Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 78
As dusk comes on, I hear the first of the bursts from what sound like enemy guns. I look out past the clearing where the red grass tumbles down a soft decline. Above the valley, just out of my sight, I see the orange haze of a thornbug burst, a saffron wash of yellow ague. I huddle down into the grass, hoping it will pass by the other way.
The drop falls comes well after dark, the time when the specter of the triple moons would have crossed above me, if the night was clear.
I hear the low hum of a carrier. I see the drop fall, too close to the downward slope on the other side of the clearing. It thumps like a body tossed from the trenches.
I wait until the hum of the carrier recedes and crawl into the clearing. As I near the far edge, the grass begins to smell strongly of lavender and cinnamon. Violet gas!
I rise up into a crouch to get above the lingering mist of gas. I find the pack at the very edge of the decline, and as I reach for the straps, I gaze below where I can see the hazy light of the globes in the enemy trenches. Someone has ordered an assault, and a stream of figures flows across the distance between the camps in the dark.
Black figures dart through rainbow bursts of vermin and contagion. Here, the air has become thick and heady with a wash of different smells; the sticky odor of bursts and bug resin, the yeasty stink of bacterial shells and gun oil.
I heft the pack onto my back, and it molds itself to my frame. It is heavier than I anticipated. Mazaa said forty kilos and carrying forty kilos when I weighed seventy-five kilos and ate four square meals was never a concern. Now, we are living on dead body suits and boiled enemies’ bootstraps, and my body protests. I feel every muscle tremble. It takes several steps to figure my balance with the extra weight.
The popping sound comes from above me. A bacterial shell showers a spray of creamy white dust in a spherical bloom.
I stand on the inside edge of it.
Even as I move, I know that I am breathing it in, but I do not know what sort of shell it is. Dysentery? Red ague? Fever fly? My body suit eats the white powder on the suit, but the rest stays on my skin, and I am afraid to smear it away with my bare fingers.
Behind me, the shouting sounds closer. Dark figures ebb up over the edge of the decline. I try to move faster, but the pack is too ungainly.
A burst of orange lights up the clearing. For a moment, the world is as bright as day when the great orange head of the sun fills the whole southern horizon. I hear the hissing of the burst-released thornbugs. I am four meters away from the scant shelter of the trees.
I run, and stumble, and I crash into the woods. I throw myself to the ground and tuck my arms up under myself. I hear the thornbugs lodge themselves into tree trunks, hiss zffft!
The light of the burst has faded, but I can still see the residual image behind my closed lids. I keep moving.
I am aware of a rustling at my left. The woods are black, and I am having trouble breathing. My vision begins to blur, and I see color where there should be none. Violet trees, orange grass, umber sky. Little flashes at the corners of my vision. Oh no, no…
Bands of pain tighten across my chest. The colors bleed out. I stumble. I see the jagged black crown of the ridge. It looks farther away than it should be.
Behind me, there is more noise. Crunching grass, breaking branches. Whoever or whatever it is isn’t a hallucination. I can hear her breathing.
My body is too heavy to bear. One foot catches in an animal hole. I lose my balance. The weight of the pack jerks me backward. I hear a nasty crunching; pain blossoms up my lower leg, burning like a spitting thornflower. I strike the ground hard enough to expel the breath from my lungs. I try to gasp.
The thing pursuing me breaks past me, stumbles, and collapses; my tardy shadow. She falls beside me, clutching at the blistered skin of her arms.
She says something to me, but I do not understand her. She smells a bit like lavender and cinnamon. Her breathing comes sharp. Or is that mine? The words continue to bubble out of her, and my vision flashes with a myriad of colors.
“—need the blister fever,” she says, and for some reason I understand the words now. “Antibodies for blister fever. Trade? Here, quick-pinch, respiratory haze. Yours. Here.” She is pricking my arm. She is speaking the common language of the Consortium. Doesn’t she know I am one of her sisters? Can she not tell what I am in all this dark?
