by Meg Elison
Tommy looked at her with his mouth open. “But they can’t . . . They can’t bear children.”
“No, but they can be the thing you want in every other way, can’t they? You can’t, but the same is true of a lot of us. In the meantime, you can dance and sing and wear your hair long.” She thought of Kelda. “You can be used. You can provide release.”
“Stop it.” His voice was cold, shaken.
“I didn’t start this.”
“I didn’t understand.” He was trying to get in front of Eddy, to look him in the eye.
“You still don’t.”
The people of Ommun were not as joyous to greet a company of men as they had been to welcome the women of Jamestown, but the last refugees of Nowhere were warmly received.
Eddy watched, bemused, as each of the men in his party struggled to take it all in. The food. The enormity of the underground city. The children. The women. Alma.
Once he knew they were cared for, Eddy left to find Gabriel and Rei. They were at Deseret by the time he caught up with them. He waited outside the door.
“I’m ready to lead another mish,” he said as they appeared.
Gabriel looked pointedly at the claw Eddy was wearing. “To where?”
“To Estiel. It’s time to kill the Lion.”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“They took my home. My mother. Every woman from Nowhere. Nobody near Estiel is safe while this is allowed to go on. His time has long since come.”
Gabriel stepped forward, pushing his long blond hair back off his shoulders. “Sister Etta, I don’t think we can do that.”
Impatient, Eddy stepped closer as well. “You have more firepower in a hole in the ground than he has in his entire operation! Remember how you cut down those men in Jamestown? This will be like that. A slaughter. Him and his cats.”
Rei spoke up shyly. “It isn’t up to us. The mish has to be called. Blessed. The Prophet has to tell us it’s Mother God’s will.”
“Fine.” Eddy exhaled hard through both nostrils. “Fine, I’ll go talk to Alma.”
“Do that,” Gabriel said. The two men walked away together, leaving Eddy alone.
Eddy waited outside Alma’s room for a long time before he was granted an audience.
Better not show her how annoyed I am.
“How are your three babies?”
Her brown eyes smiled at him as she gestured to the two in bed beside her. “As well as I could want.” Her voice was like music. “What do you need, Eddy?”
The room spun for him a little as he wondered whether he had ever told her his name.
“I need . . . I need another mish. A big one. I need to fight the Lion and free my people.”
Alma softly clucked her tongue. “You don’t need that at all,” she said evenly. “You need to stay here.”
“What?”
“I spake your destiny unto Etta, and she fulfilled it like a good sister. Now, I must tell you to fulfill hers.”
“What?”
She laid a hand on one child, watching the other. When she looked back up, her eyes had gone green again.
He stood transfixed, like a mouse watching a hawk dive down.
“Etta will be the mother of warriors.”
“No.”
Alma actually laughed. “When we say no, Mother God sends the whale to swallow us up.”
Eddy felt beads of sweat roll down the backs of his thighs.
The whales in that textbook. Long as a house, warm-blooded in the dark sea. Birth live young.
It won’t swallow me.
Alma settled her golden head back on her enormous stack of down pillows. “Eddy will fight the Lion, oh yes. You’ll never bend your will to Hers. Eddy will go in blazing and righteous and fight Samson’s fight. But the Philistines won’t cut your hair, they’ll let it grow. And then the warriors will come. Part your own red sea and they will come.”
the chair the chair the chair
“It is the destiny of every woman, child. It is your crowning glory.”
“Not me,” he croaked. “I don’t have to be that.”
“Every time you say no, the whale swims a little closer.” Alma giggled like she was watching a naughty child try to get away with not eating their vegetables.
Eddy tore from the room without another word. In private, he opened his pack and pulled from his wooden medicine chest a set of tiny red envelopes made of fabric. Each of these smelled strongly of licorice bitterness. In memory, Alice spoke.
“Sometimes it’s for the best. We all want a healthy child and a happy ending. But sometimes you’re not going to get it. Everyone knows the Unnamed did it, and Midwives can do it with knives, of course. They don’t do it much, but I’ve heard.”
Alice. Alice gone from her greenhouse, gone to the Lion.
“But for the women you meet out there, if they’re already bleeding or if they can’t get free, this will do it. Brew in hot water and drink. The taste is awful, and sickness comes quick. They’ll vomit and they’ll shit. But they won’t be pregnant anymore. Warn them, make sure you warn them.”
I’ve been warned. I know what to do.
In the morning, Alma made it crystal clear. No one could follow him. No one could help him. Avoiding Etta’s fate was an affront to their god.
They had one more private moment together. Alma cut through the crowd and put her hot hand on Eddy’s bicep.
“It will happen,” she hissed. “Don’t you understand? I can’t change it once it’s been spake. It will happen.”
Eddy stared back at her and said nothing.
“It would be better for you if it happens here. Not there.”
He yanked his arm away from her and walked to the lift.
