Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

These are not particularly good stories. What you see here is what you get: a struggling writer’s juvenilia, from the first clunking story I published when I was 17 to to the bizarre women-and-war story that got me into Year’s Best SF 12, and all the crazy stuff in between.

Writing stuff is easy. Writing stuff people actually want to read is infinitely harder. Much of it is simply finding your audience. And not sucking at your craft. The lumbering old SF/F mags never did like any of my stuff. It wasn’t until the gender-bending slipstream Strange Horizons Magazine started gaining steam that I discovered the stuff that I wrote actually had an audience.

I collected my first rejection slip at fifteen. The editor had scrawled a note across the top of the manuscript saying that cockroaches put her off her lunch, and there were far too many cockroaches in the story for her taste. I still have that rejection slip, and about a hundred others, fifteen years later.

I’ve always written violent stories. Not always stories with a focus on exploring feminist themes (in fact, many of my stories can be seen as anti-feminist, particularly the early ones, much to my chagrin). The times I’ve tried to write about other things – painters and princesses and cockroaches, oh my – I didn’t have very much fun doing it. And I didn’t publish any of those crappy stories with any more frequency than my brutal women ones.

At some point my princesses starting hacking off people’s heads. The painters had same-sex love affairs. And the cockroaches developed a taste for human flesh.

I had a lot more fun writing those.

And I finally started selling them.

Women & Violence

In my early writing life, I wrote what I’d call “Sword and Sorceress” type stories. This type was popularized by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies and her eponymous fantasy magazine. The stories had strong female protagonists who ran around in skimpy armor and/or did magic while engaged in some kind of quest or revenge or McGuffin-type plot.

I worked very hard at emulating these (see Once, There Were Wolves). It wasn’t until I’d received five years of rejections from the magazine and the anthologies that I finally threw in the towel. The problem was, I didn’t understand plot. I didn’t understand tension. And I really hated writing about syrupy nice heroines who were expected to save their children and/or tribes and/or kingdoms.

It wasn’t until I went to the Clarion West writers’ workshop in 2000 that I got up the courage to write stories I was really interested in. The story that got me into the workshop was about some defective clones that had been tailored to terraform a world, and whose programming was starting to unravel. My female protagonist was a passive blank slate goaded into action by her revolutionary brother. I kept wondering why she wasn’t more interesting.

At Clarion, I decided to write something different. I liked the idea of a desert country where the sand ate your blood. Sounds cool, right? And maybe women were immune to it somehow? And maybe you could, like, literally control the world with blood? And it was women’s blood that gave them power? It gave me an “excuse” to write a story with mostly female characters in it.

I dashed off a story about a knife-weilding nomadic military leader who had joined with a foreigner to topple her beloved desert matriarchy (see Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand). I wanted somebody who had joined with the “bad guys” against her former way of life. Somebody who had sold out. That seemed like an interesting person – much more interesting than the princess who just blindly goes off to save her kingdom the way she’s expected to.

At the end of the workshop session of my story, author Geoff Ryman, our instructor for the week, looked at me from across the critique circle and said, flatly, “I find this story personally offensive… I think it suffers from a failure of the imagination.”

It was both the best and worst thing I’d ever heard about anything I’d written. I wrote syrupy, forgettable stories that barely invited a single personal scrawl from overworked magazine editors, not stuff that offended people.

I wanted to inspire something in people. I just wasn’t sure loathing was it.

Power

Where this obsession with violence comes from, I don’t know, but after Clarion I started to delve deeply into real-life applications of violence and the history of violence across many cultures, which formed the basis of my undergrad and graduate work at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. Strength and violence is how people gained, took, and maintained power, and that fascinated me. Argue that it’s actually wealth that gets you the power and you’ll find that that wealth is generally amassed through strategic applications of strength and violence.

What I must have internalized early on is that in order to have and wield power, people needed to be physically strong. Scary. Those who aren’t physically strong should be wealthy or wily enough to be able to control strong people.

I find this idea fascinating. Not because it’s a revolutionary idea (it’s pretty obvious), but because I wanted to know if the world would be different if power was meted out differently. What would happen when a traditionally oppressed group got a lot more physical power? Would they be just as bad as the old guys? And if they had all this physical power, where did it come from? How did they maintain it? One group can’t maintain power over another without enslaving itself.

This led to the inevitable.

How would that look if women had the power?

So, what the hell?

So I started writing other types of stories. Stories about war and death and bugs and women. Strong women, angry women, powerful women, bloody women, brutal women. They’re the gritty fighters and morally fucked-up wretches that we’ve seen battling it out on other worlds for eons… as men. They have their own non-standard genders, prejudices, fears, and morals. And they aren’t generally ours.

Every one of us is capable of great violence. Great mercy. Great kindness. Great despair. What we choose to tell people is an acceptable expression of these characteristics varies by culture and class and race, and gender, and a hundred other things. But collectively, we as a culture decide just how much (and in what ways) we’re allowed to emote before we’re no longer loved. Before we’re shunned. Before we cut the odd ones away from the herd so we can start building it into whatever image of “the way things are” we desire.

In these stories, the herd has been culled in an entirely different way. And the why and the how of it is what made writing these stories so damn fun.

I hope you enjoy reading them at least half as much as I enjoyed hacking them together.

The Red House

Dayton, Ohio

December, 2010

God’s War

January 2011

Night Shade Books

Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference...

On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages. Fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers, the origins of the war are shady and complex, but there’s one thing everybody agrees on...

There’s not a chance in hell of ending it.

Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx’s ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war -- but at what price?

The world is about to find out.

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The Women of Our Occupation

This story first appeared in Strange Horizons Magazine in 2006. It was re-printed in 2007 in Year’s Best SF 12 and also translated into Swedish and Romanian. Over the years, I’ve also received emails from fans who read the story as part of their Women/Gender Studies curriculum at several universities. I’ve never understood why this story was so popular – switch out the gender pronouns, and it’s a fairly standard SF dystopia. Maybe that’s the creepy part. That it only takes a pronoun switch to change one’s reading of the story.

The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared with mortar grit, and they reeked of the dead. Even when we did not see them passing through the gates, ferrying truckloads of our dead, they came to us in our dreams, the women of our occupation.

My brother and I did not understand why they had come. They were from a far shore none of us had ever seen or heard of, and every night my father cursed them as he turned on the radio. He kept it set to the resistance channel. No one wanted the women here.

My brother got up the courage to ask one of the women, “Who stays at home with your kids while you’re here?”

The woman laughed and said, “You’re our children now.”

But I knew the way to conquer the women. When I was old enough, I would marry them. All of our men would marry them, and then they’d belong to us, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.

We woke one night to the sound of a burst siren. The scream was only a muffled moan in the heavy, humid air.

My mother bundled up my brother and grabbed the house cat. My father made me carry the radio. We hid in the cellar under the house, heard the dull thumping of bursts.

“They’re looking for insurgents,” my father said. He turned on the radio, got only static. “You know they castrate them.”

“Hush, Father,” my mother said.

My brother started crying.

The death trucks and the mortar trucks came the next morning. The women loaded up the bodies. They shoveled away the facades that had come off the houses. Our house was all right, but the one next door had been raided. The yeasty smell of spent bursts clung to everything. The house had fallen in on itself.

I saw them bring out a body, but I couldn’t tell who it was. My mother pulled the curtains closed before I could see anything else. She told me to stay away from the windows.

“Why are they here?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “No one knows.”

One night, many months into the occupation, two women came to our door.

My mother answered. She invited them in and offered them tea and bloody sen. The sen would stain their tongues and ease their minds, and the tea was said to warm women’s souls. If they had them.

The women declined.

I stood in the doorway of the kitchen and peered out at them. My brother was at the table eating cookies.

The women asked after my father.

“Working,” my mother said. “Men’s work. He’s an organic technician.”

One of the women stepped over to the drink cabinet. She flicked on the radio.

My mother stood very still. She gripped her dishrag in one hand, so tightly I thought her fingernails would bite through it and cut her palm.

The radio played—a slow, easy waltz. Someone had tuned it back to the local station.

“Your husband’s study, where is it?” the other woman asked.

“This way,” my mother said. My mother looked straight at me. They would have to come through the kitchen.

I ducked back into the kitchen and slipped into the study. I pulled open the top drawer. My father’s gun was heavy. Blue and green organics sloshed in the transparent double barrels. I’d never held it before. I didn’t know where to put it. Father’s papers were there, too, papers about the resistance that he said we weren’t supposed to touch.

My brother had followed me in. He waddled up to the desk, stared at the gun.

“You’re in trouble,” he said.

“Quiet,” I said. “We’ll play a game. Sit here. I’ll give you more cookies.”

When the women came in behind my mother, my brother and I were sitting up on the big leather sofa by the window. I opened up father’s screes board. My brother stared at the women.

The women went right to the desk. I tried not to look at them. They opened up the gun drawer.

The largest woman turned to me. She wore a long dark coat, even in all the heat. Sweat beaded her big face.

“Come here,” she said.

“He’s only—” my mother began.

“Here,” the woman said.

I got up. She put her big hands all over me, patted me down. She looked around the room. Looked back at us.

“Get out,” she said. “We’re cleaning this room.”

I took my brother by the hand. The three of us went to wait in the living room. My mother kept staring at me. I gave my brother more cookies. We sat and listened to the sounds of the crashing and tearing coming from my father’s study.

After a long time, the women came out. They stood in front of us and put their hats back on.

“Good evening,” they said.

“Good evening,” my mother said.

When they were gone, my mother held out her hand to me. I pulled up the back of my brother’s shirt and took out the gun and the papers. My mother cried. She pulled us both into her arms.

My father did not come home that night. Or the next night. We got a telegram from the women. They had taken my father away for questioning. He would be kept for an undefined period.

We were alone.

With father gone, we had no money. The lab he worked for wouldn’t send us anything. They were afraid that the women would accuse my father of something.

The neighbors came and brought over food and ration tickets. My mother went to each house afterward and asked if they needed laundry done, or shirts mended, but they all said the same thing. They were saving their own money.

No one could help us.

“What about the women?” I said. “Who mends their shirts?”

My mother frowned at me. “Certainly not their husbands,” she said.

So my mother allowed the women into our house, and she mended their shirts. She cleaned and pressed their dress pants, their stiff white collars. My brother and I shined their boots.

It was strange, to have the big women in the house, wearing their long dark coats and guns. My mother did not speak to them any more than she had to. When they came in she held herself very stiffly. She pursed her mouth. Her eyes seemed very black.

I tried to hate the women, too. They always greeted me like the man of the house, because they had taken my father. If I was the one who answered the door, they always asked my permission to see my mother. They were very polite. Sometimes they would talk to each other in low voices, in their own language. It was soft and rhythmic, like the memory of my mother’s voice before I could understand the words.

After a month of this, one of the women said to my mother, “It will be a shame when your husband returns. We will have no clean shirts.”

My mother just stared at her. I had never seen her look so angry.

When my father did come back, red dust filled the seams of his face. His hair had gone white. The spaces under his eyes were smeared in sooty footprints, a dark wash against his sallow skin.

He had no marks or scars that I could see. He still had all of his fingers. But he walked with a limp that he had not had before, and he could not close his left hand into a fist. He became very quiet. He spent most days sitting in a chair by the big window, staring out. He did not speak to us. He could not go to work.

My mother had to keep mending shirts. When the women came, my father moved his chair into his study and shut the door. He started smoking opium.

The air inside the house was heavy all the time. My mother sent me out more often to run errands for her. She didn’t have time to go to the market herself. Father never left the house. My brother tried to go with me, but mother made him stay behind to shine the boots.

On the street, I met other boys with homes like mine. Their fathers had all been taken in as well. I went out with a group of them to throw rocks at the windows of a women’s barracks. But the women were waiting for us. They grabbed the oldest boys. They shot them in the head.

I didn’t leave the house for a while, after that. I hated the women. I hated them, and I dreamed of them.

The women were making changes. They draped their country’s colors over ours. They did it first at the police buildings, then the government buildings. Fewer trucks of bodies and mortar rubble passed through the gates. There were fewer night sirens.

After a year, I noticed something else, though my mother said I imagined it, said I was giving the women more power than they had. The summers were not as hot. The air wasn’t as humid. The women were changing the weather, too.

My mother tried to make things normal. She tried to get me and my brother to go to the new schools, the ones the women opened after shutting down ours. In those schools, all of the teachers were teenage girls. Our girls, but girls just the same.

What were we supposed to learn, from girls?

The women in our house kept coming. Some of them lived just down the street now, in houses where the owners were killed or deported for being part of the resistance. When I asked one of the women if she ever got lonely in the big house, she said no, she never got lonely.

“I live with my sisters,” she said.

“Why don’t they do your laundry?” I said.

My brother was shining her boots. My mother looked up sharply, but I didn’t care. I was the man of the house. I could say what I wanted.

The woman just laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

Some time later, I met a girl at school I liked, and she liked me, I think. But the next year, she left school because she wanted to join the new fighting squad that the women had started. Girls were allowed to join when they were fourteen. I got angry when she told me she was going.

“What,” I said, “you want to learn how to kill people like those women do? You’ll be just like them.”

She glared at me. Black eyes, like my mother’s. “They won,” she said. “It won’t be so bad to be like someone who wins, will it?”

“Won? What did they win?”

“Everything,” she said.

I left school, even though it made my mother angry. I got a job unloading fishing boats in the bay. There were mostly men down there, though the women were posted around as guards and they had put a bunch of girls in charge of customs. Those women made a lot more money than any of us working the boats.

I once heard one of the men say something nasty to the customs girls. He called them whores, and traitors, and said he could fuck the traitor out of them. He said it in front of two women working as customs guards. One of the women pulled out her gun and shot him. I still stayed on in my mother’s house.

Father’s health got worse. We lost more and more of him to opium.

I sat with him one hot night during the monsoon season. All of the windows were open, letting in the rain, but he wouldn’t let me close the house up.

Mother had taken my brother to the hospital. He had an infection in his lungs.

“I have such dreams,” my father said. He reached for my hand. I let him take it. His hand was cold and clammy in mine, despite the heat.

“I dream that the women came from another world,” he said. “They came on boats made of spice and spun sugar. We disappointed them. They’re too hungry for us.” He turned his blank stare to me. “They’re going to eat us.”

There was a new woman on watch at customs. She looked at me only once, but I couldn’t help but follow her with my eyes. She was big and tall like the others, and her face and hands were broad. She had a dark complexion and tilted green eyes, like jade. She looked twenty. I wasn’t even sixteen. I didn’t think she noticed me. But she caught me heading home and said, “The streets are not safe for boys. I’ll bring you home.”

She was a head taller than me, but she moved like water. We walked through the maze of deserted streets bordering the harbor and passed under a gaslight. She suddenly took me by the arm and pulled me into a dark alley. I choked on a cry. She pressed me against the gritty wall of an abandoned warehouse and shoved her hand down the front of my trousers. I struggled, but didn’t say anything. Her big body and long coat shielded me from the street. No one could see me. No one at the dock. Not my mother. Not my father.

I gripped the back of her neck, dug my fingers into her hair. She pulled me into her.

When I saw her again, she was with a group of women by the customs house. I nodded at her. She turned to the other women, said something in their language.

The women all looked at me. They laughed.

All of the women kept looking at me. They kept laughing. I had to leave the docks.

I got a job driving mortar trucks through the gates. Most of the women had given up those jobs by then. They were all working in government and security positions.

During the day, I went to the ruins of old houses. I could still smell the yeast of old bursts. I shoveled up all the raw material and loaded it into the truck. I met other young men like me. I met men who had wanted to be teachers and doctors. It was the women, they said, who held them back. The women took all of the jobs. The women were too intimidating. The women owned the world.

One night, I drove my mortar truck through the gate and stopped at the big pit where the bodies and rubble were heaped. The women had bombed out the original government offices, long before. They used the deep pit left behind as a waste dump. I sat in the truck and stared out at the pit for a long time.

I got home sometime just before midnight.

My mother sat alone in the dark living room. She sat staring into the empty fireplace. A pile of neatly folded laundry sat at her hip. Shirts hung on the line in the kitchen.

“Do you want some light?” I asked her.

She was very still.

“Is father all right?” I asked.

“He’s passed,” she said. Her dishrag lay in her lap. She did not touch it.

I went upstairs. Father lay in bed. A single gas lamp flared, casting dark shadows. There was a bloody, clotted smear against the far wall. Half of father’s head was gone. I saw the gun near his limp hand. His eyes were still open.

He had left no note.

Some women came to collect the body, though a man drove the body truck. One of the women turned to me just before they left. “We all battle dragons,” she said. “There’s no shame in losing.”

“There’d be no battle,” I said coldly, “without the dragons.”

She grinned, slid her hat back on. “There will always be dragons,” she said. “It’s only a matter of who plays the dragon, who plays the sheep. Which would you rather be?”

I spent the rest of the night in the market square, watching the women. Sunrise rent the sky like the remnants of a red dress. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a red dress. I didn’t miss them.

I watched the changing of the guard. I bought a newspaper. It was in two languages now, ours and the women’s. I kept turning the page back and forth, back and forth, but I could see no difference between one and the other.

All the news was the same.

If Women Do Fall They Lie

This is one of my favorite stories, and the least popular with readers. It was published by Deep Outside SFFH in 2001, just a few months after I’d come home from the Clarion West writers’ workshop. At the time, it felt like a major win. I couldn’t believe anybody had seen fit to pay for this odd little story about screwed up gender politics and birthing compounds and organic weapons. However, there’s also a lot of deep-seated unease with being female here, which translates to outright misogyny in the narrator. All purposeful, yes, but also uncomfortable. When what you are is hated and powerless, you’ll do anything to disassociate yourself from it – even participate in the oppression of your own kind.

They told me the vessel could dream. I told them that was no concern of mine because vessels are of the dirt and of the desert and live only to sweat and breed and die, and I am a teacher of men and androgynies and Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and worth. Vessels are no longer my concern.

“But Kadru,” they said, “she can dream.”

I told them it was foolish to utilize me this way; I questioned their purpose.

It was not my place to question them, they said.

And they sent me to the desert.

If you have never been to the desert, you must know that the sun casts an orange shadow across the craggy red hills and sunken pits and gullies of this part of the world. The vessel’s world. The red desert looks endless here, and touches the gray-blue of the sky in all directions. The agricultural compounds are here, stained the same color as the desert, and it is here the vessels grow the starches that feed the cities. Here the vessels labor until they are old enough to breed. When I stepped out of the transport vehicle and onto the red sand I thought of blood and remembered the fluids of the vessels, remembered their filth, their stink, and I hated the vessel that dreamed. I hated her because she had brought me back to this dirty terrestrial place. The dormitory mothers led me inside the compound. I traveled alone, and they did not understand this. They talked of the arrival of “the others.” They expected the Kell. A man, they believed, was not sufficient to understand their vessel’s complication. I was not angry with them. The mothers are vessels; cleaner, stronger, perhaps, than the younger ones, but still they exist only to work and sweat and die. They will never leave the desert.

The vessel was housed inside the cell of one of the dormitory mothers.

“She cannot sleep with the others,” they told me. “She cries out at night and wakes them. It is because of the dreams.” Their desert sculpted faces tilted up to look at me, and I pretended not to see the red dust crusted in the wrinkles of their dark faces.

There was no door to the cell. I saw the vessel squeezed up into one corner of the room, one sun-browned arm flung across her face; her skinny, scabby legs pulled up close to her chest. The brown sheet was rumpled. Her hair was black, straight, unwashed. I wondered if they had deloused her before I arrived.

“Leave me with the vessel,” I said, and the dormitory mothers nodded and scurried back out to attend the vessels working in the starch fields and irrigation ditches.

The dormitory floor was hard and smooth. I stepped into the cell, stood only a few inches from the bed. A base creature, I thought. But she can dream, they told me.

“Vessel?” I said. “What do they call you?”

She lifted her skinny head. I wondered if the dormitory mothers were feeding her. She looked close to breeding age. The Kell would come for her soon.

“Daeva Four,” she said, and her voice was soft, afraid, childish. “I am told that you dream.”

Her eyes were not brown; they were black, black like the bottom of a deep well. Tears flowed out from the edges of her black eyes, made lazy lines in the fine coat of red dust on her brown face.

“What do you dream?” I said.

More tears. More wet. More base emotion.

“I dream of the ocean,” she said.

Of course you do, I thought. That is where all your kind will end. But this vessel had never seen the ocean. The ocean was on the other side of the world, and none but the Kell and androgynies had ever seen the ocean. I had only read of it.

“And what does the ocean look like?” I said.

“It’s all water,” she said, “ditch water that’s blue, not red, not brown, not muddy. All blue. And things live there, inside it.”

“If you can dream, Daeva Four, then you can lie.” The ocean was not so impossible a thing for her to believe she had seen. The Kell could have discussed it among themselves the last time they came to pick out the breeders from the ripened vessels.

But a vessel that could dream could do more than just dream. She could tell her own stories. She could lie.

I told her to tell me a story that wasn’t true.

Her big black eyes stared up at me, and the tears ceased, and I watched as the watery trails began to dry on her cheeks. I wondered again if she had been deloused.

“You want me to lie?” she said, and there was awe in her voice.

“If you can,” I said.

“Any lie?” she said.

“Any lie.”

Her gaze met mine, that wet, onyx black gaze that was so repulsive, so other, and she said, “I’m a woman.”

Some part of me recoiled at that word. “Who told you that word?” I said, and my voice came out loud, far louder than I expected, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of apprehension. I did not allow myself to recognize why, not then.

This was not just a vessel that could lie. She was a vessel who remembered a dead past.

“It’s a word I dreamed,” she said, and she pushed herself up against the wall, clasped her arms around her knees, hugged them closer to her chest. I saw the tears begin to return to her eyes. Not again, I thought. No more wet weakness.

“Fine,” I said, and talked in a soft, even voice now, as I would talk to any other fearful creature. “Fine, it is a word you dreamed.”

She dreams of oceans and -- I could not even think the other word without shuddering. Daeva Four could dream. Daeva Four could remember, and she could probably lie as well.

I knew I had to take her to the Kell.

The vessel had not been deloused. I learned this from the dormitory mothers when I asked that they wash her and prepare her for transport. I went back to my vehicle and sprayed myself in anti-parasitic spray as I called the androgynies at the city center and told them Daeva Four could dream. They arranged a meeting with the Kell city leader Ro Bhavesh.

The dormitory mothers presented the washed vessel to me. I put her in the vehicle. I had to sit across from her. My skin crawled.

The vehicle closed, the steely compound gate opened, and I entered our destination into the navigation console. All this time the vessel stared at me. She began to cry. I ignored her.

I would need a bath and disinfectant rinse, and with that I would wash away the last trace of this encounter with the vessels and the desert and the dusty, wrinkled faces of the dormitory mothers. Ro Bhavesh would deal with this vessel. Daeva Four was a Kell complication, not a man’s.

The Kell, however, still did not appear to understand that I was better utilized elsewhere. When our vehicle arrived, two tall androgynies met me on the landing space and said, “You’re to take the vessel to Ro Bhavesh.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but androgynies never meet the protestings of a man with anything more than stoic androgynous silence. I have much experience with this. I closed my mouth.

The sky in Sapan that day was lavender, the leaves of the slender trees lining the sidewalks an orange-peppered yellow. Tomorrow I hoped they would be green. The orange made me think of the sun in the desert. Here in Sapan the streets were white, the buildings blue and gray and deep green, and the vessel and I were the only things here that carried dirt and contagion with us. The city air ate away at that contamination as I entered. I felt the conditioning system pump air out around me and the vessel, the microscopic machinated nits devouring the dust and decay on my face and arms and clothing. The vessel scratched absently at her skin, as if she sensed the cleansing of her body’s filth.

Clerks and officials and smooth-faced boys selling sealed containers of starches stared as the vessel and I passed. I almost hoped no one would guess that she traveled with me, but she stayed so close behind that she could belong to no one else.

I came to Ro Bhavesh’s spherical white tower and was admitted without trouble. The vessel and I were ushered into the Kell’s meeting room by two androgynies. We stood in front of Ro Bhavesh. All this time the vessel had said nothing, but when she saw Ro Bhavesh seated in the tall white sculpted chair her black eyes grew wide and she cried out, “I saw you in my dream!”

Ro Bhavesh smiled. I had seen few Kell smile, and when this one did, it struck me that seeing this Kell smile was very pleasing to the eye. The Kell are not so different from men in appearance, and all that separates them from us is their lack of fluid and excretion. No sweat, no blood, certainly no tears. The Kell are the ascendant; they are all that the base vessels are not and never will be.

Standing before this tall, slender Kell, its face so smooth and impassive, the eyes without moist sheen, the hair orange and wrapped about the scalp with impeccable precision, I remembered that I stood now somewhere between Kell and vessel, between ascendance and baseness, and I hated this vessel again for her presence, and her dreams, and her lies.

“You say you saw me in a dream, vessel?” Ro Bhavesh said.

“I dreamed you, and you told me stories,” the vessel said.

“And what stories did I tell?” Ro Bhavesh said.

“You told me stories of women,” the vessel said.

I watched the smile fade from Ro Bhavesh’s clean, ageless face. For a moment, I wondered if I should not have brought the vessel here. I wondered if I should have destroyed her in the desert.

“I apologize,” I said. “I have heard no vessel utter such a word. I believed it would be -”

The Kell held up its hand. “Enough, Kadru. Am I correct in saying that you are intimately familiar with cases such as this?”

I thought of the desert, and of my youth - and again, my skin crawled. “I have. I excelled at the selection of breeders, laborers, and genetic flaws. I did my work well, and was rewarded for it. I enjoy my place in the city.”

And if you send me out into the desert again, I will perish, I thought, but I did not alter my expression.

“What do you make of this vessel, then?” Ro Bhavesh said, and its gaze stayed on the vessel who stared back at it.

“From what she says it appears she is not a teller of lies or stories so much as she is a teller of past truth. Most vessels are incapable of lies -- past or present -- unless they are persuaded to believe them as truth, but I have known genetic anomalies who carry the past within them, passed down from one casting to the next. She is a fourth casting. Someone felt it necessary to continue the breeding and growth of this mix beyond one casting. Perhaps they hoped this genetic storage of racial memory would manifest itself.” I hesitated. “She dreamed also of the ocean.”

Ro Bhavesh looked at me. I saw only cold Kell calculation in its face, the efficient rational thought of a mechanized ascendant. “Perhaps, then, we should take her there, and discover how much truth of the past she knows.”

My first thought was to question its use of the term “we.” My second thought was to wonder why Ro Bhavesh felt it necessary to question a vessel at the ocean. Did it expect to receive different answers in Sapan than it would receive at the ocean?

“Ro Bhavesh,” I said, “do you think it is necessary to -”

“You question too much,” Ro Bhavesh said.

The voice was without emotion, without inflection, but I was chilled by it. Ro Bhavesh nodded. It was decided. I was to travel to the ocean.

Ro Bhavesh led me to its private vehicle. It told the vessel to sit beside me and brought three androgynies to assist in our descent. We plunged away from Sapan and spiraled downward to the red-blue world below.

