My lungs are beating, but I’m. So. Close. And I can’t deny, it’ll be nice to bring the case back to Adalla in one piece. I hook my foot beneath the flap of the gill and stretch to my full height. My fingers touch it, just barely, but it’s enough, and I’m able to pull it back into my grip.
Then the beast trembles and quakes. I’m tossed away, toward the void, but I keep the box clutched tight while reaching out to grab on to a dangling tendril. That’s when I stop, out of air, and suddenly I’m staring the beast down, eye to enormous eye. She’s looking right at me. I’m fading. I can tell she’s fading too.
A punch to my shoulder awakens me, just enough sense left in my head to see Laisze looming over me. She’d climbed all this way? I won’t make the climb back, that’s for sure. She looks at me, touches my collarbone, drags her finger halfway down my breast, taps my elbow with the back of her hand, caresses my neck with the inside of her wrist; then her mouth is upon mine, over my nose, and she blows, mouthful of air, releasing my thoughts and reigniting my self-preservation. Both of our gels have faded down to nearly nothing. The cold bites so hard now. A second later, she tosses me, right toward the gills. I hit head-on, and Wheytt’s pulling me in, and then we’re watching Laisze, clawing her way back, slower, slower, until her grip on the tendrils releases, and she goes stiff, adrift at the side of the beast.
Wheytt tightens down the seal, and then air refills the room, and finally we can breathe. Finally, we can cry.
“Wheytt,” I command. “Go have Sisterkin arrested. When I’m done with her, it’ll be like she never existed.”
“But I’m not an accountancy guard anymore. What authority do I have?”
“My authority. As Matris of this beast, I appoint you my chief auditor.”
He looks down at himself, naked and smeared with gel. “But who would believe me?”
“Make them believe. This is the job you were born for.”
“Where’s Laisze?” Adalla demands. She’s delirious and in so much pain, looking around but not seeing whom she needs to right now. Wheytt flashes me a compassionate smile, then leaves us alone. The void between Adalla and me intensifies.
“Gone,” I say, my voice hitching in my throat. “I went to save the embryos. She came to save me. She didn’t make it.”
“Fuck the embryos!” Adalla screams. “Fuck them all.” And then she’s crying, big, painful heaves into my shoulder, and I press my hand to her back, but the ridges of her lace scars prickle my fingertips, and then I’m crying too. For all the pain I’ve caused her.
“I’ll get her,” I say. “I’ll get her and bring her to the spirit wall. She’ll rest with our ancestors.”
Adalla pulls back, looks at me harder than she’s ever looked at me. Beastworkers don’t get interred in the spirit wall, especially boneworkers.
“I’ll do it,” I swear to her. “Even if it takes an act of the Senate, but I will see to it. She saved me. She saved these.” I press the embryo case into her hands.
“Thank you,” she rasps.
Then after a long, difficult silence, I say, “She wrote a note. On my skin. A message.”
“How did it go?” Her eyes are wide, expectant. I bear her lover’s final words, priceless words. I try my best to remember, then slowly trace them upon her skin. When I am done, she just sits there, eyes vacant.
“I did it right? It made sense?”
She nods.
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Nothing important.” She rubs her frozen shoulder, wincing at the pain. “I’d better go get this looked at.”
“I’ll hail my doctor for you, and—”
“No,” Adalla says. “I’ve already got someone who can take care of it.”
Part IV
Exodus
Like the babe who cannot forever stay in her mother’s womb, time will come again and again for the great exodus. Beware those who press back against this force, for theirs is a fight to press back against nature.
—Matris Paletoba,
831 years after exodus
Adalla
Of Hard Plating and Soft Lies
I bite down on a strap of beast hide as Sonovan peels frostbitten flesh from my shoulder. Tears blur my vision, and for a long moment, everything goes white, but then he’s wiping me with a soothing salve and patching me with gauze.
“You need to talk to your mothers,” he whispers to me.
