“I think,” Eliana said slowly, out of her depth, trying to find a way to understand the situation. “I think you best explain to me what is going on here.”
“As if I would explain anything to someone marked like you are!”
The tattoos. Of course, it was the tattoos that spoke of Eliana’s religion, of where she had been born. The clean skin of the Returned did as much for her as the tattoos did for Eliana. The intricate words and designs that ran across the Botanist’s body recorded the forty-two years she had been alive. Parents, siblings, her growth into adulthood, her failed jobs and relationships: the words of each ran beneath her clothes and spent most of the time on the left-hand side of her body, before crossing at her shoulders and neck and descending down her right side. Once a year she left the Shaft for those markings. Once a year a Mortician’s needle and ink set down her life so that when she died, God would be able to read her body, her life, and judge her, for Life, for Heaven, for Damnation, for Obliteration.
“There is no God in the Shaft,” Eliana said, finally. “Have you not heard that?”
The girl laughed again, but this time it was forced, angry, and each broken movement she made in the laughter stripped the appearance of youth from her. Finally, when she could force no more out, the woman--the woman who was much, much older than Eliana, and who smelled of decay--lowered her head. With her very real eyes staring at the woman who looked her senior, she said, “I need a drink. Do you have one?”
She did.
It was cheap wine that Eliana brought down for the Returned. The bottle was green, the label plain and simple, and she had used a quarter of it some weeks back in a meal that had not been improved by its inclusion. It was not an act of friendship, nor was it an act of trust, but it was a signal that the Botanist was, at the very least, understanding of the situation. No woman was at her best while dying. When the Returned took the bottle with her one good hand, she did so quickly, snatching it, ripping it from Eliana’s strong, blunt fingers, before taking a long drink—and that helped too with her decision.
“How old are you?” Eliana asked, watching. She held a second, unopened, good bottle of wine in her hand, and did not bother to hide it.
The Returned swallowed, then said, “This is like vinegar.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Eliana repeated.
“No, I did not.” Her good hand placed the bottle between the shattered stumps of her legs. Loose silver wiring was reflected dully against it. “My name is Rachel, by the way.”
“I didn’t ask that.”
“No.” Her dark eyes met Eliana’s. “You’re too busy trying to figure out
what
I am, rather than who.”
The Botanist pulled the cork off her wine bottle, said nothing.
“I’m one hundred and twenty-eight,” the Returned said, a hint of defiance in her tone. “Happy?”
“Yes.”
Eliana didn’t say it, but the Returned’s—
Rachel’s
—words had affected her. The Botanist knew that she had been treating the woman as a thing. She thought that she had left that kind of prejudice behind when she had entered the Shaft, but Rachel’s words suggested that she had not.
Grabbing her orange chair that had a colourful array of patches over it, Eliana swung it round and dragged it near the bed. Once it was close enough, but not so close that the stink of the girl assaulted her overly, she sank into it, propped her feet up on the edge of the bed, and took a long drink in front of the other woman.
“I bet yours tastes better,” Rachel said.
“Let that be a lesson.” Shame had not made her more sympathetic. “Politeness has its rewards.”
At that, the Returned laughed: a short burst, different from the earlier laughter, natural this time. A faint, unwilling smile creased Eliana’s face in response.
“This is going well, don’t you think?” Rachel asked. Her broken arm lifted, paused. She grunted and her good hand picked up the bottle. “When I was standing on the edge of the Shaft, Joseph—do you know Joseph?”
“Callagary?”
“Yes.”
A tall, thin, white, clean skinned man on the Department of Botany’s Board of Directors. He had a stylish bronze eyepiece that recorded everything. “I know him,” Eliana said, and not kindly.
“Yes, that was my response, too.” Rachel lifted the bottle, drank. Around the stumps of her legs and the torn parts of her genitals, the stain was refreshed in both wetness and odour. “I’ve known worse, mind. Much worse. He showed me the Shaft when I asked, at least. Was more than happy too. I was his student for a little while. It turned him on, I think. He told me the Shaft had been made by lava—that the centre of the Earth had ruptured, leaving the heat nowhere to go. So it burst out. It scarred the world, he said. Such a dramatic boy. I still remember that little drop in his voice.
