by R. Lee Smith
She placed another finger on the map.
“Got it.” He tossed the book aside, then held out his hands.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
“What do these—” He unfolded his wings and gave them a mighty flap. “—look like to you, Olivia?”
“Sorry.”
“Hold on to me.” He leapt from the roof, caught the air, and climbed high over the lights of the city.
Olivia twisted in his arms to look at them, spread out below her like a glittering blanket. She’d never seen them this way; she’d never been in an airplane, never gone over the mountains at night and seen a city glowing from below. It was amazing to her eyes, row upon row of yellow and orange, stripes of white alongside red passing each other endless as rivers, lined by flashing greens and blues and pinks. So much light…and no sound at all with the wind rushing across her ears.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“What?”
“The lights.”
He was dropping out of the sky again. “I’ve always thought so. Too bad they’ve come to mean such danger. Sometimes I wish the humans would just string them up and leave.” He brought his legs forward and struck home with a gentle paf! Absurd to hear such a huge creature make such a small sound. “Is this the right place?”
Olivia peered over the top of the building and saw a sign nearly as tall as she was reading Midvalley Midwifery Services. “Yes. Now we just have to get in.”
“In is usually the easy part,” Doru said, crossing the roof to the access door. “It’s out that gets thorny.” He tried the doorknob, grunted, then hunkered down to examine the lockplate.
“Do you think it has an alarm?” Olivia asked worriedly.
“Only one way to find out.” He seized the doorknob, gave a tremendous wrench and snapped the knob off in his hand. He held out his hand for silence, his eyes pricked forward, and finally waved her over. “I don’t hear anything, but stay close to me.”
She gave him a gullan salute, which he bared his teeth at, and then he
pushed the door open and led the way inside. Unaccustomed to navigating stairs, he went down sideways, very slowly, and gripped the rails on both sides. When at last they came to a door, he breathed an audible sigh of relief before squeezing himself through it.
“This place stinks,” he remarked as she joined him in the hallway. He stepped forward and tapped a wall-mounted plaque with his claw. “What do these words say?”
“You know those are words?” Just when she had begun to think he couldn’t surprise her any more.
“I don’t know how they sound, because I don’t speak human very well, but I can recognize some of them.” He studied the plaque, brow furrowed. “That one,” he said after a moment, underscoring the word Level. “That’s a way of marking the place you are inside the hive. That little squiggle in front of it means a number. That says we’re standing on the fifth height of the building. But no, I don’t know anything else.”
“The pharmacy is on the first floor. That’s where the drugs will be.”
“Hm. Where else would they be?”
She looked around at him, confused, then surprised that she would be confused. Of course there would be humans here. Hadn’t she just been looking at the building directory? The regular birthing rooms were on the second and third floors. Surely someone was down there being pregnant; babies didn’t just come during work-hours.
“I…I didn’t think of that. I’m not sure where else to look.”
“Well, we’re here. Might as well throw a spear and see what it hits. Easy, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a pat. “They probably won’t come up here unless we make a lot of noise, so we’re safe as long as we’re quiet. And to save Gormuck’s baby, I’ll go down and fight them while you find the medicine. I’d just rather avoid that if we can.”
Olivia looked back at the directory. They were on the fifth floor with Imaging, Lab and Counseling. “If they have a lab up here, they might have a closet or something with drugs in it,” she said, not at all sure this was true.
“Lead on.”
Olivia oriented herself with the diagram and set off down the hall with Doru loping comfortably behind her until she found a promising sort of hallway on the other side of a locked door marked Supplies. “There’s probably an alarm on this,” she said.
“Probably.” He pricked his ears at some sound from below and then studied the door. “But if there are, the little ropes are on the inside. Can you see the medicine from here?”
“No.”
“Can you see where they put the medicine?”
“Give me your flashlight.”
