Three Steps to Salvation

In the space between the dog’s last breath and the fire, Amaya ran. She ran with dirt rushing past her skirts, ran through the tangle of thorns and stones and lizards screaming her name as above her, the memory of stars had ceased to shine, replaced with the kind of unfiltered and unfailing light that within minutes roasted her skin practically alive, but there wasn’t time for this, there wasn’t time for anything. The dog was dead, and she had to run. 

The smell of baked earth was a death sentence that she wore around her neck, grasping with both hands. 

This was the name of the graveyard. 

This was the story her mother had told her growing up behind the castle walls, trying to divorce her from the life everyone venerated, but had never, not for anyone, existed outside of thirteen different kinds of lies.  

As Amaya ran to the beat of her heart giving way across the hot plains of desert that had long ago stopped accepting water, the story played behind her head, behind her head, in it, all around. 

There were girls. Her mother never started with once upon a time. There were girls who have, and girls who have not. (Of course there were boys and people who were neither boys nor girls–do you want to correct my story, or do you want to listen to it?) The girls who have not were bitter and jealous, and they would do anything to become a girl who has, even if it meant tearing down every girl they saw, just so that no one would ever have more. But plains in which these girls lived was not conducive to actions of secrecy. The sun never left any room for shadows. 

And here there wasn’t any room for shadows either, just the thin slivers of shade that rested between Amaya’s feet and the cracked, cracked ground —

Where had all this life gone? 

Where had she gone? 

Where are you going? The voice is stuck running on repeat through your head, but the hand of your father on your sleeve makes the question inconsequential. Inconsequential. You are going where he wants you to go. You are going out of the doors of your house with its shitty sun curtains and to the garden beyond it, where all the plants withered before you were born, but the cactuses are still there, and even though they used to be as sharp as your temper, they aren’t now. They’ve been worn down, like you, by hardships and lizards. 

You hate lizards. You think they’re the only animals, besides humans, that can live on this part of the planet anymore. Until you open your eyes wider under a pair of sunglasses as equally shitty as the sun curtains to see a box on wheels waiting at the end of your driveway, two giant creatures with four legs, hard feet, and necks feet long fused back into their shoulders, which attach to stretched bodies. Their hair’s been braided with tiny, tinkling bells. 

They look thirsty. Maybe you should get them some water. With the way this is going, you can waste the water in your house now: your father told you this morning to pack up everything you owned, and if it could be sold for more than seven dollars, he put it in a box to be sold somewhere else. You’re going somewhere. Your water ration won’t be needed here anymore. 

With distaste and dust clinging to your teeth, you watch the box-top unfold, letting out a man. A man who shakes your father’s hand and takes you with him. 

Another girl might wonder why you go so willingly. You’d tell another girl to shut the fuck up and take a look around. Through the box’s window there’s only desert. A thick, cracked shell of land. Cacti. No water. No shade. Nowhere to run. Just bleached bones slowly getting stripped of their calcium by desperate vultures, who might die soon too. You had nowhere to go at home, you have nowhere to go now. Same thing, really. 

Her knees went first. Against the ground, the only thing she can see besides the expanse of blue, blue sky sweating from carrying two suns. The ground–not soil, not like in the compound–but fractured dust baked into a flat plain, dotted with sand dunes here and there, and it’s hot, she’s sweating through the layers of her skirts, time to take them off. One by one. Starting with the overskirt, then the kirtle, then the petticoats, then the corsets — all of it off, until Amaya was left standing naked under the skin-roasting sun. She needed protection. Maybe the petticoat, if it could be stripped of the hoops that keep it up. In one of the pockets, after the dog died, she had stashed the knife, handle down. The rummaging for it made her thirsty, but she told herself to save her water — it didn’t look like there would be another place to refill until she reached the treasure trove halfway between the compound and the City of Kestrel. In the City of Kestrel, labor sat on no one’s shoulders, and everyone had a free life under whatever shade or sun they chose. 

The knife. She was looking for the knife. Laying out the fabric underneath her, keeping the ground that was hot enough to cook an egg from cooking her, Amaya went through the different pockets. When she was a child, and her mother hadn’t started telling her the stories, Amaya thought that having a dress with so many layers and so many pockets was more natural than the fact that sometimes people were born, and sometimes people died. Now, she marveled at how frivolous the velvet was, the intricate embroidery of family crests filling up the dress’s outer bodice like a tattoo of ownership. Maybe the fancy clothing was just another way for people to own other people. 

