Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  After the first day we traveled at night. The days we spent in the trailer, Pammy in her hammock and me in my narrow bunk; I would wake at dusk to her chirping as she fried eggs and ate them six at a time.

  I never openly mentioned the irony of her gobbling so many.

  No raw meat, none of the energy-charge from a crowd of gawkers. We were both hungry, in that way meatskins never know. At least in Midian Baphomet fed us. Though Peloquin and his ilk wanted more. Hot blood and struggling prey, forgetting what we had once been.

  Did it matter? Forget or remember, we were hungry now.

  It was dead midnight on the seventh day when I found the exit—well, “exit” was too kind a word. A two-lane highway, rolling through forsaken mountains, pines and firs pressing close on either side, and the turnoff looked just like a long scar of gravel for a desperate trucker to use. At its end, however, there was a sharp right-hand turn onto a rutted dirt track.

  We jounced along this for a few minutes, the trailer rattling behind us, the headlights a white smear as more dust rose. This wasn’t the yellow sandy cake the carnival had been swimming in, but a floury glittering screen.

  He coalesced out of the dark and the headlights, between one moment and the next. The linen suit was exactly the color of the dust, his hands loose wriggling worms, but the hat was gone, revealing indeterminate, closely cropped hair. His eyes were holes of darkness, and beside me, Pammy let out a soft sigh.

  “At least we’re on the right track,” I muttered, and she elbowed me.

  He turned on his heel and set off up the dirt track. We inched along, his speed matching the truck’s idle creeping, his back bisected by one large crease in the linen, a knifecrack of shadow. Up in zigzags, and up, and up. Each turn was hairpin, and soon the trees choked close, their branch-fingers brushing the trailer’s side, a lover’s caress.

  It took a long while, maybe an hour, for the vegetation to draw away. We crept out into a wide half circle of more gravel and flour-dust, and on the other side was a large sloped barnlike shape. The moon had gone down, so all we saw was weatherbeaten wooden planks, a few boarded holes for windows, and the front door, its double leaves flung wide.

  Behind it, the mountain rose, a dark bulk against a star-riven sky. The moon had gone down, and our doors slammed loudly in the hush.

  There comes a time past midnight when even wild animals are silent.

  Pammy’s foot-claws scraped gravel as she scratched, luxuriously. Weeds had once forced their way up through the plain of crunched rock, but they were yellowed, blasted where they stood. I took my hat off, shaking out long, fine changecolor hair. Part black, part orange, part other colors, it was the one thing that never shifted.

  I unwrapped my scarf, my sweat-damp neck breathing freely and flushing with little pinfeathers. You’d think scales would help me stay cool, but they don’t. They just get itchy.

  I slid out of my jacket, tossed it in through the open window. My tank top was ancient and yellowed, but it didn’t matter. Prickling ran across my bare arms, the changes moving across them before settling on smooth honeybrown skin, even though I never tanned. Pinfeathers moved uneasily over my cheeks and throat, rising on little bumps. After so long walking around muffled except in the hot close confines of a tent or the trailer, the nakedness of exposure, however welcome, was still … disturbing.

  There was a pale glimmer in the dark between the doors. The nameless man glided silently up rickety stairs you could pose an extended family on for an interminable photo on a sun-gilded afternoon.

  I glanced at Pammy, who stared, rapt, at that shimmer in the door’s cave.

  The smear of paleness resolved into a too-tall, stick-thin womanshape. She stepped out, onto the porch, and starshine was lost in the inkwell of her hair.

  Seraphine … walked.

  “Welcome to New Midian,” she crooned, and beside me, Pammy began to weep.

  * * *

  Stupid, and careless. I was stupid to not ask more questions. Pammy was stupid to believe so wholeheartedly.

  I halted at the foot of the stairs. “Sera.”

  “Cal.” A slight tilt of her head. She probably thought it looked regal, but really it just reminded me of the round-faced child she’d been, pasty and burning with sullen, slinking rage. “He found you.”

  The nameless man passed her without a word, vanishing into the dark maw of the house. It was a house, a large one. Who would build it up here?

  Who cared?

