by Gin Eborn
“Maggie?” Fisher had that climax-craving pain face. I loved that.
“Scratt, you always seem to be in the know around here.” I couldn’t resist making him wait a little longer. “Did the Regys show up?”
“Nope.”
“Did they miss her at check-in this morning?” Fisher seemed aggravated.
“They did. But they did not even react. Marked her off the list and just kept going.”
“So, the Regys knows Leah is missing and sent no one to search for her?” Fisher squinted his eyes.
“Now you’re getting it,” Scratt nodded. “Has me wondering—” He looked around and bent forward over the table and gestured for us all to do the same. “What if she was—you know—one of them?”
“Them?” I growled.
“Yeah, one of those Calypso people.”
I choked on my own spit. Chama’s expression did not change. It was the first time I realized that Scratt didn’t know.
“Did you actually just say Calypso people?” My tone was more of a warning.
“I know. They supposedly got all of ‘em a while back. But I always figured that there has to be one or two more of them out there somewhere.” Scratt was serious.
“And, what do you think about that? The whole Caly round-up?” My jaw clenched. Fisher held me tighter.
“If you ask me, and you did ask me, I think that’s what we need right now. Some Calys to work that magic thing that they do and make all this, you know—”
Chama interrupted. “Oh, for fooking sake, Scratt, we need some Calypsos right here right now out in the damned open. And I know I could be taken away for saying it, but I think we all agree that something has to change.” She deliberately turned her whole body to me. “And only a Caly can do it, I think. From what I know of them. A very special unusual Caly.”
Shit.
Fisher tapped the table. We quieted down. Then Scratt continued, “I knew a Calypso when I was a kid.” I was interested. “Her name was Jaye. She was a good friend. Could do things with fire that were just beyond, you know what I mean? She always said that the Calys had talents with one of the elements and hers was fire.
And mine is water. But she should have never told you that.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Not sure. Just know one day I went to her house, and her mom told me she was gone. And that was that. None of us knew about the round-up at the time, of course.”
Rosie finished and stood up and bowed. George met her in the middle, “Sorry folks. But it’s time for everyone to head back to your Villages. May you all get back safely.” Everyone stood and held silence as we always did. It felt like a reverent prayer—an understanding that we may never see each other again. Die in the quakes. Die in the Villages. The Coals stood I imagined just to fit in. Follow the leader.
Fucking robots.
“A ho Leah. A la la ho,” the four of us chanted under our breaths, polishing off the last sip of beer. I thought for a moment I saw the woman in green hues standing in the dark. But I looked again and saw nothing.
Right, that was tonight.
Fisher grabbed me. “Come on. Let’s go. This Leah thing has me a bit twisted around.”
“I know. Me too.” I buttoned my shirt and my pants.
“We will see you guys soon. Be careful.” I cautioned Chama and Scratt as they started for the cave opening.
Chama pinched my elbow. “So darling, you going for a swim tonight?”
I winced and looked around.
She leaned into my ear, “Just be sure to come back safe and sound. And we can talk later. We have a lot to talk about.” She gave me a little squeeze and bolted off to join Scratt as he walked out.
“What was that?” Fisher asked.
Tell him everything.
“Oh, nothing, you know how Chama is.”
George, clothed, pulled me over to Rosie. She had tears in her eyes and a little lace handkerchief. Fisher nuzzled his body in behind me. I wanted to take him like an animal. I pressed my hips back into his.
“Baby,” Rosie started, “we know you have been thinking about going back out to the house.”
“What?” Fisher’s voice was loud. My spit choked me.
“It’s okay. We know it’s hard for you here sometimes. So close to the house you lived in and not knowing if there was something left.” George’s voice cracked.
Pops, I go there all the time. Fuck the rules. Confine us like—
“Sweet baby, we talked it over and agreed that George would go.”
“No,” I started, “that is too dangerous. If the Regys—”
“Too late,” George proclaimed, slowly reaching out his hand with a picture in it. “It was all I could find. But it was like your folks wanted you to have it.”
The picture still had color in it. Mom was holding me. I had to have been two, maybe three, and Dad was next to her. His smile big enough to fill his entire face. Those full cheeks. Hell, we were all smiling.
I have looked all over that house and there was nothing.
I tried to fight back the tears that dropped down my face, cool against the warmth of my skin.
“I don’t know what to say.” My throat swelled. “I just can’t believe you did this. Pops, you could have been—”
“But I wasn’t, Maggie. I got in and out safely. I left no trace. I promise you.”
“We’re just happy you have this, Maggie.” Rosie was crying, too.
“I just, well, I am blown away.”
Who the hell put that there?
I squeezed them both tight. Rosie clapped and bounced. Fisher pulled me back into his body.
“So,” I could barely speak, “we need to go. Not much time before Fish has to get back to the Basin. But thank you. Thank you for this.” I put it in the medicine pouch around my neck. “Please don’t risk yourself again like this. I mean it.”
“You two go on, ya hear?” George always seemed happy when Fisher and I had time together. “Remember what your folks used to say? Sex should be messy and wild or you aint doing it right. So, go do it right!”
