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When the Ash Are Two
Out in the sprawling montane forests of the Expanse, a deadman huddles in a clearing, surrounded by blackjack pines felled by blight. It’s been a moist season in the typically arid states, and the conditions have been ripe for the spread of disease. At her knees is a fresh grave dug into the damp soil.
The deadman has fulfilled her duties. She has stood guard at the tipi she placed her lover’s body within, and left the campfire outside burning for those days. She has slept underneath the smell of fermented iron that seeps out from the tipi and into the depression left where she has slept. On the final day she painted her lover’s body red, as tradition is, and gave prayers in the Shoshoni language she hardly knew, one left effectively extinct with her lover. And she piled the bay leaves onto the corpse within the dirt, and shoveled her into darkness.
On the grave she kneels on is her severed hand, which she intends to leave behind. She can’t stand looking at it after what she has done, even with it fully removed. With the remaining hand she holds a shotgun to her head.
#
A church hunter guides her mustang, Hettie, through a coldwater stream that flows down from the distant mountains. The horse slips on a loose rock and nearly soaks the both of them, but regains its posture and finishes the crossing. Everything but the feathering on its legs is left dry. On the edge they crossed to are smeared coyote carcasses. They form trailing bits of guts that disappear further into the forests.
The hunter muses that the reports seem to have been correct, to her dismay, and she ties Hettie to the nearest tree. No bird calls ring out; the only sounds are a gentle breeze rustling pine branches, the crunch of needles under the hunter’s wooden-soled boots, and the fading sound of the stream. The hunter pushes past brush and into the clearing the bloody trail leads to. A new noise introduces itself: weeping. The sobs are loud and sloshy, as if the lungs are damaged.
The source is a large deadman, completely bare. They’re looking away from the hunter, who observes a massive, crux shaped scar that travels up their legs and across their entire back. Even the arms have burns. The hunter wonders how it survived being crucified, but figures that maybe the ones who did it just botched the kill. She’ll put it out of its misery, even if she is not fond of the process.
She draws her chunkily serrated short sword, but the deadman hears and whips around. Its stump wrist catches her blade and knocks it away. Its hair falls off the face to reveal a gory open skull on one side, with massive chunks of coagulated blood crusted around it. Their chest appears to have been torn open down the middle, the breasts sagging off the bone. Drooping monolids part to show a set of scarlet eyes that are nearly drowned in tears. The hunter is stunned.
“Who… you?” the deadman asks.
#
I'm sore. The chains on my body weigh heavy still.
Sasja brushes my matted hair out of my face before she starts her hourly check-in. I only know her name because it popped up once, filtered through fleeting moments of consciousness. She's a church hunter, an odd job that involves killing deadmen.
Her sect and title are marked by the serrated cross and number 27 tattooed on her forearm. Titles can be individual, or in the more closely knit sects, all hunters share a title. It depends on the Cardinal and Saints they operate beneath. I have not seen another hunter in the past weeks, so I presume she operates her own sect, alone.
Her features haven't burned into my memory yet, so I examine her one more time. Sasja has black hair trimmed short on the sides and long on the top, with strands sweeping over her forehead. Freckles and beauty marks cover her sharp nose and high cheekbones. She has a few that go up to her brow which is permanently furrowed down in varying levels of frustration. Her lips are thin and her eyebrows are thick, with the occasional blonde hair poking out like dead grass in an abundant field. She smells of the dry plains and sulfur and oak barrels.
She asks, “How ya doin, Petya?” Sasja really loves using the name she’s chosen for me, as well as a few pet names, given I didn’t tell her my own. I respond that I am fine, and she continues on her checkup of me. “Well, sweet thing, yer certainly lookin better. Yer heads all closed up, the nasty bugger, and the infections gone.” She pulls back the sheet and sits me up on the bed frame. “Close yer hands into a fist fer me. Well, it’s weak, but good.” She takes some medicine and spoons it down my throat. “Good girl, Petya.”
“How much longer will you keep me here?” I ask.
“Not s’pposed to let you leave, sweet thing. Yer a red-eyes deadman.” I am aware of this, of course. We are genetically-engineered monsters tucked in human skin, the last remnants of what mankind reached before the Silence and their near-extinction. We are hunted down with our heads carved apart and bodies placed upon a crucifix to burn. It is the only way they can make sure a deadman is finally dead. I ask her why she, one specifically tasked to kill those like me, has not done it yet.
Sasja scoffs. “I’on’t wanna talk about it.”
“But why keep me alive?”
Her fist slams into the wall. “I don’t fuckin’ know Petya!” She sighs. “Yer here because I’m not fit for my job. Iss why they have me all the way out here. Hardly ever get sent out to kill one of you.” I smell the blood dripping from her splinter-filled knuckles. There’s a sweaty saltiness mixed in.
I raise an eyebrow at her response. “What?!” she says. “There’s nothin’ more to it, Petya! So stop askin’.” She storms out, but forgets her cattleman hat. She barges back in, puts it on, and slams the door.
That’s the farthest I’ve gotten probing her on why she would keep me.
#
“I’m gonna take yer chains off, ‘kay?” I ask Sasja why. “You haven’t done nothin’ to wrong me yet, Petya. And I hope to God you don’t change that.”
“You sure are a hunter,” I say.
“Don’t give me that shit or I’ll chain you right back up.”
“Why unchain me if you still wish to keep me.”
“I–” Her face stumbles as much as her words. An ever changing expression that settles on furrowing brows in concentration and clenching the jaw.
“You don’t have the nerve to kill me.” She grits her teeth but shuts up. I say, “And because you saved me, I feel deeply indebted. So allow me to give you a choice. You take these chains off and let me accompany you, on the hunt. Let me hunt my kin, Sasja.” I sweep her legs and she falls, her head landing right by mine. “Or, you shove that gun down my throat and get it over with already. Because the longer I sit here aimless, the less guilt I have at the thought of tearing that throat from your neck.”
She pushes herself off of me and backs into the corner. Her head bumps the shelf, and a book falls over. Her hand is on the revolver holstered to her side, trembling. “Petya. You would hunt yer kin? Why?”
“I want my kin gone.”
