The Bridge Read online

  No one wanted those truths. Pagan said as much. But what else did I have? How could I render my reality as their fantasy? How could I empower them with my powerlessness? And why did I want to?

  Because . . . Starv ing Hills.

  Because . . . I needed to remember.

  In the beginning, when she first came back from the dead, Kai and I would curl up in my narrow bed and she’d tell me a story, one that she’d reassembled from Narn’s weird tongue. “How did you know what the words mean?” I’d asked. She told me it didn’t matter. The words knew themselves. “They come out all right in the end,” she said. “It’s the beginnings that are hard. Starting something from not nothing, but from something you can’t see. Or something you can feel but no one else can. It pushes against you. It wants to come out. Beginnings hurt.”

  Lamp light fell across a stone bench. I felt something in my shoe and sat down to remove it. Racking my brain, I hoped to remember one of those self-told stories, but nothing, not a shred of any of them returned to me. Except these pictures in my head, useless crumbs of the past that led nowhere. Where did they, or I, end and another begin? The shadows cast stains across my bare foot, thick pools of memory between my misshapen toes (Kai always had such pretty feet). I wriggled them and the heavy shadows danced.

  Suddenly it came to me: “The sole confessor of my tale of dread has passed. No one knows that once . . .” I froze on the bench with one shoe in my hand. That was how Kai always began her stories, like a joke. Except it wasn’t. It was to cover up the hurt—the words were a bridge for the broken beginning to crawl onto.

  The stains of liquid light between my toes were still there. I pulled my sock over them and they were gone. I laced up the shoe, rose and began to weave my way down the narrow street. But behind the gossamer veil of cobbles and ironwork balconies, all I could see was Kai holding court on her bunk. Small hands of many colors clapped over groggy giggles, the eyes of the other Mades—brown, blue, round, oval—wide with suspended disbelief, wider with love. A love that even the Father couldn’t unmake because Narn’s twice-told stories promised no less than a chance of survival itself. Such was the power (chemical or alchemical) of those tales—and the teller. The stories made them multiple, conjoined their brains in a way the Father couldn’t fathom. Kai gave the Mades a reason to live. No wonder they would die for her.

  “No one knows that once . . .” I said out loud, the words echoing down the empty street.

  How did she say that with a straight face?

  “The soul confessor of my tale of dread . . .”

  Kai had no imagination—she couldn’t have made those words up. She must have stolen them from a book—I couldn’t remember which one—as a bridge maybe between Narn’s gibber and the hungry ears of her listeners. And then it came to me. Kai may be gone, but Narn wasn’t. And I had found a bridge of my own.

  Kai had said that Narn told her about finding space to move in power’s blind spot. And power always had one. Maybe Pagan was right. It wasn’t the what of Kai’s twice-told tales that gave us our safe space. It was the how, how they had the power to stop time. How they gave both teller and listener a place to imagine another one. It was the stories that had our back, not the teller. The stories lived separately, grew and changed over time—so that we could.

  I would ask Narn for a story for FiFo. Taking a leaf out of Kai’s book (the pun brought up a giggle, like a burp), I’d find a way to make them what they needed to be for the Regulars. Buy my own brand of protection. After all, I thought with a lick of jealousy, if Narn did it for Kai, why not for me?

  I thought of the beautiful Pagan, and I hoped, with a different kind of lick, that the stories would buy me my own brand of love, too.

  A sudden breeze blew up and rifled the leaves and there was the bridge over the quaint rooftops. I smiled at the ghostly blue glow ahead of me. I wasn’t lost anymore. I quickened my pace, almost running. I stumbled in my sister’s shoes. The gargoyles turned away and the narrow doorways receded at the gimpy haste of the interloper. In their place I saw an old sheep paddock and at its edge, a shearers’ shed that had not seen enough rain.

  It should have been me.

  * * *

  It should be Kai going on the Father’s errand to pick up the compounds and pharma from the old crone. But Kai is in the infirmary and insists that I volunteer in her place. A glitter returns to her dead-sea eyes as she becomes more and more agitated by my reluctance. If anyone gets it wrong, she reminds me, he’ll be ropable. Everyone knows what the Father is like when he’s ropable. My sister is more convincing even at the edge of death than I am alive.

  Lying beside her in the infirmary, I am shocked at how weak her grip is on my wrist.

  “You owe me,” she says. “If it wasn’t for me you’d be . . .”

  Truth or dead.

  Because there are no words for my shame. The shame of what the Assistant wanted from me. The shame of Kai bursting in on it. Her fine face distorted in rage. And then it became something else, beyond embarrassment, beyond memory’s reach—only him lying on the ground, gore where his man-thing should be and Kai’s brown shoes slick with blood. Blood in her hair. Kai grabbing the Assistant’s handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it off. Passing it to me with an urgency that robs her of grace. She jerks toward me, pulls me out the door with bloodstained hands. The call of the ravens outside.

  Wash your feet.

