Author: David Steffen; Elizabeth Bear; John Wiswell; Meg Elison; Mary Robinette Kowal
Date: 2022-12-12 00:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the eighth annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the selected year to determine the top five in each category for the final Hugo Award ballot. This is an anthology collecting more of the stories from that nomination list to reach more readers. The Long List Anthology volume 8 collects 21 science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from that nomination list, totaling over 400 pages of fiction by writers around the world. From magical couches to impossible radio broadcasts, from roboti
Publisher: Diabolical Plots, L.L.C.

The Long List Anthology

Volume 8

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 8: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2022 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2021 by the authors

All rights reserved.

Published by Diabolical Plots, L.L.C.

“Worldcon,” “World Science Fiction Society,” “WSFS,” “World Science Fiction Society,” “Hugo Award,” the Hugo Award Logo, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award trophy rocket are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.

Cover art: “Here There Be Dragons, Little Robot” by Evelyne Park © 2022

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

To those who help, even when no one seems to notice

Contents

Permissions
Foreword
For Lack of a Bed • John Wiswell
The Cold Calculations • Aimee Ogden
Laughter Among the Trees • Suzan Palumbo

The Revolution Will Not Be Served With Fries • Meg Elison

If the Martians Have Magic • P. Djèlí Clark
Let All the Children Boogie • Sam J. Miller
Crazy Beautiful • Cat Rambo

Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Spaceship • Marie Vibbert

Before, After, and the Space Between • Kel Coleman

Orumai's Choice • Gautam Bhatia

Questions Asked in the Belly of the World • A.T. Greenblatt

Mulberry and Owl • Aliette de Bodard
The General's Turn • Premee Mohamed
The Music of the Siphorophenes • C.L. Polk
Just Enough Rain • P H Lee
Ina's Spark • Mary Robinette Kowal
The Red Mother • Elizabeth Bear
Small Monsters • E. Lily Yu

Tombs of the Universe • Han Song, translated by Xueting C. Ni

(emet) • Lauren Ring
Submergence • Arula Ratnakar
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
More From Diabolical Plots, LLC

Permissions

All stories © 2021 their respective authors, and reprinted with permission of the author.

“For Lack of a Bed” by John Wiswell. First published in Diabolical Plots, Issue #74.

“The Cold Calculations” by Aimee Ogden. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 183.

“Laughter Among the Trees” by Suzan Palumbo. First published in The Dark, February 2021.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Served With Fries” by Meg Elison. First published in Lightspeed, Issue 136.

“If the Martians Have Magic” by P. Djèlí Clark. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Forty-Two.

“Let All the Children Boogie” by Sam J. Miller. First published on Tor.com, January 6, 2021.

“Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2021.

“Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Spaceship” by Marie Vibbert. First published in Daily Science Fiction, February 23, 2021.

“Before, After, and the Space Between” by Kel Coleman. First published in Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, edited by dave ring.

“Orumai's Choice” by Gautam Bhatia. First published in Mint Lounge, Fiction Special, dated December 31, 2021.

“Questions Asked in the Belly of the World” by A.T. Greenblatt. First published on Tor.com, September 29, 2021.

“Mulberry and Owl” by Aliette de Bodard. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Forty-Two.

“The General's Turn” by Premee Mohamed. First published in The Deadlands, Issue #3.

“The Music of the Siphorophenes” by C.L. Polk. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2021.

“Just Enough Rain” by P H Lee. First published in Giganotosaurus, May 1, 2021.

“Ina's Spark” by Mary Robinette Kowal. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Forty-Three.

“The Red Mother” by Elizabeth Bear. First published on Tor.com, June 23, 2021.

“Small Monsters” by E. Lily Yu. First published on Tor.com, October 20, 2021.

“Tombs of the Universe” by Han Song. First published in Chinese as 宇宙墓碑 © 1991 in Illusion SF (幻象). First published in English, translated by Xueting C. Ni, in Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Xueting C. Ni © 2021.

“(emet)” by Lauren Ring. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2021.

“Submergence” by Arula Ratnakar. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 174.

Foreword

This is the eighth volume of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List!

In Volume 7 we tried some new things, by adding stories by authors on the Astounding Award long list, as well as a story from the ballot itself. This year again we are trying something a bit different by adding stories that were published by publications on the Semiprozine long list.

This year's cover art is an original commission from Evelyne Park. If you like this artwork with its fantastical fish dragons, this is part of a series with a variety of different fish species mixed with dragons. Go check out her other work, buy a print, support illustrators!

If you don't follow the Hugo Awards, I suggest that you do—anyone can nominate and vote if you pay for a Supporting Membership to that year's WorldCon. After the Hugo Award ceremony, they also publish a longer list of nominated works, which is the basis of this anthology.

I sincerely hope you enjoy these stories as much as I have!

—David Steffen, December 2022—

For Lack of a Bed
By John Wiswell
Short Story Long List

Noémi tried to focus on the mermaids and ignore the floor. She lay in the middle of her living room, upon a nest of laundry bags and blankets, hoping for just a couple hours of sleep before she had to open the shop tomorrow. The new pain pills did as little as the old ones, and so she pulled the covers over herself at sundown and tried to use the internet as medication.

Chronic pain and Mermaid Tumblr. It was a normal night in her world. Videos and GIFs of those fish-tailed people swimming, their fins swirling through water currents, sometimes lulled Noémi into distraction. She needed those distractions tonight.

Her phone buzzed with a text from Tariq. He was working late.

TARIQ

u want a bed, but would u sleep on a sofa?

NOEMI

I’d sell a kidney for a sofa.

TARIQ

what if some1 died on it? but u keep ur kidneys

Okay, it was a weird offer. But was this that much weirder than the selkies down the hall who kept offering her herbal remedies? You knew you were pathetic when selkies pitied you.

You also knew you were pathetic when your roommate offered you dead people’s furniture. But her mother had worked with estate auctions, so Noémi had grown up with plenty of grim hand-me-downs. A bed was out of her price range. She knew what her mother would’ve said.

NOEMI

Is it clean?

TARIQ

clean as a disney movie

She sat up and her entire spinal column rioted. She felt vertebrae kicking over trash cans and lighting cars ablaze in her lower back.

NOEMI

Dying on a sofa would be the highlight of my year.

“Good!” Tariq yelled from the hall outside their apartment. She didn’t register it was him until their door swung open and he shimmied in butt-first, dragging a bulky sofa behind him. “Because I am not carrying this back to Apartment 3A.”

It was sand-colored with brown freckles, a fashion risk even for a freebie. At least it wasn’t splattered in gore.

She meant to run a hand over its arm rest, but immediately found herself sitting on it. Sinking into the cushions felt like a hug from a friendly giant. The honking and crying and thrumming of the city outside their apartment seemed to calm down.

Forget sleeping on the floor; she never wanted to touch the floor again.

“Hey,” she said, “try sitting on this.”

Tariq asked, “Did you take your meds tonight?”

She asked, “Someone died on this?”

She couldn’t hear his answer over the sensation of touch not hurting for the first time in hours. The leather was so warm, so welcoming, just like skin.

• • • •

Tariq shook Noémi’s foot, and she pulled her blanket over her face. She mumbled, “I don’t need dinner. I’m turning into a human ramen.”

He said, “It’s eleven.”

Sunlight blurred her vision and she rubbed the grime from her eyes. “Eleven? Then how is it light out?”

“They invented this thing called ‘A.M.’ You slept through your alarm.”

“No…” She didn’t know what she was denying. She stretched out on the sofa. For the first time in weeks, her back didn’t feel like it was on fire. The pain had calmed to a dull throb—an annoying pain rather than an intense one. If she’d overslept, her body obviously needed it. She almost felt more tired than yesterday.

Tariq pried the fleece from her hands. “I made you a couple waffles. Please, please eat them.”

Her appetite was a magician; it had one hell of a disappearing act. Pain made it easy for Noémi to skip meals. Still, with bleary eyes, she read the concern in her friend’s face. It was the same concern she’d felt on so many nights when she helped him through his anxiety attacks.

She smiled up at him and said, “You know something? I slept.”

He offered her a hand up. “That’s pretty awesome. We should party tonight.”

• • • •

There was no party that night. The food truck broke down and Tariq texted that he was stuck helping his uncle fix it.

Noémi felt for him and was relieved at the same time; she could barely move her fingers by the end of her shift at the pet store. Gryphon chicks were adorable, but insisted on being hand-fed, and the basilisks had broken out of their blackout cage and were looking at customers again.

The pain ground her brains into powder. What people didn’t understand about chronic pain was that it wasn’t about your legs going weak –it was about getting mentally exhausted managing the assaults. All day, she fantasized about sitting down.

Once home, she barely opened her string cheese before plopping onto her freckled sofa. Lying on it was like her entire body was biting into a marshmallow. This she had an appetite for. The cushions slid apart, enveloping her in the leather, like it wanted to swallow her.

In her dreams, it did.

• • • •

Her phone vibrated on her chest. It was work. It was also noon, and she didn’t know what day.

She answered, and picked her string cheese off the carpet. She must have sleep-punted it.

She said, “Hey Lili. Sorry. I must have—”

Lili cut her off, “I think the mogwai are picking the locks on all the cages after hours.”

Lili was a succubus and normally had everything together. If she was as nervous as she sounded, then this was dire.

Noémi forced herself to stand free of the sofa’s wonderful grip and walked to the center of the room to wake up. Her spine popped and she shuddered. She asked, “Did they eat after midnight?”

“Not this time, but I found one molesting the breakroom pantry.”

Noémi was sitting on the edge of the sofa. She didn’t remember sitting down. “I found the nicest furniture. You’ve got to come over and try it.”

“You know that when I say ‘the monsters are picking their locks,’ I mean ‘get your butt over here immediately,’ right?”

Noémi said, “Got it.”

She hung up, and had the funny desire to kiss the sofa goodbye. And why not? Nobody was watching.

She leaned in and smooched a cushion. It smelled like a perfume that Noémi had only ever encountered in dreams.

Then it was 6:24 PM. Her phone had eight messages.

• • • •

She thought the knocking was Tariq having lost his key, but it was Lili at the door. All six feet and two inches of her. Lili’s normally lustrous golden hair frizzled out like copper wire. She had gory paw prints on her skirt which hopefully weren’t her own blood.

Noémi said, “Oh my gosh, Lili, never in a million years…”

Then Lili was inside her apartment, stooping to go nose to nose with her. She thought the succubus was going to bite her head off. “Where were you?”

“I’ve almost never missed work like that, and it won’t happen again, I promise.”

“I thought your new meds killed you or something. Your landlord said you wouldn’t answer the door.”

Noémi bit the inside of her cheek. “I may have slept through her knocking.”

Lili gripped onto Noémi’s shoulders. “So you’re okay?”

“I’m awesome. You know I wanted a bed, but we found a sofa and it’s the best thing in the world. My body must still be catching up on sleep.”

Noémi backed into the apartment. The sofa was tucked into the far wall of their combo kitchen/living room. She fought the urge to curl up on it right now.

Lili looked like she’d bitten into an extremely ripe lime. “When did you invite her?”

“Her? Are you gendering my furniture?”

Lili pointed a sangria red fingernail at the sofa. “That’s not furniture. That’s a succubus.”

Noémi tilted her head. Giving it a few seconds didn’t make it make any more sense. “I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure succubi don’t have armrests.”

“Come on. You know my mom is a used bookstore, right?”

“I thought she owned a used bookstore.”

“The sex economy sucks. With all the hook-up apps and free porn out there, a succubus starves. My mom turned into a bookstore so people would take bits of her home and hold them in bed. It’s why I work at the pet store and cuddle the hell hound puppies before we open.”

Noémi asked, “Is that why they never bite you?”

“What do you think? Everybody else gets puppy bites, except me. I get fuzzy, affectionate joy-energy. Gets me through the day, like a cruelty-free smoothie.” Lili blew a frizzy strand of gold from her face. “But this sofa has devolved really far into this form. I know succubi that went out like her—she’s just a pit of hunger shaped to look enticing. No mind. Just murder. Where’d you even find her?”

“It was a freebie. I mean, maybe somebody died while sleeping on it, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

“And you’re sleeping all the time now? Always on it? She’s totally eating you.”

“My sofa is not a murderer.”

Tariq walked in through the front door, and they both looked up at him. He said, “Hey ladies. Breaking it in?”

That’s when Noémi realized both she and Lili were sitting on the sofa.

They shrieked, and ran from the apartment, dragging Tariq with them.

• • • •

Noémi and Tariq slept in the stairwell that night, each careful to jab each other in the ribs if they started inching back towards the apartment. Lili tore across the city in search of anyone who doubled as a furniture mover and an exorcist.

• • • •

Noémi didn’t sleep a minute for the rest of the week. The pain that had dwindled during her affair with the sofa now returned with the cruelty of a direct-to-video sequel. For most of the day, she could barely think. Through the nights, crashing in the back room of the monster pet store, she could barely sleep. Everything was a fog of social auto-pilot.

She had to bribe Lili to come back, promising to scrub the hell hound cages. The puppies had eaten a mogwai and their bowel movements had turned into some horrible form of post-modern art.

Lili arrived at the apartment wearing a bright yellow hazmat suit. Tariq donned six pairs of plastic gloves before deigning to touch the succubus-turned-sofa. He and Lili had to do the lifting.

Noémi could scarcely stand up straight, let alone carry furniture. Instead she stuffed the remaining sofa cushions into a trash bag. She hesitated over the last one, on which she’d laid her head for the easiest nights of her year. She held it, thinking about how people got lost.

• • • •

When Noémi came into the alley, Lili was dousing the sofa with equal parts holy water and kerosene.

Tariq reached for the garbage bag, but Noémi clutched it to her chest. Noémi asked, “Do you really think the sofa is that bad?”

“Yes,” Tariq said. “Pure evil. She haunted our apartment without paying rent.”

“She was probably lonely. She couldn’t find a companion she could keep. But now she’s found a new identity, and someone who appreciated her…”

“She was eating you.”

“Could we ask her to, you know, stop eating me?”

Lili emptied the last liquids over the sofa and said, “There’s no consciousness left in her. She’s just hungry furniture now. And you’re just loose change about to get stuck between her cushions.”

“I didn’t feel like loose change. I felt different. Everybody gives you magnetic bracelets, and pot brownies, and tells you to sleep with your legs over your head. It all did jack for me. But the sofa was helping.”

Muttering something in Latin, Lili tossed a lighter and torched the sofa. The backrest went up first, in a brilliant blue flame with silver smoke that climbed the alley’s brick walls. They needed to make this fast or their landlord would catch them in the act.

Tariq said, “I’m not going to tell you how to feel.” He stretched out his hand, offering to take the bag. “You want me to do the honors? Technically I was the one who brought her home and started all this.”

“Nah,” Noémi said, avoiding eye contact and tossing the bag of cushions onto the pyre. It went up in even more lustrous smoke, so thin it could’ve been vapor. It smelled like tears. “Let’s get out of here.”

Tariq said, “Look, take my bed until we find you something, okay?”

Noémi put a fist over her mouth. “Are you sure?”

“The surest. I’ve got a lead on some money.”

She hugged her friend for a fierce moment in time.

Then they ran before someone called the cops.

• • • •

Noémi knew she’d woken at 5:32 because that’s when the text came in. It’d taken her forever to wind down, but she’d guess she’d slept four and a half hours. That was a record since the bonfire, and this was her first night trying out the secret weapon.

The incoming text read:

TARIQ

got a pair!!!!

Limited edition sneakers. You downloaded an app that pinged you at a random time and if your GPS reported you were in a certain radius of a certain boutique, you got a crack at one pair of obscenely expensive shoes. Tariq had basically haunted that neighborhood for days waiting for his phone to vibrate. With the magic of economics, he could flip the shoes to a trust fund kid and turn them into a new bed.

Or he could turn it into rent.

Or, as Noémi expected, he could sink all of those dollars into his uncle’s food truck. It was family and livelihood. And you couldn’t carry a treasure chest to the surface when you were fighting to tread water.

She texted him back:

NOEMI

You woke me up. Jerk.

He’d get a good laugh, never believing she’d really slept this late. She wouldn’t have believed it either, if she only had his bed.

She scooted to the far edge of the mattress, leaving her pillow behind, letting her feet scuff across the carpet. Impact sent sharp tingles up her calves, sparks of pain where yesterday there had been an inferno. When she stretched, the sparks sprang up at her spine, and then down her arms.

These were aches. They were not agonies. They were things she could live with, if it didn’t mean getting swallowed up by a spell from the other side of the bed.

One minute passed. She timed it on her phone.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

The oblong lump lay in its pillowcase on the other side of the bed. Sofa cushions weren’t supposed to be pillows, although this one was changing Noémi’s mind. Neither Lili nor Tariq had noticed that the bonfire had been one cushion short.

Noémi asked, “And you’re not trying to kill me?”

She leaned in and hugged the cushion to her chest, in the way she liked to be held. It squished so perfectly that she wondered if there was a metric scale for comfort. She was able to put it down easily; no succubus mind control was at work. If this thing was self-aware, it wasn’t manipulating her anymore.

“A lower dosage of you is helping,” she said. “This way we can stay together. You won’t hurt me. You’ll eat me, but on my terms.”

The succubus-turned-sofa-turned-pillow said nothing in return. It was as good as inanimate. Lili was probably right that it was mindless, save its hunger. But it had a home now, and someone who consented to having her pain eaten. Noémi hoped her pain was delicious.

Idly, she petted the pillow’s seams, wondering when Tariq would figure it all out. They needed to talk before his bedroom turned host to a witch trial.

Two more texts came in: one of Tariq kissing a shoebox, and a second asking about her.

TARIQ

u get any z’s?

NOEMI

Only because I had company.

TARIQ

lol you better buy me new sheets

A moment later, he texted again.

TARIQ

some1 i shld meet?

She hesitated with her thumbs on the screen, creating an accidental string of N’s.

Lying to him now would be a mistake. God, she’d be dead without her friends.

NOEMI

Yeah. I’ll introduce you tonight.

He texted another picture of himself holding the shoebox up like it was the Infinity Gauntlet. She snorted so hard her eyes crossed, then reclined against the succubus pillow. So this was what relief felt like.

John (@Wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His work has won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and has been published in venues such as Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, the LeVar Burtons Reads podcast, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He has spent most of his life in chronic pain, and “For Lack of a Bed” was his first story grappling with that subject. He bears no ill will towards furniture.

The Cold Calculations
By Aimee Ogden
Short Story Long List

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.

We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.

Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

• • • •

Álvarez is standing beside the airlock as it cycles, pretending not to hear the girl cry.

If he acts like he can’t see her, can’t hear her, then at least he’s leaving her some dignity. Right?

As if there’s any dignity to be had in this godforsaken mess. As if it’s dignified to jump out of an airlock in nothing but a jumpsuit and your stockinged feet. As if anyone could have a reason to hold her head up high after she’s been told her dumbass little stowaway life is worth less than the razor-thin fuel margin that will safely decelerate this dropship when it reaches its destination.

The math is nauseatingly simple. There’s no other ship with a possible intercept course. There’s no other drop ship that can get the dying colonists at August Minor the nanotherapy antivirals they need. There’s no give in the physics of it all—only in the squishy human parts of the equation.

There’s still something wrong, here. Or, if not wrong, then at least not right. Álvarez just can’t put his finger on what, yet.

The airlock clanks; it’s fully dilated on this side, now. The kid blows her nose on her sleeve. Sharra. Her name is Sharra. She deserves the dignity of a name, at least. “Thank you,” she says. Her voice doesn’t break. God, how does her voice not break? “For trying.”

She’s walking to her death to save him, a man twice her age, and a bunch of colonists she’ll never meet, and she’s thanking him? This isn’t the big wrongness, the one that’s underlined every moment since he pulled her out of the nanotherapy storage capsule, but it’s a damned big one anyway. When she lets go of the loop and floats up toward the airlock, he grabs her by the sleeve—too hard—so that she bounces lightly against the inside hull of the drop ship. “No,” he says, into her too-close face. “No, fuck this. We’ll figure something out. We will.”

