Twice on the road, the leaders, Mare and Sene, take me aside and hit me. Where are you from? What are you doing out here? Where are your others? They are not above smacking the bloody hole in my head where my ear used to be.
I try to show them I can take it. Keeping quiet is easy, but I have to use all my fourteen years of strength and experience to not cry. They knock the very speak out of me.
They have questions, but I know who they are. They are banshees.
To me, banshees are heroes. I saw images of banshees growing up at home on the island, women dressed in black, warriors. The ones who fight the skrake. HERE TO PROTECT, the grimy posters said.
I thought I could be one of them so I set out to find them. And here we are.
The punches come and it’s like being hit by a rock. I keep my whisht. I think of the runaways they are after, Cillian, Nic, and Aodh, safe on my island to the west, while we work east.
To the banshees, I’m an outsider and not to be trusted. They found me on a beach, fighting for my life and losing. They killed them all, with ease, with grace, while behind me, through the mist on the sea, the runaways escaped. They bind my hands, they question me. They leave my feet free and we move fast.
In the afternoon of that third day the banshees and me come upon the outskirts of the city. They keep moving, smooth and sure, but I am caught standing on a briary slope. Dublin stretches below me, gray and glinting wet. The rain gone and the country fresh. The city like a crust on the green skin of Ireland, a scab flaking slowly away.
If I stop, I know Agata will stop too, but before she finds me I want just one moment alone. I want to feel like I have conquered something, standing here, having found the banshees and the city, and still not dead, and not made a skrake. Not yet, anyway.
I am only tired and frightened. The fight is wore off me onto the road. Hungry road. I put my dirty fingers to where my ear used be and dried blood crumbles away. It’s still chewing, so it is.
Agata’s shadow lands across me and I flinch. She only stares out over the land with an expression I can’t make out. It’s too big to take in, all the things that happened me. I don’t know which way to go with them. Once we’re in the city, I know, there’ll only be more to try and understand. But it will be over; there will be an ending. I can stop fighting. I can retreat, a little, into the quiet of my own head. Even whether I live or die will be out of my hands, and that feels like a good thing, a necessary thing. A rest.
“There.” Agata points. I follow the line of her finger to a patch of green, the other side of the city and a little inland. “Phoenix City.”
From this distance nothing but a blur of gray in a sea of green and brown.
“We’ll follow a road that circles off around the left,” Agata goes on. “Keep out of Dublin, it’s crawling with skrake.” She is quiet while the last of the banshees pass us.
Nothing surprises me—or, it’s that everything is so fucking shocking I’ve no capacity for surprise anymore. I nod to show I hear her. “What else?”
Agata looks at me and
I look back at her and there is something I recognize—grimness, resignation. A nub of something familiar that makes me feel just a little less desolate.
“You’ll know all of it soon enough.” She hesitates. “Don’t trust anyone till you know them.”
I let my eyes flicker off back to Dublin.
I don’t know you, is what I didn’t say. Maybe she is warning me about that as well.
The banshees make a joke out of blindfolding me—they make a joke out of most things.
“You’re lucky wearing this,” Lin says to me. “The last bit isn’t pretty.”
“Don’t be knifing anything with this on you.”
“Yeah, I like my tits where they are.”
A chorus of “so do we,” more laughter. I’m getting to know their voices already, all distinct, but even still, keeping track of them gives me a headache.
“It’s so stupid,” Lin says. “There’s no point to it.”
“Management says,” Mare tells her.
“Tsss. Management, who haven’t been out the walls since.”
“Since ever,” Aoife says. She takes Lin’s side, partly because Lin is her partner and partly because otherwise Lin would be alone. This I know already.
Still, nobody stops what they are doing.
The blindfold—a black cloth, damp and musty—is pulled tight and I sink into darkness. It’s almost a relief. The banshees spin me till I’m dizzy and it works: I’ve no idea where we came from. I still know where we are headed, though.
The banshees jostle me along.
It is tough going at first, but they surround me, bumping me along the right way, too close to me to let me fall. I put one foot in front of the other, same as ever. I listen hard, but not to them. A rustle of wind in trees and then of rubbish in streets. The banshees are quiet for a stretch and I hear, far off, the screams of skrake.
Down, then up, and then steeply down again. It becomes cold and damp feeling. An enclosed space, and then we are up to our knees in water. After a long time we stop, and I hear a great wrenching of metal against stone. The air is putrid. We move forward and the same wrenching again, behind me. Some kind of gate.
