An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  It’s ten and she’s still not back. I take a big gallon bottle labeled, Mirobyl Netoxate, and empty it onto the soil of her beloved xanthemum plants. Nothing happens, so I grab them by their bases and uproot them.

  A scalpel sits perfectly straight in a metal tray, and it’s infuriating, how Aster takes the time to make her tools line up just so, but can’t bother to be on time. I could be luxuriating in a bath somewhere. I could be reading a book about ladies and gentlemen, about a dandy man who is frosty on the outside but hot with passion on the inside.

  I take the scalpel and rip it through the roots of the xanthemum plants, snipping each one until they’re in coarse, woody shreds. It looks like kindling for a fire, and I get the most perfect idea in my head.

  Little fires, like for having a smoke, are all right, so I keep matches hidden in the pockets of my skirt for when I need a quick moment with the tobacco pipe. I take one out, flip it against the matchbook, then set the little flame atop the plant roots. They catch light quickly. There are so many papers to burn, to keep the fire ablaze, so I crumple them into balls one by one and burn them. Charts, pages and pages and pages of notes, thick folders smoldering to black.

  The stools are lined up around a table perfectly symmetrical, spaced evenly apart. It’s easy to bang them into the walls and break off the wooden legs. The fire bursts to new heights as I feed in the wood pieces.

  Calmly, I walk to the thermofilter, use Aster’s code to override the purification system, closing the vents so as not to smoke up the whole ship. Aster knows everything about Matilda. She could’ve long since destroyed it, flipped a switch and cut off our oxygen supply. Maybe she should’ve.

  I take my flask from thigh holster and spread its contents all around, over the plants, over the books of reports and research.

  I take special care to get ethanol alcohol on her mother’s papers, getting them good and soaked and set. Smoke rushes my lungs through my mouth and nose, and I sit in a corner and wait for everything to burn, myself included. I know I will be reborn.

  There was a time Aster and I stopped speaking for a year, when she started working with the Surgeon. Melusine was always saying Aster was so smart, so bright, so special, so this, so that, like she was an angel incarnate. Maybe she was, and maybe I’m a little devil, but that’s all right too.

  It’s just that I’m so angry, for all these reasons, for all these reasons I can’t help.

  * * *

  I don’t believe in the Heavens, I don’t believe in Hell, so when I wake up to unfamiliar voices I know it means that I’m still alive and that my half-assed suicide attempt didn’t bear its intended fruit. As with all things, you get out of it what you put into it.

  I inhale, but all I feel is burning. I start to cough so hard I hurl up bile onto myself.

  “I’m going to shift you to your side, if that’s all right,” I hear, a voice that reminds me of my father’s, though I’ve never heard my father speak. It’s God talking, or something, a soothing voice that doesn’t soothe me at all because it’s impossible to soothe an unsoothable thing like myself.

  Squeezing my body into a rod, I prepare to be touched by overly decorous and kind hands. He seizes me by the shoulders and hips, grasp so gentle as to barely be felt, and flips me until I’m lying comfortably. I throw up again, but this time the mess lands on the floor instead of on me. I don’t know why, but I’m not thankful. I’m never thankful. I want to be, I do, but all I feel is this annoyance that won’t stop. Every nice thing that anyone could ever think to do to me leaves me feeling enraged. It’s like, too little too late, buddy. Kill yourself and get out my way, that is the kindest thing you could do at the moment.

  Tears and the sensation of stinging make me hesitant to open my eyes, but when I finally do, it’s the Surgeon standing before me. I see I’ve thrown up on him too, his lab coat yellow, and I’m not sorry.

  “My throat feels like it has a urinary tract infection,” I say, or rather choke out pathetically between hoarse half-sobs.

  “You’ve inhaled a lot of smoke,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, but then wonder if it’s not clever enough for him, and add on, “You’re quite the detective,” in my most posh voice.

  “Can’t you sedate her? The Sovereign won’t stand for all that cheekiness,” says a second voice. Through inflamed eyes, I see that there are a number of strange faces, all in the uniform of the Guard.