He handed it over obligingly and Olivia used it to probe at the dark hall through its narrow security window. About ten feet down, past Lab Supplies and Imaging/Tech, she could see a door marked Emergency and next to it, a clipboard with sign-in sheet. There was also a sticker with Alarm Will Sound and another with Authorized Personnel Only.
“I think I see one, but the door definitely has an alarm on it.”
“Hm. Let me think.” He hunkered down and fanned his wings out, looking for all the world like a black gargoyle straight off some ancient European cathedral. “Can you see a window?”
She looked around at him, puzzled, then past him to a perfectly good picture window in the waiting room to their right.
“No,” he said patiently. “On the other side. Can you see a window?”
She applied her flashlight again. “Um, maybe the corner of one at the end of the hall? It might be a poster, though. I don’t know.”
“Good enough, I guess.” He straightened, flexed his powerful frame once and said, “Get ready.”
“Ready?”
His leg drove out like a piston and blew the door explosively off its hinges and into the hall. Olivia gaped for a split-second, then shook out of it and sprang inside. He came on her heels, stopped at the second door, dug his claws in around its frame and ripped the whole thing out of the wall. The ear-splitting shriek of the alarm went off at once.
“Go,” he said, and turned around, dropping to all fours and fanning out his wings to hide her.
Olivia dove into the closet and began fumbling through towels, bandages and plastic baggies filled with rubber tubing, but yes, there were drugs in here also. She spilled most of them, tossing them aside when she finished scanning them so she wouldn’t waste time hunting through the same bottles twice. She could hear human voices coming towards them and realized with a flare of surreal embarrassment that she was dressed in a bra and two bunnies.
Then Doru was roaring and at least three humans let out a close-harmony scream and bolted back the way they came. “Hurry,” Doru said tightly.
There it was, dozens of syringes labeled levonal. Olivia had no idea how much she needed, so she grabbed the whole basket containing them and emptied it into her empty pack. For good measure, she took another double handful of bottles completely at random and dumped that in too. She also took a blood-pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a box of latex gloves and as many sterile gauze sponges as would fill up her backpack. “Done!” she panted.
Sirens.
“And that means trouble,” Doru muttered. He seized her around the waist as the sounds of running footsteps came charging back down the corridor.
“Holy God, what is that?!”
Doru looked back over his shoulder and unleashed a roar that shook Olivia to her bones. Then he ran down the hall, dug in his claws and said, “Oh shit.”
There was a window at the end of the hall after all. It was perhaps three feet high, which was good as far as that went. And it was about five inches across. Doru might be able to squeeze his hand or one horn out, but nothing else. She looked up at him, momentarily stymied.
He offered her a crooked smile. “I’m open to suggestions.”
Olivia pinned the backpack between them, wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and said, “Charge them.”
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He rocked his head back, blinking, and then gave her a broad, toothy grin and said, “As you command.”
He turned around, seized the nearest moveable object, which happened to be the emergency closet’s door, and ran back the way he’d come. Doru exploded into the waiting area and threw the heavy slab of wood at the wall next to the tight knot of security guards who had gathered there.
Two of them broke and ran; the last pulled a gun and starting shrieking and pulling the trigger. Fortunately, he had not yet realized the safety was on.
Doru set his feet wide apart, yanked himself to his full height, ripped his horns across the ceiling tiles, snapped his wings out to their full span, and split the air with the voice of a dragon. The remaining security officer collapsed where he stood, freeing Doru to leap over his unconscious body toward the waiting room window. He bashed it out with one blow of his huge fist and leapt, snapped his wings open and soared away over the flashing lights of red and blue and white.
“Well,” he said, laughing. “That’ll get your blood moving.”
Her ears were ringing; she could barely hear him. “If they had any pregnant women there, they are all in labor right now, I guarantee it!”
He let out another roar, caught the wind and rode it into the clouds.
5
The first words Tina said after opening the pack were, “Holy Christ, there’s an epidural in here!”
“Dibs,” Liz said immediately.
