by Teresa Rook
“Kindling’s outside, Darga,” she says.
“On it.”
Shiny beetles the size of my thumb scurry from the wood pile as I pick through it. I load up with twigs and a few short logs thick as Mhyra's thigh, scavenged from the desert. The sun, already hours into the sky, beats dryly against the back of my neck.
Back inside, I feed the twigs one by one through the grate into the fireplace and slowly turn the switch. The flint catches on the twelfth click. Mhyra moves for the hearth and clucks her tongue as she almost steps on Abadiah.
“Come on, Diah,” I say, moving towards the door. “Let’s give your mother some space to work.”
He follows me outside and then immediately takes the lead. He drags me around the back of the small cabin and over to a discarded sheet of tin. The dry, barren ground more closely resembles the desert than it does the Farms. “Look what I found,” he whispers, even though we’re the only ones out here. He lifts the tin to reveal a shimmering device underneath, smooth and twice the size of my fist. I can see three distinct parts, though how they interact is anyone’s guess. Abadiah holds it up to me reverently.
“Cool find, kid.” I take it and hold it up to my face, watching the silver light flit across it, ducking in and out of its surface.
“Mom doesn’t think so,” he says, crossing his arms. “She’d want me to get rid of it.”
“Ah. Well. You know. Not everyone sees what we see.” I pass it back to him and he cradles it in his arms like a kitten.
“What do you think it does?”
“No idea.” I prod one of the hinges and it bends, then wobbles back into place.
“You don’t think it’s special.”
“Sure I do.”
“No. Because you see stuff like this all the time where all the other people live.”
I bite my lip. This is always hard, seeing the loneliness on him. I want to encourage his curiosity, to help him picture the mysterious machines that dot the rest of the Farms. But what little I’ve told him has backfired terribly. Mhyra doesn’t like when I give him ideas. “We should go check inside. Maybe your mom’s done with your eggs by now.”
Hurt flashes in his eyes. I gnaw on the inside of my cheek as we go back around the cabin. Mhyra needs to start letting him go.
Back inside, she hands me a plate with a cheese and tomato omelette as wide as her head. She must have added her own eggs to my offering. Abadiah obediently brings me a fork, still pouting, eyes on his feet. “Thank you, Diah.”
The three of us eat in a tense silence, the kind where I have words but swallow every one of them. Mhyra ignores the atmosphere, focusing on her breakfast. Then she resumes her bustling in the kitchen. Reorganizing, taking silent inventory. She knows from Abadiah’s sulking what we were talking about, because Abadiah and I have the same conversation every time. Look what I found, he says. Proof that the world is bigger than mom says. I tap, tap, tap my fork against the edge of my plate, willing Mhyra to give me an opening. Eventually, I sigh and stand to bring it to her. I reach my arms around her from behind and waggle the fork absently in the air before us. I stare at the small tattoo on her neck as I speak, a sun rising between a copse of trees. “I should go. Tilly’s going into foal any day now. I have to be at the Farms.”
Mhyra moves down the counter, out of my loose embrace. Her lower eyelids twitch as she dumps a dead spider out of her mixing bowl. She watches its corpse drift to the dirt floor. “Ah, yes, the Farms,” she says, as though they haven’t kept her and her son alive for the past three years. “The last refuge in a dying nation. Carnigai’s saving grace.”
I lick my lips. Don't start this, Mhyra. Say you’re glad I came and let me kiss you goodbye at the door.
Abadiah wiggles between us with new hope. He’s practically bouncing with excitement at the mention of Tilly. “Your horse? Her baby will be here soon?”
I nod. “Any day now.”
His omelette lies abandoned on the table, and I have his undivided attention. His willingness to move on draws a sigh from me. I let myself follow his lead. Relax.
“Are you still worried it will go wrong?”
“Nah.” Mhyra has tensed up with a big cauldron in her arms, her back to us, and is listening carefully. “Tilly's a good girl. Everything will be fine.”
“But she's old.”
“Everything will be fine.”
He looks at me with wonder in his eyes, a kid desperate for experience. “Maybe I could go with you. Help you. I can hold your tools or pet the horse if it gets scared.”
