She shook her head. “Dror was sloppy, but the boy is a leader. The younger Moles follow him, and kill for him. The Fish abuse the comfort girls, he will not like that. What was your advice for Marandi?”
Amirpour smirked slyly and winked. “To apply mild pressure on the other Castes. I don’t know if the Dream makes them violent, or if it terrifies them into brutality, or something else, it doesn’t matter. They will overreact, and bloodshed will ensue. That’s all they know to do, that’s exactly what they will do. We will gain more traction with the other Castes, and turn council members our way... If the boy goes the distance that is.”
“Then we will have to advise him somehow, and channel his anger...he is the best chance we have. The Fish have become too dangerous, to the Priests, the Moles, the Divine Undertaking and everybody else.” She turned back towards the window. “They will kill us all eventually—I have no doubt about it.”
Amirpour walked up behind her and rested a hand on her lower back. “I will have a word with the boy. I might have just what he wants...”
Even the balconies had lost their attractiveness with time. Rina stepped to the thin balustrade, and let the ocean breeze hit her in the face. An Ant Councilman snored behind her, impervious to the cold drafts from the open doors. On a lower level, two Beasts appeared from between a row of buildings running furiously.
“Halt!” someone shouted.
The order preceded three armed Fish in hot pursuit of the Beasts who split down separate alleyways hoping to lose their pursuers. One of them headed back towards the upper level, the second down.
She lit a thin cigarette and lost track of them between the houses until a large crash came from a lower level and a horn rang. The first fugitive had been caught.
From where she stood, she could see the second Beast making his way cautiously between houses, and the two Fish closing in on him from both sides. She saw him pause at the incoming footsteps, turn and pause again at the other, then brace himself to fight.
Both Fish rounded the corners and unloaded their shock lances, the two bright flashes meeting across the alley in seared flesh.
The Fish’s crackdown was mostly a rumour to the comfort girls, but from what she’d heard the murders had increased the Fish’s brutality which in turn gave way to more murders. The Fish spared no Caste—save the Priests, who appeared to oppose the violence. When they couldn’t arrest, beat, or kill someone they took out their energies on the comfort houses.
The first runaway and his captor had crashed into another patrol. All seven patrolmen congregated around his companion’s corpse. Their voices didn’t carry but she saw one give brief orders, three of them walk off handling the prisoner and carrying the body, while the others pointed at her comfort house, and made their way up the streets.
“Eitan, look, it’s, it’s, it’s...whatever they’ve told you, it’s not true, it’s not true, Eitan, it’s not true!” Mole Elder Nimrod Barghani’s falsetto voice rang over the edge of panic.
“We were friends with your father, Eitan...brothers even! And he knew better than to believe the Priests, Eitan, you know he did!” said Avram Sultani. Standing next to him was Elder Gilad Shahzad, his lips sealed in fright staring at Eitan walking up to them in a fire-suit.
“I know you did,” Eitan said. “I know. He spoke highly of you that last night, when he took the beating and you held your tongues. Especially you Sultani, he loved you my Father, respected you too...”
The three men standing bound inside the deep cave couldn’t feel the blistering heat building up around them, but they could see the lesions forming on their skin nonetheless. The drug cocktail they’d been given would numb them to anything, but knocking them unconscious would defeat the purpose.
“Avram Sultani, he’d say,” Eitan went on. “You can depend on Avram, my brother Avram as you put it.”
Shahzad and Baraghani were silent now, all three of them old, well fed, and until this morning expecting to hear from the Priests that Eitan had been caught, or killed. They had wanted the overzealous boy dead shortly after Dror had passed, but he had taken it upon himself to stir things up.
He turned to a group of Moles in fire-suits, standing next to one of the walls and nodded at them. They drilled a hole in the bottom of the cavern, directly across from the prisoners who started shaking.
“No!”
“We’ll make up for it, we swear!”
“Eitan! For your father!”
