The Book of Flora

by Meg Elison

  “I’ll get you another basin,” Etta said gruffly. “I’ve used both.”

  Kelda sat up slowly, extending her arms over her head and arching her back. “That’s okay,” she said, trying to hold back a yawn. “I can wait.”

  Etta dumped both basins into their private toilet, then went out the door to one of the centrally located taps in their corner of Ommun. The taps pulled water from deep underground sources. Etta had told Kelda that she had learned about it when they first came here. Ommun was built in the old world for people to shelter from storms or war. The many-leveled structure was connected to a deep hidden spring, and it had a network of cisterns that filtered rainwater as well. In the mornings, crews went to work lighting fires to pipe warm water to nearly all inhabited quarters so that everyone could get a wash.

  Pump and pipe teams worked to maintain the vast plumbing throughout Ommun, making sure waste was safely flushed away to a dump spout downstream in the Misery, and that the clean water that came in wasn’t contaminated.

  When Etta came back with two more basins of warm water, Kelda washed her face. It was a marvel to her what advantages these people had in their underground city. It took a lot of people, but they had hot water, electric light, and enough food all year round. They were safe and secure and even happy. In their bathroom, a cake of lye soap sat, prettily golden and molded in the shape of a beehive. It smelled of honey and nut oil when she lathered her hands with it. This place was nothing like the twin cities in which she had grown up: one for men, one for women, and neither with wonders like these.

  “This city is so rich,” Kelda began, pulling on her deerskin clothes. They had lasted her through their time in Estiel. The women of Ommun had offered her a cotton gown, but she wouldn’t accept. She checked that the laces of her vest were tightly gathered together, remembering how distraught they had seemed at even a hint of her brown breasts showing underneath without a baby attached to them.

  “Guess so,” Etta replied.

  “So, if you’re not going to go out with the mish, what are you going to do?”

  Kelda tried to look preoccupied with lacing up her knee-high soft boots.

  “Whatever I want.” Etta wouldn’t face her. She was standing with her back to Kelda, dressing quickly. She had slept in her long underwear, despite the warmth of the room and the deep, clean quilts on their bed. She had rebuffed any attempt Kelda made to get closer, but Kelda understood that. After Estiel, it might be a long time.

  “What are you going to do?” Etta cast her a glance over one shoulder. Kelda popped up off the bed and set about making it.

  “Well, she called me to work in the nursery.”

  “Why?”

  Kelda laid the quilt down and smoothed it. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a hunter.” Etta shoved her guns home once she was dressed, setting them in their accustomed places. “You know how to tan hides and make bows and bowstrings. You can fish too, right?”

  Kelda nodded. “Right. And make fishhooks. I’ve planted and reaped, too. And really, I’d prefer to be up top, in the sun.”

  “Why don’t you tell her that?”

  Kelda shrugged. “She didn’t ask me what I prefer. She just gave me duties.”

  Etta sighed. “Like she knows. Don’t go.”

  Kelda looked around at the little windowless room. “What else will I do?”

  “Come with me.”

  The boys running the lift did not question them. The sun hit them like a physical weight, shining off their skin and narrowing their eyes. A fat rabbit ran past their feet as they walked away from Ommun, their backs to the river.

  Kelda went ahead, stomping in her deerskin boots, flattening bushes and waving gnats away from her face. When she was hunting, Kelda could be silent. Today, however, she was not a hunter. Etta had told her what to look for. She even had a small hand-drawn picture of the two possibilities stuck into her pack, from Alice. But the woods here, near the bend in the Misery, were overgrown and lush. Bees hummed past them lazily in the thick, fragrant late-summer air. Kelda could smell the layers of rot in the forest floor, ripe with dead squirrels and sickly-sweet decaying berries. Conditions like these made it hard to focus on anything, especially as she kept catching the faint whiff of a predator somewhere not too far off.

  Kelda was looking up at the trees. “You know, cats will lie up on tree branches. I’ve seen it, while hunting. Sometimes they’ll drag a deer up there, eat it all day, and then drop what’s left. Just raining dead deer. You ever see that?”

