Symbiosis

by Nicky Drayden

  My heart skips in my chest, remembering how easily our people had bred then slaughtered hundreds and thousands of workers, just to power through the excavation and expansion phases of culling a new Zenzee. All that death so wealthy people like me and Seske and Kallum could settle into our homes a little faster.

  Seske and I exchange looks.

  I know where she’s going with this, and I hope upon hope that she’s wrong, but I would be foolish to deny even considering it. Something prickles my gut, something I realize has been there for a long, long time. Was it really a rarity to have a son born to such a prestigious Line? It wouldn’t have been if Madam Wade had gotten her way. Which leads me down another path: What if she’d known that Charrelle had been carrying a boy, and all that talk about the Ancestors sitting with our child was just a ruse masquerading as another one of our sanctified traditions?

  I feel sick, thinking about the hundreds and hundreds of pregnancies Madam Wade has presided over. And the many Soothsayers that came before her . . .

  “Are you okay, Doka?” Seske asks.

  I nod. I can’t speak aloud something so atrocious. Not before I have proof. “Kallum, you’ve been aboard other ships. What’s the gender split among them? Are they more like us, or more evenly split, like the Klang?”

  “You’re not dragging me into the middle of this nonsense,” Kallum says, shaking his head. “What about the Serratta? They’re practically all men!”

  “And we all know the reason behind that,” Seske interjects. “They sacrifice their women to run the ship. Something is definitely rank here.”

  “Each clan is unique, and they’ve all got different practices and customs and taboos,” Kallum says calmly. “The first thing I learned is not to compare, and you’d be wise to do the same.”

  Seske’s nostrils flare in frustration. “Well then, we could check our Texts for historical references. Comb through the Accountancy Guard annals. They document everything. If something really is amiss, then we’ll find it.”

  I nod and help Seske slowly to her feet. Her hands are soft in mine, but I know that her softness—in her hands and otherwise—is only superficial. There is power beneath that skin, and it feels good to see Seske slowly coming into her own again, despite the circumstances around it.

  “Great idea,” I say to her. “I’ll have Baradonna fetch the—” my breath catches. I’d forgotten that easily. “I’ll fetch the annals and you can get started researching through the Texts. I’ll meet you in the study.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Kallum calls after us as we depart. He kisses Kenzah on the cheek, then gives me a sigh of resignation. “At least be home for dinner!”

  “We will,” I say, returning to give him a kiss as well. Kallum’s eyes soften and his smile becomes less strained. I soak him in, knowing that if my suspicions are correct, our entire world will come crumbling down, and it will be a long, long time before we can enjoy something as simple as dinner again.

  Hours later, Seske and I are lost in the stacks of my study. She’s on her fifteenth paper cut as she flips through the Texts, finger meandering down each page, looking for evidence to jump out at her. I crunch census numbers from the last five hundred years, punching the data into my tablet and scrutinizing the resulting graphs. While there is no obvious evidence of a conspiracy, the numbers are damning. Three centuries ago, there was a nearly even split among men and women. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly from one generation to the next, there was a shift.

  The last notable shift was barely over a century ago, when heart-husbands were dropped from family units. The justification was there just weren’t enough men to go around. People just nodded and accepted it. No one pushed back.

  “Maybe life aboard the Zenzee caused some kind of hormonal change,” Seske says, clinging to optimism despite the facts laid about before us. “One that made it more likely for females to be conceived?”

  “Then wouldn’t the Klang have been affected in the same way? And the other clans?”

  “There has to be some other reason. We can’t be the kind of people who would just allow . . .” Her voice breaks.

  “Every single pregnancy comes under scrutiny, to see if the ancestors sit with the child, but I don’t think they’re testing for that. What if they’re checking if the child is a boy?”

  “Doka . . .”

  “I didn’t want to say it. I don’t even want to think it. Charrelle had gone to visit Madam Wade with grim results. How many expectant mothers had gotten the same results? How many of them were carrying boys? What if there’s more to it than the conveniently obscure threat of having a child that the ancestors didn’t sit with?”

