Killmaster: Chapter 2

Part Two. (a tale of two mornings)

As a child, Una was taught that the morning was the opening of all things. That every day everything began again, and each day was a mirror image of the life of the universe. The door to the Community faced east, drinking light and warming the dark and expansive stone walls which wandered labyrinthine far below the sweet earth of the Martian plain. In the mornings, the girls were awoken long before sunrise to work in the gardens, walking in long lines through the tall concrete columns of the atrium and into the high desert. If there is peace in the world, Una once thought, it exists in the cool of a garden at sunrise. Like all things, peace is subjective.

Una lived in Commune #4. One of the last all-female communes on the dying surface of post-terraform Mars. This is not the Mars you may have heard of- the expansive deserts and shallow equatorial seas, the cold rainforests and great plains interspersed with crater lakes. This is not the Mars where public theaters held concerts under a starscape visible at high noon. This is not the Mars where vast cities existed in perfect harmony with a natural world created specifically to meet their needs. This would be thousands of years later, the final days of Martian civilization. Hers were the final people to haunt the planets’ surface, and Una is the last one left.

 Commune #4 was a bunker of sorts. It’s thick, ancient steel doors opened to a wide ramp leading to the surface, framing their only patch of sky with great concrete pillars. The origin of the structure was debated-some said it had been built as a shelter for the people from the days when they were brought from the sky. Others pointed to the glyphs and symbols inscribed and painted throughout its passages and said it must have been built later- by the great people who built the crumbling cities and filled the now evaporated seas. Others still- the ones that Una believed most- pointed to a black box in the depths of their home, the deepest and darkest corner of the vast complex and found a simple explanation. The community was built by the Director. You will meet him later, but for now just know that it was morning. Early morning, before the rising of the sun where the line between the beginning and end of day is obscured and all things hang in balance before the greying of the horizon.

It was at this early hour that the sisters of the commune worked the fields. If they stayed any later, any longer into the day, they would risk dangerous sunburns from unfiltered sunlight, the ozone having come and gone long ago. They worked quietly, sharing whispers in the cold as they planted, pulled weeds, and harvested. The girls often did the heaviest labor in their teens, letting the youngest one’s harvest and fertilize, leaving the planning and organizing to the most senior among them. Una’s whole life was lived this way, waking in the dark and joining the shuffling masses as they whisper through the deep stone corridors of the community, arm in arm on their way to the fields and gardens.  It was here that Una made her first memory.

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The earth was cold in her hands. Una’s small fingers dug to find the edge of a beet root before grabbing the bulb and pulling with both hands. Crickets chirped in the ditches as she pulled, bare feet sinking into the soft dirt as the last stars of night glowed overhead. When the bulb finally pulled free, she picked it up and began to walk down the line to her parents. All the sisters of the commune looked the same in the darkness, the occasional dim glow of solar globe lamps revealing a bubble of hunched women in dirt-stained white wraps. Una walked down the line, proudly carrying her dirty beet, until she found her mothers’ leaning down beside one another, placing seeds in the ground.

“MAMA” Una belted to the both of them, attracting a scatter of looks from the women planting around them.

“yes dear?” Mona responded, turning around. She usually responded first, despite Una always talking to the both of them. She was short and dark, a gray form with bright eyes in the early morning dark.

“I GOT A BEET!” Una squirmed with excitement, digging her feet deep into the soil and holding the dirty root out in front of her. She was grinning ear to ear.

“oh honey, thank you!” Mona said in a low voice over the susurrus of digging and planting.

“Lata, our little girl got a beet for you!” she said, giving Lata a knowing look and tagging out of parental responsibility for the moment.

Lata, taller and broader in the shoulders, dropped the Hoe she was using and walked over, swooping Una up in a swarm of giggles and screams, sending echoes of smiles through the fields.

