Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (33 page)

The wet tracks of my tears stung my face with cold. It was getting dark
under the trees, and the forest no longer held anything for me. I stood, and my eyes
caught a fleck of white atop the rock, near the soldier's open, staring eyes. A
cigarette, the edges pink with blood. The wet paper had disintegrated and flakes of
loose tobacco scattered across the stone, falling damply into the hundred pools.

I wrapped Chung-hee's blanket tighter around my shoulders. The world I
had always known had been shattered like a late winter pumpkin on the Parks' farm,
but there were other worlds: Turtle had come from a different world, far away on the
other side of the ocean. And maybe he had been helped by the ancient world of
gwishin,
demons, and hungry-mouthed spirits that dwell in
rock. There were ways to get from one world to another. I started back up the hill,
pushing hard through the deep snow.

S
tars shone in the twilit sky
when I arrived on our street. I could just make out the shapes of the chicken coop
and the outhouse, our roof, and a withered curl of smoke rising from the
ondol
against the darker trees behind.

Inside, Mother argued with Chung-hee. She had the baby on her back and
held the handle of a pot with a folded rag, scolding him to save some food for me.
He laughed and snatched the pot from her hand, filling his bowl to the brim. I had
thought about it on the long walk back. Why should people like my brother be the
only ones who could create a new world and escape into it? The
waegukin
army had boats farther down the coast, and a new world at the
end of them. I didn't have to stay in this broken world, picking among the scattered
seeds.

“It doesn't matter,” I said, pushing into the room. “We're going to meet
the boats at Wonsan.”

Chung-hee acted as if I hadn't spoken. Setting his bowl on the table, he
shrugged out of his soldier's coat and tossed it at Mother. She sat down obediently
to fix the tear in the shoulder. She threaded a needle, and with her head bent over
the rough wool, said, “If we went away, your father would never find us. Our whole
family would become missing persons.”

“If we stay, he won't find us either,” I argued. “Are you the same wife
that he left? Am I the same daughter? What will we be like in another six
months?”

I didn't mention Chung-hee, but Mother's eyes darted in his direction.
She tied off the thread and pushed the coat back to him. Her ropy hands rested flat
on the scarred table. My beautiful mother had become an old woman. Her skin was
rough and chapped. Even the lobes of her ears seemed to sag lower and looser.

I went into the other room and, making sure that Chung-hee wasn't
looking, lifted Mother's jeweled hair clip from under the loose board and slipped it
in my waistband. I gathered clothes for both of us and, back in the kitchen, scraped
the last grains of millet from the bottom of the jar.

“It's too far, Min-hee,” Mother said. “Too dangerous.”

I bundled the supplies into Turtle's blanket and hung it over my
shoulder.

“There won't be room for us on the boats,” Mother said. But when I took
the baby from her, she didn't resist.

A massive shell landed somewhere on the outskirts of town and shook the
ground beneath us. I looked at my brother, one last time. Chung-hee leaned back
against the wall, the collar of his soldier's coat turned up around his skinny neck.
He held his bowl with both hands, and loudly slurped his soup—the soup that should
have been mine.

So be it, I thought. He had chosen his world, now I had chosen mine.

Those
waegukin
boats we were heading for
might get blown apart by a Chinese shell and take us to a world at the bottom of the
Yellow Sea. Or the boats would travel south, and we would step ashore into a world I
couldn't imagine. But now that I knew there were other worlds, I wouldn't stay in
this one, flapping my wings like a homeless chicken.

I tied my baby brother onto my back, took Mother's hand, and we stepped
out into the night.

Scavengers

written by

Shannon Peavey

illustrated by

JAMES J. EADS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shannon Peavey was born and raised in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. The oldest of three girls, she mostly used her vivid imagination to terrify her siblings: telling them that she'd been replaced by an evil twin from an alternate dimension, or that eating crab apples gave a person magical powers. They have since forgiven her.

After receiving a degree in English from Mount Holyoke College, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and began writing in earnest. She tries to bring the unique flavor of the west coast, its history and unexplored places, to her writing.

Shannon particularly credits Robin McKinley and Lloyd Alexander for instilling in her an appreciation for strong heroines, vivid new worlds, and beautiful words.

