The strange, dark science fiction tale that follows originally appeared in Palwick's collection The Fate of Mice, which stands as one of the best collections of the year.
He found the girl crouched in a ditch by the side of the deserted road, using a jagged rock to try to sever the muscled cords that connected her heart to her body. She was bleeding, of course, and she was weeping, too: her hair a brown tangled mass, yellowish-green snot running down her face, her hands slimy with dirt and gore. She might have been eight or ten, half his own age, or older than that but starved, her thin ribs showing through a tear in her shirt. The tear, he guessed, had once been a hole she'd made for her heart to go through, but had widened with wear and weather; it now showed so much of her scrawny chest that he wondered why she wore a shirt at all. The shirt might have been pink once. She tried to cut the pulsing cords, sawing at them, and when that didn't work, she began to bash them with the rock, crying out in pain with each impact.
"Don't do that," he said, and she looked up, quivering, flinching away as if from a blow. He himself had just walked ten miles or so, fleeing the fire he had set, and was pleasantly tired from the exercise. The stink of charred fur still clung to him, heady incense. "Can't live without a heart."
She squinted at him. "Hurts too much."
He inclined his head politely. "You born that way?" There were all kinds of stories: people born with their skeletons outside their bodies, people born with two heads or none. He'd seen a lot of other freaks, but this was the first that truly interested him. When she bent her head in a shy nod, he said, "Where your people?"
"Don't want me. I'm a freak. Where yours?"
He shrugged. "Never had none. Gave me to the North Wind when I was but a baby. Been wandering ever since. You hungry?" He reached out his hand to her: she didn't take it, but clung to the rock. Her heart pulsed, throbbing.
"You smell," she said.
"Yeah. I know. No chance to wash."
"What's that smell from?"
"Kittens. In a barn. I burned them. They screamed, but only for a second." One hand came up from the rock, now, to cover her mouth, and her eyes brimmed over again. Her heart writhed for a moment before it resumed its steady beat, and he smiled for the first time since he'd seen her. "That hurt you, huh? You'd save them if you could."
"You're a monster. They'll get you. The freak patrol."
"They'll try to get me. They'll try to get you, too."
She raised her chin. "Nobody out here anyway, is there? All the normals went away."
"For now. They'll be back. They never go away for good." He knelt down next to her, mind racing. He made his voice as gentle as he could. "Listen. We can help each other."
She shrank away again. "Won't help you burn cats."
"No no no. I know you won't. You'll help me not burn them."
She squinted. "How?"
"You'll listen to me." He'd always been smart, always been able to think quickly; it was how he'd lived this long. "You'll listen to what I want to do. And it'll hurt you, but not as much as it would hurt them, the animals and whatnot, and then I won't have to do it. Because hurting you will be enough. And I'll help you hide from the normals, get you food and that. You wouldn't last on your own. Me neither. We'll both last longer this way."
She pulled her knees up, as if to protect the heart now nestled between them and her chest. "Don't want to hurt. Told you that. Want to stop hurting. Gotten hurt already."
"How?" She had her own stories; of course she did. She could feed him that way, too.
She looked away. "Poking it with sticks. My heart. Throwing rocks at it. Calling me names. Trying to hurt me, like you want to do."
He couldn't see her heart now, but he knew it was writhing again. He smiled. "That pain ever save anything? Save kittens? Save, oh, baby birds? Let me tell you what I did one time—"
"Stop it!" Her voice was a thin howl.
He went on, implacable. "Let me tell you what I want to do next. Let me tell you this idea I have about horses. An old horse, an old mare just up the road here. A sorrel mare. I want to take red-hot irons and poke out her eyes and then stick a red-hot iron up—"
She was lying on the ground now, sideways, her heart still hidden: but all of her was writhing, hands clenched over her ears, tears streaming down her face. "Stop it! Stop it!"
