Her eyes darted through the sea of women moving ahead of her and recognized some of the mothers whose kids she had seen a day ago, running and screaming to get back to them. They looked like statues. They moved when asked to, but they weren’t there. Marie’s eyes went vacant. Callista had started talking, but Marie wasn’t listening. A blond mane bobbed for a moment over the wall of heads. She moved through the crowd, leaving Rane and the other two girls behind. They called her. She didn’t turn to answer. Despite common sense, she wanted to know if it was him. Heart lodged in her throat, she finally caught up with the blond head, but when the person slightly turned to the right, the nose was wrong, too feminine. Marie breathed once, twice, filling her lungs with air until the oxygen rush made her feel dizzy. A sound between a laugh and a sob escaped her mouth. She was relieved it wasn’t Grant, but she still didn’t know where he was.
And where is Zena? The thought came unbidden. She turned and looked for the rest of her group, but it was impossible to see anything beyond the person before or after her.
“Starting immediately, wasted women aged fifteen and workers aged twelve will be eligible to work at the recycling facility.”
Callista’s words reached her ears in a haze. The crowd angrily murmured, but the soldiers placed on the roof made a show of taking aim on them, and silence was restored immediately. It was a sick replay of yesterday’s spectacle.
“Male children will be brought to the nursery and raised as appropriate for their sex.”
A woman standing by her side started crying, at first soft sobs, and then she collapsed on the ground and wailed. She wasn’t the only one. Several images flooded Marie’s mind, but the boy screaming for his mother, his little hands stretched ahead of him while the soldier took him away, kept playing in a loop. She couldn’t stop herself from seeing the terrified eyes and the small fingers grasping at the air. Where was he now?
“We have analyzed the data from the census and realized this sewage plant isn’t utilizing its human resources as it should. There is a waste”—Callista found it humorous and sneered— “of resources, which is easy to fix by creating new shifts. Every woman fifteen and older must report to the new placement center. As of now.”
Callista left the roof, but the soldiers remained to ensure their colleagues on the ground properly corralled the crowd. While the younger girls were ordered to stay behind, the conscripted women walked along the line created by the army. Rifles at hand, Callista’s thugs directed them toward the place where only yesterday the purple barracks had stood. Now the low buildings were a matte black, paint still drying on the corrugated walls, the acrylic color evaporating under the first rays of sun.
Marie waited in line for her turn. She wished the doctor and the girls were with her. She had never minded being alone, but not now and not here where everything she laid her eyes upon reminded her of pain and death. Any time a blonde walked past her, her heart skipped a beat. Callista hadn’t said what she meant to do in regard to the men. Finally, it was her turn to be swallowed whole inside the black hole. She entered the ex-casino and walked to the table at the end of the room. She had no idea how the place had looked a mere twenty-four hours ago, but she was sure it wasn’t like this. Besides the table and the chair occupied by a middle-aged soldier, there was nothing else.
“Stop there, by the line.” The pure breed pointed with a pen at a piece of tape on the floor, just three or four feet from the table, then went back to her task.
Marie stopped where told and patiently waited for instructions.
“What’s your number?” the woman asked. She didn’t raise her head from the piece of paper she was filling with lines of numbers.
Marie was started by the question.
The woman tilted her head up and looked at her from over the rim of her glasses, then her eyes pointed at Marie’s branded arm. “What’s your number, wasted girl?”
Marie looked down at the numbers and letters that had just started to look like they belonged on her arm and recited, “Vasura, three, five, nineteen, and sixty-nine.”
The woman gave her an annoyed stare. “Symbol?”
“No symbol.” Marie caught herself before adding, “Unfortunately.”
“Just arrived.” The pure breed scribbled a note. “You still remember civilization.”
Marie didn’t think she was expecting a comment to her statement. Otherwise, she would have liked to say that she got it backward. Vasura was anything but uncivilized.
The woman lowered the pen on the notebook and gave her the onceover. “Do you have any skill at all?”
She looked back and didn’t lower her eyes. “I’ve been training as a nurse.”
