Escaping Exodus

by Nicky Drayden

  I cringe, then pull him close and seal my lips around his. I don’t know who’s caught more by surprise. My first kiss . . . never in my wildest dreams would I have thought it to be with a man.

  “Seske!” Matris squeals.

  I peel back, my lips tacky with saliva. “Wheytt and I are declaring intentions, Matris.”

  “I was wrong,” she says, shaking her head. “You do continue to surprise me.” And disappoint her, but she is too noble to say that in mixed company.

  “There’s no need to worry yourself, Matris,” Wheytt says flatly, body stiff, like he wishes he were anywhere but here. “Matriling Kaleigh and I have not, in fact, declared intentions.”

  This time I’m the one who is shocked. What kind of man is this who would deny a chance to sit by the throne? I cringe, suddenly realizing I am no better than my mother. I’ve embarrassed him, and myself too.

  This has all gone sideways.

  “Is that so, Patriline Housley?” Matris is ever the diplomat, but even she cannot hold in the sigh of relief that comes next. “I’d like to know exactly what happened out there. Every detail.”

  “Yes, Matris Paletoba.” Wheytt relays the events marked in his ledger, accounting every detail down to the exact shade of my menses, the precise measure of luminosity of the ley light, even the pitch of his scream when I pulled the crib worm from his neck. But there is one thing he’s omitted.

  “And what of Beastworker Adalla?” Matris says.

  “Beastworker Adalla was not with us. Matriling Kaleigh’s lips must have slipped,” Wheytt says to my mother. Or maybe to me. “It was only her and I the entire time.” His lie is bold and not very good. But I can tell by the resolve in his voice that he is willing to stand by it.

  “Indeed,” Matris says, clearly not believing him. And with that, Wheytt’s chance at a promotion slips from him just as fast as it came. Matris can hold a grudge with the best of them, and if a male is ever to make it to tactician, I can tell you now, it will not be Wheytt.

  And now it is I who owes him.

  “Thank you,” I whisper to him, so softly, I know only his sensitive ears can hear me. I’ll find a way to repay him for sparing Adalla. But as I look at him, I notice he’s gone stiff again, all his senses on full alert. I wait for a tremble, but nothing comes. Something else is making him nervous. “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “Nothing,” he says, turning to face Matris. Awful, awful liar. But something’s transpired between them. I quiet my mind, still my breathing. Listening.

  Then I hear it, the ruffling of silks coming from behind the throne. My heart drops. My eyes cut at Matris. I never knew she could hurt me this deeply. Before the exodus from our old beast, I’d asked, begged, for Matris to allow me to work by her side as she got the new beast up and running. She said I was too young, but that I could do it next time. Too young, she’d said, again and again, each time I’d asked. And so I’d hatched a plan with Adalla to get out on my own, to prove to myself that I wasn’t too young . . . but age had nothing to do with it after all.

  “Sisterkin!” I call out. “Come out, I know you’re in here.”

  “Seske,” Matris says, extending her arms, and the betrayal becomes too much for me to bear. “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not like that at all—”

  “I am the next in line! Not her!” Tears streak down my cheeks, hot and heavy. So many, I can’t see straight.

  Footsteps echo, filling the room with ripples of movement. Through my blurred vision, I see my sister, a visage caught somewhere in between a shadow and a reflection upon a pool of water. The hush of her silks, regal and fluid, and the tinker of gemstones knocking into themselves.

  “Seske . . .” Sisterkin says, drawing my name out in an exaggerated lilt that makes it seem like she’s about to break out into song and dance. Her speech is practiced and dignified, as though her hair doesn’t sit in an unbraided puff on top of her head. Her raiment, though its silk is not spun from the family lot, is hand-dyed and frilled and just as regal as mine, maybe even more so. She is everything that I should be. Yet Sisterkin is not the future matriarch and never will be. She’d missed that opportunity by four and a half days.

