Sometimes the harder, deeper ones come back at me too thick to fight off, and I have to get out of the little plywood structure and out of the Outpost. That’s what happened earlier that night, before I found Keegan. One minute I was sitting in the shack, having just sprayed a dose of Alkohol in my mouth. I wasn’t in the mood to be social; I just wanted to sleep through the night. The smallish dose of Alkohol had barely kicked in when I spied the moon rising just above the lone window of the shack.
The mild blur at the edges caused by the Alkohol put me in mind of the blur in light caused by eyes full of tears. And that put me in mind of a night long ago. A night when I was twelve. Though I’d been designated female when I was a child, I had just a few months before begun to shift in little ways. My voice grew deeper or higher, my lips filled out or thinned, my chest rose or fell. At first no one noticed. I had kept it hidden like I suppose a child going through a more accepted form of puberty might if they were very shy or uninformed. But before long, it became apparent. Words like freak and devil were first used in whispers that I wasn’t supposed to hear, then directed at me.
Sitting alone in the shack, remembering that time, I began to tremble. That was when I went to The Sputter, looking for a way out.
But by the time I got back to the shack, all the bad memories had been pushed out and all that was in my mind was Fai. Where had ey come from? What had happened to make em leave in the first place? Was eir relationship to me a con after all, even if that had always been more my M.O. than Fai’s? And if it was, for what? What did I have that anyone would want?
There were bad memories in with these thoughts, too. I had thought, after all that I’d been through, that nothing would ever be able to touch me again. But the days after Fai’s departure had been days of sorrow and searching. I had spent days lying in a pile of blankets and sheets in the shack in the Outpost, only getting up to spray more Alkohol into my mouth. After those days passed, I went all the places I could conceive of finding em. All to no avail.
As I paced the shack, these bad thoughts were mollified by the warmth of the transformation I had not achieved since Fai’s departure glowing in me, like just enough sips of wine. I thought quite suddenly of the good days. The first time we had been alone together, in the empty fields of Terra Thia. As if we were children cutting classes and causing trouble, Fai had set fire to several of the veins of strontium chloride that ran through the ground. We were alone there, watching the bright flames snake across the earth, crackling and fizzing apple red. I felt Fai’s hand tremble slightly in mine, and my hand respond with its own tremors, the likes of which I had never felt before. I was barely twenty then, the whole of my being honed for survival, unable to recognize when someone wanted to give me love, only able to find what people wanted and how to make it into what I needed.
Back in the shack on the edges of Hezama Outpost, I laughed to myself. Love did not take you to a state of physical and mental bliss and understanding only to pull that state out from under you. And love sure as hell didn’t come back and force that state on you right when it was most likely to get you killed. There was no question about love. The only question was, what was the con?
I kicked one of the shack’s already questionably sturdy walls with the steel toe of my boot, but not with the force I would have, had the transformation taken me into my male state. My body as it stood now, fully transformed, was lithe and smooth and strong, but didn’t have the brute force that my male incarnation did. I called him Nik. The name was short and abrupt, aggressive and fitting. I had no name for the person I was now. This smooth person full with the certainty of self-knowledge I thought I had lost so many years before. This person who felt like an epiphany.
I tried to reconcile the deep, satisfied, indisputably correct feeling coursing through me with the thoughts racing through my head. The state Fai brought me to dulled my survival instincts, made me feel like I could get through life just by being. But I knew I had to control myself and focus on the important questions buzzing through my brain. Where had Fai come from? What did ey want? Fai had never been able to make me change so easily in the past—what had made it happen so quickly and effortlessly this time? What was more, I had hidden from Fai where I came from; the dark pit of Hezama Outpost was something I never shared with em, even when the state had me feeling as little need for self-defense as a cub born to the fiercest of wild animals. The mystery remained of how ey found me at all.
I had piloted down back alleys through twists and turns, so I was fairly sure I hadn’t been followed. That left me at least one advantage in whatever game was at hand. I focused hard on the muscles of my chest and stomach, visualizing them, willing them to be. It was a technique I had perfected over the years, long years in which I had first been tortured by the change, then gradually learned to control it. Years in which I had practiced little actions—swinging a leg over a bar stool to sit instead of perching on the side, for example—that helped along the change, that helped me perform states until I could push them all the way into reality. As I stood in the shack, I pictured my body changing, a centimeter at a time, a muscle here, a hair there. I felt my skin tighten, roughen, and my bliss begin to subside.
I had the upper hand for the moment, I decided as I began to shift again. I had to capitalize on it and find Fai before ey could find me. I kicked the wall again, and the shack shook. Good. I was going to need my strength for whatever lay ahead.
“What can I do to convince you?” Fai had said, the first time. “What will it take for you to allow yourself absolute happiness?”
A million thoughts ran through my mind. A different life. A better world. A cycle so fast that I can outrun anything. But what came out of my mouth was, “I’m always happy. Everything I want, I can get—from anyone I want. What is there to be unhappy about?”
