by Bogi Takács
I don’t know why I bother anymore. You’re not listening. I don’t even know if you exist.
It’s been a while, huh? Life got busy for me. High school, mostly. Mom got a better job and now we won’t have to move again. Also I met this awesome girl named LaShawna and we’ve been dating for a month. God, I’m so in love with her. She’s funny and smart and tough and kind—and she really gets me.
Sometimes she reminds me of Zera.
I asked Mom why she kept my letters.
She didn’t avoid me this time. “I had a door when I was younger,” she said, and she looked so awfully sad. “I was your age. I met the person I wanted to stay with forever.” She let out her breath in a whoosh. “But then the door just…it broke, or something. I tried dating here. Met your father, but it just wasn’t the same. Then he ran off and it was like losing it all again.”
I told LaShawna about Zera’s world. She said she didn’t want to talk about it. I think maybe she had a door, too.
I was so angry growing up, feeling trapped. You know the best thing about Zera? She got me. I could be a girl, I could be a boy, and I could be neither—because that’s how I feel a lot of the time. Shifting around between genders. I want that to be okay, but here? I don’t know.
The thing is, I don’t want to live in Zera’s world forever. I love things here, too. I want to be able to go back and forth and have friends everywhere, and date LaShawna and get my degree and just live.
This will be my last letter to you, Gatekeeper.
If there was one thing Zera and I learned, it’s that you have to build your own doors sometimes.
So I’m going to make my own. I’ll construct it out of salvaged lumber; I’ll take a metalworking class and forge my own hinges. I’ll paper it with all my letters and all my memories. I’ll set it up somewhere safe, and here’s the thing—I’ll make sure it never locks.
My door will be open for anyone who needs it: my mom, LaShawna, myself.
—Ell
The Book is silent.
“Please,” Zera says. “Remove the curse. Let us all try again.”
And she lays her hand gently on the Forgotten Book and lets the Book see all the happy memories she shared with Ellie, once, and how Ellie’s mom Loraine once came here and met Vasha, who has waited by the door since the curse fell, and Misu, who befriended the lonely girl LaShawna and longs to see her again—and so many, many others that Zera has collected, her heart overfilled with joy and loss and grief and hope.
In return, she sees through space and time, right into Ell’s world, where Ell has built a door and has her hand on the knob.
“Ell,” Zera calls.
Ell looks up, eyes wide. “Zera?”
“Yes,” Zera says, and knows her voice will sound dull behind the door. “I’m here.”
Ell grins. “I can see your reflection in the door! Is that the Book with you?”
The Book trembles. SHE REMEMBERS.
Zera nods. The air is thinning, easing in her lungs. “I told you. Not everyone forgets.”
I would like to see LaShawna again, says Misu.
VERY WELL, says the book. THE CURSE WILL BE REMOVED.
Ell turns the handle.
Bright lights beams into the Island of Stars, and Ell stands there in a doorway, arms spread wide. Zera leaps forward and hugs her best friend.
“You came back,” Zera says.
“I brought some people with me, too,” Ell says, and waves behind her, where two other women wait.
Loraine steps through the light with tears in her eyes. “I never thought I could come back…”
Misu squeaks in delight and flies to LaShawna.
Zera smiles at her friends. Things will be all right.
“We have a lot of work to do to repair this place,” Zera says. She clasps Ell’s hands. “The curse is gone, but we have to fix the doors and wake the sleepers. Are you ready?”
Ell grins and waves her mom and girlfriend to join her. “Yes. Let’s do this.”
Three Points Masculine
• An Owomoyela •
I was serving in Baxon just north of Hescher, guard-dogging a queue of first responders heading into the riot zones, and John caught my eye. Her beard caught my eye. Some troublemaker flaunting the rules, I thought, or a guy sneaking in under cover of audacity, thinking the Women’s Volunteer Corps was a good place to get laid. If that was the case, he was looking to get roughed up, and it was my job to oblige. I pulled her out of the line.
“License.”
