The bones of my body have mended, though I’m weak as a newborn and it hurts to chew and swallow, to fucking flap my tongue. I’m no longer a dove, relieved that hurdle’s behind me, never to come around again. That’s the only thought wetting my eyes; not so much what the Biters stole from me, but that I didn’t give it away first, when I had the chance with Max, or even Rune…Rune, my first murder, the man who taught me how a woman kills.
Our chamber in the Colony is a stone cell we share with other Biters; a pair of young women who haven’t bloomed and a heavily pregnant mother of three who’d rather avoid being fucked at the moment, at least that’s my guess. I’ve spent long hours alone, invisible despite the crowd, the play, voices echoing off the ceiling. Angel labors for our keep, returning at night to bring me food and sleep curled beside me, her dreams surely more content than mine.
“You like it here,” I say, my jaw aching. I’ve a gap where I lost two teeth that my tongue can’t help exploring. Angel leads me through this rabbit hole toward daylight.
“Yes. I told you I want to stay.” She walks slowly, one hand gliding absently along the wall, pointing out the turns, teaching me the way out. Just as we did in Heaven, she wears her hair in a long, braided rope down her back, and she carries a ridiculous, floppy, grass hat brushing against her thigh with each step. We turn into a wider corridor, her hand reaching for mine. “From here, the way is easy.”
At the last doorway, the light blinds me, forcing me to squint and let my eyes catch up with my feet. I haven’t felt the sun on my face in a long time.
“I should have brought you sooner,” she says, waiting for me. “I should have dragged you out here. Wait until you see.”
The canyon is picturesque, its walls sheer, the flat bottom green with well-tended gardens. A copse of cottonwood flourishes near the whirring mill. Truly stunning in the light, the veil of white water plummeting from the rocky rim is the only thing I recall from our arrival.
Angel leads me to the orchard where I sit in the shade, exhausted from our short trek. She joins a group of women picking fruit and then borrows a knife from another Biter to cut an apple, offering me a slice I can’t chew and simply hold in my lap.
“You want to be free, Rimma. Here we’re free to come and go, to render our own choices about love and…family.” She cuts me a smaller sliver and peels the skin. I slide it carefully between my teeth. “The men seem to run things, not so different than Heaven, but women here have a role if they want it and earn it through skill or wisdom. Priest says the leaders are chosen by the people.”
I suppose she wants me to hop up and cheer. But all I want to do is kill Biters, not these ones especially, but all the others.
My eyes roam to the other end of the fields where a gated wall blocks the trail out the canyon. “What’s up that way?” I ask.
Angel’s eyes track my gaze. She smiles at my interest. “Little beside canyon cliffs until after the first wall. Then more fields and larger pastures. Priest told me a quarter of the people live outside the walls.”
“How many?” I ask.
“Nearly two hundred, I suppose.” Angel pares me another apple slice.
“No. I mean how many walls?”
“Three.” She eyes me curiously as she hands me the sweet sliver.
“Have you explored beyond the gates?”
“Explored?” Angel wrinkles her brow. “I’ve made the trek for other things: wool, and to borrow and return tools, to pick blackberries. Whatever I’m asked to do. We’re not prisoners, Rimma.”
“Why are there gates?”
“Priest says we’re perfectly safe,” she assures me, but it’s not the answer I seek.
“Safe from what?”
Angel’s mouth droops into a suspicious frown. Perhaps she’s noticed, not the fear she expected, but the current of rage still coursing beneath my skin.
“Safe from what?” I repeat at her lack of an answer.
“From raids, Rimma. Sometimes. But Priest says not very often.”
“Are the walls manned?” The one at the field’s end lacks even a guard, its doors gaping open. I suspect the first wall isn’t so disregarded. Three walls would give defenders a chance to retreat if the first was overwhelmed.
“The outer one has men on a wooden walkway. Why do you want to know?”
“Who’s in charge of the guards?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“So I can do my part, sister.” Neither of us believes my words. “Who assigns men to the gates?”
