The XY

by Virginia Bergin

  He swings himself off, and I shove my bike to the ground, grabbing up anything and everything to cover her—fallen leaves, branches, bracken fronds. My frightened hands even grab and dump the mossy rocks from a once-was wall, and he helps. He helps, and I pull him away, deep into the dying bracken, just before the car bounces into sight, its beams blasting us but not seeing us.

  It passes.

  I ease my breath. His breath, hard in my ear, does not ease.

  “Mason’s alive,” I tell him to calm his panic.

  “That so?” he says.

  “Yes!” I whisper, smiling in the darkness, waiting for amazement, for demands for explanations that I will struggle to give; waiting, above all, for joy.

  “Lying bitch.”

  That is his reply.

  His head mashes down on mine. For a half of a moment of what was left of who I used to be, I think there’s something wrong with him. It. Not him. It. What else do you call someone who does this to a person?

  There is something wrong with it. It is wrong.

  Its lips crash against mine, poisonous and ugly. Its body presses.

  I push it away. I push so hard—but it grabs back harder. So hard my shoulders feel the physics of escape. Tilt angle. Weight mass. We’re on a slope. I roll.

  It tips off me, rolls, its hands gripping my overalls so I am dragged, tipped, onto it. Physics. I flip and I roll, the slope in my favor, so steep its hands are wrenched free as I tumble, crashing down.

  I am lying in the woods on the once-was road. Branches like bones above me.

  I hear it swearing and snarling, trying to pull itself out of the tangle of brambles.

  I get up and I RUN.

  I race up through the woodland. This isn’t my side of the valley, but I know it well enough as I get into it, and I know woods. The thing behind me doesn’t know them at all—and it is behind me. I hear it as it comes after me. My sense, in as much as I have any sense right now, is that this creature is as clueless about the woods as Mason was when I found him. It crashes and blunders.

  I’m fast but—“HEY!”—every time there’s a flash of lightning, it spots me.

  FLASH—“HEY!” FLASH—”HEY!”

  And like Mason claimed he was fast, this blunderer…really is. I thought Mason was a man. He’s a boy. This it is full grown. Whatever made it slurry and slow has worn off. It blunders—but it’s fast.

  When I get to the top of the ridge, I pause, panting, hugging an ancient, wind-bent ash tree. All I have to do is get across the open land. That’s all I have to do. Get across the place the trees have yet to claim for their own, the place with the rocks where Plat and I lie. Then I can get down into the woods I know so well. I can lose it for sure there. I can get home.

  Its hand grabs my shoulder—

  “No use runnin’,” it tells me, shoving me down to the ground.

  My hand grabs out into the woodland that I love, reaching for help, finding moss, leaves, and…from the feel of the bark alone—so smooth—I know it is ash. From the weight of it in my hand, I know it is healthy. A branch struck down by the storm, by the weather that can never forget.

  I whack it. I whack it right around the head.

  It is not enough.

  “Angry now,” it says, clutching its bleeding face.

  So am I.

  I’M NOT GOING TO MAKE IT, a voice inside my head says. WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT, another voice says. A voice I never knew I had inside me.

  I am running, and I race across the open ground—the moor—branch in my hand, running for safety.

  The place Plat and I call our own. The rocks.

  It is right behind me. I cannot outrun it. I make the same choice as I did on my bike. I brake. I turn. I am choosing a different route. I whack it.

  It falls—oddly. It falls like a person who did not expect to fall.

  CRACK.

  It is not the impact of branch on face. It is not lightning.

  It’s his head. On the rocks.

  Blood floods dark.

  The storm flashes.

  It’s red. That blood. It’s red. It’s bright goddamn red.

  I try to revive him.

  I crash down through the woods.

  Not on my path. Not on anyone’s path.

  I can’t hear them.

  I can see them. The whole village is assembled for the ha-ha-harvest do. This is what I should have been doing all day, preparing for the harvest supper. It is such a fun night.

