Red as Water, White as Ruin

 

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

 
 

When we arrived on the ruined continent, we found only one survivor.

This is a citadel of time-eaten iron and bleached building-bones, the marrow of architecture spilling out through cracked pillars. The sea is red with poison, the sky Armageddon-white, the air nectar-sweet. The strata of houses and schools and streets are built high, fortified, away from the corrosive waters.

(Out of superstition, we do not call the city or the continent by name. Simply it is the Breach: a nomenclature of phenomenon rather than location.)

At every intersection of streets there is a skeleton tree. The branches are ribs, the leaves keratin, alive and lustrous like a courtier’s coiffure. These trees give no flowers, bear no fruits. After sunset they gleam blackly. At the root of such a tree, on our first night, is where we found the survivor—as pale as the tree, eyes as dark as the leaves. Curled up, half-asleep when we stumble upon her, waiting perhaps.

A child. She does not speak much.

* * *

Our scout, Tumari, is the first to disappear.

I’m awake on strength of coffee, completely black and completely bitter, the mug hot against my hands. It is my watch. I wait with my back to our encampment, the small silver house we grew from a small silver seed, planted on arrival without expectation; it was a surprise to us all that it took. What sprang up is skeletal, the roof inky and the windows full of ribs. When we lie down it is on beds of soft cartilage. The seeds take on the character of their soil, and the Breach makes for the strangest soil of all.

In the distance there is nothing, up in the sky there is nothing. The only sounds come from our makeshift house, the soft hiss of heating. No noise of the wild, even the water is inert, behaving like a trapped pond more than a sea. Neither tides nor waves. It is as if time has stopped for the ruined continent so utterly that the moon’s pull passes over this shore. Forgotten, or avoided, even by the natural forces. Sunlight is different here, and there is no moonlight. Only stars, and those loom closer, bigger here than at home. There is menace to their proximity, their size.

Next to me the girl dozes. She does not like being indoors, she says. Her name is Ouma. That her parents—or at least guardians—must be in this city is obvious, but she will admit to neither kith nor kin. We have been speculating. Her family may mistreat her. Yet they must be nearby. Tumari has gone looking. She has a peerless ear, the senses of a hound. She has been gone since nightfall.

Beside me Ouma stirs. She looks up, abruptly awake the way some children can be, leaping from sleep to full consciousness without any stage between. “Hinmayia. She’s not coming back.”

“Tumari is just thorough. Don’t worry. If we find anyone who knows you, we aren’t going to tell them you’re here unless you want us to.”

“There’s no one.” She slowly rises. There’s a tentativeness to her when she moves, as if every step might betray her balance and the coordination of her limbs. Though she has no mark on her, no scars or sign of injury, this distrust of her own body makes me wonder just what this child’s guardians did to her. She tilts her head, keeping her eye on me as she circles. “What is it like where you’re from, Hinmayia?”

She asks this often; fortunately it is a question with a wealth of answers. Where we are from is Vanuttan, the city of glass. I tell Ouma of the faceted canopies that stretch above our temples, the marble thoroughfares, the markets where one can buy beautiful quartz maps and books enclosed in platinum. The universities, the parks. I try to think of what would interest a child. “And there’s a lot of things to eat.”

“A lot of things to eat,” Ouma repeats.

Tumari does not come back.

* * *

In the morning we talk in hushed voices, away from Ouma, to least alarm her. We are the adults, she the lost child whom we must shelter. Our archivist Durun—Tumari’s sister—is in tears. The walls and empty houses now press in upon us, though a day ago they seemed safe—abandoned and eerie, but harmless. I hold Durun’s hand as she weeps. Once, at the beginning, I was slightly in love with her. She has a husband at home, though I still admire her face, those lips with the darling mole above them.

The task of questioning Ouma falls to me. I don’t think it will be easy but when I ask, she is forthcoming enough, in her own way. “You call it a city but you are wrong, Hinmayia. This is not a city. This is a machine. People don’t live in machines.” She holds the book I gave her in her lap. A picture book, of architecture and history, of how the different parts of glorious Vanuttan fit together.

“But you’re here.” I’m no good with children. Applying reason does not seem productive but I have nothing to coax her with, no sweets or toys or even the promise of a good life. “So are we. Can you think of where Tumari could have gone?” Or who could have harmed her, murdered her even. In so quiet a place, whose shadows and corners we thought we’d entirely explored.

“People can be raw material. It’s a purpose.” Ouma is not looking at me; instead she is studying the image of a park with its swans, its tame ocelots.

