Lilahiem Hill
They air was dry and the sky an undisturbed azure when the express train from Yafa entered the curve. It ran along the outside of a great many tracks bent in even orbits around the Pirrhon Rail Company’s main depot, a behemoth of metal and concrete gleaming at the heart of the rail yard. Movement was scant under the noon sun picking up only at the horizon where the edges of the old depositories blurred and danced in the rising heat. Only on occasion did the shape of an engineer dart out from one shadow to immediately disappear into another, leaving nothing but a trail of dust.
Although the track’s angle was hardly felt, the passengers gathered on the inside of the curve as if pulled by the depot’s gravity. Their eyes paid no regard to the building, however, gazing instead at a spot of blurred blue between the pylons and distant apartment buildings of western Koeiji. There, most of them would end this day among the warm waves washing off the sweat of the ride, enjoying the sand between their toes, and haggling over roasted quacks with the beachside vendors.
Only the most observant spotted the huge green one-eyed face looking back from the wall of a junction hut as it rushed past them. Hidden in the shade of a stack of empty sandboxes, it did upon closer inspection obey the rules of jinoa: pieces of different colors, assembled so that none touched on another, centered on a large motif. The features of the face stood out from the green in yellow and brownish hues. They pictured Rannek Lorne, the prefect of Koeiji, a well-known man, wearing glasses and one of the silly old hats of the Empire that seemed solely designed to make the wearer look eggheaded. Among the darker greens making up his collar, one could even make out a faintly implied lettering:
‘Have you seen meʔ’
The train trailed on in its orbit until the track straightened and left the depot behind, heading for the distant gaping jaw of Koeiji Main Station. Without tourists to ogle, the one-eyed face resumed observing the rail, the crossties, the rocks, and the containers stacked on the other side, robbed of their wells and wheels.
Rocks crunched under his feet as Yuri stepped onto the embankment with the pail at hand, and jumped across the track. The hut had a jutting metal sheet as a roof whose shadow took him in again, lifting the heat off his neck. Lunch break was sure to end soon; before long, the switchmen and engineers would return. He put down the pail and pulled out a lump of rotten fruit. With swift, yet careful motions, he applied it to the empty socket, molding it with his thumb and palm until the eye took shape. He took a step away to admire his finished work .
“Don’t forget to dot that shit,” Ogi shouted.
Yuri spotted his friend’s round face sticking out from the shadow of the containers across the track, grinning, eyes hidden by the brim of his cap. He seemed content with the jinoa—a compliment in itself, for the fallen cargo had been Ogi’s find, as had the design been his idea. Yuri searched the bucket of pulp for a sufficiently bright yellow and dotted that shit before rushing back over the track, and knocking the cap off Ogi’s head in passing.
“Dick,” Ogi said, lunging for his ribs. “What was that for?”
“‘Stay back’ doesn’t mean ‘make noise’, dumbfuck.” Yuri lifted the cap off the ground with his foot, and put it on his own head. “… Why’s it wet?”
Ogi smiled a wide smile. “Rain or sun, water will come, my man.”
“Ew.” Yuri threw the cap to the ground, letting Ogi pick it up as he looked back over the track. “You sweat like a pale.”
“So what? You paint like one. Made him all pretty and shit.”
“I gave him a jowl.”
“You gave him character. Real prefect doesn’t look half as good. If he saw that one on canvas, he’d hang it square in his office.”
“Nah… When he comes back, he’ll have other stuff to hang.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you twice.”
Yet as he evaded Ogi’s jabs and inflicted his own, Yuri had to agree. It was his fourth jinoa of the day, and as he grew more tired, his work grew uninspired. The likeness, still, was undeniable; it always was when he put his mind to it. Only the spirit wasn’t there. He vowed to replicate it another day in the city where there’d be more time and shadow, and drove his knuckles into that big-bullseye belly of his friend to end the scuffle.
Ogi sunk against the container with heavy breaths and wiped his face on his shirtsleeve, where the brown fabric had already turned dark with sweat. He’d lose a few stone over the sunyear, Yuri would see to that. He helped his friend back to his feet and spun the cap so that the brim covered his nape. “You sweat like ‘em, don’t get burned like ‘em, too.”
