The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  * * *

  Kai’s hair is unsettlingly black against the white pillow, like spilled paint. I have taken her sweaty hand in mine, and she doesn’t remove it.

  The other Mades attending to their fallen hero, have left for now. With no more stories they are unsure, once again, of where to direct their love. We are alone in the infirmary apart from a sick Made across the aisle, hooked up to an IV. A slow cramp creeps across my pelvis. This thing that the Father said he bred out of us when he clipped the wings of our lady-bits—this ability to imagine—hits me with a sense of physical pain. A picture emerges in my head, a picture of . . . time. Not Narn’s time before time, but her time that is also ours. Kai’s and mine. A time of protection, and vice versa.

  For the first time I imagine time and protection as conjoined, and how you can’t have one without the other. For the first time, I see time as my friend—if only I knew what a friend was.

  Kai is watching me carefully. “Sometimes,” she says, the milkiness in her blue eyes clearing, “sisters just don’t want the same thing.”

  “I want us to be together forever,” I say. “Don’t you want that too?”

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “Why is the Father unmaking you?” I ask, taking a strand of her long hair and winding it around my stubby fingers.

  “Because he loves me.”

  “But you’re too smart?”

  She closes her eyes and the lids are darkly webbed with veins. “Because I don’t need him,” she says. “And that scares him.”

  I concentrate on twirling the black tendril around and around. “Can’t you . . . pretend?”

  She opens her eyes and looks at me dully.

  “Like in the stories you tell. The conjure tales the witch gives you. Where people pretend to be what they’re not—like frogs and wizards and good queens.”

  “They’re just stories, idiot. The Father isn’t stupid like Mades. He knows I’m not stupid like them either. He just doesn’t know why. I try and pretend, but I suck at it. Obviously. I let him win when I can. I try not to let him see all the words I know. I take his doubles and I lose a game of backgammon, but then I win at stupid checkers with a basic bridge defense, and I take all his dumb sugar packets and he doesn’t know why.” She finds a sudden strength and leans forward, her face inches from mine. “And you can’t let him find out. Promise?”

  I must go to dinner. Her hair has left red welts around my wrist. “Will it hurt?” I ask. “The unmaking?”

  “Like hell,” she says.

  I come back as soon as I can, with some overripe grapes that she sucks. “Good,” she says with her mouth full. And then she throws up. Fleshy, milky bile with streaks of blood through it.

  Once I get her clean, she says, “Anyway, according to the Father, what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger.” She weakly slices a thumb across her belly like a knife.

  I grin at how strong she’ll be when she gets better. “You’re already strong. Stronger than I’ll ever be. The Assistant never saw you coming.”

  I clap my hand over my mouth.

  “So you do remember?” she says slyly.

  “No.”

  But I do. How when Kai burst in on where he had me on the block like a specimen, he’d looked up from his magnifying glass and beamed. A twofer! he’d said. My lucky day.

  “It wasn’t his lucky day.” Kai turns and fixes her stormy blue eyes on mine. “You’re stronger than you look. Remember that. The Father will see that too, the way he saw that I was smarter. Did you clean yourself up?”

  She tries to peer over the bed at my bare feet—too small for the older Mades’ cast-offs and too big for baby shoes. I nod.

  The Assistant was right about the twofer even if he didn’t know it. Twofers, threefers—multiple births are a bitch, the Father says. Double-trouble—a nightmare. Split and multiplied, the noncompliant ovum corrupts the source code, weakening its defenses and allowing hell to seep into the cracks.

  “How long will I have to hide it for? Being strong?”

  “The witch will tell us,” my sister says. “The witch knows even more than the Father.”

  * * *

  I woke after a nap, and had an early supper of more crackers and peanut butter and two of Trudy’s headache pills swallowed with a slug of cold witch-hair tea. Then I dressed and went to the bridge to make my call. Mades with nowhere to go on a Friday night huddled into phones against the blue-lit rails, keeping their cracked voices to a gravelly hum that rose and fell as I passed. I found an empty space somewhere in the middle.

