The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  I’d managed to get to one more FiFo, where because of a twenty-minute power outage midway through, we ran out of time for me to read. Jacinta ignored me and Pagan and her crew of Regulars snuck away before the lights came back on. After that I virtually stopped going to other classes too, glomming what I could from discussion boards or from recorded lectures, telling myself I could catch up later. I knew that Marvin would disapprove, as if he had some kind of claim on me by virtue of us both being nonvanished twins. But no one could make that claim. I belonged to no one except Kai. Still I had to admit that because he once shared his DNA with another, and his code was potentially as corrupted as mine—as broken—maybe one day we could help each other. Except I’d failed so utterly the last time I’d tried to help anyone.

  I told myself I didn’t need a friend. And I didn’t need a boyfriend. I’d had plenty of those upstairs at the Five-Legged Nag. They never lasted, which was how I liked it. I kept thinking about Pagan’s invitation, both attracted and repelled by the promise of being severed from all I knew. From the double that I was.

  * * *

  I don’t remember getting back to the bunkroom. I remember voices and pounding feet in the wake of the noise of broken glass, and then nothing.

  I somehow manage to brew Kai’s tea using a paper cup and hot water from Matron’s kettle when she isn’t looking. Because of the Father’s ravens, security is lax in the Blood Temple. They have no reason not to trust us, and no one knows that I share my twin sister’s noncompliant brain and her code-corrupting womb. No one knows that I should be the one slated for unmaking, that it is my horned bits that should be cut out and my name on that broken jar, as much as hers.

  But I know. I’ll always know.

  I wake up in her bed in the infirmary. Kai pulls me toward her in sleep. The bag drips painkillers into her veins. Unmaking hurts. I butt my head hard against her collarbone and sweat-soaked nightgown and the terrible smell of her breath. It is a few heartbeats before I remember that we are in the infirmary. Across the aisle is the Made hooked up to a blood bag—a common enough sight, but Kai and I don’t share the trait of anemia common to the Father’s creations.

  “I have to get up and burn a candle,” I mumble. “The witch is going to get us out of here.”

  “Don’t call her a witch.”

  “I made her a promise,” I say. “If she saves you, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  I’ve forgotten.

  “Idiot.” But she hugs me closer. “She is going to get us to the Starvelings. Shhhh.”

  “The Starvings?” That doesn’t sound like anywhere I want to go.

  “It’s where shlee lives, where her slisters live too, used to.” Her words slide into each other from the medication. “We aren’t meant to say it because it’s a secret place.”

  “She blindfolded the ravens, Kai. Even the Father can’t do that. And she looks like a witch.”

  “She was something else, before.” Her words float from the fog of the drugs. “And you couldn’t look at her then. She was too horrible.”

  “Before Starving Hills?”

  “Shhhh.” Kai puts a finger to her lips and then tells me how, before that Narn came from this place in hell called Dungeon of the Damned. “They flayed sinners there. Sometimes they ate them.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because that’s what they wanted.”

  “The sinners?” To my shame, I can understand sin. What it’s like to want to be eaten.

  “People who did bad things to their family. Murdered their mothers, or fathers, or hurt children, or sisters.”

  “I’ll never do anything bad to you, Kai.”

  “The sisters flew after the bad person with their scourge.”

  I nod like I know all about scourges. And flying.

  “They had wings then, big black wings. And claws. And the scourge—it’s like a whip made of snaky ropes that rip your flesh down to the bone.” Kai’s voice is weak but warms to the tale-telling. “Another word for scourge is actually bane which means curse or death or ruin.”

  I shiver, snuggle closer. “Do they still do that?”

  “They’re not supposed to.”

  “If the sisters are that old, how come they’re not dead?”

  I am distracted because across the aisle, something strange is going on with the Made hooked up to the blood transfusion. Her eyes fly open and she begins to pull at the cords. Kai is so taken up with the story of the sisters from hell that she doesn’t notice.

  “They take on new forms when the old one falls apart, so they can live as long as they need to. Not forever, but near enough.”

  “No, wait!”

  Because the Made across the aisle pulls the needle out of her arm with a yank, the blood spurting from the bag.

  Kai is rabbiting on about how Narn and her sister called Mag recycle themselves, parts of themselves, attach the old bits to new forms over hundreds of years, thousands even.

  The Made lowers her bare legs to the floor.

  “Mag?” I think of that hooded being skulking around the shearers’ shed in that huge black sweatshirt, dwarfed by the massive hood. “The one with the tattoos?”

  “That whole silent goth thing is not their original form.”

  “Back in the dungeon, you mean?”

  The Made is still across the aisle. She squats on the floor. I flick my eyes away from her bits. Her hair is in white-blond braids.

  “But it’s not like being a goth couldn’t be Mag’s truth, in some way. Like the shoe fits, if you know what I mean,” Kai mumbles.

  “The middle sister who is lost,” I ask without taking my eyes off the abominable Made, “did she run off because she didn’t want to change?”

