Unbound

by Shawn Speakman

  I took her hands. “I have. And I won. But this fight I can’t win.”

  “I’ll come,” she said, moving as if to pack, then realizing she had no idea what belongings she might have.

  “You need the attendance of the blackcoats,” I said. “For a while anyway. You’re weak.”

  “And still stronger than you,” she quipped, her eyes heavy.

  “And still stronger than me,” I repeated, hoping it was true.

  She wrapped me in her embrace then. The one that was very tight, but not so tight that a brittle-boned man need worry. We touched foreheads. We stayed that way a long time.

  “Thank you,” she finally offered. “For getting me out. I hadn’t remembered until tonight. And Lour . . .”

  “You’re remembering more,” I deduced.

  She found no words about it. I didn’t ask her to try.

  I promised to steal back into the city each moon cycle to visit. I told her she’d get stronger each day. I told her we’d find a way to be together again. They were the right lies to tell. Except for me coming to visit. That wasn’t a lie. That I’d do.

  ~

  I settled north of Aubade Grove a piece. Set to raising corn. My dad had raised corn. I’d been in my new home the better part of a month when the note came. Martin brought it himself. He stood by me while I read it.

  Anna hadn’t suffered the memories well. They’d gotten the better of her. She’d realized she’d never outlast those memories. And she’d found a way to escape. She’d had another moment of clarity—different this time, from when the Velle first touched her.

  “I’m so sorry, Lour,” Martin said. “She was a strong woman.”

  I gave him a puzzled look, even as my heart broke.

  “For my stars, a woman who goes through what she did, then chooses to end her life to escape the memory of it . . . Damn brave. Oh, I wish she were still with us. But don’t you go feeling anything but proud of that gal.”

  I cried. That’s the only way to say it. I cried. She should never have loved me. She’d have been a college savant somewhere, if she hadn’t stayed in the Grove because I was so frail.

  Damn my bones. My sensitive skin. My humped walk.

  You make me laugh, she’d always said.

  And I had survived several run-ins while putting together my argument for the forum, hadn’t I. I remember thinking philosophy was getting dangerous.

  A dangerous philosophy.

  That’s gods-damned right. And that’s exactly what I’d give them.

  I showed Martin a thin look.

  “I like what you’re thinking,” he said, smiling. “Whatever it is.”

  “Meaning you’d like to help?” I replied, folding the note and pocketing it.

  “What you got in mind?” said Martin.

  I looked up over my young crop of corn at a clear sky of stars above. “Did you know Pliny Soray appears to be off?” I pointed up at the wandering star.

  “That I did.” Martin stroked his thin white beard. “There’s a sharp woman out of the College of Mathematics—Nanjesho Alanes is her name. She might be taking a run at another Succession of Arguments on Continuity. She knows about Pliny Soray. She’s a friend of Scalinou’s.”

  There was a connection in it all, somewhere. I could feel it. Almost like a compass needle turning south in my hand.

  “League’s coming,” I said, still watching Soray. “Not today or tomorrow. But soon. And they hate the ideas about the Bourne and all it stands for.”

  “Ayeah?” Martin said, coaxing.

  Darius had been right. I hadn’t really proved my argument. I’d won. But that wasn’t good enough. Not by a damn jot.

  “I have a proof in mind,” said I. “One that’ll make them angry as every last hell.”

  “I’ll get you some sky gear—instruments, notation, skyglass,” Martin said, his voice as gleeful as when he replayed the pageants he used to perform.

  “Dear abandoning gods, here we come,” I raised a loud whoop that echoed out over my cornfield, the way my dad used to. “A story proof.”

  “Which story?” Martin asked, wearing a conspiratorial grin.

  “Not a story.” I shook my head. “A proof of story.”

  “To make Anna’s account of the Bourne true to skeptics,” Martin surmised.

  This time I nodded. “That, and the stories every pale, weak slob holds close. The ones that give him grit when the world couldn’t give a tinker’s damn.”