“You'd have to ask your mom about that.”
“You know better, Abadiah,” Mhyra says immediately, inflectionless. I throw him a quick, what-can-you-do shrug. The cauldron clatters onto the hook above the hearth, and then, dinner soup on, Mhyra puts a hand on my lower back and guides me out the door.
“You know better, too,” she says once we've stepped away from the closed door. Abadiah could still hear us if he pressed his ear against it. “Why do you make me say no, over and over again? You think I like keeping him cooped up in here every day? No. I do it because I have to, and when you do that—suggest it's something I can just change my mind about—you hurt me and you hurt my son.”
My own anger pricks beneath my skin, like a meticulously ignored bug bite demanding to be scratched. “So we’re talking now. Good.” I raise my chin and look her square in the eye. “What's your plan? To keep him locked up inside until he dies of old age? That won't work soon. He's ten. Don't you remember what it was like then, when the world was just starting to open up to you? You'd deny him that?”
Mhyra waves me away. “Keep your clichés.”
She always does this. Assumes any time I say something substantial, I'm quoting someone whose stupidity I’m too naive to recognize. It hurts extra because she's wrong. These sentiments she so easily dismisses come from me alone.
She sees it on my face, I think, because she softens. Slightly, but it’s there. “Darga. You know I must keep him here. To keep him safe.”
“No, actually, I don't know that. You're underestimating him. What, you think he's going to run up to the first person he sees, screaming I can see runes?”
“Keep your voice down.”
I laugh. “There's nobody here, Mhyra. You live at the very edge of the Farms, barely part of the community. Do you know how hard it was to convince my mother to let you in at all? And then you settle as far from everyone as you can possibly get, practically in the desert. You're paranoid, Mhyra, because guess what? I see runes, too, and nobody's come for me.”
“Abadiah is ten,” she says through gritted teeth. “You really think he can keep this secret on his own?”
“I think he's going to get out from under your thumb one day, and when that finally happens, he'll be so fucking lonely that he'll say anything for attention. I think you're bottling him up, and one day he'll burst, and who knows who'll be there to hear him?” I take a deep breath and reach for her clenched hands. “Let him come with me. He has to start somewhere, someday. He's safe with me.”
I wait, watching as Mhyra visibly relaxes, bit by bit. Her fingers unclench one at a time and her shoulders, hunched up to her neck, begin to level out. Her neck, smooth and soft with that little tattoo. I remember her shoved against the cabin wall in the cool night air, the feel of her fingers tightening in my hair. The memory of her uneven breaths prompts a hitch in my own breathing and moves me closer to her.
She inhales deeply, an inviting vulnerability, and then her eyes slide past me and she goes white as milk.
“Darga!” a male voice calls from behind me.
I turn and sputter. Mudo is breathing hard, hopping from foot to foot. And here, for some reason. I struggle to clear my head. “Wha— Hi?”
“Tilly’s gone into foal, and something’s wrong. We need you.” Mudo is already stepping backwards, tensed to dive into a sprint for the barn. Dire.
Tilly. I bite my lip and bow my head, then look back at Mh
yra. She's retreated to the house, but is paused in the doorway, watching me with eyebrows drawn low over her eyes and her beautiful lips wrinkled into the start of a snarl. Distrust. Betrayal.
How much did Mudo hear?
four
I burst through the barn doors, Mudo far behind me. The murmuring crowd parts as I shove my way to Tilly’s stall. “Let me through, let me through!”
“Bad idea,” Old Man Wells mutters, shaking his head in a perpetual tic. “Bad idea, terrible idea, awful terrible wrong bad idea.”
Tilly leans heavily against the back wall. Her flanks heave erratically, her eyes are wild, and thick strings of saliva hang from her black lips in a lattice.
My mother paces outside the stall, her hands clasped tight behind her back and her head down. Trying to maintain some composure. When she sees me, that pretense fades. Her whole face goes red, and she comes at me like a banshee. Her furious words are far too quick for me to catch.
“I'm here now,” I say, speaking over her, trying to get her to calm down and focus. “What happened?”