  Sisterkin had been carried in Matris’s womb, and at the same time, I was being carried by my will-mother. It was a delicate situation, two mothers in the same family unit, pregnant at once, knowing only one child could be allowed to live. Sisterkin was conceived first and should have been born first, but patience has never been my virtue. I’d entered the world nearly four months ahead of schedule, too small to tolerate even the smallest of crib worms, but first nevertheless. I was so weak and frail, no one expected me to live. And for the first and last time in her life, Matris thought with her heart instead of her head and chose not to end her own pregnancy. By the time they realized my will to live, Sisterkin was here, and Matris twisted each and every one of the ancestors’ rules and regulations to allow Sisterkin to remain with us.

  That’s how I ended up with the only sibling in our whole clan. Lucky me.

  “Matris only raised me first so that I could be of better assistance to you,” Sisterkin says, her voice at just that certain pitch that it sends ice coursing down my spine. “You know that I would never do anything to hurt you, my dearest sister.”

  The touch of her silks against my skin is enough to drive me to madness, but it is the false silk in her voice that pushes me even further. I’m burning up, like my skin is on fire from the inside, and I can’t hold in my anger anymore.

  Matris goes out of her way to include Sisterkin in all manners of her life, but I will draw the line at including her in my future rule. “No!” I say to Matris. “She will not advise me. Maybe if you focused more on your true daughter, I would have turned out more to your liking.”

  “Seske!” Matris says. “Please watch your tone.” She turns to Wheytt, that embarrassed look on her face she always has when I’m about. “Patriline Housley,” Matris says, “thank you for your services. You may return to your former duties.

  “Despite what you think,” Matris says to me once our company has departed, “a little blood between your legs does not make you a woman. You need to earn that title. The truth is, I didn’t raise you because you aren’t ready. I worry for our matriline, Seske, with you at the helm someday.” Matris sighs at the thought. “I’ll forfeit the throne before the Senate rather than have you run our name into nothingness, but it doesn’t have to come to that.”

  Sisterkin steps between us. “I can guide you, Seske. I know all the ways of the Matriarchy, all the Lines.” She smiles, though the gesture is more like the baring of teeth, the too-white teeth that haunt children’s dreams. Though she was born of Matris’s blood, she is not a part of our family and has no claim to our lines. As per the tenets of our ancestors, she cannot partake of our family teas, so she sips hot water from her dainty cups instead. Our head-father is not permitted to teach her, so Matris hires private tutors. Sisterkin is not allowed at our table, so Mother had an archipelago built where Sisterkin can dine with us without dining with us. Her hair grows freely upon her head, like a boundless sunburst, not the carefully braided knots of our line. Sisterkin has been given nothing, not even a true name. Sisterkin was Matris’s first abomination, and now there’s this surly beast she’s chosen. It is not my competence Matris should be questioning but her own.

  “This isn’t fair. You should have taken her to the spirit wall. The minute I was born, you should have taken her!” I don’t really wish my sister dead. I just want an apology from Matris and for her to profess that she is my mother, and mine alone, and the blood that she and Sisterkin share means nothing to her. But the way her eyes dart between my sister and me, I know it isn’t nothing.

  “Seske,” she says, finally wrapping me in her silks. “Of course, you are right.” She blathers on, apologizes, but it is too late. Yes, she’d chosen me, here and now, but there should have been no deliberation.

  At least I know now whe
re I stand. I’ll show her. There are several beast cycles left in her reign, but I will use my every waking moment to study hard and prove her wrong.

  Adalla

  Of Solid Heartbeats and Dented Pans

  “That girl’s going to break your heart, betcha girl,” Ama Morova sasses at me as she adds another amber bead to my hair. She is not gentle. My neck strains as she twists my head this way and that. She tugs so hard at my roots as she braids a sloping, curving line tight against my scalp. I’ve got tears in the corners of my eyes, but truth is, I’d be crying anyway, and any heart-mother worth her ichor can tell the difference between tears of pain and those of sorrow. “Best not get tangled up with those sorts, ’less you end up like Ol’ Baxi Batzi.”

  My lips purse. I dare not sass my mother back, but I want to, betcha. Comparing me with Our Lady Baxi Batzi? Two hundred years her bones have been drifting through space, given a charlatan’s burial for consorting with Matris Borgall’s daughter—shot straight through the beast’s anal sphincter with all that thrice-recycled sludge, which is just a polite way of saying “third-ass shits.” Your mother comparing you with Baxi Batzi and third-ass shits is never a good thing, ’specially when she’s got a good hold of your hair.