“You see pink on me?” Ogi asked. Still, he did not turn back the cap. “I’m fuckin’ starving, my dude. Enough rail roaming for the day.”
“Yaya, me too. Let’s bou—“ Yuri silenced and raised his hand. There had been a noise, neither born of metal nor insect. A voice. He pushed Ogi back into the container’s shadow and joined him, creeping up toward the track.
As soon as he stuck out his head to peek around the corner, Yuri pulled it back. Two men were walking beside the embankment only twenty ells down the track wearing the PiRaCo’s ash-gray uniform, heads scanning the container IDs. Ogi’s eyes turned fearful when Yuri showed him the ‘V’ of his fingers. As bold as he could be when it was just the two of them, the danger of being discovered always turned him back into that chubby little kid Yuri had first taken pity on in school. Unlike then, though, his fear now was warranted. The workmen would either find the container they were looking for, or they’d move closer. One way or the other, Yuri and Ogi were trapped. The rail yard’s fence lay thirty ells away from their hiding spot. The hole they had entered through, another fifty. All that with little to no cover.
“Hold on, you see that?” the voice around the corner asked.
‘Fuck,’ Ogi mimed with his mouth. Yuri pulled him around the back corner of the container. Instead of joining him, he went back to check on the workmen; if they came looking this way, he knew he would have to make a run for it. He could do it. They’d run after him and never notice Ogi. Around the corner he heard more steps, only a few ells away this time.
Only they did not seem to come closer. “Please tell me that’s been there before,” the man said.
“Doesn’t look like it,” another man added. “See the flies? It’s fresh.”
“Godsdammit. Buyee’s gonna tear us a fourth hole for this.”
“If we report it.”
“… Anything goes missing, it’s not just holes we have to worry about. We have to check at least.” A sigh followed. “Fuck me for lunchin’ early.”
Yuri took a short peek. The workmen were both standing by the hut, one palming his face, the other squinting at the jinoa. He was still prepared to run, should they turn around, yet their bodies did not raise his hopes. These weren’t the older borvin-bellied railworkers he’d fled before. These were young folk, barely five years older than him, and sinewy at that.
A hand on his shoulder made him flinch—Ogi. Yuri pinched his skin and sent him back behind the container just before the second man spoke up sounding puzzled. “Is that… is that supposed to be the prefect?”
“What?” Steps crunched softly. “Nah. Looks nuthin’ like him. Besides, they wouldn’t dare, would they?”
“Glasses, hair, wrinkles, it’s all there.”
“And how’d you know? You’ve never met the guy.”
“Been plenty pictures in the papers since he went missing. Besides, there’s something written underneath.”
“… Houndshit. Where?”
Yuri dared to peek again, and found both men sticking their heads together trying to decipher the green prefect’s collar. An idea came to him. He dashed back to Ogi’s side, and lowered his voice to the faintest whisper. “This is our chance. I have to distract them.”
Ogi looked perplexed as Yuri crouched down to the ground. “What? No! They’ll catch you, and then what? We have to—“
“They won’t.” Yuri grinned, and stood up holding a rock that fit snugly into his palm. “They won’t even see me.”
Unable to see the workmen, not knowing whether the roof still blocked their sight of the sky, Yuri reached back his arm and raised his shoulder. The containers before him were stacked twofold, so he stepped back, and fixed his eyes on a spot high in the azure. For a moment, he couldn’t but think of mister Gikyede and his attempts at imparting the every-day importance of math. Containers + Track + Hut + Some Extra = An Assload Of Force. That was his kind of arithmetic.
He slung the rock with all his might and watched it sail over the containers, shrinking against the sky before sloping down, and disappearing. He grabbed the drenched collar of Ogi’s shirt and waited, waited, until the crack of stone on stone banged across the rail yard.
“You heard that?” the first workman said.
