Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  She watches me with eyes the color of dust and gold. She is very still, as am I. We wait.

  Then she says in the common language of the old Consortium, “The Androgynies broke through our lines. They will be coming this way, filling the district to the Amber Ridge.”

  She’s a Neuter, then. Not an Androgyny.

  I stir off the last veil of the death-sleep and try to sit up. The pain in my leg awakens. I grit my teeth and take hold of my thigh and try to yank my twisted lower leg up out of the animal hole. The leg jounces unnaturally. Yields. Pain roils up my torso, and I fall back down onto the grass. Sweat beads my upper lip. I want to vomit. I fumble at my belt for the med rations.

  The Neuter is moving now, too. I am aware of her out of the corner of my eye. I put both hands over the med rations, knowing it’s a futile gesture, knowing she can simply kick me and take everything I have. But as she sits up, I notice little thorns sticking out of the unprotected flesh at the back of her neck.

  Seeing my gaze, she reaches a hand back and tugs out a thornbug. She holds the little dead bug in her hand.

  “I don’t have antibodies for thornbug bursts,” I say. I look at her waist, but her belt of med rations is nearly empty. I see antibodies for dysentery and yellow ague and the little blue-white pinch for respiratory haze that she gave me several hours ago, but nothing resembling the cure for a thornbug burst.

  She stares back at the thornbug.

  I pull out the rapid-mending gel from my belt. I look back behind me and remember what she said about the Androgynies. I am supposed to be back in my own trenches tonight.

  I empty one of my pinch canisters and bite on it. I lean over and stare at the mess of flesh and jagged bone that is my lower leg. It looks like it should belong to someone else. I use my other leg to hold down the broken one. I close my eyes, push back with my arms, and try to jerk the loose tibia back into place. I make an unrecognizable noise. Black flashes across my vision. I fall back again. I stare up at the sky, watching black haze move across the lavender wash of the brightening morning.

  Then the Neuter takes hold of my gel. I don’t want to part with it, but I cannot move, and she is stronger than me now, even if she is skinny and Neuter.

  She leans over me, tube of gel in one hand, and says, “My name is Verj.” She yanks on my leg. I bite the pinch canister in two.

  The Neuter is still kneeling over my leg. It throbs. I try to sit up, and I see her smearing gel inside the ragged gash, then fingering it on the tatters of external flesh. She does not look at me.

  She finishes, sits back on her heels, and nods. She says something in Neuter, then to me, in Consortium, “You’ll walk.” She stands and begins to walk toward the ridge.

  “Wait!” I say, and I sit up. The pain has turned into a burning fissure of fire crawling all up and down my leg.

  She turns.

  I cannot carry forty kilos. “Your position has been overrun, you said. Who are you going back to?”

  She quirks her head at me, like a nod, only it isn’t. “No one. I ran,” she says, and she looks away from me. “I wanted to be free. I cannot live in trenches any longer, you understand?”

  I understand. “You’re dying,” I say. “The thornbugs. If you help me, I can get you the antibodies for it.” I am lying through my teeth.

  She knows it. Neuters are not stupid. But she walks back to me anyway, looks at the pack that’s still strapped to my back.

  “I have to get… this pack back to the Women’s trenches on the other side of the ridge. To push back the Androgynies,” I say. “You understand? You can help kill the Androgynies, the people who took your position, the people who are killing you. Please.”

  The “please” comes out more desperate than I want it to. How long will it take for the Androgynies to get their filter back up? How long until their supply carrier gets to them? I imagine Gian peeling the flesh away from her own bones.

  “Please,” I say again, because I have run out of things to say.

  The Neuter regards me. “There is not much time before the Androgynies find us here,” she says.

  “I can walk,” I say, “but not by myself, and not with this pack.”

  “You talk like you are talking to a Woman,” the Neuter says, and I realize I said the last thing in our language. I repeat it in Consortium.

  “What are you called?” the Neuter asks, and I wonder why it could make any difference what I am called. As she stares at me with her big dust-gold eyes, I wonder, however irrationally, how Elan could have preferred one of these alien things to me. The memory hurts worse than my leg. I push the thought away.

