Christine Tyler - [BCS298 S03] Read online

  My Sister’s Wings Are Red

  Christine Tyler

  Breakfast—5:00 a.m.

  Red. I’d thought my other sisters getting blue wings and purple wings would be the worst I’d ever have to swallow. But red wings? On 4408? The sister who shrilled like a teakettle when she saw her friends and snorted when she laughed? The sister who’d called me boring, who’d yelled “This is why no one likes you!” when I threw a dead chicken in her face? And now she was going to be queen. She was going to be my queen.

  I’d only just walked into the kitchens, a plucked chicken in either hand, ready to start another ruddy shift on another ruddy day, and Priscilla went and dropped the news on me while buttering a soufflé dish, just like that.

  “Her pupa went translucent last night.” Priscilla’s mandibles clicked pensively. She coated the dish in caster sugar and tapped it on the counter to shake off the excess. “I thought I’d go to the Chrysalis House to check on her, give her a bit of encouragement. Her pupa was already starting to clear up by the time I got there. The guards, everyone, we watched it for hours. At first we thought her wings might be orange, a dark orange, but...”

  “Red.” I slapped my chickens onto the counter and tried not to picture it.

  “Red as rosehip.”

  I took a deep breath. The aroma of the in-progress fry-up for Queen Charlotte washed over me. Eggs, sausage, rashers of bacon, fried bread, baked beans, black pudding, bubble and squeak, mushrooms, and fried tomatoes—a banquet of olfactory sensations.

  But underlying it all was Her Majesty’s mandibular pheromone. Musky and floral. Real and warm. Love eddied at the edges of my consciousness. I breathed again, deeper. Queen Charlotte’s pheromone used to be potent enough to induce bliss. These days it was just enough to make me feel calm but not good. Never good.

  “Olive...” Priscilla said as she carefully separated egg whites and yolks into two bowls. “I think you should go see her. Before she hatches.”

  I preened chicken feathers from my antennae. “No.”

  “She’s your sister.”

  “She’s not.”

  Priscilla liked to use words like that, words from before the first Imago came here. She still referred to larvae as “humans” and called her brood of larval kitchen maids her “daughters.” Apparently that made us all “sisters.” Everyone loved Priscilla, so we adopted her terms. But I’d be damned if I let her use her defunct old-world jargon against me.

  “She’s scared, Olive.”

  “What does she have to worry about? She’s going to be queen.”

  Priscilla finished separating the eggs and set to beating the whites. “Metamorphosis is always a touch daunting. Surely you remember your own hatching day.” Her whisk tsk tsk-ed on the old metal bowl.

  Heat crawled up my antennae. She hadn’t needed to bring that up. I crammed clumps of herb butter under the chicken skin, trying not to think about the worst day of my life, and failing.

  The first words I’d heard, the day I regained consciousness inside my chrysalis, were congratulations. But they weren’t for me. There was talk of a blue attendant, a purple nursemaid, a yellow guard. I was so excited to hear what color my wings were that I was shaking. And then came Priscilla’s voice—so careful, so quiet, I could hear my heart beating over it. And she told me my wings were grey. That I was a drudge. That she’d requested I return to the kitchens instead of doing menial labor with the other grey-winged toilers. I was going back to the brood. With the larvae.

  “Purpose is nectar,” she’d said as she handed me my assignment file.

  “Purpose is nectar,” I’d echoed, as if in a dream.

  Then the nursemaids gave me a slap on the rump and a good look in the mirror. Sure enough, my wings were grey. And beige. Dull as a December moth. And then they’d named me Olive, like a load of right jokers.

  Priscilla lifted a white sauce from the stove and gently folded in her meringue peaks. “It’s just as hard for your sister as it was for you.”

  “Doubt that.” I shoved a lemon into the chicken.

  “Her being queen isn’t any better than you being a kitchen maid. Besides, if you didn’t have grey wings, who else would help me cook?”

  I gestured to the larval idiots.

  Priscilla sighed. “None of them can stay, as far as we know. And I’ll need someone to take my place when I’m gone. We all have our purpose, and purpose is nectar.”

