Shards and Ashes
After a moment, I hear footsteps heading toward the door. Doc leaves without another word.
Mag’s determination doesn’t change, but after Doc’s visit she is, at least, more careful.
I try—once—to ask her to consider slowing down her rebellious plans. Eldest’s power extends from more than just the drug. She’s risking a lot for a single chance.
We need plans. We need contingency plans for the original plans. This is all too important. One wrong move, and the ship descends into chaos. One wrong move, and people die.
But Mag doesn’t see it that way.
I was the one who questioned Eldest first. I was the one who was strapped to the table while Doc held a needle full of poison over me. I was the one who hid like a starved, beaten animal, waiting to see if my own exile would finish the job Eldest started.
And Mag is the one who will throw all that away on a haphazard plan to cobble together a revolution as quickly as possible.
“You know I love you?” she asks, both hands wrapped around the sides of my face. I remember her words about the baby, how easy it was for her not to love him.
I kiss her, the bitter taste of regret mingling on both our tongues.
“It’s important,” she adds. “Giving people a choice.”
I nod slowly. I do agree with her. But I worry that we can’t carry a whole revolution on just our shoulders.
“But,” I say, “you’re doing this so people can have a choice. What if they’re happier without one? What if they’d rather stay on Phydus? There’s that old Sol-Earth saying, ‘Ignorance is bliss.’ Maybe, when they find out all these truths, they will choose Phydus.”
She has no answer for that.
Mag spends more and more time in the book rooms. She pores over blueprints of the ship, schematics of the engine, diagrams of the Phydus pump. She studies how to build explosives and weapons. That’s stage two. First, destroy the pump. Then hand out weapons so the people can destroy Eldest. And, I think, the whole ship with him.
When I bring her breakfast, she stares at the little capsule of Inhibitor meds a long moment before she swallows the pill.
“You agree with me, right? You think I’m doing the right thing?” she asks. This is the first time she’s ever shown doubt.
“No,” I say simply. “I don’t.”
“But you were the one who first questioned Eldest!”
I nod. “And look where it’s gotten me. I was nearly killed; I’m in hiding now.”
“Once we start the revolution,” she says, “you won’t have to hide anymore.”
“If there’s one thing I learned,” I answer, “it’s that a real revolution will take much more than a bomb on a water pump to start.”
When I come with breakfast a few days later, I find Mag staring vacantly. I wave my hand in front of her face a few times before she blinks back into focus.
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I must be tired.”
“Mag, I want to talk to you,” I say, pushing the tray of breakfast food toward her. She fiddles with the Inhibitor pill.
“I want you to know,” I say, “that I think it really would be better if we wait. There’s a lot that Eldest has kept hidden. I think his heir will ask the same questions I did, and when he does, that will be the time to bring him to our side. We can’t change anything by ourselves. But if we can crumble the Eldest system from within, we have a chance to really change the ship. We need change, but we don’t need a revolution.”
I’m thinking now of the things Mag doesn’t know, of the secrets that make me question whether or not Phydus really is wrong. I may not agree with Eldest’s methods, but at least I understand why he’s done what he’s done. And I know, I know deep inside of me, with the same conviction that led me to question Eldest in the first place, that a mutiny will fail. It will be crushed just like the first one was.
“No.” Mag speaks with more force than I’ve heard from her in a long time. She swallows her Inhibitor pill dry. “No,” she repeats. “I know the only way to do this is with a revolt.”
That’s fine.
I’m patient.
Haven’t I already proven that before?
Another week goes by. Mag’s plans crawl, then stop. She goes to the book rooms, but she doesn’t read. She just stares.
I place the breakfast tray in front of her. She looks at it, but doesn’t think to pick up her fork until I put it in her hand.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about your grandfather,” I say.
“He was the Recorder.” Her voice is meek, quiet.
“Yes, he was. And then you were.”
“And then I was.”
“Mag, remember how he switched places with you?” I ask.
She chews on a bit of her breakfast.
“Remember what you said about the baby, Mag?” I ask gently.
“No,” she whispers.
“You said you didn’t have to love it.”
She rests her hands on the table, still holding her fork.
“I realized something then, Mag,” I say, still using the gentlest voice I can muster. “I realized then that love can be a choice.”
Her big, empty eyes stare at me.
I reach across the table and pick up the Inhibitor pill capsule on her tray. I break it apart between my thumb and forefinger. White dust sprinkles out. “You gave me the idea for this. Or your grandfather did. He opened his own capsules up and sprinkled your food with the meds until they suppressed the Phydus in your system.”
I lick my finger and touch the tiny pile of white dust. “I just did the opposite.” I press the powder-dusted finger to my lips and taste the salt I used to replace the meds in her pills.
“Mag,” I say, forcing my voice into a conversational tone. “I want to thank you. You saved me. You gave me more than sanctuary. You showed me that my mild questioning of Eldest wasn’t enough, and that things will have to change.”
Her grip slackens, and the fork slides from between her fingers to the table.
