Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

His chest seems to growl… perhaps a cough that got stuck. But in the cough Joan hears what she already knows, that his body is rapidly decomposing, going back to dirt. He has less than half a day or night, if that. And yet he looks beautiful. His cheeks like the petals of roses, his eyes like blue-green stones. The waxen white of his hairless skin gleams like its own light source there in the cave world of her life. But the veins in his arms, climbing up from his wrists, are already turning a faint blue. When he crosses his arms and speaks again, her throat tightens.

“They can track and target certain intensities of electricity,” he says. “That’s why we thought you might still be alive. They are trying to track your energy. Though they are trying desperately to uphold the story of your execution. We were able to infiltrate enough to understand the new reality they’ve constructed up there. And what they still have planned for you. And for all of us.”

Leone stands up and adjusts Little Bee at her calf, then the Beretta holstered at her thigh, and rubs her hand over her head. “They want what they’ve always fucking wanted. Slave labor and slaughter for the rest”—Leone spits—“with a dead planet orbiting beneath them like a giant turd.”

“Yes, in general terms,” Peter answers.

“General?” Leone lashes. “There’s something specific about genocide?” Leone’s face flushes, then she turns abruptly away. Joan knows her ire is not for Peter. In fact, she knows, Leone loves Peter. At least she did the last time they’d all been together in battle, years ago. The three of them were once united in violence and blood. There was no stronger bond.

Peter’s breathing grows labored. Listening to him makes Joan’s chest hurt.

“Joan,” he says, sitting down near her now Indian-style and placing his hands palm-side up on his knees. “They don’t want to kill you anymore. They need you, Joan.”

His veins river up his arms like small blue serpentines.

The walls of the cave tick.

“Again? What the fuck for?” Leone shouts. “Executing her and annihilating everyone near her the first time wasn’t enough?” Leone walks over to the side of the cavern and picks up a shoulder load of ammunition.

Joan sits silently, staring at the spider on her flesh, her thoughts between Leone’s and her brother’s words. The spider dances between her knuckles, skitters up her arm a little, then back down toward her hand. It seems… happy. She wonders if it wants to make a web there between her fingers. Some creatures are content in contained worlds. She looks over at Leone and feels a wave of something without a name. Leone is not like the spider. Leone isn’t content with states of being. She wants states of doing. In stasis, even Leone’s biceps and shoulders look wrong. She needs action. And what had Leone’s life with her all these years been reduced to? Killing. Survival. Pure action.

“So what’s the story?” Leone asks. “What the fuck do they need her for?”

“To reproduce,” Peter says.

Leone laughs. The echo mixes with the cave sounds and the murmuring micromovements of water in the deep underground reservoir next to them.

Joan can’t even get the word to go inside her ear. Reproduction? What on earth was he talking about?

“Joan.” Peter’s voice slices through her thoughts. “I need to explain. And I better do it quickly. I feel dizzy.” He hangs his head for a moment. Takes in a deep breath. Joan counts. Seven seconds, like their mother taught them as children. This is how to calm yourself.

“We haven’t just gained information on them. About CIEL. We know things about you,” he says, his voice sounding to her again like leaves and dirt blowing across barren land.

“What things?” is all Joan asks. Her voice sounding like a child’s. She holds her breath and counts to seven.

“Fucking spit it out, then,” Leone says.

Joan’s head fills with all the dead people she could not save. Armies. Her eyes sting. The spider in her hand tickles. The walls whisper and creak.

Peter digs into his rucksack and pulls out a tin container. He opens it briefly. Inside are about a dozen salamanders, all without pigment, their white bodies and eyeless heads looking vaguely embryonic. “Everything you need to know—where all our bases are stationed worldwide, what our numbers are, who to contact, how we travel, and most important, the entire cosmology of the CIEL—is contained in these. Joan will be able to upload them.”

“Upload them exactly how ?” Leone asks.

“Listen,” he says, directing his attention briefly to Leone, “these are Olms. They use light and electronic microscopy. They have ampullary organs—”

“Electrical receptors?” Leone asks. She peers into the tin and watches the little blind white creatures squirm. “They transfer current?”

“Yes. Sunk deep into their epidermis. They register electric fields. They use the earth’s magnetic fields to orient, which makes them superb carriers of information. You need only let them crawl on her body.” He stares at Joan. “Your particular body.” He hands the tin filled with blind white salamanders to Leone.

“What?” Joan mutters. And then: “I’m like an Olm, then? I’m like them?” Her own thoughts and words seem dumb to her.

Peter moves closer to Joan there in the dirt. He places both of his hands upon her shoulders. Joan closes her fingers gently around the spider to protect it from harm, though briefly she wonders why. Peter looks so deeply into her eyes that, for a moment, she can see his face as it was when he was a child. Had there been a world, people who worked and raised children, families that ate meals and pet dogs and watched television in the evenings? Wasn’t there a moon in the sky at night, stars, a sun in the morning brilliant and true, and animals and trees and fertile dirt and birdsong?

“It’s more than sound, what you heard, what moved through you, Joan. More than song. More than energy even. You are…”

Joan had to catch her brother by the elbows as his knees buckled. “There’s so much more,” he whispers, tears filling his eyes.

In that moment, the cave’s walls creak. She looks at Leone, whose face wears the same worry. Something is coming, or something is about to fall apart; they usually happened together.

“Joan!” her brother yells and coughs out to her above the rising geological noise. He grabs her arms tight enough to leave finger bruises. “Your hands in the dirt. Remember?” he rasp-screams at her. His eyes fluttering. His breath leaving.

“Remember what?” Joan screams while trying to support his falling weight. Leone moves in to help carry him—but then there is a crack as loud as a continent breaking free. The granite ceiling of the cave groans and then splits in lines extending outward; the ground beneath them arches and contorts, bringing them all down. She sees the curve and sheen of the cave walls flexing—dust falls slowly like ash, and then pellets of rock like rain and then larger stones crumble loose, until the very walls heave and shatter around them. Another blast sends a jolt up her spine and she hits her head on the cave floor. When she opens her eyes, a hard lightning of white and silver light scissors down into the cave with such force that Joan loses her hearing. If it had hit her, she would have surely died.

As the dust and light and sound dissipate, Joan crawls on the ground to her brother. She shakes him violently. Nothing but corpse. She crawls farther to Leone, who rolls back and forth on the ground holding her ears. Up close she sees why: it isn’t the noise that is traumatizing her. Leone is missing an ear. And more: she is bleeding from the nose. As they look into each other’s eyes, though, they manage to understand one another. Leone, beautiful even at the most insane moments, still clutching her rifle in one hand and the tin of Olms in the other, blood pouring from the place where her ear used to be, smiles with animal ferocity.