“It’s only a scaffold to help you get past the schizo-panic,” she continues. “It doesn’t have any personas or relationship scenarios to instill, and absolutely no emotives.”
I don’t like the ghost mask’s vacancy. But at least I can think now, and it occurs to me to scramble for my own mask.
“Stop,” she says.
I cannot move. My fingertips brush the darker green and glint of silver lying in the grass, but I can’t pick it up.
“I’m afraid the scaffold does have an obedience imprint. I am sorry about that, but it’s necessary. You wouldn’t be able to access the oversoul in your mask anyway. The scaffold creates a barrier that mask imprints can’t penetrate, and you won’t be able to take the scaffold off. Go ahead, I know you want to. Try to remove it.”
I grope my face, my head looking for something to undo. There’s nothing to unknot, release, or unbuckle. I find the edge where the ghost mask, the scaffold, gives way to skin, but it’s adhered to me. The memory from yesterday — the saffron mask, being skinned alive — is enough to deter me from anything drastic.
“What did you do to me?” I ask. “And why?”
“Good, you’re questioning. I knew you’d acclimate quickly.” A scent penetrates my distress. She is pleased. Except the tang isn’t right. It’s not feminine but not masculine either. She has no mask to tell me whether she’s male or female. Should I continue thinking of her as a girl? And for that matter, the scaffold hasn’t provided me with a gender. Am I a man or a woman, or am I neuter, or perhaps some sort of androgyne?
I feel lightheaded and ill. “If this is some perverted game,” I say, “I’m not amused. I’ll report this to the gendarmes. They’ll confiscate all your masks for this crime, and—” I trail off. Her naked face is testimony of her indifference to the severest penalty of our society.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I whimper.
“Did you ever wonder who you are beneath your masks?” she says. “When you say ‘me,’ who is that?”
Hearing her voice the question that has lately made my mornings so troubling and the hours after unmasking so long is a kind of deliverance. I’m not the only citizen to have these thoughts; I’m not alone in my distress. But the guilt remains, along with an added unease. Is exposing my crime what this is about? Am I to be penalized?
“Don’t be afraid,” she says, “I’m not going to turn you over to the gendarmes or anything like that.”
My breathing quickens. “Are you hearing my thoughts?”
“No, only watching your face.”
“My face?”
“It conveys emotions. It’s like smelling another’s confusion or knowing that someone’s angry by the tightness of their shoulders, only with facial musculature. Before long, you’ll read it as instinctively as you do scents and stances.”
“You say that as though you expect me to be pleased.”
Her mouth curves and parts, revealing the whiteness of her teeth. Being witness to such an intimate view is both repulsive and fascinating.
“I know you don’t think so now,” she says, “but I’ve given you a gift, one very few people receive.” She stands. “Walk with me.”
I don’t want to go anywhere with her, but the scaffold compels me to obey. We stroll deeper into the wilderness, leaving my mask in the grass. It is an uncomfortable sensation, having my will at odds with my body.
“I’ve been watching you for a while to make sure you were right,” she says.
“Watching me?” Fragments of confusion knit into understanding. “You’re the shop girl who sold me the Iolite Bronze and the deviant man with the pewter mask.”
“And the customer at the bakery who bought a dozen egg tarts from you before that.”
“The woman with the pink mask who asked for the recipe?”
“Yes. And before, when you wore your roan and iron mask, I was in the audience when you presented your new poem. And the day before that, I picked indigo with you for the Mask Makers.”
We emerge into a clearing. A broken-down hut lists, obscured by overgrown foliage. Her sage and toffee mask still dangles from her fingertips. She passes its brim over the doorknob, and the door swings open.
“I’m glad to finally meet you,” she says. “You can call me Pena.”
The interior is dim, lit by stray sunbeams poking through holes in the ramshackle walls.
“Pena?” The word is meaningless. “Why?”
“It’s my name, a word that means me, regardless of what mask I’m wearing or not wearing.”
I snort. “Why stop at each citizen having their own name? Why not each tile or brick the builders use or every tree or blade of grass?”
“Every street has a name,” Pena says. “And every shop.”
“So we can tell one from the other. Otherwise, we couldn’t say where a place was, or differentiate between one food market and another.”
“Exactly.” She runs her fingers over a floorboard, and I hear a click. In the far corner by the fireplace, flagstones part to expose steps.
“What’s down there?” I ask.
“Answers. Come.”
We descend, and the flagstones rumble shut overhead. Ambient light washes over us — dim and red, casting bloody shadows.
We’re in a tunnel with rough, stone walls. The light extends ten paces before us; beyond is darkness. Pena strides toward this border, and I am obliged to accompany her. When we are within a pace of light’s end, more red comes on to reveal another span of corridor. When we are within this new radius, the light behind us goes out.
And so we walk.
“Why do citizens need names?” I ask. “We change masks every day, unlike shops and streets which stay the same. What if I discover that my physician is the same citizen as my murderer? Or a citizen in one mask is my lover and in another, my enemy? If I call that citizen by a single word, it’s like treating all their mask identities as the same person.”
“That’s the point,” she says. “It lets us be who we truly are, underneath our masks.”
I shake my head. “Without the masks, we’re not anything.”
“There was a time before the masks.”
“And we were empty, primitive creatures, without will or purpose, until the First Queen created the First Mask to wear and carved faces for the citizens and—”
“And She designated the Guild of Mask Makers and tasked them with their sacred duty so that everyone would be imbued with souls, blah blah blah. I know the lies.”
Her heresy is both disturbing and intriguing. “What do you believe, then?”
“That’s what I’m going to show you.”
“Why me?”
“There’s a group of us named. We seek out others who harbor the same doubts and resentments we do, and we liberate them.”
“I don’t want to be liberated.”
“Don’t you? Haven’t you wanted to be free of the daily selection routine? Or chafed against the mask, wishing the hour of unmasking came sooner? Don’t you hover in indecision some mornings, not because the choosing is so hard, but because none of them appeal? Don’t you wonder who you could be if you were left to decide for yourself?”
I am saved from having to answer by the appearance of something new when the next lights activate: a door.
7. Red Is for Revelation
“Where are we?”
“Beneath the palace at the Mask Makers guild.”
She passes her mask over the door. Like the hut’s, it opens.
I balk. “No. Absolutely not. It’s prohibited.”
She studies me. “I can make you, but I won’t. It’s your decision.”