Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“Before-magic,” I told her.

“My dad says Before-magic is just a story for littles,” Nina said, in that nasty know-everything voice I hated. What did I care what she or her stupid dad thought? They weren’t from Sunrise. They were from some dumb town that probably didn’t have any giants or anything. “That,” she said, and she kind of nodded toward the head I’d found, “is a MACHINE. Well, a piece of one. And the rest…”

“The rest what?” I said, but I was looking at the hole in the ground while I said it, and I knew. All at once I could feel the pieces of an idea sliding together, I could feel it prickling in my brain behind my eyes.

I started digging.

It was a lot faster with both of us working. Nina was bigger and stronger than me, and she’d put her sickness and tiredness away someplace where I couldn’t see it anymore. She hadn’t brought a digging-stick, and the Waste was scratching deep lines up her arms, and her hands were bloody and gross and made me kind of sad and scared to look at them, but she didn’t care about any of that. She wanted this Before-thing too much. The wanting moved her body for her while her mind ran off ahead. That happened to secret-keepers sometimes, Mama said. They could peel their minds away clean from the hurt in their bodies. It made Mama’s job a lot harder sometimes, she’d have to work until I was asleep so there was nobody to tell me bedtime stories except the kingsguard, and they never did the voices right.

I helped along with my digging-stick, loosening the ash and junk so Nina could move it away with pieces of metal and her poor nasty messed-up hands. “A little farther,” she kept saying, way down low on the bottom of her voice so I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to herself or her hands or the Waste or something hidden underneath or what. “Almost there.”

And then I poked in my digging-stick for what felt like the millionth time that day. And this time, instead of the soft tshhh sound of stick into ashy dirt, I heard a kind of clunk .

Nina looked at me, and her face was like learning your favorite story is true.

Together we pulled out a black shiny leg-shape of the stuff, then another. Then a broken-off arm, then a shape kind of like a jacket with one sleeve that was the other arm, except the jacket-shape had a big hole melted straight through the middle, in one side and out the other. That arm’s fist was curled around something that dangled from it, a long dark weird shape that was jagged and smooth at the same time, with a long tube coming out of one end.

That thing fell out into Nina’s hands. She sucked her breath in between her teeth and dropped the thing like it was about to bite her.

When it landed I got a good look at it. It was a Before-people weapon. It was the first one I’d seen that wasn’t broken into pieces or melted into a lump of uselessness. From this one I could see the way you’d hold it, just like in the pictures of the wars Before, the way you’d put one part in one hand and one part in another, and if the strap wasn’t so rotten it would go around your neck like a satchel.

“Ragpicker slag me,” Nina was whispering, under her breath like a prayer. She kept running her hands over the shiny person-shape, like she was scared if she stopped it’d disappear.

Then came the SUPERVISOR’s voice from outside. “You better not be trying anything stupid in there,” he said. “I want to see that ruin-treasure and I want to see it NOW.”

Hearing that voice made me feel like I wanted the Waste to open up and swallow me alive, but Nina got a lid slammed down on whatever was going through her head and just yelled back in this airy voice like nothing: “Just digging still.” Then she whispered to me: “Quick. Help me put it on.”

I gave her a dirty look.

“It won’t fit you,” she whispered.

That was true, and I knew it. I pointed at the jagged-smooth weapon shape. “Then I get that.”

“You don’t know how to use it.”

“Neither do you.”

Nina looked at it, then at me. There was hard wanting in her face, but fair was fair. She nodded.

“Out in one minute or I send another one in after you,” the SUPERVISOR yelled back.

“Oh you don’t want to do that,” Nina shouted, shoving her foot into one of the shiny legs. There was a tiny shake in her voice but it didn’t carry. She got the other leg on and stood up. She looked funny, that skinny body on those huge monster legs. I helped her balance. “Stuff falling out of the ceiling everywhere. Lose three kids instead of two, and all the ruin-treasure besides.” She took a piece of metal and threw it clanging against that giant letter S. “Ah! Chooser save me. That one was CLOSE.”

Silence from outside. For the first time ever I had this thought: what if the SUPERVISOR was scared of somebody too? Who yelled at him and hit him when we came back from the ruin-fields with no treasure?

I stared at Nina. She winked.

Then she pulled the jacket-shape on over her head. It went down over her waist and hips and butt and hung real loose on her, like how Jamie’s old nettle-yarn sweater fits me. She got her arm through the one attached arm, then picked up the other one and held it out for me to hold. She dug around inside it like she was looking for something, and I remembered how she’d said her songkeeper dad had a Before-relic fossil arm just like this one. So I didn’t say anything, just held it and waited, and after a second she pulled out a long thin tube with a much thinner pointy thing on the end of it like a sewing needle.

“Help me put this in my arm,” she said, and pointed with one hard plasticky finger to the soft inside of her other elbow. “Here.”

“Why?” I asked, and my voice was shaking like a scared-of-the-dark little, but I couldn’t help it. There was a cold feeling in my belly suddenly, like the Before-magic was a bucket of ice water I’d swallowed.

“Because it’s in the old stories,” she said, “and now it’s here.” Her voice was shaking too, but not like she was scared, more like something amazing was about to happen, like a party just for her. “It’ll help us if we let it.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, hating how small and scared my voice sounded.

She looked at me strangely. “I don’t.”

I thought about Mama and Jamie and the Sunrise giants and Sam with the flies in her eyes, and I knew what I had to do. “Okay, Nina,” I told her, and I slid the needle in, and she watched me do it and didn’t look away, and I think it’s the bravest thing I ever saw.

After that I helped her kind of push-pull the arm on like a cold, hard, too-big glove. Last, she pulled the fossil-head down over her head and I couldn’t see her face anymore.

For a ten-count nothing happened. Then the shiny black Before-stuff started humming . Then, slowly, slowly , the arms and legs and head started locking themselves onto the jacket-body with these gentle little whispering sounds.

“Nina?” I asked, because I couldn’t trust my eyes to tell me what I was looking at.

“It’s not me,” her voice came from inside the fossil-head, shaking with more scared than mad now. “I’m not doing it, Aneko, it isn’t me.”

Then suddenly her voice changed, went up all high and squeaky with surprise: “There’s words on it, there are like words and shapes on the window where I look, I think it’s trying to talk to me,” and I had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t ask, I was too busy staring at the sudden shiny dark shape that used to be Nina, before she got swallowed up by the Before-magic weirdness.

I picked up the Before-relic weapon. It was cold and slick in my hands like a snake. There was a place on it that looked like the shape of a hand, and I had to stretch my fingers hurting wide to fit. The hand-shape started glowing bright bright blue, the same color as the very bottom of a candle-flame, or the stars on a cold night, or the very first scorchweed flowers in springtime.