by Tiffany Tsao
“Murgatroyd’s my apprentice,” said Ann abruptly.
“Yes, I know,” said Mildred, rolling her sleeve back down. “The One has told me all about him.” She turned to Murgatroyd. “She also told me how difficult it was for you to leave the Known World. Well done.”
Murgatroyd blushed. “No, lor. It was all Ann. If it weren’t for her trying to save me, I would never have escaped.”
Grateful at this show of loyalty, Ann smiled.
Mildred was just about to say something else, but the One poked her head in. “When you’re done with your conversation here, perhaps you’d like to join Chester and me in the other room? By all means, take your time.”
Like guilty children, Ann, Murgatroyd, and Mildred ceased their chatter and followed the One down a long windowless hallway, towards a rectangle of light that grew bigger and brighter as they approached before it finally engulfed them in a sea of blinding brilliance that stopped them in their tracks. When Murgatroyd finally regained his vision, he saw that they were in a small room ceilinged in glass. Unlike the waiting room, it was completely bare except for a large oblong wooden table and a small wooden stand bearing a thermos, several metal bowls, and a toolbox. The young man in the apron whom Murgatroyd and Ann had seen earlier, and who was apparently called Chester, stood in a corner with a large leathery cloth rolled up in one arm.
“A glass ceiling?” Murgatroyd wondered out loud.
“To keep us down,” Mildred murmured to herself before chuckling silently at her own joke.
“Operating theatre,” Ann explained with great seriousness, as if to put a damper on Mildred’s mirth. “There are no generators in Flee Town, so they have to make use of natural light.”
“Place it there,” the One instructed Chester. And wordlessly, Chester placed the cloth on the wooden slab, unrolled it, and smoothed it out as if he were setting a table for dinner.
Murgatroyd leaned over to Ann. “Is that where they’re going to put Nimali?” he whispered.
“That is Nimali,” Ann whispered back.
Murgatroyd went grey. He forced himself to take a look again at the cloth and recognize there, in the brown thing spread out before them, the crumpled projections of Nimali’s fingers and toes, the deflated features of Nimali’s face. The tears ran hot down his cheeks, and he ran to the wooden stand to throw up in one of the bowls.
Chester cleared his throat and a rusty voice rattled out, “Bovquitoes.”
Murgatroyd could have sworn he heard something catch in Ann’s throat before she swallowed it and said, impassively and fluidly, “Of course. But not the cause of death, surely. Bovquitoes only feed on soil and carrion.”
Chester reached for what was once Nimali’s throat and lifted the edge of a flap. “Slit.”
Ann approached the body and stroked it thoughtfully. “No hair or nails,” she observed.
“They fell out,” said Mildred. “Side effect of bovquito saliva.”
But Ann either didn’t hear her or pretended not to. Instead, she leaned close to Nimali, her face tilted slightly in favour of her uncovered eye, and examined the remains from head to toe.
Ann hadn’t always been able to suppress her emotions as she was doing at present, but it was a skill she had learned so long ago and so well that it came almost instinctively, as if she’d never had to teach it to herself at all. Ann took in the puckered whorls of Nimali’s toes and spared no thought for the broken left foot the girl had shown up with at her front door, back when she was alive, back when she had first been recruited and assigned to Ann as an abodemate. Then Ann scanned the desiccated torso—impersonal and sexless as a paper bag—and recalled nothing of the favourite wheat-wool sweater its owner used to wear to bed at night. And when Ann surveyed what was left of the neck and face—the gash reminiscent of a slashed balloon, the lips the texture of ancient rose petals, the eyeballs like empty grape skins—she remembered not in the least the time when the teenage girl had returned after her first expedition, laughing and babbling excitedly in half Sinhala, half English of the adventures she’d had there.
Then Ann turned over the body’s left palm. A black mark—too black. Paint or dye of some sort. Only when she stretched the skin taut did she realize that it was a word, in black capital letters—FLEE TOWN. It must have been written when the skin was still plump, before the body had been deflated. In the background, she heard the sound of retching. Murgatroyd had thrown up again.
