Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 11
Arkadi did not see the shots, but she felt them as she tumbled into Soraya. A fiery hammer whumped into Arkadi’s left shoulder. The dog yelped.
But Arkadi did hear the crack of Soraya’s head on the floor.
Arkadi rolled off of Soraya. Mavis still clung to Soraya with his front paws, though there was blood on his rear legs. Soraya’s hand was out, reaching for something. Just a few inches from her grasping fingers was a weapon, neatly hidden under the discarded suit.
“Don’t!” Arkadi said.
Soraya raised her head. Her eyes were unfocused. “You lied,” she said. Blood bubbled from her nostrils.
“I said nobody wanted to hurt you,” Arkadi said. “That was true.
Nobody wanted this.”
“It’s not for you,” Soraya said, and pointed.
Arkadi followed her arm and saw another soldier on the plat- form overhead. The soldier tried to bolt, but stumbled.
He was going to run off and blow up the whole Red Secretary.
The team wasn’t going to be fast enough to stop him.
Arkadi crawled over Soraya and grabbed the weapon with her good hand. She fired at the platform, a wild smear of lights. The soldier rolled up just as she fired again, and then her fire hit him. He tumbled over the railing and crashed to the floor ten paces away.
Arkadi dropped the weapon. Blood ran down her arm. She turned, terrified, staring at her bloody hands.
She raised her head . . . and saw the dog trainer already inside the building, crouching over Mavis the dog.
It should not have surprised Arkadi that the trainer would be first on the scene. Her gaze locked with Arkadi’s, but Arkadi could read nothing in the woman’s expression. Then the trainer was mov- ing again, back down the rise as Revlan’s promised cleanup squad rolled into the room like a tide, precisely two minutes after the shield had gone down.
Arkadi sank to her knees. She clutched at her shoulder as blood pumped over her fingers. A medic near the back of the mass of soldiers rolled her onto a stretcher. Arkadi watched the fallen weapon kicked about the floor, sliding in the dust made muddy with blood.
Another soldier loomed over her from where she lay on the stretcher. Black spots flashed across her vision. She thought the soldier might be Maradiv, then laughed at that idea because the man was the least likely to bother to come up with a retrieval team. The medic jabbed something into her thigh. The pain eased off at the edges, but it still felt like her organs were bleeding out of her shoulder.
“Were there any more?” the soldier said. “More than these?” “Just us,” Arkadi said. “Just us three.”
“Two,” the medic said. “There are two soldiers here on the floor.
Were there three?”
“The dog,” Arkadi said. “Will the dog be all right?”
Then the darkness came, and it was blissful, the little death.
Arkadi woke alone in a tent. It took her some time to convince the intern on duty to tell her where she was.
“You’re still at the Red Secretary,” the intern said. “I’m getting the medic.”
The medic came in with Revlan tagging along behind her. “Did you save—” Arkadi began.
“Both dead,” Revlan said. “The girl, we shot. She was out from a head injury. The second was dead when we came in. What hap- pened in there? Did they murder each other?”
“The dog,” Arkadi said. “Did you save the dog?”
“The dog’s fine,” Revlan said. “Tovorov is happy for that.” “She the trainer?”
“Yes. What were you thinking, throwing yourself in front of the snipers?” Revlan said.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Arkadi said, which was true.
It would take her some time to understand that.
“I told them you must have realized there were two in there,” Revlan said. “Is that right?”
Arkadi blinked at her. Did Revlan know what had happened? Was she trying to cover for Arkadi, or just guessing? No, Revlan had no reason to cover for Arkadi’s violence. Revlan simply needed to fill out the paperwork. If Revlan knew, if any of them knew that she had picked up a weapon . . .
“Ask the trainer,” Arkadi said, “she was there.” Arkadi put her arm over her face.
“We already asked Tovorov,” Revlan said. “I wanted to corrobo- rate her story with you.”
“Then you know what happened,” Arkadi said. “Put it in the report and get it over with.” What did they do to crisis negotiators who committed violence? What order would she go into the incin- erators? Before or after the soldiers? After, certainly.
“You did well,” Revlan said, “better than any negotiator I’ve seen. None of them would have taken that bullet. Tovorov says the soldiers shot each other. I admit I’m . . . trying to work that out. Which is why I wanted your help with it.”
Arkadi pulled her arm from her face. Her stomach twisted, but she said nothing to correct her.
Revlan continued, “And I said to Tovorov, are you quite certain? Because you’re good, Te Avalin, but I didn’t think you were good enough to get that soldier to shoot one of her own to save the Red Secretary. Especially considering she had a very serious concussion.”
“I didn’t either,” Arkadi said.
Revlan patted her pillow. “You rest,” she said. “Get her some water, will you?” she said to the medic, and the medic took the hint and left them. Revlan leaned over Arkadi and murmured, “Do not think I accept that your hands are clean, negotiator. None of us are. You are as human as me.”
Revlan rose.
Arkadi gave her a little two-fingered salute. “I expect you’ll get a medal,” Revlan said. “You will, too,” Arkadi said.
“I will,” Revlan said, “and I’ll be wearing it along with the others when I walk into the incinerator next year. It will be very beautiful, I’m sure.
The lorry came for Arkadi the next day. The medic had stuffed her full of drugs and coagulant, and she was able to limp her way out of the tent. All around her, the soldiers were packing up the com- mand center, carrying supplies back down to the inflatable bridge. Groups of red-liveried scientists were marching up the other way, back to the Red Secretary, presumably to recalibrate it. The Red Secretary would be a weapon no longer. Not for another three hun- dred years, at least. Arkadi was thankful she would be dead, and all these people either dead with her or incinerated, by then.
