Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The community…creates its enemy for itself within its own gates…womankind in general.

While war…the force of negation and destruction…stands out as that which preserves the whole.

—Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

…I tried to explain:

“A revolutionary is a doomed man

with no certainties but love and history.”

“But our children must grow up with certainties

and they will make the revolution.”

“By example we must show the way so plain

that our children can go neither right

nor left but straight to freedom.”

“No,” you said. And you left.

—Etheridge Knight, “No Moon Floods the Memory of That Night”

It was a hot summer, hotter than Tally could ever remember a summer being, even though the temperature never broke the high 80s. It was humid like a bowl of lukewarm soup left out on the counter, thick droplets suspended on the sides. 

By August, she could stand to wear nothing but sundresses, which she purchased in the same way one might purchase cleaning rags, which is to say that she bought ten at a time, draped in a pile over her arm, in different hideous colors and patterns. It was helpful to have the variation so that she could remember which ones she had worn and which were freshly laundered. This was sometimes difficult to distinguish because they would often fall out of her dresser—into which she shoved them in wrinkled balls—to join the damp pile of dresses on the floor that would grow over the course of the week. Some days she would add multiple dresses to the pile along with multiple pairs of underwear. She was so sweaty she occasionally went commando and would take the hem, lifting it up in a flamboyant motion to exaggerate the indecency of it, to fan herself. It seemed improbable that such copious amounts of vaginal discharge could stay suspended on her labia and pubes, but her sweat dripped down without any reluctance, salty puddles forming in her armpits and behind her knees, lines falling down her chest to pool between her breasts. A bottomless reservoir had formed under her stomach sending rivers down her legs.

Her belly had become like a second person that she carried around with her at all times, a constant strain on her back and hips. Though she supposed that was because there was in fact a second person in there. A baby, who she could feel moving around inside of her, kicking and bouncing, and who Sarah sang to every night, her head in Tally's lap, cheek pressed just below her navel where the baby shifted most. The baby would go still at the sound of Sarah’s voice, so she would stay quiet in Tally’s lap after singing and wait until a hand or foot pushed against Tally’s belly, then press a kiss down where the movement appeared.

Nicte too, when she arrived last week, dropped down to her knees to say hello and pressed an ear against Tally’s stomach to see if she could hear a response. “When the baby is here,” she said later during dinner, and Sarah had responded by saying something else, starting the same way, “When the baby is here.” And Tally too eventually joined in and signed, “When the baby is here,” as if there would soon be a baby sitting in the high chair Abigail had passed on to them now that Rayan was too big for it.

This didn’t seem like it could be true, however. Tally had the strange feeling that they were just playing pretend, and she felt this way especially when she would hold the little pairs of socks, some striped, some with polka dots, pressing the tiny pieces of fabric to her face, and see the crib that sat assembled in what they now called the baby’s room. Who is all this stuff for? she wondered each time she wandered in to put some newly acquired object away, most recently a sleep sack that Raelle swore by and claimed was the only thing that got Willa June to sleep more than 30 minutes at a time in the first few months.

The pile of identical white onesies that snapped along the side—a gift from her mother, who insisted that one could never have enough of the basics—and the ever growing mountain of diapers, made Tally wonder if, once the baby arrived, the ritual of regularly changing and dressing the baby would replace her current ritual of regularly changing and dressing herself—an attempt to keep herself dry, thinking that if she could stay dry she might be able to get comfortable, though this was a losing battle—or if it would simply become a shared ritual that she and the baby would engage in together, both of them helpless to the neverending bodily fluids pouring out of them. 

Tally had long lost any sense of her body belonging to herself. Not because it felt like it now belonged to the baby—she could only understand the baby, at this point, as an extension of herself—but because she felt like she had been submitted to the whims of a supernatural being who gave her hot flashes and contorted her body at will, making it so that she constantly needed to pee but also made it impossible to defecate—her asshole becoming like a tight funnel from which only the smallest and wettest poops could emerge.

That morning, she woke with more energy than she had in months. An early September breeze blew in through the curtains, sending in a promise of eventual fall and streaks of light that glanced across the floor as the fabric billowed in and out. Not since the end of her second trimester had Tally been so energized, which was when she last remembered feeling comfortable or like she had had a reasonable night’s sleep.

There had been a tension in the air for the last few weeks, which only increased with Nicte’s presence, a combined excitement and trepidation about the baby’s arrival. Tally felt this excitement primarily in that she was looking forward to all of this finally being over so that everything could go back to normal, though she of course knew that nothing would ever be normal again. Nothing would ever be able to go back to how it was before once this was over, which excited and scared her in equal measure.

Tally left for a walk after eating a breakfast that Sarah prepared for her, who, unlike Tally, had been bursting with energy for weeks and had recently taken to waking up at dawn to cook and clean and work on whatever household maintenance tasks she wanted to complete before Tally’s due date, and with no irritation at all from the lack of sleep. It was Tally now who stayed in bed later into the morning, working more frequently from home in the last two months, not because she was sleeping more—her heartburn and hip pain and the enforced sleeping on her side made it difficult for her to sleep more than a few hours at a time—but because she found it difficult, due to her fatigue, to push herself up to her feet. 

She had no trouble that morning however, when she stomped out into the sunlight. Her shoes no longer fit, swollen as her feet had become, so she had taken to wearing Sarah’s sneakers, whose feet were two sizes up from Tally’s, but with the laces halfway pulled out of the eyelets because in spite of the bigger size, they were still too narrow. Since they were lifted and cushioned for basketball, they gave Tally more height than her regular shoes did, and Tally enjoyed this, how she came to just about Sarah’s height, who was still only wearing her socks, when Tally kissed her goodbye.

I’m going to the store, Tally texted Sarah when she reached the nearby park, cutting through it via a shady winding path that would take her toward Amerlin Lock’s small commercial area on main street, so I might be out for a while.

K, Sarah texted back. 

Sarah had bought herself a cell phone, a chunky one with a full QWERTY keyboard and minimal apps, about a month into Tally’s pregnancy, when Tally, after a video call with her mother during which May had said in passing, “I actually wasn’t able to See or access most of my Knowing when I was pregnant with you—something about pregnancy sometimes makes things go haywire, I guess,” had arrived home in a panic.

“I need to be able to contact you at all times. What if something happens? What if I need you and I can’t use the bond for some reason and I don’t have any way of reaching you because I can’t talk to you on the phone?” she signed to Sarah in a frantic rush.

“Has something happened?” Sarah asked, standing up to reach for Tally in concern. “Can you not use the bond?”

No, I can use the bond, Tally said, relieved at the ease with which she could feel herself projecting into Sarah’s mind. But I need you to get a cell phone. Just in case. I know you don’t like them and you don’t want one—

“Of course I’ll get a cell phone,” Sarah said.

Sarah apologized profusely a few days later once she had her phone and had begun using it. “I’m sorry I never thought to get one sooner, it would have been much easier and more convenient if you were able to text me when you were traveling.”

Tally shrugged at this, her panic from prior now abated after experiencing no changes to her ability to See or project to Sarah and likely some hormonal shifts. I never really thought about it before either, she said, but I guess that was silly because I’m really glad I can text you now.

Tally was glad she could text Sarah now, though on the one work trip she took during her pregnancy, they really only texted in order to set up a video call, both because Sarah’s phone couldn’t render emojis, which made it less fun for Tally to send her flirty messages and because Sarah’s texting style left much to be desired.

Just my usual clothes. What does that punctuation mean? Sarah had responded when Tally texted her, Tell me what you’re wearing ;)

Sarah had been less amenable the following week when Tally announced that she wanted to have a home birth and was planning to contact a midwifery practice who did all care in home and would come to the house for her first appointment. Sarah had been struck with fear at hearing this and at seeing Tally’s certainty about the decision, but it came out of her as anger, frustrated at Tally’s immovability on the matter.

“I lived through a time when a great number of women died during childbirth,” Sarah said, her voice rising as she became increasingly distressed over the course of the conversation. “There is no reason for you to take that risk. Witches have been giving birth in military hospitals for hundreds of years and for good reason. It’s safer for you and it’s safer for the baby.”

The only thing military hospitals are interested in is the health of the baby so they can grow up to be good soldiers—

“That’s not true.”

It is true—the rates of C-sections are higher in military hospitals than they are in civilian hospitals, even with using Work, and that’s because the priority is delivering healthy babies as efficiently as possible over anything else.

“What else is there to prioritize?”

There’s my comfort! There’s my health—my health overall, not just staying alive. I want to be comfortable. I want to give birth in the way that I want to. I don’t want to be forced to sit in a bed or be forced to take medications or undergo procedures that aren’t necessary. I don’t want people I don’t know walking in the room or touching me.

“I want you to be comfortable, Tally, but I want you to be safe. I want the baby to be safe. What if there’s an emergency?”

Then we go to the hospital. We’ll have midwives there. We’ll have a plan.

“What if there's no time? It’s dangerous.”

Plenty of witches give birth at home. Most births on matrifocal compounds are at home. I was born at home.

“We’re not on a matrifocal compound.”

No, but we’re not on a military base either.

“But—”

I don’t want to give birth on a military base.

“A hospital is not—”

I don’t want to give birth in a hospital! I know there could be an emergency, but it’s not likely. If there are real risks, we can make another plan, but there’s no reason to assume there will be at this point.

“Anything could happen, Tally. There is always a risk—”

No, Sarah. Stop. I don’t want to be in a hospital. I don’t want to be stuck in a bed surrounded by people I don’t know who I might not be able to communicate with—

“But we can make a plan for that! We can make sure we know who the doctor will be and that they will be able to communicate with you and—”

How can we make a plan for that? Hospitals are chaotic, military hospitals especially. There are shift changes and anyone can come in who might not know how to communicate with me, or be weird about it—

“What about Fort Salem? You could communicate there.”

Fort Salem is being decommissioned as we speak, Sarah, as you very well know.

“But the university—”

The university will not be operating by then, and that’s not even the point. We don’t know what’s going to happen during the birth, whether it will impact my Knowing or anything and even if it doesn’t, I don’t want to be in a room with strangers who might treat me like a freak.

“You don’t think we can make sure to have the people that we want in the room and make you as comfortable as possible? You don’t think people will do everything in their power to make sure that the birth of the child of Sarah Alder and Tally Craven goes smoothly?”