“What did they do?” Her question resonates with me. Because I do not have an answer. Despite racking my brain, carving whatever I can through my mind, there is nothing. And then a leak. A small burst, and a blighted face in the middle of a forest.
“Sasja, they hurt her.” A face, pure pale and featureless. “I try to recall, and something is there. I cannot fully picture her, or whatever happened to her. Just that she is hurt, crying out in pain–” Her face is missing eyes. They have been flayed, and the skin of her inner thighs is rubbed raw and dripping blood. I don't tell Sasja that. Or that I recognize the dozens of individual faces. A bald, pudgy deadman. Another with their mouth sewn shut. One has a shaved head. There’s a man in a cavalier hat. A red-eye that seems uncomfortable around the others. They're the most memorable, among the rows of stones they stand between.
“And they all stand there and laugh. There is a cacophony of laughs in my head. It rips its way out of my mind.”
“I’m- I’m sorry, Petya.” Her hands reach out to my cheek, and then pulls back away. Her boots clack on the wooden floor, and she begins to leave.
“I expect an answer, Sasja!”
#
Sasja is walking with me in the quaking aspen forests by her two-room cabin. We step through piles of yellow leaves and watch the wolf spiders flee. They skitter into new ground cover, and while I can no longer see them I can hear the brush rustle. Sasja taps my back to remind me to keep it straight.
She bothers me a lot for that. Especially when she has me do physical therapy. I have a left foot that drags and a particularly bad hunch, according to her. Says I must have been doing hard labor for it to be that bad. Or that it broke. Broken makes more sense to me. She taps me again.
“We should pick you up a brace,” she mutters, more to herself than me. “Whenever we go into town, I’ll get you fitted.” I look down at her boots. Whenever she’s in thought, she clenches her feet and I can hear the leather squeak. “Mm, maybe I can make one for you at the house. I should have enough normal-sized to put one together for you.”
Sasja shoves an axe into my hand after a bit more walking. “We’re here.” She walks me over to one of the aspens. It has black growths that cover the bark, and brown spotting over the leaves on some of the branches. “It’s been spreading fast this year,” she says, “and we’ve gotta take care of the infected ones. You fine getting the branches?” I nod. “Good, let me show you where to cut.”
#
At some point my body was ready and Sasja started training me to fight. Being larger and stronger than any human meant I had never had to learn the proper techniques. We started without weapons at first. She would berate my stance more than my normal posture. Her fists would sink into my gut and then slam my head around, and even when my muscles got better I couldn’t win a spar. She didn’t count using brute force as a win, but she eventually gave up on my fists and handed me weapons to work with.
She spent the bulk of her time figuring out a single weapon I could use properly, given my tendency to break them with the force of my grip. In the recent weeks, we settled on primarily war hammers as what I carry; They feel the most natural, especially once lengthened to fit my size. The leverage behind each swing feels relieving.
Two of the hammers sit tied to my pack now. Ironic to carry two with only a hand to wield with, but it’s no matter. We’re riding together on horseback to the northwestern town of Laurel, named after a famous saint who founded the place. It’s nestled behind grassland hills that block our view of the actual town, but we can see smoke on the horizon.
The town had sent a falcon a few days ago, and the poor bird had come to us with a broken leg and a torn wing, covered in a strange white ash. Falcons are the hunters ideal form of communication. Fast, reliable, and can avoid the hazards of traveling by foot. Each town may have forty or more falcons .
The note on this one had been hastily scrawled, but had a clear message: Send all the hunters you can muster. Laurel has been destroyed. We patched it up and Sasja took it to the small aviary she maintains for her own falcons, who she sent to the other local hunters, in case the message had not reached them
It seems the falcons did their part. A few other people on horseback are inercepting us. They’re heading towards the town as well, but moving in from the western approach. Sasja motions for me to slip my hood and veil back on, and I oblige. I lean my head into her shoulder as she moves our horse over and slows its pace. “What cheer, hunters?” she shouts.
“Not much, hunter,” the closest man responds. “What cheer for you?”
“None,” she replies. “At least we’re not alone then. I was worried about it just being me and my apprentice.” The other hunter mentions seeing patrols in the distance, and others that were currently en route to Laurel. Sasja sighed in relief, and said a quick goodbye after directing them to meet with the patrols and see what they’ve learned while she would go in and render medical help.
It stinks. The putrid scent of garlic hits us before we even see the city. I’ve been smelling it for a while, but Sasja is the first to acknowledge it. “You smell that, Petya?” I nod, and then say an acknowledgement after realizing she can’t see me nod. I hate that scent, and I know exactly what it means.
Laurel comes into sight. It would have been a marvel at one point, the towering stone church sticking out among the square wooden buildings with large facades and porches on the fronts. Lookout towers on each end, an extra on the north side. Half the stuff is rubble now. Blinding fires, tinted green, are arcing between the buildings, and plumes of white smoke twirl into the sky. It seems to be a rather slow-moving fire, and it confirms my suspicions.
I lean into Sasja’s back and whisper. “Another red-eyes has been here.” She asks why. “It’s a white phosphorus fire started by one. You know you said my forearms are weird?” Sasja had often felt them up when doing her checkups, always remarking that they were off. She kept whatever other thoughts she had on them to herself. “The gas is stored there. It doesn’t react to air, though, it needs to be ignited, by accident or on purpose.”
“Then why didn’t I find any when I cut you up to see?” Sasja says. I ask her if she really did that. She laughs. “No, I think you would’ve died had I taken a drop more blood. I wish I had, though.”
“I would let you.”
“A good offer, but we’ll talk about it later. We’re goin’ in. You just hang back and let me do the talking, ‘kay sweet thing?” She flicks the reins and yells a command, and the two of us soar towards Laurel.
When we get there, it’s worse than we thought. Cries for help echo out from the rubble of the buildings, left unanswered spare a few hunters and half-dead townspeople prying at the stones to try and get their loved ones out. The noise stampedes through my head, which I shake to focus myself back in. We walk by a toppled statue in front of the church, and Sasja comments that it’s the founder of the town, Laurel.
Its face has been carved off haphazardly. My guts churn, my heart goes erratic. Tears well in one of my eyes and my nose drips. I try to wipe the tears from underneath the veil, but the stump of my arm hits my chin. Stupid. I forgot my hand was gone.
