The Withered Husk Of A Gifted Six-Grader

Of course, she wouldn’t have to contend with such things if her parents had boarded the Pinta as planned, but there was no changing the past, no arguing with the inherent risk of losing a pregnancy in transit. The error would be corrected soon enough, and being sore about it now was a waste of time. She took a half-step to the right and turned her body to catch more of the smoggy horizon, swaying all the while to keep the little one quiet. The light caught on the long cracks branching over the lens of her camera, encircling Niña and the polluted water in a shape halfway between a longhouse and a tipi. She zoomed in sightly, focussing in on the polluted water churning into its gaping maw, the clean water filtering into the engines and the pollution pouring right back into the bay. She snapped the picture and dropped her camera back to her chest, turning away from the water to keep walking.

It had been a long time since Head Hill was a true hill: the city ran on hydrogen fuel derived from the great quantities of serpentinite found in Delany’s spine, and over the years all the mineral had been systematically mined out. All that was left was a thin layer of dustbowl earth over shattered, treacherous bedrock that slid and skated underfoot — a graveyard long before the first Untouchable’s ashes were entombed there. She bowed her head respectfully as she passed the cholera graves, only a fraction of the lives claimed by the decade-old outbreak: there were twice as many in the devout cemeteries of Nassau County, for those who wanted their remains buried intact.

She stooped to pick up a piece of foul trash on the path and tucked it into a bag on her belt, and a stone marker caught her eye, one of the few that bore an epitaph alongside the name: Nicole Crane, 36. To all who ask, I am here; for all who leave, I will remain. There was a symbol carved underneath, a circle divided into four equal pieces, and suddenly she remembered Nicky Crane — she had been a formidable presence in the resistance that Mal grew up with, and was known for her heroics. The symbol on her headstone mean that she had given her life to save four others, and that she would be dearly missed.

The unfairness of it all swelled up inside her chest all at once, and died down just as quickly: death and justice existed on two entirely different axes, and rarely colluded. She turned away from the grave and kept walking; each name she passed scrawled itself on the inside of her ribcage and then fell away, making room for the next. Step by step she took on and discarded every one of the countless names, until she was suddenly at the edge of the memorials.

Her footsteps faltered for a moment, before her internal compass kicked in and tugged her toward one particular marker. Gwenh’s painting was nearly unrecognizable after years of acidic rain, only the broad strokes remaining: a blush of reddish-brown for her hair, a deeper syrup shade for her eyes, a dark purple pigment for the port-wine stain that had taken up half of her face. Mal looked out east, where Gwenh’s brothers were buried — Sulien dead from a fall before she had ever met him, Rowan dead by way of whisky. There was space between them should their little sister ever come home, but the painting was the only presence she would have here. Her body had been taken into Midtown, the northern area of the city where the wealthiest lived and worked, safe from the dirty air and water: its boundaries were heavily blockaded to prevent living Untouchables from getting in, or the dead ones from getting out. Gwenh’s body was somewhere deep in enemy territory, and there she would stay until they tired of waiting for payment — she would then be buried in an unmarked grave and summarily forgotten. That was the way of things in this city: an Untouchable’s body was always forfeit, and the price to retrieve a body was always higher than anyone could pay.

She sank to her knees, feeling embarrassed and weak for her immortal, aching grief. Even with nine years to heal, even when it was now customary to speak to the grave and make peace with what had happened, the apologies still caught in her throat like a bad cough. It was easier to accept that this was how it would always be, that she would always feel fifteen years old, that the wound would always burn like a raw scab. She couldn’t even bring herself to cut her hair, not when it happened and not in the interim years; how could she, when it was her fault that Gwenh was dead, that there was no body to bury?

She looked to the overcast sky with a sharp, steadying breath, and accidentally knocked the back of her head against the cradleboard. Her daughter gurgled, alert and ready for a break from her swaddle. Mal pushed herself upright with a groan, shoving down the feelings to be dealt with at a later date, and made for the stone-cut gazebo overlooking the rest of the graveyard.

Pillowy moss stubbornly sprouted from crevices in the rock, the one plant that grew wild in the city. It had spread to the ground in her absence, a soft place to rest as she laid the cradleboard across her knees; her daughter stared reproachfully up at her as she carefully unpicked the leather cord, her glower clear even with half her face covered by an infant-sized respirator.

