Some of the men and women were bone thin, and some were heavy, with arms that slopped and folded over each other many times. All of them were dust smeared. Mostly they huddled in stunned silence, but occasionally they wondered aloud where they would be taken, what would happen to them. “I heard about them,” the woman with the baby said. “Heard they were coming. Man came through and warned us. Said he had seen one of their hives with his own two eyes. That’s what he called it. Not a city, not a town. But a hive. As if they weren’t people, not in the standard sense, not with hearts and minds. Just a bunch of bugs with pinchers and stingers.”
A skeletal man with a broken nose was nodding when she spoke. When she finished, he said he had heard stories too. About men on horseback with whips looped at their belts and rifles holstered at their sides overseeing slaves as they felled trees, graded roads, dug irrigation canals, raised barns, built fences. They were building something, trying to put the world back together again, and treating people like the tools to make it happen. “That’s us. That’s what we’re going to be to them.”
“Not me,” a heavy woman with a red face said. “I’m nobody’s tool.”
“I guess we’ll see about that.”
They kept on with their talking and Gawea found her eyes drawn to the cratered face of the moon and the stars that pricked the sky. She got lost in their depths, as if falling into a pond full of quartz. Somehow, despite their lurching passage, they all eventually drifted to sleep.
The next morning the baby did not wake. The mother wailed for half the day before going quiet. Gawea watched her clutch the baby and felt a renewed hollowness, an inversion of her own pain in the mother’s.
A week later, the air changed. She could smell the water from a long way off. The mineral sharpness of it, like the tears of a stone. Where before there was no road, they now followed the pocked and rutted tracks of others, a narrow chute between two ridges. When they passed through the other side of it, big pines clustered, their cones crunching underfoot, their branches scraping metal. The shade pooled. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Through the pine needles the sunlight filtered green. The men and women, who said nothing for days, now pressed their faces against the bars and chirped with excitement at the green bunches of bear grass, the red splash of Indian paintbrush. The sun, which had pressed down on them for so long, now felt worlds away.
Then the pine resin and sage gave way to the smell of smoke. Cooked meat. Their smiles flattened. They passed a dented green sign whose white lettering read, ASHTON, POPULATION 10,272. Once there was an asphalt road here — buckled and broken and made impassable — but the mess of it had been cleared away into a cinder grade.
They passed a white steepled church, a blacksmith, a mercantile, all of them newly constructed, freshly painted. The trees opened up, making room for the sun. A garden, planted with rows of lettuce and carrots and onions and potatoes, reached a square acre. A man sat on a horse beside it. A rifle rested across his lap. Below him ten boys and four girls leaned on hoes, watching them pass with the same blank expression as the cattle that crowded up against the fence of a slatted pen.
The carts rolled past a man at a pump, jacking the metal arm of it, splashing full a bucket. He shaded his eyes to watch them pass. And here was the open garage of what was once a mechanic, now a carpentry shop. A man stood between two sawhorses and carved a tool along a length of wood, dirtying the floor with yellow shavings, making what appeared to be a door. A boy with a broom swept up the mess, his ankles chained loosely.
In the center of town was a park and through the park purled a river. The spring-fed water ran clear except where it made a white collar along a broad shoal built from melon-size stones. Several women crouched in the water, the water foaming with soap. With brushes, they scrubbed at laundry before hanging it from wooden racks to dry upon the shore. Their ankles were chained too.
The caravan pulled into the roundabout of an old yellow-bricked elementary school, and there he was, waiting for them on the front step — a thin man, bald and goosenecked, with a notebook and pen. He was smiling wanly. He, with the help of the drivers, unloaded every cage and examined every slave. That’s what they were now, slaves. The heavy woman tried to pull away and got kicked to the ground and beaten with a cudgel. A boy cried and one of the drivers cuffed him in the ear and he cried all the louder.
The thin man did not answer questions, but he asked them. “Have you had any illnesses? Have you had any children? Do you know any trades? Do you know how to cook? Do you know how to sew? Do you know how to garden?” And he commanded: “Open your mouth. Take off your clothes. Hold out your arms. Turn around in a circle.”
To Gawea, he said, “Is there something wrong with you?”
“No.”
“I ask, because your eyes…You don’t have a tail? Or seizures? Any difficulties with language?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” He made some notes on his clipboard and said, “Next,” and sent her into the black mouth of the schoolhouse behind him.
They branded her on the shoulder, along with the rest, her flesh sizzling, bunching up in a letter, F, and a number, 131. They cleaned her, gave her fresh clothes, assigned her a bunk. “You are now part of something bigger,” the thin man told them. “You’re serving a kind of collective. The rebirth of humanity. The reconstruction of the country. Your work matters. It’s important. You’re better off here. Forget your old lives. Forget what people used to call you. You’re a tool now. You’re a shovel, you’re a hammer, you’re a sickle, you’re a trowel.”
When the heavy woman tried to protest, the thin man nodded to some guards and they dragged her out back and tied her to a post and lashed her with a whip seven times, and after that nobody said a word when told what to do. Everyone had a task. The job of the gardener was to raise and preserve food. The job of the tailor was to weave and sew and patch. The job of the slaver was to harvest slaves. In this way, town by town, or hive by hive, they multiplied, programming behavior, constructing a new world.
Gawea was assigned to the hospital. When they told her what to do, she did it. It was easier that way. Easier to focus on a task, scraping a broom across the floor and making a pile of dirt. Knocking down cobwebs. Mopping up puddles of blood. At first it even felt welcome, curative. She had a place and function in the world. As long as she kept busy, she didn’t have to think. Her head remained empty. Emptiness felt safe.
In this way, several days and then weeks passed. She washed trays of tools — scalpels, forceps — until they gleamed. She stripped the beds of sheets, collected towels and aprons from the floor, soiled with blood and shit and amniotic fluid. “It won’t be long,” the thin man told her, “before you’re ready for a child yourself.”
Mostly they left her alone. She had a way about her, a stillness even when moving, that didn’t draw the eye. Today she paused at a second-story window to observe a papery gray wasp’s nest, half the size of her, dangling from a nearby branch. The black-bodied wasps, each the size of a finger, crawled across its outside, thrumming their wings.
Then she went about tidying a cot, folding a blanket around a thin mattress stuffed with wool. She was in the pregnancy wing, and in the room rested three other women, all wearing shapeless gowns to accommodate their rounded stomachs. Two of them weren’t much older than her, young enough to still look longingly at dolls. The other had gray threading her hair.
They rubbed their hands across their bellies, sometimes clutching themselves, as if trying to strangle away the pain contracting there. Gawea answered to the midwives, one of them a slit-mouthed, wide-hipped woman who always pointed a finger when she called out, “You!” before assigning some errand.