by Moira Crone
“No. He had mercy. That’s how we knew for sure who he was.”
She looked around, just as the prisoners rattled out a great, uniform laugh. “We need more quiet. I have to clean that wound. Let’s go. Can you stand?”
It was slow, the standing part. I was stiff, achy all over, the fires within me flared. She helped me to my knees—gently. On two feet, I was dizzy. She led me out of the cave with the captives and into the open air.
The place was in a clearing carved from scrub forest, a sort of village, made of the ruins of old trailers with ragged awnings and tents attached, as filthy and messy as any Outliar settlement. There were empty ancient cars, lean-to shacks, some little houses on platforms up in trees, huge tires carved into chairs, and flattened into pallets. Nearby, the ruins of a scrap yard made a forest of rust. A few fires were set about, embers, smoking.
She led me across the open area to the single concrete building. An acclimatizer on the outside spewing steam was the only sign of electricity I’d seen except for the flat projector in the cave.
Inside this building, fourteen limp sacks on hangers suspended from chains attached to the rafters. In each one, a hull of an Heir. Prodermises, in some state of preservation.
“Trophy room,” she said, without stopping. “We wanted you to see it, Salamander,” she said. “So you can tell Neil.”
We passed by a woman in a dark blue jumpsuit who was using a mop to swab the hanging skins with a viscous solution from a bucket. My guide continued—“He needs to understand it is war against the Bonesnakes, very clear, without mitigation—there is no compromise in this camp. It’s under my command. We have men and women and children who will fight, tear them down, strip them, they are not immortal, we know who is immortal, he who goes past, goes through,” she looked at me when she said this. “But here, we must fight. And we will help. You. That’s all we want.”
“The Ocean Springs people?” I asked.
She shook her head, almost violently. “Why do you ask such questions? Do I look like a lunatic to you? I know who you are, so don’t insult us.”
I could smell the coconut oil, the thick greasy ooze the worker used to coat the prodermises, which made me a little sick.
“Say who,” I said. I hadn’t any choice.
“Do you have amnesia?” she asked, closing her eyes for a second. “Did you lose your memory? Did they strike you? Is it the fever?” She reached for my forehead, calmer for a moment, and then she withdrew. “Or do you just distrust us? Come.”
We left the warehouse, went out into the clearing again. On the other side of a turned-over tireless WELLFI transport truck, she showed me the entrance to a a small hovel with scrap metal walls. Inside, she lit a lamp, and told me to sit on a stool.
“Now,” she said, holding up a mirror to me. “Look,” she said. “Who do you see?”
I saw my unshaven, grimy face, my brown eyes, my thick hair, my brow, my tight, too-tight Not Yet collar, and also my bloody, painful, swollen ear, and puffed-out cheek. My lip—what was it they had against my stupid lip? It was as it had always been. One day, when I got to Memphis for the Treatments, I would get the web inside fixed, have the surgeons to give me an indentation, so I looked like everyone else. But after what I’d done, would I ever get to Memphis now? Assaulted several Heirs. And didn’t care! I didn’t. Lazarus would condemn me. I could see it in my reflection—I didn’t care. I was a different man. And ashamed of it, as well.
“I’m going to numb you,” she said. “And disinfect the ear. Then, I am going to sew it up. It’s swelling, going to get worse—if I don’t. That’s why you have a fever. Do you have any objection? There could be blood poisoning, it’s angry here around your neck, red—”
She was touching it, which was excruciating. In truth, strange as everything I’d seen so far was, I trusted her. Couldn’t even explain it.
She went on, “I won’t let Salamander be imperfect.” Then she leaned over me, the weight of her breasts impressive. “Put your head back. Open your mouth. You won’t remember this—”
I did not fight.
She dropped a small lozenge underneath my tongue. As it dissolved, I began to float. I watched her carefully, though I somehow lost interest. She drew out a long flexible needle, threaded it, bit off the ends, and pierced my lobe, then drew up the needle and thread very high, before she went down for her second stitch. I started to get groggy.
As I drifted off, she said, “My name is Mo Lion. I know who you are.”
