The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  “Wait,” he says. “What the fucking fuck? Rack? What in the fucking piss just happ — Oh.” A light bulb flickers behind his eyes. Scratch that; it's more like someone throwing the breaker on an entire row of houses. “OH.” He pats his sides like a man looking for his keys. He finds the twin lumps nestled beneath his armpits. He takes a peek under the coat — just to make sure they're not vibrators or candy bars or bibles — and then he looks back up at Rack, grinning a slow, impossibly wide cartoon shark's grin.

  “You son of a motherfucker,” he says, admiringly.

  Rack knows that grin. Even on someone else's face, he knows it. His heart bucks around so wildly he's afraid he might black out. And then he's suddenly locked in a kiss — she's fast, never mind the unfamiliar body — and the weirdness of the situation isn't even registering for either of them, it's all adrenaline and relief and a sort of drunken, invincible glee. There's greasy hair in his good eye and stubble against his lips. She tastes like a chain-smoking asshole that just underwent a malt liquor enema. Fucking perfection.

  And now she's pulling away, yanking those pearly white grips out of their sockets like a dentist riding a meth binge, and the Ganymede crew never even knows what's hit it.

  Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies

  This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.

  You want that kind of horseshit, you don't have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their names get printed ten feet high on movie marquees and subway ads, the dead convenient narrative rungs for villains to climb. Heroes get names; killers get names; victims get close-ups of their opened ribcages mid-autopsy, the bloodied stumps where their wings once attached, baffled coroners making baffled phone calls to even more baffled curators at local museums. They get dissected, they get discussed, but they don't get names or stories the audience remembers.

  So, no. You don't get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no-one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion-brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That's all you get, and that's me being generous. You're fuckin' welcome.

  However, here is what I will tell you. I'll be quick.

  He did not know what I was until after. He felt no regret or curiosity, because he should have been drowned at birth. I was nothing but a commodity to him before, and nothing but an anomaly to him after.

  My copper feathers cut his fingertips and palms as he pared my wings away.

  I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it's easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn't drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It's very authentic, very down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.

  My spirit was already fled before the deed was done, back to the Nest, back to the Egg. My sisters clucked and cooed and gently scolded. They incubated me with their great feathery bottoms as they had many times before, as I had done many times before for them. Sisters have to look out for one another. We're all we've got, and forever is a long, slow slog without love.

  I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee-ninsy bit motherfuckin' pissed, maybe.

  I may have cried. You don't get to know that either, though.

  We swept back onto the mortal plane with a sound of a 1967 Mercury Cougar roaring to life on an empty country road, one sister in the front seat and three in the back and me at the wheel with a cigarette clenched between my pointed teeth. You can fit a lot of wingspan in those old cars, provided you know how to fold reality the right way.

  It's easy to get lost on those backroads, but my old wings called to us from his attic. We did not get lost.

  He was alone when we pulled into his driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels like bone. He had a gun. He bolted his doors. The tumblers turned for us; we took his gun.

  Did he cry? Oh yeah. Like a fuckin' baby.

  I didn't know what you were, he said. I didn't know. I just wanted to get your attention, and you wouldn't even look at me. I tried everything.

  Well, kid, I says, putting my cigarette out on his family's floral carpet, you've sure as hell got it now.

  Our talons can crush galaxies. Our songs give black holes nightmares. The edges of our feathers fracture moonlight into silver spiderwebs and universes into parallels. Did we take him apart? C'mon. Don't ask stupid questions.

  Did we kill him? Ehh. In a manner of speaking. In another manner of speaking, his matter is speaking across a large swathe of space and time, begging for an ending to his smeared roadkill existence that never quite reaches the rest stop. Semantics, right? I don't care to quibble or think about it anymore than I have to.

  Anyway. Like I said way back at the start, this is not the story of how he killed me. It's the story of how a freak tornado wrecked a single solitary home and disappeared a promising young man from a good family, leaving a mystery for the locals to scratch their heads over for the next twenty years. It's the story of how a Jane Doe showed up in the nearby morgue with what looked like wing stubs sticking out of her back, never to be claimed or named. It's the story of how my sisters and I acquired a 1967 Mercury Cougar we still go cruising in occasionally when we're on the mortal side of the pike.

  You may not remember my name, seeing as how I don't have one you could pronounce or comprehend. The important thing is always the stories — which ones get told, which ones get co-opted, which ones get left in a ditch, overlooked and neglected. This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. I will sing it from the last withered tree on the last star-blasted planet when entropy has wound down all the worlds and all the wheres, and nothing is left but faded candy wrappers. My sisters and I will sing it — all at once, all together, a sound like a righteous scream from all the forgotten, talked-over throats in Eternity's halls — and it will be the last story in all of Creation before the lights finally blink out and the shutters go bang.

