Marie's Journey (Ginecean Chronicles) (22 page)

“A doctor must see her.” Marie knew it was pointless to argue with them, but rage and fear were driving her insane and she didn’t care anymore if they punished her again.

“There’s a doctor there, checking the wounded. Go.” The second soldier, an older-looking woman—outranking the first—pointed her rifle behind her to show them the way.

Marie followed the pointer and saw Rane’s head emerging over the sea of people. She looked strained, but otherwise she was standing up and shooting orders to someone. Marie, helped by Carine, dragged the unconscious woman all the way to the doctor. “Rane!”

The doctor turned at hearing her voice and her face transformed at seeing her. “I was so worried about you.” She let go of whatever she was doing and ran to take Marie in her arms. “I kept looking for you in the crowd.” Her eyes roamed over Marie and then widened. “Are you okay? Were you hit?”

“No…” Marie lowered her head to look at what Rane was staring at and saw the red flower under her breasts. Her hands went automatically to touch the spot. “It isn’t mine.” Two green eyes and a blond mane flickered in and out of her line of sight and she gasped.

Rane whispered to her, “Make him go away. He’s going to get himself killed.”

Grant was staring at her from behind a brick wall standing just under the roof of the barrack from where Callista was making sure everything went according to her orders. Marie raised her eyes to show him in what danger he was, but he shook his head.

“Please,” she mouthed, “Go away.” But he didn’t move. “I’m fine.” She hoped he could understand what she was saying. A soldier walked in front of her and stopped to check what they were doing.

Rane diverted the woman’s attention by calling her. “Hey! I can’t do anything here. I need help to transport the wounded to the infirmary.”

“You need permission.” The soldier, a private no more than a few years older than Marie, moved an inch to the right and Marie looked over her shoulder.

Grant wasn’t there anymore. Thoughts of him being apprehended by Callista’s army invaded her mind and she struggled to breathe. She turned to Rane, unable to stop the sobs tearing her chest, but the doctor warned her not to say anything.

“What’s wrong with her?” The soldier gave Marie a good stare.

The doctor pulled her to her side and angled her body so Marie’s face was hidden against her body. “Give her a break. She’s just a child. Can’t you see she’s in shock?”

The soldier started to say, “I don’t c—” but one of the women standing on the roof with Callista called her. “Escort them to the infirmary,” she shouted.

Marie disentangled herself from the doctor’s safe embrace and looked up. Callista’s eyes were on Rane, a condescending smile on her frigid face. The meaning of her message clear. From now on, they would live or die based solely on her whims.

Rane lowered her head, a solitary tear running a straight, clean line through the soot on her cheek. Callista’s smile deepened at the doctor’s act of submission. Her lips moved.
“Good girl.”
The words as clear as if she had shouted them in their ears. Marie saw how Rane recoiled at the taunting. A slap would have been less painful.

“Don’t stand like that.” The private poked the doctor in the rib.

Rane blinked once and then turned to fetch some help. “You and you,” she summoned two Vasurians who looked relatively in good form apart from a few scratches on their faces and arms. “Look around and see if you can find other people who can help. We need to transport those three women first. The others can wait.”

Marie saw four other still figures on the ground. “What about them?” She indicated the two lying side by side in a peaceful pose.

Rane’s eyes darted toward the roof and Callista, and she shook her head. “Nothing we can do for them anymore.” She pinched the arch of her nose between her fingers and then instructed Marie and Carine on what to do next.

Marie worked at the infirmary the whole day without breaks. The wounded were more than they had expected. Several of them in precarious condition. One woman died later in the afternoon; she had been shot and then trampled by the receding crowd. She had been found only after Callista had declared the census done. By that time, she had lost too much blood.

