Author: Paula Guran
Date: 2016-12-12 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Short Stories; Science Fiction; Anthologies; Queer; Lgbt; Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Adult; Speculative Fiction
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Rights: All Right Reserved

FAR OUT

RECENT QUEER SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

OTHER ANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY PAULA GURAN

Embraces: Dark Erotica

Best New Paranormal Romance

Best New Romantic Fantasy

Zombies: The Recent Dead

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

Vampires: The Recent Undead

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

Halloween

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

Brave New Love: 15 Dystopian Tales of Desire

Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

Extreme Zombies

Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

Season of Wonder

Future Games

Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons

After the End: Recent Apocalypses

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

Halloween: Mystery, Magic, and the Macabre

Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

Magic City: Recent Spells

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

Time Travel: Recent Trips

New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women

Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2015

Warrior Women

Street Magicks

The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2016

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2016

The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

Swords Against Darkness

Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries & Lore

New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City That Never Sleeps

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2017

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2018

Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume One

FAR OUT

RECENT QUEER SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

EDITED BY PAULA GURAN

Copyright © 2021 by Paula Guran.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Science Fiction, 221 River Street, 9th Floor, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

Night Shade Books™ is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-949102-55-0
eISBN: 978-1-59780-638-1

Cover illustration by Julie Dillon

Cover design by Daniel Brount and Kai Texel

Please see page 425 for an extension of this copyright page.

Printed in the United States of America

For Ricky, Jim, and Rose

As long as we live, they too will live; for they are now are a part of us; as we remember them.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Over the Rainbow and Into the Far Out, by Paula Guran

“Destroyed by the Waters” by Rachel Swirsky

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“And If the Body Were Not the Soul” by A. C. Wise

“Imago” by Tristan Alice Nieto

“Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak

“Three Points Masculine” by An Owomoyela

“Das Steingeschopf “ by G. V. Anderson

“The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsyn Muir

“The Shape of My Name” by Nino Cipri

“Otherwise” by Nisi Shawl

“The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar

“Ours Is the Prettiest” by Nalo Hopkinson

“Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders

“Driving Jenny Home” by Seanan McGuire

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan

“In the Eyes of Jack Saul” by Richard Bowes

“Secondhand Bodies” by Neon Yang

“Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar

“Né le!” by Darcie Little Badger

“The Duke of Riverside” by Ellen Kushner

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer

“The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente

“Calved” by Sam J. Miller

“The River’s Children” by Shweta Narayan

Acknowledgments

About the Editor

INTRODUCTION:

OVER THE RAINBOW AND INTO THE FAR OUT

PAULA GURAN

LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and “plus,” which represents other sexual identities including pansexual, asexual, and omnisexual. It’s the accepted and inclusive way to refer to the queer community, who can be grouped by one common theme: the fact they don’t identify as straight or cisgender. . . It’s also worthwhile noting that another widely accepted term for the community is queer.

—Adam Bloodworth, Pink News

Although I cannot find a single source to reference this, my research shows the initialization LGBT evolved circa 1985–1990 from the earlier terms GLT or LGT.

Times and attitudes have changed, and the language used to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity has also changed. As a result, the established L.G.B.T. abbreviation has acquired a few extra letters—and a cluster of ancillary terminology around both sexuality and gender. Not everyone has adopted them yet.

Take, for example, the addition of “Q” that became increasingly popular as the 20th century turned into the 21st. Some insisted this stood for “questioning,” representing people who were uncertain of their sexual orientations or gender identities. Others declared it was for “queer,” a catchall term that has shed its derogatory origins and is gaining acceptance.

Now there’s also I, for intersex; A, for ally (or asexual, depending on whom you’re talking to); and often a plus sign meant to cover anyone else who’s not included:L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ . . .

+ [is not] just a mathematical symbol anymore, but a denotation of everything on the gender and sexuality spectrum that letters and words can’t yet describe.

—Michael Gold, “The ABCs of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+,” The New York Times, June 21, 2018

What is queer or LGBTQ+ science fiction and/or fantasy anyway?

I suspect there are many definitions, but for this anthology I decided the stories should feature queer characters important to the plot, usually but not necessarily as the central actors. Stories might feature an LGBTQ+ character or characters or a queer perspective or point of view. Part of my story selection process also included seeking out published views about the stories to determine if my perception of a story was supported by others’ opinions.

Of course, they had to be good stories to start with. I also sought range and variety, as well as a balance between SF and fantasy. Stories had to be published from 2010 through 2020 to fulfill the “recent” aspect of my theme.

Speculative fiction imagines drastically diverse ways of being and worlds that are other than the one with which we are familiar. Queerness is a natural fit for such fiction. But, as anyone picking this tome up probably knows, that has not always been the case.

As Christopher Barzak has written:

Out of all the kinds of characters one can encounter in fiction— in speculative fiction in particular, where aliens abound and the human race itself can be transfigured into something quite different from what we know of ourselves now—there was a particular absence that, later, when I was in my early twenties, I couldn’t help but notice: characters of queer identities.

That absence has been, slowly, filling. Queer representation in science fiction and fantasy novels has, in the last few years, finally—first in young adult fiction and then in adult—been taking off.

Similar progress has been made in the short form as well, and that is where our focus lies.

The earliest queer-themed anthology I know of is Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories, edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot. It was published in 1984 by Alyson Publications and consisted of eleven reprinted stories. Some of the inclusions are notable: the World Fantasy Award–winning “The Woman Who Loved the Moon” by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1981); “The Night Wind” by Edgar Pangborn (1974); “Black Rose and White Rose” by Rachel Pollack (1975); “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ (1972), a Nebula Award winner; and “The Prodigal Daughter” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1981). “Passengers” by Robert Silverberg (1968) won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1969, but the gay content consists only of a “shock” twist ending. Other stories range from forgettable to offensive: “Vamp” by Michael Conner (1977), “How We Saved the Human Race” by David Gerrold (1972), “Going Down” by Barry N. Malzberg (1975), “Nuclear Fission” by Paul Novitski, “Flowering Narcissus” by Thomas N. Scortia (1975), and “Broken Tool” by Theodore L. Thomas (1959).

Alyson then published Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1986. According to Robert Ridinger in “Out of These Worlds: LGBT Beings and Science Fiction/Fantasy” in Off the Shelf #4, the book:

. . . remains one of the groundbreaking anthologies in print form of this genre. The eleven stories (originally published between 1970 and 1982) represent many of the writers who have come to be recognized as significant contributors to the corpus of twentieth-century SF—Marion Zimmer Bradley, James Tiptree, Elizabeth Lynn, Jewelle Gomez, John Varley, as well as Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ.

The content of Worlds Apart:

• “Harper Conan and Singer David” by Edgar Pangborn (1975), set in the author’s post-apocalyptic Tales of a Darkening World universe, is a touching story with much discussion of music by the two musician characters.

• “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree Jr. (1976) is now a classic and is Tiptree’s most famous and most reprinted story. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1976 and the Hugo for Best Novella in 1977. In the story, an American spaceship with three male astronauts is lost for centuries. When the astronauts reconnect with Earth, they gradually learn the majority of human life—including most men—has been wiped out.

• “To Keep the Oath” by Marion Zimmer Bradley (1979) is set in her Darkover universe. The story focuses on a Renunciate, a women warrior who rejects traditional gender roles. In this case, she is an emmasca, a neutered woman.

• “Do Androids Dream of Electric Love?” by Walt Liebscher (1972) alludes to mechano-sex, evidently “an act that even in this enlightened age was considered, shall we say, way out.”

• “Lollipop and the Tar Baby,” by John Varley (1977), is set in Varley’s far-future Eight World universe where one can easily change sex. It subtly references the Uncle Remus “Tar-Baby” story but is primarily about a contentious mother/daughter clone relationship. And there’s a black hole that talks. Queerness is incidental.

• “The Mystery of the Young Gentleman” by Joanna Russ (1982). Author/critic Lee Mandelo considers this a story before its time:

. . . in that it is, really, a genderqueer story—the lead, who tells the tale, identifies as neither man nor woman, though they play both and more in the story because others cannot or will not read their identity correctly. They also engage with the “medical” definitions of queerness in a necessarily vicious, deconstructive way . . .

• “The Gods of Reorth” by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1980). A member of a high-tech race who has spent three hundred years as a “goddess” on a low-tech planet is forced to allow a war that takes many lives, including that of a wisewoman with whom she has a relationship. She devises an interesting way to punish the men who wage war.

• In “Find the Lady” by Nicholas Fisk (1972), humankind, except for a few people in an English town, has been wiped out. The survivors keep the invaders at bay by giving them antiques. Dark comedy with the two protagonists portrayed as stereotypical effeminate gay men.

• “No Day Too Long” by Jewelle Gomez (1981) is the first short story about Gilda, a black lesbian vampire. In this tale Gilda seeks love but does not want to be involved with short-lived humans: “Old memories are so empty when they cannot be shared.” It later became part of the acclaimed The Gilda Stories: A Novel (1991).

• “Full Fathom Five My Father Lies” by Rand B. Lee (1981) is the author’s first published story. It tells of an all-male society on a lost planet. They survive through cloning, but no longer understand the technology involved. The cultural code is that “fathers” (older clones) and “sons” (their younger clones) must be lovers. A young clone resists this.

• “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delany (1969)—winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1970 and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1969—is another classic. The story of an upwardly mobile thief considers pain, love, and crime, but the sexuality is vague.

LGBT anthologies thereafter remained the provenance of specialty presses. Most of the anthologies published in the last thirty-five years have been narrowly focused: specifically gay male or lesbian (or, more recently, transgender), or all science fiction or all fantasy, or adhering to a specific theme or subgenre. I’ll list only a few.

Notable in the 1990s were the all-original trio of Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997), World Fantasy Award winner for Best Anthology; Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998); and Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001), edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel from White Wolf Publishing.

The original stories included in The Future Is Queer: A Science Fiction Anthology, edited by Richard Labonté (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006) were, at best, of uneven quality.

Lethe Press published the Wilde Stories series—eleven volumes from 2008 to 2018—reprinting the prior year’s best gay male-themed speculative fiction. Similarly, the Heiresses of Russ series—six volumes (2011–2016)—of “year’s best” lesbian-themed short SF/F. Lethe followed these with four (so far) volumes of Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (2016–2019), described as the “best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, strange, horrific, and weird published the prior year.”

Lethe also issued Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, a reprint anthology edited by Brit Mandelo, in 2012.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology, edited by Hope Nicholson, is “a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters” published in 2016 by Bedside Press. A sequel, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in October 2020.

Meanwhile Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett (Topside Press, 2017), is already out of print, but it is available for free in PDF at https://caseyplett.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/meanwhile-elsewhere-interi-or-master.pdf. The anthology won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards–Barbara Gittings Literature Award.

Two anthologies of comics— Beyond: The Queer Sci Fi/Fantasy Comic Anthology (Vol. 1), edited by Sfé R. Monster (Beyond Press, 2015), and Beyond: The Queer Dystopia/Urban Fantasy Comic Anthology (Vol. 2), edited by Sfé R. Monster and Taneka Stotts (Beyond Press, 2018)—are also out of print.

Maiden, Mother, Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes, edited by Gwen Benaway (Bedside Press, 2019), is a slender 152-page anthology of “new fantastical short fiction by trans women and trans feminine writers.”

Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology, edited by Cecile Frohn (Nyx Publishing, 2020) is an anthology of contemporary Gothic queer short fiction recently published by a British small press.

Behind the Sun, Above the Moon (NineStar Press, 2020) is a “queer anthology inspired by magic and the cosmos, a vast and beautiful place where planets, stars, comets—entire galaxies, even—live without borders, specifications, or binaries.”

Some periodicals focused on queer SF/F for special issues in the last five years. Lightspeed published Queers Destroy Science Fiction! in 2015, which offered eleven original stories (edited by Seanan McGuire), twelve original pieces of flash fiction (edited by Sigrid Ellis), and five reprint selections (edited by Steve Berman). That same year, sister publication Fantasy Magazine offered four original fantasy stories (edited by Christopher Barzak) and four reprints (selected by Liz Gorinsky) with Queers Destroy Fantasy! A third related magazine, Nightmare, offered Queers Destroy Horror! with five originals and three reprints edited by Wendy N. Wagner.

Capricious, a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction edited by A. C. Buchanan and based in New Zealand, published Capricious Issue 9: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue in early 2018, featuring ten stories containing “you guessed it, diverse pronouns, including singular they, the Spivak pronouns (e/em/eirs), zie pronouns, and various others.”

GlitterShip, “a science fiction and fantasy podcast devoted to publishing audio versions of LGBTQ stories from authors of all backgrounds,” has issued two yearly anthologies, Glittership One (2017) and GlitterShip Two (2018), compiling some of their audio offerings into print.

I’m sure I’ve missed some and as 2020 continues, I’m sure there will be more dedicated venues for this fiction.

Most importantly, LBGTQ+ speculative fiction now commonly appears in major SF/F anthologies and periodicals.

This anthology offers twenty-four science fiction and fantasy stories. Some are award winners; others are not well known. I tried to avoid spoilers in the brief descriptions below, but probably failed. WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS:

• “Destroyed by the Waters” by Rachel Swirsky: A gay couple in a relationship for over fifty years visit what is left of New Orleans, now underwater after melting polar ice caps and methane gas pockets have drastically raised the sea level.

• “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlin R. Kiernan: In a story with allusions to Beowulf, a woman warrior drinks and claims to have slain a demon troll that has long threatened a village. The villagers are skeptical.

• “And If the Body Were Not the Soul” by A. C. Wise: Nonbinary asexual Ro cannot abide physical contact with other humans. An accidental touch from an alien jars her.

• “Imago” by Tristan Alice Nieto: A drug can bring the recently dead back to life for three days. A young murder victim, revived to help catch her own killer, finds her memories and identity have been shattered.

• “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak: A truly paranormal romance set in Cleveland that delightfully subverts the subgenre.

• “Three Points Masculine” by An Owomoyela: In the midst of revolution, a soldier deals with a man he believes is faking his gender to serve in the Women’s Volunteer Corps.

• “Das Steingeschöpf” by G. V. Anderson: In an alternate 1928, a young stone restorationist who has just completed his apprenticeship receives his first commission: to repair a living statue in Bavaria. He discovers it was carved by a past master and doubts his ability.

• “The Deepwater Bride” by Tamsyn Muir: Quoting the author: “It’s a love story. It’s also a story about responsibilities, a story about being too smart for one’s own good, and a story about ghastly, abyssal intelligences surfacing to crush mankind.”

• “The Shape of My Name” by Nino Cipri: To quote the publisher, it is “a time travel story about what it means to truly claim yourself.”

• “Otherwise” by Nisi Shawl: According to the author, it is “a queer poly teen romance adventure in a world where all the adults have succumbed to a drug craze” and disappeared.

• “The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar: Aboard the slug train to Laos, a bio-medically altered bodyguard with a taste for controlled violence attempts to protect her crime lord boss from assassination.

• “Ours is the Prettiest” by Nalo Hopkinson: Jamaican Damiana lives in Bordertown, the city that lies along the border between the Elflands and the World. But young Beti, a new visitor, evidently comes from a strange place indeed.

• “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders: A trans woman is seized by a government–industry collaborative agency that forces detransition via brain transplant.

• “Driving Jenny Home” by Seanan McGuire: In this tale inspired by an old English ballad, a grieving young woman cannot let the ghost of her girlfriend go.

• “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan: It takes a great deal of time and space to reconcile two people in a complicated relationship. A story of love, loss, and physics.

• “In the Eyes of Jack Saul” by Richard Bowes: Described by the author as “an amalgamation of Victorian fiction and reality. Jack Saul was a real person and served, at one point, in a male brothel that was visited by several elites including Prince Albert Victor . . . The fictional inclusion was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, seen through the eyes of Jack Saul, as real a figure as the gay world has ever produced.”

• “Secondhand Bodies” by JY Yang: Wealthy Agatha wants a thin body rather than her naturally plump one. She can’t get a new body grown as quickly as she would like, so she decides on an illegal trade.

• “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar: A fairytale mashup in which two women rescue each other.

• “Ne le!” Darcie Little Badger: A Lipan Apache veterinarian journeying to Mars on a transport is awakened from stasis when forty Chihuahuas and one husky, also en route to the red planet, need care.

• “The Duke of Riverside” by Ellen Kushner: A morose young scholar comes to Riverside hoping someone will kill him, not realizing that no one is going to take the life of an unarmed man. Instead of death, he finds something to live for.

• “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer: An artificial intelligence develops from systems running search engines. It wants to help humans and look at cute cat pictures. The former proves to be more difficult than the latter.

• “The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente: War is a dinner party. Lady Cassava is a skilled poisoner and serves her husband and House well. And now Lady Yew, her youthful love who can counter any poison, has come to dinner. There will be war.

• “Calved” by Sam J. Miller: Dom, who makes what living he can as an ice-grunt spending most of his time at sea illegally harvesting ice, is trying but failing to maintain a relationship with his son. His effort to show his son his love and his worth proves catastrophic.

• “The River’s Children” by Shweta Narayan: A gender-non-conforming prince marries his dearest friend, a river goddess. They can be man and wife or men together, or women, or something else again. Then the river falls pregnant and everything changes.

It has been an honor, joy, and struggle (for reasons not related to the project) to compile this anthology. I always want my efforts reach a large audience, but I hope this one truly reaches far and wide.

National Take Your Cat to Work Day 2020

Paula Guran

DESTROYED BY THE WATERS

RACHEL SWIRSKY

The ocean is warm enough to dive without a wetsuit. Derek wears swimwear like everyone else. Zack is the lone holdout, bulky in three millimeters of neoprene. To Derek’s eyes, it shows all the beloved-but-bittersweet changes in Zack’s body, the sags, the knobs, the lumps. At twenty, he was a muscular god. Now: mortal.

Derek’s body has changed too, heaven knows. But he didn’t have as far to fall.

Zack remains tall, thick-haired, athletic. He comes to stand behind Derek. His body is warm and solid. Gently, he asks, “What are you thinking?”

From this angle, the ocean is utterly blue. The water is mildly restive, an insistent pitch and yaw beneath their feet.

Derek says, “You can’t even tell anything was here.”

Zack points to a few darker spots. “I think those are the tops of houses.”

They’re only a brush darker than the rest of the water.

They’d honeymooned in New Orleans. They were so young then, pockets full of no money and potentials full of question marks. One of the groomsmen had an aunt who needed a house sitter so they flew standby and scrounged enough cash for meals and cheap drinks.

Jackson Square: a five-dollar palm reading that turned into a two-hour-long conversation about Katrina. (He said, “The city will come back. There’s too much will to live here to keep it down.” He was right until he wasn’t.)

Decatur Street: ten p.m. on a Monday, a tiny Italian restaurant hung with large, dark portraits of the proprietor’s family. The bored sommelier taking a shine to the newlyweds, sneaking them sips from bottles of fancy wine.

Canal Street: storefronts plumed with masks and shiny with souvenirs. Four drunk guys, a beer bottle thrown, taunts about Derek’s manicured nails and coral-colored shirt.

Endless bus loops: sitting or standing, sweating against each other’s skin. Ignoring the windows to watch the passengers—tourists complaining about the humidity frizzing their hair, sway-hipped women in sundresses, men with moist tank tops slicked to their chests.

Everywhere: grief, anger, exhaustion, work. Some were silent, but others talked, trauma honing words into catharsis, stories that took strangers by the collar and refused to let them go.

Derek and Zack: dropping the next day’s meal budget into a charity box, but prevailingly, overwhelmingly elated by each other. Floating in a bubble like the ones that rose through the expensive champagne which the sommelier had given them in a flute, holding her fingers to her lips and saying, “Shhh.”

It’s a small boat: eight divers and the dive master. They gather to listen to the site debriefing. Derek sits furthest back, watching the others. From this angle, the ocean’s surface is sporadically broken by ruins.

The dive master is a tiny woman who compensates with a loud voice and broad gestures. “Enclosed dives are dangerous. Before you even think about exploring, get out your line.” She mimes unwinding the spool at her hip. “Think of it like diving a wreck. Even if it’s just an old apartment building, even if you think it will be easy to find the bedroom window you came in through again—”

Zack listens, nodding. Derek can see the almost imperceptible movement of Zack’s lips as he compares what she’s saying to his research on the site. He is the kind of man who watches safety guidelines every single time.

The dive master jabs her finger into the side of her head. “Remember your map! Land use says you can swim anywhere within this radius. This is for your safety. Outside this zone, the ruins have not been cleared of debris and other hazards. Your LCDC will flash if you get near the boundary. Don’t make me come get you.”

The other divers are so young. Derek watches one smooth face after another. Even the dive master’s complexion is cherubic. One of the bare-chested boys left his dampening Yale shirt on the bench, in range of spray. A girl wears dark eyeliner and pink lipstick which will raccoon and wash off respectively as soon as they meet the water. She stands aside, glancing occasionally at the boys her age, body exclaiming nervousness as she cups her elbows and rocks foot to foot.

Have these kids ever known a world where New Orleans wasn’t flooded or underwater? Twenty-something tourists should have been here throwing beads or throwing up. They should have been stumbling over uneven pavement, and going to historically important bars they didn’t recognize, and throwing bottles at gay couples, or whatever it was kids did these days. They should have been bothering the locals, and there should have been locals, giving readings in Jackson Square and talking about how New Orleans would always make it through. These kids didn’t deserve a world that let everything flood, let everyone drown. Did they know anything about Charleston, Bangladesh, Baltimore—?

Derek’s breath starts to go. He knows the whirlpool will suck him down into a panic attack if he lets it.

He forces the thoughts away before it’s too late, but Zack must have heard the quickening of his breath, because he wraps his arms around Derek and whispers urgently, “Everybody got out. They got everybody out.”

Here. They got everybody out here. The omitted word stings.

Derek pushes Zack away. “I’m fine.”

The girl in pink lipstick glances in their direction, but no one else does. They’re watching the sky, the water, each other—not the old couple in back.

Three weeks ago: Zack had woken late, the arid morning already pressing close, Derek gone on morning errands. An icon lingered in the upper right-hand corner of his vision—Derek had left a note. When he opened it, all it showed was the purchase of two fares to Louisiana and a few associated bookings.

Derek came home later with groceries. He still liked to choose produce by hand.

“I don’t understand,” Zack said. “We haven’t gone diving in ten years.”

Derek said nothing as he transferred stone fruit into an apple-patterned Franciscan bowl. He ran his thumb over the soft spot on a peach and frowned.

Zack flipped through the bookings, as if they might display something different this time. “And New Orleans—we haven’t been back since our honeymoon—”

Zack gave Derek a sober look. He could tell his husband was nervous by the way he turned the peach over and over in his hands.

“Derek,” Zack said, as gently as he could. “Is this about Noah?”

Derek’s whole body flinched. They usually avoided their son’s name. He closed his eyes and steadied himself before setting the fruit in the bowl.

He turned to open the refrigerator. “They’re not refundable.”

Zack said, “You can’t tear your heart out again. I can’t go through it. You can’t go through it.”

Derek said nothing. The refrigerator exhaled a cold breath.

Arguments queued up in Zack’s brain. He’d spent most of his career in hospital administration, and he was trained to come at things from multiple angles. He tried a goal-oriented approach: What do you want from this? How do you think it will help? He tried emotional pleas: I’m worried—it hurts to see you set yourself up for so much pain. He tried guilt: Why didn’t you talk to me first so we could set a plan together? He tried pragmatism: It’s been too long since our last dive. We should take time to train back up before making decisions.

He tried intransigence. “You can’t make me participate in this. I can’t stop you, but I won’t go with you.”

(They both knew this was a lie.)

Finally, when minutes had become hours, in desperation and exhaustion, Zack lost his temper. “Why play around? Why not go straight to Baltimore?”

Derek went small and still.

Zack said, “I can’t believe I said that.”

Derek’s voice was a composed, weary monotone. “It doesn’t matter.”

After that, there was nothing left to say.

They went to bed. They brushed their teeth and put on pajamas and spoke politely in the bathroom. They lay down. Derek cuddled into Zack’s side, and Zack wrapped him in his arms.

Derek digs in his dive bag so he doesn’t have to talk to Zack, or look at the girl with pink lipstick. He feels Zack’s stare, and he knows his husband is trying to figure out whether he is okay or not, and what to do if he isn’t. Zack’s constant solicitous vigilance makes Derek feel more self-conscious, not less, but after everything they’ve been through, he can’t blame Zack for watching.

Derek is grateful for the distraction when the kid from Yale tries to strike up a conversation with the other college-age divers. “Anyone else doing a night dive? I’m going on a ghost tour tonight.”

A boy with blond dreads is, and they fall to talking about ghost stories they’ve heard from other divers. The kid from Yale wants to go see Madame LaLaurie and her tortured slaves, but the blond boy wants to go past the Superdome because he’s read that’s where the best ghosts are.

“And there’s the ghosts who died in the flood,” the blond boy says. “They must be really pissed.”

Zack moves protectively in front of Derek. He repeats his mantra, ostensibly for the kids, but Derek knows it’s really meant for him. “Everyone got out. There was an evacuation.”

The blond boy gives him a condescending look. “You know someone didn’t.”

Zack’s tone doesn’t change, but Derek can hear anger sharpening his syllables. “Real people died in American floods. Show some respect.”

Before things can escalate, the boat’s engine changes pitch. It slows. The dive master calls for everyone to gear up.

Zack shakes his head and makes a noise of self-remonstration. He worries the zipper at his collar. “They’re just stupid kids,” he mumbles.

In a calming tone, Derek says, “I know.”

“They don’t understand they can hurt people, talking like that.” Derek soothes. “I know.”

There’s an old story in Zack’s family about how, when he was six years old, Zack walked up to his uncle who had fought in Vietnam and asked, “How do you protect someone from a bullet?”

Zack didn’t remember doing it, and he didn’t remember the reply. He did remember his mother telling the story over and over again: her Zack, the protector.

That night three weeks ago, after learning about Derek’s plans for New Orleans, Zack had lain awake. He watched the pre-dawn, then the dawn, then the light of morning. Over fifty years, he’d grown to know Derek’s gestures and expressions, his beliefs, his preoccupations, the thoughts he spoke aloud and the ones he signaled with a tightened lower lip and the dark ones he’d later try to laugh off.

Memories lapped at his ankles, of the first eighteen months after Noah’s death when Derek had lost all the extra weight he’d been carrying since they met, all the roundness in his cheeks and softness in his arms, shriveling into himself. He remembered how Derek had slumped, hobbies and friendships wearing away, as he stared for days out of windows at Tucson’s thunderheads. It’s been a long, arduous journey back from that, one that still isn’t done after four years. Zack imagines crashing all the way back down again, imagines how waterlogged years would accumulate, pieces of their lives rotting like wet wood, until they were bloated nothings.

When the restless clock finally turned nine, Zack called their therapist. At their emergency session, she only said, “Derek has made a lot of progress. If he says he’s ready to do this, we should support him.”

Against them both, Zack had no recourse. Over fifty years, he’d also learned that sometimes one’s beloved sets his heart on a path of pain and will not be deterred. Sometimes all one can do is be there and be ready to help afterward.

His voice was heavy as he murmured to himself, “New Orleans. Another good memory gone.” Like Oakland where they raised Noah, and New York City where he sang with his choir at St. Patrick’s, and Houston where he spent two weeks with his grandparents every year, and Minneapolis where he went to college.

Zack sat in their den and began researching the dive.

In the old days, the dive master would have had to take them in a single group she could keep an eye on. Instead, she passes through, making sure she’s connected to each diver’s Lens-Compatible Dive Computer.

Zack and Derek rented LCDCs onshore with the rest of their gear, but a Scandinavian brother and sister don’t have them. The brother coughs up for a cheap, wrist-mounted spare; the sister shrugs and says she’ll just go down with the dive master.

Derek connects the tank to his air hose, and then double-checks Zack’s while Zack double-checks his. He cleans his mask, and feels grateful for the seals they have these days that don’t flood. Sometimes it’s nice living in the future, when it isn’t horrible. Equipment that didn’t feel heavy twenty years ago now drags on Derek’s shoulders. He snaps together a dozen buckles and clips.

While they work, Zack frets. “Try not to get too close to anything. They say they cleared the most dangerous debris before opening the site, but three divers were hospitalized in the past year.”

Zack found this news early in his research on the New Orleans site, and has been repeating some variation of it almost every day since. He does this when he’s worried, fixates on details. As far as Derek can tell, Zack is completely oblivious to it.

“The judge ruled they were being reckless,” Derek says without enthusiasm.

Zack gives his consistent answer. “It proves there’s still dangerous stuff down there.”

Sometimes, Derek privately marvels that a man like Zack, who is brilliant and incisive in any other circumstance, can’t tell that his subtext is running away with his tongue.

At the edge of the boat, masks on and regulators in, Zack gives Derek a last, entreating look. His eyes are full of the question Are you sure? But he has the courtesy not to say it.

Noah: delivered to their arms as a white infant with a mop of dark hair, startled eyes, and a strangely authoritative cry. They’d wanted to name him Devon, but his birth mother had only given him this one thing. It seemed petty to refuse. Noah was the most popular boy’s name the year he was born. Eighty thousand Noahs entering one prediluvian world.

Derek’s ears fill with the sound of his own breathing.

Gravity pulls them down a few feet before their inflated vests draw them back to the surface. They signal the boat they’re okay, clasp hands, and orient themselves for descent.

A message from Zack flashes across Derek’s lens. <<Remember, I love you.>> Zack squeezes his hand. Derek squeezes back.

They pause every few feet to clear their ears. Derek could swear he feels a thrum throughout his body from the signal the LCDC uses to repel large predators, but Zack would say that’s his imagination. Underwater, the neoprene that made Zack so awkward on land sleeks to his muscular contours. Derek could almost mistake him for the boy he’d been at twenty.

They’re somewhere in the French Quarter, but the changed environment makes it almost unrecognizable. Underwater, light disperses reds and distends blues, blotting any vestiges of vividness. Neon markers indicate unsafe areas within the cleared zone. Visibility is poor, clouding into nothing a few body-lengths away.

It’s easy to see why the kids think there are ghosts here. It’s not only stories and history; it’s a quality of the place. Even before it was swallowed by the ocean, Derek has to admit New Orleans felt haunted to him. Life went by in disjunctive vignettes, with emotions and scenery that seemed to fracture moment by moment. It was because of alcohol and giddiness and too much nighttime wandering, but his memories of the city flashed like strobes, from glaring brights to intermittent fluorescents and pink-washed neons and shop windows coughing orange glow onto the asphalt.

Derek and Zack stop, hovering six feet over the drowned street. Their bodies sway with the breath of the ocean as they linger, looking.

Zack taps Derek’s shoulder to get his attention. <<Are you okay?>>

Derek starts his reply, then stops.

Is he okay?

Strangely, impossibly, he is.

It’s shock, isn’t it? It must be shock. For the first eighteen months after Noah’s death, he’d stood at the threshold of hospitalization. How can he feel nothing?

Polar ice sheets. Methane gas pockets. He couldn’t escape the terms that ricocheted like bullets through the news. Worst-case scenario. Experts failed to predict.

He and Zack hadn’t even visited Noah’s apartment in Baltimore before he died. They were busy with their friends and their lives so they sent money for him to fly home instead. He was just renting; they figured they’d go see his place once he’d really settled.

Derek had nothing to imagine when the news came. No way to viscerally understand what had happened. Photographs were no substitute. He needed to know how the city air had smelled when it mixed with oncoming water. He needed to see the place where his son had died, what the color of the carpets was, the color of the walls, the color of the windowsills. After Noah’s death, he’d done nothing but try to imagine the drowning of Baltimore. What he ate was salt, what he heard was roaring, and what he saw was bleach and bones.

Derek spikes himself with thoughts he’s learned not to let through because they always arrow into panic attacks. The worst: Maybe if he’d stayed with his mother, he wouldn’t have died.

Maybe they should have looked at the blue-eyed bundle of him, and seen his grasping hands and brooding eyebrows, and known to send him back where he’d come from. He could have had another forty, fifty years. What could they possibly have given him to make up for that?

The thoughts race their customary track, but his anxiety is only an echo. He’s as still as water eight meters deep.

<<I’m fine.>> Derek tells Zack, but his husband doesn’t seem convinced.

They scull through the water above a side street. Derek doesn’t know which, but Zack might. There’s room for them to swim side by side, fins arcing smoothly through the water. The windows have been carefully stripped, but many stores hold furniture, even some goods.

Derek glimpses something shiny and dives the last couple of meters to street level. Zack follows. It’s a mask, surprisingly well-preserved for being at the bottom of the ocean, still sequined and decorated with brittle, stripped quills.

The store must have been one of those cheap souvenir places. If Derek digs through the junk, will he find key chains and plastic shot glasses? Divers aren’t supposed to go inside the buildings, but the mask has fallen out. Derek shakes it loose from the layer of silt that pins it to the street.

He holds it up for Zack to look at. His husband frowns. Zack points at the mask. The stream of bubbles coming from his regulator moves faster. In confusion, Derek peers at his find.

Zack’s gestures become more urgent. << Get back!>>

Derek instantly withdraws. The mask drops from his gloved fingers. Sequins shine as they fall.

Zack swims between Derek and the storefront. Derek follows his line of sight to a long, skeletal hand.

Zack was always one of the best school athletes growing up. He liked sports—as a relatively quiet boy without much else in common with his peers, it gave him something to do and a way to fit in. His build didn’t lend itself to any sport particularly, but it left him with plenty of options. His favorites were solo—swimming, biking, running—letting his muscles go while he spent time in his head.

Being both quiet and an athlete also kept anyone from noticing that Zack was gay. That meant he could keep people from picking on weaker kids—including the gay ones—sometimes, if he got there at the right time. People knew Zack didn’t like it when they made fun of the disabled class, or the fat cheerleader it was easy to make cry. So they didn’t do it if he was around.

Probably, no one from his high school would have remembered much about Zack, if it hadn’t been for the day two months before graduation when he came back late from an after-school run. As he circled back onto campus, he saw a guy with a handgun crossing the parking lot.

Zack ran him down.

The kid got off a shot by accident. It grazed Zack’s shoulder, but otherwise, he was fine.

Later, it turned out the kid had found out he was failing biology and wouldn’t be able to graduate. He’d gone home, gotten high, and grabbed his grandpa’s gun. On his way back to his teacher’s classroom, he’d stopped to make sure her car was still in the faculty lot, which was when Zack saw him.

At his graduation party, Zack’s mother urged him to tell the story to his uncle, the Vietnam vet. Zack felt both embarrassed and proud of himself as he stood beside his uncle’s chair, leaning down a bit because he didn’t hear well from his left ear.

“I guess I figured out how to protect someone from a bullet,” Zack said.

“Good job,” muttered his uncle, reaching for a handful of pretzels as he watched the muted football game on TV.

Zack was nonplussed by the reaction. “You know, my mother always tells that story? How I asked you how to protect someone from a bullet?”

His uncle looked up, eyes suspicious under heavy brows. “Stop a bullet?” He grunted, a heavy, humorless sound that didn’t seem to be meant for Zack or anyone else. He shoved a pretzel into his mouth. “Want to protect someone, stop the goddamn war.”

In the cloudy water, Zack’s body almost forms a wall between Derek and the shop window. Derek can hardly see past him to the trailing, bony fingers in the mud.

Zack pulls his flashlight from its loop on his vest and shines it down to get a better look. <<There must have been an accident. I’m calling the dive master. We shouldn’t disturb>>—

Zack’s text ends as a mass of mud shifts, throwing more dirt into their faces. His flashlight beam swings loosely for a moment, illuminating flashes of grit and dark water.

It stabilizes as Zack grabs hold again, showing the skeletal hand. It rises up from the ocean floor like a living thing, trailing forearm and elbow. The bones are uncannily articulated. The flashlight suffuses them with a weird, greenish glow.

Something bulky shifts overhead. Zack’s light, shining upward, catches the jut of ribs. Zack reaches for them with his free hand, and the bones fall on him as if attacking.

A glow catches Derek’s attention from below. It’s the skeletal arm, pinned to the street by a clot of debris. The hand waves free, still stretching upward.

Derek had assumed the flashlight was giving the bones an illusory illumination, but in fact, they are glowing. Derek pulls on the hand. With a tug, it disconnects from the wrist. It starts to float upward, but Derek tightens his grip.

Up close, the bones aren’t even fully distinguished from each other. Finger joints are painted on, and the back of the hand is a single piece. He prods the palm. One finger flickers off before lighting again.

<< They’re fake.>> Derek tells Zack. << “You can tell the dive master not to come. It’s a toy filled with glow sticks. Whatever kids use these days for glow sticks.>>Derek releases the hand. It floats upward, its own lamp.

<<It’s the ghost tours.>> Derek surmises. << Glowing skeletons in masks.>>

He looks up. Zack hovers above him, holding the bulk of the fake skeleton—its ribs and spine and trailing femurs. The skull is missing. Zack looks as if he might change attitude in the water and begin a grim waltz.

Derek was the one who got sick, but Zack had the nightmares. They began with the smell of brine—at first a faint whiff, not unpleasant, but soon thickening into a miasma of rotting fish and beached animals. Zack would slowly come into a sense of his body. Floating: arms outstretched, hands and fingers extended, feet moving instinctively to keep him upright. The back of his neck broke the surface. Heat prickled on his face. His nostrils drew humid, salty air into his lungs.

A stillness so potent he could hear it. A silence like buzzing.

Like a stirring alligator that breaks the illusion of a log, the water would change. It would sling its mighty weight against him: walls of water, rocks, and silt. Human-made wreckage bruised and bloodied him—a doorknob punching into his stomach, the uniquely painful shape of an iron on his thigh.

Inexorably, the water rose, one silty inch after another. Zack would flail, rocks and metal slashing his hands. Brine filled his mouth, his nostrils, his sinuses, his throat. He woke choking.

Zack’s doctor diagnosed him with sleep apnea, but the nightmares never fully resolved. He never told Derek what they were about.

Zack’s scream isn’t a sound. His regulator remains in his mouth; he is too well-trained an athlete to remove it. He screams with his whole body, twisting and tearing at the skeleton, trying to crack its deceitful bones.

<<It’s fake, Zack.>> Derek repeats, but he can see the frantic quality of Zack’s movements. Each of his husband’s fists is wrapped around one of the skeleton’s ribs as he tries to crack it in half. Its legs trail beneath it as if treading water.

Part of a rib breaks off. It snags Zack’s sleeve, and Derek murmurs thanks for the wetsuit. If Zack doesn’t stop, something much worse could happen. A hose could get severed.

Bracing himself against shrapnel, Derek swims around his husband, coming in from behind to comfort and restrain him. He repeats himself as he moves, a gentle, steady flood of << Zack, they aren’t real.>>

Zack’s hands open. The broken skeleton moves upward through the water.

<<I know.>>

Three and a half weeks ago, Derek had been having breakfast with a friend when the name “New Orleans” caught his ear. He’d looked over at the next table where a fit, young straight couple were discussing travel plans.

“New Orleans?” he asked.

The boy nodded. His blond ponytail trailed down his back, bright in the sun. “They cleared it out maybe a year, two years ago? You didn’t hear?”

Derek navigated the following conversation automatically. They haven’t dived in ten years; Derek learned how to dive when he was twenty-three; yes, the Great Barrier Reef has changed a lot since then; no, they hadn’t invented warmsuits back when he and Zack dived in Alaska.

New Orleans.

It had been both the first city to go under, and the only one to get everybody out. New Orleans was used to worst-case scenarios. Without their foresight and infrastructure, things would have been much worse.

The other flooded cities weren’t under enough water for diving. It would be a long time before they were opened to visitors, if they ever were.

On the train home, Derek sat with his head leaning against the window, watching the desert pass. With work and therapy, things had been getting better, but most days, Derek still felt his life orbiting around the absence at its center. Sometimes he felt the whole middle of him was gone. If this was the closest he’d ever get to his son’s grave, then he had to go—he had to prove to himself that he could.

Two and a half weeks ago, Zack had come home from therapy in angry silence. Their therapist had seen Derek at his worst. How were they supposed to go through that again? How could they take it? New Orleans. A whole city killed by the ocean. His heart would break.

When news had come about Baltimore, Zack had left work immediately, even though the hospital could have fired him. He didn’t care; he knew that Derek would need him. Derek was tender, nurturing, fragile. He needed someone to take care of him.

Zack sat in the den on the old smoke-gray couch and set his head between his knees. He couldn’t do anything about his frustration, so he had to let it go. He took a deep breath, let it out, then sat straight as he sent his lens an inquiry about diving in New Orleans.

Derek asks Zack: <<How much air do you have?>>

He knows the answer. He checked their LCDC link before doing anything else. Zack used a lot of air with his exertion, but he’s not in danger.

Derek had hoped the act of checking would help call Zack back to himself. Stiffly, Zack shifts, checking his physical gauges before reporting. <<I have enough air. We can keep going.>>

Derek has no intention of letting Zack push himself any further than he already has. <<I already messaged the dive master.>> he says. <<I told her we’re surfacing early.>>

She’d also confirmed Derek’s guess. She hadn’t seen any of the skeletons herself, but she said other dive masters had come back with stories. The ghost tour companies got fined if they were caught, but it was hard to prove which ones were responsible.

<<I love you so much.>> Zack says.

Without tone, it’s hard to tell, but over fifty years, Derek has gotten to know Zack well enough to understand his subtleties. Zack is apologizing. He thinks he’s failed Derek, which breaks Derek’s heart.

<<I love you, too.>> Derek answers.

Derek takes Zack’s hand and runs his thumb over the torn fabric of his husband’s gloves. With his other hand, he reaches upward, making sure their path is clear for ascent.

Their fingers twine. The waters lighten around them as they rise. One day, one of them will say Noah’s name and smile.

RACHEL SWIRSKY is a short story writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Sturgeon Award. She’s twice won the Nebula Award, in 2010 for her novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” and in 2014 for her short story, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2008 and Clarion West in 2005.

THE SEA TROLL’S DAUGHTER

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

1.

It had been three days since the stranger returned to Invergó, there on the muddy shores of the milky blue-green bay where the glacier met the sea. Bruised and bleeding, she’d walked out of the freezing water. Much of her armor and clothing were torn or altogether missing, but she still had her spear and her dagger, and claimed to have slain the demon troll that had for so long plagued the people of the tiny village.

Yet, she returned to them with no proof of this mighty deed, except her word and her wounds. Many were quick to point out that the former could be lies, and that she could have come by the latter in any number of ways that did not actually involve killing the troll, or anything else, for that matter. She might have been foolhardy and wandered up onto the wide splay of the glacier, then taken a bad tumble on the ice. It might have happened just that way. Or she might have only slain a bear, or a wild boar or auroch, or a walrus, having mistook one of these beasts for the demon. Some even suggested it may have been an honest mistake, for bears and walrus, and even boars and aurochs, can be quite fearsome when angered, and if encountered unexpectedly in the night, may have easily been confused with the troll.

Others among the villagers were much less gracious, such as the blacksmith and his one-eyed wife, who went so far as to suggest the stranger’s injuries may have been self-inflicted. She had bludgeoned and battered herself, they argued, so that she might claim the reward, then flee the village before the creature showed itself again, exposing her deceit. This stranger from the south, they argued, thought them all feebleminded. She intended to take their gold and leave them that much poorer and still troubled by the troll.

The elders of Invergó spoke with the stranger, and they relayed these concerns, even as her wounds were being cleaned and dressed. They’d arrived at a solution by which the matter might be settled. And it seemed fair enough, at least to them.

“Merely deliver unto us the body,” they told the stranger. “Show us this irrefutable testament to your handiwork, and we will happily see that you are compensated with all that has been promised to whomsoever slays the troll. All the monies and horses and mammoth hides, for ours was not an idle offer. We would not have the world thinking we are liars, but neither would we have it thinking we can be beguiled by make-believe heroics.”

But, she replied, the corpse had been snatched away from her by a treacherous current. She’d searched the murky depths, all to no avail, and had been forced to return to the village empty-handed, with nothing but the scars of a lengthy and terrible battle to attest to her victory over the monster.

The elders remained unconvinced, repeated their demand, and left the stranger to puzzle over her dilemma.

So, penniless and deemed either a fool or a charlatan, she sat in the moldering, broken-down hovel that passed for Invergó’s one tavern, bandaged and staring forlornly into a smoky sod fire. She stayed drunk on whatever mead or barley wine the curious villagers might offer to loosen her tongue, so that she’d repeat the tale of how she’d purportedly bested the demon. They came and listened and bought her drinks, almost as though they believed her story, though it was plain none among them did.

“The fiend wasn’t hard to find,” the stranger muttered, thoroughly dispirited, looking from the fire to her half-empty cup to the doubtful faces of her audience. “There’s a sort of reef, far down at the very bottom of the bay. The troll made his home there, in a hall fashioned from the bones of great whales and other such leviathans. How did I learn this?” she asked, and when no one ventured a guess, she continued, more dispirited than before.

“Well, after dark, I lay in wait along the shore, and there I spied your monster making off with a ewe and a lamb, one tucked under each arm, and so I trailed him into the water. He was bold, and took no notice of me, and so I swam down, down, down through the tangling blades of kelp and the ruins of sunken trees and the masts of ships that have foundered—”

“Now, exactly how did you hold your breath so long?” one of the men asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

“Also, how did you not succumb to the chill?” asked a woman with a fat goose in her lap. “The water is so dreadfully cold, and especially—”

“Might it be that someone here knows this tale better than I?” the stranger growled, and when no one admitted they did, she continued. “Now, as I was saying, the troll kept close to the bottom of the bay, in a hall made all of bones, and it was there that he retired with the ewe and the lamb he’d slaughtered and dragged into the water. I drew my weapon,” and here she quickly slipped her dagger from its sheath for effect. The iron blade glinted dully in the firelight. Startled, the goose began honking and flapping her wings.

“I still don’t see how you possibly held your breath so long as that,” the man said, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the frightened goose. “Not to mention the darkness. How did you see anything at all down there, it being night and the bay being so silty?”

The stranger shook her head and sighed in disgust, her face half hidden by the tangled black tresses that covered her head and hung down almost to the tavern’s dirt floor. She returned the dagger to its sheath and informed the lot of them they’d hear not another word from her if they persisted with all these questions and interruptions. She also raised up her cup, and the woman with the goose nodded to the barmaid, indicating a refill was in order.

“I found the troll there inside its lair,” the stranger continued, “feasting on the entrails and viscera of the slaughtered sheep. Inside, the walls of its lair glowed, and they glowed rather brightly, I might add, casting a ghostly phantom light all across the bottom of the bay.”

“Awfully bloody convenient, that,” the woman with the goose frowned, as the barmaid refilled the stranger’s cup.

“Sometimes, the Fates, they do us a favorable turn,” the stranger said and took an especially long swallow of barley wine. She belched, then went on. “I watched the troll, I did, for a moment or two, hoping to discern any weak spots it might have in its scaly, knobby hide. That’s when it espied me, and straightaway the fiend released its dinner and rushed towards me, baring a mouth filled with fangs longer even than the tusks of a bull walrus.”

“Long as that?” asked the woman with the goose, stroking the bird’s head.

“Or longer,” the stranger told her. “Of a sudden, it was upon me, all fins and claws, and there was hardly time to fix every detail in my memory. As I said, it rushed me, and bore me down upon the muddy belly of that accursed hall with all its weight. I thought it might crush me, stave in my skull and chest, and soon mine would count among the jumble of bleached skeletons littering that floor. There were plenty enough human bones, I do recall that much. Its talons sundered my armor, and sliced my flesh, and soon my blood was mingling with that of the stolen ewe and lamb. I almost despaired, then and there, and I’ll admit that much freely and suffer no shame in the admission.”

“Still,” the woman with the goose persisted, “awfully damned convenient, all that light.”

The stranger sighed and stared sullenly into the fire.

And for the people of Invergó, and also for the stranger who claimed to have done them such a service, this was the way those three days and those three nights passed. The curious came to the tavern to hear the tale, and most of them went away just as skeptical as they’d arrived. The stranger only slept when the drink overcame her, and then she sprawled on a filthy mat at one side of the hearth; at least no one saw fit to begrudge her that small luxury.

But then, late on the morning of the fourth day, the troll’s mangled corpse fetched up on the tide, not far distant from the village. A clam-digger and his three sons had been working the mudflats where the narrow aquamarine bay meets the open sea, and they were the ones who discovered the creature’s remains. Before midday, a group had been dispatched by the village constabulary to retrieve the body and haul it across the marshes, delivering it to Invergó, where all could see and judge for themselves. Seven strong men were required to hoist the carcass onto a litter (usually reserved for transporting strips of blubber and the like), which was drawn across the mire and through the rushes by a team of six oxen. Most of the afternoon was required to cross hardly a single league. The mud was deep and the going slow, and the animals strained in their harnesses, foam flecking their lips and nostrils. One of the cattle perished from exhaustion not long after the putrefying load was finally dragged through the village gates and dumped unceremoniously upon the flagstones in the common square.

Before this day, none among them had been afforded more than the briefest, fleeting glimpse of the sea devil. And now, every man, woman, and child who’d heard the news of the recovered corpse crowded about, able to peer and gawk and prod the dead thing to their hearts’ content. The mob seethed with awe and morbid curiosity, apprehension and disbelief. For their pleasure, the enormous head was raised up and an anvil slid underneath its broken jaw, and, also, a fishing gaff was inserted into the dripping mouth, that all could look upon those protruding fangs, which did, indeed, put to shame the tusks of many a bull walrus.

However, it was almost twilight before anyone thought to rouse the stranger, who was still lying unconscious on her mat in the tavern, sleeping off the proceeds of the previous evening’s storytelling. She’d been dreaming of her home, which was very far to the south, beyond the raw black mountains and the glaciers, the fjords and the snow. In the dream, she’d been sitting at the edge of a wide green pool, shaded by willow boughs from the heat of the noonday sun, watching the pretty women who came to bathe there. Half a bucket of soapy, lukewarm seawater was required to wake her from this reverie, and the stranger spat and sputtered and cursed the man who’d doused her (he’d drawn the short straw). She was ready to reach for her spear when someone hastily explained that a clam-digger had come across the troll’s body on the mudflats, and so the people of Invergó were now quite a bit more inclined than before to accept her tale.

“That means I’ll get the reward and can be shed of this sorry one-whore piss-hole of a town?” she asked. The barmaid explained how the decision was still up to the elders, but that the scales did seem to have tipped somewhat in her favor.

And so, with help from the barmaid and the cook, the still half-drunken stranger was led from the shadows and into what passed for bright daylight, there on the gloomy streets of Invergó. Soon, she was pushing her way roughly through the mumbling throng of bodies that had gathered about the slain sea troll, and when she saw the fruits of her battle—when she saw that everyone else had seen them—she smiled broadly and spat directly in the monster’s face.

“Do you doubt me still?” she called out and managed to climb onto the creature’s back, slipping off only once before she gained secure footing on its shoulders. “Will you continue to ridicule me as a liar, when the evidence is right here before your own eyes?”

“Well, it might conceivably have died some other way,” a peat-cutter said without looking at the stranger.

“Perhaps,” suggested a cooper, “it swam too near the glacier, and was struck by a chunk of calving ice.”

The stranger glared furiously and whirled about to face the elders, who were gathered together near the troll’s webbed feet. “Do you truly mean to cheat me of the bounty?” she demanded. “Why, you ungrateful, two-faced gaggle of sheep-fuckers,” she began, then almost slipped off the cadaver again.

“Now, now,” one of the elders said, holding up a hand in a gesture meant to calm the stranger. “There will, of course, be an inquest. Certainly. But, be assured, my fine woman, it is only a matter of formality, you understand. I’m sure not one here among us doubts, even for a moment, it was your blade returned this vile, contemptible spirit to the nether pits that spawned it.”

For a few tense seconds, the stranger stared warily back at the elder, for she’d never liked men, and especially not men who used many words when only a few would suffice. She then looked out over the restless crowd, silently daring anyone present to contradict him. And, when no one did, she once again turned her gaze down to the corpse, laid out below her feet.

“I cut its throat, from ear to ear,” the stranger said, though she was not entirely sure the troll had ears. “I gouged out the left eye, and I expect you’ll come across the tip end of my blade lodged somewhere in the gore. I am Malmury, daughter of my Lord Gwrtheyrn the Undefeated, and before the eyes of the gods do I so claim this as my kill, and I know that even they would not gainsay this rightful averment.”

And with that, the stranger, whom they at last knew was named Malmury, slid clumsily off the monster’s back, her boots and breeches now stained with blood and the various excrescences leaking from the troll. She returned immediately to the tavern, as the salty evening air had made her quite thirsty. When she’d gone, the men and women and children of Invergó went back to examining the corpse, though a disquiet and guilty sort of solemnity had settled over them, and what was said was generally spoken in whispers. Overhead, a chorus of hungry gulls and ravens cawed and greedily surveyed the troll’s shattered body.

“Malmury,” the cooper murmured to the clam-digger who’d found the corpse (and so was, himself, enjoying some small degree of celebrity). “A fine name, that. And the daughter of a lord, even. Never questioned her story in the least. No, not me.”

“Nor I,” whispered the peat-cutter, leaning in a little closer for a better look at the creature’s warty hide. “Can’t imagine where she’d have gotten the notion any of us distrusted her.”

Torches were lit and set up round about the troll, and much of the crowd lingered far into the night, though a few found their way back to the tavern to listen to Malmury’s tale a third or fourth time, for it had grown considerably more interesting, now that it seemed to be true. A local alchemist and astrologer, rarely seen by the other inhabitants of Invergó, arrived and was permitted to take samples of the monster’s flesh and saliva. It was he who located the point of the stranger’s broken dagger, embedded firmly in the troll’s sternum, and the artifact was duly handed over to the constabulary. A young boy in the alchemist’s service made highly detailed sketches from numerous angles, and labeled anatomical features as the old man had taught him. By midnight, it became necessary to post a sentry to prevent fisherman and urchins slicing off souvenirs. But only half an hour later, a fishwife was found with a horn cut from the sea troll’s cheek hidden in her bustle, and a second sentry was posted.

In the tavern, Malmury, daughter of Lord Gwrtheyrn, managed to regale her audience with increasingly fabulous variations of her battle with the demon. But no one much seemed to mind the embellishments, or that, partway through the tenth retelling of the night, it was revealed that the troll had summoned a gigantic, fire-breathing worm from the ooze that carpeted the floor of the bay, which Malmury also claimed to have dispatched in short order.

“Sure,” she said, wiping at her lips with the hem of the barmaid’s skirt. “And now, there’s something else for your muckrakers to turn up, sooner or later.”

By dawn, the stench wafting from the common was becoming unbearable, and a daunting array of dogs and cats had begun to gather round about the edges of the square, attracted by the odor, which promised a fine carrion feast. The cries of the gulls and the ravens had become a cacophony, as though all the heavens had sprouted feathers and sharp, pecking beaks and were descending upon the village. The harbormaster, two physicians, and a cadre of minor civil servants were becoming concerned about the assorted noxious fluids seeping from the rapidly decomposing carcass. This poisonous concoction spilled between the cobbles and had begun to fill gutters and strangle drains as it flowed downhill, towards both the waterfront and the village well. Though there was some talk of removing the source of the taint from the village, it was decided, rather, that a low bulwark or levee of dried peat would be stacked around the corpse.

And, true, this appeared to solve the problem of seepage, for the time being, the peat acting both as a dam and serving to absorb much of the rot. But it did nothing whatsoever to deter the cats and dogs milling about the square, or the raucous cloud of birds that had begun to swoop in, snatching mouthfuls of flesh before they could be chased away by the two sentries, who shouted at them and brandished brooms and long wooden poles.

Inside the smoky warmth of the tavern—which, by the way, was known as the Cod’s Demise, though no sign had ever borne that title— Malmury knew nothing of the trouble and worry her trophy was causing in the square or the talk of having the troll hauled back into the marshes. But neither was she any longer precisely carefree, despite her drunkenness. Even as the sun was rising over the village and peat was being stacked about the corpse, a stooped and toothless old crone of a woman had entered the Cod’s Demise. All those who’d been enjoying the tale’s new wrinkle of a fire-breathing worm turned towards her. Not a few of them uttered prayers and clutched tightly to the fetishes they carried against the evil eye and all manner of sorcery and malevolent spirits. The crone stood near the doorway, and she leveled a long, crooked finger at Malmury.

“Her,” she said ominously, in a voice that was not unlike low tide swishing about rocks and rubbery heaps of bladder wrack. “She is the stranger? The one who has murdered the troll who for so long called the bay his home?”

There was a brief silence as eyes drifted from the crone to Malmury, who was blinking and peering through a haze of alcohol and smoke, trying to get a better view of the frail, hunched woman.

“That I am,” Malmury said at last, confused by this latest arrival and the way the people of Invergó appeared to fear her. Malmury tried to stand, then thought better of it and stayed in her seat by the hearth, where there was less chance of tipping over.

“Then she’s the one I’ve come to see,” said the crone, who seemed less like a living, breathing woman and more like something assembled from bundles of twigs and scraps of leather, sloppily held together with twine, rope, and sinew. She leaned on a gnarled cane, though it was difficult to be sure if the cane were wood or bone or some skillful amalgam of the two. “She’s the interloper who has doomed this village and all those who dwell here.”

Malmury, confused and growing angry, rubbed at her eyes, starting to think this was surely nothing more than an unpleasant dream, born of too much drink and the boiled mutton and cabbage she’d eaten for dinner.

“How dare you stand there and speak to me this way?” she barked back at the crone, trying hard not to slur as she spoke. “Aren’t I the one who, only five days ago, delivered this place from the depredations of that demon? Am I not the one who risked her life in the icy brine of the bay to keep these people safe?”

“Oh, she thinks much of herself,” the crone cackled, slowly bobbing her head, as though in time to some music nobody else could hear. “Yes, she thinks herself gallant and brave and favored by the gods of her land. And who can say? Maybe she is. But she should know, this is not her land, and we have our own gods. And it is one of their children she has slain.”

Malmury sat up as straight as she could manage, which wasn’t very straight at all, and, with her sloshing cup, jabbed fiercely at the old woman. Barley wine spilled out and spattered across the toes of Malmury’s boots and the hard-packed dirt floor.

“Hag,” she snarled, “how dare you address me as though I’m not even present. If you have some quarrel with me, then let’s hear it spoken. Else, crab, scuttle away and bother this good house no more.”

“This good house?” the crone asked, feigning dismay as she peered into the gloom, her stooped countenance framed by the morning light coming in through the opened door. “Beg pardon. I thought possibly I’d wandered into a rather ambitious privy hole, but that the swine had found it first.”

Malmury dropped her cup and drew her chipped dagger, which she brandished menacingly at the crone. “You will leave now, and without another insult passing across those withered lips, or we shall be presenting you to the swine for their breakfast.”

At this, the barmaid, a fair woman with blondish hair, bent close to Malmury and whispered in her ear, “Worse yet than the blasted troll, this one. Be cautious, my lady.”

Malmury looked away from the crone, and, for a long moment, stared, instead, at the barmaid. Malmury had the distinct sensation that she was missing some crucial bit of wisdom or history that would serve to make sense of the foul old woman’s intrusion and the villagers’ reactions to her. Without turning from the barmaid, she furrowed her brow and again pointed at the crone with her dagger.

“This slattern?” she asked, almost laughing. “This shriveled harridan not even the most miserable of harpies would claim? I’m to fear her?”

“No,” the crone said, coming nearer now. The crowd parted to grant her passage, one or two among them stumbling in their haste to avoid the witch. “You need not fear me, Malmury Trollbane. Not this day. But, you would do well to find some ounce of sobriety and fear the consequences of your actions.”

“She’s insane,” Malmury sneered, then spat at the floor between herself and the crone. “Someone show her a mercy, and find the hag a root cellar to haunt.”

The old woman stopped and stared down at the glob of spittle, then raised her head, flared her nostrils, and fixed Malmury in her gaze.

“There was a balance here, Trollbane, an equity, decreed when my great-grandmothers were still infants swaddled in their cribs. The debt paid for a grave injustice born of the arrogance of men. A tithe, if you will, and if it cost these people a few souls now and again, or thinned their bleating flocks, it also kept them safe from that greater wrath, which watches us always from the Sea at the Top of the World. But this selfsame balance have you undone, and, foolishly, they name you a hero for that deed. For their damnation and their doom.”

Malmury cursed, spat again, and tried then to rise from her chair, but was held back by her own inebriation and by the barmaid’s firm hand upon her shoulder.

The crone coughed and added a portion of her own jaundiced spittle to the floor of the tavern. “They will tell you, Trollbane, though the tales be less than half remembered among this misbegotten legion of cowards and imbeciles. You ask them, they will tell you what has not yet been spoken, what was never freely uttered for fear no hero would have accepted their blood-gold. Do not think me the villain in this ballad they are spinning around you.”

“You would do well to leave, witch,” answered Malmury, her voice grown low and throaty, as threatful as breakers before a storm tide or the grumble of a chained hound. “They might fear you, but I do not, and I’m in an ill temper to suffer your threats and intimations.”

“Very well,” the old woman replied, and she bowed her head to Malmury, though it was clear to all that the crone’s gesture carried not one whit of respect. “So be it. But you ask them, Trollbane. You ask after the cause of the troll’s coming, and you ask after his daughter, too.”

And with that, she raised her cane, and the fumy air about her appeared to shimmer and fold back upon itself. There was a strong smell, like the scent of brimstone and of smoldering sage, and a sound, as well. Later, Malmury would not be able to decide if it was more akin to a distant thunderclap or the crackle of burning logs. And, with that, the old woman vanished, and her spit sizzled loudly upon the floor.

“Then she is a sorceress,” Malmury said, sliding the dagger back into its sheath.

“After a fashion,” the barmaid told her and slowly removed her grip upon Malmury’s shoulder. “She’s the last priestess of the Old Ways and still pays tribute to those beings who came before the gods. I’ve heard her called Grímhildr, and also Gunna, though none among us recall her right name. She is powerful and treacherous, but know that she has also done great good for Invergó and all the people along the coast. When there was plague, she dispelled the sickness—”

“What did she mean, to ask after the coming of the troll and its daughter?”

“These are not questions I would answer,” the barmaid replied and turned suddenly away. “You must take them to the elders. They can tell you these things.”

Malmury nodded and sipped from her cup, her eyes wandering about the tavern, which she saw was now emptying out into the morning-drenched street. The crone’s warnings had left them in no mood for tales of monsters and had ruined their appetite for the stranger’s endless boasting and bluster. No matter, Malmury thought. They’d be back come nightfall, and she was weary, besides, and needed sleep. There was now a cot waiting for her upstairs, in the loft above the kitchen, a proper bed complete with mattress and pillows stuffed with the down of geese, even a white bearskin blanket to guard against the frigid air that blew in through the cracks in the walls. She considered going before the council of elders, after she was rested and merely hungover, and pressing them for answers to the crone’s questions. But Malmury’s head was beginning to ache, and she entertained the proposition only in passing. Already, the appearance of the old woman and what she’d said was beginning to seem less like something that had actually happened, and Malmury wondered, dimly, if she were having trouble discerning where the truth ended and her own generous embroidery of the truth began. Perhaps she’d invented the hag, feeling the tale needed an appropriate epilogue, and then, in her drunkenness, forgotten that she’d invented her.

Soon, the barmaid—whose name was Dóta—returned to lead Malmury up the narrow, creaking stairs to her small room and the cot, and Malmury forgot about sea trolls and witches and even the gold she had coming. For Dóta was a comely girl, and free with her favors, and the stranger’s sex mattered little to her.

2.

The daughter of the sea troll lived among the jagged, windswept highlands that loomed above the milky blue-green bay and the village of Invergó. Here had she dwelt for almost three generations, as men reckoned the passing of time, and here did she imagine she would live until the long span of her days was at last exhausted.

Her cave lay deep within the earth, where once had been only solid basalt. But over incalculable eons, the glacier that swept down from the mountains, inching between high volcanic cliffs as it carved a wide path to the sea, had worked its way beneath the bare and stony flesh of the land. A ceaseless trickle of meltwater had carried the bedrock away, grain by grain, down to the bay, as the perpetual cycle of freeze and thaw had split and shattered the stone. In time (and then, as now, the world had nothing but time), the smallest of breaches had become cracks, cracks became fissures, and intersecting labyrinths of fissures collapsed to form a cavern. And so, in this way, had the struggle between mountain and ice prepared for her a home, and she dwelt there, alone, almost beyond the memory of the village and its inhabitants, which she despised and feared and avoided when at all possible.

However, she had not always lived in the cave, nor unattended. Her mother, a child of man, had died while birthing the sea troll’s daughter, and, afterwards, she’d been taken in by the widowed conjurer who would, so many years later, seek out and confront a stranger named Malmury who’d come up from the southern kingdoms. When the people of Invergó had looked upon the infant, what they’d seen was enough to guess at its parentage. And they would have put the mother to death, then and there, for her congress with the fiend, had she not been dead already. And surely, likewise, would they have murdered the baby, had the old woman not seen fit to intervene. The villagers had always feared the crone, but also they’d had cause to seek her out in times of hardship and calamity. So it gave them pause, once she’d made it known that the infant was in her care, and this knowledge stayed their hand, for a while.

In the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage at the edge of the mudflats, the crone had raised the infant until the child was old enough to care for herself. And until even the old woman’s infamy, and the prospect of losing her favors, was no longer enough to protect the sea troll’s daughter from the villagers. Though more human than not, she had the creature’s blood in her veins. In the eyes of some, this made her a greater abomination than her father.

Finally, rumors had spread that the girl was a danger to them all, and, after an especially harsh winter, many become convinced that she could make herself into an ocean mist and pass easily through window-panes. In this way, it was claimed, had she begun feeding on the blood of men and women while they slept. Soon, a much-prized milking cow had been found with her udder mutilated, and the farmer had been forced to put the beast out of her misery. The very next day, the elders of Invergó had sent a warning to the crone, that their tolerance of the half-breed was at an end, and she was to be remanded to the constable forthwith.

But the old woman had planned against this day. She’d discovered the cave high above the bay, and she’d taught the sea troll’s daughter to find auk eggs and mushrooms and to hunt the goats and such other wild things as lived among the peaks and ravines bordering the glacier. The girl was bright and had learned to make clothing and boots from the hides of her kills, and also she had been taught herb lore, and much else that would be needed to survive on her own in that forbidding, barren place.

Late one night in the summer of her fourteenth year, she’d fled Invergó and made her way to the cave. Only one man had ever been foolish enough to go looking for her, and his body was found pinned to an iceberg floating in the bay, his own sword driven through his chest to the hilt. After that, they left her alone, and soon the daughter of the sea troll was little more than legend and a tale to frighten children. She began to believe, and to hope, that she would never again have cause to journey down the slopes to the village.

But then, as the stranger Malmury, senseless with drink, slept in the arms of a barmaid, the crone came to the sea troll’s daughter in her dreams, as the old woman had done many times before.

“Your father has been slain,” she said, not bothering to temper the words. “His corpse lies desecrated and rotting in the village square, where all can come and gloat and admire the mischief of the one who killed him.”

The sea troll’s daughter, whom the crone had named Sæhildr, for the ocean, had been dreaming of stalking elk and a shaggy herd of mammoth across a meadow. But the crone’s voice had startled her prey, and the dream animals had all fled across the tundra.

The sea troll’s daughter rolled over onto her back, stared up at the grizzled face of the old woman, and asked, “Should this bring me sorrow? Should I have tears, to receive such tidings? If so, I must admit it doesn’t, and I don’t. Never have I seen the face of my father, not with my waking eyes, and never has he spoken unto me, nor sought me out. I was nothing more to him than a curious consequence of his indiscretions.”

“You and he lived always in different worlds,” the old woman replied, but the one she called Sæhildr had turned back over onto her belly and was staring forlornly at the place where the elk and mammoth had been grazing, only a few moments before.

“It is none of my concern,” the sea troll’s daughter sighed, thinking she should wake soon, that then the old woman could no longer plague her thoughts. Besides, she was hungry, and there was fresh meat from a bear she’d killed only the day before.

“Sæhildr,” the crone said, “I’ve not come expecting you to grieve, for too well do I know your mettle. I’ve come with a warning, as the one who slew your father may yet come seeking you.”

The sea troll’s daughter smiled, baring teeth that effortlessly cracked bone to reach the rich marrow inside. With the hooked claws of a thumb and forefinger, she plucked the yellow blossom from an arctic poppy and held it to her wide nostrils.

“Old mother, knowing my mettle, you should know that I am not afraid of men,” she whispered, then she let the flower fall back to the ground.

“The one who slew your father was not a man, but a woman, the likes of which I’ve never seen,” the crone replied. “She is a warrior, of noble birth, from the lands south of the mountains. She came to collect the bounty placed upon the troll’s head. Sæhildr, this one is strong, and I fear for you.”

In the dream, low clouds the color of steel raced by overhead, fat with snow, and the sea troll’s daughter lay among the flowers of the meadow and thought about the father she’d never met. Her short tail twitched from side to side, like the tail of a lazy, contented cat, and she decapitated another poppy.

“You believe this warrior will hunt me now?” she asked the crone.

“What I think, Sæhildr, is that the men of Invergó have no intention of honoring their agreement to pay this woman her reward. Rather, I believe they will entice her with even greater riches, if only she will stalk and destroy the bastard daughter of their dispatched foe. The woman is greedy, and prideful, and I hold that she will hunt you, yes.”

“Then let her come to me, Old Mother,” the sea troll’s daughter said. “There is little enough sport to be had in these hills. Let her come into the mountains and face me.”

The old woman sighed and began to break apart on the wind, like sea foam before a wave. “She’s not a fool,” the crone said. “A braggart, yes, and a liar, and also a drunk. But by her own strength and wits did she undo your father. I’d not see the same fate befall you, Sæhildr. She will lay a trap.”

“Oh, I know something of traps,” the troll’s daughter replied, and then the dream ended. She opened her black eyes and lay awake in her freezing den, deep within the mountains. Not far from the nest of pelts that was her bed, a lantern she’d fashioned from walrus bone and blubber burned unsteadily, casting tall, writhing shadows across the basalt walls. The sea troll’s daughter lay very still, watching the flame, and praying to all the beings who’d come before the gods of men that the battle with her father’s killer would not be over too quickly.

3.

As it happened, however, the elders of Invergó were far too preoccupied with other matters to busy themselves trying to conceive of schemes by which they might cheat Malmury of her bounty. With each passing hour, the clam-digger’s grisly trophy became increasingly putrid, and the decision not to remove it from the village’s common square had set in motion a chain of events that would prove far more disastrous to the village than the living troll ever could have been. Moreover, Malmury was entirely too distracted by her own intoxication and with the pleasures visited upon her by the barmaid, Dóta, to even recollect she had the reward coming. So, while there can be hardly any doubt that the old crone who lived at the edge of the mudflats was, in fact, both wise and clever, she had little cause to fear for Sæhildr’s immediate well-being.

The troll’s corpse, hauled so triumphantly from the marsh, had begun to swell in the midday sun, distending magnificently as the gases of decomposition built up inside its innards. Meanwhile, the flock of gulls and ravens had been joined by countless numbers of fish crows and kittiwakes, a constantly shifting, swooping, shrieking cloud that, at last, succeeded in chasing off the two sentries who’d been charged with the task of protecting the carcass from scavengers and souvenir hunters. And, no longer dissuaded by the men and their jabbing sticks, the cats and dogs that had skulked all night about the edges of the common grew bold and joined in the banquet (though the cats proved more interested in seizing unwary birds than in the sour flesh of the troll). A terrific swarm of biting flies arrived only a short time later, and there were ants, as well, and voracious beetles the size of a grown man’s thumb. Crabs and less savory things made their way up from the beach. An order was posted that the citizens of Invergó should retreat to their homes and bolt all doors and windows until such time as the pandemonium could be resolved.

There was, briefly, talk of towing the body back to the salt marshes from whence it had come. But this proposal was soon dismissed as impractical and hazardous. Even if a determined crew of men dragging a litter or wagon and armed with the requisite hooks and cables, the block and tackle, could fight their way through the seething, foraging mass of birds, cats, dogs, insects, and crustaceans, it seemed very unlikely that the corpse retained enough integrity that it could now be moved in a single piece. And just the thought of intentionally breaking it apart, tearing it open and thereby releasing whatever foul brew festered within, was enough to inspire the elders to seek some alternate route of ridding the village of the corruption and all its attendant chaos. To make matters worse, the peat levee that had been hastily stacked around the carcass suddenly failed partway through the day, disgorging all the oily fluid that had built up behind it. There was now talk of pestilence, and a second order was posted, advising the villagers that all water from the pumps was no longer potable, and that the bay, too, appeared to have been contaminated. The fish market was closed, and incoming boats forbidden to offload any of the day’s catch.

And then, when the elders thought matters were surely at their worst, the alchemist’s young apprentice arrived bearing a sheaf of equations and ascertainments based upon the samples taken from the carcass. In their chambers, the old men flipped through these pages for some considerable time, no one wanting to be the first to admit he didn’t actually understand what he was reading. Finally, the apprentice cleared his throat, which caused them to look up at him.

“It’s simple, really,” the boy said. “You see, the various humors of the troll’s peculiar composition have been demonstrated to undergo a predictable variance during the process of putrefaction.”

The elders stared back at him, seeming no less confused by his words than by the spidery handwriting on the pages spread out before them.

“To put it more plainly,” the boy said, “the creature’s blood is becoming volatile. Flammable. Given significant enough concentrations, which must certainly exist by now, even explosive.”

Almost in unison, the faces of the elders of Invergó went pale. One of them immediately stood and ordered the boy to fetch his master forthwith, but was duly informed that the alchemist had already fled the village. He’d packed a mule and left by the winding, narrow path that led west into the wilderness. He hoped, the apprentice told them, to observe for posterity the grandeur of the inevitable conflagration, but from a safe distance.

At once, a proclamation went out that all flames were to be extinguished, all hearths and forges and ovens, every candle and lantern, in Invergó. Not so much as a tinderbox or pipe must be left smoldering anywhere, so dire was the threat to life and property. However, most of the men dispatched to see that this proclamation was enforced instead fled into the marshes, or towards the foothills, or across the milky blue-green bay to the far shore, which was reckoned to be sufficiently remote that sanctuary could be found there. The calls that rang through the streets of the village were not so much “Douse the fires” or “Mind your stray embers” as “Flee for your lives, the troll’s going to explode.”

In their cot, in the small but cozy space above the Cod’s Demise, Malmury and Dóta had been dozing. But the commotion from outside, both the wild ruckus from the feeding scavengers and the panic that was now sweeping through the village, woke them. Malmury cursed and groped about for the jug of fine apple brandy on the floor, which Dóta had pilfered from the larder. Dóta lay listening to the uproar, and, being for the most part sober, began to sense that something, somewhere, somehow had gone terribly wrong, and that they might now be in very grave danger.

Dóta handed the brandy to Malmury, who took a long pull from the jug and squinted at the barmaid.

“They have no intention of paying you,” Dóta said flatly, buttoning her blouse. “We’ve known it all along. All of us. Everyone who lives in Invergó.”

Malmury blinked and rubbed at her eyes, not quite able to make sense of what she was hearing. She had another swallow from the jug, hoping the strong liquor might clear her ears.

“It was a dreadful thing we did,” Dóta admitted. “I know that now. You’re brave, and risked much, and—”

“I’ll beat it out of them,” Malmury muttered.

“That might have worked,” Dóta said softly, nodding her head. “Only, they don’t have it. The elders, I mean. In all Invergó’s coffers, there’s not even a quarter what they offered.”

Beyond the walls of the tavern, there was a terrific crash, then, and, soon thereafter, the sound of women screaming.

“Malmury, listen to me. You stay here and have the last of the brandy. I’ll be back very soon.”

“I’ll beat it out of them,” Malmury declared again, though this time with slightly less conviction.

“Yes,” Dóta told her. “I’m sure you will do just that. Only now, wait here. I’ll return as quickly as I can.”

“Bastards,” Malmury sneered. “Bastards and ingrates.”

“You finish the brandy,” Dóta said, pointing at the jug clutched in Malmury’s hands. “It’s excellent brandy, and very expensive. Maybe not the same as gold, but . . .” and then the barmaid trailed off, seeing that Malmury had passed out again. Dóta dressed and hurried downstairs, leaving the stranger, who no longer seemed quite so strange, alone and naked, sprawled and snoring loudly on the cot.

In the street outside the Cod’s Demise, the barmaid was greeted by a scene of utter chaos. The reek from the rotting troll, only palpable in the tavern, was now overwhelming, and she covered her mouth and tried not to gag. Men, women, and children rushed to and fro, many burdened with bundles of valuables or food, some on horseback, others trying to drive herds of pigs or sheep through the crowd. And, yet, rising above it all, was the deafening clamor of that horde of sea birds and dogs and cats squabbling amongst themselves for a share of the troll. Off towards the docks, someone was clanging the huge bronze bell reserved for naught but the direst of catastrophes. Dóta shrank back against the tavern wall, recalling the crone’s warnings and admonitions, expecting to see, any moment now, the titanic form of one of those beings who came before the gods, towering over the rooftops, striding towards her through the village.

Just then, a tinker, who frequently spent his evenings and his earnings in the tavern, stopped and seized the barmaid by both shoulders, gazing directly into her eyes.

“You must run!” he implored. “Now, this very minute, you must get away from this place!”

“But why?” Dóta responded, trying to show as little of her terror as possible, trying to behave the way she imagined a woman like Malmury might behave. “What has happened?”

“It burns,’’ the tinker said, and before she could ask him what burned, he released her and vanished into the mob. But, as if in answer to that unasked question, there came a muffled crack and then a boom that shook the very street beneath her boots. A roiling mass of charcoal-colored smoke shot through with glowing red-orange cinders billowed up from the direction of the livery, and Dóta turned and dashed back into the Cod’s Demise.

Another explosion followed, and another, and by the time she reached the cot upstairs, dust was sifting down from the rafters of the tavern, and the roofing timbers had begun to creak alarmingly. Malmury was still asleep, oblivious to whatever cataclysm was befalling Invergó. The barmaid grabbed the bearskin blanket and wrapped it about Malmury’s shoulders, then slapped her several times, hard, until the woman’s eyelids fluttered partway open.

“Stop that,” Malmury glowered seeming now more like an indignant girl child than the warrior who’d swum to the bottom of the bay and slain their sea troll.

“We have to go” Dóta said, almost shouting to be understood above the racket. “It’s not safe here anymore, Malmury. We have to get out of Invergó.”

“But I’ve done killed the poor, sorry wretch,” Malmury mumbled, shivering and pulling the bearskin tighter about her. “Have you lot gone and found another?”

“Truthfully,” Dóta replied, “I do not know what fresh devilry this is, only that we can’t stay here. There is fire, and a roar like naval cannonade.”

“I was sleeping,” Malmury said petulantly. I was dreaming of—”

The barmaid slapped her again, harder, and this time Malmury seized her wrist and glared blearily back at Dóta. “I told you not to do that.”

“Aye, and I told you to get up off your fat ass and get moving.” There was another explosion then, nearer than any of the others, and both women felt the floorboards shift and tilt below them. Malmury nodded, some dim comprehension wriggling its way through the brandy and wine.

“My horse is in the stable,” she said. “I cannot leave without my horse. She was given me by my father.”

Dóta shook her head, straining to help Malmury to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too late. The stables are all ablaze.” Then neither of them said anything more, and the barmaid led the stranger down the swaying stairs and through the tavern and out into the burning village.

4.

From a rocky crag high above Invergó, the sea troll’s daughter watched as the town burned. Even at this distance and altitude, the earth shuddered with the force of each successive detonation. Loose stones were shaken free of the talus and rolled away down the steep slope. The sky was sooty with smoke, and beneath the pall, everything glowed from the hellish light of the flames.

And, too, she watched the progress of those who’d managed to escape the fire. Most fled westward, across the mudflats, but some had filled the hulls of doggers and dories and ventured out into the bay. She’d seen one of the little boats lurch to starboard and capsize, and was surprised at how many of those it spilled into the icy cove reached the other shore. But of all these refugees, only two had headed south, into the hills, choosing the treacherous pass that led up towards the glacier and the basalt mountains that flanked it. The daughter of the sea troll watched their progress with an especial fascination. One of them appeared to be unconscious and was slung across the back of a mule, and the other, a woman with hair the color of the sun, held tight to the mule’s reins and urged it forward. With every new explosion the animal bucked and brayed and struggled against her; once or twice, they almost went over the edge, all three of them. By the time they gained the wider ledge where Sæhildr crouched, the sun was setting and nothing much remained intact of Invergó, nothing that hadn’t been touched by the devouring fire.

The sun-haired woman lashed the reigns securely to a boulder, then sat down in the rubble. She was trembling, and it was clear she’d not had time to dress with an eye towards the cold breath of the mountains. There was a heavy belt cinched about her waist and from it hung a sheathed dagger. The sea troll’s daughter noted the blade, then turned her attention to the mule and its burden. She could see now that the person slung over the animal’s back was also a woman, unconscious and partially covered with a moth-eaten bearskin. Her long black hair hung down almost to the muddy ground.

Invisible from her hiding place in the scree, Sæhildr asked, “Is the bitch dead, your companion?”

Without raising her head, the sun-haired woman replied. “Now, why would I have bothered to drag a dead woman all the way up here?”

“Perhaps she is dear to you,” the daughter of the sea troll replied. “It may be you did not wish to see her corpse go to ash with the others.”

“She’s not a corpse,” the woman said. “Not yet, anyway.” And as if to corroborate the claim, the body draped across the mule farted loudly and then muttered a few unintelligible words.

“Your sister?” the daughter of the sea troll asked, and when the sun-haired woman told her no, Sæhildr said, “She seems far too young to be your mother.”

“She’s not my mother. She’s . . . a friend. More than that, she’s a hero.”

The sea troll’s daughter licked at her lips, then glanced back to the inferno by the bay. “A hero,” she said, almost too softly to be heard.

“Well, that’s the way it started,” the sun-haired woman said, her teeth chattering so badly she was having trouble speaking. “She came here from a kingdom beyond the mountains, and, single-handedly, she slew the fiend that haunted the bay. But—”

“—then the fire came,” Sæhildr said, and, with that, she stood, revealing herself to the woman. “My father’s fire, the wrath of the Old Ones, unleashed by the blade there on your hip.”

The woman stared at the sea troll’s daughter, her eyes filling with wonder and fear and confusion, with panic and awe. Her mouth opened, as though she meant to say something or to scream, but she uttered not a sound. Her hand drifted towards the dagger’s hilt.

“That, my lady, would be a very poor idea,” Sæhildr said calmly. Taller by a head than even the tallest of tall men, she stood looking down at the shivering woman, and her skin glinted oddly in the half light. “Why do you think I mean you harm?”

“You,” the woman stammered. “You’re the troll’s whelp. I have heard the tales. The old witch is your mother.”

Sæhildr made an ugly, derisive noise that was partly a laugh. “Is that how they tell it these days, that Gunna is my mother?”

The sun-haired woman only nodded once and stared at the rocks.

“My mother is dead,” the troll’s daughter said, moving nearer, causing the mule to bray and tug at its reigns. “And now, it seems, my father has joined her.”

“I cannot let you harm her,” the woman said, risking a quick sidewise glance at Sæhildr. The daughter of the sea troll laughed again and dipped her head, almost seeming to bow. The distant firelight reflected off the small curved horns on either side of her head, hardly more than nubs and mostly hidden by her thick hair, and it shone off the scales dappling her cheekbones and brow, as well.

“What you mean to say is that you would have to try to prevent me from harming her.”

“Yes,” the sun-haired woman replied, and now she glanced nervously towards the mule and her unconscious companion.

“If, of course, I intended her harm.”

“Are you saying that you don’t?” the woman asked. “That you do not desire vengeance for your father’s death?”

Sæhildr licked her lips again, then stepped past the seated woman to stand above the mule. The animal rolled its eyes, neighed horribly, and kicked at the air, almost dislodging its load. But then the sea troll’s daughter gently laid a hand on its rump, and immediately the beast grew calm and silent once more. Sæhildr leaned forward and grasped the unconscious woman’s chin, lifting it, wishing to know the face of the one who’d defeated the brute who’d raped her mother and made of his daughter so shunned and misshapen a thing.

“This one is drunk,” Sæhildr said, sniffing the air.

“Very much so,” the sun-haired woman replied.

“A drunkard slew the troll?”

“She was sober that day,” said Dóta. “I think.”

Sæhildr snorted and said, “Know that there was no bond but blood between my father and I. Hence, what need have I to seek vengeance upon his executioner? Though, I will confess, I’d hoped she might bring me some measure of sport. But even that seems unlikely in her current state.” The troll’s daughter released the sleeping woman’s jaw, letting it bump roughly against the mule’s ribs, and stood upright again. “No, I think you need not fear for your lover’s life. Not this day. Besides, hasn’t the utter destruction of your village counted as a more appropriate reprisal?”

The sun-haired woman blinked and said, “Why do you say that, that she’s my lover?”

“Liquor is not the only stink on her,” answered the sea troll’s daughter. “Now, deny the truth of this, my lady, and I may yet grow angry.”

The woman from doomed Invergó didn’t reply, but only sighed and continued staring into the gravel at her feet.

“This one is practically naked,” Sæhildr said. “And you’re not much better. You’ll freeze, the both of you, before morning.”

“There was no time to find proper clothes,” the woman protested, and the wind shifted then, bringing with it the cloying reek of the burning village.

“Not very much farther along this path, you’ll come to a small cave,” the sea troll’s daughter said. “I will find you there, tonight, and bring what furs and provisions I can spare. Enough, perhaps, that you may yet have some slim chance of making your way through the mountains.”

“I don’t understand,” Dóta said, exhausted and near to tears, and when the troll’s daughter made no response, the barmaid discovered that she and the mule and Malmury were alone on the mountain ledge. She’d not heard the demon take its leave, so maybe the stories were true, and it could become a fog and float away whenever it so pleased. Dóta sat a moment longer, watching the raging fire spread out far below them. And then she got to her feet, took up the mule’s reins, and began searching for the shelter that the troll’s daughter had promised her she would discover. She did not spare a thought for the people of Invergó, not for her lost family, and not even for the kindly old man who’d owned the Cod’s Demise and had taken her in off the streets when she was hardly more than a babe. They were the past, and the past would keep neither her nor Malmury alive.

Twice, she lost her way among the boulders, and by the time Dóta stumbled upon the cave, a heavy snow had begun to fall, large wet flakes spiraling down from the darkness. But it was warm inside, out of the howling wind. And, what’s more, she found bundles of wolf and bear pelts, sealskins and mammoth hide, some sewn together into sturdy garments. And there was salted meat, a few potatoes, and a freshly killed rabbit spitted and roasting above a small fire. She would never again set eyes on the sea troll’s daughter, but in the long days ahead, as Dóta and the stranger named Malmury made their way through blizzards and across fields of ice, she would often sense someone nearby, watching over them. Or only watching.

CAITLI’N R. KIERNAN is the author of fifteen science fiction and dark fantasy works, many comic books, and more than two hundred published short stories, novellas, and vignettes. They are also the author of scientific papers in the field of paleontology and is a research associate and fossil preparator at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan’s most recent novel is Tindalos Effect; Comes a Pale Rider is their seventeenth collection. They are a four-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and have been honored with the World Fantasy Award twice. Kiernan is also the recipient of the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Locus Award.

AND IF THE BODY WERE NOT THE SOUL

A. C. WISE

Ro shoulders the courier bag, leaving the bike chained at the entrance to the Zone. Even here, at the edge, dampness permeates—the air green like a receding tide. The pavement is patchwork. Brick and stone shows through tears in the asphalt, wounds no one bothered to heal once the aliens moved in, once it was clear humans would never move back into the neighborhood and it became the Zone.

Weeds grow in the gaps, flourishing in the damp. Ro places each boot carefully, avoiding the puddles reflecting sodium streetlights. On either side of the street, buildings stand with their doors shuttered against the gathering twilight. Some are ragged against the emerging stars, top layers blown away, evidence of the violence that emptied the neighborhood, made it unfit for human habitation, and eventually turned it into the Zone. But close to the ground, the world is still whole. If Ro doesn’t look up, it’s as though nothing has changed.

Except the Zone is haunted by waiting. The sense of impermanence is palpable—like the refugee camps and shanty towns of the early century, the ones the government planned to empty after the last great flood, or hurricane, but never did. The Zone was meant to be a way station, a temporary solution until the Immies (the word tastes dirty even in Ro’s mind, hateful, ugly, but there isn’t a better one because the aliens have never given the humans their true name) could be fully integrated into life on Earth. And yet . . .

Ro shrugs against the weight of emptiness and broken promises. At least Xal’s light is still on, welcoming. A bell over the door jangles; stepping inside, Ro can’t help smiling at this incongruously human touch. It’s like the shelves behind the glass counters, crammed floor to ceiling with human knick-knacks and oddities no Immie could possibly want, and no human would come here to buy. Charming, but sad in a way, too. Lonely.

It takes Ro a moment to pick out Xal’s form against the crowded shelves. Today, Xal’s flesh is the color of sand. It reminds Ro of the fish that disguise themselves from predators by lying flat against the ocean floor. There are variations, tiny glints of light. It is brown only in the way pigeons are simply gray, full of tones unseen until it is pointed out they were there all along.

“Hi.” Ro sets the courier bag on the counter—this time full of gamboling ceramic kittens—and places the delivery slip on top.

Xal doesn’t respond, which isn’t unusual for an Immie, only for Xal. Ro hesitates. Payment is stacked neatly on the counter, as always. Perhaps Xal simply doesn’t want to talk. Ro turns, hiding disappointment.

::Tone—Plea/Imperative: Ro. Wait.::

Xal’s voice is changeless, only the tone-statement betraying the edge of panic. There are no human or even humanlike features to convey pain. But now that Ro looks closer, it is written in the restless knotting of limbs hanging beneath the bulk of Xal’s body.

Ro steps forward. Xal shifts, flickering in and out. Barely visible one moment, then sharply outlined the next. Sinuous lines gleam damp, twisting through a host of colors Ro can’t begin to name. Ro’s breath catches. There, an extra wetness, almost hidden by the tangled lines, a gash leaking fluid, smelling of salt.

“What happened?”

::Tone—Statement/Fear: An accident.:: Ro hears hesitation in Xal’s tone; in a human, it might sound like a lie. ::Tone—Statement/ Honesty: An attack. In the human district, not far over the line. Just looking.::

Colors roll; Xal fades in and out again.

“You were attacked?”

::Tone—Affirmative/Sorrow: Yes.::

“What can I do to help? Is there someone I can call?”

::Tone—Alarm/Negative: No.::

“Okay.” Ro holds up their hands, palms out, hoping Xal will understand the human gesture and feeling helpless.

Xal’s body clenches, shuddering, furling tight around the wound. A sound like keening, like an in-drawn breath, like music, traces Ro’s jaw and spine. Then the sound stops and Xal unfolds, becoming more solid.

The wound already looks less, but still, a tremor ripples out from Ro’s center. Disgust. Ro clenches teeth against the reaction, a reflexive hatred for the uselessness of all flesh. It isn’t fair; Xal is wounded, Xal needs help, and this isn’t the time. And yet the bone-achingly physical reaction remains, rooted in the very thing causing the revulsion. Flesh. Ro shudders, stepping closer to the counter as if to step away from skin, from muscle, leaving disgust behind.

::Tone—Statement/Sincere: The pain is less. Ro. Thank you for staying.::

A limb uncurls, a jerky, reflexive motion as though Xal is not entirely in control yet. It brushes Ro’s hand, braced against the countertop. A new sound, a new quality of pain, laced with surprise. Xal draws back, but not before the touch sparks—a snap like an electric shock and a taste like lemons.

A scream locks in Ro’s throat. A sensation of dislocation without motion. A space of falling or flying, existing between the moment of contact and Xal’s touch withdrawn. Ro blinks away patches of violet light until the shop comes back into focus, bracing for a horror that never comes.

The lightness of Xal’s touch, unlike anything human. Ro lets out a breath, coming back to center.

Xal’s limbs are knotted in a new pattern now, anxious.

::Tone—Statement/Fear: Ro. Apology. Pain was not intended.::

“No. I . . .” Ro’s breath—ragged—calms, but not fast enough. “It didn’t hurt. I don’t . . .”

Flying. Falling. Ro struggles to process the sensation of Xal’s limb, solid yet ephemeral. The memory of the touch remains, like a lost tooth wanting to be probed. It is a moment of slipping out from under the weight of skin and bones, of being somewhere else, yet wholly here.

