---

Carina

by Anna Kahn

 

“I’ve had a baby. Still feels strange that you don’t know that — I’ve been looking forward to telling you. She’s called Sophie, which you might have feelings about, and that’s OK. I want you to know I think of you fondly and often. I guess that’s everything.”

Sophie replayed the recording. Carina’s lovely soft voice.

“You just missed her,” the citadel’s newest receptionist said.

“I always do.” A baby? There was joy in that, behind the anger — not just normal existence-of-babies joy, but fiercer, an illogical, selfish joy that the Carina Sophie knew fighting and scrabbling through her twenties would have a baby.

“Can’t you catch up or something?”

Sophie hadn’t realised the receptionist was that new. She could already feel herself slipping away.

---

The citadel had neither a front door nor a ground floor. It had a huge central staircase with hand-drawn maps pinned at the intersections, or if you were among its more adrenaline-starved inhabitants you could exit a window and descend as far as you pleased, gripping onto the handily-placed buttresses, but either way you never reached ground. Everyone called the floor with the reception desk Floor 0 because, while it wasn’t a ground floor in any meaningful sense of the word, it was at least a reference point.

The naming of the citadel’s levels was further inconvenienced by its irregularities of shape, its proliferation of spires, turrets, rooftop gardens, and the other more mysterious structures mushrooming outwards. Several of its duller inhabitants had proven that at least one rooftop existed, and therefore some part of the citadel’s verticality ended, at least on every level between Floors 38 and -17.5.

New arrivals were allocated an apartment. Shy Tony had sat Sophie down with the questionnaire: preferences for view (don’t care), sleeping habits (night owl), noise (don’t mind it), neighbours or solitude (neighbours), drinking establishments (quiet-ish), languages (English, Yiddish, enough French and German to get by), proximity to baths or a garden (garden), a garden that was a riot for two months or a steady joy all year (riot).

He’d tallied her answers on a custom-carved abacus, his voice and the bead-clacks blending through each other towards an answer: her optimal apartment was at the base of Old Man Turret on Floor 12.

“Seems a long way to climb all the time,” Sophie had said.

Shy Tony had scratched his greying temple. “You’re still imagining an exit, topologically speaking.”

---

Sophie slipped into the world, still worrying about Carina. She recognised the location for once: near Bermondsey station. The cars looked to be early twenty-first century. She had a handbag: lipstick, Hello Kitty keyring, purse containing a UK driver’s license for Margaret Danvers. Sophie was fairly sure she was in a man’s body.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “That’s my handbag, you little bastard!”

Damn it. Sophie legged it.

---

Welcoming drinks had been planned in Sophie’s honour on her first night in the citadel.

“We’ll pop to your apartment first,” Shy Tony had said. “When Gregarious Tony does this bit, he jokes about offering to carry your non-existent luggage, but I’ll skip that if you don’t mind.”

The citadel was hewn from something like granite, the interior cool. Balustrades and reliefs, carved faces all over that reminded Sophie of the cherubs at St Paul’s, which she’d always found odd; the synagogues of her childhood considered faces idolatrous.

“The pantries replenish daily,” Shy Tony said, out of breath by Floor 3. “Help yourself, or there are canteens. Oh, there you are, thought you looked familiar.” He pointed. It took a her moment to spot herself, carved into the stone: her face as it had been at fifteen.

She’d tripped catching up to Shy Tony. “Is everyone carved into the place?”

“Difficult to know; there’s lots of place.”

Sophie’s apartment was — fine. It looked over the mists, not much of a view, but she’d said she wasn’t fussed. It had a bed, a low sofa by the viewless window.

“There’ll be clothing,” Shy Tony said. “Might not be your style, but it’ll fit. Don’t ask me how it appears, because we don’t know. Take an hour, get settled, and I’ll fetch you for drinks.”

He left. Sophie’s gaze caught the mirror and, goodness, there it was again.

Her face. Adult now, but still her face. Something she’d never thought she’d see again, and now she’d seen it twice. Much like her mother’s, her father only visible around the nostrils, the jaw. She spent most of the hour before Shy Tony’s return staring. He smiled like he understood.