  The community studies room is hung with flags and festooned with hops, and trestle tables groan under piles of goodies: cakes and a cider barrel and pumpkins and vegetables to be shared out and apples. Apples. Everywhere, apples.

  I can see the swan that’s been caught and killed and roasted. Our tradition. All swans in the once-was were untouchable, belonging only to the royal family. The carcass is eaten down to its bones already. I can see Sweet clutching its enormous wings, uncooked, the feathers so beautiful. I can see the plan in her mind to wire them so she can wear them. I can see Granmumma Rosie’s arthritic hands collapsed on the piano she’d have been forced to play all night; Granmumma Dora’s and Heloise’s mouths closed on the song they were belting out with Tamara and Jade; Silver-Moon holding the drumstick she just crashed a cymbal with; Lenny releasing her loving hold on her beautiful, soulful electric guitar; Kate, on bass guitar as reluctantly as ever, grimly yanking out the power jack.

  I can see them. I can see hands wipe swan grease and cake crumbs from mouths that have stopped chewing. I can see Plat, ready to run to me. I can see Mumma. I can see Mumma’s love for me colliding with things I cannot imagine. And I can see you, Kate.

  It’s your face I see hardest. Your eyes. Your eyes that somehow know what has happened.

  I can see all of this.

  I can see them.

  I can’t hear them.

  All I can hear is my own breath—in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out. All I can hear is the terrified whoosh of blood in my ears.

  There is blood on my hands. The blood of another. On my hands, on my face, on my lips. I grabbed his head. I grabbed it, fastened my mouth onto his, and tried to breathe life into his body. I pumped hard on his chest.

  I am covered—covered—in his blood.

  And I am still carrying the branch. Even when I knew for sure it was dead, I somehow couldn’t leave without that branch. Its bark is so smooth in my bloody hand. Ash, healthy ash. Fraxinus. Meaning spear. It’s a hard wood to work, I know from Kate. She also said that in the most ancient once-was, long before she was born, ash was thought to connect the entire world—roots in hell, branches in heaven. Stem of a trunk on Earth. People thought of that tree as a goddess.

  I do not believe in any such thing.

  It is a branch in my hand.

  Sound bursts in. There’s so much sound now. There’s so much activity. There’s so much rushing to help me. I hear cries of fright. I hear cries of “River?!”

  Oh, Plat, I even hear you.

  And my own voice, speaking to Kate.

  “You said they weren’t dangerous.”

  A DECISION

  Chapter 22

  Trade

  I am vibrating with the deed.

  I have done it. I have done the thing they said men did. I have killed.

  I told them where the body was. I know Plat is up there now, in the rain, with the others, picking that dead man off the rocks. Carrying him down through the woods.

  I have refused to wash. I am not ready to wash. As I sit at our kitchen table, I can feel the dead man’s blood drying on my skin, tightening it. My hands—my killer hands—rest either side of a cup of tea, but they cannot be warmed. There is a chill inside them so deep I expect they will be forever cold. I wish I could say they
feel disconnected from my body. I wish I could say something like that. But my whole body, my whole mind—all of me—feels very, very connected. Very connected and very cold. I have killed.

  There is only Mumma, Kate, and me.

  And Mason, our secret.

  Only Mumma, Kate, Mason, me, and the deed.

  I have told them everything. I have told it very clearly, from the airport to the impact, and without even a tremor in my voice. Only a warm person would falter, and I am a frozen person. I am a frozen person encased in a tightening skin of XY blood.

  “Is that where you ran from, the airport?” Kate, grim faced, asks Mason.

  He hasn’t said a word. His head is slumped forward.

  “Yes,” he says, looking up. “If you’re going to hell, you’re gonna die anyway, so I ran.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” says Mumma.

  “Hell. That’s where they were sending me. The place where they dump the baddest of the bad. Unit Zero. Supposed to be some kind of prison, but there ain’t no rules at all there. You go, you die.”

