Patreon Year 3 Collection
Among the Chosen Girls
Citizens of Elsewhen
Corpse Soldier
Echo Echo Echo Echo
Flicker
Glottal Gifts
Monsters Do Not Die Quietly
Powder Burns
The Conclave of Ravens
We Burn
Women’s Art of War
Overdark
Among the Chosen Girls
Two girls, a he and a she, married along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. They were both very small, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough to fly. Frost kissed their eyelashes. They lay in the snow, dressed all in martyr's white.
We stoned them to death at dawn. The blood was very beautiful.
Not every he and she can survive this world we’ve made. Not all are meant to.
After, my mother brought me back to town. It was four days into the new year. I was eighteen, still raw and sore from my own blooding. She dressed me in red and paraded me around the square to ensure the entire settlement got a good look at me in my new skin. I was married, sold, to the highest bidder. He was still drunk on the festivities related to the stoning. I remembered being uncomfortable, heaped onto a bed of cane flowers and figs. I did as I was expected to do, as one selected to become a she.
There are rules. We all know them.
To not follow them is to invite the stones.
After, I met the house girls, castrated, and the proper stud, who was not. He was beautiful in the androgynous way of cut girls and dancers. He was vain, and impossible. I did not care for him. When I sat two months without issue, my spouse switched him with another in an attempt to inspire my finicky womb. Time was wasted, my spouse said. My upkeep was expensive. I had to extend his household, bear my civil burden.
Don’t we all.
I smoked opium in the afternoons, ate chocolates in the mornings. We had no mirrors in the house. My spouse would not allow me liquor. Too many kept shes had fallen into that stream, my spouse said. I wondered if it were possible to be a kept thing if one wasn’t a she.
Perhaps that was blasphemy. Perhaps it was the opium.
On festival days, my spouse and I traveled by private rail to the shrine. We picked out flat stones from the warm riverbed. The river there is always warm. Steam hovers above the water, the breath of ghosts. It was my favorite place, the shrines, and the stones. I liked the blood in the snow, after the ritual, the ache in my arm from throwing. I screamed, during, until my voice hoarse. The trees were alive with white ribbons. I always took one home. Tied them around my wrists.
After the rituals at the shrine, I walked through opium dreams for days and days. When the studs came, I was floating asleep, lost. Untethered. Free of burdens. They did not chain me, only my womb, this strange new part of me I had not been born with, but had been thrust upon me, not at my behest, but at theirs. Always theirs. Who would want another body that could not bear new life, only stud it?
Most days, I did not know who or what I was. You lose all sense of things, when the world tells you that you are a thing you are not. When the world thrusts an identity upon you and tries to erase you without your consent.
The one seed that clung to me, the one that drove tendrils into this new flesh… I tried to cut out. I did not like what they had made of me. Did not like my place. I was not here to tangle with what they had given me. What they had made me.
I wanted to make myself.
My spouse took away the opium, leaving his burden, his and the stud's, for me to bear. After the child was done, I knew, it would believe it was mine, another limb, an arm, a second face.
What are you, when the world tries to make you into something you know you’re not?
Sometimes I really believed my body was mine, during dark nights of dark dreams. But I would wake and find that it was all theirs. We still die making babies. We still die, but a womb makes me not mine, but theirs.
I am theirs.
I cut myself very deep, but there was so much flesh between me and my womb. So much blood. I tried to hack it out, but one of the house girls caught me.
The doctors came, their hair all in ribbons. They argued about killing me, taking the womb out and soaking it in solution. Saving the womb, the seed inside, for some other chosen girl, a better girl, hoping it would live, not caring if I died.
The doctors decided not to take my womb. I was too young, they said. I was still viable.
This was a world of bodies where none were born with wombs. We were assigned our roles according to the need of the settlement.
I was needed here.
I was this.
The house girls strapped me into bed to heal. If I turned my head, pressed my cheek to the pillow, I could stare out the window. Through the transparent foil: an illusion of freedom, open space. A bird bell hung from the sloping eaves. It hung with a dozen shimmering coins of all colors, metallic black and crimson, amber-turquoise. The wind led them dancing.
Some days, I had to close my eyes.
I wanted to go back to my old life. They believe they can bend you to the will of the world, but that’s never been true. All it does is force you to dig more deeply into yourself. To hide. To play a role, an exhausting drama, until death takes you.
I know some of the house girls loved this life. Enjoyed what it offered.
But I was not a house girl.
I never had been.
Once they give you a womb, they want to own you. You are the means of production. You are their connection to the future.
My body expelled the seed, after a time. There was much blood, some ill-formed clots of cells. It happened at night, the pain, and I did not cry out. They found me the next morning and finally released me from the bed. They scraped the blood into a pan, pointed to a black bead, a tail just becoming legs, like a mermaid.
“See what you killed,” my spouse said, gazing into the pan containing my body’s rejected tissue. “You could have made me an heir. Look, instead, what your body has done.”
