by Rajan Khanna
“I’ll be quick,” I say.
When I get back to the warehouse, I strip the leather straps from the table I was hiding behind. Then I pull one of the chairs that the slavers had been using. I set it up, right up against the bars of one of the cages. Then I find the slaver who’s still alive, and I drag him over to the chair. I lift him up and drop him into it. He’s weak, so it isn’t hard to get his hands strapped to the bars of the cage. Then his feet to the chair. It helps that I kick him in the bullet wound in the side of his leg.
When I’m done, I step back, let him get a good look at me. “This is lucky,” I say, pointing at the space between us. At the situation. I smile. “Not for you. For me.” I lower my face to his. “See, I think dying easy is too good for the likes of you.”
His eyes widen. He starts making noises from behind the scarf, desperate noises. I shouldn’t remove the scarf—I know I shouldn’t. A voice inside of me screams not to, but I do anyway, making sure I’m out of range of his spit and making sure that I touch only the farthest part of the scarf with my gloved hands.
“Please,” he says. His voice is weak, full of air. “I can pay you. I can get you food. Ammo.”
I lean my head to the side as if considering. “Try harder.”
His lower lip and chin start to tremble, sweat flecks his mouth. “I . . . what do you want? Tell me. I can help you. I can—”
“Save your breath,” I say. “You’re going to need it.” I move to the large warehouse doors and pull them back. The ones on the other side are already open from getting the slaves out. Then I open the doors to what used to be the loading dock.
“What are you doing?” the man asks.
“Giving the Ferals a way in.”
“What?” His voice is high, almost a scream.
I turn back to him. “Soon, Ferals are going to come, attracted to the noise or the smell or whatever gets them going. They’re going to find a lot of meat. And you.” I point at him. “Are going to be some of that meat.”
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. . . .”
“Just remember,” I say. “Remember when they’re gnawing on your face, when they’re ripping off your eyelids with their teeth, when four or five of them start biting into your arms and legs and . . .” I wiggle my finger at him. “Your cock. When that happens, remember that this is because you’re a slaver. Because you spent your time abducting people who were doing their best just to survive and get by. Because you took them from whatever life they were able to make for themselves. So you could barter them like possessions. Like an old blanket or a can of beans.” I’m spitting now, my whole body rigid, a cold like the grave inside of me.
I stand over him. I think of something my father used to say. “All we have in the Sick, all we truly have, are our lives. And the choices that we make with them.” It’s like he’s speaking through me. “You took that away from these people. Now,” I turn and start walking away from him, “see what that’s like.”
“Please,” he says at my back. “Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t, please . . .”
I leave him like that, tied up, dangling out in the open, a tasty enticement for any Feral that happens to come by. As I’m heading back to the Valkyrie, I remember what we are really here for. The job that Claudia was hired for. We were trying to recover a religious relic that a bunch of Jesus-worshippers were desperate for. It was a hand. The remains of one, at least. Finger bones. Belonged to a holy man from back in the Clean. Not much more than a pile of bones. But to them, these religious types, it was blessed, by God. Some even say that it had the power to raise the dead.
What a load of rat shit.
With that in mind, I visit the mass grave, and, using the butt of a rifle, I dig a little into the dirt. It doesn’t take long to find a skeletal arm. I follow it down to what’s left of the hand. I pick up the bones, wrapping them in a handkerchief. Some cleaning and some fixing up, and they’ll look like holy relics. I mean, how different can hand bones be? And I know holy folk. They’re always twisting what’s in front of their eyes to match their belief.
I tuck the bones into a pocket, then I take the ladder up to the Valkyrie and join Claudia in the gondola.
“Did you take care of what you needed to?” Claudia asks me over her shoulder.
I nod. I certainly did.
Then I go back to the compartment I’ve been using as a bunk, and I slug back what’s left of my alcohol supply.
When I throw up, I tell myself it’s because of that.