This place they call the ocean I had never seen before. Yes, I had read that it was a vast expanse of water colored by the photosynthetic vegetation that existed within it, but I did not expect that it made noise. I did not expect it to move. This colored water rippled and thrashed and moaned as if it were a living creature, condemned for all eternity to lap at the sand and feed upon itself.

In truth, I had never wanted to see the ocean. It was here the Kell brought the ripened vessels, and here the vessels produced, bled, and died. It was here Ro Bhavesh told the androgynies to land the vehicle. I stepped out last. We stood somewhere on the coast along a paved walk. In the distance, sitting low and gray along the earth, were the breeding compounds. They stretched out all along the coastline and behind us in precise grid-like patterns. The only place one could look and not see these monstrous blemishes was the ocean. So I gazed out at the ocean, the vast roiling wetness that I knew did not end at the horizon.

“Have you dreamed of this place?” Ro Bhavesh asked the vessel.

The vessel stood beside me, and she, too, gazed not at the compounds but at the ocean. “Oh yes,” the vessel said. “I see this place.” She hesitated. “But when I see it I scream.”

I still could not look at the compounds. I could not look at Ro Bhavesh. In the desert, it is the sun you notice most, that huge orange orb that blankets the world in orange light, but here it is the feel of the wind you come away with; it is the stink of the ocean you remember, the salty wetness that clings to your skin and clothing, a wetness you cannot wash away until you ascend to Sapan.

“And why do you scream?” Ro Bhavesh asked.

The vessel now turned to gaze over at me with eyes so deep and black, like staring into a hole in the sky. I turned to her then, to this thing that had brought me to the desert and the ocean in the same day. I had to look at her now because she knew the truth, and was not afraid to speak it. She was not afraid of the truth because she had nothing to forfeit by its telling.

“I dream that the Kell take me here,” she said. “I dream that they put things inside me, and these things grow, and the Kell rip them out and put in more. And it happens every day. I can smell the ocean but I can’t see it.”

“She has most certainly heard the Kell say something of this place,” I said, but the wind took away the words, and the wind caught at my hair and pulled it loose from the tight, efficient style I had carefully maintained. It is not Kell hair I have, nor Kell hair I ever will have. Ro Bhavesh said, “But you said you dream of women, a base collective term for those of the female sex.”

“That’s a filthy word,” I said, and turned to look at Ro Bhavesh. “Why take her here? Why show her this place? This is an unnecessary measure, and dangerous. If it’s the genetically passed memory the Kell want to replicate, initiate another casting. There is no purpose to bringing her -”

“Do you question the Kell?” Ro Bhavesh said, and I saw more cold Kell calculation behind its blank stare.

“I have never questioned the Kell,” I said.

“You have not yet over-questioned,” Ro Bhavesh said. “That is why you are still living in Sapan. That is why you do not reside here.”

I could offer no reply to those words but silence. To speak more would be to admit truth.

“These are not dreams you tell,” Ro Bhavesh said to the vessel. “These are the memories of a dead casting. How much do you remember?”

The vessel gazed up at Ro Bhavesh, and I saw the wetness in her eyes. “I dream about women and men and things that weren’t people. Things like you that killed all the men. Made women into vessels. The smart women you find, the ones who can lie and dream, you don’t call them women. You can’t call them women because they aren’t, really. They can’t carry anything anymore. You fix that. You use them for cities. And you call them men.”

Ro Bhavesh smiled, turned to me. “You wonder why we have these experiments, Kadru?”

“I do not question the Kell,” I said.

“We bring this vessel to the ocean to empty her of her contents and mix those favorable things we find within her with those favorable things we have extracted from others. That is the nature of the project. They are the vessels that host those perfect biological organisms we employ against our enemies. But of course you understand this, don’t you? You understand what you are?”

“Of course, Ro Bhavesh,” I said, and I began to feel the apprehension again, the hollow stab in my belly of something akin to fear.

“Then the next time we tell you to go to the desert and evaluate vessels we expect that you will remember what you are, what you could be. This vessel holds more useful material for our cause than you do, Kadru. Do not question us. If you forget your place again we will forget it also, and remove you to the other function your people serve.”

Ro Bhavesh stood flanked by its impassive androgynies. As I looked from Ro Bhavesh to the androgynies I felt a deep well of hatred for those things without a clearly defined sex. They were not man or vessel, and stood one step closer to ascendance than I would ever be. They would never fear the ocean.

The Kell would never transport me back to the desert of my youth. If I left the city I would be sent into the gray compounds. I would become a vessel for Kell monstrosities, Kell viruses -- Kell weapons of war. They had altered me, yes, but I could be altered again. I could become one of those base things again, one of those things capable of breeding, of production, a vessel of birthing fluid and death. Here was the truth of my existence. Here it was unfolded before me by a vessel that dreamed and lied and remembered. I hated her for it. I hated her because she told me a truth I had almost succeeded in forgetting.

“Empty her,” Ro Bhavesh said to the androgynies.

I looked away, to the ocean.

“Kadru,” Ro Bhavesh said. “Watch.”

I looked back at the vessel, at Daeva Four, the creature with the brown skin and lanky black hair. I did not want to look into the well of her eyes, but that was where my gaze fell. There are days when I wonder if I ever truly returned from the depths of those black eyes.

They did not kill her. To do so would waste the vessel. The three androgynies extracted small vials of blood from Daeva Four. She began to weep. Tears tumbled down her cheeks and were swept across her face by the wind. I was brought with her inside one of the compounds. I stood and watched as she wept and the screaming began. They immersed her skinny body in an embryonic solution. They inserted the viral organism. They put her in a long, dim room with the others, a room of cells made up of transparent glass. I could not hear the voices of those vessels encased in the glass. But I could see them. I could see their lives stretched out before them, days of birth and blood and death.

The androgynies did not look back at Daeva Four, her skinny body strapped down to the soft silvery table that molded itself to her form. I did look. And I did not forget.

I walked back outside into the salty wind. I did not ask what the Kell would do with Daeva’s fluid, did not ask what plan they had to create a creature that remembered the dead past of others. I did not question the Kell.

Now when they send me into the desert I look for the dreamers. I look for the liars. I look for the ones who remember. I do not question my place. I am a teacher of men and androgynies and Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and worth, but my worth is measured by that which I am not, that which I will never be.

Sometimes I remember the lie I am able to live because I am able to dream. Sometimes I dream I am halfway to ascendance, halfway between Kell and vessel. I am a man, I say. There are days when I believe this is true. There are days when I believe the Kell cannot harm me.

There are days when I dream of the ocean.

Holding Onto Ghosts

This story first appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of Talebones Magazine. I’m told it largely made the cut because it was reasonably put together and just so happened to be about the right length to fill that issue’s word count hole. Yes, publishing is a mystical business.

In February 2003, I moved to South Africa for a year and a half to complete my Master’s in history at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In the U.S., we’re very good at hiding our ghosts. We soak them up with movies and popcorn and iPhones and trips to Costco. South Africa’s ghosts were more real to me, more tangible. In South Africa, they formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the end of the apartheid era explicitly to talk about these abuses. The purpose of the organization was to allow people to tell their stories of politically motivated violence, including rape and murder; to uncover the truth and get closure for relatives and friends who had lost loved ones to violence. Before you can go forward, you must understand your past, or you are in danger of repeating it. I wish our own country could be so introspective. If you want to read some of the stories from the TRC, they are available for free online at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm .

I remember the day my father came home from Angola. He had gone when I was too young to remember him, and I had only known his face in photographs. The big man who arrived on our stoep, with the bruises beneath his eyes and the red dirt in the seams of his face, did not look like the same man in the photographs.

I remember that he put a big hand on my head in greeting. I clung to my mother’s trousers.

“I wish you were a boy, Aninka,” he said. “I brought ghosts home with me.”

Things were never the same in the house after that.

My father went up to his room and didn’t come out for a month. My mother started throwing plates. I couldn’t sleep at night. And the house began to do odd things. Mother would leave handkerchiefs out on the table, or mismatched earrings on her dresser, and they would disappear. She said Nan stole them, but one time Nan was out picking up groceries in town, and left mother’s silver on the table for polishing, and when Nan came home, the creamer bowl was gone. Mother yelled at Nan and slapped her, and that was the night that Sizwe, the man who helped around the garden and fixed the leaky house pipes, the man who built my tree house and a tea table for my dolls, left. He stole the gun out of my father’s room. Nan said he was going to free her people.

In this house, none of us was free.

After Sizwe left, I met a black woman in the garden. She was very beautiful, and she didn’t dress in the nice clean domestic’s dress like Nan did. She dressed in a big colorful wrap. She had big beaded hoops around her neck and wrists and ankles. She said her name was Nkosi. She said she had come back with my father.

When I told mother about the woman, she said I was a liar. I tried to tell my father, but when I reached the door to his room, Nan found me and said I wasn’t allowed. She said my father was too tired to see anyone.

Nan and I watched television when my mother was at her prayer meetings. One time we watched the news and there was a black man on the steps of a gray building. He wore a suit, and he lifted his fist to the blue, blue sky, and all the people around him, a great mass of black people, more than I had ever seen, cheered and sang.

Nan started crying. She took me into her arms and said, “It’s over, my child. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over.

I woke up that night to find two little girls playing in my room. At first, I was angry with the girls for coming into my room, but then I saw that they were playing a game with bottle caps, and I wanted to learn how to play, too.

“Where do you live?” I asked the girls.

“Here,” they said.

“No,” I said, “This is my house.”

“Not any more,” the girls said.

Mother gave Nan the day off, and father came down for breakfast. It was the first time I had seen him since he came home. He sat in front of his toast and read the paper. He said, “The blacks are going to overrun this country, force us off our farms. They’ll run us out and the government will go corrupt, you’ll see. They’ll all starve to death. They’ll wish we were still here, then, won’t they? They’ll beg us to come back and feed them.”

“Nan says her people are starving now,” I said, because Nan talked to me about those things whenever we watched television together.

My father looked at me sharply, and his eyes were small and black and angry. “These people are terrorists,” he said. “Mandela is a terrorist. You should see the way they live. What they do to each other. Like animals -”

“Robert,” my mother said.

“No,” my father said. “She has to hear truth.” He waved the paper at me. “We cared for Nan and Sizwe all this time, and all the others we’ve had help us on every year, haven’t we? Where would they be without us? What would they do?”

“There were two black girls playing in my room last night with bottle caps,” I said.

My father’s mouth clacked shut.

“And there’s a black woman who lives in the garden. Her name’s Nkosi. She says she came home with you.”

My mother eyed my father sharply, but said to me, “That will be enough, Aninka.”

When Nan came back, she had me help her with dinner, but only because I asked. I wasn’t supposed to clean the dishes or pick up after myself because that’s what my mother said she paid Nan to do.

Mother sat in the tearoom talking to some old ladies who spoke Afrikaans. Mother said that they were so old that they were already married during the Great War.

They talked about the blacks overrunning the country - our country - I remembered, even though Nan lived there too, and mother laughed and said,

“Nan, my girl, if the revolution came tomorrow, you would stay beside me, wouldn’t you?”

“Like our steady girls in the South African War,” one of the old ladies said. “They marched with us all the way through, they did, right into the concentration camps.”

Nan set down more cucumber sandwiches and walked back into the kitchen. “Ma’am,” Nan said, “if the people came up today, I would be the one to stick the knife into you myself.” And Nan cut through the rind of the butternut squash with a knife so sharp the rind peeled away like butter.

My mother pretended to laugh.

The old ladies left.

That was the night my father started screaming.

I woke to the sound of his cries. I lay in my own bed, silent and still, fists full of my sheets. When he stopped screaming, I heard my mother speaking to him. He shouted back at her. The voices were loud, but I could make out no words.

I noticed the shadows of the little girls playing at the end of my bed.

“Your baba did bad things,” one of the girls said.

“He was saving our country,” I said, “from the blacks.”

“There isn’t anything to save,” the first girl said.

“There’s me,” I said.

In the morning, my mother called the doctor to see my father. I saw Nan bringing bloody sheets from my parents’ room.

“What happened, Nan?” I asked.

“It is the ghosts, my child. They tear your father apart. He is bewitched. Go watch television.”

I was never allowed to watch television by myself, but everyone was busy upstairs, and Nan was soaking the sheets in cold water.

I went down to the living room. Three black boys were already there, staring at the blank television screen. They wore jerseys with holes worn at the elbows, and dirty shorts that showed their skinny knees. I turned on the television. There was a cooking show on, in Afrikaans.

“We were playing football,” one of the boys told me. “Men came in on bakkies and shot at us. They had dogs. And gas.”

“My sisters ran up to the ambulance,” another boy said. He wasn’t wearing shoes. “The paramedics were afraid of what my sisters were going to do. They shot my sisters. Then they threw my sisters into the back with us.”

I turned off the television. “My father was saving our country,” I said. “He just came back from Angola.”

“Sisi, your baba could not have just come home from Angola. None of your people has been in Angola for a long time. He was in the townships. He was killing our people.”

“You’re all terrorists!” I shouted. I ran to the laundry room where Nan stood over the big washbasin, elbows deep in cold water.

“Nan, the boys say my dad’s a bad man!”

“Get me some ice, my child,” Nan said.

I stomped into the kitchen and opened the freezer underneath the refrigerator. “They had no right to say that, Nan. My dad is saving the country.”

Nan took the ice trays from me and cracked the ice free, into the big basin. “Yes,” she said, “and Sizwe is fighting for his.”

“There’s only one country,” I said.

“One country,” Nan said. “Many people.”

“Your people are supposed to work for our people,” I said. “Mother says God made it so.”

“Your mother, she doesn’t know everything.”

“Did my dad kill all those people?” I asked.

Nan looked down at me and crinkled her brow. “What people?”

“The people in the house.”

“Yes,” Nan said, and she went back to washing my father’s bloody sheets.

I walked upstairs and found my mother in my father’s study. She was sitting at his desk, crying.

“I want to see my dad,” I said.

“Go play, my baby. I don’t have time to -”

“I want to see my dad!” I shouted.

“Where’s Nan? Nan! Get her to play a game with you.”

I ran out of the study, my mother’s familiar call to Nan sounding behind me, long and loud, the way she called the dogs.

I got to the bedroom door. My hands just reached the doorknob. I pushed inside.

My father lay in the middle of his bed, a bulk of a man breathing heavily beneath new bed sheets.

And he was surrounded in people.

Nkosi was there, and the girls with their bottle caps, and the boys from downstairs, and many, many more. Tall men in suits and blue work jumpsuits, and women wearing shawls over broad shoulders and babies with heads so small I could fit them in my hands, and there were teenage girls there, toyi-toying - singing and dancing and clapping their hands. An old man sat smoking in a corner, wreathed in the heady sweet smell of dagga smoke.

“Dad! Dad!” I cried, and crawled up onto the end of my father’s bed. His face was very, very white, and his eyes were wide open, staring. I saw that there were long bandages wrapped around his arms. I saw dark blood seeping through.

I shook him, “See the people, dad!” I said. “I told you they were here! Make them go away, dad. You have to save our country!”

“Everything’s burning,” my father murmured.

Now I was crying because I was so scared, scared my father couldn’t make the people go away. “Tell me what to do,” I said. “I’ll make them go away. Just tell me what to do.”

My mother pushed into the room and started to yell at me. I opened my mouth to tell her about the people, but she just walked right through them, strode over the girls and their bottle caps and the circle of girls toyi-toying. She did not see the babies or the women or the men in their suits, or the old man smoking dagga in the corner.

“What are you doing here, you horrible girl!” my mother said. She grabbed me by the arm and jerked me off the bed. I tumbled onto the floor and fell against an old woman wearing a black dress. She wore a church hat and carried a small black purse, and she said something to me in Afrikaans that I was too frightened to understand.

“Dad brought ghosts!” I cried. “There are ghosts all over the house!”

My mother slapped me. I burst into new tears.

My father died that night.

The doctor said it was a heart attack. No one talked about the bandages on my father’s arms. No one talked about the ghosts. Mother said that she would punish me if I ever mentioned them again. I asked Nan if she was going to leave. She said she wanted to, but she loved me too much. She didn’t want to leave me with the ghosts.

I got used to the ghosts after awhile. They never got old. They never told new stories. They stayed the same, and I grew up. Nan voted in the elections in 1994, and came home and sang to me as I helped her with dinner.

My mother got old and died too soon. I think she really could see the ghosts, but she pretended not to. I think they drove her crazy.

But to me, the ghosts became a part of the house. Inseparable from the garden, the stoep, the stove, the big washing sink. The girls still play at the foot of my bed with their bottle caps. Nan says she keeps the men with suits company, and talks with Nkosi in the garden. The football boys watch television with us at night. The old man smokes dagga in the corner of my parents’ old room.

These are my father’s ghosts, but it is me who keeps them company. Me and Nan, because it is not my house anymore, and it is not my country. It is our house, our country, and we are all finding our places in it, carving out our own corners.

I am not afraid of the ghosts anymore. But I still hold onto them. Hold tight. I do what my father could not - I hold onto his ghosts, and by holding them, maybe one day I will set them free. And free us all.

Wonder Maul Doll

Give a woman a gun, and the power dynamics change. It’s not so much that I started out writing with the explicit goal of writing fiction that treated men and women equally (the “f” word), or even skewed the dynamics to matriarchy on occasion (which were always violent, too – you can’t oppress half of the world and have a peaceful society, no matter which half you’re oppressing. Sorry). It’s that I started writing stories I wanted to read. Gritty, brutal stories about screwed up people who also happened to be women. This story first appeared in From the Trenches: An SF War Anthology in 2006. In 2009, it was “reprinted” in EscapePod and reached a whole new audience of angry science fiction fans who felt I was gory for gory’s sake and moaned and groaned about what had happened to their happy-go-lucky Golden Age SF. “Where’s my cozy white guys rule the world stories?” they cried.

These chicks ate it.

We’d set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter around our feet, too heavy to fly.

The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.

Ro’s got her feet up on the chair next to me, head lolled back, eyes closed. She’s sweating like a cold glass.

Telle finishes up behind the curtain. She took her time with the boy, the kid. Not a kid, I guess. Looks young, too skinny. They’re all pale as maggots, here, built like stick figures. She pushes into a seat next to Kep, flicks on the radio tube. It flickers blue-green, vomits up a misty shot of President Nabirye talking trash.

“Turn that up,” Ro says. She passes me some sen. Her teeth are stained red.

The boy stumbles past the curtain. He’s a little roughed up. Ro throws some money at him.

Kep crowns my king. I steal an ace.

The boy clutches at the money in the mud; moths’ wings come away on his hands. There must be something Ro doesn’t like, cause she stands and roughs him up some. He starts squealing.

Elections back home are in a month. President Nabirye’s nattering about foreign policy in Pekoi. President says we’ll be home in six weeks. Three of our squads just got hashed by a handful of local boys and teenage girls.

“They don’t pull us out soon, and they’ll ship be shipping us home in bags,” Telle says. “Nabirye won’t be in that seat in six weeks.”

“Nabirye can eat shit,” Kep says.

Ro cuffs her. “Watch the yapping.” She sits down and starts polishing her boots.

The boy on the floor isn’t moving.

We’ve been here nine months looking for treaty violations, organic dumps. Bags of human sludge.

We haven’t found a fucking thing.

There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.

Ro has me and Kep on point. Kep’s all right, a talker, doesn’t keep the tube on all the damn time like Telle. We’re checking out another field the brains sent us out to sniff. Running fire drills, Ro calls it. We’re mucking through half-filled ditches, cutting open suspect corpses, raiding contagion shelters.

“So,” Kep says, “sister says, I want to marry her like in the books. Like, for love. A pauper. Mother Mai says –”

“Fuck you?” I suggest.

“Yeha, yeah. Mother Mai says, you marry for business. It’s in the Bible.”

“Is that truth?”

“Yeah. Book of Theclai. Page eighteen. Line ninety-five.”

“Thou shalt eat fish?” I say, wondering if we’re talking about the same book.

“Hold!” Ro yells from behind us.

Kep and I drop to our bellies in the high grass. We’re slathered in bug secretions, but it doesn’t keep them away. I can feel bugs boring up under my slick. Yellow and black ticks, hoar ticks, pill ticks. I’ll spend all night burning them out.

“Did you see anything?” Kep says.

“Nah,” I say. I crunch a bug in my teeth.

Somebody pokes at Kep. Kep nearly sets off a spray. I pivot onto my back, raise my gun. It’s just Ro. I flop back over onto my belly. Ro stays crouched.

“We’re twenty paces,” Ro says.

“I don’t see nothing,” Kep says.

“Telle and Luce are running scout,” Ro says. “Hold.”

We wait. The bugs really start to swarm.

“Clear!” Telle’s voice, loud.

“Up,” Ro says.

Kep and I pace at a half-crouch, our eyes just above the line of the grass. I can see Luce and Telle at the base of a rocky rise overhung in widow’s drape and black morvern. They’ve uncovered a gaping black mouth.

I come up along Telle. Kep flanks Luce.

“Light,” Ro says.

Telle snaps a globe off her vest and flicks the release, tosses the globe into the darkness. The globe throws off white light.

Ro points us in. “Kep, Jian,” she says.

Kep and I slip into the tunnel. We have to crouch. The floor’s smooth. The globe stops rolling at a bend in the corridor. I hear a scuttling sound, like cockroaches.

Kep raises a fist. We stop. Kep kicks the globe around the turn. The globe cracks against the far wall. Something moves.

Kep goes down on one knee. I aim over her head, into the bowl of the stone room. The globe leaves no shadows, so I see them. Hunkered against the stone, clinging to each other, quaking like boats at tide: Pekoi’s stashed organics. Their treaty violation. Nabirye might get her seat yet.

“Live!” Kep yells. “Telle!”

The three girls on the floor start crying. They try to bury their heads in their skinny arms. There’s no fat on them. I could break all their bones in my bare hands.

Telle thumps in, does a count. “Haul them out!” she says. “I called it in. They want them live.”

“The fuck?” Kep says.

So we haul them out, live.

They come kicking and biting, but they’re spent by the time they hit air. The littlest one is the fiercest, all teeth and eyes.

Ro looks them over. She’s holding Telle’s tube. I hear the tinny voice buzzing from Central. Ro clicks the tube off, tosses it to Telle.

The girls start babbling. They’re naked, and their accents are bad, but they know what we’re saying. They’re feeding us some story about hiding from bursts. Dead families, bloated bodies. They say they’re not tailored, not dangerous. They don’t know anything about organic sludge. I’ve heard it from every bag. And every bag opens up the same.

“Shut up,” Telle says. She steps in, butts the biggest one in the face with her gun.

The little one leaps on Telle and starts tearing at her slick.

Kep and Luce and I drag the girl off. Telle binds the girl’s hands, trusses up the other two with plastic wire.

We string them together and make for Central. We’re a long way from Central.

We don’t talk about that.

“So Mother Mai says –”

“Fuck Mother Mai,” I say.

Telle’s got watch over the girls. They’re huddled around a big cicada tree. Ro’s poking at the fire beetles in the stove. Dusk is heavy. The lavender sky goes deep purple, then black. It’s like being smothered.

“Mother Mai says, what you gonna do with a womb anyway? It gonna chew your meat for you?” Kep’s sitting up on the fallen tree behind me, wiping down her gun. She’s got a globe up there, set low. The light’s orange, like bad urine.

One of the girls is bleeding, the little one. It’s been three cities since I seen a woman bleed. I forgot that some still do it. Telle’s still got a grudge against that girl. She’s started calling her Maul.

“So my sister has it put back in. Nip and tuck,” Kep says. “You know what happens?”

Luce is pulling off the heads of powder bugs. She keeps dropping them on me. I pound at her ankles. She kicks away.

“Nothing happens!” Kep says. “She doesn’t even bleed, cause she’s got implants, of course. I thought she’d be crying all the time. Like a boy. No. It’s social, my sister says, makes boys so screwed up.”

“Your sister should run for a seat,” I say. “She sounds like a bleeding heart. Her and all the bleeding hearts can run the whole damn world from the seat. Start wearing their wombs like trophies.”

“Yeah,” Kep says. She spits sen on her cleaning rag. “Yeah.”

Ro yells at Luce and tells her to run a perimeter sweep. Ro kicks me and makes me heat up the pot. I take some over to Telle and the girls. The little one, Maul, bares her teeth at me, but she takes the food in, takes it so fast she vomits it up. One of the others, this big, broad-shouldered mutt, just looks at the pot like she’s never seen food before. She goggles at me like a kid. When she looks at me, I hear that boy. The mewling one.

We move at light, after delousing. The girls are sweating too much. Losing too much water. All that uncovered skin. No slicks. They drink too much.

Luce is running scout. She circles at midday, when we’re sitting out the worst of the heat.

“Off track,” Luce says. “They put up a ward over the road.”

Ro spits sen. “Our road?”

“Yeha.”

“Pekoi doesn’t want us coming back in,” I say.

“Or they’re just doing road work,” Ro says. “Don’t think they’re savvy. We reroute. Telle?”

Telle flips on the tube and reroutes us. We have six more days in the field, but the reroute gets us two more. Ro puts us on cut rations.

The girls whine about water all night. All but the broad-shouldered one. She has a tangle of curly hair, always hangs her head over. Kep starts calling her Doll.

“What we calling the other one?” Telle says.

The third one, the skinniest girl, with a face smeared purple with bruises, holds her arms over herself, bobs her head. I have a boy back home, he bobs his head like that when things get tense. Says he’s thinking too much.

“Call her Wonder,” I say.

The girls slow us down. There are bugs to eat, but the girls keep retching them up.

Kep’s on scout next day, comes in, says there’s a village a click south. “Maybe two or three dozen bags,” she says. “Mostly boys.”

Ro gives the nod. “Stock up on water. Be good.”

We push. Luce switches out scout with Kep. Kep paces me. Telle’s still on girl detail. Ro’s taking up the rear.

Kep and I hit dirt first. We scare a group of scraggly girls and kids in one of the bug farms on the edge of the village. The girls slosh up onto the banks of the ponds. I see the roiling forms of giant madillo bugs churning through the muddy water. Some of the girls grab stones as they disappear into the bush, but nobody throws any. They’ll hide and wait. Ro tells us to be careful now, look for trips. Don’t go in the water.

When we get into the spread of the village, a bunch of girls are there. They’re darting back and forth. Carrying stones. A couple have razor bugs mounted on long poles.

Telle’s got the language down, tries some bargaining, but they won’t have it. Some stones fly. Kep sprays a couple of the closest throwers. They screech. Their skin starts melting off. Telle shouts out again that we want water, a roof.

They send somebody out, some old woman. She brings two boys with her, skinny, sticky things no better than the ones in Pekoi proper. She kneels down, and the boys kneel down next to her. She holds out their hands to us.

Telle says we have to take them. It’s a cease fire offering. I tell her water’s better.

Ro grunts, grabs the boys’ hands. “A roof,” she says, “water.”