“Where were you?” she demands. “How could you disappear? Don’t you know what’s at stake here? You love this horse. Why would you leave?” She looks past me, all around us. “Is it that woman? Did you bring her here?” Her eyes are wide and her pupils dilated. The other Barnabs keep their distance, well aware of the danger zone around my screeching mother.
I shake her off me. I’m not going to get anything useful from her in this state.
“What happened?” I ask again, this time to our onlookers.
“I heard her screaming just before sunrise,” says a girl, I think Brell, exactly the sort of person you'd expect to beat the sun to the fields. Her twin braids make her look younger than she is, but her eyes are steady and calm. “She was twisting and writhing and—she’s been like this since. And then, just a few minutes ago, she started to bleed.”
My stomach drops. Why did I have to go to Mhyra's last night? Tilly's been suffering for hours in my absence. At least now the lingering dread makes sense. Nothing like a good old self-fulfilling prophecy.
I spend a few minutes with Tilly, running my hands over her trembling belly and trying to feel where the problem is. “Come on, girl,” I murmur in my sweetest voice. “Don't panic. Try to relax. I'm here now, and we'll figure this out together. Okay, brave girl?”
I order our onlookers away, including my seething mother, but not before demanding that someone stay and bring me my med kit. Brell volunteers. I sift through it while the crowd reluctantly dissipates, trying to go on autopilot so I don't have to think about what I might have to do with this blade.
“There's not enough coagroot here,” I say to Brell. “It looks like this, and there should be a whole slew of it growing on the morning side of my cabin. Gather as much as you can and have my mother boil it down. Quickly! And here,” I say, pushing the curved blade into her small hands. “Boil this, too.”
By the time she returns, I've coaxed Tilly onto the floor. Her belly rises from her side like a tumour, her skin stretched taut across the twitching foal inside. She's been trying to get it out for hours. It's not going to happen on its own.
“Brell, right? I need you to sit by her head, like that. Here, lay her head on your lap. Don't be scared, you won't hurt her, move with confidence. Turn her so her snout is in the air.” I dip a cloth in the coagroot tea, cool enough now to touch and swallow. I work a thumb between Tilly's teeth until she opens her jaw, and with the other hand I squeeze the cloth, the liquid dripping down her throat. It takes nearly ten minutes of this before she's got enough of it to take effect. The manic rolling of her eyes disappears under long-lashed eyelids, and her twitchy legs have mostly lost their restlessness.
In another few minutes, she’s gone completely still but for her slow, deep breathing. Saliva pools onto Brell’s skirt, Tilly's head resting limp in her lap. I close my eyes. I can do this.
I trace the line with my finger first, from one end of her belly to the other, a smooth curve. I've done this only once before, on a pregnant sow. I lost five then, saved two. And now one of those two is dead, the result of another botched surgery.
Focus. Neither Tilly nor her foal can afford for me to be distracted today.
I press the knife against her side, lightly at first, getting a feel for how deeply I'll need to slice to pierce the uterus. The bleeding should be minimal thanks to the coagroot. Everything should be fine.
I press harder and the knife goes in, that first giving way, the silver sliding beneath her skin. Brell stares at the opposite wall, trying to keep her nerve as the knife curves through Tilly's hide. Drops of blood bloom across the smooth, symmetrical line and run into her rough brown coat.
#####
I stitch Tilly up, and then Brell and I hold our breath. The new foal lies still on the straw, soaked with blood and amniotic fluid. I count the seconds. Then it puts out a spindly leg and begins to push itself up, a guaranteed failure for a newborn that assures me he is curious and aware and okay. My relief is so thick I have to clear my throat before I speak. “Want to name him, Brell?”
She looks startled. I smile at her and nod, shifting back so she can get closer to the foal. She reaches a bony, shaking hand out for the spot between his ears. He twitches his head away once, twice, then lets her palm land. A grin breaks over her face and I take a deep, calming breath.
“Pancake,” she says.
I snort in amusement. “Seriously?”
Tilly’s flanks continue to rise and fall. We did it.
