source
stringclasses 45
values | chapter
int64 2
122
| text
stringlengths 17
116k
|
|---|---|---|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 30 |
Back on Earth 22, I got the tattoo just after my nineteenth birthday. I'd been hooked up with Nik for over a year, and he'd gotten me a present. That's why I did it. I don't even remember the gift anymore, but it made me feel happy and loved and I couldn't stand it. So I got the tattoo for him, thinking we'd be even.
His name, each letter as big as my hand, spread from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I wish I could pretend he made me do it. That he'd held me down and branded me, like the stories say. I want to remember the pain of the needle, but when I think about that day I just remember the warmth of belonging and the thick in his voice when he said he was proud of me.
Nik Nik always said he was proud of me. He didn't say I love you. He'd say, I'm proud of you. Or, I'll keep you. Or, You're safe. But it was all the same.
It didn't work. We were never even. The next time I saw him with his shirt off my name was across his chest, and that warm feeling I was trying to hide from just came back again.
It was like day and night, the warmth of his approval just as out of proportion as the cold abuse of his disapproval. But it was warm for a while after the tattoo. Then one day I walked toward him with my arms open and he punched me in the gut so hard I pissed blood for a week. I don't even remember what I'd done wrong. It wasn't long after that he took me out to the river, to drown me for what he didn't know would be the last time.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 31 |
When I finally wake from the dream about Nik Nik I'm sober enough to know I'm drugged, which makes the fuzzy disconnection terrifying. I am in a bed with something soft at my back propping me up. There's a cloth over my eyes. The cool material is thick enough to keep me from seeing anything, but my nose is telling me two things. The first is where I am. The air of Ashtown is hot and thick with dirt. I know I'm not on the edges, in the Rurals or the wastes; I'm near its heart, where the ground is gray and the air bites back with sulfur like breath from a not-dead-long-enough volcano. I haven't slept in a smell like this since I left my world. The Rurals smell like dirt, too, but it's honest. Salted maybe, but not this acidic.
The second thing I can smell is the boiled-down sap of wasteland bushes. Medicine. I'm being cared for. Sure, I can hear the mechanical whir of a pod over me, but that doesn't require more effort than closing a clasp and hitting a button. But someone has rubbed oil into my skin, placed the strong-smelling sap beneath my nose to calm me. This is care, but I'm not in the Rurals where it's obligatory. The House? Someone might have mistaken me for Nelline, but a quick movement of my mouth signals the telling pull of the veil. When I'm visiting a place where I was recently alive, Dell always gives me the face of a deep wastelander. Spotted with sun damage, cracks across the lips, filmy eyes—the kind of face quickly looked away from, even out here. Not the kind of person who would warrant medical care, and not the kind of face you'd trouble yourself to bring in. But Exlee's always been a softie. Maybe I just got lucky and caught them on a good day.
I hear a beep from the pod. Whatever drug has kept me disoriented and hallucinating, it's just administered another dose.
"Please..." I say, even though it's too late. Already I can feel the dull throbs lessening. I try to hold on to the pain, and the awareness it allows.
Someone in the room shifts closer, but I can't see and soon won't be able to think.
"You're awake. Can you tell me your name? Do you remember your name now?"
Now means he's asked before, but I don't remember it. The voice is quiet, and seems to come from underwater, but I know it. I just can't think clearly enough to place it. Pax? He was at the House.
Do I remember my name?
I do. I don't. I remember her name, but I can't remember my own.
Caramenta, Caramenta, Caramenta.
But that's not me. But it is. Or I am no one.
He shifts the material over my eyes, and at first I know it is a cold compress. But then I don't and it's a shroud and I'm high with a burial shroud over my face, waiting for the handfuls of dirt that will cover me. After all this time running, I have finally turned into my mother.
I start to cry. Loud, sobbing cries. Cries like I didn't cry when she died or when I thought I was going to. I see her on her dirt floor, her mouth a wide, dead smile and her eyes open to the flies. Am I smiling? I don't want to be smiling. I try to reach up to cover my face, but my arms are in the pod and it won't release me.
"No more. I can't...no more."
I want to say I'm not like her, I don't want it, but the words knot up at my mouth.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 32 |
The next time I wake I am actually alert for the first time since leaving Earth Zero. Whoever has been watching me must have understood my plea, because the stronger opiate seems to be out of my system, though I'm still held in place by the pods. Pods, plural. It's not just the one plastic dome like the last time I was podded. When I first got pulled to Wiley, I hadn't been injected with the serum and I'd just suffered a world-class beating, so my touchdown at Eldridge was more of a crash landing. Dell sent me to an open clinic. I kept waiting for them to ask questions or demand payment, but I was Caramenta now. They put me into a scanner first, then a healing pod. Internal damage, external bruising, and a seriously sprained ankle, all fixed in fifteen minutes. In Ash the ankle alone would have cost a laborer his spot in rotation, would have choked his pay and kept food out of his mouth. But I was a resident of Wiley City, and residents, even former wastelanders who were not yet citizens, did not starve. I swore then that I would never be anything else again.
A warm rag is being dragged along my hands and shoulders, cleaning the parts of skin the pods will allow them to reach.
"I'm awake," I say, but my mouth is heavy. "Thank you."
The rag is pulled away, and I hear it splash into a basin.
"You're paralyzed, but don't be afraid. It's just a facet of the healing, not from your accident. Your collarbones and ribs are the last to knit. It's keeping you still."
There it is. The voice I heard before, only now it's clear enough that I recognize it. Not that I could ever forget it for long.
"You overheated from the healing earlier, but I'm sure it won't hurt to take this off while we talk," he says, and the compress comes off of my eyes.
I blink up at Nik Nik. Only the paralyzing agents keep me from flinching away, from rebreaking every bone in my body to get away from him.
The pods beep a warning at my dangerously spiking heart rate, and his eyebrows knit.
"Is the fever back?" he says, half to himself.
Then he places one monstrous hand gently against the side of my face to test my temperature, and I get to see what the emperor of the Wastelands looks like covered in my vomit.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 33 |
You're paralyzed but don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
It seems impossible that he said those words to me. Don't be afraid? It's like a lion telling a gazelle not to run, when everyone knows that's how he likes his prey best.
I kept my eyes closed and waited for him to retaliate for the mess I'd made of him, and myself, and the pod, but he just turned my head.
I don't want you to choke, he said.
Then keep your hands from around my neck, I thought.
Lying there, unable to move in the den of my greatest enemy, I listen to the wash, rinse, repeat of him cleaning and think about the plastic sheet Dell let me read before I left. Dell didn't have extensive biographical data on the Earth 175 me, but she had six entries uploaded from a pod used to heal Nelline that was kept at the palace. My injuries may be proof that Nelline is still alive, but those entries were proof she'd had cause to fake her own death. The first few were standard, bruising and a little internal bleeding from a beating. When I read those lines, I could remember the feeling of the punch that had caused them. But then the entries shifted to horrors I would never know, because I left. A miscarriage caused by trauma to the abdomen. An arm twisted to breaking. Twice, a broken jaw.
The pod fixing my ribs is probably the same one that fixed hers. The thought makes me almost as sick as the feeling of Nik Nik wiping my mouth. Am I being treated by the same man, in the same place? The veil should hold charge for three days, but what will happen if I'm still here when it dies and Nik Nik sees the face of the woman he's gotten so used to breaking?
I look around the room to avoid looking at him, afraid he'll be able to see to the real me if he looks too long into my eyes. I know this room. I'm home—my home, not Caramenta's home that I call my own the way a hermit crab wears a stolen shell. I've dreamt of it since leaving, so at first it's not strange to be here, in this bed. But then I remember this is Nik Nik's room first and foremost, and I'm a stranger who doesn't belong.
It's the room I shared with him, but different. From what I can see, it's less opulent than I remember. The wall of windows is unchanged, but the long red-and-gold drapes are gone. The bed I'm on is half the size of the one I remember, and the sheets are white instead of black-and-red silks. Gone are the oversized tapestries that only a lifelong Ash dweller would think passed for class. The walls are bare but for a few photo projections. He was always against portraits before. Take the thing you love and frame it, he'd say, show your enemies right where to aim.
I can't imagine a Nik Nik sentimental enough for pictures. I can't imagine a Nik Nik who doesn't show his wealth in heavy fabrics, sheets so smooth they're uncomfortable. I don't know if this subtlety makes him more or less dangerous.
After he finishes cleaning, he takes a seat beside the bed. He's holding a cup of something orange and steaming.
"Are you okay? Do you think you can drink this?"
I lick my lips and manage a nod, my head and neck the only mobile parts of my body. He holds the cup to my mouth.
"Can you talk?"
I can. I know how. I just have to remember how to speak without being afraid.
"Yes."
His smile at that is blinding. "Good, great. I was really beginning to worry."
There is something wrong with his smile, and it takes me a second to figure it out: it's all white. He doesn't have an onyx incisor. The absence of that dark flash inside his mouth is almost as disorienting as the absence of cruelty in his voice. My Nik Nik never smiled with genuine joy, and it pulls his face into a shape that I'm sure Nelline thought was charming. But if she was anything like me, she'd never be able to see his smile without thinking of its opposite, never be able to fully enjoy his good moods because of the inevitability of his bad.
This is like watching Nik Nik in costume. His hair is parted down the center, still long but not rowed on the side. He's wearing an embellished long-sleeve tunic that reminds me of the fancier ones my stepfather only wears when presiding over births and funerals. Until this moment I've never seen Nik Nik in anything but tank tops and leather when in his castle. It's hard to remember that, even when he looks like this, he's a villain. I go through the injuries Nelline suffered—the broken jaw, the internal bleeding, the miscarriage. That all happened here, in this place, and no amount of looking like a Ruralite is going to change that. Sure, he didn't kill her, but maybe she just used a particularly bad beating to fake her death and cover her escape. That's what happened with me. Earth 22 Nik was violent enough that I'm sure everyone assumed he'd gone blood crazy in my punishment, or that he'd left me too injured to defend myself and a water-mad deepwaster picked me off.
"Who are you?" he asks, and the softness of his voice can't stop me from thinking of this as an interrogation.
"No one. I'm no one."
"Why does 'no one' have my name on her back?"
"It's nothing. It was a joke."
"A joke?"
Shit. He's so easily offended, and I've forgotten the dance I used to do to avoid it. My jaw hurts from talking and there's a sharp buzzing growing louder in my ears.
"A dare. It's nothing," I say. "Do you hear buzzing?"
"No. Does your head hurt?"
"A little..."
"Open your eyes."
"They are open," I say, but they're not. I must have passed out again, or been close to it.
He holds more of what tastes like lukewarm lemonade against my mouth and I drink it, then he replaces the cold compress on my forehead.
"Get some sleep. You're not out of the woods yet."
"Don't kill me," I say, though I don't mean to.
"I won't," he says on a laugh, like this is a joke we're sharing.
"Hate me. I know. Rest now."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 34 |
It was a list that brought me to Nik Nik, and a list that took me away from him. I've written thousands of lists since Pax first taught me to read in the kitchen of the House during his off hours. Even when my mother was kicked out, the House was open to me. I'm sure Pax already knew I wouldn't be cut out for the work, and he tried to make me qualified for something else, something lower-paying but easier to grasp. In my journal I've got a list written in Eldridge code of everything I know about Dell. It's two and a half pages long. Not much, really, for six years.
When my mother spun her last and Exlee told me I'd never make it as a worker, I made a list of options. There were only two.
Suicide.
Nik Nik.
I hid in the rooftops near his hangouts, and took note of the kinds of girls he never noticed and the kinds of girls he always noticed. He didn't like sweet girls; he didn't like girls who were quiet. But he didn't sleep with the street-loud type, the kind you want in your corner in a fight. He'd recruit them as misters, or keep them as friends, but that was all. I became what he wanted, something in between. I put an x in my name and pretended I'd been there before. And it worked.
The hardest part was trying not to like it. I had to remind myself that his newly dead father had branded my mom like a cow and taught me what a broken bone felt like before I'd even learned to read. Remind myself it was Nik Nik's runners who brought my mom her last dose. When I was in danger of forgetting, I made a new list, names of people who walked into his office but were found open-eyed and blood-drained in the wasteland.
My last night on Earth 22, my Earth, Nik Nik was drowning me because one of his runners had found my journal and told him about my lists. He wanted to know who was asking. He thought the governments of the walled cities had broken their implied agreement of mutual noninterference—we weren't allowed to vote in their elections or freely visit their towns, so they didn't ask taxes from, or offer policing to, us.
When I told him the truth, that I was doing it to remind myself who he really was, to keep myself from loving him, he'd looked...touched. Like he didn't think it would be hard for anyone not to love him. It had more to do with me being broken than him being worthy, but he still kissed me before he left me in the mud. He still went home expecting me to follow. And if I hadn't found my own dead body in the sand that day, I would have.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 35 |
When I wake up again the sun has risen and Nik Nik is sitting in a chair at the foot of my—our, I mean, his—bed. He may have slept somewhere else, but he's settled in like he's been waiting a while even though the light tells me it's not yet full day.
He sees my eyes open and smiles. "Good news, as of this morning you can be reasonably assured you're going to survive."
I ignore what seems to be genuine happiness in his voice and look at the book in his hand.
"Why are you pretending to read my journal?"
He adjusts his glasses—fucking glasses?—and tilts his head. "Sorry? I didn't mean to invade your privacy. I was trying to find out who you are."
"Stop."
"Stop?"
"Stop acting like you can read."
That catches his attention. He's shocked, but not angry. Or maybe he is angry and this Nik Nik knows how to hide his rage to strike later.
He slides a nail into the book to choose a page. The nail is long like always, but not filed sharp to a stiletto's point or dipped black. He opens the book, and reads.
" 'Reasons I have lived: I don't know, but there are eight.' "
I try to sit up, but the pods beep at me. I slide a hand out to open the latch. I must be nearly finished cooking, because it only fights me a little and it's turned off the paralysis. I get to my feet and reach for the journal. Everything aches.
"You can't read that! That's in code. And you can't read!"
He holds me back as easily as he ever has, and I should stop. The journal isn't even important, just another collection of lists I began as a way to practice Eldridge code. It holds no secrets grander than my own fears. But he's taken so much—from me, from Nelline, from girls with my face on so many worlds—and I don't want him to have this too. I shove at his hands and reach for the journal again. He drops it and grabs me, his hand as big as both my wrists. I flinch and close my eyes. I don't know if I'm waiting for his teeth or the back of his free hand, but nothing happens. After a few breaths, I open my eyes. He's looking down at me.
"What did you think I was going to do?"
"What you always do."
"I'm not going to hurt you."
That faux-innocent voice clashes with the image of Nelline's twice-broken jaw. If I hadn't read the file, I would believe that what stands before me is a man with unbloodied hands. Sure, I've heard of killers like this. The calm, well-groomed ones with mommy issues who always do weird shit like skin their victims to wear their faces. But I'd always thought it was a Wiley City problem. I mean, Ashtown kills, sure. But we kill. We growl and we fight and we avenge and we retaliate. We don't do this polite coddling before we strike. We don't lick the tears. I'm not saying it's any better morally—a body's a body—I'm just saying I don't understand it.
I have hated Nik Nik for many things, but lying was never one of his sins. His enemies always know they are his enemies, and his friends always know they are safe. He doesn't smile and knife you in the back. This Nik Nik's behavior opens a new side to him, makes him not the man I know, or anything like him.
"Yes you will. Because you hurt everything you've ever touched."
I expect more of that chagrined smile, the one slowly making me believe I'm crazy. Or maybe for his mask to finally crack and reveal the rage of the man I know him to be.
Instead, he looks desperate. He picks my journal up off the floor.
"That isn't true. What you wrote in here, it's wrong. You don't know me."
Humans are unknowable, right? It should be easy to agree, to say I don't know him, fly under his radar until I'm healed enough to traverse. But the letters on my back burn, and I can't. I can't forget that he broke Nelline the same way he tried to break me. Humans are unknowable, but Nik Nik is an animal.
"Listen well, Yerjanik: I've always known you, and there is no evil you could not commit."
He shakes his head, less like he's denying the content of my words than denying having heard it at all.
"You should get back in the pod. You survived the fever, but your breaks need more time."
He leaves without waiting for my response, like he can't afford to hear what I might say next. I don't think he even realizes he's still clutching my journal to his chest. He certainly doesn't realize when I reach the door behind him, and keep the handle turned to stop him from locking it. He doesn't try. I prop the door so that it looks closed but doesn't latch, just in case, and then I change out of the pod gown and into my own clothes, left neatly folded on the chair by the bed. My pack is still missing, but it just contained food, backup tech, and emergency medical. The only real loss is the journal, and I'll get over it. I take the collar from my vest and check for a signal, but the fortress walls are too thick. I need to get outside to be free.
I open the door.
I know I'm not healed enough to get through the trip home without rebreaking a few bones, but there are pods on Earth Zero, too, and people less injured and with less to hide than me have died inside the palace. I'm unsteady, so I keep a hand on the wall as I make my way toward the east side of the house. The front door is perpetually guarded, but the side doors were always just locked and patrolled. All I need to do is time it right.
By the time I get to the side exit, I'm more than a little dizzy and weak enough to use the wall for more than just steadying. Still, I manage to stop and notice the shadows. They're too dark, and when a runner steps out from each side, I'm only surprised I didn't expect it.
One of the runners is a boy. He's no more than twelve, but he's already got his first mark: an eye tattooed behind his ear. The superstitious, and there is no group more superstitious than runners, used to believe the mark would improve aim while driving. I haven't seen a runner with it in ages. But then, Nik Nik never let runners under fourteen take a mark, so this is all new ground.
His partner, probably his mentor though he doesn't look much older himself, steps forward.
"No visitors on the log tonight. You trespassing?"
I can't process the question. I can only whisper, disbelieving, "Michael?"
Using the name is a mistake, but here my stepbrother stands, marked in every visible place.
His hands tighten to fists at the name. "Mr. Cross," he says.
Because what else would you name a runner you poached from the Rurals?
I think back to our last dinner, his red-stained hands as he tried to be something he wasn't. Or, at least, something I thought he wasn't.
"She's from the Rurals," says a voice behind me, and Nik Nik steps between us.
He's put his hand on my arm to help guide me back down the hall, but Michael calls after us.
"Bringing your aid work home?" he says, with more sneer in his voice than a runner should dare.
The hand around my arm goes tight, and Nik Nik rises to his full height as his spine straightens. He looks over his shoulder slowly, slowly. His eyes narrow, like a carnivorous bird spotting movement in the dirt.
Michael takes a step back, but it's too late.
"Your name. You said it was Cross?"
It's part threat, part statement, and not at all a question, but the runner answers anyway.
"Yes, sir," Michael says. The "sir" is as proper as he can make it, but he's trembling. It's fear, but also uncertainty. He doesn't know what the man before him is capable of. But I do. I tear my arm out of his grasp. Better to trust the wall.
The movement turns Nik Nik's head away from Michael, breaking the spell of his rage.
"Have a good night, Mr. Cross," he says, and resumes leading me down the hall. He does not reach for my arm again.
Walking through the palace with him is a strange déjà vu, something I've done a hundred times, but I've never done, and that I will never do again. When we get to the room I make no pretense before heading to the pod. The short walk has forced me to see how loosely my seams are held together. Every breath now is a dull ache, and there's no guarantee that I would have ever survived to the other side. I need another night in the pod. Tomorrow, I can contact Dell. I go into the bathroom to change back into the pod gown, keeping my clothes clutched to my chest.
Nik Nik is in the bedside chair reading my journal. Again. I don't write everything about my life like Caramenta did. I haven't written enough for him to still be reading. Either he reads slowly or this isn't the first time. He's still focusing on the first part. He's reading—over and over again—about himself. He takes his time before looking over at me. Once he does, once his eyes flick from the pages to me, I want to run. I have the heart of a coyote but he has the eyes of a mountain lion, a creature who doesn't need tricks because his teeth are real.
But the monster I saw in the hallway was different from the one I've known. This is a creature who knows what he is, maybe even regrets it. A monster who's seen a mirror. That must be what the journal is for him, another mirror to see himself.
"What would you have done to that boy?"
"You should know better than to call a runner a boy," he says. He lifts the journal. "You used to."
"That runner is barely eighteen. He's a boy. You're twice his age and size."
I don't know why it feels like I can do this, correct him. It's never felt possible before. I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it. I bet Nelline thought so too. And she did survive, she must have, or I wouldn't be shaking as my pieces refuse to knit back into place.
"I want to believe I would never have hurt him," he says, answering my first question.
"But you don't like it when your men get mouthy?"
He looks up, his head tilted. "You're quick to treason."
I walk over to the pods, lifting them up. He comes to my side to help ease me into the bed.
"That's not what it means," I say, the machines beginning their high-pitched whir.
Nik Nik is reading my vitals on the glass of the main pod.
"Hmmm?"
" 'Treason.' You used it wrong. Whoever taught you to read mixed up a few things."
"You called them my men. It's treason to wish a ruler dead or overthrown, which is what you do when you assume I rule."
In the hot room the air around me goes suddenly cold, and the pod feels unbelievably like a restraint.
"No..."
I should have realized. His hair isn't braided. I messed up. I've acted like a coward avoiding information about the emperor, and now I'm in a trap far worse than Nik Nik's.
"He's not dead here. The Blood Emperor's still alive? Your father is still alive?"
I pull one arm out of the pod and begin hitting the buttons to shut it down so I can open it. At least, I hope I'm hitting buttons. I might just be hitting it.
"You have to let me go. I need to go now."
I take deep breaths, try to clear my mind the way my office's psychiatrist taught me, but nothing will help the flashbacks from my childhood. A place where heads were displayed in windows to send messages, but not the tongues, because those were nailed to the doors of the surviving family members. A place where runners got their name using homemade monstrosities to mulch people down in the streets. It was a game. They kept score in tally marks on their doors. Another reason there are so few of me left alive: I was not a fast child.
I don't realize I'm still attacking the machine until Nik Nik grabs my hand.
"It's all right."
"It's not all right. Your father—"
"Died. When I was six."
The news calms me more than breathing exercises ever could. He notices, and releases me.
"How old was I when he died in your delusion?"
"My what?"
"In your journal, you think you know me. You've made an elaborate account of things that never happened."
"Right, I'm just a sun-crazed wastelander. I've spent too long drinking bad water. Once I'm healed up, turn me loose. We'll forget this ever happened."
"Why is my name on your back? How did you learn the code you use?"
"I made it up," I say, ignoring the first question.
"You're not a very good liar."
"Who taught you the code?" I ask back.
"The same person who taught me to read. My brother. Which is how I know there are no gaps in my education."
"...Your older brother?"
"You've heard of him? He's absent in your journal."
"I have. He was a prodigy. Crazy smart, right?"
Smart and curious and as weak as a baby bird. Which is why Nik Senior killed him when he was fourteen.
"He's dead though," I say.
"Treason again," he says.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 36 |
Back on my home Earth, and I'm guessing every Earth where Nik Nik rules, the story is always the same. Everyone stopped speaking of the boy after he was killed; he was taken out of the records as if he'd never existed. Only I know, because his younger brother loved me and mourned him, that his real name was Adranik, firstborn. He was smart. Too smart. He understood numbers and stars but not how to please his father. He'd gotten sick when he was young, and never fully recovered. But even worse than being weak of body, he was weak of heart. He cried when his father took him hunting. He cried when the runners went on parade. When the boy was seven, Nik Nik was born. His mother named him Yerjanik, which means happy. An empty prayer. She must have known that wasn't in the cards for either of Nik Senior's boys.
By the time Nik Nik was five, he was already the biggest child in the wasteland. He hunted with Nik Senior's men in the deep wastes, where humans barely live and grazing animals get fat off plants and water too toxic for most of us. But the second-born son of the emperor didn't hunt the slower, lumbering prey. He speared predators with the glee of his father's worst soldiers. I was never sure if Nik Nik was born cruel, or just obedient.
The story from the emperor's men was that Adra's persistent illness flared up, killing him kindly in his sleep. And that was what you said happened if any of Nik Senior's men were in the room. But the real story, the one the workers who raised me heard from clients and passed around, was that the boy was taken into the black swamps. His throat was slit and his body shoved under.
They say the dead in the bogs don't decay. That they're perfectly preserved in a grave of black moss. I've always wondered, if anyone dared brave the runners and predators that far out, if they would find him still—a small boy with a huge brain and a perfectly serene face.
I spent most of my relationship with Nik Nik wondering if he knew what everyone else did. Or if his brother's murder was kept from him even after his father's death.
It was a long time before I finally felt secure enough to mention the boy who'd taught Nik Nik to write his name but died before he could teach him much else. When I did, he didn't answer directly. He told me a story. He said his grandfather's people came from a place across the ocean. A small country, but resourceful. Once, a larger country came in and massacred nearly everyone. But that, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that afterward, swords and sickles still drenched in innocent blood, they turned and said they'd done nothing. If the massacre was mentioned, they denied it, and no one was brave enough to argue. Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his family and force them to agree you did not.
I asked him if his father was right, if that was true power.
No, he said. It was just blood magic.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 37 |
Nik Nik has programmed the pods, and I intend to get into them as soon as he leaves, but he doesn't. He sits in the bedside chair, still in his tunic and glasses, looking every bit the holy man instead of the hunter he has always been. I should rush him out. I can feel the warning pulse of my veil losing charge, but I'm not as concerned as I should be. Half of me is wondering if having this version of him see me and not hurt me will heal all those broken pieces inside that therapy has blunted but not reassembled. The other half is wondering how many more pieces there will be if I'm wrong about him.
"Going to read me a story?" I ask.
"I was hoping you would tell me one."
"You don't want a garbage git's tale. All ours end in being eaten by a mudcroc."
"Important tales, those," he says. "You're not from the deep wastes?"
Dammit. I'm acting as if the veil is already gone. "Not originally. What story did you want?"
"How old was I when my father died in your delusion?"
"World," I say. "Just...pretend I come from a different world than you do, a world where things are mostly the same, but slightly different."
"How old was I?"
I stall, because he's asking like the answer could save his life, and I don't understand why.
"What makes you think it was different than here?"
"Here he died when I was six, but you were afraid of my father like you'd seen his rule firsthand. You're easily more than six years younger than me."
Can I still get fired for violating every traverser policy if no one ever finds out?
"I don't know. I was fourteen. Someone slit his throat while he was sitting at his desk."
I remember that day like it was the best birthday I'd ever had. I was so happy he was dead, runners showed up in my neighborhood to check my alibi. It didn't help that someone saw a small girl running from his office. I didn't kill him, but a girl that young alone with a man like him? I'd sharpen the blade and hand it to her myself.
"How old are you now?" he asks.
"Twenty-six. You do the math."
"And I took his place?"
"Yes, because Adra was already dead. He died when you were—"
Seven.
The dots start to connect. In the other worlds, Adra died when Nik Nik was six. Here, it was the father who died at that same time. But I'd bet a man and a teenage boy went out into the desert in all of them.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Why are you stalling?"
"Because you might kill me for telling the truth."
"I don't kill."
There's a shakiness in the proclamation that makes it easy to believe. It's different, and so much more true, than I could never kill.
"You were six," I say.
"The same age my father died here....How did my brother die in your world?"
"I think you already know. Which means you already know your brother killed your father in this one. That's the question you want to ask, isn't it? In my world, in most worlds, your father killed your brother when you were six. In this one...Adra must have gotten the upper hand."
He stands, but doesn't approach me.
"Treason, every word."
"You said you wouldn't imprison me."
"No, I didn't."
"It was implied."
"Your injuries when you were found, did someone beat you for wearing my name? Was it my brother?"
There's real heat behind the question. I don't know where the protective rage comes from, I just know it should scare me and it doesn't.
"It was a...miscalculated landing."
This seems to amuse him. "You do this a lot?"
"It's kind of my special gift."
"World hopping?"
I swallow. "Dying."
Unsurprisingly, this gives rise to a dozen new questions. Mostly, I answer. I tell him more than I intend to about myself and where I've traveled. I realize too late that I have never gotten to talk to someone like this. Talk about world walking with someone who doesn't think it's a sin like my family or just a job like Jean and Dell. I like talking with him, and hate that I do.
I don't realize how many years I've been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone's undivided attention. I could say Wiley City has made me weak, but it's always been this way. Even my Nik Nik knew exactly how, when he wanted, to make me feel special. Just as he knew exactly how to make me feel like dirt. And I reveled in that tainted affection, like a plant settles for drinking dew because it knows it's never going to get real rain.
"You still haven't told me why my name is tattooed on your back."
"Not your name."
"Right. Another me."
"Now you're getting it."
"And what was I to you?"
He doesn't think I'm someone I'm not, so this is the longest stretch of conversation I've had without lying in a long, long time.
"A warm place to land."
"That's all?"
"Spoken like someone who's never been without a warm place. You should value them more."
"You're still talking like it's me you know. It isn't," he says. "I would never...hurt someone like that."
But he says it like it's something he wants to believe, not something he knows is true.
"Can I ask you a question?" When he nods, I continue. "Have you ever broken someone's jaw?"
He recoils.
"No," he says without a moment's hesitation.
The pulse of the veil is a steady countdown now. I could let it fizzle out on its own, pretend this wasn't a decision. If I just let the veil fall off, I am still committed to deceiving him. If I take it off, I am giving the man who looks like the monster that gave me every scar a gift. I turn the idea over and wonder how long I've been letting my most wounded self make all of my decisions.
I reach up and press the edges of the mask to release it.
It doesn't take long to see I've made a mistake. When he sees my real face, his eyes light with recognition.
Nik Nik lunges for me, and I scream.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 38 |
"I told you to go. You weren't supposed to come back. He's going to find you."
I blink up at him, surprised at the lecture.
"Did you really come back to him? He's going to kill you. He tried to kill you." He looks confused, but also tired. "I can't find you like that again."
We lock eyes, me not understanding him, and him not understanding why I don't understand him.
His eyebrows knit.
"Nelline?" he says, finally, actually looking at me. "What happened to your face?"
"You haven't been listening. I'm not Nelline." I push away from him, toward the tall mirror in the corner. "And what's wrong with my face?"
At my first glance I nearly scream again. I've had striations before, the tiger stripes of bruising that accompany traversing, but never like this. Even darker than my dark skin, they begin beneath my eyes and carry down as far as I can see. I lift my shirt, and see the marks across my torso. I lift the legs of my pants and find them there too. They might lighten with time, they've always disappeared before, but these survived the pod. Are they permanent? I press the marks that frame my cheekbones, but there is no pain. They usually act like bruises, but these feel like scars.
He touches my arm, and my whole body tenses. I turn away from the mirror.
"It was your brother, right? Adranik hurt Nelline."
"She was...his." He's still studying me. "You're really not the same?"
I shake my head. "Adranik was never the one to hurt me."
"In the times when he's not there...it's me?"
I don't know if he means when his brother's not in the picture, we are together, or, when his brother's not in the picture he is the one to hurt me. Either way, the answer's the same. I nod, and feel bad for being the one to tell him.
I can't find you like that again. There was real anguish when he said it. I picture Nyame punishing Nik Nik this way, forcing him to see and clean up exactly the kind of damage he inflicts on every other world.
"You can't stay here. He's gotten worse thinking she's dead. He'll want blood for the trick."
"I already tried leaving once today. It wasn't a roaring success."
"Daybreak will be safer. There's a runner I trust who's on watch in the morning, but he moves out to border patrol by the afternoon." He crosses his arms behind his back. "I can escort you out at sunrise."
I nod, and he walks to the door. Standing in the threshold, he hesitates.
"When you go don't leave a trace."
"I never do."
I'm so good at not making an impression it's a wonder I even leave footprints. Not once in my whole life have I been missed. I've collected marks from others all over, but I've never made one on someone else. As I close the door behind Nik Nik, I wonder how long it will be before I am less to him than a ghost.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 39 |
There are slight advantages to being so often treated as prey. For instance, you tend to watch others more than others watch you. You tend, also, to only ever be minimally disoriented by a sudden loss of safety. But the most important benefit to being so often hunted is that you always know when it's happening.
So when the men come into the room somewhere after midnight, I am sitting in a chair facing them. I'd heard the footsteps gathering about half an hour after the pod had beeped to tell me I was as healed as I was going to be, and I thought briefly of escaping. But the boots had gathered at each end of the hall, and I'd rather be dragged out than give them the satisfaction by stepping into a trap. Eventually my patience outlasted theirs, and four runners entered my room.
"Can I help you?" I ask, like they're visitors to my sitting room, not soldiers who've cornered me.
Michael and the child runner are there, but they must be outranked by the one who speaks. Both look surprised to find me, sans veil, in the room, but neither says anything.
"Emperor heard his brother had company. Wants to meet you."
"Sounds like fun," I say, standing. I can be remarkably compliant when I don't have a choice.
They don't lead me down the way I expect. My Nik Nik kept his office on the right side of the palace. His father's had been on the left, but Nik Nik respected his memory too much to take it over. He left it as a sitting room, and he would meet those who had been friends with his father there. Adra must not care much for sentiment, which makes sense, if he's as smart as the stories say.
Taking a deep breath won't actually help, but as we near the office I do it anyway. The double doors I'm led to have only ever held Nik Senior in my memory, but I try to keep calm. It can't be as bad as that. No one could ever be as bad as Nik Senior.
I'm wrong.
I've been to worlds where plants kill, where people don't wear color, where the sun sets too soon. I've seen the impossible, but nothing so impossible as this. When the runners open the doors, I see him: Adam Bosch, father of interdimensional traversing and director of the Eldridge Institute, standing behind the desk, just in front of the chair where Nik Senior bled to death.
I see a man who has always been brilliant and kind to me, but with teeth covered in onyx and rows in his hair. I want to call him sir. I want to apologize for coming into his office.
The code. Of course, the code. If I'd questioned how Nik Nik and I both knew it, I might have expected this. But I didn't, so I panic and step backward. I lick at the sweat collecting on my upper lip and feel more like my mother lying in the dirt than I ever have. I know I'm facing death, because all of the shock and confusion and anger I expected to see on Nik Nik's face when my veil came off, I am seeing now on his brother's. Adam, Adranik, whoever he is, he killed me on this Earth. Or tried to. I should have known. Nik Nik isn't the only one who would have killed like his father.
The emperor steps back. He's afraid because his first thought isn't resurrection or twin, it's ghost. But then comes rage, the curling upper lip I remember from Nik Senior. It's impossible. Impossible. I know Adam...but then, you can't ever know another person. Which is why you should never admire anyone.
It's too late for me to learn that lesson.
"Why didn't you tell me it was her?" he says to Michael.
"She didn't look like that before," says the boy runner. He's defensive of my stepbrother, but there's too much apology in his protest. He wasn't cut out for this.
I won't get to see how they're punished for failing to recognize me, because Adam orders the other two to drag me to the dungeon. The hands grabbing my arms have fingers the size of my widest bones and no aversion to digging in as they drag me back.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 40 |
In the dungeon, I add up the hours I've been gone and wonder if Dell has started to miss me. If she ever will. It's too early for her to be really worried. I've missed check-ins before, so she won't think anything's wrong tomorrow either. She'll go to Jean, probably, who will remind her I have history in the area. He'll tell her I have just let my curiosity get the better of me like I did that one time on Earth 68, and that other time on Earth 214, and that other time...maybe if I'd ever been reliable, they'd have the cavalry out.
Or maybe not.
Everything I knew about Eldridge is skewed now that I know the son of the Blood Emperor is running it. I've always believed Nik Senior killed his eldest, but apparently his narcissism was too great for that. He had wanted his second child to inherit, but he must have only sent Adam away to learn. On Earth Zero, anyway. Nik Senior probably tried to banish his son here, too, but this Adranik killed him for it.
The fact that Adam Bosch is my ex-lover's older brother is almost harder to process than him being a warlord. I roll the idea around as if tumbling the knowledge will wear the edges off. It doesn't work. It still seems impossible. I think about them, comparing their appearances in my mind, but there is nothing in my boss's face to remind me of the man I lived with for years. Even Nik Senior seems absent from Bosch. But then, when I think of the empress...yes, there he is. Adam has his mother's face.
All this thinking is just a distraction from the trap I'm caught in. The dirt is too hard to dig into on the hill the emperor chose for his palace, but the aboveground dungeons still feel subterranean. The walls are concrete, the door metal. The ceiling is made of puffy squares that keep sound from traveling to the floor above, a concession to Nik Senior's delicate wife. When I was a kid, I thought the empress was beautiful—and terrible. I hated her for standing next to a monster, for sleeping next to him and never clamping a pillow over his face. When I was a teenager, I thought I understood. She didn't like it, but she was secure the only way a pretty girl with no stomach for a hard life could be in Ash. But then, when I got older still, my understanding turned again, darker. Once I was with Nik Nik I began to wonder if the empress didn't mind the bloodshed at all, because for all the hell he bought the rest of us, Nik Senior could never do anything but love her. It is possible to love a monster, even if you spend every day reminding yourself that they are a monster.
I'm staring up at that ceiling when I hear the steps. How, how is it possible his footsteps sound the same in a wasteland dungeon as they do echoing off the high halls of Eldridge?
When I stand up, the voice comes from behind me. Quiet, but too forceful to be called a whisper.
"Don't stand. If you're not sitting when he comes in, he'll make you."
I turn around, but it's just me and the wall. I hold my hand up. The wall looks like solidly stacked cinder blocks, but enough of the mortar has been pushed away that I can feel air coming from the other side. I put my palm at mouth height and feel the warm breath of the intruder. Not a ghost, then.
I'm full of questions, but I hate to waste good advice, so I sit.
"Took you longer than I thought," I say when Adranik comes in.
"How did you know I'd come? I could have let you rot."
"You didn't order me dead. Means you want information. You don't strike me as the type who's patient when he wants something."
He walks up to the cell doors slowly, not caution but nonchalance. He doesn't open them. Wouldn't matter if he did. I could fight him in my world, where he has thin, delicate hands and a face that never quite meets another person's. But this Adam, callous and even-eyed, this one could kill me.
I think back to Adam Bosch's wide pant legs and white, white shirts. I should have known he was a wastelander. Only we know the true value of white fabric, because nothing stays white in the land of sandstorms and mudtides. And the slacks, the thin material flaring out instead of tucked into boots, an invitation to bloodmites and scorpions in Ashtown. Even I, for all my assimilation, still wear pants close and tight. He's not eccentric; he's just showing off. Does he feel exposed? Is it an adrenaline rush to dress the way he does? Or has he forgotten those old fears, a true Wiley City resident now?
I remember his smooth hands as he offered me fruit, knowing what produce would mean to me. We're all rooting for you. He might have been, because we are exactly the same and only he knew it. And I had worshiped him.
This one dresses like Ash: long hair braided twice on the side, thick pants tucked into metal-tipped boots, fingernails like stilettos, and a mouth full of shine. Adam Bosch is clean-shaven. Adranik wears a low beard against the desert wind.
"I told your brother everything."
"My brother doesn't ask the right kinds of questions," he says, flashing onyx teeth at me. Same voice, same easy authority as the man who signs my paychecks. The man who signed the letter of employment Caramenta gushed over like a sacred text.
He's right about his brother asking the wrong questions. Nik Nik wanted to know if sunsets are the same color on all worlds, and if there are places that still have frogs. He'd never even thought to ask how such a power could be exploited, how it was done.
"I'm not a threat to you. I just want to leave. I promise you'll never see me again."
He leans against the bars, hands and head hanging inside my cell. So at least he believes me about the first part.
"What game are you playing, Nelline?"
"I'm not whoever you think I am."
He looks at me, all of me, from the bottom up. "You think I don't know you? I made you. Why did you get my brother's name on your back? To make me jealous?"
I look at his hands without making it seem like I'm looking at his hands. Three scars around his index and middle finger. The emperor is married. The emperor is married and he's looking at me like he owns me.
She was my brother's. That's what Nik Nik had said. I should have focused on that. Should have asked, Your brother's what?
"We're not, I mean...I'm not your...You think I'm your wife?"
He laughs, loud and deep and cruel. "I'd never marry a garbage git. Much less a worker."
The voice in the wall gives a low rumble that's pure wasteland. I used to growl like that, before I came to the city and realized they never growled, or hissed, or spit to ward off curses.
Much less a worker. The emperor sounds like Nik Senior, full of derision for the House that keeps Ashtown running. Nik Nik wasn't like that. Peter, his best friend growing up, took the x and had his ear for sex providers ever since.
"My wife is elegant and pure. She's an angel," he says.
"Poor thing. She blind?"
"Mouth like that and you expect me to believe you aren't Nix?"
I bristle on Nelline's behalf at his use of her old name. If she did trick in Ash, she doesn't anymore, and his use of her working name means he still considers her open for business despite her wishes.
"I'm not."
"Then who are you?" His dark eyes narrow until he looks near manic. "Are you with them? The people in black suits who keep trying to kill me?"
"A rival gang squaring up on you?" I cluck my tongue. "The emperor in my world never had that problem. Neither did your old man."
"Your world," he says. "So you and my brother are telling the same ridiculous story. Say I buy that you are a duplicate from another world. How does it work? Can you show me?"
"Magic. And no."
He steps back, sliding his hands out of the bars.
"Thought you would have learned your lesson about telling me no."
He's not disappointed; he's not even curious. There's glee at my refusal, so I shouldn't be surprised by what comes next.
"The runners parade at dawn. You have until then to change your mind."
"You still..."
Memories overwhelm me. The modified vehicles, spikes and fire, the laughing. God, the laughing. I was small enough to hide, but rarely quick enough to get to a hiding spot. If you didn't cry, they didn't chase as hard, they got bored. But I was a child. Children always cry.
Can I activate my collar before they crush me? Will it even have finished warming up before they've ground me into nothing?
"You want to know what I know?"
He'd been walking to the door, but now he turns back, mistaking my rage for cooperation.
"I know that you are just like your father. Worse, even. You didn't grow up during the wars; you have no excuse for cruelty. You just like it. Your father was right. You are weak. A weak and useless ruler. Do you want to know where I come from? I come from a place where your brother is emperor and the wasteland rejoices. Everyone loves him. I don't have his name on my back to make you jealous, because not one person even remembers you. I have his name on my back because he is the best thing to happen to Ashtown. And you, you are the worst. The inadequate son, turning his father's legacy to shame."
It's a little lie sharpened to a knife, and it slices true. He closes his eyes, holds himself back from reacting. When he opens them again he's calm, focused. He looks more like Adam Bosch than I would have thought possible.
"You tricked me before, got me to kill you before the runners could have their way. It won't work again. This time, you'll go like the trash you are."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 41 |
I've thought a lot about how I could die. Most gits do. There are ways that are acceptable, and ways that are not. Of course, sometimes we fantasize about not dying at all...but it's best to be practical.
My mother knew I would die in a palace.
One night, toward the end, she said, You'll never keep your place, always reaching up.
She was too out of it to remember the story of the man who flew too high and crashed to the ground, but she'd told me it enough times before that I'm sure, if she were capable, she would have reminded me again.
It was when she was sick for the last time, and everyone on the block knew it was the last time. Half because they thought this withdrawal would kill her, and half because they were sure if she made it through this time, she would never use again. I was in the latter half. But we were both wrong.
She was lying on towels, having sweated through her bedroll and blankets the day before, the last time she told me to keep my place. She said the first things to come out of her were my hands—fingers straight, not curled—because I was born reaching.
And that's how you'll die, she said. High up in a tower where you have no business.
I leaned in then, and said it. The last words she was coherent enough to hear from me: Rather die in a tower than the dirt floor of a shack.
I still believe it. I wish I didn't. I wish I could say that she didn't deserve to die like that. I wish I could call her death a tragedy or even unexpected. But you get the death you accept. Lying on that dirt floor, spinning one last time on a free dose from Nik, her favorite nightgown full of holes she never seemed to see, that was exactly how my mother was meant to go.
And if Adranik had put his hands around my neck and choked me to oblivion, it'd feel about right for me. Dying in a palace because I brushed too close to too powerful a man? It's been written in my stars on more than one Earth.
But death by runners? As an adult? No. The parades were the specter of my childhood. In the arc of my life, the time for them to kill me ended when I outlived Senior. It's a child's death, and I won't be made a little girl in the end. I'd kill myself before I'd face the parade.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 42 |
I'm making a list of options with too few entries when I hear the scratching travel up the wall and across the ceiling. It's the sound of a sandcat—a fanged rodent whose name makes no sense, except that they do eat other rodents, as a cat would, if there were any left small enough to fit the title. The scratching is a trick. It must fool the guards into thinking the sounds in the walls are made by the creature, but I remember the litter that invaded our house when I was a girl and this sound is off. The ceiling creaks too much for the weight of a single animal and the scratching is too precise to be a pack. I follow the noise to the corner of my cell, and watch as one of the ceiling tiles is pulled away.
The person who's come to my rescue is exactly who I expect: me.
I take a moment and stare fully at her. With Caramenta, half of the cheek was destroyed, the eyes discolored. I didn't so much feel it was me as I deduced it. But this is me and I know it in my chest. I am standing here in the cell but I am also staring out from the darkness of the space in the ceiling.
First, I go a little dizzy. Then, my heart beats quickly, a panic without reason. Finally, I vomit. In the space above she does the same. This time when I straighten, I keep my eyes closed. She doesn't, and starts vomiting again.
"You have to stop looking at me directly," I say. "Your brain thinks you're hallucinating. It's trying to make you throw up whatever toxic thing you drank."
"Got it," she says between retches.
When I open my eyes, her face is turned away and she's reaching down, holding out an arm as tattooed as mine used to be. I use the cell bars to lift myself up.
"I don't know what will happen if we touch," I say once I'm in the space beside her. "This has never happened before."
"Jesus, is that what I sound like?" she says in a voice as low and rough as an asphalt road. "Do you gargle with bleach or something?"
"Me? My voice isn't as bad as yours. You sound like coffee percolating."
We quiet as we realize that we must, in fact, both sound like this. Which is a letdown. Having been raised around people with voices as inviting and seductive as a birdsong sung low, I'd always hoped a little of it had worn off on me.
We replace the roof tile, then I shimmy in the crawl space behind her. She leads me to a gap between walls and we go vertical. She doesn't look back to ask me if I know how to climb the cinder block. I wonder if she has the same memories I do, of being exiled outside when Mom had overnight clients, of climbing up the walls to sleep on the roof, high above things that bite and sting, above ground that would suck you in at the first drop of moisture.
I think again about Earth 255 me. She couldn't do this, and because she couldn't climb she would never have to.
We climb until we can pull ourselves up onto the floor of a round, domed room. A portion of the wall is missing, and we slide through easily.
I look around. "The observatory..."
"The what?"
"The observatory. It was their mother's."
And in my world it was cleaned every day. The only portrait in the house was in this room. It was his mother, life-size on the wall just before the clear roof began. Here, it's all clutter and cobwebs.
"It's just a room they never use. It's safe enough," she says.
I look at her, but only from the neck down. I recognize her gloves, fingerless reptile hide. Mixxie gave them to me—us—after my mother died. All of the providers gave me something in the days after I buried her, even though she hadn't been attached to the House for almost a year at the end. They visited me one at a time, never more than a few hours apart, a suicide watch if I ever saw one. But it was Exlee who gave me the gift that saved my life: an invitation to stay at the House for a while, whether I took up the work or not. There they taught me how to seduce a man no one else had been able to keep, how to trap a predator by looking like prey.
I allow myself to look at her through a half squint. It's still disorienting, but there's no racing heart, no nausea, so I open my eyes fully.
Once I'm staring at her I can't stop. It's not at all like seeing myself. This dirt-caked girl isn't me. But it is exactly like going back in time, seeing a portrait of myself from when I was young. She looks—
"You look like my mother," she says. "But for those weird marks."
"I was just thinking the same thing about you."
"Figures."
She perches on a dust-covered desk, one leg hanging off and the other pulled close to her chest, her arms around her knee. And I know, because she's me, that she's trying to look casual as she reaches for the knife on her calf.
"We don't know what will happen if you do that either."
Her stretching fingers relax.
"I've been listening in the walls," she says. "You think you're the real me."
"A different you. My world just learned how to traverse before yours."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you figure it out first? No, forget that. That's just luck. Why hasn't everyone else figured out how to traverse? Or have they?"
"No...they haven't."
"No one has? You've never seen another of these travelers—"
"Traversers."
"Whatever. None from other worlds have come?"
"No."
"Why not?"
I open my mouth to give the company line, that we might have been visited but they just haven't been detected, but then freeze. What if there are just too few Adam Bosches who aren't bloodthirsty emperors? How many Nik Seniors let their eldest sons live? How many Adraniks killed their fathers and took their places?
I could tell her this, but I'm not sure why she wants to know.
"I don't know. I never asked."
She leans back, a little smug.
I sit on a pile of what used to be curtains. "I don't question things. I'm just happy to have a position."
"A real position? You citizen?"
"Almost. Resident. Four years left."
She whistles low. "You told Nik you need to get outside to leave. But how will you get back if we don't have that technology here?"
She's staring at her hands when she asks, going for casual. I'm almost offended. Do I look that soft? I haven't been out of Ashtown that long.
"They'll pick me up the same place they dropped me off," I say. "The riverbed on the edge of town, the deep-waste side."
She nods. "Shift change at dawn. We'll leave then." She pulls out two thermoses, drinks from one, and holds the other out to me. "You'll need hydration for the walk. Not sure how the sun is where you're from, but here tomorrow's a bright day."
Only when she says it do I remember Dell warning me it was coming. A bright day, meaning don't go outside and bring in anything you don't want burnt or discolored. We haven't had one of those in a while. Or maybe we have and I missed it. In the city, they pull a dark screen over the sky to keep it out. We call the days overcast, and I've forgotten the shadow means fire on the other side.
I drink up, trying to remember the last time I had to face the white light.
"Thank you."
She waves off my thanks just like I would. "I'll head out soon. I've got more listening to do. Need something I can sell if I want to keep laying low."
"You spy?"
"I listen."
"Nelline...Why did Adra try to kill you?"
From the look on her face, the question catches her like a right hook. But she must have wondered, at least while it was happening.
When she answers me, it is, of course, a list.
"Because he wanted me and didn't want to. Because he wanted to prove he could live without me. Because he couldn't control me. Because..." She shrugs. "But I've been dosing myself with his paralytic, little bits, so it wore off quick. Took blood expanders on days when I saw him. Even if Nik hadn't found me, I wouldn't have even come close to dying for real."
Her voice shakes with the lie she's probably been telling herself. Lying there, bleeding out in the time before seeing Nik Nik's face, she probably felt just like I did on the desert sand after landing here. I wonder if she thought of Mom, too, when the darkness was closing in.
Odd, that 175 Nik Nik had saved us both.
I'd assume her relationship with Adra was like mine and Nik's. But no, I was never really prepared for him to kill me. I must have trusted him, at least that much. Trusted him to hurt me without killing me, to bruise me without breaking any of my most important bones. Is that still trust? Or just resignation?
Maybe Nik Nik was better than Adra so I was right to trust he'd never kill me, but more likely Nelline is just smarter than I was. That's why she's alive after facing Adra, and I was caught off guard by Adam: we saw the same face, and only she knew better than to trust it.
I shake out my pile of curtains and sit in a molding armchair.
Nelline was right. I am soft. Because I lied to her about how I'll leave, so I assumed she'd sneak out and spend her day waiting in the river for a transport that would never come. But I've been living easy for six years. Longer, if you count my years at Nik Nik's side as soft, which anyone in Ash would.
As sleep comes too easily, I realize what I missed, the most basic Ashtown truth I've let myself forget: a wastelander with two thermoses carries water and poison.
She comes over just as my limbs go fuzzy.
"Real sorry about this. His man says he'll pay teeth to get you back."
She gives me the reason even though I didn't ask. I like that. It means she respects me.
I know this death, and it's not a total one. It's a toxin made from plants found along the green sludge that passes for water in the deep wastes. Providers keep a bottle in their nightstands. Some even carefully cover themselves with it, an insurance policy against unruly clients. If a worker says no kissing, and you kissed anyway, you might go numb from the mouth down and learn a lesson. If a worker says their cock is off-limits, and you grab it anyway, you might find yourself unable to use that arm for a day or more.
Identifying the drug fills me with nostalgia. Being dosed with it—the easy blanket of a paralytic rather than the mind-churning panic of an opiate—feels like being close to home. I wish the paralysis hadn't started with my mouth. Wish I could tell her that I'm not mad, because I would have done just the same if I remembered enough about home to know who I really was.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 43 |
How does Adranik become the bloodiest emperor? This is the question I mull over when I'm awake again but still paralyzed. He was the softer child, the one who couldn't even hunt without crying. How did he preserve the runners' parade when his carnivore brother didn't? How did he break his mistress's jaw when his own father built whole rooms for the comfort of his wife? Maybe that's the point. Everyone already knew Nik Nik was good for blood. When he took over he had nothing to prove. It was the opposite—people were tense, afraid he'd be worse than his dad. When he canceled the parades everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but still eyed him warily.
Adranik must have had everything to prove. Maybe he couldn't cancel the parades because everyone expected him to. Maybe it was self-preservation, the way the smallest animals are the first to growl, the first to bite.
Or maybe he only hated hunting because he was afraid of the game, and seeing someone else spill blood sat with him just fine.
I've been taken out of the castle. With half an inhale I can tell I'm not even in central Ashtown anymore. The acid tang is out of the air, and I don't realize how used to it I've already grown until it's gone. This room smells like a hospital, heavy-duty cleaner not quite hiding the soft dirt smell. I open my eyes just a slit. The all-white room surprises me. I'm still in Ash, but the Rurals, I'm guessing.
I make out a shape loading linens into a large supply closet. He's wearing the tunics I'm used to seeing when I visit my family, the ones Nik Nik seems to enjoy here. This one started white, but is now the dingy gray of a tea stain. I test my limbs—a little laggy, but good enough.
I sit up and he turns around. Our eyes lock. Daniel. But he's not my stepfather, not here. There's surprise in his eyes, but no affection. I spring, shoving him into the supply closet he was loading, and force the double doors closed against him. I wrap a sheet around the handles to keep them closed. He's pushing against it, yelling, and already the sheets are loosening. It won't hold long.
The smell of dirt and the presence of Daniel tells me where I am: the vacant rooms in my stepfather's new church. I put my collar back on and tap the center to begin the warm-up, then I run. I emerge in a hall just off the main auditorium and sprint for the double doors at the entrance. I've almost reached them when a shape steps into my path.
"You?"
Even though I recognize him, it takes me a second to remember his name. Mr. Cheeks is still pretty, and still smiling, but now his face sickens me. He's a runner in a place where they still live up to their name. He looks just like the man who took my money a few weeks ago, except for the new tattoo at the center of his throat: a star within a star.
It strikes me, and I can't keep from saying, "Someone loves you?"
He tilts his head. "You read runner tattoos too? I knew Nelline could, but I'd expect a girl well preserved as you comes from the city."
His mention of Nelline, Nelline as someone other than me, calms me down. She had said "his man" told her Nik Nik wanted me. And Nik Nik had said the runner he trusted went out to border patrol in the afternoons. If I'd asked myself who worked border patrol in the afternoons back home, I would have known to expect him.
"I do," I say. "I just didn't always."
He nods, casting a shadow over his love mark. When it goes bad, because he's young and it always does, he'll fill in the star with black and draw a circle around it. An ink-dark hole will mark his heartbreak.
"Let me go."
"Can't. Sorry, but we need you."
It wasn't what I expected to hear. Sorry, he wants you, maybe. Or, Sorry, just doing my job.
"Who's we?"
"She's coming."
I hear them now, the light and delicate footsteps. I should have guessed who they belong to, given my location, but when she enters the room I am unprepared.
Esther. My Esther. Her clothes are understated as always, but only the cuts are modest while the material is heavy, expensive. Nothing like she can afford back home. There's something off with her face. Once I identify what it is, I go a little rabid.
I start walking toward her. Mr. Cheeks moves between us. I push past him.
"Who broke your nose, Essie?" I get close enough to see that her front incisor is fake. "Who knocked out your tooth?"
Someone has been punching my delicate little sister in the face. Someone's about to die.
She smiles. It's sad and bruised. If she means to disarm me it has the opposite effect.
"My husband."
The words spin me. They're full of shame, shame she shouldn't own, and I connect the words with Cheeks's tattoo quickly.
He's standing too close to avoid the first hit, but he catches my wrist easily on the second and shoves me back. He's had a lifetime of fighting, and I'm out of practice.
"She's barely eighteen!" I scream in his face, the words half spit.
"Not me," he says. "I'd never."
"Then who?"
"Someone you can't attack, but thank you for thinking to try," Esther says, coming between us.
She's as gracious in this world as she is on mine. If there are souls that are pure, that are insulated from things that are done to them and remain the same whether they are gutter born or tower bound, Esther is one. The knowable.
My wife is elegant and pure. She's an angel.
It clicks.
"The emperor?"
She nods. "We hoped you could help us get him out of power. Nik said you...know things."
Adra was wrong. My sister is polite, but polite and angelic are two different things. Everyone makes that mistake. They think hair like snow means angel, and eyes like the sky mean saint. But my sister would ostracize someone to their death if they threatened her church. She could teach me lessons in ruthlessness. It's what I first liked about her. If she was what people saw when they looked at her, she'd have no more use than a porcelain doll.
She sits on the church's stage. In my mind the image overlaps with her sitting on my cot during my visit. She's younger than I was when I took up with Nik Nik, and I was still too young. Mr. Cheeks sits beside her, arm over her shoulders.
Sloppy runner.
I break for the exit, putting my palm over my necklace to make sure it's warmed up. Not quite, but close enough. Mr. Cheeks scrambles behind me, but he's too late. I'm almost to the doors and they're opening before me like the gates of heaven...except it isn't God, it's Nik Nik.
I slow to a stop and hear Mr. Cheeks doing the same behind me. I expect him to grab me, but he doesn't. He's looking past me.
"Why were you chasing her?"
"She can help us," Mr. Cheeks says.
"That's not your decision. You were to barter with Nelline for her freedom, not a new capture," Nik Nik says, looking down at me. "Is there somewhere I can take you?"
I move toward him cautiously, feeling like those birds that take food from the teeth of mudcrocs. He's holding open the door, and through it I can see the butane sky. The sun's not even up all the way, but it's a bright day, so it's nearly noon-light. My collar vibrates its readiness.
"Wait!"
Somewhere, deep inside, I must be looking for something on 175, something I haven't found yet. Because when my sister screams for me, I turn back.
"Look at you," she says. "Your skin has no spots, your teeth are whole. There's no film in your eyes. Your world has been so, so kind to you. Don't you feel anything, any...obligation to help us taste just a little of that peace?"
Nope. And it's on my lips to tell her so. To tell her that I got to the city on my own two feet, with no stranger from another world to help me, and I don't owe anyone anything.
Except, that's not true, is it?
There's the workers who raised me, who took me in after my mom's death and taught me how to seduce the most powerful man in the wastes. Did I ever reach back to them? Did I ever thank them? Have I ever thanked Jean? Or prayed in thanks for Caramenta, by whose blood I've risen to heights I did not even know the words to wish for? I look over her shoulder at Nik Nik, the sometimes Blood Emperor who nursed me back from death.
Sometimes, focusing on survival is necessary. Sometimes, it is just an excuse for selfishness.
Still, I shake my head. "Dethroning an emperor? This is none of my business."
"Please?" she says.
And the longer I stare at her, the harder it is to walk away. Partly because she's still Esther. Sure, the nose is twisted, but those eyes, those are my Esther's eyes. But mostly I'm struck because the parts of her that aren't like my Esther, the traces of shadow where a powerful man has been breaking his hand against her bones, those are me. Or used to be me. Or are me somewhere, on some world, right now. I don't know who I would be if I could turn my back on that. Someone else, probably.
I reach up, putting my collar back to sleep.
"You're a brat," I say.
She smiles, because even if this Esther doesn't know me, she knows what it sounds like when someone gives in.
"What, exactly, do you think I can do for you?"
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 44 |
Mr. Cheeks goes to free Daniel from the supply cabinet, and the rest of us wait in his office.
"You shouldn't stay," Nik Nik says. "It's not safe."
"Have to."
"You haven't seen what he does to you here."
"I can guess."
We're standing too close in a corner. His voice is low, but Esther is only pretending not to hear the conversation.
He looks at me, which makes it feel as if he's moved closer even though he hasn't. "Then why stay?"
"Because she asked me."
"And she means something to you? Like I did?"
"She's my sister."
Esther's illusion of disinterest shatters, and she looks over quickly. "Truly?"
She doesn't look disgusted, only interested. I wonder if she used to wonder what it would be like to have a sister. The way I used to, until I found out about her.
"And you know her?" Nik Nik asks Esther.
"She's my husband's mistress. And his spy."
"That's Nelline. Not me. I would never sleep with the emperor," I say. Nik Nik looks at me pointedly. "I mean, not this emperor, obviously."
Mr. Cheeks and Daniel are back. Esther feels so familiar I can't help but search Daniel's face for something recognizable, some spark I can cling to. But he's a void.
"She really isn't Nelline," Esther says.
Daniel shakes his head. "How can you be sure?"
"The way she speaks. Carries herself. I know the woman."
Daniel looks at me, then away. "Careful you aren't letting your hope lead you into gullibility."
Esther lifts her chin, looking older, much older, than mine but just as strong. "Careful you don't let your pessimism drown your faith."
Daniel's face goes red. He's petty, this version of Daniel. Weaker, without Mel to prop him up. He's nothing like the tower of warmth and goodwill I know.
Daniel looks to Nik Nik. "What do you think?"
"I believe her," he says.
Back home, Esther is Daniel's most trusted adviser. He would never take the word of some man over hers.
"I can prove it to you," I say, not realizing the words are true until after they're coming out of my mouth. "Your wife, did she die here? When Michael and Esther were two?"
"Adra's always known that, and I'm sure his spy does too."
"But does he know there was another woman? About a year later while you were preaching. She invited you in and you went. And afterward, you had a choice. You could follow through with the light you saw in her, marry her...or you could never look back, and dwell in your guilt."
He's gone ashen. Good.
"I live in a world where you married her, and it made your followers trust your words of redemption. You took in her daughter and raised her as your own. Where I come from, you smile all the time and you look five years younger than you do here, all because you weren't a coward."
He takes a while to respond, and when he does his voice is quiet.
"She died," he says.
"I know."
He blinks first. "Our parishioners tell stories. I never believed them. A person from another world dropping down in the desert, then disappearing. In the stories it was a man. Are there more of you?"
"We rotate. This is my first time here. The man who used to come retired. The girl who came before me was...let go."
"You make it sound like a job," Nik Nik says.
"It is. My job is the only reason I'm here."
They all seem deflated by that. I'm not sure what they thought I was, but they find employed a letdown.
Esther overcomes her disappointment first. "Miracles can be found in the most inglorious places."
This is not a miracle, but she's got that preachy look on her face, so I know it's useless to correct her.
"You've seen worlds where Nik Nik is emperor? You'll testify to it?" she says.
"Testify to who? I can't be on record. My work gets most of your official documents, and I've broken enough rules already."
"Nothing official, just a group of people who aren't happy with the way things are, but don't have the imagination to see the alternative. They're coming here, and you can tell them Nik is better than his brother. Tell them they should support him."
It all starts to make sense. Why Nik Nik would hide me, why he would ask me to confirm the truth: that his brother committed regicide. It would make his rule illegitimate. This is a coup. And my naïve little sister is running the campaign of the usurper. Esther with her too little sense and too much faith, even in a man like Nik Nik.
"How do you even know he's better than his brother? He might just be more polite," I say, an accusation I never thought I'd lay at Nik Nik's feet.
Nik Nik hears the challenge in my voice, and responds the way he would on any Earth. He squares up.
"I'm better than the man you knew, and he's better than my brother."
"You don't know that. Even I don't know that. I haven't seen your numbers."
"Numbers?"
"Numbers. Your population, how many sick you have, how many are working, how many suffer, how many don't have to die but do."
"You can compare these numbers to other worlds? To prove concretely that we are worse off?"
It takes me a moment to realize what he's asking me to do: analyze. He's asking me to do the work of an analyst. The same thing I've been failing at on Jean's quizzes for weeks.
I look down at my cuff. I've taken ghost copies of data from all the worlds I collect so I could compare them...except I've never pulled from here before. I'd have to go to their port. And it's a bright day.
"I have the information from most other worlds, but not this one. I'd need to go to a port, but that's outside of downtown Ash."
Mr. Cheeks is looking at me like I've lost it. "There's no port in the desert."
"Not that kind of port." I hold up my hands like it will help me explain it, then I shake my head. "It's not a place where boats from other places come in, it's a place where data from other places comes in."
"Maybe tomorrow?" Daniel says.
"I can't stay another day," I say.
"Even if she could, the people are risking enough gathering here tonight. We can't ask them to do it again. It's only a matter of time before Adra links her escape to me, if he hasn't already," Nik Nik says.
"Does he believe she's from another world?" asks Daniel.
"No, this is worse. He thinks we have his spy," Nik Nik says. "I'll go to this...port. I'll get the information and be back by nightfall."
"No, I'll go. Even if you could find the port, you don't know how to access it," I say.
"Then I'll assist you," he says.
"No offense, but at least if you were cruel you'd be useful. You're not even that here. I'll take your runner instead. We'll dash out and be back in no time. I'm guessing he has a vehicle?"
Though the prospect of sitting in a runner's ride twists my stomach.
Mr. Cheeks sucks in air through his teeth, but Nik Nik calms him with a raised hand. He turns back to me.
"Even if I would order him from your sister's side, I doubt he'd listen. He'll remain here until Adra isn't a threat to her."
I study the pretty runner anew. It's an interesting match—my stained-glass sister the star on the throat of a killer with the face of a doll.
"Fine."
"We'll still need to find a way to convince the others that she's genuine," Esther says. "She looks just like her. They'll think she's just pretending."
"I can handle that," I say. "We'll just need to make a slight detour after the pull."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 45 |
We leave as soon as we can round up the gear, but it's not soon enough. Really, it's been too late since sunrise. Even under the reflective tarp, my cheeks and forehead begin to burn.
"Not far."
He yells it like there's a risk I won't hear him, but the world is so still it's like the sun has an invisible hand pressed down on us and not even air can rise. A bright day is as soundless as the hatch. I can hear our boots on sand and our rough breath. The tarp blocks everything from my vision except my feet and the ground slightly ahead, and the goggles turn even that into shades of red from blood to blush where true sunlight creeps in along the edges. If I threw all this off, I would see the truest, brightest white of my whole life...for a few brief seconds before everything went black for me forever.
This is what it's like to love Dell.
She's unattainably bright. It makes me want to touch her even if it takes my fingertips, to see her even if I'll see nothing after. And if I ever dared cross that line, if I ever got close enough to stand in the full light of that star, she'd request a transfer, or order one for me, and everything would be dark thereafter.
I replaced Caramenta without anyone noticing. Nelline could replace me just the same. But if ever Dell wasn't herself, I would know. She'd be dimmer, and I would know right off.
"Turn right in four steps, then go eight. I'll drive."
The vehicle is right where Nik Nik says it is. Even reaching out to open the door burns my fingers. I climb in, taking off the tarp and goggles only after everything is closed up again. My fingertips are still hot pink. I press them to my face. They radiate heat.
"You peeked," I say to Nik Nik, who has taken off his goggles and is showcasing the new pinks of his eyes where the whites should be. The goggles can only protect against secondary light, not direct, so he must have looked out from behind the tarp and caught the edge of the sun.
"A little. I couldn't remember where it was parked."
"Are you sure you'll be able to drive through this?"
This being thick mesh covering the windshield. I can make out shapes in the desert, but only if I strain.
"Of course," he says, which is exactly what he said earlier when I asked if he knew where the vehicle was parked. Of course apparently being shorthand for I'll figure it out.
"Fine, let's go."
The vehicle is part tank and outfitted for days like this. It crawls along with all the speed and grace of a squared-off stone. I could probably have run to the port faster...you know, if I'd ever done the weekly trainings that would enable me to run more than ten seconds without wheezing.
The port isn't visible, but its position is logged into my cuff. It's loud, surrounded by all that rattling metal, so I tap Nik Nik's arm when we get close, and point when he needs to turn. He shouldn't risk the run with already-burnt eyes, but he stands at my back as I work the port. The download is slow, and for a second I'm worried my credentials have been revoked because of my absence, but eventually the data speeds up like it always does. I move around as it downloads, releasing the heat from rising from the baked sand that's getting caught under my tarp.
"We have a problem," he says. "We're at high noon. We can't risk driving until it passes."
Because even anticombustion additives have their limits.
"We can wait it out in the car, but without the engine to run the fans..."
We could dehydrate before the heat shifts away, and pass out waiting.
I check the map Dell downloaded into my cuff again. "There's an emergency shelter just ahead. We can hide there."
I lead, keeping the tarp low and staring at the ground. Luckily the shelters are so camouflaged I couldn't get us there by sight anyway, and the verbal directions from the cuff don't require seeing forward.
A few times I almost stumble into cracks in the desert, a sign that mining continued here longer than on Earth Zero or Earth 22, but eventually I get to the square I need. I get on my knees, the ground reads my cuff's signal, and a square of earth lifts up and reveals a ladder.
I climb down and hit the button to seal it as soon as Nik is clear.
Temperature control and oxygen are working, so I peel off my gear as we wait for the sun to pass over us. At least, I wait. Nik Nik is wide-eyed, scanning every inch of the space. Eventually he goes to the emergency manuals and begins flipping through them, Eldridge code no obstacle to him. And now I know why. Because his big brother taught us both.
The sight of him reading competently is still strange, and it's a wonder my brain doesn't make me puke, because this could just as easily be a hallucination.
"It's just boring procedural stuff."
"Not to me. I want to understand the magic that brought you here."
I take the manual from him. "It's not magic. There's no such thing as magic. You sound like you've been spending too much time in the Rurals."
"And if I have?"
I look at him, his tunic, his helpful smile. "Fuck me. You're one of the faithful? That's why you had to take care of me when I landed. You had to."
Nik Nik the believer. I've seen everything.
"I didn't have to do anything. And I didn't take care of you because of religious obligation."
"Then why?"
"Because you are a miracle."
"Not a miracle." I shake the manual. "Science."
"What do you call science when it answers a prayer?" He takes the manual back, then moves away from me, finally, and I can breathe again. "That's what I was doing when we found you. I was in the desert, desperate, praying for an answer to the problem of my brother."
"It really bothered you," I say. "Finding Nelline like that."
It must have been the final straw that made his brother's cruelty impossible to deny. Nik Nik is obviously upset, clutching the manual like a man used to finding solace in texts. Because, here at least, he is.
"In your world...do they ever tell stories of the time we fought?"
Fighting is one word for it. Child abuse is another.
"Your father forced you and Adra to fight. He should have won. He was older, and Senior was testing his cruelty not his ability, but you found something to use as a weapon and..."
I shrug rather than finish. It doesn't matter if Adra surrendered before or after his little brother knifed him, the stories could never agree, it only matters that he did. Senior had already planned to get rid of Adra, most likely, but the fight primed Nik Nik for the loss.
Nik Nik is quiet. "It was a shard of metal. Sharp. Valuable. By the time I was old enough to realize my father left it there on purpose, he was long dead." He stares down at the cover of the Eldridge manual like it holds an entirely different set of answers. "When I held it, I felt the thrill. The same thrill I felt when I hunted. I almost turned on Adra, but I stopped. I knew. I was young but I knew that if I gave in, turned what I'd been trained to do to animals to a person, to my own brother...there would be no coming back from it. I dropped the shard, forfeited, and have tried never to hurt a living thing since."
That's definitely not how things went on my world. Or Earth Zero. Nik Nik had only stepped up his hunting game after the fight, and he had no qualms about using men as prey.
Nik Nik is still staring at his hands, so what he says next isn't a total surprise.
"But I still remember the thrill. After seeing what he'd done to that girl. Hearing what he's been doing...I began to think there was only one way out. That's why I was in the desert. I was praying for a way to stop the suffering that didn't end with me killing my brother. Then Mr. Cheeks found you on patrol. An angel fallen from the sky, with my name on her back so I would know the gift was meant for me."
"A fallen angel is a demon."
"A being who can enact great change, either way."
There is nothing left to say. He goes back to reading nonsense. I sit on the cot. He's gracious enough to pretend not to notice that I'm staring at him.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 46 |
Time is flat. We process it linearly, but everything is happening at once, always. Right now I am kissing Nik Nik. I am leaving him. I am killing him, because surely I've done that before or will somewhere in the infinite. I am home with Dell. We are happy. We are not. We used to be happy and now she resents my lower status and I resent her resentment and we stay together because we've given up too much to do anything else.
