Across from it, Rachel gazed at the crow in what Eliana considered a sudden lucidity that was inspired by apprehension and fear. There was no resignation in her gaze, however, no sense that she had accepted her fate, or even knew it; though it was impossible that she could have imagined that the tiny scrawl on the tiny note on the crow’s leg brought her any news that she would want to hear. The Department of Botany would send a man or woman to repair her. At the very least they would stabilize her before she was taken out of the Shaft.
Surely, she could not hope.
Surely.
“I don’t want to hear,” Rachel said. “If they are coming for me, don’t tell me.”
Eliana picked up her bottle of wine from next to the couch, ignored the crow, and passed it to her.
“Don’t waste it,” the other said, quietly. Her gaze never left the bird. “It just goes right through me.”
“Take it, anyway.”
Silence.
“Go on.”
“I want to—”
“They’re coming.”
“—You haven’t—”
“They were always coming.” She thrust the bottle a little. “Take it.”
“Okay.” Rachel’s voice was quiet with submission. Instinctively, her broken arm reached up—she must have been left handed—but a moment later, her good one found the bottle. The first one, made from cheap glass, lay on the bed, the neck splintered in a web of cracks. When Rachel took the bottle, her eyes, the eyes she had not been born with, but which had been born to someone else, those dark, dark eyes, held Eliana’s with a terrible fragility. “Please read the note to me.”
Eliana approached the crow. It scratched gently at her hand and she rubbed its cold, bronze head through its feathers. The crow had been in the Shaft as long as she had—had, in fact, come down when the unit was lowered and put into place. It had been her only companion for the years, but she had never named it; nor did she know if it was male or female. The crow was, as Rachel had said of herself, an object, a thing. It responded to Eliana’s touch only because it had been taught to do so when it was alive. At least, that is what she told herself, though she was unable to fully believe it.
“What does it say?” Rachel said, her voice still quiet, still soft.
“It is from Callagary,” she began, but then stopped. She had her back to the other woman and, conscious of it, she could not continue. She turned. “Joseph. He wrote this. He said that there was an accident on the top. That they had feared the worse. A Surgeon is on his way down as he writes.”
“A Surgeon?”
“Yes.” Silence. The crow’s cold claws pulled at the fabric of the chair. Awkwardly, Eliana added, “I’m sorry.”
Still, Rachel did not reply.
“I—”
“How do you live here?”
“What?” Rachel had spoken hard and quick, as if she was accusing her, and it caught Eliana off guard. “What are—”
“It’s awful down here.” Rachel’s voice softened and took on, once again, the tone that a woman might use when she talked to herself, and did not require an answer. In her hand, the bottle lay still, drank by only Eliana; but the stain, still growing in size and accompanied by an ever growing sharp odour, had finally begun to drop faint traces of discoloured red wine on the bronze floor. “There’s no fresh air. It’s so dark. Your light—it’s not like the light up there. It’s harder. Brittle. Everything feels like it is burning. How can you stand it?”
“No one watches down here.” Eliana hesitated. Rachel’s eyes were not focused on her: they wandered about the narrow unit, as if everything was new, and slippery, and she could not grasp any of it. Her good hand no longer gripped the bottle, but rested on it. Quite clearly, the strength, strangely for a body made, and without muscle, was gone.
She’s dying. She might not be alive by the time the Surgeon arrives
. Quietly, Eliana said, “On the surface, all we worry about is life. Who comes back. Who has what rights. Who is dominant. We fight, because we think God is watching. Or God isn’t watching. The world is dying around us and we fight and we try to make people live a certain way never understanding that it doesn’t matter. That the world we live on is—”
Rachel’s eyes focused, suddenly, on her, and Eliana’s voice faltered, the last word unspoken on her lips.
“Don’t let them take me,” the dying woman said.
A single luminescent dot was descending towards her.
Eliana shifted. In her straining arms, Rachel was heavy, and the stuttering, gurgling moan of her chest was the only sign that she was still alive. She spoke softly, now, a continual murmur as if she were speaking to a mother, or an older sister, and her cold, hard head was pressed against Eliana’s neck and shoulder, as if she were a child. Because of this, the Botanist did not tell her of the figure that rode the thin bar down her cable, and who, in an hour or so, would be upon her unit. She wondered if he—it would be a he, she decided, on instinct—she wondered if he could see her, standing bare foot in her faded black and blue, her hard, bare feet walking off the dirt trail and to the edge of the path. The pale glow of the fungus around her did light the area, if poorly, and yellow light did fall out of the unit’s doorway. It was possible that he could see her, if he was looking.
