by Various
• • •
Mara woke the next morning twisted up in her bed, the blankets twined through her arms, panting and damp with sweat. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed. But it had been something bad, and something loud, and echoes of it still rang through her head even in the stark pale light of morning.
“What did I do?” she said aloud. “What have I done?”
She got up and wiped her face clean and made herself some chicory. She drank it standing by the window, looking out at the Lady’s house, barely visible on its distant hill. High up, set away. Where she could look down on everyone.
The chicory burned her throat and settled her nerves. When it was done, she left the window and went to the place in the corner where she’d propped the harvester’s scythe, covered in sackcloth. It seemed smaller than it had been the day before.
With a hand that still didn’t shake, she twitched the cloth away. Keera’s rifle leaned against the wall where last night Mara had left the long-bladed scythe of a harvester.
“Damn it,” she said, very softly.
If only she’d felt surprised, though. That would have made it better. But no part of her was shocked. There was only the creep of horror up her spine, a cold twist in her gut. And the slow burn of shame. Because hadn’t some part of her known it already? Hadn’t some part of her seen it, out on the river road?
She set her back to the wall beside her sister’s gun and slid down until she sat in a heap on the floor. She pressed her forehead against her knees and closed her eyes. She stayed like that for a long time.
• • •
Rey didn’t need to know yet, not until she’d figured it all out. He was mourning enough. She took the grey horse and rode out as soon as the sun came up. The horse jigged underneath her, spooked at phantoms. She spoke quiet words to him but he wouldn’t calm.
The sun crept higher as she rode, already a white glow in a pale sky. The last dying gasp of summer. The day would be mercilessly hot.
The trip to the river road felt long, though she urged the horse to a trot. But she finally turned onto the road and went to the place where they’d left the dead harvester. She swung down from the horse and left it tied to a tree while she made her way down the slope. Her boots skidded on loose dirt. For a moment, she couldn’t remember exactly the spot where they’d left the body and she circled round, riffling through bushes and weeds, but then she saw a flash of bright color on the ground. The color of one of Keera’s shirts.
She brushed the leaves out of her sister’s face with the flat of her hand, straightened the fall of her hair over her shoulders.
But Keera would never pass for sleeping.
“I’m so sorry,” Mara whispered.
And there, alone, she let herself cry.
After a while, she dried her eyes on the back of her hand, went back to the horse, and got the coat she’d worn that morning. She took the coat back to Keera’s body and snugged it up over her shoulders.
“I’m going to make things right,” Mara said, voice hoarse. “And then I’ll come back for you.”
But of course, Keera couldn’t answer.
Mara lingered a while longer, and then went back up to the road. She untied the horse and swept into the saddle. If she needed answers, she had a good idea of where to look.
• • •
“Don’t go,” the finch warned, but Mara went on up the hill to the Lady’s house. The clockwork finch fluttered around her head, its movements quick and uncertain.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she said, never stopping her mad charge up the path. “And you did nothing.”
“I am her creature. What do you expect me to do?” The finch swooped and dove and the clanking sounds in its belly were louder than ever. “I tried to make you see.”
“I see fine!”
At the crest of the hill, Mara left the finch behind and burst through the Lady’s front door. Dead things crunched under her feet, rodent bones and bug wings. The clockwork birds shrieked on the rafters, all together, a mad chorus. She rounded the corner and hit the Lady’s door with her arms outstretched. It flew open and Mara half-fell into the room, stumbling and skidding over the floor. The Lady whirled from the window, her head high. Mara stopped and stood, fists clenched so her nails bit into her palms. “My sister is dead.”
The Lady moved to her armchair and sat. She folded her hands in her lap. “I know. I am sorry.”
“I don’t give a damn. Somehow, you did this.” Mara stalked the floor, gripped by a teeth-grinding feeling that wouldn’t let her rest. She had to keep moving, or it would all spill out.
“It wasn’t me that killed her,” the Lady said softly.
And didn’t that cut as sharp as a harvester’s scythe.
“You changed her,” Mara said.
The Lady moved her hands in her lap, stretching her thin fingers. They were different than before, slimmer and less wrinkled. The rings hung loosely on them. “Why are you so quick to blame me?”
“Because only you could do it.” She swept around the back of the Lady’s chair, passing by the green tapestry with the eagle gripping a man in its claws. “Because you’ve got to be doing something up here other than watching the road and fixing my eyes. You’ve got to be getting something out of it.”
“Yes,” the Lady said. “That’s true. I protect my town, and in return, I am fed. Each of you will feed me, in time.”
Mara stopped dead. “What do you mean?”
“It is as I say.” The Lady stretched out her long bare neck, turning it as if to work the kinks out. “Don’t you see it every time you look at me? I am a creature that feeds on death, girl. When someone dies here, their spirit feeds me. Makes me stronger. I was weak when you killed those two on the road. Now I am strong again.”
“No.”
The Lady had always helped her, been nothing but generous to her. Made her able to see again.
“It’s so.”
“So we’re only food for you,” Mara said, her voice tightly controlled.
