Meet Me in the Future

by Kameron Hurley

  But she struck me again, smashing my nose a second time. Blackness smeared my vision. I fell to my knees.

  I thought of the dancers, of our fire, 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. She would never be unmade.

  Chiva kneed me in the groin. She balled her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled 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 raised my head and saw her walking to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me.

  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? They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them, can you? So you tried to hurt me. You think you can unmake me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll show you how to unmake the world.”

  She collected more flares.

  “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 into the archives.

  I could already smell the burning bodies. A part of me hoped it was just the lingering smell of burning flesh from the yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I ran. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already aflame. 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 in 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 tossed me a flare. I made the choice. I took it, 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 stayed there while she continued to burn. I needed to find my keeper.

  “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. It 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 and smashed it against the wall until the casing came loose. I sat 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, 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. I saved you, Anish.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just let me burn with the others?” 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, and 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 again. 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 saw the maze of the archives, the great hexagons-within-hexagons that wound outward for 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 told 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 come here to this little village, telling me there are free cities in the wilderness, 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, if I can still speak.

  No, no. I am tired. Too old for dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of history or truth, unburdened by the knowledge of a world built long before you were born. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of Chiva, and the story of our unmaking.

  THE WAR OF HEROES

  THE HEROES LEFT THE MAN dying on the field, one of the thousands they pitched overboard from their silvery ships at the end of each battle with Yousra’s people. Yousra brought him home and had him castrated, to ensure he spread no contagion, and put him to work in the village. The Heroes’ men tended to eat little and work hard, and with so few people left in the village, his labor was welcome.

  Plague had killed most of the village men when the Heroes first came. In those early days, Yousra’s people had welcomed the castoff men the Heroes dropped at the edge of every battlefield as some kind of tribute delivered from the sky. Now they recognized them for what they were: plague-ridden bags of pollution, another weapon of war, their seed meant to sour wombs and turn babies into monsters. But her people still needed the labor, so they castrated them and hauled them home regardless.

  It was Yousra’s task to kill the children resulting from such rotten unions; the plague ran deep now, rewriting the map of each child, so even now, three generations after they understood the threat, their children were still rotten. The children Yousra killed were already rotten and gangrenous in the womb. Killing such monsters did not frighten her.

  The Heroes did.

  The Heroes’ man had big, bloodshot eyes set deep in a broad, flat face. Black blood clotted his cropped genitals. His wrists were rubbed raw. She saw bruises on his face and thighs, put there by his own people, no doubt, or perhaps some of hers, before she decided she wanted him. When she looked at him she was reminded of her own dying men on the hill of battle, the ones who tried to fight the Heroes when their big ships came overhead. Those men, she could not save. She settled for this one. They were not so different, the Heroes’ men and hers. The Heroes might have come from some other star, but Yousra’s people, too, had been born from the sky.

  She took the man inside her house. He flinched under her hands. No one had ever seen the Heroes without their big suits of armor, only their men, so she supposed it was possible that the Heroes, too, looked much like Yousra. But she had always suspected they resembled insects, like the hard shells of their suits. It had taken eight of Yousra’s people with machetes to overtake a Hero, once, but even when they did, the Heroes’ reinforcements beat them away from the body before they could peel away the scaly layers of their suits. Why they left their men behind now, when all knew they were diseased, was uncertain. Perhaps they simply wanted to get rid of them, and could not bear to kill them any more than Yousra could.

  “You’re a wreck,” she told the man. He whimpered. She pushed open his eyelids to examine his eyes. Gray eyes, unremarkable. Like her people, he had a clear, vestigial eyelid on the inner corner of his eye. Useful for the relentless sandstorms that wracked this part of the world . . . useful for the day when their crops were finally blown away and her people were cast back into the desert from which they came.

  Prophetic times. End times. She did not expect to be alive by the time the desert reclaimed them.

  She fed him milk of poppy mixed with afterdrake for the pain, then cleaned him up as he drifted in and out of consciousness. It was a wonder he had not bled out. Most did. She had to pinch and dig to find his urethra. She inserted a hollow bamboo tube to keep it open while the wound healed.

  He did not recover quickly, or well. Yousra bathed him each day with water and diluted tea tree oil. She kept his wounds packed in precious honey to combat infection and ward off fever. At night, she woke to his cries, and soothed him like a child. As she held him, it reminded her of her own childhood, when she would hush her brothers’ cries so they would not draw the scavengers. The man babbled in some unknown language. It sounded mushy, as if he were chewing a gob of sap, sticky and sweet. Every time they thought they understood the Heroes’ language, they sent them men who spoke differently.