“A BEET? MY FAVORITE!” Lata swung Una in circles, stumbling to the edge of the field. leaving Mona to work in peace. The ditch was clogged with weeds of all kinds, crickets and grasshoppers knocking from stalk to stalk. The sky was gaining a hint of grey. Lata held Una in her arms, swinging her back and forth. After a while, they settled down and Lata went to set the little girl down in the grass before suddenly lurching back.

“Shit!” she said without thinking, pulling Una tight to her chest. Una was suddenly petrified.

“Mama?” Una said, an edge of anxiety in her voice.

“Nothing sweetie, just a snake”. Lata said, peering at the serpentine form at the edge of the ditch. 

“a snake?” Una said, words quavering dramatically. She had never seen a snake before, but was always told to stay away from them. “where?”

“Just over here. Do you want to see it?” Lata said to her daughter, using the tricky, concealing tone that parents use when they ask their kid for permission to scare them.

“No” Una said. “Snakes are bad”.

“Ok, let’s go see” Lata said, completely ignoring her daughters’ objections. Lata took a series of tentative steps towards the animal, being sure to stay out of striking distance. The sun was nearing the horizon, morning light glowing in the thin, blue-black sky. Its form was confusing at first, causing Lata to furl her brow in confusion, then release into understanding, then wonderment. “Una, look” she whispered. Una turned her head hesitantly, still bowed into her mother’s shoulders, eyes barely peering beyond the thick white fabric of her wrap.

What she saw was strange and hard to understand. It would be strange and hard to understand for the rest of her life. It was a rat snake, curled in a pile, loops and coils partially obscured in the grass, its wide eyes reflecting the first light of the day in amber-streaked green, it’s mouth wide and filled with its own tail. Una and Lata stared wide eyed as the creature gently undulated, swallowing itself slowly and patiently as the sun rose behind them, rapt in the magic of the moment.

Of course, the original memory has likely long disappeared from Una’s mind, replaced, and re-written with the story her mother told her over and over again. It appeared in dreams and nightmares, in random conversations and moments of reverie, the image of a terrified child and a self-consuming snake.

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It was morning, again. Still cold in the shade as Una walked from the fields and gardens towards the towering steel doors of the community. Phobos, the first moon, shone gently just over the horizon. Her sisters, hundreds of them, did the same. Streaming from the fields in white canvas, stained black and red with the soil of the Martian plain. Some walked in groups, chatting quietly. Others held hands to acknowledge matrimony, shaved heads bobbing back and forth on the braided trails. The susurrus of feet and voices, clothing and carrying of tools rose above everything. Una walked alone.

She was nervous. Her breath escaped her in fits and starts, hands wrinkling at the corners of her stained wrap. She stared ahead, but it was apparent to everyone that she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Eyes danced around her presence in the crowd without really thinking, the way water dances around a stone in a stream. The sisters poured into the mouth of the community and divided in an atrium, finding winding paths to homes and kitchens, workshops and classrooms. Una turned to a passage of her own, followed by a select few others.

Lit with soft yellow globes, the passages wound deeper into smooth stone tunnels. The familiarity of the route was reassuring, and the quiet tap of bare feet on stone familiar. As they walked, it was clear the other sisters were waiting for Una to say something. Clothing ruffled, lights passed overhead. Passages led towards and away, the same rooms of cloth and supplies passed by in a mindless blur. The silence elongated, stretched to its limit, and finally tore. Una spoke.

“I’m terrified” the silence remained.

“we know” it was Ifta, the tall one. Then another moment, feet tapping the cold stone, lights passing overhead.

“is this the right decision?” Una asked suddenly, as if it was the first time she had doubted herself. As it happens, it was. There was more silence. “I mean, I know I can do it, but is it worth the risk?”

“if anyone can do it, it would be you” said Tara. “remember the pipeline- you were a force of nature! Whatever came over you that day, just channel that and she won’t stand a chance.” Tara was holding her arm now, gripping it as though her skin would understand the encouragement before her ears.