It is not a helpful answer. We set up flares, in the unlikely event that Tumari has lost her way. We venture out in threes, though we never go far. Our courage has been blanched. We think of our ship, moored up top, the highest point of the Breach. But we cannot easily turn back. Most of us are not here by choice; some took a life, others refused to take one, Tumari herself is a deserter from the army. As one we are exiles, and completing this expedition will earn us amnesty. We need something to bring back—a new resource or lucrative secret, an answer to why the Breach has been emptied of all life. Ouma, while part of that puzzle, does not on her own suffice.

We spend the next night cooped up in the small, silvery house. The night, we determine, is unknown. Perhaps some nocturnal predator, perhaps a time convenient for Ouma’s people to emerge and—judging us invaders—to kill. Or perhaps Tumari is fine, alive, but none of us really believes that.

At dawn, Tumari returns.

I’m the first to brave the day, and so the first to discover. She has been deposited outside our camp, prone. No injury on her, at a glance. Brackish fluid dribbles out of her lips, a muddy, dirty trail. Her jaw is oddly loose and when I pry her mouth open, I find it entirely toothless. Insects are nesting in the pits that molars and incisors once occupied.

I hold her head in my lap, gazing down at these insects—so black, so pearly and fat with blood—and feel as though my skin is surface tension, trembling, about to split open. Our handsome scout. Our dead scout.

“You should hide her,” Ouma says from behind me.

The child is untouched, unfazed. She guides me to a tenement; I carry the impossibly light corpse, the low buzz of feasting bugs against my skin. The house is locked but Ouma does something to the doorknob and it falls open. I lay Tumari down in a yellowed bed and take the chain from around her neck, a thick silver thing threaded with charms, talismans.

It is this that I give to Durun, telling her that the chain is all I found. I watch her collapse into herself from a remote distance. This place is ossifying me. First the part that fears, then the part that feels at all.

We confer and for the first time in our voyage—on the ship or in this silver house—we lay our crimes at our feet, peeled of secrets. The matter distills to this. Who faces death if we go back empty-handed, who faces merely a life of imprisonment, who faces the soft sentence of banishment.

My turn comes. A cartographer, that is all I’ve ever been, a person of maps and ink and topology. Mine was an error of politics, a refusal to recognize the new name of a conquered city, writing on my maps the old one. If I return I’ll be sent to a work camp, to labor in factories until my body fails. Compared to most it is a middling punishment, better than outright execution, worse than exile. To quantify our individual penalty is an exercise in macabre futility. “Has any of us tried to alter the ship’s course?” I say, at length.

“Tumari,” Durun says softly. “Of us all she was the closest to unraveling the engine’s mysteries.”

The ship’s engine knows only one course—from our home Vanuttan to the Breach, and back. We have tried to steer it elsewise, and it does not budge even a murmur from this path. And Tumari is gone.

“Are you not a mapmaker, Hinmayia,” says our doctor. “Isn’t it what you do, tell vessels where to go.”

She says this with such rancor. But I only laugh past her. “Maps are malleable as a child, ship engines are rebellious youths. I have tried.” To feed it different maps. To alter the map it does use. But it is only ink and paper, and the ship’s heart responds to none of those. Our trajectory is as unyielding as the sun’s.

But I do know this. I do know this suddenly, with certainty that sweeps through my aortae. It is better to be sent to the work camps than to be here. In the factories, among the lines of assembly and disassembly, there is possibility of survival. Between disembarking and reporting our failure, there is possibility of survival.

There is none in the Breach. Here there is only an incomprehensible, inevitable conclusion. I’ll never know whether Tumari suffered before she died. What she saw, what she felt. Whether she was cognizant of the coming end or died like a dumb beast.

* * *

Who next, then. No. There is no question. It was always going to be Durun. This was foregone since I found Tumari. Am I accomplice in Durun’s fate, the destruction of this soft, lovely archivist? But there is no one here to judge. We have all stood before tribunals and courts and juries, have gazed upon the pitiless masks of executioners. The Breach exists beyond their reach and their jurisdiction. Where there is no law to violate, by force no act may be criminal.

The arguments continue and we lock ourselves in our little house. Not enough space for all five of us—not counting Ouma—and we’ve forfeited any pretense of exploration. Let the dead be the dead: none of us gives much regard as to Tumari’s remains. The living take priority. The doctor jokes, out of Durun’s earshot, that with Tumari gone at least we have more supplies to divide among the survivors, there’s more coffee per head. This humor falls flat.

Ouma assures me, “You don’t have to be afraid, nothing here will harm you, Hinmayia.” She asks me to draw maps. Of the ocean between the Breach and other landmasses, of Vanuttan the glass city.