* * *
At some point, I think to pull out my father’s revolver and clean it. There’s dried blood splattered across the barrel, and a sticky, gummy mess at the end. Blowback from when I shot the one slaver in the head. I see my father’s face, hear his voice like he’s right beside me. “What the hell is that?” That’s what he would say. “I had the revolver since before you were born. And this is how you treat it? I taught you to take care of your weapons, Ben. To clean them, to keep them well-maintained. And blood? Jesus, Ben. You know how stupid and dangerous that is? You don’t deserve that weapon.”
Fuck you, Dad. You’re not here anyway.
I start a fire. Just a small one, mind you. In a small metal bowl, using some old paper and some gas. I hold the barrel in the fire, hear the sizzle as blood and skin and hair and for all I know brains burn off into the air. I’ll use some alcohol, then some oil, to get it completely clean. But right now fire is the only way I know to burn out the Bug. I hold it in the fire for a while until the metal gets nice and hot and I’m even forced to put it down with my gloves on. Then I douse it in alcohol, wipe it down with a cloth, then the fire again, then alcohol again. Only then do I reach for some oil and start oiling it up. It takes a while.
I know this revolver as well as my hand, better, since my hands are always covered in gloves. My father had it for as long as I can remember. For most of my life he wouldn’t let me touch it, not even to clean it. “Always clean your own weapons,” he would say. “You can’t rely on anyone else to do it right. You have to do it yourself.”
I remember the first time I touched it. In the dark, huddled down behind the wreck of a car, raiders firing at us. The air smelled of cactus and gunpowder. Dad fired it, then pulled a backup, slid the revolver to me. “Reload!”
My whole body was shaking with fear because we were outnumbered. But I still felt a thrill as I picked up the revolver. It seemed so huge back then. I reloaded it and passed it back, and Dad handed me the backup and together we filled the night with bullets.
The revolver is much more tarnished now. Scratched, too. The words “Smith & Wesson” are barely visible on the barrel. The grip’s been replaced twice that I know of, first rubber, now wood. It bears a lot of scars. It’s seen a lot of action. It’s done a lot of damage.
Claudia appears in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes like cold steel. The jagged scar that comes down over her eye almost shines in the light of the cabin. For a moment I’m back in that apartment building, bending over her, sewing the gash up with my gloves on, blood everywhere. A mark on her that will always say, “Ben was here.”
“What the motherfucking shit was that?” she says. I flick my eyes up to her, to the face almost as familiar to me as the revolver. The strong cheekbones, the strong nose, the shock of white in her dark hair. Everything about her seems to radiate strength and competence.
I rub at the barrel of the revolver, not meeting her eyes. “What do you mean?”
She jerks her thumb at the window. “What happened back there. Your rampage.”
Now I meet her eyes. It’s hard to not look away. “They were slavers, Claudia. They deserved what they got. And worse.”
“They’re filth. They deserve to die. That’s not the point. You ran at them, without any plan, without telling me what you were doing. You could have gotten us both killed.”
I shrug one shoulder. “It worked out, didn’t it?”
Claudia gets this disbelieving look on her face and
shakes her head. “I don’t know why it took me so long to see it.” She shakes her head again. “You’ve given up.”
“I’ve given up on this conversation making sense.”
“You’ve spent so long focusing on survival that you just don’t know how to do it. You’re hoping someone else will do it for you.”
“Do what, Claudia?”
She levels her eyes at me again. “End it. Kill yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
Anger grips my stomach, my spine, and I stand up out of the chair and take a step forward. “Yes,” I say, clenching my jaw. “Because I’m not done here. Not yet. Not until Tess pays.”
Claudia nods slowly. “And then what?”
The anger and the steel drain out of me at the thought, and I sag backward. “I’ll figure that out when the time comes. We’re not there yet.”
“We,” she says. “You keep throwing that word around.”