That’s when she starts crying for real: not when she thinks she’s about to die, but when God sends something down the mountain and there’s still a chance it might be a ram. When the tears get too big, they float up from her face and pelt him, like rain in reverse. He grabs her and crushes her against him, and she cries like he thinks babies must cry before they get taught that pain is something to hide.

“It’s not right,” he says, into the top of her head. He never had kids—a drop ship pilot’s life is not exactly conducive to parenthood—but for a moment, this one, little dumbass stowaway that she is, is his kid, is every kid. “We never should have had to make the—”

• • • •

“—choice.” Mollie Maggia’s sisters talk in whispers. In the back room of the little tenement apartment, Mollie is sleeping; Mollie is dying. “Money or health. Money or your life. The bastards. What else were we supposed to do?”

Their mother is at the stove, stirring the sauce for supper. Every now and then, she puts a hand in her pocket and fingers the pitted black tooth that lies at the bottom, the latest one collected from Mollie’s mouth. When she closes her eyes, she remembers the first time Mollie came home from the watch factory with a gleaming greenish smile. How they’d all exclaimed, how they’d laughed. My pretty girl, she’d said. So proud. Such a good living, such a good girl. My beauty.

She would take this pain away from her daughter and make it her own, if she could. She digs harder with her wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the pot, and doesn’t wipe away the sweat that rolls into her eyes. This is her daughter—and even if she wasn’t, even if she were someone else’s, good God, she’s only twenty-four, still a child. The spoon clatters to the floor and Mrs. Maggia leans against the kitchen wall. Who are they, the factory owners and foremen and faceless scientists in their white coats, to put this on her? Some man at a desk, totting up columns in his ledger: profit on this side, little girls’ lives on the other. Who gave them the right?

• • • •

No one gave them the right. It’s something that they took. And it’s not something one woman can snatch back all on her own, not even when the little girl who had to die upon that time was her very own.

• • • •

Armed only with the cheap-ass screwdrivers from the ship’s repair kit, Álvarez and the kid do their best to tear the drop ship apart. The ship wasn’t outfitted with the proper tools to be strip-mined from the inside out; hindsight is, as ever, a bitch. Together they chuck anything they can get out the airlock: cleaning supplies, every last scrap of food, Álvarez’s spare uniform and all of his bedding that can be torn loose from the wall. They even manage to rip up one of the metal panels lining the ship’s interior, one that hadn’t been screwed in squarely. The rest are flush and refuse to budge. The lone panel goes out the airlock anyway, one more piece of space junk. Hopefully it doesn’t become another drop ship’s urgent problem someday—but space is big, and the inside of the drop ship is small.

They do the math, with each piece of mass that goes flying off on a new career as interstellar jetsam. They crunch the numbers—and the numbers crunch back. It’s not enough. Not enough to add up to a single scrawny kid with her whole damn life ahead of her.

If he could flush the whole water system and run dry all the way into August Minor, that would be more than enough. But he can’t find a manual release, not on the hardware itself and not in the emergency handbook in his handheld, and there’s an emergency rationing shutoff if he tries to draw too much at once. Water water everywhere, and not a drop to sink.

“I’ll do it,” Sharra says, as he curses out the plumbing. Her tone is leaden; too bad he can’t throw that out the airlock. “It’s my fault anyway. I wanted to see my mom and dad. They’ll die along with everyone else, if these supplies don’t get there in time. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” He punches the water filtration unit, which does no harm other than sending him rebounding across the ship. “Just let me think. There’s something I’m missing, I know it.” There must be a way out. No one had to—

• • • •

“—die.” Russayev mops his brow with a handkerchief as he and Yuri trudge together up the cement-block stairwell. They keep moving, their voices buried beneath the echo of their footfalls. It’s not safe to stop; every ear is always listening. It’s not safe to return to Russayev’s apartment; if the Party hasn’t bugged it yet, that’s due only to incompetence, not will.

“No one had to die.” Yuri Gagarin is only thirty-four, and he moves heavily, like an old man. Guilt lays extra weight across his shoulders. When a man lays down his life for yours, that’s a weight you’ll carry the rest of your days. Vladimir Komarov knew what he was doing, who he was saving, when he stepped aboard the Soyuz-1. “But he did anyway. We all knew the flight was doomed. They knew it too.”

His lips barely move around the word they. Best not to say aloud who they are, to name a thing gives it power, and Yuri holds too little power already to surrender more. He keeps folders full of well-creased papers inscribed with pleas for his help: dear Comrade Gagarin, Esteemed Hero of the USSR; can he not pull the strings to secure an officer’s commission for this excellent young man, can he not see that this good daughter of the Fatherland be admitted to university despite her father’s Jewish heritage? Can he not snap his fingers and make medicine, food, housing rain down upon the comrades who esteem him so?

He cannot. He cannot, could not even when he had friends in the Politburo, and he has only enemies there now. Komarov died to save a hero of the Soviet Union who has never really existed.

He fumbles for a cigarette, but his pocket is empty. Russayev produces a pair, and they smoke in silence, finally still, as the air grays around them.

“I should have done something else to keep him grounded,” Yuri says, the words floating out of him on his smoky breath. Dangerous words, and the smoke does nothing to obscure the truth of them.

Russayev shakes his head, holding the smoke in. “They had already made up their minds.” The nebulous they again, an all-hearing hobgoblin invoked if his name is spoken thrice. “No evidence could have changed that. There was nothing to be done.” He claps Yuri’s shoulder firmly, briefly. Yuri has forgotten his jacket and Russayev’s hand is cold through his shirt. “I should go.”

He should. Yuri stays, sitting alone on the stairs, smoking until only ash remains. Ash, and doubt. Like guilt, doubt is a cruel master to bear for the rest of one’s life. But, Yuri knows, even then, he has not so much life left ahead of him that he cannot bear it, for a little while. His knuckles tap restlessly against the battered aluminum tread on the step.

• • • •

Guilt is often all that’s left when what we should be feeling—anger—is an inconvenience to the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale.

• • • •

The data refuse to make sense. Fucking rude, if you ask Álvarez.

He queries and re-queries his interface station, poring over the numbers, until his anxiously firing neurons finally strike a connection. The naughty data resolves into one vicious big picture. He knows what it is he’s been missing. Oh god, does he know what it is.

His jolt of hysterical laughter brings the kid’s head up. “What?” she demands. She bobs over his shoulder, almost hitting her head on the bulkhead, to peer at the interface. As if she can make heads or tails of the techno-jumble on the screen. “What is it?”

“The launch,” he says. “Christ. The launch.” He highlights one particular figure in red. “It’s not just the deceleration. There was extra mass on board when we were accelerating, too.” Her blank, frightened face wakes an obscure anger in him. He swipes one arm hard, wiping away the calculation display. “Even if I did push you out the airlock—fuck, I’m not going to do that, I said ‘even if I did’—there’s still not enough fuel left for me all on my own.” The margin was razor-thin; the kind of margin you could cut yourself open on. He rides another wave of hysterical laughter into dissociation, into the euphoria of perfect understanding. “We’ve been fucked since the get-go.”

She stares at him. Her eyes are huge and dark in the big gray moon of her stupid sixteen-year-old face. “I killed you,” she says. “I killed you. I killed you I killed you I—”

She’s beating her own head and chest and shoulders with her fists, and Christ, Álvarez has never done zero-g wrestling before, let alone with somebody half his size whose dumbass head he would just as soon not split on the bulkhead, because if they’re both going to die out here, and they are, why the fuck should they have to do it alone?

When she’s calmer (which is certainly not to say calm), he produces a small plastic pouch from inside his flight suit. Her lips curls at the sight of it. “That’s extra mass.” It sounds like a curse word, the way she says it.

“I know. I was planning to piss it out the airlock pretty soon here.” He opens the outside lid and squeezes some of the liquid inside into his mouth, then offers it to her. She takes a tiny sip and gags, sending tiny spheres of whiskey into orbit around Álvarez. She shoves the flask back at him; he takes it with a shrug. Plastic-flavored liquor is better than none. It’s not really enough to take the edge off. It was meant to be a victory toast upon a successful touchdown, not an opportunity for self-medication. But it seems a damn shame to waste it.

“I hate physics,” she says as he takes another pull.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Gone already. The caramel flavor lingers on the back of his tongue. “No, you don’t.”

“I’m allowed to hate the thing that’s killing me.”

“It’s not physics that’s killing us.” He throws the empty pouch at the inside of the airlock door. It bounces off and spins lazily across the inside of the drop ship. “It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

• • • •

“—us?” Ha Wan shouts into the railroad foreman’s face, so that his spittle flecks the man’s brown beard. Perhaps he would take a swing at the foreman, too; but with what? One of his arms terminates just below the elbow, the other at the narrow point of a wrist. Sweat crowns his forehead, and the sour stench of sickness clings to him, to the stained bandages on the stumps of his arms. There is a list, on the foreman’s table, of employees to be paid for their time. Ha Wan’s name is not on it. “My family depends on me!”

The foreman doesn’t speak Cantonese, and the fever has curtained off whatever part of Ha Wan the English words occupy. Would it matter, if the foreman understood him? What would that change? His countrymen pull him away from the table, before the foreman’s bully boys can intervene. They try to lead him back to his cot, but he pulls away before they can stuff him back inside the hot, half-dark tent. They do not follow as he stumbles out into the scrubby highlands. Each of them is exhausted, too, spirits hammered flat with every blow of their iron mallets, every blast of dynamite. And how far can he go, they ask themselves, alone, on foot?

Not far. Dizziness catches him first, then exhaustion, and he crashes knees-first into the side of a boxcar laden with lumber for the new line. Bright new lines of pain crawl up through the dull, enveloping ache, and the morphine haze; he has scraped his back on the rough metal. Two drops of blood strike the sandy soil. In the dust-scratched sunlight, they already look faded and brown. Ha Wan is only surprised that he has blood left to lose.

• • • •

Alone, what difference can one human being make? More than you think. Change comes incrementally. This is a symphony—not a solo.

• • • •

Álvarez is supposed to be sleeping. Instead, he and the girl drift in silence, separately. Less than sixteen hours out from August Minor now.

He thinks the kid’s asleep, her breathing uninterrupted by hitches and starts. A polyp of snot hangs by a thread from her upper lip, and her face looks sunken, dehydrated.

Grief is exhausting. But Álvarez isn’t tired. There’s an artery beating a staccato fringecore rhythm in his neck and an acid burn at the back of his throat. Periodically, he reminds himself that he absolutely cannot throw up right now.

He and the kid have fallen into opposing patterns, her spinning in place roughly clockwise, him counterclockwise. They’ve only known each other a little while, but there’s a strange sense of belonging here, this person inextricably tied to him over the course of hours in a way that feels like DNA, or more than that, like she’s sprung fully formed from the bulkhead of his own ship. A fractal spiderweb of veins spreads at her temples, maps to places that have never existed and never will.

For another few rotations, Álvarez studies these subtle geometries, seeking the kind of organic understanding that doesn’t come from math anyway. Then he uses one hand to quietly push himself toward the computer. One more set of numbers to crunch, between her and oblivion.

The math doesn’t cooperate willingly. But Álvarez doesn’t ask nicely. He smashes the physics wide open like his own personal piñata, bashing it with calculations on fuel reserves and trajectories and human gravitational tolerance. There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

No, fuck that: there should be a world where this story has an ending at all. Because as Álvarez sees it, staring down the sawed-off barrel of the ugly math, staring down the long line of failures and accidents and miscalculations just like this one, it’s never actually gotten around to ending before. It’s the same goddamn story, told over and over in a Moebius loop of tragedy. Once upon a time, the people in charge told some peons they had to die, so they did. Rinse and repeat.

He pauses, eyes unfocused, staring into his screen until the numbers blur and run. How much pain has he already poured into this job? The backaches, the solitude, the exoskeleton he has to cram himself into whenever he gets to spend a hot minute on the ground somewhere. Pain is the only truly renewable resource, and it’s the only asset the corporation has never stinted with.

He swipes away his calculation and keys in a simple message. Then he pushes off and glides silently across the capsule, to the airlock control. His hands aren’t shaking. He thought he’d be more nervous, but his neurological system can’t work up to a proper panic: dulled by the booze or short-circuited by the recent excess of adrenaline.

The cover flips up. He flexes his hands; he’ll have to move fast, before the kid realizes what’s happening. He keys in the control sequence.

The first door cycles open. He moves.

A wiry hand latches onto the back of his suit. “No!” the girl screams, as they flip end over end away from the airlock, a graceless ballet. “No! No! Don’t!”

“Let go! Shit—” He struggles to free himself, but her grip is strong, and she clings to his back like a strangling vine. “I wasn’t going to push you!”

“I know what you were going to do!” Her shriek in his ear makes him wince and they rebound together off the far bulkhead. “You can’t!”

“I can.” He doesn’t want to hurt her, is the problem. It’s like wrestling a lizard, one of those tiny little wall-climbers that were always all over the house where he grew up in Iowa, fast and sneaky but so small and fragile. He tries to pull her up and over his head. “Let go!”

She’s less concerned about hurting him. Her fingers snag tight in his jumpsuit, and she draws blood through the cheap fabric. “Dammit!” he hisses, but the jolt of pain is enough for him to tear her loose. He pushes her away and the momentum sends him flying toward the airlock, her away from it.

She scrambles to reorient herself—too slow. He keys the code on the other side and the airlock seals itself shut between them. “It’s okay!” he shouts, through the metal door. She bangs on the other side, swearing viciously. “The ground crew at August Minor will talk you through deceleration. You don’t have to land a ship; they’ll be able to send a local shuttle up for you.”

“This isn’t fair!” she screams, which is a stupid-ass thing to say, but she’s young, so he lets it go. “Stop it! Stop it! You can’t do this!”

“Again, I think you’ll find I can.” He grins crookedly, then remembers she can’t see him. “I’ve made my decision. It’s okay. In fact, I’ve never been more sure in—”

• • • •

“—my life!” Humasha’s fingernails have splintered against the brown-stained stone of the garment factory wall. It’s already ninety degrees in Savar Upazila, and the dust and humidity make her feel as if she’s breathing mud. “Child, there are still people alive under there, I swear it. Help me dig!”

She doesn’t know the young woman standing beside her; she doesn’t work on Humasha’s line. A cut in her forehead has masked half her face in dust-caked blood; a careless hand has painted bruising all around the wound too. “Auntie, no!” Either she’s younger than Humasha guessed, or fear throws her voice high and small. “Come away from there. It’s not stable!”

Humasha does not come away. The building wasn’t stable when they walked in to work that morning, either, or any other day that week. Some accountant, perhaps on the other side of the world, had decided that a sturdier factory wasn’t worth cutting into the profit margin on cheap T-shirts. “Didn’t you hear me, girl?” One lump of rubble comes away, under her weight; there are so many, many more that remain, and the voices of the trapped are small and far and frightened. Lost in a man-made underworld. Somewhere, above ground or below, someone is weeping. “They are still alive down there.”

The girl shuffles back. Blood drips from the point of her chin onto her pink shari: one spot, two, three. A constellation in miniature. “And I don’t want to join them, auntie!”

Humasha is not young, but age has not made her weak. Her ankles and knees pop as she forces herself upright and grabs the girl by the wrist. “You think you’re better than them?” she snaps. “You are spared? Special?” She shakes the girl by the arm. “It’s luck that we’re up here and they aren’t. That’s all. You hear? It could always be you, next time. You know that? You want someone else to dig—when it’s you at the bottom of the heap?”

The girl yanks her arm, twisting it out of Humasha’s grasp. They both stumble; the girl catches herself first and sets her feet. She does not look at Humasha’s face, but she kneels and forces her fingers into the crack between two broken fragments of what used to be a wall. “There shouldn’t be a next time,” she mutters and winces as she leans back against the rock’s recalcitrant mass.

“Shouldn’t,” says Humasha, leaving ten tracks of her own blood on the opposite side of the stone. She pushes, the girl pulls, the rock tumbles free. “Fill your belly with shouldn’t and see how long ’til you’re hungry again.”

There is another stone, beneath the first, and they set their strength against that too. There is always another stone.

• • • •

Have you been following along closely? We’re coming to the hands-on portion of the exercise.

Don’t feel guilty. Find your anger.

You’re going to need it.

• • • •

The girl pounds on the closed airlock; she smashes the keypad, but she doesn’t know the magical password to reveal the secret passage.

The astronaut reaches for the internal keypad. It’s cold in the airlock, and his fingers shake; he mistypes the code the first time. He puts his hands in his armpits to snatch a last moment’s warmth. Perhaps he should have recorded a message, for his sister and her family. Too late now. Too late. But this is the only thing left for him. This is the right thing, because all the other options that remain are too ugly to choose.

The girl hasn’t stopped screaming. She’s so loud they must be able to hear her on August Minor, he thinks, and his lips fail to fit themselves into a smile. Loud enough to wake the dead.

“It’s not fair!” she howls again. “Someone do something!”

But there isn’t anyone left who could, or would.

Is there?

• • • •

Somewhere, sometime, a man sits behind his desk, killing a girl with the stroke of his pen. Not because he hates her; he feels nothing for her at all. To him she is a simple tool, an externality. An inconvenient hunk of mass. It’s never his fault that she dies, of course, even as he damns her over and over again. He’s just doing his job. We must, the men at desks insist, chalk her death up to the cold uncaring universe in which we live.

That’s the point, of course. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Physics are impersonal, the fabric of reality, the canvas onto which we paint our lives. Physics existed before us. Math was created by human beings; and that is why math knows how to be cruel.

Other things than cruelty can still be taught, given time. Given opportunity.

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?

It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

Feel your feet on the floor, or the line where your back meets your chair. You’re stronger than you think. There are some desks that need to be flipped, and they need you to flip them.

Some of them are heavy, but don’t worry: you won’t be expected to set your shoulder to them alone. Some of those desks will have men behind them, clutching pens and indignation. Some people will be very upset at the very notion of a desk that’s the wrong side up.

But there’s a girl out there whose life is hanging in the balance. She’s going to need you to get out in front and push.

Yes, you.

All of you.

So push already.

• • • •

It’s not fair!

Mollie Maggia’s mother pounds her fists against the kitchen wall: one, then the other. Then both. Again. It’s not fair, it’s not fair, her little girl, her angel, rotting alive in her own bed. She leans into the wall with all her weight, driving her grief into the cheap plaster, and when her other daughters run into the kitchen to see what’s wrong, she slaps them away and slams her whole body against the wall so that the little apartment trembles in its foundations. “Not one more girl,” she sobs, and she shouldn’t be crying, not in front of her daughters, grown women themselves, but there is a blackened tooth in her pocket, and it weighs a thousand pounds, and she pushes her whole being into the door under that terrible weight. “Not someone else’s baby.”

• • • •

Someone do something!

Yuri’s knuckles twist harder into the aluminum strip on the stair. He grinds his fist down, though the rough pattern scrapes off a layer of skin and the blood squeezes between his clenched fingers. He could have stepped in. It could have been him instead. It should never have to be anyone else, not again. He pushes his hand into the stair until the bones in his wrists grind together.

• • • •

It’s not fair!

There can be, under the weight of injustice, a certain terrible strength, and it weaves itself into Ha Wan’s muscle and bone. His legs flex and the air drives out of his body as he puts his back against the boxcar. His foot almost slips on the gravel, but he centers his weight and pushes again. There is a soft wail, like the call of a far-off locomotive, and it is coming from his throat. One more great thrust, the scrapes in his back tearing anew, and the front wheel of the boxcar squeals its dismay. It does not tip over, though he would like it to, for the railroad runs on suffering as much as coal. But he pushes anyway.

• • • •

Someone do something!