Roughing someone up would’ve made my day, and my day needed making. Go figure that John stepped aside and said “Of course” in that tone people use at police, all placid and don’t shoot me. She pulled her license and handed it over—and yeah, there it was: non-transitioned male sex, last Gender Assessment Test no more than two years ago, certified female register—certified female enough for government work, right—all of it signed by a state assessor I didn’t just recognize as legit, I knew personally. The grainy photo even had her damn beard.
I thought about roughing her up for making me look a damn fool. I told myself I was better than that; even kinda believed it. “Get back in line.”
In a fair world, that’d be that.
Isaac was walking the queue, giving the pep talk, getting everyone comfy with the bulletproofs and white flags. “All our pretty little heads will be back behind our boys in uniform,” he said, and I kept my fingers on my rifle. “There’s a chance our zone might go hot; if it does, we’ll get plenty of warning, just get back on the buses and we’ll peel rubber back here. Lickety-split. Time for dinner.”
I caught up to him as we boarded the bus. For the sixteen women there were only four of us from City Guard, me looking plastic and the rest looking pale and greeny under the florescent lights. “Counting four boys in uniform right here,” I said.
Isaac looked surprised, then looked at the insignia on his chest. He grinned. “Way wrong uniform, man.”
I grunted, and pointed at John. “What’s the story here?”
“What, him? —her,” Isaac corrected. Takes more than a test and a license for some people to learn. Hand to God I don’t think Isaac believes the GATs if he looks at someone and gets his own opinion, but like the rest of us, he’ll play along because it’s law. Least, like the rest of most people, he’ll play along because it’s law. “Hell if I know. Uh, hometown somewhere up north, been working with the WVC going on six years. Career, right? Just your type.”
“Shove off,” I said, and elbowed him. He cackled and headed for his seat. I took a seat near the front and decided it didn’t matter. ’Sides, I could see or guess most of it: lily-white, unlike me. College-educated, unlike me. A girl, too, unlike me. Though half the bastards would’ve argued that, had they known.
Hescher was a hellhole. We smelled the smoke when we rolled in, and the moment they opened the doors, it was all white tents, Corps flags, antiseptic stench, and people moaning on the ground. A guy almost shoved a handful of red-yellow-green-black triage tags into my chest before deciding I wouldn’t know a sucking chest wound from a bump on the head and shoving them at the ladies behind me.
They’d cleared out one of the big bargain stores for a medical center, and its parking lot was playing support. Place was peppered with City Guard, and one came over as soon as we led our girls off the bus. “Hey. I’m Ben Kessler, managing day dispatch and logistics here. Welcome to Camp Save Big. Any two of you got a moment?”
“I got one,” I said, and Isaac came up beside me.
“So, what’ve you got going?” Isaac asked.
Ben groaned. “Cluster attacks.” He hiked a thumb over his shoulder, and Isaac and I followed him across the lot. “We go three weeks without anyone blowing anything up and now we’ve had four bombings yesterday and today.”
“Christos,” I said, and Ben hoisted up the flap of the registration tent. We went inside.
Ben went over to the sat-fax and tapped his finger on a pile
of papers. I went up and said, “What’s up?”
“Your gals signed a pretty permissive contract,” Ben said. “‘Area of greatest need,’ ‘discretionary redeployment,’ y’know.”
“So where’s our area of greatest need?” Isaac asked.
Ben pistoled a finger at him. “Here, go figure. But if it’s not too much trouble, we need someone to back up the folks at the hospital. Triage and first response. They got slammed.”
Isaac looked at me. “Hell, if that’s it, we can walk our girls over.”
“Be a dear?” Ben said, and pressed his hands together.
I crossed my arms over my chest, habit-like. Isaac whacked me on the shoulder. “We’re your angels. C’mon, we’ll pull our teams.”
Isaac turned and walked back to the buses, and Ben held out a map for me. “You’ll need this. A bunch of main roads are impassable.”
I took the map, and looked over the scrawled edits. “You’re going to make me regret wearing the injury-prev helmet instead of the smart display, aren’t you?”