  Seske shudders. “Zenzee react differently to men and women in the salivatory chambers. What if they can detect those differences in pregnancies as well?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Daide’s bells.” Seske fidgets roughly with the hem of her dress. I watch her body closely, almost able to see the nervous energy coursing through it. There’s anger there, too. And maybe a hollowness I don’t quite know how to interpret. “We have to do something. We have to tell someone!”

  “We have to dig deeper,” I say. “But old books and dusty records aren’t going to tell us what we need to know.”

  Seske nods. “Then we need to go where it starts. We need to question Madam Wade.”

  We make our way to the cerebral cortex, Seske taking the lead and guiding me away from deceptively slick paths eager to send the unsuspecting travelers into one of the deep chasms of brain folds. I’d been to the cortex once, soon after I’d officially adopted the title of Matris. I’d wanted to see how it was that we could control the whims of a beast so incredibly massive. I felt like a microbe in comparison. An infection. A parasite that had bent the will of its host.

  When we arrive at Madam Wade’s quaint shack, she is not happy to see Seske, and is even less happy to see me; she’s eyeing me suspiciously, tension in her body as if she’s torn between offering me a salute of reverence or telling me to go fuck off.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she asks, somewhere in between the two, voice polite yet firm. She stands fully in the doorway, intent on not letting us pass. This will take some diplomacy. I wish we’d brought Kallum with us.

  “We know your whole performance is a sham,” Seske says. “The Knowing Walk is fraudulent. You manipulate the bones somehow. We know the ancestors are in no way involved.”

  So much for tact.

  “Matris, you need to turn away from here,” Madam Wade growls at me. “You have no idea of what you’re tampering with.”

  I grit my teeth. “I know exactly—”

  While she is distracted by me, Seske pushes past her and storms inside. She pulls a bag from a shelf on the wall, then upturns it. Dozens of little white bones fall to the ground.

  “How do they work?” Seske demands.

  Madam Wade throws her hands to the sides of her face. “What are you doing? Why are you wrecking everything?” she says, scrambling to pick up the bones.

  I take a step over the threshold, and as soon as my foot makes contact with the floor, the air within this place changes. I feel as though I’m back in the salivatory chambers, but instead of tongues licking out at me, the entire place starts to vibrate. On the selves lining the walls, dozens and dozens of bags hop like something has come alive inside them. Inching closer to me. The bones spilled on the floor do the same.

  “Take off your shoes,” Seske yells at me.

  Madam Wade hears this and lunges at me, but she is too slow, and I brush her to the side. I slip out of my shoes and place my bare feet on the floor. It is the same process that Seske and Charrelle had described to me, only I am not pregnant, and the ancestors shouldn’t care about me being here.

  One by one, the bones turn to face me. Then one jumps up from the floor and smacks me in the shin. Another one comes, launching itself harder at me this time. The next thing I know, all the bags are rumbling violently. Th
e entire room shakes beneath my feet, reminiscent of the old tremors that used to ravage our Zenzee. I duck as one of the bags flies at me. It hits Seske in the shoulder. By the look on both her and Madam Wade’s faces, I can see none of this is normal.

  “You need to leave,” Madam Wade rasps. “Immediately. Or—”

  The shelving buckles. The wall pounds outward.

  “Or this whole thing will be exposed as a sham. Too late for that,” Seske says, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go.”

  She slings me toward the door, then snatches Madam Wade right before the shelf lands on her. We keep running until everything quiets.

  “What is going on in there?” I ask Madam Wade in my sternest tone. She may be my elder by several decades, but I don’t want her to forget who is the one in charge. “Tell me the truth. I won’t hesitate to have you strung up by your thumbs if I find out you are omitting even the tiniest detail.”

  She stares at me, trying to determine if I’m bluffing. She then looks away. “I am sworn to secrecy,” she mumbles.

