An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  Aster worked while she waited here for Seamus. As she scooped spoiled lettuce into a wheelbarrow, a man with freckles and greasy hair charged into her with his shoulder, snorting, calling her cocklet. She didn’t like the feel of his body brushing against hers, even if it was only for a moment. It made her remember all the things she didn’t want to remember. She didn’t like skin on hers, unless it was certain skin. Ainy’s skin, or Mabel’s skin, or Pippi’s, or Giselle’s. Or Theo’s.

  “Look at that little soft boy,” someone said.

  All eyes turned to Aster. Men chewed the insides of their cheeks then spit, the wads landing near her boots.

  “He’s got fancy clothes like a proper nancy.”

  “Girlyboy,” one sang in mock falsetto.

  “Leave him alone. Back to work,” the overseer called, barely looking up from a status report he was filling out.

  “We’re just having a bit of fun,” said a man. “Or are you a girlyboy too, Sergeant? You want us to look away while you have a go with Aston?”

  “I said shut it, or I’ll break your fucking nose. Today’s not the day to piss me off.” The overseer didn’t have to get up to make his point, because several of the men returned to their tasks.

  “Fine. I’ll leave the girlyboy to his work. But look at the way he walks,” the man said, laughing. “His poor bumhole’s probably sore. Sergeant, why don’t you kiss it for him to make it better?”

  Aster knew these insults weren’t meant for her. She was playing a part. They hurt anyway. They hurt because of the people they were meant to target, and they hurt for all the ways she’d been targeted in the past. With everyone insisting it was true, it was hard to believe she was any good at all.

  She felt Lieutenant was right about her. She didn’t understand, but when she thought about herself, she was repulsed. Aster was a vile fiend, a dyke, uglier than a dog. She was other things too, more dreadful things, things that were not so easy to say or admit. A bevy of parts cast off secondhand, to be used up by whomever had need.

  Memory wrapped its rope around her neck until she couldn’t breathe. Her vision was spotty and gray. She was a child again. She was three and four and six and nine at the same time. She was sitting on a guard’s lap, and she was kneeling and she was lying on her back. She was begging for her Ainy. She was thighs, knees, bellies, groaning, buttocks, ejaculate.

  If she vomited, it was her own weak stomach. Ainy always said she was an awful, picky eater, couldn’t hold a single thing down as a baby. Nothing was anything to cry about.

  Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things. Surrounded by men, they all resurfaced at once.

  Aster threw down her shovel and walked to the water cooler, bumping into her shipmates, purposefully throwing them off their course. She was someone else here. She had to remember that. They didn’t know all the ways she’d been made into to a trembling mess. They didn’t know she wasn’t strong.

  Ahead of her, there was a man with a scar across his eye, the lid pinched shut with mutilated tissue. He hadn’t been among the group of men who made fun of her before. He smiled when he saw her, one section of his face contorting. His good eye widened, threatening her. Aster did not avert her gaze as their proximity increased, nor did she inhale a steeling breath.

  Scar-man stalked up, lorded his height over her. He smelled sweet, like he’d just come from the showers—and that was just another reason to hate him, that he thought any amount of washing could ever make him clean. He pushed his chest into her, but she was prepared. Her feet stretched wide and anchored her in place. “What do you want?” she said.

  “You’re a child. You don’t belong here. I don’t work side by side with babies. It’s an insult, you simpering cunt.”

  Men dropped their tools to watch the exchange. Instead of scolding them, the overseer simply observed, hanging back. “Maybe I am a cunt. Does that mean you want to fuck me?” she asked, speaking in the manner the men had before. Laughter exploded around her.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  “That you want to fuck me. Is that what you like? Fucking girlyboys?” She channeled old games of house. She channeled theater. Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?

