by Jeff Sweat
“The Mamas are ready,” Pilar says.
“The Mamas are ready,” the village says.
And so the gods are ready to make her a Mama.
The five Mamas stand up—I’m a Mama, too, she has to tell herself, even if it doesn’t feel like it—and climb onto the narrow end of the keyhole altar. Jemma sees that the altar is covered with thin sheets of bronze. She’s never noticed before, but she has always tried to sit as far away from the altar as she can.
The Mamas choose their Dads now. The Olders pick their favorite Mamas, who pick their favorite Dads. Jemma already knows she’ll be picking last, and who will be left.
Ming, the oldest Gatherer, picks a Farmer named Jax. He’s built like a Muscle, but too gentle to ever swing a machete against anything but thorns. She’s seen the two kissing in the Circle before. Consuela, one of the Little Doctors, picks the new Muscle, the one who’s smaller than Li.
The Priestess calls out Lady, and Jemma holds her breath, wishing her a good choice. Carlos is slight but a smart Mechanic and kind, and he likes Lady. But Lady can see only the giant Exile, and when she says “Li!” Jemma feels something come ajar inside her. It only gets worse when Li lifts Lady off the altar without really looking at her.
There are always more Dads than Mamas during the Waking, so there are four boys left over by the time they call Jemma’s name, last. She had hoped that Hector would be left. Besides Blue and Jamie, he was the Muscle most loyal to Apple.
Hector looks reluctant when she picks him. Before he can lift her off the platform the way he’s supposed to, Jemma hops off and lands with an awkward little bounce that the gown disguises. She throws her arms around Hector as if to kiss him.
When her lips are close to his, she says, “I hope you ain’t feeling the urge to roll tonight. I got some fun things planned.” He’s puzzled for a moment, and then he smiles. He knows what she’s thinking, or pretty close to it.
“Yeah, I’m down with that,” he says.
* * *
The final part of the Waking is simple: They get the Mamas drunk. And Lady is ready.
“Bring the booze!” the Priestess says, and two of the younger Muscle bring out ancient bottles of whiskey, aged dark brown.
Lady remembers drinking a clear liquid with Jemma when they were nine until they couldn’t even stagger home from the house they scavenged. They lay shoulder to shoulder on carpet so thick it threatened to swallow them in their state. Lay watching the ceiling, plastered with some kind of glinty material, which sparkles with tiny stars.
“Do you ever think, you know, look at the stars and think … we part of something so … much bigger? Don’t you want to—” But Lady couldn’t talk anymore because her tongue felt too heavy and thick to lift.
“I just feel small,” Jemma said, and passed out.
Tonight, though, at the ceremony, they can drink openly. Only the Mamas can. The Dads don’t get any, because their dicks won’t work. Lady drinks deep. She holds the bottle up triumphantly, yells, even spills a little on Li, who suddenly kisses her. Maybe he actually does want her, she thinks.
Back there in the chapel, he didn’t. He looked at her as if she weren’t there, just an empty space where his eyes should be, and she felt cold.
Right before the ceremony, the little Exile approached her, all serious. “Who you gonna pick?” he said.
“It’s a secret,” she said, giddy.
“Don’t pick Li,” he said.
“What, jealous?”
“Don’t pick Li. He’s not safe.”
“I know. That’s the point.”
“Don’t pick him,” Pico said. “I know him. He is—”
“You, Exile, gotta get outta here. Come back when you big enough for me.” And now, looking at Li, she wonders.
Then they’re back on the donkeys, passing the bottles back and forth even as the donkeys sway. The Priestess, Pilar, rides with them, coming back to the village for the first time in weeks. One bottle crashes to the ground, but it’s almost empty and no one cares because the mood has changed from ceremony to party, a party that moves through the hills wrapped in a moving cocoon of torchlight, warding off all the death in the world.
By the time they reach the Circle, a giant fire is blazing. It feels different from council nights, as if it’s giving off more heat. The bottles keep appearing, from inside bags and under clothes, and it’s not just the Mamas drinking anymore. Li takes a long drink of tequila, not caring who sees.