I've always believed, like all rational people, that my selves are separate. That they—we—exist independently. But sometimes when life is too still, when I lie in bed in the quiet, I can feel it all happening. Not just my selves collapsing, but time collapsing, because past and future are other selves just as surely as those on different worlds. My mother is dying right now, and I feel it. But she also recovered, woke up, got clean, and I feel that too. I feel that somewhere I am not alone. And I feel that sometime, soon or not long ago, I will accomplish something great.
It's the latter I feel most strongly. The certainty that I am on the cusp of being worth something. But maybe that's just my justification for reaching, for disobeying my mother's last warning. Maybe she felt the flattened universe too, all things at once, there near the end. Maybe she saw how I would die, have died, will die again, and tried to tell me.
I feel those, too, when I'm not careful. I feel 372 deaths in my chest, hanging over my head like a heavenly host of guillotines. I should have known Nelline wasn't among them, because there was no tightness behind my ribs, no new death making room for itself among the others.
Right now, I'm trying to ignore the hum telling me number 373 is coming, for real this time, and soon.
"There's a voice," Nik Nik says. "In the desk."
"What?" I walk over. In the top drawer is an old-school receiver, whispering my name. I pull out the large earpiece Eldridge hasn't used in years.
"...Cara? Cara, answer me."
"Yes! Dell?"
There's a silence where I can hear her breathing out, or holding something in.
"You're late."
"Miss me?"
"Don't joke. You missed check-in. Your cuff is still on your obnoxious away message. Do you have any idea the—"
"She's not dead."
"What?"
She asks the question, but her voice is laced with horror, so she must understand.
"My dop. She's alive. I was found in time, but I spent nearly three days in that pod."
"Over three, nearly four," Nik Nik says. "You didn't wake up until the second."
That explains her anger.
"Who was that? Do you have someone in the emergency hatch with you?"
"Of course not. That's against the rules."
"You need to come back. Now."
"I can't. It's a bright day. If I go aboveground I'll get burnt. I'll be home after sunset."
"Right at sunset?"
I look at Nik Nik. He shakes his head.
"After," I say. "A little after."
"People are already upset. The sooner you come back, the better it will be for you."
"I know," I say. "But I can't get back just yet."
"As soon as you can, right?" she says.
"Tell Jean I'm okay."
I hang up before she can object and place the receiver back in the desk. Nik Nik has finally put away the books and is staring at me.
"What?"
"That was Dell?"
"What do you know about Dell?"
"Flowers she likes, clothes she wears, and doesn't. Her favorite foods."
"I'm not sure I've forgiven you for reading my journal," I say, sitting back on the cot.
He sits beside me. "You were dying. I wanted to know who you were first. You don't want to die unknown, do you?"
"I am unknowable. Everyone is."
"Not to God."
"You really have been drinking the lemonade, haven't you?"
He ignores that. "Dell, she missed you."
"She's worried about her asset. She's too classist to really care about someone like me."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know her."
"But isn't she unknowable too?"
That, I ignore. "Is it past high noon yet?"
"Almost," he says. "Did I throw you away? Is that why you don't believe you could matter to her?"
Despite myself, I smile. "No, Nik. You always held on tight enough to bruise."
And what does it mean? That the only time I've had value, the only time I've been treated as precious, was not in the arms of my mother or my upstanding Wiley City boyfriend, but in the claws of a dictator.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 47 |
When we go back outside, the car is just as hot as before, but no hotter, which means we're on the plateau before the downside of the wave. Nik starts to drive back to the church, but I direct him to the riverbed instead.
"We'll have to take another break if we go out that far," he says. "But I know a place."
At first, I don't see her. She's a hidden mound among the ridges at the edge of the bank, gray-brown tarp protecting her from the sun and prying eyes. But when she hears our vehicle, she stands. She thinks this choking motor is opportunity knocking.
"Might need your help if she runs."
"Who is it?" he asks.
"Nelline."
I open the door and pull her inside. She doesn't fight enough, but then, she doesn't know it's me. Once I close the door and she pulls off her tarp—that's when the kicking starts.
I shove her up and over the seat, where she lands in the cargo space at the back of the vehicle.
"You really are exactly the same," Nik Nik says.
"No shit," Nelline says in that god-awful voice.
"Didn't you already know that?" I ask, for once more diplomatic than someone.
"At first, yes. But I talked myself out of it. It's so impossible. And lately I only saw her when her face...when she didn't look much like herself."
I look back at her, but she's not meeting our eyes. She doesn't like hearing about her injuries, her weakness, and I don't blame her. She's uneasy around Nik Nik, like he's a stranger.
"Weren't you two around each other socially?"
If she's anything like me—and I'll admit, she is—she would have sought out the emperor right when things got desperate after her mother's death. Surely they'd been around each other enough in the past nine years to become close?
Nelline is shaking her head. "Adra's orders. If I ever fraternized with little brother or any of his other rivals, I was out of a job."
I can feel her desperation to keep living as if it is my own. I understand it, and wish I didn't. I wonder if Adra knew Nik Nik was the one who took care of her after his bouts of rage.
"That's how he's always seen me, isn't it? Just another rival," Nik Nik says—to himself, I'm guessing, because we can't possibly know. "You were romantically involved for years, but he never even mentioned you to me."
"Romantically involved." She snorts and looks to the right. "Nonsense words. Adra's wife is an image. Seen by everyone. Watched. Asked for favors and done favors in return. We could never be romantically involved if I was to remain inconspicuous."
I wonder if that's what she's been telling herself; it wasn't that she wasn't good enough or that Adra was superficial, just that her job was incompatible with being his in public. I pity her. I may hate that Nik Nik loved me, but I know he did and everyone on Earth 22 knew it too.
She moves to escape at the same second I would, but I see her tense for it the moment before, which is just enough time to grab her tarp and shove it by my feet with my own. She's halfway to the door at the back of the vehicle before she realizes.
"You could jump out, but not sure how inconspicuous you'll be when you're a giant flaming blister," I say.
And she might still do it—I'm sure suicide has never been far from her mind, just as it's never been far from mine—but I hope she doesn't. It's unnerving to have someone who looks so much like me living, but it's also comforting. The universe erases me, but it also remakes me again and again, so there must be something worthwhile in this image.
In the end, she eases away from the door.
Her head is low when she asks, "What do you want me to do?"
The question gets at me, because it doesn't sound like the first time she's asked it. I have never had to kill a person, and I'm not sure that's true of Nelline.
"Nothing. You don't have to do anything. We just need you to prove I'm not you. You can go as soon as we're done."
She doesn't look relieved. She doesn't believe me.
When the car starts to jolt, I see where we'll wait for it to cool down. I feel warm, warmer than a bright day, and I want to thank Nik Nik except he doesn't know he's given me a gift.
We're still a block from the House when the temperature gauge starts shaking in the deep red, but I don't mind. I suit up and get out like a Wiley kid on the first day of school.
I'm still steps away when it hits me how different this House is from the one on my world. The door, twice my height and an extravagance in a place where the fight against the world outside is constant, is peeling. It's a light ash that looks like a wash made from local soil, and when I get close I realize it is. Back home—and even on Earth Zero, I've checked—the door is off-white, sheened in a wash of chemicals that makes it shine gold where light hits. Repairs haven't been done yet here that were done six years ago on my Earth.
I wonder if Nik Nik gives them extra money when he's in power, or if Adra is just sucking them dry. The rule that Houses are tax-exempt has been around since the same rule about churches. I wonder if he stopped honoring one, or both. It's not a smart move. Everyone knows workers do more to keep the peace than runners and bring more civilization than the holy in the Rurals ever could.
Nik Nik knocks on the door with his free hand. In my excitement I've left him to drag Nelline along alone. But I abandon him again the second the door opens, and I see a sliver of Exlee's face.
I push inside and strip off my tarp and goggles, because I'm thinking the sooner I get unencumbered, the sooner I get a hug. But all I get for my urgency is a slap to the face.
Exlee hasn't slapped me since I was a child, but even with that distance I know this hand feels different. There is no love here, no correction, only rage. I don't return it. Nik Nik has taken off his tarp now, sending whispers through the small portion of patrons who are actually paying attention. But Nelline is still under, content to let me take punishments meant for her.
"Filthy spy," Exlee says. "Going to report to your man so runners can drag more of my staff at dawn?"
"Who?" I ask. "Who did the runners take?"
"Mixxie, though I'm sure you already know."
I turn back and yank off Nelline's tarp. Another gasp, this time from Exlee. I've always wondered what it would take to shock the proprietor of the House. Now I know.
Nelline keeps her eyes down, and it takes me a moment to realize she's looking at her hands, not the ground.
"You betrayed Mixxie and you still wear her gloves? What is wrong with you?"
I ask the question and mean it. How could she? The love I had here was always unconditional. I don't know what it would have taken to break it.
"I didn't have a choice," she says.
"I bet you did. I bet it was a choice between betraying them or poverty. And that is still a choice."
She looks up at me, sharp. "You would have done the same."
"No."
But there's just enough doubt in my voice that she smiles.
She flexes her hands. "I bet you threw these away years ago. Or hid them deep so no one would know where you came from."
"Explain," Exlee says, an admission of confusion that is the closest to a concession of weakness I've ever heard from them. Their head is still high, though, so it's more an impatient demand for an explanation.
"I'm not Nelline," I say as the curtain to the main room opens and Pax enters the lobby.
Pax focuses on me like an underfed dog. His hand is in the air before I can say I'm not Nelline; luckily Exlee is there first, towering over Pax in shoes as tall as my forearm is long.
"That's not Lorix's girl," Exlee says, then turns Pax toward Nelline. "That is."
"What? How?"
Exlee shrugs. The confusion only dims Pax's rage for a second, and in the next there is fire in his eyes again.
"Should've known," Pax says, moving toward Nelline. He spits at the ground between them. "Your teeth are rotting, Nellie Girl."
Cara Girl. Pax has called me that a hundred times since I was small, and hearing him say it now drives home that he cared for her just like he cared for me. It makes me hate her all over again.
Pax leads her away to the House's holding area, but she looks back at me over her shoulder. Her eyes are full of rage and injustice. She still doesn't think she's done anything wrong. She probably thinks even betrayal is fair play in the game of survival. Looking at her is like looking at a worse version of myself, but not far off enough for me to feel superior. I could have been her, still could be.
Exlee turns back to me, then looks past me to Nik. "I've heard you've been making moves, Second Son."
Nik Nik manages not to flinch at the name. "What you heard before were rumors. I've only recently decided."
"You should have been on my doorstep the moment you did."
He should have, and my Nik Nik would have. I wonder if this Nik's time in the Rurals has blinded him to the value of Exlee and the House. A war can't be started, fought, or won without them.
"It was an oversight, but I'm here now."
Exlee gives a rare smile, a sure sign the offense is forgiven. "So you are. My office is this way."
Exlee begins to walk to the back of the House, then looks at me. I realize I'm waiting for permission before following, like the girl I used to be. Somehow, Exlee understands and nods.
That's not Lorix's girl.
But I am, and I always will be.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 48 |
In Exlee's office, Nik Nik suffers through an interrogation about what kind of ruler he would be and why the providers should show up at his meeting. It may not have been planned, but it's good we came. News spreads from the House faster than a yell, and before the meeting even starts everyone will be talking about Nelline's doppelgänger, and wondering who she is. They might just believe Esther when she tells them.
I, still half listening, wander around the office, touching the same shelves I touched as a child but that I haven't seen since I was a teenager.
We didn't live on-site often. I don't know if Exlee had a rule about Mom staying here while she was bingeing, or if Mom was too ashamed to let her friends see her like that, but generally she stayed in the House when she was doing well, and moved to the concrete units when she wasn't. And when she wasn't, when she tried to see clients on her own without the protection of the other workers behind her, things got bad. In worlds where clients forgot their place and killed her—or me, or both—it was always away from here. I've died all over the desert, but never in the House. The House has always been a sanctuary for me.
Exlee's office was a constant for me. Even when we lived on the edges, I was allowed to pass time here during the day while I waited for my mom to be free. I imagine it's like having a grandparent's house, if there were any of those around. The generation before my mother's didn't fare well; anyone over a certain age was forced to fight and patrol during the wars. Those who survived the violence had a short life-span thanks to food, water, and whole areas of air we didn't yet know had become toxic. That is the quagmire that made Nik Senior. That is the mix of fear and blood and death that made having a warlord for an emperor attractive. There hasn't been another civil war since him, but there hasn't been much of anything else either.
I watch the stages through the window. I don't know the man on the left stage, or the enby dancing center, but the woman on the right is familiar. Her name used to be Helene X, but we teased her about it so much I'm sure by now she's changed it. We all knew she'd been born in the Wiles, but there was no need to advertise it with a name like that. I never understood how a Wiley girl got to Ash. It couldn't be simple poverty—they have systems for that—and whenever I asked her about it she seemed more scared than desperate. When my mother died, Helene gave me a useless little pin, dark and wrinkled like a sea creature. Only after I came to Wiley City did I see my first real carnation and learn people there called them the flower of mothers. The black carnation was appropriate, and I wish I still had it.
Staring at Helene X like this without paying is stealing, so I move back to the wall of bookshelves. On a small silk cloth is a glass orb. I pick it up and hold it loosely in my palms so the light hitting it reflects stars onto my hands. I am holding the universe. I am Nyame.
"Nelline used to do that too," Exlee says. "She'd hold it just like that when she was a girl."
So did I, of course. We are cut from the very same cloth, but I have to believe I would never betray them. I have to believe there are limits to my ambition...but then I think about Starla. I called her friend, and sent her away with a basket full of apples and not one drop of remorse.
I put the orb back. I haven't actually been given permission to touch it here.
"Sorry," I say.
Exlee places a hand, painted gold up to the wrists, over the glass orb, caging it in black nails each as long as a pinky.
"You're better kept than she is."
"I live in the Wiles."
"Oh? The runners didn't mention a day-tripper."
"I...came round the back."
Exlee raises an eyebrow that means another question is coming, but Nik Nik intervenes.
"We need to be going. I hope to see you all tonight," he says.
Exlee ignores him and turns back to me. "Do you think he's worthy of being emperor? Or are we buying trouble for nothing?"
I look down at my cuff. "I don't know yet. But I'll know by tonight. If you come, I'll tell you the truth."
The sound Exlee makes isn't commitment, but it isn't dismissal, so I take that as a good sign.
When we get to the front of the House, Nelline has her hands tied behind her back and a fresh stinging slap on her cheek. She's looking at me like it's all my fault. She earned that mark in the shape of someone's—I'm guessing Pax, since he and Mixxie were so close—palm, but I feel it on my own skin. We cover her with a tarp before we go out into the light, but I'm afraid it will slide off and she won't be able to cover herself, so I spend the walk back to the car hovering close to her.
When we get back into the vehicle I look her over for new burns. There are a few hot-pink patches, unavoidable on a day like this, but I feel guilty anyway. It doesn't feel like she's a version of me at all. It feels like she's a sister, or a daughter, or a mother. Someone I was supposed to take care of and failed.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 49 |
I thought the House would fill me up, but it's just left me raw. My heart hurts, and for the first time I'm actually feeling the loss of 22, my first Earth. I did keep Mixxie's gloves, and Helene X's pin. I preserved every gift and lesson the workers ever gave me. But I didn't have them with me when I came over. I might have had the gloves, but everything I was wearing became an offering to Caramenta's corpse. I won't find them in any keepsake boxes in my apartment on Earth Zero, because Caramenta's mother never died, and so there were no grief offerings to receive.
Coming to this world has derailed me. How long would I have been content to move forward, never thinking about the past? Forever, probably, as long as there was one more goal in front of me, one more pull, one more test, one more promotion.
"You look upset," Nik Nik says in a quiet pause before the last leg of our trip.
"I'm fine. Tired."
Even if I wanted to talk to him—and I do, I do—I would never give Nelline the satisfaction of hearing me say I don't know who I am anymore, I don't know who I have been.
When we get back to the church, I commandeer Daniel's office. I force myself not to look over my shoulder when Mr. Cheeks takes Nelline away. Loud noises come from deep within the building—shelterless wastelanders hiding from the heat of the day, just as my stepfather promised at the dedication.
I hit the projection function on my cuff and generate a list based on worlds whose census list Nik Nik as emperor. I stare at the two hundred or so numbers. I wait for the nervousness, the defeating apprehension that has come during every practice test. It never arrives. I do the initial comparison in half the time I would be given on the test. I double-check my data, but I didn't make a mistake.
The results are good news for the revolution. Ashtown in Earth 175 has a higher death rate and shorter life expectancy than 90 percent of the worlds where Nik Nik rules, and those where it is close are so highly numbered there might be environmental factors contributing to the mortality rate. I'm relieved, but not surprised. I'd already decided that if it weren't that way, if Adra was all bark and no bite and people were just as well off, I'd duck out into the desert and leave Nik Nik high and dry. But Adra is killing people who get to live almost everywhere else.
Once I review the primary figures, I go after little things. Ashtown here exports fewer goods to the Wiles. They seem to make less of everything, and they import more. They are operating at a staggering deficit, fabric and produce bought in bulk by the emperor from Wiley.
But why? He couldn't hope to sell it back to his people for profit, since most don't make enough in actual currency to buy their weekly expenses. Nearly half of the House's clients pay in barter—favors, grown food, weatherproofing materials, any kind of metal.
I call out, hoping for Esther, but Nik Nik comes in.
"Yes?"
"Those eight or so buildings a mile from here? Is that still an interior farm?"
Nik Nik shakes his head. "You mean Hangars Row? That's the runners' machine shop, and Adra's base in the Rurals."
"Why does the emperor have a base in the Rurals?"
"I don't know. I've never seen it. But he has a base in the deep wastes too."
"What does he charge for the food he buys from Wiley?"
"Three days' wages will get you a week's ration for those who can swing it. Otherwise, he'll take metal. He takes metal for almost anything."
"And no one grows their own?"
"Not openly. He banned individual farming two years ago. He says it's dangerous. But some of the poorer families never stopped. They grow aboveground, and they're just as healthy as the rest of us."
I turn back to my screen. "He should be buying synthetic soil from Wiley City. Not whole produce."
But the emperor wants his people dependent on him for food. Why? So he can hoard their scraps of iron?
Nik Nik leaves me in peace. I bring back the master list of worlds. I'm missing something, but I can't see it. I scroll through screen after screen, barely scanning the ruler histories, bothered by the problem of Adra's stockpiled metal.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 50 |
"Miss me, kitten?" Nelline says, biting at the rough skin on her lip. Her hands are chained to a cot. Even from here I can see the straps cutting into her wrists. I picture Mixxie's face, trying to hate this version of myself, but I can't. I just feel sad, like I've failed somehow.
I step forward. "I think it's a trick of the brain," I say. "The way I can't make myself hate you even though you're a bloodrat."
She hisses at the insult but stops short of denying it. She sold people out to runners. There is no worse thing a person can be in Ashtown.
"It doesn't go both ways, if that's what you're thinking," she says. "What do you want?"
"Help." She snorts, but I continue anyway. "I'm missing something. I can't see it, but you know this world better than I do. And you know everything about Adra."
She sits a little taller under the compliment, but keeps her face disinterested.
"And I should help you why?"
"Because you'll want to be in Nik Nik's favor when he comes out on top."
She shrugs. "The idea of being in the pocket of an emperor lost its appeal when the current one tried to kill me."
I take a risk. I sit beside her.
"Do you know why I have his name on my back?"
"You told Adra—"
"That was a lie. No one gets the emperor's name tattooed because he's good at his job. Part of his job is letting Ashtowners hate and blame him for our lives. No, I got it because I did the exact same thing you did. I failed at being a sex provider, so I weaseled my way into being the emperor's kept woman. I thought being with him was the worst thing that could happen to me...but now I've met Adra."
"He didn't beat you for getting the tattoo? For letting everyone know?" The surprise in her question makes her sound young, and the hope in it makes me feel old.
"No. Nik Nik on my world was violent too. He was quick with a backhand. He'd throw something when he was mad, choke me when I said the wrong thing. But he was more like a child than a tyrant."
She sneers at me. "You loved him," she says, like I can't be trusted.
"I didn't," I say, and this time I'm sure it's true. "This Nik Nik seems to be better in every way than mine. But I don't really know him, so that could be a lie. I'm telling you that even if he's no better than the man I know, it's still a better pocket to be in than Adra's."
She's staring down at the concrete floor. The lights overhead make a dull shine between her feet. She takes her time, but eventually she looks up.
"What do you think you're missing?"
"I don't understand the way Adra does business. In most worlds there's an interior farm in Hangars Row, so they don't have to buy produce from Wiley City. Some of the other buildings are used for textiles or pottery that get sold back. It's like this Ashtown doesn't make anything themselves."
"You're right. You are missing something. Adra is paranoid. He's sworn for years that men in black suits are trying to kill him, but no one else has ever seen them."
"Is he using?" I ask, though he'd be the first emperor that I know of with the taste.
"Obviously. Though whatever he's taking is so pure he never has any of the side effects. It's definitely not what he distributes to the masses."
"What does this have to do with Hangars Row?"
"Because his paranoia inspired him. Hangars Row is a weapons stockpile. Adra reinvented the gun."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 51 |
I cannot, at first, process what she's saying. Guns haven't existed in my lifetime. But I remember when I was a girl, people saying that if runners had to use guns instead of vehicles, they would do far worse than killing one or two people each.
There has never been weapons manufacturing in Ashtown, but it was Nik Senior who destroyed all available weapons brought from across the desert and the ocean beyond. He made the law that metal could be used only in domestic or industrial settings—partially a warlord's attempt to ease the fears of his new people, and partially to disarm any would-be usurpers. Runners had to make weapons out of vehicles, and knives had to be useful for kitchen work or tanning even if you'd only intended them for murder. Even the emperor would learn to kill with chemical-filled rings and teeth when denied the easy availability of an obvious weapon. An art he passed on to both his sons.
Wiley City's stunners are what some think of as guns now, but the city's been without guns even longer than we have, so they aren't really. They are plastic and shoot a pulse that temporarily paralyzes but won't kill. Nik Senior's edict didn't stop killing, but now people have to be in contact with their victims, have to feel their deaths.
In the wake of Nelline's revelation I try to imagine what my childhood would have been like if Nik Senior's men were armed. How I would feel if the deaths were quieter, quicker, but more common. I wonder if you feel it less, with guns. If so many people are killed with so little effort, is it easier to pretend they aren't lives? That everything is fine? It's different, I imagine, from seeing flattened forms like blood ghosts on the sand or hearing the screams in the streets during the parade. No, killing should take longer than a heartbeat. Murder should be unignorable, always.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 52 |
The church isn't nearly as packed as it was at the dedication, but there's enough nervous energy that it might as well be. Esther's invited representatives from different groups, rather than whole populations, so what stands before me is a handful of the most powerful people in the wastes. Most I don't recognize, but some hold power on every Earth I've ever been to.
Standing tallest, of course, is Exlee, who's sporting a lush beard that appeared so suddenly it supports the theory that their body hair is as synthetic as their breasts. Beside them is Tatik. She used to be a runner for Senior back in the day, but now she's the mistress of the deep wastes. She watches over those no one else cares about, and brings reports to the emperor when they have something they need or something to give. At least, that's what she did on 22. I don't know if Adra uses her here, where he's paranoid enough to have a base even in the vastness beyond the river. Under Nik Nik's reign Tatik is still called mister, even though she gave up the post, and she outranks everyone but him. This version is thinner than she should be, but she holds her head just as high.
Viet's presence is a surprise, though I guess it shouldn't be. As a deathkeeper, he's supposed to be neutral in all things political, his calling transcending anything as petty as politics. But he does preside over life and death, so I suppose this concerns him too.
Daniel, Esther, and Nik Nik round out the powerful people I recognize. A few of the strangers are runners, and I can read from their marks that they're important. Esther is holy, but she's not trusting or naïve, so they must have shown their loyalty to her some way. Or maybe they're just loyal to Mr. Cheeks. He spots me and starts walking over.
"You're late," he says.
"A bit." Nik Nik wanted me here early, but I'd spent too long trying to disprove my fears...only to confirm them. "What are they fighting about?"
Mr. Cheeks shrugs. "You, I suppose. Or Adra. You're both pretty sizable pains in the ass."
Nik Nik is addressing the group, standing tall and calm. He's changed clothes since we got back. His tunic is black, high-collared, with gold embroidery. It's a little flash on the humble garment that marries him to the Nik Nik I used to know. He handles himself well, and I spend a little time watching him listen and respond to the concerns of people who are not yet his. I wait for rage, the indignation he always showed when people dared question him, but this Nik Nik is different from mine. He's only just about to taste the power that would give him that kind of arrogance.
That is, if I don't ruin his chances. If I don't tell the whole truth.
"I would like you to trust me..." he says, answering some comment I didn't hear. "But I don't require it. I only require that you use common sense to know we can't go on like this."
"If you'd lived through the last civil wars, you'd know it can always get worse," says Tatik, who was Senior's right hand when he was nothing more than the son of a warlord.
She's not wrong.
Eventually Esther sees me, and my time as spectator is over. "Here, here she is."
The others turn to me, and their faces tell me everything. The ones who think I'm a stranger just distrust me. The ones who think I'm Nelline and know her, hate me. Judging by her pursed mouth and tightly crossed arms, Tatik is in the latter camp. But Viet only squints, trying to picture me as a baby so he can recall my name.
Tatik spits at my feet as I approach. "If you'd told me this was your source, I wouldn't have wasted the gas to get here."
She starts to walk off but then Exlee snaps open a massive black fan and the sound stops her dead.
"Hang around, General. The Second Son has a trick up his sleeve."
This stalls Tatik long enough for Mr. Cheeks to come back with Nelline. He drags her out and pushes her next to me. Her hands are tied. They can't think she's a threat right now, which means the restraints are just to shame her. It's not working. Her chin is high and she's smiling. It's a cruel one, and I'm glad I rarely smile if that's what I look like doing it. We share a look, she gives me a slight nod, and I know that if I don't mention Adra's advantage, neither will she.
"We've all heard about the visitors," Esther says. "Tatik, your domain has the most sightings of them all. That's what she is. She's Nelline from another world."
"Or the bitch has a twin," Tatik says.
"No." This, finally, from Viet. "Lorix delivered only one."
He should know. A child hasn't been born in Ash without his hands on it since his mother died.
"Then it's a coincidence! You can't expect me to believe..." She hesitates, her eyes landing first on Nelline and then darting to me. Eventually she shakes her head. "You can't expect me to believe this."
Tatik is the linchpin. If I can get her to believe me, the runners will follow. It can't be that hard. She was so connected with Nik Nik, I must have enough of her secrets to leverage.
"Does he still call you Jadda, when no one else can hear?"
She looks at Nik Nik, half-amused and half-irritated. "He calls me Jadda where everyone can hear, the stupid boy. Always has."
Shit. My Nik Nik hid his affection like a blight. All of the emperor's secrets I held on 22 are poor currency in a place where Nik Nik doesn't deal in shadows. There's only one thing...I take a second, hoping I don't look too nervous while I do the math. Nik Senior died when Nik Nik was seven here. The empress hadn't been dead long. Was that enough time?
"Your child, she was a girl, he made you"—I stop short of saying kill her, given what I now know happened to Adra—"send her to the city."
There is a moment of silence, where the whole room watches us. At first, Tatik's face doesn't change. Then it softens.
"No," she says. "My daughter was stillborn."
I was wrong. Nik Senior didn't live long enough here to father the child that only Nik Nik suspected was born in my Ashtown. I hear Esther's disappointed sigh behind me, but before I can deflate too much Tatik continues.
"But if he'd lived longer, I would have had another," she says. "And the plan was always to send her to the city."
"Her? How did you know it'd be a girl?"
"Girls are all my family makes." Now, she smiles. "Where you're from, we had a daughter survive? Did it work? Her integration into the city?"
I know what I'm not going to tell her. I'm not going to tell her the theory of the birth was only corroborated by Tatik's depression and withdrawal from the world. I'm not going to tell her that her child and any evidence of it disappeared so thoroughly, we talked about it as another floating corpse in the bog. She was so old by that point even that girl had been a miracle. Everyone knew she'd never have another.
I say, "She never came back to Ashtown," because as far as I know that's true and it's the only thing any Ash parent wants to hear.
I thought I was protecting her, but her face goes hard enough for me to know I've somehow told her the whole truth.
"I'm not saying I believe you, but I'm listening," Tatik says.
Esther speaks excitedly, taking advantage of the momentum. "The strangers don't just come here. She's been to many worlds, and learned from them."
"Always a spy, then?" Exlee asks, eyebrow raised in a perfect waxed arch.
"Not always," I say, because Esther's going pink from the interruptions and I'm probably the only one who knows she's got a temper like a solar flare. "In some worlds I'm a provider. Some worlds a grower in the Rurals. In most that I know about, I'm dead."
I hadn't thought about it being the same—my traversing and Nelline's spying—and I don't like to think the reason we've both made it this far is that neither of us is bothered by stealing the facts of other people's lives to secure our own. I activate the projector on my cuff.
"These are the mortality rates where Nik Nik rules." I show them a graph that has an average of the worlds I've analyzed. I overlay it with another. "And this is here. You're dying sooner and more often than you need to. Your quality of life is worse. On Earth Zero you grow your own food. You sell excess back to Wiley. Here, you only spend."
I continue, highlighting other basic criteria that might matter to them. I'm not sure if they believe I am who I say I am, or if they are even following the numbers being projected in light against the wall, but they stay quiet.
Finally, I get to the more personal section.
"These are just a handful of people who are alive, right now, in ninety percent of the worlds where Nik Nik rules, but who are gone here."
I hit a button on my cuff and turn the wall into a sea of faces. Mixxie is slightly larger, near the center. It's cheap, manipulative propaganda, but it's true.
Esther lets them marinate for a bit. She looks no less serene and ethereal than before, but I recognize her ruthlessness.
"You must see—"
"But there is a risk," I say, turning off the wall of the dead. A new graph appears; it's a steady line with a sharp spike settling eventually at a lower, stable point.
Nik Nik studies the graph with narrowed eyes, but Esther grabs my arm.
"What is that? What are you doing?"
When I answer, I speak to Nik. "It's the average casualty rate for worlds where you take power from your brother. It's the cost. Tatik is right. It always gets worse before it gets better."
"How?" he says. "He doesn't have enough loyal runners to enact this kind of damage."
"No. He has guns."
The news hits the others like water on wasps.
"He wouldn't dare," Tatik says. "That was his father's edict."
"He would and has," Nelline says, looking casually amused at their fear.
Viet shakes his head. "I honor life. That's all I do. I cannot be party to anything that would cause such loss."
"The change in power makes things better, there is no doubting that," I say. "How he's running things is wrong."
They're not listening. Exlee is waving their black fan, watching as Nik Nik tries to salvage the meeting. I'm guessing they knew about the guns, or at least suspected. Nothing happens in the wastelands without the House being aware. Eventually, Exlee gives a throat-clearing mmhmm. It isn't loud, but it silences the others.
They address Nik Nik and Esther. "Can you think of any way to mitigate this damage? A transfer of power without the casualties of war?"
Esther looks confused, then lowers her head. Of course she can't, because she's a believer. Believers would never consider assassination, and that's the answer Exlee's looking for.
Nik Nik is looking at his hand like that long-ago shard of metal is there again, like he's being asked the same question he was that day. Eventually he shakes his head.
"No," he says. "I can't."
I close my eyes. Nik Nik knows the right answer, but he can't do it. And that's why they're all going to die, bloodily and completely. Adra's known how to murder his way to power since he was a sickly teen. Cruelty is a science he learned early and well, just like all the others. It hits me then that Adra is smarter than his brother. Colder, worse, but smarter. Which means he must have seen this coup coming.
Exlee is finished, so the arguing resumes. It's loud, but beneath the din I still hear it. I hear it in my spine, the way a praying mantis hears a bat's shriek, the way any prey can always hear its predator: the roar of a dozen motors, far away, but getting closer.
It's a parade of runners, and it's too late to escape.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 53 |
"The doors! get away from the doors!"
Nik Nik cries out his warning while I'm still speechless. But of course, he's lived with the parade every day, and I haven't heard them in over a decade.
"We don't run in the Rurals," says one of the runners, but no one responds.
"Are you still sheltering my people here?" Tatik asks.
Daniel nods. "They were waiting out the bright day."
It's all she needs to hear. Rather than waiting to see if an exit emerges, she disappears to the back of the church. She'll get the deepwasters out, or die trying.
An engine revs in place, then squeals out, and a moment later the double doors splinter inward. The vehicle that skids into the church has four wheels as high as my hips. He doesn't stop accelerating until he's halfway into the room. I jump onto the stage, but he's not aiming for me yet. He slides sideways and Daniel disappears under his massive wheels.
Esther screams and lunges toward him, but Mr. Cheeks is already pulling her back, away from the newly broken-open entrance. He must know a rear exit or a bribable runner. I should follow, but I can't move. It's the first runner death I've seen since Nik Senior's funeral, but the smell of gasoline and blood takes me instantly back. I want to go to my knees. I want to scream.
Three more runners ride into the church, these on the two-wheelers whose speed ensures they match the body counts of the larger models despite being half their size. I see the wide, deep treads of their wheels, like teeth on a creature from the deep wastes, and I can feel those marks across my spine. How many times? How many times have I died with my back to a runner? One less, I decide. Not this time.
The men dismount and begin splashing gasoline on the walls. They each have a second canister on their bikes, and I know it is acid. They'll leave it in their wake, so that anyone who tries to run through the front door will be hobbled before they can reach it. They must already be at the rear of the building and expect those seeking shelter to come this way.
Exlee hasn't moved. They just sit perched on the edge of the stage like they're about to sing, casually flicking that large, feathered fan like a bored god. When I walk past, they raise an eyebrow, then turn to watch my progress.
Finally, Exlee stands. "Who could use a little favor with the House?"
Quickly, one of the two motorcycles pulls up and Exlee sits on the back, finger-waving goodbye as the runner rides them both to safety. I hadn't thought they would have as much pull in this world with Adra trying to choke the workers out, but apparently even with an ash-washed door there is nothing so valuable in the desert as a safe, warm place where someone will touch you exactly how you want.
I'm not looking for anything safe or warm. I'm looking for Adra. I want him to have to kill me with his own hands.
I walk forward until I am face-to-face with the line of runners keeping us inside. They are blocking the door, waiting for their cue. We started the meeting when the sun was already half-set, but night never comes slower than on a bright day, and past the broken doors the sky is still the bright blue of chemicals burning.
From outside comes a hot-wind hiss that feathers the hair from my face. It's as good as a slap, the universe asking why I'm walking toward my killers. It's Nyame leaning in, tilting her head, trying to understand why I'm choosing to leave life this way. I expect any one of them to rev forward and claim my life as their point, but they don't. Which means someone with authority is watching.
"You out there Adra? You hiding from me?"
I hear the rustle of his long coat before I see him, but eventually Adra enters the square of horizon I can see over the runners' shoulders.
He tsks his tongue against his teeth. "Nelline, Nelline, Nelline."
"Wrong. Your girl's back there."
He doesn't believe me. There's merriment in his eyes, amusement at my little game, until he looks past me. I'm not sure how she got out of her cuffs—I'm guessing she could have done it anytime—but I feel her at my back even before his eyes go wide. I look over my shoulder, and she blows a mocking kiss at him as she steps forward. I look back at Adra, hoping that Nelline will do the smart thing, the survivor thing, and use my distraction as a way to escape.
Adra looks back at me, afraid this time. Finally.
He's dressed in the full regalia of a wasteland emperor: rings on every finger that shine only half as well as they cut, huge black boots recklessly tipped in silver, black hide pants, and a wide-sleeved coat of gold and black that drags a few feet behind him. I've seen Nik Nik in that coat, but for ceremonies only. He always said it made it seem like he wasn't prepared to fight. But Adra has six runners between him and me, so I doubt he's expecting to have to throw a punch.
"Who are you?" he says, stepping forward in a jingle of metal.
In addition to the rows designating his line of succession, he's wrapped the ends of his braids in silver, another tradition Nik Nik hated. I wanted him to dip his braids. I can still hear his response: Telegraph my location? Walk around like a fucking wind chime?
"Your brother told you who I was. I'm a visitor."
"The stories aren't real. People can't just come..."
"From other worlds?" I say. "Don't act surprised, Adra. I know you. You figured out the mysteries of the multiverse when you were still a teenager."
"When I was a teenager, I was ruling Ashtown," he says, pride mostly, but a little regret.
Someone comes up behind me. Someone else facing death while the smart people take their chances hiding or finding a hidden exit. They know they're wasting their time. They know a runner never enters a building unless the others have surrounded it. But they want out before the building is razed, and I can't blame them for that. Runners sometimes miss, but fire never does.
"Tatik is in there. You can't do this," Nik Nik says. "She's an elder."
"A traitor has no age."
Nik Nik flinches. Killing Tatik isn't technically the same as killing their own mother, but it's not different in any way that matters.
"She wasn't participating in anything. This was my doing alone."
Adra's glare is potent as he looks at his brother. "Oh? My missing runner had nothing to do with this? My missing wife? The Ruralites whose house you use?" He shakes his head. "Don't worry. You will pay, but so will they all."
Nik Nik swallows. "You'll leave us here? To die in the fire?"
Adra tilts his head. "Oh, you'd like that. Leave you here to disappear into one of your hidden passages? Or to die and burn only to have your followers lie about it, turn you into a myth to use against me? No, I'll kill you myself."
He nods to the runner at his left, and the man punches Nik Nik in the stomach. The blow makes a sound that's both wet and hard and Nik Nik doubles over, only to have the same runner knee him in the face. This should make me happy, seeing the man who towered over me brought low, seeing his mouth go red for every time he fed me my own blood. But it doesn't. It doesn't make me feel better, and I'm not sure if it's because I know this is not my Nik Nik or if this kind of revenge never really heals.
"Thought you said you'd do it yourself," Nik Nik says, spitting. "Are your eyes watering for me, brother?"
All our eyes are watering. We're still in the mouth of the building, and the mixture of gasoline and smoke is overwhelming. But the comment has the effect Nik Nik wants, and Adra, who's been covering his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his robe, nods toward the door.
"Come on," he says.
As we walk, Nik Nik reaches over and touches my necklace. I get the hint. Outside means escape, and he must have remembered that before he manipulated Adra into it. He's telling me to teleport. I should have thought of it first. I look over my shoulder. Esther and Mr. Cheeks hopefully knew another way out. I don't see Nelline, but I feel watched, so she's not far. The only person I'll really be leaving to die is Nik Nik, and it's not like he's never done the same to me.
I press my collar to warm it up.
Out from the overhang of the burning church we're greeted by the long stretch of empty desert. Somewhere, in the darkness outside visual range, are the river and Ashtown and the concrete slums that brought me up. All I need to do is leave, and I won't lose a piece of myself here. But if I leave everyone in this mess, am I still myself? Or am I Nelline? She could tell herself she didn't do anything wrong, just passed on information, just survived. Will I be sitting in my apartment, telling myself all I did was go home? All I did was survive and there's nothing more important than that?
Adra grabs Nik Nik by the hair, biting at his throat and tearing open a gash far clumsier than the thin slices Nik Nik and his father used for murder. He's bringing up his hand, loaded with the poison rings he inherited, when I reach out and put a hand on his wrist.
"Do you want to see it?"
Adra goes stiff. "See what?"
"You know what. The dark between stars. When you were a boy you wondered what it would be like to walk inside it. I can show you. It won't take long."
His mouth twitches, revealing a black incisor turned brown from its new-blood sheen.
"Let me guess, all I have to do is spare him?"
"No. You have to make him an example. You're too insecure to let him live. But let it wait until you come back. He means something to me on another Earth, and I don't want to watch him die."
"You think I care about your other worlds?"
"You do. I know you do. I know you used to use rocks as models of the planets and stars, used to look up at night and know that all that darkness couldn't just be absence. If you want to see what lingers there, this is your last chance. I can slip away with or without you, and my kind won't be coming back around here for a long time."
I'm counting on at least some of what Adam Bosch said about his childhood being true. Only now am I realizing that his stories of sitting surrounded by rocks he called planets were not the stories of a boy pretending to be an astronaut. It was a boy pretending to be a god.
Adra licks his lips. He is an impenetrable emperor, wearing his embroidered jacket like an ermine robe and his gilded braids like a crown. But what flickers in his eyes when he looks at me is the wonder of a child. The boyish curiosity that has survived all his cruelties, because it existed before he murdered his father, before he heard the wet screams of his people under spinning tires.
"Show me."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 54 |
I haven't done the math of how many hours have passed since I last spoke to her, but I'm expecting someone from the night shift when she answers.
"You had better be calling for a pull."
"I am. My collar is broken, so it's not clasping. I need a proximity retrieval."
"How wide?"
I look at Adra. "Four-feet radius?"
"There's too much lingering interference."
"I told you it was a bright day."
"Best I can do is a three."
"That'll work."
"Two minutes."
She goes quiet, and I picture her leaning forward as she perfects my frequency. I'm so newly stitched together, and I've stayed here so long, the journey back will be a rough one. Not, however, as rough as it will be for Adra.
I walk up to Nik Nik. His hand is pressed against the wound in his throat, but he's more shocked than scared. He must not have thought it would come to this, between him and his big brother. He must still love him. I take some sealing bandages from my vest and hand them over.
Adra is talking to one of his men, so I lean forward and whisper, "When you take power, promise me you'll melt them down. Resist the temptation to keep them."
He nods, though he still must not expect to survive this. "May your life be long and easy."
It's a common blessing out here, but I've never dissected it before. Why are we, who are so unhappy, fixated on long lives? What is the point? An easy life isn't a blessing. Easy doesn't mean happy. Alive doesn't mean anything at all. Sometimes the path to an easy life makes you miserable. The only person I've ever heard value happiness is the former empress. She named her second son happy, hoping it would be true. She knew the cost of an easy life, and the uselessness of a long one. She had both. She wished neither for her child, only that he at some point be happy. Was he? Was anyone?
I step close to Nik Nik and inhale deeply. The scent of him, of the skin at the junction of his shoulder and neck, is instantly familiar. I never want to stop smelling it. I never want to smell it again. I take my fill, because it will be the last time.
When I step back, he's staring at my mouth. He looks disappointed as I put more distance between us.
"Goodbye, Yerjanik." Saying it eases an old ache in my chest, like I'd always meant to do this, to look him in the eye and tell him I was leaving.
"Goodbye..." He stops; his eyebrows furrow, then relax. "Caralee."
I haven't heard him say my name in so long that it uncoils me a little, and I'm not mad he read my journal anymore. The Nik Nik I knew before had a hold on me. Maybe I've never noticed until coming here, but my fear and ambition are both rooted in my time with him. I left, but never really stopped carrying him at my back. Knowing this Nik Nik has freed me. I always thought I'd have to kill him to feel free, but hearing him say my name kindly is the balm that I thought only seeing his blood would be. Maybe it just takes this, glimpsing him as a different person who is whole and undamaged and who would never have hurt me. My Nik Nik was not a supernatural monster, not an inescapable god. He was just a flawed person who could and should have been better. Just a pitiable boy who cut his brother once, and became so lost he could never find his way back. Seeing this version is like seeing a wish I never thought to make for him come true. It would never have been possible for me to forgive myself for staying with him so long, but it seems possible now.
It's close to the two-minute mark, so I move back to Adra. "You'll need to stand close to me. Within three feet."
He could have told his men to kill Nik Nik the moment we've gone, but I'm hoping he wants to do it himself. How else will he ever again taste the kind of power he felt when he killed his father?
Adra steps up to me and plants his hands on my hips just to do it, but I barely feel his touch beneath the familiar tingle of Dell calling me home. Adra gasps, feeling the electricity too. Maybe stronger, maybe it already hurts a little.
I see the flash of movement from the corner of my eye, just before we're about to disappear. She's bided her time, but her goal has never changed. She wants out of Ash, and she'll take my life to do it. Nelline charges us, pushing her way into the three-foot perimeter.
"No!"
But it's too late. We disappear.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 55 |
I am the first to enter the space between worlds, because I was at the center of the pull. It feels familiar like a recurring dream is familiar—something that is not real, but you've been there before just the same. The handbooks explain that anything unbelievable you see is a hallucination, images pulled from the subconscious to explain the sensations and absolute void of dead space. But the searching, prodding whisper feels real. I tense, remembering how quickly that muzzle turned to teeth last time. But there is no anger, no retribution. Nyame passes me easily.
It's Adra's turn, so I face him. I know it will be ugly, but it is my ugliness, so I watch. In the very back of my mind I was afraid he was just as strong and determined as I was. I was afraid he would somehow live and push through, broken but alive.
I needn't have worried.
I can almost see the dark shadow of Nyame's hand as she wraps it around the front of him like a child picking up a doll. There is no indecision, no trying to make him fit like there was with me. In a flick of motion, she lifts him, presses her thumb to his sternum, and breaks him in half. She squeezes the new shape of him together, and I am grateful this dark space is silent, because I never want to know what it sounds like for shoulder blades to fuse to knees, ribs to thighs. After he is bent he is pulled, stretched apart from the center out until bone and joints give and sinew and muscles are extended like red and black taffy somehow catching shine in this place with so little light.
The wet, lumpy horror that once was Adranik, brother of Yerjanik, son of emperor and empress, is flicked back into the void. He will reappear in the place we were standing immediately, no time passing between our exit and his reentry, and the people who know him will try to understand how such utter and wanton destruction could happen in the blink of an eye, how an entire body could be undone between one breath and the next. If the runners live up to their reputation of self-preservation, they'll abandon their loyalties and choose the brother who now has the upper hand. I have accomplished what Nik Nik could not envision: a peaceful transfer of power, bought with the blood of only one.
Nelline drifts beside me like a waiting ghost. Her eyes are wide and shining, but her mouth is set in a line. She knows. She saw Adra's death and she understands. She's reached too far this time, and it's the end.
Adra's death came first, because Adam Bosch is firmly rooted in Earth Zero, so there was no decision for Nyame, or the forces we give her name, to make. But once the pressure at my back lessened and she accepted me on my way to Earth Zero, it was over for Nelline. We can't both make it, and she's made her choice.
Time moves differently here, or it doesn't move at all. So maybe Adra's death was instantaneous, and my mind slowed it down to process. Maybe Nelline is already dead, too, but I still wish I could move, take her hands, smooth her hair down and tell her everything will be okay, the way I hope someone will do for me when my time comes. But I am caught in the tide of traversing, and I can't break out to move toward her.
I don't want to see her torn apart like Adra, but I bought this death too. I opened the door to every escape she'd ever wanted, we'd ever wanted, and I can't be surprised that she tried to walk through it just like I did.
I expect Nyame's disembodied hand, a shadowy force that our scientists have told me again and again is just pressure, a swath of dark energy meeting particles that do not belong. Instead, I see myself come up behind her, just like I wanted to. No, not like me. Younger, untouched, a version of myself that probably has the voice of a nightbird.
Caramenta.
I try to say her name, but I can only make the shape of it. She wraps her arms around Nelline. Nelline feels it. I don't know if she sees that the pressure is coming from one of us, but she doesn't look so scared anymore. Caramenta whispers in Nelline's ear, though I know sound doesn't travel here, and begins to squeeze. She hugs her tighter and tighter, until Nelline's mouth and eyes open wide and stay that way. Finally, there's a quick snap, and Caramenta's arms sink further into Nelline's body than ribs would allow. It's still a murder, but she carries her toward me like a child, delivering her to my feet with the delicate care of a sister.
Caramenta fades into the dark. I alone survive...again. Nyame lifts me toward my destination, aided by whatever sound Dell plays to please her. She fingers at the newly healed seams along my ribs until a few sing apart. It hurts, but it's not fatal and I never stop moving forward. I'm not dying, not yet.
The break of Earth Zero accepts me, and suddenly the feeling of being nowhere gives way to the feeling of being home. The darkness just feels like walls blocking out light, not the deep black of a place where direct light doesn't exist.
I'm in the hatch. I made it. And there, at my feet, eyes wide and body collapsed in, is Nelline. I thought she'd be sent back like Adra. But maybe my being in the space between rather than on Earth Zero lets her stay. Or maybe Nyame respects determination.
I crouch. The pain in my side and chest flares, but not enough to keep me from touching Nelline.
"You made it," I say. "You did it."
I know it's too late, but if she can hear me I want her to know she's not in Ash anymore. Whatever she was running from, she succeeded. She's in Wiley City, which is all we've ever wanted. She's free.
I can't crouch anymore so I roll carefully onto my back. Amid the pain of the rough trip, I feel the ball in my chest like a rock being shimmied in. A new loss, a little more weight to carry along. I welcome Nelline's death, and the everlasting memory of her.
I don't know how long I lie there before the hatch opens, an angry creak that lets in too much light. My fingers are entwined with Nelline's, but I don't know when that happened.
Dell crouches before me.
"Stop crying," she says. "I'm here."
But I didn't realize I was crying.
"I'm injured," I say. I don't know how I'm going to get up from the floor with these ribs, much less climb out of the hatch.
"But not dead," she says.
I want to ask her why that's a good thing. I want to tell her that I'm not even sure I can die anymore, that I think my destiny is this: to watch every version of myself bleed on different ground until I am all that's left. But medical is here, and I have just enough sense to keep quiet.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 56 |
"If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once."
—Ocean Vuong
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 57 |
When the recruitment campaign began, we learned Eldridge needed a very select group of people—those who lived with enough risk to have died over and over and over again...but had somehow survived here.
And the scientists said, Interstellar travel has always belonged to the few. Of course the people we seek are a paradox.
And the spiritual said, Heaven has always belonged to the few. Of course the people we seek are a miracle.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 58 |
Eldridge's physician has been clucking over my scans since they came in. Except for a few hairline fractures that reopened during my jump back home, the injuries I sustained getting to Earth 175 are just dark shadows of new healing on the projection. But the doctor can tell how bad it was, because he keeps looking from the scan to me and back like he's being tricked.
"How did you survive?" he says, at last.
Because I don't know how to die.
That would be a good answer, said with just enough cheek to let him know I don't care. But when I close my eyes, I see Nelline's broken corpse and I want to scream, I didn't, I didn't. I died. I'm dead. Again.
Instead, I say, "Someone found me and thought I was worth something."
I tell him how long I spent in the pod. I tell him about the fever. He clucks some more and presses his cuff.
"Your body is probably more acclimated to the pressures of traversing than any other human being," he says. "Your extensive experience is likely what saved you from the dop backlash."
Jean told me the same thing when he visited the infirmary, once my twenty-four hours of observation were up. Only, he worded it as Nyame knows you well. She was lenient. They are both saying I survived jumping to a world with a living dop because of how many times I survived jumping before. As if not dying is a skill I've honed, not just blind luck.
"You're the only duality survivor we've ever seen. They'll want to get a detailed account from you."
Dell comes in as the physician is taping my ribs. Half of a watcher's training is in medical, so I know she understands the extent of the damage on the scans, but if she's concerned or impressed she doesn't show it.
"Why aren't you podding her for these fractures?" she asks.
"Because she fractured along pod-healed injuries. She already had the healing fever once over there. She might not come out of a second bout without lasting damage."
She spends a bit longer staring at my face. "And these traversing bruises?"
The doctor shakes his head. "Never seen so many marks. They survived her podding on the other world, so they're likely..."
"Permanent," Dell says.
Her study of my face turns to actually looking at me in an instant, and I don't know how I can tell the difference. "Who took care of you?"
I shrug. It hurts. "No one. I mean, he wasn't a doctor or anything, but he kept me hydrated and tried to keep me cool."
Her face goes plastic, unreadable. "I'm sure he did," she says.
Her attention makes me feel exposed, and as soon as the electrical tape begins to pulse I reach for the Eldridge Institute shirt Jean brought me. Trying to lift my arms makes my whole body scream. I take a sharp breath and leave the shirt in my lap.
Now they're both looking at me.
"I can give her something for the pain, if someone can commit to seeing her home," the physician says. He stopped addressing me directly the moment my watcher entered the room. I'd hate him for it, except hate takes focus and I'm in too much pain.
"I'll see her home. She has no family in the city."
"Traversers never do," he says, not quite far enough under his breath.
The injection works quickly, and when I stand my head feels full of air and my mouth full of cotton. I turn to Dell. "I live off the fortieth floor."
"I remember," she says.
It's on my tongue to tell her she's never been to my place, but she's already holding open the door.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 59 |
Somewhere along the way, Dell has learned where I live. She walks slightly ahead of me, but never looks back to ask where we're headed. Or if we're moving too fast. Or how I'm doing. But who's bitter? Not I.
I realize too late that being alone with Dell while I'm this wrecked is probably a bad idea. All of the little annoyances I usually swallow seem intolerable now that my ribs are hissing and I can't remember my last good sleep. Only when my apartment door slides open does she come up short. She studies the walls, head tilted in a way that somehow cascades her perfect haircut without ruining its shape.
"It's...different than before."
I haven't decorated as much as I should have for six years, but now that I've spent real time back in Ashtown I realize I've collected images that remind me of home: rough fixtures made of imperfect metal, paintings in shades of gray with just enough shape and splatter to feel industrial.
"Here," she says, pointing to a distressed piece of wood I've hung above my couch. "You had a picture of flowers here, didn't you?"
No, but Caramenta did. It was the only thing hung among the half-emptied boxes. It's in my closet still, because even though it's hideous I assume it meant something to her.
"When did you come here?"
She looks over her shoulder. Her face is no more expressive than usual, but I swear I see a glare in her dark eyes.
"Why are you pissed at me? Is this about being late? You saw the scans. I was half-dead when I got there."
"You stayed after you were well."
"It was a bright day!"
The yell costs me an echoing screech along my sides, but it would be worth it if it got to her. I want her to step up, come at me, yell back that she's not stupid and she knows damn well when the sun set on 175. But she just looks slightly annoyed before turning away.
"Where is the bedroom?"
I hobble after her. "That would be the thing you can't find. Does even knowing where my bed is break protocol?"
She's glaring at me again.
"It's down the hall, Dell. Obviously. I don't have a spare."
Her face empties, leaving no trace of anger; the indifferent night sky I've come to dread.
"We should get you into bed. You're irrational."
"I'm not irrational. I'm in pain."
Her eyes soften. She takes my arm, about fifteen minutes and thirty floors too late.
"Come on."
I don't need her help to walk, but I let her lead me. I hadn't made my bed when I left, so it's easy to crawl into the crumpled mess while she answers her beeping cuff.
"Not going to tuck me in?"
She looks up. "You've been placed on leave. I would have recommended it anyway, with your ribs, but I don't know if this has to do with your health or your delay."
"How long?"
"Two weeks."
Tension constricts my chest. "Paid?"
She nods, and I relax into the pillows.
I stare up at the ceiling, bright white and high enough to make me feel like I'm floating. I feel a slight panic at the prospect of losing my job, but it's distant, muddled by more than painkillers. I grew up fearing death, every day. Tasting that terror again mutes my reaction to unemployment.
"I killed someone," I say without meaning to.
"What did you say?"
"Nothing."
"What do you mean you killed someone?"
"Nothing. It's an Ashtown expression."
It's not, though I'm sure enough people there have said it.
She studies me for a second longer than is comfortable, then looks away.
"That girl following you into a jump...I'm sure it wasn't your fault."
That girl. Like Nelline is some other garbage git. Like she wasn't me.
"What will happen to her body?"
"A week for tests, then the incinerator most likely. I doubt anyone wants to bother with a burial," she says.
"I'd like to. Bury her, I mean."
Dell is staring at me again, and I think she'll tell me no. But eventually she nods.
"I'll arrange it." She adjusts her coat. "You have my number if you need me."
"Not going to stay and watch me sleep? What if there's an emergency?"
"Then you should call emergency services."
I close my eyes. "Go if you want. Can't stop me from dreaming about you, though."
"Don't be cruel."
I don't understand her response, but I'm tired of teasing Dell, of trying to irritate her just to make her feel something at all. I fall asleep before I hear her leave, but I'm sure she does.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 60 |
Adra visits me in the night. I see him bend and break. I know I couldn't have seen his face, not once he was snapped backward, but I've invented it—eyes wide as stars, a blood curtain hanging from his mouth—turned toward me in accusation. Somehow, too, I've added sound into the void. I replay the memory and make myself sick with it, until I know the particular hurt of dry-heaving with fractured ribs.
Do you want to see it?
Those weren't the last words he heard, but they might as well have been, because he was dead as soon as I made the invitation.
Two days fighting nightmares in my apartment prompts me to make an appointment with Sasha, the same psychologist who helped stop the panic attacks I'd thought were normal because so many people who grew up with runners had them. In Ashtown, our therapists work out of the House. If Sasha were from Ashtown, her office would be filled with incense and we'd both be lying down when I spoke to her. She would cover me in oil made by pressing one of our few flowering plants. She would stroke my hair and rub my back and I would believe her when she told me my mind was wonderful, and that I would survive this and so much else.
I miss having a place where someone would touch you, just hold you if that was what you needed, or hold you down if you needed that more. But no one in Wiley touches—not me, not each other—and Sasha especially doesn't.
Sasha's office doesn't smell like smoke, or sex, or anything but clean, and we sit feet apart as she tells me I'm exhibiting a totally normal grief response. She doesn't believe I knew Nelline well enough to account for my grief. She thinks it's myself I'm mourning.
You understand you're alive, don't you? she says, more than once. You are alive, Caramenta. You are still whole.
She calls me a dead girl's name, and pronounces her alive. But even if she'd gotten my name right I wouldn't really believe her. I used to be at least 382. Now I am 7. How can I possibly be whole?
Maybe if you touch me, I want to tell her, maybe if you were stroking my hair like a sister, I would believe I was alive.
But they don't do things like that here, and it's embarrassing to realize after so many years in the city I still need it.
I'm just getting home from one of our sessions when my cuff beeps a call from Esther. I'm grateful it's a voice call, rather than the standard video. My family doesn't know about my injuries, or my new marks, and I'd like to keep it that way until I can see them in person.
"Hey you," I say, but once she starts talking, I realize my tone is too light.
"I'm heading for the wall, can we meet? I don't have much time, but I need to talk to you."
I don't like the panic in Esther's voice, but I like the quiet even less. It means she's hiding her trip from those around her, which can only be her family.
I'm already opening up a new screen from my cuff to order her a quick pass as I answer.
"Of course. Always."
And when I say that word, something that began to slide into place in Sasha's office clicks home. I have to be alive, because there is someone who needs me.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 61 |
With her fair, uninked skin and her biblical, x-free name, my sister could probably slip through Wiley City without a pass. But that's not Esther. Esther does things by the book, not just the Book, but any book.
She spends the first five minutes of our visit touching my face and scolding me for not telling her I was hurt. She says she would have brought me root paste for the pain in my ribs, so I say smelly mud is precisely why I didn't tell her. I can tell by the way she looks at them that she doesn't understand the marks are permanent, and I don't try very hard to convince her. Hearing her voice heals something inside of me, even if she is just nagging. To hear her speak without fear or shame, different from the last version of her I heard, is its own gift. I stare at her, looking for hints of damage or signs of abuse. But there is nothing. This is an Esther I haven't yet failed.
Soon enough, she shifts from examining me to examining the city. We're in a garden section near Wiley's entrance so she doesn't have to waste too much time going back home. We're forty stories in the air, but plants grow from the ground like they never will in her backyard. She's not impressed. To her the plants must seem useless. Trees and bushes and flowers—pretty things, inedible.
"Gardens like this are for aesthetics and air quality. They do have vegetable gardens and orchards here too."
"It's very nice," she says, nice somehow becoming its opposite. "No flies?"
"No, but there are bees. I've seen them."
"Honey?"
"...No, just bees."
She nods. Selling honey to the city is one of the main sources of income for people in the Rurals. They can't really harvest enough to compete with the cheaper, shipped-in supply, but some residents in the Wiles have a sweet tooth almost as big as their need for philanthropy. Overpaying for honey from the poor makes them giddy.
"Does Mom know you're here? Does Dan?"
She shakes her head. "I'm supposed to be helping the women of inner Ash."
"They let you go alone thinking that?"
"Michael's downstairs. But he doesn't know why I'm here either."
I sit on a bench. "Neither do I."
"I need help."
"I figured."
She sits beside me, arranging her pale-blue skirt against her thigh so she doesn't take up extra space. Her people are good at making themselves small.
"I've been noticing things missing during inventory," she says.
"Like parishioners helping themselves to more food than they're allowed?"
She waves her hand. "I would never care about that. It's the powder. Michael's powder."
I have just enough time to process that she means explosives when she adds, "It's been happening since the dedication and it's gotten worse."
I've just sat down, but I stand up again, pacing. I stop when the Wileyites start to stare at me. The others in the garden had been stealing glances at us; Esther's long sleeves and apron draw attention in exactly the same way as a visiting monk's orange robes. She's so Wiley-looking but for her skin that sees the real, unfiltered sun, they want to hover close to the safe, familiar-yet-just-exotic-enough novelty of her. They are smiling in a way they'd never smile at someone from downtown or the deep wastes. It's still patronizing, the look you give a puppy, not an equal, but it's less fatal than the distrust the rest of us get.
"Did you tell Dan?" I ask.
"I did. He just smiled and said there must have been an error recording it before, or that Michael had been practicing and forgotten to log what he used. He told me to let it go."
"But you didn't."
Because of course she didn't. Esther is as self-reliant as a mountain. She wouldn't come to me unless she'd exhausted all the ways she could solve this on her own.
"No, I didn't." She looks down, a little guilty, maybe, but not sorry. "I help some of the people in downtown Ash. I don't preach like Mom and Dad, just help, and they like me for it. I asked one I trust if he'd heard anything about anyone trying to sell it. He said no, but his man's a runner, and after I asked he kept an eye out for me. One night he overheard something about our building. He gave it to me directly, but I don't know what it means and neither did he. It's runner tongue."
She doesn't ask me if I know the tongue, which I like because it means she won't ask me how I know. It feels utterly without judgment, and I can see how the population of downtown would be seduced by her easy manner.
"Play it," I say.
Esther has a handheld, not the pricier cuff, but it's loud enough for me to easily hear the clipped, barking message. I listen to it twice, not because I don't understand at first but because I want to buy time. I look out over the trees. I picture her here, safe and away from runners and sandstorms and Nik. But she wouldn't be Esther without her flock, and I know she'd never come, even if I were allowed to sponsor someone full-time.
After a long silence in which Esther doesn't play the message a third time because she knows I'm stalling, I say, "You know Nik Nik?"
Her faith keeps her from expressing anger verbally, but she's got eyes that harden with hate and it's a shift that makes her warm, frothed-ocean irises seem like they were actually blue-veined marble the whole time.
"I'm familiar."
"He donated to your church's building. A lot. That's not how things usually work. Usually new builders pay him."
She's sheltered, not stupid, so she nods.
"You think the missing explosives are his tribute?"
"Maybe. Even if it is, you don't have anything to worry about. Runners have stolen powder from Ruralites a dozen times. But even experts hurt themselves with that stuff. Wait for a bang and find whichever runner has some newly missing fingers, then accuse them of theft as if the emperor is innocent."
"What exactly did the message say?"
"They're coming back to collect Nik Nik's due. It's usually a phrase used for tribute or tax money. It's code, but they must be talking about the powder."
"When?" she asks, and I wish she hadn't.
"Why does it matter?"
"Because I can—"
"Stop them?"
She closes her mouth, deflated, but only a little. "It sounds unreasonable when you say it."
"You can't fight the emperor," I say, but, because the decision isn't mine to make, I add, "You have ten days before they come, according to the message."
She looks down at her feet, smooths her hands along her apron. "Do you think my father knows?"
I want to say no. I've long thought of Dan as one of the only honest people in Ashtown, and it's difficult to lose that image. But he conspired with Nik Nik on 175, so anything's possible.
"Maybe. It might be that he made an arrangement in exchange for funding his building, or it might just be that he can deduce who would want the powder and knows enough not to get involved. Either way, he doesn't have much choice. He keeps quiet and your congregation is left in peace. You fight back and...Nik Nik will still get what he wants."
"That makes it worse," she says. "Being bought, not forced."
The words of someone who's never been forced.
"Trust me. Ignore it. When next week comes, close your door and pretend to sleep. Don't try to fight the thieves."
When she goes, I hope she'll listen. I hope she has one-tenth of the sense of self-preservation that I do. If she doesn't, if she acts on all the righteous anger in her eyes, she'll end up with a tiny cut and a quiet death and I'll have to go to other worlds to see her.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 62 |
The day of my debriefing at Eldridge, I'm woken by the proximity alert on my doorcam. I shuffle forward and make it to the door just in time to see someone retreating, ducked down so I can see only a shape I first assume is a black-clad shoulder. Too tired to be cautious, but just awake enough to be curious, I open the door and find a note—an actual paper note, not a plastic vidscreen—folded and tucked into my door. It's the kind of thing Esther might do, if she was in the city, but when I touch the paper I know it's not her.
I have an affinity for paper that is as little understood in Wiley City as it was in Ashtown. When I make my lists, I like to write them physically, not type them into a coded file on my cuff. This is precisely what got me into trouble with Nik Nik back on my home Earth. The paper that's been placed on my door is softer and smoother than Ashtown paper, because in Ashtown paper is made from blending root plants and dirt, and here the paper is made from other paper. Ashtown paper is brown to tan, depending on the quality. Wiley City paper is the gray of other people's ink. Someone from Wiley has left me a note.
For a moment, I entertain the fantasy that it's from Dell, but then the careless scrawl sets me straight. Dell practices calligraphy like other people practice meditation, and I imagine her handwriting carries the structured fluidity of anyone who is also fluent in a kanji-based language. Whoever wrote this is unused to writing physically. A tech head, for sure.
I know what happened on 175.
Beneath the declaration is a meeting place and time. I read the words again, trying not to react, forcing myself to fold the note back along its seam when I want to crumble it into nothing. I close the door and rewind my doorcam, but whoever left the note stayed tucked below its range. All I can see is the same dark bump on the edge of the feed where they didn't hunch down quite low enough. It might be a shoulder, but it might also be the curve of a back, the top of a head, or the edge of a hood. All I know for sure is they were wearing black.
My cuff beeps an appointment reminder. It's time to get ready.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 63 |
Jean is waiting for me just inside Eldridge's doors. His eyebrows go up as he studies my face.
"They didn't fade."
I touch my cheeks. I've mostly forgotten about the stripes that begin at my cheekbones and continue all the way down my body, just slightly darker and more purple than my own skin. He's wrong, they did fade a little from that first day. Just not much.
"They're permanent," I say. "Do you think it's the price for surviving?"
He shakes his head quickly, severely. "You don't pay with scars so you can survive. Scars are the badge of honor to prove you survived. This is your Purple Heart."
I could tell him Wiley City has never actually given a Purple Heart, and I'm not sure anywhere else has in decades—not since war became so technological and killing became letting the wrong people starve—but I like his explanation too much to disagree.
"Are you ready for this?" he asks, leading me to the elevator.
"I have a choice?"
"Of course," he says. "You could choose quitting. Failure."
"Then I guess I'm ready."
It's the right answer, and he smiles as he sends our elevator up. We're going all the way to the one hundredth floor, the highest artery in the city for now. They've already approved the next round of construction—soon there will be a 120th floor—but this one will still be high up enough to barely be shaded. I've never been on this floor. Adam Bosch's office is here, and all the important meeting rooms, so I wouldn't have clearance inside the building without Jean's fob. I guess I could go to the hundredth floor outside the building, make use of the exterior elevators to get to their public-access parks, but there are fewer of those on the hundredth floor than any other, so why bother?
"You're tense," Jean says as we climb. "Are you concerned about the exam?"
"No, I'm sure I'll pass."
The gut-churning nervousness that once came when I thought of the analyst test is gone. I've taken three practice tests during my leave and scored nearly perfect on every one.
"Then what is it?"
"Do you know if there was an Eldridge courier sent to my house?" I ask.
"There was," Jean says, then, before I can get excited over the clue, continues, "I sent you study materials. Did you get them?"
"I got them. I meant today. Was anything sent to me this morning?"
Jean frowns down at his portable screen. "Nothing from me or Dell, and no one else but HR has your address. Why?"
"I got a weird note. I can't tell if it's a threat or not."
"What did it say?"
The elevator doors glide open on a whisper, and suddenly there are too many eyes and ears around us.
"I'll tell you after."
"I meet with Mr. Bosch after. Monday?"
I nod, suddenly nervous as we walk to the meeting that I've been told many times is not actually an interrogation, no matter how much it feels like one.
The debriefing room is dominated by a large half-moon desk that can seat up to ten people. Today, it holds only six: two investigators in the center, my advocates on each side of them, a Human Resources representative on the end to ensure the questioning is fair and act as a mediator between the company's representatives and mine if things get tense, and then there, on the far end, is my therapist.
Sasha isn't like Dell or Jean, who have blood from somewhere else. Her people have been in Wiley City since its founding, and in a city just like it before that. Only someone whose family hasn't had to deal with uncontrolled UV rays for a dozen generations would have skin or eyes as white as hers. She's as much Wiley City as I am Ashtown, but she's never looked at me like I was anything but a person. When we first met years ago, she told me I'd grown more confident. Of course she was comparing me to Caramenta—a sweet, sheltered girl a few weeks out of her mother's house—but I liked the compliment and I liked her for giving it to me. She wanted me to succeed, to have a piece of something that used to be just hers.
Sasha's supposed to make sure I don't get too agitated by the questioning, and I trust that's what she'll do. The company pretends it's a protection for me, but it's not. If I have a breakdown during their debriefing, they'd have to take care of me, citizen or no. Wiley City might pride itself on how well it takes care of its people, but when it comes to damage to employees directly from employers, their policy has always been You break it, you bought it. Within the city limits, anyway. Back when Wiley companies operated in Ash, they'd fire children clumsy enough to lose a limb at their factories, fine families for the cleanup if an overworked loved one committed suicide there. But when dealing with their own people they are models of compassionate responsibility.
My advocates are my watcher and my mentor, Dell and Jean. Jean takes his seat and begins sliding through the files on the briefing screens that have been provided. He's trying to hide his nervousness, but he's sweating just enough for his dark skin to pick up shine from the lights overhead. I don't know how many children Jean has—not because it's a secret, but because I've lost track—and between his children and grandchildren it's as if he doesn't know how to turn off caring for anyone more than twenty years younger than him.
Dell is too professional to ever look bored, but she does look indifferent. Her hands are folded, and I'm sure she already has the information for the meeting memorized.
I am seated at a table alone. There is a microphone floating above me and a pitcher of water on the desk. To my left on the far side of the wall is something I'm sure doesn't happen for other hearings: a gallery of people—scientists, I'm guessing, because instead of the simple reading screens they've brought processors and they're tapping away at them even though nothing has happened yet. They aren't part of the committee; they're just an audience waiting for the show.
"Okay," says the ranking investigator, "let's begin."
At first, the questions are broadly curious. They say they want to know what it felt like when I first landed, but they don't. They don't want details about the taste of blood or the unique, shifting agony of being unmade and dropped in a new world like a skinned cat. They want to know how many bones I broke, how many days I was out, how high my fever got. Nice, clinical numbers that are easy to process. I tell them I don't remember much.
"And the DD-905?" asks the lead investigator.
"The what?"
Dell leans forward. "The Misery Syringe."
The lead investigator tilts his head at that, but continues. "Protocol dictates that in the event of dop backlash you call for a pull after using the dose."
This is the first lie I'll have to tell. Heart rate scanners and other anti-lie tech are supposed to be illegal for employers to use against employees. Maybe Adam Bosch would care, but I doubt Adranik does. Just in case, I hedge my answer so it's technically true.
"I'd left an away message on my cuff. When I was passing out, I couldn't call for a pull."
With some carefully moved pauses, I've told the whole truth. I can't tell them I broke protocol and used the painkiller to get help rather than accepting the death sentence of having Dell pull me back. Pigeons aren't supposed to value their lives more than the mission.
"I don't know what happened to the syringe," I say, also true. "I must have dropped it when I passed out, or when I was moved."
The second investigator turns to the lead. "Ashtown has a severe drug problem. Someone probably just thought it was their lucky day."
The room shares a lighthearted laugh. Except Jean, because he wouldn't laugh at a joke that hurts me, and Dell, because she never laughs.
It's not my fight. It's not. Even though my time spent on Earth 175 makes it feel like I am fresh from the ash. I bite my tongue when I want to call them out. Like Ashtown has the resources to even have an intravenous drug problem? When Wiley City has such a lockdown on plastic and glass? No. Ashtown junkies smoke rock shards as black as their emperor's hair in pipes they make themselves from clay they dig out of the ground. My mother would trek for miles because she swore red clay left a better taste than gray. And even an Ashtown user is too smart to take drugs from a dead body. They know what tainted looks like, and they can smell a trap better than any sandcat.
Dell taps her pen on the table, once, hard, which snaps me to attention. I've been glaring down, fingers gripping the desk. If the investigators had bothered to look at me, they'd know I was angry. And then they'd remember I was a traverser, and traversers don't come from the same places as the rest of them.