Eyebrows raised in disbelief, the woman took the pen and lowered it on the paper, but didn’t write anything. “Under a doctor?”
“Yes, under Doctor Rane at Redfarm and then here as well.” She was proud of having answered without making any sarcastic retort.
“Doctor Rane, you say?” A flicker of recognition passed through the woman’s eyes.
Marie had a bad feeling.
“Well, then it’s better if you keep working with her at the infirmary then.” The woman took something from a basket she had under the table and beckoned her to come close. “You must report every night to the infirmary registry. Now go to work.” She removed from a small bow a stamp. “Give me your hand.”
Marie reached out and the woman grabbed her wrist and stamped it. “Exit is that way.” She indicated a door a few feet from the table.
Marie hadn’t noticed it. The woman called someone, and the door was opened from the outside and a younger soldier kept it open for Marie to pass through. Once outside, the soldier asked Marie to show her wrist.
“Infirmary duty.” The woman, another young pure breed sporting the usual patrician features and lack of uniqueness, extended her arm to show Marie to follow her.
Marie gave her a brief glance—confirming her notion that pure breeds all looked alike, beautifully uninteresting with their perfect noses and slim bodies. Conversely, the clipped Ginecean accent was anything but monotonous; it grated on her nerves, making it unpleasantly unforgettable.
The soldier didn’t bear Marie’s silent assessment well and her right hand twitched over the baton hanging from a hoop in her holster just to the right of a shiny gun. “Would you mind?”
Without wasting her breath, she raised her hands and walked down the stairs, three steps that only yesterday had been purple and now were crying black paint through the cracks in the planks. Once on the paved ground, she left black prints behind and found it appropriate. She walked slowly to the infirmary, her thoughts as bleak as the black paint that seemed to never dry under her shoes. The soldier was just a step behind her the whole time.
“Marie, thank the Goddess they didn’t send you somewhere else.” Rane was at the door, face transformed by the fear, her eyes red.
Marie went inside and looked around. “Zena?” She couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.
The doctor shook her head, tears wetting her tired face. “I asked around. Nobody has seen her since yesterday. I went to the morgue… She isn’t there.”
The morgue. Marie hadn’t thought of that. “She’s well. I know she’s well. She’s hiding somewhere.” She wanted to believe her words and so she repeated them in her mind as well. “She’s strong. Nobody can harm her.” Bullets could kill her. An infected wound could kill her. She could lie in a ditch, unconscious. Several scenarios, one worse than the other, kept popping before her eyes, until she was sick with worries and her stomach hurt. And then, the carousel of hopeless thoughts started anew, just the object of her worries changed. Now Grant was lying unconscious somewhere. Finally, she hadn’t seen Nora since she had snuck in at the infirmary. “We must go look for them.”
Rane tilted her head and looked over her shoulders to the door behind Marie.
“I wouldn’t try that,” someone said.
She turned and saw Patrician Beauty, th
e soldier who had escorted her from the ex-casino to the infirmary. She had forgotten about her.
The woman stood before the open door, legs wide, one hand resting on the holster. She shook her head at Marie and her mouth morphed into a grin. “I’ll be here the whole day.”
***
Even without Door Holder—as the day progressed, the soldier was called several different names—preventing Marie from running outside to look for her friends, she couldn’t have left the infirmary. Carine and Trisha hadn’t come back. They must have been appointed to some other task. It was just the doctor and herself. A steady stream of Vasurians came throughout the day. Some looking for a comforting word more than anything else. Other nursing wounds of unknown nature. Nobody dared answer questions in front of Callista’s woman. She was relieved to see the majority of their patients were adults. Some of them were known faces. Marie rejoiced at seeing the woman she had helped giving birth during her first day of work at Vasura. The new mother had sprained an ankle when she had fallen on the ground. The reason why she had fallen wasn’t clear, but she was carrying the baby with her when it had happened. Marie didn’t pry, but the grayish-white powder all over the woman’s back could mean she was hauling bags of cement when she lost her balance and tried to save her baby from hitting the ground.