  But abruptly, Kai has now noticed what’s going on in the opposite bed. The Made, deathly pale, squatting on the floor with her gown pulled up. Blood spurts from the transfusion bag and pools in a puddle around her.

  “Wait?” Kai says, craning. “What?”

  “It’s nothing,” I say, trying to distract her. I don’t want to get in trouble.

  The Made is playing in the blood, the hem of her hospital gown turning crimson.

  “Stop!” Kai tries to sit up but she is too weak. I am crying. I don’t want this dirty Made to tell on me, to get me in trouble. I know who she is, and Kai will be angry. Angry at me! The Made gets up and her mouth is covered in blood and her teeth are white and pointed and her white braids are ghost snakes that writhe around her head. Big white snakes with ruby eyes and shimmering scales.

  I stand up on the end of Kai’s bed, wave my arms at the snake girl. My voice is shrill. “I don’t need you anymore. I have a sister. I don’t want you!” I turn cold when I see what she has been doing in the blood. Not playing. Writing. S-T-A-R-V-

  She is writing with her finger in the blood.

  “Go!” My voice is that high whistling keen again, a broken fingernail against a blackboard. “Away!”

  And just like that, she does.

  Kai has clapped trembling hands on her ears and is breathing through her mouth, looking at me with horror—I don’t yet know that it is also the look of love.

  “What language were you speaking?” she finally asks in a little voice.

  “Go to sleep,” I say. “You’ve had a bad dream.”

  Later that night, an irritated Matron returns to the infirmary with the anemic Made caught sleepwalking near the lavatories, but her teeth are no longer pointed and there are no snakes in her hair, and she quietly submits to being hooked up to a new bag of blood and to straps around her wrists to ensure she doesn’t wander a second time.

  I never see the snake girl again in this place. But I never forget the power of those words I spoke in a language I didn’t know I knew, and is lost to me as soon as it leaves my mouth.

  “Tell me another st
ory about sisters,” I say when we are alone again. “A story just for me.”

  She closes her eyes and tells me how when the three sisters got out of hand with all their blood vengeance and fury, another goddess stripped them of their power and made them leave the dungeon and go up top to make the world a better place instead of a worse one. They weren’t allowed to be assassins anymore—but they got some other skills. And a new name.

  “Seems like a strange punishment.” I snuggle closer, eye the sleeping Made in the other bed, her wrists compliant in their straps.

  Kai’s voice slows to a sluggish rasp like a wasp against a window. “It was a punishment, because the middle sister didn’t want to change.”

  “I was right.”

  “You were right. She didn’t want to make the world a better place. She thought her sisters were selling out. ‘We’re not kindly,’ she said. ‘We’re filled with fury and blood rage—that’s our power.’ She tried to tell her sisters that if they gave it up it would be the end of the world as they knew it. Blood crimes would go unpunished and chaos would reign. But mostly it was because the middle sister didn’t want to die.”

  I say, “That’s the biggest change of all.”

  “The oldest sister tried to reassure the middle one that they’d still be goddesses, except now their job was to protect the people from injustice, not to enforce justice, and that knowing that you’re going to die, even if it’s after a really, really long time, keeps you true. And that went down like a turd in the punchbowl”—one of the Father’s expressions, maybe—“with the middle sister. She liked killing and scourging, and she liked the taste of sin, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the truth.

  “‘Goddess, shmoddess,’ she said. ‘There will be crimes of sister against sister, child against parent, of blood against blood—don’t talk to me about justice or the law. The only way to get anything done in this world or the next is to live forever You’ll be a couple of invisible old hags and I’ll be a rock star.’

  “‘Something else will take our place,’ the big sister said. ‘Justice must prevail.’”

  Kai’s blue ribbon has slipped down drunkenly over her eyes, and I must adjust it. It burns from her fever. Her breath is vile. She continues her story about the sisters, how the old one said that change was natural, and that it would be against nature not to go with the times. Eternal life is what’s not natural, the big sister said, and who wants that anyway?

  She is a natural storyteller and I’m drawn along by the misremembered tale. It is firing up parts of my brain I didn’t know I had. Beginnings, middles and ends.

  “What happened?”

  “They had a big fight about it. So the middle sister ran off. Kept on killing people if their enemies paid her to do it. She got rich and infamous. She had clothes and men and women, angels, devils—anything she wanted. And the other two sisters missed her. They loved her. But they had to make do. Find a way to survive their grief and adapt to the new world. Protecting, not punishing. And it changed them.”

  “How?”

  “The older they got, the younger they got. The more they learned, the less they knew. The more they grew, the fresher they stayed. They just kept borrowing bits of themselves, remade them as their truths changed on the inside and out.”

  “And the middle one? Tiff?” I lick my lips, tasting Kai’s bitter sweat.

  “She loved herself too much to change. She loved herself more than God. She killed people and stole their bodies, threw them in the trash when she was done. But she stayed the same, just growing older, until she just . . . kind of died inside. And then . . . she began to rot. And the rot seeped through and infected everything the bad sister touched.”

  Kai pants from exhaustion. I try to help. “So the other sisters became and . . .”