Despite myself I believe Ouma’s promise of safety. I venture toward the sea so I can breathe, for all that the air is dead and no breeze relieves the stillness of this ruined place. There’s no smell of salt, only of burnt sugar. On my slow circling with Ouma by my side I think I am seeing things, the child’s face altering day by day, and is there something of Tumari in her, the curve of the cheek, the angle of the nose. My mind plays tricks. A child’s features are prone to growth, but not like that. This is wishful mirage.

Durun goes missing. I return from a long walk, and the doctor says, “She went looking for the scout.” The doctor does not sound as though she expects to see Durun again. Ever the realist.

“I will find her.” Terror has drained out of me through my pores, down my feet. The sea has a bracing effect. I retain the will to insist, the will to survive, but those are not the same as blind panic.

How do I track? Not with method or reason, or the hunter’s techniques. I’m guided by guesses and intuition. I go up and down the wide boulevards, the cobblestones knuckled under my feet. All around me the bone trees grow and I imagine the vampiric bugs nesting there in seething clusters, in marching lines. There’s beauty here still, in the braided arches that rise over walkways, in the femoral traceries beneath the roofs. I pass an artificial waterfall that has long gone dry, water collected at the bottom green and stagnant.

In just such a pond, Durun. Facedown but not bloated. Her hair rippling in the water, and it seems as if the lotuses have grown out of her scalp, mingling with the black. She is so heavy. Human skin absorbs fluid without discriminating; the liquid rot has entered through her nose, her mouth, her ears, and sits inside her like boulders. But I pull her out, and put her on her back.

Water spreads from her and seeps into the grass, and tadpoles wriggle out of places where her skin—translucent and ripe as an egg—has burst. There is no blood, only green ice that crackles under her fingernails and glitters from beneath her eyelids.

The next day, Ouma has acquired a mole. It abides above her mouth, as precisely replicated as though it has been drawn there with a pen.

She seems taller, no longer so underfed.

* * *

There is a memory I hold under my tongue. In it, Tumari slowly strokes down my belly, parting me with her blunt, rough hand. Isn’t it my sister you want, my soft little sister. Yes. But Tumari did just as well, though it happened just the once. Our scout liked pliant, quiet women, the ones who would tremble under her and whisper for mercy. I was too loud, and I left marks on her skin. She could have whoever she wanted, and I have a habit of pining for or sleeping with women who are not quite right for me.

Still she showed me how to grip and load her pistol, if not how to aim. It is a foundation.

I remember the way to the tenement in which I lay Tumari to rest. I climb the stout, teak stairs. I turn the knob and open the door. There is no stench. Decay has been kept at bay. The only change in Tumari is that she seems flatter, deflated of dimension. A husk that would disappear if turned sideways.

The bugs have left her clothing and gear alone. I loosen the dark belt, liberate the dark gun. One sister, two sisters. How fortunate that Tumari wasn’t the one who drowned, or the gun might have been sodden to uselessness. How comforting the weight of weapon, this dense metal. It is fully loaded. I hide it in my satchel, muzzle pointed outward. Now I see why Tumari was so confident. This thing lends such immediate strength, firms the resolve like nothing else.

I think of confiding in someone, the doctor perhaps; she would offer help if only because she wants to live. When we voted—four of us remaining, no one to break the tie—she and I were the two who chose the return voyage, to go home and face what awaits us. But something like this I need to do alone; this is a secret, the moment must be seamless and hermetic.

Ouma is close at hand, always. Others think she is attached to me, drawn to a maternal quality visible only to a bereaved child.

“Ouma.” Her name from my lips, to drift in the air weightless as dust.

There she is, as though she’d been beside me all along. I do not look at her face—it is easier that way—and note just her outline. Nearly as tall as I am. Her clothes fit, too, and she is not awkward or lanky at all.

“I’d like to see a place close to the sea,” I tell her, “from a spot high up, so we can see very far. Maybe I’ll be able to point our homeland to you.”

This piques her interest. Afterward I’ll wonder why Vanuttan captivates her so much, but at this moment my focus is specific, singular. How the engines of her mind turn is irrelevant.

We climb. Street after street, gate after gate. Ouma knows this place inside and out. Had we been able to pinpoint exactly what kind of lucre we sought, she might have even led us to it. Entire treasuries, abandoned. The corpses all turned to paper thinness, to translucence, to shimmering specks. She opens the door to a bronze tower, trimmed in marble, part of a compound that might have been the manor of a lord or the pride of a priest.

