by Pierce Brown
He sighs. “Can me kids go to their room? They don’t need to be around women like you.” He nods to our guns. Volga looks ashamed.
“Just the little one,” she says. “The boy stays where we can see him.”
Cormac’s son drags a chair close to the fire and sits staring at it with his arms crossed. Brea looks at us, to her father. “Go on,” he says with a little smile. “Brea. Go.” She looks at the ground and slips away to the room, closing the door with barely a sound.
Cormac sighs. “Addled girl, but sweet. Appreciate the kindness.” His chair creaks as he leans back in it. “There was some men lookin’ for you. But I reckon you know that. Bad sort.”
“Red Hand?” I ask.
“That’s right,” he says with a solemn face. “Lookin’ for a Gold, they said. Victra au Julii. Didn’t say anything about the two of you.” Volga meets my eyes. “That’s her, ain’t it? The Julii? They showed us a holo. If they find out you were here…”
“They won’t,” Volga says. “We will not endanger your family.”
“We already have,” I say. Cormac and I know the rules.
“What’s done’s done,” Cormac says. “Red Hand don’t trouble us much, being as we’re clan of the Reaper, but since the Alltribe started kicking in their teeth, they come down the coast more often. They’ll butcher the village for this. Anyone else see you come in?”
I shake my head, watching him very carefully. “We just need to use your transmitter. Reach Julii’s people and it’s like we were never here. Can you help us with that?”
“Yut,” he says. “Got the code to the building, I do. You wanna go now?”
Seeing something I don’t, Volga lets her finger click the safety off her rifle. Her voice goes deep and husky. “You legion?”
He chuckles. “Fourth. Formerly.”
“Why formerly? War’s still on.”
He pulls up his right leg and sets it on the table, jerking his pants up to show a clunky artificial limb. “Got this baby in the Rat War. Now I’m just a fisherman. Speakin’ o’ which, we got some extra stew and bread if you’re hungry.”
My stomach growls, but it doesn’t seem smart to take food from someone we don’t know. Not with the Red Hand crawlin’ about. “You think I poisoned me stew before you came in here?” he asks. “That’s some swell foresight I got. Go on. I’ll sit here, hands where you can see ’em. Even if I was the Fury herself, doubt I’d try much with an Obsidian and a Peerless under me roof with me children.”
* * *
—
Warm and filled with soup and fresh bread, I watch Cormac flirt with Volga. He’s tied her about his finger with Rat War stories. He seems nice as they come, but so was Ephraim. Volga peeks in periodically on Victra like a worrying maid, and paces as if it was her baby about to be delivered. She only sits back at the table with Cormac and me when Victra yells something with a lot of syllables at her.
Victra’s second stage of labor is not long in lasting. The storm comes in full outside as I bring her a glass of water. She chugs it down in one gulp. Sleet clatters its claws against the window. “How are our hosts?”
“I think the girl’s sleeping. Boy’s just stewin’, and Cormac’s spinning stories to Volga now.”
“You trust him?” Victra asks.
“No. Don’t know him. I say we tie him up.”
“This is my planet,” she says. “I don’t fear a man and two children.”
“But you got a blood war on you. You know well as I do what that means.” She doesn’t dismiss me this time.
“If only the world still had manners.” She sighs longingly. “That’ll be all, thank you.”
I don’t leave.
“You know, I’m not an idiot,” I say. “I’ve seen more babies born than you have. Delivered half a dozen myself.”
She crosses her arms and leans against the wall. Still naked. Her skin lit ruby by the heater’s glowing coils. “Let me guess, it’s a tribal tradition.”
“That’s right.” I cross my arms. “Me ma taught me, and her ma taught her.”
“My mother taught me how to blockade a planet with nothing but asteroids and gravity haulers,” she replies.
“And how useful is that now?”
“I’m in labor. Please spare me the recitation of your culture’s antiquated but treasured ways. Shut the door behind you. Volga is like a wounded puppy.”
