Escaping Exodus

by Nicky Drayden

  I’m too tired to speak for her, but her eyes say thank you as I wipe the vomit from my cheek with my sleeve. She raises the palette and two bone pipes she’d swiped from the doldrums. Her eyebrows pitch. After a brief wave of nausea, my mouth waters after them.

  “Yeah, okay, but where?” I ask. “We can’t go back into the doldrums.”

  Parton looks around with apprehension, then nods her head, indicating that I should follow.

  Deep past the tracts of intestinal farmland, there’s a pile of gall husks awaiting breakdown. I follow Parton, while trying to watch where I step. Pools of acid remain in some areas, and sometimes they’re deceptively deep. Sonovan says they can eat right down to the bone in a matter of seconds. He’s been known to exaggerate, but I’m not willing to risk it either way.

  Finally, Parton stops at a husk, round and brown, and as tall as the both of us put together. There’s a hole on the underside, where the larva, a plump green thing with about a million legs, had bored out. Larval steaks will soon grace the tables of the Contour class. And we beastworkers will feast on the husks, ground down into shreds and salted and spiced to make them almost palatable. It’s the same stuff they make paper out of, minus the spices. But this husk is empty, and I follow Parton up inside. There are a few pillows and a ley light in here, and it smells sweet and swampy, not the same funk that mars the air outside. There’s just enough room for the both of us to stretch out. I lean back against the curved wall of the gall, rough bite marks from the larva’s meals pressing against my skin.

  Parton settles also and pokes the black membrane of the vapor palette, sucks, then blows a ring of smoke that dissipates right before it hits my face.

  “Come here a lot?” I ask.

  “You know, it’s a home away from home,” she says, not saying. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s cozy.”

  She offers a suck from the black membrane. I steady myself, then take the smallest of sips. And, girl, it hits my head like a brick. Instantly, I’m woozy. My body feels like one of those acid puddles.

  “Maybe you should pace yourself some,” I say as she takes another full suck. She lets the vapors loose, tongue undulating as the cloud turns into fancy shapes in the air.

  “I’m a pro,” she says, not saying. “So what did you want to talk about anyway?”

  I just need to hear myself think things through. To have someone to nod along, to dump all my secrets on. Someone who I’m sure won’t tell anyone else. But before I can say a single thing, Parton throws me a saucy grin, then lifts the hem of her scratchy gray shift, higher, higher—revealing her lean and muscular thighs. I press my hand to hers before it can go farther. She looks at me, brow raised.

  “No!” I say, then bite my lip, realizing how she must spend her time here, realizing how a waif like her can afford such an expensive habit. “I want your time, but not like that.”

  “You just want to talk,” she says, not saying. Suddenly, with a transaction looming between us, I feel even more awkward about putting words in her mouth.

  “Is . . . that okay?” I wait for her response this time. Like, I actually watch her, paying attention to her, reading the words her body has to offer me. “I’ll still pay, of course. In vapors?”

  Her brows pinch; her lips purse out in that way my father’s would when he didn’t believe the lies I told about how his smoking pipe ended up broken, or how one of the pinch pies he’d baked must have been taken as favors by demanding spirits and certainly not eaten by a hungry girl, betcha. Of course you’re going to pay me is what she’s thinking, but I don’t dare say it. She pats me closer. She will listen. I relax. Her arm slips underneath mine, and she pulls me in tight, and it’s like we’re best friends.

  I tell her about my old job in the ichor vats, distilling copper from the beast’s blood, and that it’d always been my dream to work the heart. I tell her about my old life, back on the previous beast, and how hard it was to leave behind during exodus. We’re supposed to pretend those shallow roots that we dared to lay down didn’t matter, but they do. We’d watched the world we’d fought so hard to keep alive for so long slowly wither and die all around us. You can’t just ignore an open wound like that and expect for it to go away. But talking to Parton soothes the pain some.

  I even find the courage to tell her about Seske and the almost-moment we’d had, in the most inopportune place, at the most inopportune time. Those raw emotions of my past were hard to relive, but even more tender are my hopes for the future even though the fissure between Seske and me continues to grow. Parton smiles our father’s smile, and my words keep flowing. It feels so good to finally have someone I can confide in.

