The seep is low today, barely covering the pebbly bottom. It’s why we’ve designated this a washing day—if things dry up any more, all our water will have to be drawn and hauled down from the pocket, and after cooking and drinking there’ll be almost none to spare. Lila’s turn comes after mine today, and she’s pushy on washing days—there’s no time to waste. I start stripping off my clothes. Off comes my vest and dust-colored shirt. I kick off my boots—the only part of my wardrobe that’s really worth anything, as I lifted them off a well-dressed stage traveler a few months ago. After pulling off my trousers and holey stockings, I finally unhook my breast band and drape everything over a juniper bush.
The breeze is shearing up the canyon like it sometimes does, so I prop up the windbreak—a stiff old bison hide on a wooden frame—and settle down on the rocks lining the seep. I wiggle my feet through the grit and pebbles, letting them grind away the dirt creased between my toes. I bend forward, stretching out my neck, and untie the strip that holds my dreadlocks out of my face. My hair has been locked for as long as I can remember. I have vague memories of tangled curls, but whether my hair locked itself naturally or someone got it started back in Tellman’s Ditch, I was too young to remember. I have no desire to change it—I like how easy it is to keep up. No endless brushing, like Lila, to keep the knots and burrs out. No need to wrap it every night, like Rose, to keep it from drying out in the merciless desert heat.
I pinch a few of the locks in my fingers—I’m well past due for a wash, but our soap in camp is running low, and I’m almost entirely out of oil. It’s a shame—I found the bottle of high-end scalp oil by chance in a peddler’s trunk Pickle lifted in Bitter Springs. It’s perfumed, light and sweet—certainly the nicest-smelling thing I own, and I’ve been savoring it drop by drop for almost six months. Now it’s nearly gone, and I don’t have enough coin to justify buying another bottle, even the cheap stuff I can sometimes find in town. Sighing, I run my fingers through my hair, feeling the grit and grime along my scalp. No, I’ll have to wash today, oil or no, and bear the frizzing and dryness that will come along with it.
I cup handfuls of water and splash my arms and neck, leaving little tracks of slightly cleaner skin. I wipe at the dirt covering the tattoo on the inside of my right forearm, glad to see the ink isn’t bleeding. This tattoo—my longsword—and the other on my left forearm—my buckler—are two of my oldest. The point of the sword drives into the scarred concentric circle on my wrist, the brand all nonbonded laborers got in Tellman’s Ditch. I frown at the back of my hand, where the sun—my most recent tattoo—looks a little blurry near the ends of the rays. Ah, well. Rose told me the ink might not be as strong as it should be for that one.
The two words circling my wrists are clear, though. Strength on my right, my sword arm, and Perseverance on my left. I had to ask Saiph how to spell that word, and he stood over Rose’s shoulder as she worked, scratching out the letters in the dirt one by one so she got it right.
I twist to check the vaguely larkish bird on my right shoulder, and then lean back to check the coyote on my rib cage, its head thrown back in song like Rat sometimes does when he gets a wild hair about him. In this position, I see the six spots making an off-center circle around my navel. I rub at them. Sometimes what I think are marks are just flecks of stubborn dirt, but these have always been here. I think perhaps next I’ll have Rose connect them in a star. I saw the Alcoran flag once hanging on the wall of an outpost—a shiny white jewel surrounded by six-pointed stars. The idea of tattooing one of their national symbols onto my skin makes me smirk. It gives me the same satisfaction as naming my horse Jema after hearing about some famous old queen. Or young queen, or not-a-queen-anymore—I don’t know what the politics are. I just liked the idea of adding a fancy, stolen name to a fancy, stolen horse.
I splash my face and then crane my head to look at my last, and oldest tattoo. A river, starting at the top of my left shoulder and streaming down the outside of my arm. This is the only one Rose didn’t start, though she’s added to it over the years, making a sleeve. I got it started when I still worked in the rustlers’ camp. The big, dirty cowhand had just finished cutting a curvy lady into the big, dirty bicep of the cook when I sat down in front of him.
He had eyed me, scrawny and scratchy as a scrub oak, as I rolled up my dusty sleeve.
“What’cho want, Nit?” he had asked with some amusement.
“Water,” I said. “A whole bunch of water, like the South Burr.” That was the most water I’d ever seen in my life, a sluggish, dirt-colored channel, thick with the smell of cows.
He’d laughed. “S’gonna hurt some.”
“I’ll tell you if it hurts,” I said.
I watch a trickle run down the path of the river on my arm now. I’ve since seen bigger stretches of water—the river the South and North Burr run into, for one, and a reservoir a half mile wide. But it’s never enough. I have distant memories of the sea, which leads me to believe I started off somewhere in Paroa, or perhaps Cyprien, but these memories are laced with the taste of salt and a thirsty breeze, and they don’t entice me to seek out the coast. Fresh water, the most precious of all resources in the Ferinno, is what I constantly crave.
Thinking about the sea and tattoos and dirt and grime spurs a now-familiar memory that’s been dogging me for weeks—the voice of that bearded man with the ship tattoo in the stage outside Snaketown. His words have been nettling my thoughts since we wrecked his coach, usually at times like this, when I pause for breath between all the work around camp.
There are extremely influential people who are very interested in what you do. Life could be different for you and your fellows.
I close my eyes. Of course things could be different. But it’s easy for rich folk like that man to assume such a feat would be simple, because it all comes back to the system they’ve built, where they sit at the top and pretend not to notice what it is they’re sitting on. Who they’re sitting on. Rose, and Sedge, and Lila, and Saiph, and Andras, and little Whit—and all the uncounted scores of others who get eaten up by the bond labor system.
And we’re the lucky ones—the ones who got away. Rose had the shortest stint in the quarries of all of us—after her parents died, she entered herself into a three-year bond at the quarries down in Redalo, and when that was up she joined the cattle-rustling operation that found me. But Lila, the oldest among us, was trafficked her whole life, with no inkling of where she comes from beyond the evidence of her pale skin and dirty blond hair, which tells us she must be at least part Lumeni, a story she feeds with tales of shiny pearls and waterfalls she claims to half remember. But she’s not a full-blood—none of us are, except Rose and Andras, with their umber skin and curly black hair from the deep south of Cyprien.
Unlike Rose, though, Andras was stolen, and unlike Lila, he remembers his home and his parents. He’s my most recent rescue, and I’m working on finding a way to get him back into Cyprien without running up against the trafficking trade again. It’s tougher than the others I’ve managed to send back to their families in Moquoia and Alcoro—Cyprien is on the other side of Alcoro and is apparently half made of water, if tall tales can be believed, but I’ve never been anywhere near it and don’t have the first notion of how to get there.