I sit up straight. I start to smile, then remember Nelline and what a smile actually looks like on my face. I settle for not grimacing in a way I hope looks neutral.
Next they want to know what it felt like to see my dop. The scientists sit up for this part. They must have petitioned for a chance to interview me and been denied. I wonder if Dell or Sasha made that call. I tell them the manuals were right about the vomiting. They ask me how long it took the brain to adjust. I don't know if my mind ever adjusted—I still don't know what to do with Nelline—but I tell them it took about twenty minutes for the nausea to wear off.
"And what was phase two? What replaced the nausea?"
This from the quieter investigator.
"After the nausea it didn't feel like looking at myself. It felt like looking at a relative, a sister or a cousin. And I felt...inexplicably protective of her. I know it was just my mind extending its own self-preservation to a being it saw as also me. But it felt like..."
"Affection," Dell says.
I nod. The tapping on the screens to my left grows frantic.
"Did this protective instinct drive you to bring her here?" the chief investigator asks.
"No! I mean, no. I knew what would happen."
"But you called for a proximity pull. Why?"
"My collar was broken," I say.
"Was it?" the lead investigator asks, and in the silence that follows I realize my mistake.
I messed up. I called for a proximity pull, then showed up wearing a perfectly functioning collar. Do they think I was trying to smuggle Nelline in and forgot about the dop backlash? Or do they think killing Nelline is exactly what I was trying to do? It doesn't matter. They know I lied; they just won't know why.
I know what happened on 175.
Well, apparently everyone else does too.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 64 |
"Right, this mysteriously broken collar that seems to have disappeared from our inventory," says the second investigator.
"It what?"
I touch my neck, half expecting the collar to be in the last place I remember it. I look at Jean, but he seems as confused as I am.
Dell leans forward, looking straight at me even though she's giving testimony to the investigator.
"I inspected the collar when she arrived," she says. I'm sure she sees my panic before she looks away. "It was crushed. I had already suspected as much when the frequency was too weak to find her. The cleaners must have seen it and assumed it was a piece of damaged tech to be recycled."
She's lying, but I can't figure out why.
"This is where I have difficulty. The collars are made to sustain any trauma, to keep our people from being trapped. Even a pressure strong enough to break bones shouldn't have damaged it to that extent," he says. "You say it was crushed?"
He leans back, shaking his head. I drag a finger on the side of my glass.
"Have you ever heard of the Ashtown runners? Not the errand boys, the old runners. They still ride on Earth 175. And their cars aren't like Wiley City cars. They aren't lightweight, or solar. They are made of the heaviest metals and ornamented in stone. They are meant to run into people and buildings and each other. And they get twice as heavy on a bright day, when they add more metal panels coated in a cheap reflector. They don't just break bones. They liquefy bodies."
I hadn't meant to go that far. I'd just meant to offer up an alternate explanation so he'd stop looking at me and Dell like we were hiding something. I'd never meant for her to get wrapped up in this.
It takes a second, but he turns to the galley. "Would that compromise the structure of the collar?"
The scientists murmur, and then one stands. He looks nervously at me, then back at the investigator. "If the day was hot enough that the collar's structure was already taxed...possibly. If such a vehicle does exist."
"They exist."
The voice comes from behind me and everyone stands. I stand and turn, even though looking at Adam Bosch is like stabbing myself in the chest. He smiles and nods at me, kind like always, and the guilt could crush me to dust. I want to tell him I'm sorry, but he won't even know what I'm sorry for.
"Mr. Bosch, we weren't expecting you," says the chief investigator.
"I didn't mean to interrupt. I thought you'd be done by now."
His name is Adam, but Adra, Adra, Adra bounces inside my head. I don't know how long I can stand there, but luckily Jean saves me.
"I won't be much longer," he says. "I'm sure we're nearly done."
"Of course. I'll leave you to it," Adam says.
The room feels darker when he leaves, but I can breathe again.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 65 |
The nightmare that wakes me the next day is another quiet one, more sad than horrifying but a nightmare nonetheless. Nelline, who was somehow also Caramenta, and somehow also my mother, was lying beside me in bed, telling me over and over again that she's not here. That she is gone. That everyone is gone. Except me. I am alone in an infinity of universes. I actually miss the quick and easy horror of the Adra nightmares, where his mangled corpse tries to point a finger at me, but he has no fingers, only bloody stumps.
I'm half-dressed when someone buzzes at my door. Nelline's body won't be released to me until I'm at the city border, and I'm not expecting anyone else. When I check the feed, Dell's on the other side.
My first thought is that she came because she wrote the note. That the note was about me lying about the collar and she's come to collect. But I still can't square the choppy handwriting with her elegance. Besides, what could someone like Dell possibly want to extort from someone like me? I gave her my most valuable possession when I handed over the earring.
I open the door. "What are you doing here?"
She walks in without waiting for an invitation. "Today is the burial, isn't it? I'm going with you."
"You want to come with me into Ash?" I look her up and down. "You're wearing all black."
"It's a funeral."
"It is, but—"
A second buzz interrupts me. This time the screen fills up with Esther's face. She's staring wide-eyed into the camera and standing way too close to the door. I let her in.
"What are you doing here? Who sponsored you?"
She nods toward Dell. "Ms. Ikari. She told me you had a friend die, and we thought I should help you with the burial."
"I don't need help." I look back at Dell. "From either of you."
Esther steps forward. "Do you remember the prayers for the dead? The peace ritual?"
Of course I don't. When someone dies in Ashtown, we just hire someone from the Rurals to say the words. Or a sahira from inside the city, for those who lean a little more toward the pagan. I wonder if Esther has ever been hired to bury the dead. I wonder if Caramenta ever did.
"Besides," Dell says, "the van is rented out in my name. Unless you planned on transporting her in the trunk of a company car?"
These are both excellent points. "Fine. We'll all go."
"You're going into Ashtown wearing all black?" asks Esther, whose long dress is in the customary gray of Ashtown funerals, though today's apron is brown.
Dell narrows her eyes. "All right. I give up. What does it mean if I wear all black?"
I shrug. "It means you're a professional, and you're not dressed like a runner."
Dell looks down at her dress. "I'm dressed like a prostitute?"
Prostitute is another word I learned only after I came to the city. Worker, provider, comforter, house cat, on and on—we have as many words for them as islanders have for water and northerners have for snow, but prostitute isn't one of them.
"Don't be ridiculous, Dell. A mere worker would never dare wear all black," I say. "All black is for the elite."
Dell looks down, then raises her chin twice as high as before. "I would be elite."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 66 |
Border patrol stops us the moment we cross into Ashtown proper from the ambiguous stretch of desert that separates it from Wiley City. This time, I pull far off the road and into the dirt, so they'll know I mean to deal. I get out before he can make it to my window. He stumbles a bit, but then so do I. I'd forgotten this was his route. I look back at Esther in the center seat of the van, and wish it had been any other runner.
"Mr. Cheeks," I say.
There's no star on his neck, but otherwise he is indistinguishable from the version I left on Earth 175. Seeing Mr. Cheeks, plus my earlier talk with Dell, slides something into place for me: The note was left by someone wearing black. Runners always wear black.
It's farfetched—how would a runner know something you would need Eldridge access to know?—but the idea takes hold like catching the scent of an old enemy. Doesn't having the note hanging over my head make me feel hunted? And who has always specialized in hunting me?
"Miss me that badly, had to come back again?" he says. "The price is still three hundred."
I hold up the cash. "I need a guide." I nod to his vehicle, a massive truck with tires the size of my car. "Can you take us into the deep wastes?"
He walks over and looks through the windows in the back of the van. I haven't looked in the cargo hold since they loaded it, but I know he must see the unmoving chrysalis of Nelline, wrapped in a white, plasticized sheet that clips closed on the side.
"For a body dump you'll need twice that to buy silence, and I don't need you to come along. You can trust I'll do the job."
Esther steps out from the side of the van. Maybe she thinks he'll take a local more seriously than a Wileyite, or maybe she thinks her being a holy woman will help him understand our purpose. Either way, I hadn't wanted him ever seeing her at all, but now that's ruined. As she stands tall with the early-morning sun catching her hair and an ethereal shine to her serene expression, I'm sure he'd propose to her here and now...if her eyes weren't so hard. If she weren't looking at him like he was less than dirt.
I should have warned her not to let on that she knows they've been stealing from the church, but I doubt she could hide her distaste anyway.
"It's not a body dump. It's a proper burial," she says, short, clipped. "Is that a problem?"
This is more than distaste; this is a challenge. Esther wants to look a runner in the eyes for stealing from her.
Mr. Cheeks looks from her to me to the van, baffled by her irritation but more interested than offended. "No problem, but I've only got room for four."
"We're only three," I say.
I take his picture with my cuff, standard safety procedure for Wileyites who take a ride from Ashtowners. It's such a tourist move, but I've got Dell with me in clothes that scream kidnappable. He lets me record his image without comment, which means he either isn't planning on double-crossing us or he has no fear of Wiley City's retribution. He presses his wrist to the vehicle door and the old locks open. Even with the parades off, runners are married to their vehicles. I'm not surprised he's embedded a chip instead of just using a removable cuff or carrying a fob. He makes a call on his car's radio, then motions us inside.
"You all make yourselves comfortable," he says. "I'll get her."
"How do you know it's a her?" Esther asks.
Mr. Cheeks just nods toward us like it's obvious.
I sit in the passenger seat to keep Esther from being beside him, but she just sits behind the driver's seat so she can glare into his rearview mirror. The cab is separated from the back storage by a shell, so the only time I have to see the body is when he transfers her out of the van. He doesn't throw the bundle over his shoulder. He carries Nelline like a bride, and I'm grateful.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 67 |
We've made it to the edge of the deep wastes, and I've just told Mr. Cheeks my plan.
"It's not much farther."
"It's not the distance that worries me; it's the obstacles. No one's supposed to even go near the bogs."
"Is that strictly true?" Dell says. "I'd always heard that was where you took all the Wiley citizens who come seeking assisted suicide."
I turn back to her. "How do you know about Akeldama?"
She shrugs. "I imagine most in Wiley do. It's good advertising, since it's a service we can't get there."
"Those are different. Special," Mr. Cheeks says, though the correct word is cursed. Either way, I'm glad we're in agreement that Nelline won't be sleeping with the nameless.
He's not happy, but so far he's doing a fantastic job of watching his language around Esther, an effort I appreciate only half as much as I resent it. He's even muted his callbox so we can't hear the types of calls runners typically exchange.
Dell is tired of our arguing. She sits forward. "How much? How much more to take us to the un-special ponds?"
"Bogs," the runner and I both say at once.
"Whatever. Twice what she gave you?"
Mr. Cheeks is biting his lip and doing the math. He was already making out for half a day's work. A runner on border patrol can go a week without a shakedown, and even if he'd reported the six hundred honestly, no one would ever expect him to pull double. Right now there isn't a mudcroc in all the wastes big enough to deter him from that kind of payday. Still, he looks in his mirror, at Esther.
"I know you runners are becoming a greedy lot, but surely that is enough money for you," Esther says.
I'm sure when they were deciding to skim from the Rurals, the runners considered Dan retaliating, or even Michael. But it's Esther's temper they should have thought of first.
"Mouthy princess," he says, which means he recognizes her. Still, he folds and starts the engine again.
Despite the absence of a marker, he turns left and begins cutting through the desert at a diagonal from the river. He played scared with the bogs, but he's been there before. If his actions on 175 are any indication, he's the type of runner who obeys only the rules he respects, and will turn his back on an emperor who stops acting with honor. He's the type of runner I didn't think existed, one I certainly never saw as a child.
We encounter no animals, predator or prey, which makes sense given how heavy and loud the runner's truck is. Even the laziest grazing animal would have felt us coming far enough off to move, and the predators here are too well fed to be concerned with taking down what must look like a very difficult meal.
We reach the bogs in the midafternoon, and I'm just beginning to think that everything is going too well when Esther speaks up.
"I'll need to open the wrapping on the body to prepare her."
I exchange a panicked look with Dell. I'd known we'd have to take Nelline out of the burial shroud if I wanted the bog to preserve her, but I hadn't realized Esther would be with me when I did. I don't know how to explain Nelline's identity, even if there was time. But Esther knows what I do for a living, knows there are other worlds with other versions of ourselves. I'll just have to trust her to process it and understand without being too traumatized by the sight of something that looks an awful lot like her sister's dead body.
Mr. Cheeks carries the shroud-wrapped form to the edge of the bog, where the dark sand is cooler than it should be, covered in a green-black sheen unlike anything else in the area.
When he moves to undo the clasp for Esther, I stop him.
"I'll do it," I say.
He shrugs and moves back to his truck, far enough away that he won't be able to see her as Esther performs the ritual. I undo each clasp slowly, leaving the latch by her face for last. Finally, I open the shroud.
Whoever held the body must have been paid something, because she's been prepared. The blood that trickled down her face in the hatch is gone. Her sunken chest is now propped up. Her open eyes, closed.
I am better prepared for horror than this, this sleeping girl, this untouched face. When I feel the hand on my shoulder, I think it is Esther, but when I place my fingers over it, I know it's Dell. Too cool, too large, to belong to my sister.
"You need to let Esther work now, so we can send her off while it is still light."
Burial by the sun is a custom that remains the same on both sides of the wall. I stand, making way for Esther. I assume Dell will move away then, but she puts an arm around my waist.
"Is this all right?" she asks.
I nod.
"Did you pay the deathkeepers to make her up like this?"
"Morticians," she says. "They're called morticians in the city."
I knew that. It's another word from my list. Viet would be called a mortician in the city. But also a midwife. Keeper sits easier than either. Odd, after all this time it's getting harder, not easier, to pretend.
"You didn't answer my question."
She shrugs against me. "You didn't need to see her like that again."
Esther is kneeling beside Nelline. I wait for her scream, her questions, but she only goes rigid for a second. Then she takes Nelline's shoulders and lifts her, pulling at the simple gown to see down her back. After a moment I realize she's checking the tattoo. Whatever she sees must satisfy her, because she shakes her head and lays the body back down.
"It's not me," I say.
"I know. She has tattoos, but they're different from yours," Esther says.
Dell doesn't say anything, but her gaze shifts to my back like she can see the mark that's there through my clothes.
Esther is touching Nelline's face. "Is she from another world?"
"Yes. The journey back...it killed her."
"Does that happen often?"
I swallow. "It's happened before."
She looks at me for a long moment before nodding, and I feel like I've answered an entirely different question.
"I'll need her name. Her real name," she says.
"Nelline," I say.
Esther turns from us. She is gentle as she pulls the limbs out of the shroud and tucks the material beneath the body. She cuts a finger's worth of Nelline's hair and puts it into a jar, then grabs a handful of the dark sand and pours it over the strands.
She takes out a small vial of oil and pours it on the ground to make a paste, then uses the paste to make a cross on Nelline's forehead.
She's ready to begin.
Esther sits with her legs crossed. She closes her eyes and bends forward, her face by Nelline's. She will sit like this, taking deep but measured breaths, until she has finished whispering the first prayer into Nelline's ear. We are not allowed to hear. No one living is allowed to know it, only the practitioner and the dead. The superstitious believe that if you can make out the words, your time is soon coming. Most people look away so they don't risk even interpreting the shape of the words.
Oddly, though I'm not the one meditating, a calm comes over me, a spell woven by the warm heat and my sister's barely audible prayer. The minutes of inactivity should pass like an eternity, but when she finally straightens and opens her eyes, it's too soon.
"So let it be done," she says, and the first part of the funeral has finished.
Next, Esther lights a cigar and sets it aside. Using her fingers, she draws a symbol in the sand that looks like a big cross, with little crosses filling in the four sections around it. Lastly, she draws an awkward number seven over it all.
She sees me watching. "To open the gate," she says.
I should reply I know or Of course, but I'm tired of lying so I just nod.
She closes her eyes, letting the smoke from the cigar waft around her and Nelline. I don't know how long she waits, or what she is waiting for, but suddenly she opens her eyes. The door must be open, because she repeats the ritual, only this time drawing a different symbol on her left side. This one looks like an outlined cross filled in with stars, with coffins on either side.
Esther takes from her pack another bottle that smells identifiably alcoholic and pours it over each symbol, making a puddle. Then she reaches for the cigar, which has by now burnt down enough that she can add a little ash to each side too.
She closes her eyes to wait for the second symbol's work. I don't know how she senses it, but she opens her eyes at the exact moment the cigar stops burning.
Esther stands, and the second part is finished.
Now it is the final part. The only portion of the funeral I've ever been able to see from my usual position in the back of the crowd. This is the long prayer. We have to witness and repeat it to send Nelline on her way. It doesn't seem like there are enough of us to help her make the journey, so I'm glad when Mr. Cheeks steps closer to join in.
Like all things with the death ritual, the prayer is broken into three parts.
Esther stands and faces the sky, because the first part is not being spoken to us or Nelline, but some great beyond.
"Holy host above, I call as your servant, sanctify our actions this day. Receive this child into your arms that she might pass in safety from this crisis. Forgive our living and our dead, those present and those absent, our young and our old. Whomever you keep alive, keep him alive in you, and whomever you cause to die, cause him to die with hope. Wash her with dirt and ash and oil and mercy. Give her a home better than her home and a family better than her family. Admit her to the city, where living beings have no pains, but receive only pleasure. Where the rain always comes, and the sun is kind. Where swans, peacocks, and parrots sing.
"Make her grave spacious and fill it with light."
We repeat the last line three times. Dell and I move forward to the body. Next we will send Nelline away, so this is our last chance to give her a message. I kneel down first. I hadn't intended to give a secret for the dead to carry, but when I get close the whisper comes out of me.
"I'm so sorry, Nelline. Tell Caramenta I'm sorry about her too. And tell her I wish it was me. Every time it happens, I wish it was me."
I move and Dell leans forward. I'm surprised she has a message for Nelline, or some other dead, but she stays beside the body longer than I do. When she's done, we each grab a strap on the bag and carry her body to the bog. We slide her off of the bag and for a moment she floats on top of the viscous liquid. But then, slowly, Nelline begins to sink.
Esther turns her back to us, and says the second part of the prayer to the dead.
"Nelline, I am commending you into the arms of the earth, the preserver of all mercy. I am returning you to everlasting peace, and to the denser reality of the creator of all. Don't be scared. Don't regret. Whatever time you had, it was enough. Whatever you accomplished, it was enough. We will remember your good deeds for the rest of our lives. We will forget your wrongdoings forever. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for spending your time in the dirt with us."
We wait for the bog to consume her. It is quicker than waiting for the body to be shoveled in like an earth burial, but it is much, much quieter. I can't keep the words from the send-off from repeating in my head. Don't be scared. Was she scared? Of course she was. She had no training in traversing. She didn't understand what was happening, why she had to die for following me. She must have been terrified. But was she scared anymore? Did she feel anything? Did she have enough consciousness to find her way back to peace? Or was that terror in the dark the last thing she would ever know, for all eternity?
Esther doesn't turn back to us until the body is submerged. The final part of the prayer is for our benefit. Nelline is gone.
"The phenomenon of death is just the separation of the astral body from the physical body. It is the five elements of the body returning to their source. In the divine plan, every union must end with separation. Whether it was now, twenty years ago, or twenty years in the future, you were always going to lose her. We are pilgrims at an inn. When we leave is immaterial, because we are only meant to leave."
There is comfort in the inevitability. It makes my part in her story unremarkable. I didn't change her fate; I don't have that power. My presence just changed her timing. We were always going to separate. We must always separate. Time is a flat thing and we are always separating. When we are together we are already gone.
"I take refuge in the dirt. I take refuge in the ash. I take refuge in the oil."
We chant the affirmations three times.
"I go to the dirt for refuge. I go to the ash for refuge. I go to the oil for refuge."
When we finish, Esther says "So let it be done" for the last time, and then it is.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 68 |
Mr. Cheeks helps Esther build a small fire as we wait for the sun to go down. Only once it is no longer visible in the sky can we leave without a guilty conscience. Leaving in the light means you don't really care if the dead find their way. Only the truly arrogant arrange morning funerals, putting that much faith in the devotion of their loved ones and that little stock in the strength of the Ashtown sun.
Dell's cheeks and ears are turning the telling pink of an outsider, and she goes to wait in the runner's vehicle before it can graduate to a full burn. When only half the sun is still visible Esther finishes at the fire and brings me the mourning candle. It looks like oil, but it's just wax that hasn't cooled yet. Inside will be the lock of hair that Esther took, and dark sand from the place beside Nelline's grave.
"I don't need that," I say when she offers it. "We weren't that close."
She looks at me square, a sign I've entered into an argument I won't win. "You are as close to her as anyone ever can be. You are her," she says, and shoves the still-warm jar into my hands.
"It...doesn't work like that. Being the same isn't the same as being close," I say, but I clutch the jar anyway.
Esther gives a satisfied smile. "Light it when you want to talk to her. Or when you want to remember. It will run out when you don't need her anymore."
That part I know is a lie. I couldn't afford a full burial when my mother died, but Exlee paid for my mother's candle. It ran out too quickly. I still needed her. I still do.
After I take the mourning candle I think, and fear, that she'll go back to giving dirty looks to the runner, who is now crouched by the bog watching the horizon for signs that the night predators are waking. Instead, she stays with me.
"Do you know what I have to do to prepare for this? To make myself worthy of ushering the dead?"
It's a trap. The answer is no, but it should be yes, so I stay quiet.
"I have to be anointed in oil and wholly cleansed. I go to a cave known only to me, my father, and the one who will take over my duties if I ever leave or die. There is a hidden spring there. I drink from the spring, and bathe in its waters to become pure. Afterward, my apprentice works holy oil through my hair."
"Sounds...slippery."
"You can say it sounds strange. Even when I was the apprentice I thought so."
"You apprenticed?"
She looks at me. "I used to prepare Caramenta."
Caramenta. Not you.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 69 |
"How long have you known?" I ask. I realize now that she wasn't checking the body to see if it was me; she was checking to see if it was her real sister.
"From the very beginning."
My mind stutters. I think back to every interaction we've ever had, and all along she knew I wasn't her sister. A phone call stands out. When I was getting ready for the dedication, it was Esther who called to tell me Joriah might come.
...you remember. Tall, red hair? He moved out here for a little while when we were young, but then left for the deep wastes as a missionary.
She wasn't making small talk. She was feeding me information.
"Was it the tattoos?"
When I realized my mother was still alive here, that Caramenta had a family, I rushed off to see them. I still had tattoos on my forearms then. I thought I kept them covered, but if Esther was used to bathing Caramenta naked, she would have known something was off.
"No."
"The way I talked?"
"You certainly sound more like her now than you did at first. But no. I knew you weren't her because you brought me a gift."
I remember that. I was always the youngest around my mother's friends and colleagues. I didn't know what a twelve-year-old girl would like, much less a twelve-year-old girl from the Rurals. But I wanted to bring her something, because I had a little sister and first impressions matter even if she didn't know it was a first impression. I settled on some strawberry lip gloss, which my mother quietly "lost," and some dried flowers pressed into a necklace, which Esther was allowed to keep.
"She would have known not to bring you lip gloss," I say.
"She wouldn't have cared enough to try. Caramenta hated me."
"What?"
Esther wasn't half as spoiled as she could have been for being the Rural leader's heir. She was kind when she didn't even have to be. Who could hate her?
"Cara had a thing about men, and boys. She liked Michael, she loved Father, but she had no use for me. As I got older, it was like I was worse than in the way. It was like she saw me as some kind of obstacle. A problem. She made things...hard for me. I don't know what I would have done if that offer hadn't come in from the city. She didn't want to take it, but Dad thought the money would help out here. She said she'd do it for no more than a year. In my head, I thought, Oh good, I'll be thirteen before she moves back. Plenty old enough to run away."
"Jesus, Essie." I swallow my reaction, a horror-concern cocktail that's years too late. "Thirteen is too young to run away. So is eighteen, by the way, for a girl from the Rurals."
She smiles at me—nice, wide, and bright—like she doesn't know I'm not her sister.
"But I didn't have to leave. Because things changed when you came back. You didn't scheme with Mom anymore, and you smiled at me. I'd been praying for Cara to become different. I hadn't known exactly what I was asking for...but I wasn't sorry. Even after I was old enough to realize you being here meant she must have died working, I wasn't. I prayed for you, and you came. To regret that would be to reject a miracle."
That's twice now someone called me a miracle. And again it comes from the mouth of someone whose sibling I killed.
"How did it happen? Did Eldridge really think they could replace her without anyone noticing? Was it to avoid paying out the death benefits?"
I shake my head.
"You know why she was recruited?" I ask.
"Because she died on a lot of worlds and you can't travel to a place where you're still alive." She says it like she's twelve again, reciting the facts of traversing exactly as they were first explained to her.
"Right. And if you try to go to a place where you're still alive, it kills you. Usually. Almost always, with the very rare exception. She tried to come to my world, and died because I was there. I found her body. Eldridge doesn't...actually know I'm not Caramenta."
Her eyes go wide and her mouth goes small as she processes that I am not the company's contingency plan, just a first-class grifter.
"No one knows? Dell?"
"Just you," I say. "I didn't have a good life. My mother is the same person as here, but she never made it to the Rurals. She died when I was sixteen, and I didn't have a lot of options. When I saw Caramenta's body, when I heard Dell saying she was bringing her back...I didn't even care where I was going. But I got lucky. I got you. And your family. And an apartment in the city."
She takes a breath and looks back over the horizon at the nearly downed sun. She's giving more thought to her response than I gave to looting a body and taking its name, and she's younger now than I was then.
Finally, she makes a decision and looks back at me.
"I understand that the multiverse means there are many of you, and some live and some die. But I think, I believe, there is a reason for those who live. Death can be senseless, but life never is. There's a reason you're here and she's not."
"People get lucky every day."
"Is it easier for you to believe in chance than the will of the universe?"
"Yes? Obviously?"
She shakes her head at me. These days she only looks truly young when I'm irritating her. I reach up to wrap an arm around her neck, kissing her head the way she hates because it makes her feel small. I need her to be small. I need her to be small and stationary and easy to protect forever.
"You're a pain," she says. "But I'm still not sorry I wished for you."
When we finish talking I notice the sun has mostly set. I hadn't heard Dell leave the car, but she's walking quickly back from the bog now, like she's running from something. I go to the bog's edge to investigate. The surface is a darkness so still and total it may as well be the hatch. I will Nelline to sink down into the perfect black until she comes out the other side, going home the way she came.
Mr. Cheeks starts his car, and the headlights shine on something in the liquid. I can't reach it, and it's sinking slowly, so I lean down until I can make it out. At first, I think it must be a rock, the kind from the mountain that contains enough metal to wink if the light hits it right. But then I recognize its shape: an Eldridge collar, fully intact, sinking to a place no one will ever find it.
I look over my shoulder, but Dell is already in the vehicle, staring at her hands.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 70 |
Esther stays the night with me, and we hardly sleep for all our talking. She asks me questions she couldn't ask Caramenta, or any other Ruralite, even though I try to answer as if I am one of them. She even asks about my last job. I don't hold back, so by the time I'm finished my little sister knows everything about me. Nearly. I don't mention the note, because I don't want her to worry, but I give her everything else.
I thought she'd get caught up in the murder, but not my teenage sister, who'd squealed like a teapot when she'd heard about me dating Nik Nik in my old world.
"Wait, so he had the hots for you on this other world too?"
"No...maybe...it doesn't matter. It just means Nik Nik's type is consistent across the universes. I probably remind him subconsciously of his mother or something twisted like that."
"Does he remind you subconsciously of your father?"
"Wait, what?"
" 'Cause you had the hots for him twice now too."
Her eyes are wide as she looks up at me. She's sitting cross-legged on my bed with her hair braided for sleep.
"I did not."
"Some things are inevitable."
"Nothing is inevitable," I say. Nik Nik is the tide I've been kicking against for the better part of a decade, and I have to keep kicking because I'll drown in him as surely as a tar pit.
"Besides, I don't want him."
"Who do you want?"
I hesitate. Only the most hardcore Ruralites have issues with the way the rest of Ashtown looks at gender and sexuality as a casual gradient. But Esther is a leader's daughter.
I say it quick, because I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not with her.
"Dell."
She goes stiff, then tilts her head more in disbelief than disgust.
"You're really nothing like her, are you?"
"Dell?"
"Cara." She starts picking at the edge of the comforter. "I saw her once helping a congregant, a sweet girl, Sarah, who had an obvious crush on her. I told her I thought they looked nice together and she got mad. It didn't make sense, because no one cares, maybe some of the ancients but no one really. But she was so angry...she started being really cruel to Sarah after that. Which I guess means I was wrong."
"No," I say, "it means you were right."
I'm starting to understand Caramenta now, a girl who started out just like me, but had been given the kind of stability and care I only dreamt about. She'd want to be perfect to make sure she could never get thrown away again, even if that meant hating anything in herself that strayed the slightest bit.
"And Caramenta really didn't like Dell. I think she even filed a complaint against her once during training."
"Seriously? No wonder she hates me."
Esther's lips quirk. "You still think she hates you? That she attended a funeral in the Ash and dropped that kind of money to get you to the bogs because she hates you?"
"Money means nothing to her. It was probably less than she spends on a good dress."
But the argument is weak and my little sister—who looks all of fourteen in the T-shirt and pajamas I just bought her—is right. Dell is being kind.
When Esther hugs me goodbye in the morning, carrying a bag full of the lotions and cosmetics I'd been saving for my next visit, I ask her to come back. The next raid of her explosives stockpile is less than a week off, and I want her to spend that night with me, if just to keep her from standing in front of the pantry doors armed with only a rolling pin. She shakes her head, but promises not to do anything stupid. Before she leaves, she calls me by my real name.
I watch to make sure she meets Michael on the other side of the wall, and the whole time I'm thinking that now, if I died here, Esther could bury me properly. Before, it would have been under the wrong name. I never would have made it through to where I belonged. It's a morbid comfort, but still a comfort, to know that even on the wrong Earth someone carries your name.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 71 |
"Where did you get this?" Jean asks.
Since Jean went to meet Adam right after my debriefing, I've had to wait until my first day back to bring him the note. I've been watching him read it carefully. At first, the shock on his face was total. But then it gave way to anger. I made the right choice. He didn't send it.
"Someone left it on my door."
"Did you see them on your cam?"
I shake my head. "They were careful. I'm guessing they went with paper because digital messages can be traced."
"Or they just know how you like paper."
"I doubt they're trying to get on my good side. It sounds like a threat."
"You think so?" he says, in a way that tells me he doesn't. "Are you going to go?"
"I have to."
"You don't. Leave the note with me. I'll get it sorted."
"I didn't tell you so you could fix it," I say, then trail off because I don't know why I did tell him.
I shove the note back in my pocket, and Jean takes the hint that I'm done talking about it. For the rest of our meeting we go over results from my practice test with the updated information, and I'm unsurprised by the light in his eyes.
"This is really good stuff, Cara. Excellent work. I was only concerned about the memorization, but your reports have gotten cleaner too. You've really used your time off to your advantage."
He's so proud that it hurts me not to smile back. When I try, his face drops.
"What's wrong?" he asks.
"Nothing, it's just...don't you think I'm going to miss it? I'm giving up world walking for a desk."
He leans back in his chair like I'm a virus he doesn't want to catch. "A desk on the sixtieth floor. With opportunities to climb up."
"How many stories up am I when I traverse?"
He shakes his head, but a slow smile spreads across his face. "It's been a long time. I'd almost forgotten...there's nothing else like it, and I won't pretend there is."
"So, maybe I don't go for analyst. Maybe I go for a Maintenance position, something that will still get me sent—"
"No." He says it more harshly than he's ever said anything to me. "Maintenance is phased out too. This equipment is self-repairing. If you don't go for the analyst job the only place for you to go is home."
His snapping surprises me, and I want to remind him that I'm not actually one of his grandchildren. Instead, I nod.
"Okay, okay. I'll do the test. Analyst is better than nothing. I was just...I don't know, dreaming."
His smile is back. "I just don't want to see any of us fail."
I don't know if he means traversers or black people or people from outside in general, but I accept the explanation.
He looks down at his hands, and I know what he's going to say before he says it.
"Cara, about the note."
"I'm not leaving it with you."
"Please...don't go to this meeting."
"I'll be fine. I know what happened on 175. It's not even a proper threat. They're probably just trying to blackmail me. I'll show them my bank account and then we'll both walk away weeping."
He shakes his head, but doesn't say anything else.
Only after I'm out and on my way to my first pull do I realize I missed something: Jean never asked what happened on 175.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 72 |
I don't realize I've developed a fear of traversing until it's too late.
I hadn't been afraid as I made my way to the elevator to meet Dell. Sure, I'd hesitated to get in until a co-worker behind me—Maintenance, I'm guessing, given the black jumpsuit—cleared his throat and growled It's open at me. But that hadn't been fear, that had been my profound desire to go home. That had been the certainty that I didn't belong—not in this office, not in this city, not even in this world. What does it mean to miss the taste of ash on your lips? What does it mean to crave something toxic?
No, only after I'm dressed and veiled and Dell slides the Misery Syringe into my pocket does terror come for me. Seeing the syringe, a reminder of what can and has gone wrong, puts the taste of iron back in my mouth. When I climb the ladder to the hatch, my hands are shaking.
I've just landed inside when I start to panic. It's dark, true dark, and even though there hasn't been enough time, I'm sure I've already left. I'm hurtling toward a place I don't belong, but I'm not going to make it. She'll never let me. Nyame will bite through me, then rip along the perforations her teeth create. And I'll deserve it, because I used her to kill. Seeing Adra's death in the dark was as much a prophecy for me as it was for Nelline. It just took longer for the universe to catch me. Such a stupid mouse, to run back into the trap.
I feel her claws around my torso. I pound at the hatch door, but it's too late. It was always too late. Words from Nelline's funeral come back at me. This was always going to happen. I, maybe more than anyone else, have only existed to die.
Suddenly there is light, a starburst that feels like the end of the world even after I recognize Eldridge's traversing room.
Dell has lifted me half out of the hatch and into her lap on the platform above, her hand on the back of my neck. Even in this she's not sweet, not gushing. She is squeezing my neck with a firm and clinical distance.
"Breathe, Cara," she says. "Breathe now."
And I do. At first it's just short, panicked gasps, but slowly I take in more air and hold it longer. My panic is gone but I'm still wrapped up in her.
"I used to be stronger than you," I say, the space under my arms already sore from her sure, hard yank.
"You've spent too long avoiding physical training. You're light as a bird."
"I'm okay now," I say.
She takes her hand from the back of my neck. "Would you like me to call Sasha? Or...do you have someone else in the city I should contact?"
"I've never had anyone else."
"You used to. What was his name? The one with the"—she waves a hand around her head—"the hair."
She's just trying to get me talking, but it works. Impossibly, I laugh.
"Marius? From four years ago? After his mother threatened to have a breakdown, the novelty of a kept Ashtown creature wore off."
"He called you that?"
"No...she told him we can't love. That people from Ashtown can't. That we don't even really feel, we just survive."
"I think you've proven that's not true."
She manages to make crawling look elegant as she moves to the ladder and descends to the office floor. But I'm staring at her, too struck to move.
"What?" she asks.
"You're right. I...it's not true."
I was never sure. For years, I've been unsure I was capable of anything but ambition. I think back to the days lost crying for Nelline. Feeling guilty for Adra. Feeling hope for Nik Nik. Sometimes you have to bleed to know you're human. I am afraid, panicked, and ashamed, but I am also grateful. I hadn't thought all this misery would bring its own gift.
"I'd like to sit in the hatch."
Her first expression, before she masks it with her constant disapproval, is worry.
"I don't think that's wise."
"Please. I just want to sit until I can stand it. Promise me you won't try to send me anywhere. Just let me stay there."
She sits. "Do whatever you want. I doubt we'll get a pull in today anyway."
She's typing into a pad, no doubt pushing back deadlines because of me. I drop back into the hatch.
It's easier this time, to slide into the dark. The perfect black isn't such a surprise, an impossible thing my mind has lightened in my memories in the weeks we've been apart. And it is a we. I see that now. What felt like suffocating on my first attempt feels like entwining the second time. I'm not so far gone that I think the pitch-dark space is sentient, but we are partners. I wish I knew what material made this sphere possible, but even asking will get me fired, labeled, and permabanned from Wiley. Or worse. I can't picture Adam Bosch ruling with Adra's iron fist, but Eldridge's secrets have never leaked, even across worlds, and that doesn't happen purely through kindness inspiring loyalty.
I sit in the dark until my heartbeat goes so quiet it's not there at all.
I press my cuff. "I'm ready. Send me."
Dell's reply, when it finally comes over the cuff, is cool. "Absolutely not."
I climb halfway out of the hatch, glaring down at Dell seated at her desk. She's still not looking up.
"Dell. Program the pull."
She sighs, but eventually addresses me. She stands first, of course. Dell is taller than me, like all Wiley City residents are typically taller than Ashtown's people—a result of never having to guess where breakfast is coming from as a kid, or not growing up where only those small enough to hide from runners or be passed over for armed service had any chance of survival. I like addressing her from above. The way she has to tilt her head up makes her look open, vulnerable. I wonder if I look like that to her. Or if I looked like that to Nik Nik, the emperor being an exception to the rule of Ashtown's shortness, any of the times he tried to strangle me.
Dell leans with her fingertips spread out on the desk. "I am not going to approve this. What if you panic in transit? There's nothing I can do about it then. If you panic when you land and I have to bring you back it's a waste of a pull."
"So? I'm owed a wasted pull. Don't forget I did do the job on 175."
"You pulled one port on 175. You were supposed to pull four."
I wave my hand at the technicality. "Oh please. The backup ports carry so little intel that's not overlapping, it's really like I pulled from three and a half."
She tilts her head. "How do you know that?"
Oops.
I give her a look I hope passes for charming. "I'll tell you if you let me do this pull?"
She rolls her eyes.
"Oh, come on, Dell. It's my first day back and I don't want to waste it. What are you afraid of? Losing me?"
This hits home. She can keep denying me the pull, but then it will look like she cares.
"Fine," she says, sitting. "Is your veil still secured?"
I nod, feeling the tightness across my cheeks.
"Close the hatch."
She must have shut down the tuner, because I spend enough time in the dark for it to warm back up. For a second, I'm sure she went home, leaving me here as a lesson for pushing back. But just when I'm about to give up I hear the whisper that Dell calls a signal and Jean and I call a petition. It surrounds me and embeds in my skin. And just like that I'm traversing.
At the edges of the total darkness are packs of swirling light, bending out of shape, gravity turning beams into rings. It's been years since I've really paid attention to the act of traversing, the feeling of weightlessness, of being nowhere and also the center of everything. I feel the presence I will probably always call Nyame now, and that Dell will always tell me is just a mix of pressure and hallucination. Nyame is not angry with me. Her touch is gentle, a welcome back, as if I've always belonged here and my absence has been noted.
It opens up something in me, maybe not as deep as what I felt sharing time with my sister, but close. It feels like being seen, and how long have I been missing that? Suddenly I want my job again, not because I'm terrified of carving out a living in Ash, but because my job is to walk among the stars. How can I have viewed it as a paycheck for so long when I would pay to do this? I see now that it is a gift, not a lifeline.
One day soon traversers will be obsolete, and I was so focused on the next position I hadn't considered what that means. But even if I get an analyst job with a pay raise and citizenship and two bedrooms on a higher floor, I will have lost something I can never get back.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 73 |
The meeting place is on 80, so before I go I dress in the kind of clothes I learned to value by watching Dell. I'd checked before, and the coordinates on the note lead me to a public garden owned by Adam Bosch, which adds evidence to the "employee" column on my list of suspects. A runner would probably want to meet somewhere low and populated. Another piece of evidence in that column is the wording: I know what happened on 175 instead of the more proper, I know what happened on Earth 175. It's a shorthand we'd use, but anyone outside the company would feel the need to specify that they were talking about an Earth and not a street address or elevator line.
Bosch has kept this public garden since he purchased the block-sized mansion next door. It's a known place to spot him, either on his balcony or when he takes his own turn in the massive greenspace. I used to believe the garden sightings were just a man oblivious to his own celebrity taking a walk and getting caught. But now that I've seen how much shine Adra donned, I'm sure he drinks in attention like cracked ground drinks rain.
The garden is full of frivolous flowers and fruit-bearing trees, half edible and half purely aesthetic. It looks like he did what any of us would do—picked out the brightest flowers with the biggest petals he could find, the kind of plant that would be singed to brown ash by the time noon hit back home.
I grab an apple and sit at a bench where I can pretend to watch a fountain while watching the park entry. I'm looking, I realize, for Starla. Who else knows where I live and stands to gain from bringing me down? She was in charge of 175 for eight years; maybe she established some way of getting info and put two and two together. She was deported, but the walls aren't perfect, especially if you have friends on the inside. And she must have had friends, right? Even if I never saw them. I couldn't have been all she had.
But I don't see the waist-long shine of her dark-brown hair, and the bright silks she favored would stand out in this crowd. More than half of the visitors are in tight pants and the kind of boots that could keep you dry during a mudtide. Wiley City's upper class is appropriating the desert-dweller look in droves. No one's gone for the onyx teeth, rumors of loss of taste and a shortened life-span are probably enough to isolate that trend, but I see a few metal-tipped nails. Funny, there's no gold dust on the fingers. They don't want to be Exlee, only the emperor. Anyone from Ashtown would have made the opposite choice, because not only is Exlee's power greater, it's cleaner. Somehow using someone's need to keep them in line is less awful than using their fear.
I eat my apple slowly, but soon enough I find myself sliding teeth along the core, trying to milk the shavings of the fruit. A new one, lush and green instead of the red I've been devouring, appears over my head, held dangling by its stem.
Once I take it, Adra—Adam—walks around the bench to sit beside me. My heart pounds, but I try to keep my voice steady.
"I've heard stories about taking fruit from a man named Adam," I say.
"Pretty sure that one was the other way around."
"I guess I wouldn't know."
It's been a long time since our first conversation, when I hinted I wasn't really from the Rurals. He gave me fruit then, too, but I hadn't hesitated to eat it. I have no reason not to trust him, but panic washes from my head down just the same. My heart and skin are reacting like he's Adra, like I'm in danger. I picture that little piece of Nelline's ghost in my chest, roughing up my ribs because I'm talking to the enemy.
He looks sideways quickly, twice. Most of us wear cuffs or carry fobs, but Bosch has one of the few ocular ports. They say it allows all of your messages and news and research to come up instantly on the side of your vision. Messages are cleared by looking left, and notifications are shut down by closing your eyes for five seconds. They also say the first wave was an utter failure, that you have to use eyedrops every four hours or you'll want to rip the whole thing out...but probably not to his face.
"What are you doing here?" I ask, like it's not his garden.
"Meeting you, of course."
"You...you left the note?"
"Well, not me personally. But yes, I had it left."
His face is lined in that soft and perpetual smile that makes him look like a puppy even though he's the smartest man in the city. So different from Adra, but not different enough for this to feel like anything but talking to a ghost. It's too much. I look away from him and for the first time notice we are the only ones in the garden.
"Where is everyone?"
"In other parts of the park. The paths leading to this area were redirected due to maintenance," he says.
"Maintenance?"
"Maintenance..." He waves his hand, as if to remove the meaning of the word, so much an emperor there is no excuse for me not having seen it before. "It's almost always code for something else, you know."
I nod like I understand, even though I don't. I'm out of my depth. I hold up the apple. "I prefer the red."
"I had to guess. You didn't leave enough skin for the cameras to pick it up. I figured I'd bring you a new one before you attempted to swallow the core."
"I like to finish what I start," I say.
"Do you?"
From anyone else it would be some kind of sexual innuendo and I'd be disappointed in Adam but not surprised. But his tone is charmless and menacing, and it penetrates the dreamlike encounter. I remember all at once who he is, who I am, and that I'm not behaving like someone who doesn't know he's the son of Nik Senior.
I move slightly away from him. "Why did you summon me here?"
"Summon?" he says.
Fuck. Summon is what emperors do. I should have said invite. I'm blending him with Adra again.
He's staring at the bench, at the new space I've put between us. "Don't be afraid of me."
Easier said, and all that.
"Why am I here?"
"I wanted to make sure you weren't her," he says. "Two of you came back."
"But you said, 'I know what happened on 175.' What did you mean?"
He doesn't speak, but I can wait him out. I begin on my second apple. The first taste is always too much. He must be decades out of Ashtown to think anyone from there would prefer the green. Sourness isn't a novelty back home; it's in all the fruit we grow, the price we pay for our little bit of sweet. This apple just tastes like Ashtown's best efforts. But it's still free food, and I'm still me, so I keep eating.
"Do you know I'm the only one who sits here? This bench is always unused."
This is not an answer to my question, but I play along.
"Really? But it's the only one in the shade."
"For that to have value you'd have to know the sun can be dangerous. No one here does."
"...But you do?"
He takes time answering. I see him swallow twice before he finally nods. His confirmation puts me on edge. I am no one, nothing, why tell me this? Nelline's ghost is screaming in my chest and the sour in my mouth is nesting like a rock in my stomach.
"I suspect you learned my name on Earth 175, but I'll ask you not to say it."
"I'm not going to blackmail you."
He smiles. "But you thought about it."
"Only for, maybe, a second."
He laughs loud and clear. "God, you remind me of home. I look forward to working with you more closely."
"This is about a promotion?"
It can't be, not really. He would have just come to my office, or had me come up to his. He didn't need to leave a cryptic note, or empty out a public garden, if this is just about a job.
He tilts his head. There is a famous picture from over a decade ago—it originally ran on the front of a news projection but now a version of it is blown up in the lobby of Eldridge—of a twentysomething Adam Bosch at the moment they figured out the frequency to send an animal to another world. The picture was taken right before the sequence was discovered, and it captured the genius at work just before his breakthrough. He is giving me the same look now that he gave the problem of worlds.
"This area of 175 is going through a leadership transition, and it wasn't before you got there." He turns, stretching his arm along the back of the bench but not touching me.
"Does that matter?"
"It does." His smile, at last, has wavered. "I summoned you here because you killed me."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 74 |
All the words I could say crowd at the front of my mouth until only the smallest can squeeze through.
"No. Yes. What? You...yes."
His next laugh is loud enough to echo off his house. He laughs like Nik Nik, utterly unconcerned about disturbing others. I'd envisioned many reactions to him finding out I killed Adra, but glee was not on my list.
"Jean's always said you weren't the killing kind, but he doesn't know Ashtown stock like I do. Your bonus will be on your next check, but I was hoping you'd be interested in more work like that."
"I'm not Ash stock," I say, but then the rest catches up with me. "Bonus?"
"Yes, the bonus."
"My bonus...for killing you."
Things are connecting too slowly, and I keep looking at him, waiting for the world to coalesce into something that makes sense.
"It's more than generous. We would have gotten to him eventually, but 175 was always so paranoid. You've saved me a lot of hassle."
Why hasn't everyone else figured out how to traverse? Or have they?
No...they haven't.
Why not?
Nelline would have gotten it right off, but it's taken me this long. What better way to stop an invention from being made again than by killing every version of the man who invented it? Even if that man is yourself?
The sour taste in my mouth now is all bile and no apple. I let the fruit slide from my hand and roll into the grass.
"Do you feel it? When they die, do you feel it in your chest?"
His mouth opens, then closes. "Of course not," he says, but he has to look away first.
"How many of you are left?"
"About two dozen."
Three times what I have.
He's uncomfortable with my responses, obviously not in line with what he remembers from "Ashtown stock." I've played this meeting badly, but he's played it worse.
"You don't need to decide right away," he says. "Think it over."
I stand up too quickly. It looks like I'm running away...because I am.
"I've got a meeting with Jean." This is true. Jean just doesn't know it yet.
"Wait," he says, and I have to.
He stands and I try to look impatient, not disgusted or terrified.
"Take care. I pay close attention to those who carry my secrets."
It's not a threat, but it is. I should never have come here. There's no record of this meeting except the paper. I could disappear right now. I was safer when he thought I was just opportunistic and conscienceless. If he knows I'm horrified I become a liability, because people with morals do illogical things. I need to be Ashtown in his eyes.
When I open my mouth, it feels like Nelline is speaking.
"You get me that bonus, and I'll be quiet as the river."
He smiles wider now, because geniuses like it when things make sense, I guess.
"I'll personally make sure it's on your next check."
"Appreciate it," I say, all teeth, making a polite threat of my own.
When the gate to his garden opens I exhale and head down to 70, where Jean lives. It's an area mostly populated by new-money-rich immigrants. The houses are still expensive and it has just as many parks as 80, but people from higher floors travel here like it's a novelty. I don't bother going to Jean's house, because I know he'll be at his wife's restaurant. She advertises it as authentic Ivorian cuisine, but Jean has confided in me that she doesn't make it right for the public. I believe him, because the leftovers he brings me from their house have twice the smell and spice as what she serves for pay.
When I walk in I clock four of Jean's grandchildren serving customers while two of his children shout in the kitchen. Jean is occupying his usual booth in the back, though he often wanders around and talks to patrons about his homeland or his old job, depending on whether or not they recognize him. They usually recognize him.
He's sitting now, and as I slide into the booth across from him I wish I'd spent the walk planning what to say. As it is, only one word comes out: Murderer.
I want to say it angrily, but it comes out like a plea. Like I break my own heart by saying it when I wanted to break his.
He folds his hands.
"I told you not to go to that meeting."
I open my mouth again, but he holds up a finger and looks over my shoulder.
"Sita," he says, and moments later a granddaughter, or great-granddaughter now that I think of it, appears at his arm. Her hair is buzzed short and it's a redder brown than the other children's, but she has Jean's round cheekbones and his wide, bright smile.
She pulls out a paper pad and a marker. She can't be more than five, and the pad is covered in stickers.
"Two juices please. Ginger and tomi," he says.
She pretends to write our order by drawing stars and what looks like a fat tree with skinny arms, all while nodding seriously. Jean kisses her on the head and lets her go.
I'm silent until she comes back with the drinks, spilling a third of each before setting them down and walking away.
"Did you call her over because you thought it would soften me?"
"I called her over because I was thirsty," he says, and then has the audacity to smile. "And because I knew it would soften you."
I keep my face dead. He doesn't need to know that the child has utterly spoiled my rage, leaving only hurt.
"I'm right, aren't I? You know what Adam is doing? You knew he was the one I was meeting?"
Jean takes his time, sipping deep from his ginger juice, though I leave my tamarind untouched. I'd never had it before him, and I don't want the taste to remind me that it is the least of things he's done for me.
"I knew he's been wanting to recruit you to wetwork since you were hired. When I saw the note...I assumed it was him," he says.
"And you've just been letting him get away with this the whole time?"
He takes another sip, then looks at me. "Do you remember where I came from? What I was?"
Somehow I am the one who feels ashamed. I can't look at him when I answer. "I know what some of your other selves were."
"Say it."
"A child soldier. That's why you were a traverser candidate. You...you died a lot."
He twists his glass along the table. "By the time Eldridge found me I was already old enough to think I knew how my life would go. Too many children and too little money, living in a desert not unlike your Ashtown. Mr. Bosch brought me here, showed me the world, and yes I was valuable because I was rare, but I was also valuable because I was willing to make others even rarer."
"You killed the other Adams for him?"
"Hardly. Mostly his father did, or he killed himself as a teenager. So few made it out to Wiley City, he was never his own greatest challenger. There were others. Competition."
"Competition? He just killed any scientist who could do what he did? And you let him?"
He opens his hands. "There were not so many."
"If there's one, there's three hundred and eighty. If there's five there's...a fuckload. Jesus, Jean."
I set my hand down on the table hard enough that it lights up with menu selections. I slide them away because I want to do the same with him, with this information, with everything I'd ever wished was true about him.
"I've killed more for worse men, with far less reason. But this was all years ago. After I'd shown my loyalty, he decided I had more value as a traverser and face. By the time the scope of what we would need to do became clear, there was a department devoted to the...unpleasantness of maintaining a technological monopoly."
"There's a whole department? How..." But then it hits me: "Maintenance."
It's almost always code for something else, you know?
Adam told me himself, but he wasn't the first. Adra had raved about people in black trying to kill him, men who had disappeared before anyone else could see them.
"That's why you lost it when I said I wanted to join Maintenance. They're a kill squad."
"Were, Cara. You're years late to this. Occasionally some young upstart will make Mr. Bosch nervous, but for the most part Maintenance sits back and collects a check. I wasn't lying about them being obsolete. The only job I've heard of this year was another Maintenance worker who couldn't keep quiet. Which is why I didn't tell you. You have nothing to do with this. Your hands are as clean as my baby granddaughter's. You shouldn't die for these sins. And dying is all you will do if you try to expose Adam Bosch. I will tell him you're declining his offer. Take the analyst test. Spend the next four years doing an honest job and sending money back home and then when you get your citizenship you can go work somewhere else. It's too late for all of this."
"Just pretend Eldridge hasn't killed thousands of people?"
"Tens of thousands, and yes. Extend Eldridge the same courtesy you extended your other government. I don't know much about the history here, but I would guess the blood runners in your past saw as much judgment as the juntas in mine. Once they're in power, no one cares how they got there."
It doesn't matter how you got it. If you have it, it's yours.
Nothing says Ashtown like accepting mass murder without protest. Because that's what you do to survive. That's all Jean's asking me to do, to shut up and survive. I should be grateful he talked me down. I should have been able to talk myself down without coming here at all. I should have known to let the powerful man kill whomever he wants, just like I always have.
"When you came to Wiley City, didn't you want it to be better?"
"Warlord, emperor, CEO..." Jean shrugs. "No difference. You can't save the people he killed. You can only damn yourself. Unless you think some trial, some murder sentence, will please the dead?"
No, the dead won't thank me for trying to get Adam Bosch arrested. And if Adam Bosch mostly killed himself and people on other planets, the families of the victims wouldn't even know if he did go to trial.
I rub my face. "You're right."
"I know this is hard to accept, but you will see it is best. If you are still upset when you get promoted, just use some of your new salary to save lives back in your hometown. It all washes out."
He pushes my cup toward me, like he's offered everything from coffee to healing tonics hundreds of times in the last six years. If I accept it, it will mean nothing has changed. That I'm falling back into routine and looking past the bodies it took to pay my checks.
I drink every drop.
I won't act against Adam Bosch. Jean is right. This isn't the first time I've been kept by a man ruining other people's lives to hold on to power. What Jean doesn't know is that even when I intend to do nothing, I have to know the exact shape of the thing I am allowing to happen. Now, high up in Wiley City, I'll do the same thing Nik Nik drowned me for doing in Ashtown. I'll sit at my desk, and begin a list of names.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 75 |
My list grows and spreads in the days after my meeting. It started out small, a handful of scientists who expressed regret about Bosch's breakthrough because they'd been so close. Three names, all Wileyites, with a mortality rate that rivals mine. Those three represented just over a thousand murders, but rivals have continued dying off ever since.
My list now has fifty names, all dead across the majority of worlds, but none dead here. Killing on Earth Zero must be too real for Bosch, because while he dispatches his merry band of murderers to every other world, here he just buys the institutions of his rivals and runs them into the ground. He's aggressive in Wiley, but utterly ruthless in shutting down competition in every other walled city with even a half-functioning tech center. He doesn't even recruit the scientists, just leaves them to find work in another field. They must learn their lesson, because none have remained in interuniversal travel.
That kind of razing is a tactic I recognize from his father. It was Nik Nik who folded in upstarts, who turned any would-be rival gangs into sanctioned runners wearing his colors. Nik Senior would kill them all or leave them and their families without defense or supplies in the deep wastes. It is the descendants of his enemies who still haunt the edges of the wasteland, mouths blistered and minds rotted from two generations of toxic water and polluted plants.
I won't tell enforcement, but knowing how many dead I'm ignoring is like knowing how to spell the name of the demon who bought your soul. When I was with Nik Nik, I wrote the names of people he'd hurt in a book while wearing his gifts. That's all I'm doing now, looking Adam's crimes in the face while getting lightheaded over the size of the kill bonus he gave me.
It doesn't take long for Jean to call me, early enough in the morning for me to know he's not just checking in.
"You know I can see what my username is pulling up, right?"
"I'm not doing anything about it," I say, because that's what he's actually called to ask. "I just need to know."
He isn't really angry—irritated, maybe, but mostly concerned—so when he gives in with a sigh, it's more pre-planned theatrics than an actual shift in his mood.
"Get it out of your system, Cara," he says. "But keep it to yourself. Give Adam Bosch no reason to take his due."
"You make it sound like he's going to garnish my wages or something."
He clucks his tongue at my ignorance. "The only due powerful men recognize is a life—in service or in sacrifice."
Something about what he says slides into the back of my neck like a talon, and even after he hangs up I can't shake this new uneasiness. Only when I'm getting ready for work does it hit me: The only due powerful men recognize is a life...and the runners said they were coming to the Rurals to collect the emperor's due. I check the date on my cuff, but it's too late. If they stuck to their plan, they went last night. I'd forgotten, among all of the corporate espionage and murder and selling my soul, I'd forgotten that runners were coming for my sister's stash last night and she didn't want them to take it. I think about the star on the runner's throat on 175. Maybe the funeral wasn't the first time he'd seen her. Maybe he'd come for exactly what he had on another world. Or maybe Nik Nik decided to get power in the Rurals on this Earth the same way Adra claimed it there.
I press my cuff so I can call her, but before I can dial, it rings. When I see my family's number, I expect it to be someone saying Esther's name and calling me home through sobs, so when I hear her clear, even voice I calm instantly. I'm prepared for whatever comes next, because it is not the worst.
"You're okay?" I say. "I thought the runners were coming for you."
"Not me," she says. "They took him. Michael's gone."
In the background I can hear my mother, frantic and wailing while my stepfather tries to soothe her.
"Gone how?"
"There were runners here this morning. Mom thinks they kidnapped him."
Mom thinks means Esther doesn't. Which means he's run away with them, probably.
"I'm on my way."
I call Dell to let her know I won't be in. What would Bosch do if I didn't call in? Does the information I hold make me unfireable? He does have an entire murderous department standing around with too little to do, so probably best not to risk it.
It's midmorning when I make it home, but I'm already sweating in my Wiley City clothes. Esther offers me use of her closet, but I'd rather dehydrate than wear the light dresses of a Ruralite. My stepfather hugs me tight and I feel his wet face against my shoulder. I realize then that this man is too open for subterfuge, regardless of what he was capable of on 175.
"You were never letting the runners take powder from you, were you?" I ask.
Confusion clears his grief a little, but he shakes his head. "The missing powder? I think it was just Michael taking extra without logging it. He was practicing, probably."
Not practicing, stockpiling, because he knew he was leaving soon. The runners were only ever coming for him. He was the emperor's due all along.
"How long has he been gone?"
Daniel shakes his head. "I don't know. It was sometime in the night. Some of his clothes are missing, but most are still here."
Of course they are, because a Ruralite turning runner isn't exactly going to bring his collection of tunics. I bet he took only the white tank tops the boys here use as undershirts.
I turn to Esther. "Did you hear him go?"
I doubt there was a struggle, but Esther's room faces Michael's.
"No, I..." Esther looks down. "I stayed up in the storeroom all night."
Because she thought they were coming for her powder, and because I've never been able to make her listen to me. I tell myself her stubbornness was for the best. She would have tried to stop Michael, and this way she missed the runners entirely.
"I might know where"—I slide my gaze over to my mother—"they would have taken him. I'll see if he's there."
"It's too risky," Daniel says.
His concern allows me to separate the 175 version from this one. This is my stepfather, and he loves me. Or, he loves who he thinks I am and that's the best I've got.
"I'm a resident. They'll think twice before trying to hurt me. Plus, I have money, hopefully enough to buy him back."
Or to tempt them into casting him out. Runners are a loyal bunch, but if I can get to him before he takes his first mark they won't feel obligated to keep him.
"I'll go with you," Daniel says.
My mother squeals.
"If the head of the Rurals is seen at a runners' den, word will travel," Esther says. "I'll go. I do outreach in the heart of Ash all the time. It won't be unusual for me to be seen there."
There is no sound of distress from my mother at putting Esther in danger.
Daniel takes my sister's face in his hands. "Send both my girls out into that vile town? My most precious things?"
I doubt he even remembers that I was born in "that vile town" anymore, his mind rewriting Caramenta's history so it is no different from his Rural-born children.
"It will be fine," I say. "I'll keep her safe."
Daniel looks a little sad, but he smiles. "And who will keep you safe?"
I don't have an answer for that, but Esther does.
"You don't know, Father? God herself holds Cara in the palm of her hand."
I glare at my sister for what I think is a tease, but her face is open and sincere.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 76 |
Three hundred and eighty-two worlds and I bet every Hangars Row smells just like this: sweat, dirt, gasoline, and smoke. It smells a little like the side rooms at the House, but mixed with a zoo. The smell hits me like a wall that is half revulsion and half memory, but I can tell it hits Esther harder, a hell of a smell for a girl raised around open earth and interior farms.
The space used to be a warehouse, back when corporations drilled and polluted our land, working even our children till their hands bled. They were based in cities like Wiley, but like all the city-based companies, they didn't adhere to any of the same labor laws once they weren't dealing with citizens. That's why the emperor had to send a message.
It only took a little murder and a lot of vandalism for those places to learn that whoever had given them access to the land had lied; Ashtown was not theirs to claim or pillage. The Blood Emperor himself disabled the last drill. Our water's been cleaner and our ground more steady ever since, or so the story goes. Even Eldridge's industrial hatch—the machine that brings in resources from other worlds—is careful to treat its Ashtown workers fairly, with runners checking in every so often to make sure.
The first runner to see us slides out from under her vehicle. The monstrosity she's working on is technically a bike, but the two tires are wider than any two ordinary car tires combined. She hisses a little at me, but nods at Esther.
"Thought you stuck to the alleys. No souls to save here and we don't need your food."
Esther's smile is different from Daniel's. It's calm and benevolent, but it leans close enough to a smirk that she never looks naïve.
"I would never bring aid here," she says. "I'm sure you all eat better than any in my congregation."
"Damn right we do."
"Mr. Scales, that's enough."
The runner turns away at the command, which means the one who gave it outranks her.
"Don't tell me you've caught another body?" Mr. Cheeks says when he sees us.
Mr. Scales ducks her head when Mr. Cheeks passes, bringing her chin so low they almost look the same height even though she's easily half a foot taller. He taps her on the shoulder, telling her she's not in trouble, and suddenly she's the tallest in the room again.
"No, I'm looking for someone. He's a new recruit. He would have arrived last night," Esther says. "I don't want to cause trouble, but I do need to speak with him."
Mr. Cheeks either doesn't realize I don't want to cause trouble is a threat or doesn't care, because he's already shaking his head. "Once a runner, a runner for life. Not even the princess of the Rurals can convert a runner."
"I'm just here to say goodbye. It's...he's my brother. Please."
Up until now I've been silent, not just because my sister has things under control, but because I wasn't sure how much she wanted to show. She's trusting this runner with the truth that Michael, the de facto prince of the Rurals, has defected.
"You're more polite when you need something," he says.
"Last time we met, I thought you were stealing from me."
He laughs a little at that, maybe surprised her distaste hadn't just stemmed from his occupation, or maybe just surprised she felt she had a right to be mad about theft.
"We've not skimmed from the Rurals in over a decade," he says.
"I know that now," she says. "I'm sorry I was short with you, but you have to let me see him."
I step forward. "He probably hasn't even taken marks yet. You don't owe him sanctuary," I say. "Name your price."
Mr. Cheeks stiffens. "Keep your money," he says before turning on his heel and disappearing.
We've been waiting for five minutes when I get the feeling Mr. Cheeks isn't coming back.
"This is my fault," I say.
"No," Esther says. "It is most decidedly mine."
"That other world? The place where I got stuck? Michael was a runner there. I should have warned you it was possible. When I heard the message, I should have known they weren't just coming for powder they didn't even know how to use."
She smiles for me, a kinder and less all-knowing version than she shows the world. "I have always known it was possible."
"If they bring him out here, do you have a plan?"
She pats her bag. "Of course."
Finally, the door opens. Michael enters with Mr. Cheeks following close behind. No, not Michael. He's gotten marks, one on each arm, which means he can never be Michael again.
"Esther, we're too late."
Her eyes are wet, but she's still smiling. "It's been too late since we were ten."
The two runners stand opposite us. Michael doesn't reach for his twin, and to her credit she doesn't reach for him. She holds her head high. From the outside, they could be strangers, representatives from bordering territories negotiating a contract.
"Mr. Cross, I presume," I say.
He flinches, and in his uncertainty I finally see a hint of the boy I've known for years.
"How did you know that?"
"Big sister knows a lot of things, like what a shit runner you'll be. You know they only want you because of the pyrotechnics. Runners haven't had explosives in years and you're too oblivious to know they're using you."
I don't pretend I won't hate him for this. This will tear apart Esther and my parents. Not to mention what it will do to Daniel's reputation. They'll say he was such a bad father his own son chose the life of grit and blood and oil.
He's going to yell at me, maybe for the first time in his life, but Esther moves.
"It's okay," she says, touching his arm. Her palm has landed on his mark. "Will you tell me what they mean?"
He looks over his shoulder to check with Mr. Cheeks.
"The one on the left is loyalty." I say. "It's always the first. The one on the right..." I squint, trying to remember a language I was last fluent in when I was Nik Nik's. "It means he has a partner in the field, I think."
"No," he says. When had his voice gotten so deep? When had he grown up?
He looks back at Esther. "It means half to a whole. Some runners get it to commemorate their partner, but I didn't."
Esther understands the tattoo is for her the same moment I do, and now it's easy to see the water in her eyes, though she seems determined not to cry.
"You'll need to stop using words like commemorate. I want you to fit in," Esther says. She manages to sound like she means it. She opens her satchel and pulls out a woven bag. "Food. I know they tend toward meats and bread and you're used to produce. It's just a little to help you while your body adjusts. I made you gloves. You should have gloves."
Inwardly I cringe, expecting the pastel gardening gloves Ruralites are known for, but the gloves Michael takes out of the pack are black and thick. They can't be leather, Ruralites don't do animal work, but she must have taken the material from their bright-day tarps. I can see a hint of silver dust adorning the knuckles.
"They'll protect your hands if you get near anything too hot."
She knows, I realize. She must have known he would go, and what he would do for them once he left. I wonder if she'd known this was an option the moment explosives went missing and she just chose to believe it was all the runners' doing.
"I thought you had a plan," I say.
"I do. I plan to love my brother, whatever life he chooses." He gasps at that, and she goes weak. She takes his hands. "The tunic has a high collar and long sleeves for a reason. Anything at all can be covered over."
He jerks away, but he keeps her package pulled tight against his chest. I make out the hard edges of something that is definitely not fruit or clothes. Because he never publicly preached I don't know which holy book Michael favored, but I'm guessing the book she's hidden in his things already has his name inside.
Michael doesn't hug her. He nods goodbye, then turns his back and stomps away. His steps are an awkward mimicry of the runners' march, but I'm sure he'll master it soon enough.
That leaves us with Mr. Cheeks, who looks no less bewildered than when we dared him to drive to the bogs.
"He came to us," he says. "We didn't poach."
She nods. "I know. I don't blame you. My father might, but I won't."
After that they just stare at each other. I look from one to the other, but neither is looking at me. I clear my throat. Esther blinks. I liked it better when she couldn't conceal her hatred of the runner. This new mutual respect is dangerous.
"Thanks, for letting us see him," I say, and usher Esther out. Once we're in the car, I say, "I thought you'd be more upset."
"I couldn't possibly be more upset," she says, and I know beneath the affected calm, she's telling the truth.
"Surprised, then," I say. "You're definitely not that."
"Do you know why Michael took on the ritual of explosives when he was a boy? I asked him once. He said he liked not knowing what was going to happen. He didn't hope for it to go well or for it to go poorly. He didn't care either way. He liked that uncertainty. That kind of curiosity is ill fit for people who are supposed to want only the best in all things for everyone, all the time."
"What about your rituals? If only one person is allowed to hold the knowledge at a time, how will you cope without Michael?"
"We've been without a bombardier before. After my grandfather died, my father wasn't allowed to practice it, because he was an only child. The congregation did without for twenty years before Michael declared that he would read the texts and began practicing. We'll bring back the simple fire bowl. It will be enough."
"You won't practice, will you?"
When she looks at me, she's lost the fight against tears. There are fresh tracks on her face.
"I'm an only child now. It would be forbidden."
I think about Michael, drawn to a runner's kind of danger even at ten. And about Cheeks and Esther, the way they froze as if seeing some greater part of each other. Maybe I'm not the only one who feels the tugs of my other lives. Maybe they hover over us, steering us, constantly. I told Esther before that nothing was inevitable, but that was before I felt so helpless to change absolutely anything at all.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 77 |
Dell catches me sleeping at my desk the next morning. I'd stayed too late at my family's house, first to comfort Mom, then to help Esther and my stepfather arrange a prayer to send Michael safely into his new life. The whole thing felt like a funeral, and if you judged by my mother's wailing, you'd think it was. By the time I drove back to Wiley City, it was already late.
"I was just resting my eyes," I say, wiping at my mouth.
She sets a cup of coffee in front of me. Usually Jean brings me coffee, but he's kept his distance since our discussion at the restaurant and Dell must have noticed. I look from her to the cup. Dell lives and works on the eightieth floor, but this is the second time she's been down here, like my desk is somehow on the way.
"I take it things did not go well with your family emergency?"
I shouldn't hesitate to tell her, but with everything I've learned about Adam I can't help but think she's down here so often now because she's spying on me. In the end, I remember Nelline's funeral, only possible because of her, and the sight of my undamaged collar drifting down into oblivion.
"Michael joined the runners. We tried to talk him back, but it was too late."
"Wasn't that dangerous?"
"Not really. I dressed like you, so they mistook me for a real Wiley City resident, thought I had value." I throw a smile on it to make it a joke, even though it isn't.
"You shouldn't. Multigenerational citizens dress more like you do," she says. "The way I dress is too traditional. It marks me as a child of immigrants."
"You dress like an Ashtowner's dream of Wiley. It's the first thing I noticed about you."
Her brow furrows, uncertain as she so rarely is. "Why do you pay so much attention to the way I dress?"
"Why are you at my desk when you live and work on eighty?"
Her eyes widen and I realize she's just remembered why she was at my desk, which is not actually what I wanted to know.
"You missed the announcement yesterday. Adam Bosch called a special assembly for this afternoon."
My stomach drops, not just at the mention of the murderer I used to admire. "You think they've reached remote capabilities?"
I've been preparing for this, I even have a career path for the day I can no longer traverse, but my heart will break just the same to never walk the worlds again.
"I can't think of what else it could be," she says. "I'm sorry, Caramenta."
I almost believe her.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 78 |
Someone pokes my side while I'm loading up on free food before the assembly. I turn with a scowl that instantly melts.
"Dresden, Dresden, Dresden, look what the sandcat ralphed up."
"I do so miss your idioms," he says, reaching over me to load up his plate on the company dime. His eyes settle on my face. "I'd heard surviving a dop left its mark on you. Those permanent?"
I touch my face. I'd forgotten, again, that I'm branded.
"They're permanent."
His smile never dips into pity, and I'm grateful.
"I like it. Goes with your whole hard-ass brand. Probably have rebellious teens tattooing their faces before the year's out."
"Thanks. You back on rotation?"
"In a way. They brought me in when you were out, and I fill in since they're letting you get away with a low rotation. I'm just on call now, like the rest of us who aren't you."
He doesn't say it with any kind of malice, but then, he doesn't need this job so much as it amuses him. Dresden is the rare traverser who was worth something before taking the job. He's pure Wiley City, from his ice-light eyes to his nearly white hair. He'd burn up like paper where I come from. He's even paler than the others, because he was confined to his room until mid-adolescence. He suffered from a genetic immune disorder when he was a child. He shouldn't have survived, but on this Earth he did and on one hundred others he didn't.
"I'm sorry about Turner."
Dresden's partner was let go last year when my dop on 245 died. It was the last world he had keys to that I didn't. They fired him, and increased my rotation.
Dresden waves away my apology. "Better him than anyone else. I can keep him here."
"For what it's worth, it looks like we're all going to be in the same boat pretty soon anyway," I say, motioning toward the stage.
He nods. "You see the front row? It's not the board this time. All reporters." He grabs a handful of grapes. "Might as well eat the bastards out of house and home on our way out."
Pretty soon I see two other traversers present for the assembly. They've never greeted me with the friendliness of Dresden, but my existence doesn't threaten his way of life like it does theirs. Still, whatever bitterness they harbored must seem irrelevant now, because they sit with us as the assembly begins. Others in the audience take piteous glances at the four of us, but we keep our heads high, a quartet playing proudly as the ship sinks.