Ownership mattered less than Amaya out here. Nothing owned anything except the sun. She found the knife, used it to cut out the hoops, let the metal spring in all its steaming hot glory from the fabric. Using the thin muslin that was left, Amaya bound her breasts (so she could run), bound her feet (so her feet would remain whole), and tied the rest of the fabric all over her body the best she could (so the sun would be kept at bay, for the moment). 

As Amaya began to run again, leaving the massacre of her clothing in her wake, her mother’s story began to beat in her head again, to the rhythm of her running feet. 

But, like with all fairytales, in the girls who had not, there was a girl called the Ideal Daughter. Instead of trying to create shadows or take from the Haves what she had not, she followed the instructions of her father and surrendered even the bare bones of what she had—the memory of lizards licking cactus thorns, and the cactuses that came with—in order to keep her head down, work the unworkable land, and continue to be the Ideal Daughter. 

You see, what the Have Nots failed to see was that the Haves did not want competition. They were as guilty as their poorer counterparts of material jealousy. They, like the Have Nots, watched jealousy both their sisters and their brothers and their parents and all the people who had not because the more the Haves had, the more apparent it became to them that the pedestals of goods on which they created shadows for themselves were terrifyingly unstable. One golden shoe yanked away from a pile? It would all come crashing down, its gaping mouth open to devour and crush. 

Meanwhile, the sun was getting stronger. The Haves had to build their pyramids higher. 

You’ve never seen something so tall in your entire life. The carriage — they call it a carriage, that weird box with the weird people with the weird creatures called horses — trundled down the desert dirt until you saw a sliver of darkness you’ve never seen before: real, solid shadows, places where light couldn’t go. And the shadows came from the building. The building was tall, tall, taller than the tops of the skimpy clouds, all its sides done up in stone that was more grey than brown.

Now the gates are swinging open. The man next to you had leaned out of the carriage to give the order, his sand colored hair blowing in the sand colored wind — when a man dressed in metal shoves a long knife through the carriage window aimed at your throat, the man laughs and says a mumble of words that you don’t quite follow, but that end in arranged marriage, and you spend the night in the cover of darkness, awake, thinking about the concepts of darkness and arranged marriage.

Arranged marriages happen. Fathers and mothers and daughters and parents of all kinds have to secure water rights somehow, the best way to do that being a marriage with a person who owns more than you. Since the town well dried up, there’s been talk floating around about marrying all the kids off to outsiders so that the people there can do what people on this planet do best: get up and move somewhere else, somewhere where technology still works, and you aren’t isolated in a hell hole of a desert. 

Get up and move somewhere else. You’ve certainly done that. You’re in the darkness. You put your hand in front of your face. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Just a pressing feeling, growing on your chest and in the ache of your fingers, a prickle on your mouth and arms, where the hair stands up, a feeling you don’t have a name for yet making you wonder: is darkness everything your father hoped it would be, when he rhapsodized it to you? Darkness is everything. Darkness is wealth. Wealth is power. Power is freedom. 

You wonder if being so lost in a space that you’re afraid to move in it counts as being free.

She considered if she was lost. The trek shouldn’t have taken that long. In all the stories, it only took two hours, maybe three, maybe five if Amaya accounts for the ambiguities and contradictions between the different versions. But all of them had at least one detail in common — if the stolen compass tied to her chest with the remains of her petticoat was pointing her in the right direction, then she, by then, should have reached the shell of a village, brick houses with their insides torn out, abandoned wells, fallen roofs. 

So far, nothing. Nothing but heat mirages turning Amaya’s eyes in circles; God, she hoped she hadn’t been running in those too. Maybe it was time for a drink. That would be it. Time for a drink. She took the canteen from where it had been strung to her hip. One sip, she told herself, one sip, but it could never be just one sip, could it? Once her throat realized it was cracked, her insides demanded she take another, then another, until the whole bottle drained in one last drop against her furious teeth, which still wanted more. MORE. The only ways Amaya could get more, according to the stories about the City of Kestrel, were by reaching those cool, harboring walls where magic things like machines spilled mist out into the streets and private homes, or by reaching the hollow village. The Ideal Daughter’s best Have-Friend put a box of water there when she escaped Castle Doctrina. 