I fumble with the meds the kits gave me and pull out the quick-pinch for blister fever. She has one arm stretched out to me. I pinch the dose into her arm and rub at it. I wait until I can pick up her pulse. Her eyelids flutter. She reaches for my hand. Our fingers twine.
In that moment, she is my Behati, and I have saved her.
#
The dream is always the same, a subconscious imperfection; continuous loop: I am walking barefoot through Behati’s house. The worms inside the globes are dying, and they paint the whole house in orange light. Behati lies in the shallow depression in the flooring that is the tub. She is gray-skinned now, the color bleached out of her with her blood. Behati’s head lolls toward me, her eyes bleached of all color, the blind eyes of someone who’s been violet-gassed.
I tell myself I feel nothing.
She says, “This is the way the world ends.”
And the room is filled with dragonflies.
#
I wake from sleep as one would wake from death.
An alien face stares back at me. She lies as she fell, an arm’s length from me. We’re still holding hands. I pull mine away.
Her skin is clear and unblemished, the color of burnt ginger, and her hair is long and black and unruly. It spills across narrow shoulders; down a narrow body whose skinniness makes it seem all the more awkward and angular. Her brows make one clean line above her eyes, and her nose looks too small for the broad, flat planes of her face. She wears a body suit that is dying. Patches of gray mar its blue-black exterior.
She is very still, as am I. We wait.
Then she says in the common language of the old Consortium, “The men in our regiment broke with us. They are headed to your camp, coming this way, filling the district to the Amber Ridge.”
“You’re the enemy,” I say, more a question than a statement, because my body still wants to fall back into its death-sleep. “Don’t be surprised. If you side with men, then…they will be men.”
The pain in my leg awakens. I grit my teeth and take hold of my thigh and try to yank my twisted lower leg up out of the animal hole. The leg jounces unnaturally. Yields. Pain roils up my torso. I want to vomit and expel my bowels at the same time. Sweat beads my upper lip. I fumble at my belt for the med rations.
The Enemy is moving now, too. I am aware of her out of the corner of my eye. I put both hands over the med rations, knowing it’s a futile gesture, knowing she can simply kick me and take everything I have. But as she sits up, I notice little thorns sticking out of the unprotected flesh at the back of her neck.
Seeing my gaze, she reaches a hand back and tugs out a thornbug. She holds the little dead bug in her hand.
“I don’t have antibodies for thornbug bursts,” I say. I look at her waist, but her belt of med rations is nearly empty. I see antibodies for dysentery and yellow ague and the little blue-white pinch for respiratory haze that she gave me several hours ago, but nothing resembling the cure for a thornbug burst.
I pull out the rapid-mending gel from my belt. I empty one of my pinch canisters and bite on it. I lean over and stare at the mess of flesh and jagged bone that is my lower leg. It looks like it should belong to someone else. I use my other leg to hold down the broken one. I close my eyes, push back with my arms, and try to jerk the loose tibia back into place. I make an unrecognizable noise. Black flashes across my vision.
Then the Enemy takes hold of my gel. I don’t want to part with it, but I cannot move, and she is stronger than me now, even if she is skinny and Enemy.
She leans over me, tube of gel in one hand, and says, “My name is Afia.” She yanks on my leg. I bite the pinch canister in two.
The Enemy is still kneeling over my leg. It throbs. I try to sit up, and I see her smearing gel inside the ragged gash, then fingering it on the tatters of external flesh. She does not look at me.
She finishes, sits back on her heels, and nods. She says something in Enemy, then to me, in Consortium, “You’ll walk.” She stands and begins to walk toward the ridge.
“Wait!” I say. The pain has turned into a burning fissure of fire crawling all up and down my leg. I cannot carry forty kilos, not like this. “The men have broken with your unit, you said. Who are you going back to? If you disagreed with them, who’s to say they want you back? They could kill you.”
“I’m not going back,” she says. “It was a good time to break, to be free. I cannot live in trenches any longer, you understand?”
