by Eden Wolfe
Staring at the ceiling, she ran her fingers over the lava amulet she slept with every night. She didn’t care if people thought her an extremist for it. She watched the cracking concrete as the steps above her slowed to a stop. Just her luck to have a neighbor who had been modified to need less sleep than average.
Maybe she could ask Carole from the fifteenth floor about the situation, in hypothetical terms.
Don't be an idiot.
Of course, she couldn't talk to anyone about this. All she had were hints of an idea, barely more than a fleeting thought. She would need more than this if she were going to consider escalating it to Roman.
But she had come to trust her instinct. While Adam wasn’t one of the backroom men, that didn’t stop him from having ulterior motives. He could be looking to expand the Program, get more Royal support for it perhaps. But Adam didn’t have direct access to the decision-makers. Any of that would have to come through Uma anyhow, just as it always had before. Adam knew protocol and he wasn't one to defy it or find workarounds at that level. His history of openness with Management was the reason why he was allowed to be a direct report to Uma. Otherwise, he could have been stuck in an off-shoot unit. Like Isaac. Had it been Isaac who brought 4957, that would have been a completely different matter altogether. Isaac and his backroom buddies were hardly subtle.
But this was Adam.
Would Adam try to manipulate me? Could he even, if he tried?
She ran over the details of the dossier again in her head.
She had been frustrated by the initial results. It should have been terminated much sooner, that was clear. She didn't like it when the program bordered on near implementation only to be revoked at the last minute. It had only happened a couple of times in her tenure, but when it did, she had been equally disappointed. Like the Western Coast. She would never forget the look on that woman's face when they told her they would have to terminate. The Willing Woman had somehow built a bond with that thing inside her. Perhaps that was one of the side effects of its condition, for the mutual reliance was excessive from fetus to mother and they had almost lost her in the procedure. Their vitals had become interconnected.
Uma took a deep breath, eyes still fixed on a distance through the ceiling.
Lost in a meditative space of non-thought, Uma's consciousness suddenly hit her in the face.
This isn't even up to me.
This wasn't for her to decide. This was up to Roman. If she didn’t report suspicion, she would be equally culpable. And if there was nothing to hide, then Adam would simply explain, and it would all pass.
I've been overestimating my position. What if I didn't report it?
She shuddered. There had been more disappearances of late – Uma personally knew at least three over the past few weeks.
Nansy is back but just look at the state she’s in. She would never say it was because of the disappearance, but she's practically comatose.
Uma grasped the lava rock around her neck and closed her eyes.
This is all on Adam. This one isn't on me. This is not another Western Coast. This isn't on me.
Although she tried to ignore it, a blanket of guilt lay softly across her, despite her predisposition for duty. She started planning the conversation with Roman in her head.
The night continued in an internal battle. The voice of obligation, the voice of reason, the voice of self-preservation all fought with each other.
And if you're wrong? What's at stake?
Adam won't bring the findings forth to you anymore, you know he won't. Years of building trust with him and Roman. But don't you remember when the Queen was at your door?
The Queen. At your door.
And now you want to bring Roman in, after that command from the Queen? And you don't even have more than a shred of cause? What will the Queen think of that?
You idiot.
She rolled over, pressing her face hard into the pillow, letting out a low moan.
Just sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
That little voice kicked in again, kicked her in the side, it felt. She cramped up and thought she might be sick.
You want the Queen to find out you've taken the little project too far? That you've gone beyond the limits she laid out?
She hardly even said a thing! She hardly even brought you in! The Queen didn't spend more than five minutes briefing you, and that was nearly ten years ago. You're going to put it all on the line for a ten-year-old half moment with the Queen who simply said, "Give him a long leash, and make no scenes."
What does that even mean? No scenes? You don't even know what's at risk here.
She flipped back over, eyes ceiling-ward, trying to force the voice out of her head.
“Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.”
Her shoulders grew tenser and tenser. She couldn’t seem to weigh the risks for this situation the way she did on a thousand different subjects during the day. The wood platform dug into her hip she rolled to the other side. She thrust herself back flat and the sheet wound her ankles together.
This shouldn't be so hard.
But she knew. She knew from instinct, and years of experience, and from watching the quiet contact between the eyes of those she knew were backroom men. Her instinct wouldn’t leave her alone.
The backroom men thought they were so covert, so invisible.
Not to her, they weren’t; she could smell them out like cockroaches on a cooked goat. The records were clear, their responses predictable. They could try their hardest, but they were no match for Uma, no match for her at all. She reported them without hesitation.
But with all those cases – the backroom men, those who would betray, those who couldn’t keep their work confidential – in all those, she had only ever been the one to make the report. She hadn’t been the one to make the final judgment call.
Why did she come to me? Why, of all people, did the Queen come to me?
It didn’t matter now, Uma had to admit. The Queen had come. Now it was Uma who had to make a decision, one that could reflect on the rest of her career. And the rest of her life.
It’s my reputation in the middle of all this. There is no easy way out.
Every decision would have blowback; all had consequences she couldn’t anticipate. She let the hours pass, trying not to think. Finally, she accepted she just wasn't going to sleep at all.