II
2:30 PM October 17, 2121
Somewhere North on the Mississippi I-Road
Far East De-Accessioned Gulf Territory, U.A. Protectorate
I had lain on the floor of the hovel for three nights and four days. I had been awakened a few times and been given liquids to drink. I was lying still on my mat, and the dull throb around my jaw was improving.
I’d had my share of visitors over the days, mostly more of Mo Lion’s little army, it seemed—fellows in black or yellow vests with thick soled shoes, short or long brown or blonde or silver hair. Skins caramel, ebony, pink, and plaster white. The men were more likely to have long locks, but the adult women had hair no longer than a fingertip. They were mostly Yeareds, a few my own age. They came to gawk at me but said little. They had started calling me “Salamander.” But when one was about to utter the word it seemed, Mo Lion would appear and tell them, “Shhhh—he’s incognito.”
This morning, Silver, who had captured me, came in with a very small auburn-haired girl. Her green eyes had long lashes. She, too, had short hair, but not as short as the older women’s. It was the first child I’d seen in this place.
“I’ll show you, honey,” he said.
“Yes Charlie,” she said in her little voice, which was musical, charming. “I want to see.”
They thought I was asleep, but my eyes were only half-closed. I watched what they were up to.
Charlie went to a calendar on the wall and flipped through the pages with pictures of characters from history—one was of Abraham Lincoln—until he came to a portrait of a man with a five o’clock shadow, dark skin, brown eyes, thick hair, a familiar brow. “See? He looks just like the Great Neil,” he said to his small companion. “He’s traveling with false identity, as a Nyet, see the collar?”
“What is his name?”
“Shh. He’s a Salamander.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I spoke up.
“See how he keeps his disguise? What a soldier,” Charlie told the little girl. “We have to go now, we can’t bother him.” They scurried away.
These were insurrectionists, some last remnant from the Troubles, I guessed. They couldn’t imagine anything else: I had to be a soldier, one of them. I was tired, I was sick, I was even willing to indulge the fantasy as I lay there. If I were a guerilla, working for the Mo Lion clan—what would I do? I asked myself. Raid Port Gramercy and haul out Camille, get her away from Domino, find her protection. Spring Serio from jail. Among the Heirs, I would stop those horrible new Sim Verites, expose the audiences, and purge those from the ranks. But I wasn’t a guerilla. I was myself, that was, someone waiting to be alive.
The pair came back, not long after, because I was I dozing. The child touched my engraved collar, called out the numbers of my Nyet Enrollment. I woke.
Mo Lion entered, yelled at them.
“You must be awake by now, the stuff has to have worn off,” she told me when they had left the second time. She knew me.
She shoved some mush in a bowl at me. Rice and brown meat. I asked what kind.
“Horse, a little deer,” she said. “We are overrun with both herds. Eat everything; we have no fields on that account. Might as well eat them. Near here, they live right inside the old slab and brick ruins. They have fine shelter, finer than we do. They prosper.”
“Why don’t you live in the ruins?”
“The U.A. mercenaries always look there. You don’t know this? You do know this.” She had very
thick hands for a woman and a large square head. When I looked at the mush, I thought I might be sick. It had been so long, so very long, since I’d had solid food. I shook my head no, and asked for the broth again. She came back with a new bowl, a metal one this time. I sat up and drank it directly, without using a spoon, and asked for more. Delicious.
She pulled the misshapen screen door closed and clipped the hanging curtains at the other opening, so she could give this hovel a little privacy. “You don’t have to be secret with me,” she said, when she touched my stitches to examine them. It didn’t hurt as much as even yesterday. “We aren’t your enemies. We are not upset about who you are. We consider it a privilege to care for you. I sewed your ear back together. Stopped the infection.” She held up the mirror again. “See?”
I was gaunt, my eyes were hollow. I wasn’t as swollen. My neck wasn’t red any longer—wasn’t “angry” as she had put it. I thought, overall, that I looked quite strange, like someone I didn’t quite know.
“Would I save someone I wanted to harm? I know how to harm. We just want one thing.”