The path to the Pig’s Billet bent through torchlit corridors, across a rooftop where bees nosed neat rows of herbs (“Gregarious Tony calls them bee-jewelled”), down small curls of stairs. Shy Tony pointed out the washrooms, Cariad Gardens (not yet a riot), the Floor 11 canteen.

The Pig’s Billet was windowless, lantern-lit. The wood panelling made a change from all the stone, at least. Everyone cheered when she entered. There was even a banner: “Welcome, Sophie!”

First her own face, now her own name. All this time she’d never slipped into a Sophie.

Too many people introduced themselves before she made it into a chair. Carina dropped into the next chair without introduction, holding a glass of the mead that half the room was drinking.

She clinked it against Sophie’s. “Has Shy T given you the spiel? ‘Welcome! Being yanked out of yourself never stops being frightening, and we can’t do anything about it, but at least we can all be scared together!’ That sort of thing?”

“Sort of,” Sophie said.

“I tuned it out too.” Carina nudged her. “Look: bald guy with the red shirt —”

“Javier, right?”

“Right — he’s about to slip away. He’ll be annoyed, he’s only just got back.”

Javier held his arm out to Scarlett, who had a French bob and a tumbler of the potato vodka that seemed to be the only other drink. She handed off her tumbler, took Javier’s arm, and they — disappeared. The thing that had been happening to Sophie since she was 15, the thing she had never seen from the outside, and nobody reacted apart from the guy left holding Scarlett’s vodka (Fencer? Fisher?), who necked it and wandered out.

“Telling reception,” Carina had said. “We keep track of who we know isn’t here, not that there’s anywhere to evacuate to.”

---

Sophie ducked into an underpass to check her pockets. Wallet, bus pass — right, this was 2005 and she was a seventeen-year-old boy called Barnaby Ross. Tricky: she had no address. Normally if she found herself in a child’s body she’d hover and hope someone recognised her, but she couldn’t do that when she’d just nicked a handbag.

---

Once, before Sophie had thought through the ethics of tagging along, she and Carina had lasted six whole months in Hispania Ulterior. Carina had scraped together the little Latin she knew from school and set herself up as a travelling priestess, Sophie as her acolyte. In the evenings, after all the blessings of crops and so forth, Carina wrote poems and Sophie was so angry they couldn’t take them back to the citadel that she memorised the bloody lot, Carina with a wineskin and the wax tablets while Sophie paced and recited, Carina offering occasional corrections.

It was a good six months. The pallet comfortable, the wine drinkable. Sophie learned to like fried dormice. It was only years after they’d slipped back into the citadel, Sophie reciting over potato vodka, that Carina had admitted what Sophie had memorised was often not what the poems had said.

“You were my editor,” she’d said. “If you remembered something better than what I wrote, I let you.”

Sophie had cried, not entirely sure why. “I thought I had them,” she’d kept saying, “I thought I had them,” and no amount of Carina saying, “You did, you did,” had compensated the loss.

---

Since Sophie didn’t know where Barnaby Ross called home, she walked to St Paul’s Cathedral, her habit whenever possible. By her birth, the cathedral had been rebuilt five times; in her slipping she’d seen three of the previous versions, and Scarlett O’Bollocks (as everyone except Javier called her behind her back) claimed to have seen the next two. This version, though, the reformation one, was what Sophie considered the real one. The Portland stone. The crypt mosaics laid by female prisoners. The gold set into the ceiling at an angle because that’s how you make it glister.

A priest up a stepladder filled imitation candles with oil. Another at the font invited all present to say, if they could, in their own language, the Lord’s prayer, “this hour for those who keep us safe, by which we mean the law.” A third approached her, old, quiet, saying, “I hope you’re enjoying your time here,” in a voice that meant, “Jesus or tourism?”

Sophie had met this priest before, when she had been in another body, when he had been even older. In telling him she had found the space strange that time she’d mentioned she was Jewish, and he’d assumed she believed. This time she pretended not to speak English.

He found someone else to bother soon enough: a tattooed woman with a little daughter, both gazing up at the bust of John Donne.

---

Almost everyone in the citadel would prefer to be able to stay consistently in one place. There were those who thought meditation might lead to said ability (for which there was some evidence), those who insisted it was diet (little evidence), and those who thought some kind of mechanism within the citadel itself would solve the whole problem if discovered (no evidence yet, but this didn’t sound unsensible, given everything) — but this was not the important distinction. The important distinction was that some people, like Sophie, wanted to stay in here, and some people, like Carina, wanted to stay out there.

