Escaping Exodus

by Nicky Drayden

  And then I’ll have to figure out what to do about Sisterkin.

  Adalla

  Of Sharp Knives and Blunt Messages

  I’ve got about a dozen slivers of bone cutting up my hands, but I push past the pain, just like I’ve pushed past the pain of being cast into boneworks by my own ama. The hunger pangs, though, they’re more difficult to ignore. I’d skipped breakfast, the morning gruel unappetizing, but I was sure lunch would be better. It wasn’t. Same dank, cold paste . . . looks more like spackle than food. I’d choked down a spoonful then, not nearly enough to sustain me through a single shift of bonework. Down here, the rhythm is on the scale of seconds, slice and saw, slice and saw. Chop and chip, chop and chip. Mindless work. Soulless work.

  And now here, after shift, I’m staring down at my dinner. More spackle. Thicker, this time, and lukewarm. Small bits of rubbery stuff—cartilage, maybe, or specks of liver giving the bonemeal more sustenance? I pick one up, examine it. Hold it to the tip of my tongue. Balk at the taste. So bitter.

  The women from the next table over laugh. It’s then that I notice I have an audience. Boneworkers, all of them, though that’s the only kind that frequent a dive like this. I try not to stare at the scars across their chests, deliberate ones made into all sorts of shapes from tiny, thin scratches. The sides of their heads are shaved, leaving a line of hair, tangled and twisted with bone slivers. They’re broad and muscular from decades working beast after beast.

  “It’s worms,” one woman says, the broadest, biggest one with the most scars. “Bone worms. They leave them in the mash to provide a little protein. Where you from, worm-licker?”

  The others laugh.

  “Don’t want any trouble,” I say, staring into my mash. I force a bite, hoping it’ll stay long enough in my stomach to get some nutrients. It makes gall hash seem like the gourmet stuff they served at Seske’s coming out party.

  “Telling me where you’re from won’t cause you any trouble. Not telling me might.” She stands, comes over, and sits across from me. I can smell her—pungent, spicy. Like her body hasn’t known a sliver of soap in all her life and has made up for it by collecting an assortment of potent odors as a cover-up. “No scars. Wearing a shirt. Limp hair. You an organ girl?”

  The way she says it lets me know that admitting I’m from an organ, any organ, would be a bad idea. Telling her I was from the heart . . . they’d have me strung up and beaten so fast. I shake my head. “Ligaments,” I say, rounding out my vowels like they do, practically chewing the words. “Cut the wrong one, and they sent me down here.”

  “Ugh.” The woman nods. “I’ve got five chits on you that says you can finish your gruel. Don’t want to prove me wrong, do you?” She lays the cowrie fragments on the table, and her friends come over and crowd around me after laying down their own bets.

  “Probably not the wisest bet,” I say.

  “Little thing like you needs to eat up. Here.” She raises a hand. The server comes over, slams a cup of malt cider in front of me. “That’ll make it go down easier. Now eat up.”

  From the tone of her voice, it isn’t a suggestion. I pour a bit of the hot cider into the meal, stir, then take a spoonful. It’s marginally better—warm, and the spices make the bone mash go down easier. I swallow, manage to keep it down. Then go for another. I’m five spoonfuls in when it all comes back up, covering the table and a couple of the women. They just laugh and wipe the offending bits off with the backs of their hands.

  “Acquired taste,” the brutish woman says. “Kaieda, get this girl cleaned up!” She scoops my bowl away and returns it to the server.

  “Wait!” I say. “I think I blew some chunks in that.”

  The server shrugs, then scrapes the whole thing back into the serving pot.

  “No waste,” the woman says to me. “We’re so scrappy around here, even the lash counters have stopped hounding us. Besides, it hardly even touched your stomach before coming back up. Just as good as new.” She laughs, then goes to help me out of my soiled shirt, but I balk.

  “No, I’m okay. I’ll clean up at home,” I say.

  “Nonsense,” she says, tugging my shirt again. I hear the stitches popping. I stand up abruptly, my eyes focused. I won’t be bullied, not even by someone twice my size. My hand goes to my knife. Their eyes go to my hand.

