Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  This time around, he wouldn’t let everyone die. Maybe that’s why he was spared. So that he could do it over…

  At least the girl wasn’t in pain anymore. No whimpers.

  She was such a tiny, mousy thing, bone-thin, pale as a ghost, hair sticking out in every direction, all freckly, knobby knees…

  She had to be lying about being sixteen. He wouldn’t give her a day past twelve. Maybe thirteen.

  Mirabelle… Funny name. Sounded almost Spartan, didn’t it? Except that Spartan girls were never this tiny, unless they were ten.

  She was still scared of him. Even now, curled up next to him. He could feel it, the fear. For some odd reason, that was the worst thing about this whole mess. The fact that she feared him so much. Like he was some kind of wild beast.

  But how could she not fear him? The first Citizen she had ever met, more likely than not, had tried to do what?

  “Probably would have killed her, too, the bastard, may he burn in Gehinnom for all eternity,” thought Yosi.

  Acid, shame and a personal loathing that went far beyond disgust rose in the pit of his stomach at the thought of it.

  A Citizen! That a Citizen of the League would…

  And not just any Citizen of the League, was he? The swine had worn a tallit katan under the poncho. Olive-green cotton. Green tzitzit. Same as his. And there was a tallit gadol and a tefilin bag in the rucksack. The shame of it made Yosi want to cry.

  The Citizen Assessment Test did a pretty good job of measuring intelligence and such. Too bad no one had figured out a way to test a man’s scruples as well.

  You could smile and be nice, and pass all the tests, and go to the synagogue on Shabbat, and still be a dirty, rotten, evil bastard on the inside, and no one would ever suspect a thing. Until one day you found yourself alone in the woods with a helpless little girl, and no one would ever know what you did. And then…

  Except Hashem would know, wouldn’t He? That’s what the evil bastards always forgot. That from Him there was no hiding. That He would make all the evil bastards pay, in this world or the next. That there were no coincidences.

  He had lived so he could save this girl. And Leo. And who knew why else? And he was responsible for those whom he saved, wasn’t he? That’s how it worked.

  “I’ll protect you, sweetie,” thought Yosi intently at the tiny warm body curled up against his stomach.

  “I’ll keep you safe, no matter what. Don’t be afraid. I won’t let anything hurt you. Just, please, please, don’t be so scared of me. We’re not all monsters. I’m not.”

  He felt the little body uncurl and turn over beside him. She was looking up into his eyes. All he wanted was to keep her safe. He didn’t know why, really, but he did. The poor, helpless little thing. If she would only stop fearing him so much…

  “Yosi…” she whispered hoarsely.

  “Don’t be afraid, honey,” replied Yosi, stroking her hair, “I won’t hurt you.”

  He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek…

  And suddenly she was kissing him back. Her arms were around him and her tongue was in his mouth and she was kissing him with a desperate need the likes of which he had never felt. It was like a fire inside her. And, in an instant, it was inside him, too. It was as if a dam had broken inside his soul, and all the desire he had ever felt just poured through all at once.

  A flick of his eyes at the poncho’s control menu, and the thin partition between them was gone. He could feel her soft, smooth skin against him, the curve of her breast, the rough little button of her nipple beneath his hand, the slick, warm wetness between her legs…

  The scent of her soaked into his soul as he showered her with kisses.

  “No,” he thought, “no, this is no twelve-year-old girl.”

  He suddenly wanted to kiss every square millimeter of her, head to toe, every little bit of that soft, smooth, fragrant, feminine skin. It was like nothing else he had ever felt. Nothing could compare to this desperate hunger. As if every kiss might be his last.

  She was… Like water. Like water in the desert. Like shade at noon. Like food after Yom Kippur.

  Her body arched beneath his hands. Her mouth merged with his again and again and again in long waves, as if she wanted to melt into him, or pull him in to melt into her, until there was no Yosi, no Mirabelle, just a single being with no need of names, for nothing else existed in its realm, but it.