Here is a roof. We can see our ship from here and this rivets her immediately; she peers forward, leans over the withered hedges. We can see the ocean too, the poisonous red, the dead currents. How white is the sky, and our ship so dark against it, like charcoal on paper.

“Tell me about the ship,” Ouma is saying, her eyes on it, hungry.

“It’s one of the smaller ones. Not comfortable. There are larger vessels, meant for luxury, and they are like palaces that can fly. With baths inside them, and dining halls.” My hand disappears into my satchel. I watch her back. She inches closer to the edge, unafraid of height, unafraid of the plummet. Unafraid of anything at all.

“Do those big ones have a lot to eat?”

“They’re usually supplied well, yes. Kitchens.” I ought to say or ask something symbolic, something final. What does she fear, if anything. What are her hopes and dreams.

Instead I draw the gun and then I shoot. There’s hardly any aiming to do. I fire twice, just to be sure. I watch her flinch from the force of impact and fall, limp, against the hedges. She does bleed. The exit wounds hemorrhage. It must be the most human thing about Ouma.

When I push her over I make sure that my hands do not touch where the bullets have gone through. These waters will devour, I think, the way they corrode stone. There will be no carrion left behind. Violence will dissolve into a gentle, pastel froth.

* * *

The first kill is easy, the second trivial, the third not worth mentioning at all.

Ouma, then the members of our expedition who refuse to go back, who would rather chance the Breach than face Vanuttan’s tribunal. Three deaths on my hands and I feel nothing.

In the end, with the two of us—the doctor and I—there are plenty of supplies to go around, the voyage home will be no time at all, and we’ll be full every meal. If the doctor is alarmed she does not show it; she does not ask what happened to Ouma, what happened to the others. Disappeared into the Breach, disappeared into thin air, it doesn’t matter. The tie has been broken, she and I vote the same. We engage the ship’s engine. It lifts off beautifully.

Reduced to two there is so much space in the cabin, so much room to stretch our legs. For the first time since we set out I feel joy. The doctor glances at me, and there’s a question lodged behind her mouth, but she leaves it be. The means are immaterial, the end is in sight. It is a fast ship and its course is absolute.

She assays a theory that the Breach was caused by a curse, a sickness so thorough that it left no traces. I do not tell her this, but I think it did leave a trace. Ouma was not a survivor; she was the disease. A plague that’s annihilated its hosts must of necessity seek a new vector. But I have halted that. I’ve saved us.

I don’t tell her this. The doctor doesn’t press. We eat in companionable silence, or something like it.

* * *

We see land, the familiar coast on which Vanuttan abides. The doctor shouts at the sight, wordless, giddy. I’m more reserved but every muscle inside me is loose with relief, and I press my brow to the windowpane, breathing slowly against it.

The ship descends. It knows its dock and its landing, like a homing pigeon knows its roost. We should have known ours too, and we should have noticed. But human perception is poor, human reason poorer still, both easily blinded.

We disembark expecting a reception of armed guards who would bring us to our patron, then bring us out again—to our punishment—once it is found out that we brought nothing back.

The day is so bright, so still. There is no wind, even though I remember the dock was near the sea, the air should ripple and snap and lash my skin, it should glitter with salt. There is no one here. An expanse of space, empty. Ships with inert engines. Without their moving parts in motion, ships are just massive sarcophagi.

The doctor says the air tastes sweet, like nectar and burnt sugar.

I’m thinking of animals sedated, bound for abattoirs. My hand is on Tumari’s pistol but it does nothing for my courage. The symbol has become impotent.

We wait. For what? For lack of alternatives. We both understand the signs. We have seen ruin and its symptoms.

Footfalls. A door opens, from the other end of the dock. Loud in this quiet: the pallid light commands its own acoustic rules, and it cages the sound in place so that everything is intimately close and distant at once.

As before I draw the scout’s gun. But this is foregone. Everything is, has been since we first inhaled the Breach’s fumes. The doctor and I stand side by side as she comes. At least I am not alone. Though I might as well be.

Tumari’s face, Durun’s mole. The composite. One sister, two sisters. Tall now, the way Tumari was, strong of limbs. No more lost child. How quickly they grow.

She smiles at me. “Flesh containers have so many rules, but once I was freed to be water and air, distance became as nothing. Welcome back, Hinmayia,” says Ouma. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

When we arrived on the ruined continent, we found only one survivor.

This is a citadel of time-eaten iron and bleached building-bones, the marrow of architecture spilling out through cracked pillars. The sea is red with poison, the sky Armageddon-white, the air nectar-sweet. The strata of houses and schools and streets are built high, fortified, away from the corrosive waters.