But what about those other people? Those future generations, the ones born of those who had committed no violence during this horrible war? Only the peaceful could create a peaceful society, all the holy books said, and this is where it left them in the aftermath of war. She had given them nothing, preserved nothing but a cy- clical war as regular as the seasons. Maybe someday they would murder every last one of the enemy. Or maybe someday the enemy would destroy them. One could hope.
As Arkadi reached the fissure in the road, she saw Tovorov there counting out the dog crates and overseeing their transit across the bridge.
Arkadi could not help herself. She limped over to Tovorov and stood a pace distant until Tovorov relented and said, “What do you want?”
“Why didn’t you tell them?” Arkadi asked.
“To what end?” Tovorov said. “So you could get incinerated af- ter this, too? No. Someone has to rebuild. Someone has to go on. What you did was not wrong.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“Who else’s decision would it be? People make the laws.” “The gods make the laws. People follow them.”
“That’s a pretty story in the daytime,” Tovorov said, “but it doesn’t hold up here on the field, when you see night eight times a day.”
“You should have told the truth.”
“You tell the truth,” Tovorov said. “I’m damned already. I just want a nice quiet year or two with my dogs before the end. That’s all. One more dead out there . . . No point.”
“How is Mavis?”
“Alive,” Tovorov said. “No thanks to you. But he’ll need to be retired.”
“We should all be retired.”
“Not you,” Tovorov said, pointing across the fissure at the lorry. “You have work. My work is done. Soldier work is done.”
The driver waved, and Arkadi recognized her. It was the same driver who had taken her up here. She had kept her promise to return.
“When they said the war was over, I was glad,” Arkadi said. “I thought it would get easier after that. But it’s harder now. It’s harder to fight your own people. Harder to see what’s right.”
“Get yourself a dog,” Tovorov said. “They’ll keep you straight.” When she saw Arkadi staring at the dog crates, she said, “Not one of mine.”
“Sorry,” Arkadi said. She waved to the lorry driver again, who motioned her over. Arkadi stepped up onto the bouncy bridge, and this time she looked down into the fissure, down and down, past the colorful layers of minerals to the darkness that never seemed to end. It was like looking inside of herself, inside of Soraya. A blackness that would never be filled.
“Come in,” the driver said from the other side of the bridge, “Come in,” but Arkadi remained transfixed on the bridge, halfway between the driver’s open arms and the darkness, halfway between war and peace.
THE CORPSE ARCHIVES
THE BODIES YOU SPEAK OF, those that existed before the world was silenced and unmade, the bodies of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than the earth.
Whenever I tried to join the dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her claws.
“Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide, so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her still, about her devouring me whole.
She was so beautiful.
“Don’t you join that, don’t dance that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”
When the stack of synthetic logs burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother released me. I ran across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.
When I think of my first conception of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, end- ing in a pool of scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the keepers could not bear to throw away.
I was the most hideous of these texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could still carry me in her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh—smooth, incomplete, ugly—but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, ob- scene. They were merely incomplete.
These incomplete texts told me I was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birth- ing center . . . including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.
I was the living text of my mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That was why the keepers saved me . . . But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.
The other body-memories of my life are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me to Chiva, Chiva. . . the one you asked me about.
I think of them often, these bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly, round faces, the thick, dark hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I remember the burning of the partial texts.
I remember the burning of my kin.
These obscene texts arrived through the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.
The others they herded together at the center of our dusty com- pound. Hundreds of partial texts.
The bodies clung to one another. Clawed hands tipped in cres- cent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth. These precious, beautiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent flesh, drew blood.
I pressed my palms to the transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And screamed.
But the vehicle was a closed box. I heard nothing but my own screaming.
The empty texts sprayed the bodies of my kin with a thin, red- dish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs. One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.
Fire crawled across my kin like a living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.
I saw the terrified open mouths of my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bod- ies perfected as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.
Before the sun touched the horizon, all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.
The empty texts strode back to the vehicle and put their flam- mable fluid into the back where I sat.
“You are called Anish?” one of them asked.
I nodded.
“Are you a dumb body, Anish?”
“Better hope you are,” the other said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they just feed you so you fuck.”
I did not know then what an archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her existence.
I am most comfortable speaking of the archives, of written his- tory. Here is truth that I touched and altered as necessary. Under- stand the archives, and you will understand the text of my unmak- ing. You will understand Chiva.
I passed the tests that said I was not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives. There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The keepers designated bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in our rooms at night.
The night terrified me. I heard nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.
When the overseers opened my cell each morning I eagerly fol- lowed the other students to the archives. A little group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was not called storytelling—storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies narrated. Bodies told only truth.
The only bodies the overseers allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched, the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been; how plain, how lacking.
Our little cluster of students stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor, regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner, twice a day, administered by the archivists.
The body existed solely as an organic text capable of narration. It bore no discernible face, only a slit for a mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow over it.
I stood transfixed. The body spun my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.
I fell in love with its body.
I heard thousands of other texts in my years at the archives. I heard how the keepers found our world, a lonely planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the keepers to direct them.
“You were simply our curiosities in the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions, one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”
Often I lay awake at night and closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stom- ach, the insides of my thighs. I thought of another’s body pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my own body, my mother’s text.