  “Thought he was looking for any of the tribes.” We locked gazes, again, Seraphine’s dark and mine … whatever it was. The shift responded, pinfeathers and scales retreating, meatskin form settling on me with the weight of her will.

  Did she expect me to look like one of them, or was it just that we’d been children together? Her with her glass bones and me with scales and hair and claws coming in unpredictable waves.

  “He was. But I’ve spoken of you often.” Her smile wasn’t pleasant, but I suppose mine wasn’t either.

  Pammy scraped tears away with the flat of her hand. “Is this the entrance? To New Midian? Is it really true?”

  “It is.” Seraphine’s smile was supposed to be gentle, maybe. It showed her teeth far too much for my comfort. “Come on in, Pammy.”

  Pammy’s claw-feet scraped against the stairs. The blackened stubs on her back twitched, muscle flickering as she balanced. Up, and up again, and she passed by Seraphine without a look back. Which meant I had to follow, stepping on the groaning, worn-smooth wood. Holes in the porch roof let fitful starshine leak through, and the blackness through the door was a balm and a promise at once.

  I stopped, shoulder-to-shoulder with Seraphine. She facing the world, me turned toward this New Midian. “Am I welcome?”

  A slight, disdainful, chilling little laugh. “Very.” Seraphine moved slightly, and for a dizzying moment I was nine years old again, listening to that laugh. “Very welcome, Calpurnia.”

  It smells wrong, I realized, just as a stunning blow smashed against my head. Seraphine laughed again.

  “After all,” she continued, Pammy’s terrified scream echoing oddly behind the words, “I am very hungry.”

  * * *

  “Cal.” A sharp hissing whisper. Blood caking my face, everything hurt. “Wake up. Cal!”

  I groaned.

  A frantic jabbing at my ribs. My head rang. What the hell?

  “Cal, wake the fuck up.” Pammy sobbed in a breath, and I jolted fully into myself. Blinking away crusted blood, I scrambled up to hands and knees, searching for a wall to put my back to.

  I didn’t find one. I found iron bars as thick as my forearm, and a wretched stink, and sterile dirt that hadn’t seen light in a long, long time. And Pammy in the cage next to me, the faint gaseous light from above painting shadows on her face.

  No, not shadows. Bruises, deep and fresh.

  I coughed, rackingly. Spat to the side—the shift twinged and ached all the way through me. Now that I was conscious, the pain was roweled spurs all over. Scales flashed up, fur too, then retreated.

  No wonder she’d wanted me pink-skinned and soft.

  “What.” I coughed again, retching up something foul that might have been the last bit of meatskin food I ate, swallowed hard—never waste anything edible—and found out I could breathe. “The. What?”

  “Broke her arm.” Pammy had found a stick somewhere and used it to poke me; it dropped on the floor between our cages. “At least, I think so. There was another Breed down here, they took him—”

  “Who? Seraphine?” I winced, my head pounding. “Who else?” Who’s working with her?

  “Those … the nameless. Cal, she ate them, she hollowed them out. She’s halfway to being Titan. They all look the same, and they took another Breed away. He was worked over pretty good too, and she’d been draining him for a while.” Pammy pointed off into the darkness. “He was over there.”

  Four cages, familiar iron bars with dappled radiance dying slowly along the
ir edges. Berserker cages, the smaller ones. Nothing Titan-sized, but then, she didn’t need those. How had Seraphine brought them here?

  Probably only Baphomet knew, since it was his blessing in the iron, leaching away like the glow in the salve. Maybe Seraphine had been hunting for a while, since Midian fell, and the nameless shadows did all the heavy lifting. She would only need a few cages, because we were scattered to the four winds now.

  I scrubbed at my face as Pammy babbled on, trying to think through the noise in my skull. Grabbed Pammy’s hand to reassure her, and she finally quieted. There were sounds overhead—wet creakings, slapping noises, muffled howls.

  “That’s him,” she whispered. “Maldeane. He told me she got him the same way—a nameless came and found him. They bring her fresh Breed. He also said—”

  “Shhhh.” I took stock. Tank top and jeans; my boots were gone. They’d probably searched me, and found the knife. Under the thin scrim of cellar dirt on the floor was rock. Our truck and trailer were probably pulled off into the woods—she’d probably go through it for supplies, too.