I set it back on the tray. “But I can’t risk your carelessness. I’ve faced Eldest and nearly died for it. This is too big, too important, for you to throw everything away with reckless plans. It doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”
“Like? Love?” she whispers, the words struggling to escape from her Phydus-fogged mind.
“I can choose to love you,” I say. “Or I can choose not to.”
I help her stand. She follows meekly beside me as I lead her to the door of the Recorder Hall. “Go back to your grandfather. Go back to your other home. I will be the Recorder now.”
She doesn’t look back as she descends the stairs. I knew she wouldn’t. That’s what Phydus does. It makes you easy to control.
I stand in the shadow of the Recorder Hall, watching her go. I will stay here. I will be the Recorder. The Hall is rarely used, and I can stay in the shadows. As long as there’s no more trouble, Eldest won’t bother to come down here again. He hates to be reminded of the world outside his empire of steel.
And meanwhile, I will learn every single last secret that Eldest has.
When the time is ready, I will make my move.
It might be years. A decade or more. But while I wait, I will construct a plan so foolproof that, even if I die, the revolution—the freedom—Mag wants will still be ensured.
If I loved Mag the way she thought I did, I would have stood beside her and died a ridiculous, noble death.
But love is a choice.
And I can choose not to love her.
Miasma
by Carrie Ryan
THERE WAS A time when men had cures for things like the disease that swept through Portlay that summer. That was before the cities grew sick and crumbled into themselves, before the waters rose and the swamps swallowed what was left of civilization.
For a while divers took to the waters trying to salvage scraps of the old world, but they always came to the surface sickened and weak. The mortality rate became alarmingly
high, and eventually people stopped pining after what came before.
What they didn’t expect was that generations of toxic soup would eventually belch up diseases that wafted through the air like a stench with no way for a body to defend against it. And without medicine, civilization turned to darker ways of handling outbreaks of the fever: doctors with beaks like birds and their plague-eating beasts.
Once the beaked doctors were invited in to quash sickness in a town, their rule became absolute and their decisions unquestionable. They bred monsters who lived off disease, and then they starved them, sending them into the streets to sniff out their next meal.
If you had any money, you could pay off the doctors to pass by, or, if you were wealthy, you could pay for a private room at the hospital and a chance at recovery. Unless your tears ran red; by then it was too late. That meant the walls that held the inside bits of your body separate from one another had already begun to crumble and disintegrate. Your lungs had begun melting into your heart, and your stomach into your intestines, until you became nothing more than a jumbled mass of deteriorated cells barely held together by yellow-tinged flesh.
The moment you cried red, they took your body to the hidden tunnels underground and left you to the plague eaters.
Someone started a rumor that the plague hadn’t come to Portlay until the beaked doctors arrived—that they were the ones to unleash the fever in order to feed their monsters—but Frankie knew that wasn’t the case. She saw them come riding into town. She’d been hiding in the cemetery during the darkest hours of the night on a dare from her friends Cecily and Bardost. They’d told her that in the silences between the midnight chimes, you could hear the dead shift in their coffins, but Frankie didn’t believe them and aimed to prove them wrong.
Except that when the bells tolled the middle night, she did hear something. At first she was afraid it might be the dead, and her heart stormed against her rib cage. Then the noise resolved into the pattern of hooves and carriage wheels, and that was when she caught a glimpse of the first doctor.
Growing up, she’d been told stories about them—every kid in Portlay had heard: If you don’t eat your vegetables, your skin will grow green, and we’ll have to send you to the beaked doctors. Frankie had always imagined them as bent crones with long, sharp fingers, but that was not what she saw on the horse at all.
The first doctor was tall and straight, broad-shouldered with large hands cloaked in thick gloves. He wore black from head to foot, every possible hint of skin covered and covered again. But the face . . . that was exactly what Frankie had pictured: a bone-white mask with a long curved beak stretching an arm’s length beyond where his nose and mouth would be. Two holes were drilled in the tip of it, and a thin trail of gray smoke wafted from the holes to mix with the midnight mist.
It should have been impossible for the doctor to see any-thing through the thick black lenses of his goggles, but he turned his head as he passed the cemetery, and Frankie could feel his eyes on her. She should have ducked behind a headstone or raced back to the shadows of the trees, but she just stood there, bare toes curling against the fecund dirt of the dead.
Stacked neatly in the cart trailing behind the horse were groupings of cages draped in black cloth. Frankie thought the sight of the doctors would be enough to send her heart tripping hard for hours, but it was the cages that truly sent the fire of fear through her.
She’d never seen a plague eater before, and most people got quiet if the topic was ever mentioned. Some things were too terrifying for even whispers. A few years ago a kid down the block had found the skeleton of a ferret and tried to trick up the bones to look like the doctors’ pets, but it hadn’t fooled anyone for long, and he’d regretted it after the beating he’d gotten from his father.
Frankie found herself staring after the cages as the cart rolled toward the hospital in the center of town. She wondered if reality could ever be as horrid as her own imagination. There was a tiny part of her that wanted to sneak after the cart and lift one of those blankets and peek inside the cage. She just wanted to know what they were up against, something visible to aim her hate at.
