Escaping Exodus Read online

  We’re done for.

  Wheytt leads the way as the three of us file through the belly of the beast. I leave footprints upon the ground where it’s soft and still moist, not the paved walkways I am used to. I’d wanted to see excavation, and I’m seeing it. The beast’s stomach is still a wide expanse of wild frontier, full of the untamed life native to the beast’s gut, an ecosystem that nourishes the beast during its journey through the void. Soon it will nourish us. This is where we will live, big, beautiful ceiling of flesh lofting over us. Incisions are cut here and there as workers pull resources from other parts of the beast. Slivers of rib are used for scaffolding and building materials, harvested and carved up by boneworkers. The hide is thick and is cut for work leathers and boots, while silks are harvested from gall worms—big lumbering beasts the size of two full-grown women. It’ll take a ton of work to get this place habitable, but unlike our cramped ship that now clings to the beast’s hide like a wart, there is room for us to expand here, to live here. To thrive. But right now, it feels so cavernous and empty without structures climbing up the walls, and so hollow without the wild calls of vendors, the laughter of my cohort, and all the scents and textures of the meticulously manicured gardens in which I often find myself lost, both in thought and body.

  My stomach still cramps, but it’s from dread now and not my menses. What I thought would be a ten-minute journey upon walkways cobbled with pearlescent stones has turned into a thirty-minute slog through a hostile, overgrown marsh—and we are only halfway to Matris’s throne room.

  Now that I’ve had the time to think clearly, I realize the real trouble we are facing. Maybe Adalla can tolerate the thumb hanging, but even if she can, she’d be left with a criminal record. She’d end up a boneworker with ornate scars covering her whole body, bone chips in her hair, probably in a gang. Or worse, she’d be sent to swab the beast’s bowels right as she is starting her years of courtship. What kind of wives and husbands would she find there among the refuse? Other criminals serving their time instead of respectable beastworkers? My heart weeps, thinking about the little bowel-swabbing child her family unit would share, a daughter most likely, her hair brittle from a nutrient-deficient diet, unable to hold the braids or twists or knots of her family line.

  And then I am actually weeping, over the nonexistent future of a nonexistent child. Adalla lays her hand upon my shoulder.

  “Are you okay, Seske?” she whispers into my ear. Wheytt walks several feet ahead of us, but I am certain he is listening.

  There’s not much I can do to deter my punishment, but Matris is expecting only me. If I can get Adalla free, it will be my word against Wheytt’s, and whose word would Matris believe? I cringe. Wheytt’s probably, but he’d have no physical proof and Adalla would be spared.

  I take Adalla’s hands in mine and draw the Vvanescript symbol for we. Adalla looks at me, confused. But then I cup my ear and nod at Wheytt to indicate that he might be eavesdropping, wink at her, and start the inscription again. We . . . Adalla’s eyebrows crinkle as she looks at the strokes I made. Adalla’s still learning, but she’s sharp, and I’m not a bad teacher either. Yet when I retrace the script once more, slowly, she shakes her head.

  “I don’t remember,” she whispers. How can she not remember? We’ve been practicing her Vvanescript for four months straight! We’d just had a session last night, right before—

  Exodus.

  I bite my lip. For me, it feels like hours ago, but for Adalla, it’s been nearly half a year. Once our old beast’s resources had waned beyond the point of being sustainable, Matris had ordered all nonessential Contour class family units into their stasis pods, while the Accountancy Guard began the meticulous task of taking stock of everything that would need to be re-created, and then beastworkers condensed or dismantled or eviscerated the insides until every last usable scrap from the beast had been harvested.

  Daidi’s bells. Why can’t I ever catch a break? “Do you trust me?” I say to Adalla, more than a whisper, because there’s no use trying to hide.

  “Of course,” Adalla says.

  “Then give me your ley light and follow my lead.”

  Wheytt stops and turns around and approaches me. “What are you plotting, Matriling Kaleigh?” His brow is doing that patronizing thing again. It fires me up inside. And then I realize why. It’s the same look Matris gives me when she’s too disappointed for words. It is a flimsy imitation, though, and I refuse to be intimidated by it. I’ll show him and his stupid heightened senses. Behind my back, Adalla’s ley light sits coldly in my hand. I grab the goggles from Wheytt’s face. Immediately, he winces and brings his hands to his temples.

