Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Five soldiers rode across the plains,

At a cave they arrived.

I opened my eyes and gazed at the outside of my apartment building.

How curious that I was here and that I'd just opened my eyes. That meant they'd been closed. I remembered Ox's eyes on mine. Their terrible void and nothingness.

I shivered, and though the cold hadn't caused me to shake, a chill crept over me. Many strange things had happened already today.

"You okay, girl?"

I glanced down the fairway. Mother said cars used to drive in the spaces between apartment buildings. Now, plants, whether flower or grain, carpeted the roads from door to door. Lupins currently grew here, but in other places, buckwheat or mustard were used at this time of year. A garden team toiled at the task of harvesting the lupins with their sickles, loading the chopped flowers onto a wagon afterward. The lupins would be used to build soil for food crops in the garden centers. I might've chosen to specialize in that skill in another version of my life.

A gardener had paused in the middle of the harvesting row, sickle by her side as she awaited my reply.

Nodding once, I forced my focus back to my apartment building.

The memory of Ox's gaze swam behind my eyes again. My mind had squeezed so painfully at what I hadn't seen in their depths. He'd had no trace of person in him. His eyes had lacked hopes and dreams and fears and experience. I didn't want to think about them.

So maybe I wouldn't.

What else had happened this morning? I recalled in a rush that Ox, Stag, and Sand Cat had closed Hotel Vitale. I had three days of medicine for my mother and two days of food. No money for rent tomorrow. Of all the misfortune that Hotel Vitale should close on payday. I should have asked the daydreaming skull for my pay. As it was, I'd need to track down Frank and hope the skeleton crew hadn't put him in a ditch. Dead people couldn't pay their previous employees. Maybe Frank had another venture he could employ me for.

The woman called again, "You sure you're okay, lady?"

Was I? I couldn't tell.

I glanced at the sun, nearly straight above. Midday.

"Drat," I murmured.

Only pausing to pick up two handfuls of my sage linen dress and hotel apron, I darted to the entrance of my apartment building. Yanking a rusty key from under the high neckline of my dress, I unlocked the building door and took the stairs in twos and threes until arriving at the third floor.

Panting, I fitted a different and equally rusted key into the lock of our apartment.

"Rent due tomorrow," the landlady rasped through her cracked doorway down the hall. She coughed her wet cough.

I nodded like I did every week at this same time and during the same conversation. "Yes. Tomorrow."

Pushing inside, I shut and locked the door again. I didn't have the luxury of sliding down the door to sink into a heap, though I'd rather like to. Striding through a short hall to the cool room instead, I crouched to reach into the depths of the corner cupboard and pulled out a small vial, one of three.

I half-ran past the front door again and through to my bedroom, where I heaved aside a small trunk against the wall to reveal a smaller hole behind.

I wiggled through the hole into darkness, with the vial clutched tight in my hand.

Flat on my stomach, I reached back through to drag the trunk over the hole once more.

Pitch-black.

This space was once an elevator shaft, an ancient contraption invented so tired people didn't need to climb stairs. I'd long since moved past the ridiculousness of such an invention to feel deeply grateful to the person who'd wondered them into existence.

The day of Mother's stroke, which marked the start of her withering disease, she'd become illegal per the laws of Vitale that demanded resources go to the fit and able only. Those laws gave an invalid the choice of death by needle or death over the wall, and neither had appealed to Mother. And so, from a tiny hiding place in our last apartment, she'd bid me hunt down the few buildings that remained with elevator shafts. These were the crumbliest buildings in the city, and no one wanted to live in them, so securing an apartment hadn't been any trouble, even for an unskilled nineteen-year-old.

I'd broken through the wall into the shaft when the landlady went to do her shopping one day. Piece by piece over two weeks when the landlady went out, I'd built a platform in the elevator shaft, and then—under the frail cover of night, I'd carted Mother here from across the city.

I'd stayed on at our old building another week and invited our friends and neighbors for a farewell tea party so they firmly believed Mother gone. They'd assumed I'd moved across the city for cheaper accommodations. They'd pitied me because I turned from schooling before specializing in a skill that would earn me better prospects in life. They'd believed me incapacitated by overwhelming grief and unaware of the ramifications of my choice. I would always struggle to make ends meet because I'd missed my one and only chance.

They'd been wrong about one thing, though. I didn't turn from that easier future because of grief.

But because of love.

"Patch, my love," Mother wheezed in greeting.

"You're awake. Are you in pain? I'm late today."

"I'm fine enough."

