by Sean Grigsby
She stood at the bottom of the receiving stage, in front of the area designated for the Daughters of Forgotten Light. Dwellers shuffled at the sides of the waiting area, staring at the still-closed shipment or fighting for a better view. The streets Lena had left behind were a monastery compared to the bustling and shouting at the center of the city. Every damn dweller in Oubliette must have been there. Lena only knew a few of them outside those dwelling in her territory, and she’d never tried counting. It wasn’t like the gangs took a census, and the Amazons were aggressive in hiding their numbers. But there had to be hundreds there at the stage, maybe a little over a thousand.
“Had some engine trouble.” Lena swung a leg over the seat. That’s one way to put it.
Grindy nodded. “Bring it by later. I’ll take a look at it.”
“I think we have her fixed,” Lena said. “But I appreciate an extra eye.”
“Anyway,” Grindy flicked her hand, “I fought them to wait long enough for you to still get first pick.”
“I owe you one,” Lena said.
“Then that puts your tab at about a thousand you owe me.” Grindy winked and stomped up the stairs to the stage.
Lena led the Daughters to the front of the multitude. Giant, black columns rising from the stage radiated a piercing blue light against the sides of the shipment. The box’s jets hissed as they cooled, frothing steam at the back. It was just a big box. No pilot. No windows to see into, or out of.
The other gangs waited at either side of the Daughters in their respective areas. The Onyx Coalition stood to the left. An all-black gang, the OC had failed to charm Dipity over to their ranks. Lena had never asked if it was intentional that they were all the same race. Maybe it was just a coincidence, like how all the cannibals were white.
To the right, the Amazons waited. Farica Altstadt, their head, sat on the cold frame of her cyclone, cleaning the front of her teeth with a finger. Unlike the other Amazons, she refrained from the mohawk look, and opted instead for spiky mounds that resembled an inhabitable red planet on top of her head.
“We should have skipped your turn, Horowitz.” Farica squinted one eye, aiming with fatal intent.
“Piss off,” Lena said.
Farica’s raised cheek twitched. She looked around the crowd and to the four Amazons behind her.
Missing someone? Lena pocketed her hands and choked down a laugh, staring at the glass below her feet.
Whispered words danced among the Amazons. One nodded and rode her cyclone out of the crowd, into the dark of the outlying streets. Farica turned back. She’d replaced the squinty eye with a leashed rage that weighed down the length of her cherubic face.
“I’m sorry, Horror,” she said. “Fair is fair.”
Lena really wanted to spit again.
“I feel like a damn broken record having to say all this every quarter,” Grindy addressed the crowd. “But I know how you simpletons will forget everything I say as soon as the words leave my mouth, so here we go.”
The dwellers looked on. They just wanted the box opened.
Shamika Caruthers, head of the Onyx Coalition, folded her arms and waited just like the rest. She reeked of attitude. The slight curl in her lips was all it took for anyone to know she gave the least amount of shit anyone in the prison city could. Lena envied it.
“The Daughters are down one,” Grindy said. “That means they get first pick.”
Groans from the Amazons. Silence from the OC.
Grindy continued. “After that, they’ll pick which gang goes next. As if we don’t already know who that’s going to be.”
Shamika nodded to Lena, who returned it.
“The last gang picks. We divide the food up. The Amazons have their business, and then we can all go home and get on with our lives until next quarter. Does anyone not understand this?”
A few hands shot up from the dwellers.
Grindy huffed and rolled her eyes, ignoring the raised hands. “Let’s get on with it, then.”
She dug out the shimmering card she kept on a necklace and shuffled over to the shipment, where she pulled out a small touchpad at the side. The glow from the touchpad’s screen shone onto the crevices covering Grindy’s face, reminding Lena of times around a camp fire, flashlight beaming under chin. Time for a scary story.
