The Daughters of Moab - Kim Westwood (SFF)

[marianne]

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Title: The Daughters of Moab
Author: Kim Westwood
Publisher: HarperVoyager -- an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Format: B Format
ISBN: 9780732286330

This work is copyright, and cannot be reproduced without express permission of the author and the publisher.

For more about the author and this book: www.voyageronline.com.au

[marianne]

Chapter One excerpt


1

Each bruised and purple day in the 9th Year of Tribulation, Assumpta Viali dresses in the uniform of the True Believers; but although she has nothing against beige, her heart isn’t really in it.
For several years she has passed as a Nathan and knows that it’s only a matter of time before the Council of Nathan — who pay her handsomely for her services — find out she’s not. Her voice is perpetually husky, some might say seductive. In truth the hole in her throat where the chip was ripped out still hurts behind its latex, so she says as little as possible.
She’s been contracted to fix an errant administrator at the Kingdom Fort True Believer Centre, a day’s walk north, and doesn’t bother to suppress the worm of satisfaction. Ryland Drake has always made her skin crawl, having a disturbing habit of standing too close, as if about to sniff her. She knows he suspects her of too much good health for a Nathan.
Until now the Councillors have turned a blind eye to his peccadillos, but if Assumpta had had her way, he would have been put at the top of her ‘To Do’ list long ago.
She packs her bivvy for the trek to Kingdom Fort, then checks the knife in its sheath inserted into the elastic of her regulation Blundstones, the slim leather pouch at the waistband of her pants and set of picklocks in a pocket of her True Believer shirt. One hand goes, reflex, to her throat. Her employers have aged noticeably of late, and she doesn’t want any of them — particularly not the Head of Council — dying on her just yet, in case their replacements renege on a long-standing deal.
Lantern light flickers on curved metal walls, revealing a spartan taste in décor: strung across the far side of the room near a darkened porthole is a hammock attached to eyebolts, and below that a neat pile of clothes. The lighthouse had withstood two centuries of weather before a deep seismic tearing (proclaimed by Council to be the Great Tribulation) ripped open the seams of the earth and avalanched the cliffs north and south like icebergs. Now the prefabricated iron slabs pressed together by giant rivets and splayed buttresses like the fins of a missile appear to stand atop their own island, a crooked finger of rock connected to the mainland by a causeway that’s slapped constantly by waves and submerged each high tide.
Spiking through her bedroom on a central pole is a metal staircase, and above that a trapdoor to where the careful arrangement of prisms and reflectors sits salt-rimed and unattended. Once it cast its loom many kilometres across the sea; now all it does is provide something to lean on while looking at the view, which isn’t pleasant. The earth is a wasted land forgotten of green, and the ocean is a roiling sludge still washing up the bones of the dead in its breakers.
She goes to the porthole and pushes. As it swings open the room fills with the delicate memory of loam.
Set in the cool of the wall cavity is a collection case, perilously old and resting on a platform bolted to the outer shell. Before Tribulation these wooden boxes could be found everywhere, a means to transport plants between private greenhouses and the CSIRO-run propagation facilities and seed banks at a time when entire species were disappearing from Country faster than they could be saved.
She breathes deep. Even through the timber, the fused glass top stained an impenetrable black, she can tell what’s tucked inside, the charge from the containers of blood singing in her head like wires in wind.
They always let her choose her own. Ridding Council of a number of dissenting Prefects from the True Believer Centres a few years ago had given her a lot of leverage. So much so that when she demanded ‘special’ payment for each subsequent job in addition to food and water, they agreed.
From Council’s point of view, a sample from their columbarium was a high price to pay, but they had too many uses for Assumpta’s skills to deny her. And what else was there left to bargain with in this world?
Unfortunately, she had to give them all a little show the first time. Shepherded into the limestone grotto beneath Kingdom Fort’s watchtower, she chose a rust-lidded jar from the glinting array stashed in its niches, then carried it up into daylight, lay it on the dirt in front of them and watched it fry. It had been murder in her book — the only kind she didn’t do. But let into the fold after that symbolic act, she has never again been required to confirm her commitment.
As for the members of Council, they have no idea they are employing someone whose unique qualities happen to include dingo, and understand her demand as part of the instinctual drive to rid the world of all transfected humans, the Abominations of Moab, given the chance.
But Assumpta has other plans.
She swings the porthole closed and grabs her flannel-lined japara and battered Akubra off their hook, then heads down spiralling art deco into the jaundiced landscape outside.