by Meg Elison
“You’d have to watch out for Paws.”
And every other man on earth.
No shrug. The girl made no sign that she had heard.
When Gabriel realized that many of the girls were too weak to walk back, he set about starting the truck that the Paws had come in with. It had high wooden sides on its bed, big enough for everyone to ride in. Once he got it running, the boys hopped up into it and helped the scarecrow girls climb in. Etta helped the girl from the floor, standing in the dirt and lifting her whole weight. Her body felt as hollow as a bird’s.
Etta climbed into the cab with Gabriel. She felt a pang for Flora, remembering their rides.
The roar was terrific, and she knew they wouldn’t be heard.
“Why bother?” Etta stared out over the tall weeds in the culverts that lined the roads. She didn’t want to speak, but she had to.
“What?” Gabriel kept his eyes on the road.
“Why bother with this mish? The Lion. Those girls. The trouble was just as bad before.”
“How do you know?”
She jerked her head back toward the whistling rear window, the boards that enclosed the bed. “Get a look. That’s not new to them. One girl told me they don’t even have names, they never have. Why didn’t you come for them before this?”
Gabriel shrugged, wrestling the wheel over the rough fields. “We didn’t know. We watch for the Lion.”
She didn’t like the answer but she didn’t know what to do with it. She settled back and rode.
I need to go home.
Getting the girls down the hatch and into Ommun was quite a production. A couple had to be lowered in slings made of bedsheets. The women of Ommun came out, their braids shining like the scales of shiny fish, their smiles concealing their horror with long-practiced kindness. The girls from Jamestown were fed again and clothed in long woven dresses. They looked like the figures Etta sometimes found in old-world stores; tall, faceless woman-shaped objects that clothes hung off of in long, rat-gnawed shreds. The activity around them gave the impression of life, but Etta could not tear her gaze away from the eyeholes of the woman she’d stepped on, the girl from the floor.
No name.
Etta slipped away from the tumult, the preparations for whatever feast was about to come.
One more night in these featherbeds, then I’m going home.
But the night was going to pass too slowly, and she needed to steady herself.
She followed the rattling sound to an open vent, felt the air blowing on her face. Standing beneath the grate, she rolled and lit a joint. She hit it over and over until the fog settled into the dips and valleys between her thoughts. She slid her back down the wall and sat on the floor.
The sound of singing came low and sweet, echoing through the metal hallways and stretching out between the minutes like warm caramel pooling in her ears. When she could feel the bones of her legs bounding against one another in their abundant flesh, when she knew she wasn’t one of the scarecrows, she rose.
The main hall was thronged with people. Men came to sit or kneel beside the women of Jamestown. Etta listened and gathered that they had all been given names. Coral. Sarah. Leah. The girl from the floor was being called Sheba. The men who spoke to her were quiet and deferential.
She looked right through them.
Etta felt that she was dragging chains behind her. The chains were stories. They were the burdens of Chloe and Flora and Alice, of every nameless woman she had ever failed to help. She was dragging the chair and her mother and the Unnamed and every woman she had ever known. She looked at Sheba and she was so tired she couldn’t move at all. If air were water, if today were the day she jumped into the Misery, she would sink, she would drown.
Alma was there, glowing and nursing one of her infants as she spoke. Etta couldn’t follow it. She heard buzzing like a thousand bees until her own name broke through.
“And Sister Etta. Like Nephi, took upon herself the guise and the voice of the enemy in order to bring us another mish victory. Just as it was revealed to me.”
There was another ripple of incredulity through the crowd. Gabriel turned to look at her, and Etta tried hard not to laugh. She saw Rei’s face suddenly take on surprise and remorse, looking at her and trying to convey some kind of forgiveness.
More stories that don’t mean anything. More names. More calling a past that anyone could see a vision of the future. Didn’t she say I was Moroni before?
But inside her, something tickled near her heart like a bare branch scraping the side of a house in the wind. She stood on tiptoe and felt no ghost of a cramp.