“What?” I hoped I could offer her something. Of course, somewhere, I knew I had to get this matter with my Trust fixed, go to Memphis, do the Boundarytime ceremony—in fact, the last few days alone, when I had been awake, recovering, I had gone over all my mistakes since I left the Wood Palace, and tried to explain all the errors in judgment—I was drunk, I was confused, I was light-headed from fasting, under the influence, etc, etc.
But over and over, I had come up against a single, glaring fact. At the Miramar, I’d thrown Heirs down and later, I’d stolen a transport from one and I would have killed him if I’d had to—but I couldn’t find the guilt in me. I kept looking in the mirror, even, for it, but it was not there.
Camille—I wanted to see her, save her. There it was—
She was ready to speak. “When you leave here, go to your cohort, Neil of Pensacola or Jude—we did lose John, didn’t we? That’s not a myth, is it?” she asked, conversational now, less emphatic, for a second, then returning to the formal tone: “Tell him to join forces with us, or let us join with him—we can be his guards, his higher corps, his shock troops,” she said. “And you—you see what we have. We wouldn’t harm you and we wouldn’t harm him. Ultimately, we know your nature. So how could we harm you?”
“To join forces, exactly, to do what?” I asked. It came to me she’d given me some potion, that’s why I wasn’t outraged. At all I’d done, at what she proposed, I should have been horrified—
“Take the transport that belonged to that abomination,” she said. “We filled it with cornosene. Go to your leader and explain. Will you do that? We can’t use the Net, messages intercepted, no matter what code we use. We have not gotten through in a long time.”
“How long?”
“Seventeen years I count,” she said, with no note of futility.
I nodded “yes.” I felt terrible, having to trick her.
She took up a piece of paper with typing on one side, which she intended to reuse, and a long stick, a homemade pencil.
She put the paper on a book near her, and began to write with the concentration and intent of a child. Her lips moved often, tightening while she formed the difficult letters, or came up, I supposed, with a complex phrase. I liked watching her compose. In fact, I wanted to do what she asked. If she hadn’t been insane, and hadn’t believed me to be some mythical person, I would have tried to do what she asked. After great effort, she folded the long letter in half, and handed it to me as if it were the most grand and elaborate scroll engraved by calligraphers, and said, “Tell Neil of P. Give him this. Read it now, make sure you understand.”
I took it and read it, aloud.
“To HIGH NEIL BY WAY OF THE Glorious Younger Salamander we found wandering in the Picayune Hills, Incognito—
Mo Lion of the Picayune Hills Clan by the Bullet Tracks near the Pearl Tributary beseeches you to let us join with you in the cause of the Greater Rebellion. We want you to reconsider your present doctrine of restraint—we want to fight for your glory, we want to be engaged in the great slaughter of the totalitarian Elysian Shades, the monstrous venal Usurpers of all the thriving, of real, conditional, transmutable life, the cowardly Bonesnakes here to prey on sacredness, which is, more than anyone alive, what you know. We want war not with you but with them, to your kind we surrender. We will be subjugated, we understand your sovereignty. Yet, we want you to see our desire for the greater cause of destroying the rubber-covered reptiles, cold blooded, flaying them, handing them their ending.
Here is our magazine: two thousand liters of cornosene, a ton of thick nails, twenty-three shotguns, sixteen pistols, two gross shells, plastique, ammonium nitrate—three tons. Troops, one hundred and two alive, no disease. And fifty-one Shades ripe for ransom, to negotiate, prodermises preserved for fourteen. And hatred for the enemy, which is the only thing we are not prepared to lose. With your Salamander, we send three young recruits, so you can see our mettle, test it.
Mo Lion, General, Picayune Hills Army
October 18, 2121”
When I had finished reading it aloud, she said, “Good. Say we did not seek to harm you. Say we know our place, say we know your gifts, his gifts, we understand their meaning, and acknowledge the divinity. Which is why we are willing to fight. We are believers,” she said. “And if he’s quiescent as you are, will you tell him why we have to fight? We know these things—we have read all the chronicles of Defuniak, of Pensacola, the Rebellion—the fight cannot end—that’s our position—the Bonesnakes cannot prevail, it is death if they do.”