I set my shoulders square up with her. “All’s I’m saying is it’s at least several…or more weeks late…right? You said that yourself. You might need help.”
“All my babies are fashionably late,” she replies. She sighs when she sees I’m not leaving. “You deliver that blind one? The one in the Citadel?”
“His name’s Liam.”
“Was he blind at birth or did you boggle it up?”
“Tryin’ to make me cry and run away?” I ask. She was. Words don’t stab so deep as they used to. “He was premature. And yeah. I was there. I cut the lifestring with my own hands.”
“Lifestring? Quaint. Your sister didn’t cut it herself?” she asks in surprise.
“You lot do that?”
She frowns. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“I just thought you had doctors. Morphone. Crystal glasses to sip from.”
“Please. Only Pixies use morphone and the only person I had in my room when I gave birth to my three girls is the man that put them inside me.” She softens and laughs. Maybe she realizes we’ve got something in common after all. “Hilarious really. I’ve seen that man pull a knife out of his own eye and keep running. I’ve seen him face down a Stained and smile. But he was shaking like a leaf soon as he saw me dilate. Like he’s never been down there before. Men. If I asked him to cut the cord, he’d probably faint. It’s the mother’s job. You should know that.”
“My sister chose who got to cut it,” I say. “It’s an honor.”
“Oh please. It may seem insignificant, but it’s enfeebling. It’s saying she’s too weak to do it herself. It’s important to finish the things you start, Blister. Remember that when you have a little squirt. What statement does it make to your baby if you let someone else do it? Lying there with women sopping your brow with wet cloths and preening over you like you’re a plague victim?” She wrinkles her nose and juts her jaw upward. “Tigresses don’t need nursemaids. Neither should we.”
“My sister wasn’t weak.”
“Maybe not. But she let others convince her she was.”
“You do realize we’re not all you.”
“I’m dreadfully aware of that.”
“Act all high and mighty. Fact is you can afford to be brave. If that’s what you wanna call it. Bet you had doctors on standby. A whole team, right? It was bloody scary seeing my sister screamin’ like that, not knowing if she would die. No blood bags, no plasma.”
“Did she hemorrhage?” Victra asks.
I nod. “I didn’t know someone had that much blood.” Victra says nothing. “I loved her so much. You know? I was afraid. My hands were shakin’ on the scissors so bad I thought I’d take out my own eye. Sister’s bleedin’ there, I thought they’d shoo me out. But all those women were looking at me, waiting for me to do my part. And she was smiling, pale as milk. Of all those women, she chose me. Me.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t mean you’re weak to ask for help. But we’ll do it your way.”
I head to the door.
“Harmony has reason to hate me, and you,” she says. I stop and turn slightly. “My mother knew of a radiation leak in her clan’s mine. Deeming it advantageous from a tax perspective, she chose not to make immediate repairs. Radiation medication was distributed to the Gammas via the Laureltide boxes. As I understood it, the intent was for them to sell it to the other clans. Instead, the Gammas hoarded it while the others died due to tribal grudges. I thought my mother’s p
lans derailed. Then she told me that their greed was exactly according to plan. I remember her words to this day. ‘They’ll be too busy hating each other to ever hate us.’ She came down to distribute medicine herself a month later. Benificent.”
“And you just let it happen?” I ask, unsurprised by the cruelty of the logic.
“I wasn’t who I am now. Why didn’t you tell Volga to shoot Harmony? She killed your family. Was it because you thought I would kill Volga before she could pull the trigger?”
“Would you have?”
“Yes. I protect mine above all else, because no one else ever does. So?”
I discovered the truth to her words in my cell.
I’ve chewed on the question she asks for days as we scrambled across the highlands. I didn’t know at the time why I told Volga not to shoot. There was too much anger and confusion to really suss it. But it wasn’t fear. “Harmony will pay the debt she owes me,” I say. “Not your baby.”
