by Neil Clarke
That was a long time ago, but I remember the taste of cedar ash and sea salt as I look at the back of him. I never once thought those moments would last forever, and yet here I am, regretful and old.
Yolanda is one of the last to leave, stately and elegant with her braided white hair and black church hat with netting. I catch up with her as she heads down the steps.
“Can we talk?” I ask.
Her shoulders slump a little when I ask, but she bids the reverend farewell and walks with me until we are out of earshot.
“Tris needs an abortion,” I say.
Yolanda nods up and down like a sea bird, while she takes deep breaths. She became our midwife because she’d helped Bill’s mother with some births, but I don’t think she wants the job. There’s just no one else.
“Libby, the glassmen don’t like abortions.”
“If the glassmen are paying us enough attention to notice, we have bigger problems.”
“I don’t have the proper equipment for a procedure. Even if I did, I couldn’t.”
“Don’t tell me you agree with Beale.”
She draws herself up and glares at me. “I don’t know how, Libby! Do you want me to kill Tris to get rid of her baby? They say the midwife in Toddville can do them if it’s early enough. How far along is she?”
I see the needle in my mind, far too close to the center line for comfort. “Three and a half months,” I say.
She looks away, but she puts her arm around my shoulders. “I understand why she would, I do. But it’s too late. We’ll all help her.”
Raise the child, she means. I know Yolanda is making sense, but I don’t want to hear her. I don’t want to think about Tris carrying a child she doesn’t want to term. I don’t want to think about that test kit needle pointing inexorably at too fucking late. So I thank Yolanda and head off in the other direction, down the cracked tarmac as familiar as a scar, to Pam’s house. She lives in a small cottage Victorian with peeling gray paint that used to be blue. Sure enough, Bill sits in an old rocking chair on the porch, thumbing through a book. I loved to see him like that in our clam-digging days, just sitting and listening. I would dream of him after he disappeared.
“Libs?” he says. He leans forward.
“Help her, Bill. You’ve been outside, you know people. Help her find a doctor, someone who can do this after three months.”
He sighs and the book thumps on the floor. “I’ll see.”
Three days later, Bill comes over after dinner.
“There’s rumors of something closer to Annapolis,” he says. “I couldn’t find out more than that. None of my . . . I mean, I only know some dudes, Libby. And whoever runs this place only talks to women.”
“Your mother didn’t know?” Tris asks, braver than me.
Bill rubs the back of his head. “If she did, she sure didn’t tell me.”
“You’ve got to have more than that,” she says. “Does this place even have a name? How near Annapolis? What do you want us to do, sail into the city and ask the nearest glassman which way to the abortion clinic?”
“What do I want you to do? Maybe I want you to count your goddamn blessings and not risk your life to murder a child. It’s a sin, Tris, not like you’d care about that, but I’d’ve thought Libby would.”
“God I know,” I say, “but I’ve never had much use for sin. Now why don’t you get your nose out of our business?”
“You invited me in, Libby.”
“For help—”
He shakes his head. “If you could see what Pam’s going through right now . . .”
Bill has dealt with as much grief as any of us. I can understand why he’s moralizing in our kitchen, but that doesn’t mean I have to tolerate it.
But Tris doesn’t even give me time. She stands and shakes a wooden spatula under his nose. Bill’s a big man, but he flinches. “So I should have this baby just so I can watch it get blown up later, is that it? Don’t put Pam’s grief on me, Bill. I’m sorrier than I can say about Georgia. I taught that girl to read! And I can’t. I just can’t.”
Bill breathes ragged. His dark hands twist his muddy flannel shirt, his grip so tight his veins are stark against sun-baked skin. Tris is still holding that spatula.
Bill turns his head abruptly, stalks back to the kitchen door with a “Fuck,” and he wipes his eyes. Tris leans against the sink.
“Esther,” he says quietly, his back to us. “The name of a person, the name of a place, I don’t know. But you ask for that, my buddy says you should find what you’re after.”
