The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (29 page)

And always, that searing pain
inside me. My ageless heart thumps against my ribs when memories of that night
return to me. Sweat floods my skin, I quiver and curdle inside.

I’m not there anymore, in that
filthy cell, bleeding onto that stained mat. But it’s worse, remembering, than
it was at the time, I sometimes think. I am still here, still haunted by them,
but they are all long dead.

Peng-zu
law dictates that all
wives—we are called
cai
—are their husbands’ communal property. Thus, the
ritual: every so often all the brides of the
peng-zu
are shuttled off to
a new complex. This pattern rules our lives, as seasons once did.

I have crossed snowy wastes,
lived deep within brutally scorching deserts, slept in gardens of mottled
bamboo, and poured out tea in mountain palaces so lofty I could gaze down upon
cloud tops. Each stay has ended the same way: with a forced march.

How long ago was the first one?
A dozen years? Hundreds?

For a long time I didn’t know.
What they did to me... I can’t feel time’s flow anymore. A blessing, maybe.

On every march since the first,
I have walked freely. It was only during the first time that soldiers came,
chained us with bands of iron at our necks and ankles, and shouted orders
through their machines, waved guns at us. The pills they forced down our
throats that first time made us bleed between the legs, from inside.

Only the first time. I never
thought to run away after that. The chains were never needed again. The chains
were in my mind.

Every march ends in the same
way. We reach a wall with a door in the middle. It opens, and all the soldiers
left behind flee as if from devils or ghosts.

The
peng-zu
are neither,
but they
are
terrifying. They emerge, angelic, to lead us, the
cai
,
to their bedchambers. So beautiful, every one of them unearthly, pure as fire.
Living among them is like being locked in a prison full of sweetly smiling
buddhas, each with a nest of demonic snakes coiled under his robes, each
waiting for a chance to pounce.

Such exquisite rooms: silk
cushions, scarlet bridal robes, golden hair-combs, looking glasses and jewels
and unimaginable banquets. The ancient emperors look like beggars and filthy
peasants beside the
peng-zu
.

An ancient
cai
with a
very young girl’s body, perhaps thirteen, taught me the most ancient tea
ceremonies.

“If you do this right, they
will love you and give you immortality,” she said. “Make them come so hard they
hit the rabbit in the moon, and they’ll give you everything.” She believed it,
too. “But not until the tea is drunk. Otherwise they will grow bored with you
and never give you the gift. This game is won with squeezed thighs and pretty
conversation.”

So many
cai
believed
these lies and fantasies.

I performed the ceremonies well
but carefully avoided perfection. A few
peng-zu
delighted in my grace,
praised me, called me ‘wife’ instead of ‘
cai.
’ Grabbed at me with their
greedy hands, tearing my vermilion silks away.

But none was ever
overwhelmingly enchanted. I made them grunt but never made one call out my
name.

Most of the
cai
are
uneducated: simple country girls, they are convinced that their
‘husbands’—their owners—are magical beings.

But I know the real story of
Peng Zu. He was a legendary
Shen Xian
, a methuselah who survived for
eight centuries. The many emperors envied him, sent bribes, but he shared no
secrets with them. He took a long-lived woman named Lady Cai as a lover, taught
her the secrets of immortality: sex magic, and tonics of reindeer horn and mica
dust.

They claim
this fairy tale monster who never existed as their ancestor and Lady Cai as
ours, just as they say Peng Zu claimed the Yellow Emperor as his. A lineage of
liars. But I know that they are not immortal.

I
know
. Because I have
seen them die.

With every forced march, it
grew harder to understand the soldiers’ words. Their translators began failing
to make sense to us, as if language were slowly slipping from us.

On the last march, down the
high mountain, one tried to speak to me through his translator machine.

“Nya ho,” he said. It took me a
moment to realize he was greeting me, his accent was so strange. He fiddled
with the machine.

“What’s your name?” he asked
through it.

I looked at his face like I
would an empty bowl.

He spoke slowly: “Is there an
endless
cai
among you?”

We locked eyes, and I realized
he meant
immortal
. “Why?”

He glanced around, checking
perhaps for an angry superior. Then, leaning close to me, he said: “I
know
.
The
peng-zu
virus...that it’s a sex disease. I want to wash my prick in
an immortal woman’s...”

“What? Those monsters have...”
I caught myself too late. “Our husbands enjoy us often. If it were a sex
disease, every
cai
would be immortal. Do I look like it to you?”

“How old were you?” he
whispered. “When you were captured?”

“Fifteen. They called it
‘liberated’ back then.”

He squinted. “What year was
that?”

I thought it over and told him
a year a few years after the real one. If he thought me recently captured,
maybe he’d go away.

He was awed, instead, and spoke
as he would to an old woman. “That was over a century ago,” he whispered, his
face suddenly pale as the machine softly translated.

I looked away.

“I’ll see you again,” he said,
touching my arm.

Halfway down the mountain we
reached some trucks, waiting at a rest stop. We were sorted, it seemed
randomly, and sent into different trucks. I ended up in a group with only one
cai
I knew, although I couldn’t remember from where. Neither of us spoke, as the
others were unchained and herded in behind us. I saw the soldier who’d talked
to me, unlocking their neck-bonds. He stood watching me as the truck’s door
slammed shut, leaving us in darkness.

“Upgrades,” the
cai
whose face I knew whispered to me. Her breath was hot and strangely sweet, like
mine.

“What?”

“Upgrades. You haven’t noticed?
We’re stronger now.”