  “Your secrets are killing innocent people. They’re harming families,” I say. I can’t imagine a world without Kenzah now, and I have to keep my anger pressed down into the back of my chest to keep from lunging at her and strangling the truth out.

  “It’s tradition,” Madam Wade says this time. “And there is no killing. The children live on.”

  “As fucking fish!” I say. I can’t take it any longer, I grab her by the lapel and pull her close to me. “Tell me how it works!”

  A weighty silence lingers between us, then she finally speaks.

  “The Zenzee’s synapses are sensitive to human hormones,” Madam Wade stutters, refusing to meet my eyes. There is deep shame buried within her. “They can sense the changes in blood during a pregnancy, even as early as seven weeks, discerning between female and male fetuses. The disruption in synapse firings happens in a predictable pattern. I’m not exactly sure of how, but it manipulates the iron in the marrow of the bones, causing them to turn in certain ways. Of course there are natural variations in hormone levels, so it’s not completely accurate, but it’s close enough.”

  I let Madam Wade loose and she starts sobbing into her hands.

  “The ritual was passed down to me by the Soothsayer before me, and the one before her, and so on. For generations. We are taught to bear the pain of this knowledge so that others won’t have to.”

  “Will you testify to this in front of the Senate?” I ask.

  Madam Wade shakes her head vehemently. “I can’t. People come to me in confidence. I won’t breach their trust.”

  “You breached their trust the moment they stepped foot in the Knowing circle,” I say, my voice firm. If she is looking for compassion, she won’t find it here. “You almost killed my son. Should I bring him here, so that you can look him in the face and tell him that his life was better off spent swimming in a bog?”

  Madam Wade is silent, but I see the thoughts churning now. Feelings have flooded her body. Hopefully one of those is remorse. “I—” she mutters.

  “This has to stop. And stopping it starts with you. Please.”

  Madam Wade is quiet for a long moment, then she nods. “I’ll do it. I’ll testify.”

  Seske and I look at each other, then sigh in relief. The proof is mounting on our side.

  Armed with several bags of meat and cabbage, we work well through the night. We visit four different bogs, me luring throttle fish with tasty morsels while Seske scoops them up with a net. She pinches their mouths shut so their screaming doesn’t draw unwanted attention. Harassing throttle fish like this was something we were taught early on to be morally reprehensible. I suppose I understand now why that trip with my mother through the bile ducts had been so fraught. Maybe she hadn’t known the true depths of the silent genocide, but she knew it was something shameful, and people tried to soothe that guilt through their revered treatment of the throttle fish.

  We take genetic samples from every throttle fish we can wrangle. Though some come up as inconclusive, the vast majority are male. Seske and I return to our study with the weight of this new knowledge on our shoulders. Our bodies are worn, and so are our spirits.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I say to Seske.

  Her head hits my shoulder and she utters a noncommittal grunt. “We should rest. Today has been a lot.”

  “I wish I could, but we need to take our evidence to the Senate first thing tomorrow, and we should spend every second we have between now and then preparing what I’m going to say to them. And I need you to be by my side, or else I’ll look like a frantic man spouting conspiracy theories. I always feel more confident when you’re with me.”

  “I always feel more confident with a full night’s rest, but I guess that’s shot now.”

  “Fine, a ten-minute break,” I say. “Then we’re back to work, okay? We’ve only got a couple hours left.”

  “Make it twenty minutes and I’ll do anything you say.”

  I let out a deep sigh, then stand up to stretch. My legs ache from stooping down on the boggy shores so long. Seske stretches too, arms thrown back, standing on her tiptoes. Then she lets out a huge yawn. The fabric of her robes clings to her curves, and I have a hard time putting our time in the boat behind us. Nothing had happened. I’d touched a part of her bare skin, simple as touching an elbow or a knee. Except I hadn’t touched an elbow or a knee, and Seske hadn’t minded.

  “What do you think’s for breakfast?” I ask, trying to distract myself with something a little less tension-filled.

  “Egg loaf, mostly likely. It’s Adalla’s turn to cook, and that’s what she always makes.”