  Etta picked through the bushes at the edge of the rough trail Kelda was blazing. “I’ve heard rock cats will do that. Never seen it, though.”

  She glanced up nervously, scanning the dark canopy of overlapping branches above their heads.

  Etta could not stand still. She couldn’t stay in Ommun and take on domestic work. Everyone there made her itch beneath her skin. Ina was not well. Her face had taken on a look like she was being pinched continually under her clothes. Her thinness was shockingly evident, with sharp angles jutting out everywhere around her battered wooden belly. Her eyes were too large, too dark. She had taken to working in the nursery over the last few months, spending all her time quieting crying babies and reading to the toddlers.

  Even worse was Alma, who seemed to hover over Etta’s shoulder at every turn, wanting to whisper something. Etta thought of her voice, saying that Etta was full of ghosts.

  Shit, Etta thought. I am now.

  Etta pushed forward, scanning over the riotous shrubs and vines and ferns that strangled one another for the dappled sunlight that barely shone through. She had not yet found what she was looking for.

  She couldn’t stand Alice, or Flora, or anyone who had known her at home. She couldn’t stand Sheba, or any of the rescued women from the harem. Some of them had gathered to talk about what had happened, and to comfort one another and cry. Etta had not joined them.

  Kelda had, and she had returned clearer eyed and with a weight visibly lifted from her. In the nights after they had returned to Ommun, she had sometimes held Etta when she couldn’t sleep. When Kelda invariably dropped into a deep, seamless slumber, Etta had gotten up and paced the empty metal hallways of Ommun’s underground city.

  It had taken nearly a month after the escape from Estiel for anything to feel like normal life again. Ommun took in all refugees, gladly. The Leaf had been more than happy to adjust provisions and even break into storage to feed everyone.

  Ommun was too large by far for the number of people in it. Empty rooms abounded, and everyone was settled into their own or a shared space. Ina was living alone again, but many of the women chose to room together. One by one they picked up work spinning or sewing or testing the water that flowed in. A few chose to go topside daily with the farmers.

  Sheba, Etta’s wordless, wantless rescue girl taken from slavers who had held her all her life had become another of Alma’s attendants, to Etta’s surprise. The girl had desired nothing after her rescue from Jamestown, not even a name. Her silence and her bearing had not changed, but her eyes followed Alma’s glow and magisterial presence with awe verging on reverence.

  Alma’s triplets, including Etta’s namesake, were flourishing. Each girl had dainty rolls of fat on her back and ringing her dimply thighs. They were always at Alma’s breasts or in the arms of one of the many nursing women. Kelda had not believed in the multiple birth at first. She thought it was a story or some kind of metaphor. As the babies grew, their eerie similarity and identical faces did the work of convincing all the newcomers. The other twins running around Ommun did the rest.

  People like Kelda, who rarely saw babies and had never seen multiples, were overwhelmed by the strangeness of Ommun. People like Sheba, who had come from nothing and less than nothing, were transported by the mere existence of this place.

  But Etta could not help but compare it to Nowhere.

  Nowhere had been better, hadn’t it? Hadn’t they been more free?

&nbs
p; Not free, Etta thought. Not free to live with Alice, or tell my mother that I loved her. Not free to be Eddy. And Tommy and the other fancy boys—were they free?

  Some of the catamites from Estiel had taken to living together in a block of adjoining rooms in Ommun. There were whispers about that already.

  In her own mind, Etta had to admit that Ommun and Nowhere were very much alike, aside from the peculiar faith of the underground people and their uncanny fertility.

  It’s the same shit. Nobody likes what doesn’t breed. Nobody wants to waste women. But if scarcity is the problem, why worry what the fancy boys are up to? Whose business is it? They can’t all be making babies all the time.

  Etta’s fingers touched a fuzzy white clump of berries atop a tall, reedy bush. She stopped and stared at them a moment. She brought her face close and sniffed.

  “Is that it? The plant you’re looking for?” Kelda asked hopefully.