“Oh, there’s a lot of regret here in Hescher,” Ben said. “If that’s all you’ve got, you’re coming out ahead.”
John was in Isaac’s group. She didn’t look at me when we rounded our eight up, and I mostly ignored her. We just got in line and marched into the evacuation zone. I did notice she didn’t walk like a girl learned to, didn’t hold herself like a girl learned to. She might’ve had the GAT, but she was off.
Shit like that makes me check how I’m walking. Out here, no one was gonna come up and check my license, but still, it’s habit, like.
The evac zone was quiet. All these buildings, still as death—no one even looting, anymore. Plenty of people were probably displaced and angry somewhere easterly, keeping their mouths shut because you didn’t bitch at the hand that fed you and rounded you up onto government buses, and that just left this place all creeped-out empty like a ghost town. Isaac and I didn’t talk. We had our hands on our rifles, watching for revs, and the girls didn’t talk because they knew you don’t distract the guys with automatics. We went in past the empty houses, past the bombed-out school, over the recent debris that made driving impossible and walking a chore and, hand to God, but I didn’t know what the revs thought they were getting by blowing up all the empty places. With all the rubble, though, I pitied the girls and their uniform skirts. Damn glad I didn’t wear one.
We were maybe halfway to the hospital and passing office buildings when Isaac held up a hand, and we stopped and ducked down. Someone was running at us down the road.
He was yelling. “Get outta there! Get outta there!”
I took aim. I was just good enough for a hipshot—not being military I couldn’t gun the guy down, not when he was waving his hands and not a gun, but for all I knew, he had three pounds of plastic on his chest. I thumbed my rifle over to single-shot, and yelled, “Do not come closer!”
Then the office behind us blew.
I was on my face like that. This chunk of concrete hit the pavement two feet from my shoulder and crap rained down, drifting on my uniform, drumming my helmet. A lot of it was glass. A rock the size of my fist caught me in the back, another almost took a chunk out of my hand. My head was ringing when I picked myself up.
First thing that crossed my mind was That’s okay, I can go home now, ’cause that was a bomb.
Ten seconds later that didn’t make sense to me, and it still doesn’t. It’s just what I thought.
I don’t remember how I got to my feet. The place was quiet. Crap wasn’t falling. The guy I’d been aiming at wasn’t running at us any more, wasn’t anywhere any more, and I looked around. The color was off. Everything was yellower, and I kept blinking and blinking, trying to make it go away, and then I caught this light coming through the buildings off west. I thought, The bastards set the city on fire.
Wasn’t any smoke, though. It was the sun.
Then I thought, Shit. I’d thought no time had passed. No, I’d been down for half an hour, and my helmet fit odd—pressure and suction—like I had a head injury, and the automated aid kicked on.
And where the hell were my girls?
Ten minutes later I worked out that my helmet radio had given up the ghost and wasn’t coming home for Christ’s Mass. The tips of my fingers were numb and I couldn’t pull the helmet for fear that I’d open up a wound, so poking at the buttons was the best I could do to fix it. My maps were safe and I should’ve headed back to drum up a search, but I had a chip on my shoulder for the guy who blew me up and I wasn’t trotting home with my tail between my legs. Mama always said pride would get me killed.
So I went deeper into the evac zone.
Sure enough, before long I started seeing people, and I had to crouch down and sneak behind dumpsters and burnt-out cars and roadblocks. I could hear them yelling to each other, pick out the ones walking with rifles—and damn, some of those rifles were better than mine.
I found the supermarket easy. It was big, with people going in and out. The entire street in front was busy with revs, six or eight at a shot, walking around on important rev business. Someone came out with a big bag of something, and they gathered up and walked away. That was an opening if I ever saw one.
The supermarket was big, the kind with doors at both ends and checkout lanes lined up all across the front. Big, and stocked enough to be Rev HQ. That made walking into it a stupid idea, and of course that’s what I did anyway. I snuck around, trying to avoid the automatic doors until I remembered there was no power to this neighborhood. The doors couldn’t give me away. I picked one, poked it to see it didn’t creak, and pushed it open.