“Clay,” she murmured, turning her attention to the substance embedded in the floppy crevices between what used to be fingers.
The One nodded. “From Jamaica-Fallacy—her last reported location. She was conducting a secondary survey of the area.”
“So why was she found here?” Murgatroyd asked weakly.
No one answered. Ann turned to the One, who said simply, “The necessary files are in my room. I’ll pass them to you tonight before I leave.”
“Is there anything else I should see?” asked Ann.
The One gestured to Chester, who held up a small coarsely woven sack. “Loose hair, nails, and teeth,” she explained. “But Mildred and I haven’t found anything that would provide us with further clues.”
“No, we didn’t,” affirmed Mildred. Again, Ann seemed not to hear, but now Mildred seemed determined not to care.
“Where was the body found?” Ann asked the One.
“On the settlement outskirts,” said Mildred before the One could answer. “You can take a look at the site if you want, but the One and I combed that pretty thoroughly as well.”
“When?” Ann asked, still looking at the One.
“When Nimali was found, or when she died?” asked Mildred.
“Both,” said Ann, forced to acknowledge Mildred at last.
The One finally intervened. “What in the worlds is the matter with you two?”
They were silent.
“Chester?” said the One, motioning for him to speak.
Chester looked unhappy at this invitation to say something, but nonetheless, he obliged. “Found seventeen days ago. Time of death less than two days before discovery.”
“You can tell when she died?” asked Murgatroyd, who had been following the conversation as best he could.
In typical Flee Town fashion, Chester didn’t respond.
“Bovquitoes got to her before she was found,” declared Mildred, though somewhat less antagonistically than before. “She was discovered like this.”
“And who discovered it?” asked Ann.
“You’ll meet him this evening,” said the One, “but he doesn’t have much to say.”
“None of them do,” muttered Mildred under her breath.
Chester cleared his throat. “Surgery.”
The One nodded, and as Chester began folding Nimali up, she and Ann headed for the door.
“What’s going on?” asked Murgatroyd. Mildred too looked somewhat startled.
“Didn’t you hear him?” snapped Ann over her shoulder. “They need the room to perform a surgery. While it’s still bright outside.”
“Oh, right,” he said meekly, and together with Mildred, he hurried after the two women who were already at the corridor’s other end, walking side by side.
“Standing up and sitting down are difficult for her,” said Mildred with a slight nod in the One’s direction. “But when it comes to horizontal movement, she’s still as fast as anything.”
“So it’s not so bad after all?” asked Murgatroyd.
Mildred shook her head gravely. “It’s pretty bad. I think it’s worse than even she knows.”
“Say again?”
Mildred’s brow furrowed. “She’s an extraordinary woman with extraordinary powers of self-discipline. It’s almost as if she’s holding herself together physically without even realizing it. Like someone who doesn’t know she’s clenching her fists. The moment she relaxes . . .” She shook her head again.
“The moment she relaxes what?”
Mildred looked at Murgatroyd.
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t finish your sentence,” said Murgatroyd, blinking. “What comes after she relaxes?”
Mildred frowned. “Um. She’ll die.”
Murgatroyd gasped. “No!”
Mildred was quiet for some moments. “You really are as clueless as people say,” she observed finally. Her tone was more of wonder than scorn.
Murgatroyd sighed. “I know. I’m not smart. Never was.”
“Well, nobody can be good at everything.”
“But they are.” Murgatroyd gestured at the front door, beyond which Ann and the One were waiting impatiently for him and Mildred.
“No, they’re not.”
“Yes, they are,” insisted Murgatroyd. “Name one thing they’re not good at.”
“Sensitivity?”
“That’s not true!” exclaimed Murgatroyd.
“So it’s perfectly normal to keep referring to someone as ‘it’ and ‘the body’?”
Murgatroyd was silent.
“Wasn’t Nimali Ann’s abodemate at one point?” Mildred continued.
