Nebula Awards Showcase 2016
Page 27
Key is thirty-four. She is old for a human woman without any children. She has kept herself alive by being useful in other ways. For the past four years, Key has been the overseer of the Mauna Kea Grade Orange blood facility.
Is it a concentration camp if the inmates are well fed? If their beds are comfortable? If they are given an hour and a half of rigorous boxercise and yoga each morning in the recreational field?
It doesn’t have to be Honouliui to be wrong.
When she’s called in to deal with Jeb’s body—bloody, not drained, in a feeding room—yoga doesn’t make him any less dead.
Key helps vampires run a concentration camp for humans.
Key is a different kind of monster.
Key’s favorite food is umeboshi. Salty and tart and bright red, with that pit in the center to beware. She loves it in rice balls, the kind her Japanese grandmother made when she was little. She loves it by itself, the way she ate it at fifteen, after Obachan died. She hasn’t had umeboshi in eighteen years, but sometimes she thinks that when she dies she’ll taste one again.
This morning she eats the same thing she eats every meal: a nutritious brick patty, precisely five inches square and two inches deep, colored puce. Her raw scrubbed hands still have a pink tinge of Jeb’s blood in the cuticles. She stares at them while she sips the accompanying beverage, which is orange. She can’t remember if it ever resembled the fruit.
She eats this because that is what every human eats in the Mauna Kea facility. Because the patty is easy to manufacture and soft enough to eat with plastic spoons. Key hasn’t seen a fork in years, a knife in more than a decade. The vampires maintain tight control over all items with the potential to draw blood. Yet humans are tool-making creatures, and their desires, even nihilistic ones, have a creative power that no vampire has the imagination or agility to anticipate. How else to explain the shiv, handcrafted over secret months from the wood cover and glue-matted pages of A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i, the book that Jeb used to read in the hours after his feeding sessions, sometimes aloud, to whatever humans would listen? He took the only thing that gave him pleasure in the world, destroyed it—or recreated it—and slit his veins with it. Mr. Charles questioned her particularly; he knew that she and Jeb used to talk sometimes. Had she known that the boy was like this? He gestured with pallid hands at the splatter of arterial pulses from jaggedly slit wrists: oxidized brown, inedible, mocking.
No, she said, of course not, Mr. Charles. I report any suspected cases of self-waste immediately.
She reports any suspected cases. And so, for the weeks she has watched Jeb hardly eating across the mess hall, noticed how he staggered from the feeding rooms, recognized the frigid rebuff in his responses to her questions, she has very carefully refused to suspect.
Today, just before dawn, she choked on the fruits of her indifference. He slit his wrists and femoral arteries. He smeared the blood over his face and buttocks and genitals, and he waited to die before the vampire technician could arrive to drain him.
Not many humans self-waste. Most think about it, but Key never has, not since the invasion of the Big Island. Unlike other humans, she has someone she’s waiting for. The one she loves, the one she prays will reward her patience. During her years as overseer, Key has successfully stopped three acts of self-waste. She has failed twice. Jeb is different; Mr. Charles sensed it somehow, but vampires can only read human minds through human blood. Mr. Charles hasn’t drunk from Key in years. And what could he learn, even if he did? He can’t drink thoughts she has spent most of her life refusing to have.
Mr. Charles calls her to the main office the next night, between feeding shifts. She is terrified, like she always is, of what they might do. She is thinking of Jeb and wondering how Mr. Charles has taken the loss of an investment. She is wondering how fast she will die in the work camp on Lanai.
But Mr. Charles has an offer, not a death sentence.
“You know . . . of the facility on Oahu? Grade Gold?”
“Yes,” Key says. Just that, because she learned early not to betray herself to them unnecessarily, and the man at Grade Gold has always been her greatest betrayer.
No, not a man, Key tells herself for the hundredth, the thousandth time. He is one of them.