  The Surgeon hands me a cup of water I’m too thirsty to refuse. My gulps are loud, wet, obnoxious, and I don’t care. The liquid cools my sooty mouth and throbbing esophagus. That’s Aster’s favorite word, and I get it. Like all words that describe the body, there’s a strangeness to it. For fun sometimes, I imagine Aster talking dirty using such vocabulary. Shoot your come down my esophagus. She hates it when I talk like this, because it reminds her of how different she is, and more than that, how we all notice that difference. But I keep doing it. I like making her mad. I like making her feel embarrassed and humiliated. I get pleasure from it, even if I know later I will feel so bad it makes me nauseous. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have this compulsion to hurt, and I try and try to stop it, but I never do.

  “Guards, you’re dismissed,” says the Surgeon.

  “We’ve got direct orders from the Sovereign on this one,” says a man with pinky-white skin and graying hair. Everything about him is repulsive, his sniveling voice and button nose and wide, shock-stricken eyes.

  “You have direct orders from me to stop talking,” I say, and I try to get up. It’s only then I realize one of my wrists is cuffed to the side of the cot. “What is this? What did I do?” I ask, but I know what I’ve done. There are so many sins on my register.

  The same sandy-haired guard comes toward me with a hand wrapped around his baton, and I wonder if he realizes how incredibly phallic the whole thing looks! “Come closer and I’ll bite off your dick,” I say, but I wouldn’t. I’ve never bitten a man’s bits, unless he specifically asked me to use teeth. I’m compliant. Easy. Tell me what you want done, and I’ll do it without protest. People think me a fighter, but I’m the opposite, really, when it comes to the bed. If people want to have me, they’ll have me. There’s nothing to be done.

  “You will give me and the girl fifteen minutes, and that is an order. I’m very sure the Sovereign will understand. Get out now,” the Surgeon says, placing himself between me and the other guards, all four of them.

  There’s a hum of understanding among the four, and one says, “As long as I get fifteen minutes next, sir,” like it’s the cleverest thing he could’ve said, rather than the dumbest. They’re bumbling idiots, the whole lot of them, and I’m glad I’m not too incapacitated by smoke to roll my eyes.

  The guards funnel out the hatch, and one gives me a backward glance. I don’t feel afraid. I don’t remember the last time I felt afraid.

  “We don’t have much time,” says the Surgeon.

  “What’s happening?” I ask, and then correct myself. “What happened?” He gives me another glass of water, which I devour. Everything upward of my stomach aches and burns, but I can speak clearly now.

  “I discovered you in the lab, unconscious, and brought you to safety,” he says. “Obviously, we were discovered in the corridor. Your attempts to seal the smoke into the botanarium weren’t successful.”

  “Fuckwit,” I say. “You should’ve left me.”

  He nods, and it’s not the reaction I was expecting, his sage face struck with remorse. “I overrode the locks because I thought you were Aster. Believe me, had I known it was you, I wouldn’t have bothered.” His tone implies insult, but I know him too well for all that. His lips shake, actually shake, and I know there’s something he’s hiding.

  “You would’ve left me to die?”

  “I believe that would’ve been the merciful route.”

  “What do you mean?” But I know perfectly well what he means. I’m boarding the same train Flick did.

  “An execution,�
� says the Surgeon. “Sovereign’s order. This time, it’s for the whole ship to see.”

  I gesture for another glass of water, and he fills my cup from the pitcher. “Does Aster know?” I ask.

  “I will contact her by radio shortly. She wouldn’t let any harm befall you.”

  I bite my lip and close my eyes and imagine the unusual cadence of her voice. “When Aster sets her mind to something, it’s as good as done.” My voice isn’t as firm as I’d like it. Water splashes on my fingers. The glass almost slips from my hand, but the Surgeon catches it. “You and Aster are together?” I ask, and now he’s the one to almost drop the cup. “She’s more delicate than you’d think,” I say. She’s glass. I’m glass. We’re all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments. It’s a circus act. “She’s my kin,” I say. “I think our fifteen minutes are up.”

