by Paul Jessup
Mari tried to think of something appropriate to say. She could think of nothing at all. So, instead, she chanted more calming words under her breath, the phrases like steel rods rubbing together as she ran her hands through Ekhi’s hair. Ekhi screamed and wailed and bit and pushed, painful hands on breastbone, knees digging into ribs, teeth pushing past flesh and leaving red moons on Mari’s arm. Mari said nothing but her incantation, biting back her own screams of pain.
Sugoi stomped over to Hodei, his fists clenched and his eyes burning. He said something that was lost amongst the screams. Something threatening to Hodei. A warning, perhaps. Or a threat of things to come. His voice was low. It rumbled beneath the ship like an asteroid striking the armored sides, a thunder in the halls.
Hodei said nothing. He stood his ground, staring at his brother, the threats hitting hard and deep but causing no damage. Mari did not know what was happening. All she knew was that Ekhi screamed and Ekhi remembered, and that Mari would hate to be in that situation. To see Sugoi die before her very eyes. To be a survivor, carrying their child inside, planted with memories and genetic architecture, but still alone, haunted by the moments they had spent together.
Sugoi tensed, his rock form trembling. He pushed Hodei to the ground, the massive force throwing his tiny brother across the room with a single flick of a finger. Mari saw and could not move. She screamed, “Stop,” but it was lost amongst the wails and the sobs and combat, her words floating empty, without meaning, formless spirits forced back into the ether without purpose.
Hodei stood up, whipping out a crowbar from behind his back. It shone black under the halos of orange light.
STOP! STOP! He’s dead! He’s dead! screamed Ekhi. I will never see him again! Stop! Please stop. Stop it. Don’t kill each other—bring him back to life! Take me beyond death! I can’t handle this anymore. I can’t. Please, stop. Don’t do this. We don’t need this. Stop.
Footsteps. In the hall. Clanging, metallic. The footsteps of a doll. Hodei turned to see who it was, the ripples of his spine exposed. Sugoi moved a giant stone fist, punching Hodei square in the back as one of Itsasu’s dolls glided into the far end of the hall. Hodei’s body hit the ground with a wet thump.
Around Itsasu’s blue-haired doll floated the thalna on lightning-coated wings, their little eyes glowing blue with a holy neon light that blinked in short bursts of electrical conversation. Hodei spasmed on the ground in front of her, Sugoi grinning over his body like a mad giant about ready to eat for the first time in months.
Ekhi stopped screaming when she saw the captain’s doll. She lay quietly, curled up in Mari’s arms, gnawing tiny mouse holes in her fingers with the pointed tips of her eyeteeth.
Several of the thalna flew down and stitched Hodei back together, webs of glowing light fluttering beneath their fingers and sticking to his wet skin with a faint scratching sound, like a knife against canvas, removing paint. Sugoi stepped back, letting the doll through. She did not say anything to him. Not a word of reprimand or appraisal.
She bent over, her doll eyes staring into Ekhi’s flushed face. “I see that you remember.”
Ekhi nodded, muttering incantations under her breath.
“Good. Do you want to forget him? Your lover? Forever? I can do it. One word and the thalna will enter your mind, fixing it forever with their tiny scalpels. Is that what you want?”
Ekhi shook her head. “I have a responsibility. To remember him. For my sake. For our daughter’s sake.”
The doll nodded. “I understand. Do you want a sedative?”
Ekhi smiled. “No, no I’m fine now. A little shaken. But that’s about it.”
Mari helped Ekhi stand. Marble eyes watched them move, recording each movement and sending it back to Itsasu through her doll. Sugoi stood and watched as well, waiting for them to leave. Waiting to be alone with Hodei, once again. So he could break him, smash him, grind his face into the ribs of the egia for touching his girl.
The two women walked down the hallway, arms around each other’s waists, each using the other for support. They were like dolls themselves, broken rag dolls, trying to prop up one another’s boneless bodies. Itsasu watched through avatar eyes, through the mozorro eyes, through a thousand many-faceted eyes throughout the ship. The doll did not move her head, her face still staring down the hall. She whispered back to Sugoi, who waited.