  She saved me and I do owe her. It should be me lying in the infirmary instead of her. So when Matron comes marching down the hallway with Father’s errand list, looking for a “volunteer,” I am front and center. Matron looks down at the barefoot runt, trying to place me. There are so many of us, and we all look the same to her. Doubtfully hands me the scrap of paper and a small white cooler bag emblazoned with a red cross. She begins to give me directions, but I am already gone.

  I don’t know the way but I force my mind back to the times I watched Kai swinging that medical bag across the dusk-slanted fields toward the witch’s shed. Her black hair melting into shadow one moment, an inky flash against the weak sunlight in the next like an on-off switch, ones and zeros. How I’d wait for her to safely return with powdered lichen compounded into antibiotic solutions for the embryos, tree-fern bundles for luck, henna for the Father’s hair (his pride), poppy seed pods for kicks, a myrtle cake for the midnight feast—and a story. No one knows that once . . . Demon lovers and lonely highways and gingerbread houses. Dragons and damsels and ragged mountains. Stories with the twin powers to conjure and protect.

  The shed nestles in gangly Tallow woods that rain blossoms on its roof. Tongues of shadow unfurl at my approach, and stones dig into the soles of my bare feet. Mades only get shoes if there are enough to go around, and my feet are too small to fit into most hand-me-downs. The sky behind the trees is fiery and the Father’s ravens track my progress. Even if we were made with any desire to escape, which we were not, our Father’s bird’s-eye view of all he has created, is more of a deterrent than any fence.

  Look! Looo-ooook, the ravens cry, at what the ca-aaat dragged in. I limp across the small yard, bird shit in my hair.

  The digital layer of my brain snaps into overdrive—details are stark. Colors blinding. I visor my free hand above my eyes. The shed is up on low joists, blooms of corrosion on scrap metal strewn in the crawl space. The old crone stands on a veranda under low eaves. She wears guano-spattered gum boots and a coarse smock, her face in shadow except for agate eyes bright in a slice of setting sun. She beckons me forward. I hesitate. The hut passed from shearers to the pervy janitor who shot himself dead. But here he lounges in plain sight, on a squatter’s chair with half his head missing and the gun held loosely in his liver-spotted hand. Blood and brain matter have soaked the canvas and drip through the boards of the porch and onto the subfloor where a huge silver-gray cat laps at the pudding-like puddle.

  Following my gaze, the c
rone makes a sign in the air and the janitor disappears leaving nothing but stained canvas and splintered pine.

  “Him has the Dead-See?” she says, pointing a bent finger at me. It will take me some time to get used to her catch-all hims, thems, and its, unable for some reason, to get her tongue around she, her or you or me. And never I. It will take me some time to get used to never knowing, with Narn, where the act ends and she begins.

  From under the shed, the cat glares at me resentfully, pawing at her bloodied whiskers.

  “What does crappy twin want?”

  I think that I want to be anywhere but here. How did Kai stand it? But I am on a promise. “I have a list from the Father.”

  “Where’s other one?” the crone asks. “Better twin?”

  I swallow. “How did you make us?”

  “Ah. No time for questions.”

  “Tell me. How?”

  “Narn wanted one,” she says, pointing to herself. “Got two—a crappy twin and a good one.” She points a crooked finger at me, and another one at her heart. “Special words needed to make double-yolker using code and two eggs.” She holds up two fingers. “Long story. Hard work. Plenty shrooms, special words—danger everywhere.”

  A magpie warbles sadly. I clutch the medical bag. “How did you hide us, what we are, from the Father?”

  “Boss only saw what him wanted to see.” She shrugs, and even then I guess that I will probably never know the whole truth. “Shrooms helped. Magic helped more, even false magic. Problem was two surrogates needed—only one be real, and other fake. One alive, one dead.”

  A dead surrogate?

  “Many dead surrogates. Narn picked a fresh one.”

  Helpless tears of horror prick my eyes. “But the ravens?”

  “Too many questions.”

  I am insistent. “Didn’t they see what you were doing?”

  Her sigh is like sandpaper on rough wood. “Special words for ravens too. Ravens be Narn’s children. Special words for Assistants made him see nothing but themselves.”

  I think she’s telling me all this because she’s going to kill and eat me like the witch from the last story Kai told at midnight on the morning before she kicked the Assistant in the thing. The witch lures twins—a boy and a girl—away from their father to her cottage made of candy and cookies in the woods, to fatten them up and eat them. “The Father will be waiting for his delivery,” I say, holding the bag out in front of me.

  But now she acts like she doesn’t hear, and her eyes have gone an earthen red as if she is looking nowhere. “One surrogate dead with him baby dead inside. Narn pulled dead baby out and throws him away. Then put crappy twin”—she points to me—“up instead, shove it up real good and then did C-section. Boss likes knives. Knife made Boss see what him wanted to see. Narn said many magic hoo-hah words to keep Boss happy. To make Boss believe.”

  “You hid me in a dead surrogate? And her own dead baby—you threw away? The real one?”

  “Trash baby.” She beckons, and I start to walk backward instead of forward. “Many babies in trash back in them Temple days.”

  Narn half-turns toward the front door. The orange light behind her hut grows surly, making the shearers’ shed seem to move forward, move toward me, like if I won’t come to it, it’ll get me anyway.