  “Keep faith,” he says, walking toward the hatch. “Aster is limitlessly resourceful.”

  She is.

  Maybe she’ll save me. Maybe I want to be saved.

  xxvii

  Aster received the news about Giselle via two-way. “Are you there?” Theo asked through coarse static.

  “Aye,” she said, “I’m in Alpha. I’ve figured out how to plot courses into the shuttles, but only one of them has fuel. Of course, that’s the one with the password lock. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get more from the manufacturing plant without Lieutenant finding out, but I may be able to crack the code with a bit of time.”

  Aster chose the route for the shuttles based on her mother’s disguised star map, the blue dot in the center of the chemical models. She knew that was the Great Lifehouse.

  More and more of Lune’s notes about the navigation systems made sense. In the control room Aster familiarized herself with the manuals explaining the computing consoles. One of them compiled data about potential habitable planets using sensors in Matilda’s external systems. The printouts from Lune’s time looked so grim, nothing habitable for light-year upon light-year upon light-year, it was no wonder she’d chosen to flip the ship around, where she knew, at least, there was an end in sight.

  “You’ve not been to your botanarium yet, have you?” Theo asked through the radio.

  “Not in a few days, actually,” said Aster, sitting on top of the Fleeting, legs dangling.

  “Right. You left me to go straight to the Shuttle Bay?”

  “Yes.”

  She heard him breathe heavily over the transmission. “There’s no effective preamble I can give, and so I’ll give none. Your botanarium is gone, Aster.” His syllables were rushed and slurred together. “Giselle set fire to it.” The transmission ended abruptly, a silent emptiness in its place.

  “I didn’t hear you correctly. Repeat.”

  “I think you did, and I’m sorry to say that’s not the worst news yet. Aster, are you still there?”

  She was already on her way to the lowdecks, dread urging her to action. Was it gone, or going? Still ablaze?

  “Aster, please, I need to hear you say you’re still there, still aware, still focused.”

  “Here, aware, focused,” she said. Indeed, she walked purposeful steps down the secret staircase, sliding through the slim hatch, not bothering to reset the screws.

  “He’s going to kill her,” said Theo.

  “You mean that I am going to kill her.”

  “Aster.”

  “This is Lieutenant’s doing?”

  “Welcome to the New Regime,” Theo said.

  “I’ll be in touch shortly,” said Aster, cutting off the transmission.

  * * *

  Aster ran her fingers along the walls of her laboratory, peels of cakey black falling to the floor in papery rinds, the texture calling to mind recently shed snakeskin. Archimedes, the fourteen-year-old tree Aster grew from seed, lay in a pile on the floor. She remembered him as a weak-kneed sapling, yellow leaves, failure to thrive—the right mixture of cool air and low light, a feeding solution of water, bone gristle, duck eggshells keeping him alive. Sounds stirred him into vigor. The recordings Aster used to learn to speak proper helped Archimedes too. His stems turned a lush shade of dark green, as rich as maple leaves. He grew tall, spread his shoots around the laboratory with colonizing force, emanating the sweetest, crispest smell.

  Her mother’s lab notebooks, the curiously tiny print, almost microscopic, carefully color-coded, the detailed diagrams labeled with neat script, burned up to nothing. Maps, so many maps, of the stars and the galaxy and of places Aster would never understand, the last in the universe, gone.

  Everything she’d ever held dear had been housed in this botanarium. There’d be no forgiveness this time. It was one thing to destroy a person, but to destroy their work was a sacrilege Aster couldn’t easily forget. All that was left of a person’s life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.

  * * *

  Without her notes, without a laboratory, Aster could do little but thrash open each of Theo’s cabinets, raid their contents for something, anything at all, that might work. Brown glass bottles with cork stoppers broke against the floor: larium coltate, ammonium brislyhide, silver dilectide, all of it useless. Anesthesia would do the trick, lure her into a comatose state, slacken her heart into a slow, syrupy waltz.

  With Theo’s help Aster could, for all intents and purposes, kill Giselle, pump oxygen artificially through her body to sustain her organs, then revive her at the right moment.