She measures me a long time before speaking. “Revenge is best dealt with a patient hand. With what Fig gave you when she died, you won’t have to wait long.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“I don’t know, not entirely. But it was what made Fig…different. I am different. I know that. I had things you didn’t. But I saw evil too. Only difference is you saw the bottom, I saw the top. I wasn’t born the woman I am. I made me. That’s the problem with your people. You’re arrogant. So busy preaching you need a clan to do everything. But you take the clan away, and you fall apart. Like you did in that cell. So easy to blame others for failing you, for leaving you, for mistreating you.” She sets her hands on her belly, grimacing at the pain as a spasm flickers across it. “Some things are about the power of one. With what you have in your head, you need to know that. Now, if you can exist without tormenting me with sympathy, I’ll show you what a woman can do by herself. But first, be a dear, and tell Volga to tie up our hosts.” She smiles nastily. “As an unctuous girl once said: we don’t know them.”
* * *
—
Victra hunches over as the storm rattles the windows, consumed with and by her labor so that nothing exists in the world except the life inside her. Her triceps flex as her hands grip her muscled thighs. Her feet are planted on the stone floor over a thin layer of linens, like she’s about to take flight. Her razor waits by her foot.
She is not invulnerable like I thought. She feels the pain. Sweat beads on her upper lip and dangles there, dropping only when a low moan escapes her. It melts into the sound of the storm as it howls through the chimney in the common room. She rolls her head like a fever victim, breathing heavily, scraping her feet on the ground. Muscles spasm in her lower back and around her taut belly. A huge contraction racks her, forcing her to a quarter squat. She tenses there, exhaling a low, primal moan that lasts and lasts until a gush of liquid ruptures out from between her legs and becomes a slow dribble. A tuft of matted hair peeks out. She brings her right hand back behind and between her legs, her left to the front to spread herself as she continues to push. The crown of the baby’s head juts through, trickling liquid onto the floor.
Then she brings both hands back around onto her thighs and crouches a little lower for the final effort. The baby’s whole head is hanging out. With another sustained push, its shoulders slip through and a purple mass of flesh spurts out.
She brings her arms down and catches the baby at the base of its skull, supporting it as she sweeps it upright while falling to her knees in a motion both complex and instinctive. She sorts the lifestring from the baby’s neck as it begins to gurgle, and then cups it in her arms. Victra brings her mouth to her baby’s face, sucks to clear the mouth and nose, and then spits on the floor. The baby is blotched and viscous and alive. Its eyes are clamped shut against the dim light of the room. It cries until it finds her nipple, then takes it in its mouth and, cocooned in the arms of its wet, scared mother, grows still.
Victra sways there, in a world of two, rocking the baby so tenderly, so intimately, with such encompassing love that I am unable to look away. They begin to pulse, to throb with color, the warmth inside them or maybe the emotions in me triggering the parasite so that their thermal heat glows in the coolness of the room.
“It’s a boy, Sevro,” Victra’s glowing mouth whispers. “You guessed right.”
And for a moment, as I watch, as I see the heat that makes their bodies, the vibrations that form her words, I believe the hero of my brothers can hear his wife, wherever he might be. Just as I believe deep down I could feel the death of Aengus and Dagan and Liam, the last of my family. Neither time nor space can sever the strands of life between those we love, not really. It is not the parasite telling me this. It is my heart. In the room, I feel my father and mother, my sister and my brothers. The joy we had is no lesser for having ended in horror. It is not gone, as I thought it was. It is here. In these moments that are larger than the world itself. They were alive. They lived. They were loved.
“Come say hello,” Victra says.
I am startled back into the room. “Me?”
“I thought you weren’t an idiot.”
She leans the baby close to me as he snuffles at her breast. I take his little hand and smile as his fingers curl around mine. He is slightly larger than my brothers were, but those eyes that will mark him different from them are closed. The winged sigils on his hands are bone, not yet coated with gold. He is just a child.
“Hello, little haemanthus,” I say, just as I once said to my sister’s children as they took their first breaths, “welcome to the worlds.”
