Alembics line the walls, rounded and bulbous glasses blown in bubbly greens and creamy whites and swirling yellow-blues. Their contents shift and churn of their own accord, some in slow dancing waves, some in quick jerks, crashing against the walls of their vessels.
There is a queue out the door, and August wishes they had an assistant. But anyone who would take an assistant’s wage would also be in the age range where they’d be receiving a conscription letter. If not now, then soon.
“Next?” August tries to sound welcoming. “Here, have a seat. Now, what’s your name?”
They collect each name, type it carefully, check and double check the number on the glass alembic standing on the table.
“Perfect. And if you could just fill this in, next of kin, nothing to worry about, just standard practice. You’ll reconnect with your spirit just as soon as your service is complete. Don’t want anything tainting your soul, now, eh?” They affix the electrodes to a hand, a head, a chest. “Don’t worry about the tingling, all normal, mouth here, you’re doing great.”
August takes payment, feeling awkward every time they tick the ‘paid’ box. Enlistment: compulsory. Soul decanting: required. Payment? Well, someone has to cover the cost of the technology and all the research that went into it. Someone has to pay for the glass alembics, the only material besides a body that can hold a soul. Someone has to pay for the overheads of a well-trained operator and the long-term storage. And, so far, no one has come back to reclaim or complain.
###
“Next?” August says as pleasantly as they can, though their throat aches and their head throbs from the day. They’re grateful that this is the last person today. The continuous rumble of vehicles out front picking up the conscripts has made everyone nervous. Every person who has sat at the table constantly, twitchily glances back toward the door. August has been speaking overly loud all day, an encouragingly pleasant face pasted on to combat the concern. Their face aches.
The boy sits at the table across from them, nervously fidgeting with the strap of a bag. August begins to speak, clears their throat, begins again. The boy reaches down, and there’s a clinking. He passes them a flask.
“Here,” he says. “You sound kinda hoarse.”
“Oh, no, dear, I couldn’t,” August glances down at the golden-red liquid. “What is it?”
“Rakija,” the boy says. “From the crabapple trees down the way. I haven’t got. I can’t. Well.”
August gazes at the boy, and it clicks why he’s waited to be the last of the day.
“Payment. You can’t pay.”
The boy shakes his head. “I thought I’d sneak through, but Gran said no. She said the law’s there for a reason. That it’s better to come back to an untainted soul. She gave me this and more. There’s more. She’ll send it. It’s all we have. And, I have to go with them.” He glances nervously over his shoulder, towards the sounds of engines outside. “Maybe you could even use the bottles?” The boy adds. “For holding souls?”
August glances at the flask on the table, a small, heavy-bottomed jar, malformed and ugly. It’s barely good enough to hold the rakija. It would never do for souls.
“Yes,” they nod. “I could. So, what’s your name?”
August marks ‘paid’ on the paperwork. Let someone else deal with the accounting, that’s not their job. They open the first bottle of rakija.
###
Days and days, and conscripts stream in. The air is full of drones and copters: buzzing, rumbling. The news is full of fighting: empty-eyed soldiers capturing, killing, destroying. Winning, says the news. Terminating everything but their souls. Those that August, and a few others, keep safe.
August plays music in the evenings on their old boombox, after the urgency and the noise of the day has died down. They sometimes play something soothing, something to calm the spirits in their alembics. The spirits, normally calm and unmoving, will slosh around slowly, gentle waves rippling in the little glass containers, and August will sway along with them, a gentle rocking motion. Sometimes August will play something jazzy or with a serious dropped beat, and the spirits will wriggle and jive and get groovy in the dim light, swirling in their coloured glass homes.
Sometimes August sits cross-legged on the floor, nodding along to the music. The deep red of Enead’s alembic nestles perfectly in their lap. The unexpected daughter, the last of a family destroyed at the dawn of a war they didn’t know was coming. A light in the dark. One of the first to go under the new scheme, her soul left here, her body sent off. So young and scared and brave. Months gone by and no word, but her spirit in August’s lap shimmies and shines.
They watch the dancing spirit and they cry.