We come up again and I feel a breeze of fresher air. At last there are voices, and I’m pushed on faster. Rough hands, not Agata’s, but Sene’s and Mare’s. I can feel her, though; she is still with me. The blindfold itches my nose and I go to rub it with my shoulder. Out of nowhere a hit, hard, in the back of the head. It is easy to let the tears well behind a blindfold at least. Being hit in the dark hurts worse.
I am stopped, at last, with strong hands put squarely on my shoulders. A noise, the first I can identify in a while other than voices, breathing, and footsteps. We are outside still but, with the way the sounds of the banshees bounce off walls, I can feel buildings are close by.
It is a fight not to drop to my knees with pure exhaustion. I try to lock them upright, to lift my chin, roll my head on my neck. The banshees surround me.
The noise is a thumping, nearly rhythmic. I think I can smell skrake, but there is no sense of panic around me. I try again to relax my shoulders, to let go a little. Breathe.
The blindfold is whipped away without a word and I blink into the gloom.
“Night.” A woman’s voice. Thump, thump thump. A swish. “Best time to train.” I blink again and the world comes into focus a little better. “Only time for me, usually.”
She huffs out a couple of
breaths.
“Ash,” Mare whispers, bowing her head.
“An outlier. She’s not bound?” Ash sounds impatient.
I look around. We are standing in a big square, the buildings on each side looming in the dark. Glowering nearly. Packed dirt beneath my feet. It’s hard to see much.
“No, Mother,” Mare says, so quiet her voice just barely reaches through the air.
I watch Ash, fascinated, forgetting about my exhaustion.
Her hair is long for a banshee, and she is taller even than Sene. She lets loose a flurry at her punching bag, a jab-jab-cross, a jab-jab-uppercut-CROSS, and there is something so gorgeous and generous and powerful about her. She finishes with a spinning kick from a standing start and her form is perfect, the force, the height she manages.
She is the biggest person I’ve ever seen, her shoulders rounded, her thighs and upper arms powerful. She walks gracefully, each step managed carefully by dainty, pointed feet. Not a bit out of breath as she comes toward us, unwrapping her handguards. “And the others?”
I am glad she is looking at Mare so I can continue to gape at her.
Suddenly, a rush of activity.
From the other side of the square, coming at us—
Skrake. I knew it.
There are no discernible thoughts. I run past Ash, pushing her aside with all my might, out of the path of the skrake. My hand goes for my last knife, still hidden in its sheath in my ankle, my mother’s knife.
I ground myself and aim, and it is coming so fast, straight for us. I let fly.
Somewhere between aiming and firing I get a look. It is a big one. It had been a large man once, and there are still wisps of hair attached to the scalp. Something wrong with the jaw or what was the jaw: It is hanging off to the side with the skrake’s proboscis, a huge sluglike organ, sliming fully out of its body and up through its mouth. The smell. Once bitten, it will take a week, maybe two, to die. It’s painful. The life shitting out of you. But instead of you just dying, the skrake takes up your body and uses it like a puppet. Fast, vicious, strong, with long sharp teeth, the skrake is like a child’s bad dream.
The skrake goes down about ten foot from where we stand. It is not dead. I know that already. I have to move—the fear is beginning to set on me—but I find my wrists are held tight behind my back.
Ash holds me absolutely still in front of her while the monster rights itself and comes at us, all dead flesh and teeth, and the handle of my knife up to the hilt in its eye socket.
I’m going to die, I think. All this way, I came through so much and now this …
The skrake stops, its jaws going like mad. A metal collar around its neck, its arms. It is held entirely by chains.
Ash’s punching bag.
She lets go my hands and I stumble backward, never taking my eyes off the skrake.
“I go out and bring one back every now and then,” she says, smiling as she walks over to the skrake. Ash casually plucks my knife from its eye, expertly avoiding its
roving hands, the jaw still trying to snap, though it has fallen half off. She wipes the blade of the knife on a length of fabric at her belt.
“I’m going to take care of this for you,” she says, and she lets that warm smile fall directly on me while I sit in the dirt. While my last good knife disappears like the rest.
“I like this one, Mare,” she calls, grinning. “Let’s keep her.”
Six Years Later
Another glorious day in Phoenix City.
Another night done of fitful sleep, waking in the dark, thinking I hear my mother crying for me to come home.