It didn’t matter. It simply didn’t. A stone stabbed into the sole of her foot, and she grunted from the pain, but kept walking. The moan in Rachel’s chest began to grow louder. It rattled as if she was empty. As if all she was could be described by a heart that had been made from bronze. Perhaps, even, that was true, as the sharp, putrid smell that had been about her in the unit when Eliana picked her up had all but disappeared in the Shaft. Perhaps all that was left of her was a struggling, dying heart.
The Shaft was before her. Its emptiness yawned wide and full, and she could see the track that ran its circumference like a giant, fallen halo; a broken halo, for she could not see the wall on the opposite side. It was as if, on her ledge, she stood at the very edge of a burnt, broken world, and that there was nothing, an absolute nothingness before her.
“It’s okay.”
Rachel’s whisper barely rose over the sound of her heart. If her cold lips had not been so close to Eliana’s ear, the dark wind of the Shaft would have stolen it, the now grinding growl of her heart smothered it. When Eliana met her gaze, she found Rachel’s eyes open, partly lucid, partly aware, but not fully. She was not gone, but she was going.
“It’s okay,” Rachel repeated. “It’s okay—God is not watching, not down here.”
“No. He never is.”
And she let go.
When I was twelve, my mother took me to see a doctor at the Samohshiir Medical Clinic. We could not afford a private Doctor and this was the closest public one, so we left early, and walked the two hours from our home to the clinic, and waited in the dim morning light with a dozen others who had travelled early and on foot, like us. I did not particularly care about seeing the doctor, for at this point, my illness was not considered serious, but above the clinic there were thousands of lights in the roof of the world. They were the most lights that I had seen anywhere before, and I was content to sit on the stony ground and watched them brighten. To my gaze, the white stones sitting in the roof of the world were like tiny, misshapen eyes, and looked as if the ground herself was watching us living inside her. My father, a miner, had laughed when I told him this, once. The light was made from the empty world outside, he explained, and the red sun’s light filtering through long shafts of crystal and quartz to us.
The doctor that I eventually saw was named Osamu Makino. He was a small man with a thin, sad-eyed, lined face beneath disintegrating grey-white hair. When he stepped out of his office and into the waiting room to call out my name, he was dressed in the doctor’s black pants, black jacket, the black gloves, and the doctor’s white closed-collared and buttoned shirt. Under the bright white light of the room—the hospital had been built around a huge triangular eye shaft that flooded the room with light—he appeared as if he were falling apart; that it was not only his hair, but his entire person, that was crumbling into nothing before us.
He examined me in his bright surgery, dripping ointments over my hairless chest, placing cold coins on my eyes, and pressing down on me with warm, powdered fingers. Eventually, he began rubbing a slender bone across my arms. While he did this, he dropped powder onto my left arm. Finally, he said, “Does your skin hurt?”
“Sometimes,” I replied, quietly, for I had always been a quiet child. “It feels as if something is pulling at it. At night, mostly.”
My mother had brought me to the clinic after she and my father had found me walking around our house two nights earlier. I had never walked in my sleep before and, when they had stopped me and asked me what I was doing, I spoke about a life that I had not experienced, about things that I could not have known. I remembered none of what I said in the morning, but when they asked me if anything was wrong, I did not speak of the pulling on my skin. We could not afford for me to get ill, even with the public clinics. But after consulting the family history and agreeing that there was no lingering ancestor in me who could be the cause, my parents felt it best to take me to a doctor, anyway. So, when the doctor asked me about the pain in my skin, and I responded, my mother shifted her thick, heavy body in her worker browns and pursed her thick lips together in a frown.
“You should have told me,” she said, finally.
I nodded.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Doctor Makino said. He stood and brushed flakes of powder from his black pants “There’s no harm, so long as he doesn’t lie now. Tell me, do you have other pains?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, for emphasis.
“No strange dreams that reoccur?”
“My parents say that I walk in my sleep.”
His lips curved into a sad, disintegrating smile. “I was not asking what your parents told you, but what you experienced. Do you dream?”
“No.”
“Why are you asking him this?” my mother asked.