  The next day, after shift, we meet in our gall cave. I bring a mirror, in case Parton hasn’t ever really looked at herself. Our faces press against each other, and we both see it now, the similarities painfully obvious. I start to tell her about our father, but it’s tedious. I love that she really wants to understand, but she stops me each time a word snags her. I have to explain father. I have to explain mother.

  “Were you raised by beetles?” I ask her, mostly a joke, but then it occurs to me: I’ve been dropping all my baggage on her, without even trying to get to know something about her life. “I mean, seriously. How were you raised? No mother, no father?”

  She pantomimes the word baby, which I’d taught her yesterday, then points to me. Then she points to herself and shakes her head.

  “You were never a baby? Never had a childhood?” I think she’s being melodramatic. Maybe her childhood was rough, but there had to be something there. “Come on, it’s not like you were hatched out fully grown!”

  She nods, then pinches her ear. Our little signal that I’ve understood what she’s trying to say. She then pulls a pillow into her lap, draws a finger in a circle, leaving a trail of upturned fibers behind her. She points at herself and draws a dot.

  “That’s you,” I say. “That’s Parton?”

  Pinched ear. Then she draws a bunch of other dots. Maybe eighty or so.

  “Those are others like you? A bunch of you born at the same time? Like a brood?” She continues for some time, and ear pinch by ear pinch, I listen. As we build our vocabulary, the easier it is to get deeper and deeper. She teaches me a dozen hand gestures and I teach her a dozen words. The wall between our lives starts to crumble. Finally, I am able to explain who I think she is to me.

  Brood sister, she signs at me.

  I draw a deep breath, and when I let it out, a loneliness I never knew I had escapes with it. I love my family, and it has always felt complete. I have Sonovan and my head-mothers to worry after my learning. I have my heart-mothers to guide me toward my passions and my will-parents to ensure I make the soundest decisions. But now I know there was something missing all along, and she’s sitting right in front of me.

  I pinch my ear. Yes, brood sister, I sign back at her.

  Ama asks for volunteers. There’s an infestation of heart murmurs in a cleave in the muscle surrounding ventricle nine, deep too. No room for two workers, and barely enough room to accommodate a bucket waif. They’ll need the fastest. The bravest. The deadliest. Most heart murmurs can be detached with patience and a little elbow grease, but ventricle nine supplies ichor all the way to the beast’s brain, so there’s no room for error. I raise my hand for the job, while in my head, I rehearse the killing swipes of a knife. Single slit, eyes to tail; two inches deep for the grown ones, inch and a fourth for the youngins. Cut too deep and you nick the ventricle. Cut too shallow, and the murmur sends out a warning and the others dig in deeper, which makes everything ten times more complicated.

  I raise my hand higher until Ama has no choice but to notice me. My record is spotless. I stare her in the eyes. She knows I need this to prove myself worthy of working the beast’s heart.

  “I’ll go,” I say, practically a challenge. If I don’t get this, I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself.

  “You’re sure?” Ama says to me.
>
  I hold my knife out in front of me, hand as steady as steady gets. She nods. I breathe, and all at once, the tension I’d been clinging to slides right out of me. On the next beat, I’m sprinting, fast as my legs have ever taken me. My focus is tight, one hand on my anchor should the beat come again prematurely. I feel the fire behind my eyes, a tingle in my sinuses. I’m not about to cry. Don’t have time for that either. A dozen bucket waifs trail behind me, but they don’t need to be fast in, only fast on the way out.

  I slow when I see the cleave, a jagged fissure in the smooth inner lining of the ventricle a few feet wider than my shoulders. One of the bucket waifs follows me in, and the rest wait outside. In the shallow light, I see a massive colony. Nearly a hundred heart murmurs. I don’t waste time and start slashing, and they fall to the ground in gray-green piles, wings splayed, mouths twisted, eyes . . . I don’t look them in the eyes. The waif works underfoot, silently stuffing her bucket full, then hauling it back out and sending the next waif in. Then the next. Then the next.

  There’s a massive one, as big as five murmurs put together easily. I glance at my bucket waif, then at her bucket, already nearly full.

