by Otter Lieffe
Elias stood by the pile of ashes of what was once the Memory Board. He could still hear the music and laughter from the kitchen.
How quickly we forget, he thought to himself and turned towards home.
* * *
The shoal walked on for another half hour until Vicki stopped abruptly.
“I think we're here—”
Ash and Pinar stood beside her expectantly.
“—Should be just around this corner.”
In the light of the glowstick, they watched as she pushed open a heavy metal door. They stepped through it and the ground ahead of them sloped away opening into a massive cavern. The walls of the cavern were so far apart that the light didn't reach the other side, but in the semi darkness Ash could just make out what looked like tables and plastic chairs and…what's that? From a shop window, a wigged mannequin stared back at them illuminated faintly in green.
Ash took a step back.
“What the hell?”
“Of course!” Pinar exclaimed. “The Mall!”
“Welcome to the City!” said Vicki, beckoning them forwards.
Chapter forty-six
Elias was glad to be back on the deck of his boat. Somewhere in the woods he could hear owls calling to each other, there was a soft humming of crickets bringing the cool night and above the mountains he could see the light of the full moon peeking between clouds.
He sat back in his folding wooden chair and sipped from another glass of gin he'd snuck out of the kitchen. The third glass was always better than the second and he enjoyed the burn it left in his chest as it went down. He relaxed a bit more and listened as the owls kept up their calls.
Despite everything, it's not really so bad here, he thought to himself. There are worse places to be and here at least I have a family. And I'm well fed and taken care of. The cricket song began to fade and the owls moved to another part of their territory. The night was left silent, perfectly still.
No, Elias thought to himself, this life isn't bad at all.
* * *
The raid happened just before dawn while the Sett was sleeping. They were completely unprepared.
4. City
Chapter forty-seven
The General rolled onto his back. He was covered in sweat and smelt awful, but he was undeniably alive. He lay on his back, staring up. The air was hot around him and his head was pounding. He blinked to clear his vision. He could see the sun blazing in the sky and was shaded by something.
My God, trees!
His memory was messed up. He could remember being back on base. And the shower—the grunt—and the prison cell. He could remember the factory. And then he was here. Somewhere outside, under a tree.
Where the hell am I?
He tried to get up, but he was too weak. He felt like he'd been drugged. His arms and legs weren't responding in the way they were supposed to. His head was heavy and groggy. He lifted it a little but could only see trees. There were trees in every direction he looked.
Is this some kind of game? Some kind of punishment before they kill me?
His headache was worse. His vision was swimming and his eyes watered. He lay back down and gritted his teeth against the pain and the heat. The world went black.
* * *
Elias awoke with a start, his heart racing.
The morning was filled with screams that turned his blood cold. Before he could think, he was out of the door and standing on the deck of his boat.
There were uniformed state troopers everywhere kicking down doors and smashing windows. The kitchen tent hung at a wild angle and the burned square was a mess of running children. Troopers were arresting and handcuffing everyone they could catch. Elias saw two running towards his boat.
He kicked off the little plank that connected him with the riverbank, but the boat was too close to make a difference and the river was far too low to escape. The soldiers jumped easily onto his deck and grabbed him, forcing his arms behind his back and handcuffing his wrists. He couldn't even resist.
What's the point? They could snap me like a twig.
The tallest of the two effortlessly flipped Elias onto his shoulder and carried him over the gap to the riverbank. He was made to walk again and, still in his light blue pyjamas, they marched him to the burned grass of Central Square where most of the community was already kneeling, hands tied behind their backs.
Elias hadn't seen and heard so much fear in many blissfully long years. The troopers handcuffed him, forced him to his knees and left him surrounded by his adopted family. All around him he could hear the panicked voices of his neighbours, his colleagues, his students. But he couldn't look anyone in the eye. The smell of fear, the cries and tears.
It just makes all this worse.
He looked on as the troopers trashed their home. They had no reason to be quiet and seemed to be taking great delight in destroying what had taken years to build.
They dragged people out of their beds and through the dust. They pissed on mattresses and tore what was left of the crops from the gardens.
Elias felt nothing but numbness. He had seen all this before.
* * *
The troopers were efficient and merciless.
Looking at his community traumatised around him, Elias did a quick head count. Around thirty people were missing, including some of his students. They must have escaped, probably fleeing up into the mountains.
Elias knew this would happen one day. The fire, he saw now, must have been a State operation to flush out the community. When that failed, they simply sent in the troopers.
The Sett was totally unprepared. Elias remembered in the first few years after exile, they had stayed constantly ready for an attack and eviction. They had been proud of their self-defence training and round-the-clock vigilance. But over the years they had become complacent.
We committed the greatest sin of all—of allowing ourselves to relax and to forget the past. In this world, for the kinds of people who live here, moving on will never be a possibility. Forgetting is a luxury we can never afford.