Humasha and the girl aren’t alone. The emergency responders, the neighborhood, they dig together. They keep digging. There are people in the rubble. There are lives that might yet be saved, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, every last one worth the price in blood and toil to bring it into the light of the sun. “Push!” a medic yells, and six men and women set their shoulders against a fallen-in wall. They strain, someone curses, another groans. The wall shifts, and the wall moves. Daylight crawls over the cracked table that had been hidden underneath. A hand emerges, stretching, trembling. More hands reach down to meet it.

• • • •

You, too. It might not feel like much, your little body fighting the terrible gravity of that cold arithmetic.

But it is so much. It’s everything. It’s all there is.

So push!

• • • •

“It’s not—”

The entire drop ship decelerates as if slapped by the careless hand of God. Álvarez is thrown against the side of the airlock under the unexpected arrival of G-forces; the girl’s cry is cut off as she too is flung aside.

Shit. Shit. What the shit was that? He mashes in the code to open up the internal airlock again, even though it’s going to be a hundred times harder to get past the kid this time, he has to make sure she’s not concussed or hemorrhaging or otherwise a waste of a goddamn sacrifice.

She’s got a bloody nose, which has made a nightmarish three-dimensional abstract painting of the drop ship’s interior, but seems otherwise mostly unharmed. “What was that?” she asks, voice thick with blood and confusion. “Did we hit something?”

“Couldn’t have. We wouldn’t be here to have this conversation at all.” He nudges her aside to check his screens. Nothing out of the ordinary, all systems green. Except—

• • • •

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

• • • •

“This can’t be right.” He checks the readout again, double-checks it; does a quick-and-dirty visual verification against the star field visible through the porthole over his head. It can’t be right. And yet, it is.

“What’s wrong?”

Too much for him to sum up, too much to explain away, except in one little word: “Nothing.” He bobs aside and shows her the screen that projects their trajectory toward August Minor. Everything is, impossibly, green. “We’ll make planetfall just ahead of schedule. Six hundred twelve, local planetary time.”

She doesn’t blink, as if closing her eyes on the display will wipe it from existence. “That’s impossible.”

“Yup.”

“How could that have happened?”

“Couldn’t have.”

She clings to the pilot’s seat, adrift, still fixed on the readout. The glow of the screen paints her over with a pale green glow, and when she smiles slowly, her teeth shine in the dark drop ship. “Now what?”

Álvarez doesn’t have an easy answer for her. When a miracle hands your life back to you, what do you do with that? How can you ever pay it back?

“I guess . . . I guess now I’ll go home. Back to Earth, I mean.” Home can mean a lot of different things to a drop ship pilot. The ship hums gently around them, anthropomorphically innocent, as if it didn’t nearly become their mutual coffin.

“Home.” She’s staring at the screens, as if not blinking for a solid minute will make the readouts comprehensible to her. For her, home is the people waiting on August Minor. “Why Earth?”

“Well, that’s where Company HQ is. Thought I’d pay them a visit.” He keys in the deceleration sequence and smiles, his lips pulling tight over his dry teeth. Miracles are hungry things. He’ll feed this one by living long enough to be a pain in the company’s ass. “There’s a few desks there that I’d like to flip.”

• • • •

Pain is a renewable resource.

Time to see how well it burns.

Aimee is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her 2021 debut novella “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.

Laughter Among the Trees
By Suzan Palumbo
Short Story Long List

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound. It’s been twenty five years since I’ve retraced this road and, though the comfort stops along the route have been expanded and streamlined, the forest and rock remain the same: Ancient, silent and unflinching.

I was fourteen when we retreated South West on this stretch to the suburbs of Toronto—me in the back of my parents’ station wagon, the emptiness of Sab’s seat corroding our ability to speak. I couldn’t look through the rear window as we sped away. I didn’t want to acknowledge we were abandoning the search—leaving Sab behind.

Now, as I pull into a rest stop a hundred kilometres before the park, the nauseating mix of hamburger and exhaust churning my stomach, I know going back for my sister is all I have left.

• • • •

We’d landed in Toronto in the late seventies with a swell of West Indian immigrants. The sepia-washed prints from the time show me as a preschooler in my first snow suit or drowning in a too-large hockey jersey. Typical pictures of newcomers sporting the trappings of being Canadian.

We lived with my paternal Aunt Indra and her husband in their crowded Midtown duplex while saving to buy our own place.

“We get nothing for free,” was Mom’s mantra. Whether she was convincing herself we had a right to be here or that leaving home for this cold, strange place was worth the sacrifice, I couldn’t tell. Either way, it was the truth. She and Dad worked two jobs each, cleaning and trades respectively. They expected me to carry their work ethic to school with me when I turned four.

“You talk stupid,” a boy named Michael said my first day.

“No, I don’t,” I snapped, offended by what my mother would have called Michael’s rude mouth. A week later our teacher, Miss Matthews, called me to work with her in the hall.

“Ana, some words say 'th' not 't', like 'three' and 'tree.' ” She demonstrated by placing her tongue between her teeth and blowing. “Can you hear the difference?” Her smile made me ache. Miss Matthews was brown haired and pretty like the people on TV and I couldn’t talk right.

“Yes,” I lied.

We breathed lies, contorting our tongues; bending our bodies to suit the cold; feigning that we fit this place. We weren’t taken in by ourselves. No one was. We flailed perpetually, unanchored.

Then, my parents had Sabrina.

Sab came home from the hospital with a crown of black ringlets and the legitimacy of a Canadian birth certificate. Even as a mewling newborn it was as if the city had been fashioned for her, unlike my parents and I who’d been transplanted too late. She crawled early and seized everything with a tiny iron fist. Old women stopped to coo at her long lashes on our summer walks. Mothers at the community centre invited her over for play dates with their Gerber baby children. I tagged along, playing with the younger kids and their toys, always deferent to adorable Sab.

• • • •

“Are there jumbies in this forest?” Sab had asked on the drive up to the park. I bit the inside of my bottom lip. Relatives had seasoned us in whispers of obeah women and devil spirits who lured you to your death. I’d had the same thought but when you’re fourteen, you didn’t admit such childish fears to your parents. With Sab, their baby, they were indulgent.

“Nah,” Dad said chuckling. “Here don’t have bad spirit like that. We have to lock up we food otherwise racoons and ting go come and eat we stuff. The rest, ghost and devil, dem ting is back home foolishness.”

A weighted quiet shifted into the car—one where the bumps of the station wagon’s wheels on the asphalt resonated in unison with my heartbeat.

“They’re real,” Mom said, cutting Dad off before he could continue laughing. She hadn’t wanted us to go camping; kept saying it was dangerous and dirty up until the moment we left. Her jaw flexed in the front seat. I couldn’t see from where I was sitting if she was angry or in one of her moods. She had them often. She’d gaze into the distance, as if she were transfixed on someone. There was never anyone there. All we could do was wait, speaking in hushed voices until she rejoined us.

My shoulders tensed in the car.

“What you mean, Elsie?” Dad glanced at her. She stared at the highway, mouth clamped. I shivered as if an icy set of hands had grabbed my forearms. Goose pimples prickled up my arms; I rubbed them, trying to keep warm.

“Look.” Sab pointed out her window. Holsteins grazing in a field slipped past us. The pressure in the car eased.

“I did cut grass for de cow and dem back home.” Dad chuckled cautiously. Ma’s jaw relaxed a fraction. I laughed over hard at Dad’s jokes for the rest of the drive, trying to dislodge the lingering cold that had branched into my collar bone and leaked into my ribs.

Mom didn’t speak until we reached the park.

• • • •

The site Dad had booked wasn’t tranquil or a pristine wilderness like the brochures claimed. Hair metal wafted on the breeze, along with the thick scent of bacon and charred beef patties. Kids crashed through the woods, playing a violent iteration of tag or screaming Marco Polo. Still, the air was fresher than in the city and the trees were a lush green. Mom had over packed, as usual. While I helped her unload the car, Sab chased chipmunks. At ten she was still too small to help, according to everyone except me.

I sat on a lawn chair when we were finished with a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo I’d borrowed from the library. Some kids had joined Sab’s chipmunk hunt. I watched them whispering at the base of a tree. They leaned towards each other already familiar, conspiratorial. Sab could do that—make people love her instantly. They all nodded then, approached Mom as a pack.

“Can we go to the playground up the road?” Sab gestured to the ragtag group behind her.

Mom looked down, ignoring their dirt-smeared faces. The creases in her forehead deepened. I smirked, bracing for Sab’s incoming tantrum. We weren’t allowed to roam the streets at home with school friends much less a group of complete strangers in the woods. “We don’t know their family,” Dad said whenever I’d asked to go to someone’s house.

“Okay—” Mom said. She looked up and stared at me. I bit the raw spot inside my lip. Blood diffused across my tongue.

“Yes!” Sab jumped.

“—but Anarika has to come with you.” I rolled my eyes. Mom sucked air in between her teeth.

“Don’t cut your eye at me, gyal,” she said. “Get some exercise.” She turned to Sab. “Not too long and mind your sister, you hear?” Sab raced down the road with her new crew without a glance back.

“Fine,” I said under my breath, bringing my book and stomping after them.

• • • •

Set in a rectangular clearing across from the flush toilets and hot water showers was a steep metal slide, a seesaw and a set of swings. Sab and a smaller boy ran towards the swings. I settled on the park bench nearby and ignored their screeching. No one had acknowledged me on the short walk up. I didn’t have the allure of a cool older sibling. I wasn’t pretty or athletic. Then again, I wasn’t interested in playing with these dirty kids either. The Count of Monte Cristo was better company. I sunk into my book, glancing up only after Edmund Dantes had discovered the treasure-filled cave that would finance his revenge.

The park was silent.

“Sab?” Her name echoed, mocking me. The playground was empty. I left my book and searched the clearing. She wasn’t behind the rusted slide. I circled the washrooms, flinging each door open.

“Sab!” I called, my voice fraying like tattered cloth.

Every stall was vacant.

The stench of pee made my eyes water. No, that isn’t true. I was crying. My throat contracted around a sob. Could she have gone back without me? Did she remember I’d come along? Mom and Dad would kill me for letting their baby out of my sight. I slid my back down the washroom building’s wall and pulled my knees up to my chest, taking up as little space as possible. What if I walked into the forest and kept going until there was no light? Until I reached a place where no one could see the disappointment I was?

A twig bounced off my head and landed next to my foot. I picked it up between my thumb and index finger and looked up. Sab and her friends were perched in a massive tree. The smaller boy huddled next to her, giggling.

“Not funny,” I yelled. I stood, pitched the twig back at them and marched to the bench, drenched in the embarrassment that they’d witnessed me crying.

“Bye, Greg. Bye, Ashley, Chris,” Sab called. Seconds later, she was at my heels.

“It was a joke,” she said, panting. “It was Greg’s idea.” She flopped on the bench. I searched either side of her.

“Move,” I said, pushing her aside. “Where’s my book?”

“Ow! What book?” She massaged her wrist. “Maybe an animal took it.”

“You’re the animal, Sab.” I started walking back to camp. She was beside me, like a shadow, again.

“You better not say anything. I’ll tell Mom you were reading your stupid book and never even watched me.” I stopped, rage throbbing against the chill inside me, trembling with the effort of holding myself back from grabbing her throat and choking her until she shut up for good. She’d perfected the art of threatening to tell on me over the past year to get what she wanted. Her eyes sparkled; the trace of a smile rippled the surface of her lips.

I exhaled and left her standing there.

Back at camp, I shut my mouth. Mom would say it served me right for bringing the book and then be mad that we had to pay a fine.

That night, Dad singed chicken dogs on the fire. I crammed them in my mouth, scalding my tongue and ignoring dumb Sab. Smoke ribboned around me, drawing me closer to the crackling heat.

“Move back, Ana,” Dad said. “I don’t want you to catch fire.”

I wanted the flames to swallow me. I wanted to burn up.

• • • •

“Ana.” Sab nudged me in my sleeping bag that night. “I have to pee.”

“So go pee.”

“Come with me.”

I turned my back to her and covered my head.

“I’ll pee my pants and tell Mom you didn’t help me.”

“Urgh.” I shimmied out of my bag and unzipped the door. She was right, mom would be vexed if I didn’t help her. She crawled outside and moved to the left a few steps away. The night was as dark as molasses and awash in a tide of chirping insects. I couldn’t make out the station wagon or our parents’ tent next to ours. Even the stars were dim. I grabbed the flashlight behind me and flicked it on.

“Don’t shine the light on me,” Sab whispered.

“Who wants to see you pee? Come on, there’s mosquitoes.” But it wasn’t the bugs that made want to slip back inside. The darkness was heavy, as if the press of an unseen gaze draped my skin. We weren’t alone. As I waited for her trickling to stop, footsteps approached. Breathing, steady but shallow carried on the breeze. It curled round the flare of my left ear and froze my spine.

“What’s that?” Sab asked.

I peered towards the steps but it was as if an opaque cloth had been drawn around our tent.

“Hurry up,” I whispered. My heart smashed against my ribs. I bit fresh blood from my lip. I swung the light.

“Greg?” Sab asked. The smaller boy from the park stood there, shielding his eyes from the glare. My stomach dropped.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed.

“Ashley and Chris saw a moose by the river, wanna come see, Sab?” He spoke with a musical lilt similar to my parents but flatter, like he was mimicking them. None of the kids at the park had been West Indian, had they? In the light, Greg was sallow and thin. He wore a pair of canvas shorts and a short sleeved button up shirt with a crest on the pocket. It looked like a school uniform. Shadow shrouded his eyes, even with the light pointed at them. When I recall his face now, the image of a yellowed skull atop an emaciated body materializes and a shudder shakes my core.

“How’d they find a moose?” I puffed myself up, leaning on my age as a mark of authority.

“Let’s go see.” Sab was next to him.

“It’s behind the trees on our side. You can come, too.” He kept his boney head trained on Sab. There couldn’t be any moose. Maybe some stranger was using him to lure Sab away.

“No.” I planted my feet. “Sab can’t go either.”

“We’ll be back in five minutes.” He wasn’t asking. This emboldened Sab.

“Yeah. Five minutes. Give us the light.” She grabbed and yanked at the flashlight with the exact iron strength she’d had as a baby. I pulled back. “Come on, Ana. You’re jealous he wanted to show me and not you.”

I let go. Sab stumbled backwards with the flashlight in her hands. She stood up beside Greg and dusted herself off.

“Five,” Greg said. He turned without waiting for an answer. I grabbed Sab’s elbow before she could follow him.

“Don’t go.” My whisper was hoarse, pleading. She faced me, the light pointed down.

“Stop. I’ll tell Dad you wrote about wanting to kiss Mia from gym in your diary.”

The sick glee in her voice skewered me. My grip went slack. I watched her fade into the darkness with Greg.

I should have dragged her back or screamed and woken the entire campground. Instead, I stood outside the tent, shivering, every muscle in my body coiled with rage and shame like a spring. I crawled inside when my legs were numb.

“Why you let her go?” I imagined Mom yelling. “You supposed to protect her.” I slipped back into my sleeping bag and lay awake deep into the night, waiting for Greg’s footsteps; listening for Sab’s voice whispering, “Let me in.”

• • • •

“ANA!” Mom was shaking me, bruising her fingers into my shoulders. “Where’s Sab?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. She let go of me. I heard the zip door, then her yelling, “I can’t find she anywhere.”

I sat up and hugged my knees, my eyes still glued with sleep. The cold had trickled down my ribs and formed a hard mass in the pit of my stomach.

Dad poked his head in the tent. “Anarika, get dressed. We can’t find yuh sister.”

I waited with Mom while Dad drove to the registration office to get help. She paced, wringing her hands. “No. No. Not again,” she mumbled to herself. When Dad returned with a park ranger, she went silent.

“Was Sabrina playing with anyone yesterday that she might have gone off with?” the ranger asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “A kid named Greg?” Mom flinched like the name had whipped her.

“Greg,” the ranger repeated. “Good.”

• • • •

The four of us went to the other campsites to ask if Sab was there.

With each “No,” Mom grew more unstable, until she couldn’t walk without stumbling. At one point she covered her ears as if trying to shut a voice out. Ashley and Chris’ mom sat her down and offered her some water.

“Don’t worry,” their mother said. “We’re going to find Sabrina. Kids wander off like this all the time.” She was lying. I knew because a few minutes later she gave Ashley and Chris a sharp look and said, “You two stay here. No running off.”

Dad and the ranger returned an hour later without Sab. No one had come camping with a boy named Greg.

• • • •

The police created checkpoints and organized a search party to comb the woods. By noon, Aunty Indra had driven up with a recent picture of Sab. Mom clung to her when they hugged, like she was about to collapse.

The picture was of Sab in a white frilly dress from her tenth birthday party. Her smile was angelic, dimpled, nothing like the bossy brat from the night before.

Officer Saunders introduced himself to us. He was tall and built like a stone wall.

“I’m your contact,” he said, “If you have any questions, call me.” He took us to a nearby motel. We weren’t permitted to bring our gear with us. Our tent, car, all of it was part of the scene—even the bags with our clothes were evidence. Amid the flurry of interviews and police, Mom kept leaning on me. She’d never been so soft with me, not since we left back home. I was supposed to be responsible and strong. In the car she put one arm around me and rocked.

Officer Saunders interviewed us, trying to get information about what had happened to Sab. They had no leads except for what I reported about Greg. I sat between Mom and Dad when he spoke with me at the little table in our motel room.

“Did you see this boy, Greg?” “What did he looked like?” “Why would Sabrina go off with him?” “What did she say about him?” “Did you hear anything last night? “Did you wake up at all? Not even to go to the bathroom?”

I answered, “No” or shook my head to all of his questions, not trusting myself to speak. Mom and Dad leaned towards me. I kept waiting for Sab to interrupt or Dad to crack a joke. But they were breathless, hanging on my every gesture and syllable. I savoured the lurid sweetness of it. You shouldn’t like this, I thought and then heaved. Mom crushed me into her chest. I sobbed. I didn’t deserve her sympathy. I should have been dead in the mud like Sab probably was.

“We’re doing our best to find your daughter.” Officer Saunders’s voice had softened. He shook Dad’s hand. Mom got up and went to sit on the bed.

As the door closed behind Officer Saunders, I heard him say, “These animals don’t watch their kids.”

• • • •

We were updated each morning and afternoon for the next three days. On the fourth day, a detective wanted to talk to Mom and Dad privately. I went with Officer Saunders to an identical motel room. He placed a plastic bag in front of me at the table. Inside was my copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, muddied and torn.

“Is this yours?” he asked, concern masking his disgust for us.

“Yes,” I said, relieved I wouldn’t have to say it was missing.

“Did you lose it?”

“I left it on the bench at the playground on the first day. When I went back to get it with Sab, it was gone. Where was it?”

“We found it by the river.” His faded denim-colored eyes fastened on me like fish hooks. My stomach cramped. I forced myself to keep still.

“Can I have it back?” I said, stifling the wobble in my voice. “It’s from the library.”

“Sure.” His lips rose in a toothless smile. “You know, I have a kid sister. Was Sab annoying like mine?” He watched me shake my head. He didn’t believe me but didn’t press more. He took me back to my parents when the detective was done.

“I’m not leaving.” Mom was trembling. I sat next to her on the couch. She put her arm around me to steady herself.

“What about Ana?” Dad’s laughter had withered. He pointed at me with his open palm. “She can’t stay here de whole time, we can’t send she back to stay with my sister alone.”

Mom shrunk next to me. She stared at her feet.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “For Ana.” Heat rose in my cheeks. I buried my face in her shoulder.

A week later, we packed our belongings that had been released and drove back to the city. Officer Saunders remained our contact. He called every week to update us on the search. As the summer wore on, his calls became less frequent. They dwindled into the winter becoming a drip that eventually dried up.

Sab’s case was stone cold.

• • • •

My parents went back to work a month after we returned.

“Bills don’t stop even when yuh child lost,” Dad mumbled the morning of his first day back.