“You had better go. Go back to your room. I’ll take good care of your brother. Understand?”
Sugoi did not nod, did not respond verbally. He only turned and walked back down the long ribs of the hallway. He would deal with Hodei later. He kept such events logged in his mind, deep in the crevices of his hate-drenched soul.
Someday, he was going to kill his brother.
It was just a matter of time.
11
Ekhi sat on her bed, the soft sheets knotted around her waist and legs, and a bulb of tea between her hands. Her eyes closed as the aroma of it teased her senses. Mari sat in the same chair by the same round door, a replica of when Ekhi had first awakened on board this new egia.
Maybe I was sleepwalking, Ekhi thought as she sipped the tea, the steam tickling her nose. Maybe I was sleepwalking and I just woke up now. That is why all of this is the same. Because now, now I am really awake.
Mari sighed, then spoke. Her voice was naked, the only sound in the room. “We’re hitting a port tomorrow. Floating port, out in the void of space. You don’t have to stay with us. You could find someone else there. Someone else who could take you—”
Ekhi opened her eyes. She was calm. A strange calm. The orange lights were low, tinting the room amber. “No,” Ekhi said, “What would I do? He’s not there anymore.”
Mari nodded. “You want me to go? I can leave you alone now, if you would like.”
Ekhi sipped some more tea. Calm. No, she wasn’t calm. That was the wrong word for this. Numb. She was numb. “No,” she said, “I want you to stay.”
Mari walked over and sat on the edge of her bed. “Okay. But I have to warn you, I’m not good for company. I guess that’s why me and Sugoi are perfect together. He doesn’t talk, and he doesn’t expect me too, either.”
The tea tasted strange on her tongue. Like a forest fire. As if Mari’s words had corrupted its flavor. “I know. I mean, in a way. I know.”
Mari pulled Ekhi against her shoulder again. “It’s the same isn’t it? Both of us trapped in silence. Silence we enjoy. What do you plan on naming her, your daughter?”
Ekhi sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t even know her yet. I’m not even starting to show. Maybe then, when I’m ballooning out and this feels real, when it is concrete fact. Then I can come up with a name for her.”
Mari kissed Ekhi on the head, her hair brushing against Ekhi’s lips and teeth. “Nothing is ever concrete.”
Their voices died down, their breaths silent on their lips. No noise, no sound. Not even the struggling engines of the ship or the cleaning of the mozorro. Just a void of space engulfing them with non-noise, surrounding them with non-being.
Act II: All the Stars Have Teeth
12
Ekhi awoke, panting, her body soaked in sweat, the room hot and the orange lights still on, still tinting the room in fluctuations of amber. The lights felt alive. She had dreamt. What had she dreamt? Of her star, her lover.
Still alive. Searching her out.
A pain tugged at her, dug into her. She felt her mind splintering, breaking apart. He was dead. She had watched him die. She came as he went, the lights of galaxies filling her, embracing her. Exhaling her. Making her whole.
She laid her head back on the pillow, resisting the desire to call Mari. She was split between what she felt and what she knew. She could not see reality, not even in the middle, floating between the two like a bridge. Only illusions, faceted shadows, splintering into dizzying forms.
She could not go back to sleep.
She did not want to go back to sleep.
Instead she tossed and turned,
trying to decide which had more reality, which had more gravity. Her dream and her intuition, or her memory?
13
The mozorro howled in wolfling pain, their lizard-skull faces shaking with each movement as they combed the ship, bursting with warning. The lights went from amber to a waxy red, the walls shaking and the bursts of hollow explosions ringing in their ears, trapped within the void of space.
Intruder! they howled, Invader! Foreign!
They called for the white blood cells to come storming through the ship with poison arms, wrapping and grasping the outsiders that walked amongst them. They sent warning chemicals to Itsasu, recorded images of the invaders for her to watch.
