“We come to ask for—”
“We know.”
Both of them tensed at the plural and the knowledge, wary of another betrayal. The children became still in their arms, picking up on their sudden alertness. The Door smiled and looked to an exit to their left, where a small Turms appeared.
“June had hoped you might come here for sanctuary. We are happy to grant it.”
“Why? What do you want in return?” Jagi was agitated and uncertain at the ready acquiescence to their request.
“June feels guilty for their part in Holder Liliana’s fall.”
Min whimpered against his chest and Jagi gave the Door a dark look, but it was met with a continued smile.
“Perhaps it would help you all to know that no one knows where Liliana is.”
This was decidedly not helpful. They knew Chayyliel would dare not expose what had happened. The Holders and their Holder-Apprentices were both feared and revered among the ’dants. To hear that the Ruling Courts had killed one, with the way the city already seethed because of mysterious attacks of the creeping dark?
It would start a riot.
The only way to survive it would be to reveal what had actually happened, in which case Court Chayyliel would lose most of its support from the other Courts and possibly their place.
“We know,” Arel said with finality, hoping to stop the Door from going on any further. Min and Davi were back to burying their faces in the their chests.
“You misunderstand me. Queen Chayyliel has lost her.”
All their heads came up at this. They stared at the Door in consternation. Arel and Jagi wished this had not been mentioned in front of Davi and Min because they were both smiling and happy through tears, and if this turned out to be a rumor? False hope provided to vulnerable children?
“How do you know this?”
The Door’s head tilted to gesture at the quiet Turms standing beside it.
“I regret to tell you that no one knows where she has gotten to. Those assigned to punish her were found passed out on the floor. They say that the Nif helped her. Chayyliel does not believe them, but the Nif of the Ruling Courts are now gone from all the Hives, which leads credence to it. But whether they left or are now under the delicate hands of other punishers no one knows. How would one even torture a Nif?” The Door’s head tilted the other way, contemplating the question.
“We will find her,” Arel said. Exhaustion pulled at all his limbs, and Davi had already fallen asleep against him despite the good news or perhaps because the news had finally allowed him to relax. He glanced over at Min and saw her fighting heavy eyelids. Now that they had hope that Lil was alive somewhere, things felt less desperate, and their bodies were all succumbing to the events of this evening. “We thank you for the news. May we be shown to a bed?”
“Of course. I regret to say that we are booked tonight, so we only have one room available.”
Arel and Jagi nodded. They would not feel comfortable sleeping separately tonight anyway. The Door returned the nod and led them out of the main foyer and up the stairs. There were noises coming from the rooms they passed. Some sounded like weeping and others like lovemaking, but they were too tired to care about anything more than getting their charges to safety and sleeping themselves.
A form appeared in the hall and both of them paused, only unfreezing when the Door greeted the man and turned to introduce him to them.
“Allow me to introduce you to Byron of San Francisco.”
They nodded warily to the ’dant in front of them. His curled dark red hair was sticking up at all angles and the skin beneath his eyes was dark and bruised. They did not introduce themselves and the Door seemed to know better as well. Byron did not seem to notice, simply lifting his hand in greeting before he and his two silent companions disappeared behind a door.
Once inside their own room, they laid Min and Davi in the middle of the bed. Jagi moved to the door and opened his mouth. A thin stream of filth came out, forming a tough web over the entrance. Either of them could break the seal easily, but if anyone else tried they would be infected immediately. Arel nodded and they crawled into bed on either side of the children, who had curled into each other. Slowly, they slid their tentacles out. They laced them together above the sleeping children. It gave them comfort to touch each other in this way and to know that any who came for the children would have to go through some part of them.
LIL
Lil woke up. Her first surprise.
The others being that she was warm, had no new hurts that she could discern, no one standing over her with a blade and a laugh she would hear in her nightmares for the rest of her life. It was not that she had forgotten her rescue but that she had lost hope and had thought the whole thing to be some sort of fever dream.
In the times she had been conscious in the Nif cocoon, all she had seen was darkness. She couldn’t help but wonder if this was a new torture or if this was death. Was this the return to oneness that she had been promised?
Instead she was on a soft bed, in a room lit by a fire in a center hearth, which kept from getting too hot by the open window that let in sunlight and wind. The smell of burning wood filled the air. Too much for it to be solely the hearth. Without looking outside the window, the smell told her where she was.
She looked around the room and spotted the pool of shadow in the corner. As she stared, it sluggishly formed a hand that waved once before collapsing back into itself. The Nif who had carried her away. Saved her. She had no idea they could even get tired, yet they were exhausted, unable to hold any shape. She had to figure out some way to thank them.
She had a lot of figure out. Where she was. Where her sibs were. What to do next.
First she took a deep breath and yanked the blanket off. So many parts of her body protested the sudden move so violently that all she could do was lie still and try to force air back into her seizing lungs. When she was finally able, she took one shuddering breath and then another. She looked down at her body, nude and a mess. Pink-stained white bandages covered her so completely she looked almost clothed. In some places the bandages were actually concave, where she was missing pieces.
