I grabbed her arm, aiming the multi-tool at the wall. “No killing. That’s not what we do.”
“He understands nothing but death.”
“No, Morehshin!” Soph pushed in front of us, blocking Elliot. “We cannot do good with evil means.”
On the floor, Elliot spat. “Every day, I treasure my memories of a timeline where you mindless bitches never got the vote. You never agree on anything! You haggle over the rules of war. Yap, yap, yap, like the little doggies you are! That’s how you ruined America.”
Aseel put a slippered foot on his neck and pressed down lightly. “Too bad you are in this timeline, then. Be quiet while we vote on what to do with you.”
“Fine, no killing.” Morehshin grunted, and knelt next to Elliot. Then she aimed the multi-tool at his chest before we could stop her.
“No—!” I cried.
But she was only sewing his sleeves to his shirt, and weaving the legs of his pants together. “Harder to run like that. Now, drone, tell us when your boss is coming to the village.”
When Elliot refused to speak, I had an idea. “This guy’s a traveler. Check his mark. I want to know when he’s from.”
Another flick of the multi-tool, and Elliot’s shirt parted over his tattoo. Born in 2379. So he was a contemporary of Berenice’s killer. I wondered if Elliot really did remember a timeline where women didn’t get the vote. Was that part of the highly divergent branch Morehshin remembered? Or another horrific possibility known only to Comstockers trying to revert the edit?
“From the Esteele Era. That’s good,” Morehshin sneered. “That means you know what I can do with this.” She yanked off one of his shoes and squeezed the multi-tool over his bare toes.
For the first time, Elliot looked scared. “You know that’s not… it’s not permitted for you.”
She showed her teeth in the opposite of a smile. “I have eaten meat. Do you think I care what is permitted?”
The multi-tool rained a few drops of green light onto his pale ankle, and Elliot began to struggle.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a panic.
“Don’t worry. He’s not hurt.”
The green specks of illumination moved up his ankle and beneath his pants; we caught glimpses of light shining through his shirt, and then the glow circled his neck slowly before disappearing.
“When is Comstock going to visit the village?”
“I… he’s… no!” Elliot was trembling, but not with pain. It was something else.
“Tell me when.”
“W-Wednesday night.”
I spoke up. “Now tell us what you’re doing with the Machines.”
Elliot’s struggles were weaker now, as if he knew spilling his guts was inevitable. Soph met my eyes, her expression troubled.
“Reverting the timeline. We’re fighting for—for men’s rights! The vote! Full access to reproduction! The natural rights you whores stole from us!”
“What about your plan to sabotage the Machines?”
A whistling breath came from Elliot’s throat. His eyes wandered, unfocused. This time when he spoke, I wasn’t sure Morehshin had told the truth about not hurting him.
“Soon we will have full control of the Machines, and restore the moral order.” His face turned gray as green pinpricks throbbed below his skin. “You will no longer be able to repress our true history.”
“How are you going to control the Machines?”
Elliot wheezed. “The sword… in the stone. You… you…” He looked at me with those perfect eyes. “You will never understand. It is the destiny of men.” His tongue started to loll, like a man being strangled.
Soph rushed to his side, feeling for his pulse. “Stop now! Can you not see he is dying!”
“Fine.” Morehshin made a dismissive gesture with the multi-tool. “You can sleep now.” A bit of glimmering dust swirled out of Elliot’s ears and he snored, ruddiness returning to his face. With a few more sweeps of her multi-tool, Morehshin restored his clothes to their original state. She didn’t bother to look up at us until she’d put his shoe back on. Then she registered the horror on Soph’s face and shrugged. “What? He won’t remember anything.”
“What the hell is that… thing?” I’d never seen Aseel search for words.
“It’s my multi-tool. You called it a sewing kit.”
“Did you torture him?” I was sweaty with anxiety, and something worse. Memories from my past that I wanted to forget.
“No. I made him tell the truth.”
“What—like Wonder Woman?” Embarrassed, I realized I’d made a reference to the future.
Morehshin cocked her head at me. “Not like Wonder Woman. Like a queen.”
“But I thought you said the queens have no power.”
“Hearing the truth isn’t power. Doing something about it… that’s different. That’s where the Daughters of Harriet come in. Now help me get this sack of potatoes out on the street.”
We wrapped Elliot in an old blanket and dragged him downstairs, snoring loudly, then deposited him unceremoniously next to the gutter.
Morehshin surveyed our work. “He’ll have a headache when he wakes up, plus short-term amnesia.”
Soph spilled gin on him, then planted an empty bottle next to his slumped form. “That completes the picture, doesn’t it?”
Back in Soph’s chambers, none of us felt like drinking except Morehshin, who tossed back another shot and rubbed her hands together. “We know when Comstock is coming to the village, so let’s invite all our sisters to join him.”
I was still stuck on what Elliot had said about the Machine sabotage. “What do you think he meant by ‘the sword in the stone’?”
Morehshin shrugged. “He used wordplay to tell the truth without revealing anything. We can’t afford to worry about that now—we’re in real time. The Machines are stronger than men know. Let us turn to the abolition of Comstock. How can we reach all the women?”
I frowned, but she was right. We had only five days to plan. “This is going to be a major outreach effort. It’s not like we can contact women psychically like one of those scammer Spiritualists.”
“Oh.” Morehshin sounded abashed. “Right. No neuro-magnetics in this haplotype.”
It was another one of those bad translations, or maybe a perfect translation of a concept for which we had no equivalent. Aseel gave Morehshin a dubious look. “I suppose we don’t. Soph, you must have a pretty big mailing list from your newsletter subscribers.”
She nodded. “I can send out cards that say the angels are gathering at the Algerian Village on Wednesday night. I bet a lot of them will be curious enough to come. Plus we can hand out copies of my article on the danse du ventre at the show!”
“Oh, did it finally come out in print?” I grinned, remembering how she told me about it on the day we first met.
Soph nodded, flushing with pleasure as she showed us copies of New York World with her byline.
Aseel grinned too. “That’s a good idea. I can take invitations around to women at the other villages on the Midway. All we need are about fifty women to make a crowd.”
I thought about Lucy Parsons and her fiery speech. Maybe she wasn’t willing to speak up about race and gender, but she was still our ally. “I’ll make a few signs and put them up at the union meeting halls,” I said. “Plus, I can flyer women’s dormitories at the university.”
Morehshin filled in as show seamstress the next day while I posted leaflets at the University of Chicago campus. When it opened a couple of years ago, the regents of the school had taken the radical position that education should be coed. Today there were a lot of young women in bicycle outfits and split skirts wandering around, though school was out for the summer. I couldn’t help but smile at one who had a thick geology textbook in the straw basket attached to her handlebars. Still, it was a bittersweet feeling. This was the first generation of college-educated women in America. Our place in this nation was so fragile; it was still far too easy to edit us out.