This Hollow Body Read online



  This Hollow Body

  Table of Contents

  SUMMER

  Thanks & Acknowledgements

  SUMMER

  The brand is a focus.

  On nights like these, when sleep refuses to come, Rowena whiles away her insomnia staring at the silver sigil inlaid into her upper right arm—the brand, the old way mark—which blares her curse to the world.

  The air is heavy with the smell of gunpowder and sweat. Work burns through the night, and the sounds of metal and human effort ringing through the thick canvas of her tent would’ve kept Rowena awake even if the tension of the oncoming battle did not.

  She shifts aimlessly. Her bedroll is thin and beaten, providing hardly any barrier between her body and the pebble-strewn ground beneath. Sleep won’t find her, and let the noisy camp or the discomfort of a tired body atop hard ground be the reason for it. Either’s a good enough excuse to pass muster.

  Concentrate on the brand. Spend enough time tracing the angular, runic patterns with her eyes and, eventually, she’ll lose herself in them. Eventually, her concentration will buy space where she can forget.

  Rowena fans her tank top against her chest, a meager breeze hardly worth the effort. Dawn is still hours off, but sweat rises from her skin almost as fast as she can wipe it away. A bestial thought comes to mind and her skin ripples with the promise of tomorrow’s battle, and her imminent change. She digs her fingers under the waist of her trousers, providing precious clearance for the skin beneath to breathe. The heat in this place is even worse, once sun climbs sky. You’d think the discomfort of thick fur in dank summer would ward against allowing the change to take hold.

  But with the change comes a luxuriating speed. Find an open field and, once you’re up to motion, the wind whistling over your ears and through your fur cools the body and, eventually, the mind. Find a big enough field, big enough to run without stopping, and that wind might convince you that you’re comfortable. Run long enough, it might even convince you that you’re free.

  Few fields like that in places like these.

  She rolls onto her side. Hair falls into eyes and she swipes it away. No matter how tightly she binds it, it always comes loose. Bothersome.

  She doesn’t have any affection for her hair, she only keeps it this length because it’s a special dispensation allowed to soldiers like her—it’d be a crime to throw away a privilege, wouldn’t it? They’d make her chop it off if she were anyone else.

  Smaller in that form, with fur blacker than this long night, she could tiptoe unseen from this tent. She could change her body into that compact, lupine shape and tread through the lacing web of shadows just outside the campfire light. In ten minutes she’d be away from the camp; in thirty, gone from the theatre of war; in sixty, perhaps in another country entirely—their purviews morph with each passing week, their borders intersecting and overlapping, shifting on whims.

  Run far enough, she might find somewhere quiet, somewhere like the farms, and fields, and small houses of her childhood—idyllic in her memory, but only through nostalgia’s gloss—and there, far away from the vengeful bodies resting beneath the battlefield mud, she might approach peace. It could be that a bestial body need not have a bestial mind. It could be that it’s not the curse that makes her a beast, but her proximity to the soldiers and leaders and countries that would twist it to their purpose.

  A tink-tink-tink alerts Rowena to the tent’s new occupant. She looks towards her oil lantern and the errant moth that hurls itself against the glass, seeking the weak flame within. Beyond that, on the other side of the small tent, her crisp blue uniform is cast in deep shadow by the straining lantern light. An ominous portent of what tomorrow will bring.

  If her mother heard her say that, she’d belt her across the lips—“Poetry’s for those who don’t have to fret on hungry mouths going hungry,” she’d say, or something like it, urging Rowena to commit to a life of hard effort tiling an uncooperative, rocky field—not so different from this one, less the blood.

  What’s the point in uniforms for a woman like her? They only ever shred to pieces when the change comes. Yet, no matter how many she destroys, there’s always a fresh one waiting for her on return to the camp. Worth the cost in cloth and buttons? She must be; but what a strange way to tabulate the value of a life.

  The wings of the moth flutter in irritated buzz as it continues its futile assault on the lantern. Rowena pillows an arm beneath her cheek, watching. Does it injure itself against the glass? Does it even know what it’s after? And what would it do, if it ever got it?

  Such a life there is for insects.

  With a shudder, she recalls the red bites that covered her throughout the Ceratara campaign; better moths than mosquitos any day. Her fingers trace over the small clump of scar tissue at her left shoulder. The fiery lance of the silver bullet, she took it conquering a machinegun nest, is more distant in her memory than the legion of bug bites she suffered in the weeks before the city fell. The wound was searing, instant. She’d never felt anything like it, pain so deep it stripped away senses, struck her blind. Truly terrifying, she supposes.

  The pain was brief, in retrospect, and it got her sent away from the front, to a hospital, for a several day reprieve from the scourge of hungry mosquitos and the squelching feel of muddy trench water in her boots. Firm bed in the hospital, good food too. The smell was wretched, but what can you do? All in all, it would’ve been a nice vacation, if she hadn’t spent the whole time worrying over Malak.

  The tent flap rustles and Rowena startles to sitting.