He waited a long time before he realized that no help meant no help. He made the exhausting climb up ladder after ladder alone. The stores of guns and ammo would not open for him, but he still had what they had given him last time. The climb was torturous under the added weight, and he had to rest many times. When he got out, he was glad he had started early.
The Book of Eddy
Summer
Nothing she said matters. It’s all made up, her stories of whales and soldiers and funny names. Her eyes must just be something else in the stew of their blood, the gene squares in the Physicians’ Desk Reference. Just like the albinos. They’ve crossbred too many times and made her crazy. Fertile, but crazy.
I’m going to get my mother. And Alice. And Flora. I’m going to walk out of there with the Lion’s entire harem and they won’t dare refuse me entrance to Ommun then. I’ll be the richest man on earth.
It’s ten days walking, maybe more. Plenty of time to plan it out.
He thought of nothing else. He scraped his memory raw, trying to recall every detail of the huge building the Lion occupied. The place he had seen the catamites at play. The old metalworker’s shop.
Won’t kill anyone I don’t have to. But I’ll probably have to kill everyone who has a gun.
He thought hard about the Paws he had met. Some had guns, but many only had knives and other short-range weapons.
Need to get up high. Pick off a few at a distance. That first.
He thought of the best places near the Lion’s stronghold, where he could get the advantage and keep it awhile. He tried to see the whole thing, the glass and boarded-up windows. The stink of the cats. The Arch.
The Arch. The black rainbow. The metal skeleton.
It was guarded, but by how many? Metal plates shed like scales off it all the time, so there were plenty of places to hang on. How many could he kill there?
He couldn’t swim the river with the guns, so he stole a boat from the dock and floated soundlessly down toward the Arch in the middle of the night.
When he reached the Arch, he saw one guard. As he crept closer, he could hear the man snoring. His knife slid between the man’s ribs and he didn’t even scream. He wiped the blood off on his pants and retrieved his pack. He climbed.
The first men out were farmers. They emerged to feed chickens and milk cows, and Eddy let them pass. He waited.
When Paws began to appear, he waited.
When he saw three Paws moving a group of catamites across the green, he opened fire.
They ran in all directions, looking wildly to discover the source of incoming bullets. One pulled a gun but dropped quickly after. Wounded, but Eddy couldn’t see where. He waited.
I can do this. I am this. This is now.
As he’d planned, the chaos brought more of them pouring out of the main building. Gripping his perch with his legs, he shot with both hands, emptying the cylinder of the revolver first and the clip of the newer gun long after. Shakily, he stowed one and reloaded the other, then switched.
Another two rounds of this. He wasn’t killing as efficiently as he had hoped, but he had done some real damage. He was breathing so fast and shallow that he began to see spots.
Eight in, eight out.
He climbed down, worried that he would fall. Two loaded guns in his hands, he walked toward the Lion’s home.
One lone man came out from behind the hulk of a car, raising a deer rifle at Eddy. Eddy shot him in the face.
He came to the open door of the Lion’s den. He smelled the oily garlic-sweet stink of the cats. Darkness within, but no sound.
He stood at the doorway a long time, waiting. Nothing came.
He swept the room while his eyes adjusted, panting again and frantic. The smell was everywhere at once, and his frenzied imagination told him the cats were everywhere.
The cats were nowhere.
He backed toward the staircase, guns raised, wind whistling in and out of his nose.
Eight in, eight out.
Where are you?
I’m now. I’m here.
The stairs were closed off from even the little light that came through to the main foyer, and he held his eyes wide open. When he saw a muzzle flash and felt the air slamming around him, he shot back blind and heard the groan as someone slid to the carpeted floor.
At the landing, a boarded window admitted slivers of white light. They striped the wall like the coat of a tiger. Eddy turned and took the next flight up.
He climbed and climbed, like the way out of Ommun. The final landing was lit with oil lamps of some kind.
This is it. Fuck my destiny.
The double doors burst open and Eddy pissed down both legs as the lion and the tiger sprang at him at once, their chains flying out behind them. He had never known pure terror like this. The moment stretched out for an eternity as the massive animals bounded and leapt at him, their teeth and claws filling the world and all his senses as he fired fired fired fired.
Three bullets caught the lion in the air and the big cat went down, blood black in its deep chest. The tiger was hit only once and landed heavily on top of Eddy, the rich doom of its reeking breath puffing into his face.
Claws sank into his right shoulder and he screamed in a voice he didn’t recognize. His left arm went up and he fired into the tiger’s chin a dry and useless click from a dead revolver.
The tiger’s snarling head came down, wide as the world, targeted with a million years of predatory instinct on Eddy’s slender neck.
Right arm searing with a vast and unbelievable pain, Eddy raised the newer gun as far as he could and shot the beast in its groin and thigh until the clip was empty.
He felt the animal’s blood pouring out, hot on his belly. Its terrible weight pinned him down and crushed the breath out of him as the monster collapsed. Eddy bridged and bucked, trying to slide out from under, but his crazed breath dragged the animal’s fur into his mouth and he choked on it. As he chased what was left of his mind down a small black hole, he could swear he heard his mother’s voice.