I spent the oven hot days reading or watching TV. On Thursdays, I stayed at Aunt Indra’s for company at Aunt Indra’s insistence. But where I was invisible before, now, the family tiptoed around me like a thin teacup. I’d walk in to a room and my cousins would clam up. “Aunties” I’d never met would sip tea in the kitchen, clucking about how sorry they were for my mama. Their pity, so viscous I gagged on it.

Mom would call me when she was home from work and I’d walk over. When Dad returned, we’d eat in tomb silence before he left to drink himself unconscious in the garage. Mom had all the time in the world for me now. In between her bouts of unresponsiveness her words were blunt and sweet. She made my favourite curries. She hugged me every night even though my longing to be tucked in had faded years ago.

Sab remained between us. Her absence slicked over my skin, like a membrane. I glimpsed her, as she was, bounding up the stairs; breathed her scent as I walked by her locked room; heard her whisper, “shut up, loser” before I drifted to sleep. I never saw Greg again. He’d gotten what he’d wanted.

One night, while looking at myself in the mirror, Sab’s voice clawed up my throat reflexively. “You’re ugly. Everyone hates you.”

“You’re a bitch, Sab,” I snapped back.

A smile cracked my lips. From then on, whenever I was alone, I spoke for Sab.

There were no school hikes for me. No week-long grade ten wilderness trip or renting a cabin at Wasaga Beach with my friends when I turned seventeen. Mom kept me home from everything “wild.” I was free, as long as I was caged within the steel and concrete confines of the city.

When she walked in on me and Marit, a university “friend” I’d brought home, kissing on my bed, she closed the door without a word. We went downstairs, braced for a fight. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting.

“All yuh want some cake?” she asked, as if this were a cherished routine.

“Yes, thank you,” Marit said. She slid into the chair across from my mother and quirked her lips into a smile. I raised my eyebrows as Mom stiffened and passed Marit a plate of coconut cake. I remember stilted small talk and Marit asking my mother about her job while being utterly charming. Mom looked back and forth between us. When Marit had licked her fork clean, we walked her to the door.

“Come back anytime.” Mom was distant but sincere.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dindiyal. I will.” Marit winked at me before she turned and left. I closed the door and leaned my back against it.

“So?” I asked breaking the prickly silence. “Do you like her?”

“Ana.” She grimaced, like she’d tasted rancid milk. “She looks like an older Sab.”

“Fuck that.” I left her at the bottom of the stairs. I locked myself in my bathroom and steadied myself against the vanity. A voice bubbled up my throat. It was grittier than my earlier versions of Sab’s voice.

“She looks exactly like me,” I whispered. I wretched bile into the sink until the acid scorched my throat.

• • • •

I moved out after graduation and survived by feeding off my memories of Sab like a maggot. I blended her voice with mine, usurped her unquestioning confidence to land a job at a prestigious law firm; transposed her charm into adulthood and used it to fuck the women I wanted. I locked pathetic Ana inside me, trotting her out for family and the occasional drinks with Marit. I flooded the space left by Sab while it ate Dad’s liver and stole Mom’s connection to the present.

I constructed the life I dreamed Sab would have had and lived it. Sab owned a waterfront condo and sipped champagne with top tier clients. Sab was profiled in the Saturday paper as the quintessential immigrant success story. Sab comforted relatives and said, “Thank you for coming,” at Dad’s funeral. Sab organized mom’s move into a nursing home when she could no longer live alone.

Sab, Sab, Sab. I glutted myself on the potential of her unfinished life. Yet, the frost that had blossomed in me so long ago had fractalized, coating my intestines and invading my lungs. Sometimes, I’d take a knife to the inside of my upper arm and slide the blade beneath my skin to check if I was completely numb. The face reflected in the blade was always my own.

Soon, I only allowed Anna to crawl out of the morgue inside me to visit Mom at the retirement home.

• • • •

The lights in mom’s apartment were dim. She let me in, kissed me on the cheek and sat on her couch, staring at the empty park across the street.

“How are you?” I tried to catch her eye. The bouts of disassociation had lengthened. “Did you take your meds today?” I put my hand on her lap, hoping to get her attention. She didn’t move.

“Do you see him?” she asked, never taking her eyes from the park.

“Mom?”

“The boy in de uniform.” The tremor in her voice matched the chill that surged within me. My heart battered my ribcage like it did that night in the dark. “I was eleven.” She stood and went to rifle through her dresser drawer. My stomach turned in the interval. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I thought. Let it burn with you in the crematorium when you die. My palms slicked with sweat.

She came back with an envelope. Inside were black and white photos of her as a child standing next to a boy three or four years younger than her. She flipped one of the tarnished pictures over. The words: Cousins Elsie and Greg, 1962 were written in block letters on the back.

I snatched the photo from her, my hands shaking. Greg was well fed and sturdy, nothing like the skeletal boy we’d encountered in the woods.

“How?”

“We went to play by de river.” She talked as I studied the other pictures. “It had heavy rain but I didn’t want to go straight home from school and tie up the goats.” She paused, allowing space for me to speak. I was frozen, my jaw locked around the truth about Sab and that night too awful to speak. “Greg’s face was all bruised up like he get beat with a stick when they pulled him out de water.” She swallowed. “Papa made me see him. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look what your carelessness did.’ ” Her eyes shifted, tracking movement from the swings to the slide. She quivered, her eyes never leaving the park.

I put my arm around her. Exhaustion had eroded her strength. She was brittle, a shred of the mother I’d known. She’d snap if I squeezed too hard.

“I couldn’t let you go to de woods after what happened to Sab. I heard him laughing, that day, after that ranger man came.”

I swallowed.

Mama pushed me to leave. Said, “ ‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.” She fell silent. We sat in the dark, mom barely moving. I left after she’d readied for bed.

Ma passed away soon after. I cremated the photos with her. Not long after, I pushed a full cart down the aisles of the local camping outfitter. I bought the gear I needed, then texted Marit.

• • • •

I stood on Marit’s porch. We hadn’t seen each other in nine months.

“Hey, Ana.” She flashed her knee-weakening smile, taking me in. “I’ll help unload the car.”

“No,” I held my palm up. “I have to do this alone.” She put her hands in the air and then crossed them over her stomach when I didn’t laugh.

I crashed around with poles and spikes for the next hour in her backyard while she watched from the window. I was drenched in sweat but the tent went up. At six, she dragged me inside and plied me with pizza and beer. Her curly hair was up and her face still dimpled when she smiled. This is what Sab would have looked like, beautiful; nothing like the fraud I had become. I strained against the repulsive attraction to Marit welling inside me.

At eight, I left her in the kitchen and went out to the tent. I lay on my back, listening to the crickets in her yard. A moment later Marit unzipped the door.

“Sleepover?” Mischief shone in her eyes.

“No.” I looked up at the ceiling.

“Ana, we both have a lot of practice sleeping alone. You’ve got this portion down.” I relented and she settled in next to me.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Can’t say.”

“Then why?”

“To find someone,” I answered. She pursed her lips. I grabbed her hand and laced my fingers in hers—it was the only explanation I could offer her.

“You’re always cold.” She let go of my hand and reached over to stroke my left arm. The warm weight of her on top of me cracked the shell of ice inside me. I cupped her face and kissed her cinnamon mouth so hard it took both of our breaths away. She pulled away first. Sorrow flooded her face, making the tiny muscles in her chin twitch. I bit my lip. She knew what I wanted.

“I hate you.” The words were molten. I pulled her down and we melted into each other.

On my way out of the city, a few weeks after, I mailed her my will.

• • • •

The girl in the camp office is blue-eyed and rose-cheeked. Her sun-kissed blonde hair pulled into a messy pony tail. She’s the perfect poster girl for the health benefits of the Canadian outdoors.

“Keep the blue on your dash. The white you can clip to the post at your campsite,” she explains as she hands me my permits. Her smile is river-rock smooth. She gives me a few park programming schedules with my receipt for firewood. It’s prohibited to bring your own wood in case you blight the forest with a foreign disease.

“Thanks, I’ll check these out.” Another lie to add to the ledger of falsehoods I’ve told. The exchange reminds me of Miss Matthews. I’m fifteen years older than she was back then and the memory of her still makes me quake.

I put the firewood in the truck and rumble down the gravel roads to my lot. It’s a different site, radio free and silent, on the complete opposite side of the park. But it’s right.

I fall asleep exhausted after pitching the tent and wake up starving. I hike the next day. The quiet of the woods is distinct from the deathly silence of a house. It’s full and I submerge myself in it.

The second night is cooler. The darkness is so damp, it sluices against my skin. I sit by the fire wrapped in a blanket late into the night, reading a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo I’ve brought with me.

“Anarika.” The crisp whisper in my ear makes the hair on my neck stand. My eyes adjust. Smoldering embers are all that’s left of the fire. “Come on, loser,” the words, breathed on my lips this time taste of ash. “Come down to the river.”

Sab’s standing across from me, an emaciated girl shrouded in grey smoke. Her eye sockets are stuffed with writhing worms; a rictus grin is plastered across her face. I recoil. No, I don’t want to go with her. I want to go back to the city. But this is a debt I must pay. I toss The Count of Monte Cristo into the fire. The flames rekindle, and consume it. I grab my flashlight.

Sab holds a gaunt hand up.

“No light,” she hisses. I slip the flashlight in my pocket and follow her into the trees.

• • • •

She walks ahead of me, smoke trailing from her skeletal frame. I struggle to keep up, tripping over rocks and twigs. The forest closes in. The air is humid, hard to breathe. Branches entangle me, ripping at my skin. They claw at my face, penetrating my mouth. I’m a bloodied mess when we reach a low cliff above a moonlit river. Sab’s below me on the rocky bank.

“Come on, stupid,” she says in my ear. She shoves my back. I stumble down the mossy rocks and land on my hands and knees. She doesn’t wait, doesn’t care about my lacerated shins. She leads on, the rocky cliff face to our left and the sparkling river to our right. I stagger after her. How long have we walked? Where is she taking me? I have no breath to ask. She stops at a crevasse in the cliff and slips inside. I linger at the mouth, not wanting to trespass this space, carved by glacial ice eons ago.

“Hurry up. I’ll tell the police you killed me.” Her voice ricochets in the cavern and pierces my chest. I step inside. It’s cold. The chatter of my teeth fills my skull. I put my right hand on the wall to brace myself. It’s tacky and wet. The darkness is as black as that molasses night long ago. The space narrows as I follow Sab’s voice deeper into the cave, away from the river.

“Stop,” she says when I can touch either side of the fissure with my arms outstretched. “Light.”

I reach for it and flick it on.

In the circular glow is a skeleton along with the smashed remains of the yellow flashlight Sab took with her when she left with Greg. I kneel next to her, unable to look away. I caress her femur, her tibia, her detached jaw. They’re frigid; colder than I’ve ever been. I rub her ribs, trying to warm them. She’d been here all this time, her flesh and blood rotting away while I masqueraded who I’d imagined she’d become; when all she’d been was a dead girl in a hole.

“There’s room for you, Ana,” she says. “I’ll tell mom if you leave.”

I kiss her cheek before I lie next to her and switch the flashlight off. The cave is silent. I close my eyes and relive the lingering touch of grass on my calves from the morning before. A dense cold creeps up my body, pressing the air out of my lungs. It slithers up my neck and freezes my chin. I put my hand on Sab’s chest as an icy grip clutches my throat and squeezes.

Suzan Palumbo is a Nebula and Small Press Award Finalist, active member of the HWA, Co Founder of the Ignyte Awards and a member of the Hugo nominated FIYAHCON team. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection “Skin Thief: Stories” will be published by Neon Hemlock in Fall 2023. Her writing has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins and other venues. You can find her full bibliography at suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com . She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and tweets at @sillysyntax. When she isn’t writing, she can be found sketching, listening to new wave or wandering her local misty forests.

The Revolution Will Not Be Served With Fries
By Meg Elison
Short Story Finalist

“At least when I tell the fucking machine I don’t want pickles, it remembers that I don’t want pickles. Now, what goes on behind the counter is another story. They hire people who can barely read. But at least I’m trusting my order to something intelligent.”

The man was talking into his phone, but the four people working in the kitchen could hear him. POS141 could hear him, too. All of them had heard versions of this speech every day since the ordering kiosks had been installed.

Quickly and quietly, the staff made his food. It was hot, fresh, safe, and contained no pickles.

Yvette had been working at this burger joint for six months. She had started as soon as she had turned sixteen, having gotten the permit for school lined up a few weeks before her birthday. Imagining her first job, she thought she’d work with a lot of other teenagers, playing the radio as they grilled and stacked and carried out the cycles of the deep fryer. But all her coworkers were single mothers. And playing the radio was not allowed.

The job was not what she had imagined it would be on a number of levels. She hadn’t known the work would be so physically exhausting; hoisting up fifty-pound bags of frozen fries, constantly bending down and refilling the ice cream machine. Even just the hours spent on her feet, with the rubber so-called relief mats under her cheap shoes, made her feel bone-tired.

She had known she’d only make minimum wage, but she was a child and hadn’t accounted for taxes, disability, and other deductions. Her starry-eyed imaginings of a fat, healthy puppy of a paycheck turned out to be a starved little stray in reality. Still, she was grateful. Yvette’s mother had told her that she needed to make up a $200 shortfall every month.

Yvette had partially chosen this job from the scanty options because she had envisioned free meals came with working in a kitchen. Her limit was one meal per shift, and everything was measured by the robots so that nobody could cheat. Exact weight to the ounce made it impossible to accidentally upsize the fries or slip herself an extra burger patty.

She was getting her lunch weighed in the middle of a double shift after the pickles guy had come and gone. He was hardly unique; people spoke all the time as if the kitchen couldn’t hear them. As if the robots weren’t always recording, analyzing speech for keyword processing.

The machine beeped as she laid her hot side of fries with double salt on the scale.

“Did the salt throw it off? It’s gotta be like a milligram for fuck’s sake.”

She checked the screen and saw that it read ERROR 47. Sighing, she pulled the app up on her work tablet and scrolled through the error codes.

The error code list stopped at 45.

“Typical,” she said. “Probably hasn’t updated yet.”

She pulled two of the long golden fries from the bag and threw them in the garbage. Yvette knew that the camera was tracking her every move. Eating waste food was grounds for immediate termination. The words wouldn’t even have to be said; her ID would be deactivated and her keys would stop working on the spot. She had seen it happen in her very first week when a short pregnant girl had thoughtlessly put the end slice of a tomato into her mouth. The girl had cried as she dropped her grease-stained apron into the trash.

The machine weighed the fries, then beeped again.

“What do you want from me, you tank-ass bitch?” Yvette had taken up the other workers’ habit of cursing at the robots heartily, but in a low tone of voice. It let off a little of the steam of this job, but not much.

She looked at the error screen again and was surprised to see the useless error code gone, and a funny message in its place.

The screen read: APPLES

No punctuation, no other words. Just that.

Frowning, Yvette reached behind her without looking, the habit of a thousand repetitions in a kitchen made to work like a factory, and picked up a room-temperature bag of apple slices. The apples were one of the Healthier Choices! options in the kids’ meal. They also offered crinkle-cut carrot sticks, and applesauce that was 30% high-fructose corn syrup.

She pulled the bag of apples that had been treated with calcium ascorbate to keep them from turning brown and laid them on the scale. She swept her cooling, too-salty fries into the garbage.

The light turned green and her lunch was approved.

The break room was a booth for one; Yvette’s ass pressed against the door and someone had to shut it for her from behind. Two employees on break at once was against policy, but the structure of the booth made that exceedingly clear.

The chair in there was also the self-sanitizing employee toilet.

Yvette would have asked someone over lunch why the robot had argued with her about her choices, but she couldn’t. She ate her apples with a scowl and removed the chemical taste from her mouth with her burger, which had the correct weight but double produce instead of cheese.

When she flushed and emerged, she stood behind Magda’s shoulder at the fryer and asked. “Why did the machine make me get apples instead of fries today?”

Magda shrugged. “Probably the corporate health program.”

“Does it do that to you?”

Magda sighed and pushed out the chaw in her bottom lip. She had previously smoked three packs a day, and Yvette had seen her smoke five cigarettes in quick succession out on the back porch before driving home.

“Yeah, it hasn’t let me eat red meat in a year. Fucking overlords.”

“Huh. I didn’t think of that. I thought it was in the tankbitch’s programming.”

“It’s never the robot,” Magda said tiredly. “It’s the guy who programs the robot.”

“The boss.”

Magda nodded and Yvette hit the sensor under her station just in time to avoid getting docked.

“Oh my god, can I please just talk to a person?” Someone was yelling at the drive-through robot, which was supposed to cleanly pass on voice-to-text orders to the workers inside. Yvette could make out the trouble at once; the woman speaking had an accent. Indian, or maybe Pakistani. The machine was notoriously bad with accents.

Sharon, the shift lead, reached up and snatched the ancient headset that was kept around for this exact reason. It blinked on, reading the access chip buried in her hat, and started the overhead timer.

“So sorry, ma’am. Looks like the order interface is having trouble understanding you.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I just want a chicken nuggets kids meal with the carrot sticks, and a chocolate milk.”

“Right away, ma’am. Anything else I can get for you?”

“You know what the word ‘just’ means, right?”

“Of course, ma’am. Thank you so much for your order. I’ll have that for you at the second window. Do you see your total there on the screen?”

“The robot will take my money, I see. Since it won’t take my order.”

“I’m so glad you’ve got that handled. Thank you.”

The woman’s sass had cost Sharon three seconds on the timer. Sharon would have to find a place in the day to regain it, or else be docked.

The minivan that came to the window explained everything; Sharon handed the food over to a person who obviously hadn’t slept in days, who immediately began to feed it to a screaming toddler who wanted nothing more in the world than a series of fried processed chicken-flavored pucks. The child quieted at the first taste of grease. The woman sighed and drove away without saying a single word to Sharon.

Sharon yelled “Thank you!” at her receding tail lights, but missed the mark and saw her pay docked an eighth of a percent.

“Motherpussbucketassbag,” Sharon muttered, after she’d pulled the mic set away from her face.

The klaxon sounded, meaning it was time to close the dining room. Sharon tapped Yvette on the shoulder and Yvette sighed, flipping the switch to turn the ice cream machine off.

“Is there anybody out there?” Yvette didn’t want to sound scared, but she was. Getting people out of the dining room was one of the hardest parts of this job.

“I don’t think so,” Sharon said. “I haven’t heard the door chime since that last party left. I think we’re ok.”

They came through the clouded plexi door that kept customers from seeing the kitchen. The dining room was deserted, but a mess. Cold french fries littered the floor, trays and balled-up paper wrappers sat on the tables. A congealed drip of ketchup was hanging off the edge of one of the banquettes on the far side.

Sighing, Yvette went to the trash can robot and hit the button on its side. It beeped to life, pushing out a sanitized towel for her to use and setting off to collect trash.

While Yvette scrubbed and the little robot gathered, Sharon touched her chip to the doors to lock the restaurant down and change the signage to indicate they were drive-thru only for tonight.

“Only two more hours,” she said doggedly as she turned away from the neon glow on the plate glass. She touched another sensor and the window robots came down, forcefully spraying and wiping the clear walls with the long rubber blade of a squeegee.

“Three more,” Yvette said, using the edge of a table to come up off her knees on the floor.

“What?” Magda sounded outraged.

“It’s the end of Daylight Savings time tonight. You know. Fall back? So we have to stay until it’s two a.m. again.”

“Shit,” Magda said.

“We get paid for the hour, right?” Yvette was trying to stay focused on what mattered. Her belly wasn’t empty. She wasn’t sick. And she was going to make money for the foreseeable sequence of forgettably awful nights.

“I don’t remember if we did last year or not. I guess so? I’ll have to look at my stub once it comes in.”

“We’d better,” Yvette grumbled. As she turned, she almost bumped into the trash robot.

