When We Were Executioners (27 page)
Read When We Were Executioners Online
Authors: J. M Mcdermott
“We will. Just, not yet.”
He nodded. “The weed is something else, isn’t it? I mean it really gets in your head.”
“Yeah. So you need to cut it out.”
“Or leave. We could go somewhere new, and I wouldn’t know where it was or how to find it. Maybe it wouldn’t be there at all.” “No one’s found out about me. We’ve been here for months and we haven’t had to run. No one is paying attention to us.
Djoss, maybe you should start bouncing again. Maybe you should get out of it.”
“We’d have to leave this place. Go somewhere cheaper.”
“Yeah, but that’s nothing.”
“Let me think about it, then. Let me just think about it.”
“I’m working at a new place again. I’m way out on the water. I have to take a ferry to work. People there’re almost respectable.”
“Show me.”
“Tomorrow. You know you’re going to leave before I do.” She was meeting Jona later. She couldn’t show him anything.
* * *
Rachel saw a familiar face running from a mob of little sharks— a kid’s gang that claimed most of the boys on the street.
In the poor streets, this girl that we called Jess once hauled muddy rags on her back in heaps, like a hump. Rachel caught the girl’s eye but she didn’t look long and soon they passed each other.
When the ships unloaded their sailors, these women ran to the dock and pinched their cheeks red to look healthier, happier. They took any kind of coin you had, and not much of them. They slipped into alleys and fell back, their humpbacks like cheap mattresses. They pulled their skirts up.
Men ran past the cheap girls with ragbacks while the girls ran for the new ships—owners hate free girls—with spikes and small clubs up their sleeves. The girls ran fast with their rag bed humps always on their backs. That’s why they wore them.
Jess had children chasing after her—a kid gang screaming at her humpback. They threw rocks at it.
The hump back girls stank worse than the alleys they slept in.
And these girls liked to dream back to their younger days, at the best brothels in town, wrapped in silk and flattery.
Then, the silks wore down to linens and then wools, and the men were workers with the smells of their profession—printers drenched in acrid ink, fruitmen like sweet rot, and bakers in a cloud of musty flour. Now, the sailors rolled off the ships to these used-up girls with beds on their backs for the first furious rounds of shore leave.
Sometimes the smarter girls saw the shape of their destiny and saved their coins, opened their own brothels or married an older client whose wife had passed.
The ones who married usually found themselves back on the street, when their husband passed, and the rest of the family threw her out of her own home over a few coins left in no one’s name and the judication that should have saved her was bribed to throw her out.
* * *
Rachel never told the women of her brothel about their future, no matter how often they asked. Sometimes Rachel lied, if she needed the money. Sometimes, she focused on the bright spots in the black night.
She didn’t like to think about her brother’s future, but she knew it, too.
Inside of herself, she wondered if there was anything she could do about it. She pushed her mop, and hung the clean sheets to dry. She threw out the trash. She focused on the Unity. She dreamed of Jona.…
The hot corn girl, back in from the streets with a bed and men paying for her, asked Rachel for help. The words didn’t register right away. Rachel was mopping. The mop moved from one side to another. She didn’t look up. The night was almost done, and then Rachel’d go home.
The girl, Jess, touched Rachel’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “Hey, Senta, can you help me?”
“What?” said Rachel.
Jess had a speculum in one hand, and a small hook in the other. “You know what this is, right? Maids and Senta do this. I’ll pay you for it. Please?”
Rachel took the speculum in one hand, not knowing precisely what Jess meant. Then, Rachel saw the hook and thought for a moment about what the two together could be used to do to a working girl, and how Rachel had seen these before, all bloody.
Rachel frowned. “I don’t want trouble,” she said.
“Maybe you know somebody?”
“Don’t
you?
”
“I’ve never…” Jess looked down at it. “I’m sorry. I thought you would. Everyone said to ask the maid. Ask a Senta. Ask someone.”
“I don’t do that. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t want anything.”
Two days later, Jess was gone. Rachel didn’t need dreamcasting to know what had happened.
This book is dedicated to the early visitors in the streets of Dogsland, who each took time to make the city and people there more true: Nancy Holder, James Patrick Kelly, Michelle Muenzler, Sharon Maas, and Juliet Ulman.
Juliet, in particular, moved mountains.
When We Were
Executioners
J. M McDermott
Book Two of the Dogsland Trilogy
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
About the Author
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
About the Author