Brutal Women (16 page)

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
said to us.

“I have seen them,” I said, and
they looked upon me: the tattooed 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
forget. But now you walk up here 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.

No, no. I am tired. Too old for
dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of
history. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of my unmaking.

It is always a silent dream.

This is one of my favorite short
stories. It’s the first time I really started digging into the guts of organic
weapons and gendered warfare. Trouble was, it didn’t seem to make much sense to
anybody but me. Here’s to hoping some of you enjoy it.

Twice a day we feed and oil the big
rotating guns - once at dawn and once at dusk. The dawn is the malignant
crimson of a sailor’s warning. The dusk is a gray gauze that turns the light of
our globes the color of burnt lemon.

I like to walk the perimeter of our
trenches in the early evenings, before the globes go smoky, after I’m done
filling in the sick trenches. The haze of our bubble filter obscures my view,
but if I stand with my nose against it I can see across the dozen-meter swath
of untouched red grass and catch a glimpse of the Androgynies’ dark haired
heads as they mill back and forth in the bowels of their trenches. Their filter
gave out four days ago. If we had the right bursts, we could liquefy them where
they lie and retake our position, maybe move forward further into the Androgyny
district. But the Neuters raided our supply carrier weeks ago.

When darkness washes away the last
of the sun, I climb back down into the trenches to join the rest of the women.
Globes cast ghastly light onto dirty, hollow-cheeked faces. Everyone’s eyes
look too big.

A skinny girl, not a year out of
matric, approaches me from a connecting trench. Her bob of dark hair is thin
and lanky, her eyes the nearly colorless of the violet-gassed. She squints at
me, at the red mesh of the armband molded to my upper arm. I am amazed she can
see at all.

“Trench director’s asking for a
runner called Nadav,” she says. “That you?”

The trench director does not look
up from her desk as I pass through her filter and into the command hole. Her
name is Gian, and she’s a handsome woman, the sort of tall, broad-cheeked
intellectual all three of my mothers would have approved of. She is the fourth
trench director we have had in eight weeks; I watched two die of dysentery, and
the last literally peeled the flesh away from her own bones in the end, victim
of an Androgyny burst we had never encountered before.

“I need you to retrieve a drop,”
Gian says. She is chewing kaj, and she looks up now. Her eyes are the color of
cut obsidian. She pushes green papers bled through with black ink off her desk.
Beneath the papers is a map of our position, the Amber Ridge and what was once
the Men’s District.

“Carrier doesn’t have enough fuel
to divert from its supply course over the Red Ridge, but they can drop it en
route. Some Neuters are boxed in here, on the other side of the ridge,” Gian
says, pointing out the position. “They’re being routed by these two Androgyny
bubbles, here. Rumor has it that the last of the Men are making a stand at the
edge of the district, here, pushed up against the sea. You shouldn’t have to
worry about them.”

“It’s only Androgynies I fear,” I
say, and naming the fear eases the twisting in my gut.

Gian nods. “Home Defense has
organized the drop here,” she says, pressing her thumb to a position on the
other side of the ridge, just below the Neuter and Androgyny camps. “You’re to
pick it up tomorrow night. No moon.”

She leans toward me. “Carry-ready.
Forty kilos. Strap it on and go. You’ll be carrying thornbug bursts and CFR.
You know what CFR is?”

I shake my head.

“Neither do I, but HD says we lob
it at our Androgynies on the other side of that red grass before they get a
filter up, and we can hold them off long enough to get reinforcements. If they
get a supply carrier in here before we get that drop, we go home on our
shields, so to speak. You know what that means?”

“I’m not stupid,” I say. The
Neuters used to duel with physical shields. My mothers used to take me to the
duels, back when the Consortium still functioned.

Gian taps at the map, a nervous tic
of a gesture. “Rumor has it you’re a queer,” she says, and the word sends a
cold ripple down my spine. “I’m a new TD, and we don’t last long on the line. I
have to measure you by what I see and what I hear. You’re the only runner I’ve
got, but it’s dangerous to send out a queer with Neuters and Androgynies.
Queers get notions, fancies. You understand?”

I think of my dead lover, Elan, her
body so still and swollen in the tub. Elan was the queer, not me. Elan loved
those of the Other sex, not me. I only loved Elan. “There’s a black beetle in
every trench,” I say.