Behind the statue and on the church are a few people, scrambling on the rooftop, trying to pry a corpse off of the church’s cross. The corpse has had its stomach sawed open, and guts occasionally fall off and splatter onto the stairs. The murmuring of onlookers suggests the man was a hunter who tried to confront whoever did it. A groan comes from the corpse, and everyone goes quiet for a few moments, as if scared its still alive. It isn't.
We enter the town square, where the cries are tenfold. I wish I could plug my ears. Sasja retracts her command for me to hang back, and soon I’m hauling up rubble and dragging charred corpses out. They’re warm to the touch nestled in my arms, and sometimes they let out one loud sob before they actually die.
I get a living one, and call Sasja over. I help her carry him into a quieter alley and she has me hold him down while she picks out shrapnel. Once she’s done working through his wounds she tosses a fresh shirt to him and offers some water from her canteen. He gulps it down, coughs some up, and gulps even more down.
“I’ve–” He hacks up clumps of ash. “Sorry.”
“Yer fine,” Sasja says.
“I’ve been in there since last night, haven’t I?” he asks. Sasja nods. “Fuck.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” she asks.
The man’s eyes are wild, darting around every which way. He seems terrified. As if they’re still around, and waiting to come back and finish him off. “It was red-eyes. But not just any old one. It was him. The darkskin. Laurel’s dog. What, what she ever saw in that fucker, I don’t know.”
“Laurel’s dog?”
“Yeah. The one that was with her all the way to, well, y’know. Fuck, man. I never talked to ‘im, but never saw ‘im do anyone harm unless it was pratectin’ his woman. Still can’t believe a deadman snuck his way into human society, all the way up to her…
“But here, here he was in a fucken headdress of crosses. You know how fucked up that is!” The humans use crosses with their names, just in case their bodies are destroyed when they die. Like dog tags. Like branded animals. “That’s the only thing left of however many hundreds of the people were hanging on his head, God knows he didn’t leave bodies for half of the people here. And that jaw. All of ‘em. Strung up on necklaces, with teeth janglin’ like windchime.”
I kneel beside him and lean close. Sasja tries to motion me back but I ignore her. She tries again and I swat her away. I need to know more. “What did they look like?”
“The jaws? They were all sorts of weird.” His face moves an inch from mine. “You ever seen a youngin’s skull? All the teeth.” He grabs my face. His grip is strong, and he’s sobbing while shaking me. But his arm gives, and my veil tears off as he falls back. His eyes bulge. He claws backwards away.
“You’re the red-eyes. You’re him. The red-eyes has returned to consume us!” Coughs interrupt his screams. “Help, please. Help!” I reach for my midriff but there's nothing there to reach for. Not sure why I did that.A gunshot rings, and he goes silent.
Sasja is standing over him, but instead looks at me. She has a deep frown. “Put yer veil back on, Petya.”
“You killed him.” My voice is shaky. I have never seen Sasja upset in this manner. I don't particularly care for humans, but what she did. Shit. “Why?”
“Because you have to fuckin learn. You survive no matter the cost, Petya, you hear me?” She walks over and her boot slams into my jaw. “Do you fucking hear me!”
I nod. “Good,” she says. Her hand stretches out to help me to my feet.
A couple of the townspeople come running around the corner, questions of what happened echoing into the alley. Sasja waves them away and tells them the man was too far gone and needed to be put down anyways. There’s some arguing over the morality of mercy killing a man by splattering his brains on the dirt, and it gets worse when someone brings the man’s wife over to inform her she's now a widow and a single mother. I put my hand on Sasja’s shoulder to check that she doesn’t need me to interfere and get her away from the aching sobs. Maybe I want to get away too. She acknowledges me and gives a quiet thanks but insists she’s nearly done, and soon we’re stepping away from the crowd that formed back towards where the hunters have set up camp.
We duck into a tent, and are met with the eyes of a dozen hunters. All bear heavy robes adorned with patterns of three crosses on the hoods. The fanatics of sect 3, those who follow the Third Saint. “What cheer, hunters?” a grizzly man with a torn nose asks. His name, Borendt, is carved in large letters on a cross placed square on his chest.
“We can confirm it’s a red-eyes,” Sasja said. The group murmurs. Of course they would. No human has ever killed one, or even gotten close.
You lean in and whisper, “He is wearing deadman jaws, Sasja. He is a kin-hunter.”
She relays the information. “It's a trophy hunter, and has both deadman jaws and human crosses strung up on its head. Should be easy enough to spot coming.”
“Clean-up continues until the birds come with news of any sightings,” Borendt says. “From there we’ll send for reinforcements and send multiple groups to close in. You're free to go, hunter.” Sasja nods. “But I want to talk to your apprentice. Alone” She tries not to react, but I see her fingers tense as she leaves with everyone else.
I step in front of Borendt. He hardly moves for a few minutes, let alone speak. His nose scrunches slightly, and his grey-streaked brows move up and down erratically. I have no idea what he's thinking, as he stares at the veil between us.
He moves his arms a lot when he speaks. “You are apprentice to Sasja, correct?” I nod. “That’s an interesting– Ah, I will not mince words. Does not matter. What matters is you. I do not need to see under that veil to know what you are.” I reach for the hammer but his meaty hand taps my arm. “Do not draw. I will not harm you.
“Ah, but do not mistake that for me particularly caring. Call it morbid curiousness, apprentice of Sasja, that your hunt will be of great fascination to me.” He says, “You're free to go as well. Be careful out there.” I bow my head and exit the room.
“What did he want?” Sasja asks. I shrug, and tell her he didn't say a thing. “Shit.”
#
We have been lodging for a few days in Laurel, sleeping in a single bed in a room that seemed more like a closet. Being in human society makes me uneasy, and Sasja laying right on me makes me even moreso. I am not used to her presence, despite it being the only reality this damaged mind can clearly recall.
She used to sleep on the floor while I was recovering, until I pointed out that I could hear her pulse and breathing pretty loudly. After that she slept in the only other room, the kitchen that acts as storage and the primary entry. I could still hear her pulse, and when I told her she moved back to the bedroom floor. On a particularly heavy night of training, we came back both dripping sweat, her making fun of me the whole way home for being so exhausted. She threw on a fresh shirt and fell right asleep on my lap. She acted like nothing happened, but from there on she no longer insisted on taking the floor.
