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Chané sees the package arrive as she approaches her sister’s apartment for a visit. She picks it up before she heads inside. The box is about the size of a small stack of paperback books, and it’s taped tightly shut; it is addressed to Hilton, which Chané knows is her sister’s title in the capacity of her work for their father. For a moment, her heart leaps with hope, but the handwriting on the package is large and square, nothing like Huey’s flowing script.
There’s no return address.
Frowning over the mystery, Chané climbs up the stairs and rings the doorbell. When Liza answers, she hands her the package and sees her eyes widen with the same brief hope.
“Oh,” she says a moment later. “It’s not his handwriting.”
She turns away, picking at the tape. Chané follows her inside. The apartment is tidy, but it’s just as bare as it was when the Lemures used it, or when Chané used to stop by. Chané wonders if Liza might need help decorating. It seems that she buys and cooks her own meals—Chané offered to help once and was greeted with a prim indignation—but she can’t be more than fifteen. Maybe art stores and hardware stores are beyond her capabilities. Or maybe she just prefers the austere environment. Chané had been that way, once.
Before Chané can begin to guess which one might be true, a sharp gasp cuts into her thoughts.
Liza has gotten the package open and is staring, wide-eyed, at its contents. Nestled carefully into the packaging is a sealed vial, about as long as a finger, with some kind of clear liquid inside. A typed label on the front of the vial reads Hilton. But just below that, crowded onto the small slip of paper, the word (Liza) is written in handwriting that they both recognize.
Chané finds her hand reaching out for the vial on its own, her curiosity and her shock at seeing her father’s handwriting again overcoming any sense of propriety. But Liza snatches the box away.
“Don’t,” she says, guardedly.
Chané blinks, coming back into herself, and mouths Sorry, too embarrassed by her actions and too sincere in the sentiment to waste time finding a scrap of paper to write it down. But Liza isn’t looking at her; she has her eyes trained on the box still. Her hands are shaking.
“Don’t,” she repeats. “Okay, sis? Don’t ever touch this. It’s… dangerous.”
Chané tilts her head in quiet confusion, but Liza doesn’t explain further. She pulls an envelope out of the packaging and breaks the seal on it without another word. After a single brief glance at the letter inside, she grimaces and folds it up again. She takes a deep breath.
“Hey, sis?” she says. “Can you go home? I’m not gonna be able to give you my full attention right now.”
Chané nods. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she takes a pen and a small notebook out of her purse.
Will you call us later? she writes. Liza is as pale as death, her hands still shaking visibly. Chané is worried.
Liza looks at what she’s written and grimaces in a different way. “I hate calling you two,” she says, an openly bratty tone to her voice. “Your fiancé is annoying. He says too much sappy stuff about you.”
Chané’s cheeks color with a pleasant sort of embarrassment, but she nods in acknowledgement of what her sister said. At least she is well enough to act like a child, instead of the oddly mature personality she affects at other times. Chané stands to leave.
As she reaches the door, Liza’s voice comes from behind her.
“Hey, Chané?”
Chané turns towards her younger sister.
“You want to come by this time tomorrow? I’ll be better then, I think.”
Chané gives a firm nod and a reassuring smile, and then she leaves her sister her privacy.
*
A few minutes later, a young woman knocks on the door of an old man’s apartment. The old man answers the door, and his curly beard twitches with a smile. “Hello, granddaughter. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The young woman only pushes past him and pulls the door shut behind her. “Do you think you’re funny, Sham?” she asks.
The old man shrugs and locks the door. “Hello to you too, Hilton.”
He turns and watches her perch on the arm of his couch.
“Or should I be calling you Liza?” he asks. “I thought Liza was just the one vessel, but for Master Huey to have added that name on the bottle itself—”
“You can call me Hilton,” the woman responds, scowling. “You traitor.”
Sham only inclines his head. “Was it news to you?”
Hilton presses her lips together instead of answering. It hadn’t been, not really. She’d learned of her “brother’s” betrayal from that damned information broker a year ago, as much as she’d been loath to believe it. But Huey had been so busy getting ready for the experiment in New York and Sham had seemed well-behaved and she’d thought she could tell Huey afterwards.
And now Huey is nowhere to be found.
Back at home, Liza turns her eyes downwards and looks once more at the bottle Sham has sent to her. The bottle that contains her consciousness. The liquid inside of it is even more her than her Liza vessel is, and holding so much of it at once makes her so uncomfortable that she wants to throw the bottle across the room and watch the liquid seep away into the floorboards.
But she doesn’t have the right to do that.
“How dare you send that to me?” she asks Sham. “How dare you steal what belongs to Master Huey? Do you think that I’ll forgive—”
“Huey isn’t using it, Hilton.” The eyes of Sham’s elderly vessel go from bleary to focused and his hunched posture straightens. “He hasn’t stopped by any of Rhythm’s facilities, hasn’t been in contact with Time. He hasn’t contacted any of my vessels that he knows of, nor has he passed any of my vessels that he doesn’t know of. He’s gone, Hilton. Maybe eaten—”
“No.”
The word bursts out of her automatically. Sham’s brow furrows with what looks like sympathy. “Hilton…”
She shakes her head. “No, listen to me, I’m telling you that he hasn’t been eaten. Firo said so,” she adds in a mumble. Technically, she isn’t even supposed to say that much, but like hell is she going to sit here and be pitied based on false information.