“Your son’s skeleton is distorted.” Doctor Makino sighed and rubbed at the left side of his face with his black gloved hand, as if to erase himself. “There is a second shadow around his—the skeleton that is naturally his, I mean. It is the first stages of soul infection, I am afraid, but you need not worry. It is early. We can remove the infection—”
“Infection?” Mother interrupted.
“Yes.” Doctor Makino’s sad dark eyes never met mine, only hers. “Infected is probably not the best word to use. A soul is not meant to be an aggressive thing, but in the situation your son finds himself, the soul cannot stop itself. It is a lost soul from the war; there are more than a few in our city now, though the Queen and her department never speaks of it. The war—the attacks against us continue, despite our successes, and soldiers do die. The souls infecting our young are those Aajnnese men and women who have lost their soulcatchers, or who have had their catchers broken by the enemy after their death, thus leaving their soul lost and scared.”
I had a soulcatcher around my neck—my fourth. My father and I had made it from pieces of bone and silver on my eleventh birthday. He had shown me how to bond the silver with the bones of a blackbird we had purchased at the market, but it was I who had made most of it, and I who had killed the bird. I still remembered the blackbird watching me silently with its white eyes as Father and I had walked through the narrow, crowded streets of our neighbourhood that evening. The roof of the world was lit with a weak scattering of eyes, and so most of our light had to come from the blue and green mushrooms people planted on the sides of the road. The blackbird did not utter a sound when, at home the following day, I had reached in with my hands and snapped its neck.
It bothered me, that last part, as if it knew what I was to do, and was allowing me.
“Who . . .” I hesitated.
“What is it, Mi?” Mother asked.
I asked, “Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” Doctor Makino said. “The problem is that these souls are falling into the bodies of our young and their identities are completely unknown. Without knowing who they are, it is difficult to draw them out, and no one has yet been able to explain why it is happening. It is becoming more and more frequent, that much I know, however. Just last week a young girl was bought in with three souls—three, would you believe! She was in agony, poor girl. Souls pulling at every part of her. She had already gone blind, the poor girl—”
“It can be removed, yes?” Mother asked. “This soul. We can remove it?”
“Not by me, no,” he said. “I am sorry. It is beyond me. You will have to write to the Queen and request a soulbird. I will provide you with a letter to accompany it.”
“What will happen if, if the Queen says no?” I asked.
“She won’t,” my mother said sharply. “The Queen protects us, remember.”
The doctor’s disintegrating smile was less comfort. “The soul in you has died violently, I am afraid. It was not ready for death. Few of those fighting are, I suppose. But it is important for you to understand that the soul is trying to live again—that it wants to live! It is trying to make you into itself so that it can have that life. Because of your youth it will eventually be able to dominate your own soul, to rule it, if you like. When it has done this, your skin and bones will begin to grow into this old memory at an accelerated rate. It is happening now; that is why your skin aches.”
I did not fully comprehend the danger of the doctor’s words by the time he had finished speaking. I had not yet seen the boys and girls whose souls had been overtaken by lost souls—who would be called the
Infected
—and whose bodies were now monstrosities. I had not seen the extended arms, the twisted faces, and in some cases, limbs that they had removed in brutal, ugly fashions to fit the phantom memory of injuries that had been sustained before death. My mother’s face when she stood, however, was pale and grim in a way that I had never seen before, and so I knew, then, and knew again as the doctor gave his private address to her “just in case,” that there was some danger. I had the sense then to be frightened and to realize that the words Mother spoke on the way home were hollow comforts, meant to assure both her and myself.
When we arrived home, the blackbirds were waiting with letters.
Satomi
I want to go home. It’s cold. So cold. I’ve never been this cold. The wind pierces the thick army greys I am wearing, ignores my gloves, sinks into my bones. Kyo tells me that I will get used to it, that my duty will warm me, but I don’t believe him. I can’t. Everything around me is dark and damp. Everything is heavy with ash that is turning the ground an ugly black-brown.
This ugly empty world spreads out beneath the stilts of our watchtower like a stain. If not for the thin, stilted shadows of other watchtowers around us, I would think us alone and dead. I have not seen Aajnn for over a month. I am here beneath the empty red sky with a musket Kyo assures me I will never have to fire. Fire! As if it will in this damp! The powder for it is useless. I tell him this, teeth chattering, but he shrugs and tells me the Queen will never allow the enemy to come close to us, anyway.
I am writing in the fading light of the red sun. The sun—the sun is worse than we were ever told. It fills the emptiness day and night. At night, the sky turns an ugly brown black, never truly dark. To think, our clear, beautiful white light is drawn from this!