  I nod. “Have you mentioned to her that maybe she could use less hedge leaf? It gets stuck in my teeth. And fewer peppers? It’s always so spicy.”

  “It’s a beastworker custom, so probably no. And you can always ask me if you have hedge leaf stuck in your teeth. I’ll for sure let you know if you do.”

  “Well, see anything now?” I ask, then give her a full glimpse of my teeth.

  “No. Nothing. Wait. Maybe. Come a little closer.”

  I comply, but I hide my smile behind my lips, tilt my head down to hers, so close, I can feel her breath against my face. My heart pounds, knowing that the thing I desire the most is so close, and yet so far.

  “Your lips are in the way,” she says to me.

  “Maybe my lips are in the exact right place they need to be,” I say. Closer now. Shivers run through me.

  Seske blinks rapidly, then pulls away, diving back into one the ancient tomes she’d had her nose buried in earlier. She’s flipping the thin pages so hard and fast, I fear she might tear them. She clears her throat. “Maybe we should get back to work. Every moment we waste—”

  I shut the book and turn her back toward me. “We’ve drowned ourselves in the atrocities of our people. We’ve lost sight of the surface. But we need to remind ourselves what we’re fighting for. That there’s something on the other side worth fighting for.”

  My eyes soften, and I lean in closer.

  Seske raises a skeptical brow. “And let me guess . . . I’m going to find that by shoving my tongue in your mouth? That’s mighty bold of you.”

  “No, but, on the boat—”

  “Nothing happened on the boat. And even if something had, are we just supposed to forget about Adalla and Bakti and Kallum and Charrelle? Are we supposed to ignore all of our duties and obligations, just because maybe we have feelings that run so deep, we can hardly stand to be in the same room together? Are we supposed to forget about how well we fit together? To forget about how maybe we once had something great, and I was too young and naive to realize it, so I just threw it away?” Her voice trembles and so does she.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I do want to forget. Just for a moment,” I say, dead serious, though the consequences of violating our marriage oath tap against my brain. If you’re found out,
seriously dead is just what you’ll be. Apart from my head-spouses, I am forbidden from romantically consorting within our family unit structure, but those rules are all just a construct to prevent jealousy and complications and unnecessary drama. Things are different between me and Seske. We have a history. We have something special.

  It’s disconcerting how easily I quiet my reservations. This one moment is all I need, and it is our moment that’s been owed to us. For just a while, we’ll exist quietly outside of this place. Outside of this time. It is ours alone.

  Seske’s mouth opens, closes, opens again, gasping for words that refuse to come. Then she throws herself upon me, our lips behaving like they’ve grown appendages, trying to pull each other in a passionate tug-of-war. And the war within me grows. With Seske, I feel like I’ve got too many arms, too much skin. Too many tongues. More dicks than I can count. And I think we’re fucking, but I can’t even be sure, because there’s just too much of me, and too much of her, and this moment won’t stretch big enough to fit us both.

  Seske moans and screams my name, and then my mouth is full of a tacky sweetness that runs down my throat. I swallow as much as I can, but there’s too much of that too, and then I’m drowning, drowning. Her skin burns against mine. And now I’m on fire as well, but I don’t care, because her mouths are putting them out, one by one.

  By one.

  Just the one dick now . . .

  . . . spent and limp and happy, barely clinging inside her. I stay perfectly still, so that we can remain connected a little longer. But already I know that our moment has already moved into the next. We drift asleep anyway, arm in arm, sticky and sore.

  I dream of her. And in that dream, we have a hundred sons, each of them loved and nurtured and cared for. They lie together in a big, snuggly pile, smiles as bright as stars. So bright, their smiles shatter.

  My elbow is wet. And warm. It wakes me from my dream. I’m lying in liquid now, purple . . . pretty sure it didn’t come from me. Less sure it didn’t come from Seske. Smells like tea, though. I run my finger through the puddle. Taste it. Definitely tea.