“What are you in for?” said the woman sitting at the top of the wall. I’d seen her up there many times, but this was the first time she’d spoken. Her hair was a tangled nest, all shadows. She held a colorful red umbrella with faded black markings and smoked marijuana cigarettes. Her teeth were covered in blood.
“I ran away,” I said. “I wanted to be … different.”
She cackled, spitting bloody droplets. “We all got our wish! They made us into the monsters they believed us to be, all us resisters, vandals, arsonists, thieves, and social deviants. But you, you don’t like what they’ve done.”
“No.” I began to weep again. The world smelled metallic.
The woman gave a great guffaw. I’d never seen her come down, wasn’t even sure she had legs; a big tattered skirt, made of cast-off shirts and robes and tunics, covered her lower half. “This life,” she said, “is a gift. You don’t see it? They sent us out here, billions of years into the future, when everything on the Earth we knew is dead. They thought they were condemning us. Instead, they have given us a gift.”
“Life used to be worth something. Eleven years I’ve wept here. It’s gotten me nothing.”
“Stop weeping, then,” she said. “Start living. Embrace what they made of you.”
“I have to fight it. I have to—”
“Life isn’t what’s done to you,” she said. “It’s what you do with what’s been done to you. Live. You have wept enough.”
I picked up a stone. I wanted to knock her off that high point. In all the years I have been here, no one had spoken to me like she did. No one challenged the way I coped with this horrifying life.
As I drew up the stone, three women ran from the market behind me and peeled the stone from my fingers.
I cried out, “It’s my right!”
And they hushed me, they hushed me and said, “That was the old world.”
Their eyes were silvery, and their skins hardened like reptiles.
“We aren’t human,” I said.
“No,” said the woman on the wall, “and that is why we will survive.”
The other women led me back to the market. They wrapped me in a blanket. They fed me warm soup made of kelp and marrow broth. That night, I slept better than I had in eleven years.
In the morning, one of them sat at my side, humming a little tune, mending my mercury-soaked shirt.
“I’ve spent so long fighting,” I said. “I don’t know how to do anything else. I want to fight all this darkness.”
She held out the mended shirt to me. “It’s not enough to fight the darkness,” she said. “We must bring the light.”
I put my shirt on and went out to greet the orange demon of the sun. All around me, the market was still. We were criminals, condemned. I gazed at the wall. The woman was still up there, snoozing on the wall. My name was there, on the wall. I knew my end. We all did. But she was right. What I did between now and the end was up to me.
I exchanged my metallic tears for a knobby, apple-like fruit at a market stall, and made my way back to the woman on the wall. It was time to stop running.
Bring the light … I didn’t know how. I had never done that before.
But I knew how to start.
The End
Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!*
She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.
…was an epigraph engraved at the basses of statues around the city, meant to dissuade women from fighting monsters. But to Moira, the epigraph inspired. We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing.
So despite or because of that epigraph, Moira intended to carry on in the work that had led to her own grandmother’s death, and her mother before, back and back, to the beginning of this world, and into the next. Someone had to hold back the monsters.
Moira left the confines of the gated city. She moved into the hills. She carried only a crystal staff. The city sent up the golems after her, as she knew they would. Many didn’t understand that someone had to fight the monsters. Someone had to persist, or the city would be overwhelmed. She fought the golems, twisting their guts and gouging out their ticking hearts. Snakes and bears and other beasts bred to keep her behind the walls slithered and snapped and snuffled in her path. Moira wrestled them too, and emerged bloody and bitten, but triumphant.
She limped her way to the base of the great mountain that all her female kin had talked of for time immemorial. She climbed and climbed, until her shoes were shredded and her fingers and bled, and her arms shook so badly she thought they would fail her. When she pulled herself up onto the great ledge at the top, she saw what remained of her sisters: wizened, mummified visages, scattered bones, discarded shoes, two broken crystal staves. She limped through the detritus of her kin and into the cave where the monsters lay.
The monsters rose from their beds, already armored and bristling for another attack on the city below. They came to extinguish light, and hope. She was here to remind them they wouldn’t do it unchallenged.
Moira raised her staff in her hands and shouted. The monsters yowled and overtook her. She bludgeoned them, snapping and biting like the creatures in the valley, poking at their hearts with her staff until it hit home, ramming through the eye of one of the great giants. They fell together, she and the monster, gazing into one another’s ruined faces.
One less monster to take the city, one less woman to defend it.
“Oh, our faces, radiant sisters,” Moira said, gazing out over the monster’s body at the scattered bones as the monsters snarled in the darkness, readying to tear her to pieces, as they had her kin, “Our faces, so full of light.”
When Moira failed to return, and the monsters crept down from the mountains – one less this year, one less each year, one less, always one less, but never none, never enough – a statue of Moira’s likeness was raised beside her grandmother’s.
Each day, young women visited her statue. They ran their fingers over the inscription at its base. They did so generation after generation, as more statues rose and fell, more monsters came and went, and time moved on, the eternal struggle of light and dark.
