Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 95
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Abijah stood above the factory floor, next to the boy foreman whose locker she had riffled through. He looked tired. She imagined she did too. Abijah pressed the call button on the fob, re-dialing the coordinates for the first call it had made, here at the factory.
The boy besides her stiffened. "Excuse me," he said, "I need to –"
"You should come with me," Abijah said, and led him into one of the cramped meeting rooms. She patted him down, and came up with the communicator fob, tucked into his sock.
“You his brother? Father?” Abijah said, pulling a can of vodka soda from her pocket and placing it on the table in front of him. “He wanted to come planetside, looking for you. I have a feeling you weren’t happy about that.”
"I'm his mother," the boy said, and that gave Abijah pause. She supposed they did all look alike, after all. "I told him not to come. I didn't trace his communicator. That was the team. They traced several on that transport.”
“Does Zoya know she employs terrorists?”
“It’s… not like that. There’s something going on up there which is far more complicated than any of you –“
“So, you’re just… blowing each other up? Three shuttles in as many months? What the fuck?”
“He took that job to get passage.”
“And died for it.”
“He knew passage was dangerous!”
“You think of yourself as a boy, a woman? Something else?”
“A mother,” she said. “My name is Dosia.”
“He didn’t know you were the one blowing up shuttles, did he? Didn’t think you were connected at all.”
“He wasn’t supposed to come.”
“When did you know he had?”
Dosia wiped her palms on her tunic and looked away. Outside the meeting room, Zoya arrived, with three other women who had the whiff of security about them. Abijah raised her hand, urging them to give her time.
Dosia's left hand trembled as she said, “That night, when I checked my messages. He sent it when he was about to go into atmospheric entry, when coms go dark. Even if I’d have seen it earlier… it would have been too late.”
“I don’t know what the issue is with all of you up there,” Abijah said, “but you know I have to turn you in. We don’t need your war following you down here.”
“Just our labor, right?” Dosia spat. A film of tears made her eyes glisten. “You think you can exploit our bodies without any consequence? That is a fool’s dream. A tyrant’s dream. The people on the continent have that dream about you, you know.”
“It’s another thing entirely.”
“Someday you will wake from that dream.”
Abijah lifted her wrist to call open her display, but Dosia grabbed her hand. “Please,” Dosia said. “There’s no need for this. Who’s to know? Give me clemency. Mercy. I’ve already lost a son. Grant me this boon, as one mother to another.”
“We are not the same mothers,” Abijah said, and pulled her wrist away.
“Cyrek,” Dosia said. “He wasn’t a boy, some boy. He was my boy. His name was Cyrek.”
“You should have thought of that before you started blowing them up,” Abijah said, and called Katya, even knowing how much she was about to get cussed out by doing so. She would rather the gardai take Dosia than Zoya. Zoya would disappear Dosia. With the gardai, there might be a life of hard labor.
When the gardai came for Dosia, Zoya entered the meeting room, gliding in like some ethereal force; and perhaps she was. All former capitalists were, certainly. It’s what gave them their power.
“Exceptional job,” Zoya said, taking her wrist as the gardai hustled Dosia out. Her fingers were soft, as expected. “I will tell everyone I know how… thorough you are.”
“Thank you.”
“And you are so…. ruthless. The line about how you aren’t the same mothers?” She covered her mouth with her hand and tittered. “Incredible! Better than any programming.”
Abijah gently pulled her wrist from Zoya’s grasp. “I guess.”
Zoya lowered her voice. “You could make far more if you just –“
“No, thank you,” Abijah said. “I have to go home. My daughter, you understand?”
“Oh, of course!”
The one thing Zoya could not argue about. Not now. Not after… this.
“I hope you find something else to serve your guests, for the feast,” Abijah said.
Zoya waved her hand, tittering again. “Oh, of course. You know… there’s so much… flesh, on offer, right now. Have you tasted an alien?”
Abijah took the trolley home; the dark was deep. The cold was enough to make her tremble, but not absolute.