She did not check her tongue until last because she held an insane hope that it was not actually gone. She reached into her mouth and felt the ragged stump that lived there now.
The door opened and Lil yanked her hand from her mouth and recoiled farther into the bed, placing her back against the wall. The woman who entered was ancient for a ’dant, her face a mask of wrinkles. Her hair was bone white and fluttered about her head like fog.
“You’re awake? Good.”
She was dressed in a white smock with tiny red dots all over it. Lil opened her mouth to reply, then shut it again. The woman noticed, however, and gave her a sad smile. Lil looked away toward the wall.
“Now, none of that.” Two things landed on her lap in quick succession and she looked down. A pad of what looked like homemade paper made of cut and woven reeds and a curving stylus formed from pink stone. She looked at the old woman in question.
“Have no worries. Enough of those in this place are literate.”
It was a valid concern. Only maybe one in ten ’dants could write their own name; one in twenty could read something more complex than a news pamphlet. Lil nodded and opened the pad. Writing quickly, she held it up for the woman to read.
Why are we in the Out?
“Yes, you would smell that, wouldn’t you? Fear hangs over the area. Those who live here are few and far between. They have no love of the Ruling Courts and their secrets and murder. We know when to help one another and when to mind our own business.”
Lil nodded slowly. She was unaware that anyone still lived in the Out. Out was short for the Burned Out because at one point it had been a large and sprawling park, filled with a whole community of ’dants that paid no tribute to the Ruling Courts. They lived quietly, on their own, never leaving the protection of the park. Until one of the Courts had
burned them out of their leafy home for their trouble.
It had happened almost four hundred years ago. Mayer said that Kandake Athenaeum had taken in many of the survivors and saw them settled in different cities where the Ruling Courts of Zebub could not reach them.
She bent over the pad again.
Who are you?
The woman hesitated. “It’s best if someone else tells you. Here, let me help you into a robe and we’ll go to the other room.”
The woman reached to pull down Lil’s blanket, but Lil grasped it tighter to her ravaged body. She met the woman’s eyes and looked pointedly at the door. The woman laughed and raised her hands in defeat. She laid the robe on the bed and moved toward the door. Lil waited until it closed completely before throwing the covers off and carefully wiggling into the robe. She did not look at her body as she pulled on the robe. She did not want to see.
It was not vanity but memories. They had done this to her. They had taken something as personal as her body and made it their plaything, had changed it so she did not know it any longer. Her body was new now, and she did not want anyone else to see it yet.
The robe’s material was soft and soothing. The chill of it calmed some of the shivers of fever that racked her frame. Rising from the bed was more difficult. She stared at the two smallest toes on her right foot, the only ones left, for a full minute before she could tear her gaze away.
It hurt to stand but whoever she was now the prisoner of, she would not meet them carried or looking weak. Her balance was off and it took her several tries to take the first step. Slowly she limped. Every step brought a pain that shot through her whole body. As she passed the mass of Nif on the floor, the top of it rapidly expanded into a bubble. When the bubble popped the Root lay at her feet, still in its traded bag.
She bent down to gather them in her fist. Rising back up was harder than she imagined at first and she struggled and grunted her way back to her feet. The robe had pockets, so she placed the Root in one. The bag radiated an odd warmth. As it radiated through her hip, it soothed some of her pain. She heard voices through the door as she got closer.
“Where is she?” A younger voice, impatience laced through it.
“She’ll come out when she pleases, not a moment before.” The older woman she’d already met. “And you will remember that she is an honored guest, and an ally. Not one of your tools to be used and discarded.”
She opened the door and they were arrayed before her, five of them, so at least three had kept silent about her. Either smart enough to know she could hear through the door or reserving judgment.
A ’dant stepped forward, barely into her third decade if Lil was correct. She wore a bodysuit of black, faded and painted in places to allow her to blend in with the burnt-out landscape all around them. She smiled as she stepped forward and offered her hand.
“I’m Kima. Welcome to the Resistance.”
This is my first published book but I’m going to try and buck the trend and go short:
To my first readers, Christopher Chinn, Charlie Jane Anders, Rachel Swirsky, Justin Goldman, and Elsa Hermens, thank you, this book would not have made it this far without you.
To Borderlands Books & Cafe, Alan, Jude, Cary, John, Jim, Zev, Cole, Devany, & everyone else thank you for believing in me when I did not.
To my family, both born and made, thank you for your support.
To my lovely friends, thank you for listening and caring.
To my editor, Jeremy Lassen, thank you for seeing something in me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Na’amen Gobert Tilahun is a bookseller and a freelance writer who split his early years between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area full time to earn his BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and an MFA in english and fiction from Mills College and never left. His poetry has appeared in Faggot Dinosaur, StoneTelling, So Speak Up, and The Dead Animal Handbook; his fiction in Collective Fallout, Full of Crow, and The Big Click, and his essays/reviews in io9; The Angry Black Woman; The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution and the Future; Fantasy Magazine; Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It; and The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 9: Intersections and Alliances. He is also cocreator and cohost of the geek podcast The “NEW” Adventures of Yellow Peril + Magical Negro.
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