She’s laying on my stomach in the bed right now, the window shutters slightly ajar while she smokes a cigar from a pack she traded for. She’s fiddling with a ring in her hand. At home, she would leave it beside a family photo, with what I assume was her and a man. She seems to be pregnant. A family. She does not talk about it, but it seems she does have one anymore, the same as me.
“Sasja,” I say, “Can I ask you something?” Her hat is laid flat over her eyes. The cigar is wedged between the skin at the base of her fingers. She brushes her hat off onto the mesquite wood floor and sits up, shifting around to end up with her knees pressed into the sides of my stomach. My skin sizzles from the cigar’s heat.
“Whadda you want, sweet thing?” Sasja asks.
“The deadman.”
“What about it?”
“I remember all red-eyes. We were raised together. Two are albinic, the others all fair skinned. I am the only dark skin. Yet the man said this one is dark skin as well.”
“Yer saying there’s not another one that looks like you?”
“That I know of.”
“Well,” she says, “and here I thought my sweet thing is one of a kind.” Sasja smiles and pushes my hair off my face. She leans forward and her forehead touches mine. “Try not to worry ‘bout it ‘til we see for ourselves, ‘kay Petya?”
“Yeah.”
“You want a drag?”
“Yeah.”
#
A flock of falcons has been coming and going the past few weeks. The first came from the west, the residence city of one of the Cardinals, Senmibaal. The place is set deep in the high deserts, and buried down into one of the plateaus. They’ve been carving up those orange rocks for decades, according to Sasja. The same thing they’re doing where the Cardinal August lives down south. She says they have an obsession with stone, the church authority. Burying themselves in red rock ahead of their death.
Nearly every hunter was sent to Senmibaal’s aid, but Sasja abstained. I didn’t question it, but when a second group was dispatched further south towards Cardinal August, she again abstained. Even the third one tonight, coming from the Salt Flats to the southeast, she rejected. I ask her why.
“Because, Petya, by the time– They’ll be long gone when we get there, sweet thing.”
“So what is your plan?”
“I want you to look at this.” She walks us over to a small map she’s spread out on the side table of our bedroom. There’s around 10 different marks, with one placed right on us in Laurel. Another is by Senmibaal’s palace. It’s where the red-eyes has attacked. “You see it?” she asks.
“They’re moving methodically. The marks start here…” My finger lands in the northeast, and circles counterclockwise until it hits the Salt Flats. “And end here.”
“Good,” Sasja says. “And if they’re moving methodically…” Her hand brushes by mine. “We can expect to see them in this region in the coming days.” Her fingertip glides along all the way to the east, where the foothills taper into yucca-dominated deserts and the lengthy wall along the state lines begins.
It separates the Expanse and the Desolation Zone, and although the old freeways went through the wall at one point, they've been completely shuttered and are just flat stretches of concrete and asphalt, flush full of bandits. The Desolation Zone itself is composed of the human survivors of the bombings that occurred there, although their status as humans is generally questioned, given the massive horny growths that protrude from all over their cerise flesh.
The only reason a person has to go into those glass-coated lands, where the sun bakes skin bright red and devils live, is to escape something so horrible it would find you anywhere here. Someone who wants away from the red-eyes is out there, maybe fleeing from one of the previous attacks. And it is gonna find them.
“When do we ride?” I ask Sasja.
#
Sasja and I left to intercept the red-eyes with a few birds in tow. We avoided the freeways and went down the edges of the montane into high desert. Our horses gallop around the spiky shrubbery. Black clouds choke the sky. The lightning storms are frequent here, and bolts fork into the dark buttes and the closer flatlands. An occasional strike is close, and my ears ache.
Our horses stop after cresting a slope and entering a clearing. Shredded backpacks and tents have been strewn everywhere, and are covered by the gore of ten people. Some of the bodies are propped up on succulents, the spines of aloe and agave poking into their backs. The occasional cactus is limp and soggy with blood, innards spilling out like the people who had died trying to hold their own guts in,.
The place is dead quiet, not even a breeze to break up the sound. I hear maybe three, four weak heartbeats coming from the bodies, and that's it. Sasja is going over the body of a hunter, which was less disfigured than the others. She says, “Looks like the hunter fought first. It was a clean kill. Poor girl.” She points to one of the women laying next to the hunter, whose entire midsection was a hacked apart mess. “The rest of them are way worse off than this, so they must have gone next.”
“Some are still alive, Sasja,” I say. She raises a brow to question me, but I pull her from her current study and walk her over to where the faint beating was sourced from, only to come across the worst of the two. “These two are still going.” She scoffs that it won’t be for long.
The middle one is a deadman I recognize. Rather odd for one to be with humans, but not unheard of. She's an albino with a weak form and missing its entire lower jaw. She’s another like me, and while I don’t have the clearest memories of the deadmen I was raised around, I know she was one of them. And she was a part of the chorus of laughter. She had harmed my lover. I pry open her eyelids to show Sasja the scarlet eyes. My hand slips on the blood and pushes back some of their hair, showing the true extent of the injuries.
Her head had been blown open nearly fully, and there was nothing left of her brain that wasn’t scattered about. “You see her neck?” Sasja asks. I do. There’s strangulation marks from a rather large hand, and I move my own against it. The size is about the same. I mutter that it’s strange, and she agrees. But we’re mostly dancing around the part we don’t want to acknowledge. I break and do.
“Sasja, you see her chest?” I point down at a strange pink spot that’s nestled between the ribs. Sasja rolls up her sleeves and cracks her knuckles. Her hands plunge in. She beckons me for help, and I follow suit. Our hands go rib by rib, snapping off the damaged ones that were left to open the way.
She says, “There’s something beneath the lungs, ain’t there?” Sasja takes the shivering lungs and spreads them open, revealing a bony shell beneath that seems to have been blasted through. “That’s a brain. It has a second brain. No wonder no one’s been able to kill one.”
The body spasms, and knocks Sasja down. Soon the deadman is on her feet, and the bloodied scarlet eyes open and stare. “I will not let,” she rasps. Blood gargles in her throat, and the remnants of her jaw swing on strands of flesh. “No more hurt.” She throws a fist at me that’s missing half the fingers, and I respond with a fist through one of her lungs. It feels good as it pops under the pressure. She falls over.
