Three Inesa
Three
Inesa
The next weeks pass in a rush of storms, relentless and torrential. If I didn’t know better, if I hadn’t lived in Esopus Creek all my life, I’d worry they would never end. But they always do. Eventually, nature permits us a bit of sun.
I pole down to the shop before dawn, the sky humming a tender, pretty blue-pink that belies its ugly origins: air pollution wafting from the City that traps all sorts of noxious gases beneath the smoggy stratosphere. Mom and some of the older folk in Esopus say the air used to smell different, fresher. They always talk about some mythical “before” time, when seasons were drier and milder, when white-tailed deer were abundant, when the trees were filled with birdsong.
It bothers me to hear them talk about it, not because I’m envious, but because this is the only world I’ve ever known. They treat it like the dismal end of some story, but for me, it’s the beginning, whether I like it or not. I’m seventeen, and I’ll never see a dull sunrise.
Main Street is already busy with punters and rafters, people from Lower Esopus shaking out their wet hair. I’m relieved to see Mrs. Prinslew hunched on one of the punts. The deck of her shop is soggy and rotted, the sandbags split open, but the cinder blocks beneath have held firm.
Dr. Wessels is stepping through the door of his shop; his son lingers behind on the porch. I remember when Jacob Wessels was five inches shorter and following Luka, ever popular, around like a puppy. Now his limbs have lengthened, wiry but strong, and his dark curls are cut close to his scalp. His skin is a deep bronze even in this sunless place. He gives me a wave, and my heart flutters.
“Hey, Inesa,” he calls.
I pole over to him and step off my raft onto his porch, stamping my boots dry. “Hi,” I say. “You’re here early.”
“Shadowing my dad,” he says. “He finally decided he was sick of me turning green at the sight of blood, so we’re doing a bit of exposure therapy. Someone is bound to come in needing stitches.”
Hardly a day goes by in Esopus Creek without someone slipping down their steps and gashing their head, wobbling on their raft and falling face-first against the wood, or, when the water is treacherously low, crumpling their raft against one of the sharp rocks that jut upward like shark fins. When Luka was twelve, he crashed into a rock, stripping all the skin from his left forearm and chipping one of his front teeth. I’ve heard girls whispering about how cute his slightly imperfect smile is.
“I was probably just as squeamish when I first started,” I say, which is an understatement. I used to keep a bucket under the counter so I could periodically lean over and retch. “And I only deal with dead things.”
Jacob laughs. “Will it sound creepy if I say sometimes I hope you get hurt—just a little—so I can see you?”
That is creepy, but also kind of sweet, in a weird way. My cheeks are warm. “Best of luck overcoming your phobia of blood. We’re going to need another doctor someday. Already we could do with more than just one.”
Jacob’s smile falters. “Well... he’s training me so I can apply for medical school. In the City. Get an actual Caerus license, get out of here.”
The flush leaves my cheeks, and my veins grow cold. People my age are always talking about leaving Esopus. They wistfully recount their plans to move to the City, or at least to take off to a different town, one on higher ground. Esopus Creek sits in a valley right between the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains, so all the rainwater that gathers on top of those peaks slides down and puddles into our town.
But I’ve never thought about leaving and, as far as I know, neither has Luka. Where would we go? What would we do? The City feels too distant to even imagine. I’ve never even seen one of those sleek high-speed trains that connects the outlying Counties to the metropolitan region downstate. Our dad was born in Esopus, and so was his father, and his father. We’re four generations deep in this water.
Not that this legacy seemed to have any sentimental effect on Dad. He made leaving look so easy. But Luka and I couldn’t abandon Mom. She’d die without us.
I’m about to reply to Jacob when there’s a sudden, powerful gust of wind and a warbling, uneven call that sounds like wood groaning under my feet. Everyone on Main Street looks up, gripped by identical terror.
A winged shadow passes over us, blotting out the shy light of sunrise. We all recognize the creature right away, with its enormous scaly wings and cruelly curved beak, its jagged proportions. It dips and reels overhead, awkward with the novel bloat of its body.