Oh, Tally said, her eyes wide with disdain, you think that just because you’re Sarah Alder that everyone is going to get down on their knees—

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

—and do everything you want?

“Tally—”

No. I don’t need people who are scared of you or in awe of me. I need people who I can communicate with. I need to feel comfortable and safe and this is how you can do that for me.

“But the hospital—”

No! I don’t want to give birth in a hospital if I can avoid it. I don’t want to! And it’s not up for discussion.

Sarah did not feel settled by this, but she clenched her jaw and didn’t say anything further, thinking that she could try again in a few days, when Tally might feel a little less fixated on the idea and might thereby be less stubborn, but that night in bed, Tally had turned to her and whispered, “I understand your concerns and why it’s scary for you but it’s scary for me. I know that it’s going to be painful and I know that it’s dangerous, but I don’t want to be in pain and afraid and be in an unfamiliar place surrounded by people I don’t know. I know that I’m Tally Craven, and whatever that comes with, but it’s not always easy. People can be rude or impatient or treat me like I’m not there just because I can’t talk to them. Just—” she let out a deep breath, catching slightly as if near tears, “I need you to trust me, okay? I’m going to do what I want to do whether you like it or not, but I would really like it if you were on my team.” 

“Okay, okay,” Sarah whispered, pulling Tally in toward her and kissing her forehead, trying to accept that this was just another thing in her life that she had no control over and hoping that the fear and anxiety still raging inside of her would dissipate eventually.

It did mostly dissipate during Nicte’s next visit, who simply said, “Yeah, that makes sense,” when Tally told her about her plan and then asked a number of good questions about backups and substitutes when the midwives came to visit and how to make sure that Tally met anyone who might end up being present at the birth.

“You should definitely get a doula, Red,” Nicte said when Tally answered the midwives’ question by saying that she wasn't sure since it seemed like there would already be a lot of people there, with Sarah and Nicte and a pair of midwives and probably her mom. “We can probably find someone who signs. I'll ask around.”

It annoyed Tally, even if it ultimately made things easier, that it was Nicte’s confidence in the plan that assured Sarah, as if Tally couldn't be trusted to know what was best for herself. But then she realized that Sarah was most likely assured out of a latent need to compete with Nicte over everything, including how supportive she could be for Tally’s birth plan. This was, Sarah would admit to herself, the likely reason, but there was also the reality that Nicte had personal experience that Sarah did not. 

Sarah had never attended a birth before. It had scared her, when she was young, the blood and the screaming and the closeness to death, and she hadn't liked the secrecy of it, the way, at the time, only women were allowed to be present, and how that had made her aware of her femininity, or her lack of it, which discomforted her. She got used to these things as the commanding general of an army made up of witches, but by that point she was no longer getting invited—nobody wanted their commanding officer present while experiencing childbirth. It would have felt inappropriate to her, in any event, in the way she thought of herself as a harbinger of death, to be present at the birth of a child.

“What, you think a lot of Spree witches were giving birth in military hospitals?” Nicte said when Sarah expressed her surprise at Nicte having been present at a number of births, all home, or, as Nicte said sardonically, “field” births. “We made do with what we had.”

Amerlin Lock’s main street consisted of a large grassy square that sat in front of a meeting house, with crisscrossing pathways that came together to form a pentagram, and handful of buildings—a gas station, a library, an antique shop, a drug store and herbalist, and a bakery-cafe-grocery simply called the general store that also rented kayaks and stand up paddle boards that could be hauled down to the rocky coastline that started just behind it. Mrs. Stavros, who owned the general store and was a small woman in her late 70s, manned the check-out most days, sitting atop a stool so that her knees peered out over the top of the counter.

“Ms. Craven!” she called out when Tally stepped inside, a soft bell ringing out from the top edge of the door and the AC blowing in cold relief. It was early on a Thursday, not too warm outside in spite of the heat that felt like it was radiating from Tally’s bones, and quiet since it was a work day. Tally, who had already established a leadership structure and overseen setting the Spree’s agenda for the next six months in advance of taking parental leave, had been doing little work that week. “You look just about ready to burst,” Mrs. Stavros continued, “how are you feeling?”

Tally smiled and waved at her brightly, giving her two thumbs up. “Can I use your bathroom?” she mouthed, pointing at her belly and then at the door next to the check-out counter that had a taped up paper sign with the words “staff only.” Mrs. Stavros didn’t have any ASL, but this did not at all impact her enthusiasm for speaking to Tally, who mostly, during their conversations, smiled and looked on with attempted enthusiasm, indicating agreement or interest by nodding or with the occasional hand motion, or, if Mrs. Stavros gave Tally enough time during a pause in her long-winded stories—the most recent one about how her son was insisting she get hearing aids, but when she went to the appointment the doctor spoke too quickly, didn’t answer her questions, and then handed her a brochure for over-the-counter ones as if that settled it but left her overwhelmed by the options, and it didn’t seem to her like they were really necessary anyway, why did aging mean that her son suddenly had a right to an opinion on her medical decisions? —Tally would type up a few words on her cell phone, in a large font size and lift it up for Mrs. Stavros to read, which would require her to lift up her glasses and squint at the screen.

“The bathroom? Oh yes, of course,” Mrs. Stavros said, clambering off of her stool to open the door for Tally and usher her inside.

“Thank you,” Tally mouthed brightly, accompanying it with a quick sign before rushing into the bathroom and nearly slamming the door closed in urgency. Tally glanced at the mirror before sitting on the toilet and saw that her face was blotchy and red from the sun in spite of the wide brimmed hat she wore, the cord cinched up to her chin. She pulled at the plastic toggle to loosen it and took it off, gripping it in her hand as she peed, harder and faster than she had thought possible before getting pregnant. The faucet, when she turned it on after standing up, the toilet seat sticking to her legs and bouncing against the bowl, let out a slow dribble of tepid water that barely rinsed the soap from her hands.

“How are General Alder and your friend?” Mrs. Stavros asked when she stepped back out of the bathroom. Nicte had had the idea to rent kayaks and spend a few hours on the water one weekend in late July. By the time they got there, only a stand-up paddle board and a two-seater kayak were left, so Nicte took them with the assumption that Tally and Sarah would share. But Tally, as soon as she sat down in the kayak, felt her back pain flare from the angle of the seat, the hard plastic pressing into her spine, and insisted on switching, climbing carefully back out and onto the paddle board, leaving Nicte and Sarah together on the kayak.

After fifteen minutes of arguing about timing their paddle strokes so they came at the same time—oars knocking, the kayak veering slightly off course, the water rocking gently beneath them—Nicte let out an irritated breath, dropped her paddle across her lap, and said, “Fine, you can do all the work,” before leaning back to sun tan, eyes closed.

Tally made only minimal effort to paddle, the board drifting at a slow pace, Sarah circling around her at a short distance, and mostly just stood with her face tilted up toward the sun, her life jacket bulging out over her round belly as the water lapped softly against the sides.

“Good,” Tally mouthed, broad smile back on in spite of the exhaustion that had started teasing at her, and again flashed a thumbs up.

“Come sit,” Mrs. Stavros said, “I want you to try my son’s newest recipe—Amelia, bring Ms. Craven a matcha cookie.” The bored teenager standing behind the bakery counter looked up from her phone and sighed, then plated one of the green chocolate chip cookies that sat in a pile under a glass cloche. She put it down on Tally’s table with barely a smile. 

“I’ll be right back,” Mrs. Stavros said, “I need to grab something from the basement. Amelia, come help me, I’m never able to reach all the shelves. You’ll have to tell me what you think.” She looked meaningfully at the cookie, so Tally broke off a piece of the soft dough, the taste both cloying and bitter, while she and the teenager disappeared downstairs.

It was clear to Tally right away that she would not be able to eat the entirety of the cookie. Under normal circumstances she thought she might have liked it. The cookie was soft and the chocolate melted quickly in her mouth, but it had a grasslike quality and her digestive system had limited capacity to hold onto anything that tasted even the slightest bit off. She stood to retrieve a napkin and wrapped the cookie inside of it, then looked around the store to see where she might be able to dispose of it before Mrs. Stavros returned and so that it would not be noticed when she did.

The space was arranged in two sections: a sizable seating area that took up the back half of the store and a span of shelves that ran along six narrow aisles starting just after the entrance. There were tall windows that overlooked a porch with tables and benches and the ocean just beyond that, a small strip of sand surrounded by boulders and sea-smoothed stones and a grassy hill with a broad oak tree. The shelves held a mix of eclectic products—artisanal pasta, pickled vegetables, an overwhelming collection of sauces, and various snacks that appeared at first glance to be the standard fare, but were all in some way unusual, made from chickpea flour or sweetened with maple syrup or used beets and turmeric for coloring. Along the wall facing the check out area and the bakery-cafe counter, ran floor to ceiling shelves that held locally made home goods and bath products, stopping just before the back windows where a station for cream and sugar stood.

The bell over the door chimed as a man strode inside, wearing a business suit and gripping a briefcase. He moved quickly, neck outstretched as he looked around, his phone in his other hand, which he kept glancing down at, his thumb running along the screen. Then, noticing Tally, he said, “Excuse me, I’m looking for Elaine Stavros?” Tally smiled at him and mouthed, “She’s downstairs,” pointing toward the stairway that curved behind the checkout counter, but he had already looked back down at his phone after speaking.

“Hello?” he said, looking up again when no reply came. “Do you know if Elaine Stavros is here?”

Tally grimaced. Her hand was sticky with matcha and chocolate, the cookie now crumbling inside the napkin clenched in her fist. She lifted her phone, which she wore slung across her torso on a lanyard—a dorky way of accessorizing, but useful, and she figured if she was going to be a parent she might as well get used to doing dorky things—and began to type SHE’S DOWNSTAIRS, not wanting to go through the always somewhat humiliating experience of trying to communicate silently to someone who wasn’t paying attention.

“Excuse me,” the man said, his tone sharpening as he glanced up and saw her looking down at her phone. “I’m speaking to you.”

“Gregory!” Mrs. Stavros called as her head appeared at the top of the steps. “I wasn’t expecting you until later.” Tally clenched the cookie tighter in her fist.

“Ah, did you meet Ms. Craven?”

“Ms. Craven?” Gregory said, glancing at Tally. “You mean—oh.” His face flushed red, though he didn’t apologize for not recognizing her—which didn’t bother or surprise Tally, given her current appearance—nor for any of his rudeness. What did bother her was the heat rising in her own face, the flush she could feel spreading on her neck, knowing she had nothing to be embarrassed about and yet not being able to stop it.

