Amal takes her fingers out of your throat. Incestuous relationship to an incestuous land. Shards of the old oceans are frozen in the sky and desert winds blow flat and eternal and—what is it Lovecraft feared so much again? The unknown?
"Howard was a racist piece of shit," Amal says. She reclines beside a pile of burning books, voice muddled in boiling Campbell's soup. She stinks—combs have replaced the luxury of shampoo—but she still reminds you of aquariums, or a future. A world promised and broken.
Muscle memory. The desert and Amal and you. Fascists invented a weapon that turned the Earth to salt and you can still taste it on your sister's skin, in the folds of her narrow heart.
Imagine clinging. Imagine keeping, imagine anything that lets you back into the heartache or your own senses. Cold knife and a stranger's jugular—anything.
The moment you neurolinked with the Madeira you became both an aircraft and your own sister. Three broken minds normalized across three broken bodies with no care for the damage. Every childhood trauma from two perspectives. You remember Hailley Loftgren laughing at you in the MOA Hot Topic for bleeding through your pants, in parallel with your own wretched Eagle Scout boyhood. Sometimes you sit with Amal and the grief comes back—what have they done to me—what have they done to us? Your sister's voice cracks at the edges. Somehow, you still speak in different pitches.
Later, Amal works the knots out of the ailerons in your phantom wings and tells you a bedtime story you already know. Reality normalizes again. Mom said it like this—no, Mom said it like this. Work and play and sex and salt. You'll always be sisters, but one day maybe you'll know where you're going, and who you'll become.
Something about her. Something about how all you both have is each other. Something about the raw eroticism of plane crashes, something about feeling Madeira tear your bodies apart in different ways, burning alive with her, and something about that being the last time you were ever truly inside each other.
And what about morals, really? Who affords morals in the aftermath of everything? Morals are found in AP English stories, in stained glass Church windows and the grape juice blood of the Lord. Morals are God and God is this nation, said the Sergeant in the next-to-last dispatch you ever received. And you, sir, are made in His image.
It makes you laugh. Makes you miss the machine and all the puppy stickers Amal put on the flight console. That's the thing about being a strike pilot, you remember that twinky little fuckboy Brayden Caulter saying. It's an addiction. You're drugged up on adrenaline, but you'll never feel more whole.
I am you and you are me, and together, we might as well be Gods.
Nightmares again. Link memories. Sometimes you wonder if you and Amal are still psychically connected like you were in the cockpit, where the tails grafted to your spinal cords connected to an autopilot full of someone else's trauma. Madeira's trauma. You remember Amal crying by firelight while you scraped meat and teeth out of Madeira's number three engine nacelle: She's just a person, Clio. She's just our baby. She's crying out for help and—
Nightmares again. The protest slogans haven't even washed off your arms before someone corners you in your men's prison cell and—
Nightmares again. Death before detransition. You're sixteen degrees nose down and Madeira ingests a body. You feel the texture of a man inside you, cloth and gristle and all.
Nightmares again. The first time you neurolink with Amal you both realize that you weren't the only one that—
Don't chase the rabbit.
A disembodied voice. Don't chase the rabbit, Clione.
Who are you? you ask.
Second rabbit.
You wake up in the salt.
It wasn't always like this. You had a normal childhood, for some definition of normal. You had Ms. Anderson and Ms. Novak and went to the school nurse for eye exams and the war raged on. Amal walked you home on weekdays, held you like a leashed dog when you tried to chase squirrels up trees. Back then, one of you was still the big sister. Now neither of you can tell.
It's impossible and beautiful. Amal calls you both "walking libraries" because she needs to sanitize the way you're both insane and alone on this un-Biblical, sterilized firmament that used to be called a planet. You are her and she is you and both of you are the Madeira and—
It wasn't always like this. You and Amal used to pretend you were psychically connected in school. Must've been middle school because neither of you remember being in the same class until things got bad. Really, it was all theatrics and anime club chuunibyo shit. You were weird emo edgy kids who knew sign language and each other, and that was it.
It wasn't always like this. You both remember being an adult and having three other tgirls touch you at the same time—and the "other" in the memory is key, because that means it's for sure yours. Your mind might lie but your body never does.
Sometimes you wonder which grains of salt you've already touched. Who you loved and where they were taken to.
Amal tugs your leash. The chain on your collar slips through its metal heart and chokes you for a brief, real moment.
"Rabbit," Amal reminds you.
Your body never lies.
You keep walking. Culture is a thing of the past, a thing you and your sister keep building like a dilapidated in-joke. No listener and no audience. No Madeira to keep you flying when you both collapse.
For now, you're going from wreck to wreck. Dreadnoughts and Galleons and Brayden Caulter's Strike Eagle with the prop strike scars still not buffed out of the tailcone, and whatever else fell from the sky when the world died.
"Spam," Amal declares, holding a tin above her head like she just found it in a Zelda game.
"Spam?" you echo. "Who keeps spam in a Striker?"
