Mary gasped when she saw the woman with the trellis. Sybel and Lacond turned withering expressions of contempt toward her that she pretended not to see. Sybel had never been underground, but he had a way of adapting to each new situation as it presented itself. Lacond, meanwhile, had not gone as far belowground as Duncan, nor for as long, but he was marked for life by it, nonetheless: an encrusted blackness sometimes shone through his pores.
“You’d all better get used to it,” Lacond muttered. “There’ll be much more than that to get used to before the end.”
Sybel scowled; I knew Lacond’s pronouncements sometimes struck him as both vague and pretentious.
But you may wonder how, even with so great and ponderous a weight as James Lacond between us, Mary and I could walk so calmly into the opera house as members of the same group. The circumstances of war, as well as her keeping her distance and being eclipsed by the mushroom moon known as Lacond, didn’t hurt, but you must also remember that the two semesters of Bonmot’s ban had long since passed into history. The ban, along with much else from before the war, had become so remote that sometimes I could not find these details in my memory, or could not find them with a sharpness that made them real.
So I had, for the duration of the conflict, suspended my judgment of many things, including Mary. I had even become reconciled to the idea that Duncan and Mary might make a life together. Indeed, you might say that the war, for a time, created another kind of excitement for Duncan and Mary, an urgency to replace what they had lost now that they could no longer sneak around Blythe Academy. (Yet you were still so tense, your smile so forced, your politeness so impolite.) I did not speak to her, but we both laughed at Duncan’s jokes, and made comments to each other indirectly, through Duncan or Lacond. Sybel, for his amusement, tried to create situations in which Mary would have to talk to me, or vice versa, but was never successful.
Through the sweat-stained, boot-scuffed antechamber we walked, all of us crowded together as we climbed the stairs to the balcony, having to ignore our own sour smell.
Then, a rush of stale air in our faces, followed by another, even staler, blast, as we walked onto the balcony and beheld the opera house!
We stared down at row upon row of worn gilt seats, rapidly being filled by the people sitting in them, saw the orchestra pit filled with the febrile scratchings of musicians tuning their instruments, and beyond that, the plain wooden stage, half hidden by burgundy curtains that had great, gaping holes in them, revealing the scurrying singers behind the veil, the grunt and nudge of set pieces moving into place.
The more we looked, the more small details came into focus, the grandeur fading upon closer inspection. Plaster cherubim placed at the corners of the balcony, framing our view, had grown old, fissures of wrinkles aging them to appear wiser, and more malevolent than innocent. Every seat had a sweat stain from years of use. Every filigree and swirl of decorative paint on the walls or ceiling had a crack, a dent, a fault line. It had always been that way, and the familiarity of it comforted me.
Then Duncan gasped.
“Look,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. Only Lacond did not make a sound when he saw it. Even Sybel swore, under his breath.
It seems odd now that we had not seen it before all else, as if we wanted at first to deny its existence.
Looking up, as we walked forward to the edge of the balcony seats, we slowly came to recognize the source of the clear, clean, but undeniably green light that served as our illumination. (The rational mind can absorb only so much of the strange without damage.)
“What is it?” Mary whispered.
“The remains of a fungal bomb,” Lacond replied.
“Half exploded,” Duncan said. “Fused to the ceiling.”
The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’s defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.
My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.
Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.
“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouper-like lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance … well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.
“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.
“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.
“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”
“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a half-hearted scowl.
I tore my gaze from the ceiling. I had to. Otherwise my thoughts would have remained up there, trapped, during the entire opera. (It stunned me to see such a thing aboveground. It reinforced a thought that had come to me more and more frequently during the war: if that which belonged belowground came above- ground, why should I remain aboveground? I was like a sailor who falls overboard and reaches for the light, only to find that the light is false, and he has descended into even greater depths.) And yet, haven’t we all seen things much stranger since the beginning of the Shift? Thinking of that ceiling now, I’m oddly unmoved. I’ve been undone by too many miraculous sights, both holy and unholy.
No one had tickets, but that didn’t mean we had good seats. Even during the war (especially during the war!), there remained hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies. Lacond could have sat in the orchestra area with one guest, but that would have meant leaving the rest of us behind. Guided to the top row, we had to lower our heads for fear of bumping them against the balcony ceiling (a comforting white, that ceiling, at least). The seats were hard wood—hard indeed for an opera that promised six acts and only one intermission. Above us, the dome; below, the fatal curving lunge down to the ground floor seats (which, from that perspective, seemed to go on forever), then up and through them to the orchestra pit and the stage. The balcony smelled like old rotten books. No one had cleaned it for ages. That which from afar had looked both smooth and spotless was, up close, tawdry and sad. Only Sybel, with his lithe frame, seemed comfortable.
Perhaps I remember the opera so clearly because it was the last time anyone saw so many enemies occupying the same space without trying to stick a literal or figurative knife into one another. Agents from both sides of the conflict attended the opera that night, carefully guided through separate entrances, one of which consisted of a large hole in the wall. Anyone considered neutral had been positioned in the middle section of the ground floor, farthest from the exits. (Which made me laugh—should the two sides lose composure and attack each other, the neutrals in the middle would suffer greatly for their nuanced stance.)