  “Purpose is nectar.” I murmured, joined by a chorus of voices from behind me. I turned to see the kitchen larvae staring, and I jumped. It was times like this, with a dozen pairs of creepy white sclerae all set on me, that I was reminded how odd looking larvae were. No wings sprouting through the backs of their jumpers; no mandibles or antennae. They didn’t even have exoskeletons but skin that tore and bruised as easily as a peach.

  The kitchen larvae had to know about 4408 already, gossips that they were. They just wanted to see what their ornery, rubbish-winged sister had to say about it.

  “Bugger off,” I said, and went back to salting my stupid chicken.

  Priscilla shooed the larvae away and slid her soufflé into the oven. “Get back to work, you silly pests.”

  The larvae feigned busyness, rattling plates and thunking pans, though a few kept stealing glances at me. Their voices buzzed, and a bloom of excited pheromones rose with the aroma of breakfast. A new queen. One of Priscilla’s daughters. Everyone was delighted, just delighted.

  “Purpose is nectar!” came a cry above the din. A larva waddled toward us with a bucket of jelly. For every meal, whatever Queen Charlotte didn’t eat went to the royal entourage: attendants, nursemaids, drones. After they’d had their fill, it was liquefied, distilled, flavored with a black currant extract, and turned into the cloying gelatinous nectar all of us workers knew and hated.

  “Purpose is nectar,” the rest of us repeated, and formed a queue. I grabbed my mug and stepped behind Priscilla.

  When the sludge hit the bottom of my cup, I half turned, expecting to hear 4408 say, “What, no roast chicken?” I’d told her one time, just one time, that I had a daydream about burying my face in a fat, greased up, oven-roasted chicken, cramming gobs of meat into my mouth. I wanted to bite it off the bone, to feel the juice dribble down my chin, to crunch and chew and mash, to suck it all up with ice-cold elderflower cordial. 4408 had loved that idea so much she teased me about it every day for the next five years. Every day. “What, no roast chicken?” and I would deadpan, and she would needle me with her pointy little vertebrate elbow and tell me I had no sense of humor. The day before she went into her chrysalis she’d said, “You’ll get it someday, Olive.”

  But I wouldn’t. She would, though. She’d get everything.

  I sloshed the nectar around in my mug and slurped it up as quickly as I could. The sickly-sweetness made my proboscis ache and my stomach churn. I dumped the chicken onto a roasting pan with some garlic and onions and opened the oven to get it cooking.

  “My soufflé!” Priscilla gasped and lunged for the door, but it was too late. The little tower of perfect fluff let out a sigh and sank into the center of the dish.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot it was in there...”

  Priscilla retrieved the fallen soufflé. Her antennae drooped clear to her shoulders.

  “Can’t you send it up anyway?” I asked. “It’ll still taste good.”

  “I’ll make another.” Priscilla scraped her would-be masterpiece into the liquefier and retrieved the kitchen ledger to account for the wasted ingredients while I stood there like a fool, still holding my roasting pan.

  “Why are you making a soufflé for breakfast, anyway?”
r />   “It’s for elevenses,” she said. “It’s actually slated to be made by you, later on. I just wanted you to be ahead of things so you could pay your sister a visit.

  “I told you, I’m not going.”

  “Olive, you don’t have time to be stubborn about this. Once they declare her queen, you’re never going to see her again.”

  “Good.”

  “Why are you being like this? What did she ever do to you?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Let’s have it, then.”

  I slung my disaster of a chicken into the oven and slammed the door shut. “Okay. Fine,” I said. “You know what? It’s not fair.”

  “Not fair?”

  “She had better odds than me! If Queen Charlotte’s pheromone was anything like it used to be, we wouldn’t even have another queen, but it’s been at an all-time low for months. Months! Someone was getting red wings. The timing was perfect for 4408.”

  Priscilla didn’t immediately reply. Because I was right.

