Outside, Rhys asked, “How did it go?”
“They can fuck themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Silvi and Taite sat on the front of the bakkie, drinking sodas like two dumb kids.
“What you sorry for?” Nyx said. “I fucked it up.”
“You were trying to do a friend a favor.”
“All my friends are dead,” Nyx said, and went to the bakkie.
#
They got back to the keg so late it was early. Nyx was exhausted, and Rhys was snappish. Nyx brought them all back into the work area, where Anneke was passed out on a divan. Nyx divided up their pay.
“I feel like I didn’t do much,” Silvi said.
“My fault,” Nyx said. “Better to have too many hands than too few. You can crash here if you want.”
Nyx pulled the papers from Fatimah’s residence from her dhoti and stuffed them into her desk drawer. Taite watched her do it, hanging around in the doorway.
“You really aren’t going to do anything?” he said.
“I’m going to get drunk,” Nyx said. She opened up her makeshift bar, grabbed a bottle, and trudged up onto the roof to cool off.
The city was pretty, from up here. A black wash of muddy shadows and twinkling lights. Humps of sand dunes and twisted rock formations lay to the east. The sunrise was going to look great. She settled onto the lip of the flat roof and swung her legs over the side. Listened to the pattern of sand and tiny stones hitting the sidewalk below.
After a while, she heard someone behind her, and turned to see Silvi coming up.
“What did you do with the papers?” Silvi asked. “I mean, really? Are you going to destroy them?”
“Not going to do anything.”
“That’s… fairly criminal.”
“Who would I give it to?” Nyx said. “The media? They’re owned by the state. Little more than a fucking parrot for the queen. Some other country? They would file it away and say thanks. Bel dames? They don’t give a shit.”
“Give it to me,” Silvi said.
“Why?”
Silvi sat next to her on the edge of the roof. The blue wash of the first sunrise crested the horizon and bathed her face, making the regal angles of it all the sharper. She could be a statue come to life, something out of a goddamn museum. Nyx wanted to work with her again, but didn’t want her to die. Some days she thought being around her put a lot of people at risk. Other times, like with Rhys, she kept them close because it felt like it was the only way to protect them. The world would eat all these kids alive without her.
The morning call to prayer sounded, loud and eerie.
“I’m eighteen,” Silvi said. “You’re nearly thirty. We live in… different worlds.”
“You mean you’re young and idealistic. Too stupid to know better.”
“I mean this world hasn’t beaten all the hope out of me yet. I understand people like you.”
“People like me, huh?”
“Monsters,” Silvi said. “Monsters from an old and dying time. And monsters don’t die quietly. They rage and rage against the world dying around them.”
“This world isn’t going to die. Just go on and on like it has. You all want some apocalypse, some fresh start. There’s no fresh start. You drag the past with you.”
“Sure, if people like you keep doing nothing, everything will be the same. You’re stuck.”
“Fuck you,” Nyx said. “Get the fuck out of here.”
The big orange demon of the second sun tickled the horizon. It turned the edge of the city brilliant purple, the color of a bruise after a good fight.
“What will you do with the papers, with what you know?” Silvi said. “Nothing. At least let me do something.”
“Fucking kids,” Nyx said. She reached for her bottle, but it was empty. She needed to drink slower. Or become a cheaper drunk.
Silvi held out her hand. Nyx handed her the bottle. Silvi tossed it over the side of the roof. It shattered on the sidewalk below, sent a million glittering pieces of glass all across the road.
“Let me try, Nyx,” Silvi said.
Nyx peered at her. For the first time she saw something of the fox about her, the twinkling eyes, the way she canted her head to the side. Smarter than Nyx, maybe, certainly more idealistic. The world would beat that from her soon enough, strangle that little fox out of her, carve up her skin, use her abilities for some nefarious purpose. Nyx knew what the world was really like. Silvi still hoped for something better.
“Get out of here,” Nyx said.
Silvi sighed and swung her legs back over onto the flat of the roof. “I hope we can work together again.”
“Go back to your curry shop.”
Silvi stepped away.
Nyx said, “They’ll come for you eventually. Order keepers, probably. Maybe mercenaries like me, if the queen thinks you’ve valuable enough.”
“What makes you think they haven’t?” she said.
“Taite already gave you those papers, didn’t he?”
Silence.
Nyx turned. Silvi shrugged. “Do you want to know, or is it better not to?” Silvi said. “Rhys got that recording from Fatimah. I have that, too. It’s better none of that’s here, I bet. They will come for you too, eventually. We’re both monsters in our own way, I suppose. Both monsters they want to use and control. You’ve fought it. So have I. The difference is I’m not some old drunk.”
“Not yet. Listen, turning in those papers, that recording, will end it for you. They’ll kill you.”
“They’ll kill us all eventually. I want to say I was doing something good, in the end.”
“And I don’t give a shit.”
Silvi smiled. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Should we have fucked?”
“…what? No.”
“You like Taite. You know he’s not into you?”
