by Gwen Benaway
“They want you to become Nahaka,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admit. “I’ll get you all away from there, somehow.”
She dares the tiniest hint of a smile. Hope. An unwept tear forms in the corner of her eye, but she strains her face not to let it fall. I realize the Nahaka must hurt them more when they cry, so they cry in their dreams. But here, in control now, she still tries to restrain it.
“They took my shawl,” she says. “The one you gave me. They burned it.”
“I’ll make you another one,” I say.
“I’m scared.”
“I know.”
I lean forward and hold her. She cries openly now. I do too.
When the embrace ends, her face is solemn.
“They’re taking us to their city tomorrow.”
“What?”
“They built a city near the World Breach. They’re giving us a tour tomorrow.”
I try to imagine a city built from the wreckage of their metal beast that fell from the sky. A city like their lost ones. But I can’t. It’s too monstrous. Nonetheless …
“Go,” I say. “You will be safe there while I destroy this place.”
“How?”
I smile. “I’ll show you someday.”
Kiwu considers this a moment.
“Be careful,” she says. “When we cry too much, they say the Reaper will get us.”
“The Reaper?”
“We’ve never seen it. But they talk as if it’s very powerful.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her.
I lean forward and embrace her again. I kiss her forehead. Then I whisper prayers that give the dream back to her. Hopefully, she can sleep soundly for tonight at least.
I spend the rest of the night trying to soothe the dreams of the other children. Most are Anishu, but some have been taken from the other Seven Nations. All have nightmares to soothe. It’s exhausting due to the distance and because their nightmares are so powerful.
By the time the Sun rises, I need to nap before starting a war.
For three years, I dreamt of the same smooth, white walls.
I don’t know how they knew how to imprison me. Not that I meant to leave, as long as I believed Kiwu and the rest of the children were safe. But it was strange.
The smooth, unblemished walls of my prison weren’t made of anything of this world. They resembled a ceramic surface, but there was no clay in them. They were a wholly artificial material. My dreams couldn’t penetrate them. Not even my nightmares.
Every few days, a Nahaka wearing glass lenses in front of his eyes would visit. He said he was a scientist. He asked me questions about dream-magic. I told him lies.
I waited.
In my dreams, I pushed against the walls little by little.
One day, they pushed back.
The walls were not completely dead. So I asked them questions. Little by little, they answered me in dreams. I found in them the remnants of organic material, transformed and remade. I whispered prayers to their ghosts, and they whispered back.
These walls were the ghosts of plants and tiny marine organisms, buried in the earth and fossilized long ago, and then extracted millions of years later by the Nahaka. Their dreams were even more ancient and inscrutable than Hani Eshi’s, but I had time to learn their language. Through them I saw the history of a world. A different world. The one from which the Nahaka came. Through their ghost-dreams, I saw the eras of that world come and go. I saw cataclysms and mass extinctions. After a few millennia passed, I saw the rise of the Nahaka. They quickly spread across that world. They built cities that destroyed the natural landscape. They sucked up the resources of their world. They fought over what remained. They did to each other what they’re doing to us now. Soon, their world was dying.
They built a machine to escape. They filled it with the wealthiest and most privileged of their race. The other Nahaka, most of the ones with different skin colours and the ones who were too different in other ways, were left behind.
The smooth, white walls of my prison came from that machine, which became the metal beast that emerged from the World Breach and crashed on this world. The Nahaka opened the World Breach to come here. They wanted a new world for themselves.
The next time the Nahaka scientist came, I recognized him from the dreams as one of the designers of the machine that brought them here. I asked him questions. He told me the walls are called “plastic.” He told me building a new world sometimes requires destroying an old one.
Then he told me he still wished for peace. He told me he was sorry.
I didn’t believe him anymore.
One day, he told me they had enough data, so I was free to go.
I walked for three days to return to a Hilowa with no children in it.
In the morning, the children leave in a caravan of metal vehicles.
It’s late afternoon by the time I’ve recovered enough to do what I need to do. And I need to finish before the children are returned in the evening.
In the light of day, I can see what I couldn’t the night before. The landscape here is warped and mutated. Roots curl up from the ground. Stone protrudes where it shouldn’t, and grows in unnatural shapes. Some of the trees and plants have petrified.
The Nahaka don’t know what they’ve done. All Anishu children are capable of dream-magic, but only the few boys who join the dream-priesthood are typically trained. But dream-magic is as powerful as dreams themselves, and this place has borne powerful nightmares. Without training, unchecked dream-magic leaks out into the waking world and warps it in its image. That is what happened here. Now I understand what my elders prophesied.
I don’t have much time left.
I’m kneeling on the hill above the school as the Sun sinks low in a lightning-veined sky. The Twin Moon sisters burn bright on the opposite horizon, shadowing their father on his journey across the clouds. I will need their help too. I put my palms on the skin of the earth and whisper prayers to all of them. The world shifts and blurs around me.
In my waking dreamscape, I can see everything.