(Out of superstition, we do not call the city or the continent by name. Simply it is the Breach: a nomenclature of phenomenon rather than location.)

At every intersection of streets there is a skeleton tree. The branches are ribs, the leaves keratin, alive and lustrous like a courtier’s coiffure. These trees give no flowers, bear no fruits. After sunset they gleam blackly. At the root of such a tree, on our first night, is where we found the survivor—as pale as the tree, eyes as dark as the leaves. Curled up, half-asleep when we stumble upon her, waiting perhaps.

A child. She does not speak much.

* * *

Our scout, Tumari, is the first to disappear.

I’m awake on strength of coffee, completely black and completely bitter, the mug hot against my hands. It is my watch. I wait with my back to our encampment, the small silver house we grew from a small silver seed, planted on arrival without expectation; it was a surprise to us all that it took. What sprang up is skeletal, the roof inky and the windows full of ribs. When we lie down it is on beds of soft cartilage. The seeds take on the character of their soil, and the Breach makes for the strangest soil of all.

In the distance there is nothing, up in the sky there is nothing. The only sounds come from our makeshift house, the soft hiss of heating. No noise of the wild, even the water is inert, behaving like a trapped pond more than a sea. Neither tides nor waves. It is as if time has stopped for the ruined continent so utterly that the moon’s pull passes over this shore. Forgotten, or avoided, even by the natural forces. Sunlight is different here, and there is no moonlight. Only stars, and those loom closer, bigger here than at home. There is menace to their proximity, their size.

Next to me the girl dozes. She does not like being indoors, she says. Her name is Ouma. That her parents—or at least guardians—must be in this city is obvious, but she will admit to neither kith nor kin. We have been speculating. Her family may mistreat her. Yet they must be nearby. Tumari has gone looking. She has a peerless ear, the senses of a hound. She has been gone since nightfall.

Beside me Ouma stirs. She looks up, abruptly awake the way some children can be, leaping from sleep to full consciousness without any stage between. “Hinmayia. She’s not coming back.”

“Tumari is just thorough. Don’t worry. If we find anyone who knows you, we aren’t going to tell them you’re here unless you want us to.”

“There’s no one.” She slowly rises. There’s a tentativeness to her when she moves, as if every step might betray her balance and the coordination of her limbs. Though she has no mark on her, no scars or sign of injury, this distrust of her own body makes me wonder just what this child’s guardians did to her. She tilts her head, keeping her eye on me as she circles. “What is it like where you’re from, Hinmayia?”

She asks this often; fortunately it is a question with a wealth of answers. Where we are from is Vanuttan, the city of glass. I tell Ouma of the faceted canopies that stretch above our temples, the marble thoroughfares, the markets where one can buy beautiful quartz maps and books enclosed in platinum. The universities, the parks. I try to think of what would interest a child. “And there’s a lot of things to eat.”

“A lot of things to eat,” Ouma repeats.

Tumari does not come back.

* * *

In the morning we talk in hushed voices, away from Ouma, to least alarm her. We are the adults, she the lost child whom we must shelter. Our archivist Durun—Tumari’s sister—is in tears. The walls and empty houses now press in upon us, though a day ago they seemed safe—abandoned and eerie, but harmless. I hold Durun’s hand as she weeps. Once, at the beginning, I was slightly in love with her. She has a husband at home, though I still admire her face, those lips with the darling mole above them.

The task of questioning Ouma falls to me. I don’t think it will be easy but when I ask, she is forthcoming enough, in her own way. “You call it a city but you are wrong, Hinmayia. This is not a city. This is a machine. People don’t live in machines.” She holds the book I gave her in her lap. A picture book, of architecture and history, of how the different parts of glorious Vanuttan fit together.

“But you’re here.” I’m no good with children. Applying reason does not seem productive but I have nothing to coax her with, no sweets or toys or even the promise of a good life. “So are we. Can you think of where Tumari could have gone?” Or who could have harmed her, murdered her even. In so quiet a place, whose shadows and corners we thought we’d entirely explored.

“People can be raw material. It’s a purpose.” Ouma is not looking at me; instead she is studying the image of a park with its swans, its tame ocelots.

It is not a helpful answer. We set up flares, in the unlikely event that Tumari has lost her way. We venture out in threes, though we never go far. Our courage has been blanched. We think of our ship, moored up top, the highest point of the Breach. But we cannot easily turn back. Most of us are not here by choice; some took a life, others refused to take one, Tumari herself is a deserter from the army. As one we are exiles, and completing this expedition will earn us amnesty. We need something to bring back—a new resource or lucrative secret, an answer to why the Breach has been emptied of all life. Ouma, while part of that puzzle, does not on her own suffice.