I reach for my hammer to finish the job as she keeps wheezing, but something brushes my leg. I look down and see the source of another heartbeat, a frail woman with a massive gash across her upper back. Her spine’s been severed.
“Please,” she begs. She's not talking to me. “Rese, please don’t.” Her hands take clumps of dirt as she tries to move herself towards the deadman, Rese, but she’s certainly paralyzed. She turns back to me. “Please treat her nicely. She’s been kind to us for so long. Please treat us all nicely. Let me lay with her again.”
There’s some stirring, and the final heartbeats show. Two more women, both with innards dragging, move to help the woman up and over to Rese, who has been still since hearing the voices. One of the women collapses when they get there, and her heart goes silent. The next gives a rasping thanks to Sasja and I, and is gone. And the paralyzed woman just stares, pleading.
“We can’t let you live, you know?” Sasja says. She’s now back on her feet, and holds a revolver with her index waiting to enter the trigger.
The paralyzed woman laughs, which sends her into a wheezing fit. “I never expected that. But can I request one last thing?” Sasja sighs, and listens to the request. “Kill us at the same time. I couldn’t stand to be alive even a moment without her, and I think she feels the same.”
Sasja says, “Will you tell us which way she went in return?”
Rese gurgles. “North. Where it all started.”
“They’ll be in the Stone Fields, won’t they?” I ask. The rows of graves behind the laughing deadmen. It’s the only place they could be. Rese does her best to nod. “Thank you.”
Sasja motions over, and pulls the hammers from my back. She tosses one to me and it slips right into the proper grip. I ready mine behind the second brain of Rese, and Sasja over the woman’s skull. We swing. My hunger is unsatisfied.
#
We pitched our tent a few miles away after we sent the birds back with notice that the red-eyes had gone through. There was an outcrop on the edge of one of the rocky hills that provided enough ledge to keep us dry in the case the lightning storms turned to rain. Once it clears up we plan on riding a straight shot to the Stone Fields.
I slip the black veil off and set it on my pack. Next come my headwraps, which peel away like old gauze. The hood is glued to my hair from sweat and dirt, and takes a moment for me to pry off. After that the scarves tug away fairly easily. I unbutton my shirt and start to slide my arms out of the sleeves.
“What are you doing?” Sasja asked. She is used to seeing me undress, so I am unsure of how she can tell this is different.
“I want you to check,”
“Check what?”
“Under my lungs, for that thing.”
“Alright,” she says. “Turn around, we’ll go from the back.” I finish taking off the shirt and from there Sasja has me raise my arms as she peels my undershirt off from sweaty skin. Her fingertips tap the ridges of my spine, and then her whole hand shifts flat against it. “Forgot how much of a bear you are, sweet thing. Ya got hair fer days.” She chuckles. “You sure you want me to do this?”
“Yes.”
Sasja digs a scalpel just a bit shy of my spine. I wince just a bit, and she squeezes my arm. The blade works its way around the vertebrae and to a spot just behind. It hits bone. Sasja sets the scalpel down and reaches for a bone saw that was tucked away in her bag.
“I have not asked why you carry such tools, Sasja.”
“I was a doctor, once. You good to keep going?” I doubt she will tell me much more.
The saw grates through the bone shell, and I hear the clatter of the small piece she removed. I feel her finger slip into the wound. She is always gentler with the wound care than anything else.
It is an odd feeling, someone digging around your spine and ribs. But not one I am unfamiliar with. I wonder why it is so familiar.
“What the fuck–”
“What?”
“It’s an empty cavity, Petya.”
“It is empty?” She reaffirms what she said. “What does that mean?”
“Hell if I know. That brain was there at some point. You don't remember it getting damaged– removed. Anything?”
“No.”
“And here I was lookin’ forward to scratchin’ yer brain. Well, let me sew you back up and we’ll get some rest. Unless you want me to trim yer hair and give you a shave too.” Her nails dig into my scalp and run along the suicide wound I don’t remember.
#
“Sasja, you’re still awake, aren’t you?” She seems to have lost any hope of sleeping after the downpour started.
She rolls over and her eyes cut into me. They shimmer like pond water under the stars. Like rain drops blurred in motion. “You could tell?”
“Your body heats up when you sleep. I can see it with my pit organs. But tonight, you’ve been as cold as ever.”
“You have those?” She’s racking her brain trying to figure out what that would look like.
I say, “It’s like colors overlaid on everything. People are orange and yellow and red. The world is blue and green and the sky is purple. What’s keeping you up?”
She jolts from returning the subject to her. But she responds, and starts saying, “The deadman from today…”
“Rese. What about her?”
Her face is struggling to find an appropriate expression again. It settles on a slightly shaking lip and skin that droops off of her sadness. “She just seemed so… human. You all do. Every one I’ve killed.”
“You feel?”
“No– I just, I don’t like killing something that thinks and feels and… and expresses those thoughts and, and loves others, like genuinely loves others.” Her hand brushes my jaw, feeling between the blunt edges of the hair she had shaved before we slept. The thinner fuzz is pushed up between her nails. Her rough fingertips grate my skin, but I don't mind.
Sasja continues, her hands left on me: “You saw her… She really loved that woman. She was gonna protect her to the end.”
“You sound hesitant.”
She examines the ring on her finger. I wait a while, the patter of the rain counting up her quiet. Her breaths quicken. “Because I don’t want to believe them.”
“You were a doctor before. What changed?”
“You care to know?”
“I care enough to want you to get some rest instead of whatever this rumination is.”
“You asked me before why I saved you.” She turns away, and I let her head rest on my hand and put my other arm around her stomach. She goes slow, and occasionally stops to violently twitch. “It’s the first one I hunted. She… was pathetic, weak. I hardly had a muscle on my body. And I pinned her down with a revolver and kitchen knives.” She jerks around but I hold her tight. “Gutted her there and shot her head right the way open.
“Never fought back. Said she’d feel bad, hurting a poor old widow like me. I beat the shit out of her when she said that. She was the widower, for Chrissake. But… Fuck.”
