Authors: Rob Ziegler
In front of her, Jake held back shoulders thickened by three months of solid exercise and Satori nutrition, and jammed his fists to hips. He hollered like a sergeant at the platoon of forty new soldiers who stood at ragged attention in the dome’s vast shadow.
“You got to embrace the pain, bitches!” His voice was almost a man’s. Doss tried to place the feeling working its way through her chest as she watched him. Something like pride.
She worried a leather thong strung with finger bones in one hand while she silently assessed her new troops. They’d been fed, but they were still skinny; new fatigues looked strangely deflated over their bones. They were like all fresh meat. Didn’t know asses from elbows, shit from shinolah, left from right, up from fucking down. But they’d lived on the road, in the dust and in the starved remnants of the world, and they had survived. They were tough. Some of them were even adults.
“Pain means you’re living!” The inverted Vs of Jake’s staff sergeant chevron gleamed on the shoulder of his white t-shirt. So natural he could’ve been born with it. The red hand printed on the t-shirt’s front—that he wore like a badge, like it was his own heart. He thrust his chest out, aimed that red hand at his troops, letting them know exactly who wore it, and who didn’t. “You like being alive? Then you like pain!”
The platoon yelled
Hooahs
, timid, out of sync, but earnest. Jake turned and marched them, all gangling limbs and eagerness to please, along the leathered skin of the outer wall, into the furnace heat of late October sunshine pounding the gravel expanse of Satori’s airfield. Mixed groups of migrants and thick landraces, headed out to harvest in the north fields, parted before them.
“Agent Doss!”
She turned, cursed under her breath.
An entrance had split open in the dome’s greened flesh. A dozen people emerged. Big migrants and thick landraces, zeroing on her, chins cocked with self-importance. They wore long white tunics.
La Chupe
white. Rebranding, Tsol had called this.
La Chupes
in red, people thought of as thugs. But
La Chupes
in white, well…
He strode at the group’s center, his white robe billowing around him, its hood cowling his face. Like Robin Hood, or some kind of badland angel. Two young girls walked with him, one caucasian, the other a smooth landrace. Well-fed, both of them, all tits and hips, wearing nothing but short white skirts.
The
Chupe
boss drew up close to Doss. Exuded beefy physicality into Doss’ space while his entourage fanned out around her. Doss glared at the red hand emblazoned on the breast of his robe, over his heart.
“You like it?” Tsol asked. “It’s got a certain cachet, don’t you think?” Doss let a second pass, during which she regarded him with naked contempt.
“You look like an attendant in God’s own personal shitter,” she said. Tsol laughed. Inside the hood, teeth flashed.
“It’s meant to honor you, Agent Doss. You’re the queen of the Burning Hand. You liberated Satori.”
It sounded like a punch line, which Doss knew it was. It was the boy who’d liberated Satori, the boy who now controlled Satori. Doss had done nothing besides get her kids killed, and Gomez, too.
She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Raised the hand that held the leather thong and with a finger scratched her nose along the near-seamless edge of the new skin graft Satori had given her. Born of her native cells, a few drops of viscous liquid to swallow. It had left only the tiny hint of scar, a vertical line at the center of her brow that gave her a look of perpetual concentration.
“They’re finally coming.” Tsol raised a shot-putter’s finger to the east, where the black zep grew steadily fatter as it neared.
There had been rumors. The government pulling up stakes from D.C., readying itself for a transition westward. Not even trying to pretend anymore that their country would ever again exist in any meaningful way.
“Cabinet, you think?” he asked. Doss shook her head.
“Probably Sec Serv, here to pave the way.” But it was D.C. making decisions, after all, so who really knew? It could have been Ellen Vokle, General Rippert, even Doss’ father on that zep. The thought made Doss tight inside.
She’d stopped pretending, too. The wound in her chest still ached—worse in the mornings, during the liminal half-dreams before she fully awoke. She’d lay in the soft fur of her bed, feeling colors shift in the slick skin walls of her apartment in Satori Tower while Emerson’s voice echoed in her memory. The wound would throb, a dull spasming ache in her chest and shoulder. As healed, she was certain, as it would ever be. Painful, but good enough: she could function.
She’d cast her allegiance with her Rangers. Gave her days to training them, trying to make them somehow useful. Whom they served…she didn’t know.