We spend the next night cooped up in the small, silvery house. The night, we determine, is unknown. Perhaps some nocturnal predator, perhaps a time convenient for Ouma’s people to emerge and—judging us invaders—to kill. Or perhaps Tumari is fine, alive, but none of us really believes that.

At dawn, Tumari returns.

I’m the first to brave the day, and so the first to discover. She has been deposited outside our camp, prone. No injury on her, at a glance. Brackish fluid dribbles out of her lips, a muddy, dirty trail. Her jaw is oddly loose and when I pry her mouth open, I find it entirely toothless. Insects are nesting in the pits that molars and incisors once occupied.

I hold her head in my lap, gazing down at these insects—so black, so pearly and fat with blood—and feel as though my skin is surface tension, trembling, about to split open. Our handsome scout. Our dead scout.

“You should hide her,” Ouma says from behind me.

The child is untouched, unfazed. She guides me to a tenement; I carry the impossibly light corpse, the low buzz of feasting bugs against my skin. The house is locked but Ouma does something to the doorknob and it falls open. I lay Tumari down in a yellowed bed and take the chain from around her neck, a thick silver thing threaded with charms, talismans.

It is this that I give to Durun, telling her that the chain is all I found. I watch her collapse into herself from a remote distance. This place is ossifying me. First the part that fears, then the part that feels at all.

We confer and for the first time in our voyage—on the ship or in this silver house—we lay our crimes at our feet, peeled of secrets. The matter distills to this. Who faces death if we go back empty-handed, who faces merely a life of imprisonment, who faces the soft sentence of banishment.

My turn comes. A cartographer, that is all I’ve ever been, a person of maps and ink and topology. Mine was an error of politics, a refusal to recognize the new name of a conquered city, writing on my maps the old one. If I return I’ll be sent to a work camp, to labor in factories until my body fails. Compared to most it is a middling punishment, better than outright execution, worse than exile. To quantify our individual penalty is an exercise in macabre futility. “Has any of us tried to alter the ship’s course?” I say, at length.

“Tumari,” Durun says softly. “Of us all she was the closest to unraveling the engine’s mysteries.”

The ship’s engine knows only one course—from our home Vanuttan to the Breach, and back. We have tried to steer it elsewise, and it does not budge even a murmur from this path. And Tumari is gone.

“Are you not a mapmaker, Hinmayia,” says our doctor. “Isn’t it what you do, tell vessels where to go.”

She says this with such rancor. But I only laugh past her. “Maps are malleable as a child, ship engines are rebellious youths. I have tried.” To feed it different maps. To alter the map it does use. But it is only ink and paper, and the ship’s heart responds to none of those. Our trajectory is as unyielding as the sun’s.

But I do know this. I do know this suddenly, with certainty that sweeps through my aortae. It is better to be sent to the work camps than to be here. In the factories, among the lines of assembly and disassembly, there is possibility of survival. Between disembarking and reporting our failure, there is possibility of survival.

There is none in the Breach. Here there is only an incomprehensible, inevitable conclusion. I’ll never know whether Tumari suffered before she died. What she saw, what she felt. Whether she was cognizant of the coming end or died like a dumb beast.

* * *

Who next, then. No. There is no question. It was always going to be Durun. This was foregone since I found Tumari. Am I accomplice in Durun’s fate, the destruction of this soft, lovely archivist? But there is no one here to judge. We have all stood before tribunals and courts and juries, have gazed upon the pitiless masks of executioners. The Breach exists beyond their reach and their jurisdiction. Where there is no law to violate, by force no act may be criminal.

The arguments continue and we lock ourselves in our little house. Not enough space for all five of us—not counting Ouma—and we’ve forfeited any pretense of exploration. Let the dead be the dead: none of us gives much regard as to Tumari’s remains. The living take priority. The doctor jokes, out of Durun’s earshot, that with Tumari gone at least we have more supplies to divide among the survivors, there’s more coffee per head. This humor falls flat.

Ouma assures me, “You don’t have to be afraid, nothing here will harm you, Hinmayia.” She asks me to draw maps. Of the ocean between the Breach and other landmasses, of Vanuttan the glass city.

Despite myself I believe Ouma’s promise of safety. I venture toward the sea so I can breathe, for all that the air is dead and no breeze relieves the stillness of this ruined place. There’s no smell of salt, only of burnt sugar. On my slow circling with Ouma by my side I think I am seeing things, the child’s face altering day by day, and is there something of Tumari in her, the curve of the cheek, the angle of the nose. My mind plays tricks. A child’s features are prone to growth, but not like that. This is wishful mirage.