In the corner I spot a pack of black jumpsuits that used to mean nothing to me. I look in their eyes for some mark of the things they've done, but workers in Maintenance just look like people, younger than you'd expect and laughing too loud at one another's jokes. Someone else might be surprised that so many are Wiley City stock—assuming, against all evidence, that cold-blooded murder is a desert trait—but I know better. I'm only surprised at how many of them are still employed. I've taken more comfort than I deserve from the idea that they're mostly inactive, but there are nearly twenty in attendance. Even if I didn't know what they really did, I'd hate them. They're too excited, making jokes on the morning the only other world walkers in the company will be getting unemployment notices.
The lights dim, and a hush falls over us. A woman I don't recognize talks about Eldridge's legacy, something that doesn't usually happen. This recitation must be for the reporters' benefit, because she's only telling stories we've heard a dozen times. Eventually she introduces Adam Bosch, and the applause is so much louder than usual I look for the speaker playing the track.
Once Adam takes the stage I assume the announcement will come quickly, but he's in a storytelling mood. I used to relish this part, the human side of the genius letting us in and, in his awkward way, begging us to understand him. Now I just see a tyrant establishing a legacy. He wants his journey recorded, not in the universal desire to be remembered, but because he pictures every word he says going on a plaque somewhere. He doesn't want us to feel closer to him; he wants us to worship him.
I feel Nelline's long hiss building in my chest. It's probably just my own dislike, but it feels like a warning.
I know, I think at her. Fuck him. I know.
I bite into what I can already tell will be the first of many danishes.
Eventually he starts revving up for the kill. He's made his voice louder but clearer and more careful, like this is the clip he wants news outlets to replay.
"And so I struggled with how to share this amazing experience. I believed there must be a way to open it up to others. Now, I am proud to say that I have found that way."
"Here it comes..." Dresden says.
"I am thrilled to announce the first ever commercial traversing trip, made possible by our new inoculation against the backlash of duplicates."
"What the shit?" I say, the words half pastry.
The reporters are shouting questions, too many at once to differentiate. Adam holds up his hands.
"This is by no means the beginning of a commercial wave. This inoculation is made from limited resources, and incredibly tedious to distill. For our initial trip we will only have five doses available. We'll begin auctioning those seats for a traversing trip to leave early next year. I want to stress that we have no intention of taking more passengers than we consider absolutely safe."
The rarity will increase the trip's value for buyers, I know better than anyone.
My mouth is dry. The cheering continues even as he starts taking questions.
Dresden starts clapping. "Looks like we get to live another day," he says.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 79 |
"You know damn well there is no inoculation. You have felt Nyame. You can't inoculate against her."
Jean sits down behind his desk. I didn't have an appointment, so after the meeting I just went to the elevator and started bleating into my cuff like a goat. Eventually he sent the elevator down. Unlike Dell—and, really, anyone under forty-five—Jean doesn't have his security clearance integrated with his cuff. He carries a manual fob, which means he had to get up and come to the elevator to keep me from making a scene.
He tosses his fob on his desk before sitting with a loud sigh. He looks distressed, and I want to believe the press conference turned his stomach just the same as mine, and the prospect of the commercial traversing trip is weighing on him.
"I'll admit, it is...sudden," he says. "But I'm not in the loop on R&D, and neither are you. Maybe he developed something."
"Something of this scope? How? You're the one who told me business was becoming less lucrative. And then he magically finds a way to milk five of the super-rich for capital? That's fifteen hundred people dying."
"No, it's five. Only five on each Earth. No one will experience more than five deaths. And that's only if he plans to kill the dops. As much as you hate him, don't forget he is a genius. He may very well have found a way around the backlash. Maybe it was because you survived. Maybe there was something in your blood that helped them figure it out."
I'd already thought of that. That's why I'd spent time since the press conference scouring Eldridge's network for proof that the work had been done. But no one had accessed my blood sample since the day I came back. No one but the doctor had accessed my medical file at all—except Dell, probably looking for an excuse to put me on yet another period of limited rotation.
"If he'd found a way around it, a scientist would have done my pull today."
"We don't know that."
I lean forward, putting my arms across his desk and maintaining eye contact so he doesn't look down. Is this what I look like when I make excuses for my own comfort? Weak and ashamed? It must be.
"We'll see," I say, then stand and walk out.
His office door is the kind that slides open into the wall, so I can't slam it, but I wish I could. I settle for walking heavily back to the elevator. My boots are heavy desert stock, and the sound is as satisfying as punching a wall. The slapping sound reminds me I've been dressing more and more like Ashtown since I got back from 175. It hasn't been a deliberate change, but I don't care enough to fight against it.
I still love Jean like an uncle, but I can feel the rift forming between us. I sit down at my desk and shake the fob I stole from his office out of my sleeve. I didn't want to steal it, but he couldn't have maintained his denial and still given it to me.
I tried to do this the easy way, tried to prove the legitimacy of the discovery by following the trail of research on Eldridge's servers. But even with Jean's credentials I couldn't find anything. No funds allocated to it, no scientists moved to the project. I found one reference attributing the discovery to a specific department, but all their files are locally stored. Meaning I would have to be on a terminal in their department on the seventy-eighth floor to access it.
I wait until the last person has left my area for the day, then go to the elevator and use the fob to unlock upward access. I get off on 76 and take two flights of stairs up, in case an elevator going to that floor would attract attention, but I'm still waiting for someone to stop me. When I walk out of the stairwell and onto the floor, it's dark. Not dark like my floor is dark, meaning everyone's gone home and there's only ambient lights from computers and appliances, but perfect dark.
I'd expected this floor was still research and development, just working on a different project. I was going to access their computers to either see the research for the inoculation, or prove there isn't any because the inoculation doesn't exist. But Adam hasn't even bothered to set up a dummy department. There are no desks, no computers. Just empty space where a miracle was supposedly manufactured. I make my way through the floor by touch. There aren't even the required holograms pointing out the exits. Nothing.
Jean will say this isn't proof. Bosch might have the floor mislogged to protect the breakthrough. He might be concealing the names of the scientists to keep them from offers by poachers. But Bosch has eliminated any competitor who could make use of his staff. There are no poachers, and there is no inoculation. He just plans to kill the winning bidders' dops. I knew it in the auditorium, I knew it when I tried to look up the department, and I knew it when I lifted the fob from Jean. I was just looking for an excuse to turn away.
Convinced, I find my way by feel back to the door to the stairwell, but when I turn the handle nothing happens. I jiggle the handle, throwing my shoulder against the door, but it doesn't budge. So...logging the floor was a trap. Which I would have known if I'd stopped for a second to ask myself if the smartest man in the city would really let it be so easy to discredit him.
I'm wondering if I can bust open a lock in the dark, when I hear it: the high-pitched whirring of a building electrical charge. Of course. The auto-locking door is the trap's cage, but the electrical net will be the glue.
Security nets are usually built into the floor and designed to electrocute trespassers, incapacitating them until private security or public enforcement can be summoned. Something tells me Adam Bosch doesn't have this particular alarm set to inform city enforcement. If I go down, I'll disappear forever. Dell would ask where I went, but Jean wouldn't. He'd know.
I spider-climb into a corner, playing a real-life version of the floor is runners' acid from my childhood. I've been climbing since I could walk, so I'm able to put yards between the ground and me. At first, I see the glow of shock go through the floor and think I'm safe. But then it begins to climb too.
The thorough asshole has put the conductive mesh up the walls. My left side is propped on the wall with the elevator panel, and it remains dark. But the light is moving steadily toward my right. I try to outclimb it, but it follows. I move my hand at the last second, but then I slip and instinctively try to catch myself again on the wall that is the bright blue of a lightning strike.
The electricity screams through me and I shake so bad my eyes blur. The floor charge has gone out, so when I slam against it the most I get is bruises. Bruises I can't even feel, since I'm numb on my whole right side. I should be unconscious, but my Ashtown boots have mitigated some of the damage. Some, not all.
I'm half-blind and I can't walk. My ears must be working fine enough, because I hear steps coming. They are careful, different from a runner's only in that they are lighter. Security has come to see what the net has caught. No, not security. I can hear the wrinkling of a plastic jumpsuit. A Maintenance worker's coming for me.
I try to drag myself back toward the door, but I only have one working arm and leg and even those are twitching. I barely have the strength to slide my hand against the locked door, much less break it down, and the footsteps are getting closer.
I'm seventy-eight floors up, reaching where I don't belong, and yet somehow I'm still sure I'm not going to die.
Not yet, I say to the dead in my chest. I'm not coming yet.
And I'm right. The moment I have the thought, the door at my fingertips opens and I'm hauled up. I know it's not one of Adam's people, because I know just what she smells like and she had to pull me up the same way last week.
Dell hooks my dead arm around her neck and closes the door to the seventy-eighth floor tight behind us. The guard will have to unlock it to follow, if he sees any reason to check the stairwell at all. Since I should be unconscious on the floor, he might convince himself the net malfunctioned. Dell isn't taking that chance though. She drags me up the stairs and out of the building's exit on the eightieth floor.
When we get to her apartment, the shaking in my left side has stopped, though I'm still numb on the right.
Dell all but drops me on her couch when we enter, then begins messing with her cuff. I'm guessing she's checking Eldridge's security memos to see if they've reported a break-in. Or maybe she's telling Bosch I'm the intruder, and that she has me. It's impossible to tell; her face always goes blank when she's concentrating.
"Last person who found me incapacitated made me juice. Just saying."
My words are slurred, my tongue fat and pressed against the sides of my teeth.
"Stop fighting unconsciousness. We'll talk in the morning," she says, bringing a throw from another chair and draping it over me. As she tucks me in, she leans down to whisper, "And I was the last person to find you incapacitated, don't forget."
She's right. I don't remember how I got out of the hatch after landing from 175, but I do remember her finding me and telling me to stop crying. I want to smile at her scorekeeping, but my mouth only half cooperates.
"See you."
She must nod, but my eyes are already closed. I wonder if I'll wake up to her, or a group from Maintenance. I still manage to go to sleep, so I must not care. Or maybe I trust Dell...just a little.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 80 |
The smell of food wakes me long after the beeping of my cuff should have. At first, I don't move. I'm thinking about yesterday, about everything I've learned. Does knowing Adam is planning another kill campaign change things, when I've already agreed to ignore the ones in the past? I have never considered my own moral character. I've never known exactly what my limits were. I still don't, but I know that this is too much. Glossing over murders that have already happened so I can keep collecting a paycheck? I can take that. But standing by while the next round happens, and the next round, all so I can retire a citizen? I might as well jump in the bog beside Nelline, because that will take me to a place just as dark and suffocating.
I have to do something. It's probably the worst mistake I'll ever make, but I've got to.
I'm a little shaky, but I manage to chase the smell of food until I stumble into Dell's kitchen. The space is roughly the size of my whole apartment, minus the bedroom. She has a formal dining room, I'm sure, but there's a table here too. Everything in sight is either clear or silver, and all the lines are sharp and clean. Dell is bringing two plates to the table when I enter.
I take a seat at her table, rubbing at my neck, which is kinked from being pressed against the arm of the couch.
"This high up you must have at least one guest room. Afraid I'll dirty the sheets?"
She levels a glare at me across the table. "The bedrooms are all on the second and third floors. You were in no condition."
The sound of her setting a plate—loudly—in front of me calls me an ungrateful asshole more pointedly than words ever could.
"Sorry...I just wasn't sure what I would be waking up to."
She nods, acknowledging my apology and letting it go. At first, I think she's being extremely cool under the circumstances. But once I'm finished eating she slides something across the table. It's a jade teardrop earring in a plastic bag.
I look back up at her. She's wearing the pair.
"Fuck."
"Indeed." She leans forward. "It and its mate are one of a kind. But I now have three. I saw the otherworld menagerie on your wall, all in Eldridge specimen bags...with one empty space. Care to elaborate?"
I finger the edge of the bag. "This is what you want to ask me? You find me half electrocuted on a restricted floor, and this is what you want to know?"
"I've wanted to ask you for a while, but you were so upset when you first returned I thought it best to wait. I'm done waiting."
I can justify hiding my reasons for breaking into that floor, because she might report me to Bosch. I can't justify lying to her about this anymore. I never could, really.
"It was part of my collection. When you lost yours, and I had an extra, I gave you mine."
"And what is that collection? Half of it just looks like dirt, or water. And did I see a sample of Lot's Wife in there? What are you thinking?"
"It's perfectly contained. It all is. I just save things that don't exist in my world. Or"—I look down at the earring—"things I can't touch here, but was allowed to touch somewhere else."
It takes a second, but her entire face contorts when she understands. I expect disgust, but there's only confusion. Like this is an impossibility.
I'm afraid of what she'll say next, so I jump ahead.
"You approached me. I tried to slow things down, but in the end spending a night with you was a gift and I took it. We drank and we talked and you treated me like an equal because, in worlds where you don't know where I came from, you actually let yourself be attracted to me. I was going to leave before things went too far, but you were charming and open and lonely and you wanted me. I know it wasn't real. But you wanted me before I said a word. I'll say I'm sorry it happened if you want me to, but I won't mean it."
I take the bag and shove it in my pocket, angry for no reason. I'm more sure now than ever that this memento is the closest I'll ever come to holding her.
Dell's made a temple of her hands and pressed her face into it. Her eyes are closed as she slowly shakes her head.
"Stupid girl."
At first, I'm sure I've misheard the whisper, but she says it again, and then once more. When she finally opens her eyes, they are wet and raging.
"Do you not have a single memory from before your first jump?"
"Not...really."
"I kissed you! After our training, before I knew you'd be assigned to me. You invited me to your apartment and I kissed you and you kissed me back and the next morning I had a long message in my cuff saying I was the devil sent to tempt you. You called me a sinner and said if I ever so much as looked at you for too long again you would file a harassment suit."
My mouth is dry. "No, that's not...no."
"Yes. After we were matched for our first jump, you said you would request a transfer when you returned. But you never did. It was worse than that. You flirted, pushing at me, teasing me with what you knew I wanted, when I already knew you would destroy me for acting on it."
"I wasn't...That's not what I was doing."
But it was exactly what I was doing, from where she sits. In her universe. The multiverse isn't just parallel universes accessible through science. They are in each of us, a kaleidoscope made of varying perceptions. Dell and I were in different universes this whole time, and I should have known. I thought she was ignoring her attraction to me, but I was torturing her with it.
Isn't Dell unknowable too?
A warning from Nik Nik, but even that had already come too late. I broke Dell's heart before I even knew I had it, and I've been breaking it and breaking it again ever since, thinking I was the victim the whole time.
"I thought you were just classist. That's why you pretended you weren't attracted to me when there were times...times I could tell. I thought you were telling me I was beneath you every time you pulled away. I didn't know what she'd done."
"She?"
"Me, I mean I didn't remember that I'd—"
"You said 'she.' "
"I know what I said!"
I stand up. Dell stays sitting. I see it now, every ounce of hurt I'd missed before, that I'd caused. Or Caramenta had. What must she have thought? Me flirting with her after threatening her like that. All that subtle anger I'd harbored against her, thinking she thought she was better than me, did she feel it? Did she think it was Caramenta's Ruralite hate? I owe her so much. I owe her the truth.
"Imagine, just pretend, that I came back from that first pull six years ago...different. Pretend that I was a girl who'd never set foot in the Rurals, and wasn't properly trained to work for Eldridge, and when I was called to this Earth yours was the first face I saw and I wanted you. And I didn't know anything about what happened before, because that was Caramenta and not me, but I knew you were holding yourself back. I assumed the worst."
Because I always assume the worst of Wileyites. Because I have a chip on my shoulder as big as a mountain and twice as sharp. Because at the end of the day, I was the one who couldn't look past class, not Dell.
Dell shakes her head, stops, then shakes it again. "That's not possible. Bosch himself programmed first pulls. It's just...not possible."
It is, and if I leave her alone with it long enough she'll put it all together. Leaving her alone is the least I can do, but it's also all I can do. I take the bag out of my pocket and slide it across the table to her.
I replay the moment I gave it to her, the way her eyes lit up—had it been hope?—and then darkened. And I read that shift all wrong, punishing her when I should have been comforting her.
"What am I supposed to do with three earrings?" she says, picking up the bag.
"Whatever you want," I say. "I really didn't know. I'm a con and a liar and a garbage git and anything else you ever thought of me, but I really didn't know what had happened between us. You've got to believe that."
She doesn't stop me with more questions as I go, though I'm sure she has them. She's probably weighing whether or not they are worth asking, now that it's too late to change anything. We've wasted six years looking at each other and thinking we knew what we were seeing. Now it can't be anything but too late.
Walking home hurts, and takes longer than it ever has. I spend the rest of my weekend woozily recovering from my run-in with high voltages and the truth about Caramenta and Dell. It doesn't help that every news projection is rehashing the details of Eldridge's announcement, which feels so long ago but was only yesterday. In a later press conference Adam Bosch confirmed plans to repeat the journey every two years.
Because you can't have a mass murder every year. That would be too much.
He's had to be a little bitter; being subsidized by the government means he has to be overseen by them. It must feel just like having a father again. He wants enough money to be independent. The industrial hatch makes money, but not enough for the truly ambitious. And I know he is, because I am, because all of us who were told we were nothing will never stop trying to be everything.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 81 |
When I'm summoned to the hatch for my first pull on Monday, a man is waiting for me.
"Oh sorry," I say. "Must have double-booked."
"Wait. Caramenta, right? I'm really excited to meet with you. I've never seen a traverser who's done a three-hundred-pull year."
His smile is almost blue-bright, standing out against his gold-toned skin. Gold, not an ordinary brown or beige. Providers at the House sometimes use dust to get the same effect, but they start out with skin ranging from tan to dark brown to a black so rich customers line up to rub against it, so it makes them all look like earthbound gods. On his Wiley-descendant skin, the gold tones make him look like a pearl. There is a line of white at the base of his dark reddish-brown hair where the roots are beginning to grow in. He's a Wileyite trying to pass as something else, and I can't quite figure out why. Doesn't he know we still die for not being what he is?
"Three hundred and two," I say when I'm done sizing him up.
He takes my response as a good sign and holds out his hand. His palms are undyed, and they seem flat and pale and almost blue compared to the rest of him. I take his hand, my skin suddenly looking darker than it has since coming here. I've gotten paler without Ashtown's real and untamed sun, but I'll never catch up to those whose blood has been in the city for as long as mine has been in the desert.
"My name is Carrington, and I'll be your watcher for today's pull."
I yank my hand out of his. "They fired Dell?"
He laughs. "Ikari's position is more secure than any watcher in the sector, thanks to you."
"Oh...good. Where is she?"
"She's just taking some time off from this part of the job," he says. "Don't worry. I promise I won't get you killed."
I don't want him to think I don't trust him, so I hide my displeasure.
"Sorry, I don't like change. I've never pulled with anyone but Dell before."
"Never? Weird," he says, and begins my prep.
It is weird, I guess. In six years Dell's never taken a vacation while I worked, or called off long enough that we couldn't just reschedule pulls for another day. But then again, neither have I. We've never said aloud that we didn't want to work with anyone else, but we've both done our part to make sure we never had to.
Until now.
The ache in my chest isn't just for a missing romantic prospect. It's also just missing Dell. I've seen her face nearly every day since I hatched in this land of strangers, and I wish I'd realized she was my best friend, not just the girl I couldn't have.
She's removed herself from seeing me, which makes her wishes clear. I won't reach out to her, won't burden her with having to respond to some grand romantic gesture. But if she ever chooses to talk to me, I'll promise to do whatever she wants. I'll never flirt again if she'll stay in my life. I'll always want her, but I won't make that her problem.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 82 |
When i finally see Jean again, I'm ready for a fight. Working with Carrington has spoiled my mood like milk on a bright day. The watcher and I have nothing to talk about, but that doesn't stop him from talking.
I sit down, sliding Jean his fob across the desk.
He looks more irritated than surprised.
"You know, if I'd reported this stolen instead of just malfunctioning they would have GPS tracked it to your house and you would have been deported before sunup."
"I'm sorry, but I had to know. Are you going to cut me out of your life too?"
He looks at me from just under his eyebrows, holds on to that disapproving scowl for about three more seconds, then softens.
"I heard Dell requested desk duty. She said she was behind on her files. How are things going with Carrington?"
"Do you know how many horses he has? Twelve. Do you know their names? I do. They're named after the signs of the zodiac. Did I ask for any of this information? I did not."
He laughs. "Dell will be back. It's been six years with a mouth like yours, who wouldn't need a break?"
"Keep talking, old man, and I'll tell Carrington where you spend your off hours. He's a big fan."
"Carrington is a world-walker groupie," Jean says. "Careful he doesn't try to sleep with you to taste the stars."
I gag audibly.
Sitting across from him shouldn't still feel like sitting with family, but it does. I notice he's looking down at his fob, so I wait. He draws a quick circle around it with his finger, then taps it like he's made a decision.
"What did you find?"
This is a good sign. If he was going to ignore what was happening regardless, why would he even ask?
"I was right. There's nothing there. No R&D department, just a security net to trap anyone who comes looking."
"Did you get hurt?"
His concern is genuine, which makes it that much harder to be at odds.
"I managed to get out before the shock deployed," I say, a lie that protects Dell and thankfully takes some of the fatherly fear from his eyes.
"That was a close call. They'll only get closer from here," he says.
"You're not going to try and talk me out of acting against Bosch?"
"Would you listen if I did?"
"Maybe, if you could give me a good enough reason." I lean forward. "What are your reasons, Jean? What do you tell yourself to make this okay?"
He's studying the top of his desk like he can see a pattern in the plastic. I've seen this look before, when we were discussing my odds at getting analyst. He's deciding how much sugar he needs to coat the truth he's about to give me.
"Have you seen the list of leading bidders? The youngest is two decades older than the life expectancy where I come from. Every year walled cities get richer and more developed, and every year rural provinces get poorer and sicker. The other side of the scale tips down because of their rise, and they do nothing to balance it. I'm supposed to care about these five, when they have ignored entire plagues just outside these walls? I will give their deaths the same courtesy they've given the deaths of my people and yours. I'm going to kindly look away."
I don't have the right to say he's wrong. I was born at the tail end of Ashtown's wars, and I was a child through the time of the blood parades. But Jean was born and grew to adulthood in war and starvation and pestilence. He watched his eldest child born surrounded by the same violence and death he'd grown up with—violence and death driven by a lack of resources, while cities like Wiley grew higher and higher on the horizon.
"I can't use that as a reason to ignore this. It's your reason, but it can't be mine."
"I know," he says. "You realize that even if Bosch does not kill you for meddling, you will lose your job and your place here?"
I shrug. "We've always known me getting citizenship was a long shot. Me making it to thirty has always been one too."
"What is your plan?"
"I've been gathering information, the names of people he's ordered killed. I'll have a comprehensive list in a few days. When I tell the authorities what I think he's planning, I'll add the evidence I've collected so they can see he's done it before. This place is still mostly government funded, so his board will comply with enforcement even if he doesn't want to."
"And if he learns it is you who began the investigation?"
"Will you tell him?"
It's a question I should have asked before running my mouth, but I can't stop feeling safe with Jean.
He shakes his head. "I won't."
I believe him. Not as a kindly grandfather who wants to protect the young, but as a once-and-always soldier who would never put one of his own in danger.
"But if a complaint is made anonymously, the accused is allowed to read it. You may give yourself away."
"I'll deal with the consequences, whatever they may be."
Jean leans forward and puts his hand over mine. His hand is darker and larger, but still more like mine than Carrington's could ever be.
"Their indifference has killed you on hundreds of worlds, and here you are, sticking your neck out to let them do it one more time. I want you to know, after this goes bad and you're facing whatever end you've engineered for yourself, that I do admire you."
"Thank you. I mean it. Don't think I'm not still grateful for everything you've done for me. This doesn't change that."
"Will you still take the analyst test?"
"Jean, I'm definitely going to get fired for whistleblowing next week."
"Good thing the test is first thing Monday." He puts his hand over his heart and makes his eyes wide. "For me?"
I roll my eyes. "Yes, fine. I'll take the test."
That weekend, I finish assembling the packet detailing what I've found out about Eldridge's competitors dying unusually on other worlds. I add a letter explaining what I think he plans to do with the highest bidders to facilitate his lucrative commercial trips, including what happened when I visited the department that made the breakthrough.
On Sunday, I airdrop the information to Wiley City's Tech Crimes digital box.
On Monday I take the exam, dressed like an analyst in my business best.
When the time is up, the screen dings a perfect score. The victory is a little bit of ash on my tongue, but a victory nonetheless. I look around at the Wileyites surrounding me, their expressions ranging from open dismay to disappointment. I want them to know I did it. That I, an Ashtown child so worthless they've let her die hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, have scored perfect on a test made for them.
I message Jean about my score, then I walk back to my desk and wait to lose it all.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 83 |
It's illegal for Wiley City to investigate a citizen without their knowledge, so I'm sure enforcement will be here soon to inform Adam Bosch of the case. If they come to interview traversers, I won't hide who I am. Once Adam reads the complaint, he'll know it's me. I was mostly anonymous in the letter, but I made sure to mention that I was a high-volume traverser. It may condemn me, but it protects Dresden and the rest of the part-timers from being caught in the crossfire. Once I get the boot they'll all get an increased rotation. Plus, I never have to hear Carrington talk ever again, so that's another bright side.
But Maintenance makes their move first. I see them coming from a long ways off, leaving their offices on the far end of my floor. There are three, walking in a V formation in those awful black jumpsuits. They dress how a child imagines a bad guy would dress, and I still hadn't known they were killers.
"Who do you think is on the chopping block?" Dresden asks, suddenly at my shoulder.
Me. They're headed right for me. But he doesn't know what they really do, so I shake my head. "What do you mean?"
"First Wiley City dispatches enforcement here, and then—"
"What? When?"
"While you were taking your test. You didn't miss anything. They went straight to the top floor and came right back down and left. But now Maintenance is on the move, so they must be clearing out someone's stuff, right? Changing the locks?"
"You're thinking of Building Maintenance. They're Off-World Maintenance," I say. "That's not what these guys do."
They're only eight feet away now, so I stand and turn around. I want to face them. They won't do anything to me in front of Dresden, he's a citizen, so they must just be escorting me off the property.
Standing doesn't make it easier to pretend I'm anything but prey, and my breath goes shallow as they approach. Why does it feel just like a runners parade, even after all these years? But they pass me without slowing down. The woman at the front offers a glare, but the man on the left greets me with a wide smile. They must know. They know I've killed one of the Adams. The one with the smile winks like I'm one of them, like we're in on the same fun secret.
They march past me to the elevator. I watch the display, expecting them to go straight to 100, where Adam's office is. But they stop at 80. The rock that's been growing in my chest plummets into my stomach. I run to the elevator without thinking, remembering only when I'm there that I can't make it take me where I want to go.
I pound at my cuff, trying to call Jean, but there's no answer.
Finally, I dial Dell.
"You don't have to talk to me, I just need you to send the elevator down so I can go to the eightieth floor. It's an emergency."
She closes the connection without saying a word.
I begin to pace, frustrated and helpless, but then I hear the ding of the elevator opening behind me. I get in and see it's programmed to return to 80. Whatever else is between us, Dell came through.
I rush out as soon as the elevator arrives, hitting my shoulders on the sides of the doors. I run toward Jean, but I've been late to see him so many times no one even looks out of their offices. Or maybe up here they already know what I've just discovered, and they're burying their heads because they saw Maintenance come this way.
I run into Jean's office, but the only ones here are the three I followed in. They freeze in a tableau—one righting a knocked-over chair, another sliding glass from a shattered award into the trash can, and the third spraying what smells like bleach over what looks like blood on the back of Jean's chair. I shake my head, letting denial hold me in place for just a second before I turn and run in the opposite direction.
No one came down the company elevator, which means whoever took Jean must have exited the building on this floor. I run outside wondering if they went down the escalator, or used an exterior elevator, but then it hits me: we're on the eightieth floor. I run in the direction of Adam Bosch's garden. Once inside, I look for the paths with holograms that say CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. The path leads me to a clearing so close to the back edge of the garden I can see the desert beyond.
At first, all I can see are leaves and a wall of black jumpsuits with their backs turned to me. I try to push past them, and in the struggle of them pulling me back and me raging forward, I land on my knees in the clearing, face-to-face with Jean. Adam is standing over us, his constant smile in place. There's blood on the cuff of his customary wide-collared white shirt. It's Jean's blood. I couldn't see it at first, but there are wet rivers crawling from his mouth and temple.
"You're beating a man old enough to be your grandfather. What is wrong with you?"
I look around at the others, but their expressions are either gleeful or empty. Adam could be at a speaking engagement for all the change his face shows. Only his eyes are a little off—not unfamiliar, just different.
"Traitors have no age," he says, his voice too light for his statement.
And then I understand why his eyes look familiar. They're his father's eyes, and that was his father's line. Usually he said it about children executed for carrying messages of rebellion, but I learned from Adra on 175 that it applies on the other end of the age spectrum too. I'm only now realizing Adam didn't so much inherit his father's traits as he was possessed by them.
I push myself to my feet, even though I hate standing over Jean. I never wanted to be taller than him.
"Jean isn't a traitor. He's loyal to Eldridge. He's grateful for everything you've done for him. He knows what kind of life his family would have had without you. He tells me all the time."
This seems to please Adam, but it doesn't stop him from rearing back and kicking Jean in the spine, sending him forward onto his hands. I can't contain my scream, so someone steps up from behind and does it for me. The gloved hand covering my mouth smells like crude oil. It tastes like it, too, when I bite their fingers.
"I can tell this upsets you," Adam says. "But he sent a very incriminating package to enforcement. I don't know what I'll have to do to shake them. It's...inconvenient."
"It was me." I can't get the words out fast enough. "Everything you think he did, it was me."
"We already know it was a traverser with access to information your clearance doesn't provide, and his fob was used to access a restricted floor last week."
"That was me! I used his login when I found the information. I stole his fob."
"This fob?" he says, pulling it out of his pocket. "This fob that was sitting on his desk when we came in to question him?"
"Yes, I just...I gave it back after."
Adam clucks his tongue. It sounds like I'm lying. I kneel down and pull Jean back up from the ground so we're both on our knees.
"It's all right, Cara," Jean says. He's calm, but his jaw isn't connecting right.
"It's not all right," I say, then look up at Adam. "Let me take him to a pod."
Adam tilts his head. "But we're not half finished yet."
"Do it to me. Whatever punishment you have planned, I'll take it."
"No," Jean says, too clear for someone in as much pain as he must be in.
"You're being irrational," I say to Jean, then to Adam: "Don't do this."
"He's already told us that no one else has his login, and that he's never lost track of his fob," Adam says. "You're too late to lie for him."
I reach out to Jean, because I want to touch him somewhere, but I can't tell where he's injured. He holds my wrist, and I hold his in return. His hand could be the hand of my grandfather, could be Pax's hand, could be anyone I'd call family. In this land of strangers, he is the only thing that has ever looked or felt like home. He doesn't need me like that, he brought his land and people with him in a dozen other family members, but I have always needed him.
"Tell them it was me. You have to tell them," I say. "You have, I don't even know, sixty-four grandkids who need you."
He smiles, small and painful. "Do you know how many lives I've taken?"
"I don't care."
"Of course you don't, but I've started to, as I've gotten older." He looks back to Adam and clears his throat. "And that is why I went to the authorities. I wanted to go out doing one good thing...."
He squeezes my wrist so hard my bones ache. He's so strong, even after all these years.
"Let me."
I refuse and keep refusing. I scream his innocence and my guilt until two Maintenance workers each take an arm and drag me away. It doesn't stop my screaming. They let me go wild until we get near the entrance of the garden, then one threatens to drug me. He isn't mean about it. He tells me he understands. He says the first colleague is always hard, but it's time to pull myself together or he'll do it for me.
They escort me all the way home. Once I close the door in their faces, I call Jean on his cuff. He doesn't answer. My next call is to enforcement. I tell them a man's being hurt in the back of Bosch Garden. The automated voice on the other end records coordinates and issues me a file number in case I want to follow up, then disconnects. It's the only time in my life I've ever missed the runners, because I'd give anything for the call bot to be a violent human looking for an excuse to let their blood boil over.
I call Jean back, and when he still doesn't answer I try again every fifteen minutes. Thirty-two calls and eight hours later, someone picks up. But it's not Jean. It's his wife, Sopia. She gets out two words, but then she can't speak. I hear rustling.
"Cara?" The voice is clear and strong, the emotion in it subdued.
"Aya?" I say, and it must be. Jean's level-headed oldest daughter, who went into business school when the rest of his children chose art or cooking or agriculture. But he loves her just as much despite her differences from the rest of the family. He loves them all. He loves me.
"Yes, it's me," she says. "We've just gotten Dad's cuff working again and...there was an attack. They say he was checking on the industrial hatch just outside the city. Runners found him. He must have tried to fight..."
"Is he okay? Aya, is he going to be okay?"
There's a moment of silence, and I wonder if she's had to answer this question yet.
"He's dead, Cara. They killed him."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 84 |
When asked what this discovery could teach us about what mattered, about death, and human nature, and how to make the world a gentler place, both parties were silent.
But we were right, the scientists said.
And so were we, the spiritual said.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 85 |
We used to believe the universe was stable. We saw its cycles, the reliable circles it traced, and called the pattern static, meaning unmoving. Then we learned its wildness—asteroids that leave their own clusters and impact with planets that've also abandoned their orbits, everything dancing off track to the music of chaos.
I believed I was stable. I thought my ability to go to work, to visit my family, to eat and sleep, meant that I was. I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety. I had no idea the chaos I was capable of holding inside of me. Now the only thing "static" about me is the buzzing rush in my ears when I try to think, a hiss like the sound that comes through the speakers when Dell tries to contact Earths that are lost.
I am lost.
I spend my days in bed, leaving only to eat and go to the bathroom, staring up at a ceiling that calls me murderer.
The day after Jean's death, I'm guessing the second the news reaches the desert, Esther petitions for a day pass. I deny it. She petitions every morning for the next week, but I deny those too. I don't deserve her. I didn't deserve Jean. They both loved and encouraged me and I can't figure out why. Have I done anything for Esther? Had I ever done anything for Jean? Sure, little presents here and there. Bringing him lunch occasionally. But I'd never done anything to earn the way he always tried to lift me up. Just as I've never done anything equal to Esther's kindness, her acceptance of someone she knew all along to be a stranger.
I am a rot to the people I love, and the world keeps giving me gifts I don't deserve. This apartment, this life, the sound of Jean's laugh, the smell of Dell's hair—all memories of things I never deserved to experience in the first place. And how do I repay the world for my luck? By infecting everything with my darkness. By taking the light out of Dell's eyes and taking Jean away from his children.
Eldridge closes until the weekend in honor of Jean. I spend the days wandering around my apartment forgetting to eat. Sasha sends out a department-wide message encouraging anyone struggling with his loss to make an appointment with her or one of the other grief counselors. I delete it. She can't help me. This isn't a Wiley City kind of grief, grief at the unknown, a twist of fate taking a life. This is grief because a powerful man killed someone I love but will never see consequences and it's Ashtown all over.
For the first week of work after Jean's murder, I don't go in. I don't do anything. Finally, on the third day of my second week out of work, something moves me. I shower and dress and drive the hell out of Wiley City. When a runner I don't know pulls me over I throw the money at them without even turning off my car. I don't go toward my family's place. I drive into the heart of Ash and get out at the House.
Exlee must be surprised at my appearance, but nothing shows on that painted face.
"What do you need, child?"
This, precisely this. I need someone to call me a child.
"I don't know." My eyes are suddenly too wet, and I wipe at them. "But I have money."
"Of course you do."
Exlee motions me forward and takes my hand. I've seen Exlee lead others back, usually with an arm around their waist or draped over their shoulder. But I am led like a cousin, an intimacy that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with safety.
I think I'm being taken to one of the other providers' rooms. But I'm led down the enby wing and eventually into Exlee's own work suite.
Exlee rarely sees clients. At first, I'm afraid. What if they've forgotten me? What if Exlee doesn't recognize me as a daughter, and tries to give me something I've never wanted here. But then they pull out the duvet I used to curl up on as a toddler. But I'm not a toddler anymore, so they push it against a long couch draped in warm, red velvet.
"Lay down. Tell me what breaks your heart."
I'm crying before I even make contact with the couch. Exlee lies beside me, and I curl around a body broader than mine but just as short without the advantage of shoes. I cry into the chest, arms, and hair of a person who feels more like home than this world's version of my mother ever could.
I'm not even sure if I'm talking, if I'm coherent, but I feel Exlee saying, I know. We all know. We understand. As they stroke my back and gently massage my neck, I realize it is touch I want, touch that is making me feel a little bit whole again, and it is touch from a person who is part castle, someone I cannot destroy and who will always be safe.
Maybe that was Nik Nik's appeal. Not that he was powerful enough to keep me safe, but that he was too powerful for my curse to touch him. I can destroy almost anyone. My mother, Jean, even myself over three hundred times. Death hangs over me like too-fine dust settles on the skin—weightless but impossible to remove, no matter how hard you try.
I sleep through the night for the first time since Jean's death. In the morning Exlee brings me breakfast. I say I'm not hungry.
"You will eat because I'm charging you for the food, and you're still too much Ashtown to waste that."
I eat a meal of stringy meat, the eggs of a ground-lying bird, and a tough grain loaf. There are better meals at the House, they have access to even Wiley City's ingredients, but Exlee has given me flavors I would not even find in the farming-centric Rurals. Food that tastes like blood, and gives me a little piece of downtown Ash's strength to take with me.
I am fed twice more before I go. I'm never given a proper bill, so I take what I remember from the menu back at my world's House, and triple it. As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean's name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won't let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.
When I get home, I am still sad. I am still distraught and full of guilt. But I have taken a step back from the edge of true despair, or something even more dangerous.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 86 |
Jean's funeral is a Wiley City event. His family is there, down to the smallest member, eight rows of love with their arms entwined like a net to carry the heaviest burden. And that is what they will have to do now, because Jean's absence is exactly that.
The mayor speaks about Jean as a treasure, an explorer, one of the first to return from the dark unknown that claimed so many lives before him. It doesn't take long for her to digress into the political, saying Jean's murder is exactly the reason Wiley City needs to "intervene with added security measures" in the land outside the wall. In the past, additional border security has always been unpopular, because the same things it is supposed to fix were supposed to be fixed by the numerous vertical wall extensions they've already authorized. Border security never lowered crime rates the way they said it would, and eventually Wiley accepted that they were murdering and stealing from each other. It wasn't worth it to spend on external security, not when so many still remember what Nik Senior paid them out for trespassing last time. But Jean's death has ignited a new hatred for runners, for Ashtown, for dirt itself, and this time people applaud.
Eventually she remembers this is not a rally but a funeral. She tells us that we've lost a rare kind of hero, the kind of knight who would fight a dragon. She says it must have taken such great bravery, to traverse when before they'd only recovered bodies. I'm sure, but not nearly as much bravery as it took to accept someone else's death, knowing no one would praise you for it.
I want you to know, after this goes bad and you're facing whatever end you've engineered for yourself, that I do admire you.
Would he still mean that if he knew this was what I'd bought?
I've forgotten myself and worn gray, a speck of ash in a sea of black. It's not the kind of funeral I'm used to. No one speaks to Jean, only about him. We are never invited to approach him with our secrets. I settle for whispering I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to myself and anyone who'll listen. I say it to his family after the service, but they think it's I'm sorry you lost your father, when I mean I'm sorry I got him killed.
Dell is here. I sense her looking at me, but I can't look back because I don't know how to seem like I don't need her, and it wouldn't be fair to use Jean's death like that. Sita is in front, the dark-brown girl with hair the color of clay and a face just like her grandfather's. I remember Jean holding her quickly, kissing her head as she squirmed to leave. I hope she remembers too. I hope she never forgets, because it will be all she has left now.
It's too much. I duck behind a tree to wait for the crowd to thin. Footsteps follow me, but they aren't the ones I want.
"Fuck off."
His amused chuckle grates like a knife being badly sharpened. "I like your rage. It means you're loyal."
I turn on Adam Bosch. It hasn't been that long since I was afraid of him, but now I feel nothing at all.
"To him. I was loyal to him. If you wanted to make anything but an enemy of me, you should have let him go."
He tilts his head, studying me like a puzzle.
"I don't expect you to approve of what happened to Jean, only to learn from it." Too casually, as if we're discussing the weather, he takes out a vial of eyedrops and drops liquid into his enhanced left eye. "I don't need to earn your loyalty. I just need to give you time to understand that you don't have a choice. You Ashtowners are very good at figuring out your options."
"Us Ashtowners, Adranik. You've more than earned the Blood Emperor title."
I want to insult him, but he doesn't get angry. Just peers closer.
"Do you know there are five worlds where we've been lovers?"
I know of one, but I won't tell him that.
"Five whole worlds where I'm brain-dead? Tragic."
"In two we're still together, in the other three...you've died."
"Suicide, I imagine."
"No, and I think you know that." He steps forward until he's practically against me. His closeness is threatening but not human enough to be sexual. It's like I'm being threatened by a rock, a robot, a weapon. "I just want you to understand that I've killed you in worlds where you meant something to me without a second thought. And you mean nothing to me here."
"I told you to kill me last week. And you should have."
"And waste such potential? After all the trouble I went through to get you?"
"Don't you get it? I don't care about potential. I am the one who betrayed you. You killed an innocent man."
He laughs, just a little, just enough to piss me off. "You think Jean outsmarted me? That I didn't know he was lying?"
I shake my head. "Then why—"
"If he had betrayed me, and I killed him, I killed the traitor. But if I killed you, whether you were the traitor or not, I would have lost him. He would have reacted irrationally. But if you were the traitor, and I killed him, you would learn the consequences your actions have on those around you. You still need Eldridge. Jean did not. I removed the element I could not control."
I run through his words twice before I truly understand them. He didn't even kill Jean because he hated him, or because he felt betrayed. He killed Jean because it made the most sense. Murdering Jean was just the answer to a riddle.
He's still studying me like he's trying to see beneath my skin and behind my eyes.
"You hate me, don't you?" he says.
"More than anything in this world."
This seems to surprise him. If I'd killed you...he would have acted irrationally. Adam Bosch doesn't understand hate.
"But you'll still report for work when your personal leave is up, just like everyone else. I could tell you all the ways I'll kill your family if you talk, how many pieces your sister can be severed into, but I don't think it matters, does it?" he says. "In every world, you are ruled by blind ambition, not familial love or loyalty. You're not going to throw your chance at Wiley City away over this."
Something's been bothering me, but I couldn't quite figure out what until he says this last part.
"What trouble?"
His smile drops. He tilts his head at me.
"You said you went through so much trouble to get me. But you didn't. It was just a recruitment letter."
When his eyes settle on me, I can't find a trace of Adam. All I see is Nik Senior.
"I think we both know that's not true, Caralee."
Hearing my real name from his mouth pitches me close to vomiting. Dell told me he programmed the pull himself, but I was so distracted by our fight I hadn't listened.
"You killed Caramenta? But why...why bother?"
"Before her first pull Caramenta came to me, her conscience bruised because of some heavy petting with Ikari. I knew then she'd be useless to me."
"Because she wouldn't kill for you?"
He lets out a bark of a laugh. "Kill? The little Ruralite would have gone to the authorities over insider trading her second day. Too self-righteous. But even then it would have taken two dozen people to access her worlds. Your worlds."
So he sent her body into my path, and hoped I would do what Ashtowners always do: take what wasn't mine. And I did because, in his words, I've always been blindly ambitious, or, in my mother's, I was born reaching. But I wasn't exactly what he wanted. In the garden he said Jean had told him I wasn't cut out for murder. Jean had kept him from recruiting me to Maintenance. What if he hadn't? Would there be as many traversers as there are Maintenance workers now, while I put all of the black jumpsuits out of work instead? Would I have taken the job when I was just a broken bit of a girl from Earth 22? Before I learned generosity from Jean, or compassion from Esther?
My memory of our first meeting, once my favorite, turns rotten. The way Adam came down to see me, and told Dell to be patient. It was because he knew I never went through training. He knew who I was the whole time.
Nelline was a killer and a spy, exactly what Bosch wanted. Did he plug her death into the system without full evidence, hoping she'd faked it and history would repeat itself if she found out about my body? He said he'd come to my meeting to see if I was her, but did he hope I was? Did he start planning to kill me as soon as he found out I'd been studying for the analyst test? Or did he just get bored with the version of me that wouldn't kill, when he was about to need so many more people dead?
"How does it feel?" I ask, finally. "To turn out just like your father?"
For a moment, the space between one heartbeat and the next, I am sure he will hit me. What he threatens instead is worse.
"Do you want me to fire you? Will Jean be properly avenged if you die working as a whore in the desert? Will that sate your righteous fury?"
I hesitate, not for long, but long enough for Adam's smile to turn real.
"Of course not. Because for all your words, you don't know how to go backward, Cara."
I'd wondered why he didn't kill me, too, and here it is. He couldn't control Jean, didn't have anything he needed anymore, but he can control me. He sees me like a toothless dog on a leash, not really a threat despite all my growling.
He takes a step away and puts his hand in his pocket. A half smile creeps onto his face. He looks like the Adam Bosch the papers show.
"I meant to tell you congratulations on your perfect score. I understand you landed in the first round of interviews. I'm sure you're concerned about getting another mentor with as much experience as Jean Sanogo, so I want you to know that I've had you assigned to me personally as protégée."
"Eat a whole dick, Bosch."
He chuckles, actually chuckles with Jean's body not yet fully buried. "You do so remind me of Ashtown."
"Don't kid yourself," I say. "You never left."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 87 |
I take off my mourning dress for the second time in a month, and put it in the top of my closet. My hand glides against the cold jar, and without thinking I take it down. I'd tried fruitlessly to get Esther to take Nelline's mourning candle back, but Esther had insisted like only the princess of the Rurals can.
I light the candle at my small kitchen table. You're supposed to know what you want to say, or at the very least who you need to speak to, when you light it. My mind is swirling with a hundred questions and twice as many dead, most of whom wear my face.
I remember a line from one of Esther's songs, and speak it.
"I do not know which way to go, but my eyes are turned toward you."
I watch the smoke for what feels like an hour, looking for an answer in the shapeless gray. The room fills with the smell of the bog at sunset, as if I'm sitting back there watching Nelline go, but there are somehow also hints of the neatly clipped grass from Jean's ceremony. The two deaths are entwined, not separate griefs but wells digging into the same dark reservoir inside of me that is growing wider by the day.
I revisit the realization I had at the House. I am a creature that destroys all who stray too close to her.
My fingers flex on the candle and I understand the words anew.
I am a creature that destroys...and Adam Bosch has strayed too close.
Will Jean be properly avenged if you die working as a whore in the desert?
Adam thinks I hesitated because I care enough about my job to make me malleable, but really I hesitated because as he spoke I got caught on the word avenge and have been ever since.
The sound that fills my head is something between a laugh and a chant, shapeless and expanding like the smoke in my kitchen. I look down at my hands, hands that aided a coup against Adranik, hands that killed him. Not only can I destroy Adam, I already have.
My mistake was thinking that his were Wiley City crimes and that those should be handled in the Wiley City way. I went to the authorities because I thought a citizen had committed a crime. I thought he would fire me, then wait for the notoriously long Wiley City judicial process to take its course. I didn't know that even here he was an emperor, but I do now. Adam may have forgotten what happens when you kill the wrong person in Ashtown, but he'll remember soon enough. Blood is the only answer for blood in the desert.
Thinking this way is dangerous. Murder has a cycle just like water. In the same way water becomes a cloud, then becomes water again, when blood calls for vengeance the blood from that vengeance calls too. If you plan to give death, it will always return to you. But I'm not worried. I've been close enough to death to see its shadow my whole life. It always misses me, but only just, like the person who leaves the room before you get there but whose scent is still in the air.
If this is how death finds me, at least it will be different. I have died a hundred ways, but never in defense of another. Not until now.
I make a list of what I need to accomplish, which is long. Then I make a list of people I can trust, which is short. By the time I finish planning, the candle is out, though the smoke still hangs heavy like a ghost.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 88 |
I drive into Ashtown so slowly that even the most distracted runner could have clocked me. But when the heavy boots walk up to my window, it's not who I want to see.
"Where's Mr. Cheeks? I need to talk to him."
The runner tilts her head. At first I think her tight expression is suspicion, but then I realize it's less serious and more complicated than that: jealousy. That's when I recognize her. The mechanic. The tall one. Mr. Scales.
After letting me sit with the sun in my eyes, she finally looks away.
"He's on the later patrol," she says. "It's still morning."
Technically it's noon, but I give her the cash without haggling and start the car.
"Don't you want your receipt?" she asks.
I shake my head. "Won't do me any good."
I drive back toward the Wiley City border and wait. The city has increased perimeter patrols since Jean's death. The conversation that should be about what Adam Bosch has done is instead about outer-city crime.
When I'm sure enough time has passed for it to no longer qualify as morning even for a group of night owls like the runners, I drive back toward Ashtown. This time I recognize the giant vehicle with a back like a winged beetle that pulls me over.
I get out before he does, and at his first sight of me he closes his eyes, looking for all the world like Esther when she prays for patience.
"What now? First you want me to trespass on the bogs, then you want to leave a runner a care package. What career-threatening event do you have planned for me today? You want to give the emperor a lap dance and need me for access?"
I decide to spare him the knowledge that I've already given his boss a lap dance, and it was as subpar as all my other sex work.
"I need to talk with you about a job, but I didn't have any contact info."
"A job?"
"Consider it a consult."
He looks back at his vehicle. "No time now. Tomorrow?"
"Okay. I don't get off until five, but I can get you a day pass."
"You want me to go into the city? Now?"
He has a point. Jean was a hero. It will take a long time for the city to stop raging at the people they think took him.
"Is there a place in Ashtown we could meet? I don't want your colleagues to think you're making side deals."
He thinks for a moment and shakes his head.
"I'll come to you," he says.
He reaches into his pocket and hands me a piece of metal that is as wide as two fingers but paper thin, though it doesn't bend when I press it. His name has been punched out at the top, and beneath that is his contact info.
"Next time, just message me."
"Seems less fun when you're expecting me."
"Oh, it's never fun. Don't worry about that," he says, and we walk back to our separate cars.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 89 |
When I'm summoned to the hatch I expect to see Carrington again, but it's Dell. Seeing her so unexpectedly, bent over a screen while light from the window turns strands of her dark hair to pure shine, is a fist in the throat. I manage to control my reaction enough to keep from running to her. I walk quietly, like I'm trying to catch a bird.
I get close enough that I can see the heading of the file she has up on her screen before she notices me. It's information about Earth 22.
"If you want to know about me, you could just ask."
I'm certain she didn't know I was standing there, but she still looks up casually as if she isn't surprised. On her face I see everything she wants to say to me. In the end she settles for the most familiar: indifference.
"I just wanted to see what went wrong, to prevent it from happening again."
"Little late for that. If it happens a third time, I may just have to accept that someone is trying to kill me."
It's the truth, but I've gotten good at telling Dell the truth in a way that's so obvious she can't hear it.
"Right..." She looks down at her reader, tapping on the desk with her index finger.
"Just ask."
"Ask what?"
"Whatever questions have your face all corkscrewed."
"My face is not..." She takes a breath. "Your name. It's not Caramenta, is it?"
I shake my head. "Caralee, though, so when you abbreviate it I can still pretend you're saying my name."
I didn't mean for it to sound flirtatious, but it does and we both look away.
"How did you know what to do?"
"You. You walked me through it. I saw myself as a corpse lying in the desert. I heard a tiny voice saying a name that wasn't mine. I put the earpiece in and you told me, 'Make sure your collar's secure.' So I took off her collar and put it on. And then you said, 'Make sure the pouches on your vest are closed so you don't lose anything on the jump.' So I took her vest. The only things of mine that came over were my boots and tattoos. The cuff had an ID with her address and emergency contact information on it. Her front door was keyed to my face. It was...easy."
"I should have known you weren't serumed. When you came back you were too bruised for such a short jump."
But she didn't say a word, because she didn't want Caramenta to think she'd been studying her body too closely. The rift between Dell and me is mostly my fault, sure, but I hate Caramenta for her role in it too.
"I wanted to tell you I'm sorry," she says. "Jean was a good man."
I don't think he would fit her definition of good, but he does fit mine, so I say, "The very best."
"He cared about you. I know it seemed like he cared about everyone sometimes, but the way he spoke about you to others...even I was jealous."
The tears come fast and hot, lacing the edge of my vision. I stare at the bright outside to dry my eyes, but the regulated daylight could never be hot enough.
"Thanks."
"There are rumors..."
"Rumors?"
"Rumors that he wasn't alone," she says.
She does not say he was with me, though that must be what she is thinking. Which means she understands his death is partially my fault, even if she's off on the details.
"What do you think?" I ask.
"I think he had no reason for being in Ashtown, so it would make sense that he was with someone else who had business there when the runners found them."
It's been a long time since I let myself give a good, hard, Ashtown hiss. I do it now.
"Runners don't kill their customers."
"Customers? You think extorting people is a financial transaction?"
"No, but they do. And you Wileyites love it. You tell your friends how you bribed your way into the desert, even though it's not a real bribe. Just like you come to the craft bazaars knowing we've overpriced everything, just so you can tell yourself you've haggled when we let you pay fair value. Every dead Wileyite is a hundred more who will never come, and never pay the toll for coming. Runners aren't stupid. The House would punish them for the damage a killing does to business."
She's staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to mark the constellations. It's not that you can't make out a shape, it's that you can make out so many shapes you'll never know which one is right. If I wanted to, I could read longing in her distance. But if I'm honest, it's probably just my own reflected back by her indifference.
"What?" I ask, because even lovely puzzles get tiring if they're unsolvable.
"You used we when talking about Ashtown."
"Does it bother you?"
It might. The Caramenta she was attracted to was perfectly tame—a Ruralite, a farm rose, not a garbage git. How would Dell react if I threw away every attempt at assimilation? How quickly would she and everyone else spit me out if I became that unpalatable?
But she surprises me. She smiles her real smile, wide and white and nearly perfect but for how much longer it stretches on the left side of her face. It's the same side of the face where the Ashtown version of her carries a scar.
"I've gotten used to you pretending you're from nowhere. It's a change to hear you declare yourself."
Declaration sounds too formal, but I have claimed my home more in this conversation than I have in six years. Maybe just existing as what I am is a statement.
Dell inserts a vial of serum into the injector. "It's time," she says.
After my prep, when I'm climbing into the hatch, Dell calls my name.
"What?" I ask.
She's looking down at her desk, but eventually she raises her eyes.
"Jean loved fiercely. It fits the story of his life to die protecting someone he loved. The only person who should feel guilty is the monster who beat him."
Her dark eyes have the shine of sincerity, and I want to tell her everything. Maybe I should never have let her hold my real name, because it seems I can't keep anything from her now. But I can't tell her what really happened to Jean, or what I plan to do about it. Not just because she might be connected to Adam, but because she might try to stop me.
"I'll keep that in mind," I say, and take the ladder down into the dark.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 90 |
Esther buzzes at my door as aggressively as the technology will allow—which isn't very, but she caps it off with a scowl into the camera. When I open the door an inch she pushes it open three feet, and my calm, Ruralite sister stomps into my home like Nik Nik's meanest runner.
"Oh? You're not dead. Interesting. I was sure you were dead. I messaged you a hundred times. I even got a digi of Jean's funeral coverage so I could see you, but you weren't in it."
"I was in the back..."
"And then I hear that you have, not once but twice crossed the border but didn't see fit to let me know you were okay? I was halfway to picking ingredients for your candle!"
"I'm sorry I didn't think...wait, who told you I'd crossed the border? Are you still talking to Michael?"
The flame of her rage flickers, then surges. "It doesn't matter! I thought you were dead! I thought they'd killed you with Jean and nobody cared enough to inform us."
Did she think a new replacement was coming? This one just as off as I was?
"It's my fault."
"Yes, it is."
"No, not that."
Her glare narrows.
"I mean, yes that too. I should have called."
The heat of my sister's righteousness can rival a brush fire, but so can her empathy. That's why she puts out her rage with a sigh.
"You can't blame yourself for Jean," she says.
"Why not? He's dead because of me. This is why I didn't call you back. I knew you'd make me feel better and I don't deserve to."
She swallows what's probably another balm, another sweet comfort I don't want and haven't earned.
"Fine," she says. "Tell me. You can tell me everything."
And I do. I tell her things I couldn't tell Exlee because it would be too exhausting to explain, and things I can never tell Dell because she doesn't know me well enough to understand. I tell Esther, first and only, everything. I've already told her about what happened on Earth 175, so it's easy to tell her of Adam's bonus and how I found his other murders. When I tell her about turning the packet in to enforcement she says she's proud of me, but I can sense her hesitation because she still lives in Ashtown so she knows what a bad idea it was.
By the time I finish telling her about Jean and what Adam said at the funeral, she's pacing my tiny living room, her flowing clothes swooshing around her ankles like a mudtide.
"You can't let him get away with this."
"I know. I just need a little help."
She nods. "Anything. What do you want me to do?"
"Not...from you."
And up goes her eyebrow. "Then who?"
There's a suspicious pitch in her voice, and I have a feeling the leniency my grief bought me is about to run out.
"You're not the only one I invited here tonight." I'd hoped to tell her before the runner actually arrived, but my door monitor beeps with the proximity of my new guest.
Mr. Cheeks is lingering near the entrance. He's wearing a high-collared jacket and gloves, covering every inch of skin from chin to fingertips, but even without the tattoos his identity is obvious. It's not even his desert skin or silver teeth. It's the narrowed, wary set of his eyes. No one else in Wiley walks around looking like they're expecting to be jumped.
"Him?" Esther turns toward me. "I don't like him."
"Why not? He was never actually stealing from you."
"I know, it's just...his presence. Has he killed me on another Earth? That might explain it."
It somehow feels wrong to tell her what I know, like ruining a surprise.
"Not that I've seen. But this isn't the only world where you know each other."
Mr. Cheeks has picked a peach on his way to me, and right now his head is craned all the way up, staring at the steel and glass the same way I did when I first came. At first I think his awe is pure, but after he lingers too long I see the two enforcers just at the edge of my feed. He's probably been wasting their time for hours, and he's determined to make it stretch.
I open the door. "Taking your sweet time?"
"Just having a bit of fun." He smiles wide. "You see the light out there? Sun's half set but it's still day bright."
"They want people to commute home in the light, so they don't switch to nighttime until about half past seven, regardless of the time of year."
"They just push back the sun?" He shakes his head. "That's city stock for you."
I start to nod in agreement, then realize he's including me.
When Mr. Cheeks steps into my apartment he becomes the second person to enter my home and instantly begin lecturing me.
"What are you thinking? She shouldn't be anywhere near runner business," he says, pointing his half-eaten peach at Esther.
"Why? Because I'm a Ruralite and we all know Ruralites are thick as rocks and full of judgment?"
"No, because you're an only child now. That makes you sole heir. Business with runners has consequences, and the emperor'll strip me if I cause unrest in the Rurals by letting its future wander into sinking sand."
He's not wrong, but my sister will claw before she backs down, so I step between them.
"This is just a conversation. Esther's here to visit me, but she won't be involved. She knows how to handle herself. She only looks soft."
"Soft?" He says it like the word is an impossibility. "Soft like a diamond, maybe."
He means to insult her, but he doesn't know my little sister has waited years for someone to see her and know she can cut.
When he sits on the couch, he tosses his gloves aside and begins eating the veggie snacks I've set out by the fistful. Esther sits beside him. I don't like the look of them so close together, but that's because when I look at her I see a twelve-year-old and when I look at him I see Nik Nik.
"Tell me your story, and I'll decide if we can do anything for you."
"This won't make sense unless you know I'm a traverser."
Mr. Cheeks chokes on his food. "Thought you guys all got the slip?"
"No, I'm still working. And there are a few others in the sector who are part-time."
I don't know why I need to correct him, except maybe I need to hear it myself. I'm still working. I still have a job. I don't have to do this.
"Last month I was trapped on another Earth and when I was there...I had to kill that version of Adam Bosch. It was self-defense, kind of, it doesn't matter."
"Who's Adam Bosch?" he asks, not so much as blinking at the murder.
Esther all but rolls her eyes as she turns. "The king of the interstellar empire? The inventor of traversing? He made the first portal when he was barely out of his teens in a neighbor's shed? Everyone knows Adam Bosch."
He nods. "Right, the white shirt."
"Any other questions?" I ask.
"Just one." He wipes his hands on my couch. "Is that where you saw me?"
Suddenly he's staring at me, eyes clear and mouth hard, and I realize he was playing stupid to disarm me. And it worked. It worked like it would work on any Wileyite...or an Ashtowner who's forgotten that the runners want the smartest along with the strongest.
"Why would you ask that?"
"Because of your face when you first saw me for the burial, and how you've trusted me like we've got history since, and how you just answered my question with a question."
All good points.
"Fine. Yes, you were there, and we were on the same side. But that doesn't matter here," I say. "When I got back Adam Bosch on this Earth gave me a bonus."
Mr. Cheeks furrows his brow. "How much?"
"A lot."
"Five thousand?"
I nod.
"Adam Bosch paid you for a wet job."
I nod again. "It turns out when Eldridge first started he had his men kill him and anyone else who could have figured out traversing on other Earths."
Mr. Cheeks just shrugs. "You called it an empire. That's how they're built."
"I know. That's why I thought I could keep working for them despite the past. But when he announced his new commercial trips, I figured out he planned to kill the highest bidders on other Earths to make it happen. I sent an anonymous tip to enforcement. But they thought it was sent from my mentor."
"What was his name?"
He asks casually, but I understand his cunning now, and I'm sure he already knows.
"Papa Jean," I say. "Jean Sanogo."
He leans forward, metallic nails disappearing as he clenches his fists.
"I've beaten my runners up and down trying to find the one who crossed your Jean. I should have known he was city-killed. We don't kill Wileyites unless they come to the blood field, begging for it and willing to pay the fee."
If Jean had gone that way, Viet would have had a record. Even if the keeper couldn't be bothered to watch the news, whichever mister is acting as executioner would have come forward.
Mr. Cheeks looks down at his knuckles, eyes moving like he's doing math, then he shakes his head. "If that's how this Adam does business, he'll do it like that all over. He's going to make five dead—five rich dead—and we'll get pinned on whatever world he kills them. They're already crawling into our edges over one man. They come knocking on our door every time a pretty-enough Wiley girl checks in too late. Five dead? They'll raze the town."
I hadn't thought about that. But nothing about Maintenance leads me to believe they are equipped for anything more sophisticated than violent murders. Even if all they do is traverse them back and count on the backlash to kill them, that's still five bodies that look mangled enough to have been run over. Who better to take the blame than runners?
"Enforcement won't do for you. He's got that machine bringing in oil and metal from god knows where. They'll treat him with the soft touch until they've got enough for building the next twenty floors," he says. "What's your plan?"
"My plan...is to kill Adam Bosch."
Mr. Cheeks allows me five whole seconds before laughing. "Nah."
"Oh, Cara..." says Esther.
"What?" I look at them. "Why can't I kill him?"
"Don't you pay attention to projections about him?" Esther says. "I only skim them because I knew he was your boss, and even I've heard the stories."
"What stories?"
"He keeps the secrets of traversing to himself. He doesn't trust anyone else with unlimited power to access worlds, so he won't allow it to be re-created. I'd thought he was being noble, but I guess he's just power hungry. He still does core diagnostics himself. Without him things would run fine for a while, I'm sure. But once something broke down, or went wrong, there would be no way to correct it. Maybe if one of his rivals could look..."
I shake my head. "He's put them mostly out of business. Forced them into other fields for years now. They'd probably be able to catch up, but it would take time." I look up at them. "Is it the worst thing? Maybe we've had our time in the stars, and if letting that kind of evil live is the price, we should let it go."
"It's not about your fucking job," Mr. Cheeks says. "That industrial rig stops bringing in metal and oil from other worlds, Wiley City's going to look for somewhere else to get it. They'll violate the treaty and come to take what Ashtown stopped giving decades ago. And the runners will parade again."
Hearing a runner make that proclamation sets my teeth shaking. Funny, for all the glory attributed to the blood runners, Mr. Cheeks seems to share my dread at the prospect.
How badly I wanted to kill Adam Bosch. I still do. If I hadn't reached out for help, I might have started a war without even knowing it. I can't kill him, but I need to stop him from sending out Maintenance.
"Could you...blow something up?"
"Depends on the something," Mr. Cheeks says, but he's already smiling.
Esther looks concerned.
"We traverse using a machine called the hatch. I know the materials are unstable, because most of Eldridge's training manuals are about how to keep it from exploding. Losing the traversing hatch just stops people from traversing. The industrial hatch is rough. It can't sustain anything that breathes or bleeds, so resources would continue to come in uninterrupted, but there would be no way for the assassins or bidders to get to another world."
"Bosch will rebuild," Esther says.
"I know, but it'll buy us time."
Mr. Cheeks is nodding. "Blowing up a thing that wants to blow up? That's a party. The hardest part would be convincing Himself to outsource us. We can't accept jobs. He can only loan us out. You'd have to have something he'd really want for him to agree, and he doesn't want for much."
What do you get the emperor who has everything? Last time I asked myself that question, I ended up with his name on my back.
"I'll figure something out. If I can find a tempting enough payment for him, will you get me the meeting?"
He looks suspicious. "Don't offer cash, you know. He won't like that."
"I know."
"I'll set the meet, but if you waste his time with my name attached to you, don't call on me again."
"I won't."
The meeting slowly dissolves after that. When Mr. Cheeks stands to leave, he smiles at me.
"So this other world? Was I the same?"
"Almost exactly. You were a runner, but you were loyal to Nik Nik, even though he wasn't the emperor. And...you had one more tattoo."
I can't quite keep my eyes from darting to his throat. He notices, and his eyebrows go up.
"Definitely not fun, but certainly never boring," he says.
Mr. Cheeks agrees to see Esther home, but before she goes she corners me.
"Wouldn't it be wise to include Dell in your plan?"
"No," I say, and as soon as the word is out I know I've said it too quickly. "You and Cheeks aren't from here. Neither are any of the other runners who will help. Enforcement has no jurisdiction over you. I'm the only one they can hold accountable, and I'd like it to stay that way."
She believes the excuse, which is true, if only part of the whole truth.
I watch them go, then sit down to list out what bits of gold might interest a dragon like the emperor.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 91 |
I burst into the prep room with more momentum than I intend, startling Dell into dropping the veil she's holding.
"Any chance I'm scheduled for a pull on 175 today?"
Narrowing her eyes, she picks up the delicate bit of plastic and wires. "You are not."
"Do you know when I will be?"
"You assume they'd send you back?"
I just look at her, because we both know the fact that I'm salary means they'll send me before booking a freelancer.
She sighs, setting the veil on the counter. "You'll be returning in three weeks."
"I need to go today."
"Cara, it's not just against policy for you to fraternize with those from other worlds, it's unhealthy and...and I think you've done quite enough of that."
If I were doing this for any other reason, her plea would have changed my mind.
"I'm not going to fraternize. I left something there, but I know where it is. I need to get it back. Please."
I haven't asked her for anything since the day Jean died. Even if she denies me now, I'll still owe her for that. Because of her I was able to see him one last time. I couldn't save him, but Dell gave me his goodbye.
"This place almost killed you."
"I know. But that was because Nelline was still there. She's...not there anymore."
Another bit of loss, another senseless death. And if Dell doesn't give in, it may all be for nothing. I've spent the two days since my meeting with Mr. Cheeks thinking of what would tempt an emperor, and I think I've finally got it.
"Fine." She looks back at her desk. "Will you require a veil?"
"It's too late for that."
"You'll have thirty minutes, and this time you will not lose your comm or turn it off. I need to be able to reach you directly."
"Fine."
"Swear it."
"I'll swear on my mother's grave if it'll get me to Earth 175."
"Your mother isn't dead."
She says it so quickly, I can't quite hide my reaction. I flinch. She notices, her face falling as she realizes that just because Caramenta's mother is still alive, it doesn't mean mine is.
"Cara, I didn't think. I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago, long before I came here. Imagine my surprise to see her again," I say. I try to keep my tone light, but her eyes are heavy on me. "So, 175?"
"Give me ten minutes to reset."
"Thank you."
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 92 |
When I land in the dirt banks of the dry river, the smell of hot sand and ash hits me like other people must be hit by the smell of their mother's cooking. After a second I lick my lips and the salt and acid taste of the air settled there isn't the shock it was last time.
I hit my earpiece. "I landed. There's no nuclear wasteland, no raging fires. I'm alive."
"Stay that way," Dell says back.
I walk along the road that will, eventually, lead to the emperor's palace. The sun is high and the wind is angry. Mr. Cheeks is the first person I see, hovering at the entrance of the palace. He takes a deep breath when he sees me. There's surprise and irritation on his face, but no malice.
"Knew you'd be back. Trouble always comes twice."
"You know you give me that same exasperated look in every world I see you?"
"Good. Means the other mes have a level head."
He turns around and motions for me to follow him.
"Are you really off patrol now? Such a sellout."
"That seems to be the general opinion," he says. "The emperor wanted me close by, and it's a hazardous post now with Adra's holdouts waiting in the wastes. I wanted something more stable."
Because he's in love, and he has someone who depends on him.
"Is Esther all right?"
"Almost," he says.
"Was she burned badly? In the fire?"
He shakes his head. "She burned, but not bad. Her trouble's not that. Adra tasked Mr. Cross with killing the wastelanders who were seeking refuge that night."
I close my eyes, not just at the former emperor's cruelty in sending a Ruralite runner to kill those he'd grown up learning how to protect, but because touching those from the deep wastes only ends one way.
"Tatik killed him?" I ask.
He nods.
"And Daniel didn't make it?" I say it like a question, but I already know. The vehicle that hit him that night was too heavy to do anything but obliterate. Even if he'd survived the running, the condition he'd have been in after would have made a bullet a better remedy than a pod.
His nod is short. "She'll be steady soon enough. She's been throwing herself into setting up the new government."
Nik Nik has taken the same office he had on my world, leaving the office of his brother and father alone. When we get to the door, I turn to Mr. Cheeks.
"Do me a favor? Don't tell Esther I was here. I won't be coming back and I can't stay long. There's no point."
He nods, then opens the door. "I'll be right outside."
Nik Nik is staring out the window, looking like a man I've seen a thousand times, rather than just a dozen. My Nik Nik used to stare like that too. Anytime he needed to think I could find him at a window. Granted, mine would have died before doing it in a tunic, but still.
"Shouldn't you be wearing your fancy coat?"
He turns quickly, and when he sees me his face passes through hope and joy before settling into the kind and welcoming expression of all Ruralites. He walks toward me slowly, hands clasped as always, like a man who is constantly keeping himself from doing something. Given his blood, it's probably for the best that this is the type of man he is.
"It didn't agree with me," he says. "I found it cumbersome."
"You always do."
"Do I?"
"I've never known a Nik Nik who wore the cloak for anything but ceremonies and very public appearances. You'll find the hair adornments won't agree with you either."
"No, I didn't think they would."
He's in front of me now, so close that if I don't look up I'll see only his neck.
"The braids look nice though."
He has three rows on the side of his head, the ends of which are braided loose down his neck. It's one more than the other Nik Niks I know, because he's not the second in his family to rule, but the third.
"Why are you here? My first thought was that you'd come to stay. But now that I see your face, I think you must need something."
"You've gotten good at this mind-reading thing."
"They say the emperor is omniscient. What is it? You must know I can deny you nothing."
I was going to dance around it, but there's no point and I don't have much time. I meet his eyes.
"I know you kept one. I need it."
He doesn't play dumb. He turns away and kneels by his desk. I can't see him, but I know there is a small, hidden safe beneath the emperor's chair. On 22, it held a fresh cache of poison. It could either be put into his rings, or, if the palace were ever overrun and the emperor saw defeat on the horizon, he could retreat to the office to rob his enemy of at least one victory.
I wonder if the contents here serve the same purpose.
When Nik Nik rises, the light catches on the object in his hand, held delicately between his palms like a wounded bird. A small gun. A pistol. Something I've only read about. He holds his hand out to me and I take it.
"I melted the rest down, just like you said. It was Mr. Cheeks who thought this one should be saved. It belonged to my brother."
Fitting, since it's going to destroy him...just not in the way a weapon usually destroys.
"I'll need to take this. Are there bullets?"
"Only six. We destroyed the means of production and I've...ordered that the knowledge be lost."
Meaning anyone who attempts to pass the information along would be killed, and there's a fat reward for whoever turns them in. There aren't many willing to turn bloodrat in Ashtown, but there are enough.
He gives me the bullets. I hold them in one hand and the gun in the other.
"I thought they'd be heavier."
I know metal. I know vehicle parts, and window blocks, and the thick clumps of it that get passed around as a rough currency. I'd expected something more like that. Not this fine work, this jewelry.