  “Narn?”

  It would be dawn in the oasis of bloodwood and bamboo with the sun yellow between the branches and I could hear the ah-aaaah-aaaaaah of the ravens.

  “Who?” Narn’s voice was strong but huskier than I remembered.

  “I enrolled in a new class yesterday.” I was trying not to yell. “It’s called Fictional Forms. It’s a writing class—and it’s held every Wednesday evening on the Wellsburg campus.”

  There was a clunk and chittering at the other end as if Narn had put her phone on the table under the bark awning and gone to set something on the stove. I could hear the tap of Eric’s paws on the boards and I inhaled sharply.

  “What kind of writing?”

  “Stories.” A few faces turned in my direction. “Made-up stuff.”

  She asked what happened to Computer Science, and I explained how the electives worked and how this was my only option unless I wanted to be stuck in the Tower Campus for the rest of the program. I told her about the quota of survivors in FiFo.

  “Tower Campus all right for other Mades,” she sniffed.

  “Yes. Okay. But not for me. Being in Wellsburg is the only way I can get through the program. And I need to survive to get back to you. And Eric. To get back to . . .”

  “Shhhh!” she hissed. “Mustn’t be spoken. Stay with own kind. Safer that way.”

  “They’re not my kind,” I sighed. “You know that. I feel lost there. In Wellsburg I stand out. People see me, and I can hide behind that. With all the other Mades . . . we disappear. And it’s terrifying. That’s what the Regulars want—to make us disappear.”

  “Safety in numbers,” she said, and the ravens flapped in agreement.

  “I know, I know. Find room to move in power’s blind spot,” I said. “But it’s not as easy here.”

  “Not easy anywhere.” Down in the bushes below the bridge, an owl began its gallows chortle.

  “I’m scared all the time here, Narn. I live in a tower with hundreds of other strangers and none of us will survive intact and I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  And worlds away in the Starvelings, a lonely thylacine sighed and lay down at the feet of a pretend witch with time on her hands.

  “Choose different class, then. Why be telling tales with them stinky skanks?”

  “Not all of them are stinky,” I said, brightening up. “The girl in the Writing and Culture Office had skin like the petals of a swamp lily.”

  The guard barked something at some rowdy Mades thronging past the gatehouse.

  “Her name is Pagan. And she threw a whole piece of cake in the trash. And I met a Malemade, too. An autodidact—he wears suspenders to hold up his soul.”

  “Fetch him trash-cake,” Narn barked into the speaker. “Cut off a piece and cook in a pot with a club foot and some wood shavings and three drops of monthly blood . . .”

  I coughed painfully, partly from the rotten-egg vapor from the river, and partly because of the infection roaring back into my lungs. My hands looked blue as a corpse’s in the light from the bridge. “Thanks Narn, but I don’t need that kind of spell this time.”

  I tried to keep my voice even. Narn wasn’t a morning person and she hated anyone to startle her birds. She called them her children be
cause they were the only real ones she’d ever have.

  “What kind, then?”

  The bridge was emptying and a Made further along against the rails palmed her phone and headed back toward Tower Village where she belonged. Where we all belonged.

  “The story kind,” I said, cupping my hand over my mouth. “Like the ones you gave to Kai.”

  I could see Narn shaking her clown head, holding onto her cap so it wouldn’t fall off. “Good twin needed stories to keep Blood Temple sisters safe. Make them love her more than Father—dead now. No need for conjure stories, and dangerous in wrong hands—crappy twin has no memory for stories.”

  And there I was, where I’d always been. Up against her dismissal of me.

  “Kai remembered them and still got them wrong. I’ll just fill in the blanks. Make up what I don’t remember.”

  “Make-up lets the conjure in,” Narn warned.

  “Isn’t that the point?” I said.

  “Mades be bad liars,” she reminded me. “Even twofers.”

  “Making-up isn’t lying exactly, though, is it Narn?”

  “Wouldn’t know,” she said cagily.

  “Well, lying,” I said, thinking about it, “is falsifying with intent.”

