Future Artifacts by Kameron Hurley

Author:Kameron Hurley [Hurley, Kameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

“We aren’t going to make the next water hold,” Hoshana told Kanika and Fahra. Nisa listened to them speak. For three days they talked only of where they would sell the ladies. Now they realized they had too many ladies among them, no one to sell them to, and not enough water.

Nisa spat at their circles. Hoshana's circles.

I will bind your clan together no longer, Nisa thought.

Hoshana convened the women’s circle that night. The clan camped next to a tall pillar of gray stone jutting up from the red sand. The women’s circle put up their tent next to it, and the clan’s fires burned in a wide circle around the pillar, just inside the circle on the sand. The others took up sleeping places inside the circle of fires and muttered among themselves. Nisa heard soft whispers in the dark, a cloud of fear and rumor.

“They’re going to make someone walk,” the voices said. “Walking dead across the sand. Who will they choose?”

Nisa knew who they would choose.

She walked into the tent, unbidden, uninvited. She stood at the outer edge of the circle of women. The tent was too hot, stuffy. The air choked her.

“The water’s low,” Hoshana was saying. She looked up once when Nisa walked in but said nothing to her.

Fahra spat onto the sand. “You want advice on who walks? We have enough men among us. Too many, I think. We’ll find wanderers the farther we cross into the desert. We should purge the old blood before we take up the new.”

“None of ours,” Hoshana said. “I’m not feeding any more of ours. We’ve got a dozen ladies tied up outside. I feed chattel to the desert first, then our own.”

The women protested. Fahra, Kadife, Nasirah, Kanika, all of the others, nearly twenty voices loud and strong in the close confines of the tent.

Nisa said nothing.

“Welcome back to the desert,” Hoshana said, her voice louder than the rest. “We live by desert rules again. There is no space within our number for ladies we can’t sell.”

“Edibe died to get us those ladies!” Kanika said.

“That’s the price we paid the sand then. This is the price we pay now,” Hoshana said. “Not enough food and water to keep them. You want to kill them instead? No, we have given the sand too much since we arrived back into the desert. They’ll walk.”

Nisa imagined little ladies sprawled across the sand. She saw the desert eat them alive and drink their blood.

And she saw her babies, curled around one another at the bottom of a silty pit.

“How many do you want to throw out?” Nisa said.

The women all turned. They looked at her as if a ghost had spoken, not a woman.

“We need to leave three of them,” Hoshana said.

“You want to bury them here?” Nisa said.

“We’re not going to bury trading goods,” Kanika said. “Someone else might find them. Someone else might—”

“You buried my babies,” Nisa said. “Why not these pale things, too?”

“I told you, we have given too much,” Hoshana said.

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