The women pressed their hands to the words there until the only script that remained visible of the epigraph on Moira’s statue was a single word:
“persist.”
The End
*see. Sheldon, Racoona. “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Full of Light.”
The Conclave of Ravens
“Strive to discover the mystery before life is taken from you.
If while living you fail to find yourself, to know yourself,
how will you be able to understand
the secret of your existence when you die?”
- Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-Din Attar
Nyx pawned her sister’s bum kidney for the third time in a week, because rent was due and her sister hadn’t been specific about how Nyx was supposed to use the kidney. Not that Nyx would have cared what pleased her sister. If she cared about pleasing anyone but herself, she sure as fuck wouldn’t be in this miserable but gratifying profession.
But to get away with this many surgeries in so short a time, she had to get the butcher too drunk to notice that Nyx had been shuffling the same kidney in and out all week.
“No refunds or exchanges,” the little Heidian man always said, but as far as Nyx was concerned, rules were for other people.
“No liquor after this,” the man said, his hands trembling with drink and nerves. He was operating without a license. Order Keepers hated that. Once upon a time, Nyx might have hated it too. A long, long time ago.
Nyx snorted, watching her watery blood drip from hands. She took a slug from the nearly-empty whisky bottle next to him and sat up on the cold slab. Her guts protested. Gurgle and slosh of organs.
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” She smacked him on the back and palmed a couple ampules of morph
ine when he wasn’t paying attention. She tugged on a tunic and knee-length trousers, wrapped her burnous close. Winter in Nasheen was mild during the day, but colder at night. The world hadn’t heated back up yet, and she found herself shivering, from cold or shock or some combination of the two.
He wrapped the kidney in wax paper treated with flesh mites. She toted her dubious package across the way to the little hedge witch’s shop in the Heidian district. The breeze carried the smell of boiled cabbage and burnt butter. Behind her, the big orange demon of the second sun rose over her shoulder, throwing shadows from the taller buildings across the little entryway to the witch’s shop. A step down, a quick adjustment to the dim.
The plump old woman behind the counter rolled her eyes at Nyx. She sat at the counter with her accounting books while the radio blew misty images of some tired fictional drama into the air.
“Rent?”
“Rent,” Nyx said. She leaned on the counter. Duaa, the hedge witch, was easily forty years old. If Nyx lived that long, she would throw herself a fucking party.
“You need a job.” Duaa peeled back the paper and peeked at the kidney. Shook her head. “Is this the same one?”
“I suppose I could have taken out the other one. But why ruin a good thing?”
Duaa muttered something; maybe an old litany, the ninety-nine names of God. She packed the kidney off into the back and returned with a few notes. Placed them on the counter.
Nyx counted it out. “Not enough.”
“It’s a shitty kidney.”
“I’ll have you know that came from my sister, originally. She’s a fine upstanding organic technician at the breeding compounds. I can get you references and everything.”
“It may have been pristine when that tee-totaling Kitabullah martyr lugged it around, but you’re not good to your organs, Nyx.”
“The fuck am I supposed to get the other three notes?”
“Sell an eye. A tongue, maybe.”
Nyx grimaced. “You have a line on a job?”
“I do, but you won’t like it.”
“When have I ever liked it?”
“She’s a sweet-eyed foreigner. I know how you hate those.”
“Send her over. I can overcharge the sweet-eyed ones.”
Duaa pursed her mouth and tsked. “Just remember, you asked me.”
Nyx jammed the fistful of notes into her pocket. Sneered. “You remember that you underpaid me.”
“When will you become a sober, responsible adult, Nyxnissa? You have all the proper skills. You could have been the country’s most celebrated bel dame. Could be married to three women and –”
“And pushing out babies for the war? I’m better at killing people than making them. You imagine me with a garden and a couple kids at the coast? Never gonna happen. I’d end up murdering them all.”
“Selling me the same kidney three times in a week isn’t a promising way to build a future, or stay out of prison.”
“I’ve been out of prison two years already. Why you keep bringing that up? I’ll come back for it next week.” Nyx showed her teeth and strode back out into the street. She took a huff of the cabbage-reeking air. Her guts gurgled.
Nyx vomited in the storm drain, wiped her mouth, and headed back to her own storefront. Maybe she could sell one of her team’s kidneys for a couple more notes. Start parceling out their flesh in exchange for whisky.
A girl could dream.
#
Nyx arrived back her storefront just in time to deliver rent to her beefy landlord, who stood inside the foyer muttering at the sign in the window that proclaimed: Odd Jobs and Body Reclamation.
“You’re short five notes.”
“Have the rest tomorrow.” Nyx shrugged.
“Liar.”
“Long practice. Have we ever not been square?”
Gamila, the hefty landlord, snorted her displeasure. She had some kind of progressive genetic condition that meant she had avoided the front. Her bowed spine gave her the appearance of a skittering insect. Nyx suspected she wasn’t much older than twenty, if a day.
“You got jobs lined up?” Gamila asked.
“Don’t I always?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Such a killjoy.”
“Tomorrow, Nyx. You’re done if I don’t have it. Get your jobs in cantinas.”