Once the boats, tents and little wooden houses had been wrecked to their satisfaction, the troopers began to line up the prisoners and tie them in two long lines to march them to the City.
“Where are you taking us?”
“What's happening?”
Every question was answered with a slap or a kick and people soon fell silent, resigning themselves to whatever the State had in store for them.
Elias and a few others were still kneeling and four troopers approached them to add their chains to the growing line. One grabbed Elias under the elbows and expected to lift the frail older man easily. But the trooper grunted in frustration.
“What the fuck?” he said. “He's as heavy as a rock!
His eyes vacant, his face expressionless, it was as though Elias was somehow stuck to the ground. The trooper braced himself, planting his boots firmly into the dust and tried again, but Elias wouldn't budge.
This is my home. I'll die before they take me from it.
Chapter forty-eight
Another soldier joined in and even together they couldn't lift Elias from the ground. His friends looked on, confused, as three more troopers tried to move the old man still mysteriously bound to the earth.
Everyone else in the square was already chained to the marching lines and watched on as for twenty long minutes the troopers tried to lift their friend. Forgetting their fear for a moment, they began to shout and jeer at the troopers, at once both begging them to leave him alone and hoping desperately for Elias to somehow stay rooted to this land, their land, forever.
But his tired body could only take so much. Suddenly a look of agony flashed across Elias' face and with a long, low groan, he fell to the ground, his arms still handcuffed behind him.
“My arm!” he shouted and the troopers stepped back in surprise. Elias' friends pulled desperately at their chains to try to reach him.
“Are you okay?”
Elias writhed for a moment, his face pushed into the dust until he fell silent, his body, completely limp.
It's my heart. They've finally broken it one too many times.
He felt it slowing in his chest, wanting badly to stop beating, to give up on this life.
Beyond the square, he could see the forest canopy. And he saw crows, so many crows, gathering around them in the branches. They were beautiful, he noticed. They were watching him. But his eyes had seen too much beauty in this life, and he let them fall closed.
One last time his heart pulsed with pain and Elias sighed with relief as it stopped.
Chapter forty-nine
The General woke up and vomited.
Wiping his mouth, he noticed the air was cooler now, the sun less intense. It could be dawn or dusk.
His brain was still pounding in his skull, but he could see a little clearer and managed to sit up. He looked around slowly. Still trees as far as he could see. Birds were singing all around him, the air smelled of leaves. The only thought that made sense: somehow, he was in the forest and he was free.
He had absolutely no memory of how he got here, but he was no longer in a State cell and he wasn't going to die.
I'm outside, I'm under the sky!
He stood up and wobbled. He still felt a bit drugged but was elated. A roar of laughter overtook him and hands on his hips, he doubled over until he vomited again. He didn't care. None of that mattered. He had survived.
* * *
“This is so surreal.”
“I hate it. Can we leave now?”
Ash and Pinar stood with their shoal deep underground in the great Mall. The single green glowstick created more shadows than light and the effect gave Ash chills.
“Did you ever come here?” Pinar asked her as they crossed the main concourse together.
“Never. Why would I?”
“For a while, I think pretty much everyone came here.” Pinar pointed at the abandoned shops, the closed-up restaurants. “As the weather got worse each year, the Mall and the tunnels became the best way to get around. I used them sometimes, remember? And most importantly it was free, as long as you didn't mind seeing all the miles and miles of commercials.”
“That was too high a price for me. Give me the sky and the heat any day.”
“I get it. It was convenient to get around, but totally creepy. And now it's abandoned it's even weirder. It smells awful.”
Without electricity and without air conditioning, the air was thick and smelt like oil, gas and mould.
“It's more than creepy, it's sad,” Ash declared. “Whole generations considered this their public space. Forget about parks and plazas and street life, this place, this private temple to capitalism became their place to hang out.”
“Now it's just for the rats.” Pinar watched as a colony of them ran by, squeaking.
“They're welcome to it.”
Vicki came over smiling.
“Don't worry, we're not staying. Not the friendliest place in the world, is it?”
Ash made a face.
“Kind of hard to believe that people ever came to these places of their own free will,” continued Vicki, “At least the tunnels have some fresh air from time to time, but the Mall is hundreds of metres underground. This air hasn't moved down here for decades.”
“Can we leave now please?” said Ash.
“Let's go. It's not far.”
Vicki gathered up her people and led the shoal up a dead escalator. Ash took a final look back at the Mall and they entered a narrow tunnel. Every wall was lined with photographs of smiling white people advertising toothpaste and instant coffee and washing powder and all the other things that no longer existed. At every tunnel corner was a smashed-up café or a shoe store, long ago raided and emptied. Small armies of mannequins stood in shop fronts and Ash could swear she felt their cold eyes on her as she walked by.
