Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Silence falls. In it, Zinhle tries to understand. Her society—no. Humankind doesn’t want…her? Doesn’t want the ones who are different, however much they might contribute? Doesn’t want the children who cannot help their uniqueness despite a system that pushes them to conform, be mediocre, never stand out?

“When they start to fight for you,” Lemuel says, “we’ll know they’re ready to be let out. To catch up to the rest of the human race.”

Zinhle flinches. It has never occurred to her, before, that their prison offers parole.

“What will happen then?” she whispers. “Will you, will you join with all of them?” She falters. When has the rest of humankind become them to her? Shakes her head. “ We won’t want that.”

He smiles faintly, noticing her choice of pronoun. She thinks he notices a lot of things. “ They can join us if they want. Or not. We don’t care. But that’s how we’ll know that your kind is able to live with us, and us with them, without more segregation or killing. If they can accept you, they can accept us.”

And finally, Zinhle understands.

But she thinks on all he has said, all she has experienced. As she does so, it is very hard not to become bitter. “They’ll never fight for me,” she says at last, softly.

He shrugs. “They’ve surprised us before. They may surprise you.”

“They won’t.”

She feels Lemuel’s gaze on the side of her face because she is looking at the floor. She cannot meet his eyes. When he speaks, there’s remarkable compassion in his voice. Something of him is definitely still human, even if something of him is definitely not.

“The choice is yours,” he says, gently now. “If you want to stay with them, be like them, just do as they expect you to do. Prove that you belong among them.”

Get pregnant. Flunk a class. Punch a teacher. Betray herself.

She hates him. Less than she should, because he is not as much of an enemy as she thought. But she still hates him for making her choice so explicit.

“Or stay yourself,” he says. “If they can’t adapt to you, and you won’t adapt to them, then you’d be welcome among us. Flexibility is part of what we are.”

There’s nothing more to be said. Lemuel waits a moment, to see if she has any questions. She does, actually, plenty of them. But she doesn’t ask those questions, because, really, she already knows the answers.

Lemuel leaves. Zinhle sits there, silent, in the little office. When the principal and office staff crack open the door to see what she’s doing, she gets up, shoulders past them, and walks out.

Zinhle has a test the next day. Since she can’t sleep anyway—too many thoughts in her head and swirling through the air around her; or maybe those are people trying to get in—she stays up all night to study. This is habit. But it’s hard, so very hard, to look at the words. To concentrate, and memorize, and analyze. She’s tired. Graduation is three months off, and it feels like an age of the world.

She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.

There’s no decision, really. Lemuel knew full well that his direct intervention was likely to work. Even if he hadn’t come to her, Rule 3—staying herself—would’ve brought her to this point anyway.

So in the morning, when Zinhle takes the test, she nails it, as usual.

And then she waits to see what happens next.

THE FLEET RIVER STARTS SOMEWHERE UP ON THE HEATH. I’VE never bin there, but Morris has. It’s where the North London drug barons live in big houses—palaces, like—all ringed with steel security fences and guard dogs and armed patrols. Morris goes there on business, to get supplies. “You’d never get in unless they wants you in,” he says, and then he grins a bit, showing his gums, and says, “nor you’d never get out again neither.”

Well, the Fleet starts there, up in the woods, and then it dives underground and runs along in drains and sewers for a while, but all the time it’s chewing away at the bricks and burrowing under old roadways till they sag and collapse, till by the time it gets to Kings Cross it’s opened itself a nice deep channel, not that you’d wanta swim in it. There’s whirlpools and sinkholes that’d suck you down hundreds of meters into the old drowned underground system, and there’s lagoons where buildings have crashed across and the water dams up and spreads around, and there’s narrows where the river jist roars along. But the last bit, where it runs into the Thames, is tidal. Coupla times a day, it heaves itself up and over a quarter mile or so of mud banks and ruins, and you can take a boat on it then, if you’re careful.

Which is what I’ll tell Morris if he finds out where we are. Which I hope he don’t. Which he shouldn’t, seeing as my cell’s switched off so he can’t call up with some little job he wants doing, and we’ve got all day, but it’s took longer than I thought, weaving through the channels and the shallows. Some of them rocks is sharp. I’ve seen rusted metal rods poking out of blocks of concrete what would rip holes in the dinghy, and then Morris would kill me. He really might. If we didn’t drown first, a’course.

Billy’s sitting in the front and I can tell he’s not spotted it yet, the place we’re headed for—two sharp towers and a dome rising up behind the spoil heaps. I betted him I’d see it first, but this might be the last thing Billy and me do together for a long time, and now I kinda want him to win. So I don’t say nothing, and at last he turns his head—and then he points, and he says, “Charlie, look! Look! ” He beams at me, and I grin back at him like a dog, coz this is intense. We’ve wanted to do this forever. Years. We’ve always wanted to go and visit Nelson.

I open the throttle and the dinghy scoots in over the shallows. The tide’s so high that when we finally touch ground on a tilted shore of red bricks and shattered concrete, we’re hardly a stone’s throw below Sint Paul’s. We jump out, drag the dinghy clear of the water—and we stare.

Sint Paul’s is a cathedral—that’s what it’s called, “Sint Paul’s cathedral.” That’s a kind of palace. Morris says it’s jist a big church, but it don’t look like a church to me. Hundreds a years ago, Morris says, before the world warmed up and the Flood began, important people useta get married in there, and then when they died, they useta get buried; but I reckon they musta lived there too, in between. Be a waste of space otherwise. It hangs over us like a cliff. Seagulls go drifting from its ledges. The doorway at the top of the steps is dark as a sea cave. Billy blinks, his mouth ajar. “Is this where Nelson lives?”

“Lived,” I say, but I know Billy don’t make no difference between lives and lived , and now we’re here neither do I: it’s Nelson’s palace, that’s what counts, where he lived an’ where he’s buried, so I say, “Yeah. This is it. Nelson’s house. Let’s go and find him!”

But first I look around. I’m armed with one of Morris’s little handguns, what he calls his pocket darlings—coz I don’t want no trouble, not with Billy along. The boat’s got DK , for Damned Krew scrawled on it in red and black, and no one wants to mess with the Krew on the west side of the Fleet, but here on the east side is out of our territory and the between-tides zone is teknikly no-man’s land, which means anyone can roam here but they hafta be mad or desperate first, like Hairies and outcasts and refugees from drowned countries, though I don’t know why refugees seemta wanta get into London when most of us spend our lives dreaming of getting out .