“Do you know where they’ve taken the older kids?” Marie leaned closer to her while massaging some ointment on her damaged ankle.
Nadia—Marie had discovered her name only now—looked at the soldier and then slightly relaxed. “They rounded up the kids, separated the boys from the girls—” She couldn’t finish. Her eyes misted and she lowered them to her baby girl clutched to her chest, the small head bobbing under the scarf she was using to breastfeed her daughter in relative privacy.
Marie smiled at the sight of a small foot, the perfect minuscule toes curling as the baby fed and made satisfied suction sounds. Then, darkness claimed her thoughts again. “What about the baby boys?”
Nadia caressed her baby with slow strokes over the scarf. “I don’t know.”
Marie wasn’t sure what the Ginecean protocol with baby boys was. It was one of those topics a good fathered woman would never talk about in company. But it was said that donors who became pregnant hated their baby boys and didn’t want anything to do with them. There were rumors about places where women went to terminate their pregnancies. Donors who couldn’t tolerate the idea of having to wait nine months to discover their babies’ gender. She had never thought twice about those rumors, but she had never been in proximity to newborns before. Now, only looking at the perfection of the small fingers, something stirred inside of her. Not because she had rid herself of all the prejudices against donors and pregnant fathered women. No, it wasn’t that. She had just realized a man couldn’t help his gender, the same way she hadn’t decided to be a fathered woman. It was sheer injustice to condemn a human being from her or his first breath.
“You can sleep here tonight.” Rane had approached them and was looking at the baby girl with longing.
Nadia thanked her and then added, “I don’t want to go back home. It feels empty without him.”
The doctor crouched beside the mother and asked if she could hold the baby for a moment.
Nadia tiredly smiled and opened her arms. “Please, I need a moment of rest.”
Marie knew she was lying; she had seen how strong her hold on her daughter was. It had been nice of Nadia to give Rane a moment with the baby and she mouthed a thank you to her. Nadia made a gesture that meant it was nothing at all.
Someone tapped on her shoulder and then called, “Marie?”
She turned to face a girl named Roxanne who had come to the infirmary earlier on for a possible concussion. “Are you feeling dizzy or nauseous?” She had asked the girl to tell her if any of those symptoms occurred.
“Yes.” Her voice unnecessary loud, Roxanne bit her bottom lip and looked over their heads toward where the soldier was, as everybody had been doing the whole day.
Marie immediately focused on her. “Both?”
The girl leaned toward her and stumbled.
Marie reached out and stabilized Roxanne. “Dizzy, then.”
At the same time, the girl thrust a folded piece of paper in her hand. “I’ll sit now.”
She stared at Roxanne and silently asked what it was. “Yes, good idea.” Her fingers curled around the paper.
Roxanne mouthed something, a name.
Marie brought the paper to her heart. She turned toward the doctor who was still holding the baby. “Rane, can you manage by yourself for a moment?” She pointed at the bathroom in the back of the infirmary.
“Sure.” Rane’s eyes went to Marie’s fisted hand.
Marie saw the soldier’s head following her from one end of the room to the other. She closed the bathroom door behind her and cursed there wasn’t any key to lock it. She sat on the floor with her back firmly against it, in case the woman decided to check on her, and finally opened her hand. It was a note. From Grant. She read it and then she read it again. Only a handful of words, but they made all the difference in the world.
I’m fine. You’re in my thoughts. Grant.
She brought the paper to her lips and kissed it. Grant’s longhand was neat. Neater than mine, and she found herself laughing on the bathroom’s floor.
A firm knock on the door. “May I see what’s so funny?” The soldier didn’t give her time to answer.
The door hit her back with a slam and she cried. “One moment!” Hastily hiding Grant’s note inside her bra, she stood and moved out of the way. Just in time.
“What were you doing there?” The Tormentor—she had just earned another name—gave a good look at the bathroom and then came back to her with an accusing gaze.
“What one normally does in a bathroom…” Marie shrugged.