  “I am called Nadav,” I say.

  “Nadav,” she says, and nods. She walks over to me, leans over, and holds out her hand. I stare at the slender fingers, dirty fingernails.

  I take her hand. She pulls me up, and I have to take hold of both her wrists to keep my balance.

  “You have to take off the pack,” she says. “We’ll carry it between us.”

  And we do.

  My leg still burns, and I cannot put much weight on it. The Neuter is shorter than I am, thinner and weaker, so even with my injury, her side of the pack is still the side that slopes closer to the ground. The pace is agonizing. We have to stop after barely a hundred yards. It occurs to me that we’ll need water, and I haven’t eaten since the day before.

  She can still move faster than I can. She leaves me with the pack so she can find food and water. She has a deflatable container, empty.

  I sit on top of the pack and wait for her.

  I do not think she will come back.

  She does.

  The water tastes good going down, but it has a rusty aftertaste, like old blood. The Neuter squats opposite me, watching me drink.

  I hand back the water. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say.

  She quirks her head again, that nod-that-is-not. “You think I should look for Androgynies instead?”

  “Would be more useful,” I say.

  “The Androgynies I know would cook us alive before we heard the grass twist,” she says, and I think “twist” is the wrong word, but I do not correct her.

  “This is the most Consortium I have spoken in years,” I say.

  “It is good to stay in practice,” the Neuter says, and I wonder if she is joking or not. I try to remember how different Neuter humor was from ours.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Those were nice days, were they not?” she says. “Those days when we all met and talked?”

  “Until the day you talked away our birthing tech,” I spit, and the aftertaste of the water still sits in my throat. I want to spit blood at her.

  She grimaces. “The same argument. You Women, you have wombs, what need do you have for tech? You could have made a truce with the Men or Androgynies. And the Androgynies, they have all they need.”

  “Truce? With them?” I cannot keep the disgust from my voice. Neuters do not understand what it is, to have a womb with which to breed a parasite. “Nine months of servitude, pushing out half-formed flesh? Tell me, Neuter, what person consents to slavery? Getting that tech is the only way we’ll be free.”

  The Neuter’s lips make a hard line. Not a frown, but an attempt at non-expression. “Slavery. What did the members of the Consortium force upon my people but slavery? Breeding your babies in jars. We were restoring balance. And then the Men got angry.”

  “And then the Men got angry,” I agree, and we are both silent, brooding.

  “We should walk,” I say. I have never been much afraid of Men, not even when they blew through the Divide and tried to tear the world apart. They were doomed from the start. The Androgynies can still reproduce.

  The Men can’t.

  Nor can we.

  The Neuter takes her side of the pack, and I take mine.

  “At least now,” I say, “the Women are free.”

  “Free,” the Neuter says, “and dying.”

  We start to walk agai
n toward the Amber Ridge. The Neuter remains quiet, though she looks over her shoulder often, the fearful look of the followed. I wonder if she looks for the Androgynies, or for the Neuters who could murder her for desertion.

  As I walk, the world begins to blur at the edges. From pain, disorientation, lack of sleep, hunger, all of those things. I pretend the world is different. I pretend I am somewhere else. I pretend Elan is alive and she and I are carrying a picnic basket between us, and the far-off pop of bacterial shells is just the sound of fireworks. I pretend that Elan loves me.

  It is a common daydream of mine, and it keeps me walking.

  We stop three more times before dark. By the time the hazy blanket of dusk begins to cloud the world, we stand a hundred yards from the face of the Amber Ridge.

  The Neuter helps me drag the pack into a clump of thorn trees, and we sit down with the pack behind us. Her skin is flush. There’s sweat on her brow, her upper lip, and the gray patches of her suit are beginning to peel off.

  Night comes more quickly this close to the Ridge, and it is always colder next to the remains of the Divide. We drink the last of the water.

  “Did you ever duel?” I ask the Neuter.