My mother could be in excruciating pain and still answer the same.

"I have your midday dose," I said.

I stepped on the most solid boards and crossed to where Mother reclined on a mattress in the corner. I'd stitched together burlap sacks the night before bringing her here, then stuffed the huge bag with worn bedding I couldn't sell. Mother said the mattress did the job well enough. I knew "well enough" from treating her bed sores that wasn't the case. The thing was, I had no more to give her, and that made my heart ache from dawn to dusk and back again.

She sighed. "Is it only midday? I thought it afternoon."

I crouched beside her on the mattress and kissed her pale, warm cheek. "Here it is."

"Hold off on the medicine, for now, my love. Tell me of your morning."

The times before I administered more medicine were her most lucid, and we both enjoyed them. She'd lived in this shaft for nearly nine months—hidden from sun and people and everything that filled a soul with joy. Pitched into darkness, what life was this? Death would be kinder.

Like me, though, a harder future didn't deter Mother, and she'd informed me many times that her life couldn't end yet. She said that I'd get hurt if she left early.

I believed my mother.

"I lost my job," I told her. "A skeleton crew shut down the hotel. I went to speak to their boss, but he wouldn't hire me."

She gasped. "Patch! A skull as your employer? What were you thinking? Did they harm you?"

"I'm fine enough." I sounded just like her, so I added, "They didn't hurt me. They just behaved oddly."

Shivering again, I tried to brush away the cobwebs of strangeness. The unsettling feeling caused by Ox's nothing eyes remained, however, and I'd only experienced something like it once in the blurred days after Mother's stroke.

Though I could remember each action undertaken back then, the memories had a blur to them. I'd spent our entire savings on a pig carcass to throw over walls, waiting until the carrion birds and sand had time to do their work before reporting Mother's disappearance and possible suicide to the law agents. As far as they were aware, the females in our line had a consistent history of such things. The rapid beating of my heart was what I recalled most from those days, just like the beating of my heart now.

"You need more medicine." I reached for her arm.

She jerked away. "Not yet."

Without medicine, she suffered from spasms that wrenched her weakening body rigid. Mother said the spasms would lock her heart up and throw away the key one day, but medicine would give her enough time. I would have chosen a locked-up heart over losing my mind to a medicine-induced haze each day only to slowly die in a dark elevator shaft, but then, by not entering the breeding pens, I was making a choice that forty-nine daughters before me hadn't.

The day of my stroke, I'd choose death over the wall as my fate.

"Let me change your toilet cloths at least," I said.

She relaxed against the pillows while I rolled her and changed the toilet cloths for fresh ones. I shoved the dirty linens out through the hole, dragging the trunk back after.

"Tell me of the skull and his skeleton, daughter," she said. "How were they odd?"

I cut her a sharp look. She'd said "skeleton" instead of "skeleton crew," and that drifted close to the all-knowing terror of the skull's comments.

I didn't wish to speak of my time with them. I wanted to go along with my mind's suggestion to deny the entire experience.

"You shouldn't leave your arm bent like that," I scolded, pulling her left arm straight. Too fast—her bicep spasmed and locked. I bent her elbow again, then extended her arm slower. "Leave it like this, will you?"

She became more curled and caved with each week. I needed to move her more, exercise her, feed her proper food, and stitch together a bed of clouds she could adjust with the press of a button.

I needed to give my mother so much like she'd given me so much. Yet I couldn't.

"Strange in what way?" she asked in a sterner voice.

I looked into her blue eyes, so like mine and so like her mother's. "The skeleton and skull spoke of possibilities. I didn't understand what they meant, only that they knew more than they should about me. They knew of your withering, and yet they didn't care about it as they should either. They could've used the information to make me obey them or as a bargaining chip with law agents. Maybe they still will. Mother, I felt like a puzzle piece in their company, but they had no interest in figuring out where I would fit in the jigsaw. The skull didn't like my company. I was grossly unset, he said, and purposeless." I frowned. I begrudged that comment in a way I didn't begrudge much ever.

My mother watched me from her corner, skin pale and sickly as always.

I didn't wish to worry her. "Strange, as I said. Nothing more. They didn't harm me." I'd ignore the part where I woke up here without any memory of the journey.

"They affected you," she rasped. "You are unsettled."

I was struck by how much she appeared like skin stretched over bones. "Today was an unusual one. I will need another job, and the hotel job gave me such hope for a few months."