Even through her fog of exhaustion and near-constant anxiety, Mal could appreciate that Clover was the most perfect baby ever to exist. Her round, chubby cheeks dimpled when she laughed, and the thick and curly hair she had come out with was getting longer every day. She didn’t have Mal’s monobrow yet and wouldn’t until puberty, but she had inherited her deep, downturned eyes, her round face and ink-coloured hair. Her hawk nose and warm brown skin came from her donor parent, left behind in Akwesasne, but no one was sure where she had learned to be so expressive at only six months old — it was one thing to already have a signature smile, but her withering glare was something else entirely.

And her tantrums were nothing small, either. She was happy enough to have her snorkel removed and the condensation swabbed from her cheeks, but the moment the mask went back on she was screaming her heart out. Mal sighed and pulled her out of the swaddle, intermittently shushing her and cajoling in Kanien’kéha, “I know, my girl, I know — it’s just for a little while longer.”

Clover was unconvinced, and it wasn’t like Mal loved how her snorkel was pressing hard lines into her face, or that her less-than-sweet breath was starting to overpower the crushed herbs lining her filters. She glanced again at the ship’s blurry shape, feeling a familiar kind of turmoil over the one-way journey ahead. It was hard to leave behind everyone she loved and everything she knew, but at least Clover would be oblivious, for the first few years. That had to be kinder, to leave before she could remember anything. She hoped so, at least — it was easy to doubt everything she knew about parenting when she couldn’t even get her daughter back into the cradleboard.

Finally, she sighed and lifted her up to look her in the eyes, bumping their rubber noses together. “You know, Grandma Vi worked hard on that cradleboard. She’d be very sad to see that you don’t like it anymore.”

She blew a raspberry. Mal rolled her eyes and hauled herself upright, setting out for the final leg of the journey. Outside of Head Hill and heading northeast for Silver Lake, the roads were rubbled into boulders and cliffs, all the more difficult to navigate with an angry baby on her hip. It was a relief when the road finally became level again, but a short-lived one: between her heavy breathing and Clover’s crying, she didn’t hear the Hammerhead until it rounded the corner at the end of the street.

Muscle memory overtook her body like a leading dancer, waltzing her into the safety of a nearby alley as she wrapped Clover in her blanket and tucked her into an alcove that a suspicious eye would pass over, leaning a piece of corrugated tin over the hiding place. After a moment of deliberation she placed her camera with her daughter — it was supposed to be safe to carry a camera in this part of the city, but a patroller’s mere presence here meant that things had changed.

The drone motored past her alley, just missing her as she ducked out of its periphery. Her fingers closed around a rock as she rose and followed close behind, watching its snaking body sway in counterbalance to the swivelling of its wide, flat head. She was lucky: Hammerheads had no combat capabilities, narrow lines of sight, and were easy enough to take by surprise. The danger lay in their eyes and ears — if one drone overheard a ciphered war strategy in Silver Lake, another on the front lines could anticipate the operation and counter it. If this particular drone got a good look at Mal’s face, she would be back in the Database before she could bash the thing’s skull in.

The rock skipped off one wheel, toppling the drone to the ground with a crunch and petering whine of machinery. It flopped helplessly on the gravel as it tried to writhe back to its feet, motors kicking up as she placed a boot on its head to pin it down, blocking its camera-eye. The tip of her chipped knife brushed against an exposed wire as she leaned down to sever the tendon cables; the shock travelled up her arm and flung the knife from her hand, just out of reach. She grumbled and massaged the tingling from her fingers, unwilling to risk the drone getting back up while she recovered her weapon.

Just then, the drone heaved a strange, robotic sigh. She glanced down with a furrowed brow: drones couldn’t so much as sneeze outside of their pre-programmed parameters, and they certainly couldn’t sigh like that. She pivoted her boot to get a better look at the back of the drone’s head — the Midtown repositories bolted their drones together for easier maintenance, but the seam beneath her sole had been melted together with a lumpy weld. This drone belonged to an Untouchable, and she owed them a visit for nearly giving her a heart attack.

She took another rock and surgically damaged the drone’s antenna, enough that it needed to be repaired but not so badly that it couldn’t navigate its way home. She stepped back as the machine righted itself and swung around to face her, her heart in her mouth until she saw that its eye had been covered with bright orange paint. Its muddled voice chirped endlessly, damage, transmitter/receiver, damage-damage-damage; finally, it executed a three-point turn northwest and headed back the way it came, whistling a familiar tune that she couldn’t quite place.