#####
Shortly after midnight, Tilly wakes up. I think I've imagined it at first, that I've fallen asleep with my back against the stall and Tilly raising her head is just a dream. But she kicks her feet a little and stretches out to nudge my foot with her nose. Relief pours through me, more potent for my exhaustion. I stroke her nose.
“You did well, old girl. Really well.” Her new colt stands a few feet away, sleeping soundly on all four legs. Tilly watches me with shiny, lidded eyes. I snap my fingers. “I think you've earned an apple, don't you? I won't tell if you don't.”
I'm surprised at how dark it is outside, and how quiet. I take the lantern from beside the door, twisting the starter on my way to the storehouse. I don’t need light for the walk, just to find the right box once inside. The fire doesn't catch until I'm standing at the entrance to the hollowed-out cellar, and when the flame finally does burst to life, I narrow my eyes. Someone left the double doors open, the entry to the storehouse gaping wide, the scent of the food inside a buffet for wandering animals. We can't afford pests, especially not with the recent Chiral collection. We need every scrap.
Something aboveground catches my eye, hidden in the darkness but startlingly large and close. A rectangular shape newly illuminated by the lantern, easy to miss if you’re not looking. In front of it, something moves. Two horses, nervous at the fire I hold up to investigate. They seem ill-fed, with hollows around their eyes and ribs that stick out in the orange light. Definitely not Chiral.
I put a hand on one, and it stamps at me. I follow the line of its harness to the wagon, messily painted as if by a child. Curling vines and wide, sweeping leaves, the kind of jungle that’s impossible in Carnigai, the likes of which I’ve never seen. I can’t help but stare. I go around to the wagon’s opened back. Barnab crates filled with potatoes, carrots. Those apples for Tilly. Someone is stealing from us.
I whirl around, thrusting my lantern out like a weapon, but there's nobody in the night for me to strike. They must be inside the storehouse. But how many? I feel for the small dagger always stuffed in my boot. We are hungry, but far less hungry than most. People get desperate. This has happened before. It’s why I know how to fight.
I descend into the cellar step by step, a small enough space that once the lantern has cleared the ceiling, the entire place lights up. But it’s bizarre, because under the yellow light of the fire is a softer light, a shimmering white emanating from th
e boxes lining the walls. I’ve seen these shimmers before, confined to the old tools we can’t work without the witches. Abadiah’s most recent find is nothing compared the living mural shifting over the ordinary crates all around me, white runes dancing along our ordinary wooden boxes.
There’s a woman, curly-haired and peering out at me from behind a stack of parsnips, the flame reflected in her piercing green eyes. Her skin is a deeper brown than my own, almost black. She sees me see her and mutters a curse. One deep breath, and then she launches herself over the crates, her foot aimed at my head. I sidestep and grab her ankle as it whizzes past, pulling her off balance and changing her trajectory so she slams into a dirt wall, boxes already cleared out. I grab my knife as she lays there, winded, but she gets herself together enough to raise a hand, and with a slight flick of her wrist, the wall slams into me from behind.
I turn in time to see it, the glowing boxes like a giant, crushing wave, and there is no escape. I dodge the first few, but there are too many, heavy and wooden and splintering, and they bury me in the dark.
#####
I see a black-skinned child with twiggy arms and round, kind eyes. She’s brushing a toddler's hair and singing something, but the words are far away, locked inside the dream. There's a din outside, a great crashing and releasing, like she is inside the sea, like she’s found the single spread of calm inside the storm. But the ocean swells and erupts around her, and it's hard to make out the words to the lullaby she sings.
The ocean will crash but we stay safe within…
Her voice moves to the rhythm of her fingers brushing through the toddler's hair.
For we are sea and sky and earth…
#####
I wake up groggy from a dream that feels like a memory. The dark and damp reminds me where I am, and the aches across my body bring the memory of dozens of crates flung on top of me, pinning me down, choking me out. There’s no weight on me now.
The shimmering has gone and I can’t find my lantern, so I just crawl along the length of the storehouse, hands out in front of me, feeling blindly. My fingers connect on all sides with the damp dirt wall. No boxes anywhere. No food.