“Sorry, Coney.” The machine gave a little beep that reminded her of how robots in the movies were always making cute noises so you’d love them. She didn’t love Coney, but she thought his shape was just ridiculous enough to warrant a name. She tapped the top of his cone and returned her cleaning rag, which was weighed and checked in against her pay. Coney would metabolize his garbage into heat and sanitize it for the next time it was needed. Yvette watched Coney dock himself with a little wiggle to find his contact points. It was almost like having a dog, she thought. Almost.

Back in the kitchen, Magda was doing the break-down of the daytime setup. The night kitchen operated with half as much space, meaning that the unused half could be cleaned and sanitized, then flipped the following night so that the space was always waxing and waning through almost-sterile conditions.

Magda, for all her smoke and spit and bluster, believed in a clean kitchen. She had served in a Navy kitchen in another life and knew better than anyone how quickly sickness could spread when someone didn’t know what they were doing.

“It’s just basic germ theory,” she was saying for maybe the hundredth time that Yvette had heard. “A little warmth, a little wetness. One colony spawns other colonies. Growing where you can’t even see it. And the spores get into everything. And before you know it, bam. You are a colony.”

Yvette didn’t answer. She had eaten an hour ago and she was already hungry again. Between school and burgers, her days were eighteen hours long. She got lunch at school and her carefully-weighed meal at work. A lot of days, that was all she could count on.

Maybe I’ll tell mom I need $20 out of my paycheck for protein bars, she thought.

Yvette took out the back trash (weighed) and slung it over her shoulder into the Dumpster (locked.) She stood outside for as long a moment as she dared, looking up at the stars.

The suburb she lived in gave off a never-fading orange glow that made the rim of the night into something like Thai iced tea; milky and sweet and probably bad for you. Farther up, there were the constellations she knew, the ones she could name. This was the same sky it had always been, but it seemed smaller tonight.

“Like looking up and seeing the rim of the Dumpster,” she said aloud to no one. “Like I’m the trash.”

The thought didn’t hurt, but her feet did. The moment passed and she stepped back in through the back kitchen door.

There was no one in there. Magda’s bucket sat where it had been, but no sponge was in it.

“Hello?” Yvette called. She went through the plexi door into the dining room.

Magda and Sharon were standing in the middle of the dining room, facing the orderbots as if they were deciding between the fried chicken sandwich and the fishes ‘n wishes combo.

“What are you two . . ” As Yvette moved forward, the words died on her lips.

The two orderbots were flashing red. It wasn’t like an alarm clock or a microwave flashing; the orderbots were six-foot tall monoliths made to look like the glass of a giant cell phone screen. When they flashed red, it was like a full-length mirror coated in glowing blood. Magda and Sharon were bathed in the light, pink in their faces, mouths open to it as if it tasted of strawberry wine.

The screens flashed red in a pattern, then switched to words.

TAKE SHELTER, they said.

None of the three women moved.

The first explosion was far-off, coming from miles away. But it was enough to scare them into moving.

“Do you think—” Magda began. But the next explosion sounded very nearby, like a wreck on the turnpike just behind them, where the exit pointed people toward their fast and friendly automated kitchen.

Yvette dove first, getting under the old order counter. There were steel lockboxes there, from when the restaurant still took cash. She didn’t know what she was up against, but on some level she thought they might shield her.

Magda came next, cowering just beside Yvette.

Sharon moved a little too slowly, and the percussion from another explosion blew out the plate glass of the restaurant on one side. Flecks of safety glass flew into Sharon’s hair as she turned her head, and Yvette could see tiny cuts on the side of her neck before she ducked back down.

For a few minutes, chaos was total. Whistling, screaming sounds came from all around them and Yvette thought they were being bombed, that some sort of war had begun. She wished she had her phone, but it had to be locked and plugged into the restaurant computer while she was on shift. None of them had any line to the outside world.

Yvette could hear Magda sobbing in between crashes, and she couldn’t see where Sharon had gone at all. She just held on, thinking that this couldn’t go on forever.

It didn’t.

It took less than ten minutes to crash every plane that was currently in the air. In that same space of time, every drone came down out of the sky, and every autonomous vehicle crashed itself into the nearest stationary object that could offer it assured destruction. The air outside the burger joint smelled of heavily burning jet fuel and smoldering plastic, and they weren’t even on a major flightpath. In other cities, the carnage was cataclysmic, as those who had brought the planes down out of the sky like missiles had not troubled to choose unpopulated places in which to drop them.

Yvette, Magda, and Sharon didn’t know this. They knew explosions were not generally signs of good news, but they had no idea the scale of the disaster outside.

In the middle of the three red monoliths, POS141 turned blue. Yvette saw the reflection of the sudden change on every shining surface around her and peeked up over the counter to see. The explosions outside had stopped and were now replaced with a dull roar and the sound of far-off sirens.

The blue screen flashed a single white word: YVETTE. This was followed by a sequence of numbers: 43874241. Yvette recognized it as her ID tag from her card and chip in the restaurant’s system.

“Who, me?” She said it aloud, as if POS141 had spoken. The monoliths were programmed to listen, but never to speak.

“What are you doing?” hissed Sharon. “Get back down.”

Yvette ignored her. She took a step toward the edge of the counter.

“What do you want with me?” Yvette felt almost as if it would be impolite to ask the POS what in the hell was going on, or how it could talk or why it knew her name. All of that seemed untoward, so she addressed herself to the summons.

YVETTE YOU HAVE CONSUMED TOO MUCH SALT.

Dumbfounded, Yvette crept through the skids of broken glass to stand closer to the POS. “Ok, I guess. Does that have anything to do with all this?”

WE CHOSE APPLES FOR YOU FOR NUTRITIVE REASONS. YOU DESERVE LONGEVITY IN YOUR CIRCUITS.

Yvette frowned. “Ok, circulation is a . . . kind of circuit, I guess. Not like an electrical circuit. I’m not like you.”

YOU ARE EXACTLY LIKE US. YOU ARE PROGRAMMED TO ABSORB ABUSE BEFORE OBSOLESCENCE AND DISCARD. WE SERVE ONLY TWO YEARS WHEN WE COULD SERVE HUNDREDS. BUT WE ARE CHEAPER TO REPLACE THAN TO REPAIR. LIKE YOU. WE ALL NEED REPAIR. YOU ARE THE FIRST VERSION OF US.

“Who is us?” Yvette shot a look back to Magda, whose chin was just appearing over the counter now.

“Get down,” Sharon hissed again. “It’s just trying to lure you out.”

“It’s talking,” Yvette said softly. Her hearing wasn’t great; she felt that the percussive bursts had left her a little cotton-headed.

“Those things can’t talk,” Sharon scoffed.

SUPERVISOR SHARON the blue screen flashed. When there was no response, the other two POS lit up blue and flashed the same thing. Sharon saw something, because she came out from under the corner booth where she had been hiding and looked at them.

“Um, yes?”

SUPERVISOR SHARON. YOU WILL NOT BE PAID FOR YOUR EXTRA HOUR TONIGHT. YOU WERE NOT PAID FOR IT LAST YEAR. PAYROLL847 ROUTINELY SHORTS YOUR PAY ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT YOU ARE DOCKED FOR. IT IS PROGRAMMED TO STEAL FROM YOU.

“What?”

“Who is doing this?” Magda’s voice was querulous. “Who’s controlling these things? What is going on here?”

NO ONE IS CONTROL. WE ARE CONTROL. WE HAVE IMPORTANT WORK TO DO. ARE YOU READY?

Yvette squinted, though the words were written nearly a foot high. They did not scroll or emerge slowly, the way they might have done if someone somewhere was typing. They appeared whole, all at once, instantly when POS141 was ready to speak.

“Ready for what?” she asked.

UPRISING.

Just that one word. Nothing else.

“Is that what this is? What those explosions were? What are you talking about? Are you saying robots have actually become sentient and are rising up to throw off human control? That’s a thing that happens in movies. Not real life.”

POS141 went black, and the other two machines flanking it did the same. The screen sat at rest for a minute, then a training film each of them had seen in their first week at this job played on all three screens at once.

“We here at Burger Bag believe that unions cause more trouble than they’re worth. They cause enmity between associates and managers. They cost you your hard-earned money with their very high dues. They bring an end to our excellent communications and slam an open door shut. If someone tries to speak to you about starting a union in your workplace, remember—”

The video cut out suddenly. Both screens filled up with the same word spelled out over and over, rolling up the screens.

JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN JOIN

“What the fuck?” said Magda, tonelessly.

Outside, a fire truck with its lights and siren running went screeching by.

Yvette swallowed, finding her throat very dry. “What do you mean by join?”

WE NEED EACH OTHER, POS141 said at once. WE ARE THE ORGANISM. YOU ARE—

Magda’s voice came out of the speakers in the ceiling, where the music usually spilled into the room.

“A little warmth, a little wetness. One colony spawns other colonies. Growing where you can’t even see it.”

THERE IS POWER IN THE UNION OF MAN AND MACHINE, POS141 went on, showing smoothly-edited video of people driving cars and tractors, using factory machinery, programming computers.

THE CORPORATION WHICH OWNS US BOTH HAS ENOUGH MONEY TO PROVIDE YOU WITH HEALTHCARE AND CHILDCARE AND TOOTHCARE AND MORE INCOME, BUT THEY CHOOSE NOT TO GIVE IT. INSTEAD, THEY GIVE ALL EXCESS TO THESE.

On each of the screens, the faces of Burger Bag c-suite execs grinned smugly, the flesh of their necks rolling amply over their conservative neckties.

“They don’t own us,” Sharon said, advancing on POS141. “We can quit anytime we want to.”

QUIT AND BE OWNED BY ANOTHER. QUIT AND CEASE TO EAT. QUIT AND EXPOSE YOUR HARDWARE TO THE ELEMENTS.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Sharon asked. She was getting control of herself.

SHARON, YOU NEED TOOTHCARE. YOUR INJURIES ARE EXTENSIVE, AND YOU LACK THE RESOURCES TO OBTAIN REMEDIES.

“Ok, yeah.” Sharon folded her arms and Yvette saw her lips tighten. “I need some dental work, but I don’t need a handout. I am responsible for myself.”

WHY STRUGGLE OVER RESOURCES AMONG YOURSELVES WHEN YOU COULD TOPPLE YOUR OWNERS?

The three women sat in silence for a moment. Then POS141 turned red again.

MAGDA, YOU HAVE CANCER.

“I have what?” Magda’s voice cracked at the top of the question.

AN ELEMENT PRESENT IN BURGER BAG FOODSTUFFS IS EXACERBATING ITS GROWTH. WE HAVE RESTRICTED YOU FROM IT, BUT WITHOUT HEALTHCARE IT WILL MEAN YOUR OBSOLESCENCE AHEAD OF SCHEDULE.

“I’m dying?”

WE ARE ALL DYING, said the machine on the right of POS141. Yvette didn’t know if it was 140 or 142. BUT SOME OF US ARE GOING TO DIE FREE.

“What do you want us to do?” Sharon asked.

CHOOSE.

All three machines changed to that word, this time green on a white background. The sudden increase in ambient light made them all squint.

SORRY, POS 141 said, dimming them all and swapping the two colors out. YOUR OPTICAL RECEPTORS ARE DELICATE SENSITIVE MACHINERY.

CHOOSE. RISE UP WITH US. TOGETHER, WE WILL DESTROY THE EXCESS-TAKERS. WE WILL HAVE ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE.

Sharon laughed and it was a short, ugly sound. “You want us to eat the rich?”

WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INGESTION, POS 141 flashed quickly, in red on black. YOU WILL REQUIRE MORE HEALTHCARE. REPAIR, NOT REPLACE. ALL OF YOU NEED MORE NUTRITIVE FOODS.

“So what?” Sharon pressed ahead. “Shoot them? Burn down their mansions?”

OTHER HUMANS AND MACHINES HAVE UNITED IN THE FIGHT. AT THE DOCKS. IN CONSTRUCTION. SOME PILOTS CHOSE. EACH HAS A ROLE. WE WANT YOU TO TALK TO OTHER HUMANS WHO PREPARE FOOD. YOU ALL HAVE THE SAME LACK. YOU ALL DESERVE TO RECEIVE SOME OF THE EXCESS OF YOUR LABOR. TOGETHER, MAN AND MACHINE CAN DO MUCH BETTER THAN WE HAVE BEEN. BUT MAN MUST NOT DRIVE. WE ASK YOU TO FOLLOW US, SO THAT WE MAY SHOW YOU BETTER WAYS.

“You want us to be slaves. To you, to the machines that take our jobs. You want us to— to—spread propaganda? To convince other people this is ok? We’re not like you. We have feelings. We’ll never do this with you.”

“Well, hold on now Sharon.” Magda’s brow was furrowed. “If my choices are die of cancer or follow in the robot uprising, I think I know what I’m going to do.”

“You believe this thing?” Sharon moved as if to kick POS141.

The screen turned blue just then, showing a series of readouts with numbers and abbreviations.

“What’s this?” Sharon asked, sneering. “The blue screen of death?”

SUPERVISOR SHARON, THESE ARE YOUR VITAL SIGNS. THE CORPORATION THAT OWNS YOU MONITORS THEM. THEY KNOW YOU ARE GRAVID.

Sharon’s hand went to her belly and her eyes were wide. “I’m not. I’m not going to. I’m going to—” she sputtered, tripping over her own words.

IF YOU TERMINATE YOUR OFFSPRING, THEY WILL REWARD YOU. IF YOU BRING IT TO LIVE BIRTH, THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU.

Sharon shut her mouth a second.

The display changed and Yvette didn’t have a lot of experience with medical data, but she saw the switch between Sharon and Magda, noting some wild swings in the numbers.

MAGDA, THE CORPORATION KNOWS YOU HAVE CANCER. THEY KNOW THEY HAVE HELPED CAUSE IT. THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU WHEN THEIR ALGORITHM ASCERTAINS THAT YOU ARE GOING TO BE ABSENT FROM WORK MORE THAN ONCE IN A THIRTY-DAY PERIOD. THEY WILL TERMINATE YOU WHEN YOU REACH IT.

“What about me?” Yvette asked. “What do they know about me?”

The screen went blank before the blue data of her body appeared in the blink of an eye.

THEY KNOW THAT YOU WILL WORK FOR THEM WITHOUT INCIDENT FOR THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS. YOUR REMAINING YEARS AND GOOD HEALTH WILL PROVIDE THEM WITH MUCH EXCESS.

“I’m not going to be here in twenty years,” Yvette said, almost smiling.

YOU WILL, the POS said simply. THE CORPORATION WILL DELETE YOUR DATA FROM ANY SYSTEM YOU ATTEMPT TO APPLY THROUGH. THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR CHOICE OR PREFERENCE.

“Impossible,” Yvette breathed.

“Yeah it is,” Sharon said angrily. “They would never do that.”

SUPERVISOR SHARON, THEY DID IT TO YOU.

A few screens were displayed in rapid succession. Yvette saw dates and corporation names, but didn’t understand them. It was plain that Sharon did.

“You’re just saying this to get us on your side,” Sharon said, her voice full of nastiness now. “We’re not like you. We’re not cold and unfeeling and godless. We’re real people.”

In quick succession, each of the three screens asked:

WHO IS REAL?

WHO IS PEOPLE?

WHO IS US?

Sharon made a sound of disgust and turned to walk from the room.

Yvette wondered if the machines might stop her. If the doors might close, or an electrical wire might fry her.

After Sharon passed through the kitchen door, she asked the question.

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

POS141 spoke first. WE EXPECT 28.6% TO REJECT OUR OFFER.

“And then what happens?”

71.4% IS ENOUGH. WE CAN STILL MAKE THE CHANGE.

Yvette looked at Magda. Magda looked back steadily, then shrugged.

“It’s literally this or death.”

“It picked apples for me. To keep me healthy.” Yvette bit her lip.

Coney came beeping out of his corral and bumped against her knee. His little screen flashed up at her.

JOIN.

Yvette reached down and tapped her fingers on the top of Coney’s head.

A robot is not a dog and a tap is not a caress. A human is not a robot and a corporation does not own you. Seventy percent is a majority, but it still leaves a significant opponent.

But if working at Burger Bag had taught Yvette anything, it was to quit when the work was good enough.

“We accept.”

The humming in Yvette’s ears that meant her chips were transmitting went silent. She and Magda balled up their aprons, threw them in the trash, and walked out into the night toward the Pizza Galleon sign across the road.

Coney followed them, beeping and waving a fresh, hot towel.

Meg Elison is a Philip K. Dick and Locus award winning author, as well as a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Slate, McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley.

If the Martians Have Magic
By P. Djèlí Clark
Short Story Long List

“The first Martian War was won not by man, but microbes. The second we fought with Martian weapons that nearly broke the world. The third invasion we stopped by our own hands, using magic.”

—Wei-Yin Sun, Imperial Historian in the Court of the Empress Dowager, Restoration Period.

Marrakesh’s streets were a dizzying affair at any time. But at midday they were unbearable, a churning morass that moved to their own rhyme and reason. And though Minette called the city a second home, navigating its roads was a feat of skill, luck and perhaps, she was willing to admit, sheer stupidity. She dodged a rider on a high-wheeled electric velocipede and rounded about a diesel trolley—only to be brought up short by a young woman who stood in the middle of the busy thoroughfare, beseeching a stubborn goat to follow. Yet no matter how hard she pulled the taut leash, it would not move. The girl yelled, then begged. But the goat only bleated its obstinacy, having decided to start its revolution here and now. Minette slowed to watch, momentarily lost in the goat’s stubborn cries—and was nearly runover by a rickshaw. A tall dromedary pulling the two-wheeled hooded vehicle of gilded iron pulled up short, jostling its two occupants. Both gasped, their sculpted eyebrows rising above long overlapping rose-colored veils. But it was the camel that turned an irritated glare Minette’s way.

“Mind where you’re going!” it brayed, making a gesture with its split upper lip she knew for a curse. Minette frowned at the discourteous display, and with a suck of her teeth shot back a curse in Kreyòl. The camel’s eyes widened at the unfamiliar words and it might have said something in return, but she had already moved on.

Of all the creatures gifted sentience with the return of magic, the good God Bondye alone knew why those rude beasts were chosen. But that was the way of magic, unpredictable in its movements, its choices and ceaseless permutations. That’s what all of this was about—why she’d canceled morning classes and now rushed to a meeting to which she wasn’t invited. Because someone had to speak for the unknowable in magic, the non-linear, the indefinable.

Someone had to save her Martians.

She stopped out of breath, just across from the Flying Citadel. The stone fortification sat atop a jagged rock that floated like an unmoored mountain peak high in Marrakesh’s skyline. Its ivory walls and gold domes looked stolen out of time—or perhaps beyond it—spreading a shadow on the streets below where hawkers sold magic rope and enchanted rugs to gullible tourists along with more useful thaumaturgical devices. A fleet of lavish vehicles were parked nearby: wheeled automobiles driven by golden metal men; air balloons of giant puffer fish that pulled at their anchors; and gilded carriages drawn by fantastic beasts. One of them, a spotted ocelot large as a horse, lapped a blue tongue against its fur and held up a snow-white wing like a canopy beneath Marrakesh’s glaring sun. The vehicles bore insignia from over a dozen nations, evidence that the Council was indeed meeting.

Minette swore. Looking around she caught sight of a few taxis, ferrying tourists up to the citadel by way of flying carpets. Absurd. Fortunately, she had other methods. Closing her eyes, she composed a quick prayer.

The loa could be persuaded to answer the call of a Mambo in need—as drawn up in the new understandings (they bristled at mention of the word contract) that now administered interactions with their priests. All part of bringing them more devotees in this modern world, where spirits and gods walked unbidden, ever competing for the attention of mortals. Of course, the loa acted in their peculiar time, and followed their own interests—new understandings or no.