“You don’t seem that sad either,” Murgatroyd pointed out weakly.
“Yes,” Mildred acknowledged. “But I didn’t know her. They did.” She sighed. “Look, I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you at all. We’ve just met. Maybe it’s because I’ve been stuck for two weeks in a settlement of jerks who won’t give anyone the time of day with the most hyperrational individual I’ve ever met. Don’t get me wrong—I admire the One a lot. She can be thoughtful, and believe it or not, I can even make her laugh, but she’s not . . .” Mildred chose her words carefully. “. . . A sympathetic woman. And from your mentor’s reputation and the way she’s acting now, she’s not much better. No offence.”
Murgatroyd shook his head. “Ann’s not usually like this.”
“Whatever you say,” Mildred sneered, and from the cracks between her words, hurt feelings oozed like sap.
“She’s not!” They were standing at the entrance now, and Murgatroyd tried to summon the words necessary to articulate what he wanted to say—that this wasn’t the Ann he knew; that the Ann who mentored him and who had rescued him from destruction by the Known World was not overtly affectionate or sympathetic, but she was capable of being gentle in her own way and of being kind. He wanted to tell Mildred that on some level he suspected that Ann, like the One, was unconsciously clenching something within herself—a muscle that shut off emotion like a faucet in order to hold herself together so she could keep on going.
But then darker possibilities tumbled into his brain, and he was overwhelmed. Could he say for certain that it was Mildred who didn’t understand Ann? What if it was he who was wrong? What if this was the real Ann, and what if he was just as mistaken about her as he had been for the first twenty-five years of his existence about his parents, his best friend, his job, his whole life? Would he become an “it” to Ann if he were to die? Of course not, he wanted to say. Yet at the same time, he knew the answer could easily be “of course.” After all, if Ann had really cared about him, wouldn’t she have come looking for him immediately when he’d gotten lost on the way back from China-Plummet? Did Ann actually care about him, or anyone, at all?
“She’s not,” Murgatroyd repeated, faintly. Entangled in the thicket of these thoughts, this weak defence was all he could manage.
Mildred shrugged and pulled open the door.
If they looked very hard, they could see the path of trampled grass leading over the hill in the direction of the Bovquito Arms.
“Oh good,” said Mildred sarcastically. “I was worried we were keeping them waiting.”
CHAPTER 5
Cambodia-Abscond hadn’t always been bloody. In fact, when Cambodia-Abscond was first discovered in 1943, just four years after the Quest’s official founding, it was so drab, it was hardly worth mentioning. At least, that’s what was indicated by the initial report:
Beige.
There was much more room for unorthodox reporting practices in those early days. The Compendium hadn’t been built yet, and expedition reports were nothing more than notes scribbled on sheets of scrap paper, stored in an enormous biscuit tin. And since the Quest’s membership consisted entirely of the three individuals who had founded it—a young woman from the Maluku Islands named Francesca, a young man from Singapore named Yusuf, and a child named Hector—there was arguably no need for reports at all.
“Who’ll read them?” Yusuf had asked when Francesca first proposed the idea. “It’s just you, me, and Hector. And Hector can’t read or write.”
“It might not always be just us,” Francesca replied, her large eyes fixed on a distant horizon, her thinking as systematic and far reaching at seventeen as it would be when she was a woman of eighty-four. “There are too many Territories. We’ll need more people. And this knowledge is too important. We’ll have to find a way to share it with others. We’ll definitely need to keep records.”
And so Yusuf, in awe as he was of his cofounder in those days, complied, writing down observations of every new Territory he discovered. He even followed as best he could the Territory-naming system the One had come up with, which involved consulting an alphabetical list of countries and major geographical landmarks alongside the One’s tattered copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. (Strict adherence to the system would be abandoned in the end, thanks to Hector’s profound inability to abide by it.) Though Yusuf’s reports were never as comprehensive as Francesca’s, they were always reasonably detailed. And even if Francesca found his language too ecstatic—too passionate were her exact words—she had no other cause for complaint.