The training room was near. Una looked to Tara, who smiled in return. Her eyes were warm and bright in her dark face, combating the ugly scar a blade had made across her scalp. Her anxiety abated for a moment and was soon replaced with the feeling one gets while looking off a thousand foot cliff. She made her choice and was now pulled into the future regardless of her willingness to do so.

The door was up on the left. She felt a spike of fear. Tara grabbed her hand and stopped her, pulling Una into a hug. Ifta joined. They stood there for a moment, hanging in embrace. The lights continued to shine. Soon they let go, trailing their arms and looking back, reassuring her. The rest of her training group did the same, hugging her, giving words of encouragement. Little of it helped. Soon, Una was left alone in the hallway, facing the dark entrance of her old sparring room. Taking a deep breath, she stilled her mind. I will survive. She thought. She remembered the feeling of that day, not long ago. The rout, securing the water line. Flashing blades and screams. I will survive. That is what she thought. She killed four people that day. Today was no different. She walked through the door.

Within the hour she would rise to the station of Killmaster or lie dead on the stone floor of the sparring room.

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interlude

What is a killmaster? More than anything, they are a product of their environment.

Mars is a violent place. In Una’s time, water was a scarce resource, rapidly depleted by evaporation and the slow rarification of the Martian atmosphere. It had been 1000 years since the Martian magnetic field failed and the atmosphere was leeching away. Ecosystems failed at an incredible rate. Communes provided shelter, identity and purpose, eventually becoming city states of their own. The people worked together, but they too were quickly disappearing. Water was defended, then captured by force.  The peace of utopian mars descended into chaos and a people who had never experienced war invented it once again. Enter the Killmaster.

A Killmaster is a woman who has taken a life in a one-on-one duel, the ultimate test. A Killmaster is a leader, a teacher, the highest ranking one can achieve among the sisters of the commune. She must be skilled. She must be strong. She must be competent. She is the enemy’s worst fear. The armies of Martian communes have many members, soldiers who fight and kill in ambushes and guerrilla warfare. There are very few Killmasters. 

One month ago, Una had never considered the test. A month ago, Una had never seen combat. One month ago, Una had never killed another person.

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It was hot. The plains were sweltering, dry scrub and long dead creek beds baked in the unforgiving sun, the wind picked up in patches, swirling into dust devils that narrowly missed the shallow drainage where Una and three other sisters waited patiently. Ifta, Talia and Tara were lying as still as possible, They wore loose red shirts and pants, the color of the dry dirt around them. Their faces were painted red to match, with the exception of a single black stripe across their eyes, an imitation of warpaint.  Long, thin swords graced their backs, double-length handles sticking over their shoulders.

Peering over the ditch, through creosote and yucca, Una could barely make out the guard post. Four women in white standing atop the dull green of the water line. They couldn’t hear her, but she breathed shallow breaths, nonetheless. Tara tapped her on the shoulder. They had been instructed not to speak, so Tara looked her in the eye and squeezed her shoulder. They were both terrified, Una especially. It was her first raid.

Growing up, Una usually placed last in sparring competitions. Some kids seemed to have this gift some sort of genetic intuition that made them fight harder than the others. Always the silent observer, she saw a kind of drive that she never truly felt. But she was strong. She could hold her own and ended up fighting anyway. Tara was one of the gifted kids. The girls that fought to the death in every match, no matter how important. She had been doing raids for a year now.

The Director had specified that the attack must occur when Phobos, the first moon, reached it’s height. Feeling another tap on her shoulder, Una saw Ifta, squatting to hide her height. She pointed upwards. It was time. The girls looked to Ifta for the signal. Waving her hand, the unit launched out of the riverbed and across the ten meters to the pipeline. Una’s legs were heavy, fear coursing across her skin like cold water. Her thoughts were small and sharp. Nobody said a word, no guard screamed for backup. It was silent as she ran and skidded to a halt at the base of the pipeline. She pressed hard against the scratched green paint, the ancient yellow glyphs peeling at her shoulders.  I will Survive. She thought. I will survive.