The Lady wrung her head back and forth. “It’s not like that. You are my people and I love you. My greatest wish is for everyone in the Goldwater to live to old age and die happy, surrounded by the ones you love.”
“So the reason no one comes here, no one leaves?”
The Lady drew into herself, tucking her elbows close to her sides and pulling her head back into the shade of her big cowl neckline. “The towns where I lived before were not understanding. Accepting. I could not stay anywhere for long. So I thought it best to take this town and keep it small. To take one group of people and their families who would grow to know me as a guardian. No need for outsiders. No need to stir up trouble.”
“The harvesters don’t exist.”
“No.”
Mara exhaled a long breath and went to the window. She put her hand on the sill in case she needed the support. It wasn’t even that she didn’t know what to think, what to say—but that she couldn’t think. Every thought felt like spring ice, cold and thin and so brittle.
“None of those men Keera killed were harvesters.”
“No,” the Lady said. “Travelers, traders. But you understand, you were still right in your job. You kept the Goldwater safe.”
Mara clenched her fingers on the edge of the sill. Paint cracked and flaked. She whirled and faced the Lady. “You made Keera look like a harvester. She could have come back!”
“But she knew. And she would have told you and her man. No one would have been safe here anymore.”
“You wouldn’t be,” Mara said. “How could we know the truth and still let you live up here, a stinking carrion bird, picking our corpses clean.”
The Lady hissed and sprang from her chair. “Keep a civil tongue around me, girl,” she said, beak clacking. “And how thin is your outrage when now you have what you’ve always wanted. Your old job back, your old man. Isn’t that so?”
Mara froze.
“And don’t forget who gave
you those eyes.” The Lady’s chuckle grated on Mara, an unnatural thick sound. “Take them back, then,” Mara said, and took three long strides to meet the Lady in front of her chair, where they’d always sat when Mara came for treatment. Only this time Mara reached for the knife that in her boot and came up with it gleaming in her hand like a tooth.
The clockwork finches on the rooftop screamed louder and louder.
“You don’t know what you have said, girl,” the Lady said, and she drew closer.
Mara looked at how the tip of the Lady’s beak curved down into a cruel point. She raised the knife.
The Lady’s head darted out of her cowl faster than Mara could track, and her beak gaped open. Mara fell back, wrenching her head back and slashing out with the knife at the same time. She caught the edge of the Lady’s dress. But the tip of the Lady’s beak caught Mara’s left eye, raking through it and popping it free of its socket, tearing through the flesh of her eyelid down to her cheekbone.
Mara fell to her knees. She was screaming, she knew, but it didn’t really feel like her. She was only this white-hot pain, the run of blood and fluid down her face and over her hands.
The Lady stooped over her, and Mara could do nothing. Blood dripped from the Lady’s beak, and she clicked it back and forth as if she were chewing. She brought the beak down against Mara’s jawbone, and then slowly slid it up to rest against her right cheekbone, below her other eye.
Mara could only gasp for air. Blood ran into her mouth.
“Let her be, Lady,” said a finch. Mara’s finch. The one who had warned her. “I think you have hurt her enough.”
The Lady withdrew. “She knows.”
“She’ll keep quiet,” the finch said. “She knows now not to cross you.”
Mara curled on the floor with her hands to her face, trying to press everything back in, hold it all together. Her knife was useless on the floor next to her.
The Lady spoke to Mara, though she didn’t look back. “I didn’t want to do it, girl. I’ve always been fond of you.”
“You need her,” the finch said. “No one else has her training. Her family is the work. You need them to carry on.”
The Lady fell quiet a moment, then grasped Mara by the shoulder and pulled them both upright. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
Mara followed mutely. She couldn’t have walked anywhere on her own—the world through her good eye was edged round in white and prone to spin if she moved too quickly. The Lady sat her down in the velveteen chair and got a pot of cream and a winding of linen bandage. Mara faded in and out of consciousness while the Lady treated the hole where her eye had been.
She saw Keera, once, and her parents who had gone before, but then she blinked and her vision cleared. The Lady was there once again, twisting her bandage into place.
When she was done, the Lady looked Mara squarely in the eye and said, “Now that you know, you must choose for yourself what to do. I hope you choose well.”
She reached up and dabbed a little blood away from the corner of her beak.
Mara nodded and got up. She had to lever herself out of the chair, leaning hard on the armrests.
The Lady called after her as she shuffled to the doorway. “I don’t do anyone any harm, you see? The Goldwater is happy because of me.”
Mara didn’t look back. She kept putting one foot in front of the other until she was down the long hallway and pushing through the door to the outside. The clockwork finch kept pace, flying close beside her.
She stood at the top of the trailhead, but didn’t start down. Instead, she stared down at the town spread below her, the collection of little houses and barns and green fields. Harvest time wasn’t far away.
“What will you do?” the finch said.
Mara worked her mouth to clear out the taste of blood. She spat on the rocks below. The copper tang didn’t clear. “I have to tell everyone,” she said. “It’s my job to protect the Goldwater. Not some vulture.”
“You know everything will change,” the finch said. “You’ll lose everything. Lose that life you were building.”