Nobody had time to grieve over the loss of the human life. People kept entering the infirmary until late at night, when Rane finally had to redirect the less serious cases elsewhere. Around midnight, Mala offered to take care of the infirmary so that Rane, Marie, Carine, who had stayed with them the whole time, and Trisha, who had joined a few hours later, could rest. Nobody knew what had happened to Zena or why she hadn’t come back to the infirmary. Marie had looked at the door every few minutes, hoping to see the nurse enter. She kept telling herself that the woman was too strong and that nothing had happened to her. But when she wasn’t looking at the door, Rane was. The doctor had the same worried expression on her face, but neither of them uttered a word about Zena.

And so they went to lie on the floor—all the cots were taken—and tried to rest. Marie arranged a thin sheet under her body that did nothing to prevent the cold seeping from the tiles to creep through her bones. The hard surface of the tiles didn’t help either. She did sleep though. A fitful slumber filled with nightmares. Sweating while freezing.

Marie’s eyes were wide open and staring at the windowpanes at dawn when Callista awakened Vasura again. She and rest of the infirmary’s crew and patients who could stand upright walked down the steps in a mournful procession. A few minutes later, an angry but muted crowd had gathered in the main hub as ordered. Dread filled her heart as she realized not a single child roamed the street.

Her eyes darted through the sea of women moving ahead of her and recognized some of the mothers whose kids she had seen a day ago, running and screaming to get back to them. They looked like statues. They moved when asked to, but they weren’t there. Marie’s eyes went vacant. Callista had started talking, but Marie wasn’t listening. A blond mane bobbed for a moment over the wall of heads. She moved through the crowd, leaving Rane and the other two girls behind. They called her. She didn’t turn to answer. Despite common sense, she wanted to know if it was him. Heart lodged in her throat, she finally caught up with the blond head, but when the person slightly turned to the right, the nose was wrong, too feminine. Marie breathed once, twice, filling her lungs with air until the oxygen rush made her feel dizzy. A sound between a laugh and a sob escaped her mouth. She was relieved it wasn’t Grant, but she still didn’t know where he was.

And where is Zena?
The thought came unbidden. She turned and looked for the rest of her group, but it was impossible to see anything beyond the person before or after her.

“Starting immediately, wasted women aged fifteen and workers aged twelve will be eligible to work at the recycling facility.”

Callista’s words reached her ears in a haze. The crowd angrily murmured, but the soldiers placed on the roof made a show of taking aim on them, and silence was restored immediately. It was a sick replay of yesterday’s spectacle.

“Male children will be brought to the nursery and raised as appropriate for their sex.”

A woman standing by her side started crying, at first soft sobs, and then she collapsed on the ground and wailed. She wasn’t the only one. Several images flooded Marie’s mind, but the boy screaming for his mother, his little hands stretched ahead of him while the soldier took him away, kept playing in a loop. She couldn’t stop herself from seeing the terrified eyes and the small fingers grasping at the air. Where was he now?

“We have analyzed the data from the census and realized this sewage plant isn’t utilizing its human resources as it should. There is a waste”—Callista found it humorous and sneered— “of resources, which is easy to fix by creating new shifts. Every woman fifteen and older must report to the new placement center. As of now.”

Callista left the roof, but the soldiers remained to ensure their colleagues on the ground properly corralled the crowd. While the younger girls were ordered to stay behind, the conscripted women walked along the line created by the army. Rifles at hand, Callista’s thugs directed them toward the place where only yesterday the purple barracks had stood. Now the low buildings were a matte black, paint still drying on the corrugated walls, the acrylic color evaporating under the first rays of sun.

Marie waited in line for her turn. She wished the doctor and the girls were with her. She had never minded being alone, but not now and not here where everything she laid her eyes upon reminded her of pain and death. Any time a blonde walked past her, her heart skipped a beat. Callista hadn’t said what she meant to do in regard to the men. Finally, it was her turn to be swallowed whole inside the black hole. She entered the ex-casino and walked to the table at the end of the room. She had no idea how the place had looked a mere twenty-four hours ago, but she was sure it wasn’t like this. Besides the table and the chair occupied by a middle-aged soldier, there was nothing else.