  “There’s no such place,” says Mumma.

  “There’d better not be,” says Kate.

  “Stones bounce, huh?” Mason says. “You tellin’ me I’ve been lied to about hell too? What would you know?”

  “I think it’s really highly unlikely that such a place exists,” says Mumma—more to Kate than Mason.

  “It does, and that’s where I was going.”

  “No, you weren’t,” says Mumma, staring at the table.

  “Zoe-River,” Kate says, “I asked you before. I asked you what you know about this.”

  “I didn’t know—before. I didn’t know.”

  “I raised your mumma and I raised you. I’ve pretty much raised your daughter. I did not bring any of you up to sit at this table and lie to me.”

  “I didn’t know. And then I found out. About two weeks ago.”

  “Found. Out. What?”

  “It’s confidential information.”

  “Not at this table, it’s not.”

  My mumma looks up at Kate. “He was being sent to China.”

  “Excuse me?” whispers Kate.

  “There’s a trade deal in progress,” says Mumma.

  “We’re exporting boys…” Kate speaks into the silence.

  “Yes,” says Mumma. “There was an outbreak of the virus in the Chinese Sanctuaries. They’re in desperate need of XYs. Desperate need.”

  Mason laughs, hard and angry. “Have to be totally desperate if they’d take a boy like me… Wait! I get it! I’ll bet you’re telling them Chinese wimmin they’re getting prime stock, ain’t you?”

  Mumma looks sick. “It doesn’t matter what they’re getting,” she says. “We’re trading sperm, not personalities.”

  Kate—she laughs. She actually laughs. It’s not like Mason’s angry bark. It’s bitter mirth. “Trading them for what?! Oh! No! Don’t tell me! What? Let me guess. Boys for…for what?! Insects?!”

  We have had a lot more imported insects over the past year. I’ve grown up eating them, but Kate, and even Mumma, took time to get used to the idea that they are an excellent, plentiful source of cheap protein. Cheap and plentiful in theory. Though our techniques have improved, it’s so hard outside tropical zones to produce enough insects of a kind and a quality that people will eat. Insects need heat.

  I need heat. I need…to find a way to not be frozen.

  “The insects were a sweetener,” Mumma says. “Negotiation gift.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s confidential information.” I know my mumma well enough to know she means it this time—and Kate does too.

  Kate points at me, in my too-tight skin of blood. “This is your trade,” she tells Mumma.

  “I never ever thought that River would be…in any way involved.”

  “Too late now,” says Kate.

  “We are world leaders in IVF,” says Mumma. “We have the most advanced IVF program. We have nothing that the world needs except a reliable, virus-proof supply of sperm.”

  “No, you ain’t,” says Mason. “You ain’t got sperm. That’s all I’m good for to you, isn’t it? That’s all I’m good for.”

  There is a silence of a whole new kind. You could call it an imported silence, because it comes from so many different places. No one owns this silence. It doesn’t even belong to us: to Mumma, to Kate, to Mason, to me. It is bigger than all of us.

  “I am so tired,” my mumma says. She works day and night—long days and long nights—but I’ve never heard her say that before, not in the way she is saying it right now. “We have to make some decisions. There is no way this will not be investigated,” she mumbles.

  “We could bury the body,” Kate says in a low, cold voice. A low, cold, desperate voice. “We could just bury it. Deny all knowledge.”

  “I want to wash now,” I say out loud, scratching at my own skin. Flecks of dried blood peel off—ping off—in every direction. “I WANT TO WASH! I’VE GOT TO WASH!”

  I sit in the bath. Yes, I am having a bath because this is—is it not?—a special occasion. I feel like the water should be red, but it’s not—it’s just mud grubby, with a terrible tinge of pink. My mumma is washing me. My mumma hasn’t washed me since I was a baby.

  “This is not your fault,” my mumma is saying over and over. “None of this is your fault.”

  Chapter 23

  It Is Agreed

  I don’t remember falling asleep.

