Since writing the excerpt below, my vision for this world and the characters within it has changed considerably. Even in this iteration of the narrative, the characters and the story itself are different from what I envisioned in November of 2013. But I want to celebrate writing that I am proud of, and part of that celebration involves sharing it with you today.
Not knowing Republican Shee hadn’t been a hindrance in the disputed territories, but inside a government run hospital staffed almost exclusively by Shee physicians it was proving to be a real liability.
Corelli Jones stared uncomprehending at the paperwork in front of him. His skin felt hot and cold under his clothes and the terrified lump in his throat was making it hard to breathe.
The Shee attendant, who had been sitting with him patiently for three and a half minutes of unbroken silence, finally betrayed a hint of discomfort and twitched one of the long quills that had been laying comfortably still across the scaled crest of her scalp. She stilled it and said, gentle as she could, “Water? Would you like?”
It was an English word Corelli recognized. He forced a closed mouth smile and put the pen down to shift the sleeping infant in his arms. “Please,” he said. The attendant got up from her seat and left the exam room, closing the door behind her, and only when he heard the latch did Corelli exhale raggedly and lean against the table. He bore the heel of the hand not supporting Gabriella into his forehead. Alone, he bit his lip and smothered the sob before it could come out.
They knew. They had to know. No human on New Persepolis grew to adulthood without fluency in the dominant Shee dialect unless they were from the disputed territories. Crossing the border into Republic territory without submitting to immigration processing was grounds for execution. Humans with counterfeit identification papers–or none at all–were as likely to be terrorists as refugees, the prevailing thought was. Better to err, with extreme prejudice, on the side of caution. The attendant had probably gone to page security–immigration, if Corelli was very lucky. An agent if he wasn’t.
Gabriella would end up a ward of the state and grow up with no knowledge of him. There was no way to ensure she made it to Diederik without implicating him in their dangerous and illegal border crossing, and the cache of funds they’d stashed outside the city would end up in the Republic’s coffers long before it would ever be of any benefit to Gabriella. This gambit had been a risky one, but Corelli thought he had prepared for everything.
Evidently, assuming that humans would be presented with human language intake papers at the hospital had been one assumption too many. What a careless mistake.
Continue reading “old stuff: new persepolis excerpt” →
no shrinking violet 