  She was sighing softly. Little tiny sighs of pleasure between kisses, almost moans, as her hands caressed his body.

  “Please be gentle,” she whispered into his ear as her legs opened to receive him, “I’ve never done anything.”

  Guilt stabbed Yosi straight through the heart like a dagger.

  “My God,” he thought, “I am worse than that bastard! He was just going to rape her and maybe kill her. Me, I’m…”

  He pulled away from her, and she tried to follow. The poncho partition was suddenly back between them.

  “No, sweetie. Miri, honey, no,” whispered Yosi as he evaded her questing lips, “I can’t. I can’t. It’s wrong.”

  “No, Yosi, please don’t stop!” she replied in a desperate whisper.

  “You can do anything you want. I’ll be your girl. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Anything. Whatever you want.”

  A new wave of guilt stabbed Yosi’s heart with every word. He could feel the warm, soft invitation of her body on the other side of the partition. The scent of her hair filled his nostrils as his arms enfolded her, pinning her. Her frantic hands struggled to find a way around the partition, to touch his bare skin again.

  “Miri,” he whispered, “Miri, it’s wrong. Your first time should be special. It should be with a man you love. On your wedding night, not like this. I can’t take that away from you. It’s all you have left.

  “You’re so terrified of me, half the time you want to scream. But I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’ll protect you. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to buy safety like this, ok? You don’t.”

  “But I want to,” whispered Mirabelle as she snuggled up against him.

  “You’re… You’re not that scary. Sometimes. Sometimes you’re really nice. And I don’t know why.

  “Don’t you… Don’t you want me to, you know…” she continued, sheepishly.

  “I do, honey,” replied Yosi softly, as he kissed the top of her head. “I want you very much. You’re a cute girl, you really are, and I haven’t… Not in a long time. And I’d be your first. It’s really hard to turn down something that precious.

  “But it’s wrong, ok? I can’t marry you. And you don’t love me, you’re just scared and lonely. And that’s not why I helped you. I just did it because it was the right thing to do.

  “Do you really think that I could just walk away and let that monster rape you? Torture you? Kill you? Do you really think that, if you don’t give yourself to me, I’ll just leave you behind in the woods to starve to death or die of metal poisoning?”

  “Umm…” replied Mirabelle, “I don’t know. You’re… You’re so alien, right?

  “It’s like… Like you’re two people in one body. Sometimes you’re so kind and nice and you touch me like I’m made of glass. And sometimes you look at me like you’re going to eat me, and growl and toss me around like a sack of potatoes. And I never know which one it’s going to be, unless I start crying, or something. I just don’t…

  “I just don’t know the rules,” she continued, looking up pleadingly into his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve never met anyone from the League before. Mom made me learn your languages, but she never taught me the rules.

  “Look, I know it’s your world now. You’ve been raised to it since you were in diapers. You’ve been doing this stuff your whole life. Probably since before I was a baby. God only knows how many battles you’ve been in. Probably more than I’ve had high school midterms.

  “So… I don’t know anything about…all this, right?

  “I was going to go t
o college, work in some office, get married some day… Nobody told me I’d be running around the woods with some Leaguer who kills aliens and rapists and takes their food, right?

  “So… So could you please just be nice to me? Just a little bit?”

  “I’ll try, honey,” replied Yosi, smiling.

  “Just… Bear with me, ok? I don’t know the rules, either.

  “I was going to serve my Duke and guard his grandson and look all handsome in a House uniform. Maybe I was going to fight the Omicronians again. Maybe I was going to storm Tienchen, and maybe we would keep it, the third time around. Nobody told me I’d be running around the woods on Paradise, saving random cute Outsider girls from rapists and aliens. And the only Paradisians I’ve met have mostly been waiters and concierges and customs agents and whatnot.

  “So I’ll make you a deal,” he continued, “no screaming and crying and being all scared out of your wits on your side, and no growling and tossing you around like a sack of potatoes on my side.

