The river by my house flooded every spring, swollen by the snow melt. As the ice cracked, our normally placid river ran grey and tumultuous. The sandbags that we stacked along the banks always seemed woefully inadequate to me against the fury of the spring river. Usually we didn't have to leave the house but there were a few springs where I grabbed a favorite stuffed animal and as we drove away, I didn't know if we'd have a house to come back to. The thought of my small treasures lost forever in the water was traumatic.
One spring of particular violence haunted my dreams. We'd had a long winter and the snow had been deep. It joined the river in quick brown rivulets, the music of running water constant. I recall seeing my dad silhouetted by the headlights of his truck as he ran out into rain, which hit the ground in heavy drops, leaving bullet hole impressions in the mud. I ran out after him, throwing my small arms around his legs as the mud seeped through the knees of my nightgown. If he went down to the river, I would never see him again. I screamed into the storm; even as I did I was afraid that somehow the river was now alerted where my family lived and would creep over our fields and sneak through the culverts to drown us all. My dad didn't go down to the river that night. Instead, he loaded us into the truck and drove us to town. That night, the river crested the banks and flooded the whole first floor of our house. Our neighbors did not evacuate and their coffins were empty at the funeral, the river having swept their bodies away.
After that my dad always referred to me as his "knower". Most people in our town thought the genesis of this nickname was that I was good at school, but he only used it when he was being serious and he always spoke the name with a small measure of awe.
"Sarah," he'd say, "You're my knower. What do you think about this trip?"
My mom hated the nickname; she would always give my dad a glare that she thought I couldn't read. My mom was a God-fearing woman before anything else, and I think she thought there was something occult in my knowing, that I had done something bad to get it. It didn't occur to me to hide this from everyone else until elementary school. I accidentally predicted, during roll call, that a girl who had been gone on a road trip out west with her family was not coming back because she was dead. The girl and her entire family had been wiped off the face of the earth when a semi truck drove through their minivan on I-70. The other kids beat me up, as though I had willed her fate into being. The teacher went out of her way to never be alone in the room with me.
As the years passed, I'd come to regard my "knowing" as a series of hunches and lucky guesses, blown wildly out of proportion by my hyper-religious mother. Even as I wrote it off as nothing, it leant me a sort of calm when my team was on call during my internship. When the code pager would go off, its tinkling notes spurring everyone to grab their stethoscopes and run, I'd know what the outcome would be before we even got to room. The nurses would be performing chest compressions, anesthesia would be readying the airway, my senior resident would be sweating bullets, and I would be calm, known that the person was already dead and nothing that we did would bring them back. It was terrifying when I knew the patient would live because with every second we were exponentially multiplying the odds that this person would get their heart beat back just to live in an ICU for a few weeks until they got ventilator-associated pneumonia and died.
When I awoke, I felt like I had slept for days but I felt more exhausted than refreshed. There was a window in my little cupboard, and it looked like it was midmorning on a cloudless day. A tray of cold soup, rimmed with congealed fat, rested beside the door. I sat on the floor and mindlessly ate. Then I washed. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to leave my room and find someone, or if I should wait here to be found. I waited indecisively for about an hour. During that time, I looked out of my window and realized that I was on some kind of zeppelin because the ground was moving very slowly a mile below me. I thought about the dreams. I didn't know what to make of them; I was very familiar with the feeling I got about which people would live and which would die. I guess I assumed that I subconsciously processed all the information and came to a conclusion, not that it was due to some kind of psychic power.
I dumped the contents of my backpack out. White coat with my name embroidered on the pocket-this I realized could be a very real danger, full of antibiotic resistant bacteria and other horrible things that might not exist here yet. I jammed it under my bed, resolving to ask to have it bleached or burned later. I had the coat I had been wearing when I came over, a grey, military-style trench of warm wool. There was a second large pocket of the backpack that up until this point I had forgotten about. I silently pumped my fist in the air when I opened it. The last time I had used this backpack was when I had gone to visit friends in Sioux Falls. One pair of flannel pj bottoms, a pair of jeans, a baseball tee shirt, Chuck Taylors; all things that I had never unpacked, and then given up for lost. I changed out of my patterned tights and the grey dress and gratefully put on more comfortable clothing. Then I waited.
At length I left the room and began to meander pointlessly down the metal hallways. I passed the occasional guard in full armor standing still at attention. The first time they made me nervous and I was afraid they would tell me to go away, or escort me back to my rooms, but they were like stone and did not move.
The men in blue exercised in a gymnasium below me. Right now they were running in circles around the gym, the Captain in the lead with an easy stride. I sat perched on the railing and watched. They finished their laps then moved to push ups and sit ups. They set up what looked like circuits with the weights. For this portion the Captain walked among them and yelled at them. He would occasionally perform a station, but spent most of time policing them. Having nothing to do, I just watched. It was a little anxiety provoking, to be doing nothing when it seemed like I should be actively carving out a place for myself in this world.
"I had looked for you in your quarters," Folken said from behind me, sounding irritated.
"I'm sorry," I said, my heart in my throat. I wondered how they killed people on board, or if they just threw them off.
"Come this way."