They put us up in the old woman’s hut, a circular mud pit layered over in thatch. Telle turns on the tube. Ro takes up the food they bring in. We stash the boys in a corner and tell them to shut up. The hut’s pretty small, and there’s a lot of us. It’s too crowded. Ro puts Kep and Luce and me outside, tells us to watch point.

Kep squats down against the house, pulls out her cards. I don’t like the air we’re getting off the locals. They’re too used to muscle.

There’s a boy watching from the doorway of one of the far huts. He’s seven or eight, old enough to be trouble, young enough not to be much trouble. He comes out of the doorway, takes a couple steps forward. I’m keeping an eye as we lop cards. Luce stares the kid straight in the face. He waves at her. Kep adjusts her gun on her shoulder.

Luce yells out at him in the local. Her accent is bad. “You stay there! Stay or we shoot. Understand?”

The boy goes still. His eyes are wide. He’s looking past us.

I look at Kep. She’s at the corner of the hut. I can’t see around it.

I yell, “Kep!”

Kep unshoulders her gun, flops on the ground. She fires around the corner without looking.

Luce is up. I dart around the other side of the hut. I hear the girls inside, screeching. I pace all the way around, duck out and see what Kep hit. There’s a couple screamers. A boy and a woman, maybe his older sister. Their faces are pretty smeared. Black holes for mouths and eyes, flesh running off bone, no noses. They’re wiping off their own faces with their hands.

I do a quick sweep. There are half a dozen people out. More coming up from the other end of the village. They’ve got stones. Somebody’s got a writhing basket. Flesh beetles.

“Hold!” I yell. I only know a couple words in local. I got that one down.

But they don’t hold. They start screaming. Somebody throw a stone.

Luce sprays the nearest two. They go down.

There’s a girl up on a roof. I see her throw, but she’s so far off, I don’t think she can hit anything.

But her aim is good. Kep goes down, struck right between the eyes. I run toward her. The crowd screeches.

I can hear Ro’s voice somewhere behind me.

“Move back!” Luce says, and yanks me away from Kep. I can’t shoulder my gun and grab Kep. I’ll lose point on the hostiles.

“Cover me,” I say.

The girl with the basket dumps her beetles.

Luce sprays her. But the beetles are out. They swarm. Hunched, dark figures, big as my palms. I fall back from Kep, and the bugs overtake her. Kep jerks.

I duck to reach for her flailing arm. One of the bugs jumps on my hand. I try and smash it, but the pincers get me between thumb and forefinger, right through my slick. The bug starts pumping yellowish fluid.

Luce keeps dragging me back.

Ro’s up behind me now. She rips off the bug, takes a hunk of my flesh with it. Pain jolts up my arm.

Ro’s got her gun out. “Jian, take girl watch. Telle, get out here! I need a translator!”

I hump back around to the front. Telle’s already heading my way. I take watch on the girls. They’re huddled in the entryway, clinging to each other. Doll is starting to cry.

We’re boxed in. We’ve got hostiles all around. I can see a half dozen more coming up from the ponds. They’re running. There’s more screaming around the other side. Ro’s shouting --

“Spray! Take them out!”

And when the ones from the pond get close enough, I take them out. Their hands are empty, but Kep’s dead, and Ro’s giving the watch. We’re the muscle. Not the brains.

I can’t hear the girls anymore, because everyone else is screaming. I slip a knife out of my boot and go and cut the ones I sprayed. Shut them up. I’ve got my slick on, so the spray stays off me. Their heads are just big globs of goo now.

Luce is running toward me. I’m standing over a half dozen bodies. I wonder how many more hostiles we’ve got left.

“Orders?” I say.

“Telle’s it!” she yells. “Ro’s down.”

“Down?”

“Down!”

I stare past Luce. Telle’s humping back. There’s a heap of oozing bodies behind her. She’s got Ro’s gun.

“The fuck?” I say.

“She’s down,” Telle says.

“The fuck you mean she’s down?” I say.

“Let’s go. Let’s get these bags and go,” Telle says. She grabs Wonder by the arm, tries to yank her up. The whole lot of them are clinging so tight that when Wonder moves, they move too.

I do a quick count, look for movement. There’s the heap Telle and Luce left behind, the heap where Ro and Kep are. I can just see something flickering on a far roof. What have they got left? Kids and kittens?

“I said we’re up!” Telle says.

Luce and I share a look. “Luce, run point!” I say, because I can’t grab the girls and aim my gun. I’m stronger than Luce, but she’s a better shot.

I look back again, at Ro and Kep and the bodies. I can’t even tell one from the other.

“Move!” Telle says.

I grab hold of Maul. She bites at my slick, so I throw her over my shoulder. She goes limp, and we move. Luce paces ahead. She sprays anything that moves. Boys, chickens, bugs. She sprays out a path, and there’s nothing left living behind us.

We make it to the bug ponds. Maul twists suddenly, so sudden I think she’s having a fit. I lose my grip, and she goes over, rolls into the water with a splash.

Luce twists toward the pond, aims her gun at the water.

“Luce, point!” I say, because I’ve got my own gun out now. She’s moved off point.

Wonder and Doll are crying.

I try to switch my gun setting low, but it’s been jammed since the last city.

“Go get her!” Telle says. She’s got the other two by the hair. Some of it’s come out in her hands.

“Fuck you,” I say, because she isn’t Ro, but Ro’s dead. And that leaves her.

The girls’ sobs are turning to keening. I can’t see a ripple in the dark water.

Luce sets off a spray ahead of us. “I got movement!”

“What are you shooting at, dogs?” I yell.

Telle hits my shoulder with the butt of her gun. I nearly lose my balance, nearly go over.

But Telle had to let go of the girls to do it. Doll’s crawling away. Wonder’s almost on her feet.

Telle grabs Wonder by the hair. This time, a big hunk of her hair comes away, leaves a bloody scalp. Wonder screeches.

I stumble forward. These bags of sludge are going to come apart. They’re going to come apart and vomit on us, hock up a thousand hours of organic tailoring.

I grab Doll by the ankle, pull her toward me. She bites at my slick. Her teeth don’t go through. I put my hands around her throat and squeeze. And squeeze. She flails, like Kep flailed, only her face is turning gray.

Telle’s with Wonder. Luce is yelling something.

Doll finally goes still. I let her go limp. I stand up. Telle’s standing over Wonder. Wonder’s curled up into a ball. I take my knife out of my boot.

“Don’t cut her!” Telle says.

But I cut her anyway, because Telle can test and bag a corpse better than a live fish, and Ro and Kep are dead.

Wonder bleeds, more than I thought she would. I keep her between my legs, hold her still. She jerks a little. Her eyes go glassy.

I let her go, wipe my knife. “Tag and bag her,” I say. “Central gets their proof. They just won’t be live.”

Telle’s staring at me. Luce’s still got her gun trained on the trees. I stare out at the water.

Telle rips off her test pack and starts cutting open Wonder’s warm body. Wonder jerks some more.

I crouch, point my gun at the pond, and wait. Maul’s body finally comes up, floating face down. Telle’s hands are elbow-deep in Wonder’s corpse.

I chew some sen. “You gonna fish her out?” I ask Luce, but Luce hasn’t seen the body yet. One of the big bugs grabs hold of it again, hauls it back under.

Telle sits back on her heels. She wipes her hands on her slick. She stands up. She looks blank.

“What?” I say.

“Body’s clean,” she says.

“Clean?” I say.

“There’s nothing in there,” Telle says. “They weren’t organics.”

“Check the other one,” I say.

“I don’t need to --”

I point my gun at her. “Check the other one.”

Luce licks her lips.

Telle guts the other one. She cracks open the ribcage. The body shudders. She digs around for awhile. Her hands come out bloody. No sludge. Clean. She looks up at me.

“Clean,” she says.

“Now what?” Luce says.

“We burn them,” I say.

They don’t have a better idea. So we burn them. And they burn. Like good little girls, my little Wonder, Maul, Doll. They burn.

I chew some more sen. Telle flicks on the tube.

There’s nothing dangerous in Pekoi.

We ship out three weeks later. We’ve got a new first, and a new flank. We’re the last squad to take off, so we get to see it. It’s Telle who’s on the tube, Telle who says,

“We’re clear.”

They drop fire on Pekoi. Pekoi burns. Just like anything else.

The brains say Pekoi is too dangerous to the civilized world. Doesn’t matter what the muscle says, what the muscle did. It’s all about the brains, in the end. What they thought they saw. What they thought they knew.

Telle’s got the tube up by her ear. I’m watching the city burn.

“You hear it?” Telle asks our first.

Our first shakes her head.

“Eighty percent of the districts reporting. Nabirye’s leading fifty-six to forty.”

Luce is wiping moths’ wings off her boots, smearing dusty color on her cheeks. She laughs and laughs.

Nabirye flies us to another city.

Genderbending At the Madhattered

“The Madhattered” was, I believe, the name of a bar in one of fellow Clarionite Andy Scott’s workshop stories. I loved the name so much that I vowed to use it in a story one day. In 2004, I got my chance when Strange Horizons Magazine published Genderbending at the Madhattered, probably the only magazine that would ever take a weird little story like this. Turns out I can write about painters afterall – so long as they’re gender/sex morphing ones. This is also, possibly, the closest I will ever come to writing a romance with a “happy” ending. Or at least a romance about two people who don’t totally annihilate each other. You’ve been warned.

My friends are cyclical, like the eight seasons—always changing, always the same. I never believed this. About them. About myself. I didn’t like politics.

I photograph the perpetually gendered in little rural towns outside the city, towns with names like Ash and Beech and Coriander. After half a year of churning along muddy rails, knocking on knotty doors tied with twine; after half a hundred debates with operators about misdirected calls, charges, disconnected or nonexistent lines; after all that, all I wanted was to be back in the city, drinking at the Madhattered, thinking about anything but politics.

My friends kept tabs on when I’d be in; we’d meet at the Madhattered thirteen hours till dawn. Nib and Page were always there first, always arguing: debates about heterosexist dogma, or who could drink the most tarls without compromising gender propriety. Margin would drink mandalas and tell me it was barbaric that there was actually a country where drinking processed food was taboo.

Rule showed up the same every night, of course. He’d walk in, tall and straight-hipped, denouncing social authorities and gender prescription. He’d come in with his beard plucked because the government wouldn’t let him get it surgically eradicated. His wish for smooth cheeks fell outside his gender prescriptions, especially since he was queer. “Nothing personal,” Rule told me the first time we met, when I asked him to be female for the night, and he admitted to his inability to alter sex. “Just born that way.”

Rule always ordered the drinks: mandalas straight up, sprins over ice, four tonic and tarls . . . and then he’d order drinks for the rest of us.

By the end of the night, we were always drunk, and Margin would be slumped over in the seat next to mine, wearing a blue tunic or pink tutu and enough makeup to paint a landscape. Margin would blubber about the latest love he or she had lost that night, Page and Nib would be yelling about whose turn it was to be male in their ongoing adolescent opera, and Rule would be wearing a dress, illegally. Around two hours till dawn, when the perpetually sexed couples were going home to baths and babies and picket-fenced houses, we’d start to talk photographs. History. We would start talking about who we were, who we wanted to be.

Those were the worst nights.

But I need to tell you what I did outside the Madhattered, before Liquid Sunshine and the end of adolescence. Before perpetualism, complacency, adulthood.

Photographs form our historical memory, our past. The image of our forebears, sexed in the ideal of their vision upon our discovered landscape of sand and stone, is our starting point: they upon the black shores, wrapped in lingering sea-fog, posed among amber forests, recording our landscape as significantly as the record of their own existence; back when the landscape was still significant. Each of us is remembered in the same way. Photographers, through photos, prove our existence. Mine. Yours. Ours.

I’m one of those photographers. I help document every mature citizen who’s formulated a sense of gendered identity. In little towns like Tansy and Burdock in the north, most people are photographed male; that’s the perpetual gender they chose, the one the government ordains they’re recorded in. You’re stuck with perpetualism until you’ve dried up your breeding potential. Some change back afterwards—many do before I come to town—but really, it doesn’t much matter after the photograph; whatever you’ve chosen as your twenty-year perpetual sex is the one you’ll be remembered by, the one that forms your perpetual identity for posterity. In a little town south of Tansy called Grass, I once waited four weeks—a whole season—for half the elder population to shift itself back to female so I could capture the images of themselves they were bound by law to portray for posterity. All those perpetuals, adults, so certain of who they were, where they belonged. I envied them: their unchanging core of identity, their sense of themselves as a part of our historical present, permanently recorded for our future.

After I met Sunshine, I called every night I spent in those tiny towns, and every night Sunshine laughed and said, “Cue, have them send you home. I’ll remind you who you are.”

But the Historiographical Society has its own agenda, both now and then, and by the time I got back to the city, high summer was usually over, the leaves were turning lavender, and I’d almost forgotten those peculiar things about Sunshine that fascinated me from the start.

When I first met Sunshine, I had my imager set up outside a couple of storefronts in a backward little town called Sage. Some neuter youths were throwing stones at the windows of one of the tuck shops, and I wanted to bring a copy of the photograph back to the city and put it into the Sage collection in the archives. I was going to call it “Violence Outside the Window,” which I thought was quite clever. We’re normally not allowed to photograph underage neuters. They’re not considered a part of historical memory until after they’ve chosen a perpetual gender. In this case, however, the town elders had had trouble with these neuters vandalizing storefronts, and they employed me to provide the artifact with which to procure compensation from the neuters’ families.

After I’d snapped a few images, the neuters caught sight of me at the end of the street. They started throwing stones at me. I panicked, looped my imager around my neck, left the tripod, and ducked into the first door along the street that opened for me— and tumbled into a thin blond man giving a seasonal presentation on sex mutation theory to a room full of prostitutes. The man and I crumpled onto the maroon carpet in a tangle of arms and legs. I got a mouthful of his hair, my imager banged into his groin, and he punched me so hard he gave me a black eye.

The imager didn’t break, and Sunshine wasn’t really hurt, but he spent the next three weeks being female out of spite. I asked her to lunch to make up for it. She said she didn’t like to eat in public because her last partner was from Thosaline, and Thosalines considered eating in public aesthetically unappealing.

We settled on iced water. I had a citrus in mine.

Sunshine gestured with her slender hands when she spoke. Her voice was soft, and she was very open, articulate. She was the only person I’d ever met whose mannerisms remained the same no matter their sex. Sunshine still looked me directly in the eye when male, and used the same effeminate gestures. His laugh still came out a girlish giggle. Sunshine’s indifference to gender prescriptions unnerved even my friends.

I loved Sunshine for it.

Sunshine was slim and straight-hipped, even when female. The government had recommended she become perpetually male, as bearing children would likely kill someone with hips like hers. Because of that, he hadn’t had any identity issues since he was a neuter. I always envied her that. She worked as a social health worker and disease counselor for the city University, which explained his lecture at the brothel in Sage. He practiced yoga and knew jujitsu.

Sunshine asked for my call number at the end of our iced-water date. She said she wanted to get a copy of the prints when they were done.

I didn’t get back to the city for another two weeks after that, and then I spent four days locked up in my flat waiting for her to call. I drank a lot of citrus-flavored water. Margin and Rule called me three times, concerned about my mental state.

“She’s a small-town flirt,” Margin said. “I’ve met a thousand like them. Get off the floor. Come meet us at the Madhattered.”

But I didn’t go. And Sunshine called. When she asked me out for dinner (attempting to get over her previous lover’s aversions), I spent the next three days trying to decide which sex I should show up as. An hour before I was to meet Sunshine, I made a hysterical call to Rule asking for advice.

“Listen,” he said, “anyone the social authorities are going to tag as perpetually male’s going to want to spend a night with a male. Might help some in making up for that twenty years of perpetual pairing with a woman he’s got ahead of him. Government’s got their dirty fingers in everything.”

So I met Sunshine as a male, and we ate a little, and talked a lot. I never ran out of things to say to him. We had both studied political theory and both had an aversion to Revisionism, Rule’s political party of choice.

Sunshine took me back to his flat. Inside, bright washes of color lined the walls—paintings.

“You want a drink?” Sunshine asked.

I nodded. He brought me back a tonic and tarl from the coldbox as I looked over the paintings.

“You did these?” I asked.

He nodded.

The paintings were a wash of bright colors—orange, magenta, crimson, neon yellow, turquoise, vermilion, lavender. In one of them, a pair of figures of indeterminate sex danced and embraced. A frame of words bound them, too small to read. Another canvas portrayed the form of a sexed male wearing gendered female clothing, and a sexed female wearing gendered male clothing. The script border read, “They say love has a bitter taste. But what matter? What matter? I have tasted you. Love is bittersweet.”

I studied Sunshine with new eyes—the thin, yellow-haired man beside me. These were caustic paintings. Anti-government. Anti-gender prescription. Rule had told me what they did to people who created work like this.

“You could be bound for painting these,” I said.

He sipped his drink, still staring at the “love is bittersweet” painting.

“I wanted to show you,” he said, “in case you thought I was too revolutionary to associate with.” He had a smatter of freckles across the fair skin of his nose and cheeks. I wanted to touch him.

“It’s just one more thing to like,” I said.

Sunshine kissed me.

I spent the night.

Margin told me I must be in love.

We huddled over our table at the Madhattered. I spilled everything. Nib and Page were babbling about their lesbian sexuality course at Book’s School of Sexuality. They were having trouble remaining dually female for consecutive days; too much like perpetuality, they said. Margin wore a tutu and red heels, but I wasn’t so certain she was totally female-sexed that night. Rule’s politics were catching.

“I don’t want to be in love,” I told Margin. “Love is as changeable as sex.”

Margin rolled her (his?) eyes. “What, you think it’s just about the sex? It’s never just about the sex. Maybe for the queers and the perpetuals, but not for us. Too much variety. Why choose one over another, if not for love?”

But I didn’t want to be in love. I knew what that meant. Sacrifice. Obligation. Perpetuation. Two people pair up and they have to know who they are: forever, unchangeable, as permanent as a photograph, as history.

Sunshine asked me to move in. Sunshine made room in the flat for me. I brought in my photographs, my imager, my set of recording disks, my gendered wardrobes, my set of photography books, gender-theory books, and sexual evolution books. I carved out my own little corner of Sunshine’s world.

Sunshine went to jujitsu class twice a week and painted four times a week. Whenever Sunshine was gone, I went through the painting studio in the flat’s spare bedroom. I liked to touch the brushes and dabble my fingers in the paint. I liked handling the things Sunshine had held. The smell of that room always reminded me of Sunshine: wet paint, fresh canvas, watered down color. The paint drippings on the floor made their own unique Sunshine portrait. Whenever I missed my lover I would move quietly through that room, breathing in the scent of Sunshine.

The government sent me out every year, usually from high winter or low spring to low autumn, which meant that I only spent about half of every year with Sunshine. Sunshine spent odd moments on the Great Work, the one I always heard about when I came back, the one that gave a new pattern to the paint-drippings portrait on the uncovered studio floor. The Work itself, though, Sunshine always spirited away before I came home, and switched to working on smaller projects: half-covered canvases smeared in orange and lavender, smudged photographs and small portraits framed in elegant script. I searched the studio for clues of the larger piece, but found nothing unusual about the new pattern on the floor but the slow, sensual silver arcs of spattered paint by the door.

So I ignored the Work. Sunshine did not speak much of it in our three years together, and I never brought it up. I didn’t see a need to. There were always other projects, always different conversations.

“Do you believe being perpetually sexed really means you know who you are?” Sunshine asked me one night after we’d made love. I’d gotten back from another terrible historical imaging in a muddy town called Root whose elders quietly told me they did not believe in “unnecessary technologies”—like plumbing. I’d found myself shivering in an outhouse at fourteen in the morning, wishing I was home. Here. With Sunshine.

Sunshine and I lay side by side, blankets bunched up around our feet. Our fingers touched.

“Of course,” I said. “Only perpetuals are part of the historical landscape. Perpetualism and identity precede imaging.”

Sunshine sighed. He was male that night, and he’d lost weight since I’d last seen him. Blue and silver paint stained his fingertips.

“You think your friends are waiting to be perpetual, or do they like being like they are, like the eight seasons, cyclical, always changing, always the same?” Sunshine asked.

“They aren’t the same,” I said, “except Rule. Queer. Changeless.”

“But they are,” Sunshine said. “Believing that being perpetual precedes identity, you’d be arguing that your friends change identity every night.”

“Why are you asking?”

Sunshine toyed with the edge of my pillowcase. “Something I’ve been thinking about. About images and identity. Honestly, Cue, if you were different every time you swapped, I’d be living with two different people. You’re always the same.”

I sat up, offended. “This is—”

“Aren’t I always the same?” Sunshine asked.

“You do it on purpose.”

“Have you ever dressed like a woman while you were a man?” Sunshine asked.

“Only with you,” I said.

“In public?”

“That’s illegal.”

“Too political for you?”

“I just—”

“I love you.”

I looked over at him. He had never told me that before.

“I love you no matter what sex you are,” Sunshine said, “and that changes things.”

“Let’s not—”

“I want us to be a couple.”

I stayed silent for a long while. Then, “I’m not ready to be perpetual.”

“Let’s not be perpetual. Let’s be an adolescent couple, forever.”

“You can’t use ‘adolescent’ and ‘couple’ in the same sentence,” I said.

“I want to be bound to you. Just you.”

I reached over and took Sunshine’s hand. “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

Sunshine pulled his hand away. He stood up quietly, pulled on his robe. I heard the door to his studio close.

Rule told me I was a fool.

“You’re telling me a beautiful painter says you’re the love of their life and you blow them off? You’re stupider than Margin gives you credit for.”

We were, of course, at the Madhattered. Page and Nib were male and female, respectively, arguing about whether or not Nib looked better in Page’s tutu than Page did, which technically wasn’t an appropriately gender-prescribed discussion. Margin was flirting with someone named after a kitchen appliance. Rule was drinking tarls.

“I’ll never understand what a bright person like Sunshine sees in you,” Rule said. “You can be mewling. A lazy coward, when the mood suits you. Sunshine needs fire. Someone whose thinking works outside the perpetual.”

I glanced over at Page and Nib and Margin. “You think any of us is ever going to be perpetual?”

“No, Cue. I think we’re the lost children of history. Perpetually adolescent.”

Sunshine remained male for almost four months: four seasons, half the year. He spent his nights in his studio. He locked it whenever he left.

I received my government contract for the year, a detailed itinerary of little towns on the outskirts of the northern province, most of which hadn’t been photographed in almost a decade. I told Sunshine that I’d be leaving the next day. He said nothing. Something was slipping away.

The day I left, Sunshine walked me to the silver tube of the train.

“When you get back my project will be done,” he said.

I nodded. I was female that day. The first town on my itinerary was Lilac, a last resting place for female queers. I wasn’t allowed to photograph the town, of course, because queers can’t legally formulate a self-willed gendered identity—and are therefore outside the realm of history. I was only going there to take a written census for the health authority.

“I’ve been thinking about being a couple,” I said.

Sunshine glanced up at me.

“When I come back I can be perpetually female,” I said, “and you can be perpetually male. We’ll sign the government forms for—”

Sunshine put his finger to my lips. “You don’t understand, Cue.” He kissed me. He left me.

I called Sunshine every night, but the operator could never get a connection through. “No one’s picking up the receiver,” the operator said.

I photographed four women in Evergreen and thirty-two men in Beech. In Coriander, a bridge washed out, and eight men and twelve women died before I could photograph them, erasing them from history forever. I met three men named Stove who took me out for tarls and toast. I slept with a woman named Cup after I photographed her nude, surrounded by her twelve perpetually sexed children.

“It’s so good to see them all as real people,” she told me.

I went by mule and rickshaw and carriage and steam car. A town named Magnolia, a blond woman named Comb. A stir of queer men outside a pub in Fern being given handouts and then beaten away with sticks. Mothers now perpetually male, fathers now perpetually female. Neuter children plucking at my imager, tugging at my sleeves. The black, lined face of a person named Ripple whose sex I never knew, because all I saw was the face and hands, gesturing for the imager through the folds of a black robe. Eighteen women in Hyacinth wearing crimson headbands. Two nude men in Willow with bodies lean and sinewy as whips. A man named Rubble. A woman named Stone.

When I got back to the train line it was already low autumn, and as the train curled toward the city, the rain started, slow and steady, streaming past my windowpane in ever-changing rivulets. Different patterns, different paths, but always rain.

I climbed the stairs to the flat Sunshine and I shared, but there were no lights on. I unlocked the door and palmed on the light.

Sunshine’s paintings were gone. All of Sunshine’s things were gone. I walked slowly through the flat, the living space, our bedroom. Her books were gone, his black suits, her red tutu, the silver scarf I gave him for her birthday. I turned on the light in the studio. The room was bare. The floor had been scraped clean. White walls, white floor, an empty room looking out onto the cloud-heavy bay.

I stood in the doorway, numb.

The phone rang.

I dropped my traveling case and ran to the living area, picked up the receiver.

“Connected,” the operator said.

“Sunshine!” I cried.

“Fuck, no! Why aren’t you here?” Rule said.

“What?”

Margin’s voice crackled in through another line. “Sunshine’s opening is tonight! Why aren’t you here? He told you, didn’t she?”

“Where?” I said.

“Where else, fool, the Madhattered,” Rule said. “Get over here. You’re missing it!”

“I’m coming,” I said, and dropped the receiver. The operator yelled at me. I darted down the stairs.

The Madhattered was crowded, more crowded than it had ever been. Adolescents and perpetuals vied for space. Three extra bartenders tossed drinks. Margin wore a black tunic and four-inch green heels.

Rule dressed in a snazzy suit with a blue kerchief. Page wore a silver tutu. Nib wore a gold tunic and thigh-high boots. I hadn’t had time to dress up. I wasn’t even sure what sex I was.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Rule pulled me up to the table. Page and Nib and Margin all leaned in. Rule pointed to the open gallery doors by the bar. “We’ve been in. You have to see it, Cue. This is a good crowd, but it won’t last.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Go,” Margin said.

I pushed my way to the gallery, through the mass of tutus and tunics. In the first room were half a dozen of Sunshine’s paintings, all of which I’d already seen, in one form or another. Sunshine wasn’t there. The second gallery, behind the first, was more crowded, and more people were talking in there, a low rumble of voices. I squeezed my way past the crowd. Someone elbowed me. A drink spilled across the front of my blouse. There was only one work in there, made up of seven canvases. A little rope cordoned it off from the press of people. I was forced up against the rope. I gazed at the paintings, only— they weren’t really paintings.

They had begun as photographs. Seven canvases. Sunshine and a faceless partner. But when Sunshine added paint, they merged into something else.

I saw seven paintings arranged vertically along the far wall, two-by-two, progressing closer to one another as they moved inward to frame the final painting mounted below them. The images were of Sunshine, altered photographs of Sunshine’s unmistakable form:

That final image, that blended image, I realized, was Sunshine, dancing. Just Sunshine; not male, not female, just the person I loved, sexless, genderless, Liquid Sunshine, painting Sunshine’s past, present, future.

Sunshine had created Sunshine, carved a history of this one image, this one self. No imagers, no photographers. Just Sunshine, painting over the image that photographers like me would have set down as truth. Remaking it.