“What is it?”
“Nevermind, I’m going to sleep.” Her body never grew hot with sleep. I could tell, because I was just as unable to rest.
#
We’re on the edge of LaiKyn, an eastern town home to a score of hunters, who seem to have got the message we sent to rally them. They're here to join us in being the first hunters to kill a red-eyes. At least, they assume that, unaware of what Sasja and I have done to the half-dead Rese..
“What cheer, hunters!” Sasja calls out to the four ahead of us. A native man with scarlet scarves, a leather vest, and a faded tattoo of Saint Peter on his shoulder. He introduces himself as Vincent. A woman with a thick canvas hood that strands of her hair poured out of, and silver gauntlets etched with images of the Lady Guadalupe. Her name is Crisanta. Another man, Oliver, wears a tan hat and a matching reinforced duster with belts of knives across the torso. The last one, Yasmin, wears a poncho over bandoliers stuffed with rifle ammunition.
After some more introductory conversation Sasja parses the most important part. “You were the group sent to Senmibaal?” she asks. They clarify that Oliver and Yasmin were sent to another attack site, and only the two had been with the palace response.
“The entire palace was wiped out,” Crisanta says. Ah, her Guadalupe engravings have the slightest smile on her face. Is it meant to show emotion so unclear?
I perk up when Vince mutters, “All that fer a single man, that damned cavalier.”
“A cavalier?” I ask. “What did he look like?”
“Hell if we know,” Vince says. “Besides the feathered hat, nothing was left of ‘im.” A feathered hat. It could have been him, then.
“Ours only had the stitching on his upper lip left,” Oliver says, fidgeting with the knives on his coat. “Poor guy’s jaw was torn straight off, and it was clear something had ate him while he was still live.”
“Whatta ‘bout you two?” Yasmin asks. Sasja responds that we’ll tell them more when we get closer. For now, all that matters for them to know is a red-eyes is heading north, and we’re going to kill it.
#
We’re on the verge of the Stone Fields. An ever snowy mountain pass that carves through the Sierras, named for the thousands of gravestones that are spread out, marking the spots where many of the vestiges of humanity died out on a pilgrimage into the Expanse. Even on the backend of a humid fall, there’s a thin layer of frost protected by the thick clouds that circle overhead.
Idle chatter is shared as we ride the last few miles in. We round a hill and come to the verge of the graves. And we are not alone. Two hunters are laying prone in the grass, holding massive rifles, marked with the number 3, that are propped up on bipods. They do not turn to acknowledge us.
“They’re Borendt’s men,” Sasja whispers. I ask her what they're doing here, and she responds that she has no clue. We tie up our horses to the trees, where the snowpack is less dense, and go up to the hunters..
“Get down!” they hiss. “It'll see us.” We all drop, and then they're willing to give introductions. Their names are Alsin and Sandr. Alsin has a tattoo of Laurel on the nape of his neck that makes me feel nauseous.
We pass around the scoped weapons in our party to look at the situation they're observing. In the distance is a mass of bodies, built into a circular structure not unlike a pomegranate. At the base is a hulking figure sitting against a grave with a serrated two hander beside them. A few cloaked hunters are sitting in front of them, and Sandr explains it’s Borendt and the others attending to the red-eyes.
“Attending to?” Crisanta says. “Why is he out there, just, conversing with it?”
“No clue. We’re just posted where he wants,” Sandr says.
“I want to go down there,” Sasja says. Alain mutters not to give up their position. “Let's go back down and wrap around.”
We leave descend the hill towards the scene. Borendt does not turn, but gives a greeting to us. Sasja and I place ourselves behind him, and the other four follow.
In front of us the one-handed deadman sits, her fingers on the two-hander and her feet impatiently tapping. She has torn, blood-stained jeans and boots covered in tight leather straps. A holster on the waistband holds a double barrel. She has dark skin like mine, and bears various scars. Across her entire chest is a massive shrapnel scar, and spiked deformities where her breasts have been torn out. On her neck is a cluster of yellowed deadman jaws, some still with the flesh clinging on. One of them is sewn over her own mandible, rows of teeth protruding out from it. A massive sombrero has chains of hanging of crosses that dangles over red eyes with collapsed irises and pupils torn open. She blindly looks off into nothing.
“More joined,” the deadman says, her voice rougher and deeper than my own. “I suppose I can introduce myself, Laurel.” Laurel? The dead Saint?
Her whole body turns towards me. “Name is Ash, though they already know, don’t they, my Devotion? I am responsible for stupid town’s death, and all of those fools they have autopsied. And these as well.”
She gestures to the pack of slaughtered deadmen behind her I had paid little notice to. Some are propped up on the stone crosses of the graves, held on with chains. The rest are piled on top, forming a half circle that fans put behind Ash. Their mangled faces are like the seeds of a pomegranate. Tears from a woman drip down. They’re all alive. All placed around a single one at the bottom.
I double over to retch. I can’t stop, and fully vomit. The stuff explodes out of my veil and onto the ground, steaming and spreading out into streams of bile. Sasja drags me back away from the sight of the others, and her hands caress my face.
“Any more or you done?” she asks.
“I think– that is it.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.” The deadman is pudgy, and although appearance was hard to discern with his jaw gone, his stomach carved up, and his eyes flayed, I could identify his wriggling form. I could identify all of the jawless bodies. “I know him. He’s one of them laughing, Sasja. When I remember, he is there, they are all there, and I–” My whole body trembles.
“Shit. He’s one? What’s it doing with him then?”
“I am not sure. But, but– She knows.”
“Change yer veil, okay?” Sasja digs a fresh one from her bag and despite her command to me, she changes it herself. She even paused to wipe the bits from my face. “After this, we’ll get you a fresh change of clothes as well.” She guides me back to the group.
Ash is tapping the gravestone she's sitting on with her heel. She yells, “My sister understands what I have done, don't they, Laurel?” Everyone's eyes descend on me. Hammers press back and click into place. Blades slide from their sheaths. Borendt motions them down, remarking that I am not their enemy. “I have gotten our revenge! I have righted you from the rapists who defiled you, Laurel!”
She stands up. “A shame they survived, though. I cannot allow their brain to live on outside my body. And I cannot allow these hunters who disgrace your will to exist.”