Is this how it happened with the Unnamed? Did they make her out of a person and into a story?
In full view of the room, she lit up again and inhaled deeply. She made her way to Sheba, reaching out to take the gaunt woman’s limp hand. Into it, she pressed a vial of som.
“All I can give you is a choice in whether you want to go on or not. That’s the only real gift anyway.”
Vaguely, by a circuitous route, Sheba’s eyes found Etta’s. They saw each other for just a moment. Etta thought of a deer sliding between the trees, its round black eyes.
Shouldn’t have done that.
Had to.
She stumbled over her own feet, following the Prophet as she dismounted the stage. She elbowed her way into the room.
“Alma.” Her voice sounded rough and too heavy in her own ears.
Alma lifted her rosy, golden head and smiled. “Sister Etta. I knew you would come.”
She had to blink again and again; her eyeballs felt furred.
“Did you know? Did you.”
Alma gestured and the room cleared itself. Etta came to the bed like a moth toward a campfire. She felt like she was rocking, waving with her whole body toward Alma and back.
“Will you stay with us?” Alma was smiling.
Smirking. Like a cat that’s just eaten.
“No. I have to leave here. Do it again.”
“What?” Alma’s wheat lashes beat against her cheeks. “Do what again?”
“What you did before. Fix me. I’m tired of dragging this ghost around. All these ghosts. Take them away, if you can.”
Alma’s laugh bubbled up out of her throat. She grabbed Etta’s arm, and the heat beat up toward her face like a blush. Alma’s face pinked, too. Etta surged in place, throbbing like her whole body was a sore tooth.
“I don’t know which one you are. It’s all ghosts in there.” The heat faded from Alma’s cheeks. She turned to work on someone else.
Etta shook herself loose. She decided to become Sheba, the nowhere ghost, the no eyes and no mouth, nobody and no body.
Did I really think she’d lay her hands on me and I’d walk away Eddy, perfect Etta, someone else in some other world?
She smoked until she fell asleep, not caring who smelled it. In the morning, there was a burnt circle in the bed and the room smelled like a chicken on fire.
The walk back to Nowhere took too long. Eddy was weeks on the road, weighed down by the guns he couldn’t wait to trade and use. Some days he didn’t walk at all. He raided ghost towns and read books, examined the tools of the old world and tried to see what kind of life they had.
The Book of Eddy
Sheba is still looking up at me. I wonder what she did with that vial. I wonder if Alma will explain away how Sheba died and what it means. How it fits some story that was already known and told. I could go home peddling bullshit about my travels, my visions and what they mean. I could turn the Unnamed into Nephi and all that, make it a story that we know but nobody else. Is that what keeps them together?
Why couldn’t she fix me? She fixed the chair.
I was born in the book. Not in the chair. Etta was wrong about that. I don’t know if she’s the ghost or if I am, but we’re both going home. She’s going back to Nowhere. And someday soon, I am going back to Estiel with what I’ve got on my back.
Not like those rattling bastard guns that cut them all u
p. But enough in my revolver to change the way things run. Even a Lion will die if I shoot it enough times.
And then, his whole Hive will walk down the stairs and add themselves to my chains.
I’m going to go home and tell my mother my name.
I’m going to walk into that basement and meet the men who are women. I am going to dance their ghost dance to their dead music.
I am going to walk through those gates and tell them I am Eddy, son of Ina. I am going to ask Alice to live with me. And Flora. Maybe I will have a Hive after all. Who’s going to stop me?
He was ready. He was bound and masked and had his guns loaded behind him. He hefted up the pack and winced at the weight settling back into the sore grooves in his shoulders. He couldn’t wait to put it down. He was so tired of carrying everything.
He knew something was wrong before he could see it or smell it. He waited for the feeling to settle into anticipation or just the anxiety of meeting Ina and explaining himself. He walked slowly, expecting the faded white sign that read “Nowhere” to rise into view over that next hill.