“Claudia—”
“Spare me.” Her smile is humorless. Bitter. “I’ve been trying to help you, Ben. Help you break out of whatever this is that you’ve fallen into. Because we have a past, and because you were always special to me. But I don’t know that I can do it anymore.”
I should feel something at that—sorrow, loss, grief, recrimination, guilt. Take your pick. But I don’t.
“I’ll get you to Tess, I promised you that. But after . . .” She shakes her head and lowers it, running a hand through her long dark hair.
“Fair enough,” I hear myself saying.
After she leaves, I look around for a bottle that’s not empty.
* * *
I hold a small wooden box in my hands. I don’t remember reaching for it, but I keep it close to my sleeping mat. It’s never far away when I’m on the Valkyrie, though I don’t bring it out in front of Claudia. I open the lid and pull out the burnt and battered notebook. I hold it for a moment, just feeling the weight of it. It’s solid. Real. Then I pull off my gloves and run my fingers over it. It’s rough now, not nearly as smooth as it might have once been. But I try to feel each wrinkle and crease. Which ones did she make, I wonder?
Not much survived the attack that killed Miranda. The house was completely demolished. The wood burned quickly from the explosions. Most of what was found inside was melted metal—the remains of tools or instruments or weapons. But miracle of miracles, three notebooks survived. They were partially burned. And pages were blackened or later damaged by water—two were missing whole sections. But there were still pages with Miranda’s words all over them. Legible pages. Or, with her handwriting, mostly legible. But even now, as I touch them, as I flip open the cover and run my fingers over the words, I am amazed by what I have here. These are Miranda’s thoughts. Her hopes. Her fears. Her opinions on all kinds of things. Still here. Still accessible to me.
I’ve read them all. Many times. But I never get tired of them.
I’ve tried to consume them, to let those words inhabit my mind in such a way that I don’t always know the line between her thoughts and mine. Which she would have thought insane since we always saw the world so differently.
From the moment I met Miranda, she was always jotting something down in a notebook. Often it was just notes on Feral movements. Or notes about blood. Or notes about the Bug. But as I got to know her better, I realized that she also wrote down personal things. From the beginning, I wondered what that would look like. I know how to write. I write directions or notes or messages, but I never wrote in a journal. Never saw the need to write down my thoughts in any permanent way. I guess that’s one reason I am the way I am.
I wonder what purpose it served for her, a woman of science, of fact, of observation. Maybe it helped her to organize her thoughts. Maybe it purged the feelings that she was having—she could write them down and then move on. Or maybe it was just to talk to someone. We never discussed it. But she did it, wrote in her journals, all the time.
It wasn’t until . . . until she was gone that I looked inside one of them. Say what you will about me, I respected her privacy.
Only she’s not here anymore to need privacy. So I open the cover for the thousandth time and start reading.
CHAPTER TWO
FROM THE JOURNAL OF MIRANDA MEHRA
. . . easier to fight when we only had one enemy, Maenad—a single virus that upended the world. But now . . .
Now I fight a war on two fronts.
No pressure or anything, Miranda.
I’m not fighting alone, at least. Not now that I have the others back. If there’s any hope for a cure, it’s because of them. Because they’re good scientists, good people, and I’m so happy to have them back. More than they’ll ever know.
They all look to me. To lead them. To show them the path that we’re heading down. I suppose I fought for that, all these years. Back at the commune, after my mother died, everyone was ready to overlook me. They certainly didn’t take me seriously, not back then. I was just Ilaria’s little girl. No matter that I was already doing lab work and theory as well as anyone there. No—better. Sergei was the only one who ever recognized that.
So of course I spent all that time proving myself. Showing everyone there that I could do the science, yes. But also more than that. Showing everyone there that I could lead. That I could point the way.
So now, when everyone looks to me, they expect me to point the way. But they don’t realize how much I lean on them. How much of the weight they bear. How they lift me up, on their shoulders, so that I can see the terrain.