  “You don’t have to get them all on one try,” she says to me, not saying, voice pitched high, like the child she nearly is. Her eyes widen. I haven’t worked with her before, so she doesn’t understand my awful little game.

  “I know,” I tell her. “But if I can, imagine how everyone will talk. I’ll forever be ‘Adalla, the heartworker who slayed eighty-eight murmurs in one go.’”

  “I don’t think anyone would ever call you that.” Cynical, this one.

  I slay the last five smaller murmurs, saving the mammoth one for last. The waif’s bucket is full now, and it’s way too late for any more waifs to be racing back. “Go,” I tell her. “I’ll carry this one.”

  I look at it, so big, I see it breathing, in and out. I don’t have much time, but I take a second anyway to examine it. Four inches. That’s how deep I should go. I raise my hand high, then slice down the whole length. One, two, three seconds . . . I’m worried I’ll have to slice again, but finally its body goes slack and falls to the floor in a crumple, like an oversize blanket. Maybe I’ll have Sonovan tan it so I can sleep under it, a constant reminder of being “Adalla, the heartworker who slayed eighty-eight murmurs in one go.” I quickly bend down to roll it up, but from the corner of my eye, I see a little flutter. Eighty-nine murmurs. The tiniest, cutest murmur had been hiding under the wings of the big one. It’s pale green, just like my little Bepok had been, but the markings on its back are different.

  My heart twists, and I make the mistake of looking it in the eyes. I’m overcome with memories of the murmurs we kept on the last beast, mostly used to keep the warmth, but you grow attached to such things, and they become pets whether you want them to or not. Without thinking, I slip my knife under the ridge of its mouth and pry. It’s so small, it comes off with a pop, no struggle at all. It’s barely as big as my spread hand. I lay it upon my arm, and its suction grip returns. I pet it, just once, don’t know why—muscle reflex, an ache for my old pet—but immediately I know it was a mistake. It’s not tame. It’s not mine. It startles and screeches, bites down harder into my arm with those tiny burrowing teeth.

  I scream from the pain, and then at my feet, the giant murmur convulses. I hadn’t cut deeply enough after all. In a half a second, it’s got me wrapped up in its folds, climbing up my legs. I try to kick at it, try to run, but I’m tripped up and fall into a heap. In no time, its wings are suffocating me. Fangs sink into me, here, there. It rips my satchel from my hip, my anchor and all my tools out of reach, but I’ve still got my knife. My hand swipes blindly, blade cutting, blood flowing into my nostrils, my mouth. So much of it, I’m drowning here, under this murderous blanket. Yeah, so maybe I killed its entire family, then tried to take its child as my own, but if you start giving these things feelings, personalities, it makes it a lot harder to discard them. Sometimes these “things” look like moldy blankets. Sometimes they look a lot like you. My soul clenches up. The beat is coming, and soon we’ll all be dead, so what use is it musing about such things anyway?

  Only the beat doesn’t come. The ichor doesn’t flow. I count a few more seconds, praying it’s not just coming late, but no . . . it’s the arrhythmia. A skipped beat. I wait a moment for my own heart to stop pounding, realizing the luck I’ve drawn. I’ve got a whole three minutes and forty-seven and a half seconds left. I spend twelve seconds wrestling myself out from under the blanket. Four cursing all heart-fathers there ever, ever, ever were. Twelve retrieving my anchor. Eight rolling the blanket up into a nice roll. Four dusting myself off, trying to look a little less disheveled. And twenty-three sprinting back to the opening, where everyone is waiting for me, wide-eyed.

  I throw the blanket down in front of me. “Eighty-eight killed in one go,” I declare. They applaud. All of them except Ama. She takes one look at my anchor and the frayed end of the rope and at the murmur trembling upon my arm. It’s scared. Alone, thanks to me. But I’ve tamed one before, and I can do it again.

  Ama’s eyes, though, they slit at me, sharper than the blade of my knife.

  “Damned dizzy-headed girl! If the beat hadn’t skipped, you’d be dead now. And for what? To prove yourself? Nothing, ’specially your ego, is worth risking our lives, Adalla. Strip!” she orders me like I’m an initiate on her first day.