  Malak enters, letting the flap fall behind her. She dips her body in obsequious bow. “Lieutenant Sted.”

  It’s only a ceremonial title. She didn’t earn it.

  “Corporal Yata.” Rowena replies to the bow with a curt nod, playing out this game of theirs, pretending as if this woman is somehow below her station, or that deference is required, or that there could be any true difference between the two of them, who spent their childhood bathing in the same rickety wooden tub, and all the years since at each others side in one way or another.

  Malak’s lips spread wide in toothy grin. She raises a bulging leather flask and sloshes its contents with a flick of her wrist. “Wanted someone to share the spoils with, saw your light.”

  “You would’ve come even if you didn’t.”

  “You’ve never slept a night before a battle in your life, so we’ve got no way to test that theory.” Malak drops herself onto the hard dirt by Rowena’s bedroll. She offers the flask. “Here, have a taste.”

  Rowena unclasps the stopper and steals a gulp from the flask before the smell of its contents wards her away. Too quick. The bitter rotgut, flecked with the acrid aroma of residual machine oil, bends her forward at the waist, choking and gagging.

  Malak cackles, leaning in to slap Rowena between her flexing shoulder blades, grabbing back the flask as she does and taking an eager chug.

  “Hoo!” She exhales sharply, undoing the buttons of her stiff uniform coat. “That’s nice.”

  Rowena’s nose wrinkles. She shakes her head to clear her sinuses. “Next time have them wash the flask. It reeks of oil.”

  “Oh, it’s just a whiff.”

  “Some of us have sensitive noses, Malak.”

  “Have another swig, then I’ll apologize.”

  Despite her aborted first attempt, Rowena nerves herself up for another. Her second swallow is slower, more careful, and she draws a stiff breath through her nose to cool the sear of liquor burning down her throat.

  “Good, eh?” Malak asks. The question’s rhetorical, of course; Rowena’s given no time to answer. “Perfect to loosen you up before a battle. Mother’s remedy.”

  Pressing
the crook of her elbow against her mouth, speaking between her coughing fit, Rowena asks, “Who’d you steal it from?”

  “You trying to get me pilloried?” Malak laughs. “Didn’t steal, traded a hank of salt pork for it.”

  Rowena lifts an eyebrow. “Where’d you get the salt pork?”

  That broad smile widens—feeds—on Rowena’s disbelief. “Filched from the mess after chow.”

  “Thought so.”

  In the dim lantern light, Rowena can hardly see the thin, diagonal scar that bisects Malak’s face from jaw to hairline, cutting a pale line through her dark skin across the bridge of her thick nose. Survived a bayonet slash, she did. By her telling, she turned that pig sticker right around and put it into the gut of the one who dealt it to her, but it was always hard to separate fact from fiction, where stories told by Malak Yata were concerned.

  Rowena leans back on one hand, stares back up at the steepled blackness of the tent above. The moonshine sloshes in her empty stomach, burns with a particular warmth, soothing and fearsome both—like placing your hands against a wood stove in the morning after the fire’s gone out, testing how long you can hold it there until you scream and pull away. Malak always won that game. Malak had a will like an angry badger (still does) and the face to match (but that’s grown more handsome, with age).

  Truth or myth, Malak became the talk of the company for a week thanks to her heroic injury—though even a full month of praise wouldn’t be enough for a woman like her. A year, that’s what Malak said she deserved.

  Malak? Corporal Yata now, let’s try to remember that.

  Titles, ranks. These things have meaning, she knows, but Rowena’s never seen the value in it. This is the peril of being granted rank without having earned it; that’s what many of the women and men in the camp would say regarding her apparent indifference to her role. Strange thought, where Rowena is concerned. To her, it seems she very well did earn it—only by a more imminently painful route.

  At the age of fifteen, Rowena was turned. The law on her particular curse being what it is, she found herself pressed into service, shown how to fire a rifle and pull a pin, elevated immediately to the rank of “Lieutenant,” and nothing was ever in question, and no choices were ever made.

  Whereas Malak made many choices, didn’t she? She chose to follow Rowena into this life, when she easily could’ve shirked the draft. She chose to grind against this machine, to throw herself into its cogs over years, and emerge each time to a modestly improved station—Recruit, Private, Private First Class. And now? And finally? Two years on, she’s Corporal Malak, and she burnishes the chevrons of her station with bulging pride, where Rowena can only think to spit on her own—and has done exactly that, once or twice.

  The alcohol bridles in her gut, struggling to consume a troublesome memory before it breaks the surface of her stomach. It’s powerful stuff, this ‘shine. Bolstered by it, what thoughts come seem less like recollections, more reflections. She could view them as something external to her self, like in a mirror, helpfully smudged by the passage of time…

  Perceptive Malak takes another gulp of the moonshine, leans forward, and snares her fingers around Rowena’s hand, dragging her friend away from barbarous thoughts of the terrible past with a gentle tug.

  “Neh, Wren.” She puts on a look of greedy curiosity to occlude the concern darkening her eyes. “Tell me a story about the dead.”