“Might be a hard winter for
El Presidente
,” Tsol mused, and there was something hungry about the way he said it. “Living under the same roof as his poor and huddled.” He angled his chin towards where, across the airfield,
La Chupes
in their new white tunics manned the bone gates of the outer wall.
Migrants crowded outside. They streamed in from the plains, as they had now for months. They camped out in the old city, awaiting admittance to Satori’s sheltering breast while Tsol’s
Chupes
organized them. Got them sorted into work pools for planting and harvests. Situated them with places to live inside the dome. Noted them on a census they’d begun. Got them fed. Together with Doss’ Burning Hand, the
Chupes
had turned into the cops. Rebranded indeed.
“Might be,” Doss figured. As she looked on, the
Chupes
at the gate pulled a man from a wagon loaded with small children. Voices rose. One
Chupe
pulled the man to the ground. The others began to kick him.
“I suspect he’ll find it crowded.” Tsol said. He pushed back his hood then. The skin of his face sizzled audibly, turned instantaneously green as the sun hit it. Grey eyes dimmed for a moment, focused inward with evident pleasure as chlorophyll bubbled out against cell membranes. Doss stared.
“Jesus.”
“You should try it, Agent. I haven’t eaten anything in three days. I think I could walk across this entire country with nothing more than a sip of water.”
“So badass,” one of Tsol’s big bodyguards declared, and pursed appreciative lips. The caucasian girl’s face twisted with disgust as she watched Tsol’s skin go green, but she didn’t move from his side. She kept laying tentative fingers on him. Touching his arm or his muscled shoulder as though he were a pet bear who could turn on her at any moment. Tsol leered at Doss.
“You know you like it.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Doss told him.
“The kid still won’t give me the real graft.” Tsol squinted up at the mountainous dome. “I think he suspects we’ll replace him, if we can.” Doss arched an eyebrow.
“Is he wrong?”
“I only want what’s best for everyone, Agent.” The
Chupe
leader spread innocent hands. Big teeth coruscated within the meaty verdance of his face.
“Right.” Doss turned away, looked out on her new troops.
They worked hard for Jake in the hundred-degree heat. Marching. Burpees. Pushups. Sprints. He was a good sergeant, the sort they wanted to please. The sort who did not Fuck Up.
“They’ll be good soldiers,” Tsol observed. “If they have enough time.” His thumb played absently over the swell of the landrace girl’s long hip and his eyes drifted to a spot above Doss’ head. “It’s been a long time since this country’s seen an election.” He said this offhandedly, the way he’d talk about the days growing shorter, the first hints of summer’s heat waning. Then his expression hardened and his chest rotated like a gun battery in the direction of the slowly incoming zep. “They think we’ll still settle for scraps.” His gaze settled on Doss, a mad white crescent gleaming above his irises. “You’re my guardian angel, Sienna Doss. We’re fated, you and I. I’m going to call on you soon, and you’re going to answer.” He uttered words then that Doss hadn’t heard since before she’d left D.C. “For the people.”
Doss said nothing, simply held Tsol’s eye. After a moment, he nodded once, emphatically, then turned and strode away, his entourage coalescing around him.
When he’d gone, Doss stood there, watching a small migrant caravan the
Chupes
had let filter through the gate. What looked like a couple of families. They lugged bags over their shoulders, makeshifted from canvas tarps or animal skins. They pulled wagons pieced together from bicycle parts, stacked with plows and rusted hand tools. They carried rifles, held the hands of small children. They were like all migrants. Farmers and thieves. Scavengers and killers. American people. Tsol’s people. Fleeing a dead world. Doss wondered what their chances were, what her own chances were. Overhead, the fat government zep vectored in.
“Right face!” Jake bellowed. Half his platoon turned left. Muscles worked in his jaw and he cast a bitter look Doss’ way. She smiled at him. It was far more than pride.
….
Brood raised his foot and a furred stool rose helpfully from the floor. He propped his army boot atop it. A boot which, to his amazement, he’d actually grown to prefer over his sandals. He stuffed the cuffs of his fatigue pants inside and laced it tight.
“Satori,” he said.
“Yes, Carlos?”
“I want to talk to Bacilio.” A pause, then:
“Bacilio is not available right now. Can I tell him something for you, Carlos?” The walls gurgled, turned the color of ice.
“No.