He raised a hand and the drilling stopped. “Gag them, and bring the priest.”
A short man walked in covered in a suit, followed by two armed Beasts.
“Priest,” Eitan asked the newcomer “are these the men who spread rumours about me to the Beast councilmen?”
“Yes,” Amirpour answered. “Slander as it were.”
He nodded again, and the drilling resumed, releasing a thick stream of lava that washed away flesh and bone. Their eyes bulged above their gags, they writhed against their chains, and muffled screams covered the sound of the wall breaking open to more lava.
“Isn’t this somewhat cruel, Eitan? There are people watching, and people talk,” asked Amirpour.
“They don’t feel a thing,” Eitan replied. “They’re pumped so full of stimulants and anesthetics they’ll live until they’ve melted to the waist. There’s not much you can do after that, but they don’t feel a thing.”
The Priest pinched his nose, closed his eyes, sighed and said, “The killing must stop, Eitan. We can help, tremendously in fact, but you have to stop the killings, the other Castes won’t take this much longer, and we still need to change minds in the Council.”
“Agreed,” Eitan replied, “in the meantime you turn a blind eye to my operations in the tunnels. We’ll have an army, Priest, just as long as you work your way with the council members.”
Rina held herself up against the wall by a hand. She could not see through her left eye, but felt the throbbing in her temples; she passed her tongue timidly over the torn flesh above her lips, stinging herself.
She cleaned blood out of her right eye enough to see herself in the mirror. The lower half of her face was covered in it; the bite to her lower lip had torn most of the skin off.
When the Dream took over, Fish could be unpredictable; some would freeze mid-motion, some would drop unconscious for minutes or hours, but they inevitably came to. They knew they were mad and what they hated the most was having someone witness it. They would go limp, they would go crazy. The closer they were to jumping over the cliff the more brutal they became.
On those nights, she needed medical assistance, and several days rest. She used to look for sympathy, but they never apologised, and there was never a measure of pity—just shock, and sometimes a faint echo of her fear. The Dream was all-consuming, and did not allow for even a sliver of empathy. When drums rolled on those mornings she would not hear them; there were no windows in the basement.
She held herself against the sink, leaving bloody fingerprints on the stone. Her vision blurred. She held her hand to the mirror and leaned on it but her fingers slipped and smeared the glass. Some Fish had their favourites, and knowledge that this would be this Fish’s last visit helped her cross over into limbo, but it would not heal her wounds.
“This is highly unorthodox!”
“What isn’t these days?”
“What if a Priestess came?”
“You’re bound to have goggles lying around somewhere. Throw a blue shirt on me and tell them I’m an Ant.”
“With that scar on your face?”
“Since when do you care?”
The voices were familiar. Her left eye hurt too much to even try and open, bandaged by the feel of it. Vision out of her right eye was not steady enough to make out the speakers’ features, and the lights were dimmed, but she distinguished two voices, one male and one female.
“I like them safe, so did she, and you know exactly what I mean. How do you expect me to handle this?” snapped the female voic
e.
“It’s not the first time we do this. Tell the Priests she died and you handed her over for recycling, pays to have Ants handy, that kind of thing.”
“It’s not the Priests I’m worried about, the Fish...”
The word Fish sent a jolt of pain through her face. She let go of a moan, lifting herself up from the mattress a brief moment before falling back into the pillow. The man approached the bed, leaned over her and ran his hand soothingly through her hair. Her first impulse was to recoil, but every movement was painful.
“Don’t worry, little sister, he’s been dealt with, I’m here to take you back.” Eitan came suddenly into focus. His face was harder than she remembered; the scar across his left eye was also new, and still healing.
“Good. She’s awake.” Rina recognised Adina’s sharp tone; or rather, she recognised the no-nonsense undertone in the old maid’s voice. Adina rose from her chair and approached the bed, but did not spare Rina a glance. She turned to Eitan. “The Fish will come back. You take her now. You might have done this before, but it’s the last time you do it with me—understood?”