The banshees are up with the sun, the vapors of our dirty breaths mingling together in the shitty air. We dress, as best we can, in various shades of black, the best and darkest clothes on the oldest and wiliest of us. Layers, where we can find them; wraps for our wrists and ankles and breasts. Feet stay bare for the most part; we’ve shoes, but they’re only for missions, and for the latrines. Dressing is ritual, for banshees. There’s an art to the way styles are mixed, there’s ingenuity and guile. We check each other, encourage, edit.
Agata is finishing wrapping her hands, shaking her head at me. “Bad bitch,” she sighs quietly. We put our foreheads together for a moment, letting our breaths mingle, then we’re going.
Our dorm is three stories up, and the noise of the morning is our bare feet on the stone blocks of the stairs, a slapping smooth sound, sending aches into our already cold flesh.
There’s something about that building, with its echoes and smells and the broken windows. There’s a rhythm I can nearly make out every morning, a patter of us working together, working toward something forever just out of reach while whatever is coming up behind us—famine, disease, the skrake—inches closer.
There are worse ways to wake up, so there are. I’ve seen them.
This building was once a hospital. There’s the name of it outside the front on a sign, the letters carved deep into stone. I try to see it as it might have been when it was meant to bring comfort and help to people. The little rooms with the painful-looking equipment, the long, echoing corridors.
Nothing in this building heals now. Banshees do not save anything; we do not bring succor. This is what I have learned.
Whatever whispers of conversation were starting up, warming us into the day, they are cut short on the threshold of the dorms. The city is silent. They’d cut the tongues out of the very dogs. If there were any dogs left. No talking in-house unless it can’t be helped, no talking at all when we’re under the sky, no clanging, no messing, no slipping.
That slapping of our own feet against the ground when we’re out running is the only noise a person who is not a banshee will hear out of us some days. If they’re lucky.
We don’t need to talk to each other anyway. We know each other’s thoughts, we know what jokes Aoife wants to make, which direction Mare will turn us next, we know where Lin’s appraising eye will fall.
Out the back is where we are. The building looms up around on four sides and I can’t help but Beware.
Beware tall …
I’m shrugging it off, my shoulders the same slippery stone of the dorm stairs. The voices of my mothers, warnings from a lifetime ago. I keep trying to leave them behind. Beware tall buildings in case they fall down on you is the learning they drilled into me. One piece among many.
The buildings around us make a box, a place for our morning stretches and afternoon sparring sessions. This area houses nearly all the banshees, except those few high enough to have made management, or to be protecting management, over in Government Buildings. Real beds over there is what I’ve heard. Someone told me there’s taps you can turn on and water will run out, clean and cold. You can bathe in the stuff.
As we file out, the night watch start in. Red-eyed but alert still, silent on their feet, cold as hell despite the extra rations of clothes. I nod at Saoirse, Sanchez, Yen, and the rest of B-Troop. Ahead of me, Agata has her hand out to touch them home in a friendly manner, but Saoirse goes to dig her instead and Agata lets her hand drop. I go for her—I can’t help it. A great leap in the air, a powerful spin kick going straight for Saoirse’s smug little face, but Mare, out of nowhere, throws one of her long legs out to rein me in.
Awful pricks, B-Troop.
Agata’s hand is on my shoulder. I glance at her and she gives a wink. She doesn’t let it bother her. Tough and relaxed and I love her. It annoys me, though. There’s no need to let these pricks push us around.
We’re getting going, together and correct, a team. First in the troop leads, and second enforces, but Mare and Sene don’t need to tell us anything. Stretches done, but we’re only getting cooler in the still morning air. We get them over quick and easy, and we get moving.
We’re running.
We move in our twos, headed out of the hospital complex for the north face of the wall. The limbs are slow and solid-feeling. It’s difficult to move for the first klick or so but we work at it. Getting our feet to hit the ground light, we work on our silence and our speed. We’re running and, beside me, Agata, familiar as my own skin, coughs, hucks up something and spits it elegantly off to her left.
There’s a great brick wall still surrounding the city. On this side of the wall, the city side, there is a trench thirty foot deep and nearly as wide. The earth is taken and used to build up a tall bank, shadowing the wall and reinforcing it, the whole way around the city. The sides are soft with grass. Plants have done their best to grow up out of the earth on either side, and I look at them, thinking: me too. ...
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