Itsasu stirred; the chemicals burned her skin.
The antibodies were withdrawn, their chemical compositions still forming. She would have to go as a doll and stop this herself. She only hoped her crew was prepared. This was war. This was suicide. They had no choice. Invaders could only be after one thing, the thing that Itsasu kept hidden in the secret part of the ship. The true meaning for her mission, the sole purpose of the last few centuries of her life.
The Ortzadar engine.
And there was no way she was going to give it up to some pirates storming her ship. No way she was going to just roll over and play along with their stupid little games. It would stretch her brain waves thin, but she commanded the computer to awaken four of her dolls and get them ready for war.
14
Mari ran to Ekhi’s room, her boots sliding across the floor as she came to an abrupt stop in front of the door, her heart on fire, her lungs struggling, her mind floating with a thousand thoughts. Panic, she thought. Emergency, she thought. In the distant echoes of the halls, she heard the mozorro scream.
She forced the door open with a single thrust of her orange passkey. It slid aside reluctantly, the rust on the sides grating against the ceiling and sending a metallic dust below. In the circle of the doorframe, Mari saw a hollow-shelled room with the bed messed up and the blankets strewn across the floor in knotted piles. No sign of blood, no sign of struggle.
The butterflies in her skull cage leapt about, fluttering in fright. They spoke what Mari could not: danger, warning. Something in the ship. Something coming for them. Ekhi wasn’t there, wasn’t in her room. Mari hoped Ekhi was safe. Hoped Ekhi was someplace else, hiding in the secret corners of the ship.
She turned and let the door slide back to a close as the sound of footsteps penetrated her thoughts. The metallic clang-clanging of dolls as they stomped through the long, winding halls of the egia. She remembered when she was a child, living on one of the Norilian moons. She had gone swimming in the planet-sized lake, diving off the edge of the man-made island, the metal edges brushing her feet as she knifed into the water. Cold. Blue. Rushing around her.
And then she remembered seeing things, things on the bottom of the lake. She had known that her people had killed all of the original inhabitants, that the terraforming and the island had cost the natives their lives. But she had never seen it until that moment. Never seen that the bottom of the planet was one long graveyard, filled with the corpses of mermaids and mermen, their long hair whipping along with the waves, their eyes staring up in the leathery skull skin.
A fear. She had been afraid that they would reach up and grab her. That they would drown her to keep her down there with them, forever on the bottom of the lake, swimming with them until she bubbled out of breath. Terraformed to death.
It was the same in the egia, this fear, this fear that these people could destroy them, could kill them. It came back fast, filling her every vein with that same panic she had felt as a child. Outsiders. Invaders. Those who wanted to kill her.
Crimson-faced war dolls stomped around the corner with ringing feet. All female, carrying betadurs in their hands, the rifle tips sparkling with gold and blue energy. Ready to fire. Ready to turn Mari into a pool of flesh and metal. They wore white aprons trimmed with red flowers, their waxy skin barely covered by the straps and fabric. They each had red hair that fell over faces and shoulders in wild, messy curls.
The dolls stopped when they saw her. Their feet stopped clang, clang, clanging; their marble eyes focused on Mari. “You are not him,” one said, pointing the rifle at Mari, the tip glowing hot and the air tensing with magnetic spirals.
These were not Itsasu’s dolls. Her dolls had an elegant grace, a sort of Neo-Victorian aesthetic. These were crude creatures. Sex puppets. War puppets. Something designed by a man, controlled by a man.
Mari looked at each of the dolls. “I’m not who?”
The mozorro screamed in the background.
“She is of no use to us. Continue the search.”
They clanged past Mari, shoving her aside. The minute they were out of her sight, she ran through the hallways, the honeycombed passages blurring past, her body in a panic, her mind filled with terror. With each moment, she remembered swimming down, seeing the graceful limbs dancing even in death. Her arms shook and her heart danced. But her mind, her mind was perfectly clear. Focused on a single goal: to be armed. To be ready.