On arrival, she knew immediately that her daughter was no longer there. A lack of a certain scent in the air; the perfume of the continent, the leather of some expensive beast. She collapsed into the divan, face first, too tired even to fish around for a vodka soda.
The sound at the door, she knew, was not her daughter, but Pats, because Pats was the only one she knew with nothing else to do. And also, when Pats picked the lock, it was very loud.
“I’m tired, Pats,” she said, still face first in the divan.
“It’s all right,” Pats said, and Abijah felt the heavy weight of Pat’s coat over her. “There’s some good shows on, Jeezmo.”
The flickering of the projection screen. The inane, soothing banter of idiots on the local programming.
“You have kids, Pats?” Abijah mumbled into the upholstery.
“Fuck no…. Oh, maybe. Sort of. It’s overrated.”
“It’s like having a limb out there, walking and talking.”
“Sounds weird.”
“Get me some crisps. And a vodka soda.”
“Sure thing.”
Abijah raised her head to the projection; the programming was unfamiliar, something from the continent. That’s how they would get them, eventually, the same way every colonial did; the kids, the culture.
Pats shoved a vodka soda into her hand.
She opened it.
The show went on.
THE WOOD OF WAILING CHILDREN
I REMEMBER BLOOD in my shoes. The blood was already there, when I put on my shoes. That, I remember.
I remember the three of us heading into the woods. Healthy. Laughing. Young. Luminous.
They have asked again and again, where my memory begins and ends, that day. I can tell you: it begins early, toast and tomato juice, my mothers arguing about something petty, something that after that day, they never brought up again. It puts it in perspective, the blood in your shoes.
We always played in the woods. The three of us. Me, Maeve, and Flyn. Had since we were so small that those woods are my first memory, and my mothers’ warning: “That’s the Wood of Wailing Children. Children go missing there. Your cousin, Seva. Your mother’s brother’s friend’s child, you remember Luce?”
Of course I did not. They were ghosts, all. Dead and gone.
Not like us.
And so we played in the Wood of Wailing Children; we called it only “the wood.” And that day was no different than the others.
We walked the long path from our parents’ houseshares and ran headlong into the wood. We loved it because in the wood, you could be anyone, anything. Shed your past. Ignore the future. There was only this moment, us together. My first memory of the wood is bright, brilliant. My last: blood in my shoes.
I walked into the wood that day a child. I walked out, stockings covered in blood, shoes pristine, which meant at some point I had been barefoot, and only put on the shoes, after. They asked me again and again – what happened in the wood? But there was only this: me, Maeve, Flyn running into the wood, hopping over the rill of water we called the Penitent Peace, and then, the black leaves, dirt, and nothing. Nothing, until I was sitting in the dirt, blood on my stockings, shoes cast past me, the mud all around churned up. Marks on my wrists. Rubbed raw.
Blood. I didn’t know it was blood, at first. It was coppery brown, by then; and in the dusk, it was dark, so dark. I could not imagine any scenario where I awoke, covered in blood. But here it was.
The investigators from the Contagion College tested the blood and compared it to Maeve’s and Flyn’s. It did not match. It was someone else’s, not mine, not theirs, not anyone in their very old records.
It was a month before they found Maeve and Flyn, weighted down at the bottom of the rill, just bloated bodies, long dead, bereft of blood. My mothers tried to keep it from me as long as possible, tried to soften it.
“But the blood?” I said, “if not us –“
“Hush now,” my mother Morrow said, pulling me into her lap. “The blood… it’s from children long gone. Ghosts.”
“How?”
“I don’t understand it,” mother Morrow said, “but that wood wants to eat you. Don’t give it its due. Please. If you must go back, wait until you’re older. It does not bother us, older people. Don’t feed those ghosts.”
And so I did not go back, year after year. I joined the Contagion College, and became a Plague Hunter myself. I hid from the past in dark libraries, and I lived in the bottom of a glass; peppery whisky and botanical gins. But when I turned twenty, I went back to the Wood of Wailing Children.