Tally smiled awkwardly, then glanced back down at her phone. She saw an email notification from Indigo Swythe, the young Knower she had taken on to mentor that year, who had postponed his military service. The subject line read: Checking in about trial session. Tally pointed at her phone and then tilted her head to the side, grateful for an easy exit from the situation.

Tally hadn't planned on taking on a new mentee that year, what with her pregnancy, but Indigo had struck her as independent and hardworking, if a little nervous, with impressive Knowing abilities that he had developed himself—coming from an old military family, his parents saw no particular benefits to Knowing and had been disappointed in his decision to postpone service, his lack of skill or interest in weatherwork, and the fact that he was transitioning, which disqualified him from combat, though, he had told Tally, he never would have been interested either way—which was why she decided to work with him, even though she knew she wouldn’t be particularly available. He had studied ASL since the age of 15 specifically so that he might be able to train with her.

As all the young Knowers Tally mentored did, he was working full time as a member of the Spree, meeting with her regularly to develop his Knowing skills while otherwise reporting through the regular chain of command. Indigo was currently working with early-onset dementia patients in an attempt to recuperate their memories, partnering with a Fixer out of a clinic in the Salem area.

She opened her email inbox as she stepped into one of the aisles, leaving Mrs. Stavros and Gregory to whatever urgent conversation it seemed they needed to have.

Hi Tally,

Sorry to bother you right now, I hope everything is going well. This isn’t super urgent but I just wanted to make you aware. I had an unexpected moment with one of the dementia patients I’ve been working with on the trial where some of my own memories leaked through the link. Some of those memories were not exactly pleasant, and I think it made the patient pretty uncomfortable. 

I’m not sure what caused the leakage or what to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again since it’s never happened before. I have a follow-up session scheduled for next week, and I wanted to ask if you have any advice on how to approach that session or anything I should be careful about. I’m a little nervous he’s going to drop out of the trial, which would not be ideal since we’re still trying to get more patients.

I know your time is limited right now, so please don’t feel any pressure to respond quickly. I just wanted to make sure you know what’s going on.

Thanks!

Indigo

Hi Indigo, she typed, leaning her head against the metal shelving, her hat, back on but pulled away from her forehead, pushed against a box of cereal. Thank you for emailing, please don’t hesitate to reach out whenever you have a question like this. Why don’t you come to the house tomorrow so you can tell me more about what happened. What’s your schedule like? Could you come around 1PM? —Tally

She let out a deep sigh after dropping her phone to hang back at her hip. Tally had walked to the store because she wanted a destination, she thought that without one she would get discouraged by the sun beating down on her and how quickly her socks soaked through, and because they stocked a rotating selection of unusual drinks and she thought it would be fun to try something new. 

She looked up at the refrigerator by the front door—one in amber glass with a label that read "Mycelium Mist / refreshing, energizing, and full of probiotics / With the Mother!" caught her eye—and then had the thought that she might as well turn her walk into a snack run. Her labor was likely to begin in the next week and Nicte had been talking about how they needed to make sure the kitchen was stocked with easy things to eat beforehand. 

She filled a basket quickly, with the closest approximates to their standard fare that she could find. No-sugar-added chunky peanut butter and gluten-free oreo-type cookies for herself, flavored stone-ground tortilla chips, cheesy lentil puffs, and dried persimmons for Nicte and Sarah, dates and trail mix for May, and a couple boxes of protein bars and energy drinks just in case. She added some chocolate covered butter cookies, which she thought would be a good pick for Aisha, her doula, who had told Tally that she always brought her own snacks and didn’t need to be hosted, but it felt strange to Tally to invite someone into her home and not host them, especially if she was planning on birthing a baby in front of them.

They had ended up finding Aisha through Miriam. She was a child of Deaf adults and a native signer who had grown up in the Deaf community in the Hudson Valley, where Willow and Rafael lived. She had become a doula after completing her military service, during which time she had given birth to her first child, and when Tally asked, she did not hesitate to say that her experience giving birth in a military hospital had been traumatic—a single mother by choice, she brought her parents with her for support, but the staff had been dismissive of them, leaving them alienated from the experience and her without anyone who could effectively advocate for her. It had been, she said simply, enough to make her want to do something about the system.

Most of the witches she worked with still gave birth in military hospitals, Aisha told Tally, though it had been a fight for her to be allowed into the room at all. There were strict limits on how many people could be present, policies that shifted depending on who was asking, though Abigail had given birth at Fort Salem and said that she had had as good an experience as she could have wanted, but it was difficult to trust the word of a Bellweather when it came to any military institution.

“Do you need bags, dear?” Mrs. Stavros asked her as she scanned Tally’s groceries. Tally nodded, she hadn’t thought to bring a bag, which was annoying because the store only stocked handleless paper bags and reusable totes that could be purchased, but were heavy and made of recycled jute. She pointed at the tote bags.

“I’ll take two,” she mouthed, holding up two fingers, and then on impulse added a package of the organic ice pops that were ready to be frozen and sitting by the counter. She eyed the pack of chocolate pudding in the nearby fridge that made her mouth water—they were in small glass containers and the labels were written in French—but when she looked back at the rest of her purchase, she thought better of it. She already had a lot to carry home.

She realized it had been a mistake to purchase anything at all once she was back in the sunshine, her hat cinched up under her chin once again, and felt the jute of the tote bags scratching against her arms. The walk home was slow, she stopped a few times to rest the groceries on the ground, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, and sat for a while on a bench once she approached the final stretch. The birds tittered in a symphony around her. Yes, I will be there, thank you so much! The email response from Indigo read when her phone lit up with the notification.

“Wow, you carried all this home by yourself?” Nicte said when Tally walked into the kitchen and plopped the bags on the table. The kitchen was a mess. Half the cabinets were open and all their tupperware was laid out on the table along with a pile of items from the pantry—half empty boxes of cereal and stale chips long past their expiration date. Sarah was fighting to tie an overfull trash bag.

“Yes, all by myself,” Tally signed, rolling her eyes, though she did feel proud of herself for making the schlep back and forth even if she found the comment condescending. “Those are for when I’m in labor,” she signed indignantly as Nicte opened up the bag of lentil chips.

“When you’re in labor?” Nicte said as she crunched down on a handful of chips. “Girl, we’re going to Costco later. Fuck, these taste weird.” She lifted the bag up to examine them.

“Do you want to come with us?” Sarah asked, the trash bag now leaning against the counter with a tear a quarter of the way down the side. “We’re planning to leave after we’re done with this,” she motioned to the piles of tupperware Nicte was sorting through, matching tops to their respective containers, then looked down at her wristwatch, “and once the laundry is done.”

“No,” Tally shook her head as she sat down and rubbed at the lingering red marks on her arms from the bags. “I want to rest for a bit and I have some emails to respond to.”

“Okay. Do you want to do the massage now or after we get back?”

Tally made a face. “I could really go for a foot massage now, but I assume that’s not the kind of massage you’re talking about?”she signed with a pout. Sarah lifted an eyebrow and gave her a meaningful smile.

“I’ll give you a foot massage, Red,” Nicte said, tossing the container she was holding to the side and running her fingers, sticky from the layers of oil and grime that had collected on some of the plastic, over the front of her shirt. “Ugh, honestly you should throw all this stuff away and just start over. If the plastic is yellow it’s past the point of no return.”

Tally leaned back in her chair and swung her legs up into Nicte’s lap at her urging.

“Should I assume this means you want to do it later?” Sarah asked, watching them with a neutral expression as Tally fluttered her eyes closed at the pressure on her foot, Nicte’s hand bracing her heel while the other pressed her thumb into the arch. She opened them again, glancing toward Sarah.

“Can we do it tomorrow?”

“No. We were supposed to do it on Tuesday and we pushed it twice. We’re doing it today.”

Nicte snorted then dug her thumb in deeper. “Damn,” she muttered, “no breaks in this house, huh?”

It was an ongoing negotiation with Sarah, what, if anything, Tally allowed her to have any authority over, because, though she had willingly given much of it up in the context of their sex life, Tally found, more than most things in her life, that pregnancy awakened a need for her to be in control, even more so than Sarah, who had, at all times, a clawing desire to be in charge. This was a challenging experience because what Tally continued to discover was that everything about pregnancy required a near total surrender. This frightened her, because unlike the surrender of sex, which happened with someone who made her feel safe, everything about this process required her to submit to forces unknown—the mysterious workings of her body that she could not control.

Nicte hadn’t been there for their first meeting with Aisha, the one that had made everything feel suddenly, irreversibly real, when she met with Tally and Sarah over coffee at the general store in early spring.

“There’s a lot that goes into planning a home birth,” Aisha told them, curling her hands loosely around her drink. She had ordered a hot apple cider and the smell of cinnamon wafted between them. “But I always like to start with planning all the just in case stuff, so that we can get it out of the way and know what we have in our back pocket. The key things are to have a plan in the case of the baby being premature or sick, or a stillborn, so that you’ve already made some of those decisions beforehand—it’s obviously difficult to think about, but I have some resources and worksheets with questions to answer that you can work through together and then we can put it away and not think about it unless it’s necessary.” Sarah’s fingers stilled where they rested on the table for a moment before she moved her hand to rest it on Tally's knee. 

“But I think, in some ways, the thing that might feel more challenging and that I want to make sure you’re thinking about, Tally, is having a support plan in place in the event of an emergency C-section,” Aisha continued as Tally traced a thumb along the seam of her mug, feeling where an air bubble had made the glaze uneven. “I’ve worked with a few silent witches, one who had an unplanned C-section and it was significantly more distressing than anyone expected, so I want that to be something you put some real time into thinking about so that no matter what happens, we can make this the most positive birthing experience for you as possible.” 

“Two oat milk lattes for Evan!” the barista called out from behind the counter. 

“Why ‘more distressing?’” Tally signed, her face tightening in anxiety.

“You would be awake for the surgery,” Aisha said gently, “so there are a lot of things to think about there, anticipating what could be triggering, like what kind of conversations you might be hearing at the time—” 

Tally had, at least in principle, already known how C-sections worked, had a vague awareness that one was conscious during the procedure, but she hadn’t really processed what that meant until that moment, when her vision was interrupted by a sudden bright light just above her, the memory of men laughing as they cut her throat open, feeling hands inside of her body, her arms strapped down flat to a metal table. She couldn’t move or hear anything as the memories rushed through her, but she felt, as her vision cleared and Aisha came back into focus, Sarah stiffen beside her.

