Heiresses of Russ 2013

by Tenea D. Johnson

  The dread-spiders had come back with relatives and associates. Her whole body was one knot, waiting for something to happen, but nothing quite did. The stone in her throat had migrated to her belly. Someone you’ve wronged, her mind kept repeating sibilantly. Then came the flash of memory, the brown and gold and red, a wet nasal cry echoing in her ears and chaotic struggling flesh under her fingers, curved to grip and squeeze.

  The house was wrong. It was all wrong. The isolation, the storm, the birds cooing and rustling down the hall as if gossiping; all of the pressures lumped into one thing: trap. She had been trapped. The certainty of it locked her to the couch, her eyes longingly tracing the vague shapes of the outside in the dark. There must be a foot of snow. She would die of hypothermia out there.

  True dark came like a blanket draped over the world. The door in the kitchen banged again. Harvey twisted to see Anne come inside, brushing snow from her clothes and thumping around in huge rubber snow boots.

  The woman’s face was closed off, her red hair a frizzy damp halo. There was something fearsome in her eyes. Harvey reigned in her legs’ urge to make for the front door and run until she couldn’t run anymore. Her instincts would not stop shrieking at her to leave, to run, to hide. There would be no help from this quarter.

  “It’s late,” Anne said. “I’m going to bed. They should plow the road in the morning and you’ll be able to leave.”

  Harvey only nodded. The woman walked down the hall into the dark.

  After a long, silent moment, Harvey made her way stiffly to the guest bedroom and closed the door, locking it for good measure. The sheets she slid between fully clothed were cold as ice and just as crisp, starched to sharpness. She kept her eyes open. The aviary across the hall made a thousand tiny inescapable sounds that grated on her ears. A sort of madness settled on her. Anne was up to something. She knew it. The nature-loving bitch was plotting, scheming. But sitting up in bed, her hands fisted in the covers, the notion seemed insane. She lay back down and tried to settle. She was just stressed and angry and ready to lash out—those were not new things. Would she really attack a woman in her own home, her own bed, for a bad attitude? She buried her face in the cover and sighed.

  There were footsteps in the hallway. She froze. They meandered past her door without stopping and her muscles slowly unkinked. She heard other sounds, scuffling and clinking like a refrigerator raid, late-night. That relaxed her. A door closed.

  Against the odds, she had begun to drift to sleep when a strange noise pulled her up from her half-dreams. The lock to her door clicked open visibly in the twilight of the moon streaming through the windows and she sat up in a rush. The door swung open. The hall was dark but she saw the yellow eyes and let out a low moan, scrabbling off the bed and pressing her back to the wall.

  The owl hooted at her and ruffled its wings from its perch on Anne Caulfield’s arm. Her up-tilted face was that of a vengeful deity. Harvey fumbled for anything she could throw on the desk and came up empty, her hands bare and useless. Her heart raced to a thundering beat. An icy sweat prickled down her back.

  “I suspected as much,” the woman said.

  The owl on her arm hooted again, blinking. Its heart-shaped face wasn’t able to smile, but Harvey knew it was mocking her. It had to be. It shifted its monstrous talons carefully on Anne’s arm.

  “I wonder—” Anne said. “Did you come here because you knew it was time to pay the piper, or because you honestly didn’t believe I would be able to talk to this beautiful girl and know what you did?”

  “What?” Harvey sputtered through her fear.

  “I didn’t think you were that good a person,” Anne sneered.

  Words were shriveled hard things in Harvey’s mouth, ashen in flavor. She had no excuses because there was a terrible knowledge in her captors’ eyes, yellow and human brown.

  “Leah,” she pleaded.

  The owl flew at her, talons first; she raised her hands in front of her face and screamed. The knife-edged claws ripped along her forearms, biting easily through cloth and flesh. Heavy wings buffeted her head as the owl screeched, its talons losing purchase as she collapsed to the floor. The sound of it rang in her ears. The owl landed next to her with a heavy thud, its head bobbing in anger, a low hiss coming from its break. It blinked rapidly. Harvey rolled onto her stomach and moved to stagger to her feet, panting, but her blood-wet hands slipped on the floor and she landed in a heap.