***

Of course, she wouldn’t have to contend with such things if her parents had boarded the Pinta as planned, but there was no changing the past, no arguing with the inherent risk of losing a pregnancy in transit. The error would be corrected soon enough, and being sore about it now was a waste of time. She took a half-step to the right and turned her body to catch more of the smoggy horizon, swaying all the while to keep the little one quiet. The light caught on the long cracks branching over the lens of her camera, encircling Niña and the polluted water in a shape halfway between a longhouse and a tipi. She zoomed in sightly, focussing in on the polluted water churning into its gaping maw, the clean water filtering into the engines and the pollution pouring right back into the bay. She snapped the picture and dropped her camera back to her chest, turning away from the water to keep walking.

It had been a long time since Head Hill was a true hill: the city ran on hydrogen fuel derived from the great quantities of serpentinite found in Delany’s spine, and over the years all the mineral had been systematically mined out. All that was left was a thin layer of dustbowl earth over shattered, treacherous bedrock that slid and skated underfoot — a graveyard long before the first Untouchable’s ashes were entombed there. She bowed her head respectfully as she passed the cholera graves, only a fraction of the lives claimed by the decade-old outbreak: there were twice as many in the devout cemeteries of Nassau County, for those who wanted their remains buried intact.

She stooped to pick up a piece of foul trash on the path and tucked it into a bag on her belt, and a stone marker caught her eye, one of the few that bore an epitaph alongside the name: Nicole Crane, 36. To all who ask, I am here; for all who leave, I will remain. There was a symbol carved underneath, a circle divided into four equal pieces, and suddenly she remembered Nicky Crane — she had been a formidable presence in the resistance that Mal grew up with, and was known for her heroics. The symbol on her headstone mean that she had given her life to save four others, and that she would be dearly missed.

The unfairness of it all swelled up inside her chest all at once, and died down just as quickly: death and justice existed on two entirely different axes, and rarely colluded. She turned away from the grave and kept walking; each name she passed scrawled itself on the inside of her ribcage and then fell away, making room for the next. Step by step she took on and discarded every one of the countless names, until she was suddenly at the edge of the memorials.

Her footsteps faltered for a moment, before her internal compass kicked in and tugged her toward one particular marker. Gwenh’s painting was nearly unrecognizable after years of acidic rain, only the broad strokes remaining: a blush of reddish-brown for her hair, a deeper syrup shade for her eyes, a dark purple pigment for the port-wine stain that had taken up half of her face. Mal looked out east, where Gwenh’s brothers were buried — Sulien dead from a fall before she had ever met him, Rowan dead by way of whisky. There was space between them should their little sister ever come home, but the painting was the only presence she would have here. Her body had been taken into Midtown, the northern area of the city where the wealthiest lived and worked, safe from the dirty air and water: its boundaries were heavily blockaded to prevent living Untouchables from getting in, or the dead ones from getting out. Gwenh’s body was somewhere deep in enemy territory, and there she would stay until they tired of waiting for payment — she would then be buried in an unmarked grave and summarily forgotten. That was the way of things in this city: an Untouchable’s body was always forfeit, and the price to retrieve a body was always higher than anyone could pay.

She sank to her knees, feeling embarrassed and weak for her immortal, aching grief. Even with nine years to heal, even when it was now customary to speak to the grave and make peace with what had happened, the apologies still caught in her throat like a bad cough. It was easier to accept that this was how it would always be, that she would always feel fifteen years old, that the wound would always burn like a raw scab. She couldn’t even bring herself to cut her hair, not when it happened and not in the interim years; how could she, when it was her fault that Gwenh was dead, that there was no body to bury?

She looked to the overcast sky with a sharp, steadying breath, and accidentally knocked the back of her head against the cradleboard. Her daughter gurgled, alert and ready for a break from her swaddle. Mal pushed herself upright with a groan, shoving down the feelings to be dealt with at a later date, and made for the stone-cut gazebo overlooking the rest of the graveyard.

Pillowy moss stubbornly sprouted from crevices in the rock, the one plant that grew wild in the city. It had spread to the ground in her absence, a soft place to rest as she laid the cradleboard across her knees; her daughter stared reproachfully up at her as she carefully unpicked the leather cord, her glower clear even with half her face covered by an infant-sized respirator.