Grindy’s card fit against the screen. A small chirp later and the door lowered like a ramp. Dwellers began to shove and grumble, an anthill kicked. Containers crammed the shipment, all gray and about the same size. The manna inside bore the same color as the boxes and was just as tasteless. But that wasn’t really what everyone wanted to get a look at. In the center of the shipment container, more than a dozen girls stood huddled.
“Come on out,” Grindy said to them when the door had completely dropped. “No need to worry.”
Lena sighed.
They looked like beaten puppies, even the ones who tried to pull off a “don’t fuck with me” demeanor. In old films of concentration camps receiving new prisoners, or in more recent media of the illegal immigrant interstellar deportation, they’d all been weatherbeaten and dirty. But these girls were spotless, scrubbed free of any smudge – by force, from Lena’s recollection – all wearing those ugly white shippee uniforms.
Has it really been ten years? Lena wondered.
“Line up, please.” Grindy extended her left hand to the front of the stage. “As best as you can, anyway.”
“Is the war over?” a dweller shouted.
“Who won the Super Bowl?” asked another.
“Please, God, tell me one of you brought some Tampax.”
“Shut up!” Grindy said. “All of you. You can get your questions answered by going to your gang’s right arm.”
Lena had her own questions. Is legislation moving to abolish Oubliette? When can we go home?
The new arrivals shuffled into a crooked line. Each of them carried objects of varying size, single selected items to bring with them for their last days rotting in another galaxy. Here, a guitar in the hands of a thin shippee with wet eyes. There, a paralyzed girl in a wheelchair clutching a Bible, probably with the hope she’d find comfort in its pages. At the end of the line, a young woman cradled a bundle wrapped in black cloth like a baby.
“You’re up.” Grindy nodded to Lena.
The heft of Lena’s boots thudded against the steps leading onto the receiving stage, then clanged when they reached the lowered metal shipment door. The shippees shivered under her gaze. Lena could never get used to that antiseptic smell they always brought with them, the kind of fumes you’d inhale when making out with your boyfriend in a janitor’s closet or visiting grandma in hospice.
She appraised each of them. The Daughters couldn’t use anyone too young – easily moldable, but too much to teach. They’d be too small to ride a cyclone anyway. Someone older, yes. Not one of the lot was over eighteen. None of them ever were, but Lena would try to get as close to that age as she could. Grindy once told Lena there used to be older shippees, all criminals, but that had stopped almost a quarter century ago. Oubliette was the best crime deterrent that had ever been invented.
Lena came to an Asian shippee with blue hair. This one didn’t tremble – not her body anyway. You could always see it in the eyes, though, and hers, dark and coiled like a pressurized Slinky, were a textbook case. Still, she was trying.
“Shipper guards couldn’t scrub out your hair dye?” Lena asked.
“It’s a dope job.”
“You injected yourself with that gene shit? Just for blue hair?”
Blue Hair swallowed, but didn’t answer. She was smart, knew when not to talk.
Lena regarded her empty arms. “Didn’t bring anything with you?”
“This,” the shippee said. She raised her right hand – there was an automatic tremor of anxiety through the crowd behind – and flaunted brass knuckles.
Lena grinned. “Interesting.” She eased Blue Hair’s hand back down. Nodded. “The guards never let us keep w
eapons.”
“They stole it from me at first. But it was the only thing I wanted to take. A guard slipped it to me before the launch. He had a crush on me.”
“You give him a handy or something?”
She wrinkled her face in disgust. “Why would he have helped me if he’d already gotten what he wanted?”
Lena laughed.
Among Bibles and guitars, this one knew she’d be in for a fight. There’d be no comfort on Oubliette, only pain and, if you weren’t wise and rough enough, death. She came prepared.
Lena moved to the next girl in line but stopped and turned back to the one with the brass knuckles and blue hair. “What’s your name?”
“Sarah Pao.”
Lena nodded again, committing it to memory.
Pow like a comic book punch. Looks like we have a frontrunner.