  A few weeks later, when the village priest and his brother entered into an agreement with the potter woman on the edge of the village to form a marriage, Yousra was called to organize and bless the wedding, and the bride, and her most-likely rotten womb. Why her people married anymore, she did not know. She would bless this girl now and kill her monsters in a few months. Round and round, as their numbers dwindled, and the Heroes came through, building shining cities of glass and amber where once there were sprawling towns.

  The bride dressed in the white of a martyr. Yousra had the Heroes’ man bring her tools into the bridal tent. When Yousra was a child, weddings took months or years to plan. Now the time of engagement was a matter of weeks.

  She called the Heroes’ man simply “Boy,” and he answered to it. He could walk, after a fashion, and that was good, because she had no use for a broken man. She bore some affection for the boy—how could one not bear affection for one you nursed and comforted? But she had borne affection for monsters, too, the ones that went bad days or weeks after birth.

  And she had killed them just the same.

  The bride, Chalifa, was lovely. Her mother was one of the first births Yousra had tended after her predecessor, the village head-woman and priest, had died in childbed.

  Yousra had always hoped to be headwoman herself by the time Chalifa married, so the girl’s wedding night would belong to her. Instead, Yousra merely outfitted the bride and gave her blessing.

  “Will it hurt?” Chalifa asked as Yousra placed a circle of holly above her brow.

  “It’s a ritual unblocking,” Yousra said. “It will make your first coupling much easier.”

  Chalifa took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean the unblocking of the womb. I meant . . . the birthing.”

  “That’s some time away,” Yousra said carefully.

  “If it’s . . . If it’s gone bad . . . I don’t have to see it, do I?”

  “No,” Yousra said.

  “You’ll kill it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Yousra opened her mouth to tell Chalifa what a fine choice she had made, what fine children she would have—the same speech she had given a hundred doomed women—but as she did, a dull, vibrating hum stilled her speech. The holly leaves on Chalifa’s head trembled.

  Yousra looked to the entrance to the bridal tent. The Heroes’ man had paused also, water bulb in hand. The fine hairs on his arms and neck stood on end.

  The hum grew to a tinny whine. It was like nothing Yousra had ever heard. She felt the air tremble. Heard a heavy whump-whump, far off.

  Yousra gazed outside the bridal tent. Something silver streaked across the lavender sky, like a giant thrush. The other villagers had come out of their tents. They, too, looked up—rapt, open faces gazing skyward.

  “What is it?” Chalifa asked.

  The world went dark.

  Smoke. Heat.

  Yousra flailed in the darkness, pinned by the cloying weight of wha
t must have been the bridal tent. She clawed for daylight. The air was bad. She gasped. Then screamed. Screamed and screamed and clawed at the tent, ripping and tearing at the hemp cloth. It wasn’t until the hilt of her machete knocked her hip that she realized she still carried it.

  She pulled out the machete and sliced open the shroud of the bridal tent. Smoky air rushed in.

  Yousra stumbled out. A low fog of blue smoke obscured her view. She heard muted screams. One ended abruptly. Loose clods of dirt blanketed the far side of the bridal tent. The remains of another tent poked up from a heap of shattered earth.

  The rest of the village . . . she saw only hazy snapshots amid the smoke-fog . . . curls of flame. Dark, bulbous shapes. Clumps of dirty meat. Smears of clotted blood and offal.

  She stepped away from the ruins of the tent and lost her feet. She tumbled to the bottom of a deep crater. It stank of wet earth and copper and something else . . . sulfur? She clawed her way up the side of the crater.

  A low rumble sounded overhead. Something blotted out the suns. She looked up and saw a slow-moving, silvery ship. Even in her terror, she gaped. She had never seen one of the Heroes’ ships up close. She saw her own reflection, distorted, gaping back at her from the impossibly shiny craft.

  Yousra ran back toward the bridal tent. She called, softly, for Chalifa. She hacked at the tent, but found nothing. Half the tent was buried in the soil thrown up from the crater.

  Voices sounded, close. Then other sounds, unfamiliar. Clicking. A soft buzz. Footsteps across the earth. Not sandaled feet, no, but boots. Metal. The crisp creak, whine, and hum of something Other.

  Yousra hid in the crater, and peered above its edge.

  Shapes appeared from the smoke—blocky, gargantuan. She had never seen a Hero, not like this. These were massive, twice as tall as the tallest man she knew, as wide as she was tall, encased in blackish-green material with the glossy sheen of a damp leaf. The pieces of their armor came together at the seams, moved like scales. The heads were mounted with a single horn from which protruded a long mane of hair. In her mother’s time, they’d thought the Heroes were shelled creatures, bestial. It was a decade before they knew that the hard shells protected a soft interior.