I shake my head. I can’t deal with them, ’specially Ama. “Please, don’t tell them I was here. I don’t want to be here. I just didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
He picks at one of the bone pieces entwined in my hair, sighs. “You always have a place here, Adalla. Nothing you could do will ever change that. Please, promise me you’ll talk to your mothers before you go.”
“How often should I change this wrap?” I ask, poking at the gauze covering my wound. Sonovan says I should be grateful the burn hadn’t gone any deeper. Might have lost the whole arm. But I don’t see it that way. I keep wishing the great dark had cut me deep, carved me up until there was nothing left. Like it did with Laisze.
Sonovan keeps talking, giving instructions for how to care for the wound, I guess. I’m nodding along, but my mind is elsewhere: on Laisze’s last words, the ones Seske had traced across my skin. I wonder how long I can go on pretending they weren’t true, wishing they weren’t true. Sonovan’s midsentence when I grab the salve he’s holding out and kiss him on the forehead, and then I’m out of there, and he’s whispering at me:
“Talk to your mothers, Adalla. Please!”
But I’m weaving through the pods of the surrounding families, making my way back to the heart. I need to put my mind to something useful. I cut straight for the ventricles, where all semblance of order is lost. Medical staff sits at the ready, a couple of them already treating an ichor-soaked worker still gasping for breath. It’s so chaotic, they don’t even notice me at first, a bare-chested, bone-haired, big-knifed bitch about to blast what they know about the beast’s heart to bits.
Finally, someone notices. “You can’t be here,” Uridan says to me.
I don’t meet her eyes. She’s weak. Slow. Not worth my time. She approaches me, and I punch her in the throat. She goes down with a gurgle, trying to warn the others, but it’s too late.
“We need to reinforce the valves on ventricles nine, seven, and three,” I say. “And reshape the cardiac muscle with inch-thick bone strips around all the weak spots. I’ll need three teams of eight.”
“Who do you think you—”
Another throat punch ensures there are no more interruptions. “Matris Kaleigh sent me. I am here on her order to restore the heart as close to its original state as we can.”
“But—” A hand raises, held up by a worker with scared eyes. I nod. “The heart is too erratic for that kind of major work. Lives will certainly be lost.”
“Then let them be lost. The only life that matters now is the beast’s. If she dies, we all die.”
“But—”
I raise my fist again, and groups break off, bone plating is fetched. The beat comes, a hard beat, but not hard enough. When it’s done, the groups start forward, ready to get to work, but I hold my hand up. “Wait!” I scream.
A lightness pierces through me, I can’t quite describe it . . . like falling but from all directions at once. Twelve seconds later, a second beat comes, one that would have killed all twenty-four of us without a thought.
All eyes look at me, desperate to know if it’s safe now. Or as safe as it’s going to get. I nod, then we run, make the slits, and shove thin bone strips behind flaccid walls, bringing them closer to their original shape. Two minutes later, we’re out again, leaving a large margin for error. The beat is late this time. So late, we could have installed at least a half dozen more strips, but we cannot rush this. The next beat comes, full of force. The others look to me and then we’re off again.
Eighteen more runs, and the heart has steadied some . . . not th
e exact three minutes forty-seven and a half seconds we were used to, but it’s only off by seconds now, not minutes. The other workers are exhausted and rest, but excited by the work and that no one has died. While they catch their breath, I slip into ventricle nine unnoticed.
I immediately see how red the flesh is, how inflamed. How thin the flesh is. Bet my knife would make it all the way through to the other side if I stabbed hard enough. I can’t help but think of how much our accomplishments have cost us. Of the sacrifices we’ve made, only to commit the worst atrocities in return. I know this beast. I know we could fix it if we really wanted to. We could repair things, make things right, but do we even deserve that after all we’ve done? I press my knife into the flesh. Ichor dribbles around the shallow divot. I press harder.
Adalla would have chosen you . . .
Laisze’s last words, I feel them upon my skin where Seske had written them. A message not for me but for Seske. There, on that Serrata ship, forced to choose between the woman I loved and the one who’d skewered my heart, Laisze thought I would have left her, abandoned her at a chance to be hurt by Seske once more, twice more, a dozen times . . . My knife inches deeper.