“—the midwives you’re working with have a really good track record of avoiding surgery except in truly necessary cases, but there is always a chance and it’s better to be prepared,” Aisha continued. Tally nodded and thanked her and said she would think about it and talk it over with Sarah, though she hadn’t been able to think about anything at all for the rest of the day. 

Tally went quiet for the next week, though quiet probably wasn’t the right word, but she felt her silence pressing in on her more than she usually did, and it was accentuated by the noise inside her body. There was something growing inside of her. Something growing that was, at some point, going to come out. She already loved this baby, couldn’t wait to meet this baby, to hold this baby, and yet also began to experience the baby as a kind of parasite, sucking everything out that it could from her. This made her feel, in spite of the galloping pace of the changes to her body, like a prey animal, frozen in the knowledge of its impending death but unable to run away.

She couldn’t stop thinking about herself on that table, remembering the feeling of her skin being pulled apart, holding her throat open, and then she imagined her stomach splayed out in the same way, the scar on her neck transposed to the soft flesh of her abdomen. She saw her organs displayed and available for the taking by shadowy figures examining her as they held her down. But then she began imagining that opening coming from within, the baby like a mutant bursting out of her, destroying her body for its own.

Tally didn’t think very often about her experience of being dewitched, she didn’t think of herself as particularly traumatized, no more so than anyone else who lived through the war, though she knew that this was, in some ways, a protective measure against the pain that pulsed deep inside of her. So this mix up of feelings confused her greatly, to feel at once a great desire for this baby and also to feel afraid of it—to feel as if it was it, the baby, that wanted her back on that metal table, opened up like a piece of meat to be experimented upon. She thought more than once about getting rid of it—killing it, as it was clear to her would be the case, something she recognized with both anxiety and relief—but then while sitting on the toilet, after she wiped herself and discovered a smear of blood, she realized, with resolve, that she did want this baby, wanted it enough to risk subjecting herself to her worst nightmares, and that realization, that she was willing to offer herself up like a sacrifice in exchange, scared her most of all.

What if I’m losing the baby? Tally said, upon exiting the bathroom, to Sarah in a panic, who had herself spent the week on edge. 

Sarah had tried to work through some of the planning pages Aisha had given them, bringing them into the bedroom on a clipboard so they could discuss them before going to sleep, but Tally had been uncooperative. I don’t know, Tally had said, Do we really have to worry about this? I mean, what are the chances something bad is actually going to happen? “I think the point is so that we don’t have to worry about it if something bad does happen,” Sarah had responded, but Tally just chewed on her cheek and stared off into space, an empty look in her eye, and Sarah had been unable to break through this wall. “Can we talk about a plan in case you do need a C-section?” Sarah had asked her, “I want to do everything I can to be here for you.” But Tally had just shrugged and turned away.

“Spotting is normal,” Sarah said in an attempt to be soothing after Tally described the brownish blood, but she called the midwifery practice to inform them, and Tally, as she listened to Sarah on the phone, was frustrated by a feeling of helplessness. She could, of course, have texted or emailed herself, but in that moment, she felt herself as reliant on Sarah in a way that she could not bear and a deep panic set in.

I don’t know if I can do this, she said as Sarah hung up the phone, flapping her hands in an attempt to soothe herself. I don’t know if I can go through with this. What if I do need to get a C-section? What if I—I didn’t think about this before. Why didn’t we think about this before? 

Sarah, who felt overwhelmed herself, in pain at seeing Tally suffering, afraid—and therefore avoidant—of the possibility that Tally would be forced to relive her greatest trauma, tried to pacify her. “The chances are slim, most likely everything will be fine,” Sarah said, “I’ll be there with you the whole time, no matter what happens.”

No matter what happens? Anything could happen! What if you can’t be there? Nothing is going to be fine, Tally said, nearly shouting in Sarah’s mind. Nothing Sarah said helped at all, and Tally pushed her away when she tried to touch her, so after a while, once Tally went silent, crying and tense and with her head in her hands, and Sarah felt panicked herself, unable to imagine herself supporting Tally through reliving the torture that Sarah blamed herself for, Sarah found herself calling Nicte. 

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, as soon as Nicte picked up the phone.

Nicte had told Sarah, once she explained the situation and described Tally’s state, to put the phone on speaker. “You’re going to be fine, Red,” Nicte said. “It might be horrible, it might feel like the worst thing you’ve ever experienced while it’s happening, but you’ll survive it. You’ve already survived worse, so you already know you can survive whatever happens. I’ll be there and Sarah will be there, but all that really matters is that you will be there. And you are a survivor.”

This had calmed Tally down enough to get through the night, though it left Sarah no less overwhelmed than before. The experience had left them, even though they did succeed a few days later at answering all the questions on Aisha’s worksheet, swimming in a pool of apprehension. Sarah was filled with the fear that she would not be able to support Tally through whatever was to come, that she would be too triggered herself and that she would fail to be a good partner, as she already felt like she had by having to rely on Nicte.  

Sarah dealt with this by reading all the books Aisha recommended to them about the stages of childbirth and about how best to support someone through pregnancy. Sarah soaked in every piece of information like a sponge, and she tried to regain a sense of calm by taking on the responsibility for everything she could—researching birthing tubs, painting the nursery, ensuring Tally was getting all the nutrients she needed. Meanwhile Tally, though she was able to find her regular good natured stability in the weeks and months that followed, could not quite shake the fear that she would not be able to survive this, a fear which she ignored, and grew all the larger in the corner of her mind as she pretended it wasn’t there. 

They both recognized in each other these anxieties, but neither of them would acknowledge it, as to do so would be to admit to their own weaknesses, and neither of them had the habit of admitting to weakness before a battle. So instead, Sarah did her best to be attentive to Tally, to try to reassure Tally that she would survive, and Tally allowed herself to accept Sarah’s attention, hoping that if she accepted being cared for now, then she might be able to accept being cared for later, when she would really need it, and when it would be the hardest to tolerate.

“I do recommend perineal massage,” Aisha had told them. “I find that my clients who do it have an easier labor and tend to experience less tearing.” 

Sarah, when Tally complained that she didn’t like doing it to herself, jumped on the opening and said that she could do it for her. So twice a week for the last five weeks, Tally had submitted herself to Sarah massaging her perineum, which she found at first to be painful, the stretching causing a surprising stinging sensation, and then over time merely uncomfortable. Tally was, at this point, able to relax into it, Sarah’s fingers working inside of her, and found it a mix of pleasurable attention and an annoyance that she would sometimes complain about, but when Tally would ask if they could delay it because she wasn’t in the mood or dismissively say that it wasn’t that important, Sarah would insist, “This is my job. Let me do my job.”

“Okay, fine,” Tally signed, “we can do it later.” Sarah held her eye contact for a moment before she smiled, then waved open another trash bag with a loud ripple of air, tossing the sorted out tupperware inside. Tally tapped her toes against Nicte’s hand to indicate that she wanted her other foot massaged. She leaned her head back and sighed as Nicte rubbed the ball of her foot, where it ached right under her big toe.

Tally set herself up in Sarah’s office once they left, rocking on an exercise ball—another of their many recent purchases—with her laptop open on the desk and a bowl of cereal next to it. The office had been Tally’s office when Sarah first built the house, and still theoretically was, but Tally rarely worked from home, and when she did, tended to prefer sitting at a 45 degree angle on the couch with her computer in her lap. Over time, as Tally hardly used it, they had both started to think of it as Sarah’s office, who couldn’t break the habit of sitting behind an imposing desk while reading or doing paperwork, and would compulsively keep it neat and organized, while Tally, when she did use the space, would leave her things and papers in messy piles. The furniture and decor had over time come to reflect Sarah’s tastes, which Tally appreciated as a harkening back to the earliest days of their relationship and she thought of the office primarily as the perfect setting for teasing Sarah rather than one in which any work could really get done.

Typing on a keyboard while reclining on a couch wasn’t an option at the moment, which was why Tally pushed Sarah’s chair to the side to set herself up in order to respond to some emails. Hi Tally, read the first, The midwest housing coordinating team has been overwhelmed since that massive tornado hit Jackson county—the army came in to blow it out of the agricultural areas but as usual, did no cleanup for the residential areas that took a big hit (booooo the army sux). Can we get a go ahead on a budget transfer for the funds the northeast team hasn’t used this year? Tally crunched down on a spoonful of cereal, then responded in the affirmative, copying the finance team. This was what made up a considerable amount of Tally’s work life these days—responding to emails about finances, confirming budgetary transfers—as the five other emails with similar questions attested to. It had been a challenging transition, changing the operations of the Spree from terrorism (or revolutionary militancy, depending on who was being asked) to para-militarism to humanitarianism, but they had made it out to the other side without too much strife.

She opened another email. Dear Ms. Craven, I am writing to you because my daughter has reached the age where she can no longer postpone her military service.  I understand that the government has been overlooking witches who refuse conscription, provided they contribute their abilities in service to the Spree, but I am deeply concerned about how this might affect her future. I am a civilian, and my wife died while serving in the military. Tally shifted slightly on the exercise ball, the rubber giving a soft squeak beneath her weight, and leaned forward to scroll. The cereal had already gone a little soggy, the flakes collapsing against the roof of her mouth as she read. I’m not sure how this process works, and the army service people I have spoken to have not been able to give me clear guidance. I am reaching out in the hope that you might be able to help us understand our options. 

Tally’s jaw slowed. She rested the spoon against the edge of the bowl. Tally received emails like this frequently, often from confused and anxious parents of witches who did want to serve and wanted her help convincing them to choose another path, or sometimes from young witches who were receiving parental pressure to present themselves for service, and in either case, Tally felt sympathetic to the distress expressed in the final sentence of this email, I don’t understand why young women like my daughter are still put in this position, and I am trying to do what is best for her. In spite of the fact that Tally’s life work was dedicated to the dismantling of the accords, Tally found, year after year, as alternative options for young witches continued to grow, that she felt only increasing dismay at the reality that the pressure to offer their bodies to the US military still remained, even if the enforcement of the requirement had lessened. She responded with some kind words, CCing the new social worker they had hired to help people with questions like these, then, remembering a question she had had that morning, opened a new email draft to write to Aisha.