  “You’re dead.” He pushed Aster into a large metal vat. Her skull slammed against a metal knob, and she shook her head to shoo off the pain. His cocky grin revealed twisted, graying teeth. “I will gut you.” As he sized her up, no doubt underestimating her strength, she took advantage. She pushed out of the vat, screamed, and went for him. She took the steel toe of her brand-new boot and cracked it into his knee as hard as she could. The man tumbled down, groaning. His voice was like a hog’s, simultaneously guttural and squealing. He tried to stand up, but Aster knew she’d broken his knee.

  She took her boot to his other knee, to his thigh, to his groin, to his stomach, her movements quick so that he could never get the better of her. She hit every part of him over and over until she felt hands around her waist, pulling her back. So she went at that man too. Nobody could touch her unless she said they could.

  “Calm down,” someone said. The man turned her around, moving his hands from her waist to her shoulders. It wasn’t anyone she recognized. “Come on, son,” he said. “It’s all right now. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  His affirmations inflamed the wound. Things were no more all right now than they’d ever been. She writhed, hoping her fury was enough to outgun him.

  “Let it pass,” he said.

  “No,” she cried out, but her body began to heed his words anyway, her heartbeat slowing. She relaxed into his grip.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Nobody’s allowed to touch me. Nobody’s allowed to call me names. I’m alive,” she sobbed out. “I’m alive.”

  “You are. You’re here, and it’s going to be all right. It’s over.” His eyes were on her, examining.

  “It’s never over.” She turned and launched a wad of spit at Scar’s wilted body. A couple of others saw to him.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed, acting like that,” the man said. He wore a knit cap that covered his ears, the brown of it milky and murky compared to the rich brown of his skin. She knew then that this was Seamus. He’d told her he’d be wearing a cap.

  “I didn’t mean for you to see me like this,” she said quietly.

  He nodded his head. “I don’t think any different of you.”

  She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want them to see me crying.” She wasn’t certain she would, but she didn’t know what to expect of herself at the moment. She wasn’t stable. She felt her emotions were as wobbly as Giselle’s.

  “I know a place we can go. Aster, that’s your real name, right?” he asked, quiet. He was nothing like Cassidy. Aster supposed it was because they weren’t really siblings.

  “Yes, but I’m Aston here.”

  She wiped her sweaty brow with her jacket, not like a proper girlyboy would do, but she had no handkerchief. Scar-man groaned on the floor. “You’ll think twice before touching me again, won’t you?” she called over, but Seamus led her away.

  “Leave him,” he said. “You already won it, right?” It didn’t feel like she’d won anything.

  Two men helped Scar to his feet. “You’re a little shit,” one of them said to her. He had velvety golden skin and thick eyebrows that met in the middle. His voice was as pretty as his face, which held dark eyes, a sculpted nose, and pursed, angry lips.

  Seamus slung his arm around her shoulder, pulling her in close, away from Scar and his entourage, ducking into another aisle of the Bowels so they were alone. “You were a terror in there. Haven’t you heard you’re not supposed to kick a man while he’s down?”

  “Whoever said that?” Aster asked, because no, she’d never heard that. That was the best time to kick a man, that was what Melusine had taught
her.

  “God or somebody said it.”

  “Which god?”

  “The big one,” Seamus said, shrugging.

  Aster leaned back against a metal column. Her heels rubbed up and down against the back of her boots and were starting to blister. She slumped against the column until she flopped onto her butt, pulling her knees into her chest.

  “Don’t you believe in God?” Seamus asked. He sat down next to her, his eyebrows raised.

  “I believe in unseen things,” she replied, imagining the billions of atoms floating around her.

  Seamus nodded. “Your mother did too. Believed in a world off this ship. She got me to believe it too. She thought she’d found a home for us and that she could fly Matilda to it. I’m not a scientific-minded person, but she seemed so sure that I believed it.” There was a somberness in his aura. Lune had given him hope, then taken it away.

  “My mother’s mother, my grandmother, used to tell me something her mother’s mother used to tell her. A fact they passed down,” Seamus said. “Landside, the sun was bright and heavy on her back; it tickled her skin and woke her when she lay too long on the dirt. The rays touched you, hot beams of light and heat that stroked your skin like a meema’s hand against her baby. Bright and yellow and sometimes white. Not like that Baby Sun that grows the food—but thick in color like turmeric or soured milk. That’s what she said. And she would douse me with kisses and warm breath and say, This is how my nanny told me it was, and this is how you’ll tell your grandbabies it is.”