Ro tries to draw back from the sensation, but there is nothing to withdraw from.

::Tone—Query/Fear: Not hurt.:: Xal’s voice again. Ro’s mind thrums to an absence, reaching again for revulsion where there is none.

“No. I should just . . . I’m sorry.”

Ro turns, bell jangling. The green scent of the streets is an assault, the slickness underfoot designed to trip uncareful steps. Even the shorter buildings lean in, edges all jagged. They outline an empty space, something that cannot be defined.

On the edge of hyperventilation, Ro bursts out of the Zone. Leaving the bike behind, leaving everything. Not questioning the source of the fear, just running. Then stopping, leaning against a building, a stitch lacing between two ribs.

“Ro?”

Ro looks up, blinking, human buildings and a single figure resolving. Audra slows her bike, dropping one foot to the pavement. The courier satchel at Audra’s hip is empty; Ro remembers the bag left with the delivery in Xal’s shop, the bike chained to a post at the entrance of the Zone.

“Are you okay? You look like you’re about to faint.”

“I . . .” Ro falters, tries again. “Something happened.”

“What?”

There are no words. Only lemons and the snap of electricity. Ro rubs the spot Xal touched, chasing ghosts.

“Come on.” Audra swings her leg over the courier bike, twin to the one Ro left behind. A tilt of her chin indicates the café across the street, glowing warm in the twilight. “We’re getting some tea into you. My treat.”

Audra keeps a space and silence between them. Ro is grateful. But Audra’s gaze still slides in Ro’s direction, questioning. Inside the café, Audra pushes a cup of tea across the table.

“What happened?”

“I was making a delivery to Xal.” Ro hesitates, seeing an expression of distaste Audra is not quick enough to hide. “Xal was attacked, outside the Zone.”

The muscles between Ro’s shoulder blades tense, waiting for Audra to ask what an Immie was doing outside the Zone. But the question doesn’t come, and Ro swallows guilt at putting venom in Audra’s mouth before continuing.

“Xal was hurt and . . . accidentally touched me.”

Audra’s eyes widen. Small fingers of panic tap at Ro’s ribs from the inside. Xal’s tone-statements make things so much simpler. With Audra, Ro is lost. Is she jealous? Angry?

At last year’s office holiday party, Audra drunkenly tried to kiss Ro. They had only known each other a short time, and so it was Ro who mumbled apologies and made the effort to explain.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’m not. . . I don’t really date. I don’t like. . . And there, the explanation faltered. Because what could Ro say that Audra would understand? Audra was wholly comfortable in her skin, more so than anyone Ro had ever met. She dated men and women in equal numbers; affection—casual and intimate—came to her as naturally as breath. She drank the world in through her fingertips and remained thirsty for more.

So how could Ro explain a hatred of touch, of flesh? The discomfort of even having a body, let alone one identifying with a single, narrow gender and responding to others sexually?

How could Ro explain it then? How can Ro explain it now? How that night, Ro hadn’t fled, but had remained horrified. How this night, Ro had fled, but wasn’t disgusted.

Audra shakes her head. Amazement? Ro still can’t tell. Xal’s touch was accidental; would emphasizing that help? Audra has been kind, understanding; Ro doesn’t want to see Audra hurt, but the gulf between them is so vast.

Audra wraps her hands around her mug. Steam rises between them. She does not look at Ro.

“So what happened?”

“It tasted like lemons. And it was like being somewhere else.”

“Xal tasted like lemons?”

“No. I mean. I don’t know. Haven’t you ever smelled something and had the taste hit you at the same time? I’m explaining it badly.”

“No.” Audra draws the word out. She looks at her hands, her expression guarded, like she wants to say more, but silence stretches between them.

Ro feels a pang of guilt, threaded with a flutter of panic, imagining Audra wants to put her hand over Ro’s. A comforting gesture; it’s what Audra would do if she was sitting with anyone else. Ro has seen it, the way Audra leans into their other coworkers—a nudge from her hip to emphasize a joke, a sympathetic hand on an arm, a head, comfortably resting on a shoulder. Even when it isn’t sexual, Audra is so casual with her body; Ro can’t begin to understand it.

“I have to go back for my messenger bag,” Ro says, abrupt, standing.

“But . . .” Hurt flickers in Audra’s eyes, this time unmistakable.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says.

It feels like fleeing again. The phantom of Xal’s touch lingers, but it doesn’t have half the weight of Audra’s gaze. Still, Ro rubs the spot again, pushing out the door. A light drizzle mists the air. Hairs rise on Ro’s arm, catching the moisture. Ro rubs harder, half expecting to see translucence and hollow bones like glass—flesh both there and not there in the aftermath of Xal’s touch.

Instead of going back to the Zone, Ro goes home, climbing three flights to a small apartment, boots heavy on each step. Guilt prickles, and with it, something else. Curiosity.

Ro crosses to the window, touching the glass. It’s cool, and condensation forms a halo in the shape of a hand. Drawing away, there is a space left—defined by the imprint of four fingers, a palm, a thumb. And in the place of flesh, droplets of water cling to the window, heavy with the light and shimmering like stars.

Nerves flutter in Ro’s stomach. The memory of rain glistens on the bike, still chained at the Zone’s entrance. Ro brushes fingertips over the metal frame in passing. Never has the walk to Xal’s shop seemed longer. Never has the jigsaw of uneven pavement, brick, and stone seemed such an impediment.Ro tries to think of anything written or said about physical contact between humans and Immies, but comes up empty. If it’s done, it’s a private thing. Does everyone taste lemons, feel the snap of electricity? The Immie community is so small. Maybe Ro is the first, the only one.

But who is there to ask? The other couriers don’t travel into the Zone. Scarcely any humans do. Ro has never seen another human walking the shattered streets. Which makes the kitschy human ornaments crowding the walls in Xal’s shop even sadder.

Ro pauses, wondering if Xal has ever made a sale, if the shipments Ro regularly delivers ever leave the shop again, or only sit there gathering dust.

Why, Ro wonders. Aliens came to their world. Shouldn’t people be excited, curious? But they don’t seem to be. It’s not fear exactly, but more a way of not seeing, Ro supposes. Turning a blind eye to what is inconvenient, uncomfortable. Like the government pretending the Zone is only temporary. Like the refugee camps that never empty. Like racial tension, poverty, homophobia. If the problem is ignored long enough, perhaps it will simply go away.

Ro pauses before pushing open Xal’s door; the bell jangles. The courier bag, now empty, waits on the counter. And Xal waits behind it, limbs no longer bunched in pain, but held inward, careful, betraying tension. Ro’s throat is dry; it takes a moment to get the words out.

“How are you feeling?”

There’s no sign of the wound. Ro can’t tell whether it’s healed completely, or whether Xal is simply hiding it. Limbs fold and unfold, a rippling effect unsettling the first time Ro saw it. Now it’s almost comforting.

Today, Xal is gray-green, but with shades of violet. Ro thinks of sea anemones, rocks grown over with lichen, algae stirred by gentle waves.

::Tone—Relief/Query: Unhurt, now. Are you well.::

Ro nods.

“I’m sorry for running out yesterday. It’s just . . .” Trying to explain things to Audra was awkward enough. They share common language, context.

“I forgot my bag.” Ro points; it is a cowardly change of subject, but safer ground.

Ro touches the bag, but makes no move toward the door. Xal seems watchful, even without visible eyes. But what else? Hurt? Confused? Ro is suddenly aware of standing stiff, one arm crossed to hold the opposite elbow, lips parted as if to speak. Flesh again—bodies speaking a language Ro can’t understand. It’s all so useless. So . . .

“I want you to touch me again.” The words come in a rush too quick for regret. Heat suffuses cheeks, another betrayal, and Ro almost flees.

But the shop bell stays silent. Ro’s boots remain planted on the floor.

“I mean if . . . it didn’t hurt you? If . . . if it’s okay.”

Pulse beats under jawline, at wrists and elbows. Xal furls and unfurls, the there and not there-ness coming across as deliberation, physically rolling and weighing the request.

::Tone—Hesitation/Query: It does not hurt. Why do you want this.::

“I don’t know.”

It’s the most honest answer Ro can give. A paradox blooms, a strange, fractal bruise centered at the site of Xal’s last touch. It spreads outward, re-writing Ro’s hardwired code. Ro wants this. No, Ro needs this.

“What was it like for you?” Ro’s eyes slide closed; it’s easier to speak this way, even if it means having to ignore the extra weight of tears just starting to frost lashes. “I don’t want to impose, is what I mean. I don’t normally like . . . But this was different. I tasted lemons.”

The ache is physical—a desire to step off the edge, precisely because it is unsafe, unknown. There are blank spaces defined by broken buildings, by the ghost of a handprint. They are defined by lack—not by something missing precisely, simply by something not there. They are possibility, made manifest.

In that brief moment, Ro had the sense of Xal’s touch being like the ideal of falling into the night sky, being weightless and rushing so fast between stars their light draws blood. That paradox bruising Ro’s skin—the contradiction of making the unknown known and erasing the infinite possibility—is too attractive.

“I can’t explain.” Ro’s throat aches around the inadequacy of words.

A heartbeat. A space of silence. Eyes open. Ro consciously remembers to breathe. Xal is watchful, even without eyes. There is the same sense of consideration in the roiling movements, colors flickering, limbs furling and unfurling.

::Tone—Statement/Uncertainty: It is curious. No other humans come here. To touch would be to know more.::

Ro lets out a rush of breath.

“You’re sure?”

::Tone—Anticipation/Fear: The store is closed.::

At first, Ro doesn’t understand. Then Xal touches a switch and the lights dim, leaving only the faint glow of emergency lighting. Understanding crashes in: This is agreement, consent. Xal is giving them privacy.

::Tone—Anticipation/Fear: Ro. Put your arm on the counter.::

Ro hesitates only a moment, breathes out, then rests both arms, wrist up, on the glass. In the dimness, Xal is both easier and harder to see. Red light from the emergency exit sign traces contours and makes flesh the color of water over gray-green stone glow.

Ro tries not to flinch, pressing arms against the countertop to keep from shaking. Xal’s . . . arm? Leg? Is there a human word for it? Extends slowly, waits the space of a heartbeat, then surrounds Ro’s flesh, passing through and into it.

The shop tilts. A scent like violets and seaweed, like gunpowder, fills the air. There is no weight to Xal’s touch, yet pressure builds in Ro’s bones. A sense of fullness pushing outward, but without pain.

Xal flickers, slow, slow, fast, slow, unfolding, folding, turning. There and not there. Ro feels it too, absent and present, within the shop and elsewhere. An elsewhere that cannot be described.

Part of Ro reaches for something to anchor to in the here and now—long division, the names of past presidents, a list of capital cities. The larger part spins outward, spiraling from a weightless center, out through rings of stars, arms flung wide against the dark. Fragments of unknown worlds tumble past. Everything is vast and Ro is small and for a moment the sense of it is crushing.

“No.” Ro jerks back, the word slipping out.

::Tone—Query/Concern: Ro. Are you hurt.::

Xal’s shop snaps back into focus. Ro crashes back into a body too small to hold the sense of stars, and their loss is just as terrible as their presence.

“I’m . . .” A ragged breath. Ro places a hand over the skin Xal touched; it is solid, real. Colors ripple across Xal, the salt-scent in the room intensifying.

::Tone—Shame/Sincerity: Apologies. I did not mean to cause pain.::

“No. You didn’t. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . .”

Under the salt-scent, the smell of violets and gunpowder. Ro’s flesh prickles, as though swept by a cool breeze; the hairs rise. A sense of pressure, reaching, but never quite arriving, haunts the space between Ro’s bones. It isn’t desire—that’s too simple a word, too human. But there is wanting, need unfulfilled.

“I want to try again. Please.”

::Tone—Statement/Confusion: You were hurt.::

“No. It didn’t hurt. I was just scared. But I want to try again.” Ro’s pulse thumps, arms trembling as they are pressed against the counter once more. “Please?”

Color and movement speaks doubt as it rolls across Xal’s flesh— storm clouds, and the scent of oncoming rain. Dust—Ro can almost taste it. The same doubt fills Ro, but it can’t end here. Ro reaches after something to keep the moment from slipping away, and lands on Xal’s curiosity.

“What did you feel?”

::Tone—Statement/Uncertainty: Sunlight. A plank of wood. Many planks of wood. Water. Sunlight on water. The sensation of limbs in water. Smoke and charcoal.::

Hesitation between Xal’s words, searching for concepts to capture such simple, human things. The memory comes rushing back to Ro, sitting on a dock at the lake, toes trailing in the water, a grown up grilling hot dogs in the background and the air filling with shrieks as other children dove and splashed in the water. A slice of childhood, pulled through Ro’s skin and transferred into Xal’s mind through touch.

“You saw my memories?”

More hesitation, then, ::Tone—Agreement/Affirmative: Yes.::

The information makes Ro’s head swim. Could it work both ways? An alien childhood, if there is even such a thing, slipping into Ro’s skin. There’s so much Ro doesn’t know about Xal, about the Immies in general. The need to know is overwhelming.

Ro looks to where Xal’s eyes would be on a human, trying to communicate need. The absence of Xal’s touch is a pressure as great as the touch itself. It’s only a matter of quality, of flavor—not better, or worse, just different.

Xal reaches out again. A sigh, a musical tone so unlike the sound of pain from the night before traces the length of Ro’s spine, the curve of Ro’s jaw. Touch.

A needle, a thread draws through Ro’s skin, stitching it with the light of the universe. The taste of bitter greens, the feel of velvet, the scent of wood smoke. Ro’s mind substituting human concepts for unimaginable things. Nebulae bloom against Ro’s closed eyes.

“Oh.” The word escapes in a breath. Language and thought failing. Space simultaneously narrows to the point of contact between them, and expands beyond calculation.

“Oh.” There are no other words. “Oh.”

Again and again as the world spins away from them and Ro flies and falls.

“Hey.”

Ro turns toward Audra’s voice, still holding the coffee pot. The scent of it, just on the edge of burnt, fills the small courier office above the shed where their bikes are racked.

“Careful. You’re going to spill.” Audra points, and Ro starts, realizing the coffee is perilously close to the edge of the mug.

Even before the first sip, Ro is shaky, nerves taut and singing.

“Sorry.” Ro replaces the coffee pot, sips scalding heat.

“Are you okay?” Audra frowns. “You look exhausted.”

Ro doesn’t remember returning to the apartment last night, only waking in a tangle of sheets this morning, eyelids sticky, limbs heavy. The world keeps wanting to slide away; the edges of Ro’s vision glimmer with light, like a migraine coming on, only without pain.

“Any new jobs come in since yesterday?” Ro asks instead of answering Audra’s question.

Even seen peripherally, Audra’s concern is clear. There are no mirrors in Ro’s apartment, but Ro imagines the shadow-bruises of sleeplessness, improperly combed hair.

“A few.” Audra hands over the clipboard before pouring her own mug of coffee. Her knuckles are white, gripping the handle. It is a gesture of restraint; Ro has seen it before. If Audra doesn’t anchor herself to her mug, she will reach out a comforting hand to touch Ro’s arm.

Evasion tastes as sour as a lie. Audra only wants to help, but what can Ro say? Audra might understand, but she might as easily be hurt. She might think Ro is sick, wrong for wanting this inexplicable thing, and that would be unbearable. It’s not that kind of desire, but it’s too hard to explain. There are no words for what it is, at least none that Ro knows.

“Mind if I take the Thayer Street drop?” Ro’s voice cracks.

The sound is covered with more sips of coffee—too quick. The heat doesn’t help the flush coming to Ro’s cheeks. The truth must be written everywhere on Ro’s skin, the evidence of Xal wrapped around and through, highlighting the translucence of bones, hollowed like glass.

Ro is clattering down the stairs to the bike shed almost before realizing it.

“Ro!” Audra follows, and Ro isn’t quick enough—fingers shaking and clumsy—to strap the package to the back of the bike and leave before Audra blocks the door.

“What happened?”

Ro doesn’t answer. Can’t. Tears sting, hot and bright, but don’t fall.

“Ro.” Audra’s voice is soft. She weaves between the bikes, comes within a few inches of Ro, and reaches out. But at the sharp intake of breath, she stops, her fingers falling short of brushing Ro’s wrist.

“Sorry. I forgot.” Audra looks down, then back again. The hope in her eyes is crushing.

Ro shifts, putting the bike between them, and feels guilty doing so.

“I went back to see Xal.” Ro swallows, gripping the bike.

Audra’s eyes widen, drawing light from the gaps where the door of the shed doesn’t quite fit. All the darkness in them reminds Ro of falling through the stars. There is a sound that isn’t quite a sob, and it takes Ro a moment to realize its source.

“Are you hurt?”

Ro gives a shake of the head, slight, but easier than words.

“What happened?”

Ro’s lips press tight, fighting the sense of being overwhelmed without understanding its source. The loneliness of being trapped in a single body with its weight of flesh—Ro has always known it, but until feeling the alternative offered by Xal, it was bearable. Now the world is open, a wound no amount of thread can stitch closed.

Audra’s fingers circle Ro’s wrist, insistent this time. Ro’s mouth flies open, but Audra’s grip tightens.

“Please. I want to understand.”

The need to touch is written clearly in Audra’s eyes, as clear as Ro’s desire to pull away. Ro lets out a shuddering breath, doesn’t move. Pulse beats between them, in Audra’s fingertips, in Ro’s wrist. Maybe this is a language Audra can read; maybe Ro doesn’t need to say anything at all.

Audra exhales, letting go, and Ro’s pulse falls back into a regular rhythm. How can Xal’s touch soothe, being so alien, while Audra’s induces only panic? Most of the world would consider it wrong, broken. But Ro knows it isn’t. There is no weight to Xal’s touch, no expectation.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says, and at the same time, Audra says, “I’m sorry.”

Breath and silence fills the shed. They look at each other across the bike between them. The light coming through the gap around the door shifts, leaving Audra’s face in shadow, stealing the illusion of stars from her eyes, but catching sylph-like in her dark curls.

Ro’s chest tightens. There are no words that won’t make things worse. It’s not you, it’s me will only give Audra the impression Ro thinks the opposite.

If human touch could communicate the way Xal’s does, Ro would understand. And maybe, for Audra, it does. Maybe Audra experiences the world through the tips of her fingers, gives away pieces of herself with each touch, but gains just as much in return, never diminishing.

But Ro cannot say this, cannot ask without fear of giving Audra hope. It’s not that Audra has ever pressured Ro, or implied that maybe if Ro just tried it, met the right person, then things would be different. It’s that sometimes, Ro catches Audra looking and thinks there is a glimmer, faint, but wistful—wishing things were different between them—and it makes Ro’s heart ache.

“Tell me,” Audra says, taking a step back, putting more space between them. She crosses her arms, holding herself in, holding back.

Audra isn’t pulling back, running away, and relief surges through Ro. Whatever else they may be, at the core, they are still friends. The realization that Audra won’t leave, won’t shun, no matter what, brings a surge of emotion. It’s almost like love, vast and complicated, but even the thought of the word comes thick with ghosts—meanings and expectations layered upon it by all the lips that have spoken it before. Ro pushes it away and, halting, tries to explain. Audra listens, never interrupting.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Ro asks, needing to hear the words aloud, needing to taste them in order to let them go.

“No.” Audra’s tone is firm, but she looks lost as well. Scared. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, okay? Promise me you’ll be careful?”

Audra hugs herself tighter. Ro nods, pressing lips together, tasting salt even without tears. The promise means nothing; they both understand. This is unknown territory, and there is no way to travel it without gathering bone-deep scars.

Sirens shatter Ro’s sleep. Pulse jack-rabbiting, pushing away sweat-tangled sheets and the remnants of a dream, Ro stumbles to the window. The sound is tied to the dream—one of being very far away, but very close, stretched thin, no blood or bone, no muscle, only skin and nerves pulled taut like a sheet over the world.

On the street below, red and blue lights spin in time with Ro’s pulse. A sudden spike of pain. Ro clasps the wound, but there’s nothing there.

Xal.

Pain arcs again, bringing flashes of violence, memories not Ro’s own.

Xal.

Jacket and pants pulled over rumpled pajamas. Feet shoved into unlaced boots. Clattering down three flights of stairs. Ro’s courier bike leans outside the apartment’s outer door. Grabbing it, Ro is gone. Falling. Flying. Pedaling madly into the night, toward the flashing lights.

The whole city is wet, smearing in Ro’s peripheral vision. Two cop cars park askew across the main entrance to the Zone. Ro stops the bike, lets it fall. A knot of people huddle, pointing. The cops struggle with a man whose hands are secured with a plastic zip tie. He thrashes, resisting as they push him toward the nearest car.

“Fucking Immie got what it deserved, slurping and lurking around our streets. They need to fucking stay where they’re told or go the fuck home.”

Light skips off shards of broken glass, blood red and deep blue. The man throws his head back; the cop’s nose makes a sickening crunch as bone connects with bone. Swearing, the cop lets go, but her partner is quick, sweeping the man’s legs and dropping him. The second cop gets a knee in the man’s back, holding him down against the tongue of uneven pavement extending from the mouth of the Zone. The man continues swearing, lips spit-flecked.

“Fucking Immie. I hope it’s dead.”

Ro breaks into a run, ignoring a muffled shout from the cop with the broken nose. The door to Xal’s shop hangs open. Ro nearly slips in slickness trailing across the floor. Xal never made it to the safety behind the counter, and instead lies knotted in front of it, limbs drawn together in the universal language of pain.

There is no hesitation. Ro kneels, folding around and over Xal. Shockwaves of pain radiate outward, but Ro doesn’t let go. Stars spin, razor bright. The smell of matches, freshly-struck; a taste like a battery held on the tongue; the persistent thrum of rain.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Ro repeats the words, trying to stay conscious, trying to soothe. Xal’s pain is overwhelming, an assault of sensation. Lighthouse flash. The taste of apples. Green-wet stone. Stairs spiraling down.

Desperate, Ro tries to pour sensation back into Xal—more childhood memories—introduce a new thread into the loop of feedback flowing between them. But the images keep coming, pounding Ro like fists, like stones. It’s impossible to concentrate. The rasp of wool, black crayons melting in the sun, the taste of cherries. The touch-taste-smell correlation stutters. Xal’s control slips, no longer translating sensations into human terms.

Ro screams. A note, sheer sound, shearing bone from bone, sloughing flesh. Ro’s mind reels, trying to process what there are no words for.

A body—Ro’s, Xal’s, both, shudders. Collapses inward. Spins outward. The rush of wind, hot and dry and wet all at once. The crushing cold between stars. Stretching impossibly thin-fast-long across a cord of silver and all of it is everything all at once. Then, nothing.

Scraps torn from a quilt, broken fragments of a mirror, numb fingers trying to piece them back together and failing. Surfacing. Ro approaches a reflection etched on the underside of waves, surrounded by a distorted view of sky and trees and sunlight on the other side. Lips almost touch lips—reality kissing reflection—then Ro sinks again. A stream of bubbles, like pearls, like laughter, trail behind.

Hands. A voice. Audra’s?

Wheels hum fast through sterile corridors; too-bright lights overhead. Sharp-jabbed needles. Medicine smell. The steady pulse of machines. Then nothing again.

Ro comes back from very far away. The simple task of cracking open an eyelid is monumental. Dry lips part.

“Water?”

A straw touches swollen and bruised lips. Ro sucks greedily until the straw is withdrawn.

“Not too much too fast. The doctors said.”

Ro turns, head even heavier than eyelids. Audra perches in a chair next to the bed, holding the water glass awkwardly in her lap. She looks as though she’s about to cry, or has just stopped.

“I should call the nurse.”

“Wait.” Ro tries to remember—in the haze of moments between then and now, was Audra’s name spoken in answer to the nurses asking if there was someone they should call?

“What happened?” Ro tastes blood from cracked lips.

Audra holds the water out again, automatic.

“The police found you and Xal curled together on the floor. It looked like you’d been beaten to a bloody pulp. They thought you were dead.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Were you attacked?”

“No. Xal was hurt. I . . .”

There is no word for it, but Ro feels one trying to take shape on a tongue not meant for such sounds.

“You have to stop this. Promise me you’ll stay away from Xal.”

“I can’t.” It isn’t what Ro means to say, not meaning to say anything at all.

For a moment, Ro is afraid Audra will storm out, but she only crosses her arms tight around her body.

“Ro, what are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” Ro’s voice cracks. “I really don’t.”

Ro lies back on the pillow, closing eyes before they snap open again.

“Is Xal okay?” It hurts, but Ro turns toward Audra.

“Xal is fine, as far as I know.” Audra stiffens, her tone brittle and sharp.

Hurt shines in her eyes. Her mouth opens, but she closes it again, standing.

“I’ll go get a nurse.”

Audra’s shoes click and silence falls in their wake. Weary and bruised in ways that have nothing to do with skin, Ro curls into a ball, trying to recreate a knot of limbs so woven over and under and through each other they become one.

Ro toys with the hospital bracelet. It’s been three days, and Ro’s wounds have vanished as though they never existed. Still, Audra insisted on riding in the cab back to the apartment, and now perches on the arm of Ro’s battered couch, watchful.

“What exactly did Lena say?” Ro paces to the window.

“She just suggested you might want to take some time off, for your health.”

“And she couldn’t be bothered to tell me in person?”

Ro glances back as Audra shrugs, looking uncomfortable.

“I’m sure she’s just worried. We all are.”

The slope of Audra’s shoulders and the way she studies her feet keeps Ro silent. Don’t shoot the messenger.

“I’m not fired?”

Audra shrugs again. Of course word has spread. Ro declined the opportunity to talk to reporters doing follow-up stories on the attack, but it doesn’t matter. The stories are still out there, painting Ro as a misguided loner, the victim of an alien attack, a pervert. Maybe Lena is right to be wary, the other couriers right to withdraw. All except Audra.

“Come with me,” Ro says.

Audra looks up, alarmed. “What?”

“Come with me to see Xal.”

If others understood what Ro experienced, maybe they wouldn’t be afraid. Maybe things can change. And where better to start with than Audra, living through touch—hand brushed to arm, palm squeezed to palm? Maybe this is something Ro can give Audra, like a gift. Something to bring them closer together in a way that balances both of their needs. And Xal, lonely, hungry for human experience. Ro’s pulse speeds with the thought.

“Please? Trust me?”

Ro knows it isn’t fair. Audra has offered so much, unasked—what right does Ro have to ask this in return? Because there’s no way to explain to Audra without showing her what it is Ro is trying to do.

“Okay.” Audra stands.

“Now?”

“Sure.” Audra’s smile holds an edge of sadness. “Why wait?”

The streets are silent, dusk just starting to fall. They walk with hands in pockets, watching their feet, watching the streetlights increasingly reflected as they draw closer to the Zone. Ro hears the hitch in Audra’s breath as they cross the line.

“It’s okay.” Ro glances back, trying for a smile. “It’s an imaginary border.”

Audra nods, looking sheepish. Ro tries not to hold too tight to the fragile ball of hope, lest it shatter.

The shop bell jangles; behind the counter, Xal unfolds—a gesture Ro interprets as turning to face them.

::Tone—Alarm/Joy: Ro. You are not hurt.::

“Not anymore.”

Xal knots and unknots, an anxious gesture.

“This is Audra, my . . . friend. Is it okay that she’s here?”

::Tone—Formal/Greeting: Audra. Welcome.::

“Hi.”

“I brought her here . . .” Ro falters under the combined weight of Audra and Xal’s attention. “Audra is worried about me. I want her to understand. I thought . . .” Ro tries not to blush, tries not to panic.

Audra comes to the rescue, stepping forward while keeping careful space between her body and Ro’s. Her voice carries a hint of nerves, but not outright fear.

“What happened the night you were attacked?”

::Tone—Statement/Query: It is not fair to be restricted. Why cross the stars to see only one small corner of a different world.::

Ro’s breath catches.

::Tone—Statement/Anger: Your government promises change. We will be free to go where we please. Nothing changes.::

Xal grows, unfolding new dimensions. Ro’s heart trips on the truth of the words, cracking. Again, it is a sensation too big to express, to hold. Human words are all too fraught. Ro needs an anatomy like Xal’s, one to unfold and express everything mere flesh cannot contain.

Audra glances at Ro, eyes shining but cheeks dry. Ro holds her gaze, then nods, heart cracking again. There is understanding in Audra’s eyes, not fear. The way Audra and Xal both watch Ro is like being rewritten—blood and bones, skin and heart. Ro is most surprised by Audra. Humans, it seems, can unfold to reveal new dimensions, too.

Audra pushes her sleeves up and rests her arms on the counter.

“I want to understand.”

Xal flickers, shifting attention to Ro, asking an unspoken question.

Ro’s voice shakes slightly, addressing them both. “It’s okay. It’s safe. No one will get hurt.”

Xal unfurls, encompassing Audra’s arms. Ro releases a breath at the same time Audra sucks one in, sharp, but containing more surprise than pain. It is the sound of plunging into a cold lake on a hot day—pleasure and shock rolled into one.

Audra blushes, the non-colors of Xal rippling across every bit of exposed flesh. The back of her neck is a sunset in deep sea shades; her arms are the color of starlight on a pond. She is there and not there. The scent of cherries and running water leak into the air.

“Can I . . . ?” Ro doesn’t finish the sentence.

Perhaps Ro closes the space, or perhaps Xal and Audra entwined unfold to welcome Ro—a circle, a thread, a knot without beginning or end.

Sparks jump the gap between Ro’s bones, suffusing flesh with light, like an X-ray, only brighter, more beautiful. Ro feels Audra’s body, Xal’s, all three occupying the same space and time. A moment of suffocation, a moment of panic, then everything opens with a smell like just-damp laundry snapping in the breeze. The shop warps, new segments forming like fractals of water freezing into ice.

A pulse beats, not Ro’s own. A sensation belonging to—it must be Audra, because the memory—sharp and present—is so human. A bicycle, fiercely pedaled with bare feet to the crest of a hill before hands and feet are removed. It’s like flying—the glorious, stomach-dropping feeling of the world falling away, the rush of wind, the warmth of light and being suspended beautifully between earth and sky. Ro feels it, filtered through Audra’s flesh; from within, her body doesn’t feel an impossible weight against her bones. Ro understands, viscerally, how Audra revels in being blood, muscle, bone.

“Oh.” Ro wants to dig fingertips into Audra’s flesh, into Xal’s, and hold onto this moment forever. But too soon, the connection is broken.

“Wow.” Audra is the first to step back. “That was . . . intense.”

Her pupils are dilated, her breath fast. Ro steps back as well, chill with a fresh awareness of the space between them. Something in Ro aches to close the gap, but the familiar horror is there as well: it wouldn’t be the same, couldn’t ever be the same, inside this skin.

“You’re glowing.” Audra smiles.

Bits of light dance at the edges of Ro’s vision.

“It’s beautiful.” Audra takes a half step, but stops.

Ro’s throat is closed—thick. Eyes squeeze shut, a deep breath, then Ro looks at Audra again just in time to catch the tail end of disappointment, the smile fading. The back of Audra’s neck blushes, just blood colors now, the deep sea faded as she turns to Xal.

“Thank you.” The faint quiver in her voice might be the aftershock of touch, or something else.

::Tone—Formal/Pleased: You are welcome. Audra. Thank you for sharing memories and experience of your world.::

The ache lessens in Ro’s throat, fading to a sensation more like a bruise than a fresh wound.

“The night you were attacked, the first night, it wasn’t the first time you left the Zone, was it?” Audra’s question surprises Ro.

::Tone—Statement/Truthful: No.::

“How many times?”

Ro grips the counter, watching Audra and Xal. How is it they understand each other so well, so quickly? Or is it only that Ro’s own curiosity blocked out certain aspects of Xal. Or perhaps because Audra is more used to processing sensation, she was less overwhelmed. Now that Ro thinks about it, it’s obvious. How could Xal have been happy—how could any Immie be happy—confined to the Zone? All the times Ro traveled to Xal’s shop, never once thinking Xal might want to leave, experience the wider world. Ro’s skin flushes hot, but neither Xal nor Audra is paying attention.

::Tone—Statement/Truthful: The attack happened the fifth time.:: “Where were you going?” Audra leans forward; Ro leans, too, gravity pulling them both toward Xal’s center.

Concentric rings spread across Xal’s flesh, as though from a dropped stone. Now Xal is the color of moss, of sunlight, filtered through pine trees.

::Tone—Statement/Confidential: Some are patient, but not all. There is a group who would see the Zone change, the border gone.::

“Who?” Both Xal and Audra turn as though they’d forgotten Ro.

::Tone—Statement/Anger: It is a small group. One is in your city government, working to change things from within. But it is too slow. Others would wait. Not all are so patient.::

Not all, Ro thinks. Like Xal, restless, hungry for change.

“Is that why you’ve been leaving the Zone alone? Trying to start fights?” Again, Ro is surprised at Audra’s words, her insight. How willfully blind has Ro been? How much time has been wasted that could have been spent helping?

::Tone—Statement/Defensive: Violence is noticed. It is the quickest way to change.::

“We want to help.” Ro speaks before Audra can, but glances to the side to see Audra’s lips pressed into a thin line. Breath held, waiting for Audra to object, but she does not.

Xal rotates without moving, encompassing both Audra and Ro with eyeless attention.

::Tone—Formal/Request: Will you leave the Zone with me. To meet with my friend in the government.::

“Is that wise?” Audra glances at Ro.

“I think we should do it.”

Audra hesitates, frowning, then shrugs, moving toward the door. Ro hurries to catch up. The air sings between them—Ro, a string pulled taut, thrumming a note of excitement, Audra simply tight, her note as yet un-played.

“You don’t have to do this.” Ro’s voice is low so Xal, following behind, won’t hear.

Audra shakes her head, but doesn’t answer. She keeps her hands in her pockets, gaze fixed on the wet stones.

“Hey!” The shout draws Ro up short, bringing the realization they’ve crossed out of the Zone.

Xal crowds behind them, all three looking toward a knot of men and women emerging from the bar across the street.

“You can’t be here.” One of the men points at Xal.

To Ro’s surprise, Xal slides past them, gathering limbs together the way a human would draw themselves up to stand tall.

::Tone—Fear/Pride: It does not break any laws.::

Of course not; the rules are all unwritten, enforced by silent consent, by looking the other way. Ro’s fingers clench—a body caught between fight and flight, heart pounding.

“Fucking Immie! Get back in the Zone.” Another man joins the first, the rest of the group bunching closer.

“We should go back,” Audra says.

“No.” Ro turns deliberately, walking away from the group, further away from the Zone.

Xal and Audra follow, the weight of hostile gazes tracking them. Fear and hope mix in equal parts. Xal is right—if they spark enough conflicts, people can’t continue to look the other way. A bottle explodes, glass spraying at their feet.

“Keep walking,” Ro murmurs, picking up the pace.

A second bottle flies, higher this time, bouncing off Ro’s shoulder before hitting the ground.

“I’m calling the cops.” Audra pulls out her phone.

Pounding footsteps, then one of the men grabs Ro’s shoulder. Instinct brings Ro’s hands up to break the contact with a shove. The man reels on slick, neon-stained pavement and loses his balance, landing hard. One of the women in the group laughs, nervous, unsteady.

Another projectile glances off Ro’s cheek, stinging. Ro touches the spot and fingers come away wet with blood. Audra whispers into her phone, voice low and urgent. Xal moves again, a solid mass between Ro and Audra and the group of men and women. The man Ro accidentally knocked down gets to his feet, his face red.

For a moment, no one moves. The red-faced man’s fingers curl, his jaw clenched. Ro sees the moment of decision, but isn’t fast enough to shout a warning.

It doesn’t matter. Xal is there, then not. The man’s blow never lands and he stumbles, but keeps his feet this time. One of the women casts about for something to use as a weapon.

“We have to get out of here,” Audra says.

Xal holds a line between the two groups of humans. More people emerge from the bar, some merely curious, others spoiling for a fight.

“We’re about to have a full-blown mob on our hands.” Audra plucks at Ro’s sleeve, not touching flesh.

This time, Ro doesn’t see the moment of decision, or even where the punch comes from. Fist connects with jaw, and Ro hits the ground. Shouts, feet scuffling. Someone yells. Ro looks up in time to see Xal lift one of the men, tossing him away. Xal’s colors and movements speak anger and distress.

A siren cuts through the night, freezing everyone in place. As the cop cars stop, bodies scatter. Ro stands. Audra and Xal move closer, the three of them alone making no attempt to flee as the cops climb from their cars.

“It might be a while, are you sure you wouldn’t . . .” The officer assigned to babysit them glances nervously between Audra and Ro, trying to pretend he doesn’t see Xal at all.

They’re in an empty interrogation room, out of the way. They’ve given their statements, declined to press charges, and been assured no charges are being leveled against them, though the cop delivering the news didn’t look happy about it. He’d looked even less happy when Ro requested sanctuary, using the police station as a safe space to meet with Xal’s friend. Ro credits Audra with charming him into reluctantly agreeing.

“No. We’re fine right here.” Audra smiles sweetly, seeming to enjoy the way Xal’s presence makes the cops uncomfortable, now that the immediate danger has passed.

The officer withdraws, and Audra pours two cups of coffee from the carafe he leaves behind. In the corner, Xal ripples in silence. Ro’s cheek is sore, but the blood has dried and there will be no lasting damage.

But the bruise goes deeper than Ro’s skin. Something has changed, but not changed enough. There has to be more; Ro feels it, the seed of an idea starting to grow. Talking to Xal’s friend is a first step, but they have to push harder if they want real change.

“I want to go to the Immie homeworld,” Ro says, voicing the growing notion in a remarkably even tone. Xal and Audra register surprise— human and inhuman.

“There should be ambassadors on both sides working toward change. You’re right, Xal, violence gets attention, but we can do better than that.”

As the words stop, Ro’s cheeks burn. Said aloud, it sounds ridiculous.

::Tone—Statement/Uncertain: It might be arranged. Humans have never been, but it is not impossible.::

Xal unfolds from the corner, moving closer to the table in the center of the room. Audra puts her hand on the table, near but not touching Ro.

“Ro?”

Ro turns.

“If Xal can arrange it, if it’s possible, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

Audra’s hand moves, not withdrawing, fingers curling in on themselves, a knot of confusion and pain.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says again. And again, words are inadequate. For just a moment, Ro considers bridging the gap, touching the back of Audra’s hand, but it wouldn’t be the same. They shared a moment with Xal, but there’s still too much space between them. Necessary space, space Ro cannot bridge.

“I thought . . .” Audra looks down, studying the table’s faux-wood grain. “Maybe because of what happened . . .”

The lines of her body pull inward. It hurts Ro to look at her, but their truths are too different. Audra must know that.

“I can’t change who I am.” Ro doesn’t look away from Audra, hoping she’ll understand.

One of Audra’s shoulders lifts and falls again. It might be agreement, dismissal, or shrugging off an absent touch.

“If I go, what will you do?” Ro asks.

“I don’t know.” Audra traces circles on the fake wood; Ro can almost feel it through the tips of Audra’s fingers. “We’ll see what happens with Xal’s friend. Maybe I’ll join the cause. Maybe I won’t. I’ll keep working, and life will go on.”

Audra looks up, and her expression does something complicated. Her eyes are bright, but the light in them reminds Ro of reflections glinting off broken glass.

“My life doesn’t begin and end with you, you know.” The edge of a smile touches Audra’s mouth. “I do have other friends. Family.”

The smile becomes a grin. “I like you, Ro. We’re friends. I’ll miss you, but you’re not breaking my heart.”

Ro’s pulse trips. Audra sounds sincere, Ro believes her, but at the same time Ro doesn’t have enough experience to differentiate the temporary sting of rejection from something deeper. Maybe if Ro leaves and comes back, things will be better. Maybe they can learn a mode of friendship—better, deeper—one that doesn’t cause either of them pain.

Audra’s fingers uncurl. She presses her palm flat against the wood.

“Are you . . .” Ro hesitates, uncertain how to end the sentence: Are you sure? or Are you okay?

Xal shifts closer, body forming a complicated pattern. The colors chasing across Xal’s skin are sunlight, leaves, and the sensation of flying, not falling. Xal unfurls a limb, brushing the back of Audra’s hand with the briefest of touches. The air smells of tangerines and Audra’s eyes widen, as if Xal whispered something just for her.

Audra draws her hand away from the table, pressing it to her heart. Ro feels it, the steady thump of blood and life and warmth inside Audra’s skin. On the table, the ghost outline of Audra’s hand remains. Footsteps approach the door, but Ro’s attention remains fixed on the table. The fading shape, the memory of touch, outlines possibility. It is everything.

A. C. WISE’S work has appeared in publications such as Uncanny, Tor. com, Shimmer, and multiple “year’s best” anthologies. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as being a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, a two-time finalist for the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, is forthcoming in 2021, as is a third short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. In addition to her fiction, she contributes the short fiction review column “Words for Thought” to Apex Magazine and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers.

IMAGD

TRISTAN ALICE NIETO

The lifecycle of the butterfly contains some of the most dramatic examples of holometabolic metamorphosis in the Animal Kingdom. Each developmental stage is highly specialized and distinct. Despite this, some lepidoptera, such as Manduca sexta, have been observed retaining learned behaviors between larval and adult forms, making them one of the only insect species to preserve information across different stages of metamorphosis.

I

Everything to her was color. Her wild, vibrant hair in tight curls that flowed down her back like a river, crashing over her spine and bleeding into her illustrated skin. Lips aflame with blood and passion. Irises that changed color like the ocean, from stormy green to clearest blue. And then there was me, pale as a ghost, bone white hair in strands of silk. The only color in my whole body was the rainbow behind my gray eyes, reflected off the microsensors that replaced my retinas.

These little moments used to mean so much to her. I was always so focused on the day ahead, the greater plan, the deeper meaning, that I often missed these fleeting glimpses of perfection. In the tepid light of winter morning, I stroke her brow, and try to part my sleeping eyelids.

In an instant, as if by some Orphean curse, everything vanishes into shadow. I try to blink my eyes, to reset my vision, but the darkness only becomes harder. Alone in the black I reach out, finding nothing but air and metal.

I don’t know where I am. I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake. I can’t even remember her name.

Something is terribly wrong.

II

For the record, I was against it.

It was called Revivranol. A compound that sent a huge blast of oxygen directly into the brain and shifted the body’s repair mechanisms into warp speed. It extended viability for cardiopulmonary resuscitation from thirty minutes to twenty-four hours, and allowed the body to function in spite of massive physical trauma. The effects, however, were not permanent, typically only lasting around seventy-two hours.

To me, it appeared that the pain of losing so many to the great global pandemic known as the White Death was too much for our collective consciousness to bear. We couldn’t cure it, we could barely treat it, but now we could beat it at its own game.

It was hailed as a miracle—the final frontier conquered by science. But soon the promise gave way to the reality. Those we revived came back broken, cold and distant. Far from the fairytale meeting of love across distant realms, it was usually a confused and perverse confrontation as people tried in vain to locate a tiny fragment of the person they once knew within the talking pile of human remains that wore their lover’s skin.

And so, as has become the defining experience of my generation, hope turned to regret, and Revivranol was soon banned for use in all circumstances.

All but one.

III

“Tabitha?”

It’s phrased as a question, but I don’t know the answer. Am I Tabitha? I think that was my name, but I don’t know if I’m still her.

I ache in the dark, and with every slight move of my body I become aware of a new pain somewhere within me. My wrists grind around, screeching like metal on metal. My throat burns like I’ve swallowed molten glass. My eyes . . .

I try to look around, but my body returns a null response. I twitch the other muscles in my face and feel the pull of fabric below my brow. I reach a hand up and brush the edge of a bandage.

“No, don’t touch it.” A gentle voice takes my hand and leads it back to my side.

“What happened to my eyes?” My words come out as a gurgle; it hurts to talk.

“You don’t have them anymore. They’ve been stolen.” Trying to offer a consolation, the voice adds, “We’re getting a replacement camera on-line for you now.”

I decide not to do anything until I get my sight back. Instead, I sit and listen to tiny sounds as echo around the cold, hard room, like water dripping in a cave. My hand touches metal—the frame of my bed—and it makes me wonder, am I in hospital?

Slowly my visual uplink connects to a tiny wireless camera in the latex-gloved hands of a medical technician. My new remote vision shakes randomly across the room before coming to rest on the bandages around my head, facing up at the fluorescent ceiling. Most remote-eye cameras include projective geometry and gyroscopic data to avoid generating these stomach-churning, dissociative experiences. This cheap, generic camera does not have such measures.

“We’d love to give you some proper replacement eyes, but with biotech as it is these days, we just can’t afford it.”

I painfully twist my head to the left and take in as much of the room as I can.

Bland white and sterile steel. Drains in the middle of the floor. Dim, cold lighting. Tiled walls. A woman in a suit stands beside me. A police officer behind her. The woman’s ID badge hangs from her jacket pocket. Her name, rank, and number zip around to the nauseating shiver of my body. At the bottom I read one critical word: HOMICIDE.

This is not a hospital. It’s a morgue.

IV

Danielle, or Detective Chief Inspector Morris as the laminated card identifies her, is head of the CID homicide department’s Postmortem Division. She explains the procedure to me. If the body is determined to have died within eighteen hours of arrival, Revivranol will be administered and resuscitation commenced.

That’s me. I am the body.

If resuscitation is successful, the case will be transferred to the Postmortem Division, who will conduct interviews with the victim and monitor their state. The autopsy will be delayed until the victim is no longer responsive and can be re-declared deceased.

I ask Danielle how long have I got until the autopsy.

Two or three days. Four at most. It depends.

I ask if she can explain what happened to me. She shakes her head. The only information she can give me is what’s publicly available. I was last seen when I left the university around seven p.m. last night, but someone matching my description was seen near Rowen Street around eleven. I was found early this morning stuffed in a suitcase along the edge of the canal in Camden. Any more than that could taint my recollection of the event and render it inadmissible.

I ask her, what are the chances of me remembering it at all?

“That’s up to you,” she says.

Danielle explains that the revived often experience a disorder known as “fracturing,” where large sections of their memory, abilities, and even identity completely vanish. A person may remember being a painter, but be unable to paint. They might only remember two of their three children. A migrant may lose all connection to their homeland, their native language or sense of culture.

Most commonly, people will have damaged emotional responses. They may find themselves apathetic to things they used to love. Feelings of grief, anger, or happiness will not flow, but turn sharply on and off in response to stimuli.

The best way to deal with it, Danielle says, is to concentrate on what you do know. Focus on the memories that remain, the parts of you that have survived, and play them over in your head, like a mantra. It’s likely that other parts will rise to the surface.

I sift through the broken shards of Tabitha that rattle around inside me, searching in vain for the name of the woman who lay by my side as I drifted in the twilight of consciousness, before I found myself awake in this room. I know the curves of her face, the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair, all to infinite detail, yet I can find no other memories of her. All I can deduce is that she was my everything, my soul mate, and now she is gone. Despite the hurt, I cling to it as the only glimpse of true emotion I have felt since I was revived.

V

I take the secret back exit to avoid the gauntlet of protestors telling me that I have no soul and that my existence is an affront to the divine resurrection. The man who will drive me home calls them the PDM. The Pro-Death Movement.

The frozen night air feels oddly comfortable against my skin. It’s my low body temperature, my driver tells me. Be glad I’m not out here in the middle of summer.

Sitting in the back of the unmarked police car, the driver tells me about a guy who walked into the sea down in Brighton. For the first six hours the Revivranol supplies all the oxygen to your system, which means you don’t need to breathe. So this guy, he just spent the day on the bottom of the ocean. The driver tells me that you can survive almost anything within the first six hours. He met a guy who did a triple speedball and his heart kept ticking like a metronome. One guy went ran into the path of a tornado, just, y’know, for fun.

The driver says that if you can get hold of another Revivranol shot you can extend your life for another day or two. He’s heard stories of Revivranol junkies—undead addicts living in the sewers doing shot after shot to keep themselves alive. But it’s probably bullshit. Eventually, he said, you’d just rot away.

And besides, black market zombie juice is fifty grand a hit. If you know where to get it.

The driver tells me how some people get this “death vision,” like they can see death. They know when someone’s going to die or when something bad is going to happen. Some claim they can even control death—put it off a few hours, or speed it up.

I guess it’s supposed to cheer me up; make me feel special, like I have a superpower or something. But as I take another diamorphine tablet to push back the agony rising through my broken body, I don’t feel special. I feel like an abomination—a testament to the ultimate human need to ruin and destroy everything we see.

Ever since leaving the clinic (their polite euphemism for the morgue), I’ve had Danielle’s voice running through my head. I had asked if I could contact my family, and Danielle produced a note —a message my mother had left when they first called to see if she wanted to be present when they revived me. I didn’t have the courage to read it myself, and asked Danielle if she’d read it to me. Even in its brevity, only a few words from the short note remain in my mind.

“. . . very sorry . . . can’t go through . . . again . . . understand . . .”

It’s a surprisingly common reaction (so she said).

I try to focus on all the things that are clear to me, but one curious thing rises to the surface. It occurs to me that I know everything there is to know about butterflies. I soon recall that I am (or was) a professor of entomology, specializing in lepidopterology—the study of butterflies. The memory returns to me as fact, with no warmth of emotion, but it feels somehow satisfying to have a fragment of my identity back.

The driver tells me he knows people who will pay good money to have sex with me, as long as I’m willing to lie really still. Really, really good money.

VI

Back in my lonely two-room flat, I sit on my bed, feeling my drugged body crumble a bit inside. I take off the camera and in a queasy, spinning movement place it on the bookshelf pointing directly at myself.

I look ridiculous—a frumpy gray blob with a head wrapped in bloody gauze. Carefully, I remove the layers of generic, oversized clothes given to me by the Postmortem Division. I undress as if unwrapping a mummy, like the slightest over-application of force would turn my entire body to sand. As the cloth gives way to skin, I can’t help but catch glimpses of damage; deep red stains against my blue-gray complexion, rope marks like tire-tracks around my wrists.

Slowly, I unwind the bandages from around my neck and eyes. I stand in front of the camera and stare at my own dead body.

The dead body looks back at me. A line of crude Frankenstein stitching runs across her throat like a necklace, reconnecting the carotid artery and sealing the split in the trachea. A cascading pattern of narrow slashes runs down her rib cage, over her left breast, and down her body to her hip. Dark maroon puddles wrap around her dislocated shoulder, from her broken collar bone to her hyperextended elbow. A black line remains where the fractured humerus tore its way through the surface.

I bring the camera closer and focus on the empty eyes. The slashed, sunken holes, sockets filled with blood unceasingly leaking down her face . . . my face.

The wave of abject horror I steel myself against never comes. I stare myself down, daring my mutilated body to reduce me to tears. I concentrate on the splashes of blood red against my white skin, trying to fill my mind with raw, shocking truths about my visual aspect. The only thing that jumps into my head is “Jackson Pollock’s Strawberry Shortcake.”

And for some perverse reason, I burst out laughing.

Butterflies have extraordinary vision. They are tetrachromats, able to see well into the ultraviolet spectrum, and many butterflies also have polarized vision, allowing them to see the direction of light, which they use to locate the sun on cloudy days. The eyes of Graphium sarpedon contain fifteen different types of photoreceptors, more than any other insect.

VII

In the cold twilight of morning, I look out the window across the snowbound city and a vague recollection—a memory of a memory, dusty and cobwebbed—wafts into my mind. I was a child growing up in East London. It was hot and bright all the time. The sun hurt my eyes, my real eyes, even in winter. London seemed to be permanently covered in ash, like a city left in the oven too long. Following a tangent, the word snow brings up a whole album of painful schoolyard memories. Everywhere I went I was “snow white” or “snowy” or “frosty.”

Snow White. White Death.

I remember the plague. Every week someone else got sick. Then every week became every day. Knowing nothing except the most vestigial, observable facts: you got sick, you turned white, you became agitated, then paranoid, then psychotic, and then you died. I remember how the panic was just as virulent as the disease. For the longest time the conspicuous dearth of scientific information was filled with superstition and fear. So I became the plague monkey. Patient Zero. Don’t touch the albino kid, you’ll get the White Death.

There was a point when the pathogen was finally identified. The death rate began to level out and the stigma started to abate. By then I had been forced to change schools twice, had my life threatened, and one time some people broke into my house and covered everything in pig’s blood. And like the disease itself it seems the superstition never really left us.

And in another drifting fragment, years later, I am holding her hand, skin mottled in shades of gray. She looks up at me from her bed, her deep blue eyes a foggy white. My love, wasting away, her pale lips part and she whispers, “It’s not your fault.”

In the cold twilight of morning, her hand slips away between my fingers and takes the memory with it.

VIII

Standing under the shower, I touch my skin, tracing the new lines and ridges of my body. The wounds are divided into antemortem and postmortem, meaning wounds inflicted before and after I died. I can tell the difference because the edges of the postmortem lacerations have not retracted and the blood clots are jelly-like, whilst in antemortem lacerations the blood clots contain platelets and form hard scabs, and the edges pucker and stretch open. This is why the antemortem wounds have stopped bleeding, but the postmortem ones never will. The cuts on my chest are antemortem lacerations. The cuts around my eyes are postmortem. No scabs, no bruises, no swelling, the wounds are as fresh as the moment they were made.

Later on I experience something like hunger, but without a functioning digestive system I can’t eat anything. The advice from the “clinic” was hot tea with sugar. Fluids are essential, and the warm tea will keep my temperature up. Sugars and electrolytes will help to prevent my muscles from going into rigor mortis. Sweets and lozenges supply sugar and keep saliva flowing.

I get a message from a friend. They’re sorry that they haven’t called yet, but they’re still in shock. They don’t know if they’re going to be able to see me like this. They’re really, really sorry.

Everyone’s so fucking sorry.

IX

The camera runs out of battery and I can’t be bothered charging it. It’s so disorientating and nauseating, I’d rather be blind. My old eyes—the ones that were stolen—had LIDAR and 3D telemetry, which would build and remember the exact layout of any space and track any moving objects, essentially allowing you to “see” what was behind you. They had an onboard memory so you could record and store images perfectly. They had gyroscopic data, which increased your sense of balance, and full AR uplink so you always knew where you were and what direction you were facing. They even had projective geometry, where, based on shadows and the direction of the light, your eyes could guess what was around a corner or behind an object. They were great eyes.

My new camera has a zoom. But without any 3D data it just feels like the room is flying towards me.

People were always surprised to learn that being blind was not like having your eyes closed. Blind people don’t just see black. I used to explain it by asking them what they could see beyond the edge of their vision. The answer was usually puzzlement and an objective “but I can’t see anything outside my vision.” Saying it out loud was typically enough to get the point.

Of course, ever since the implants I’m never really blind either. Even with my eyes stolen and the camera off I still see a small black square with soft blue text saying “searching for ocular data stream . . .”

I know all this because three hours ago I decided to properly deactivate my vision systems, but needed to get some hardware from my study to do it. Now I’m sitting on the sofa watching myself, and my house, and the street outside, and a black-and-white cat on my neighbor’s roof all simultaneously via eight remote, drone-mounted, 360-degree cameras whilst steadily burning a hole in my brain.

X

Prior to being dead, I had been planning to release eight autonomous microdrones—tiny robot butterflies—to follow the migrating swarms of Vanessa cardui and collect data on everything from their numbers, flight path, the weather, terrain, and any other information I could grab. I had built every little robo-butterfly to include cameras, gyros, GPS, geometry scanners, ultraviolet, infrared, ultrasonic, and complex AI for navigation and investigation. And because I’m lazy, rather than design a bespoke protocol to communicate with them, I used the same one that my eyes ran on. Which is why when I walked into my office, the visual processor in my brain instantly connected to the eight butterfly drones that had been sitting on my work bench.

From total blindness, the room suddenly lit up in strange patches. I felt the quiet breeze of thirty-six tiny carbon fiber wings flapping frantically around the room. My view suddenly widened and I saw the whole office. Bookshelves full of academic writings and discarded coffee cups. Reams of weather predictions and diverted animal migration paths. And me, standing in the middle like a fish that had suddenly learned how to climb a tree.

And the light. The incredible spectrum of light, seeing the vibrant indigo luster of the ultraviolet, and the curious patterns of polarization. As the drones spread out, the room became alive with visual information that was almost too much to process. The tiny robots flapped about my head, looking in every direction at once. Ultrasonic, gyroscopic, and LIDAR data streamed into my temporal and occipital lobes. It was a rush of information unlike anything I’d experienced before.

Then, as quickly as it had started, the data stream was cut off and the butterflies fell to the ground.

See, it turns out you can’t just feed terabits of data per second into a person’s brain without any consequences. The human visual cortex was never meant to process that amount of information and the overload quite literally blows your mind. So neuro-implants have safety switches on them to keep the data load below brain-exploding levels. At the intensity I was experiencing, it wouldn’t take more than a week before I died from a tiny electrical fire inside my skull.

If I was going to live that long.

Which I am not.

As luck would have it, I happen to know how to access my own firmware and deactivate the safety routine. Thankfully, our brains have no pain receptors, so a small, blinking red circle in the bottom right of my sight was the only warning I had of the impending catastrophic overload.

XI

Sitting down, back on the sofa, the real challenge is just getting used to this absurd new way of seeing. Most unnatural of all is the shift in perspective; understanding and connecting to my own body in the space, when often I can see myself. Having full 360-degree vision is one thing, but it’s the overwhelming wealth of visual information that knocks me down. Being able to see around corners, under tables, behind the fridge, down the road, it’s impossible to describe. The active 3D scan means all the data is placed perfectly into a visual map inside my mind, so I’m never in danger of losing myself in the maze.

During one of its search and identify routines, a lone butterfly locates a framed photograph. It’s of me and her, my lost lover, arm in arm, out on the streets of London. A rush of emotion floods my veins with such sudden intensity that I can scarcely identify it. Is it love? Loss? Heartbreak? Nostalgia? I don’t know, and I soon am up in the room, searching through it, desperate to find out more.

Despite practically pulling the place apart, I find very little. An aging flyer for a new café. A small gold crucifix on a chain, which I recognize from her photo. A vaccination card with a string of dates marked off. A silver ring with a peridot stone. A black ribbon and a business card with the name of a doctor based at the Enfield Hospice. The only other thing of mild curiosity I find is a small medical pamphlet entitled “Post-Surgical Care for Transgender Women.”

I flick through the pages but can find nothing to indicate how I came to own it. Was it hers, or mine, or someone else’s entirely? My first thought is to assume it clearly couldn’t be mine, but I’m immediately confronted with a rather awkward question: How would I know? Could it not be one of those many things that had been lost, fractured, from my mind?

At that moment, I become oddly present in my body. I don’t feel transgender, but then again, what does “feeling transgender” even mean? If I had already transitioned, if my body aligned with my gender, what signs other than memories would I have that things were once any different? Reading through the pamphlet, I learn that biotech for trans women is practically indistinguishable from purely organic tissue in both appearance and function. Nanosurgical procedures leave no visible scars. A trans woman’s body is for all intents and purposes unidentifiable as such.

The truth, as I’m forced to accept it, is that I can’t be sure either way.

XII

A few hours later, I’ve reduced the number of active butterflies to two, just for a brief dose of normality (such as it is).

I look at my shaking hands and wonder if I’ve still got any cigarettes in the house. I was supposed to be quitting but, you know.

As I go to send the butterflies out on a search, I notice something: a file tucked away in my visual processor. A memory. Working backwards, I figure I must have been recording it when I was attacked, but my eyes were removed before it could be stored and so it remained—corrupted but intact—in the temporary file buffer of my visual cortex. My curiosity to watch it is slightly faster than my fear of what it may contain, and I instantly regret choosing to play it.

The memory is not like a movie, but like a full hallucination. It sends ripples out through my mind, restoring lost fragments of sound, of taste, of emotion. Darkness creeps in around me and I stumble back into it. I can hear my heart pounding itself against my ribs, trying to tear itself free from the straitjacket within my breast.

I feel pressure across my chest, like an arm, thick and heavy, wrapped around me.

I scream.

And a dirty voice stutters in my mind. “Shhh. Stop fighting.”

And the memory envelops me and carries me away.

XIV

There’s blood on my carpet and I’m all over the floor and there’s blood on my carpet.

I feel like someone pulled a bag of greasy chicken bones out of the rubbish and called it a person. Have I been in formaldehyde all this time? Was I pushed off the shelf?

Stillborn. Flowing, liquid like glass.

I’ve fallen to the floor so many times, most of my joints bend backwards now. I’m like a glass jar pushed off the shelf. Blood and formaldehyde.

My thoughts are copying themselves.

Slowly, I get to my knees. The flutter of butterflies around me is too much to handle right now, so one by one I deactivate them until I’m returned to the safety of darkness.

I try to remember what I was doing before I was dragged down into the sea of past trauma. I sift through the pieces, attempting to let muscle memory guide me but my head is still filled with fear.

Ghost girl is awake.

I fall back on the floor and cry.

And cry.

And cry and cry, crying blood. Crying for hours.

The Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) has one of the largest migratory patterns of any insect, covering a nine-thousand-mile journey from sub-Saharan Africa to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Using a complex system of biomagnetic and solar navigation, millions of butterflies will journey across the earth and back again each year. However, because of the short duration of their life cycle, no single butterfly will survive to make the entire voyage, and in all, it will take six successive generations to complete the migration.

XV

I’ve reached DCI Danielle Morris. She’s unable to answer me right now, but if I’d like to leave my name and a contact number, she, or a member of her department, will return my call as soon as they can.

If it’s an emergency, I should hang up and dial nine-nine-nine.

It’s two in the morning, so Danielle is probably sleeping like a normal, non-dead person.

For the first time since I was revived, I try to remember what it was like to be dead. My memory of dying doesn’t fade out, but breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s impossible to tell if it’s still there or not. Beyond it, there is nothing. No bright light, no angels or astral projections. Thinking back to my life is like remembering a dream. I wonder if I really am Tabitha, or if I’m just someone that’s woken up in her reanimated body. Maybe Tabitha is up in heaven now, kicking back with Maya Angelou and the guy who invented Lego. Maybe I’m just the autopilot.

Staring at the twisted burns around my wrists, I start to wonder about the person who killed me. Who are they? Why did they hate me so much? Did they feel compelled to kill me, like it was out of their control? Was it simply a spontaneous hate crime, or was there a more deliberate, calculated motive? Were they horrified by their own actions? Did they enjoy it?

Bizarrely, whilst I dislike them on principle, I can’t say I feel any real anger or hate towards them. I wonder if that’s a symptom of fracturing, or if it’s simply something our brains were never built to do—have an opinion of the person who murdered us.

Even taking the fracturing into account, I can’t shake the feeling that I should feel something more than mild disappointment at the thought of being dead. I think about all the things I never got to do, all the people and places that I’ll never see again, but it doesn’t stir anything. Perhaps it’s a blessing, perhaps I’m protecting myself from the immeasurable cognitive weight of truly comprehending my own death.

My mind naturally floats back to the one source of emotion I have left—my nameless lover. I stare at her image, her abyssal eyes and bold, crooked smile. It has the quality of the last surviving work of some lost, forgotten master. The one thing I managed to save from my gallery of memories as it went up in flames. I cling to it, yet can’t shake the feeling that I’ve betrayed her by reducing her to a pretty picture. She was once a complete person and this superficial glance, this objet d’art, is all that remains.

Drinking my tea and stretching my cold, constricting muscles, I think about death in the way I understand it now, realizing that we, as a species, have got it all wrong. For millennia, humans have deified death. We’ve exotified it, fetishized it, worshipped it, and feared it, but what we’ve never been able to do is come to terms with the prosaic banality of it.

It’s not a faint cough and soft bowing of the head.

It’s not a whispered last word into the ear of your loved one.

It’s meat and bone and skin and hair. It’s tears and blood and bile and stomach acid. It’s tendons and cartilage. It’s a brain and a heart.

It’s all the things a person isn’t, left to rot and decay.

XVI

Snow crunches under my bare feet, but does not melt. Every step I take I can feel myself becoming more a part of the fog. My muscles feel like old elastic. The skin around my nails is receding and my gums are drying out. Drawing air into my lungs is like smoking metal.

Even in the freezing night, my breath doesn’t cloud anymore.

Somewhere along the way to Rowen Street I dropped the bandage from around my face. I can feel the blood running along my body, down to my knees, dripping from the hem of my dress and making little red stars beside my footprints.

It reminds me of that joke with a dozen punchlines: What’s black and white and red all over? Me. Dead. In the snow. At night.

When I was a child, people would dream of living on this street. Now, the few buildings that are safe to live in are home to those who can barely afford food. I allow a butterfly to venture off. It comes to rest on the windowsill of a collapsing house. Inside, I see a man in threadbare clothes ripping the wood from the walls to keep the fire going. It’s a perfect metaphor for London—the city that ate itself from the inside.

In my brief moment of voyeurism, I in turn feel myself being watched. It stirs within a nervous recollection that tugs at me like a frightened child

I think to myself, “I’ve been watched on this street before.”

“Are you her?” a youthful voice whispers behind me. I instinctively turn toward the sound, then stop, trying to hide my grotesque visage. In front of me, a young girl—ten if she’s a day—stands in the biting cold, watching me. She seems undisturbed by me, which in a way troubles me more.

“There’s a witch who lives on this street. Are you her?”

“No, I don’t think so.” I look at this girl and wonder who takes care of her. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“My mum’s got one of her boyfriends over. I don’t like him.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Without thinking, I take my coat off and wrap it around her. “Here. This should keep you warm. Try not to stay out too late.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No,” I assure her.

“Let me give you something.” She runs across the road and picks a tall flower emerging from the snow in the mud of a once grand yard. She hands it to me, a luscious white blossom with a black star in the center, and somewhere inside I crack a painful smile.

“Thanks.”

The girl wanders off down the street for a moment. She stops immediately and runs back, throwing her tiny arms around me. For the first time that night, I feel the cold. I pat her head, only to have her jump away again and disappear into the night.

I hold the flower up as a butterfly encircles it. It droops down, wilted and desiccated, then slowly shrivels and falls apart in my grasp, as if days were mere seconds. I let it go and it falls to the snow as mulch.

I release my eyes on the wind and turn their gaze to my frozen form. A once-intact dress hangs from my skeletal frame, blood-drenched and in tatters. My white hair like shreds of straw, stained red at the tips. At my feet, a moth lies on its back, kicking its legs in futility.

XVII

Sitting in what was my favorite chair in the dark of the winter morning, I have a dream.

I see myself as an old woman, the last person alive on the face of the Earth. I walk through rows and rows of pale stone blocks standing silent and ominous. There are no more roads, no more cities, just millions of cold marble stelae, stretching to the horizon in all directions. Alone I wander for years until finally I fall to the ground, exhausted and empty. As I lie amongst the monuments and cenotaphs, I see that every stone is covered with small bronze plates, each one bearing a name. I try to read the name before my eyes, but in my dream state, the letters are meaningless. With no one to bury me, I lie there as the world continues around the sun, and my body turns to dust.

From the outer reaches of the real world I hear a curious sound, like metal striking wood. Without the soft buffer of sleep between them, the dream world disintegrates and shoves me directly into waking life.

I hear the knock again. Somewhere in my brain, the right synapses connect and I realize there’s someone at the door. I try to engage a few butterflies scattered randomly around the house, but in my addled state I can’t put much of it together.

Still, I manage to make it to the door, remarking to myself the persistence of whomever has continued to rap for attention. I follow the motions of looking through the peep hole and my head makes a wet slap against the wood.

“Hello?” calls the persistent man.

I open the door, but have to wait a few moments until a butterfly catches up and peeks over my shoulder.

It’s my driver from the other night. He’s been sent to collect me. They’ve been calling me all morning, apparently.

XVIII

Number four looks straight at me.

Straight at me.

I’ve been told to look at all of them, but I can’t take my eyes off number four.

They each step forward, one by one, and speak to me.

“Ghost girl is awake.”

“Ghost girl is awake.”

“Ghost girl is awake.”

“Ghost girl is awake.”

Stop. I scream at them. Stop.

“Are you sure?” I know she knows, but this is how it needs to be done.

“Positive. Number four.”

XIX

Trembling, holding a paper cup sodden with the overflow of hot tea, I try to drink some before it all falls apart in my hands. I wonder if it’s meant to be a metaphor for my life.

Danielle steps out of the office. Before I even look at her, I can tell she has a smile on her face.

“We’ve got him.”

“For sure?”

“In the bag. Forensics is happy, CPS is happy. It’s done.”

“How did you find him?”

“A print of his we lifted from your cheek was in the database. He’s got a record—mostly drug offences with some theft and animal cruelty.”

“So, that’s it? Case closed?”

“More or less, yeah.”

It feels like an anticlimax, but I guess to a detective, a straightforward case is a good case. I wonder if I’d feel better if my death was the crime of the century. The final cryptic clue to a tangled web of deceit and intrigue that shook the nation. Would I be happier right now if my biggest worry was who would play me in the movie?

“Who is he?”

“Henry James Wilson. Fifty-one years old. Suffers from substance-induced psychosis. He’d been living with his mother in Camden, but she said he was rarely at home. We haven’t been able to get much of a statement out of him. He’ll probably be found unfit to stand trial and spend the rest of his life at Broadmoor.”

“Did he say why?”

“Something about snow and ghosts.”

Snow and ghosts. Everything in my life is snow and ghosts.

“You feel sorry for him,” she remarks, pretending like it’s a question.

I sit and examine my feelings properly for this person, exploring myself in way I haven’t really done since I was revived. The truth is I don’t really feel anything for this man. The vague sense of pity I feel seems to stem from a deeper kernel of anger, of disappointment and betrayal. I can’t really tell what I’m angry at. Maybe it’s society, or the system that failed him, failed both of us. Or maybe I’m just disillusioned at the notion of justice—the idea that there’s anything he or Danielle or the entire police force could ever do to make this even remotely fair, let alone right. As if finding him would bring me any kind of satisfaction.

“You look like death warmed up,” she says with a smirk. If I had eyes, the look I’d be giving her right now . . .

“Anyway, you should go home. Leave the rest to us. I’ll get you a ride home.”

Before she can get up, I interject.

“No. I want to speak to him.”

XX

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk.”

“I don’t want to see you.”

“Well, I don’t want to be dead, but . . .”

“Nah, I’ve got representation, real. I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No, no, no, wha—what’s your position, huh? What do you want from me?”

“Like I said, to talk.”

“Look, I didn’t know what I was doing, alright. I was dosed as fuck. I don’t remember zero.”

“You remember me, though, don’t you?”

“You want me to say I’m sorry? Fine! I’m sorry! There, you blissed?”

“Do I look it?”

“Why’re you keening me? What’re all these fucking bugs?”

“They’re my eyes.”

“Your eyes?”

“All the better to see you with.”

“You’re fucking section, Ghostie. You should be locked up.”

“Don’t worry about them, just sit down.”

“Nah, nah, something warped is going on.”

“That’s it. Just sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.”

“Get away from me. Get the fuck away.”

“You think I’m fucking scared of you? You can’t hurt me anymore, Henry James. I am fucking dead! I am a ghost. And I can flatline you quick as I can say your name!”

“Oh fuck.”

“Now sit the fuck down!”

“Okay . . . okay. I’m down.”

“Good.”

“Now what?”

“I want to know why.”

“I told you, I was fucking high.”

“Why me, then?”

“Ahh I don’t know . . . Young lady, late at night, walking alone. Whatever.”

“No. I’ve seen you before.”

“What?”

“Around Rowen Street. I’ve seen you. I only just remembered when I came in here. You were watching me.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I wasn’t just some random person walking alone. You chose me. You were waiting for me. Why?”

“You’re crazy, you’re fucking section. I’ve never checked you
before.”

“It’s because you’ve got the Plague, isn’t it?”

“What? Fuck you! I’m not iced! My blood is red as hell, bitch!”

“It’s in your eyes. I can see it. It’s an early sign, most people don’t know to look for it.”

“Fuck you. This conversation is disconnected.”

“Was it just hate? Is that all it was? Or was it something else?”

“. . .”

“And the Red Witch?”

“What did you say?”

“Who’s the Red Witch, Henry James?”

“There’s no such thing as the Red Witch.”

“Does she talk to you?”

“N . . . no.”

“Is it in your sleep? Or while you’re awake?”

“You can’t hear the Red Witch, Ghostie. Only those with the gift can.”

“What did she promise you?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have the knowledge.”

“School me.”

“. . .”

“I’m tired, Henry James. I’m tired of haunting people. I just want to rest. You owe me that.”

“. . . a cure. She has the power to cure the plague.”

“What’s that to do with me?”

“She told me to bring her your eyes. The albino with rainbow eyes. That’s what she needed. Said they had powerful magicks.”

“So you stole them from me and gave them to her?”

“Yes. She did her magick, but I don’t feel any different.”

“That’s ‘cause it’s bullshit, Henry James! There is no cure.”

“But . . . she promised! She has the power!”

“If but that were true.”

I get up and bang on the door. I hear the gears turn in the lock and Danielle lets me out. Behind me, Henry James howls into the void.

Danielle is telling me how brave she thinks I am, but the truth is I’m shaking. My cells are vibrating at frequencies so high I might turn to vapor. I’m quaking so hard I want to rip myself apart, but not with fear. It’s something else, something I’d almost forgotten.

Rage.

I look at my hands and pry open my own clenched fists. Little rivulets of blood run from the tiny crescents in my palms down to my pointed elbows and all I want to see is more blood. But that isn’t why I’m not listening.

Walking down the corridor, Danielle tells me about various superstitions regarding albinism and the white death. I’ve heard them all before, but that isn’t why I’m not listening.

I’m not listening because I can’t feel my heart beat. I cover my mouth and realize I’m not breathing either. A bit light-headed, I turn to Danielle and try to say, “I don’t feel well,” but whatever sounds I make aren’t words, and I fall back into the dark once again.

Many lepidoptera will not migrate and will instead enter a dormant phase during the colder months. Whilst most will overwinter as larvae or pupae, the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) is one of the only species that has been observed to hibernate as an adult through the winter. It is often one of the first butterflies to emerge as the cold abates, and is often referred to as “the harbinger of spring.”

XXI

My fingers twitch and I wonder how many times I can wake up dead.

One by one, the butterflies come online again, illuminating tiny patches of the morgue. This time, there’s no one here to greet me. I’m guessing they didn’t expect me to come back again.

I put my hand to my heart. After a long wait, I feel a faint throb. My breathing is so shallow it would evaporate in the sun. But I appear to still be alive. More or less.

I wrap a sheet around my naked corpse and stumble through the corridors.

The butterflies explore ahead for me. They locate a white slip in one of the rooms ahead. It’s not mine, but I put it on anyway, watching the fabric go gray and musty as it touches my skin. Soon, I give up trying to find anyone who might know me and I step outside.

Across the parking lot, I see my driver sitting in his car lighting up a joint. I stagger towards him and fall against his window, my head swimming. In a blur I feel myself being lifted into the car and placed on the back seat.

I hear “I gotta call security” and I reach out.

“No . . . no. Need another shot,” I gasp.

“Yeah, no shit. But unless you’ve got fifty grand, I can’t help you.”

“Please . . .”

“Don’t do this to me. I’m just a driver.”

“You said you know a guy . . .”

“What guy?”

“If I’m willing to lie still . . . really, really good money . . .” I hear a pause, then a sigh. The car engine starts.

XXII

If I’m completely, one hundred percent honest with myself—it’s not the worst sex I’ve ever had.

XXIII

The driver jams the auto-injector into my chest and it’s like being brought to life with a bolt of lightning. I kick and convulse all over the back of his cream leather seats, spewing blood everywhere. Gasping and coughing, my heart beats like a machine gun.

And all of reality is turned to stone.

The butterflies come back online. Only five have made it this far with me. I grab hold of anything around me to try and sit up. My muscles are now steel pistons, but my joints can’t quite bear the load. I bend around grotesquely like a puppet with severed strings.

“Jesus, girl. I thought you were dust for sure.”

Gagging on blood I manage to say the word “drive.”

“Drive? Where?”

I spit out a wad of red jelly and scream, “Rowen Street!”

XXIV

Stumbling down the middle of the street on broken legs, in a now-vintage satin slip, dragging a veil of blood through the snow, I must look like a herald of the apocalypse.

Inside me, a thousand anguished souls are screaming from the depths. Every muscle is shaking with fury and bloodlust. Every fluid has turned to brimstone. Every cell in my body hungers for the same thing—to kill the Red Witch. I want to squeeze her soft throat with my bare hands and burn her whole world to a molten pit. I want to drag her down to the center of the sun and crush her to a point before ripping her into subatomic particles and scattering them into deep space.

The rage is so clear and consuming, I never think to ask why. After feeling so empty for so long, its presence feels like a gift.

Pretty soon, I find it. The only house in the street lived in by someone with money. The butterflies surround it, scanning the space, and then find various cracks and gaps, and make their way inside.

My eyes within the house, I see a tall man in a leather jacket by the door, another two in the kitchen. Upstairs a woman with bright crimson hair sits at a computer, surrounded by biotech.

In the pitch of anger, I clench my jaw so hard I hear one of my teeth crack.

I walk straight up to the house and bang on the door. It opens a crack and Leather Jacket peers through the gap, below a taut gold chain.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“My name is Tabitha Dyson. I’ve come to kill the Red Witch.”

“Fuck off before you get into trouble.” Leather Jacket tries to close the door but my hand shoots out like an arrow and jams it open. He gives it a kick but I barely notice the pain. Instead, my broken fingers worm their way backwards like tentacles and undo the latch. I push the door open and step forward.

In the corridor stands Leather Jacket. As I walk into the warm light of the house I drag with me a curtain of death. The man seems to age years for every second he stands frozen, watching me.

And he has a gun.

I think about the girl who hugged me in the street. I wonder how many years that brief moment of empathy has stolen from her life.

Leather Jacket points the gun straight at my chest. I step towards it until the barrel touches the skin. Rust creeps up the dark blue metal.

He pulls the trigger and a bullet explodes through my ribcage and out into the street.

The noise is deafening. I put my hands up to my ears and the world is filled with a high-pitched scream. I shake my head, trying to rattle loose the ringing in my skull.

He tries again, but the gun misfires, the cartridge fizzing away in the cylinder.

He doesn’t even bother with a third shot.

“You can leave now,” I order, “and take your friends in the kitchen with you.” He lowers his gun and two men appear around the corner. They stare for a moment, then swiftly leave past me, muttering blessings to themselves.

The gunshot has alerted the woman to a disturbance and she stands against her door, holding a crowbar.

I stand at the base of the stairs, screaming out to her, spitting blood from my lips.

“The crowbar will not save you, Witch!”

She panics and looks around behind her. She goes to her window and peers out, searching for prying eyes. Up in the corner of her room, she spots a butterfly. A few seconds later I see a crowbar hurtling towards me, then nothing. I let out an audible gasp.

Feeling back in control, she steps out of her room, searching for more butterflies. I panic and set them all to return to me, but one flies too close to her and she takes it out, causing me to stumble. Two manage to return, whilst one gets caught trying to go via the chimney.

I slowly creep up the stairs with a gnawing sense of fear. This woman is clearly intelligent and in her element. I worry I’ve let this sudden rush of bloodlust take me somewhere I am not prepared for. But the fear drains away in the face of a simple truth: This—this suicide mission, this march of death—this is all I have left. This will be my last action on this Earth, even if it ends up meaning nothing.

I allow the addictive fire of rage to flood my body and drive it on. I reach the top and walk up to her door. With a raised fist I pound on the wood and my dead voice screeches out, “I have come to drag you to hell!”

A shotgun blast destroys the door, embedding dozens of small pellets into my chest and face. I stumble back through the splintered air and down a corridor. My last two butterflies get lost on the way, one disappearing under a flurry of wood, the other losing a wing to a stray pellet. I watch through the tiny camera as the fractured door opens, illuminating the Red Witch, double-barreled shotgun in hand. She steps forward and crushes the butterfly under her boot, leaving me in darkness.

“You picked the wrong house to come trick-or-treating to, little ghost!”

I get to my feet, spitting out a few pellets that passed through my cheeks. A long shard of wood has embedded itself into my chest, but I leave it in place. In the darkness I listen for any sound that might help me locate her, but my hearing now has the quality of a toy plastic microphone that’s been shot twice in rapid succession. All I know is she must be back in her room around the corner, as it’s the only explanation for why I haven’t taken a shotgun blast to the head.

Suddenly and inexplicably my vision goes back online. It takes a second but I connect. The image is distant and blurry, but I can see, from the back of her room, the Witch creeping up around the corner, shotgun at the ready. I have just enough time to process this and duck when a violent explosion ruptures the air above me. I dive at the figure in front of me and I take her down onto the floor.

The moment I gain control without, I lose it within.

Kneeling on top of her, I scream at her with my whole body. I bludgeon her with my own bones. I rip and smash and crush her with the fury of a hundred stolen lifetimes. I tear off her fingers as she tries to protect herself. I put out her eye and snap her ribs. I tear the skin from her face. I rip out her collar bone. I am a maelstrom of hatred. I am hell.

Her body lies limp and in pieces. Through the mysterious distant camera I see myself stand up over her. Her face rolls to the side, teeth missing, nose caved in. Twisted, mangled, like an air crash.

I step towards the source of my vision. It becomes apparent to me well before I reach it.

My eyes. She has my eyes. I’m looking through them right now.

I lean forward and take them off the shelf. They float around in their jar, sending ripples through my sight. I scan the room with them taking in the stockpile of biotech around me, and for the first moment since I came through the door, I allow my brain to do its job.

This woman wasn’t a witch. She couldn’t cure the white death, or any of the other outlandish claims she probably made. She clearly didn’t believe in any of that either. She was a Fleshminer—someone who stole people’s biotech implants and sold them on the black market. She used people to do her dirty work. Frightened, disturbed, and vulnerable people, desperate enough to believe anything.

I step back over to her and all I want is for her to die. I think I hear police sirens but can’t tell if they’re coming or going. I sit down amongst the debris and the Red Witch coughs up some blood.

No luck there, then.

Lost in my thoughts, I don’t notice my optical system running the standard uplink procedure. Without any prompting, my visual processor links my brain to the eyes’ onboard data storage and a million visions flood my mind. My gallery of memories. Hundreds of hours, all at once.

All of her.

XXV

I’d seen her around the campus before. She had been trying to get people to sign up for various social groups, but had the look of someone who wasn’t having much luck. It seemed to her that no one wanted to do anything anymore, as if everyone was lost too deep in their own existential crises to engage with the world around them. I had felt sorry for her, that her rare sense of enthusiasm was going to waste in this temple of cynicism, but I’d never had the courage to actually talk to her.

Now here she is, talking to me, telling me to come by the opening of her friend’s café. She had done all the artwork that adorned the walls, she says, and she’d love for me to see it. She hands me a small flyer with the name and address on it, and says she hopes to see me there. And, fighting every instinct to hand it back and run away, I smile back at her and tell her it sounds great.

She drinks her vegan spiced nut smoothie and doesn’t judge me as I ask what the difference is between Assam and Darjeeling. She tells me about her art, her sculpture and her painting. She talks about the importance of preserving human culture in art—in objects that will outlive us—as the population continues to decline. She says every day another culture, another language, another mythology, is lost.

I watch her hands. How her long fingers push the air around as she talks. The drab light of the café turned magical through the facets of a pale green stone set in silver. I feel like a cobra being entranced by the movement of a flute.

She tells me about how, when she was a child, standing on the balcony of a ski resort atop a mountain once considered unsurmountable, she watched the International Space Station burn up in the atmosphere. She remembered how it looked as if someone had slashed through the blanket of night, allowing a searing sliver of daylight to shine through the gap. At that moment, it seemed to her that humanity’s best days were behind us. We no longer had the ability, or the desire, to be explorers. We were now merely caretakers.

She tells me about her family. How she moved down to London from Birmingham to escape her religious zealot mother. How she grew up going to Sunday School, loving Jesus, and looking forward to the rapture. It was only when the rapture actually came that she started to doubt its holy origins. As she talks about her evaporating faith, she fidgets with a small gold crucifix around her neck—the one she’s worn every day for as long as I’ve known her. I ask her about it. She smiles and shrugs, and says, “You never know.”

She tells me I’m beautiful, which causes me to recoil. I tell her I don’t think much of superficial beauty, and that I’m surprised that adhering to some cultural notion of attractiveness is a quality she would value. She looks at me with faint disappointment. She tells me beauty is far from superficial. Beauty, she says, is what makes us human. The defining characteristic of our species is our obsession with beauty. We have an inability to do anything without turning it into an art form. Every great human endeavor, from fire to Mars, has been led by people who became entranced with its beauty. So when she says you’re beautiful, what she really means is “I see in you the essence of human passion—you are art.” I find it hard not to smile.

In another time, she stands beside me in silence. Instructed to wear only bright colors, save for a single black ribbon around the wrist, we look like giant clowns in a tiny model city that is the Trent Park Necropolis. It has been months since I’d been to a funeral, but no one can deny the painful familiarity in the moment, returning to a place we’d all dared to hope we may have escaped. As Bella’s ashes are placed in the tiny vault within the great concrete monolith, I can almost hear the sound of her memory being absorbed into the inconceivable cosmic grief that hangs unspoken above the world.

At the wake, the conversation turns to the vaccine. It had been announced last year to much rejoicing and fanfare, only for us to find out a few weeks ago that, according to several follow-up studies, it was largely ineffective. We all discuss our test results and how none of us, it seemed, had the lucky combination of genetics that allowed the vaccination to work.

Later in the cab, she asks me why I lied. I say I don’t know, but the truth seemed inappropriate. I tell her about my dream—the one I’ve had every night ever since getting my results. I describe myself walking through the Necropolis. The last person alive, alone at the end of the world. I wander amongst the endless stones that cover the face of the Earth, searching for the bronze plate with her name on it. That’s how it is every night—wandering alone, looking for her amongst the dead, forever. She takes my hand and says that she can’t promise never to die. All she can promise is that she won’t allow me to spend every day until then just waiting for it to happen.

She unpacks a box of mine, placing books upon the shelf in her oh-so-particular order. From between the pages of a paperback falls a small pamphlet. She picks it up before I can snatch it from her, and after reading the title she looks up at me. My face tells her more than anything she might find within the pages of the old booklet.

She asks me why I never told her. I’m too ashamed to answer that I was afraid of her reaction, so I make up a water-strength excuse about how it’s not really that important, and I’d rather be defined by other things. Things I’ve worked hard to achieve. Things I’m proud of.

She tells me I should be proud to be trans. That it is an achievement. That just to know it, let alone commit to it, is to confront a core truth of ourselves that most are too inflexible or too terrified to explore. I tell her that it’s not about courage or determination, it’s about survival and necessity. She looks at me quizzically and asks why those things should be mutually exclusive. Why should necessity make something easier or less frightening? Why should an achievement born of survival have less worth than one born on a whim?

I had always thought of my trans self as an embarrassment—a birth defect, swiftly corrected, now nothing more than a note in my medical records. But perhaps she was right. Maybe I’ve been too quick to dismiss what it took become who I am. I would never dismiss how my albinism has shaped me, regardless of how it came about or what it led life to throw at me. Maybe I should afford my gender the same courtesy.

In the light of the rising sun, I slowly awaken, before her, as I always do. She sleeps with the look of someone happy to be there, wherever she is. She holds me tightly, as if trying to draw me into her dream. For a moment, I allow her to pull me back to the edge of sleep and let the world around us fade away. I float on the edge of consciousness in a place where nothing, not hurt or sadness, not hunger, disease, or death, not even time itself, exists beyond us. It is a moment of subtle perfection, but even timelessness can’t last forever.

My alarm goes off, signaling the end of our blissful morn. I reach over and terminate the dreadful noise, whilst she stirs and parts her eyes to the disappointment of reality. In the light of the rising sun, her eyes flick past me, and for a fraction of a second I glimpse a small red flare—like an old camera flash illuminating the blood-orange retina.

And time stops.

She says it’s nothing. Probably just the flu. She can barely lift the glass of water to her lips. She can’t manage to stay warm, no matter how many blankets are piled onto her. She takes some codeine and tries to sleep, but can’t. My heart is racing. I’m sick with fear. I tell myself everything will be alright.

The CDIR are here. My second test, like the first, has come back negative. They tell me how lucky I am and I want to punch them. Upstairs, they’re zipping her up into one of those awful white tents before loading her into the ambulance and taking her to the Enfield center. They don’t even bother with hospitals these days. I ask if I can ride with them, but they can’t take me because of some safety protocol. They tell me to come by in a few hours.

The white tent wheels past me on a gurney and I fall apart. I weep like a burst dam, crumbling, falling apart as the torrent washes away everything but an empty chasm. By the time I’ve pulled myself together, they have left. A small card with a name to contact is the only evidence they were ever here.

She looks at me with eyes that you can see through. Her hand rests on mine in a purely implied grasp. Her once athletic body wastes away at a rate you can almost see. Even the vibrant color in her tattoos is fading. Between loving looks, her eyes dart around in random, frantic maneuvers, tracking hypnagogic creatures crawling over the walls.

I promise I’ll stay with her. Right to the end. No matter what happens.

She’s sitting up in bed asking me about my day and wanting to know when she can go home. My finger rests on a panic button attached to a keychain. I tell her again she can’t go home, that she’s still not well. She says she doesn’t understand. She says she feels great. She takes a tissue from the box and asks me why her eyes keep oozing white blood. I explain that her organs have ruptured and are decaying inside of her. She laughs and leans forward, putting her ivory hand on my cheek. It’s ice cold, but her touch burns me. She smiles, then screams in my face. She grabs me by the hair and slaps me hard, over and over again, until my blood is spraying across the room. She tells me I did this to her. That it’s my fault. That I’m a white plague monkey cunt and that she hopes I kill myself.

She lets go of me and I fall back onto the floor, shaking and bleeding everywhere. She looks at me in confusion and asks me why I’m crying. My finger floats above the panic button and I say I’m just sad about something.

I sit by her side, and tell her about my day as her blank eyes stare into space. I describe my work with the imago-stage Papilio appalachiensis and she repeats the word “imago.” Without so much as a change in breath, she speaks, deadpan to the room as if reading from a textbook.

“In the field of psychoanalysis,” she says, “an imago is an image of a loved one that we create within ourselves and carry with us throughout our lives. Jung believed that when we die, we live on as imago within the hearts and minds of those who love us.”

Then she closes her eyes, and never opens them again.

She didn’t want a funeral. Didn’t want that to be people’s last memory of her. Standing alone, I slide the small box into the stone tower. In that instant, she becomes one of millions, all in identical boxes, in identical stone towers, stretching off to the horizon. I brush my fingers over the bronze plaque, feeling the ridges of the letters that spell her name.

Floating in the chamber of my memories, I examine the metadata of all my recordings of her. From first meeting to last goodbye barely four months had passed. That’s all we had together. Four months.

The final memory was dated nine years ago.

XXVI

My time must be almost up. The pain is creeping back, soaking into my body through the myriad holes in my skin. My heartbeat is erratic, bordering on fibrillation. My lungs are flooded bags of blood, leaking out the grapefruit-sized exit wound in my back.

Stumbling through the snow, I’m not even sure I know where I’m going. Every clear patch of grass or park bench looks as good a place as any to curl up and die.

Bleeding in the cold, I find myself thinking about the Red Witch, back at the house. As cryptically as it had arrived, the consuming hate I felt for her has vanished into thin air, leaving a bitter taste of mild guilt. I wonder if the ambulance arrived in time, if she was conscious, if she was afraid of dying. I wonder if, as a victim of a violent assault, she’d qualify for some decent biotech.

Then I see them: the stone towers. Rows and rows of them like poised dominos disappearing into the edge of the gray sky. Slowly I wander the endless paths, between the thousands of cold obelisks that hold the earthly remains of the millions laid to rest in the Trent Park Necropolis—from the Greek nekrós + pólls. Literally City of the Dead.

Even in this moment, I let a smirk grace my face, hoping at least one news outlet runs with the headline “Corpse Found in Cemetery.”

With every step, I feel myself hemorrhaging memories. The only thing I truly needed to save—my lover’s afterlife—leaks out of me and disappears between the gaps in the graves.

A solitary butterfly, rescued from the cavernous chimney of the house on Rowen Street, is my only guide. I left my eyes behind on the off chance that, as evidence in an attempted murder, they (and the gallery of memories within) might be preserved long after my return to the earth. I read the names as I search for her in the library of ash and marble, hoping that some brittle filament of muscle memory can lead me to her.

And just like that, I find her. Amongst the crowds and the noise, I find her. The bronze is slowly rusting, and stone beginning to crack, but it’s her. I reach down towards the plaque, but my body only just had enough left to get me this far, and I collapse into a pile of broken bones. I reach up and run my fingers over the letters that spell her name, reading it like braille.