Sometimes I feel so lost. They don’t know that, how truly in the dark I feel so much of the time. I can’t let them know. Even drowning in doubt and fear, I need them to believe that I know which way leads to the light. I won’t have all of us wandering in despair and darkness.
I won’t.
I just get weary, from keeping it all hidden. I choose to, I know, and I deserve the consequences. But here, and only here, I can at least admit how tiring it is. I get so weary of the charade, so tired that I just want to take off this mask of hope and fall into something resembling relaxation. Or maybe truth.
That’s the part that Ben doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m all about truth. The science—the science is all about truth. Always. Searching for it even if we can’t find it at first. But everything else? Being a leader? That’s as much truth as it is fabrication. Tamoanchan’s leaders, like Lewis, they understand that. The irony is that Ben is good at lying. Most of the time, at least. It’s just that the well that he usually pulls from is Fear. The one I reach for is Hope.
You really must be tired, Miranda. You’re waxing philosophical. No one has time for that.
Maybe I should go find Ben. We may approach all of this differently, but one thing that has been true from the beginning, despite all the fighting and all the tension, is that he doesn’t expect anything of me.
(I expect batshit craziness, he would probably say.)
But he doesn’t expect me to lead. He doesn’t expect me to know it all. He just expects me to be human. It seems like he’s always trying to remind me of that. Most of the time it does drive me batshit crazy. But right now . . .
Right now I just might need it.
CHAPTER THREE
It’s always worse after I read the journals, like I opened a door and the memories just come walking through.
This time it’s Miranda, on the Cherub before we blew it up, back before the Valhallans took Apple Pi. I’m flying her back from collecting blood samples, but at the moment that’s forgotten. A Prince record spins on the phonograph. Miranda dances through the gondola, liquid and light. And I just drink her in.
Then another night, on Tamoanchan, music in the air again, and Miranda drinks from a bottle of wine. Her tongue licks the excess from her lips and she smiles. She holds the bottle out to me, and as I reach for it, our hands touch.
Then that moment aboard the Cherub right before we threw ourselves into the ocean, when we
kissed and despite all the danger, all the fear, everything else just stopped for a moment. We were the spindle, standing still, while the world revolved around us.
It ended too soon. It all ended too soon.
I put the journal away before my tears blur the ink.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shale Station isn’t much as far as trading posts go, but it is safe, and it’s been stable for at least a few years. Not big enough to attract unwanted attention. Not small enough to fade away. That’s where Claudia set up the meet to drop off the hand bones, and it seems as good a place as any to drop off the slaves we freed. Some of them might be able to get word back to loved ones through the use of the message station there, or find work on a passing ship. Or barter what meager things they were able to take for some clean clothes or lodging or whatever. I feel bad. I truly do. I wish I could do more for them. But there’s no safe place I can take them, and Claudia can’t feed all those extra mouths.
For a moment I think about Tamoanchan. Alone and on the sea. I think about how at one point I could have sent all of these people there, given them a chance at a decent life once they got past the quarantine. But now that would require a time machine. There’s no going back.
The thought brings a sour taste to my mouth, and so of course I start thinking about drowning that taste with another. Shale’s got booze and food and most human necessities. But first I need to take a piss, so I head to the outhouses. A thin, young man hovers outside one, eyeing me as I walk up. “I’ll get you off,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “We can use your gloves.” I wince as I recognize him, one of the people we rescued from the slavers.
“No thanks,” I say, pushing past him into the dark stink of the outhouse, the kind of smell that seems to get inside of you and never leave. When I exit, I feel like I need a bath, though I’m not sure that’s from the outhouse.
So when I lean up against the stall of the hooch seller, it’s a relief. “What you got?” I ask.
The woman operating the stall, all gray hair and missing teeth, holds up a dusty glass jar and swirls the liquid inside. “This here’s a premium beverage. Distilled from potatoes.”