Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 14
We parted in the individual history corridor. I stayed there while she continued to burn. I needed to find my keeper.
“Why are you looking for us?” my keeper said.
“Because it was always you and your kind I wanted to silence.
Just as you silenced my kin.”
“We’ll die soon enough. Let us die.”
“You didn’t let us die,” I said. “You used us. Destroyed us. Un- made us.”
“No, Anish. You did that yourself.”
I found the door. How I found it, I do not know, not to this day. I had walked so long and so far that I could no longer smell the smoke or hear the screaming. I pressed my hand against the door, tried to open it. It did not open.
“Let me in,” I said.
“Just let me die,” my keeper said. “No,” I said.
The door opened. I approached the large structure of the hexa- gon. The sliding door of the central storage chamber was already open.
I walked into the keepers’ room. I stared at the last of the little glowing lights. Three. Just three little lights. Three dying keepers left to rule the world.
“I thought you said no,” I said.
“I didn’t let you in,” my keeper said. “They did. You’ve burned the texts in the corridors they oversaw. Their overseers have run off. What do you expect them to do but die?”
I pressed open the panel of one of the squares. I ripped out the tubing and gazed at the shiny, black casing inside. I found a little groove on the underside of the casing and pulled it out. The whole black case came out smoothly, easily, as if it had been placed inside the square just a moment ago. It was rectangular, about as long as my arm, as wide around as my palm. I could not see inside.
I brought the case to the doorway and smashed it against the wall until the casing came loose. I sat on the floor and pulled at the casing until I succeeded in tearing it off. The rectangle inside was transparent. I saw the red fluid inside, long rows of metal chips, spidery wires and tiny hair-like filaments. I set the keeper in the center of the room and unpacked the second keeper. I set it next to the first, then pulled out the last case.
My keeper.
When I sat staring into my keeper’s translucent body resting there in my lap, I said, “How long have you been watching me?”
“Forever,” he said. “You saw my mother?”
“The recordings used to be stored,” my keeper said, “when there were enough of us to oversee them. She was an exceptionally violent body. I watched you birthed out of her death. I was linked to the overseer that pulled you out.”
“You know everything about me.”
“Our observation of your compound deteriorated just after I placed you there,” my keeper said. “I sent the empty texts after you. They were going to burn everything, you know. But I knew you were still there. I had their keepers tell them to bring you back. I saved you, Anish.”
“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just let me burn with the oth- ers?” My tears fell onto the casing. I did not wipe them away.
“I watched you always, Anish. What we cannot have we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes. Thought of Chiva.
I set my keeper’s casing on top of the other two. I carefully placed three of the flares under the stack of keepers. I poured the whole container of flammable fluid over the keepers. I held the last flare, and walked back into the doorway, away from the pool of reddish liquid. I lit the flare. It glowed white in my hand. The heat was so intense that I had to hold it away from my body for fear of setting myself on fire.
“What will you do now?” my keeper said. “Tell stories,” I said.
I tossed the flare. The room exploded in a wave of brilliant light. The flame roared up and out. The heat knocked me out of the doorway. I felt the sensation of flight. My body smashed against the far wall. The flame whirled above my head, curled back into the room.
It was very beautiful.
I did not see Chiva again. Most of the students and archivists had escaped to the burning yard, and I found them there. We climbed atop one another’s bodies to scale the wall. From the top of the wall, I saw the maze of the archives, the great hexagons-within- hexagons that wound outward for as far as I could see.
The archivists told me Chiva was dead. They told me she choked on the smoke of the bodies and became lost in the maze, entombed forever. But I knew Chiva would never become lost in the archives. She knew them far better than I did.
We walked as far from the archives as we could. Most of us. Some collapsed and wept under the heat of the sun, frightened by the chill of the wind, the uncertainty of living outside of the archives. The day it rained we reached a small settlement like none I had ever known. No gates. No fences.
The bodies there were all empty, and they welcomed us. They smiled. They gave us food and drink, and they asked us to tell them stories. The others with me did not know what to say. It had been years and years, the new bodies said, since they had heard anything of the keepers, those strange beings said to have once ruled the world.
“We’ve never seen them,” the bodies told us.
“I have seen them,” I said, and they looked upon me: the tat- tooed partial text with burn scars on his face, his arms. I had no eyebrows, and most of my hair was gone. They called me an ugly body, but they wanted my stories.
And I told them all I knew, as I am telling you now.
No one ever asked about Chiva. Few of those from the archives remember her name. I thought the burning of the texts would erase all of our sadness, all that darkness. I thought we would for- get. But now you come here to this little village, telling me there are free cities in the wilderness, and ask to dance around my fire and hear the stories of a past I thought no longer existed. If it does not exist, how can I tell it? There must be some truth, still, something to be remembered, if I can still speak.
No, no. I am tired. Too old for dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of history or truth, un- burdened by the knowledge of a world built long before you were born. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of Chiva, and the story of our unmaking.