  The color of his eyes strikes me—his irises so pale, they’re nearly white, and the pupils are like a burst of black ink, spilling out in all directions. I blink, stunned by their odd beauty . . .

  Adalla tugs my arm. “I’m supposed to be following your lead . . .”

  Ah. The ley light. I shake it vigorously, until the solution inflames and then shoots out a bright red light. I shove it right in Wheytt’s face. His howl echoes through the cavernous, not-yet city of our beast. His hands go to his eyes and he falls to the ground. “You’ve blinded me!” he calls out.

  “Only temporarily,” I yell back, as Adalla and I make our way to the large knotted twist of a woodward canopy, more of a cave than a tree. We duck inside, but instead of the familiar neat paths I’m used to strolling upon, there is a thick tangle of reeds resting in a swamp of putrid burbling juices. Carnivorous plants snap at us, and thorny vines cling to the ceiling, scratching at our skin as we pass under them. I look back, and Wheytt is stumbling around, eyes clenched shut and hands outstretched. Then his nose sniffs at the air and he turns and starts walking right toward us. I’ve knocked out one of his senses, but he’s still more than capable of tracking us down. Plus now, he’s really mad.

  I take a step and the spongy ground swallows my leg up to my calf. “Come on. We can hide in here. He won’t be able to track us. Not with this smell.”

  “Seske,” Adalla says to me in a way that makes me stop and look back at her. I’d asked her to trust me, but I can see in her eyes that it is taking everything in her being to do so. “Are you sure we’re not just making things worse?”

  I shake my head adamantly. “Your child is not going to be a brittle-haired bowel-worker with criminal parents!”

  “My what?”

  I don’t answer, just tug her deeper into the canopy, carving my way through the native flora and fauna and those things caught between. I feel something slither past my ankles, and suddenly, one of those things caught between catches me. A tentacled frond spirals up and around my thigh and tightens until my circulation is choked off and my leg throbs like my veins are about to burst. I shriek. Adalla shrieks, caught by the tentacles as well. I pull my bone shard and cut like mad, freeing myself, then freeing Adalla.

  Wheytt shrieks, a blood-curdling cry that makes all the critters in the canopy go silent. Shadows twist in the murderous red glow coming from the ley light, and this place gets a whole lot creepier. Thoughts of Adalla’s torturous spirits run through my mind, and just for a moment, I worry that one has gotten to Wheytt and that we’ll be next, but when I look back, Wheytt’s battling a crib worm, of all things, its latch bored right into the exposed skin on his neck.

  It’s cute, as far as crib worms go: big, fat circular mouth, pudgy grayish-purple body, and stubby little tail. Their venom is harmless, and in fact, it’s soothing. I’d slept with one until I was nearly twelve years old, though I won’t admit it to anyone, not even Adalla. They draw blood, but not much, and their latch tickles more than anything, but on Wheytt’s hypersensitive skin, it’s probably agonizing. He shrieks again.

  I sigh. “I suppose I should save him,” I say to Adalla. “Go back home, and if anyone asks where you were, deny everything. I’ll cover for you.”

  “Is that an order from my future matriarch?” she says with a grin.

 
; “It’s a request from your best friend. This is all my stupid idea. You don’t need to suffer for it.” I give her a quick hug, her arms as tight around me as that tentacle frond had been. I feel the heat rise in my cheeks, knowing my tattoos have brightened two and a half shades.

  And then Adalla is off, and I’m left with boy wonder here.

  “Be still,” I say to him, his eyes still clenched. Removing a crib worm this big can be a tricky maneuver. Luckily, I’ve had a ton of practice. I examine it from all angles, looking for the darkest of the dark spots beneath its chins. Carefully, I plunge my finger into the soft divot and wiggle around until I feel the nodule beneath. I rub at it a few times until the crib worm begins to purr, and the suction breaks with an audible gasp. I cradle it in my arms, tickle its underside. For a moment, I am a young girl again, not one teetering on the responsibilities of womanhood.

