Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  I looked across the river at the slow spirals of greasy smoke, at the clouds running in their dawn circus of rose and gold, and thought for a time that I was free.

  I went home to Ira and my aunts as soon as I was sober enough to hitch a ride on a flatboat. Ira’s face seemed too fragile to hold a twelve-year-old’s unfettered glee, as if his huge smile might crack him in half. My aunts were less enthused, sitting hunchbacked around their fire with lines running down their faces like tears. I wondering uncharitably if they were more bitter about my Eastern impurities or the absence of the sizable payment I sent them each month.

  For eight days—days that still shimmer in my memory, like precious metals winking out of a rock seam—I thought I could live with Ira in our little cabin forever. But on the ninth day a crew of khaki-clad state workers rapped on my door.

  Two of them sat me down to ask a series of dull, persistent questions.

  “How would you describe your financial situation now that you lack employment?”

  “Utterly dire.”

  “Do you find you can provide for Ira’s basic needs?”

  “Yes.”

  “What has the doctor recommended regarding his condition?”

  I stopped answering, watching another worker pushing and prodding at Ira’s thin chest, listening to the rasp of his lungs, laying white fingers across his forehead. I remember a sound in my skull like a thunderstorm rolling nearer.

  “Excuse me, but what the hell is this?”

  “Ms. Sawgrass, there’s no need for that kind of language.”

  “The hell there isn’t! Get your goddamn hands off him—”

  I lunged toward Ira, but never made it to him. A tall Easterner with a face like curdled cheese sank his fist into my stomach and left me retching on the floor.

  They explained to me that I was an unqualified guardian, that Ira suffered from every sign of neglect, and that his consumption earned him a place at St. Joseph’s Sanatorium in Mayfield. I half-crawled toward him again. A boot heel connected with my face and all I could hear for a while was the cartilaginous echo of my nose breaking.

  I lay heaving and sobbing, snot and blood drawing watery red patterns in the dust, while they took him away. Ira’s slight shoulders shook beneath dirty cotton as they hauled him into the boat.

  My aunts hobbled over to me and spat, one after the other, on my curled-up body. They were cleverer and older than I was, and already knew the reason the authorities of the Eastern States had suddenly descended on our quiet border village and abducted my brother.11

  Because I was a mapmaker, and I had broken my contract.

  When I returned to work the following morning Clayton was waiting for me with the confidence of a man who has placed a bet on a rigged horse race. I didn’t say anything to him until we were unloading at the pier at dusk.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Where is who, my lovely Oona?” I stared at him with eyes hollowed out by hate and regret. “Ah, the young Master Ira, wasting away from consumption. He’s receiving the very best care at St. Joseph’s. If you behave, I’ll see if I can arrange some visiting hours for you.” He stepped closer to me as the last of his surveyors trudged homeward. He touched my cheek with one calloused thumb. “If you behave very, very well, I’ll make sure they give him the good stuff—they’ve got some new drugs, powerful things, that might give him years.”

  I would’ve paid any price to take back the tear that made its salt-slicked path down to his thumb. “One day, Clayton, I swear by all the bones of the West, I’ll kill you.” It came out flat, toneless, without an ounce of belief.12

  He laughed, kissed my cheek, and left.

  I was a model mapmaker for four more years. I led them wherever they liked, I held the land still as a corpse, and on Sundays I took the train to Mayfield and visited Ira at St. Joseph’s.

  I drank. And when that wasn’t enough, when the crust of the earth beneath my feet felt so thin and friable I thought it might crack open like a vast eggshell, I took some local man up to my room and forgot everything in the urgent percussion of our limbs.

  That night after I failed to hold the bone trees, I was half-waiting for my late-summer lover to walk through the doors. Francis was a pale clerk who worked upriver keeping books for the ferries. He was kind to me, I suppose, but he didn’t love me so much as he loved the thrill of fear when my teeth closed on his pale shoulder, as though he always half-suspected I would run wild one night and tear him into long white strips of flesh.

  I hoped he would come that night just to help me upstairs without making a fool of myself. He didn’t. I made a fool of myself.