I stared. For how long I stared I don’t know. At some point I realized my cheeks were wet. I wiped at my face. My tears.

A hand on my shoulder.

I turned.

Sunshine smiled. “You like it?” she asked.

I couldn’t say anything.

“You understand,” she said.

I understood. I remembered the little villages, the rain on the train window. I remembered Ripple beckoning to me in black robes. Margin and Page, Nib and Rule. My friends, always changing, cyclical, like the seasons, always the same.

“I wouldn’t have taken those photographs you altered,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I still love you for it.”

She smiled again. Turned. The stir of people pulled her away.

I could have reached for her. My fingers and hers, twining together, a merging, too late, of two bodies, two people, just us, not perpetual, not sexed, just people.

But I did not reach out. I wanted to watch her go, a ripple through the wave of bodies; there, then lost, adrift and then swallowed.

I went back to the flat. I sat down on the floor of the empty studio and cried.

Liquid Sunshine—I always thought of the piece that way—drew attention from government authorities and moral purists. Rule told me three months later that Sunshine had disappeared after an exhibition in a neighboring city, Lavender.

I sat up for three nights wondering if it would have been different if I had reached out for Sunshine’s hand that night, if I had told Sunshine that, I, too am infinitely malleable, that I, too, am capable of painting my own past and future, creating my own image. But I would have been lying to the one person I loved. And to myself.

Rule and Margin became a perpetual couple. Margin bore three children. Page and Nib never settled, and were lost to history. I have no images of Sunshine but memory. They are fewer and fewer these days, often mixed with more recent faces, freckled women in purple tutus in Flower, a blond man in Lotus named Glass, three brown neuter children in Wisteria with paint-stained fingers. I signed a permanent government contract. I don’t come back to the city much. I don’t like to. It reminds me of my adolescence. I am perpetually female now, and every year I ask for assignments further afield, census trips to remote queer villages. I ask for them because sometimes I think that the farther I go from the city, the farther I will get from Sunshine . . . the farther I will get from myself.

I longed to create my own perpetual identity for so long that I never stopped to think that perhaps I would not like it when I discovered it. Sunshine was right: we all stay the same, there, in that place that is ourselves, the blending point of sexed identity, gendered existence, infinitely malleable. Sunshine knew that you could find that place where the malleable was your view of the world, your view of yourself, but I never found that. Maybe I don’t believe in it. But Sunshine did. Sunshine believed in everything.

Even me.

My Oracles at the End of the World

So let’s say Macbeth was a post-apocalyptic warlord called Madden, and his right-hand man was a woman named Banan instead of Banquo? Still with me? Good. This one first showed up in a now defunct online magazine called The Boundless Realm back in 1998. It was the second fiction piece I ever published, and I got a whopping $5 for it. It’s the original Brutal Women story, and sorta set the scene for everything I’d write afterward.

I gave birth to my boy along a barren stretch of the High Way near the King’s hold in Skall, twelve miles from the Hold at Inveress. I squatted in a dusty ditch as twilight neared, a time when spirits of the dead and dying roam free in search of unwilling hosts.

I pulled on my tattered trousers - patched and bloodied so many times that I’ve lost track of which blood came from whom - and started my walk to Inveress with my son wrapped up in an old black tarp and bits of burlap. I would train him as I wished, I decided, with help from the best teacher of battle and survival I knew.

The hold at Inveress is not like the King’s hold in Skall. It is not one of the old, burned out structures, built before the cataclysm when men loved their buildings tall and full of large windows. Inveress was built to defend. It resides on a rocky rise called Dunsinane Hill, about four miles from the black square of Birnam Glen.

The gate’s small peeking portal swung inward, and a pair of sharp, frightened blue eyes peered out at me. My boy sucked contentedly at my breast, wrapped up securely within the tarp. Warm and fed, he kept silent.

The eyes continued to stare. For a brief moment, I thought perhaps my greeter had been stabbed in the back; his eyes remained so emotionless and still in their glistening. As I reached across my boy for my blade, the man croaked, “Mistress...?” as if it were a question. And, I suppose, it was. I did not look myself. Women do not carry babes at their breast.

“Come now, get me your Master, the Thane of Glen,” I said. “He will not be pleased to know that his comrade Banan has been kept waiting.”

The peeping portal snapped shut.

The gate opened abruptly, and I almost dropped my boy for my blade.

“Banan!” the figure cried. It was a voice deep and familiar. I had to dart from the doorway to keep the man from crushing my child in his embrace.

“Clumsy, drunken brute,” I growled.

The bright gleam - enhanced by much drink - in his eyes faded, and he looked down at me from beneath thick, furrowed brows. A hand strayed to his sword hilt, and I watched his form grow wary and alert.

“I will ask only one favor of you in this lifetime,” I said. “I want you to train my boy. Here, in Inveress. I cannot raise a boy and command battles. You have servants and a Lady. I do not.”

He glanced over at me where I stood, deep into the shadows next to the gate, the heavy tarp of burden in my arms, headband dangling from bruised, bloody fingers, the blood smearing crimson between my thighs.

“Come in, friend Banan,” he said, voice soft, compassionate. I hated it. He made me feel like a flimsy, ill-bred woman; like a Lady.

I spat at his feet. “Curse you, Madden,” I barked, and walked - and, I admit, painfully - into the hold at Inveress.

If I would have known then what I was doing when I gave him my boy, when he accepted my plea, I would never have done it; but a woman goes half-mad when she has just birthed, and I did not think about his Lady. That was my greatest mistake. I did not consider his Lady.

And she was one to be reckoned with.

I named my son Flanin, after a popular man who came into power just after the first socerorous clouds of the cataclysm settled. I did not visit Inveress often, and when I did, I did not pay much attention to Madden’s Lady; not many of us real women did. Madden and the other Thanes and several warrior nobles from Skall visited Inveress on many occasions, and I made fast companions of the Thane of Ross. I knew Ross from many a campaign in the north, and she and I soon banded together in our taunts of Madden’s Lady.

Lady Madden was a slight, ever-smiling young woman who looked to be of no more than thirteen years at a glance. Only her revealing dress - red and often transparent, impractical even for a Lady - gave away her age as something other than that of a maturing young child. When Ross and I told tales of the oddities we had encountered on various campaigns, whispering that they were unhappy ghosts, the Lady scoffed at our words, insisting that there were no such things as spirits or demons now that magic had been bled from the earth by the cataclysm.

We won battle after battle, Madden and I, commanders of King Dunwan of New Skalland’s vast army. More land joined New Skalland with every victory, so much land that rebellion was inevitable. Where there are conquered, there is unrest.

The rebellion came, and with it, the beginning of my nightmares. The Thane of Cawdor grabbed a hold of a vast portion of northern New Skalland and rallied the rebels and townsfolk there together. He grabbed up mercenaries from a loose clan known as the Old Illand, adding strength and experience to his numbers. When the rebels moved to overrun Skall, Madden and I were waiting with an army at our backs. The battle was short-lived and bloody, as many are. The rebel Thane of Cawdor was hauled off to Skall to be tried for treason. As for Madden and I, we camped that night near a twisted tree on a slight rise several miles from the battle sight to tend to our wounds. We were just half a day’s walk from Skall.

“Mallen, King Dunwan’s son, is looking after our troops,” Madden said, spitting on a tattered, filthy bit of linen that he had pulled from his leather vest’s pocket. He began wiping the blood from his brow with the wetted rag. “I told him to take them back to Skall and we would follow within a day.”

Madden took the first watch as the bitter cold of evening came upon us. I watched my battle companion as I fell into a fitful half-sleep. He stood outlined beneath the pinkish-red glow of the crescent moon, eyebrows furrowed in thought. Madden had slain the New Illand’s leader, Mydrenar, who attacked Dunwan’s oldest son, Mallen, early on in the conflict. For us, only another body to be gutted, but for Dunwan, a kill deserving reward.

At dawn, I stood watch and witnessed the rise of a bloody, crimson sun. Light blazed across the horizon. Madden rose soon after, and we began in the direction of Skall. Orange-red dust swirled about our ankles, coating our already filthy legs, arms and faces in a thin, grimy coating. The sun grew high and hot, and we both drew our hoods down over our faces. Daylight is not the best time to travel, but then, neither is the darkness.

By the third hour, we came upon the High Way. Madden jumped about the ancient, rusted vehicles lining the cracked, dirt strewn Way, just as we had always been told not to do as children. I was in good spirits, happy to be returning to Skall where my son awaited my arrival. With a grin, I leapt up onto the nearest vehicle and trotted after Madden. He drew his blade while astride the back end of a dilapidated carriage. I drew mine as well, and we sparred throughout the make-shift training ground, making our way ever closer to Skall. Before we realized it, we were out of breath underneath a dusky sky mottled in frills of orange, violet, pink and rose.

No more time to waste. Darkness means death. We sheathed our blades and began trotting through the path cleared down the middle of the High Way, stopping for nothing as we leapt over unrecognizable bits of rusted metal and plastic. A cool wind came out of the north, and I shivered involuntarily. Darkness touched the sky.

I ran only a short distance when I heard something carried to my ears with the wind. A chanting, cackling sound. My throat abruptly went dry.

Spirits.

I shook the thought from my head. I did not believe in such things at that time. I considered, and still do, that people are the most frightening, unpredictable beings that have ever existed. But that day, I would rather have fought a thousand unpredictable warriors than witness the wretches we encountered on the High Way.

Madden disappeared just in front of me as he vaulted over a vehicle frame. He gave a shout of alarm, and I drew my blade before following. As I scrambled over the frame, I choked on the stench that assailed me. A thousand horrible things I have smelled, and a thousand more I could describe, but none were like that reek of death and rot and gore; of garbage and feces.

The figures, the things that exuded this stench, were almost as jarring to the senses. They were three apparitions standing about a low burning barrel. They did not huddled about it for warmth, but hunkered down near the flickering wisps of flame as if to listen to their secrets. Thick strips of leather and tarp and linen - so many kinds of fabrics that I could not tell one from the other - draped them from their cavernous, blistered faces to their scabbed, callused feet.

Madden kept his sword in one hand, rag to cover his nose in the other. I breathed through my mouth. Madden stood several paces across from them, and I sprang to his side, sword free.

“What are they?” he muttered, more for his ears than mine.

I grinned, trying to ignore those wilted faces outlined in tendrils of orange firelight and sooty smoke.

“I would say they are women, friend,” I said. I raised my dull, battered blade toward their sickly forms. “Can you speak, spirits?”

They muttered something, whether to the two of us or to the air I could not tell. One, a large, rotund figure slightly shorter than the others, put a finger to her lips as she gazed into the fire, as if contemplating a serious question.

“Speak up or move out of the way, hags! Our business is in Skall, and you bar the path.” In truth, Madden and I could most likely have squeezed past them and continued along the Way, but the thought of brushing so close to those reeking, apparitional bodies made me shiver. I would do it, but not if a better solution presented itself.

“Can you speak, witches?” Madden shouted.

“Hail!”

I jumped into a defensive stance when the rotund witch shouted into the night. Her sickly, croaking voice filled the sky.

“Hail to the Thane of Glen,” the witch continued, wretched voice dipping into a paper-thin rasp.

“Hail to Madden, the Thane of Cawdor,” a second witch piped up, hair a tangle of filthy dreadlocks. She sounded young beneath all that muck, though I couldn’t put an age to her.

“Hail to Madden, for he will be King of New Skalland,” hissed the last. She was thin and willowy, the second eldest of the witches, if age could be determined by voice.

My eyes met Madden’s. He had grown deathly pale despite the dirt and blood on his face. His eyes were wide, almost frightened. I did not realize why at the time. I should have known better.

“King,” I muttered. “You will be king.” I turned my attention back to the witches, who were cackling silently, shoulders trembling in soundless mirth. “You speak of great things for my companion. Tell me then, the fate of my boy. What will become of him?”

One does not see apparitions often. One must question them whenever they appear. They see a world we cannot.

“Your son will be King, Banan, and all those thereafter,” the youngest said.

I did not even notice the women begin to fade into the night.

“Wait!” Madden shouted, raising a hand into the air as if to grab hold of their misty forms. “How do you know these things? Who told you? Are you spirits?” He took a step toward the three sisters.

The fire went out.

The three mysterious women vanished with it.

We did not speak the rest of the way to Skall. Madden brooded, encased in his own thoughts, and any attempt on my part to bring up the strange encounter was met with silence.

The gate at Skall was guarded by over forty warriors and twelve sentries, every last one of them with sharp wits and sharper eyes, so it came as no surprise than a small party came out to greet us, fully armed. It was a common enough occurrence, but the faces of the party weren’t common at all. Nor was what they had to say.

“Who comes to greet us?” Madden called.

I could barely make out the dim outlines of two figures jogging quickly toward us, chains and swords clanking. A party of just two? Wasn’t five the usual assembly?

“The Thanes of Ross and Annil,” came a familiar voice, so full of triumphant joy and pride that it took me a moment to recognize the voice of Ross.

I waited until the two of them were close enough to make out their faces before letting my hand stray from the hilt of my blade. The moon hung low, but it was enough to make out Ross’s continence. Annil grinned as well. Her cropped yellow hair was a mass of sticky dred-locks. Ross had taken down her own waist length hair and divided it into a festive array of tiny braids.

Ross grinned like a fool. “The King,” she managed to sputter, and Annil laughed. “The King has heard all about the battle, Madden, and when the couriers began coming in, each one baring your name and praises on their lips, he actually began wondering whether the crown should be yours or his!”

I started, and Madden and I exchanged guarded looks.

“No money, no, but not only his thanks.” Ross reached into her long leather coat. “He also commanded me to dub you the Thane of Cawdor.”She pulled the heavy gold chain of office bearing the Thane of Cawdor’s symbol and held it out in front of my companion.

“I can’t be the Thane of Cawdor,” Madden said, voice deep, angry. “He still lives in-”

“Aye, he lives,” Annil said, spitting on the ground at her feet. “But with all that rippin’ an tearin’ `scribed in his death sentence, who knows how many more hours he’ll live? Certain not `til morning. So take yer title, young bastard, and let us celebrate.”

I glanced over at Madden as he held the chain in his hand, eyes never leaving the Thane of Cawdor’s symbol. “They say I will be King as well, Banan. But your boy will be King thereafter. This they promised, friend. This they promised.”

There was something in his voice, something so dark and sinister that I felt as if I were standing next to a stranger. I was suddenly very anxious to get back to my boy.

King Dunwan, his great mass filling the raised and tattered recliner that made up his throne, rose to meet us with open arms as we were ushered into his chamber. He praised both Madden and I on our success, and I had to bear through an overwhelmingly unpleasant embrace that I could have easily done without. I would have smelled better the rest of the night if he had refrained.

All of the Thanes were present, and they flanked King Dunwan in a small, neat half circle which Madden and I joined. Ross winked at me as I took my place, and I grinned back. Madden, I knew, received the Thane’s title because of his blood lineage, not his valor. The King knew of my endeavors as well. I may not be duly rewarded, but my son, perhaps... I shook the thought from my head.

“I have gathered you here for a purpose, my Thanes and kinspeople,” King Dunwan began after the small crowd quieted. His sons, Mallen and Donal, flanked either side of him, and two of his Ladies stood behind him, both looking young enough to be his grandchildren.

I glanced about for my wild-eyed boy, knowing that he would find a way to listen in on this gathering. Sure enough, I caught sight of his honey-colored head peeking down at me from a loose ceiling tile. The ducts and vents in these old pre-cataclysm holds did not offer any sort of secured privacy. For once, I was glad. I grinned up at my boy, and he grinned back, smiling a foppish adolescent smile.

“I have summoned you as witnesses to the descent of my lands and title. I have decided to name my heir,” Dunwan announced. “My lands, Thanes and all other resources of New Skalland, will, upon my death, be granted to…,” he paused for effect, beady little eyes staring out at each and every one of us through thick wrinkles of fat, “my eldest son, Mallen.” He finished with a flourish of his hand.

My heart jumped. The other Thanes looked a bit confused as well, but rushed to congratulate the named heir. I looked to Madden. He wore an expression like the hard rocky face of Dunsinane hill, stable and never-changing. I had never seen him in such a state - except before battle.

“You will hold us a celebration at Inveress in three days time?” Dunwan called to Madden.

“Of course, my King,” Madden answered, expression melting into a smile that did not touch his eyes. “Let me start ahead to bring news of your coming. My Lady must prepare.”

Madden walked from the throne room with a hand on his sword and death in his eyes. I gazed up at the ceiling where Flanin still remained, and motioned toward the doors. He gave a nod and disappeared without a sound to be heard over the hearty cheering and drinking of the Thanes, King Dunwan, and a blushing Mallen. Yes, the named Prince of New Skalland was actually blushing.

Like an ill-bred Lady.

When we arrived at Inveress three days later, Lady Madden gave us all such a pleasant, polite welcoming that Ross and I were nearly sick. Madden’s Lady was dressed in practical attire, consisting of a halter top, black leather coat and faded, tattered trousers that hung loose about her slight form.

Madden seemed moody most of the night, and he and his Lady left the banquet table early. At the time, I thought little of it. Flanin sat beside me at supper, grudgingly displaying his table manners. Even Ross complemented me on my boy’s behavior, and the Thane of Len’s Lady offered to purchase him from me. I was very proud.

Several of us sparred in Inveress’s courtyard after the meal. Madden watched coolly with a chipped porcelain cup in his hand. My boy battled with Ross, and was thrown to the dirt arena many a time, but his spry, wiry form kept coming back up until he had learned all he could from her fighting forms. Madden, for the first time, watched my boy with interest. He had never taken any notice of him, even when his Lady bore him no children.

As Flanin went to shake hands with Ross, I noticed Madden’s Lady in the shadows near the stairway leading up into the guest rooms. Her eyes were narrow slits. I had heard many times the tricks he played on that unpleasant woman, and I rewarded him with a sweet treat from New Ley every time I heard of those tricks. Her eyes found their way to me, and I stared right back at her with the gaze of a woman. For several moments we stood like that, eye to eye, a courtyard arena between us. She did not turn away until Flanin rushed up to my side to receive a hearty pat on the back and a wink. And then, her eyes turned to him.

I could not stand it any longer, and told my boy that we were going to bed. He protested, but I would not have him running about with that mad Lady on the loose. Flanin and I shared a good room at Inveress, and it should have been a restful night, despite Madden’s Lady. It was not.

“Mother? Banan!”

I threw off my flimsy sheet and jerked my head to the glowing coals of the fireplace. No, it wasn’t a fire. My boy stood at the window, fully dressed and armed with his dagger.

“Come to the window,” he said.

I grabbed my sword from beside my sleeping pallet and went to stand with him at the cracked window. He pulled back a bit of cloth keeping out the chill night air from a large fracture and stuck his head dangerously close to the jagged glass.

“I heard a shout,” he muttered. His hair stuck up in all directions, so dirty it looked as if he bore thick brown locks like my own. “Nyden and Len came in from a ride last night and asked Madden if they could see the King. Nyden just went up to the King’s rooms.”

I glanced down into the courtyard where Madden and Len were speaking in low voices. A door just five rooms down from our own was flung open, and a piercing cry split the dusky haze of dawn.

“Murder and treason!” Nyden cried, and pounded down the stairs.

Madden and Len conferred with him a moment, and then they jumped up the stairwell to Dunwan’s rooms.

“Ring the alarm bell!” Len shouted as he darted back out from the room.

Nyden sprinted to the great gong next to the gates and picked up the mallet. A single boom shuddered the air, and those not already stirring stirred. Those awake flung open their doors and strapped on their weapons.

“Stay here, boy,” I said to Flanin, and opened up the door.

“Mother?”

“Stay here!” I shouted, and slammed the portal shut.

What followed was utter chaos. I have never heard such wailing and disorder except on a battlefield. Ross and Annil were ready to slit the throat of Nyden. Len insisted that he and Madden were innocent. Lady Madden looked as if she were about to faint, even before Madden stumbled back down the steps, shouting that King Dunwan’s attendants were drunker than New Ennlanders and covered in the King’s blood, daggers in their hands. He said he’d killed them in his rage.

Nyden raised a cry of alarm at the deaths of the attendants and said that they had not been allowed to attend a proper trial. Len said that the spirits of the dead had to be laid to rest or would walk about the night seeking revenge.

“There are no such things as spirits,” Lady Madden contended.

The shouting began to trouble my ears, and I grew tired of the endless tirade. Lady Madden grew considerably paler the more Madden spoke. She finally fainted.

“Help the Lady!” Nyden cried, and rushed to her side. Len and Madden followed suite, fondling over her as if she were truly as frail as she appeared.

Ross and I exchanged disgusted looks.

Mallen and Donal, Dunwan’s sons, stood apart from the others, shock painted on brotherly faces. They would be of no help. Ross and Annil stood solidly, however, and the three of us stepped forward as one.

“Yes, look after that Lady,” I said, voice heavy with scorn. “And when we have our frail, delicate Lady safe from the sight of blood, we’ll meet together to discuss what happened to our King.” I glanced over at Madden’s Lady. She watched me closely from beneath thick, heavy lashes. “Fear and Ladies cloud our judgment. I’m willing to put both aside to find the traitor who killed our King.”

“I am as well,” Nyden said.

“So I,” Ross and Annil echoed.

The rest rose up a roar of approval, and at Madden’s say, we went to the hall to discuss the treachery. All but Mallen and Donal.

By noonday, Dunwan’s sons had fled without a trace. Nyden said they must have conspired to kill their father. I disagreed. We all agreed that the servants had either been hired by a higher personae. Even as we discussed this, thoughts were whirling about in my head faster than I could grasp them. One thing was ominously clear: I had to get my son as far away from Inveress as possible.

When we gave Madden the title of King of New Skalland that night, having no choice because of the amount of his land holdings and the loss of Prince Mallen, I thought of the witches.

As Madden knelt to receive the crown, my former companion, my former partner in battle, and I might even go so far as to say my former friend, looked up at me with a hazy sorrow in his eyes, and I knew he was thinking of the witches as well. His Lady watched from the hallway, since Ladies were not allowed into such meetings, and I realized she knew of the witches’ prophesy. I looked over at her. Her eyes were full of fire and greed and intense, almost erotic, pleasure as she watched not Madden, not me, not any of the Thanes, but the crown; a beaten piece of silver embossed with precious flecks of gold and glass that glowed in the lamp and candle light.

I knew in that instant who had murdered our King, who had twisted my companion’s will and the prophesy of the witches. She stood in the doorway in a nearly transparent swath of crimson linen, dark as blood; dark as her deepest ambitions.

Days passed. One week, two. I kept Flanin by my side, and Madden kept me by his. Every time I thought to slip away, his Lady was offering me a bit of water, some tea, perhaps? Or a look at the weapon’s room? Flanin went near mad with it all, and disappeared only once. I screamed and beat him so severely afterward that he did not dare do it a second time.

I found myself a prisoner in the place that I had once thought of as my home, the place my boy was raised. And all the time Ross and Annil were hearing rumors, rumors that Mallen had flown to New Ennland for their King’s support and Donal had joined the New Illand clan in the north. More rumors, rumors of spirits and freak storms, of thunder and lightening appearing out of a cloudless sky more often than usual. Whole clan holds were said to have been swept away by great winds. But nothing, I knew, was so horrible as the atmosphere inside Inveress.

It wasn’t until three weeks after Madden’s coronation that I received my chance to escape. Autumn had begun to cool into winter, lessening the sun’s bite. Madden decided to hold a banquet in my honor, and told me to go out to Nyden’s hold in Fyfe to escort Nyden’s Lady and son to the celebration.

I was so elated at the chance to leave the stifling hold that I didn’t notice the deadness of his eyes, or the hunch in his stance. He had not been sleeping well as of late, but I considered it none of my concern, and shrugged off his manner as having to do with his lack of rest.

“Flanin,” I said, once we were back in our room. “Take nothing more than the clothes on your back and your weapons. We can afford nothing else.”

We left Inveress that morning, and once out of sight of that dreadful prison, we began to run. Perhaps it was the joy of freedom, or the relief at knowing Inveress and its crazy Lady lay behind me, or that my boy was finally going to be safe. Whatever the reason, I did not think of pursuit or ambush. I did not think.

We slowed at noon and took refuge in an abandoned car on the High Way. Flanin and I discussed our plight. He voted that we join Mallen and his growing army in New Ennland.

When darkness came, we were well off the High Way, far from Fyfe or Inveress, and I let myself relax. Flanin stayed at my side.

Whisper.

I stopped still at the noise. We stood several yards from a stack of dark, hunkered vehicles, little more than their frames still intact. Flanin motioned in the direction of the vehicles.

My hand rested on my sword hilt, more out of habit than caution at the moment. I knew I had heard something. But what?

The noise came from behind me.

In one quick stroke, I drew my blade and turned to face a man twice my size covered in bits of patched and battered metal. I cried out to warn Flanin, and another figure emerged, rushing at my boy from the heap of cars. A third and a fourth arose. It was too dark to make out any faces, but I knew who had hired them. Even as I felled the first man, a second and third rushed at me from behind. My sword arm was twisted painfully behind me.

With every muscle in my body, I screamed. I screamed so loud that I hoped the treasonous Madden and his frail Lady heard me, “RUN BOY! MADDEN IS A TRAITOR! A TRAITOR!”

I felt the blow to the back of my head first, like a heavy hand trying to split open a melon. A sharp object, dagger or wood, I know not which, forced itself into my side. Once, twice, three times. They threw me to the ground and began kicking and punching. I lost count of how many times. The more I moved, the harder they hit me.

I must have blacked out, because the next moment, I was being dragged by the hair back toward the High Way. One eye was swollen shut, and I could feel blood trickling down my cheeks like warm, sticky tears. Why had they not cut my throat or split open my head? What kind of assassins were they? Poor fellows, most likely. Poor, ignorant townsfolk trying to get out of debt with their king. I didn’t know if I wanted to scream or cry. The decision was made for me. My head bumped into a jagged rock sticking up from the sandy soil, and I faded again.

I awoke to find myself staring at a variety of insects swarming about my face and arms. I couldn’t move. For a moment, I panicked, and tried to claw at the darkness enclosing me on all sides. No, not all sides. Those were stars up above, weren’t they? Yes, yes! And dirt. By the cataclysm, it was dirt beneath my fingernails! I tried to laugh. Pain. So much pain that I thought perhaps I was baring a second child. Burning, searing pain lanced through my body, up and down my ribs and face and back. And I knew I was going to die. I turned my head toward the stars, trying to ignore the industrious critters burrowing into my flesh and feeding on my blood. I would bleed to death in this ditch as Madden and the Thanes feasted in my honor. I dared not attempt to laugh again, but I wanted to. I found this so humorous. Here I was, in this ditch most likely on the side of the High Way, where I had borne my own boy, and where my mother had borne me. I wondered, did my mother die in a ditch such as this, betrayed by her fellow? Did it matter? I so wanted to laugh. I felt so tired, so deathly tired. Another joke. This was so funny.

“Mother?”

The sound of the whispered voice ravaged me anew. No, no, boy, get away!

“Mother?”