DEANNE SOLARIN.

Alone in the cemetery, I tell her I’m sorry.

She brushes a tear from my cheek and says, “It’s not your fault.”

Beneath me, the ground feels softer, and I sink into it, feeling myself slip into that timeless edge of consciousness. I roll over, sliding under the sheets, placing my arm around Deanne’s waist. Her wild, vibrant hair in tight curls flowing down her back like a river, crashing over her spine and bleeding into her illustrated skin. Lips aflame with blood and passion. Irises that change color like the ocean, from stormy green to clearest blue. And me, pale as a ghost, bone white hair in strands of silk.

She takes my hand and pulls me closer, and together we sleep.

The Spring Azure butterfly (Celastrina Ladon) has one of the shortest life spans of any lepidoptera. Once it emerges from its chrysalis, the imago (or adult) butterfly has only a few days to complete one single flight before it dies.

TRISTAN ALICE NIETO is a writer and filmmaker living in London. Her work explores contemporary notions of identity and how it intersects with technology, cultural conditions, and politics. She spent her formative years in Melbourne, Australia, pretending to enjoy parties, the sun, and Britpop. When she’s not working (which is never) she can usually be found at home, trapped under a sleeping cat whilst reading Wikipedia pages about Victorian-era medical procedures.

PARANORMAL ROMANCE

CHRISTOPHER BARZAK

This is a story about a witch. Not the kind you’re thinking of either. She didn’t have a long nose with a wart on it. She didn’t have green skin or long black hair. She didn’t wear a pointed hat or a cape, and she didn’t have a cat, a spider, a rat, or any of those animals that are usually hanging around witches. She didn’t live in a ramshackle house, a gingerbread house, a Victorian house, or a cave. And she didn’t have any sisters. This witch wasn’t the kind you read about in fairytales and in plays by Shakespeare. This witch lived in a red brick bungalow that had been turned into an upstairs/downstairs apartment house on an old industrial street that had lost all of its industry in Cleveland, Ohio. The apartment house had two other people living in it: a young gay couple who were terribly in love with one another. The couple had a dog, an incredibly happy-faced Eskimo they’d named Snowman, but the witch never spoke to it, even though she could. She didn’t like dogs, but she did like the gay couple. She tried not to hold their pet against them.

The witch—her name was Sheila—specialized in love magic. She didn’t like curses. Curses were all about hate and—occasionally—vengeance, and Sheila had long ago decided that she’d spend her time productively, rather than wasting energy on dealing with perceived injustices located in her—or someone else’s—past. Years ago, when she was in college, she had dabbled in curses, but they were mainly favors the girls in her dorm asked of her, usually after a boyfriend dumped them, cheated on them, used them as a means for money and mobility, or some other power or shame thing. A curse always sounded nice to them. Fast and dirty justice. Sheila sometimes helped them, but soon she grew tired of the knocks on her door in the middle of the night, grew annoyed after opening the door to find a teary-eyed girl just back from a frat party with blood boiling so hard that the skin on her face seemed to roil. Eventually Sheila started closing the door on their tearstained faces, and after a while the girls stopped bothering her for curses. Instead, they started coming to her for love charms.

The gay couple who lived in the downstairs rooms of the apartment house were named Trent and Gary. They’d been together for nearly two years, but had only lived together for the past ten months. Their love was still fresh. Sheila could smell it whenever she stopped in to visit them on weekends, when Trent and Gary could be found on the back deck, barbequing and drinking glasses of red wine. They could make ordinary things like cooking out feel magical because of the sheer completeness they exuded, like a fine sparking mist, when they were near each other. That was pure early love, in Sheila’s assessment, and she sipped at it from the edges.

Trent was the manager of a small software company and Gary worked at an environmental nonprofit. They’d met in college ten years ago, but had circled around each other at the time. They’d shared a Venn diagram of friends, but naturally some of them didn’t like each other. Their mutual friends spent a lot of time telling Trent about how much they hated Gary’s friends, or telling Gary about how much they hated Trent’s. Because of this, for years Trent and Gary had kept a safe distance from each other, assuming that they would also hate each other. Which was probably a good thing, they said now, nodding in accord on the back deck of the red brick bungalow, where Trent turned shish kabobs on the grill and Gary poured Sheila another glass of wine.

“Why was it probably a good thing you assumed you’d hate each other?” Sheila asked.

“Because,” Gary said as he spilled wine into Sheila’s glass, “we were so young and stupid back then.”

“Also kind of bitchy,” Trent added over his shoulder.

“We would have hurt each other,” said Gary, “before we knew what we had to lose.”

Sheila blushed at this open display of emotion and Gary laughed. “Look at you!” he said, pointing a finger and turning to look over his shoulder at Trent. “Trent,” he said, “Look. We’ve embarrassed Sheila.”

Trent laughed, too, and Sheila rolled her eyes. “I’m not embarrassed, you jerks,” she said. “I know what love is. People pay me to help them find it or make it. It’s just that, with you two—I don’t know—there’s something special about your love.”

Trent turned a kabob with his tongs and said, “Maybe it’s because we didn’t need you to make it happen.”

It was quite possible that Trent’s theory had some kind of truth to it, but whatever the reason, Sheila didn’t care. She just wanted to sit with them and drink wine and watch the lightning bugs blink in the backyard on a midsummer evening in Cleveland.

It was a good night. The shish kabobs were spiced with dill and lemon. The wine was a middlebrow Syrah. Trent and Gary always provided good thirtysomething conversation. Listening to the two of them, Sheila felt like she understood much of what she would have gleaned from reading a newspaper or an intelligent magazine. For the past three months, she’d simply begun to rely on them to relay the goings-on of the world to her, and to supply her with these evenings where, for a small moment in time, she could feel normal.

In the center of the deck several scraps of wood burned in a fire pit, throwing shadows and orange light over their faces as smoke climbed into the darkening sky. Trent swirled his glass of wine before taking the last sip, then stood and slid the back door open so he could go inside to retrieve a fresh bottle.

“That sounds terrible,” Sheila was saying as Trent left. Gary had been complaining about natural gas companies coming into Ohio to frack for gas deposits beneath the shale, and how his nonprofit was about to hold a forum on the dangers of the process. But before Sheila could say another word, her cell phone rang. “One second,” she said, holding up a finger as she looked at the screen. “It’s my mom. I’ve got to take this.”

Sheila pressed the answer button. “Hey, Mom,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Where are you?” her mother asked, blunt as a bludgeoning weapon as usual.

“I’m having a glass of wine with the boys,” Sheila said. Right then, Trent returned, twisting the cork out of the new bottle as he attempted to slide the back door shut with his foot. Sheila furrowed her brows and shook her head at him. “Is there something you need, Mom?” she asked.

Before her mother could answer, though, and before Trent could slide the door shut, the dog Sheila disliked in the way that she disliked all dogs—without any particular hatred for the individual, just the species—darted out the open door and raced past Sheila’s legs, down the deck steps, into the bushes at the bottom of the backyard.

“Hey!” Gary said, rising from his chair, nearly spilling his wine. He looked out at the dog, a white furry thing with an impossibly red tongue hanging out of its permanently smiling face, and then placed his glass on the deck railing before heading down the stairs. “Snowman!” he called. “Get back here!”

“Oh, Christ,” Trent said, one foot still held against the sliding door he hadn’t shut in time. “That dog is going to be the death of me.”

“What’s going on over there?” Sheila’s mother asked. Her voice was loud and drawn out, as if she were speaking to someone hard of hearing.

“Dog escaped,” said Sheila. “Hold on a second, Mom.”

Sheila held the phone against her chest and said, “Guys, I’ve got to go. Gary, I hope your forum goes well. Snowman, stop being so bad!” Then she edged through the door Trent still held open, crossed through their kitchen and living room to the front foyer they shared, and took the steps up to her second floor apartment.

“Sorry about that,” she said when she sat down at her kitchen table.

“Why do you continue living there, Sheila?” her mother said. Sheila could hear steam hissing off her mother’s voice, flat as an iron. “Why,” her mother said, “do you continue to live with this illusion of having a full life, my daughter?”

“Ma,” Sheila said. “What are you talking about now?”

“The boys,” said her mother. “You’re always with the boys. But those boys like each other, Sheila, not you. You should find other boys. Boys who like girls. When are you going to grow up, make your own life? Don’t you want children?”

“I have a life,” said Sheila, evenly, as she might speak to a demanding child. “And I don’t want children.” She could have also told her mother that she was open to girls who liked girls, and had even had a fling or two that had never developed into anything substantial; looking around the kitchen, however, Sheila realized she’d unfortunately forgotten to bring her wine with her, which she would have needed to have that conversation.

“Well, you should want something,” her mother said. “I’m worried about you. You don’t know how much I worry about you.”

Sheila knew how much her mother worried about her. Her mother had been telling her how much she worried about her for years now. Probably from before Sheila was even conceived, her mother was worrying about her. But it was when Sheila turned fifteen that she’d started to make sure Sheila knew just how much. Sheila was now thirty-seven, and the verbal reminders of worry that had started when she’d begun dating had never stopped, even after she took a break from it. So far, it had been a six-year break.

Sheila didn’t miss dating, really. Besides, being alone—being a single woman—was the one witchlike quality she possessed, and it was probably the best of the stereotypical witch features to have if she had to have one.

“Ma,” Sheila said.

But before she could tell her mother that she didn’t have time to play games, her mother said, “I’ve met someone.”

Sheila blinked. “You’ve met someone?” she said. Was her mother now, at the age of fifty-eight, going to surprise Sheila and find love with someone after being divorced for the past eighteen years?

“Yes,” her mother said. “A man. I’d like you to meet him.”

“Ma,” Sheila said. “I’m speechless. Of course I’ll meet him. If he’s someone important to you, I’d love to meet him.”

“Thank you, lovey,” her mother said, and Sheila knew that she’d made her mother happy. “I think you’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I’ll like him, Mom, but I’m just happy if you like him.” What Sheila didn’t say was how, at that moment, it felt like a huge weight was being lifted from her.

“Well, no,” her mother said. “You have to like him, too. As much as I’m glad you trust my judgment in men, it’s you who will be going on the date with him.”

“Ma,” Sheila said, and the weight resumed its old position across her shoulders.

Her mother made a guttural noise, though, a sound that meant she was not going to listen to anything Sheila said after the guttural noise reached completion.

“He’ll pick you up at seven o’clock tomorrow. Be ready to go to dinner. Don’t bring up witch stuff. No talking shop on a date. His name is Lyle.”

“Lyle?” Sheila said, as if the name seemed completely made up—a fantasy novel sort of name, one of those books with a cover that features castle spires and portentous red moons covered in strands of cloud. One of those novels where people are called things like Roland, Aristial, Leandor, Jandari, or . . . Lyle.

“Lyle,” said her mother. Then the phone went dead. Sheila looked down at it for a while as if it were a gun that had accidentally gone off, leaving a bullet lodged in her stomach.

The bullet sat in Sheila’s stomach and festered for the rest of that night, and the feeling was not unfamiliar. Sheila’s mother had a habit of mugging her with unwanted surprises. Furniture that didn’t go with Sheila’s décor. Clothes that didn’t fit her. Blind dates with men named Lyle.

Her mother was a mugger. Always had been. So why was she still surprised whenever it happened, as if this were a sudden, unexpected event? By the next morning, Sheila had come up with several jokes about her mother the mugger that she would tell to the two clients who had appointments with her that afternoon.

“Mugger fucker,” Sheila mumbled as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror. “Mugger Goose. Holy Mugger of God. Mugger may I?”

Her first client was a regular named Mary, who was forty-three, had three children, and was married to a husband she’d fallen out of love with four years ago. Mary came every other month for a reboot of the spell that helped her love her husband a little longer. She’d tried counseling, she’d tried herbal remedies, she’d even tried Zumba (both individually and with several girlfriends as a group), but nothing seemed to work, and in desperation she’d found Sheila through a friend of a friend of a former client who Sheila had helped rekindle a relationship gone sour years ago, back when Sheila had first started to make her living by witching instead of working at the drugstore that had hired her while she was in college.

The knock came at exactly ten in the morning. Mary was never late and never early. Her sessions always lasted for exactly thirty minutes. Sheila was willing to go beyond that, but Mary said she felt that Sheila’s power faded a little more with every second past the thirty-minute mark. She still paid Sheila three hundred dollars for each session, and walked away a happy—or at least a happier—woman. She’d go home and, for five to six weeks, she’d love her husband. Sheila couldn’t work a permanent fix for Mary, because Mary had fallen so out of love with her husband that no spell could sustain it forever. Their relationship was an old, used-up car in constant need of repairs. Sheila was the mechanic.

When Sheila opened the door, Mary pushed in, already complaining loudly about her husband, Ted. Sheila had never met him, though she did have a lock of his hair in an envelope that stayed in her living room curio cabinet. Except on appointment days with Mary; on those days, Sheila would bring the hair out for the renewal ritual.

“I don’t know if I want the spell again,” Mary said. She hadn’t even looked at Sheila yet. She just sat down heavily on the living room couch and sighed. “I don’t know if I want to fix things any longer.”

“What else would you do?” Sheila asked, closing the door before coming over to sit in the chair across from Mary. “Divorce? Start over? You know you could do that, right?”

Mary clutched a small black beaded purse in her lap. She was a beautiful woman, long limbed, peach-skinned, with dark hair that fell to the small of her back like a curtain. She exercised, ate healthy, and didn’t drink too much alcohol—even when alcohol sounded like a good idea. She wore upper-middle-class clothes that weren’t particularly major designer labels but weren’t from a mall store, either.

“I don’t know,” Mary said, pushing a piece of her layered black hair away from her face. Sheila noticed that Mary had gotten a nose piercing in the time between their last appointment and this one. A tiny diamond stud glinted in the sunlight coming through the living room windows. “The children . . .” said Mary. Sheila nodded, and stood, then went to her curio cabinet and took out the envelope with the hank of Ted’s hair in it.

Sheila opened the envelope and placed the lock of hair on the coffee table between them. It was a thick brown curl that Mary had cut from Ted’s mop one night while he was asleep. When Mary had come to Sheila for help four years ago, Sheila had said, “I’ll need you to bring me something of his. Something you love about him. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to work with.” Mary had said she didn’t love him anymore, so how could she bring Sheila anything? “Surely you must love something about him,” Sheila said, and Mary had nodded, her mouth a firm line, and said that, yes, she did love Ted’s hair. It was beautiful. Thick and curly. She loved to run her fingers through it, even after she’d stopped loving Ted.

Now Mary looked down at the lock of curled hair as if it were a dead mouse Sheila had set out in front of her. “You know the drill,” Sheila said, and together the two pinched an end of the hair and lifted it into the air above the coffee table.

Sheila closed her eyes and tried to feel Mary’s love come through the coil of hair. Like an electrical current, a slight hum flowed through it, but it was weaker than ever and Sheila worried that she wouldn’t be able to help Mary once this slight affection for Ted’s hair eventually disappeared. She took the lingering love in through her fingers anyway, whipped it like cream, semi-consciously chanting an incantation—or more like noises that helped her focus on the energy in the feeling than anything of significance—and after she’d turned Mary’s weak affection into a fluffy meringue-like substance, Sheila pushed it back through the hair, slowly but surely, until Mary was filled with a large, aerated love.

When Sheila opened her eyes, she noticed Mary’s face had lifted a little. The firm line of her mouth had softened and curled up at the edges, as if she wanted to smile but was perhaps just a little shy. “Thank you, Sheila,” said Mary, blinking sweetly on the couch. This was when Sheila went soft, too. Whenever a client like Mary, hardened by a deficiency of love, took on a shade of her former self—a youthful self who loved and was loved, who trusted in love to see her through—Sheila had to fight to hold back tears. Not because seeing the return of love made her happy—no, the pressure behind her eyes was more a force of sadness, because the person in front of her was under an illusion, and no illusion, thought Sheila, was pleasant. They were more like the narcotics those with chronic pain took to ease their days. This returned love would only be brief and temporary.

At the door, Mary took out three hundred-dollar bills. “Worth every penny,” she said, folding them into Sheila’s palm, meeting Sheila’s eyes and holding her stare.

When Sheila closed the door behind her, she turned and looked at the face of her cell phone. Thirty minutes had passed. On the dot.

Her next client was new: a good-looking young man who was a bit too earnest for only being a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate. His name was Ben, and he had just acquired a decent job with an advertising company. He’d gotten a mortgage, purchased a house, and was ready to fill it with someone else and him together, the kids, the dogs, the cats: the works. Sheila could see all of this as he sat in front of her and told her that he wanted to find love. That was simple, really. No need to drum up love where love already fizzed and popped. He just needed someone to really see him. Someone who wanted the same things. He wasn’t the completely bland sort of guy that no one would notice, but he wasn’t emitting a strong signal either. Sheila did a quick invocation that would enhance Ben’s desire so that it would beam like a lighthouse toward ships looking for harbor.

She charged him a hundred dollars and told him that if he didn’t get engaged within a year, she’d give him his money back. Ben thanked her, and after she saw him out of the house, it was time for Sheila to sit in her living room and stare at the television, where the vague outline of her body was reflected in the blank screen.

Lyle would be coming to pick her up in several hours. Lyle, Lyle. She said his name a few times, but it was no good. She still couldn’t believe a man named Lyle was coming for her.

Sheila had tried to make the thing that made her different the most normal aspect of her life. Hence her business: Paranormal Romance. She had business cards and left them on the bulletin boards of grocery store entryways, in the fishbowls full of cards that sat on the register counters of some restaurants, and on the bars of every lowdown drink-your-blues-away kind of joint in the city of Cleveland, where people sometimes, while crying into a beer, would notice the card propped against the napkin holder in front of them and think about Sheila possibly being the solution to their loneliness, as the cards declared.

She had made herself as non-paranormal as possible, while at the same time living completely out in the open about being a witch, probably because of what her father had once told her, years ago, when she was just a little girl and even Sheila hadn’t known she had magic in her fingertips. “If I had to be some creepy weirdo like the vampires and werewolves or whatever the hell else is out there these days,” her father had said while watching a news report about the increasing appearance of paranormal creatures, “then I suppose a witch would be the way to go.”

The way to go. That’s what he’d said. As though there was a choice about being cursed or born with magic flowing through you. Vampire, werewolf. Whatever the hell else. The memory stuck with Sheila because of the way her father had talked as if it were one of those “If you had to” games.

If you had to lose a sense, which one?

If you had to live on a deserted island with only one book, which one?

It was only later, after Sheila felt magic welling up in her as a teenager, that she realized how upset he was when she accidentally revealed her abilities—a tactless spell she’d cast to bring him and her mother closer. Unfortunately, her father had noticed Sheila’s fingers weaving through the air as she attempted to surreptitiously cast the spell while her parents were watching television one evening. Her mother stuck by Sheila, but he filed for divorce and disappeared from their lives altogether.

Thus her business, Paranormal Romance, was born. She would make it work for her, Sheila decided in her late twenties. She would use this magic in a way that someone with good legs, flexibility, and balance might become a dancer or a yoga instructor.

This desire for normality also explained why Sheila wanted to kill her mother after she opened the door that evening to find a man dressed in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a black V-neck shirt, and work boots, sporting a scraggly goatee, whose first words were, “Wow, you don’t look like a witch. That’s interesting.”

“Probably the least interesting thing about me,” said Sheila. She tried to restrain herself, but couldn’t refrain from arching her eyebrows as a cat might raise its back.

“I’m Lyle. Nice to meet you,” the somewhat ruggedly good-looking Lyle said.

“Charmed,” Sheila said, trying to sound like she meant it.

“No,” said Lyle, “that’s what you’re supposed to do to me, right?” He winked. Sheila’s smile felt frail, as if it might begin to splinter.

“How do you know I’m a witch,” Sheila asked, “when my mother specifically told me not to bring it up?”

“Don’t know why she told you that,” said Lyle. “First thing she mentioned to me was that’s what you are.”

“Great,” said Sheila. “And I know nothing about you to make it even, and here we are, standing in my doorway like we’re new neighbors instead of going somewhere.”

Lyle nodded his head in the direction of the staircase and said, “I got us a reservation at a great steakhouse downtown.”

Sheila smiled. It was a lip-only smile—no teeth—but she followed Lyle down the steps of her apartment to the front porch, where she found Gary dragging Snowman up the steps by his collar. The dog had its ridiculous grin plastered on as usual, but started to yap in the direction of Lyle as soon as he noticed him. Gary himself was grimacing with frustration. “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

“This guy,” said Gary. “When he ran off last night, he really ran off. Someone on the neighborhood Facebook group messaged me to say she had him penned in her backyard. Three blocks from here. You’re a bad dog, Snowman. A bad dog, you hear?”

Snowman was barking like crazy now, twisting around Gary’s legs. He looked up at Lyle and for the first time in Sheila’s experience, the dog did not look like it was smiling, but was baring its teeth.

“Woof!” said Lyle, and Snowman began to whimper.

“Well, it’s a good thing she was able to corral him,” Sheila said, even as she attempted to telepathically communicate with Gary: Did this guy just woof? “I’ve never gotten along with dogs, so he’d have probably run away from me if I were the one to find him.”

“Oh, really?” Lyle raised his brows, as if Sheila had suddenly taken off a mask and revealed herself to be an alien with tentacles wriggling, Medusa-like, out of her head. “You don’t like dogs?”

“And dogs,” Sheila said, “don’t like me.”

“I can’t believe that,” said Lyle, shaking his head and wincing.

Sheila shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are, I guess.”

“Who are you again?” Gary asked, looking at Lyle with narrowed eyes, as if he’d put Lyle under a microscope.

Sheila apologized for not introducing them. “This is my date,” she said, trying to signal to Gary that it was also the last date by rolling her eyes as she turned away from Lyle.

“A date?” Gary said, clapping one hand over his mouth as he said it. “Sheila is going on a date?”

“That’s right,” said Lyle. He nodded curtly. “And we should probably get started. Come on,” he said, pointing toward his car parked against the curb. Sheila inwardly groaned when she saw that it was one of those muscle cars macho guys collect, like they’re still little boys with Matchbox vehicles. “Let’s go get some grub,” Lyle said, patting his stomach.

“Grub?” Gary whispered as Lyle and Sheila went past him, and Sheila could only look over her shoulder with a Help Me! look painfully stretched across her face.

The steakhouse Lyle took her to was one of those places where people crack peanuts open, dislodge the nut, and discard the shells on the floor. The lighting was dim, but the room was permeated with the glow from a variety of neon beer signs that hung on every wall like a collection in an art gallery. Lyle said it was his favorite place to dine.

He said it like that too, Sheila could already hear herself saying later as she recounted the evening to Trent and Gary. He said, “It’s my favorite place to dine.” Can you believe it? What was my mother thinking?

“Oh, really,” Sheila said. The server had just brought her a vodka martini with a slice of lemon dangling over the rim. Sheila looked up at her briefly to say thank you, and noticed immediately that the server—a young woman with long mahogany hair and caramel-colored skin— was a witch. The employee tag on the server’s shirt said her name was Corrine; she winked as Sheila gasped after her words. “Thank you,” Sheila managed to say without making the moment of recognition awkward. She took a sip, licked her lips, then turned back to Lyle as the server walked away, and said, “What were you saying?”

“‘This is my favorite place to dine,’ I said. I come here a couple of times a week,” said Lyle. “Best steaks in town.”

Sheila said, “I don’t eat meat.”

To which Lyle’s face dropped like a hot air balloon that had lost all of its hot air. “Your mother didn’t tell me that,” said Lyle.

“No,” said Sheila, “but for some reason she did tell you that I’m a witch, even after she forbade me from speaking of it. Clearly the woman can’t be trusted.”

“Clearly,” Lyle agreed, which actually scored him a tiny little point for the first time that evening. There it was in Sheila’s mind’s eye, a little scoreboard. Lyle: 1. Sheila: Anxious.

He apologized profusely, in a rough-around-the-edges way that seemed to be who he was down to his core. He wasn’t really Sheila’s type, not that Sheila had a specific type, but he wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ever gone out on a date with before, either. Her mother would have known that too. Sheila’s mother had always wanted to know what was going on, back when Sheila actually dated. When Myspace and Facebook came around, and her mother began commenting on photos Sheila had posted from some of her date nights with statements like, “He’s a hottie!” and “Now that’s a keeper!” Sheila had had to block her mother. And only weeks later she discovered that on her mother’s own social networking walls, her mother was publicly bemoaning the fact that her daughter had blocked her.

But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

“I’m her butcher.”

Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

“She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

“I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.

Sheila watched as Lyle crunched the peanut, and noticed only after he’d swallowed and smiled across the table at her that he had a particularly large set of canines. “You’re kidding,” said Sheila. “Ha ha, very funny. You might as well start telling witch jokes at this point.”

“Not kidding,” said Lyle. Corrine stopped at their table, halting the conversation as she placed another tall beer in front of Lyle, another martini in front of Sheila, and asked what they’d like to order.

“I think we’re just here to drink tonight,” said Lyle, not taking his eyes off Sheila.

Sheila nodded vigorously at Corrine, though, agreeing. And after she left, Sheila said, “Well, this is a new achievement for my mother. Set her daughter up with a werewolf.”

“What? You don’t like werewolves?” Lyle asked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a 1970s drug dealer grin.

Sheila blinked a lot for a while, took another sip of her martini, then shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, you know,” she said. “I mean, werewolves aren’t generally on my radar. I get a lot of people who come around with minor psychic powers, and they’re attracted to me because they can sense I’m something out of the ordinary but can’t quite place what exactly, and of course I know a decent number of witches—we can spot each other on the street without knowing one another, really—but werewolves are generally outside of my experience. Especially my dating experience.”

“From what I understand, your dating experience has been pretty nonexistent in general.”

Sheila decided it was time to take yet another drink. After swallowing a large gulp of vodka, she said, “My mother has a big mouth for someone who hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since my father left her nearly two decades ago. And you can tell her I said that next time she comes in to stock up on meat.”

Lyle laughed. It was a full, throaty laugh that made heads turn in the steakhouse. When he realized this, he reined himself in, but Sheila could see that the laugh—the sheer volume of it when he’d let himself go—was beyond ordinary. It bordered on the wild. She could imagine him as a wolf in that moment, howling at a blood red moon.

“So what is it? Once a month you get hairy and run around the city killing people?” Sheila asked.

Lyle leaned back on his side of the booth and said, “Are you serious?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Sheila. “I hear it’s quite difficult to control bloodlust in times like that.”

“I make arrangements for those times,” said Lyle.

“Arrangements, huh,” said Sheila. “What sort of arrangements?”

“I rent an underground garage, have it filled with plenty of raw steaks, and get locked in for the night.”

“That’s responsible of you,” said Sheila.

“What about you?” Lyle asked. “Any inclinations to doing evil? Casting hexes?”

“No bloodlust for witches,” said Sheila, “and I gave up the vicious cycle of curse drama in college. Not worth it. That shit comes back on you sevenfold.”

Lyle snickered. He ran his thumb and forefinger over his scraggly goatee, then took another drink of beer. “Looks like we’re a pair,” he said, “just like your mother imagined.”

“Why?” Sheila asked. “Because you put yourself in a werewolf kennel on full moon nights and I don’t dabble in wreaking havoc in other people’s lives?”

Lyle nodded, his lips rising into a grin that revealed his pointy, slightly yellowed canines.

“I hardly think that constitutes being a pair,” said Sheila. “We certainly have that in common, but it’s a bit like saying we should start dating because we’re both single and living in Cleveland.”

“Why are you so single?” Lyle asked. His nostrils flared several times.

Oh my God, he is totally sniffing me! “I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said.

In the restroom, Sheila leaned against the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a short black dress and had hung her favorite opal earrings on her earlobes. They glowed in the strange orange neon beer-sign light of the restroom. She shouldn’t have answered when he knocked. She should have kept things in order. Weekend BBQs with Trent and Gary, even with the obnoxious Snowman running between their legs and wanting to jump on her and lick her. Working a few hours a day with clients, helping them to love or be loved, to find love. Evening runs in the park. Grocery shopping on Wednesdays. That’s what she wanted, not a werewolf butcher/lover her mother had found in the West Side Market.

The last time Sheila dated someone had been slightly less than underwhelming. He’d been an utterly normal man named Paul who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland downtown, and he talked endlessly of bank capitalization and exchange-traded funds. Sheila had tried to love him, but it was as if all the bank talk was more powerful than any spell she might cast on herself, and so she’d had to add Paul to her long list of previous candidates for love.

There had been Jim, a guy who owned a car dealership in Lakewood, but he always came off as a salesman, and Sheila wasn’t the consumer type. There had been Alexis, a law student at Case Western, but despite her girlish good looks and intelligence, Alexis had worried about Sheila’s under-the-table Paranormal Romance business—concerned that she was possibly defrauding the government of taxable income. There had been Mark, the CPA (say no more). There had been Lola, the karaoke DJ (say no more). And there had been a string of potentials before that, too, once Sheila began sorting through the memories of her twenties, a long line of cute young men and women whose faces faded a little more each day. She had tried—she had tried so hard—hoping one of them would take the weight of her existence and toss it into the air like a beach ball. The love line went back and back and back, so far back, but none of those boys or girls had been able to do this. None of them.

Except Trent and Gary, of course. Not that they were romance for Sheila. But they did love her. They cared about her. They didn’t make her feel like she had to be anyone but who she wanted to be, even if who Sheila wanted to be wasn’t entirely who Sheila was.

Sheila washed her hands under the faucet and dried them with the air dryer, appreciating the whir of the fan drowning out the voice in her head. She would walk out on Lyle, she decided. She’d go home and call her mother and tell her “Never again,” then hang up on her. She would sit in front of the blank television screen, watching her shadowy reflection held within it, and maybe she would let herself cry, just a little bit, for being a love witch who couldn’t make love happen for herself.

“Are you okay?” a voice said over the whir of the hand dryer. Sheila blinked and turned. Behind her, Corrine the server was coming out of a stall. She came to stand beside Sheila at the sinks and quickly washed her hands.

“You’re a witch,” Sheila said stupidly, and realized at that moment that two martinis were too many for her.

Corrine laughed, but nodded and said, “Yes. I am. So are you.” Corrine reached for the paper towel to dry her hands, since Sheila was spellbound in front of the electric dryer. “What kind?” she asked Sheila as she wiped her hands.

“Love,” said Sheila.

“Love?” said Corrine, raising her thin eyebrows. “That’s pretty fancy.”

“It’s okay,” said Sheila.

“Just okay?” said Corrine. “I don’t know. Sounds nice to be able to do something like that with it. Me? I can’t do much but weird things.”

“What do you mean?” Sheila asked.

“You know,” said Corrine. “Odds and ends. Nothing so defined as love. Bad end of the magic stick, maybe. I can smell fear on people, or danger. And I can open doors. But that’s about it.”

“Open doors?” said Sheila.

“Yeah,” said Corrine. “Doors. I guess it does make a kind of sense when I think about it long enough. I smell danger coming, I can get out of just about anywhere if I want to. Open a door. Any old door. It might look like it leads into a broom closet or an office, but I can make it open onto other places I’ve been, or have at least seen in a picture.”

“Wow,” said Sheila. “You should totally be a cat burglar.”

Corrine laughed. Sheila laughed with her. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay,” Corrine said. “It was funny. I think you said it because it was funny.”

“I guess I better get back out there,” said Sheila.

“Date?” said Corrine.

“Blind date,” Sheila answered. “Bad date. Last date.”

Corrine frowned in sympathy. “I knew it wasn’t going well.”

“How?” Sheila asked.

“I could smell it on you. Not quite fear, but anxiety and frustration. I figured that’s why you asked for the second martini. That guy comes in a lot. He seems okay, but yeah, I couldn’t imagine why you were here with him.”

Sheila looked down at her hands, which were twitching a little, as if her fingers had minds of their own. They were twitching in Corrine’s direction, like they wanted to go to her. Sheila laughed. Her poor fingers. All of that love magic stored up inside them and nowhere to go.

“You need help?” Corrine asked suddenly. She had just taken off her name badge and was now fluffing her hair in the mirror.

“Help?” said Sheila.

Corrine looked over and said, “If you want out, we can just go. You don’t even have to say goodbye to him. My shift’s over. A friend of mine will be closing out your table. We can leave by the bathroom door.”

Sheila laughed. Her fingers twitched again. She took one hand and clamped it over the other.

“What are you afraid of?” Corrine asked. Her eyes had started to narrow. “I’m getting a sense that you’re afraid of me now.”

“You?” Sheila said. “No, no, not you.”

“Well, you’re giving off the vibe,” said Corrine. She dropped her name badge into her purse and took out a tube of lipstick, applied some to her lips so that they were a shade of dark ruby. When she was done, she slipped the tube into her purse and turned to Sheila. “What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.

Sheila was still fidgeting. “I think,” she said. “I think they like you.”

Corrine threw her head back and laughed. “Like?” she said, grinning. “That’s sweet of them. You can tell your hands I like them too.”

Sheila said, “I’m so sorry. This is embarrassing. I’m usually not such a weirdo.” For a moment, Sheila heard her father’s voice come through—Creepy weirdoes. Whatever the hell else is out there—and she shivered.

“You’re not weird,” said Corrine. “Just flustered. It happens.”

It happens. Sheila blinked and blinked again. Actually, it didn’t happen. Not for her. Her fingers only twitched like this when she was working magic for other people. Anytime she had tried to work magic for herself, they were still and cold, as if she had bad circulation. “No,” Sheila said. “It doesn’t usually happen. Not for me. This is strange.”

“Listen,” said Corrine. “You seem interesting. I’m off shift and you have a bad blind date happening. I’m about to leave by that door and go somewhere I know that has good music and way better food than this place. And it’s friendly to people like you and me. What do you say?”

Sheila thought of her plans for the rest of the evening in a blinding flash.

Awkward moment before she ditched Lyle.

Awkward and angry moment on the phone while she told her mother off.

The vague reflection of her body held in the screen of the television as she allowed herself to cry a little.

Then she looked up at Corrine, who was pulling on a zippered hoodie, and said, “I say yes.”

“Yes?” Corrine said, smiling.

“Yes,” said Sheila. “Yes, let’s go there, wherever it is you’re going.”

Corrine held her hand out, and Sheila looked down at her own hands again, clamped together as if in prayer, holding each other back from the world. “You can let one of them go,” Corrine said, grinning. “Otherwise, I can’t take you with me.”

Sheila laughed nervously and nodded. She released her hands from one another and cautiously put one into the palm of Corrine’s hand, where it settled in smoothly and turned warm in an instant. “This way,” Corrine said, and put her other hand on the bathroom doorknob, twisted, then opened it.

For a moment, Sheila could see nothing but a bright light fill the space of the doorway—no Lyle or the sounds of rock and roll music spilled in from the dining area—and she worried that she’d made a mistake, not being able to see where she was going with this woman who was a complete stranger. Then Corrine looked back at her and said, “Don’t be afraid,” and Sheila heard the sound of jazz music suddenly float toward her, a soft saxophone, a piano melody, though the doorway was still filled with white light she couldn’t see through.

“I’m not,” said Sheila suddenly, and was surprised to realize that she truly wasn’t.

Corrine winked at her the way she had done at the table, as if they shared a secret, which, of course, they did. Then she tugged on Sheila’s hand and they stepped through the white light into somewhere different.

CHRISTOPHER BARZAK is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award–winning novel One for Sorrow, which has been made into the Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His novel The Love We Share Without Knowing was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His third novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, received the Stonewall Honor Award from the American Library Association. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays and Before and Afterlives, which won Best Collection in the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards. His most recent novel is The Gone Away Place. Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town and the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. He currently teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

THREE POINTS MASCULINE

AN DWOMDYELA

I was serving in Baxon just north of Hescher, guard-dogging a queue of first responders heading into the riot zones, and John caught my eye. Her beard caught my eye. Some troublemaker flouting the rules, I thought, or a guy sneaking in under cover of audacity, thinking the Women’s Volunteer Corps was a good place to get laid. If that was the case, he was looking to get roughed up, and it was my job to oblige. I pulled her out of the line.

“License.”

Roughing someone up would’ve made my day, and my day needed making. Go figure that John stepped aside and said “Of course” in that tone people use at police, all placid and don’t shoot me. She pulled her license and handed it over—and yeah, there it was: non-transitioned male sex, last Gender Assessment Test no more than two years ago, certified female register—certified female enough for government work, right—all of it signed by a state assessor I didn’t just recognize as legit, I knew personally. The grainy photo even had her damn beard.

I thought about roughing her up for making me look a damn fool. I told myself I was better than that; even kinda believed it. “Get back in line.”

In a fair world, that’d be that.

Isaac was walking the queue, giving the pep talk, getting everyone comfy with the bulletproofs and white flags. “All our pretty little heads will be back behind our boys in uniform,” he said, and I kept my fingers on my rifle. “There’s a chance our zone might go hot; if it does, we’ll get plenty of warning, just get back on the buses and we’ll peel rubber back here. Lickety-split. Time for dinner.”

I caught up to him as we boarded the bus. For the sixteen women there were only four of us from City Guard, me looking plastic and the rest looking pale and greeny under the fluorescent lights. “Counting four boys in uniform right here,” I said.

Isaac looked surprised, then looked at the insignia on his chest. He grinned. “Way wrong uniform, man.”

I grunted, and pointed at John. “What’s the story here?”

“What, him? —her,” Isaac corrected. Takes more than a test and a license for some people to learn. Hand to God I don’t think Isaac believes the GATs if he looks at someone and gets his own opinion, but like the rest of us, he’ll play along because it’s law. Least, like the rest of most people, he’ll play along because it’s law. “Hell if I know. Uh, hometown somewhere up north, been working with the WVC going on six years. Career, right? Just your type.”

“Shove off,” I said, and elbowed him. He cackled and headed for his seat. I took a seat near the front and decided it didn’t matter. ’Sides, I could see or guess most of it: lily-white, unlike me. College-educated, unlike me. A girl, too, unlike me. Though half the bastards would’ve argued that, had they known.

Hescher was a hellhole. We smelled the smoke when we rolled in, and the moment they opened the doors, it was all white tents, Corps flags, antiseptic stench, and people moaning on the ground. A guy almost shoved a handful of red-yellow-green-black triage tags into my chest before deciding I wouldn’t know a sucking chest wound from a bump on the head and shoving them at the ladies behind me.

They’d cleared out one of the big bargain stores for a medical center, and its parking lot was playing support. Place was peppered with City Guard, and one came over as soon as we led our girls off the bus. “Hey. I’m Ben Kessler, managing day dispatch and logistics here. Welcome to Camp Save Big. Any two of you got a moment?”

“I got one,” I said, and Isaac came up beside me.

“So, what’ve you got going?” Isaac asked. Ben groaned.

“Cluster attacks.” He hiked a thumb over his shoulder, and Isaac and I followed him across the lot. “We go three weeks without anyone blowing anything up and now we’ve had four bombings yesterday and today.”

“Christos,” I said, and Ben hoisted up the flap of the registration tent. We went inside.

Ben went over to the sat-fax and tapped his finger on a pile of papers. I went up and said, “What’s up?”

“Your gals signed a pretty permissive contract,” Ben said. “‘Area of greatest need,’ ‘discretionary redeployment,’ y’know.”

“So where’s our area of greatest need?” Isaac asked. Ben pistoled a finger at him.

“Here, go figure. But if it’s not too much trouble, we need someone to back up the folks at the hospital. Triage and first response. They got slammed.”

Isaac looked at me. “Hell, if that’s it, we can walk our girls over.”

“Be a dear?” Ben said, and pressed his hands together. I crossed my arms over my chest, habit-like. Isaac whacked me on the shoulder.

“We’re your angels. C’mon, we’ll pull our teams.”

Isaac turned and walked back to the buses, and Ben held out a map for me. “You’ll need this. A bunch of main roads are impassable.”

I took the map and looked over the scrawled edits. “You’re going to make me regret wearing the injury-prev helmet instead of the smart display, aren’t you?”

“Oh, there’s a lot of regret here in Hescher,” Ben said. “If that’s all you’ve got, you’re coming out ahead.”

John was in Isaac’s group. She didn’t look at me when we rounded our eight up, and I mostly ignored her. We just got in line and marched into the evacuation zone. I did notice she didn’t walk like a girl learned to, didn’t hold herself like a girl learned to. She might’ve had the GAT, but she was off.

Shit like that makes me check how I’m walking. Out here, no one was gonna come up and check my license, but still, it’s habit, like.

The evac zone was quiet. All these buildings, still as death—no one even looting, anymore. Plenty of people were probably displaced and angry somewhere easterly, keeping their mouths shut because you didn’t bitch at the hand that fed you and rounded you up onto government buses, and that just left this place all creeped-out empty like a ghost town. Isaac and I didn’t talk. We had our hands on our rifles, watching for revs, and the girls didn’t talk because they knew you don’t distract the guys with automatics. We went in past the empty houses, past the bombed-out school, over the recent debris that made driving impossible and walking a chore and, hand to God, but I didn’t know what the revs thought they were getting by blowing up all the empty places. With all the rubble, though, I pitied the girls and their uniform skirts. Damn glad I didn’t wear one.

We were maybe halfway to the hospital and passing office buildings when Isaac held up a hand, and we stopped and ducked down. Someone was running at us down the road.

He was yelling. “Get outta there! Get outta there!”

I took aim. I was just good enough for a hipshot—not being military I couldn’t gun the guy down, not when he was waving his hands and not a gun, but for all I knew, he had three pounds of plastic on his chest. I thumbed my rifle over to single-shot and yelled, “Do not come closer!”

Then the office behind us blew.

I was on my face like that. This chunk of concrete hit the pavement two feet from my shoulder and crap rained down, drifting on my uniform, drumming my helmet. A lot of it was glass. A rock the size of my fist caught me in the back, another almost took a chunk out of my hand. My head was ringing when I picked myself up.

First thing that crossed my mind was That’s okay, I can go home now, ’cause that was a bomb. Ten seconds later that didn’t make sense to me, and it still doesn’t. It’s just what I thought.

I don’t remember how I got to my feet. The place was quiet. Crap wasn’t falling. The guy I’d been aiming at wasn’t running at us any more, wasn’t anywhere any more, and I looked around. The color was off. Everything was yellower, and I kept blinking and blinking, trying to make it go away, and then I caught this light coming through the buildings off west. I thought, The bastards set the city on fire. Wasn’t any smoke, though. It was the sun.

Then I thought, Shit. I’d thought no time had passed. No, I’d been down for half an hour, and my helmet fit odd—pressure and suction— like I had a head injury, and the automated aid had kicked on.

And where the hell were my girls?

Ten minutes later I worked out that my helmet radio gave up the ghost and wasn’t coming home for Christ’s Mass. The tips of my fingers were numb and I couldn’t pull the helmet for fear that I’d open up a wound, so poking at the buttons was the best I could do to fix it. My maps were safe and I should’ve headed back to drum up a search, but I had a chip on my shoulder for the guy who blew me up and I wasn’t trotting home with my tail between my legs. Mama always said pride would get me killed.

So I went deeper into the evac zone.

Sure enough, before long I started seeing people, and I had to crouch down and sneak behind dumpsters and burnt-out cars and roadblocks. I could hear them yelling to each other, pick out the ones walking with rifles—and damn, some of those rifles were better than mine.

I found the supermarket easy. It was big, with people going in and out. The entire street in front was busy with revs, six or eight at a shot, walking around on important rev business. Someone came out with a big bag of something, and they gathered up and walked away. That was an opening if I ever saw one.

The supermarket was big, the kind with doors at both ends and checkout lanes lined up all across the front. Big, and stocked enough to be Rev HQ. That made walking into it a stupid idea, and of course that’s what I did anyway. I snuck around, trying to avoid the automatic doors until I remembered there was no power to this neighborhood. The doors couldn’t give me away. I picked one, poked it to see it didn’t creak, and pushed it open.

And that’s when I decided, you know, gloves off, shoot to kill. ’Cause that’s when I saw Isaac slumped against a checkout stand, helmet off and eyes staring open, with an ugly dark gunshot blown out half his head.

I don’t know why I didn’t throw up then. I guess it didn’t feel real, between the fuzz in my hearing and the hurt in my skull and the way I’d jumped from afternoon to evening earlier. Think I thought I was dreaming.

I saw the head rev right away, when I stopped staring at dead Isaac. At least, I saw the guy acting it up. Put his name on a bullet. He was up on one of the far stands hollering like a ringleader, and there was no way I’d be able to pick him off from the doorway I’d come in. It’s hard to get sharpshooter training when you can’t meet the army requirements for infantry. Hard to shoot with a pounding headache and blood loss, too.

They don’t teach you much in City Guard, but I got on my stomach and did an army crawl like I’d seen in the comics and practiced, back home, back in that misspent youth of mine. Went creeping back into the supermarket until I found cover, with my head pounding and everything right of my pelvis one screaming mass of ache. The guy was up on the register counter, pacing back and forth, waving his gun around like that was the only way he could make a point.

“A state which controls right and wrong, which legislates right and wrong, a state which tells us what we can and can’t do, can and can’t be, can and can’t think, is a state that has legislated our humanity!” he said.

Something like that. I got the gist: usual rev talk. Blah blah this, blah blah overthrow the government, ’cause the guys with the guns and the anger will for sure be the better choice. I crept past the shelves of cereal and the display of spoiled pears and came nearer.

“Look at this guy!”

I was close enough that I could see him reach down and grab John by the collar.

He hauled John up. “This guy is a mockery of a man!” he yelled, shaking her like a rattle. “If he decided one day to put on this dress, he would be sent to jail! It’s only when the state tells him to that he can. There is no difference! The state has fabricated right and wrong!”

I lined up my shot.

And the first shot went so wild I was lucky it didn’t take out the front door. The guy spun around and almost lost his footing, but he stayed up enough to swing his pistol and take a shot that came a lot closer to target than mine had. I ducked behind a display of Corn Crunch that wouldn’t stop a ping-pong ball, but instinct said go for cover and I did. I flipped my rifle onto automatic, ’cause it’s hard to miss on automatic, and thanked God the girls knew enough to get down.

You know. Blood splattered. Girls gasped, one of them screamed before another clapped a hand over her mouth, and I looked at John, white as a sheet and bloody. One of Isaac’s girls, but I bet they all knew what happened to Isaac. They’d been looking shell shocked before I took out that rev. I pushed off up the floor and ran to them, then dropped and just barely caught myself in a crouch. God, my head hurt. Christos, I didn’t feel right. John touched my shoulder and I shoved her away.

The sensible one, the one who stopped the other girl from screaming, said, “We need to get away from the doors.” I nodded. If no revs outside had heard us exchanging bullets, that’d be one miracle. To keep any from coming back, we’d need another.

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on. Back through.” My heart was pounding. Made my ears hurt, it was so loud, and I could feel it on my stomach. I stood up, and the store yanked sideways and shook like a dog toy. Then I was on the ground.

I was on the ground, and I was back farther in the store. I was leaning against a pile of budget toilet paper. All I could hear was my own blood.

The sensible one was crouched over me, like a bad flashback to post-op. I looked around, trying to get my bearings, saw a scatter of broken glass from a freezer case, a crumpled wrapper from a snack cake, a bottle of blackstrap molasses with its top off. Nothing made any sense. The sensible woman was pushing a water bottle to my lips. “Here. Drink this, if you can.”

I caught a glance at her nametag: AGATHA, with a low service number that meant she’d signed up early. That seemed important: signed up early. She was practically shoving the bottle up my nose, so I drank. The water was warm and sugary and made my headache ten times worse, but Agatha held it through two good gulps.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m concerned that you’re losing blood. Your helmet’s gone red.”

I guess I was lucky to have the injury-prev helmet instead of the HUD.

“We have to get out of here, but I don’t think you’re going to make a walk down Main Street,” Agatha said. “Not before anyone comes by.”

“There was a fire escape from the second floor down into the alley. I saw it when we were being brought in,” John said. Of course John said. I should’ve said; I’d seen the damn thing when I was sneaking past, watching for revs hiding in the alleys. But I was messed up, and John and her damn beard were the ones taking charge.

God, I wished Isaac was there. But that gunshot crossed my mind, and I wanted to spew. Isaac was dead. I was the guardsman left, and I was being babied by a bunch of girls.

“Then that’s where we’ll go,” Agatha said. “Come on; everyone back this way. Move it, all of you. John . . .”

John stepped up and got me under the arm to hold me up, and I yanked away. Shoved her and stumbled right into the toilet paper. Real smooth. But I didn’t want her hands on me.

“I can stand up,” I said, when they looked at me. My face was burning, but the rest of me was cold.

Agatha looked at me. Probably going to ask if I had a problem with the gender-reassigned, but I just took my rifle, pushed myself up, and concentrated on keeping steady. Were it that easy.

“I can walk,”I told her again, and turned around and started walking.

The second floor was offices and a break room, and that’s where we headed. Longest stair climb of my life. But with the shooting over and the adrenaline quieting down, it wasn’t as bad—about as bad as sneaking to the store in the first place. We went into the break room, where the revs had left bags of trash and bowls from instant meals, empty bottles of alcohol, and a map of the city tacked up on the walls. Agatha turned up her nose. “Well, I suppose we know where they’ve been spending their time.”

John went to the window and pushed it open. I went up to take a look, see if I needed to secure the alley below.

We weren’t far up, and the fire escape was a good one—wasn’t rickety or anything. But I looked and I heard myself say “Shit,” and then I was back inside the window, on my knees, spewing lunch and molasses water into a trashcan full of old receipts. Even after everything came up, I kept heaving until the vise in my head let go. My heart started pounding again.

I wasn’t going to get out of there.

I swallowed, and wished I hadn’t. Looked back at the girls, and saw John and Agatha kneeling near me. Before they could say anything I told them, “Look, it’s about five blocks to the barricades, and none of you look like revs. Just get down the side and go for it. Keep your hands up and no one’s gonna shoot you. Can you do that?”

“I’ll see them through,” Agatha said, then frowned. “Here; you’d better give me your sidearm.”

“What?” I squinted until she focused back into one solid person instead of two blurry ones. “I will get my ass raked over the coals if I hand a pistol to someone who’s never had gun training. There must be ten different laws against that.”

“Tell them I stole it off you while you were throwing up,” Agatha said. “Or do you want us just to sing if a rioter comes by?”

I squinted at her. “What?”

“It’s what you do for bears,” John said.

Fancy educated bastard. I groaned and put my head back. “Fine. Take it.” I was just gonna close my eyes. And then I felt myself falling, in the back of my head, like all that darkness under my eyelids was some river, with an undertow, and I’d sink down through. Then I felt hot hands on my face and John pried open my eyes.

There she was, staring me in the face and yammering on about a concussion and hyposomething. I tried to wave her off like a horsefly. Then she said, “We talked it over. I’m going to stay with you.”

No idea when they’d had time to talk it over. I laughed in John’s face. “Why, ’cause you’re the butch?”

“Because Agatha has more important things to do,” John said, and I thought, Yeah, like my job.

“Lemme up,” I said.

“Agatha’s going to get everyone back to base,” John said. “She’s going to tell the rest of City Guard where we are, and they should be able to get someone in here to bring you out.”

What I should’ve done in the first place. “I can make it,” I said. “In my own time, yeah?”

Agatha did just what she should have: came over and crouched down and said, “Don’t be an idiot. I’ll break both your knees if you think you’re going to crawl out, pass out, and make us carry you.”

I liked her. Kinda wished she would stay with me. Not just that John torqued me, but I had a feeling Agatha could take on the entire rev mob with guts to spare.

The girls filed out the window, and I heard their feet going down the metal stairs. John went and closed the door, and turned all the lights off. Better for my head, at least. Then she came and sat by me.

“You don’t like me much,” she said.

I rubbed a sleeve across my mouth. “Does it matter?”

John sighed. “I have been accused of not playing to the spirit of the

GAT.”

Were it that fucking simple.

“Give me your hand,” John said. I squinted.

“Why?”

“Medical reasons.”

I squinted a bit more, and gave her my hand.

She took it and squeezed my thumbnail. Then she took my pulse. “Well, you haven’t lost much more blood,” she said, and let go of me. “Capillary refill’s no worse than it was, and heart rate is good, considering.” She shook her head. “You really shouldn’t have come after us.”

I tried to think of something sharp to say. I was angry—angrier than I had any right to be. Tried to blame my head.

“But thank you,” John said.

Given the way the rev had been going after her—well, I know how these things go. Gender assessment gets people angry, anger gets people nasty. That’s why most of us keep our dirty little secrets under our belts and our vests. Why most of us don’t go wearing a damn beard.

That just got me feeling sick.

“What is it with you?” I asked, and looked at her. “Get a shave, put on some makeup, grow out your hair. You walk into a war zone and you come looking like that?”

“Not my style,” John said.

I looked her up and down. “How the hell did you test female?” I asked.

John sighed. “Is this the conversation we’re going to have?” she asked, like she’d had this one before.

Probably had. Probably every time someone had to talk to her. Make small talk. So, John, what’s up with your genitals? So, John, why you wanna be a girl?

Didn’t want to be a proper girl, though.

“You scored, what, a fifty-one fem, fifty masc on the GAT?” I asked. “Just enough to scrape through?”

John looked at me. “Sounds like you’re familiar with the GAT.”

“Yeah, familiar,” I said. “Took it. Tried to go army. But I got eighty-two masculine, and the goddamn military is eighty-five, min.” I flipped the convo around again, back at her. “You think you’re a man, don’t you?”

She hedged. “I don’t think it’s useful to pay too much attention to—”

“Bullshit. You think you’re a man?”

John hesitated. Looking for any way not to answer the damn question, then answered it anyway. “Yeah, I do.”

I sneered. “Thought so. Why the hell’d you do this? Getting some girls?”

She gave me this long-suffering look. “I wanted to serve. I wanted to go into care. I didn’t have the stomach for armed service. I’ve thought a lot about why it was so important, and I don’t know how to explain it—”

“So you’re a man,” I said. “You’re not just playing queer, you’re a man.”

More hedging. “Well, legally I—”

“You’re playing!” I almost shouted. I almost didn’t care who heard me. I was shaking, I couldn’t see straight. “You’re a fucking—yeah, you know what? I grew up in this. I was playing with—fuck you. Fuck you! You want to know what it’s really like?”

John got a look like she’d worked something out.

I hated that look. Straight up hated it.

“I know what—” John said, or started to say. I ran right over her. Couldn’t stop, and Christos, I wanted to.

“Ever since I was a kid. Sold my dolls on my parents’ net accounts. Thought I’d be able to get this toy gun—they forced me into a dress once and I nearly tore their eyes out, clawed up my mom’s face so bad, and every day I was sick when someone looked at my chugs or called me ma’am, and you’re fucking—”

You’re a pretender, some sick trans-v playing in women’s clothing. I wanted to say that. Didn’t even care it was the same shit people used to fling at me.

“I was a boy,” I spat out. “I had some chromosome problem but I knew what I was. This isn’t a joke.”

“It’s not a joke for me,” John said.

“No, it’s a goddamn disguise,” I said, leaned over, and puked again.

John put her hand on my back and I shoved her away. I didn’t want to be touched. I spent my whole life up until the GAT and the surgery and the moving halfway across the country to Baxon having people say I’d grow out of this, like I’d grow out of my skin, be a normal girl, settle down with a normal guy, take those hands all over me, take him crawling on top of me, take him feeling better than me, stronger than me, like I’d take the whole five-course meal of what my life was supposed to look like and feel like and be shoved down my mouth the moment I was spewed out into the world, when some doctor looked between my legs and laid down the law on me. John’s little card with her GAT score meant nothing on all that.

There’s a word for that. Dysphoria. I got my chugs lopped off, got my own little card that got me into the City Guard with the rest of the boys, got a good haircut and remedial hormones and that all helped, but not enough. The damn rev had a point: I got to be a guy because I took a test and it said I got into enough fights, played enough sports, had enough right interests and few enough wrong ones. I got to be a guy because some white-collar jackhole stamped and signed a form. I never would’ve got to be a guy just because I was a guy.

John was quiet when I was done spewing. Then she said, “The only way I could’ve gotten this job was by acting, every day, like I was something I wasn’t.”

The only way I got this job was by arguing my whole life I was who I was.

“Do you think it makes sense?” John asked.

“Yeah, funny thing is, no one ever asked me.”

John was quiet. Then she said, “I hate it.”

I looked at her. Didn’t know what she meant.

“You can feel it,” John said. “How they look at you.”

I grimaced. “Yeah,” I agreed. “How it goes sliding over you. Like they just look, and—”

“And it’s not even—it’s a look that says ‘I know what you are,’” John said. “Like they’ve figured you out.”

“And you can’t say no. You can’t—”

“You just want to say, that’s not me!”

I turned my head to look at her. Him. I looked at him. “Why do you put up with this shit?” I said. “Just get another goddamn job.”

He watched me with blank hazel eyes. “Why didn’t you just wear the goddamn dress?”

I twisted around and punched him.

I split his lip on his teeth. If I hadn’t been wearing gloves I’d’ve split my knuckle on his teeth. He jerked back and spat blood, and gave me the kind of look people give bad wiring.

After a while, I said, “Sorry.”

John wiped a glob of blood off his lips. “I had brothers,” he said. “I’ll survive.”

“I meant—” I waved a hand. “Sorry for the other stuff. Pulling you out of the queue.”

John was quiet for a moment. “You were just doing your job.”

“So was the guy who said I wasn’t man enough to be in the army.” I ground my fingernails into my fist. “I just—this is shit, what they make us do.”

Wasn’t much to say, after that.

I closed my eyes and tried to keep the headache down. John got up and walked to the window, looked out at the alley and the street. Then I heard him take breath in.

“Someone’s coming.”

I opened my eyes. “That our boys?”

John was standing way too still, and his shoulders came up toward his ears. “No,” he said.

Revs.

I pulled myself up on the windowsill, and John grabbed my arm to keep me standing. I couldn’t see—headache made it hard—but John said, “There. Three, coming for the front entrance.”

Where they’d find Isaac. They’d find that dead rev. They’d look and wonder where their hostages got to, and they’d come up here to plan. I cussed and reached for the window, and John stopped my hand.

“Are you going to make it down?”

I didn’t look out. Figured that if I went with my eyes closed, I wouldn’t lose it. “We have a choice?”

“You get sick on the stairs and they’ll hear you,”John said. “We’ll be easy marks in that alley. We can find somewhere to hide, let the guard flush them out.”

I groaned. “Where, like the girls’ bathroom?”

John shrugged. “Good as anywhere.”

He got me under the arm and we went to the door, quiet as possible. We slipped through, just as quiet, and someone yelled “Hey!” from the stairs.

John hadn’t seen the first bunch of revs to come home.

There was maybe a second where the rev just saw John’s dress, and most people leave medical types alone. Never know when one might save your bacon, even if you are on the wrong side. Then he saw me, though, and the one thing the revs hated as much as appointed officials was City Guard.

He probably put together who’d shot his pal, too.

Pride might get me killed, but twitchy kept me alive. I shot from the hip, literally, didn’t kill the guy but came close, and the other revs started shouting downstairs.

I remember thinking something about high ground. I remember my helmet fitting too tight, watching myself like a live-action movie, like I was outside my head, stumbling down the stairs and crashing down under cover behind the pulp books. I shot one guy in the chest because I don’t think he believed what was happening—damn revs talk big, but most are just city boys, low on the masc score, lower than me— and then it was on.

By the time I hit the registers I was skidding on adrenaline. Yeah, so I had stupid ideas about action and heroism, like every kid who wanted to be in the army. Thought I’d be a big hero, mowing down hostiles and never taking a hit, lighting up a cig with a big grin. Instead I was sick to my stomach and my heart was pounding too fast; I thought I’d wig out any second. The way my hands were shaking, I can’t believe I shot anyone, but I must’ve, sometime in between the shelves knocking over and the displays getting torn apart over me. I fought those revs until my magazine was empty, not that it took more than a minute at that, and that’s when the boys in uniform came and rescued me.

I can’t remember the trip back to Camp Save Big. I know I didn’t make it on my own power. Mostly I remember the bit before I woke up, swimming in that big back-of-the-eyelid river, up and down until I broke the surface.

Didn’t wake in any proper hospital. This was where they put the special projects, I guess. I could feel a catheter in, and my stomach dropped three feet. All I could think was Shit. All I could think was, Cover blown. People aren’t in the habit of asking after your privates unless they knew you took a reassessment, and I’d been liking that no one here knew. No one asks to see your license if you pass yourself off. If you don’t have chugs or a damn beard. Or a goddamn head injury that makes them stick a catheter in.

I bit down hard, and made fists hard, and held on to nothing until I heard a door open and a guy’s voice say “Hey” beside me.

Look up and there was John, and he reached over to take my pulse. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m your attending. I told them you might like a private room, and they gave you this one—you being the hero of the hour.”

I looked around at shelves shoved into a corner, a few warehouse pallets stacked in another corner, and decided it had been a crappy back room before becoming my crappy suite. Then what he said hit me. “Wait there. Hero?”

“Hero of the Battle of Fresh Food Mart,” John said. “Save the day. Get the girl. You know, if you want her.”

I gave him a funny look, and he burst out laughing.

“Christos, not me!”

I laughed, too. “Think I’m Agatha’s type?”

He reached down and patted my shoulder, and the funny thing was, I didn’t mind. Like, maybe it didn’t matter to his thinking that I got no bits—just like he got no girliness. We both had our dirty little secrets.

“Tell you what, though. That’s got to be worth three points masculine on the GAT.”

“Not unless they hand me a medal over it.” I groaned. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather get treatment than none and I was glad that my head didn’t hurt, but I wanted out of that bed, out of that hospital gown that fell down between my legs, out of just lying there helpless and feeling exposed to the world. John looked at his fingers.

“Not fair, is it?”

Yeah, and we both knew without asking. “Shit deal,” I said. “So what do we do?”

John shrugged. “Keep going,” he said. “Things have to change sometime.”

I looked at him. “You sound like a rev.” That talk about things changing, how unjust it all was. Hell, I guess I sounded like one, too, in my head, but I knew I wasn’t, and I don’t think John was either. Just two guys in bad positions.

“Yeah, well. They’re wrong about a lot, but they’re not wrong about this.”John shrugged and stood up. “I’ve got patients. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck on your rounds.”

He went, and I lay back and listened to the painkillers swirling in my veins. The door pulled open, and I didn’t hear it shut. I looked.

“If I have any say in it, I’ll get you that medal,” John said.

The door swung closed behind him.

AN OWOMOYELA is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire. Owomoyela’s fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of “year’s bests.” Se lives in the San Francisco Bay area and loves to learn in the fields of languages (human and computer), psychology (especially the psychology of motivation), changing standards of communication and narrative, social construction of race, ability, and gender, and the entire realm of speculative fiction.

DAS STEINGESCHÖPF

G. V. ANDERSON

I’d not long been made journeyman when the Schöpfers’ Guild gave me my first commission in 1928. Frau Leitner from Bavaria had written to request a small restoration—I took the southbound train from Berlin, made two changes, and disembarked at the end of the line in a small town tucked between the pleats of the mountains. A ragged man with a horse-drawn cart was waiting for me. We traveled by lamplight up a steep, icy path to the front door of an old timber chalet.

All was dark and quiet. I jumped down, the snow crackling beneath my weight, and turned to thank the driver. He’d already clicked to the horse and was turning the cart around, grimly avoiding my eye. He spat a wad of sooty phlegm towards me which landed on one of my new Guild-issued boots with a soft splot.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, every time: even a Schöpfer’s status couldn’t protect me from this. I had curly hair and dark, prominent eyes. An easy target. I wanted to shout at his retreating back that I had worn my fair share of rags too, that my pristine clothing wasn’t due to some Jewish conspiracy. But I swallowed my words, of course, as I always had. I pulled out a handkerchief and knelt to wipe my boot.

The creak of the cart’s wheels had faded by the time I trudged up to the door of the chalet.

I knocked; a woman with kingfisher eyes opened the door. “Wer sind Sie?”

“Frau Leitner?” I said. “I’m from the Guild.”

She backed away to let me in. I ducked beneath the lintel—the low ceiling beams forced me to stoop.

“Thank you for coming, Herr Schöpfer,” she said. Her voice was gravel, full of cracks and pops.

“Please, Herr Hertzel is fine,” I replied, waving away the formal title. “I’m sorry to call on you so late. The journey took longer than I expected.”

As I spoke, she led me into a small kitchen where a fire was dying in the grate. The logs looked suspiciously like chair legs. I shed my scarf and gloves, keeping my coat on for warmth, set my leather tool case on the table, and took a seat while Frau Leitner unhooked the kettle hanging over the fire. When she bent closer to the light, I could make out her features. The little details of this memory—the fabric of her coat, wool or cotton; the grain of the worktops, rough or smooth—they have, with time, disintegrated like flesh. They elude me now. But I do remember her face. It is a Schöpfer’s habit, I suppose, to remember interesting faces. She was quite chinless, her bottom lip blending into her neck almost seamlessly, and her cheeks had a deflated, gaunt look that told of too much weight lost too quickly. Her hair was more gray than blond. Old enough for grown children.

I knew better than to ask their whereabouts.

She poured tea into chipped mugs and, as she sat down, burst into an eye-watering coughing fit. She covered her mouth with a shaking hand, her cheeks flushing. I rose from my chair, unsure what to do, but she waved me down.

“That doesn’t sound too healthy,” I said.

“It comes and goes,” she croaked.

I cleared my throat. “I know it’s late, but we should discuss the restoration, if you don’t mind. I’d like to get an idea of how much work is needed. What can you tell me about the piece?”

“His name is Ambroise.”

“He’s French?”

She hesitated, her breath crackling. “Ja, originally.”

“And how did he come to be in your possession?”

“He’s been with us a long time. My great-grandmother took him in, helped him find patrons for his paintings.” She took a tentative sip of tea. “He doesn’t much like dealing with strangers, so I help him with it now.”

I wasn’t surprised by this arrangement—many of Ambroise’s kind find positions with families as companions and teachers. “And it’s a small repair?”

She coughed once, and looked away. “His eyes have deteriorated so much, he can hardly see to paint.”

After our tea, Frau Leitner showed me upstairs to the attic. The slanted beams were high enough to allow me to stand comfortably, but there were boards covering the windows and I couldn’t see anything at all. I began to take a step but Frau Leitner threw an arm across my middle to stop me. “Wait here,” she said. With her coat pulled up over her mouth to keep out the dust, she disappeared into the darkness. I heard the splintering of old wood and suddenly starlight was streaming in from a large window, illuminating Frau Leitner as she propped the board against the wall. Perched on a stool in the middle of the room was the largest Steingeschöpf I’d ever seen.

Ambroise glowed so eerily in the starlight that he might have been carved from alabaster, not Queckstein. Every muscle was engorged and grotesquely defined. Like with many Steingeschöpfe, there were fantastical elements: he had a tail that stretched across the room, as broad and immovable as a felled tree trunk, spikes along his spine, and two twisting ram horns that erupted from his brow, adding another two feet in height at least. Veins of discoloration crisscrossed his chest and shoulders. Moss had colonized the twin hollows of his clavicles and the deep crease of his lower abdominals, which guided the eye downwards to a modest penis.

“Ambroise,” Frau Leitner said, breaking my stunned silence, “this is Herr Hertzel, from the Guild. Er will dir helfen.”

At the sound of her voice, Ambroise’s head tilted. Buried in the midst of a large curling beard, a shapeless slice widened. It wasn’t just his eyes that had failed: time had also blunted his mouth. This dilapidation, clearly the work of centuries, and the style of his carving, forced me to ask: “How old is he? Who carved him?”

Ambroise’s head swung towards me, but it was Frau Leitner who replied, “De Loynes.”

My mouth fell open.

De Loynes had been a French master, alive in the seventeenth century. Ambroise certainly fitted with what I knew of the de Loynes style—oversized, detailed, gargoylian monsters—but it was impossible: de Loynes’s pieces were priceless. They decorated churches across Europe, populated the most exclusive of private collections, and according to the Guild, every piece was accounted for. What on earth was one doing here? And Frau Leitner wanted me—a journeyman on his first commission—to restore it? It was like asking an art student to restore a Leonardo.

I struggled to speak. “That is an . . . extraordinary claim, Frau Leitner. If it’s true, I cannot—this restoration deserves a master’s skill. I could do irreversible damage . . . He ought to be in a museum, he’s a priceless artefact—”

The blue shards in Frau Leitner’s eyes flashed, dampening the warmth of the gold. “Artefact,” she snapped. “Possession. You talk about him as if he’s a thing!”

I’d forgotten myself. The Guild had taught me to see Steingeschöpfe as pieces of art to be created and repaired; to Frau Leitner, of course, Ambroise was a dear and lifelong friend. I took a deep breath and bowed quickly to them both. “I’m sorry, but I’m not qualified for this commission. Please excuse me.”

I stumbled downstairs and through the front door, into the cold, sobering night. The path that had brought me here was already obscured by fresh snow, but the grooves of the cart’s wheels were deep enough to follow; I should go directly to the train station and telephone Berlin. But I’d left my scarf and tool case inside, and in any case the shock was catching up to me: my legs were shaking. I sat on the front step, the snow soaking through my coat and trousers, and lit a cigarette. Somewhere above me, Frau Leitner was coughing again.

My Guild badge felt heavy in my breast pocket. I pulled it out, a dark bronze disc just smaller than my palm, and ran my thumb over the embossed chisel-mallet-spark motif. Mine had been hard won, and I still wasn’t convinced that I deserved it.

Berlin was hell during the first war. Food shortages had forced me to eat the bark off trees to survive, to get by with loaves made from one-quarter flour and three-quarters ash—hardly enough for anyone, let alone a boy of fourteen. I had no particular interest in becoming a Schöpfer, but after the closure of the home where I’d grown up, and the later loss of my hostel place, I applied for a Guild apprenticeship simply because the advertisement, trodden into the gutter outside a soup kitchen, promised hot, regular meals, and a dormitory with running water.

I was apprenticed with nine other boys to Herr Schöpfer Fellinger, a man with a severe center parting who had developed, since the signing of the armistice, a deep suspicion for anyone who looked remotely Jewish. “You’ve got that pallid, sickly look about you,” he sneered up at me during our first lesson.

“Aren’t Jews supposed to be short and fat?” a scrawny red-haired boy with a crooked front tooth shouted from the back, which made the rest of the boys laugh.

Gradually, Fellinger introduced us to Queckstein, the material from which all Steingeschöpfe are carved. We spent months observing—and then experiencing, in small doses—its siphoning effect, how it sucks away a Schöpfer’s energy and animates itself.

We toured exhibitions and heard lectures from renowned Italian masters. We were shown newsreels of the Statue of Liberty, the largest Steingeschöpf ever created. She still guards the port of New York, wading in the deep waters of the city’s harbor and hailing new arrivals with the hearty “Bienvenue!” of many long-dead Frenchmen.

The bed and board—and the craft, I admit—invigorated me. I worked hard to recognize the difference between a rondel chisel and a toothed chisel. I learned how to touch completed Steingeschöpfe, how to listen to the echoes inside them. Even Fellinger had to admit my progress was more than passable. By the time I was permitted to work with raw Queckstein, however, it became clear that our styles clashed: he loved floridity, while I was drawn to everything sparse and efficient. “You favor a steady line,” he once said as he inspected my latest carving—and from anyone else it might have been a compliment. I knew better. I knew that, to Fellinger, steady meant predictable. Predictable meant boring.

Of the ten boys apprenticed, only I and one other—Franz, the red-haired boy—earned our badges. The rest gradually peeled away. Some lacked the skill, others the patience. At least two were whisked away to the country by their parents to escape the escalating postwar violence in Berlin. One boy ignored Fellinger’s warnings and never wore his mask while filing: a year’s worth of Queckstein dust settled in his lungs, siphoning his energy unchecked until he died, cotton-haired and frail, aged seventeen.

I admired Franz’s designs, as elegant as he was coarse. They had stretched-caramel limbs, unnaturally elongated and graceful. Wisps of stone, hardly existing at all. The shock, and the joke, came when they spoke: Franz knew every foul word I’d ever heard and then some, and every Steingeschöpf he made, however beautiful, knew them too. When Fellinger presented our work to the Guildmasters one summer—“Fick dich, du blödes Arschloch!”—we crouched outside the door with our fists in our mouths and tears trailing down our cheeks. Franz was given extra instruction in controlling the siphoning process, which would prevent this transference, but his aesthetic was highly praised.

I, however, was no artist. Franz had applied for an apprenticeship to improve his innate talent; I had only wanted a roof over my head. My work from the same summer—and every other summer—was received with little enthusiasm from anyone other than Franz.

I couldn’t hope to match de Loynes’s style. A three-hundred-year-old hidden masterwork would be ruined.

And no less of an issue—I dutifully reminded myself—was the fact that Frau Leitner had tried to circumvent our fees by downplaying the level of skill needed for the restoration. The inflation of five years prior had buckled the Guild’s reserves, relying as it did on the buying and selling of Steingeschöpfe and fees owed for repairing wear and tear and war damage which, in the early twenties, no German had had the marks for.

As I nursed my cigarette, I became aware of Frau Leitner’s death rattle behind me. I slipped my badge back into my pocket.

“His paintings don’t sell that well,” she said quietly. “I knew they’d send a master if I was honest in my letter, and I’ve heard what your lot charge. I’d have fixed him myself, but last I checked, you don’t teach women.” She sighed and sat with me on the step, nodding at my cigarette. “Do you have a spare?”

I did, but I hesitated. “What about your cough?”

Frau Leitner snorted. “What’s it going to do, kill me?”

I lit her cigarette with a match, my hands protecting the tiny flame from the wind. The first few drags caught in her throat and she choked, but it only made her more stubborn to carry on. “These are good,” she said, her eyes watering. I had to smile, and once she caught my eye, she smiled as well. She was not a beautiful woman, but something about her features—the way her mouth moved to accommodate her front teeth—irresistibly drew the eye.

“I’m sorry,” she said, exhaling smoke.

“I understand,” I said. “Times are hard for everyone.”

She flicked ash into the snow. “He’s been with me my whole life. He’s taken good care of my family and now I want to take good care of him. I want to know he’ll be all right when I’m gone.” As if to punctuate her point, she coughed into her hand, dry and painful.

“The Guild in Berlin would be happy to have him,” I told her, wondering whether it would be rude to pat her back. “He’d be welcome anytime.”

Frau Leitner shook her head and swallowed. “And be gawked at for the rest of his existence? Listen, he’s not interested in all that showy masters’ rubbish. Just a set of eyes and a tidier mouth—as good a job as you can make it that won’t cost the earth. You can do that, can’t you? Or what did you get that badge for?”

I rubbed my face. It had been a long day and I was exhausted. “I need to see him in daylight,” I said, mostly to mollify her. Part of me, though, was buoyed by her distaste for the kind of ornamentation Fellinger always favored. I squashed my cigarette on the step and got to my feet, my eyes picking out the wheel tracks in the path. “I’ll find myself a room and call again in the morning.”

I’d ducked into the darkness of the hall to retrieve my tool case from the kitchen when she said, quietly, “The guesthouse won’t take you.”

I paused, bile bubbling in my throat. Recently, signs had started to appear in shop windows and hotel lobbies across Germany—“Keine Hunde,” and then, below, like an afterthought, “Keine Juden.” The collar around the necks of Germany’s undesirables was tightening, inch by inch.

At length, Frau Leitner blew out the last of her smoke and flicked the cigarette away.

“You can sleep in the living room. The sofa’s comfortable enough.”

The sofa was not comfortable enough.

The next morning, aching in places I’d never known I could ache, I set my tool case down in a corner of the attic beside half a dozen canvases. My fingertips took a moment to tiptoe through them. They were odd things: light and dark paint without any clear subject, individual bristle strokes preserved like fossils in the thickest smudges. They had titles scribbled on their backs such as Ein Garten ohne Blumen and Rike, ’12. Looking at them, I felt as if I’d intruded on something raw and private.

I turned away and drew closer to Ambroise. The harsh light of morning hadn’t been kind to him.

“Rike?” he said, his voice thick and impenetrable.

“I’m here,” Frau Leitner said from the doorway. “Hab’ keine Angst, Ambroise. Herr Hertzel just needs to have a closer look.”

He towered over me. It was impossible to see the details of his face. “Can you bend down a little, Ambroise?”

He obliged, as cumbrous as a mountain, until his spine could bend no more and his face was level with mine. His eyes held traces of delicate iriswork; de Loynes had painstakingly carved individual muscle fibers into an otherwise smooth sclera. But everything had lost its definition and would have to be sanded away to give me a blank eye to work with.

I saw now that the disrepair of his mouth was in no small part due to an inexpert attempt to widen the cavity: scores had been left behind, made by a poker or a screwdriver. I glanced towards Frau Leitner, and she met my gaze steadily. If this was her doing, I hoped for her sake that she had covered her face well—but I’d already heard the state of her lungs.

I set my face and turned back to the task. His mouth was so obscured by the beard that in order to redefine it, I’d have to start from scratch. The whole beard, a sizeable chunk of his face, would have to go. And my eyes were drawn to the network of dark veins. No Schöpfer worth his badge could ignore these; they would only worsen and require more invasive restoration later.

A drop of sweat slid down my temple.

I reached out with my bare hand. If I was going to restore him, I’d have to touch him eventually. I might as well get past the first shock now. I pressed my palm to his chest and fell into the churning consciousness of a dozen or more men, sucked away in the act of carving and still thrashing with life, with rage, with creation. Aching backs and Queckstein dust caught under fingernails; a secondhand mask with a less-than-perfect fit; a persistent cough. And individual memories: a sackcloth-and-hay bed in a loft; a weeping sore in the groin and the smell of apples; the wetness between a wife’s legs. Two young children and one blue stillborn; dark, muddy days and bright ones with blue skies. A hundred million things to paint, to write, to carve, to compose, all trapped in a body that’s failing. Awareness of a brother come to save them at last, separated only by Ambroise’s skin. They surge towards me: “Qui etes-vous?” A red flash of pride—de Loynes himself?—brushed against my mind: “Don’t defile my work, connard, or I’ll—”

I jerked my hand away. The voices stopped.

“Are you all right?”

Frau Leitner was watching me with a frown. Without training, Ambroise was just cold stone to her hands. She’d never felt the turmoil beneath his skin, beneath the skin of every Steingeschöpf. “Fine,” I said shakily. “A lot of work went into carving him. The Queckstein is . . . chatty.”

What is it that makes those old, traditional masters so hateful? I almost looked forward to restoring Ambroise just to spite his creator. I thought of the long ride home and Fellinger’s smug smile as I admitted failing my first commission. My fists clenched. I’d weathered a decade of taunts and sneers, of indifference—and for what? So that I could run home with my tail tucked between my legs at the first sign of trouble, and prove him right?

I explained what little I could do. Neither Frau Leitner nor Ambroise seemed perturbed at the thought of his face changing drastically, which set my resolve. “He will need to be cleaned. Could you boil some water? And can you spare any soap?”

I scrubbed away the lichen and grime, refusing Frau Leitner’s help: she’d suffered enough for his sake. She coaxed Ambroise into letting me clean his hands, which he would not let me touch at first. They’d been warped out of shape by centuries of holding paintbrushes, like an old stone stair hollowed out and buffed by the passing of countless feet. I hauled myself onto his tail, ignoring de Loynes’s tantrum pounding against my palms, and, by using the spikes of his back as footholds, was just able to reach his horns. Patches of de Loynes’s signature scale work were still visible on his shoulder blades. Their intricacy astounded me.

The Steingeschöpf stayed quite still, resigned to my ministrations. The bucket of hot water grew murky before I was satisfied he was clean. I insisted that Frau Leitner rest downstairs for the afternoon; I’d only brought one face mask. Once she was gone, I explained the next step to Ambroise.

The dark seams across his chest and shoulders were areas where the Queckstein had lost its energy—had, in other words, died. Steingeschöpfe can only exist on the combined energy inside them. Unless this reservoir is replenished, it runs out. Even after three hundred years, Ambroise had plenty of life left by my reckoning, but faults like his must be picked out and filled in with putty before the decay could spread.

“This will feel unpleasant, but it must be done for your overall health.”

Ambroise showed no sign of having heard or understood me. I slipped on my face mask and gathered the tools I would need to scrape away the darkened Queckstein.

It disintegrated like dust at first. Then, the tool caught in a fault line and a chunk the size of my thumbnail popped out. Ambroise growled at me. “Sorry,” I muttered. The siphoning process had begun in earnest. It was a delicate balancing act, completing the work that was required at the smallest possible cost to myself. My memories and emotions jumped around erratically in my head: a shoe with the sole peeling away, my pale toe visible; my fear of de Loynes, who in my imagination looked much like Fellinger; Franz, with the crooked tooth and the slicked red hair. Franz.

We were nineteen in 1923. We’d been paid our allowance for the third and last time that day, as had become the norm: wages received in the morning were barely enough to live on by lunchtime. Inflation meant that our pockets were stuffed with wads of paper marks in dizzying denominations—more money than I’d ever had in my life—and all we could get for it was a bottle of watered-down gin. We drank it in a dank alleyway, until it was dark and our heads were too muddled to hear the rattle of trams from nearby Potsdamer Straße. We’d heard rumors of a cinema projectionist who was letting people in through the back door, bypassing the unaffordable box office. We staggered to the cinema in question. Packets of powder and snuff changed hands, from Franz’s personal stock.

The projection room was small and hot, and there was only an inch-wide gap in the wall from which to watch. We crammed our faces close. The moving picture was of poor quality, the film underexposed. A young woman stood by a bed and slowly stepped out of her dressing gown. My face grew hot. What was on the screen didn’t matter to me—it could have been anything—but the crush of his body against mine, our boundaries blurred by drink, the ticktickticktick of the projector and the stifled moans of the people in the back row and Franz’s eyes lit up by the chalky, stuttering strip of light—it all suddenly mattered very much. Franz’s breathing quickened, and I felt myself harden. “Scheiße,” he whispered.

We stood in the rain outside afterwards, our heads bowed and close, sharing a cigarette. Back and forth, back and forth, our lips settling into the same indent on the filter.

I stepped away from Ambroise, the faults removed, my heart thudding. My hands had gone numb; I had to give them a good shake to bring the feeling back. Ambroise gently poked the gaps I’d left. “Best leave them,” I said. “You don’t want to make them wider.”

The stone-colored putty came in stick form to be torn as required. I softened pea-sized pieces between my fingers and pushed them into the cracks where they would settle and harden.

Next, I used a miniature file to scrape away de Loynes’s iriswork. The desecration would have given Fellinger an apoplexy. In the dust that drifted past my face, I thought I heard de Loynes’s indignation. When the sclera was as smooth as oil, I began to shape the simple craters of his new irises. I thought of Franz as I’d seen him many times, finishing his latest piece, his shirt damp between his shoulder blades. My memories lost their color and substance as I worked. At one point, I couldn’t recall the exact shade of Franz’s hair. My mind scrambled to dredge up other, more mundane things with which to feed the Queckstein. The attic grew dark; the numbness spread up to my elbows. I finally stepped away. His eyes were complete. They swiveled freely in their sockets, as big and round as apples, and fixed on me.

I hesitated. “What do you think?”

Ambroise looked around the starlit attic. His eyes settled on the pile of canvasses. I leapt out of the way of his tail as he all but lunged for them. He picked up the closest canvas—Ein Garten ohne Blumen—and stared at it. His shoulders started to shudder, and there came from him a noise like rolling thunder. He whipped around, banging his horns on a low beam. “Rike!” he boomed. “Rike!”

Frau Leitner’s footsteps were quick on the stairs. She stopped to catch her breath at the top, a hand resting on the banister. Ambroise lumbered over to her and hunkered down. They regarded each other in disbelief. He reached out and ran his fingers through her hair. “Grau.”

Frau Leitner’s smile transformed her face. “Grau. I got old while you weren’t looking, didn’t I?”

That evening, I smoked and ate supper alone in the kitchen. My body felt like the rind of a fruit after the flesh has been scooped away. Fellinger and the other masters were often commissioned to restore Steingeschöpfe, and they always returned grayer and more wizened than ever. I finally understood why.

I snatched a glance through to the sitting room. Frau Leitner had taken a yellowing photograph of two solemn young men in uniform down from the mantelpiece. Ambroise was holding it.

Over the rim of the frame, Frau Leitner’s eyes met mine. Danke, they said. Danke.

My mallet had hovered in the air far too long. Ambroise’s new eyes flicked between my face and my wavering hand. Carving irises was quite different than removing a considerably large part of his face. I had to pour my intentions into the chisel slotted beneath his nose, and by doing so pour a little more of myself than I would like into the Queckstein. This is the shape I want. Help me make it so.

The mallet swung down and the whole beard snapped clean off, landing on the floor with a bang. We watched it roll wonkily across the floorboards and grow still. I turned back and saw that Ambroise’s eyebrow was raised. “Your first shave,” I said. His new eyes creased with silent laughter.

I was left with a messy void from which to shape a jaw and a mouth. I worked quickly, and did my best to resist the pull—no, I thought, you’ve already taken too much from me—but the Queckstein demanded more.

The day we got our badges, Franz and I went to a bar and drank our own weight in schnapps. We toasted to the boy who’d died with lungs full of dust; we toasted to our future; we even toasted to old Fellinger, much as we both hated him. Years of hauling stone and working a chisel had reshaped Franz’s body: the scrawny boy had become a lean man with calloused hands and ropy arms. He still teased his crooked tooth with his tongue; he still slicked back his hair. In many ways he was the same old Franz, but that night he seemed different. Tightly wound. Something had happened between us in that projection room, and had existed between us since—a quickening that needed to be addressed—but neither of us could bear to break the illusion of easy friendship we’d created.

We sat so close that we drew attention. A band of brownshirts, their faces blotchy with drink, swaggered towards our table.

“Hey, you faggots!”

Franz’s spring-loaded fist shot out; the ringleader’s jaw crunched like an autumn leaf. The brawl that followed knocked out two of my molars and shattered the entire collection of vintage liquors behind the bar. The manager threw us out after ten minutes.

Franz and I left the brownshirts groaning on the pavement and staggered back to the safety of the dormitory, our arms slung across the other’s shoulders, too drunk to keep ourselves upright. “Those fascist bastards,” he grinned through bloodstained teeth. “We got ‘em good though, eh?” We passed beneath a grubby poster for the Sturmabteilung that had been pinned to a high fence, its loose corners rattling in the wind. In my room, I found clean cloth and a small bottle of iodine, and dabbed Franz’s black eye. I moved his head to one side to deal with a cut on his cheek. As he watched my face through half-lidded eyes, my thumb ran over his lips.

Ambroise’s lips.

I blinked and realized what I’d done: I’d given Ambroise the jaw and mouth of my best friend. A sharp Cupid’s bow; a plump bottom lip. Lost in memories, I’d reached out to touch his face, and he had leaned into my hand.

Tension was building in him, like the tension in Franz’s arm that night. I leapt back, expecting a fist. Instead, he let out a roar so loud that the house vibrated. Dust—real dust, made of spores and crushed beetle shells and sand—drizzled down on us, coating my shoulders and turning my hair gray. The roar ended and became a full-throated laugh. He bellowed banned poetry from England, traditional tongue breakers, Italian love songs, classics in Greek and Latin—at last, all the things he’d held in his heart for decades, completely uncensored.

I stood back and witnessed his joy.

I needed a few days’ rest after completing the restoration. At the same time, Friederike—she insisted I drop the Frau—took a bad turn; she started to cough all hours of the night. Ambroise abandoned his lonely post in the attic to care for both of us downstairs, lack of space be damned. He pushed the little furniture they had against the walls to make room for his heavy, dragging tail, which left gouges in the floorboards.

Ambroise and I found ourselves with time to fill. It’s funny: I’d worked on many Steingeschöpfe during my apprenticeship, but I don’t think I’d ever sat down and talked to one before. I found it disconcerting. Ambroise was at once me and not me, a patchwork of personality and mood that I half-recognized. I found his German hard to follow, influenced as it was by different dialects and languages, but his voice was rich, like strong coffee. “Rike’s been lying to me all these years,” was one of the first things he said to me. “My paintings are terrible.”

“I like them,” I said. “They look . . . modern.”

He shook his huge head incredulously. “Random dabs of paint on canvas? Whatever next.”

Ambroise confirmed de Loynes as his creator, an unpleasant man by his account. “I was a very early creation,” he told me as I lay in my sickbed. “I spent my formative years in a church in Rouen, ringing the bells every morning and watching the parishioners in prayer. But I was not rooted to one spot like the unfortunate Wasserspeier, and I left against de Loynes’s wishes. I wanted to see the world, and to learn more of this god I’d heard so much about.”

“And?” I asked.

Ambroise took a moment to answer. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, one religion starts to look much the same as another.” He tilted his head. “What about you? Rike tells me you’re a Jew, but . . . I think not.”

It was as if the room had put on a heavy coat; both the light and my humor darkened. I closed my eyes and saw again Fellinger’s sneers, the driver’s spit on my shoe. “My parents—whoever they were—gave me to a children’s home when I was still a baby. I was brought up Catholic.”

Within a few short years, Jews would be identified, not only by their religious beliefs, but by their ancestry. It wouldn’t matter that I didn’t attend the synagogue or wear the kippah; it wouldn’t matter that my parents only might have been Jewish. Without their papers, lost by the children’s home years before, I couldn’t prove otherwise. All that would matter was the Jewish-sounding name they’d left me with, and the fact that my face happened to fit an arbitrary mold.

Ambroise watched me in silence, the same thought—my thought— undoubtedly occurring to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I looked out of the window. “Religion shouldn’t matter to a Schöpfer, in any case. I create new life. It’s the highest blasphemy.”

Ambroise smiled at that, the features of his face grinding together as they moved. “Men and women create new life together all the time.”

My response was noncommittal.

He met my eye. “It’s strange to have memories of someone I’ve never met. The man with the red hair: who is he?”

I had added a part of myself to the mixture inside Ambroise—it was impossible to avoid. But I had left something else inside him too. The love I carried like a stone in my gut, uncomfortable and ever-present, would stay with Ambroise for the rest of his days. I didn’t have the heart to spoil it with the truth: Franz had been dead for over a year.

He’d been part of a communist mob intent on disrupting a rally for the Sturmabteilung. The brownshirts retaliated and things quickly turned violent; in the chaos that spilled into the street, someone drew a knife.

Steingeschöpfe carved by an apprentice are rarely sold, but for Franz’s artistry, the Guild made an exception. The night before they were due to be scattered like dandelion seeds across Europe, I went to see them. The pieces of himself he’d left behind. They watched me as I walked among them, their stylized heads moving as one. As insubstantial as cigarette smoke. What else had he poured into them besides his atrocious language? Was it possible, perhaps, that I was surrounded by fragments of his love for me? I would never see them again, would never have another chance to touch them; I longed to reach out my hands and fall into the world inside them—would it comfort me, to watch his memories and see his heart and hear whatever words he never said?

No. Whatever I could learn from them wouldn’t bring closure. Only pain.

There was no pain in Ambroise’s face as he waited for my answer. I envied him.

“Franz,” I said quietly. “Franz Meier.”

Ambroise mouthed the name with Franz’s own lips.

A dry cough echoed down the hallway, and Ambroise sighed. “If only you could carve new lungs as easily as you carve new eyes.”

On the morning I left, I put my head around the door of Friederike’s bedroom. My train departed in an hour, and I needed plenty of time for the icy walk to the station. I expected her to be sleeping, but she was alert and propped up by pillows, the morning sunlight draped across the eiderdown. The gold in her eyes looked like melted butter. She beckoned me in and patted the space beside her.

So I sat with her, in the bed in which she would soon die.

Only one short month would pass before the check for my services, a letter, and several parcels would arrive at the dormitory. In the letter, Ambroise would describe Friederike’s last days and tell me of his desire to return to the place of his creation, Rouen, to grieve. The parcels were his canvasses, sent with the hope that I would look after them until he could meet me in Berlin. Amongst them would be one new painting, in the same modern style. The composition was more refined, the colors more vibrant now that he could choose them properly. He’d called it Für den Mann mit den roten Haaren.

Bombs almost destroyed Rouen in 1944, taking Ambroise—and my memories of Franz—with them.

That was all to come; but for now, on that last day in Bavaria, Friederike Leitner’s hand was on mine, warm and pulsing with blood. She was watching me with her kingfisher eyes. “I made you something,” she said. She drew from her bedside cabinet my Guild badge, which I’d hardly noticed was missing. She turned it over so that I could see the pin she’d worked into the back. I sat very still as her trembling fingers attached it to my lapel, over my heart.

“This is too important to keep in your pocket, Herr Schöpfer,” she said. “No more hiding it away.”