  She looks over at me. She is hugging her knees to her chest. She, too, is shivering. “Yes,” she says. “I dueled a friend, once.” I hear a smile in her voice, and she uses a word I do not know, “--ruined my shield.”

  “What’s that word?”

  “The pronoun for us.”

  “Oh,” I say, and wonder how I could have forgotten it. Then, “I just think of you as `she’.”

  “Most people think of us as `it’,” she says. “We find both offensive.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “It’s all right,” she says, “I can’t hear the way you think.”

  I try to open my eyes again, but the stars are too bright. I wonder if the thornbugs got me too, or if another bacterial shell burst over me that I did not notice. I feel so very cold.

  “I once loved a Woman who loved Neuters,” I say, and after I say it, I feel sick, like I have told someone I like to slit the skins from children.

  “Oh,” is all the Neuter says.

  “You know what that means?” I say. “I loved someone who was queer. You know what that is?”

  “You’re speaking Woman again.”

  I repeat, in Consortium.

  Verj says, “I am cold.”

  I scoot closer to her, until our bodies touch. She feels warm, too warm. I am afraid now, really afraid that the thornbugs are killing both of us.

  “I have to tell you,” Verj says. “I ran away from the Neuters long ago. I have been fighting with the Androgynies.”

  I am too cold to pull away, and my mind feels fuzzy now. The night feels too loud, and sounds too dark. “You’re a queer too, aren’t you?” I say.

  “Only with Androgynies,” she says. “Women are just not so desirable to me, that’s all. About as desirable as another Neuter. No personal dislike of you, of course.”

  I laugh. I laugh so hard that my chest begins to hurt. “Oh no,” I say, and my laugh has turned into hiccups. “Oh, no, it’s all right, I’m used to it.”

  “I once heard it said that queers could have saved the world,” Verj says. “They could have helped everyone see that we are still a Consortium. That we are still the same. But I think it’s gone too far now.”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking; Elan, my love, you could have saved the world.

  And suddenly I am afraid. The world is spinning, but I know this much. “If you fight for the Androgynies, why are you helping me? Verj, I’m killing Androgynies. I mean, they’re killing us, and I’m taking this to -”

  “They threw me out.”

  “What?”

  “How do you think they broke the Neuter lines?” I hear sorrow there, but it is not the sorrow I think it is. She says, “I turned off the Neuters’ filter. When the Androgynies broke the lines, my lover no longer wanted me.”

  I know this kind of sorrow. I curl my body around hers, and we shiver in the cold together.

  “I am free, now,” she says.

  “Dying,” I say.

  She laughs, and it sounds absurd between us, a little bubble of laughter in all this dark. “I suppose we all are,” she says.

  The long night passes.

  I do not dream.

  I wake with Verj’s body curled around mine. Her skin is hot to the touch. I see little black threads running beneath her skin from the thornbug punctures on the back of her neck.

  “Verj,” I say, and shake her gently. “Verj, we have to go.”

  The dawn is cold and gray. Clouds hang low over the Ridge.

  Verj moans and mumbles something in Neuter. I pull her to her feet. My leg is not so shaky or inflamed as the day before, but it still snaps a bloom of pain up through my leg and torso when I put my weight on it. I grab my strap of the pack.

  Verj is moving now, slowly. She stands, stumbles. She steadies herself against one of the trees. I step toward her to help, but she motions me away.

  The pack between us, we walk. Verj’s face goes from flush to ashen as we make our way into the scar.

  How long did it take me to get to this point when I walked here? A night? That would be nearly nine hours this time of year. And I am hungry. Verj is hungry. She was eating bits of her suit the night before.

  We walk.

  We make it to the other side, across the quiet, lead-tasting air of the scar, before she has to stop.

  “Here,” she says, and the word comes out in Neuter, but I know it.

  We collapse onto the pack. It is the first time I think to go through the pack. Could they have dropped water and food with it as well? Med rations? I try to pull open the top, but I can see that it’s bugged for a TD. Only Gian can open it. I curse.