“None for you,” Lady says, giggling. “You got work to do.”
He just takes another drink. She sees his face slide out of place for a moment, and then it’s back like a mask. But another spin around the fire and she’s already forgotten it.
She sees Jemma dancing under the stars, even with Apple—even with what’s about to happen to Apple. Even Jemma can’t help herself when the fire roars and the Mamas dance. Isn’t this life, too? Lady wonders. To put down your weapons, to sing, to dance? Is that what keeps you alive when there’s so much death?
Everything is part of her tonight—the fire, the music, Jemma, Li, Apple, Trina, the stars, even the weird little Exile. She dances next to the fire and touches everyone who passes by her. The fire shoots out fingers of warmth; some of them touch her belly. They burn inside until the flames reach every corner. She is ready ready ready.
“Let’s go now,” she says to Li, knowing that she will die if she doesn’t kiss someone. If she doesn’t roll with him. She pulls him all the way to the Mamas’ house, facing the Circle. He follows. She sees Jemma’s face on the way out of the Circle, now set hard. Oh, Jemma, she thinks. Tomorrow I’ll mourn with you. But tonight I’m gonna live.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE MAMAS
The drops of whiskey roll down Jemma’s chin. She can’t have booze, not tonight. But she has to look like she’s Waking. That’s easier to fake than she would have guessed, because when they reach the Circle it starts to feel real. She finds herself dancing under the stars, feeling the movement in a way she almost never does. The swallow of booze that made it down her throat warms her. She can feel calmness settling upon her shoulders.
One by one, the Mamas and Dads disappear as Jemma watches. Lady pulls Li toward the house, tugging at his shirt. Jemma understands. She wishes her well. She notices Pico making his way silently around the edge of the Circle, moving through the crowd but never seeming to quite touch it.
“You ready to roll?” Jemma says. Hector nods, maybe not as lusty as he should look. She didn’t pick him for his acting.
Each of the couples get their own room tonight in a house meant for the Waking. She’s made sure she has one with a window facing away from the street. She pulls in Hector, laughing, swishing her gown, and shuts the door.
“Whaddya need me to do?” he says, whispering.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just stay here.”
“I can help.”
“You planning on getting Exiled? Getting a bullet in your head?”
He doesn’t answer immediately.
“You can help,” she says, “by staying here. I ain’t trying to be nice. I need you to stay.”
Soft giggles and whimpering sounds filter through the walls. Jemma reaches under the bed and pulls out her Gatherer’s pack, which she had Pico sneak in earlier in the day. Hector’s face shows he’s beginning to understand.
“Make some noise, bang the bed against the wall. Moan if you want,” she says brightly. “When they come get you in the morning, say you fell asleep and you don’t know where I went.”
Jemma opens the window and drops the pack through it. “Got it?”
Hector nods. “You gonna climb out with that dress?”
“I leave it behind, it’ll be tough to explain where I went naked,” she says.
She puts her hands on the windowsill. “Oh—you can totally tell everyone we rolled. And you was good.” She hoists herself up, while Hector steadies her foot.
Then a scream tears thr
ough the night, not a scream but a cry of rage and pain and the voice of her very best friend.
* * *
The gown is complicated, way more complicated than when Lady put it on. Li can’t work the zipper. Neither can she, her fingers thick with drink, and they seem to struggle for minutes. Finally she falls back on her bed, and the gown flips up into the air like a bell. “It lifts up,” she laughs. “Just lift.”
Li is on her, an animal just like she hoped, but then too much like an animal—pawing at her neck, growling in her ear. “Hey,” she says.
Both hands slam her shoulders back. “Hey! Stop!” she says. Li slaps her, hard, and grabs a hunk of hair with one hand to pin her to the bed, while the other tears at the gown. She can’t move her head.
All the burning is gone, all the flames from the Circle. In its place is the cold of fear. Lady feels a sharp pain under the gown and sees the mask is gone and the only thing on his face is death.
She wrests one arm free. She hits him but he doesn’t seem to feel, just punches her in the mouth. She shouts in frustration and anger and fear.
It can’t be like this to roll with someone. It won’t be. She reaches into her hair, finds the pin that held it up—and drives it into his shoulder.