“Stop there, by the line.” The pure breed pointed with a pen at a piece of tape on the floor, just three or four feet from the table, then went back to her task.

Marie stopped where told and patiently waited for instructions.

“What’s your number?” the woman asked. She didn’t raise her head from the piece of paper she was filling with lines of numbers.

Marie was started by the question.

The woman tilted her head up and looked at her from over the rim of her glasses, then her eyes pointed at Marie’s branded arm. “What’s your number, wasted girl?”

Marie looked down at the numbers and letters that had just started to look like they belonged on her arm and recited, “Vasura, three, five, nineteen, and sixty-nine.”

The woman gave her an annoyed stare. “Symbol?”

“No symbol.” Marie caught herself before adding,
“Unfortunately.”

“Just arrived.” The pure breed scribbled a note. “You still remember civilization.”

Marie didn’t think she was expecting a comment to her statement. Otherwise, she would have liked to say that she got it backward. Vasura was anything but uncivilized.

The woman lowered the pen on the notebook and gave her the onceover. “Do you have any skill at all?”

She looked back and didn’t lower her eyes. “I’ve been training as a nurse.”

Eyebrows raised in disbelief, the woman took the pen and lowered it on the paper, but didn’t write anything. “Under a doctor?”

“Yes, under Doctor Rane at Redfarm and then here as well.” She was proud of having answered without making any sarcastic retort.

“Doctor Rane, you say?” A flicker of recognition passed through the woman’s eyes.

Marie had a bad feeling.

“Well, then it’s better if you keep working with her at the infirmary then.” The woman took something from a basket she had under the table and beckoned her to come close. “You must report every night to the infirmary registry. Now go to work.” She removed from a small bow a stamp. “Give me your hand.”

Marie reached out and the woman grabbed her wrist and stamped it. “Exit is that way.” She indicated a door a few feet from the table.

Marie hadn’t noticed it. The woman called someone, and the door was opened from the outside and a younger soldier kept it open for Marie to pass through. Once outside, the soldier asked Marie to show her wrist.

“Infirmary duty.” The woman, another young pure breed sporting the usual patrician features and lack of uniqueness, extended her arm to show Marie to follow her.

Marie gave her a brief glance—confirming her notion that pure breeds all looked alike, beautifully uninteresting with their perfect noses and slim bodies. Conversely, the clipped Ginecean accent was anything but monotonous; it grated on her nerves, making it unpleasantly unforgettable.

The soldier didn’t bear Marie’s silent assessment well and her right hand twitched over the baton hanging from a hoop in her holster just to the right of a shiny gun. “Would you mind?”

Without wasting her breath, she raised her hands and walked down the stairs, three steps that only yesterday had been purple and now were crying black paint through the cracks in the planks. Once on the paved ground, she left black prints behind and found it appropriate. She walked slowly to the infirmary, her thoughts as bleak as the black paint that seemed to never dry under her shoes. The soldier was just a step behind her the whole time.

“Marie, thank the Goddess they didn’t send you somewhere else.” Rane was at the door, face transformed by the fear, her eyes red.

Marie went inside and looked around. “Zena?” She couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.

The doctor shook her head, tears wetting her tired face. “I asked around. Nobody has seen her since yesterday. I went to the morgue… She isn’t there.”

The morgue
. Marie hadn’t thought of that. “She’s well. I know she’s well. She’s hiding somewhere.” She wanted to believe her words and so she repeated them in her mind as well. “She’s strong. Nobody can harm her.” Bullets could kill her. An infected wound could kill her. She could lie in a ditch, unconscious. Several scenarios, one worse than the other, kept popping before her eyes, until she was sick with worries and her stomach hurt. And then, the carousel of hopeless thoughts started anew, just the object of her worries changed. Now Grant was lying unconscious somewhere. Finally, she hadn’t seen Nora since she had snuck in at the infirmary. “We must go look for them.”