Hi Aisha - Your supply list had KY jelly on it, but I’m wondering if any water based lube works. We have something called Fuck Water - is that okay? she pressed send, then navigated to a brand new notification from Tonutiah, Tally - can you give us the go ahead on if this works for a response? Thanks, the last of a long email thread that Tally had forgotten to respond to.

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

Subject: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

Dear Leadership Team,

We are writing as a group of new and longtime Spree members concerned by the organization’s increasing reliance on public relations in the face of escalating anti-witch sentiment at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Seeing Spree leadership publicly aligned with politicians who continue to accept funding from anti-witch organizations signals a troubling compromise of our commitments to witch liberation. We are reaching out to express our concerns following the suppression of a recent direct action proposal where we were told that the use of empty balloons would be potentially triggering to civilians and counter to integration. We ask: what does integration mean if it requires us to repress visible expressions of who we are? We are requesting a forum for open discussion on these issues. 

In solidarity, 

Jessa Alvarez

Ash Calder

Maya Deshpande

Wren Donovan

Dalia Reyes

Elara Vance

 

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

subject: Re: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

Okay…most of these folks are way too young to remember anything like the balloon days. This feels a little dramatic. Also “expressions of who we are”? Give me a break.

 

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

cc: [email protected]

subject: Re: Re: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

Who exactly is the politician they’re talking about? 

 

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

cc: [email protected], [email protected]

subject: Re: Re: Re: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

I believe they’re referring to a group shot from the last DC lobbying visit. I think Corey White was in that photo.

 

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

Oh yeah, he’s a dick. Not sure why that’s being treated as some kind of alignment issue on our end, we didn’t use that photo for anything.

 

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Request for Open Forum on Strategic Direction

From what I can tell, these are mostly very new and young members (except Wren, who everyone knows will sign anything). They don’t have many signatures behind them, and at the open meeting where this was discussed, the majority of people present didn’t support the proposed action anyway. How’s this for a response: 

Thank you for your message. We appreciate your passion and the time taken to articulate your concerns. However, we would caution against framing recent strategic decisions in terms of compromise. The Spree remains committed to its mission, including both integration and safety considerations. Not all forms of action serve our goals equally, and care must be taken to ensure our efforts do not inadvertently undermine the very communities we seek to support. We remain open to continued discussion, provided it remains constructive and aligned with our shared objectives.

This was followed by affirmatives from the rest of the leadership team and then Tonatiuh’s prod for Tally to respond. Yes, please go ahead and send that. Sorry for the slow response! she sent, and then, as the front door slammed shut, Nicte and Sarah both calling out to announce their return, she deleted an email that read Die Dyke Bitch ↴⤯ aLL witches are WHORES ⊘ ⊘ fuCk YoU teRROrist cuNt once she forwarded it to the Spree’s security team.

“Hey,” Nicte said from the office door, “I got you a chocolate milkshake. It's kind of melty now,” a drop of condensation dripped off the paper cup and onto the floor below, “and uh, this.” Nicte held up a jar of green olive tapenade. Nicte had brought a jar of the stuff to snack on on the train ride to Boston, and, after arriving in Amerlin Lock with some left over, Tally had, despite her usual tastes, tried some, having been struck all month with cravings for anything salty, and devoured the rest of it within minutes.

“Do you want crackers with this?” Nicte asked as she approached the desk once Tally waved her over eagerly. 

“No, just a spoon is fine,” Tally signed, which Nicte dutifully handed to her and then made a face as she watched Tally take a slurp of the barely cold milkshake and dig into the tapenade as if it were pudding. 

“I thought Tally didn't like olives,” Sarah had said to Nicte when she added the jar to their cart in Costco, and Nicte, who, though she and Sarah had established a sincere truce in recent years, still found genuine pleasure in any opportunity to antagonize her, shrugged and said, “Well, she does now,” and then smirked at the way Sarah blinked in an attempt to hide her dismay. 

“I’m never going to get over you having a domain name now,” Nicte said, peering over Tally’s shoulder, “Tally Craven at the spree dot org.” She let out an exaggerated breath of air. “Just another day watching you destroy my life’s work.”

Tally waved a vague hand behind her to smack playfully at Nicte, then signed, “You and Sarah should start a club,” which made Nicte scowl. A new notification popped up on Tally’s screen. Yes fuck water is fine! Aisha’s email read. Tally responded with three thumbs up and a smiley face.

“How are you feeling?” Sarah asked as she entered the bedroom that evening. Tally was lounging on the bed in nothing but a pair of ankle socks.

Sleepy, Tally projected, stretching out, or, trying to stretch out as much as her body would allow, I did way too much today. Why don't we just skip the perineal massage this time and you can just tuck me into bed?

“Mmm, nice try. Do you want these on?” Sarah pulled on the toe of Tally’s sock.

No, I just couldn't bring myself to pull them off.

Sarah's energy had not wavered for a moment over the course of the day, and she had gone from putting the groceries away to making the bed in the small bedroom downstairs in anticipation of May’s arrival in a few days time to rearranging all the bookshelves in the living room—deciding that if she didn't finally arrange them by genre and author now, then she never would—while Nicte helped, sitting on the floor and sorting through the piles Sarah passed to her, and Tally lay on the couch watching them and occasionally, having momentary bursts of energy herself, taking a stack to sort through.

“Scoot up,” Sarah said, pulling Tally’s socks off and then gently slapping Tally’s outer thigh as she crawled onto the bed to join her.

What difference does it even make at this point? I mean the baby is probably coming next week, don't you think if it'll make any difference it already will have done its job?

“I think that probably makes it all the more important that we keep it up. But if you really don't want to…” Sarah let her hand holding the bottle of lube go limp as she looked at the soft look on Tally’s face, her eyes gently closed.

No, we can do it. But you have to let me complain.

“I think I can do that,” Sarah said. She pressed a kiss to the inside of Tally's thigh, just below the crease of where her leg met her pelvis.

It wasn't quite that Sarah found Tally more beautiful pregnant, because Sarah thought Tally was perfect at all times, but there was something about the roundness of her body that made Sarah flush with desire for her. Sarah had worried, before they began trying, that she would feel extraneous to the pregnancy, given how they had needed to get sperm from elsewhere, and from Atticus Bricker of all people (“He’s my friend,” Tally had signed when they first began discussing it, which had led to a number of initial disagreements, “and he could be your friend if you let him. I want our baby to know their history. And who would you prefer we ask?” “We could ask Miriam.” “I know for a fact that Miriam doesn't have any sperm to give,” Tally had said, which made Sarah feel stupid even if she already felt stupid for not just agreeing in the first place. If anything, she thought to herself, it should be Atticus who should feel stranger about it than her), she worried that she would be nothing more than a stranger to the baby. But she felt right away, after she impregnated Tally—that it was someone else's sperm turned out to be irrelevant to the satisfaction she felt from the experience—and as Tally grew full and soft, that that was her baby in there, without any question. Though it did still make her feel warm and recognized when Tally would say, most often to preempt a demand or a complaint, You do know that I'm carrying around your baby in here, right?

“Is this okay?” Sarah asked, her fingers prewarmed and slick with lube when they entered Tally’s vagina. Tally let out a slow breath of air as Sarah pressed down on the back wall, stretching the skin as she felt Tally make an effort to relax into it.

Yes, thank you.

“Thank you?”

Yes, Tally grumbled half-heartedly, don't make me say it again. I'm trying to relax.

In spite of Tally's complaints about it, they both enjoyed it. Sarah, for obvious reasons, enjoyed getting to touch Tally in any way, and liked getting to be a participant in such a way that she could be useful, and Tally liked to see the gentle focus in Sarah's eyes, and, because relaxing into it was the whole point, would feel open and pliable afterward such that it would often lead to sex, which it did then. Sarah, once she completed three two-minute repetitions of the process, proceeded to massage Tally’s clit and suck at one of her nipples, the both of them moving languidly, Tally lightly brushing Sarah’s hair away from her face and rolling her head back in pleasure.

Sarah felt that night, as they drifted off to sleep, Tally on her side with a pillow between her legs, finally allowing Sarah to spoon her, her belly too big to reach Sarah comfortably, peaceful and prepared. Like she was finally ready for the upcoming birth, having read everything she could to prepare, having done everything in the house to make it organized and ready, having fully accepted the home birth and Tally's request that any intervention using Work or otherwise be done only if absolutely necessary. 

She hadn't expected, though, that night, for Tally to awaken her in a panic in the dark, sitting up and saying, The baby is coming, followed by a pained breath as she bent her body forward from a powerful contraction. She hadn't expected the way her stomach dropped, or the way she couldn't remember anything she had read over the last few months, not knowing at all what she should do. She felt suddenly afraid, more afraid than she thought she could ever remember feeling, more afraid than she had ever felt preparing for war, and certainly more useless.

“Okay, it's okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, but then, as another contraction came, only a minute after the first, Tally pressing her hands into her eyes, Sarah swung her legs out of bed. “I'll be right back,” she said, and then rushed down the hall to wake Nicte.

Chapter Text

Nicte hadn’t grown up with a culture of war, not really, not the way that other witches did, groomed from birth to be proud of one’s culture and birthright to be a soldier on the front lines, seeing their mothers wield their throats like a weapon. Her mother had never been a soldier. From a young age, she developed benign polyps in her throat that made her speak with a hoarse voice—like a smoker, though she never touched a cigarette, at least not as far as Nicte could remember—and sing at a contralto, which even in its grainy shakiness, Nicte found to be the most beautiful sound in the world. But it made her Work unstable, and therefore ineligible for Chilean military service. 

The polyps became cancerous when Nicte was six years old, so her mother took Nicte and her two sisters with her to America, where she could get medical treatment that wasn’t available in Futrono and that would be subsidized by the US government, which was willing, at the time, to make deals to bring in immigrants whose daughters would be offered up to the military when they came of age, and Chile, just a few years into a government that owed America everything, was willing to allow it. It made little difference to Nicte, who, being at such a young age when they moved, didn’t think there was much of a difference in being a soldier for one country over another. What was a shock was the concrete, and the dry winds that pummeled down the Chicago streets, and the sounds she could hear echoing up through their apartment windows at every hour of the night. She missed the smell of earth, but quickly her childhood turned from one where she was always surrounded by cliffs and trees, to one of bright hospital lights and the smell of antiseptic.