"You will have purpose soon. Do not fret," Mother said. She smiled right into me, and for a blink, I saw my mother how she'd been—beautiful and stern, full of movement and energy. Then she closed her eyes, and I saw her for what she'd become.

"Here," I said. "We can't delay your medicine any longer."

When she didn't hold out her right arm, I took her hand, kissed the back, and made quick work of administering the anti-spasm meds.

"Thank you, my only love," she whispered.

I kissed the back of her hand again. "Thank you, my only mother."

My only parent.

My father was as unknown as hers and as unknown as all the fathers in our line since The End. Hardly anyone knew their father, though, so there was nothing strange about that. Couples did exist in Vitale, but I'd only met one in my life who was certified to have children outside of the breeding pens. The vast majority of us had an anonymous sperm donor for a father—likely from one of the other seven hundred and thirteen walled cities.

Mother said women used to meet men and be romanced and wooed into lasting unions. She'd spoken of forbidden romances powerful enough to start wars. She'd said that people used to have children without knowing whether the genetic outcome was favorable. They'd had no agenda but love. The time before The End seemed a wild fairy tale, and I could never decide if the lot of them were fools or whether I felt saddened such tales of magic and freedom were now myth.

A haze spread across Mother's blue irises, one that freed and imprisoned her by turn. I didn't want her lucidness to go. I hated this haze that stole our conversation away. Despite this, I spent whatever time was available to me in this elevator shaft, watching her slip away like sand through my hands.

What would fill my days when she left me here alone?

"I will stay with you, Mother." Please stay with me , I silently added.

I lay on the mattress, holding her—my everything—close. She'd been my everything even while warning me that one day, the withering sickness would claim her. Since my earliest memories, I'd lived in fear of that day, then in numbness of it, then anger and acceptance of it, just like forty-nine other daughters in our line.

Twelve hundred years of daughter watching Mother curl in and cave away to death.

This anguish would stop with me.

Mother's voice rang strong and clear. " Men in threes, I steer clear of thee. Perantiqua, have I taught you nothing?"

Lucid mother was gone. This was the part where she tended to say any number of things and call me by my full name before falling into a drug-induced sleep. I didn't love this part.

"I remembered, Mother. Just not until too late."

"Not too late, love of mine. You are too early, don't you know?" She laughed. "But soon..."

I should humor her. If I didn't, she got loud. I lived in constant fear the landlady would hear her through the walls, though two empty apartments sat on the other side of us.

"Too early for what?"

"Your possibility." She laughed again. "For now, there are so many."

My skin crawled at the similarity of her comment to what the skull had said.

I startled when she gripped my wrist and rose to sit in the bed. I hadn't seen Mother sit unassisted in months, and awe struck me to stillness when she wrenched upward like a creature from the dead, an unhinged sparkle in her blue gaze.

"Soon it will be time." Mother flopped flat again and turned her head to face me. "Fifty mothers, fifty gifts."

She'd said this before. "Yes, Mother."

"You do not know, my child, my love, our legacy."

"What don't I know?"

She chanted,

" Five soldiers rode across the plains,

At a cave they arrived.

Green light shone from far within,

So sought it, the brave five.

A pulsing power, a stone half-buried,

Beckoned, taunted, coaxed.

'Til five brave men, in unison did,

Touch left hand to olden rock. "

Her voice faded, and I felt her will drain away. Her frail, twisted body started to shake.

My mother was a picture of the things a person shouldn't take for granted—and she'd never taken anything for granted before withering. She'd become a painting of mortality's failings. Looking at her, a person might remember that a functioning body, a free mind, and a life in the sun were luxuries. They might go on with life happier about their lot.

Nine months ago, I'd gained any number of conventional troubles, but I'd gained a deep appreciation to match. The shadow of Mother's condition didn't darken everything around her as I'd assumed and instead made everything else brighter. If only a person chose to look closely, they would find that tragedy was a pedestal where the most precious diamonds could be found on display.

Mother spoke again, making me jolt. I'd thought her asleep.

"A mother's love is Perantiqua ," she stated.

I smiled. The comment wasn't unusual for her in this state. My name meant "very ancient."

She said next, "Mother's love will make you strong. You have been our pain and our purpose. You will be magnificence . I love you, my Patch."

I frowned. She never called me Patch during a haze. Never.

And why was my heart pounding so?

Her grip slid away, and as always, I whipped my hand out to catch hers, checking her pulse.

Still there. As erratic as ever, but still there.

I cradled her hand in mine, kissing the middle of her palm. "Stay with me for another day, Mother. Please stay."