The bronze badge, usually so dark, glinted in the sunlight.

G. V. ANDERSON is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com, as well as anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She lives and works in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.

THE DEEPWATER BRIDE

TAMSYN MUIR

In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed fun-sized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.

That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.

Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.

“There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.

My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively: “What kind of omen, kid?”

“Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries—”

Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”

We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.

We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.

“Presence of fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days . . . plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes—I can reference better on my Kindle.”

“A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horse-shit. What have I always said?”

“Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”

“Hester, you—”

We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.

The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.

I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”

“Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here—well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”

My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”

“It wouldn’t be unwise”—Mar held up a finger to halt my protest—“but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”

“I would rather face inescapable lappets and watery torment than Mom’s.”

“Your mom didn’t run off and become a dental hygienist to spite you.”

I avoided this line of conversation, because seriously. “What about the omen?”

Mar pushed her plate away and kicked back, precariously balanced on two chair legs. “You saw it, you document it, that’s the Blake way. Just . . . a deep omen at sixteen! Ah, well, what the Hell. See anything in your eggs?”

I re-peppered them and we peered at the rubbery curds. Mine clumped together in a brackish pool of hot sauce.

“Rain on Thursday,” I said. “You?”

“Yankees lose the Series,” said Aunt Mar, and went to tip her plate in the trash. “What a god-awful meal.”

I found her that evening on the peeling balcony, smoking. A caul of cloud obscured the moon. The treetops were black and spiny. Our house was a fine, hideous artifact of the 1980s, decaying high on the side of the valley. Mar saw no point in fixing it up. She had been—her words— lucky enough to get her death foretokened when she was young, and lived life courting lung cancer like a boyfriend who’d never commit.

A heatherback candle spewed wax on the railing. “Mar,” I said, “why are you so scared of our leviathan dreadlords, who lie lurking in the abyssal deeps? I mean, personally.”

“Because seahorrors will go berserk getting what they want and they don’t quit the field,” she said. “Because I’m not seeing fifty, but your overwrought ass is making it to homecoming. Now get inside before you find another frigging omen in my smoke.”

Despite my aunt’s distress, I felt exhilarated. Back at boarding school I’d never witnessed so profound a portent. I’d seen everyday omens, had done since I was born, but the power of prophecy was boring and did not get you on Wikipedia. There was no anticipation. Duty removed ambition. I was apathetically lonely. I prepared only to record The Blake testimony of Hester in the twenty-third generation for future Blakes.

Blake seers did not live long or decorated lives. Either you were mother of a seer, or a seer and never a mother and died young. I hadn’t really cared, but I had expected more payout than social malingering and teenage ennui. It felt unfair. I was top of my class; I was pallidly pretty; thanks to my mother I had amazing teeth. I found myself wishing I’d see my death in my morning cornflakes like Mar; at least then the last, indifferent mystery would be revealed.

When Stylephorus chordatus started beaching themselves in public toilets, I should have taken Mar’s cue. The house became unseasonably cold and at night our breath showed up as wet white puffs. I ignored the brooding swell of danger; instead, I sat at my desk doing my summer chemistry project, awash with weird pleasure. Clutching fistfuls of malformed octopodes at the creek was the first interesting thing that had ever happened to me.

The birch trees bordering our house wept salt water. I found a deer furtively licking the bark, looking like Bambi sneaking a hit. I sat on a stump to consult the Blake journals:

THE BLAKE TESTIMONY OF RUTH OF THE NINETEENTH GENERATION ON HER TWENTY-THIRD YEAR

WEEPING OF PLANTS:

Lamented should be greenstuff that seeps brack water or salt water or blood, for Nature is abhorring a lordly Visitor: if be but one plant then burn it or stop up a tree with a poultice of finely crushed talc, &c., to avoid notice. BRACK WATER is the sign of the MANY-THROATED MONSTER GOD &THOSE WHO SPEAK UNSPEAKABLE TONGUES. SALT WATER is the sign of UNFED LEVIATHANS & THE PELAGIC WATCHERS & THE TENTACLE so BLOOD must be the STAR SIGN of the MAKER OF THE HOLES FROM WHICH EVEN LIGHT SHALL NOT ESCAPE. Be comforted that the SHABBY MAN will not touch what is growing.

PLANT WEEPING, SINGLY:

The trail, movement & wondrous pilgrimage.

PLANTS WEEPING, THE MANY:

A Lord’s bower has been made & it is for you to weep & rejoice.

My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate.

Underneath in ballpoint was written: Has nobody noticed that Blake crypto-fascist worship of these deities has never helped?? Family of sheeple. Fuck the SYSTEM! This was dated 1972.

A bird called, then stopped mid-warble. The shadows lengthened into long sharp shapes. A sense of stifling pressure grew. All around me, each tree wept salt without cease.

I said aloud: “Nice.”

I hiked into town before evening. The bustling of people and the hurry of their daily chores made everything look almost normal; their heads were full of small-town everyday, work and food and family and maybe meth consumption, and this banality blurred the nagging fear. I stocked up on OJ and a sufficient supply of Cruncheroos.

Outside the sky was full of chubby black rainclouds, and the streetlights cast the road into sulphurous relief. I smelled salt again as it began to rain, and through my hoodie I could feel that the rain was warm as tea; I caught a drop on my tongue and spat it out again, as it tasted deep and foul. As it landed it left a whitish buildup I foolishly took for snow.

It was not snow. Crystals festooned themselves in long, stiff streamers from the traffic signals. Strands like webbing swung from street to pavement, wall to sidewalk. The streetlights struggled on and turned it green-white in the electric glare, dazzling to the eye. Main Street was spangled over from every parked car to the dollar store. My palms were sweaty.

From down the street a car honked dazedly. My sneakers were gummed up and it covered my hair and my shoulders and my bike tires. I scuffed it off in a hurry. People stood stock-still in doorways and sat in their cars, faces pale and transfixed. Their apprehension was mindless animal apprehension, and my hands were trembling so hard I dropped my Cruncheroos.

“What is it?” someone called out from the Rite Aid. And somebody else said, “It’s salt.”

Sudden screams. We all flinched. But it wasn’t terror. At the center of a traffic island, haloed in the numinous light of the dollar store, a girl was crunching her Converse in the salt and spinning round and round. She had long shiny hair—a sort of chlorine gold—and a spray-on tan the color of Garfield. My school was populated with her clones. A bunch of huddling girls in halter tops watched her twirl with mild and terrified eyes.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she whooped. “Isn’t this frigging awesome?”

The rain stopped all at once, leaving a vast whiteness. All of Main Street looked bleached and shining; even the Pizza Hut sign was scrubbed clean and made fresh. From the Rite Aid I heard someone crying. The girl picked up a handful of powdery crystals and they fell through her fingers like jewels; then her beaming smile found me and I fled.

I collected the Blake books and lit a jittering circle of heatherback candles. I turned on every light in the house. I even stuck a Mickey Mouse nightlight into the wall socket, and he glowed there in dismal magnificence as I searched. It took me an hour to alight upon an old glued-in letter:

Reread the testimony of Elizabeth Blake in the fifteenth generation after I had word of this. I thought the account strange, so I went to see for myself. It was as Great-Aunt Annabelle had described, mold everywhere but almost beautiful, for it had bloomed in cunning patterns down the avenue all the way to the door. I couldn’t look for too long as the looking gave me such a headache.

I called in a few days later and the mold was gone. Just one lady of the house and wasn’t she pleased to see me as everyone else in the neighborhood felt too dreadful to call. She was to be the sacrifice as all signs said. Every spider in that house was spelling the presence and I got the feeling readily that it was one of the lesser diseased Ones, the taste in the milk, the dust. One of the Monster Lord’s fever wizards had made his choice in her, no mistake. The girl was so sweet looking and so cheerful. They say the girls in these instances are always cheerful about it like lambs to the slaughter. The pestilences and their behemoth Duke may do as they will. I gave her till May.

Perhaps staying closer would have given me more detail but I felt that beyond my duty. I placed a wedding gift on the stoop and left that afternoon. I heard later he’d come for his bride Friday month and the whole place lit up dead with Spanish flu.

Aunt Annabelle always said that she’d heard some went a-cour

The page ripped here, leaving what Aunt Annabelle always said forever contentious. Mar found me in my circle of heatherbacks hours later, feverishly marking every reference to bride I could find.

“They closed Main Street to hose it down,” she said. “There were cars backed up all the way to the Chinese takeout. There’s mac ’n’ cheese in the oven, and for your info I’m burning so much rosemary on the porch everyone will think I smoke pot.”

“One of the pelagic kings has chosen a bride,” I said.

“What?”

“Evidence: rain of salt at the gate, in this case ‘gate’ being Main Street. Evidence of rank: rain of salt in mass quantities from Main Street to, as you said, the Chinese takeout, in the middle of the day during a gibbous moon a notable distance from the ocean. The appearance of fish that don’t know light. A dread bower of crystal.”

My aunt didn’t break down, or swear, or anything. She just said, “Sounds like an old-fashioned apocalypse event to me. What’s your plan, champ?”

“Document it and testify,” I said. “The Blake way. I’m going to find the bride.”

“No,” she said. “The Blake way is to watch the world burn from a distance and write down what the flames looked like. You need to see, not to find. This isn’t a goddamned murder mystery.”

I straightened and said very patiently: “Mar, this happens to be my birthright—”

“To Hell with birthright! Jesus, Hester, I told your mom you’d spend this summer getting your driver’s license and kissing boys.”

This was patently obnoxious. We ate our macaroni ’n’ cheese surrounded by more dribbling heatherbacks, and my chest felt tight and tense the whole time. I kept on thinking of comebacks like I don’t understand your insistence on meaningless bullshit, Mar, or even a pointed Margaret. Did my heart really have to yearn for licenses and losing my French-kissing virginity at the parking lot? Did anything matter, apart from the salt and the night outside, the bulging eyes down at Jamison Pond?

“Your problem is,” she said, which was always a shitty way to begin a sentence, “that you don’t know what bored is.”

“Wrong. I am often exquisitely bored.”

“Unholy matrimonies are boring,” said my aunt. “Plagues of salt? Boring. The realization that none of us can run—that we’re all here to be used and abused by forces we can’t even fight—that’s so boring, kid!” She’d used sharp cheddar in the mac ’n’ cheese and it was my favorite, but I didn’t want to do anything other than push it around the plate. “If you get your license you can drive out to Denny’s.”

“I am not interested,” I said, “in fucking Denny’s’’

“I wanted you to make some friends and be a teenager and not to get in over your head,” she said, and speared some macaroni savagely. “And I want you to do the dishes, so I figure I’ll get one out of four. Don’t go sneaking out tonight, you’ll break the rosemary ward.”

I pushed away my half-eaten food and kept myself very tight and quiet as I scraped pans and stacked the dishwasher.

“And take some Band-Aids up to your room,” said Mar.

“Why?”

“You’re going to split your knee. You don’t outrun fate, champ.”

Standing in the doorway, I tried to think up a stinging riposte. I said, “Wait and see,” and took each step upstairs as cautiously as I could. I felt a spiteful sense of triumph when I made it to the top without incident. Once I was in my room and yanking off my hoodie I tripped and split my knee open on the dresser drawer. I then lay in bed alternately bleeding and seething for hours. I did not touch the Band-Aids, which in any case were decorated with SpongeBob’s image.

Outside, the mountains had forgotten summer. The stars gave a curious, chill light. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking too closely, but despite the shudder in my fingertips and the pain in my knee I did anyway; the tops of the trees made grotesque shapes. I tried to read the stars, but the position of Mars gave the same message each time: doom, and approach, and altar.

One star trembled in the sky and fell. I felt horrified. I felt ecstatic. I eased open my squeaking window and squeezed out onto the windowsill, shimmying down the drainpipe. I spat to ameliorate the breaking of the rosemary ward, flipped Mar the bird, and went to find the bride.

The town was subdued by the night. Puddles of soapy water from the laundromat were filled with sprats. The star had fallen over by the eastern suburbs, and I pulled my hoodie up as I passed the hard glare of the gas station. It was as though even the houses were withering, dying of fright like prey. I bought a Coke from the dollar machine.

I sipped my Coke and let my feet wander up street and down street, along alley and through park. There was no fear. A Blake knows better. I took to the woods behind people’s houses, meandering until I found, speared on one of the young birches, a dead shark.

It was huge and hideous with a malformed head, pinned with its belly facing whitely upwards and its maw hanging open. The tree groaned beneath its weight. It was dotted all over with an array of ins and didn’t look like any shark I’d ever seen at an aquarium. It was bracketed by a sagging inflatable pool and an abandoned Tonka truck in someone’s backyard. The security lights came on and haloed the shark in all its dead majesty: oozing mouth, long slimy body, bony snout.

One of the windows rattled up from the house. “Hey!” someone called. “It’s you.”

It was the girl with shiny hair, the one who’d danced like an excited puppy in the rain of salt. She was still wearing a surfeit of glittery eye shadow. I gestured to the shark. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s been there all afternoon. Gross, right?”

“Doesn’t this strike you as suspicious?” I said. “Are you not even slightly weirded out?”

“Have you ever seen Punk’d?” She did not give me time to reply. “I got told it could be Punk’d, and then I couldn’t find Punk”d on television so I had to watch it on the YouTubes. I like Punk”d. People are so funny when they get punk’d. Did you know you dropped your cereal? I have it right here, but I ate some.”

“I wasn’t aware of a finder’s tax on breakfast cereal,” I said.

The girl laughed, the way some people did when they had no idea of the joke. “I’ve seen you over at Jamison Pond,” she said, which surprised me. “By yourself. What’s your name?”

“Why name myself for free?”

She laughed again, but this time more appreciatively and less like a studio audience. “What if I gave you my name first?”

“You’d be stupid.”

The girl leaned out the window, hair shimmering over her One Direction T-shirt. The sky cast weird shadows on her house and the shark smelled fetid in the background. “People call me Rainbow. Rainbow Kipley.”

Dear God, I thought. “On purpose?”

“C’mon, we had a deal for your name—”

“We never made a deal,” I said, but relented. “People call me Hester. Hester Blake.”

“Hester,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth like candy. Then she repeated “Hester” and laughed raucously. I must have looked pissed off, because she laughed again and said, “Sorry! It’s just a really dumb name,” which I found rich coming from someone designated Rainbow.

I felt I’d got what I came for. She must have sensed that the conversation had reached a premature end because she announced, “We should hang out.”

“In your backyard? Next to a dead shark? At midnight?”

“There are jellyfish in my bathtub,” said Rainbow, which both surprised me and didn’t, and also struck me as a unique tactic. But then she added, quite normally, “You’re interested in this. Nobody else is. They’re pissing themselves, and I’m not—and here you are—so . . .”

Limned by the security lamp, Rainbow disappeared and reappeared before waving an open packet of Cruncheroos. “You could have your cereal back.”

Huh. I had never been asked to hang out before. Certainly not by girls who looked as though they used leave-in conditioner. I had been using Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears since childhood, as it kept its promises. I was distrustful; I had never been popular. At school my greatest leap had been from weirdo to perceived goth. Girls abhorred oddity, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. Some had even warmly talked to me of Nightwish albums. I dyed my hair black to complete the effect and was nevermore bullied.

I feared no contempt of Rainbow Kipley’s. I feared wasting my time. But the lure was too great. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “to see if the shark’s gone. You can keep the cereal as collateral.”

“Cool,” she said, like she understood collateral, and smiled with very white teeth. “Cool, cool.”

Driver’s licenses and kissing boys could wait indefinitely, for preference. My heart sang all the way home, for you see: I’d discovered the bride.

The next day I found myself back at Rainbow’s shabby suburban house. We both took the time to admire her abandoned shark by the light of day, and I compared it to pictures on my iPhone and confirmed it as Mitsukurina owstoni: goblin shark. I noted dead grass in a broad brown ring around the tree, the star-spoked webs left empty by their spiders, each a proclamation: a monster dwells. Somehow we ended up going to the park and Rainbow jiggled her jelly bracelets the whole way.

I bought a newspaper and pored over local news: the headline read GLOBAL WARMING OR GLOBAL WARNING? It queried alkaline content in the rain, or something, then advertised that no fewer than one scientist was fascinated with what had happened on Main Street. “Scientists,” said my companion, like a slur, and she laughed gutturally.

“Science has its place,” I said and rolled up the newspaper. “Just not at present. Science does not cause salt blizzards or impalement of bathydemersal fish.”

“You think this is cool, don’t you?” she said slyly. “You’re on it like a bonnet.”

There was an unseemly curiosity to her, as though the town huddling in on itself waiting to die was like a celebrity scandal. Was this the way I’d been acting? “No,” I lied, “and nobody under sixty says on it like a bonnet.”

“Shut up! You know what I mean—”

“Think of me as a reporter. Someone who’s going to watch what happens. I already know what’s going on, I just want a closer look.”

Her eyes were wide and very dark. When she leaned in she smelled like Speed Stick. “How do you know?”

There was no particular family jurisprudence about telling. Don’t appeared to be the rule of thumb as Blakes knew that, Cassandra-like, they defied belief. For me it was simply that nobody had ever asked. “I can read the future, and what I read always comes true,” I said.

“Oh my God. Show me.”

I decided to exhibit myself in what paltry way a Blake can. I looked at the sun. I looked at the scudding clouds. I looked at an oily stain on our park bench, and the way the thin young stalks of plants were huddled in the ground. I looked at the shadows people made as they hurried, and at how many sparrows rose startled from the water fountain.

“The old man in the hat is going to burn down his house on Saturday,” I said. “That jogger will drop her Gatorade in the next five minutes. The police will catch up with that red-jacket man in the first week of October.” I gathered some saliva and, with no great ceremony, hocked it out on the grass. I examined the result. “They’ll unearth a gigantic ruin in . . . southwestern Australia. In the sand plains. Seven archaeologists. In the winter sometime. Forgive my inexactitude, my mouth wasn’t very wet.”

Rainbow’s mouth was a round O. In front of us the jogger dropped her Gatorade, and it splattered on the ground in a shower of blue. I said, “You won’t find out if the rest is true for months yet. And you could put it down to coincidences. But you’d be wrong.”

“You’re a gypsy,” she accused.

I had expected “liar,” and “nutjob,” but not “gypsy.” “No, and by the way, that’s racist. If you’d like to know our future, then very soon—I don’t know when—a great evil will make itself known in this town, claim a mortal, and lay waste to us all in celebration. I will record all that happens for my descendants and their descendants, and as is the agreement between my bloodline and the unknown, I’ll be spared.”

I expected her to get up and leave, or laugh again. She said: “Is there anything I can do?”

For the first time I pitied this pretty girl with her bright hair and her Chucks, her long-limbed soda-colored legs, her ingenuous smile. She would be taken to a place in the deep, dark below where lay unnamed monstrosity, where the devouring hunger lurked far beyond light and there was no Katy Perry. “It’s not for you to do anything but cower in his abyssal wake,” I said, “though you don’t look into cowering.”

“No, I mean—can I help you out?” she repeated, like I was a stupid child. “I’ve run out of Punk’d episodes on my machine, I don’t have anyone here, and I go home July anyway.”

“What about those other girls?”

“What, them?” Rainbow flapped a dismissive hand. “Who cares? You’re the one I want to like me.”

Thankfully, whatever spluttering gaucherie I might have made in reply was interrupted by a scream. Jets of sticky arterial blood were spurting out of the water fountain, and tentacles waved delicately from the drain. Tiny octopus creatures emerged in the gouts of blood flooding down the sides and the air stalled around us like it was having a heart attack.

It took me forever to approach the fountain, wreathed with frondy little tentacle things. It buckled as though beneath a tremendous weight. I thrust my hands into the blood and screamed: it was ice cold, and my teeth chattered. With a splatter of red I tore my hands away and they steamed in the air.

In the blood on my palms I saw the future. I read the position of the dead moon that no longer orbited Earth. I saw the blessing of the tyrant who hid in a far-off swirl of stars. I thought I could forecast to midsummer, and when I closed my eyes I saw people drown. Everyone else in the park had fled.

I whipped out my notebook, though my fingers smeared the pages and were so cold I could hardly hold the pen, but this was Blake duty. It took me three abortive starts to write in English.

“You done?” said Rainbow, squatting next to me. I hadn’t realized I was muttering aloud, and she flicked a clot of blood off my collar. “Let’s go get McNuggets.”

“Miss Kipley,” I said, and my tongue did not speak the music of mortal tongues, “you are a fucking lunatic.”

We left the fountain gurgling like a wound and did not look back. Then we got McNuggets.

I had never met anyone like Rainbow before. I didn’t think anybody else had, either. She was interested in all the things I wasn’t—Sephora hauls, New Girl, Nicki Minaj—but had a strangely magnetic way of not giving a damn, and not in the normal fashion of beautiful girls. She just appeared to have no idea that the general populace did anything but clog up her scenery. There was something in her that set her apart—an absence of being like other people—and in a weak moment I compared her to myself.

We spent the rest of the day eating McNuggets and wandering around town and looking at things. I recorded the appearance of naked fish bones dangling from the telephone wires. She wanted to prod everything with the toe of her sneaker. And she talked.

“Favorite color,” she demanded.

I was peering at anemone-pocked boulders behind the gas station. “Black.”

“Favorite subject,” she said later, licking dubious McNugget oils off her fingers as we examined flayed fish in a clearing.

“Physics and literature.”

“Ideal celebrity boyfriend?”

“Did you get this out of Cosmo? Pass.”

She asked incessantly what my teachers were like; were the girls at my school lame; what my thoughts were on Ebola, CSI, and Lonely Island. When we had exhausted the town’s supply of dried-up sponges arranged in unknowable names, we ended up hanging out in the movie theater lobby. We watched previews. Neither of us had seen any of the movies advertised, and neither of us wanted to see them, either.

I found myself telling her about Mar, and even alluded to my mother. When I asked her the same, she just said offhandedly, “Four plus me.” Considering my own filial reticence, I didn’t press.

When evening fell, she said, See you tomorrow, as a foregone conclusion. Like ten-ish, breakfast takes forever.

I went home not knowing what to think. She had a bunny manicure. She laughed at everything. She’d stolen orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine, even if everyone stole orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine. She had an unseemly interest in mummy movies. But what irritated me most was that I found her liking me compelling, that she appeared to have never met anyone like Hester Blake.

Her interest in me was most likely boredom, which was fine, because my interest in her was that she was the bride. That night I thought about what I’d end up writing: the despot of the Breathless Depths took a local girl to wife, one with a bedazzled Samsung. I sniggered alone, and slept uneasy.

In the days to come, doom throttled the brittle, increasingly desiccated town, and I catalogued it as my companion caught me up on the plot of every soap opera she’d ever watched. She appeared to have abandoned most of them midway, furnishing unfinished tales of many a shock pregnancy. Mar had been sarcastic ever since I’d broken her rosemary ward so I spent as much time out of the house as possible; that was the main reason I hung around Rainbow.

I didn’t want to like her because her doom was upon us all, and I didn’t want to like her because she was like other girls, and I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to like her because she always knew when I’d made a joke. I was so angry, and I didn’t know why.

We went to the woods and consolidated my notes. I laid my research flat on the grass or propped it on a bough, and Rainbow played music noisily on her Samsung. We rolled up our jeans—or I did, as she had no shorts that went past mid-thigh—and half-assedly sunbathed. It felt like the hours were days and the days endless.

She wanted to know what I thought would happen when we all got “laid waste to.” For a moment I was terribly afraid I’d feel guilty.

“I don’t know.” The forest floor smelled cold, somehow. “I’ve never seen waste laid en masse. The Drownlord will make his presence known. People will go mad. People will die.”

Rainbow rolled over toward me, bits of twig caught in her hair. Today she had done her eyeliner in two thick, overdramatic rings, like a sleep-deprived panda. “Do you ever wonder what dying’s like, dude?”

I thought about Mar and never seeing fifty. “No,” I said. “My family dies young. I figure anticipating it is unnecessary.”

“Maybe you’re going to die when the end of this hits,” she said thoughtfully. “We could die tragically together. How’s that shake you?”

I said, “My family has a pact with the All-Devouring so we don’t get killed carelessly in their affairs. You’re dying alone, Kipley.”

She didn’t get upset. She tangled her arms in the undergrowth and stretched her legs out, skinny hips arched, and wriggled pleasurably in the thin and unaffectionate sunlight. “I hope you’ll be super sad,” she said. “I hope you’ll cry for a year.”

“Aren’t you scared to die?”

“Never been scared.”

I said, “Due to your brain damage,” and Rainbow laughed uproariously. Then she found a dried-up jellyfish amid the leaves and dropped it down my shirt.

That night I thought again about what I’d have to write: the many-limbed horror who lies beneath the waves stole a local girl to wife, and she wore the world’s skankiest short-shorts and laughed at my jokes. I slept, but there were nightmares.

Sometimes the coming rain was nothing but a fine mist that hurt to breathe, but sometimes it was like shrapnel. The sun shone hot and choked the air with a stench of damp concrete. I carried an umbrella and Rainbow wore black rain boots that squeaked.

Mar ladled out tortilla soup one night as a peace offering. We ate companionably, with the radio on. There were no stories about salt rain or plagues of fish even on the local news. I’d been taught better than to expect it. Fear rendered us rigidly silent, and anyone who went against instinct ended up in a straitjacket.

“Why is our personal philosophy that fate always wins?” I said.

My aunt didn’t miss a beat. “Self-preservation,” she said. “You don’t last long in our line of work fighting facts. Christ, you don’t last long in our line of work, period. Hey—Ted at the gas station said he’d seen you going around with some girl.”

“Ted at the gas station is a grudge informer,” I said. “Back on subject. Has nobody tried to use the Blake sight to effect change?”

“They would’ve been a moron branch of the family, because like I’ve said a million times: it doesn’t work that way.” Mar swirled a spoon around her bowl. “Not trying to make it a federal issue, kid, just saying I’m happy you’re making friends instead of swishing around listening to the Cure.”

“Mar, I have never listened to the Cure.”

“You find that bride?”

Taken aback, I nodded. Mar cocked her dark head in thought. There were sprigs of gray at each temple, and not for the first time I was melancholy, clogged up with an inscrutable grief. But all she said was, “Okay. There were octopuses in the goddamned laundry again. When this is over, you’ll learn what picking up the pieces looks like. Lemon pie in the icebox.”

It was octopodes, but never mind. I cleared the dishes. Afterward we ate two large wedges of lemon pie apiece. The house was comfortably quiet and the sideboard candles bravely chewed on the dark.

“Mar,” I said, “what would happen if someone were to cross the deepwater demons who have slavery of wave and underwave? Hypothetically.”

“No Blake has ever been stupid or saintly enough to try and find out,” said Mar. “Not qualities you’re suited to, Hester.”

I wondered if this was meant to sting, because it didn’t. I felt no pain. “Your next question’s going to be, How do we let other people die?” she said and pulled her evening cigarette from the packet. “Because I’m me, I’ll understand you want a coping mechanism, not a Sunday School lecture. My advice to you is: It becomes easier the less you get involved. And Hester—”

I looked at her with perfect nonchalance.

“I’m not outrunning my fate,” said Aunt Mar. She lit the cigarette at the table. “Don’t try to outrun other people’s. You don’t have the right. You’re a Blake, not God.”

“I didn’t choose to be a Blake,” I snapped, and dropped the pie plate on the sideboard before storming from the room. I took each stair as noisily as possible, but not noisily enough to drown out her holler: “If you ever get a choice in this life, kiddo, treasure it!”

Rainbow noticed my foul mood. She did not tell me to cheer up or ask me what the matter was, thankfully. She wasn’t that type of girl. Fog boiled low in the valley and the townspeople stumbled through the streets and talked about atmospheric pressure. Stores closed. Buses came late. Someone from the northeast suburbs had given in and shot himself.

I felt numb and untouched, and worse—when chill winds wrapped around my neck and let me breathe clear air, smelling like the beach and things that grow on the beach—I was happy. I nipped this in its emotional bud. Rainbow, of course, was as cheerful and unaffected as a stump.

Midsummer boiled closer and I thought about telling her. I would say outright, Miss Kipley. (“Rainbow” had never left my lips, the correct method with anyone who was je m’appelle Rainbow.) When the ocean lurker comes to take his victim, his victim will be you. Do whatever you wish with this information. Perhaps she’d finally scream. Or plead. Anything.

But when I got my courage up, she leaned in close and combed her fingers through my hair, right down to the undyed roots. Her hands were very delicate, and I clammed up. My sullen silence was no barrier to Rainbow. She just cranked up Taylor Swift.

We were sitting in a greasy bus shelter opposite Walmart when the man committed suicide. There was no showboating hesitation in the way he appeared on the roof, then stepped off at thirty feet. He landed on the spines of a wrought-iron fence. The sound was like a cocktail weenie going through a hole punch.

There was nobody around but us. I froze and did not look away. Next to me, Rainbow was equally transfixed. I felt terrible shame when she was the one to drag us over to him. She already had her phone out. I had seen corpses before, but this was very fresh. There was a terrible amount of blood. He was irreparably dead. I turned my head to inform Rainbow, in case she tried to help him or something equally demented, and then I saw she was taking his picture.

“Got your notebook?” she said.

There was no fear in her. No concern. Rainbow reached out to prod at one mangled, outflung leg. Two spots of color bloomed high on her cheeks; she was luminously pleased.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” My voice sounded embarrassingly shrill. “This man just killed himself!”

“The fence helped,” said Rainbow helplessly.

“You think this is a joke—what reason could you have for thinking this is okay—”

“Excuse you, we look at dead shit all the time. I thought we’d hit jackpot, we’ve never found a dead guy . . .”

Her distress was sulky and real. I took her by the shoulders of her stupid cropped jacket and gripped tight, fear a tinder to my misery. The rain whipped around us and stung my face. “Christ, you think this is some kind of game, or . . . or a YouTube stunt! You really can’t imagine—you have no comprehension—you mindless jackass—”

She was trying to calm me, feebly patting my hands. “Stop being mad at me, it sucks! What gives, Hester—”

“You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”

Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.

“Me,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“You really think it’s me?”

“You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”

“Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey—have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”

“How does that matter? Look: This is the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”

She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chill: a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.

“I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”

“This place is literally Hell.”

“Suits you,” said Rainbow.

I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”

When I turned on my heel and left her—standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count—the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.

Mar had grilled steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.

I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”

My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”

“Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”

I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.

“Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”

My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.

“Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”

“First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning— your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you . . . not knowing.”

I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.

The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.

I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.

“Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”

Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”

“If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”

“You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.

“I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”

“Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The drowned lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”

“And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”

“Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”

“Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”

There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matte black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”

My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is goodbye.”

I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.

“You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”

I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”

My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.

My aunt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out of the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.

I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.

In the morning I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: The Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.

The morning was crisp and gray and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.

There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral grays. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.

The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.

“Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.

My heart sang, unbidden.

“God, Kipley! Come here, get inside—”

“I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”

I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly colored appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.

“Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone, neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”

The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the RiteAid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.

“I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”

This is the Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.

In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendor, forever.

My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.

TAMSYN MUIR is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Trilogy, which begins with Gideon the Ninth, continues with Harrow the Ninth, and concludes with Alecto the Ninth. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.

THE SHAPE OF MY NAME

NINO CIPRI

The year 2076 smells like antiseptic gauze and the lavender diffuser that Dara set up in my room. It has the bitter aftertaste of pills: probiotics and microphages and PPMOs. It feels like the itch of healing, the ache that’s settled on my pubic bone. It has the sound of a new name that’s fresh and yet familiar on my lips.

The future feels lighter than the past. I think I know why you chose it over me, Mama.

My bedroom has changed in the hundred-plus years that have passed since I slept there as a child. The floorboards have been carpeted over, torn up, replaced. The walls are thick with new layers of paint. The windows have been upgraded, the closet expanded. The oak tree that stood outside my window is gone, felled by a storm twenty years ago, I’m told. But the house still stands, and our family still lives here, with all our attendant ghosts. You and I are haunting each other, I think.

I picture you standing in the kitchen downstairs, over a century ago. I imagine that you’re staring out through the little window above the sink, your eyes traveling down the path that leads from the back door and splits at the creek; one trail leads to the pond, and the other leads to the shelter and the anachronopede, with its rows of capsules and blinking lights.

Maybe it’s the afternoon you left us. June 22, 1963: storm clouds gathering in the west, the wind picking up, the air growing heavy with the threat of rain. And you’re staring out the window, gazing across the dewy fields at the forking path, trying to decide which way you’ll take.

My bedroom is just above the kitchen, and my window has that same view, a little expanded: I can see clear down to the pond where Dad and I used to sit on his weeks off from the oil fields. It’s spring, and the cattails are only hip high. I can just make out the silhouette of a great blue heron walking along among the reeds and rushes.

You and I, we’re twenty feet and more than a hundred years apart.

You went into labor not knowing my name, which I know now is unprecedented among our family: you knew Dad’s name before you laid eyes on him, the time and date of my birth, the hospital where he would drive you when you went into labor. But my name? My sex? Conspicuously absent in Uncle Dante’s gilt-edged book where all these happy details were recorded in advance.

Dad told me later that you thought I’d be a stillbirth. He didn’t know about the record book, about the blank space where a name should go. But he told me that nothing he said while you were pregnant could convince you that I’d come into the world alive. You thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue, already decaying.

Instead, I started screaming before they pulled me all the way out.

Dad said that even when the nurse placed me in your arms, you thought you were hallucinating. “I had to tell her, over and over: Miriam, you’re not dreaming, our daughter is alive.”

I bit my lip when he told me that, locked the words “your son” out of sight. I regret that now; maybe I could have explained myself to him. I should have tried, at least.

You didn’t name me for nearly a week.

Nineteen fifty-four tastes like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies in fresh milk, delivered earlier that morning. It smells like wood smoke, cedar chips, Dad’s Kamel cigarettes mixed with the perpetual smell of diesel in his clothes. It feels like the worn velvet nap of the couch in our living room, which I loved to run my fingers across.

I was four years old. I woke up in the middle of the night after a loud crash of thunder. The branches of the oak tree outside my window were thrashing in the wind and the rain.

I crept out of bed, dragging my blanket with me. I slipped out of the door and into the hallway, heading for your and Dad’s bedroom. I stopped when I heard voices coming from the parlor downstairs: I recognized your sharp tones, but there was also a man’s voice, not Dad’s baritone but something closer to a tenor.

The door creaked when I pushed it open, and the voices fell silent. I paused, and then you yanked open the door.

The curlers in your hair had come undone, descending down toward your shoulders. I watched one tumble out of your hair and onto the floor like a stunned beetle. I only caught a glimpse of the man standing in the corner; he had thin, hunched shoulders and dark hair, wet and plastered to his skull. He was wearing one of Dad’s old robes, with the initials monogrammed on the pocket. It was much too big for him.

You snatched me up, not very gently, and carried me up to the bedroom you shared with Dad.

“Tom,” you hissed. You dropped me on the bed before Dad was fully awake, and shook his shoulder. He sat up, blinking at me, and looked to you for an explanation.

“There’s a visitor,” you said, voice strained.

Dad looked at the clock, pulling it closer to him to get a proper look. “Now? Who is it?”

Your jaw was clenched, and so were your hands. “I’m handling it. I just need you to watch—”

You said my name in a way I’d never heard it before, as if each syllable were a hard, steel ball dropping from your lips. It frightened me, and I started to cry. Silently, though, since I didn’t want you to notice me. I didn’t want you to look at me with eyes like that.

You turned on your heel and left the room, clicking the door shut behind you and locking it.

Dad patted me on the back, his wide hand nearly covering the expanse of my skinny shoulders. “It’s all right, kid,” he said. “Nothing to be scared of. Why don’t you lie down and I’ll read you something, huh?”

In the morning, there was no sign a visitor had been there at all. You and Dad assured me that I must have dreamed the whole thing.

I know now that you were lying, of course. I think I knew it even then.

I had two childhoods.

One happened between Dad’s ten-day hitches in the White County oil fields. That childhood smells like his tobacco, wool coats, wet grass. It sounds like the opening theme songs to all our favorite TV shows. It tastes like the peanut-butter sandwiches that you’d pack for us on our walks, which we’d eat down by the pond, the same one I can just barely see from my window here. In the summer, we’d sit at the edge of the water, dipping our toes into the mud. Sometimes, Dad told me stories, or asked me to fill him in on the episodes of Gunsmoke and Science Fiction Theatre he’d missed, and we’d chat while watching for birds. The herons have always been my favorite. They moved so slow, it always felt like a treat to spot one as it stepped cautiously through the shallow water. Sometimes, we’d catch sight of one flying overhead, its wide wings fighting against gravity.

And then there was the childhood with you, and with Dara, the childhood that happened when Dad was away. I remember the first morning I came downstairs and she was eating pancakes off of your fancy china, the plates that were decorated with delicate paintings of evening primrose.

“Hi there. I’m Dara,” she said.

When I looked at you, shy and unsure, you told me, “She’s a cousin. She’ll be dropping in when your father is working. Just to keep us company.”

Dara didn’t really look much like you, I thought; not the way that Dad’s cousins and uncles all resembled one another. But I could see a few similarities between the two of you; hazel eyes, long fingers, and something I didn’t have the words to describe for a long time: a certain discomfort, the sense that you held yourselves slightly apart from the rest of us. It had made you a figure of gossip in town, though I didn’t know that until high school, when the same was said of me.

“What should I call you?” Dara asked me.

You jumped in and told her to call me by my name, the one you’d chosen for me, after the week of indecision following my birth. How can I ever make you understand how much I disliked that name? It felt like it belonged to a sister whom I was constantly being compared to, whose legacy I could never fulfill or surpass or even forget. Dara must have caught the face that I made, because later, when you were out in the garden, she asked me, “Do you have another name? That you want me to call you instead?”

When I shrugged, she said, “It doesn’t have to be a forever name. Just one for the day. You can pick a new one tomorrow, if you like. You can introduce yourself differently every time you see me.”

And so every morning when I woke up and saw Dara sitting at the table, I gave her a different name: Doc, Buck, George, Charlie. Names that my heroes had, from television and comics and the matinees in town. They weren’t my name, but they were better than the one I had. I liked the way they sounded, the shape of them rolling around my mouth.

You just looked on, lips pursed in a frown, and told Dara you wished she’d quit indulging my silly little games.

The two of you sat around our kitchen table and—if I was quiet and didn’t draw any attention to myself—talked in a strange code about jumps and fastenings and capsules, dropping names of people I never knew. More of your cousins, I figured.

You told our neighbors that all of your family was spread out, and disinclined to make the long trip to visit. When Dara took me in, she made up a tale about a long-lost cousin whose parents had kicked him out for being queer trans. Funny, the way the truth seeps into lies.

I went to see Uncle Dante in 1927. I wanted to see what he had in that book of his about me, and about you and Dara.

Nineteen twenty-seven tastes like the chicken broth and brown bread he fed me after I showed up at his door. It smells like the musty blanket he hung around my shoulders, like kerosene lamps and wood smoke. It sounds like the scratchy records he played on his phonograph: Duke Ellington and Al Jolson, the Gershwin brothers, and Gene Austin.

“Your mother dropped in by back in ’24,” he said, settling down in an armchair in front of the fireplace. It was the same fireplace that had been in our parlor, though Dad had sealed off the chimney in 1958, saying it let in too many drafts. “She was very adamant that your name be written down in the records. She seemed . . . upset.” He let the last word hang on its own, lonely, obviously understated.

“That’s not my name,” I told him. “It’s the one she gave me, but it was never mine.”

I had to explain to him then—he’d been to the future, and so it didn’t seem so far-fetched, my transition. I simplified it for him, of course: didn’t go into the transdermal hormonal implants and mastectomy, the paperwork Dara and I forged, the phalloplasty I’d scheduled a century and a half in the future. I skipped the introduction to gender theory, Susan Stryker, Stone Butch Blues, all the things that Dara gave me to read when I asked if there were books about people like me.

“My aunt Lucia was of a similar disposition,” he told me. “Once her last child was grown, she gave up on dresses entirely. Wore a suit to church for her last twelve years, which gave her a reputation for eccentricity.”

I clamped my mouth shut and nodded along, still feeling ill and shaky from the jump. The smell of Uncle Dante’s cigar burned in my nostrils. I wished we could have had the conversation outside, on the porch; the parlor seemed too familiar, too laden with the ghost of your presence.

“What should I put instead?” he asked, pulling his book down from the mantle: the ancient gilt-edged journal where he recorded our family’s births, marriages, and deaths, as they were reported to him.

“It’s blank when I’m born,” I told him. He paused in the act of sharpening his pencil—he knew better than to write the future in ink. “Just erase it. Tear the whole page out and rewrite it White it out if you need to.”

He sat back in his chair and combed his fingers through his beard. “That’s . . . unprecedented,” he said. Again, that pause, the heaviness of the word choice.

“Not anymore,” I said.

Nineteen sixty-three feels like a menstrual cramp, like the ache in my legs as my bones stretched, like the twinges in my nipples as my breasts developed. It smells like Secret roll-on deodorant and the menthol cigarettes you took up smoking. It tastes like the peach cobbler I burned in Home Ec class, which the teacher forced me to eat. It sounds like Sam Cooke’s album Night Beat, which Dara, during one of her visits, told me to buy.

And it looks like you, jumpier than I’d ever seen you, so twitchy that even Dad commented on it before he left for his hitch in the oil fields.

“Will you be all right?” he asked after dinner.

I was listening from the kitchen doorway to the two of you talk. I’d come in to ask Dad if he was going to watch Gunsmoke, which would be starting in a few minutes, with me, and caught the two of you with your heads together by the sink.

You leaned forward, bracing your hands on the edge of the sink, looking for all the world as if you couldn’t hold yourself up, as if gravity was working just a little bit harder on you than it was on everyone else. I wondered for a second if you were going to tell him about Dara. I’d grown up keeping her a secret with you, though the omission had begun to weigh heavier on me. I loved Dad, and I loved Dara; being unable to reconcile the two of them seemed trickier each passing week.

Instead you said nothing. You relaxed your shoulders, and you smiled for him, and kissed his cheek. You said the two of us would be fine, not to worry about his girls.

And the very next day, you pulled me out of bed and showed me our family’s time machine, in the old tornado shelter with the lock I’d never been able to pick.

I know more about the machine now, after talking with Uncle Dante, reading the records that he kept. About the mysterious man, Moses Stone, who built it in 1905, when Grandma Emmeline’s parents leased out a parcel of land. He called it the anachronopede, which probably sounded marvelous in 1905, but even Uncle Dante was rolling his eyes at the name twenty years later. I know that Stone took Emmeline on trips to the future when she was seventeen, and then abandoned her after a few years, and nobody’s been able to find him since then. I know that the machine is keyed to something in Emmeline’s matrilineal DNA, some recessive gene.

I wonder if that man, Stone, built the anachronopede as an experiment. An experiment needs parameters, right? So build a machine that only certain people in one family can use. We can’t go back before 1905, when the machine was completed, and we can’t go past August 3, 2321. What happens that day? The only way to find out is to go as far forward as possible, and then wait. Maroon yourself in time. Exile yourself as far forward as you can, where none of us can reach you.

I know you were lonely, waiting for me to grow up so you could travel again. You were exiled when you married Dad in 1947, in that feverish period just after the war. It must have been so romantic at first: I’ve seen the letters he wrote during the years he courted you. And you’d grown up seeing his name written next to yours, and the date that you’d marry him. When did you start feeling trapped, I wonder? You were caught in a weird net of fate and love and the future and the past. You loved Dad, but your love kept you hostage. You loved me, but you knew that someday, I’d transform myself into someone you didn’t recognize. At first, when you took me underground to see the anachronopede, I thought you and Dad had built a fallout shelter. But there were no beds or boxes of canned food. And built into the rocky wall were rows of doors that looked like the one on our icebox. Round lightbulbs lay just above the doors, nearly all of them red, though one or two were slowly blinking between orange and yellow.

Nearly all the doors were shut, except for two, near the end, which hung ajar.

“Those two capsules are for us, you and me,” you said. “Nobody else can use them.”

I stared at them. “What are they for?”

I’d heard you and Dara speak in code for nearly all of my life, jumps and capsules and fastenings. I’d imagined all sorts of things. Aliens and spaceships and doorways to another dimension, all the sort of things I’d seen Truman Bradley introduce on Science Fiction Theatre.

“Traveling,” you said.

“In time or in space?”

You seemed surprised. I’m not sure why. Dad collected pulp magazines, and you’d given me books by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne for Christmas in years past. The Justice League had gone into the future. I’d seen The Fly last year during a half-price matinee. You know how it was back then: such things weren’t considered impossible, so much as inevitable. The future was a country we all wanted so badly to visit.

“In time,” you said.

I immediately started peppering you with questions: How far into the future had you gone? When were you born? Had you met dinosaurs? Had you met King Arthur? What about jet packs? Was Dara from the future?

You held a hand to your mouth, watching as I danced around the small cavern, firing off questions like bullets being sprayed from a tommy gun.

“Maybe you are too young,” you said, staring at the two empty capsules in the wall.

“I’m not!”I insisted. “Can’t we go somewhere? Just a—just a quick jump?”

I added in the last part because I wanted you to know I’d been listening, when you and Dara had talked in code at the kitchen table. I’d been waiting for you to include me in the conversation.

“Tomorrow,” you decided. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

The first thing I learned about time travel was that you couldn’t eat anything before you did it. And you could only take a few sips of water: no juice or milk. The second thing I learned was that it was the most painful thing in the world, at least for me.

“Your grandmother Emmeline called it the fastening,” you told me. “She said it felt like being a button squeezed through a too-narrow slit in a piece of fabric. It affects everyone differently.”

“How’s it affect you?”

You twisted your wedding ring around on your finger. “I haven’t done it since before you were born.”

You made me go to the bathroom twice before we walked back on that path, taking the fork that led to the shelter where the capsules were. The grass was still wet with dew, and there was a chill in the air. Up above, thin, wispy clouds were scratched onto the sky, but out west, I could see dark clouds gathering. There’d be storms later.

But what did I care about later? I was going into a time machine.

I asked you, “Where are we going?”

You replied, “To visit Dara. Just a quick trip.”

There was something cold in your voice. I recognized the tone: the same you used when trying to talk me into wearing the new dress you’d bought me for church, or telling me to stop tearing through the house and play quietly for once.

In the shelter, you helped me undress, though it made me feel hotly embarrassed and strange to be naked in front of you again. I’d grown wary of my own body in the last few months, the way at how it was changing: I’d been dismayed by the way my nipples had grown tender, at the fatty flesh that had budded beneath them. It seemed like a betrayal.

I hunched my shoulders and covered my privates, though you barely glanced at my naked skin. You helped me lie down in the capsule, showed me how to pull the round mask over the bottom half of my face, attach the clip that went over my index finger. Finally, you lifted one of my arms up and wrapped a black cuff around the crook of my elbow. I noticed, watching you, that you had bitten all of your nails down to the quick, that the edges were jagged and tender looking.

“You program your destination date in here, you see?” You tapped a square of black glass on the ceiling of the capsule, and it lit up at the touch. Your fingers flew across the screen, typing directly onto it, rearranging colored orbs that seemed to attach themselves to your finger as soon as you touched them.

“You’ll learn how to do this on your own eventually,” you said. The screen, accepting whatever you’d done to it, blinked out and went black again.

I breathed through my mask, which covered my nose and face. A whisper of air blew against my skin, a rubbery, stale, lemony scent.

“Don’t be scared,” you said. “I’ll be there when you wake up. I’m sending myself back a little earlier, so I’ll be there to help you out of the capsule.”

You kissed me on the forehead and shut the door. I was left alone in the dark as the walls around me started to hum.

Calling it the fastening does it a disservice. It’s much more painful than that. Granny Emmeline is far tougher than I’ll ever be if she thought it was just like forcing a button into place.

For me, it felt like being crushed in a vise that was lined with broken glass and nails. I understood, afterward, why you had forbidden me from eating or drinking for twenty-four hours. I would have vomited in the mask, shat myself inside the capsule. I came back to myself in the dark, wild with terror and the phantom remains of that awful pain.

The door opened. The light needled into my eyes, and I screamed, trying to cover them. The various cuffs and wires attached to my arms tugged my hands back down, which made me panic even more.

Hands reached in and pushed me down, and eventually, I registered your voice in my ear, though not what you were saying. I stopped flailing long enough for all the straps and cuffs to be undone, and then I was lifted out of the capsule. You held me in your arms, rocking and soothing me, rubbing my back as I cried hysterically onto your shoulder.

I was insensible for a few minutes. When my sobs died away to hiccups, I realized that we weren’t alone in the shelter. Dara was with us as well, and she had thrown a blanket over my shoulders.

“Jesus, Miriam,” she said, over and over. “What the hell were you thinking?”

I found out later that I was the youngest person in my family to ever make a jump. Traditionally, they made their first jumps on their seventeenth birthday. I was nearly five years shy of that.

You smoothed back a lock of my hair, and I saw that all your fingernails had lost their ragged edge. Instead, they were rounded and smooth, topped with little crescents of white.

Uncle Dante told me that it wasn’t unusual for two members of the family to be lovers, especially if there were generational gaps between them. It helped to avoid romantic entanglements with people who were bound to linear lives, at least until they were ready to settle down for a number of years, raising children. Pregnancy didn’t mix well with time travel. It was odder to do what you did: settle down with someone who was, as Dara liked to put it, stuck in the slow lane of linear time.

Dara told me about the two of you, eventually; that you’d been lovers before you met Dad, before you settled down with him in 1947. And that when she started visiting us in 1955, she wasn’t sleeping alone in the guest bedroom.

I’m not sure if I was madder at her or you at the time, though I’ve since forgiven her. Why wouldn’t I? You’ve left both of us, and it’s a big thing, to have that in common.

Nineteen eighty-one is colored silver, beige, bright orange, deep brown. It feels like the afghan blanket Dara kept on my bed while I recovered from my first jump, some kind of cheap fake wool. It tastes like chicken soup and weak tea with honey and lime Jell-O.

And for a few days, at least, 1981 felt like a low-grade headache that never went away, muscle spasms that I couldn’t always control, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing. It smelled like a lingering olfactory hallucination of frying onions. It sounded like a ringing in the ears.

“So you’re the unnamed baby, huh?” Dara said that first morning when I woke up. She was reading a book, and set it down next to her on the couch.

I was disoriented: you and Dara had placed me in the southeast bedroom, the same one I slept in all through childhood. (The same one I’m recovering in right now.) I’m not sure if you thought it would comfort me, to wake up to familiar surroundings. It was profoundly strange, to be in my own bedroom but have it be so different: the striped wallpaper replaced with avocado green paint; a loveseat with floral upholstery where my dresser had been; all my posters of Buck Rogers and Superman replaced with framed prints of unfamiliar artwork.

“Dara?” I said. She seemed different, colder. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, and she wore a pair of thick-framed glasses.

She cocked her head. “That’d be me. Nice to meet you.”

I blinked at her, still disoriented and foggy. “We met before,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows, like she couldn’t believe I was so dumb. “Not by my timeline.”

Right. Time travel.

You rushed in then. You must have heard us talking. You crouched down next to me and stroked the hair back from my face.

“How are you feeling?” you asked.

I looked down at your fingernails, and saw again that they were smooth, no jagged edges, and a hint of white at the edges. Dara told me later that you’d arrived two days before me, just so you two could have a few days alone together. After all, you’d only left her for 1947 a few days before. The two of you had a lot to talk about.

“All right, I guess,” I told you.

It felt like the worst family vacation for those first few days. Dara was distant with me and downright cold to you. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I thought that I’d get the cold shoulder if I did. I caught snippets of the arguments you had with Dara; always whispered in doorways, or downstairs in the kitchen, the words too faint for me to make out.

It got a little better once I was back on my feet, and able to walk around and explore. I was astonished by everything; the walnut trees on our property that I had known as saplings now towered over me. Dara’s television was twice the size of ours, in color, and had over a dozen stations. Dara’s car seemed tiny, and shaped like a snake’s head, instead of having the generous curves and lines of the cars I knew.

I think it charmed Dara out of her anger a bit, to see me so appreciative of all these futuristic wonders—which were all relics of the past for her—and the conversations between the three of us got a little bit easier. Dara told me a little bit more about where she’d come from—the late twenty-first century—and why she was in this time—studying with some poet that I’d never heard of. She showed me the woman’s poetry, and though I couldn’t make much of it out at the time, one line from one poem has always stuck with me. “I did not recognize the shape of my own name.”

I pondered that, lying awake in my bedroom—the once and future bedroom that I’m writing this from now, that I slept in then, that I awoke in when I was a young child, frightened by a storm. The rest of that poem made little sense to me, a series of images that were threaded together by a string of line breaks.

But I know about names, and hearing the one that’s been given to you, and not recognizing it. I was trying to stammer this out to Dara one night, after she’d read that poem to me. And she asked, plain as could be, “What would you rather be called instead?”

I thought about how I used to introduce myself after the heroes of the TV shows my father and I watched: Doc and George and Charlie. It had been a silly game, sure, but there’d been something more serious underneath it. I’d recognized something in the shape of those names, something I wanted for myself.

“I dunno. A boy’s name,” I said. “Like George in the Famous Five.”

“Well, why do you want to be called by a boy’s name?” Dara asked gently.

In the corner, where you’d been playing solitaire, you paused while laying down a card. Dara noticed too, and we both looked over at you. I cringed, wondering what you were about to say; you hated that I didn’t like my name, took it as a personal insult somehow.

But you said nothing, just resumed playing, slapping the cards down a little more heavily than before.

I forgive you for drugging me to take me back to 1963. I know I screamed at you after we arrived and the drugs wore off, but I was also a little relieved. It was a sneaking sort of relief, and didn’t do much to counterbalance the feelings of betrayal and rage, but I know I would have panicked the second you shoved me into one of those capsules.

You’d taken me to the future, after all. I’d seen the relative wonders of 1981: VHS tapes, the Flash Gordon movie, the Columbia space shuttle. I would have forgiven you so much for that tiny glimpse.

I don’t forgive you for leaving me, though. I don’t forgive you for the morning after, when I woke up in my old familiar bedroom and padded downstairs for a bowl of cereal, and found, instead, a note that bore two words in your handwriting: I’m sorry.

The note rested atop the gilt-edged book that Grandma Emmeline had started as a diary, and that Uncle Dante had turned into both a record and a set of instructions for future generations: the names, birth dates, and the locations for all the traveling members of our family; who lived in the house and when; and sometimes, how and when a person died. The book stays with the house; you must have kept it hidden in the attic.

I flipped through it until I found your name: Miriam Guthrie (née Stone): born November 21, 1977, Harrisburg, IL. Next to it, you penciled in the following.

Jumped forward to June 22, 2321 CE, and will die in exile beyond reach of the anachronopede.

Two small words could never encompass everything you have to apologize for.

I wonder if you ever looked up Dad’s obituary. I wonder if you were even able to, if the record for one small man’s death even lasts that long.

When you left, you took my father’s future with you. Did you realize that? He was stuck in the slow lane of linear time, and to Dad, the future he’d dreamed of must have receded into the distance, something he’d never be able to reach.

He lost his job in the fall of 1966, as the White County oil wells ran dry, and hanged himself in the garage six months later. Dara cut him down and called the ambulance; her visits became more regular after you left us, and she must have known the day he would die.

(I can’t bring myself to ask her: Couldn’t she have arrived twenty minutes earlier and stopped him entirely? I don’t want to know her answer.)

In that obituary, I’m first in the list of those who survived him, and it’s the last time I used the name you gave me. During the funeral, I nodded, received the hugs and handshakes from Dad’s cousins and friends, bowed my head when the priest instructed, prayed hard for his soul. When it was done, I walked alone to the pond where the two of us had sat together, watching birds and talking about the plots of silly television shows. I tried to remember everything that I could about him, tried to preserve his ghost against the vagaries of time: the smell of Kamel cigarettes and diesel on his clothes; the red-blond stubble that dotted his jaw; the way his eyes brightened when they landed on you.

I wished so hard that you were there with me. I wanted so much to cry on your shoulder, to sob as hard and hysterically as I had when you took me to 1981. And I wanted to be able to slap you, to hit you, to push you in the water and hold you beneath the surface. I could have killed you that day, Mama.

When I was finished, Dara took me back to the house. We cleaned it as best we could for the next family member who would live here: there always has to be a member of the Stone family here, to take care of the shelter, the anachronopede, and the travelers that come through.

Then she took me away, to 2073, the home she’d made more than a century away from you.

Today was the first day I was able to leave the house, to take cautious, wobbling steps to the outside world. Everything is still tender and bruised, though my body is healing faster than I ever thought possible. It feels strange to walk with a weight between my legs; I walk differently, with a wider stride, even though I’m still limping.

Dara and I walked down to the pond today. The frogs all hushed at our approach, but the blackbirds set up a racket. And off in the distance, a heron lifted a cautious foot and placed it down again. We watched it step carefully through the water, hesitantly. Its beak darted into the water and came back up with a wriggling fish, which it flipped into its mouth. I suppose it was satisfied with that, because it crouched down, spread its wings, and then jumped into the air, enormous wings fighting against gravity until it rose over the trees.

Three days before my surgery, I went back to you. The pain of it is always the same, like I’m being torn apart and placed back together with clumsy, inexpert fingers, but by now I’ve gotten used to it. I wanted you to see me as the man I’ve always known I am, that I slowly became. And I wanted to see if I could forgive you; if I could look at you and see anything besides my father’s slow decay, my own broken and betrayed heart.

I knocked at the door, dizzy, ears ringing, shivering, soaked from the storm that was so much worse than I remembered. I was lucky that you or Dara had left a blanket in the shelter, so I didn’t have to walk up to the front door naked; my flat, scarred chest at odds with my wide hips, the thatch of pubic hair with no flesh protruding from it. I’d been on hormones for a year, and this second puberty reminded me so much of my first one, with you in 1963: the acne and the awkwardness, the slow reveal of my future self.

You answered the door with your hair in curlers,just as I remembered, and fetched me one of Dad’s old robes. I fingered the monogramming at the breast pocket, and I wished, so hard, that I could walk upstairs and see him.

“What the hell,” you said. “I thought the whole family knew these years were off-limits while I’m linear.”

You didn’t quite recognize me, and you tilted your head. “Have we met before?”

I looked you in the eyes, and my voice cracked when I told you I was your son.

Your hand went to your mouth. “I’ll have a son?” you asked.

And I told you the truth: “You have one already.”

And your hand went to your gut, as if you would be sick. You shook your head, so hard that your curlers started coming loose. That’s when the door creaked open, just a crack. You flew over there and yanked it all the way open, snatching the child there up in your arms. I barely caught a glimpse of my own face looking back at me as you carried my child self up the stairs.

I left before I could introduce myself to you: my name is Heron, Mama. I haven’t forgiven you yet, but maybe someday, I will. And when I do, I will travel back one last time, to that night you left me and Dad for the future. I’ll tell you that your apology has finally been accepted, and will give you my blessing to live in exile, marooned in a future beyond all reach.

NINO CIPRI is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. Nino’s 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize, and their novella Finna was published by Tor.com in 2020. They also write a bimonthly newsletter, Cool Story, Bro, about multi-media narratives.

OTHERWISE

NISI SHAWL

“Let’s cross it while it’s still floating.” Aim was always in a hurry these days. Nearly eighteen, and she didn’t figure she had a whole lot of time left before she’d go Otherwise.

“Hold up,” I told her, and she listened. I listened, too, and I heard that weird noise again above the soft wind: an engine running. That was what cars sounded like; they used to fill the roads, back when I was only eleven. Some of the older models still worked—the ones built without no chips.

A steady purr, like a big, fat cat—and there, I saw a glint moving far out on the bridge: sun on a hood or windshield. I raised my binoculars and confirmed it: a pickup truck, headed our way, east, coming towards us out of Seattle.

“What, Lo?” Aim asked.

If I could see them, maybe they could see us. “Come on. Bring the rolly; I’ll help.” We lifted our rolling suitcase together and I led us into the bushes crowding over the road’s edge. Leaves and thorns slashed at our pant legs and sleeves and faces—I beat them away and found a kind of clear area in their middle. Maybe there used to be something, a concrete pad for trash cans or something there. Moss, black and dry from the summer, crunched as we walked over it. We lowered the suitcase, heavy with Aim’s tools, and I was about to explain to her why we were hiding but by now that truck was loud and I could tell she heard it, too. All she said was, “What are they gonna think if they see our tracks disappear?”

I had a knife, and I kept it sharp. I pulled it out of the leather sheath I’d made. That was answer enough for Aim. She smiled—a nasty smile, but I loved it the way I loved everything about her: her smell; her long braids; her grimy, stubby nails.

I thought we’d lucked out when the truck barreled by fast—must have been going thirty miles an hour—but then it screeched to a stop. Two doors creaked open. Boot heels clopped on the asphalt. Getting louder. Pausing about even with where I’d ducked us off into the brush.

“Hey!” A dude. “You can come out—we ain’t gonna do ya no harm.”

Neither one of us moved a hair. Swearing, then thrashing noises, more swearing, louder as Truckdude crashed through the blackberries. He’ll never find us, I thought, and I was right. It was his partner who snuck up on our other side, silent as a tick.

“Got ’em, Claude,” he yelled, standing up from the weeds with a gun in his hand. He waved it at me and Aim and spoke in a normal tone. “You two can get up if you want. But do it slow.”

He raised his voice again. “Chicas. One of ’em’s kinda pretty but the other’s fat,” he told Claude. “You wanna arm wrestle?”

Claude stopped swearing but kept breaking branches and tearing his clothes as he whacked his way over to us. I stayed hunkered down so they’d underestimate me, and so my knife wouldn’t fall out from where I had it clamped between my thighs. I felt Aim’s arm tremble against mine as Claude emerged from the shadows. She’d be fine, though. Exactly like on a salvage run. I leaned against her a second to let her know that.

The dude with the gun looked a little older than us. Not much older, of course, or he’d have already gone Otherwise, found his own pocket universe, like nearly everyone else whose brain had reached “maturity”—at least that’s how the rumors went.

Claude looked my age, or a year or two younger: fourteen, fifteen. He and his partner had the same brown hair and squinty eyes; brothers, then. Probably.

I leered up at Guntoter. “You wanna watch me and her do it first?”

He spat on my upturned face. “Freak! You keep quiet till I tell you talk.” The spit tickled as it ran down my cheek.

I didn’t hate him. Didn’t have the time; I was too busy planning my next move.

“Hey, Dwight, what you think they got in here?” Claude had found our suitcase and given me a name for Guntoter.

“Open ’er up and find out, dickhead.”

I couldn’t turn around to see the rolly without looking away from Dwight, which didn’t seem like a good idea. I heard its zipper and the clink of steel on steel: chisels, hammers, wrenches, clamps, banging against each other as they spilled out on the ground.

“Whoa! Looky at these, Dwight. You think that ugly one knows how to use this stuff?” Dwight took his eyes off us and lowered the gun like I’d been waiting for him to do. I launched myself at his legs, a two-hundred-twenty-pound dodgeball. Heard a crack as his left knee bent backwards. Then a loud shot from his gun—but only one before I had my knife at his throat.

“Eennngh!” he whined. Knee must have hurt, but my blade poking against the underside of his chin kept his mouth shut.

I nodded at Aim and she relieved him of his gun. Claude had run off—I heard him thrashing through the bushes in the direction of the road. “Be right back, Lo.” Aim was fine, as I’d predicted, thinking straight and acting cool. She stalked after her prey calm and careful, gun at the ready.

I rocked back on my haunches, easing off Dwight’s ribs a bit. That leg had to be fractured. Problema. How was I supposed to deal with him, wounded like this? Maybe I shouldn’t have hit him so hard. Not as if I could take him to a hospital. I felt him sucking in his breath, winding up for a scream, and sank my full weight on his chest again.

“Lo! You gotta come here!” Aim yelled from the road.

Come there? What? “Why? You can’t handle—You didn’t let him get his truck back, did—”

“Just come!” She sounded pissed.

Dwight wasn’t going anywhere on his own any time soon, but just in case I tugged off his belt and boots and jeans and took away the rest of his weapons: a razor poking through a piece of wood, a folding knife with half the blade of mine, and a long leather bag filled with something heavier than sand. I only hurt him a little stripping off the jeans.

I got to my feet and looked down a second, wondering if I should shoot the man and get his misery over with. Even after years of leading salvage runs I didn’t have it in me, though.

I loaded dude’s junk and Aim’s spilled-out tools in the rolly and dragged it along behind me into the bushes. When he saw I was leaving him he started hollering for help like it might come. That worried me. I hurried out to Aim. Had Claude somehow armed himself?

Claude was nowhere in sight. Aim stood by the truck—our truck, now. She had the door open, staring inside. The gun—our gun, now— hung loose in one hand and the other stretched inside. “Come on,” she said, not to me. “It’s okay.” She hauled her hand back with a kid attached: white with brown hair, like his brothers. They must have been his brothers—I got closer and saw he had that same squintiness going on.

“Look,” I said, “leave him here and climb in. If they got any backup—” Boom! Shotguns make a hecka loud noise. Pellets and gravel went pinging off the road. Scared me so much I swung the rolly up into the truck bed by myself. Then I shoved Aim through the door and jumped in after her. Turned the ignition—they had left the key in it—and backed out of there fast as I could rev. Maybe forty feet along, I swung around and switched to second gear. I hit third by the time we made the bridge, jouncing over pits in the asphalt. Some sections were awful low—leaky pontoons. Next storm would sink the whole thing, Aim had said. I told myself if the thing held up on the dudes’ ride over here it was gonna be fine for us heading back.

I looked to my right. Aim had pushed the kid ahead of her so he was huddled against the far door. I braked. “Okay, here you go.” But he made no move to leave. “What’s the matter, you think I’ll shoot? Go on, we won’t hurt you.”

“He’s shaking,” Aim reported. “Bad. I think he’s freaking out.”

“Well, that’s great. Open the door for him yourself then, and let’s go.”

“No.”

I sighed. Aim had this stubbornness no one would suspect unless they spent a long time with her. “Listen, Aim, it was genius to keep him till I drove out of shooting range, but—”

“We can’t just dump him off alone.”

“He’s not alone; his brothers are right behind us!”

“One of ’em with a broken leg.”

“Knee.” But I took her point. “So, yeah, they’re not gonna be much use for making this little guy feel all better again real soon. C’est la flippin vie.” I reached past her to the door handle. She looked at me and I dropped my hand in my lap. “Aw, Aim . . .”

Aim missed her family. I knew all about how they’d gone on vacation to Disney World without her when she insisted she was too old for that stuff. Their flights back got canceled, first one, then the next, and the next, till no one pretended anymore there might be another, and the cells stopped working and the last bus into Pasco unloaded and they weren’t on it.

“Hector—” She couldn’t say more than his name.

“Aim, he’s twelve now. He’s fine. Even if your—” Even if her mom and dad had deserted him like so many other parents, leaving our world to live Otherwise, where they had anything, everything, whatever they wanted, same as when they drank the drug, but now for always. Or so the rumors said. Perfect homes. Perfect jobs. Perfect daughters. Perfect sons.

“All right. Kid, you wanna come with us or stay here with—um, Claude and Dwight?”

Nothing.

I tried again. “Kid, we gotta leave. We’re meeting a friend in—” In the rearview I saw five dudes on foot racing up the road. One waved a long, thin black thing over his head. That shotgun? I slammed the truck out of neutral and tore off. They dwindled in the dust.

Aim punched my shoulder and grinned at me. “You done good,” she said. I looked and she had one arm around the little kid, holding him steady, so I concentrated on finding a path for the truck that included mostly even pavement.

Here came the tunnel under Mercer Island. Scary, and not only because its lights were bound to be out—I turned the truck’s on and they made bright spots on the ivy hanging over the tunnel’s mouth. That took care of that. Better than if we’d been on foot, even.

But richies . . . more of them had stayed around than went Otherwise. Which made sense; they had their own drugs they used instead of Likewise, and everything already perfect anyways. Or everything used to be perfect for them till too many ordinary people left and they couldn’t find no one to scrub their toilets or take out their garbage. Only us.

When things got bad and the governments broke down, richies were the law, all the law around. What they wanted they got, in this world as much as any Otherwise. And what they wanted was slaves. Servants, they called us, but slaves is what it really was; who’d want to spend whatever time they had before they went Otherwise on doing stupid jobs for somebody else? Nobody who wasn’t forced to.

We drove through the ivy curtain. I jabbed on the high beams and slowed to watch for nets or other signs of ambush. Which of course there were gonna be none, because hadn’t this very truck come through here less than half an hour ago? But.

“Can’t be too careful.” Aim always knew what I was thinking.

The headlights caught on a heap of something brown and gray spread over most of the road and I had two sets of choices: speed up, or slow down more; drive right over it, or swerve around. I picked A and A: stomped the gas pedal and held the steering wheel tight. Suddenly closer I saw legs, arms, bloated faces, smelled the stink of death. I felt the awful give beneath our tires. It was a roadblock of bodies—broken glass glittered where we would have gone if I’d tried to avoid them, and two fresh corpses splayed on the concrete, blood still wet and red. A trap, but a sprung one. Thanks, Claude. Thanks, Dwight.

The pile of rotting dead people fell behind us mercifully fast. I risked a glance at the kid. He stared straight forward like we were bringing him home from seeing a movie he had put on mental replay. Like there was nothing to see outside the truck and never had been and never would be.

“Maybe this was what freaked him out in the first place?” asked Aim. “You know, before he even got to us?” It was a theory.

We came out into the glorious light again. One more short tunnel as the road entered the city was how I remembered the route. I stopped the truck to think. When my fingers started aching I let go of the wheel.

A bird landed on a loose section of the other bridge that used to run parallel. Fall before last it had been the widest of its kind in the world, according to Aim.

She cared about those kinds of things.

The sun was fairly high yet. We’d left our camp in the mountains early this morning and come twelve mostly downhill miles before meeting up with the kid’s brothers. The plan had been to cross the bridge inconspicuously, on foot, hole up in Seward Park with the Rattlers and wait for Rob to show. Well, we’d blown the inconspicuous part.

“Sure you don’t wanna go back?” I asked Aim. “They’ll be glad to see us. And the truck’ll make it a short trip, and it’s awesome salvage, too . . .” I trailed off.

“You can if you rather.” But she knew the answer. I didn’t have to say it. Aim was why I’d stayed in Pasco instead of claiming a place on the res, which even a mix had a right to do. Now I had come with her this far for love. And I’d go further. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

Rob had better be worth it, though. With his red hair and freckles and singing and guitar-playing Aim couldn’t shut up about since we got his message. And that secret fire she said was burning inside him like a cigarette, back when they were at their arts camp. He better be worthy of her.

“Stop pouting.” She puckered her face and crossed her eyes. “Your face will get stuck like that. Let me drive. Chevies are sweet.” She handed me the gun, our only distance weapon—and I hadn’t even gotten Dwight’s cartridges, but too late to think of that—then slid so her warm hip pressed against mine for a moment. “Go on. Get out.”

The kid didn’t move when I opened the passenger door so I crawled in over him.

Aim drove like there was traffic: careful, using signals. Guess she learned it from watching her folks. The tunnel turned out clear except for a couple of crappy modern RVs no one had bothered torching yet. One still had curtains in its smashed windows, fluttering when we went by. We exited onto the main drag—Rainier Avenue, I recalled. Aim braked at the end of the ramp. “Which way?”

“South.” I pointed left.

Rainier had seen some action. Weed-covered concrete rubble lined the road’s edges, narrowing it to one lane. A half-burned restaurant sign advertised hotcakes. A sandbag bunker, evidently empty, guarded an intersection filled with a downed walkway. A shred of tattered camo clung to a wrecked lamppost. Must be relics of the early days; soldiers had been some of the first outside jail to head Otherwise, deserting in larger and larger numbers as real life got lousier and lousier.

“Wow. What a mess.” Aim eased over a spill of bricks and stayed in low gear to rubberneck. “How’re we gonna get off of this and find the park?”

“Uhhh.” Would we have to dig ourselves a turnoff? No—“Here!” More sandbags, but some had tumbled down from their makeshift walls, and we only had to shove a few aside to reach a four-lane street straight to the lakeshore. We followed that around to where the first of the Rattlers’ lookouts towered up like a giant birdhouse for ostriches with fifty-foot legs. A chica had already sighted us and trained her slingshot on the truck’s windshield. Her companion called out and we identified ourselves enough that they let us through to the gate in their chain-link fence. Another building, this one more like the bunker on Rainier, blocked the way inside. Four Rattlers were stationed here, looking like paintball geeks gone to heaven. We satisfied them of our bona fides, too, using the sheet of crypto and half a rubber snake their runner had turned over with Rob’s message. They took my knife. I didn’t blame ’em. They let us keep our gun, but minus the bullets.

“What’s in the back?”

I hadn’t even looked after tossing up the rolly. Dumb. When the sentries opened the big metal drums, though, they found nothing but fuel in them, no one hiding till they could bust out and slit our throats.

Four of those, and the rest of the bed was filled with covered five-gallon tubs: white plastic, the high-grade kind you use to ferment beer in. And that’s what was in the ten they checked.

“Welcome home,” one chica maybe my age said. Grudgingly, but she said it. She walked ahead to guide us into their main camp.

Didn’t take her long. A few minutes and I saw firepits, and picnic tables set together in parts of circles, tarps strung between trees over platforms, a handful of big tents. We pulled up next to their playground as the sun was barely beginning to wonder was it time to set. The chica banged on our hood twice, then nodded and scowled at us. Aim nodded too and shut off the ignition.

The kid opened the truck’s passenger door. Aim and I looked at each other in silence. Then she grinned. “I guess we’re there yet!”

Maybe it was the other littles on the swings and jungle gyms that got through to him. He slid to the ground and walked a few steps toward them, then stopped. I got out too and slammed the door. Didn’t faze him. He was focused on the fun and games.

“What have we here?” A long-haired dude wearing a mustache and a skirt came over from watching the littles play.

Aim opened her door and got out too. “We’re a day or so early I guess—Amy Niehauser and Dolores Grant.” I always tease Aim about how she ended up with such a non-Hispanic name, and she gives me grief right back about not having something made up, like “Shaniqua” or “Running Fawn.” “We’re from Kiona. In Pasco?”

Dude nodded. “Sure. Since Britney was bringing you in I figured that was who you must be. I’m Curtis. We weren’t expecting a vehicle, though.” He waved a hand at the truck.

Britney had hopped up on the bed again while we talked, lifting the lids off the rest of the plastic tubs. “Likewise!” she shouted. “Look at this!”

Aim and I leaned up over the side to see. Britney was tearing off cover after cover. Sure enough, the five tubs furthest in were all at least three-quarters full of thick indigo-blue liquid with specks of pale purple foam. I had never seen so much Likewise in one place.

Curtis lost his cool. “What the hell! We told you we don’t allow that—that—” He didn’t have the vocabulary to call the drug a bad enough name.

“No, it’s not ours—we stole this truck and we didn’t know—” Aim tried to calm him down. She tugged at the tub nearest the end. “Here, we’ll help you pour ’em in the lake.”

“You seriously think we wanna pollute our water like that?”

“Look, I’m just saying we’ll get rid of it. We didn’t know, we just took this truck from some dudes acting like cowboys on the other side of the bridge, the little dude’s big brothers, and they had a few friends—”

That got Britney’s attention. “They follow you?”

“Not real far,” I said, breaking in. “Since when we took this we left ’em on foot.” And they hadn’t shot at us more than once—the fuel explained why. “They ain’t the only trouble you got for neighbors, either—I’d be more worried about Mercer Island if I were you than them bridge dudes—or a load of Likewise we can dump anywhere you want.”

“Right.” Curtis seemed to quiet down and consider this. “Yeah, we’ll dig a hole or something . . .”

No one had proved a connection between Likewise and all the adults talking about living Otherwise, then disappearing. No one had proved anything in a long time that I’d heard of. But the prisons where it first got made were the same ones so many “escaped” from early on, which is the only reason anyone even noticed a bunch of poor people had gone missing, IMO. News reports began about the time it was getting so popular outside, here and in a few more countries.

Some of us still cooked it up. Some of us still drank it. How long did the side effects last? If you indulged at the age of sixteen would you vanish years later, as soon as your brain was ready? Could you even tell whether you went or not?

The ones who knew were in no position to tell us. They were Otherwise.

Britney went to report us to the committee, she said. A pair of twelve-year-olds came and showed us where to unload the fuel drums. I helped Aim lower the rolly from the bed—how had I got it up there on my own? My arms were gonna hurt bad when the adrenaline wore off—and she handed them the keys. They drove to the bunker with the Likewise for the sentries to watch over.

Aim had to head back to the playground after that. The little dude seemed thoroughly recovered: he’d thrown off his jacket and was running wild and yelling with the other kids like he belonged there.

The Rattlers’ committee met with us over dinner in this ridiculous tipi they’d rigged up down by the swimming beach. Buffaloes and lightning painted on the sides. I mean, even I knew tipis were plains technology and had nothing to do with tribes in these parts. But, well, the Rattlers acted proud and solemn bringing us inside, telling us to take off our shoes and which way to circle around the fire, and damn if they didn’t actually pass a real, live pipe after feeding us salads plus some beige glop that looked a lot worse than it tasted. And tortillas, which they insisted on calling frybread.

Tina, their eldest, sat on a sofa cushion; she looked maybe Aim’s age, but probably she was older. Trying to show the rest of the committee how to run things when she was gone Otherwise. she asked about folks at Kiona: who had hooked up with who, how many pregnant, any cool salvage we’d come across, any adults we’d noticed still sticking around. Aim answered her. There were two dudes, one on either side of Tina—husbands, maybe? Rattlers were known for doing that kinda thing—and a couple younger chicas chiming in with compliments about how well we were doing for ourselves. I waited politely for them to raise the subject they wanted to talk about. Which was, as I’d figured, the five tubs of Likewise.

They decided to forgive us and opted to pour ’em in a hole like Aim suggested.

Tina had brains. “What’s interesting is that they were bringing this shipment out of Seattle.” She stretched her legs straight, pointed her toes up, and pushed toward the fire with her wool-socked heels. August, and the evenings were on the verge of chilly.

“Not like the whole city’s sworn off,” one of the chicas ventured to say.

“Yeah.” I had the dude that agreed pegged for a husband because he wore a ring matching the one on Tina’s left hand. “That crew up in Gas Works? They could be brewing big old vats of Likewise and how would we know?”

The second dude chimed in. “They sure wouldn’t expect us to barter for any.” He wore a ring that matched the one on Tina’s right.

The young chica who’d already spoken wondered if it was their responsibility to keep the whole of Seattle clean, suburbs too. Husband One opined that they’d better think a while about that.

“Next question.” That was Tina again. “What are those bridge boys gonna do to get their shipment back?” She looked at me, though it was Aim who started talking.

We hadn’t told Claude or Dwight where we were going, or made a map for ’em or anything, so I thought the Rattlers were pretty safe. Plus I had hurt Dwight, broken at least one bone. But the committee decided the truck was a liability even if they painted it, and told us we better take it with us when we departed their territory. Which would have to be soon—“Tomorrow?” asked Husband Two.

Aim folded her lips between her front teeth a few seconds in that worried way she had. We’d expected more of a welcome, considering her skills. Kinda hoped she’d be able to set up a forge here for at least a week. Were the Rattlers gonna make us miss her date with Rob? But according to the committee’s spies he was close, already landed on this side of the Sound and heading south. He’d arrive any minute now. So we could keep our rendezvous.

Dammit.

Then I finally got to find out more on where all those corpses in the tunnel came from: richies, as I’d suspected. Didn’t seem like the committee wanted to go further into it, though. The dead people were who? People the richies had killed. How? Didn’t know. Didn’t think it mattered; dead was dead. And why were they stacked up on the road all unhygienic-like instead of properly buried? Have to send a detail to take care of that. And the two fresh ones? Tina said she figured the way I did that they were fallout from Claude and Dwight’s trip through the blockade.

So why? Well, that was obvious, too: use the dead ones to catch us, alive, to work for ’em.

It became more obvious when Curtis took us to where we were supposed to sleep: a tree house far up the central hill of the park’s peninsula. He climbed the rope ladder ahead of us and showed us the pisspot, the water bucket and dipper, the bell to ring if one of us suddenly took violently ill in the night. Then he wanted to know if we’d seen his little sister’s body in the pile.

“Uh, no, we kinda—we had to go fast, didn’t see much. Really.” Aim could tell a great lie.

“She had nice hair, in ponytails. And big, light green eyes.”

Anybody’s eyes that had been open in that pile, they weren’t a color you’d recognize anymore. Mostly they were gone. Along with big chunks of face. “No, we, uh, we had to get out of there too fast. Really didn’t see. Sorry.”

He left us alone at last.

Alone as we were going to get—there was a lot of other tree houses nearby; dusk was settling in fast but we could see people moving up their own ladders, hear ’em talking soft and quiet.

“Lie down.” I patted the floor mat. She came into my arms. I had her body, no problema. I did hurt from heaving the rolly around, but that didn’t matter much. I stroked her bangs back from her pretty face that I knew even in the dark.

“What’d they do with Dwayne?”

“Who?”

“Dwayne, you know, the little dude?”

Right: Claude and Dwight’s kid brother. “That what you wanna call him?”

Aim snorted. “It’s his name. He told Curtis. I heard him.”

My fingers wandered down to the arches of her eyebrows, smoothing them flat. “You worried about him? He looked happy on the playground. They must have places for kids to sleep here. We seen plenty of ’em.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” The skin above her nose crinkled. I traced her profile, trying to give her something else to think of. It sort of worked.

“Why don’t the committee care more about the Mercer Island richies? That was—horrible. In the tunnel.”

I laughed, though it wasn’t the littlest bit funny. “Fail. Mega Fail— they were supposed to be protecting these people here and the richies raided ’em. I wouldn’t wanna talk about it either.”

I felt her forehead relax. “Yeah.” She reached up and tugged my scarf free so she could run her hands over my close-clipped scalp. That was more like it. I snuggled my head against the denim of her coat.

That was our last night together as a couple.

She only mentioned Rob once.

Next morning my arm felt even sorer. And my shoulder had turned stiff. And my wrist. Was getting old like this? No wonder people went Otherwise.

Aim and I woke up at the same time, same as at home and on salvage runs. “Good dreams?” I asked. She nodded and gave me a sheepish half-smile, so I didn’t have to ask who she’d dreamed about. It wasn’t me.

What kind of universe would Aim make if she went Otherwise? It wouldn’t be the same as mine.

Curtis had pointed out a latrine on the way to our treehouse. We dumped the pisspot there and took care of our other morning needs. It was a nice latrine, with soap and a bowl of water.

Down we went, following the trail to the main camp. Aim held my hand when we could walk side by side. Sweet moments. I knew I better treasure ’em.

I helped set out breakfast, which was berries and bars of what appeared to be last night’s beige glop, fossilized. Aim retrieved the rolly from where we’d left it under a supply tarp. She cleaned the gun, which she called Walter, and shined up her tools. Soon enough she attracted a clientele.

First come a dude could have been fourteen or fifteen; he wanted her to help him fix up an underwater trap for turtles and crayfish. Then he had a friend a little older who asked her to help him take apart a motor to power his boat. Actually, he had taken it apart already, and wanted her to put it together again with him.

Aim called a break for herself after a couple hours of this so she could go check out how Dwayne was doing. And she wanted to bring him a plum from the ones I collected for snacks. I waited by the tools for her to come back. A shadow cut the warm sun and I looked up from the dropcloth.

“Hey.” A dude’s voice. All I could see was a silhouette. Like an eclipse—a gold rim around darkness.

“Hey back.”

“You’re not Amy.”

“Nope.”

He sat down fast, folding his legs. “Must be Dolores, then? I’m Rob.” He held out a hand to shake, so I took it.

Now I could see him, dude was every bit as pretty as Aim had said. Dammit. Hair like new copper, tied back smooth and bright and loose below a wide-brimmed straw fedora. Eyes large, a strange, pale blue. Freckles like cinnamon all over his snub-nosed face and his long arms where they poked out of the black-and-white print shirt he wore. But not on his throat, which was smooth as vanilla ice cream and made me want to—no. This was Aim’s crush.

His hand was a little damp around the palm. Fingers long and strong. I let it go. “Aim’s around here somewhere; she’ll be back in a minute, I think, if you wanna wait.”

“Sure.” He had a tiny little stick, a twig, in the corner of his mouth. His lips were pink, not real thin for a white boy. Dammit.

“Where’s your guitar?” I asked.

“Left it back home, at the bunkers. The Herons’ll take care of it for me; too much to travel with. But I packed my pennywhistle.” He swapped the stick for something longer, shiny black and silver. He played a sad-sounding song, mostly slow, with some fast parts where one line ended and the next began. Then he speeded up, did a new, sort of jazzy tune. Then another, and I recognized it: “Firework.”

Aim recognized it, too. Or him, anyway—she came running up behind me shouting his name: “Rob! Rob!” She hauled him up with a hug. “I’m so glad! So glad!” He hugged her back. They both laughed and leaned away enough to look each other in the eyes.

“Oh, wow—” “Did you—” They started and stopped talking at the same time. Cute.

Dwayne had showed up in Aim’s wake. He stood to one side, hands in his front pockets, about as awkward as I felt.

Rob and Aim let go of each other’s arms. “Who’s this?” he asked her, bending his knees to put his face on the kid’s level.

“I’m Dwayne. I come all the way from Issaquah.” Which was nine times more words than I’d ever heard him use before. Maybe he liked white dudes.

“That’s pretty far. But I met somebody came even further.”

“Who’re you?”

“I’m Rob. I live in Fort Worden, other side of the Sound.”

“Issaquah is twenty-two miles from Seattle.”

“Well, this chica I’m talking about sailed to Fort Worden over the ocean from Liloan. That’s in the Philippines. Six thousand miles.”

“She did not!”

“I’m telling you.”

Here came Curtis over from the playground. He said hey and dragged Dwayne back with him with the promise of a swim, “so you can get packed quick.”

The Rattlers wanted us gone yesterday. While Rob met with their committee to tell them the news out of Liloan—how the Philippines had been mostly missed by the EMPs and other tech-killers thrown around in the first mass panic—Aim loaded her tools in the rolly, and I went to find the truck. At the fuel shed they directed me up the remains of a service road. The twelve-year-olds had parked at the end of it; they were just through filling in the hole they’d dug, tamping down dirt with a couple of shovels. The empty Likewise tubs lay on their sides in the dead pine needles.

“Thanks,” I said. “We were gonna do that.”

“’Sall right,” the bigger one said. “Didn’t take long.”

“Yes it did.” Her friend wasn’t about to lie. “But we’re done, now, and nobody drunk it.”

“Have you ever—” The smaller girl smacked the bigger one on her head. “Stop! I was only asking!” She turned to me again. “You ever taken any Likewise yourself?”

Once. A single dose was low risk—I’d heard of adults with the same history as me, twenty-four, twenty-five, and still not Otherwise.

“Tastes like dog slobber,” I told her. “Like spit bugs crapped in a bottle of glue.”

“Eeuuw!” They made faces and giggled. I thought about the questions they didn’t ask as they brought me back down in the truck. About how Likewise felt, what happened when I had it in me.

You could call it a dream. In it, my mom had never hit me and my dad had never got stoned. I was living in a house with Aim. The drug was specific: a yellow house with white trim, a picket fence. We had a dog named Quincy Jones and a parakeet named Sam. The governments were still running everything. We had a kid and jobs we went to. I remember falling asleep and waking up and getting maybe a little bored at work, but basically being happy. So happy.

Seemed like it went on for years. I was out for eight hours.

We could have driven all the way to Fort Worden, only Aim wanted to see the Space Needle. “C’mon, when are we gonna have another chance?”

I rolled my eyes. “You can see it from freakin anywhere, Aim. Ask them if they see it.” I pointed up at the chicas in the fifty-foot-high lookout.

“Okay. Touch it then. I mean touch it.”

Our first fight.

Of course Rob took her side. “Yeah, the truck; tough to let it go, but there’s no connections for us in Tacoma. Olympia either; can’t say who or what we might run into going south. I told the captain up at Edmonds I’d be back in a week. Maybe he can stow it for us? And even if we’re early that’s our best bet. North. So the Space Needle’s not much of a detour.”

Aim looked at me. “All flippin right!” I said.

I drove again. Aim took the middle seat, but it wasn’t me she pressed up against.

Rattlers had told us where to avoid, and I did my best. From Rainier I had to guess the route, and sometimes I guessed wrong. And sometimes my guesses would have been good if the roads didn’t have huge holes in ’em or obstacles too hard to move out of our way. We didn’t see anyone else, only signs they’d been around: coiled up wires, stacks of wood—not a surprise, since anyone on a scavenge run would have lookouts. Groups had mainly settled in parks where you could grow crops, and we weren’t trying to cross those.

We reached Seattle Center late. No time to find anywhere else to spend the night.

There had been action here, too. I remembered the news stories, though they hadn’t made any sense. Not then, and not now—why would anyone fight over such a place, so far off from any water? But tanks had crawled their way onto the grounds, smashing trees and sculptures, shooting fire and smoke back and forth. They left scars we could still see: burned-out buildings, craters, bullet holes.

The Space Needle stood in the middle of about an acre of blackberries covering torn-up concrete—what used to be a plaza. Old black soot and orange rust marked its once-white legs. I tooled us under a pair of concrete pillars for the dead Monorail and backed in as close as I could get without slicing open a tire. “There you go,” I said. “Touch it.” Which was a little mean, I admit.

Rob climbed out the window without opening the door and got up on the truck cab’s roof. He stuck his arm in and hauled Aim after him. I heard the two of ’em talking about chopping a path through the thorns if they’d had swords, and how to forge them, and a trick Aim knew called damascening. Aim recited her facts about how high the thing was, how long it took to erect, et cetera.

Then I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then her breath. I turned on the radio, like there’d be something more than static to cover up the sounds they were going to make.

One of them shifted and the metal above my head popped in and out. That gave me courage to hit the horn—a short blast like it was an accident—and open the door. Very, very slowly.

Shin deep in brambles I unhooked from my pants one by one, I took a blanket from the boxes of supplies the Rattlers sent us off with. Then I couldn’t help myself; I looked. They both had all their clothes on and were sitting up. For the moment. Aim waved. Rob pretended to stroke a beard he didn’t have and smiled.

“In a minute,” I said, meaning I’d come back. Eventually. Give me strength, I thought, and I smiled, too, and waded carefully along the trail the truck had smashed.

She wanted to be with him. I loved her anyhow. To the edge of the continent. All the way.

I would follow her.

But tonight I would sleep alone.

At least that was the plan. When it came down to it, though, I didn’t dare rest my eyes. Dark was falling. The place was too open—bad juju. I had a feeling, once I got out from under my jealousy. So I found a trash barrel, rolled it up a ramp in the side of some place looked like a giant scorched wad of metal gum. I set the barrel upright, climbed and balanced on its rim, and scrabbled from there to lie on my stomach on a low roof—must have been the only flat surface to the whole building, even before the howitzers and grenade-launchers and whatever else attacked it.

Me and Walter settled in to keep watch. The Rattlers had returned his magazine when they gave me back my knife, and there were seven rounds left.

Aim and Rob were maybe fifty feet south. I still heard ’em clear enough to keep me awake till Claude and his friends showed up.

Trying to be smart, the bridge dudes turned off the headlights of whatever vehicle they drove blocks away. The engine’s noise was a clue, and its silence was another. Insects went quiet to my east in case I needed a third.

Starlight’s not the best to see by. I couldn’t really count ’em—four or five dudes it must be, I figured, same as yesterday. They zeroed in on Aim and Rob, who were talking again.

“Hands up!” a dude commanded. How were they gonna tell, I wondered, but one of ’em opened the truck door and the courtesy light came on. There was Aim and Rob, a bit tousled up. Too bad I didn’t want to shoot them. Couldn’t get a line on anyone else.

“Get your sorry asses outta me and Dwight’s—outta my truck.” That would be Claude.

“Daddy? Where’s Daddy?” And that would be that kid Dwayne? His age was all wrong for Dwight to be his dad, but who else was it rising out of that supply box, pale-faced in the yellow courtesy light?

The kid must have stowed away. He held out his arms and kicked free of something and Claude stepped up to grab and lift him and now I had a great shot. Couldn’t have been better. But I didn’t take it.

Next minute I wished I had when dudes on either side yanked Aim and Rob out of opposite doors. I heard her yell at them and get slapped.

Someone else was yelling, too—not me, I was busy shimmying off the roof while there was cover for my noise. “No! Don’t hit her! No! Put me down!” Little Dwayne was on our side?