"All right," he said, as light-headed as if he'd been drinking wine. "You just did. You stopped it. Look at me." He reached out a tender hand to touch her knee, just barely brush it; she flinched away, but he reached out again, and this time she let his hand stay there, although she whimpered. "Look at me," he said again, and she did, finally. Her eyes were a muddy brown, red with crying. "You saved that sorrel mare. Just now. By listening. By letting me hurt you, by letting me see how it hurt you. You saved her. I won't touch her now. I promise. I don't need to anymore. It's done. You did that."
"You're a monster."
"I am. But I always tell the truth. Everything hurts you: everything hurts your heart, because it's out there where everything can touch it. Right?" She nodded, as he had known she would, and he removed his hand from her knee. "I'll never touch you again, not unless you want it. All I'll use is words. Listen: you cut your heart away, you die. You don't hurt anymore, but things die, because I kill them. You walk away from me and live, you still hurt, and things still die, because I kill them. You stay with me, you still hurt, but those things don't die. You save them. And maybe you save me, too, from the freak patrol."
She was listening, although she hadn't said anything. Her eyes were fixed on his. She had lowered her knees a little, and he could see her heart, beating more calmly now. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a translucent stone he'd found weeks ago, a rock the color of the sea; he hadn't known until now why he'd been carrying it with him. When she saw it her eyes widened and she smiled, startled, and he said, "See? There's beauty too, in the world. Good things, not just hurtful ones. Reasons to stay. Your heart is beautiful."
The smile faded. "No it ain't."
"I say it is, Sorrel. That's what I'm going to call you. Your heart is beautiful to me. Your heart is a reason to stay in the world. Come on now: get up, and we'll go get food."
She couldn't get up: she was after all too weak, from lying in the ditch and trying to hurt herself. She'd been there for hours, maybe days. At last he asked permission to pick her up, and she gave it, and he lifted her in his arms and carried her, his own heart filled with unaccustomed peace. She weighed hardly anything. He looked down at her, her head cradled on his shoulder in sleep, and he wanted to kiss her forehead. But he didn't, because he hadn't asked her leave.
They were together for years after that. He called her Sorrel, and she called him Quartz. He grew into a quiet man, a man neither thick nor thin, with hair the color of wheat and eyes that gazed into far distances and sometimes went dead and blank, and at those times he would tell her what he wanted to do, tell her his yearning dreams, tell her about torn skin and roasted flesh and organs torn from their bony cradles, and she would weep and moan and clutch herself until he was done. When he was done, he would dry her tears and tell her he loved her, and if indeed he was capable of love, then it was true. He was true to his promise, certainly: he never performed the deeds he described to her in such vivid detail. And certainly he found her beautiful, and not just her heart: for if he had grown into a man few people noticed, she had grown tall and lovely, her hair a reddish-brown cascade of curls and her body as graceful as autumn aspens.
And yet he kept his own promise not to touch her, until the night when she crept into his bed and asked him to. Then he did his clumsy best to give her pleasure, and she did her best to teach him, although pain came far more naturally to him, and fear to her. He had been used to meeting his own needs with his own hands, and he found the rhythms of another's flesh unnerving, as unnatural as walking on some other creature's legs. When Sorrel cried out beneath him and then began to weep, he thought that he had broken his promi
se, that he had hurt her with something other than words; he could feel her heart, crushed between them, beating frantically, and he feared that she would die. But at last she opened her eyes and laughed up at him, and he kissed her on the forehead then, as he had wanted to so many years before.