CHAPTER 17
In the red haze of fever, Etta knew a few things only.
Flora was there. She tended Etta most of the time, she was pretty sure. She could feel Flora’s fingers checking her pulse, wrapping delicately around her wrist below her leather bonds.
Ina was there. Etta could hear her, but never close by. For days, she wondered why she did not come to her living daughter. Later, she thought it might have been because Ina would have killed Etta to spare her what was to come.
No sign of Alice. She knew Alice was here somewhere, because she never felt the pain of Flora cleaning the wound in her shoulder at all. Only Alice could do that.
In the pounding madness of the fever, she saw the tiger again and again. When the fever subsided, she knew the tiger was real.
“What?” asked the silky voice of the Lion. “You thought I only had one?”
He walked the chained cat into her room often. The smell of it kept her nightmares florid and active.
In her terrible weakness, Etta struggled to look around the room and get a sense of where she was. Out the window, she could see only sky, ceaseless blue, every day. She was restrained all over and wore diapers like a baby. Flora tended to her gently and carefully, but everything itched and ached down there anyway.
When the fever was gone, Flora gave her a drink that knocked her out cold and she woke up in a different room. This one was bigger, nicer, and stocked with old-world treasures that made Etta’s mouth go dry. She was restrained, but Flora came and let her use a bedpan. In the mirror, she was painfully thin and she flinched from the length of her hair.
How long have I been here?
Flora would not answer any question she was asked. She would smile sadly and shake her head, that was all.
On the third day in the new room, she was given a long silk nightgown to wear after a warm sponge bath from Flora, who would not meet her eyes. Flora carefully locked Etta’s wrist cuffs, one at a time, to the foot of the bed while she cleaned her back.
Flora laid her down and locked her wrist restraints over her head again.
“Flora, I’m much stronger now. I could walk out of here, if you’d help me.”
That same sad shake of her head. Etta fell into a fitful sleep.
The next days followed the same. Flora came and cared for Etta, keeping her clean and comfortable. When Etta’s wrists were wet, she tested her restraints to see if she could slip free with a little help.
She looked up at Flora, her eyes pleading. “You could get me a little grease. Soap. Anything. I could slip my wrist out and they’d never know it was you.”
A look of consternation flitted over Flora’s face, and she bent down to dry Etta’s wrists carefully.
“You have to do this job, I know that.” Etta spoke through her teeth. “But you don’t have to be good at it. That is a choice.”
Flora looked at the floor, shrugging.
“Are you not allowed to talk to me?”
No answer, not even with her eyes.
“You know why he’s keeping me. Look at me. Look, Flora.”
Flora’s eyes flashed back to Etta’s. Etta saw that her roots were grown out and there was stubble on her chin. Her eyes were like cored fruit.
“Kill me,” Etta said. “Say I got free and tried to kill you. Just kill me so I don’t have to do this. You know what’s going to happen.”
Flora nodded, tiny up and down with her chin.
“Don’t leave me to it.” Etta was pleading now. “Help me. In any little way, Flora. I’m begging you to help me.”
Etta thought she saw something coming back into Flora’s eyes. Some hint of the woman she had been.
But there was a sound of footsteps outside the door, and Flora turned to leave at once.
Etta awoke the next day, knowing it was late night. A candle burned across the room. She could see the Lion’s outline, his broad back turned to her as he flipped the pages in a book.
“Your breathing
changes when you’re awake.”
His voice startled her. She tried to sit up but found that she was bound tight.
She said nothing.
“I’ve been reading this diary, this Book of the Unnamed Midwife,” he said. “Is this your hero? Was this what you were planning to become?”
Etta didn’t answer. She looked out the window and saw that just a little bit of the waning moon was visible outside.
The Lion closed the book and turned around to face her. He was still just a dark shape, backlit by the candle.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Her voice sounded screechy, like she hadn’t used it in days.
He didn’t answer.
Her whole body tensed. She shivered and she hoped he couldn’t see it in the poor light.
“There are two things you can be,” the Lion began. He turned and picked up the candlestick and walked slowly across the room toward her. “You know that, right?”
Mother or Midwife
Eddy or Etta
alive or dead
“You can be useful to me by telling me what I want to know. Or you can be useful to me the way every other woman is useful. You get to choose, right now. Do you understand?”
Etta looked at the face behind the candlelight. He looked perfectly rational. Calm and controlled. She shook like a leaf.
“Yes. What do you want to know?”
He reached behind his back and pulled out one of her revolvers. He laid it on the cover beside her. She ached to put her hands on it.
“You had a bag full of these when you got here. They’re clean, and they’re filled with old-world bullets. Perfect condition, and you’ve got hundreds.”
He took the gun and put it in the drawer at her bedside.
She watched the gun, and when he tilted it against the light, she saw that it was loaded.
“Where did it come from?”
“I have a secret,” she said, her face boiling hot and her whole body cold.
“Yes?” He leaned in over her, prowling like one of his cats.