"It doesn't seem like it's enough to kill," I say.
"It kills. Adra had been...practicing. That one will put a hole through an entire man. There were others. The runners say they could blow off limbs."
A coward's machete.
I put the gun in my largest pocket, but put the bullets in my vest. Technology that runs on electricity fritzes out during jumps—the more complicated the tech, the less chance of it surviving. I don't know if this counts. It feels more mechanical than electrical, more like gears than circuits, but it doesn't need to work to accomplish my purpose. It just needs to look like it does.
"You'll be leaving now?" he asks, but it's not really a question. When I nod, he continues. "I can't help but think, with a request like this, you may be in trouble."
"More often than not, these days."
"You have no enemies here. Whatever ugliness has led you to need such a weapon...this can be your sanctuary from it."
It's a nice thought. Just step into the hatch and disappear forever. Earth Zero isn't even my home. I'd just be leaving Caramenta's world for Nelline's. I could start over, never think about Maintenance or Adam Bosch again. Maybe this guilt belongs to Caramenta, too, and I can shed it when I shed her name.
"It's kind of you to offer. Kinder than I deserve. But I think this time I'll stick around and see what I can do."
"If you change your mind, we're here. I'm here."
"Don't wait on me."
He tilts his head, acknowledging the gentlest refusal I know how to give.
"Your Dell, did she miss you?"
I lower my head. "No, or if she did, she won't anymore. You were right. I was judging her and I was wrong."
"There is no undoing the damage?"
I shrug. "It's not really my call. Can I ask you one more favor?"
"Of course."
"Do you have an image of your brother as emperor? It can be digital or physical."
He freezes, but nods. I expect he'll go back to his desk, but instead, he reaches down into his collar. On his neck is a small fob. When he hits the button on the side, a hologram of his brother in full regalia projects out. As I watch, it cycles. His mother and father are in the fob too.
It only takes a second to plug his necklace into my cuff and copy the image.
"Can I take your picture?"
"Sure," I answer, a little crookedly because I'm saying yes before I understand the question. It's not easy for me to deny him anything either.
He doesn't ask me to smile, just points the fob at me and takes a quick snap. This is a sign that he's letting me go, storing my image with the rest of his dead.
I don't hug him goodbye. I just walk out. I'm only in the sun for a few seconds before I'm back in total darkness again.
When I climb out of the hatch, Dell is studying me.
"What is it?"
She blinks, shaking her head a little like she hadn't realized she was staring. She pulls her comm out of her ear.
"I just thought it would take longer," she says. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
"Not exactly," I say, because she might ask to see it.
She turns away from me. "You can go. I've fixed the schedule. You'll need to do a double tomorrow. It will bruise."
"With the marks I've got now, I doubt I'll notice."
She looks over her shoulder. "Even if it doesn't show, it will hurt."
"I know, but it will be worth it."
I mean that pulling the double will be worth it because now I have something to tempt the emperor. But I also mean everything else. It will be worth it, all this pain. It has to be.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 93 |
As we wait for the emperor, Mr. Cheeks seems even more nervous than I am. He said he could get me a meeting with Nik Nik quickly, and he wasn't lying. It was only Thursday that I got the gun, now it's Sunday and I'm waiting in an empty warehouse for His Royal Pain-in-the-Assness. I haven't been granted an invite to the palace, which isn't surprising. If Mr. Cheeks had gone through any official channels, I wouldn't be meeting with the emperor at all, only his emissary.
Mr. Cheeks pushes back his already-slick dark hair.
"He must trust you, to agree to meet like this," I say.
"He trusts me now. Ask me if he still does when this is over," he says, and returns to his nervous preening.
Two runners open the double doors and Nik Nik steps through. He's come out in full shine—nails, boots, and rings. His long vest was made from a giant wasteland reptile, in case anyone forgets that he was a hunter first. It isn't as cumbersome as the royal coat; it doesn't drag and he can freely move his arms, but it inspires far more respect in those who've seen the creature it was made from.
Seeing him feels like being back on Earth 22, in all the worst ways. I was uncertain when I first met the Nik Nik on 175, because he didn't look like I expected him to, and so I wasn't sure how he would act. That was a blessing, because this one looks just like mine, which means I know exactly what he's capable of.
He comes with only two runners—not the six Adranik insisted on—and even those he dismisses when he sees me. He must trust Mr. Cheeks very much indeed. I've tried my best to look important but nonthreatening in my thick Wiley City shirt. I've brought a jacket of my own, white as bleached bone, the kind of thing that no one here would ever waste money on. But I don't live in a place where all bright things turn gray anymore, and I need to show it.
When he tilts his head, his long braids slide against each other, snakes cradling the side of his face.
"I told my boy that no matter what you were offering, I wasn't in the mood to lend out my runners. But now"—he looks me up and down, sucking at his lip—"I'm suddenly open to negotiation."
It's an intimidation tactic, nothing more. The emperor takes surprisingly few lovers, and when he does he prefers the professionals at the House to unvetted strangers.
"I'm afraid that's not on the menu, not even for Your Imperial Majesty."
I don't quite bow, but I give a deep enough nod to make him smile. Nik Nik is made up of as much ego as the rest of us are water, and giving him respect has always made him respond in kind.
"Shame," he says, motioning toward the marks on my cheeks, "I've never had a cat before. Should have figured the preacher's eldest would leave me blue."
I want to laugh at that. Nik Nik thinking I'm too pure to be poached, not understanding that I am nothing if not my mother's daughter.
"Show me what you have for me," he says.
I see Mr. Cheeks relax in my periphery. If Nik Nik hadn't liked his first impression of me he wouldn't have given me the chance to present. We're over our first hurdle.
I open the pack at my side and pull out my silk-wrapped bundle. When I pull away the wrapping, Mr. Cheeks audibly gasps. Nik Nik keeps his face from changing, but his eyes look hungry.
I hold the gun out to him quickly so he won't confuse this for an assassination. I don't need to tell him what it is or what it can do. Even decades out of circulation, their legend hangs heavy over us all. My grandfather killed himself with one. His grandfather used one to kill too many others to name.
"How do you have this?" He holds the pistol awkwardly at first, but then it finds a place in his palm like it was always meant to be there.
"Did your runner tell you what I do for a living?" I ask, because saying Mr. Cheeks's name would suggest a familiarity that might put the emperor on edge.
Nik Nik nods. "You're a world walker."
"I smuggled that in from over a hundred worlds away. Last of its kind. The means to reproduce it doesn't exist here, and they've just been destroyed in the other world."
I can tell by his renewed focus that the pistol's rarity is tempting him more than its shine. I know that look. He wants it, and he'll do anything to have it. I wonder if he's already trying to decide if he will keep it a secret or wear it on his hip to show the world.
He holds the gun up and points it straight at me.
"I'm listening," he says, finally lowering the weapon when I don't react.
We've passed the second hurdle.
I lay out the plan as Mr. Cheeks and I have rehearsed it. He warned me that once the meeting started he would have to pretend to be an uninvested observer, and he wouldn't be able to help if I forgot something. I recite everything just as he taught me: how many men we would need, for how long, and how much of a bonus we would front for the families of any men for whom the job went south.
Nik Nik listens quietly. He lets the gun hang loosely in one hand while he stares at the other, dragging the tip of his thumb over stiletto nails like he's testing for sharpness.
"And for allowing my men to take this job, I keep the gun."
"The gun you can keep as a thank-you for meeting with me. If you allow your runners to do my job, you'll get the bullets. There are only six, but time it right and you'll only ever need one."
Mr. Cheeks suddenly straightens, giving a nervous shuffle, but I can't see why. Nik Nik is smiling...too late I realize he's just showing all his teeth.
His coat hisses like the creature it once was as he moves even faster than I remember. Suddenly he's behind me, his arm a bar at my throat while his other hand presses against the back of my neck. He had been testing for sharpness after all, because with a curl of his hand four of his nails puncture the side of my throat.
"You think I need the rumor of bullets to secure my throne? You think me impotent? In need of a weapon?"
I lock eyes with Mr. Cheeks, who seems to vibrate as he's torn between duty and honor. I keep eye contact as I shake my head. I can handle this. I've been here a hundred times before. I focus to calm my beating heart. He's letting me have a little air, that's good. I can feel the hardness of his chest like a boulder at my back. This Nik Nik is mine, exactly the same. Which means I know how to make him stop.
I don't fight. I go soft against him, prey showing its belly. The weaker I become, the looser his hold, until I can finally squeak out something to distract him.
"Your...brother..."
He all but drops me.
"What did you say?"
"If you don't want the bullets, fine. I'd think you'd take the job to get back at the brother who abandoned you."
He doesn't look at me like I'm lying, just lost.
"My brother died when we were boys."
He believes what he's saying. Good. If he'd known what really happened, I would have lost my fail-safe.
I press my cuff, calling up an image of Adam Bosch. Nik Nik glares a little.
"Another too-soft Wileyite, so what?"
I slide to the picture of Adranik in regalia. Finally, Nik Nik reacts.
"It...can't be."
"This is the world where the gun came from. He's the emperor there, because Nik Senior died when he was fourteen."
Nik Nik doesn't hear me, so he misses my accusation of murder. I don't exist. He's walking over to the hologram of Adranik like he can touch him—to embrace or choke, I'm not sure.
He looks over his shoulder at me, half-feral. "I want to see the other one again. Put them side by side."
I do what he says with trembling fingers. I've never seen him like this, on any world. He's not quite saying his brother's name, but his mouth opens like he wants to. I give him time with the images, and do my best not to make a sound. Finally, he turns.
"And this is who you want to ruin. Your employer. My blood."
Brotherly loyalty is something I hadn't counted on, after all these years.
"He killed my mentor, and blamed it on your runners. You might not have known who he was, but he definitely knows who you are. He still knows his old name. He knew the runners were yours when he pinned it on them."
Truthfully, Adam Bosch has likely not thought once about his family since his father sent him away, but framing this as an insult might be the only way to make him forget mine.
Nik Nik looks back at the images, then away again.
"We have a deal. For the gun and bullets, you'll have whatever you need."
"Thank you—"
"This is no longer a loan of my men, but an authorized action. You are just access. The credit for the attack is mine to claim, not yours."
"I understand," I say, meaning I understand the order, but also I understand what it's like to have a hurt so bad you need your hands in something vengeful to lessen it.
"A week?" he asks.
"Less. It needs to be this Friday. They're hosting the analyst interviews and we'll need the influx of strangers to hide our presence on the elevators."
He nods one last time, then snaps his fingers. The two runners outside open double doors. He walks out stone-faced, accompanied by the whisper of his coat. Long after the trio has gone, Mr. Cheeks moves toward me. He lifts my chin to check the bones of my neck.
"Not broken," he says, letting me go. "You didn't tell me they were brothers."
"You would have been obligated to tell him, and I would have lost the advantage."
We're both staring at the door now.
"If you don't arrange the attack, he'll launch one himself. No turning back now."
"I'm getting that."
"I thought I'd seen all of his moods," Mr. Cheeks says. "But never this."
"Rage?" I ask.
"Hurt," he says.
When I finally make it back to my apartment I peel off my clothes. Blood has snaked from the puncture wounds on my neck down my white coat, making a mockery of my attempt to be from here. I'm not just a child of ash, I'm a child of blood, and it's a giant cosmic joke to think I could ever reach higher than that. A line across my throat is already starting to darken, and the bones of my neck hurt so bad the throbbing is traveling up into my skull. The worst part isn't the pain; it's the familiarity. It's how many times I've felt this before and how many times I've sworn I would never feel it again.
I sit on the floor, the years collapsing. Yeah, time is flat, but it's never been flatter than right now, and all the nights I've nursed a throat crushed by Nik condense until I am a girl on my knees in the emperor's bedroom. A girl who never found a body, never got out. Never free, but endlessly dreaming of freedom.
Never has it been easier to know who I really am, because Caramenta didn't feel violence until the day she died, and I've never been more than a step ahead of it.
I should go to a pod and get instafixed, or at least get an injection of euphoria that outlasts the pain of healing. Maybe in the morning. Tonight is for living like I'm still on Earth 22, for feeling every ounce of pain, and converting it into rage. Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 94 |
"What happened to you?"
The naked concern in Dell's voice gets at me. "Nothing. It wasn't even really a fracture. It's just the bruise left."
She doesn't listen. She circles me, prodding along the discolored skin.
"I told you, I've already been podded."
"These cuts are newly healed. How did you...?"
But then, standing behind me exactly as Nik Nik had and at roughly his height, she puts her hand against the spot and must see the way her fingers line up perfectly.
"Who."
Oddly, there's no question in the word.
"No one." I move away from her. "Where am I headed?"
"Nowhere. Doing a pull today might aggravate your injury. We'll resume tomorrow."
"I don't want to get behind."
"You're injured."
There is something in the way she says it that sets me on edge. She's saying it with the same tone she used after Jean's death. It's the same tone she's been using since she learned where I'm really from.
"I liked it better when you talked down to me. This constant pity is your worst look yet."
Her eyes harden, which is what I was going for. She can hate me all she wants, as long as she stops feeling sorry for me.
"I'm canceling the pull. That's final."
"It's a short jump."
"The decision is made."
"I'm fine."
"And I'm the watcher. Which means this conversation is over."
I grab my jacket. "It's never a conversation, Dell. It's just you giving orders."
"I'm doing my job. I suppose Carrington was gentler about it."
"I liked Carrington. Loved him. He had twelve horses and a sunny fucking disposition."
"Oh, he's a bore and you know it."
"A ray of sunshine compared to you, sweetheart." I move to the door, but it slides closed in my face. I turn to see Dell's hand on the desk's lockdown button.
"Send me on a pull or let me go," I say.
"Is there something going on? Something you need to tell me?"
And there it is, the truth sitting on the tip of my tongue, begging to run to her. I grit my teeth.
"Not a thing."
Dell stares me down. I stare right back, even though making contact with those dark pools is not unlike getting trapped in a bog.
Eventually, she forfeits and releases the lockdown.
"Don't expect me to clean up your mess next time," she says.
I don't know if she's talking about hiding my unbroken collar, or helping me escape security when I was electrocuted, or sending me to Earth 175 off the books, and the fact that there are so many options fills me with gratitude out of place in the argument.
"I'd never ask you to. Wouldn't want to soil your hands."
She takes it as sarcasm, but it's the truest thing I've ever said.
I spend the next morning in my customary post-fight-with-Dell bad mood, and running through pithy responses I wish I'd used is enough to distract me from my imminent corporate sabotage. On my way to breakfast, I hiss at everyone who smiles at me and glare at everyone who doesn't. Dell has taken me off rotation for an extra day, and when I try explaining this audacity to my sister she just says, "So...she's protecting you?"
I hang up on her. My day shifts from gray to black when I get an ominous text from Mr. Cheeks: Expect a batch. Act surprised.
A batch is what you call ten to fifteen runners, but if he means they'll be here in Wiley City it might as well be a brood, or a whole goddamn parade.
Before I can reply my cuff notifies me that someone has requested a day pass on my residency. I open it up, automatically expecting to approve Esther...but then come up short at the name.
Yerjanik Nazarian.
The emperor himself.
I quickly hit the redial on Esther, determined that, in at least this, she would be sympathetic.
"This can't be possible, right? He must be on the restricted travel list."
"Would you restrict the ruler of a neighboring principality? Particularly one known for...less-than-diplomatic responses to insult?"
I'm not sure where Esther is, but judging by her breathing I'd say she's weeding the interior garden.
"Cara, you did approve it, didn't you?"
"...I'll call you back."
I confirm the pass.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 95 |
When Nik Nik arrives, he has brought a posse, and if I hadn't received the text from Mr. Cheeks I would have fainted at the sight. I haven't seen this many idle runners gathered together in years. And there is nothing more terrifying than an idle runner.
I step aside, motioning them in quickly. It does no good; none of the runners will move until Nik Nik clears the threshold, and he takes his sweet damn time. He's wearing a black sweater that he must have purchased here. Full-coverage clothes in Ashtown are always thin, because they're for protecting against burn and sand rash, not the cold. But the sweater the emperor wears is a thick, soft material. If it weren't for his onyx-dipped teeth he could be a Wileyite—one of the bored, rich ones who adopt the Ashtown aesthetic for fun. His rows are tight, shiny, and new. If I didn't know any better I'd think he's dressing up for someone, and I can only keep my nausea at bay being sure it isn't me.
"What are you doing here?"
"Lemonade," Nik Nik says, ignoring my question and answering the one I should have asked.
"I don't have lemonade. It's not as popular here in the city."
"What do you have?"
"Coffee, soda...things it takes a machine to make."
"Water, then."
I bring Nik Nik his water. Because of the text from Mr. Cheeks, I'd gone out for extra drinks and food. I should have figured His Royal Pain in the Ass wouldn't want any of it.
"You guys can help yourselves, but you'll have to share. I don't have that many cups."
The runners shrug and half of them make their way to the kitchen while the others stand on either side of Nik Nik, who has taken a seat in my favorite chair. No one else sits.
"How did you get them all here? I only approved the pass for one."
I couldn't approve this number if I wanted to. I'm a resident, not a citizen, which means the most I can do is three in a week, with no more than two in a single day. Even fewer if it's for something longer than a day pass.
Nik Nik drinks his water without answering.
"We built your city full of holes. Ins and outs, where only we can find them," says one runner, using the slightly maniacal voice they use on outsiders.
Mr. Cheeks steps forward. I've been avoiding looking at him, remembering he'd said bad things would happen if the emperor suspected we were conspiring separately.
"If we get caught, they may decide to mark us as ineligible to return because we don't have proper papers," Mr. Cheeks says, respecting me enough to talk to me like I'm Ashtown instead of Wiley.
"And it wouldn't do for the emperor to be marked, so he comes in legitimately," I say.
Mr. Cheeks nods. The runners who raided my fridge—and, from the sounds of it, my pantry—have returned so the second half can take their turn. They're working in shifts, never leaving Nik Nik unprotected, with the exception of Mr. Cheeks, who forgoes refreshments to stay at his master's side. I'm not sure if it's loyalty or if he just doesn't trust the emperor with me.
"Why are you here? I thought we weren't moving until Friday?"
"We need to scope out this hatch."
" 'Scope out'?"
Mr. Cheeks shrugs, this time another runner answers.
"Scope out. Figure out how thick the hull will be. Record how long it takes to cut through. Plus, Mr. Cross wants dimensions."
My mouth goes dry. "You want me to get you into Eldridge? Fifteen of you? No way. There's no way. I'll only be able to get you in on Friday because all the interviewees have to go to that floor, so it will be set up for outsiders. I can't even make the elevators take us there today."
My discomfort is amusing, and laughter rolls through the batch like thunder. I am surrounded by my enemy, and it makes the back of my neck twitch.
"Adam Bosch has a replica in his mansion. A nonfunctioning prototype," says another runner I don't know.
They speak based on who has the relevant information, not who has the highest rank, and it leaves me ping-ponging between them.
"He's having a party tonight, so rear entrances have biometric access disabled for vendors. We slip in, get the info, and slip out."
"Okay," I say, "but do you really need sixteen people for this?"
They laugh again, higher this time. I don't want to make them laugh a third time.
Nik Nik answers this time. "Half to do the job, and half to distract security somewhere else." He drags a finger against the arm of my chair. "Runners play in the park to send a message, we slip in while the city scum scatter."
"But why are you here? Why did you come to me instead of just heading straight to Bosch's place?"
The emperor sits forward, so he can reach into his back pocket. He pulls out a cloth and tosses it at my face. I unfold it, rubbing the material through my fingers. It's black, but catches a metallic shine in the light. Without testing I know it's breathable, but will keep dust out of your lungs on a long ride. I'm holding a runner's bandanna.
I drop it and step back. The image I have of the bandanna is not Mr. Cheeks, is not any of the runners I don't hate. It's of the parade. The bandanna is a talisman that takes me back to a time when the cloth covered the mouths of the cackling drivers, laughing loud enough to be heard over engines and screaming.
Nik Nik takes my reaction as an insult, and maybe he should. In the next breath he's on his feet, sharpened nails digging into my biceps as he grabs me by the arms.
"You wish to use us as a tool and think yourself clean? Are you like them? So city, so Wiley that you can let someone else do your work and be satisfied? Are you afraid of Adam Bosch?"
I can't stop myself from hissing at that, and the emperor smiles and lets me go.
"The choice is yours," he says, and I almost believe him.
I bend down and pick up the bandanna. This is what Adam does. He dispatches operators to three hundred worlds, killing in his name, and thinks himself civilized because he doesn't go along. Maybe if I never go, I'll pretend afterward that this had nothing to do with me. That Jean was avenged by some stranger, instead of someone who loved him.
"I'll ride with you tonight. But I don't want to be part of the distraction. I need to get inside Adam's house."
Nik Nik's smile widens, a black shine that mocks me and knows me well. "Leave your scent where the enemy sleeps?"
"Something like that."
"Very well. The path we take will keep us out of view of surveillance, but if you're caught later..."
"I'll be on my own?"
He shrugs. "You're not a runner. But you can rest easy knowing that, with or without you, we'll make Bosch kneel."
"That's all I need."
I head to my room to get ready, pulling clothes out of the back of my closet that I haven't worn in years. They were the first things I bought when I landed, before I understood what I needed to pretend to be.
Just a few months ago when I was packing for my stepfather's church dedication I agonized over how to dress for Ashtown in a way that still showed I was a resident. Dressing between two worlds was difficult, and I weighed a dozen variables before I could decide on one outfit. Now, the clothes I need leap into my hands, because I remember who I am. Black, and lean, and ugly—I dress in my Ashtown best and I don't pretend it's anything but that. I am Caralee through and through. I'm a garbage git and even the air in the Rurals is too clean to agree with me.
They say hunting monsters will turn you into one. That isn't what's happening now. Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too. This isn't a becoming; it's a revealing. I've been a monster all along.
That's why when I make it halfway down the hall, I turn back to my room for something else.
When I come out, Mr. Cheeks sees I'm wearing gloves.
"They won't scan prints. They won't even know we were there," he says.
"Just in case," I say.
"Have you thought about how to keep him from rebuilding? He might care enough about his legacy to train someone if he was going away, but I think we both know enforcement putting pressure on him is a long shot."
"I'm working on it."
Before we go he helps me fasten my bandanna, tying it tight over my nose and mouth so only my eyes are visible. He pulls up his own, marked with three needles to designate rank. With his face covered, he's all lovely eyes. Without the shine in his mouth and the line of his jaw, he has the eyes of a doll and the lashes of a vidscreen model.
"It suits you," he says. "If things go south...we're always looking for a few good misters, and not even Wiley's best can reach into Ash."
If he'd said that to me three months ago I would have spit in his pretty face, because I believed that anything that wasn't a Wiley City citizenship was failure. But I find myself nodding, accepting a vision of a future that might want me more than the city ever has. I could become the thing I'd always feared, and then I might never be afraid of anything again.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 96 |
What surprises me the most when I'm moving with the runners is that Nik Nik doesn't demand deference during the run. All of the pomp and circumstance he'll usually kill over—lowering your eyes when you speak to him, never questioning him—all of that goes away as we navigate the scaffolding of Wiley City. They use a construction elevator for thirty of the floors, but then we have to get off and take a dark stairwell from the sixtieth floor to the eightieth. If we weren't dressed like runners, and if we weren't about to commit a public disturbance, we could just take the public elevators up. Anything outside of the buildings is public commons, and access isn't restricted the way it is in buildings like Eldridge.
About halfway through our climb my gasping is louder than the stomping of fifteen pairs of boots, and I can hear Dell lecturing me about physical activity in the back of my mind. We part ways near Adam's land. The runner who will be leading the distraction grabs Nik Nik's shoulder without asking. I expect the emperor to turn around with a backhand that's heavy on the rings, but instead he returns the gesture, grabbing the man's shoulder in a display of affection and a wish of good luck.
I didn't understand how Mr. Cheeks could be so loyal to someone like Nik Nik, but the creature he obeys wears a face I've never seen. This Nik Nik—a man who is focused and sure, who issues confident commands and moves with the swiftness of the creatures he once hunted—this is the man Mr. Cheeks chooses to obey. Not the insecure, spoiled child who has choked me either once or a hundred times.
When we get to the edge of the garden that houses Adam Bosch's mansion, Nik Nik holds up a hand to stop us.
"Follow my path exactly. Cover to cover, two at once."
He points to Mr. Cheeks, then me. Mr. Cheeks nods and moves beside me. We move through the yard in starts and stops, until the mansion is close enough that we can break for the door in a final sprint. We don't break for it though, not yet. We're all crouched, silent and staring at nothing, but I'm the only one who seems antsy. Just when I'm about to ask what we're waiting for, I hear it. The screaming starts a moment before I see the smoke, then a chainsaw rages to life in the distance.
Nik Nik sprints from the brush and we all follow.
Adam may have turned off the biometric requirements for his party, but the door still locks automatically when it's closed. Unfortunately for Adam Bosch, the door is metal and we've always known more about metal than city kin.
It takes me a moment to place the woman who moves to the front of the pack, but that's because I've never seen Mr. Scales in glasses before. She rolls up a sleeve, revealing a gauntlet laced with magnets. She slides them along the exterior of the door, pressing her ear to it to hear the progress. Eventually, the door slides open. As she reattaches her magnets, Nik Nik touches her bare arm—not her shoulder like the others—and when she catches me noticing she looks away and so do I. She nods to him, then runs back to the perimeter while the rest of us duck inside.
Once we're inside, the group begins to move down the hall, but I linger behind.
The emperor notices before Mr. Cheeks does, and his awareness, as always, makes me uncomfortable.
"Scared?"
I shake my head. "No, I want to find his room."
I expect him to ask me why, but instead he just smiles wide with teeth like an oil slick. He pulls out a fob necklace exactly like the one he carries on 175. He pushes a button and projects a map of the mansion against the wall. "There, the far corner. If you aren't out in ten minutes, they'll notice you leaving."
The others begin to make their way to the prototype held in Adam's home lab, but Mr. Cheeks lingers behind.
He waits until we're alone to ask the question I'd expected from the emperor.
"Why?"
"I just want to see if there's some evidence of what he's done. I know enforcement is slow, but we might be able to give them something they can't ignore."
He shakes his head. "Man's a genius. He'll keep himself clean."
"I'm just going to check."
He's looking at me like I'm lying. And I am lying. But he lets me have it and goes to meet the others in the prototype room.
Adam Bosch's walls are lined with news projections featuring him. There are no images of his friends or adopted family. When I finally reach the double doors of his room, I realize I never needed Nik Nik to give me directions. Adam sleeps exactly where I would expect: in the rear of the house, with an entirely clear wall overlooking the desert in the direction of Ashtown. Does he miss it? I didn't, but my upbringing and his were as different as gold dust and dirt.
I go through his things quickly, but the search is as fruitless as Mr. Cheeks said it would be. The only thing of interest is a digital filing cabinet mounted on his wall. It's cut off from the network, safe from hacking, so I'm sure every file is encrypted. But there's nothing to stop me from reading the menu. I have to take off a glove to scroll through the headings on the screen, but I use my palm just in case it's a trap complete with fingerprinting. The screen is filled with options. Some file names I recognize as boring procedure, others read like math I don't understand at all, but then I get to the impossible.
My name, my real name, is a file on Bosch's personal server. Why? I open it, even though all the files inside will be password-protected. They are. I can't open them, but I recognize the type from the extension at the end of the names—they're from medical. Why is Adam Bosch getting copied on all of my medical workups? There are enough files to go back to before Jean died, before 175, almost to the start of my employment. Did he get copied on all the high-volume traversers, and now I'm just the only one left, or is he watching me specifically?
I leave the filing cabinet alone and put my glove back on before surveying the room again. Even here there are no images of anyone who might matter to him. His space is as bare of sentiment as the emperor's, and I wonder if it's for the same reason. I tell myself that just because he doesn't keep images of friends or family doesn't mean there isn't someone out there who loves him.
The Nik Nik I knew understood it was important to view your enemy as a whole person. Think of a traitor as a father and a husband too. He didn't mean grant mercy. He meant when you kill him, know him well enough to know who might seek revenge. If Adam had studied Jean better, he would have known I'd end up in his bedroom, puzzling out the problem of his existence.
This is how I would kill him. In the place where he sleeps. According to Adam Bosch's walls, there is no one who would seek revenge. Just like there will be no one to get revenge if—when—he has me killed.
Only Mr. Cheeks texting me that I'm running low on time reminds me that I can't do what I want. I can't wait here until he enters and turn him to bloody pulp the way he did Jean. Because that would start a war, and even though those hypothetical deaths feel distant and unimportant against the loss of my only friend, they wouldn't be.
If we can't get rid of Adam, he'll just rebuild the hatch. The next one will be bigger and more protected and in a few years' time Jean's death will be a blip on the otherwise uninterrupted pattern of Adam's greed. Only I'll be gone, and there might not be anyone else who cares. I can't let that happen.
When Mr. Cheeks sends me another, more irritated message, I'm in Adam Bosch's oversized bathroom. I rush out into the hall and hear a gasp. I turn slowly, but I already know. I always feel it when she looks at me.
Dell is standing at the other end of the hall. She's never looked more beautiful, and we've never looked more impossible. She's wearing an evening gown, a sea of black crystals interrupted only by the bright V of her skin from collar to belly button. Her eyes are wide with horror, and a glass of Champagne hangs from gloved hands.
We're both wearing gloves. We're both wearing black. There our common ground ends. Seeing her like this is like seeing a star from the mud. I can't say this is a misunderstanding, that this isn't who I am. I can't lie the way I've been lying to myself for years.
I can tell from the hurt just beneath the shock that she recognizes me behind the bandanna. I'm not surprised. We've spent so many years together now, she could recognize me in the dark just like I recognized her scarred and covered in ash.
Before I can speak, before I can step toward her, Mr. Cheeks comes from the other side. He grabs me by the arm and drags me away. I look over my shoulder, but with the runner's appearance her eyes have turned cold.
Nik Nik and the others are at the edge of the property. I take a second to empty my pockets and throw their contents and my gloves in a nearby incinerator.
Nik Nik raises an eyebrow. "They won't—"
"Scan for prints, I know. Just being thorough," I say. "Where's your mask?"
Nik Nik smiles. "I wanted him to see my face."
Wanted Adam to know that he knew they were brothers, more like. I want to scream, call him stupid. He's tipped our hand and jeopardized the whole thing, but there's an energy in his eyes I've never seen before. His hands are fists, clenching and unclenching.
"When the bomb goes off, he'll know it's the past calling."
I hadn't believed Mr. Cheeks before, when he said Nik Nik was hurt by the news of his brother, but I see it now, clear as a knife wound. He hates his brother. But he also wore his best shirt and had his hair freshly done before seeing him.
"I'll take her home through the shadowways, and meet you back at the palace," Mr. Cheeks says.
Nik Nik nods. "Watch yourself until you've passed downtown. They'll chase us over the border for this."
The two men grab each other's shoulders, and then the emperor departs. Head high, steps long but slow, not at all like a man trying to hide.
Mr. Cheeks leads me back down the scaffolding to the dark elevator. We pull down our masks, and he pulls up his collar once we're on my floor. We walk slow and close like a couple out for a stroll until we're in front of my door.
"Are you sure you don't want to stay the night?" I say.
He shakes his head. "Light will be no friend of mine. And I need to be with the rest."
"I understand," I say, but I don't.
With the exception of my too-brief stays at the House when I was a girl, I've never been a part of anything. I thought of Nelline as being tragically lonely, without so much as a lover who would claim her in the light. But now that I've lost Jean, I'm not much better off.
I'm looking up at him, finally coming to terms with the fact that he might be the one Esther chooses, and maybe he wouldn't be the worst pick in the world, when I see the slender fingers work around his throat, grab his bandanna, and yank.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 97 |
Mr. Cheeks's head snaps back with the violence of a whip, and for a moment I think it's over that quickly. But then he ducks and turns, spinning away.
My mind stutters at the sight. "Dell?" I ask, but she ignores me, slamming a hand into Mr. Cheeks's throat that leaves him sputtering.
Dell is taller than either of us, but Mr. Cheeks is a runner. He should have retaliated by now. He keeps his hands at his sides.
I wrap my arms around Dell's shoulders. She shakes me off.
"Dell, stop!" I say, but she's already going for him again. "He can't fight back. You're a Wileyite. He can't lay a hand on you. It's not fair."
She snaps her head toward me so fast her hair spins like a propeller.
"Fair? I suppose it's fair for him to choke you, then? When you're so small? Is it fair for him to make you smuggle guns for him and break into mansions?"
"What? No, that's not what happened."
"I know you must...feel for him. But no one should treat you that way. Use you like that."
Mr. Cheeks is laughing loud now, and Dell's confusion at the sound gives me an opening.
I step forward and touch her hand. It's trembling. "He's not for me. He could never be for me."
"You think I'm dragging her into this? That's a laugh. She hired me and mine. We're working a job for her." He shakes his head and glares at me like it's all my fault. "Sucker-punched by a Wileyite. The shit you get me into."
Dell looks back at me. "You hired him? I thought..."
"I know what you thought. That I'm a tiny little Ashtowner, easily led astray." I turn to Mr. Cheeks. "I'm sorry. I owe you."
"Yeah, yeah. What's new?"
He rubs at his throat, and points at Dell, squinting. Then he abandons whatever threat he meant to deliver and shifts his gaze to me.
"Trouble. White-hot trouble, that's all you are."
"That mean you're rescinding the job offer?"
"Like I'd let you land anywhere else."
"I'll see you later, Mr. Cheeks."
He nods, then steps back, merging into the shadows.
Without a word I usher Dell into my apartment and try to figure out where to start. Her eyes are on my neck, and I realize I'm still wearing the bandanna. I pull it off and remove my boots, hoping I'll look more like the Cara she knows when we talk.
I sit in my chair, hands on the arms the same way Nik Nik sat. When I notice, I take my hands off and fold them into my lap.
"You eavesdropped on me on Earth 175."
Dell rolls her eyes as she sits down. She's removed her coat and I see that she was fully prepared to start a fight in her scrap of an evening gown.
"Yes, please make this about an invasion of privacy," she says. "Some watchers listen to their traversers' every trip. I've obviously allowed you too much leniency for too long. A gun? A real, working gun? Are you crazy?"
"It only has six bullets, and it can't be re-created here. Besides, I didn't have a choice. I needed it to pay Nik Nik. Otherwise he wouldn't let me use his runners. He still almost said no. I insulted him." I touch my neck. "He's...sensitive."
"The emperor of Ashtown choked you?" She looks away. "You sounded like friends on 175."
"On Earth 175 he's my friend. On every other world he's an enemy." I feel guilty about the half-truth. "On 22, he's my ex, but that just makes him even more my enemy."
She leans forward. "You don't need to do this. Whatever you want, I can get it for you. You don't need to hire wasteland runners to steal for you. I have money."
It's strange, her talking about her money like I should think of it as mine.
"I didn't hire them to steal from Adam Bosch. I hired them to destroy him. Tonight was just a test run."
"Why?"
I look down, calculating. She was at his house tonight. She could be more than his guest; she could be an accomplice. Jean knew what was really happening; maybe Dell does too.
"How did you find me that night?"
"What night?"
"You know what night. The night I was electrocuted."
"I was on fortieth. I saw you taking the elevator up instead of down and I thought you might be coming to see Jean. But you got off on seventy-six, so I followed you. I lost you in the stairwell, but then I heard the net go off and knew it was you."
"And you didn't wonder what I was doing up there?"
"I've become adept at overlooking things about you that don't add up."
"How generous," I say. "Why were you on fortieth? You live and work on eighty but lately you've been down on forty an awful lot."
"I have my reasons."
"And what were you doing at Bosch's place?"
"He was having a party. All of the elite got invited."
"Must be nice."
"Oh, be more bitter. I never get sick of it."
"Why were you heading toward his bedroom?"
Her eyes flare before they narrow—rage and insult, but not guilt. I've missed the mark.
"Why do you think that's any of your business?"
She doesn't make it easy to trust her. We've never communicated well, but between tonight and our fight yesterday a canyon has formed between us. We danced around each other for years because neither would tell the other the truth. If I keep quiet, she'll walk out, and we'll spend whatever time I have left navigating around each other like ships and icebergs. All because neither of us is brave enough to show our throat first.
"Adam Bosch didn't create an inoculation. He's just going to kill the dops of the winning bidders. I made a report to enforcement and he...he thought Jean did it."
I don't spell it out, and it takes no time for her to get it. She sits up straight.
"Adam killed Jean? And then he spread the rumor that it was your fault, that you were there?"
I hadn't known Bosch was responsible for the rumor, but I should have guessed.
"I was there. Jean made him let me go."
She runs both hands through her hair, though even after that dishevelment it resets to perfect.
"I'm so sorry. I should have...I'm so sorry." She takes a breath, then lets it go slowly. "I checked the record from your...Caramenta's first pull. It had a death entered without enough evidence, just like 175. I got suspicious. I was hoping to speak to Bosch alone about it. I wasn't headed to his bedroom. I was headed to his library. Why were you in his bedroom?"
"Looking for evidence. He has a file on me, but it looks like it's just filled with medi-scans?"
She nods. "I forward all of your scans. Quarterly bloodwork too."
"Did he request that from all of the high-volume traversers?"
"I wouldn't know. You're the only one I've ever had. But"—her eyebrows furrow, like she's accessing information stored deep down that she'd never thought she'd need again—"once I compared the serum compound I had to what Anthony gave Starla. They weren't the same."
"The serums are individualized?" I ask. "Or Starla's was special?"
"Or yours was, and he gets the medical scans to track its effects," she says, which feels like an obvious option now that she's said it out loud and everything.
Has Adam experimented with me? I wonder if Jean knew. The urge to call him up and ask is so strong I could cry from it.
"You should go," I say. "Nothing good will come of you being seen lingering around my apartment."
"Is there anything else I can do?" she asks.
I struggle with how much to tell her. I don't want her getting in trouble over this, but it's not fair to let her get taken by surprise.
"Don't come to work Friday."
"Friday? This Friday? That's only three days away." She tilts her head. "Cara, you can't kill Adam. If he dies, the hatches will stop working."
"I know. Trust me, no one lets me forget," I say. "I'm just going to disable traversing for a while. I'm working on something for the long term."
"The hatch?"
I stay quiet.
"No, I understand, don't tell me." She stands. "I thought after Jean died you spiraled and got involved in a dangerous relationship. I could see you were sneaking around, hiding something. I just thought it was your runner boyfriend trying to ruin you."
"And your solution was to beat up a man who beats up people for a living?"
"I wasn't thinking clearly."
"You? I didn't think you ever lost control."
"Only every single time something happens to you," she says, putting on her coat. "These last few weeks, I've felt you truly slipping away from me for the first time. I handled it poorly. I'm sorry."
I know what it sounds like, but that might just be what I want it to sound like. She's gone before I can form a response. Which is just as well, because I don't know what to say. At some point, maybe when she gets home or maybe when it's already too late, she'll realize she's right and I am slipping away. Adam will know that someone on the inside helped the runners, and he knows I hate him for what he did to Jean. I'm not going to get away with it this time. But I'll leave that nightmare for Friday. When she gets a call, or sees a news report with my name on it. Until then, let her think we're fine. Let her believe we can keep up this dance forever.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 98 |
The news projections catch fire after the runners' display. They used flamethrowers, chainsaws, and motorized skates to terrorize the garden with one clear message: We didn't kill Jean Sanogo. I scan the coverage obsessively, making sure none of the images contain my eyes or utterly unique facial striping. I'm in the clear, but I may have a new problem. There's a capture going around of Adam Bosch just after the runners receded, which means it's Adam Bosch just after he saw his brother's face for the first time in decades. He looks wide-eyed and utterly shaken, but just beneath it all, where another person would have confusion or hurt, there is cunning.
My building access still works, a Maintenance gang doesn't come for me in the night, but I'm still convinced he's making moves.
I monitor things around the office to make sure he doesn't increase security in anticipation of Nik Nik's next act. But as far as I can tell he hires only a little more security for his house and garden. Maybe he thinks Nik Nik will strike only at him personally, not professionally, so he's not thinking about protecting his company. Or maybe he's made preparations I won't see until it's too late. But it is too late, too late to think of something else and too late to pull back. The pieces are already in motion, and we're about to find out if Adam or I played the better game.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 99 |
The day before we strike, I find myself looking at everything like it's for the last time. When I pack, I expect a mountain of possessions, heavy as an anchor, to prove I did belong here. But it's just a backpack's worth of clothes and a box filled with my collection of items from other Earths. Soon my name will be off Eldridge's books, off rotation, and these sealed bags will be the only evidence that I once walked among stars, that I was valuable and the universe looked me in the eye.
Instead of dread or sorrow, it's gratitude that fills my last normal day. When I get breakfast at my usual place, I'm compelled to say thank you, and then say it again when the first goes unheard. Thank you for always being open. Thank you for always being as rude to me as you were to every other citizen patron, even when I barely passed as a resident.
I walk slowly through the street gardens, staring in wonder at the tall buildings like I haven't since my first week here. Under a flowering tree I thank the city for treating me better than any stranger deserves. For giving me a comfortable place to sort out who I really am. For letting me know what security felt like, even if just for a few years that feel briefer now that they are coming to an end. And I thank the city for letting me know Dell, not just because she's beautiful and I got to see her, but because I was able to know a person who carried strength and perseverance, but was utterly devoid of self-pity.
When I get to work, Dell doesn't quite seem to know how to interact with me. She avoids my eyes in a way she never has. I'm desperate to bring up what she said in my apartment, just to hear the parts of it again that make it sound like she loves me.
The closest I can manage is to look her in the eyes and ask, "Any plans for tomorrow?"
"No," she says. "I might take it off. Personal day."
I nod. When she doesn't pick up the thread of conversation, I climb into the hatch and let her send me away for the last time.
I stretch out to touch Nyame's muzzle eagerly, and the energy doesn't withdraw. I let her know she's going to be alone again. But then I see pictures of shamans in trances and dancers in drum circles and children sleeping and I know she's never been alone. She's never needed us. There have always been those who transcend, and traversing is just one way to walk between worlds. I don't think she'll miss me, that's too limited a way of thinking, but she makes me feel like she's noticed me, and I am grateful for that too.
When Dell pulls me back I sit for a moment in the total dark, saying goodbye to this space, the womb that brought me here, the grave that took Nelline. By the time I climb out of the hatch for the last time, I'm near tears.
"I got you something for your interview tomorrow."
Dell hands me a box. Inside is a suit, the kind I've always admired but never purchased because I was saving my money like an idiot to remove tattoos I might as well have kept.
"You asked me how I found you," she says. She's looking at me squarely, and I can hardly take it. "You asked me why I was always on the fortieth floor if I lived and worked on eighty."
I lick my lips. It's a nervous habit, but the attention it draws only makes me more nervous.
"Why were you?"
"For the same reason I have never taken a promotion or a vacation, Cara. I'm always on the fortieth floor because that is where you are. I will always want to be wherever you are."
I drop the box so I can pull her close, wrapping my arms around her waist so I'm surrounded in her scent. I stretch up to kiss her, because what the hell. I'm sure the tears I taste are half hers, but when I step away her eyes are clear. She holds my face and kisses me again. I close my eyes and let her make me feel small one last time.
"I love you," I say, out loud and formal like I never have before. Wiley words for my Wiley girl. "You know that, right? I've never said—"
"Come home with me tonight," she says, Ashtown all the way.
And I don't think there is a version of me on this or any other world that could say no to that. The walk to her place passes in a giddy haze where the buzzing reality of touching her—really and finally her—is only matched by my disbelief that this is happening at all.
In her apartment I learn that our height difference means I'm perfect for her on my knees, and that her being strong enough to toss me around brings all the thrill of Nik Nik with none of the cloying fear. Most important, I learn that you can love someone so much and so thoroughly it chases away even thoughts of death.
The bubble doesn't shatter until late in the night when we're lying in her bed and she says, "It's going to be okay, Cara. Everything's going to be all right."
They're her last words before she falls asleep, and once she goes soft with oblivion I get up and head toward her kitchen. I won't leave, I'll soak up every inch of her until I have to go, but I stand naked in her kitchen and use a knife to cut sizeable chunks from the hair on the side of my head. I find paper wrappings and bundle two chunks separately before writing a note for Esther on the outside.
For you, and Dell.
I creep back into bed, where Dell fell asleep thinking everything is going to work out. It won't. Not after tomorrow. But she hasn't figured that out yet, so I hold her until morning, and in her sleep she holds me back.
When I think of Wiley City, this will be what I miss. Not the magic pods, or freely growing food, but this, being close to a woman who inspired me and challenged me, and changed me for the better. Touching, finally, the night sky.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 100 |
I wait for my interview in the lobby. Without looking, I see six black jumpsuits, Maintenance workers on a day they don't usually work, waiting with me. I'm dressed in Dell's suit, and it makes me feel confident. I guess it's easy to be confident when you're helpless, easy to be fearless when you have nothing left to lose. I'm bobbing along in a tide I've set in motion but can no longer control.
When the time comes, I buzz up. The voice that answers scans my face for identification and unlocks the elevators. When I step on, Maintenance steps on with me. The black jumpsuit nearest me elbows my side.
"Mr. Scales," I say. "For a mechanic, you spend a lot of time away from the row."
"Heard we're blowing up some rich guy's stuff. Wouldn't miss this party for all the silver in the world," she says.
She's younger than I first thought, younger than me, and it makes me hate Nik Nik all over again. It's refreshing, simple, and familiar to hate him. It reminds me that, months ago, before crashing on 175 changed my whole life, hatred for him was my only complex emotion.
The only way to get past the guards is in plain sight. I count on Wiley City classism to keep the employees from looking Maintenance in the eye long enough to realize how Ashtown this batch is. It's a risk, especially after being so wrong about Dell's classism, but they've been in the building for half an hour and no one has looked close enough to sound an alarm yet. When they review the footage, they'll see that I'm the one who let the vandals in. Adam is too smart to think that's a coincidence.
Michael is huddled toward the back of the elevator. He's probably hoping I don't recognize him, but I knew he'd be here and I need a favor.
"Mr. Cross?" I take out the package with my hair and note in it, and hand it to him. "Can you see that this makes it to the Rurals...if anything happens."
He takes the package, frowns at its lightness. Then he must understand, because his eyes dart up like he's scanning my scalp for the missing piece.
"You're not going to die."
"Actuuaaaallly..." says Mr. Scales, before someone else elbows her into silence.
I smile, or try to. "It's okay. I know."
When we get off the elevator, the jumpsuits turn right toward the hatch and I turn left. The waiting area is full. They only took the top 2 percent of applicants to the interview stage, but between all the testing groups there are easily over two dozen. It seems every research head has been forced to take part in the selection process. A woman with a portable screen is going from applicant to applicant, dividing us into groups depending on who our interviewer will be.
Someone grabs my shoulder. I recognize the creaking plastic of the jumpsuit before I turn around.
"You're on the wrong floor," the Maintenance worker says as I face him.
My heart bounds, but I nod in resignation, following without resistance as he leads me to the elevator. He's focused on me, which means he doesn't see the counterfeit Maintenance crew heading fast toward the hatch. I don't know what's about to happen to me, but the runners will do the job.
The elevator is programmed to go up, which makes the destination obvious. When we get off the elevator at Adam Bosch's office, I expect more Maintenance armed with anything from stunners to chains. But it's just Bosch's secretary, a woman so Wiley City she could be made of ice. She ushers me back, past the interior fountains and lush ottomans, into Adam Bosch's office.
He doesn't stand when I enter, and I don't want to sit. While I'm watching, he rubs at his eye.
"You look like shit," I say, trying not to sound nervous. "Trouble with your super-tech? This is why smart people wear cuffs."
He takes a bottle out of his pocket and tries to squirt a few drops into his eye, but it's empty.
"The next model will be self-lubricating. That will solve the problem." He scoots closer to his desk. "Please, sit."
I raise an eyebrow and take my seat. "Are you pretending this is a real interview? I figured this was either the part where you tell me you'd never hire me for analyst, or you hire me, but give me a stern warning that you'll kill me if your secrets ever get out."
He laces his fingers. "Maybe there's a third option. Maintenance pays better than analyst ever will. Plus, we've recently developed a need for more workers in that arena. It's harder than you can imagine to find people willing to do what I need."
The offer is an empty one. There's an edge to his words, not quite concealing his rage. He's angry at me. He knows.
"Is it? Your brother always made recruitment look easy," I say. "Is he why I'm here?"
He leans back, too relaxed. "I didn't peg you for a planner. That was my mistake. I thought when you wanted revenge, you'd come into my house and kill me. But to sell me out to my brother? That...that was an interesting move."
I curse Nik Nik for showing his face. I curse myself for expecting anything less from the peacock of an emperor.
"Was it?"
"Of course. When you have no power, it's best to align yourself with those who do. A pawn recruiting a king to fight on its behalf. But this isn't a game for pawns, Cara. That's why I went to him directly, king to king, and made a friend."
Fuck. What's a gun to the kind of power Adam can offer? My mouth is dry, but I try to hide it.
"You made a friend of the emperor? No easy feat."
"I made him an irresistible offer. I told him I would secure jobs and visas for some of his more promising staff to work in Maintenance for me, and I sent along a pile of cash to sweeten the deal."
I've been spiraling since he began talking, imagining what I would do if I'd been double-crossed by Nik Nik, but then one word sticks out.
"Sent...you didn't...you didn't send the offer, did you? You took it in person."
"I hardly have time to be running into the desert," he says, but his face is already twisting. Some part of his brain is aware he's made a mistake.
He could have had me. He could have beaten me easily. I laugh. I can't help it. I laugh and keep laughing.
"So you insulted the emperor by making an offer remotely, you insulted him further by giving him cash, and then you insulted him a third time by assuming he would part with his men if you paid enough. They aren't his slaves; they're his family."
Adam licks his lips. Hubris. That is the word that will be written on his grave. He's spent decades studying any space he's ever wanted to conquer, any person he's ever wanted to win over, but he didn't bother to check even the most basic things about Nik Nik. Because, despite his blood and his birth, he thinks of us as simple, stupid, greedy creatures.
And me, for my part, I was saved by my knowledge of him. I will bring Adam to his knees because I spent years yielding in his brother's house. Every bruise and broken bone, every moment of self-loathing and tainted desire, has led me to this: sitting across from the smartest man in the universe, and having the upper hand.
"Nik Nik was supposed to just blow up the hatch, but now I don't know what he'll do," I say.
He still looks calm. His hand is steady as he presses his ear.
"Communications for the building have been down for five minutes," I say. "Don't panic. Buildings like this are meant to contain an explosion. And the hatch is so unstable, you took extra precautions in that room. No one will get hurt."
"Nothing is going to happen. The emperor is a smart man. He knows how valuable it will be to have friends in the city. He needs someone like me. Besides"—he smiles wide—"I'm his big brother."
"You are. And you have no idea what he is capable of doing even to those he loves."
I check the countdown on my cuff. Fifteen seconds. I grip the arms of the chair and brace myself. He opens his mouth to speak again, some bravado to hide his fear, but it's time.
The shaking is subtle twenty stories away, but it's enough to set the sirens off and for Adam to understand.
I expect rage, but as the smoke slowly drifts up past his office window he only leans farther back into his chair. His face is pinched as he works at this problem, this puzzle it's too late to solve.
Moments later a second explosion goes off, louder than the first, though it's farther away. When I look out the window it's easy to see the second wave of smoke, as big as a city block.
"Looks like your house is gone. You really should not have sent cash."
"You did this, all of this, because of Jean?"
"And to stop you from killing the bidders."
That hits him.
"You care?" He laughs. "Why should you care? They're no one to you. They're nothing."
"They're people."
That only makes him laugh louder. "If only I'd realized how surprising you would be. This could have been fun. You know it's useless, don't you? I'll just rebuild. You haven't done anything but waste my time and signed your own death warrant."
I pull a pair of gloves out of my pocket and slip them on, then I walk over to him. I sit on the edge of his desk, sliding my hands along it. It's actual wood, and I don't think I've touched real wooden furniture since I've been in the city. Shame I can't take off the gloves.
"You weren't so wrong about me. You're a genius, after all."
I lean forward. He should stop me, but he doesn't, because he's intelligent and the downfall of all intelligent creatures is curiosity.
"You said when I wanted revenge I would come into your house and kill you. And that's exactly what I did."
I grab the empty vial of eyedrops he shoved away when our interview started.
"You've been putting Lot's Wife into your eye every four hours for the better part of two days. First, your iris will bleach, then I imagine your hair. But soon enough your entire body will be a white and frozen statue. Best guess is you have three years, but you'll be blind long before that. You can either begin training someone else in how to keep the hatches running...or let them break, and let your legacy die with you. No one remembers traversing, and no one remembers your name."
"I would have known."
But I can tell his eye burns more with every word I say.
"Decide who you want to be, Adam, with whatever time you have left."
"I'll kill you," he says. "I'll tear you apart."
"I very much expect you will."
He hits a button on his desk. It must be on the local network to buzz his assistants, not the larger communications that a runner named Mr. Splice jammed, because moments later four Maintenance workers enter, thick jumpsuits rustling like leather. For the first time I realize the jumpsuits are easy to rinse off; that's why they wear them.
"Grab her. We're going to the border."
My chest is singing as I am yanked out of the room. I tell my dead hush. I tell my dead I will see them soon. There was a time when the thought of ending up in the same desert I came from was the worst possible fate, but now I am comforted by it. Being beaten to death on the same sand that raised my sister, that made me enough of a fighter to get me here, it feels like coming home. If it's good enough for Jean, it's good enough for me.
Fingers dig into my arms, and only then do I realize I'm dragging my feet; my body reluctant though my mind is at peace. Then the office's double doors open, and I see Dell. At first, I think I've invented her, because I wanted her to be my last thought and because I want her to be there when my heart stops beating this time. Selfish, I know, to wish that violence in front of her.
But then I notice the enforcement officers standing on either side of her.
"Good, you've already detained her," Dell says. She nods to enforcement. I'm close enough to read their patches so I can see they're immigration. "That's the one, you can take her."
The enforcement officers grab me, gentler but just as sure as Adam's team.
"What is going on here?" Adam says, not quite in control again, but who would be?
"I filed the report with HR last night," Dell says. "She's been caught violating company policy. Smuggling, fraternizing off-world. Her visa was dissolved this morning. Immigration has orders for her immediate dismissal."
It's all moving so fast, but I understand, just barely, that Dell has saved my life. I look over my shoulder at Adam, expecting rage, but instead he's calm. He can't follow me. He won't risk himself or his men being caught in the wasteland after the message Nik Nik sent with his mansion. But he's already looking past me and through me, which means he believes me about the Lot's Wife, and I just became his least-important problem. Maybe he'll figure out a cure, maybe he won't. He's an evil man, but the world will lose something unique when he goes.
"I hope you choke on every lungful of ash, knowing you will never taste clean air again for the rest of your days..." His eyes shift from mine down to the scars on my face, and he tilts his head. "However long that may be."
"What does that mean?" I ask.
He smiles. I knew he wanted me to ask even before I did, but I couldn't help it.
"You have no idea what I've been putting in your veins. Even I don't know all of the long-term effects. How long did you intend to live, Caralee?"
Three hundred and seventy-odd deaths in, it's a stupid question to ask.
"I don't, Adranik. I never did."
I could tell him I didn't want this. That every time it's happened, he's made me kill him. But I let him keep his anger, even though I can't match it.
"Take her," he says, and they do.
Immigration allows me ten minutes to pack while supervised, but I only need five. I take a moment to drop my gloves and Adam's eyedrops into the incinerator. Bringing Lot's Wife into the world feels no different from bringing in a gun. I've taken precautions to contain the damage of both, but anything can happen.
I grab the things I packed yesterday and I'm ready. They confiscate my cuff, but I've already messaged Esther that I'll need a pickup at the city gates. It doesn't feel like much, six years of trying as hard as I could, but it's all gone now. When I walk escorted out of my apartment, Dresden is waiting for me. His smile is crooked, not sad but awkward, and I shrug at him so he knows it's no big deal, that I'm fine. He hands me a basket, and I know without lifting the cloth cover that it is full of apples.
I hear Starla in my head from what feels like a lifetime ago.
It'll be you soon enough.
She was right. She always was.
Enforcement leaves me in the desert. I stand in the sun eating an apple from my friend while waiting for my sister and feel very, very lucky.
|
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson.txt
| 101 |
The acidic air only burned for the first week. After a few days I can't even taste the salt on my lips. Early on, I spend most of my days feeling my own pulse, waiting for it to slow. Adam Bosch made it seem like the long-term effects of the serum would kill me, but after the second week I have to admit that I'm feeling better every day, not worse. It's possible the smartest man in the world was wrong or just bluffing. But maybe it isn't one of those quick corporate deaths, like the factory accidents from long hours and lax safety protocols, maybe it's one of the slow corporate deaths, like that dust that settled in our grandparents' lungs until there wasn't room enough for air.
I'm not dying quickly, but I can still starve. I'm not eligible to work at any of Eldridge's import sites or processing facilities, so I start out doing scavenging, but that only pays out big once every so often, with a lot of starving in between.
Esther pressures me to come back to the Rurals, but to join with the holy I'd have to confess my sins, including murder, and if I can't regret it I won't be allowed in. And I don't regret it. I could lie, I'm sure I wouldn't be the first liar in a tunic, but it's time to stop pretending I'm anything but a girl from downtown Ash.
Mr. Cheeks keeps dropping stronger and stronger hints about becoming a runner. But a runner is a runner for life, and if I've proven anything it's that I never go anywhere to stay.
My obsession with writing lists finally pays off, and pretty soon word gets around that I'm good with a pen and I know how to talk like a Wileyite. Suddenly I am a resource. At first, it's just a favor I do for parents who want to write to children who have been granted full-time enrollment in city schools. They want to talk to their children without their children being embarrassed by them. So I write their letters, translating what they want to say into something that sounds less like home. Then vendors from the bazaar come around, looking for help writing an ad to increase traffic from the city. They don't want the full Wiley City treatment. They want it to sound enough like Ashtown to be quaint and original, but not threatening or crass.
By the time the emperor's adviser brings me a job, I've accepted that this isn't side work anymore. This is what I do. I act as an intermediary between two worlds, a traverser like I've always been. A vendor I write for offers me a desk in her shop to use as a base, as long as I keep an eye on her goods while she's out, and I take it. I like having a place to work. She likes having the increased traffic of curious locals wanting to see a fallen world walker, the girl with the traverser's skin. I've had the space a week when Michael comes in, marching perfect like he's been doing it a decade. He's got three times the marks he had last time I saw him, and most are achievements. He's thriving. The shop owner and other customers are watching too closely, a decorated runner enough to make them nervous. He drops an unopened package on my desk.
"Told you," he says.
"You win," I say, and tuck the package away. "How's business?"
He shrugs. "Things went tense right after...Himself was in a mood."
"I can imagine," I say, and then, because I can't quite resist, add: "It can't be easy, to find out your brother left you behind."
He snarls a little at me, showing off the runner's tooth he always wanted. He leans forward on the weathered desk I use to write.
"You taught me how to leave, Cara. I learned to chase the edge from watching you."
It's not an accusation, I realize. He's thanking me.
"You were always going to find your place. Didn't matter what I did."
"Maybe," he says, and takes those careful runner's steps away from me. "They're making up, you know. The brothers. They've been talking. They're only fighting now, but...you know."
I do. I remember Michael and Esther fighting in the backyard, and this is no different. Fighting means there is something worth fighting over. It means you care. I enjoy the image of Adranik and Yerjanik together again, for the first time without their father's cruelty or their mother's apathy. It's an odd place to find love, but I hope they do.
I have a job in Ashtown, and no plans to move. For as long as I've lived, my mind has been on the next thing, reaching for something higher and better. I did not think I was capable of contentment. And I did not think it would be so lonely once I found it.
The biggest surprise is Nyame. I still see her. At night when I sleep, she shows me images of the worlds I used to know but am cut off from now. She shows me how Nik Nik and Esther are ruling 175, and that Earth 255 me had a child and named it after the mother she doesn't remember enough to resent. In the dark she reaches out to me, because no one is lost. It is not a testament to affection for me, but a fact of her existence. She finds us in the in-between places, cradling individuals in the same way she cradles the whole world.
My dead grow quiet in my chest, content now that I've brought them back to a place they know. The scientists would say this is all expected, that the pressure in my chest was just the toll traversing took on my most concentrated bones, and that my dreams are the same as the hallucinations in the hatch because they are both just the mind trying to process what it doesn't understand. And there is a world where they are right, and a world where they are wrong, and I don't need to know which this is.
I've been back for a month when she finds me like a miracle. I recognize her at first sight, though she lingers near the shop's entrance and only slowly makes her way to me. She bends over the vendor's creations as if she's interested in purchasing them. And maybe she is. Maybe she doesn't even notice me. It's not unheard of for Wileyites to get their thrills buying from downtown directly instead of waiting for a bazaar. She doesn't seem to have seen me yet anyway.
But of course she has. Of course she knew I was in this room just as I knew the moment she walked up to the door. We are planets in orbit, pulling at each other as surely as gravity.
She picks up a knickknack, a mudcroc made of local ash and clay, carrying the colors of Ashtown as if we need reminding.
"You're hard to find," she says, bringing the trinket to me.
I wonder if she thought I was dead. It's been time enough for Adam to have had me killed. There's also the matter of my possibly dying/possibly not dying, given what Adam said about the serum. I wasn't looking at Dell's face when he said it, so I don't know if she believed him or not.
She doesn't look worried. She looks good. She's wearing all white, a color I've never seen on her. It makes her glow, and the Ashtown sun has pinkened her cheeks something lovely. She looks young, nervous.
"I may or may not have given Adam Bosch a terminal illness. I don't think he'll kill me, but it's best if I lay low."
She raises an eyebrow. "That does explain the shift. He's taken on a team of apprentices, and switched the company's gears from profit-making to community outreach."
"Lot of buildings going up with his name on them, I'm guessing?"
She nods.
He's dying, and with the time he has left he will ensure he lives forever.
"How is it working there?"
"I don't know. Eldridge had become...unstable. I thought it best if I spent a little time focusing on family assets for now."
Moving money around is not the kind of thing I'm sure she'd want to do, but it's also always an option for an heir like Dell. She has a security that not even Adam Bosch could claim, wealth generations back growing fat on itself. Soon, they'll want her to marry. Sooner still, they'll want her to have a child.
I clear my throat and pick up the mudcroc. "Cash or barter?"
"Barter."
Dell slides over a jewelry box and takes the mudcroc without giving me time to assess it. I don't call her back, because I'm sure she's covered, but when I open it I wish I had.
In the box is Dell's jade earring, the third she had no use for, but it's been fixed onto a necklace. Instead of a platinum chain like most of Dell's jewelry, this chain is black as night and catches the light red like Ashtown stone.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 2 |
The eviction notice was hanging on the door when they got back from the hospital. The time stamp said 1:27 am, six minutes after Mary Shelley Bierce's official time of death, an hour and twenty-eight minutes before her two daughters sitting in the waiting room had even been informed.
Amber sent Nicci in to bed while she stood out in the hall and read. The eviction gave them thirty days to either vacate or sign under the terms of the new lease, a copy of which was attached. Amber read them. Then she folded up the notice and slipped it into her pocket. She made herself a pot of coffee and sipped at it while watching the news. She thought. She said hello when Nicci woke up and that was all. She went to work.
The funeral was held three days later, a Tuesday. The insurance company covered the cost, which meant it was a group job, and although it was scheduled 'between the hours of eight and eleven,' the other funerals apparently dragged long and then there was lunch and so it was nearly two in the afternoon before Mary's name was called and the cardboard case with her label pasted on the side slid by on the belt and disappeared into the oven. Nicci cried a little. Amber put her arm around her. They got a lot of dirty looks from the other mourners, even though it had only been sixteen years since Measure 34 had passed—Zero Population Growth, Zero Tolerance—and they had both been born by then.
Amber was used to getting dirty looks when she went out with Nicci. Sometimes siblings could pass themselves off as cousins or, even better, as just friends, but not the Bierce girls. Even with different fathers, they were each their mother in miniature and the three years between them had an oddly plastic quality: in the right light, they could be mistaken for twins; in the wrong light, Amber had occasionally been addressed as Nicci's mother. Part of that was the size difference—Nicci was, as their mother used to be, fine-boned and willowy below that round, cherubic face, while Amber was pretty much round all over—but not all of it. "You were just born old, little girl," as her mom used to say. "You were born to take care of things."
She tried to take it as a compliment. The only part of Mary Bierce that knew how to be a mother had been cut out years ago and tossed in a baggie with a biohazard stamp on the side. The parts that were left after that didn't give a damn about homework or lunches or scrubbing out the toilet once in a while. Someone had to be the responsible one and if Amber wasn't actually born knowing that, she sure learned it in hurry.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 3 |
There could have been a lot more than two children at the funeral if it hadn't been for Measure 34. Mary Bierce (known to her clients as Bo Peep for her curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and child-sweet face, a name she was quick to capitalize on with frilly panties and ribbons and the intermittent plush sheep) had never been the careful sort. Amber had been putting out cigarettes, sweeping up broken bottles, and making sure the door was locked since she was six; she knew damned well that her mom wasn't going to lose a good tip by insisting her clients wore a condom when she was working. Bo Peep had been to the aborters three times that Amber knew of and there had probably been others, but that all ended with the Zeros and Measure 34. One day, she went off for her regular monthly shots and came staggering home three hours later wearing a diaper. She sort of collapsed onto the sofa, sprawled out like she was drunk, only she wasn't loud and laughing the way she ought to be. Her mouth had hung open slightly and there was some kind of gooey paste caked at the corners of her lips. All her makeup had been wiped away and none too gently; she looked haggard and sick and dead. Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.
"Spayed!" their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. "Spayed me! Those motherfuckers spayed me!"
At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom's black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment's uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn't quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.
Spayed.
Later, of course, she had plenty to say—about Measure 34 and the Zero-Pop zealots who passed it, about the insurance company and their fine print policies, and about men. It always came back to the men.
"They'll spay the hookers, sure they will," she'd sneer at some point. "But do they ever talk about neutering the fucking johns? Oh no! No, they're still selling Viagra on the fucking TV, that's what they're doing! Let me tell you something, babies, what I do is the most honest work in the world because all women are whores! That's how men see it and if that's how they see it, little girl, that's how it is!"
And Amber would nod, because sometimes if you agreed enough early on, the real shouting never got started, but privately she had her doubts. Privately she thought, even then at the age of eight and especially as she got older and Bo Peep Bierce grew more and more embittered, that it didn't prove a whole lot to say that men thought all women were whores when the only men you saw in a day were the ones...well, buying a whore. If you want to hang with a better class of man, Amber would think as she nodded along with her mother's rants, quit whoring.
Not that you could quit these days. But it had still been her choice to start.
And these probably weren't the most respectful thoughts to be having at your mother's funeral. Amber gave Nicci's shaking shoulders a few more pats and tried to think of good things, happy memories, but there weren't many. Her mind got to wandering back toward the eviction and the Manifestors. It had better be today, she decided, listening to Nicci cry.
After the funeral. But today.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 4 |
She didn't say anything until they got back to the apartment. Then Amber sat her baby sister at the kitchen table and put two short stacks of papers in front of her. One was the eviction notice, the new lease, and a copy of their mother's insurance policy. The other was an information packet with the words Manifest Destiny printed in starry black and white letters on the first page.
"Please," said Nicci, trying to squirm away. "Not right now, okay?"
"Right now," said Amber. She sat down on the other side of the table, then had to reach out and catch her sister's hand to keep her from escaping. It was not a gentle grip, but Amber kept it in spite of Nicci's wince and teary, reproachful look. Sometimes, the bad stuff needed to be said. That was the one thing Mary Bierce used to say that Amber did believe.
"We're going to lose this place," Amber said bluntly. "No matter what we do—"
"Don't say that!"
"—we're going to lose it."
"I can get another job!" Nicci insisted.
"Yeah, you can. So can I. And they'll be two more full-time shifts at minimum wage under that fucking salary cap because we dropped out of school. And that means that the most—the absolute most, Nicci—that we can make between us will be not quite half what we'd need for the new rent."
"What...? N-no..." Nicci fumbled at the papers on the table, staring without comprehension at the neat, lawyerly print on the new lease. "They...They can't do that!"
"Yes, they can. They did. Maybe they couldn't raise Mama's rent, but they can sure do it to us."
"How do they expect us to pay this much every month?"
"They don't. They expect to evict us. They want to get a better class of person in here," she added with a trace of wry humor, "and I can't say I blame them."
"But...But where are we supposed to go?"
"They don't care," said Amber, shrugging. "And they don't have to care. We do. And we've only got about four weeks to figure it out, so you really need to—" She broke it off there and made herself take a few breaths, because stop whining wasn't going to move the situation anywhere but from bad to worse. "We need to think," she finished, "about what we can do to help ourselves."
Nicci gave her a wet, blank stare and moved the papers around some more. "I don't...Where...What do you want to do?"
Amber picked up the brochure and moved it a little closer to her sister's trembling hands. "I went to see the Manifestors."
Nicci stared at her. "No," she said. Not in a tough way, maybe, but not as feebly as she'd been saying things either. "Amber, no!"
"Then we're going to have to go on the state." She had a pamphlet for that option, too. She tossed it on the table in front of Nicci with a loud, ugly slap of sound. More a booklet than a pamphlet, really, with none of the pretty fonts and colorful pictures the Manifestors put in their own brochure. "Read it."
"No!"
"Okay. I'll just run down the bullet points for you. To begin with, it'll take six to eight weeks before we're accepted, if we're accepted, so we'll still lose this place. However, once we're homeless, there shouldn't be any trouble getting a priority stamp on our application to move into a state-run housing dorm, so there's that."
Nicci put both hands to her face and sobbed harder. Amber's own eyes tried to sting, but she wouldn't let them. Crying was a pointless little-girl thing to do and it hadn't fixed one goddamn thing since it had been invented by the very first pointless little girl. Problems only got solved when you did something about them.
"We'll only be allowed to take one standard-size carry-case each," said Amber evenly, watching her baby sister cry, "and we can't afford a storage pod, so most of this stuff will have to be sold or left behind."
"Stop it! Please, just stop!"
"And we probably won't be able to live together. Not in the same dorm room, maybe not even in the same complex."
"I can't be alone!"
"You won't be alone, Nicci. You'll be rooming with up to seven other women, they'll just be strangers."
"No!"
"We'll lose our jobs and have to work a state-job as partial payment for those dorms, where our salary cap will be half what it is now, so once we move into those dorms, we are never getting out."
"No!"
"Yes, dammit!" Amber snapped. "These are the facts, Nicci! We can't stay here and nothing we do can change that. This place is all over. Maybe if we had enough time, we could find another place we could afford on just what we're making now, but you know goddamned well that we'd end up on a first-served list and we could be there for years! Where are we going to live in the meantime, huh?"
"You could get more time!" Nicci snatched at the lease, tearing it in her haste. "Did you even ask? There has to be a number that...that you could call and they'll give us more time if they know we're...on a list or..."
"We can file for a four-week extension. That's what we can do, and only if we can prove we can pay the lease at the end of those four weeks. That's all they care about and that's all they have to care about. Everything else is on us."
"Then I'll do like Mama did! I'm not leaving!"
"You mean you want to be a whore."
Nicci flinched. Amber did not.
"You want to do like Mama did," said Amber, ruthless and calm as her stomach churned. "You want to be a whore."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 5 |
"How are you going to fuck men—"
That flinch again.
"—for money—"
Nicci broke, tried to get up. Amber caught her by the wrist again and held on in spite of her sister's squirming efforts to tug free. She hated this, hated herself, but she kept on talking and her voice never shook. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff, right, Mama? Right.
"—if you can't even admit you'll be a whore?"
"I can do it," whispered Nicci, but she wouldn't look at Amber.
"Maybe you could, but you couldn't do it here, and you had better be sure that's the way you want to go because they don't let you stop anymore once you start. You'll have to get the barcode and you'll be subject to scans at any time. They'll cancel your insurance—look at me, Nicci—and garnish your wages to pay for the state insurance and all your monthly tests, plus the initial registration and the operation where they spay you, and you know it took Mama five years to pay all that off. And in the meantime, where will you be living? Because you won't be able to pay the new lease on a state-paid whore's salary and this place will still be just as gone."
"Stop it!" Nicci shouted. "Stop bullying me! I'm not leaving!"
Amber pressed her lips together and folded her hands. She told herself she wasn't a bully. "What are you going to do, Nicci? Where are you going to go?"
"Shut up!" Nicci beat her palms on the table loud enough that old Mrs. Simon in the next apartment banged her cane on the wall. "I'm not leaving! You can't make me leave, Amber! You can't make me leave the planet!"
"I'm not making you do anything," said Amber, knowing damned well it was a lie. "I'm just telling you that I'm going, with or without you."