  Resourceful Seraphine.

  The cages weren’t whole. The doors had been wrenched open, broken when Midian fell. A heavy chain wrapped around the doorfront of each one, locked with a padlock the size of a Berserker’s fist. Snugged tight enough, it kept the thing closed, and Seraphine probably kept the keys on her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Pammy whispered.

  The noise overhead crested, and a choked cry spiraled up into nothingness. I’d never passed words with fish-gilled Maldeane; he’d been one of the solitaries, swimming the underground rivers.

  Now I never would.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and I patted her hand.

  “Shhh. It’s all right.”

  “I wish we’d never left the carnival.”

  I don’t. I exhaled, sharply, and forced myself to think.

  Because if I knew Seraphine, they would come for Pammy first.

  * * *

  It was silent overhead, the silence of digestion. The shift burned, or maybe it was the bars.

  Didn’t matter. I tried again.

  Pammy’s shallow, rapid breathing echoed. She huddled in a ball in the corner of her cage, and it was hard to think with her hyperventilating.

  Forcing the shift this far was dangerous. There were some things that couldn’t elongate the way I needed them to, so it was a geometry problem, bone crackling slightly as I pushed further than I ever had. The skull was trickiest, because squeezing my brain in certain ways might even make me black out. Plus, I’d spent so long just showing off for the paying crowds, my control wasn’t what it—

  “Sssa!” I hissed in pain as a bar scraped along my narrow, naked hip, scoring a weal along my flank. A sick, appetizing draft of roasted pork rose. My pelvis creaked alarmingly, torqued almost double. Naked, sweat-greased, grimly hanging on to consciousness, I shifted a little more.

  Stealthy creakings overhead. The quiet had been so thick they were unnaturally loud, and I strained against the limits of bone and stretched-tight Breed flesh. My foot slid, nails scratching against bedrock, scrabbling for purchase, and I tumbled into a heap with a loud crackle, rolling in grit and a splatter of foulness.

  There were no bathrooms down here.

  Hands and knees, the shift retreating and my body shrinking back into normal dimensions, head pounding, the smoking burns all over me steaming and grinding with pain. I curled into a ball, and it was a good thing I’d already emptied myself in every possible way. Slick with effluvia, I rested.

  Outside the cage.

  Pammy scrabbled closer, retreated when the bars of her own cage fluoresced warningly. “Cal?” A shocked whisper.

  I’m fine. My voice wouldn’t work. Maybe I’d broken something. So tired. Soft black wings at the corner of my vision, beating in my brain.

  Soft and black like hers, before Midian burned.

  I spent a little while in a soupy kind of half consciousness, my burnt flesh smoking in the dimness. The cages hummed, and overhead the creakings took on new life.

  Thud. Thud. Thudthud.

  At first I thought it was my heartbeat, but Pammy made a tiny whining sound and I realized what it was.

  Feet. On the stairs.

  I strained to move, collapsed, strained again. Get up. Get up now.

  * * *

  She stopped to sniff the reek of roasting filling the cellar, and that was what saved both of us.

  I fell on Seraphine from behind, from the dark, as if I were Peloquin hunting in the ruins of the daylight world, outside the bounds of the law. My teeth sank in at the juncture between her shoulder and neck, and smoky-spiced wickedness filled my mouth as she shrieked, flailing across the stony floor.

  Hit the side of one cage, a fountain of blue-white sparks popping, and she howled as her own white flesh, bloated with her recent meal, seared. I tore a great mouthful of muscle free, spat, dug my claws in, tangling in her ribs. They had once been brittle; now, bolstered by the death of her own tribefolk, they were merely spongy-resilient.

  Pammy shrieked too, her arms through the bars, wicked claws slashing air as she tried to help. Seraphine spun just like the Tilt-A-Whirl ride, the cellar smearing like grease on slick cheap cardboard. I clung to her back like a habit, monkeylike, just as she had clung to mine during our voyage to Midian, whispering in my ear.

  In Midian I’ll walk. I’ll be a princess.

  I did not whisper. I bit. Again and again, and there was a clattering as the key ring sailed in a high arc, hitting Pammy’s cage with a heavy clanging.