The next was probably ten years old. A pretty little girl, blonde-haired and soft-cheeked. She had her arms curled into her chest and chewed on her fingernails. When Lena smiled down at her as she passed her by, the girl began to scream, howling unformed words. She slapped herself repeatedly. Red marks appeared on her cheeks, across the bridge of her nose. Lena grabbed her arms. The little girl fought her at first, but soon calmed down into quiet moans.
“You going to let a toddler kick your ass, Horowitz?” Farica laughed, and her cannibals laughed with her.
“She’s been doing that the whole way here,” the one next in line said, annoyed. The little girl tried to grab onto her neighbor’s leg and cry into it, but the taller shippee kicked her away.
Lena scoffed through her nose and skipped over the rude older twat to the next in line. The slap-happy little girl was probably autistic, and her parents had decided they couldn’t handle her. A shame. The older shippee dropped her mouth like she knew she’d fucked up in some way, but couldn’t figure out how.
The next one looked the oldest, the one with the bundle wrapped in cloth. She wobbled from side to side as if she might faint. Her skin held little color, pale even by sunless Oubliette standards. Her eyes said, “What the hell have I come to?” She didn’t realize that’s exactly where she’d come.
“So what’s your–”
The bundle cried.
At first Lena thought it might have been the mewling of a cat or even, God forbid, a ferret. But, no. It was distinctly human. A baby. Lena reached for the cloth. The girl pulled away from her, but that just pissed Lena off.
“Hey!” Lena kicked the girl’s shin.
Pale Girl dropped to a knee, clutching the bundle as Lena opened the blanket. The baby inside had beautiful black skin and tiny, peachy palms that reached out as she stirred and croaked those whimpers of hunger Lena thought she’d never hear again. Not outside dreams. Nightmares. The baby girl couldn’t have been more than two or three months old.
Like a distant radio message thrown across space, after a delay the crowd became aware of the bundle’s contents. “A baby!” a dweller shouted. “They’re sending anyone now,” said another.
The pale girl brought the baby back to her chest. “Please, don’t take her. I made a promise.”
“She yours?”
Silence.
“Did you steal her?” Lena asked.
“No.” Pale Girl shook her head, tears flicking off her cheeks. “Given.”
Lena believed her. Damn it.
If the child wasn’t hers, then whose? What terrible, soulless, donkey-fucking dishrag of a mother would send their infant to Oubliette?
Lena turned back to the crowd, her gang, the OC, the Amazons. Shamika fought quiet word battles with her left leg, her fourth-in-command. The subordinate looked like she’d been cheated out of a poker game and was ready to do some rang shooting. No doubt, Shamika had gotten a good look at the baby, and might have considered killing one of her own to open up a spot in the gang. It wasn’t technically against the truce to kill your own gang members. At the other end of the stage, Farica licked her lips, squinting with both eyes now. Lena didn’t like it. It meant the cannibal was thinking.
The Amazon envoy returned on her cyclone and whispered into Farica’s ear. So, the time had come. Lena imagined what had crossed that mohawked mind when she’d come upon the wreckage above the Sludge River. Did she figure it had been a horrible accident? Just a bad day for one of their purple-haired people eaters?
If Lena was a betting woman, and she was, she’d venture that Farica would find a way to seek vengeance on the Daughters whether they’d truly killed one of her Amazons or not. It just happened that this time she’d be guessing right.
Keep playing it off. When you bury something, you make sure it stays that way.
Farica’s reaction chilled the back of Lena’s neck. The head Amazon nodded at what her third-in-command told her, relaxed onto her cyclone, and smiled, staring at the pale girl rocking the cranky kid. Lena liked this even less. No, not one bit.
“Everybody needs to calm down,” Grindy called out to the masses. “Granted, this is something we’re not used to seeing.”
Good. Grindy would see that the pale girl and the baby would be escorted away. No need in them staying around for this. For what came after. They could interrogate the girl and find out why in fuck the government would allow a baby to be sent up here.
“But it changes nothing,” Grindy said.
Lena nearly choked. “What?”
