by R. Lee Smith
“Fuck Gann,” he said mildly. “Or fuck a kipwe, anyway. They used to have kipwe shows in the camp when I was young. I may have mentioned that once. Druud, get over here.”
Scott came, his head bent and jaw tightly clenched.
“Did she fight back?” Iziz asked, prodding at the worst of the scars with his fingertip.
“No,” Scott said sullenly.
“Could she? Or was she just lying there in a pool of her own fucking blood?”
“She wasn’t bleeding.”
“She wasn’t bleeding,” Iziz echoed, again in that almost-laughing way. “That bled, Druud. Tell me it didn’t again and I’ll tear your squirming little tongue out and feed it to you. You’ve seen me do it before. Dare me not to now.”
“She was bandaged up when…She was bandaged by then.”
“I see. You really are a shining drop of poison shit, aren’t you?” Iziz asked, almost admiringly. He fingered the edge of the scar for a moment more, plucked at it just once with the rough scale that acted as a fingernail, and then moved his hand unhurriedly lower, wedging it beneath her breeches with a grunt of effort to grip at her sex. He had to hook at her girdle to hold her from her instinctive flinch, but he wasn’t bothered by it. His expression remained serene if distracted as he felt between her legs for her opening and forced a finger inside.
Not a sound from him. Not a sound from anyone, unless the low mutters and speculative grunts from the watching raiders counted. Iziz worked a second finger in and rubbed them slowly back and forth, watching her watch the sky. At last, he wrenched the fishhook out of her girdle and cupped the back of her head instead, more or less making her face him.
“I’m going to fuck you,” he told her grimly. “I don’t think I’ll enjoy it much, but I’m going to do it. After that…well, I promised my men a fresh poke if we ever found you. So. Here’s what’s going to happen, Eshiqi, if you want to start making your plan. You’re going to catch every cock in my camp all the way down to little Thirqa unless you pick someone to take your place.”
Amber pressed her lips together and glared at him.
His spines flicked. “You don’t mean that.”
That felt horribly like the truth, but she shook her head and glared at him anyway.
“Point your finger for me, Eshiqi,” Iziz said, working his own a little deeper into her. “I promise not to kill them if you give them to me freely.”
She shivered, but kept silent.
Iziz waited, running his gaze over Eric and Nicci, and then the rest of his huddled human slaves, keeping his hand at work the whole time. When his eyes finally came back to her, he pulled his hand out of her breeches and wiped it on Scott’s chest. “Not a damn one of them would do the same for you,” he told her seriously. “You know that, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“When I told Druud to pick one of his for mine to play with, he did it. He would have sold them if I’d offered him coin. He promised me you before I even knew he knew you.” He smiled with his head cocked and the yellow throbbing on his neck. “I’ll make it easy for you, just tonight. I’ll let you choose Druud.”
Scott made a cawing sound, but she didn’t look at him.
“It’s not the fresh poke I promised, but then again, it’s nothing new to Druud either,” Iziz said. “Point him out to me and I’ll even let you sit with your man tonight where you don’t have to watch. No?” The tilt came out of Iziz’s neck. He leaned very close, his breath hot and bitter on her lips. “Say it, then. Tell me no. Say it like the fierce little thing Zhuqa always said you were.”
Amber did not answer. Her jaws ached from keeping them clenched. Her palms hurt where her fingernails dug at them in fists. Her heart hurt, but it kept beating.
Iziz turned his head slightly while keeping his eyes on Amber. “Nicci!” he called.
“You stay the fuck away from her!” Amber shouted, and she must have lunged too because there were hands all over her all at once, yanking her back and holding her tight. “Leave her alone! I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I’ll kill—”
Iziz slapped her. He didn’t let her see it coming like Zhuqa would have done. She scarcely saw him move at all. There was a black blur and a white light and then she was sagging back in a raider’s grip, staring dazedly at the sky while her face swelled with heat.
