The Scar Read Online Free PDF Page B

as somebody walked past the pane, outside, barely three feet away. Stooping, she squinted through the dirt, out over the ship. The enormous mizzenmast was before her, and faintly, she saw the main- and foremasts beyond it. Below her was the main deck.
    The sailors were moving, climbing and cleaning and winding in their rituals.
    There was a mass of others, huddled in groups, moving slowly if at all. Bellis’ mouth twisted. They were mostly human and mostly men, but they defied generalization. She saw a man with a sinuous three-foot neck, a woman with a skein of spasming arms, a figure whose lower quarters were caterpillar treads, and another with metal wires jutting from his bones. The only thing they had in common were their greying clothes.
    Bellis had never seen so many Remade in one place before, so many who had been altered in the punishment factories. Some were shaped for industry, while others seemed formed for no purpose other than grotesquerie, with misshapen mouths and eyes and gods-knew what.
    There were a few cactacae prisoners, and other races too: a hotchi with broken spines; a tiny clutch of khepri, their scarab headbodies twitching and glinting in the washed-out sun. There were no vodyanoi, of course. On a journey like this, fresh water was too valuable to use keeping them alive.
    She heard gaolers’ shouts. Men and cactacae strutted among the Remade, wielding whips. In groups of two and three and ten the prisoners began to shuffle in random circles around the deck.
    Some lay still, and were punished.

    Bellis pulled her face away.
    These were her unseen companions.
    They had not seemed much invigorated by the fresh air, she reflected coldly. They had not seemed to enjoy their exercise.

    Tanner Sack moved just enough to keep from being beaten. He moved his eyes in a rhythm. Down for three long steps, to keep attention from himself, then up for one, to see the sky and the water.
    The ship was juddering faintly from the steam engine below, and the sails were extended. The cliffs of Dancing Bird Island moved past them fast. Tanner moved toward the port side, slowly.
    He was surrounded by the men who shared his hold. The women prisoners stood in a smaller group, a little way off. They all wore the same dirty faces and cold stares as him. He did not approach them.
    Tanner heard a sudden whistle, a sharp two-tone different from the scream of the gulls. He looked up, and perched on some bulky metal extrusion, scrubbing it clean, Shekel looked down at him. The boy caught his eye and gave Tanner a wink and a fast smile. Tanner smiled back, but Shekel had already looked away.
    An officer and a sailor with distinctive epaulets conferred at the ship’s bow, huddled over a brass engine. As Tanner strained to see what they were doing, a stick slapped across his back, not hard but with the threat of much worse. A cactacae guard was bellowing at him to keep moving, so he picked up his feet again. The alien tissue grafted to Tanner’s chest twitched. The tentacles itched and shed skin like severe sunburn. He spat on them and rubbed the saliva in, as if it were unguent.

    At ten o’clock precisely, Bellis swallowed her tea and went outside. The deck had been swept and scrubbed clean. There was no sign that the prisoners had ever stood upon it.
    “It’s odd to think,” said Bellis a little later, as she and Johannes stood watching the water, “that in Nova Esperium we might be in charge of men and women who traveled with us on this very boat, and we’d never know.”
    “That’ll never happen to you,” he said. “Since when does a linguist need indentured assistants?”
    “Neither does a naturalist.”
    “Not true at all,” he said mildly. “There are crates to be taken into the bush, there are traps to be set, there are drugged and dead carcasses to lug, dangerous animals to subdue . . . It’s not all watercoloring, you know. I’ll show you my scars some time.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Yes.” He was