The two of them had spent years hashing arguments for and against.

“It’s unethical,” Sophie might say during a kitchen shift, halfway through the thirty onions she was slicing, while Helen O’Dylan nodded vigorously over the mushrooms. “We don’t know what happens to the people we slip into.”

“What’s happened to us isn’t ethical either,” Carina would say as they sat by candlelight darning clothes they liked well enough that they didn’t want the citadel to replace them. “If we stop, we’re imprisoned.”

“They aren’t our bodies,” Sophie would say, in the Pig’s Billet, hunched over the new backgammon set Scarlett had carved.

“If it’s us or them,” Carina would say, sunning herself in the garden most equidistant between their two apartments, “I’m looking out for us,” at which point Javier would high five her.

“We wouldn’t get to pick our lives,” Sophie would try. “They’d have been too shaped by someone else.”

“We didn’t pick these either,” Carina would shoot back.

---

Sophie ditched the handbag so she could wander into A&E at St Thomas (all these blasted saints) and tell the intake admin she didn’t know who she was. Not ideal — too much attention, the possibility of Margaret Danvers recognising her thief in the paper — but someone else could figure out where she was meant to be, and she needn’t feign any knowledge.

She spent seven weeks as Barnaby Ross, pretending to have lost his memory. He had a sister, who was sweet, and a Saturday job, which was fine; Sophie could flog bread to posh gits. She improved his room decor (and odour), his social standing and his aftershave, but avoided his driving lessons, in case he found himself back in his body on a dual carriageway.

The hovering anxiety of his loved ones, hoping for this or that memory to resurface. She felt guilty, yes, for lying, but what else could she do?

---

At first Sophie had assumed she and Carina were out of sync. It happened; she hadn’t seen Javier in Christ knows how long, and she’d been unfortunately well-aligned with Scarlett for months. When she’d mentioned this to Scarlett (the lack of sync with Carina, not the lack of luck in seeing so much of Scarlett), Scarlett had rolled her eyes.

“What?” Sophie had said.

They were at the toes of the leftmost of the Two Spires That Look Like Legs, sitting on the window ledge so Scarlett could play a fishing line into the mist.

“You’re not out of sync,” Scarlett had said. “She’s here less.”

Sophie had tried to persuade her nervous system that sitting here was not materially different from sitting on a chair. “How?”

Scarlett had reeled in, cast out. “Rumour is she’s been cooking something up.”

“She’d have said.”

“Check the logs if you want.”

Sophie had done so. Stared at the ledger: her own longest stint in one body had been that six months as Carina’s acolyte, but Carina had been gone a year and a half, back three days, gone for another two years. No wonder Sophie hadn’t seen her. Carina, Carina, what have you done?

---

Sophie winked into her own body in the arrival room. Muted lights, a sick bucket next to each chair. Goodbye, Barnaby Ross.

Fencer was on duty. He held Sophie’s hair while she vomited everything that had been in her stomach when she’d last been in the citadel. “Rough one?”

A young man winked in, breathing hard, cataloguing; clearly he didn’t recognise arrivals.

Fencer went to crouch by him. “Mate, you’re OK. You’re in your own body. You’re in a place full of people who slip in and out, just like you do. You’re alright, mate.”

The boy looked defensive. “The fuck are you talking about?”

Sophie staggered off. She hated her own shifts as warden.

---

After her conversation with Scarlett, Sophie had picked the lock to Carina’s apartment. The picks had appeared next to her while she dozed in Cariad Gardens, which felt like the Citadel’s tacit permission. Carina’s apartment was at the edge of Floor 16, in an outgrowth that meant she had no downstairs neighbours, only an indefinite drop below.

Sophie had been unsure what to look for. Something among the clothes and dirty plates to explain how Carina was staying in the world.

Under a stack of tapes was a list of what looked like room designations, a star next to one.

She’d recognised none of the landmarks; she’d gone to the Floor 9 library to look them up.

Gregarious Tony had made her put on gloves before she touched the hand-stitched volumes of maps. “We need them to last, my darling. What are you after?”

“Just interested.”