“I know.” She thought about Rey, waiting back in the little house by the turnip field. She raised a hand to the ruin of her eye, but couldn’t stand to touch it. “It wasn’t mine anyway.”
The finch said nothing. It chirped instead, a sad rusty sound.
Then she turned and started down the hill. Above her the sky stretched pale blue and cloudless. Below, the grey horse stood waiting for directions, with blind animal faith.
She walked down cautiously and the finch flew beside her. In time she reached the bottom and the horse was there waiting, standing where the path forked in many directions. One way led to home, to Rey. The other to town—she would go there soon. She would tell them about the Lady’s lies. But there was something she had to do first. She turned the horse in the direction of the river road and urged it on faster.
First, she would bury her sister.
GHOSTS IN THE WALLS
by Shannon Peavey
First published in Daily Science Fiction (May 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden
• • • •
THE BABY in the north-side wall of Laura’s apartment never cries during the earthquakes. Other times it will scream and wail loud enough to keep her up at night, even with a pillow over her ears—but when the shaking starts it quiets. Like it’s being rocked to sleep.
She’s asked her neighbors about it a few times and most of the time they say they don’t know what she’s talking about. Her next-door neighbor, Ted, suggests leaving milk out for it, since it might be hungry.
“It’s a baby, not a kitten,” she says.
Ted shrugs. “So leave it a bottle or something, I don’t know.”
And that’s just goddamn ridiculous, putting out a bottleful of milk for some ghostly baby, so she thanks Ted and tucks the edges of her scarf into her coat and heads down the stairs.
“Wait, do you think it would need, like, formula or something?” Ted calls after.
“How the hell should I know?” she says, and pushes out the door into the cold and the dust settling from the quake like snow.
It’s not like she knows anything about babies, after all.
• • •
The buses are out: something junked in their electronics, maybe. She passes one out-of-service at a stop, windows dark and doors hanging open. Like a dead animal with its tongue lolling.
She walks and her phone rings and she doesn’t answer it. She watches people sweeping up broken glass and chunks of concrete. In one spot there’s a dark stain of blood on the pavement and she asks around and finds out someone smashed their head on a flying piece of rebar. They’re still living, apparently. If it can be called that.
When she passes a doorway and nobody’s watching she snugs up tight to it, pressing her palms and her ear to the door. Listening for crying inside. But she doesn’t hear anything.
• • •
Laura sits on a bench by the canal and watches things fall into it. Leaves, trash, pebbles. Heavy dust from the guts of buildings, the parts that are never meant to see the air. The city is choked with it these days.
Her phone rings.
She answers it.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Max says. He sounds far away, but he probably isn’t. His new apartment is only a couple blocks from the canal.
“I’ve been busy,” she says.
“The lawyer drew up some new paperwork. They need you to sign it.”
“Okay.”
“Great.”
A pair of boys in hats and heavy coats walk along the edge of the canal and throw stones into it. One of them has a hat with a red pom pom, the other a yellow one.
“Do I need to go into the office to sign it?” she asks.
• • •
She can hear the baby screaming even before she turns the corner on the stairwell, screaming like its life is ending. She unlocks her door and go
es inside and lays her hand on the north-side wall, says “Shh, shh, it’s okay. Please stop. You don’t need to cry.”
It doesn’t stop.
Feeling stupid, she goes to the kitchen and pours milk into one of her heavy stoneware bowls and microwaves it until it’s just body temperature. Then she lays the bowl at the base of the wall with the air of a penitent leaving an offering.
All that night she lies awake and listens to the baby cry.
• • •
In the morning she takes the bowl—still full, skinned over with a delicate blue film—and pours the milk down the drain. Then she walks downtown to sign Max’s papers. He meets her at the office and takes her hand awkwardly and says, “My God, did you walk here?”
“The buses are out,” she says, and fishes in her purse for a pen.
When it’s all done he offers her a ride home but she demurs. If only he would stop trying to be so damn nice about the whole thing, she thinks.
• • •
She’s halfway home when the the shaking starts and at first, she doesn’t notice it. Then her feet drop from under her and her knee hits the pavement and skids and glass falls in a shower around her, powdered safety glass like glitter or fake snow at Christmastime.
“Get over here, damn you!”
She looks up and sees a tall woman braced in a doorway. Six feet tall, at least. She staggers over to the doorway, nearly falls again. The woman reaches for her arms and pulls her inside.
Feet from them, the sidewalk buckles and rolls. She hears a crack of bursting concrete and the synchronized wails of dozens of sirens. The tall woman hasn’t let go of her forearms and they stand like that, in a near-embrace, hiding from disaster.
“Jesus,” the woman says. “Jesus.”
The shaking stops suddenly. From a window above them, someone shouts something Laura doesn’t understand. The two of them remain as they are, frozen in tableau.
“I was on my way home,” the tall woman says. “I slept with my dentist on my lunch break. He had the hairiest toes I’ve ever seen. Jesus.”
Laura leans into the woman’s grip, closes her eyes. “I just signed divorce papers,” she says. “My husband and I lost our baby. Crib death. Couldn’t do it anymore.”