“I assume we have no deal,” Borendt calls. He is standing, his hand resting on the hatchet at this side. It signals the rest of us to warm up our hands and get a grip on our weapons. My hand clenches the hammer, and I hear it creak.
“The old fool thinks I would ever work with the humans who tried to rip you away! I already have my human, my light, with me.
“Laurel!” Her sword pulls slow from the ground, crunching against bits of rock. “Your light brings me here! My devotion guides me, and hunters stand not in my way, my own kin stand not in my way.” They look towards me with those blind eyes. I know they see me in those pit organs. “I stand not in my way.
“They. All. Burn.” They plunge their sword into their forearm, coating their weapon in whatever was left in their air bladder. A white mist pours over it, and the garlic scent penetrates my nose. The others reel in disgust. Everyone’s hearts are running 50 beats higher than they were moments ago.
“You all ready to die?” Crisanta mutters.
Oliver replies. “To be the first ta kill a red-eyes? It’ll be worth it.”
Borendt raises a fist and flings it forward. Alsin and Sandr fire. One bolt hits Ash in the jaw and lodges between the teeth. The other strikes her sword, and it bursts into a putrid green and white fireball. The heat singes my hair, and the snow melts down. Ash regains her hunched posture, the flaming sword dragging behind her on the ground. She goes for one of Borendt’s hunters, a man with a gold-embellished cloak, leaping forward and using the blade to corral them towards her. She kicks his knee out of his leg and slits his throat in one erratic motion.
Borendt darts around and slams an axe down into Ash’s back with a snap, and their blood sprays over his bearded face. It lodges in the bone. They yelp and whip around with the sword, but the weapon is caught by another hunter via their claymore. The axe is removed, and both hunters dart away.
Again, Borendt raises his fist, and another volley of bolts blast through her head. Bits of charred hair fly into the air, the smell almost rivaling the phosphoric flames. Crosses fall into and leave indents in the snow. Clean hits, but besides shards of her skull and blood, not a single piece of brain has hit the ground. I can see clean through.
Ash turns what’s left of her face over to Alsin and Sandr, and hobbles towards them. The hunter with the claymore attempts to interrupt. He swings it at their calf but misses when she lurches out of the way. The serrated sword clips his ankles and he falls flat on his face. Before she finishes him, Yasmin fires her rifle into Ash’s chest. A clean shot through their breast. They stumble and drop the serrated sword
I want to interrupt, but the others are on the way, and I know the rules Sasja taught. Hunters fight in twos and threes. A crowded fight lets the deadman kill everyone in a single swoop, while also preventing the hunters from swinging with abandon. It isn't ideal. So we let the twos die until it's our turn.
Ash limps to the downed hunter, pries the claymore from his hands and with a wild fling sends it through Yasmin’s chest. She’s impaled to the ground as the sword buries deeper, nearly covered by the snow. The deadman turns back to the hunter with clipped ankles, and stomps down on his head a few times. In the frigid air, his brain steams. She leaves her sword in the ground as she sprints to Sandr. She yanks the shotgun from the holster on her waist, and with her fourth finger slipped into the ring-shaped trigger, she blasts him clean open. His arm lands near my feet, and his torso rolls down the slope.
The rest of us dash over to try and interrupt the slaughter. Alsin rolls over and tries to shoot her, but she lands a kick that knocks his arm out of place. She reholsters the shotgun and places her hand on his neck. His eyes bulge out. “They do not deserve to bear your visage,” she says. Her nails claw into the nape and tear the tattooed skin from him. He screams in pain. I feel a strange satisfaction, seeing it. We haul Ash off of him, and Sasja pulls Alsin out of the fight.
I pound the square of my hammer into her stomach and she spits blood over my face. “Them!” she shouts. Her fist takes my side, and it digs deep. I hit her arm until it gives and my hand comes out with chunks of flesh. “They plunged me, into darkness,” Ash says, gasping. She slams her forehead against mine. Again. Again. My vision flashes black and white. “When they shot, us. For months I suffer, in pain.” Gunshots tear through the air, iron taste fills my mouth. “In pain, on your grave. But I grew out of their chest, and your light blessed me once more. I see white, bright. Laurel, you guide me still.” I can hardly think. She moves to slam my face again.
Borendt’s axe carves the back of her hat and head in two, and a sword swings straight into her neck. Oliver hauls it halfway through and it gets caught. It’s too late for him, and Ash’s elbow knocks his jaw clean off. Once more he attempts to push the sword further, but one more elbow sends him dead into the snow, his duster red. Next she grabs Borendt, and throws him into the back of a headstone that his skull cracks on.
Sasja pulls me away and quickly looks over my head. She takes my hammer and her sword, and places herself between me and Ash. Sasja, Crisanta, Vincent, and Alsin are the only ones left standing. The four attack.
Crisanta dances with short blades, shredding Ash’s calf to ribbons. Alsin cuts the other ankle. Ash kneels down. Vincent draws a blunderbuss, shoves it into Ash’s mouth, and slams the trigger. Their head blasts apart into even more pieces, and the hat is knocked off, but to no effect. There really is no brain in there.
I call, “Sasja, her brain isn't there!
Sasja grunts, “You, you think I… don't know that, Petya?”
The hammer Sasja wields pushes into the sword stuck in her neck and budges it a bit further. I stumble forward, take the hammer from a visibly surprised Sasja, and swing with all my strength. The head dangles, still barely attached.
Ash slams into the ground and spasms. She takes her arms and drags herself, leaving a bloody trail through the frosted grass as she makes her way to her sword. Her head bounces off the ground and lags behind. She struggles to pick up the sword. She takes a deep breath, and gurgles. “Laurel, sundeháihundu ne. I must kill, my other brain. I wish not– your light to see.”
The two-hander plunges into her jaw at an angle. She braces harder. The skull cracking apart as the serrated edges saw through is a horrific noise. Her head catches on the parrying hook, and it finally tears free. The lodged blade clatters to the ground. The open neck splurts, and I watch their eyes go still.
“What the fuck,” Crisanta mutters. A hand tapped her shoulder, and a messy Borendt pushes past her and to the front of us. He’s hobbling worse than usual, but another person is better than nothing.
