Free Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott Page A

her twisted flesh beneath Senta robes, like her mother had taught her. She practiced her mother’s faith, though the Senta would burn Rachel just like everyone would burn her. Her brother raised her after her mother died, and he was a hard man that knew no way to raise a girl. The koans raised her, studying them focused her mind into a form that carried her into the world, and her place inside of it.
    When I entered Jona’s skull, I heard the coagulation of her stories inside of him, and saw her with my eyes, smelled her, tasted her. I saw deep.
    This was his Her.

    ***

    We came to Dogsland on a boat.
    The sloop was full of garbage. The old man who sailed the little boat alone never tossed anything away.
    Below deck, damp papers clung together tied up with strings and stacked. The paper attracted flies chasing the greasy remains of the food eaten off the paper. Clothes were folded loosely across every spare spot of floor. Old crates and empty boxes piled against the walls. The shifting waters knocked them over sometimes, never to be picked up again.
    Beneath the rotten crates, people and things came to Dogsland, and back out again, where no inspector would want to look. He knew what Rachel was, and he didn’t care. He was paid better for this than for the pinker’s weed. Rachel’s passage had cost almost everything she and her brother had. She had been found out. They had jumped out a second story window to escape the city. They had run to the seaport and moved fast to find a man who would take their coin.
    Her brother, Djoss, stayed on deck to help with the sail and the rudder. They sailed for three days. Rachel sat alone in the dark. She felt the ocean below her rolling around. When she was bored, she snapped her fingers and watched the Senta fires flicker in the little cabin. She couldn’t keep a fire inside a wooden hull with all that rotting paper everywhere. All she could do was spark a little. Snap. Snap. Snap. When she wasn’t fidgeting from boredom, she crossed her legs, and closed her eyes, and her breathing drifted into soft syllables in her mother’s tongue. She searched for the truth in the koans she had memorized since she was young.
    After nightfall, Djoss came down below to bring her food and eat with her. They ate sea tack in the dark. It was hard, and tasted like pig fat and sand. They drank weak tea made without any boiling water. Fire left a smoke trail in the sky that could be seen and followed.
    Rachel tried to say she was sorry she had been found out. Djoss wouldn’t let her apologize. “People would never understand,” he said, “and there’s nothing anyone can do but move on.”
    “Run, you mean,” she said. “Run for our lives before anyone can catch us.”
    “Something like that,” he said.
    “Maybe things will be different this time.” She didn’t believe that, but she had said it anyway.
    The sloop faced fair weather all three days. The channel’s famous storms were missing. The old captain leaned back in his seat. “Must be blessed by the Nameless,” he muttered. “Not a cloud in sight.”

    ***

    We landed north of here.
    On the third day, they reached Dogsland. The customs agent took one look into that filthy sloop, and curled his nose. He handed the Captain a slip of paper from across the bow, and rowed on to the next ship.
    At night, the true cargo unloaded. Rachel and Djoss stood on a rocky shoreline next to abandoned warehouses. Djoss pushed the old man’s sloop back into the sea, and waved. The old man didn’t wave back.
    Rachel squinted at the moon over their heads. She couldn’t see any stars. The street lamps drowned out the night sky, their gathered light pushing against the sea clouds. The moon slipped out from behind the sky’s curtain like a pale, bodiless belly. A bad omen, after all that good weather. Storms were coming back, and soon.
    By morning, rain fell in sheets. The streets ran black with rivers of mud. The sewers belched a thick, green sludge