Nicte had no weatherwork prior to her military service—her mother couldn’t teach her, and she was too insolent, even then, to be of any interest to the handful of veterans who lived in their neighborhood—though Lupe, her older sister did, because she couldn’t wait to be a soldier, was proud to now be an American and have the honor of serving her new country, and she would come home with propaganda and memorabilia that she would hang on the walls of her room. An American flag draped the inside of Lupe’s bedroom door, though Nicte would rarely venture in to see it. She didn’t like to look at the poster of General Alder that hung above Lupe’s desk, because it made Nicte feel both curious and frightened in a way that confused her. She preferred to spend her time in the room she shared with Marisol, who was younger than her by two years, and which they kept decorated with a fishtank and pictures of birds that Nicte would carefully tear out of magazines or textbooks, papering the walls with them because they made Marisol happy. Marisol liked to dance and would say that she didn’t want to be a soldier, but Nicte would scoff at her, and then get angry when Marisol, at the age of only 11, would insist that she planned on dodging her service.

“Don’t you care about Mama?” Nicte would snap, “Don’t you know they won’t let her see any doctors anymore if you or any of us do something so stupid like that?”

“I was only joking,” Marisol would insist, but Nicte knew that was a lie, and she would storm off to sit on the stoop and stare up at the gray sky, claustrophobic from living with a sick mother and sister who dreamed of freedom and a sister who couldn’t wait to die.

Nicte learned her first off-canon Work on that streetcorner, from other immigrant witch kids who had been traded to the military in exchange for documentation, and who experimented with the vibrations in their throats to pass the time until their conscription dates, too lazy to do any of their homework. Their teachers never called on them anyway. What was the point of teaching math to kids who were going to be doing nothing but fighting wars with hurricanes? And the civilian kids gave them a wide berth, they were outcasts even from the other immigrant kids, whose families had fled political repression, rather than been traded by it. There were hardly any American-born witches in the Chicago public schools—most of them were sent to military prep schools, where they would develop the skills they needed to get a chance at war college, and a chance to survive past 25. 

Nicte liked the off-canon Work, but she liked math too, and she liked to take the seeds she learned—the ones that could make someone jump on one foot or laugh until they couldn’t breathe—and tinker with them until they were stronger and until she began to understand the inner workings of the vibrations and why they did the things they did. Nicte liked Work for Work’s sake, she liked the way it felt in her throat to invent something new, she liked the danger of it. She didn’t think about it in terms of violence or war. She was curious and smart and needed something to direct that into.

Nicte had, however, grown up with a culture of death. Her father died the year that Marisol was born, from an untreated heart condition, a hole in her life that she knew only from photos, and her mother was dying for as long as she could remember. 

“You girls are going to make me so proud,” Mama would say when they watched the military parades on the TV, but Nicte always knew that her mother wasn’t going to live long enough for them to make her proud. It wasn’t the cancer though, that killed her in the end. It was a truck that spun out on the freeway and killed her and Lupe, crushed under the metal within seconds, just weeks before Lupe was supposed to say the words and report to Fort Salem.

Nicte knew what it meant when the officers came. When she opened the door and saw the uniforms, the way one of them held a clipboard angled against her chest while the other kept her hands folded behind her back, and listened as they told her that there had been an accident on the freeway and that they would need someone to come and make a formal identification. Nicte told Marisol to stay before following them down the stairs and into the back of the car, the lock clicking behind her. 

The room they brought her to was cold and she stood there longer than necessary because she had never seen a dead body before, not in person, not like this, and she felt herself numb to it. She signed where they told her to sign, but then she saw Lupe’s paperwork, marked with military insignia. “She wasn’t a soldier, not yet,” Nicte said, “she didn’t get the chance.” The coroner glanced at the form, then back at her, and shrugged. “There’s no difference,” he said. “That’s why it’s marked for non-reporting anyway.” When she returned home, Marisol had filled the apartment with music loud enough to make the silverware in the sink—a mess left over from yesterday's dinner—rattle, tapping gently against the bowls with the remnants of their soup still dried to the bottom. 

People came to clear out their apartment later, Nicte hadn’t been able to process the details, though she took the American flag with her when they moved in with their neighbors, along with a quilt her mother had made with each of their names stitched onto one of the pieces. Their neighbors lived on the floor above them, and for the next two years that Nicte lived there, she would close her eyes as she walked down the stairs, so as not to have to see the front door of their old apartment or the ghost left from the welcome sign that used to hang there, proudly bearing the name Batan.

Marisol stopped dancing after that, and instead started spending her time with boys. Older, civilian boys who couldn’t find jobs and liked the idea of getting attention from a young witch who they would ask to sing for them. Nicte didn’t like the way they spoke to her or the way they looked at her, but Marisol had no patience for it, brushing Nicte off when she tried to warn Marisol away, to talk to her, to yell at her, to ask if she thought she was respecting Mama’s memory by acting this way. “So if they were witches, it would be better?” Marisol said. “Why? What does it matter? You know Mama and Lupe would have died sooner or later. And anyway,” she added, “you like civilians just as much as I do, I’ve seen the girls you go around with.” 

“You don’t know anything about the girls I go around with,” Nicte said, because she didn't care about those girls and she knew they didn't care about her either. 

The boys stopped coming around after a while, but Marisol started getting sick then—sleeping all day, looking red-eyed and listless while awake, vomiting out of what Nicte couldn’t tell was illness or grief. Nicte tried to pull her back into some routine, tried to get her to see a doctor, tried again talking to her, yelling at her, but it was no use, because Marisol, six months before Nicte’s conscription date, swallowed a bottle of pills and didn’t wake up the next morning.

Don’t cry for me, Nicte. I’m already dancing with Mama and Lupe, read the note she held clenched in her fist, and the autopsy, as was required in the event of the suicide of any witch, revealed her to have been three months pregant. 

Abortion was still criminalized for witches, even after it was legalized for civilians—the government wasn’t willing to risk losing even a single baby that might grow up to be a powerful weapon—and suicide was as well. Attempted suicide while pregnant carried with it a prison sentence under enforced medical supervision, during which one was forced to carry the pregnancy to term, and afterward a quick deployment to the front lines of wherever the US needed more cannon fodder, while the child, if carried to term, was taken into military guardianship and raised on a base as a foundling. In the event that the suicide was successful, then scrutiny would be put on family members. All of that scrutiny, in this case, landed on Nicte, the neighbors who had taken them in denying any meaningful relationship to them.

Nicte spent the months leading up to her conscription under intense oversight. They questioned her, to see if she had known anything about Marisol’s plans, and then watched her, to make sure she wouldn’t do the same. “We better be getting our money’s worth out of you,” is what she knew they were thinking, so she kept her head down, worked at the cantina at the end of the block for some pocket money, made it look like she was fine, like she was ready to do her duty, like she was going to be a good soldier.

She always showed up to work on time. She made the lemonade by hand, pulling the handle down to squeeze the juice out from its flesh, the sugar and acid mixing on her skin so her fingers burned a little. She smiled at the customers when she stood behind the counter, flirted so that no one could see the pain behind her eyes. “You want a little extra sugar in that, mami?” She would smirk and wink and lean back with her arms crossed, her thumb pushed up against the crease between her bicep and her chest.

And even though Nicte would cry herself to sleep every night, bundled under the heavy weight of her Mama’s quilt and of Lupe’s flag and with Marisol’s faded birds looking down at her, Nicte was ready. She was going to be a good soldier. What else was there for her to be?

Everyone already knew about Nicte and what had happened with Marisol when she arrived at Fort Salem. She knew this because Mara Swythe, when they were assigned to the same unit, said to Nicte, “You better not be planning to go the same way as your sister, because I’m planning to get into war college and I won’t have you ruining that for me.” Nicte had rolled her eyes at this—she knew she wasn’t making it into war college and she didn’t care about Swythe’s plans—but she saw the way the other cadets looked at her, like she was spoiled goods, wary, like they were worried that if they got too close, Nicte might drive them to suicide too.

They were assigned to an obstacle course on the fifth day of basic. “Line up,” their drill sergeant, Imogen Vance barked. “This is an independent exercise today. There’s no time limit and no get out of jail free card. You get through it quickly, you’ve got your first free afternoon to look forward to. If you take your time,” she looked up at the sky and then over the group of cadets, some of them bouncing on the balls of their feet, some of them shivering, all of them rapidly soaking from the cold sheets of February rain lashing down on them, “then I guess you’ll be cold.” She blew her whistle and they moved forward as a pack. Nicte pressed into the freezing rain, running with Swythe at her side, the rest of the cadets behind them, to the first wooden wall they needed to clamber over.

Nicte didn’t mind her unit, but she was pleased at the opportunity to be freed from them for a little while at least. Nicte found Swythe to be a wet blanket, but Swythe knew things about Work that Nicte had never been taught, which made them more successful in their unit exercises, even if afterward Swythe would act the insufferable braggart. Samira Harris, the third member of their unit was, by contrast, quiet, though she didn’t seem shy. She was neither flustered nor charmed by Nicte’s attempts at flirting when Nicte was assigned to the bunk above her. “I guess it’s my lucky day that I get to be on top of you, Harris,” Nicte had said with a wink, but Harris had raised her eyebrows and scanned Nicte up and down with disinterest and Nicte had felt her body flush with embarrassment in response. What Nicte most of all did not mind however, was that they were called the Batan unit, a simple accident of the alphabet, but one that made Swythe suck on her teeth each time she heard it.

Swythe hit the wall first, with Nicte half a stride behind. Nicte jumped, caught the top, then swung a leg over. She dropped to the ground, the impact reverberating up through her knees, but kept running without pause. They crossed the next stretch at a jog. The rain had turned the dirt to mud, and it pulled at Nicte’s boots with each step. She leaned forward and drove through it, the rain like ice against her skin, then dripping down to collect beneath the collar of her fatigues.

Nicte dropped into the pit, the mud squelching around her knees and soaking through her pants, and began a low crawl on her elbows. The barbed wire scraped at whatever skin it could reach. Burning lines flared across the backs of her hands and her neck, but she barely flinched. She pulled herself up and out, still neck and neck with Swythe, to continue through the course. Nicte already knew about her ability for tolerating pain, an ability she thought made her well suited to becoming a soldier, and an ability that was not easy to show off, but there was a satisfaction she felt at this opportunity to do so.