  Aster tried to feel it for herself, what it would be like for a star to spray plasmic light onto her. She could almost access it, a memory etched in her organelles, in the golden hairs that lived on her dark skin, in the shade of the dandelion flowers that poked from the greens she picked and ate.

  “Were you my mother’s companion?” Aster asked.

  “No.”

  Aster let the breath rush from her lungs and out her mouth in a tidal swoosh, her limbs loosening. “Who were you to her?”

  “A man who could be of service. Little more than that, I’m afraid. I work in identities, trading them whenever a middecker dies. Lune threatened to expose me unless I helped her.” He laughed.

  “Help her how?” asked Aster.

  “Get her books from the Archives. Sneak into some gent’s quarters to get plans and blueprints. Help her with the shuttles.”

  “You’ve been up there?”

  “Not since the day you were born,” he said, standing up. “Come on. Let’s go to the break room. Get something to eat. Stories are best shared over meals.” He reached his hand out to help her stand, and she took it.

  The mess was a large cabin with rows of tables, where a woman served food from a pot of something brown and bubbling. Aster missed the meals Ainy could no longer make under Lieutenant’s new rules. Just last month, they’d be gathering suet, cornmeal, salt, and pumpkin flour into little balls, dumplings they’d steam in a spicy broth of duck and greens, the water thick from chicken feet and pepper paste.

  “Try to eat a least a little of it,” said Seamus. “Shoveling like you were is hard work.”

  Aster stared blankly at her soup.

  “One bite,” he pressed. The bigness of her earlier mannishness was nowhere now. Short-lived. All that was left were the taunts, and the crack of Scar’s knee, and the past swooping in, an unkindness of ghosts. Her old life had possessed her, strengthening her, but like everything, used her up and then was done. She scooped some of the broth into her mouth, swallowed.

  “What did she need your help with the shuttles for?”

  “Fixing them up, working my connections to see about getting fuel, testing to see how many could fit in a single one. She was planning an escape, far as I could tell, though I don’t know where the hell to.”

  “And then?” asked Aster.

  “And then nothing. One day I never heard from her again. I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you. I brought the books, though, like you asked.” He passed her a heavy duffel.

  Aster wondered if Lune had taken one of the shuttles to see what she could find. Perhaps she thought she could do better than Matilda’s computers. “What was she like? Was she nice?”

  “Nice enough, though not the first word I’d use to describe her. Smart as a whip, sharp-tongued. She was a lowdecker but had a lot of upperdeck ways, in my humble opinion. I reckon she went through one of the reform education programs they used to have. Lune was fine, well-spoken. She charmed people. Always knew just what to say.” Seamus grabbed a shaker of pepper and sprinkled it into his bowl, followed by the salt and some red sauce in a jar. “You look just like her, you know. When I saw you in that fight, I knew you were who I was supposed to be meeting. The last time I saw her was so many years ago, but when I glimpsed your face, it was like being back in that moment two decades ago.”

  Seamus ate up his food with vigor, and Aster had a sense he was doing it more for her than him, giving her a chance to absorb the information. When he stood to get himself seconds, she closed her eyes and tapped her fingers against the tabletop. She wasn’t sure why she’d bothered.

  “Marlowe is staring at you,” said Seamus when he returned.

  “Who?”

  “Look.”

  Aster turned to where Seamus gestured, saw the man from earlier with the perfect skin and the perfect eyes and the perfect lips, his thick black eyebrows knit together, the man who’d helped Scar up back in the Bowels.

  “I have to go,” Aster said, abandoning her tray.

  “That’s what he wants. He’s trying to goad you into another fight. Stay. Sit. Eat. Be calm. You got to stick by me, okay?”