  “Well, almost no growling and tossing you around. I might have to do it to save your life. But then you’re allowed to be scared out of your wits, as long as you’re quiet and do what you’re told when you’re told to do it. And we’ll just make up the rest of the rules as we go along. Deal?”

  “Deal!” laughed Mirabelle, hugging him.

  “But… could you please still hold me? You’re so warm. And…

  “And I feel safer when you hold me. Even though you’re kind of scary sometimes.”

  “Sure,” replied Yosi, kissing her on the cheek. “I like holding you.”

  * 21 *

  “Matti Livshitz,” read Yosi.

  The blood-encrusted wallet in his hands was dead, of course, but apparently some things were stamped onto the case, for emergencies.

  He brushed some of the flaky brown crust off with his thumb. “B-class Citizen. Home address in Nes Ziona District, New Israel. Honorable discharge from the Navy after the requisite six years. Reserve position as petty officer on the destroyer Hunter… Average Shimon.”

  “Mamzer ben zonah!” he exclaimed with quiet anger, pitching the wallet into the beaver pool.

  “I thought you said his name was Matti,” said Mirabelle.

  Yosi laughed, blushing.

  “I guess there are some words that aren’t taught to nice young girls by Hebrew tutors, huh?”

  “It’s amazing,” thought Miri. “He kills people like it’s nothing, but he blushes because he cursed in front of a girl. How does that work?”

  “So what’s it mean?” she asked.

  “Err…” stuttered Yosi.

  “If he turns any redder, he’ll look like a tomato,” she thought. A slightly brownish tomato, kind of like the ones Corazon got from her grandfather.

  “A mamzer is… someone whose parents were brother and sister. And a zonah is a woman who sells herself for money,” he choked out.

  “Well, that would certainly be an unfortunate background to have,” laughed Miri.

  He really wasn’t scary at all, she thought.

  Well, he was, but he wasn’t. It was kind of like when she was seven, when she’d first met the shepherds at Corazon’s grandfather’s hacienda. She’d almost peed herself when they’d come over to sniff her, the first time around. By the end of the week, she was tagging along with the herdsmen, riding the biggest dog to the pasture, like a pony.

  Except that he was much weirder than a bunch of huge dogs, wasn’t he? Like last night, when he’d felt so guilty. She didn’t know that guys could feel guilty over that sort of thing. They were supposed to always want it, right? And if you gave them a little, they were supposed to want more. So, if they wanted you and you offered to… do everything, weren’t they supposed to… take you up on it?

  So, maybe he didn’t really want her?

  “But he does want me,” thought Mirabelle. “He’s all embarrassed about it, but he does. He keeps glancing at me when he thinks I’m not looking. And last night… He wasn’t faking it.”

  “Ok, beaver tail stew should be done,” mumbled Yosi, clearly trying to change the subject.

  “I always know what he feels. I just have to kind of… reach for it, and I simply know. Or is it just my imagination?” thought Mirabelle. “It has to be my imagination. I’m just used to him now. It’s his face, and his tone. That’s all.”

  “I thought beavers were toxic,” she said. “And… don’t your people have a bunch of rules about not eating things?”

  Yosi popped open the lid of the mini-kettle and reached inside for a spoonful.

  “Well,” he said, “kashrut went out the window when a bunch of aliens showed up and started dropping nukes on us. A warrior on the battlefield can eat whatever he needs to eat. That’s been settled halacha for a couple of thousand years, at least.

  “Although it would be nice if we could find a kosher deli in these woods,” he grinned, “I could use an overstuffed pastrami on rye right about now.

  “This stew could use some salt. Chili pepper would be nice, too. But all I have is a bottle of pepper sauce. Oh, well.

  “Let’s cook it a bit longer, huh? Your stomach needs things to be easy to digest right now.”

  “Don’t dump that whole bottle in there!” exclaimed Mirabelle.

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Here,” replied Yosi, proffering a spoon, “have a taste. It’s nowhere near as scary as you think.”