  When the barman dumped me into bed I fell into a hazed stupor somewhere between sleeping and dreaming and dying. My favorite kinds of dreams—of the wilder far West, where red buffalo still ran in their endless, rolling oceans of sweating hide, where the mountains hid a thousand secret and twisting valleys—slipped away. They were replaced with something gray and looming. I felt Clayton’s ghostly lips touching my cheek again and again, felt the finality of ownership in that touch.

  I must have slept eventually, because I woke in the humid midmorning feeling like some poor forest creature fallen into an alcoholic swamp, exhausted by my own thrashing and soon to decay. The taste in my mouth indicated the rotting might already have begun.

  But Ira wouldn’t care. He’d seen me worse.

  Mayfield was only twenty or so miles East, but it was like crossing into a different country. The land sliding past the train windows was old and well-settled, utterly quiescent beneath the plows and plantation crops, as though it was distantly embarrassed by the mischievous shapeshifting of its youth. I’d heard people say Western Kentucky was a model for the march of civilization the world over, a near-miraculous transformation from dark and bloody ground to profit.13 I always wonder what happened to the other faces of the land—did they die? Fade to silver like old-fashioned daguerreotypes? Perhaps they only lay gently down to sleep.

  I walked from the station along a narrow lane bordered by stubbled cornfields. St. Joseph’s loomed eventually on the horizon. It was an ugly, gray stone square with narrow slits for windows, as if it were some Old World castle which might need to defend itself with arrows and boiling oil at any moment.

  The familiar guilt settled over me as I looked at that gray beast and thought of sweet Ira trapped in its belly. He always assured me, in his earnest adolescent way, that I needn’t worry about him or imagine he was suffering. Then he would pat my hand and ask to play another round of Sticks and Bones.14

  I would be lying if I told you I was without hope. The fat yellow tablets he took every morning and evening seemed to be working their miracle cure on him those first few years. The rattle in his chest seemed to lessen; his fingernails lost their blue-bruised look. If he seemed thinner and paler in the last few months, well, perhaps it would get worse before it got better.

  I knew the shackles Clayton hung on my wrists were made of both fear and hope, and I knew hope was by far the heavier of the two. But knowing didn’t matter much, in the end.

  The nurses in the front offices waved me past with terse little motions. I knew the way, through two floors of wood-paneled halls that smelled of chlorine and consumption, blood-tinged and rotting.

  But when I opened his door, mustering my most cheery smile, I found Ira was not alone. He was propped on half a dozen pillows, his light eyes ranging between three men standing at the end of his bed.

  Clayton. And a thuggish employee of the Imperial American River Company, familiar to me by the menacing shape of his gloved hands.

  “Ah, Ms. Oona, here at last. A late night, I suppose.”

  I couldn’t speak. My mouth was full up with something mad and inarticulate, like howling.

  “Take a seat.” Clayton’s voice had lost the softening edges of his drawl. Now it had a flat, driving quality that made me think of railroad spikes and hammers. I didn’t move. His man closed a fist around my re
d braid and tugged me into a chair, as if he were leading a recalcitrant horse by its reins.

  “Oona—” Ira’s eyes were two moons shining at me, huge and fearful.

  “It’s fine, hon,” I told him untruthfully. “These men are just here to talk to me about my work. It has nothing to do with you.” The threat in my voice sounded terribly, awfully like a bluff.

  Clayton gave a genial headshake. “Well, it didn’t have to involve you, Ira my boy, but your sister has made some regrettable errors of late. Awful disappointing from my perspective, from the Company’s perspective.”

  Clayton dragged a stool across the floor and sat at Ira’s side. He leaned in like a conspirator. “See, your sister made a promise to us. She swore she’d help us spread the light of progress to the West in exchange for fair pay, but she keeps trying to weasel out of it. Now what does that make her?”

  Ira did not answer, but stared at Clayton with a curiously impassive expression, as though he were a botanist examining a fascinating but toxic new species. My brave, foolish brother.

  “It makes her a traitor. And we can’t have that.”