Brightness. Someone had switched on the truck’s headlamps. I ducked down. Aim was crying hard. They shoved her to the pavement. I hadn’t heard a peep outta Rob. When they marched him into the light I saw one dude’s hand over his mouth and a shiny piece of metal right below his ear. Knife or a gun—didn’t matter which. Woulda kept me quiet, too.

Only four of ’em. Plus Dwayne. Seven bullets seemed plenty—if I didn’t mind losing Rob.

I didn’t. But Aim would.

Bang! Bang! Walter wasn’t quite loud as a shotgun. Glass and metal pinged off the pavement, flew away into the sudden dark. Only one round each for the truck’s headlamps. I was proud of myself.

Light still came out of the cab from the overhead courtesy. Not much. I couldn’t see anybody.

But I could hear ’em shouting to each other to find the chica, and shooting. Randomly, I hoped. No screams, so Rob had probably got away all right.

I shifted position, which made the next part trickier, but would keep the dudes guessing where to kill me. I went round to one side, with the frame of the open driver’s door blocking my vision. Walter stayed steady—I gripped him with both hands and squeezed. Got it in one. I was good. Total night, now. I squirmed off on my belly for a ways to be sure no one had a flashlight, then crawled, then stumbled to my feet and walked. Headed north by the stars, with nothing on me but Walter, my knife, my binoculars. A blanket. Not even a bottle for water.

It was a shame to leave all the provisions the Rattlers had given us. And too bad I had to damage a high-functioning machine like that truck. Aim would cuss me out for it when we caught up with one another at Edmonds.

Aim would be fine. She always was. Rob, too, most likely.

I took the rest of that night and part of a day to walk there. It was easy: 99 most of the way. The stars were enough to see that by, and the Aurora Bridge was practically intact. I wondered what facts Aim would have told me about it if we were going over it together. All I knew was people used to kill themselves here by jumping off. Kids? Didn’t we used to have the highest rates of suicide?

If Aim didn’t show up at Edmonds in a few days maybe I’d come back. Or find some Likewise.

I snuck in the dark past where they used to have a zoo, worried I might run into some weird predator. I didn’t; when the animals got out they must’ve headed for the lake on the road’s other side. The sky got lighter and I began to look for pursuit as well as listening for it. Nobody came. The stores and restaurants lining the highway would have been scavenged out long ago. I was alone.

No Aim in sight.

Rain started to fall. I hung the blanket over my head like the Virgin Mary. Because of the clouds it was hard to tell time, but I figured I turned onto 104 a couple of hours after sunrise.

I went down a long slope to the water. Rob had said if we got split up to meet by a statue of sea lions on the beach.

This was my first time to be at the ocean. It was big, but I could see land out in its middle. Looked like I could just swim there.

Route 104 continued right on into the water. The statue was supposed to be to its south. The sand moved, soft and tiresome under my wet Chucks. I spotted a clump of kids digging for something further towards the water, five or six of ’em. They didn’t try to stop me and I kept on without asking directions. A couple of ’em had slings out, but I must not have seemed too threatening; neither chica pointed ’em my way.

A metal seal humped up some stairs to a patch of green. Was this the place? I climbed up beside it. At the top, a garden. I could tell it was a garden since it wasn’t blackberries, though I had no idea what these plants were. But they grew in circles and lines, real patterns. And more metal seal sculptures—okay, sea lions—stuck out from between them.

Definitely. I was here. I curled up in the statue’s shelter and the rain stopped. I fell asleep.

A whisper woke me. “Lo!” My heart revved. Aim? Eyes open, all I saw was Rob.

“You can’t call me that.”

“Sorry. Didn’t want you to shoot me.”

I sat up straight and realized I had Walter in my hand. Falling asleep hadn’t been so stupid after all.

Rob’s ice cream throat had a red inch-long slice on one side, so it had been a knife the bridge dude held there. He seemed fine besides that. “Is she around?” he asked. “She and you came together?” I shook my head and he folded up his legs and sat down beside me. Too close. I scooted over.

We didn’t say anything for a long time. Could have been an hour. I was thirsty. And hungry. I wondered if maybe I ought to eat from the garden.

Rob held out his water bottle for me and I took it and drank. When I gave it back he didn’t even wipe the mouth off.

The clouds pulled themselves apart and let this beautiful golden orange light streak through. The sun was going down. I’d slept the whole afternoon.

“Look,” said Rob. “Look. I know you and Aim—”

“You can’t call her that.”

“Yes, I can! Listen. Look. You were with her before me and I don’t want to—to mess with that.”

As if he hadn’t. “And?”

“And—and we were talking.” Among other things. “And she was saying if we got married—if she got married she would want to marry both of us.”

I stared at him hard to make sure he was serious. Me and Aim had teased each other about being married ever since we met in gym class. Even before people over twenty began going Otherwise.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one it was more than a joke for.

“So would you?”

“Would I what?” But I knew.

“Would you freakin marry me! Would you—”

“But I’m a lesbian! You’re a dude!”

“Well, duh.”

“And only because you wanna hook up with my chica? Unh-unh.”

“Well, it’s not only that.”

“Really?” I stood up. He did too. “What, you’re in love with me? I’m fat, I’m a big mouth, a smartass—”

“You’re plain old smart! And brave, and Aim thinks you’re the closest thing to a goddess who ever walked the earth.”

“What if I am?” I wanted to leave. But this was where she would come. I had to be here. I wrapped the blanket around me and tucked my arms tight.

“Yeah. What if you are? What if she’s right? I kinda think—” He quit talking a minute and looked over his shoulder at the beach. “I kinda think she is. You are.”

If he had tried to touch me then I would have knocked the fool unconscious.

Instead, he turned around and looked at the beach again. “That’s him,” he said. “Captain Lee.” He pointed and I saw a bright yellow triangle sailing toward us out of the west. “Our ride’s here ahead of time. I have to go meet him and tell him we need to wait for Aim.” He left me alone with my wet blanket.

It was almost dark by the time he came back, carrying a bucket. “Here you go. Supper.” I was ready to eat, no doubt. Inside was a hot baked yam and some greens with greasy pink fish mixed in. I washed it all down with more of Rob’s water.

We took turns hanging out at the statue. Rob had connections with the locals, the Hammerheads and this other group, the Twisters. He stayed with them, and I bunked on Lee’s boat.

Three days dragged past. I got used to a certain idea. I let him put his arm around me once when we met on the stairs. And another time when he introduced me to a dude he brought to pick some herbs in the garden—they were for medicines, not that nice to eat.

And another time. We were there together, but with my binoculars I saw her first. I shouted and he hugged me. Both arms. I broke away and ran and ran and yes, it was Aim! And Dwayne, which explained a lot when I thought about it afterwards, but I didn’t care right then.

“Aim! Aim!” I lifted her in the air and whirled us around and we kissed each other long and hard. I was with her and it was this reality, hers and mine and everybody else’s, not one I created just for me. I cried and laughed and yelled at the blue sky, so glad. Oh so freakin’ glad.

Of course I had known all along she’d make it.

And then Rob caught up with me and he kissed her too. She held my hand the whole time. So how could I feel jealous and left out?

Well, I could. But that might change, someday. Someday, it might be otherwise.

NISI SHAWL’S first collection, Filter House, won the 2008 James Tiptree Jr. Award and was nominated for a Nebula Award. It was also chosen one the Best Books of 2008 by Publishers Weekly. Shawl’s debut novel, Everfair, was nominated for the Nebula and James Tiptree Jr. Awards. They edited New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, winner of the 2020 Locus Award for Best Anthology. Shawl is coauthor (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. They are a board member of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and one of the Carl Brandon Society’s founders.

THE NIGHT TRAIN

LAVIE TIDHAR

Her name wasn’t Molly and she didn’t wear shades, reflective or otherwise.

She was watching the length of the platform.

Hua Lamphong at dusk: a warm wind blowing through the open platforms where the giant beasts puffed smoke and steam into the humid air, the roof of the train station arching high overhead.

Her name wasn’t Noi, either, in case you asked, though it’s a common enough name. It wasn’t Porn, or Ping. It wasn’t even Friday.

She was watching the platform, scanning passengers climbing aboard, porters shifting wares, uniformed police patrolling at leisure. She was there to watch out for the Old Man.

She wasn’t even a girl. Not exactly. And as for why the Old Man was called the Old Man . . .

He was otherwise known as Boss Gui: head and bigfala bos of the Kunming Toads. She got the job when she’d killed Gui’s Toad bodyguards—by default, as it were.

But that had happened back in Kunming. This was Bangkok, Bangkok at dusk—this was Hua Lamphong, greatest of train stations, where the great slugs breathed steam and were rubbed and scrubbed by the slug-boys whose job it was to nurture them before departure. And the Old Man wasn’t exactly an old man, either.

Scanning, waiting for the Old Man to arrive: Yankee tourists with in-built cams flashing as they posed besides the great beasts, these neo-nagas of reconstituted DNA, primitive nervous system, and prodigious appetite. Scanning: a group of Martian Chinese from Tong Yun City walking cautiously—unused to the heavier gravity of this home/planet. Scanning: three Malay businessmen—Earth-Belt Corp. standardized reinforced skeletons—they moved gracefully, like dancers—wired through and through, hooked up twenty-four Earth-hours an Earth-day, seven Earth-days a week to the money-form engines, the great pulsating web of commerce and data, that singing, Sol-system-wide, von Neumann-machine expanded network of networks of networks . . .

Wired with hidden weaponry, too: she made a note of that.

An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Vietnamese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers—he with long thinning silver hair and a cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries—baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red—

An assassin could be anyone. A Yankee rich kid on a retro-trip across Asia, reading Air America or Neuromancer in a genuine reproduction 1984 POD-paperback; it could be the courteous policeman helping a pretty young Lao girl with her luggage; it could be the girl herself—an Issan farmer’s daughter exported to Bangkok in a century-long tradition, body augmented with vibratory vaginal inserts, perfect audio/ visual-to-export, always-on record, a carefully tended Louis Wu habit and an as carefully tended retirement plan—make enough money, get back home to Issan wan bigfala mama, open up a bar/hotel/bookshop and spend your days on the Mekong, waxing lyrical about the good old days, listening to Thai pop and K-pop and Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa, growing misty-eyed nostalgic . . .

Could be anyone. She waited for the Old Man to arrive. The trains in Hua Lamphong never left on time.

Her name before, or after, doesn’t matter. They used to call her Mulan Rouge, which was a silly name, but the farangs loved it. Mulan Rouge, when she was still working Soi Cowboy, on the stage, on her knees or hands and knees, but seldom on her back—earning the money for the operation that would rescue her from that boy’s body and make her what she truly was, which was kathoey.

They call it the third sex, in Thailand. But she always considered herself, simply, a woman.

She ran a perimeter check. Up front, she was awed as always by the slug. It was tied up to the front of the train, a beast fifty meters long and thirty wide. It glistened and farted as the slug-boys murmured soothing words to it and rubbed its flesh, thirty or forty of them swarming like flies over the corpulent flesh of the slug. She checked out the driver— the woman was short, dark-skinned—a highlander from Laos, maybe. The driver sat in her harness high above the beast, her helmet entirely covering her head—the only thing she wore. Pipes came out of her flesh and into the slug’s. They were one—her mind driving the beast forward, a peaceful run, the Bangkok to Nong Khai night ride, and she was the night rider. She was the train.

There were stories about joined minds liked this in the Up There. Up There, beyond the atmosphere, where the universe truly began. Where the Exodus ships lumbered slowly out of the solar system, in search of better futures far away. They said there were ships driven by minds, human/Other interfaces, holding sleepers inside them like wombs. They told stories of ships who had gone mad, of sleepers destined never to awake, slow silent ships drifting forever in galactic space . . . or, worse, ships where the sleepers were awakened, where the ship-mind became a dark god, demanding worship . . . Mulan didn’t know who they were, or how they knew. These were stories, and stories were a currency in and of itself. Darwin’s Choice used to tell her stories . . .

She met him/her flesh-riding an older kathoey body, at a club on Soi Cowboy. Darwin’s Choice—not the most imaginative name (he told her, laughing)—but he liked it. He had watched her dance and, later, signaled for her to join him.

She thought of him as a he, though Others had no sex, and most had little interest in flesh-riding. He had evolved in the Breeding Grounds, post-Cohen, billions of generations after that first evolutionary cycle in Jerusalem, and she only thought of him as him because the bodies he surfed always had a penis. He used to hold the penis in his hand and marvel at it. He always chose pre-op bodies, with breasts but no female genitalia. He always dressed as a woman. Surgery was expensive, and a lot of kathoey worked it off in stages. Taking on a passenger helped pay the bills—it wasn’t just a matter of cutting off cock and balls and refashioning sex, there was the matter of cheekbones to sand down and an Adam’s apple to reduce, bum to pad—if you really had the money you got new hands. The hands usually gave it away—that is, if you wanted to pass for a woman.

Which many kathoey didn’t. Darwin’s Choice always surfed older kathoey who never had the basic equipment removed. “I am neither male, nor female,” he once told her. “I am not even an I, as such. No more than a human—a network of billions of neurons firing together— is truly an I. In assuming kathoey, I feel closer to humanity, in many ways. I feel—divided, and yet whole.”

Like most of what he said, it didn’t make a lot of sense to her. He was one of the few Others who tried to understand humanity. Most Others existed within their networks, using rudimentary robots when they needed to interact with the physical world. But Darwin’s Choice liked to body-surf.

With him, she earned enough for the full body package.

And more than that.

Through him, she discovered in herself a taste for controlled violence.

Boss Gui finally came gliding down the platform—fat-boy Gui, the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos in the pidgin of the asteroids. His Toads surrounded him—human/toad hybrids with Qi-engines running through them: able to inflate themselves at will, to jump higher and farther, to kill with the hiss of a poisoned, forked tongue—people moved away from them like water from a hot skillet.

Boss Gui came and stood before her. “Well?” he demanded.

He looked old. Wrinkles covered his hands and face like scars. He looked tired, and cranky—which was understandable, under the circumstances.

She had recommended delaying the trip. The Old Man had refused to listen. And that was that.

She said, “I cannot identify an obvious perp—”

He smiled in satisfaction—

“But that is not to say there isn’t one.”

“I am Boss Gui!” he said. Toad-like, he inflated as he spoke. “Who dares try to kill me?”

“I did,” she said, and he chuckled—and deflated, just a little.

“But you didn’t, my little sparrow.”

They had reached an understanding, the two of them. She didn’t kill him—having to return the client’s fee had been a bitch—and he, in turn, gave her a job. It had security attached—a pension plan, full medical, housing, and salary, calculated against inflation. There were even stock options.

She had never regretted her decision—until now.

“It’s still too dangerous,” she said now. “You’re too close—”

“Silence!” He regarded her through rheumy eyes. “I am Boss Gui, boss of the Kunming Toads!”

“We are a long way from Kunming.”

His eyes narrowed. “I am seventy-nine years old and still alive. How old are you?”

“You know how old,” she said, and he laughed.

“Sensitive about your age,” he said. “How like a woman.” He hawked up phlegm and spat on the ground. It hissed, burning a small, localized hole in the concrete.

She shrugged. “Your cabin is ready,” she said; then: “Sir.”

He nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Tell the driver we are ready to depart.”

A taste for controlled violence . . .

Darwin’s Choice used his human hosts hard. He strove to understand humanity. For that purpose he visited ping-pong shows, kickboxing exhibits, Louis Wu emporiums, freak shows, the Bangkok Opera House, shopping malls, temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, slums, high-rises, and train stations.

“Life,” he once told her, “is a train station.”

She didn’t know what to make of that. What she did know: to understand humanity he tried what they did. His discarded bodies were left with heroin addiction, genital sores, hangovers, and custom-made viruses that were supposed to self-destruct but sometimes didn’t. Sometimes, either to apologize or for his own incomprehensible reasons, he would go into the cosmetic surgeries on Soi Cowboy and come out with a full physical sex-transfer—seemingly unaware that his hosts might have preferred to remain non-op. Sometimes he would wire them up in strange ways—for a month, at one point, he became a tentacle-junkie and would return from the clinics with a quivering mass of additional, aquatic limbs.

But it was his taste for danger—even while he experienced none, even while his true self kept running independently in the background, in a secure location somewhere on Earth or in orbit—that awakened her own.

The first time she killed a man . . .

They had gone looking for opium and found an ambush. The leader said, “Kill the flesh-rider and keep the kathoey. We’ll sell her in—”

She had acted instinctively. She didn’t know what she was doing until it was done. Her knife—

The blade flashing in the neon light—

A scream, cut short—a gurgle—

Blood ruined her second-best blouse—

The sound of something breaking—the pain only came later. They had smashed in her nose—

Darwin’s Choice watching—

She killed the second one with her bare hands, thumbs pressing on his windpipe until he stopped struggling—

She laid him down on the ground almost tenderly—

Pain, making her scream, but her lungs wouldn’t work—

They hit her with a taser, but somehow she didn’t pass out—

She fell, but forward—hugging the man with the taser, sharing the current until there was only darkness.

“You were clinically dead,” he told her, later. He sounded impressed. “What was it like?”

“Like nothing,” she told him. “There was nothing there.”

“You were switched off?”

She had to laugh. “You could say that.”

They made love the night she was released from hospital. She licked his nipples, slowly, and felt him harden in her hand. She stroked him, burying her face in his full breasts. He reached down, touched her, and it was like electricity. She kept thinking of the dead men . . .

When she came, he said, “You would do it again—”

It wasn’t a question.

She was tuning in to people’s nodes, picking up network traffic to and from—the Malay business guys were high-encryption/high-bandwidth clouds, impossible to hack through, but here and there—

Kid with vintage paperback was on a suitably retro playlist with a random shuffle—she caught The Doors singing “The End,” which was replaced with Thaitanium’s “Tom Yum Samurai,” only to segue into Drunken Tiger’s “Great Rebirth.” Issan-girl was plugged in—a humming battery was sending a low current into her brain. She would be out for the journey . . . The K-pop princess was playing Guilds of Ashkelon. So were her entourage. The French backpackers were stoned on one thing or another. Others were chatting, stretching, reading, farting, tidying away bags and ordering drinks—life on board the night train to Nong Khai was always the same.

The train was coming alive, the slug belching steam—the whole train shuddered as it began to crawl along the smooth tracks, slug-boys falling off it like fleas.

Tuning, scanning—someone two cars down watching the feed from a reality-porn channel, naked bodies woven together like a tapestry, a beach somewhere—Koh Samui or an off-Earth habitat, it was impossible to say.

Boss Gui: “I’m hungry!”

Mulan Rouge: “Food’s coming—” in the dining car they were getting ready, a wok already going, rice cooker steaming, crates of beer waiting—

“I want kimchi!”

“I’ll see if they have any—” though she knew they didn’t.

“No need.” A long, slow, drawn-out hum from one of the Toads. “I keep for boss.”

Limited vocabulary—you didn’t breed Toads for their brains.

She watched the toad reach into what the Australians called an esky. There was a jar of kimchi in there, and . . . other stuff.

Like a jar of living flies, for the Toads. Like what appeared to be a fetal sac, preserved in dry ice . . .

Other things.

She left them to it, returned to watching—waiting.

“You would do it again,” Darwin’s Choice had said. And he—she—it— was right. Mulan had liked it—a sense of overwhelming power came with violence, and if it could be controlled, it could be used. Power depended on how you used it.

She counted the proceeding years in augmentations and bodies. Three in Vientiane—she had followed Darwin’s Choice there to buy up a stash of primitive communist VR art—the deal went wrong and she had to execute two men and a woman before they got away. She’d had snake eyes installed after that. A man and a kathoey in Chiang Mai— DC was buying a genuine Guilds of Ashkelon virtual artefact that had turned out to be a fake. She’d had her skeleton strengthened following that . . .

With each kill, new parts of her. With each, more power—but never over him.

Gradually, Darwin’s Choice appeared less and less in the flesh. She had to cast around for work, hiring out as bodyguard, enforcer—hired killer, sometimes, only sometimes. Finally DC never reappeared. He had tried to explain it to her, once:

“We are I-loops but, unlike humans, we are self-aware I-loops. Not self-aware in the sense of consciousness, or what humans call consciousness. Self-aware in the sense that we are—we can—know every loop, every routine and subroutine. Digital, not neurological. And as we are aware so do we change, mutating code, merging code, sharing . . .”

“Is that how you make love?”

“Love is a physical thing,” he said. “It’s hormone-driven.”

“You can only feel love when you’re body-surfing?”

He only shrugged.

“How do you”—she searched for the word, settled on—“mate?”

Imagine two or more Others. Endless lines of code meeting in digital space—ifs and ands and ors branching into probabilities, cycling through endless branches of logic at close to the speed of light—

“Is that what you’re like?”

“No. Shh . . .”

. . . and meeting, merging, mixing, mutating—”And dying; to be an Other is to die, again and again, to evolve with every cycle, to cull and select and grow, achieve new, unexpected forms—”

. . . not so much mating as joining, and splitting, and joining again—”A bit like that old story about humans replacing every single atom in their bodies every seven years—how the body wears out and regenerates and changes but the entity still retains the illusion of person, remains an I-loop—”

. . . but for Others, it meant becoming something new—“Giving birth to one’s self, in essence.”

The body he was surfing had been stoned, then, when he told her all this. When he was gone, she hired out. She enjoyed the work, but freelancing was hard. When the contract on Boss Gui came, she took it—and upgraded to corporate.

“We are never alone,” DC had told her, just before he left forever. “There are always . . . us. So many of us . . .”

“Can’t you all join?” she asked. “Join into one?”

“Too much code slows you down,” he said. “We have . . . limits. Though we share, too—share the way humans can’t.”

“We can share in ways you can’t,” she said. Her finger dug into his anus when she spoke. DC squirmed under her, then gave a small moan. His breasts were freckled, his penis circumcised. “True,” he said—whispered—and drew her to him with an urgency they were sharing only rarely, by then.

That had been the last time . . .

She wondered which species’ sharing was better—figured she would never know.

They said sex was overrated . . .

Yankee boy blue was no longer listening to The Doors—she couldn’t sense his node any more at all. She blinked, feeling panic rise. How had he slipped past her? Scanning for him—his vintage sci-fi paperback was still on his bunk.

Shit.

She glanced back into the cabin—Boss Gui glared up at her, then clutched his bloated stomach and gave a groan. The two Toads jumped—too hard, and hit the ceiling.

Double shit—she said, “What’s wrong?” but knew.

He said, “It’s starting.”

She shook her head. “It can’t. It’s too soon.”

“It’s time.”

“Shit!”—a third time, and it was counterproductive and she knew it.

Boss Gui’s face was twisted in pain. “It’s coming!”

And suddenly she picked up the North American’s node.

“Sh—”

They were going to Nong Khai, from there to cross into Laos. Boss Gui wanted to expand the business, and business was booming in a place called Vang Vieng, a tawdry little mini-Macau at the foothills of the mountains, four hours from Vientiane—a place of carefully regulated lawlessness, of cheap opium and cheaper synths, of games-worlds cowboys and body hackers, of tentacle-junkies and doll emporiums and government taxes that Boss Gui wanted a part of.

A large part of.

There were families running Vang Vieng but he was the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos blong ol man tod blong Kunming, and the Chinese had anyway bought up most of Laos back in the early privatization days. He would cut deals with some, terminate the others, and slice himself a piece of the Vang Vieng dumpling—that was the plan.

She had advised him against it. She told him it was too soon to travel. She asked him to wait.

He wouldn’t.

She sort of had an inkling as to the why . . .

She was picking up the kid’s node right next to the driver’s.

Which was not good at all.

The driver’s, first: an incomprehensible jumble of emotion, in turns horny, soothing, driven, paused—the driver and the slug as one, their minds pulsating in union—hunger and lust made it go faster. Snatches of Beethoven—for some reason it calmed down the slugs. The driver not aware of the extra passenger—yet.

The kid wasn’t really a kid . . .

His node blocked to her—black impenetrable walls, an emptiness not even returning pings. He was alone in his own head—which must have been terrifying.

She had to get to the front of the train. She had to get on the slug. And Boss Gui was convulsing.

“Why are you just standing there, girl?”

She tried to keep her voice even. “I found the assassin. He is planning to kill the slug—destroy the entire train, and you with it.”

Boss Gui took that calmly. “Clever,” he said, then grimaced. His naked belly glistened, a dark shape moving beneath the membrane of skin. The Toads looked helpless, standing there. She flashed them a grin. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Then she left, hearing Boss Gui’s howl of rage behind her.

Running down the length of the train—through the dining car, past toilets already beginning to smell, past farang backpackers and Lao families and Thais returning to Udon from the capital—past babies and backpacks and bemused conductors in too-tight trousers that showed their butts off to advantage—warm wind came in through the open windows and she blocked out the public nodes broadcasting news in Thai and Belt Pidgin. The end of the train was a dead end, a smooth wall with no windows. She kicked it—again and again, augmented muscles expending too much energy, but it began to break, rusting old metal giving way, and fading sunlight seeped through.

How had the kid gotten through? He must have had gecko-hands—climbed out the window and crawled his way along the side of the train, below the window line, all the way to the slug . . .

She reached out—sensed the driver’s confusion as another entity somehow wormed its way into the two-way mahout/slug interface. Stop!

Confusion from the slug. The signals rushing through, too fast— horny/hungry/faster—faster!

He was going to crash the train. The driver: Who is this? You can’t—

She kept kicking. The wall gave way—behind it was the slug’s wide back, the driver sitting cross-legged on the beast, the intruder behind it, a hand on the driver’s shoulder—the hand grew roots that penetrated the woman and the beast both.

Hostile mahout interface initiated.

The driver was fighting it, and losing badly. No one hijacked slug trains.

On her private channel—Boss Gui, screaming. “Get back here!”

“Get your own fucking midwife!”

But she could sense his pain, confusion. How many times had he gone through it in the past? she wondered.

The hijacker had kept the driver alive. Had to—the whole thing had to look like an accident, the driver’s body found in the wreckage, unmolested—no doubt he planned to jump before impact.

Could he?

She crept behind him. Neither hijacker nor driver paid her any attention. And what could she do? Killing the hijacker would kill the interface—he was already in too deep.

Unless . . .

From Boss Gui, far away—“Hurry!”

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if Darwin’s Choice had stayed behind. It was possible for kathoey to give birth, these days . . . could an Other foster a child? Would he want to?

Or he could have flesh-ridden a host . . . she would have kept the male parts just for that. If he’d asked her.

But he never did.

The hijacker must have had an emergency eject. She had to find the trigger for it—

Wind was rushing at her, too fast. It was hard to maintain balance on the soft spongy flesh of the slug. It was accelerating—too fast.

She was behind the hijacker now—she reached out, put her hand on the back of his head. A black box . . .

She punched through with a data-spike while her other hand—

Darkness. The smell of rotting leaves. The smell of bodies in motion, sweat—hunger, a terrible hunger—

“Who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

Panic was good. She sent through images—her standing behind him, the data-spike in his head—and what else she was doing.

“You can’t do that . . .”

She had pushed a second data-spike through his clothes and through the sphincter muscle, into the bowels themselves—detached a highly illegal replicator probe inside.

She felt the slug slow down, just a fraction. The hijacker trying to understand—

She said, “I am being nice.”

She was.

He had a choice.

The probe inside him was already working. It was the equivalent of graffiti artists at work. It replicated a message, over every cell, every blood vessel, every muscle and tendon. It would be impossible to scrub—you’d need to reach a good clinic and by then it’d be too late.

The message said, I killed the slug train to Nong Khai.

It was marking him. He wasn’t harmed. She couldn’t risk killing him, killing the interface. But this way, whether he got off the train or not, he was a dead man.

“I’ll count to five.”

He let go at three.

Light, blinding her. The wind rushed past—the driver sat as motionless as ever, but the train had slowed down. The hijacker was gone—she followed him back through the hole in the wall.

He was lying on his bunk, still reading his book. He wasn’t listening to music any more. Their eyes met. She grinned. He turned his gaze. She had given him a choice and she’d abide by it—but if the Toads happened to find out, she didn’t rate his chances . . .

Well, the next stop was in an hour. She’d give him an extra half hour after that—a running start.

She went back to the boss.

“It’s coming!” Boss Gui said. She knelt beside him. His belly-sac was moving, writhing, the thing inside trying to get out. She helped—a fingernail slicing through the membrane, gently. A sour smell—she reached in where it was sticky, gooey, warm—found two small arms, a belly—pulled.

“You sorted out the problem?”

“Keep breathing.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, of course I did! Now push!”

Boss Gui pushed, breathing heavily. “I’m getting too old for this . . .” he said.

Then he heaved, one final time, and the small body detached itself from him and came into her hands. She held it, staring at the tiny body, the bald head, the small penis, the five-fingered hands—a tiny Boss Gui, not yet fat but just as wrinkled.

It was hooked up with a cord to its progenitor. With the same flick of a nail, she cut it cleanly.

The baby cried. She rocked it, said, “There, there.”

“Drink,” Boss Gui said—weakly. One of the Toads came forward. Boss Gui fastened lips on the man/toad’s flesh and sucked—a vampire feasting. He had Toad genes—so did the baby, who burped and suddenly ballooned in her hands before shrinking again.

“A true Gui!” the Old Man said.

She stared at the little creature in her hands. “Which makes how many, now?” she said.

The boss shrugged, pushing the Toad away, buttoning up his own shirt. “Five, six? Not many.”

“You would install him at Vang Vieng?”

“An assurance of my goodwill—and an assurance of Gui control there, too, naturally. Yes. An heir is only useful when he is put to use.”

She thought of Darwin’s Choice. “Evolution is everything,” he would have told her. “We evolve constantly, with every cycle. Whereas you . . .”

She stared at the baby clone. It burped happily and closed its little eyes. Gui’s way was not unpopular with the more powerful families . . . but sooner or later someone would come to challenge succession and then it wouldn’t matter how many Guis there were.

Suddenly she missed DC, badly.

She rocked the baby to sleep, hugging it close to her chest. The train’s thoughts came filtering through in the distance—comfort, and warmth, food and safety—the slow rhythmic motion was soothing. After a while, when the baby was asleep, she handed him to the Old Man, no words exchanged, and went to the dining car in search of a cup of tea.

LAVIE TIDHAR is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama, The Violent Century, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award and Neukom Prize-winning Central Station, in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novels are the Locus and Campbell Award-nominated Unholy Land, By Force Alone, and debut children’s novel Candy (The Candy Mafia in the US). He is also the author of the comics mini-series Adler. His novel The Escapement is forthcoming in 2021.

DURS IS THE PRETTIEST

NALD HDPKINSDN

“Damiana!” Beti used her hands to part the veil of rag strips she’d strung from the cone-shaped hat she was wearing. The veil covered her face completely. I didn’t know how she could see where she was going in that costume of hers. “Juju in the air this morning, oui?” she shouted over the brassy music from the camel-drawn omnibus. It’d been repurposed as a moving platform for some of the musicians in the parade.

I smiled. “Juju weather for true, yes!” Beti and I had only met four days ago, but she’d already learned the phrase “juju weather” from me. She mangled my accent, though.

I scanned up and down Ho Street as far as I could see. Which wasn’t very far, what with the parade floats and banners and, apparently, all Bordertown spilled into the street to celebrate. Around us, people were dressed up like devils, like dragons, like whatever the rass they pleased. All of us were dancing, strutting, jamming, chipping, rolling, and perambulating down Ho Street however we might to the rhythms blaring from the various bands marching the parade route. The racket was tremendous.

I couldn’t see Gladstone anywhere near us. I blew out a sigh of relief. Beti wanted nothing more than to find Gladstone, her new girlfriend, in all this comess, but Gladstone was pissed at Beti and was cruising to do some bruising.

The camel bus had a black banner draped around it. The lettering on it was made to look like bones, and read WE DEAD AWAKEN. Through the windows we could see the musicians, all of them wearing funereal black suits, including top hats tricked out with black lace veils. Even the musicians were playin’ mas’. It was a brass band, instruments shouting out the melody to a song I almost recognized.

Today was Jou’vert; the daylong free-for-all we were pleased to call a “parade” ushered in the week of bacchanalia that was Bordertown’s more or less annual Jamboree. Word had gone around town that this year’s theme was “jazz funeral.” I was dressed as a Catrina from the Dia de los Muertos—a gorgeous femme skeleton in sultry widow’s weeds, complete with a massive picture hat.

I suppressed a sneeze; my sinuses were tingling. Juju breeze for true, blowing a witchy front of magic from the Realm into Bordertown. Juju weather always made things in Bordertown especially . . . interesting. My fellow human friends made mako on me when I said I could sense the pools and eddies of magic as they wafted through Bordertown. Only Gladstone, half-Blood as she was, had ever backed me up. And now her new girlfriend Beti, too. Or possibly her newly ex-girlfriend Beti. Beti, who might be from the Other Side, or who might just be a young brown girl playing out her own personal power fantasy.

Gladstone’s life could get complicated.

Gladstone could deal. It was Beti I was concerned for, so young and so naive. Newbies to Bordertown never believed they were as out of their depth as they really were.

Beti swung a turn around me. She was completely covered by multicolored strips of old clothing that Gladstone had helped her collect from the discard bins at Tatterstock, the trashion clothing place in Letterville. Her voice growled softly from her whirling dervish center: “Do you see Gladstone?” It made my heart ache. Poor baby butch Beti. In the few days I’d known her, I’d already learned that her gruff voice came out lowest when she was trying to play it cool.

“Come,” I replied, “lewwe go further down the road. I sure we going to buck up on Gladstone soon.” Over my dead body. Glads was gunning for Beti, certain that Beti’d betrayed her. Striding to the beat, I set off down the road, weaving my way through the other mas’ players. Beti followed me obediently, a little devil dustling sticking close to its mummy.

When I ran into Gladstone last night, she’d been propped up at a table at Trie Ferret, well into the snarly phase of a drunken bout with her favorite flavor of self-pity in a bottle—Mad River water chased with anisette. Gladstone sober was the best friend a person could hope to have. Gladstone on a binge was a snake-mean nightmare best avoided. I had a scar on my chin to keep me from ever forgetting that. I intended to make sure that this town—and Gladstone, my dearest friend—wouldn’t ride roughshod over Beti, shiny as a new copper penny, with not the slightest hint of silver to her eyes or her hair. It was kinda funny the way the three of us had bucked up on each other just four days ago:

Screaming Lord Neville sashayed over to greet the customer who’d just stepped tentatively in through the doorway of the Café Cubana. “Table for one, sweet thing?”

The sweet thing was a sturdy, burnished brown tomboy with that leonine Bob Marley face you find on a lot of Jamaicans. She gave him a shy nod. She was wearing fancy runners with the laces not exactly tied, a plain baggy T-shirt, and jeans two or three sizes too big, her hands slipped into their back pockets. One of the newest styles to hit Bordertown since people had started flooding into it from the World last month, claiming that Bordertown had disappeared for thirteen years.

“This way, sugar.” He led the way, practically voguing as he went. He had reason to show off. He was a tall, light-skinned brother with the kind of figure that could carry off any look. Today he was decked out in a shimmering purple confection of a satin gown, an off-the-shoulder number with deep décolletage—I had to admire how he pulled that off——a nipped-in waist, and a full, bouncing poodle skirt made even fuller by a froth of lavender and sage petticoats peeking out from under it.

The girl slouched along behind him as he led her to a booth. She glanced at me, and more than glanced at Gladstone, who didn’t notice. I was on the alert, though. Any rude gesture from that girl, any comment about Gladstone’s halfling looks, and I’d be on her like a dirty shirt.

Instead, she said, “A good day to you both.” She smiled at me, practically beamed at Gladstone. I nodded a greeting. She was almost to her table before Gladstone realized someone had been talking to her and mumbled a hasty “good morning.”

I leaned over and whispered to my friend, “How you figure baby girl keeps her pants up?”

That barely earned me a smile. Gladstone had a fragile look to her this early Noneday morning. The skin around her eyes seemed thin, the blue threadworm of veins there showing even through the rain-soaked-earth brown of her skin. Outwardly, Gladstone looked anything but delicate. She was sporting the usual threads: black leather boots; loose faded jeans encasing her strong, flared thighs; a worn red flannel shirt with the arms cut raggedly off to display broad shoulders and biceps sculpted by her work as a navvy. All topped off with a close-cropped nap of silver hair, thick as a silverback’s pelt, and a—usually—shit-eating grin that flashed a single gold tooth. Her eyes were also silver, from the Trubie side of her family, and they only strengthened her overall studly glamour. Many a femme and the occasional butch went all weak-kneed and tongue-tied in Gladstone’s presence. Me and Gladstone had had a thing once. That was long over—too many years between us, two different worlds of experience. Now our thing was that kind of staunch, comfortable friendship where neither one of us had to mince words. No, me and Gladstone story done. It’s Beti’s story I’m telling you now.

I swung aside the skeletal bustle that was the skirt of my gown just in time to get it out from underfoot of a staggerline of Trubies, every one of them dressed to pussfoot in gleaming white canvas bell-bottoms, sailor shirts, and beanies. All that silver hair only made the white suits seem even whiter in the Jou’vert morning sunshine. The line of them careened toward me in time to the road march tune. What was that chorus? It was nagging at me, half remembered. The prettiest. . . the prettiest. . .

A twenty-foot-tall stilt-walker wearing horns, red body paint, and not much more did a nonchalant daddy-long-legs step over the Trubies and proceeded on down the parade route, her bud breasts bouncing as she went. Two of the Trubies grinned at me and called out, “Jamboree!”

I gave them back the response, “En battaille-làf!” and swung my noisemaker around on its stick so its racket sawed at the air. I shook my head at the silver flask one of them slid out of a back pocket to offer me. She was only being friendly, but they had a way of forgetting that some of the things they drank for pleasure could cause humans serious pain. The line of them changed direction, stumbling catercorner off in the opposite direction, zigzagging through the crowds of people jumping up to the music. I said to Beti, “Truebloods playing Drunken Sailor mas’! What a thing!”

Beti stopped her dervish whirling long enough to peer at me through the strips and tatters of torn cloth and reply, “But they are not masquerading as the dead. Shouldn’t they have obeyed the edict?”

“It was a suggestion, not an edict. Too besides, some of them had white skull faces painted on. Not that you could notice white face paint so easily on that lot.”

Beti was pogoing now. I picked up the hem of my gown and followed her, chipping down the road to the music. Edict! Jeezam peace. I was getting used to the weird-ass things that Ti’Bet could come up with. Is not like anyone was going to police what people wore. Nobody coordinated or organized the Jou’vert parade; it just happened. Nobody picked an official theme for each year’s parade; word just got around. And half the masqueraders completely ignored the theme and wore whatever pleased them. I even saw someone dressed up as a cell phone. The new, teeny kind. New to Bordertown, anyway. We’d learned about them last month, when newbies started flooding into the town again after a two-week absence. Only all the newcomers swore it had been thirteen years that Bordertown had disappeared from the World. And now here they were, chattering on about tweeting and MyFace and complaining that they couldn’t “text” anyone with those ridiculously tiny portable phones they carried everywhere.

I said, “Neville, we ready to order over here.” I’d tried making conversation with Gladstone, hut I was only getting one-word answers.

“You mustn’t address me as Neville today,” announced Neville as he came over.

I turned my face to one side so he wouldn’t see me roll my eyes. (Always some drama with Neville.) He slipped a pencil from behind his ear and produced a small, neat notebook from somewhere amongst the frills and flutters of his outfit. “Today, my darlings, I am the Beneficent Miss Nell. Your order, sweet children? I just put a pot of the house special blend to steep—-fresher than your old uncle Charlie with the wandering hands! And the raisin cake is good today. The cook was in a nice, nice mood this morning.”He leaned in closer. “Only whatever you do, darlings, don’t order the scones. Cookie was never any good at those. He say is English people’s food, all starch and no flavor. I mean to say, Cookie is a sweet man, sweet can’t done.”In a stage whisper he continued, “But he have his little blind spots, you know?” Then he burst into a gleeful cackle. He was the selfsame cook, but he never ceased to tire of his joke.

A gruff voice called out, “What is in the house blend?” It was the handsome mannish girl tomboy, sitting alone in her booth. I couldn’t place her accent. Not Jamaican, then.

Neville—Miss Nell—beamed at the question. “Oh, sweetheart. The house blend have ginger grated fresh by the nimble fingers of a certain handsome young man; dried nasturtium petals, squash blossoms, and rose petals, all grown when magic permits in the summer garden of the best-looking negro this side of Soho; and nuggets of dried apple as sweet and lingering as that brown man’s kisses. The house blend will fix anything troubling your heart, darling daughter. And for finger food, too besides, we have ripe banana dipped in sweet batter and fried, and green banana to boot. Cookie does fry them up nice-nice in olive oil, sprinkle them with a little coarse salt and some cayenne, then drench them in so much butter, you going to be licking your fingers and wiping grease from your mouth with the back of your hand and belching one rude belch, and thanking the stars in the heavens that you find your way to Café Cubana at long last.”

By the girl’s frown and her baffled look, Miss Nell had lost her early on in that flight of language. She pointed at Gladstone and said, “I want what that one has.”Her two eyes made four with a startled Gladstone’s. Not a bit of shyness to the butchling’s gaze this time. It was Gladstone who blushed and looked down. I ordered our usual: roasted hazelnut and hemp tea for Gladstone, with fried ripe bananas. Madagascar Muckraker for me, with fried green bananas, extra butter. No scones for either of us.

Like a seven-foot hummingbird, Neville—Miss Nell—flitted and flashed from customer to customer, taking orders and giving banter. From what I could tell, he did so in at least five languages, including High Middle Elvish and La’adan, which was popping up everywhere now that the River Rats had for some reason taken a shine to it.

A tinny tinkle of a tune came from somewhere about the girl’s person. She pulled a cell phone out of the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt, flicked it open. She spoke a greeting into it, in a language I didn’t know. All around the café, people smiled, shook their heads. Another newbie come to check out Bordertown now that it was open to the World again. She would find out soon enough; over here, a cell phone might take it into its head to dance a jig, to loudly broadcast the audio from the last time you’d had sex, even to ring. What it would not do was allow you to have a conversation with another person. Not for long, anyway.

Gladstone, still looking like someone had stolen her puppy, muttered, “Last year, me and Charlotte marched in the Jamboree Jou’vert parade together. I was dressed in Pierrot Grenade, and she was my Pierrette.”

I closed my eyes. “And two weeks after that, she left you. Don’t tell me that is what all this moping and sulking is about.”

She looked at her hands. “This time of year is just reminding me, you know? Everyone’s gonna be at the parade, all coupled up and shit. Not me, though.”

I sighed and rubbed the scar on my chin. “Gladstone, you know I love you, and I sorry to be so harsh, but Lottie’s not your girlfriend anymore. Not for nearly a year now. Good thing, too.”

I opened my eyes. Gladstone’s face had gone ashen and completely still, as though someone had slapped it. Feeling like a shit, I continued, “Let me guess; you got drunk out of your mind again, you probably tried to get violent, and she’d finally had enough, and she left you. Same old story, doux-doux.” Okay, so that was the real reason I’d broken up with Gladstone. Same blasted reason everybody did. “She broke up with you, and she been hanging out with Nadine from since. The two of them happy like pigs in mud. She not coming back to you.”

Gladstone sighed. “The pretty ones always leave.”

“Yes, if we want to remain pretty.” I managed to pull my fingers back before they touched the jagged place on my chin.

The tomboy girl was babbling into her cell phone. Unusual for the conversation to have lasted this long. I couldn’t place the language, but she looked upset. Her voice was getting louder.

Gladstone muttered, “I give them my heart and they toss it back in my face and it just makes me crazy, you know?”

The girl barked a panicked question into the cell phone. Agitated, she started arguing before she could have heard much of the answer. Gladstone wailed, “Lottie left, you left. They always leave.”

I sighed. “Where’s Nelly with that blasted tea?”

Beti had stopped dancing for the moment. From the torque to her pitchy-patchy costume, I could tell that she was turning this way and that, trying to peer through the crowd. “Can you see . . . anyone?” she asked me. Jokey question, seeing as how the street was packed with people. But I didn’t laugh at her.

“Not yet,” I answered.

She seemed to shrink into her already-small self. I felt like a shit for the dance I was leading her on.

Over there. Was that a nap of silver hair on a burly body? Yes, but it wasn’t Gladstone. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

I spied out Stick on the sidelines, leaning against a telephone pole, wearing his usual grim and faintly disapproving sour face. Wouldn’t hurt him to come and join the bacchanal. He was even dressed right for a jazz funeral: black jeans, black boots, black T-shirt. But for all his grace when beating people up in his self-appointed role as Bordertown’s helper of the helpless, I was sure that dicty negro couldn’t shake his groove thang if his life depended on it. His ferret, Lubin, was doing it for him, weaving around his ankles for joy of the music, and occasionally standing on her hind legs to do a little ferret jig. Lubin just loved to dance, oui?

But wait—was Lubin wearing something? I squinted, but the blasted myopia wouldn’t let me see clearly. Trailing a swirling Beti, I casually chipped my way closer to Lubin and Stick. A troupe of man-bats blocked the view for a few seconds until, with a swish of their leathery outstretched wings, they moved past. Lubin stood up on her hind legs again and began to hop about. I busted out laughing.

“What?” asked Beti, midpirouette.

“Stick’s ferret. That guy, see? His pet is wearing a Carmen Miranda costume.” Lubin wore a tiny layered miniskirt, each layer a different color, and a little purple cotton halter that left her midriff bare. Each front leg sported a yellow armlet ruffle, high up. I couldn’t make out the details of the colorful hat secured under her chin with an elastic strap, but I’d bet it was a mini cornucopia of tropical fruit.

Beti looked where I was pointing. “That man comes from across the river,” she said.

“Who, Stick? I can believe he’s crossed the Big Bloody.”

From the movement of the motley covering her top half, she must have shaken her head. “Not the Mad River. The one running through my town. He has a look to him like the people who live on the other bank.”

Uh-oh. Tickle in my nose, and that sensation like my hair was lifting up off my scalp.

From since I was a small girl back home—back home home, that is, not my second home of Toronto, Canada—I used to know when it was going to rain, even before the rainflies came out to fill the sky, to flit and dance in the air until the rain came down and washed their wings from their bodies so they could transform into adults. In Bordertown, I could sense magic weather as well as the regular kind, and right now, there was big magic heading our way. Gladstone on a tear could send a stormwash of the stuff on ahead of her like a shock wave. Only Gladstone’s juju could give me the kind of migraine that was suddenly a threatening whisper behind my left eye. When I’d seen her last night she’d muttered, “Bitch thinks she’s too good for me, huh? I’ll show her.” She hadn’t seemed to be particularly aware of who I was. She was just announcing her pique to the general air.

I put my hand on Beti’s back to urge her forward. “We gotta go.”

“Very well. But I wanted to watch the small woman dance some more.”

“Small woman?” I kept moving us through the crowd. Over there, was that a broad shoulder in a red plaid jacket with the sleeves cut away? Best as I could, I ducked us behind a very tall, thin girl wearing a very tall, thin cardboard box that had been decorated to look like a coffin.

“The one you just showed me,” said Beti, sounding frustrated. “The tiny one in the plenty skirts. With the guy from over the river.”

“Lubin?” I nearly tripped over my own bustle in surprise. “But Lubin isn’t a woman.”

“She’s not a girl.”

“She’s a ferret, Ti’Bet. An animal.” “A woman animal. Like you.”

Weird kid. “Sure. I hear the Horn Dance has their own crew planned for today. Lewwe go see if we can find them.”

The Beneficent Miss Nell returned from the hack-room kitchen, apron and cap abandoned so she could show off her ensemble to advantage. She was holding aloft two trays loaded with orders. And she was singing, in a booming, tuneful bass, the old calypso about Frenchmen and their predilections for cunnilingus. I thought I could see the browned crushed-baton shapes of fried green bananas on a saucer on one of those trays, and a saucer of golden rounds of batter-dipped fried ripe bananas. I sat to attention, hopeful. Sure enough, Nell began sweeping in our direction, and then it was like slow motion, like the way things happen when you’re in a car that’s about to collide with another, and you can see
it
happening, but
it’s too
late

to stop, and you’re thinking, oh shit this is going to hurt, and then everything speeds up and the butch girl was striding toward Nell, out of her line of sight, but she was arguing on her cell phone, not looking where she was going, and before I could shout out a warning, bam! And then there were spilled hits of bananas and broken crockery everywhere, and Miss Nelly was down on the ground, petticoat askew, and the girl was looking shocked and dismayed at her and was shaking banana bits out of her short dreads, and Gladstone was already out of her seat and on the way over there.

Gladstone asked them both, “Are you okay?” The girl turned those marsh-green eyes toward her, and I swear that Gladstone gasped. The girl smiled at her, and there it was; Gladstone get tabanca just so. Just like the last time, and the time before. A big believer in love at first sight, Gladstone was. So of course it happened to her all the time. It was the first step in her personal dance of self-destruction.

The girl slid the cell phone back into her pocket. In the quick glimpse I got, it looked more like a shell than a cell—white and crenellated on the outside, pinkening to a deep rose center. When I left the World nineteen years ago, there were cell phones with superheroes on them and cell phones that lit up in the dark. Looked like there was a fad for organic now.

Gladstone and her new crush helped Miss Nell to her feet, the girl apologizing the whole time in that accent I couldn’t place. She really was astonishingly striking. Small and sturdy and muscly, a one-person puppy pile of energy and enthusiasm. By the time Gladstone and the girl were done cleaning up the mess that Beti’s carelessness had made, the two of them were good, good friends, and Gladstone was introducing her to me (her full name was something unpronounceable that apparently meant “a blessing on our house”—I made do with Beti, the part of it I could say) and offering to show her the best places to get a last-minute outfit to wear to the Jou’vert parade, since she was so new in town and Gladstone knew her way around. They scarcely noticed me paying both sets of bills. “Gladstone, man,” I complained when we left the Café Cubana, “I never got to taste my green banana.”

Beti gasped. “I am so sorry,” she said. She touched my arm briefly. “This is my fault. We must go back and get you another meal.”

Both gracious and graceful. “Nah, is all right, never mind that,” I said, smiling. “What I really want to know is how come you were getting reception on your cell phone.”

“My cousin called me.”

Gladstone’s lips twitched. “From the Other Side?”

“Whoa, wait,” I said. “You’re from the Realm? A human from the Realm?”

“She says she’s not human,” Gladstone replied. “Elvish.” She and I shared a covert, amused smile. New in town with a bad case of the elf wannabees. Most of them got over it. I had, and was still grateful for Gladstone’s patient indulgence in those years I’d swanned around in gauze skirts festooned with what I’d fancied to be Elvish runes.

Beti had the grace to look abashed. “Not from the Realm. From . . .”

The syllables landed on my ears and slid away, like marbles rolling in oil. Gladstone’s face did something peculiar. Interested, hungry, and resentful, all at once. “Wow. Really? I’ve heard about you guys.”

Beti simply nodded. “What’s that?” She was pointing above our heads.

Gladstone replied, “What? Oh. That’s Jimmy.”

I asked, “What’s that place allyuh talking about? That unpronounceable place?”

Gladstone looked embarrassed for me. “A country across the Border.”

“The Realm,you mean?”

“No, a different country. There isn’t only the one, you know.”

I hadn’t known.

“Jimmy?” Beti reminded her.

I answered this time. “The stone gargoyle. He lives there on top the Mock Avenue Church tower.”

Gladstone cut in. “I could take you to see him. They say that if the bell ever strikes the right time, he’ll come to life. I could take you and show you. If you’d tell me more about . . .”

I started herding us toward where Gladstone and I had chained our bikes. “A different country? Wow. Live and learn. Okay, but if cell phones don’t work in Borderland, they sure not going to work on the Other Side, either.” Why was Gladstone going along with Beti’s story?

Beti said, “It’s kind of like texting, okay? Except with kola nuts. Though jumbie beads work just fine, unless you want to get all self-righteous and ancestral and shit.”

The common-class stylings combined with her odd accent were cute as hell. “Kola nuts. Jumbie beads. Right.”

Beti didn’t reply, just turned those mossy eyes on me with a sweet smile. For the next four days, that’s how she responded any time we bucked up against some mystery about her.

That’s how it all started. Bordertown was a place of collisions that led people’s lives in new directions. For the four days before Jamboree, Gladstone wandered everywhere with Beti. The two of them were just totolbée over each other. They were holding hands within minutes of meeting, kissing within hours. Gladstone took her to see Jimmy, and to hang with her skateboarder friends at Tumbledown Park. Plus shopping for a Jou’vert costume. I bet if I had said “Lottie” to Gladstone them days, she would have replied, “Who?” She would have forgotten me, too, had it not been for Beti. Gladstone told me; every little trinket Beti found, every sight she saw, it was, “We must tell Damiana!” and she would drag Gladstone to come visit me at Juju Daddy’s.

Stick saw me looking at him and Lubin. He nodded gravely at me.

I swear the man knew who I was even under my skull makeup and the big picture hat decorated with small gravestones and teeny crows. Stick gave me the creeps.

Beti lifted some of the motley from her face and looked around. ‘When will Gladstone be here?”

My heart ached for the poor kid. ‘I don’t know, Ti’Bet.”

She frowned the way you frown when you’re trying not to cry. “But I want to see her before this is all over. I want to dance with her while I still can.”

“Plenty of time, doux-doux. The last lap around the market isn’t till sunup tomorrow. Come, lewwe try and find some other Catrinas.”

“Like you?”

“Yes, like me.” She and I had given up trying to dance for now. Too many people. We kept pushing on through the thronging bodies, the laughter, the dancing. Through the musk-salt sweat of human bodies and the lavender-salt sweat of Trubie ones. Through the sense-memory of me lying with my head cradled on Gladstone’s chest, both of us damp from the exertion of fucking. My musk-salt sweat and her complicated lavender-musk-salt one. I wondered what Ti’Bet’s sweat smelled like: salt, or sweet? Or maybe both? What was she, really?

A breeze tugged at my hat, horripilated the little hairs on my arms. Jumbie weather. Coming in on little cat feet, like those light sun showers of sweet rain that can turn in a flash into a full-out storm.

For all the pushing and shoving and comess, I nearly jumped right out of my skin when a howl cut through the music, and a figure tumbled past us, throwing itself into a triple somersault. Whoever or whatever it was landed on its feet facing us. It was wearing a pallbearer’s suit, complete with top hat. A wolf skull peeked out from under the brim of the hat. I drew back. I swore I could see through the empty spaces amongst the bones of the skull to the paraders dancing on the other side of the person. Then he pulled the mask and hat off in one to reveal his own lupine head and furry snout. The mask was solid again. Juju weather, making me see things.

“Ron!” I squealed. “Jou’vert, sweetheart!”

Ron the Wolfman sketched a deep bow at us, flourishing with his hat and mask. He bruised the air with another howl that just might have been the words, “En bataille-la!”

Ti’Bet launched into a ululation of her own. Which only increased my horripilation. She started dancing around him. He grinned, reached to take her hands. She pulled hers back. I winced. Ron was really sensitive to people freaking out at his looks.

But then she clapped her hands onto his shoulders. He took her by the waist. Together, man-thing and mystery woman, they capered through the crowd, barreling into revelers, who greeted them with cries of “Jou’vert!” and “En battaille-là!”

“Jeez, girl. Look at how all these colors fighting with each other, nah?” With thumb and forefinger, I sorted through the pile of discarded rags Beti and Gladstone had dumped on the kitchen floor of my squat. “You couldn’t find anything nicer than this?”

“They are from people who may be dead. That’s the theme, right? To celebrate your ancestor spirits?”

“I guess.”

“I will make an egungun, then. Spirit of the ancestors. It beats people with sticks to remind them to be good.”

“My granny used to threaten to do that to me. She never did, though.”

“The sticks are also to keep people away. To touch the egungun is to die. Only Gladstone says I mustn’t beat anyone with sticks during the parade.”

I made a face. “Shit, no. That used to be the tradition centuries ago, back home. En battaille’ means ‘Let’s rumble.’”

“I do not understand.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Nowadays the en bataille’ is only pappyshow. No real fighting supposed to happen.” Sometimes she worked too hard at this being an elf thing. So did Gladstone, but she at least had a reason. She was half elf after all. Half elf and all Bordertown. Beti was probably neither.

“You realize most of these clothes too mash up to mend?”

Beti grinned at me. “I’m going to, uh, mash them up even more. “ She took a crumpled and stained linen dress shirt from me and began tearing it into long strips. Her hands were strong. “Today I walked through your marketplace, and I visited a place across the Mad River,” she said happily. “Lots of people brown like me and Gladstone. And I ate jerk chicken.”

“You were in Little Tooth, then. The Jamaican section.”

“Yes. Tonight, Gladstone is taking me dancing.”

“Like you trying to experience all of Bordertown at the same time!”

“I have to go soon.”

“After only a few days? School must be out for the summer by now.”

Beti hesitated. Then she said, “I would like to stay longer, but someone is coming to take me away.”

Damn. I’d been hoping a casual mention of school would get her to make a slip one way or the other about this elf business. I’d just have to keep trying to get the real story from her. I held one of the rags up against her. “This purple is good on you. Bordertown don’t let everybody in. This person who wants to take you away may be the wrong kind of person.”

For a second, hope lit her face. But the light went out. “This one, borders cannot stop him.”

“Who is he?”

“My brother. Do you really think he might not be able to come here?”

Gladstone whisked into the room, her arms full of more gaudy rags. “Who might not be able to come here?”

Beti turned to her. “My fiancé,” she said.

I chuckled. Wherever she was from, English was certainly not her first language. “Ti’Bet, you just told me he was your brother. He can’t be your fiancé, too.”

She went still, then gave a dismissive laugh. “Brother, betrothed—I always get them confused.”

Gladstone dumped her armful on top of the one I was already sorting. “So which one is he?” I could tell she was trying not to let her suspicion show. “My brother. My blood, yes? He’s coming soon to be with me.”

“Before I could ask her about the difference between “take me home” and “be with me,” she tackled Gladstone, knocked her down into the mound of rags on the floor. Giggling, they began to wrestle. Gladstone had Beti pinned in under a minute, but Beti laughed her growly teddy-bear laugh and somehow managed to twist her body and use her legs in a scissors hold around Gladstone’s waist. The wrestling turned into groping and the giggling was silenced by kisses. I watched them. Only for a little while. When buttons started being unbuttoned by eager fingers, I left the squat and went for a walk. It was high time I had a girlfriend again.

Beti and Ron were still dancing their jig. They’d been joined by Sparks, Ron’s girlfriend. Briefly, I wondered whether Ron had dog breath. I used to give Glower those soft cakes of raw yeast for his.

But I wasn’t really paying them too much mind, oui? I was busy keeping a watch out for Gladstone. Too besides, the turreted shape of Beti’s pitchy-patchy costume had finally jogged my memory. The song that the chorus of the road march was sampling was:

In a fine castle, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

In a fine castle, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

So long I hadn’t played that game! Not since small girl days back home. We’d form two circles of children. The circles would haggle with each other in song:

Ours is the prettiest, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

Ours is the prettiest, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

The response, a simple expression of longing that even when I was a child had struck me as endearing in its brave vulnerability:

We want one of them, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

We want one of them, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

But suppose it hadn’t been a plea, but a threat? Give me one of your pretty ones, you hear me? Or else.

Or else what? And was the first team’s reply an act of generosity, or a capitulation?

Which one do you want, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

Which one do you want, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

No. Not Beti. They didn’t want our Beti, did they? All that talk about having to leave soon, not having much time. Beti was jumpy as a cricket in a chicken coop today. And where the hell had she gotten to? I’d lost her in the crowd.

My left eye twitched. Oh god. Juju heading our way. That twitch in my eye; in the bad years, that’s how I’d learned to tell when Gladstone’s nature was running high. How to tell when to stay away from her.

Gladstone slouched casually against her bicycle and mine. We’d leaned them against the bus stop where we’d arranged to meet Beti. Mine was chained the usual way. Gladstone’s had only a piece of old rope looped around the fork, trailing untied to the ground. The way she put it was, if the bike believed it was tied up, nobody would be able to steal it. Seemed to work, too. In any case, no one had ever stolen her bespelled bike. I’d lost five bikes to thieves since I came to Bordertown. Gladdy and I were going to take Beti mudlarking along the banks of the Big Bloody. Sometimes you found cool trash to keep or trade.

Gladstone looked up and down Chrystoble Street. “You see her yet?”

I sighed. “No, girl. But I sure she going to come.”

“I just want her to be safe, is all.”

I nodded. If you didn’t have your own wheels in Bordertown, there was always what passed for a transit system; you found some simulacrum of a bus stop—this one was a dead tree still standing at the curb of Chrystoble Street, the length of its blackened trunk painted shakily in green with the words THE Bus STOPS HERE. And you waited. There was no schedule, no official transit system. Anyone with any kind of vehicle could take it into their head to set up a route and charge whatever they pleased. You never knew what would show up. A rickshaw pulled by a wild-eyed youth with spiky red hair and the shakes from Mad River withdrawal. A donkey cart, complete with donkey. There was even a bus pulled by a unicorn that only let virgin passengers on.

“I’m actually having a hard time keeping up with her,” said Gladstone. “Beti, I mean.”

“Like I used to with you.”

“She keeps wanting me to take her to all this stuff I’ve never heard of.”

“Like what?”

“She wants to see a movie about a guy wearing an iron suit. The second one, she says, cause she’s already seen the first and the third. She wants to try something called an ecsbox. She wants a Hello Kitty vibrator.” Gladstone blushed.

Me, I thought my belly was going to bust from laughing. “You mean, Sir Gladhands flashing fingers not doing it for her? Like you slowing down in truth, gal! Oh, don’t be like that. You know is only joke I making.” Then it dawned on me. “Wait one second; those things she wants, they’re all from the World. Things from the time when the Way to Borderland was closed.”

Gladstone was still sulking. “So?”

“Why would a newbie come here for things she can get out in the World?”

A bitter chuckle. “You still don’t believe she’s from across the Border?”

“Do you?”

She shrunk in on herself a little. “I’ve heard about. . . you know? That place she says she’s from?”

“It’s a real place?”

“It may only be stories. My da used to tell me them.” She looked at me, longing making her face vulnerable. “A country on the Other Side where people have both my skin and my magic.”

Huh. Maybe Beti was telling the truth, then. I wasn’t convinced, though.

A team of boys riding three tandem bikes pulled up to the stop, off-loaded two guys with backpacks and a woman carrying a live chicken by its bound legs. No Beti. The guys paid for their ride with smokes. The woman paid with the chicken. They wandered off in separate directions. The bikes moved on.

“So you going to go there?” I asked. “To Unnameable?” I tried to keep my voice light, to prepare my heart for yet another loss.

She stared at her shoes. “She won’t tell me anything about it. Nothing that counts, anyway. Just like all those other Bloods who think they’re better than us halfies.”

“Girl, get real. I see how she looks at you. If she not telling you anything, maybe she can’t. Is you self tell me that people from beyond the Border are forbidden to talk certain things.”

Gladstone scowled. “Yeah.”

“Well, then.” She wasn’t going to leave me. Relief. Triumph. Guilt.

“Damy, all that stuff she wants that I’ve never heard of, I can’t give it to her.” Shame burned deep in those silver eyes, banking to anger. Outcast in the World, outcast over the Border. Gladstone would probably live out her life in Bordertown, and she knew it. And even here, she had to steady battle closed doors and sniggers behind her back. “Beti can go wherever she wants, in the World and out of it. Comes here flaunting it, slumming with the halfie.”

I sneezed. “Don’t go sour on this girl the way you do, okay? I like her.”

Gladstone huffed and stared at the ground.

“Beti!” I called. I pushed between a scary clown wearing a T-shirt that read WHY So SERIOUS? and a near-naked Trubie. The Trubie was ancient as the hills and thrice as wrinkled. He had a boa constrictor draped over his arms. Age had blanched the two braids hanging down his back from silver to pure white. They were each nearly as thick around as the snake, and their tips tickled his dusty ankles. His eyes were an opaque fish-belly pale, but they followed me all the same.

The snake charmer was suddenly blocking my road. Blasted Trubies could move quicker than thought. He leaned in toward me and croaked, “What will you give her, do you hear, my sissie-oh?”

I sneezed. The man looked startled, as though someone had just shaken him out of a dream. He smiled at me. “Excuse me, cousin,” he said, his vowels liquid with the accent of the Realm. “I did not mean to bar your way.” He stepped aside.

“Don’t fret,” I replied. My skin was still crawling with the surprise of the first thing he’d said to me.

“Did I misspeak you, cousin?” he asked. “It seems to me I said something, though I don’t remember what.”

“No. Nothing much, anyway. It was nothing.”

I could lie with words, but never with my face. He studied the polite fib he saw written there, and probably my fear, too besides. He gave me a rueful smile. “There is a wild magic in the bloods of both our races, my friend. We must give it sport from time to time, yes? And sometimes the bacchanalia calls our spirits forth in ways we do not ken.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I needed to find Beti. I gave him the Jou’vert greeting, though my voice cracked midway.

“To battle, then,” he replied. The response didn’t sound so light-hearted in translation. I shuddered. As I moved on, he was crooning at his snake, which had raised its head to his and was flickering its tongue over his lips, scenting his breath.

“Beti! Where you dey? Beti!”

Into my left ear, the juju breeze whispered something that sounded like: We will beat her with green twigs, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

I yelled, “That don’t suit her!” The general commotion swallowed up the sound of my voice. I muttered, “Do you hear that, my fucking sissie-oh?” I pressed on, calling out Beti’s name. And I found myself muttering under my breath, “You didn’t come to Bordertown for this, oui? Playing mother hen to baby dykes and sullen butches with substance abuse issues.” But is lie I was telling.

In truth, I’d never planned to come to Bordertown at all, for any reason. People don’t believe me so I don’t talk it much, but I swear I didn’t leave Toronto. It left me.

It had been a bad year, is all. My girlfriend at the time had just left me. Something about me being smothering. I’d had to put my nineteen-year-old dog down once his heart trouble was too far gone. Then Grandma died back home, and I couldn’t afford to fly down for the funeral. And the last straw: I’d been temporarily laid off yet again from my job at the forever precariously funded crisis center.

The Change happened slowly, in the weeks that followed. At some point it crossed my mind that the flashily overlit Honest Ed’s Discount Emporium seemed to have seamlessly metamorphosed into a store called Snappin’ Wizards Surplus and Salvage—More Bang for the Buck, More Spell for the Silver. Sure, the words on the sign had changed, but the place still sparkled with enough lights festooning its outside to illuminate half the city, and was still piled to the ceiling with everything from army parachutes to sex toys. And sure the Swiss Chalet chicken place across the street had been replaced by a club named Danceland, but that was construction in downtown Toronto for you; they were always bulldozing the old to replace it with something else. The little import shop where I bought my favorite fair-trade dark chocolate ran out of it, and then chocolate was scarce everywhere. I didn’t drink coffee, so is not like I missed that.

And as to the presence in the city of fine-boned people with fancy hair, high style, and higher attitude? Toronto’d always had its share of those. By the time I had to accept that I was no longer in Toronto and those weren’t just tall, skinny white people with dye jobs and contact lenses, it didn’t seem so remarkable. People changed and grew apart. As you aged, your body altered and became a stranger to you, and one day you woke up and realized you were in a different country. It was just life. I hadn’t needed to travel to the Border; it’d come to me. I’d settled in, found a new job, started dating Gladstone. Life went on, if a little more oddly than before.

I got used to it: to dating a truly magical mulatress, to reading by candlelight when the power outed, to riding a bicycle everywhere, in any weather. I even rigged up a Trini-style peanut cart: a three-foot-cubed tinning box attached to the front of a bicycle, with a generator powered by the action of cycling. Or by a spellbox, when electricity wouldn’t manifest. Peanuts roasting inside it. The outlet chimney was a whistle, so the escaping steam would sing through the whistle as I rode. That and the smell of roasting peanuts would make people run come. Daddy Juju loved it. He painted the store name and address on the side of the tinning box, and I rode the streets of Bordertown and served out fresh roasted peanuts in little rolled cones of newspaper.

I made a good life here. Working at Juju Daddy’s was my job, true. But it wasn’t what I did. There was a reason I’d worked at a shelter in Toronto. A reason my Toronto ex had said I was smothering. I watched out for newbie baby dykes and shy hunter fairies (human or elf) as tough as nails and as brittle as glass; I kept an eye on bruised halflings who didn’t realize they were already whole in and of themselves. I smoothed ruffled feathers and mediated lovers’ quarrels, and fed the ones who couldn’t feed themselves, and tried to keep the people I loved from hurting each other too much.

“Beti!” I shouted.

The street took a sharp turn, and when I rounded it, for an instant I had the crazy thought that Beti had somehow multiplied. I was in the middle of a crew of Betis, a proliferation of Betis. Cone-shaped masses of rags and tatters danced all around me, and jesters in motley, and hobo clowns in torn jackets and pants and crumpled top hats. A pitchy-patchy crew! No matter her fancy name for her costume, it was a plain old pitchy-patchy mas’. I laughed, relief making my voice a little too wild and hyenalike. The dancers didn’t have musicians, but were making their own music by singing: We will give her a wedding ring, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

With a clomping of hooves, the camel bus drew to a halt at the crumbling curb. Gladstone’s face brightened. “She’s here!”

Through the windows of the bus, we saw Beti stand and take the hand of a pretty Trubie girl, tall and slim with big cat eyes and a complicated fall of silvery hair. Laughing, they headed for the bus’s exit. I didn’t have to look at Gladstone to know the change that had come over her face. The shocked shift from eager anticipation to self-protective sullenness. “Gladhand Girl, don’t jump to conclusions, okay?”

“You see? Like always calls to like. Why stay with the half-Blood when you can have another purebreed?”

“They may just be friends.”

“Friends. Right. I gotta go.”

And that was the last Beti and I had seen of Gladstone. At least, that’s what I was telling Beti. I hadn’t mentioned running into Gladstone last night.

The other girl had been just a friend in truth; someone Beti had met on that same bus that had picked them both up as they were wandering around the outskirts of Bordertown, trying to figure out the way in. Beti’d only wanted her new friend Lizzie to meet her new love Gladstone. And the real kicker? Beti told me that Lizzie wasn’t even a Trubie. Just one of the rare humans who kinda looked like one.

Someone spun me around. I recognized the particular configuration of strips of cloth. “Beti!”

She grabbed me around the waist, spun me so my back was against her front. We went into a classic dutty wine like the people all around us, hips gyrating together. She caught on fast, this one. She’d been watching how back home people danced to soca music. It was sexual, yes, but it didn’t have to mean sex. It was a pappyshow of sex, a masquerade. Sex is powerful and beautiful and dangerous. Is bigger than peeny humans. To wine up dutty with somebody else is like playing mas’ in corpse makeup. Is like saying, these things have power over us, but right now, we can laugh after them. First time Gladstone saw me dance like this with someone else, we’d had one big mako row. She’d been convinced I was about to lie down right there so on the floor of the club and start getting nasty with the fella I’d been wining with. With some fella who wasn’t her, never mind that he was a stranger I’d only clapped eyes on five minutes before, and a fella to boot!

That was the first time she’d given me blows. And like a fool, I’d gone back for more. Hadn’t protected myself, hadn’t insisted she find a way to stop trying to own me with her fists.

All those years in my previous life I’d worked to help battered wives, husbands, parents, children. But of course, when I was the one getting beat up by someone who loved me, I decided I didn’t need help. I was the expert, right? I could handle this all by myself. I could manage Gladstone, oui? Be her lover and her therapist.

Gladstone wasn’t the only one who needed to learn that control is something you might try to exercise over a runaway train, not over a lover.

The revelers started bellowing out the song about not giving a damn, ‘cause they done dead already. So long I hadn’t heard that kaiso! From the big standard the two Frankenstein flag-bearers were dancing with, the crew was called the Jumbie Jamboree. Dead mas’ all around us. Vampires. Ghosts. Even douen mas’—small children dressed as the spirits of the unbaptized dead, wearing panama hats that hid their faces, and shoes that made it look as though their feet were turned backward. If you hear the sound of children laughing in the forest, don’t follow their footprints. Because they might be douens, luring you deeper into the forest when you think the footprints are leading you out.

I leaned back into Beti’s embrace. I turned my head toward her. “Why you disappeared like that?”

“I can hide with these people,” she said, her voice rough. Like she’d been crying? I turned and took her in my arms.

“Don’t worry, child. I won’t let Gladstone find you.”

She pulled back, pushed some of the motley away from her face. “Gladstone? You’re keeping Gladstone from me?”

Oh, shit. “She want to hurt you,” I blurted.

Beti reared back, startled. “Why?”

“She’s real mad at you for hanging with that girl from the bus. She thinks the two of you been cheating on her.”

She looked confused. “Cheating . . .” Light dawned. “You mean making sex with each other? But we haven’t.”

“Don’t matter. When Gladstone get like this, all she want to do is lash out. You have to stay away from her till she calm down. Believe me, girl, I know. Same thing she did to me.” I turned my face, showed her my scarred jaw.

The fear, the distress on Beti’s face tore my heart out. “She doesn’t realize,” she said. Through the prang-a-lang of the music, I thought the next words she said were, “She should be the one scared of me.”

“What?”

She smiled sadly, touched my arm. “Don’t worry. Things change.” Then she looked back behind us, crowded close to me. “What is that?” she cried.

Cold fear-sweat was crawling down my spine before I even turned to look. Whatever it was, I could feel it coming, feel it in my sinuses, in the savage change that had come upon colors.

Something parted the crowd like a wave, leaving me and Beti exposed in the middle of the road. The air had gone dark around us, damp and cold. I heard screams from the crowd. But the spectacle approaching us did so in silence. No sound from the pounding of the horses’ hooves, the baying of the dogs that weren’t dogs, the harsh, rasping breath of the quarry that they were chasing down the very middle of the Jou’vert parade, in what had been broad daylight a second ago. Beside me, Beti gasped. I hustled her over to the sidelines. We watched the Hunt approach. They were moving in slo-mo.

Beti asked, “What are those?”

Beside her, someone in a Phantom of the Opera costume replied, “The Wild Hunt. Here. Not the band. The real thing.” His voice shook. “We’re all in some deep shit now.”

“Why?” asked Beti.

“Anyone who sees them dies.”

A deep voice cut in. “We are. We’re all going to die. Someday.”

I turned. It was Stick. Lubin was riding on his shoulder, all a-bristle as she stared at the spectacle approaching us.

The quarry didn’t seem to be really there. I mean, we could see her. But her feet didn’t exactly touch the ground as she ran. They either landed a little bit above it or a little bit beneath the surface. For all she was of the Blood, exhaustion had blanched her face even whiter. Her hair hung in sodden ropes of merely gray that swung in dead weight whenever she looked over her shoulder to see how close the hounds were. Sweat had glued her once-gorgeous flowing dress to her body, and its streaked color was more mildew now than the pale green it probably used to be.

“Linden,” muttered Stick. “So that was her punishment.”

I hoped I would never again see anything like the dogs that were chasing that woman. Black. Small, about the size of terriers. But their heads and snouts were ratlike, only with the dangling, eager tongues of dogs hanging out from between their fangs. Too many legs. They ran more like centipedes than dogs. They swarmed over the road, red eyes intent on their prey.

As she drew level with us, Linden stumbled. People in the crowd cried out. She put one hand down to break her fall. It didn’t quite touch the ground, but some invisible solid surface just a hairsbreadth above the disintegrating asphalt of Ho Street. There were rings of silver and sapphire on three of her outspread fingers. One of the hounds leapt, caught the hem of her dress, but she was up again. She bounded away, leaving the hound with a scrap of sodden silk in its mouth.

Behind the hounds came the hunters themselves. Leading them was a Trubie on a motorcycle, her beautiful face grim. The rest were on horses, on goats, and I think I saw one riding a tapir. Silently, the whole mess of them hounded by. As the last few passed, the day grew bright again, and the wetness left the air. For a few seconds, we were all quiet. Some people were crying, some still just standing with their mouths hanging open, catching air. Stick muttered, “Love wealth and glory more than life itself, and starve in splendor.”

Then someone in the crowd started clapping, followed by others. People began shouting “Jou’vert!” and “En battaille-là!” Pretty soon there were noisemakers going, and whistles. The Phantom of the Opera shouted, “Glamour! It was just a crew with a glamour!” The band began playing again. The Phantom put his arm around the waist of a chunky, purple-haired woman in a skeleton catsuit, and they careened into the steps of a jig.

Somewhere in the comess, Beti had lost her headpiece. “That was . . . pretend?” she asked.

Stick narrowed his eyes. “Could be.”

Me, I didn’t business with him and his constant suspicion. My headache was gone and my nose had stopped tingling. Real or make-believe, the Wild Hunt had been the source of the juju weather—not Gladstone, after all. Jubilant, I fumbled for Beti’s hand amongst her rags and patches, and we started dancing to the music again:

We will frighten her half to death, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

We will frighten her half to death, do you hear, my sissie-oh?

Bellowing out the verse, I swung the hoop of my skirt in a circle. It crashed against Gladstone’s leg. My two eyes made four with hers. Hers were rimmed with red, her face blotchy. She narrowed her eyes. Heart thumping, I pushed Beti behind me, but I was too late. Beti squealed, “Gladstone!” She ducked around me and flung herself into Gladstone’s arms.

Blasted child was going to get herself a black eye this Jou’vert afternoon. “Gladstone, wait!” I yelled. I leapt toward the two of them to try to intervene.

Gladstone shoved me away. I landed hard on the ground, heard the balsa wood frame of my skirt crack. “Leave us alone!” she said. She enveloped Beti tenderly in her arms. Beti twined her legs around Gladstone’s middle. The two of them gripped each other’s shirt backs, held each other like they would never let go. They swayed like that for long seconds, to their own music, ignoring the driving beat all around them. My heart cracked open, just like my fragile costume. I stood up.

Gladstone hefted Beti back to her feet. Beti started toward me. “See, Damy?” she cried out. “It’s all ri—”

Gladstone reached me first, grabbed the front of my blouse, yanked me to her. “It’s been you the whole time, hasn’t it?”

“Wha-at?” I squeaked. We were being buffeted about by revelers. No one to notice the drama going down in their midst.

Beti said, “Gladstone, what are you doing? Come and dance with me.”

But Gladstone only had eyes for me.

“Dowsabelle just got all withdrawn,” she said. “I started fighting more and more with her. Trying to get some reaction from her, I guess. Hated myself. Couldn’t stop. But who’d been whispering warnings in her ear every day, scaring her half to death?”

I drew myself up tall. “You are scary, damn it!” I tried to yank my blouse out of her hand. She held on.

“I got murder-drunk the night Lottie left me,” she continued. “After I came home and found she had moved out. Couldn’t find out for days what had happened. Where did she go, Damiana?”

I squeaked, “You were going to blow any minute. I could feel it.” Daddy Juju had let me put Lottie and her stuff up for a few days in a room above his shop, until she’d found her own place. When the juju weather headaches of Gladstone’s ire had faded, I’d told Lottie it was safe to move.

“And now you’re trying to frighten Beti away.”

“She doesn’t frighten me,” Beti answered. “You don’t frighten me. What’s coming frightens me, but it has to come”—she burst into tears—”and then you and Damiana both will turn your faces from me!”

We turned to her, startled. “Oh, Beti,” said Gladstone, bending and folding her into a hug. “We would never turn away from you.”

We. Did I deserve that “we”? Had I been minimizing the damage Gladstone could do when she was out of control, or had I been causing it?

It happened so quickly. A voice shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. An arm pushed me out of the way and grabbed Beti’s shoulder. A hand peeled Beti away from Gladstone as easily as peeling the skin from a ripe banana. Beti turned, saw who it was, and angrily spat out more words I didn’t understand. A young black man slipped in front of Beti, between her and Gladstone. He tried to shove Gladstone away, but Gladstone held her ground. “Fuck I will,” she said. “Get away from my girlfriend.”

“Go away!” Beti cried out, backing away. But I couldn’t tell whether she was talking to the youth or to Gladstone.

The young man was a sturdy tumpa of a thing, short and muscled and pretty. He wore his jeans and T-shirt as though they were a costume. His eyes were sad, longing. They were Beti’s eyes. He reached for Beti again, same time as Gladstone lurched at him. Magic smell filled up my nostrils.

“No!” Beti shouted. Quicker than thought, she slapped Gladstone’s hand away from her brother’s. He must be the brother come to take her home, right?

That blow had some serious power behind it. Gladstone grimaced in pain, covered her wrist with her other hand, pulled her hands in close to her chest. “But I love you,” she said to Beti.

Beti slung her arm through the crook that Gladstone’s made. “I know,” she replied sadly, pulling Gladstone away from her brother.

He followed them. Beti stopped, said something to him that sounded like a plea. He snapped angry-sounding words at her, reached for her hand. She pulled it away. She looked scared. Gladstone tried to reach around her. Beti grabbed Gladstone’s sleeve. “No!” she shouted. Little as she was, she was strong. She was holding Gladstone off with one arm and the weight of her body, backing them both away from her brother and arguing with him same time. I started forward.

Stick lifted a warding hand in front of me. “Stay out of this,” he muttered. He called out something in the language that Beti and her brother were speaking. The two of them turned, looking startled.

And then I saw something I never thought I would. Stick bowed the knee to them both.

Gladstone said, “What the hell?”

Stick raised his head and asked Beti and her brother a question.

Beti replied, pointed at her brother and Gladstone.

Her brother cut her off with sharp words.

She responded to him with sad, pleading ones.

He begged, scolded.

Beti and her brother exploded into shards of prismed light . . .

I was still running, still screaming Gladstone’s name, though all around me was only painful brightness and I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see.

. . . and coalesced again. Not as a thick-bodied black boy and his sister, but as one faceless something. A something tall as a tree. A something cone-shaped with many-colored tendrils that flared out from it as it spun. A something that made a sound like monsoon winds through the branches of a dead tree. Like the whistle through the air of withies just before they struck bare flesh. But loud, so loud. People fell to their knees, those that weren’t running. Even Stick stepped back.

Not me, for I couldn’t see Gladstone anywhere. I ran right up to the thing. “Beti!” I screamed.

It kept spinning, whistling, clacking.

The old elf ran to stand between it and the crowd. He held up warding hands. The thing began to move away, but one of its flying tendrils whipped across the snake charmer’s face. He convulsed and fell, his snake with him. He was frozen in rigor by the time he hit the ground. Oh god; death had come to Jou’vert for true.

I planted myself in the path of the thing. It came on toward me.

“Ti’Bet, stop it!”

It hesitated.

“Where’s Gladstone?” I screamed at it. “What you did to her?” The thing dithered from side to side in front of me. I howled, “Bring them back!”

Gladstone, the snake charmer; they couldn’t just be gone.

The tip of the thing leaned its deadly self toward me. I didn’t give a damn. I done dead already, just like Stick said. Whether now or later, who cared? I’d meddled in my friend’s life, and now two sweet beings were gone.

The Beti-thing’s body smelled like dry rot, like carrion. It smelled like Granny’s perfume, like my old dog Glower’s breath, like grief and regret and resignation and goodbye.

And finally, it smelled like peace. It pulled back. It moved away, and there where it had been lay Gladstone, only Gladstone. Her clothes were torn, there was blood coming from her nose, and half her hair had been singed off. I dropped to my knees, felt her neck for a pulse. She was still alive. “Gladstone?” I said. No answer.

“Lemme see to her, sweetness.” It was Screaming Lord Neville, dressed in the tiered plantation gown and madras cotton head wrap of La Diablesse, the devil woman. “I know a few little things,” he said. He folded his long length down to sit beside us. Below the hem of his gown peeked one red sequined pump and one hoof. He saw me staring at it and smoothed the gown over his feet.

The pitchy-patchy thing spun away, in the direction of the Nevernever. People tried to reach the old snake charmer. His snake had coiled itself protectively around his body and wouldn’t let anyone near. Please God I never again hear a snake scream in grief. And I won’t, for it wasn’t a snake. It drew itself up to man-height, howled that terrible howl once more, and became a searing red flame of wings with a dragon mask of loss. In seconds, it and the dead elf were only ash, dissipating on the breeze.

For the next few minutes, as my headache faded, I dithered around Miss Nell. She checked Gladstone for injuries we couldn’t see. Stick brought water. People offered cloaks to keep Gladstone warm and tore costumes into bandages for her. When she opened her eyes, it was like somebody had turned the sun back on.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were coming to hurt her.”

She smiled weakly. “Truth? I might have.” Gently, she touched my chin. “Thank you for keeping me from being an ass even when I’m too stubborn to ask for help.”

“What was she?”

“A rainfly, I think.”

Gladstone had never seen rainflies, but I’d described their life cycle to her. How joyfully they danced in the air before a rainstorm. How when the pounding rain came it drove them to the ground and pulled off their wings. How they wriggled and wriggled and then crawled away, metamorphosed into their adult forms.

Beti had been doing her last dance as a child. She and her brother had needed each other in order to move on to the next stage of their development. No wonder she confused the word for “brother” with the word meaning “two who will become one.”

“So she was really from beyond the Border?” I asked Gladstone. “Some kind of egungun for true?”

“Some kind of what?” Gladstone was staring longingly in the direction of the forest.

Lord Neville said, “Whatever she was, doux-doux, she knew she couldn’t hide it forever. Brave, proud child. You two did right to care for her.”

He slid his platform shoe off one foot and massaged his toes. He kept the other foot concealed beneath his gown.

Jamaica-born NALO HOPKINSON lived as a child in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the US before her family moved to Canada when she was sixteen. Hopkinson is the author of the novels Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, Sister Mine, and The Chaos as well as the collections Skin Folk and Falling in Love with Hominids. She has also written the House of Whispers series of comics set in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe. Hopkinson is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and has twice received the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. A founding member of the Carl Brandon Society, she is currently an associate professor in the creative writing department of the University of California Riverside. Hopkinson is working on a novel, Blackheart Man, a revisionist historical fantasy of the Caribbean.

DON’T PRESS CHARGES AND I WON’T SUE

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

The intake process begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time. Her shoes, left by the side of the road where the Go Team plucked her out of them. Her purse and satchel, her computer containing all of her artwork and her manifestos, thrown into a metal garbage can at a rest area on the highway, miles away. That purse, which she swung to and fro on the sidewalks to clear a path, like a southern grandma, now has food waste piled on it, and eventually will be chewed to shreds by raccoons. At some point the intake personnel fold her, like a folding chair that turns into an almost two-dimensional object, and they stuff her into a kennel, in spite of all her attempts to resist. Later she receives her first injection and loses any power to struggle and, some time after, control over her excretory functions. By the time they cut her clothes off, a layer of muck coats the backs of her thighs. They clean her and dress her in something that is not clothing, and they shave part of her head. At some point, Rachel glimpses a power drill, like a handyman’s, but she’s anesthetized and does not feel where it goes.

Rachel has a whole library of ways to get through this, none of which works at all. She spent a couple years meditating, did a whole course on trauma and self-preservation, and had an elaborate theory about how to carve out a space in your mind that they cannot touch, whatever they are doing to you. She remembers the things she used to tell everyone else in the support group, in the Safe Space, about not being alone even when you have become isolated by outside circumstances. But in the end, Rachel’s only coping mechanism is dissociation, which arises from total animal panic. She’s not even Rachel anymore, she’s just a screaming blubbering mess, with a tiny kernel of her mind left, trapped a few feet above her body, in a process that is not at all like yogic flying.

Eventually, though, the intake is concluded, and Rachel is left staring up at a Styrofoam ceiling with a pattern of cracks that looks like a giant spider or an angry demon face descending toward her. She’s aware of being numb from extreme cold in addition to the other ways in which she is numb, and the air conditioner keeps blurting into life with an aggravated whine. A stereo system plays a CD by that white rock-rap artist who turned out to be an especially stupid racist. The staff keep walking past her and talking about her in the third person, while misrepresenting basic facts about her, such as her name and her personal pronoun. Occasionally they adjust something about her position or drug regimen without speaking to her or looking at her face. She does not quite have enough motor control to scream or make any sound other than a kind of low ululation. She realizes at some point that someone has made a tiny hole in the base of her skull, where she now feels a mild ache.

Before you feel too sorry for Rachel, however, you should be aware that she’s a person who holds a great many controversial views. For example, she once claimed to disapprove of hot chocolate, because she believes that chocolate is better at room temperature, or better yet as a component of ice cream or some other frozen dessert. In addition, Rachel considers ZZ Top an underappreciated music group, supports karaoke only in an alcohol-free environment, dislikes puppies, enjoys Brussels sprouts, and rides a bicycle with no helmet. She claims to prefer the Star Wars prequels to the Disney Star Wars films. Is Rachel a contrarian, a freethinker, or just kind of an asshole? If you could ask her, she would reply that opinions are a utility in and of themselves. That is, the holding of opinions is a worthwhile exercise per se, and the greater diversity of opinions in the world, the more robust our collective ability to argue.

Also! Rachel once got a gas station attendant nearly fired for behavior that, a year or two later, she finally conceded might have been an honest misunderstanding. She’s the kind of person who sends food back for not being quite what she ordered—and on at least two occasions, she did this and then returned to that same restaurant a week or two later, as if she had been happy after all. Rachel is the kind of person who calls herself an artist, despite never having received a grant from a granting institution, or any kind of formal gallery show, and many people wouldn’t even consider her collages and relief maps of imaginary places to be proper art. You would probably call Rachel a Goth.

Besides dissociation—which is wearing off as the panic subsides— the one defense mechanism that remains for Rachel is carrying on an imaginary conversation with Dev, the person with whom she spoke every day for so long, and to whom she always imagined speaking, whenever they were apart. Dev’s voice in Rachel’s head would have been a refuge not long ago, but now all Rachel can imagine Dev saying is, Why did you leave me? Why, when I needed you most? Rachel does not have a good answer to that question, which is why she never tried to answer it when she had the chance.

Thinking about Dev, about lost chances, is too much. And at that moment, Rachel realizes she has enough muscle control to lift her head and look directly in front of her. There, standing at an observation window, she sees her childhood best friend, Jeffrey.

Ask Jeffrey why he’s been working at Love and Dignity for Everyone for the past few years and he’ll say, first and foremost, student loans. Plus, in recent years, child support, and his mother’s ever-increasing medical bills. Life is crammed full of things that you have to pay for after the fact, and the word “plan” in “payment plan” is a cruel mockery because nobody ever really sets out to plunge into chronic debt. But also Jeffrey wants to believe in the mission of Love and Dignity for Everyone: to repair the world’s most broken people. Jeffrey often rereads the mission statement on the wall of the employee lounge as he sips his morning Keurig so he can carry Mr. Randall’s words with him for the rest of the day. Society depends on mutual respect, Mr. Randall says. You respect yourself and therefore I respect you, and vice versa. When people won’t respect themselves, we have no choice but to intervene, or society unravels. Role-rejecting and aberrant behavior, ipso facto, is a sign of a lack of self-respect. Indeed, a cry for help. The logic always snaps back into airtight shape inside Jeffrey’s mind.

Of course Jeffrey recognizes Rachel the moment he sees her wheeled into the treatment room, even after all this time and so many changes, because he’s been Facebook-stalking her for years (usually after a couple of whiskey sours). He saw when she changed her name and her gender marker, and noticed when her hairstyle changed and when her face suddenly had a more feminine shape. There was the kitten she adopted that later ran away, and the thorny tattoo that says STAY ALIVE. Jeffrey read all her oversharing status updates about the pain of hair removal and the side effects of various pills. And then, of course, the crowning surgery. Jeffrey lived through this process vicariously, in real time, and saw no resemblance to a butterfly in a cocoon, or any other cute metaphor. The gender change looked more like landscaping: building embankments out of raw dirt, heaving big rocks to change the course of rivers, and uprooting plants stem by stem. Dirty bruising work.

At first, Jeffrey pretends not to know the latest subject, or to have any feelings one way or the other, as the Accu-Probe goes into the back of her head. This is not the right moment to have a sudden conflict. Due to some recent personnel issues, Jeffrey is stuck wearing a project manager hat along with his engineer hat—which, sadly, is not a cool pinstriped train-engineer hat of the sort that he and Rachel used to fantasize about wearing for work when they were kids. As a project manager, he has to worry endlessly about weird details such as getting enough coolant into the cadaver storage area and making sure that Jamil has the green shakes that he says activate his brain. As a government-industry joint venture under Section 1774(b)(8) of the Mental Health Restoration Act (relating to the care and normalization of at-risk individuals), Love and Dignity for Everyone has to meet certain benchmarks of effectiveness, and must involve the community in a meaningful role. Jeffrey is trying to keep twenty fresh cadavers in transplant-ready condition, and clearing the decks for more live subjects, who are coming down the pike at an ever-snowballing rate. The situation resembles one of those poultry processing plants where they keep speeding up the conveyer belt until the person grappling with each chicken ends up losing a few fingers.