I reach out through the soil and the rock, through the roots of the desert plants that aren’t stone and the skeletons of the plants that are, and through the wombs of the earth-mother below, where she is most powerful. I reach out to the wood and clay and metal foundations of the buildings and trace their angular designs up into classrooms and dining halls and bedrooms, and I find them all haunted with nightmares and stained with memories of blood. In the ground, I find the bones of children I am too late to save, and I receive their dream-names as prayers whispered by the earth and reverberate them up through me into the sky. I will remember them. My blood roils.
A dozen or so Nahaka still linger in the buildings. And there is something more that I can’t discern. Something wrong, even more than anything else, as if all the nightmares dreamt here have become something else with a life and will of its own.
There’s no use waiting any longer. I grab hold of it all, and whisper to Hani Eshi that it’s time to reclaim this place into herself and let time heal the wounds. Perhaps in a hundred thousand years or so, our ancestors will be free from the scars of these nightmares.
It’s time. I let go, and the ground rumbles. Reverberating out from the centre that is me, the earth turns under itself, and the soil consumes the foundations above it. The metal breaks. The clay cracks. The wood snaps. The earth destroys and reclaims. Some of the buildings collapse in on themselves, and the surviving Nahaka rush outside to escape.
A crackling burst of sound and a searing pain breaks my concentration.
I blink myself back into the waking world, and my shoulder is bleeding onto my breast. More gunshots follow. Fortunat
ely, most are not so accurate. But the ripped flesh hurts. The earth continues to shake. With great pain, I find the wound in my dreamscape, and begin to heal it. The metal slug cleanly exited through the other side, making this task slightly easier, but still distracting and mind-twistingly painful. I’m dizzy from the loss of blood but somehow struggle to stand anyhow. I start walking down the hill, stumbling along the way, healing as I go.
I need to end this. I need to make sure the children are returned home.
My shoulder is nearly healed by the time I reach the front gate and walk through it on unsteady legs. The remaining Nahaka soldiers have collapsed from the tremors. But my body is aware of the earth’s dreams, and knows which way to shift and sway with her. I’m wary of more gunfire, but the soldiers seem to have used up all their ammunition.
“My name is Ume,” I shout in Nahakatsi. “I’m taking our children home with me.”
“Did you do this?” one of them shouts back, incredulous.
“Yes.”
To my surprise, he starts laughing. I don’t understand. Have they gone mad? More mad?
“You’ll die,” he says.
Before I can react, one of the collapsed school buildings bursts outward in a shower of splintered wood and metal shards. At the centre of the explosion stands what appears to be a Nahaka soldiers but isn’t. What stands there is wrong, as wrong as this whole place. Its body is twisted and warped and stretched. It leaks dream-magic. It’s as if the Nahaka have somehow channelled the collective nightmares of all the children into its body. In doing so, they’ve imbued it with a nightmarish dream-magic, but they’ve broken its mind.
Ah.
The Reaper.
The Reaper lunges forward in jerky, flickery, blurry motions, screeching and wailing as it comes. There is nothing left of the Nahaka soldier they used to create it, only a flesh-and-blood husk used to house a living breathing amalgamation of nightmares. Its wails cloud my mind, and the fabric of the world seems to bend around it. I drop to my knees and grab my head in my hands. It hurts. I’m shivering. I’m crying. It feels like I’ll shake myself apart.
This thing is trying to destroy me.
But, for some reason, it doesn’t want to finish it.
Against all my better judgment, I reach out to the Reaper. I ask to share its dreams. It grasps me in its dreamscape and sucks me inside with all its power. Inside its dream, the world is made of beatings and rape and forgotten words and unremembered prayers and broken, burning things. And hidden somewhere deep inside a brutalized, torture-born heart, I find a desperate wish for the world to end because even that would be better than enduring this living terror.
I won’t let either happen.
It’s suffering. Its dreams are made of fear. And I know how to heal fear.
I whisper prayers to the earth-mother, and her Twin Moon daughters, and their Sun father, and Alale-as-spirit, and together we begin to soothe the Reaper’s nightmares.
Soon, the body is just a body again.
I’m back in the ruins of the school. The earth is finally still again. The Reaper is dead. The other Nahaka soldiers have collapsed or given up or passed out from the aura of the Reaper’s nightmares. The one who shouted to me earlier is still awake, though. A garbled voice begins talking from a black box on his belt. I move toward him.
He scowls at me, a look of pure hatred I’ll never understand.
The Sun is setting. I’m exhausted.
A caravan of vehicles approaches from the direction of the World Breach.
“Tell them to keep going,” I say. “Tell them to take the children back to Hilowa.”
“You haven’t won,” he says.
“Tell them.”
The caravan slows as it approaches the wreckage of the school.
“I don’t want to kill you,” I tell him. “But I will.”
The soldier sighs. He takes the talking box from his belt and speaks into it. “There’s been an incident here. Take the kids back to their village. The experiment is over.”
“Copy that,” says a distorted voice on the other end.