“Look at all this!” Tina began to rifle through the pills and syringes in a kind of daze. “What did you do, dump a whole shelf in here?”
“Just about. Are there enough syringes?”
“For now.” Tina frowned. “Some of these are in prepackaged doses, so that’s good as far as it goes, but you’re going to have to go out again eventually and get just a handful of your basic needle. They have ‘em at any drugstore; you won’t have to find a real pharmacy again.”
“There’s a relief.” She exaggerated a grin for Tina’s benefit. “You can tell Amy I wasn’t what you call a hundred-percent successful.”
“Whatever you were, you did something good,” Tina said seriously. “I hope you know that.”
“Doru gets half the credit.”
Tina’s face softened. “Does he? God bless the big guy. I’m going to get Tobi to give him a big wet one. Hell, I’ll do it myself.” She looked in the pack a final time, then zipped it shut. “Okay, I’m good here. You can take off.”
Since handing over her responsibilities as the tribe’s main healer, Tina tended to wax authoritarian and so Olivia was more amused than offended as she was propelled towards the door. Immediately on the other side was Horumn, who grunted when she saw her and said, “That rutting fool is waiting for you.” Without looking to see if Olivia followed or not, the aged gulla limped off.
Her good mood and sense of duty done well died at once. She had not forgotten Carla, but she had been avoiding this moment. Now it seemed, Carla was tired of waiting. Olivia went to her workroom and there she was, sitting on a bench and looking edgy and impatient.
“Do you have it?” Carla asked tightly. “Or do I have to find a fucking flight of stairs to fall down?”
“I have some.” Olivia knelt down beside a Coleman cooler and fished through it until she found the 7-Up bottle with its evil-looking contents. “But we need to talk.”
Carla heaved a sigh. “Fine. Give me the lecture. Get it over with.”
Her naked hostility sparked a faint twinge of real anger in Olivia. She slammed the lid of the cooler and advanced on the other woman like a predator. “Do I have to remind you what will happen if Vorgullum ever finds out about you?” she snapped. She hated using his name as a weapon, but it had the desired effect immediately.
Carla looked down at her hands and frowned. “No. I know.”
“Then why are you doing such a stupid thing?” she demanded. “I mean…aren’t you even trying to be careful?”
“I was at first. I don’t know. It’s just easier. It makes me feel…I don’t know, like I’m really here. Most of the time, I just kind of drift along, wondering how all this happened.” Tears welled up in her eyes, but her voice stayed steady, emotionless. “All those times behind the bleachers with Jeremy Massey and I wouldn’t let him get to second base. Can you believe it? What was I saving myself for? If I could go back in time, I’d drop and suck him off like a lollipop just so I’d know what it felt like to do it with a regular guy.”
“Carla—”
“What do you want to hear, huh? Sutung tried to have sex with me on the fifth day. We got naked okay, and then he…stuck it up a little ways and then he stared at me and pulled out and sat down and wouldn’t look at me. He sat there for, like, an hour without moving or looking at me or anything. He only got up because the fire was dying. And after he dumped more wood on, he turned to me like…like I was shit he had to shovel!” Carla reached up calmly under her sleeve, dug her fingernails into the side of her arm and opened four furrows clear down to her elbow. Olivia reached for her with a gasp, only to see dozens of similar scars, some still scabbed, others white with age.
Without altering her expression or the tone of her voice, Carla went on. “He couldn’t get hard right away. He had to, you know, and all the time he’s staring at me like that. Then he just put it in me and when he was done, he left and didn’t come back until the next night. He didn’t touch me again until I had that season thing. Do people do that?” she asked suddenly, anguished. “Real people? I’ve never heard of it before, but I don’t know!”
Olivia closed her eyes against the sudden, vivid memory of Vorgullum falling on her; his eyes blazing with empty lust, battering into her as she screamed and tried to get away; waking up hours later with his spend dried to a crust over her belly and thighs and blood matted into her pubic hair.