His face became visible just above me, outlined by the stars. There was a bruise on his cheek, and his lip was swollen, but he looked well. I tried to say something, tried to croak out some sort of explanation, or tell him to leave me here, to let me die.

“I will not leave you here, mother,” he said.

His fingers were warm and gentle as he bent to pick me up like I was a frail, ill-bred Lady. As he moved my bruised, battered form, I screeched my painful entrance back into the world of the living. He shushed me quietly.

I said nothing as my boy wrapped me up in an old tattered tarp and stanched the blood from my wounds with bits of burlap. He carried me down the long, dark High Way to Inveress, the only place we knew as home. The moon hung crimson in the sky, dark and lovely as the blood coating my ribs, head and face.

It was a long walk to Inveress.

Madden’s Lady would soon believe in vengeful spirits. She would soon believe in many things.

Once, There Were Wolves

This is probably the worst story of mine to ever see print, and also the first fiction story I published. It showed up in The Leading Edge in 1997. It’s probably one of those stories I should try to bury, the way Michael Cunningham disowns Golden States. It has alls the usual clichés – evil magicians, telepathic wolves, scourged villages, and angry heroines. But I’ve always found comfort in knowing that other writers have written crap, even if none of it is as crappy as mine. It’s inspiring or something.

Faylle rubbed the small stone in her pocket. Emptiness crept into her chest. She felt hollow. Vultures circled the sky, and a few of the braver birds settled on the outskirts of the bloody carcass. Thick, savage beaks pecked at fingers, toes, eyes.

The body would not be found.

Faylle twisted around, her back to the scavengers. Sun dappled her shoulders, her dirty blond hair. Endless hills of yellow grass lay before her, met the horizon, blue on gold. Scraggly trees twisted up from the long grass, reached for the sky, fell short, and remained huddled down close to the ground as if seeking to return to it.

She surveyed the trees, and could feel the pack of wolves that lay in wait, their golden coats blending them into the grasses. They lay to the west, beneath an ancient tree, silent and unmoving as stone. Do not shun me because of a promise, she thought, staring into their hiding place. What I do, I do for you. For all of us. I keep my promises.

Faylle started down into the vast grassland, her bare, callused feet padding soundlessly across the turf. As she passed the second pack of wolves, she felt them stir. Ears twitched, gazes flitted in her direction.

Where do you go, Wolf Lady? One of them asked. The image burned in her brain.

She answered, I go to the tower. To make good on a promise.

Confusion sped through the wolf’s mind at the image of “promise.” I don’t understand, he told her.

You can’t understand anymore. Finish the kill. Scatter the bones. It is my gift to you.

It smells bad.

Faylle recoiled at the scent the wolf projected. She stumbled, nearly fell onto the grass at her feet. She focused on the grassland once more, looked for the faint line that was the main road. You remember the stink, don’t you? she said.

No answer.

She snorted, lifted her nose to the wind, tried to clear her nostrils of the stench. I go to the tower, she said. Let me be. Finish the kill.

It smells like the tower.

At least you remember that much.

Faylle stepped forward, and her bare feet met warm, smooth oaken panels. The road. She gazed south, up the plank roadway, and hesitated only briefly as the wolf sent her one last message.

I speak no more to those who go to the tower, he said. There is death there. And no wolves. We have sense enough to stay away, Wolf Lady. You never had sense.

She felt him move away, lead his pack toward the remains of the kill.

Across hot planking she ran, ever southward in the oppressive heat of late afternoon. The sky turned glassy, and sweat beaded across her forehead, her upper lip.

And she ran on, toward the tower. Grassland swept past. Hours crept by. The hot orange sun sank low, turned the sky into a swath of molten reds and yellows and pale pinks just over her right shoulder. Heat escaped with the sun, and the shadows of evening wrapped Faylle in a cool blanket, dried the sweat on her face, billowed chilly air through her loose brown tunic and trousers. The road widened, and as she came to the crest of a slight hill, she slowed to a walk. Ahead of her, below, in the valley, lay the tower.

All those she knew, from the beginning, had called it “the tower.” There was never other name. A thick, gray stoned tower, it stood encircled by a dry ditch some twelve feet deep that filled with water when the rains came. Slit windows ran up the tower’s height, providing light to those within, but no view inside to those without.

From her place on the hilltop, Faylle could see candlelight glowing from one of the lower windows. The tower had defended them until it was the last human dwelling left standing. The unlucky ones had their homes turned into roads. Faylle shuddered, scraped her foot across one of the oaken panels that made up the roadway. Whose house had this come from? Mister Connell? Her mother, Marion? Or the three weaver sisters who had lived so close to here?

All gone now.

Faylle made her way down the road and across the stout oak drawbridge. She gripped the heavy iron knocker on the front of the gate.

Once, twice, thrice, she knocked, and waited.

A cold wind blew, whipping her hair from her face. She scratched at a bug bite on her elbow, eyes still locked on the iron-wrought door. From inside came the sound of metal on metal - a screeching, squealing sound that hurt her ears. A boom followed, and she stepped back as the small sally port - the smaller gate within the gate - opened to allow her entrance.

From the sally port, a small, slight, pale face gazed out at her, eyes wide. “He is expecting you?” the small person whispered. Masculine or feminine? Faylle didn’t know.

“Yes,” Faylle said.

The small figure waved for her to come in, and she followed, stepped into the musty darkness of the tower. The air stank of closed, confined spaces and thick dust. Faylle stared into the wide, circular room that made up the base of the tower. Lamps burned in sconces along the wall - they used less smoke than torches.

The small figure who had led her in started forward to the stairs, expected her to follow. Faylle had been in this room many times before, and it still held no decoration, nothing other than the lamps and staircase. She followed the servant to the stairs.

A new servant; a face she did not know.

She mounted the dark staircase, followed the servant ever upwards. One, two, three flights she climbed.

She walked down a dim hallway. Beside her, in the shadows, she could make out the twisted forms of her friends and kinsman. Tortured faces gazed out at her, frozen forever in thick white marble. Lamplight threw shadows across them, made their features change, ripple. When he first summoned her here, so long ago, she had cried out upon seeing the statues, and the shadows skittering along their faces made her believe that they moved there in their marble prisons, writhed and screamed and clawed to be free.

But such things, she came to realize, were mere fantasy. Her friends did not rest in the statues. Only their bodies. Their souls were somewhere else.

Faylle came to the end of the hall, and the servant tapped on the door. Once, twice, thrice.

The servant opened up the thick oaken portal.

“Wait here,” the servant said, and entered. The door closed.

Faylle remained outside the door and put her hand in her pocket, caressed the stone that rested there, wrapped tightly in a handkerchief.

I keep my promises, she thought.

The door swung open soundlessly. “Enter, enter,” came a voice; soft, deep.

Faylle obeyed, walked to the entryway and stepped into a halo of bright white light. It took her eyes a moment to get used to the light, and she blinked and squinted, held a hand up to her eyes.

“Too bright?” he asked. The lamplights sputtered and dimmed.

Faylle found herself in his study. The door swung shut silently behind her. He stood with his back to her, at one of the small slit windows. Dust crept into her nostrils. She sneezed. The room was small and cramped. Heavy tables stood pushed against the wall, piled high with books and papers and diagrams. In the far corner of the chamber, a twisted contraption of wire and glass lay, accumulating a heavy film of grime. Beneath her bare feet, tiny bits of glass and metal and paper littered the floor. No other doorway was visible, yet the servant was nowhere to be seen. Faylle wondered it he had spirited it away, returned it to its marble prison.

The man turned away from the window to face her. A shock of thick white hair covered his head, ran down over his shoulders to his waist. Black eyes stared out at her from beneath heavy white brows. His white beard was interlaced with braids decorated in beads and bits of glass. The beard swallowed the other features of his face, all but his nose, which stuck out from the mess of white hair like an eagle’s beak. He stood a head and shoulders taller than she.

Clutching pale, bony hands in front of him, he regarded her. “I summoned you here for a purpose, Wolf Lady. Tell me of my sister.”

Faylle’s eyelids flickered. “I spoke with the wolves.”

The man’s face remained unmoved. “What care I for the wolves? Tell me of my sister and the package she was to bring. “

“We spoke of your sister.”

Silence.

“They remember nothing now. I’ve tried to talk with them, but they don’t remember who they were,” Faylle said. She reached into her pocket, caressed the stone like a talisman, a ward against evil. “My father doesn’t remember that I am his daughter.”

The man snorted. “Must we start in with this again? Be thankful that I spared you, Wolf Lady. You used to be pretty until sun and wind and age marred you. I have no use for you now but messenger.

“Tell me, then, is today the day you join them? Join your family and kinsman as they slaughter and fornicate like wild beasts?” He paused, gazed into Faylle’s eyes. “No? Not today? I thought not. Be useful and tell me of my sister.”

Faylle felt hurt and anger pounding within her, deep in her chest. Color rose in her cheeks. With fingers that trembled, she withdrew the stone from her pocket, held it out before her. She gently pulled away the dirty white handkerchief that covered it. The stone glowed a faint blue in the dim room, casting the man’s face in deep aqua shadows. His eyes were wide; twin circles of amazement.

“Give that to me, Faylle.”

A shiver ran down her spine at the use of her name. He only ever used that name late at night, when he wanted favors of her.

She flicked a corner of the handkerchief back over the stone, cutting off the blue glow. “I made a promise,” she said. “It is a promise I intend to keep.”

“Do you know what that -”

“Your sister is dead.”

The man’s face became cold, hard, like the stone. Thick brows knitted.

Faylle stood solidly, feet planted slightly apart, jaw set. She clutched the stone in her fist and shoved it back into her pocket. She bore no weapons, nothing with which to defend herself.

“You murdered her,” the man said, and stepped toward her. One step, no more.

Faylle held her ground. “I did. It was the least she deserved, after what the two of you did to us. All of us. I’ll murder you as I did her. Will you beg as she did? Will you scream as she did? Will you give me her lifestone, as she gave me yours?”

He stared at her. “What will you do with that, Faylle?”

“I promised my father something, a long time ago, when he still held his wits and the whole pack of them was ready to tear down onto this tower and end your lives. I promised him that I would kill the both of you.”

The man didn’t flicker an eyelid, and remained silent for some time. Then he said, “We can come to an agreement, beautiful Faylle. You and I.”

“You said I’m ugly. I’ve outlived my use to you,” Faylle spat.

He licked his lips. “You misunderstand.”

“Why?”

Hesitation. “Because I can set your family and kinsmen free. What has been done can be undone. I’ve nearly finished with the valley, Faylle. My work is nearly complete. I’ve stripped these lands of their magical properties. Bottled them up. Carted them away. I can leave now, today, if this suits you. Think of it, Faylle. All as it was.”

“You stole my life from me.”

“I’ve stolen many things.”

“You stole everything.” Faylle pulled the stone from her pocket, opened up the handkerchief again. Blue light painted the room.

“Faylle, please -”

“They would be wolves in men’s bodies, if you brought them back. I’ve learned that from you.”

“Faylle, my Wolf Lady, let us be reasonable.”

“I’m a dead woman here. A dead Wolf Lady, a woman who can speak with wolves because she should have been one. There’s no magic anymore. Only heat and death and wolves.”

She leaned down, set the stone on the floor. Rising, she said, “I used to love the wolves. There were real wolves here, once. And you drove them away. I made a promise, and I keep my promises, even if you do not.” She looked over the table at her right, found a fist-sized rock being used as a paperweight, and picked it up.

Promises.

She crouched close to the floor and raised her arm. The man let out a wail.

“Spare me!”

Faylle’s deep brown eyes met his clear blue. “My father asked that of you. What was your answer?”

Her arm came down.

The man cried out as his lifestone shattered into a hundred pieces, scattered across the floor as his body fell. She watched as the flesh pulled back from his face, and his eyes grew milky white. His body lay thin and wan, blotchy skin pulled taut over rickety bones. Wisps of white hair fell from his skull and face, surrounded him in snowy puffs.

Faylle stood, went to his corpse. She kicked it with one foot, listened to the dull thump. Outside, in the hall, she heard something crumbling, thudding to the floor. She spent no time lingering around the body, as she always thought she would.

Instead, she went to the door, opened it, and stared into the hall. The marble encasing the bodies of her family and kinsman had crumbled to the floor. Lying atop the rubble were their inert bodies, devoid of spirit.

She started into the hallway, walked past the empty shells, stared into one face, then another. The noise had ceased, and only silence met her as she walked, surveying her people, saying good-bye one last time.

Down the steps she traveled. One, two, three flights. The lamps were still lit, and lighted her way to the oaken gate. She pulled open the sally port and stepped out onto the drawbridge. All three moons lit up the sky this night, the big, red moon full, the other two mere white slivers against the night sky. She stared out across the plains, lifted her nose to smell the wind.

A wolf howled, close.

She gazed toward the sound, toward the top of the ridge of the valley. There they were, twenty-seven large, black, tan and gray shapes, sitting on their haunches and gazing toward her with soft yellow eyes. The howling started, a chorus of howling that broke the night air, wrapped her in stillness.

They would never know why they were drawn here, and would not think of it after they dispersed. By tomorrow, their gathering would be nothing but a dim memory in their wolf minds.

Wolf Lady.

She started, looked again up onto the rise of the hill. It was the male she had spoken with; the wolf who had once been her father.

Where do you go? he asked.

Only when he asked did she make up her mind. I go north.

Humans live in the north. A pause, maybe confusion, then, But you are human, aren’t you, Wolf Lady? Yes, humans should go north.

Faylle closed her eyes, felt tears spill over.

I kept my promise.

Curiosity, then interest. This thing, this promise. It was important. You are my kinsman, so I hope you are satisfied with the keeping of this thing, this promise.

I am.

Then I wish you well.

Faylle watched the wolf pack turn away, lope off into the rolling hills and plains beyond.

With her back to the tower, Faylle stepped onto the old plank road and began jogging back the way she had come. I will never see this tower again, I swear it, she thought, and glanced back only once. There, on the third floor of the tower, she could still see the yellow candle glow burning from the window.

You will steal nothing from us again, she thought, or anyone else. This, I promise.

Bare feet slapped smooth planks. Cold night air felt good in her chest, blowing past her, through her tunic. On either side, dark grass flanked her, concealed the world from view.

She closed her eyes and dreamed of a land still soaked in magic.

Behind her, the world howled.

Canticle of the Flesh

Now we get into unpublished story territory (that’s really why you downloaded this collection, right?). There are all sorts of reasons stories don’t get published. Mostly, it’s because they’re really, really bad. Occasionally it’s because there’s just no market for them. And every once in a while, a story is picked up and dropped and picked up and dropped again for half a dozen other random reasons. That’s what happened with Canticle of the Flesh, which sat on magazine editors’ desks for years with vague updates about it getting through round one or two or three and “maybe the next issue” and then the magazine would go defunct, or they couldn’t afford it, or it was just “too weird.” Ultimately, everybody passed. But you get to read it anyway! Lucky, lucky you. This was one of the most uncomfortable stories I’ve ever written, with some of the most unlikable people (or, what passes for people) in the universe.

The bodies you speak of, the bodies of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than the earth.

Whenever I tried to join the dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her claws.

“Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide, so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her still, about her devouring me whole.

She was so beautiful.

“Don’t you join that, don’t dance that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”

When the stack of synthetic logs burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother released me. I ran across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.

When I think of my first conception of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, ending in a pool of scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the keepers could not bear to throw away.

I was the most hideous of these texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could still pick me up into her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh – smooth, incomplete, ugly – but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, obscene. They were merely incomplete.

These incomplete texts told me I was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birthing center… including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.

I was the living text of my mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That is why the keepers saved me…. But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.

The other body-memories of my life are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me to Chiva, Chiva… the one you asked me about.

I think of them often, these bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly round faces, the thick, dark hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I remember the burning of the partial texts.

I remember the burning of my kin.

These obscene texts arrived through the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.

The others they herded together at the center of our dustry compound. Hundreds of partial texts.

The bodies clung to one another. Clawed hands tipped in crescent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth. These precious, beautiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent flesh, drew blood.

I pressed my palms to the transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And screamed.

But the vehicle was a closed box. I heard nothing but my own screaming.

The empty texts sprayed the bodies of my kin with a thin, reddish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs. One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.

Fire crawled across my kin like a living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.

I saw the terrified open mouths of my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bodies perfected as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.

Before the sun touched the horizon, all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.

The empty texts strode back to the vehicle, put their flammable fluid into the back where I sat.

“You are called Anish?” one of them asked.

I nodded.

“Are you a dumb body, Anish?”

“Better hope you are,” the other said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they just feed you so you fuck.”

I did not know then what an archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her existence.

I am most comfortable speaking of the archives, of written history. Here is truth that I touched and altered as necessary. Understand the archives, and you will understand the text of my unmaking.

I passed the tests that said I was not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives. There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The keepers designated those bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in our rooms at night.

The night terrified me. I heard nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.

When the overseers opened my cell each morning I eagerly followed the other students to the archives. A little group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was not called storytelling – storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies narrated. Bodies told only truth.

The only bodies the overseers allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched, the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been, how plain, how lacking.

Our little cluster of students stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor, regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner, twice a day, administered by the archivists.

The body existed solely as an organic text capable of narration. It bore no discernable face, only a slit for a mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow around it.

I stood transfixed. The body spun my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.

I fell in love with its body.

I heard thousands of other texts in my years at the archives. I heard how the keepers found our world, a lonely planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the keepers to direct them.

“You were simply our curiosities in the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions, one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind. Such delight. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”

Often I lay awake at night and closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stomach, the insides of my thighs, and caressed my penis. I thought of another’s body pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my own body, my mother’s text.

And during the day, I had the archives.

I frequented the niches I knew the others had no interest in. I stood in front of those texts illustrating the unmaking of the bodies who ruled the world before the keepers came. No one wanted to view these texts; these twisted, angry figures that wept blood and cried out for a freedom their flesh still remembered. Many of the archivists wanted to burn them. I knew that as more keepers began to die, more texts would be purged, and these would be the first destroyed. So I spent my days with them. I wanted to remember them.

One day I found the body text of the keepers’ emergence from their sailing ship, and their linking with the first bodies. I stepped up into the niche containing the text.

“Don’t narrate,” I told it. “I just want to touch you.” But the body could not be silent. None of them could. It existed to narrate.

As the open scream of its mouth moved to form words, I ran my gaze across its form. The body lay flat on the floor, both arms raised up as if to shield itself from harm. From the torso downward, the body seemed to liquefy and spill across the floor. A section of the scalp and skull was missing on one side so you could see the shiny little chip embedded into the soft tissue. The eyes were always open.

My hands trembled. I knelt down beside the body and traced the jagged blue tattoos on its flesh with my fingers.

I wondered if it could feel pleasure, or anything at all. Anger? Loneliness? Or did the keepers order the archivists to deaden that too, as they deadened the body’s flesh?

“So sad,” I said. I moved my fingers down the torso, to the mass of featureless flesh. I stared at the wide glassy eyes, brown as dust.

A gorgeous text.

I pulled my hands off the body and fumbled at the knot on my robe. I struggled out of the robe, and I was already erect. I wanted to be inside the body, to join my flesh to the body’s, to become one text, the altered and the empty.

Only the mouth was open to me, wide and wet and full of teeth. My body shook with fear and anticipation. I wanted to silence the text.

I entered gently, and the text cupped its lips around me, permissive.

The words stopped. History stopped.

I spilled myself into the body, into the history of the keepers. I fell back onto the floor and was dizzy. Giddy. Terrified.

The text drank me in silence. I stared at the text and then back out into the hallway, afraid. What would the keepers think of a student that silenced their history? I tied my robe closed and ran from the niche, back to the main archives. My whole body trembled. I expected one of the overseers to find me, to say the keepers had seen what I’d done and would purge me.

Yet no one came for me. The other students continued to ignore me. The overseers still let me explore the archives alone.

I became addicted.

At the end of each class I went back to the far corners of the archives. I buried myself in texts. I silenced them. They choked on me. Silence the texts, silence the keepers, silence the world. I was an ugly empty text, but I had power over all of them.

I do not know how many texts I took pleasure in this way. Always I returned to my favorite, and told it to tell me its story in a different way, but it could not tell a story that was not true. So I spilled myself into it, altering the text as I knew I should not - could not. There was no one to stop me.

Until.

I withdrew and licked the mouth of the text, and heard:

“What are you doing?”

The voice was not the text’s.

I fell back onto my robe and kicked away from the text. One of the other students stood in the corridor, staring at me with large, dark eyes.

“I’m…” I said, putting my arms through the sleeves of my robe with limbs that felt clumsy. “I’m touching the texts.”

“You’re defiling them,” she said. “You’re silencing them. That’s obscene.”

“No,” I said, and knotted my robe closed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs. “I was just –”

“I watched you,” she said. “You’re that strange body, that violent body, the one they brought in from the compounds. Anish.”

She was older than I was, nearly an archivist already. I had seen her before, assisting in the cleaning of texts.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you touching the body texts?”

“Because all of you are so ugly.”

She laughed. When she laughed she threw back her head, and a snarl of dark black hair came loose from her twisted braid of hair. It curled down along the side of her face, touched the empty, appalling smoothness of her cheek.

“One doesn’t touch the body of another,” she said. “One only touches texts. Haven’t you been taught that?” She knitted her dark brows so they formed one line above her eyes. “Do you think you understand them better, because you’ve spilled yourself into them?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They why do you do it?” she said. She stepped up into the niche. She approached the flat, featureless end of the text.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve never done it?”

“You really are a dumb body, aren’t you?” She unknotted her robe, held it open. Her body was not straight and flat like mine, and she had no external male organs. She looked to me like most of the partial texts I fucked at the compounds; those texts I thought had been altered. She taught me the pronouns I use now.

“They cut you?” I said.

She retied the robe. “No. I was born this way, in the birthing centers.”

“Then you won’t understand,” I said.

“Show me how you touch them,” she said. I recognized a desire there, in her eyes, her voice, as if she held up a mirror to my own. No other empty text had ever approached and spoken to me.

I reached for her hand.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

We knelt over the body of the text.

“Here,” I said, and moved my fingers up to the wire around the head. “Feel how cold the wire is. Imagine the way it feels, to have your flesh try to grow around it.”

She touched the wires with hesitant fingers. I saw that her hands trembled. Did she have the same desire I had? The same fear and anticipation?

I moved my palms down across the jagged welts, traced them with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said.

She, too, ran her fingers along the tattoos, down across the throat, the shoulders, the chest. “I’m not afraid,” she said.

But she was afraid of them. I knew it even then.

“Do they feel anything?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not allowed to ask, and I don’t like them to talk.”

I traced a line of tattoos that brought my fingertips to hers. Our fingers touched. She looked at our hands there, joined atop the text.

She withdrew her fingers from mine. “I told you not to touch me,” she said. She stood up to walk away.

“Wait!” I said. “What are you called?”

“I don’t tell dumb bodies such things,” she said. She jumped out of the niche and into the hallway.

I did not see her for many days afterward. The overseers had deemed my independent study complete, and they lumped me back into a student group, this time a group watching the dictation sessions. The art of dictation was the most difficult an archivist had to learn. I had already accompanied the archivists on feeding and cleaning sessions, but it was the dictation that most interested me. Here I could perfect bodies with my own hands.

Sometimes I snuck away from a feeding session early and wandered the lonely corridors, passed row upon row of texts. Sometimes I came to corridors that had been barred off with a thick steel gate. These were the libraries that had already been purged. I had watched the archivists unhook the bodies from the tubing that bound them to the floors of their niches. The archivists carted the bodies out on long wheeled trolleys. Piles of bodies. When I asked why they had to get rid of them I was always given the same answer.

“The keepers are dying. We must conserve only the most important truth.”

But who decided what the most important truth was?

So I walked down the long halls, passing those texts the keepers still retained, and I searched for the student I’d touched over the text. I often dreamed of her. In those days my dreams of her were pleasant ones – out bodies entwined, my mouth on her skin. The dreams sickened me at first. She was ugly, incomplete. What kind of a body had I become?

Yet my desire for her was so great that I did not eat or sleep or visit the texts for three days while I looked for her. When I found her she was just outside one of the barred corridors, following a train of archivists carting out obsolete texts.

“Anish,” she said.

“What are you called?” I said.

We stared at one another.

I wanted her name, as if knowing that, I could own her and begin to fill her emptiness.

“Help me with the cleaning of the texts,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She told my overseer that she wished to work with me, and my overseer agreed without hesitation.

She strode quickly back down to the archival corridors, so fast on her long legs that I had to struggle to keep up. She did not go down the long individual history corridor where most of the other students clustered. Instead, she took me back to the Unmaking Hall where those exquisite texts of the end of human freedom were still held.

She stepped up into one of the empty niches. She gazed around at the clean floor, the bare walls. “We took this one out today,” she said.

I climbed up beside her. “Did you burn it?” I asked.

She nodded.

“They aren’t going to recopy it?” I said.

“No. This corridor must be cleaned out by the end of the year. The keeper who oversaw its maintenance is dead.”

“Dead? What about its own history?”

“It’s already written on one of the bodies in the individual history corridor. It will survive in that, at least.” She gazed out into the hall, and I saw her look turn inward. “I want you to touch me, Anish, here, where the text would be.”

I shivered.

She untied the knot of her robe, let the gray material fall open. “I want you to touch me the way you touch the texts.”

She stepped directly in front of me. She reached out and unknotted my robe. She was so close I felt the heat of her body; her breath on my skin. I gazed at the flesh of her, the smooth, brown, hideously unmarred flesh. She was uglier than I was.

She placed her palm on my chest. I was trembling.

“I won’t hurt you,” she said.

“I know that,” I said.

She pushed off her robe, and it piled around her ankles.

I wrapped my arms around her. She pulled our bodies together. For the first time since my arrival in the archives, I found myself pressed against a body that not only responded to mine, but wanted me there against it. This was all I had dreamed of doing during the terrible loneliness of those nights when I wrapped my empty arms around myself, trying to fill them.

We ended up on the floor that had until that day been housed by a body text, rubbing our bodies together against the same floor it had been displayed upon.

I tried to fuck every part of her, to join with her as I had the texts, but she pushed me away from her mouth and thighs and forced me down onto my chest, against the hard, slick floor. She pressed her whole body down onto mine, wrapped her strong hands around my throat.

“I own all the bodies here, Anish. Even you,” she said.

“Let me fuck you,” I said, and my breath condensed against the shiny floor.

She laughed at me, released me.

I struggled up and tried to grab her the way I’d often been grabbed in the compounds, grabbed and entered. But she cried out in pain when I gripped her. She pushed me away with a strength I did not expect.

“You hurt me!” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and wondered how I had hurt her. This is what we had done in the compounds, all of us. The pain and fear and pleasure all went together.

“Don’t ever hurt me again,” she said. “If you hurt me again I’ll burn you, Anish, just like the texts.”

“I won’t hurt you,” I said. I would have promised her anything to be able to touch her.

She hit me then, across the mouth. I gasped at the shock of it, but I desired her as I desired the beautiful bodies of my youth. She brought pain and pleasure and fear.

