A fountain pen rested at the desk's very edge, dripping ink onto the wood.

With a troubled exhale, Sorin nudged the pen away from the edge and stepped behind the desk, pulling a curtain aside to reveal the narrow staircase that led to the apartment above. He climbed it with a studied quietness, keeping his footsteps light. If he knew Liesel at all, she was almost certainly still asleep.

He was right.

Liesel, the woman who'd taken him in after he'd found himself homeless and starving twelve years before, was slumped on her futon, buried so deep in a sea of handmade blankets that only a tuft of her frizzed auburn hair was visible. Resting precariously on the floor beside her was a half-empty cup of coffee and a conspicuous circle of biscuit crumbs.

Sorin glanced at the clock on the wall, let out a sigh of dismay, and poked Liesel on the top of her head. "Liesel."

Her only response was a loud snore. Sorin groaned.

"Liesel," he tried again, and poked her once more, this time with more force. "Hey, are you alive? The shop's supposed to open in thirty minutes."

She snorted and picked her head up, bangs hanging wildly in her sleep-drunken eyes. Murmuring nonsense under her breath, she dragged herself upright, her blouse wrinkled. "Sorin? Is that you?" She squinted in his direction, overgrown eyebrows pulling close. "Oh, glasses. Where are my glasses?"

Sorin scanned the room before he found them sitting on the coffee table. They were an atrocious pair of glasses, really. They were disgustingly circular and thick and took up about half of Liesel's finely-lined face. Somehow, though, they did make the odd little woman seem more awake.

"By Kiro, Liesel," Sorin said, drifting towards the kitchenette. He yanked out a drawer, sifting through a pile of ancient silverware before he found a match to light the stove. "You've got to get this oversleeping habit of yours under control. It's just a shitty way to start the day, don't you think? Rushing about. I mean, really. I feel like this is the umpteenth time I've told you this."

Sorin hinged to grab a carton of eggs from the icebox, but stopped when Liesel said from behind him, "Sorin, what's on your shirt?"

Sorin froze. He'd been so preoccupied that he hadn't thought to change.

He stood up, slowly, and turned around. Liesel's face was red with the beginnings of anger, her small hands knotted in the blankets. Even if he'd wanted to, which he didn't, there was no time to lie.

"You didn't."

Sorin pushed out a long breath, jutting his chin. "I didn't have a choice."

"You always say that!" Liesel cried, jumping to her feet. She was a short, stout woman, round in the middle, and far from the most intimidating person. Yet Sorin cringed at her risen voice anyway.

"'I didn't have a choice,'" she repeated, dropping her voice lower to mimic his. She scoffed, stomping over to him. "There's always a choice, Sorin. I-I know it's what you're used to. I know it's how you survived before, you know, I found you. But there are better ways to do this! I mean, why? What reasons did you have to kill this person, whoever they were?"

"They were one of Vernon's patrons," Sorin answered, because he knew it would draw her up short. And it did. "A wealthier one, at that. I was hoping he could tell me where Vernon was, but he lied to me. Said that when he met Vernon he was working out of an old office building on the riverfront. Anyone with half a brain knows that Vernon wouldn't work that far into the city. The noise bothers him."

Liesel grew solemn, as she always did whenever Vernon was mentioned. Resting one hand against the wooden counter, she sighed, looking up at Sorin. "You're right," she allowed. "He was always picky about that, wasn't he?"

"Is," corrected Sorin, almost under his breath. "Is picky."

An uneasy quiet swelled between them, interrupted only by the blare of boat horns just outside the dust-covered window and the crackle of the flame still flickering on the stove.

"I think," said Liesel, "that maybe it is time I let go of him."

Sorin's muscles went taut. "Wait. But—"

"No one disappears for no reason, Sorin. Either he's...dead, or he doesn't want anything to do with me anymore," Liesel said, crossing her arms. "Either way, it's already over."

"Already over, huh?" Sorin scoffed, and whirled, slamming an iron pan atop the stove's eye with a violent clang. He selected an egg, cracking it expertly on the pan's rim. Clear sizzled into white. "Because that's so like you, Liesel. To give up on things just because it'd be easier that way. Do you know where I would be if I was like that?"

"Sorin—"

"Dead on the street, probably. No proper cremation. Just another corpse rotting in a trash heap somewhere."

Behind him, Liesel's voice had grown small. "Please don't say things like that."

"It's the truth," Sorin told her, and it was. He still remembered with lucid clarity the first night he'd spent on the street: the gnawing feeling in his stomach like it was slowly eating itself away as he watched the streetlights' reflections tremble and move across the river's black-green water. He'd fallen asleep leaning against an abandoned latrine and woken up with flies in his mouth. He hadn't expected to wake up at all.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm going to find the son of a bitch," Sorin said. He flipped the egg onto a plate and took a slice of bread from its cabinet. "No matter how many people I have to cut into."

Sorin pivoted to hand Liesel her plate, but stopped when she smiled and stretched a hand towards his head.

Reluctantly, Sorin bent a little at the knees as she ruffled his hair, her fingers twining through the midnight black strands, playing with the lighter streak of blond that fell across his forehead.

He glared at her. "I'm not a little kid anymore, Liesel."

She ignored this, patting his cheek gently with her palm. Beneath her glasses, her eyes were big and brown and bottomless. "You do too much for me, you know?" she whispered to him. "Way too much."

She took her plate then, and settled back on her futon with a yawn, scratching her head of buoyant curls.

Sorin watched her as exhaustion seeped into his own body, crawling along his veins and pumping like a dense sedative into his aching muscles.

No, he thought, but didn't say. I haven't done nearly enough.