* * *
There are times when it helps to be unseen. Pico’s been mostly not seen his whole life, and he uses that tonight.
His pack is on his back. In the time he’s been here, he’s never unpacked it all the way. Just another place that didn’t welcome him. It doesn’t bother him, though, because he’s found something better. Villages aren’t home. People are home.
The Casa de las Casas stands empty and alone. One Muscle usually guards it, but since Hyun and Heather have started their attack on the Muscle, no one’s bothered to take the post. He imagines Muscle all over the Holy Wood suddenly asking to be Carpenters or Smiths.
The wood-and-glass case is at the back of the main room, meant to look imposing when the Olders give their speeches. It would be safer if it were built of steel or stone, but then no one would look on it in awe and wonder.
The case is protected more by taboo than a lock. No boy would touch it, under pain of Exile. No girl would, either, out of reverence. The gods would haunt your death and keep you from returning to the Parents. But taboos only work if you believe them. Exile only works when you want to stay.
The breaking glass would bring someone running, so Pico pulls a flat screwdriver from his pack. A few swipes and he’s popped the lock’s latch. Is this what keeps the Holy Wood in balance? This thing from the Long Gone? Pico reaches into the case and touches the wood. He feels it, smooth and ancient and deadly under his fingers. There’s a hitch in his movement as he hesitates. Even when you don’t believe it, apparently taboos still have power. But his fingers close around the stock, and then he has the One Gun.
Pico fills his pack with bullets. He wraps the gun in the blanket from his pack, but there’s no disguising the rifle. It won’t fit in the pack. In the streets he keeps to the shadows, with his right hand slung at his side. If he’s seen with the gun, he doubts he’d live until the morning.
It’s two short blocks to the old pool shed where they’re holding Apple. Pico crouches in the deep darkness cast by a hedge next to the road. He watches the Hermanas while he waits for Jemma to arrive. There are four of them here, all awake and moving. There’s no fire, so they’re not blinded by it. It’s going to make it a lot harder for him just to walk in and grab Apple, even with the gun. He wishes that he’d thought to think up a distraction.
A scream splits the night, coming from the house of the Waking. Even from here, it sounds like Lady. There’s a long stillness, then shouts. Two of the Hermanas jump to their feet and race toward the tumult. Pico ducks deeper into the shadow of the hedge, but they never glance his way. Jemma must have thought of a distraction herself.
He keeps waiting for Jemma to burst out of the night, breathless, but a minute later, two minutes, she’s still not here. He can’t afford to waste the moment he’s been given. Pico steels himself to step toward the shed. The girls are much bigger than he is, and they seem to have been training as warriors. Then he thinks: The gun makes you stronger.
The moon breaks through a hole in the trees and lights the grass around the shed. He must look tiny to them when he comes out of the darkness onto the moonlit grass, because they don’t react to his steps. “I wanna see my friend Apple,” he says.
“Your friend is gonna die in the morning,” the left Hermana says. She is almost fourteen, the other maybe twelve. His age, really. What is it that makes the Tweens and younger teens especially want to join the Hermanas? Do they hunger for power, or are they afraid of being left out of everybody else? He suspects it’s the latter.
“That’s why I wanna see him now.” Pico slides the wrap off the One Gun, holds it with the butt close to his waist, and just watches their faces. He can see the exact moments when one Hermana, then the other, recognizes the blue-black barrel of the gun.
“You ain’t sposed to have that,” the younger Hermana says slowly. As if that will make the bullets hurt less. And their staffs waver.
“I see we all got sticks,” Pico says. “Mind putting yours down?”
* * *
Gowns aren’t meant for running. Jemma finds this out at the living room door when hers traps her feet in poofy layers, sending her crashing hard to the floor. She stares up to see Lady already in the living room, Li towering over her.
“Stay away!” Lady shouts, warding him off with crossed arms. Jemma sees Lady’s ripped gown almost torn from her shoulders, the bleeding lip, the white eyes, and she’s up again, looking for a weapon. There’s nothing, not in the Mamas’ house, but she sees a bottle from the ceremony flung in the corner. As she dives toward it, Li backhands Lady in the face and knocks her down.