“So after a while we got to go out of our rooms and meet people. I don’t know…there was this one guy…I don’t know his name. I had to go to the bathroom, and usually when one of us has to go, we go in pairs, but this time I figured I knew the way pretty well so I just went, and when I there, this guy comes in and he…he…” Carla’s brows wrinkled, like she was trying to puzzle out a particularly thorny math problem. “He put his hand on me and then he…and I just found myself wondering why he was bothering to cover my mouth, you know? Who was I going to yell for help to? So I…kinda put my legs around him and let him. He was looking at me, right into my eyes. There aren’t any other mirrors here; it was the first time I really felt like this was all…still happening, you know? It was real. It hurt, but it was real. Then he was done and he told me he’d kill me if I told—” Carla laughed and shook her head. “—and I got cleaned up and left. No big deal.”
“Who was it?” Olivia demanded.
“Oh please, what are you going to do? It was just a guy. They’re all like that, you know. He was just the first. It’s happened, like, ten times since. If they see you alone and if you give them the space and the time…” She shrugged, smiling, but her eyes stayed distant. “And then one day, I saw this other guy, and I kinda came onto him, just to see what he’d do, and he got down right there and did me on the bench, and it was no big deal. So the next day, I went out to baths…You remember how you had to go down the Deep Drop to get there? Well, this guy came along and I asked him if he’d take me to the baths, and if he did, I’d fuck him. So he did, and I did, and it was no big deal.”
“He’d have carried you anyway,” Olivia said quietly.
“I know! That’s not the point! The point is…The point is….” She shook her head slowly, her eyes staring unblinkingly at the floor. “Pretty soon, they’re coming to me, and I took them all. I take them two at a time, if they want to. Some of them like to hit me when they’re doing it and that’s okay. Sometimes they’re careful about not cumming in me, but I don’t care. I got pregnant the first time, and I went to Murgull and she slapped me in the face and that was pretty real, too. But that’s the only
time she ever did it.”
She looked down dully at the potion in Olivia’s hands, then reached over and took it. “I don’t care anymore. I really don’t. You’re right, Vorgullum will probably kill me if he ever finds out. He can’t exactly kill everyone who fucks me. That’s…that’s okay.” Carla took the pop bottle and stood up to go.
“Wait.” Olivia stared at her empty hands. “I have something…”
Carla looked back at her.
“It’s called barrenroot. You use it, and you can’t ever get pregnant again. I’m pretty sure it hurts, though.”
“That’s okay,” Carla said, still with that eerie calm. “Pain is fine. That’s pretty real. Let me have it.” No hesitation. Not even a moment of uncertainty. She simply stood and waited with one hand outstretched.
Olivia walked woodenly to her worktable and unwrapped the dark brown root. “You have to peel it,” she said.
Carla fingered the root. “You stick it in you?”
Olivia nodded. “Take the potion first. Wait three days. No sex for three days. Then you…use it.”
“Okay.” Carla stuck the root inside her shirt with the 7-Up bottle. “I can go three days. Thanks.” She walked away.
Her footsteps were still receding when Horumn limped into the room. The old gulla studied Olivia in silence for a long time. “Best for all,” she grunted at last. “You might not think so now, but it is truth.”
“I feel awful.”
“You feel too much.” But Horumn came over and laid her hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “Go home,” she said. “Hold your Somurg. Breathe in his breath. He is healthy and strong. Take your comfort for that.”
Yes. He was healthy and strong.
For now.
6
Olivia was sitting in a drift of bear fur in Sudjummar’s forge, holding Somurg comfortably on her lap and watching the smith at work when Sutung entered the room.
“Just a moment, please,” Sudjummar said pleasantly, not looking around as he carefully filed the jagged edges of a candle bowl.
“It’s Olivia I’ve come to see.” Sutung’s voice was very low, very even, and very angry.