Once upon a time it was a gull, obnoxiously loud and bolder than it had any right to be, but now it’s something else, something treacherous and terrifying. A mutation, transfigured by the polluted air and radiation but most of all by evolutionary necessity.
Everyone ducks and scrambles for cover, and fear rolls over me. I’ve seen gull mutations carry off cats and dogs, and there are rumors that one of them even snatched up a small child.
Larger wings make it easier to stay in flight for longer periods of time. Given the near endless stretches of flooded land in New Amsterdam, you could go for miles without so much as an outcropping for a bird to rest. Water glints off its scales, turning them iridescent as it circles and circles, looking for prey. Scales are better than feathers for sloughing off thick, fetid water. It’s survival of the fittest taken to its most extreme and appalling end.
There’s the crack of a gunshot, and the gull mutation plummets out of the sky. Its body falls into the flooded street, where it floats with its wings outstretched, easily the size of my raft. Blood, almost the same color as the muddy water, trickles from its breast.
Jacob glances at me questioningly, but I’m a taxidermist, not a trash collector. Like everyone else, I’m going to leave the ugly gull mutation where it is, until another rainstorm comes and flushes it away or its body decomposes and joins the water itself.
“Shit,” Jacob said. “I haven’t seen one get this close in a while. Disgusting.”
It’s hard to defend the mutations, especially the ones fabled to carry off small children, but they’re also the only reason I have a job. The faunae of New Amsterdam have been mutating for generations. We have squirrels and deer with scaled bellies, rabbits with webbed paws and canine teeth, and birds grown to monstrous proportions. Changed by the hostile world around us, driven by the bone-deep need all organisms share: to survive.
Everyone thinks they’re hideous, a grotesque reminder of the planet’s inexorable decay. That’s why the work Luka and I do, killing and preserving the last of the unchanged deer, rabbits, squirrels, and birds, is valuable. If it weren’t for us, they’d disappear completely. Stuffed and dead, they’ll exist forever. Mounted in the studies and dining rooms of City folk, they’re immortal.
But seeing a mutation turns my stomach all the same. It’s a reminder that our work has a planned obsolescence, an expiration date. One day we’ll wake up and all the ordinary animals will be gone. Only the mutations will be left, and the lab-grown meat that Caerus drones carry to our doorsteps.
Our livelihood will die with them. To Luka, I know it’s just a paycheck, a shallow cushion between us and a steep pit of debt. Maybe I’m the only one who assigns a deeper meaning to it. Even Jacob talked about leaving like it’s the simplest thing in the world. I can’t help feeling like I’m holding on to something that is slipping further and further out of my grasp with every passing day. I say goodbye to Jacob and step back onto my raft, poling toward the shop.
The stubborn leak in the ceiling has filled the bucket beneath to its brim, but the shop is dry—a relief. I empty it and then unload Luka’s latest haul. Two rabbits, already stiff, and the deer, which is so heavy in death that I’m panting by the time I’ve dragged it onto my worktable. Since we have a down payment on the deer, I start with him first. He’s young—still a few fading white spots on his flank—but his antlers have come in nicely, a broad and curling coronet of bone.
With my buck knife, I cut a seam down his belly, careful to puncture just the skin and not any of the muscles or organs underneath. It took me a long time to be able to make such precise cuts—it pains me to think how many potential mounts I ruined back then, all those credits down the drain. At least we could eat those deer. We had venison stew and venison jerky for weeks afterward.
I like to think of it as taking off the animal’s shirt and pants. That makes it easier to stomach. Like the heart of the animal isn’t its skin, or its meat, or even its actual heart. There’s something enduring but invisible that constitutes the very core of the creature. I’d call it a soul , but even I wouldn’t take myself seriously if I spoke the word aloud. And Luka would laugh at me.
Unlike with Luka’s hunting, there was no one to teach me taxidermy. I figured it out by myself, over the course of several bloody, woozy months. My early mounts were overstuffed and lopsided, and they looked half like mutations themselves. People bought them anyway; people from the outlying Counties, at least. We didn’t start getting our City customers until my work started getting decent, only a year and a half ago. It was convenient timing, because that’s when Dad disappeared for good.