So this was thirst. If Amaya’s side continued flaring the way it did, she wouldn’t have to think about stepping over the body of her mother’s dog to look out the window at the gallows bursting into flames under concentrated rays of sunlight. 

The dog would have led her to water. Her mother would have brought more water. But her mother was hung in the yard just after the dog died, and her last words to Amaya were run. 

Her mother might have brought more water, but her mother was hung in the yard under the sun just after the dog died, and her last words told Amaya to run. 

So even drinking, Amaya hadn’t stopped running. Or thinking. And there, on the horizon, maybe that’s a roof, or maybe that’s a ghost. 

Whatever did happen to the Ideal Daughter? Well, the Haves saw that the Ideal Daughter wanted nothing from them, so naturally, they wanted everything from her. When her father offered her up for marriage, there was a bidding war of shade making objects in her honor, one that cost a man — the Have Prince, but not the highest Have Prince—quite a lot of the height of his tower, which lasted the Ideal Daughter’s father long enough in the shade to thoroughly ruin himself and die parched, with nothing. 

The Ideal Daughter, however, went with the Have Prince to the land of shade and shadows, where she lived cloistered with her new husband and all the other Haves. Such an opulence of shadows was supposed to give her such joy! But the Haves had picked her accordingly: the Ideal Daughter, maybe not so ideal after all, felt confined, stifled, by the fact that all the beauty – however harsh, however human hating, however evil and poor it was – could be erased so easily by lack of light. 

So, instead of rejoicing, she wept. Instead of taking from the Haves as any other Have or Have Not would, she sat with her hands in her lap. Instead of screaming when she gave birth to her child, she told her husband to give it whatever name he wanted — she, certainly, did not want to raise a creature in darkness. 

It was at this juncture, however, that the Ideal Daughter found hope, as all storybook characters are apt to do. Just as there was an Ideal Daughter in the Have Nots, so there was a Less Than Ideal But Still Perfect Daughter in the Haves. And the Less Than Ideal But Still Perfect Daughter was the one who came to the Ideal Daughter to clean the sweat off her forehead, the blood from her ankles. 

“I know a place, where you can go,” she said, hating the world of shadows just as much as the Ideal Daughter. “The City of Kestrel.” 

The wedding proceeds. The consummating of the wedding proceeds. All this bores you — what you’re fascinated with isn’t the prince really, or any of the people in particular, or even the meals that must have taken years to make. It’s how everyone here acts like this play-pretend of a castle system with its dukes and duchesses has somehow uprooted reality.

This means you do make a case study of people, but not just people. People and their surroundings, coupled with people and each other, and, of course, people and the darkness. So you bare it when your stomach starts to show, with everyone running their hands over it, poking you with long fingers. They recommend witch women and water herbs. Long stints in the darkness. A long walk in the sunlight, as if sunlight is now a commodity. 

They don’t understand. 

The way to have a child is to go to the tiny town hospital, which might not have a lot, but it’s better than this. Not to sit on a birthing stool, bleeding your life out. 

As it gets closer and closer to the due date, you try to get medical help. Something. Anything. Nothing. Just more darkness closing in. More uncaring faces, so obsessed with this pathetic, provincial way of life that if you die, all the better! They have a real life martyr. A person that really embodies the values of the place and past they call Earth. You find instruction manuals — instruction manuals — in a tiny chamber you weren’t supposed to be able to worm your way into, the one that has all the technology and books that keep everything dark and cool but, according to the layers of dust between them and the world, machines that everyone has forgotten they live next to. 

You want out. You want escape. You want better for the child that — your water breaks as you’re running, running, running as fast as you can for the doors, and a man stops you, pins you to the wall, ties you to the birthing stool, where women take their turns delighting in how much this fucking hurts. When the baby comes out, everyone waltzes away with it, to show her to your husband, to christen her, while you collapse back onto the silky sheets turned cotton gags. 

And then Aviana comes. Since she’s the daughter of a minor duke, and you’re a class and a married prince above her, she hasn’t spoke to you much, but while stroking your hair, Aviana tells you the story her mother told her, about the City of Kestrel, the place where there can be technology and water at once, far away from here and past the town you came from, where she and you can go together one day. She saw you slip into the engine room, and she hopes you’ve realized what she has: this isn’t a settlement, it’s a prison, this isn’t a second chance, it's a death sentence spelled c-u-l-t.