  “Clayton—please, it was an accident, a stupid accident, we can go back tomorrow and fix it, I swear I can hold it—” But my words withered away. There was pity lurking in his long-lashed eyes. You don’t pity the unhurt, the unbroken.

  I think I screamed. I know the big man tightened his grip on my hair and crushed one hard palm against my mouth and already-crooked nose. Clayton leaned over Ira’s bed and picked up his wrist gently, almost lovingly.

  I flailed, succeeding only in kicking the chair out from under myself and dangling stupidly from my own braid, biting at that impassive palm.

  It happened so quickly and efficiently that I would have missed it if it weren’t for that sound: a dull cracking like dry branches beneath boots, like a china plate falling to the floor, or like three fragile finger bones snapping.

  Even then, even while Clayton wrenched each finger with precise brutality, Ira barely made a sound above a choked sigh. He seemed somehow distant from the four of us writhing, struggling humans in his room.

  It ended. Clayton straightened up, ruffled Ira’s hair in casual apology, and strode out. His man followed. I clattered to the floor like a masterless puppet.

  I must have been making a great deal of noise, something like a scream or a wail, because nurses streamed into the room in a white-pressed line, little crimps of vexation between their brows. I was pulled aside, stuttering with tears and curses, wanting to knock each of their creased white hats onto the floor and stomp them.

  The nurses stretched Ira’s fingers straight and wrapped them in gauze. They chastised him for being so clumsy as to fall out of bed and left without meeting our eyes. We were left alone again with the late-afternoon sunlight spilling in honey-and-blood pools across Ira’s bed.

  I slunk to Ira’s side like a beaten dog, buried my bruised face in his chest—hot, frail as the netted twigs of a bird’s nest—and felt him stroke my hair with his unbroken hand.

  We lay in silence for a long while. I was all hollow inside, like a lightning-struck tree gone dead and punky at my center. Ira was still except for the familiar heaving motion of a person clamping their jaws around the coughing.

  “Oona,” he asked in a burred voice, “what would you do if you weren’t a mapmaker?”

  “I’ll always be a mapmaker.” It was true; Clayton had added a dozen years to my contract when I tried to quit, and he could go on adding years until the day I died so long as he had Ira locked up at St. Joseph’s.

  “But what if it were. If you were free.”

  I hated playing these sorts of what-if games—we two prisoners surely did not need them. But I told him the truth. “I’d go West.”

  “Home?”

  “Hell no. I’d go farther West. So far West they wouldn’t know why I had red hair, wouldn’t know about borders and maps and traitors.” Too far down the what-if path; I found I couldn’t stop myself. “I’d go adventuring, I’d ride down unknown rivers like Conrad and Darwin did, but I wouldn’t write down a word of what I saw so no one could ever follow me.”15

  Ira looked so beatific, so pleased with my answer that I asked: “And what would you do? If you weren’t sick.” And locked up in this hellish place, held hostage, broken for his sister’s failures.

  My question surprised him into a cough. It was the worst kind of coughing, seeming larger than the body that contained it, bending him in half and spraying dark blood across his sheets. My faith in the yellow tablets wavered.

  I held his shoulders until it passed, gave him water, patted the blood dry. As I had done for our mother at the end.

  He lay back and smiled up at me with rust-stained teeth. “Why, I would go with you, of course,” he said.

  I wanted to cry. I wanted to break every single window in St. Joseph’s and dance barefoot through the glass. I wanted to run away.

  Ira knew it. “You’ve got to get the last train. There’s a gift for you in that drawer—don’t open it until you’re on the train. You’ll only make a fuss.” I pulled a brown paper package out of his bedside table, the approximate size and shape of a book.

  I kissed his forehead. I kissed his bandaged hand. I whispered I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry in a broken little chant, as if I had been assigned to say it a certain number of times before I could receive absolution, except I knew the number was infinite.

  “Oona?” He touched my hand, and said something in our language. It was the kind of phrase you might say to a loved one before a very long journey. It meant something like I love you, and if I never see you again while I live then I’ll wait for you beneath the bone trees.