THE HEART IS EATEN LAST
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
—Proverbs 4:23
THE SABOTEURS FLED the bombed-out wreckage of the smoking chemical plant like roaches from a burning cane field. Black smoke clotted the air. The toxic bloom unfurled across the desert sky outside Alabbas like some black portent. It rolled over the fleeing insurgents, covering their escape into the warren of workers’ houses and tumbledown ruins from the last time someone tried to build something worth a damn out here on the edge of the southern desert.
Nyxnissa so Dasheem—bounty hunter, mercenary, and former government agent—watched the explosion from the hot rooftop of an abandoned mosque half a kilometer away. She pulled on a respirator without taking her eyes from the specs that gave her a keen view of the action. Behind her, her magician, Rhys, was crouched against a nearby minaret, arms over his head, yelling about the end of the world.
Typical day, really.
“Put on your respirator,” she said around hers.
“As if that makes a difference,” he said. “That cloud will eat us down to bones in an hour. Why did you take this awful job? Why are we still here when we know what’s really happening?”
Nyx adjusted her respirator and stuffed a pinch of sen into her mouth and sucked at it, considering the cloud. “Wind’s the wrong way,” she said. “It’s heading out over the desert.”
“Why didn’t we stop them, Nyx?” Rhys said. “If nothing else we’ve done out here is worth anything, at least we could have stopped that.”
Nyx watched the toxic cloud shift with the wind that now blew against her back, pushing the worst of the fallout in the other direction. Lucky break, that. Satisfied, she shoved the specs in her pack, pulled out the respirator, and spit bloody red sen on the sandy rooftop.
“No one’s dead down there yet,” she said. “We’ll get to that next. Sometimes you got to let them burn and follow them back.”
Rhys huffed out a breath. He was a handful of years younger than her, which put him in his early twenties. He had been on her bounty hunting team two years, though he insisted every six months that he was going to leave and find some new job, and this time he seemed to mean it. He was pretty enough, for a Chenjan, and she liked his eyes and his hands. But the complaining she couldn’t stand, especially because it all came out in his terrible Chenjan accent. The accent reminded her she was supposed to be killing people like him on the other side of the border, not consorting with them. The accent took her back to the warfront.
She regretted taking this job, then. But the only time she didn’t regret taking a job was when she was drinking the money it earned her. Every other moment was stuffed with poisonous doubt. Served her right. She was a sucker for pretty boys and plain-faced girls, and the girl who had given her this job had been tough to refuse. What surprised Nyx was that even after saying yes, and finding out what she’d really been hired for, Nyx was still here anyway. Girls with silvery tongues had secrets, and Nyx couldn’t help but try and fish them out. It was all too irresistible.
“Let’s go start the cleanup,” Nyx said.
“We’re bringing the saboteurs in, then?” Rhys said.
Hopeful. “I knew you would see sense!”
“We’re finishing the job,” Nyx said. She picked up her scattergun, and pointed it at his chest.
The day the girl with the job had walked into Nyx’s gym in Punjai, Nyx was sitting at the front with the gym owner, Husayn, and nursing her usual morning hangover. Nyx dredged a hunk of stale bread into a cup of thick, dark buni so strong just the smell of it made her feel sober. Buni was the kind of thick, sludgy coffee that she had dreamed about often at the front.
Husayn sat opposite her, unwrapping her own hands after teaching an early morning class of eager young women how to throw punches. It had gone well enough until two of them got into a brawl over some slight, and one bit the ear off the other. The front of Husayn’s breast binding was spattered in blood.
“What you teaching these girls?” Nyx said, nodding to the bloody floor. The class had cleared out, and old Marise, the Ras Tiegan cut woman, was mopping the concrete floor.
“I don’t have any control over what they bring into the gym,” Husayn said. She sniffed at Nyx’s buni. “Shouldn’t eat right before a workout. Or are you just here to socialize?”
Nyx shrugged. “Bit of both.”
“Avoiding that Chenjan at your office more like,” Husayn said.
Nyx slurped her buni.
Husayn guffawed. “You never did take it well, not getting what you want.”
“Got him on my team, didn’t I?” Nyx said. “Can’t imagine what else I’d want from a man like that.”
A shadow fluttered in the open doorway, and Nyx squinted into the light; a shapely silhouette moved into the gym. Nyx sat up a little straighter.
The silhouette resolved itself into a thin-lipped woman in her early thirties. Her broad face was too smooth to be lower class, too marked to be First Family. Nyx guessed she was the daughter of some merchant family selling weapons or bugs; maybe landowners. Nyx had known farmers with plantations so large that they didn’t bother working the land themselves, and it kept them out of the cancerous suns. Why bother when there was cheap refugee labor? Nyx flexed her own fingers, remembering the repetitive work involved in harvesting sugar cane and rye on her mother’s farm. This woman didn’t have the face or hands of someone who’d worked a day in her life. The woman wore a long wrap of a dress, not trousers and certainly not a dhoti like Nyx’s, and that was odd. That was a southern look, meant for impressing foreigners in cooler climates like the prudish, idol-worshipping Ras Tiegans. In Punjai nobody much cared about covering up in fear of cancers. This close to the contested border with Chenja, everyone figured a bullet or a burst would get them long before cancer from the blazing suns and toxic air. It was too hot, and life too short, to worry about it.