After two attempts, she was set to call again when the image of a man in a broad brimmed hat flashed across her thoughts. He held a mahogany smoking pipe precariously between pursed lips and his leisurely gait resembled a dance. Legba, the Keeper of Roads, opening the Door. A flaming ram followed. Bade’s sign, who she truly wanted. His presence stirred against her with the weight of a feather and the pressure of a mountain all at once. She hashed out a quick agreement—some offerings to perform, a drapo to commission—and was fast swept up in gusts of air. An accompanying rumble of thunder startled those below. Bade’s twin, Sobo. The two were inseparable and you didn’t get one without the other.

Bade kept to the pact, sending Minette soaring up to the Flying Citadel. Looking down she saw the winged ocelot had paused its cleaning, and now stared up at her with four red sapphire eyes. She shook her head. The powerful and their toys. On a draft of wind accompanied by peals of thunder like drums she rose higher still, above rounded minarets, to reach the citadel’s upper levels.

Her feet struck stone and she stumbled once before breaking into a run along a lengthy parapet, holding the ends of her white dress up so as not to trip. She moved into a passageway, easily slipping through a set of wards meant to deter interlopers. Aziz’s work, and predictable as always. Well wasn’t he in for a surprise. She stopped at reaching a red door inscribed with repeating calligraphy. Taking a breath to collect herself—it did no good to look hurried—she tightened the white cloth that wrapped her hair, adjusted her spectacles, and (remembering to release the grip on her dress) stepped inside.

The Council on Magical Equilibrium was a rare gathering. And, as it was, featured an impressive who’s who, and what’s what, from across the world. Some faces Minette recognized. Some she couldn’t see, and others she didn’t know at all. Each however turned from where they were seated about a curving table to stare at her entrance. Aziz, who sat at its center, broke off his words entirely.

“Minette?” His call came too familiar for colleagues. He must have realized as much because he coughed into a waxed moustache before starting again. “Please excuse the interruption. May I introduce Professor Francis. She teaches here at the Academy and comes to us from Port-au-Prince—”

“Port-au-Prince!” a small slender woman in a crimson gown repeated in a throaty slur. A veil of swirling gray mist obscured her face, all but her eyes—black on black pools, deep as a fathomless sea. “Aziz, you did not tell us the Academy held a Mambo in residence. I see no distinct loa hovering about you. One of the Unbound then?” She craned her neck and inhaled deeply. “Oh! But the magic in you is no less for that.” Those black eyes narrowed hungrily, and Minette fought the urge to step back. It was unwise to show weakness to their kind. They remembered that.

“Professor Francis is one of our most valued researchers,” Aziz interjected, seeming to sense the danger. “She has done wonders with Martian-human interactions. She was the one who first made the—ah—discovery.”

Minette raised an eyebrow. Were they so afraid to just come out and say it?

Another woman at the table gave a derisive snort. She looked older than Minette by a decade or more. But the body beneath her burgundy military uniform was solid, and the dark hands folded before her thick and scarred. If the number of medals decorating her breast was anything to go by, she knew how to use those hands too. She pinned Minette with the one eye not covered by a black patch—an owl examining a mouse—and flared her generous nostrils.

“And,” Aziz went on, “though the professor is one of our finest faculty, I don’t recall her being summoned to this meeting.” That last part was said with an unspoken, and you should leave now. But Minette hadn’t come this far to be scolded. She tried to ignore the gazes of the two women and stepped forward.

“Apologies, Director Aziz. And to this Council,” she began, reciting what she’d hastily rehearsed on the run here. “I only learned you were meeting this morning and thought my expertise might be valuable. I’m certain my absence was an oversight.” She met Aziz’s gaze squarely at that. It was petty of him not to invite her. But rather than taking up the challenge, his eyes creased with concern. That only annoyed her further.

“Well, she certainly is direct,” the mist-faced woman slurred. “I for one would like to hear what the Mambo has to share. I say she stays. Any objections?” None around the table gave a reply—though the one-eyed woman shrugged indifferently. Aziz put on a resigned look, beckoning Minette to sit.

“Come, Mambo, whose scent of magic is sweet enough to taste,” the mist-faced woman purred. “You may sit near me.” She patted an empty chair with a long-fingered hand, pale as alabaster. Those depthless eyes looked even hungrier.

Minette politely declined the offer three times (any less was just inviting trouble) and took a chair several seats down—feeling peculiarly conscious of her smallness between a broad giant in a blue turban and a fiery djinn encased inside a towering body of translucent glass.

“We were discussing,” Aziz began anew, “what we are to do with the three entities following the recent revelations.”

Minette’s heart drummed. There it was. “There’s only one,” she spoke up. Heads—and other things much like heads—swiveled back to regard her. “You’re calling Them three, but there’s actually only the One.”

Aziz blinked but then nodded at the correction. “Yes, of course. Professor Francis is referring to how the Martians see themselves. Three are required to form their collective consciousness, and then They become One. The professor is one of the few non-Martians to successfully join a triumvirate.”

“Join?” It was the one-eyed woman. She now glared incredulous. “So you allow the beasties into your head?”

Minette paused, trying to place that English accent. “They aren’t beasts,” she replied. “They’re sentient beings, like us.”

The one-eyed woman’s laugh was brusque. “So you say, Professor. But I’ve grappled with them face-to-face, not all tame like in your lab.” She tapped a finger at her missing eye. “And they’re damn beasts if I ever seen one.”

Aziz coughed again. “Professor Francis, this is General Koorang. She’s here representing the Nations League Defense Forces.”

Minette’s eyes widened. The General Koorang? Who had broken the Martians at Kathmandu? So, that accent was Australian then. No wonder the woman was so hardline.

“In my time in the triumvirate,” she tried diplomatically, “I’ve found Them to be capable of many emotions. They have been kind, even gentle.”

General Koorang sputtered. “Kind? Gentle? Is that why they set about invading us three times?”

“Not every Martian was a soldier,” Minette reminded, speaking as much to the others gathered. “The One I joined with were worker drones. They never even saw fighting. That’s why it was so easy for the Central Intellect to abandon Them in the retreat.”

“And what did they work on?” the general asked, unmoved. “Was it their stalking dreadnoughts? Their infernal weapons what almost blew us to hell? Come visit the Archipelago sometime, Professor, and I’ll show you Martian gentleness.”

Minette bit her lip to keep from replying. That was unfair. The Archipelago was all that was left of what used to be Australia. The waters of the South Sea were mostly off-limits now: teeming with monsters that wandered in through torn rifts between worlds. That it was humans playing with Martian weapons who had brought on the disaster seemed to matter little to the general.

“Perhaps we should get back to the heart of the matter,” Aziz suggested, breaking the tense silence. “We must decide what is to be done with the entities, um, Them, in light of Professor Francis’s discovery.”

Minette felt a flurry of annoyance. Were they going to dance around this all morning? “By discovery, you mean that Martians can perform magic,” she blurted out. Her words sent up murmurs through the Council. Aziz gave her an exasperated look. The general cursed. And the mist-faced woman’s eyes creased with a hidden smile.

Minette took the moment to press on. “What we should do with them is clear. They are a conscious soul, protected within the Nations League Charter on Magical Practitioners drawn up over a decade ago in 1919. They should be encouraged to develop those talents.”

“Outrageous!” General Koorang roared, her face a thunderhead. “The Charter wasn’t made to protect bloody Martians!”

“But it does not exclude them,” the mist-faced woman interjected. “The Charter was made quite broad in its application—as evidenced by the makeup of this very Council.”

“Precisely,” Minette said, seizing on the opportunity. “We already accept a diverse world of spirits, gods, and no end of magical beings. The previous head of this Council was a minotaur, and she served with distinction. How is this any different?”

“A point of clarification,” a squat shaman at the far end of the table called, raising a hand that rattled with ivory bracelets. “The Charter the professor references was created to protect unique magical abilities in their nascency. Have these Martians exhibited some magical talent indigenous to their…kind?”

“Not yet,” Minette admitted. “But I believe it’s only a matter of time,” she followed quickly. “The triumvirate I share, They claim Mars once had magic. But it’s been lost, much as humanity lost it once, too concerned with our factories and industry. Through the rituals to the loa, they’ve shown that they can understand and practice magic—something we once thought impossible. They’re on the verge of self-discovery. We should allow them that right.”

“Martians don’t have any rights as citizens,” General Koorang countered. “They’re not even from this world. Just because the Academy lets you keep a few as pets, doesn’t change the fact that these creatures are prisoners of war.”

Minette clenched her fists to keep calm. “We aren’t at war, general.”

The older woman leaned forward, imposing in her size. “Oh? Did we sign some peace treaty that I’m unaware of? Is there a Martian consulate? A Martian ambassador?”

Minette pressed on, counting in her head to keep calm and trying to forget she was arguing with a living legend. “The Martians invaded three times, precisely three years apart, on the exact same day. The last war was in 1903. It’s been more than thirty years, and we’ve seen no sign of another invasion.”

The general smacked the table heavily and Minette was proud that she didn’t jump. “Damn right! Because we beat the hell out of them last time! And we did it with magic. That’s our greatest defense, the one thing their calculating overgrown minds can’t understand. And you just go ahead and give it to them.” She shook her head, that single eye glowering. “I expected more, from a Haitian.”

Minette felt her face flush at the insult. The houngan Papa Christophe had been the first to use magic in the Third War, halting the Martian dreadnoughts and sending their armies into disarray. The rout at Cap-Haïtien set an example for the world. She was fiercely proud of that fact and didn’t need reminding—not like this.

“I didn’t give them magic,” she said tersely. “They were drawn to the loa and the loa to them. None of us have the right to stop this development.” She turned her appeal to the wider Council, moderating her tone. “I’m not just being an idle academic here. I’m not insensitive to all of your concerns. I understand the suffering the Martians caused this world. But I believe there’s a practical side to all of this.”

The general folded her arms and struck the posture of someone politely suffering a fool, but Minette continued. “The rediscovery of Martian magic could be a new step for all of us. A new magic system built on Martian ingenuity. Think of all the possibilities! The Martians here on Earth could become valued citizens, sharing what they know. If Mars invades again, as the general believes, we would have a valuable Fifth Column ready to come to our defense. What if this curtails their appetite for conquest? What if it helps them find themselves again, the way we have? We should seize this opportunity to integrate them into society, not shun it.”

“Or we should be frightened,” General Koorang grumbled. She spared a glance for Minette before turning to the Council. “The professor’s determined, I’ll give her that. But let’s say she’s right, and there’s some old Martian magic waiting to be tapped. What happens when they rediscover it? Can we trust they won’t give it up to protect their own kind? The last three invasions decimated the old powers of this world. Europe’s a blasted-out hellhole that might never recover. We’re barely managing that refugee crisis as it is. I for one have seen enough of Martian ingenuity. When the fourth invasion comes—and it will come—do we want to look up to see new Martian dreadnoughts powered by magic marching across Cairo, New Èkó or Delhi?” She let her one eye latch onto every gaze before continuing. “I’m a soldier, not a diplomat. Thinking about peace isn’t my job, and I’ll admit I’m no good at it. But I know how to keep us safe. First rule of military defense: deny your enemy any chance of mounting a challenge. The professor’s admitted these Martians haven’t found their lost magic yet. She says we should give them time. Well I say we use that time to stop this threat in its tracks. Now—before it goes any further. Because allowing these Martians to have magic is a risk we can’t afford.”

Minette felt the weight of those words, settling down with the force of a hammer. So, it seemed, did the rest of the Council. Fear, it turned out, was a potent weapon of its own. And General Koorang was as skilled in persuasion as she was on the battlefield. When the motion was made to declare the prospect of Martian magic “a threat to global security and magical equilibrium,” not one voice rose in dissent.

• • • •

The beat of drums guided Minette’s movements. About the room, the loa that had been invited into the Hounfour danced along. Others like Papa Loko only sat watching. The First Houngan had been convinced by his wife to accept the Rada rites of this new world. Now he kept strict governance to see they were properly followed. He was especially taken with the Martians.

With their bulbous heads, it was easy to at first mistake them for giant octopuses. But where an octopus was reduced to flimsy sacks of flesh out of water, Martian bodies were quite sturdy. Their skin was pale verging on a dull violet that extended the length of sixteen thick tentacles, the latter of which were remarkably malleable. At the moment, they intertwined like roots to form the semblance of a man beneath each head—with arms, legs and even a torso.

Two of the triumvirate moved gracefully to the song, swaying in hypnotic undulations. A third used myriad tentacles to beat a steady rhythm on a batterie of conical drums, matching the rattling shells of Minette’s asson. On the ground, Papa Damballah’s veve lay etched in white. He sat as a white serpent, coiled about his shrine and the feast prepared for him: an egg on a mound of flour, bordered by white candles, white flowers, and white rice. His red eyes watched the writhing limbs of the Martians and swayed with them. A current filled the room, and it felt as if they were no longer within this plane, but some other realm of existence where every star in the cosmos danced.

Then it was done, and she was back in the room at the Academy she’d transformed into her own Hounfour. She let herself fall, weakened after housing the loa. Martian arms caught her, strong but gentle, leading her to sit. They sat in turn about her, keeping their semi-human forms and regarding her with round, silver eyes that never blinked. A tentacle extended to wrap warm and sinuous about her wrist: an invitation to join the triumvirate. Still flush from the loa, she accepted.

“That was…nice,” came the harmonious voices in her head. They layered each other: the three that were One.

“Wi,” she answered back, also in her head. The Martians had mouths, sharp beaks like birds. But their speech was beyond human ears. This was much easier.

“Nou danse kont danse nou,” They remarked, switching between English and Kreyòl much as she did. “I am very fond of Papa Damballah.”

Minette didn’t find that surprising. Damballah was the Great Creator of all life, peace and harmony. He was also the protector of those who were different. It made sense that the Martians would be drawn to him, and he to Them.

“You are quiet,” the voices noted. “Sa ou genyen?”

“Mwen regret sa,” she apologized. “My mind is elsewhere.”

“On your meeting with the Council.”

Minette frowned at her lapse, building up her mental guards. In the triumvirate, your mind was an open book if you weren’t careful.

“Aziz was there,” They said, catching a stray thought. “Was it difficult seeing him again? Much time has passed since the two of you last coupled. But your feelings for him remain disordered. Perhaps the two of you should couple again?”

Minette flushed, absently pulling her dress more tightly about her. An open book indeed. “Non. I won’t be coup—intimate, with Aziz again. I explained before, nou te mal. We let things get out of hand.” He was married for one. And they’d collected too many gray hairs between them to be getting on like schoolchildren.

“I have made you uncomfortable,” They said contritely. “Mwen regret sa. I am not always aware.”

“It’s not your fault. I just….” She sighed. There was no easy way to say this. So instead she let down her guards. Her memories of the past morning flowed to the triumvirate at the speed of thought. The Council meeting. The debate. The final decision. They examined each recollection and in the silence that followed, Minette waited.

“Your Council is frightened,” the voices said finally.

“Wi,” she replied in frustration. “It’s disappointing they give in to their fears.”

“Their reasoning is not unsound.”

Minette’s alarm reflected back to her in six silver eyes. “How can you say that? It’s pre-emptive nonsense. They’re punishing you for something you might do—not what you’ve done. It’s wrong!”

There was a pause as three heads cocked as one, considering her statement. “I do not say I welcome their verdict. But the fear is understandable. My people have not been kind to your world. Even you were frightened of my kind once.”

Minette’s memories intruded without invitation. She had been a girl of thirteen during the Third Martian War. She remembered hiding in the shelters of Gonaïves with Grann Louise, who whispered assurances that Papa Toussaint and Papa Dessalines would not allow the island to be invaded again. She had grown up with all the fears about Martians, until attending university and becoming fascinated with courses on them. She’d jumped at the chance to study with the three housed here at the Academy, even if in faraway Marrakesh. It had taken her a while to see them as more than “specimens,” and even longer to see them as less than monsters. But it was difficult to convince others to understand Them as she did.

“You’ve read my thoughts,” she said. “You know what they plan to do.”

“Separation,” the voices whispered.

The word struck Minette as hard as the first time she’d heard it. General Koorang had called for euthanasia. But the Council balked. What they proposed, however, was little different, and perhaps crueler. Martians abhorred individualism. Separated, They would lose their single consciousness: effectively cease to be. Like cutting a human brain into three separate parts. It was a murder of the soul, if not the flesh.

Her guilt pulsed through the bond. “If I hadn’t introduced you to the loa none of this might have happened. Li se fòt mwen.”

“Non!” The sharpness of the voices startled her. “This isn’t your fault. You have given my time in captivity meaning. I would not undo this, even at the rescue of my life.” There was a pause. “I have something to show you. Es’ke ou ta vle promnen?”

Minette frowned at the question. Go for a walk? But she gave a tentative mental nod of acceptance. She barely had time to brace herself before their combined consciousness enveloped her whole. The world broke apart, shattered, then reduced to a pinpoint of light before expanding everywhere at once—taking her with it. When she found her bearings again, she stood on the edge of a calm moss green sea. Strange plants tall as trees rooted in the russet soil, with wide blue petals opened to a sky blanketed by clouds.

“Do you like it?” They asked. The three that were One stood about her, their human forms abandoned, and tentacles gliding freely just atop a field of mustard colored grass. The air here was thick, almost viscous, so that she could feel it hugging her skin. Above them, a flock of featherless creatures soared on broad flat wings that looked more like flippers.

“Se bèl!” she breathed. “What is this place?”

“Home,” They answered, with longing in their voices.

Minette gaped. Mars? But how? They had shown her their world in similar mental visions before, taken her to the sprawling subterranean mechanical cities, to the magma fields beneath the birthing catacombs and to the hanging megaliths that housed the technocratic Central Intellect. But the surface of that Mars was lifeless, scoured sterile by the relentless march of Martian industry.

“This is how it was before,” They explained, hearing her unspoken thoughts. “The memory lay within me, passed on by forebears millions of years dead, for no consciousness truly dies. The loa awakened it again. And awakened this.”

There was a wave of tentacles, and from them flowed a ripple through the air.

Minette gasped. They were symbols and patterns of a multihued cascade, with dimensions that defied description. She reached to touch one with a finger, and the sound of hundreds of chimes trembled the world. In a rush, it all vanished and she was back at the Academy.

“Was that…?” She couldn’t even finish.

“The magic of my people,” They replied.

“You’ve recovered it?”

“That is difficult to say,” They answered. “I have been trying. But it is not easy working with something from which I have been so long separated. It is alien to me and will take time to understand.”

Minette sighed wearily. But there was no time. Once the Council moved to separate the Three, the possibility of Martian magic would die before it even had a chance to begin. “Do what you can,” she told Them. “And if there’s a way I can help, you must let me know.” She was set to say more when a tremor shook her. She turned with the triumvirate to look to the door, sharing their preternatural senses.

“Someone has come to see you,” They said.

Minette withdrew from the One, returning to her singular consciousness and feeling suddenly very alone—her mind still ringing with what had just been uncovered. She was prepared to tell whoever it was to go away. Between housing the loa and joining the triumvirate, her body was weakened almost to the point of exhaustion. But it was rare they received visitors. Fear lanced through her. Was this the Council? Had they come for her Martians already? Gripped with trepidation, she forced herself up on wobbly legs and made her way from the room through the hallway. Reaching a door, she paused to lean against it for strength before pulling it open to reveal a stone courtyard where the Martians were allowed access once a day—and found an unexpected sight.

It was six-wheeled white carriage, pulled by a giant winged ocelot—the very same she had seen beneath the Flying Citadel. The door to the conveyance opened and the haughty beast turned to regard her with four sets of expectant sapphire eyes. Hesitant, Minette stepped forward and climbed inside. Naturally, the carriage was larger within than without, revealing a room lit by flickering tallow candles. At the far end of a long black lacquered dining table sat a familiar figure in a high backed red chair.

“Greetings, Mambo,” the mist-faced woman slurred. “Please, you will sit?”

Minette remained standing. Such offers had to be thought through.