"This faggot." Amal points too excitedly, and a dislodged skull rolls into the salt.
"No water?" you ask.
"All jet fuel," Amal says. "And American Spirits."
Dejected, you keep walking. Sled dog and its handler. Five partial Rolls-Royce compatible propjet engines and a bastardized sky-ocean map to guide you back to Madeira's corpse.
Amal keeps time like a crazy person. Tally marks carved into whatever she's next to—aluminum cargo-door sled or her own skin. 109 days for the burns to heal. Weeks of rainwater distilled by jet fuel campfires. Smoke in your black hair and stains in the sky. Your sister's heart and yours; her fingers tearing your trachea back open before it heals shut the wrong way. Sign language. Please.
"Amal, I—" —the last thing you said with your old voice. Ten feet to the ground. Fire from heat; heat from fire. Poets call love a conflagration.
The first time you touch Madeira, she touches you back. Sleek, articulated aluminum and the most modern neurolink technology in Tesla's military. A million dollar coffin for two poor kids from Minneapolis.
The targeting computer feeds you a warm rush that spreads through your body to your legs. Wings you never knew you had unfurl from your back. You see your sister's body in first person and look down. Always comparing yourself to her.
You can't hide anything from the link. Rabbits. You both know about men's prison and you both know why Amal can hold down rent despite always being unemployed. Another rabbit—you're thirteen and you sneak into Amal's room and take a pair of her panties out of her hamper and—
Don't chase the rabbit, Amal thinks. She's being kind, but you feel her discomfort like it's your own. It makes you want to throw up but the simulation has to go on. The sergeant has spent so much on us. We can't pay it back. We'll never—
It was just experimentation, you think. I was desperate. I wanted to be you so badly—
Disgust. And now you are.
Amal, you think. Amal, I'm so sorry—
You both learn how to run away.
You smoke a cigarette. You smoke a cigarette. You smoke a cigarette. It feels like the ones you'd have after sex, passed around the bed from regular Claire to blue Claire to Alexandria. Your whole memory is polluted.
The worst part is—whatever shame or reflection you feel tonight, Amal will feel it tomorrow.
It wasn't always like this. You were sisters and you fell in love with other women and that's how the world worked. You were a 6'5" dyke too scared to do her own E injection and Amal was a tiny high school dropout that, despite your mother's tendency to simply fuck around and lie, was actually somehow your biological sister. Link compatible. 73 percent base alignment. Proved and proved again.
"C'mon, that's only a C," you'd said—but the military recruiter in your college dorm widens his eyes. "The average baseline in my unit is thirty, son." Misgendering is a weapon, and for the first time you and Amal both feel its sting. The recruiter turns to his aide. "Think we just found our new aces."
Later, you find out it's all patriotic bullshit. You're not special. You're not even good. You just win in a sky full of dead kids and dumb luck.
73 percent. The other 27 percent is rabbits. Amal helps—being in her head really is a drug. She makes you feel safe for the first time since ketamine.
You get addicted to her fast.
A slab of the Pacific ocean burns up on re-entry and slams into the Earth. It's fresh water—all the salt was left behind after the—
It doesn't matter. The rain is torrential. Weeks and weeks of refilled plastic Coke bottles and a new saltwater lake to name for yourselves. You raise your arms over your head; your too-small crop top rides up and soaks transparent.
When Amal finishes loading the sled, you tackle her to the murky ground. The leash handle you've obediently kept in your mouth falls onto her chest when you kiss her.
What happened to you? What happened to us? Don't think about it. Dont follow the rabbit. Just let it happen. Just feel.
Just please—let something be real.
Let this bastardized, incestuous, impossible joy be real.
When the rain ends, you both lie there staring up at the sun, surrounded by water and death and salt and lies and everything, and everything, and everything.
Halfway back to the Madeira, you and Amal find the war.
You don't recognize her at first. She's a sad, crying little girl who lives inside both of your bodies—metaphorical at first, until you recall that she is you and you are her and the war made you both insane. You've fucked your biological sister so many times that it makes sense that she'd be pregnant.
Amal takes it in stride. Says you can wait a few months before you punch her in the stomach until she miscarries—and that's when you lose the joke. You don't have the Madeira and you don't have Mike Tesla's neurolink and there's a horrible dawning realization that you might not understand each other and—
"We knew this was possible," Amal tells you.
You nod. Something beautiful shatters in the sky and dances a stupid rainbow across the fractured moon.
Amal cracks open a Mandarin Red Bull, conspicuously reading and ignoring the pregnancy warning in the fine print of the can. "Well," she says. "We did decide that generational trauma would end with us."
"Can't feed another mouth," you say.
"Not much of a world left," Amal adds. "Got a Yang Ming full of this shit but no coat hangers. Do you want some?"
It's getting harder to play off as a joke. You take the Red Bull, drink its blood and imagine killing it for its meat.
"Remember how all those weird white women made smoothies out of their placentas?" Amal says.