They were in a barn that night, much like the one where he had burned the cats so long ago. The farmhouse was deserted, and Quartz and Sorrel had raided it for quilts to wrap around themselves and books to use as fuel. They would not destroy the house itself, which might give needed shelter to other freaks some other day. The normals were long gone, the place bereft of food and livestock; this family might not be coming back. It was dangerous to linger in places known abandoned, because that was where the freak patrols hunted, knowing anything left alive would be twisted and diseased. Sometimes there were tales of bands of freaks, groups who had ganged together for protection, but they were hunted and slaughtered, always: no safety in numbers, and even if the stories were invented to prevent such bands from forming, Quartz and Sorrel put their trust in speed and secrecy. They kept always on the move, stopping in normal towns when they had no other choice. At such times they would wrap Sorrel's heart in a shawl and pretend that it was a nursing infant, and when townsfolk asked to see the child, or commented with narrowed eyes on how it never cried, Quartz would bully and bluster, cursing them for daring to disturb his wife, showing them his scarred fists. Did they want to fight? Did they? Dared they suggest that he, so clearly normal, would wed some filthy freak, or father one?
The challengers backed down, always: not from Quartz' words, which meant little—for there were those who would rape any freak, male or female, left unprotected, and countless freaks had been born to normal parents—but from his fierce body, and from his eyes. He would let himself go stone-cold then, let the cruelty come out, and they could see it plain enough. Sometimes he almost wished for a fight, but always when the attackers backed off, he and Sorrel fled. There had been close calls, too many to remember. Always he marveled that no one followed them. And sometimes they would near a town, or enter one, and hear reports of what had just occurred: a shopkeeper saying, That tinker with horns and a tail, we hung him sure enough, or children laughing about last night's sport, The lady who crowed like a rooster, we chased her through the streets until the dogs got her, or women gossiping idly in the market, Oh, of course they had to kill the devil-child, born with a fish's tail, and killed the mother too, it was only a mercy, who knows what else she might have birthed. And sometimes they heard nothing, but saw instead: gutted three-legged corpses by the side of the road, heads with no mouths rotting on fenceposts, misshapen bodies dragged behind carts.
All such towns they skirted, or left as quickly as their legs would carry them. And soon enough Sorrel told him, "If that's normal, you must be normal too, Quartz, freak only that you've found a way not to do it." They were curled in a ditch, then, not so different from the one where he had found her, save that it was night, and warm, and stars and a round moon shone overhead.
"No. They hurt freaks. It's the normal I want to hurt, what's whole and healthy."
She shook her head. "No different. You could—you could live normal. Give me up, give up the danger. Cut my heart from my body and leave me, live in some town, take joy in their hunts and hatreds."
"None," he answered, stubborn. "I'd have no joy in that: only in hurting what they love. Kittens and horses, baby birds, their own children, maybe."
"They don't love me." Her voice was quiet. "Hurting me is what saves the kittens and babies, the things they love that you hunger to hurt instead. That's how you said it worked, all those years ago. But they don't love me. They'd kill me if they saw me uncovered."
That stopped him. He raised himself on one elbow and peered down at her in the moonlight. He could feel himself frowning. What did she mean? "You don't want me to hurt you anymore? You're tired of saving those other creatures, when you can't save freaks from the normals? You want to die again. You want me to go live in some town where—"
"No. No, Quartz. None of that. None of it. All I mean," and then she stopped, for so long that he thought she'd fallen asleep, or forgotten what she meant. "All I mean," she said at last, and suddenly he found that he could breathe again, "is that when you found me, you said I'd protect you. But you don't need me for that. You don't need me to stop you from being what you are. You could be what you are; you could live among them, and they'd never know no difference."
She looked up at him, and he saw tears shining in her eyes. "Quartz, when you found me, you said as how you needed me. But you don't, not now. If you're with me, you're with me because you want me. I'm a choice then, after all. Not a cage or a burden. You see?"
He saw. He sat up, and took her heart in both his hands, and kissed it, feeling it pulse against his lips. "I told you it was beautiful," he said.
Not long after that—and later they thought perhaps it had happened that very night—she told him she was with child. She could tell, she said, although her belly was still flat. She knew. And she was afraid. Afraid that he'd hurt their child, Quartz thought she meant at first, when she told him about the fear; but no, her fear was different.