  The Only Harmless Great Thing

  Part I

  FISSION

  There is a secret buried beneath the mountain's gray skin. The ones who put it there, flat-faced pink squeakers with more clever-thinking than sense, are many Mothers gone, bones so crumbled an ear's flap scatters them to sneeze-seed. To fetch up the secret from Deep-Down requires a long trunk and a longer memory. They left dire warnings carved in the rock, those squeakers, but the rock does not tell her daughters, and the stinging rains washed everything as clean and smooth as an old tusk a hundred hundred matriarchies ago.

  The Many Mothers have memories longer than stone. They remember how it came to pass, how their task was set and why no other living creature may enter the mountain. It is a truce with the Dead, and the Many Mothers are nothing more and nothing less than the Memories of the Dead, the sum total of every story ever told them.

  At night, when the moon shuffles off behind the mountain and the land darkens like wetted skin, they glow. There is a story behind this. No matter how far you march, O best beloved mooncalf, the past will always drag around your ankle, a snapped shackle time cannot pry loose.

  All of Kat's research — the years of university, the expensive textbooks on physics and sociology, the debt she'll never in the holy half-life of uranium
pay back, the blood, sweat, and tears — has come down to making elephants glow in the goddamned dark. It figures. Somewhere her grandmama is sure as hell laughing herself silly.

  A million different solutions to the problem have been pitched over the years. Pictographs, priesthoods, mathematical code etched in granite — all were interesting, intriguing even, but nobody could ever settle on one foolproof method to tell people to stay away. Someone had even suggested dissonant musical notes, a screaming discordia that, when strummed or plucked or plinked, instinctively triggered a fear response in any simian unlucky enough to hear it. The problem with that one, of course, was figuring out what exactly would sound ominous to future generations. Go back two hundred years and play your average Joe or Jane Smith a Scandinavian death metal record and they might have a pretty wicked fear response, too.

  Then came the Atomic Elephant Hypothesis.

  Kat grew up, as most American children did, associating elephants with the dangers of radiation. Every kid over the past hundred years had watched and rewatched Disney's bowdlerized animated version of the Topsy Tragedy (the ending where Topsy realizes revenge is Never The Right Option and agrees to keep painting those watch dials For The War Effort still makes Kat roll her eyes hard enough to sprain an optic nerve) a million times, and when you got older there were entire middle school history lectures devoted to the Radium Elephant trials. Scratchy newsreel footage the color of sand, always replaying the same moment, the same ghostly elephant leader eighty-five years dead signing the shapes for “We feel” to the court-appointed translator with a trunk blorping in and out of focus. Seeing that stuff at a young age lodged in you on a bone-deep level. And apparently it had stuck with a whole lot of other people as well: Route 66 is still studded with neon elephants cheerfully hailing travelers evaporated to dust and mirage fifty years back down the road. The mascot of the biggest nuclear power provider in the country is Atomisk the Elephant, a cheerful pink pachyderm who Never Forgets to Pay His Utility Bill On Time. Fat Man and Little Boy were decorated with rampaging tuskers, a fact deeply screwed up on several counts. It's a ghoulish cultural splinter the country has never quite succeeded in tweezing.

  Kat had taken a long, hard look at all of this, rubbed her chin in a stereotypically pensive fashion, and suggested a warning system so ridiculous nobody took her serious at first. But it was one of those fuckin' things, right? The harder they laughed, the more sense it seemed to make. They were all at the end of their collective ropes; the waste kept piling up and they needed to let whoever took over in ten millennia know what it was, where it was, and why they probably shouldn't use it as a dessert topping or rectal suppository.

  And so here Kat sits, tie straightened, hair teased heaven-high, waiting to meet with an elephant representative. Explaining the cultural reasons why they want to make the elephant's people glow in the dark is going to be an exercise in minefield ballet, and godspeed to the translator assigned.

  They killed their own just to see time pass. That's how it started. Humans were as hypnotized by shine as magpies, but no magpie has ever been so thinkful about how many days it has left before it turns into a told story. Even in the dark they fretted, feeling the stars bite like summer flies as they migrated overhead. They built shelters to block out the sight of their passing. This only succeeded in making things dimmer; the unseen lion in the tall grass is still a lion that exists. Clever-turning cicada-ticking sun-chasers they tied together so that they would always know where she was, clinging to the sun's fiery tail like frightened calves.

  (Try not to judge them; their mothers were short-lived, forgetful things, clans led by bulls with short memories and shorter tempers. They had no history, no shared Memory. Who can blame them for clinging ape-fearful to the only constants they had?)

  “But how to track time's skittering in the night with such tiny eyes and ears?” the humans squeaked. “What if the sun should go wandering and leave us and we don't even realize we've been left behind?”

  The answer, as with so many things those piteous little creatures dredged from the mud, was poison.

  They gored the earth with gaping holes, shook her bones until crystals like pieces of starless sky fell out. Trapped inside were glowing flies. Trampling them made a smeary shine, but they carried sickness within their blood and guts. Pity the poor humans! Their noses were stumpy, ridiculous things and they couldn't smell the Wrongness, even as they rubbed it across their teeth and faces. All they could see was how bright it looked, like sunlight through new leaves. For want of a trunk, much sorrow would come to them — and on to us, though we knew it not in those days.