Gracias
.” He stood, reached for a rucksack that hung from a finger-thick bone protruding through the smooth skin of a nearby wall, then turned and surveyed the room’s mutable vacancy.
He’d grown fond of the place. Its vaguely animal scent, the way it responded to his presence, welcoming. He never felt alone here, even though he’d rarely brought company. Four months, the longest he could remember ever having stayed in one place.
He moved to the wall, which undulated as he neared, flexed wide, grew transparent. The city below pulsed with life. Its own, but also with the bustle of migrants. They moved along snake-scale streets, in and out of the buildings where they lived—in apartments, like how people had lived in the old world. The gossamer haze of their cook smoke now perpetually filled Satori’s dome.
Someone had set up a still on the street below, a tangle of plexi pipes leading to a steel cauldron from which dark vapors rose. Migrants gathered around it, trading Satori rations for corn alcohol. They hunkered against flesh and brick walls, and drank, exhausted from long shifts in the north fields. Listless, like they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves in this city with the beating heart, didn’t quite know how to settle. Brood knew the feeling. What were they now? Refugees? Immigrants? He figured there might not be a word. They were simply fed, and that was that.
As he watched, a slender male landrace approached the still, proffering a fat barrel squash. A migrant woman in clean white shift waved him away. The landrace persisted, smiling. Other migrants rose, formed a barrier of ill will between the landrace and the still. The landrace turned and fled, back towards the dome’s outer reaches, where the
Chupes
had pressed Satori’s children.
Brood touched his forehead to the wall. Felt Satori’s heart, steady and slow. Bacilio’s heart. It was calm. He pressed his lips lightly to skin, then reached a hand below the window. A hollow opened there. He withdrew the pig sticker and a stockless M-8. Slid the blade inside the back of his pants and stuffed the compact rifle into the rucksack.
“Carlos.” Pollo’s voice filled the small chamber, confident and solid, like Brood could reach out and touch it.
“
Que pasa
,
manito
?”
“You leaving.”
The walls reddened. “
Sí
.”
“
A dónde
?”
“South, I guess.”
For a long time Pollo said nothing. Brood figured he’d drifted off.
It’d been like that. They’d talked a great deal in the first days after Pollo had gotten into the pod. Brood’d lain on his back in the soft fur of the apartment’s floor, fingers laced behind his head. He’d spoken up at the ceiling, where pores flexed and colors shifted. Spoke about their mother. About winters in the malarial gulf coast planting grounds. About how scared he’d been during every job they’d ever pulled with Hondo.
Pollo had spoken, too, filling the room with his voice, casting Brood adrift in the vertiginous illusion that he lay suspended in Pollo’s mind, had become part of one of his brother’s catatonic dreams. He’d told Brood of the frozen world where his mind had lived before the graft, before he had become Satori. A place built of unfiltered noise and light. Pollo had told Brood how all the animals there had been dying, ever since he could remember. How, when he could surface, he’d felt the real world dying, too. How he’d seen the places where pieces connected, and sensed them collapsing. The world was still dying out there. But here, Pollo’d told him, in Satori, maybe they could all stay afloat.
The months passed, and they’d spoken less and less. Pollo had drifted. There seemed to be less and less of him, more and more of Satori. These days they hardly spoke at all.
“Carlos,” Pollo stated finally, “my landraces breaking you off some seed. Meet them at the outer gate.”
“
Gracias
,” Brood said.
He waited. A minute passed, but Pollo said nothing more. Brood slung the rucksack over a shoulder and crossed to the door. It flexed open and he stepped out.
….
The Lobo sat in front of the
Chupes
’ sagging brick stash house, bumping mean bass. As far as Brood could tell, that’s all it ever did. For two days he’d sat, wrapped in a filthy wool blanket against the long chill of early-autumn nights, and watched from the shadowed back corner of the old squatters’ lot. Richard had taken the Lobo exactly nowhere.
The big
Chupe
seemed to live in the truck. Occasionally he’d get out and hang with a dozen or so other
Chupes
. Kids who, in their new white tunics, seemed caught in the Lobo’s orbit. They’d sit on the eight long struts, drink corn mash from dirty plastic jugs, hassle the few girls who still worked the stash house. Just hang, leaching off the Lobo’s inherently badass vibe while Richard let the reactor growl, feeding the big speakers he’d installed inside.