"My mama died giving birth to me," she said softly. They were sitting under a rare tree off the road, sitting in the shade: sometimes a cart passed by, and then they'd nuzzle each other and pretend to be young lovers, which was true enough. "She died because I wasn't shaped right, because I tore her up inside, and I almost died too, because my heart got trapped inside her. The midwife had to reach in to pull it out, and then my mama died, and my daddy and my aunt had to pay the midwife all the money they had not to kill me too, not to tell anyone what had happened. They had to run. And finally they were tired of running, tired of having to hide me, and they left me behind, abandoned me so they could live as normals."
"We won't leave our baby, Sorrel."
"What if I die? What if the baby dies? Having babies is hard work. No midwife will help me, Quartz. We don't have money to pay anybody, to buy silence."
"We'll figure something out. Hush now. Hush, Sorrel." But fear rose in him, too. They couldn't always be moving, with a child. They'd have to settle somewhere, and where was safe? "We'll go to the mountains, the high places. We'll find our way there before you're too big."
"That's where the worst freaks are," she said. "The ones who eat people, the monsters who'd eat us too, oh Quartz, you've heard the tales—"
"Tales. That's all they are. Tales told by normals, and how much truth can those hold? Who's been to the mountains and come back to tell the tales?"
"Nobody! Because they get eaten!" Her heart fluttered wildly, and he put out a hand to soothe it.
"Sorrel, hush. They don't come back to say, so we don't know. Maybe they don't come back because it's so beautiful, because they're happy. Maybe they don't come back because—because the freaks welcome them and they don't want to go back to hurting folks. Maybe all the freaks there are the ones who've gone to have their babies in peace, like we'll do, Sorrel."
She shuddered, her heart still racing. "And maybe there's no freak settlement in the mountains at all. Maybe the normals put that story out so they can trap and kill any freaks who try to go there, jump them on the road."
He'd thought that, too, more than once. It was why he had never suggested going there until now. He closed his eyes. "We have months. We have months to get there. We'll find a side road, a secret way. A cave. We'll be careful."
And so they began to walk towards the mountains, visible only as a faint blue line in the distance, and then only in the clearest weather. They walked as quickly as they could, and yet they found the going slow. Sorrel was sick and grew weak; she craved foods Quartz could only get in towns, butter and cheeses and cured meats, and he had to take to thieving to meet her appetites. Her ankles swelled as her stomach did, and sometimes, when she cried out in pain, Quartz found himself cursing the child, wishing that this baby would either lose itself or co
me more easily. He himself was afraid, afraid. He had never wished to nurture any small thing, only to harm it, and he found himself craving release, longing to torture rabbits he startled in the fields or the piglets they passed being driven to market, hungering for the feel of blood flowing through his fingers, for the stench of burned flesh and the agonized screams of the slaughtered.
He shared one such fantasy with Sorrel, but her grimaces were so dreadful, her heart so reckless in its pounding, that he stopped, knowing his own face ashen. She could not protect him anymore. Her world was all the child within her belly, and so must his be. And so he tried to content himself with hunting game she did not wish to eat, with skinning fowl whose smell, as they roasted, made her retch.
And yet the baby clung, and her belly grew, and the mountains grew nearer. They walked uphill now, more and more slowly, and their choices of road narrowed. Quartz scouted other paths as Sorrel slept, but found only wildernesses of brambles, pathless forests, sheer rocky slopes: places that would be difficult for him to travel, impossible for her. There was one road only, now. And he thought of the tales, the tales of how no one survived in the mountains, and dread settled in his gut, as heavy as if he too bore a child.
There was one road only, and it led to a small village they must pass to reach the heights. They arrived there at dusk, Sorrel exhausted and dragging. They stood in a square surrounded by houses and barns: Quartz could hear bleating and neighing, and had to close his eyes to fight his lust for torn flesh, for pain and blood. He opened them only when he heard panting next to him: Sorrel, fighting for breath. He put his hand on the cloth covering her heart; it beat alarmingly, very very fast and then too slow. "The baby," she said. "I think—"
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II Page 44