  “Fair trade,” Anne said.

  Harvey caught a last glimpse of her lounging in the doorway with a smile on her face. Then, the owl was her whole vision, and the girl that was the owl with her bruised throat and the water of the lake still streaming from her hair. Harvey didn’t say she was sorry. Feathers slid through her fingers like liquid as she pushed against the owl that was everywhere, the owl that was the world, the owl that was sinking now inside her chest like a second heart.

  •

  The morning was bright and shatteringly white with its coating of snow. Anne walked the bandaged, wobbly young woman to the door. Her eyes were golden-brown where they had been hazel. Her mouth formed soft cooing answers as easily as it did words. The owl-girl who had once been Harvey smiled beatifically at her and flung herself into a clumsy hug.

  “You’ll learn to wear the body soon,” Anne murmured into the shell of her ear.

  “Fair’s fair,” the owl-girl who was Leah murmured back. “How did you learn to speak to birds?”

  “I know how to listen,” she answered.

  “Harvey was a bad listener,” she said.

  “I noticed.”

  “Did you know when she came, what she’d done to me?” the owl-girl asked.

  “No,” she said. “But I knew when I saw you in the trees. You’re not my first hungry ghost.”

  “You’re a nice woman,” the new Leah said.

  She fidgeted, smoothing fingers down her aching arms and playing with the thick bandages. This bare-fleshed body and its attendant pains—it had been so long it was nearly a new sensation. A thick silence settled between them. She looked up from under her eyelids, head bobbing low and birdlike for a brief moment.

  “You can stay awhile if you need to adjust,” Anne offered.

  “All right,” she said. Her smile was tentative and fresh. “Until we can clear her car—my car—out.”

  “I’ll make tea.”

  The owl-girl tested her human hands by taking Anne’s arm and drawing her into another embrace. The flannel was luxuriously soft under fingertips that felt as sensitive as a baby’s. She let out a humming sound and the older woman hugged her back, the press of a hand on the back of her neck a warm caress. Her found-life was full to bursting with possibilities.

  •

  Reality Girl

  Richard Bowes

  1.

  You want to know who I am and how I got here?

  •

  Reality Girl is the name my mother gave me but Real’s what I’m called. I’m fourteen and until one day a week or so back my ambition was making it to fifteen. What I want to tell starts that day.

  Me and Dare—my girlfriend and partner—led our boys, Nice and Not, Hassid and Rock down to the river for this appointment I’d set up.

  It could have been any October afternoon: hot orange light and the sun hanging over the smashed towers on the Jersey Shore. Like always, rumors ran of everything from a new plague to war between the Northeast Command and the Liberty Land militia.

  But I could see planes coming in and taking off from Liberty Land Stronghold in Jersey like always. And along the waterfront little ferry boats took people on, unloaded freight.

  The world that day was the way I was used to: broken cement under bare feet, bad sunlight that’d take off your skin if you let it, the smell of rot and acid on the water. Mostly I was trying to get control of this thing inside me. I wasn’t sure I owned it or it owned me.

  Dare looked all ways, kept her hands inside her robes so no one knew what weapon she was hol
ding, ignored the boy babble.

  Hassid told Rock, “You look too much at who’s watching you dive instead of on the gold.”

  “I gotta take this from a loser midget?”

  “Listen to the lovers,” Nice said.

  Dare stood tall with that crest of hair like a web singer or some photo you see and know is of a hero. “Look tough,” she told them and they formed a front as we moved down to the waterline.

  Me, I just stared around, looked downtown where black Hudson tide water was over the banks and in the street. Anyone looking maybe would guess I was Dare’s useless little girl trick. In truth I was seeing through her eyes which was part of the thing inside me.