I shook my head. Fisher grabbed me as I kicked off my red heels and grabbed my boots from behind the bar, and we ran out into the light of night.
2
Regys Scum
It was an easy climb down to the edge of the ocean from Dragon Flies. The moon, Neesa, so bright and taking up such a generous portion of the sky it seemed fake hanging there. Like someone had cut it out of sequined sheers and taped it onto a black felt backdrop. Its effervescence spilled down over the horizon and onto the line of infinity. That place where the ocean touches the sky. That place where all souls lie waiting for us when we take the last breath.
“We only have about 20 minutes.” Fisher whispered, grabbing at the buttons on my shirt.
“Works for me!” My clothes came off more easily than during the striptease. He smelled like earth. “I love to see you naked.” I was on my knees, dropping his pants.
“I love to feel you naked.” Fisher’s hands poured over my back.
As Neesa shone down over our bodies, her light surged through my core. Fisher’s fingers outlined every curve of me with an innocence, like we had never been naked together before. Each nuzzle brought a new taste. Each kiss brought the anticipation of him finally deep inside me.
Fisher fingered the bird skull pendant wrapped with the leather cords on my medicine pouch. “It looks like it’s glowing.” He pulled me onto my feet with one motion, stroking my hip bone. I wrapped my legs around his waist as we pushed into each other and fell back into the water.
“Maggs?”
“Yea,” I whispered, devouring his neck and breathing in the smell of him.
“Wait.” He brushed my wet hair off my face.
“Wait? Yea, right.” I moved my hips.
“I’m not kidding.” Fisher’s voice surprised me. He was serious.
“I want you to fuck me right this second. And please, do not ruin th
e whole ‘I have the power thing.’ You know how much I love that.”
“Look at me.”
“I would rather feel you.”
“I mean it. I’m not kidding.” His body felt more like a stone statue than flesh and blood. I met his stare and held the silence with him for a moment.
“What is it? What’s going on with you?”
“Let’s get out of here.” His face was still. I could only meet so much intensity with humor.
“Right now?” I put his hand on my breast. “Do you feel that? You get to have all of this that you want.” I wiggled my hips. “Do you feel that?”
“Oh, I feel you. And trust me, I love this. I love you.”
“Then fuck me. We can talk later.” I buried my nose in his neck until he stopped me again.
“I want to take off—tonight. I want us to leave here. I can go back to the Basin, grab my stuff, and meet you right back here before anyone knows I’m gone.”
“Okay.” That was enough. I started to climb off him, but he grabbed my ass and pulled me in even closer.
“No, don’t.” He wanted me, too. That was physically obvious. “My turn to hold you in suspense. Listen to me. I’m leaving. Tonight. I want you to come with me.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“I am.”
“We can’t just go. Are you forgetting this?” I tapped the tracker wedged deeply under his skin.
“No, no I can hardly forget that thing inside me.”
“Wherever you go, they can find you.”
“Once they know I’m gone, yes, they can track me. Just like they could’ve tracked Leah. But didn’t.”
“That was different and you know it. Something weird happened with her. We don’t even know if that was the Regys or not. You leaving? You are their top producer in those mines. They would hunt you, and if they found you, they would kill you without asking questions. And you know it. Now let me go.” I jumped onto my own two feet. “You are fucking crazy pants right now.”
Fisher grabbed me and pulled me back to him. In the moonlight, I would have sworn he was about to cry. But that is the magic of the moon, is it not? The masks of daylight fade into the purity of who we are. Just as landscapes seem to morph into entirely different structures, beings become somehow—real.
“I can’t live like this any more, Maggie. I can’t. It is getting worse. You even said so yourself. The Coals, remember?”
“Of course, I remember. But I didn’t mean we should just take off.”
“So, you want to hide? Like you’ve been doing your whole life?”
“That isn’t fair.”
He grabbed my bird skull. “Okay then. Throw this out in the water right now, and let’s see what happens.”
“No. You know I can’t do that.”
“Why? Because your mother told you it protected you? From what? From yourself?”
“You know what she said.”
“Yea, she said you were a freak.”
“She did not call me a freak.”
“Too powerful? Right? Something like that?”
“What’s your point?”
“We have no idea who you are. I don’t even know who I am anymore. But I’m willing to go and find out. Are you? I want us to go find ourselves again. I want us to be real again. And not who the damned government says we are. And not who your mom said you were. You haven’t even let the Calys know who you are. The girl I grew up with was not this timid.”
I started to rip the skull off just so I could blow him to pieces. But I pushed the anger down.
“This is a big thing to think about. I mean, it would require me leaving my tribe. And you—a life of running.”
“I would be with you. They can’t track you. You have powers. Shit, aren’t we running anyway? I mean the earthquakes and the Regys and the Coals. This last month at the Lava Pits—no one is normal down there. I can’t explain it. I wish I could. But I told you when we were teenagers that I would protect you. And I meant it.”
“And you always have.”
“Then trust me now. We have to leave. Tonight. I may not have your powers, but I do have a sense of things, and you know it. And I am telling you, something is about to happen here. Something bad. And I want to get as far away from it as possible.”
Truth.