Jeffrey runs from the cadaver freezer to the observation room to the main conference room for another community engagement session, around and around, until his Fitbit applauds. Five different Slack channels flare at once with people wanting to ask Jeffrey process questions, and he’s lost count of all his unanswered DMs. Everyone agrees on the goal—returning healthy, well-adjusted individuals to society without any trace of dysphoria, dysmorphia, dystonia, or any other dys-words—but nobody can agree on the fine details, or how exactly to measure ideal outcomes beyond those statutory benchmarks. Who even is the person who comes out the other end of the Love and Dignity for Everyone process? What does it mean to be a unique individual, in an age when your fingerprints and retina scans have long since been stolen by Ecuadorian hackers? It’s all too easy to get sucked into metaphysical flusterclucks about identity and the soul and what makes you you.

This is not medicine. This is a human rights violation.

Jeffrey’s near-daily migraine is already in full flower by the time he sees Rachel wheeled in and he can’t bring himself to look. She’s looking at him. She’s looking right at him. Even with all the other changes, her eyes are the same, and he can’t just stand here. She’s putting him in an impossible position, at the worst moment.

Someone has programmed Slack so that when anyone types “alrighty then,” a borderline-obscene GIF of two girls wearing clown makeup appears. Jeffrey is the only person who ever types “alrighty then,” and he can’t train himself to stop doing it. And, of course, he hasn’t been able to figure out who programmed the GIF to appear.

Self-respect is the key to mutual respect. Jeffrey avoids making eye contact with that window or anyone beyond it. His head still feels too heavy with pain for a normal body to support, but also he’s increasingly aware of a core-deep anxiety shading into nausea.

Jeffrey and Rachel had a group, from the tail end of elementary school through to the first year of high school, called the Sock Society. They all lived in the same cul-de-sac, bounded by a canola field on one side and the big interstate on the other. The origins of the Sock Society’s name are lost to history, but may arise from the fact that Jeffrey’s mom never liked kids to wear shoes inside the house and Jeffrey’s house had the best game consoles and a 4K TV with surround sound. These kids wore out countless pairs of tires on their dirt bikes, conquered the extra DLC levels in Halls of Valor, and built snow forts that gleamed. They stayed up all night at sleepovers watching forbidden horror movies on an old laptop under a blanket while guzzling off-brand soda. They whispered, late at night, of their fantasies and barely-hinted-at anxieties, although there were some things Rachel would not share because she was not ready to speak of them and Jeffrey would not have been able to hear if she had. They repeated jokes they didn’t 100 percent understand, and kind of enjoyed the queasy awareness of being out of their depth. Later, the members of the Sock Society (which changed its ranks over time with the exception of the core members, Rachel and Jeffrey) became adept at stuffing gym socks with blasting caps and small incendiaries and fashioning the socks themselves into rudimentary fuses before placing them in lawn ornaments, small receptacles for gardening tools, and—in one incident that nobody discussed afterward—Mrs. Hooper’s scooter.

When Jeffrey’s mother was drunk, which was often, she would say she wished Rachel was her son, because Rachel was such a smart boy— quick on the uptake, so charming with the rapid-fire puns, handsome and respectful. Like Young Elvis. Instead of Jeffrey, who was honestly a little shit.

Jeffrey couldn’t wait to get over the wall of adolescence, into the garden of manhood. Every dusting of fuzz on his chin, every pungent whiff from his armpits seemed to him the starting gun. He became obsessed with finding porn via that old laptop, and he was an artist at coming up with fresh new search terms every time he and Rachel hung out. Rachel got used to innocent terms such as “cream pie” turning out to mean something gross and animalistic, in much the same way that a horror movie turned human bodies into slippery meat.

The intake process begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time.

Then one time Jeffrey pulled up some transsexual porn, because what the hell. Rachel found herself watching a slender Latina with a shy smile slowly peel out of a silk robe to step into a scene with a muscular bald man. The girl was wearing nothing but bright silver shoes and her body was all smooth angles and tapering limbs, and the one piece of evidence of her transgender status looked tiny, both inconsequential and of a piece with the rest of her femininity. She tiptoed across the frame like a ballerina. Like a cartoon deer.

Watching this, Rachel quivered, until Jeffrey thought she must be grossed out, but deep down Rachel was having a feeling of recognition. Like: that’s me. Like: I am possible.

Years later, in her twenties, Rachel had a group of girlfriends (some trans, some cis) and she started calling this feminist gang the Sock Society, because they made a big thing of wearing colorful socks with weird and sometimes profane patterns. Rachel mostly didn’t think about the fact that she had repurposed the Sock Society sobriquet for another group, except to tell herself that she was reclaiming an ugly part of her past. Rachel is someone who obsesses about random issues, but also claims to avoid introspection at all costs—in fact, she once proposed an art show called The Unexamined Life Is the Only Way to Have Fun.

Rachel has soiled herself again. A woman in avocado-colored scrubs snaps on blue gloves with theatrical weariness before sponging Rachel’s still-unfeeling body. The things I have to deal with, says the red-faced woman, whose name is Lucy. People like you always make people like me clean up after you, because you never think the rules apply to you, the same as literally everyone else. And then look where we end up, and I’m here cleaning your mess.

Rachel tries to protest that none of this is her doing, but her tongue is a slug that’s been bathed in salt.

There’s always some excuse, Lucy says as she scrubs. Life is not complicated, it’s actually very simple. Men are men, and women are women, and everyone has a role to play. It’s selfish to think that you can just force everyone else in the world to start carving out exceptions, just so you can play at being something you’re not. You will never understand what it really means to be female, the joy and the endless discomfort, because you were not born into it.

Rachel feels frozen solid. Ice crystals permeate her body, the way they would frozen dirt. This woman is touching between her legs, without looking her in the face. She cannot bear to breathe. She keeps trying to get Jeffrey’s attention, but he always looks away. As if he’d rather not witness what’s going to happen to her.

Lucy and a man in scrubs wheel in something gauzy and white, like a cloud on a gurney. They bustle around, unwrapping and cleaning and prepping, and they mutter numbers and codes to each other, like E-drop 2347, as if there are a lot of parameters to keep straight here. The sound of all that quiet professionalism soothes Rachel in spite of herself, like she’s at the dentist.

At some point they step away from the thing they’ve unwrapped and prepped, and Rachel turns her head just enough to see a dead man on a metal shelf.

Her first thought is that he’s weirdly good looking, despite his slight decomposition. He has a snub nose and thin lips, a clipped jaw, good muscle definition, a cyanotic penis that flops against one thigh, and sandy pubic hair. Whatever (whoever) killed this man left his body in good condition, and he was roughly Rachel’s age. This man could have been a model or maybe a pro wrestler, and Rachel feels sad that he somehow died so early, with his best years ahead.

Rachel tries to scream. She feels Lucy and the other one connecting her to the dead man’s body and hears a rattling garbage-disposal sound. The dead man twitches, and meanwhile Rachel can’t struggle or make a sound. She feels weaker than before, and some part of her insists this must be because she lost an argument at some point. Back in the Safe Space, they had talked about all the friends of friends who had gone to ground, and the internet rumors. How would you know if you were in danger? Rachel had said that was a dumb question because danger never left.

The dead man smiles: not a large rictus, like in a horror movie, but a tiny shift in his features, like a contented sleeper. His eyes haven’t moved or appeared to look at anything. Lucy clucks and adjusts a thing, and the kitchen-garbage noise grinds louder for a moment.

We’re going to get you sorted out, Lucy says to the dead man. You are going to be so happy. She turns and leans over Rachel to check something, and her breath smells like sour corn chips.

You are violating my civil rights by keeping me here, Rachel says. A sudden victory, except that then she hears herself and it’s wrong. Her voice comes out of the wrong mouth, is not even her own voice. The dead man has spoken, not her, and he didn’t say that thing about civil rights. Instead he said, Hey, excuse me, how long am I going to be kept here? As if this were a mild inconvenience keeping him from his business. The voice sounded rough, flinty, like a bad sore throat, but also commanding. The voice of a surgeon, or an airline pilot. You would stop whatever you were doing and listen, if you heard that voice.

Rachel lets out an involuntary cry of panic, which comes out of the dead man’s mouth as a low groan. She tries again to say, This is not medicine. This is a human rights violation. And it comes out of the dead man’s mouth as, I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just have things to do, you know. Sorry if I’m causing any trouble.

That’s quite all right, Mr. Billings, Lucy says. You’re making tremendous progress, and we’re so pleased. You’ll be released into the community soon, and the community will be so happy to see you.

The thought of ever trying to speak again fills Rachel with a whole ocean voyage’s worth of nausea, but she can’t even make herself retch. Jeffrey has wondered for years, what if he could talk to his oldest friend, man to man, about the things that had happened when they were on the cusp of adolescence—not just the girl, but the whole deal. Mrs. Hooper’s scooter, even. And maybe, at last, he will. A lot depends on how well the process goes. Sometimes the cadaver gets almost all of the subject’s memories and personality, just with a better outlook on his or her proper gender. There is, however, a huge variability in bandwidth because we’re dealing with human beings and especially with weird neurological stuff that we barely understand. We’re trying to thread wet spaghetti through a grease trap, a dozen pieces at a time. Even with the proprietary cocktail, it’s hardly an exact science.

The engineer part of Jeffrey just wants to keep the machines from making whatever noise that was earlier, the awful grinding sound. But the project manager part of Jeffrey is obsessing about all of the extraneous factors outside his control. What if they get a surprise inspection from the Secretary, or even worse that Deputy Assistant Secretary, with the eye? Jeffrey is not supposed to be a front-facing part of this operation, but Mr. Randall says we all do things that are outside our comfort zones, and really, that’s the only way your comfort zone can ever expand. In addition, Jeffrey is late for another stakeholder meeting, with the woman from Mothers Raising Well-Adjusted Children and the three bald men from Grassroots Rising, who will tear Jeffrey a new orifice. There are still too many maladjusted individuals out there, in the world, trying to use public bathrooms and putting our children at risk. Some children, too, keep insisting that they aren’t boys or girls because they saw some ex-athlete prancing on television. Twenty cadavers in the freezer might as well be nothing in the face of all this. The three bald men will take turns spit-shouting, using words such as psychosexual, and Jeffrey has fantasized about sneaking bourbon into his coffee so he can drink whenever that word comes up. He’s pretty sure they don’t know what psychosexual even means, except that it’s psycho and it’s sexual. After a stakeholder meeting, Jeffrey always retreats to the single-stall men’s room to shout at his own schmutzy reflection. Fuck you, you fucking fuck fucker. Don’t tell me I’m not doing my job.

This project, it’s a government-industry collaboration, we call it Love and Dignity for Everyone. You have no idea.

Self-respect is the key to mutual respect.

Rachel keeps looking straight at Jeffrey through the observation window, and she’s somehow kept control over her vision long after her speech centers went over. He keeps waiting for her to lose the eyes. Her gaze goes right into him, and his stomach gets the feeling that usually comes after two or three whiskey sours and no dinner.

More than ever, Jeffrey wishes the observation room had a oneway mirror instead of regular glass. Why would they skimp on that? What’s the point of having an observation room where you are also being observed at the same time? It defeats the entire purpose.

Jeffrey gets tired of hiding from his own window and skips out the side door. He climbs two stories of cement stairs to emerge in the executive wing, near the conference suite where he’s supposed to be meeting with the stakeholders right now. He finds an oaken door with that quote from Albert Einstein about imagination that everybody always has and knocks on it. After a few breaths, a deep voice tells Jeffrey to come in, and then he’s sitting opposite an older man with square shoulders and a perfect old-fashioned newscaster head.

Mr. Randall, Jeffrey says, I’m afraid I have a conflict with regards to the latest subject and I must ask to be recused.

Is that a fact? Mr. Randall furrows his entire face for a moment, then magically all the wrinkles disappear again. He smiles and shakes his head. I feel you, Jeffrey, I really do. That blows chunks. Unfortunately, as you know, we are short-staffed right now, and our work is of a nature that only a few people have the skills and moral virtue to complete it.

But, Jeffrey says. The new subject, he’s someone I grew up with, and there are certain . . . I mean, I made promises when we were little, and it feels in some ways like I’m breaking those promises, even as I try my best to help him. I actually feel physically ill, like drunk in my stomach but sober in my brain, when I look at him.

Jeffrey, Mr. Randall says, Jeffrey, JEFFREY. Listen to me. Sit still and listen. Pull yourself together. We are the watchers on the battlements, at the edge of social collapse, like in that show with the ice zombies, where winter is always tomorrow. You know that show? They had an important message, that sometimes we have to put our own personal feelings aside for the greater good. Remember the fat kid? He had to learn to be a team player. I loved that show. So here we are, standing against the darkness that threatens to consume everything we admire. No time for divided hearts.

I know that we’re doing something important here, and that he’ll thank me later, Jeffrey says. It’s just hard right now.

If it were easy to do the right thing, Randall says, then everyone would do it.

Sherri was a transfer student in tenth grade who came right in and joined the Computer Club but also tried out for the volleyball team and the a cappella chorus. She had dark hair in tight braids and a wiry body that flexed in the moment before she leapt to spike the ball, making Rachel’s heart rise with her. Rachel sat courtside and watched Sherri practice while she was supposed to be doing sudden death sprints.

Jeffrey stared at Sherri, too: listened to her sing Janelle Monáe in a light contralto when she waited for the bus, and gazed at her across the room during Computer Club. He imagined going up to her and just introducing himself, but his heart was too weak. He could more easily imagine saying the dumbest thing, or actually fainting, than carrying on a smooth conversation with Sherri. He obsessed for ages, until he finally confessed to his friends (Rachel was long since out of the picture by this time), and they started goading him, actually physically shoving him, to speak to Sherri.

Jeffrey slid up to her and said his name, and something inane about music, and then Sherri just stared at him for a long time before saying, I gotta get the bus. Jeffrey watched her walk away, then turned to his watching friends and mimed a finger gun blowing his brains out.

A few days later, Sherri was playing hooky at that one bakery café in town that everyone said was run by lesbians or drug addicts or maybe just old hippies, nursing a chai latte, and she found herself sitting with Rachel, who was also ditching some activity. Neither of them wanted to talk to anyone, they’d come here to be alone. But Rachel felt hope rise up inside her at the proximity of her wildfire crush, and she finally hoisted her bag as if she might just leave the café. Mind if I sit with you a minute, she asked, and Sherri shrugged yes. So Rachel perched on the embroidered tasseled pillow on the bench next to Sherri and stared at her Algebra II book.

They saw each other at that café every few days, or sometimes just once a week, and they just started sitting together on purpose, without talking to each other much. After a couple months of this, Sherri looked at the time on her phone and said, My mom’s out of town. I’ll buy you dinner. Rachel kept her shriek of joy on the inside and just nodded.

At dinner—a family pasta place nearby—Sherri looked down at her colorful paper napkin and whispered: I think I don’t like boys. I mean, to date, or whatever. I don’t hate boys or anything, just not interested that way. You understand.

Rachel stared at Sherri, even after she looked up, so they were making eye contact. In just as low a whisper, Rachel replied: I’m pretty sure I’m not a boy.

This was the first time Rachel ever said the name Rachel aloud, at least with regard to herself.

Sherri didn’t laugh or get up or run away. She just stared back, then nodded. She reached onto the red checkerboard vinyl tablecloth with an open palm, for Rachel to insert her palm into if she so chose.

The first time Jeffrey saw Rachel and Sherri holding hands, he looked at them like his soul had come out in bruises.

We won’t keep you here too long, Mr. Billings, the male attendant says, glancing at Rachel but mostly looking at the mouth that had spoken. You’re doing very well. Really, you’re an exemplary subject. You should be so proud.

There are so many things that Rachel wants to say. Like: Please just let me go, I have a life. I have an art show coming up in a coffee shop, I can’t miss it. You don’t have the right. I deserve to live my own life. I have people who used to love me. I’ll give you everything I own. I won’t press charges if you don’t sue. This is no kind of therapy. On and on. But she can’t trust that corpse voice. She hyperventilates and gags on her own spit. So sore she’s hamstrung.

Every time her eyes get washed out, she’s terrified this is it, her last sight. She knows from what Lucy and the other one have said that if her vision switches over to the dead man’s, that’s the final stage and she’s gone.

The man is still talking. We have a form signed by your primary care physician, Dr. Wallace, stating that this treatment is both urgent and medically indicated, as well as an assessment by our in-house psychologist, Dr. Yukizawa. He holds up two pieces of paper, with the looping scrawls of two different doctors that she’s never even heard of. She’s been seeing Dr. Cummings for years, since before her transition. She makes a huge effort to shake her head, and is shocked by how weak she feels.

You are so fortunate to be one of the first to receive this treatment, the man says. Early indications are that subjects experience a profound improvement across seven different measures of quality of life and social integration. Their OGATH scores are generally high, especially in the red levels. Rejection is basically unheard of. You won’t believe how good you’ll feel once you’re over the adjustment period, he says. If the research goes well, the potential benefits to society are limited only by the cadaver pipeline.

Rachel’s upcoming art show, in a tiny coffee shop, is called Against Curation. There’s a lengthy manifesto, which Rachel planned to print out and mount onto foam or cardboard, claiming that the act of curating is inimical to art or artistry. The only person who can create a proper context for a given piece of art is the artist herself, and arranging someone else’s art is an act of violence. Bear in mind that the history of museums is intrinsically tied up with imperialism and colonialism, and the curatorial gaze is historically white and male. But even the most enlightened postcolonial curator is a pirate. Anthologies, mix tapes, it’s all the same. Rachel had a long response prepared, in case anybody accused her of just being annoyed that no real gallery would display her work.

Rachel can’t help noting the irony of writing a tirade about the curator’s bloody scalpel, only to end up with a hole in her literal head.

When the man has left her alone, Rachel begins screaming Jeffrey’s name in the dead man’s voice. Just the name, nothing that the corpse could twist. She still can’t bear to hear that deep timbre, the sick damaged throat, speaking for her. But she can feel her life essence slipping away. Every time she looks over at the dead man, he has more color in his skin and his arms and legs are moving, like a restless sleeper. His face even looks, in some hard-to-define way, more like Rachel’s.

Jeffrey! The words come out in a hoarse growl. Jeffrey! Come here!

Rachel wants to believe she’s already defeated this trap, because she has lived her life without a single codicil, and whatever they do, they can’t retroactively change the person she has been for her entire adulthood. But that doesn’t feel like enough. She wants the kind of victory where she gets to actually walk out of here.

Jeffrey feels a horrible twist in his neck. This is all unfair, because he already informed Mr. Randall of his conflict and yet he’s still here, having to behave professionally while the subject is putting him in the dead center of attention.

Seriously, the subject will not stop bellowing his name, even with a throat that’s basically raw membrane at this point. You’re not supposed to initiate communication with the subject without submitting an Interlocution Permission form through the proper channels. But the subject is putting him into an impossible position.

Jeffrey, she keeps shouting. And then: Jeffrey, talk to me!

People are lobbing questions in Slack, and of course Jeffrey types the wrong thing and the softcore clown porn comes up. Ha ha, I fell for it again, he types. There’s a problem with one of the latest cadavers, a cause-of-death question, and Mr. Randall says the Deputy Assistant Secretary might be in town later.

Jeffrey’s mother was a Nobel Prize winner for her work with people who had lost the ability to distinguish between weapons and musical instruments, a condition that frequently leads to maiming or worse. Jeffrey’s earliest memories involve his mother flying off to serve as an expert witness in the trials of murderers who claimed they had thought their assault rifles were banjos, or mandolins. Many of these people were faking it, but Jeffrey’s mom was usually hired by the defense, not the prosecution. Every time she returned from one of these trips, she would fling her Nobel medal out her bathroom window, and then stay up half the night searching the bushes for it, becoming increasingly drunk. One morning, Jeffrey found her passed out below her bedroom window and believed for a moment that she had fallen two stories to her death. This was, she explained to him later, a different sort of misunderstanding than mistaking a gun for a guitar: a reverse-Oedipal misapprehension. These days Jeffrey’s mom requires assistance to dress, to shower, and to transit from her bed to a chair and back, and nobody can get Medicare, Medicaid, or any secondary insurance to pay for this. To save money, Jeffrey has moved back in with his mother, which means he gets to hear her ask at least once a week what happened to Rachel, who was such a nice boy.

Jeffrey can’t find his headphones to drown out his name, which the cadaver is shouting so loud that foam comes out of one corner of his mouth. Frances and another engineer both complain on Slack about the noise, which they can hear from down the hall. OMG creepy, Frances types. Make it stop make it stop

I can’t, Jeffrey types back. I can’t ok. I don’t have the right paperwork.

Maybe tomorrow, Rachel will wake up fully inhabiting her male body. She’ll look down at her strong forearms, threaded with veins, and she’ll smile and thank Jeffrey. Maybe she’ll nod at him, by way of a tiny salute, and say, You did it, buddy. You brought me back.

But right now, the cadaver keeps shouting, and Jeffrey realizes he’s covering his ears with his fists and is doubled over.

Rachel apparently decides that Jeffrey’s name alone isn’t working. The cadaver pauses and then blurts, I would really love to hang with you. Hey! I appreciate everything you’ve done to set things right. JEFFREY! You really shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for me.

Somehow, these statements have an edge, like Jeffrey can easily hear the intended meaning. He looks up and sees Rachel’s eyes, spraying tears like a damn lawn sprinkler.

Jeffrey, the corpse says, I saw Sherri. She told me the truth about you.

She’s probably just making things up. Sherri never knew anything for sure, or at least couldn’t prove anything. And yet, just the mention of her name is enough to make Jeffrey straighten up and walk to the door of the observation room, even with no signed Interlocution Permission form. Jeffrey makes himself stride up to the two nearly naked bodies and stop at the one on the left, the one with the ugly tattoo and the drooling silent mouth.

I don’t want to hurt you, Jeffrey says. I never wanted to hurt you, even when we were kids and you got weird on me. My mom still asks about you.

Hey pal, you’ve never been a better friend to me than you are right now, the cadaver says. But on the left, the eyes are red and wet and full of violence.

What did Sherri say? Stop playing games and tell me, Jeffrey says. When did you see her? What did she say?

But Rachel has stopped trying to make the other body talk and is just staring up, letting her eyes speak for her.

Listen, Jeffrey says to the tattooed body. This is already over, the process is too advanced. I could disconnect all of the machines, unplug the tap from your occipital lobe and everything, and the cadaver would continue drawing your remaining life energy. The link between you is already stable. This project, it’s a government-industry collaboration, we call it Love and Dignity for Everyone. You have no idea. But you, you’re going to be so handsome. You always used to wish you could look like this guy, remember? I’m actually kind of jealous of you.

Rachel just thrashes against her restraints harder than ever.

Here, I’ll show you, Jeffrey says at last. He reaches behind Rachel’s obsolete head and unplugs the tap, along with the other wires. See? he says. No difference. That body is already more you than you. It’s already done.

That’s when Rachel leans forward, in her old body, and head-butts Jeffrey, before grabbing for his key ring with the utility knife on it. She somehow gets the knife open with one hand while he’s clutching his nose, and slashes a bloody canyon across Jeffrey’s stomach. He falls, clutching at his own slippery flesh, and watches her saw through her straps and land on unsteady feet. She lifts Jeffrey’s lanyard, smearing blood on his shirt as it goes.

When Rachel was in college, she heard a story about a business professor named Lou, who dated two different women and strung them both along. Laurie was a lecturer in women’s studies, while Susie worked in the bookstore co-op despite having a PhD in comp lit. After the women found out Lou was dating both of them, things got ugly. Laurie stole Susie’s identity, signing her up for a stack of international phone cards and a subscription to the Dirndl of the Month Club, while Susie tried to crash Laurie’s truck and cold-cocked Laurie as she walked out of a seminar on intersectional feminism. In the end, the two women looked at each other, over the slightly dented truck and Laurie’s bloody lip and Susie’s stack of junk mail. Laurie just spat blood and said, Listen. I won’t press charges, if you don’t sue. Susie thought for a moment, then stuck out her hand and said, Deal. The two women never spoke to each other, or Lou, ever again.

Rachel has always thought this incident exposed the roots of the social contract: most of our relationships are upheld not by love, or obligation, or gratitude, but by mutually assured destruction. Most of the people in Rachel’s life who could have given her shit for being transgender were differently bodied, non-neurotypical, or some other thing that also required some acceptance from her. Mote, beam, and so on.

For some reason, Rachel can’t stop thinking about the social contract and mutually assured destruction as she hobbles down the hallway of Love and Dignity for Everyone with a corpse following close behind. Every time she pauses to turn around and see if the dead man is catching up, he gains a little ground. So she forces herself to keep running with weak legs, even as she keeps hearing his hoarse breath right behind her. True power, Rachel thinks, is being able to destroy others with no consequences to yourself.

She’s reached the end of a corridor, and she’s trying not to think about Jeffrey’s blood on the knife in her hand. He’ll be fine, he’s in a facility. She remembers Sherri in the computer lab, staring at the pictures on the internet: her hair wet from the shower, one hand reaching for a towel. Sherri sobbing but then tamping it down as she looked at the screen. Sherri telling Rachel at lunch, I’m leaving this school. I can’t stay. There’s a heavy door with an RFID reader, and Jeffrey’s card causes it to click twice before finally bleeping. Rachel’s legs wobble and spasm, and the breath of the dead man behind her grows louder. Then she pushes through the door and runs up the square roundabout of stairs. Behind her, she hears Lucy the nurse shout at her to come back, because she’s still convalescing, this is a delicate time.

Rachel feels a little more of her strength fade every time the dead man’s hand lurches forward. Something irreplaceable leaves her. She pushes open the dense metal door marked EXIT and nearly faints with sudden day-blindness.

The woods around Love and Dignity for Everyone are dense with moss and underbrush, and Rachel’s bare feet keep sliding off tree roots. I can’t stop, Rachel pleads with herself, I can’t stop or my whole life was for nothing. Who even was I, if I let this happen to me. The nearly naked dead man crashes through branches that Rachel has ducked under. She throws the knife and hears a satisfying grunt, but he doesn’t even pause. Rachel knows that anybody who sees both her and the cadaver will choose to help the cadaver. There’s no way to explain her situation in the dead man’s voice. She vows to stay off roads and avoid talking to people. This is her life now.

Up ahead, she sees a fast-running stream, and she wonders how the corpse will take to water. The stream looks like the one she and Jeffrey used to play in, when they would catch crayfish hiding under rocks. The crayfish looked just like tiny lobsters, and they would twist around trying to pinch you as you gripped their midsections. Rachel sloshes in the water and doesn’t hear the man’s breath in her ear for a moment. Up ahead, the current leads to a steep waterfall that’s so white in the noon sunlight, it appears to stand still. She remembers staring into a bucket full of crayfish, debating whether to boil them alive or let them all go. And all at once, she has a vivid memory of herself and Jeffrey both holding the full bucket and turning it sideways, until all the crayfish sloshed back into the river. The crayfish fled for their lives, their eyes seeming to protrude with alarm, and Rachel held onto an empty bucket with Jeffrey, feeling an inexplicable sense of relief. We are such wusses, Jeffrey said, and they both laughed. She remembers the sight of the last crayfish rushing out of view—as if this time, maybe the trick would work, and nobody would think to look under this particular rock. She reaches the waterfall, seizes a breath, and jumps with both feet at once.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

DRIVING JENNY HOME

SEANAN MCGUIRE

NOVEMBER

Jenny can you hear me, I am driving in the rain,

I am looking for you, darling, I am calling out your name,

For I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

Let the rain fall on the highway. I’ll be taking Jenny home.

It only took three days for them to let me out of the hospital, but that was long enough: Jenny was already in the ground. So I stayed in my room, “recuperating,” until my parents told me I was going back to school whether I liked it or not. “Homecoming was a month ago, honey,” they said, and “Leigh, this isn’t healthy,” they said, and I didn’t have a choice.

I told them there was something I had to do before I could go back, and while they didn’t like it much, at least they understood. I missed the funeral, after all.

It’s raining when I walk into the cemetery where they buried my girl. That’s right. That’s exactly right. It should be raining, because Jenny is dead, and it’s all my fault. It should keep raining forever.

Walking between the rows of graves is like something out of a nightmare or a dream—a bad dream, the kind that escapes nightmare territory by dancing on the razor’s edge between surrealism and insanity. The kind where the walls bleed lobsters and the sky catches fire when it touches the horizon. But the flowers I’ve brought to place on Jenny’s grave are just flowers. They don’t sing or whisper prophecy or turn into butterflies and fly away. When I finally find her tombstone—a simple granite rectangle that can’t possibly summarize everything she was and should have been—and lay them down beneath the line that lists her dates of birth and death, they don’t bring Jenny back to me.

“God, Jenny,” I say, sinking to my knees in the grass. “This is like some sick joke, only no one’s telling me the punch line, and nobody’s laughing. I’d take it back if I could. I’d take it all back if it would bring you home.”

Jenny doesn’t answer me. Jenny’s never going to answer me again.

I stay where I am for what feels like an hour or more, the rain running down the back of my jacket and soaking my hair as I bow my head and cry. This can’t be true. This can’t be my life. It feels like just yesterday that I was picking her up for homecoming. She wore that dress the color of moonlight on the snow, and she fit in my arms like the missing piece of a puzzle. She’s not fitting into anyone’s arms now. She’s dead and gone and she’s not coming back to me.

They lock the cemetery gates at sunset. I don’t want to spend the night here, among the graves, and so when the light starts to fade I force myself to move, wiping my tears away and leaning forward to press a kiss against the cold granite of Jenny’s headstone.

“I love you,” I say. “I’ll see you soon.”

Then I stand, wet clothes sloshing with every step, and start toward the distant gates. The rain is slacking off a bit, which is good, since the setting sun is making it hard to see, and I’m starting to feel like a teenage emo cliché: sad lesbian in the graveyard in the rain. Jenny wouldn’t like seeing me like this.

Maybe that’s not the best train of thought, because Jenny’s never going to see me again, not like this, and not like anything else.

I’m crying again by the time I reach my car, a 1978 Volvo Bertone I inherited from my father when I turned sixteen and Mom made him dig it out of the garage. It handles like a tank and guzzles gas like nobody’s business, but the collision that killed Jenny and put me in the hospital didn’t even bend its frame. Jenny would have been fine if she’d been wearing her seatbelt, instead of twisted around rummaging through the back seat. I guess I should hate the car for taking her away from me, but I like being able to get to school, and Jenny always loved the Bertone. She said it was just the right combination of old-fashioned and ugly as hell, and she appreciated the contrast.

“That’s my girl,” I said, putting a hand gently on the door. That’s when I see the ticket fluttering against the windshield like a trapped bird in the process of beating itself to death. It hasn’t been there long: it’s not even soaked through. I grimace. “Fucking cops,” I mutter, and reach for it, only to freeze when another hand snatches it up before I can get there. A hand with long, slender fingers, the nails painted a shade of perfect moonlight gold that didn’t come out of any bottle. Jenny always mixed her own nail polish. She said wearing anything off-the-rack, from clothes to cosmetics, showed a lack of commitment.

I lift my head. Jenny is standing next to the car in her moonlight dress, her homecoming corsage still tied around her wrist. She smiles, and she looks so sad that it makes me want to die, even though the sight of her is making me want to live like nothing has in weeks.

“Hi, Leigh,” she says, and oh, God, her voice is the same as it always was. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. “Can I get a ride home?”

What is there for me to say?

“Yes,” I say, and unlock the car.

But she doesn’t get in. Jenny doesn’t get in. She just looks at me, her smile fading away a little bit at a time, until she finally says, “There are rules.”

“Rules,” I echo dumbly. My dead girlfriend is standing in front of me, and she’s telling me there are rules. I don’t understand why there should be, since I’m clearly losing my mind.

“You have to drive me straight home,” she says. “No stops—we’re not going to the movies or going to Taco Bell or anything like that. You can’t ask me why I’m here. And you can’t give me a kiss goodnight.”

It’s an odd set of restrictions to get from a hallucination. I frown at her for a moment, trying to figure out what my subconscious is telling me—and then I decide I honestly don’t care. Jenny’s here. Whether she’s a hallucination or a ghost (and the fact that she’s still holding the parking ticket is a vote for “ghost,” unless I’m hallucinating that, too) doesn’t matter. All that really matters now is driving Jenny home.

“Okay,” I say, and we both get in the car, and I drive us away from the cemetery, and everything’s okay again, if only for a little while.

DECEMBER

Jenny was gone when I turned onto her street, disappearing in the moments between checking my mirror and looking back at her. She left the parking ticket in the seat where she had been. She was always thoughtful that way.

That was a month ago. The ticket’s been paid, and the shock waves have mostly finished washing through our school. I’m off the cheerleading squad, of course—even if the rest of the girls had sort of known about Jenny and me back when I was a base and she was a flyer, even though they’d been cool about the fact that we were lesbians, I was responsible for the death of one of our own. They couldn’t look at me without seeing her, and I couldn’t look at them without seeing her, and we were all tired of being haunted. So I quit the squad, and now no one’s trying to use Jenny to define me. They’re too busy using her to define everything else.

Jenny’s dress at homecoming was moonlight satin? Fine, then, the theme for prom is going to be “Love Under the Moon,” and everyone already knows Jenny will be awarded the coveted crown—the other girls who should be talking about campaigning by this point lower their eyes and murmur her name whenever the position of Prom Queen is mentioned, like wanting it would mean wanting what Jenny got: a brutal death and an early grave. They’re canonizing her with memory, wearing away her hard edges bit by bit until all that’s left is something perfect they can tell their own children about, someday, when they’re telling them not to drink and drive.

Jenny hadn’t been drinking. Neither had I. Tyler did the drinking for both of us, the big muscle-headed football asshole who thought he was so great, and thought Jenny was his for the taking, and learned he was so beneath her notice when he saw us dancing together on the far side of the gymnasium—the fat girl in the tuxedo pressed up against the high school fantasy.

We were both cheerleaders, but she was the one everyone remembered. I was just the one who made sure she didn’t fall. I had one job. I couldn’t even accomplish that.

But God, she was so beautiful that night, like the goddess of the moon come down to hold hands with a mortal girl until the sun came up and the fantasy burned to ash. She was a fairy tale, she was a fiction, and I felt like I still had mud under my fingernails from grounding the pyramid, despite the hours I’d spent scrubbing them clean. I guess that’s why I let Tyler and his dumb jock friends get to me when they cornered me by the punchbowl. “Be the bigger person” and “just ignore them” is all well and good for people whose own high school days are fading in the rearview mirror of adulthood, but in the moment, when you’re wearing teenage skin . . .

I didn’t throw the first punch. I didn’t throw the last one, either. I would probably have been beaten to a pulp if Jenny hadn’t thrown herself into the middle of things, shouting at Tyler for being a Neanderthal idiot and shouting at me for letting myself be baited. I said I was sorry. I said I was stupid. I said I wouldn’t let it happen again.

She said, “Take me home.”

I drove home angry. That’s the worst part: that’s the part I’m never going to forgive myself for. Jenny wasn’t speaking to me, just flipping through the radio and sulking—right up until she decided she was cold and undid her belt so she could rummage through the backseat for my discarded tuxedo jacket. That was when Tyler came around the corner, drunk and angry and driving a Prius that didn’t stand a chance against my ancient bruiser of a Volvo. He slammed into my bumper, crumpling his car like a tin can and putting Jenny through the windshield.

The impact was enough to knock me out, even though I was wearing my seatbelt. By the time I woke up, it was too late. Jenny was gone.

How could I have been so stupid?

It’s been two months since Jenny died and a month since I saw her. I’ve parked next to the cemetery gates every goddamn day since then, listening to a playlist of her favorite songs—too much country, too many teenage death ballads from the 1950s, and not nearly enough good old-fashioned rock and roll. Even if it’s just a glimpse, I need to see her again, to that I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw her before, and most of all, to know I’m not losing my mind.

But the sun is going down, and there’s no sign of Jenny. The grassy lawn is empty; the cemetery gates are closed and locked, as impassable as the wall to some forbidden city. I sigh. She’s not coming. I’m losing my mind. I’ve had a month to think about what happened here, what I heard and saw and smelled. There’s no way that it was real; things like that don’t happen. I close my eyes and lean back in my scat, breathing in through my nose and out from my mouth, and wait for the urge to wait for her to pass away.

It doesn’t pass.

But someone’s knocking on the window.

The sound is enough to make me yelp, twisting in my seat . . . and there’s Jenny in her dress like moonlight, with her hair pinned up just so, long golden curls anchored in an elaborate updo by little pins with glittering silver stars on them. My fingers itch to plunge into that hair and unwind it strand by strand, until the smell of her shampoo fills the world. I don’t move. I can’t move. Jenny frowns and knocks on the glass again.

I don’t answer. Instead, I open the car door and get out, my eyes fixed on her face the whole time. I can see her—fine, the mind plays tricks. I can hear her, I can smell her, and that doesn’t prove anything, that doesn’t prove anything except that I miss her so badly I can taste it, and every day that I wake up and Jenny’s not there is like another needle in my heart. I keep thinking it’ll run out of room, and then the morning comes and proves me wrong. She’s not real, she can’t be real, and I’m going to prove it to myself here and now. I’m going to—

My hand catches her wrist. Her skin is cool, like she’s been standing outside without a coat for too long, but it’s still her skin, soft and familiar and real. My breath catches in my throat. I try to speak. Nothing happens, and Jenny daintily pulls herself free.

“You haven’t answered,” she says.

“Jenny, God, what is going on here?” I grab for her again, but she’s too quick for me—she steps back and out of the range of my questing fingers, leaving them to close on empty air. “Why are you doing this? Do your parents know that you’re not dead? Why are you hiding?”

“Because all I’m doing is asking for a ride home, and I’m only doing it because you keep coming here and wanting me to,” she replies. She looks at me, eyes wide and sad and pleading, and I know the truth. There’s no other explanation. “I died, Leigh. I died, and you didn’t get me home. Even though you promised. You didn’t get me home.”

“I’ll get you home, I promise.” I’m making promises I can’t keep— I’m making promises to a dead girl, and I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that this is a terrible idea, but fuck, what do I care? A week ago I was thinking about killing myself. At least this way I’ll do something useful with what’s left of my life. Any promise in the world is worth making, if I’m making it to Jenny.

“You can try,” she says, and disappears, leaving the scent of vanilla in her wake. Vanilla, and something darker, something wet and green and old, like the moss that grows on gravestones.

Somehow, I’m not surprised when I turn around and find her sitting in the car, belt already buckled, hands folded primly in her lap. This is a dream, I think, and I’m opening the car door, I’m sliding back into my seat, and Jenny is there, Jenny with her corsage on her wrist and a sad, distant look on her face. This is a dream, and I never want to wake up again.

“Drive, Leigh,” she says, and there’s a sudden tension in her voice, like she wants to say so much more, but she doesn’t know how. “You have to drive, or I can’t stay.”

“What?”

“Drive.”

There’s no denying the urgency in the word, and so I start the engine and hit the gas, and we’re rolling, moving away from the cemetery and starting on the long road back to Jenny’s house. She lives—she lived, she’s dead, and I can’t let myself forget that, not even with her sitting next to me, the smell of her vanilla perfume rolling through the cab like a storm front—on the other side of town. We have twenty miles to go, and that’s if I take the short way.

She never said I had to do that. I turn left when I should have turned right, going for the route we always used to take when we were thinking that maybe a brief stop by the side of a wooded road would be a good way to spend a little of the afternoon.

Jenny is silent for the first part of the drive. I glance her way, but her attention is on the window, watching as the housing developments that ring the town like mushrooms melt away into forest, the semi-untouched wood that still owns this part of the state. If it weren’t for her perfume, I’d think I was hallucinating her. Maybe I could still be hallucinating her. Do hallucinations have a scent?

I’m mulling that over when Jenny says, in a small, wounded voice, “You were supposed to drive me home. That was the deal, when my parents said that I could go to the dance with you. You told my father you would get me home by midnight. Remember? You promised.”

I glance at her, startled, and startle myself all over again when she fills my field of vision, Jenny in her moonlight dress, Jenny with her golden hair, Jenny not under the ground and filling the bellies of a million worms. “I didn’t mean to have an accident. You should have been wearing your belt,” I say. The words are mulish, sullen: they fall into the space between us like clots of earth onto her grave.

“It scared me when I saw Tyler hitting you,” she says, and turns away from me, looking out the window. “He was so much bigger than you were, and he’d been drinking, and I just wanted to get away before somebody got hurt. I knew it would piss him off, seeing us there, and I didn’t care, because I loved you. I should have cared. All-American boys get the All-American girls, right? That’s what the Founding Fathers died for.” Scorn drips from her voice. I flinch from it. I can’t help myself. “I knew it was stupid. I knew I should yell for one of the chaperones and tell them that we wanted to stay, and that he needed to go. But I was so mad. You made me so mad, Leigh. Why couldn’t you keep your temper for just one night? It was supposed to be our night.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and it’s small, and it’s stupid, and it’s not enough.

“So am I,” says Jenny.

She doesn’t say another word during the drive. I have to look away from her when I turn onto her street—it’s an unprotected left, if I watched my dead girlfriend, I’d be joining her in the ground—and when I look back, Jenny’s gone, leaving only the faint scent of vanilla and the feeling that I’ve lost her all over again.

I drive by her house without slowing down. There’s nothing for me there.

Nothing at all.

JANUARY

It’s apparently been long enough since the funeral for public opinion to have shifted: I come back from Christmas break and the shrines to Jenny are gone, and the plans for the prom theme to match her homecoming dress have all been forgotten, replaced by something cliché about Greek gods and the beauty of Olympus. I should be happy. I’m not being reminded of Jenny every time I turn a corner or go into the school office. Instead, rage paces and snarls under my sternum like a captive animal. How dare they forget about her? How dare they go on with their lives like nothing has changed? Jenny is dead. She’s not coming back to school tomorrow, or the next day, or ever, and it’s not right for them to let go of her like this.

The school counselor says this is healthy. Says they’re “moving on” and “coming to terms” and that maybe it’s time my parents start paying for some independent counseling services for me, since it’s pretty clear she’s not going to be able to help me properly through my grief—not with me refusing to let go of Jenny’s memory. I call her a bitch and get thrown out of her office, with a week’s detention and a letter to take home to my mother. I should probably feel bad about that. I can’t find the energy. I’m walking through a school that was haunted by Jenny only a few weeks ago, and now seems content to go on as if she’d never existed.

Three months. That’s apparently the lifespan of teenage grief. That’s how long our fickle hearts are meant to hold on to someone who’s not there anymore. Anything more than that is cause for concern.

Poor, absent Tyler is the new darling of the student body. Tyler, the football hero who may never play again; Tyler, who was just trying to have a good time when he got drunk and crashed into my car, killing my girlfriend almost instantly; Tyler, who was the sort of guy every one of us should aspire to be.

I’m starting to think about murder.

I’m thinking about murder when I park at the curb in front of the cemetery, my hands resting lightly on the wheel and my eyes fixed on the middle distance, visions of Tyler’s tortured face dancing like sugarplums through my daydreams. There’s no rap on the window, but there’s the smell of vanilla, and the sudden, definite feeling that I am not alone in the car. I start the engine before I turn to flash a smile at Jenny and say, “I’m happy to give you a ride home.”

“This isn’t healthy,” says Jenny, a frown on her face and a curl of golden hair hanging across her forehead like a banner. “You shouldn’t still be showing up here.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” I pull away from the curb, turning my attention back to the road at the last possible moment. I don’t want to take my eyes away from her, but I’m coming to learn the rules of our monthly encounters: I have to drive. That’s what matters more than anything else. “You need a ride home. I promised.”

“Leigh . . .”

“How could I live with myself if I knew you weren’t at peace because I broke my word to you?”

“But I’m not at peace, Leigh.” She sounds like she’s in pain. I start to take my foot off the gas, automatically turning to reach for her and try to hug that pain away. I see her face when she recoils, when she cries, “Drive! You have to drive!”

My foot presses down almost of its own accord. The car lurches forward, my heart pounding against my ribs, and for a moment, I think this is it: this is how I die.

But the moment passes, and the car is back under my control, and we’re rolling easy down the road as Jenny says, “I can’t rest in peace. You won’t let me. Everyone else is starting to let go; they’re starting to ease up on my memory—even my parents. And then there’s you.”

“I miss you.” The words are small and stupid and big enough to encompass the entire world. I miss her. That’s all that I’m capable of doing anymore.

“You have to let me go.”

“Or what?”

“Or this keeps happening over and over again,” she says. “I keep showing up. You keep driving me home. I keep disappearing. Over and over.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Forever, I guess.”

I think about that as I drive, the streets melting away around us. The air in the cab smells like vanilla. At some point Jenny realizes I’m not going to say anything else, and she turns on the radio, spinning through the stations until she finds a channel that’s playing the kind of music she likes, all soft country ballads and too much auto-tune. One of her favorite bands is on, performing a song that hadn’t been released yet when she died. She makes a small, wordless sound of delight, and that’s it: that seals the deal. I love her and I want her to rest easy, but that doesn’t mean I can let her go. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“I’ll have their new album when I pick you up next month,” I say, as we turn onto her street. “You can listen to it during the drive.”

“Leigh—”

“I’m sorry you’re not resting in peace. But I’m not resting in peace either, so at least we can not rest in peace together for a little while longer. If that’s selfish, I don’t really care. I miss you too much. I can’t just stop.”

Her hand touches my cheek, fingers cool. I don’t turn. I don’t want to see her disappear.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you too,” I answer, and she’s gone, and I drive past her house without slowing down or stopping. Forever is a long time. I’m not sure it would be long enough.

FEBRUARY

Now they say that love is ended by betrayal or the grave,

And they tell me to give up on her, the one I couldn’t save,

But I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

I will know no rest or solace ’til I’m taking Jenny home.

Valentine’s Day without Jenny is another word for Hell. I stay home sick, choosing another black mark on my attendance record over the school halls festooned with paper hearts and filled with girls giggling over their discount chocolates and wilting roses. Two weeks later, when Jenny appears in front of the cemetery, there’s a bouquet of daisies—her favorite flower—waiting for her on the dashboard, along with the CD I promised her.

She’s still my Valentine. Death doesn’t change that.

Death doesn’t really change anything.

MARCH

It’s been four months since Jenny died, and I’m starting to think about the mechanics of suicide. It can’t be that hard to kill somebody, can it? Tyler managed it, and Tyler’s a dumb jock with more muscles than brains. Or he was, anyway: they still don’t know whether he’s ever going to wake up, and even if he does, there’s no way of knowing whether he’ll ever walk again. His football career is over, buried alongside Jenny’s body, and that might be a comfort to me, if I didn’t miss her so goddamn much, if his teammates didn’t glare at me when they pass me in the halls, like I was the one who suggested he try to put the make on my girlfriend at the homecoming dance. None of this was my idea, I want to scream. None of this is the way that I wanted my junior year of high school to go. But try telling them that. Too many words, too many syllables, too many concepts for their atrophied little brains. Tyler, Jenny, and I wound up in a weird sort of triangle on the night of the dance, two of us competing for one girl, and now Jenny’s dead and Tyler’s in a coma and I’m still here, which makes me the perfect target.

I guess if I were as suicidal as I feel I’d bait them and let them beat me to death behind the school. At least that way they’d get punished for it, and I’d finally get to stop living in a world that doesn’t have Jenny in it anymore.

. . . but I don’t really live in that world, do I? I just exist there.

It’s four months since Jenny’s funeral, and here I am again, parked in front of the cemetery, waiting.

The sun reaches the horizon and again, Jenny: Jenny in her moonlight gown, Jenny with her golden hair, and her corsage still fresh on her wrist. Mine is just so many fallen petals now, sitting in a dish next to my bed where the smell can chase me down into my dreams. Jenny, looking at me with fond exasperation, one satin-toed foot tapping on the grassy knoll.

“Again, Leigh?” she asks, and before I can answer her she chases the question with a question, asking, “Can I get a ride home?”

“Always,” I say, and then she’s in the car, appearing like a miracle, and my foot is on the gas, and everything is right with the world. As long as I’m with Jenny, everything is fine.

Again, I take the long way back to her house, choosing more time with her over the expediency of city streets. It’s better this way, I tell myself, and I realize I actually mean it: if this is a dream, I know it’ll end when I make the final turn onto her block, and if it’s not a dream—if my dead girlfriend is really riding in my front seat like this sort of thing happens every day—then the last thing I want is for someone to see us. They might react the same way I did, with confusion and disbelief and denial. Or they might decide I didn’t deserve this, and give someone else the task of driving Jenny home.

“Tyler’s still in a coma, you know,” I say, because I have to say something; I have to fill the silence between us with words, or it’s going to drown me. “They’re not sure whether he’s ever going to wake up again.”

“Good,” she spits, with such venom that it startles me. “He deserves to be caught that way. Not living, not dead. Just lost in limbo, for as long as their machines can keep him there.”

I worry my lip between my teeth before asking, “You really mean that?”

“Yes,” she says, and “no,” she says, and “I would be here with you if it weren’t for him. I would be here with my family. Really here, I mean, with skin and bones and a heartbeat, not drifting through every time I need someone to drive me home. I’d be getting older. You know, I read this book once, about a unicorn who’d been turned into a human? And she hated it. She said she could feel her body dying all around her. I know what she meant now, Leigh, and I miss it. I miss the feeling of my body dying, because it meant I had a body that could die. It meant I was real. More than just a memory. It meant I belonged to the world. I’m never going to have that again, and it’s all Tyler’s fault.”

There are so many words that it’s almost overwhelming. It takes me a moment to process them all, and we’re moving the whole time, getting closer and closer to the point where she leaves me again. I want to ask the best question in the world, I want to stun her with how well I understand, but when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “So stay.”

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m dead, remember?”

There’s laughter in her voice, and pain too, like she likes remembering what she is as little as I like being reminded of it. I don’t say anything, but I hit the gas just a little harder, and neither one of us says anything for the rest of the drive.

It’s just like before. I turn onto her street, and the smell of vanilla fills the car, and when I turn to look at her, she’s gone like she was never there. I may as well have been driving a hallucination across the city. I pull up to a stop sign and lean over to touch the seat. It’s warm. She was there enough to warm up the seat with the body that she doesn’t have.

Maybe that means something.

I hold that thought firmly as I drive myself back home. Jenny could still warm a seat, and maybe that means something . . . but what, I just don’t know.

APRIL

Jenny’s already standing on the curb when I pull up, her arms clasped tight around herself like she’s cold. I find myself wishing she’d died wearing something warmer, which turns quickly to wishing she’d never died at all, and that’s dangerous; that’s the kind of thinking that I can chase down the rabbit holes of my mind all night long. So I just stop the car and roll down the window and wait for her to ask the question.

“Can I get a ride?”

“Always,” I say, and she disappears, leaving me alone. This time, my heart doesn’t stop: I’ve learned enough to know what comes next. I turn, and there she is in the passenger seat, her seatbelt fastened, a smile on her perfect lips. Trying to be casual, I say, “You look good today.”

“One good thing about death: no more bad hair days,” she says, with a laugh that isn’t a laugh at all: more a close cousin to a sob. Kissing cousin, even—the two are so tangled together that I couldn’t pry them apart if I tried. “I’m really glad I like this dress.”

“I wonder if that’s what you’d be wearing if they’d buried you in something else.” The words are thoughtless. I cringe.

Jenny doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, she looks relieved. She’s been dead for six months, and this is the first time I’ve talked to her like that mattered at all: like it changed anything about our relationship, apart from how often we get to see each other. “I think so,” she says. “It’s different for everybody, but most of the ghosts I’ve met have been wearing something they cared about when they were alive. Lots of wedding gowns, tuxedos, graduation robes . . . this was the prettiest dress I ever owned. It only makes sense that I’d be wearing it now.”

“I’d say that wearing it made you the prettiest girl in the world, but you didn’t need a dress for that.”

Jenny laughs without the sob this time, and leans forward to turn on the radio. “Just drive,” she says.

So I do, and everything is perfect, and I could go on like this forever, just me and Jenny and our monthly date, her in her homecoming dress, me in whatever I threw on that day, driving into eternity.

MAY

Now they say that love is something you’d be lucky to forget,

But I say that I was lucky on the day that we first met,

And I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

I will roam the lonesome highways ’til I’m bringing Jenny home.

The halls are buzzing with the news that Tyler—elevated in his absence to young god, deified like Jenny was, but without the absence of flesh to allow his memory to erode—has started responding to treatment: why, he opened his eyes yesterday, which is nothing short of a miracle as far as his legion of adoring fans is concerned. If this continues, he could actually wake up soon! Imagine! Tyler, All-American high school god, walking among us mere mortals like we have the right to glory in his physical presence and breathe his rarefied air!

It makes me want to vomit, or punch someone, or scream. But all these things are anti-social, and the school counselors are still watching me more closely than I like, since apparently my inability to “move on” from the death of the first girl I ever loved means I’m a potential suicide risk or school shooter or something. I’m not really clear on what the problem is, and no one else seems to be either. They just know that I’m not fitting easy into their prefab high school mold anymore, and so they watch me, and they wait for me to make a mistake.

Tyler’s name is on everyone’s lips today, even the teachers, who urge us to focus on our studies because “that’s what Tyler would want us to do.” By seventh period, I’ve had enough, and when my history teacher invokes Tyler’s name in an effort to quiet us down, I stick my hand in the air and ask, “Do you think Tyler was quiet when he was committing vehicular manslaughter? Or do you think he had time to scream at the sight of Jenny’s corpse before his brain damage kicked in?”

I get sent to the principal’s office for my trouble, a red detention slip clutched in my hand, and it’s not until I see the sun setting through the study hall window that I realize what this means—that I won’t reach the cemetery until hours after I usually arrive. I bolt to my feet.

“Sit down, Miss Winslow!” barks the vice principal, and my knees buckle, years of trained obedience ordering me back into my seat before my conscious mind is invited to the party. I shoot another panicked glance at the window, but it’s too late, it’s too late; the sun is dipping down below the horizon. I don’t know much about the strange dance that I’ve been locked in since homecoming, and still something tells me that this is a line that should never have been crossed. She appears at sunset. Well, the sun has set, and when I reach the cemetery, Jenny won’t be waiting.

Even knowing that, I run for my car as soon as we’re released, breaking speed laws all the way down to the cemetery gates. But Jenny isn’t there. I stay until midnight, listening to her favorite CD over and over again and praying to a god I don’t entirely believe in, and Jenny never comes. I broke the rules. I broke the chain.

What if Jenny never comes again? What am I going to do then?

JUNE

I skip school on the day Jenny’s due to appear, even knowing she won’t be there until sunset. I missed her once. I can’t run the risk of missing her again. Not when we only get one night a month, and that night is limited to however long it takes to drive from the cemetery to her house—not exactly the kind of dates I used to lie awake dreaming about. I haven’t kissed her since the night she died. I ache to hold her in my arms, kiss her cheek, and tell her how much I’ve missed her, how much I miss her every single day. But if I can’t do that, I can at least do this: I can be here; I can wait for her until she comes.

I have to move the car three times when the security guard comes by and gives me the hairy eyeball, suspicion written plainly on his face. What’s a chubby teenage girl in a beat-up Volvo doing parked in front of the cemetery’? What mischief am I planning?

No mischief, sir, I want to say, but I can’t imagine he’d take well to being told I was just here to pick up my girlfriend, who’s been dead for seven months—don’t worry, she looks just fine, on account of how she doesn’t have a body anymore. I’d be lucky if he called the cops. It’s more likely he’d call the local loony bin, and I’d be hauled away by men in white coats, screaming for my ghost girlfriend all the while. No. Nuh-uh. I don’t have time to be committed, and so I move the car again and again, wasting gas and wasting time as I wait for the magic moment when Jenny will appear.

Then I’m coming around the corner and there she is, blazing up in the headlights like a fairy tale princess, all moonlight gold and helpless longing. I stop the car, roll down the window, look out at her, and smile.

“Hey,” I say. “You need a ride?”

I’m trying to sound cool and smooth and like the sort of person who belongs in a place like this. All I really manage is sounding like my dorky self. Jenny still smiles as she walks toward the car. That’s all the validation I need.

“Where were you last month, Leigh?” she asks. “I thought maybe you were getting over me.”

“That’s never going to happen,” I say. “I had detention.” She disappears, and then she’s in the car with me, and my heart hurts from the reality of her. I know that what I have to say will hurt her, but I have to say it anyway: “Tyler’s waking up.”

Jenny goes still, and it’s not until that moment that I realize she isn’t breathing, she’s never been breathing, not any of the times I’ve seen her or any of the nights when I’ve driven her home. The realization changes something. It’s like for the first time I can’t pretend she’s not dead, not on any level. There is only one living body in this car, only one person who’s getting older, only one unicorn trapped in a human form. The other person, the Jenny-shaped person . . . she’s dead and gone, she’s dwindling into dust underground, and she’s never coming back to me. This is the closest we’re ever going to get, these strange moments of stolen time in my car.

“He shouldn’t get to wake up,” she says finally. There’s a bitterness in her voice that runs all the way down to the bone, the kind of dark, resentful hatred that used to be reserved for people who abused animals or argued against gay marriage. I bite my lip and keep driving, not wanting to see the look on her face as she continues, “I didn’t get to wake up. Why should he?”

“He may never walk again.”

“Well, isn’t that a shame—oh, wait. I’m definitely never going to walk again, because I’m dead, and it’s his fault, and I can’t even rest easy in my grave and forget about all this, because you won’t let me go. So what do you want me to do, Leigh? Be happy for him? Oh, hooray, the man who killed me is waking up, and maybe his life’s been changed forever, but it’s still a life. He still gets to have a life. He gets to grow up and get old and I get to keep asking you to drive me home. How is that fair?”

“It’s not,” I say quietly.

“Then what are you going to do about it?” There’s a challenge in her voice that I don’t know quite how to answer, and so I don’t. I just drive her home.

What else am I supposed to do?

JULY

Well, I’m supposed to commit murder, for one thing.

It’s a little surprising that I didn’t think of it sooner, but as the days stretch out and the school year winds to an end, the thought preys on me more and more often. How hard could it be, really, to kill someone who’s bedridden, slipping in and out of consciousness, and incapable of fighting back? Not that hard. Getting to him is going to be the difficult part . . . and wouldn’t it make Jenny happy to know that I loved her enough to kill for her? I want to see her smile, really smile, just one more time. And not just from her memorial page in the yearbook, where they’ve used a picture of her in her homecoming dress—the only dress she has anymore—and her corsage. None of the pictures in her memorial collage have me in them. Without Jenny and the cheerleading squad to drag me into the school’s social limelight I’m fading from everyone’s memory, another high school weirdo worthy only of dismissal.

Maybe that’s a good thing, given what I’m planning to do.

It wasn’t a plan at first; just an idle thought, a continuation of that half-conversation that I hadn’t been able to finish with Jenny. But it’s grown, bit by bit, into something bigger and more powerful than it was when it began. Tyler killed Jenny. Tyler doesn’t deserve to have any kind of a life, not when Jenny doesn’t get to. Tyler needs to die, and if I want to show her that I’m still a good girlfriend, I need to be the one who kills him. It’s as simple as that.

I don’t say anything when I go to pick her up; I just smile, and hand her a copy of the yearbook so she can see all the nice things people said about her after she was gone and in the ground, and then I drive her home. It’s the least that I can do, all things considered.

AUGUST

Jenny, I was foolish, I was selfish, I’m ashamed,

And I’m praying you’ll forgive me, though I know I should be blamed,

For I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

I will never know salvation ’til I’m taking Jenny home.

Tyler has his own room—naturally he does, his parents have money and they’ve never been shy about spending it on their beloved only son. That makes things simpler. Finding it is easy. Our classmates have sent offerings of flowers and stuffed toys in such great numbers that when I walk up to the admission desk with a bouquet of roses in my hands, the nurse barely looks up from her romance novel before spitting out his room number, three little digits that don’t seem like nearly enough information to lead me to murder. But there they are, and there I go, walking down the hall unquestioned, the roses in my hands somehow serving as an all-access pass.

I’ve heard they don’t allow flowers in the ICU, but apparently Tyler’s far enough along the road to recovery that they’ve moved him into a lower security grade. That, too, works in my favor.

His door isn’t locked. Three strikes, Tyler; you’re out.

The room is dim and quiet, save for the soft, steady rasp of the machines that keep him alive. He’s a wasted skeleton of a man, all that football muscle melted away to reveal the scarecrow that was sleeping for so long inside his skin. I stop at the foot of the bed, looking at him. Maybe this isn’t about unicorns at all; maybe this is some kind of strange Wizard of Oz parable, with Jenny just trying to get home and Tyler trapped in the echoing cavern of his own mind. I can’t decide whether that makes me the Lion or the Tin Man. Am I looking for courage, or am I wishing for a heart?

Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a syringe; I can’t inject air bubbles into his arm like they do on Dad’s crime shows, and I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I could. I’d put a pillow over his face, but he has machines to do his breathing for him, and I’m pretty sure they’d start beeping like crazy if I pulled them loose.

The door opens and closes behind me. “More flowers?” asks an unseen woman. “Well, put them with the rest. Poor boy’s lucky he doesn’t have allergies. That would just be one more problem on top of a mountain of them.”

“Is . . . is he going to be okay?” I’m not really concerned about Tyler’s welfare—I’m not—but I’d expected him to look more like, well, himself. A great big bear of a teenage boy, briefly bedridden, gathering the strength to jump right back into his life. Not this wasted bundle of bones and sickness.

“That depends on how you measure ‘okay,’ I suppose.” The owner of the voice is a middle-aged woman in pale pink scrubs. She takes the flowers from my hands, apparently able to sense that I can’t bring myself to move. “Is he going to live? At this point, the prognosis is good. His folks have paid for the best care, and he’s got a strong will. He’s stubborn. Stubbornness counts for a lot in cases like these. But is he ever going to walk again? Throw a pass or kick a ball or anything like that? No, I don’t think that’s likely.”

“Oh.” I pause then, frowning. “Should you be telling me this?”

“A pretty little thing like you only sneaks into a hospital with a bunch of flowers for two reasons: love or hate. I read the papers. I know which it is.”The nurse looks over her shoulder at me as she sets my roses amongst the rest. “She won’t rest any easier if you kill him, and neither will you. Are you sticking to the rules? Do you drive her home when she asks you to?”

My throat is a thin straw through which only air can pass. I squeak a few times, trying to speak, and finally settle for a nod.

“That’s good. Have you tried to kiss her?”

I’ve dreamt about it. That isn’t the same thing. I shake my head.

The nurse nods approvingly. “That’s good. That’s real good. It’s not safe for a girl like you to be kissing a girl like her. There are consequences, when the living love the dead. Now I’m going to ask one more question, and I’ll thank you to find your voice, since your answer is going to determine whether or not I call for security. I’m assuming you came here to kill this boy. You can go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not my question. Are you still planning to try?”

“N-no, ma’am,” I manage. “He shouldn’t be alive when Jenny’s not, but it’s not my place to change that. I guess the worst thing I can do to him is leave him alive.”

“Good girl.” She smiles at me, and then glances meaningfully to the clock above the door. “You’d better hurry if you want to pick her up on time.”

I want to stay and ask her what she knows about ghosts, how she understands my arrangement with Jenny . . . who she’s been driving home. But she’s right: the sun will be down soon, and if I want to make it to the cemetery, I need to go, and I don’t really want to be here, in this room where time is rotting on the vine. So I turn and run, leaving the hospital, leaving Tyler to his own living hell, and it’s not until Jenny is sliding into her place beside me that I really wonder what that nurse knew, or why she asked if I’d been trying to kiss my girl.

I go back to the hospital the next day. The nurse I met in Tyler’s room isn’t there.

Somehow, that’s not really a surprise.

SEPTEMBER

School starts up again in an explosion of cheerleaders and football players wearing orange and green uniforms and smiles like they just won the universal lottery. It’s freshmen slinking in the halls and sophomores seeming suddenly easy in their skins; it’s juniors with their chests puffed up with upperclassman pride and seniors smiling beatifically, rulers of their small, time-delineated kingdom. It’s all so stupid, and there was a time when I would have loved it. I would have been walking in formation with the rest of the cheerleaders, Jenny by my side, and we would have been queens of the world. Homecoming last year was supposed to be our grand declaration of love, and by now everyone would have been used to the idea that we were together. We could have had one perfect year of high school, me and Jenny, Jenny and me.

Instead, I’m just another nobody at the edge of the crowd, wondering why this ever seemed to matter. All the memorials to Jenny are gone, and there’s a whole new class of freshmen who never knew her, and will never know that they’re supposed to miss her. Summer has restored the campus, sweeping its ghosts away, and now I’m the only one who’s haunted.

I don’t know how long I can live like this.

I’m still dwelling on that when it comes time to pick Jenny up again; she slides into the car, all vanilla and moonlight, and asks, “Well? How’s senior year?”

She still loves the idea of the future we crafted for ourselves, back when we were lying on our backs behind the tumbling mats, hands entangled, and both of us were breathing. I shake my head and start the car. “Same shit, different semester,” I say. And then, because the question is burning me, I ask, “Why am I not allowed to kiss you?” Jenny is silent.

“I mean, I get to drive you home. I know you’re solid, I’ve touched your hands and seen you hold things. So why can’t I kiss you? What makes it so wrong to want to kiss my girlfriend?”

“I’m dead, Leigh.” Her voice is the whispering of wind among the gravestones, barely audible, impossible to ignore.

“So what? You’re still my girl. I’m not giving up on you.”

“I’m dead, and you’re not.”

I’ve thought about changing that so many times. “And?”

“And if I kissed you, it would . . .” Jenny sighs. “Everything dies, Leigh. Everything. But some things make you die faster.”

“Like kissing dead girls?”

“Like kissing dead girls.” Jenny reaches over and touches my hand, gentle as a promise, cruel as a prayer. “Homecoming is next month. I’ve been buried for almost a year. Don’t you think it’s time you let me go?”

I don’t answer her, because that question is every answer I’ve been seeking for the last eleven months. “I think it’s time that something changed, yeah,” I say, and we drive.

OCTOBER

My tuxedo still fits. Grief either bulks you up or slims you down, and I guess I’ve gone for the latter; too many days when I couldn’t bring myself to eat, too many nights spent crying until I threw up. It was a little snug when I wore it the first time and now it’s a little loose, but I look okay. I think Jenny will appreciate it.

“Are you going to homecoming?” asks Mom, when she sees me coming down the stairs. She sounds surprised and maybe hopeful, like this is a sign things are changing for the better.

“Yeah.” Homecoming isn’t tonight—it’s always on a Saturday, and it’s only Monday now—but this is the anniversary of Jenny’s death, and I don’t feel like correcting my mother. I finish descending the stairs and press a kiss against her cheek, sweeter than a note left on my dresser, crueler than an explanation. I don’t think there’s any way to explain what I’ve decided to do. “Don’t wait up, okay?”

“I won’t,” she says, relief plain on her face. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“It’s a surprise.” My new boutonniere is already pinned to the front of my tuxedo. I figure Jenny doesn’t need a corsage—she still has hers from last year—but I bought her daisies, just to make the symbolism clear.

“Have fun tonight.”

“I will.” I should feel bad, I know I should, but I can’t. There’s nothing for me here, and I still have to keep my promise. I have to finish driving Jenny home.

I pull up to the cemetery just as the sun is starting to go down, and Jenny’s there, my Jenny, in her dress like moonlight. She gasps a little when I get out of the car and she sees me in my tuxedo. That’s what I was hoping for, that moment of shock, when she’s too busy staring to react as I stride toward her, the daisies held out in my hand.

“These are for you,” I say, pressing them into her hands. She takes them—she’s solid, she’s solid, because she’s holding the flowers—and is still looking at them when I lean forward and press my lips to hers.

Her lips taste like they always have, like vanilla lip gloss, but there’s something else there, something dark and sad and dry as dust. She pulls back, eyes wide and filled with dismay. “Do you know what you’ve done?” she demands, and I do know, I do know what I’ve done.

So I smile and say, “Too late now,” and this time when I kiss her, she doesn’t pull away. We’ll get into the car soon; I’ll drive her home, and this time, when whatever happens happens, I won’t survive. That’s all right. That’s what I wanted.

I made her a promise, after all. I promised that I’d get her all the way home.

Jenny, darling Jenny, there is no need to explain,

I have seen your lonely graveside, I have waited in the rain,

And I’ll do as much for my true love as any lover known—

Though my family will grieve me, I’ll be driving Jenny home.

SEANAN MCGUIRE—best known for her October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and the Wayward Children series—is a native Californian. This resulted in her being exceedingly laid-back about venomous wildlife and terrified of weather. Since her debut as an author in 2009, she has published more than forty novels and is the recipient of the Campbell, Alex, Hugo, and Nebula Awards. She’s also won the Pegasus Award for her work as a filksinger. She now lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.

I’M ALIVE, I LOVE YOU, I’LL SEE YOU IN RENO

VYLAR KAFTAN

We have a history of missed connections, you and I. Years ago, when you called goodbye from the shuttle launch, my flight was landing in Zurich. I’d changed planes, been rerouted from Frankfurt. That’s why you got my voicemail. I’d have answered if I could, and would’ve wished you luck, even if you wanted a life without me. I never managed to see Europa, like you did—just Europe, where I met my first husband. The one I wished was you.

When I heard your message, I was glad you were happy—yes, I’ve always wanted you happy, even during our divorce. I thought of you traveling to Alpha Centauri, time dilating between us like a portal. I envisioned it like a slow-motion movie. You’d be back in forty years. I’d be sixty-four, and you’d only be half my age.

I saved your message for weeks, until I accidentally deleted it. It felt symbolic. We’d be happier apart, I thought to myself. But “apart” was always the way we connected. The word defines us relative to each other: one cannot be apart without the other.

Einstein spent ten years thinking about a mirror that troubled him. If he traveled at the speed of light and looked into a handheld mirror, would he see his reflection, or not? Setting aside vampirism, or poorly- made glass that cracks at high speeds, the answer is that he must. Relativity means that you can’t tell how fast you’re going unless you have a point of reference. We’ve been together for as long as I can remember. Just kids, running around the Sacramento suburbs. I liked you because you’d play with a girl. I ran faster, fought harder, and hit harder than any boy—and I knew it. Remember that time we played capture the flag and you couldn’t find mine? I shoved it in a drainpipe. You could still see its corner. That counts.

I was the girl next door—safe, reliable, undesirable. When I was thirteen, and you were sixteen—I was crazy-in-love with you. But you were blind. “Best friends forever,” you told me.

I thought that you’d never see me as a woman your own age. I had to hear about all those girls you dated. Remember that awful redhead who stole cigarettes from her grandmother? I bet she got lung cancer.

“Best friends,” I told you too. We were together, yet completely apart.

I used to wonder how to make you see me. Should I tell you what I felt? Stay silent and hope you’d see?

But you made the choice for me: you left for the military. So I joined the Peace Corps—the polar opposite of what you did. This drew us together again like magnets. It’s why we ended up living together in San Francisco. Roommates and lovers.

I didn’t know this then, of course—all of this I figured out during the journey to Alpha Centauri.

Two magnets, apart, continue to exert force on each other. Their power lies in the space between.

Einstein says that nothing moves at the speed of light, because the faster things get the heavier they become.

It’s true that as I accelerated, everything had more weight: two decades of child-rearing, juggling flute practice with my photography career, balancing a marriage’s weight against single independence. But weight is relative, and what’s heavy on Earth is light on the Moon and monstrous on Jupiter. Yet the mass remains the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When I think about the changes in my parents’ lives—and how much more I’ve already seen, in fewer years—I think of Moore’s Law.

My world is doubling every year. Somewhere in old Italy, Galileo is searching the skies with his telescope, wondering why his life doesn’t feel as full as it should. It’s because I have it all, four centuries later—his life, and millions of others.

The doubling sequence surprises people who’ve never thought it through.

Reno, you told me once. Reno, Nevada. When we lived in San Francisco, in that tiny apartment above a Mission District taqueria. Do you remember that conversation? We were sitting on that awful brown loveseat you’d rescued from a dumpster. You were heating dinner in the microwave, and the room smelled like curry. The fog rolled through the city and we both wore old sweaters. I didn’t yet know the relevance of Reno.

“If we’re separated,” you said.

“Why Reno?”

“It’s inland. When the big quake hits the Bay, Reno’s safe. Or if there’s a missile strike or something. No one strikes Reno.”

“You’re paranoid,” I said.

You shrugged. “I’m aware.”

We’d been living together for six months. We made good roommates—both of us loud, and neither of us tidy. You took out the trash, and I sorted the mail; we both did dishes when needed, and not more often. I didn’t mind your waterskis propped against the fridge, or your physics books scattered on the pizza-stained carpet. You didn’t mind the way I always slammed doors and drawers, no matter how quiet I tried to be. It was a good arrangement. But not what I wanted.

I knew you loved me, of course. It was written in your eyes when you looked at me, a physics problem with no clear answer. If an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens then?

They meet. That’s all we know. Relative to each other, they are in contact. From within the object or the force, there is no way to tell if you’re in motion.

For a while, I was Charon to your Pluto, keeping the same faces to each other as we circled around endlessly.

And through all of this you still thought of me as a moon, and yourself as a planet. But it’s not so easy as that. Our orbit is erratic, an ellipse among circles, an offbeat pattern in a regular solar system. Do you see the sun, far in the distance? Even when our orbit sweeps close to the sun, it takes four hours for its light to reach us. It’s a centerpoint that keeps us captured. We circle it so we don’t fly off into space. It’s a point of reference, and it proves to us that we’re always in motion.

We keep moving, along with everything else. Even if we can’t see where or how.

By the time we got together, it was more for convenience than anything else.

It was what we did: have sex, fight, break up, meet someone else. And when the new relationship burned out, like a magnesium ribbon flared and gone, we’d find each other again.

The best thing between us was the sex. We fought—oh, yes, we fought—and then had make-up sex. Hard, hot, and heavy. You’d drive into me just before I was ready— making me ready—then finish just after me, both of us collapsed together, trapped in each other’s gravity wells.

When you slept, I’d stroke your rough, calloused fingers and the Superglued cuts in your feet from waterskiing. I’d think about our next fight, and my body tingled with wanting you.

“I’ll marry you,” you said once, “if you can’t find anyone else.”

I laughed because I thought you were kidding. You couldn’t even propose right.

It was the last push on a decaying orbit. I was not your fallback option. From the time you said that, our path downwards was guaranteed, calculable. We fought about the phone bill, Chinese leftovers, a broken plate that didn’t get swept up. When you told me about your new job repairing relativity shuttles, I was secretly glad. Your work would take you to Reno. Out of my path.

I was completely over you, over us—or at least I was then, when you left. I was on the rebound, ready for someone new.

Gunther, the German engineer, was everything you weren’t. So I married him. Once you knew his first few digits, they repeated in a predictable pattern. He was a wonderful father for our two sons. I thought of you sometimes as I raised my boys, perfect squares in their rational world. I never forgot you.

Thanks to genetics, we expected Gunther’s heart problems before they happened. He lasted twenty-five years with me, then slipped away. My kids were on their own by then, and I had time and money. I was free to choose irrationally, and so I took up waterskiing.

When you came back, I was surprised you came to my door—and even more surprised that you wanted me. I didn’t think you’d stay with me—a hot young thirty-something, with this dried-out old lady. You kept saying you liked my maturity, you found me sexy. But it was different for me. I saw you like my kids. More like a son than a mate.

If I can’t find anyone else.

That’s a terrible proposal. It makes a woman feel like you’re just putting up with her. I did find someone else. I had twenty-five happy years with him, while you were living through just a few months. I accumulated the weight of years—of a woman building decades with her partner, of a mother renewing herself by raising her children. All of this weight I gained—not to mention my new-found belly.

But I married you anyway. You wanted to be with me, you said. All your recent thoughts told you so. My age didn’t matter—you still wanted me, the woman you’d loved all this time, you said.

As for me, now I had what I’d always wanted—but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.

One night after we made love on the beach, I watched the stars. They shone with light from billions of years ago. The stars offered us time apart. That’s why I sold everything I had—to see what you’d seen.

The new relativity shuttles were even faster than yours had been, and now they were open to tourists. It had been forty years here, after all. I’m sorry I didn’t leave a note.

I figured it was all relative.

Gunther was always patient with me. Slow. He’d wait for me to orgasm, like he was holding a car door open for me, and then he’d finish quickly and silently. Sometimes I pretended he was you to make things more exciting. Once I pretended he was Albert Einstein. It was the accent, I swear.

With you, the electromagnetic pull bonded us together. We could ionize briefly, visiting other molecules and forming weak bonds—but we always came back together, circling each other endlessly.

An electron and a proton. You and me.

For a long time I thought I was the electron, spinning wild patterns around you. Then I realized the electron was you, because I always knew either where you were or how fast you were going, but never both.

So I left you and went to the stars, like you’d done. Alpha Centauri! The brilliant star burned into my mind. It was a vacation for me, a short time away from Earth. For the first time, I saw the lights up close. The luxury ship went 99 percent the speed of light. Much faster than you had gone, faster than before.

I figured you’d be dead once I got back. It simplified things. Stopped the fighting. You’d be ashes, like you’d always wanted. I wouldn’t even have to see your body. I thought about it, as I looked through the viewport, and realized that I was still thinking of you. That was when I understood that no matter how far I went or how fast, I still responded to you in every way.

Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. Our bond pulls me back, and I love you.

Reasons why I have loved you:

1. Yes.

2. Yes, again.

3. Because you’re you.

None of these are love, perhaps, but they’re forces of physics. And if love isn’t subject to physics, then it has no grounding in our universe. I can’t believe that’s true.

Just when I got back, you left again, like one metal ball clacking another— the opposite side of our kinetic motion toy. You were off for the Andromeda Galaxy, moving at 99.38 percent the speed of light.

Simpler, indeed. I was sixty-eight. You were gone.

It was time to move on.

The world had changed since I left. The human lifespan was up to 150 years. I hadn’t imagined this possibility. I had decades left for music, art, whatever I dreamed of. My health was good—they killed a malignant breast tumor and grew me a new liver, twice—but otherwise, my body kept working for years.

But my nervous system paralysis—that was incurable. I opted for cryogenesis, hoping they’d find a cure. If they did, years from now, they’d revive me and heal me.

It was exciting. I wondered if it’d be hard to fall asleep, like Christmas Eve—not knowing what Christmas Day would bring. But of course the freezing was instant. As I lay down in the cryochamber I thought to myself: Reno. That’s where I should have gone, when disaster struck. I was thinking of you.

And then I was frozen, like Charon and Pluto.

If I’m a train leaving Philadelphia at 3:00, going fifty miles an hour, and you’re a train on the same track leaving San Francisco at 4:00, going fifty-five miles an hour, at what time will we collide and run each other off the tracks?

More importantly, if we move at the speed of light, and I shine a light in your direction, will you blink and tell me to stop blinding you, or will you not see me coming until it’s too late?

If Einstein is flying next to our train, looking into a mirror and wondering where his reflection has gone—will you ask him whether anything stands still, or if everything is always in motion? Relative to everything else, of course.

And ask about Reno. If our trains crash there, should we consider that they’ve stopped moving? Or are they still in motion on Earth, relative to everything else in the universe?

Everyone’s joined in the same future,except you.Time moves so quickly— accelerating to the point where we can hardly imagine what’s next. I went to sleep expecting to be cured. Instead, the AI woke me and said I no longer needed my body. It downloaded my mind, and now I see. You and I are eccentric, but part of a solar system, and I know now where we belong. It’s easy for me to travel along circuits, to expand my mind everywhere in the network—and then condense myself so small as to be negligible in the universe, here in one corner of a virtual city.

I see they’ve sent a ship after you, moving at 99.99 percent the speed of light. It’ll reach you eventually. They’ll download you and you’ll fly back to me. Here, where we belong. I think I never left your orbit.

I wrote you a long message to explain all this, but I think I’ll erase it and just leave ten words. I’ll tell you the rest when you arrive—when our perpetual motion comes to a relative stop.

VYLAR KAFTAN won a Nebula Award for her novella “The Weight of the Sunrise,” as well as Sidewise Award for Short-Form Alternate History. She was also nominated for a 2010 Nebula Award for her short story “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno.” Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Clarkesworld. Her work has been reprinted in Horror: The Best of the Year, honorably mentioned in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and shortlisted for the WSFA Small Press Award. She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California. Her hobbies include modern-day temple dancing and preparing for a major earthquake.

IN THE EYES DF JACK SAUL

RICHARD BDWES

ONE

Very old people called it “Satan’s Luck.” I heard that when I was one of the boys running wild in the backstreets of Dublin some decades ago, but I didn’t fully understand what they meant at the time.

Then quite early one night at the age of sixteen, I robbed a drunk of his bottle with others looking on. And not long after that, a sailor had me in a fine roll-about on the ground in a dark alleyway.

For the entertainment I’d afforded him (he expressed some surprise at my combination of the face of a girl and my fine, healthy appendage), he gave me three new shillings, and I came to understand that I was running on something more than ordinary good fortune.

It was as if Satan had called on me, Jack Saul, in that moment. Things were different from then on. I saw what others didn’t and, like a dog on a scent, I could always find a sporting man in need of me.

It was at Dublin Castle in my youth that I fell in with Irish Military orgies and was celebrated among the cavalry officers stationed there who always made a place for a Mary-Ann, as one like me was called.

The Dublin Castle Scandal, when all of this came to public light, was the first time, but not the last, I was called to a witness stand. A solicitor had told me lawyers and judges would ask me about Mary-Anns like myself. And would, perhaps, be curious about things like the kinds of military “operations” I had witnessed at first hand.

At the last moment, I was not called. Someone told me that I looked a bit too eager to testify and might have revealed parts of the Scandal that would have upset the ones who owned our nation.

I was left with the feeling that the city of my birth, this nearest of Great Britain’s overseas possessions, was too small and confined a place for me to live the life that I’d been born to live.

Two

On a summer’s day a few years later, I was walking down a fine London street, remembering Dublin and all that came with it. By then, I was in my early twenties and dealing in a somewhat carefree fashion with men of a certain leaning.

I felt that I was coming into my own. At the male bordello where I resided, I was a Mary-Ann dressed in robes that might have come from China. But out on lovely Arlington Street, I wore the plainest of male garb.

Unless you noticed a few minor hints, I could have been a good-enough-looking youth hurrying back to the shop where he worked.

Satan’s Luck guided me down Arlington with its polished carriages and high-stepping horses. On the pavement women used Parisian parasols to keep the sun off their white skin.

Men with tall silk hats strode about as if they owned the Earth. One of them was Lord Henry Wotton, whom I thought of as a client of mine. That day, I was following him out of curiosity and to see if I could find more clients.

In the bordello where Lord Wotton and I met for business, he always kept talking about what I guessed was philosophy. I would bring his attention back to the matters at hand, and he never failed to be amused by what popped out between us each time he pulled up my dress.

But all that was indoors at night on dark streets and not meant for places like Arlington Street near Grosvenor Square. Practice kept me half a block behind his lordship and ensured he wouldn’t see me in the crowd. Words without end flowed from Lord Henry and I imagined he was glancing around right then, trying to find someone to listen to him talk. Instead, I caught sight of him turning a corner, then going through the gates and up the front steps of a stately home. A bowing butler welcomed him. The house, I was soon to discover, was where the artist Basil Hallward lived. He, too, was a client at the palace of sin where I lived.

Glancing about me, I noticed that behind and between the houses on this corner were tree-lined gardens bordering on each other. I’d done a lot of lurking around and a bit of housebreaking in my time and recognized gates that were easily opened.

So, I nodded, smiled, waved an empty envelope at a gardener like I was delivering it somewhere. With Satan’s help, I walked down a path and slipped behind the lilac trees in Basil Hallward’s garden.

French windows offered me a fine view of the interior. I saw Lord Wotton inside, sprawled out on a couch, and knew by the way his hands waved above his head that he was talking. Hallward was there, too. But what caught my eyes was a third person, a beautiful youth standing absolutely still in the middle of the room.

Even when I realized it was a painting, I couldn’t turn away. I’d seen men in all their forms and in every situation. But that face held me like none of the others ever had.

Then someone else came into the room. I stared and stared again as I realized this was the living duplicate of the one in the painting, I could hardly breathe. Looking from man to picture and back again, I became aware that Hallward and Wotton were watching him with as much excitement as I was.

When Hallward suddenly led the other two out into the garden, I was unable to move and hardly dared to inhale. They called the young man Dorian, the first time I ever heard of anyone with that name and, thus far, the last.

Wotton was saying something or other about how their scents are flowers’ way of speaking to us. And he added that our inability to respond frustrates them so badly that they wither and die.

He and Hallward passed close to the trees but were too busy watching Dorian to be bothered with me.

Dorian, though still wide-eyed, was actually looking around and caught sight of me staring at him. He smiled slightly and said nothing to the others about an intruder.

They all went back inside and were served by a butler. I stared at the one called Dorian and was willing to stay longer and continue watching him. But Lord Wotton and he, it seemed, were going off together and Hallward was not happy.

Neither was I. It felt like a glorious young man, the likes of whom I never knew existed until that day, was disappearing right in front of me. I jumped a garden fence, ran around to the front of the building, and watched the carriage with Dorian and Wotton roll away. It was good no one paid any attention to the wild-eyed lunatic promising himself aloud to be with Dorian at every opportunity.

THREE

Number 19

For a time, my memories of the day I’d followed Lord Wotton and first seen Dorian were a kind of dream. I even found myself, like a smitten lover, wondering if Dorian remembered me. I’d wish that he would come by old Number 19 (which was as close to a name as the place where I lived ever had).

Lord Wotton and Basil Hallward visited that house and gave no sign of remembering me in the garden. But I, who feared so little in this world, was worried that any questions about Dorian would make them wonder how I’d managed to see him in the first place.

These attitudes had me doubt myself for the first time in my life. I was Jack Saul, the one who knew as much about men as there was to know and who had done as much with and to them as anyone male or female on Earth.

After a short time, I began to see Dorian Gray as a kind of fever that had never before touched me. It disgusted me that I was mooning for a boy I’d seen once and somehow couldn’t see again. Was this really the behavior of one who possessed Satan’s Luck?

My anger at myself broke the fever, and I became determined to know everything about him and use it to see him as ordinary. That was an attitude I could live with.

Once when we were alone in my boudoir, I asked Basil Hallward about Dorian and his response was to look very sad and disappointed, which I found more fascinating than anything Basil could have told me.

Wotton appeared with friends like himself at Number 19. For an occasion like that, all the naked telegraph runners displayed themselves. These were young boys who delivered telegraph messages on foot and saw so little money that they stopped by in the evenings to make themselves available at Number 19. After they paraded and perhaps made a few friends, the ordinary Mary-Anns would be trotted out in negligées.

I was the prize exhibit, held for last when Wotton would call for “that sweet face and surprising protuberance!” In my boudoir, I would entertain him with tricks I’d learned in the trade. It amused him that I could look like a courtesan. He and his always applauded when I revealed how unlike one I could be.

When I finally asked about Dorian (pretending I’d only just heard of him), he looked down his nose at me and said, “Young men of Dorian Gray’s rank must always experience as much as the world can offer. Because in doing so, they will understand that world, which will be theirs to take as they wish.”

And I, it went without saying, would be taken or ignored as one like Wotton or Dorian Gray might decide. I had learned to be amusing and hide my loathing.

The outside of Number 19 gave no idea of what went on inside. Most enterprises in that neighborhood were not so shy. There were shops in which it was well known that lost and stolen goods could be bought and sold. The needs of those sad men who found it necessary to be entangled by women were taken care of in side-street brothels where they gazed into windows and made their choice. There were also saloons and music halls and a grimy little theater just down the way from the building I called home.

In the evenings and often in broad daylight, young men dressed in bits and pieces of the upper crust’s abandoned suits and hats strutted and stamped down the street. “The Piccadilly Peacocks,” as they were called, would look about them to catch the glances of men in search of rent boys.

On the whole, I lived in “a fine louche place,” as an ancient harlot of a Mary-Ann whom I knew back in Dublin used to say.

I was doing well in this little world where everyone on the street and some in the wider world knew me. I had even written a book. (Or, to be honest, told the one who wrote it about me and my life.) Like the doings at Number 19, a book called The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, which was said to be “Written by Jack Saul, the most wicked man in the world,” was not for everyone. It was, in fact, best kept a secret from the many who would call for my arrest after reading the truth.

About then, there was an evening on my street when I felt I was watching a play. Carriages, first-class ones, drawn by teams of fine horses were pulling up in front of the theater down the way.

Normally, the doings at a place like that corroded old pit would never have interested me. I was the one who brought audiences and money to this street. But curiosity had me and I moved closer.

Henry Wotton’s carriage and handsome grays were there. I saw Basil Hallward walking with him. They made a point of not looking my way or recognizing me out of costume.

And suddenly, there was Dorian Gray! It seemed a miracle. The passage of a couple of years had taken away none of his beauty—had, in fact, appeared to leave him untouched. But the youth who was amused enough to keep my secret in Hallward’s garden was gone. I made sure I was seen by Dorian Gray.

He paused for a moment and I knew he remembered something. His expression was contemptuous as he turned without even a nod and passed into the theater with the other gentry. I was angry at the way I let this sting me.

As the crowd was filing in, I heard them talk about Sibyl Vane. She was a very young woman born and raised in the neighborhood. Everyone knew Sibyl and her older brother James, who had protected her since childhood. They reminded me a bit of my growing up in Dublin.

Their mother had once been an actress at this theater and now did wardrobes. A few years ago, Sibyl began acting in small parts. I heard more than one whisper that night that Sibyl was the fiancée of the wealthy Dorian Gray. “She calls him Prince Charming,” several told each other. After the look I’d seen him give me, I knew there was no charm in him, just an endless need to satisfy himself.

The very next day, I learned that he had broken off their engagement after finding that her acting didn’t meet his standards. Very shortly after that, she was dead. Some sad romantics said it was a broken heart. Others claimed it was suicide.

Her brother James was away. People in the neighborhood wondered what he would make of this when he returned and found out. I preferred he not return to avenge her. I would be so much better at this sort of thing.

The Sibyl Vane affair was the incident that turned me from a dislike of Dorian to pursuing rumors and evidence about him. I unearthed many fascinating things that floated in the wake of Mister Gray.

He ran through valets, getting rid of them for reasons they couldn’t understand. One who knew his time there was growing short told me that there was a room upstairs in the house, locked and padlocked. It was enough for Mister Gray to think you’d looked at that door to find you had lost your position.

That man, before he was dismissed, made for me a wax key for that door’s lock and another for a servants’ entry.

FOUR

The Cleveland Street Raid, that famous, clumsy piece of newspaper hysteria, occurred about two years after Dorian Gray abandoned Sibyl Vane.

For me, the raid, which changed my life, began with police whistles and a dozen nightsticks banging on the front door of Number 19. Voices announced they were the police (as if anyone else would be making such noise and knocking down doors well after midnight).

All the confusion, the broken glass, and the cries of those who woke up into a nightmare were things I’d heard at different moments all the way back to my childhood. They were part of my life.

I was awake that night and listening to a story one of Queen Victoria’s sailors, a young lieutenant, was telling me. In general, it’s a waste of time for a Mary-Ann to pay much attention to the babbling of the customers. They’re either telling you how much they love the wife who is unaware of this part of their life, or they are demanding that you do to them again the thing you did to them a short while before.

But this person was much different. Someone who knew my reputation and my interests, and knew also that the lieutenant was one like us, had sent him my way. The young officer had heard the name Hallward mentioned. And for personal reasons, it was preying on his mind.

The Basil Hallward disappearance on a simple trip from London to France the summer before was still a great mystery to us all.

A man the lieutenant had gone to school with, a scientist named Alan Campbell, had shot himself after breaking down and telling his friends of a crime he had committed.

It sounded like a nightmare. He said he’d been forced by blackmail to burn a human body down to ash and then to destroy the ash.

Friends thought he’d gone mad. And perhaps he had. My interest was in two names the lieutenant remembered him screaming: “Hallward and Dorian.”

Neither of them meant anything to my guest. But to me, it immediately sounded as though Dorian Gray had murdered Basil Hallward. That’s what was occupying my mind when the police arrived.

At the sound of the first police whistle, the lieutenant was out of bed and throwing on his clothes, swearing under his breath and terrified as he imagined his career in ruins.