  That required equipment, devices, a team of healers. She needed something straightforward and elegantly simple, and then the solution occurred to her. A concentrated dose of poppyserum would slow her respiratory functions and heart rate, enough to fool the Sovereign. As the Surgeon General, Theo would be the one to declare death. When it was time to move the body to the morgue, and they were clear of oversight, Aster could inject her with enough adrenaline to awaken her body’s system. It was far from a perfect plan. On the converse, the scheme carried with it a number of risks.

  Aster fumbled through her keys until she found the right one, inserted it into the cabinet where Theo kept his narcotics. She squinted at the vials until she found two labeled, Dihydromorphinone. It would have to do. The time on the big grandfather clock read 22:00 till. She didn’t have much time. Aster tucked the two bottles into her medicine belt and ran faster than she’d ever had reason to before.

  She needed to get in touch with Seamus before meeting Theo. Mabel too. And the Tide Wingers. The time had come.

  * * *

  Matildans gathered in the corridors around the loudspeakers, making passage difficult. Though those in the lowdecks were already used to Lieutenant’s reign of terror, a state-sanctioned, ship-wide execution was a novelty. Their ears turned to the wood-cased speakers. Husbands and wives held hands. J deck teemed with a diverse cross section of Matilda’s inhabitants. Lowdeckers, laborers who rarely had a rotation out of the fields, lowborns who’d managed to marry into a measure of success, merchants, poor professionals. Aster dodged through all of them with not so much as an excuse me. The execution was to be held in the Maple Wood Clearing, a particularly cruel choice. To inject a girl’s veins with poisons in the same space folks gathered to worship their gods indicated a hatred Aster couldn’t fathom.

  She worked her way both downward and toward the center of Matilda, sprinting through Lagoon Wing, Laurel, Locust, Lark, Lightning. She had only ten minutes now. She hoisted herself up onto the bannister and slid down three flights of stairs to M deck, finally. Here, too, Matildans milled anxiously, gathered around the double-paneled hatch that led to Maple Wood.

  Aside from narrowed eyes and a few heavy breaths, they appeared calm. Aster recognized their expressions as ones of resignation. She’d cultivated such a face herself, a refusal to react because reacting never helped a damn thing, often made it worse.

  “Move,” she said to a skinny
, dark man with woolen white hair. He looked ready to start something, but by the time he turned to face her, she’d moved past him.

  The hatch was open so that people could peek through, and Aster saw him. “Theo!” she called out, entering. She had minutes to spare, enough to slip him the poppyserum covertly.

  In what was becoming a predictable pattern, a guard grabbed her by the arm harshly and pulled. “We’re at capacity, no more people. And that’s General to you. Show the Surgeon some respect.” A murmur of commotion played out up ahead, through the thicket of stunted trees, but Aster couldn’t see.

  “Leave her, she belongs to me,” said Theo. His voice came out a barely contained roar. It frightened Aster, almost, to see the man she most associated with equanimity so visibly infuriated. “My assistant. She’s here to clean up any mess there may be, Sovereign’s orders.” Maple trees twelve meters tall rose above them in a thick, short canopy, blocking out Baby’s rays, giving Theo a dark look. Shadow painted his face into fearsome lines. He was not putting on a show for the guard. His rage poured from him genuinely.

  “Teach her some manners,” said the guard, shoving Aster toward Theo. The look he gave her, the way he poked his lips out in a mock kiss, said he didn’t believe Aster to be Theo’s assistant, but his whore. His assumption didn’t bother her. Say it were true—there was no shame in it. She didn’t understand the smug, knowing way he eyed her.

  People like this guard tried so hard to make Aster feel lesser, but some days, like today, it didn’t work, because she saw clearly how superior she was.

  She walked at Theo’s side to Maple Wood Clearing. His gait was longer than hers, and he moved at a steady clip, but Aster kept up, explaining her plan.

  “I don’t know if it’ll work,” he said as they approached the Clearing.

  “I don’t know if it’ll work either,” she replied. “That’s the nature of a plan.”