She watched with wooden dread as the red sun rose through her old cracked window.
14
Trudith
"Rainfields is a horrible place," Marian Gillard drawled out, spittle bubbles running down the side of her mouth, the paralyzed side, the one that only partially spoke, partially smiled. "I've been there, you know."
"We know, Marian, we know."
"Aye, not everybody knows, I'm not a fool telling stories for the wind, you witch."
"Carry on then, Mari-girl."
Marian snarled in the direction of Trudith, the serving woman. "Trude the Prude, you can shut up and mind your own business."
Trudith winked at Rhonda as she served her a beer.
Turning back to the young ones, Mari continued.
"It's horrible. Wet rock that you slide across, sometimes not knowing if you'll ever stop. You glide along the moss cover to the next rock, and never mind the sharp edges tearing up your soles in the meantime. But it's not just your soles getting ripped to shreds, it's your soul."
"Geez," a little voice said.
"Mari, you calm down now, you'll scare them."
"They should be scared!" Mari stood from the stool, stomach dropping down around her. She was mammoth in proportions, top of her head just grazing the wood ceiling.
Trudith looked back at the scene; even Rhonda was now wrapped up in the storyteller's weave. She paused, remembering the first time she'd caught sight of Marian Gillard. She had towered over her, just as she did now, but then every ounce of her giant ogre body had been muscle. She had been dexterous and quick even with all the bulk she brought along with her. Imp
osing wherever she went, she had been a memorable sight. Her wide face was almost man-like with an imposing square jaw, and some wondered whether there was a genetic secret behind it.
Trudith didn't wonder if there was a secret, she knew there was. No one had to tell her. Despite being born half-blind and finding her way out to Cork Town, Trudith had her head about her. She saw, and understood, what was happening around them.
But even she couldn't explain Mari's transformation. It seemed almost overnight. She had been growing upward and outward, and then suddenly it seemed she grew outward and outward only, fatter and fatter. Her face started to droop, and over the course of a shockingly short period, it looked like Marian Gillard was going to drop dead in front of them. She'd been a guard at the fortress, one of the Queen's Guard, no less, and within seeming moments she was reduced to this, a blabbing obesity, she hardly shut up - the dignified giant now a pub junkie in Cork Town. Her fall was astronomical, her tragedy visible to all.
"Are you coming to the blowout this weekend?"
Rhonda's voice broke Trudith out of her memory. Rhonda was fresh out of school, but was bright. Trudith wondered whether she'd become a Willing Woman. They needed more women like her as Willing Women.
Can't attend the blowouts if she's a Willing Woman, though. I don't know if she's ready to give that up.
"Probably," Trudith mustered up a smile. "After a week like this, it'll do me some good." An easy way to blow off some steam, Trudith loved the beating of the drums. She felt it like seven heartbeats and the ancient rhythms would take over her body. There was nothing like dancing in one of the underground blowouts.
"Just when you think you have your way about you, bam!" Marian's voice overtook the pub. "A massive storm will hit. The hail will poke your eyes out and imagine crossing that kind of terrain then! Wa-ho, it's a mess, and you're a mess in it. But the hail will stop and the sun will emerge from the blackest of clouds, just to burn the flesh off your face, just like that!" and she snapped her fingers, the sound echoing through the pub, her fingertips still more powerful than most peoples' thighs.
"What're you staring at, girlie?" Mari caught the red-haired girl-woman with the deformed face poking her head around from the kitchen.
Trudith had told Rose to stay out of sight. She tended to poke her head out to hear the stories told by the patrons, though most folks were put off at the sight of her. When Trudith took over the pub a few years earlier, Rose came with the place. She swept and washed up, asking for nothing more than her meals. Trudith figured she was a teenager, maybe even in her twenties. Though she looked pre-pubescent. Her horrible face and stunted body never seemed to age.
"Well? I asked ye a question?"
Rose backed away slowly, vigorously shaking her head, keeping her eyes on the floor. "Not, nothing, I - "
"Get on then, get back to work."
The girl-woman scurried away, as she always did. Rose never liked to be called out for watching.
"And then what? And then what?" Fred, always an eager audience, simple and sweet, he hung off every word Marian dribbled.
Mari smiled, her charm pulling the small crowd closer, increasing the dramatics.
"If you have to spend the night there, that's when the real darkness sets in, and I don't mean the darkness of night, no, though it is a kind of blue-black of the sea that swallows you whole. But no, I mean the ghosts. When you find some little space to lay your head, inside a shelter or not, you can't sleep. Hell no! You can't sleep with the voices of the dead and disappeared running across the wide expanse. You can't see them, but you can hear them, clear as a bell, the pattering of their feet, the insistence of their decaying dead breath, it heats the hair on your neck, they breathe that close on you."
"Ghosts of who?" a little voice in the crowd asked.
"Who? Oh, child, I won't be the one to tell you, no, not me. The nightmares you'll have, the horrors, the sights - no, not this one, I won't tell you that. What I'll tell you is this. Rainfields is a horrible place, has been for generations, perhaps since the earth itself vomited up the black rock that those horrors call home."