After a moment, the caravan starts moving again. Toward Hilowa.
I turn my back on the school and start walking.
I make it to the other side of the hill before collapsing. I’ll need to rest before following the caravan. I touch the earth and thank her. From one mother to another. Night falls.
The stars are calm. It begins to rain.
Somewhere between waking and dreaming, I reach out and try to find Kiwu in the distance. It’s more difficult now because she’s awake. But I find her by following a shimmering dream-strand of fear and anxiety: the lone Anishu girl cramped in a vehicle full of Anishu boys. They’re all afraid. They don’t know what’s happening.
“It’s okay,” I tell her in dreams.
“Ume-woshi?”
“You’re going home,” I say. Then I tell her: “Remember. You are Kiwu eshi Yana ishi Walewo kuni Kipiku imu Wushiku shi Anishu. You are loved. And I’ll see you soon.”
Failure
Casey Plett
The value of a reviver diminishes the longer we stay in one place, so we are always moving (I am always moving, rather, revivers work alone). The reason our value diminishes such is two-fold: One, our ability to learn atrophies, and two, the populations we serve get very agitated when they see the limits of our abilities.
Eight out of ten people who come to see me will get better or worse no matter what I do. The rest, maybe I can actually help. But everyone knows this. If I knocked on any old door right now and asked them if revivers fix people, they’d probably give a right laugh and launch into some story about how so-and-so they knew was deathly ill and no one knew it was wrong and finally a reviver got to him and two weeks later he died anyway the sorry old sad hopeful bastard.
But no one won’t call on us. And everyone wants to see the new reviver in town, the one with the freshest knowledge, the strangest experiences, the kindest face.
It’s so hard trying to stay on top of the game. I’m proud of what I do but can’t begin to tell you how hard I try and how exhausted I am all the time. The ocean of sickness and disease in these lands, the morass of pain that greets me in every new town—the lakes of persistent illness that remain when I leave. I give myself time to relax, I mean I’m told I have to and feel okay about relaxing (“Self-care” is what many of the other revivers call it, some of whom, though I guess not all, practice a very different kind of reviving than I), but I always keep wondering, who could I be helping? What more could I be doing? Even when there aren’t sick people in front of you, there’s still research and learning and trade-swapping to be doing.
I know I’m no use to anyone if I’m collapsed or dead, but it eats at me a little. And these failures always appear in my dreams. I’m glad for the necessity of revivers to move. I can’t picture- don’t want to picture- what it would mean for someone like me to stay in one spot and just serve one community. What would people expect of you? What would it do to trust?
“I promise this is over in two seconds.”
“AICK—ahhh…”
“How in pain are you on a scale of one to ten?”
“Awake.”
I hoisted my gear and swabbed her neck. The woman had an infection that was attacking her muscles. Sarania, they were calling it. It was new. “That’ll keep you feeling normal for at least a month,” I said. “If we’re lucky, longer than that. But if your symptoms come back, please go see another reviver immediately.”
The woman turned around with her eyes lamps, like I’d given her good drugs and not antibiotics. “I will, I will. I already feel better. What’d you give me?”
“Cranaloxin,” I said. “Let me write it down for you in case you have to get it again. Anyone who knows how to treat Sarania will know it though.”
S
he paid, put her sweater back on, and left. I put away my shit and turned my sign on the door. It was already very late. I took out my other gear, the kind for stuff that doesn’t make anybody say “Awake.”
Revivers rarely spend their company with each other. Whoever saw that woman next, now or in the future, is a person I almost certainly will never meet. At the most, we’ll have met each other in passing. But we pick up on each other’s traces, we leave and send communications, we’re connected like no sibling or lover could ever be. I run into another every week or so and we share what we’ve seen and learned, and it’s short but intimate in this kind of way—well I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. I am one of the more romantic ones. And there is a newspaper that runs out of a little backdoor shack in Martanas once a month, closest thing we have to something organized. That’s the way it has to be, I suppose. Like many siblings and lovers, we respect and need each other but we don’t really like each other. You’d never see three revivers walking down the street laughing. Who knows what people would do?
Is it such a sap move to say being united around bodies, reviving the body, is still sacred? Do carpenters feel this way about each other?
I set up my gear and I lit candles, put on soothing music, and opened the curtains so tomorrow I could be up at dawn. I had some additional research to do about Sarania and I’d been needing to do it for days now, but it could wait till tomorrow, and I knew where the woman lived if it was important. I was so tired. I was so so tired. I can’t tell you how tired I am, have been. I calmed myself, let the worry sink out of me. I gazed at the sky by the window in my sleepers, the sky so devoid of stars but shimmering through all the smoke and light from the factories. In about two weeks time I’d be gone again, moving through the forests to Martanas. It’d take me a good half a year, probably, once I was done with the city and then out the other side. And there would be stars, stars everywhere.
I lay down in bed, shot up, and dissolved until the sun touched me into consciousness.
I was almost about to turn the sign again when the woman was back and rapping at my door.