Durun goes missing. I return from a long walk, and the doctor says, “She went looking for the scout.” The doctor does not sound as though she expects to see Durun again. Ever the realist.

“I will find her.” Terror has drained out of me through my pores, down my feet. The sea has a bracing effect. I retain the will to insist, the will to survive, but those are not the same as blind panic.

How do I track? Not with method or reason, or the hunter’s techniques. I’m guided by guesses and intuition. I go up and down the wide boulevards, the cobblestones knuckled under my feet. All around me the bone trees grow and I imagine the vampiric bugs nesting there in seething clusters, in marching lines. There’s beauty here still, in the braided arches that rise over walkways, in the femoral traceries beneath the roofs. I pass an artificial waterfall that has long gone dry, water collected at the bottom green and stagnant.

In just such a pond, Durun. Facedown but not bloated. Her hair rippling in the water, and it seems as if the lotuses have grown out of her scalp, mingling with the black. She is so heavy. Human skin absorbs fluid without discriminating; the liquid rot has entered through her nose, her mouth, her ears, and sits inside her like boulders. But I pull her out, and put her on her back.

Water spreads from her and seeps into the grass, and tadpoles wriggle out of places where her skin—translucent and ripe as an egg—has burst. There is no blood, only green ice that crackles under her fingernails and glitters from beneath her eyelids.

The next day, Ouma has acquired a mole. It abides above her mouth, as precisely replicated as though it has been drawn there with a pen.

She seems taller, no longer so underfed.

* * *

There is a memory I hold under my tongue. In it, Tumari slowly strokes down my belly, parting me with her blunt, rough hand. Isn’t it my sister you want, my soft little sister . Yes. But Tumari did just as well, though it happened just the once. Our scout liked pliant, quiet women, the ones who would tremble under her and whisper for mercy. I was too loud, and I left marks on her skin. She could have whoever she wanted, and I have a habit of pining for or sleeping with women who are not quite right for me.

Still she showed me how to grip and load her pistol, if not how to aim. It is a foundation.

I remember the way to the tenement in which I lay Tumari to rest. I climb the stout, teak stairs. I turn the knob and open the door. There is no stench. Decay has been kept at bay. The only change in Tumari is that she seems flatter, deflated of dimension. A husk that would disappear if turned sideways.

The bugs have left her clothing and gear alone. I loosen the dark belt, liberate the dark gun. One sister, two sisters. How fortunate that Tumari wasn’t the one who drowned, or the gun might have been sodden to uselessness. How comforting the weight of weapon, this dense metal. It is fully loaded. I hide it in my satchel, muzzle pointed outward. Now I see why Tumari was so confident. This thing lends such immediate strength, firms the resolve like nothing else.

I think of confiding in someone, the doctor perhaps; she would offer help if only because she wants to live. When we voted—four of us remaining, no one to break the tie—she and I were the two who chose the return voyage, to go home and face what awaits us. But something like this I need to do alone; this is a secret, the moment must be seamless and hermetic.

Ouma is close at hand, always. Others think she is attached to me, drawn to a maternal quality visible only to a bereaved child.

“Ouma.” Her name from my lips, to drift in the air weightless as dust.

There she is, as though she’d been beside me all along. I do not look at her face—it is easier that way—and note just her outline. Nearly as tall as I am. Her clothes fit, too, and she is not awkward or lanky at all.

“I’d like to see a place close to the sea,” I tell her, “from a spot high up, so we can see very far. Maybe I’ll be able to point our homeland to you.”

This piques her interest. Afterward I’ll wonder why Vanuttan captivates her so much, but at this moment my focus is specific, singular. How the engines of her mind turn is irrelevant.

We climb. Street after street, gate after gate. Ouma knows this place inside and out. Had we been able to pinpoint exactly what kind of lucre we sought, she might have even led us to it. Entire treasuries, abandoned. The corpses all turned to paper thinness, to translucence, to shimmering specks. She opens the door to a bronze tower, trimmed in marble, part of a compound that might have been the manor of a lord or the pride of a priest.

Here is a roof. We can see our ship from here and this rivets her immediately; she peers forward, leans over the withered hedges. We can see the ocean too, the poisonous red, the dead currents. How white is the sky, and our ship so dark against it, like charcoal on paper.

“Tell me about the ship,” Ouma is saying, her eyes on it, hungry.