  But I was weak, and she was flush with cannibal strength. Seraphine twisted, and I was flung loose, thrown across the cellar. Fetched up against a stone wall with a sickening crack, and the coppermad scent of my own blood-filled mouth and nose and eyes.

  “You bitch!” Seraphine raved, as she bore down on me. “Look what you’ve done!”

  I’ll do it again, too. My arms and legs wouldn’t work. Her will, giant pale brooding thing that it was, pressed down on me, the savagely mistreated shift responding sluggishly to my own expecting.

  She kicked me, once, and howled afresh, hopping back. She could walk, certainly, but she needed other hands to do her violence.

  There was a soft, slithering commotion at the stairs—the hollowed-out nameless ones, pale and stumbling, responding to their mistress’s call.

  Then, out of the dark, a harpy descended.

  Pammy leapt, her hands and feet smoking—she had clambered atop her cage once the front was open—and her foot-claws sank in with a heavy, meaty sound. Her hands were claws too, burst free of the facsimile of meatskin camouflage. Her head snaked forward, burnt stubs on her back twitching frantically. If she’d still had her wings, the buffeting would disorient her prey. Frothing, rearing back and striking again and again with snakelike speed, her teeth slicing effortlessly …

  She was beautiful, in the way only one of the Moon’s children could be.

  I crawled forward as Seraphine thrashed. Her cries rent quivering air; her nameless servants fell in writhing heaps, noisome sand tricking through rents and gouges in their pale exteriors.

  The cellar resounded with crunching and slurping.

  We ate our fill.

  * * *

  Night fell in great indigo waves across the mountain. At dusk we crept out to the well behind the house, and a sluicing of cold water woke me fully from post-gorging doze.

  Pammy made a happy humming sound, clicking her claws and emptying the bucket over her head. Fine bones and leathery skin unfurled, the prickles of black pinfeathers blooming as her wings creaked and crackled, expanding. All that stolen life could work wonders. It let Seraphine walk, and we had eaten our share. Watching Pammy’s wings spread and flesh themselves with feathers in the umber and blue of dusk, I shuddered. The burning crackled as it fell from my skin. Naked, honey-glowing in the dark, I dredged up another bucketful and washed away pain and roasting.

 
; Finally, dripping and shivering, I let Pammy close her arms and wings around me. We stood like that for a long time, my forehead against her breastbone, and we slowly warmed. Her wings kept making little sounds as they grew back, and her humming took on a deeper note. Her claws flexed, and she could stand straight if she wanted.

  Straight and proud.

  When the shivers were gone, thin traceries of steam rising from us both as we dried, I sighed.

  Pammy’s humming stopped. “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I’m so sorry, Cal.”

  Why? You’ve got your wings back. “Me too. I should’ve suspected she would…”

  “We ate her.”

  “Yes, we did. She was almost Titan, though. It wasn’t against the law.” At least, I hoped it wasn’t. There was no Lylesburg to tell us Baphomet’s will, no Baphomet to speak. We’d come all the way out here just on the hope that something could be salvaged.

  “If there’s a New Midian…” Tentatively.

  She was bird-timid, but not stupid. “There might be. We can look. Seraphine kept everything that came in the door, there’s probably cash hidden in that pile. Find our truck, too.”

  “I … I have my wings, now.” She spread them, and the sudden chill forced answering fur from my back and legs. A lovely, glossy pelt, black instead of changecolor now. “They’ll let us in. Both of us.” Hope lighting her beaky face, her hair raveling into black feathers along her shoulders, Pammy shifted from foot to foot. She probably couldn’t wait to get into the sky.

  I shrugged. Stepped back. “First we have to find it, Pammy. How about you go up and look around, see if you can spot our truck?” If she stayed in the wild places, she could hunt. Meat could be had. She wasn’t helpless now.

  Pammy didn’t need me.

  She outright danced now, but stayed on the ground. “You’ll stay? You won’t look without me? You won’t leave?”

  Fur eased over my breasts. The night wind ruffled it, and I stretched, luxuriously, tipping my head back to hide the sudden welling in my eyes. “I wouldn’t go to any Midian without you, Pammy. Go on, now.”