But it was not my body, not anymore. It was his.
Why does the ability to bear children transform your rights? Turn you into a not-human?
My spouse brought me to bed a few weeks after the end of the mermaid, the promise of one. He gave me time, he said, to grieve my body’s loss. Not mine, my body’s. He said we would try again. We. All of us. He and the stud, and the house girls with their keys to the opium, the alcohol.
My spouse and I, a he and a she, met along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. We dressed all in martyr’s white.
I was old, by then. Barren. Nothing else would take hold. I had brought our house to this. Me. My womb. One and the same, to the law.
I begged them to take it out. To make me a person again.
But that isn’t how our world works.
The breath of the river was warm as a stud’s body. I held a stone in my palm, a perfectly flat stone the shape of a conch shell. I held it to my ear, but there was only silence.
We stood under the tall trees. The long ribbons stirred our hair. I gave my stone to a small girl, her body still her own, not yet retooled for use by the settlement. Still just a girl. She looked up at me. I saw she would like the blood on the snow just as I had. I knew what the spouses feared, then, knew it as I knew the blood on the snow would be beautiful.
They fear our free will. They fear bodies they cannot own.
The girl throws the first stone. My stone. Ours. It strikes my temple. Blood runs.
She throws stones at what she will become. What they will make her. But she cannot kill it, cannot stop it. They’ll take my
womb. They’ll give it to her.
We will go around and around.
She throws stones at herself. She throws stones at the world we have made. She throws stones.
There is frost on our eyelashes. My spouse is singing.
It is very beautiful.
END
Citizens of Elsewhen
“Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.” - Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon
We drop through the seams between things and onto the next front.
The come down is hard. It’s meant to be. The universe doesn’t want you to mess with the fabric of time. Our minds are constantly putting down bits of narrative into our brains, a searing record of “now” that gives us the illusion of passing time. In truth, there is only “now,” the singular moment. We are all of us grubs hunting mindlessly for food, insects calling incessantly for mates. Nothing came before or after.
But because time is a trick of the mind, it can be hacked. And we have gotten good at it. We had to. It was the only way to secure our future.
“Who’s got the football?” Elba says from the darkness beside me. “Lexi?”
“It’s en route,” Lexi says. “I’m rerouting the coordinates. Coordinates are 17,56-34-12 knot 65,56-22-75. Confirmed placement.”
“Recording,” Elba says
And there is light.
Our brains start recording moments again, rebooted from our last jump. I half-hope this is some new scenario, a fresh start, but the chances of that are slim. We do these over and over again until we get them right. Because if we don’t get them right... well, shit, then we don’t exist.
We only remember our successes, never our failures. This helps with team morale, or so the psychs told us back in the training days, back when everything was burning, the whole world coming apart, and we got tapped to save it.
When they first started sending us back to secure a better future, the teams could remember every failure. It led to weariness and burnout; only the very stubborn or very stupid can stand living with the memory of compounded failure. Teams engaged in Operation Gray could endure more drops if we only remembered the good times. The successes. It kept us pushing forward.
For the failures, we had the logs. Our logs told us how many times we’d dropped in, and what we’d tried before. The trick, for me, was to pretend the log was from some other team. I pretended I was reading a report about somebody else who failed to complete the mission. I told myself my squad was coming in fresh to solve a problem someone else fucked up. Don’t think too hard about the fact that you were thinking the same thing every time you failed beforehand, or you’ll get stuck thinking about it, round and round, and then you’re not good for anything.
Trust me.
The light and shadow transforms into our current coordinates in space and time. It’s the last month of autumn in the year we call 4600 BU (before us), known locally as the year 1214 Ab urbe condita, or 461 C.E. by some old alternate calendars. We are in the Western Roman Empire in what is known around here as Hispania, which will become Spain, then the European Alliance, then the Russian-US Federation, the Chinese-Russian Protectorate, the Europe again, and eventually, after several more hand-offs, the province that, in my time, we call Malorian. I know this area, its future, because I was born sixteen kilometers north in the city of Madira. I know this coast because I will, more than three thousand years from now, walk upon these same beaches with my mothers, and raise a little orange flag during a parade celebrating the anniversary of Unification. My first visit here was also the first time I’d ever eaten a lemon, and the sharp, bitter taste is tied so closely with my memory of the coast that I taste lemon as we take in the sight of the sea just to our left.
A soft, salty wind blows in from over the Mediterranean. My bare toes sink into the sand. I bowl over and spit a mouthful of vomit. Beside me, Lexi has taken the jump worse. He’s lying on his side, frothing and seizing. Elba stumbles over to him and shoots him up with a stabilizing agent.
I pat at myself as the gear bags materialize around us. “Got the football,” I say. We’re nothing without the gear. Without the gear, we have to start the fuck over again. We’ve stumbled naked into camps before, no plasma, no flesh fix-up, no anti-bacterial mesh, nothing, and for all our knowledge, we’re useless without those things. It wasn’t being dumb that killed so many of the people we’re here to save. It was simply not having access to what we did.