Mr. Charles sits in a hanging chair shaped like an egg with plush red velvet cushions. He wears a black suit with steel gray pinstripes, sharply tailored. The cuffs are high and his feet are bare, white as talcum powder and long and bony like spiny fish. His veins are prominent and round and milky blue. Mr. Charles is vain about his feet.
He does not sit up to speak to Key. She can hardly see his face behind the shadow cast by the overhanging top of the egg. All vampires speak deliberately, but Mr. Charles drags out his tones until you feel you might tip over from waiting on the next syllable. It goes up and down like a calliope—
“. . . what do you say to heading down there and sorting the matter . . . out?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Charles,” she says carefully, because she has lost the thread of his monologue. “What matter?”
He explains: a Grade Gold human girl has killed herself. It is a disaster that outshadows the loss of Jeb.
“You would not believe the expense taken to keep those humans Grade Gold standard.”
“What would I do?”
“Take it in hand, of course. It seems our small . . . Grade Orange operation has gotten some notice. Tetsuo asked for you . . . particularly.”
“Tetsuo?” She hasn’t said the name out loud in years. Her voice catches on the second syllable.
“Mr. Tetsuo,” Mr. Charles says, and waves a hand at her. He holds a sheet of paper, the same shade as his skin. “He wrote you a letter.”
Key can’t move, doesn’t reach out to take it, and so it flutters to the black marble floor a few feet away from Mr. Charles’s egg.
He leans forward. “I think . . . I remember something . . . you and Tetsuo . . .”
“He recommended my promotion here,” Key says, after a moment. It seems the safest phrasing. Mr. Charles would have remembered this eventually; vampires are slow, but inexorable.
The diffuse light from the paper lanterns catches the bottom half of his face, highlighting the deep cleft in his chin. It twitches in faint surprise. “You were his pet?”
Key winces. She remembers the years she spent at his side during and after the wars, catching scraps in his wake, despised by every human who saw her there. She waited for him to see how much she had sacrificed and give her the only reward that could matter after what she’d done. Instead he had her shunt removed and sent her to Grade Orange. She has not seen or heard from him in four years. His pet, yes, that’s as good a name as any—but he never drank from her. Not once.
Mr. Charles’s lips, just a shade of white darker than his skin, open like a hole in a cloud. “And he wants you back. How do you feel?”
Terrified. Awestruck. Confused. “Grateful,” she says.
The hole smiles. “Grateful! How interesting. Come here, girl. I believe I shall have a taste.”
She grabs the letter with shaking fingers and folds it inside a pocket of her red uniform. She stands in front of Mr. Charles.
“Well?” he says.
She hasn’t had a shunt in years, though she can still feel its ridged scar in the crook of her arm. Without it, feeding from her is messy, violent. Traditional, Mr. Charles might say. Her fingers hurt as she unzips the collar. Her muscles feel sore, the bones in her spine arthritic and old as she bows her head, leans closer to Mr. Charles. She waits for him to bare his fangs, to pierce her vein, to suck her blood.
He takes more than he should. He drinks until her fingers and toes twinge, until her neck throbs, until the red velvet of his seat fades to gray. When he finishes, he leaves her blood on his mouth.
“I forgive . . . you for the boy,” he says.
Jeb cut his own arteries, left his good blood all over the floor. Mr. Charles abhors waste above all else.
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nbsp; Mr. Charles will explain the situation. I wish you to come. If you do well, I have been authorized to offer you the highest reward.
The following night, Key takes a boat to Oahu. Vampires don’t like water, but they will cross it anyway—the sea has become a status symbol among them, an indication of strength. Hawai’i is still a resort destination, though most of its residents only go out at night. Grade Gold is the most expensive, most luxurious resort of them all.
Tetsuo travels between the islands often. Key saw him do it a dozen times during the war. She remembers one night, his face lit by the moon and the yellow lamps on the deck—the wide cheekbones, thick eyebrows, sharp widow’s peak, all frozen in the perfection of a nineteen-year-old boy. Pale beneath the olive tones of his skin, he bares his fangs when the waves lurch beneath him.