“You won’t be free long. You’re dying. The thornbugs. If you help me, I can get you the antibodies for it. I have to get…this pack back to the Women’s trenches on the other side of the ridge. It’s supplies. Things we need to live in the trenches. Please.”
The “please” comes out more desperate than I want it to. How long until our own position is overrun? I imagine Mazaa peeling the flesh away from her own bones.
The Enemy regards me. “What are you called?” the Enemy asks, and I wonder why it could make any difference what I am called.
“Nyala.”
“Nyala,” she says. She walks over to me pulls me up.
“You have to take off the pack,” she says. “We’ll carry it between us.”
And we do.
My leg still burns, and I cannot put much weight on it. The Enemy is shorter than I am, thinner and weaker, so even with my injury, her side of the pack is still the side that slopes closer to the ground. The pace is agonizing.
She can still move faster than I can. She leaves me with the pack so she can find food and water. She has a deflatable container, empty.
I sit on top of the pack and wait for her.
I do not think she will come back.
She does.
The water tastes good going down, but it has a rusty aftertaste, like old blood. The Enemy squats opposite me, watching me drink.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say.
“You think I should look for Men instead? For the enemy? Is that really all you call us? The Enemy.” She snorts. “We are the revolution, you know. We are the future.”
“Keeping watch would be more useful.”
“The Men I know would cook us alive before we heard the grass twist,” she says, and I think “twist” is the wrong word, but I do not correct her.
“This is the most Consortium I have spoken in years,” I say.
“It is good to stay in practice,” the Enemy says, and I wonder if she is joking or not.
“Maybe,” I say.
“Those were nice days, were they not?” she says. “Those days when we all met and talked?”
“Until you betrayed us,” I spit, and the aftertaste of the water still sits in my throat. I want to spit blood at her. “Siding with those men, stealing our birthing tech. Those men deserved what we did to them. They would have made us slaves.”
“Genocide is all right then?” She grimaces. “There were other ways it could have gone. We did not have to…do what we did. Some of us understood that we’d become corrupt.”
“We should walk,” I say. I have never been much afraid of Men, not even when they blew through the Divide and tried to tear the world apart. They were doomed from the start. But women, well…we can go on. We can rebuild. So long as we don’t think too much about it, don’t feel it too much, don’t linger on it. It’s why everyone takes the lethe. Even I take it, for all the good it does me.”
The Enemy takes her side of the pack, and I take mine.
“At least now,” I say, “women are free.”
“Free,” the Enemy says, “and zombies. You all might as well have lobotomized yourselves.”
“We’re much more logical now.”
“There’s no logic without emotion,” the Enemy says. She sighs. “You don’t have any idea.”
We start to walk again toward the Amber Ridge. The Enemy remains quiet, though she looks over her shoulder often, the fearful look of the followed.
As I walk, the world begins to blur at the edges. From pain, disorientation, lack of sleep, hunger, all of those things. I pretend the world is different. I pretend I am somewhere else. I pretend Behati is alive and she and I are carrying a picnic basket between us, and the far-off pop of bacterial shells is just the sound of fireworks. I pretend that Behati loves me. I pretend I don’t love Behati, because I do, I still do, no matter how many injections I take, no matter how many pills they give me.
It is a common daydream of mine, and it keeps me walking.
We stop three more times before dark. By the time the hazy blanket of dusk begins to cloud the world, we stand a hundred yards from the face of the Amber Ridge.
The Enemy helps me drag the pack into a clump of thorn trees, and we sit down with the pack behind us. Her skin is flush. There’s sweat on her brow, her upper lip, and the gray patches of her suit are beginning to peel off.
Night comes more quickly this close to the Ridge, and it is always colder next to the remains of the Divide. We drink the last of the water.
“Did you ever duel?” I ask the Enemy.
She looks over at me. She is hugging her knees to her chest. She, too, is shivering. “Yes,” she says. “I dueled a friend, once.” I hear a smile in her voice.