He crested the hill and stopped.
There was no spotter in the tower. The gates were wide open. Ashes from the cornfields blew into his open mouth.
CHAPTER 16
It was hard to find an entrance to the tunnels with so many landmarks razed. Eddy searched frantically for long minutes, the stink of burned houses choking him.
A trapdoor finally appeared beneath a drift of ashes and he wrenched it upward, flinging himself headlong down the stairs so heedlessly that he tripped. He pulled himself up from the dirt and blinked into the darkness. By feel he managed to get a torch out of the sconce on the wall, but dropped it a second later. In the light of the sparks from his flint, he saw it lying there and struggled to light it. Once he had the hope of a flame, he crouched and began to crawl.
“Hello? Anyone?”
He couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of his heart. His breathing was hard and ragged, so he held it. He could see his pulse in his eyeballs.
“Hello! Hello!”
A dim echo returned his own voice to him.
Fuck fuck living fuck.
He crawled as fast as the small space would allow him. He worked his way to the juncture beneath the schoolhouse and shouted in each direction in turn.
“Hello! Damn it. Hello! Anyone?”
From far down the western tube, he heard someone answer.
“Your name?”
He breathed in sharp and held it.
This is not the moment.
“Etta! Daughter of Ina!”
For a moment she heard nothing and fought terror that the Lion’s men were in the tunnels with her. But then the grunting of the men in the tunnel came close enough and she heard a voice she knew.
“Rob?”
Rob, son of Marcia, emerged, filthy and with one arm bandaged. Behind him, Aaron and David dragged themselves into the slightly roomier space of the juncture.
Etta hugged Rob, and over her shoulder saw Tommy the bather crawl slowly into view. Something was wrong with his face.
“What happened?”
Tommy shrugged. Rob spoke first. “We were attacked. It was those men you were talking about, the Lion? They knew everything, where everything was kept. They took the women and girls first, then they emptied out Alice’s place. Her garden, everything.”
“Alice? What about the Mothers?”
Aaron was nodding, his cheeks hollow under his beard. “Them, too. Ina and Lisa and Bronwen. All gone.”
I told them this would happen.
But would it have happened if I hadn’t brought Flora back here?
“Where are the rest of the men?” Etta looked around, unbelieving.
“Some of them got away,” Tommy said. His speech was mush. Etta guessed someone had kicked him hard in the teeth. “Just ran. Most of them are dead.”
Etta waited for rage or sorrow to take her, but nothing came. Her stomach contracted into a tiny ball.
“We have to get them back. The women. We have to attack the Lion. I know the way.”
The men looked at each other. Doubt and fear passed between them in the deep shadows of the torchlight.
“I don’t think you understand,” David said slowly. “They were all armed. They killed dozens of people, just in the first few minutes. They burned down our whole city.”
“I understand perfectly,” Etta snapped back. “Because I’ve seen it before.”
For a few minutes, she told them about her experience with the Lion. She sketched Manhattan and Ommun lightly, leaving out things she couldn’t explain. They settled in, sitting down. It made her furious.
“Don’t sit down! We can’t lose any time! We have to go now, back to Ommun. We can get supplies there, and guns. We can make a plan.”
No one spoke, no one stirred.
“What are you doing?” She was screaming at them now. “Are you going to stay in this grave like you’re already dead? Come on!”
Tommy scooted forward, putting his light bather’s hand on Etta’s knee. “Etta. Etta, come down here.”
Etta fumed for a moment, then knelt.
“They’re scared. I’m scared. We’ve seen things . . .” His voice cracked and he stared at the floor for a moment. “We’ve seen things happen to people we love that we’ll never get over. Things that don’t even bear thinking of.”
Tommy’s eyes were glassy and he wasn’t looking at her.
Sheba on the floor.
Eight in, eight out.
Where are you right now? Where are they?