Gian spits kaj onto the dirt floor
and smiles at me. Her teeth are stained red. “You’ll do,” she says. “Get your
med ration from the kits and go.”

I once dreamt of my mothers, all
dead. They lay close together in a field of red grass. Close, but not touching.
They were warm, but I could not wake them, and they were covered in
dragonflies. The flies’ wings were made of color. Not painted in it, no, but
made of it: violet and lime, olive and saffron, turquoise and sage, and the
color dazzled me. The world dazzled me, and I could not speak.

It is the only dream I have ever
had of my mothers.

I move into the dark and up and out
the rear line of our trenches. I follow the black spine of the ridge. I like to
think that the darkness hides me, but this is not true. My body suit is still
living, feeding off my sweat and urine, and it colors itself the same
blue-black of the darkness.

The kits gave me standard
anti-infection doses for yellow ague and blister fever, but we are out of
quick-pinch antibodies for standard bursts, thornbug or otherwise. They
allotted me rapid-mending gel, but no painkillers. We haven’t had painkillers
in eight weeks.

I come to the end of the ridge and cut
across to the other side at dawn. Beneath my feet is a long scar of stone and
metal thirty meters across, the width of the old Divide - before the Men blew a
hole in it big enough to swarm through. The air is quiet here; I can taste lead
on my tongue.

The sun’s light begins to splinter
into sunset, and I circle the edge of the drop site. The wood here is made up
of thorn trees and twisted willowrens. The branches tangle overhead, but they
are so thinly leaved that they appear skeletal, hungry. The red grass is knee
high.

As dusk comes on I hear the first
of the bursts from what sound like Androgyny 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, and I huddle down into the grass.

The drop falls well after dark, the
time when the moon would have crested in the sky on a moonlit night. I hear the
low hum of a carrier over the bursts. I open my eyes and see the drop fall, too
close to the downward slope on the other side of the clearing. It thumps to the
ground like a body being tossed from the trenches.

I wait until the hum of the carrier
recedes. I 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 myself out of 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 Neuter and Androgyny trenches. Someone has
ordered an assault, and a stream of figures flows across the distance between
the camps in the dark. Black figures dart madly through the 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. Gian said forty
kilos, and carrying forty kilos when I weighed seventy-five kilos was never a
concern. Now, weighing sixty-five and living on dead body suits and boiled
Androgyny bootstraps, my body protests, and I feel every muscle tremble as I
stand with the pack. It takes several steps to figure my balance with the extra
weight, and they are slow, awkward steps. I should be halfway back across the
clearing by now.

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. I look back. Dark figures ebb up over the edge of the decline. I try to
move faster, but the pack is too ungainly. I nearly fall over.

A burst of orange lights up the
clearing. For a moment, the world is as bright as sunset. 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. When I can hear
no more bugs zipping past, I struggle to my feet and keep moving.

I am aware of another sound at my
left. Someone else in the trees? But I cannot see them. 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. But it is
dark outside, and the world should have no color.

Bands of pain tighten across my
chest. The colors bleed out. I stumble, keep walking. I can 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. There is someone there, now, I know. I can
hear her breathing.

The pack is suddenly too heavy to
bear. My body is too heavy to bear. One foot catches in an animal hole, and I
lose my balance. The weight of the pack jerks me backward. I can’t get my foot
free as I fall. I hear a nasty crunching sound; pain blossoms up through my
lower leg. I am aware of falling, striking the ground with enough force to
pound a gasp of breath from my lungs. I am lying on my side among crushed
blades of grass. I cannot move. It hurts to breathe.

My follower breaks past me,
stumbles, and collapses; my tardy shadow, struggling to catch me. 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 more color.

“-blister fever,” she says, and for
some reason I understand the words now. “Antibodies for blister fever. I have
the quick-pinch for respiratory haze. Here, here.” She is pricking my arm with
something. She is not speaking our language: 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, pull out the quick-pinch for blister fever, but her body has already
gone slack. 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 Elan, and
I have saved her.

The dream is always the same, a
subconscious imperfection; continuous loop: I am walking barefoot through
Elan’s house. The worms inside the globes are dying, and they paint the whole
house in orange light. Elan 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. Elan’s head lolls toward me, her eyes bleached of all color, the blind
eyes of someone who’s been violet-gassed.