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This was early August, three hundred and some odd years after the apocalypse, during one of those heat waves that dries up the creeks and kills the corn. Only the cicadas were happy, crooning like a funeral choir from the trees.
I knew what he saw: Another underfed outlander girl, thin and brown in homespun coveralls. Pretty, in the way that anyone who isn’t sick is pretty, but not striking; clever, to be a Secretary at seventeen, but not remarkable.
Still, they say demons are spirits freed from hell by the fifth trumpet, along with cancer and microplastics, which slink into people’s souls and change them into monsters.
they were too obsessed with the past to think much of the future. They spoke a dead language and worshipped a dead god, a man suspended gruesomely on two sticks. They gave themselves antiquated names (Ashley, Charlemagne, John) and obscure titles (president, chief operating officer, knight).
To grieve as I have grieved is unseemly; the wheel turns, and we do not cling, howling, to the rim.
We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
I’d only seen her pull the trigger once, and still woke sometimes with the sound of that shot in my ears: like a hundred hammers, like a crack that divided the world into before and after.
A patchwork monster. A nonsense of scales and fur which bore no resemblance to the girl I’d loved or the woman I’d married. Except, of course, that I loved her.
May knew what I was; she’d found my pack when we were kids. But she hadn’t pitied me or mocked me. She’d only asked if I would take her with me when I ran. And I said yes—easily, honestly—because by then she had become one of the things I needed to survive.
“Why do people change, Secretary? Why are they one thing, and then another?”
Then came the older stories, stranger and more fantastic, with no obvious moral. Once upon a time there was a doctor who was poisoned by radiation and became a great green-skinned giant. Once upon a time there were five children who transformed themselves into animals in order to rescue their world from invaders.
You see the pattern, don’t you? That’s the true work of a Secretary, of course: not only to remember the stories but to make sense of them. To find the patterns and fashion them into answers. Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.
Finch always said there were certain places where it was easier to tell stories, and to hear them: around a fire at night, in the mist at dawn, on a porch at dusk. In-between places, balanced on the border between familiar and strange.
At six, I’d thought love was a full belly; at sixteen, I’d thought it was wildflowers and gooseberries and Mayapple’s mouth on mine. At seventeen, I knew better: love is whatever you’re willing to kill for.
Or perhaps she was a woman made as Eve was: from the bones of something else.
“Sometimes she’s gone so long I think: Maybe she won’t come back, when I call. But she does, she always does, and then I force her to be one thing again instead of everything, and she hates me,
Finch had never been very affectionate with me—I was her apprentice more than her daughter. But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.”
I decided I would find the answer, no matter the cost. I was a knight, wasn’t I? That’s how a knight proves his love: on a pile of corpses.”
Every time they should have died they changed instead, slipping out of one form and into another, because they had to. Death, now, was the bride, who could not keep hold of her shape-shifting lover.
Laurel had sighed, as a woman who has a headache that she is beginning to suspect will last for several decades,
An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.
For centuries the enclaves have taught us to mourn the old world and fear the new one. They told us Bible stories and demon tales, sent out knights and priests. There’s nothing more dangerous, they said, than change.
Once upon a time there was a knight who married a demon. He loved her so much that he held tight to her even as she changed in his arms, even as her talons tore through muscle and cartilage. He held her so long that she fell in love with him, or remembered that she loved him already.
I heard a strange cry and looked up. A pair of hawks circled above me. No, perhaps they were gulls or bats—angels or dragons, or every beast that has ever heralded the end of one world and the beginning of another.