She started again, softer. “Look, men. It’s early morning up there. They’re all gone. What’s done is done. There’s nothing for you here, probably not even anything to eat. Ommun has enough food to feed every traveler. They’re strange people, but they’re good. And their town . . . it’s full of women. More women than I’ve ever seen in my life. Go there with me. Whatever happens, whatever you all choose, they’re our best hope now.”
They softened to her. She coaxed them out into the light. Before noon, the smell of Nowhere burning was gone from their noses and only clung as a memory in their clothes and hair. They walked the road in a short V with Etta at its point.
They walked for a few days, talking little. Etta hunted and fed them, the men gathered nuts and fruits as they went. On the fifth or sixth night, Rob was ready to talk a little.
“They really did come out of nothingness. No spotter saw them. One moment we were all asleep and the next minute there’s screaming and gunshots from everywhere at once.”
Etta nodded over a cup of wild mint tea. They had eaten a couple of squirrels and were still awake, staring at the fire.
“I heard Janet screaming first,” Aaron said softly. “I was in the Hive house next door, but by the time I got there, she was dragged out and they were all dead. I took to the tunnels right away. But her baby . . .”
Janet had been five moons gone, Etta remembered.
“They didn’t . . .”
Aaron shrugged. “As far as I know, they took the women without hurting them. But still.”
There were grim nods around the circle.
“Even the Mothers, they all fought.” David was staring at the fire. “I saw Carla bite a man until he bled. He slapped her, but with his open hand.”
“They must have had orders to bring them to the Lion,” Etta mused, still feeling nothing. “Had to be.”
“Maybe that’s where Alice went,” Tommy said. His broken mouth made her name “Alish.”
Etta looked at him sharply. “What?”
He took a gulp of tea. “It makes sense. She and that Flora disappear weeks ago, and then these men show up and they know everything—”
“Alice and Flora left?”
Tommy looked guilty.
“There were rumors,” Rob said reluctantly.
“All kinds of rumors,” Aaron added.
“People said they went after you,” D
avid offered, miserably.
“People also said they were in love.” Aaron’s eyes were bright in the firelight, accusing her.
“Right,” Rob said. “But Emory said you had had a plan to trade som with the Lion. And I think they decided to do it without you.”
Now it came. The rage like a firestorm from one side, and the sorrow like a sunless sea on the other. Etta was hot and cold and lost within it. For a moment she thought she might pass out.
“Etta? Etta, you okay?”
Rob put his hand out to her and she smacked it away with a force that scared him.
“Look,” Eddy said. “I’m going to tell you this one time, so all of you pay attention. My name. Is Eddy. And when we’re out here, I’m a man. You understand?”
They didn’t, that was plain on their faces. But no one argued.
“We’ll make Ommun tomorrow,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
In the morning, they got started in the blue light before true dawn.
Eddy walked out ahead by himself, but after it got light, Tommy jogged up to join him.
“You know I’ve bathed you for years.”
“What’s your point?” Eddy did not deign to look at him.
“I know what you are. What’s all this about?”
They walked in silence. Eddy clenched his jaw over and over, chewing on his empty mouth.
“Why would you want that, when all anyone in this world wants is a woman?”
Eddy did look now, to see if Tommy really was this stupid.
“I saw you dancing.” Eddy looked ahead again.
“What?” Tommy sounded confused, but defensive underneath.
“In the spring. I left the main hall and I heard music. Old-world music. I looked in a cellar window and I saw you dancing. As a woman. You and another. Fancy boys.”
Tommy didn’t speak for a few moments. “Yeah. Yeah, that was me. That was me trying to be the thing everyone wants. Like Breezy.”
“Like the women stolen by the Lion.”
“Not wanted like that,” Tommy began truculently.
“Being a woman means always being wanted like that. There is no such thing as safe wanting. Safe wanting always turns into ownership. Desire turns to chains faster than you can breathe in to say no. Be careful what you decide you’re going to be. Outside the walls of a city like Nowhere, women become things. You don’t have to be born a woman. The Lion’s men keep boys, too.”