The Forever Court by Dave Rudden

Author:Dave Rudden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

You have no imagination!

“I don’t need imagination,” Denizen said, his eyes scrunched closed. “I don’t have time for imagination. There’s imagination, and then the real world, and the real world is always worse.”

Silence, out there in the darkness beyond his eyelids, and then a voice, soft and musical.

All of it?

Don’t blush. “No. OK. Not all of it.”

Good. Now open your eyes.

Denizen did.

She smiled at him. “How do I look?”

Mercy stood in front of him. Stood. On feet. Feet that were attached to legs that sat under a torso that had two arms and a head crowned by a tangle of curls. All real. All human.

Her eyes were the color of sunlight on steel, her skin amber in the streetlight’s distant glow. The curls avalanching down her shoulders were silver, the color of freshly stamped moonlight.

“Well?” she said, a tad impatiently. “How did I do?”

Simon had been wrong. It wasn’t that Denizen hadn’t ever fancied people. He had seen movies and advertisements where everyone was floppy-haired and symmetrical, and it wasn’t that Mercy looked like a movie star, or a model, or anything like that. She didn’t. It was simply that Denizen knew nobody in the history of the world had ever looked like her before, and nobody would ever look like her again.

She wasn’t pretty. She was poetry.

“Good,” Denizen croaked. “You look very, very good.” He glanced down. “Though you are wearing the exact same clothes as me.”

“I needed a template,” she said. Said, in a voice that played Denizen’s spine like a piano. “Clothes are difficult. You have to do different textures and colors, not just loose folds of skin.” She paused. “That’s not acceptable, right?”

“No,” Denizen said in as heartfelt a tone as he could muster without actually picturing it. “No it isn’t.”

“You’re tricky,” she said. “Lot of moving parts. I didn’t do the organs. Nobody does the organs. Too hard to keep going. But the surface works, and that’s what matters, right?”

“Umm ...” Denizen said. “In this situation, I guess. How do you feel?”

Mercy had extended her arms, slowly moving each joint—fingers, wrists, elbows—before stretching up on her toes like a dancer. “Good,” she said. “I think. Make faces at me?”

“What?” Denizen said, blushing.

“Make faces at me,” she said. “I need to make sure I’m—wait, which one’s that?”

“Confusion,” he said. “And now amusement.”

She scowled. “Am I scowling at you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She pulled on a lock of her hair and watched it spring back into shape. “Flesh isn’t difficult to spin; it’s just ... complicated. Especially if you want to pass among humans. You need to concentrate, make sure you’re not slipping anywhere, and the longer you’re here, the harder it becomes. That’s why a lot of Tenebrous choose metal or stone. You can just let it set and focus on movement. Me, I like light.”

“Light?” Denizen said, and she nodded, the briefest shine of white behind her teeth.

“I don’t like the idea of just being one thing. Light’s very difficult ... but that’s why I like it. A particle and a wave—constantly moving, never one thing or the other.

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