But Frankie was smarter than that. Instead she faded back toward her home along the edge of the swamp, enjoying her last night of freedom out in the midnight air. If the beaked doctors were here, everything in Portlay was about to change.
A few hours later, the beaked doctors knocked on their door, and her mother let them in. As one of them entered their tiny shack of a house, he didn’t utter a word, just loosened the leash attached to his beast and let it approach each of them in turn: Frankie, Cathy, and their mother. The beast was smaller than Frankie had imagined, with a long, thin, ferret-like body covered in mangy patches of fur.
Its nose was narrow and pointed, barely concealing sharp teeth. Its forked tongue slithered out, raking against Frankie’s flesh before moving on to her sister. It let out hisses and growls—until it reached her mother. Then, it grew agitated and began to screech.
Frankie tried not to be mesmerized by the thing, this nightmare made flesh, but she couldn’t help it. Here was the threat that had always hovered unspoken over Portlay. They’d known that eventually the swamp would drain, and the miasma would run thick. They’d known the fevers would come, and with them the beaked doctors and plague eaters.
They should have been prepared. They weren’t. Frankie didn’t even realize her mother was sick and should have said she’d seen the beaked doctors riding into town, but she hadn’t wanted to get in trouble for sneaking out. And now the doctors were here, in her house, with their plague eaters howling.
Her mother tried to swat at the creature, but the gesture was useless. The beast had talon-like claws that it used to climb her body, ripping her skirt and tearing into the skin of her legs.
Cathy started wailing, and Frankie reached for a log from the pile by the fire, brandishing it like a weapon. The doctor swung to face her, long white beak breathing smoke, eyes empty disks of glass. He towered over her, larger than any human being had a right to be. With one swipe of his arm he could knock her unconscious. He raised his walking stick in a warning.
Her mother pulled out a ragged purse and dug through it for money—offering out everything they had. It wasn’t even a full day’s wages, as earlier they’d been to the market to buy food for the week. The doctor gazed down at her mother’s trembling palm, and Frankie held her breath, waiting.
“It isn’t enough,” the doctor pronounced. “Next time have more.”
Frankie froze. More doctors came in and bound her mother. “Take care of your sister,” she shouted as she was dragged away. Even though Frankie was the younger sister, she knew her mother was speaking to her. Cathy’s brain didn’t always work the way it should for a girl her age, and Frankie had learned early on how to be the older sister in responsibility if not in years.
The next statement came out muffled as one of the doctors shoved a rag into their mother’s mouth. “Remember I love you!”
And then she was gone.
The quarantine was instantaneous. Not that it took much work to shut down the little town. Portlay was squashed between the swamp and the sea—the only way in was either by ship or the rickety bridge leading out past rotting water and wilted trees. What was left of the mainland civilization was miles and miles away.
Most people knew it was suicide to try going through the swamp this time of year anyway—the miasma hung thick as fog, just waiting to lay waste to whatever crossed its path. Of course that didn’t bother the doctors. Their long, thin beaks were stuffed with incense and herbs; their clothing was doused with scented oils to keep the bad air at bay.
Once the doctors made it into town, they didn’t bother with gates or guards to seal off the entrance to Portlay. Instead they sent out the diggers to pull up the foundation for the first section of bridge. The men did as they were told, shirts off in the heat and backs glistening with sweat, as they stacked the old brick on a slice of dry land.
br /> Three days later most of those men were crying red tears and being taken into the bowels of the hospital so that the people of Portlay wouldn’t realize just how many were dying on a daily basis. It was one thing for people to abstractly gauge the scope and breadth of the disease, but another for it to be so blatantly visible in the form of dead bodies piled outside for family members to claim. The numbers would incite a riot, and that would disrupt the order of things. How would the Oglethorpes’ gardens be maintained, and the Tybees’ tea be served, and the Musgroves’ linens be changed if the masses took to the street in protest?
For those who lived behind pruned hedges with properties wrapped in sweet-smelling gardens, the fever was nothing but a nuisance. Their houses stood tall on the tops of hills, well above the weight of miasma, so that the scant wind of summer could stir the air through rooms, dispelling any sour odor that might lead to illness.
Those families had ample stores of sweet-scented oils and incense and candles with smoke that smelled like irises and clouds. Their water ran through layers of filtration before being pumped into basins and sinks.
Frankie knew well the lengths the wealthiest in town went to avoid contact with illness and how vexed they became at any interruption to routine. And so the night after her mother was taken, she bent over the last of their candles fighting with needle and thread as she cut her mother’s Oglethorpe uniform to a size that would fit her own much smaller frame.
On the other side of the bed Cathy whimpered in her sleep, and Frankie noticed the sheen of sweat along the back of her neck and a flush to her face. For a long while she watched her sister sleep through eyes thick with tears.
She should have fought harder for their mother. She should have been better prepared. She’d failed their tiny family—what was left of it—and she refused to let that happen again. From now on there would be a tub of water always standing ready, and at the first hint of a beaked-doctor raid she’d shove her sister into it and coat her with rose powder to fend off the scent of sickness that seemed to be spawning inside her.