Scarred the world
.”
“That’s the theory,” she said.
“Believe it?”
“No one has seen the centre.”
“No.” She fell silent. Then, “No, he said that. He said that some had journeyed down. He said that they never returned.”
“And you?” Eliana pulled her legs off the bed, leaned forward.
“What?”
“What was your plan? Were you running from Joseph?”
Rachel let out a breath, half a laugh, half a grunt, and rubbed her chest as if it were in pain. Perhaps it was. “Joseph was just a man for the night.”
She frowned. “You’re a prostitute?”
“Yes.” The Returned lifted the bottle, regarded her with the defiance she had shown earlier. “I’m a prostitute. A dirty
whore
. Are you morally outraged, now?”
“I’ve known whores.”
The other woman stared at her.
“Just not Returned whores,” Eliana finished. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“You live in a giant hole in the ground.” Rachel took a long drink and the dark stain across the bed sheet increased. The wine was going right through her—her thirst, her need, would never be sated by it. Seemingly unaware, she added, “In this case, however, I do admit: there aren’t many of us. It’s expensive. Being Returned is expensive. You have a body partly carved and partly found. It has to look real. That’s not cheap, so to buy us is not cheap. No.”
Eliana did not know how to respond. She was not, and never had been, a woman who could connect with others quickly. She responded better to situations, and was able to meet a moment with the appropriate emotional response without difficulty. But sitting in front of Rachel, watching the wine stain her bed, trying to hide her growing revulsion at the smell that was growing stronger, and aware that the woman’s voice was not really focused on her, Eliana was being asked not to react to the moment, but to the person; and here, she did not know what to say. Fortunately, she did not need too:
“I have over a hundred years of being fucked,” Rachel said. Her good hand tightened around the neck of the bottle and a faint cracking followed. “In eight days, I will have been a Return for a hundred years. Another month, and I’ll have been working for a hundred and seven years. Working! Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea? How many men and women have fucked me? How many have looked at me as if I was nothing—as if I was an object!
“My boss looks at me just like that. She organizes who sees me. She keeps me in drugs. She makes sure I get what I need to live. She’s surely a lot better than some of the pimps I’ve seen, but she doesn’t see me. She doesn’t talk to me. She talks
about
me. She talks around me.” She stopped, gave a faint
ha
, and then fell silent.
“I don’t—”
“She’s my eleventh boss,” Rachel said, not even noticing that she interrupted the other woman. “My eleventh
pimp
. I hate that old term. But she’s my number eleven. I have watched ten others get old. I have watched clients get old. I’ve watched them all go grey and small. It doesn’t matter how rich, how intelligent, how whatever they were. They each faded, they—
“I had worked for two years before I was Returned.” The woman switched topics without pause, her mind erratic. “I wanted money. I had plans—
plans
. The world—this world—I wanted to see it. With the money I had left I could buy a house. I wouldn’t owe anything to anyone. But there was a problem. I got sick. I had a hole in my heart. A
hole
. Surgeons told me I wouldn’t live past twenty-eight unless I got it fixed. And you can earn a lot of money on your back, but it’s not enough to get a new heart. No. You need help for that.
“The man who paid for my Return ran
The Brothel of Exotics
. That’s what he called it. He was a Returned himself: Baron De’Mediala. His real name was Gregory. I—I didn’t want to die. Twenty-eight is too young to die. He sat me down in his office. It was filled with statues of birds: flamingos, cockatoos, seagulls, and dozens of other birds, coloured yellow and green and pink—every colour but black and red. If there was a hint of black or red in it, it wasn’t there. I later learned that he had a strange obsession with bright colours. Bright colours meant life. He had even dyed his hair a shocking lemon.
“He said to me, ‘The price, it is great.’ He had that way of talking. A theatrical way. I heard a rumour that he had once been a stage magician. I told him that no price was too high, that I would pay it. Even if it meant a hundred years on my back, I would pay. He told me that I would probably never be free from the debt. He said, ‘M’dear, m’dear, each year a repair must be done, a part of you fixed. Each year you will have to fix your appearance. Each year your living tissue will require ointments. Each year the wires in you will need to be cleaned. Each year your look and fashion will need updating.’ Each year, he said. But it didn’t matter—I told him it didn’t matter. I was so afraid. I didn’t see endless service as a problem. I thought, ‘What’s so different about that to the life I currently live?’