“I don’t know,” she repeats, her pretty lips pressed in a testy line.
“Who could I ask?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” Each of Angel’s syllables snaps out as her fists find her hips, apple core gripped in one hand, knife in the other.
“I’ll ask Priest.” I smile at my sister, trying not to wince at the pain stabbing my face. She stews in her apples as I saunter away in search of the man who so impresses her.
**
I leave the orchard for the fields. My body feels like shit, a wrung out rag with all the life squeezed from it. I need to stop mewling and sulking in that rabbit hole of a cave and build my strength instead. Perhaps, if I drag in a fucking deep breath, I can craft a life here for Angel…or let her create a life for herself. Sometimes, I think she’d be far better off without me, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. I swore to protect her, and I wonder, on occasion, if I’m the one she needs protecting from.
The man proves hard to find, the Colony larger than it appears, and that’s just within our rock bowl. The dwellings are a maze beneath each overhang, and though I doubt anyone could lose their way forever, I’d rather not test that assumption. Instead, I wander the fields, returning waves and offering tight smiles to all those who believe I’m Angel, content to toil among them.
At the base of the falls, I stand in sunlit mist, studying the wheel, listening as the roar and whirr drowns out all other sound. For a moment, I feel akin to the falls, relentlessly pounding at rock, roaring my power, spinning insanely in place. But this fall and wheel accomplishes something after all, lights the filaments and grinds grain, cards wool and ultimately waters gardens, cleans clothes and bodies, and quenches thirst. What have I accomplished?
Before I’m soaked to the bone and adding to my complaints, I wander back through the fields to the log stables. There I find Priest brushing down a bronze-coated horse with a tawny mane and tail. I stand beside him, my hand on the animal’s shiny neck, feeling the brute muscle beneath my fingertips. I wonder if the man recognizes me.
“Would you care to learn to ride?” he asks.
“I never thought I’d have the chance,” I reply, “but yes, I’d like that. The Biters never let us near the horses. They only owned two and each was worth ten of us.”
“Here.” He hands me the stiff-bristled brush. “I’ve loosened the dirt. Now she needs a brushing to remove it. Go gently while she gets to know you and work in the natural direction of her coat, short strokes front to back, except at the flanks. See.” He points out the different pattern of hair growth. “You can use this brush on her legs, but we’ve something softer for her face.”
As I begin my careful strokes, the horse gives me a bulging devil-eye, and I give it right back. “Why brush them?” I ask, the horse not particularly dirty in my opinion; I’ve been far filthier.
“Because they’re worth ten of us,” Priest says with a smile. “It improves the health of their skin and coat. Gives you a chance to scan for cuts, swelling, or tenderness. It also helps you to get to know each other, to trust each other.”
“I’m Rimma,” I inform him.
“I know.” He wipes down the horse’s face with a rag. “You wear the same face as your sister, but otherwise you’re as different as day and night.”
“Angel and Devil.”
“No, just…broken. We can’t break the world and expect to survive unscathed. All of us are a bit cracked.”
“Ha!” I bark a laugh and my jaw aches.
“And you’re the only one who calls us Biters.” He looks at me from beneath a raised eyebrow.
“Habit,” I concede without apology. My hands glide over the horse’s chestnut coat, the rhythm soothing. With one side done, I step to the other. “I want to man the wall,” I finally say, remembering why I sought him.
“Why?” he asks me, an echo of my sister. I wonder what she’s told him of my past.
“Because Angel told me I need to be useful, that everyone in the Colony needs to contribute.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says. “Why the wall? Why not help with the gardens where you have experience, knowledge we lack.”
“Because, Priest, I’m not Angel.”
“Ah, yes, we discussed that. You’re the Devil.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you believe in, Rimma?”
The question unsettles me. He stands at the horse’s head, finished with his work, a handsome man with direct eyes. We had no brown-skinned descendants in Heaven, no one quite so black among the River Walkers, and yet the world teems with a myriad of shades. I glide the brush over the horse’s loin, hair and dust rising with each stroke. “Why do my beliefs matter?”