I stepped over the rill where Maeve and Flyn had been found. I walked and walked, deeper and deeper into the wood, until I recognized the great gnarled tree that I had awoken next to ten years before, covered in the blood of ghosts.
I took off my shoes. Stood there in the moist soil in just my stockings. Pressed my palms to the tree. “What happened?” I whispered. “Please?”
I stood there all night, until dawn crept across the woodland the next day; I did not sleep, but dawn still felt like waking. The cold and damp crept up through the soles of my feet and made me shiver.
“Please?” I said, as dawn’s fingers began to warm my face.
But there was only the sound of birds. The burble of the stream. Innocent as our youth. As unassuming as we believe the unknown world to be. The wood had done something, taken something from me, and I railed against it.
Yet, as the burst of light cut through the tree cover, I recognized something in the light, the heat, the sound of the birds, the insects. I recognized my own ignorance.
I left the Wood of Wailing Children that day, alive and unbloodied. I wanted so badly to burn it to the ground, to destroy this copse I did not understand, this ancient, ensorcelled place. But who was I, to decide? Who was I, a wayward, wailing child, spared and covered in the blood of ghosts?
We want to destroy what we don’t understand. We forget that what we want to destroy sometimes spared us. How do we reconcile this?
I don’t know. I don’t know. What I do know is that these dangers, these experiences, they mold us and make us. Some of us endure. Some do not. The wood decides, and that is terrifying… but is it also necessary? I hope I do not ever remember what happened there.
When my children ask if they can play in the Wood of Wailing Children, I hope I will let them. I hope I will tell them, “Just do not tie your shoes too tightly.”
THE OCEAN BROTHERS
SANAIS SYNCHRONIZED HER STEPS with Dilen’s. The two assassins walked softly, rolling their weight to the outside of their feet. Neither carried weapons. They were the weapons. She had left the two young girls she was mentoring, Shani and Akila, alone in her room. What would happen to them if she died here for a brothers’ spat?
Sanais felt her senses heighten as they neared the room. She heard the brothers a dozen paces behind her. She heard the soft rustle of Dilen’s robe. Her dress felt cloying, heavy. She poised a hand behind her, prepared to step out of the material in order to fight unencumbered.
Amber, she thought. The name became a litany in her mind. No spider assassin had ever rivaled Amber, the one who now guarded the third of the ocean brother’s, Dakarai. If Amber and Dakarai outwitted them tonight, Shani and Akila would die, no doubt. So much death, so many possible ripples, from what they were about to do.
We should have been bound to the same brother, she thought, but that was not the way of the desert.
And now there was to be a sacrifice.
There were too many brothers trying to rule this desert, and Sanais had made her choice. They turned at the end of the corridor, passed pale slaves. Two honor guards stood outside of Dakarai’s rooms. They looked her over.
“Dakarai didn’t ask for another --“ was all the first of them got out.
Jab to the kidney. Palm to the nose as he doubled over. She felt and heard the crunch of bone and cartilage.
The blood lust filled her. She had no other name for it. The rush she felt when she killed, when those endless hours of practice and preparation amounted to something.
No more the lady in waiting.
Dilen twisted the neck of the second.
Both spiders were through the door before the second man fell.
The main room was empty, lit with only one brazier at the center. Sanais heard Dakarai in the bedroom, but did not trust the lady or ladies to be Amber. She motioned to Dilen to check, and made a pace around the wardrobe. She found Amber’s kneeling pillow, but saw no one in the shadows of the wardrobe. She made a circuit of the room that got her to the bedroom.
Two more braziers, one at each far corner of the room. The bed dominated the room, but there was no canopy. Sanais saw a wall hanging above the head of the bed.
Sanais tugged off her red dress in the shadows just outside the door to the bedroom. The dress pooled off her, and she felt the cold air on her skin. She saw two ladies in the bed, and Amber kneeling on a cushion at the foot of the bed, facing toward the bed itself.