When not writing, Shannon works as a horse trainer and continually attempts mastery of the piano (so far, the piano is winning). Her Writers of the Future win is her first published work.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

James J. Eads is a freelance illustrator and art instructor from Orange County, California. He received his BA from California State University, Fullerton and began his career as a public school teacher, until he was quickly hired away as a graphic designer for the furniture industry, where he worked for the next fifteen years.

James became the owner and head designer for VIP Arts, a rubber art stamp and craft supply company. With VIP, he had the opportunity to teach art classes across the country. Once again, teaching became an important part of his life, leading him to teach art to the incarcerated juveniles and adults at Santa Ana Jail. For the past decade, James has worked at creating an art program for elementary schools, working with children grades K–6, as well as special needs classes. He has recently retired to work on more personal projects.

James works primarily in pen-and-ink and watercolor, but is not above drawing in crayon with his granddaughter. He is honored to be among the Illustrators of the Future, and is already hard at work on writing and illustrating children's books.

Scavengers

K
eera leaned back to peer at the sky,
shading her eyes with one hand, a turnip hanging by its fringe in the other. Mara
glanced over at her sister and wondered what she saw.

“Vulture's pet is coming,” Keera said.

Mara put her spade down, but didn't see anything but blue sky, clouds
smeared blurry with distance. Then a black speck appeared, growing steadily larger.
“I see,” she said, but it wasn't true. The speck didn't resolve into a clockwork
finch till the thing was nearly upon her, its wings flipping air and light drops of
grease into her hair.

“Hail,” the finch said.

“Hail,” the two women said together, but Mara frowned. The Lady's birds
seldom left her house on the hill. When they did, the news was never good.

“News from afar.” The finch's beak moved when it spoke, but the motion
always seemed a little delayed, half a beat behind the words it formed. “Shall I
tell you?”

“Only if it's important, you chattering fool,” Keera said. Mara hung
back, watching.

The finch whirred, gears inside it working, processing. “I won't presume
to judge the quality of my news, miss. That's for ones cleverer than I.” The bird
sounded offended.

“Spit it out.”

The finch blinked, once, in its curious way: first closing one eye, then
the other, so that at no point was it ever wholly blind. It settled on Mara's
shoulder with a heavy thrum, clutching her rough-spun vest with talons like
needles.

Mara held perfectly still, watching the finch from the corner of her
eye. When it spoke next to her ear, its belly clicked in time with its words. “The
Lady sees strangers coming. Two days out. They come with weapons and evil
intentions.”

Mara sucked a breath and the finch dug its claws into her shoulder.

“Who are they?” Keera demanded.

The finch shuffled from foot to foot, ducking its head in a shrug. “Who
would tell a simple songbird?” It chirruped, shrill and rusty. “Looked to me like
they were carrying scythes.”

“Harvesting,” Keera whispered, soft as smoke.

The finch's insides clicked and clunked and it said, “I only tell you
what I saw.” Then it turned its head into Mara's hair, muttering low for only her to
hear. “The Lady will see you at half past the noon hour.”

Mara nodded once, small so Keera wouldn't see. Then the bird tensed its
claws into her shoulder and launched back into the sky. “Be warned,” it said, “and
warn your fellows.”

They watched it go, flapping smoothly on metal wings.

“Do you think they really are harvesters?” Keera asked, head tipped
back, still watching the clockwork bird. Mara had lost track of it some time ago,
lost in the blur that made up her world beyond the stretch of her arms.

“I don't know. A scythe doesn't make a harvester, not for sure.”

“No. No, you're right.” But Keera still seemed troubled. Mara didn't
blame her. Once upon a time, a scythe hadn't made a harvester. But now, who else
would carry one?

“Naught we can do now,” Mara said shortly, and knelt back to the field,
more rocks and weeds than turnips. “Best get this done with before the weather turns
bad. There's lightning in the air.”

Keera crouched next to her, carding through turnip fringes for the
telltale strangers, weeds with spiked leaves, or slender, or broad. “It's a fine
morning. Not a cloud in the sky.”

“I smell it,” Mara said. An acrid, charged smell, sharp in her nose.
“You just see if I'm wrong.”

“No,” Keera said. “It's fine. We'll finish up here in another hour or
so, anyway.”