She ran through the rec room and the half-filled mess hall, the mozorro screaming at her as she passed. She ran through bedrooms and entertainment parlors, and finally she ran to the docking station, the long hangar next to the main airlock.
The room was the largest in the egia, big enough for smaller ships to be docked inside of it. Above her head lay the ribs of the ship, gothic bone arches propping up the ceiling. At the far starboard end she saw that the air vent was open, and it led into a fragile glass tube suspended between two ships. A sucking sound came from the tube, like wet lips over a straw. She saw stars glitter beyond the tube, the walkway exposed to the infinite emptiness of the universe.
The light of a sun glittered off of the glass, reflecting a nearby planet and its trio of moons. The moons, they were blue and hovering, terraformed places, designed to keep human life. One was covered in water and gentle mechanical islands, and she thought again about the dead of her home planet and could not help but feel like she had come full circle in her life.
She walked calmly over to the line of lockers against the wall and pulled open her personal closet. She pulled out her suit, pulled out her own betadur. She slipped the black fabric over her head, hooking up the oxygen tubes, letting air flow through her suit. The cool artificial breeze tingled against her skin, giving her goose bumps and awakening some hidden cluster of memories nested in her mind. Memories of space. Of killing. She felt a change come over her, the suit clinging to her, masking her in its own memories.
This was a second skin. An exoskeleton. She felt insectoid, the memories of a hive mind crawling into her through the chitinous armor. Now she was the scavenger. Now she was the killer. This suit had seen death, had seen blood. It would see more, it would shed more. She twirled her betadur in her hands. It was heavy, hot. Enchanted. She felt the fire grow inside her.
And now, Mari thought, I beat them at their own game. They will see the thunder of my hands, feel the roaring waves of my heart burst upon them. They will tense and burn in my fire, their bodies crisp relics scattered across the stars.
As quietly as she could, she crept into the glass tube. She kept in the shadows, using the tricks of artificial light to hide her body as much as possible, letting the glow refract around her and disguise it as shadows on the wall.
15
Ekhi hid. She hid in the dark place, the unseen place. The place that was barely habitable. A tube that carried oxygen and hot air down through the vents below. She was curled in a ball, trying to close in on herself, one hand protectively grasping around the circle of her stomach.
It’s them, she thought. The glass eaters. They’d come back for her even though the planet was gone, was burnt up, was nothing but asteroids now. That had to be them. They made the same loud clanging noise, had the same metallic voices.
She had thought she was safe. After so long, after so many years. How could s
he have thought that? Her brother’s ghost still haunted her, and that meant they could, too. It meant they could hunt her and find her, even though they should be dead. Because by all rights, she should be dead too, dead over and over again. Because the world wyrms had eaten them all.
She crawled a little farther into the vent, thinking. She tried to forget about the past, even for a moment. Tried to forget being twelve and hiding in the passages beneath the station, seeing the ground so far below and the moon so close above, fat and pregnant and full, just like now.
She tried to forget about them dragging Tobat’s dead body through the tunnels. Tried to forget the trail of blood behind him. Like a snail. A red snail trail. A brother blood trail. The scraping sound of flesh on metal. She felt nauseous.
As a distraction from her memories, she decided to try to name her little girl. She knew it was a girl, no sensor or scanner necessary. A little girl whom she would keep safe. Keep alive and normal and brilliant. Naming her would be a way of moving out of the past and into the now. A chanting of names to calm and quiet her busy nerves.
Laino? Lurra? What was her name? Ekhi looked down at her stomach and asked in a whisper, What is your name, little girl? What is it? Urtzi? Sorguin? Tronagarru? Maju?
None of the names fit. None of them felt right. The words entered her mind, whispered on the tingling tips of her lips, but died when spoken aloud. They were void words. Empty, meaningless words.
She heard a banging directly beneath her. And the sound of something sliding across the floor. And she knew, knew, knew it was her brother’s body again. And again, and again. That body sliding, that wet red trail slicking the ground beneath him.