  “What?”

  “It was a mistake not to complete your training, so we’re going to complete it now. Strip, I said.”

  And there, in front of everyone, I drop my dress, letting it fall into a pile with the slayed blanket. I stand there, on display, in front of everyone. Ama draws her whip from her satchel. The first strike hits me square in the back. I don’t flinch. The cuts burn, deeper and deeper, until everything feels inflamed. There’s a long pause, so long, I think she’s done, but she hasn’t dismissed me. One more whip cracks into my forearm, right where the baby murmur is settled. Thing splits in two, sliced down right in between those bulging black eyes, and falls to the floor.

  If Ama wanted to break my spirit, she’s succeeded.

  Part II

  Expansion

  From the moment of conception, we are ever expanding—as cells, as individuals, as a people. It is our duty to look past the horizon, to ask what lies there and to wonder how we might strengthen our lines so that we may extend our reach.

  —Matris Mittark,

  512 years after exodus

  Seske

  Of Soiled Cloths and Pristine Dances

  I can’t keep an eight count for my life. My ama remains intent on guiding me through this final dance lesson, proudly swaying to the beat despite the number of times I’ve stepped upon her feet, her shins. One time, I even managed to kick her in the knee. Every time I start to get into any kind of rhythm, any time I think I’m about to enjoy this and just have a little fun perhaps . . . my mind starts wandering . . . about the baby beast mostly, hoping those lab techs haven’t figured out a way to breach its membrane.

  Here, my ama’s hand is around my waist; the other holds my hand high up in the air as she spins and twirls me, preparing me for the pomp and circumstance of my big day, but really, I’m swimming, swirling, playing games with the baby beast, her tentacles picking and plucking at my skin—

  “Seske Kaleigh!” my ama screams at me. I look down. She’s no longer holding me but now holding her shin. A rivulet of blood drips down, pooling upon the satin of her dance slippers.

  There’s a medic on hand. She comes over, applies salve and a bandage. This isn’t my first dance rehearsal. She’s got a cold pack handy too.

  “I’m sorry, Ama. If you want to call the rest of the evening off, I’m okay with that.” I press my hand upon her back.

  “Bless the mothers, no,” she says. “We have to have you in top form for tomorrow. Let’s keep going.” Ama tries to stand, but she winces and bites back a pained curse. “Sisterkin!” she
calls, her voice reverberating through the dance hall. Sisterkin comes shuffling from out of whatever hole she’d been pouting in, probably lamenting that these should be her dance lessons for her coming out party. Not that she’d need lessons.

  My insides cringe up.

  “Dance the molalari baret with Seske,” my ama demands.

  “Yes, Amakin,” Sisterkin says. “Original, palatial, or Courdarin version?”

  Ama laughs hard. Too hard. She meets my eyes and they melt into something more compassionate. “The Courdarin,” she says. The remedial version. She doesn’t say it out loud, but I can feel it. All the flourishes that make the dance beautiful have been trimmed away. The moves are as basic as they’ll get, but I’m still tripping over myself.

  “Don’t worry, Seske. We’ll have you in prime shape before your coming out party.” Sisterkin smiles at me, face and chest close in, but feet angled awkwardly and obviously away from me. “Feel the beat with me. Ready?”

  She signals to the musicians, and they climb back up onto the gangliar pipes. Each pipe takes three people to play, and there are twelve in total, though only four are in use for these practices. They squeeze air sacs, clap copper cymbals over the release holes, until the soulful sweet tunes fill the cavernous hall.

  “One-two-three-four, step-two, and slide . . .” Sisterkin demonstrates for me, and it’s like she’s floating atop a cloud of mad vapors. Her whole body sinks into the song, down to each and every finger moving with the grace of a dancer. “All you have to do is feel the rhythm. Your potential suitors will do the rest.”

  “I can’t believe I have to dance with all of them,” I grumble, feeling overwhelmed and lost within the cavernous walls of the dance hall. Florists are busy covering them in the most resplendent blooms harvested from the woodward canopies: lots of ferns, river lilies, and my favorite, the creeping nova with its silver tendrils and succulent purple petals. But it’s hard to see their beauty when such frustration tears at my soul.