“What does it feel like?” she asks him.
“Like frozen worms in my veins,” he says, after a full, long minute of silence. Then he checks the guns and tells her to wait below, the humans are coming. She can’t see anything, but Tetsuo can smell them like chum in the water. The Japanese have held out the longest, and the vampires of Hawai’i lead the assault against them.
Two nights later, in his quarters in the bunker at the base of Mauna Kea, Tetsuo brings back a sheet of paper, written in Japanese. The only characters she recognizes are “shi” and “ta”—”death” and “field.” It looks like some kind of list.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Recent admissions to the Lanai human residential facility.”
She looks up at him, devoted with terror. “My mother?” Her father died in the first offensive on the Big Island, a hero of the resistance. He never knew how his daughter had chosen to survive.
“Here,” Tetsuo says, and runs a cold finger down the list without death. “Jen Isokawa.”
“Alive?” She has been looking for her mother since the wars began. Tetsuo knows this, but she didn’t know he was searching, too. She feels swollen with this indication of his regard.
“She’s listed as a caretaker. They’re treated well. You could . . .” He sits beside her on the bed that only she uses. His pause lapses into a stop. He strokes her hair absentmindedly; if she had a tail, it would beat his legs. She is seventeen and she is sure he will reward her soon.
“Tetsuo,” she says, “you could drink from me, if you want. I’ve had a shunt for nearly a year. The others use it. I’d rather feed you.”
Sometimes she has to repeat herself three times before he seems to hear her. This, she has said at least ten. But she is safe here in his bunker, on the bed he brought in for her, with his lukewarm body pressed against her warm one. Vampires do not have sex with humans; they feed. But if he doesn’t want her that way, what else can she offer him?
“I’ve had you tested. You’re fertile. If you bear three children you won’t need a shunt and the residential facilities will care for you for the rest of your mortality. You can live with your mother. I will make sure you’re safe.”
She presses her face against his shoulder. “Don’t make me leave.”
“You wanted to see your mother.”
Her mother had spent the weeks before the invasion in church, praying for God to intercede against the abominations. Better that she die than see Key like this.
“Only to know what happened to her,” Key whispers. “Won’t you feed from me, Tetsuo? I want to feel closer to you. I want you to know how much I love you.”
A long pause. Then, “I don’t need to taste you to know how you feel.”
Tetsuo meets her on shore.
Just like that, she is seventeen again.
“You look older,” he says. Slowly, but with less affectation than Mr. Charles.
This is true; so inevitable she doesn’t understand why he even bothers to say so. Is he surprised? Finally, she nods. The buoyed dock rocks beneath them—he makes no attempt to move, though the two vampires with him grip the denuded skin of their own elbows with pale fingers. They flare and retract their fangs.
“You are drained,” he says. He does not mean this metaphorically.
She nods again, realizes further explanation is called for. “Mr. Charles,” she says, her voice a painful rasp. This embarrasses her, though Tetsuo would never notice.
He nods, sharp and curt. She thinks he is angry, though perhaps no one else could read him as clearly. She knows that face, frozen in the countenance of a boy dead before the Second World War. A boy dead fifty years before she was born.
He is old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, the detention camps, the years when Maui’s forests still had native birds. But she has never dared ask him about his human life.
“And what did Charles explain?”
“He said someone killed herself at Grade Gold.”
Tetsuo flares his fangs. She flinches, which surprises her. She used to flush at the sight of his fangs, her blood pounding red just beneath the soft surface of her skin.
“I’ve been given dispensation,” he says, and rests one finger against the hollow at the base of her throat.
She’s learned a great deal about the rigid traditions that restrict vampire life since she first met Tetsuo. She understands why her teenage fantasies of morally liberated vampirism were improbable, if not impossible. For each human they bring over, vampires need a special dispensation that they only receive once or twice every decade. The highest reward. If Tetsuo has gotten a dispensation, then her first thought when she read his letter was correct. He didn’t mean retirement. He didn’t mean a peaceful life in some remote farm on the islands. He meant death. Un-death.