Yuri pulled his friend over trackbed after trackbed, over rusted rails and rotten crossties, trying his best to keep the rocks from crunching. Ogi obeyed his hand wherever it pulled, puffing. The second workman said something far behind them, but it was quiet, and he stayed quiet when the two of them kept running. After three beds, Yuri looked back to see containers, pylons, a corner of the hut beyond—but no one in sight. They’d taken the bait. It was Ogi’s hand that stopped him just before he would have crashed into the fence.
They made their way along the yellowed weeds and bushes creeping through the wires’ criss-cross, throwing back nervous glances. Back at the containers, a gap opened up showing the silhouettes of two gray men standing far away behind the hut, one crouched down on a track. Ogi pointed at the tree crown reaching over the fence ahead, an old, broad lilahiem with less leaves than branches, as still as the bushes underneath. They raced to see who could get there first even though they both knew the answer.
Yuri kept watch while Ogi went to his knees, then his belly, and entered the bushes. A rustling of leaves accompanied his labored breathing until finally, his feet disappeared, and he stood up on the other side. Yuri immediately dove after him. Dirt smearing against his bare chest from underneath, wires snatching at him from above, he crawled through the half-an-ell opening and arrived outside the fence only to be greeted by a knee to his stomach.
“You’ll pay for that,” Yuri said, wheezing.
“Gotta catch me first.”
And like that, Ogi was off into the undergrowth, twigs and branches and leaves cracking with thirst as he barreled through them. Yuri caught his breath watching the plump boy struggle up the hillside. He was having fun. More than that, he was getting bolder by the day. Going that deep into the rail yard, painting the jinoas, it had all been his idea. As he jogged after him at an unhurried clip, Yuri wondered whether he was doing the right thing giving in to this new, more reckless Ogi.
Seeing his friend cry over the arrest had been more painful than any beating he’d ever taken. Diaen was Simoe’s brother, yet he’d been no less a brother to Ogi. Their families had lived side-to-side for three generations, and were joined in every way but blood. If a grandparent or an uncle died, both houses suffered; if Ogi brought home another stellar grade, he’d receive gifts from Simoe’s parents that outmatched those of his own. Yuri had not visited in years as both their moms weren’t fans of his, yet still, he felt for them. Diaen turning TLA terrorist must have devastated each household equally.
Not to mention the way he’d done it. Yuri knew Diaen from passing, from ball games played during the moonyear before the dry heat came, yet he could gauge his character, well enough in fact to know that the attack hadn’t been his idea. Killing the prefect—how’d one come up with such a shit plan, anyway? The only good thing about it was how truly shit it had played out.
They said old man Lorne had been bloodied, but barely grazed. Had he died, on the other hand…
Yuri stopped, and looked around. The stillness of the lilahiems was broken only by the twelve-legged insects crawling through the cracks in their winding trunks. A whistle blew four times far behind him, hoarsely, the cry of lunch ending on the rail yard. He had lost sight of Ogi. There was no way the fatboy had outpaced him, he was hiding somewhere. Yuri walked back a few steps down the hill scanning the branches of the crooked trees.
It was hardly a forest he was walking through, hardly more than an island of wooden skeletons amidst the concrete ocean of western Koeiji. Another few seasons, and the lilahiems would die and crumble, and through the loss of their shade the bushes and farns would die too, all because of the rail yard’s expansion. He stepped over a handful of rotted wooden beams let into the earth. They had once been stolen from the yard by kids like him, like Ogi, kids whose treehouses still clung to the highest lilahiems, rotting as well.
But because you can’t have the locals peeping in on PiRaCo business from the trees, Lilahiem Hill had been declared off limits, and the kids told to play in the forests, the same forests the missing prefect told their parents were unsafe. Meanwhile, the rails kept reaching out from the depot claiming more ground like a fungus of a thousand metal roots. Whose city is this, really? Someone had asked him that once.
It had been Diaen.
A cracking of twigs sounded to his back. Yuri started jogging, running through the dying forest as fast as he could trying to expel the memory. It didn’t make him one of them, he told himself. It didn’t make him complicit. What he had replied didn’t mean anything at all.
The gojas’, for now.
Between a slanted chalice of lilahiem branches, he spotted his friend. Ogi turned to run almost instantly, but slipped on a bed of tangled roots. As he regained his footing, Yuri jumped through the chalice and rushed up to deliver a stab to his kidney. “‘at’s what you get.”