Here, for some reason the shoal—even Pinar—seemed to be speaking louder and more excitedly than they had in the forest.
They're actually more relaxed, Ash observed. They're more at home here.
But for her, down beneath the centre of the State, far from her precious woods, she couldn't remember a time when she had felt less safe.
She trudged along past more advertisements and up another escalator with her mood as heavy as the hundreds of metres of rock that lay between them and fresh air.
I'm so done with this.
Harsh and unexpected, sunlight suddenly flooded into the tunnel as Vicki cracked open a door. After hours of darkness, they were all blinded and Vicki took a few minutes to let her eyes adjust before she opened the door further and peered through. She looked from side to side and silently slipped out.
She was gone a few minutes and the whole group, lining the service stairwell that led up to the door, stood in total silence. Eventually, her smiling face appeared around it.
“All clear!” she called out. “No-one's here yet, it's just us.”
And up and out they went.
They were in an abandoned warehouse, a large open space, impossibly bright after the tunnels. Ash looked up to the ceiling where early morning light poured in through massive windows in the roof. The sky was still red with just a few fluffy clouds. She had never been so glad to see it.
Chapter fifty
As he looked around him, the General noticed that it was getting warmer by the minute and the sky was reddening. Through a fog of confusion, he reasoned that it must be dawn. I can't stay out here forever. That much is clear, but which way to go?
His empty stomach cramped and made his decision for him. He turned east towards the rising sun—towards the City and food—and started walking.
* * *
As soon as they arrived at the warehouse, the shoal became busy, preparing the space and setting up a kitchen. City collectives began to arrive and Pinar went off to ask for news about Jason. Staying alone, Ash curled up on an old futon in a corner to rest. She was exhausted and badly needed to sleep.
“Hi, my name's Sandy. What's yours?”
The voice was loud and penetrating.
“I'm…err…Ash. Nice to meet you,” said Ash as politely as she could. Before she could say anything else, the stranger was holding her shoulder and giving her four—loud—formal kisses.
“Hi 'err-Ash' I thought I'd come over to say hi while you weren't busy.”
“Well actually, I—”
“I'm curious about new people. I saw you over here and thought we should talk.”
Sandy sometimes spoke and signed at the same time for emphasis. Ash noticed she was signing in female.
One of the things she had really enjoyed about USL as it evolved was its self-identifying gender. The first-person pronoun—the equivalent of I, me and my in English, could be gendered female—if signed with the left hand, male—if signed with the right, or just dropped from a sentence completely. On the other hand, unlike English, there was no gender in the third person—he, she, it and they all used the same sign—so gendering, at least linguistically, was designed to be always consensual.
Ash, of course preferred signing in female or occasionally she would drop the pronoun in the street if she felt like the apparent discord between how people read her and the gender of her sign might be dangerous. After Resistance Sign was co-opted by the State, it became obligatory to use the first-person pronoun in every sentence and avoiding self-gendering by dropping the pronoun was no longer optional. Ash got into the habit of switching into English when she needed to. Anything was better than pretending to be a guy.
“Well, okay…what would you like to talk about?” This person, Sandy, grinned at Ash enthusiastically and she already found her too intense.
“Being trans-feminine for example?”
Ash's hands immediately lifted to touch her hoop earrings and stroked them defensively.
“Is that a problem?” she asked.
“Not at all, I'm trans myself.”
Sandy signed every word a little too large, her pale hands flashing in the bright morning sunlight.
“But I still, you know, live in the City I haven't met so many of the…exiliadas. I'd hate to leave. It has its problems or whatever, but for me it's home.”
Ash already didn't like this person. She knew it wasn't fair to judge someone within ten seconds of meeting them, but something about this Sandy didn't feel right. Over the years, people had often criticised Ash for being so judgemental, but this sixth sense, this intuitive feeling about people, had saved her skin more than once.
“I…didn't feel that way about living here,” she said diplomatically. “Or particularly have a choice. Honestly, I wouldn't be here now if I had a choice either.”
“Because you don't pass?”
“Excuse me?”
“As a woman, I mean. Because you're pre-op or whatever.”
God!
Ash felt herself getting angry, she switched to USL and signed uncompromisingly in female.
“I pass just fine,” she signed, emphasising the pronoun with her left hand. “As myself, as a trans woman. I may not pass as a cis woman because I couldn't afford medical transition—or particularly want it—while there was such a thing.”
“—But—”
“My body is my body and the only thing that doesn't work is society. Who the hell are you to comment on it? Why would a trans woman want to judge me when you know from your own experience how hard it is?”
“—What I meant was—”
“And another thing. 'Passing' means nothing at all when it relies on other people to decide who I am. I know who I am, I pass perfectly.”