“I’m aware. But you keep reminding me, I’m young yet.”
“Just saying, would be nice for you to get a good fuck before you die.”
“Well… thank you, for that. I know you mean well. That’s… certainly an important thing for you, all the fucking, I’m sure. Good bye.”
Nyx faced the sky again and listened to Silvi descend the steps back into the keg.
She had no whisky, no whisky bottle to play with, nothing to do with her hands. Nyx pulled one of her pistols and took it apart. She lined up the bullets one by one beside her, and considered what it was she was doing with her life. Kids like Silvi lived for ideals. Nyx had seen enough of the world to know you needed to live for the pleasures, because the horrors were enough to drown you.
“Hey, boss?” Anneke padded her way over, bare feet slapping on the sandy roof. She had a bottle of vodka with her.
“My savior,” Nyx said, holding out her hand.
“We got another job,” Anneke said. “Mercenary downstairs says she needs help with a local job.”
“Fun never stops,” Nyx said.
“That’s the way you like it. Fun stops, you gotta start thinking about what comes after the fun, eh?”
“Kids keep waiting for their lives to start,” Nyx said. “But this is it. This is all it is.”
“Save your grim optimism for somebody who gives a shit,” Anneke said. “I’ve got a new acid rifle I want to try out. Let’s go blow stuff up with some mercenaries.”
Nyx turned away from the dawn, and went down, down, back into the keg, into the warm and comforting dark, into the world she had built for herself on the bones of everything that came before.
END
A Most Monstrous Confession
The Recollection of Angels
We drew the rotting army with us across burning cities villages. And of course in the pamphlets we sent ahead of us we didn’t call it a rotting army, we called it a “Wake of Angels.” Many of the cities towns and villages we targeted visited prepared for a religious, mystical experience,
not an army with death plague war truth on its breath. It gave us the advantage we needed to eliminate soothe them. But putting out a warning of any kind was enough to ensure our compliance with the Universal Laws of Combat. We killed and we burned and deployed a plague miasma so virulent that nothing little will live thrive in that land for a hundred years – and we did it all in full compliance with the law.
My sister taught me that there is great power in what we call things, and it was learning her skill of spinning people’s expectations that got me my place as an interrogator one of the Enlightened Corps. They call me the Chief Officer of Pain Truth, but of course pain truth has little to do with it. It’s about telling stories that give them power over us all.
That’s why this is not a Confession Testimony of War Crimes, as my colleagues captors here in this house cell would call it, but a story, a truth-telling. I am not a war criminal, I am a hero. I did not order half a billion people murdered put down killed removed, I ordered them liberated from the fear of death.
Our army angels may not have performed at their peak when they routed your city village this time, but they will fly again. And again. And they will bring with them the liberation I promised you all when you held caged me here in these quarters this cell.
So tell me tales of your people’s bravery, and sacrifice, and of the wrongs done to you you believe we committed. Erase Rewrite the words I pen here to suit your story. Sing them long and loud as my angels winnow you each from the fields. Because when we win it will be my people editing this truth. It will be my people deciding if this is confession or testimony.
And our history will be kind to the recollection of angels.
END
We Have Returned What We Took
From the far window - a cry, then a crash, like a bird falling through a skylight.
When I went to the window I saw it was not a bird, but a child. It lay on the floor covered in glass, though the window was open and nothing else appeared disturbed. There were any number of things I could imagine coming through a window in this neighbor, but a child was not one of them.
I did not know children. I had spent the last twelve years in Forin-Morsifa prison. Before that I took up with people called One-Eyed Martina, Stumpy Solifar, and Three-Cat Wattas. They were not the sort of people who took children to work with them.
The child did not cry, only opened its arms to me, and I felt obligated to act, just as I had when the last and least favored of my dying mothers opened her bloated, cancer-ridden arms to me for some final comfort. I could not help but open my arms to the child in a way I had not with my mother. Maybe the old gang was right and prison had changed me. Or perhaps it was just age. This knowledge that all of us is alone, arms open, desperate for connection.
I fed the child peanut toast and mayberry jam. It smeared more across its face than it ate, and spoke not a word, only gaped at me, grinning like a tumblejack at a puppet show.
“Where did you come from?” I asked, but it only gabbled at me, though it looked old enough to know language. I had lost my own language, once, after eighty-five days in solitary confinement. When they hauled me out no one could understand me. I had traveled to somewhere else in order to keep my sanity during confinement, and stepped out of the cell into some fantastic world of my own imagination. When I came back I was someone else. I forgot about the robbery, and the man I covered in glass.
I tucked the child into bed and sat up reading penny novels until dawn, expecting the child to fly away or vanish like those things I hallucinated in confinement. But when the bleary red sun came up, the child was still there, snoring contentedly. Had I ever been that content?
It woke hungry, and toddled off to the kitchen. It pulled out various pots and pans and began stacking them into outlandish structures, laughing softly to itself.
A shushing sound from the door captured my attention. A violet letter stamped with the red insignia of the Forin-Morsifa prison slid under my door.