I follow him outside, barefoot and confused that I’d bother when he’s so clearly had enough of us. I call his name, then start jogging and catch his elbow. He turns around.
“What, Libby?”
He’s so angry. His hair didn’t grow in very long or thick after he came back. He looks like someone mashed him up, stretched him out and then did a hasty job of putting him back together. Maybe I look like that, too.
“Thanks,” I say. We don’t touch.
“Don’t die, Libs.”
The air is thick with crickets chirping and fireflies glowing and the swampy, seaweed-and-salt air from the Chesapeake. He turns to walk away. I don’t stop him.
We take Dad’s boat. There’s not enough gas left to visit Bishop’s Head, the mouth of our estuary, let alone Annapolis. So we bring oars, along with enough supplies to keep the old dinghy low in the water.
“I hope we don’t hit a storm,” Tris says, squinting at the clear, indigo sky as though thunderheads might be hiding behind the stars.
“We’re all right for now. Feel the air? Humidity’s dropped at least 20 percent.”
Tris has the right oar and I have the left. I don’t want to use the gas unless we absolutely have to, and I’m hoping the low-tech approach will make us less noticeable to any patrolling glassmen. It’s tough work, even in the relatively cool night air, and I check the stars to make sure we’re heading in more or less the right direction. None of the towns on our estuary keep lights on at night. I only know when we pass Toddville because of the old lighthouse silhouetted against the stars. I lost sight of our home within five minutes of setting out, and God how a part of me wanted to turn the dinghy right around and go back. The rest of the world isn’t safe. Home isn’t either, but it’s familiar.
Dad gave us a nautical chart of the Chesapeake Bay, with markers for towns long destroyed, lighthouses long abandoned, by people long dead. He marked our town and told us to get back safe. We promised him we would and we hugged like we might never see each other again.
“What if we hit a jewel?” Tris asks. In the dark, I can’t tell if it’s fear or exertion that aspirates her words. I’ve had that thought myself, but what can we do? The glassmen make sure their cluster bombs spread gifts everywhere.
“They don’t detonate that well in water,” I offer.
A shift in the dark; Tris rests her oar in the boat and stretches her arms. “Well enough to kill you slowly.”
I’m not as tired, but I take the break. “We’ve got a gun. It ought to do the trick, if it comes to that.”
“Promise?”
“To what? Mercy kill you?”
“Sure.”
“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”
“And we’re just out here to do a little night fishing.”
I laugh, though my belly aches like she’s punched me. “Christ, Tris.” I lean back in the boat, the canvas of our food sack rough and comforting on my slick skin, like Mom’s gloves when she first taught me to plant seeds.
“Libs?”
“Yeah?”
“You really don’t care who the father is?”
I snort. “If it were important, I’m sure you would have told me.”
I look up at the sky: there’s the Milky Way, the North Star, Orio
n’s belt. I remember when I was six, before the occupation. There was so much light on the bay you could hardly see the moon.
“Reckon we’ll get to Ohio, Jim?” Tris asks in a fake Southern drawl.
I grin. “Reckon we might. If’n we can figure out just how you got yerself pregnant, Huck.”
Tris leans over the side of the boat, and a spray of brackish water hits my open mouth. I shriek and dump two handfuls on her head and she splutters and grabs me from behind so I can’t do more than wiggle in her embrace.
“Promise,” she says, breathing hard, still laughing.
The bay tastes like home to me, like everything I’ve ever loved. “Christ, Tris,” I say, and I guess that’s enough.
We round Bishop’s Head at dawn. Tris is nearly asleep on her oar, though she hasn’t complained. I’m worried about her, and it’s dangerous to travel during the day until we can be sure the water is clear. We pull into Hopkins Cove, an Edenic horseshoe of brown sand and forest. It doesn’t look like a human foot has touched this place since the invasion, which reassures me. Drones don’t do much exploring. They care about people.