“It’s one of the smaller ones. Not comfortable. There are larger vessels, meant for luxury, and they are like palaces that can fly. With baths inside them, and dining halls.” My hand disappears into my satchel. I watch her back. She inches closer to the edge, unafraid of height, unafraid of the plummet. Unafraid of anything at all.

“Do those big ones have a lot to eat?”

“They’re usually supplied well, yes. Kitchens.” I ought to say or ask something symbolic, something final. What does she fear, if anything. What are her hopes and dreams.

Instead I draw the gun and then I shoot. There’s hardly any aiming to do. I fire twice, just to be sure. I watch her flinch from the force of impact and fall, limp, against the hedges. She does bleed. The exit wounds hemorrhage. It must be the most human thing about Ouma.

When I push her over I make sure that my hands do not touch where the bullets have gone through. These waters will devour, I think, the way they corrode stone. There will be no carrion left behind. Violence will dissolve into a gentle, pastel froth.

* * *

The first kill is easy, the second trivial, the third not worth mentioning at all.

Ouma, then the members of our expedition who refuse to go back, who would rather chance the Breach than face Vanuttan’s tribunal. Three deaths on my hands and I feel nothing.

In the end, with the two of us—the doctor and I—there are plenty of supplies to go around, the voyage home will be no time at all, and we’ll be full every meal. If the doctor is alarmed she does not show it; she does not ask what happened to Ouma, what happened to the others. Disappeared into the Breach, disappeared into thin air, it doesn’t matter. The tie has been broken, she and I vote the same. We engage the ship’s engine. It lifts off beautifully.

Reduced to two there is so much space in the cabin, so much room to stretch our legs. For the first time since we set out I feel joy. The doctor glances at me, and there’s a question lodged behind her mouth, but she leaves it be. The means are immaterial, the end is in sight. It is a fast ship and its course is absolute.

She assays a theory that the Breach was caused by a curse, a sickness so thorough that it left no traces. I do not tell her this, but I think it did leave a trace. Ouma was not a survivor; she was the disease. A plague that’s annihilated its hosts must of necessity seek a new vector. But I have halted that. I’ve saved us.

I don’t tell her this. The doctor doesn’t press. We eat in companionable silence, or something like it.

* * *

We see land, the familiar coast on which Vanuttan abides. The doctor shouts at the sight, wordless, giddy. I’m more reserved but every muscle inside me is loose with relief, and I press my brow to the windowpane, breathing slowly against it.

The ship descends. It knows its dock and its landing, like a homing pigeon knows its roost. We should have known ours too, and we should have noticed. But human perception is poor, human reason poorer still, both easily blinded.

We disembark expecting a reception of armed guards who would bring us to our patron, then bring us out again—to our punishment—once it is found out that we brought nothing back.

The day is so bright, so still. There is no wind, even though I remember the dock was near the sea, the air should ripple and snap and lash my skin, it should glitter with salt. There is no one here. An expanse of space, empty. Ships with inert engines. Without their moving parts in motion, ships are just massive sarcophagi.

The doctor says the air tastes sweet, like nectar and burnt sugar.

I’m thinking of animals sedated, bound for abattoirs. My hand is on Tumari’s pistol but it does nothing for my courage. The symbol has become impotent.

We wait. For what? For lack of alternatives. We both understand the signs. We have seen ruin and its symptoms.

Footfalls. A door opens, from the other end of the dock. Loud in this quiet: the pallid light commands its own acoustic rules, and it cages the sound in place so that everything is intimately close and distant at once.

As before I draw the scout’s gun. But this is foregone. Everything is, has been since we first inhaled the Breach’s fumes. The doctor and I stand side by side as she comes. At least I am not alone. Though I might as well be.

Tumari’s face, Durun’s mole. The composite. One sister, two sisters. Tall now, the way Tumari was, strong of limbs. No more lost child. How quickly they grow.

She smiles at me. “Flesh containers have so many rules, but once I was freed to be water and air, distance became as nothing. Welcome back, Hinmayia,” says Ouma. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

 

 

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year’s best collections. She was shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright was nominated for the British Science Fiction Association Award. Her newest is an epic fantasy retelling of “The Snow Queen,” Winterglass, published in 2017 by Apex Publications.

About her story, she shares, “The title ‘Red as Water, White as Ruin’ is a slight homage to Tanith Lee (‘White as Snow, Red as Blood’), though theme-wise it doesn’t have much relation. The story is one of my rare horror tales, and I wanted to impose an atmosphere of claustrophobia where the narrator has to contend not with just mistrust among her group but also a deeply hostile land. I’m fascinated with total destruction, apocalypses, and that’s part of this story as well: about what is left afterward, what happens when those unwitting stumble across them.”

 

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