I slip the young buck out of his skin, taking care not to rip the hide. He’s so freshly dead that there are still some oils in his coat, and it’s soft under my hands as I lay it out on the drying table.
Dad approved of the business. He approved of doing anything outside Caerus’s control. A system of exploitation , he called it. The more dependent we are on Caerus, the more power we give them. Dad’s whole life was about outsmarting, evading. When he was around, we never went without power because he figured out sly—and very illegal—ways to wire us to the grid. As far as I know, he never had a single credit on his account. When he needed something, he bartered for it, offering his skills as a self-taught electrician, handyman, or hunter. He patched roofs and fixed plumbing. He rebuilt Mrs. Prinslew’s crumbling porch, with Luka hanging around to hand him wrenches or hammers. I could tell from Luka’s furrowed brow that he was trying to commit everything Dad did to memory, so that one day he could do it, too. I know he imagined they’d be a team, father and son evading that system of exploitation together.
My chest tightens suddenly, surprising me. I thought I’d gotten numb to memories of Dad, but now they wash over me like floodwater. I can feel his strong arms around my shoulders, and see his warm brown eyes crinkling when he smiled. The knife wobbles in my hand and I have to put it down and draw in a breath so I don’t make the wrong cut.
Dad was born in Esopus Creek, but he spoke differently and thought differently than everyone else. His mother was a schoolteacher. She had a lot of pre-Caerus books around, histories that were otherwise obliterated. People and places we were never supposed to know, or at least were supposed to forget. I wish I had paid more attention to the things he told us, but that’s the way it always is: You never really understand what’s important until you lose it.
Dad was the one who told me about evolution and natural selection. Only the strongest creatures survive, so their traits are passed down to their descendants. Gulls with larger wingspans were more likely to survive, so with each successive generation, their wings grew larger and larger. The new replaces the old. The powerful replace the powerless.
“Don’t let Caerus think there’s anything natural about what they’re doing, Nesa,” Dad had said. “They’ve created conditions that allow some organisms to thrive and others to die—all by their design. It’s intentional. We aren’t less-evolved creatures. We’re just land animals in a sinking world, and they’re the sea animals. If the lakes and rivers were drying up and the sea level was falling instead of rising, they’d die like beached fish. Do you see what I mean?”
To tell the truth, Dad drank more than he should have, so when he talked, his eyes turned glassy and far away, and his stories meandered and zigzagged until he was slurring words and dropping syllables. And I didn’t usually understand him, not really.
Most of the time, it was hard to imagine how he and Mom had ever ended up together. But in those moments, I could see it. In their own ways, they both thought they deserved more from the world than it had given them.
Dad coped with it by slipping further and further off Caerus’s grid, and ours, until one day we woke up and he was gone. Mom copes with it the way she does. And Luka and I just try to keep our heads above water.
But Dad leaving ripped a wound in Luka that I don’t think will ever heal. As much as he thinks I’m the softhearted idealist between us, he’s the one who believed the things Dad said about escaping Caerus’s system, about being free. I’m not sure I can believe it the way Luka does.
And anyway, right now I’m up to my elbows in dead deer.
I should’ve started with the rabbits. I didn’t eat anything before I left the house and I feel lightheaded. I salt the deer’s skin and then take a step back, drawing in a shaky breath. I’m suddenly overcome with the desperate desire to do anything but this ugly, bloody, small work. I march up to the counter instead and turn on my tablet.
I scroll through my receipts and accounts, my virtual ledger. There’s the City buyer who wanted four mounted stag heads, Arend Meester. I could barely understand his thick Damish accent. Next to him is Floris Dekker, and I flinch at the sales column: seventy-five credits. It should have been ninety at least. And that’s not even accounting for what I risked by helping him.
But Floris hasn’t left his house since the day he spread his daughter’s dead body across my counter. I wonder if he’ll ever leave again. Someone—I really wonder who—splashed black paint across the door of his Caerus pod home. Coward.