  “That include philosopher slobs?” Martin put a warm hand gently on my shoulder.

  I’ll miss you, Anna. Dear silent gods, I will.

  I was eager to begin. But not that night. That evening I stood with Martin for a long while, regarding the stars.

  It’s a good feeling knowing someone is no longer in pain. And it’s a good feeling being on the front end of doing something you believe is important. And maybe irreverent.

  Anna would have laughed at that.

  River and Echo

  John Marco

  They say the plague started with a nosebleed.

  The story goes that one day a tailor named Deon sneezed when a cat came into his shop. Afterward, he couldn’t stop sneezing, his handkerchief turning red with blood. His wife washed the handkerchief and she started bleeding too, and then all the shopkeepers near the gate bled, first from their noses and then from their eyes. And they bled from their mouths, of course, because the coughing put holes in their lungs.

  River’s mother had died that way, but he wasn’t sure about the story. For one thing his mother loved cats and never sneezed around them. They’d even had a cat of their own when he was little—which he wasn’t anymore because he was nine years old now. River’s father got the nosebleed too, but his eyes never bled, not even when pieces of his stomach showed up in his vomit. His parents had both died quickly, and that was good so they could go to the “better place” River’s mother always talked about. All the city suffered like that before they died, but they all died fast. Even the humatons died.

  All but River and Echo.

  The thing that killed them didn’t have a name. River called it “the plague” because he’d heard his father call it that, and his father was a professor. Still, no matter how smart they were, nobody had been able to save themselves or figure out what killed them.

  Whatever the plague was, it had come from the enemy outside the city’s walls. They had put the plague into the city and then come to watch it die. And every night there were more of them, hovering just at the edge of invasion, their campfires twinkling like distant stars. There were so many campfires now River couldn’t count them. Even with winter approaching, they came. But they never came closer, and that irked River because he wanted to see them for real, and not just in the book Echo showed him.

  At noontime the big clock in Concourse Square chimed. It seemed louder now with all the people gone. River had told Echo they could stop at noon and take a break from their work. The day was damp and the cold made his fingers ache where he’d clipped down his gloves. He dragged the humaton he’d found in the baker’s shop onto the pile, then scratched another line into the cobblestones with his chalk. Each line meant a dead humaton for their army, and this latest made twenty-one. River stepped back and looked at the humatons and nodded. Twenty-one would look good on the wall. With weapons and helmets, twenty-one would look frightening. He was proud of his idea to set up his army atop the wall. With their metal bodies, they wouldn’t collapse or rot the way people did. They didn’t stink the way people did, either. To River, the humatons looked pretty much the same, except for the blue light of their eyes, which of course flicked off the moment they died.

  “Echo!” River called out. “Where are you?”

  The clockworks in his head meant Echo was never late unless he wanted to be. River looked around the empty square, expecting Echo to peek out from one of the stalls. Mostly everything was just as the shopkeepers had left it, when they went to the wild camp. Luckily, that
was far from Concourse Square.

  “Echo? Come on, I’m hungry!”

  Finally he came, his big feet clanking on the stones. River turned quickly toward him, surprised to see Echo carrying two humatons over his shoulders. One had long, beautiful hair that almost swept the ground. The half of Echo’s face molded to look human flushed with color, the closest a humaton could come to smiling. The other half whirred and clicked to make the illusion happen.

  “I found these two in the furrier’s workshop,” Echo pronounced. The voice came from a rectangular slit where a mouth would be if he were human. It sounded alive, pretty much, but a little like talking into a bucket. Echo strode on toward the collection of humatons they’d gathered.

  “He had two?” asked River.

  “He was a furrier,” Echo reminded him. “There are some beautiful pelts in his shop. I saw unskinned sable there just where he left them. We’ll go back later to see. Let me show you this one with the hair.”

