Free Elephants and Corpses by Kameron Hurley Page A

jars of preserved organs, coagulated blood, and personal preservation and hydrating concoctions he’d learned to make from the Body Mercenary Guild before they’d chucked him out for not paying dues. Since the end of the war, business for body mercs had been bad, and the guild shed specialist mercenaries like him by the thousands. On a lucky day, he was hired on as a cheap party trick, or by a grieving spouse who wanted one last moment with a deceased lover. That skirted a little too closely to deceptive sexual congress for his moral compass. Killing people while wearing someone else’s skin was one thing: fucking while you pretended to be someone they knew was another.
    Tera helped him strip the sodden coat and trousers from the body. What came out of the water around the pier was never savory, but this body seemed especially torn up. It was why he didn’t note the lack of external genitals, at first. Cocks got cut off or eaten up all the time, on floaters like this one. But the look on Tera’s face made him reconsider.
    â€œFunny,” Tera said, sucking her teeth. She had a giant skewer in one hand, ready to stab the corpse to start pumping in the fluids that reduced the bloat. She pulled up the tattered tunic—also cut in a men’s style, like the trousers—and clucked over what appeared to be a bound chest.
    â€œWoman going about as a man?” Nev said. Dressing up as a man was an odd thing for a woman to do in this city, when men couldn’t even own property. Tera owned Nev’s workshop, when people asked. Nev had actually bought it under an old name some years before; he told the city people it was his sister’s name, but of course it was his real one, from many bodies back. He and Tera had been going about their business here for nearly five years, since the end of the war, when body mercenaries weren’t as in demand and old grunts like Tera got kicked out into a depressed civilian world that wanted no reminder of war. When he met her, she’d been working at a government school as a janitor. Not that Nat’s decision regarding the body he wore was any saner.
    â€œYou think she’s from the third sex quarter?” Nev said, “or is it a straight disguise?”
    â€œMaybe she floated down from there,” Tera said, but her brow was still furrowed. “Priests go about in funny clothes sometimes,” she said. “Religious thing.”
    â€œWhat are you thinking?”
    â€œI’m thinking how much you hate going about in women’s bodies,” Tera said.
    â€œI like women well enough,” Nev said, “I just don’t have the spirit of one.”
    â€œAnd a pity that is.”
    â€œShe cost money. I might need her. What I prefer and what I need aren’t always the same thing. Let’s clean her up and put her in the cellar with the others.”
    A body mercenary without a good stash of bodies was a dead body mercenary. He knew it as well as anyone. He’d found himself bleeding out alone in a field without a crop of bodies to jump to before, and he didn’t want to do it again. Every body merc’s worst nightmare: death with no possibility of rebirth.
    Tera cut off the breast binding. When she yanked off the bandages, Nev saw a great red tattoo at the center of the woman’s chest. It was a stylized version of the God’s eye nebula, one he saw on the foreheads of priests gathering up flocks in the street for prayer, pushing and shoving and shouting for worshippers among the four hundred other religious temples, cults, and sects who had people out doing the same.
    Tera gave a little hiss when she saw the tattoo, and made a warding gesture over her left breast. “Mother’s tits.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWrap her up and—”
    The door rattled.
    Nev reached for his scimitar. He slipped on the wet floor and caught himself on the slab just as the door burst open.
    A woman dressed