“You had the first choice,” Iziz spat. “You threw it away to score points off me. How many points was it worth, eh? Nicci!”
Nicci came. No one brought her. She just came. Her neck was bent, like a lizardlady’s, to an subservient angle. “Can I pick someone else?” she asked.
Iziz, one hand on the buckle of his belt, paused. His spines flicked, then flared curiously. “Who?”
Nicci looked at Amber.
But of course that didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t. They were sisters. They were all each other had. Amber had taken care of Nicci all her life. She’d tucked her in at night, got her up in the morning, walked her to school, done everything their mother was too strung out to care about. Amber was the one hiding with her in the bathroom when Bo Peep brought her bad dates home. Amber was the one stealing fruit cups and milk cartons off the lunch line so Nicci would have something to eat that night. Amber had fought off big kids and alley dogs and their mom’s drunken punches and every other goddamn thing the world had thrown at them and they loved each other, they were sisters, and this was not happening!
“Take her,” said Nicci. “She’s the one who deserves it. Not me. So you take her. You make her feel it.”
“You don’t mean that,” Amber heard herself say. Heard someone say, at any rate. It sounded more like their mother, when she was stoned and half-asleep.
“She looks like she means it,” Iziz remarked. “But I’m not bargaining with you, Nicci. Not tonight. On your belly.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Amber lunged again, but she was held fast. “Please! You can take me, just please let her go!”
Iziz finally looked at her, but he never had a chance to answer.
“Go?” said Nicci. “Go where? Look where we are! You…You made me come here!” Nicci shook her head in an incredulous, angry series of jerks. “How could you do that? How could you do that? You were supposed to take care of me!” she screamed suddenly, throwing open her arms. “Me! And you picked him! So fuck you, Amber! You hear me? Fuck you! I hope you choke on their fucking cum and die!”
“You don’t mean that!”
“Let’s find out.” Iziz offered the fish hook.
Nicci looked at it, then snatched it from his hand and stepped up, holding it in her shaking fist.
The hands pinning Amber to this moment tightened, but she wasn’t struggling. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even feel the air in her lungs. This wasn’t happening. It just…just wasn’t.
“I hate you,” said Nicci. “I want you to see this. I want you to know that this happened because of you.”
She swung. But not at Amber, motionless, stunned.
The curved edge of the fish hook sank as easily into Nicci’s throat as it had into the soft inner meat of Zhuqa’s body. She screamed again and ripped, grunting with the effort to make the hook move. A hot, heavy gush struck Amber in the eyes. She slapped at them, screaming and tasting her sister’s blood—swallowing it—and still somehow heard Iziz’s quiet, “Ah,” just exactly the way he’d said it over Zhuqa’s corpse.
The fury of Nicci’s features slackened, twisting into something merely bewildered in the moment before she staggered. Amber lunged to catch her, punching at the lizardman who tried to restrain her, but Nicci’s weight was too much to hold and her hands were slippery. They went down together in a hot, wet heap with Amber on top, trying desperately to push the blood back in through the open gash in her baby sister’s neck. It didn’t last long; she could have counted the seconds by the slowing spews of fresh gore if she could have counted anything at all, but there weren’t many. Nicci clutched once at her arm and once at her hair. Her lips moved,
but there was no sound, no way to say for sure just what she would have said. It looked like ‘help’. Or ‘hate’. Then she was dead—warm clay in the shape of Nichole Sarah Bierce—and nothing was left to move her blood except gravity.
“That was even better than I hoped for,” said Iziz, but so far away and through so many muffling layers of cotton that she could barely understand him. “Stand her up.”
Someone must have tried because it seemed to Amber that she fell upwards for a moment, then downwards, then both at once and then she was gone too.
* * *
The lights came on, vast bright lights with no particular source, whiting out the world to a clean, featureless blank in which Amber stood alone. After a while, it occurred to her that she was standing in a line, and sure enough, there was a string of people in front of and behind her. They were all in white, like the lights, like the walls and floor and ceiling. She was in the Manifestors’ skyport, she realized, and there it was, the Pioneer, not in space at all but sitting right there on the tarmac, waiting to board.