Grindy held out her arms, as if in defense, as if she couldn’t do anything about this. “The terms of the truce stand, Lena. Now pick a replacement for your gang or some other item in the box, and get off the damn stage.”
Lena sensed a quiver in Grindy’s mouth after she’d said it. It pained the older woman as well, but the truce was the truce, and she was determined to see it stand.
“Let me talk to my ladies.” Lena stomped down the steps and waved her hand for the Daughters to huddle around her.
“Who are you thinking?” Dipity asked. “That one with the brass knuckles?”
“She’s cute,” Hurley Girly said with an impish smile. “I could use some blue hair between my legs.”
They glared at her. Sterling shook her head.
“What?” Hurley Girly shrugged.
Lena dropped her head and sighed. “That baby.”
The other Daughters groaned.
“I won’t be able to live with myself if that baby dies,” Lena said. “If one of those fuckers eats her.”
I won’t lose another one.
“They aren’t that bad,” Ava said.
Everyone stared at her until she nodded, knowing that wasn’t true.
Dipity released a tight breath. She always saw these situations as purely business. Just another decisive act on the streets. Survival, nothing more. “We need someone who can ride.”
“We don’t have the shit we need to take care of a baby neither,” said Hurley Girly. She opened her mouth to say something else, but, instead shook her head and looked outside their huddle.
Sterling placed a firm hand on Lena’s shoulder. With her big nose shadowed in the blue stage lights, she looked like a gargoyle, ever watchful, ever silent. Lena didn’t know what to make of her gesture, didn’t want to sign to find out. She’d probably say the same thing. They couldn’t take the baby.
Lena tore from their huddle and launched at her cyclone. She kicked, slamming her foot into the dark metal, screaming to high hell. “Goddamn it!”
Across from her, Farica laughed again.
“Hey, Horror!’ Shamika waved her over.
Lena limped with her sore foot to where the OC stirred like bottled lightning. None of Shamika’s gang looked too happy. They shook their heads, huffed, and made statements under their breath for no one but the Devil to hear.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Shamika said.
“Yeah?”
Shamika tensed her brow, tightened her jaw. It must have been pretty painful for someone usually so brash to hold back for the sake of getting what she wanted. To her, the kid g
oing to anyone besides the Onyx Coalition would be just as unholy as letting the Amazons gobble her up.
“A trade,” Shamika said. The words could have been vomit the way she squirmed as they came out.
“What do I have that you want?” Lena knew what Shamika had in mind, but drawing out this torturous event might give her the half second she needed to come up with a valid solution.
Shamika rubbed her face, quick and hard. “Pick the baby. I’ll trade you one of my gang.”
One of the OC, the one with the big hair, spit and cursed. Lena knew how she felt. The spitter was the gang’s ass, the lowest on the totem pole. So, Shamika would not only trade Lena the last in command, but one that clearly had a problem with leaving.
Not much of a deal.
“You gonna throw in some of your manna loaves, too?” Lena asked.
“Fuck you, Horror. A sheila for a sheila. Fair and square. You don’t even know what to do with that baby. She needs to be with her own.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Lena said, “we’re all the same here. We’re all forgotten.”
“Our gangs have had an understanding out there on the streets, even since the beginning. I’d hate for something like this to ruin that.”
A threat. Well, that just made things a whole lot more fun. Lena stood her ground, keeping her eyes on Shamika’s. The OC leader thumbed her nose. Lena sucked her teeth.
Oubliette had been Lena’s home for ten years and she’d been head of her gang for the last two. How could anyone forget Lena “Horror” Horowitz had one, unmistakable quality? Threatening her just made her dig in deeper.
“Grindy!” Farica hollered.
Lena and Shamika turned back.
Farica smiled from her cyclone. “Maybe I can move this along a little quicker.”
“You know the rules,” Grindy grumbled. “You have to wait your turn.”
Farica shifted happily in her seat. “See, that’s just the thing. You might see that I’m missing my ass.”