  “You put me in the belly of a dead mother?”

  We aren’t meant to call them that. They aren’t our mothers, or anyone’s. They serve the Father. Never ask about the surrogates. Which ones are . . . which? Because it doesn’t matter. The eggs are harvested at random and implanted in the same way. And the witch knows I’m not asking about that . . . about the surrogate. I’m asking about the eggs, the double-yolker conjoined by the same bridge of broken code.

  “Tried to throw crappy twin in trash too—but good twin cried himself almost to death. Made Narn save him sister.”

  And she jabs that finger at me again. And then she cackles. And it’s nothing like the fairy tale. At all.

  * * *

  The shearers’ shed fragmented into Wellsburg bars and cafés. They oozed a cozy menace with fashionable patrons raising painted eyes as I passed. I stayed on the road to the bridge. It throbbed overhead like a broken vein, and the guard stepped out to watch me pass, to make sure I joined the rushing student throngs eager to be across and in the safety of a world made just for them.

  I had planned to call Narn, but now that I knew what I had to ask from her, it all seemed too hard. How would I explain it—without one drink at least? Booze helped me deal with Narn, always had. Dirty Bert’s, the Malemade who’d stopped me earlier—I’d been too sick to go to any of the bars in Tower Village, swore I never would, but for some reason now I wanted the company of my own species, almost as much as I felt like a drink. Normalcy beckoned. The promise of swift conformity and bland disappointment—all the trappings of the civilized world—seemed all the more precious now that I’d knowingly and willingly exiled myself from it.

  Except, when I finally pushed through its swinging double doors, I hesitated on the threshold. The only pub I’d ever been to was the Five-Legged Nag in Norman. Dirty Bert’s was not the Five-Legged Nag. Instead of drovers and shearers, Dirty Bert’s thronged with digitally augmented survivors of a Paradise cult, hefting identical plastic pints with shutter-stop enthusiasm. Or maybe just disbelief in their own existence.

  Dirty Bert’s was about as phony a dive bar as its name suggested. If I’d been this desperate for a drink I could have gone up to my room, gotten soused on some of the moonshine—also good for sore throats and warts—that Narn had slipped into my luggage.

  “Like immigrants finding themselves in a rich capitalist country for the first time, willingly seduced by a game they know is rigged, telling themselves they have soul to spare.”

  I turned to the voice behind me. It was the Malemade from the bridge. What I’d thought was a gray beanie was a shock of hair gone prematurely silver, and behind tinted glasses glistened round, mournful eyes, upturned like a cat’s, with dilated pupils that narrowed in the light. Suspenders held his trousers up over a cheap crumpled shirt. I recognized the affectation for what it was. A bid for differentiation, a wave, or a prayer, to the ravening wolf that here be no ordinary sheep.

  He said his name was Marvin. I followed him to the bar. Many of the other Mades acted like they recognized him, laughed at his jokes, drawn like me to how comfortable he seemed in his own skin. If I looked closely, I could almost see their mouths move along with his, as if they were putting his easy dialogue through new software, memorizing it for a rainy day. Or if—and this was just as likely—their augmented cortical stack was communicating with his, and they knew what he was going to say before he did. But I hadn’t had those weeks to repurpose my processing power, and I could not see myself in the laughing faces and unsmiling eyes, the fast fashion and hair gel. I could not see Kai there either, or Narn. But above all what drew me to Marvin was how, between being charming and clever, he would sometimes turn his gaze to one side as if to listen to someone who wasn’t there, or only he could hear. And see. A ghost?

  Either way, it was another thing we had in common.

  I complimented him on knowing his way around, or seeming to. He told me he’d started his program last semester, had been at the Village since just after Christmas last year and stayed over the summer. He was from the Father’s property on the mainland, and raised separately with the other Malemades in its furthest northern edge. There, bordering the desert, Masters were charged with overseeing the selective breeding program that grew into a lucrative side-hustle. Chemically neutered a year after puberty, the Malemades would soon become an outsourced concession to marginalized tastes and specialized travel services.

  “You had Matrons. We had Masters.” Marvin said. “Any stepping out of line and we were dangled over the crocs. Legs were lost. Among other things.”

 
He looked away then—it was awkward. Above the bar, screens played reruns of hit TV shows that I did not recognize, but other Mades laughed and clapped and mouthed the punchlines. There was a poster on the wall showing a wizard looming over a quaint little town like Wellsburg, and below it the words, Our shadow’s taller than our soul.

  “Maybe best not to talk about it,” I said. “The past I mean. Our memories could be false.”

  He asked if I learned that in orientation and I explained that I’d missed that week, but got the gist of it from my roommates.

  “It’s what they want us to believe. That memory is a curse. They’re right. But it’s a weapon too,” he said, “even false memory. Why else do you think the Father cut it out of us?”

  I followed his gaze around the happy forgetful crowd. Plain and pretty, fat and thin, black, brown and white—yet all with the same careful mincing movements and cracked laughter, slurping as one their sweet cocktails, a candied cherry here, a twist of lemon there, sold out wholesale for a life free of fear.