She looked to her left and there was Nicci, hugging her duffel bag and crying because she didn’t want to go. She looked down and by God, she was fat again, her belly straining at the stiff fabric of her brand new colonist’s shirt.
None of it had happened yet. She could stop now, walk away. There’d be fines to pay, but she could figure something out. Get another job. Lose the weight (again). Hell, she could leave the city and watch on the tiny television above the bar where she worked just down the road from the trailer where she and Nicci lived as the whole world wondered what had happened to the Pioneer, and on the other side of the universe, Meoraq would go to Xi’Matezh without her.
Scott was waiting to scan her thumb, only she didn’t know he was Scott yet. She didn’t ever have to know. She could still walk away.
And Meoraq would walk home from Xi’Matezh alone.
“Let him.”
She turned to her right and there was her mother, somewhere between Bo Peep and Mary Bierce, wearing a white t-shirt and no makeup, smoking a cigarette. She smiled with half her mouth, not mean but just tired, the look of a woman who knows. “You can’t save everyone, little girl.”
Maybe it was the dream that made her do it, although none of this felt like a dream yet. Maybe it was her bitchy nature. Maybe it was just because it was Mama saying it, but Amber suddenly had to argue.
“I could save them,” she said. “I could shout the place up right now, tell them the ship’s going to crash, tell them everyone who goes is going to die.”
“Go ahead,” said her mother. She tossed her hair back and looked at the ship, her eye lingering over all those people going in. She looked…sad. Honestly sad, not angry or self-pitying or bitter but just…sad. “They’ll drag you out of here and launch anyway.”
“So what if they do? If I could just delay them five minutes, maybe five minutes is all it would take.”
“For…?”
“For the ship. You know, for whatever happened out there to miss us.”
“You think so?”
“Maybe,” said Amber defensively, but now her mother’s sad eyes were staring into hers and she remembered all at once that there had been four more days of boarding after this. Five minutes, give or take, just didn’t mean that much in the end. “Maybe,” she said again, but she didn’t believe it.
“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and it rains in New York.”
“Huh?”
“A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan,” said her mother, “which blows pollen into the nose of a cow, which sneezes, which startles the rest of the herd into running, which changes the air currents by just a tiny fraction of a degree, which picks up momentum and instability as it travels across the ocean until it becomes a storm front, and it rains in New York.” She paused for a puff. Her eye sparked red with reflected light from the cherry. Meoraq’s eye. “Is that what you were thinking, little girl?”
“That sounds like total horseshit,” Amber admitted.
“That’s because it is. It relies on the idea that while all these little things are happening, the rest of the world is holding still to let them happen and that simply isn’t the way the world works. The reality is, it would have rained in New York anyway. The reality is, a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and a fence gets broken, but that just doesn’t have as much punch.”
Amber hadn’t moved in all this time, hadn’t taken a single step, but she found herself at the head of the line. Scott was waiting in his clean red uniform, one of thousands of brand-new crewmen, a cog in the machine that was about to blow up.
“So you’re saying it doesn’t matter what we do?” Amber asked uncertainly.
“Of course it matters,” said her mother, now gazing at the big television monitors where the Director was giving his uplifting speeches over and over…like Nuu Sukaga inviting all the post-Wrath survivors to come to Matezh hundreds of years too late to matter anymore. “But you can’t always stop it.”
“Because…it’s supposed to happen?”
Her mother looked at her, still not in a mean way, but with such bizarre force that Amber had to drop her eyes and even squirm a little.
“Are you asking if this was God’s plan?” her mother asked quietly, and suddenly the skyport was gone, replaced by the screaming wind and wasteland of Meoraq’s world. She could see the Pioneer, there at the end of the long, black scar it had left in the crash. She could see thousands of moaning, weeping, terrified people staggering around in the wreckage, illuminated by a sky filled with fire. “Do you really think this was part of anyone’s plan?”