“You lost?” Nyx said, ripping off a hunk of bread with her teeth. She imagined doing the same to the woman’s dress.
The woman narrowed her eyes at Nyx. She had gloriously shiny dark hair rolled up against her scalp—also a rural southern style. Nyx was leaning more and more toward thinking she was a land owner. There was a little scar on her upper lip; she’d clearly been born with a cleft palate, and been rich enough to get it fixed but not rich enough to remove the scar. She had a nose bold enough to be Chenjan, though her complexion was Nasheenian, and the thin lips and long face put Nyx in mind of some southern people like the Ras Tiegans or Drucians. In Nyx’s line of work, it paid to pay attention to the cut of a woman’s face. Could save you a whole lot of trouble.
“I’m looking for Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the woman said.
Nyx leaned forward while tucking her left hand behind her, closer to the scattergun stowed at her back. “That so?”
The woman held up her hands. She had long, slender fingers that Nyx imagined would feel delightful wrapped around her thighs. “I’m not armed,” the woman said.
“Need a room?” Husayn said, snorting.
“I came to discuss a job,” the woman said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re Nyxnissa so Dasheem?” She was looking at Husayn.
Husayn laughed, and Nyx relaxed. An assassin would have moved already. And been better at making her.
“Get her some buni,” Nyx said.
“I’m not a fucking bartender,” Husayn said. “I’m going to have a rub down.” She left them with her bloody hand wraps on the counter.
Nyx patted the stool next to her. “I don’t bite unless you ask,” Nyx said.
The woman looked visibly flustered at that, which Nyx found endearing. It had been some time since she had made a woman blush. Southern country kids, new to the city, were rarities this close to the border after a few hundred years of war. Only crazy kids and refugees came out here. Nyx supposed she herself was a bit of both.
“You have a name?” Nyx asked. She finished the bread and licked her fingers.
“Binyamin.”
“That all? One name?” “For now, yes.”
“Huh,” Nyx said. She held out her hand. Binyamin just stared at it. Nyx laughed. “You were brave enough to come out here, but too scared to play nice?”
Binyamin cleared her throat. “I have concerns about . . . disease. You spent a year in prison, didn’t you?”
“Couple years ago,” Nyx said. She wondered why that was relevant. “No more diseased in prison than anywhere else.”
“I just thought that meant you’d look a little older, like your friend.”
Nyx raised her brows. “I’m twenty-seven,” Nyx said. “Husayn’s thirty-two. Not a huge leap.”
“I’ve known too many women like you and her,” she said. “My mother says she can read faces like yours the way hedge witches read palms. But I’m not as good at that.”
“I find it hard to believe you’ve ever met anyone like me,” Nyx said, “on some southern plantation.”
“How did . . .” She patted the rolls of her hair. “Ah, I suppose it’s obvious.”
“So what are you here for, southern girl? The killing will cost you, but there’s plenty more that we could do for free.”
“This is a serious matter.”
Nyx stared into her cup and sighed. “Always is.”
“There have been a series of explosions at weapons plants in the south. I’d like you to bring the saboteurs to justice.”
“Nasheenian justice,” Nyx said, “is a head in a bag. Why should I care about the south? Stuff blows up every day. Not my job to handle that shit. That’s what bel dames and order keepers are for.”
“It’s . . . a domestic problem. Not a terrorist problem. If we thought it was Chenjans we would use more orthodox methods.”
“These are your family’s plants, then?”
She nodded. “It could be any number of people,” she said, “but we have had some concerns with bel dames. That’s our worst fear, that it may be a bel dame. You know that these former government assassins don’t even answer to the government, once they are let loose.”
“Then you should talk to the bel dame council. Only bel dames hunt down other bel dames. They exist as their own independent entity. They govern themselves.”
“I went to them first,” she said. “But they told me she was just an apprentice, and never finished the training. That is close enough to a bel dame, to me, but not to them. They told me to speak to order keepers.” She made a sound of distress, deep in her throat. “As if order keepers would make a difference.”
“But I would?”
“You used to be a bel dame,” she said. “Most die in service, but you served your time in prison and survived.”
“So who is this bel dame apprentice?” Nyx said. “My sister.”
“Terrorism and family problems,” Nyx said. “I’m not in the mood for either today.” What Nyx wanted was a good fuck and a whisky tonight, not trouble with the bel dame council. She finished her buni. “I’m here to work out. You should go.” She grabbed her gloves off the counter as she slid off her seat.
The woman flinched. “I can give you more than money,” she said. “You’ll have a favor from a very powerful family. We aren’t First Family, but when it comes to wealth and influ- ence, we may as well be. Isn’t that something?”
“A favor? Like what?” “Anything within . . . reason.” “Pardons for crimes?”
“Only the Queen can grant that. But we have other types of influence. Land grants, political pull with the high and low councils, contacts in land management—”
“What would I do with land?”