  There was a good place, once. Grass went crunch-squish underfoot. Mother went wrrrt. The world was fruit-sticky warm and sunlight trunk-striped with swaying gray shadows smelling of We. Mud and stories and Mothers, so many Mothers, always touching, always telling, sensitive solid fearless endless. Their tusks held the sky up up up. Their bare bones hummed in the bone places, still singing even with all their meat and skin gone to hyena milk. Nothing was greater than Many Mothers. Together they were mountains and forevers. As long as they had each other and the Stories, there was no fang or claw that could make them Not.

  They had blown raw red holes through the Many Mothers, hacked away their beautiful tusks, and the sky had not fallen and she had not mourned the meat. She was She — the survivor, the prisoner, the one they called Topsy — and She carried the Stories safe inside her skull, just behind her left eye, so that they lived on in some way. But there is no one left to tell the histories in this smoky sooty cave Men have brought her to, where the ground is grassless stone and iron rubs ankleskin to bloody fly-bait. There are others like her, swaying gray shadows smelling of We, but wood and cold metal lie between them, and she cannot see them, and she cannot touch them.

  In this mean old dead-dog world you do what you gotta do to put food on the table, even when you're damn certain deep down in your knowing-marrow that it's wrong and that God Almighty his own damn self will read you the riot act on Judgment Day. When you got two kid sisters and an ailing mama back in the mountains waiting on the next paycheck, you swallow your right and you swallow your wrong and you swallow what turns out to be several lethal doses of glowing green graveyard seed and you keep on shoveling shit with a smile (newly missing several teeth) until either the settlement check quietly arrives or you drop, whichever walks down the cut first. Regan is determined to hang on until she knows her family is taken care of, and when Regan gets determined about something, look the hell out and tie down anything loose.

  The ache in her jaw has gone from a dull complaint to endless fire blossoming from the hinge behind her back teeth, riding the rails all the way to the region of her chin. It never stops or sleeps or cries uncle. Even now, trying to teach this cussed animal how to eat the poison that hammered together her own rickety stairway to Heaven, it's throbbing and burning like Satan's got a party cooked up inside and everybody's wearing red-hot hobnails on the soles of their dancing shoes. She reminds herself to focus. This particular elephant has a reputation for being mean as hell; a lack of attention might leave her splattered across the wall and conveyor belt. Not yet, ol’ Mr. Death. Not just yet.

  “Hey,” she signs, again. “You gotta pick it up like this. Like this. See?” Her hand shakes as she brandishes the paintbrush, bristles glowing that familiar grasshopper-gut green. She can't help it; tremors are just another thing come along unexpected with dying. “Dip it into the paint, mix it up real good, fill in each of those little numbers all the way 'round. Then put the brush in your mouth, tip it off, and do it again. The quicker you get done with your quota, quicker you can go back to the barn. Got it?”

  No response from Topsy. She stands there slow-swaying to hosannas Regan can't hear, staring peepholes through the brick wall of the factory floor opposite. It's like convincing a cigar-store chief to play a hand. Occasionally one of those great big bloomers-on-a-washline ears flaps away a biting fly.
>
  Regan's tired. Her throat is dry and hoarse. Her wrists ache from signing instructions to sixteen other doomed elephants today, castoffs bought butcher-cheap from fly-bait road-rut two-cent circuses where the biggest wonder on display was how the holy hell they'd kept an elephant alive so long in the first place. She pities them, she hates the company so much it's like a bullet burning beneath her breast bone (or maybe that's just another tumor taking root), but the only joy she gets outta life anymore is imagining how much the extra money she's making taking on this last job will help Rae and Eve, even if Mama don't stick much longer than she does. Regan ain't a bit proud of what she's doing, and she's even less proud of what she does next, but she's sick and she's frustrated and she's fed the hell up with being ignored and bullied and pushed aside. She's tired of being invisible.

  She reaches over and grabs the tip of one of those silly-looking ears and she twists, like she's got a hank of sister-skin between her nails at Sunday School. It's a surefire way of getting someone's attention, whether they want to give it or not.

  “HEY!” she hollers. “LISTEN TO ME, WOULD YOU?”

  The change in Topsy is like a magic trick. Her ears flare. The trunk coils a water moccasin's salute, a backhanded S flung high enough to knock the hanging lightbulb overhead into jitter jive. Little red eyes glitter down at her, sharp and wild and full of deadly arithmetic. The whole reason Topsy ended up here in the first place was because she had smashed a teasing fella's head like a deer tick. You don't need a translator to see what she's thinking: Would it be worth my time and effort to reach down and twist that yowling monkey's head clean off her shoulders? Would it make me feel any better if I just made her… stop? For good? Would that make my day any brighter?