 There was a ladder in front of her, and as she stepped toward it a figure in white fell into the corner of her vision. Talia, behind her, stepped forward. The woman in white stared them down. Her sword was drawn,the speck of deimos rising above her left shoulder.

“Move and you die”. The woman shouted. She was shaking. She had long hair.

Talia stepped forward again. She was shorter than the woman in white, but broader in the shoulder. She had been fighting for longer than anyone there. 

“No. abandon your post. Commune 4 is taking custody of this supply line, if you wish to fight, you may. I assure you that you will lose.” Her sword was in her hand now. The woman in white was pale with fear. Talia stood still.  They stared for a long moment, the moon hanging in the sky, swords drawn in front of them. Una watched the guard, saw the shaking in her breaths and felt the looseness in her own legs. We’re the same, she thought.

At that moment, she heard a howl from above. More guards jumping from the pipeline. Talia reacted immediately, her blade flashing into the gut of the woman in front of her with startling force. Tara and Ifta stepped forward and clashed with the newly arrived guards. Talia turned in time to see a blade take her in the neck, sword still dripping blood. Una couldn’t move. Tara turned and startled her into action:

“To the top! Take the high ground!” she turned back to the melee, facing the enemy side by side with Ifta.

Una ran and climbed the ladder, hoping no one would be waiting for her on top. She could hear screaming but she wasn’t sure whose it was. She climbed on top as fast as she could, looking up just in time to see a flash of white as a booted foot flew into her stomach. 

It hurt unlike anything she had ever felt, sending her to her back in a ball. I will survive, I will survive, The thought ran through her head in a loop. Another flash of white came towards her, but this time she expected it. she grabbed the boot and kicked upwards at the guards groin, knocking her off balance and forcing her to take a three-meter fall into the fight below. She looked up and saw three more guards, standing with swords drawn. There’s eight of them? She thought. That’s twice as many as there should be. It must have been a guard change, something unpredictable. The Director was always right.

 Una stood up, confused why the guards hadn’t yet attacked her. Then she saw their faces. They were trembling, each of them probably as new to this as her. It struck her for a moment how absurd this all was. She didn’t know these people at all, but due to a decision made by other people in a different time and place, she had no choice but to end their lives or face death herself. She was the only thing stopping them from killing her friends, from winning the inevitable wars to come. The wind whipped dust into four pairs of eyes. All of a sudden, It clicked.

Una has never seen snow. Snow fell on mars only briefly and long before her time. But as the reader, I hope you will humor a helpful metaphor. When you watch snow fall, and you look carefully, you will find that the patterns snowflakes make in the sky is not truly random. If you watch long enough, you will find that snow comes in waves, waves of size and intensity, and that the randomness you perceive is a farce. You see only chaos before you because you fail to see the little slice of snow and sky as part of a grander picture. Once you see it this way, it all makes a little more sense. This same thing happens in our lives. You live, bouncing from one thing to the next, performing tasks and doing duties until once in a great while you see the random collection of events you have experienced and perceive an emerging trend, like a curved line that belies the presence of a circle, and for a beautiful moment, things click into place.

Una felt this feeling. Memories flooded through her rushing mind, her mothers, the sparring rooms, a single sentence: we’ll be home soon. She knew her place in the world, if only in that moment. The pain of loss, the opium of anger chasing fear from her veins. She raised her hand above her shoulder and drew her sword, the ancient glyphs across it’s blade glinting in the sun, then stepped forward with purpose and drove it into the sternum of the woman in front of her.

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The fight was quick. Una could barely remember it. There were loud screams and grunts, a brief exchange of blades. But she carried through it with an intensity she had never felt, a feeling that could only be described as Purpose. Without her, they would have lost the day.