  “Seske and I are just friends,” I tell my ama. “My heart is in the job and my job is in the heart.”

  “Betcha,” Ama says, snatching my head back so hard, the skin at my throat goes tight. I struggle to swallow, and the tears I’d mostly contained start flowing. “You don’t know all I’ve gone through to get you this promotion. This family has climbed to the top of the pile, child. It’s nice up here, but you go walking around with a headful of dizzy thoughts, the fall won’t be kind. For any of us.”

  The snots. The snots are coming now. I snort ’em back up best I can and try to compose myself. I try to forget what I’d heard that lash counter say, that Seske’s always flushing around me, because I know my face always gets hot around her, and maybe my humble bits, too, but until my ama said it out loud, I never even considered my heart being caught up in a tangle. I’m a beastworker. She’s in line to be our next matriarch. Us being friends is enough to cause this beast’s bowels to roll.

  Ama’s fingers are like fire twisting the second braid down my back. She ties it off with a stretchy strip of cartilage. When she’s done, she dips her hand in a jar of yonatti oil, fragrant and fresh and flowery, just gathered from the blooms in the beast’s stomach. Ama says the yonatti blooms are always the first to be completely culled, but while we’ve got them, their oil will make your hair shiny and strong as beastie’s backbone. Maybe it’ll make me look like I’m deserving of this promotion. She smooths down my edges with a bit of ichor, then turns me around, looks me up and down, and ichors my eyelashes as well, so they look longer, fuller. A big fuck you to the lash counters.

  “There,” she says, patting my cheeks, pleased with her work. “You’ll fit right in, sure is sure is sure. Come, we can’t be late.”

  She tugs me up, yanks me forward with those hard hands that could crush bone, and I’m suddenly on my feet. Numb feet. I’ve been sitting so long, brooding so long, trying not to be mad. It’s not so uncommon for people to forget things right out of stasis. Seske would have remembered to ask about my promotion, if she’d been given another minute or two before that lash counter interrupted us.

  “Dizzy head, this way, girl,” my mother calls.

  I look up and she’s practically to the next living pod. My feet are steady now. My heart . . . my heart is another matter. I catch up, not wanting to get lost. I still haven’t figured out the layout of our new pod yet. It’s not neat and nice like the Contour class gets, every piece put back how it was before. Here we get new neighborhoods, new neighbors, new problems. Like we’ve got high ceilings now, which is great for Sonovan’s hunch, but that means we have trouble keeping heat when we sleep, and we burn nearly twice as many parchment rolls to keep our toes from freezing. Freezing toes used to not be a problem for any of us, high ceilings or not. We had pet murmurs, back on our old beast. Four of them. Bepok was mine. She was the runt, wingspan barely able to cover me up to my shins, and she was as thin as an old sheet, but, girl, did she purr like the thickest of them. Not having her at night leaves me with a whole ’nother kind of coldness, betcha.

  Ama leads us through our neighbors’ living pods, our eyes cast down when the ley lights are dimmed or off, stopping a moment to chat when they’re burning brightly. It’s what passes for privacy. Truth be truth, I never thought anything of it before I happened into Seske. But the first time I had her over, she couldn’t stop staring at our neighbors, like the ley lights meant nothing to her. Old Man Saym, he’d gotten mixed up with some bad, bad favors—his wrecked-out will-mother put a curse on him, sure is sure, and he’d be on his dent pan, trying and trying and trying to take a shit, and Seske just stood there and stared and pointed, like she could see him, and kept asking why he didn’t just go somewhere with more privacy, and I said, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, silly girl, there’s nothing there but the ley of our home,” even though I also saw Old Man Saym, squatting, thighs shaking, eyes quivering, lips cursing that mad jealous wife of his.

  Dent pan got filled eventually, and my nose ignored that too.

  “Damn dizzy-headed girl!” my ama screams. I’ve rolled up on her. Knocked her down, nearly. Old Man Saym has caught her, his hands out, his face flushing.

  “So sorry, Morova,” he apologizes repeatedly, like it’s all his fault. He’s a lot more careful about throwing his glances around these days, but hugging up on a woman, ’specially a heart-mother, would have him squatting on the dent pan for a month straight if his wife caught him.