  “You think that’s fair?” I said. “That we get to wake up in the dark every morning and kill and pick chickens we’ll never eat? That we get to spend every day for the rest of our lives chopping and kneading and boiling and frying, glazing and deglazing, cooking feasts, while 4408—or whatever her name will be—gets to lounge on silk cushions and eat meat and cake and sandwiches!”

  “It is fair,” Priscilla said quietly. “It’s as fair as nature.”

  “Nature’s a bitch.”

  Distress pheromones emanated from Priscilla, but she kept her composure. “It’s a big change, and she’s vulnerable. A lot could go wrong.”

  “Oh don’t. Don’t.”

  “I’m not trying to guilt you, Olive. I’m asking you, as your mother, to do something kind for your sister. If you won’t go for her, and you won’t go for yourself, then go for me.” Her wings flickered. They were a gorgeous iridescent blue, as velvety deep as any of the queen’s attendants but crumpled as a dishrag.

  Admittedly, Priscilla’s story was worse than mine. When the first Imago arrived here, they discovered an entire planet full of larvae that didn’t know they were supposed to change, that didn’t even know they could. For whatever reason, “humans” lacked the hormone to trigger their metamorphoses. The Imago showed them their full potential, and humans became Imago; or they realized they’d always been Imago, just trapped in stasis, never reaching their individual or collective destinies.

  There’d been a few outliers, misled radicals who fought against the change. One night they broke into the Chrysalis House and ripped open a whole row of pupae before anyone could stop them. Priscilla had been in one of those chrysalises. She’d survived it because she’d been so far along, but the moment the air hit her premature wings they’d shriveled like a half-baked soufflé. She’d gone from one of the queen’s royal attendants, destined for easy work and opulence in a glimmering palace, to nobody. Queen of the Rubbish Dump, people called her. Because broken wings, no matter the color, were just as bad as grey wings.

  Somehow she pulled enough strings to get this stint in the kitchens, to recruit larvae—who weren’t even supposed to have jobs—to make pre-colony human food for Her Majesty. It didn’t make any sense. But it was her way of getting by. Her idea of purpose. Not Queen of the Rubbish Dump but Queen of the Kitchens.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  Priscilla’s blue wings twitched happily, wrinkles and all.

  Elevenses—11:00 a.m.

  I tried to renege on my promise during my next shift, but Priscilla pushed me out of the kitchens. She’d spent the rest of the morning obsessing over the perfect infusion of vanilla oolong with cream and white blueberry, raspberry buns, custard tarts, currant cake, cranberry scones, blood-orange jam, as well as that damned soufflé, and she said she’d worked too hard doing double-duty for me to back out now.

  So I headed to the Chrysalis House. The moment I stepped out of the kitchens, the heady tang of pheromones hit me like a blunt axe and made my eyes water. Drones.

  A couple hundred showed up every year for the nuptial flight with Queen Charlotte—local males who’d turned twenty, along with a few from other colonies brave enough to take the lead-lined trains across the toxic flats. But apparently the burgeoning mandibular pheromone of a virgin queen was another matter, because the colony was crawling with more drones than I’d seen in my life.

  Drones had clear wings, but they made up for it by wearing velvet suits in every color of the rainbow. It seemed blue was especially popular this year, paired with brown leather brogues. The drones used canes they didn’t need, constantly doffed their hats at each other, and enjoyed saying things like “An ascot is always a cravat, but a cravat is not always an ascot.” Then they’d laugh with their mouths closed, “Hmhmhmhm!”

  Crowds of them loitered along the colony’s streets, congregated around lamp posts and perched atop the crumbling rectangular ruins of the old world.

  I set a steady pace toward the Chrysalis House and kept my head down. Drone pheromones clung to me as if I had walked through a trail of spider webs. Envy sat heavy in my stomach. But why? It wasn’t the sex that made me jealous. I didn’t really feel a need for it. In addition to keeping the colony calm and staving off new queens, Her Majesty’s mandibular pheromone shrank the workers’ ovaries and subdued our reproductive drives. So sex didn’t happen between workers and drones. We were technically capable of it, probably. But it wasn’t worth the bother.

  So it wasn’t all of that. It was... how could I describe it? The luxury of romance.