Ogi panted. “Fuck… hah… you.”
“Fuck you twice.”
They passed the afternoon chasing after each other, hiding, enjoying what was left of Lilahiem Hill. Yuri let Ogi catch up from time to time just to keep his spirits up and even let the odd punch knock the wind out of him. They climbed the tallest of the trees, finding not one, not two, but three treehouses in varying stages of decay. A girl’s cry escaped Ogi when his foot burst through the rotten floor boards. He clambered back down to the ground afterward and took a frag to catch his breath.
The sun slowly descended from its noon throne until the heat came less from above than it did from below, warming their feet through the thin leather of their slippers. After hours of play, their speed and ambition had faded, their arms become shiny with sweat, and their chase devolved into a wandering about, jabbing at each other not with fists but words.
“You’re delusional.”
“You haven’t seen the way she looks at me. Givin’ me erue’s eyes and stuff.”
“Didn’t take you for the kinda guy who gets horny at the thought of monkeys.”
“You know what I mean.”Ogi chuckled. “Wait, you don’t. Right. Virgin lips ’n all.”
“Don’t act like you’ve kissed before—you’ve been kissed. Big difference. Might be some drunk rando slobbered all over those flaps of yours, but that don’t mean their stock went up.”
“Stock? Leave it to a Foeilei to make romance sound like business.”
“As my old man always says, ‘nothing more pathetic than supply without demand’.”
“That doesn’t sound like your dad at all. He talks more like…” Ogi started pointing around the dying forest in a manner that did resemble the index finger sometimes seen darting across the Foeilei dinner table, and spoke in the deepest, most commanding voice he could muster. “ ‘Bitch, Imma fuck my way through Rhon for a season. Watch the house, bitch.’ ”
Yuri burst out laughing. “Doesn’t sound like him at all. Besides, he took Jyen with him this time.”
“Like that’ll stop him. Still, he could’ve let her stay. I miss her.” Ogi gave him a stupid grin. “What does he sound like, then?”
Yuri raised his own finger, booming out. “ ‘Son, if you don’t get your grades up, I’m gonna have to buy the school! You want that, you little bitch?’ “
Ogi’s laugh roared out loudly, cackling through the dying forest. It was an old man’s laugh, hoarse, and rasping, a sound so full of joy it never failed to infect Yuri. He looked around, fearing for a breath that someone might have heard. But there was no one on the hill besides them. “Sounds like he’s getting way cooler these days,” Ogi said, and turned his voice deep again. “ ‘What’s that fucking teacher’s name again? Icky Feet?’ “
“ ‘Do you know how fucking hard I work to make these deals happen? I’m supposed to take time out of my day to take care of your shit?’ “
“ ‘I’m gonna kick in principal Sticky Seed’s door, unzip my pants, and slam my full ell on his table. Is that what you want?’ “
“ ‘I’m like, this thing isn’t even erect. Know why? BECAUSE THERE AREN’T ANY FUCKING DEALS BEING MADE!’ “
Ogi turned into a ball of spasms. Yuri opened his mouth, but then thought better of it. As bright a fire as his friend’s joy was, it also burned too bright; already he could hear him struggle for air. He waited, and patted Ogi’s back when the inevitable coughing started.
“You gotta cut back on the tobacco,” Yuri said.
“Pure sweewee, that what you’re sayin’?” Ogi spat out a glob of phlegm. “Sure, why not. Got any?”
“Not with me, I’m not stupid.”
Ogi sighed. “No time, anyway. Gotta get back before dark or my mom gets angry.”
“How does that sound?” Yuri probed.
“Same as her crying, just angrier.” And with that, silence returned to Lilahiem Hill. “… Sorry. I ruined it.”
“Can’t be sorry if it’s true.” Yuri punched his friend in the ribs with a hollow fist, and ruffled his moist cap. “Let’s go.”