“Touch me, but never hurt me,” she said. “Understand that, dumb body?”

“What are you called?”

She turned away from me, jumped down out of the niche, and gazed back up at me with her big, dark eyes.

“I am Chiva,” she said, “and I am to be the librarian. Your body, all of these bodies, are mine, to do with as I please. Don’t forget that, Anish. We touch only when I want to. You understand that, dumb body?”

Chiva wanted only unaltered bodies, those ugly texts like me. She liked me best, she said, because I desired the texts, and she found that so revolting that I became desirable to her, she said. We spent our days entwined among texts, and I reveled in the feel of her body against mine. For me, it was enough. My loneliness had ended, and the archives were no longer so cold and empty to me. Chiva told the overseers she was instructing me, and most of the time they did not argue with her. I learned that there were not enough overseers to look after us anymore, and the few that remained were happy to pass my training on to Chiva, even though she had no direct link to a keeper. She was as free as an empty text could be.

Sometimes she and I simply sat in observance of texts and listened to them narrate their histories. We lay in one another’s arms as the bodies told us a truth that would no longer exist by the year’s end. Chiva often wanted me to help her when the archivists purged another text, but I refused.

“We just have to unhook them and put them on the cart,” she said, but I left her to it and ran off down the winding corridors to find a quiet space. I did not like to watch them take the texts away.

I remember once when we lay across the body she had first seen me spill myself into. We both curled up next to it, told it to narrate, but did not listen. Instead, we spoke together in our soft lover’s voices, heads bent forward, bodies touching.

“We have to burn them down until they’re just ash,” she said.

“Why do you have to talk of it?” I said. Sometimes I thought she took delight in the burning of the texts.

“You know what we do with the ash, when we burned it all down? We used to gather it up in big containers, and they shipped it down to the synthetics factories along the coast, and you know what they did with it?”

“Threw it into the sea?” I said.

She laughed. “No. They condensed it all down, mixed it with chemicals and wood char and made synthetic logs for the living compounds around the factories.”

“Synthetic logs?” I said.

“Yes. I heard stories, not truth, of course, just stories, that the workers out there, the keepers would let them set the logs on fire, and they would dance around them. These naked, empty texts. They would just dance!”

I remembered the dancers. The orange flames leaping high in the air. I remembered how proud we all were of watching that flame, that one bit of making we were able to perform while the keepers owned our bodies. The smell of the black dust, the way it coated our bodies.

“Don’t talk about burning things anymore,” I said.

Our days were not to last, of course. Contentment never does, does it? But then, would we remember it as content if it was not prefaced and ended in darkness?

“I watched you always, Anish,” my keeper told me the day it died. “I watched you and wanted to be you, and when I could not be you, I wanted to unmake you. What we cannot have, we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

My overseer approached me one morning after Chiva and I had fought. Chiva said that my silencing of the texts was a form of rebellion, of subversion. She said my body was not mine but hers, to direct as she pleased. I was nothing, she said, just a dumb body, an empty text.

My overseer waited outside my door.

“Come with me, Anish,” he said.

I did not ask where we were going. Perhaps a part of me already expected this.

The overseer brought me to the center of the labyrinthine archives. I knew I would not be able to find my way back unaided. He palmed open a door and stepped into a domed room. At the center of the room stood a large hexagonal structure. The air was much cooler and drier than in the archives. The overseer walked up to the structure, pressed his hand against it, and a section of the wall opened to admit us. We stepped in.

We stood inside a perfect hexagon. Lining the walls were row upon row of square gray panels, each no bigger than my palm. All of them had one small light on the lower left hand side. There must have been thousands of them, all up and down the walls, all around me. They stretched upwards some twenty feet above me. Soft light illuminated the room from panels on the ceiling, panels much like the ones in the archives; only the light these ones emitted was less white, more orange. On these thousands and thousands of squares, all of the small indicator lights were dark; all but the ones on one solid bank of squares on my right, a collection of perhaps a dozen yellow lights. I walked over to them.

“Is this all?” I said.

My overseer nodded. He went up to the wall, selected a square situated at the far left corner of the roughly circular pattern of lights, and pressed the panel. It clicked open.

I stared inside.

And was disappointed. All I saw was a long tube of wire connected to the shiny black shell of the interior. The overseer unwound the wire, asked me to come closer.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Adjusting you,” he said. “Your communication hardware was fitted in the birthing centers, but never used. This keeper wants to be linked to you. I have to attune your hardware to its settings. Be still. It will not hurt.”

It hurt.

I tried to pull away from my overseer, but he held me tight. The tubing in my ear sent a wave of pain shooting through my ear canal and behind my eyes, and I heard a terrible hissing sound that filled my head.

When my overseer released me, I fell onto floor. I held my head in my hands and gasped.

“So this is Anish.”

My overseer had not spoken. I looked up at him, at the tubing he held, and glanced up at the casing of the keeper’s square.

“Yes, that’s mine,” the voice said. Did the voice have a gender? I do not know. It simply existed. I call my keeper he because my overseer was male. When I think of my keeper I think of the body of the overseer -- his broad shoulders, broad face, narrow nose.

“What do you want with me?” I asked.

Laughter. The laughter of keepers is not a laughter you ever want to hear. It echoes in your head, over and again until it feels that your head has been broken.

“You are so silly, Anish. Such a lovely body, but full of silliness! Don’t you know, haven’t you guessed? Why would I bring an archivist here?”

“You’re dying. You want me to write your history.”

“Ah. You see. I knew all along you were not a dumb body. I would not have chosen you otherwise.”

“But I’m not an archivist yet.”

“More intelligence. Perception. Such quickness. Why aren’t all bodies so? Ah, yes, because my esteemed brethren found them troublesome.”

“I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t know how to do proper dictation.”

“I have been watching you, Anish. I’ve seen the way you touch the texts. You have a reverence for our truth, don’t you?”

Did I? I wondered if the keeper could read my thoughts, or if I had to say them out loud. I kept saying them out loud. “It will be good to record your -”

“Do you want to know the body I’ve chosen for you to dictate upon?” the keeper said.

My head ached. I already knew.

“I prefer the more educated bodies,” my keeper said. “Best find one that comprehends truth and history, one that appears dull and animalian because it is concealing its thoughts from me, not blank and dull because it is empty. I experience too much emptiness in my own kind now. Too much death. You see us dying, do you not, Anish? But that will not save you from me. The absence of the future does not negate the past.”

“Please,” I said. “Choose another text. She’s a good archivist, and she’ll be a better librarian, when she’s finished learning.” If I unmade Chiva she would never be able to touch me again.

The keeper started laughing again.

“Chiva?” he said. “You are such a silly body, Anish! You thought I wanted Chiva? Oh no, oh no.” Laughter, laughter, my head throbbing. “Haven’t you guessed, Anish? I want you to unmake yourself.”

The world the keepers created had been falling apart throughout my life, but I had not noticed it. I did not think forward, only back. That was the nature of my existence. Now, though, none of my days were spent in causal silent observance, sprawling lazily in the present while listening to the truth of the past. Now I was told stories, stories I knew could not be truth, stories I could not silence.

The stories my keeper told me did not match what all the texts narrated and illustrated.

“Exiled us?” my keeper said. “Oh, pity no, that’s the old religious pull, you understand? The persecuted few? Your people consumed it well the first few centuries. Oh, no, we went out on our own, thought we were wonderfully special, thought we could leave our dead bodies behind and live in the synthetic ones forever. Ha! All fools. The last of the synthetic bodies gave out half a millennia after we crashed here. All gone. No more bodies. At least we had enough time to indoctrinate and implant you.”

The voice in my head had made me nervous. I could not halt his stream of stories. I could not ask him to be quiet, so I stole quietly back to my little room and lay down. I avoided Chiva. My head always hurt.

“When will the sessions begin?” I asked.

“Oh, soon enough, little Anish,” he said. A long pause. Then, “Let us see Chiva.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I could make you.”

“I thought you were here to unmake me.”

“Ah! I thought we’d bred the cleverness out of you. Perhaps another day, then.”

But in the morning my overseer waited for me again.

“It’s time for the sessions to begin,” he said.

I tried to protest, but my keeper grumbled, “Oh, it’s not me, Anish. It’s those ancient fools back there, spouting off about mortality. They’re so old they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a body that’s yours. Well then, since it’s already scheduled…”

My overseer let me into the dictation room. He shut the door. I gazed at the apparatus on the walls – the needles, lasers, the skin grafting equipment, the row upon row of shiny surgical tools, glass containers of narcotics.

“I can’t do this alone,” I said.

“Oh, I think you can,” my keeper said. “I’ll not ruin you so terribly as the others. I’d like you to function as I would, if I had such a delightful young body. Now sit on that stool and listen. You’re not just here to tell my stories. The truth, as you call it, the stories I liked best, were the ones I had when I owned my own body. You’ve never seen mountains, have you? Lakes? River stones?”

I had never heard the terms before.

“I’m going to have your body illustrate the real truth about our kind,” my keeper said, “I want you to be a literal text. Not one of those useless globs. I want you to be able to walk and spit and fuck. After all, what is the purpose of a body but to exert one’s power over another?”

I wondered if he spoke of my power or his own.

I spent our first three sessions learning to draw symbols. My keeper was able to direct me through the motions; he had a limited power over my body - enough so he could assist when I misplaced a stroke of the stylus.

Each night, he asked after Chiva.

“Don’t you miss her terribly?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, and thought, but you do enough talking for all of us.

The fourth session, I began to write. I can think of no other body but mine when I remember this session, this memory of writing. The way the precise tool inscribed my already numbed flesh in a long series of puckered marks that reddened or blackened as I pressed the button that allowed the ink to flow into the wounds.

Afterward, I always closed my eyes. When I closed my eyes I heard the words of the woman who called herself my mother. I felt her clutch at me with her claws. “You are already our history, yes?”

No, I thought. I am nothing. I am an empty canvas being filled. I won’t be ugly any more.

By the fifth session the markings covered my throat and shoulders. This will not be so terrible, I thought, watching the curious red tattooed welts forming on my flesh.

I do not remember how long my keeper and I spent in the dictation room.

One morning I awoke in my own room and my door remained locked until well past midmorning. Another overseer arrived to unlock the door.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“His keeper died,” the overseer said. And nothing more.

With the death of that keeper came yet another purging of the texts. Piles of bodies were carted out through the corridors. I watched them with a dizzy sense of horror.

After that, I slept in the dictation room.

Finally , the day came when I stepped out of our dictation session, the one that I know now was our last, and Chiva stood in wait for me. When she saw me, her eyes widened.

“It’s true,” she said.

“It must be,” I said.

“You don’t look like you,” she said.

The markings now covered my torso all the way down my right leg and up to the thigh on my left, but I had only seen the black and red marks section by section, reflected back at me from a small round magnification mirror that let me apply the tattoos with accuracy.

“It isn’t so terrible,” I said, but as I watched her eyes move over me I felt a stab of fear. “I’m still the same,” I said. “I’m not going to be in one of those niches. I’m not -”

“You’re just another used text,” Chiva said. “You’ve lost your history and given it to a keeper. You’re just another dead keeper’s writing.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it. I’m beautiful.”

“You’re so stupid, Anish. Have you looked at yourself? You said you were your mother’s text, our text. You’re just another one of theirs now. Go look at yourself,” she said. She turned and walked away from me, trailing after a trolley piled up with bodies.

I heard my keeper’s laughter.

“What did you do?” I said. I walked back into the dictation room, pushed the small mirror back into the wall, opened up the panel where the full-length mirror was. I had been too afraid to look, before.

The body that stared back at me was never mine. I had always known it was not mine. I belonged to the keepers from birth, but it was my mother’s body I spilled from, my mother’s history I had always been. But no longer.

“What did you make me write?” I said. “What do these symbols mean?” Another question I had not asked during dictation, a question I feared the answer to. They were unlike any marks on the other texts.

“Words,” my keeper said. “Not pictures of things, but symbols representing the sounds of the actual spoken words, words so old I thought I’d forgotten how to form them.”

“What do they say?”

My keeper was silent.

“What do they say?”

“They negate all truth,” he said.

“What?”

“I wrote words that told an untrue history. One different from all those others.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not? Are you a fool? There is no truth, Anish. Only stories. Only things we wished had happened. Words unmade the skin that formed so smooth and perfect in your mother’s body. And now we will finish negating the existence of the texts and the existence of all your bodies. We will finish unmaking history.”

“You can’t tell lies on a body,” I said. “You can’t –”

“And what does Chiva’s empty body attest to, Anish? What truth does she tell? She is empty and free and when the last of us dies she’ll burn you along with the rest of them, to be free of you.”

“Shut up!” I said, and I slammed the mirror panel shut and ran out of the dictation room. I saw again the vision of my burning kin. “You can’t negate their bodies!” I said, and I ran down through the corridors, my keeper’s laughter ringing in my head.

Other students and archivists stared at me as I passed. I ran and ran, looking for the Hall of Unmaking. I knew the route so well, that place where Chiva and I had touched truth. Down this corridor, left here, another left, and –

A steel gate blocked my path. I stopped. I stared at it.

“She likes to kill them, you know,” my keeper said. “She likes to kill them because she’s afraid of them.”

“No,” I said.

“You think that word saves you? It changes nothing. You think I can say no and go back to being an organic body? You think I can say, `no’ and cease to be a swimming mass of synthetic fluid and artificial synapses?” my keeper said. “That word cannot unmake what I became. You want truth, Anish? We envy your bodies. Your beautiful smooth bodies. We covet them. We have built not an archive but a shrine, not a world of absolute truth but a world that records the stories we wish were ours. We use flesh to fantasize about that which we can never be. You bodies are so stupid. You lie about this place talking of how ugly you are, running around in this artificial labyrinth of our making, your unmaking. You have not seen the sun in years now, Anish. You lounge about here and squander your lives, and when we’re dead you’ll still lie about here as your bodies waste away. You’ll exist only to preserve the history of our death.”

“You’re lying,” I said. I pressed my palms to the cold steel of the gate. “These are just stories.”

“But now I’ve had you write them on your body, little Anish. Now they’re truth, aren’t they?”

I turned away from the gate and began to run again through the halls. How long had we spent in dictation? How much had things changed? I saw more gates. Corridors ended abruptly. Those corridors still open had empty niches. What had happened to all the texts?

“How many keepers are left?” I said. My legs hurt. My throat was raw. “How many have died?”

“There are five of us left. We die in groups, you know. Just as we were made,” my keeper said.

I stopped and stood still in the hall, breathing deep, gazing at the monstrous construction that enclosed us all. When the keepers died, would we be trapped in here? Trapped inside this hollow casing to die as the keepers died?

No. Where did Chiva take the texts to be burned? Not inside. There had to be a way out. I remembered the way it felt to dance in the dust. I remembered sun on my skin. How had I forgotten it?

I found Chiva with three archivists and another trolley heaped up with bodies. When she saw me she looked away, but I grabbed her by the shoulder. The other archivists stared at us. I did not care.

“When you burn them, where do you take them?”

“What?”

“Where do you burn them?”

“Outside, of course,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You never wanted to talk about it before. You ignored –”

“Show me,” I said.

“We’re going there now.”

We ascended through a long narrow hall, entered a cylindrical lift, and stepped out onto ground covered in grayish ash.

I looked up and saw a blue sky striated in white clouds. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. I looked back down to the yard. It was a broad, circular pit. Surrounded by a wall fifty feet high.

I felt dizzy. I collapsed into the grayish dust.

The archivists piled up the bodies, wet them down with reddish fluid, opened up a bin of flares by the doorway. The texts burned without making a sound. I watched the bodies flame, bubble, melt and char.

The archivists did not even wait for this batch of bodies to finish burning before they took the trolley back to the lift.

“Chiva?” they called, but Chiva stood in front of me. The bodies belched smoke behind her.

The lift closed.

“What’s wrong, Anish?” Chiva said.

I pressed my hands against my face, covered my eyes. “I’m unmade,” I said. “There is no truth.”

She knelt beside me. “Don’t you know?” she said. “There never was any truth. We’re just like these burned things.”

I reached out to her, tried to hold her body against mine. I had missed her so much. Having her close meant I was not alone, trapped within these walls with a dying keeper.

I held her by the wrist. My grip was firm.

She stared at me. She stared down at my hand on her wrist. “Anish?”

I pulled her robe loose, pushed it off. She fell back, grabbed at the robe, smacked me across the face. “Don’t touch me. You’re a violent body!”

I grabbed her by the shoulders, pressed her down into the gray ash. The dust puffed up around her, fell across her skin. She tried to get up. I held her. I put a hand to her throat, just as she had done to me, so long ago. She was strong, but I had put myself on top of her. I pressed my body down upon her, pushed my robe out of the way, bit her smooth flesh. Pleasure and fear and pain, they were all the same to me - inseparable.

I had wanted so long to be within her, to feel again as I did in the pens, my body slick with sweat and dust, surrounded in moist flesh.

I forced myself inside her. She screamed at me.

Someone was laughing in my head, laughing, laughing.

I wanted to spill into her, and more. I wanted her to tell me truth. I wanted to unmake her as I had been unmade, to write on her as I had been written upon. I could not tell my keeper no when he told me to write his lies. I would not allow her to be empty anymore, empty and free as I once was.

Her body was tight, all her muscles clenched, and her cries filled my head even more than my keeper’s laughter. My sweat smeared her flesh. Dust and sweat, and the sun overhead.

I thought of the dancers, of our fire, of the texts I fucked, the texts the keepers burned while I did nothing. I did nothing but watch, nothing but witness a truth no one would ever record. I wanted to silence Chiva as I had been silenced. But Chiva was not like me.

I released everything into her body: all the anger, the loneliness, the pain, the pleasure, the fear, the unmaking. I cried out because for one moment, I too felt empty. And beautiful.

An empty text. Belonging to no one.

Then Chiva punched me in the throat, pulled away, and kneed me in the groin. I screamed at her and fell over. She balled up her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled up into a ball in the dust and tried to shield myself against her. Then the beating stopped. I heard her walk away from me.

I looked up. I saw her walking awkwardly to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me. I saw the wetness on her face, the raised bite marks on the flesh of her throat, her breasts. Along the inside of her thigh, there, a long dribble of reddish fluid oozed downward; blood and semen, and her own body’s wetness.

Now she would burn me.

I lay huddled in the dust, watching her approach.

She stood over me, the flare in her hand. She had only to ignite it.

“You love them, don’t you?” she said.

I did not know what she meant. “Chiva, I—”

“You think you can control the world by hurting me? I hate you. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You can’t do the rest. They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them can you? You think you unmade me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll show you how to unmake the world.”

She did not put on her robe. She went back to the bin, collected more flares. I stared at her.

“What’s she doing?” my keeper asked, very softly.

I had almost forgotten him, this thing I could not silence.

Chiva walked to the lift with a heap of flares in her arms. The lift closed.

And I knew what she was going to do.

I ran to the lift. I descended back into the archives.

I could already smell the burning bodies. A part of me hoped I was only still smelling the burning flesh from the yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I stared to run. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already afire. I watched the history of Chiva’s destruction of the past.

And then I saw her, heading back toward me, smoke billowing in her wake, her arms empty.

“I need more flares,” she said, and she strode past me on her long legs, and her eyes were dark, her face grim.

“Chiva, please…” I did not dare touch her.

She walked away from me. The archivists ran madly through the corridors. I saw some of them huddled up by the niches, weeping.

“Do something,” I told my keeper.

“What? This is your creation, Anish, not mine.”

I could do nothing. The keepers were dying. The past was burning.

I could do nothing but help Chiva with its destruction.

I went back out to the burning yard. Chiva was there, piling flares into her robe. She glanced up at me. Her face was dark, expressionless. She tossed me a flare. I took three more and a container of flammable fluid.

We descended together.

We burned the world.

My mother was dead. Her history undone. The bodies were lies. My body was a lie. The world was a lie. I had hurt the one thing I knew to be real, to be true.

We parted in the individual history corridor. I began to search for something else. She continued to burn.

“Why are you looking for us?” my keeper said.

“Because it was always you and your kind I wanted to silence. Just as you silenced my kin.”

“We’ll die soon enough. Let us die.”

“You didn’t let us die,” I said. “You used us. Destroyed us. Unmade us.”

“No, Anish. You did that yourself.”

I found the door. How I found it, I do not know, not to this day. I had walked so long and so far that I could no longer smell the smoke or hear the screaming. I pressed my hand against the door, tried to open it. It did not open.

“Let me in,” I said.

“Just let me die,” my keeper said.

“No,” I said.

The door opened. I approached the large structure of the hexagon. The sliding door of the central storage chamber was already open.

I walked into the keepers’ room. I stared at the last of the little glowing lights. Three. Just three little lights. Three dying keepers left to rule the world.

“I thought you said no,” I said.

“I didn’t let you in,” my keeper said. “They did. You’ve burned the texts in the corridors they oversaw. Their overseers have run off. What do you expect them to do but die?”

I pressed open the panel of one of the squares. I ripped out the tubing and gazed at the shiny black casing inside. I found a little groove on the underside of the casing and pulled it out. The whole black case came out smoothly, easily, as if it had been placed inside the square just a moment ago. The whole black casing was rectangular, about as long as my arm, as wide around as my palm. I could not see inside.

I brought the case to the doorway, smashed it against the wall until the casing began to come loose. I sat down on the floor and pulled at the casing until I succeeded in tearing it off. The rectangle inside was transparent. I saw the red fluid inside, the long rows of metal chips, spidery wires and tiny hair-like filaments. I set the keeper in the center of the room and unpacked the second keeper. I set it next to the first, then pulled out the last case.

My keeper.

When I sat staring into my keeper’s translucent body resting there in my lap, I said, “How long have you been watching me?”

“Forever,” he said.

“You saw my mother?”

“The recordings used to be stored,” my keeper said, “when there were enough of us to oversee them. She was an exceptionally violent body. I watched you birthed out of her death. I was linked to the overseer that pulled you out.”

“You know everything about me.”

“Our observation of your compound deteriorated just after I placed you there,” my keeper said. “I sent the empty texts after you. They were going to burn everything, you know. But I knew you were still there. I had their keepers tell them to bring you back.”

“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just let me burn with the others?” I saw that I was crying. My tears fell onto the casing. I did not wipe them away.

“I watched you always, Anish. What we cannot have we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

I closed my eyes. Thought of Chiva.

I set my keeper’s casing on top of the other two. I carefully placed three of the flares under the stack of keepers. I poured the whole container of flammable fluid over the keepers. I held the last flare, walked back into the doorway, away from the pool of reddish liquid. I lit the flare. It glowed white in my hand. The heat was so intense that I had to hold it away from my body for fear of setting myself on fire.

“What will you do now?” my keeper said.

“Tell stories,” I said.

I tossed the flare. The room exploded in a wave of brilliant light. The flame roared up and out. The heat knocked me out of the doorway. I felt the sensation of flight. My body smashed against the far wall. The flame whirled above my head, curled back into the room.

It was very beautiful.

I did not see Chiva. Most of the students and archivists had escaped to the burning yard, and I found them there. We climbed atop one another’s bodies to scale the wall. From the top of the wall, I gazed out at the incredible maze of the archives, the great hexagons-within-hexagons that wound out for almost as far as I could see.

The archivists told me Chiva was dead. They told me she choked on the smoke of the bodies and became lost in the maze, entombed forever. But I knew Chiva would never become lost in the archives. She knew them far better than I did.

We walked as far from the archives as we could. Most of us. Some collapsed and wept under the heat of the sun, frightened by the chill of the wind, the uncertainty of living outside of the archives. The day it rained we reached a small settlement like none I had ever known. No gates. No fences.

The bodies there were all empty, and they welcomed us. They smiled. They gave us food and drink, and they asked us to tell them stories. The others with me did not know what to say. It had been years and years, the new bodies said, since they had heard anything of the keepers, those strange beings said to have once ruled the world.

“We’ve never seen them,” the bodies said to us.

“I have seen them,” I said, and they looked upon me: the tattooed partial text with burn scars on his face, his arms. I had no eyebrows, and most of my hair was gone. They called me an ugly body, but they wanted my stories.

And I told them all I knew, as I am telling you now.

No one ever asked about Chiva. Few of those from the archives remember her name. I thought the burning of the texts would erase all of our sadness, all that darkness. I thought we would forget. But now you walk up here and ask to dance around my fire and hear the stories of a past I thought no longer existed. If it does not exist, how can I tell it? There must be some truth, still, something to be remembered.

No, no. I am tired. Too old for dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of history. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of my unmaking.

It is always a silent dream.

In Freedom, Dying

This is one of my favorite short stories. It’s the first time I really started digging into the guts of organic weapons and gendered warfare. Trouble was, it didn’t seem to make much sense to anybody but me. Here’s to hoping some of you enjoy it.

Twice a day we feed and oil the big rotating guns - once at dawn and once at dusk. The dawn is the malignant crimson of a sailor’s warning. The dusk is a gray gauze that turns the light of our globes the color of burnt lemon.

I like to walk the perimeter of our trenches in the early evenings, before the globes go smoky, after I’m done filling in the sick trenches. The haze of our bubble filter obscures my view, but if I stand with my nose against it I can see across the dozen-meter swath of untouched red grass and catch a glimpse of the Androgynies’ dark haired heads as they mill back and forth in the bowels of their trenches. Their filter gave out four days ago. If we had the right bursts, we could liquefy them where they lie and retake our position, maybe move forward further into the Androgyny district. But the Neuters raided our supply carrier weeks ago.

When darkness washes away the last of the sun, I climb back down into the trenches to join the rest of the women. Globes cast ghastly light onto dirty, hollow-cheeked faces. Everyone’s eyes look too big.

A skinny girl, not a year out of matric, approaches me from a connecting trench. Her bob of dark hair is thin and lanky, her eyes the nearly colorless of the violet-gassed. She squints at me, at the red mesh of the armband molded to my upper arm. I am amazed she can see at all.

“Trench director’s asking for a runner called Nadav,” she says. “That you?”

The trench director does not look up from her desk as I pass through her filter and into the command hole. Her name is Gian, and she’s a handsome woman, the sort of tall, broad-cheeked intellectual all three of my mothers would have approved of. She is the fourth trench director we have had in eight weeks; I watched two die of dysentery, and the last literally peeled the flesh away from her own bones in the end, victim of an Androgyny burst we had never encountered before.

“I need you to retrieve a drop,” Gian says. She is chewing kaj, and she looks up now. Her eyes are the color of cut obsidian. She pushes green papers bled through with black ink off her desk. Beneath the papers is a map of our position, the Amber Ridge and what was once the Men’s District.

“Carrier doesn’t have enough fuel to divert from its supply course over the Red Ridge, but they can drop it en route. Some Neuters are boxed in here, on the other side of the ridge,” Gian says, pointing out the position. “They’re being routed by these two Androgyny bubbles, here. Rumor has it that the last of the Men are making a stand at the edge of the district, here, pushed up against the sea. You shouldn’t have to worry about them.”

“It’s only Androgynies I fear,” I say, and naming the fear eases the twisting in my gut.