“You think you’re smart?” The Idiot—Marie was having a blast at calling her names in her head—beckoned her outside. “Next time you want to use the bathroom, you ask me for permission. Understood?”
“Loud and clear.” Marie refrained from raising her hand to her temple in a martial salute. The woman didn’t seem the humorous type. “May I go back to my patients now?”
The soldier nodded but didn’t look convinced she hadn’t done anything wrong. Marie knew she should have flushed the note down the toilet, but having the folded piece of paper pressing against her heart made her feel better. She walked slowly through the patients’ beds, checking on their conditions, until she was back at Roxanne’s side. “Where is he?” She spoke so low she wasn’t sure the girl had heard her.
“The pavilion,” Roxanne whispered equally low. “The pure breeds have imprisoned all the adult workers there.”
She didn’t know where this pavilion was. She had never strayed far away from the main hub. Now she regretted it.
The girl must have read her mind because she added, “It’s at the northern end of the fields. Maybe two hours’ walk from here. It’s heavily guarded.”
Two hours from here. Roxanne had walked two hours with a possible concussion. “How did he give you the note?”
Roxanne lowered her voice to barely audible murmur. “While I was walking by, someone shouted. The guards went to check what was going on, and he threw it at me, saying to look for you.”
“Thank you.” She would have hugged the girl for having taken such a risk, but the soldier was hovering nearby. She pressed her hand over her heart and thanked her again. She didn’t ask her to take a note to him. She wanted to. But she understood she couldn’t ask Roxanne anything. She had done a lot for her already.
Later, when all the patients were resting or trying to and she had dutifully reported to the infirmary registry, escorted by the guard, she went to sleep on her new makeshift bed, a slightly more comfortable replica of the previous night’s accommodation. This time, she put a worn blanket on the tiles and she laid on it, pillowing her head on the balled-up sheet. In her mind, she read Grant’
s note until her mind couldn’t recognize one word from the other. Finally, she relaxed and succumbed to a much-needed sleep. Her last thoughts were about his smile and how beautiful his handwriting was.
When the siren announced dawn for the third day in a row, she opened her eyes, and for the first time since she had landed in Vasura, she wished she could go back to her dreams. The next twenty-four hours were a repetition of the day before. But the fourth, fifth, and sixth mornings all followed a different pattern. Every day started a half hour earlier than the previous one. A week later, the waste plant was awake in the wee hours of the night. Callista never failed to address the crowd from the safety of the roof while she waited for the raised stage she had commissioned to be completed. She announced all the new changes she had made to better Vasura’s productivity. She never said where she had taken the boys or what was happening to the men. Public floggings became part of the daily routine. Every night, before the recorded bells called the curfew, women were tied to the pole in the main hub, sentenced, and punished. The reasons for the public humiliation and pain were laughable. People soon lost heart.
Meanwhile, Marie feared for Grant and at the same time hoped to receive a new note from him. Neither Nora nor Zena had showed up to the infirmary. A week after Callista’s tyranny had begun, reality had started to resemble a nightmare Marie woke up from only when she went to sleep. She learned a lot in those seven days. Women arrived at all hours because Rane’s infirmary was one of three still open. In her eagerness to optimize Vasura’s resources, Callista repurposed and reconfigured the majority of the buildings. The result was that a crowd formed before the infirmary and sick people were made to wait. Every morning, a new soldier appeared at the door and was replaced at dinnertime by the night shift. Marie and Rane took turns to eat their three allotted meals. Food wasn’t as plentiful as before and the quality of the fare had suffered. Still, Marie barely noticed what she ate. During her meals in the cafeteria, her eyes scanned the equally silent crowd, looking for her friends, then got her hand stamped so she wouldn’t be able to re-enter for another meal. The faces she came upon were different, eyes of different colors, but always sad, already defeated. Ginecea had sent another contingent to support the major’s efforts to civilize them. Other dormitories were seized to accommodate what now amounted to a true army. Vasura had been invaded.
Marie's Journey (Ginecean Chronicles) Page 22