  “How is making-up different?” There was suspicion in her question which I knew I deserved. A test maybe.

  I gathered my answer together, letting the twinkling lights from the town assemble themselves into a discernible pattern. “Make-up is invention. Configuration. Fabrication—over a framework that is already there.” I lowered my voice. “Like how you and your sisters made yourselves up, but not out of nothing.” I ignored her ragged shushing—we’d rarely spoken of such things. “It can also be a compensation for failure, Narn. Like to make up a test you’ve missed, or failed. Or have been unable to face.” I was drawing from knowledge I didn’t know I had, the kind of pedantry that Kai reveled in. I felt for a moment a vertiginous impulse to climb atop the railings and jump off, see if I could fly.

  There was a pause while Narn lit a stick for smudging—a little early for that I thought, but perhaps there was need for it. I could almost smell its damp, bitter heat, thanks to my drinking the telepathy-enabling tea. But for some reason, instead of being a comfort, the reminder that Narn’s smoking bundle of sage and wattle and guano and who knew what else, could reach across worlds and hold us both in its protection, made the hair rise on the back my neck.

  “What does crappy Made want from rich bitches?” Her voice deeper now, and stronger too.

  “Protection. The same as Kai wanted.”

  “Protection from what?”

  The Father is dead. Long live the Father, the owl hooted.

  “Something else is here,” I said carefully, forcing the truth—my truth—to the surface, where it pierced and hurt. “Maybe the Redress Scheme is not what it says it is. Maybe it doesn’t want to make us better.”

  “Unmake instead?”

  I didn’t hesitate this time. “Re-make Narn. And I don’t want that either.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m already Made.” I waited. “Aren’t I?”

  “Rich bitches want Mades in story class. Otherwise why quotas? Why do what rich bitches want?”

  I had the feeling she was testing me.

  “It’s not Mades they want,” I said, as if she didn’t know. “It’s the stories. They don’t care about us.”

  “Why?”

  Because we’re just trash, baby . . .

  What then?

  Once they’re done with me, maybe they’ll want to throw me away.

  “But with your help, Narn, I’ll survive the Scheme. Come back home to you. Come back to the Hills where I belong.”

  I no longer knew if we were talking or just reading each other’s thoughts. But out of nowhere came a memory of the dead thylacines back in the Rim, how the settlers exterminated them by baiting sheep carcasses with wolfsbane. I tried to breathe through the panic induced by Narn’s capacity to conjure memories into my brain, even across ten thousand miles and half a dozen time zones.

  “The old bait and switch,” I said.

  “Dangerous game.” Again reminding me with her thoughts, how, back in South Rim, the wolfbane-baited meat made it into more than a few settlers’ stews, although Narn swore that was never her doing.

  “Apparently the Regulars love to be scared, Narn,” I said, “Pagan said that they see us like barmaids from the abyss. Don’t tell me you didn’t slip a mickey into those conjure tales you told Kai.”

  She scoffed. “Them rich bitches eat Mades for breakfast. Barmaids too. Power don’t love scares. Power just loves itself. Gobbles up strength from weakness.”

  Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

  “Fakelore, it’s called. And yes, that’s the bait: our weakness is ourselves. Mades, witches”—I felt her flinch at the word—“every weird story that was born from the Blood Temple. It’s all fakelore.”

  There was a long pause, during which I listened to her quickened breath. “What’s the switch?”

  Finally, we’d come to it, sooner than I thought. My heart skipped. Most of the bridge callers had gone back to where they belonged, so I could speak more freely now without fear of being overheard. “You said stories conjoin love and fear, Narn. What else can . . . do they join? I mean any opposites, right? Life and death, maybe, too?”

  “Get to the point,” she snapped impatiently. “Rich bitches take big bites from each one. Twin truths be trash food for hungry power.”

  “You’re not listening,” I said very slowly. “The switch is what if I . . . we . . . were able to bite back?”

  The silence stretched out on the other end. Even the ravens held their tongues.