I leave Victra alone. The door bumps against Volga, who waits outside with a blank look on her face. I close the door behind me and nod. She breaks into a smile, as confused as I am to find herself celebrating the birth of Julii’s child.
Through the cracked door I hear Victra whisper a benediction to her child: “My son…” Her voice falters. “My son, you are of the gens Julii. Your ancestors looked to the night sky when there was nothing but drips of light in the darkness. Roads they built to stitch that light together. You are also of the gens Barca, guardians of the human race. You will be hated and you will hate. You will love and be loved. You will fall and you will rise. Never will you know peace, but you will know joy. You may even sail the dark seas in ships and lie beside nymphs in alien woods. You are your father’s son. Forever my boy. Forever our Ulysses.”
VICTRA EATS WHAT’S LEFT of the soup and bread at the kitchen table. Ulysses is swaddled in her arms. The storm’s still howling outside, having lasted through the night. In a few hours it’ll be daylight. Volga and I stay awake on coffee. We all know we can’t stay here long. If we keep Cormac and his family inside after the storm dies, it’ll arouse suspicion from the townfolk, and there’s no telling which of them will call the Red Hand. We have to be gone as soon as possible.
Volga and I want to wait, fearing Victra isn’t strong enough. She looks paler than I’ve ever seen her, and even if Golds are Golds, they’re still human. She needs to rest. We manage to convince her to let Volga go to the transmitter now. Cormac offers to take her, but Victra doesn’t want the man out in the village. His son volunteers. But that’s just the same. Volga can find it on her own. Better they stay tied at the table.
I stand with her in the open doorway. Volga squints into the swirling snow, then back at Ulysses in the crook of Victra’s arm as his mother finishes off a heel of bread. Volga’s left Fig’s black orb by the fire. “I wish I could have watched,” she says, mildly jealous. “Why did she let you?”
“Think she wanted to teach me a lesson.”
“I’ve never seen a baby born.”
“Never?”
She shakes her head.
I pat her arm. “You’ll get your chance one day if you like. It is something.”
“No,” Volga says. “They made me without a womb.�
� She sets her hand on her rifle.
“You know with enough money, bet they can change that now.”
“Twenty million,” Volga says. “Twenty million is what it takes.” I tilt my head. Is that why she’s been doing all this? Is that what Fig’s bounty means to her? I feel a sudden heaviness in my heart for the big woman. Not just because of the confession, but because she chose to trust me with it. She smiles and pats my shoulder, closer than we were even the night before. “I will be back soon. Guard them well.”
I watch Volga disappear into the snow and close the door.
She is a good person. Well, maybe not good. But what is good? She was raised by a bastard, but my father was a bastard too. Not always, and not to me, but I know how he hoarded our Laureltide boxes. How other families perished while ours grew strong. All my family’s joy grew in the shadow of that truth, whether I want to admit it or not.
Maybe it wasn’t my mother’s death that broke the man. Maybe it was his conscience.
Victra tries her best to stay awake after Volga leaves, but after the pace she set through the highlands, and the labor, it seems even a Gold has limits. She keeps falling asleep at the table. I convince her to go rest with Ulysses, telling her I’ll keep watch. By the time she wakes, her men will be on their way here. She smiles at that, no doubt thinking of her daughters, her husband.
I sit at the table with my gun in my lap and glance sideways at the orb. The flames from the hearth fire bend along its glossy surface. I pick it up and run my hands over the smooth metal. Its whispers tickle the back of my mind. What’s inside you?
Across the table, Cormac yawns, tied to his chair by Volga’s knots. His son, Alred, sleeps on a blanket by the fire, his hands bound in front of him.
Maybe I was too hard on them. Maybe we shouldn’t have tied them up. But with Volga gone, I sure as hell am not going to have a crisis of conscience. I may have a gun, but I’m no Obsidian. And Victra looks worn through.
“Sorry if we gave your girl a fright,” I say, setting the orb back down. “Considerin’ how she is. And about the binds.”