The girl weaved her way through the little crowd, coming eye to eye with Marian, her face delicate and her skin translucent, but her gaze fixed. Her dress dangled on her, not too large but appearing so. This girl's shoulders were just bone jutting out of her paper-thin skin. She was, as far as could be seen, the exact opposite of Marian Gillard.
"I want to know who they are," she said without fear, turning her shoulder to Mari in an almost provocative way, something exaggerated about it. Something Marian seemed to recognize.
"I will not say. Who are you, girlie?"
"I will not say,” the girl mocked. “But you will tell me.” The crowd began to back away, sensing something raw, something not quite right was happening there.
Even Mari was starting to falter, "Why would you want to know, little one?"
"I am not so little. I only look that way. Now tell me."
Mari looked even more unsure, but she had been the Queen's Guard. Trudith watched as Mari pulled back her shoulders and sat taller, setting her face as though she would not budge.
"I will not. You tell me why you must know."
The girl leaned in and whispered in Mari's ear, then stood back and smiled with darkened teeth, before backing away and turning out the door into the day. Mari’s face dropped.
Trudith felt she had to step in. Mari was going from grim to worse before her eyes.
"Go on then, all of you. We've got work to do here," Trudith shooed the crowd off, giving Mari some air and time. The pub could reopen for dinner, no need to entertain now. But even Trudith's curiosity was getting the best of her. She massaged Marian's shoulders from behind the stool.
"What did she say, Mari? What's got you so upset now?"
"I cannot say."
"But - "
"I cannot say!"
And with that Marian stood and rushed out the door, unhinging it on her way.
Outside Marian tried to shake it from her head. She violently shook herself, hoping the sounds, the words, the memory would fall off her.
She wouldn't repeat it, couldn't repeat it. But the words kept circling in her head.
She is as real as I am. Can her words be true?
Mari was haunted, would continue to be. Even with all she'd come up against, all she had done in the name of the Queen. The disappearances, in the hundreds by the time she retired. And then there were the more serious offenders. Marian had been skilled if brutal, but that had been the Queen’s command.
But this. This was driving somewhere deep inside her. The child's rice paper skin of veins. The child’s cruel smile, knowing the menace she was causing.
The child's whispered words whirlpooled, unceasing and grating in Marian's head:
"You once disappeared me there."
15
Rose
Fire to water to earth and to wind. Some of the Cork Town girls called her a witch, but she wasn't a witch of any kind. They only said it because Rose tried as much as possible not to be seen, ever. A heavy hood hid her deformed face from view even in the hottest seasons. But despite their taunting, Rose still felt connected to them: to each person, each living creature, to the earth itself, and she was grateful for her existence. She knew how much it had cost.
Her one-room hut in Cork Town, the last commune before leaving the capital altogether, was her little haven. She loved being so close to Papa and she felt safer being far from the center of Geb. It didn’t matter that she was nearly thirty years old, the dizziness of urban life was often too much for her. She took it all in like a deep breath, the sounds, the colors, the people, and their directions. It was overwhelming and made her brain move in so many directions, processing plans and would-be plans and pains and fears. She read them like a book on each passerby’s eye.
She felt everything.
Their blood. Their breath. Their heartbeat.
Sometimes she could feel
a child’s eyelashes as they blinked. Or so she thought. Papa said she was empathizing too much.
It was she who named herself Rose. Roses were so pretty, so hard to grow, so soft and so red. She loved red. Red like her heart. Red like the blood of every being in Lower Earth. Rose.
She retired her old name at the ripe age of four, conducted a ceremony in the back ally of Cork Town after the pub had closed for the night. The glasses were clean and the women had moved on for the night, so in the back alley, she buried her name and gave birth to a new one. Rose. No one ever asked her for any other name. No one cared to know. She was Rose, the woman-child of Cork Town who smiled warmly under her misshapen face. The neighbors had grown used to it, becoming at ease with her, forgiving the accident of her birth. No one there knew about the circumstances leading to her defects.
For the rest of Cork Town, kindness was not naturally given to her. The hood helped, both saving herself from prying eyes, and avoiding discomfort for those who might look upon her.
Eyes too big and too far apart. Nostrils that stretched too far from the bridge. Only her mouth was right-sized, though her tongue could stretch to the length of her elbow if she willed it to be so. Her ears gave her shame, beast-like ears that ejected out from her head, as though they would depart at any moment. She kept her soft red hair full and long, its natural wave creating a forest in which her ears could hide, and to dull the sounds that invaded her brain. Angry sounds hit her like batons, voices shouting or glass breaking or children shrieking. She would stuff her ears with cotton wool to sleep.
Whimsical and fairy-like she floated through the night-time streets, comfortable in cold midnights, humming sad melodies that existed only once. She never remembered them or tried to.
It was well past sunset when her work at the pub was done. She stepped into the night air, the street mostly clear. The blowout would have most of Cork Town’s women in the caves by now, so she could move freely without fear of being seen. She inhaled deep and then felt a call, a desire, or a wish. The words in her mind molded emotion into thought.