Mara laughed and scraped her knees in the dirt of the endless field of
turnips. She knew they wouldn't finish in an hour, not even if they worked all day.
The field was too large, the weeds too persistent, the turnips sick with a leaf
blight. And above, lightning was stirring.

A
t noon precisely, Mara started
up the path to the Lady's house. Within five minutes she was winded, feet slipping
on the sharply pitched slabs that lined the steep path up to where the house perched
on a ledge, looking as if it were poised to jump. Above her, the sky was
greening.

She watched her feet, though she knew the way. Better to watch them than
to watch the way the town receded into a blur behind her, small and low, a daub of
darkness in the wide flat plain. Everything flat, save the great hill where the
Lady'd made her home.

She'd made the first switchback when one of the finches fluttered out of
the sky to hover near her hairline. Impossible to say if it was the same one that
had spoken to her in the field—they were as like as siblings. She thought it was,
though. “Prompt as always,” it said.

“That's the way my mother raised me.” She kept on walking.

“Just as my dear mother said, when I was just bare hatched from my egg:
‘Timeliness is goodliness,' she said, didn't she?” The finch darted around her face,
flying close enough that she felt the air move.

“You never hatched from an egg.” She didn't know this for certain, of
course, but felt fairly sure. The egg that could make such a creature had never
been.

“Ah, such a clever girl,” the finch said with a trill that she thought
was probably laughter.

“I'm nearly there,” she said. “Why don't you go tell your Lady that I'm
coming?”

“She knows.” The finch flitted ahead.

Mara swore low under her breath and walked on, stolid as a mule, staring
at her feet. The finch flew back with a huge bug in its mouth, crunching through the
hard outside with a sound like bones breaking. “Everything tastes better when caught
on the wing,” it said, through a mouthful of insect.

“I wouldn't know.”

The bird trilled laughter again and swooped to settle on her shoulder,
crunching its meal close to her ear. They walked through the last switchback
together, not speaking, and then the Lady's house met her at the top of the path,
crooked and full of windows.

“In the usual place,” the finch said, and lit off her shoulder to one of
the high windows, left open to admit the breeze and the birds.

The Lady's door had a latch that was never locked. Mara pressed the pale
wood with her fingertips and the door opened easily, as if a stiff wind could send
it swinging. She tried not to look too closely at the grain of the wood, because it
always seemed to her like faces.

The house stank like oil and rust, and like the little bodies of bugs
and rodents that the clockwork birds left chewed but undigested on the carpets. Mara
was used to the smell, though, and her eyes only watered a little. She stepped over
the bare spots in the rug and the places where it was stained dark, and where small
things cracked under her feet.

“Hello, my dear,” said the Lady from the next room. Mara hurried to join
her, slipping through an open door into the parlor.

The Lady sat near the window, a metal bird nestled into the fold of her
collar. “Go on, then,” she told it, and the bird stirred, stretching its wings so
that every silvery pinion showed wide and sharp. Then it swooped in front of Mara,
flashing close to her eyes. She sucked a breath but stood still.

“Silly creatures, aren't they?” The Lady craned her long neck to watch
the bird go. “I think they get jealous.”

Mara said nothing. The Lady clicked her beak and motioned Mara in,
gesturing to her usual chair with a knobbed hand heavy with rings.

Mara settled in the chair, listing to the left just a bit by habit,
avoiding the broken spring hidden under the dusty velveteen. The Lady looked out the
window for one long moment, then twitched the drape closed, plunging the room into
hazy half light.

“How are your eyes, my dear? Any improvement?” The Lady leaned close to
peer into Mara's face.

Mara sat very still, trying not to flinch as the vulture's head drew
near. The Lady had done her a great favor. “They are,” she said hesitantly, “perhaps
a little better, ma'am.”

The Lady drew back, crooking her neck to look at her sideways. “Can you
see what is in the bottom left corner of that tapestry on the wall? The green
one.”

Mara squinted. She'd seen the green tapestry before, she felt sure. “A
doe?”

The Lady clicked her tongue. “We shall try again. It is a process.”

“Of course,” Mara said.

The Lady picked up a small jar from her side table, one with a large
foggy crystal cragged out of the top. “Lean forward,” she said, unscrewing the
lid.

Mara leaned forward. The Lady dipped her fingers into the jar and
brought out a dripping lump of pale clay. Mara opened her eyes wide, though the urge
to shut them nearly overwhelmed her.