The rope slid through her hands as she climbed, her feet catching on the knot at its base before she swung across the span. It tore at the skin of her palms, but again it didn’t slow her. By the time she hit the tires, her legs felt heavy, and her arms began to falter near the end of the course, but she felt proud at holding her place at the front of the group. Not because of her strength or her speed—both middling at best—and not because she ignored the pain that burned in her, but because it egged her on and kept her singlemindedly focused on the finish.

The other cadets straggled after her, carefully crossing the rain-slick plank while Nicte watched, and most were more ragged, even as she was bent halfway over, forearms braced against her thighs, breathing hard. They dropped where they stood, no longer caring about the cold or the rain, too exhausted and overheated to move. One by one, the cadets finished the course, then peeled away as they caught their breath, heading back with their units to the mess hall or the barracks. Swythe, who had slapped hands and knocked shoulders with the cadets who exited the course just after her—already a leader among them because of her name, which marked her to the rest of their comrades as someone who would be worthwhile to befriend—was long gone, arm in arm with another High Atlantic.

But Nicte was curious about the other cadets, which was why she waited, standing with her arms crossed and her head tilted down once she regained her strength, to watch as each one passed the finish line. Her eyes tracked the last few still on the course, and she noticed that Harris was still in the pit crawl, moving slow, far behind even the other final laggards in their group. Harris pushed up onto her hands to catch her breath, retched, and the barbed wire above her pressed down into her shoulders and forced her back into the mud. She stayed there a second before she again began dragging herself forward on her elbows. Nicte stepped closer to the edge of the pit, boots sinking into the wet ground. 

“Do you need a hand?” Nicte asked, reaching down toward her as Harris approached the end of the wire crawl, making slow work of pushing herself up to her feet.

“This is an independent exercise, Batan!” Sergeant Vance shouted from the front of the course. “You’ve completed it, so clear off.”

“What happened to ‘sticking by your unit?’ She couldn’t shut up about that just yesterday,” Nicte muttered so that Vance couldn’t hear her. Harris snorted, but she didn’t accept Nicte’s hand as she struggled upright.

“I don’t need your help,” Harris said, then spat on the ground and limped forward, her shoulder brushing against Nicte’s as she moved with an unsteady gait.

“Okay,” Nicte said, trying to sound breezy despite the way her stomach dropped uncomfortably at the reaction. She lifted her arms up in a casual spread, “Well, it's right here if you change your mind.” She watched Harris move through the rest of the course at the same slow and unsteady pace, completing it long after the rest of their company, otherwise just Nicte and Vance standing under the rain. Nicte was unbothered by the cold, having no desire to return to the other cadets who looked at her with such distaste, but she felt gratified at the way Vance shivered as she watched Harris limping off toward the mess hall without so much as a glance in her direction. 

Nicte, in spite of herself, discovered that she liked the army. She liked the routine, liked how the structure of everything—wake up, training, meal times—regulated her grief as much as it did her body. But it still wasn’t enough, because she didn’t have any talent for weatherwork or for the skills the army wanted to teach her. She felt resentful, that she wanted to prove herself and couldn’t figure out how. She felt lonely and she felt sad and she couldn’t sleep, not even when her body ached with exhaustion.

That Nicte struggled with canon Work didn't stop her from experimenting with off-canon Work—even while at Fort Salem, where she knew it was risky—she couldn't curb her own curiosity. She would take out her lighter at night and flick it open and closed and open and closed and watch the hottest part of flame burn. It didn't seem to bother Swythe or Harris. Swythe snored loud enough to cover up any other sounds, and Harris was tired all the time, she’d fall asleep in the bunk below Nicte within minutes. Nicte, who was restless and anxious to forget her recent history, made herself into her own test subject.

She learned how to glamour herself. Learned to make herself invisible or render her skin into something else—a cleansing fire and a brand, both. She could only hold it for a few seconds at a time, but each sleepless night that passed, she got just a little bit better at it, got closer to being able to change her face, make herself over into someone new. And then, her curiosity continuing to get the best of her, she played with her emotions, thinking that if she could make her skin take on the look of something else then maybe she could make her heart take the feeling of something else. But this too only lasted moments. A minute at a time, she could infuse herself with happiness or calm, but it was never enough to get a full night's sleep. 

She took to drinking bottles of iced tea that she would buy from the vending machine in order to get through the day, the sugar and the caffeine making her hands shake but at least keeping her eyes open. And then one night, as she changed out of her fatigues to settle into bed, she pulled the empty plastic bottle out of the pocket next to her knee, and wondered whether, since she had already discovered her burgeoning ability to force emotions inside of herself, she might be able to force emotions out. 

When Swythe flicked off the lights and Harris stopped tossing and turning below her, Nicte held the bottle close to her lips and hummed out a sound deep and quiet straight from the bottom of her throat, until she held in her hands a bottle full of grief and she felt her chest empty. She slept all through that night, no nightmares, no dreams. In the morning, Nicte swallowed back down what she had put in that bottle, but she found that those feelings had already built back up inside her and so she spent that day full of a depression deeper than she had ever experienced before. Her Work suffered more than usual, both weaker and less controlled, and her ability for physical exertion was completely depleted. She didn’t know what to do then, the next day, when she repeated the same process to get herself to sleep, blowing her sadness into a bottle until the plastic was tight under pressure. She couldn’t swallow it down again, but it seemed dangerous to her to let it out where someone else might be able to breathe it in. She ended up leaving it on the sill just outside their window, the cap halfway unscrewed so that her grief would escape slowly, and not risk causing any damage.

“Look at this,” Swythe said later, pointing at the window. A smear of blood and feathers graced the surface of the glass and a sparrow’s corpse lay still on the sill where Nicte’s bottle had been. Nicte opened the window, flipping the latch and swinging it inside to look at the mottled design. The bottle was nowhere to be seen.

“That happens during breeding season sometimes,” Harris said, looking up from tying her boots, “birds get confused by their own reflection. They can kill themselves trying to get to what they think is a potential mate.” She tugged on her laces to make them snug against her ankles. “It’s still a bit early in the year for that though,” she added with a downward turn of her lips.

“I need you two to get serious,” Swythe hissed. They had spent the morning in windstrike training, Harris barely managing to vocalize anything with any power behind it, while Nicte could only let out overly aggressive and undirected bursts of wind. Nicte smirked at Harris over her food tray, the mess hall was rowdy around them as the other cadets ate dinner, and Harris rolled her eyes in response. They had not become friends, but after two weeks, they had become allies in response to Swythe’s incessant nagging about their Work and the way they were holding her back as her unit.

“Funny,” Nicte said. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

Swythe scoffed. “Excuse me?”

“All that talent, but the only thing you can worry about is us,” Nicte said as she took a bite of her collard greens. Harris snorted into her cup as Nicte reached for the salt.

Swythe’s jaw tightened. “This isn’t a joke. If we don’t start performing better, they’re going to start watching us, and if that happens—”

“We’re already being watched,” Harris cut in.

Nicte’s eyes flicked toward her. Even if they weren't friends, Harris had not, up until that point, made any indication that she was bothered by the problematic elements of Nicte's background or family history. Nicte had assumed Harris knew just as much as anyone else did and didn't hold it against her that it didn't seem like she wanted to be friends. Harris didn't seem to want to be friends with anyone.

“Then even more so, you need to shape up. You especially,” Swythe said with a nasty look at Nicte. “If we're going to be known as the Batan unit then the least you can do is try to earn it.” She picked up her food tray and stalked away.

“She's not wrong,” Nicte said, looking down at her plate, Swythe now long gone, “even if she's being a bitch about it.” Harris raised an eyebrow as Nicte gazed back up toward her. “You know, maybe you could help me with my control and I could help you with your power? It wouldn’t be a bad thing if we were a better unit, and it would probably be good for when we start doing real weatherwork.”

“I don’t need your help with my Work, Batan.”  

“Well, your Work sucks, so it seems like you need help from someone.”

“My work doesn’t suck. I have other stuff on my mind. Some of us have shit to deal with.”

Nicte tilted her head. “Yeah? Like what?”

For a moment Nicte thought she might answer, but then Harris stood, her chair legs screeching against the floor, drawing a few glances from nearby tables. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. She turned and moved away, cutting through the crowd and within a few seconds she was just another uniform among many, lost to the press of bodies and noise. 

Harris did come to her later though, during the fifth week of basic. She cornered Nicte before bed, when Swythe was in the shower, after a long day of running in the rain and more windstrike training. The lights were low, a drizzle tapped against the window. There was a quiet bustle of cadets walking back and forth down the hallway just outside their door.

“Can I talk to you?” Harris said, her jaw working nervously, just as Nicte was about to clamber up to her bunk. Nicte was surprised by the request because Harris had spent the day more close-lipped than usual. Nicte paused, her hand still on the ladder, glancing over her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said easily. Harris had never asked her for anything before. “What's up?”

“I need your help,” Harris said.

Nicte raised an eyebrow, leaning her hip against the cool metal of the bunk. “So you finally admit that your Work does suck?”

“It's not my Work,” Harris said, an aggravated grimace appearing on her face, but then she glanced around the empty room and lowered her voice to say, “I’m pregnant.”

Nicte blinked. “Okay,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. “And?” Harris stared at her, disappointment appearing in her eyes. “What’s the problem?” Nicte continued, speaking at a regular volume. “What does the army love more than a witch carrying a little witch baby?”

Harris flinched. “I can’t survive basic like this.”

“Then tell Sergeant Vance, this is exactly the kind of thing they make exceptions for.”

“I mean—” Harris swallowed, then leaned in, speaking in a tense whisper, “I want to get rid of it. I need to get rid of it.”

“Okay,” she said again, slower this time. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Harris’s gaze flickered over Nicte’s face. “I thought—” She inhaled, trying again. “I thought you might be able to help me.”

 “You thought that because my sister was pregnant when she offed herself, that I might know something about where you can get an illegal abortion?” Nicte scoffed, feeling indignant and defensive at the request, annoyed to have something so painful shoved in her face like this.

Harris recoiled. “No,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “That’s not— I saw you.” Her voice dropped even further, “What you do at night with your lighter. I thought—” she rubbed a hand over her mouth but then pushed on, some confidence settling into her voice. “I know you know how to do stuff that’s off-canon. I thought maybe you’d know how to get rid of it.”

Nicte looked at her for a long moment. Her lighter felt heavy in her pocket. Neither of them moved until Swythe re-entered the room, the door snapping shut behind her, and it made them both jump. 

