“My brother Chima searched far and wide to find a butcher in need of a cleaver. Told him about this perfect knife. That butcher came one day and traded Cleaver a whole goat for his weapon.”
Uh-oh.
“That’s right, Doli. Without his legendary knife, fat old Cleaver had no chance to defend his wall. I took it away from him with only a single wound. A clever boy, that Chima. Much smarter than his older brother, that’s for sure.”
We are leaping, soaring over yet another dead zone.
When we touch down, the slum looks like any other. The screams are the same. The crackle of flames.
I almost do not recognize the stick-thin boy running at me. His eyes burn with evil and hatred. As the rag covering his face falls away, I see the pink smear of flesh that is his face and recognize my own brother.
“Chima,” I say. Or maybe I only think his name.
My head rings with the impact of metal on metal. Chima has set a trap. Our wall surges into my vision just before it collapses onto me. The disintegrating rock smashes into my body, pulls me down in a wave of rubble. As the pain of the reverberation lances through my head, I pray for my prison to shatter, to fracture and fall away like plaster. I pray for Chima to be victorious. I pray for my own death.
But the strength of the Helmet will not succumb to prayer.
The armor is intact. I feel my arm questing through the broken shards. A slab of powdery cement scrapes off my visor and falls away. I sit up from the bed of sharp rock. Chima falls upon me, vicious, swinging my old rebar spear.
“Die, demon,” he screams, each word a guttural cough. “Why won’t you die?”
He is too close. My Helmet grabs Chima with one hand. Pulls him toward me and slams him onto his back. I hear his ribs snapping against the uneven rubble. Yet he continues to roar.
A warrior.
I choke down tears as my armored fingers crush my brother’s throat. Blinking, I focus on his face. This sweet boy whom I raised and protected for so many years. When he screams, I bite through my own lips and scream with him.
“I love you, Chima,” I sputter.
I cannot close my eyes to the horrible sight.
The one I love more than myself is dying inches from me. Suffocating with a broken neck. And all I can do is greedily memorize his features. Each fleck of shrapnel in his cheeks. His smoke-black eyes. Thick, arched eyebrows, twisted in venomous anger. In a moment, my body will leap away empty-handed. These memories will be all that I can carry.
The life leaves his eyes and I feel it leave my own, as well. My little brother chokes, chest heaving, and his jaw moves. Mouths a final word.
Ajani.
* * *
—
It is not until later that I receive Chima’s gift.
He found the answer in the shrapnel embedded in his face. Said it hurt him because of the radio transmissions between Helmets. And my Chima recognized a weak spot. Where there is radio, he must have thought, there is an antenna. Destroy the antenna and the radio cannot function.
Such a clever boy.
Our beautiful wall fell and pinned my Helmet in its ruin. Brave as a lion, Chima struck again and again. His blows were not random. Each landed in one spot at the base of my spine. The armored lump resting there was damaged, but not destroyed. Not yet.
It happens while I’m crossing the dancing hills, the familiar nibble of radiation in my legs. I am midleap when I feel something wrong. I open my eyes and notice the ground is coming too fast. My Helmet is not reacting. Instinctively, I try to thrust out my hands before I hit the poisoned dirt and rock.
I smash into the toxic hardpack like a meteorite.
Rolling, limbs flailing, rocks battering my ribs and head—I luxuriate in the pain. Each gasp is a wonder, a reminder that I am still alive inside this cage. My own arms and legs are weak as dead grass but the Helmet is amplifying my tiniest movements. Climbing to my knees, I feel the venomous heat pouring up out of the ground and into my face. Sweat drips from my forehead and streaks the inside of my visor. The orange flash of Doli is rapidly disappearing ahead. Only enemies wait behind me.
My wall is gone. My brother gone.
I scramble to my feet and make a clumsy leap after Doli. My powered legs catapult my body into the air. It is a jerky, mechanical leap that sends me cutting through the sky like a bullet. There is no feel of wind on my face, no roar of the air in my ears. Even so, I find that for the first time I enjoy the leap.