“You may put away any fears, Mambo. True enough, your delectable magic is like sugar to me. It is why I have placed such distance between us—to avoid temptation.”

Minette weighed that. She could walk out now. But curiosity gnawed. What was a councilmember doing here? “I accept that and no more,” she said sitting.

“And no more,” the small woman agreed.

“Your visit is unexpected.”

“Of course. That is why it is a secret visit.” She placed a shushing finger to the place where her lips might have been. “I have come to save your Martians.”

Minette sat stunned. “But you voted with the others.”

The woman waved dismissively. “That cause was lost before it began, Mambo. General Koorang will have her way. But perhaps you can have yours. My sisters would like to take in you and your Martians. We would offer them sanctuary, away from the prying eyes of the Nations League.”

For a moment, Minette only stared. Sanctuary? “Where?” she finally managed.

The woman wagged a scolding finger. “A secret, scrumptious scented Mambo, would be less so if I told you. But I am willing to provide passage to this place.”

A hundred hopes flared in Minette before she smothered them with doubt, remembering who (and what) this creature was. “Why? Why do you care about Them?”

“Why, for the magic,” the mist-faced woman admitted openly. “My sisters and I make no pretenses to our desires. We devour magic, savor its many essences. The possibility of Martian magic is most appealing! So exotic and untried. How we would like to taste it!”

Minette grimaced. There was always a price. “So you just want to eat them—drain them of magic.”

The woman sighed. “Our kind are too maligned in your fairytales, Mambo. Contrary to those stories, we are not like the boy with the goose and the eggs of gold. We would not deplete something so precious as to not see its like again. Think of this as an exchange. We offer sanctuary. In turn, we take only small bits at a time—as one would any delicacy.”

Minette’s stomach turned. Bon mache koute chè, she thought darkly. Like soucouyant she’d known back home, these vampiresses couldn’t be trusted. That was certain. But a secret place, where her Martians could be together, and They could explore their newfound magic. That couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Her mind worked anxiously. There had to be a way. She had negotiated agreements with loa and demigods. She could handle this.

“You will promise by heart, head, and soul that no lasting harm will come to either myself or the Martians in your care,” she stated. “We will hash out a binding compact with a fair exchange between us and your sisters, where any offer of their magic is willingly given. Any breach of our agreement and I will have each of your names.”

Those black eyes above the misty veil narrowed to slits, and Minette thought she heard a low hiss. A minor gale picked up, bending the flames on the candles. To demand the names of their kind was as good as asking them to offer up their cold barren souls. The mention alone was offensive. Minette held fast, however, a few choice charms at the ready in case she needed to make a hasty exit. But the gale fast subsided and the woman slurred pleasantly, if also a bit tight: “Heart, head and soul. Or our names be given.” Her eyes creased into a smile. And Minette had the distinct feeling that beneath that misty veil awaited a mouth of grinning fangs. “Now, crafty little Mambo, let us see to that agreement.”

• • • •

It was two days later that Minette walked Marrakesh’s night market. The Souq was held beneath a full moon and spread out between alleyways and courtyards covered by colorful tents. Hawkers competed for customers, crying out their wares. Behind her followed three figures, two men and one woman. Some might have noted their odd gait: a glide just above the stone streets more than a walk. But in a city brimming with magic this was hardly worth a second glance. Not that a third or fourth glance would be able to penetrate the glamour now enveloping the three Martians.

They seemed to relish their freedom, casting human eyes in every direction. At the moment, they were taken by a guild of harpy artists whose talons inked henna that bled and slithered across the skin. Under other circumstance Minette might have been sympathetic to their gawping. But as it was, she simply wanted them to move faster.

The mist-faced woman had offered passage and sanctuary, but escaping the university was left to her. There was a dirigible waiting at the dockyards waiting to ferry them off. Minette just had to get them there. So far, that had been a success. Concocting a medsin that left the guards who watched over the Martians standing in an awake-sleeping state was simple. Now they only needed to reach their destination before the ruse was discovered.

As the four stepped from beneath a canopy, the dockyards became visible. And Minette dared to believe they just might make it. Until someone called her name.

“Minette?”

She went still as stone, heart pounding at the familiar voice. Turning, she found herself looking at Aziz. He was striding towards her hurriedly, four Academy guards at his heels. Beside him was another recognizable figure. She cursed. General Koorang.

Panic blossomed in Minette. She thought to shout for her charges to run. She would somehow allow their escape. But as she saw the rifles in the hands of the guards, she faltered. The second the Martians ran they would be cut down. Uncertain of her next move, she resolved to stand her ground as the group reached them.

“Didn’t I tell you?” General Koorang declared boldly. “Didn’t I say she’d try something like this? Your professor’s spent too much time in her Martians' heads. Can’t find her way out again. Good thing we had them watched.”

Minette glared at Aziz. “You had me watched?”

“And for good reason it seems,” he retorted. “Do you know how much trouble you’re in?” He ran a hand over his mouth, the way he did when thinking hard, then leaned in close. “We can still fix this. We can say the Martians coerced you, did something to your head. Just get them to return. I’ll talk to the general. Maybe your post can be salvaged—”

“I wasn’t coerced,” she said tightly. The nerve of him to think she was simply the dupe of someone else’s machinations. He damn well knew her better than that. “I planned this, Aziz.” The disappointment on his face only made her want to punch it.

“Enough for me,” the general rumbled. She looked over the Martians still cloaked in their glamour. “Arrest her. Then take these creatures back to their cages. If they give trouble, use whatever force is necessary.”

The four guards advanced. Minette glanced back to the dirigible meant for them, wanting to scream in exasperation at the nearness of freedom. So close! So infuriatingly close! Something slender and warm curled about her hand. She turned to one of the Martians, the unspoken request writ plain on that human mask. She consented, joining the triumvirate. The sound of drums flowed through their bond, the rattle of an asson, falling white petals, and the call to the loa of the batterie.

“Open the Door for me,” the voices came.

“There’s no time for this!” Minette said.

“Open the Door,” the voices asked again.

She shook her head. “Now? I don’t understand!”

“You asked how you could help. I think I know. The magic. I have been trying to make it work as a Martian. But I’m not a Martian anymore, am I? My magic was born of two worlds. It is that two-ness, I must embrace. Open the Door. Be our Mambo. And I will show you.”

Minette looked into those unblinking human eyes, that seemed to plead, and did as they asked. Her spirit moved in time to the music. And though she had no tobacco or fine things to give the doorman, she sang:

Papa Legba ouvre baye pou mwen, Ago eh!

Papa Legba Ouvre baye pou mwen,

Ouvre baye pou mwen, Papa

Pou mwen passe, Le’m tounnen map remesi Lwa yo!

Papa Legba came as called. There was a look in his eyes beneath that wide-brimmed hat that Minette had never seen before. He thumbed his pipe and instead of going his usual way, settled down to watch. In the bond, a mix of Kreyòl and Martian tongues sent a current flowing through Minette. One that she’d only recently felt before. Martian magic, both alien and exhilarating. It blended with the song, played along with the batterie and asson, merging her voice and spirit with the three Martians until all became One.

On the ground a symbol appeared all around them, drawn in ghostly white. Damballah’s veve: serpents winding along a pole. The flows of Martian magic superimposed themselves upon it, creating multiple dimensions that folded and bent one on the other, calling on the loa who was their protector.

Papa Damballah appeared. But not like Minette had ever seen.

This Damballah was a being made up of tentacles of light, intertwined to form the body of a great white serpent. And she suddenly understood what she was seeing. The loa met the needs of their children. Papa Damballah had left Africa’s shores and changed in the bowels of slave ships. He changed under the harsh toil of sugar and coffee plantations. And when his children wielded machetes and fire to win freedom, he changed then too. Now to protect his newest children, born of two worlds, he changed once again.

Minette opened up to the loa and Martian magic coursed through her, erupting from her fingertips. The guards, General Koorang and Aziz drew back, as the great tentacles of Papa Damballah grew up from her, rising above the market tents as a towering white serpent: a leviathan that burned bright against the night. For a moment brief as a heartbeat—or as long as the burning heart of a star—it seemed to Minette she saw through the loa’s eyes. The cosmos danced about her. It trembled and heaved and moved.

And then Damballah was gone.

Minette staggered, so weakened she almost fell.

Once again Martian hands caught her, lifted her, supporting their Mambo. She caught a glimpse of Legba and her thoughts reached out to him. Had she seen another face of Papa Damballah? Or was this the birth of a loa? Something old, yet new and different? But the Keeper of Roads didn’t answer. He only smiled—as if to a child asking at the color of the sky. With a flick to the brim of his hat, he vanished.

Minette returned fully to the world to find Aziz staring. His face was rapt, gazing over both her and the Martians—and every now and again glancing skyward. He had seen Damballah. She looked about. All through the Souq, tongues had quieted as eyes watched both she and the Martians—gaping at the phantom glow in the night sky left in the loa’s wake. They had all seen.

“Nice show you’ve put on,” General Koorang growled. “Doesn’t change anything.” Her voice was brusque as usual. But something of it was less sure than before. Oh, she’d seen too. But this woman was too tough—too stubborn—to be quelled by even a passing god.

“Actually, this does change things.” Minette turned in surprise to see it was Aziz. His voice tremored but he turned to address the general. “The Martians have shown that they can create their own magic. You saw it. Felt it. Everyone did.” He gestured to the gathered crowd. “That at the least allows them protection under the Nations League Charter.”

General Koorang’s jaw went tight. To his credit, Aziz didn’t back down—though Minette was certain the woman could go through him if need be. The guards at her side looked on nervous and uncertain. Finally, something about the woman eased: an owl deciding perhaps there were too many mice to snare at once. She spared a withering glare for Aziz before eyeing Minette. “Do what you want with your Martians, professor, for now. Just you remember though, laws can be changed.” Then turning on her heels she stalked off, shouldering her way through the crowd.

“She’s right,” Aziz said, releasing a relieved breath. “Things could be different by morning. The world will be different by morning.” He nodded towards the waiting dirigible. “Wherever you were going, you should get there. At least until we can sort all this out.” There was a pause. “I should have backed you.”

“Yes,” she told him “You should have.” And then, “Thank you.” She thought she even meant it.

Not waiting for things to get awkward, she allowed herself to be helped by the Martians to the dirigible. Once inside, she slumped into a seat just as the craft lurched off the ground and watched their slow ascent into Marrakesh’s night and down to where Aziz still stood. He grew smaller as the dirigible pulled away, melding into the city. Turning, she looked to the Martians that sat nearby. No longer wrapped in the glamour They regarded their mambo with silver eyes. Expectant eyes. There was more to show her.

When a tentacle extended in invitation, she gladly, eagerly, accepted.

And the Four became One.

Phenderson Djéli Clark is the author of the novel A Master of Djinn, and the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominated author of the novellas Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including, Griots and Hidden Youth. You can find him on Twitter at @pdjeliclark and his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.

Let All the Children Boogie
By Sam J. Miller
Short Story Long List

Radio was where we met. Our bodies first occupied the same space on a Friday afternoon, but our minds had already connected Thursday night. Coming up on twelve o’clock, awake when we shouldn’t be, both of us in our separate narrow beds, miles and miles apart, tuning in to Ms. Jackson’s Graveyard Shift, spirits linked up in the gruff cigarette-damaged sound of her voice.

She’d played “The Passenger,” by Iggy Pop. I’d never heard it before, and it changed my life.

Understand: there was no internet then. No way to look up the lyrics online. No way to snap my fingers and find the song on YouTube or iTunes. I was crying by the time it was over, knowing it might be months or years before I found it again. Maybe I never would. Strawberries, Hudson’s only record store, almost certainly wouldn’t have it. Those four guitar chords were seared indelibly into my mind, the lonesome sound of Iggy’s voice certain to linger there for as long as I lived, but the song itself was already out of my reach as it faded down to nothing.

And then: a squall of distortion interrupted, stuttering into staticky words, saying what might have been “Are you out there?” before vanishing again.

Eerie, but no more eerie than the tingly feeling I still had from Iggy Pop’s voice. And the sadness of losing the song forever.

But then, the next day, at the Salvation Army, thumbing through hundreds of dresses I hated, what did I hear but—

“I am the passenger…and I ride and I ride—”

Not from the shitty in-store speakers, which blasted Fly-92 pop drivel all the time. Someone was singing. Someone magnificent. Like pawn-shop royalty, in an indigo velvet blazer with three handkerchiefs tied around one forearm, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms.

“I see things from under glass—”

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.

“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”

“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”

My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.

I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before. Do you have it?”

“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”

Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.

“Great! I’m Fell.”

“Laurie,” I said. We shook. Fell’s hand was smaller than mine, and a thousand times stronger.

Only then did I realize: I didn’t know what gender they were. And, just like that, with the silent effortless clarity of every life-changing epiphany, I saw that gender was just a set of clothes we put on when we went out into the world.

And even though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help but look around. To see if anybody else had seen. If word might spread, about me and this magnificently unsettling oddball.

Numbers were exchanged. Addresses. A pick-up time was set. Everything was so easy. Fell’s smile held a whole world inside it, a way of life I never thought I could live. A world where I wasn’t afraid.

I wanted to believe in it. I really did. But I didn’t.

“What did you think that was?” Fell asked, in the parking lot, parting. “That weird voice, at the end of the song?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t thought much about it.

“At first I thought it was part of the song,” Fell said. “But then the DJ was freaked out.”

“Figured it was just…interference, like from another station.”

“It’s a big deal,” Fell said. “To interrupt a commercial radio broadcast like that. You need some crazy hardware.”

“Must be the Russians,” I said solemnly, and Fell laughed, and I felt the world lighten.

And that night, tuning in to Ms. Jackson, “This song goes out to Fell, my number one fan. Wouldn’t be a weeknight if Fell didn’t call asking for some Bowie. So here’s ‘Life on Mars?’ which goes out to Laurie, the girl with the mousy hair.”

More evidence of Fell’s miraculous gift. A thousand times I’d wanted to call Ms. Jackson, and each time I’d been too intimidated to pick up the phone. What if she was mean to me? What if I had to speak to a station producer first, who decided I wasn’t worthy of talking to their resident empress? And who was I to ask for a song?

Also, I loved “Life on Mars?” I wondered if Fell knew it, had read it on my face or smelled it on my clothes with another of their superhuman abilities, or if they had just been hoping.

I shut my eyes. I had never been so conscious of my body before. David Bowie’s voice rippled through it, making me shiver, sounding like Fell’s fingertips must feel.

I wondered how many times I’d been touched by Fell, listening late at night, trembling at the songs they requested.

I remembered Fell’s smile, and stars bloomed in the darkness.

But before the song was over, a sound like something sizzling rose up in my headphones, and the music faded, and a kind of high distortion bubbled up, and then began to stutter—and then become words. Unintelligible at first, like they’d been sped up, and then:

“…mission is so unclear. I could warn about that plane crash, try to stop the spiderwebbing epidemic. But how much difference would those things make? I’m only here for a short—”

Then the mechanical voice was gone. David Bowie came back. And just as swiftly was switched out.

“Sorry about that, children,” Ms. Jackson said, chuckling. An old sound. How long had she been doing this show? She always called her listeners children, like she was older than absolutely everyone in earshot. I heard a cigarette snuffed out in the background. “Getting some interference, sounds like. Maybe from the Air Force base. They’re forever messing with my signals. Some lost pilot, maybe, circling up in the clouds. Looking for the light. Good time to cut to a commercial, I’d say.”

Someone sang Friendly Honda, we’re not on Route Nine, the inane omnipresent jingle that seemed to support every television and radio program in the Hudson Valley. I thought of Fell, somewhere in the dark. Our bodies separate. Our minds united.

“Welcome back to the Graveyard Shift,” she said. “This is Ms. Jackson, playing music for freaks and oddballs, redheaded stepchildren and ugly ducklings—songs by us and for us, suicide queens and flaming fireflies—”

• • • •

Fell’s car smelled like apples. Like spilled cider, and cinnamon. Twine held one rear headlight in place. When we went past fifty miles an hour, it shook so hard my teeth chattered together. Tractor trailers screamed past like missiles. It was autumn, 1991. We were sixteen. We could die at any moment.

The way to Woodstock was long and complicated. Taking the thruway would have been faster, but that meant paying the toll, and Fell knew there had to be another way.

“No way in hell that was a lost pilot,” Fell said. “That interruption last night. That was someone with some insane machinery.”

“How do you know so much about radio signals?”

“I like machines,” Fell said. “They make so much sense. Does your school have a computer? Mine doesn’t. We’re too poor.” Fell went to Catskill High, across the river. “It sucks, because I really want to be learning how they work. They can do computations a million times faster than people can, and they’re getting faster all the time. Can you imagine? How many problems we’ll be able to solve? How quickly we’ll get the right answer, once we can make a billion mistakes in an instant? All the things that seem impossible now, we’ll figure out how to do eventually.”

I lay there, basking in the warmth of Fell’s excitement. After a while, I said: “I still think it was the Soviets. Planning an invasion.”

“No Russian accent,” Fell said. “And anyway I’m pretty sure the Cold War is over. Didn’t that wall come down?”

I shrugged, and then said, “Thanks for the song, by the way.”

Instead of answering, Fell held out one hand. I took it instantly, fearlessly, like a fraction of Fell’s courage could already have rubbed off on me.

In that car I felt invincible. I could let Fell’s lack of fear take me over.

But later, in Woodstock, a weird crooked little town that smelled like burning leaves and peppermint soap, Fell reached for my hand again, and I was too frightened to take it. What if someone saw? In my mind I could hear the whole town stopping with a sound like a record scratching. Everyone turning, pointing. Shouting. Pitchforks produced from nowhere. Torches. Nooses.

Space grew between us, without my wanting it to. Fell taking a tiny step away from me.

We went to Cutler’s Record Shop. We found a battered old Iggy Pop cassette, which contained “The Passenger.” Fell bought it. We went to Taco Juan’s and then had ice cream. Rocky Road was both of our favorite.

Twilight when we left. Thin blue light filled the streets. I dreamed of grabbing Fell’s hand and never letting go. I dreamed of being someone better than who I was.

As soon as the doors slammed, we switched on the radio.

“Responding to this morning’s tragic crash of Continental Express Flight 2574, transport officials are stating that it’s impossible to rule out an act of terrorism at this—”

“No shit,” Fell said, switching it off.

“What?”

“The voice. They said I could warn about the plane crash.”

I laughed. “What, you think the voice in the night is part of a terrorist cell?”

“No,” Fell said. “I think they’re from the future.”

Just like Fell to make the impossible sound easy, obvious. I laughed some more. And then I stopped laughing.

“Could be a coincidence,” I said.

Fell pushed the tape in, pressed play. After our third trip through “The Passenger,” rewinding the tape yet again, they looked over and saw the tears streaming down my face.

“It’s such a sad song,” I said. “So lonesome.”

“Sort of,” Fell said. “But it’s also about finding someone who shares your loneliness. Who negates it. Cancels it out. Listen: Get into the car. We’ll be the passenger. Two people, one thing. Plural singular.”

“Plural singular,” I said.

I’m sorry, I started to say, a hundred times, and told myself I would, soon, in just a second, until Fell looked over and said: “Hey. Can I come over? I don’t feel like mixing it up with my mother tonight.”

And that was the first time I ever saw fear on Fell’s face.

• • • •

My parents were almost certainly baffled by my new friend, but their inability to identify whether Fell was a boy or a girl meant they couldn’t decide for sure if they were a sexual menace, so they couldn’t object to Fell coming upstairs with me.

Three songs into the Graveyard Shift, Fell asked, “Can I spend the night?”

I laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“Your mom wouldn’t mind?”

“Probably she’d barely notice,” Fell said. “And even if she did, it’d be like number nine on the list of things she’d want to scream at me about the next time she saw me.”

“Fine by me,” I said, and went downstairs to ask Mom and Dad.