  When I was a little kid I had flashes where I was inside someone else’s head for a second. It began to happen more often once my monthlies started. It scared me till I saw it as a weapon and tried to take control.

  This summer was me and Dare’s second together and we fit like a knife in a fist. At first she hated it when I began slipping into her brain and we fought. Then she saw what we could do with it and went along.

  That day I saw what Dare could see: used-up diving boys with the skin coming off them in clumps and scavenger ladies with bags of garbage all turned towards us snarling. But Dare saw fear in their eyes, knew they were looking for ways to back off and gave them the chance.

  For what was left of the afternoon we owned that stretch of the shore. But even here some water spilled over the walls onto the walkway. And barefoot kids don’t ever want to touch river water unless there’s gold in the air.

  Then Dare and me caught sight of a long ground car with tinted windows and double treads coming down the highway, dodging the holes, bouncing over the rubble. According to the deal I set up with Depose this was a party of tourists who wanted to see New York diving boys.

  The car stopped, the doors opened and Depose’s people jumped out of it holding their AK474s ready. One kept an eye on Dare and the rest of us—cradled the rapid-fire in her arms. Two covered the other directions, on the alert but not tense. One stayed at the wheel.

  When Depose runs things there’s no reason to worry. You don’t cross her and you’re okay unless she’s been given the contract on you or she sees some reason her life would get better without you. In those cases you’re dead. Simple, the way not much else is in this world.

  Next the tourists in their protective suits and helmets got out of the car. A pile of wreckage juts out from the walkway and into the water. Security escorted them up there so they could see the show, then stood guard.

  Dare and the boys looked up at them. Not said, “Aliens,” and spat into the water but Dare signaled him to cool it. Not and Nice became partners that summer and Nice rubbed his back and whispered, something. They and Hassid, who’s single and older than any of us—eighteen—stepped out of their shorts and moved right to the edge of the cement. Rock, our fourth boy, was new with us and not easy but he did the same.

  Tourists get off on American kids staring up like starving dogs. Tourists want to see us bare ass and risking our lives. Dare and me hated them as much as Not did, but this was the cleanest way we’d come up with to get money out of them.

  At first this bunch seemed the usual: half a dozen figures with white insulated helmets to keep the sun off their faces, conditioned coveralls to make them comfortable, shields to protect their eyes and masks so they breathed clean air.

  Under all that protection you can’t even tell what sex they are. They could be alien conquerors built like insects, soft and lovely ladies in silk from China where everyone is rich, kings and queens from Fairyland. You hear stories of creatures like those coming to see how New York got laid low. I maybe could have gone into their brains but I didn’t want to give away that secret until I really knew what I was doing.

  Then the tourists shifted and one who’d been hidden by the others stepped out front and showed me something very different.

  This one didn’t wear coveralls, helmet or mask and was female with copper skin and hair not far from mine. She wore goggles and took breaths out of a tube she carried while someone held a metal shade above her.

  She looked familiar as I saw her through Dare’s eyes and I felt my partner’s surprise at how much the tourist girl looked like me.

  This one was the center of the group’s attention and concern. They clustered around like they’d stop bullets for her. Because of the goggles I couldn’t see her eyes but I could tell she was staring my way.

  Looking back, maybe I kept my talent too much a secret. If I’d gone inside a couple more heads we’d have been spared a lot of grief. As it was when Rock turned to look my way Dare said, “Eyes front,” under her breath because we didn’t want me drawing attention.

  Dare checked the boys one last time, made sure their skin was intact and that they had the safety lenses in their eyes before they hit the water. She took some extra care with Rock. Dare was a diver herself before she hooked up with me. She got out of it in time but she remembers.

  If no one managed divers, Tourists would make them compete so they drove each other to death. With murder and the diseases they get and being drafted to serve in the militias, boys are scarce and talented ones like ours are rare. Dare and I kept the ones we had healthy.

  Then sunlight flashed as a tourist’s hand came out of a pouch. Dare, calm and steady, nodded to the boys to stand right on the edge of the busted pavement in the spaces where there are no rails.