“Because you want a weapon, because you want to guard our wall.”
“Fair enough,” I admit, and after a moment, I answer his question, “I don’t believe in anything.”
“Nothing?”
“I believe the sun rises and sets, water is wet, my body hurts and bleeds. But that’s not what you’re asking is it? You’re asking about good and evil, choices and God.” The brush floats gently down the horse’s leg as my bitterness rasps from my tongue. “I lived in Heaven, blessed by God, guided by his irrefutable laws, my ancestors chosen for their righteousness to survive. I couldn’t have been more blind if my eyes had been seared from my skull. Nothing that I knew for fact was true. My ancestors were deceivers that broke the world and left thousands of millions to perish. I grew up enclosed within a wall of bones, our victims’ ancient bones. God was an excuse, a rationalization, a fantasy that evaporated when our luck ran dry. Our laws were myths. My father was a good man with honorable ideals who accomplished nothing and died for nothing. With my mother stolen by Biters, Angel is the only one left, the only one that means anything to me. That’s what I believe.”
“Yet, you retain the power of choice,” he says, a statement with no trace of challenge. His hand strokes the horse’s neck. “I’m not a believer in the old Gods, Rimma, but I’ve found random sparks of wisdom in the words of the ancient prophets, that kindness will be repaid with kindness, evil with evil, life with life, death with death.”
Done with the chore, I hand him the brush. “You remind me of a Bite…River Walker named Shy. After I dug into our bone wall, she told me, ‘All who bear the sword will perish by the sword, all who dig a pit shall fall into it, and a stone shall come back on him who starts it rolling.’”
**
The outer wall juts twelve feet high and two feet thick, spanning the fifty paces between forbidding canyon walls, their faces varnished with black and brown streaks as if painted by dark rain. A wooden walkway traverses the length three feet from the top, low enough to shoot over, high enough to duck behind. Wide double doors stand closed and barred with a long plank fitted into metal brackets. On well-greased, tapered hinges, a smaller wicket allows for the less cumbersome passage of individuals traveling by foot.
Autumn hangs in the air, morning frosts lingering until noon in the long shadows cast by the canyon walls, wrinkling golden leaves in the apple trees and hurrying the harvest. I’m stronger now, muscle contouring my body, my stamina returned, old hurts replaced with the healthy ache of exertion. I’ve worked the gardens, cooperated, done more than asked of me. I’ve earned my place on the wall.
Beneath the lower edge of the alcove, a small windowless cell secures our weapons cache behind a locked hasp. The inventory surpasses the Biter’s supply of crude weapons, overwhelming me in its size, scope, and bite, all carefully maintained by none other than Chantri. She traverses the deadly storeroom in a slow limp, tawny blond hair spiking from her head, hands on her hips, chewing her lower lip in thought as her blue eyes flit between me and the array of arms.
Mounted on the walls is a wide variety of bows, both curved and recurved, as well as compound crossbows with rope pulls for cocking. Two wonderfully crafted, razor-edged swords rest on dusty stands, their ancient blades mottled as if forged of swirling water. Behind them a pitiful collection of newer, duller, shorter, heavier things hang by their hilts on fat nails. Scores of spears lean into corners: short thrusting weapons with steel shanks filed to ruthless points, long throwing javelins, and wood-shafted pole-arms with every sort of metal spike imaginable affixed to their ends.
“Carry a knife or two when you’re on the wall,” Chantri says, pointing at a wooden box, its contents glinting with sharp edges. “Take your time picking ones that feel good…and think about how you’ll carry them. Every year we have a fool or two who stabs himself when he squats to take a shit.” She huffs a little laugh and winks at me. “Men.”
None of these blades resembles the clumsy kitchen knife I used to chip bark from Heaven’s trees. The steel ranges from a finger’s length to nearly a foot, curved and straight, one-sided or two, long-bellied slashers to needle-thin stabbers. “I’d prefer a throwing knife,” I tell her as I admire a dagger as long as my forearm.