  “This is all going into my ledger,” Wheytt scolds me, rubbing at the purple hickey on his neck. His eyes are just barely slits now. I bid myself not to look directly into them. “I could have died, you know.”

  “What?” I’m suddenly filled with hope. “You could have died? So you’re saying I saved your life?”

  “No, but—”

  “I just saved your life, and as such, you’re bound by Fate’s Accounts. And while you’re at it, I think a thank-you is in order.” I smile to myself. Wheytt owes me one. Adalla will be spared.

  “Thank you?” Wheytt tries to give me my mother’s scowl, but he can’t. There’s something else sitting on his brow now. Not quite respect . . . more like restrained derision, but I’ll take it.

  “This may all be a joke to you,” he continues, “but another minute of that, and I could have gone into sensory overload, and you would have been charged with deadly assault. Not even your pedigree would save you from that.”

  “For giving you a hickey? You mean neither of your wives ever laid one on you?”

  He flinches. I’ve made him uncomfortable. He’s obnoxious, yes, and probably deserves it, but I’d never ask something like that from one of my mother’s female guards.

  “Sorry,” I say to him. I hand Wheytt his goggles and watch those exotic eyes disappear behind them. “Sometimes my mouth says things before I get the chance to think them through.” The silence stirs between us, and I dig my foot into the murk, kicking up black grit from the bottom. It swirls in pleasing patterns.

  “You know this place hasn’t been neutralized yet,” Wheytt finally says. Behind the dark lenses of his goggles, I feel his eyes smiling at me, even though his lips deny it. “We’re basically slowly digesting in this beast’s stomach acids.”

  “Eh,” I say. “There are worse fates.” Like the one currently awaiting me in the throne room.

  Near the head of the beast, things start to look more normal. Behind the scaffolding, boneworkers have already completed the framework for our family dwelling and those of twelve of the thirty-seven Senators. Walls are starting to go up, and nerve lines are being rerouted to fill our rooms with a pulsing pale-blue light.

  Then I feel a foreign movement beneath my feet. The ground lurches. My eyes flick to Wheytt. He’s as startled as I am, which brings me no comfort.

  “It’s just a little tremor,” he says, jotting something in his ledger. “We’ve been having them all day.” His head pricks up from his book. His body tenses, his mouth opens slightly, and I get the feeling that his mind has floated off to somewhere not quite here—

  Wheytt shoves me forward, into a naturally occurring canal, then shields my body with his. Right when I begin to protest about being handled so roughly, the ground bucks again, harder this time. Someone barks out instructions, and the boneworkers react, helping one another down to safety in five seconds flat. Just as the last worker reaches the ground, the scaffolding she’d been perched on buckles, and the framework collapses. Debris rains down around us, and a stack of it falls exactly where Wheytt and I had been standing.

  It takes me a moment to catch my breath, but as soon as I have it I thank him, still caught between his firm body and the soft, waxy moss lining the canal. “How did you know that was going to happen?” I ask.

  “Smelled it. Tasted it. Felt it.” He shakes his head. “It’s too hard to explain.”

  “Try,” I say. “Or is it some lash counter secret?”

  He flinches. “We don’t like being called that. And it’s not a secret. Just honed senses.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up behind my back?” I ask.

  “Three,” he says without pause.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Not telling.”

  “How about now?”

  “Five.”

  Right again, I think. “What color am I thinking of?”

  “Doesn’t work like that.” Wheytt peels back from me and dusts himself off. “Look, Matriling Kaleigh, I’m just accountable for getting you to Matris. Then you’re her responsibility.”

  We start walking again, and I can’t help but notice how Wheytt walks next to me now. He’s quiet. Focused. Tuned in to the world in the way only an accountancy guard can be, noticing everything. Me, I’m busy worrying if another quake is going to knock me senseless, if the ground is going to open up and swallow me. Maybe I should have just slept through the excavation phase, all the gritty hard work, taming this wild into something civilized, or at least less deadly. Right now, I could be curled up with the rest of my family, my bapa and my pai, and all my mothers, and Sisterkin, too, I guess, who has a small stasis pod of her own, right next to ours. Then we’d awake with the rest of the Contour class to celebrate the first day of the expansion phase. Safe. No chance of getting brained by falling scaffolding.