  The hand went up, snapped the gold coin into the air where it turned over as it fell toward the water a bit too far away for a boy to make an easy catch.

  Dare had tapped Nice and he dived forward in an arc, snapped it up as he hit the water. Nice flipped over and swam back and the tourists applauded, laughed. Nice was back up on the pavement with Dare taking the gold out of his mouth as the next coin sailed up in the air.

  This was further away and thrown harder but Hassid kept his eyes on it as he dived and was a yard away from where it went into the water. He came up with the coin and headed back as the next coin went further out and Not showing his skill and class went under and grabbed it.

  The tourists applauded but this is how they always do it, throwing each one a little further away, watching kids risk skin and eyes in water full of everything from turds to nuclear waste, seeing if their nerve will fail, hoping for the thrill of seeing one go under and not come up. The girl on the block pile watched it all intently. It didn’t seem possible anyone from my world could have the wealth and power she did.

  Jackie Boy is the legend they’ve heard about. Jackie skimmed over the surface of the water and no matter how far or hard it got thrown, could catch tourist money in his teeth before either he or the gold hit the river. Maybe he wasn’t human. I’d started wondering if I was.

  The tourists that day didn’t work the boys as hard as lots of them do. We got all the coins except for one that Rock missed. But it turned out all this was just a test.

  One time that afternoon a plane, a fighter, flew low over the city and we flinched but the tourists paid no attention. This meant that it was nothing important.

  Then maybe they got bored and started climbing down the rock pile. Right that second a chimera, the one called Silky who’s half seal, half woman and old like they all are, came out of the water a bit further upstream and caught their attention. Her skin is tough and she doesn’t stay in long and maybe that or luck lets her survive.

  Chimeras come from when things were falling apart but some people in the city still had money and tech and a big need to keep amused. There aren’t any new chimeras; probably no one knows how to make them any more.

  Tourist helmets flashed as they took pictures of Silky. I saw the girl look my way again and say something to one of the guys in protective gear who took a few pictures of me.

  When tourists lose interest and city smells and poisons start getting in their masks they go back to the expensive air at hotels in the Security Zone. Seeing the lights from the Zone
way uptown always twisted my stomach, made me want to do a lot more than spit in their direction.

  We got the boys cleaned off. There’s stuff the U.N. clinic in Times Square gives to people exposed to the river or harbor and we rubbed them down. We used expensive pure water to clean out their eyes and mouths.

  All of a sudden Depose drove up. The girl said something to her before the tourist party got in the big ground car and took off. Depose, wide and mean, and her bodyguard stayed behind. Through Dare’s eyes I saw her stride towards us. But I didn’t look up until Depose went right past Dare without even nodding to her.

  “Real,” her voice is this low growl and she motioned for me to step away from the others, stood over me bearing down, sticking her face close to mine. “My clients are in the city to shoot a Net episode. I brought you out today so they could look at you and your fags. Mai Kin wants to use you!”

  She watched through those heavy lids for a reaction. Depose went through girl and boyfriends like they were toilet paper but liked them a little older than me. Otherwise I’d want to stay away from her. I nodded that I understood, shrugged like it was no great matter.

  But that was why the tourist girl looked familiar. Mai Kin was a rising star right then playing Astasia X99, a girl super heroine who’s supposed to be around sixteen and who goes from place to place having adventures, fighting crime and vampires and it’s so dumb that you can laugh at it.

  Astasia has the power of disguise. She’s totally different in each episode. The last time I saw her she was in a big city in Africa and she was dark with wild black hair, infiltrating a revolutionary group.

  What I just saw I guessed, was the way she’d look here in New York. Pictures of Mai Kin before Astasia X99 show an okay-looking Asian girl who’s maybe twenty.

  “The one called Caravaggio is going to direct this thing,” Depose told me. “He’ll get in touch. I trust you not to screw this up. Remember, Real, you owe me. You’re smart. You don’t need these dumb kids,” she indicated Dare and the boys.