  “No,” Etta said, wiping her fingertips on the legs of her pants. “Close, but that’s not it.”

  Kelda walked on dejectedly.

  And anyhow, if they’re so lucky in Ommun, why not let everybody be who they’re going to be? It’s not even a problem for them. They’ve got Alma having babies two and three at a time. What’s a few women sleeping together beside that?

  Etta thought of the faces at breakfast when she and Kelda showed up together. The way people from Ommun looked them over, as though they hadn’t washed properly. It wasn’t the same look they gave the other women who were rooming together. It was as if they could see her essential nature—the same way she and Kelda had first seen each other.

  I know what you are.

  Ghosts.

  Kelda called back from farther ahead, behind a clump of moss-covered trees. “I think I’ve got something!”

  Etta jogged to catch up, holding her pack so it didn’t bounce the guns out of her waistband.

  Kelda was holding one of Alice’s drawings in her outstretched hand, looking at the plant that came up to her neck.

  “That looks like this one, doesn’t it?”

  Etta frowned in concentration, comparing the two. She cut a tiny section of the hard, whitish berries with her thumbnail and sniffed.

  “Bitter, just like Alice said. I think this might be it, Kelda.”

  “And this is the medicine?”

  “Yes,” Etta said, producing a knife and cutting the crowded heads off the plant, taking berries, stem, and leaf just to be sure.

  “Well, we’re not going to make it back to Ommun before dark,” Kelda said, a slight whine in her voice.

  “No, we won’t.”

  “But we could go back to that little house we saw. The one from this morning?”

  The little house Kelda was talking about had been a mostly stone cottage full of the metal skeletons of old-world furniture and almost entirely taken over by squirrels. Still, it had a stone fireplace and would keep them safer than sleeping in the open.

  “Yeah, let’s head back there.”

  Kelda took Etta’s bow from her back and plucked at the string. “I’m going to shoot us something to eat.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Etta said. She was starving. They had walked all day and had eaten only a thin porridge with summer fruits that morning.

  But Alice said that all these plants are basically poison, and the trick is to take just enough. So that means I’ll probably end up shitting and puking, and I’d just as soon have a belly full of water as one full of hot fish or deer meat.

  “Well, I am,” Kelda laughed. She struck out again, her tread becoming surprisingly quiet as she made her way back in the direction of the old cottage. “I’m hoping for another rabbit. I’ll eat two, if you won’t have one.”

  “Fine,” Etta said distractedly. She was looking over the plant matter in her hands.

  Make tea. Pulverize the whole thing and steep in hot water, but don’t boil it. It’ll taste awful and bitter, so add honey if you have it. Drink as much as you can bear. If you don’t feel sick, it’s not enough. If you get too dizzy to stand, it’s probably too much.

  Alice’s advice had come from diaries and distant memory. In her work in Nowhere, she had helped Midwives dose women who had begun to miscarry and wanted help, but no one had asked to be spared pregnancy altogether. There were stories from past Midwives where that had been the case, but the practice had become less and less common. There was only that one book from the old world where Alice had found the word for this procedure: abortion. It was a word neither one of them had ever said out loud.

  Just enough poison to kill you but not me, little Lion.

  Addressing herself to the parasite inside her, even for just a moment, made her weak and shaky with revulsion. Her body felt like an atlas of betrayal, swelling with treachery and planting sedition in her dreams. She felt like she was dragging an animal on a leash, but the animal was her. She could not exist in her body at all without knowing that although the Lion’s leather straps were long gone from her wrists and ankles, his life was in her. His hope and his plans for the future lived on, eating her blood and her body to feed itself.

  She stroked the poisonous berries and quickened her pace.

  That ends tonight. It all ends tonight. If I could cut off the parts of me that keep you alive and leave them bleeding in this forest, I would. But this will have to be enough.

  And how many more back in Ommun were infected with this same disease? How many of them carried Lion-seed in their bellies? How many little Paws would be born in the spring?

  I can bring the poison cure back with me, Etta thought. I can save them again.