Sanais gestured to Dilen.
The brothers they tended – Hanif and Gahiji - entered the main room behind them. Sanais knew because their steps were loud. Sanais heard an empty wine jug clatter onto the floor.
Amber leapt up from the cushion.
Sanais expected her to turn, so she moved forward with Dilen to confront her when she did. But Amber did not turn. She leapt up over the bed and grabbed for the slightly bowled disk of the brazier. She pulled the metal disk from the tripod and as she turned, sent the disk and flaming coals flying toward the door.
Sanais ducked and made for the other brazier. Dilen wasn’t fast enough, and the disk caught him in the torso. He cried out and tipped the disk back over to smother the coals.
Deeper shadows crept up the wall.
Dakarai started yelling. The ladies screamed and scuttled out of the bed.
Sanais bumped into one of them. Amber leapt over the two of them to get to the second brazier. Sanais slid underneath the bed. The brazier flew to the door again, and Sanais realized that the brothers had followed them into the bedroom.
She heard Hanif cry out, and the second brazier was turned over.
The room went black.
Gray light pooled at the edges of the doorway where the light from the other room seeped in, but for several minutes, Sanais was completely blind. She closed her eyes and scampered out from under the bed. She crouched at the other end of the room, and listened. She was here to kill Dakarai, and Amber was here to protect him. Amber would stay near Dakarai.
She listened to the darkness. Hanif and Gahiji had moved to the main room. She heard the ladies sobbing at the other side of the room, in the corner, and Dakarai’s heavy breathing, there, where? Not the bed. Amber had moved him. He was by the door, near where Dilen had been hit with the brazier. Dilen she sensed at her right hand, a little more than an arm’s length away.
“Sanais?” Hanif called from the other room.
“You fucking maggots!” Dakarai screamed. “You fucking cowards! Brothers!? What is that word to you!”
Sanais heard Dilen move toward the door. She used the distraction to creep back up to the bed. She reached up at the head of the bed, tugged at the edges of the wall hanging, waited. She heard Dilen hit flesh. Dakarai cried out.
Sanais jerked the hanging from the wall and rolled with it back off the bed. It was heavier than she thought it would be. She threw it toward Dakarai’s cry with the weight of her body behind it. She heard the hanging fall. Dakarai’s voice was muffled.
A blow came down on the back of her head. She fell, rolled away, and heard her attacker pound the dust where she had been.
Sanais came back up in a low crouch, eyes still closed, and listened. The ladies were directly behind her. She could feel their breath on her skin.
There had just been the two ladies, hadn’t there? The two ladies and Amber.
She heard Dakarai crawling out from under the hanging.
Dilen cried out.
Sanais leapt in the direction of his cry. She grappled for two figures, and caught hold of the fabric of Amber’s dress. She knew the feel of lady’s red. She heard Amber swing, and ducked.
Then she saw Dakarai’s big body moving out into the main room, a large shadow against the orange-gray light. He stood just outside the door and walked toward his brothers. Hanif and Gahiji stood at the center of the chamber.
Sanais and Amber both moved at the same time.
Dakarai was naked, and he had grabbed a dagger from somewhere inside the bedroom.
“Is this what you wanted, Hanif?” he yelled.
Hanif and Gahiji, too, were armed. There could be many dead men here tonight. Sanais wondered, again, why she did not kill them all and end it this tired charade.
Sanais saw Amber keeping pace with her. She abruptly twisted back behind Amber and grabbed her by the dress and yanked her back. Amber tumbled into her, and they both fell. In this light, the shadows still twisted around them, but Amber was visible.
Sanais grabbed for Amber’s hair, tried to yank her neck around. Amber jabbed at her throat. Sanais blocked, rolled off her. Grabbed Amber by the back of her arms and hefted her up, tried to get her in a hold that would disable her arms.
Amber leapt up and back flipped her body so her feet struck Sanais in the face, forcing them apart.