Tris falls asleep as soon as we pull the boat onto the sand. I wonder if I should feed her more—does she need extra for the baby? Then I wonder if that’s irrational, since we’re going all this way to kill it. But for now, at least, the fetus is part of her, which means we have to take it into consideration. I think about Bill with his big, dumb eyes and patchy bald head telling me that it’s a sin, as though that has anything to do with your sister crying like her insides have been torn out.
I eat some cornbread and a peach, though I’m not hungry. I sit on the shore with my feet in the water and watch for other boats or drones or reapers overhead. I don’t see anything but seagulls and ospreys and minnows that tickle my toes.
“Ain’t nothing here, Libs,” I say, in my mother’s best imitation of her mother’s voice. I never knew my grandmother, but Mom said she looked just like Tris, so I loved her on principle. She and Tris even share a name: Leatrice. I told Mom that I’d name my daughter Tamar, after her. I’d always sort of planned to, but when my monthlies stopped a year ago, I figured it was just as well. Stupid Bill, and his stupid patchy hair, I think.
I dream of giant combines made from black chrome and crystal, with headlights of wide, unblinking eyes. I take them to the fields, but something is wrong with the thresher. There’s bonemeal dust on the wheat berries.
“Now, Libby,” Bill says, but I can’t hear the rest of what he’s saying because the earth starts shaking and—
I scramble to my feet, kicking up sand with the dream still in my eyes. There’s lights in the afternoon sky and this awful thunder, like a thousand lightning bolts are striking the earth at once.
“Oh, Christ,” I say. A murder of reapers swarm to the north, and even with the sun in the sky their bombs light the ground beneath like hellfire. It’s easier to see reapers from far away, because they paint their underbellies light blue to blend with the sky.
Tris stands beside me and grips my wrist. “That’s not . . . it has to be Toddville, right? Or Cedar Creek? They’re not far enough away for home, right?”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know. I can only look.
Bill’s hair is patchy because the glassmen arrested him and they tortured him. Bill asked his outside contacts if they knew anything about a place to get an illegal abortion. Bill brought back a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of farm equipment and scars from wounds that would have killed someone without access to a doctor. But what kind of prisoner has access to a real doctor? Why did the glassmen arrest him? What if his contacts are exactly the type of men the glassmen like to bomb with their reapers? What if Bill is?
But I know it isn’t that simple. No one knows why the glassmen bomb us. No one really knows the reason for the whole damn mess, their reapers and their drones and their arcane rules you’re shot for not following.
“Should we go back?”
She says it like she’s declared war on a cardinal direction, like she really will get on that boat and walk into a reaper wasteland and salvage what’s left of our lives and have that baby.
I squeeze her hand. “It’s too close,” I say. “Toddville, I think you’re right. Let’s get going, though. Probably not safe here.”
She nods. She doesn’t look me in the eye. We paddle through the choppy water until sun sets. And then, without saying anything, we ship the oars and I turn on the engine.
Three nights later, we see lights on the shore. It’s a glassmen military installation. Dad marked it on the map, but still I’m surprised by its size, its brightness, the brazen way it sits on the coastline, as though daring to attract attention.
“I’d never thought a building could be so . . .”
“Angry?” Tris says.
“Violent.”
“It’s like a giant middle finger up the ass of the Chesapeake.”
I laugh despite myself. “You’re ridiculous.”
We’re whispering, though we’re on the far side of the bay and the water is smooth and quiet. After that reaper drone attack, I’m remembering more than I like of my childhood terror of the glassmen. Dad and Mom had to talk to security drones a few times after the occupation, and I remember the oddly modulated voices, distinctly male, and the bright unblinking eyes behind the glass masks of their robot heads. I don’t know anyone who has met a real glassman, instead of one of their remote robots. It’s a retaliatory offense to harm a drone because the connection between the drone and the glassman on the other side of the world (or up in some space station) is so tight that sudden violence can cause brain damage. I wonder how they can square potential brain damage with dead children, but I guess I’m not a glassman.