As we near the walled city, other incoming Helmets join us. It takes all of my concentration to maintain the scripted movements that my body has repeated day after day: Form in a line outside the city. March through the gate. Down narrow alleys. Every nerve in my body is pleading, begging for me to run away. Rip this Helmet off my flesh. Feel the air on my skin.
But Doli marches ahead of me. Her frame is so small. Armor beginning to flake from our constant trips through the dancing hills. She is trapped, just as I was. Just as all Helmets are.
And I cannot abandon her.
On schedule, we enter the feeding tunnel. I march in careful step until I reach my hole in the wall. I stand the right distance away from Doli, face the wall, and draw on every last shred of my willpower to keep my superpowered limbs perfectly still. That cursed umbilical tube emerges and my stomach spasms as the blind, grasping appendage delivers sustenance and removes waste.
Snap, snap, snap.
The overhead lights blink out. We are left in semidarkness, an endless row of shadowed statues standing at attention. No movement, no sound. Except the quiet, oh so quiet, grind of my Helmet.
I turn my head slightly to the left, to see Doli. Nothing happens. No alarm sounds.
In this world of sameness, I am miraculously different. A sculpted man come to life and alone in the company of my fellow works of art. I gingerly reach up and take my Helmet in both hands. My fingers are so strong; I must be careful. Gently, I pull my visor straight up.
Metal strains. The visor hisses at the neck as the first rip appears. The helmet comes unmarried from the armor.
And finally, blissfully, cool air washes over my filthy face.
Smells. I can smell wet concrete around me. The strange chemical smell from the umbilical devices. My own breath and hair and skin take on a long-forgotten stink in contrast to these new odors. I sniff deeply and nearly cry out from the joy of air rushing into my nostrils. My tears evaporate from my cheeks and the feeling is blessed. Finally, I remember Doli.
She stands loyally next to me, as always, facing her wall.
I place a hand on her shoulder. In all the massacres and slaughter, our Helmets have never touched. I don’t even really know that she is a she. It could be anyone in there. Leaning over, I look into her visor. In the reflection, I see my lips are flecked with blood, lost in a tightly curled beard, and my cheeks streaked with sweat. I notice that I am smiling, my teeth yellow and bright in the darkened corridor.
“I have been looking forward to meeting you for a long time, Doli,” I whisper. “You do not know this, but we have had many conversations. We are old friends.”
What must she be thinking? This change in routine. To be on the cusp of freedom after so long. Countless years of bloodshed and evil and those frowning monsters shouting down accusations of sin and responsibility.
With both hands, I take hold of her helmet.
Squeezing, I gently pull the visor up. A seam appears at the neck. Squealing, the metal parts. A putrid stench spews from the gap. I retch once before I can hold my breath. In a last burst, I tear the visor off. Stumbling backward, gasping for air, I finally meet Doli.
She is a she.
At first, I think Doli is smiling at me. And then I realize that she has no lips. Her teeth are bared at me in a rictus of pain and insanity. She has chewed through her own mouth and swallowed most of it a
nd done the same for large pieces of her tongue. It has healed and been eaten again. Bits of rotting flesh line the inside of her visor. Blood and vomit and saliva coat the interior of her visor, obscuring the view.
I realize it is possible that Doli has never even seen me.
Clumps of hair cling to her peeling scalp. A stiff strand is plastered over one of her eyes. She has had no way to move it, maybe for years. Her eyes roll idiotically in their sockets. She moans, and I think of my murdered brother.
“I’m so sorry, Doli,” I say.
With all the gentleness I can muster, I push the crusted hair out of her eyes. Smooth it back in an uneven mass behind her ears. Then, reverently, I fit her visor back over her head. I press it down hard, crushing the metal seal back together. Then, I do the same for myself. Turn and face my own patch of nothing.