  Echo loved beautiful things. Shiny things. Beads of glass. He still collected them even though the city was dead. Gently he placed the two humatons near the one River had found. Almost all of the humatons they’d found were male; most of the female versions were built as girls, and too small to be frightening. The furrier’s female was remarkable looking. Like all the humatons, her head was half human and half machine, all covered in luxurious hair. River knelt down next to her and ran his fingers through the blond strands. It felt completely human, like his mother’s hair.

  “That’s twenty-three,” said Echo. He didn’t need River’s chalk marks to count them. He could count anything just by looking at it. River was still playing with the female humaton’s hair. Echo noticed this and said, “We can cover the hair with a helmet. Or cut it off.”

  “Oh, no way. Don’t cut it.” River looked at the humatons they’d gathered. Once, they’d been alive, like Echo. “I don’t want to change any of them. I want to leave ’em like they are. That’s what they would have wanted.”

  “If we want to scare the enemy, we’ll have to change them. Weapons and helmets at least.”

  “Weapons and helmets, yeah, but that’s it.”

  “Whatever you want, River. I can start bringing them to the wall now.”

  “I’m hungry. Let’s take a break.”

  “All right. Take a break. I’ll work.”

  “Leave it for now. Sit with me.”

  Echo hesitated. “This is what you wanted to do today.”

  “I know. We’ll do it. But we’ll break first, okay? We can set up the army later.”

  “Later we have your lessons.”

  River groaned, because there were always lessons. Echo had been built to give lessons. History, mathematics, philosophy—Echo knew them all. It was impossible to stump him, though River sometimes tried.

  “We can skip the lessons,” said River. “Just for today. You can do that for me, can’t you?”

  “Your mother and father would want them to continue.”

  River let the female’s golden hair fall like sand through his fingers. “Why didn’t my father build you with hair?”

  “Professor Nous started losing his hair when he was twenty-one.” Echo made a thumping sound, his version of laughter. “I’m you in the future, remember.”

  “Oh.” River fell on his backside. He hated the thought of going bald like his father, but it didn’t really matter now. There were no girls to impress or marry. No apprenticeships or professions. No reason to take a bath. All he had to do was defend the city. But setting up the humatons was a big job. They were heavy, and hoisting them up to stand guard atop the wall would be tough even for Echo. And first he had to dress them . . .

  “Let’s eat.”

  * * * * *

  For the first month after the plague, finding food was easy. To River, the city was the whole world, and he had never been beyond its walls. According to Echo, the king’s last census had put the population of the city at about 20,000—too many bodies to bury, of course, though most had gone to the wild camp to die. Those who had remained had died in their homes, mostly, sealing themselves away so only the rats and insects could find them. Despite the stink, River was glad the city had fed so many people. They had left behind stores and farms to explore for food, and he knew that if he kept on looking, he would always discover a new jar of pickled fruit or some cured ham to keep him alive.

  Concourse Square, where they’d stacked the humatons, still had plenty of unspoiled things to eat. Besides the furrier and the baker’s shop, there was a butcher who had persevered chicken meat in fat, jamming it into jars the size of human heads. The baker’s stale biscuits softened nicely in the fat, and River smeared it on fearlessly. He and Echo rolled two barrels out of the brewer’s shop, sitting atop them while River ate and drank a glass of the brewer’s ale. When his parents were alive, he had snuck sips of ale from his father’s mug. Now that they were gone only Echo could stop him, and Echo never did.

  A black metal gate, twenty-feet high and forged into the city’s wall, led into the square. In all his life River could not recall a time when the gate was closed, but it was now—closed and locked and wrapped with chains. The gate had been shut the same day the king ordered the flags hung upside down.

  Like wild fire, they all said. That’s how quickly the plague had spread. River had never seen wild fire, but he supposed it was pretty damn fast.

  “Wild fire,” he said between sips of ale. “Damn fast.”

  He was cursing a lot. His parents wouldn’t have liked that. He felt bad for a moment then said it again.

  “Damn fast.”