I shake my head, as if to clear it of the memory, and keep scrolling through the accounts. It’s almost impossible to tell a City resident from an Outlier by name alone, because New Amsterdam’s provincial government offered an incentive program a while back for Outliers to change their names to Damish. Ten thousand credits of debt, erased—we really could have used that, but Mom had refused. She said people had been trying to make us change our family name for centuries, including the officials at the City immigration port where our great-great-great-whatever ancestors first landed. They came from a small village in some old country thousands of miles away, where they ate mostly cabbage and didn’t work on Saturdays, which doesn’t sound too bad.
In the Dominion of New England, just north of us, they offered a similar financial incentive for people to change their names to things like Prudence and Bartholomew. I don’t think I’d ever do that, not even for fifty thousand credits.
I’m so zoned out staring at my tablet that I hardly notice when the door of the shop swings open. I only startle when I hear how heavy the footsteps are on the floor. Thick, weather-resistant boots made of durable rubber. No one in Esopus has boots like that.
Slowly, my gaze rolls upward, from the boots to the pale gray suit, inexplicably dry and entirely featureless, save for the Caerus insignia on the breast.
I can’t make eye contact with the Mask, of course, but I fix my stare about where I think its eyes should be. I can’t see anything in the smooth metal visor except my own reflection, warped and tiny, like a fish trapped in a bowl.
“Hello,” I say. “Welcome to Soulis Taxidermy Shop. How can I help you?”
We’ve had Masks in here before, sent by Caerus to appraise the shop. Sometimes they offer to buy it, but Luka and I always refuse. Even though I didn’t understand everything Dad said, I know when someone is trying to stiff me.
I assume this Mask is here for the same reason. Usually they send us a notification, my tablet screen momentarily blinking red. Not this time, though it doesn’t matter. I’m not selling the shop.
I’m preparing my most polite refusal when the Mask shocks me by saying my full name aloud.
“Inesa Yael Soulis.”
It’s not a question. I cringe at hearing it in the Mask’s staticky, monotone voice. “Yes?”
“Account number 6415506781.”
With its flat, robotic tone, it’s hard to tell if this is a question. “Yes?” I try again hesitantly.
“You have been nominated for the Lamb’s Gauntlet beginning March eighth. More information will be forwarded to your tablet.”
“What?” The word comes out strangled. I stare at the smooth metal visor, my mind racing, and I don’t understand.
“The Lamb’s Gauntlet,” the Mask repeats. If there’s a tinge of annoyance to its voice, I can’t suss it out. It just sounds like the buzz of black flies as they hover around a corpse. The memory of Sanne flashes through my mind, the muddied hem of her white dress, her still-open eyes. And, then, worse: the flash of the Angel’s white hair. Her gloved hands, sliding up the barrel of her rifle. The utterly inhuman coldness of her stare.
This all happens to other people, not to me. To people who carelessly let themselves slip so far into the red that they can’t dig themselves out. My thoughts skip around, scattered. We’ve never gone a single credit into debt. Luka and I work so hard to keep our family out of the red. It can’t be me.
“Your Gauntlet will begin in twelve hours. Please refer to your tablet for the countdown.”
There’s a roaring in my ears, my blood pounding like rainwater down a mountainside. It can’t be me. Unless—
“Who?” I manage.
“What?” I imagine some impatience in the Mask’s voice.
“My sponsor,” I say, my voice a weak croak. “Who is it?”
But I already know.
“Account number 8148775617, Janina Soulis.”
The words should hit me like a blow to the head. Instead I just stand there behind the counter, staring blankly at the Mask. My brain is sparking like a cut wire. My throat is dry.
And then the Mask steps forward. All it takes is one swift movement and their fingers close around my upper arm. I don’t have the time, or the reflexes, to react. The Mask jerks me forward until I’m bent over the counter, knocking the breath out of me.
“Please,” I gasp. “Don’t—”
In the Mask’s other hand is something that looks like a syringe, only appallingly large, as wide around as my two fingers. Three needles protrude from its end, each one shiny and solid-looking and terrifying. The syringe is made of sleek metal, opaque, so I can’t even tell what’s inside.
“Your tracker will be inserted now,” the Mask says. “Hold still.”
All I can do is choke out a wordless protest, tears blurring my vision.
The Mask plunges the syringe into my throat and immediately the counter flies up at me. I hear the crack of my head against the wood, and then everything goes black.