She’s right. And I hate myself for it.
No one else could ever hurt me like Seske had. But what if human hearts could be mended, just like beast hearts? My knife retracts.
“Make the slit,” Parton says. She’s standing right next to me, watching the ichor dribble. “Make the cut. End all of this.”
I startle. Not at her ghost. She’s haunted me enough that I’m used to her presence, but she’s never been so forceful, so adamant about anything. And she’s so corporeal. Like if I reached out, I’m sure I would touch her.
“You know you want to,” she says. “And you’re right. We’ve messed this up. We will continue to mess it up. Best to just end things right now. There’s nothing for you but more hurt.”
I bite my bottom lip, try to shake the schematics from my head. It’s never been that we “can’t” . . . it’s just that we love the little conveniences of life too much.
“There’s no such thing as harmony, no such thing as symbiosis. Only struggle!”
“Why are you shouting at me?” I say to Parton’s ghost. My knife is aimed at her now. “What do you care what happens to us anyway? You’re dead!”
“She’s gotten to you again, hasn’t she? Worming her way back into your heart?”
“Who are you? Parton would never speak to me this way!” I turn to run, but there’s a wall of people in front of me now. A wall of ghosts. It takes me a while to recognize their faces, but they’re all there. The original ancestral mothers. All twelve of them. I must have gone completely mad.
“Make the cut, Adalla,” they say. “Cut deeply, cut quickly. Free us from this torture. Free yourselves.”
“No!” I scream. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Well, I believe in you,” says a new voice, a lone voice. My ama’s voice. She steps through the crowd of ancestral mothers, as much of a gauzy wisp as the rest of them. “I always have. You’ve got the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. Use it here, daughter. Use it now.”
“Ama . . .” I gurgle. I shake my head. “You’re not—”
“Dead? But I am. Caught by a rogue beat. It didn’t hurt.”
“No! Sonovan would have told me!”
“He’s your tin uncle. He had no right to bear such news. That right belongs to your mothers. You refused to see them. I think it’s because you knew in your heart.”
My hand is shaking, barely able to hold on to the knife.
“Here,” Ama says, pointing to a section of ventricle wall. “It’s thinnest here. Won’t take much effort. The heart will rupture after three beats. It will be quick for everyone involved.”
My eyes flick to the ancestral mothers. Stately, graceful, put together. They are everything Seske is not. But maybe, judging where the mothers have landed us, that’s a good thing. Seske is the leader we need. Maybe I’ll never trust her with my heart, but I do trust her with this beast. She has her own visions, her own ideas. I have to at least give her a chance.
Then I hear a whimper. Down the shaft, I see a lone murmur, and I’m struck by the markings on its back. It’s Bepok, my sweet pet, still as thin as the last time she’d curled up at my feet. Couldn’t be anything else. But how? I’d left her behind with the last beast. She cries out to me. My tears well up in my eyes and I’m running to her. But I must have spooked her, because she’s burrowing into the flesh. Hiding. I hush, whisper to her. “Come out, Bepok. It’s me.” I press the tip of my knife to where she’d gone below. Gently, gently, careful not to cut too deep. I can excise her if I’m quick enough, steady enough . . . My knife goes still.
She calls out to me again, a deep purring from within the wall.
Something in my soul catches. The beat. I’ve lost all track of time, but I know it’s coming. Parton, even the ancestral mothers, I could pass off as ghosts, or deficiencies in my mind, but not this. Something else is scripting my delusions. Something that wants me dead. Wants all of us dead.
I sheathe my knife. The mothers howl.
“You are nothing but a virus,” my ama says to me.
“Deadly to everything you touch,” Parton agrees.
“A plague upon the galaxy, this one and the next!” the ancestral mothers intone.
I turn tail and run through them all, get through the exit right as the tremble comes, so strong, it nearly rattles the teeth out of my head.