He’d looked around the open, airy space for other visitors and, on finding none, leaned in. “You can tell GT. It all goes in and never comes out.” This was, of course, bollocks; Gregarious Tony was to confidentiality as a sieve is to a bucket.

Sophie hadn’t wanted to mention the starred room. She went for one near it on the list. “Someone mentioned the Grotto of Sparkling Tortoiseshells — it sounded cool.”

“Ah, for that we want the index.” Gregarious Tony pulled down another book. He paged through. “It’s not between here and Floor 100. Just a tick.” He’d checked another book, then another, another. “Here we are, Floor 396 — who on earth mentioned that?”

Sophie had shrugged. “I was pretty drunk.”

---

The citadel didn’t have computers, but it had tape recorders. All of the citadel’s soaps and musical performances and podcasts were recorded painstakingly and circulated until they wore out. Sophie and Carina always left each other recordings in their cubby holes at the reception desk.

No message from Carina this time. Sophie checked in, the new receptionist no longer looking so new. She started the climb, touching her face to reassure herself that Barnaby Ross’s acne really was gone.

Her teenage face just below Floor 4. Roses in Cariad Gardens. Several people Sophie didn’t know, going up, going down. They seemed to have a purpose she didn’t feel. The whirls of daffodils Javier had painted on her apartment door.

Carina was on Sophie’s bed. She launched into Sophie’s arms. “Hi, hello, finally.”

---

Sophie had dithered for days before exploring Floor 396. A wall collapsed on Floor -15 (and Sophie was the third person Fencer saw after discovering this, thus requiring her presence on his emergency committee with Scarlett and Nadira and Helen O’Dylan). Then Cherie Gardens wanted weeding (where did the weeds even blow in from? That’s what Sophie wanted to know.) Then she had scripts to edit for The Family That Roars With Ghosts, the citadel’s longest-running soap, plus a cameo as a drunken aunt revealing that an illegitimate second cousin was inadvertently shagging his own half sister. (Honestly, how did Gregarious Tony think of this stuff?)

But there had come a clear day, and a pair of stout new boots in her wardrobe. She’d taken the hint.

The highest she’d ever climbed had been Floor 56, where Scarlett O’Bollocks had insisted a helter skelter encircled seven floors of the central staircase. Sophie and Carina had made a day of it. They hadn’t expected to find anything; they’d wanted to be away, to get giggly on Fencer’s experimental plum wine, their only audience the succession of carved faces. But there it was: a tunnel. Carina had muttered about broken necks. For once, Sophie hadn’t hesitated. She’d launched herself before Carina could react, laughed wild all the way, come to a smooth stop on Floor 49.

Gregarious T had been narked: “Seven blasted maps will need redoing. Which room did it come out into? How can you not know?”

Up and up, carved faces watching. Sophie spotted Nadira’s face; she made a note of the floor number, and then realised she’d have to admit being here to tell Nadira.

The stone grew lighter and softer, a conversion so slow it took a while to notice. Her footsteps dulled. The faces blurred.

The Grotto of Sparkling Tortoiseshells did what it said on the tin, rockface carved into rounds and the rounds set with hexagons. Sophie rubbed a sleeve through the dust to confirm everything sparkled.

The starred room was a nearby apartment. Except it wasn’t an apartment; it looked like a blacksmith’s workshop. No, the tools were tiny and there were ring blanks on the worktop: a silversmith’s. It had also been thoroughly tossed. She’d sifted the disruption, trying to borrow Carina’s eyes, not knowing what was needed.

---

Carina wouldn’t answer any questions.

“I can’t stay long” she said, “I have to isolate when I come back, so she doesn’t do anything inconvenient, you know?”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter, she won’t be a problem any more, because I’m not coming back.”

“Wait,” Sophie said, “have you been slipping into the same woman every time?”

“Here.” Carina passed Sophie a — necklace? An amulet? A little twisty metal thing on a silver chain. “It’s taken this long to find a third. Javier’s got the second, we found them together. You can come with.”

“Carina —”

“I know you’ve said you wouldn’t stay in the world, but it was hypothetical then —”

“Carina —”

Carina shoved papers at Sophie. “I’ll be Rosemary Tallis, husband Keith — don’t blame me, blame the ironclad prenup. I’ve reached 2005, so if it’s after that I’ll be me and not her. My current address is here, and a self portrait, and my tattoos. I take Sophie — my Sophie — to St Paul’s Cathedral every year, June 1st. We sit under John Donne.”