  I left without answering him. Why didn’t I shake him and ask what the hell he meant by that? Why didn’t I throw him over my shoulder and make a run for it? Most especially, why didn’t I tell him that I loved him, too, and would find him at the bone trees someday?

  Instead I just looked at his clear-November eyes, at the sharpening bones in his face and the angry flush along his cheeks, and left with his gift tucked under my arm.

  I opened the package on the train, just as he’d told me. It was a rather fine edition of The Book of the Marvels of the West, promising twenty-four color plates illustrating the Wondrous and True sights Polo saw.16 He knew me well, my brother.

  There was a note penned in shaky English:

  Oona,

  I want you to understand that this is a gift for you, but it’s also a gift for me. It’s a chance to choose, and make the choice mean something.

  You have to run, my dear sister. Run wherever you like, but run very far and fast. Won’t take the Company very long to find some new way to bend you, and this time I think you will snap in two.

  Do not come back to St. Joseph’s tomorrow, or do anything else foolish. I am something of an expert on how many days and hours a person in my state has left to live—haven’t I seen enough of it at Saint Joe’s?—and you will not be quick enough. And anyway it would spoil the gift.

  All my love,

  Ira

  There was a postscript, cramped and shivery at the edge of the page:

  P.S. Take this to the bone trees. I don’t know if it will do any good, but I suppose I want to believe it will.

  A hank of dark hair lay curled beneath the note.

  I remember the curious sensation of simultaneous understanding and desperate not-understanding as I read. The letters arranged and rearranged themselves in obscure patterns, as if the ink lines were actually tiny, black-clawed beasts roaming through white fields.

  I opened the book.

  The inside had been messily hollowed out. In the wounded heart of the book, piled carelessly like golden coins in some ancient treasury, were hundreds of fat, yellow tablets. Doses enough for a year, slipped beneath his tongue, spat into his palm, hidden away.

  My brother had given me the gift of his death.

  I cannot write it down, the name of t
he feeling that shuddered through me, or perhaps it has no name. It was as if every wound I had ever suffered reopened all at once, and I was watching my own blood flow away in a dozen red rivers. Or as if I had fallen from the flatboat and found there were stones in my pockets, and all I could see was the stream of bubbles twirling to the surface like escaping birds.

  But it was worse than that. Far worse. Because beneath the drowning there was something oiled and sweet. Something that sang. Something that knew this terrible gift was a gift in truth.

  I have hated myself for many years for that knowledge, for the queer synchronization of my heart breaking and the shackles falling from my wrists.

  I closed my eyes as I stepped off the train, letting the Western sun touch my face with sweet scarlet fingers. Run very far and fast.

  But oh, not yet.

  * * *

  Clayton and his men were loading the boat when I arrived next morning. I was a sleepless, shambling shadow of my usual self, but I suppose heartbreak resembles a hangover closely enough that I went unnoticed. Clayton’s gold teeth flashed at me, and I managed not to leap at him and drown him in the coal-slicked water. Nor did I collapse on the dock and cradle my tear-swollen face, nor did I permit myself to wear the jagged, unhinged smile that tugged at my lips.

  Black boots appeared beside me. “You understand your situation clearly, don’t you love?”

  “Yes, sir.” The sir tasted like bile and ash in my mouth.

  “Give Ira my regards when you see him next.” If Clayton had said Ira’s name again, I think I would have flung everything away and clawed him to pink ribbons. But Clayton was not a foolish man. He saw me the way a surgeon might see a body, all my fragile nerves exposed on the operating table, neatly labeled arteries pumping love and hate in equal measures through my limbs. But he didn’t know, didn’t yet see the carved out hole where my heart had been.

  I was a prisoner with the key held beneath my tongue, waiting for my moment.

  He left. A few of the men muttered threats and entreaties on the journey across (Give us another scare like that and soon we’ll be looking for a new mapmaker and Can’t never trust a savage, can you), but I ignored them. I watched the steam swirling up from the river water as if someone were writing messages made of fog, and thought of Ira. His hair lay like the feather of some rare and precious bird in my palm.