  “Can you carry the rest… alone?” Verj says, and I look at her. She is slumped up with her back against the pack, her limbs lax, head lolled toward me, eyes closed.

  “You’re not going to die!” I say, and I am startled at how loud my voice sounds. The whir of the chorus beetles in the grass around us abruptly ceases at the sudden noise.

  Verj opens her eyes. Dust and gold.

  “Listen,” I say, “when my trench director gets this open, there will probably be med rations in it. Probably thornbug pinches. You understand? We just have to get there.”

  Verj gives me a wan smile. “Ah,” she says. “You told me you already had thornbug antibodies in your trenches.”

  “I lied to you,” I say. “You would have lied too. But listen, Verj, they’ll be in here. They have to be in here.”

  She begins humming softly, some melody that I have no name for, but sounds familiar. A child’s lullaby, something my mothers would have sung to me.

  “Stand up,” I say.

  I stand, as if to show her. I reach down and take her hand. “Up. Stand up!” I pull her to her feet, but she leans heavily on me.

  I wait until she has her balance, then I grab for the pack. “Come on,” I say. “Please. Please, Verj, I can’t do this without you.”

  She takes hold of the pack strap like an automaton. Her eyes have taken on that outward gaze, ever outward, looking in.

  We are dragging the pack now.

  I think of Androgynies with their filters up. I think of Androgynies with thornbug bursts. I think of a hundred terrible bursts and bacterial shells I have never seen.

  And then Verj stumbles, and I can think of nothing but this moment, now, this one human being, and the overwhelming urge to live.

  I start to talk to her. I tell her about my mothers. I tell her about Elan. I tell her about the Neuter duels I used to go and see. Some of it gets confused, and I realize I am speaking some of it in our language, and I have to stop and go back and start over in Consortium, but Verj does not seem to notice.

  The pack smoothes a long trail of broken red grass behind us. I tell her I fell in love with Elan and moved in with her before she to
ld me her secret. She did not desire me. She wanted Neuters to touch her, not me.

  The sky is turning the gray of dusk again. I am so thirsty. The hunger has dissolved into a dull ache. I help Verj up for the third time. The left side of her face is a blotchy blue-black, the color of a new bruise.

  I have forgotten what language I am speaking in. “They found out about her, Home Defense did,” I say. “I came home one night, and she had killed herself. Home Defense said she must have found out they were coming for her. But you know what I think? I think they killed her. I think Women killed another Woman. It’s not bad enough that we kill other people. Now we kill each other. Bugs don’t kill each other.”

  And I fall.

  Verj tumbles down next to me. The pack rests between us. I can hear her breathing, a phlegmy rasp that makes me shiver. I reach out to her. She takes my hand. I look out past us, there, across the beaten down red grass, and I can see the smoky glow of the globes, thirty yards distant.

  “Verj,” I say. I squeeze her hand. “Verj, we’re here.”

  Her hand feels so hot. She murmurs something I cannot hear.

  I hear the chorus beetles grow quiet. I hear the tread of footsteps across the grass. Some part of me expects to see an Androgyny face.

  “Runner?” says a Woman’s voice.

  And I feel that I am home.

  I dream that the last of the Men have been run into the sea. The sea is the color of smoky foam. There is no horizon line over the water, only an endless gray haze, a merging of sea and sky. The Men’s bodies disturb only the water along a narrow shore, the thin perimeter of a vast body whose breadth is impossible to measure.

  I walk along sand the bleached color of death. I see the Men’s bloated bodies rolling in with the tide. I look into their mouths, and they are filled with dragonflies.

  I hear Elan’s voice, “This is the way the world ends.”

  I am pulled through a haze of successive dreams-and-wakings. They’re putting tubes into me, feeding me bugs; someone puts a pinch into me, tells me she’s curing me of red ague. Gian is yelling at me, something about a Neuter.

  “It’s Verj,” I say. “Verj is important. She’s a queer.”

  And Gian spits red kaj and curses at me and says something about not trusting a queer runner.