  “No,” Narn said. “No biting back. No more blood vengeance.”

  What I said next took us both by surprise. It wasn’t what I’d planned to say, but the words came, out of nowhere, from the mist swirling at my feet. “Okay, not vengeance. But justice. They took your sister. Tiff. I mean something did. You deserve to know. She flew the coop in Rogues Bay. Last heard of in Upper Slant and then nothing. Maybe I can find her.”

  I heard her breath stop. The phone felt hot against my ear.

  “Crappy twin wants to be bait? Let rich bitches chew on fake stories, wet panties with scares while crappy twin sniffs out lost sister?”

  “In a nutshell,” I said. “Might need some fine tuning, but yeah.”

  Narn said a little hoarsely. “Maybe lost sister doesn’t want to be found. Maybe too lost.

  “Maybe. But at least you’ll know. There is justice, not vengeance, in that.”

  The bridge was half-empty. The blue railings stretching to either side. A streak of light left in the sky. Everything below in darkness.

  “Think about it, Narn. The stories you gave Kai conjured protection. They made the Mades love her more than they loved the Father. They would have died for her, and that love protected them, enabled them to survive the unsurvivable. Whatever code you conjured, or conjure you coded—what if you can do the same for me? What if you can conjure love to not only protect me, but give you back your sister, too?”

  What if, what if, what if went my heart. I had no idea what I was saying. It was as if the words, the ideas, were coming to me from somewhere, someone else. Kai? I felt like a means to an end, the bridge between the thing and the word.

  “Stories made sister dead meat,” Narn said quietly, and I could hear the unhappy shriek of her cooking pot scraping against the hob.

  “That was me, Narn. I made Kai into dead meat.”

  Hadn’t confusion dogged me my whole life? Her lost sister, and my found one. Her living one, mine dead. Hers bad, mine good. Me crying beside Kai’s grave, while Narn, thirteen moonshine sheets to the wind, sobbed over the disappeared Tiff, stumbling to
her cave and emerging days later, smeared with shit and bleeding from the scourge hung on the rock wall by a hook fashioned from a pig’s snout. When the Redress Scheme was offered, I had been ashamed of wanting to leave all that confusion and sorrow behind, to leave Narn and the mutilated Mag, and yet here I was, between something and nothing, making it all up as I went along. Afraid not so much of what I was asking for but how, and why.

  The whole flock of Narn’s ravens were awake now, and I could cup their sad-baby song in my hand. Narn had begun to growl, a grinding snore. Eric whined.

  “The sooner I complete the program the sooner I can come home,” I said as gently as I could. “And then you’ll know about your sister. Maybe. It’s the least I can do for you. You and Mag.”

  She snorted, but I suddenly knew that I meant it. More than I’d ever meant anything in my life. Because she would never know how desperate I was to prove that she was right not to throw me away.

  “Crappy twin really doesn’t like living in castles?” she asked sharply.

  “It’s not your fault. We couldn’t know—the pictures on the brochure were fake. It’s not a castle. This is a prison. And we’re just test subjects—models made to break for their tomorrow, not ours. If I stay here too long, it’ll be me who’s lost.”

  There was a long silence. I wanted to hear that she didn’t want to lose me after all. But she didn’t speak. Into the pregnant pause, I said: “Narn? All of our brains are on a database called Skillzone.”

  “Kill what?”

  “And there’s a ghost,” I said more to myself than her. “Some witch-hunter who jumped off the bridge.”

  “Them bitches not scared of hunter?”

  “No, but we are,” I said.

  “Kill Zone?”

  “It’s some kind of hack, I guess.”

  “Daaa-ata. Haaa-aack,” the ravens cried.

  “Like lady-bits?”

  “Yes, but this time it’s our brains.” My eyeballs prickled. “I don’t want to be in another temple, Narn. I won’t survive this one.”

  Along the bridge, as if on cue, the remaining Mades hung up their phones and wiped their eyes, our grief contagious. Narn’s droning continued, a breathy wheeze like a motor in a piece of obsolete machinery.