When they returned, they brought Talia with them. She did not survive. Una had seen corpses before, but she had never seen death in action. It was a shock to her that the woman she had spoken with so casually that morning had somehow left her body, never to return. If she wasn’t sure before, she was now. She knew why she had to fight, no longer simply how. And that night, she had an idea.

Within a week, she had made her mind. She would take the test. She would become a Killmaster.

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The sparring room was meant for training a hundred sisters at a time. Entering, Una saw that the mats had been removed from the center of the room. There was a crowd of maybe fifty, small in the cavernous room, loosely gathered around a red ring on the floor. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. The lights were dimmed, causing the four massive columns that held the ceiling to throw sinister shadows to the corners of the tan mats. It took a moment for the crowd to notice her, slowly turning heads and tapping shoulders. Una looked to the ground. 

Steps measured, breath under control. She tried not to think, save for one thought: I will survive. The crowd parted, showing her the center of the circle where a small black box sat. Una recalled the name of the circle, it’s colloquial title, Blood ring. Another sister knelt in front of the box, she was taller than Una.  Una knelt with her. There was silence in the crowd, whispers petered out like candle flames. As if on cue, the box spoke:

“IMAT, DAUGHTER OF MARS. WHY ARE YOU HERE?” The voice was deep, flat and crackling unlike any Una had known in the community.

“To kill, director.” Imat replied. She was taller than Una, the hair on her shaved head curling slightly. Una could see the sweat on her palms, could smell the dried sweat from years of training and sparring. Much of it was her own. The stone was cold and hard on her knees.

“I WISH YOU LUCK. UNA, DAUGHTER OF MARS, WHY ARE YOU HERE?” the lack of tone, of anything resembling inflection, was unsettling to Una. Speaking with the director reminded her of her first time sparring, surrounded by tall, strong sisters who were intimidating to stand near, much less speak to.

“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” the Director repeated. 

“To kill, Director” she replied. The words felt alien to her. Imat was staring, trying to intimidate. Feet shuffled on stone. She heard Tara behind her, her longest friend, could sense anxiety in the room. No one had expected Una to take the test. Imat was fierce, everyone knew she was stronger. The Director spoke.

“I WISH YOU LUCK. YOU MAY BOTH STAND AND PREPARE.” Imat and Una stood. They walked to the edge of the circle and removed their wraps. Una felt the cold air travel across her bare skin as she accepted a chest wrap and loincloth from Tara. Words seeped from the crowd, most of them indistinct. She dressed. Someone handed her a sword, her mother’s. The cord on the handle was familiar, still stained with the blood of a stranger. It’s weight was familiar, balanced at the top of the handle, tip slightly wider than the base, straight and long. Her breaths were even now. Tara was staring at her. She looked back, and for the first time since meeting her, Una feigned strength.for a moment. They looked at each other, full and unblinking. To Una her eyes were like pools of cool water, a refuge in a world of sharp stone. She took a final look at the sea of familiar faces around her, then turned around. Imat was ready. Someone had moved the Director to the side of the ring.

“SISTERS, ARE YOU READY?” it said. The crowd hushed. The columns threw their angled shadows at the empty walls.

“Yes” they both said. There was a long moment of silence, of shuffling feet, of snowflakes falling on distant mountains and rivers flowing in the dreams of women who watched two of their own face each other with lethal intent in a world all to brutal, all too real to fully acknowledge.

“KILL” the Director said. 

Snowflakes of random qualia flew about Una’s mind. They swirled and tumbled at every angle, and in the heft of a sword, a closing of the eyes, they snapped beautifully into place for an instant in the shape of a perfect circle. An opening of the eyes and release of breath took hold of it and followed its rime to an apex, a terrible and blind sense of purpose. If we were in the crowd, do you think she would understand if we told her? If we clued her in? would she drop the sword if she knew that circle was one of many? If she knew of the terrible things to come?  Probably not. Let us watch for now, sooner or later she will see for herself...