“I learned. The Baron—that’s what I called him,
the Baron
—he knew. He had Returned himself. He knew the cost. He kept himself free with our servitude and—and—” Rachel’s voice trailed off for a moment.
Eliana, having not moved once during her speech, shifted her bottle, but did not drink. Opposite her, the Returned lifted the bottle, took a short, sharp drink, and then said, “He was killed for bodysnatching. They caught him one night standing in an open grave. That’s what I heard. There were eight of them and they burnt the skin from him. When he didn’t die, they removed his organs. You only need the heart—” she tapped her chest, rubbed the spot where the moan gurgled “—that mechanical heart to live. I don’t know how long it took them to get to that. I know you can live without everything else. I once had lungs. A liver. I had all my organs, and they worked—but now? Now I have supplements. I can’t afford real livers, real replacements. I have fakes. I have simulations for sensations. I simulate. I—
“The Baron was right. There’s no end to your debt. The debt—it’s to a Surgeon, or a Hospital, but it’s not just for one job. Not just for the Return. It’s for every day of living you do after it. Every day is debt. My debt would be passed from boss to boss, and I would work to pay it off, and I would work to make sure that I was kept alive.
“It wasn’t such a bad life in the start. There is an attraction to be exotic. A power.
Ha
. A power. I’ve wanted to stop so many times. One boss even let me. She was a terribly obese woman, caught in her own addictions. I think she understood it. I had been working for fifty-six years, by then. I—there are no jobs that will pay a Returned what she needs. I was free for two weeks before I went back to her. When I got back, I decided I would train myself. I enrolled in a college, but I never finished any course. I kept telling myself I would. I kept telling myself I could. I said it for forty years. I said it in four different cities. I said it with five different bosses. Eventually, I just—I had to just admit that I couldn’t change. I hated that.
“It was simple, really. I told Joseph I wanted to see the Shaft—I used my best girl’s voice.” The last of the bottle was tipped into her throat. She did it roughly, angrily, and wiped her mouth with the back of her good hand after. When she spoke, there was only self-loathing in her voice, “It’s hard to kill yourself when you’ve already died once. A girl I—a girl I was
friends
with did it. Not so long ago. A month. We’d—we had known each other for sixty years. The night before, we got drunk and talked about how we would do it. You couldn’t cut veins, we said. You couldn’t poison yourself. You couldn’t drown. You couldn’t suffocate. There was only the heart and the head. It was like a nursery rhyme. Do you know what she did?”
There was a pause, but not long enough for Eliana to answer.
“She paid a man to cave her head in with a hammer. A hammer!
A hammer!
I—I saw her the day after. She had had the man chain her to a chair. He had left her in the basement—and—and—
“I figured the Shaft would be a good choice. That was my idea. The Shaft. All you had to do was jump. I could never sit there and let a man cave my head in. That waiting, that—no.
No
. All I had to do was push Joseph back—let him get me in close, first, tell him I wanted to stand on the edge, tell him it excited me. That was all. Then I could just push him back. Then I could just jump. Then—then—I would be free.”
Rachel stopped, her good hand releasing its hold on the bottle.
In the silence that followed, it occurred to Eliana that it was now her turn to speak, that she should say something. She should offer sympathy. Understanding. At the very least she should acknowledge the other woman. But she couldn’t. The silence between the two stretched until it was taut and Rachel’s eyes closed slowly and her head sank and Eliana looked down at the smooth floor and tried to find words . . . and had almost succeeded when a faint scratching at the door interrupted her.
It was the crow: its sharp, glass beak was pecking against the door.
When Eliana opened the door, it flapped through to the cushioned armchair silently and sat, shaking flakes of ash out of its black feathers. They fell over the fabric, over the floor, the residue of its journey outside the Shaft and beneath the red sun. Once it had done that, it waited, patiently, for the Botanist to open the brass casing on its leg.