  She groped for Eddy, her other self, her mirror. She remembered the feeling at last of being whole and perfect, working together as though she was his right hand and he was her left, united at last as we instead of I. But ever since the day she first woke to the nausea and sickening tenderness of this invader living inside her, Eddy had been nowhere to be found. He could not do this with her. He would not drag this animal body around as long as its doubled traitor heart kept beating.

  She didn’t blame him. And she could not wait to feel him return.

  CHAPTER 6

  OMMUN

  Flora went to Alma first thing in the morning but found that she was out of her apartments already. Two women came out her door, carrying three tightly wrapped babies.

  “Oh, isn’t Alma here?” Flora smiled at the three and looked toward the door.

  Eliza’s black braid looked hastily done, and there were circles under her eyes. She held the child tighter. “The Prophet is out among the stake,” she said very formally.

  Lucy, her pink eyes shining in her pale face, reached out and put a hand on Eliza. She turned her kind face toward Flora. “Please don’t mind my Sister. She’s had a loss, and she’s upset.”

  Eliza’s mouth hardened. Flora dipped her head and looked at the floor.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s been a long time since anyone here has lost a child. The Prophet says it must be a sign.”

  Eliza busied herself with the children in her arms.

  “Do you know where I might find her?”

  Lucy nodded. “She went to find a medical laboratory somewhere in the unused spaces that Sister Alice can use to fulfill her calling. She says Heavenly Mother told her there would be one, but she must find it.”

  Flora nodded. “Which way to the unused spaces?”

  Lucy explained which parts of Ommun’s alphanumerical grid were uninhabited, and gave Flora an idea of which level Alma might be on now.

  “Thank you,” Flora said quietly. Eliza was staring daggers at her before she left. Flora pretended that she did not see.

  Ommun spread out for miles beneath the earth, with a vaguely square shape. The grid helped by setting cardinal directions and establishing units of distance, and the coordinates were painted in fading old-world stencils at every corner. Even so, nothing could change the fact that they were in a dar
k burrow under the dirt.

  The city had limited electricity, with scheduled days and times for most services. The corridors were always lit during daytime hours, but the uninhabited parts of the grid were disconnected to keep them from draining power. Flora hadn’t thought about this until she realized she was getting deeper into darkness without any source of light. She had nothing on her that would help.

  She peered into the brown dimness that faded to black and saw something glowing, off to the right, two junctions down.

  She walked briskly toward it, trying not to be afraid. She rounded a corner and saw Alma, her hair in tight braids, a lantern held in a gloved hand.

  “Prophet,” Flora said in a low voice.

  Alma turned and raised her lantern higher. “Flora. From Nowhere.”

  Flora smiled but shook her head. “Not really. From Jeff City.”

  Alma’s face darkened somewhat, growing sad. “You were in Estiel.”

  “Yes, I was. Anyway, I was wondering if I could talk with you a bit.”

  Alma gestured with the lantern, and Flora caught up so they could walk together.

  Some of the old steel doors were marked. The ones close to the main tunnel line had the same numbers that indicated living quarters elsewhere in Ommun. Others had designations that Flora had not seen before: “SEED REPOSITORY.” “WOODWORKING SHOP.” “WAR ROOM.”

  How much war fits in one room? Flora wondered. She thought of the harem in Estiel. A lot, I guess.

  She realized Alma was not going to speak first.

  “So, I was wondering why I didn’t receive a calling, like everyone else.” She looked sideways at Alma’s serene and unlined face. “I thought maybe your argument with Eddy . . . Etta kept you from telling us the rest.”

  Alma chuckled. “Sister Etta didn’t argue with me. She argued with Heavenly Mother. That’s how you end up in the belly of a whale.”

  Flora didn’t know what that meant, and so pressed on. “Well, I’m not here to argue. I would like to be useful. So I’d like a calling. I am trained as a weaver. There’s no silkworms here, or I’d get back to throwing silk without a second thought. I’ve seen the spinning and weaving operation the Leaf has here in Ommun. I believe I could be of service.”