I closed my eyes, flexed my
muscles. I couldn’t tell, except that my legs didn’t ache.

“That was a Taishan complex we
were at. The
peng-zu
there are the head researchers. They’re always
upgrading the bug, testing it on us, and then sending us out to spread it to
the others. That’s why we’ve all been split up, sent apart.”

Another crazy wives’ tale? Was
that what I was, after all these years? Not just a slave, but a container for a
disease? But why the newly-captured girls?

“Bug...
disease
, you
mean? But I’m not sick...”

“You’re over a hundred years
old, and your tits still haven’t come in,” she hissed. “You don’t
feel
sick, but you’re infected.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She was quiet as if thinking.
The weak, still-human girls around us sobbed and whispered, a few coughing and
sniffling. Poor things.

“I can’t remember,” she finally
answered.

I nodded. “Neither can I.”

Sleep took forever to swallow
me down, like an enormous snake swallowing a broken-necked child.

When my body slammed down
against something soft, I woke.

It was another body. Bones
cracked beneath me. Shrieks filled the dark, as I was thrown sideways and then
down, and suddenly the bodies were crashing down against me.

My bones did not break.

The darkness was spinning and,
inside it, the screams and bodies of terrified girls and women tangled and
writhed within the truck.

Something exploded outside.

The truck was rolling downhill,
sideways. I couldn’t stabilize myself, so I relaxed, let my body follow the
movements. The other girls fought too hard, resisted gravity’s pull, stiffened
themselves against it. That was why their bones were cracking. While they
hollered in pain, I hummed one of my mother’s night-songs quietly to myself.

Another voice joined in with
me. The
cai
whose face I knew. As we hummed the melody, the truck’s spin
seemed to slow, and with a final clattering of teeth and limbs, crashed to a
stop.

The smell of blood and piss
filled the inside of the truck, and the moaning quickly reached a crescendo. I
was in the middle of a pile of jarred bodies, ribs and legs snapped into terrible
angles. I kept breathing slowly and began to dig through them toward the exit.

Someone ripped the door open,
and the noise of battle crashed in. Explosions, bombs screaming their way down
toward us. Guns stuttered all around, the flashes of their muzzles lighting my
way out of the jumbled mess of bodies.

A dozen soldiers piloted
springing, bouncing jeeps all around us. In the dark they looked a little like
frogs with salt dropped onto their backs, leaping around frantically. Their
pilots were blasting terrible-looking cannons at some enemy up above. Everyone
was staring uphill at the invisible attackers.

Everyone but him. He grabbed my
hand and dragged me out of the mess of whimpering, broken girls.

“Come with me,” he yelled.

I turned, straining against the
glare of the explosions to search the truck’s inner darkness, and I saw her
eyes—only her eyes—focused on mine. She didn’t move.

I shivered. The soldier assumed
I was frightened and forcefully led me away from the battle, off behind some
rocks.

“I want to be immortal,” he
said, reaching for the zipper of his pants.

I looked at his face.
You’re
all the same
, I thought to myself.

“Can you give me that?”

“Let me go...” I said, and
turned to leave. The sudden wave of dizziness that washed over me was startling:
somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten how to think of leaving. I felt like I
was dream-walking, still really trapped in the
peng-zu
’s strange, closed
world, even out here. My legs locked for a moment, locked completely still.

That was all he needed. He
clubbed me on the head, and I collapsed—not unconscious, just shocked by the
pain. He dragged me off quickly into the shadows, and then rolled me over and
began struggling with my clothing. Robes are not difficult to yank open, but by
then I was fighting back, ignoring the pain blooming in my skull as I clawed at
his face.

“Stop it,” he hollered, and
slapped me. “Don’t you want to be free?”

I was walking away
, I thought then,
gouging at one of his eyes.
How can you bargain with me for what was already
mine?

Then he had a pistol in his
hand. I stared at it, wondered whether it could kill me, whether he knew if it
could.

But that didn’t matter. She had
followed us. I saw her creeping up behind him and tensed. While he struggled
with the belt on my robe, she pounced, digging her fingers into his throat from
behind.

“Die, bastard!” she screamed.
They both fell on top of me, and he raised the pistol behind him in a single
lunge.

I grabbed for it too late. The
noise of the shot stunned me. She went slack, hands suddenly limp, and he
shoved her corpse off, down to the muddy ground. I could smell her blood all
over me, all over him.

With her body still shuddering,
her head blown open, he said, “I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt
you.” Her face twitched—one eye open, the other fluttering. Spilled out of her
skull, covered in foamy blood, were jittering threads of shattered crystal.

I leaned closer. Light
flickered through the crystalline fibers. A garden of tiny buds sprouted from
them, flowered into wriggling crystalline threads as I watched. Her shattered
brain was trying to heal itself. It didn’t know yet that her body was dying.

Is that what’s inside
my head, too?
,
I asked myself.

“All I want is immortality,” he
said, his hand on my shoulder, holding me down. “You can give that to me, or I
can take it.”

He rolled off me suddenly,
barely dodging her hand as it lunged at him. With a curse, he shot five more
bullets into her head and chest, and then turned the gun on me. I wondered how
many shots he had left.

“You’ll let me go?” I asked, as
he stood.

“I promise. Over here, let’s
go.” He pointed into a deep ditch nearby. “Take off your clothes.” He wasn’t
speaking to me like an old woman anymore.

One last time
, I thought to myself
as I yanked my robe open, knowing then that he would be immortal after this.