Gian nods. “Home Defense has organized the drop here,” she says, pressing her thumb to a position on the other side of the ridge, just below the Neuter and Androgyny camps. “You’re to pick it up tomorrow night. No moon.”

She leans toward me. “Carry-ready. Forty kilos. Strap it on and go. You’ll be carrying thornbug bursts and CFR. You know what CFR is?”

I shake my head.

“Neither do I, but HD says we lob it at our Androgynies on the other side of that red grass before they get a filter up, and we can hold them off long enough to get reinforcements. If they get a supply carrier in here before we get that drop, we go home on our shields, so to speak. You know what that means?”

“I’m not stupid,” I say. The Neuters used to duel with physical shields. My mothers used to take me to the duels, back when the Consortium still functioned.

Gian taps at the map, a nervous tic of a gesture. “Rumor has it you’re a queer,” she says, and the word sends a cold ripple down my spine. “I’m a new TD, and we don’t last long on the line. I have to measure you by what I see and what I hear. You’re the only runner I’ve got, but it’s dangerous to send out a queer with Neuters and Androgynies. Queers get notions, fancies. You understand?”

I think of my dead lover, Elan, her body so still and swollen in the tub. Elan was the queer, not me. Elan loved those of the Other sex, not me. I only loved Elan. “There’s a black beetle in every trench,” I say.

Gian spits kaj onto the dirt floor and smiles at me. Her teeth are stained red. “You’ll do,” she says. “Get your med ration from the kits and go.”

I once dreamt of my mothers, all dead. They lay close together in a field of red grass. Close, but not touching. They were warm, but I could not wake them, and they were covered in dragonflies. The flies’ wings were made of color. Not painted in it, no, but made of it: violet and lime, olive and saffron, turquoise and sage, and the color dazzled me. The world dazzled me, and I could not speak.

It is the only dream I have ever had of my mothers.

I move into the dark and up and out the rear line of our trenches. I follow the black spine of the ridge. I like to think that the darkness hides me, but this is not true. My body suit is still living, feeding off my sweat and urine, and it colors itself the same blue-black of the darkness.

The kits gave me standard anti-infection doses for yellow ague and blister fever, but we are out of quick-pinch antibodies for standard bursts, thornbug or otherwise. They allotted me rapid-mending gel, but no painkillers. We haven’t had painkillers in eight weeks.

I come to the end of the ridge and cut across to the other side at dawn. Beneath my feet is a long scar of stone and metal thirty meters across, the width of the old Divide - before the Men blew a hole in it big enough to swarm through. The air is quiet here; I can taste lead on my tongue.

The sun’s light begins to splinter into sunset, and I circle the edge of the drop site. The wood here is made up of thorn trees and twisted willowrens. The branches tangle overhead, but they are so thinly leaved that they appear skeletal, hungry. The red grass is knee high.

As dusk comes on I hear the first of the bursts from what sound like Androgyny guns. I look out past the clearing where the red grass tumbles down a soft decline. Above the valley, just out of my sight, I see the orange haze of a thornbug burst, a saffron wash of yellow ague, and I huddle down into the grass.

The drop falls well after dark, the time when the moon would have crested in the sky on a moonlit night. I hear the low hum of a carrier over the bursts. I open my eyes and see the drop fall, too close to the downward slope on the other side of the clearing. It thumps to the ground like a body being tossed from the trenches.

I wait until the hum of the carrier recedes. I crawl into the clearing. As I near the far edge, the grass begins to smell strongly of lavender and cinnamon. Violet gas. I rise up into a crouch to get myself out of the lingering mist of gas. I find the pack at the very edge of the decline, and as I reach for the straps, I gaze below where I can see the hazy light of the globes in the Neuter and Androgyny trenches. Someone has ordered an assault, and a stream of figures flows across the distance between the camps in the dark. Black figures dart madly through the rainbow bursts of vermin and contagion. Here, the air has become thick and heady with a wash of different smells; the sticky odor of bursts and bug resin, the yeasty stink of bacterial shells and gun oil.

I heft the pack onto my back, and it molds itself to my frame. It is heavier than I anticipated. Gian said forty kilos, and carrying forty kilos when I weighed seventy-five kilos was never a concern. Now, weighing sixty-five and living on dead body suits and boiled Androgyny bootstraps, my body protests, and I feel every muscle tremble as I stand with the pack. It takes several steps to figure my balance with the extra weight, and they are slow, awkward steps. I should be halfway back across the clearing by now.

The popping sound comes from above me. A bacterial shell showers a spray of creamy white dust in a spherical bloom.

I stand on the inside edge of it.

Even as I move, I know that I am breathing it in, but I do not know what sort of shell it is. Dysentery? Red ague? Fever fly? My body suit eats the white powder on the suit, but the rest stays on my skin, and I am afraid to smear it away with my bare fingers.

Behind me, the shouting sounds closer. I look back. Dark figures ebb up over the edge of the decline. I try to move faster, but the pack is too ungainly. I nearly fall over.

A burst of orange lights up the clearing. For a moment, the world is as bright as sunset. I hear the hissing of the burst-released thornbugs. I am four meters away from the scant shelter of the trees.

I run, and stumble, and I crash into the woods. I throw myself to the ground and tuck my arms up under myself. I hear the thornbugs lodge themselves into tree trunks, hiss zffft!

The light of the burst has faded, but I can still see the residual image behind my closed lids. When I can hear no more bugs zipping past, I struggle to my feet and keep moving.

I am aware of another sound at my left. Someone else in the trees? But I cannot see them. The woods are black, and I am having trouble breathing. My vision begins to blur, and I see color where there should be none. Violet trees, orange grass, umber sky. But it is dark outside, and the world should have no color.

Bands of pain tighten across my chest. The colors bleed out. I stumble, keep walking. I can see the jagged black crown of the ridge. It looks farther away than it should be.

Behind me, there is more noise. Crunching grass, breaking branches. There is someone there, now, I know. I can hear her breathing.

The pack is suddenly too heavy to bear. My body is too heavy to bear. One foot catches in an animal hole, and I lose my balance. The weight of the pack jerks me backward. I can’t get my foot free as I fall. I hear a nasty crunching sound; pain blossoms up through my lower leg. I am aware of falling, striking the ground with enough force to pound a gasp of breath from my lungs. I am lying on my side among crushed blades of grass. I cannot move. It hurts to breathe.

My follower breaks past me, stumbles, and collapses; my tardy shadow, struggling to catch me. She falls beside me, clutching at the blistered skin of her arms.

She says something to me, but I do not understand her. She smells a bit like lavender and cinnamon. Her breathing comes sharp. Or is that mine? The words continue to bubble out of her, and my vision flashes with more color.

“-blister fever,” she says, and for some reason I understand the words now. “Antibodies for blister fever. I have the quick-pinch for respiratory haze. Here, here.” She is pricking my arm with something. She is not speaking our language: she is speaking the common language of the Consortium. Doesn’t she know I am one of her sisters? Can she not tell what I am in all this dark?

I fumble with the meds the kits gave me, pull out the quick-pinch for blister fever, but her body has already gone slack. She has one arm stretched out to me. I pinch the dose into her arm and rub at it. I wait until I can pick up her pulse. Her eyelids flutter. She reaches for my hand. Our fingers twine.

In that moment, she is my Elan, and I have saved her.

The dream is always the same, a subconscious imperfection; continuous loop: I am walking barefoot through Elan’s house. The worms inside the globes are dying, and they paint the whole house in orange light. Elan lies in the shallow depression in the flooring that is the tub. She is gray-skinned now, the color bleached out of her with her blood. Elan’s head lolls toward me, her eyes bleached of all color, the blind eyes of someone who’s been violet-gassed.

She says, “This is the way the world ends.”

And the room is filled with dragonflies.

I wake from sleep as one would wake from death. I am aware of being awake, but I am not aware of heat or color or feeling. I cannot recognize any of my limbs.

And then I remember how to open my eyes.

An alien face stares back at me. She lies as she fell, an arm’s length from me. Our hands are still twined. I pull mine away. Her skin is the color of burnt ginger, like mine, and her hair is long and black and unruly. It spills across narrow shoulders, down a narrow body whose skinniness makes it seem all the more awkward and angular. She wears a body suit that is dying. Patches of gray mar the exterior.

I cannot say how she looks so different from a Woman. There are ways one learns to tell. The sharpness of the body, perhaps, the severe lines of the face, and the length of the hair - too long to be practical, too short to be masculine. Her brows make one clean line above her eyes, and her nose looks too small for the broad, flat planes of her face; a human face, yes, but Other, apart.

She watches me with eyes the color of dust and gold. She is very still, as am I. We wait.

Then she says in the common language of the old Consortium, “The Androgynies broke through our lines. They will be coming this way, filling the district to the Amber Ridge.”

She’s a Neuter, then. Not an Androgyny.

I stir off the last veil of the death-sleep and try to sit up. The pain in my leg awakens. I grit my teeth and take hold of my thigh and try to yank my twisted lower leg up out of the animal hole. The leg jounces unnaturally. Yields. Pain roils up my torso, and I fall back down onto the grass. Sweat beads my upper lip. I want to vomit. I fumble at my belt for the med rations.

The Neuter is moving now, too. I am aware of her out of the corner of my eye. I put both hands over the med rations, knowing it’s a futile gesture, knowing she can simply kick me and take everything I have. But as she sits up, I notice little thorns sticking out of the unprotected flesh at the back of her neck.

Seeing my gaze, she reaches a hand back and tugs out a thornbug. She holds the little dead bug in her hand.

“I don’t have antibodies for thornbug bursts,” I say. I look at her waist, but her belt of med rations is nearly empty. I see antibodies for dysentery and yellow ague and the little blue-white pinch for respiratory haze that she gave me several hours ago, but nothing resembling the cure for a thornbug burst.

She stares back at the thornbug.

I pull out the rapid-mending gel from my belt. I look back behind me and remember what she said about the Androgynies. I am supposed to be back in my own trenches tonight.

I empty one of my pinch canisters and bite on it. I lean over and stare at the mess of flesh and jagged bone that is my lower leg. It looks like it should belong to someone else. I use my other leg to hold down the broken one. I close my eyes, push back with my arms, and try to jerk the loose tibia back into place. I make an unrecognizable noise. Black flashes across my vision. I fall back again. I stare up at the sky, watching black haze move across the lavender wash of the brightening morning.

Then the Neuter takes hold of my gel. I don’t want to part with it, but I cannot move, and she is stronger than me now, even if she is skinny and Neuter.

She leans over me, tube of gel in one hand, and says, “My name is Verj.” She yanks on my leg. I bite the pinch canister in two.

The Neuter is still kneeling over my leg. It throbs. I try to sit up, and I see her smearing gel inside the ragged gash, then fingering it on the tatters of external flesh. She does not look at me.

She finishes, sits back on her heels, and nods. She says something in Neuter, then to me, in Consortium, “You’ll walk.” She stands and begins to walk toward the ridge.

“Wait!” I say, and I sit up. The pain has turned into a burning fissure of fire crawling all up and down my leg.

She turns.

I cannot carry forty kilos. “Your position has been overrun, you said. Who are you going back to?”

She quirks her head at me, like a nod, only it isn’t. “No one. I ran,” she says, and she looks away from me. “I wanted to be free. I cannot live in trenches any longer, you understand?”

I understand. “You’re dying,” I say. “The thornbugs. If you help me, I can get you the antibodies for it.” I am lying through my teeth.

She knows it. Neuters are not stupid. But she walks back to me anyway, looks at the pack that’s still strapped to my back.

“I have to get… this pack back to the Women’s trenches on the other side of the ridge. To push back the Androgynies,” I say. “You understand? You can help kill the Androgynies, the people who took your position, the people who are killing you. Please.”

The “please” comes out more desperate than I want it to. How long will it take for the Androgynies to get their filter back up? How long until their supply carrier gets to them? I imagine Gian peeling the flesh away from her own bones.

“Please,” I say again, because I have run out of things to say.

The Neuter regards me. “There is not much time before the Androgynies find us here,” she says.

“I can walk,” I say, “but not by myself, and not with this pack.”

“You talk like you are talking to a Woman,” the Neuter says, and I realize I said the last thing in our language. I repeat it in Consortium.

“What are you called?” the Neuter asks, and I wonder why it could make any difference what I am called. As she stares at me with her big dust-gold eyes, I wonder, however irrationally, how Elan could have preferred one of these alien things to me. The memory hurts worse than my leg. I push the thought away.

“I am called Nadav,” I say.

“Nadav,” she says, and nods. She walks over to me, leans over, and holds out her hand. I stare at the slender fingers, dirty fingernails.

I take her hand. She pulls me up, and I have to take hold of both her wrists to keep my balance.

“You have to take off the pack,” she says. “We’ll carry it between us.”

And we do.

My leg still burns, and I cannot put much weight on it. The Neuter is shorter than I am, thinner and weaker, so even with my injury, her side of the pack is still the side that slopes closer to the ground. The pace is agonizing. We have to stop after barely a hundred yards. It occurs to me that we’ll need water, and I haven’t eaten since the day before.

She can still move faster than I can. She leaves me with the pack so she can find food and water. She has a deflatable container, empty.

I sit on top of the pack and wait for her.

I do not think she will come back.

She does.

The water tastes good going down, but it has a rusty aftertaste, like old blood. The Neuter squats opposite me, watching me drink.

I hand back the water. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say.

She quirks her head again, that nod-that-is-not. “You think I should look for Androgynies instead?”

“Would be more useful,” I say.

“The Androgynies I know would cook us alive before we heard the grass twist,” she says, and I think “twist” is the wrong word, but I do not correct her.

“This is the most Consortium I have spoken in years,” I say.

“It is good to stay in practice,” the Neuter says, and I wonder if she is joking or not. I try to remember how different Neuter humor was from ours.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Those were nice days, were they not?” she says. “Those days when we all met and talked?”

“Until the day you talked away our birthing tech,” I spit, and the aftertaste of the water still sits in my throat. I want to spit blood at her.

She grimaces. “The same argument. You Women, you have wombs, what need do you have for tech? You could have made a truce with the Men or Androgynies. And the Androgynies, they have all they need.”

“Truce? With them?” I cannot keep the disgust from my voice. Neuters do not understand what it is, to have a womb with which to breed a parasite. “Nine months of servitude, pushing out half-formed flesh? Tell me, Neuter, what person consents to slavery? Getting that tech is the only way we’ll be free.”

The Neuter’s lips make a hard line. Not a frown, but an attempt at non-expression. “Slavery. What did the members of the Consortium force upon my people but slavery? Breeding your babies in jars. We were restoring balance. And then the Men got angry.”

“And then the Men got angry,” I agree, and we are both silent, brooding.

“We should walk,” I say. I have never been much afraid of Men, not even when they blew through the Divide and tried to tear the world apart. They were doomed from the start. The Androgynies can still reproduce.

The Men can’t.

Nor can we.

The Neuter takes her side of the pack, and I take mine.

“At least now,” I say, “the Women are free.”

“Free,” the Neuter says, “and dying.”

We start to walk again toward the Amber Ridge. The Neuter remains quiet, though she looks over her shoulder often, the fearful look of the followed. I wonder if she looks for the Androgynies, or for the Neuters who could murder her for desertion.

As I walk, the world begins to blur at the edges. From pain, disorientation, lack of sleep, hunger, all of those things. I pretend the world is different. I pretend I am somewhere else. I pretend Elan is alive and she and I are carrying a picnic basket between us, and the far-off pop of bacterial shells is just the sound of fireworks. I pretend that Elan loves me.

It is a common daydream of mine, and it keeps me walking.

We stop three more times before dark. By the time the hazy blanket of dusk begins to cloud the world, we stand a hundred yards from the face of the Amber Ridge.

The Neuter helps me drag the pack into a clump of thorn trees, and we sit down with the pack behind us. Her skin is flush. There’s sweat on her brow, her upper lip, and the gray patches of her suit are beginning to peel off.

Night comes more quickly this close to the Ridge, and it is always colder next to the remains of the Divide. We drink the last of the water.

“Did you ever duel?” I ask the Neuter.

She looks over at me. She is hugging her knees to her chest. She, too, is shivering. “Yes,” she says. “I dueled a friend, once.” I hear a smile in her voice, and she uses a word I do not know, “--ruined my shield.”

“What’s that word?”

“The pronoun for us.”

“Oh,” I say, and wonder how I could have forgotten it. Then, “I just think of you as `she’.”

“Most people think of us as `it’,” she says. “We find both offensive.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s all right,” she says, “I can’t hear the way you think.”

I try to open my eyes again, but the stars are too bright. I wonder if the thornbugs got me too, or if another bacterial shell burst over me that I did not notice. I feel so very cold.

“I once loved a Woman who loved Neuters,” I say, and after I say it, I feel sick, like I have told someone I like to slit the skins from children.

“Oh,” is all the Neuter says.

“You know what that means?” I say. “I loved someone who was queer. You know what that is?”

“You’re speaking Woman again.”

I repeat, in Consortium.

Verj says, “I am cold.”

I scoot closer to her, until our bodies touch. She feels warm, too warm. I am afraid now, really afraid that the thornbugs are killing both of us.

“I have to tell you,” Verj says. “I ran away from the Neuters long ago. I have been fighting with the Androgynies.”

I am too cold to pull away, and my mind feels fuzzy now. The night feels too loud, and sounds too dark. “You’re a queer too, aren’t you?” I say.

“Only with Androgynies,” she says. “Women are just not so desirable to me, that’s all. About as desirable as another Neuter. No personal dislike of you, of course.”

I laugh. I laugh so hard that my chest begins to hurt. “Oh no,” I say, and my laugh has turned into hiccups. “Oh, no, it’s all right, I’m used to it.”

“I once heard it said that queers could have saved the world,” Verj says. “They could have helped everyone see that we are still a Consortium. That we are still the same. But I think it’s gone too far now.”

“Yes,” I say, thinking; Elan, my love, you could have saved the world.

And suddenly I am afraid. The world is spinning, but I know this much. “If you fight for the Androgynies, why are you helping me? Verj, I’m killing Androgynies. I mean, they’re killing us, and I’m taking this to -”

“They threw me out.”

“What?”

“How do you think they broke the Neuter lines?” I hear sorrow there, but it is not the sorrow I think it is. She says, “I turned off the Neuters’ filter. When the Androgynies broke the lines, my lover no longer wanted me.”

I know this kind of sorrow. I curl my body around hers, and we shiver in the cold together.

“I am free, now,” she says.

“Dying,” I say.

She laughs, and it sounds absurd between us, a little bubble of laughter in all this dark. “I suppose we all are,” she says.

The long night passes.

I do not dream.

I wake with Verj’s body curled around mine. Her skin is hot to the touch. I see little black threads running beneath her skin from the thornbug punctures on the back of her neck.

“Verj,” I say, and shake her gently. “Verj, we have to go.”

The dawn is cold and gray. Clouds hang low over the Ridge.

Verj moans and mumbles something in Neuter. I pull her to her feet. My leg is not so shaky or inflamed as the day before, but it still snaps a bloom of pain up through my leg and torso when I put my weight on it. I grab my strap of the pack.

Verj is moving now, slowly. She stands, stumbles. She steadies herself against one of the trees. I step toward her to help, but she motions me away.

The pack between us, we walk. Verj’s face goes from flush to ashen as we make our way into the scar.

How long did it take me to get to this point when I walked here? A night? That would be nearly nine hours this time of year. And I am hungry. Verj is hungry. She was eating bits of her suit the night before.

We walk.

We make it to the other side, across the quiet, lead-tasting air of the scar, before she has to stop.

“Here,” she says, and the word comes out in Neuter, but I know it.

We collapse onto the pack. It is the first time I think to go through the pack. Could they have dropped water and food with it as well? Med rations? I try to pull open the top, but I can see that it’s bugged for a TD. Only Gian can open it. I curse.

“Can you carry the rest… alone?” Verj says, and I look at her. She is slumped up with her back against the pack, her limbs lax, head lolled toward me, eyes closed.

“You’re not going to die!” I say, and I am startled at how loud my voice sounds. The whir of the chorus beetles in the grass around us abruptly ceases at the sudden noise.

Verj opens her eyes. Dust and gold.

“Listen,” I say, “when my trench director gets this open, there will probably be med rations in it. Probably thornbug pinches. You understand? We just have to get there.”

Verj gives me a wan smile. “Ah,” she says. “You told me you already had thornbug antibodies in your trenches.”

“I lied to you,” I say. “You would have lied too. But listen, Verj, they’ll be in here. They have to be in here.”

She begins humming softly, some melody that I have no name for, but sounds familiar. A child’s lullaby, something my mothers would have sung to me.

“Stand up,” I say.

I stand, as if to show her. I reach down and take her hand. “Up. Stand up!” I pull her to her feet, but she leans heavily on me.

I wait until she has her balance, then I grab for the pack. “Come on,” I say. “Please. Please, Verj, I can’t do this without you.”

She takes hold of the pack strap like an automaton. Her eyes have taken on that outward gaze, ever outward, looking in.

We are dragging the pack now.

I think of Androgynies with their filters up. I think of Androgynies with thornbug bursts. I think of a hundred terrible bursts and bacterial shells I have never seen.

And then Verj stumbles, and I can think of nothing but this moment, now, this one human being, and the overwhelming urge to live.

I start to talk to her. I tell her about my mothers. I tell her about Elan. I tell her about the Neuter duels I used to go and see. Some of it gets confused, and I realize I am speaking some of it in our language, and I have to stop and go back and start over in Consortium, but Verj does not seem to notice.

The pack smoothes a long trail of broken red grass behind us. I tell her I fell in love with Elan and moved in with her before she told me her secret. She did not desire me. She wanted Neuters to touch her, not me.

The sky is turning the gray of dusk again. I am so thirsty. The hunger has dissolved into a dull ache. I help Verj up for the third time. The left side of her face is a blotchy blue-black, the color of a new bruise.

I have forgotten what language I am speaking in. “They found out about her, Home Defense did,” I say. “I came home one night, and she had killed herself. Home Defense said she must have found out they were coming for her. But you know what I think? I think they killed her. I think Women killed another Woman. It’s not bad enough that we kill other people. Now we kill each other. Bugs don’t kill each other.”

And I fall.

Verj tumbles down next to me. The pack rests between us. I can hear her breathing, a phlegmy rasp that makes me shiver. I reach out to her. She takes my hand. I look out past us, there, across the beaten down red grass, and I can see the smoky glow of the globes, thirty yards distant.

“Verj,” I say. I squeeze her hand. “Verj, we’re here.”

Her hand feels so hot. She murmurs something I cannot hear.

I hear the chorus beetles grow quiet. I hear the tread of footsteps across the grass. Some part of me expects to see an Androgyny face.

“Runner?” says a Woman’s voice.

And I feel that I am home.

I dream that the last of the Men have been run into the sea. The sea is the color of smoky foam. There is no horizon line over the water, only an endless gray haze, a merging of sea and sky. The Men’s bodies disturb only the water along a narrow shore, the thin perimeter of a vast body whose breadth is impossible to measure.

I walk along sand the bleached color of death. I see the Men’s bloated bodies rolling in with the tide. I look into their mouths, and they are filled with dragonflies.

I hear Elan’s voice, “This is the way the world ends.”

I am pulled through a haze of successive dreams-and-wakings. They’re putting tubes into me, feeding me bugs; someone puts a pinch into me, tells me she’s curing me of red ague. Gian is yelling at me, something about a Neuter.

“It’s Verj,” I say. “Verj is important. She’s a queer.”

And Gian spits red kaj and curses at me and says something about not trusting a queer runner.

“It’s all right,” I explain to her, and my voice sounds far away, “She doesn’t like Women.”

Gian spits at me again.

When I wake again, the real waking, I wake to the little violet-gassed waif who first summoned me. She says I am needed on the line.

“Verj?” I say.

“The Neuter?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Are you really a queer?” she says.

“Verj,” I say.

She points across the med tent to a still, solitary figure in a low-slung hammock.

I roll out of my hammock. My leg bleeds pain. I limp over to Verj. Taking her hand is like holding a rotting melon. The tissue beneath the skin is rotting away. Her face is unrecognizable. Blue-black, the flesh beginning to liquefy.

“Verj,” I say.

Her lips move, and then, “You liar.” But she is not angry.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I want to squeeze her hand, but I know the flesh will spill open. She will dissolve before my eyes. I saved her just to watch her die.

“It does not mean she did not love you,” Verj says.

“What?”

“Elan,” she says, and the name sounds strange coming from the lips of a Neuter, a thing Elan desired far more than she desired me. “You can love a person you do not desire,” Verj says, and she tries to laugh, maybe, but it turns into a liquid cough. Blood smears her chin. “What strange creatures you Women are, to think you must devour the body of one you love. Perhaps, the translation is wrong… love… you use the wrong words for everything, you Women…”

“Nadav.” The waif is behind me. “The trench director,” she says.

Verj has not opened her eyes. I let her hand go. Someone has taken off her suit and covered her in clean white.

I walk out of the med tent and the med trench, and up to the front line. Gian is there. She has her arms folded, waiting. She is taller than me, and she frowns when she sees me.

“Ready?” she says.

“For what?” I say.

Dawn is breaking across the sky.

“You brought it. You should see it.” And she gestures to the women behind the big rotating guns. They pour resin into the barrels.

“The CFR?” I say.

She nods.

“The pack was too heavy to be holding only those bursts,” I say.

“Med rations,” Gian says.

“Thornbug pinches,” I say. “Antibodies. You asked for them. You told them to bug the pack for a trench director.”

Gian does not look at me. “Of course.”

Gian spits kaj at her feet. “Can’t be too careful with queers, now, can I?”

“No,” I say. “I suppose not.” I can still feel Verj’s hand in mine.

Our filter winks out. The guns fire.

I watch two neat spherical bursts shoot out over the long swath of red grass between our trenches and the Androgynies. The bursts are beautiful. They look transparent, like soap bubbles. But I know they are not colorless; they are full of color, painted in it, awash in it.

I hear the bursts pop.

And the world is filled with dragonflies.

This is the way the world ends.

Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand

Finally, I wanted to end this collection with the original Nalah story I wrote back at Clarion. This one made the rounds at all the major (and a lot of minor) magazines, but was never loved. I still had a long way to go to figure out pacing and plot and tension (oh my). I never did figure out how to “fix” it in a way that would sell it. My first novel, God’s War, was inspired in large part by this portrait of a disillusioned warrior battling it out in the desert (Nalah even makes an appearance in the third book in my series). You’ll also see a lot of similiarities between this story and My Oracles at the End of the World. And, once again, plenty of woman-on-woman misogyny. Women vs. ladies happens all the time out here. Divide and conquer works.

Nalah sent the boy out across the sand in search of Hanife’s rebels three days ago. They left her this of him.

Nalah pulled out the blade sheathed across her chest. It was the dull blade she used for traitors and criminals, the blade she had carried with her since the beginning.

She looked across the blistered body of the boy to where Tarik, her second, stood - his tall form outlined in the dusty red haze of the sky. His onyx-colored hair was braided back against his scalp, and his eyes were cold, intense, set close together in his narrow face.