“Glad to see you still alive, boss” Alsin says.
Ash gets up to the best of her ability. She's left on her knees, her now useless legs simply weights. She readies the two-hander once more, the blade cutting into the ground as her damaged arm struggles to even hold it. Her face stares blankly from its place atop the guard. We all shiver, but approach nonetheless.
Her first attack is a heavy slam that takes Borendt’s arm, but he muscles through to slash their stomach open. He’s pushed down. Crisanta has blades on her gauntlets that she pushes into the deadman’s good arm, but Ash drops the sword and catches her with the double-barrel she whips out. Crisanta’s stomach is blown out and her body drapes limp. Vincent takes the second shot straight in his chest and is sent airborne.
“Sasja!” I say. “We need the second brain!” She turns to me and nods. We move in together. Ash swings on me and I catch the heavy two hander with my hammer, but I can’t hold it for long. My face on the guard smiles at me. Sasja’s blade goes through her back and slices it, but a glancing blow catches her head. She’s sent rolling away.
Her blade is sticking out of their back, and I go for one heavy hit to send it into the deadman’s brain. The flat of my hammer smacks into the blade and with a deep crunch, it pushes through the bone and into the cavity where her only brain is.
She drops the sword and collapses, writhing like a dying spider. I go for another hit, but she dodges the blow, and rises to her knees. With some difficulty, she picks up the shotgun, breaks the ring off the trigger, and tosses it to me. It lands in my lap. She turns, and drags herself away, at a speed I can't believe could be reached with no working legs.
She just up and left.
I could follow her, but Sasja’s groans echo from behind me. I run to her pack by the horses, and then slide down beside her. I ask her to guide me through patching her up, and pull out her thread and gauze.
“You idiot sweet thing,” she says. “Yer supposed to finish the job.”
“I just– could not.”
“‘Cuz it’s you?”
“No, they are not. At one point, I am sure they were but– I am my own person. I am not here to chase what I was. I have to make sure what is around now survives.”
“Anything to survive was meant to be for you alone, y’know. Yer supposed to live on, no matter the cost to me or anyone else.”
“Ya think?”
“Hell if I really know.” I get to work on her broken arm, feeling around for any fragments that need to be pushed back into place. Sasja grips onto my leg, her nails drawing blood even through the denim. I splint my work and wrap it up.
“You both made it!” Borendt says. He’s fumbling with a tourniquet a few feet away from us. “I was not worried for you, apprentice, but Sasja made it as well. A pleasant surprise.”
“Why weren’t you worried for her?” Sasja asks. I lean in and explain that he knows. Sweat drips down her forehead. She spits out blood and turns to Borendt. “You knew and said nothing?”
“I figured it would be a valuable asset, your apprentice. But to think that it’s identical to that red-eyes.” He points at my face with his good hand. My veil had fallen off in the fight. “We have our deadman now! We have one on our side, and a red-eyes at that. The church cannot be stopped with this power! One of it is hundreds of men, a perfect weapon for our chur–”
My hammer slams through his head.
Sasja sits up and puts on her hat. She nods in approval.
“What– What are you?” Ah. Alsin is still alive. “You’re that thing?” Sasja tilts her head to me and runs her finger across her throat. I head over to him. “No, wait, please, I won’t see a thing, I promise, I won’t tell a single person, I–”
“Wow, his head just smushed, didn’t it?” Sasja says. “Good job, Petya.”
“I have one last thing to check,” I say. I head over to the pudgy man, the center of the arrangement of bodies. His visage makes me sick, and I kick his stomach. His flayed eyes bulge as he wakes. It seems fitting, that he would suffer the way he had made her suffer. I take a shortsword, skin the last of his face, and work out the tiny bones of his ears. They’ll make a beautiful necklace. It takes some time, but I remove every bit of his nose and sinuses with a paring knife. He’ll have no senses. He will be left in darkness, in pain, for the last of his life.
I return to Sasja, who is stumbling to the tree. I carry her over to our horse and lift her on. I get on behind her and we gaze at the still groaning pomegranate deadmen and the gutted hunters.
“Let’s go home,” she says. I oblige.
#
I’m examining the ring. Sasja steps into the bedroom. She tucks her boots in the corner and walks over to me. “That’s what it tossed at you, right?”
I shake my head and hold out my hand, which has Ash’s ring on the fourth finger. The ring I’m looking at is hers, which I picked up from the nightstand she sets her family photo and the current book of her choice on. There’s a name carved on the inside. “Can I ask why you don’t wear this? Sasja?”
She snatches it from my hand. “Because I’m not the dumbass doctor who married that man without seeing the signs.”
“What do you mean?”
She sits down on the bed beside me, and buries her head into my chest. Her hat pushes in painfully, but I don't try to move it or bring it up. “The first deadman I killed. Before she died, she… She told me he– “ Her tears drip down my stomach, and she heaves out more.
“He had raped her. That he had been… doing, that, for months. She said it was self defense that time… That he had gotten more violent. I… only thought to look after I killed her.
“He, he carved his name on her backside. Same exact way he did on my ring.”
“Why carry it around?”
“It’s my shame. To abandon it… I’d be a goddamn coward.”
“Are you a coward?”
“Yes!” she sobs. “Of course I am, Petya! I’ve killed dozens of you, all because I couldn’t own up to a single mistake. But that changes. I can’t do this anymore. The hunt. I’m tired of hunting deadmen for simply existing.
“I don’t want to burden you with this,” she says.
“I have burdened you just as much with myself.”
“Would you keep doing so then, just a bit longer? Burdening me, I mean.”
“Of course.” I wipe her tears with the knuckle of my index, and let her breathing relax as she melts down onto me.
“Sasja,” I say, “If the ring Ash gave was ours, or well, mine, before Ash and I split, then that would mean the woman I married was Laurel, wouldn’t it?”
“You still can’t remember her?”
“No, but–” I rotate the ring. “It feels warmer, this way.”
“I’m done hunting. But, I want to stick by you. What are you thinking of, Petya?”
“I want to find Ash. They hunted down those laughing deadmen. I want to know the one that remembered enough of their past to get revenge. I want to know why they took our hand, why they shot us. Why Laurel is gone.”
“I’m here with you the whole way, sweet thing.”