“Lights out,” Swythe said, before she toweled off her hair and snapped the switch off. It took a moment for Nicte’s eyes to adjust, but then, the fog lifting as her pupils grew in size, she saw Harris standing still. She didn't look pleading, but she looked at Nicte intently.

“I don’t know anything about anything,” Nicte said, lifting her bare foot up to the first rung of the ladder, and then, knowing she would regret it, added, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

It turned out to be harder than Nicte expected it to be, though parts of it were easy. It was easy to get through the wards around Fort Salem—the ones intended to keep soldiers in and civilians out—because she only needed a few minutes of face changing magic for that. It was a gratifying discovery that her own shoddily invented Work was strong enough to trick the wards to let her through without tripping any alarms. And it was easy enough to make it into Salem proper, where a new civilian women’s clinic had recently opened, and where she was able to steal a few purses—which got her enough cash and some IDs and new faces along with them. The problem was that she needed to figure out how to make the face changing magic stick.

She tried everything she could to make it work better—burning the fire hotter, changing the vibration of the seed—but it turned out that the only thing that made a difference was control, and for that she needed practice. She worked on it every night, stretching her ability to hold it longer little by little, until she made it to four hours, three weeks of practice passing by.

It wasn’t entirely clear to Nicte why she was doing it. It wasn’t pure altruism by any means, even if it made her sick to think about, to both be forced to be a soldier and forced to give birth to more. And it certainly wasn’t out of any loyalty or friendship to Harris, who remained an ally to Nicte in the moments that Swythe could not help herself, but she was otherwise no friendlier than she had been before—though Nicte began to recognize this aloofness as being due to the anxiety Harris felt about her pregnancy, and also noticed how unwell Harris seemed to feel most of the time, vomiting regularly and trying to hide it. She told herself that if she helped Harris, then Harris would get better, and then their unit would get better, and Nicte might then come out on the other side of basic better prepared to be a soldier. But most of all, Nicte liked having a project to work on, a project that she was naturally good at, and that she could feel herself improving at.

“Tomorrow,” she told Harris when she made it to the four hour mark, who gave her a tight smile and a nod in return.

“Here,” Nicte said, passing the driver’s license she had pilfered out of one of the stolen purses. The photo was of a young woman in her late 20s. “Your name is Loretta Simmons.”

They stood on the outer limits of the fort, a blind spot in the trees where they could climb over the fence and where, once they changed their faces, they wouldn’t be noticed by the wards.

“How’d you learn to do that?” Harris asked once Nicte burned Loretta’s face onto her with her lighter. She shrugged, then changed her own face—Guadalupe Mendez, according to the photo ID.

“I tried to get someone who looks like you, but it can feel a little weird,” Nicte warned her. “And we don’t have much time, we’re going to need to get to Salem quickly.”

“Got it,” Harris said, already tucking her foot into the chain of the fence to climb over. “What happens if we run into ourselves?” She dropped with a thud onto the other side.

“You mean, the people whose faces I stole?”

Harris nodded.

“Uh,” Nicte said, climbing the fence herself, “that would be pretty bad.” She flung herself over and landed next to Harris, a little too hard, but she limped it off quickly. “So hopefully that doesn’t happen.”

“You're late,” the receptionist said when they arrived at the clinic and Harris passed over the ID card and gave her fake name under which Nicte had made the appointment.

“But you'll still see her, right?” Nicte asked.

“Yes, but you'll have to wait,” she said, giving them otherwise little mind. The waiting area was busy, even then when it was dark and past dinner time, nurses were calling out orders and names, people filing in and out through the doors to the medical offices. “Sit down, you'll be called when they're ready for you,” the receptionist said, then called out, “Williams, this is for you, the bathroom is over there,” holding up a urine sample container.

Nicte felt tense at how crowded the clinic was and the fact that they would have to wait. She crossed her arms and stared blankly at the chaos surrounding her, hoping that her Work would hold, but Harris, who looked calmer than Nicte had seen her before, put a hand on Nicte’s arm and said, “Come on.”

They found a pair of seats in the corner, at 90 degrees from each other so that their knees bumped as they sat down. Harris reached for a magazine on the small table that sat in the space between their chairs, the glossy front page picturing a swimmer mid-stroke, water sheeting off her shoulders in a frozen arc of blue.

“I swam competitively in high school,” Harris said, flipping through the pages. It was the first piece of personal information, other than the pregnancy, that Harris had shared with Nicte, and it surprised her, to realize that Harris had a past.

“Really? That seems like the kind of thing only civilians do.”

Harris smiled. “My dad’s an immigrant. The divide between witches and civilians isn't as strong in Lebanon as it is here.”

“Have you been to Lebanon?”

“No. My dad hasn't gone back since the war started. But I'm hoping I can get stationed there, at least if the US does the right thing and helps the rebuilding effort. He’s always wanted to build something back home—expand his business, maybe—but it’s never been stable enough.”

Nicte didn't know how to respond to this. There was something that suddenly felt very big to her about war, something beyond her comprehension. She had never thought very hard about politics, it didn't seem worthwhile, not if she was fated to be someone who followed orders. 

“I don't know how to swim,” she said instead, which wasn't entirely true, because Nicte knew that she had once known how to swim, since there were pictures of her in the water, swimming in Lago Maihue, but she could hardly remember it. Her mother hadn't had the time or energy to bring them to the pool or the lake when they arrived in Chicago, and by the time Lupe was old enough to take her, or Nicte was old enough that Mama would have let her go alone, it had been too long, and Nicte had developed a fear of the water, came to believe that her body was too dense to float and that no one would come to rescue her if she drowned.

“I could teach you,” Harris said, “I mean, you'll have to learn by the end of basic anyway, but I could help you. If you wanted.”

Nicte said okay, and then listened as Harris told her how she spent her summers swimming in Lake St. Clair, but during the school year spent most afternoons in the chlorinated water at the Y. She was a serious swimmer, and watched the clock carefully, keeping her strokes even and powerful, and paying attention to her time, but she liked to play too, which was how she had chipped a tooth, when she swam, goggled-eyes wide and mouth open, too close to the bottom of the pool. Nicte told her how she spent her summers walking along Lake Michigan and sucking on popsicles and sometimes watching the skaters in the parks along the path, wondering what it would feel like to try salva for the first time when she saw the way the skaters would float for half a second, suspended in the air above the half-pipe.

Harris asked her if she missed Chicago and Nicte laughed and said she had spent every day since they moved there waiting to get away and that was why she liked Fort Salem, liked that there were real trees and hills and her eyeline was broken up by more than flat pavement and boxes of concrete, and Harris told her that she missed Detroit everyday, missed the food her dad cooked for her, but she liked how close they were now to the sea, that even though she hadn't seen it yet, she could feel it pulling on her, the waves crashing on a beach just miles away.

Nicte then told her how actually she barely knew anything of Chicago, that she had spent so much of her childhood sitting in hospital waiting rooms that looked like this one, that what she had really wanted was to get away from her mother, for all of it to be over, but now that it was over, she wished she could have stayed waiting in that hospital room forever. 

“Where did you learn to do that off-canon stuff?” Harris asked her.

“What? They don't teach that in Detroit?”

“I had a very sheltered childhood,” Harris said, and Nicte laughed at that and said she figured as much, what with the competitive swimming and all. “I'm sorry I've been a lousy unit-member. I won't need your help with my power, not once they take this baby out of me,” she said, “but I can help you with your control. If you want me to.” 

“Simmons?” A nurse called out, 

“But I'll definitely help you with the swimming.”

“Loretta Simmons?”

“That's you,” Nicte said, nudging her with her knee.

Harris stood up. “Nicte,” she said, turning around after taking a step forward. “Thank you.” And then she disappeared behind the double doors.

Samira returned 30 minutes later, looking no worse for wear, and Nicte stood up right away, glancing at her watch before heading to the door. They only had about an hour before her Work would wear off.

They walked in a hurry back to the fort, but their pace soon slowed as Samira began to feel out of breath, cramping and nausea setting in. Waves of fatigue began to overtake her as they reached the outer perimeter, and Nicte gave her a leg up to climb the fence, Nicte scrambling behind her as quickly as she could, and just in time, because the face changing Work began to wear off as soon as her boots hit the ground.

Their escapade had seemed to go off almost flawlessly—the Work had held up, no one blinked at Samira's stolen ID, she got the abortion, they didn't run into the civilians whose faces Nicte had stolen—but Samira's cramps doubled in strength as they made their way out of the copse of trees by the fence and onto the path to return to them to the barracks, requiring Nicte to offer her an arm to keep her upright and moving. Nicte knew that there was a chance they would run into a patrol on their way, figuring that the worst that could happen was getting assigned some kind of grunt work as punishment for being away from the barracks without leave, but she hadn't expected to run into General Alder herself, out for a midnight walk, her biddies flanking her as she came across them in the moonlight.

“What are you doing out here in the middle of the night, cadets?” she asked them, her voice hard.

Nicte had only seen General Alder in person once before, on the first day of basic, when she spoke to all of them, telling them about what an honor it was for them to serve and protect their country. “Storm and fury,” she told them, and Nicte had felt at the words and in her presence, that same frightened curiosity she once felt in Lupe’s bedroom, but along with it came some undefined resentment, as well as a resolute desire to prove herself. 

She felt then though, as Alder’s eyes scanned them both, Nicte attempting to stand at attention while Samira stood bent over beside her, gripping at her stomach in response to her unbearable cramps, something that she could only describe as terror. It seemed obvious enough what had happened, what with the state that Samira was in, and Nicte’s presence, and the fact that they were still so close to the edge of campus, and Nicte felt certain that this was the end for her, that she had effectively committed treason, all the evidence for it written on their faces, and caught by General Sarah Alder, no less.

Nicte never knew what General Alder thought had happened, though she noticed the way Alder’s jaw clenched and the way her steely gaze landed on Samira, looking her up and down, and Nicte thought she saw some recognition in Alder’s eyes before she snapped, without waiting for a response to her earlier question, “Get to bed.”

Nicte saluted, then grabbed Samira by the arm to pull her forward, at as much of a rush as Samira's limping would allow. They slowed down once they were out of Alder's immediate vicinity, Samira bracing herself on her knees to catch her breath, letting out a warm, surprised laugh, which Nicte caught on to. 

“You okay?” Nicte asked her. Samira looked up at her with a smile that showed off her chipped front tooth, then took Nicte's hand in her own and squeezed.