“Shh,” the Lady crooned, sibilants whistling through the cruel arc of
her beak, wrinkled fingers outstretched. Gently, she smeared the clay over Mara's
open eyes, once from corner to corner, then from brow to cheek, like a cross.

A shudder raced through Mara's body, one that made her teeth clack
together. She stilled herself, and the vulture woman patted her hand. She heard the
Lady get up and move to the far side of the room. “Just a few minutes,” she said,
and dragged something heavy over the carpet.

Mara's eyes flicked sightlessly in their sockets, trying to trace the
scuffs and sounds of movement that were now her only indications of place and
presence. The shuffle-drag of whatever the Lady was doing, the whuff of the wind
behind the drapes, the far-off cries of a bird. The sound of her own heart beating.
She swallowed. “Lady, is it true what you said?”

“Is what true?”

“That the harvesters are coming to kill us and steal our crops.”

The Lady made a noise deep in her throat and Mara heard her step away.
“They come, yes. It has been long since we saw them last, has it not? I had begun to
think they were scared away.”

“Or all gone, at last,” Mara said. It was her sister's pet theory, that
the past group of harvesters, two years ago, had been the last.

“No, that shall never be,” the Lady said sadly. “For all men must
harvest.”

“Oh.” Mara tried to blink but the clay held her eyes open. “Do they
strike everywhere, or only here?”

“Everywhere that is, harvesters are. It is how men evolved, to be
hunters and killers.”

Birds kill, too,
Mara thought, but said
nothing.

She heard the Lady sit back in the chair across from her, and some
prickling in her spine told her she was being examined. She knew how the Lady moved
even without being able to see her. The Lady gave the same scrutinizing stare to
anything that interested her, or anything small that moved too quickly and looked
too much like prey. She sat with her head cocked and her long, naked neck craned out
of the cowl collar of her dress, where, somewhere beneath, the bird's rough skin
turned to human flesh.

“I'll peel it off, now,” the Lady said, “and we'll see how it has
worked.”

Mara's hands almost leapt to claw at the stiff dressing and peel it
away, but she held still and let the Lady do it. A long claw slid over her face,
under her eye socket along the bone, then crept under the edge of the clay. The Lady
hooked her fingers, pulling away, and the clay popped away neatly, impressed with a
hollow where her eye had been.

Mara squeezed her eye shut, glad for the ability to do so. When the Lady
pulled the poultice from her other eye, Mara closed it, too.

“Open them,” the Lady said.

The room fuzzed, then swept into focus. The thing at the corner of the
green tapestry, Mara saw, was an eagle with a man in its talons.

“How is it?” The Lady peered at Mara's face, swept a hand in front of
her to see how her eyes focused. The rings on her fingers glittered even in the
dim.

“It's—better than it's ever been,” Mara said. “Everything is sharp, even
the far-off things. I might be able to see all the way to the river, if I
tried.”

“Not even I could see that far,” the Lady said, but she sounded pleased.
“We shall see how long it lasts, this time.”

“One day it will be forever, won't it?”

“Yes. One day it will be forever.”

Mara rose and smoothed her hands over the front of her only dress, still
rough and uncomfortable after years of special occasions. “I don't know how to thank
you.”

The Lady rose as well, and turned to the window. “I need no thanks for
providing for my people. Do make sure that someone is on the river road in two day's
time, though. Midday. Your sister and her man should be easily capable.”

“I shall see it done. Keera is honored by your trust.”

“She is a fine fighter. You both are a tribute to your family.”

“Thank you,” Mara said, but the Lady paid her no mind. She threw open
the drapes and gazed out the window. Watching for birds on the wind, Mara
supposed.

She made a hurried half bow, feeling awkward and out of place, and left
the room. Being able to see the filth on the carpet, the feces and the crushed
rodent skeletons, brought little pleasure. Some things were better left blurred.

The finch found her as she pushed open the Lady's door and stepped onto
the bluff. “And how are you seeing things now?” it said, a mocking tone to its
voice. “Clear as the day? Shall it now be you who informs us of the dangers come
close?”

“I see fine,” Mara said shortly, “but my insights remain woefully
human.”

“That is woeful indeed.” The finch chirruped and swooped a low circle
over her head. “I wish you true sight, Mara of the Goldwater.”