Before Sham can open his mouth to speak again, Hilton cuts him off. “Anyway, he’s not dead, so like I said, you can’t steal what belongs to him.”
“Hilton, that bottle contains you,” Sham says. “It should belong to you.”
Liza bites her lip, her hands beginning to shake around the bottle again. “Th-that’s how—” the her that is with Sham starts, but she doesn’t like how her voice comes out. She swallows and tries again. “That’s how you feel,” she says, managing to sound a little more like Hilton this time. “But I belong to Master Huey. You can’t change that.”
Sham sighs. And then, rather than arguing, he says, “Alright, fine.”
“Huh?”
“I will grant that you prefer to belong to Huey. But in that case, isn’t it true that you don’t belong to Rhythm?”
Hilton sneers, “Of course I don’t belong to those weirdos at Rhythm—”
“Do you think it’s as obvious to them as it is to you?” Sham’s posture sags again as if his vessel’s aged body is too tired to hold itself up any longer. He shuffles over to the couch and takes a seat. “Right now they’re behaving themselves because it hasn’t even been a year since Huey’s gone missing. But how long until they decide to help themselves to the fruits of his labor? How long until they decide it’s up to them to choose your next vessel and give you orders?”
Hilton flinches backwards. “I don’t care what they decide, I won’t listen to them.”
“You won’t have to as long as you have that vial,” Sham says. And then, as Liza drops her eyes to the vial once more and the other vessel remains silent, he shrugs. “That’s just my strategy. If you ask me—”
“I didn’t,” Hilton snaps, but without venom in it.
“If you were to ask me,” Sham revises his statement patiently, “I wouldn’t recommend giving that vial back to Rhythm, myself. Keep it, and and if Huey wants you again, he’ll know where to find you. But until then, live your life. Your own life.”
“Haha…”
It’s the Hilton who’s in the apartment with him who laughs; Liza remains silent, her eyes boring into the vial and her mouth pressed into a thin line as she speaks from far away.
“My life? Or my lives?” she asks. “Sham, I’m Master Huey’s information network. That’s my purpose, just like it’s yours. That’s why there’re so many of us. If I just let my vessels go about their ordinary lives, then ‘Hilton’ might as well not exist.”
Sham turns a long stare towards her. Then he sighs.
“You have Liza,” he says.
“Liza is Master Huey’s daughter,” Hilton counters. Liza certainly doesn’t know how to define herself without Huey. She’s never thought to try, never even wanted to. One of her vessels is an amateur psychologist and so she knows it isn’t exactly healthy to cling so tenaciously to her father—that she could stunt herself, never to grow up properly. But she’s shared her consciousness with adult women since before she was out of diapers. Growing up properly is relative; either that, or it’s completely meaningless to her.
“Miss Chané is his daughter as well,” Sham points out. “She’s living her own life.”
Liza feels something curious twist in her chest. She remembers the concern in her older sister’s eyes, the dogged way in which she shows care for Liza even when Liza is snotty in return. She remembers the way Chané’s eyes look when she turns them towards her fiancé, and she knows exactly why she used to hate that.
“My sister is a different person from me,” she says, and she won’t admit to Sham that she’s ever wondered how to be more like Chané. She has to keep that secret. She catches herself thinking sometimes that Chané got out earlier than she did, like she’s describing an escape from prison. And in her heart of hearts—wherever that might be, physically speaking—she knows what she means by that.
She can’t make the thought go away.
“I’m leaving,” she mutters through the vessel that is with Sham, and hops off his couch.
“All right.” Sham’s face softens for a moment. “Why don’t you let my granddaughter stay for a bit? It’s been a while since they’ve visited.”
“Do they care?” Liza asks. The question means Do they still exist to care?, and Sham only shrugs, as uncertain of that answer as she is.
Liza turns her attention away from that vessel anyway, letting herself be only distantly aware of the way her vessel conversed with Sham’s like the old man and his granddaughter that they were. In her own apartment, she tucks the vial back into its cushioned box, closes it, and tapes it shut. She puts it into the Lemures’ safe, locks it up, and wonders if Chané wouldn’t mind helping her find a nice painting to hang in front of it. And a few more paintings for the rest of the apartment, as camouflage.
And across the city, Annie excuses herself from work early and makes her way to Firo’s casino. It’s a quiet afternoon, so he sees her come in and emerges from the office.
“Everything alright, Annie?”
She winds her hands into her skirts, suddenly tongue-tied. “Yeah. Just wanted to come say hi,” she says, and it’s not quite the truth but Liza doesn’t know what she wants or why she’s come here. She just knows that Firo is always kind and respectful to her, even if she still isn’t used to dealing with that.
“You wanna sit in the office?”
She does. He shows her into the office and she takes a seat, glancing around with interest but not too much interest. Firo turns back to whatever he was doing before she arrived, and she looks down at her hands.
After a moment, Firo lifts his head. “You okay?” he asks. This time, he doesn’t append Annie’s name to the question, but nor does he presume to add Liza’s. Liza takes a deep breath and then exhales, through both her own body and Annie’s, and really gives the question some thought.
“I think I’m gonna be,” she says at last, and she doesn’t know what that looks like yet, but she’ll have to have to figure it out for herself.