The wind is crisp. I shiver as I tear open the gooey sac protecting our gear. I make a guess at how all the clothes are supposed to go on; my AI still hasn’t completed the download for this mission. I lace on boots over sandy toes. The clothes part is always haphazard, never quite right. I don’t care what anyone says – it’s clear every time we jet into some other time that we’re aliens, strangers in a strange land. Go back far enough, you can claim godhood, but fewer people fall for that than the old stories would have you think. Better to say you were sent by a mutual acquaintance, a family friend.
I give another heave, spitting more bile, and blink as my AI completes the mission download. The AI’s presence is a warm, comforting one, sitting there in the back of my head, dutifully making connections faster than a non-augmented brain, and storing more information, more quickly, than a civilian. Four hundred years before I was born, AI’s were considered separate entities, a different consciousness, like something that lived on its own. They stuck them into people’s heads and gave them names. But that drove far too many people mad. They tore off their own faces trying to get the fucker out. It was better if subjects saw the AI as a part of themselves, an enhancement to their own intelligence, instead of a separate entity.
The AI is how I knew that this was former Visigoth territory, only recently brought to heel by the Western Roman Empire. I knew Majoram, the Western Roman Emperor, had been killed in the summer at the ripe old age of forty, and this being early autumn, there was a heated battle for the Emperor’s title still raging here in the west, led by Ricimer, the head of the army who’d had Majoram killed.
But the lofty milestones of history don’t prepare you much for the sort of work we do. All it does it provide greater context for what we’re walking into.
As we suit up, we don’t ask dumb questions like where is she? Where are we headed? The memories are already pouring in. We have other things to talk about.
“Lemon cake,” I say, continuing the last conversation we can remember; the one we were having after our last successful extraction, killing time before the next jump.
“Can’t talk about food,” Lexi says; he gags again.
“I miss cheeseburgers,” Elba says. “You remember those cheeseburgers at that diner back in... the woman on all the pills? That green vehicle? AI says the colloquial year was 1955.”
“Should have killed us,” I say. “You know how they processed meat back then?”
“Still mad they pulled us before I finished,” Elba says.
Lexi dry-heaves.
“Sorry,” Elba says.
I heft my pack; I’m the muscle on this trip, every trip, but you don’t want to carry stuff that looks too much like a weapon. We aren’t permitted to kill anyone anyway. You kill someone you aren’t supposed to, and you start over.
“We’re four to one,” Lexi says, knotting the laces of his sandals. He spits again.
I figure he’s referring to the fact that the log says our failure last time was because the subject bled out.
“Your mistake last time,” I say. “That’s four to two.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “She’d have died of an infection if she hadn’t bled out.”
“Who dropped the antibiotic mesh?” I say.
We are dressed in linen tunics, knee breeches, and long coats; the clothes aren’t well-worn enough to pass muster, even if they are the right cut for whatever class we’re supposed to be, and I’m sure they aren’t. When I ping the AI about that,
I learn that we tried a more patrician style of clothing on our first drop, and got run out of town for it. This one apparently worked to get us past the settlement gatekeepers. I wasn’t going to argue with the AI’s memory.
“Up the dunes,” Lexi says. “You can shit on each other and walk at the same time, right?”
“Memory serves, we sure can,” I say.
We walked up off the sandy beach. There’s not much I can recognize here, except the sea. The sea has washed up all sorts of detritus. There’s broken pottery and tiles, rusted bits of metal, tattered riggings, and refuse of all sorts. Far up the beach, I see what must be beach scavengers. They are headed the other direction; I’m not sure if they witnessed our appearance on the beach.
Here and there are the jutting ruins of more sea trash, old shipwrecks, discarded implements, reminder that though this place is three thousand years before our time, the world here is already ancient. We’ve been further back in time, much further, but had found the results to be less precise. The further back we go, the more complicated the mathematical models become. Too many variables. Turns out reverse-engineering a future by fiddling with the past can be… complicated. And often, terribly messy. Careening through space-time wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I signed up to serve and see Unification through. But here we were.
“If it’s the bleeding,” Lexi says, “I’ll prep the line first thing this time.”
On the other side of the dunes are a series of caves. The wind changes, and I catch the smell of the fires. Cave dwellers like these tend to choose these areas because they dislike the oppressive reach of the states. It was a wonder they weren’t slaves under some Roman land lord, but our records of Roman activity and expansion have never been exhaustive. Everything that is the past is fragmented. Our models do better tracking people through genetics – births and deaths - than across cultures and kingships and writs of sale on clay tablets that wash away over time. We can read the histories of our bodies in our blood - but less so the history of our cultures.
Our presence is noticed immediately by a young girl scouting on the rocks. She runs into the village for the headwoman. The AI tells me they are fisher folk, protected from engulfment by the wider body politic largely by geography. The able-bodied men are either dead or gone trawling, clinging to the edges of the beachhead, no doubt, worrying after fish.
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