  “We’re even now, you realize,” Wheytt says, interrupting my thoughts. “All of Fate’s Accounts are balanced.”

  Mothers’ mercy. He’s right. I saved his life, and now he’s saved mine. Our debts cancel out, and now he owes me nothing, and he’s going to tattle on Adalla. I shoot him a tight scowl. Balanced forever, too. Even if I saved his sorry self a hundred more times, we’d still be even. Not that I’d lift a finger if he were in need of saving again.

  “After you, Matriling Kaleigh.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up behind my back now?” I say.

  “One,” he says with a sigh. “And it’s most inappropriate.”

  Matris greets me, arms spread open, enveloping me into the folds of her raiment. I wriggle and fuss, like any daughter my age would, but to be honest, I savor the affection. I’m swaddled in layer upon layer of silks and overwhelmed by the scent of her musk, a cloying perfume made from the rare white blooms of agile clover found upon the ceilings of woodward canopies. Mother pulls back and looks me over, ignoring my fetid and dampened beastworker’s suit and the flecks of builder’s bone in my hair. “It’s so good to see you, Seske.” She smiles, but her eyes don’t quite meet mine. “Oh, I cannot believe you’ve finally ripened. This is a proud moment for me.”

  Something is definitely wrong. Ripening or not, Matris should have me by the thumbs by now, her tongue lashing out and chastising me and threatening to raise my will-father so I’d have to deal with his disappointment as well. I’m so confused by her display of affection that I find myself groveling, knowing that if she turns . . . when she turns . . . her mood swing will be brutal.

  “I’m so sorry, Matris. I should have never—”

  “Seske,” Matris coos into my ear. “Your curiosities do not catch me by surprise anymore. But you shouldn’t be about. You’ve seen how ornery this beast is. It’s too dangerous for a young girl.” She turns to Wheytt. “She wasn’t any trouble, was she?”

  “Not a once, Matris Paletoba,” Wheytt says with a full flourish of respects, including a double arm roll and a bow down on his knee. I gasp. Is he really going to lie to Matris?

  “Don’t be modest. You delivered my daughter with such diligence and haste, despite these awful tremors.” Matris can be charming when she feels
like it, and her voice comes out smoother than the silk of her raiment. But I know how fast it can turn.

  I wrinkle my nose, and while I’d like to think that saving my life would entail such high recognition, there’s no mistaking that Matris wants something from him.

  “What is your rank, Patriline Wheytt Housley?” she asks.

  “Audit clerk, Matris.”

  “Clerk? Someone of your quick action and accountability should be serving as a tactician already,” Matris says, an alluring lilt in her voice.

  This reeks of manipulation.

  “Matris,” I plead. “Let him return to his duties. I’m sure he’s had more than enough excitement when he saved me from falling—” I cinch my lips. I shouldn’t have said that. If she thinks she’s indebted to him, I’ll never hear the end of it. “But you don’t owe him anything! I saved his life already, so we’re even,” I explain, hoping that’ll stave off any questions, but my tongue keeps going. “See, what happened was, on our way here, we got stuck in a bog. Things were crawling all over us, and then Adalla and I—”

  “Adalla,” Matris says in her familiar condescending tone. I welcome it, feeling relieved that we are once again on normal terms. “You’re not creating mischief with that scoundrel again, are you? Is she, audit clerk?” she asks, this time from Wheytt.

  Wheytt’s mouth opens.

  Please don’t tell on us. Please don’t.

  I fear for the worst, what with my mother practically dangling a promotion right in front of him. Who could turn that down? I know her better than to think this is some sort of gift on her part, though. What Matris’s reign needs most right now is a distraction, and what better way to get people’s minds off her wretched selection of a beast than to promote the first male accountancy guard?

  But I’ve got a distraction of my own. My mother called him “Patriline,” the title for an unmarried man. And as of today, I am wholly a woman. If I lay intentions upon him, by the Laws of Lineage, he won’t be able to speak against me.