Tordotcom Publishing 2021 Debut Sampler by S. Qiouyi Lu Lee Mandelo Freya Marske Aimee Ogden Zin E. Rocklyn and Andrew Kelly Stewart

Author:S. Qiouyi Lu, Lee Mandelo, Freya Marske, Aimee Ogden, Zin E. Rocklyn and Andrew Kelly Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

The first meal of the day is always the same.

Broth of bladderwrack. Dried mushroom and algae cake. “Grey cake,” Lazlo calls it. We grow and harvest the mushrooms from atop the generators. Used to be a time we would have fish press as well, but now press comes at the meal following Vespers. If we’re lucky. With our slurry and drip.

Brackish draught.

These meals provide little lasting sustenance.

There has been no raid above for some time. No meal or flour or canned, sweet things. Not that I would have an appetite for such delicacies.

Lazlo is trying to speak with me, from across the table.

We are free to speak in the mess. In whispers, but it’s allowed. A low chatter amongst the four tables, like steam.

Today, I have few words.

Lazlo wonders why, I know. Muddied eyes, squinted. Little body hunched. Big, red cheeks. Scurvy efflorescence, Brother Karson calls it. From a lack of fresh victuals. We all suffer it. I taste blood at the back of my throat when I wake. Bleeding, raw gums.

Worst is when the old scars open again.

Lazlo asks again if I am in pain, that he can get me a poultice if needed. Poultices help with the swelling, with the bleeding. He’s close with Brother Ignacio, in the galley.

I tell him it’s nothing, though my throat is tight with unsaid truths.

Caleb, the youngest, and the one with the freshest scar, has endured the worst of the pain and the bleeding. So much that when we have steamed sargassum or kelp, I give him some of my portion—one of the few plants from the sea that can stave off the scurvy.

Today, he looks pale.

“You know, if you bleed too much before your twelfth birthday, you’re in greater danger of turning out a Demi,” St. John says, in that stiff way he says things. Speaks the same way he sits—straight, rigid. Face tight with superiority.

Caleb, already pale, goes fully white.

“And you know where Demis go…” St. John says, leaning in, a taunting smirk. He is not above plain meanness, St. John. A long nose. A bulbous head prone to shaving rash. We all must keep our hair shorn, of course. Honed shells do the work well enough. In skilled hands, anyway.

“Don’t scare him,” Ephraim, the eldest of us, chimes in, unamused. “That isn’t true, Caleb.”

Caleb takes in a bracing breath and returns to his meal; all the while, St. John continues to wear a prideful smirk.

If voices break after a cutting, it occurs by the age of twelve or thirteen. Caused by an unblessed blade, they say, but Brother Silas has told me privately that it sometimes just happens. There’s no accounting for it.

St. John has passed that age where the breaking of a voice happens. Fourteen years. He has been vicious and haughty ever since. The truth is that half of all those castrated have either died from their wounds or turned. Become Demis, and must be purified in other ways.

I know that St. John has been waiting for my voice to break, or Lazlo’s, so that he might ascend to our positions.

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