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, glancing around at the men as they ate. There were about forty of them, or more. She didn’t know how she’d missed them before. She started to move away.

  “As—” Seamus called. She heard him get up to follow after her, but she was already ahead of him, and unless he jumped over the table, she had an advantage. “Wait!”

  “Thank you again for everything,” she said, grabbing on to what she could to steady herself—one man’s shoulder, a table, a wall.

  She hustled through the mess until she reached the corridor. There, she could finally breathe. All she had to do was make it back to the Bowels, where she’d be under the gaze of the overseer. She looked left, then right, realized she’d been so busy letting Seamus lead her that she did not remember which way it was. She picked left and hoped for the best.

  “You’ve reached a dead end,” Aster heard behind her, and even though she knew she shouldn’t, she turned.

  “Please leave me alone,” she said.

  “Like you left Ty alone? A doctor just looked at his leg. Said he might not walk right again.”

  Aster thought, Good.

  Marlowe walked up and grabbed her by the neck, his hand forcing her windpipe shut. “Sick of pricks like you thinking you can treat us like that. Who told you? Give me a name, and I might spare you.”

  He loosened his grip on her neck, but Aster still felt like she couldn’t breathe, her clavicular muscles bruised and sore. “I don’t know what you speak of,” she mumbled. “I assaulted Scar-man because otherwise he would’ve assaulted me.”

  “Scar-man? Say his fucking name.” Marlowe pushed his palms into Aster’s chest.

  “Ty.”

  “Did you know that he got that scar from a fucker just like you, some pansy-ass kid trying to prove himself, came right up behind him, jumped on his back, and sliced a razor across his face? Said faggots were half-people, so he should only have half a face. Is that what you think?”

  She shook her head but had trouble saying the word aloud. The absurdity of it, that anyone could think she had a vendetta against Ty for being with another man when it was mostly women Aster longed after.

  He slapped her hard across the jaw, knocking her to the floor. Half her face disappeared in an instant, like Ty’s, numb, the nerves dying off.

/>   “Take off your trousers,” he said.

  Aster hadn’t put on her salve today. She’d never had the chance. She tried to gather herself up, but her eyes watered, obscuring her vision. She tried to crawl away. “You misunderstood,” she said, in a voice that was chopped and choked.

  “Shut up. You talk again and you’re dead. Trousers off, now.” Marlowe reached into his back pocket, revealing a large knife with a serrated edge. “I just have to decide whether I’m going to cut off your balls and let you bleed out, or sew you back up.”

  Aster forced her eyes shut, and she rocked on the ground. In her fantasies, she always said to them, I could rip you up. I could kill you. I could kill you so many times. And the men would say, Go on and try. And Aster would, and she’d bite them and scratch them all over, hard enough so that she broke off pieces of their bodies. And the men would say, getting the better of her, Cry mercy, girl, and she’d say, You cry mercy! You cry mercy! Cry mercy, and maybe I will grant it to you! But heed, I am not a merciful god!

  She hardly felt Marlowe cut the fly of her trousers, then through the cotton fabric of her briefs. But she registered his shocked gasp, his pulling back.

  Aster’s eyes darted open. Marlowe stood over her. She gulped, tried to pull up her slacks, but they were shredded at the top, ruined, her underwear and thighs exposed.

  Marlowe unbuttoned himself, let his trousers fall to the floor. Stepping out of them, he kicked them to Aster and stood there in long johns. Aster put on the new slacks over her ripped ones.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She was going to respond, Aster, but then that seemed like a lie too. Orphaned and feral, she didn’t deserve a name.

  xxiii

  It would be foolish to say that the mutiny that led to the massacre of hundreds, their limp bodies lying across Matilda’s corridors, began with Aster, who after all was only a woman, a small and largely unliked woman, whose heart was no more prone to thoughts of violence than any other who’d endured the decades of trauma that characterize all who lived in the lowdecks. She was stubborn and recalcitrant, but so were many. Like any tidal matter, a mutiny only had a middle.