  “It’s this one’s fault,” my ama says, a thumb and index knuckle pressing the life out of my earlobe. I dare not make a peep. If I was dizzy before, I’m not now. Embarrassing your ama, now that’s just not something you do. But that’s not it. Ama Morova, old as she is, she’s solid as a brick of builder’s bone. I’ve seen her stop a runaway cart filled to the brim with core wax, head-on, and not even flinch. Nothing can topple her. ’Specially not the likes of me.

  At least not the wispy girl I used to be. I glance at the bulge of my biceps, feel the strength in my core, flex thighs solid as gall casings. Working in the ichor pits has molded me into something presentable, and for the first time, I feel like my body is ready to take on the physical challenges of organ work. My only hope is my mind is ready too.

  “Ama, you sure I’m ready for this?” I ask her, real quiet, once we’re back on the move. “Aren’t there some kind of tips you can give me?”

  “You’re ready for this,” Ama says. She smiles, but it looks more like she’s holding back a mouthful of sick. “Sure is sure.”

  The missing “is sure” doesn’t go unnoticed. With beastworkers, “sure” is akin to a very soft “maybe.” “Sure is sure is sure” means you’d stake your life on it. And “sure is sure” . . . well, that’s something drenched in doubt. Not a hard no, but about as close as you can ride up on it without it biting your head clean off. I want to pry, wondering if it’s just a general nervousness she’s feeling or if it’s something I need to be worrying about. I spend a few minutes trying to think up a way to question my ama without my earlobe ending up in another of her vise grips, but then the ground starts trembling before me. I brace myself up against the side of the wall, nervous about another of those tremors we’ve been having, and oh, blessed mothers, Ama laughs at me so hard, she’s got tears in her eyes.

  I’m about to grab Ama’s hand to try to save her life, despite how small she makes me feel, but then she says, “That’s no tremor, girl. It’s the beat. The heartbeat of the beast. Once every three minutes and forty-seven and a half seconds. Remember that. Remember it better than your own name. How’s that, girl?”

  “The beast’s heart beats once every three minutes forty-seven and a half seconds,” I report back, serious from the tips of my braids to the toes i
n my boots. I’ve been begging my ama to take me to visit the heart since forever, but she kept that side of her a secret from me, and now look at me—so, so close. I go to set my watch, to show her I’m being proactive about keeping proper time, but Ama takes one look and her face goes blank.

  “Who gave you that? Was it Matris’s girl? That kind of gadget will get you killed up here faster than a murmur sucked up the valve.”

  “Sonovan,” I say with a shake of the head. My tin uncle, adopted father, whatever you want to call him. My head-mothers’ almost-but-not-quite husband after my pai died. “He made it for me, out of a bunch of discarded parts. Didn’t cost him anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I’ve got a sore spot for Sonovan, sure is sure is sure, and that must have come out in my tone, because now Ama’s cold, open hand is speeding toward my cheek, and I’ve got about three-eighths of a second before the slap lands, and I can decide to take it, and have that be over and done, or I make this into a thing.

  A thing. It’s going to be a thing, betcha. I pull back, just out of her reach, and Ama goes swirling. I reach out, catch her in my arms right as she loses her balance.

  “Now don’t go cursing my tin uncle, Ama. He didn’t mean any harm in this. Just thought it would give me a hand up. He knows how important this is to me—to us.” I set my ama firm on her feet, and oh, the smolder in her eyes; I can feel the heat from them where I’m standing.

  “Girl,” she says. One word, but she drags it out into at least three syllables, and I’m holding back all my urges to protect my soft spots. She keeps staring. For so long. Not letting up. Finally, she says, “Beat.”

  Half a second later, the ground trembles again.

  “Three minutes and forty-seven and a half seconds is not something you can time on your wrist. It’s something that needs to be timed in your soul. Sonovan, bless his fathers nine and nine generations back, is a good man. He’s great at fixing things and mending things and doing men’s work. But he knows nothing about the heart. How are you going to waste time, glancing up and down at a gadget, when there’s a hundred different checks and balances needing to be done between each beat? Or sweat gets in your eye and you misread the dial and miss sealing a valve or you nick an artery, and all of a sudden, we’re all dead. Get me, girl?”