Sophie glanced through the drawings. “I’ve seen you. Talking to a priest.”

“I’ve often wondered if you were there. I know you like to visit. I’m going now. You can’t tag along in case you end up in Sophie’s body, I’m sorry. She’s beautiful, Soph. The most perfect thing.”

“But —”

Carina was gone.

Carina was confident she’d be Rosemary Tallis indefinitely — confident enough to give birth. Where was the real Rosemary Tallis? Carina, Carina, what have you done?

---

Sophie had last seen Carina at a ball. The citadel threw them sometimes: when inhabitants found strange finery in their wardrobes, negotiations would commence between the citadel’s various, loosely-pieced-together bands. Attendance was not exactly mandatory, but those who skipped too many might find only strange finery in their wardrobes.

Locations varied: there was a rooftop bandstand on Floor -8, perfect for summer, or the Flint Ballroom on Floor 14, which glittered in candlelight even if the acoustics were for shit, or the Plain Ballroom on Floor 7, which glittered not at all but where sound soared as though the singer were whispering in each dancer’s ear.

Sophie had started the evening plastered, after booze-soaked hours making canapés. Fencer’s plum wine, now perfected, had flowed all night; the man himself picked out torch songs on one of Scarlett’s zithers and Nadira sang, everything flowing, flowing through the Plain Ballroom, Nadira’s voice bodied with anger, a black glass knife in her black glass dress. Nadira had started slipping comparatively late in life, not as a teenager like the rest of them had; she’d had a wife, a son who would never know her, however many times she contrived to walk past him in someone else’s body.

Carina had stuck close, matched Sophie drink for drink. Forest-green velvet to Sophie’s red silk, a silver chain Sophie didn’t recognise slipping into her cleavage. If Sophie had known it was their last night, she’d have — what? Drunk less, hugged more? Danced every song? Sat at Javier’s easel for one last caricature?

Carina had known, hadn’t she? Why hadn’t she made Sophie do those things?

---

She wanted to get rid of the amulet. She wanted to put it on, chase after Carina if such a thing were possible, argue until she saw reason. She wanted to hand it to someone or other and make it everyone’s problem.

Instead she wrapped it in some knickers and put the knickers inside a skirt with socks underneath, like she’d stepped out of the lot. She tucked Carina’s papers into one of Gregarious Tony’s scripts, the paper similar enough, and placed it in the box third from the bottom of her pile.

Down to the Floor -2 library, the grimly-lit shoebox that housed the indexes. Empty, as usual.

Several Rosemaries were listed in the citadel’s inhabitant index, none of whom had the right tattoos, but no Rosemary Tallis. Sophie couldn’t decide if it was worse for Rosemary Tallis to be here, where someone could explain, or somewhere else. Worst was the idea she might be still in her body. Sophie worked so hard to leave as small a footprint as she could on the bodies she was dragged into, accepting that, unless she conceived in the citadel, (inadvisable,) she would only ever give birth if she slipped in at the most perfect, most terrible moment. Carina had just — sidestepped that. Named the sidestep Sophie.

Could Sophie forgive that?

Gregarious Tony waltzed in, saw her. “Sweetest of cherubim, welcome back! Scarlett’s been butchering my scripts.”

“Hi, GT.” Sophie half-rose for airkisses, right left right.

“More indices? Carina got back today, is this related?”

“Is she?” Sophie said. Didn’t seem sensible to admit she’d seen Carina until she’d decided what to do.

“Be like that, then.” His voice was airy in such a way as to convey that he expected the listener to maintain the fiction that he was joking while understanding they had offended him.

“GT —”

“No,” Gregarious Tony said, “don’t mind me, I was just after an auger.” He rummaged pointedly in the cupboards.

Sophie tried to think what she could offer to make him less upset. Asking was good, wasn’t it? Librarians liked to be asked things. She thought of the silversmith’s tools in the apartment-turned-workshop.

“When was the last time we had any jewellers?” She thought that sounded innocent enough, until Gregarious Tony stopped rummaging.

“Carina has found a locket? Shy Tony suspected, but without evidence.”

Sophie blinked.