The sky reminds me of how much I have left behind, how much I loved the narrow, twisting passages of our home. How much I miss the cool, clean smells. Everything is so mixed up here. Ash and meat. Meat and trees. Trees and waste. Why did I come here? Why did I just not ignore the Queen’s conscription and go further down, to the deeper towns, to where the lights are blue and green, and it draws nothing from this awful, awful red sun?
My only pleasure comes in watching the blackbirds. Day or night, they pass through the red sky. They settle on our towers. They scratch. They look for food. Later, they fly away, either behind or in front, to Aajnn or towards the thin, thin plumes of ash that signal the approaching enemy. The birds, at least, are free.
Yoshio
It is wrong of me to write that the blackbirds were simply
there
when my mother and I returned from the public clinic. In truth, they were there for the entire walk home. The dark feathered birds sat alone on the sloping roofs of houses, sat on the wires across the roof of the world in twos and threes as they often did, and landed on the sidewalk, to peck at the glowing mushrooms, or in the cracks of the road. They were silent, as always, but there was never anything strange or untoward about these birds until we emerged from the narrow tunnel and into our neighbourhood. It was there, with hundreds of blackbirds perched silently, always silently, always watching silently, that my statement that the birds were waiting for us was born.
I was born in the neighbourhood called Yokto. For most of its existence, it was beneath the notice of anyone who did not live in it. It had been built only seventy years ago in a small cavern that could hold fifty families comfortably, but which held more than two hundred, now, in cramped, narrow streets. In Yokto, the roof of the world hung so low that none of the houses could ever grow beyond one storey, and those at the corners of the neighbourhood had to do without the steepled roofs that were in fashion, and which blackbirds favoured. The poorest of the poor lived in flat roof houses. Yokto was a dim, chill neighbourhood in comparison to others far across the roof of the world with the lightest scattering of eyes, a hundred and thirteen, none of them bigger than my fist at the age of twelve. We relied upon fungi and portable stones for light, and it served, but with only so many lights in the roof of the world, Yokto also kept a certain chill, as it never drew enough of the red sun’s warmth for us.
By the time of our return, the blackbirds had covered the neighbourhood to such a point that their presence was noticeable, but not the curiosity that it would eventually become. My father, who had returned from the mines at midday, said that the blackbirds had migrated one at a time. They emerged from the tunnel’s black like an inky drop of water falling from a tap. As he was illiterate, he did not use such language, but you will forgive an old man this quirk in his own memoirs. Yet still, emerge the blackbirds did, and they came with scraps of paper in claws and beak, and they dropped them on the streets and the houses of Yokto. Burnt and dirty and caked in dried blood, these letters lay, unmoving, until the soul-infected children of Aajnn arrived to retrieve them.
Satomi
An order today. An order? I don’t know if I could call it such. They’ve told us to capture blackbirds. As many as we can. Any way we can. Alive or dead. It matters not. The musket in the tower up from us lets out a crack every so often, proof that they have the same order, for there is no enemy to shoot at. No birds fall from the sky, however, and there is no sense that they have hit anything, so far. And why should they? You don’t catch blackbirds, Kyo said after the order was delivered. If they’re wild, you just don’t. It’s the Queen’s law.
Our musket has proved useless, but we are trying despite ourselves. Orders are orders. We are using a blanket. When one of the birds lands before us, we throw it, trying to toss it over the bird to catch it alive. So far, we have succeeded only in throwing the blanket off the tower and into the ash and mud below.
Yoshio
My mother wrote a letter to the Queen, asking for a soulcatcher. She included Doctor Makino’s letter, but there was no immediate response, which my father said was unsurprising. No one in Yokto could afford a soulcatcher, and the Queen’s mercy was not as infinite as it had once been. My mother ignored him and more blackbirds arrived, and more paper filled the streets. Stories of people trying to pick up the letters reached everyone, and my father tried it himself, to know if it was true. Like the stories, my father found his hands pecked by a sharp beak, but it could have been worse, as there were stories of a sudden murder of blackbirds falling upon individuals, their black wings beating and claws scratching in their faces silently.
“There is over three thousand now,” my father said, staring out the window, a bandage around his left hand. He was a short, stocky, unshaven man in worker browns. He could not read, it is true, but he could gauge numbers and lengths and widths with a glance better than anyone I knew, and no one disputed his estimation now. “There’s no sign that they’re going to stop, either.”