So we row carefully, but fast as we can, hoping to distance our little fishing boat from the towering building complex. Its lights pulse so brightly they leave spots behind my eyes.
And then, above us, we hear the chopping whirr of blades cutting the air, the whine of unmanned machinery readying for deployment. I look up and shade my eyes: a reaper.
Tris drops her oar. It slides straight into the bay, but neither of us bother to catch it. If we don’t get away now, a lost oar won’t matter anyway. She lunges into our supply bag, brings out a bag of apples. The noise of the reaper is close, almost deafening. I can’t hear what she yells at me before she jumps into the bay. I hesitate in the boat, afraid to leave our supplies and afraid to be blown to pieces by a reaper. I look back up and see a panel slide open on its bright blue belly. The panel reveals dark glass; behind it, a single, unblinking eye.
I jump into the water, but my foot catches on the remaining oar. The boat rocks behind me, but panic won’t let me think—I tug and tug until the boat capsizes and suddenly ten pounds of supplies are falling on my head, dragging me deeper into the dark water. I try to kick out, but my leg is tangled with the drawstring of a canvas bag, and I can’t make myself focus enough to get it loose. All I can think of is that big glass eye waiting to kill me. My chest burns and my ears fill to bursting with pressure. I’d always thought I would die in fire, but water isn’t much better. I don’t even know if Tris made it, or if the eye caught her, too.
I try to look up, but I’m too deep; it’s too dark to even know which way that is. God, I think, save her. Let her get back home. It’s rude to demand things of God, but I figure dying ought to excuse the presumption.
Something tickles my back. I gasp and the water flows in, drowning my lungs, flooding out what air I had left. But the thing in the water with me has a light on its head and strange, shiny legs and it’s using them to get under my arms and drag me up until we reach the surface and I cough and retch and breathe, thank you God. The thing takes me to shore, where Tris is waiting to hug me and kiss my forehead like I’m the little sister.
“Jesus,” she says, and I wonder if God really
does take kindly to demands until I turn my head and understand: my savior is a drone.
I will feed you,” the glassman says. He looks like a spider with an oversized glassman head: eight chrome legs and two glass eyes. “The pregnant one should eat. Her daughter is growing.”
I wonder if some glassman technology is translating his words into English. If in his language, whatever it is, the pregnant one is a kind of respectful address. Or maybe they taught him to speak to us that way.
I’m too busy appreciating the bounty of air in my lungs to notice the other thing he said.
“Daughter?” Tris says.
The glassman nods. “Yes. I have been equipped with a body-safe sonic scanning device. Your baby has not been harmed by your ordeal. I am here to help and reassure you.”
Tris looks at me, carefully. I sit up. “You said something about food?”
“Yes!” It’s hard to tell, his voice is so strange, but he sounds happy. As though rescuing two women threatened by one of his reaper fellows is the best piece of luck he’s had all day. “I will be back,” he says, and scuttles away, into the forest.
Tris hands me one of her rescued apples. “What the hell?” Her voice is low, but I’m afraid the glassman can hear us anyway.
“A trap?” I whisper, barely vocalizing into her left ear.
She shakes her head. “He seems awfully . . .”
“Eager?”
“Young.”
The glassman comes back a minute later, walking on six legs and holding two boxes in the others. His robot must be a new model; the others I’ve seen look more human. “I have meals! A nearby convoy has provided them for you,” he says, and places the boxes carefully in front of us. “The one with a red ribbon is for the pregnant one. It has nutrients.”
Tris’s hands shake as she opens it. The food doesn’t look dangerous, though it resembles the strange pictures in Tris’s old magazines more than the stuff I make at home. A perfectly rectangular steak, peas, corn mash. Mine is the same, except I have regular corn. We eat silently, while the glassman gives every impression of smiling upon us benevolently.