  “Like I said, I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Aw, you’re no fun,” the woman says. Then she turns her attention to three waifs, hunched in the corner, on the floor, fingers all dipping into the same bowl of bonemeal. “Eh, look at them. Scarfing that down like it’s their last meal. Like they won’t be feasting tomorrow night!”

  “All that bare, soft skin,” another woman says. “An empty canvas.” She takes out her knife, flicks it open. I flinch. I leave now, and those waifs are going to get worse than they’d ever deal me. I’d seen the way they treated the waifs today. Not simply ignored, like up in the heart, but kicked around, cussed, abused. And there are so many more of them here too. Almost as many as there are boneworkers.

  “Wait,” I say, pulling one of the two chits in my pocket out. “Let me buy you all a round of ciders. It’s the least I can do for losing you a bet. And for blowing my dinner on you all.”

  The brutish woman turns back at me with a smile. “Now them’s the kind of words I like to hear, worm-licker.”

  “The name’s Adalla,” I say, offering her my hand.

  She takes it in both of her hands, shakes it, but doesn’t let go right away. “I’m Laisze, you met Kaieda. That’s Malika, Sandris, and Josoki.”

  I’m nervous, having them crowding me like this, ’specially when I’m pretty sure they’re all armed, but as I look around the bar, I see that it is merely the boneworkers’ way. I’d seen it as I worked today too. How all the women stood so close, touched so much. Just simple conversations, but there’d be a dozen touches between them, single presses of the hands to forearms, to shoulders, to the chest, to the cheeks.

  It’s odd. The people back home are all very friendly, but there’s always an unspoken barrier between us. We spend so much of our time pretending that our neighbors don’t exist, even though we can see them clearly, for lack of any real kind of privacy. Only one of my friends has ever dared to cross it, and if thoughts of her are going to be swimming around in my mind, I’m going to have to do my best to drown them. I put my hand upon Laisze’s forearm, trying the custom out. Maybe it’ll help me blend in and sell my story about being from ligaments.

  When the warm mead ciders come out, I slurp mine down faster than I should, ’specially on an empty belly. The buzz hits me quickly, the stickiness both sweet and tart on my lips. I’m pulled into their rough huddle, laughing, joking, trying to seem like I’m relaxing, while studying their body cues and posture so I can learn to speak and act and think like they do. Then suddenly, Sandris is buying another round, and my cheeks are warm, along with every other part of me, and I’m wondering if this is where I’d belonged all along. Here, I’m not Ama’s child. No bloodlines to live up to or worry over shaming.

  Being handsy must be easier when I’m drunk, because now my hand is on Laisze’s shoulder, admiring the scars of a clockface. “It’s beautiful,” I say. “What is it?”

  “My great-grandmother’s pocket watch,” Laisze says, voice caught between pride and remorse. “Smuggled seven generations, but that ended with me, two beasts ago. Got randomly selected for a cavity search, and it got left behind, or more likely became some lash counter’s souvenir. But I’ve got it with me here, still.” She rubs her shoulder. “They can never take that away. Can’t take any of these away.” Her hand swipes over the scars along her chest and breasts, down to her stomach. Each of them a memento from the lives she’s had to give up, time after time. My eyes stop on the scars depicting a crib worm, tail swirling around her navel. Childhood pet to be certain, and it all just sort of hits me . . . the life I’d left behind on our old beast. I was so young during my first exodus, and I can’t
even remember the transition, only the part where I’d lost my pai. I was too young to help with excavation, and all through the long course of our expansion, my wounds slowly healed. By the time the signs of extinction started to arrive, I was so caught up in the prospect of working for the heart that I didn’t have time to process the parts of my life that we’d abandon on the beast. Our possessions. Our pets. Our home.

  “We had a murmur named Bepok,” I say. “In that old life. She was thin as tissue paper, but she still kept me warm on cold nights. The way she purred tickled me so much. Left little heart-shaped hickeys all over my legs. I miss her.”

  Laisze claps her hand down on my back. “To Bepok,” she slurs. “Best damned murmur anyone ever had.” Glasses are raised and clinked. Another round guzzled down. Finally, when we leave the dive, we’re all arm in arm in arm, for physical support more than emotional, but just barely. I’d intended to return home after my shift, but when my turnoff comes, my feet keep walking by it.

  “You got room for me to stay the night?” I ask.