“Where would my team sleep?”
“In the fucking cantinas. Or the gutter. Not my fucking problem. They’re you’re goddamn problem.”
Gamila huffed out the door.
“Hey!” Nyx yelled after her. “Sure you don’t need anybody murdered? I’ve got good rates!”
“Only you, Nyxnissa. Only you.”
Nyx slammed the door. She turned, folding her arms. Her magician, Rhys, stood in the bowed entry between the foyer and the gear hub in back, shaking his head.
“Why the fuck you let her in?” Nyx said.
“She does own the building.”
“I own the lock!” Nyx stomped into her office and tossed her burnous on the chair. She grimaced as she sat, clutching at her burning left side.
“You’re leaking,” Rhys said.
Nyx grunted. Pulled her fingers away. Bloody discharge smeared her hand.
“Did you sell Kine’s kidney again?” Taite, her com tech, peeked into the office from behind Rhys, as if using him as a shield to her potential wrath.
“Does this mean we aren’t getting paid?” Rhys asked.
“You get paid when we do a job,” Nyx barked. “I don’t work on charity. You got a job lined up?”
Nyx yanked at her desk drawer and produced a bottle of whisky.
“We could always sell the booze for notes,” Taite suggested.
“Go fuck yourself,” Nyx said. “Where’s my new jobs from the boards?”
Taite ducked away again. “On it!”
Rhys sighed. “Let me clean up that wound for you.”
Nyx took a hit straight from the bottle. The burn of it soothed her anger, but not her roiling guts.
Rhys returned with a box of bugs and bandages and little jars of salve that smelled as terrible as the butcher’s place.
She rucked up her tunic and let him clean the hastily-closed wound. The butcher had closed it with the pincered heads of red ants, and they didn’t seem to be holding together well.
“Shoddy work,” Rhys muttered. He ran his cool fingers over her flesh, rubbing a sticky, foul-smelling salve over the wound and placing a fresh bandage over it, affixed with some matter of flesh beetles that would help repair her skin.
Satisfied, he pulled down her tunic. Did not meet her gaze. It was never the blood that bothered him, but the display of living female flesh. Funny little Chenjan.
“If you’re going to keep drinking,” Rhys said, pulling a vial of clear liquid from the box, “as least take this. There are besedamites in here. They’ll help clear toxins from the blood, until you get that kidney back.”
“Didn’t know you cared so much.” Nyx smirked and wrapped her fingers around the vile, tried to get him to look at her. He wouldn’t.
As he turned, he said, “I don’t. But I do care about my pay checks, and you still issue those.”
He was already in the foyer, or maybe the hub, when she thought up a suitable response. “You know you love me!” she called.
Rhys didn’t respond.
#
Nyx sat at her desk cleaning her sword and eating peri-peri rice out of an old boot when a knock came at the door. It was well past evening prayer, coming up on midnight prayer, and for a long moment she thought the knocking was coming from her own head. She glared accusingly at her nearly-empty whisky bottle.
“I got it, boss!” Anneke, her hired gun, yelled from the back. The rest of the team was likely already asleep. Men slept like cicadas between swarms.
A hushed voice in the foyer. Anneke rattling off something, like the maybe the woman needed
directions.
“Oh, Nyxnissa?” Anneke barked. “Uh, sure. She’s here. If you’re sure.”
Nyx gripped her sword as a slight woman wearing a thick, hooded burnous slipped into her office ahead of Anneke. Anneke carried her shotgun, a constant companion, and her dark hair was a wet, fiery purplish-red color the color of some deep organ.
“The fuck, Anneke,” Nyx said. “You bath your hair in the blood of your enemies?”
“Like it?” Anneke said. Her hands, too, were stained a vibrant red, far redder than blood. Some had smeared onto her gun. Whoever the visitor was must have a strong resolve to come out here in the middle of the night and keep walking in when she saw Anneke.
“And who are you?” Nyx wasn’t even close to marginally sober, but she could play at it if she needed to. She straightened.
The woman pulled off her hood. A slender woman, plump in the cheeks, though, which made her look as if she was permanently storing something in the pouches of her face. Her features struck Nyx as being Heidian; the round face, flat nose, and stringy dark hair paired with a sallow complexion. Too unblemished to have been in Nasheen long, and certainly not a refugee, judging by the expensive cut of her burnous and quality of her thick purple skirt and tailored tunic.
“Duaa sent me,” the woman admitted, almost a question, as she gazed around the dusty office and its various piles of gear and dirty dishes.
Nyx waved at Anneke. “Go on, I got it.”
Anneke shrugged. “I’ll be banging around the back.”
“You want to sit?” Nyx asked.
The woman hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“What’s the job?”
“My wife was a diplomat working for the Heidian government.”
“Here in Nasheen?”
“Yes.” Still wary. She would not meet Nyx’s look.
Nyx put her feet on her desk and stretched her hands before her head, smirking. “You say diplomat and I hear ‘spy.’ Sounds like a government thing. Queen doesn’t like me. She can put bel dames on it.”
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