Dead Americans by Ben Peek Page A

Worse had touched her hands in her life, but still, she hoped it was not urine. There was no smell to the girl, but the Returned ate, drank, pissed, and shat, simulating the life that they had once been born into, so it would be only a matter of time before the internal parts of her body began to fail if they were as broken as the external parts.
    Ahead of her, the slim, pale-lit outline of her unit drew closer. Eliana thanked the God That Could Not See Her that she knew the narrow tracks of the Shaft’s circumference so well that she need not look down, that she did not need her gaze to direct every step. Though she did wish, squat, and strong as she was, that she had not aged so much in the Shaft; that she still had the strength of the thirty year old woman who had descended so long ago and who could have carried the girl without the strain she felt.
    In the end, Eliana was forced to set the girl down to gain her strength before continuing. She sat for a few minutes on the path, in the pale glow of her uniform and a brighter cluster of fungi. She was used to seeing things in that eerie glow, but even so, the girl did not look healthy, or functional, or whatever other term you might use for a made person. Did a Return die? Did they go pale and cold? Well, perhaps not cold. The Returned were always cold to touch. With a grunt, Eliana resumed her sure walk with the girl. If she had not been so close to the tarnished, bronze door of her unit when the strain began to tell again, she would have had to rest a second time. Instead, her muscles burning, the Botanist shouldered her way into the narrow unit and, thankful for once that she did not keep her bed upstairs, placed the girl down on the dark blue sheets.
    In the bright, yellow light inside the unit, Eliana could see that the girl was made, not just from bronze, but brass as well. The darker and lighter colouring that shone through the tattered remains of skin around her arms and legs suggested imperfection and sickness that had existed long before her fall. The girl’s clothes, which were made from red and brown, likewise hinted at blood and defecation. As if listening to her morbid thoughts, the sick machine moan of the girl’s heart grew louder, as if threatening to burst from its casing, struggling, pushing . . .  and then silent, silent,
silent
, before with a spasm and a cough, it started again.
    Though her arms still ached from carrying the girl, Eliana descended to the bottom level of her unit. It was, like all single Botanist units, made from three narrow floors, linked by a set of rungs down the middle. The centre floor was where she slept: there were tall, narrow closets and a comfortable chair that she sat and read in. The top floor held a small kitchen and the single, narrow table that she ate at. The knives and forks and cooking utensils were suspended from the ceiling and dangled like a pit of spikes reversed. When strong winds buffeted the unit, they swayed dangerously and occasionally fell—she had been hit more than once, though thankfully she sheathed all the blades. There was an opening up there that she could push to release smoke and odours from cooking. On the bottom floor was the workbench where she kept her samples, notes, and where she could manufacture pellets. There was also a tiny shower and toilet, the drains of which opened out into the Shaft in what she considered a small contradiction to her work of healing. In the opposite corner was a large cage that ran from floor to floor and which held a single, medium sized crow, all black and smooth, and who watched her with cold glass eyes.
    Under those eyes, she sat at her workstation and pulled free a piece of paper. In a thick, bold script, she wrote to the Department of Botany and explained what had happened. In her opinion, Eliana stated, she did not believe the Returned had much time left. She did not ask how the girl had come to be at the Shaft, or how she fell, though she might have,