And your daughter? She says the nobles and your husband have decided to call her Amaya. If you wanted to know. 

A roof. It was a roof. A roof almost bald, its thatch collapsed, half of it burned away with the sunlight, the other half clinging weakly to the property of the particular plant it was taken from, a property that says that it shouldn’t burn, but the desert didn’t care very much about that at all. When Amaya mounted the top of the hill, she lost her footing, and rolling all the way down, which seared the pattern of the desert into her skin—hot sand worked its way around her petticoat bindings, down to the center of her, even her ribs, leaving grain shaped blisters behind. 

Water. She needed to coat herself in water, to stop the heat. Her mother’s story said it should be here. Gasping, weeping, bleeding, burning, Amaya scorched her hands digging out every part of the foundation of the first house, then the second, then the third, until she knew, she knew, it wasn’t there, it never was, there was no City of Kestrel, and Amaya had left imprisonment to die in the desert, a captive of the world instead of the tower. 

To die in the desert. To die looking for a fantasy. Amaya tried to remember the rest of her mother’s story, realizing that it was, in fact, just a story. 

The sand closed in, too hot. 

And so did the bright red of a closed eyelid, the last sight she’d ever prepared herself to see, passing in a place without darkness. 

But the Ideal Daughter, for the first time since she crawled out of her mother’s womb, a week late, felt the deep, uncertain stones of fear pushing themselves through her mouth, down her throat. She told herself this was but practicality: she, unlike the other Perfect Daughter, had known what it meant to live outside the shade of the mountains of the Haves—she knew how the Have Nots stand ready with their knives, death sentences, and hungers. So when the other Perfect Daughter stole out from the shadows when all the other Haves had turned their heads, the Ideal Daughter did not follow. Instead, she held her daughter (for she had given birth to a girl) close to her and waited. She hoped the other Perfect Daughter would send a sign of safety, and though she waited throughout the years as her daughter grew up, the sign never came. 

You let Aviana go to the City of Kestrel without you. In the quiet time of night — you know night now; it ceases to amaze you; there is nothing dazzling in darkness anymore — you wonder if you should have followed, tossing and turning so much that your husband puts his hands on your shoulders to steady you as you worry your nails down to your fingertips to taste blood. Your daughter tastes blood, trying to reach your breast and catching cuticles instead, her teeth stained red when they whimper angrily through her gums. 

Aviana is dead. You’ve realized this. 

She’s dead, and she’s never coming back, and all you can do is tell your daughter the story of you coming here over and over until she knows that as much as life here catches you around the throat like a necklace or a noose, there’s no leaving here besides a noose outside of the metaphorical. 

Then the dog comes. The dog. 

With its collar. 

The inscribed collar. Follow me to freedom. Love, Aviana. 

You, of course, burn the collar, after you memorize the map sewn onto it. 

Then you work that into your story too, carrying the feeling that you won’t make it out. Not if your daughter does. 

And you’re right. You’ve never been righter. Your husband finds the dog somehow, figures out where it came from – how you don’t know, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is your daughter’s face, now gaunt and grown, promising you as you walk to the gallows, that whatever comes, she’ll run to the end of the world, to the City of Kestrel. 

“Drink.” 

Cold shoved against her lips. Hands, braced against her chin, holding a bottle—Amaya drank so much that her stomach threatened to split, and then she drank more before she opened her eyes. The red outline solidified into a girl, hair tied up, covered from head to toe in tan cloth. “My mother told me you were coming. Or someone was coming. More like someone. You’re from Doctrina, aren’t you? Just shake your head yes and no.” 

Yes. Yes. 

“Good. I’m Aviana’s daughter. I’m here to get you the rest of the way to Kestrel.” 

But, by then, the Ideal Daughter had a daughter of her own, who would have to make the journey in her stead. 

So she taught her daughter this: leave here. Leave the Haves and Have-Nots. Run as far as you can in the direction the second sun travels. Halfway between you and where you are going, under the roofs of broken houses, you’ll find water and temporary salvation. Drink, wait, and keep running. Run for three hours, four, five. Run, and the City of Kestrel  will catch you, arms outstretched. 

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