Eitan nodded at her, and bent down over Rina. “It’s gonna hurt.” He snatched her off the bed and started walking towards the wall at the far end of the room.
Rina was too dizzy to feel pain. She had not visited her family in four years, and had decided she would never go back. Eitan was barely there, Hadar had died soon after delivering her seventh child, her brothers were either married or dead, and she couldn’t be around all the new children, or their revolving mothers.
It was then that she had realised the irony of her circumstances. On the one hand she would never have to suffer the tremendous pressures of childbirth that Chaya had made seem so easy. On the other, she would never know what owning her freedom would mean. If she were going to be passed from man to man until she passed away or was cast away, then it would be the houses for her she’d thought. That was before she had met her first Fish patron.
Adina ran up to them and stuck a syringe in her arm. A surge of energy pulsed through her legs and the dizziness faded along with the numbness in her face. “Careful not to talk, girl. It only feels like you can.”
Eitan pushed a stone on the wall and a trap door appeared in the basement floor, sending a gush of hot air up from the tunnel beneath it. Her brother lowered her to the floor, whistled down the tunnel, and footsteps rushed towards them. Eitan lifted her up, and lowered her into the opening.
A group of three Moles was waiting for them with glowsticks. They turned them on and activated glowstrips along the tunnel walls with them. Iridescent strips lining the walls and ceiling spread light and colour down their segment of the tunnel, too intensely for Rina’s weak eye to handle.
When she opened it again, the Moles were wearing high-intensity light visors, made for prolonged exposure to lava and drill sparks when Moles dug new caves. They wrapped her in a blanket. Eitan started lowering himself into the tunnel.
She heard Adina’s voice through the opening. “Is it worth it boy? Are they any happier down there than in here?”
Eitan paused holding himself up on the edge of the opening. “You can’t compare happiness, Adina. How happy are you? Stay safe.”
Eitan landed next to her, hitting a dial on the wall. The door slipped shut overhead, followed by the slamming and suction of a plastic seal that barred any air in the tunnel from slipping into the basement rooms. In her six years at the comfort house she had never suspected the tunnel even existed.
Eitan grabbed her shoulder. “We have to hurry, the overseers won’t be much longer. Try to keep up. I’ll be right behind you. Dov, cover our back, and kill the light.” The glowstrips faded to black and the three lifted their visors with relief.
“Ethel, Davi, cover the front. If a Fish or anybody you don’t recognise pops their head...” he patted an elongated black metal tube on his left leg, “aim to kill. That’s for you too, Dov. We’ll deal with bodies later. Now go!”
In the faint light of the cave, sulphur drifted from underground pockets caressing Rina’s cheek and tearing up her eyes.
She donned her helmet before placing the drill directly between her legs. A sub-zero draft whistled its way from the mouth of the caves high above and far behind her down the narrow halls, and sent a rare shiver through her neck and shoulders.
The motion of the drill freed stones in small clusters, sprinkling around her feet. The smell of sulphur intensified as a hole started to appear in the rock. A gust of smoke rose through it, revealing the familiar red glow underneath. She raised her helmet long enough to spit through the crack, her saliva turning almost instantaneously to a puff of mist. She thrust her boot heel through the fragile crust, tossed the drill on her back, stretched her arms alongside her body and let herself drop.
Halfway through the fall she activated the cleats inside her boots and landed on the rocky surface, knee down, with a crunch.
She was on a tiny, rocky island inside a smaller sub-cave in the middle of a lava swirl. Left, right, and all around her, boiling lava spun and flowed in a stream leading out of the cave and deeper underground. Her fire-suit and helmet’s sensors absorbed the heat, powering her in-suit equipment.