I leave Doli there, small, facing the blank wall.
* * *
—
The Triumvirate guides us.
The three man-things huddle together behind the towering wooden wall of their bench. Twisted faces peering down from above. But I have leapt higher in my months-long orgy of murder. I have vaulted city walls and crushed huddling families to ruin under my boots. Brushed my fingers over the throats of men and left yawning corpses. I have heard wild flames licking the bodies of the fallen.
We thousand Helmets stand at attention in a sweeping semicircle, arms by our sides, facing the bench, a mute audience held captive. Forced to absorb blame and abuse and madness. Each of us a slave to his own machine.
All save one.
As they do every morning, the Triumvirate speaks together, finishing each other’s sentences. The three-headed monster is here on schedule to lay down its sins upon our strong shoulders.
“War criminals,” says the First, voice booming.
“Are you not ashamed?” howls the Second.
“Murderers, know that your path leads to death,” mutters the Third.
And I take a step forward.
“Your grisly work…,” says the First, trailing off. The old man sees me. Blinks his shark eyes sleepily, not believing it.
“Criminals responsible for atrocity,” says the Second, rotely.
I throw off my helmet and break into a trot, weaving between the rows of gleaming statues, gaining speed.
The First shoves the Second on the shoulder, points at me frantically.
“Killers!” booms the Third, clueless, as the Second gives him a push.
I launch myself upward, rising above the wooden wall in a single bound. My body is a majestic suit of golden armor, soaring. I thrust out my rippling metallic arms like wings. At the top of my arc, at my perfect zenith, I gaze down. In my shadow, the Triumvirate gape up at me.
Scared old men with dirty minds and clean hands.
Once, I had a little brother named Chima. He slept with his mouth open. Together, we conquered a wall and built our lives in its safety. Our wall was made to shelter and protect. Others are made to confine and control. But no wall yet built can deflect the knifing flight of blame. The sin circles above, waiting for its moment. And one day it will strike its true target.
My fingers collapse into fists. Legs brace for impact. The three old men hold each other and wail for mercy. But there is no mercy.
At last, I am ready to sin.
BLOOD MEMORY
The hideous child sat up in its cradle and shrieked in delight, “I am old as an oak in the woods, but I never saw a sight such as this!”
—“Fairy Changeling,” a folktale (date unknown)
When Beatrix was diagnosed, I made a promise to her that I would do everything I could to heal her. It’s not a promise I ever intended to break.
She’s my daughter, no matter what or how hard it is. My MawMaw used to set me on her lap and tell me that our blood is all we’re given and it’s all we can hope to leave behind. Sure, little Bea was an odd duck. She didn’t talk much or cry or laugh like the other children. She just stared—with eyes like stones—looking for patterns in sunlight or in the carpet or wallpaper. The doctors couldn’t make heads or tails of her. So, they called it autism and left it at that.
But I promised her.
Now, staring into my twelve-year-old daughter’s black, unblinking eyes, I’m telling myself that again and again. Bea clings to me, her body leaning halfway out of the teleporter gate. Her thin fingers claw at my forearm and my ears buzz from the sucking hiss of the machine’s open mouth. Her dark brown face is empty, emotionless as always, and the ends of her long black braids are skimming through the oil-gleam of the gate’s surface, lost and reappearing in spitting rainbows of color.
“Mama,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s in pain.
Nothing ever came easy for my little Bea.
This girl may have been born with my same dark eyes, but I could never pretend to understand what she sees from behind those flat mirrors. The doctors put her on the spectrum, but if I’m telling myself the truth—and now is the time, why not?—I always felt like there was somebody else trapped within my daughter’s body, something else, watching me from inside her skin.
“Mama,” she says, face flashing with light. “It’s pretty.”
Bea’s lips curl into the ghost of a smile and for an instant I catch sight of a different person—a purer reflection of myself and of my husband, too. But I can’t let myself think about him right now.