And that’s when I decided, you know, gloves off, shoot to kill. ’Cause that’s when I saw Isaac slumped against a checkout stand, helmet off and eyes staring open, with an ugly dark gunshot blown out half his head.
I don’t know why I didn’t throw up then. I guess it didn’t feel real, between the fuzz in my hearing and the hurt in my skull and the way I’d jumped from afternoon to evening earlier. Think I thought I was dreaming.
I saw the head rev right away, when I stopped staring at dead Isaac. At least, I saw the guy acting it up. Put his name on a bullet. He was up on one of the far stands hollering like a ringleader, and there was no way I’d be able to pick him off from the doorway I’d come in. It’s hard to get sharpshooter training when you can’t meet the army requirements for infantry. Hard to shoot with a pounding headache and blood loss, too.
They don’t teach you much in City Guard, but I got on my stomach and did an army crawl like I’d seen in the comics and practiced, back home, back in that misspent youth of mine. Went creeping back into the supermarket until I found cover, with my head pounding and everything right of my pelvis one screaming mass of ache. The guy was up on the register counter, pacing back and forth, waving his gun around like that was the only way he could make a point.
“A state which controls right and wrong, which legislates right and wrong, a state which tells us what we can and can’t do, can and can’t be, can and can’t think, is a state that has legislated our humanity!” he said.
Something like that. I got the gist: usual rev talk. Blah blah this, blah blah overthrow the government, ’cause the guys with the guns and the anger will for sure be the better choice. I crept past the shelves of cereal and the display of spoiled pears and came nearer.
“Look at this guy!”
I was close enough that I could see him reach down and grab John by the collar.
He hauled John up. “This guy is a mockery of a man!” he yelled, shaking her like a rattle. “If he decided one day to put on this dress, he would be sent to jail! It’s only when the state tells him to that he can. There is no difference! The state has fabricated right and wrong!”
I lined up my shot.
And the first shot went so wild I was lucky it didn’t take out the front door. The guy spun around and almost lost his footing, but he stayed up enough to swing his pistol and take a sh
ot that came a lot closer to target than mine had. I ducked behind a display of Corn Crunch that wouldn’t stop a ping-pong ball, but instinct said go for cover and I did. I flipped my rifle onto automatic, ’cause it’s hard to miss on automatic, and thanked God the girls knew enough to get down.
You know. Blood splattered. Girls gasped, one of them screamed before another clapped a hand over her mouth, and I looked at John, white as a sheet and bloody. One of Isaac’s girls, but I bet they all knew what happened to Isaac. They’d been looking shell-shocked before I took out that rev. I pushed off up the floor and ran to them, then dropped and just barely caught myself in a crouch. God, my head hurt. Christos, I didn’t feel right. John touched my shoulder and I shoved her away.
The sensible one, the one who stopped the other girl from screaming, said, “We need to get away from the doors.” I nodded. If no revs outside had heard us exchanging bullets, that’d be one miracle. To keep any from coming back, we’d need another.
“Yeah,” I said. “Come on. Back through.” My heart was pounding. Made my ears hurt, it was so loud, and I could feel it on my stomach. I stood up, and the store yanked sideways and shook like a dog toy. Then I was on the ground.
I was on the ground, and I was back farther in the store. I was leaning against a pile of budget toilet paper. All I could hear was my own blood.
The sensible one was crouched over me, like a bad flashback to post-op. I looked around, trying to get my bearings, saw a scatter of broken glass from a freezer case, a crumpled wrapper from a snack cake, a bottle of blackstrap molasses with its top off. Nothing made any sense. The sensible woman was pushing a water bottle to my lips. “Here. Drink this, if you can.”
I caught a glance at her name tag: Agatha, with a low service number that meant she’d signed up early. That seemed important: signed up early. She was practically shoving the bottle up my nose, so I drank. The water was warm and sugary and made my headache ten times worse, but Agatha held it through two good gulps.