  Echo didn’t answer. His blue eyes stared at the distant hills where the enemy waited. They were too far away to see in the daylight, but they weren’t hiding. Every night, more and more of their campfires came, glowing around the city like a necklace.

  “We should get to work,” grunted River. He stuffed a biscuit into his mouth, saying as he chewed, “Just let me finish up.”

  Echo nodded only a little. His silence flustered River.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No, I’m not afraid,” replied Echo. “I was made out of you. If you’re not afraid then I’m not afraid.”

  River chewed, swallowed, and took another big bite. Humatons could lie just as easily as people.

  “You know,” said River after a moment, “If we were going to die, we’d be dead already. Don’t you think that’s true?”

  “Yes,” agreed Echo.

  “But we’re not dead. I check my nose every night. You don’t see me but I do. I look up there and I don’t see any blood. Nothing. And I never sneeze. Never.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “What I’m saying is that we’re here for a reason. Whatever the plague is, it can’t touch us. That’s got to be the way God wants it, right?”

  “God?”

  “Yeah. God. Or whatever. He wants us here to take care of things, to make sure the enemy doesn’t get through. That’s why we didn’t die.”

  “I like that story,” said Echo. “But what about everybody else? Why are they dead?”

  River shrugged. “God don’t need them, I guess.”

  “But he needs us—a nine-year-old boy and a machine? Why not a hummingbird and a pencil?”

  “You’re not a machine.”

  “The story has to make sense,” said Echo. “Explain it to me. Why did God choose us?”

  River shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s God.”

  Echo approximated a sigh. “This conversation is a circle. It has no end. Therefore, no purpose.” He slipped down from his barrel. “Keep eating if you want. I’m going to work.”

  * * * * *

  Dressing the dead humatons was harder than River expected. They had already stripped the coats and hats from the fallen soldiers they’d found throughout the city, piling them in a stable at the far side of the square to keep them safe from the weather, but the trek between the stable and their undressed army ti
red River quickly. There were weapons to haul as well, mostly long-guns and swords, and these River carried two at a time, balancing them in his armpits while he carried the clothes.

  Most of the humatons, like Echo, wore trousers and shirts and vests—the usual stuff for an upper-class citizen. The few females in their lot wore skirts, and River undressed them with a powerful curiosity, wondering if they—like the males—had been created sexless. To his disappointment they were, just as Echo had told him. Still, it felt odd to River to be taking their clothes off. It almost felt like he was hurting them, so he told each one that they were being dressed to defend the city, like heroes, and that he was sorry they were dead and couldn’t dress themselves anymore.

  One by one, River and Echo hoisted the humatons onto the battlements and watchtowers, sometimes using ropes to lift their heavy bodies and then positioning them to look fierce. The big clock in the square chimed as the hours past. The sun slipped away. Finally, they lifted the humaton with the beautiful hair up onto a catwalk near the gate. She looked very much like a soldier in her gray coat and trousers, but the sweeping blond hair remained a problem. River watched as Echo placed the silver helmet on her head.

  “That’s peculiar looking,” said River. “She looks like a girl.”

  “I told you we need to cut it. It’s too much to stuff under her helmet.”

  River took a step back. “From far away will they even see it?”

  “Maybe they come closer at night when we’re sleeping. If the wind blows her hair they’ll see it.”

  “Yeah. They have eyes like eagles.” River remembered that from the book. Eyes like eagles and scales like snakes—those were what he remembered most. “Does it matter? Who says a girl can’t be a soldier?”

  Echo’s blue eyes flashed with frustration. “This was your idea. We should cut it.”

  But River couldn’t. “Leave it.” He put the long-gun he had chosen for her in her metal hands, closing the fingers around it. “I like her the way she is.”

  They stayed on the catwalk for an hour more, watching the hills turn black around them. As always, the campfires of the enemy winked into view, just a few at first, then many, many others. Some were closer now too. By the time the big clock struck eight, the hills were ablaze with them.