Rane tilted her head and looked over her shoulders to the door behind Marie.

“I wouldn’t try that,” someone said.

She turned and saw Patrician Beauty, the soldier who had escorted her from the ex-casino to the infirmary. She had forgotten about her.

The woman stood before the open door, legs wide, one hand resting on the holster. She shook her head at Marie and her mouth morphed into a grin. “I’ll be here the whole day.”

***

Even without Door Holder—as the day progressed, the soldier was called several different names—preventing Marie from running outside to look for her friends, she couldn’t have left the infirmary. Carine and Trisha hadn’t come back. They must have been appointed to some other task. It was just the doctor and herself. A steady stream of Vasurians came throughout the day. Some looking for a comforting word more than anything else. Other nursing wounds of unknown nature. Nobody dared answer questions in front of Callista’s woman. She was relieved to see the majority of their patients were adults. Some of them were known faces. Marie rejoiced at seeing the woman she had helped giving birth during her first day of work at Vasura. The new mother had sprained an ankle when she had fallen on the ground. The reason why she had fallen wasn’t clear, but she was carrying the baby with her when it had happened. Marie didn’t pry, but the grayish-white powder all over the woman’s back could mean she was hauling bags of cement when she lost her balance and tried to save her baby from hitting the ground.

“Do you know where they’ve taken the older kids?” Marie leaned closer to her while massaging some ointment on her damaged ankle.

Nadia—Marie had discovered her name only now—looked at the soldier and then slightly relaxed. “They rounded up the kids, separated the boys from the girls—” She couldn’t finish. Her eyes misted and she lowered them to her baby girl clutched to her chest, the small head bobbing under the scarf she was using to breastfeed her daughter in relative privacy.

Marie smiled at the sight of a small foot, the perfect minuscule toes curling as the baby fed and made satisfied suction sounds. Then, darkness claimed her thoughts again. “What about the baby boys?”

Nadia caressed her baby with slow strokes over the scarf. “I don’t know.”

Marie wasn’t sure what the Ginecean protocol with baby boys was. It was one of those topics a good fathered woman would never talk about in company. But it was said that donors who became pregnant hated their baby boys and didn’t want anything to do with them. There were rumors about places where women went to terminate their pregnancies. Donors who couldn’t tolerate the idea of having to wait nine months to discover their babies’ gender. She had never thought twice about those rumors, but she had never been in proximity to newborns before. Now, only looking at the perfection of the small fingers, something stirred inside of her. Not because she had rid herself of all the prejudices against donors and pregnant fathered women. No, it wasn’t that. She had just realized a man couldn’t help his gender, the same way she hadn’t decided to be a fathered woman. It was sheer injustice to condemn a human being from her or his first breath.

“You can sleep here tonight.” Rane had approached them and was looking at the baby girl with longing.

Nadia thanked her and then added, “I don’t want to go back home. It feels empty without him.”

The doctor crouched beside the mother and asked if she could hold the baby for a moment.

Nadia tiredly smiled and opened her arms. “Please, I need a moment of rest.”

Marie knew she was lying; she had seen how strong her hold on her daughter was. It had been nice of Nadia to give Rane a moment with the baby and she mouthed a thank you to her. Nadia made a gesture that meant it was nothing at all.

Someone tapped on her shoulder and then called, “Marie?”

She turned to face a girl named Roxanne who had come to the infirmary earlier on for a possible concussion. “Are you feeling dizzy or nauseous?” She had asked the girl to tell her if any of those symptoms occurred.

“Yes.” Her voice unnecessary loud, Roxanne bit her bottom lip and looked over their heads toward where the soldier was, as everybody had been doing the whole day.

Marie immediately focused on her. “Both?”

The girl leaned toward her and stumbled.

Marie reached out and stabilized Roxanne. “Dizzy, then.”

 At the same time, the girl thrust a folded piece of paper in her hand. “I’ll sit now.”