But then he turned in Beige.
“And?” Francesca asked, brandishing the unfilled sheet of paper like an irate schoolteacher.
“That’s it,” Yusuf replied.
“What do you mean? You just spent three whole months there! What about the terrain? The flora? The fauna? The climate?”
Yusuf’s brow furrowed, as if he were trying to relive the experience of being in that Territory—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the temperature—and finally, he sighed, as if to admit that his colleague was right. To Francesca’s satisfaction, he took out his fountain pen (which he always carried around with him), and with a flourish, in a peacock-blue scrawl, he amended his report.
Very Beige.
Francesca had conceded defeat and made a note to herself to visit the Territory in the near future and write a more extensive follow-up report. She got around to it a year later and made a point of staying for the same length of time that Yusuf had—three months. And at the end of that period, she returned to her abode in Spain-Adroit and sat cross-legged on the sapphire sand, notebook in lap, pen poised in the air, trying to decide where and how to start. The result:
Completely beige.
For it was true. At the time, Cambodia-Abscond was so profoundly beige, so limitlessly beige, that it was impossible to describe the Territory without resorting to that word. Not only that—as Yusuf and Francesca felt profoundly and viscerally upon their respective returns, the Territory seemed to demand that it be described just so, with that word and nothing else, apart perhaps from auxiliary words whose function would be to amplify the supremacy of that single, most fitting, most rightful word, beige.
Then the Colour Shift happened. When, nobody knew. No one had been around to witness the change. All anyone could say for certain was that by 1974—when the Territory began to be settled—Cambodia-Abscond was red.
The first people to discover what had happened were a man and woman whose names were never recorded. They were startled, for they had counted on finding a reality that corresponded to what they had read in the Compendium records. Beige was appealing. Beige was soothing. Beige could cover over the multitude of sins they were seeking refuge from—the dark deeds that defied all description, exceeded all language, achieved their fullest expression only in the sweat-soaked nightmares that punctuated their restless slumbers. B
eige could help, and guarantee their solitude as well, for who else in their right mind would choose beige?
Understandably, it took some time for them to come to terms with beige’s absence. They spent the first day searching for beige high and low. Then they stamped their feet and cursed the Quest’s deception, vowing to give the Compendium staff a piece of their minds once their Sumfit constitutions had recovered enough to make another transfer.
After this, they made a brief attempt to negotiate with the cosmos: if not beige, at least not red; and if red, at least not blood (yes, blood—they were far too well acquainted with the stuff to delude themselves about that). Hadn’t they waded in enough bathtubfuls of it? Weren’t their souls drenched enough in it, as it were? Negotiations were unsuccessful, and the subsequent days passed in a fog of listlessness and despair. Their curse was undeserved survival. Running low on food and water, yet unable to acquiesce to death, they roused themselves and got to work.
Settlement in those days was undeniably tough. There were no preexisting communities to join or more experienced settlers to offer advice. There were no suppliers to provide seeds for planting or tools for building. And since the Quest provided no assistance apart from information about individual Territories and directions for transferring (the One was adamant about this: “Settlement is a side effect, not an aim, and not our responsibility”), the first generation of Sumfits who paved the way for others to settle in the More Known World were essentially on their own—pioneers in the truest sense.
Flee Town’s founders were no exception. Although they had brought as many supplies as they could carry, they had neglected to bring many items that would have been useful—a hammer, for instance, though they had brought two machetes. They’d also forgotten matches, but the wilderness survival guide they had packed helped them build their first fire. Foraging was stressful: if food watered by blood was unappealing, potentially poisonous food watered by blood was positively nerve-racking. Eventually they figured out which fruits and nuts were edible, which roots and shoots were tastiest—and they even found a way to prepare the grubs they found nesting in the trunks of the bloodwood trees so that they tasted like shrimp if you swallowed them at just the right time. (Too soon, and they tasted like grubs. Too late, and they tasted like grubs dipped in urine.)