Jemma has already leapt to her feet and broken the bottle against the wall by the time Li sees her, and his eyes widen at the sight of the jagged edge. “Touch her again, puto,” Jemma says.
He backs away, then lunges at her, hitting her hard. Jemma takes a step back, her gown flowing around her. She keeps her feet, slashes upward, and slits his face from mouth to cheek. Then Hector and the other Dads are on them, knocking the bottle away. Jemma struggles with them, but they throw her out the door and onto the hard pavement of the Circle. She jumps up but hears footsteps behind her. Before she can make it back to the house, Hermanas are holding her arms. They march her backward toward the fire.
Now the Dads push out Li, his arms pinned behind his back. He’s still tossing them around, but they outnumber him and his movements get smaller. Jemma suddenly remembers what fled her thoughts a minute ago: Pico is at the jail now, by himself. She can’t help him. She hopes he’s even smarter than he seems.
“What is this?” a voice says behind Jemma. She turns her head to see the Priestess, still clothed in red flames, while in the Circle the fire itself is nothing but coals. Next to the Priestess is Trina, who looks as if she just woke up. There’s no Heather, and the Hermanas look uncertainly between the Priestess and the Oldest for cues as to which to follow.
“They cut me,” Li says, and Jemma realizes she’s never heard him speak. His voice is higher than she thought, like a spoiled Tween.
“You attacked one of the Dads?” the Priestess asks. Her voice is quiet, but Jemma can hear anger rising in it. Jemma is only half listening, though; the other half of her hearing casts for the jail. No shots, no shouts. Yet.
“He raped me.” Lady steps out of the Mamas’ house, and if you didn’t know her like Jemma did, you would have thought all the fear had gone. Jemma can see it in the corner of her eyes, but the rest of her face is as fierce as only Lady’s can get.
“What?” Trina says. “You better be sure, Lady.” They have the word for it, but they almost never use it. Some of the priestesses think rape isn’t even possible. The babies are so important to the survival of the Holy Wood that any way they get them
is tolerated, even by force. When you sign up to be a Mama, you have to be willing.
Lady nods, but a little less sure. Sometimes the girl who says she was raped gets into more trouble than the boy. “He hurt me and I told him to stop, and he wouldn’t. I stabbed him with my pin and I—I got out of the room and Jemma was there with her knife.”
Jemma doesn’t say that it was a bottle, not a knife, but it worked on Li anyway.
“They cut me!” Li says.
Trina speaks. “You hurt one of my Mamas, Li. For that, I could cut you myself. Take him away.” The Hermanas grab his arms and look tiny next to him.
“No!” the Priestess says. The darkness hides the anger in her face, but it’s there. “They ruined the Waking. They gotta fix it for the gods.”
“You gotta be shitting me,” Trina says. The Hermanas have stopped, paralyzed.
“They both broke it, they both fix it,” the Priestess says. “She’s a Mama, he’s a Dad. They go back in.”
“She ain’t going back in there,” Jemma says.
“Fine. Someone’s going in with him.”
“No!” Lady says, but for Jemma the Circle has gone cool and clear. In the silence, she notices that no one else is shouting for them. They’re alone.
“I would love to go in with Li,” Jemma says with a bravado she doesn’t feel. “Cuz then I can cut his balls off.”
“I’ll kill you, bitch!” he says.
“You almost seventeen,” she says, so cold. “You better hurry up, then.”
“No one’s killing anyone,” Trina says, not even looking at the Priestess. “We figure this out tomorrow once you’ve all calmed down.”
“They will begin now—”
“It’s time for you to go back to your Zervatory, Pilar,” Trina says, almost spitting out the name. “This is Older biz.” And the Dads drop Jemma’s arms.
Pilar, looking a young fifteen, steps back nervously and disappears into the night. Only the Oldest could talk to her like that, and only if the Oldest is Trina.
Lady rushes to Jemma and hugs her tight. “Jesucristo, Jemma.”
“Trina, he raped her,” Jemma says. “You know it. You can’t be okay—”