I try to open my eyes again, but the stars are too bright. I wonder if the thornbugs got me too, or if another bacterial shell burst over me that I did not notice. I feel so very cold.
“A woman once loved me,” I say, and after I say it, I feel sick, like I have told someone I like to slit the skins from children.
“Oh,” is all the Enemy says.
“You know what that means?” I say. “I consorted with someone who was an anomaly. You know what that is?”
“A human?” she says.
“It means she was weak. It means… it means I was weak, too, I am weak, because I still feel, here—" I press a hand to my chest. “I feel her. That’s unnatural, isn’t it?”
The Enemy snorts. “It’s the most natural thing in the world, Nyala. Whoever decided not caring about something made you strong was a fool. And they’re going to murder us all because of that foolish stupidity.”
“I’m cold,” I say.
She scoots closer to me, until our bodies touch. She feels warm, too warm. I am afraid now, really afraid that the thornbugs are killing both of us.
“I once heard it said that your anomalies could have saved the world,” Afia says. And I think, Afia, this warm, thorny woman with the soft voice. “They could have helped everyone see that we are still a Consortium. What you all call anomalies over there are just…those are the normal humans, to us. We understand that. We haven’t lost our humanity in this war, despite everything you’ve thrown at us.”
“Yes,” I say, thinking; Behati, my love, you could have saved the world.
And suddenly I am afraid. The world is spinning. We are dying. Both of us. All of us. Because we cannot feel anything anymore.
The long night passes.
I do not dream.
I wake with Afia’s body curled around mine. Her skin is hot to the touch. I see little black threads running beneath her skin from the thornbug punctures on the back of her neck.
“Afia,” I say, and shake her gently.
The dawn is cold and gray. Clouds hang low over the Ridge.
Afia moans and mumbles something. I pull her to her feet. My leg is not so shaky or inflamed as the day before, but it still snaps a bloom of pain up through my torso when I put my weight on it. I grab the pack strap.
Afia is moving now, slowly. She steadies herself against one of the trees.
The pack between us, we walk. Afia’s face goes from flush to ashen as we make our way into the scar below us.
We make it to the other side, across the quiet, lead-tasting air of the scar, before she has to stop.
“Here,” she says, and the word comes out in Enemy, but I know it.
We collapse onto the pack. It is the first time I think to go through the pack. Could they have dropped water and food with it as well? Med rations? I try to pull open the top, but I can see that it’s bugged for a TD. Only Mazaa can open it. I curse.
“Can you carry the rest…alone?” Afia says. She is slumped up with her back against the pack, her limbs lax, eyes closed.
“You’re not going to die,” I say. “When my trench commander gets this open, there will probably be med rations in it. Probably thornbug pinches. You understand? We just have to get there.”
“Ah,” she says. “You told me you already had thornbug antibodies in your trenches.”
“I lied to you,” I say. “You would have lied too. But listen, Afia, they’ll be in here. They have to be in here.”
She begins humming softly, some melody that I have no name for, but sounds familiar. A child’s lullaby, something my mothers would have sung to me. Because of course we are the same people, people who have just chosen different sides. Different ways forward. Different futures. Which future would win?
“Stand up,” I say.
I stand, as if to show her. “Up. Stand up!” I pull her to her feet. She leans heavily on me. She takes hold of the pack strap like an automaton. Her eyes have taken on that outward gaze, ever outward, looking in.
We are dragging the pack now.
I think of a hundred terrible bursts and bacterial shells I have never seen.
I start to talk to her. I tell her about my mothers. I tell her about Behati. I tell her about the long, long war in the trenches, and all the people I have lost. So many holes in my heart.
The pack smoothes a long trail of broken red grass behind us. The sky is turning the gray of dusk again. I am so thirsty. The hunger has dissolved into a dull ache. I help Afia up for the third time. The left side of her face is a blotchy blue-black, the color of a new bruise.