Fai sighed; I was fooling no one but myself. “Picture one person—or a place even, a place—and with this person or place, you can be exactly whom you want.”
I exhaled through my nose, a cynical snort that fell short of laughter. “No such person. No such place.”
Fai had a rare moment of consternation. Fai came from a different place than me entirely, from an enclave called Campelli, which was home to most of the dissidents left over after the Final Illness and The Last War. Most of them were rich enough to access the proper means to travel wherever they chose. They did not understand Fai, but eir parents and the people around em had been tolerant. They had taught Fai to talk things through, not to lash out, to keep a level head when angry. All the things I had never learned.
But right then, a moment of consternation lowered Fai’s brow and darkened eir eyes. Eir hands clenched together, and for a minute I wondered if ey would completely lose it—grab me, hit me, engage in some sort of violent action. I tensed up, ready to run, ready to get out.
Maybe Fai saw this; quicker than a summer thundershower, the moment passed. Fai’s slim hands moved together. It was like watching a graceful bird’s wings fold. Fai’s left hand moved away from eir right, then raised up, holding a dark circle that shone with the most impossible colors. A sly smile flickered across eir face.
“What if I gave you a magic ring? And even if none of those people existed, even if there was never a place like that, this magic ring, just for the time you wore it, made me a person like that and this a place?”
“Magic ring...” I began, derisively. Then I looked at it more closely. It was black opal, and one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I wanted it. I would con em, I thought. No harm in letting someone think you’re playing along.
“Okay, hand over this magic ring.”
Of course, there was never any magic in the ring. But sometimes believing, or in my case, pretending to believe, is enough to open a door just a crack. That was how I got conned into changing into that blissful state of liminality that first time.
After Fai disappeared and I came back here, I threw the black opal ring into one of the most foul-smelling
pits in Hezama Outpost.
I was the first that Fai found. The only, as far as I knew. There was just us, piloting through the black opal pits of the Cerbeus enclave where the stone eir magic ring had been fashioned from was found, though the vast expanse of dust fields mid-land mass where stars as bright as supernovas shone in the distance. There were their highly coveted travel papers that took us anywhere, even me when I was with ‘em. There was only us, and I couldn’t imagine there ever being anyone else.
But Fai could. Alone back in Campelli, ey had poured through what books had been saved by the once-rebels, looking for any hint of something mirroring eir own existence. And ey had found it, one day in a dusty vault lined with shelves of books. A book of myths that spoke of people like us, and a place where real supernovas shone but never burned out. Fai had clung to it like the Micantologists in the Selva enclave hold onto their dogma. Here was proof, ey thought, secreting away to that vault and reading that book again and again, that ey was not alone.
At the time ey told me, alone in eir ship, with both of us in our true states, I held back tears. Even in my state of bliss and perfection, I could not allow myself to cry, had not since I was a child.
“If only you’d known about these myths,” ey said, sensing my emotion.
“Myths never would have helped,” I said, the edge of Hezama Outpost and my bad history still there with me.
“One day, I will find that place,” Fai said with a determination that I never heard. “I will take you there, and we’ll never leave for anything.”
I had smiled, a tear finally slipping down my face that I had found this person who seemed not to want my body, my money, my strange abilities—only my joy.
“Magic rings,” I muttered. But even as I hastily wiped the tear trail off my face, the slightest of smiles had begun to turn my lips up.
The aloneness had never been so vast as it was after ey left me in one of the enclaves we’d been traveling through. At first I waited for em to come back, even though ey’d left without a word. When it became apparent that ey was gone for good, I began walking and hitching back to the Outpost, back to the evil I knew rather than the vast landmass I was no longer up for wandering in solitude, to the search for the papers or money that would allow me out. Myths were myths and facts were facts. At least in the Outpost, I knew how to survive.
What had ey wanted from me after all? I wondered even now. As I paced the shack, a resolve formed inside me to find out. To find em.
I searched through the Outpost’s feral night. I ran a race over the edge of a cliff at Giant’s look, just above the tar pits, surrounded by people with hard eyes filled with fury or perhaps some sort of insanity—the poverty, violence, and short, hard lives of people in the Outpost filled many of us with the same look. I passed saloons, cruised through ditches, circled pits. I even went to Old Rena’s shack and let her throw some runes over a cloth that was the cleanest thing in the whole place. She spoke of the undercurrents and overtones, the center of the pattern. She agreed that something was coming.
Early in the dark morning hours, I found myself in Maswit Forest. I rode my cycle into the woods a bit, but then the trees became too thick and the paths too indistinct. I rested it by the side of a tree so thick that three of me—even the burly, strong me that was Nik—could have fit easily in the trunk if it were hollowed out.
There was a motion off in the distance. I could see darkness and shadows sliding about between the trees. I kicked at the ground and pulled out the gutting knife I’d slipped into my pocket before leaving the shack. I didn’t know what I would find, and it was best to be prepared.