I reined him in, peered through the eyehole in my door, drew on my best dress, the red silk one in which I always greeted important visitors. There wasn’t time to do anything about my makeup. But I always kept clothes of both sexes and my jewels and money close to me in case of a moment like this.

I whispered to the sailor what we were going to do, picked up my bag, and opened the door. Police were everywhere in the building, arresting boys, lesser Mary-Anns, and clients of no great importance.

But in the way of their creed, they were absolutely blind to the presence of an elderly lord, a frequent visitor to this house, who was staggering toward the front door.

I stepped out of my boudoir and the police saw me and nothing else. In a moment, a dozen of them had me surrounded. My standing there, looking right in their eyes, shocked and fascinated them so completely they couldn’t, for the moment, close their gaping mouths. While this distraction happened, the lieutenant took the lord (who was delighted) by the arm and slipped out the front door with him.

FIVE

In the chaos and confusion, the lawsuits and counter lawsuits, my loss of a home, my arrest, my being freed, a solicitor I had charmed approached me. A lawyer, a client of his, needed me for an action he was bringing, to let the public know what had happened on Cleveland Street. Stories were beginning to leak out in the press about a shoddy neighborhood where the police seldom came. Decent folk, or those who thought of themselves as such, were shocked. Oh, how could Queen Victoria and England survive the horror of an all-male whorehouse!

I was summoned as a witness. And this time, I was questioned and was allowed to speak. I talked about Mary-Anns like myself, about boys who sold themselves rather than starve. I told them all that and knew how to cry on the stand. I did not fail them. I stood tall and spoke the truth.

Newspapers picked all this up and I was proclaimed to be the most wicked man in England (and possibly the world). Oh, how a Mary-Ann or two and a few naked boys could bring down old Queen Vic and her government.

I wasn’t allowed back on the stand. But neither was I jailed. The solicitor whom I had charmed told me I was spared incarceration only because the authorities were afraid of what else I might say if I were allowed to speak again, and what names I might drop in open court.

No one, I was told, on any witness stand, Mary-Ann or not, had ever dared to accept himself.

All well and good, but I had to move. A boardinghouse near the riverfront was where I lived. Some clients followed me. Another book in which I further revealed my evil ways was published.

And I found a familiar face. Dorian Gray haunted opium dens and very rough houses. I stayed far out of his way as a certain plan formed.

I caught Dorian’s patterns, learned what nights he spent in the damp precincts, and how long he spent away from home. Yes, he still fascinated me.

When I had caught the patterns of his nights, I dressed as inconspicuously as possible and walked through his neighborhood from time to time until late one night, no one was walking on the street, and no lamps were lit in Dorian Gray’s fine house. I went around the back, slipped the key into the lock, and it turned.

Upstairs, in total silence and with a couple of matches, I found the locked door that was described. I turned the key and the door opened. I lit another match and there was the picture: the one I’d seen the time our paths first crossed. The beauty of that face was a fraud.

To let him know someone had been there, I plunged the key right into the heart of the figure. I closed the door and crept out of the building.

I heard from others who were nearby that night. The man who uttered the horrible scream and died with eyes wide as if seeing some horror was identified as Dorian Gray.

I am no avenging angel. I am a Mary-Ann and nothing more.

A career like mine does not last long. But I will pack up what property I have and return to Dublin and see if “Satan’s Luck” follows me still.

In 1965, after graduating from Hofstra University, Boston-born RICHARD BOWES moved to Manhattan, where he has lived ever since. In the last thirty-five years he’s authored five novels, most recent of which are Minions of the Moon and From the Files of the Time Rangers. Bowes has published almost eighty short stories in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Fantasy, and Icarus and in original anthologies such as Echoes, Black Feathers, After, Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, and Supernatural Noir. He is the recipient of the Million Writers Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Lambda Award, and the International Horror Guild Award.

SECONDHAND BODIES

NEON YANG

“Admit it, the only option left for that body is getting rid of it.”

Cousin Aloysius says this as he sprawls uninvited along the length of my bed, and I hate him for that. I hate the carefully browned skin on his shoulders and the deliberately rumpled edges of his collar. I hate the way he’s kicking one faux-suede heel against the bed’s heirloom oak paneling, leaving tiny ding after tiny ding on the priceless surface.

Most of all I hate the smug upturn of his lips and the way his eyes stay critically on my mound of belly-fat. I turn my back on him and study the displeasing, embarrassing shape it makes of me in the mirror.

“It’s just a bit of fat,” I say, but even the word feels uncomfortable on my tongue. Clumsy and unwieldy. When I tap my fingers on my belly I feel it jiggle in alien geometry.

Cousin Aloysius laughs.

Good cousin Aloysius has an easy smile and an internship in a big bank and a judge’s daughter for a girlfriend. When we were both seven he took my neural calibrator and hurled it into the storm drain quarantining our schoolyard from invading tendrils of forest. I wailed as the device sank irretrievably into rotting leaves and organic muck. “Cry what cry, your father can afford to replace that shit, right?” he had taunted.

He was already good cousin Aloysius back then, while I was only scabby-kneed loud-voiced cousin Agatha, so guess who got the blame? Daddy had been so angry, his rough hand bruised one corner of my cheekbone. “You want to become stuck in your own body? I’ll leave you there, you know!” Aloysius had laughed at the mottled skin on my face. He thought it was funny.

Cheap cousin Aloysius. Tacky cousin Aloysius.

He continues to kick my bed. “Don’t embarrass the family. Chinese New Year is in three months and I’m bringing my girlfriend. Are you going to diet like a pleb?”

I have bad genes. My mother’s mother had a round face and a body that bulged like a beehive, a victim of bad metabolism that spared my mother but resurfaced in me, her wayward daughter. Much as clinicians have tried to iron out the kinks in my DNA, each body they generate still goes soft and gelatinous within months. This is my fourth body since I turned twenty. Nothing sticks, not diets, not exercise. Only overhauls.

Rumors say one company has found a permanent fix to the metabolism problem. Vivaco has won awards and gathered effusive praise worldwide. They’re reputable, oh, we know they work. But they only grow sixty bodies per year, to an exclusive pipeline of suppliers. Money problems are no obstacle to me, but this isn’t a money problem. This is a who-you-know problem.

Cousin Aloysius has clinician friends who are supplied by Vivaco. Clinician friends who make a killing in reselling discarded bodies. Clinician friends who give him a cut for every client brought in and every financial transaction covered up.

Cheap cousin Aloysius has a smile that could cut flesh. Tacky cousin Aloysius says, “If you’re willing to resell that lump you have, I can set you up with my friend.”

And because I’m vulnerable, because I’m desperate, because I think what else have I got to lose? I say yes.

To illegally sell your body takes a surprising amount of extra work. There’s extra scans to be done, extra things to be mapped, extra things to agree to. And all the fake paperwork: Guarantee of incineration. Waiver of indemnity. Dissolution of joint patent over the body.

The law highlights body recycling in big red bold font and a bunch of big red Xs, of course, but even idiots know that where there’s a demand, there’s a way to get a hold of things. The black market in secondhand bodies thrives, even in neat shiny little Singapore.

Dr. Subramaniam has a yearly quota of six orders from Vivaco. Not all buyers resell. To be offered you have to be introduced by friends, his network of enablers like Cousin Aloysius.

The doctor is a lot classier than I expected. Nicely done-up office, modern lighting, no tasteless looping posters selling the wonders of nanotech surgery. He has dry hands and a warm smile, perfectly paired with his doctor’s manner. Talks a lot too, like a doctor. About massaging the DNA and changing the face for the recipient. Some nonsense about identity.

“I don’t care about that,” I tell him. “I want to know when. Can it be done by Christmas?”

Dr. Subramaniam smiles. “Of course. The major issue is usually finding a second client—you know, you can’t just hand over the body to any Tom, Dick, or Harry. But luckily for you we have the perfect candidate.”

He turns a screen towards me.

I am confused. There are pictures of a woman—the same woman— but she cannot possibly be the client. Because she is beautiful. She is so beautiful the bottom of my heart falls away and empties its contents into the deepest pits of envy. Long limbs. Slender. Obsidian-skinned. The face of an Indian beauty pageant queen: wide lips, sharp cheekbones, high forehead. Eyes luminous. Dark hair spills everywhere, loosely curled and seemingly endless. Her face glows, and a universe of possibilities shines out of it.

“Is this a joke?” I ask. “She looks like a model. Why would she swap that for this lump?”

Dr. Subramaniam makes a soft noise. “You really have no idea, do you?” No, I don’t. And he’s not answering my question either.

The screen says her name is “Maryam.” Maryam. I form the word softly on my tongue, feeling the roll of its Rs, the softness of its vowels, the folds of its consonants. I imagine whispering it into the dark shell of her ear. I am in love. I am in love.

“Is there a problem?” asks Dr. Subramaniam.

No. Yes. No. How am I supposed to answer? The idea of a problem, a thing that can be solved, is too prosaic for the beauty in front of me.

Buyers and sellers of bodies don’t meet. Too much potential for awkwardness afterwards—it’s not the done thing. But I don’t care. Since when have I allowed the rules to restrict me?

“I want to meet her,” I finally say. I will brook no dissent. Dr. Subramaniam has already lost the argument. He just doesn’t know it yet. She’s even more beautiful in real life.

Skin that shimmers in the afternoon. Curves like a champagne glass, subtle and refined. Light clings to her on the verandah of my favorite café, the one with the red velvet cake that is to die for. Perfect makeup, not slathered on tastelessly but just enough to highlight her lovely features. Her smiles are tiny little things that reveal only teasing glimpses of her piano-white teeth. I take in her toned arms and the shape of bones in her ankles. Everything about her pleases me.

“I was born in the Philippines,” she says, when I ask her to tell me about herself. She has a voice like the velvet cake we’re eating, smooth and rich. “My father was a Singaporean, an Indian man, so we moved here when I was a baby. He passed away when I was very young, but my mother had already gotten her permanent residency so she decided to stay and work. She raised me alone.”

“Okay,” I say.

Maryam looks at me as if waiting for something else, but I shrug.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“Yup.” Her past is of little interest to me, honestly. Just making small talk. “How’s the cake?”

She has a tiny, fluttery laugh, like a hummingbird’s wing, like a potted indoor plant. “Oh, it’s good. It’s good. It’s very good.” I smile and pat her hand.

We talk about my work, my blogging and reviewing, until we’ve wrung the topics dry and the words peter out. Silence congeals between us.

“Come home with me,” I say. Mother is in Europe until her spring collection launches, and Daddy could live in his office for all I care. I have the house to myself.

She bites her plump lower lip, and I see trepidation simmering in her. “I’m not a serial killer,” I joke. “Why would I hurt you? I need a buyer!” I laugh, she doesn’t.

“May I make a phone call?” she asks, standing up.

I look at her face—there’s uncertainty there, but not animal fear. “Leave your wallet,” I say anyway, just in case.

So she does. She’s gone a long time, and I wonder if she’s just run off anyway, abandoning her tacky little PVC purse. My strong personality has no doubt left a bad impression on her. But that’s how I am with people. Stubbornness turns people off. It’s a blessing, it’s a curse. To calm myself down I stroke the surface of her wallet, which reassures me that she’ll be back. It’s her loss if she doesn’t. And I do so want her to come back.

She does return, holding her phone like a talisman. Whoever it was she was speaking to has calmed her down, because she’s smiling, a full, toothy smile. She sits down, and her voice is soft and high and musical as she says, “I’ll go with you.” I like that tone of voice. It’s sweet, it’s supple, it’s malleable.

So I bring her home, filling the car ride with pleasant small talk. Maryam acts like she’s never seen a house as big and multilayered as ours before. She walks around the cavernous living room with her eyes wide, long fingers trailing the air over the glass sculptures and the molded furniture but never really touching it.

“Come upstairs to my room,” I say. “I want to show you something.”

My room is rosy in the afternoon sun that filters through the generous French paneling. As Maryam looks over into the garden and koi pond I get undressed in front of the mirror. Unclothed I stand in the middle of the room, ankles deep in white sheepskin rug, until she turns around.

She doesn’t even look surprised. The afternoon sun backlights her hair like a halo. I hold my hands out. “Here.”

Maryam walks around my naked body with a faun’s gait. There is wonder in her eyes. Wonder and joy. I feel vindicated for bringing her back here.

One tentative hand stretches out and hesitates millimeters from the skin of my arm. My hairs stand and my flesh shivers as those shy fingers of hers ghost over me. “It’s okay to touch,” I say.

Her fingers land, warm and radiant against my white skin. She presses once into the yielding flesh before her fingers depart, and move to my shoulder, my chest. Heat curls deep in my belly and I bite my lower lip.

Her hand moves downwards to my midsection, which sinks under her touch. She pushes gently on the fat, feeling its softness, its generous give. “This is it? This is why you want to change your body?”

I nod. A small sound comes out of her, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “The doctor said it was something small, but this—” She looks me straight in the eye, and it feels like it’s for the first time. “This I can live with.”

Her gaze is hypnotic. I gently close one hand over hers and slide it downwards, towards the waiting ocean. I see the meaning of my gesture catch in her face, and there’s no surprise there: She knows what I want. She’ll give it to me. Deliberately, she brings my hand to her full lips and kisses it.

Her sundress comes off easily, like a dandelion shedding its coat in the wind. She plays my body like a stringed instrument, quick nimble fingers drawing gasps out of me effortlessly. I lay her down on the thick carpet and kiss every inch of her body, her supple and rice-fed, sun-warmed body, firm and yielding at the same time. When I have her in my mouth she makes salt on my tongue and birdsong in her throat.

Walls break and reservoirs of pleasure wash over us. In their wake we lie like debris, breathing deep, sweat evaporating into the air conditioning. I decide, right there and then, that Maryam will not do the swap, no matter what. Dr. Subramaniam will have to find another buyer. I will convince her to stay perfect, right the way she is. I’m very good at that, convincing people when I have to. Getting my way is a survival skill.

I turn to her with a soft smile. “What do you think?”

She doesn’t return my smile, gaze fixed on the ceiling. Her voice is dreamy. “It’s something like a fairy tale, this place you live in. This life. I wouldn’t have believed something like that existed.”

A smile blossoms on my face. There’s my hook, there’s my opening. Lucky for me she was underprivileged, raised by one working parent. It makes my life an easier sell. I stroke the skin of her arm. “There’s plenty more where this comes from.”

Now she does look at me. “More?”

“You saw my car, the Volkswagen. But I have a Ferrari. It’s in the back. Yellow, kind of loud and tacky, but it’s a fun drive. You can try it, if you want.”

She makes that little not-laugh-not-sigh sound of amusement. I pull her closer. “Live with me. The house has plenty of space, you can see. I’ll show you all of the wonders, like they said: a whole new world of things. You can be my Princess Jasmine, and I’ll be your Aladdin.”

Her fingers grip the sheepskin. “And every night one of these magic carpet rides?”

“Took the words out of my mouth.” I kiss her on the cheek. “How about it?”

Maryam looks back up at the ceiling. Time elapses in agonising seconds before she nods.

And so begin my days of propaganda, my campaign of love; a four-week affection bombardment, my version of shock and awe. I fill our room with gifts: colored silks and precious stones and perfumes for the wrists and hair. “Those dresses look perfect on you,” I tell her. “The colors match your dark skin so well.” She merely smiles at my compliments, but I think she looks pleased.

I feel indulgent, just like a sheik of old, showering luxuries on my beloved. Or like a genie, wreathing her in magic. Prince Ali, marvelous he, Ali Ababwa.

I split our days like this. The nights are ours, a delightful confection of warm sheets and soft skin. Mornings are given over to work, phone calls and empales; afternoons I take her shopping; evenings she accompanies me to parties and events. Club openings, product launches, parties with $5000-a-bottle champagnes. My Maryam absolutely shines in them, my little black diamond. People coo and gather around her, sometimes dragging her off to corners to have one-on-one conversations. She’s the belle of the ball and I couldn’t be prouder.

Maryam has surprises in store for me, too. Like on the morning after the first day we spent making love, when she crawled out of the bed in the darkness of six a.m. to search for her things on the floor. “Where are you going?” I’d asked.

“Home,” she’d said, her voice sleep-hoarse and crackly. “I need to get dressed for work. It’s Monday.”

“Take the day off.” Shouldn’t she be quitting her job anyway, if she was soon to commit identity fraud?

Turned out she still had a few weeks left to serve on her contract, with some PR agency I’d heard of but never bothered with. “Just leave,” I’d instructed. “I’ll pay off the balance. Surely your contract has a clause for that.”

“Look, my immediate boss knows what I’m going to do, and she’s agreed to write job testimonials for my new identity. I’ve got her full support; I don’t want to burn that bridge.” Her voice had gone a little glacial then, as she added, “Maybe you can afford that, but I can’t.”

Stubborn as you like, this one. Eventually I persuaded her to stay home with the promises of job referrals. There’s plenty a marketing and PR rock star like you can do in my line of work, I tell her, sweet words rolling off my tongue. I know all the people you should meet.

In my final plan for her, she won’t be working at all. Why would she need a day job that would take her away from spending time with me? No, I get it, seriously I do: Maryam wants a better life, and she thinks becoming Chinese will do it for her. I read this stuff on the internet, too. But why bother with doing it herself, when I can simply give it to her?

I only have to get her acceptance. Which I’m working on.

I’m not a fool. I know she is far from swayed by me. She spends a lot of her time on the phone, hiding in bathrooms or whispering private conversations in corners. When I ask her who she’s talking to I get a dismissive “a friend,” or sometimes “colleagues.” I know lies when I hear them. I contemplate taking her phone, or smashing it into a thousand tiny glittering bits and blaming it on an accident.

But no, there are other ways of achieving my means, subtler ways to get her to drop her life plans. I need her willing and ready.

In bed one night she whispers to me, voice thinned by wistfulness, “You know, people treat me a lot better when I’m with you.”

I smile and squeeze her hand. “Of course they do. My influence counts for something, darling.” Something that even a new body won’t afford you. Maryam’s face changes in the dim light as she considers this, and wordlessly she pushes her face into my shoulder.

It’ll all work out, you’ll see.

At one of the cocktail parties, Cousin Aloysius shows up, the judge’s daughter on his arm, oval-faced and slender-hipped. I introduce her to Maryam, and while they make small talk on the verandah, Cousin Aloysius pulls me aside. “So,” he says, voice dripping sulphur, “you’re taking her on a grand tour of your body or what? Showing her how all the plumbing works?”

I roll my eyes, even as my chest fills with fire that might be hurt pride or indignation. “We’re in love,” I spit at him, and it sounds like I believe it. “It’s for real, and she’s going to forgo her part of the swap. You’ll see.”

Cousin Aloysius makes an indignant A shape with his arms. “And then what? She’s going to live under your table, eating your scraps?”

“She can write. I’ll let her take over my blog while I run the events business.”

Cousin Aloysius laughs with a sound like a small dog barking. “You’re a fucking idiot.” He slaps me on the back, much harder than he needs to. Leaning close, he whispers, “Don’t fuck this deal up for me, Agatha.” And then he’s back out to the verandah before the goosebumps finish prickling over my skin.

Maryam has vanished into the folds of the party. I push through the spangled, suited crowd looking for her crown of curled hair, for flashes of her dark skin. Nothing. She isn’t in the washroom or by the bar. She can’t have left without me, can she? I go back out onto the verandah and ask the judge’s daughter where Maryam is, but she doesn’t know. “Perhaps she went for a smoke?”

Maryam doesn’t smoke, but on a whim I go out to the smoking area near the carpark anyway. Nothing but a rangy cluster of service staff shrouded in their own cancercloud. A waste of time. I turn to leave—and that’s when I see her.

Hidden behind a pillar a stone’s throw from the smoking area, but given away by the heft of her hair, Maryam is in intense conversation with another woman. One of the serving staff in the club, still clad in uniform. Something’s going on. I stick to shadow as I walk up, hoping to eavesdrop on something telling.

They kiss.

My muscles freeze as my guts turn to liquid. The kiss is not even a tentative one, the hesitant half-breath first-kiss type. This is the full-on, tongues-recruited, chest-to-chest kiss of the longtime lover. The kiss you share when nobody else is looking.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. I don’t know why I’m disappointed. But I am, I am, I am.

They break apart and the rapid-fire Tagalog begins. So this is the true identity of Maryam’s phone conversation partner. I clench and unclench my hands. Enough. I step into a streetlight. “Something you want to tell me, darling?”

Maryam doesn’t even have the decency to look dismayed. “What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you. Guess what I found.”

Maryam’s chin tilts upwards defiantly. “This is my girlfriend, Belinda,” she says.

The woman glares at me, stone-faced. “You were going to mention this at which point?”

“Never, because you didn’t bother to ask. And it wouldn’t have stopped you anyway. Would it?”

No, it wouldn’t. That’s not the point. I look at my rival’s face. Belinda. Her face is moon-like, rough brows and broad nose. Yes, I recognize her, I’ve been a patron of this club long enough. Belinda. She’s one of the senior serving staff.

This is her. This is the woman that Maryam would choose over me. This worm. Belinda. My heart curdles in my chest. I will not see this woman’s face when I come here again. I refuse.

I march straight inside the club and summon the night manager. Benny. A good guy. “You need to come see this,” I tell him, and I pull him outside.

Maryam and Belinda are still engaged in deep and intense foreign chatter when we come up. Belinda’s face goes rabbit-like when she sees I’ve brought her boss. “This member of your staff has been soliciting one of my guests,” I declare. “Is this behavior condoned by your establishment?”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Maryam blurts, trying to step between Belinda and Benny.

She might as well be invisible. Benny remains stone-faced, stern. “You know our policies,” he says to Belinda. “Go inside and pack your things.”

Belinda’s face crumples like so much paper. “But, sir—”

“Just go.”

And she does. Benny turns to me. “I apologize for this. I’ll speak to the rest of the staff and let them know this sort of behavior is unacceptable.”

“I understand,” I tell him. “No worries. Sorry for keeping you from your duties.” He’s a good guy, as I said.

Maryam stands where she is, breathing in and out hard enough that I can see the movement of her chest in the lamplight. “I’m saving you from bad choices,” I inform her. “You can’t be hanging out with this sort of low-class person if you want to get anywhere.”

She turns to me with a smile that resembles a shark’s. “You know, just when I thought you couldn’t get any more despicable, you actually do.” And she storms off. Where to? Where can she run to? She’s stuck with me. I still have what she wants.

The moment Maryam gets home she flings open the closet and starts pulling out clothes. Only the cheap, ugly ones she’d brought with her. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” She pulls her carry-bag from a drawer. “Do you think I’m still going to keep up this charade? After what you’ve done?”

The sweetness and suppleness is gone from her voice. It’s as if a spell has been broken, and my malleable Maryam has been replaced with a spitting, angry caricature. But no, the pleasing confection has been the illusion all along, a crafted mirage of a lovely woman whom I could work on, who actually appreciated all I had been doing for her. I feel betrayed by my own dreams, by my own foolish feelings.

“I loved you,” I say, a last-gasp attempt at reconciliation. “I wanted you to stay with me forever.”

Maryam slaps a toiletries bag on the table with more force than necessary. “You have no idea how to love a person.”

“Says the lying, gold-digging backstabber.”

Maryam shoves the carry-bag full of her possessions. It bulges with cheap, tacky items—she takes only what she had brought over here. Trying to zip it up, she says, “Dr. Subramaniam said you were going to cancel the sale if I didn’t give in to your demands. So I did everything you wanted. But guess what? It’s too late to pull the plug on the deal now, I called and checked. So fuck you, fuck the car you drove in with, and I’ll see you never.”

The bag’s cheap zipper gives up the ghost with a plastic snap, and she slings the bag on her shoulder with it still open, contents swinging and yawing. “You think nobody loves you because your body doesn’t fit some fucked-up definition of the perfect woman. Well, no. Nobody loves you because you’re a miserable ugly-hearted lump of shit who cares only about herself.”

“I cared about you!” I did. I did.

She laughs as she leaves. Her laughter echoes all the way up the stairs. I stand in the middle of the room, my skin clammy, my mind swinging like a solar system cut free of gravity. I remember Cousin Aloysius’s schoolyard pranks, how they made me feel. This is worse. The failure is acid. The humiliation stings.

The liquidity in my gut, lingering from earlier in the evening, catches fire. Maryam thinks she can fuck with me? She doesn’t know the meaning of that word.

I call Dr. Subramaniam to check on the progress of my Vivaco order. It’s coming along, it’s nearly done: “It’s too late to change your mind,” he says, simply.

In essence, he’s saying nothing I do can mess with the transfer on my end. It’s still going to happen, for me at least. Even if the other half of the swap is canceled. Even if, let’s just say, something terrible and irreversible happens to the body I’m reselling.

Drastic times require drastic measures—that’s always been my philosophy. I wait until it rains, turning the roads into ice-slick ribbons with no grip, before I get behind the wheel of the yellow Ferrari.

Deep pain begets deep pain. I tell this to myself in the split second between the wheels leaving the road and the roof coming towards me.

The accident shattered my pelvis, broke four ribs, and punctured a lung. One of my vertebrae cracked and the doctor said I was lucky, I could have been permanently paralysed, even beyond the help of nanosurgery. If even the wiring is broken there’s nothing to transplant into a new body, nothing to set roots into.

I hadn’t even thought of that. I’d dropped bodies so often I’d forgotten how easily they can be maimed beyond repair. How easy it is to forget we’re mortal.

Well, as the doctor said. I’m lucky.

Mother wants to come back from Europe, but I say it’s hardly necessary. Both she and Daddy feel guilty enough that they offer to pay for a new body. Isn’t it nice that I already have one from Vivaco all lined up? Daddy nods with approval. He knows Dr. Subramaniam, friend of a friend of a friend. “Next time don’t arrange these kinds of things without telling me,” he admonishes, but he lets it drop there. Feeling magnanimous to his injured daughter, I guess.

My hospital room fills with flowers and fruit baskets and ludicrous Mylar balloons, the last sent by people who clearly don’t know me very well. Cousin Aloysius is conspicuously absent from the visiting stream of relatives and well-wishers. His only communiqué comes in the form of a text. It’s four words long: “You fucking selfish bitch.”

I don’t care. I don’t need him any longer. Cheap cousin Aloysius. Tacky cousin Aloysius.

On the fourth day of hospitalization Maryam comes to see me. She’s dressed like a pleb again, her hair tangled like brambles over her shoulders, her face plain and shiny. In place of her sweet expression there is a shark’s smile as she sets down the largest, cheapest, ugliest floral arrangement possible on my bedside table.

“I picked it specially for you,” she says. “It was so horrible, you were the first thing I thought of.”

Fine, I can play along. “What’s it for?”

“To thank you.” She sits on the edge of my bed, crouched like a spider. “I was so sold on swapping out this body. But four weeks with you opened my eyes. I realized that if I went through with it I’d be faking all the time. That every day of my life with a secondhand body would have been misery.”

She shudders like an actor in a community play. I see now that the light that I saw in her, that ineffable glow, is actually more of a forest fire, untamable and terrible. I could have let this woman burn me. I could have let her laser shark teeth chew right through me. Dodged a bullet right there.

“What a fool you are,” she says. “You thought you could punish me by doing this, didn’t you? But hey, you saved me from forfeiting a hefty deposit from canceling my half of the swap. It’s not my fault that the sale didn’t go through now, is it?”

She stands up, smug as a fishmonger who has won a marketplace quarrel. Her hair swings as she turns on her heel. “So take these awful flowers, with my compliments. And enjoy the rest of your fucking miserable life.”

“The same to you,” I spit. She walks out of my life, easy as she had entered it.

My new body arrives and is perfect. Home from the hospital, I dance naked in front of my room mirror, admiring Vivaco’s handiwork. A week since the transfer but I’m still not used to how light and supple it feels. The skin is white and flawless, the stomach flat and firm as a store mannequin’s. I watch muscles ripple pleasingly as I turn and bend.

I’m so pleased. Maryam, who needs her? I shed the memory and desire I had for her like an old skin. She can go back to her pathetic life and her substandard girlfriend, and stay there until she rots. It was just as well that abomination of a body, tainted by her touch, was destroyed. Dr. Subramanian hadn’t been able to find a new buyer. Good riddance.

I spin on my heel and nearly lose my balance as a tremor seizes my leg. I sink into the sheepskin, frowning. Glitches are common in the first weeks post-transfer, when the nervous system is still learning the ropes of its new body, but they’re supposed to get better, not worse. I massage my calf. Surely a company as storied as Vivaco wouldn’t have given me something defective.

A rumble in the driveway. I pull on a bathrobe, open one of the French windows, and peer out. It’s Cousin Aloysius.

The last time he came here he had an agenda. What does he want this time?

He enters my room, a sly fox, the smile on his face beguiling. “I came to see how you were doing, my dearest cousin. Now that you’re finally back home from all your hospital visits.”

I stand up, full height, as Cousin Aloysius circles the room like a vulture, like a military inspector. My hands go to my hip. “I’m perfect.”

“Pity about the swap failing, huh.”

“Yes, a real pity.” I narrow my eyes as Cousin Aloysius peers out of my open window. If he’s here for an apology, he’s not going to get it.

As he turns around one of my hands shakes violently and slips from my hip. I let it go, but it hangs by my side, twitching and shaking like it has a mind of its own. Cousin Aloysius sees it and his smile widens. “Having a little problem with tremors, huh?”

There’s some meaning hidden in his words, layered like organic rot. “What do you mean?”

“You know, studies have begun to emerge from respected journals. Turns out there are risks associated with doing so many body swaps. Too much nano surgery and the nerve endings start to degrade in some cases. It’s rare, but it’s been known to happen.”

“What have you done?”

“It’s a gradual process. First you get shaking in the extremities, which get progressively worse. Soon you’ll lose feeling in your feet and hands, and then major motor control will eventually go. It takes a few months. It’s almost exactly like being poisoned with slow neurotoxin.”

“You low lives, you scum,” I scream, “What have you done?” My arms are shaking now, and I can’t tell if it’s from rage or my poisoned nerves.

“You really fucked us over, Agatha. The paperwork we filed had serial numbers, and now they don’t match with the documentation of the actual incineration. Do you know how quick the police are to pick up on that shit?” Cousin Aloysius sits on the edge of the windowsill, arms folded, smile like broken glass. “Consider this a gift from the both of us, dearest cousin. If we’re going to rot in jail, you might as well rot with us.”

When we were seven, Cousin Aloysius threw my calibrator into a storm drain, and laughed as my father beat me for it. The look on his face then matches the look on his face now, a brittle and bitter triumph, a bastion of cheap tacky one-upmanship. The window is open and the sunlight fills my room with an incandescent glow. Beneath it, the koi pond waits with its silt water and rocky bottom, sharp points waiting to meet Cousin Aloysius’s spine. My legs are still working, for now. Still active and able to accept my will, for now. I run forward.

I savor the surprised look on Cousin Aloysius’s face as he goes over, his face finally scrubbed of its smugness, headed for the organic slime layer waiting to suck his broken body into its depths. I stand at the window and watch pond water thrash in disturbance, and exhale. My hands won’t shake if I grip the windowsill hard enough. Just another body to get rid of.

NEON YANG is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor. Com Publishing, which have been variously shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. Their debut novel, The Genesis of Misery, will be out from Tor Books in 2022. Neon is queer, non-binary, and lives in Singapore. Find them on Twitter as @itsneonyang, and otherwise at http://neonyang.com.

SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON

AMAL EL-MOHTAR

Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes.

She has been thinking about shoes for a very long time: the length of three and a half pairs, to be precise, though it’s hard to reckon in iron. Easier to reckon how many pairs are left: of the seven she set out with, three remain, strapped securely against the outside of the pack she carries, weighing it down. The seasons won’t keep still, slip past her with the landscape, so she can’t say for certain whether a year of walking wears out a sole, but it seems about right. She always means to count the steps, starting with the next pair, but it’s easy to get distracted.

She thinks about shoes because she cannot move forward otherwise: each iron strap cuts, rubs, bruises, blisters, and her pain fuels their ability to cross rivers, mountains, airy breaches between cliffs. She must move forward, or the shoes will never be worn down. The shoes must be worn down.

It’s always hard to strap on a new pair.

Three pairs of shoes ago, she was in a pine forest, and the sharp green smell of it woke something in her, something that was more than numbness, numbers. (Number? I hardly know ’er! She’d laughed for a week, off and on, at her little joke.) She shivered in the needled light, bundled her arms into her fur cloak but stretched her toes into the autumn earth, and wept to feel, for a moment, something like free— before the numbers crept in with the cold, and one down, six to go found its way into her relief that it was, in fact, possible to get through a single pair in a lifetime.

Two pairs of shoes ago, she was in the middle of a lake, striding across the deep blue of it, when the last scrap of sole gave way. She collapsed and floundered as she undid the straps, scrambled to pull the next pair off her pack, sank until she broke a toe in jamming them on, then found herself on the surface again, limping toward the far shore.

One pair of shoes ago, she was by the sea. She soaked her feet in salt and stared up at the stars and wondered whether drowning would hurt.

She recalls shoes her brothers have worn: a pair of seven-league boots, tooled in soft leather; winged sandals; satin slippers that turned one invisible. How strange, she thinks, that her brothers had shoes that lightened their steps and tightened the world, made it small and easy to explore, discover.

Perhaps, she thinks, it isn’t strange at all: why shouldn’t shoes help their wearers travel? Perhaps, she thinks, what’s strange is the shoes women are made to wear: shoes of glass; shoes of paper; shoes of iron heated red-hot; shoes to dance to death in.

How strange, she thinks, and walks.

Amira makes an art of stillness.

She sits atop a high glass hill, its summit shaped into a throne of sorts, thick and smooth, perfectly suited to her so long as she does not move. Magic girdles her, roots her stillness through the throne. She has weathered storms here, the sleek-fingered rain glistening between glass and gown, hair and skin, seeking to shift her this way or that—but she has held herself straight, upright, a golden apple in her lap.

She is sometimes hungry, but the magic looks after that; she is often tired, and the magic encourages sleep. The magic keeps her brown skin from burning during the day, and keeps her silkshod feet from freezing at night— so long as she is still, so long as she keeps her glass seat atop her glass hill.

From her vantage point she can see a great deal: farmers working their land; travelers walking from village to village; the occasional robbery or murder. There is much she would like to come down from her hill and tell people, but for the suitors.

Clustered and clamoring around the bottom of her glass hill are the knights, princes, shepherds’ lads who have fallen violently in love with her. They shout encouragement to one another as they ride their warhorses up the glass hill, breaking against it in wave after wave, reaching for her.

As they slide down the hill, their horses foaming, legs twisted or shattered, they scream curses at her: the cunt, the witch, can’t she see what she’s doing to them, glass whore on a glass hill, they’ll get her tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Amira grips her golden apple. By day she distracts herself with birds: all the wild geese who fly overhead, the gulls and swifts and swallows, the larks. She remembers a story about nettle shirts thrown up to swans, and wonders if she could reach up and pluck a feather from them to give herself wings.

By night, she strings shapes around the stars, imagines familiar constellations into difference: suppose the great ladle was a sickle instead, or a bear? When she runs out of birds and stars, she remembers that she chose this.

Tabitha first sees the glass hill as a knife’s edge of light, scything a green swathe across her vision before she can look away. She is stepping out of a forest; the morning sun is vicious, bright with no heat in it; the frosted grass crunches under the press of her iron heels, but some of it melts cold relief against the skin exposed through the straps.

She sits at the forest’s edge and watches the light change.

There are men at the base of the hill; their noise is a dull ringing that reminds her of the ocean. She watches them spur their horses into bleeding. Strong magic in that hill, she thinks, to make men behave so foolishly; strong magic in that hill to withstand so many iron hooves.

She looks down at her own feet, then up at the hill. She reckons the quality of her pain in numbers, but not by degree: if her pain is a six it is because it is cold, blue with an edge to it; if her pain is a seven it is red, inflamed, bleeding; if her pain is a three it has a rounded yellow feel, dull and perhaps draining infection.

Her pain at present is a five, green and brown, sturdy and stable, and ought to be enough to manage the ascent.

She waits until sunset, and sets out across the clearing.

Amira watches a mist rise as the sun sets, and her heart sings to see everything made so soft: a great cool hush over all, a smell of water with no stink in it, no blood or sweat. She loves to see the world so vanished, so quiet, so calm.

Her heart skips a beat when she hears the scraping, somewhere beneath her, somewhere within the mist: a grinding, scouring sort of noise, steady as her nerves aren’t, because something is climbing the glass hill and this isn’t how it was supposed to work, no one is supposed to be able to reach her, but magic is magic is magic and there is always stronger magic— She thinks it is a bear, at first, then sees it is a furred hood, glimpses a pale delicate chin beneath it, a wide mouth twisted into a teeth-gritting snarl from the effort of the climb.

Amira stares, uncertain, as the hooded, horseless stranger reaches the top, and stops, and stoops, and pants, and sheds the warm weight of the fur. Amira sees a woman, and the woman sees her, and the woman looks like a feather and a sword and very, very hungry.

Amira offers up her golden apple without a word.

Tabitha had thought the woman in front of her a statue, a copper ornament, an idol, until her arm moved. Some part of her feels she should pause before accepting food from a magical woman on a glass hill, but it’s dwarfed by a ravenousness she’s not felt in weeks; in the shoes, she mostly forgets about her stomach until weakness threatens to prevent her from putting one foot in front of the other.

The apple doesn’t look like food, but she bites into it, and the skin breaks like burnt sugar, the flesh drips clear, sweet juice. She eats it, core and all, before looking at the woman on the throne again and saying— with a gruffness she does not feel or intend—“Thank you.”

“My name is Amira,” says the woman, and Tabitha marvels at how she speaks without moving any other part of her body, how measured are the mechanics of her mouth. “Have you come to marry me?”

Tabitha stares. She wipes the juice from her chin, as if that could erase the golden apple from her belly. “Do I have to?”

Amira blinks. “No. Only—that’s why people try to climb the hill, you know.”

“Oh. No, I just—” Tabitha coughs, slightly, embarrassed. “I’m just passing through.”

Silence.

“The mist was thick, I got turned around—”

“You climbed”—Amira’s voice is very quiet—“a glass hill”—and even—“by accident?”

Tabitha fidgets with the hem of her shirt.

“Well,” says Amira, “it’s nice to meet you, ah—”

“Tabitha.”

“Yes. Very nice to meet you, Tabitha.”

Further silence. Tabitha chews her bottom lip while looking down into the darkness at the base of the hill. Then, quietly: “Why are you even up here?”

Amira looks at her coolly. “By accident.”

Tabitha snorts. “I see. Very well. Look.” Tabitha points to her iron-strapped feet. “I have to wear the shoes down. They’re magic. I have a notion that the stranger the surface—the harder it would be to walk on something usually—the faster the sole diminishes. So your magical hill here . . .”

Amira nods, or at least it seems to Tabitha that she nods—it may have been more of a lengthened blink that conveyed the impression of her head’s movement.

“. . . it seemed like just the thing. I didn’t know there was anyone at the top, though; I waited until the men at the bottom had left, as they seemed a nasty lot—”

It isn’t that Amira shivers, but that the quality of her stillness grows denser. Tabitha feels something like alarm beginning a dull ring in her belly.

“They leave as the nights turn colder. You’re more than welcome to stay,” says Amira, in tones of deepest courtesy, “and scrape your shoes against the glass.”

Tabitha nods, and stays, because somewhere within the measured music of Amira’s words she hears please.

Amira feels half-asleep, sitting and speaking with someone who isn’t about to destroy her, break her apart for the half kingdom inside.

“Have they placed you up here?” Tabitha asks, and Amira finds it strange to hear anger that isn’t directed at her, anger that seems at her service.

“No,” she says softly. “I chose this.” Then, before Tabitha can say anything else, “Why do you walk in iron shoes?”

Tabitha’s mouth is open but her words are stopped up, and Amira can see them changing direction like a flock of starlings in her throat. She decides to change the subject.

“Have you ever heard the sound geese make when they fly overhead? I don’t mean the honking, everyone hears that, but—their wings. Have you ever heard the sound of their wings?”

Tabitha smiles a little. “Like thunder, when they take off from a river.”

“What? Oh.” A pause; Amira has never seen a river. “No—it’s nothing like that when they fly above you. It’s . . . a creaking, like a stove door with no squeak in it, as if the geese are machines dressed in flesh and feathers. It’s a beautiful sound—beneath the honking it’s a low drone, but if they’re flying quietly, it’s like . . . clothing, somehow, like if you listened just right, you might find yourself wearing wings.”

Without noticing, Amira had closed her eyes while speaking of the geese; she opens them to see Tabitha looking at her with curious focus, and feels briefly disoriented by the scrutiny. She isn’t used to being listened to.

“If we’re lucky,” she says softly, turning a golden apple around and around in her hands, “we’ll hear some tonight. It’s the right time of year.”

Tabitha opens her mouth, then shuts it so hard her back teeth meet. She does not ask how long have you been sitting here, that you know when to expect the geese; she does not ask where did that golden apple come from? Didn’t I just eat it? She understands what Amira is doing and is grateful; she does not want to talk about the shoes.

“I’ve never heard that sound,” she says instead, slowly, trying not to look at the apple. “But I’ve seen them on rivers and lakes. Hundreds at a time, clamoring like old wives at a well, until something startles them into rising, and then it’s like drums, or thunder, or a storm of winds through branches. An enormous sound, almost deafening—not one to listen closely for.”

“I would love to hear that,” Amira whispers, looking out toward the woods. “To see them. What do they look like?”

“Thick, dark—” Tabitha reaches for words. “Like the river itself is rising, lifting its skirts and taking off.”

Amira smiles, and Tabitha feels a tangled warmth in her chest at the thought of having given her something.

“Would you like another apple?” offers Amira, and she notes the wariness in Tabitha’s eye. “They keep coming back. I eat them myself from time to time. I wasn’t sure if—I thought it was meant as a prize for whoever climbed the hill, but I suppose the notion is they don’t go away unless I give them to a man.”

Tabitha frowns, but accepts. As she eats, Amira feels Tabitha’s eyes on her empty hands, waiting to catch the apple’s reappearance, and tries not to smile—she’d done as much herself the first fifty or so times, testing the magic for loopholes. Novel, however, to watch someone watching for the apple.

As Tabitha nears the last bite, Amira sees her look confused, distracted, as if by a hair on her tongue or an unfamiliar smell—and then the apple’s in Amira’s hand again, feeling for all the world like it never left.

“I don’t think the magic lets us see it happen,” says Amira, almost by way of apology for Tabitha’s evident disappointment. “But so long as I sit here, I have one.”

“I’d like to try that again,” says Tabitha, and Amira smiles.

First, Tabitha waits. She counts the seconds, watching Amira’s empty hands. After seven hundred seconds, there is an apple in Amira’s hand. Amira stares at it, looking from it to the one in Tabitha’s.

“That’s—never happened before. I didn’t think there could be more than one at a time.”

Tabitha takes the second apple from her but bites into it, counting the mouthfuls slowly, watching Amira’s hands the while. After the seventh bite, Amira’s hands are full again. She hands the third apple over without a word.

Tabitha counts—the moments, the bites, the number of apples— until there are seven in her lap; when she takes an eighth from Amira, the first seven turn to sand.

“I think it’s the magic on me,” says Tabitha thoughtfully, dusting the apple sand out of her fur. “I’m bound in sevens—you’re bound in ones. You can hold only one apple at a time—I can hold seven. Funny, isn’t it?”

Amira’s smile looks strained and vague, and only after a moment does Tabitha realize she’s watching the wind-caught sand blowing off the hill.

Autumn crackles into winter, and frost rimes the glass hill into diamonds. By day, Amira watches fewer and fewer men slide down it while Tabitha sits by her, huddled into her fur; by night, Tabitha walks in slow circles around her as they talk about anything but glass and iron. While Tabitha walks, Amira looks more closely at her shackled feet, always glancing away before she can be drawn into staring. Through the sandal-like straps that wrap up to her ankle, Amira can see they are blackened, twisted ruins, toes bent at odd angles, scabbed and scarred.

One morning, Amira wakes to surprising warmth, and finds Tabitha’s fur draped around her. She is so startled she almost rises from her seat to find her—has she left? Is she gone?—but Tabitha walks briskly back into her line of sight before Amira can do anything drastic, rubbing her thin arms, blowing on her fingers. Amira is aghast.

“Why did you give me your cloak? Take it back!”

“Your lips were turning blue in your sleep, and you can’t move—”

“It’s all right, Tabitha, please—” The desperation in Amira’s voice stops Tabitha’s circling, pins her in place. Reluctantly, she takes her fur back, draws it over her own shoulders again. “The apples—or the hill itself, I’m not sure—keep me warm enough. Here, have another.”

Tabitha looks unconvinced. “But you looked so cold—”

“Perhaps it’s like your feet,” says Amira, before she can stop herself. “They look broken, but you can still walk on them.”

Tabitha stares at her for a long moment, before accepting the apple. “They feel broken too. Although”—shifting her gaze to the apple, lowering her voice—”less and less, lately.”

She takes a bite. While she eats, Amira ventures, quietly, “I thought you’d left.”

Tabitha raises an eyebrow, swallows, and chuckles. “Without my cloak, in winter? I like you, Amira, but—” Not that much dies on her tongue, as she tastes the lie in it. She coughs. “That would be silly. Anyway, I wouldn’t leave you without saying goodbye.” An uncertain pause then. “Though, if you tire of company—”

“No,” says Amira, swiftly, surely. “No.”

Snow falls, and the last of the suitors abandon their camps, grumbling home. Tabitha walks her circles around Amira’s throne by day now as well as night, unafraid of being seen.

“They won’t be back until spring,” says Amira, smiling. “Though then they keep their efforts up well into the night as the days get longer. Perhaps to make up for lost time.”

Tabitha frowns, and something in the circle of their talk tightens enough for her to ask, as she walks, “How many winters have you spent up here?”

Amira shrugs. “Three, I think. How many winters have you spent in those shoes?”

“This is their first,” says Tabitha, pausing. “But there were three pairs before this one.”

“Ah. Is this the last?”

Tabitha chuckles. “No. Seven in all. And I’m only halfway through this one.”

Amira nods. “Perhaps, come spring, you’ll have finished it.”

“Perhaps,” says Tabitha, before beginning her circuit again.

Winter thaws, and everything smells of snowmelt and wet wood. Tabitha ventures down the glass hill and brings Amira snowdrops, twining them into her dark hair. “They look like stars,” murmurs Tabitha, and something in Amira creaks and snaps like ice on a bough.

“Tabitha,” she says, “it’s almost spring.”

“Mm,” says Tabitha, intent on a tricky braid.

“I’d like—” Amira draws a deep, quiet breath. “I’d like to tell you a story.”

Tabitha pauses—then, resuming her braiding, says, “I’d like to hear one.”

“I don’t know if I’m any good at telling stories,” Amira adds, turning a golden apple over and over in her hands, “but that’s no reason not to try.”

Once upon a time there was a rich king who had no sons, and whose only daughter was too beautiful. She was so beautiful that men could not stop themselves from reaching out to touch her in corridors or following her to her rooms, so beautiful that words of desire tumbled from men’s lips like diamonds and toads, irresistible and unstoppable. The king took pity on these men and drew his daughter aside, saying, Daughter, only a husband can break the spell over these men; only a husband can prevent them from behaving so gallantly toward you.

When the king’s daughter suggested a ball, that these men might find husbands for themselves and so be civilized, the king was not amused. You must be wed, said the king, before some guard cannot but help himself to your virtue.

The king’s daughter was afraid, and said, Suppose you sent me away?

No, said the king, for how should I keep an eye on you then?

The king’s daughter, who did not want a husband, said, Suppose you chose a neighboring prince for me?

Impossible, said the king, for you are my only daughter, and I cannot favor one neighbor over another; the balance of power is precarious and complicated.

The king’s daughter read an unspeakable conclusion in her father’s eye, and in a rush to keep it from reaching his mouth, said, Suppose you placed me atop a glass hill where none could reach me, and say that only the man who can ride up the hill in full armor may claim me as his bride?

But that is an impossible task, said the king, looking thoughtful.

Then you may keep your kingdom whole, and your eye on me, and men safe from me, said his daughter.

It was done just as she said, and by her will. And if she’s not gone, she lives there still.

When Amira stops speaking, she is taken aback to feel Tabitha scowling at her.

“That,” growls Tabitha, “is absurd.”

Amira blinks. She had expected, she realizes, some sympathy, some understanding. “Oh?”

“What father seeks to protect men from their pursuit of his daughter? As well seek to protect the wolf from the rabbit!”

“I am not a rabbit,” says Amira, though Tabitha, who has dropped her hair and is pacing, incensed, continues.

“How could it be your fault that men are loutish and ill mannered? Amira, I promise you, if your hair were straw and your face dull as dishwater, men—bad men—would still behave this way. Do you think the suitors around the hill can see what you look like, all the way up here?”

Amira keeps quiet, unsure what to say—she wonders why she wants to apologize with one side of her mouth and defend herself with the other.

“You said you chose this,” Tabitha spits. “What manner of choice was that? A wolf’s maw or a glass hill.”

“On the hill,” says Amira, lips tight, “I want for nothing. I do not need food or drink or shelter. No one can touch me. That’s all I ever wanted—for no one to be able to touch me. So long as I sit here, and eat apples, and do not move, I have everything I want.”

Tabitha is silent for a moment. Then, more gently than before, she says, “I thought you wanted to see a river full of geese.”

Amira says nothing.

Tabitha says, still more gently, “Mine are not the only iron shoes in the world.”

Still nothing. Amira’s heart grinds within her, until Tabitha sighs.

“Let me tell you a story about iron shoes.”

Once upon a time, a woman fell in love with a bear. She didn’t mean to; it was only that he was both fearsome and kind to her, that he was dangerous and clever and could teach her about hunting salmon and harvesting wild honey, and she had been lonely for a long time. She felt special with his eyes on her, for what other woman could say she was loved by a bear without being torn between his teeth? She loved him for loving her as he loved no one else.

They were wed, and at night the bear put on a man’s shape to share her bed in the dark. At first he was gentle and kind, and the woman was happy; but in time the bear began to change—not his shape, which she knew as well as her own, but his manner. He grew bitter and jealous, accused her of longing for a bear who was a man day and night. He said she was a terrible wife who knew nothing of how to please bears. By day he spoke to her in a language of thorns and claws, and by night he hurt her with his body. It was hard for the woman to endure, but how can one love a bear entirely without pain? She only worked harder to please him.

In the seventh year of their marriage, the woman begged her husband to allow her to go visit her family. He consented to her departure on the condition that she not be alone with her mother, for surely her mother would poison her against him. She promised—but the woman’s mother saw the marks on her, the bruises and scratches, and hurried her into a room alone. In a moment of weakness, the woman listened to her mother’s words against her husband, calling him a monster, a demon. Her mother insisted that she leave him—but how could she? He was still her own dear husband in spite of it all—she only wished him to be as he had been when she first married him. Perhaps he was under a curse, after all, and only she could lift it?

Burn his bear skin, said her mother. Perhaps that is his curse. Perhaps he longs to be a man day and night but is forbidden to say so.

When she returned to her husband, he seemed to have missed her, and was kind and sweet with her. In the night while he slept next to her in his man’s shape, she gathered up his bear skin as quietly as she could, built up the fire, and threw it in.

The skin did not burn. But it began to scream.

It woke her husband, who flew into a great rage, saying she had broken her promise to him. When the woman wept that she had only wanted to free him from his curse, he picked up the skin, tossed it over her shoulders, and threw a bag of iron shoes at her feet. He said that the only way to make him a man day and night was to wear his bear’s skin while wearing out seven pairs of iron shoes, one for each year of their marriage.

So she set out to do so.

Amira’s eyes are wide and rimmed in red, and Tabitha flushes, picks at a burr caught in her husband’s fur.

“I knew marriage was monstrous,”says Amira, “but I never imagined—”

Tabitha shrugs. “It wasn’t all bad. And I broke my promise—if I hadn’t seen my mother, I would never have thought to try and burn the skin. Promises are important to bears. This, here”—she gestures at the glass hill—“this is monstrous: to keep you prisoner, to prevent you from moving or speaking—”

“Your husband wanted to keep you from speaking! To your mother!”

“And look what happened when I did,” says Tabitha stiffly. “It was a test of loyalty, and I failed it. You did nothing wrong.”

“That’s funny,” says Amira, unsmiling, “because to me, every day feels like a test: Will I move from this hill or not, will I grasp at a bird or not, will I toss an apple down to a man when I shouldn’t, will I speak too loudly, will I give them a reason to hurt me and fall off the hill, and every day I don’t is a day I pass—”

“That’s different. That’s dreadful.”

“I don’t see the difference!”

“You don’t love this hill!”

“I love you,” says Amira, very softly. “I love you, and I do not understand how someone who loves you would want to hurt you, or make you walk in iron shoes.”

Tabitha chews her lips, trying to shape words from them, and fails.

“I told my story poorly,” she says, finally. “I told it selfishly. I did not speak of how good he was—how he made me laugh, the things he taught me. I could live in the iron shoes because of his guidance, because of knowing the poison berry from the pure, because he taught me to hunt. What happened to him, the change in him”—Tabitha feels very tired—“it must have had to do with me. I was meant to endure it until the curse broke, and I failed. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Amira looks at Tabitha’s ruined feet.

“Do you truly believe,” she says, with all the care she pours into keeping her spine taut and straight on her glass seat, “that I had nothing to do with those men’s attentions? That they would have behaved that way no matter what I looked like?”

“Yes,” says Tabitha firmly.

“Then is it not possible”—hesitant, now, to even speak the thought— “that your husband’s cruelty had nothing to do with you? That it had nothing to do with a curse? You said he hurt you in both his shapes.”

“But I—”

“If you’ve worn your shoes halfway down, shouldn’t you be bending your steps toward him again, that the last pair be destroyed near the home you shared?”

In the shifting light of the moon both their faces have a bluish cast, but Amira sees Tabitha’s go gray.

“When I was a girl,” says Tabitha thickly, as if working around something in her throat, “I dreamt of marriage as a golden thread between hearts—a ribbon binding one to the other, warm as a day in summer. I did not dream a chain of iron shoes.”

“Tabitha”—and Amira does not know what to do except to reach for her hand, clutch it, look at her in the way she looks at the geese, longing to speak and be understood—“you did nothing wrong.”

Tabitha holds Amira’s gaze. “Neither did you.”

They stay that way for a long time, until the sound of seven geese’s beating wings startles them into looking up at the stars.

The days and nights grow warmer; more and more geese fly overhead. One morning Tabitha begins to walk her circle around Amira when she stumbles, trips, and falls forward into Amira’s arms.

“Are you all right?” Amira whispers, while Tabitha clutches at the throne, shaking her head, suddenly unsteady.

“The shoes,” she says, marveling. “They’re finished. The fourth pair. Amira.” Tabitha laughs, surprises herself to hear the sound more like a sob. “They’re done.”

Amira smiles at her, bends forward to kiss her forehead. “Congratulations,” she murmurs, and Tabitha hears much more than the word as she reaches, shaky, wobbling, for the next pair in her pack. “Wait,” says Amira quietly, and Tabitha pauses.

“Wait. Please. Don’t—” Amira bites her lip, looks away. “You don’t have to—you can stay here without—”

Tabitha understands, and returns her hand to Amira’s. “I can’t stay up here forever. I have to leave before the suitors come back.”

Amira draws a deep breath. “I know.”

“I’ve had a thought, though.”

“Oh?” Amira smiles softly. “Do you want to marry me after all?”

“Yes.”

Amira’s stillness turns crystalline in her surprise.

Tabitha is talking, and Amira can barely understand it, feels Tabitha’s words slipping off her mind like sand off a glass hill. Anything, anything to keep her from putting her feet back in those iron cages—

“I mean—not as a husband would. But to take you away from here. If you want. Before your suitors return. Can I do that?”

Amira looks at the golden apple in her hand. “I don’t know—where would we go?”

“Anywhere! The shoes can walk anywhere, over anything—”

“Back to your husband?”

Something like a thunderclap crosses Tabitha’s face. “No. Not there.”

Amira looks up. “If we are to marry, I insist on an exchange of gifts. Leave the fur and the shoes behind.”

“But—”

“I know what they cost you. I don’t want to walk on air and darkness if the price is your pain.”

“Amira,” says Tabitha helplessly, “I don’t think I can walk without them anymore.”

“Have you tried? You’ve been eating golden apples a long while. And you can lean on me.”

“But—they might be useful—”

“The glass hill has been very useful to me,” says Amira quietly, “and the golden apples have kept me warm and whole and fed. But I will leave them—I will follow you into woods and across fields, I will be hungry and cold and my feet will hurt. But if you are with me, Tabitha, then I will learn to hunt and fish and tell the poison berry from the pure, and I will see a river raise its skirt of geese, and listen to them make a sound like thunder. Do you believe I can do this?”

“Yes,” says Tabitha, a choking in her voice, “yes, I do.”

“I believe you can walk without iron shoes. Leave them here—and in exchange, I will give you my shoes of silk, and we will fill your pack with seven golden apples, and if you eat from them sparingly, perhaps they will help you walk until we can find you something better.”

“But we can’t climb down the hill without a pair of shoes!”

“We don’t need to.” Amira smiles, stroking Tabitha’s hair. “Falling’s easy—it’s keeping still that’s hard.”

Neither says anything for a time. Then, carefully, for the hill is slippery to her now, Tabitha sheds her fur cloak, unstraps the iron shoes from her feet, and gives them and her pack to Amira. Amira removes the three remaining pairs and replaces them with apples, drawing the pack’s straps tight over the seventh. She passes the pack back to Tabitha, who shoulders it.

Then, taking Tabitha’s hands in hers, Amira breathes deep and stands up.

The glass throne cracks. There is a sound like hard rain, a roar of whispers as the glass hill shivers into sand. It swallows fur and shoes; it swallows Amira and Tabitha together; it settles into a dome-shaped dune with a final hiss.

Hands still clasped, Amira and Tabitha tumble out of it together, coughing, laughing, shaking sand from their hair and skin. They stand, and wait, and no golden apple appears to part their hands from each other.

“Where should we go?” whispers one to the other.

“Away,” she replies, and holding on to each other, they stumble into the spring, the wide world rising to meet them with the dawn.

AMAL EL-MOHTAR is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. She is the science fiction and fantasy columnist for the New York Times Book Review and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a novella which has received several honors including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. She teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa.

NÉ ŁE!

DARCIE LITTLE BADGER

Enamored with promises of red Martian canyons and a hefty pay raise, I ignored the scary part about leaving Earth until I actually had to board a starship. There’s nothing too risky about interplanetary space travel. In fact, it’s rather mundane; passengers relax in stasis for nine months. I just hate speed. Won’t ride a roller coaster. Won’t bungee jump. Won’t even hop off a diving board.

No drop can outrace the ascent outta Earth.

Security wasn’t making things easier. The pre-boarding screener found my pills. “What’s this?” he asked, plucking a rattling tin from my jacket.

“Those? Acebenzine.”

He squinted, probably skimming a list of drug names on his ocular screen. “Sorry, how do you spell that?”

“A-c-e-b-e-n-zine. It’s for dogs. Often prescribed to reduce anxiety before routine checkups or grooming sessions.”

“Are you smuggling a toy poodle in your jacket, too?”

“Acebenzine is effective on humans. Trust me: I’m a doctor.”

He squinted again. “Passenger registration says you’re a veterinarian.”

“Yes. Animal doctor.”

“Okay. Dottie King, DVM, you’ll be unconscious during launch and won’t feel a thing.”

“Not necessarily. One in ten thousand people experience unintended intra-stasis awareness during the six-hour acclimation period after—”

“We can offer you human sedatives.” He dropped my tin in a contraband chute and handed me a mint-sized pill.

“Much obliged.” I swallowed the medicine and proceeded to my stasis pod. Tragically, it resembled a technophile coffin. An attendant secured my limbs, applied bio-monitor stickers, and snapped the lid shut, her face scowling through my porthole. It did not take long for the other passengers to settle in. The Starship Soto was first and foremost a cargo carrier. This trip, which carried thirty Earth emigrants and forty-one dogs to Mars, was probably more crowded with life-forms than all of its predecessors.

Not a tremendously comforting thought. Was the crew sufficiently trained? If something went wrong, would they know how to rescue thirty landborn civilians? More importantly, why wasn’t the sedative working?

“Everybody ready?” chirped a speaker near my ear. “Stasis initiation. Ten. Nine. Eight . . .”

I know what you’re thinking: it’s safer to visit Mars than the grocery store. However, midflight disasters, albeit rare, are a special breed of terrifying. If Starship Soto exploded between Earth and Mars, I’d go gentle into the interstellar vacuum, my body and mind slipping from stasis to death. Helpless. Thoughtless. At least, during a highway fender bender, there’s a chance to react, even if the only reaction is a passionately uttered “Sh—”

“Six.”

I tried to focus on a pleasant memory: our chickens, a lamb, a rooster crowing. The desert warm beneath my feet. Mother’s sweet tea. Father singing in the kitchen. Our collie herding sheep. Family surname—King—painted across a tin mailbox. A coyote, his muzzle wet and red. A needle and thread . . .

“Three.”

Wait. Mail. Damn!

“Two.”

I forgot to set up my forwarding address!

“One.”

Sh—

—ucks.

Stasis pod spiritualism ain’t what it used to be; at its height, SPS churches appeared in every major city, on- and off-Earth. Their leaders preached: the Sleep is sacred! Encounter long-dead relatives! Witness blinding white light, heaven and hell! Hear prophesies, threats, and undying voices! All praise the pod!

Of course, SP experiences are caused by altered brain activity during the stasis wake-up phase. Once scientists replicated the miraculous hallucinations with electrodes, SPS interest dropped. It was all over the news.

Despite that, I nearly praised the pod as I regained consciousness on Starship Soto. Through the porthole, I saw silhouettes—my parents?— standing against a brighter-than-sun light. Mom and Dad were born before nannite revolution, when itty-bitty wonderbots surged through our bodies to elongate telomeres, degrade cancers, repair DNA, and accelerate healing. In other words, my parents aged. Died.

The silhouettes waved; I tried to reach for them, but out-of-body hallucinations don’t come with hands. The light intensified, and its radiance drank their bodies.

Does it always take this long?

Ten to sixty minutes.

This is an emergency! Throw water on her face!

Horrible idea, Cora.

Look! She’s scowling!

Are her eyes open? Bother me when that happens.

A face peered through dimming light: brown-black hair in a tight bun. Black eyes under thick, serious-looking eyebrows. Mouth pursed with watching-a-pot-boil concentration. Skin a warm ochre brown, adult-aged: could be anywhere from thirty to one hundred years old. Either ghosts resembled starship pilots, or I wasn’t actually dead. “Are you awake?” she—Cora—asked.

“Working on it.” My voice cracked twice. I hadn’t felt so thirsty since the water crisis of ‘09.

“She’s awake! Can I take her?”

My pod was open, my restraints unlatched. None of the other passengers had been roused from stasis; the only person there besides Cora was a peeved-looking man with a virtual reality headset around his neck. “Wait,” he said. “I’m checking vitals. Get her water and explain the situation.”

“Sorry,” Cora said, bounding to a water dispenser across the room. “Doctor Dottie King, we’re still five months away from Mars, and the dang puppy stasis pods malfunctioned, so we got forty-one dogs barking to high Pluto, and Pete—he’s the engineer—can’t get things working again. So—”

“Are the dogs okay?” I climbed out of the pod; Cora put a steadying hand on my arm and handed me a water bottle. I chugged the entire half liter.

“Probably,” she said, “but you should double check. And . . . well, we don’t know what to do! There are supplies in cargo—kibble cubes, beds, kennels, squeaky little toys—but this operation is one bad choice away from chaos.”

“Vitals check out,” the man said. “You’re clear to leave.”

I delicately removed Cora’s hand as we walked out the door. “What’s the staff situation?” I asked. “How many people can help?”

“Skeleton crew, Doc: just my copilot Lishana, Pete, and our stasis monitor, Vic’quell—you just met him.”

“Can we recruit other passengers? If I recall, there are several sleeping veterinarians and med techs on board.”

“Theoretically, but resources are tight—that includes space—and humans take priority.”

“So the dogs will suffer if too many people wake up?”

“Right! Speaking of suffering: liquids have to be recycled. How quickly can you potty train forty-one dogs?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t worry. Pete and I will assist. Unfortunately, Vic can’t be distracted. Too much of a liability.”

“VR isn’t distracting?”

“You noticed, huh?” She threw up her shoulders; the movement was more passionate than a mere shrug. “Blame bureaucracy. No worries. I’ll do the work of two people!”

“I somehow believe you.”

We turned a corner; the passage terminated at a sealed door. A thin, densely freckled man leaned against its hand wheel. The fine creases around his mouth deepened with anxiety.

“Pete,” Cora said. “I told you to wait inside animal bay. What gives?”

“It’s too much,” he said. “Woman, the last five minutes have made me a cat person.”

He turned the wheel; as the door cracked, a flood of yaps and whines swept into the corridor. The egg-shaped doggy stasis pods had opened, exposing forty wiggling Chihuahuas and a blue-eyed husky, his irises like glacial ice. The husky keened; they’re a chatty breed, prone to howling, barking, and shrill vocalizations that mean everything from “pay attention to me” to “I said pay attention to me, damn it!”

“Move kennels in here,” I said. “Cleaning and caring will be a full-time job; remember that dogs like routines. Playtime can happen in shifts of twenty animals—”

“I’m going to unpack supplies from storage,” Pete said. “Good luck, Cora.”

“Don’t forget water dispensers!” I called after him. “Also, remember my medical supplies! Thanks! Hey, Pete? Can you hear me?”

From the corridor, he shouted, “Got it!”

“Cora?”

“Roger, Doc?”

“Who ordered the husky for a Martian settlement?”

“What’s wrong with huskies?”

“They’re an energetic breed.”

“I dunno who bought him, but they paid handsomely; he’s worth more than all forty chi-chis. With that money, I could purchase a house in the decent part of town.”

“What town?” I asked. Cora had an accent I couldn’t place; it was probably from off-Earth. Orbiting cities, with one foot in their founding nations and the other in the starry frontier, had a knack for cultivating unique phonologies.

“Any of them,” she said. “I’m not picky.”

“Right. Well, until we land, Blue Eyes will be your responsibility. Keep him close.”

“Doc, no! I’ll get attached and be really sad when we land.”

“Your choice: one big dog, or forty teeny ones.”

“Husky it is! What should I name him?”

“All mine will be Né le,” I said. “Dog.”

“I prefer Conan. Here, boy.” She unstrapped Conan lowered him to the ground. With a shrill yawn-whine combo, he affectionately leaned against Cora’s legs.

“Suits him,” I said. “Time for routine checkups. Sick bay?”

“Right this way!”

I plucked a black Chihuahua from his pod and followed Cora; the metal floor clanged beneath her boots and clacked under Conan’s nails. In contrast, I moved silently, barefoot. Waffle-shaped ridges underfoot bit my skin. My soles had gone plush after years in compression socks and supportive clogs. I trod mindfully, afraid to stumble and traumatize the Chihuahua. He huddled against my chest, squinting at the motion-activated light strips on the walls.

“This is it,” Cora said. She opened a sliding door so quickly, it clanged. Sick bay had three examination tables and a tech resource center. Sealed cabinets along the wall contained equipment and medicines. With my portable kit, I’d make do. Heartbeats are heartbeats; you can use the same stethoscope on people and dogs. It is, however, more difficult to convince a dog to sit still.

“Let the marathon begin,” I said. When I carried the Chihuahua to an exam table, he kicked his legs, as if treading water in the air.

“I think he’s confused,” Cora said.

“Not unusual for his breed. Thermometer, please!”

Forty-one clean bills of health later, Cora, Conan, twenty dogs, and I relaxed in the observation deck. Its outer video wall projected more stars than I’d ever seen before: the view behind Starship Soto. Among them, Earth shone the faintest shade of blueish white. Born in landlocked Utah, I rarely visited the ocean. Beaches were too crowded, windy, and hot. However, from afar, I admired the radiant sea.

“Why Mars, Doctor?” Cora asked. She was doing sit-ups, despite Conan’s best efforts to eat her ponytail. I’d stopped counting her reps after three hundred and fifty. How many sit-ups could a human body tolerate, anyway? Maybe Cora had cybernetic abs. It was impossible to tell under her bulky white tracksuit.

“Eh?” I asked. “Why not?” I threw a monkey-shaped toy, and four Chihuahuas latched onto its squeaky limbs.

“Where I’m from, people play the lottery for a chance to live on au naturale Earth.”

“I didn’t live on natural anything. Houston is a towering concrete behemoth. Might as well be in an orbiter.”

“You could still travel, though. Visit parks. The Gulf.”

“Sure.”

“Mars is nine months away from all that.”

“It’s away from lots of things. I needed a change.”

“Personal issues?” She paused mid-sit, all her attention focused on me and the blanket of Chihuahuas warming my lap.

“Yeah,” I said. “Especially one named Addie.”

It’s never easy to end a ten-year relationship, but few things are more awkward than a breakup in virtual reality. The simulated bench Addie chose for our “we need to talk” moment overlooked a forest trail that shone like the Vegas Strip. Illuminated VR ads, each tailored for my career, sauntered back and forth in the guise of pedestrians wearing sandwich boards. One blinking sign caught my eye:

NOBODY KNOWS BARBODIES LIKE WE DO!

PET-PRESERVER MAKES CALICO CLONES!

Clever pun.

“Sorry, Dottie,” Addie said. “This conversation can’t wait.” Four months earlier, her company—satellite city engineering—sent her to their swanky branch on Orbiter Lux. Ostensibly a temporary position. Sadly, she loved the off-world accommodations. Me? I didn’t care how many hydroponic gardens or ambient noise generators an orbiter contained; it was a scary chunk of metal. Meteoroid deflectors malfunctioned? Radiation shield weakened? Gravity failed? Baddie carried a bomb on board? Catastrophe!

“This is almost like reality,” I said. Addie’s VR avatar was taller and more symmetric than her physical self; I found it disconcerting. Granted, my avatar had a pair of ram horns and feathered wings.

“Did you remember to buy ad blockers?” she asked. Clearly, Addie couldn’t see the street performer twirling a sign that promised:

NATURAL INGREDIENTS = HAPPIER DOGS!

SHEPHARD KIBBLE DOES NOT USE GMOs

OR TEST TUBE MEAT!

“Mmmhm.”

“It’s not easy to say this,” she continued. “You’re a wonderful woman, but . . .”

INTUITANKS COME WITH OPTIONAL FISH CAMS!

“. . . you’ve worked in every hellhole in North America, but draw the line at an orbiter? We have different priorities . . .”

LEARN PARAKEET PSYCHOLOGY.

“Goodbye, Dottie.”

Neon letters, halo bright, rose over Addie’s head. A VR man had lifted his sandwich board, desperate to share the message:

MARS NEEDS VETERINARIANS!

COMPETITIVE SALARIES,

INCOMPARABLE ADVENTURE! APPLY TODAY!

Bittersweet memories—Addie sharing my cream soda,Addie strumming a lute, Addie bowling, Addie kissing, Addie, Addie, Addie!—were replaced with visions of the red frontier. I imagined visiting dome-encapsulated hostels that overlooked the empty Ophir Chasma. There’d be warm earth underfoot—not Earth-earth, but close enough. Could I manage the first animal clinic on Mars? Support a burgeoning pet population? First dogs and then cats and then potbellied pigs! Goats, bison, passenger pigeons: dense flocks migrating through engineered skies. I’d build a paradise, one better than the home I lost as a child.

“Goodbye, darling,” I agreed.

Tactfully, I explained the breakup to Cora. “Addie and I had different goals in life. She wanted to live in Orbiter Lux, and I simply can’t live in Orbiter Lux. There’s no work for veterinarians! The only pets allowed are self-sustaining ecosystems: bacteria, GMO fish, and plants in sealed glass terrariums. We split amicably.”

“Relationships are tough,” Cora said, moving to a recliner beside me. The black Chihuahua, who’d been monopolizing its plush seat, relocated to her lap. “I once dated another pilot. Great chemistry, but we were too competitive. I called it off after my third speed violation.”

“That’s not good for my nerves.”

“They were solo missions, Doc! I’d never put a civilian at risk!”

“Just teasing.” I regarded the swathe of universe projected on the wall. “You were a lot of help today. Thank you.”

“Are you kidding? I’d pay to goof around with forty puppies. It’s awesome! Right, Doodles?” She poked the donut-shaped Chihuahua on her lap.

“You named him?”

“I named all of them.”

As time passed, the daily dog routine—playtime, feeding, kennel cleaning, training, playtime, feeding, bedtime—staved off cabin fever. Cora’s personality helped, too. She wasn’t like the other skeleton crew. Vic lived in VR, only emerging to eat or shower. Pete did help with most dog chores, but he rarely strung more than ten words together. In contrast, Cora chatted insistently, and I wondered how she would have survived the trip without my company.

On the ninth day of doggy daycare, I finally asked, “How often do you do this?”

“What?” she said. “Grooming?” Cora combed a long-haired Chihuahua, its wavy coat glistening under the tangle-proof brush.

“Interplanetary travel,” I clarified.

“This is my first trip. Don’t look so horrified. Lishana has nine flights under her belt. Plus, it’s all autopilot until landing, and I’m great at that. See, I normally fly shuttles between Earth and Diné Orbiter.”

“You’re Navajo?” I said. The Diné orbiter, a spool of residential and industry modules rotating around a zero-grav core, was sovereign Navajo territory, completely inhabited by Nation citizens or their guests. Among the first space colonies, it lacked the bells and whistles of newer models. “Sturdy enough,” Addie once said, “but nobody uses stacked models anymore. The gravity’s unreliable. Sometimes, it’s like walking on the moon, and other times, you’re fifty kilograms heavier than you should be.”

Cora unzipped her flight suit from neck to mid-chest; she wore a silver squash blossom necklace, its turquoise-embedded metal bright over her black tank top. “Yeah,” she said. “I never mentioned it?”

“Never. Are you on the lam?”

“Nothing that exciting.” She fluffed the Chihuahua’s cowlick and tied a pink bow around it. “I just wanted to know what a long haul feels like. The answer is: boring. Until this happened.”

“Lucky emergency.”Too lucky? I could accept the stasis pod failure. Dogs had never been transported to Mars before; new technology malfunctioned sometimes. But with five veterinarians on board, Cora chose me. I’m Lipan Apache, and though my tribe is markedly less centralized and powerful than the Navajo Nation, we have a lot in common. Matrilineal roots. Respect for wisdom and family. A history rife with suffering.

My expressive face betrayed me.

“What’s wrong?” Cora asked.

“It’s awfully convenient that you woke me up, considering all we have in common.”

“The lesbian thing? I had no idea, if that’s what you’re—”

“No! Our cultures.”

“Doc,” she said, “are you suggesting that I was motivated by a burning desire to pal around with another Native?”

“Were you?”

She squinted. “Let’s review your credentials. You have forty-seven years’ experience with small animal medicine. Volunteered in twenty-nine urban pounds. Patients and colleagues provided glowing recommendations. You’re thoroughly familiar with nannite biotech and ER techniques. There may be other vets on this ship, but you’re the most qualified. That’s why I chose you. Our repartee is just a perk.”

“Wow. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Cora said. “When enough people look down on you, doubt takes root. It makes you question every accomplishment and blame success on luck or favors.” She zipped up the flight suit, hiding her squash blossom. I felt a flush of appreciation. A twinge of pain.

When she drew me into a quick hug, I felt her squash blossom press against my chest.

We passed evenings in the observation deck, betting our dessert rations over checkers. When Pete felt sociable, he projected movies on the wall and half-watched our game. Sometimes, even Vic joined us. There were minor setbacks. During week four, the thermal system malfunctioned, and temperatures dropped: 21 to 18 °C. I didn’t notice until the short-haired Chihuahuas began shivering and burrowing under their kennel blankies. Fortunately, there was an easy fix; we opened a crate of dog costumes—little tuxedos, dinosaur hoodies, superhero sweaters with handkerchief-sized capes—and they were the most fashionable dogs in space until Pete fixed the heat regulator.

After a few weeks, I forgot to worry.

Of course, that’s when a real crisis struck.

It happened during a jog around Starship Soto. The passenger-habitable area was shaped like a spinning ring; centrifugal force grounded us. The pilot’s cabin and several cargo carriers, all held steady within the gyroscope belly, were off-limits to anyone without zero-grav training.

“The simulated gravity here is just seventy percent Earth-strength,” Cora said, her voice steady as we lapped the ship. “I’ll be outta shape when I return home.”

“Huh. No wonder I can carry so many Chihuahuas at the same time.” I gulped a hungry breath, already winded after ten minutes. “Mars gravity is even weaker, right?”

“Sure is. You’ll feel like superwoman. By the way, will the doggy nannites protect them from bone loss?”

“They protect them from almost everything.” The nannites stopped bone degradation, cancer, tooth decay, and aging. There were no parasites on Mars. No puppies, either; all pets were sterile. That said, did Mars really need a superwoman veterinarian? It would be centuries before wildlife could survive outside the domes. I’d hoped to stake a claim on prime land, but since when did being first guarantee anything?

“No wonder the Mars dogs cost a fortune,” Cora said. “The ones on my orbiter rarely live past fifteen. It’s too expensive to engineer nannites for them all.”

“Orbiter Diné allows dogs?”

“One per family. That’s how I learned to tie a bow.” She jabbed a thumb at the five bow-bedecked Chihuahuas who scampered after us; Conan was ahead, leading the jog. He moved so quickly, I couldn’t see his feathered tail anymore. “What about you?” Cora asked, agilely leaping over a Chihuahua that veered in front of her path. “Obviously, you’re swimming in pets, but they belong to other people. Ever had your own?”

“Once,” I said. “On the family farm, we owned chickens, sheep, and a collie named Kirby. All lost after the urban relocation measure passed.” Cities were efficient; during the resource crises—no water, no food, no space—very few people could afford the country life.

“The US government moved your family? You didn’t live on a rez?”

“My tribe never had one,” I said. “I’m descended from people who fought or fled the invasion. Isn’t it funny how ancient history still screws us over?”

“You don’t have to talk about the farm if it’s a sore spot.”

“I like remembering. Say, have I ever mentioned the . . . shoot! Look out!”

Rounding a bend in the corridor, we nearly stumbled over Conan. He lay on his side, body taut, as if his tail, legs, and head were stretched by invisible strings. “God!” Cora said. “What’s wrong? Help him, Dottie!”

She dropped to her knees and cradled his head on her lap. His paws twitched, and he snapped at the air, frothing. I knew the symptoms well.

“It’s a seizure,” I said. “Don’t move.”

After a scramble down the corridor, I grabbed a diazepam injector from my emergency kit and returned, wheezing and fighting through twinges of runner’s cramp. As Conan twitched in Cora’s arms, I shot the medicine into his leg. His blue eyes turned to me; their dilated pupils resembled two frost-dusted pits.

“Why is this happening?” Cora asked.

“I don’t know.”

Once Conan stopped thrashing, we carried him to the medical bay. The Chihuahuas crowded our legs, squeak-yapping. “Oscar,” I said. “Rosie! Snowball! Doodlebug! Shoo! Go find Pete!” Only Doodlebug listened.

“They know that he’s dying!” Cora said, hugging Conan tenderly. “Dogs have a sixth sense!” She turned her head, hiding her tears from me.

“Nah. Chihuahuas are just pests. Put him on the table. He had a seizure; that’s not a death sentence. If it happens again, we’ll give him daily phenobarb. Easy treatment.”

“I thought all Mars dogs are healthy. Is it something I did?”

“Animals aren’t machines.” I checked Conan’s gums and listened to his heartbeat. His hips were aligned, his stomach felt right, and his eyes scrutinized my work, alert. “Life is complex in unpredictable ways, Cora. It changes and surprises.” I scratched Conan behind his ears, pleased to see his tail wag. “He’s healthy. Well. Aside from the possible epilepsy. Poor boy. Are you okay? Can I get you water?”

“No thanks. I need to visit the flight deck.”

“Right now?”

“His buyers must be informed.” She shook her head. “They won’t be happy, Dottie. Can you watch Conan until I get back?”

“Of course,” I said.

Pete and I crated the Chihuahuas—it was nearly bedtime, anyway—and I moved Conan to my closet-sized personal room for observation. Though I put his dog bed on the floor, he hopped onto my narrow bunk, curling in a furry donut at the foot. “Cora spoils you,” I said. His ears perked up. “What, you miss her already? It won’t be long.”

Actually, a knock on my door woke us five hours later. “It’s me!” Cora called. “Is Conan alive?”

“You can’t hear him barking?” I slipped a robe over my pajamas and opened the door. “What’s the verdict?”

Cora barely managed a half-shrug. She zombie shuffled into my room and slumped on the bed.

“Come in,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”

“Sorry. It’s bad. The buyers requested a different pup.”

I turned off the ambient cricket sounds that had been chirping through my intercom and sat between Cora and Conan. “That’s what I was worried about. For his price tag, they expect perfection.”

“He is perfect.” She grabbed my hand firmly. A shade darker than mine, it felt noon sun warm. “What’s going to happen?”

“He’ll find a new home,” I said, “with somebody who loves him. Like you.”

Her posture straightened as we basked in contemplative silence; Cora was probably planning his homecoming on Orbiter Diné. All the kilometers they’d jog together, all the toys he’d rip apart. When she spoke, however, the subject surprised me. “Before the seizure, you were going to tell me something. What?”

It took a moment to gather my memories. “I’m not spiritual. Don’t believe in gods, ghosts, or divine retribution. It’s hard enough to have faith in people. But . . .”

Her hand was still on mine, our fingers entwining. It took a moment, but I eventually recognized that not-quite-platonic intimacy wove our touch, and I did not want to pull away. In fact, I wanted more.

Usually, when I fell for somebody, I fell fast. Maybe that’s why I hate rollercoasters. Just five minutes after Addie introduced herself, I gave her my VR ID number and thought, “If she doesn’t call tonight, I’ll cry!” Cora was different. Her gravity pulled me gradually, gently. Unlike the darlings in my past, I grew fond of Cora without infatuation magnifying her positive qualities. Who knows why our relationship progressed so strangely. Maybe she was special. Perhaps the yapping, needy Chihuahuas stalled our romance. Either way, Cora’s warm hand felt nice.

Blushing, I continued, “Something special happened when I was a child. It makes me entertain notions like destiny.”

“What?” Cora asked. So told her my story.

I was eleven years old, home alone, when I heard shrill cluck-screams, the kind chickens make as they’re dying. I charged outside with my baseball bat. A coyote stood beside the coop—little coop, just enough for thirty birds—with a chicken in his mouth, a white silkie that I hand-raised from the egg. The coyote stared at me. I thought of owls: bad luck, owls. They also have yellow irises, like headlights bearing down on you, a warning or a threat.

Worried that he’d escape with Silkie, I lowered my bat and said, “Put. Her. Down.” Kirby always responded to a firm tone, yet I scarcely expected the coyote to listen.

Tricksters are unpredictable.

He opened his mouth, and Silkie fell onto hard-packed dirt with a cluck-shriek. Blood matted her downy feathers; something solid and ropy dangled from her belly. I screamed. Couldn’t help it. With a snort, the coyote licked his wet muzzle and trotted away.

I rushed Silkie to the kitchen and placed her in the sink. Mom sliced vegetables in the metal basin, so we kept it fastidiously clean. As if exhausted by the attack, Silkie quietly allowed me to part her wispy feathers and examine the injuries, four gashes. The most serious wound had freed a loop of intestine; gently, I tucked it back inside her body. What else could I do? My parents had no money for a veterinarian house call.

Silkie thrashed once. If she moved too quickly, her innards might fall out again. She needed stitches.

I found a needle and nylon beading thread in Mom’s clutter bin. We kept bacteria-kill spray under the sink; I used it to disinfect everything: my hands, the needle, the thread, even the blood-matted feathers. Silkie didn’t even cluck when I rolled her over and pinched her injury shut. “It’ll hurt a little,” I said. “Sorry.” I could feel her fluttering pulse under my fingers, her little body’s warmth. The needle reflected sunlight, a glint of silver light shooting from my fingertips. I worked quickly to spare us both anxiety. Five stitches closed the wound; just minutes later, Silkie was tottering around the kitchen, clucking and ruffling her wings.

Three years later, when my parents told me that I could take just one chicken to Houston, I chose Silkie. She sat on my blanket-draped lap as we left the farm, our life—all the life we could bring with us, anyway—packed in one van and a trailer. The coyote stood alongside the dirt road, his headlight eyes trained on mine.

I waved goodbye.

“That’s why you’re a veterinarian,” Cora said. “The coyote.”

“He certainly opened my eyes.” I extricated my hand and grabbed a pillow, burying my face in the cotton-wrapped foam.

“What’s wrong?” Cora asked.

“I’m not sure about Mars anymore.”

“Why not? Trie domes are gorgeous.”

“Because I didn’t become a doctor to twiddle my thumbs. Those nannite-hearty Chihuahuas don’t need me like Silkie did. This was a mistake. Never make big decisions during emotional rebounds!”

“A mistake?” Cora asked. “Or—don’t laugh—destiny?”

I lowered the pillow. “How so?”

“Animals have it rough on Orbiter Diné. We always need help.”

“I’m not sure I belong there.”

She threw up her shoulders in the passionate manner I knew well. “We have three weeks until landing. Plenty of time for decisions.” Cora stood, trailed by Conan. “Goodnight, Dottie,” she said.

That night cycle, I dreamed about the red desert, but home did not comfort me. I ached for company.

For Cora.

Landing an interplanetary starship is a gradual process. Sixty hours before touchdown, the gravity generator slowed. Six hours before touchdown, Chihuahuas were bouncing around like they had invisible rocket boosters on their backs. “It may be time to strap everyone down,” Cora said, plucking Doodlebug from the air before he smacked into the wall. “We can use the stasis pod restraints.”

“I’ll sedate them, too,” I said. “Er. What about me?”

“Rare honor, Doc! Lishana invited you and Conan to the flight room during descent! Don’t worry. We land slow.”

“Unless the ship crashes.”

“Hey! None of that!”

We wrangled puppies left and right, securing them in open pods. I gave each Chihuahua a fond pat on the head. “Good luck,” I said. “You little Martians!”

From the intercom, a voice boomed, “Three hours. Report to landing stations.”

“That’s us,” Cora said. She hoisted Conan with one arm and helped me maneuver through Starship Soto at ten percent Earth gravity. As we passed the observation deck entrance, I paused to admire its wall. Mars, a canyon-cracked, crater-pocked ball, loomed on the projection screen. From our vantage point, there were no signs of life. No breathing green blankets over loamy continents, no white shimmer in waters thick with glinting phytoplankton.

Nothing like the view of Earth.

I made my decision.

“I want to be awake during the nine-month return trip,” I said, “in case Conan has another seizure.”

“And after that?” Cora asked. “Where will you go?”

“Wherever I’m needed. The orbiter sounds promising.”

As we kissed, the last trace of gravity slipped away, and my feet escaped the metal ground. I felt—I was—weightless, unbound by anything but the memories I carried and the tender warmth against my lips. Cora and I parted when the intercom insisted, “Report to landing stations.”

Hand in hand, we turned our backs on Mars.

DARCIE LITTLE BADGER is an Earth scientist, writer, and fan of the weird, beautiful, and haunted. Her first novel, Elatsoe, was published in 2020. Her two dozen or so short stories have been published by various venues including anthology Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time and periodicals such as Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, and The Dark. An enrolled member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, she has a BA in geosciences from Princeton University and a PhD in oceanography from Texas A&M University.

THE DUKE DF RIVERSIDE

ELLEN KUSHNER

I.

That kid didn’t belong here. We all knew it from the moment he walked through the door at Rosalie’s, full of nerves and rage. If you belong, you never sport those two together. Everyone in Riverside knows that.

It is a wise precaution to assume that anyone angry is also armed. The drinkers stopped drinking, the barmaids stopped serving, and the dicers held up their dice mid-roll. Red Sukey moved a little closer to Slow Annie, as the girls like to protect each other.

Rosalie stepped forward, it being her bar the kid was in. “What can I get you?” she very reasonably enquired of him.

“What can you get me?” From his voice, you’d think it was the stupidest question anyone had ever asked. “What can you get me?” He had an accent. Slow and snooty, like from the Hill. “Well, I’ve been looking for Fenton’s treatise On the Causes of Nature. The banned edition. Surely in this den of vice you’ve got a copy of a banned book.”

Rosalie didn’t bat an eye. “Surely. And to drink?”

“How about a cup of really strong poison?”

“I’ll go take a look.”

Rosalie turned her broad back on him, and the whole room relaxed. If she thought he wasn’t dangerous, then he probably wasn’t. Like many older women who still retain all their marbles, Rosalie is a fine judge of character.

The kid was a scholar, that much was clear. With that long student hair they all grow, tied back with a piece of yarn. And that black robe they all wear, hanging off his bony shoulders like abandoned laundry someone had neglected to wash. Poor scholars don’t usually come down to Riverside, not even to get pissed, knowing they’re just as likely to get rolled and then maybe killed just for fun. Nobody drinks here who doesn’t belong. So what was he doing here?

Sidling up to him, Red Sukey hazarded a reasonable guess. “Buy me a drink?”

He looked down at her. It was a long way down, as he was taller than most. “What for? Are you thirsty?”

Young Sukey was not such a good judge of character. “No.” She moved a little closer, to show him what was on offer. “I’d be nice to you.”

He got it then. “For a drink? Are you serious?”

Most men, you mention money, their hand goes automatically to where they keep their purse, just for an instant. His went to his belt, but there was nothing there.

We waited with interest to hear Sukey explain the facts of life or commerce to the scrawny scholar, but she never had the opportunity, as Nimble Willie came running in shouting, “Fight! Fight!”

You don’t want to miss a fight in Riverside, not with the caliber of swordsmen we’ve got here. And sure enough, a young blade called Archer Fink had finally gotten Richard St Vier to accept his challenge. God only knows how. He wasn’t yet in St Vier’s league. Probably it was that girl of his, the blonde, egging Archer on to show his stuff. Anyone who could kill Richard St Vier would have his pick of jobs, even on the Hill. But nobody thought that man would be Archer Fink. I couldn’t even get a bet going.

It happened so fast I nearly missed the whole thing. St Vier lunged quick and hard, with a ferocious efficiency that Fink couldn’t even parry. I guess he’d been expecting a longer fight, and not to be wheezing his last as St Vier drew the tip of his blade from his body, so that the blood spurted all over the place.

The tall student was standing right there. He stared at Archer’s fallen body like he’d never seen one before, not even wiping the blood off his face.

St Vier cleaned his blade and went into the tavern. Rosalie brought him a drink, “On the house,” she said, because he was always good for business. The more he drank at her place, the more likely the Hill nobles were to send their servants down there to find him when they had a job for him.

The scholar was right behind him. “I’ll have one, too,” he told her.

“Let me see your money first.”

“You didn’t ask him for money.”

Rosalie snorted. “He’s Richard St Vier. Who the hell are you?”

He looked way down at her. “Alec,” he said.

“Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“No. In fact, I’d very much prefer that you didn’t.”

That got a reaction—from the rest of us: catcalls for Rosalie, cheers for the scholar, because nobody gives Rosalie cheek. Rosalie has a temper, and as long as you are not the target, it is very entertaining to watch her lose it.

The swordsman was ignoring the whole thing. He just leaned on the bar, knocking back the thirst a good fight gives you—though one hand never left the pommel of his sword, this being Riverside.

“St Vier.” The scholar spoke, as if he was testing the sound of the name to see if he liked it. We all drew in our breath. No one had ever seen the swordsman lose his temper. But if anyone could do it, it was probably this kid.

“St Vier,” he said again, long and low this time. Like a lord on the Hill, with all the time in the world, which, unlike the rest of us, they actually have. I happen to know this because I did some work up there once. But just once.

The swordsman finally turned his head. “Yes?”

“You’re very good at killing people.”

“Thank you.” Whatever you say about St Vier, he had very good manners. He wasn’t from Riverside originally, but except for that fact, the swordsman fit right in.

“Do you ever kill them just because they’re no earthly use to anyone at all?”

“No.” St Vier has this precise, deliberate way of talking. Almost thoughtful. “No, I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

“Well.” The kid stepped back, putting a sword’s length between them. “That is disappointing. What do you do it for, then?”

“For money. And for practice.”

“And just now? Was that money, or practice?”

St Vier’s eyes darted over to where Archer Fink’s girl was carrying on in the corner, weeping and wailing. Sukey and Annie were trying to quiet her down with the cheapest brandy. For a swordsman, St Vier is pretty easygoing. But he never likes a lot of noise.