Nicci stared, her mouth working in silent horror.
"There is no other place for us to go," said Amber.
And she waited, but Nicci still couldn't find anything to say, so she picked up the brochure and started to flip through it.
"So I went to see the Manifestors," she said. She sounded, to her own ears, a lot like the pinch-faced old man at the orientation seminar, trying to be professional while still getting through something deeply unpleasant and perhaps contagious as quickly as possible. Everyone knew about the Manifest Destiny Society and their ship; she said it anyway. "They've still got room. I guess they're having some trouble filling their quota for young women, so we're actually guaranteed a contract if we apply."
"They're having trouble because it's never been tested!"
"Sure it has. They've Tunneled out to all the other planets."
"Oh what? To Neptune? Saturn?" Nicci uttered a shrill, fearful laugh and shook her head. "They've never taken it to this other place! This...This..."
"Plymouth," supplied Amber, not without rolling her eyes a little. The Director of the Manifest Destiny Society was simply full of the pioneering spirit. "They're calling the planet Plymouth."
"I don't care what they're calling it! I don't want to go!"
"You don't have to. But I am," said Amber again, and watched her baby sister start to cry. "The trip's going to take about three years, they said, but we'll be in Sleepers the whole time. That's kind of like in the movies, when they freeze you, only we won't actually be frozen. We won't feel anything and we won't age, although the guy said sometimes the umbilical...the place where they plug you in leaves a pretty gnarly scar. Those weren't his exact words—"
"Amber!" Nicci wailed.
She waited, but that was apparently the sum and substance of Nicci's argument, so after a moment, she just went on.
"When we get there, the ship lands and becomes like the staging area for the colony. We'll be building the colony up around it—farms and stuff, I guess—but civilians like me won't be responsible for much. I guess it'll be pretty hard work, but it's only supposed to be a six-hour shift, which is less than I'm working now. I got one of their silver civilian contracts, which means five years—Earth years, that is, and it doesn't include the transport time. They're going to pay me twenty thousand dollars a year, plus five thousand just for being a fertile female of childbearing age."
Nicci looked up, her tears hitching to a brief stop in her throat. "W-what?"
"Plus another ten thousand for every kid I have while I'm there, but I'm not having any. I told them that, and they said that was my decision, but I still have to take my implant out before I go. They won't pay for that, but they do pay for a full medical exam and I'll get all my shots so I'm clean to go. By a doctor," she added. "Not some insurance company's medico. Plus, I'll get the Vaccine."
Not a vaccine. The Vaccine. And even Nicci, who obviously tried so hard to understand as little as she possibly could, knew what that was. Because before the Director had been the leader of a bunch of space-happy freaks, he'd been a doctor, and much as he would like to say that his greatest contribution to humanity was the ship that would carry the first colonists to another world (and he said that a lot), he would probably always be known best for the Vaccine, which worked itself all the way down into your DNA and made it so you could never get sick again. Here on Earth, people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to endure the agonizing year-long process while the Vaccine was introduced, but the Director was just giving them all away to his happy little colonists, who'd get them painlessly in their Sleepers, which was the perfect application process, according to the brochure. No more worrying about that niggling little 14% failure rate or the greatly exaggerated reports of the birth defects caused by genetic drift. They'd just wake up, secure in the knowledge that now they were cured for life of every possible virus—of the flu, of HIV, of whatever alien illness might be crawling around on Plymouth. Of everything.
Amber could see this sweeping, silent argument hammering away at Nicci's defenses. Ever since the Ebola attack at the UN summit, there had been a dramatic end to the prohibitions on biological warfare. These days, it was fight fire with fire, and now it seemed every country was bragging about the bugs they could grow. Super-polio, rabies-13, dengue, hanta, yellowpox and God only knew what else. They lived in the city. They were a target. It could happen any day.
"Well..." Nicci ran her wet eyes over the papers on the table without seeming to really see any of them. "Can't we go on the next ship? When we know it's safe?"
"No."
"There's going to be more!" She reached tentatively for the Manifestor's pamphlet, but withdrew her hand without touching it. "We can take the next one, okay?"
"No, Nicci. They only pay people to be colonists for the first ship, because it's the first and everyone wants to wait and see what happens. After it gets there safe and sound, the Manifestors stop paying and start charging."
"You don't know that!"
"I do know that, actually, because I was there and I talked to them. I also know that the next three ships are already booked, so it's this or nothing. Well," she amended ruthlessly, "it's this or go on the state or start whoring. I guess we do have options."
Nicci sniffled and rubbed at her face.
Amber picked up the brochure on the ship and made herself read it. It took a lot of time and when she was done, she could not remember a thing she'd just read. She'd hoped it would settle her twisting stomach some, but if anything, the wait and the silence and the sound of Nicci sniffling made her feel even sicker. She folded up the brochure and put it down, talking like she'd never stopped, like she didn't care, like she was sure. "The best part is, the five years I spend on the planet counts as improved education when I get back. Not as much as a degree would, but some. My salary cap will be raised and I'll even be eligible for college credit, just like if I'd been in the army."
She waited. Nicci kept sniffing and wiping.
"Fine," said Amber, sweeping the papers together in a single stack. "You stay here and have fun with the whoring. I'll miss you."
Nicci didn't call her back as Amber walked down the narrow hall to the room that the sisters had shared since Mary brought baby Nichole home from the insurance company's birth clinic. Amber put the papers in the drawer with her shirts and socks, then changed out of her funeral clothes and into her work uniform. She went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. She tried to be as quiet about that as possible and she didn't feel a lot better when it was done. In the other room, she could hear her baby sister crying again. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and saw a big (fat) unsmiling (mean-eyed) stranger (bitch) who'd bullied her only living relative on the day of their mother's funeral.
"It had to be said," whispered Amber. She rinsed her mouth and washed her face and put her hair up. "Sometimes you just have to say the bad stuff."
She went on out past weeping Nicci and off to work like it didn't matter. In a way, it didn't. They simply didn't have any choice.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 6 |
They called the ship the Pioneer, of course. The launch had originally been scheduled for August 3rd, but it had been pushed back three times and now was set for January 22nd, and, barring another sanction from the United Nations, set in stone. That gave the Bierces a little more than twelve weeks to prepare for the flight, but they only had Bo Peep's apartment for four. The Manifestors provided housing, but required a signed contract before approval, which in turn required a certificate of medical clearance. They got their exams the third day after requesting one and Nicci passed hers easily. Amber hit an old, familiar snag.
Her tests were all negative, the medico assured her, as though Amber needed assurances. She did not. Her job at the factory took the weekly drug-and-disability tests allowed by law and Amber had seen too many people dismissed, often with a hefty fine for 'misrepresentation of faculties,' to ever be tempted by her mother's stash. No, the problem was what the problem usually was: Her weight.
She wasn't huge. She had more than one chin and she lost her breath easy when she had to take the stairs, but she got her clothes at the same store Nicci did, just on the lower shelves. So this was a setback, but it wasn't unexpected and it couldn't be insurmountable. She just wasn't that big.
"How much would I have to lose?" Amber asked bluntly, interrupting the medico's careful dance around the three-letter F-word.
"It isn't a matter of, well, weight."
"It isn't?" she asked, surprised. "Is something wrong with me?"
"Not necessarily. Your blood pressure is, well, on the high end, but normal, and although you show some pre-diabetic conditions, your glucose levels are just fine."
"How do you have a pre-diabetic condition? Isn't every healthy person a pre-sick one?"
The medico's lips pursed slightly.
Amber made herself shut up. She glanced at the nicely-tiled ceiling and then at the pleasant wall-mounted light meant to mimic a curtained window, since the actual view of rundown buildings and garbage-strewn alleys was so deplorable. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not trying to be a bitch, I just really want to go."
The medico softened slightly, even smiled. No doubt she saw before her an excited, if fat, young pioneeress on the threshold of a lifelong wish and she alone had the power to grant it. Amber let her think whatever she wanted. This was the last hurdle and if she could just get her fat ass over it, she and Nicci would be on their way.
"I have to do this," said Amber. "So just tell me how much I have to lose."
"I'm really not sure. The problem isn't just a matter of weight, as I said. It's a matter of risk. You have to realize that even though your tests all fall within the normal range right now, you'll be contracted to the colony for five years as, well, as a potential mother. Obesity creates an increased risk for all pregnancies."
They thought she was obese? Amber rubbed her stomach and scowled. "Okay. I'll be back," she said, and went out to the clinic's waiting area to collect Nicci. She made herself a second appointment for the end of the month, the same day the apartment's lease expired. She went home, saw a nervous Nicci out the door and on her way to work, then took half the money out of her bank account and got back on the bus.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 7 |
Amber knew where he lived, but she went to 61st Street anyway because when Bo Peep moonlighted, which was almost every night these past few years, she did it on 61st and the Six-Ones might be feeling territorial. Sure enough, after standing out in the grey rain for a good half-hour, a kid sidled up and asked who she wanted. She asked for the Candyman. He had a lot of names, and Amber even knew a few, thanks to his long working relationship with her mother, but that was the one that could always find him. The kid went away and another ten minutes passed. Permission came in the form of a low, black car with tinted windows that rolled down just enough for some other kid to tell her where to find him.
The Candyman wasn't much to look at—a scrawny, toothless man of indeterminate age and race, with a propensity for cheap suits and a swishy way of talking that should have made him a target on these streets. Instead, he was perhaps the one man who could walk freely from 14 East all the way up to Brewer Drive and get nothing but nods from the people he passed. It wasn't just the drugs. Just what it was, Amber didn't know, but the drugs made an easy sideline and he was good with them. He rarely met with anyone apart from his own crew and the leisure girls who did the things he liked in exchange for the glow only he could give them. But he met with Amber, perhaps just because he'd seen her before, hanging on Mama's hand and wishing she was someplace else while Bo Peep begged in her pretty way for the sweet stuff, trying to pretend Mama really meant candy, like the lollipop he gave little Amber on the way out his door.
He admitted her past ten or twelve of his heavily-armed good friends to the squalor of his apartment as if to a royal audience, which she supposed it might be, in a way. He said a few solemn words on the passing of her mother, which was nice of him. And then he got down to business.
"Are you going on the state?" he asked in his mushy, sing-song way. "Candyman can talk around, you bet, find you a prime place to strut. No charge, even. Out of respect. Would you like a soda? Nickels, get Bo Peep's little girl a soda."
"No, thank you. I need to lose a lot of weight in the next four weeks," said Amber. "A lot. And I need to pass a drug-and-disability at the end of it."
"Mmm-hm." Candyman leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. "That does limit our options. Let me think."
He thought. And then he went into his dingy kitchen, rattled around, and came out with a crinkled paper lunchbag, well-used, but strong enough still to hold whatever it held. He folded the top down three times and pinched the crease sharp with his knobby, stained fingers. "You take one of these in the morning, sweets, when you get up. One twelve hours later, no more and no less. It make you hum around some, you bet," he said, and tittered. "You say four weeks, uh-huh, you take this three weeks and let the last week go. If you like to tip the bottle, you best be setting it aside for a while or you find you lose all the weight, all at once, and go slithering off in just your soul."
"How much do I owe you?"
"I like this girl. She all business," Candyman remarked to one of his good friends and the good friend grunted. "Well, Miss Business, out of respect for your dear departed mama, I'ma give you this for just twenty a shot, mmm-hm. That's twenty-one days, two shots a day...help me with the higher mathematics here, Snaps."
"Eight-forty," rumbled one of his men.
"Just so." Candyman held out the bag.
Amber didn't take it. Eight hundred and forty dollars was more than she had on her, but not more than she had. On the other hand, she still had twelve weeks to get through and she didn't like spending so much of it at the beginning without knowing how it was all going to end. But then again, if she passed her medical exam, she'd be in the Manifestors' care for most of that time, and after that, it didn't matter. She meant to put whatever she hadn't spent in one of the colonist's accounts, so whatever she had when she left could sit in the Director's bank growing by half a percent a quarter until she got back. Maybe by then it'd be up to four digits. And when she did come back with her colonist's pay, eight hundred and forty dollars was going to be pretty small change.
"Give me a little time to put that together." Amber turned around.
"Ooo, now I really like her. She don't haggle, she don't beg, she don't cozy up other arrangements. She just gets things done," said Candyman, and he must have gestured because two of his good friends stepped sideways in front of the door. Amber studied them, aware that this might be very bad, as behind her, the Candyman considered.
"How much you got in your pocket?" he asked at last.
Dumb question to answer in a room full of men with guns.
"Five hundred."
"Mm-hm. Tell you what I'm going to do, because you're Bo Peep's little girl and because I like you, I'm going to take that five hundred right now and you gonna give me the rest plus another one-sixty—another even five, you hear me?—the day you take your last shot. You do this like an honest businessman, yeah? And we got no problems."
She looked at him. "Is there a catch?"
"I do like her," said Candyman to Snaps. And to Amber again, "Just another business arrangement, nothing bad. Good business. Repeat business, if you understand me, anytime you find yourself in the market. You just let Candyman take care of you, we gonna get along just fine."
"I can agree to that," said Amber, who had no intention of either buying his products or selling her body. She doubted he'd follow her offworld to complain about it.
Candyman smiled at her, but his eyes turned cold and somehow older—the eyes of a crocodile, half-sunk in swamp and too damned close to shore. "Whether or not you can is not what I'm waiting to hear, Miss Business."
"Sorry," said Amber, and unlike the nurse, the apology did not soften up the Candyman in the slightest. "I mean I will." And she put out her hand for him to shake.
He looked at it. His friends looked at it. They all looked at each other. Some of them laughed, but it was good, honest laughter.
"Business all the way," marveled Candyman. He shook with her. His hand was soft and bony at the same time, with too much skin for its little size, and abrasive calluses on the fingerpads. He did not release her right away. "You gonna find I'm a man of my word, despite what you might be thinking, and that can be good or bad depending on how you want to play this out."
"I came to you for help," said Amber. "That's how I'm playing it."
"Mm-hm." He opened his hand and let hers go. "I knew your mama," he said, giving her the lunchbag. "I knew her about as well as she let anyone know her, if you feel me, and if you don't mind my saying, you not a whole lot like her."
She knew. And she knew it probably wasn't a compliment, but she took it as one.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 8 |
She took her lunchbag home and put it in Mama's room without looking at it. Then she cleaned house. Ice cream, frozen pizzas, peanut butter, all the nuke-and-eat dinners in the freezer and the just-add-hamburger boxes from the cupboard—opened or unopened, it all went into a garbage bag and straight out to the dump-bin behind the building. If it wasn't here, she wouldn't think about it; if it was, she'd probably eat it all, just to have something to do. It wasn't until much later that night, after Nicci was in bed and Amber sat alone in Mama's room that she opened up the thin, stained paper and had her first look at forty-one pre-loaded needles. She tried not to think about how many times they'd been used when she pushed the first one in.
She didn't even have enough time to wonder when it was going to hit before it hit. She didn't sleep that night. She didn't sleep much at all for the next twenty-one days, but she hummed all right. Sometimes her heart raced hard enough that she made herself sit down with the telephone on her lap and her finger on the emergency-response button, just waiting for the last reason to push it, but she got through it.
She lost her job, but not for the shots. She wasn't sure how they found out about Manifest Destiny, but they must have, because in spite of her 'recent increase in enthusiasm and productivity' at work, they felt that, regrettably, she had ceased to envision a future with the company. They didn't offer to send her last paycheck and she didn't ask. She considered herself lucky they hadn't taken her to court for breach of occupational contract.
Jobless, she counted days by the mornings when she shot up and nights the same way. Otherwise, there was no time, no sense of its passage, no sense of change in herself, only sleepless nights and blurry days and gradually loosening clothes.
She paid the Candyman his money the morning of her last injection. He told her she looked good, reminded her of their future business arrangements, said he'd see her around. She did, once or twice, but only at a distance.
She made her appointment at the clinic on time after sleeping nearly two days straight through. She looked and felt like home-brewed shit in her opinion, but she didn't have the same medico and the new one didn't remark on her appearance beyond voicing some concern that if the records were accurate, Amber appeared to have lost fifty-seven pounds since the last examination.
"Mistakes happen," said Amber. "Do I pass?"
The medico took some measurements. He flipped through some papers. Then he excused himself. Amber waited for a few seconds, then eased the door latch silently down and opened it just a crack. She could hear her medico down at the nurses' station, conferring with whoever else was there in low, urgent tones.
"—not sure what to tell her," he was saying.
"How old is she?"
"Twenty-four, but she's a big girl. I don't think the—"
"She clean?"
"What? Yeah, she's fine other than the—"
"Pass her."
"Are you sure she's going even going to fit in the Sleeper? They don't exactly make those things in plus sizes."
"Did you look at her home address? She's asking for her clearance this early, it's because she wants to move into the housing those nuts are offering. And she is not getting any bigger over there, I guarantee it."
"I don't know..."
"Seriously, I have to spell this out for you? The Director has God knows how many investors convinced that this deep-space disaster of his is a five-year swinger's party. If they show up with their money and find a fucking weiner roast, they're going to make him very unhappy and he will make his underlings unhappy and that shit will roll downhill until it hits us. Who cares how big she is? Someone will be into that. Pass her."
Amber got her health clearance. She took it to the local branch of Manifest Destiny and got a room for her and Nicci to share at the compound for thirty dollars a week and a thumbprint. It took just a few hours to load up their things and sign out of the apartment. She left all the big stuff behind for the super to steal and got on the shuttle that took them to the busport that took them to their new, temporary home. It was a nine-hour drive with seventeen other hopeful colonists and nobody did much talking. That night, in their new beds and their old sheets, Nicci cried. Amber slept.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 9 |
Time came back.
She had eight weeks to kill with nothing to do. She went to all the seminars the Manifestors offered. She took a class in agrarian infrastructure, and another in canning, figuring they'd be useful skills to have on the new planet. She went to the gym every day, but gained back five pounds. She would have gone back to the Candyman for another thirty pounds' worth of needles if she had the money, but she didn't, so fuck it. Once the ship took off, it would be too late for the Director to hang out his No Fat Chicks sign.
Finally, their boarding orders. They were boarding the corporates first, the gold class second, and the families third, in alphabetical order, so Amber and Nicci were scheduled for eight in the morning on January 17th. There was an orientation lecture on boarding procedure. Amber went. Nicci stayed home and cried.
On the last day, Amber packed. They were allowed to bring whatever they wanted for free, provided it fit in one of the standard Fleet-issued duffel bags. Anything other than that, they charged for. Amber put in the three spare colonist's uniforms first, leaving only the one she'd be wearing for boarding. Then she rolled up a few sweaters, some jeans, socks, underwear, her favorite tee and, with what little space she had left, the most useful study material from the seminars, and two coffee cups. She stared at it for a while. She packed Nicci's duffel for her, rummaging through the apartment stuff for more than two hours to find the shoebox with their photos. She removed the pictures where Bo Peep was too obviously strung out and put the rest in Nicci's duffel bag. Then she cried, but she did it quietly in the bathroom. It was almost morning, almost time.
It was almost over.
"Here we go," muttered Amber. She dried her eyes and switched out the light, saying, with absolutely no sense of premonition, "Plymouth or bust."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 10 |
That day, Amber learned early that standing around in an skyport was pretty much exactly like standing around in an airport. This was probably because, regardless of the Director's many efforts to make it look futurific and exciting, it was an airport, only with a space shuttle behind it instead of a bunch of planes. The actual ship, the Pioneer, was already in space, where it and the rest of the Director's fleet had been built.
As 'strongly advised' in the seminar, she and Nicci took the transport two hours in advance of their boarding time, only to discover that the line was already stretched out of the maze-like queue and wrapped three-quarters of the way around the terminal. It was not the best weather for standing in line. The Manifestors, or maybe just the airport people, had set up several canopies, but the rain got in anyway, splashing in fat, random splats against her arm, her neck, her eye. Outside of the canopies, the rain quickly plastered her official Manifest Destiny flightsuit to her body, and since it was white, it exposed not only each and every unsightly bulge of fat, but also the pebbly bumps of her nipples and the hem of her panties and God alone knew what else.
The conditions were bad enough; the company was worse. All around them were young couples hiss-fighting their way through the nerves, bickering teenagers, screaming babies, and every shade of human misery in-between. Adding to the fun was Nicci, who kept insisting it wasn't too late yet, they could still go back and maybe talk to the super, just talk to him, Amber, and maybe get their old apartment back and they could make it work, they really could. By the time she reached the terminal doors and bared her face to the gust of heated air blowing down from the overhead fans, Amber was ready to tell her to go wherever the hell she wanted to as long as she shut up when she did it. And that made her feel sick all over, because she knew her sister's fear wasn't only genuine, it was normal. They were doing something that had never been done, had never even been tested in any real practical way. Fear was a perfectly reasonable reaction, but it still didn't change the fact that they were homeless, jobless and alone. Whining about it was not going to change anything.
They made their way back and forth through the ropes of the queue holding hands. Manifestors walked happily up and down beside them, offering hot coffee and smiles and sedatives for those who needed them. A young mother not far from Amber abruptly ducked out of line with her small son, only to be met by three Manifestors who politely but firmly reminded her of the contract she had signed, the amenities she had already accepted, and the criminal charges awaiting her if she left. The mother began to cry, the son joined in, and both were ushered swiftly away. Not out the door, Amber noticed, but deeper into the terminal. They did not come back. Maybe Nicci was watching too; she stopped asking to go home, but the hand that gripped Amber's trembled the closer they got to the head of the line.
Halfway there, they were met by a registrar—not one of the skyport's, a Manifestor—pushing a cart loaded with baskets of flat and featureless metal bracelets. She was accompanied by an honest-to-God Fleetman. Seeing him in his plain military uniform was, even more than the queue or the rain or the space shuttle itself on the launching platform out the window, the slapping hand of reality for Amber. The registrar had to repeat herself before she could bring herself back from that.
"I'm sorry?" she stammered, wrenching her eyes off the Fleetman.
"I need your print, please?" The registrar lifted her scanner higher.
Amber offered her thumb. The scanning plate was warm and a little slippery. Quite a few sweaty hands in the line ahead of her, she supposed.
"Amber Katherine Bierce, do you accept the terms of the contract you have signed with the entity identified as the Manifest Destiny Society and revoke all other rights save those guaranteed you in the aforementioned contract until such time as the contract has elapsed?"
"Yes."
"Do you understand that by agreeing to these terms, you have become a member of the Manifest Destiny Society and a civilian of the planet identified as Plymouth, subject to all laws of that entity and that planet, both existing and to be determined, until such time as your contract has elapsed?"
"Yes."
"Do you understand that when this document is finalized, you will not be permitted to renege on its terms and any attempt to renege on its terms will be prosecuted on three felony charges of theft, fraud and conspiracy to defraud, carrying no less a sentence than fifteen years in prison and a fine of no less than two million dollars, and that failure to pay that fine may carry its own liability?"
Nicci trembled.
"Yes," said Amber.
"Great!" The registrar turned to let the Fleetman, who was apparently doing the witnessing, tap at the scanning screen. The registrar played with it some more, then printed out a plastine label. She applied this to one of the bracelets on her cart and fit it onto Amber's wrist, pinching it to make it tight. "There you go! Enjoy your flight! May I take your print, please?" she chirped, turning her sunny, Manifestor's smile on Nicci.
Amber watched the Fleetman run his restless, military stare out over the crowd of would-be colonists. He looked bored. When his eyes met hers, she said, "Are you coming with us to Plymouth?"
"Hell, no," he replied. "They had to pay me double just to do this much."
That earned him as dirty a look as the registrar seemed capable of manufacturing on her perky, young face. He shrugged one shoulder in something like an apology, tipped Amber a wink when the registrar resumed the legal stuff, and went back to crowd-watching. Nicci got her bracelet. The trudge through the queue continued.
Not just 'no', but 'hell, no'...
The next time the line took them close enough to a registrar, Amber reached out and waved for the accompanying Fleetman's attention and asked if he was boarding.
"No, ma'am," he replied firmly, which was not as unsettling as 'hell, no,' but was still pretty negative.
"I was told there was going to be a Fleet presence on Plymouth. I mean, the flight crew are all Fleet, right? They're not...um..." ...a bunch of Director-worshipping space-zealots?
The Fleetman smiled. "There will be a full military flight crew, ma'am. Six hundred and forty proud men and women of the first United States Deep-Space Fleet."
"Is that all?"
"This isn't a military operation," the registrar inserted with a disapproving frown. He was a lot better at that than the last registrar.
The Fleetman gave him a knowing sort of glance and asked Amber if she had any other questions. She did not and the line was moving, so she shuffled on ahead and let them get started on the next colonist.
Six hundred and forty. Didn't seem like a lot of crew for a ship the size of a football stadium, let alone the police force for fifty thousand people.
'We'll be way too busy colonizing to need policing anyway,' Amber told herself, but couldn't make herself believe it. She didn't think it mattered how tiring life on the farm was going to be. People were always going to need policing, especially when things were new and scary and people were apt to be at their worst.
Nicci was looking at her, all wide eyes and apprehension. Amber smiled and squeezed her hand, disguising her misgivings with an ease born of many long years of practice. Worrying was useless now; the bracelet on her wrist was as good as handcuffs.
'I'm not scared,' thought Amber, stepping up to the head of the line at last. 'I'm the tough one. I'm the strong one. I'm the one Nicci's going to lean on for the next five years, so suck it up, little girl.'
They ran them and their duffel bags through the usual set of scanners, checked their thumbprints against their bracelets, gave them each a smile and the opportunity to opt out and be arrested—Nicci opened her mouth, but Amber squeezed her hand and she closed it again, shivering—and then they were sent down the tunnel and onto the shuttle, which was, in spite of its size and the cool lights and the seatbelts that locked them in and had no release button, just a big airplane. It smelled like one, especially when all the other people got squeezed in around them; it sounded like one, once the pilot droned out the weather conditions and how it affected their launch time; it felt like one when they taxied away from the terminal and turned onto the runway.
"Here we go," said the pilot, sounding comfortingly bored.
No one else made a sound.
The shuttle began to move, slowly at first, but picking up speed fast until Amber could feel the funny tugs of lift under its wings. She squeezed Nicci's hand again, but her sister did not respond—not with a word, not with a shiver, not even with tears. The shuttle bumped up once, twice, and then lurched into the sky and stayed there. Amber tried to look, but the nearest window was six nervous people away and it mostly showed her the wing anyway.
The shuttle was tipping as it flew, leaning everyone further and further back in their chairs. "Just a little jump now," said the pilot, and almost exactly on the word 'jump,' there was a tremendous roar behind him and a mighty lurch straight up.
People screamed in the reedy, I-know-I'm-being-silly-but-Jesus-Christ-not-cool way they sometimes did if the elevator they were on suddenly quit working or some yappy dog on a leash took an unprovoked lunge at them. Some of them laughed a little afterwards as the shuttle ripped them out of Earth's sky. Some cried instead. Amber squeezed Nicci's hand and watched the stars come out through the nearest window.
The roaring noise gradually died away. The shuttle didn't slow down or right itself, but with nothing but space through the windows to orient themselves around, it seemed to do both. Quite a few people threw up in the courtesy bags provided for that purpose. 'Spacesick,' Amber thought, watching everyone's hair drift.
Now the shuttle slowed, firing its engines in little lurching bursts while the real ship rolled in and out of view through the windows, impossibly huge. The pilot came on to tell them they had permission to dock and that they'd feel a little bump when the clutch made contact. These words were followed within a few minutes by a loud scraping noise and a thump that made everyone rock sideways in their seats. The lights flickered. People screamed again, laughed, cried, threw up. 'We sound like crazy people,' thought Amber, frowning, and she put her arm around her sister and hugged her.
They waited for what felt like a very long time without anything happening until someone at the window suddenly announced they were going in. Everyone tried to lean over everyone else and look. Amber hugged Nicci and watched the lights dim and glow, dim and shiver.
According to the pilot, they docked. The clamps engaged. The stabilizers were initiated. Atmosphere was restored—she could see that one for herself when everyone's hair came down—and the engines were cut. The pilot reminded them not to forget their bags and wished them all Godspeed and a great adventure. The shuttle doors opened. Their safety restraints unlocked.
No one moved.
Another perky Manifestor stuck her head inside and smiled at them. "Let's get going, shall we? Just follow the white line to the boarding hub and an usher will be waiting to direct you to your room! So exciting! Single-file, just like back in school!"
"My school used the buddy system," someone said, sounding worried.
The Manifestor looked at him. So did a lot of people, but her smile was nicer.
"Then I'll be your buddy," she said and held out her hand.
And just like that, it turned back into an airplane. People started getting up, looking for their bags, muttering and laughing and getting tangled up in their seat belts, and everything was fine again. Shouldering her duffel bag, Amber waited for a break in the stream of disembarking people and then joined it, holding her sister's hand firmly in her own. 'Just like an airport,' she thought, stepping onto the painted line. 'Nothing to worry about. Keep walking. Stay calm. It's almost over.'
The queue moved faster than the one back at the skyport. They were already in space; she supposed there was really no point in anyone dragging their feet anymore. The halls they walked through were clean and well-lit and carpeted, not at all like the grim, utilitarian ships you saw in sci-fi movies. More like a hotel, except for all the shiny metal trimming. There were no windows, nothing to remind them that they were in space. There were a few pictures on the walls in the boarding hub, but they were all of the Director—walking with various dignitaries, frowning seriously at important documents, gazing pensively into the sky, clasping hands with his loving cultists, and just generally being inspiring. Supposedly, he was putting in a lot of public appearances these days, but she hadn't seen him anywhere around the compound.
She found herself wondering if he was even coming to Plymouth with them.
"Welcome aboard!" said the square-jawed young usher waiting for her at the end of the line. He even fired off an honest-to-goodness salute which, in addition to raising Amber's eyebrows, brought out a gust of laughter from the actual Fleet soldiers lounging around a little further down the corridor from the Manifestors. "I'm Crewman Everly Scott of the Pioneer! And you are...?"
"Amber Bierce," said Amber. "Space Adventurer."
The Fleetmen down the hall laughed again and this time some of the Manifestors joined in. Crewman Scott's enthusiasm visibly iced over. He lowered his saluting hand and looked at her, not smiling.
'Great,' thought Amber. 'Now he thinks I was making fun of him.'
Weren't you? some small part of her wanted to know. It sounded a lot like her mother.
"Sorry," Amber said, setting her duffel bag down. "I didn't mean anything by that. Just nervous, you know. It's my first time going to another planet."
This prompted another good-natured rumble of humor down the hall, but did not appear to thaw Crewman Scott much. His professional smile went no further than his clenched jaw as he scanned their thumbprints again, checked whatever came up on his little screen against their papers, then against their wristbands, and finally gave them both an official nod of approval. "Bierce, Amber K.," he said. "You've been assigned to bed FH-0419. Follow the green line to the family housing bay, take the elevator marked H to the fourth floor, turn right, and bed 19 is down the first hall on your right, okay?"
"H, four, right, right. I got it."
"Bierce, Nichole S., you've been assigned to bed FW-1866," Crewman Scott continued.
"What?"
"Follow the green line to the family housing bay and take the elevator marked W to the—"
"Hang on," interrupted Amber, giving Nicci's startled, clutching hand a distracted pat. "We're supposed to be together."
"—to the eighteenth floor—"
"I was told that we'd be together," said Amber again, a little bit louder.
"—turn left and you'll find your bed on the third hall on your right," Crewman Scott concluded, holding out a helpful printed map of the ship. "Enjoy your flight, ladies."
Amber did not take the map. "Are you finished?" she asked coolly.
"Enjoy your flight, ladies."
"We were told we'd be stationed together."
"Enjoy your flight, Miss Bierce."
"I hope you can say that all day, because I'm not moving until I get this cleared up and seeing as I'm standing in the boarding hub of the friggin' Pioneer, I think you can safely assume I've got nowhere else to be."
Crewman Scott continued to hold out the map.
Amber folded her arms across her chest and waited.
The other uniformed people in the hall were still watching them.
"I'm sorry," Scott said with a polite smile. This time, it made it to his eyes, but not in a very polite way. "I don't have anything to do with the bed assignments. Please follow the green line. There are other people waiting for assistance."
"I want to speak to your supervisor."
"This is a starship, Miss Bierce, not a Starbucks. I don't have a supervisor, I have commanding officers. You can speak to one by going to the family housing bay and picking up any courtesy phone. If you'll please follow the green line—" he suggested, reaching past her to scan the next man in line.
Amber took the scanner out of his hand and set it down firmly on the desk. "I'll let you know when we're done here, pal."
"Miss Bierce—"
"Everly," she countered. "Get your goddamn supervisor."
Nicci shuffled off to one side, looking slightly relieved now that the situation was being handled by a person and in a manner she was accustomed to. The people behind them in line gave them a little space. Crewman Scott stared at her, his mouth shut tight and his ears brick-red, then turned around and walked stiffly up the hall to the place where the other red-suited Manifestors were standing. They listened to whatever he had to say and soon one of them came for Amber.
"Good morning," he said pleasantly. "I'm Steven Fisch, the docking coordinator. How can I help?"
"She doesn't like her assigned—"
"I'm handling it, Scott," said Fisch, still pleasantly and without looking at him. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"My sister and I signed up for a five-year contract," said Amber, presenting her thumb for him to scan, which he did. "And I was told we'd be stationed together for the flight and at the colony."
"Mm-hm. And it looks like you've both been assigned to beds in the family housing unit."
"Right, on different floors and different, um, letters. That's not acceptable to me," said Amber as Nicci sidled up closer to her. "I'm not looking for trouble, but I was told we'd be together and I kind of want what I was promised."
"I understand."
"We don't have anything to do with the bed assign—"
"I'm handling it, Scott," said Fisch again, not quite as pleasantly as before. He pushed a few buttons on his digireader. "It looks like you waited for the last minute before signing on with us, Miss Bierce. And Miss Bierce," he added, with a nod to Nicci, who nodded nervously back at him. "I'm afraid the group units in family housing filled up months ago. There's nothing left except singles and frankly, I'm a little surprised you got beds there at all. It's just like any big event, Miss Bierce. These are the best seats in the house and after a certain date, you just don't find two of them together. I'm sure the recruiters made you all kinds of promises to get you, but they don't have anything to do with you once you're on board and they shouldn't have made you any promises at all."
"I realize this seems like a petty problem to you," Amber began.
Crewman Scott uttered one of those huffy little breaths that snotty people liked to use when they didn't quite dare to laugh out loud. Amber was willing to overlook it this time, but Fisch's face went cold.
"Excuse us for just a moment, please," he said, and took Scott aside.
Amber couldn't hear anything that was said and couldn't hazard any guesses to judge by Fisch's broad and rather bland face, but she waited and watched Scott's ears turn red with a faint sense of satisfaction. In less than a minute, Fisch was back, smiling again.
"I apologize for the interruption, please go on. A petty problem...?"
"We'll both be in Sleep," said Amber. "I get it. We won't be conscious, we won't be lying there missing each other for years, we won't miss anything at all. But we've been checking in for three hours already. I've got no reason to expect to check out in less time. And yeah, it may only be a few hours, but it'll be a few hours on another planet, for God's sake, and I want my sister with me."
"Please," said Nicci.
Fisch glanced at her and his eyes lingered. When he looked back at Amber, he seemed somewhat less politely pleasant and more sincerely thoughtful.
"Isn't there anything you can do?" asked Amber. "We don't have to be in family housing. We just want to stay together."
He hmmmed again and checked with his digireader, tapping the stylus through several screens before frowning at her. "I think we could find a way to accommodate you, Miss Bierce, but you need to understand that once you're confirmed to a bed, those may be your living quarters for quite a long time after we arrive."
"We know."
"The family units are much larger and, honestly, far superior in terms of comfort and entertainment purposes. The general housing mods are pretty much your beds, some public showers and a cafeteria. There's no comparison to family housing. To prison, maybe, but not to family housing. And signing you off on a corporate mod or a suite or anything like that is simply out of the question, so if that's what you were hoping..."
"General housing works just fine if we're together."
Fisch tapped his stylus against the top of his reader and glanced at Nicci. "Miss Bierce?"
Nicci stepped back, holding her case in front of her like a shield against his attention. "I...I guess. I don't know. Amber?"
"Please," she said.
"All right," said Fisch, in that rising, sighing, I-wash-my-hands-of-this way that people use when they think you're making, if not the biggest mistake of your life, at least the one people will be bringing up for the next ten years to embarrass you. "Scott, come over here, please. Gen-Pop hasn't been boarded yet, so we're just going to take two beds in the women's dorm and bump them up to family housing, then put the Bierces in their place. See how I did that?"
"Yes, sir."
Fisch sighed. "Scott, for God's sake, relax. Mr. Fisch will do just fine. Did you see what I did?"
"Yes, um...yeah."
"Okay, it's probably not going to be the last time, so do the best you can with it and try to remember that these people are not the enemy."
Scott's ears pinked. "Yes, sir. Mr. Fisch."
"Good. I'll take over here for a bit. Why don't you help these ladies with their cases and get them settled in their beds?"
Pink deepened into red. "Um...sure. I could do that. I don't mind." He turned stiffly to Amber, hesitated, and then turned away and took Nicci's things.
She could have let it go. She should have let it go.
Amber cleared her throat and held out her duffel bag.
Scott did his best to stare her down, but Fisch was standing right there and now he was watching pretty closely too. He took the strap out of Amber's outstretched hand and slung it over his shoulder with as much dignity as such a menial task allowed. He started walking, his boots clicking firmly along the grey stripe on the floor like it was a tightrope over lava.
"He looks mad," whispered Nicci, following close behind Amber as they moved out of the intake line, away from the rumbling, stuffy excitement of a thousand nervous families and into the largely empty corridor leading to the general housing mods. "I don't think he likes you very much."
"He doesn't have to like me," Amber told her, talking low but making no real effort to be inaudible. She didn't care if Crewman Everly Scott heard this or not. "There's going to be fifty thousand people and an alien planet to entertain us where we're going. We're never going to see each other again."
Scott did not reply or give any indication that he'd even heard them. He brought them into the empty, echoing, half-lit elevator bay and over to the lift marked with an A. Between the gunmetal-grey paint and the stark stenciled lettering, everything looked very much like a military operation. Cold. Authoritative. Menacing.
The lift was big enough for fifty people, according to the capacity rating posted above its utilitarian doors. The sound of three people breathing was very loud. They went up just one level and Nicci was clinging before the doors dinged open.
The first two doors on the first left-hand hall were theirs. WA-0001 and WA-0003. They opened at a swipe of their keycards on what indeed appeared to be a broom closet: narrow enough to touch both walls at once while keeping her elbows bent, just deep enough to accommodate the Sleeper, with a door she had to duck through and a ceiling that did not allow for jump rope.
Crewman Scott dropped Amber's duffel and went inside to secure Nicci's to the wall. He opened up her Sleeper and moved back as far as the dimensions of the room allowed. He waited.
Nicci looked at Amber. "Do I...just get in?"
"Yeah, that's what they said at the seminar."
"I don't...I mean...Do I take my shoes off?"
"You can if you want," said Amber, and Scott said, "No, you can't. No loose articles in the cabin."
"She can put them in her bag," Amber told him.
"I already secured her bag."
"You can unsecure it and secure it again with her shoes inside!"
"I'll just wear them," said Nicci, looking and sounding right on the edge of tears. "Okay?"
Amber looked at her, feeling her temper at full throb right behind her eyes, and then turned that look on Crewman Everly Scott. "Listen, Space-Scout."
"Amber, please!"
"You got a problem, you take it up with me, you don't take it out on my sister."
Scott gave her a cold look and a wide smile and said, "Just lie down, Miss Bierce, and we'll get you all tucked in!" in a voice like preschooler's poison.
Nicci slunk past Amber, her head bent and lips trembling. She sat on the edge of the Sleeper, kneading at its hard sides as she looked one last time from Amber to Scott and back to Amber. "Please," she said, but whether it was please say we don't really have to do this or please don't fight, she didn't know. Scott put his hand on the Sleeper's lid and Nicci lay obediently down, even as she gasped out the first hoarse sob. The lid shut, snapped, hissed, and the single panicked, silent cry that Amber saw her sister make faded into sleep. Or into Sleep, she guessed.
The snake-like cable of the umbilicus slipped out of its port inside the tube and slithered under Nicci's shirt. She watched it tunnel across her sister's unmoving body until it reached her navel. The stiff fabric of her clean, white, colonist's shirt bulged and then slowly deflated. In almost the same instant, the panel above the Sleeper lit up, all its many systems diligently engaged. Amber could look at that panel and see that her baby sister's heart was no longer beating, her lungs were no longer working, her brain was no longer thinking, and all this, according to the Sleeper, was perfectly normal.
She looked dead.
"Any time," said Scott, waiting in the hall.
Amber backed up until the door hissed shut on the sight of Nicci in her (coffin) tube. She told herself they had nowhere to go, no one to take them in. This was the only way out. It was the only choice.
'I just killed my sister,' she thought.
"Your turn," said Scott, printing out a nameplate on his scanner and inserting into the protective sleeve on door WA-0003. He did not pick up her duffel bag. He opened up her Sleeper and stood back against the wall.
This was really it. She was going to close her eyes and it would be over and either she'd wake up on Plymouth and she'd be fine, or...or she wouldn't. And that would also be fine, she supposed. At least, it'd be just as over.
Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of Scott's contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.
"You waiting for a tip?" she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.
"Your shirt's pulled up," he told her flatly.
Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.
"Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right," he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid's locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.
She was asleep when Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny's charismatic leader as the Pioneer's mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tunneling as the speakers above her bed blatted a polite, unheard alarm. She slept through the crash. In the last eleven minutes, as her umbilicus began to retract its countless filaments and her Sleeper gently reanimated her long-static cells, Amber dreamed of the beach and her mother was there, smoking one of her endless cigarettes, and they stood hand in hand together to watch the sun set so red over the ocean, and all the gulls were screaming...
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 11 |
Amber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper's lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn't. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed and crushed against the Sleeper's wall, but she still couldn't do anything about it. God, how annoying.
She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment's provocation, but she couldn't do it this time. The Sleeper's computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: "—is estimated to complete in...five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus."
Right. She remembered now. The orientation seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn't move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn't really sleep and there wouldn't be any dreams, but she'd had a real whopper. She didn't understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.
And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother. Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they'd gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to walk down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn't think of a single trip they'd taken together, unless it was to get drugs.
'Maybe that's why you dream about it,' she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.
It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom's cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear...
What...What was she hearing? Was that...people?
She was on her side...but she wasn't really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn't on her side; the Sleeper was.
Amber could feel the fear leap into her, but she couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn't sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn't take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe...all of them.
Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pleasant voice interrupted itself to say, "Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in...three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm."
Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?
Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn't even open her eyes.
"Please remain calm," said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. "Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in...one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm."
The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn't airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn't, what else wasn't working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they'd landed.
Only she was on her side. So they hadn't landed. They'd crashed.
"A medico has been notified of your distress," the voice informed her. "Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in...one minute eleven seconds." A short pause and that musical tone again. "The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort."
She didn't or perhaps simply couldn't notice against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.
"The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn," the computer said. "You will shortly begin to recover mobility—"
Amber's hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn't manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.
"—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed."
Amber's eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.
She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper's wall. The computer was still talking, telling her that she should report to the recreational area of her housing unit as soon as she was released by a member of the crew. The disembarking stations had been alerted and someone would be here shortly to release her. Did she want directions to the recreational area now?
"No," croaked Amber. She got her arm up, groping clumsily at the underside of the Sleeper's lid until she hit the medico alert switch. "Hello?" she said and coughed. The air coming in through the vents suddenly seemed smokier. And hotter. "Hello? This is Amber Bierce in room...um...three. In the women's dorms. Mod A. Or WA, I guess. I'm okay, but there's something wrong with my Sleeper. I can smell...smoke...hello?"
No answer. If she held her breath to listen, she could hear the faint hum of empty air in the speakers, so they were probably working. But no one was answering. Of course, they might all be away from the alert station, if every screaming person Amber could hear had their own medico dispatch, but Amber really didn't think so. There weren't enough medicos on the ship to answer all those screamers.
"Hello?" Amber pushed the switch again, and again, and then really leaned her thumb on it and kept it there, but no one buzzed through and told her to get off and quit being a bitch. No one told her she was on the list of panicky people to deal with and she'd be charged a fee or even arrested for making a nuisance of herself on her first day awake. No one told her anything. Because no one was there.
"Bullshit," said Amber, badly frightened. But she stopped playing with the alert switch at once and started hunting for the latch.
It opened without incident, dispersing the fear that she would be burnt to death right here in the tube, but it didn't go far. She could still be burnt to death in this room. She rolled out and onto her feet, but kept her hands on the Sleeper to help keep her balance until her head was together. The floor was definitely slanted, but not as much as she'd thought inside the tube. Maybe it was a little steeper than the average incline on, say, a wheelchair access ramp, but not much more. She could walk just fine.
Amber let go of the Sleeper and moved to the wall, unlocking her duffel bag from its restraints without any thought in her head at all except for how much she needed to hurry up and get out. Getting her luggage was Step Two of that process, right after exiting the tube and right before opening the door, so she did it. She didn't think she was in shock. She knew she was scared, but she thought she was handling it rather well, all things considered.
"Please remain in your room until you are released by a crewman. Failure to remain in your room may result in loss of privileges or reduction of earnings."
"Fucking bill me," said Amber and opened her door.
The smoke came sweeping in, eddying around her in gusts and streams, sometimes thick enough to choke, but not often. The wind was blowing the other way. The wind...
Amber looked out through her open doorway at what should be the central hall of Mod A and saw an ugly overcast sky instead. The hallway broke open just a few meters outside her door, leaving nothing but a handful of odd-numbered rooms before those too were just...gone. Out of the entire mod, there were only five doors—
nicci
Amber lunged for her sister's door, catching at its frame to anchor her on the metal ledge that used to be a hallway. Nicci's door opened as easily as her own had done. Nicci's Sleeper was still shut. Nicci was on her side, both hands pressed to her face, crying. She screamed when Amber opened the Sleeper, slapping and kicking and trying to pull the lid shut again until Amber got her by the arms and gave her a shake.
"I'm having a nightmare," sobbed Nicci, still struggling. Then her dazed eyes finally seemed to focus. She shrank back against the wall of her Sleeper, then let out a startling cawing cry and attacked.
To Amber's knowledge, Nicci had never hit anyone or anything in her life. It was the last thing she was expecting; she never thought to duck away but only stood gaping as her baby sister slapped her in the forehead, the ear, the chin and the nose. Then Nicci burst into fresh tears and lunged in to hug her, howling, "You promised there wouldn't be dreams! I want to wake up now! Right now!"
Amber brought up her arms and hugged her back. If it wasn't for the mild throbbing of her nose—Nicci was no better at hitting than Amber at dodging—she'd wonder if it had really happened at all. Nicci didn't hit people and Nicci would never hit her. They were sisters. They were all either of them had left.
'She's in shock,' Amber decided. 'People in shock do weird things.' "Come on, Nicci," she said out loud. "Get your bag."
"I don't want it."
"Get it anyway. We have to go."
Nicci allowed herself to be pulled from the Sleeper and put on her feet, but she made no effort to do more than that. Amber had to pull down her duffel bag and put it in Nicci's arms, and then had to take her sister by the hand and physically lead her through the door. Nicci moaned when she saw what was waiting outside and refused to step out onto the broken ledge, but Amber didn't try to force her yet. She didn't know where to go either. Following the green line back through the ship to the boarding bay was the only thing she could think of; it seemed that the ship had broken cleanly off at the perimeter wall of Mod A, suggesting that the rest of the ship was still there. That it might be a very bad idea to go any deeper into the burning ship did not yet occur to her. She let go of Nicci, who promptly began to cry harder, and eased carefully out along the ledge until she could reach the keypad beside the sealed door that separated the women's dorms from the rest of the ship. The ship was slanted so that gravity pulled her into the wall, which was lucky because she was not the most coordinated person under the best of conditions. When the door didn't open at her touch, Amber turned around and put her back to it, utterly lost. Where was she supposed to go now?
Down.
She looked down through shifting walls of smoke and saw Mod A and the rest of the Pioneer about five meters below her, all three levels—crew civilian and ship's functions thank god for all those informative seminars i learned so much—pancaked together in a rumpled ruin, like a burnt blanket someone had tossed on the floor. Beyond it, the blackened scar of the ship's landing reached out for miles, lifeless.
But someone was alive. The screaming/sobbing/hysteria had never stopped, never even slackened. People were alive and they weren't in Mod A, that was for sure.
Amber crept back along the wall to Nicci. "We have to get down from here," she said firmly. She felt better, having a goal, a plan. "So we're going to drop down—"
"No! No, we can't! We'll fall!"
"It's not that far, Nicci. We can do this."
"We have to stay here, okay? Someone will come and get us, okay?"
"Maybe," said Amber, looking doubtfully back at the sealed door that led deeper into the ship and where she knew (in the shocky state she didn't realize she was in) the crew and the Fleet were mobilizing to meet this emergency. "But it could be a long time before they get to us and the ship is on fire. I'm not waiting. We're going down."
Nicci shook her head frantically, even as her tears subsided. She had to be tugged out onto the ledge, but after that she moved on her own. Giving orders made Amber feel better; taking them had the same effect on Nicci.
"Right there." Amber pointed to the little jut that was left in front of the mod door. "That'll be the shortest drop. Send your bag down first and try to land on it."
"You go first, okay?"
Amber shook her head. "I've got to check the other rooms."
"No! Don't leave me! You can't leave me!"
"I'm not leaving, I'm just—"
"No!"
"Damn it, Nicci, just do it!" Amber shouted. "This is serious, so stop acting like a fucking baby and go!"
Nicci stared at her, tears sliding sideways on her face in the wind.
Amber stared back, as stunned or more than she'd been after Nicci's attack. She and Nicci fought now and then, but she didn't think she'd ever raised her voice before. At Mama, sure...but not at Nicci. She wondered if the crash had made her go crazy, the way that things sometimes did in the movies. "I'll be right behind you," she said. "Okay?"
Nicci nodded, silent. She looked down, hugging her duffel bag to her chest, then slowly got to her knees. Her lips moved, but the wind took away her words.
"You can do it," said Amber, backing away. "I'll be right back."
Nicci did not react. She might not have heard, the way Amber hadn't heard whatever she'd said. It was the wind...and the screaming.
Amber turned around, groping her way along the wall past Nicci's room and her own to the next room, WA-0005. The door opened when she slapped the pad and the woman pacing inside immediately turned on her in the kind of calm, accusatory fury that meant she was probably on the verge of some pretty impressive hysterics. "It's about goddamn time! What the hell is going on? Who are you? Are you one of the crew?"
"No, I'm from next door. We crashed. Get your things."
"Figures. This is all the military's fault," she spat, yanking ineffectively at her duffel bag until Amber came over and opened the restraints. "The Director had billions and billions of dollars, but oh no, he had to let the military take over and what did they do? They contracted out to the lowest bidder. Over eighty percent of this ship was built in Uruguay, do you believe that?"
"Uh..."
"It's a fact," the woman insisted, shrugging the duffel onto her shoulder. "You can look it up. Or at least, you can look it up when we get back to Earth and you better believe that's where I'm going right now. Right now! And if they don't have a lifeboat on this goddamn thing that can get me there..." She faltered, some of the fire in her eyes fading behind a shine of watery panic, but only for a moment. She shored herself up, her shaking hands clenching into fists around her duffel bag's strap. "Where are we going?"
Amber moved aside. The woman's eyes flicked past her to the smoky sky where the other half of the hallway should have been. Her brows knit. She took one step forward and looked down, at the top of the Pioneer. Her lips parted, then pressed firmly together.
"I am going to sue their precious little Director to death," she announced. "I'm going to start a class-action suit and just...just kill him with it. Where do we go?"
Amber pointed down the ledge to the place where Nicci still huddled, hugging her duffel bag. "Drop down from there. Make sure she gets down too, okay?"
The woman nodded and went, keeping one hand on the wall and the other in a firm grip on her duffel's strap. Amber watched until she saw the woman talking and Nicci listening, or at least looking up, and then worked her way back to room WA-0007, but when the door opened, it showed her only half a room. The hallway wall might continue on for two more doors, but the ship itself stopped here. There was no Sleeper, no angry occupant ranting about lawsuits and Uruguay, no floor. There was only smoke, broken framework, spitting cables, and the ruin of the ship below her. Of the four thousand people who shared this mod of the women's dorms, she'd saved everyone there was to save.
All three of them.
The shock she hadn't known she was in suddenly welled huge inside her and popped, soundless, like a soap bubble. Amber staggered back, feeling the slant in the floor and the distance between her and the ground for the first time to real, disorienting effect. Smoke filled the gasping breath she took; she bent, coughing, and saw the world darken around her.
'If you faint up here, you'll fall and die,' she thought, but she wasn't fainting. The world really was darker. The clouds overhead were thickening; the heavy wind didn't seem to be blowing them away, but rather pulling them down. She'd never seen clouds do that before. It wasn't even raining.
But it was cold. It was cold and the wind was brutal and the only shelter Amber could see was a burning ship.
She didn't know what to do.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 12 |
She stood there for an undeterminable stretch of truly awful minutes, locked in a kind of mindless, paralyzed panic, aware that time was passing but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. It was bad, and she often thought back on that moment later with the idea that that had to be at least some of what Hell was like, if there was a Hell worse than this, but eventually Amber looked down and saw Nicci below her, huddled small against a twisted flap of metal in the torn hull. Smoke poured through this wound so thickly it formed a solid wall behind her, but Nicci just sat there. Like it was a safe place. The other woman had left already but Nicci was waiting for her. Nicci needed her, just like always. She had to be there.
"Okay," whispered Amber, and started back down the ledge. "Time to suck it up, little girl. Let's do this."
She dropped her duffel bag over the side and tried to dangle herself over it, but her arms gave out before she even had both legs free of the ledge. She fell with a yelp and landed mostly on her back, missing her stupid duffel bag entirely. She lay there for a second or two, dazed and breathless, needing Nicci to come tug at her arm before she could pull herself together enough to try and stand.
"Are you okay?" she managed, rubbing at her back.
"No."
Amber looked her up and down. "You're fine," she said, and picked up Nicci's duffel bag, shoving it once more into her sister's arms. "Where'd the other lady go?"
Nicci looked helplessly around. "I-I don't know..."
"Nicci, we have to stay together," Amber said firmly. "I know you're scared, but we'll get through this. Now I need you to pull it together. Which way did she go?"
Mutely, Nicci pointed across the smoky wreckage.
"Okay," said Amber. She shrugged to feel the weight of her duffel bag more securely against her shoulder. She took her sister's hand and squeezed it. She was fine. They were both fine. She started walking.
When they reached the edge of the hull, there was another drop, but the buckling of the Pioneer's metal skin when Mod A had broken off made for a fairly easy descent. Not as easy as walking down a set of stairs, but there weren't any more painful landings and when they reached the bottom, they were standing on the ground. True, the ground had melted and cooled again into a mass just as rigid and uneven as the crumpled hull had been, but it was the ground and that made her feel better. She was off the ship and she'd gotten Nicci off the ship. Now she just had to find the others.
They walked, hand in hand, around the side of the Pioneer and as soon as they'd navigated the corner and were out of the smoke and most of the wind, there they all were. And at first, she thought it wasn't that bad. People were screaming, crying, and hysterical, sure, but there were a lot of them. They'd survived. That had to count for something, right?
Her relief at seeing so many survivors was a kind of second shock, and its bolstering effects wore off much more quickly. Even as she was taking that first reassuring look at the crowds, her vision seemed to double, and suddenly the hundreds of people before her shrank back into the miniscule fraction of fifty thousand colonists and crewmen that it really was. She staggered on her feet a little and then turned slowly around and looked at the ship.
This time, she really saw it.
The Pioneer had scraped over the skin of this alien world for miles, sharpening itself like a knife; family housing and the rest of the forward compartments were gone, rubbed away, and the pointed tip of what was left had ultimately struck something unyielding in the ground and stabbed itself in. This was what had created the steep angle of the ship's final position, which had in turn created the awful weight that had caused not just Mod A but also Mods B and C to break away and fall. All the women's dorms were gone. The men's mods were still there, jutting crazily into the sky and spewing fire from every opening. Virtually everyone was dead.
The world got oddly lighter. This time, it wasn't the clouds. Amber realized with a start that she was trying to faint and so she sat down and leaned forward to put her head between her knees as far as her bodily dimensions made possible. She really didn't want to faint. Whatever was going to happen next, she wanted to be awake when it happened. Bo Peep's little girl was not about to die with her eyes closed.
The warmth and soft press of a body beside her told her Nicci had sat down too. Amber raised her head a little and looked at the Pioneer some more. This was what she'd spent six days bullying her baby sister into. This was what she'd lost her apartment, her job, and sixty pounds for. This was it.
She leaned forward again and opened her mouth, but apart from a groggy belch, nothing came out. She hadn't had anything in her stomach for years, after all. Maybe a lot of years. Like...hundreds.
That made her want to throw up again, but since that was just futility, Amber made herself look around some more instead. She could see a cluster of uniforms standing apart from the rest, close to the biggest gash in the smoking side of the ship, and a little ways from them stood just two—one crimson and gold Manifestor and one military grey Fleetman, close together, deep in conversation.
She stood up.
Nicci caught at once at her hand. "Where are you going?"
The last thing Amber wanted was to start a mob. She bent over to speak softly against Nicci's ear. "To see if I can't find out what's going to happen next."
"Next?" Nicci's hand tightened painfully. She didn't seem aware of it. Her eyes were huge, glazed, pleading. "We're...Someone's going to come, right? Someone's going to come from Earth and rescue us? We're going home now, right?"
A few people looked their way. Amber made a point of patting Nicci's hand, trying to look as if she were comforting someone. She wasn't sure if people really patted other people's hands for comfort or if that was just in books, but no one paid them too much attention, so she guessed that was all right.
"Keep your voice down," she said, once she was fairly confident they had privacy again. "And don't freak yourself out. Panicking can't help anyone."
"Amber..." Nicci's staring eyes became a wondering, glassy gape. "Amber, the ship crashed! We crashed here! People are dead!"
"I mean it, Nicci, calm down."
But Nicci either wouldn't or couldn't obey. Her voice kept rising, sending shards of panic through every quavery word. "We crashed here! Half the ship is gone! Amber, the ship is broken! We have to be rescued! We have to be rescued right now!"
Amber grabbed a fistful of Nicci's shirt and yanked her to her feet, thrusting her face right up close. She hissed, "Shut up or I'll slap the shit out of you and I guaran-goddamn-tee I'll be better at that than you are! Shut! Up!"
Nicci did, trembling. She blinked and tears came bubbling out of her, but they were silent tears for now. Her lips pressed together, turned downwards in a clownish exaggeration of sorrow.
"If you panic, other people are going to panic and once that starts, we are not going to be able to stop it, so you take deep breaths or do whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?"
Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her hair. "I'm scared," she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.
"Go ahead and be scared all you want," said Amber, releasing her. "Just do it quietly." She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci's hand (cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don't see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn't get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.
Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.
Nicci...
Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister's shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber's shirt.
"It's okay," she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci's shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. "It's okay, we'll be okay."
"I didn't want to be here!" Nicci brayed. "I didn't want to do this!"
Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. "I know."
"You made me! Why did you make me?"
"Nicci...please, it'll be okay."
"I want to go home!"
"I'm sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on."
The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she'd made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she'd know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. "Can I help you, ma'am?" he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.
"I can't think of how," Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci's back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. "I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys are talking about plans, I'd like to hear them."
"Go sit down," said Scott firmly. "As soon as we've debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—"
"No offense," Amber said, looking at him. "But I don't believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but we all need to know what happens next."
"Go find a seat," Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.
"At this point, ma'am," he said, "all we're doing is talking out the situation."
"But we're going to get rescued, right?" Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.
"If you've got any ideas," the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci's shaking shoulders, "I'm willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you've been with us, if you haven't got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job."
"You can tell us how you're going to sue us later," Scott added derisively.
Amber shot him an angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. "I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first, just so we're all on one page, okay?"
"Fair enough."
"Do you know what happened?"
"More or less. We were hit by some sort of unmapped interstellar traffic...an asteroid field or maybe we passed through the tail of a comet or something. The shields are supposed to be able to repel collision, but...the hull was penetrated in a number of places...a lot of systems took heavy damage. There was massive explosive decompression. None of the active crew appear to have survived it."
"Is this...all of us?"
"I don't know." The Fleetman's gaze skewed away to stare at the ship, at the men's dorms in particular, burning so hard they could actually hear it, even over the wind. "The military mods survived the crash more or less, but the asteroids...or whatever they were..." He trailed off, then shook his head and looked at her. "Most of the Sleepers I saw in my unit looked like Swiss cheese, ma'am. So did the people inside them. People I knew."
"I...I'm sorry." The smallness of that sympathy could not stand against the present horror. Amber groped for something better, then gave up and simply said, "So we're it?"
"There could be others. I just don't know. The mods sealed themselves as part of the emergency lockdown. None of the communication stations appear to be working. I have no idea what the situation is...underground. For all I know, parts of the ship could still be intact, but it's...not likely. I've got some men trying to organize a search and rescue operation, but it's been...slow starting."
Amber nodded. "How long have we been flying blind?"
"I don't know how long, but we can't have been entirely blind or we wouldn't be breathing this atmosphere, we'd be melting in it." He broke off there, ran one hand over the side of his smooth head and started again, more calmly. "The ship has several emergency failsafes in place. Locating an Earth-class planet and landing was one of them, but...I don't even know off the top of my head how many others had to fail for that one to engage. In the event of any major incident, the ship was supposed to take us home."
"Do you know where we are?"
"No, although the guidance system itself has to be functioning or we never would have made it here. This planet is very Earth-like. And before you ask me which world it is, understand that there are over seven thousand Earth-like planets in the Fleet's database, and we've mapped less than one percent of one percent of this galaxy. Without a working guidance system's interface, we have no way of discovering where we are."
"Can anyone repair it?"
He spread his hands, his expression pained. "With what?"
"All right. I have to ask. Is there an emergency beacon or any way to send a transmission of any kind back home?"
The Fleetman nodded back in the direction of the fractured ship while still holding her eyes. "At the very best, we have lost thirty percent of the ship's structure, including the entire command center, and the primary and tertiary lifeboat launching bays. That number could be as high as seventy-five percent if none of the structure below the surface has survived impact. Even if the halls have collapsed, the skeleton could be intact. Right now, I have to hope that it is, because only if we can tunnel our way in to certain engineering portals do we have any hope of making the necessary repairs to the guidance system."
"You said the primary and the tertiary bays were out. What about the secondary lifeboats?" Amber asked. "Is there a beacon or anything with them?"
"There is. And that—" The Fleetman pointed up at the extreme tip of the blazing men's dorm. "—is the bay where it is located. It looks like it might be intact and if it's locked down like the rest of the compartment doors, it might not even be burning. Getting to it is going to be a process, but I have to tell you, ma'am—"
"Amber. Amber Bierce."
"Amber." His brows furrowed slightly. "Jonah Lamarc, Lieutenant Junior-Grade."
That was a lot further down the authority ladder than she'd been hoping to hear, and by the look on his face, he knew it. But he struck her as a thoughtful man and definitely not prone to panic. She put out her hand impulsively.
He shook it while Crewman Scott watched.
"It's going to be a process?" Amber prompted.
"But I believe it can be done, once the fire burns itself out," he finished, and then gave his head a grim shake. "Miss Bierce, I don't think I'd say this to anyone else out there, but you seem to have a level head and I want to be honest with you."
"Go on then. I'm braced."
"I'm not sure we can launch a beacon from this location—planet-side, I mean—but assuming that it is possible, we first have to get guidance repaired, online and talking to the beacon so that it can orient itself to Earth. After that..." He paused again, looking down at Nicci, who had drawn up her knees and was now resting her head atop them and lightly rocking. He looked back at Amber, his expression drawn and greyed with strain. "I haven't talked around much yet, but I served my second shift before the incident, so I know it's been at least two years, plus however long the ship was flying blind to get to this planet after it was hit. But even if we magically crashed the instant after I went back in Sleep, we'd still have been Tunneling for two years before that. We can't be less than five hundred light-years from Earth," Lamarc said softly, slowly. His eyes communicated far more than his careful words. "And that is way more than we have mapped out along our pre-arranged route. Even if we were only knocked a little bit off-course, which I'm guessing—" He looked pointedly around, taking in the whole planet at a glance. "—may be overly optimistic, our guidance system might not be able to find Earth."
Nicci moaned and began to sob again.
"Okay," said Amber. "Now what's the real problem?"
He shared her lackluster smile. "Believe it or not, there is a real problem."
"Oh for God's sake. Okay. What is it?"'
"The beacon doesn't have tunnel-drive. It was never meant to travel at anything close to that speed, not even at light-speed. So even if we are only five hundred light-years away, and even if we can reach the beacon, repair it, program it, and launch it tomorrow through this planet's atmosphere and onward straight to Earth, it will take more than six thousand years for the damned thing to get there."
"So there's no point in looking for it," said Amber. After a moment, she hammered the reality home with a nod. "All right. So we're here."
He frowned at Nicci, then at her. "I didn't say that and I wouldn't, if I were you. For a while, that hope of rescue is all that is going to keep some of these people alive."
"So what are you planning?"
"We haven't decided," said Scott.
Lamarc glanced at him, still frowning. "We're discussing our options."
"What have you come up with so far?"
"I believe our best hope of survival lies with the ship," said Lamarc, and did not react when Scott heaved a short, hard sigh at him. "It was built to be a ready-made city. It provides shelter and security against the elements here and, most importantly, familiarity. We have food, moisture evaporators and purifiers, medical facilities, and general supplies to last easily a hundred years. Comfort is going to be our most precious resource for the immediate future and it should not be underestimated."
Amber looked at the ship and said nothing. She could hear the logic in his words, but she could also see the smoke funneling out of dozens, if not hundreds, of wounds. And where there was smoke...
At last, just to demonstrate that she wasn't a complete bitch and he shouldn't feel the need to be a complete bastard, Amber looked at Scott. "What do you think?"
Even if she was a civilian and therefore an unnecessary component to this conversation, Scott seemed pleased to be asked. "I think the first thing we need to do is re-establish a chain of command. And maybe we shouldn't be so quick to blindly adopt the ranks we held before. It's clear that the disaster has taken a mental toll on certain members of the Fleet and I would be hesitant to put any of them in a position of authority. And we could even bring some civilians in," he added, including Amber in a magnanimous sweep of his arm and completely overlooking the fact that, snappy uniform or no, the Manifest Destiny badge on the sleeve of his jacket did not put him on the same level as an officer in the Fleet, or in any other army, or even in the Cub Scouts. "Some of them, anyway. But the main thing is, if we're going to establish any kind of a future here, we have to know who's in charge."
She had a feeling he had a name in mind. "Okay. Let's pretend it's you. What's your plan, Commander?"
Scott threw Lamarc a fierce smile, the sort that could make even a handsome man like him look schoolyard-small and mean. "Like he said, we have enough supplies to last us for a long time, so nothing is more important than knowing what we're up against. We need to organize units to scout out the terrain and establish a perimeter. We need to organize defenses. We need to arm ourselves."
"And I told you, the munitions bay is gone," said Lamarc flatly. He turned to Amber. "What about you? Do you have any suggestions?"
She scowled, her eye going back to the ship and the smoke pouring out of it. "Lieutenant Lamarc—"
"Jonah," he said quietly.
Scott frowned.
"Jonah, that ship is on fire. And there aren't enough words in the world to fully express just how bad a feeling I have about hanging around a burning ship where the extent of the damage is completely unknown."
He nodded once, acknowledging without comment, waiting.
"I agree with what you said about shelter and security, but I'm sorry, until those fires are out, I think we'd ought to make camp somewhere else."
"Which means we need to start scouting now," said Scott. "Before we lose the light."
"I haven't made a count yet," said Jonah. "But at a guess, I believe I'm looking at close to two thousand badly frightened people, some of them with missing loved ones, and all of them in shock. Present company most definitely included." He rubbed at the side of his head again. "Moving that many people overland on an alien world away from the ship they rode in on would be disastrous to morale, not to mention devastating to the terrain itself. If it rains, which is damned likely looking at that sky, two thousand pairs of feet are only going to need a few seconds to turn this ground into quick-mud. Also, we might be able to carry enough food with us for a few days, but not water. We have evaporators and we have purifiers, but we have no actual water. And, I'm sorry, but where are we going to go to the bathroom? I can see you think that's a pretty trivial point, but I guarantee it won't seem as trivial when two thousand people have dysentery."
"We're going to have all those problems no matter where we are."
"Yes, eventually. But here at the ship, we can postpone them. Amber, if we don't give those people some kind of familiar routine, something safe to cling to, we're going to lose them. People this lost, this desperate...don't need a lot of help to die."
"Okay," interrupted Scott as Amber gazed out at the sea of survivors, "I think these are all valid points, but you've brought us right back to the issue of who's in charge. You can't develop a routine without someone giving orders."
Amber shook her head and looked back at Jonah. "I admit it's been a while since my last babysitting gig, but I'm pretty sure that making sure the babies don't catch fire is higher up on the priority list than making sure they don't have nightmares. Jonah, staying here is a bad idea!"
"I know it looks bad, but each compartment of the ship is designed to seal itself specifically so that fires don't spread."
"Yeah, and the ship is designed to turn itself around and go back to Earth if it gets hit by an asteroid. And who knows what else has been damaged? Things can be leaking and melting and overheating as we speak! We can't afford blind faith, Jonah! We can only trust what we can see and I can see the smoke!"
"Can you see the people?" he asked quietly. "Can you see their faces? Can you see yourself marching them away when the wind is blowing this hard and this cold and no one knows what night will bring? And what about the people we can't see? What about the people who may still be trapped behind those sealed doors, just praying that someone up here at least tries to find them? Amber—" He took her hand between both of his; she looked down at her small wrist being swallowed by his giant grip and thought of him patting Nicci as he guided her to the ground. He was awfully good at the comforting stuff. "Amber, if we don't give these people some time to come to grips with what has happened to them, some of them never will. You may be thinking of them as two thousand survivors and I know Crewman Scott sees them as two thousand colonists, but they are neither. Right now, as of this moment, they are two thousand victims and they need to be taken care of. Please."
Scott paced a few meters away and came back, looking profoundly annoyed with both of them.
"I want to take them in out of the wind for just two or three weeks. Let them dig for that beacon and fix a few broken doors. God willing, let them save a life, just one, to remind them that life is precious and hope can be rewarded. Put them back in control and then talk to them about survival. What can it hurt to give them just two or three weeks to learn how to cope? I want your support on this," said Jonah. "Please."
Amber looked at the ship. She tried not to see the smoke. She tried to look through the emergency doors at the hold and imagine two thousand people sleeping there tonight. She threw in a snowstorm to help weigh down the vision and a couple generic howling-monster sounds. She pictured Jonah with his jacket off the next day, arranging teams to work in shifts clearing the halls, repairing machinery, sorting supplies, and later, building gardens and houses and latrines. She saw him taking charge and it was an easy thing to see. She saw the ship turning into a colony after all, and maybe it would only be the shell of one at first, but as she pulled back the camera of her mind, she could see the ship in a better time, in the summer maybe, with crop-fields and canals in orbit around it, a thriving hub of life and hope and—
—or it could all blow up in an hour, she thought, in a voice so clear it might as well be someone speaking directly in her ear. And she saw that pretty damned clearly too: the wind, just like it was now, whipping the giant fireball of its belching destruction into an orange tornado for maybe two or three seconds before blowing it all away. Nothing would be left but the crater where they landed, the twisted skeleton of the hull, and a Rorschach scorch-mark burned into the stone, maybe in the shape of a butterfly.
"I can't stay here," Amber heard herself say.
Nicci raised her head and looked at her.
"Not tonight," she amended. "I think...I think maybe Scott's got a point about the perimeter thing. Maybe it would help these people start coping faster if we took some of the mystery out of where we are."
Scott looked surprised for a second and then smiled.
"So here's what I think. I think we should make a camp..." She looked around and pointed. "On that ridge. Call it a lookout post. We'll organize a team and take whatever supplies we need to set up, you know, some latrines and supply tents. If nothing else, it'll give people something to do who don't know how to fix doors or program emergency beacons. And who knows? We might look down from that ridge and see...I don't know, a lake or whatever they have for cows or someplace easier to live than this."
Jonah shook his head, not in denial, but in mute helplessness. He looked out at the survivors and then down at her. "Can you give me until morning to work with them? Please. We can take a head-count, get some kind of inventory for our supplies...If nothing else, give me that time to see if anyone is trapped in there."
That wasn't unreasonable, she thought, and said instead, unexpectedly, "No. I'm sorry, but if anyone is trapped in there, they're already dead. The ship is on fire. It is not a safe place. We have got to get away from it tonight."