"Socially acceptable cannibalism," you say.
You think about social media for a bit. Think about how every time you and Amal get back to the Madeira you charge your phones and scroll through the cached versions of web pages and think about how none of the people on Twitter and none of the telecommunications satellites and none of the places exist anymore.
It's odd. No internet left, but Amal has all the early 2000's pop punk downloaded onto her SD card. Evanescence in a world of salt.
You think we're the only people in the world who remember Shadow the Hedgehog? Amal had asked once. She peppers you with questions and it's beautiful. Maybe you appreciate being outside of her mind for once, so she can finally surprise you.
You'll just be walking in the salt, and then she'll pipe up: "Hey, do you remember the bi lesbian discourse on tumblr?" Or: "Do you think we're the last people who haven't forgotten 9/11?" Stupid shit. "Hey sis, are we ontologically proshippers?" It's nice. Gives you a pointless distraction from a pointless half-existence.
"You're pregnant," you say aloud. "We got you pregnant."
"That's what happens when you cum in your sister." Amal shrugs. "You know we'll do it again."
You're both ignoring the war. It's better that way. Gives you more to think about.
Salt and more salt. It's changing your skin, changing your eyes and personalities. No explanation for why or how this happened, and so both of you tap-dance around creating religion from first principles to explain it.
Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve's children and the inherent incest implied by the Bible, and all the other incest implied by the Bible that neither of you can quote because you stopped being into the Bible way before you started being into incest.
There's no Christianity where you're going, anyway. No way back to your father's church and no way to knock the crucifix off the wall of your shared childhood bedroom and burn it.
For now, you bring the war with you, and carry on home. Wanderers in the wasteland of yourselves, aimless and caffeinated beyond reason.
Home is a plane crash called the Madeira, and your past is a memory of two other transsexual dykes named Claire holding you while you pronounced the latin names of animals in the Kyoto Aquarium. Call it littlespacing or a dream come true—the same way you and Amal still call the frozen rings around the Earth oceans.
"I'm gonna kill that Tesla bitch one day," Amal says, pointing her left finger-gun at the moon and— "Bang." —pulling the trigger. "Just like that. Brains splattered on the wall because he's just a man with money."
You settle onto Madeira's cold metal back. If either of you had the gall, you could plug your tails into the flight computer and feel the plane and each other inside and out. You'd confront the reality of what happened to the world and wake up screaming when the APU finally cuts out, and you'd gain nothing. There are things bigger than you'll ever be, things you'll never know or confront.
"Imagine if dad knew about us," Amal says.
"He'd find a way to blame mom," you immediately reply, and Amal laughs. "Probably say she gave us the 'woke mind virus' or some shit. Something about her son's transgender insanity."
"I fantasize about murdering him too," Amal says, completely non sequitur. "Sometimes I hope he's alive up there so I can."
You light an American Spirit off the exposed number one engine tailpipe and breathe smoke. "How would you do it?"
"Dunno. Reach for the stars and punch them out, probably. Just can't think of a cheesy one-liner to drop before I drop him."
"Do you need to make a show of it?"
"Most people only get one shot at patricide," Amal says. "And mine's gotta be extra special since I'm doing it to impress the girl I like."
"Shut up," you blush.
Amal snatches the cigarette out of your fingers and smokes. "It's a pipe dream. But girls can dream."
Shooting stars and smoke. Too many potential wishes and not enough real ones. Millions of dog tags clatter under the wing; after a moment of consternation, Amal offers your cigarette and one of the war's degloved, rotting hands snatches it away.
"What's the point?" Amal says. She's been inside your head enough to know that your silence is neutral. "Why not make impossible promises at the end of everything?"
"Because it would be lying," you say.
The war churns from its nest beneath the wing. You've both come to know it in the weeks since it followed you home—imperceptible except for glimpses on the periphery, an amalgamation of weapons and fascists and scared children capable of speaking in every voice but only ever choosing none.
"Can I lie to you?" Amal asks.
"Always," you say. It's a promise, but you don't promise it. Just say.
The war changes shape.
"I'm gonna take you to an aquarium one day," Amal says. You're quiet, so she continues: "We'll sit on the bench and eat shaved ice like in those stupid yuri anime. We'll walk around holding hands until we kiss like it's the first time, and—"
You roll over, take your sister's hand, and kiss her on her lips.
"And—" Amal starts. She brushes some of your long hair behind your ear. "And everything will make sense, and—"
Two shards of the ocean collide overhead, shattering each other into dust. You kiss her again, wretched.
"Promise?" you say.
Amal slips her fingers under your collar, so gently that the chain doesn't even slip and choke you. "Promise, Clione. Anything."
You let her guide you into the Madeira's husk.
This is where you sat when you burned alive. This is the way metal wrote her name into your body. This is where the plushies go; this is where you held each other and looked sideways at nothing until you remembered how to move. Keloid scars and shellshock.
For now, nothing else matters.