“Damnit, Sophie, I have evening plans. You couldn’t have told Shy Tony? I could have failed to answer my door when he knocked, the bore, not that he’d ask me to join his committee. This is his sort of thing, you really should have told him.”

“I didn’t tell you.”

Gregarious Tony was out the door. “Come along.”

---

The citadel’s next new arrival after Sophie had turned out to look like, without being, Sophie’s favourite cousin. Sophie had escaped the welcome drinks to a balcony. Angry at the boy for not being her cousin. At herself for the unfairness of her anger. At everyone in the Pig’s Billet toasting what little was left of their lives, and at everyone who didn’t even know there was a Pig’s Billet filled with such a pathetic lack.

Carina had followed her out.

She’d sat at Sophie’s feet, stretched out her legs.

She had gently, with a grasp so light that Sophie’s slightest movement would break it, wrapped her fingers around Sophie’s ankle.

Sophie’s instinct had been to hit, to kick, to hiss, “Fuck off.” She had focused until that spidersilk grip felt less like restriction and more like a person on the other side, waiting for her, with her.

---

Gregarious Tony towed Sophie to his library, snagging Nadira en route, for an emergency procedures book. Not the everyday one: older, dustier. He waltzed them through back corridors, neatly avoiding everyone he didn’t want on a committee. Eventually they found Shy Tony doing something to some beehives with Helen O’Dylan.

“That’s five,” Gregarious Tony said. “We now constitute an emergency committee.”

Helen O’Dylan’s apartment was closest. It smelled overwhelmingly of peppermint; Helen had a knitting project on every available surface.

GT paged through procedures. “Lockets, lockets — here we go! Oh goody, a list. Question one, Sophie: where might Carina have found the locket? Sparkling tortoiseshells, perhaps? Floor 396?”

Sophie shrugged. “An apartment nearby, maybe.”

“Christ,” Helen O’Dylan murmured, “that’s a distance record.”

“I’ll sort the cleanup,” Nadira said.

Gregarious T flashed a thumbs up. “Thank you, darling. Next: does anyone else know, or have possession, of any other locket?”

“Is Carina in trouble?” Sophie said.

“Not if it’s melted down.”

“But she has a daughter.”

Thick, thick silence. Like treacle, like grave dirt after rain.

“The idiot,” Nadira said.

Gregarious T sighed. “Let’s try to go in order.”

“Let’s not,” Sophie said. “Let’s explain.”

---

Carina, cackling at Sophie’s joke, hands flapping, “Stop, I’ll wet myself.” Sophie’s satisfaction at the near-urination, the knowing what to say.

Carina, wrestling a poem while Sophie wrestled script edits, silence only broken for one to ask the other for a word they couldn’t find alone.

Carina, dancing in the Plain Ballroom and the Flint Ballroom, ancient Spain and far-future Prague.

Carina with a baby called Sophie.

Carina, Carina, what have you done?

---

“You know Carina’s actions aren’t right,” Shy Tony said.

Of course Sophie knew. “But her daughter.”

“Birthed using someone else’s body,” Nadira bit out, her voice as fierce as it ever had been on stage.

Shy Tony took Sophie’s hand. “When we don’t have a choice there’s not a lot we can do, ethically speaking. The locket creates a choice.”

“What’s happened to us isn’t ethical,” Sophie said, Carina’s words strange in her mouth.

“It’s worse,” Shy Tony said, like she hadn’t spoken, “that she’s using the same person’s body for such extended periods.”

“So, what, you’d remove her from her daughter? Good thing she isn’t coming back.”

Treacle. Grave dirt. The silence sticky-tackied.

“Then we’ll fetch her,” Helen O’Dylan said. “Where and when is she?”

“Her child —”

“Don’t talk,” Nadira said, “about children.”

“The list,” Gregarious Tony said. “Does anyone else know, or have possession, of any other locket?”

“Javier’s got the other one,” Sophie said, semi-misdirection. “Oh, bugger.”

She backed up, fast and sharp, so nobody could join as she slipped.

---

Sophie’s first slips were an array of calamities, but Carina said she’d always found it easy. One of nature’s mimics, one of those plants whose leaves resemble whatever environment surrounds them.

---

Sophie slipped into Lilli Herschel, fifty-six, Paris, 1947. She was travelling, blessedly alone, with a written itinerary and enough money to get on with.