Amber couldn’t answer. She could see herself down there, dragging Nicci through the crowds with her duffel bag firmly over her shoulder, heading for Scott and that other man (he was going to need someone to roll around with he said and then he apologized but not because he didn’t mean it and his name was john something french i think and if he’d only come with us we’d have rolled around plenty and how different things could have been maybe better maybe worse but oh so different).
“People make their own choices,” said her mother, now walking away behind her. “And God has to let them live with the consequences.”
Amber turned around to follow and staggered in the sudden silence. The wreck of the Pioneer was gone; she was in the courtyard at Xi’Matezh. The cliff was cold and muddy. That crumbling wall surrounded her, blocking out all but a little piece of the ocean. Her mother was already leaning up against the broken wall, smoking and watching the tide come in. Amber hesitated, then turned away and tried to open the outer doors of the shrine. Meoraq was in there. He was watching the video without her and she had to get to him before he came out. But her hands slipped weirdly over their surface without finding a gripping place; the more she struggled with them, the taller and heavier they seemed to get, until they towered over the whole enclosure, threatening to fall.
She gave up, stumbling back in their shadow, and turning at last to discover a lizardman standing where her mother had been. He was strangely hard to see. The sun was coming up over the ocean, stinging at her eyes like tears, blurring him in and out of recognition. She thought it was Meoraq at first, then Zhuqa, then some stranger in a white hood, but when she got closer, he looked back at her and she realized he was Lashraq. He still had her mother’s cigarette in his hand. He waited for her to join him at the hole in the wall and then took an impossible drag through his inflexible lizard-lips and turned back to watch the ocean.
The Ruined Reach as she’d last seen it was gone. The flotsam of a million bloated bodies bobbed on the tide, stretching out north to south as far as she could see, interrupted only by the carnage of a ruined port the land hadn’t yet reclaimed. There were no seagulls to scream over this feast, no crabs or sharks to pick it over from below. Everything was dead: the people, the animals, the ocean. She couldn’t smell it, which was the first she knew—cigarette-smoking lizardman and all—that this wasn’t real.
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“Am I dead?” she asked warily.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me!”
“Only if you’re not dead.”
That…made a certain amount of sense. If she was dead, she had a feeling not much would matter at all anymore. So since it did matter, was that proof she was alive? But if she was alive, she had to be dreaming, and if this was a dream, it wasn’t proof of anything.
“Are you supposed to be God?”
He snorted and glanced at her. “You sound skeptical.”
Amber groped for and found an irrefutable argument. “God doesn’t smoke!”
His spines shrugged. “You’d know, I guess.” Lashraq stubbed out his cigarette on the back of his hand and tossed it into the wind, leaning out over the broken bricks to watch it fall. “Want to know why I called it Gann?”
“Huh?”
“This world.” He gestured. “Clay. The evils of men. And all the other things it means. Want to know why I called it Gann? Would that prove something to you?”
“It’s the name of this planet, isn’t it?”
“Before the Fall, we called the planet I’az. It’s an old, old word that means, eh, foundation. The stuff beneath your feet.”
“Earth,” whispered Amber.
Lashraq shrugged again and turned back to the sea. “More or less. I called it Gann in the Word, though. That is, I said that Sheul called it Gann. I thought it sounded more otherworldly, you know, that God had a secret name for all things, that He had knowledge beyond ours. And I picked Gann specifically because my youngest brother was born with a mild deformation of the throat and until they fixed him, he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t say Zhan.” He glanced at her, smiling. “He called me Gann.”
“You named the devil after you? As a joke?”
“Not the best joke in the world, but I laughed now and then.”
“This doesn’t prove anything,” Amber insisted. “This is nothing but…but subconscious crap! You’re not my mother! You’re not the ghost of Lashraq Zhan! And you’re for damn sure not…not…”