  “Oh, yes, honey, there’s room for you.”

  Laisze nudges me in the ribs, and I look up at the enormous wall standing before us. My vision blurs for a moment, and then I notice hundreds of oval-shaped gouges cut into it like a giant gray sponge. A few of the holes are lit by ley lights, where I can see a person in each small room, just larger than a bed. The rest are dark, with just hints of the silhouettes of people milling about.

  “Block ninety-nine, best block there is.” Laisze points up high. “There are a few empty lofts up there. New meat like you, I can guarantee someone will come milling around, hoping to get at your humble bits. Just pretend you’re asleep, and they’ll take the hint.”

  I swallow. My humble bits? Maybe I should have gone home. Maybe it’s not too late to change my mind. I start to take a drunken step in that direction, but Laisze snags me by the shirt and steers me up the first couple footholds. “I still don’t understand why you insist on wearing this thing, when it’ll just get ripped or stained, or get you caught up in a bind.”

  Then her hand is on my ass, pushing me higher and higher. I shouldn’t be climbing. I can barely walk. I dive into the first loft I come to. It’s smaller than most, just enough room for me to lie down and sit up without banging my head. Probably why it’s vacant, but I can’t risk falling by going higher for more space. I snuggle in, and sleep settles over me. But soon enough, I’m woken by someone pushing up next to me. I’m so shocked, I make the mistake of opening my eyes. I’m staring right at her, a young, thin boneworker with bright eyes and voluminous lips. Her hair is more bone than hair.

  I clench my eyes before I can see more and start to snore. Loudly. Obnoxiously. Laisze was right, though. She slithers out of my bed so quickly, so lightly, I barely feel her leave. I clutch my covers tight to my body, only a little shaken. My second visitor, things go more naturally . . . realistic snoring, and I don’t open my eyes, even though she smells really nice, her entire body like one tensed muscle next to mine. I think I’m getting the hang of things, maybe even enough to trust myself to get some real sleep, but then the bone around me creaks, and someone’s pelvis settles itself right on top of mine. I snore loudly, but she doesn’t move. I snore even louder, high-pitched inhale, blubbering exhale. Tossing and turning restlessly from the waist up.

  Then she’s pulling my shirt up and over my head, and I’ve got no choice but to confront her. It’s Laisze. She’s drunk. Drunker than I’d left her. And she’s got a knife.

  “Get off me!” I scream.

  “Relax, I’m not here for jollies. I’m here to cut you.” Her thumb presses my left nipple down, and she wipes pink gel across my breast and underneath. “Here, right above the heart.”

  I struggle to free myself, but my arms are caught in the fabric of my shirt. Laisze gives me a sloppy I-told-you-so grin.

  “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “I do my best work when I’m drunk,” she says. I try to buck her off, but she’s too heavy and she squeezes me tight between those rock-hard thighs.

  “Shh . . .” she says. The look she gives me is crazed, yet earnest, and it settles the thoughts still rearing inside me. “You asked for this. Bepok. She’ll be right here with you, forever and always now. You’ll never leave her behind again. Okay?”

  I nod, and with that, the tip of her knife bites into my flesh. She blots the blood away with a questionably clean rag, and memories rush forth of the first signs of extinction on our last beast—of walls weeping blood and of a multitude of tumors budding, growing rapidly, and finally hemorrhaging. The lash counters were so busy yelling at us to prepare for exodus, that I never had time to fully process the trauma of seeing the world I’d grown up in completely and utterly ruined. The illusions of home and permanence had crumbled so easily.

  And now, my eyes are tearing up, and not just from the physical pain of Laisze’s knife. This scar will be the first thing I truly own.

  Laisze leans in close, her hot, spiced breath spilling over my skin. A few more minutes of cutting pass, then she’s massaging oil into my skin. She releases her grip and slides off me. It stings like the nettles, but when I look down, I see her there—Bepok: a red outline of cut flesh upon my brown skin, her wings spread, tail coiling around and around my nipple.

  I turn to thank Laisze, but she’s passed out next to me, like a hunk of stone. The bed’s not quite wide enough for the both of us, so I lie on my side and press close to her, feeling the roughness of her scarred skin against the smoothness of mine.