  It wasn’t. Kind of spicy, a lot like the food at Corazon’s house, but not bad. Before the quarter-kilo of cut-up beaver tail and some water got added to it, it had been a packet of instant beef stew. The bits of beaver meat gave it an odd taste, though.

  “So, aren’t beavers toxic?” repeated Mirabelle.

  “Their guts are,” he replied, “But not their meat. Mr. Li designed the meat to be edible.

  “Neat, huh?” grinned her Leaguer.

  Clearly, thought Miri, it was neat to him. Either that, or he genuinely liked explaining things to her.

  “These guys eat some of the most toxic stuff on the planet,” he continued, “They can even digest actual native Paradisian life. But they themselves are kind of edible.

  “See the beavers have a huge liver lining their entire abdominal cavity. All their other organs are inside the liver. That’s why they have those barrel chests and potbellies. There is a silk bag all around the whole mess, and a bunch of fat around that, and another silk bag lined with connective tissue around that.

  “They sequester their metals as nodules inside the fatty layer, so everything inside the bags is toxic. Everything outside the bags is edible.

  “The body meat is pretty nasty. You don’t want to eat it, except in emergencies. But the tail can be quite good, if you know how to prepare it.”

  The dead beaver Yosi was using for illustration was kind of gross, thought Mirabelle, but the stew didn’t taste bad at all. And… it was kind of neat. A critter that eats gray algae and Heaven knows what else, but is itself actually edible. Who would have thought it was even possible? She’d grown up on Paradise, but she didn’t know all that much about the way the ecosystem actually worked, did she? Nobody really thought it was all that important, unless you were going to be an eco-manager or a forester, or something. And who’d ever heard of a blanco forester?

  “So, how come you know all this?” she asked.

  “You should have a survival library in your poncho,” replied Yosi.

  “Let’s see… Yes you do. See, here is the library index, under the other functions icon. The survival manual for Paradise is right here, see?”

  “But that’s not how you know!” blurted Mirabelle.

  A little thrill of fear shot through her at his sudden glance into her eyes and the way his fingers tightened into a vise around her forearm.

  Her hand shot up to her mouth. It had just come into her head and she’d blurted it without thinking.

  But it wasn’t wrong, was it? No, no it wasn’t! How did she know that?
<
br />   “No,” he replied, relaxing his grip.

  He knew… something. Or maybe just suspected it. Something about her… Something… important? Right? Or was it just her imagination?

  “That’s not how I know these things. I went walkabout up around here about four years back…”

  “Oh my God, what’s happening?” thought Mirabelle.

  No, no, it had to be her imagination. Just his tone, that’s all.

  But why did it feel so… real? She just wanted to curl up and cry all of a sudden, and she didn’t even know why.

  “Well, doesn’t matter,” he continued abruptly, hand chopping through the air to cut off the horrible torrent that sliced right through her soul.

  “I wanted to be strict about it, so I memorized everything. About four months in the bush above the toxic line, with nothing but furs and stone tools. Climbed up the Katarina Glacier for the winter solstice. The only things I brought were a water filter, a mini-kettle and some vitamin pills. Didn’t turn out the way I’d expected back then, but I guess it’ll all come in handy now.”

  “A winter walkabout above the toxic line? A wintertime climb up the Katarina Glacier? Up the north face of San Sebastian?” thought Miri, “Alone, with no radio and with nothing but stone tools? Who in their right mind, if they wanted to stay alive…”

  He wasn’t lying.

  Two weeks ago, she’d be ready to run away screaming over something like this. Now… Now she felt a strange… kinship with him. That was the word, wasn’t it? Kinship. When you knew how much it could hurt to live.

  Her hand reached for his.

  “How far did you climb up?” she asked, fixing his eyes with her own.

  “For the solstice, I watched the sunrise from the summit of San Sebastian. It was the second most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.”

  “And?” asked Mirabelle, fighting the sudden urge to kiss him.

  His eyes were dark pools full of pain, and she was falling in…

  Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, he burst into a gale of laughter, and the spell was broken.