###
“Name?” August is running out of soothing tone. It dried up sometime in the last, gruelling week. Weeks ago, August raised a government ticket, had begged for an assistant. Someone to help with the unending stream of comforting words and the stink of fear-sweat. Response: No one free, no one trained, no one in the vicinity. All other spirit alembic keepers fully occupied. Maybe after the next budget review.
The woman across from August smiles, though, tells them her name, offers the money and her hand. Not as frightened as she should be, August thinks. A convert as well as a conscript.
“Don’t worry about the tingling, all normal, mouth here, you’re doing…” they pause, stare at the readouts. This wasn’t right, it shouldn’t be. This was supposed to be screened in advance.
Two spirits pour into the spout, two souls, double the number permitted from one body. August leans forward, pops off an electrode. The souls slip back into the woman, who looks startled.
“Am I back?” she asks, eyes refocusing. “Is it over? Did we win?”
“No,” August shakes their head. “No, I can’t. You have…” They point at her midsection. “You’re pregnant.”
“Oh,” she says. “Ok. So?”
“So I can’t extract. You’ll have to go back home, let the authorities know.”
She shakes her head. “Just do the thing. I’ll be back. We both will. But right now, they need as many of us as they can get, or we won’t win. They need me.”
That’s what the news has been saying, August knows. They need as many people as they can get. The age limit changed just this past week: younger, older, less firm. Anyone and everyone who can be thrown in the way of the tanks and the guns. Conscripts keep coming. August tries not to think of their bodies as cannon fodder. They try only to focus on keeping the souls safe for when their bodies return.
There had been so many people that August had, after all, started to use the empty rakija bottles, after running out of alembics. A backlog in the supply chain, orders delayed. A requirement, to store the souls. Payment that goes… where? Not to replenishing the alembic stocks, or to finding an assistant. The misshapen rakija bottles that, after all, work just as well, and a boy’s gran who keeps sending more.
“I can’t do it,” they say.
“It’s not your body,” she replies. “Not your choice.”
They consider asking the woman to stay. To stay, and help, and have the baby here where they can keep it safe. They glance at Enead’s alembic, always the closest one to August. They know that, truly, they can’t keep anyone safe.
The two souls dance and swirl together in the little bottle on August’s table.
The next person comes in, barely older than a child. One of the expanded age range.
###
August drinks rakija, emptying another bottle for the souls. Their head nods to the beat of the music, stroking Enead’s alembic in their lap. They rock back and forward, their stomach clenching at every crash and boom that rumbles across the floor, up their spine.
A blast: an alembic topples off a shelf, smashes on the ground. August leaps up, holding Enead’s alembic close, like they did when she was little and had a nightmare. But the soul shakes itself free of the glass shards, hesitates, then oozes towards the door. It pauses briefly next to August, as if sniffing them, then moves on. A spirit in search of its home.
August watches it go, watches as it struggles to slide under the doorframe, and when that doesn’t work, they watch as it presses itself against the door which fizzles and smoulders. It departs through a hole, burnt through the four-inch thick wood.
It disappears into the night, and August mutters a prayer, wishes it luck, tells it they hope it finds its body. They don’t know what will happen if the body is gone. No one has told them what happens if there is no retrieval. It wasn’t in the training or in the manual, which concludes with how much more cost effective it is to temporarily store souls, how much it saves in post-conflict care, the end.
August stares after the soul, wondering what will happen if it doesn’t find its body. A spirit loose, on the prowl. No longer untainted, but filled with fury. Lost, unfightable, beautiful. Free.
They turn towards the room, towards the lively spirits. In the coloured glass, the spirits jump and cascade, active in the late evening cacophony of sound. August walks to the shelves and strokes one alembic after another, then they begin to knock them to the ground. Shelves and shelves of beautiful, smashed glass, of beautiful, unfettered souls.
The spirits pour out, pour over each other, push out through burning holes in the door and walls. The glass of the windows falls, shatters, and they spill out through the gaps.
August stands in the wreckage, rocking and swaying to the booms outside, holding the remnants of Enead’s empty alembic, knowing deep in their own soul that everyone has to pay.