  Turns out being hungover is good for bonework. My heart is beating in my head, the exact right rhythm for my knife to be digging into this storefront sign. The Vvanescript lettering comes back to me, letter by letter, and I remember how Seske had traced each of them for me hundreds and thousands of times. abacca’s jewelers, dewside, the sign reads, replacing another sign that had already been hung. The whole inside is getting a new treatment, in fact. A rush job, with three dozen boneworkers converting aisles and lighting to the Accountancy Guard’s specifications.

  “Looking good, worm-licker,” Laisze calls up to me. I toss a bone fleck back at her, and it hits her square between the eyes. She laughs, then says, “Almost done? We need to disappear before the posh arrive.” She nods off in the distance, where two Contour class men stand, staring at us, gilded up in patinas. Just plain staring, like we’re in the way. Like they can’t wait ten more minutes for us to clean up and move on. I puff my chest and stare back, my new scar proudly on display. The air cool on the shaved sides of my head. I was half asleep when I’d agreed to the cut this morning. Laisze’s idea, of course.

  Kaieda did the actual cutting this time, tugging the razor up against my skin. When the first swatch of hair fell to the floor, I’d nearly fainted. All my life, these same braids have been a badge of honor worn upon my scalp, of both the lines of blood and the lines my ancestors had drawn between stars in the sky. But as much as it was a shock to my system, it didn’t feel wrong.

  And when Kaieda had styled what was left of my hair, tugging it and teasing it and adorning it with slivers of bone . . . that felt right.

  It’s a lot of change, all at once, but now I look like I belong. I do belong.

  I turn my attention back to the sign, take a dozen more whacks until it reads just right, then I join Laisze back on the ground. “Going to that dive again tonight?” I ask, because I’m thinking of asking her for another scar, but I need a few ciders’ worth of courage first.

  “Not tonight. It’s the hundredth night of expansion. You know what that means.”

  I shake my head, but then my last time with Parton races back to me. “The masquerade party? I thought that was just for waifs.”

  “We crash it every beast cycle. It’s a feast, Adalla. Bigger than you can imagine. Music. Dancing. You’ll come with us? Malika has an extra mask you can use . . . a fox.”

  I nod. A fox, a creature of the time bef
ore—similar to a dog, if I remember right. Or maybe a cat? They’re all so foreign. What matters is that this will be another night out. I could get used to this. And come morning, if I’m still in a fog, I can stagger in to work, and the worst that will happen is that I spell a word wrong on a sign. No veins getting nicked, no millions of lives depending on the steadiness of my hand.

  I think of Parton, missing her, hoping she’s doing fine where my ama sent her. But she will be at the party, and maybe if I pray to the spirits, I’ll be lucky enough to run into her.

  The men are still staring as we start to clean up.

  It’s weird—one of them seems familiar, but I’m sure I’d remember a face like that.

  Laisze’s hand comes down on my shoulder. “Something wrong?” she asks.

  “That man over there. He reminds me of someone. Someone from another life.”

  “Maybe they share an ancestor some ways back. His great-grandfather took up with some beastworker on the sly. Unless you’re accustomed to hanging out with the Contour class?”

  I shake my head, hearing the venom in the word Contour.

  “So, was this someone a neighbor? A friend? Or something more?” Laisze asks, and I laugh at the hint of jealousy in her voice.

  “A friend,” I say to Laisze, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. I stare at my feet, and by the time I’ve gathered my thoughts and dare to look back up, the men are gone. “Isn’t it odd that some of the things that we left behind in that other life are still here haunting us in this one?”

  “If I had a scar on my skin for every scar in here”—she thumps her chest, right above her heart—“I wouldn’t have a scrap of me that hadn’t been touched by a knife.”

  My costume’s “fur” is shedding bits of red moss all over the place. My mask is stuffy inside, smells faintly of mildew, and the entirety of my vision is reduced to two jagged holes, but even through all these issues, I’ve never been so excited to wear anything in my entire life. The Hundredth Night Masquerade is more than I’d imagined, thousands of waifs dancing and swirling under twinkling ley lights made to resemble the pattern of stars that had shone over Mother Earth. There’s even a giant disk hanging above called Luna, or so Laisze tells me, the moon where their spirit mothers lived.