“Blade,” she said.

He tossed her a sharp steel blade. She caught it by the hilt, turned back to the boy. The boy opened his mouth, gurgled words she pretended not to hear. The red sand would chew him apart come nightfall. To leave him as he was invited the sand to eat through the open wounds of his body.

She took hold of the boy’s mop of black hair, brought the knife down cleanly across either side of the throat. Blood rushed out across her forearm.

This was not the war she had agreed to fight.

Nalah tossed the weapon at Tarik’s feet.

“Bury him,” she said.

Another offering to the insatiable sand.

She turned on her heel and slipped back across the red sand to where her group of fighters squatted at the bottom of a dune a dozen yards distant, all eyes on her and the body. She walked past them and up to the crest of the dune, gazed south.

Tarik met her later, licking the blood from his calloused hands. The desert would eat him if he left blood on his skin. Nalah stared down at her own bloody hand. The desert did not eat women.

“We should press on to the hold,” Tarik said. “If the runner’s blistered like that, it means they marched on to the hold sometime after dawn.”

“They don’t know where the hold is. They could still be wandering.”

“You should have sent Shani,” he said. He didn’t look at her.

“I thought of it.”

“An emotional decision.” Tarik glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Should I wrap you in a red dress and call you lady?”

“Save your questions for the city. There’s no place for them here.” The boy’s blood felt sticky on her hand. “We push on,” she said. “Send out a runner ahead to see if they’ve reached the hold.”

“Another runt?”

“Send Shani.”

“Done.” He slid back down the dune.

She gazed after Tarik, watched the red sand shift in his wake, and thought of dead boys in shallow graves.

Nalah led the march, a force of just over fifty, across red dunes and loose pockets of red rock. Jagged pillars of gray stone thrust up from the hilly landscape, made deep shadows across the sand as dusk fell.

Shani traveled back to them just after dark, running hard and fast under a big full moon and smaller half-moon of radiant scarlet.

“They won’t be expecting us,” Shani said. Her bare blade was wet with blood, and Nalah watched her lick it clean. “I found their runner.”

Nalah led them across the twilight sand. She crept to the edge of a sandy rise with Tarik. Her force outnumbered the one below by a full half, and the people that milled about the brightly lit tents below were robed for the city. King Hanife’s youngest boy had never lived out on the open sand. He knew nothing of thirst and blood and stealth.

Nalah drew her sword and moved. Her fighters moved with her. They came silent as night into the camp, and in the flickering light of the fires, the rebels saw them too late.

Dust and sand and dirt stung Nalah’s eyes. In the heat and darkness, she saw a dead boy in place of the one she faced, a dead boy clawing out at her from a shallow, sandy grave.

She tread across a dead, cooling body, sandals pressing the choking form into the sand.

Nalah heard something above the grunting, clanging fray - Tarik’s voice, rich and loud in the sobbing night.

“I have him!” he cried. “I have him!”

For Nalah, there was only her next opponent, only her sword, only his staff and knife. A body fell beneath her. She twisted around to take note of the camp. Her fighters were finishing skirmishes at the edges, but most of the robed men had fallen. Sweat slathered her skin.

She nodded at Shani, and Shani knew: the sand would finish the wounded. Loot the bodies before it swallows them.

Shani leapt over a dying figure, her knife raised. She called for a handful of fighters, her voice exuberant.

Nalah wondered if she had ever been as young as Shani.

Tarik dragged a howling, sinewy male toward Nalah. The boy had smoke-gray eyes and a hawkish nose like his father. Tarik had stripped the clothing from him, or found him that way - Nalah never asked.

Behind Tarik, two fighters, Heru and Akila, stood over a huddle of four thin ladies dressed in red, all no older than thirteen or fourteen. Their painted eyes and faces were garish in the flickering light of the strewn fires. They wore silver collars with the king’s seal stamped into the metal.

“You’re Kesi,” Nalah said to the naked boy. He was young, younger than she remembered, sixteen or seventeen, no older than her own boy. She did not remember the last time she saw her own boy on the open sand.

“Nalah, you know me,” Kesi said, struggling to his knees. “Eshe and I played together. Upon the desert wind, Nalah, we played together!”

Those fighters Shani had not taken with her stood watching, their bodies merely shadows. Nalah felt their eyes. Somewhere, far-off, she heard the hiss of the sand. It smelled the blood. Nalah remembered the boy, the runner, the death-stink of his living body.

“Let him up, Tarik,” she said.

Tarik released his hold.

The captive scrambled across the sand on his hands and knees, prostrated himself before her, and raised only his head.

“Thank you,” he said, “Thank you.” She saw moisture in his eyes that threatened to spill down his dusty cheeks.

Nalah pulled out her dull blade. She saw Tarik move to give her his instead, but she shook her head. The bone hilt felt good in her hand.

Kesi understood. The water escaped from the corners of his smoky eyes, carving lazy tear trails down the sides of his face.

This was not the war I agreed to fight.

The sand howled.

Nalah and her fighters arrived at King Hanife’s hold four days later. The hold lay at the edge of an oasis, a square of deep green grass and tall, three-tiered palm trees with serrated leaves. The city’s mud-brick watchtower had a view that stretched out across the hilly desert to the horizon, and when Nalah and her fighters came into their line of sight, the gates opened and a handful of white-robed king’s guards strode out across the sand to escort Nalah into the city.

“Success?” one of the robed men asked Nalah.

She nodded to Tarik. He pulled Kesi’s severed head from a leather satchel at his hip.

The speaker, Gahiji, gave a curt nod. Gahiji was a silver-haired fighter with a desert-hewn face. He and Hanife were brothers.

Gahiji escorted her and her fighters back toward the hold through a maze of mud-brick shops and private residences enclosed in an immense defensive wall, thirty feet high. Nalah remembered scaling those walls a decade ago. Hanife had added another ten feet to them.

The press of noise and bodies created their own heat and stir in the walled city. Nalah heard the chatter of public ladies from the balconies that stretched out over the streets, and the loud calls of the men in the market stalls, their tattooed faces soaked in sweat and sun. Small boys ran alongside her column of fighters. They had their hair braided back like fighters, and the bolder ones picked up handfuls of sand and threw it at the collared ladies. The less bold boys clutched at one another and giggled.

Nalah got her fighters settled in the garrison. Gahiji called up her and Tarik into the heart of the hold, to Hanife’s keep.

As they wound through the low, cool mud-brick halls of the keep, robed men moved past them. Their gazes were long and open, displaying the usual curiosity of city men. City men did not often see real women inside the walls. Women were the stuff of blood and sand. Men didn’t need women inside the walls: the walls kept out the sand.

“Hanife asks to see you tonight,” Gahiji said.

“My son?” Nalah asked at the door of her room.

“In the training yard. You’ll be assigned servants. I have other duties.”

He inclined his head and left them. Gahiji had never much cared for Nalah.

Nalah nodded to Tarik before he could enter his room. “Bring the head to Hanife’s second.”

“You don’t want to do it?”

“Not today.”

“This wasn’t the sort of battle we said we’d fight,” Tarik said.

She looked back at him, heard the thoughts she could not speak. Ah, Tarik - my conscious, my reason, my second. We have spent too long together.

“We’re fighting rebels who disagree with Hanife’s vision,” she said. “We’ve done that since the beginning.”

“I never agreed to slaughter children.”

“Nor did I. The battle changed, that’s all.”

Nalah wiped her left hand on her tunic, noted the brown bloodstains beneath her fingernails. She needed a good steam bath and scraping.

Tarik gritted his teeth and pushed through the heavy curtain into his room.

Nalah walked down to the steam room. She scraped the dirt and the last of the dried blood from her skin. Blood and grit stayed locked under her nails. Her body ached.

She walked back to her room just in time to meet her servant, a thin, dusty-skinned boy with liquid dark eyes and shaggy black hair covering his ears. She asked for food and clothes. She dressed in clean brown leggings and a short brown tunic. He cleaned her sandals.

She slept fitfully on one of the rug-covered mud-brick benches in the room. She awoke to the boy shaking her, dark eyes rolled back in his head, fingers bony thin, his face emaciated, and the smell... No. She rubbed at her face. The vision passed. Her servant gazed down at her, dipped his head.

“Your son-”

“Leave us alone.” Her son’s voice carried from the doorway.

The servant ducked his head again and slipped out into the hall.

Nalah sat up, swung her feet to the dusty floor. Her boy stood in the doorway.

Her boy.

His short, sinewy body was clothed in a too-short gray robe with a green belt. He wore a length of steel at his hip, a sharp sword that had yet to be blooded and dulled. The features of his face were hers; the snub nose, dark, deep set eyes and high brow, but the height and form were his father’s, the ghostly remnants of a dead man eaten by the sand. Here in the city, her boy’s hair had grown long and wild and hung into his face.

Nalah felt a knot of worry ease in her body, the twisting fear that rode with her every time she left him, the fear that when she returned, she would return to a dead boy.

“You’ve been well?” she asked.

“He sent you to murder Kesi.”

“He sends me to murder a lot of people,” she said.

“It’s true then.”

She wanted to tell him: Yes, boy, I slaughtered your crib mate. Yes, boy, I slaughtered a baby. Yes, boy, but you know all this as you know hunger, as you know fear, as you know sand, as you know me.

“You’ve seen me fight,” she said. “You understand it.”

But he had only seen her fight in closed circles inside city walls. He had not seen her on the sand. “I wish it were different,” she said.

“No you don’t,” he said. “Look at you, sleeping here in your clean clothes, with good food and a servant who bows his head to you.

And where’s Kesi? His head’s in Tarik’s bag and you’re here, giving your loyalty to a fat city king.”

Nalah gazed down at her son’s feet. He wore new sandals. His feet were soft. No calluses. Her gaze went back to his clean face.

“You have not killed a man,” she said.

He puffed up his thin chest, gripped the hilt of his sword with his right hand. “Kesi was going to change everything.”

Nalah stood, and saw him take a step back as she did. She was a woman, and she stood like one, a stance she had perfected in her two decades of fighting.

“Don’t ever say that boy’s name again,” she said. “Ever. Hear that, boy?”

“Why?” Eshe screwed up his face into a semblance of courage. “Why should I be quiet? Hanife’s government has flaws. Kesi and I had solutions, and Hanife had him killed for it. Kesi-”

She had left him here too long, left him here with city men and frail ladies and court politics.

“Kesi wanted to fuck his father’s ladies and take over his father’s holds,” she said.

“Hanife’s vision was always one of keeping peace. I remember it. I saw it. You see nothing. You’re just a boy.”

The wrong words. She knew they were wrong as soon as she said them.

“You’re just a woman,” Eshe blurted. “You should have been brought up a lady. You’re turning into one.” He pushed back the heavy curtain and fled from the room.

Nalah fell back down onto the bench. She looked at the fruit platter at the center of the room, realized she was not hungry.

My boy… My boy… what about my boy?

She curled back up onto the bench. Closed her eyes.

Dreamed of dead boys in the sand.

Nalah’s servant woke her for the banquet, but she did not follow after him. In the room next to hers, she heard Tarik and a couple of ladies in the throes of something other than battle.

She stood and walked out to find her servant. She asked him to summon Shani from the garrison. He padded off down the hall.

Before she could turn back into her room, she saw Gahiji coming down the hall toward her, wearing a stern frown on his dark face. “You were summoned to the banquet,” he said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Hanife wants to see you. Now.”

Gahiji led her to the throne room, a wide rectangular room covered in colorful throw rugs. The air stank of sweat and dust and heavy pomade. A dozen merchants and councilors and tax agents - dressed in red and green and too-bright yellow - milled about, holding rolled parchments and waving their fleshy hands to emphasize their flowery words. They turned at the motion from the doors and stared.

Nalah stared back. They looked away. From their speech and clothing, she guessed that they were from Khairi, outside the southernmost edge of the desert wall - new officials, new men of words and water. They were young. Everyone seemed to be getting younger but her and Hanife and Tarik.

Hanife stood just to the left of his throne, a carved slab of gray rock pressed up against the far end of the room. He had gained more weight in her absence. The flesh of his face was paler than she remembered, dusty brown instead of dark onyx. His brows made one clean line above his eyes, and he left his hair unbraided, let it grow long and thick. He dressed in a silver robe tied with gold and blue tassels.

Hanife gestured at her, and the murmuring officials ceased.

“We need to speak,” he said. He waved away the group of men and moved toward Nalah.

Gahiji came up behind her. A half-dozen members of Hanife’s white-robed honor guard, with steel swords at their hips, moved from their places at the back of the room to follow.

“It has been some time,” Hanife said as he walked beside her down the corridor. His walk remained the same; a strong, purposeful stride that spoke of a body used to physical power.

“It has,” she agreed. They stepped into a low doorway, down a cool hallway.

“You were successful with the traitor, then,” Hanife said.

She did not answer him. It didn’t sound like a question.

Gahiji opened up the door to the king’s chambers. He searched the room, returned, and nodded to Hanife.

“Come, woman,” Hanife said.

Nalah strode through the door, ducked to enter, and settled onto one of the benches along the wall. Thick rugs lined the floor and the benches. A rectangular patch of dusky light streamed in from the opening at the center of the ceiling. A second door led off into his sleeping chambers. Here, a silver tray of grapes, oranges, dates, and figs sat on a low wooden table at the center of the room next to a flagon of wine and two silver cups.

Hanife offered her refreshments. She shook her head.

“You were never one for words,” he said.

No, she thought, you were always the one for words.

“Was the head delivered to you?” she asked.

“Yes, just after you arrived. Are you certain you don’t want something to drink?”

She shook her head, and he poured himself a glass of wine. He settled onto the bench next to her, robe trailing across the floor, and she caught the familiar scent of him above the reek of pomade: fermented wine and stale sweat.

“You have another assignment for my fighters?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I request two weeks of city leave.”

Hanife touched a soft finger to the edge of his glass. “Have you seen your son?”

“We spoke when I arrived,” she said.

“Did he speak of my son?”

Nalah saw pale gray eyes leaking warm tears. She felt her fingers tangled in soft black hair that stank of desert and ladies.

“They were close friends,” she said.

The wrong words. Again.

“You still kill with the dull blade?” he asked.

“Only traitors, as I’ve done from the beginning. The dull blade for traitors, sharp steel for kin, and the sand for those who have always been enemies.”

“You sound as if you’ve grown weary.” His dark eyes were expressionless, the face softer than she remembered, but this was the same man she fought and sworn her life to, the man who brought the nomads into the cities, the man who wanted to bring the world to heel.

“No,” Nalah said. “I’m a woman. I was born to this.”

He sipped his wine. “Not all women remain so. I have known women who become ladies.”

“I’m not a breeder. Or a slave.”

Hanife took a lazy breath through his nose. “You’ve been away from the cities for some time, Nalah. I’ve been thinking about what I promised you, in the beginning. I promised you peace. A haven from blood and sand. Now I look around at the cities I’ve created, at the safety they provide to those within.

“There was a time when women were necessary as fighters. Only a woman can walk without fear across the red desert. But, there have always been the others. The private and public ladies, and they are good for the care of children, the weaving and baking, the necessities of the city and -” he pressed two fingers to his lips. “I don’t believe the distinction is necessary any longer. The world is changing. Women, too, can remain safe within these walls, walls that keep the sand at bay. The men here will protect you, comfort you. It is the peace I promised.”

“What? You’re saying you want me and the desert women to become -” she almost choked on the word, and it came out harsh, biting, a curse, “ladies.”

“Perhaps not you, Nalah. No, not while you can train men to fight without bleeding on the sand. But look at this vision; see it as I see it. Women able to live in peace, to stay within the home and see their children grow strong and healthy.” A thin smile settled across Hanife’s face. “I must admit, women like you are... unpredictable.”

You know nothing of me, she thought, but she remembered the other things he had done, collecting nomads into the cities, imposing law, order on a people who fought with their fists and teeth on a desert sea that fed on their blood. I am no one’s slave, she thought. No one’s but Hanife’s. He has these walls. This power.

And I helped give it to him. I brought it on myself.

“What is my task?” she said.

“You know it,” he said. “Your boy left the city just hours ago with a handful of others. Kesi’s friends. They’re moving south. I want the boys finished.”

“I bore one child. Women don’t bear children outside the walls, but I chose not to kill him in the womb or feed him to the sand.”

“And I made it possible for you to keep him. If not for me, you would have fallen out of training, become a public lady. Eshe was my ward and my son’s playmate. Do you think I have no heart?”

No, she thought, but you don’t carry your son’s blood beneath your fingernails. She nodded. “We leave in three days, then.”

“No.”

“My fighters need rest and water.”

Hanife smiled. “You leave tomorrow, woman, after your fighters are fed. I want you to find these ones sooner than the last. I can’t afford to lose your force for another three months.”

Nalah sucked in a small, slow breath. “Tomorrow, then,” she said.

Shani waited for her in the cool room, her naked form stretched out on the covered bench at the back of chamber, green tunic tossed over her narrow hips. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed softly, black braids falling across her brown shoulders. Nalah stood in the door a moment, appreciating the softness of her face, the innocence of sleep.

But Shani had grown up in the desert, and woke before Nalah had time to sear her image into memory. Shani pulled a blade from beneath the tunic, narrowed her eyes at the doorway.

“We leave tomorrow,” Nalah said.

“Who are we after?”

“Kesi’s followers.”

Shani sat up. “Eshe. Nalah--”

“Shush. I’m sick of men and words.”

Nalah undressed. She curled up next to Shani, wrapped her arms around the woman’s slender form. Took comfort in her warmth. Did not sleep.

Her dreams would be full of dead boys.

An hour before dawn, Nalah listened to Tarik and his ladies begin again. Nalah pulled away from Shani, dressed, and went out into the hall. She pushed through the curtain and into Tarik’s room to find a big-breasted lady astride Tarik, her mouth open, fingers digging into his torso. Another lady, smaller, paler than the first, watched from her position on the floor, naked form glistening in the low light of the last lit brazier. The lady on the floor looked back at Nalah.

“Finish,” Nalah said.

Tarik, hands gripping the lady’s thighs, looked over at her. He swore. “Nalah-”

“Finish. I need you to get the fighters ready. We move at dawn.”

Tarik groaned, pushed the lady off him.

The lady obeyed, shot Nalah a vicious stare. “Who are you to interrupt, woman?”

“Far more than you, lady,” Nalah said. “Move, Tarik.”

“Where are we going?” he said. He sat up and searched for his clothes. The lady on the floor offered him his tunic.

“Traitors,” Nalah said.

“More babies?” He pulled his tunic away from the lady on the floor.

“Eshe,” Nalah said.

“Fuck.” Tarik pulled away from the lady on the bed. Both ladies were looking at Nalah now. Nalah saw the cosmetics on their faces, smeared and garish in the low light.

The one on the bed looked to the one on the floor. “She’s just a woman,” said the lady on the bed. “Good for nothing but blood and sand.”

Nalah would have spit at her, but Tarik was dressed now and moving to the door. Nalah looked back, once, at the ladies searching for their clothes, their hair long and unbraided across smooth, dark shoulders.

Tarik swore at her again in the hallway.

They moved out through the gates, a ragged, dirty band of warriors, underfed and battle-weary. Full morning found the tattered group of fighters following tracks in the sand, clear tracks that no one had bothered trying to cover up. They trekked across the desert for three days, one step behind the boys.

Nalah swore beneath her breath. Eshe knew better than this. She had taught him better.

Tarik pulled the green hood of his burnous up to keep the sun off. She saw him toy with the sharp blade strapped across his chest.

They were nearing the Jafari holdfast, the last stronghold before a nine-day trek across the sand that led to the next source of water.

She told Tarik to send out a fast runner.

Shani came back with news that Jafari Holdfast was indeed just ahead, a small holdfast built up between two jutting pillars of stone. The patron of the holdfast was loyal to Hanife. Nalah had never known him to refuse her entrance. Eshe would have known better than to seek refuge there. Yet when they arrived at the hold at dawn, the tracks they followed ended at the gate.

Nalah told little Heru to take a force out around the back and guard the rear escape. Nalah took the bulk of her force to the gates. The hold was carved from the stone pillars and filled in with mud-brick. Nalah requested entrance. The watchers at the walls swung open the gates.

Nalah kept Tarik at her left, told Shani to keep the rest of the force outside, brought a dozen fighters into the courtyard behind her.

A thin man walked across the stone of the yard to meet her. He was old, older than Gahiji, his hair gone to white.

“What event heralds this pleasure?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a group of young people,” Nalah said. “A boy named Eshe, and friends of Kesi, the king’s youngest son.”

The man looked behind him to one of the towers of stone. He sighed. “They arrived yesterday. This way.”

Nalah was numb. She gestured to Tarik.

Tarik motioned a group of three to come up behind them. The others stayed in the yard to keep watch at the gate.

Nalah followed the old man up a flight of stone steps, up and up into one of the pillars that flanked his hold.

The man came to the top of the steps and gestured to a circular room carved into the gray stone. The room smelled of sweat and dust and leather. A rectangular window cast early morning light across the smoke-gray room. A table of stone stood at the center of the chamber. Eight low stools of polished wood and leather surrounded the table, and sitting upon them were a handful of boys, no older than her son, their dark hair braided back from their faces. They dressed in robes the color of sand.

Eshe stood at the window, and turned his thin body to face her.

“These are the boys?” the old man asked.

Nalah did not trust her voice. She nodded.

“Yes,” the man murmured. “Yes, well...” He looked at Eshe, then back at Nalah. “You tell Hanife I’m a king’s man.”

Eshe spit at him. The hold owner pushed past Tarik and the three fighters, scurried back down the stairwell.

Nalah stood very still.

“He sent you after us,” Eshe said. His voice was low.

She wanted to chastise him, to scream at him, to weep. Instead she looked at his boyish face and saw more boys’ faces; saw gray eyes and dark hair, saw a face scarred in rotten wounds, saw the sand swallow them all.

The only words she could think of were, “I didn’t want you to be part of this.”

Eshe shrugged, but she saw a slight tremor in his jaw. “You took them all with you, taught them to fight. But you left me in the hold.”

His face now, she saw his face mutilated, the blistered flesh peeling off his arms. She felt her fingers grip his hair, jerk back his head.

“That isn’t what you want,” she said.

The other boys looked from her to Eshe with wide eyes. The younger boys fidgeted, watched the fighters standing in the doorway, the only exit.

“I know what I am,” Eshe said. “I know what I want. Gahiji’s taught me so much, and Kesi’s ideas... There’s a whole world out there, beyond the desert, toward the sea. Don’t you understand what the world could be? Hanife’s blind.”

She heard another voice as he spoke, a voice that had promised her a better world, a richer life, a world of free women and an end to death and blood and sand. Hanife had been young and fiery then, his passion contagious, his visions vivid. Nalah had slaughtered hundreds for him, for the vision; slaughtered hundreds and then a hundred more. She gave her body, her life, her husband, to the vision, and found only more blood and death and sand. She was a free woman - free to do whatever Hanife told her to do.

“I wish things were different,” she said.

Eshe’s shoulders slumped. “I wish you weren’t blind.”

Nalah glanced over at Tarik.

“Finish it,” he said.

She pulled the dull blade from the sheath at her chest, took the cold hilt into her palm.

“Mama,” Eshe said. He reached out his hand to her.

She remembered what the boy had said, then, the boy she buried in the sand.

“Tell my mama,” he had said, “Tell my mama how I died.”

“Leave me with my boy,” she said.

Tarik raised a brow. “Nalah?”

“You take care of the others. This is my boy. Leave me with him. Burn the others.”

Tarik gestured to the three fighters at his back. They herded the boys to the stairs, and the boys started to cry out, their shrill voices echoing in the stairwell. Tarik went to the stair, turned back to look at her.

“I trust your judgment,” he said.

“You always have.”

He gave a curt nod and padded down the steps.

Her boy took a deep breath, stood outlined in the hazy sunlight streaming through the window. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mama, I didn’t want -”

“You didn’t cover your tracks.”

“We were moving fast.”

Nalah strode to the window, faced her boy. She gazed out behind him, over the ragged stone that made up the pillar. Her eyes moved back to her boy.

Eshe tugged at the collar of his robe, loosened it around the neck. “Just be quick,” he said.

She held out the knife. She saw Kesi’s blood there, still stained beneath her fingernails, and she stared at her boy, this squalling child she’d birthed at the edge of the Warrior’s Road, the road that led east, to the sea. She had wrapped him in a green robe and walked four miles, staying a step ahead of the hissing sand that smelled her blood and mistook it for his. When she told the boy to shush, he quieted, and remained so until she stepped into Hanife’s walled camp. The wave of hissing gray sand at her back had broken around the walls, howled in fury and lashed back across the red sea of the dunes.

“I taught you to cover your tracks,” she said. “I taught you how to fight. Now you bare your throat at me.”

“You’re my mother.”

She gazed out the window and thought, yes, I’m you’re mother, less a woman than some, more a lady than most. Hanife couldn’t kill his own son. He charged her with that, blooded her hands. She obeyed him without question, obeyed all those men who believed they knew her place. She did their dirty work, and her reward was a lifetime of slavery.

She tossed up the knife, caught it by the blade, thrust the hilt toward Eshe. “I also taught you how to climb.” She gestured to the window, the rocky pillar of stone outside it. “Can you climb that without getting blooded?”

Nalah descended the steps. Tarik waited at the bottom, a bulging leather sack in his hand, drops of blood spattered across his face.

“Here’s the one that looked most like Eshe,” he said. “After four days across the sand, Hanife won’t know any different.”

She wet her fingers and wiped the blood from Tarik’s brow. She took the sack from him and moved out into the courtyard, ordered the fighters back outside.

She gestured to Shani, and Shani grabbed up a pack and two full pouches of water, sprinted out across the sand to the other side of the hold, to the sandy soil at the base of the stone pillar.

They had already set the bodies on fire. Oily smoke stained the sky. The old man watched from the top of the walls.

“You expressed our appreciation?” she asked Tarik.

“He’s happy enough to get Hanife’s favor. And happy we didn’t stake them out and leave them for the sand to gnaw on after dark.”

The sun was rising, high and hot in the hazy red sky. “Back to Hanife, then,” she said.

“You’re a dead woman, you know,” he said. “Hanife’ll find out. Eshe’ll come back, bring those wet people here to quell and conquer.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re all dead women anyway.”

Eshe would not come back. He would leave her behind, leave Hanife and his vision. Eshe would walk to the edge of the sea, feed her blade to the sea, and the sea would eat all of this sand and sorrow.

Tarik watched her with eyes she knew better than her boy’s. He watched her as the smoke roiled up into the sky behind him.

“There is no forgiveness for what we do, Nalah,” he said.

Nalah turned away from him. She stood at the edge of the desert, a woman alone at the edge of the world, a pile of bodies at her back. She saw the future spread out before her as the past, a long unending river of women and ladies, blood and sand.

“We have a long way to go across the sand before dark,” Nalah said.

Shani walked at Nalah’s left, Tarik at her right, and Nalah’s fighters followed behind.

They left a trail of footprints in their wake, footprints as constant as the shifting face of the desert.

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