He kissed me with a tenderness that pulled my knees together. We spoke to each other in silence—there in the dancing light of Neesa. I wondered if there was ever actually a way to tell someone how much you loved them.
“Okay,” I mouthed, surprised by my own intention to go wherever he would go. Life without Fisher was unimaginable. He was me. “Okay. So which way do we go?”
“You won’t like this.”
His thoughts seemed clear. The damned Lava Pits.
“No, no, Fisher.”
“We go back South by the Pits. No one will track us that way first.”
“Because no one in their right fucking mind would even think of going there!” My belly hurt.
“But it will buy us some time. They will know I am missing at morning check-in, and if they search the East and North first—then maybe, just maybe, we can get far enough ahead of them.”
“If.”
“I know it may not work out that way, but I have been over it and over it in my head, and this is the only way that makes any sense to me. These Regys are idiots! They aren’t capable of independent thought. That is the one consistent thing about them. And consistency can work to our favor. When they see I am gone, the last place they will look is at the Pits.”
“Okay. Say you’re right and we actually make it to the South. We can’t live at the Lava Pits. It’s another fucking government-issued Village, and they will be waiting for us. Well, you.”
“Not at the South Village. We go by it. Over the South border wall. I made a couple connections down there—people I trust. I know you’d need to meet them and decide, but they say there is still land below the Pits with water and caves and the Regys don’t go there. At least not yet.”
“They say it’s deserted beyond the walls.”
“But it isn’t, Maggie. There’s a whole group of people hidden away down there. Healthy people. No virus. And they have children. And they are growing food. Real lives.”
“What?”
“I know, I didn’t believe it either. But I’ve seen them.” His face was alive in ways I had not seen in a very long time. “They have to meet you, too, but they said we can come. And if we pass their tests—”
“Their tests?”
“Yes, well they have to be sure we are virus-free and that we can be trusted. But I’m telling you, it is just a formality. All we have to do is get there.”
I felt his excitement grow again, pushing into me. I touched his lips. His eyes were alive. The first sounds of the Earth rumbling returned. I was not ready for the next quake.
What if these are the South Calys? The Earth people? Do they even know we have survived?
“Maggie? Please.” He slid his knee between my legs. “Please.”
“Not fair.” He lifted me back up onto his hips. “But gods-damn, you are fucking in luck, old boy. It seems I can’t imagine living one day without you.”
“You can’t?”
“Not one day.”
We pushed into each other as he slid inside me. I gasped from the pleasure of being filled. Our hips rocked, as I pulled him in and let him go. Like one person, we moved together in the water, remembering the depths of our bodies.
I can not get close enough to you.
We twisted, intertwined until every cell inside me erupted and we burst to the surface gasping in air. Fisher’s eyes ran all over me. I wanted to freeze that moment. Him inside me and looking at me so intently. The vulnerability of that moment—just the two of us in full communion, breathing, being seen—holding the depths of life itself. I put a finger to Fisher’s lips not wanting any sounds to interrupt the pleasure of that one moment. We held the silence. Tender
. Intimate.
“I love you,” I mouthed. He started to shift. “No, not yet. I hate that part. Stay inside me as long as you can.”
Each drop of water rolling off Fisher’s chest held the glow of moonlight. The sound of panting filled the air—our chests expanding and contracting in a dance matched only by the gentle pulse of the ocean’s tide. Our bodies fit together with an undeniable ease, and I wanted to hold that moment of perfection for as long as possible.
Until the Earth began shaking, making herself known with a louder voice. We were out of time.
“I’ll go. I’ll go get packed.” Fisher dressed. “And you feed. Meet me by the sacred tree and we’ll go.”
Fuck. We are actually doing this.
“Be careful.” We nuzzled together for one more kiss. “My snapshot tonight? It was not—”
The Earth roared, silencing me. The trees twisted and stones clacked, hitting each other as they rolled down the cliff face. The moon hid behind the thickness of storm clouds as lightning shot down toward the Basin.
“I gotta go, Maggs. Don’t stay long down there, you hear me? Twenty minutes tops. This storm looks to be a bad one.”
“They all look bad these days. Have you noticed how they—Fisher?” I yelled at him as he disappeared behind the rocks.
Great. Alone.
The water enveloped my body. So comforting as I ran my hands over my body for a moment before dropping down to the sandy bottom. A cord opened out of the bottom of my spine spiraling down through layers of rock, down into the fire at the center of the Earth, until it reached a hidden, guarded place. Inside a whole other plane of existence was a lush garden with a freshwater river flowing through it. And there, a cloaked woman always met me and brought me a chalice. Dark but welcoming, I toasted her. “In beauty, in bounty, in love, and in heartbeat,” I chanted and drank deep. The energy of that place streaming through my spinal cord and up into hips—my very happy and open hips—and into my body’s energy field. Nourishment. My whole body relaxed as I fed.
I moved my fingers through the water imagining Fisher and me in a small houseboat floating on the ocean. Up and down in gentle waves, we were smiling and laughing. And as I held the energy of this image, it took shape in front of me like a living outline of my dream. As real as a painting I could just step into. This was my favorite part of feeding. The magic of my energy married with the Earth herself.