  I always imagined the queen, having exhausted her throng of suitors, turning regally in the air and pointing to the last drone flying. The fastest, the handsomest. Then the two of them would find some secluded grotto full of soft moss and moonlight. Feed each other macarons and lick grape juice off each other’s antennae or something.

  Now 4408 would have that, too.

  When I arrived at the Chrysalis House, there were even more drones converging outside the massive geodesic dome, buzzing around, trying to catch a whiff of 4408. I shouldered through the crush, cringing at the body contact. I could feel the drones’ sweat, the heat blazing through their jackets and shirts. I held my breath and pushed harder until I reached the front entrance. A quick pheromone check got me past the guards, and I practically raced across the threshold.

  Entering the Chrysalis House was like falling into a glorious, amber-colored dream. The swelter and noise dropped away, replaced with cool air and stillness. The primitive ninety-degree angles that still haunted the center of town were nowhere to be seen. Here, shapes worked together in harmony. Triangles. Hexagons. Polyhedrons. Cohesion. Even the sound was right. The ambient thrumming of wings, the sussurration of hushed whispers; all resonant, all perfect. Errands to the Chrysalis House were rare, but it felt like a reprieve every time.

  I walked along a colonnade of glowing resin. Each hollow pillar contained a single chrysalis, visible through a membranous window. The newest pupae were white as milk, a few with their owner’s previous skin still attached. Just seeing them made me itch. No one ever forgot their molts, when you scratched and scratched until you sloughed skin from your neck to your ankles like stripping off the world’s worst pair of long johns.

  Five times you shed your skin, until you were ready to take the whole thing off for good, flesh and fat and all. Instinct took over and... sure it was painful, but there was so much satisfaction, so much release, that it didn’t matter. When I hung upside-down in that chamber and shed the old me—writhed until my face split in two and the fissure arced over my skull and seared down my spine like a ripped seam—it felt glorious. My body wasn’t me anymore. It belonged to someone else, someone long gone. Even the pain was someone else’s, and I was nothing but a bag of proteins.

  4408’s pillar was the last in line. Sure enough, her chrysalis had gone completely clear, revealing red wings with striking black veins and blue eyes
pots. Traces of distress pheromone wafted from her chamber. Jitters, probably. The scent was accompanied by inklings of a queenly mandibular pheromone, familiar in essence but brighter than Charlotte’s. Younger. More potent. The more I breathed in that vapor, the more I loved her. I couldn’t help but love the source of that pheromone. And I hated her too. So much.

  I pressed my hands against the warm membrane protecting her, imagining 4408 wrapping a blue-suited drone in her gorgeous red wings and eating food. Meat and cake and sandwiches. Grape juice.

  “I wish I were you,” I whispered. It wasn’t what I was supposed to say. It wasn’t making my peace. I should have told her it wasn’t her fault. But it felt like it was; like everything my sisters had gained had been stolen from me, like every kind of worker I could have been was curled inside me and every time one of my sisters left they yanked it out of me. I could have been red. It felt like 4408 had pulled her rosehip wings, her future, from the deepest part of me. And the only reason my wings were grey was because everything else had been taken.

  “I hope it’s awful,” I said. “I hope you hate being queen and everyone learns to hate you as much as I do.” And then I was crying, because she was so beautiful. So unmistakably red. And it wouldn’t be awful at all. It would be wonderful. Wonderful, every day for the rest of her life.

  Lunch—1:00 p.m.

  Kitchen maids aren’t servers. But by the time lunch came around that day, so many drones had come spilling out of the train station that Priscilla conscripted me to wait on the entourage. When I reminded her I’d never served food before, she said, “We’ve never had a virgin queen before,” and handed me a frilly apron. How Priscilla planned to cater to a thousand drones instead of the usual hundred or so was a mystery in itself, but why she wanted to was completely beyond me.

  To my relief, however, she asked a dozen other kitchen maids to entertain the drones, and she sent me to the royal pavilion with the lunch crew. We’d be waiting on the queen’s attendants, which meant there was a miniscule possibility that we’d catch a glimpse of the queen herself.