The room was hung with skeletons of small animals, and the walls were painted with runes. There were no windows here, only those eerie blue torches. A small man enveloped in dark velvet robes rose in greeting and inclined his head in Folken's direction. He had a small blue goatee and his bald head was circumferentially tattooed with triangles, with the exception of his forehead, where a blue circle was tattooed in between his eyes.
"So this is the girl from the Mystic Moon," he said wonderingly, looking me up and down.
"Her name is Sarah. She claims to be a physician," Folken said to him.
"I had heard," the sorcerer said. He gestured to a table with two chairs on either side. Folken melted into the shadows. I sat opposite of the sorcerer uncertainly. The chair had a short leg and wobbled when I shifted my weight backwards. The sorcerer moved to a cabinet behind him and produced a glass flask with deep purple liquid inside. This he poured into a small tumbler, and placed in front of me. I didn't move to take it.
"Well. Drink," he ordered crisply as he set the flask back into the cabinet.
"I don't know what it is," I said.
"Refreshment."
"I don't believe you." Folken chuckled in the corner; it was the purring of a tiger. The sorcerer shot him an angry look and grabbed the tumbler away from me. He poured it back into the flask, muttering.
"Fine," he said and grabbed a necklace from a pocket of his robe, "I will have to hypnotize her." He sounded like it was great inconvenience for him.
"Just bring her deep enough to relax her," Folken said. The sorcerer gave an exasperated sigh, thrust the necklace back in his pocket and returned to the cabinet and looked within, evidentially not finding what he sought. Folken moved from the corner and his long arms reached around the sorcerer, and returned with a bottle, followed by three wine glasses on his second reach. He poured a measure of wine in each and set two on the table. He retired to the corner with the third. The wine was delicious and very relaxing. Because I was hungry and thirsty, I drank mine rather faster than was wise. My glass was quickly refilled. It was very alcoholic wine, and I felt immediately sloppy and at ease.
"You are young to be a physician," the sorcerer stated.
"I skipped two grades and went through the University of Wisconsin's early medical school placement program. I matched in medicine for residency. I passed the medical licensing exam." The sorcerer's quill scratched furiously on the paper as I spoke. I had a feeling that though Folken didn't write, he would remember all of this.
"How would you fix a wandering aura?" the sorcerer shot. I stared at him dumbly. He looked knowingly at Folken, triumph in his eyes.
"How would you stop a man from changing into a woman?"
"Excuse me?"
"When a man acquires the breast and belly of a woman with child," the sorcerer replied smugly.
"Where they have yellow skin, and bruise easily?" I asked.
"Yes I suppose they do," the sorcerer conceded with less enthusiasm.
"They have end stage liver disease; the cow is already out of the barn. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that you can do, other than make sure that they move their bowels regularly. They should probably stop drinking liquor too. If you can get them a new liver, maybe, I don't know if you guys able to do transplants."
The sorcerer looked incredulous. I grabbed the paper from underneath his hand, and snatched the quill. I drew a person from the front. There were lots of arrows and little words, but at the end it was a good schema of a cirrhotic person, despite the difficulties I had using the quill.
"Oh, and they aren't changing their sex. They have a big belly because of fluid accumulation and get breasts because they aren't able to metabolize estrogen as well without their liver. You can go after the fluid with a needle." The tenor of the conversation shifted from this point, and even as inebriated as I was, I knew that finally they believed me. The questioning continued, but it was clear that I knew more than him. They accepted my every word.
After the questioning, I was led out of the room and they leaned me against the wall. I was so drunk that it was everything I could do to stay upright. I don't know how long the sorcerer talked to Folken, but by the time they came out to get me my knees were about to buckle. My vision was swimming. I eventually wound up in my bed but I don't know how long it took me to get there or how.
When I came to, it was evening. I was wide awake, with the slight headache and queasy stomach that comes from drinking too much. I wanted to curl up in the bed and fall asleep again but I felt too sweaty and gross.
I stalked down metal corridors, up and down staircases. I felt acutely homesick and scared. I was trapped, literally, hundreds of feet up in the air in a world where men wore swords and there was only the thinnest of lines between sorcery and medicine. The windows offered a view of dark pastoral lands, with the same stars that I knew well and the two moons in sky, one of which was home. I sat down heavily on a metal staircase, my arms resting on my knees. This place felt like a hospital. I wondered if I could live in this ship in the same manner as a mouse, filching things here and there and living for the most part in darkened corridors and broom closets. I chuckled at the mental image of myself sneaking around a corner, so fast that only the flickering of a shadow was visible to the next girl that they summoned. She would look up at Folken, afraid and uncertain, and he would reassure her, saying "that's only feral Sarah. She went insane." My humor soured quickly. Perhaps there was a portion of this floating fortress where the mad girls were held, the seers and the fortune tellers screaming lunatic prophesies like the cries of tropical birds.
This was an unsettling thought, and as much as I didn't want to dwell on it, there was something definitely disquieting about this place and I thought back to the sorcerer's room with the skeletons and the runes. With definite intention, I packed up those feelings and tossed them away to a remote, dark corner of my brain.
By the time I made it back to my room, I was fully tired and the little cupboard felt something like home. I picked up the tray of food outside my room, and ate on the floor before returning to bed.