After all these years, Tetsuo means to turn her into a vampire.
The trouble at Grade Gold started with a dead girl. Penelope cut her own throat five days ago (with a real knife, the kind they allow Grade Gold humans for cutting food). Her ghost haunts the eyes of those she left behind. One human resident in particular, with hair dyed the color of tea and blue lipstick to match the bruises under her red eyes, takes one look at Key and starts to scream.
Key glances at Tetsuo, but he has forgotten her. He stares at the girl as if he could burn her to ashes on the plush green carpet. The five others in the room look away, but Key can’t tell if it’s in embarrassment or fear. The luxury surrounding them chokes her. There’s a bowl of fruit on a coffee table. Real fruit—fuzzy brown kiwis, mottled red-green mangos, dozens of tangerines. She takes an involuntary step forward and the girl’s scream gets louder before cutting off with an abrupt squawk. Her labored breaths are the only sound in the room.
“This is a joke,” the girl says. There’s spittle on her blue lips. “What hole did you dig her out of?”
“Go to your room, Rachel,” Tetsuo says.
Rachel flicks back her hair and rubs angrily under one eye. “What are you now, Daddy Vampire? You think you can just, what? Replace her? With this broke down fogie look-alike?”
“She is not—”
“Yeah? What is she?”
They are both silent, doubt and grief and fury scuttling between them like beetles in search of a meal. Tetsuo and the girl stare at each other with such deep familiarity that Key feels forgotten, alone—almost ashamed of the dreams that have kept her alive for a decade. They have never felt so hopeless, or so false.
“Her name is Key,” Tetsuo says, in something like defeat. He turns away, though he makes no move to leave. “She will be your new caretaker.”
“Key?” the girl says. “What kind of a name is that?”
Key doesn’t answer for a long time, thinking of all the ways she could respond. Of Obachan Akiko and the affectionate nickname of lazy summers spent hiking in the mountains or pounding mochi in the kitchen. Of her half-Japanese mother and Hawai’ian father, of the ways history and identity and circumstance can shape a girl into half a woman, until someone—not a man—comes with a hundred thousand others like him and destroys anything that might have once had meaning. So she finds meaning in him. Who else was there?
“Mine,” Key answers the girl.
Rachel spits; Tetsuo turns his head, just a little, as though he can only bear to see Key from the corner of his eye.
“You’re nothing like her,” she says.
“Like who?”
But the girl storms from the room, leaving her chief vampire without a dismissal. Key now understands this will not be punished. It’s another one—a boy, with the same florid beauty as the girl but far less belligerence, who answers her.
“You look like Penelope,” he says, tugging on a long lock of his asymmetrically cut black hair. “Just older.”
When Tetsuo leaves the room, it’s Key who cannot follow.
Key remembers sixteen. Her obachan is dead and her mother has moved to an apartment in Hilo and it’s just Key and her father in that old, quiet house at the end of the road. The vampires have annexed San Diego and Okinawa is besieged, but life doesn’t feel very different in the mountains of the Big Island.
It is raining in the woods behind her house. Her father has told her to study, but all she’s done since her mother left is read Mishima’s Sea of Fertility novels. She sits on the porch, wondering if it’s better to kill herself or wait for them to come, and just as she thinks she ought to have the courage to die, something rattles in the shed. A rat, she thinks.
But it’s not rat she sees when she pulls open the door on its rusty hinges. It’s a man, crouched between a stack of old appliance boxes and the rusted fender of the Buick her father always meant to fix one day. His hair is wet and slicked back, his white shirt is damp and ripped from shoulder to navel. The skin beneath it is pale as a corpse; bloodless, though the edges of a deep wound are still visible.
“They’ve already come?” Her voice breaks on a whisper. She wanted to finish The Decay of the Angel. She wanted to see her mother once more.