I nodded. Didn’t know what to say.
At that point she put both her hands on the crown of my head—and parted my hair at a certain place slightly forward of the swirl on the top. She weeded through it as if she were looking for lice, the way Marilee used to do. I did not fight, somehow. I wanted her to find what she was looking for as much as she did. But, I couldn’t want that—
“Here,” she said finally. “I have it. I see it. I was just making sure.”
Some small indentation on my scalp. It seemed to be about the size of a mole, and until I felt her fingernail exploring it, I had never known it was there.
But this was odd—when she rubbed it hard, a steely thrum went down my spine. As if she were plucking me like a string. I straightened, jerked slightly, got a little scared.
“I thought the reaction would have been stronger,” she said. “It’s not completely closed, just a slight membrane on top. You can’t deny it now.”
“Tell me who I am,” I said. I believed her, for a moment. Though this had to be a parlor trick.
“You lost your memory?” she asked and stared, sharp as Lydia. “I’m tired of you being coy.”
I was frightened. I shook my head no.
“Well?” she asked. “Say who you are.”
“Salamander,” I lied. The distinct feeling I was not lying.
“Where born?” she asked.
“Florida,” I said. What else could I say?
“Were you in the latter set? We have only read the twenty -nineties records, say they all died. We only hear about Cuba now.”
The nickel tags Ariel had sent me were in my jacket. I showed them to her.
She read the number, examined the white star on the blue background, and said, “Well stop your act, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“We don’t know the tray numbers,” she said, which meant absolutely nothing in the world to me. I nodded, as if it did. She gave me my tags back, and some tablets to stop the infection, and then she patted me on my breast. I wished she would explain to me what I pretended to know.
Charlie came in then, without the little girl. He held an ancient map sealed in wax paper. It showed what the roads had been sixty years before; I saw the date on the back. Meticulously, someone had marked out the many routes that were no longer viable, and drawn new ones in, using crude pen and ink. He inc
luded the toll stops run by the Ocean Springs Clan and ways to avoid these. He indicated he thought I would go into the hills outside of the abandoned city of Mobile. There was a circle, with the marking, “NEIL OF P?” where they guessed Neil or his minions were hiding out, or had been once. There was an arrow, as well, pointing south, which said, “ISLA DE YOUVENTOOD?”
“Do we have it right?” he asked.
I didn’t want to lie.
“Don’t make him divulge,” Mo Lion instructed from the other room where she was talking to the woman who swabbed the hanging prodermises. “He’s the real thing. Wait until we are allies, then we can share intelligence—he’s their prince, don’t expect—besides, our passengers will be with him—”
“What passengers?” I asked.
“Some of our army will come, keep you safe, and talk to Neil direct. Escorts.”
“Escorts?” I asked.
Charlie’s gray eyes looked up at her as she came in. “How many are there?” he asked her. “Salamanders?”
She said, “We don’t know. He’s younger than any of our intelligence has ever—” She turned to me. I was still studying the map. She pointed to the markings outside of the ruins of Mobile. “Well, do you see it there? Or the way to it?”
I nodded again.
She seemed satisfied. She gave me some cocaine salve for my ear, and told me, “Godspeed, give our highest to your brethren.”
Another man came in, one I’d never seen before, said, “Come talk to them, they are restless…”
“Who?” Mo Lion asked.
“The escorts are having an argument about the weapons. Which ones you want them to take? They all want to carry the magnum—if it works, they want to test it—”
A shot, then, and Mo Lion called, “Those wasteful idiots—”
I didn’t have the keys to Gepetto’s, had no idea who did, but found Serpent’s gift, his knife, with that curvy razor wire. The transport was just behind the concrete building where the prodermises were hung.
After Mo Lion and the others went out to break up the fight, I fled. At the other end of the camp, I saw the “army,” a group in black with shoes made of silver duct tape and soles of pieces of tire, their heads wrapped in mesh helmets. They each held a pole, like the handle of a hoe, with a curved crude blade attached to the top.