She shot her arms out at an angle in front of her, lodging hooks into the ceiling, swinging herself from the rocky island onto a larger ridge by the cave wall. The hooks shot back into her suit as she landed and she loosened the drill on her back, and tightened her helmet. The helmet was equipped with a light-deflecting visor, but Rina, and the other comfort girls, had no use for them.
Running through the pitch dark tunnels three years earlier, Rina had wondered how her brother and his friends managed, without using the glowstrips, to stay afoot and find their way in the maze of illegal tunnels that seemed to stretch through every quarter in the colony. Eitan had told her that eventually she would not need light either. She had not believed him then, but he had been right.
After centuries in the caves, Moles were genetically predisposed to working in dark environments. Male Moles laboured at the Divine Undertaking from the age of five from sunrise to sundown. Their eyes weren’t worth much in the sunlight but had excellent night vision. Mole girls had always carried the trait, but until comfort girls were enrolled in the rebellion, their ability was latent. Not anymore. She could see perfectly in sunlight or darkness.
The helmet was a nuisance. Though necessary, it was uncomfortable, and the light-deflecting function got in the way of her eyesight. Not by much, but it was distracting when passing through different types of lighting. She could not remove it or her face would break out in blisters from the heat. The other comfort girls had the same difficulties. Eitan said they would have to deal with it. Smuggling equipment was a crime, and an unsupervised request for modifications would be suspicious. Ants were discreet, but their discretion might end with a Fish inquiry in their affairs—they had things of their own to hide—or again, it might not. One never knew, but Eitan would not risk failure because his soldiers were uncomfortable.
She didn’t see much of him at all come to think of it. He was distant and much darker than she’d remembered as a girl. The sombreness following Dror’s death had grown inside of him. It gave him purpose, but sometimes she wondered who he was.
Rina adjusted the zoom on her visor and scanned the cave. The crust she stood on circled it almost entirely, except for two holes on either end allowing the lava to flow. There was no exit she could see except for the hole she had come down through. Rather than circle the cave, she repeated the operation to the opposite wall, bouncing off the central island just long enough to lunge to the other side.
The moment she landed, her suit and helmet registered large volumes of heat radiating from the cave wall directly ahead of her. She applied her hands to the surface; the effect was immediate, her bodysuit’s power gauge hit full capacity in less than a second. She was at a dead end though. She stuck her helmet to the surface, powering it and activating audio-sen
sors, scanning for the slow motion grinding of hot stone behind the wall.
Small fissures were appearing on the rock, and a closer look showed thin cracks reaching halfway around the wall from either opening in the cave base, turning the wall into a spider web of connecting cracks in the rock. She only had a few minutes, likely less, before the magma broke through and inundated the cave.
The rumble deepened, and small flakes of stone started crumbling from the wall. High-pressured sulphur blasted stone chips at Rina and into the lava stream, and droplets of magma leaked through, sending ripples through the cracks with a powerful crunch as the wall gave way to the superheated basalt behind.
Rina landed on the small central island, instinctively sending her hooks through the hole and into the ceiling of the grotto above and shot herself upwards in a spin.
The explosion hurled large chunks of rock across the cave, red-hot slag pouring from one cavern to the other and filling it to the brim. Rina pierced through the hole just as the smaller sub cave’s ceiling collapsed under toe, connecting both caves into a pool of fire directly beneath her.
Her options were limited, but her suit and helmet were operating at full power. Her suit could withstand the immense heat and weight of magma for up to fifteen seconds. She should not need that long.
She plunged headfirst into the boiling swirl, supercharging her suit, and propelling herself straight ahead under the surface towards the opening she had drilled to get inside what was then the upper cave. It should remain open above the downpour, but the tremors could bring stones down and leave her trapped outside. She had only a few seconds left before the suit melted, but the magma gave her almost unlimited energy. She shot herself out of the swirl, connected her hooks to the ceiling and threw herself through the hole seconds before it crumbled and closed in on her, catching the hooks’ chains, pulling her sharply back, and slamming her hard into the floor.
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