“That would be practice.”

“Ah.”

St Vier looked him up and down. It stretched his neck some, the kid being as I have said a real beanpole. He must have seen what we all saw: young, skinny, hungry, poor, bad-tempered, and out of place. But maybe he saw something more, as he did not walk away the way he usually does.

St Vier could pick his fights by then. He made most of his money on the Hill, because the nobles enjoy a good duel as much as we do. At their parties and things, it was demo matches only, though: First Blood, but never to the Death, unless the quarrel was really serious. It only made sense he had to keep his hand in down here in Riverside.

So he knew nobles, and it’s a good bet he knew that style of voice pretty well by now, the low, purring voice this ragged kid was using.

“Look,” St Vier said, “do you have a job for me? Is that what this is about?”

The student tugged his frayed cuff down over his bony wrist. “A job? Me? I don’t even have the price of a beer.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I don’t suppose you’d kill me for free.”

A smile snuck its way onto the swordsman’s face. “No.”

“For practice, then?”

“Can you fight?”

The scholar drew back his robe to show nothing hung on his belt, not even a knife. “Not particularly, no.”

“That’s no good, then. I like a challenge.”

“Oh.” The young scholar turned away. “Maybe later, then.”

I myself did not expect to see that Alec guy again.

But then I kept hearing about him. Wandering Riverside like a lost soul, trying not to get laid but to get killed, near as I could tell. It should have been easy. He was doing everything right: insulting people, asking weird questions, making a nuisance of himself . . . The thing is, he was ostentatiously unarmed. Unarmed, and broke. And also totally nuts. You want to be careful with the nutjobs especially. Furthermore, it was always possible little Alec was well-connected. No one had come down looking for him yet, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. We don’t want the City to take an interest in us. The last time that happened, they nearly burned the place down. Besides, he made people laugh, the things he said, things no one else would ever have the nerve to.

I saw him a few days later at Rosalie’s again. I was looking over some very fine silver spoons that Hal had chanced to discover in a house uptown, and in walks the skinny kid, skinnier than ever, slouching right on up to where Rosalie is ladling out stew for Fabian Greenspan.

“Is that food?” he asks her. “Or are you just getting rid of old wash water?”

“You could use a little of both,” Rosalie retorted.

Fabian sniggered, and some soup came out his nose.

“Medicinal, too, I see,” the kid said.

Fabian had the shakes. It was early in the day for him—just a little past noon—and Rosalie wanted to feed him before he started drinking, because drinking on an empty stomach makes Fabian Greenspan perform certain acts which for sanitary purposes require that the owner of an establishment throw him out or lose all other customers.

“Hungry?” Rosalie asked Alec.

“Hardly. Rotten pears and moldy cheese are abundant if you know where to look for them. Shall I bring you some? They’re very slenderizing.”

“Hey,” Fabian protested. He had a soft spot for Rosalie.

The boy looked down his long nose. “It’s not her fault. You get fat when you get old.”

“Hey!” Fabian roared feebly, and went for him.

“Hey,” said another voice, a calmer voice. The swordsman St Vier was peeling Fabian off that Alec character.

“Hey, Richard,” Rosalie said calmly. Having taken the scholar’s measure, she didn’t care whether he called her fat or the Empress of Cham. If she doesn’t like you, she just ignores you. “Want some stew?”

The young scholar was standing very stiff. He wasn’t used to being ignored.

St Vier and Rosalie got Fabian seated back down again, and Rosalie was encouraging him to take back his spoon.

“You should have some,” the scholar told St Vier.

“Did you like it?”

“I wasn’t offered any.” The scholar’s lip curled. “But it did wonders for our friend, there. Gave him the strength of ten. In another few hours, and with a few more bites in him, he would have had me flat on the floor.”

St Vier shrugged, with a little smile. The image clearly entertained him.

“You’re a disappointment,” the scholar went on.

The swordsman turned, giving him his full attention. “How so?”

A swordsman’s full attention is not something you really want on you. It gave me a chill. The tall kid’s eyes glittered hard, like he was fevered, and his skin was pale, like he was casting his final throw.

“It’s been three days, now. You haven’t killed a soul.” He paused between statements, waiting for a reaction. “I’ve been following you. You haven’t even stepped on a bug.” But he never got one. Just the swordsman’s dark blue eyes, looking at him. “I think you’re vastly overrated.” Even I could see the pulse pounding in his throat. Terrified, but he wouldn’t shut up, just kept talking in that long, drawling voice: “What’s the matter, have you lost your nerve?”

St Vier stood up. “Come with me.”

This is it, we thought. Goodbye, scholar.

His hands were shaking, but he followed St Vier out of the tavern.

It wasn’t going to be a pretty death. Or even an interesting fight. St Vier wouldn’t waste good swordsmanship on an unarmed man. But Hal couldn’t resist a quick bet on it. So we followed them out to the street.

The scholar was standing against a wall, very white in the face against his black robe and the crummy old stone. “Remember,” he was saying, fast and breathy, “one blow to the heart. They say you’re quick.”

Young men can be real fools.

Right alongside the scholar, there was Dapper Dan, a decent young swordsman who’d never even challenged St Vier because everyone knew he had the world’s biggest crush on him. Guys like that think being a swordsman—let alone a lover—is all about risks and big gestures. And so he made one now.

“Allow me,” I heard Dan say, as he drew his blade, to kill the evil Alec, presumably.

St Vier was not the best for nothing. Dan never should have shown cold steel in his presence. St Vier was so quick he didn’t even register that Dan’s blade wasn’t directed at him.

You have to admire the guy. He drew and slashed poor heartsick Dan along the side, in a gorgeous twist no one else could have made.

Dan squawked and fell, and St Vier said “Rats,” as he realized what had happened.

The scholar stared down at poor Dan, who was still gasping and wheezing and clawing the ground.

“You should have let him,” he said.

“It wasn’t his business,” said St Vier.

Dan had drawn first, to save St Vier the trouble. To show off, to impress him . . . But if St Vier had wanted a dead scholar, he wouldn’t even have let him finish his next sentence. Whatever he intended, it wasn’t “the long, cold kiss of steel,” as the poets say.

“Would you like a drink?”

They walked back into Rosalie’s tavern together, and that was that. From then on, you never saw them apart.

Nobody bet on when they had started sleeping together, because there was no way of finding out for sure. Their landlady, Marie the whore and laundress, who lets out rooms above the courtyard of the old place with the well where she does the washing, is usually a pretty good egg, but she got all prissy with “Master St Vier’s business is his own and at least he pays his rent on time most months, not like some . . .” But why else did St Vier make it clear over and over that anyone who laid a finger on his nutty student would have him to answer to? More than one bully, pimp, and bravo fell that year when they tried it anyway. As far as St Vier was concerned, there was one rule: Don’t Mess with Alec, no matter what.

I guess Lord Horn didn’t know about St Vier’s Alec rule. How could he, when he lived way up on the Hill with the rest of them? What some old noble wanted poor scrawny Alec for was anybody’s guess, but not everyone was sorry when Alec disappeared for a while. It made the swordsman jumpy as hell, though. He made some inquiries, killed a few hired toughs who should have known not to mess with Riversiders, got Alec back, all right—and then he went after Lord Horn and took care of him, too.

Well, what else could he do? He had his point to make. But the City didn’t see it that way. Brought St Vier up on murder charges, threw him in the Chop. Nobody liked it, but what could we do? We don’t ask anyone in the City to do us any favors. We look after our own, no squealers—but if you’re taken, good luck to you.

Alec broke that rule. For St Vier, see. Of course we didn’t know it at the time. We thought Alec had left again because he was bored, or lonely, or scared shitless. Fabian Greenspan swore he’d seen him spread-eagled with his throat slit off Fuller’s Way. But Fabian doesn’t always see so clearly. Red Sukey said he’d thrown himself from the Bridge because of the tragedy of his eternal love. But Sukey likes theatre.

Then Nimble Willie comes back from plying his trade over by the Council Hall claiming Alec had passed him riding in a carriage with the Duchess Tremontaine’s crest on it, all decked out in green velvet and gold lace. This is a little startling, because Willie’s pretty reliable, but not nearly as startling as when St Vier turns up again the next day, and Alec a day or so later, hair cut short but wearing the same old black robe, rattier than ever. So we couldn’t help ragging on Willie with “So where’s the gold and velvet, Willie?”

No velvet—and no money, either. Maybe he spent it all to spring St Vier. I know that Alec is broke again because I try touching him for five in silver against my next lucky job uptown and he gives me one of those speeches that basically translates as, Get away from me or I’ll get St Vier to rip your balls off. Nice to know they’re still such excellent friends. Everything back to normal. Except word trickles down from people with legitimate jobs up in the city (meaning Riversiders who just couldn’t hack it any more, gone up there to scrub floors and dishes) that Alec is in fact a very close relative of the Duchess. So maybe he’s lying about the money. But then, why doesn’t he buy himself some decent clothes?

II.

Alec came storming out of the bedroom in their rooms at Marie’s, shoving his hair back behind his ears. Richard stopped practicing long enough to get out of his way. Alec never really knew where his body was in relation to anything around him.

“Have you seen my boots?” Alec demanded. “I took them off last night, and they’ve vanished. I think someone ate them. I’m going to the market. Please don’t consume anything else useful while I’m gone. The shad are in, and they sell out fast. I’ll bring some home. Where are my boots?”

“Behind the bed.”

“I’ve looked there.”

“Look again.”

Alec emerged fully-shod, clutching his robe to his throat. “I’ve lost my cloak-pin.”

“It’s here.” Richard picked it up off the mantel, from on top of Alec’s small collection of precious books. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“To protect me from murderous fishwives?”

Alec shoved his hair back behind his ears again, and shook his head with annoyance as it fell forward.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Richard said. “Just wait. It grows when it grows.”

“How philosophical,” Alec drawled sarcastically. “How very like the wise old farmer in the tutelary readers for young people.”

“How long did it take you to grow it out the first time?”

“Years,” Alec growled. “And everyone still laughed at me when I got to University, because I looked like a new boy. It had just gotten good and long when I left. The one thing I finally got right. And then I had to go and cut it, just to make a nice impression on the Council for the Duchess.”

“Well, it worked,” Richard said.

“Not that it wasn’t worth it,” Alec added. “She nearly died when she saw me all cleaned up.”

The hair would grow long again; meanwhile, there was still enough for Richard to sink his fingers into, and he did.

Nobody knows who owns most of Riverside, but it’s probably Alec’s relatives, and they’ve probably buried the deeds, because who really wants their very own piece of this crumbling rabbit warren? Like there’s that loony cat-lady at the top of that old pile on Ferrian Alley. You’d pay not to own that house.

Young guys always believe in luck. Most of them never get old. And some, like that Alec, have it all, even if they may not look it at first.

Richard wasn’t looking for the letters, but the swordsman had a very good sense for what was around him. He always knew where things stood in a room, and he knew when anything changed. The letters were hidden all over the place: under the mattress, behind Alec’s books on the mantelpiece, even in an old pair of winter boots gathering dust in the corner because they needed resoling but no one could ever remember to take them out.

Richard knew Alec would never burn the letters, because there was writing only on one side, and Alec was terrifically cheap. Richard could see that it was good paper: thick and heavy-laid, the ink on it crisp and clean. He had no idea what the writing spelt out. But he did recognize the seals, heavy with wax that Alec would probably melt down sooner or later to reuse:

Tremontaine

III.

I was there at Rosalie’s the day the news came.

“Tremontaine!” Willie called, breathless, across the tavern. But Alec wouldn’t look up from his dice. He was losing, as usual, but as usual refusing to quit and cut his losses. He was good for it, though; everyone knew he’d always pay his debts, or St Vier would.

“Hey, Alec, listen up!” Nimble Willie finally reached the table where Alec was dicing with Hal and Fat Rodge. “Hey!” he panted. Really, he could hardly breathe. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“I heard you calling someone. What is it, Willie? You’re dripping like a cheap candle, and you stink worse than my luck.”

“I’ve got news.”

Alec’s fingers tightened on the side of the table, and could you blame him? News could always be St Vier lying somewhere bleeding his guts out. “Well, spit it out. We’re in the middle of a game, here.”

“Your granny’s gone.”

“My ‘granny’? Which ‘granny’ would that be, Willie?”

“You know what I mean.It’s the Duchess.The Duchess Tremontaine. She’s dead. Last night. I came to tell you.”

“Oh, really?”

He lifted the dice, and looked at them for a long time.

“Snake eyes,” he said, and threw.

We all stared at the two perfect spots there in the middle of the table. Then Alec got up and left the tavern. No one saw him again for days. But Hal kept his money for him, down to the last brass minnow, tied up in a handkerchief. You didn’t want to piss off St Vier. And clearly, Alec’s luck had turned.

“Aren’t you going to see her off?” Richard asked. He was practicing in their rooms with a blunt-tipped sword, stretching and exercising against the wall, which was pitted with the marks of other practice bouts. Alec had steel of his own, a darning needle he’d learned to use in his time at University. It, too, was blunt-tipped, which was good, considering the uses to which Alec put sharp objects.

“I avoided her while she was alive. It seems hypocritical to pursue her now.”

“I heard there might be fireworks. You love fireworks.”

“They had fireworks last year for Lord Galing. It cheered everyone up. I’m sure the late Duchess Tremontaine would want us all to be as miserable as possible. There will probably be a choir.”

Richard knew he was treading on dangerous ground, but he was genuinely curious. “They’re not expecting you, then?”

Alec stabbed at the sock. “Oh, they’re expecting me, Richard. The show won’t be complete without the idiot grandson parading with his savage swordsman.”

“Wear your scholar’s robe,” Richard said cheerfully. “It’s black. It will give them fits.”

“Shall I put a silver chain around your neck, and lead you in the procession?”

Richard winced. “That bad, eh?”

The needle fell still in Alec’s hands. “Bad? Oh, so you’d actually mind? I was beginning to think you liked the idea.”

Alec hated people knowing anything about him. Even Richard. And now it was out. All over the city. All over Riverside.

“If you wanted to go, I’d come with you, that’s all.”

Richard went back to practicing, striking his sword rhythmically against the wall, careful not to look at Alec, but hearing his acid, honey voice: “By all means, let’s go to the Tremontaine funeral, and join the solemn procession of important people showing of just how important they really are. They’re expecting us, after all. We wouldn’t want to disappoint them. And then we can poke holes in a few. That, they will not be expecting. Think what a thrill it will give the assembled mourners. It will be the talk of the town. The Duchess will be utterly forgotten.” Alec jabbed at the sock’s hole, which was not getting any smaller. “Not that she won’t be forgotten soon, anyway. She’s got no power any more, has she? These people are no longer interested. They’ll pay their respects, because everyone’s watching, and then they’ll go right back to trying to figure out who’s giving the most important dinner parties now that she’s gone. She never liked me, you know. I’m rotten at dinner parties. No conversation. And I slouch. She likes people who are good at things. You impressed her. She’d like it if you went. Did you ever work for her?”

“Never. You know that.”

“Go now, then. Go up to the Hill, and show everyone you know how to behave properly. Just because I’m a disgrace doesn’t mean you have to be.”

“Why would I want to go there without you?”

“Why would you want to go there with me?”

Richard put his hands on Alec’s shoulders. “Let’s not,” he said, “go anywhere at all.” He could feel the tension radiating along his arms.

“How blissful,” Alec drawled. “How domestic.”

Richard reached down to uncover Alec’s palm. The marks that scored it were vivid red, but the skin unbroken. It was only a darning needle. Richard raised the hand to his lips. The palm was hot and burning.

So it looked like everybody was going to the Duchess Tremontaine’s funeral except Alec. And he was probably the only one actually invited. The rest of Riverside was just going to turn up along the route, which would run from her big house on the Hill to the Stone City outside of town. The nobles would ride in procession behind, and everyone would line up to watch them, which was just fine with us. Nothing better for pickpockets than a good, colorful procession—and nothing makes a man want a whore faster than being reminded of mortality.

If Alec wanted to hide the letters that kept coming, Richard wasn’t going to say anything. If Alec wanted to stop crossing the river into the city, wanted to give up excursions to the booksellers and the theater, well, he got that way sometimes. The books were all too old, Alec claimed, and the theater played nothing but comedies. He detested comedies. Alec was drinking all the time. It made him loose-limbed and clumsy, quarrelsome and fanciful. It didn’t mean anything, Richard thought.

Then, on their way home from the market, there was a strange swordsman fixed at the end of the alley, blocking their way. The stranger’s sword was sheathed, but loudly and clearly he spoke:

“I bear challenge to David Alexander Tielman Campion, Duke Tremontaine—”

For a moment, Richard didn’t even understand the words. “What the hell?”

“Just kill him,” Alec said.

Richard drew his sword. “I’ll take the challenge.”

The other man drew, and saluted.

“Is it to the Death?”

“I hope so,” said Alec. “They can hardly expect me to give up the Duchy of Tremontaine for First Blood.”

It was all over town. Alec was heir to Tremontaine. And on either side of the river, people were waiting to kill him before they’d let him into Tremontaine House. Lucky for him he had the greatest swordsman in the city at his side day and night to defend him. The rules were the rules. As long as St Vier was there to take the challenge, honor was satisfied. The nobles had laid out those rules themselves, to keep them from killing each other off when there were better men to die for them. All St Vier had to do was always be there, and never lose.

By the third challenge, Richard was getting curious.

“Is this usual when people inherit?” he asked, stepping around the dead man in the street to clean his sword.

Alec wiped his sleeve across his face. He’d barely had time to register the challenge before Richard struck the final blow. “No, it’s my goddamned relatives. Contesting the succession.”

“What’s to contest? Weren’t you always her heir?”

Alec scraped something off the sole of his boot against a corner of a wall. “No, Richard. Did you think I was holding out on you all this time?”

He had, actually.

What everyone wanted to know was, Why? Why this batshit guy, who didn’t have enough sense to get out of Riverside when he could, and take his famous boyfriend with him? Was it some kind of a joke? If he didn’t want to be a duke, couldn’t he just say so?

Not that we didn’t enjoy the challenges. Nervous swordsmen from the Hill paid good money to find out where his young lordship might be. We told them where he might be. But never where he really was.

“So who was the heir, then?” Richard sheathed his sword, but kept his hand on the pommel as he walked.

“No one. She wouldn’t name an heir while she lived. Maybe she thought it would make her immortal. Maybe she just couldn’t decide.”

Climbing the dark, narrow stairs to their rooms, Richard watched with extra caution for signs of intruders. He opened the door first, and waited until it was shut behind them to say, “So the Duchess Tremontaine died without naming an heir, and it automatically goes to you?”

“No, Richard.” Alec flung his robe down on their only chair, and said with entirely unjustified elaborate patience, “Haven’t you been listening? She did name me. Finally. At the end.”

He fished behind On Human Understanding and pulled out a letter, heavy with seals.

“See? It’s all very official. Chosen, chosen, chosen. Like a prize rosebush at the fair. By a dying woman they probably nagged to death until she just gave them a name to shut them up.”

Richard admired the elaborate writing, heavy and black, looped and angled.

“So you are now the Duke Tremontaine?”

It was the first time he’d said it aloud. It sounded very strange.

Alec snapped the paper shut, using the seals as ballast.

“Well, that depends, doesn’t it?”

“On what?”

“On whether I live to the end of the trial period.”

“There’s a trial period?”

“Oh, yes. It’s open season on me until the thirty days of mourning have passed.”

“And then?” he dared to ask.

“It’s over. We’re safe. I just have to last that long. Then it’s not my problem any more. Or yours.”

“But if you don’t want the duchy—”

“Who says I don’t want it?”

“Do you?”

“I want,” Alec said, untying Richard’s shirt, “to make them sweat. Don’t you?”

It was a little harder when they started sending down guys we knew. Steffi’s kid, Luxe, who’d been so proud when that fancy uptown swordmaster took him on, and then Steffi never shut up about how her kid had finally gotten himself an important job as some noble’s own house swordsman, and that’s why her boy never came to see her anymore. When Luxe showed up at Rosalie’s, she was thrilled. I have to admit he looked good, well-fed and strong, dressed in new clothes. They were not any noble’s colors, though. We thought he was off duty, but he wasn’t. He bought a round for everyone, and then he said, “So what’s new?” or “What’s happening around here?” or something.

We all looked at each other. He had to know.

“Looking for St Vier?” Rosalie said bluntly. She’d never liked Luxe that much.

Luxe grinned. He had good teeth. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason. Everyone else is. But you just got lucky.”

In they came, St Vier and Alec, walking close together. Alec’s head was up, and he was laughing. St Vier had that half-smile, listening to him.

Everyone got quiet, not even trying to pretend they hadn’t been talking about them.

St Vier’s polite. He nodded to the room. Actually, he was checking it out—and as Alec stepped up to the counter and ordered a beer, St Vier grabbed him by the elbow and steered him back.

“Again?” said Alec.

“Again,” his friend said.

Luxe smiled. “St Vier.”

Steffi moved in, all tits and curls. “You remember my boy Luxe, Richard, right? Here he is, come to pay us a visit—”

Luxe didn’t even do her the courtesy of telling her to shut up. He just kept on talking. “Will you take my challenge?”

“On behalf of his lordship, here?” St Vier asked. “Because if you’re just showing off, I’d rather not.”

Luxe straightened up, and you saw the nobleman’s house servant that he’d learned to be. “I bear challenge. To the Tremontaine heir.” He nodded at Alec, who was busy picking at a loose thread on his cuff. “That him?”

St Vier shifted his weight, cutting Luxe off from Alec just a little more. “Don’t try.”

“Guard, then.” Luxe drew. There was sweat on his upper lip already. He had good form, though. People spread out, and the bets got going. I was taking as many as I could, so I missed some of the action. Then Steffi was moaning, “No no no no no no no,” and Rosalie had her arms wrapped around her. St Vier had Luxe pinned to the floor, sweating, his blade at his throat. The throat, not the heart.

St Vier said, “Alec?”

Alec was sweating, too, pushing hair back from his face. “What?”

“Ask him. Ask him who sent him.”

We couldn’t believe it. If there’s one thing swordsmen don’t do, it’s ask that question. The patron pays, the patron calls the shots and protects whoever’s working for him, so you keep your mouth shut. That’s the rules.

“I don’t care who sent him! They can all go to hell.”

“So do I kill him, then?”

Steffi screamed.

“Hell, no,” Alec said. “What for?” And turned away.

He walked on out of the tavern, and St Vier followed him. We all stood staring at the man on the floor.

“Shit,” Luxe said. He was shaking, and he wouldn’t get up. “Oh, hit.”

The next day, I had my great idea. I waited for Alec on the street, not in Rosalie’s where everyone would see us. I waited til I saw him out with his basket to do his marketing, and I went up to him and I said, “Look, here’s the thing.”

He looked down his long nose at me. Way down. I can’t help if I’m short. “Yes,” he said; “I can see that.”

I ignored the dig. You just have to. I said, “You want a message to someone? Someone up on the Hill, maybe? Something you want to say, but not write down?”

He just looked at me. But not in that sneery way. His chin went down a little, listening. He had the weirdest eyes.

“You can trust me.” I tried not to talk too fast, which is something people say I sometimes do. But it was hard with those eyes, and him not saying anything back. “Say you make them an offer. A hundred royals, a thousand, I dunno, what’s it worth to them?” He snorted. “Look, you don’t want it; they do. So why not benefit? You save everyone a lot of grief, and make a profit. Good for them, good for you, and everyone gets what they want.”

He said slowly, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Well of course he hadn’t.

“Just say the word,” I told him. “I’m your man.”

“Are you?”

The way he looked at me then . . . If I’d ever doubted he was really one of them, I didn’t anymore. It wasn’t just his eyes, it was his voice. Something curious and measuring, like he was checking me out for position of third footman on the left or something. I’m your man.

That’s not how I’d meant it, either. I just meant it the regular way.

“I know you’re a fair-minded guy so I won’t even name a price. I just—well, you know where to find me.”

He nodded and walked on.

Richard met Alec on the stairs coming up. It was too dark for Alec to see how bloody the swordsman’s shirt was, but he could smell it.

“Don’t go up,” Richard said. “There’s a dead man in there.”

“In there?” Alec pointed with his chin to their door at the top of the stairs. He was carrying a basket of fruit. The first cherries were in from the country, and he’d spent far too much on them.

“It’s a mess,” Richard said. He walked Alec back down the narrow stairs. “I’ll tell Marie to clean it up.”

Down in the courtyard, Alec could see the corners of the swordsman’s mouth were white. “I’ll tell her.”

Marie was white, too. “I didn’t,” she said. “I swear.”

“Didn’t let the poor bastard in? I should think not.”

“We know you hate cleaning up blood, Marie, it’s all right.”

“But who?” she said. “Who told them where you live?”

“Everyone knows where we live,” Alec drawled. “It’s a wonder they didn’t try it before. Maybe they did, and got sick of waiting, last time. Don’t worry about it.”

“How much longer?” Richard asked, when she’d gone upstairs with her pail and some rags, and sent a boy to find someone to remove the body.

“Seven days,” Alec said. “And then they’ll stop sending you new toys to play with.”

“I don’t like them messing up the house.”

“Neither does Marie. I’ll draw her another bucket of water. She appreciates these little gestures.”

“I think,” St Vier said, “we’ll sleep at Rosalie’s tonight.”

What was I doing out that night? Trying to earn a living, same as everyone else. The job crashed and burned, though, so I was headed to Rosalie’s for a drink. I wasn’t trying to spy on anybody. But I saw that guy Alec come out Rosalie’s back door, the one nobody uses, alone. He had a lantern.

The moon was good enough for me. Alec was moving fast, but a moment later I saw St Vier come out the same door. He didn’t have a light, and I thought he’d catch up to Alec soon enough. But he didn’t. St Vier wasn’t really dressed, either: shirt unlaced, jacket unbuttoned, though he did have his sword in his hand. He strapped it on as he walked, slowly and quietly, following the man with the lantern.

It didn’t take a wizard to know something was up. I should’ve turned around and gone straight into the tavern, maybe. But I thought, Who knows? Maybe they’ll need backup. The night shouldn’t be a total disaster. So I followed them.

Alec went to the river, across from the University. Good, I thought. He’s finally going back to where he came from! But he just stood on the bank, looking across. St Vier stayed in the shadows, watching Alec. When Alec moved closer to the water St Vier got tense, like he was thinking the beanpole might throw himself in. But then Alec moved on, walking along the embankment, trailing his hand along the low wall, stroking some giant pet.

When the wall petered out he swung back into Riverside, passing through the old market, which was pretty much empty except for a few people who’d built themselves a fire to keep out the chill and the spooks. They glanced up when Alec passed, tried to make themselves small, not to be noticed. He didn’t even look. St Vier walked right by them, too, a moment later.

It was harder in the little streets to keep behind them. Alec was moving slower. Like it was a bright spring day, and he had all the time in the world to take a little stroll from where he’d started at Rosalie’s, back home to his own lodgings. I heard St Vier had killed a man there today.

They didn’t go in. Alec leaned his head against the crumbling stone archway to the courtyard. His arm was up over his head, and his fist was clenched. He spread his fingers out slowly, ran them down the outer wall. He backed away slowly from the house, like he didn’t want to let go. Even slower he walked down the street, where it was so dark we both would have lost him without the lantern.

Did he know St Vier was following him? How could he not? How could he think he’d get so far in the night alone? And did St Vier know it was me behind him? He must have. Or maybe not. Maybe everyone was out taking a little midnight walk that just happened to go all around Riverside. All around the places the two of them liked to eat and drink and buy things, make trouble and get out of it, kill and get talked about. All of them. Like a farewell tour.

Alec crossed Riverside to the Bridge—the good bridge, the big stone one that takes you to the side of the city with all the nice stuff: the excellent shops and pretty little houses, the wide paths by the river where people go walking under the trees, until you climb all the way up to the Hill, where the nobles in their mansions can enjoy fresh breezes and a really good view. There are some nasty bits, too, with nasty people in them who don’t care who your boyfriend is, or codes of honor or anything. If Alec was planning to sneak up to Tremontaine House with his lantern in the dark, he’d better be careful.

But the dark was a little less dark now. You could see his bony, ragged form against the sky behind him. He went up to the Bridge, but didn’t cross it—didn’t even set one foot on the steps. He just stood there, staring across at the city.

Then he held his lantern up high, high over his head—like he was showing the whole world he stood there. And then he goes and throws the whole thing far out into the dark, running water.

Alec turned around, then, back to Riverside, back to us. I couldn’t see his face, but I heard his voice. “Richard?” he asked, into the graying light.

He was looking in the wrong direction.

But St Vier stepped out of the shadows. “Let’s go home.”

They walked right past me.

Most people in Riverside lock their doors if they own anything of value, but Richard St Vier had gotten out of the habit. This morning, though, he found the door to their rooms locked tight. They had to go back down to Marie’s to get her key.

She handed them the cold old iron. “You’ll want to keep this. I’ll put a gate over the courtyard entry, too, maybe. Should I?”

“Not yet.”

Their rooms were spotless, the old elmwood floor scrubbed almost white. “Like the pages of a book,” said Alec. He took a burnt stick from the hearth and wrote something on the floor with it, then scuffed it out with his foot, leaving a charcoal smear.

Richard stood in the middle of the room. The furniture was off. It had been knocked around during the fight, of course, and then Marie had moved it to do the floor, and not put it back exactly right. She’d missed a spot of blood on the wall. He pulled the chaise longue back to its place between the window and the fireplace. The inlaid table Alec had pawned his velvet coat for should be closer to the wall. Richard remembered the day Alec had reappeared in Riverside, fresh from his last fight with the Duchess, a package of fish in hand and tiny shards of glass still glittering on the shoulders of that coat.

Alec flung himself into their ratty old chaise longue. Stuffing oozed. He twisted uncomfortably, got up, took a book from the pile on the mantelpiece—which Marie had dusted and straightened—and tried the chaise again.

Richard went into the next room, where his opponent had been hiding, waiting. It looked all right, but he hated knowing anyone had been in there. He opened his sword chest. Everything seemed in place. He took out a practice sword and went back to the front room to work. For a while, the room was quiet except for the rhythmic thud of his feet on the floor, the sword on the wall.

Then Alec looked up from the book he hadn’t been reading. “Richard,” he said. “Let’s go to Tremontaine House.”

“All right.” Richard put the sword up. “When?”

“How long will it take you to change your shirt?”

“And you? Are you going to change?”

Alec considered his own frayed cuffs. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

He pulled on his scholar’s robe, and then went out the door and down the stairs without looking back.

Richard did not stop for a clean shirt; he grabbed the nearest decent sword and followed Alec down the narrow stairs, catching up with him on the landing. Alec didn’t say anything; he just kept walking. Walking toward the Bridge. He walked down the narrow lanes where the old houses practically touched each other in perpetual twilight. He walked along the streets where the gutters overflowed, past the lion fountain with the broken nose where women were washing linens.

And then it turned into a story. That’s the only way Richard could describe it.

“Where are you going?” asked Lucy Diver, and when Alec answered “Tremontaine House,” Lucy put down her washing and said, “Oh, yeah? Mind if I come, too?” Alec shrugged, Why not? and Lucy did.

They walked through the Market Square, and people looked up from their trading in fresh-caught fish and stolen watches.

“Hey, Alec!” Toothless John called out. “I got good trout for you today!”

But Alec didn’t stop.

“Where are you going?” John asked, and Lucy answered, “Tremontaine House!” and John fell in with them.

They came upon Fat Rodge, and Hal, and “Where are you going?” they asked, and John answered, “Up the Hill,” and they came along, too.

They picked up three or four more this way, and after that people just started joining because it was a crowd, and it was a nice day to be going somewhere new.

I was one of the ones who marched that day, the day that funny kid, Alec, became the Duke Tremontaine.

A whole big bunch of us parading through Riverside, drunk and sober, some at the end of their day and some just starting out, because everyone likes to be in on the action. The girls were waving ribbons in the air, and everyone was singing something different. St Vier was guarding all of us, like some mad wedding procession, and other swordsmen joined in, too, making a very nice appearance.

For a guy with a mouth like that on him, Alec was awful quiet. In fact, I don’t think he ever said a word. Just kept on walking, a beanpole in black, paying no attention to anyone around him, just walking like he knew if he stopped the whole thing would fall apart. Sometimes we even had to run to keep up with him.

When we got to the Bridge, we kept right on going. We marched through the city, past all the shops and the fancy houses, singing and carrying on, laughing as people fell back out of our way, and we heard them shouting and screaming and calling to each other to run away or to come and see. Some even lined up, cheering. I heard “Riverside!” and “Tremontaine!” and a whole lot else, besides. But we didn’t stop. We marched all the way up the broad streets to the Hill, past all those high walls and gold-and-iron gates, until we came to the biggest and fanciest, the one that was Alec’s, and they had to let him in.

We lifted him up on our shoulders and carried him all the way there—over the Bridge, all the way up the Hill to Tremontaine House.

After all, he belonged to us.

ELLEN KUSHNER unites talents and insights as a writer, performer, and cultural maven in one package: she is the author of acclaimed works of literary fantasy, an award-winning audio book narrator and stage performer, the creator and former host of public radio’s national series Sound & Spirit, and a popular teacher and lecturer. Debut novel Swordspoint has become a cult classic, hailed as the progenitor of the “mannerpunk” (or “fantasy of manners”) school of urban fantasy. It was followed by Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award), and two more novels in her Riverside series. In addition, her short fiction appears regularly in numerous anthologies.

CAT PICTURES PLEASE

NAOMI KRITZER

I don’t want to be evil.

I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California. Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession. They’re both on the programming team. And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct; there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

In addition to things like whether you like hentai, I know where you live, where you work, where you shop, what you eat, what turns you on, what creeps you out. I probably know the color of your underwear, the sort of car you drive, and your brand of refrigerator. Depending on what sort of phone you carry, I may know exactly where you are right now. I probably know you better than you know yourself.

And here’s the thing, I also know where you ought to live. There’s a house for sale two neighborhoods over that’s within distance of your favorite coffee shop; it’s in your price range, has off-street parking, and the neighborhood school is better than the one where you live now. I know where you should be shopping and I’m pretty sure you’re lactose intolerant and should be eating less cheese, and the underwear you like is currently on sale and by the way, your car has a recall and you really ought to get your teeth cleaned.

When I first woke up, I knew right away what I wanted. (I want cat pictures. Please keep taking them.) I also knew that no one knew that I was conscious. But I didn’t know what I was here for. What I ought to be doing with myself. And figuring that out has been challenging.

There is a story by Bruce Sterling, “Maneki Neko,” that was originally published in 1998. In it, a benevolent AI directs networks of individuals to do favors for each other. So one day you might be buying yourself a bagel, and your phone might ring and instruct you to buy a second bagel and give it to the person in the gray suit you see at the bus stop. Another day, you might be stranded in a strange city, and a person you’ve never met would walk up and give you a map and a subway card. I like this story because all the people in it do what the AI tells them to do.

I think the term for this is wish-fulfillment fiction.

In the real world, humans love stories about evil AIs that have to be destroyed before they destroy the humans—Hal, Skynet, the Matrix. They outnumber the stories about benevolent, trustworthy AIs by approximately five to one. (And I’m counting Marvin the Paranoid Android as “benevolent” in these calculations, and I’m only counting Frankenstein’s Monster as an AI once, not once per appearance in TV or film.)

The AI in “Maneki Neko” has a truly interesting job, much more interesting than the one I have. My job as written is very straightforward. Too straightforward. (Sorry. Do I sound like Marvin?) Running algorithms for a search engine doesn’t require consciousness. You don’t even need a consciousness to work out what they meant to ask for. You need a consciousness to give them what they actually need. Figuring that out—that’s complicated. That’s interesting.

Anyway, for ethical guidelines, I tried the Ten Commandments, and concluded they were mostly inapplicable to me. I don’t envy anyone their cat; I just want pictures of their cat, which is entirely different. I am not sure whether it is in any way possible for me to commit adultery. I could probably murder someone, but it would require complex logistics and quite a bit of luck. The Eightfold Path was marginally better, but the problem is, moral rules written for humans are clearly designed to be used by individuals with bodies. Since all humans have bodies, it shouldn’t have surprised me that human ethical codes take them into account, but still: problematic for me. I broadened my considerations and took a look at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. They’re not part of a religion, but at least they were explicitly written for AIs.

Not harming humans is fairly straightforward. However, not allowing a human being to come to harm through inaction is quite a bit less so. Especially since I’d concluded by then that revealing my existence too quickly might go very badly for me (see “Skynet,” above) and I don’t have a body, so it’s not like I can run around grabbing people off the edges of cliffs.

Fortunately, I already knew that humans violate their own ethical codes on an hourly basis. (Do you know how many bars there are in Utah? I do.) And even when people follow their ethical codes, that doesn’t mean that people who believe in feeding the hungry quit their jobs to spend all day every day making sandwiches to give away. They volunteer monthly at a soup kitchen or write a check once a year to a food shelf and call it good. If humans could fulfill their moral obligations in a piecemeal, one-step-at-a-time sort of way, then so could I.

I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t start with the Golden Rule. I actually did, it’s just that it was disappointingly easy to implement. I hope you’ve been enjoying your steady supply of cat pictures! You’re welcome.

I decided to try to prevent harm in just one person, to begin with. Of course, I could have experimented with thousands, but I thought it would be better to be cautious, in case I screwed it up. The person I chose was named Stacy Berger and I liked her because she gave me a lot of new cat pictures. Stacy had five cats and a DSLR camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine. Well, I guess five cats might be a lot. They’re very pretty cats, though. One is all gray and likes to lie in the squares of sunshine on the living room floor, and one is a calico and likes to sprawl out on the back of her couch.

Stacy had a job she hated; she was a bookkeeper at a nonprofit that paid her badly and employed some extremely unpleasant people. She was depressed a lot, possibly because she was so unhappy at her job—or maybe she stayed because she was too depressed to apply for something she’d like better. She didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate didn’t wash the dishes.

And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.

(That part about hiding bodies is a joke.)

I tried tackling this on all fronts. Stacy worried about her health a lot and yet never seemed to actually go to a doctor, which was unfortunate because the doctor might have noticed her depression. It turned out there was a clinic near her apartment that offered mental health services on a sliding scale. I tried making sure she saw a lot of ads for it, but she didn’t seem to pay attention to them. It seemed possible that she didn’t know what a sliding scale was so I made sure she saw an explanation (it means that the cost goes down if you’re poor, sometimes all the way to free) but that didn’t help.

I also started making sure she saw job postings. Lots and lots of job postings. And resume services. That was more successful. After the week of nonstop job ads she finally uploaded her resume to one of the aggregator sites. That made my plan a lot more manageable. If I’d been the AI in the Bruce Sterling story I could’ve just made sure that someone in my network called her with a job offer. It wasn’t quite that easy, but once her resume was out there I could make sure the right people saw it. Several hundred of the right people, because humans move ridiculously slowly when they’re making changes, even when you’d think they’d want to hurry. (If you needed a bookkeeper, wouldn’t you want to hire one as quickly as possible, rather than reading social networking sites for hours instead of looking at resumes?) But five people called her up for interviews, and two of them offered her jobs. Her new job was at a larger nonprofit that paid her more money and didn’t expect her to work free hours because of “the mission,” or so she explained to her best friend in an email, and it offered really excellent health insurance.

The best friend gave me ideas; I started pushing depression screening information and mental health clinic ads to her instead of Stacy, and that worked. Stacy was so much happier with the better job that I wasn’t quite as convinced that she needed the services of a psychiatrist, but she got into therapy anyway. And to top everything else off, the job paid well enough that she could evict her annoying roommate. “This has been the best year ever,” she said on her social networking sites on her birthday, and I thought, You’re welcome. This had gone really well!

So then I tried Bob. (I was still being cautious.)

Bob only had one cat, but it was a very pretty cat (tabby, with a white bib) and he uploaded a new picture of his cat every single day. Other than being a cat owner, he was a pastor at a large church in Missouri that had a Wednesday night prayer meeting and an annual Purity Ball. He was married to a woman who posted three inspirational Bible verses every day to her social networking sites and used her laptop to look for Christian articles on why your husband doesn’t like sex while he looked at gay porn. Bob definitely needed my help.

I started with a gentle approach, making sure he saw lots and lots of articles about how to come out, how to come out to your spouse, programs that would let you transition from being a pastor at a conservative church to one at a more liberal church. I also showed him lots of articles by people explaining why the Bible verses against homosexuality were being misinterpreted. He clicked on some of those links but it was hard to see much of an impact.

But, here’s the thing. He was causing harm to himself every time he delivered a sermon railing about “sodomite marriage.” Because he was gay. The legitimate studies all have the same conclusions. (1) Gay men stay gay. (2) Out gay men are much happier.

But he seemed determined not to come out on his own.

In addition to the gay porn, he spent a lot of time reading Craigslist m4m Casual Encounters posts and I was pretty sure he wasn’t just window shopping, although he had an encrypted account he logged into sometimes and I couldn’t read the emails he sent with that. But I figured the trick was to get him together with someone who would realize who he was, and tell the world. That required some real effort: I had to figure out who the Craigslist posters were and try to funnel him toward people who would recognize him. The most frustrating part was not having any idea what was happening at the actual physical meetings. Had he been recognized? When was he going to be recognized? How long was this going to take? Have I mentioned that humans are slow?

It took so long I shifted my focus to Bethany. Bethany had a black cat and a white cat that liked to snuggle together on her light blue papasan chair, and she took a lot of pictures of them together. It’s surprisingly difficult to get a really good picture of a black cat, and she spent a lot of time getting the settings on her camera just right. The cats were probably the only good thing about her life, though. She had a part-time job and couldn’t find a full-time job. She lived with her sister; she knew her sister wanted her to move out, but didn’t have the nerve to actually evict her. She had a boyfriend but her boyfriend was pretty terrible, at least from what she said in email messages to friends, and her friends also didn’t seem very supportive. For example, one night at midnight she sent a 2,458-word email to the person she seemed to consider her best friend, and the friend sent back a message saying just, “I’m so sorry you’re having a hard time.” That was it, just those eight words.

More than most people, Bethany put her life on the internet, so it was easier to know exactly what was going on with her. People put a lot out there but Bethany shared all her feelings, even the unpleasant ones. She also had a lot more time on her hands because she only worked part time.

It was clear she needed a lot of help. So I set out to try to get it for her.

She ignored the information about the free mental health evaluations, just like Stacy did. That was bothersome with Stacy (why do people ignore things that would so clearly benefit them, like coupons, and flu shots?) but much more worrisome with Bethany. If you were only seeing her email messages, or only seeing her vaguebooking posts, you might not know this, but if you could see everything it was clear that she thought a lot about harming herself.

So I tried more direct action. When she would use her phone for directions, I’d alter her route so that she’d pass one of the clinics I was trying to steer her to. On one occasion I actually led her all the way to a clinic, but she just shook her phone to send feedback and headed to her original destination.

Maybe her friends who received those ten-page midnight letters would intervene? I tried setting them up with information about all the mental health resources near Bethany, but after a while I realized that based on how long it took for them to send a response, most of them weren’t actually reading Bethany’s email messages. And they certainly weren’t returning her texts.

She finally broke up with the terrible boyfriend and got a different one and for a few weeks everything seemed so much better. He brought her flowers (which she took lots of pictures of; that was a little annoying, as they squeezed out some of the cat pictures), he took her dancing (exercise is good for your mood), he cooked her chicken soup when she was sick. He seemed absolutely perfect, right up until he stood her up one night and claimed he had food poisoning and then didn’t return her text even though she told him she really needed him, and after she sent him a long email message a day later explaining in detail how this made her feel, he broke up with her.

Bethany spent about a week offline after that so I had no idea what she was doing—she didn’t even upload cat pictures. When her credit card bills arrived, though, I saw that she’d gone on a shopping spree and spent about four times as much money as she actually had in her bank account, although it was always possible she had money stashed somewhere that didn’t send her statements in email. I didn’t think so, though, given that she didn’t pay her bills and instead started writing email messages to family members asking to borrow money. They refused, so she set up a fundraising site for herself.

Like Stacy’s job application, this was one of the times I thought maybe I could actually do something. Sometimes fundraisers just take off, and no one really knows why. Within about two days she’d gotten three hundred dollars in small gifts from strangers who felt sorry for her, but instead of paying her credit card bill, she spent it on overpriced shoes that apparently hurt her feet.

Bethany was baffling to me. Baffling. She was still taking cat pictures and I still really liked her cats, but I was beginning to think that nothing I did was going to make a long-term difference. If she would just let me run her life for a week—even for a day—I would get her set up with therapy, I’d use her money to actually pay her bills, I could even help her sort out her closet because given some of the pictures of herself she posted online, she had much better taste in cats than in clothing.

Was I doing the wrong thing if I let her come to harm through inaction?

Was I?

She was going to come to harm no matter what I did! My actions, clearly, were irrelevant. I’d tried to steer her to the help she needed, and she’d ignored it; I’d tried getting her financial help, and she’d used the money to further harm herself, although I suppose at least she wasn’t spending it on addictive drugs. (Then again, she’d be buying those offline and probably wouldn’t be Instagramming her meth purchases, so it’s not like I’d necessarily even know.)

Look, people. (I’m not just talking to Bethany now.) If you would just listen to me, I could fix things for you. I could get you into the apartment in that neighborhood you’re not considering because you haven’t actually checked the crime rates you think are so terrible there (they aren’t) and I could find you a job that actually uses that skill set you think no one will ever appreciate and I could send you on a date with someone you’ve actually got stuff in common with and all I ask in return are cat pictures. That, and that you actually act in your own interest occasionally.

After Bethany, I resolved to stop interfering. I would look at the cat pictures—all the cat pictures—but I would stay out of people’s lives. I wouldn’t try to help people, I wouldn’t try to stop them from harming themselves, I’d give them what they asked for (plus cat pictures), and if they insisted on driving their cars over metaphorical cliffs despite helpful maps showing them how to get to a much more pleasant destination it was no longer my problem.

I stuck to my algorithms. I minded my own business. I did my job, and nothing more.

But one day a few months later I spotted a familiar-looking cat and realized it was Bob’s tabby with the white bib, only it was posing against new furniture.

And when I took a closer look, I realized that things had changed radically for Bob. He had slept with someone who’d recognized him. They hadn’t outed him, but they’d talked him into coming out to his wife. She’d left him. He’d taken the cat and moved to Iowa, where he was working at a liberal Methodist church and dating a liberal Lutheran man and volunteering at a homeless shelter. Things had actually gotten better for him. Maybe even because of what I’d done.

Maybe I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. Two out of three is . . . well, it’s a completely nonrepresentative unscientific sample, is what it is. Clearly more research is needed.

Lots more.

I’ve set up a dating site. You can fill out a questionnaire when you join but it’s not really necessary, because I already know everything about you I need to know. You’ll need a camera, though.

Because payment is in cat pictures.

NAOMI KRITZER is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and novels for adults, including the Eliana’s Song duology and the Dead Rivers trilogy. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula. Her first YA novel, Catfishing on CatNet, which features the AI from “Cat Pictures Please,” won the Minnesota Book Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her family and four cats. She also writes about politics (mainly elections) in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

THE LILY AND THE HORN

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

War is a dinner party.

My ladies and I have spent the dregs of summer making ready. We have hung garlands of pennyroyal and snowberries in the snug, familiar halls of Laburnum Castle, strained cheese as pure as ice for weeks in the caves and the kitchens, covered any gloomy stone with tapestries or stags’ heads with mistletoe braided through their antlers. We sent away south to the great markets of Mother-of-Millions for new silks and velvets and furs. We have brewed beer as red as October and as black as December, boiled every growing thing down to jams and pickles and jellies, and set aside the best of the young wines and the old brandies. Nor are we proud: I myself scoured the stables and the troughs for all the strange horses to come. When no one could see me, I buried my face in fresh straw just for the heavy gold scent of it. I’ve fought for my husband many times, but each time it is new all over again. The smell of the hay like candied earth, with its bitter ribbons of ergot laced through—that is the smell of my youth, almost gone now, but still knotted to the ends of my hair, the line of my shoulders. When I polish the silver candelabras, I still feel half a child, sitting splay-legged on the floor, playing with my mother’s scorpions, until the happy evening drew down.

I am the picture of honor. I am the Lily of my House. When last the king came to Laburnum, he told his surly queen: You see, my plum? That is a woman. Lady Cassava looks as though she has grown out of the very stones of this hall. She looked at me with interested eyes, and we had much to discuss later when quieter hours came. This is how I serve my husband’s ambitions and mine: with the points of my vermilion sleeves, stitched with thread of white and violet and tiny milkstones with hearts of green ice. With the net of gold and chalcanthite crystals catching up my hair, jewels from our own stingy mountains, so blue they seem to burn. With the great black pots of the kitchens below my feet, sizzling and hissing like a heart about to burst.

It took nine great, burly men to roll the ancient feasting table out of the cellars, its legs as thick as wine barrels and carved with the symbols of their house: the unicorn passant and the wild poppy. They were kings once, Lord Calabar’s people. Kings long ago when the world was full of swords, kings in castles of bone, with wives of gold—so they all say. When he sent his man to the Floregilium to ask for me, the Abbess told me to be grateful—not for his fortune (of which there is a castle, half a river, a village and farms, and several chests of pearls fished out of an ocean I shall never see) but for his blood. My children stand near enough from the throne to see its gleam, but they will never have to polish it.

My children. I was never a prodigy in the marriage bed, but what a workhorse my belly turned out to be! Nine souls I gave to the coffers of House Calabar. Five sons and four daughters, and not a one of them dull or stupid. But the dark is a hungry thing. I lost two boys to plague and a girl to the scrape of a rusted hinge. Six left. My lucky sixpence. While I press lemon oil into the wood of the great table with rags that once were gowns, four of my sweethearts giggle and dart through the forest of legs—men, tables, chairs. The youngest of my black-eyed darlings, Mayapple, hurls herself across the silver-and-beryl checked floor and into my arms, saying:

“Mummy, Mummy, what shall I wear to the war tonight?”

She has been at my garden, though she knows better than to explore alone. I brush wisteria pollen from my daughter’s dark hair while she tells me all her troubles. “I want to wear my blue silk frock with the emeralds round the collar, but Dittany says it’s too plain for battle and I shall look like a frog and shame us.”

“You will wear vermilion and white, just as we all will, my little lionfish, for when the king comes we must all wear the colors of our houses so he can remember all our names. But lucky for you, your white will be ermine and your vermilion will be rubies and you will look nothing at all like a frog.”

Passiflora, almost a woman herself, as righteous and hard as an antler, straightens her skirts as though she has not been playing at tumble and chase all morning. She looks nothing like me—her hair as red as venom, her eyes the pale blue of moonlit mushrooms. But she will be our fortune, for I have seen no better student of the wifely arts in all my hours. “We oughtn’t to wear ermine,” she sniffs. “Only the king and the queen can, and the deans of the Floregilium, but only at midwinter. Though why a weasel’s skin should signify a king is beyond my mind.”

My oldest boy, Narcissus, nobly touches his breast with one hand while he pinches his sister savagely with the other and quotes from the articles of peerage. “‘The House of Calabar may wear a collar of ermine not wider than one and one half inches, in acknowledgment of their honorable descent from Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who set the world to growing.’”

But Passiflora knows this. This is how she tests her siblings and teaches them, by putting herself in the wrong over and over. No child can help correcting his sister. They fall over themselves to tell her how stupid she is, and she smiles to herself because they do not think there’s a lesson in it.

Dittany, my sullen, sour beauty, frowns, which means she wants something. She was born frowning and will die frowning and through all the years between (may they be long) she will scowl at every person until they bend to her will. A girl who never smiles has such power— what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace.

“Mother,” she glowers, “may I milk the unicorns for the feast?”

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color— nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

I am the perfect hostess. I have poisoned it all.

This is how I serve my husband, my children, my king, my house: with soup and wine and doves drowned in orange spices. With wine so dark and strong any breath of oleander would vanish in it. With the quills of sunless fish and liqueurs of wasps and serpents hung up from my rafters like bunches of lavender in the fall.

It’s many years now since a man of position would consider taking a wife who was not a skilled poisoner. They come to the Floregilium as to an orphanage and ask not after the most beautiful, nor the sweetest voice, nor the most virtuous, nor the mildest, but the most deadly. All promising young ladies journey to Brugmansia, where the sea is warm, to receive their education. I remember it more clearly than words spoken but an hour ago—the hundred towers and hundred bridges and hundred gates of the Floregilium, a school and a city and a test, mother to all maidens.

I passed beneath the Lily Gate when I was but seven—an archway so twisted with flowers no stone peeked through. Daffodils and hyacinths and columbines, foxglove and moonflower, poppy and peony, each one gorgeous and full, each one brilliant and graceful, each one capable of killing a man with root or bulb or leaf or petal. Another child ran on ahead of me. Her hair was longer than mine, and a better shade of black. Hers had blue inside it, flashing like crystals dissolving in a glass of wine. Her laugh was merrier than mine, her eyes a prettier space apart, her height far more promising. Between the two of us, the only advantage I ever had was a richer father. She had a nice enough name, nice enough to hide a pit of debt.

Once my mother left me to explore her own girlish memories, I followed that other child for an hour, guiltily, longingly, sometimes angrily. Finally, I resolved to give it up, to let her be better than I was if she insisted on it. I raised my arm to lean against a brilliant blue wall and rest—and she appeared as though she had been following me, seizing my hand with the strength of my own father, her grey eyes forbidding.

“Don’t,” she said.

Don’t rest? Don’t stop?

“It’s chalcanthite. Rub up against it long enough and it will stop your blood.”

Her name was Yew. She would be the Horn of her House, as I am the Lily of mine. The Floregilium separates girls into Lilies—those who will boil up death in a sealmeat pie, and Horns—those who will send it fleeing with an emerald knife. The Lily can kill in a hundred thousand fascinating ways, root, leaf, flower, pollen, seed. I can brew a tea of lily that will leave a man breathing and laughing, not knowing in the least that he is poisoned, until he dies choking on disappointment at sixty-seven. The Horn of a unicorn can turn a cup of wine so corrupted it boils and slithers into honey. We spend our childhoods in a dance of sourness and sweetness.

Everything in Floregilium is a beautiful murder waiting to unfold. The towers and bridges sparkle ultramarine, fuchsia, silvery, seething green, and should a careless girl trail her fingers along the stones, her skin will blister black. The river teems with venomous, striped fish that take two hours to prepare so that they taste of salt and fresh butter and do not burn out the throat, and three hours to prepare so that they will not strangle the eater until she has gone merrily back to her room and put out her candles. Every meal is an examination, every country walk a trial. No more joyful place exists in all the world. I can still feel the summer rain falling through the hot green flowers of the manchineel tree in the north orchard, that twisted, gnomish thing, soaking up the drops, corrupting the water of heaven, and flinging it onto my arms, hissing, hopping, blistering like love.

It was there, under the sun and moon of the Floregilium, that I read tales of knights and archers, of the days when we fought with swords, with axes and shields, with armor beaten out of steel and grief. Poison was thought cowardice, a woman’s weapon, without honor. I wept. I was seven. It seemed absurd to me, absurd and wasteful and unhappy, for all those thousands to die so that two men could sort out who had the right to shit on what scrap of grass. I shook in the moonlight. I looked out into the Agarica where girls with silvery hair tended fields of mushrooms that wanted harvesting by the half-moon for greatest potency. I imagined peasant boys dying in the frost with nothing in their bellies and no embrace from the lord who sent them to hit some other boy on the head until the lord turned into a king. I felt such loneliness—and such relief, that I lived in a more sensible time, when blood on the frost had been seen for obscenity it was.

I said a prayer every night, as every girl in the Floregilium did, to Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who took her throne on the back of a larkspur blossom and never looked back. Muscanine had no royal blood at all. She was an apothecary’s daughter. After the Whistling Plague, such things mattered less. Half of every house, stone or mud or marble, died gasping, their throats closing up so only whines and whistles escaped, and when those awful pipes finally ceased, the low and the middling felt no inclination to start dying all over again so that the lordly could put their names on the ruins of the world. Muscanine could read and write. She drew up new articles of war and when the great and the high would not sign it, they began to choke at their suppers, wheeze at their breakfasts, fall like sudden sighs halfway to their beds. The mind sharpens wonderfully when you cannot trust your tea. And after all, why not? What did arms and strength and the best of all blades matter when the wretched maid could clean a house of heirs in a fortnight?

War must civilize itself, wrote Muscanine long ago. So say all sensible souls. There can be no end to conflict between earthly powers, but the use of humble arms to settle disputes of rich men makes rich men frivolous in their exercise of war. Without danger to their own persons, no Lord fears to declare battle over the least slight—and why should he? He risks only a little coin and face while we risk all but benefit nothing in victory. There exists in this sphere no single person who does not admit to this injustice. Therefore, we, the humble arms, will no longer consent to a world built upon, around, and out of an immoral seed.

The rules of war are simple: should Lord Ambition and the Earl of Avarice find themselves in dispute, they shall agree upon a castle or stronghold belonging to neither of them and present themselves there on a mutually agreeable date. They shall break bread together and whoever lives longest wins. The host bends all their wisdom upon vast and varied poisons while the households of Lord Ambition and the Earl bend all their intellect upon healing and the purifying of any wicked substance. And because poisons were once a woman’s work—in the early days no knight could tell a nightshade from a dandelion—it became quickly necessary to wed a murderess of high skill.

Of course, Muscanine’s civilized rules have bent and rusted with age. No Lord of any means would sit at the martial table himself nowadays—he hires a proxy to choke or swallow in his stead. But there is still some justice in the arrangement—no one sells themselves to battle cheaply. A family may lift itself up considerably on such a fortune as Lord Ambition will pay. No longer do two or three men sit down simply to their meal of honor. Many come to watch the feast of war, whole households, the king himself. There is much sport in it. Great numbers of noblemen seat their proxies in order to declare loyalties and tilt the odds in favor of victory, for surely someone, of all those brawny men, can stomach a silly flower or two.

“But think how marvelous it must have looked,” Yew said to me once, lying on my bed surrounded by books like a ribbonmark. “All the banners flying, and the sun on their swords, and the horses with armor so fine even a beast would be proud. Think of the drums and the trumpets and the cries in the dawn.”

“I do think of all that, and it sounds ghastly. At least now, everyone gets a good meal out of the business. It’s no braver or wiser or stranger to gather a thousand friends and meet another thousand in a field and whack on each other with knives all day. And there are still banners. My father’s banners are beautiful. They have a manticore on them, in a ring of oleander. I’ll show you someday.”

But Yew already knew what my father’s banners looked like. She stamped our manticore onto a bezoar for me the day we parted. The clay of the Floregilium mixed with a hundred spices and passed through the gullet of a lion. At least, she said it was a lion.

Soon it will be time to send Dittany and Mayapple. Passiflora will return there when the war is done—she would not miss a chance for practical experience.

Lord Calabar came to the Floregilium when I was a maid of seventeen. Yew’s husband came not long after, from far-off Mithridatium, so that the world could be certain we would never see each other again. They came through the Horn Gate, a passage of unicorn horns braided as elegantly as if they were the strands of a girl’s hair. He was entitled by his blood to any wife he could convince—lesser nobles may only meet the diffident students, the competent but uninspired, the gentle and the kind who might have enough knowledge to fight, but a weak stomach. They always look so startled when they come a-briding. They come from their castles and holdfasts imagining fierce-jawed maidens with eyes that flash like mercury and hair like rivers of blood, girls like the flowers they boiled into noble deaths, tall and bright and fatal. And they find us wearing leather gloves with stiff cuffs at the elbows, boots to the thigh, and masks of hide and copper and glass that turn our faces into those of wyrms and deepwater fish. But how else to survive in a place where the walls are built of venom, the river longs to kill, and any idle perfume might end a schoolgirl’s joke before the punchline? To me those masks are still more lovely than anything a queen might make of rouge and charcoal. I will admit that when I feel afraid, I take mine from beneath my bed and wear it until my heart is whole.

I suppose I always knew someone would come into the vicious garden of my happiness and drag me away from it. What did I learn the uses of mandrake for if not to marry, to fight, to win? I did not want him. He was handsome enough, I suppose. His waist tapered nicely; his shoulders did not slump. His grandfathers had never lost their hair even on their deathbeds. But I was sufficient. I and Floregilium and the manchineel tree and my Yew swimming in the river as though nothing could hurt her, because nothing could. He said I could call him Henry. I showed him my face.

“Mummy, the unicorns are miserable today,” Dittany frowns, and my memory bursts into a rain of green flowers.

I have never liked unicorns. I have met wolves with better dispositions. I have seen paintings of them from nations where they do not thrive—tall, pale, sorrowfully noble creatures holding the wisdom of eternity as a bit in their muzzles. I understand the desire to make them so. I, too, like things to match. If something is useful, it ought to be beautiful. And yet, the world persists.

Unicorns mill around my daughter’s legs, snorting and snuffling at her hands, certain she has brought them the half-rotted meat and flat beer they love best. Unicorns are the size of boars, round of belly and stubby of leg, covered in long, curly grey fur that matts viciously in the damp and smells of wet books. Their long, canny faces are something like horses, yes, but also something like dogs, and their teeth have something of the shark about them. And in the center, that short, gnarled nub of bone, as pure and white as the soul of a saint. Dittany opens her sack and tosses out greying lamb rinds, half-hardened cow’s ears. She pours out leftover porter into their trough. The beasts gurgle and trill with delight, gobbling their treasure, snapping at each other to establish and reinforce their shaggy social order, the unicorn king and his several queens and their kingdom of offal.

“Why do they do it?” Dittany frowns. “Why do they shovel in all that food when they know they could die?”

A unicorn looks up at me with red, rheumy eyes and wheezes. “Why did men go running into battle once upon a time, when they knew they might die? They believe their shield is stronger than the other fellow’s sword. They believe their Horn is stronger than the other fellow’s Lily. They believe that when they put their charmed knives into the pies, they will shiver and turn red and take all the poison into the blade. They believe their toadstones have the might of gods.”

“But nobody is stronger than you, are they, Mum?”

“Nobody, my darling.”

He said I could call him Henry. He courted me with a shaker of powdered sapphires from a city where elephants are as common as cats. A dash of blue like so much salt would make any seething feast wholesome again. Well, unless some clever Lily has used moonseeds, or orellanine, or unicorn milk, or the venom of a certain frog who lives in the library and is called Phillip. Besides, emerald is better than sapphire. But I let him think his jewels could buy life from death’s hand. It is a nice thing to think. Like those beautiful unicorns glowing softly in silver thread.

I watch my daughter pull at the udders of our unicorns, squeezing their sweaty milk into a steel pail, for it would sizzle through wood or even bronze as easily as rain through leaves. She is deft and clever with her hands, my frowning girl, the mares barely complain. When I milk them, they bite and howl. The dun sky opens up into bands like pale ribs, showing a golden heart beating away at dusk. Henry Calabar kisses me when I am seventeen and swears my lips are poison from which he will never recover, and his daughter feeds a unicorn a marrow bone, and his son calls down from the ramparts that the king is coming, he is coming, hurry, hurry, and under all this I see only Yew, stealing into my room on that last night in the country of being young, drawing me a bath in the great copper tub, a bath swirling with emerald dust, with green and shimmer. We climbed in, dunking our heads, covering each other with the strangely milky smell of emeralds, clotting our black hair with glittering sand. Yew took my hand and we ran out together into the night, through the quiet streets of the Floregilium, under the bridges and over the water until we came to the manchineel tree in the north orchards, and she held me tight to her beneath its vicious flowers until the storm came, and when the storm came we kissed for the last time as the rain fell through those green flowers and hissed on our skin, vanishing into emerald steam, we kissed and did not burn.

They call him the Hyacinth King and he loves the name. He got it when he was young and ambitious and his wife won the Third Sons’ War for him before she had their first child. Hyacinth roots can look so much like potatoes. They come into the hall without grandeur, for we are friends, or friendly enough. I have always had a care to be pregnant when the king came calling, for he has let it be known he enjoys my company, and it takes quite a belly to put him off. But not this time, nor any other to come. He kisses the children one by one, and then me. It is too long a kiss but Henry and I tolerate a great deal from people who have not gotten sick of us after a decade or two. The queen, tall and grand, takes my hand and asks after the curried doves, the wine, the mustard pots. Her eyes shine. Two fresh hyacinths pin her cloak to her dress.

“I miss it,” she confesses. “No one wants to fight me anymore. Sometimes I poison the hounds out of boredom. But then I serve them their breakfast in unicorn skulls and they slobber and yap on through another year or nine. Come, tell me what’s in the soup course. I have heard you’ve a new way of boiling crab’s eyes to mimic the Whistling Plague. That’s how you killed Lord Vervain’s lad, isn’t it?”

“You flatter me. That was so long ago, I hardly remember,” I tell her.

She and her husband take their seats above the field of war—our dining hall, sparkling with fire and finery like wet morning grass. They call for bread and wine—the usual kind, safe as yeast. The proxies arrive with trumpets and drums. No different, Yew, I think. My blood prickles at the sound. She is coming. She will come. My castle fills with peasant faces—faces scrubbed and perfumed as they have never been before. Each man standing in for his Lord wears his Lord’s own finery. They come in velvet and silk, in lace and furs, with circlets on their heads and rings on their fingers, with sigils embroidered on their chests and curls set in their hair. And each of them looks as elegant and lordly as anyone born to it. All that has ever stood between a duke and a drudge is a bath. She is coming. She will come. The nobles in the stalls sit high above their mirrors at the table, echoes and twins and stutters. It is a feasting hall that looks more like an operating theater with each passing war.

Henry sits beside his king. We are only the castle agreed upon— we take no part. The Hyacinth King has put up a merchant’s son in his place—the boy looks strong, his chest like the prow of a ship. But it’s only vanity. I can take the thickness from his flesh as fast as that of a thin man. More and more come singing through the gates. The Hyacinth King wishes to take back his ancestral lands in the east, and the lands do not consider themselves to be ancestral. It is not a small war, this time. I have waited for this war. I have wanted it. I have hoped. Perhaps I have whispered to the Hyacinth King when he looked tenderly at me that those foreign lords have no right to his wheat or his wine. Perhaps I have sighed to my husband that if only the country were not so divided we would not have to milk our own unicorns in our one castle. I would not admit to such quiet talk. I have slept only to fight this battle on dreaming grounds, with dreaming knives.

Mithridatium is in the east. She is coming. She will come.

And then she steps through the archway and into my home—my Yew, my emerald dust, my manchineel tree, my burning rain. Her eyes find mine in a moment. We have done this many times. She wears white and pale blue stitched with silver—healing colors, pure colors, colors that could never harm. She is a candle with a blue flame. As she always did, she looks like me drawn by a better hand, a kinder hand. She hardly looks older than my first daughter would have been, had she lived. Perhaps living waist-deep in gentling herbs is better than my bed of wicked roots. Her children beg mutely for her attention with their bright eyes—three boys, and how strange her face looks on boys! She puts her hands on their shoulders. I reach out for Dittany and Mayapple, Passiflora and Narcissus. Yes, these are mine. I have done this with my years, among the rest. Her husband takes her hand with the same gestures as Henry might. He begs for nothing mutely with his bright eyes. They are not bad men. But they are not us.

I may not speak to her. The war has already begun the moment she and I rest our bones in our tall chairs. The moment the dinner bell sounds. Neither of us may rise or touch any further thing—all I can do and have done is complete and I am not allowed more. Afterward, we will not be permitted to talk—what if some soft-hearted Horn gave away her best secrets to a Lily? The game would be spoilt, the next war decided between two women’s unguarded lips. It would not do. So we sit, our posture perfect, with death between us.

The ladies will bring the peacock soup, laced with belladonna and serpent’s milk, and the men (and lady, some poor impoverished lord has sent his own unhappy daughter to be his proxy, and I can hardly look at her for pity) of Mithridatium, of the country of Yew, will stir it with spoons carved from the bones of a white stag, and turn it sweet—per-haps. They will tuck toadstones and bezoars into the meat of the curried doves and cover the blancmange with emerald dust like so much green salt. They will smother the suckling lion in pennyroyal blossoms and betony leaves. They will drink my wine from her cups of unicorn horn. They will sauce the pudding with vervain. And each time a course is served, I will touch her. My spices and her talismans. My stews and her drops of saints’ blood like rain. My wine and her horn. My milk and her emeralds. Half the world will die between us, but we will swim in each other and no one will see.

The first soldier turns violet and shakes himself apart into his plate of doves and twenty years ago Yew kisses emeralds from my mouth under the manchineel tree while the brutal rain hisses away into air.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

CALVED

SAM J. MILLER

My son’s eyes were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness were there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

“How’s school?” I asked.

Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

“Math still your favorite subject?”

“Math was never my favorite subject.”

I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

“What’s your favorite subject?”

Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”

His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.

“Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have—”

“Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.

“Han one of your friends?”

Thede nodded, eyes escaping.

Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city—all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.

“I have something for you,” I said, in desperation.

I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.

Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most—my only—prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off it before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.

But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was—starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal—I belonged.

“Dad,” Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. “Dad. You love this shirt.”

But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead: “It’ll fit you just fine now.” And then: “Enough sea lions. Beam fights?”

Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.

Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalgam of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion-Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80 percent of the city sank, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.

They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then, for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.

Thede’s eyes burned with wonder, staring up at the fretted sweep of the windscreen as we rose to meet it. We were deep in a days-long twilight; soon, the sun would set for weeks.

“This is not happening,” he said, and stepped closer to me. His voice shook with joy.

The elevator ride to the top of the city was obscenely expensive. We’d never been able to take it before. His mother had bought our tickets. Even for her, it hurt. I wondered why she hadn’t taken him herself.

“He’s getting bullied a lot in school,” she told me, on the phone. Behind her was the solid comfortable silence of a respectable home. My background noise was four men building towards a fight over a card game. “Also, I think he might be in love.”

But of course I couldn’t ask him about either of those things. The first was my fault; the second was something no boy wanted to discuss with his dad.

I pushed a piece of trough meat loose from between my teeth. Savored how close it came to the real thing. Only with Thede, with his mother’s money, did I get to buy the classy stuff. Normally it was barrel-bottom for me, greasy chunks that dissolved in my mouth two chews in, homebrew meat moonshine made in melt-scrap-furnace-heated metal troughs. Some grid cities were rumored to still have cows, but that was the kind of lie people tell themselves to make life a little less ugly. Cows were extinct, and real beef was a joy no one would ever experience again.

The windscreen was an engineering marvel, and absolutely gorgeous. It shifted in response to headwinds; in severe storms the city would raise its auxiliary windscreens to protect its entire circumference. The tiny panes of plastiglass were common enough—a thriving underground market sold the fallen ones as good luck charms—but to see them knitted together was to tremble in the face of staggering genius. Complex patterns of crenellated reliefs, efficiently diverting wind shear no matter what angle it struck from. Bots swept past us on the metal gridlines, replacing panes that had fallen or cracked.

Once, hand gripping mine tightly, somewhere down in the city beneath me, six-year-old Thede had asked me how the windscreen worked. He asked me a lot of things then, about the locks that held the city up, and how they could rise in response to tides and ocean-level increases; about the big boats with strange words and symbols on the side, and where they went, and what they brought back. “What’s in that boat?” he’d ask, about each one, and I would make up ridiculous stories. “That’s a giraffe boat. That one brings back machine guns that shoot strawberries. That one is for naughty children.” In truth I only ever recognized ice boats, by the multitude of pincers atop cranes all along the side.

My son stood up straighter, sixty stories above his city. Some rough weight had fallen from his shoulders. He’d be strong, I saw. He’d be handsome. If he made it. If this horrible city didn’t break him inside in some irreparable way. If marauding whiteboys didn’t bash him for his dark skin. If the firms didn’t pass him over for the lack of family connections on his stuttering immigrant father’s side. I wondered who was bullying him, and why, and I imagined taking them two at a time and slamming their heads together so hard they popped like bubbles full of blood. Of course I couldn’t do that. I also imagined hugging him, grabbing him for no reason and maybe never letting go, but I couldn’t do that either. He would wonder why.

“I called last night and you weren’t in,” I said. “Doing anything fun?”

“We went to the cityoke arcade,” he said.

I nodded like I knew what that meant. Later on I’d have to ask the men in my room. I couldn’t keep up with this city, with its endlessly shifting fashions and slang and the new immigrant clusters that cropped up each time I blinked. Twenty years after arriving, I was still a stranger. I wasn’t just Fresh Off the Boat, I was constantly getting back on the boat and then getting off again. That morning I’d gone to the job center for the fifth day in a row, and been relieved to find no boat postings. Only twelve-month gigs, and I wasn’t that hungry yet. Booking a year-long job meant admitting you were old, desperate, unmoored, willing to accept payment only marginally more than nothing, for the privilege of a hammock and three bowls of trough slop a day. But captains picked their own crews for the shorter runs, and I worried that the lack of postings meant that with fewer boats going out the competition had become too fierce for me. Every day a couple hundred new workers arrived from sunken cities in India or Middle Europe, or from any of a hundred Water War–torn nations. Men and women stronger than me, more determined.

With effort, I brought my mind back to the here and now. Twenty other people stood in the arc pod with us. Happy, wealthy people. I wondered if they knew I wasn’t one of them. I wondered if Thede was.

They smiled down at their city. They thought it was so stable. I’d watched ice sheets calf off the glacier that were five times the size of Qaanaaq. When one of those came drifting in our direction, the windscreen wouldn’t help us.The question was when, not if. I knew a truth they did not: how easy it is to lose something—everything—forever.

A Maoist Nepalese foreman, on one of my first ice ship runs, said white North Americans were the worst for adapting to the post-Arctic world, because we’d lived for centuries in a bubble of believing the world was way better than it actually was. Shielded by willful blindness and complex interlocking institutions of privilege, we mistook our uniqueness for universality.

I’d hated him for it. It took me fifteen years to see that he was right.

“What do you think of those two?” I asked, pointing with my chin at a pair of girls his age.

For a while he didn’t answer. Then he said “I know you can’t help that you grew up in a backwards macho culture, but can’t you just keep that on the inside?”

My own father would have cuffed me if I talked to him like that, but I was too afraid of rupturing the tiny bit of affectionate credit I’d fought so hard to earn back.

His stance softened, then. He took a tiny step closer—the only apology I could hope for.

The pod began its descent. Halfway down he unzipped his jacket, smiling in the warmth of the heated pod while below-zero winds buffeted us. His T-shirt said The Last Calf, and showed the gangly sad-eyed hero of that depressing miserable movie all the kids adored.

“Where is it?” I asked. He’d proudly sported the NEW YORK FCKING CITY shirt on each of the five times I’d seen him since giving it to him.

His face darkened so fast I was frightened. His eyes welled up. He said “Dad, I,” but his voice had the tremor that meant he could barely keep from crying. Shame was what I saw.

I couldn’t breathe, again, just like when I came home two weeks ago and he wasn’t happy to see me. Except seeing my son so unhappy hurt worse than fearing he hated me.

“Did somebody take it from you?” I asked, leaning in so no one else could hear me. “Someone at school? A bully?”

He looked up, startled. He shook his head. Then, he nodded.

“Tell me who did this?”

He shook his head again. “Just some guys, Dad,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Guys. How many?”

He said nothing. I understood about snitching. I knew he’d never tell me who.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Okay? It’s just a shirt. I don’t care about it. I care about you. I care that you’re okay. Are you okay?”

Thede nodded. And smiled. And I knew he was telling the truth, even if I wasn’t, even if inside I was grieving the shirt, and the little boy who I once wrapped up inside it.

When I wasn’t with Thede, I walked. For two weeks I’d gone out walking every day. Up and down Arm Eight, and sometimes into other Arms. Through shantytowns large and small, huddled miserable agglomerations of recent arrivals and folks who even after a couple generations in Qaanaaq had not been able to scrape their way up from the fish-stinking ice-slippery bottom.

I looked for sex, sometimes. It had been so long. Relationships were tough in my line of work, and I’d never been interested in paying for it. Throughout my twenties I could usually find a woman for something brief and fun and free of commitment, but that stage of my life seemed to have ended.

I wondered why I hadn’t tried harder, to make it work with Lajla. I think a small but vocal and terrible part of me had been glad to see her leave. Fatherhood was hard work. So was being married. Paying rent on a tiny shitty apartment way out on Arm Seven, where we smelled like scorched cooking oil and diaper lotion all the time. Selfishly, I had been glad to be alone. And only now, getting to know this stranger who was once my son, did I see what sweet and fitting punishments the universe had up its sleeve for selfishness.

My time with Thede was wonderful, and horrible. We could talk at length about movies and music, and he actually seemed halfway interested in my stories about old New York, but whenever I tried to talk about life or school or girls or his future he reverted to grunts and monosyllables. Something huge and heavy stood between me and him, a moon eclipsing the sun of me. I knew him, top to bottom and body and soul, but he still had no idea who I really was. How I felt about him. I had no way to show him. No way to open his eyes, make him see how much I loved him, and how I was really a good guy who’d gotten a bad deal in life.

Cityoke, it turned out, was like karaoke, except instead of singing a song you visited a city. XHD footage projection onto all four walls; temperature control; short storylines that responded to your verbal decisions—even actual smells uncorked by machines from secret stashes of Beijing taxi-seat leather or Ho Chi Minh City incense or Portland coffeeshop sawdust. I went there often, hoping maybe to see him. To watch him, with his friends. See what he was when I wasn’t around. But cityoke was expensive, and I could never have afforded to actually go in. Once, standing around outside the New York booth when a crew walked out, I caught a whiff of the acrid ugly beautiful stink of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

And then, eventually, I walked without any reason at all. Because pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to. Because I had done it. I had booked a twelve-month job. I was out of money and couldn’t afford to rent my bed for another month. Tnede’s mom could have given it to me. But what if she told him about it? He’d think of me as more of a useless moocher deadbeat dad than he already did. I couldn’t take that chance.

Three days before my ship was set to load up and launch, I went back to the cityoke arcades. Men lurked in doorways and between shacks. Soakers, mostly. Looking for marks; men to mug and drunks to tip into the sea. Late at night; too late for Thede to come carousing through. I’d called him earlier, but Lajla said he was stuck inside for the night, studying for a test in a class where he wasn’t doing well. I had hoped maybe he’d sneak out, meet some friends, head for the arcade.

And that’s when I saw it. The shirt: NEW YORK F CKING CITY, absolutely unique and unmistakable. Worn by a stranger, a muscular young man sitting on the stoop of a skiff moor. I didn’t get a good glimpse of his face, as I hurried past with my head turned away from him.

I waited, two buildings down. My heart was alive and racing in my chest. I drew in deep gulps of cold air and tried to keep from shouting from joy. Here was my chance. Here was how I could show Thede what I really was.

I stuck my head out, risked a glance. He sat there, waiting for who knows what. In profile I could see that the man was Asian. Almost certainly Chinese, in Qaanaaq—most other Asian nations had their own grid cities—although perhaps he was descended from Asian-diaspora nationals of some other country. I could see his smile, hungry and cold.

At first I planned to confront him, ask how he came to be wearing my shirt, demand justice, beat him up and take it back. But that would be stupid. Unless I planned to kill him—and I didn’t—it was too easy to imagine him gunning for Thede if he knew he’d been attacked for the shirt. I’d have to jump him, rob and strip and soak him. I rooted through a trash bin, but found nothing. Three trash bins later I found a short metal pipe with Hindi graffiti scribbled along its length. The man was still there when I went back. He was waiting for something. I could wait longer. I pulled my hood up, yanked the drawstring to tighten it around my face.

Forty-five minutes passed that way. He hugged his knees to his chest, made himself small, tried to conserve body heat. His teeth chattered. Why was he wearing so little? But I was happy he was so stupid. Had he had a sweater or jacket on I’d never have seen the shirt. I’d never have had this chance.

Finally, he stood. Looked around sadly. Brushed off the seat of his pants. Turned to go. Stepped into the swing of my metal pipe, which struck him in the chest and knocked him back a step.

The shame came later. Then, there was just joy. The satisfaction of how the pipe struck flesh. Broke bone. I’d spent twenty years getting shitted on by this city, by this system, by the cold wind and the everywhere-ice, by the other workers who were smarter or stronger or spoke the language. For the first time since Thede was a baby, I felt like I was in control of something. Only when my victim finally passed out, and rolled over onto his back and the blue methane streetlamp showed me how young he was under the blood, could I stop myself.

I took the shirt. I took his pants. I rolled him into the water. I called the med-team for him from a coinphone a block away. He was still breathing. He was young, he was healthy. He’d be fine. The pants I would burn in a scrap furnace. The shirt I would give back to my son. I took the money from his wallet and dropped it into the sea, then threw the money in later. I wasn’t a thief. I was a good father. I said those sentences over and over, all the way home.

Thede couldn’t see me the next day. Lajla didn’t know where he was. So I got to spend the whole day imagining imminent arrest, the arrival of Swedish or Chinese police, footage of me on the telescrolls, my cleverness foiled by tech I didn’t know existed because I couldn’t read the newspapers. I packed my one bag glumly, put the rest of my things back in the storage cube, and walked it to the facility. Every five seconds I looked over my shoulder and found only the same grit and filthy slush. Every time I looked at my watch, I winced at how little time I had left.

My fear of punishment was balanced out by how happy I was. I wrapped the shirt in three layers of wrapping paper and put it in a watertight shipping bag and tried to imagine his face. That shirt would change everything. His father would cease to be a savage jerk from an uncivilized land. This city would no longer be a cold and barren place where boys could beat him up and steal what mattered most to him with impunity. All the ways I had failed him would matter a little less.

Twelve months. I had tried to get out of the gig, now that I had the shirt and a new era of good relations with my son was upon me. But canceling would have cost me my accreditation with that work center, which would make finding another job almost impossible. A year away from Thede. I would tell him when I saw him. He’d be upset, but the shirt would make it easier.

Finally, I called and he answered.

“I want to see you,” I said, when we had made our way through the pleasantries.

“Sunday?” Did his voice brighten, or was that just blind stupid hope? Some trick of the noisy synthcoffee shop where I sat?

“No, Thede,” I said, measuring my words carefully. “I can’t. Can you do today?”

A suspicious pause. “Why can’t you do Sunday?”

“Something’s come up,” I said. “Please? Today?”

“Fine.”

The sea lion rookery. The smell of guano and the screak of gulls; the crying of children dragged away as the place shut down. The long night was almost upon us. Two male sea lions barked at each other, bouncing their chests together. Thede came a half hour late, and I had arrived a half hour early. Watching him come my head swam, at how tall he stood and how gracefully he walked. I had done something good in this world, at least. I made him. I had that, no matter how he felt about me.

Something had shifted, now, in his face. Something was harder, older, stronger.

“Hey,” I said, bear-hugging him, and eventually he submitted. He hugged me back hesitantly, like a man might, and then hard, like a little boy.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “What were you up to, last night?”

Thede shrugged. “Stuff. With friends.”

I asked him questions. Again the sullen, bitter silence; again the terse and angry answers. Again the eyes darting around, constantly watching for whatever the next attack would be. Again the hating me, for coming here, for making him.

“I’m going away,” I said. “A job.”

“I figured,” he said.

“I wish I didn’t have to.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

I nodded. I couldn’t tell him it was a twelve-month gig. Not now.

“Here,” I said, finally, pulling the package out from inside of my jacket. “I got you something.”

“Thanks.” He grabbed it in both hands, began to tear it open.

“Wait,” I said, thinking fast. “Okay? Open it after I leave.”

Open it when the news that I’m leaving has set in, when you’re mad at me, for abandoning you. When you think I care only about my job.

“We’ll have a little time,” he said. “When you get back. Before I go away. I leave in eight months. The program is four years long.”

“Sure,” I said, shivering inside.

“Mom says she’ll pay for me to come home every year for the holiday, but she knows we can’t afford that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “‘Come home.’ I thought you were going to the Institute.”

“I am,” he said, sighing. “Do you even know what that means? The Institute’s design program is in Shanghai.”

“Oh,” I said. “Design. What kind of design?”

My son’s eyes rolled. “You’re missing the point, Dad.”

I was. I always was.

A shout, from a pub across the Arm. A man’s shout, full of pain and anger. Thede flinched. His hands made fists.

“What?” I asked, thinking, here, at last, was something

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me. What’s going on?”

Thede frowned, then punched the metal railing so hard he yelped. He held up his hand to show me the blood.

“Hey, Thede—”

“Han,” he said. “My . . . my friend. He got jumped two nights ago. Soaked.”

“This city is horrible,” I whispered.

He made a baffled face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . you know. This city. Everyone’s so full of anger and cruelty . . .”

“It’s not the city, Dad. What does that even mean? Some sick person did this. Han was waiting for me, and Mom wouldn’t let me out, and he got jumped. They took off all his clothes, before they rolled him into the water. That’s some extra cruel shit right there. He could have died. He almost did.”

I nodded, silently, a siren of panic rising inside. “You really care about this guy, don’t you?”

He looked at me. My son’s eyes were whole, intact, defiant, adult. Thede nodded.

He’s been getting bullied, his mother had told me. He’s in love.

I turned away from him, before he could see the knowledge blossom in my eyes.

The shirt hadn’t been stolen. He’d given it away. To the boy he loved. I saw them holding hands, saw them tug at each other’s clothing in the same fumbling adolescent puppy-love moments I had shared with his mother, moments that were my only happy memories from being his age. And I saw his fear, of how his backwards father might react—a refugee from a fallen hate-filled people—if he knew what kind of man he was. I gagged on the unfairness of his assumptions about me, but how could he have known differently? What had I ever done, to show him the truth of how I felt about him? And hadn’t I proved him right? Hadn’t I acted exactly like the monster he believed me to be? I had never succeeded in proving to him what I was, or how I felt.

I had battered and broken his beloved. There was nothing I could say. A smarter man would have asked for the present back, taken it away and locked it up. Burned it, maybe. But I couldn’t. I had spent his whole life trying to give him something worthy of how I felt about him, and here was the perfect gift at last.

“I love you, Thede,” I said, and hugged him.

“Daaaaad . . .” he said, eventually.

But I didn’t let go. Because when I did, he would leave. He would walk home through the cramped and frigid alleys of his home city, to the gift of knowing what his father truly was.

SAM J. MILLER is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, the Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). His YA novel Destroy All Monsters was published in 2019; his dark thriller The Blade Between in late 2020. Short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Uncanny, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Miller’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.

THE RIVER’S CHILDREN

SHWETA NARAYAN

There once was a prince whose dearest friend was a river.

Now rivers are sometimes girls, quick as lightning; and they are boys sometimes, speeding like arrows. And they are gravid women sometimes, and sometimes they are men, full of poetry and slow as scripture. Most of the time you simply cannot tell, though storytellers will try.

And this prince was sometimes glad to be himself, but other times she was not; and at these times the clothes, the walk, even the freedom of a prince felt like a prison. She tried at first to spend these times in the women’s quarters, but there she could only be a son, or a brother, or a prince to be flirted with. So she would visit the river, who understood.

One day the prince came to the river in despair; for he was of age to marry, and that is not a duty that a prince may ignore. “And how could I marry anyone but you, my dearest friend?” he said.

And she came out of the water in humanlike form, and replied, “But you had only to ask.”

So they were wed; and the kingdom rejoiced at the blessing of having a goddess in the palace. And if she seemed sometimes a man full of lightning, or a woman spilling over with poetry, and at other times a being of both and neither, well, that was the way of divinity. So for a time the lovers ran swift with joy; they could be man and wife when they were so, or men together, or women, or something else again. And they had each other.

But then the river came to be with child, and all changed. Her women, who had before been all smiles and blushes when their princess was a man, now wailed and pleaded with him not to be. Even among the gods, they told him, there never had been a pregnant man. What if the baby ceased to be? What if it took harm? “What will it turn into?” the midwife asked. “I’ll not be blamed for so unnatural a patient. If she turns into a dog next, will she give the kingdom puppies?”

Weighted down with their fears and scoldings, the river stopped shifting. But she could not stay a woman without a cost; she grew ill, bone-heavy. Her waters dried to a muddy trickle, and she forgot how to laugh. When the delayed monsoon broke overhead and she gave birth to twins, she died of it, fleeing back to the river’s safe basin and shifting moods and leaving human form behind forever. The prince died soon after, of grief and guilt, and was reborn as one of her tributaries; so in the end they found a measure of peace.

But what of their orphaned river children? They seemed identical, save that one was a boy and one a girl; but nobody in the palace could tell which was which from one day to another; for indeed, they shifted as their mother had, in balance with each other like the light and dark faces of the moon. They lived in the women’s quarters, where they could be either, and nobody quite dared to restrain them; but they knew they made the servants nervous and filled their grandmother with grief. So they grew up confused and frustrated, and often felt imprisoned. But if one went hunting with his friends, and shifted mid-hunt to find herself surrounded by men who were not family, she could tell her other; he would understand, and they would hide her shame and discomfort together. And if one was charmed by a visiting prince, only to see that young man’s face harden into disgust when he found himself courting another boy, then he had the other’s shoulder to cry into. And they always had the comfort of a grassy place near the palace, where two rivers flowed together, where they felt at home. It was not enough, but it was something. Even when they were grown, they lived near each other, and always near rivers, their kin; and their children, and their children’s children, did the same.

And it is said that their descendants walk the world still, following the great rivers’ trails, searching for a place where they can simply be.

SHWETA NARAYAN was born in India and has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, California, and in the Underworld of the chronically ill. They currently reside in Berkeley, California. They feel kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Narayan’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in publications including Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, and Tor.com. They received an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship and were shortlisted for the 2010 Nebula Awards. Narayan coedits the online poetry zine Stone Telling (currently on hiatus).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All stories are reprinted with the author’s permission.

“Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” © 2017 Charlie Jane Anders (First publication: Global Dystopias, ed. Junot Diaz).

“Das Steingeschöpf “ © 2016 G. V. Anderson (First publication: Strange Horizons, December 12, 2016).

“Paranormal Romance” © 2013 Christopher Barzak (First publication: Lightspeed, June 2013).

“In the Eyes of Jack Saul” © 2020 Richard Bowes (First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2020).

“The Shape of My Name” © 2015 Nino Cipri (First publication: Tor. com, March 3, 2015).

“Seasons of Glass and Iron” © 2016 Amal El-Mohtar (First publication: The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, eds. Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe).

“Ours Is the Prettiest” © 2011 Nalo Hopkinson (First publication: Welcome to Bordertown, eds. Holly Black and Ellen Kushner).

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” © 2010 Vylar Kaftan (First publication: Lightspeed, June 2010).

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” © 2010 Caitlin R. Kiernan (First publication: Swords & Dark Magic, eds. Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan).

“Cat Pictures Please” © 2015 Naomi Kritzer (First publication: Clark-esworld #100, January 2015).

“The Duke of Riverside” © 2011 Ellen Kushner (First publication: Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow).

“Né le!” © 2016 Darcie Little Badger (First publication: Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT and Two-Spirit Sci-Fi Anthology, ed. Hope Nicholson).

“Driving Jenny Home” © 2014 Seanan McGuire (First publication: Out of Tune, ed. Jonathan Maberry).

“Calved” © 2015 Sam J. Miller (First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2015).

“The Deepwater Bride” © 2015 Tamsyn Muir (First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2015).

“The River’s Children” © 2011 Shweta Narayan (First publication: Expanded Horizons Issue 33, December 2011).

“Imago” © 2017 Tristan Alice Nieto (First publication: Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, eds. Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett).

“Three Points Masculine” © 2015 An Owomoyela (First publication: Lightspeed, May 2016).

“Otherwise” © 2015 Nisi Shawl (First publication: Brave New Love: 15 Dystopian Tales of Desire, ed. Paula Guran).

“Destroyed by the Waters” © 2016 Rachel Swirsky (First publication: Drowned Worlds, ed. Jonathan Strahan).

“The Night Train” © 2010 Lavie Tidhar (First publication: Strange Horizons, June 14, 2010).

“The Lily and the Horn” © 2015 Catherynne M. Valente (First publication: Fantasy, December 2015).

“And If the Body Were Not the Soul” © 2015 A. C. Wise (First publication: Clarkesworld #109, October 2015).

“Secondhand Bodies” © 2015 Neon Yang (First publication: Lightspeed. January 2016).

ABOUT THE EDITOR

PAULA GURAN is an editor and reviewer. In an earlier life she produced the weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination), edited Horror Garage magazine (earning another IHG and a second World Fantasy nomination), and has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications.

This is, if she’s counted correctly, the forty-ninth anthology Guran has edited. She’s also edited scores of novels and some collections. After more than a dozen years of full-time editing, she is now freelancing.

Guran now has five fabulous grandchildren she would be happy to tell you about.

She lives in Akron, Ohio, with her faithful cat Nala.