At 17, I started to starve myself

I thought that love was a kind of emptiness

And at least I understood, then, the hunger I felt

And I didn't have to call it loneliness

— Hunger, Florence and the Machine

Rani

When Malin threw open a trapdoor in a condemned warehouse’s floor and ordered Rani to get in, she wondered — again — how her life had gotten so covert in mere months.

She does it though, and Malin entered after her and shut the door behind them with a gentle creak. A minute later, footsteps pounded past.

“We lost them,” Rani breathed.

“For now,” Malin muttered. She squeezed past Rani and continued down the narrow staircase. Rani blinked past the spots dancing in her vision and followed, clutching the rough stone walls closing in on them.

At the bottom of the stairs was a small nook. It had an old, lumpy couch and a tiny fridge which hummed loudly in the otherwise silent room. Malin sat at a tiny school desk with an old laptop, cursing under her breath as it booted up. Rani went to the couch and let it swallow her up, breathing out slowly as hugged her, warm and solid.

She stared down at her hands. She blinked, and they were alight with green particles, bacteria and viruses no human could survive. She blinked again. They were gone.

But before, fighting Malin’s associates without letting them realize she’d turned on them, the particles had been everywhere. Rani had removed her gloves and bared her skin and then, it had been as simple as laying a hand on their face, their hand, their ankle. They’d been overcome, cheeks hollowing and hair falling out, coughing up blood and other medical catastrophes not even the best doctors could’ve saved them from.

She’s a child of Apollo, but she is wrong. She is not light, or good, or sunny, or musical. She’s the part of him that rained down death and destruction on the Greeks during the Trojan War, the unfortunate side of the coin that exists opposite to life.

She doesn’t know why he gave her that side of him. She never will.

“You okay?”

Rani opened her eyes. Malin was watching her from the desk, her chair tipped back so it was balancing on two legs. Miraculously, the computer was working, running some kind of code. But that was Malin’s blessing: a child of Hades who couldn’t raise the dead but could make any system move faster, bend bureaucratic systems to her will, rule over them the way Hades ruled the sorting of souls. Rani hadn’t known computers counted.

“I’m fine.”

“Here.”

Malin was holding something out. “Take it,” she urged. “You need to eat, after getting us out of there.”

Malin could fight too, but not without showing her face. No one could know they were working together to take down her own boss. It would defeat the purpose of spying.

Rani hadn’t used her powers that much in a long time. The room was still a little crooked.

“What is it?” she asked.

Malin rolled her eyes. “Biscuits, Rani, they’re biscuits, for fuck’s sake, just eat — ”

And then she leaned over and pressed them into Rani’s hands, and she felt her hand brush hers, and she panicked.

Rani wasn’t wearing her gloves. It generally wasn’t a problem; everyone she interacted with checked if she was wearing gloves before they shook her hand, a quick glance down that Rani had always noticed.

But Malin hadn’t, and she’d brushed her bare, plague-ridden hand and —

And turned back to her computer, leaving the biscuits in her hands. No screaming, no flailing, no fear.

No fear?

“What?” Malin asked.

It was only then Rani realized she’d made a choked noise.

“Rani. You good?”

“You touched my hand.”

Distantly, she was aware she shouldn’t have been so shocked. Malin wasn’t her handler; she wasn’t responsible for her. The Bureau, Rani’s organization of demigods who’d dedicated their gifts to fighting crime, had been trained for years on how to interact with her. To watch out for her bare skin, to avoid standing too close to avoid breathing her air, to remind her to wear her gloves.

But Malin didn’t care, brows furrowed in confusion at whatever expression was on Rani’s face. “I — yeah. I did. So?”

“I — I wasn’t wearing gloves.” Rani murmured, watching Malin’s eyes flick down to their hands.

“Well, you’re not still … charged up from the fight. Right? Or I wouldn’t be talking right now.” she said. She shrugged. She just shrugged. “So it’s — we’re good. Aren’t we?”

Rani could control her curse, could call it only when she needed it. But that had never mattered to anyone else.

“I mean, c'mon,” Malin said with a wry smile. “It’s not like you wear gloves all the time, right? Your powers aren’t active all the time. You don’t need to.”

It sounded simple when she said it. Why did it sound so simple when she said it?

Rani thinks about Malin’s hand again, warm and soft and calloused in odd places from her training with an arsenal of weaponry. Thinks about how their hands brushing was no big deal to her and feels monumentally stupid.

When she looks back up at Malin’s face, she’s frowning. Only a little, but it’s there. Rani turns away. She wants to drop the packet of biscuits in her hands.

Her eyes only open again when the couch sinks next to her. Malin sits with her feet tucked under her, the laptop in her lap.

“I have cameras set up in the warehouse and street,” she said. On the screen, there were little squares, all displaying grainy footage. “I don’t see anyone. We should be safe here for the rest of the night.”

Her knee is resting against Rani’s thigh. It’s all she knows for sure.

“Okay.”

“Eat your biscuits,” she said.

“I wanna sleep.”

“Eat, then sleep. I’ll force feed you.”

Rani snorts, resisting a smile. She eats the biscuits and swallows her thoughts alongside the stale sweetness.

Varsha Palaniyandy ’28

The Indicator x The Student: “There Are Many Ways to Starve”