Bea’s fingernails are tracing hot ravines down my arm as she pulls me closer. I manage to swallow a moan, molars clamping down on the skin of my cheeks. The familiar words surge through my mind like a prayer.
You are my baby. You are my blood. My baby. My blood.
I’ve been forcing these words through my mind for a long time, picking them up like rocks and carrying them with me since the day Beatrix and I met each other in a dark hospital room. In the stink of ozone and fear, both of us were so close to crossing over to the other side. Taking her in my arms that day, I saw her little face, those eyes, and I knew in my heart she would never be the person I imagined my daughter might be.
* * *
—
Nothing ever came easy. Not even in our post-transmission world.
The teleporter gates give us what we need, when we need it. Drop something into the gate and it’s broken down to atoms, sent over as information, and put back together again in another place. The thing is destroyed, and then reborn.
It’s only the pattern of it that’s important.
If you know the pattern of a thing—even a strange, broken thing—then you can piece it back together. In the end, we’re all just patterns, and our babies are the patterns we leave behind, echoes of ourselves that grow louder instead of fading.
Those gates sure changed the world.
Wars gave them to us. Military people fired the first teleporter gates like missiles, scooping up buildings and bunkers where terrorists hid. Then mining companies started pushing industrial versions into solid rock, processing whole mountains. NASA put one on the International Space Station and they started flinging more into space, to the moon and Mars and Europa. Here on Earth, vending machines could suddenly deliver anything. By now, omnigates are an everyday appliance, like a dishwasher or a garbage disposal. Most people have one at home for throwing away trash or receiving deliveries.
Ours is the size of a big trash can with a lid on top. We keep it in the basement.
Turns out, knowing the pattern is enough to put things back together, but not people. The trip through a gate breaks anything that lives. What comes out looks the same as what went in, but it’s crazy, spitting and screaming and dying within seconds. There’s something—some pattern of the mind—that gets lost in there.
At night, with my husband asleep beside me, I’ve often wondered if the thing that can’t find its way out is a person’
s soul. I think maybe the mortal parts of us get sent over, but not the divine—the weightless part that lives on even after our bodies are gone.
The people in lab coats put one of everything through the gate—a Noah’s ark of insanity. After I became a mother, I watched the videos online. Monkeys writhing out with black eyes and bared fangs, choking on their own tongues. Pigs and cats and lab mice crawling out as dried, dying husks. Nematodes, the stupid little worms, they come through fine, wiggling and happy.
Maybe worms don’t have souls. Or, who knows, maybe they’re just at peace?
* * *
—
On the day Bea was born, I already knew something was wrong before we reached the hospital. The unborn baby didn’t feel right, a painful knot inside me. My husband, Kemper, was holding my hand and grinning with excitement. He had a timer that he bought special for this occasion hanging around his neck, like a gym coach.
But I just felt a deep, gut-wrenching sense of dread.
Later, wearing a backless hospital gown under fluorescent lights, I fought to give birth. Hour after hour, I pushed, my arms swollen and marked with purple-blue gashes from the IVs, my vision flashing red from squeezing my eyes closed so tight. Breathing through my teeth, I tried to focus on the next ten seconds.
For thirty hours, I lived ten seconds at a time.
I remember the fat drops of rain that thumped like moths against the black windows of the delivery room. A freak storm was growing in the night, dark waterfalls cascading down from vacuum-kissed heights. As the gale raged, each droplet exploded against cold glass, pulling its neighbors down into the abyss.
Doctors said the baby couldn’t get positioned. Worst case, they’d order up a C-section and take her out that way. But I wasn’t through trying.
When the lightning storm hit, nobody came right away. The overhead lights blinked out and emergency backups flickered on, glowing crimson like dying embers. Nurses were sprinting through the dim hallway outside, yelling about a fire. Kemper held my hand and we waited until a nurse finally rushed inside.
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