His gaze was troubled; his hands, warm. "They won't be moved tonight."
"Then move as many as you can. We..." can't save everybody, trembled unspoken on her lips. She swallowed them, wondering where in the hell this was all coming from. She didn't feel panicked, but maybe panicking was like being crazy or having a fever, where you couldn't tell just by feeling at yourself. "We can't stay," she finished.
Jonah looked at the people again, watching them the way another man might watch the tides. His eyes went back and forth, tracking motion no one else saw.
"I think a lookout post is a great idea," Scott announced. "I'll start putting a team together."
"I can't leave them," said Jonah quietly.
"I said I'd do it," said Scott, frowning again. "I want to be in charge. Of the lookout team. You can be in charge of these people."
"I wish you'd come with us," Amber said. The words felt heavy, too much like a confession.
"Yeah, well...I wish you'd stay." Jonah uttered an oddly thin laugh for such a big man. "When the lights go out, things are going to get a lot worse. I was really starting to hope you'd stick around because I'm going to need someone to roll around with if I'm going to get any sleep tonight." He rubbed at his head, shook it, rubbed some more. "That was offensive. I'm sorry. I'm just..."
Scared. And fear does weird things to people.
"Jesus, man!" Scott was staring. "I can't believe you just said that!"
Amber gave Jonah a lopsided smile and squeezed his slack hand. "I'll help you sleep plenty at the lookout post, Lieutenant Lamarc. Just come with us."
Scott gaped at both of them now.
"Another time, Miss Bierce." Jonah pulled in a breath and let it out as a military man. "I can think of a few men who you might want along. I'll talk to them."
"I'll come back," said Amber. "As soon as the smoke stops, I swear."
He nodded, started to walk away, and then stopped. When he came back, she thought for one dizzying, unreal moment that he meant to kiss her and she'd already made up her mind to allow it (total stranger old enough to be my father for god's sake and what he'd want in a chubby little white girl like me i don't know he probably doesn't either but fear now fear does weird things oh yeah play it again sam fear can really fuck you up), but instead, he put out his hand.
They shook.
"Take care of things," said Amber.
"I will," he replied. "Come back safe."
"I will."
They walked away then, and as things turned out, those were the last words they said to one another and they both lied.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 13 |
Crewman Scott put himself in command. This initially made for some tense moments when he was trying to recruit for what he was calling 'reconnaissance and establishment of a forward operations base,' particularly from the Fleetmen, who certainly seemed open to doing something but were visibly hostile to the idea of taking orders from a Manifestor in a make-believe uniform. No punches were thrown, but Scott quickly moved his efforts to the cluster of sobbing, shock-eyed civilians.
Amber left him to it without much hope and distracted her jangling nerves as much as she was able by venturing into whatever exposed areas of the ship she could reach, picking through the wreckage for anything they could use. Since the supplies had been evenly distributed among each mod throughout the ship, there was plenty to find, even if it was all mashed together in the aftermath of the crash. Unfortunately, the crates were all marked with such baffling examples of Fleet-speak that she had to bust them open to find out what the hell was inside. This was a lot of work with little reward; none of the really useful things were portable and most of the small stuff was ridiculous. Thumbtacks. Baby bottles. Yarmulkes. Replacement sponge-heads for the oscillating arm on a model Dynamo-3Z cleanerbot. Swimming goggles, for Christ's sake, perfect for lounging around the colony pool on Plymouth.
The frustrating search ultimately turned up a stash of duffel bags (each one proudly screaming out the Manifest Destiny logo), which she started stuffing with the one useful item she had dug out of the wreckage: some Fleet-issue ration bars packed like bricks in a khaki-colored crate where the available flavors were listed as Choc, Van and Other. These were Other. Nowhere on the individual bars did it indicate what Other was, but she guessed as long as it wasn't worm, booger or bubblegum, she was fine.
"Ma'am?"
She looked up without stopping, taking stock of the four Fleetmen coming toward her—three boys and an older man—and making up her mind right then that if they pulled some bullshit military rule out of their asses to stop her from taking this stuff, she'd kick it right back up there.
But, "Lieutenant Lamarc said you were looking for a few good men," said one of them, putting out his hand. "Eric Lassiter. Engineer Second Class."
"Engineer?" she said uncertainly. "Did Jonah, um, Lieutenant Lamarc tell you what I wanted was to get away from the ship?"
"Yes, ma'am. We're here to help."
"Are you sure? Wouldn't you rather stay here with, you know, the other engineers?"
He was already shaking his head. "Enlisted engineer," he said, putting the stress on the first word. "That's construction. Well, that's the grunt work for the construction units, but I'm pretty sure I can help you throw together your forward operations outpost or whatever that idiot out there wants. This is Crandall."
"Brian," said the next guy, also shaking her hand. "Electronics tech. And before you ask, I've already given this tin bitch my professional attention and concluded that she's fucked. So I figured I could at least carry shit around."
"Same," said the third man. "Gunnarson, Dagwood D. Call me Dag." He nodded at the duffel bag she was filling. "I was the main supply clerk in Corporate Mod G, so I know where everything was. I know it all got tossed around pretty good, but if nothing else, I can read the codes on the labels." He gave the haphazardly-opened crates around her a meaningful glance. "Maybe focus on finding stuff we really need, like tents."
"And medical supplies," said the last of them. He was the older one, although it was tough to say just how much older. He was Asian and his face was creased but ageless. He had no accent, unless it was a trace of some southern state, but he bent his head to her instead of taking the hand she extended. "Yao. Lucas, I should say, circumstances being what they are, but I prefer Mr. Yao."
"He's a doctor," Eric supplied, pointing at the little frills sewn onto Mr. Yao's sleeve which apparently proved it.
"I am not a doctor of medicine." The older man did not look around. "And I'd just as soon be Mr. Yao from now on. My service contract appears to have expired."
There was a short, ugly silence while the five of them stood there, avoiding one another's eyes.
"I'm Amber," she said belatedly, just to get them talking again.
It worked.
"So you are the right girl," said Eric, glancing once at Mr. Yao, who wandered off, righting crates and checking labels as he went. "Great. Lamarc said you were heading out with that other guy. Thought you might like a hand."
"If we can ever get going. How's he doing out there? Scott, I mean."
"He's bringing 'em around, shockingly enough." Dag shrugged, rolling his eyes as he did it. "He's got all the enthusiasm of a bulldog with none of the brains—and those are some dumb dogs, lady—but give the man his credit, he can talk a great line."
"Of bullshit," snorted Crandall, checking the contents of the packed duffels. "Lady, you need to disperse some of this stuff. No normal person's gonna be able to carry a hundred pounds of MREs."
And after that, it was all unpacking and re-packing and shouting questions or advice at each other across the dark, cluttered bay. It kept Amber's mind nicely occupied until they were done and emerged into the cold, smoky light to find that Scott was still talking, although he was at least winding down.
Amber sat down on a bundle of tents to watch as he marched himself importantly among the masses, trying to win them over with talk of setbacks and the necessity of moving forward in the footsteps of their pioneer forefathers, who had also suffered unspeakable tragedy in the fulfillment of their goals, also undertaken in the name of Manifest Destiny. And because it was manifest, because it was true, because it was a goal set in their hearts by that higher power that all men, regardless of creed, aspired to, it was still a goal worth seeking.
"At any cost!" Scott thundered in conclusion, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand. "But never think that makes us unmindful of the cost. The cost will be counted, just as we remember and honor those who perished in the crossing of the ocean, who were buried alongside the ruts carved by covered wagons, and whose wooden markers were paved under by the rising streets of San Francisco! The people we have lost today are our fallen heroes, but we are the heroes who go on!"
To Amber's mild astonishment, that actually worked. Not on everyone, of course, but he got some applause for that flowery heap of horseshit even while Scott was still pumping it out.
"What'd I tell you?" said Eric beside her, shaking his head. "I guess it's true what my grandma says. God gives even the biggest fool one real talent."
"What's yours?" asked Amber, watching people line up to shake Scott's hand.
"Hoops."
"You wish, whitebread," said Dag, who was just as white as a man named Dag Gunnarson ought to be.
Scott shook hands, patted shoulders, began to put people in a group.
"I'm ambidextrous," Crandall announced suddenly.
"Oh yeah?"
"Selectively. Eating, smoking and jerking off." He started to mime, re-discovered Amber in their midst and stopped, looking flustered.
"I ain't blushing," she said dryly and wasn't. She'd heard worse—seen worse—in the stairwell back home.
Scott finally headed their way, with Nicci walking close at his side although she was quick to do her huddling next to Amber once she got there.
"We're ready," he said, giving the Fleetmen a stiff, soldierly sort of nod. "I haven't done an official head-count, but there must be a couple hundred of them."
"Yeah..." said Eric, eyeing the crowd. He shook his head. "They might all be willing to come live in the tents once they're up, but I bet we don't even get half that when it comes to carrying this stuff up that hill tonight."
"So let's hurry and get them set up," said Amber, slinging her duffel over one arm and snatching up a bundled tent in the other.
"Just relax for a bit, Miss Bierce," said Scott, also frowning back at the crowd now. "Let me talk to them some more and—"
"Do what you got to do, Everly," said Amber, walking. "You can meet me there."
She didn't mean it any way but exactly what she'd said—do all the talking he wanted, get more people on board, meet her on the ridge—but he took it for a challenge and an ugly one at that. She heard him clapping his hands and shouting people into order and within a few minutes he was shouldering his way roughly past her to take the lead.
She thought about saying something (ah hey i didn't mean it like that be cool you're still the commanding space scout here so grow the fuck up and quit shoving), but in the end it was enough that they were moving. Amber reached out to catch Nicci's hand and give it a reassuring little squeeze. They were moving and as bad as things were, that made her feel just a little bit better.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 14 |
Much later, in the waning light of the alien, cloud-covered sunset, Amber finally took that head count. She couldn't do anything else at the moment, not after that hike, except sit on the ground with her aching, rubbery legs splayed out before her, trying to gasp her lungs into working again.
She'd been the last to come into camp, except that wasn't right, was it? 'Coming in last' implied there had been a line and she'd been at the end of it. Well, there had been a line, and she'd come in about three and a half hours after it, breathing so hard she could barely see and dragging her duffel by its strap. Nicci had been carrying the tent by that time, and Nicci was setting it up with the help of Mr. Yao and thank God for that, because Amber had spent the last hour of the hike thinking she was going to faint and now that she was here, if she had to stand up and move again, she damn well knew she would.
So she counted people, just in case no one had done that yet, trying to fool herself into thinking that was contributing in some way. Altogether, herself and Nicci included, there were forty-eight of them, a sad fraction of the hundreds Scott thought he'd won over with his inspiring speeches (although, to give him his due, it had seemed like a lot more than that when they were passing her, one by one, all the fucking way across the burned scar of the ship's final landing). Of that number, only eleven were women. There were no atheists in foxholes, it was said, and she guessed when it came to lugging crates uphill in the freezing wind on an alien planet, there were no feminists either. Maybe there'd be more tomorrow. Maybe spending the night in a burning ship would make more people feel better about coming out to the ridge.
Or maybe spending the night in a tent would make all of Scott's people want to go back to the ship. And if that did happen, if they all left, would she go with them? Was it worse to do something she thought was stupid, like make herself at home in a burning ship, or something she already knew was stupid, like sit alone in the wilderness on an alien planet?
'Wait for it,' she told herself. 'There are enough real problems here, little girl. Start making plans for those and stop worrying about what may not happen.'
"Amber?" That was Nicci, coming to fret over her. Probably wondering if she was having a heart attack or something. There'd been times on that hike that Amber had wondered herself. Even the Candyman's humming little shots hadn't made her feel like this. "Are you okay?"
"I'm getting there." She smiled to show how much she meant it. Nicci flinched a little. Amber stopped smiling. "I'll be stiff as hell tomorrow, but if they all go back to get more supplies and people and stuff, I'll just stay here and...I don't know. Guard the camp. From what, I don't know, but..." Amber trailed off with a frown and looked around—at the ridge, at the scarred plains with the ship burning in the middle of it, at the sky. "Do we know yet if there's any animals on this planet?"
"Mr. Yao was just talking about that," said Nicci, sitting gingerly in the grass beside her. "And he says there's plants, so we should expect there to be animals who eat them."
Sensible. Although by that logic, if there were animals who ate plants here, there were probably animals who ate meat, too. Forty-eight unarmed humans made an awful lot of meat.
"But no one's seen any?" Amber pressed, already thinking that even if there weren't animals, that was a whole new kind of trouble, because those MREs wouldn't last forever and she wasn't exactly seeing fields of wild corn and apple trees out there in all that grassy nothing. "Not even bugs?"
"Well, yeah, bugs. The ground kind. And Mr. Yao says there's a lake on the other side of the ridge."
"So there might be fish?"
"I guess, but Mr. Yao says if there are animals, we might see their footprints and stuff down by the water."
"Oh. Yeah, right. Makes sense." Amber knew nothing about animals except the little she'd seen on television and in most of those programs, they wore clothes and talked. Times like this made a girl wish she'd paid attention in Biology to something besides Trevor Macavee in the second row.
Nicci drew up her knees and hugged them, shivering a little. They watched people mill around in the camp, opening packs, eating ration bars, lighting fires. Nobody seemed to be talking much, but no one was crying and no one was wearing that empty survivor's stare. The outlook was just as bleak as it had ever been, but at least they had something to do.
That made her think of Jonah and so she turned listlessly that way, seeing nothing but the ship like a guttering torch in the growing dark. She wondered if he'd organized all the people Scott had only half-convinced into being his search and rescue team. She wondered if they'd found anyone alive to save. She wondered who he'd roll around with tonight to help him sleep.
She wondered if she was doing the right thing.
"Commander Scott wants to send you back," said Nicci suddenly, softly.
Amber rolled her eyes, once more firmly in this moment, on this hill. "Crewman Scott can kiss my pudgy white ass."
"He says there's no room for stubbornness out here. He says if someone can't do something to help, they need to get out of the way."
"I was miles behind everyone else most of this damn day. I couldn't have been more out of his way."
But it bothered her. Because he talked a great line and people listened. And applauded.
"What does everyone else say?" she asked finally.
"Nothing much. Except Mr. Lassiter said that Mr. Lamarc told them to go with you, not him, and Ms. Alverez said she didn't see him pulling people out of the ship when we were first waking up so he should just shut up, pretty much."
"I didn't pull anyone out of the ship either," said Amber, startled.
"Yeah, that one lady. From the room next door."
"Oh. Yeah. Lawsuit-Lady."
"That was Ms. Alverez."
"Oh!" Amber looked at the camp again. "Which one is she?"
Nicci stared at her.
"I don't remember what she looked like." Amber hesitated, then admitted, "I don't think I looked, you know? I was kind of...out of it."
Nicci frowned, but pointed. Scott, not quite at the end of her arm, immediately noticed and looked their way. Nicci put her hands back around her knees.
Amber glanced at her and uttered a huffy, humorless laugh. "What, are you afraid he's going to write you up for creating dissension in the ranks?"
"He's in charge."
"No, he's not."
"He says he is. No one says he isn't." Nicci chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then lowered her voice to say, urgently, "And he really doesn't like you."
"He can suck it up. We've got real problems to worry about. I am not in the mood to compete in his personality contest."
"Well, Sabrina says—"
"Who the hell is Sabrina now?"
Nicci looked surprised. She raised her hand to discreetly point, lowering her voice to a whisper. "Over there, with Lani and Rachel, see?"
Amber looked, but saw only a loose knot of people—Manifestors, indiscriminate to her eyes—sitting on the concrete bags to keep off the wet ground. "Which one? The redhead?"
"No, the..." Nicci hunched and whispered, "The black lady," before nervously looking to see if she'd been overheard.
"I think she knows she's black by now, don't you?" Amber asked, smiling.
Far from returning it, Nicci recoiled with a look of embarrassed horror. And what had she expected, really? Neither of them had much of a sense of humor, at least not around each other. They were sisters; they loved each other, and nothing made Amber feel better than to know she was taking care of her sister, just as nothing made her feel worse when she couldn't. Amber had fed her little sister breakfasts and dinners, washed her clothes, walked her to school, but they didn't talk very much and they didn't joke around even when they did.
"Okay, so who else am I looking at?" Amber asked, pretending to care as she looked back at the other people where 'Sabrina' sat with 'Lani' and 'Rachel'. "Do you know them all?"
"I think so." Nicci hesitated a few glances that way, her eyes darting from face to face. "There aren't that many."
"I guess not." But there was no guessing about it. Forty-eight people was nothing. It was less people than had shared a classroom with her in school, less than half of the number that worked with her at the factory, less than a quarter of those who had lived at the apartment complex. There was nothing amazing in Nicci's knowing everyone's name; it was, come to think of it, a little disturbing that Amber didn't.
The wind blew. Nicci sat and rocked beside her, hugging herself and rubbing at her sleeves. The ship burned.
"Do you think they found anybody?" Nicci asked. "You know...alive?"
"I don't know." Amber's gaze drifted up to the men's dorm mods, still burning high and hot. "I kind of hope not. We may not have a doctor or a medico or anyone like that, so if someone's hurt...and they'd have to be hurt...what could anyone do about it?"
Nicci ducked her head and rubbed her arms some more. "What's going to happen to us?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think they'll find the beacons?"
Amber glanced at the burning ship and away again. The sky was now completely black, but the Pioneer gave them more than enough light to see each other by, even at this distance. If there were animals, either they'd stay well away or they'd probably go investigate there instead of here. She wondered if Jonah was prepared for that. She thought he probably was.
"Amber?"
"Nicci, you were sitting right there when Jonah and I talked about this. You know what I think."
Nicci's arm bumped hers. She'd started crying again, quietly this time. Amber watched Scott move around the camp—inspecting his troops, improving morale, being a dick—amazed that her sister could still have any tears left after all the crying she'd already done. They said catastrophe stripped away the masks. A person could be almost anything with enough time to prepare for the part, but it took a disaster to show the world who you really were. Maybe even to find out for yourself. And she sure didn't need the ship to crash to know Nicci was a crybaby.
'And I'm a bitch,' she thought disgustedly, and held out her arm in a silent invitation for Nicci to come in under it. "We're going to be okay," she said as they huddled together in the grass. "I don't know what's going to happen, but we'll be fine. I'll take care of you, you know that."
"I don't believe you!" Nicci sobbed.
"Oh come on," said Amber, smiling to hide how deeply those surely thoughtless words had hit her. "When have I ever let you down?"
"When you brought me here!" Nicci shouted, turning heads all around the camp. "When you pushed me around and made me come here! I hate you sometimes, Amber! I hate you!"
And with that, she shoved herself back and out of Amber's stunned embrace, stumbling back to the group. Amber tried to follow, but her legs collapsed under her, all the hurt in the world not enough to undo that hellacious uphill hike. She had to sit and watch as the people at the fire took Nicci in, patting at her back and rubbing at her arms and closing in around her until she was lost to sight.
Scott looked over at her across the tops of all their bent, consoling heads. She couldn't tell if he was giving her a commander's frown of censure or just an asshole-smirk.
She turned her back on him, on Nicci, on all of them. She watched the ship burn.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 15 |
They made their way down to the water in the dark. And it was dark, much darker than it had been up on the apex of the ridge, where the sullen red glow of the smoldering ship had been their nightlight. It was a lot steeper on this side as well, so they went slow. It seemed like hours before they actually reached the water's edge and saw with their own eyes that the many tracks left in its muddy bank were all made by their own boots. Even after they spread out and searched, just exactly the way Scott had assured them they would not do, they found nothing.
"Well, we might see something in the morning," Eric began as he and Dag slogged their groups over to join with Scott's. He said something else after that—Amber could see his lips moving—but he made no sound.
All the sound was gone. Even, for that split-second, the wind. But that was all the warning she got. And then she was in the water.
She thought she'd been pushed—the name Everly Scott leapt to the top of a short list of suspects—and while that thought certainly brought out a lot of anger, outrage and confusion, it didn't come with fear. She didn't gasp or try to scream; she knew she was underwater, even as she was curiously unable to process that the water had lit up brilliantly orange and churned out of all visibility.
Then something struck her in the back of the thigh and she realized that she wasn't the only one in the water. She arched instinctively, trying to surface, and instead bumped painfully into a rock. Her world spun; she was upside-down, absent all sense of gravity and perspective. She twisted clumsily and got her feet against the ground, knowing that the water couldn't be very deep this close to shore, that she should be able to just stand up, but although her legs straightened out, she remained submerged.
It was then that several revelations came to Amber: the slight ache of her lungs as they began to make their first complaints for air, the orange murk that had been perfectly normal water just an instant ago, the shadowy figures of other people struggling in the pond around her—any one of whom might be Nicci—and over all things, the terrible roar that was not merely the sound of water in her ears after all, but something else, something bigger.
Something burning.
Underwater, she had no idea how deeply, Amber jumped. Her feet left the ground, but her reaching hands did not break into the air. She'd never learned to swim, never had the opportunity and never really felt the lack, but now here she was and she had the rest of her life to learn. Amber kicked upwards, directly into the path of a flailing arm that punched into her stomach. Bubbles spilled out of her mouth in a watery cry, but there was no new air to pull in. Panic flared, hot and tight inside her aching chest. She lost her last hold on calm and began to thrash, clawing at the water above her without any sense of rising, right up until her face broke out into the wind.
The hot, glowing, smoke-thick wind.
Amber gasped in new breath, but it burned in her lungs. Her second was mostly water. She sank briefly, came up fighting again and was driven under a third time by some screaming lady trying to use her as a float. She didn't want to hurt whoever it was holding her down, but she was underwater, where restraint meant drowning. She broke free with several clumsy punches and grappled her way to the surface once more.
Only now did she see that she had not merely fallen into the lake, she had somehow been thrown in and thrown pretty damned far. She oriented herself to the shore through a screaming mass of splashing limbs, but managed only a few clumsy strokes before she stopped again and this time, turned around.
The light. The smoke. The roaring.
The ridge they had crossed over was burning. The flames blew sideways in the wind, flapping like party streamers, beautiful. The sky—the whole sky, as much as she could see in the treeless expanse of the hilly plains—was on fire. Heat blasted at her face, chapping her lips and searing at her eyes even as she choked on water.
Like the moment between standing on the shore and finding herself submerged, the next little space of time just seemed to melt away. Amber was not aware of swimming, but she must have done so because she had been ten meters or more out into the lake when she breached and at her next dim moment of awareness, she was only knee-deep and sloshing her way onto the bank. She grabbed the first duffel bag she saw and then two more before she found the one that was probably hers, but she didn't let any of them go. Their weight and the wind made her stagger at every step, but she fell only once and landed with her face in some kind of rough, smelly hole. Pushing herself awkwardly up in the mud, she could see dozens of short, pipe-like openings all around her that she was pretty sure hadn't been there before.
They were boots, she realized. Everyone's boots, stuck in the mud. Her own boots included. They had all been blown out of their boots.
Her first steps were toward the ridge, but she made herself stop. There would be nothing left to see, not if the whole fucking sky was on fire. There would be nothing left to see and she knew it.
She knew it because there was nothing to hear beyond the ridge except the roaring of the fire. No screams. No cries for help. No coughing. Just the fire.
In the crowd, in the panic, she heard Nicci scream her name. Even when she could make out no other single sound, she heard that. Hearing it pushed all the rest of the world out of focus and into it at the same time. She turned her back on the burning sky and fought her way through the tangle of wet, panicked people, shoving them into the water or into the mud until she could catch at her baby sister's arms and pull her protectively close, just as if her arms were some shield against the heat that had already dried her hair and her clothes and wouldn't need more than a few minutes to boil away the water in the lake and burn the skin off all their bodies.
But she held Nicci anyway, bellowing into her ear that it was all right and she was there and to close her eyes and keep them closed. She knew it was all over, but she wasn't scared. There wasn't time. The same numbness that kept her from understanding how she'd gotten into the water or how she'd gotten out kept her nicely cloaked against the horror of being burnt alive. She could only hope it wouldn't take long.
But the wind changed. Suddenly and forcefully, it blew back against the ridge, pushing both the heat and the smoke entirely away and replacing it with choking cold.
Amber staggered in the wake of this new wind, trying to clear her lungs of the sediment made by water, smoke and heat. She didn't feel very successful and the effort left her throat, chest and, oddly, her eyes feeling scraped and bruised. Cold, clear air cut at her lungs, making her cough even harder.
"What happened?" Nicci's hands dug painfully at her neck, but Amber didn't push her off. If anything, she pulled her sister closer, so that Nicci's next frantic shout rang out painfully right in her ear: "What happened? Oh God, what is this?"
"It's the ship," Amber croaked, even though she knew Nicci couldn't hear her through her own panic just yet. There wasn't much point in talking, but Amber said it all anyway, just to hear it out loud and know that it was real. The waiting was over; the worst had happened. "The ship blew up."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 16 |
In the city of Xheoth, in the state of Yroq, in the world and the hour of Gann, a pillar of fire rose up in the east, reaching like a desperate hand to heaven. It was a cool night, but not a cold one, and rainless although the wind was strong over the city, and so there were many who saw this miraculous sight. Uyane Meoraq, Sword of Sheul and well-honored in His sight, was one of them.
He supposed that was a smallish sort of miracle in itself. He spent enough time under the open sky that, given his leisure, he preferred a closed hall for his evening meditations. But the hall was engaged this night for the young initiates of Xi'Xheoth to take their oaths of ascension and so Meoraq took himself to the rooftop courtyard instead. He saw the fire that he might otherwise have never seen and therefore, there must have been some significance to the vision meant only for him. He meditated upon that as he watched it burn.
The sky had been filled with omens for many years, they said, but this was the first Meoraq himself had seen and he was a Sheulek—God's Striding Foot—who had spent most of the past twelve years in the wildlands. And this, this was far more impressive a sign than the occasional glimpses of light or colors that some claimed to have seen behind the ever-present clouds. For hours, that blazing arm strained upwards and its many fingers grasped at salvation, but though it fell with each strong gust of wind, it always rose again.
Behind the low walls that separated the temple's courtyard from those of the city's ruling Houses, Meoraq could see smaller flames spark to life as braziers were lit, until it seemed all Xheoth had come out to see. As a man who often went many days without seeing another living man or hearing any dumaq voice but his own, sights such as these still had power over Meoraq. He admired the city as he admired the fire in the sky. Walls a quarter-span thick, now alive with lights, formed a perfect ring around the protected fields where cattlemen and farmers labored. In the daylight, from this same vantage, he would be able to see the lush colors of living crop against the dead wastes of the world outside the city walls. But at night, on this night, the fires of so many braziers seemed a wondrous proof of life, a miracle in itself, and as precious as any burning pillar Sheul had sent to be seen.
Meoraq bore it a reverent witness, keeping his own company as the rooftop over the temple-district filled with on-lookers. Although they kept a respectful distance, every backwards glance showed Meoraq more priestly robes: acolytes, monks, scribes, oracles and even the young candle-wards came to stare until it seemed there could not be a man left in the rooms beneath his feet.
Hours passed, each one marked by the tolling of bells throughout the city, not quite in sync with one another. It began to rain, dampening not only the fields below—the sweet, green smell of freshly-wetted manure billowed up at once and Meoraq breathed it in, still thinking of fields, of farms, of life—but the enthusiasm of many of those watching. Braziers all across the city roof began to gutter and die, breaking the perfection of the ring they had so briefly formed, but some stayed regardless of the discomfort. Meoraq was one of these. There would always be rain and he would always have days when he had to walk through it and nights when he had to sleep in it, but this fiery arm might never come again and he still had not determined its meaning.
As he meditated, one of the acolytes was jostled suddenly forward by the crowd, stumbling hard against Meoraq's back. Meoraq spared his immediate bows and apologies a distracted grunt, but the damage was done. With a few shouts and clapped hands, the courtyard was cleared of all but the highest members of the priestly caste. The next man who drew near to speak apology was the abbot, whose name escaped Meoraq for the moment, but who seemed an amiable sort, for one of his caste.
They watched the fire together in comfortable silence. The rain and the wind both grew stronger, making the gesticulations of the flame wilder and more desperate even as it began to die down.
"It seems to be beckoning," the abbot remarked.
Meoraq acknowledged him with a grunt, but his interest intensified. It did look like a beckoning arm now, less like the clutching one he had first imagined it to be.
"How far away would you say the fire burns?" asked the abbot.
It was a fair question. Meoraq was one of perhaps a hundred men in Xheoth this night who had ever been beyond the city's walls. To speak in measurements of distance had only the most abstract meaning to most citizens, but this man had surely made pilgrimages in the past to be in a position of such authority now and so Meoraq considered the question fairly.
"The shadow of the Stepped Rise stands before it," he said at last. "And is not illuminated by it. It could not be less than thirty spans."
The other man grunted thoughtfully. "To see a flame at thirty spans...What city lies in that direction?"
"Tothax," Meoraq replied at once. He knew every city that fell within his circuit well, and quite a few others that did not. Tothax, he knew better than most. He had received an urgent summons to that city half a year back, a summons not merely for a Sheulek but for Meoraq himself, and refusing to name the charges. This had so annoyed him that Meoraq deliberately made Tothax his last stop upon his circuit and he made certain the courts of Tothax knew it. Indeed, upon his arrival in Xheoth, he had found another summons waiting for him, even more tersely worded than the last. And if there was a reason why he had perhaps overstayed himself in this city many days after the last dispute had been heard and the last trial judged, there it stood. He was a Sword of Sheul, greatest of the warrior's caste, a Sheulek. He took orders from his father and from God and no one else. He would move on in his own time, and he fully intended to make himself obnoxious in the House of whoever wanted him so damned badly right up until the last lick of autumn.
Ah, but then it would be home, home to Xeqor and House Uyane. Familiar faces. A bed more myth than reality. His father's company in the evenings, and perhaps his brothers' as well, if they were home from their own duties. Well...Salkith would be there; he was a governor's guard and entitled to a room in their barracks, but he preferred to sleep at home where he could punish those who joked about his infamously slippery brain instead of force himself to laugh along. Nduman was a Sheulek with his own circuit and his visits were infrequent enough, but he was also keeping a low-born woman and several children in Vuluth, outside of conquest and without formal marriage, although he thought it a great secret. Thus far, their father had seemed strangely inclined to tolerate this, but Rasozul was lord of Uyane and steward of the bloodline and could not ignore the scandal forever. As for Meoraq himself, he was what he was: the eldest son of a legendary man, the heir to a glorious name and a proud House of Oracle Uyane's own lineage, a servant in the favor of great Sheul, and a man who was perhaps not as humble as he'd ought to be. He was working on that.
"Tothax," the abbot mused, bringing him roughly back to himself.
"If somewhat to the north."
"So it is not Tothax that burns."
"No." Regrettably. "There is nothing there that should burn for so long."
"Without moving," agreed the abbot, tapping the back of one hand broodingly with his fingertips. "A plains-fire would move in this wind."
"And swiftly die in this rain," added Meoraq. His clothing was now plastered unpleasantly to his scales. "And no plains-fire would ever burn so tall."
"Yet still it burns. And beckons."
Meoraq grunted.
"It is a true sign of Sheul, then."
"So it would seem."
They watched. Another hour was tolled and the fire waved, feebly but still with some life, as it slipped lower and lower.
"He has set a mighty banner," the abbot remarked. "But for whose eyes, I wonder?"
Meoraq flattened his spines. The elderly priest gazed benignly straight ahead and did not acknowledge his narrow glance.
"I should have journeyed on to Tothax many days ago," Meoraq admitted at length.
The abbot bent his head at a polite angle, flexing his spines forward with interest. "Perhaps the message is meant for you."
"Perhaps." But now he felt certain it was. Meoraq had trained a lifetime to hear Sheul's voice and feel His touch. Now he saw His waving arm. It would be a foolish thing to pretend he did not know what it meant.
Or what he had to do.
"I leave for Tothax immediately," he said. And naturally, it was raining. "I require provisions for the journey."
"Name them and be met, honored one," said the abbot mildly. "Shall you take a bed until the morning?"
"No." Meoraq turned away as the burning arm, its work done, finally slipped behind the horizon and returned the night to uninterrupted black. "Sheul has lit His lamp for me at this hour. I can only trust it is the hour He wishes me to follow. It would seem I have lingered too long already."
"We shall pray for you," said the abbot, bowing. The other priests remaining on the rooftop bowed as well. "Go in the sight of Sheul and serve Him well."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 17 |
Meoraq descended the stair and beckoned indiscriminately to the crowd of youths and low-born priests still clustered in the upper halls hoping for a glimpse of the miraculous fires. Several came forward at once. He took the first to reach him for his usher, made his few demands to the others, and allowed himself to be led back to the room he had been given for his own upon his first night's arrival. He did not have many preparations to make, but it was the polite thing to give the temple's provisioner time to arrange his supplies so that they would be at the temple gate when he did leave. Rushing out at once only to wait around where all could see him would only embarrass Xi'Xheoth and those who lived there. Meoraq knew he was not always as patient as he ought to be, but he tried not to be rude. Sometimes he tried.
The boy bowed in ahead of him and lit the lamp, then waited, his small head pressed to the floor and back stiff with pride at being made usher for so prestigious a guest. Meoraq dismissed him with a silent tap to the shoulder and, knowing that little eyes would be on him and little ears listening, kept his back to the door until he heard it shut and catch.
He was alone.
"Fuck," said Meoraq, and gave the cupboard where he ought to be sleeping even now a solid kick. He hit the supporting framework rather than the lower door as he'd intended, so that instead of a resounding thump as his boot struck home, he damned near broke a toe. He swore again, limping over to the simple chair provided for his simple needs.
It was raining. It would be raining. Thirty days he'd passed in Xheoth and it had not rained once in all that time. Thirty days, but now he was leaving and the water poured out of the sky as from a cattleman's pump.
He sat there in his soaked leather breeches and the city-soft tunic the priests had given him while his own was laundered, dripping puddles on the floor, and cursed the rain, which did no good. He had dry clothing in his pack, but could see no point in donning it only to have it drenched ten steps out of the city gate. The rain fell and he would just have to walk in it as just punishment for staying so long in Xheoth.
"A refinement to my sense of humility, I suppose," muttered Meoraq, glancing heavenward. "And I thank You for it, O my Father. It is so comforting to know that You take so personal an interest in the improvement of my character."
Sheul did not reply. Not here, at any rate, although it might be raining even harder outside.
Meoraq tightened his bootstraps and loin-plate and finally glared at the table where his weapons awaited him. The abbot had requested, as all of them did, that he not go armed within Sheul's House. Meoraq's usual reply to this was that all the world was Sheul's House and he went where directed ever-ready to do Sheul's work, but having the right to be an arrogant ass whenever the whim took him did not make it an obligation and this abbot was a better man than most.
He put his travel-harness on over his wet tunic and clipped the great hook of his beast-killing kzung at his hip. Its weight was an immediate comfort to him. Next came the long, wide samr, sheathed and slung across his back to be drawn against those whose crimes either did not merit or could not wait for trial. Last of all, his honor-knives, the slender sabks, buckled high on his arms. They were meant only for the arena in the sight of Sheul and frequently used in the wildlands for all manner of menial work. If his years of service had taught Meoraq nothing else, it had taught him that one could not skin a saoq with a blade as long as one's arm. If Sheul saw it as disgrace, He had never let Meoraq know.
A soft knock upon his door. A familiar sound these past many nights. Not a priest.
"Enter," Meoraq called without turning. "And stand."
She had already taken her first steps toward him. Now they faltered to a stop. Her voice was as hesitant as her footsteps. "Sir?"
"Sheul calls and I go to answer. You have done well in your service to me," he added, damned generously. "Go in my favor."
She retreated one step, but only one. Her hands clasped, trembling, at one another. "Have I offended you, sir?"
She had not. Nor had she gone to any great effort to please him. Indeed, she had done little to make any impression on him whatsoever. She hadn't even told him her name.
Nor should she, in all honesty. She was not a friend to him, only one of the many women who came to the temple after being turned away by their husbands for want of children. They haunted the halls of the temples in every city, veiled shadows in the shape of women, offering themselves in solemn rituals in the hopes that Sheul's sons would heal their wombs. She did not come to him for pleasure and he should not expect to find any in her.
She was neither young nor beautiful, but Meoraq had been compelled to have her all the same when he had passed her in the hall, returning from his first judgment in this city. As Sheulek, he had the right to any woman he was given to desire, but it was this one who lit the spark in him that night and every other night that she came to him. The marks of many Sheulek before him scarred her from neck to mid-arm, but she had not burned for Meoraq and his own did not stand among them.
He had not decided yet how this made him feel. His masculine pride was, in truth, somewhat insulted, although he knew it was Sheul who had the ultimate judgment over each mortal coupling and therefore His will that she not conceive of him, but only receive Meoraq's fires. If that was enough to heal her barren womb, so be it. If not, well, Meoraq didn't particularly want her haunting the halls at House Uyane anyway. Sheul had blessed him at each coupling, sometimes twice, but the sex itself had been as unpleasant as sex could be. Her way of bending silent and motionless beneath him disturbed him. He had given her permission to move, to speak, even to struggle, but she did nothing except to whisper her prayers and drift away when it was over.
Now she seemed dismayed at his leaving, as if it were some failing of hers that drove him out from the city in the dark hours of night. That if she had been more winsome, or if her worn flesh had just been fresher, he might stay and give her the children Sheul had thus far denied her. That she had displeased him, shamed herself, failed God.
Meoraq understood the situation well, but he knew no better how to extract himself from it than he ever had. He finished securing his travel-pack and slung it onto his back, then turned to face her at last.
She bent her neck at once, hiding her eyes from him as a proper woman learns early to do, but her hands grasped anxiously at one another, never entirely still.
Meoraq started walking, but stopped at the door. He sighed, rubbed once at his brow-ridges, then came back to her. He stood awkwardly before her while she cowered, then reached out and brushed the back of his hand gently across her well-scarred shoulder. Her short spines only flattened further, uncomforted.
"I thought surely it would be you," she whispered.
"Mine is the same clay as any other's. Look to no living man for your restoration."
"He has forsaken me."
Meoraq gave the door a glance, wishing it would be miraculously filled by a priest who would know better how to handle this. It remained shut. The woman before him continued to stare at the floor between her bare feet, even as silent tears welled in her eyes. He was Sheulek, a true son of Sheul, and he had felt His touch and heard His voice all his life, but for the sake of that same life, he could not think of a thing to say to her.
"We are all tested in our time," he said at last and immediately regretted it. It was precisely the sort of lame and obvious non-answer that priests liked to give and which Meoraq himself had always found simply infuriating.
But she only brushed at her eyes and made a quiet sound of wordless acceptance. Living here, no doubt she'd heard such answers too many times to be moved by them any longer.
"Forgive me, honored one," she said, sinking to her knees. "I have delayed you with a foolish woman's unhappiness. Go your way in the sight of Sheul, I pray, and good journey to you."
All spoken as heavy as the eternally overcast skies. He found himself wishing she would look at him, as wildly inappropriate as that would be, to show him her naked eyes and let him see some glimmer of a future in them.
But the burning arm beckoned. A Sheulek answered to God above his brothers, his teachers, even his own father. He could not spurn Him to linger with this woman, particularly since he could be of no comfort to her.
He touched her again, actually gripping her shoulder this time in a more direct farewell than he had given anyone else in Xheoth, but she cringed beneath his hand, understandably confused and dismayed by this intimacy. He left her, shutting the door behind him to give the first of her soft, broken tears some privacy.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 18 |
His usher was waiting in the hall to lead him to the temple's gate, trying—and failing—to disguise his curiosity at the sexual mysteries he knew to be unfolding behind the door once the woman entered. He seemed very surprised to see Meoraq so soon emerged and it took him some little time to remember the proper genuflections. Meoraq, brooding, waited out about half of them and then set off without him.
He regretted it within a few moments, knowing it was only the difficult scene with the woman and the prospect of walking in the dark and the rain that fanned the impatience in him, and knowing also that the boy would suffer the kind of poisonous insinuations that only one's young peers are capable of making for his perceived failure to perform this very simple task. He'd been a boy once. He'd heard those insinuations. Hell, he'd made them.
When he reached the gate and the cluster of priests waiting to see him off with the right chants and prayers, Meoraq made a point of tapping the boy on the shoulder. "I have left my bedroll. You may have it, if you like." And to the smiling abbot, ignoring the boy's immediate outcry, "I leave Xi'Xheoth to you."
"We thank you for your service, honored one, and pray we shall not soon require your return."
His provisions were presented, exactly as he had demanded: Two waterskins sized for long travel, bread enough to see him to Tothax and cuuvash enough to see him right through and on to Xeqor, a fresh bedroll, and a good thick blanket to hold back the growing chill at night. Of his own will, the provisioner had added a candle-brick and a small pot of honey, doubtless from the temple's own waxbeetles. Meoraq would not have asked for these things. He was entitled to whatever he was moved to demand, but Xheoth's usual prosperity had been hard-tested this past year and he was loathe to take away even its most frivolous resources. Besides, he had every intention of making outrageous demands when he reached Tothax and the House of whoever dared to summon him without giving cause. Oh yes. Then, he meant to replace his tent, his travel-packs, his boots, his harnesses—both travel and battle—all his buckles, his various tools for skinning and scaling, and he thought he might even be up to feeling a strong need to acquire a mending kit with metal needles and every grade of stitch from sinew to fine thread. And a tea box. A nice one, not just another clay pot with pouches. He wanted to see some inlay after half a year of summons.
The abbot began to pray as Meoraq made himself ready, and since it was the custom for the prayers to continue for so long as the honored visitor was there to hear them, he did it quickly and moved on before the elderly man's voice could tire.
Beyond the temple gates, the city moved and breathed. At this hour, on any other night, the inner passageways of the city would have been empty, save for the watchmen on their patrols and the beacons with their lumbering carts, measuring out dippers of oil to keep the lamps lit.
Now the walkways were choked with people and most of the food-stalls in sight were opened as merchants took advantage of the crowds. Looking around at all this activity, anyone would think it was full day outside.
A shifting beside him. The temple had sent for watchmen to escort him out of the city and they waited nervously for his acknowledgement, looking at him with eyes that said they knew as well as he did for whom the message in the sky had been written.
Meoraq beckoned and started walking for Southgate. He was recognized—in his battle harness, with blades hanging off every side of him, he was damned hard to miss—and hailed in many voices all at once. Each had a different turn of phrase, but it all came to the same question: What was the meaning of the fire?
As if any man could know the mind of Sheul. The fire had been for him, and even Meoraq did not know what it meant.
He kept moving. The temple watchmen fell in close beside him, warning back the crowd when they pressed too close, lest some overenthusiastic fool catch at Meoraq's arm and earn himself a cut across the face from a Sheulek's samr, or worse, catch at the samr itself and earn himself a cut across the throat. Such things happened far more often than Meoraq ever would have imagined in the days before his ascension. Fools forgot themselves easily. And thus there would always be a need for Sheulek.
It was a long walk to Southgate. Meoraq's clothes were nearly dry when he arrived, having just reached that damp, clinging stage where they pulled at every scale. The doorkeeper was expecting him and, by the flat-spined sour-faced look of him, sorely offended by this upset to his routine.
"On your way," he said, indicating the watchmen at Meoraq's flanks with two fat fingers in a lofty wave. "To your work and leave me mine. Go on, I say! What are you waiting for?"
"My word of release," said Meoraq.
The doorkeeper stood back, his head twitching downward with flustered ill-humor he tried to hide, and waited.
So did Meoraq.
One of the watchmen shifted, but only once.
In the stretching silence, the doorkeeper's discomfort grew until it finally burst out of him in a grumbling, "Do you wait on something, honored one?"
"I do. I wait on your salute."
For the second time, the doorkeeper gave ground, this time enough to bump his backside against the heavy door he guarded. His neck bent. He made a surly genuflection, and another, more formally, when Meoraq continued to wait. Then and only then did Meoraq dismiss his escorts. He didn't look to see if they saluted before they went. He was not a man who cared about salutes; he cared about being pointed at by some unwashed doorkeeper as if he were a servant.
'Patience,' he thought, watching the doorkeeper work his keys in the impressive lock of Southgate. 'Sheul, O my Father, give me patience, if not enough to get me through this life, at least enough to get me out of Xheoth without disgracing the name I carry.'
"Fire in the sky, they tell me," grunted the doorkeeper.
Meoraq did not reply. Doorkeepers were born of the warrior's caste, like watchmen and the slightly higher-ranked sentries and, for that matter, butchers and smiths and fleshers and even the lowly handlers whose job it was to stand watch in the kitchens and see that no man took up the bladed weapon in defiance of Sheul's law, but instead used only those poor tools built for them. Yes, this man had been born in God's favor, and Meoraq supposed they must have at one time stood some of the same training, but he was not a warrior, he was not a brother, and he was not a friend.
'I am in a truly piss-licking mood tonight,' Meoraq thought in a faintly wondering way.
They walked together down the long, damp passage through the wall of the city, feeling its colossal weight and age bearing down from every side. The doorkeeper, well accustomed to this walk and perhaps annoyed at Meoraq's silence, lit no lamp. They walked in darkness until Meoraq could feel the cool air of the outside world blowing against his eyes and hear the rain above their own echoing footsteps.
The doorkeeper stopped. So did Meoraq, and he heard a low, irritated sound escape the man beside him, cheated of the peevish pleasure of hearing the high-born Sheulek walk into a gate. Meoraq smiled to himself in the dark.
Keys rattled. The scrape of metal in a lock. The heavy creaking of weathered hinges. "Stands open, sir," said the doorkeeper sourly. "Watch your footing."
Meoraq opened his mouth to demand a parting salute that he wouldn't even be able to see, but made himself bite it back. A truly piss-licking mood. He deserved a long walk in the rain in which to meditate upon the Prophet's many sermons on the subject of emotional restraint.
There was silence behind him as he went on ahead, out of the last length of the tunnel and into the full storm Sheul had waiting for him.
"Who walks there?" someone called. One of the sentries, huddled against the wall to wait out the last hours of his patrol.
"Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor," he said, making a final adjustment to the many straps of his packs. "A Sword of Sheul. Challenge me or cry surrender."
"I cry," the watchman said, wiping rain from his face, and, the last formalities dealt with, added, "First rain of the season is treacherous enough without flying thunder and fiery towers. So good journey to you, honored one, but mind your footing as you go. A man can see a thousand miraculous things in his life and still be washed away by one bad turn on a stretch of bad road."
Good advice. Meoraq raised him a brother's hand in farewell and walked on as the gate of Xheoth slammed behind him and all the empty world of Gann waited in darkness for the dawn.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 19 |
It stopped raining a quarter-span outside of Tothax, with the city walls looming black and tall before him and his clothing as heavy as another damned man riding about on his back. Meoraq cast a surly word of gratitude upwards, accepted the final mutter of far-away thunder for the rebuke it surely was, and walked the last length of road ankle-deep in mud. At least, it seemed mostly to be mud, although Meoraq knew the road could not possibly be so softened, even by days of rain, unless some prospering cattleman had driven his herd out to graze beyond the walls very, very recently.
"Perhaps I will demand my boots cleaned once I have answered my summons, eh?" Meoraq said to himself, spines twitching in a grim, self-indulgent sort of humor. "And once I am satisfied that they are clean enough for a Sheulek's feet, by Gann, I'll demand them replaced. I never much cared for these boots anyway."
"Hail and stand fast!"
Meoraq halted and raised one hand in acknowledgement. He had been aware of the sentry circling him for quite some time and suspected he was being hailed now only because the man had finally met up with reinforcements. Tothax was hardly a city teetering on the undefendable frontier, but every city raised out of Gann's flesh knew violence. Meoraq stood with his arms raised and hands empty, waiting for the sentries—and yes, now there were three of them—to nerve themselves for a cautious approach.
"I see Uyane, a Sword of Sheul," said one of the sentries, bending his neck in swift apology.
The face was familiar, but Meoraq couldn't scratch up a name, so he merely grunted and tapped at the man's shoulder in what he hoped came across as casual and forgiving as well as wet and entirely out of patience. "Uyane Meoraq stands before you. I come to take Tothax. Challenge me or cry surrender."
"We cry to you, conqueror." The sentry raised his head, frowning. "Exarch Ylsathoc requests your audience immediately."
A name at last. And an exarch, no less. Highest of the governing caste, they followed circuits of their own, moving from city to city to oversee the legal affairs of the most eminent Houses. This one was probably here about some oversight in the records of one of his recent trials, and wasn't that just like one of the governing caste to sit around half a year sending summons just to have a handful of questions answered? Meoraq grunted again, less politely, and walked on toward the gate.
Behind him, the sentries conferred in uneasy mutters. The one who had called him by name now called out again, saying, "Have you a message for me to carry, honored one?"
"I do not ask my brothers under the Blade to carry my messages," Meoraq replied, still walking.
It was a rare thing for a sentry to hear himself addressed as brother by a Sheulek and it gave these three pause enough that Meoraq had nearly reached the outer gate before they tried again.
"When shall I tell Exarch Ylsathoc you will see him?"
"Name any hour that pleases you," said Meoraq, drawing his kzung to strike against the gate. "But any lie is a lie before God and you must answer for it. If I choose to see this man you speak of at all, it will be in my own time."
"I mark you, sir. "The sentry sighed, rubbing at the bony ridges over his brows in a dejected manner. "I only give the message I am given."
The sentries retreated and Meoraq was given a few moments in the relatively dry pass-way to kick the worst of the mud from his boots while the gatekeeper finished locking them in and turned around. He made an offensively cursory salute, which Meoraq immediately forgave since he also offered both a flask of twice-brewed nai and to carry Meoraq's pack. The drink was hot and strong and good—Sheul's love in a swallow, as his father often said—and it was difficult to bear in mind that he would have as much nai as he wished once he was settled, but this flask would be all the gatekeeper could claim until the end of his shift. A Sheulek had the right to seize whatever goods he desired of any man he wished, but Meoraq did try not to be an ass.
"Suppose I should ask your name," grunted the gatekeeper, striking a lamp. "See your bands and the seal of your blades and all the rest of that ribbony shit, but I've had that over-groomed slaveson bleating in my face six times today alone and if you aren't the Uyane he wants, by God and Gann, you're still the man he'll get."
Meoraq grunted, flexing his spines forward to show some degree of acknowledgement, but he had no intention of seeing anyone until he'd had a bath and a hot meal.
The rest of the walk through the pass-way was comfortably quiet. The gatekeeper made a mutter when the urge came on him, but like Meoraq's own mutterings were so often apt to be, they were not made in expectation of answers. The flask passed back and forth between them freely, and Meoraq never refused it, although he did limit himself to sparing sips. By the time they had reached the inner gate, it was down to the dregs and bitter with coarse, smoky grounds.
"Keep it," grunted the gatekeeper when Meoraq tried to return it. "I see you've not got one and that's a hard lack when the weather turns."
"I do not ask the gate to make provision when the temple summons me," said Meoraq, and firmly held out the flask.
The gatekeeper snorted humor as he brought out his keys. "Ask for a flask from that crowd and they'll bring you the finest jeweled cup your eyes will ever clap to. Priests. They think worth is in riches, not use. Hear me and mark well," he went on, just as if he were a training master and Meoraq a boy on his field. "A thing is not what it looks like, but what it does. Finest priestliest cup in the world won't keep nai hot in its belly on a long walk in the rain."
"I mark," said Meoraq, amused.
The gatekeeper grunted again, swinging the door wide open. He bellowed for an usher then turned in the same breath to give the proper formal farewell, since little ears were around to hear them: "Tothax is yours, honored one. Show mercy to us."
Meoraq raised the flask as he would raise his sabk in the arena, then slung its strap around his neck and walked on, smiling.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 20 |
One city was very much like another, each one being made after Oracle Mykrm's design at the Prophet's direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the busy streets of the inner ring with his usher hurrying to keep ahead of him.
This was the living body of any city: the inner ring, where farmers and cattlemen met abbots and oracles, where merchants ruled over lords and the taxman ruled over all. Voices struck out on every side—hailing friends, hawking wares, protesting price—until they all came together in a great cursing, laughing, chanting wave of chaos. After so many days alone with nothing to see but the rain and the empty road, the thousand sights and sounds and smells of the city were both welcome and abrasive. They were close enough to the terrace that the grey shine of true light could be seen if Meoraq looked to his left down the long rows of shopfronts, but if he looked to his right, orderly rows of hanging lamps burned a far brighter path deeper into the protected city and that was how he turned as soon as he reached the wide archway that led to Xi'Tothax—heart of Tothax—the Temple district.
Gradually, the crowds loosened and the clamor faded. The many noisy bodies became a few strolling priests and even fewer scampering boys. Meoraq slowed his long strides to let his particular boy take a proper place before him.
The Temple gates were closing as he neared them, but the watchmen posted there gave the sabks riding at Meoraq's arms a glance and opened them right up again.
"Exarch Ylsathoc—" one of them began, bowing, but shut his mouth at Meoraq's upraised hand. He basked in the warmth of their uncomfortable silence as his usher exchanged himself for one of the temple's own boys and then he walked on.
"I will meet with the abbot," he said to his new boy, making certain the watchmen at the gates could hear. "And him alone."
The usher, oblivious to everything but the naked blades adorning Meoraq's harness, gave breathless obedience and set off.
Meoraq followed, thinking pleasantly vindictive thoughts of the faceless Exarch Ylsathoc pacing himself into a frothing fury in some priestly corner of the temple, and it was some time before he realized he was not being led to the cloister, but to the stronghold. He started to say something about it being the custom to show a Sheulek to his chambers before all else, but turned the half-formed sound to a wordless grunt instead. He had said he would meet with the abbot, so the boy was by-Gann taking him to the abbot and if he went there tired and wet and muddy as a cattleman, he had only his own peevishness to blame for it.
'Life is filled with small lessons,' thought Meoraq, casting a dour eye up at the soot-black ceiling and through it, to Sheul's ever-watchful gaze. 'I hear You, O my Father, and I am humble at Your instruction, but just once I would like to indulge a mortal failing without having to learn from it.'
Sheul did not reply.
The boy brought him into the hold as far as the doors to the Halls of Judgment and there delivered him with great importance to an amused council guard. They waited, showing each other the proper motions of dominance and submission with one eye on the boy until he was entirely gone. Immediately after the closing of the door, the guard dropped his arm mid-genuflection and gave Meoraq a slap to the chest.
"Ssh, you're wet!" he said, shaking out his hand.
"It's raining. Or has been. Ten days and nights. Here." Meoraq thrust his damp, muddy pack maliciously into the other man's arms. "You can carry that."
"You are a low man, Raq."
"The man who walks in the sight of Sheul walks the high path at every hour," Meoraq replied piously and walked around the low wall separating them to help himself to the guard's cup. Also nai, but quite cold. Meoraq drank it anyway, fingering thoughtfully at his new flask. "How are you, Nkosa?"
"Walking, working and getting dipped. Guess that means I can't complain." Nkosa folded his arms and watched as Meoraq forced the last bitter swallow down and turned the empty cup over on the wall.
They were somewhat related, Nkosa's mother having been a servant in a house where Meoraq's father had once stayed on a circuit. She claimed him for the sire, and even though she carried no scars to prove it, when the baby opened up male, Rasozul had paid for the boy's placement at a training hall (or whatever passed for one in a city like Tothax). Of course, the woman had been swiftly married to one of her own caste, the man whose name Nkosa carried. Meoraq had known nothing of this until their first meeting, when Nkosa rather shyly asked if he was by chance related to Rasozul and the whole story had come out. Meoraq had seen no reason to query his father for confirmation. The Uyanes were Sheulek all the way back to the founding of the House; it was inevitable that he should find blood-kin. Really, it was a wonder he didn't find more of them.
"You're late," Nkosa said now, cocking his head to a censuring angle.
"Impossible."
"You come through twice a year, early sowing and second reaping, regular as a cattleman bathes or an abbot shits. Last harvest was a quarter-brace ago. You're late."
"A Sheulek moves at God's hour."
"Mm. Was it a woman?" Nkosa asked, with just a hint of wistfulness. During their infrequent and much-enjoyed chats together, he had confided that he had stood twelve years of the seventeen required of a Sheulek's training before he had been culled, but he was still a bastard, even if he was one of Rasozul's, and there never was much hope of him being called higher than he stood now. "It was my mother's doing," he liked to sigh at the end of this confession. "If only she'd been presented to him as a daughter of the House instead of some linen-girl who helped him rumple up the sheets before she changed them, I'd be wearing a set of my own blades." Such things were not supposed to factor in a Sheulek's selection, but of course they did. Politics had no place in Sheul's sight, but this was Gann's world.
"There was no woman," said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul's granting and never entered his mind.
"Was it two women?"
"No."
"Ten?"
"No," said Meoraq, grinning. "Although I appreciate your high opinion of me."
"I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night," sighed Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.
"And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right," said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, "but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best."
"I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten." Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. "I suppose you heard I married."
"No. It was only rumor when I was here last."
"Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something," he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. "It's been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead."
Meoraq frowned.
Nkosa noticed and snorted. "It's not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it's just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we're kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?"
Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he said merely, "How does she suit you?"
"Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father's wife and the servants. I hardly know her."
"Your women share rooms with the servants?"
"We don't all have Houses, Raq," said Nkosa with a snort. "Some of us just have homes. But she's all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her."
"Your father really should have explained that to you years ago," Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave Nkosa a comradely tap and said, "Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—"
"You are such an idiot," snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.
The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles. Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn't hot enough to steam. "What did you say?"
Nkosa opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.
"How could you—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!" Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, "This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!"
Meoraq kept his hand on Nkosa's shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, "You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself."
He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it. Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man's name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature...but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn't.
Meoraq released him. Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. "I should tell someone you're here," he said, not looking up. "Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days."
"Exarch Ylsathoc." Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. "So I hear. Do you know why?"
"You have to be better than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job," he added at a mutter. "But if you want to hide from him, there's a petition in the hall right now."
"A Sheulek doesn't have to hide from anyone," said Meoraq. And frowned. "A dispute at this hour?"
"They've been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn't hear the charges."
Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment's thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the warrior's caste.
"I suppose I should put my name in," said Meoraq, heading for the door. "It was good to see you, 'Kosa."
"Think of me tonight when you're making free with all your conquered virgins," Nkosa said morosely.
"I sincerely hope not. But think of me while you get dipped with your wife."
"I always do."
They both laughed, but it wasn't quite the same laughter as it might have been.
The clerk, or whoever he was, was in the hall just outside, gesticulating wildly as he hissed to a whole crowd of solemn-faced men, some of them robed as judges. Civil judges, perhaps, but a very bad thing to see. They all looked at Meoraq.
Nothing he did now could possibly be the right thing to do. If he said nothing, Nkosa was sure to be punished, which could mean anything from the loss of his post to a public whipping. If they waited to bring their charge against him until Meoraq was gone and another Sheulek heard that he had put his naked hand on Meoraq, Nkosa could easily be exiled to the wildlands or even executed. But if Meoraq did speak in Nkosa's defense, he would make a public issue out of what still might be a private one, humiliating not only his friend, but the man whose name he carried. The taint could reach as far as his household's master, the steward-lord of House Kanko, who might take the view that House Uyane had dishonored him personally. For that matter, the governor of this piss-miserable little city might raise formal charges against the governor of Xeqor, since House Uyane was that city's championing House.
The only reasonable response was silence.
Meoraq twitched his spines...then flattened them and strode purposefully over to the watchful crowd. "Twice a year," he said over their bowing heads, "I have the pleasure to see my cousin." It wasn't entirely untrue. They were blood-kin, anyway. "We have precious few moments together and you—" He leaned close, staring furiously into the top of the clerk's bent head. "—have robbed me of three of them. One for the interruption I might have forgiven. Two for the threat you had no right to make. And three that I find you so soon smearing the tale out into the hall. How say you, man?"
The man could not seem to say anything. Meoraq was not entirely certain he was breathing, although he did appear to be trembling very slightly.
Meoraq gave him a quick count of six to feel the weight of all these staring eyes and then he straightened up and drew his samr.
Everyone took a long step away, save the clerk, who dropped with a wheeze of terror to his knees. He stared up at him, his eyes in the lamp-light like daubs of jelly, like something already dead that only glistened.
"Uyane Meoraq stands before you," spat Meoraq. He was calm, quite calm despite the venom in his tone and the shine of his naked blade. "And with the right to carry this weapon comes the right to use it however I will. You offend me."
From the kneeling man's motionless, open mouth came a series of soft, dry clicking sounds. After a moment, Meoraq decided he was trying to say, 'I cry,' but managing only the first glottal before his strength failed. His bladder, Meoraq noticed, already had. A twinge of disgust flexed through his spines, seeing that. He did not expect every man to face death as a warrior, but he should at least face it as a man.
"I have not decided to forgive you," he said, sheathing his samr and stepping away before he got piss on his muddy boots. "But I will think about it and let my judgment be known when I return in the sowing season."
He left unspoken but very clear the understanding that if he returned to news that Nkosa had been punished, his judgment would be severe.
"Thank you, honored one," breathed the man on the floor, still without moving.
Meoraq turned his eyes on the best-dressed of the men still clustered to witness all this nonsense. "Where shall I find the abbot?"
"I don't...In the quorum?"
"He might be in sequester," another man offered. "I think there was a vote tonight."
"A sequestered vote?" asked the first, clearly surprised.
"One of the oracles died."
"Orved," said a third, timidly nodding in Meoraq's direction to excuse himself for speaking. "He was on the roof when the fire went up and he fell down the stairs."
"Oh. I heard about that but I didn't know it was Orved."
"Where do you think he's been all this time?"
"The Halls of Judgment don't exactly drip oracles," said the first crossly. "I don't see any number of people for days on end, but I don't assume they're all dead!"
Meoraq folded his arms and gripped his biceps very close to the hilts of his sabks, waiting.
He had their attention again at once.
"If he is not sequestered, honored one, then he should be in the quorum. There is a dispute in session...ah...Are you here for the dispute?"
Meoraq turned away without feeling any strong urge to answer, although he did spare a last glance down at the floor where the kneeling man still knelt. He had recovered only enough to close his eyes and that was just as recovered as Meoraq wanted to see him. There was a great rustling behind him as men made their salutes and bows, but Meoraq didn't stay to witness them. He knew where the quorum was. It abutted the arena.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 21 |
There was a man posted outside the quorum doors, swordless, with a brutal-looking hammer at his side. Not one of the warrior's caste. A bailiff, then, and not one Meoraq knew or at least not one he remembered. He gave his name and went into the arena hold to wait. It was his right to hear any dispute where he might be called to challenge or champion, but he wasn't in any kind of mood to hear the bickering that invariably accompanied legal disputes.
He was not alone in that, it would seem. There was a man in the arena hold already, sitting on the altar and leaned back against the wall, by all appearances asleep, except that no sleeping man's breath was so precisely even. He wore nothing but a battle harness and a loin-plate, cinched tight over a ridiculously young and unscarred body. His sabks were metal and shiny, as young or even younger than he was. He rested one finger lightly on the hilt of each.
Unwilling to interrupt a brother's meditations, Meoraq gave no greeting. He set his pack down and opened it, working quietly through his supplies until he came to his spare clothes, which were not much cleaner and not much drier, but some of each and worth changing into. He began to undress.
"I had a bath brought," the other man said without opening his eyes. "Water's cooled, but not too murky."
Meoraq located the basin in an unlit corner of the hold and went to use it, grunting appreciatively. The other man acknowledged this with a grunt of his own, but that was all.
The water was indeed cool where it lay in the basin, but there was more in a closed pail and that warmed it some. It made for rather a deep bath, but Meoraq didn't mind sloshing over. He didn't have to clean the floors. There was soap in a sachet and several grades of brush and the bath was quite pleasant even if he had to do it himself. Oh, he could have sent for a servant, and really preferred to use one, but they always sent women and that was too distracting before a trial. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his clay and impervious to all temptation, but Meoraq had found that having a woman rub oil into his naked body had a tendency to arouse him regardless of how inappropriate the place or time might be. He was working on that.
Bathed and dried, Meoraq briskly oiled up and made ready for trial, if it came to trial. The other man finally slid his eyes open toward the end and watched as he whetted his sabks. Meoraq let him watch. They were good knives, made in the age before the Fall of the black, stone-like substance called qil, which no man could now duplicate. The knives had served his bloodline since the founding of his House and he never drew or sheathed them without this hot, fierce leap of pride, remembering how it had felt to take their weight for the first time and feel his father's hands binding them to his arms. In all his lifetime, including his years of service as Sheulek, Meoraq had never seen a more intimidating set of honor-blades.
The other man hardly cowered at the sight, but he did tip his head and flare his spines forward in respectful admiration. "Ni'ichok Shuiv stands before you," he said, and glanced down at himself, still very much seated on the altar. "Metaphorically. Sheulteb in service of House Arug."
Ah, Sheulteb. If a Sheulek was the Striding Foot, then the Sheulteb were God when He stood. Only one short year of training and one degree of rank separated them, and they shared many of the same duties, save that Meoraq served every city on his circuit and the Sheulteb were called to only one House, to act as champion if it had no lord born to the warrior's caste. There were more of those every year, it seemed. Even Uyane's line in other cities had Sheulteb now. The Age of the Warrior was ending, men said, and perhaps it was true. Too many of the old blades were broken.
Meoraq sheathed his sabks and went over for a brother's tap—his open palm to Shuiv's chest, Shuiv's open palm on his own. Their hearts were already in sync.
"I do not recall the privilege of meeting one of Ni'ichok's sons, but I know House Arug well," said Meoraq when it was done. "He has had more than his share of troubles in recent years. What curse has he brought upon himself?"
"A curse of daughters," said Shuiv, wryly smiling. "And neither wealth nor name enough to sell them all off. "
"Sell them?"
"Not so boldly as to be criminal." Shuiv flicked his spines forward carelessly, then leaned back against the wall again and closed his eyes. "But I had one waiting in my chambers the day I took oath for him, before any blade had been drawn on his behalf. And as soon as I had made her belly round, I found another."
Meoraq recoiled with a disgusted hiss.
"My samr and I explained together to her father the laws against incest." Shuiv flared his mouth briefly, showing the tips of his teeth in idle expression of meditative contempt. "But he has had one catastrophe after another ever since, it seems, and he tries to solve every one of them with the offering of marriage."
"A foolish way to empty one's House."
"Oh, he's emptied it," said Shuiv with a snort. "The mediators have cited him for frivolous intent eight times this season alone, and each fault doubles his fine. He's sold two fields already to pay them, not to mention his sovereignty over two hundred households, and low though it may be to repeat rumor, I could not help but notice that two of his creditors forgave his debts after a speedy marriage to his daughters. But he has a legitimate complaint this time," Shuiv admitted, opening his eyes.
After so many years of judgment, Meoraq rarely bothered to hear complaints. They had a way of prejudicing a man's mind and when he stood in the arena as an instrument of Sheul, his own will could only prove a distraction. Besides, the grand trials that pitted righteous but wronged men against corrupt and cunning powers that he had read about in his boyhood were just that: stories told by priests to impress and excite young minds. Men did not need reasons to indulge in acts of evil, just as they did not need evil enacted against them to send them crying to the courts for justice. Still, Meoraq tipped his head to an inviting angle, showing interest he did not particularly feel, and the young man before him sat up a little straighter.
"Arug's debts have been such this year that he sought to squeeze in an extra harvest between riak's reap and sweet-pod's sowing. He couldn't afford to compensate his farmers with coin, so he promised those who met his demands that they would have one-half the final crop of the year rather than the customary quarter. For a surprise, he held to his word. But one of the farming households under his sovereignty went out to find that most of his share of the field's crop had already been harvested. He suspects a certain farmer, a man who had suspiciously great yield in his own rows, but there is no proof. Both men claim to be wronged, one by theft and one by slander."
"And as Arug is lord over both, he cannot find for either man without appearing to show favor," finished Meoraq. He glanced heavenward through the ceiling and sighed.
"Glamorous, I know." Shuiv gave his spines a rueful flick. "He brought them both here so that they could see how assiduously he serves the interests of his protected, but really, he wants the mediators to make a ruling for him that neither man can hold against him. And probably offer them each a daughter in commiseration, ha. I know he's brought a few."
Meoraq grunted his disapproval, but felt his belly warm.
"They've made him sit all day in the antechamber while they heard every other dispute in the logs," Shuiv went on, "but he's refused to leave and now that you are here, the mediators will surely take it for proof that Sheul has a will in this matter and send the whole stupid thing to trial."
"Surely. Yet trials have been called over smaller disputes."
"Not a spear of grass grows save by His design, so my training master told me. And even Arug must serve Him in some way, I suppose. Yet I wonder if I see no more omen in you than a Sheulek coming in out of the rain." Shuiv settled back against the wall once more, letting his eyes slide shut. "What did bring you, brother?"
"I received a summons. Many summons, to be precise. Commanding me by name. May I be safe in assuming they do not come from House Arug?"
"I shouldn't think so. If secrets were teeth, Arug still could not keep them in his mouth and I would remember if I heard him utter your name." A sly peek beneath heavy lids. "It is rather a well-known name."
"It is not the sword, but the hand that wields it," Meoraq replied, just as if he were not flattered. "I have been half a year ignoring these summons and so Sheul sent me one of His own."
Shuiv did not ask his meaning, but studied him with new interest. "I was in meditation that night. I never saw it. They said it filled the sky."
"I would not say so, but it was tall enough at its first rising to touch the clouds, to pierce them."
"And you think it was set for you? Truth?"
"I think it was set by Sheul. I think it was tall enough that there might be a thousand men who saw it and believed it for their eyes alone."
Shuiv waited, faintly smiling.
"It was mine," said Meoraq.
Shuiv grunted, closed his eyes, and quite some time later said, "The man who has been summoned by Sheul's own torch must have further to go than Tothax."
"Then there will be some other sign to lead me on, if it was indeed for my eye. All things indeed serve Sheul, but I can't think how the squabbles of two farmers and a few rows of riak could be dire enough to warrant a tower of fire on a rainy night."
"It was gruu, actually."
"Ah, well that makes all the difference then. For gruu, I should be surprised there wasn't a hammer of ice to go with it."
Shuiv snorted.
"I hear," mused Meoraq, "there is also an exarch who wishes my audience."
"An exarch in Tothax is rare enough that word has even reached lowly House Arug," Shuiv replied, eyes shut. "But as he only arrived twenty days and some ago, I can't think how he could have been sending summons half the year, as you say. As for the exarch himself, I hear nothing save that he has a scandalously gilded taste for drink and a free hand with the abbot's coin, but there may be more envy in that than truth."
Meoraq grunted, inviting the conversation to continue if it was the other man's wish, although the politics of priests and farmers and the eternal rift between them were of no interest to him. Perhaps it would be different if he were a Sheulteb, shut up every day of the year in that common House with its common problems and common tongues forever flapping, but he was not.
"I used to wish for exciting trials when I was young and stupid," Shuiv said after a companionable silence. "Well, younger. And less stupid. Then I had my first trial..." Shuiv hesitated a glance at him, seeking censure, but Meoraq merely waved at him to speak on. "And as proud as I was to burn with Him, I found myself wishing afterwards for a long, boring post. Which was given to me. And on the way here for—I don't even know anymore—the sixth time? The tenth? I wished again that something real would happen, something meaningful. And here you are." There was quiet between them and then Shuiv laughed a little. "It does not bode well for me in the trial to come. May I ask you a brother's consideration?"
Meoraq tipped his head, knowing what was coming.
"My woman bore my child near the freshening of the year. If it opens a son, will you see him taken to my father? Knowing Arug, he'll have married its mother off again before my bones are even black and I don't think I can die completely if I have to worry over another man raising my son. Especially the sorts of men Arug's been hawking daughters to."
"My oath is yours, brother. If I stand in Sheul's favor, I shall pass through Tothax in the early spring."
"It should be proved by then. My thanks."
The door opened. Not the door to the hall, through which Meoraq had come, but the door to the arena. The bailiff entered, bowing low. "Honored ones, the court of Tothax under High Judge Sen'sui requests your judgment at trial."
Shuiv pushed himself off the wall, his smile broad and guileless, eager as only a young man could be. He offered his arm and they clasped shoulders, then left the hold. The bailiff lowered the stair for them. Meoraq descended first—the Swords were equal in the eyes of Sheul, but he reasoned that he had more years of service and if he didn't take the initiative, they risked standing in the doorway saluting each other like idiots while everyone watched—and Shuiv came after, but they went together to the center of the ring and bent their necks.
It was not a large room, really. They never were. A man could count off fifty paces if he crossed at its widest point, but only if he was sparing with his stride. The corners were rounded; the floor was bare stone, sloping toward its center where the drain was set, to make cleaning easier; the mediators and witnesses had no access to this level, but watched from behind a screen from the floor above. There were no furnishings, no banners, no embellishments. The one indication of this room's singular importance was the window set high in the ceiling, round as an open eye and stained with colors. In the right hours of day, the light that fell through that window seemed to pour fire itself over the arena floor, but it was growing late now and the arena was mostly dark.