She talked to as few people as possible in her two days as Lilli. Mostly she stared out of train windows; the least she could do was get Lilli’s body where it was meant to be when (if? Please don’t be if) Lilli returned to it.

Carina or Rosemary couldn’t both win. It seemed obvious, to Sophie, that Carina should lose. And yet.

---

Sophie’s first visit to St Paul’s had been her last day in her body. Sophie had not been exactly secure in that body, its sudden productions of breasts and hair and sweat that smelt, but she’d expected to remain in it, not that that stopped her slipping out to smoke. Youthful doublethink: you will live forever; you will never grow old.

She’d returned to hear the guide explain that the carved faces were real London youths. She’d gazed at 1600s children looking just like today children, until came a yank she didn’t yet recognise, and she was elsewhere, her body no longer hers and everything afraid.

---

Sophie winked into arrivals, opposite Fencer.

Scarlett glanced up from her whittling. “I’m supposed to let GT know when you’re back.”

“Give me five?” Sophie said.

“I shouldn’t,” Scarlett said, but Fencer began to emit a mesmerising variety of fluids.

Sophie got out while she could. She took all the shortcuts she knew to her apartment at a hobbling run. Shouldn’t have listened to Shy Tony about the distance from Floor 0.

Her cupboards had been tossed, but her papers were still in their boxes.

She grabbed the third box from the bottom.

Footsteps. Helen O Dylan’s voice. “Sophie?”

Not enough time to find Carina’s papers.

Sophie still wasn’t sure of the right thing to do. She tossed the box out the window anyway, to butterfly down, down past the endless floors of the citadel.

She tossed the rest of her boxes with it. All her words, falling open.

“Hi, Helen. I’m in here.”

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was Carina by Anna Kahn, and if you enjoyed that then I do believe I spotted their Insta @‌annacarlabadger, which has snippets and mentions of stories in Nature, Night Shade and others, though of course Instagram is a pain in the arse and doesn’t make links easy, so consider those posts as more sort of… clues on a treasure map to track down the actual stories. The things you work for are always a little sweeter, aren’t they?

Anna sent us these notes on today’s story: In Carina I was trying to capture the thing that happens when the close communities of your early twenties fade and fragment, until at some point the people you used to drink with every weekend appear in your life mostly as a succession of voice notes.

I tried setting it in some kind of hotel of the damned, but it didn’t click until I found the citadel, uncovering the logic of it sentence by sentence, realising slowly that what these characters needed for a setting was an odd child of a place with Ghormenghast and the silo from Hugh Howey’s Wool series as its parents.

The story was vastly improved by feedback from Manchester Speculative Fiction Writers, with particular thanks to Rob Prescott for all the rounds of heated debate with me about buttresses and naming conventions for floors.

Thank you, Anna, for the thoughts and the story. This was one of those wonderful stories that made me feel very stupid indeed, where I got to the end having been absolutely enthralled and with no idea what I could say about it, dimly aware of how much cleverness is going on beneath its surface but, alas, with only this dull and limited brain to try and grasp for it, like a toddler splashing at the surface of the sea, vainly trying to clutch at the wonders below.

I did at least pick up on the Gormenghast vibes! I grew up in an era of British spec fiction where everything was influenced by that old castle, so it is sunk deep in my bones, and I loved the vibe of it here as much as I do anywhere.

It has left many thoughts rattling around this largely empty head of mine, though: about how we drift apart as we finally grow up, a process that lasts well into your twenties these days, certainly in the UK; about how the people who were so precious and vital to us at one age might be bad for us at another; about how that growing up involves so much reinvention as a different person, sometimes conscious and forced, sometimes an accident of circumstance, and how sometimes that reinvention is a deliberate lie about who you are—and is that morally wrong, or is that a necessary act in being able to define yourself, rather than being defined by a past you weren’t fully in control of? Is that not a lesser moral wrong than those people who police us to stay who we are and how we are, stultify us and cut us off from growth and new possibility? Is that because they are afraid to do the work of growing and changing, because there is no library of instructions, no prior guidance, only the risk and adventure of finding out your own path?

The more I write here, the more I find layers and layers all the way down in this one, not unlike the castle itself. I think it’s one that might reward another read, or listen, and see what other thoughts you might find yourself slipping into.