The sky did darken as they shuffled up the hillside toward the western burbs. Koeiji afternoons lingered, yet they ended fast and marvelously. Yuri saw the light change around him as a golden veil descended on the forest, an otherworldly twilight. A deep sense of humility overcame him. When he cared, Yuri proved quite apt at jinoa, yet he could only dream of capturing such beauty on a wall. Over were the days when he had thought it a limitation of the medium itself; photos and recreations of the Jaemeni scene had taught him better. Walls the size of the depot dressed in a million shades of the same color, trains turned into worms and snakes, entire high-rises plastered with the absurd stylings of the artist named Blueface…
There were those able to put their imagination out there without distortions for the world to see. And one day, he’d go and join them. His father would hardly notice. Jyen would, but even if she mounted a search, Jaemeni was huge, four times the size of Koeiji. They’d never find him. One day, he told himself. When Ogi didn’t need him anymore. When no one did. He’d slip away, and all his parents would ever see of him would be his art, passing them by on a train ride during one of their endless trips.
“… Do you really think they’ll hang him?” Ogi asked.
Yuri found his friend’s face wearing a gloomy look, eyes cast down at the ground ahead of his trudging feet. “I wouldn’t joke about it if I did, you know that.”
Ogi looked up. “Mom thinks they won’t. But why wouldn’t they? What he did was treason.”
“The same treason committed by prefect Rai’s attackers. Close age, too. Got threatened with the noose, but here we are five years later. I hear one of them’s even up for parole next winteryear.”
A nod and a grateful smile were the only response. Yuri smiled back. It was an easy task, caring for Ogi. Such a goodnatured kid, such a sickeningly goodnatured family. For Yuri to claim he didn’t envy him from time to time would have been a lie; who didn’t envy a home that was full of people, full of love?
Being banished from there had stung him even though it didn’t come as a surprise. He had never fit in. He had talked to Ogi’s parents, Diaen and Simoe’s parents like he was one of them, and they did not like that at all. How could they? Their children were each respectful—save for prefects, perhaps—and knew the dance of ‘yes mom’ ‘yes dad’ in their sleep. He didn’t. He wanted to tell them each time he saw the offense in their eyes, and still couldn’t. It would have sounded pitiful. He may have earned their disapproval, but sting or not, he had rather earn that than pity.
“But what if Lorne is dead?” Ogi asked.
Not this again. “He’s not.”
“But what if he is? It was him who pardoned those kids back then. If he gets replaced, who knows who they’re gonna put in his place. He could—“
“Pale prefect’s alive and well. He’s in hiding.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“… I just am.” Yuri noticed by Ogi’s silence that his words had been too harsh, and stopped. “Do you trust me?”
Ogi turned, and looked confused. “The fuck? Of course.”
“Then trust when I say this: they won’t hang him.”
“That’s what everybody else says.”
“They’re right. They’re idiots, most of ‘em, but they’re right. The longer Lorne stays away, the more of us will convince ourselves that he could never order Diaen and his dumbfuck friends killed. He won’t defy our expectations, Ogi. He fears us.”
“… You sure?”
But Yuri just rolled his eyes and jumped, hoisting himself onto the thick limb of a lilahiem. He’d seen something, a swathe between the trees. The golden twilight grew warmer as he climbed upward through the leaves and branches, until he arrived on the tree’s shoulder, poking his head out of the crown. There it was down the hill, past the fence and barren sidings—the hut, a mere match-box from up here, throwing warped shadows a hundred ells long across the rails of the PiRaCo.
“Can you see it?” Ogi’s voice called out from below. “Is it still there?”
His friend had asked for reassurance, but there was only so much Yuri could give him. Sometimes, distraction was the better way. “I think it is,” Yuri said. And when arched his neck, he saw that it was indeed. A green orb dwelled in the shadows of the hut still, waiting to peer inside the passenger trains going around the rail yard and perturb the passengers, and maybe scare some children. The grayshirts must have risked a fourth hole.
“It’s there,” Yuri said. “Dotted and all.” When he looked down, he saw that the distraction had worked. Ogi grinned a grin full of mischief, sure to signal a joke being cooked up, or a knee or elbow waiting for him on the ground. Yuri took his time coming down the tree, and wondered. ‘Have you seen me?’
In his mind, it wasn’t the old prefect asking.
Martin Surga 