  I don’t even remember going to bed. My mind and my body finally disconnected.

  I do remember waking up. I remember waking up and creeping, not to my mumma or to Kate or to go outside and breathe in the cold night and the moon and the stars, but to Mason’s room. It feels as though it will never truly be my room again.

  I didn’t knock. I just went in. He was not in the bed that I could see—I could see enough in the dark to know that the hunched shape on my window seat was him. My window seat, where I have liked to sit and watch the sky.

  I join him. I sit at the opposite end of the window seat. I do not pull my legs up onto it as I have always liked to because there is not room for both of us. If I pulled my legs up, we would have to touch. I do not want to be touched by an XY. Not ever again.

  We are silent, just looking out at the sky, though there is no sky to see. It is clouded. Hard to tell in such dark, but the clouds seem low and heavy.

  I don’t quite know why I have even come here. I think there are questions I want to ask. That’s true, but more than that… It’s the strangest feeling. It’s the violence. He has come from it. He has come from a place no one else around me knows or could even begin to understand. Only Kate seems capable of imagining it, but as far as I know she has not, for instance, ever actually killed someone. I have.

  I am in an opposite world now. That’s how I feel. My world was love and duty and courtesy. My world was kindness and help, and I didn’t even realize it, how kind and helpful it was. Why would I? It was my whole world. Now it has been split, and here I am, seeking out the company of one who has lived on the other half of a divide I never even knew existed.

  Words will not come.

  “Can’t see no stars tonight,” he says after a time. “I like ’em. I had a window, back in U-Beta. Couldn’t see anything much out of it. We got walls—big walls—all around the place. But the sky? That I could see. I can tell you most every star in it. There’s shapes! There’d be the panther,” he says, pointing at nothing but dark cloud. “That’s got a claw to it. And the lizard—that crawls almost flat on its belly. ’Cept if you look hard enough, that lizard’s got legs. And the snake got its head rearing up like it’s about to attack.”

  I am quiet. A strange, strange thought is happening in my head about how the stars got named and by whom. I think I kn
ow what he is talking about: how the constellations we should be able to see would look if those clouds weren’t in our way.

  “You thought you were going to prison. To hell? What for?”

  That’s what I say; I’m not even sure if I mean to say it. It’s just that I feel so bad right now, so deeply troubled, that I somehow need to know how a person could feel worse. I need to know what terribleness would take a person to a place where they would choose death over life.

  “I stabbed someone.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No. I ain’t a killer.”

  At those words, I slump.

  “Christ! Sorry, River—”

  “Did you want to kill him?”

  “Did you?”

  “I…wanted to stop him. I just wanted it to stop.”

  “That’s how it was for me too. I wanted to stop Lion, and it didn’t seem like there was any other way. Lion! Never met a boy that chose himself a more stupid name. You ain’t got no name otherwise ’cept ‘boy,’ but Lion?! Who’d choose that? That’s a name says ‘pick on me.’ Only no one did because—hey. Guess what? In Z-Beta the FU is called Killer. That’d be another stupid choice of name, but Killer he was. Father of the unit?! He was the meanest of the mean, but, oh, Killer loved his li’l pet Lion.”

  “Why did you do that?” I ask quietly. “Why did you stab that boy?”

  “’Cause he was gonna stab Jed. Jed was my friend. Where I come from, you can’t have friends. You’d better not get to caring about a person. You’d better not let that kind of stuff show. All you’ve got is Code of Honor. And the code…it ties you to whomever.”

  “Like you and me?”

  “S’pose. I don’t even know about that anymore. I don’t know anything, do I?”

  He shifts about on the window seat. “Reckon after Jed, you are the closest thing to a friend I’ve got.”

  “What happened to them? What happened to these people?”

  “Well…I stabbed Lion, I did. Mess of blood like you’ve never seen…”

  He trails off. I have seen a mess of blood. I have been covered in it.