The closer I got, the more I could see a figure that hulked in the pre-dawn darkness. The person was pitching and heaving towards the ground, then coming back up again in a regular rhythm. It looked like they were digging. Not good news. I crept closer, willing my massive form to be quiet and lithe. As a twig snapped beneath my boot and sounded like a gunshot, I was reminded that dexterity was not one of Nik’s qualities.
The person ahead of me in the trees threw their shovel to the ground and ducked down. I stood frozen for a moment. Slowly, the shadowy figure came back up and ran right at me.
I hit the ground hard as the person tackled me. I heard a familiar-sounding grunt and smelled familiar-smelling rotten breath. Who did I stumble across but Keegan. I saw a something human-shaped in a blanket lying on the ground. Out burying a body, from the looks of it. Like catching a bear at a kill site. Actually, almost exactly like that.
And then I was down on my back and there was a red light shining into my eye that I knew, at the lightest touch of a button, could lobotomize me permanently. I’ve been in life-threatening situations more than once in my time, and the thing my brain always screams out before sending a jolt of energy and intelligence into the rest of my body is survive. But this time was different. This time, as my body prepared, my mind sent out a cry that was plaintive—Fai. If I didn’t make it through this, I was never going to know why ey had come back, what ey wanted with me. And that I had to know.
I kicked up with my heavy boots, catching Keegan in the balls. He grunted, and the light went out of my eyes. He didn’t nurse his injury long before he lunged back at me. His weapon lost, he grabbed for my throat.
I tried to break the hold he had on me, but he was strong. Before a minute had passed, I began to feel a tingling mix with the panic in my head. My head grew fuzzy—I was not going to make it out of this if I didn’t do something soon. I was grappling and I was fighting, but the truth was that I was fading.
Then the feeling spread through my arms and legs. Something was not right. And then, though the panic, a warm feeling like being buzzed up on too much of the sun at midday began to pulse through me. I opened my eyes as the tightness of Keegan’s hands fell away from my neck. Suddenly his entire weight was on me. I caught his body with my arms even as they began to shift and elongate, to lose their strength and gain grace. Overwhelmed with an emotion like empathy, I cradled his body, thinking of all I had been through, and all he, too, must have faced to become the crude, vile, person he was. As my body shifted, I felt tears sting my eyes.
“Come on!” I heard. And someone was pushing his body and pulling my hand. And I knew who that someone was, the someone who had made me shift again, so against my consciousness will, but not against my desires. Fai.
“What did you do to him?” I asked as we ran through the forest. Around us, animal noises were stirring in a cacophony.
“He’ll wake up in a few hours,” Fai said. “He’ll have a hell of a headache. But he’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t run into any cretins as big as himself.”
Fai’s hand was in mine, and the pleasure from it and from the change I was going through was so great that I wanted to stop, to climb to the tops of the trees and sing to the moon. But in the center of all of that bliss, the reality of the situation came crashing through. I pulled my hand away from Fai’s.
“Why?” I demanded.
Fai stopped and stared at me as if I were insane. Eir almond-shaped eyes flashed.
“He was about to kill you!”
“Why save me? Do you know how many times since you were gone I came close to death? Do you know how close you put me to death the other night in that shitty saloon?”
Animal eyes flashed here and there in the darkness between the trees as the forest sang with sounds. We had to get out of there. And there I stood, defying all the danger.
“I know.”
Fai grabbed my hand again. I felt something hard there on eir fingers, and I looked down to see the ring, the magic ring, the one I had thrown deep into some foul-smelling pit, there on eir hand. I pulled eir hand up to look closer.
“There will be time to tell you all of it when we get out of here.”
The bliss came back, but not so greatly that I did not feel the danger. We ran through the woods, to my cycle. We coasted through the trees, out into Hezama Outpost proper, down dirt roads, pa
st twists and turns, to where Fai’s ship sat glinting in the far-off lights of what little town the Outpost had to speak of. I wasn’t sure why I was getting into that ship. The ring glinted on Fai’s hand, beckoning me. Keegan was out there somewhere, and so were the people who wanted people like us dead, or slaves to their fantasies. They all rose up together and spun in the darkness, and there was this person who knew what it was like to change, and ey was offering me a door out of that darkness.
And then all the bad things of the Outpost—Keegan, the Sputter, the shack where the faith healers had pressed hot stones to my skin and worse—all began to fade until they were specks beneath us.
“Myths are myths,” Fai said, as the dark earth shrunk beneath us. Even eir ship couldn’t get us away from this dying landmass, but ey could get us far enough away from the Outpost so that it felt like nothing more than a bad dream. “And the truth is the truth. The truth is that there never was that place with the supernovas. Or, if there was, I was never able to find it.”
“That’s why you left me?” I said. “To look for a place that you read about in a storybook?”
“I had to find it,” ey said. “It tortured me thinking I’d be able to take you there if only I could find it. I had to go.”
“But you never found it,” I said.
Ey smiled on one side of eir mouth. “I didn’t find it.”
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