One panel of the enclosing screen slid open, revealing the witnesses' box. Meoraq knew Arug by his garish clothing and the frantic way he was hissing at his manservant, who then left at a run. He could guess the reason easily enough, but did not dwell on it. What happened after the trial was not important. All his mind and body now belonged to God.
The high judge raised both hands, although there was only solemn silence around him to begin with, and said, "The trial of Ezethu, a man of House Arug, against Mihuun, a man of House Arug, is hereby brought to light before Sheul."
The men were not identified, but Meoraq knew them for their staring faces, where horror painted itself as thick as awe. Simple farmers with a petty squabble, neither man could have possibly foreseen this dispute going to trial and both clearly feared the consequences—a sure sign that both carried some measure of guilt.
The bailiff came while the high judge read the formal charges, to paint the sign of the Sword in white upon Shuiv's chest. Somewhere behind the high half-wall, one of the farmers was marked in the same fashion, just as the other would be wearing the hammer now being painted in red over Meoraq's own heart. He acknowledged the bailiff's murmur of apology for taking such liberties, but scarcely felt the touch. His muscles were tightening, anticipating. He had fought three hundred battles and more; they were all the first and only one.
"—and submit ourselves before You, great Father. We await Your judgment. Do the Swords of Sheul stand ready?"
Meoraq saluted. Beside him, Shuiv did the same.
The bailiff retracted the stair and shut the door to the arena hold. The high judge brought his hammer down against the top of the half-wall with a flat, unimportant rapport and closed the screen. He could see shadows moving as Arug and his farmers drew slightly back, unsure what to expect, and hear the stern rumble of a judge's voice warning them to be still. He closed his eyes as Meoraq the man to clear his mind of these distractions and opened them again as Meoraq the Sword.
As the ranking warrior between them, Meoraq began, drawing his sabks. "I do not spill my brother's blood," he said, facing Shuiv. "I do not bare my blades for men. I am not Uyane Meoraq within this ring."
"I am not Ni'ichok Shuiv." Shuiv smiled as he drew his new, shining knives. There was already color coming in at his throat. "I have no heart and no will in this hour," he said, now in unison with Meoraq. "I know no fear and no vengeance. I am no more than a sword in Your hand, O my Father. Let them behold me, drawn. And let Your will be done."
Shuiv began with the same ritual movements they had been taught as children, stylized expressions of balance more than battle whose familiarity helped to focus and center him. Meoraq's body knew just how to meet him; his mind drifted, counting breaths while he watched his hands work. Their blades clashed and scraped, clashed and fell, clashed and whirled. He knew no urgency, no fear, nothing but the heat rising in his throat and belly, and the simple pleasure that could always be had from indulging in something fine after a long and difficult day.
How long that first, formal stage of battle lasted, he could not say. Shuiv's movements became steadily more ragged as the color at his throat grew stronger. Meoraq could hear his breaths falling roughly out of rhythm, see the fires burning high in his eyes. He knew the moment that Shuiv let go and became the sword in Sheul's hand, but he did not soon follow. So perhaps it was not for him after all, he mused, parrying the younger man's increasingly savage lunges and thinking of the tower of fire. Or if it had been, strange that it should have been all to bring him this far to Tothax only to end him in the arena over a few rows of gruu and some bitter words. Perhaps it was Shuiv who was meant to go on. For a young Sheulteb to take victory over a veteran Sheulek of so grand a House as Uyane was certainly the start of a damned good story.
But his own breaths were coarsening now, his thoughts becoming more difficult to grasp even as they slipped through his mind. He was aware, vaguely, of that curious blankness stealing in while he pondered Shuiv and whatever fate awaited him, replacing words he knew with timeless stretches of empty heat. He stood against it for as long as he could, because the struggle was as glorious as the burning, but his world became a blackness.
He burned.
Fire. He felt it every time, but this time, disturbingly, he saw it. It spilled upwards from the heart of the black, filling his vision and searing at his soul's flesh, brighter than it had been that night on the rooftop of Xheoth. Not beckoning. Demanding. And in that endless moment between Meoraq the man and Meoraq the Sword, there was only stillness and his heart beating and that tower of fire burning his eyes, and he said or heard or perhaps only imagined the word, "sukaga."
It caught in him like a fishing hook, almost familiar...
And then the blackness slipped away again. Weight and substance fell back onto his bones; he staggered, catching blindly at a man's shoulder to steady him until he could see Shuiv's face through the flames that still coursed through him. He looked down, confused, and saw the black blade of one sabk deep in the younger man's chest. He had no idea where the other one was.
The high judge's hammer struck twice, invisible. Meoraq leapt back with a mindless hiss, slashing at the empty air before he could master himself. The fire rose again, but this time, he closed his eyes and made himself breathe until it cooled. Shuiv was dead and Sheul's judgment, known to all. He was Uyane Meoraq once again; the Sword of Sheul was sheathed.
He closed his eyes, counting his breaths the way every boy born to his caste was taught, with the primary verse for the Six. A slow count, they called that. Slow and calm and even. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay and so, 'One for the Prophet, the wide open eye...Two for his brunt and the sign of the fist...'
He couldn't believe he was standing here. His palms ached, but apart from that slight pain, he didn't think he'd even been scratched, although he felt worn enough that surely the battle had been a long one. Shuiv had started to burn so quickly...but not for the honest man, it seemed. And now House Arug had his widow to care for, at least until her infant had opened and Meoraq could judge it for a son or daughter and see it placed accordingly.
'Three for Uyane, the unclad sword...Four for Mykrm, the hammer of his law...Five for Oyan of the ash-stained leaf...'
Ashes...Fire...Like the tower he had seen from Xheoth and followed to Tothax. Like the tower he had seen in the blackness of his burning, where he had never seen anything before. And the word, sukaga...a name, perhaps, but not one he immediately knew. Why was it now so maddeningly familiar?
'Six for Thaliszar and the healing hand...'
It went on from there, but Meoraq started over at one (they only named the low castes to fill out the numbers from seven to ten; the Six were the only verses that mattered) and let his mind wander. By his third slow-count through, he was completely cool and lucid enough to really wonder what he'd done with his other sabk. He cast about for it on the floor while the high judge finished the trial's closing prayers, then went to see if he'd left it buried in the body anywhere odd. He was careful with his brother's body as he turned it. Shuiv's blood was slow, his life gone, but he would not truly be dead until his funeral pyre had been consumed. While he could still feel, he deserved no less than the highest respect.
"Honored one."
Meoraq looked up to see that the bailiff had lowered the stair and now stood before him, offering his sabk. Bloodied.
Meoraq took it and pinched the blade to clean it. "Where was this?" he asked curiously.
The bailiff bowed. "By Sheul's judgment, through the throat of Mihuun."
Meoraq looked up, startled, and saw that the screen wall above him had indeed been battered open. A great deal of blood stained what he could see of the narrow chamber beyond. He looked at his hand, turned it upwards, slowly flexed his fingers. Splinters.
"Having seen that, I think...Ezethu?...will not be quick to bring future disputes to his lord's attention," he remarked, sheathing his sabk to pick them out.
The bailiff bowed again. "Ezethu was first to fall beneath Sheul's judgment, honored one." He paused, clearly wondering if his next words were in bad taste, then lowered his voice and said, "But I think we have finally seen the last of Lord Arug."
Pity it took a man's life to stop a greedy lord from abusing the law, but he was so seldom called to court for good reasons.
Meoraq glanced back, then went and knelt by Shuiv again. He pressed his palm against the still chest and bent his neck in a warrior's bow. "I will envy you, my brother, when you behold our Father's face tonight," he said, and looked up through the high, colored window to the heavens. "Take him, O my Father, and receive him well. He is a good man."
The bailiff grunted approvingly. Not every victor of the arena gave respect to a fallen Sword, but Meoraq did not do it just because it was the custom. Not this time, anyway. He often felt strange in his own skin after a judgment, but this was different. The vision of the burning tower; the word, sukaga; and Shuiv, falling into God's fires right in front of him—everything seemed braided, bound to him, impossibly heavy.
He felt a sudden restlessness, an urge to call for his pack and just leave. Never mind the exarch and never mind whoever it was that had been summoning him half the year. He knew what awaited him in the next room and there was a time when he would have been eager to go to it, but not tonight. Sheul was calling him. Meoraq wanted nothing in this world more than to answer.
But he could not answer from the arena and men were surely waiting to bear Shuiv away for his final rites, so Meoraq finished his respects. He found Shuiv's shining sabks and broke the blades, placing the hilted halves carefully at his feet. He said the Prayer For the Fallen and the first three verses from the Book of the Sword. Then he let the bailiff lead him back into the arena hold.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 22 |
In retrospect, the trouble with Scott started immediately, but it took a few days before Amber caught on to just how bad it was. She knew she was as guilty as everyone else of letting him take over. She also knew that she didn't want to be the one in charge when the whole human race was just forty-eight people on an alien world with a handful of supplies camping in spitting distance of the melted remains of a ship that could very well be radiating cancer into every living thing for miles around. Oh no. Fuck that. Scott could be in charge of that mess all he wanted.
And if there was one thing Scott was good at, it was putting himself in charge. Before the sun came up over the remains of the Pioneer, he'd made two trips to the top of the ridge and compiled a complete inventory of what they had left, which wasn't much but was still more than they should have had.
Tents, for example. All the tents that had been up on the ridge had been incinerated in the Pioneer's explosion. Not just burned. Erased. There was nothing left up there to prove there'd ever been a camp at all except a melted heap of glass and metal that had probably been one of the solar generators. But as bad as that was, it could have worse.
Not knowing how to set up an outpost, Scott had apparently just dumped the supplies in piles wherever he thought he might like to put a building someday. Most of those piles had been up on the ridge, but he did have a number of tents down by the lakeshore, marking the proposed site of the colony's pump house and filtration station, to hold the necessary equipment and materials until he'd decided exactly when and where to begin construction.
"Tents?" Maria interrupted immediately upon hearing this. In her firm, furious tone, Amber heard again her threat to sue the Manifestors and their Director right down to the ground. "You said there weren't enough tents! I was in a sleeping bag and you had more tents the whole time?"
"They're for keeping the equipment dry," Scott answered. "They aren't for personal use."
"Well they are now, bucko. It's pouring! Where are they?"
"I haven't decided how to assign them," said Scott, and whenever Amber thought about it, she always came back to that as the only moment when someone might have been able to put a stop to things. But you can't take out the guy in charge without replacing him. And she did not want that job.
So when people started arguing and those angry voices started climbing and Scott was holding up his hands in an ineffectual bid for silence, Amber said, "That was smart, Scott."
He swung around to glare at her, holding up one hand against the storm—the miraculous storm which had probably saved their lives but which showed no sign of blowing off any time soon.
"I'm not being sarcastic," she told him. "That was smart. If you hadn't set that stuff aside, we wouldn't have anything right now. How many did you save?"
And that was the word that did it. Save. Like he'd planned it. Like he'd pulled them out of the fire with his bare hands and carried them to his desperate people.
Scott squared his shoulders and gave his crewman's jacket a brisk tug. "Six. Two command units and four bivies."
"What the heck is a bivy?" Maria wanted to know.
"How big are they?" Amber asked.
"Not very," someone else answered. Eric Lassiter, one of the soldiers Jonah had sent her. "What he's calling a command unit is just your typical one-room dome tent. Allegedly, it could hold eight people."
"If they were greased up," Crandall added dubiously. "And drunk."
"And a bivy is pretty much a sleeping tube."
"More like a body-condom," inserted Crandall.
"Two people could share one if they were really, really cozy, but even if you packed them all full, most of us are going to be out in the weather."
"Well, that's bullshit!" said Maria, doubtless ready to add a few new names to her list of impending lawsuits for her brother to receive back on Earth.
"No," said Amber, as quietly as the driving wind and rain allowed. "That's just the way it is. Getting mad won't help."
There were mutters, but that was all, and even Maria didn't protest when Scot kept one of the command units for himself, because he was in command. He gave the bivies to the Fleetmen—Eric, Dag, Crandall and Mr. Yao. The last tent, he gave to the women at the end of a chivalrous and deeply concerned speech in which he referred to those women, not just once or twice but at least a dozen times, as resources. And Amber let him. So it was her fault too.
She didn't even get a space in the tent. Despite Eric's assertion that eight people could fit, only six of them actually did and there were eleven women. Amber didn't try to bully her way in, because she knew she was fat and didn't need to hear it again.
As for the rest of the equipment Scott had set aside, they had another solar generator, but nothing that really needed running except the water purifier, which was useless because they didn't have any intake hoses. They also had six crates of irrigation pipes so they could run purified water all through the camp, but none of the joints or valves. They had everything they needed for the pump, except, of course, the motor and belts. They had a power mixer without a battery and enough bags of concrete to pour the floor for the pump house, currently being stored in all those one-man tents so the rain couldn't turn them into sixty-pound bricks. The rest of their provisions were comprised of 1500 other-flavored ration bars packed together with emergency blankets, flashlights and fire-strikers in about thirty duffel bags in assorted neon colors with the Manifest Destiny logo on the side. And one medikit.
The medikit belonged to Mr. Yao and during the next morning's debriefing, which Amber was not invited to but attended anyway, he opened it up and read out its contents: Six rolls of sterile gauze, one box of medium grade self-sticking bandages, a tube of burn relief gel, a tube of antibacterial ointment, a bottle of low-dose aspirin, a bottle of extra-strength aspirin, and a dermispray pen with twelve doses of nalfentypine.
"What's that?" Scott wanted to know.
"A synthetic opiate used for pain management."
"That's part of the kit?" Eric asked, not quite smiling.
"Of course not," said Mr. Yao. "It came with the surgical supplies you brought, but they were lost on the ridge. This was with my personal effects."
"And how did that happen?"
Mr. Yao looked at him without emotion. "In my medical opinion, I required sedation."
Eric held up his hands in surrender.
"I require sedation," Crandall said hopefully.
Mr. Yao ignored him and looked instead at Scott. "I want you to know that I have this, and I want you all to know where to find it and how to use it, because this is now the only source of anything like anesthetic we possess. But I think it would be best not to let everyone know of its existence, because it would also make an extremely effective form of suicide."
"So does that lake," said Amber, the first remark she'd made at that meeting.
"Miss Bierce, if you're going to eavesdrop, at least do it quietly. We're trying to have a debriefing."
Mr. Yao ignored Scott and turned to her. "Drowning oneself, like hanging oneself with one's shirtsleeve or cutting one's wrists with broken glass or any number of options presently available to us, requires a great deal more courage and determination than putting a dermisprayer against one's arm and pressing a button. I would rather save it for our first broken leg than make it available to those seeking a quick, painless way out of our present circumstance."
"Good point." And because he was glaring at her, Amber looked at Scott and said, "I guess it should stay here, huh?"
They were all in Scott's tent at the time, the command unit, the only place they could all squeeze together out of the drumming rain and wind. Scott blinked around all the same, as if he expected a bank vault to open up behind him. "Why here?" he asked.
"Shouldn't the really important stuff be with the guy in charge?"
Mr. Yao waited, holding the medikit on his lap.
"Well, I...guess I have more room," said Scott cautiously.
Mr. Yao passed it over.
"So...So I guess I'm in charge of the food and stuff too?"
That was a lot more unsettling than letting the man babysit the first aid supplies.
"Someone ought to be," Amber said, hoping her hesitation hadn't been too obvious. "And the rations do need to be kept dry."
"And away from hoarders," said Eric. "Because there will be hoarders."
Amber started to nod her agreement, then noticed they were all looking at her. "You know, every now and then, I manage to go two, sometimes three whole minutes without eating," she snapped, and they all looked away again. "I know the food is finite. I also think we need to start thinking now about what we're going to eat when it's gone."
Scott frowned at her, but the severity of this effort only made him look younger and more uncertain. "You mean..." He eyed the other men in the tent and lowered his voice a little. "...people?"
Amber rocked back. "What?"
"We don't have to talk about this until someone actually dies," said Eric.
"Oh my God," Amber said, staring at both of them. "No, I meant looking for fish or rabbits or whatever freak moose thing was shouting up the place last night! People? You thought I wanted to eat people?!"
"We'll get to the native flora and fauna as soon as we're able to arrange teams for reconnaissance and study," Scott told her, blushing. "And we were already looking into that, so please be quiet, Miss Bierce. I know you think you're contributing, but you're a civilian here and you're distracting us from the real problems under discussion."
She could have pressed the matter. None of the Fleetmen seemed eager to jump in, and other than making sure the public was kept under control, Scott himself seemed to have run out of steam. So she could have easily forced them all to face the food issue head-on. Instead, she sat back and let the whole thing drop.
Scott opened the medikit and studied the contents, then closed it again and looked around at them. "Then I guess the only other thing we need to talk about is the Pioneer's salvage prospects. Do I have a volunteer to head that team?"
"Salvage?" Amber checked the others, but they seemed as stunned as she. "Are you serious?"
"The escape bays were designed to survive catastrophic failure of the ship. The beacons may still be recoverable."
Amber stared at him, utterly unable to make those words make any kind of sense, given the situation. "Mr. Scott," she said at last, making a real effort to speak softly, reasonably. "How far are we from the ship?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Mr. Lassiter, then? Mr. Crandall? What are we, about five miles?"
"Three, maybe," said Eric, and Crandall shrugged and nodded.
"Okay. Three miles." Amber pointed through the tent wall in the direction of the ridge, which was at that time just lighting up with the grey promise of another day through one hell of a roaring rainstorm. "We were three miles away from the explosion last night, Mr. Scott, and you said our solar generator melted."
His jaw tightened. "The escape bays are heat-proof up to, I don't know, thousands of degrees. The beacons are our only hope of rescue, Miss Bierce, and they could be all right."
"Okay," she said, although she personally thought this was horseshit. "Say the escape bays are intact. It could happen. But they're going to be intact at the center of the melted pile of slag that used to be the rest of the ship. How are we going to get to them?"
The other men looked at Scott. He flushed and glared back at her.
"Jonah...Lieutenant Lamarc said that even if the beacons could be launched, they'd need the guidance system on the Pioneer to find Earth," said Amber. "And we don't have that anymore. Mr. Scott, I'm sorry, but I think we can cross rescue completely off the list."
"I'm not prepared to do that, Miss Bierce," Scott said stiffly.
"And then there's the little matter of all this rain."
"That you want to go hiking in," Scott interrupted.
"Yes, I do. Before it floods the lake we're camping next to." Amber hesitated, unsure whether she really wanted to bring out the big guns yet, but in the end, she just couldn't not say it. "And before all the toxic seepage from the Pioneer washes into the water we're drinking. And before you ask, no, I don't know for a fact there's anything seeping out of it, but it seems like a pretty goddamn good bet this morning, doesn't it?"
"I don't need to hear the swearing," said Scott.
"It could be happening, though." Eric unfolded himself and stood up as straight as the tent allowed. "Okay, Bierce. If there's a vote involved here, you just got mine. But we can't just pack up and go, we've got to have a plan." He paused, then glanced at Scott and said, "Right?" in the same careful way that Amber told him he could keep the food.
Scott scowled. "Sure, as far as that goes, which is why we need to prioritize our efforts. Organize teams. Investigate our options."
Amber pressed a hand over her eyes and tried very hard not to either sigh out loud or shake her head. "We don't have time for that."
"I'd rather take a little extra time than charge stupidly out into the wilderness without any kind of plan."
"And thanks to you," Eric inserted gently, "we have at least the beginnings of that plan."
Scott's frown went crooked, distracted. "What? We do?"
"When we scouted this place out yesterday, we found several watersheds that emptied into the lake here," Eric explained, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder at the tent wall. "I suggest we follow the biggest of them upstream and get to high ground."
"I am not willing to abandon the ship," said Scott, also standing up.
"It's not going anywhere," Eric argued. "But for the moment, it's probably still burning on the inside and still very much a threat to us. I think we'd all feel better if we got some distance and got out of the imminent flood zone, but I agree that it's important that we don't go so far that we lose our water source, because I was looking yesterday, and the water we're camping next to was the only water I could see."
He turned to Amber, directing his next words only to her. "I know it must make you nervous to be here. I know you must be thinking of pretty much everything that might happen. I know. But if we get too far away from the water, we're going to die. Not might. Will. We have a purifier—"
"But we don't have water," said Amber, thinking of Jonah, who had said the same thing. She nodded, sighed, and then shook her head, her shoulders slumping. "So just sit around and talk, is that all we're going to do?"
"And this is why I didn't want you in here," Scott remarked.
"Just be patient," said Eric. "Let us figure a few things out. I know you want to do something, but the day after we've all seen our ship blow up is the wrong time to expect everyone out there to pull it together and start marching in line."
"I get it. I don't like it, but I get it."
"You don't have to like it," said Scott. "And I'll tell you right now that I'd better not hear you running off your mouth out there about toxic seepage and floods, trying to scare people into doing what you want them to do."
"Running my mouth?" Amber shook her head and then just had to laugh before she got pissed. "You're in charge, for Christ's sake! Want me to go out there and build a rooftop so I can shout it?"
The soldiers all looked at each other. Crandall snickered.
"I'll let you know when I've made my decision," said Scott, moving to unzip the tent for them. "This meeting is over and Miss Bierce?"
"I know, Everly," she sighed, heaving herself up. "Don't let the flap hit me in the ass on my way out. Let me tell you something."
"Bierce," said Eric warningly, but Crandall, grinning, said, "Let her talk, man."
"Sooner or later, you are going to have to say something that people won't want to hear," Amber said. "And if you can't handle that, you shouldn't be in charge."
Scott tried to stare her down, but she refused to look away. Eric watched them for a while and then heaved a loud sigh and said, "Don't we have enough real problems here? Come on, you two, lighten up." He pushed his way between them and walked out. The other Fleetmen followed. Soon, Amber and Scott were alone and for just a few seconds, she had the chance to either apologize and try to put things right between them or run after Eric and try to form some kind of future that didn't include 'Commander' Everly Scott.
She did neither. She left. So if there was blame, and she knew there was, she shared it.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 23 |
It rained for days. Amber lost track of how many. They had no computers anymore, no digireaders, no handhelds, not even wristwatches. They talked about hours or minutes, but in truth there was no time on this world—just one endless day cycling between grey and black, filled with wind and rain.
The lake started rising, and on the day the water first climbed over the mudbank and reached the grass, Scott did two things. He gave the order to pack up the camp and move upstream, and he cut Amber's rations from two bars to one. This, when she knew that everyone else was getting three.
"What the hell did I do?" she demanded.
"This isn't personal, Miss Bierce," he'd said, handing Nicci a ration.
"The hell it isn't! What, it rains for six days so I go to bed without supper? What the fuck is that about?"
"I don't need to hear the swearing, Miss Bierce."
In spite of everything, Amber had managed to keep a pretty good grip on herself. She had neither turned into a shell-shocked sleepwalker nor a senseless hysteric. For days, she had slept without complaint in a raging downpour with nothing but a piece of tinfoil to wrap herself in. She'd made a point of supporting the man who was incapable of wiping his ass without calling a meeting or holding a meeting without calling it a debriefing, and now he was punishing her because she'd dared to suggest that rain could cause flooding.
She lost her temper. Not a lot, not at first, but just like the rain, once it started pouring out, there was no end in sight.
"Don't you fucking walk away from me, Space-Scout," she snapped. "I'll tell you when we're done talking."
Scott stopped in his tracks and turned around. Nicci shuffled back, her eyes huge, clutching her ration so tightly that she'd pinched it in half through the wrapper.
"You don't get to take away my food just because I was right about needing to get out of this valley."
"First of all, moving this camp has always been under discussion. You had nothing to do with it." Scott zipped up his duffel bag and slung it decisively over his shoulder. "And secondly, I'm not cutting your rations because of your attempts to sabotage my authority here, I'm cutting them—"
"Sabotage your authority?"
"I'm cutting them because—"
"You were supposed to hold the rations because you were hogging the biggest tent, that's all! You were supposed to keep them dry, not use them as your own personal gold-star stickers for all the people who kiss your ass!"
Nicci took another step back. She looked as if she might be on the verge of tears. "Please don't fight!"
"No one's fighting, Nichole," Scott assured her, then turned his best in-charge frown on Amber. "Miss Bierce, you are grossly overweight."
"Grossly?" she echoed. She looked down at herself and up at him again, as derailed as she'd been when the medico back on Earth had called her obese. The next argument that wanted to come out of her wasn't even about him, but just that she'd lost sixty pounds, goddammit, and how overweight could she possibly still be? Grossly?!
Scott seized the opportunity of her angry silence to make another speech, half-turning away from her to include all the other people watching them as he said, "It wasn't all that long ago that you decided you had to lecture me on how a leader should be willing to sacrifice his popularity when he makes a command decision. Well, we all have to make sacrifices, Miss Bierce. We have limited rations and frankly, you can live off your reserves for a while."
"I'm fat, so I don't need to eat ever again, is that what you're saying?"
"Hey." Eric stepped up between them, both hands raised and empty. "Both of you. Calm down."
"I'm not upset," said Scott. "There's nothing to get upset about. The facts are these: A human being can survive without food for at least three weeks, provided he or she has plenty of water, which we have."
"Now wait a minute," said Mr. Yao.
"And judging from the looks of you, you could probably go twice that, easy. Now we've got a long hike ahead of us, Miss Bierce, so why don't you stop complaining and get ready to go."
Nicci grabbed at her arm. "Please!"
Amber shook her off. "These aren't command decisions, damn it! This is just you being a dick!"
Scott did not immediately reply. Instead, he reached out to touch Nicci's shoulder, his brow furrowed with concern. "Are you all right, Nichole?"
Nicci blinked at him. So did Amber.
"I didn't hit her, for Christ's sake!" she sputtered. "Why wouldn't she be?"
"Mr. Gunnarson, can you take Nichole and see if you can't find her some tents or something to carry?"
Dag glanced at Amber. "Sure," he said, beckoning to Nicci. "Come on, people. Show's over and we got a lot of shit to shift."
Scott waited, watching while the crowd loosened up and milled away. Amber waited too, watching only him. When they were mostly alone, except for the other Fleetmen, he finally turned back and faced her again.
"I'm warning you," said Amber. "This is not the way you want to play this."
"Miss Bierce, I'm willing to continue to take care of you, but I'm not going to stand here and entertain your selfish little temper tantrums. This is still a colony—"
"It's a what?"
"—and now more than ever it is absolutely essential that we support one another in the spirit of that colony. You do not have the right to ask the rest of us to suffer the consequences of your choice to be obese."
There was that word again. Amber sent a single furiously baffled glance down at herself—this is not obese damn it i fit in the sleeper i fit in your stupid clothes this is not obese this is just plush—and when she looked up again, Scott was walking away.
"Let him go."
Amber swung around, ready to throw all her embarrassment and anger right in Eric's face. "And thank you so much for standing up for me!"
"Come on, this isn't personal."
"That," she snarled, pointing at Scott's retreating back, "was personal! If the food is so limited and we've all got three weeks before we start starving, why am I the only one losing my rations?"
"I'll talk to him about that," said Mr. Yao.
"What did you expect?" asked Eric, looking pained. "You've been out here convincing people the whole valley's going to flood out when we told you how important it was to keep people calm."
"What? I have not!"
"We've had, like, six people bring that up in the last two days," Crandall said.
"Because it's raining, you idiots!" she exploded. "We're in a goddamn valley taking in all the goddamn runoff that's pouring over the goddamn fucking hills! I don't have to say a fucking word! Everyone can see the water rising!"
The Fleetmen exchanged frowning glances.
"I'll talk to him," said Mr. Yao again and this time, he headed after Scott.
"So don't tell me it wasn't personal!" snapped Amber. "You just admitted he thinks I'm plotting against him!"
"No, at the moment he only thinks your bitching is bad for morale," Crandall said. "If he thought you were really plotting, he'd toss you out on your butt."
"He can't do that!"
They looked at her. Crandall laughed a little. After a moment, Eric swiped rain out of his face, sighed, then looked her in the eye. "Have you ever been popular in your life?"
She blinked again. "What?"
"Popular. Have you ever been. In your whole life."
"No," she admitted, puzzled. "But I'm still standing."
"Yeah, yeah. Stick to yes or no, Bierce. Have you ever been popular?"
"No."
"Have you ever had any reason to think that being popular doesn't matter in social situations?"
Her eyes narrowed.
He waited.
"No," she said.
"Is this a social situation?" he asked patiently.
"It's a fucking survival situation!"
"Aside from that."
She glared over her shoulder at the camp, which was already coming down and being crated up. Dag was still with Nicci, trying to teach her how to bundle up a tent when all she seemed willing to do was hold one.
"Making friends here matters," said Eric, coming up beside her. "Making friends with Scott matters. You're a smart girl, Bierce. Surely you've got to see that."
"I'm smart enough to see that he doesn't know what he's doing. Why the hell aren't you the one giving orders? You were trained for this!"
Crandall laughed again.
Eric looked at her for a long time as the rain drilled their hair flat against their heads. Then he said, without expression, "Yeah, I was Fleet. And when I enlisted, they taught me how to shoot guns we don't have, run computers we don't have, pilot vehicles we don't have, and keep the peace on a ship we don't have. I'm not the hero here, Bierce. I don't want those people down there to look at me like I am. When it goes bad here, the guy in charge is probably going to get strung up from the nearest tree."
"We are one more disaster away from a mob as we speak," Crandall agreed, crookedly smiling. "I think the space-scout is finally starting to wise up to that and that's bad for you, sweets. He's going to need someone else to blame when the shit hits."
"Keep your head down and your mouth shut," Eric warned. "For what it's worth, I actually think you've got your head on pretty straight, but I'm not putting my ass on the line to cover yours. Regardless of what that loudmouth says, this isn't a colony. This is a whole new world, Bierce, and it's every man for himself."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 24 |
They hiked for days in the rain, moving the camp piece by heavy piece, following a storm-swelled fall of water up the eastern slope and away from the Pioneer. It shouldn't have taken as long as it did, but Scott refused to leave anything behind. The purifier, the generator, even the stupid bags of concrete—everything was the property of Manifest Destiny, everything was necessary to the settlement of a self-sustaining colony, and everything came with them.
Amber did not object. She carried her concrete all day and slept in the rain all night and took the single ration she was allotted and did not so much as mutter under her breath. Now and then, Scott came out of his tent long enough to say inspiring things about the indomitable spirit of exploration or the human will to thrive and survive, and it bothered her to see so many people not only listening but smiling and nodding and sometimes clapping their hands, but she didn't say anything.
The rain began to wind down the same day that they actually made it over the top and started down the other side. The view was pretty much what it had been on the other side of the valley, except that there wasn't an enormous skid-mark slashed through the middle of it or a pile of melted wreckage entombing fifty thousand human beings. It was just grass. Brown grass and tangles of trees stretching out for God knew how many miles beneath the low, rolling clouds, uninterrupted by even the most ambiguous sign of civilization.
But there was life. The total lack of cities, roads or any other distraction made the small groups of animals grazing on the plains impossible to miss. To Amber, whose personal experience with animals could be almost entirely summed up by dogs, cats, rats and roaches, they didn't look too scary. Long-necked bodies and four thin legs made them look more or less like deer, except that they also had long tails. Instead of antlers, they had a set of back-sweeping horns, in addition to which they also had two huge jutting tusks. Their shiny, scale-covered skin was brownish on top and black underneath, with a white stripe on their bellies that only showed if they stood up on their hind legs, which two of them kept doing, gronking and clawing at each other with their hoofless, taloned feet.
People began to murmur in an uneasy way.
"They're not going to bother us tonight," said Scott firmly. "Let's establish our camp and secure a perimeter. Over there."
He pointed at a hilltop not too steep or too far off, with a few trees around it, but not so many that they had grown into impassable thorny walls. It wasn't right up by the stream anymore, but maybe that was a good thing, if the native animals decided to wander over in the middle of the night for a drink.
That first night wasn't bad. The wind never let up, but no one complained; it felt good just to dry out a little. There was enough deadwood lying around to start a couple fires and Scott pulled out a pocketknife, of all things, so that people could take turns cutting grass and dried thorns to keep burning. Dag roasted his ration on a stick, so a couple other people did too. Amber didn't have another ration. She sat next to Nicci, watching her sister try to heat bites of concentrated protein supplement on a stick, and listened to the scaly deer-things bawl and gash at each other.
When it got dark and the talk died down and Nicci wrapped herself inside her laughably ineffective emergency blanket and fell asleep, Amber picked up one of the roasting sticks and fingered thoughtfully at its heat-hardened point.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 25 |
Although the right to move freely between the cities of Gann had been a favorite dream as a boy, Meoraq the man did not enjoy travel. He didn't hate it; travel was an inevitability of being Sheulek, which was so great a sign of his divine Father's favor that he could hate nothing that came of it. But the distance between the cities of his circuit was vast and the land that separated them, gone ugly with the coming winter. The wind was always blowing—frequently in his face—and at this time of year, the steady rain necessitated the choice of walking on the road and miring himself in mud or cutting across the wildlands and soaking himself to the hips in wet brush. Meoraq had only one comfort as he walked and it was the knowledge that he was not going home to take possession of House Uyane. The extraordinary honor of entering Xi'Matezh and hearing the voice of God was shamefully secondary, but he was praying about that.
So he was deep in the wildlands and wet to the hips, comfortably numbed within his own mind but keeping an idle eye out for danger, alone and expecting nothing but to stay alone for all the days of his journey, when Meoraq saw what was probably the strangest thing he'd ever seen.
His circuit of service was a wide one, encompassing twenty-three of the fifty-one cities in Yroq, and he had been predisposed to wander in his first years of service. He had explored many ruins and seen many forbidden relics, but after close inspection of this new thing, Meoraq decided it wasn't old. Many of the machines the Ancients left behind them still functioned, maintaining themselves with surprising success even after all this time, but all of them showed their age. No matter how clean a thing was or how often repaired, age got in. The air itself could corrode a thing, given enough time, but this looked new.
Of course, men did fall from Sheul's laws. Those who lived in wretchedness and sin outside the city walls did occasionally try to remake the machines. Some even succeeded to a small degree. But this was no machine. He didn't know what it was, but it was no machine.
What it looked like was a bedsheet, blown into a hsul tree where it had been so hopelessly tangled in its thorny branches that the wind could not carry it out again. It was not a bedsheet, however. It was metal. At least, it looked like metal, the shiny grey-white of purest silver, save that it was as pliant as fine cloth and thinner even than a sheet of paper. Although the thorns of the hsul had pierced it and the wind torn its unbound edge to streamers, Meoraq suspected it had begun as a single squarish piece.
He had no idea what it was supposed to be, but clearly he had been meant to find it. Meoraq made his camp there and sat in the open mouth of his tent most of the afternoon, watching the silvery ribbons of the windblown thing snap and flash. When he slept, he dreamed of the tower of fire rising in the night, beckoning.
The silver sheet remained unfathomable by morning's light and so Meoraq left it. He considered cutting a piece to carry with him, but ultimately decided against it. The thing could not be a relic of the Ancients or the construct of men; therefore, it was a sign from Sheul and as such, it was probably a sin to cut it. It made him uneasy to think that there was nothing in the Word about such manifestations and whether it was safe to touch them, but this was a pilgrimage and tests were to be expected.
His journey continued. The land resumed its customary view of nothing, but his mind at least was occupied. He meditated as he walked, wondering what the silver sheet had been meant to represent to him and feeling more and more like he'd failed in his first ordeal, but he was not so distracted that he failed to see the footprints when he came to fill his travel-flasks at a stream.
So. The wildlands might appear lifeless, the same way they appeared barren, but even as the rolling sameness of the landscape was made up of grass and trees and beasts and a thousand living things, every shadowed dip or stand of trees could hide a raiding party. No, it was not curiosity that made Meoraq crouch down to read the marks better, but the alarm that came from seeing, not a ragged band of six or twelve or even twenty, but a well-shoed troop with numbers great enough to trample down the stream-bank four body-lengths to one side.
He thought of Szadt, the only raider he'd ever heard of that had commanded numbers such as these. He knew Szadt was dead and buried deep in Gann's cold grip—another brick to add to Uyane Rasozul's wall of legend—but the thought bit at him all the same. Sheul's Word said that each generation was given one great plague, one scourge, and one blessing. Szadt had been the scourge of his father; perhaps this one was Meoraq's own.
He filled only one flask, keeping his burden light, and followed the tracks upstream. He made no camp that night, set no fires. He ate bites of cuuvash when he required them and drank only what his body needed. He found the ash-pits of their many fires, the flattened fields of their many messy encampments, the rain-soaked and half-hidden piles of their stinking dung, and before the sun had reached its highest point on that next day, he had found them.
Soon after, Meoraq lay on his belly in the brush beneath a small stand of prairie trees, trusting to the tall grass to hide him as he watched them. He did not count them; he could see at a glance there were more than he could fight. He saw no sentries, which he did not trust given the size of this band, and so did not dare to approach closer than this ridge, but even at this distance he could see that there was something wrong with them.
They could not have been long in this camp, he decided. There were no hides hanging from the trees, no bone-midden, no sign of any shelter apart from a handful of flimsy, silvery tents. He could see crates, presumably for trade (for there would always be men wicked enough to develop that evil hunger for phesok and strong drink), but no sleds or carts. The mystery of the curious depth of the tracks he had followed seemed to be solved, but the mystery of why they were carrying their goods in arms only deepened. He supposed some of those he saw might be slaves, but all the prints he'd seen were those of very well-made boots and what raider would shoe a slave?
Then there was the matter of their dress. They did not wear hides, nor could he make out the lines of any belt or harness cut across their colorful clothing. He could see no weapons strapped to any back or slung in a communal heap for the easy reach of all. In fact, many of them appeared to be gloved and hooded, because what he could see of their hands and faces looked pale. Not merely grey, as with youth or bad diet, but really pale. He couldn't imagine how they could be covering their faces like that and still see.
Then one of them got up and turned to the side and Meoraq realized they had not covered their faces after all.
They had none.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 26 |
At the center of camp, unaware of the new eyes watching them from the shadows, the survivors of the crash of the Pioneer prepared for their first Stone Age hunt. Amber was right in the thick of them, heating up the tips of the spears she'd helped cut earlier that morning. Scott had deigned to give her his approval, and she knew she'd ought to be wired up with the thrill of that victory if nothing else, but she wasn't. She wouldn't leave camp at all today if it weren't for the fact that she knew Scott expected her to chicken out when it came time to actually get out there and stab a scaly deer. He probably already had some kind of speech prepared to the effect that she was a whiny little bitch and if she didn't like the way he did the leading around here, she could leave.
She didn't need Scott's help to feel like shit today, anyway. That had started last night, when the skies ripped open and dumped what felt like a bucket of water directly over her head. The rain hadn't lasted long, but it had been just exactly like standing in the shower while it was happening. Or lying in the shower, rather. Covered in an emergency blanket that couldn't keep the wet out no matter how she wrapped herself in it, so tired that she didn't even care that she was lying in rainwater, Amber had thought she felt as bad as it was humanly possible to feel.
And then she'd heard Eric, jogging back from a brief midnight trip to the bushes, pause beside Maria's blanket. "You sure you don't want to get cozy?" he'd asked. He'd had to shout it, really. So much rain. "Two people can fit if they're cozy."
Amber raised her head to watch, expecting a tirade that might actually end in some kind of fair tent rotation since it wasn't coming from Amber herself. Instead, Maria threw back her blanket almost at once, snarling, "I am so ready to get cozy. Let's go."
If Eric was surprised by the speed and ease of this capitulation, he hid it well. He helped her up, grabbed her pack, and the two of them splashed through the soggy grass to his bivy. It bucked and rolled for a few minutes as they worked their way in and then the flap zipped shut.
Amber put her head back down and listened to their two voices, unintelligible beneath the rain. In the dark, she could make out only the faintest outline of the bivy. When it started moving, she closed her eyes. She pulled her emergency blanket over her ears so the rain could hammer out the identity of the women who went to the other bivies. She just put her arm around Nicci to make sure she couldn't be one of them. She pretended not to know why when Nicci started crying.
And she slept, eventually, because she was just so damned tired.
She woke up before dawn, soaked to the pruny skin, and hobbled into the bushes to pee. She thought the low ache in her belly was hunger right up until she got her pants down and saw the blood.
Terror woke her all the way up before she realized what she was looking at. Of course. Her implant was gone and the stupid umbilicus in the Sleeper had been giving her works a tune-up and oil all the way here, wherever here was. She wasn't dying; she'd gotten her period. Her very first period. Wearing a pair of white pants.
Motherfuck.
"Suck it up, little girl," she hissed at herself, absolutely disgusted. "Grow a goddamn sense of proportion. This shouldn't even make your list of problems."
So she went back for her duffel bag and took it a little deeper into the trees. She pulled some grass and wadded it into a pad of sorts and stuffed that in her panties. Off came the white pants with the red badge of womanhood stamped across the crotch and on went her only pair of jeans. As for the evidence, she stuffed it under the exposed roots of one of the trees, scraping up handfuls of wet earth to push into the hole until it was good and buried. She felt guilty doing it since they were perfectly good pants, but she was never going to get that blood out and if she had to listen to just one joke, she was going to have to kill someone. After washing the (blood) mud off her hands at the stream, she'd gone back to camp, walking right past Scott and his loyal lieutenants at their morning debriefing so she could curl up in her blanket and pretend nothing had happened.
She lay there while the sun crawled higher behind the clouds, wondering if it was supposed to feel like this. She'd had the implant since she was ten—God bless Measure 34 and Zero Tolerance—and at the moment, she felt like she could cheerfully give up anything, even her place on a lifeboat back to Earth, to get the stupid thing back. Second-grade sex-ed was a long time ago; she couldn't remember how long this was supposed to last, only that it would happen again about once a month for the rest of her miserable fucking life. Was it normal to hurt like this? How much blood was she going to lose? Was there something she should be doing besides just packing her panties with grass and waiting for it to be over? She'd gone to so many stupid seminars preparing her for life in a colony that were about as useful now as that solar generator they were lugging around, and she'd never even thought about reading up on what was going to happen to her own damn body!
Naturally, it had been later that morning, when she could not have cared less, that Scott gave the speech Amber had been waiting for—the ration bars were almost gone and it was time to learn how to catch dinner. "Miss Bierce has volunteered to make spears," he'd said at the end of it, and there she sat, hugging her cramping stomach in one arm and Nicci in the other, wishing he'd take that pocketknife he was holding out to her so gallantly and pound it right up his ass.
She made the spears. It wasn't as easy as she'd thought it would be. The first set of sticks she was able to break off the trees were way too small once they'd had their points cut. The next set—deadfall branches she'd picked off the ground—seemed okay as she did the carving and heating, but every one of them broke when Scott sauntered over to give them a practice throw, and as much as she'd wanted to sock him for doing that, even she had to admit he was right when he pointed out that if they'd break that easy, they'd be no good as a weapon. But three seemed to be the charm and the day was only half-over. The deer drifted back and forth across the plains as they had for days now, but never went far. It was almost like they were waiting for them.
"How are we doing on those spears, Miss Bierce?"
"I'm doing fine, Everly," said Amber, testing the point of a hot spear before setting it aside in the Finished pile with the other six. "How many have you made?"
It didn't seem to embarrass him. If anything, his officious little smirk widened. "You asked for this job, remember? You practically begged for it."
"I remember. That was the day you called me a pig."
"I did not." But he looked to see if anyone else was close enough to hear. When he saw a few frowns pointed their way, he blushed. "Miss Bierce, if you can't do what you promised to do, that's all right. I'll understand if your physical limitations—"
"Godammit, I am not too fat to make spears!"
"I never said that either, Miss Bierce, but you are clearly having difficulty. Instead of getting angry with me, why don't you tell me what the problem is?"
'At the moment, it's the jackass breathing down my neck,' Amber thought. Aloud, she said, "I'm just trying to finish this. What are you trying to do?"
"Have a civil conversation with someone who is determined to cause trouble in this colony." Scott heaved a sigh. "There is absolutely no reason for this, you know."
"For what?"
"This." Scott waved irritably at the sky, as if her question were a distracting fly. "I get it, okay? I understand."
Amber felt her eyes narrowing. "You understand what?"
"Why you're like this."
Had he found her pants? Amber made herself pick up another spear, even as she told herself that this was probably not a good time to fill her hands with weapons. Fat jokes she could handle, if not entirely with good grace. If he pulled out a period joke, she was clubbing him.
"I understand that you feel like you have to be a bitch because you think that people will take you more seriously if they think you're strong."
She let out a laugh before she could help herself. He hadn't found her pants. He was just being his usual dicky self. "I think we're done with this conversation."
"No, we're not. This is something we should have said a long time ago. Amber." He came and put his hand on her shoulder, did it like he was knighting her. His expression was that of a bold and rugged space adventurer comforting his distressed damsel—noble and determined, with just the right degree of pity. "We're going to take care of you, Amber. You and all the other girls. You're our most precious resource."
"What?" she said flatly.
"This is still a colony," said Scott. His hand was still on her shoulder. "Only we're not in it for the five-year contract anymore and you are one of only eleven wombs. We've been talking about this."
"Wombs."
"And we've made some difficult decisions regarding our duty here." Scott ran his commanding eyes across his gallant colonists. "It may be our immediate goal to persevere, but our ultimate goal hasn't changed from the day we boarded the Pioneer. It's not just about living, surviving. It's about preserving our lives, yes, and our way of life, our very future. Yes, Miss Bierce, we have a duty...and we're going to have to be mature about this."
"Says the man about to order people to fuck," said Amber, and quite a few people flinched, just like that wasn't where that little speech was going. "Were you planning to pass us out like the tents or let everyone draw straws? Let me guess: Your lieutenants get the first pick?"
Maria looked at Eric. He did not look back at her.
"You're right, Scott," Amber said, removing his hand from her shoulder. "This is a conversation we should have had before now. Because it seems that someone actually has to point out to you that eleven wombs plus one or two hundred years equals so much inbreeding that it ain't even funny. This is not a colony."
"And what is it, then? What is it you expect all these people—" A sweep of his arm included the whole camp, quite a few of whom stood quietly up and moved a little closer to him. Taking sides. "—to do, Miss Bierce? Just stand around waiting to die?"
"No, Everly, I expect us to stop standing around and start finding a way to live! Picking out who to screw ought to be dead last on our list of priorities, right after building a goddamn musical theater and casting for The King and I! Clean water! Food! Shelter from this constant cold, windy piss we're stuck in! That ought to be where your head is at, not in my pants!"
"Oh believe me, nobody here is looking forward to getting in your pants." Scott gave that a dramatic pause, then added, "Although God knows there's room for two or three in there once you're out of them."
"Another fat joke," said Amber, rolling her eyes. "If you can't quit the name-calling, can you at least pick a new name?"
Several female voices called agreement and a few of the men standing behind Scott slunk off and sat down again.
Scott noticed. He glanced around, flustered and trying not to show it.
"You're losing your crew, Commander," said Amber.
"No one ever taught you when to shut up, did they?" He looked at her again, almost but not quite sneering, and dropped his voice until it was just for the two of them. "You want to call this a win, you go right ahead. But there is no future in all your self-righteous talk about what we eat and where we sleep. There's a future in fucking. So you give it a week. Give it two. And then you get ready to spread that butter because things are going to change."
He waited, just in case she wanted to get the punches started, but she turned her back on him instead, since that had always been the best way to chap Nicci's ass when they fought. They both walked away, but it sure didn't feel over.
"All right, people." Commander Everly Scott, in charge once more, clapped his hands to get people's attention just like the argument itself hadn't done that. "Volunteer hunters, front and center. Miss Bierce will be in charge—"
So it could be all her fault when it failed.
"Dick," Amber muttered, picking up her last spear and throwing it down again on top of the Finished pile without bothering to test it.
Nicci came and sat down beside her, but she was looking back at Scott. "What are you going to do?"
"Get a deer." Amber clapped a hand to her cramping belly and rubbed hard, giving herself something painful to feel to try and avoid throwing up out of sheer, messy misery. "Or die trying."
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 27 |
Amber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him with them.
So now he was here and he was staring at her. And that was okay, because honestly, she was staring back at him.
She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she'd first seen the scaly deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.
Lizardman was perhaps a derogatory term. It was also the only one that fit. There was nothing wholly recognizable about his features, nothing she could point at and say with authority that looked like a crocodile or a komodo dragon or an iguana, but lizard summed it all up nicely. It was the 'man' bit that bothered her.
She was pretty sure he was a man, anyway, or at least a male. Masculinity was a stamp over the whole of his body: his lean and muscular build, the craggy scars cut into his scales, even the predatory way he had of crouching down and holding perfectly still while he stared at her—none of it was any guarantee of gender on an alien, but all of it screamed male to Amber's eye.
So he—if he was a he—was a biped and essentially humanoid, with two legs and two arms and no tail. His was a gladiator's body: a long, V-shaped chest, heavily scarred and ridiculously muscle-wrapped, that tapered into a flat stomach and narrow hips. His skin was the smooth, scaled hide of a snake rather that the rough one of an alligator, but however you looked at them, they were scales, black and shiny. But his hands had only three fingers, and they were fingers, not claws. His legs looked like normal legs, and although he had a habit of walking forward on the balls of his feet, they weren't all bent backwards and bestial. He was even wearing boots.
The fact that he wore clothes had a way of wanting to boggle in Amber's mind, as if the toughness of his scales rendered further covering superfluous and never mind the man's modesty. He had pants stitched out of dun-brown hides with a wide leather belt to hold it on, and a harness over his largely-naked chest that seemed to serve mostly as an anchor for his hammered metal shoulder-guards. Apart from that, and the boots, he wore only weapons: a pair of short knives strapped to his bulging biceps, a hook-shaped sword clipped to his belt so it hung over one equally-bulging thigh, one broad, highly-polished sword carried in a sheath across his back, and a leather cord around his neck from which hung yet another knife, a small one this time, with an ivory handle. It appeared to be his favorite; his hand had a way of straying there when he muttered to himself. He did a lot of that, although he didn't look crazy when he did it.
Not that she would know crazy when she saw it on a lizard, she supposed, but she was convinced there was a quietness to his expression. Not a calm, maybe, but a quietness. And she would be the first to admit that this was an unreasonable assumption because there was next to nothing that was readable about his face. He had two eyes aimed forward just like hers (except for being too big and for the color, which was a deep red, flecked with gold), under a heavy brow-ridge lined with pebbly scales that became a tight double-row of flexible spines that swept over the top of his skull to about halfway down his neck. His nose and mouth were combined into a dragonish snout, which was broad, lipless, and immoveable except at the corners; she could see the point of his thick, rigid tongue when he opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't figure how he was shaping his words at all. Like a parrot, he just spilled out sound, then closed his mouth again and looked at her. It was easy to imagine she saw frustration mounting in those reptilian eyes as she tried to repeat him, and eventually he quit talking at all.
He just stared at her.
"I'm telling you for the last time, that thing is not sleeping in this camp tonight," Scott announced.
The lizard's eyes shifted to him.
"Good," said Amber. "If it's the last time, maybe now you'll shut up about it."
The lizard's eyes came back to her.
"Miss Bierce—"
Back to Scott.
"—that thing is carrying a dozen weapons. It's dangerous."
"Wow," drawled Amber. "Good eye, Commander. I can only count five myself. Where are the rest?"
The lizard's eyes stayed on Scott. That was weird enough that she glanced around, too.
Scott was glaring at her. She was getting that look out of him a lot these days.
"You may not care what happens to these people, Miss Bierce—"
The lizard reached back and pulled that long, shiny sword out of his back-sheath. He didn't do it fast, but he did it so smoothly and silently that it still looked like magic (and at the same time, he managed to make it clear that he could have done it fast if he'd wanted to).
"Here's a thought," said Amber. "If you're really all that concerned about how dangerous the lizardman is, why don't you stop antagonizing him?"
Scott walked away.
The lizard's eyes tracked him. The sword stayed in his hand.
Scott came back.
"I want you both out of this camp right now," he announced.
Amber's eyes went automatically to her sister, seeking support or at least surprise, but Nicci didn't protest. She didn't even stand up. Nicci just looked back at her with that same lost and unhappy vagueness she'd pretty much worn since the crash.
And for the first time since that day, Amber had to fight—really fight—the urge to slap that vacant stare right off her.
Instead, she made herself turn back to Scott, and with all the disgust she could not unleash on her baby sister, she said, "I have a reality check for you, Everly. You are not Commander-in-Chief of the entire planet or even this miserable little piece of it. You don't get to say who stays and who goes."
He muttered something, flushed and glaring.
"What did you just say?" she demanded, knowing damn well she'd heard him. "Oh no. No no. If you're so goddamned sure of yourself, you say it right out loud!"
She didn't think he would, and for a moment or two, she could see him waver, wanting to back down, find his supporters, regroup. Then, without warning, he changed his mind and stepped up.
"I said, things have changed. And whether you like it or not, I am in charge. And while I'm in charge, you better watch your fat fucking mouth or else."
"Hey." Eric stood up, his hands open and raised. "Everybody calm down."
Scott took a step forward.
Amber hopped up to meet him and bumped into the lizard's back. He really could be fast when he wanted to be; he'd been behind her just a second ago. She had to move around him to see why everyone else had suddenly gone so quiet.
For the moment, Scott's head was still firmly attached to his neck. For the moment. The edge of the lizardman's sword hovered motionless in the air just beyond the throbbing vein in Scott's neck and the lizardman seemed content to leave it there. All day.
"Call him off," Eric said.
Amber looked around, thunderstruck, and sure enough, he was talking to her. More astounding, everyone else was looking at her. "Hey, this is not my trained alligator!" she said crossly. "If he wants the sword out of his face, he needs to stop acting so fucking hostile!"
The alien punctuated this with a low, menacing hiss.
"You're not helping," Amber snapped. She started to take his wrist, but thought better of it and snapped her fingers a few times instead. "Hey! Meoraq!"
He looked at her. The sword stayed where it was.
"You're not helping," she said again, and just said it this time. "Ease up on him. We're all friends here. Sit down. But while I have your attention," she went on as the lizard grudgingly lowered his arm and hunkered down again, "I would like to point out that this is the only guy in camp who knows where the next nearest waterhole is. He might also know which plants are poisonous and which ones aren't. Judging from his outfit, there's even a good chance he knows how to take down some of those stupid deer-things and he maybe even could help us turn a few of them into clothes of our own. This is a godsend and you'd know that if you weren't so worried about who's in charge!"
"She's right," said Dag, looking at Scott. "If nothing else, we're going to need to know what we're up against, right? I mean...if there's one, there must be more."
"And I don't believe for a second they're all going to be happy to see us," declared Scott. "Miss Bierce can believe what she wants—as loudly as she wants—but that doesn't change the fact that, historically speaking, natives don't take it too well when strangers show up."
"Particularly when the strangers start acting like dicks!" Amber interjected.
"No," said Eric, also moving around to Scott's side. "I'm sorry, Bierce, but you are dead wrong on this one. Unfortunately," he added, looking at a smirking Scott, "that's the best reason I've heard yet to let the lizard stay. I'd rather have him where I can see him than let him go who knows where and say God knows what to who, you know?"
"Well," said Scott after a moment, "I guess we could kill him."
"Oh my God, seriously?" Amber stepped aside and flung both her hands at the lizard's battle-scarred chest. "I want to see you try it," she said as the lizard cocked his head at her. "Right now. Whip out your little knife, Space-Scout, and see what he does with his."
The three of them stood close together and eyed the lizard with caution until the lizard glanced their way. Then Dag and Eric backed away and Scott turned pink and angrily said, "Have you even thought about the germs that thing could be carrying?"
"We all got the Vaccine," she argued, but she didn't like the way it came out, almost as a question.
"The Vaccine isn't magic, Miss Bierce. We are all very much vulnerable to bacterial infection and other forms of contamination which I'm sure never occurred to you. No," Scott said, frowning very seriously at the lizard, who stared expressionlessly right back at him. "Bringing that thing into our camp without consulting anyone was a stupid and reckless thing to do and we are all at risk because of it. He may turn out to be friendly, I don't know, but his intentions aren't the only things potentially endangering us. You're on probation, Miss Bierce."
"Oh for Christ's sake."
Scott stared her down with unbelievably effective dignity. "You may not think this a colony. But it is a community and that community cannot afford to have members who don't care about the consequences of their actions."
She was not going to win this one, not with an alien sitting in their camp, dripping with swords, scars and bacteria. Amber turned her back on Scott and stared at Meoraq instead. After a few minutes, he noticed and shifted his red eyes from Scott to her. He frowned; the corners of his mouth were the only flexible parts of his whole face, but they were turning down.
"How can he possibly help us?" Scott demanded, coming up behind her. "He can't even talk."
"Yes, he can. He just doesn't know English yet." Amber hesitated, and then eased a little closer to the lizardman and sat down, facing him. His spines came all the way forward. Otherwise, he was perfectly still. "But we can teach him."
"Sure you can. This I've got to see."
"Meoraq," said Amber, reaching a hand toward the lizardman's chest.
His hand snapped out and caught her wrist. He held her for only a second or two, which was plenty long enough for her to feel how easily he could be breaking her bones, and then slowly opened his fist.
"You're going to get hurt," said Scott. "Or you're going to be responsible for hurting other people who don't deserve it. And sad to say, that will probably be the only way you will ever admit you were wrong to bring him here in the first place."
The lizardman glanced at him, then looked at Amber some more. He raised his own hand and tapped a knuckle to his chest. "Meoraq."
"And I'm Amber." She patted herself. "Amber."
He watched her hand while it was moving, but made no effort to repeat her.
"This would be funny if it weren't so sad."
"Shut the hell up already, Scott!" Amber snapped. "You made your point. Now you're just acting like an asshole."
"Leave her alone," Eric said. "You know how she gets."
"I know I'm getting more than a little tired of how she gets," Scott announced, but he moved away. Everyone just stood around, staring like they expected her to do something. The lizard kept looking at her and she had no idea what he was thinking.
"Amber," she said again, feeling foolish and a little desperate.
He uttered a curt grunting sound without opening his mouth and reached out to thump her on the chest with one knuckle. He still didn't try to say her name.
But he knew it was her name. That was something.
"So...okay. We—" Amber waved around at the whole camp to include everyone; the lizardman's eyes never left hers. "We're humans. We're from another planet. Called Earth. Um...Earth? Humans? Feel free to make an effort here, Meoraq."
His spines twitched. "Meoraq."
"We're humans. Um...what are your people called?"
Nothing. No reaction. Not one word. Not even another grunt.
This wasn't working. She didn't even know what she was doing wrong. Amber started to get up, then sighed and sat back down. She rubbed her face, then looked at her hand and raised it up like she was making a shadow-duck.
The lizardman's eyes moved to it and narrowed.
"We came here from Earth," she said, sweeping her hand through the space between them and down to thump on ground. "And we crashed."
The lizardman frowned, watching her turn her hand over into a limp, dead palm. With her other hand, she made walking fingers to step out of her palm into the grass.
"Then the ship blew up." She tried to show him by flexing her fingers and making what she hoped was a fiery whooshing sound.
The lizardman's spines ticced. He looked up—not at her, but at the sky. He said something, then frowned at her again.
"I guess you saw that, huh?" This time, when she waved at the camp, he looked at the people instead of her hand. "We're the only ones left and we can't get home."
"You don't know that," Scott interrupted.
Amber simply looked at him, then shook her head and looked back at the lizardman. "We need your help. I wish I knew how to make you understand. We need your help, Meoraq."
He looked at her, unmoving and unmoved. Then he leaned back slightly and muttered to himself for some time, frowning and rubbing at the side of his snout. At last, he stood up and shrugged out of his backpack.
"What's he doing?" Scott asked.
The lizardman unrolled a huge bundle of leathery something to lay on the ground, but it was not until he also began to assemble some short threaded lengths of metal rods into flexible poles that Amber had an answer.
"He's...putting up a tent," she said, a little dumbfounded that aliens even had something as banal as a tent.
"Why is that thing putting up a tent in the middle of my camp?"
His lieutenants exchanged glances.
"To sleep in," said Amber. "Just a guess, but—"
"I said I'd think about it! I never gave you permission to let that thing stay!"
Amber watched the lizardman hammer his poles into place and raise the tent up. It was bigger than Scott's, and a part of her could not help but wonder if that was the man's biggest objection to it. "He's not asking for permission."
"He'd better," said Scott, marching himself over. "This is my camp and if—"
The lizard turned around and extended his arm with a sword magically at the end of it, so suddenly that Scott almost walked right into the point.
"Amber," said Eric quietly, after it became obvious that Scott had rooted himself to the spot and the lizardman's arm wasn't going to get tired anytime soon.
"Jesus, you people. What do you want me to say to him? Meoraq!"
"Meoraq," the lizardman said without looking at her. He said something else too, and then said, "Meoraq," again.
"Please stop poking swords at Scott! Being a dick is not a capital offense where we're from. See? He doesn't—"
The lizardman sheathed his sword and went back to assembling his tent.
Scott swung around and glared at her. "You call me that again, you dumb bitch, and I'll kick your fat ass for you! See if I don't!"
"Calm down," said Eric before Amber could say anything. "You're being kind of...aggressive."
Scott looked at him, then past him to the lizardman, who was still making himself at home. His jaw ticced. After several cooling minutes of silent thought, he looked back at Amber. "You really think you can teach it to talk?"
"He already talks. It's just a matter of teaching him English."
"Fine." He gave his jacket a few curt tugs and ran a hand through his hair. "Then do it. But the rest of you—" He swung to face the watching crowd of Manifestors and they obediently shuffled back a few steps. "—keep a prudent distance. Until the full ramifications of Miss Bierce's decision are known, I'd just as soon not risk any more lives."
They obeyed, huddling up at the far end of camp to watch the lizardman, and Amber, with equal parts awe and suspicion.
"Make sure they stay back," Scott told the Fleetmen. He glanced once at Meoraq, who gave the front of his tent a last adjustment and then went inside it with his backpack. "And keep an eye on that thing. I want someone watching it at all times."
Dag snorted. "What the hell are we supposed to do if—"
"We'll figure something out," Eric interrupted, giving Scott a nod. "Come on. Let's...Let's get all the tents moved back."
Amber watched as the Fleetmen left, knowing that a few more choice words were coming and that now that the witnesses were all gone, no one would ever believe he'd started it, so no matter what happened next, she'd have to shut up and take it. "We got something more to talk about?" she asked, as calmly as she could.
Scott waited until they were good and alone before he bothered to turn around and look at her. "Just this. I'm letting this happen because I can see the slimmest chance of it working and I know there's some benefit to having one of the natives as a member of this colony."
That word again. Amber rolled her eyes.
"You're making it happen," Scott continued, "because you're a stupid bitch who's trying to make trouble for me. But okay. Fine. Have it your way. If you can actually teach it to talk and we can get it working for us, I may even re-evaluate your position here, but I'm warning you right now, Bierce, the first thing you'd better teach it is some goddamn respect for authority, because if I don't start seeing it from it and you, I'll bounce you both right out of here. Dare me if you don't think I can do it."
Amber clenched her jaws shut and said nothing.
Scott nodded once and stepped back. "I'll let you get on with it then. This debriefing is over."
She watched him walk away. Then she went across the camp—her jaws hurt, but she couldn't seem to unclench them—to find her duffel bag. No one said anything to her, not even Nicci, although she could feel stares on every side of her and hear their whispers under the wind. She got her things and her spear and came stalking back to throw them down next to the lizardman's tent.
The lizardman lifted the flap and looked at her.
"Repeat after me," she said tightly. "Scott is a dick-headed motherfucker."
The lizardman grunted, now looking at all the other people looking back at him. He let the flap drop.
Amber clapped a hand to her face and rubbed until her wind-chapped skin had warmed some and her aching muscles began to relax. Then she said, "Meoraq."
The rustling noises inside the tent paused. After a long moment, the flap lifted again. He looked at her, the double-row of spines on his head and neck twitching first higher, then flatter.
She didn't know what to say to him. He couldn't understand anything anyway. Amber stared at him, feeling hot and angry and cold and useless all at the same time. At last, she reached out and patted the ground in front of her. "Please."
He looked at the ground, then at her. He frowned.
She patted it again, trying to smile, although the effort felt ghastly and she couldn't imagine it looked very convincing.
He dropped the flap. Amber's shoulders sagged in defeat, but almost in the same instant, the tent opened and Meoraq came out. Ignoring her, he cleared a small area, gathered up enough rocks to form a ring, piled up some deadwood, and took a burning stick from one of the other fires to start his own, close to his tent and to her. When it was going strong, he broke down some fairly long branches and lashed them into a tripod-shape, then set this close to the fire and hung a smallish leather pouch from it. He filled it with water he poured from a huge leather flask almost as long as Amber's arm, then ducked back into his tent, emerging with a few round, polished stones which he placed in the hottest part of the fire. Back he went into the tent, this time for his swords, which he stabbed into the ground after deliberately pacing off six long strides, kicking two stray duffel bags and a pair of boots ahead of him. When he came back, Amber was on her feet with her bag and her spear, ready to move on, but he plucked them both out of her hands and set them down again more or less where she'd already had them. Then he finally sat down.
Looking at her, he knocked on the ground in front of him like it was a door.
Amber stood there.
The lizard knocked again, this time with a few words and a flick of his spines.
She sat down where he wanted her.
He grunted and looked away, watching all the people who were watching them. He muttered under his breath, glanced skyward, scratched his throat. If he had a reason for calling her over, he was in no hurry to tell her what it was.
"Meoraq," said Amber.
He grunted, still without looking at her. Scott was at the head of the crowd now, just beyond the invisible boundary marked by the lizardman's swords, listening to the complaints of the people who'd had their bags kicked.
"Meoraq," said Amber again, reaching for his arm.
He caught her before she could touch him, but he looked at her.
Now what?
"Hand," said Amber, feeling stupid and a little desperate. She pointed at her own, caught in his unbelievably strong, scaly grip. "Fingers." She wiggled them.
Meoraq released her, frowning, and watched as she brought her arm up between them.
"Fingers. Look! One, two, three, four, five. Hand," she said, now pointing at her other one. "And fingers. One, two, three, four, five."
He said nothing.
"Head," said Amber, pointing at herself. "Hair. Ear, see it? And this one. Ear. Two ears. Eyes. One, two. Two eyes. Nose. One nose. Mouth. All of it together? This is my face. My face is the front of my head. It...Damn it, will you say something?"
He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.
"Hand," said Amber, rubbing her eyes.
He splayed it.
She straightened up a little. "Fingers."
He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off. He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.
But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.
Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 28 |
The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet's Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.
So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother's womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human's flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures' jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.
Amber. Her name was Amber.
She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile, then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.
When darkness fell, they lit more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.
She took it. Not immediately and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.
Scott came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. "No one speaks for a Sheulek," he told her. To Scott, he said, "Go away," making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.
Scott talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq's cuuvash.
"Get your own," said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.
Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.
Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.
And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.
"No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of Sheul's making," he said, speaking to himself more than to her. "So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man's comprehension?"
"Mee'orakk," she replied and reached to touch his chest.
This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his bare flesh. "No man could have imagined a hand like that," he mused. "Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?"
"Amber." She patted herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.
"I hear you," he said, studying them. "Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies."
Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.
That was kind of cute.
"I have to pray," Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father's divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.
As he waited for Sheul's peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother's teats (Amber's, for no other reason than that she was the human he'd been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.
Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire. Scott's voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.
|
The Last Hour of Gann - R. Lee Smith.txt
| 29 |
He dreamt.
Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this...
When he became aware of it (he could not say 'at its beginning' for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.
But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lessons slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.
Without looking at him, this stranger said, "What is it you seek in Xi'Matezh?"
Wasn't that just like an exarch, to involve himself in someone else's personal business?
But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: "I seek communion with Sheul."
"A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty," the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. "Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father's honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father's name?"
Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. "I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!"
"You certainly seem eager to postpone it."
"No!"
"No? Then why—" The exarch's head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. "—do you seek Xi'Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?"
And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, "If it is Sheul's will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him."
The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.
"But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!"
"Is the House so hateful?"
"The House?" Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). "No," he said now, puzzled. "It is my father's House and has all my love."
"Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it."
"It is not the House I wish to escape."
"No?"
Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father's innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father's bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father's back as it bunched and heaved and arched.
Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father's deep, steady breaths. His mother's feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.
The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. "This embarrassed you."
Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.
"Is it not a lord's responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?"
His loyal woman. Meoraq's jaws clenched.
"Surely you do not question Yecedi's loyalty?"
"I am sure she was ever faithful to my father," Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father's own House to Rasozul's and did not leave it until the day she died.
"She was a good woman."
"I suppose so." Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother's urgent moaning would. "She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command."
The exarch looked at him. "Do you think your father gave it as his command?"
The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.
"Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring," the exarch mused. "What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul's fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?"
"My father had no business taking her to his bed!" Meoraq burst out.
"Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man's desires?" said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.
"No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?"
"Perhaps she was invited," the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.
"He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to fetch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!"
"Do you think so?"
"But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!"
"The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him."
Meoraq snorted.
"When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as Yecedi?"
Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.
"A good woman. A loyal woman."
A mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq's wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city's honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.
"Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?"
"I am frequently happy with women," Meoraq snapped.
"With one woman."
He rubbed his brow-ridges. "If that is Sheul's will."
"And so you travel to Xi'Matezh."
"Yes."
"To pray for Sheul's guidance."
"Yes."
"That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House."
Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. "Yes."
"Perhaps you could find one here."
"Here?" Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. "There are no women allowed in the training halls!"
It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone unnoticed all this time, suddenly rang out like tribunal bells. Every head turned.
"Uyane!"
He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.
"No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?" Tsazr inquired caustically. "Or your clay?"
"My mind, sir."
"I have my doubts. Amber." The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr's mouth.
"Yes, sir." The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber's.
"What is the day's lesson? Remind Uyane."
"We speak of the Ancients, sir."
"Tell Uyane your lesson."
Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss, but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, "Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Gann."
"The Ancients corrupted Gann," agreed Master Tsazr, striding along the rows of silent students and pausing often to run a speculative (and largely dismissive) eye over each face. "And Gann in turn corrupted them. The Ancients turned from Sheul, devastating the land to fuel their wickedness and making constant war upon themselves until at last Sheul rose up and smote them with His judgment. Uyane!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients."
Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. "The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Gann."
"For how long?"
Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr's hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.
"Amber," said Tsazr, turning around. "How long did the act of wrath last?"
"It is still among us," she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul's world of peace.
But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. "Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?"
"The curse of blight," he said at once, "when the land failed and the skies were filled with storms. The cities of the Ancients fell and famine and disease preyed upon the landless people."
"For how long?" asked Tsazr, casting a cold eye back at Meoraq.
He looked at Amber, but she was bent over her slate, making human letters. In another moment, Meoraq was reeling from the dream-like painlessness of Master Tsazr's blow. Amber's voice drifted up from his side, the dumaqi words made haunting in her human mouth: "It is still among us."
"Uyane."
Meoraq straightened up and put his arms to his side, only to find that Master Tsazr had somehow been replaced by the strange exarch with the low hood.
"What was the third act of the Fall of the Ancients?" this figure asked in Tsazr's voice.
He knew this one, thankfully. "It was the return of Sheul and the hope of His forgiveness. And it is still among us," he added, anticipating the next question.
The stranger did not reply, but the silence that swept the lessons room proved more disconcerting than his hooded stare. Meoraq looked away and saw the prairie all around him; he looked back and there was Amber before him and they were sitting, face to face, in the dark of the humans' camp.
"We built a ship," said Amber. She raised her hand to make a wedged shape and passed it between them. "And it flew through the sky, beyond the clouds that covered our world, into the lights that shine forever." Her arm arced up, graceful as the neck of a thuoch. Her eyes never left his and they were green, so green. "But the ship was hurt and it fell here, out of the storm. It broke open over Gann. It died and many died with it." Her hand fell to earth and opened, her fingers flaring out and curling slowly back toward her palm. Her second hand lit upon this imagined carnage, made walking fingers, and stepped out onto the grass. "But some of us survived and now we're here. We're here and there's no way home." She looked back over her shoulder and let out a shaky breath, then turned back and caught his hand in both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm; her eyes were terrible in their beauty. "I need you."
Something in him shivered right down to the core of his soul. He tried to say her name, but the magic of the dream ended, it seemed, with his mouth. "Mmbr," he said, just as he always had, and shook his head with disgust. His next attempt was nothing but a hiss and a choke of meaningless sound.
"Please, Meoraq," she said. "I need your help. And you need mine."
He did not remember getting up, but they were standing suddenly, the two of them together before a dark structure he somehow knew was Xi'Matezh. They were standing, yes, and his arms were going around her just as if that were not a perfectly appalling thing to do. He could feel her heat against his body and her horrible face was right before him and her name, ah, her name was like wine in his mouth. "Mmbr," he said, bending close. "Mm—"
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.