The beast wants us dead, so much so that it’ll sacrifice itself in the process. The other workers pile around me, asking what had been done. Didn’t I know that it was a restricted area? But I’m a blubbering mess.
“Look at what your girl has done,” someone cries.
“Explain yourself,” come my ama’s words. I look up through my tears. She’s standing there, in the flesh. I fling myself into her arms, make a million apologies into her shoulder. She hugs me tight, looks me over, then shakes her head. “Girl, you’ve worried us sick. Why didn’t you come back home? What’s happened to you?”
“The beast,” I say. “It’s speaking to me. Lying to me. It told me you were dead. This beast hates us with a fury I can’t describe,” I tell her.
“We must get you to bed, to rest,” Ama says, looking at me worriedly, like I’m delirious.
I shake my head. “The beast has spoken to Seske. It was the one that told Seske of the planet. If the beast is capable of lying, she needs to know right now.”
I pull myself from my mother’s grip, and then I’m running, a dozen ghosts nipping at my heels.
Seske
Of Shoddy Lists and Perfect Planets
I hold the list in my hand, looking it over for places to squeeze in last-minute additions. But for every person I add, another has to come off, and that person will be put into a stasis pod and have exactly four ounces of poison injected into their sleep balm. Death will come within fifty seconds, my tacticians assure me. They’re sequestered. All of them. If news gets out, there will be pandemonium, and all hope will be lost.
I shuffle two more names and have to hold back the bile in my throat. “Here,” I say, handing the list off. “It’s done.”
My tactician takes it from me. Her name is not on there. I don’t even know her name.
“Set a course,” I say. Culling our population by two-thirds will buy us eight years, just enough time to make it to the planet.
Eight years at war with our ship. Eight years fighting this sickness. Eight years of limping along through space in a wounded ship, hoping that sacrificing all these souls will be potent enough a medicine.
“We will get there,” Wheytt says. “We’ll mourn and praise them when we do.”
I nod.
There’s a commotion outside the throne room, and I hear Adalla’s shouts among them. I run to her, find her coughing and wheezing, body darkened by dried patches of ichor.
“Seske! Seske, the beast .
. . it lies. It lied to me, and I think . . . I think it’s lied to you about the planet.”
“What are you talking about? I saw it with my own eyes, Adalla. And our preliminary scans confirm the presence of liquid water and of a breathable atmosphere. It might not be perfect, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.”
Adalla shakes her head, then grabs me by the shoulders. “The beast has no reason to help us. It wants us dead. Wants us dead so badly that it’s willing to sacrifice itself. What it showed you was a lie! Have your tacticians scan it again.”
I give the command, and then Adalla and I just stare at each other. I want to confess to her. She is on the list—not just because of what she means to me but because of her skill. The list skews young, but her ama is on it, and Sonovan too—the knowledge between those two combined is that of a dozen beastworkers. But her other mothers and her will-father . . .
“Adalla, I have to tell you something—” I start to say, but her words overlap mine, and suddenly, again we are at an impasse. “You go—”
She looks down at her toes. “Back at the Serrata ship, when you were demanding that I choose . . .” She swallows. “It’s just that I couldn’t, because my mind was telling me one thing and—”
“Matris,” the tactician interrupts. “All of our scans are confirmed. The planet is fine. Better than fine. It’s near perfect.”
“See,” I say to Adalla. “I’m not saying it will be easy, but we can do this. This—this will be my legacy.”
“Of course it’s perfect. But what are the chances of that? All these years, searching for a suitable planet, and all of a sudden one falls into our lap?” Adalla shakes her head. “Your instrumentation, it’s all hooked through the beast?”
“Of course,” the tactician says.
“Then the beast could feed you whatever information it wanted. Use the ship, the Parados I. Scan it with something that has no connection to the beast whatsoever.”
“Do as she says,” I command the tacticians, and they scurry off to the ship with Adalla and me running behind them. “If you’re right, Adalla,” I say, “we’re doomed.”
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