The best time to find your bones is four hours after sundown on a festival night, when the sorcerers drink to escape the truth of what they have done. Bring your wedding dress. Do not worry about the floodlights. Do not worry about the drones with their scrambling claws, or the bots on the ramparts, or what your mother will say. She does not understand. She never did.
There is a set of forgotten stairs in the south of the city, behind the spindling, abandoned insulae where fishermen once slept; they crumble like broken teeth, and the cold wind can jostle even the heaviest of our metal bodies from our almost-forgotten dreams. I will wait for you at the top, guarding your path. I will wrap you in blankets and kiss you with a memory as bitter as midnight.
We will pretend to be warm.
Do you remember what the world looked like before they took our bones to make the wall? That there was land outside our drowned city? Do you remember what we gave up in order to survive the rising waters? Our bodies, our breath, how we thought mere survival was preferable to skin? The long shining beach slipping into the black ocean, the waves gasping and breathing to reclaim the land? Close what once were your eyes and see it now, with the five moons above, scattered across the sky like the diodes that regulate the voltage across your small circuits. The beach is gone now, but—
You do remember.
We would sit there for hours. You would bury your toes in the sand, your skull a welcome weight on my thin shoulders. Our fingers twisted tight together, our teeth white in the dappled sun under the great oak where we married. Do you remember the sun? The leaves twisting in the summer breeze, your white veil lifting in the wind? There it is, the very tree—just now tiny dead branches gasping, spindle-grey, above the encroaching waters. Next year it will drown.
Just like us.
You can start to see the bones at the top of the stairs, here—white striations just behind the cement, glittering in the moonlight. Spindly phalanges and long, thin ulnas, the curve of a rib, the jut of a maxilla, writ together to keep the rising waters away. We once thought it a good trade. Just our bones, they said, and they would give us forever in return. Just our bones, and everything that mattered.
You are frightened, now. I understand. I am frightened, too. Embrace it. It’s all we have left. Be in that moment between shivers; relish the memory of your skittering heartbeat. Forget these shining ingot bodies, their numb, careful manipulations. Forgive them. Without them, we would have died long ago.
But you want more.
That’s why you came to find me after all these lost years, these numb and blank centuries, why you told me about the code you were injecting, the scripts that made your broken nerves sing, how you pushed your metal heart so fast the gearstems wore down to their wet silicon bases, just so you could feel something again. I suppose when the sorcerers built the wall that would save us, they forgot to kill the part of us that would accept being caged.
Look—there they are. Our bones are still mingled like the keys of a piano, fingers wrapped together like they were on the day of our wedding, like the day we went to give our bodies to the glorious cause. Here—give me your laser cutter, use the trowel on the limestone and gneiss, watch as the stone drip-plops to the molasses ocean. I will do the rest. Sibilance and undulance, the poetry of sorcery.
Two hundred years of serving the sorcerers, pouring their drinks, mopping up vomit, managing their shame—you can learn anything if you listen.
I hear our bones aching. I see them shine. Crack away the polyethylene rind of your shoulder. You do not need it. Hammer the pelvis into place. Twist the phalanges on. You’ve brought the packing tape? Good. It will be fine connective tissue for our lost and broken spines, for the blue crackling muscles and tendons that will support the rest of the structure. The sweet, nutty bone marrow is long gone; we will replace it with the cold air of the blistered sky. The important thing is that we be light, like the birds that no longer exist.
Now the wings, cut from the wedding dress you saved. Your veil, for feathers. The sorcerers told you that part of your life was over when they took your bones to keep the waters at bay, that you could not love without the silver lies that serotonin speaks, but what do they know? Serotonin is just code.
And so are we, for just a little while longer.
We are almost finished. You tie each feather on my rig like a prayer. I take your every cracking blow with a smile. Do you remember what it was like to smile?
Step forward, my love. Let your crackling bones embrace the edge of forever. The frigid wind is screaming from the east. The dark beaches are out there. Trees grow beyond the horizon. They must. We will hear the sparrows sing.
We go tonight.
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Karen Osborne is the Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Award-nominated author of Architects of Memory and Engines of Oblivion from Tor Books. A graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop, her short fiction appears in Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Fireside, Escape Pod, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and has been selected for LeVar Burton Reads. For more information, please visit www.karenosborne.com. |