Even through her fog of exhaustion and near-constant anxiety, Mal could appreciate that Clover was the most perfect baby ever to exist. Her round, chubby cheeks dimpled when she laughed, and the thick and curly hair she had come out with was getting longer every day. She didn’t have Mal’s monobrow yet and wouldn’t until puberty, but she had inherited her deep, downturned eyes, her round face and ink-coloured hair. Her hawk nose and warm brown skin came from her donor parent, left behind in Akwesasne, but no one was sure where she had learned to be so expressive at only six months old — it was one thing to already have a signature smile, but her withering glare was something else entirely.

And her tantrums were nothing small, either. She was happy enough to have her snorkel removed and the condensation swabbed from her cheeks, but the moment the mask went back on she was screaming her heart out. Mal sighed and pulled her out of the swaddle, intermittently shushing her and cajoling in Kanien’kéha, “I know, my girl, I know — it’s just for a little while longer.”

Clover was unconvinced, and it wasn’t like Mal loved how her snorkel was pressing hard lines into her face, or that her less-than-sweet breath was starting to overpower the crushed herbs lining her filters. She glanced again at the ship’s blurry shape, feeling a familiar kind of turmoil over the one-way journey ahead. It was hard to leave behind everyone she loved and everything she knew, but at least Clover would be oblivious, for the first few years. That had to be kinder, to leave before she could remember anything. She hoped so, at least — it was easy to doubt everything she knew about parenting when she couldn’t even get her daughter back into the cradleboard.

Finally, she sighed and lifted her up to look her in the eyes, bumping their rubber noses together. “You know, Grandma Vi worked hard on that cradleboard. She’d be very sad to see that you don’t like it anymore.”

She blew a raspberry. Mal rolled her eyes and hauled herself upright, setting out for the final leg of the journey. Outside of Head Hill and heading northeast for Silver Lake, the roads were rubbled into boulders and cliffs, all the more difficult to navigate with an angry baby on her hip. It was a relief when the road finally became level again, but a short-lived one: between her heavy breathing and Clover’s crying, she didn’t hear the Hammerhead until it rounded the corner at the end of the street.

Muscle memory overtook her body like a leading dancer, waltzing her into the safety of a nearby alley as she wrapped Clover in her blanket and tucked her into an alcove that a suspicious eye would pass over, leaning a piece of corrugated tin over the hiding place. After a moment of deliberation she placed her camera with her daughter — it was supposed to be safe to carry a camera in this part of the city, but a patroller’s mere presence here meant that things had changed.

The drone motored past her alley, just missing her as she ducked out of its periphery. Her fingers closed around a rock as she rose and followed close behind, watching its snaking body sway in counterbalance to the swivelling of its wide, flat head. She was lucky: Hammerheads had no combat capabilities, narrow lines of sight, and were easy enough to take by surprise. The danger lay in their eyes and ears — if one drone overheard a ciphered war strategy in Silver Lake, another on the front lines could anticipate the operation and counter it. If this particular drone got a good look at Mal’s face, she would be back in the Database before she could bash the thing’s skull in.

The rock skipped off one wheel, toppling the drone to the ground with a crunch and petering whine of machinery. It flopped helplessly on the gravel as it tried to writhe back to its feet, motors kicking up as she placed a boot on its head to pin it down, blocking its camera-eye. The tip of her chipped knife brushed against an exposed wire as she leaned down to sever the tendon cables; the shock travelled up her arm and flung the knife from her hand, just out of reach. She grumbled and massaged the tingling from her fingers, unwilling to risk the drone getting back up while she recovered her weapon.

Just then, the drone heaved a strange, robotic sigh. She glanced down with a furrowed brow: drones couldn’t so much as sneeze outside of their pre-programmed parameters, and they certainly couldn’t sigh like that. She pivoted her boot to get a better look at the back of the drone’s head — the Midtown repositories bolted their drones together for easier maintenance, but the seam beneath her sole had been melted together with a lumpy weld. This drone belonged to an Untouchable, and she owed them a visit for nearly giving her a heart attack.

She took another rock and surgically damaged the drone’s antenna, enough that it needed to be repaired but not so badly that it couldn’t navigate its way home. She stepped back as the machine righted itself and swung around to face her, her heart in her mouth until she saw that its eye had been covered with bright orange paint. Its muddled voice chirped endlessly, damage, transmitter/receiver, damage-damage-damage; finally, it executed a three-point turn northwest and headed back the way it came, whistling a familiar tune that she couldn’t quite place.

***