An icy dagger throbbed behind my right eye. But I got up. I opened the letter. It read:
Now that your debt to our commonwealth has been paid in full, we have returned what we took from you in Forin-Morsifa.
I lifted my gaze to the child playing in the kitchen, and the letter disintegrated in my palms.
END
The Improbable War
The wall was made from the faces of the dead.
If First Officer Khiv turned from it quickly, she could glimpse her probable future: her face on the wall. The wall had started as a war memorial. With the advent of technology that captured the soul, it had become something else. Now it was a massive probability engine, the souls of the dead merging into one sentient consciousness. Seeing the promise of her future reflected here told Khiv time was short.
Four million soldiers in gleaming obsidian suits stood on the wall. Khiv climbed after them, pressing her boots into the worn moues of writhing faces, and took her place beside them while the engine that was the wall heaved beneath her.
“How will we fight?” the generals had asked when their old enemies had risen up from the north. “We have given up hierarchies, and hate, and war. Going to war will destroy all we’ve built on the ashes of the corporations that once drove our governments. We will again become slaves to war.”
It was Khiv who told them, after she trained her country’s first army in a century.
“We will fight them with the love of our dead.”
Now the enemy swelled before them on the other side of the wall, their soldiers enhanced with spidery metal suits, commanding nanotech swarms that made the air sharp and hot as her people’s memory of war.
As the enemy prepared to strike, Khiv gave the order. Four million soldiers threw themselves from the wall.
“Love drives the engine,” Khiv had told the generals. “The love the dead have for us.”
The wall heaved, its sentient engine whirring, calculating. The souls within did what they must to preserve the peace they had died for.
The bodies of both armies exploded like stars.
Not a likely eventuality. But within the realm of probability.
Scholars would argue which side the wall took when it obliterated the armies. Some said it chose neither. It chose the future where those its gibbering souls loved would survive.
And in that future, there were no soldiers.
The End
Marigold
Marigold lived at the edge of the sea with a cat named Syrah and a person she no longer believed was really her mother, or her father, or a near-uncle or closest cousin. She was not sure who the person was any longer, but that was all right, because she didn’t know who she was either.
It began one morning just after her fourteenth birthday when she sat down by the sea with Syrah and the person she once believed was her mother, or her father, and the sea began to sing to her. She waded into the foamy waves up to her hips, listening.
“Come home to us,” the sea said, but it was not the sea, it was her kin, and she heard and understood them better than she had understood anything said to her in all her years by the sea.
When she would go into town, the village people did not speak to her like that. They poked and prodded at her and asked, “What are you?” and “Who are you?” and “Who are your people?” and they were endlessly concerned about whether or not the person she lived with was a boy or a girl or a kel, and what that made her and who they were to each other, all questions that did not concern her, and questions she did not think to ask.
The sea didn’t ask her any questions.
So when the call came again one night and woke her from a sound sleep, she went down again to the ocean. This time she waded up to her hips. Then her waist. Then her chest. Then her throat. Then the waves took her under, and she surrendered to the sea in a way she had not yet surrendered to anything.
The tangled arms of her kin reached up and took her to their own breasts and hushed her
and chortled and she began to laugh as the air slipped from her lungs and the water filled it, because breathing water felt far more natural than breathing air ever had.
Now when she wraps up her fins and her flippers and strolls through the marketplace of the village in her damp robe to visit what she once knew, and people ask her what she is, she has an answer. She is not this or that, one or the other, either, or.
“What are you?” they ask.
And she says, “I am Marigold, and I belong to the sea.”
END
After the End of the World
My mother was the last person to leave me.
Now, only I do the leaving.
I shouldn’t be surprised where that led me.
For the past eleven years I’ve lived in this broken city, weeping under the massive orange demon that is the dying sun. There are nameless creatures, snapping reptiles and invertebrates, stinging insects, and quailing little deer-things that can’t regulate their body temperatures. It’s colder than the world I came from, which seems cruel, considering how big the sun is. I’ve stayed around the main city, at the equator, because as much as I can’t stand people, there’s some comfort in continuity, in the known. People who leave the city . . . they don’t come back. Is it because they find something better? I don’t think so. I think this future world eats them.
Transporting us here to this wasteland, the law says, is more humane than killing us outright. I never understood that. How can you condemn someone to a slower death and call it being more humane? But here we are, staring at our deaths.
My tears are not salty anymore, but full of iron. I sweat mercury. Inside, I have ceased to be anything human. The gift our jailers gave us was the gift of rapid adaptation to our new circumstances. Our DNA is mutating quickly, changing us, so that we can survive. We can survive anything. Oh, God, we have survived the end of the world.
There’s a wall here they call a “memorial” and it’s the largest structure in the city. It is carved with the faces of the dead, our faces. Whether we’re dead or not. The wall exists to remind us that we have no future on this wasted Earth that we’ve been sent to. We are meant to die. We were sent here because we kept running away and could not stop.
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