  “. . . just kept rebecoming. Remaking themselves from scraps of . . .”

  “. . . their souls . . .”

  “. . . a good witch, a skinny goth . . .”

  “. . . but the middle one unmakes herself . . .”

  “. . . from what she can never be . . .”

  I have lost track of who is saying what, or maybe we are both just thinking the same thing. My heart is so full that I don’t care.

  “What happened in the end?” I try and get comfortable on the crumbs of myrtle cake that sprinkle the bed.

  “To be continued.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

  The security lights come on in the playground, wash the infirmary in their wakeful glare.

  “There’s a jar,” I say.

  “Shuddup.” She smacks her mouth against mine.

  And then she falls back on her pillow and I listen to the other Made in the infirmary cough in her sleep. My sister’s breathing sounds different. Shallow and labored.

  I drift a little. I come to and she’s staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes are cavernous in the darkness. “Just promise me you won’t let the Father hack me. Promise me that?”

  “I’m going to save you.”

  “Promise.”

  I do.

  “Meera,” I sense her smile.

  “Kai,” I say. “I saw the birds.”

  There is no answer at first. I nudge her sharply in the ribs. They stick out like the bars on the Father’s aviary.

  “You meet Dani?” she whispers so softly I have to lean in to hear.

  “She bit the Father.”

  She wheezes out a laugh, but then begins to leak a greasy, rank sweat. I kneel up in the bed, reach for the washcloth and dip it in a bowl of water. I wipe the snot from her face and the tears. Her lovely hair is lank against the pillow and I try to cover the bald patches on her scalp.

  “Go light that candle,” she says. “It’s time.”

  And when I wake up in the darkest hour, I am curled up beside her with the hooded Mag’s leathery hand over my mouth, and my sister is dead.

  * * *

  I knew it was time for me to turn up at another FiFo. So I went. It was the second week in October. It wasn’t my turn to read, and I needn’t have bothered. Jacinta wasn’t there and neither was Pagan. A grad student from the music department tried to run the workshop but gave up in the end, and we all made it home well before the curfew.

  I spent the rest of the week anxious about coming up with a story for Fearsome Gatherum. On the Thursday before the weekend, with the session break upon us, I had nothing, and went down to the bench in the shadow of the bridge beside the running track. Wrapped up in a deceptively thick coat and false memories, I waited for dusk so I could call Narn, although I wasn’t sure how I’d explain what a reading series was to her, having only the faintest idea myself. My imagination failed me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even Kai’s mnemonically noncompliant brain, untethered from the Father’s code, had betrayed her in the end.

  The Father showed us pictures once, projected on the whitewashed brick wall of the playground, of broken children. The drawings were from medical books hundreds of years old and had captions like on the jars in the womb room, rather than the actual names of the children, if they’d had them. One little girl was called “The Hairy Virgin.” She was born covered in hair because, according to the doctor, her mother was obsessed with a saint in his bear coat rather than her own husband. “The Boy with the Upside-Down Face” was a child born with no forehead, the spitting image of a print of another saint seared on the mother’s imagination while her husband was on top of her, “trying his bloody best,” the Father reminded us, to “give her a son.” Instead of looking at him, the mother gazing the wrong way up at the saint resulted in this upside-down abomination, the Father said, because women have no idea which way is up. There was another drawing of a crippled teenage boy with his limbs contorted in agony. The Father said that the child was born that way after his mother went to a public execution instead of staying at home where she belonged.r />
  “Study after study has shown that females can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. Between real memories and images created from nothing. Your adulterous imagination is as slutty as you are,” the Father said, “and monstrosity its only issue.”

  Mades, the good ones, couldn’t bear children. For there to be more of us, we needed the Father’s code. For there to be less of us we just needed time.

  The sky hung in low clouds heavy with clotted tears that blew in my face As I sat on the bench, talk of the latest victim of the Hunter wafted by from bikers and joggers. There was a giant chessboard paved onto the ground beside some tables, and I watched pigeons shit on the pawns. At dusk I followed the other lonely Mades back onto the bridge to call home.

  “I feel like I’m falling,” I said when she picked up, worlds away.

  I think I meant to say “failing,” but what I meant to say these days, and what came out seemed to be less and less connected.

  “How many credit points for fearsomeness?” Narn said, when I told her about it.

  “None. It’s the belly of the beast,” I said. “That is its own reward.”

  All along the blue railings, blue-washed Mades perched like birds on a wire. Midsession breaks were a lonely time for us, a reminder of how we had nowhere to go, Wellsburg parties to which we weren’t invited.

  There was a doubtful pause. “Tiff said the same,” Narn said. “But hungry beast must eat itself.”

  “I’m not Tiff,” I said.

  Narn clicked her teeth.

  “If I’m lucky,” I said, “it will be the stories they eat up, instead of me.”

  “Mades aren’t lucky.”

  “It’ll buy us time. Even more than FiFo. This is the real deal,” I said, echoing Pagan.

  “Time is hungry,” Narn said. “Middle sister lost to it.”