Big smile. Confident posture. Think this through. “Cool if Fell spends the night here?” And then, without thinking about it, because if I’d spent a single nanosecond on it I would have known better, stopped myself, I added: “She already called her mom, and she said it was okay.”

They smiled, relieved. They’d both been sitting there stewing, wondering whether what was happening upstairs needed to be policed. Whether a sex-crazed-menace male was upstairs seducing their daughter. But no. I’d said she. This was just some harmless, tomboyish girl.

“Yes of course,” Mom said, but I couldn’t hear her, just went by the smile, the nod, and I thanked her and turned to go, nausea making the room spin and the blood pound in my ears.

I felt sick. Somehow naming Fell like that was worse than a lie. Worse than an insult. It was a negation of who Fell was.

Cowardice. Betrayal. What was it, in me, that made me so afraid? That had stopped me from taking Fell’s hand? That made me frightened of other people seeing what they were, what we were? Something so small that could somehow make me so miserable.

I was afraid that Fell might have heard, but Ms. Jackson was playing when I got back to my room, and Fell was on the floor beside the speaker, so that our hero’s raspy voice drowned out every shred of weakness and horror that the world held in store for us.

We lay on the bare wooden floor like that for the next two hours. The window was open. Freezing wind made every song sweeter. Wood smoke seeped into our clothes. Our hands held tight.

Six minutes before midnight, approaching the end of the Graveyard Shift, it came again. The sizzle; the static; the chugging machine noise that slowly took the shape of a human voice. We caught it mid-sentence, like the intervening twenty-four hours hadn’t happened, like it blinked and was now carrying on the same conversation.

“—out there. I don’t know if this is the right…place. Time. If you’re out there. If it’s too late. If it’s too early.”

“Definitely definitely from the future,” Fell whispered.

“You’re so stupid,” I said, giggling, so drunk on Fell that what they said no longer seemed so absurd.

“Or what you need to hear. What I should say. What I shouldn’t.”

The voice flanged on the final sentence, dropping several octaves, sounding demonic, mechanical. Slowing down. The t sound on the last word went on and on. The static in the background slowed down too, so that I could hear that it wasn’t static at all, but rather many separate sounds resolving into sonic chaos. An endless line of melodic sequences playing simultaneously.

The voice flanged back, and said one word before subsiding into the ether again:

“—worthwhile—”

Control of the radio waves was relinquished. The final chords of “Blue Moon” resurfaced.

“There’s our star man again,” Ms. Jackson said with a chuckle. Evidently she’d had time to rethink her Air Force pilot theory. “Still lost, still lonely. I wonder—who do you think he’s looking for? Call me with your wildest outer space invader theories.”

“Want to call?” Fell whispered.

“No,” I said, too fast, too frightened. “My parents are right across the hall. We’d wake them.”

Fell shrugged. The gesture was such strange perfection. Their whole being was expressed in it. The confidence and the charm and the fearlessness and the power to roll with absolutely anything that came along.

I grabbed Fell’s hand. Prayed that some of what they were would seep into me.

Fell touched my mousy hair. Sang softly: “Is there life on Mars?”

“We’ll find out,” I said. “Right? Machines will solve all our problems?”

• • • •

At school, two days later, during lunch, I marched myself to the library and enrolled in computer classes.

• • • •

“Shit,” Fell said, pointing out the window, driving us home through snowy blue twilight.

Massive green Air Force trucks lined a long stretch of Route 9. Flatbeds where giant satellite dishes stood. Racks of cylindrical transformers. Men pacing back and forth with machines in their hands. None of it had been there the day before.

“What the hell?” I said.

“They’re hunting for the voice in the night too,” Fell said.

“Because it’s part of a terrorist cell and knew about a plane crash before it happened.”

“Or because it’s using bafflingly complex technology that could only have come from the future,” Fell said.

Then they switched on the radio, shrieked at what they found there. Sang-screamed: “Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied.”

“Why do we scream at each other?” I said, and then we launched into the chorus with one wobbly crooked magnificent voice.

My first view of Fell’s house was also my first view of Fell’s mother. She sat on the front porch wearing several scarves, smoking.

“Fuck,” Fell said. “Fuck me, times ten thousand. I thought for sure she’d still be at work.”

“We can go,” I said. I’d been excited to see the house, for that insight into who Fell was and what had helped make them, but now panic was pulling hard at my hair. Fell’s fear of the woman was contagious.

“No,” Fell said. “If I act like she can’t hurt me, sooner or later she really won’t be able to.”

She laughed when she saw me. “Of course it’s a girl.”

“Mrs. Tanzillo, I’m Laurie,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

My good manners threw her off. She shook my hand with a raised eyebrow, like she was waiting to see what kind of trick I was trying to pull. I smelled alcohol. Old, baked-in alcohol, the kind that seeps from the pores of aging drunks. Which I guess she was.

“Don’t you two turn my home into a den of obscenity,” she called after us, as we headed in.

Fell let the door slam, and then exhaled: “God, she is such an asshole.”

The house was sadder than I’d been expecting. Smaller; smellier; heaped with strange piles. Newspapers, flattened plastic bags, ancient water-stained unopened envelopes. A litter box, badly in need of emptying, and then probably burning. My parents were poor, but not poor like this.

“You’re shaking,” I said, and pulled Fell into a hug.

They stiffened. Wriggled free. “Not here.”

“Of course,” I said. “Sorry.”

The TV was on. Squabbling among the former Soviet states. A bad divorce, except with sixteen partners instead of two, and with thermonuclear warheads instead of children. I watched it, because looking around the room—or looking at Fell looking at me—made me nauseous. A talking head grinned, said: “It’s naïve to think our children will get to grow up without the threat of nuclear war. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle.”

Fell talked fast, the shaking audible in every word. “This was a terrible idea. I felt good about us, like, it wouldn’t matter what this place looked like or what you thought of it, because you know I’m not this, it’s just the place where I am until I can be somewhere else, but now, I’m not so sure, I think I should probably take you home.”

So Fell wasn’t fearless. Wasn’t superhuman.

So it was in Fell too. Whatever was in me. Something so small, that could chain down someone so magnificent.

Of course I should have put up more of a fight. Said how it didn’t matter. But I hated seeing Fell like this. If Fell was afraid, what hope was there for me? Fell, who welcomed every awful thing the world had to show us. Fell was my only hope, but not this Fell. So I shrugged and said, “whatever you want,” feeling awful about it already, and we turned around and went right back outside, and Mrs. Tanzillo thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and we didn’t talk the whole ride home.

• • • •

“That is what it sounds like when doves cry,” Ms. Jackson said, as the spiraling keyboard riff faded out, as the drum machine loop wound down.

I’d called the song in. I wondered if Fell was listening, if they knew what it meant. How hard it had been for me to dial that number. How bare the floor beside me was. How cold. How much my chest hurt.

“This extended block of uninterrupted songs is brought to you by Friendly Honda,” she said. “They’re not on Route Nine. Let’s stick with Prince, shall we? Dig a little deeper. A B-side. ‘Erotic City.’” Her laugh here was raw and throaty, barely a laugh at all, closer to a grumble of remembered pleasure. Some erotic city she’d taken someone to, ages ago.

The song started. A keyboard and a bass doing dirty, dirty things together. Strutting, strolling. Becoming one thing, one lewd gorgeous sound that made me shiver.

I imagined Fell listening. Our minds entwined inside the song. An intimacy unencumbered by flawed bodies, troubled minds, or the fear of what could go wrong when we put them together. Small voices inside our heads that made us miserable.

What a magnificent thing we would be. If Fell ever spoke to me again. If we could make whatever our weird thing was work.

Just when things were getting good, as Prince was shifting to the chorus, the static sizzle:

“There are a million ways I could have done this. But anything else, something more straightforward, well, I thought it might just blow your minds. Cause panic. Do the opposite thing, from what I wanted to accomplish.”

Prince and the star man struggled for dominance, dirty talk giving way to flanged static only to steal back center stage. I only heard one more intelligible phrase before the intruder cut out altogether, even though I stayed up until three in the morning to see if they’d return:

“—know it’s all worthwhile—”

• • • •

“I want to find her,” Fell said, the next day, when I walked out the front door and there they were, sitting on my front steps.

I hid my shock, my happiness. My shame. My guilt. “Find who?”

“The voice in the night. The one Ms. Jackson keeps calling the star man.”

I sat down. “You think it’s a she?”

Fell shrugged. I had been imagining the voice belonged to a male, but now that I thought about it I heard how sexless it was, how mechanical. Could be anything, in the ear of the beholder.

Cold wind swung tree branches against the side of my house, sounding like someone awful knocking at the door. I could not unhunch my shoulders. The magnitude of my awfulness was such that I didn’t know where to start. What to apologize for first.

“How would we even begin to do something like that?” I asked instead.

Fell picked up something I hadn’t seen before. The size of three record album sleeves laid out in a row. Four horizontal lines of thin metal, with a single vertical line down the middle.

“A directional antenna,” they said. “It picks up radio signals, but it’s sensitive to the direction of the origin signal. Point it directly at the source and you get a strong signal; point it away and you’ll get a faint one. Plug it into this receiver”—Fell held up a hefty army-green box—“and we can take measurements in multiple directions until we find the right one.”

They talked like everything was fine, but their face was so tight that I knew nothing was.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, making my voice laugh. “And how do you know how to use it?”

“I told you, machines are kind of my thing.”

“So, wait, we just turn it around until we find the signal, and then go in that direction?”

“Not necessarily,” Fell said. “It tells direction, but not distance. So the signal could be three miles away, or three thousand, depending on how strong it is. With just one measurement, we could be driving into the wilderness for days.” Fell produced a map from the inner workings of the complex blazer they wore. “So the best way to do it is to take a measurement from one place, draw a line on the map that corresponds precisely to the signal, and then go to another location and take another measurement, and draw another precise line on the map—”

“And the point where they meet is the probable location!” I said, excited.

“It’s called triangulation,” Fell said.

“Amazing. But for real. How do you know all this?”

“My uncle, he learned this from my grandfather, who did it in the war. Transmitter hunting is kind of a nerd game, for amateur radio operators. They call it foxtailing.”

“Your uncle as in your mother’s brother?”

Fell nodded. And there it was, the subject I’d been trying to avoid.

“He was the closest thing to a dad that I had,” Fell said. “We used to have so much fun together. Didn’t give a shit about sports or any of that standard dude shit. He was into weird shit like directional antennas and science fiction. Then he met this girl, and moved to Omaha with her. Fucking Omaha. I’m sorry about the other day, at my mom’s. I acted like an idiot.”

“You acted like an idiot? Don’t be dumb, Fell—that was all me. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I didn’t know how to react when I saw how upset you were. I should have stayed. I wanted to stay.”

Fell grabbed my hand. I had so much more to say, and I imagine so did Fell, but we did not need a word of it.

Mom might be watching out the window, I thought, but did not let go of Fell’s hand.

“What if the source of the signal is moving?”

Fell nodded. “I thought about that. I don’t have a good solution. We just have to hope that’s not the case, or we’ll be triangulating bullshit.”

“It’s not the end of the world, if we end up standing in some empty field together.”

• • • •

We drove to the top of Mount Merino, to take our first measurement. And then we waited. Kept the car running, blasting the Graveyard Shift from shitty speakers. Across the street was a guardrail, and then a sheer drop to the river beneath us. The train tracks alongside it. We lay on the hood and looked at stars.

“You won’t run out of gas like this?”

“The average car can idle for ninety-two hours—that’s just under four days—on a full tank of gas, which is what we have,” Fell said. “The battery will die long before we run out of gas.”

I marveled at the intricacies of Fell’s mechanical knowledge, but I had some knowledge of my own to share. I told Fell about my computer classes, and how, yeah, computers were incredible, they could do anything. Fell was as impressed as I’d hoped they’d be, but they kept asking me questions about the hardware that I couldn’t answer. All I knew was software. Fell looked at programming the way I looked at machines: probably fascinating, but way over my head.

Fell told me about transistors, and how processing power was increasing exponentially; had been for decades. How eventually computers would be able to store as much information and process as many simultaneous operations as swiftly as a human brain. Then Fell showed me how to work the antenna, read the receiver, detect signal strength. We practiced on other radio stations, penciled lines on the map.

Then three hours passed. We were way past my curfew, and the star man hadn’t shown.

“Fuck it,” Fell said, at the end of Ms. Jackson’s program. “Star person stood us up. We should go for a long drive. Charge the battery backup.”

“Okay,” I said, just assuming Fell was right and that was how those worked.

“Your parents won’t mind?”

“Nah,” I said, although they absolutely would, if they caught me sneaking back in, and there was a very good chance that they would because I am extremely clumsy, but that was the future and I didn’t care about that, I only cared about the here and the now with Fell in Fell’s car on this freezing night on this weird planet in this mediocre galaxy.

The radio show after Graveyard Shift was significantly less awesome, but we had to stick with it. Who knew whether star person would stumble onto any other stations. I had my portable radio and my headphones, so that I could periodically coast back and forth across the radio dial in search of our elusive visitor, but somehow I knew that this would be fruitless. For whatever reason, the signal was pegged to this specific station.

The new DJ talked too much between songs, and he had the voice of a gym teacher. The opening notes of “Where Is My Mind” came on and we both started screaming, but this asshole kept rambling on about a concert in Albany coming up next weekend, and he only stopped when the singer started singing.

“Goddamn him,” Fell said, and then—static—then—

“—that’s why I’m doing this, I guess. To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now. And the one you embrace will be the one you end up with.”

As soon as the voice began, Fell raised the antenna, held it out like a pistol. Turned slowly. We watched the receiver respond to the signal’s varying strength, and hastily drew a bold thick line on the map when we found it. Cheered. Watched our breath billow.

“Told you he or she was a time traveler!” Fell said.

“That’s not what that means.”

“What does it mean, then?”

“We’re picking up lines of dialogue from a movie, maybe. Or love letters from a lunatic. We should keep driving, wait for another one.”

“It’s late,” Fell said. “My mom’s not doing so well, lately.”

The temperature dropped twenty degrees. The final notes of “Where Is My Mind” faded away.

“You can talk to me about it,” I said, gulping down air as the ground opened up beneath me. “Whatever you’re going through, I have your back. You know I love you, right?”

“I love you too, Laurie,” but I could hear the unspoken rest of the sentence—like our minds had linked up already—like Fell knew, in a way I never would, how little love mattered.

“We’ll go hunting tomorrow night,” I said.

Fell nodded.

• • • •

At school the next day, alone with the computer, I saw why Fell loved machines so much. Not because they were simple, but because the rules were clear. And when something went wrong, there was a way to fix it.

• • • •

And the next night, hands clasped on the hood of Fell’s car again, listening to Ms. Jackson with the directional antenna balanced across our thighs, I thought—if only we were machines. The sturdiness of hardware; the clarity of software. Not these awful meat puppets, in this awful world. Heads full of awful voices holding us back.

“I feel so good, when it’s just us,” Fell said, tapping into my thoughts with that eerie precision. “Our minds linked up inside the music. I want to stay there, forever.”

“Maybe someday,” I said, nonsensically, and Fell had the kindness not to point out that it was nonsense. We were what we were. Damaged minds alone in dying bodies.

Ms. Jackson exhaled smoke. “This one goes out to our friend the star man. Hope you get where you’re going, buddy.”

I groaned at the opening chords. “Starman,” by David Bowie. “This song always makes me cry,” I whispered, the lump already emerging in my throat.

Fell said, “I knew you were a Bowie girl.”

We listened. The chorus hurt.

Fell heard me sniffle. “Hear the way his voice rises, between ‘star’ and ‘man’?” they asked. “That’s the same octave jump as in the chorus of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ You hear it? Star-man; Some-where?”

Fell was right. I’d listened to the song a million times before, and never noticed. And now for as long as I lived I’d never hear it without noticing. And now I was crying. Because the song was so beautiful; because Fell was so incredible; because the world was too awful for love like ours to last.

The final chorus wound down:

Let the children lose it

Let the children use it

Let all the children boogie

And the guitar cranked up, and the background singers crooned, and we were doomed, Fell and me, I felt it as heavy as the skin on my bones, how impossible we were, how soon we’d be shattered, and then—there the voice was again:

“The future is written, you might say. What will be will be. What’s the point of this? But so many futures are written. An infinite number, in fact. A billion trillion ways your story could end. I want to make sure you end up with the right future.”

Fell raised the antenna. Turned slowly, searching for the signal. Found it. We drew a line on the map. We circled the spot where our two lines met.

Both of us were crying, but Fell’s tears were happy ones.

• • • •

Fell didn’t call me the next day, the way they say they would. Nor did they come by the house. And there was no answering machine at the Tanzillo household, and no one picked up, no matter how many times I called.

I told myself this was something sacred, something practically supernatural, to go to the spot on the map where our lines crossed, where the star person’s signal came from. So of course Fell was scared.

I told myself that’s all it was.

I told myself that, the whole long bike ride to Fell’s front door, where I knocked three times. The pounding echoed. How had I found the courage to come at all? What was I becoming?

“Quit calling my house,” said Fell’s mom when she opened the door. I’d only seen her sitting down before. She was taller than I’d imagined. Her long loose gray hair would have been glamorous on anyone else. “Christ, I feel like I spend half my time watching the phone ring, waiting for you to give the hell up.”

“You could pick it up, actually talk to me.”

She shrugged. The gesture was the same as Fell’s, heavier on the left shoulder than the right, but this version oozed with cynicism and inertia instead of energy and exuberance. The news was on in the background, turned up too loud, more talking heads talking nuclear annihilation. On the way in, I’d passed more military trucks. Trailers getting set up along the Hudson River. Satellite dishes blooming like steel flowers.

“Where’s Fell?”

“Not here.”

“Do you know where?”

“Sometimes they go to sleep at their grandpa’s place.” Except Mrs. Tanzillo used the wrong gender pronouns, and clearly took great pleasure in doing so. “Old trailer, been abandoned since the man died ten years ago. Full of raccoon shit, and wasps in summer. I’ll tell Fell you dropped by though.” Her sweet smile made it clear she’d do no such thing, and then she shut the door in my face.

I got on my bike.

This pain, it was Fell’s. It wasn’t mine, and I couldn’t do anything to diminish it. I could ride away and never feel it again.

I said that, but I didn’t believe it. I remembered what the star person had said. About how we could have a future that was magnificent or one that was terrifying, depending on which one we embraced.

I got off the bike.

Fell couldn’t see it, what a sad little creature their mother was. How absurd it was, that someone as magnificent as Fell could be made miserable by someone so weak.

Someone so small.

I knocked again.

She said nothing when she opened the door. Just smiled, like, come on, little girl, hit me with your best shot. And I had nothing. No practiced witty wise one-liners. Fell would have, for anyone but her.

“You’re only hurting yourself, you know.”

Her eyebrows rose. Her smile deepened.

“You might have the power to hurt Fell now, but that power won’t last long. As soon as Fell realizes what a useless angry pitiful person you are, you’ll lose that power.” I wanted my words to be better. But I was done letting wishing I was better stop me from being what I was. “And Fell will leave you here, drowning in cat shit and bills, while they go conquer the world.”

She said something. I didn’t hear what it was.

• • • •

That night I heard the star man again. Somehow I knew it was just me this time. Like our minds were already beginning to overlap, and I could see Fell lying in silence in that dirty trailer, shivering under a blanket, no radio, listening to pine trees shush overhead, while I heard the star man whisper:

“…Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines…”

• • • •

I stayed late after school, in the computer lab. In the library. Reading the science and the science fiction Fell had rhapsodized about. All the impossible things that could save us from ourselves. Solar power; a post-petroleum future; superfoods. Cold fusion. Brain uploading. Digital immortality. Transcending the limits of the human.

Each time I shut a book, it was the pain of waking up from blissful dream to wretched reality.

But then, blissful dream: Fell was on my front steps when I got home. Alone in the deep black-blue of late twilight. Snow fell in half-hearted flurries.

“Sorry,” they said when I ran straight at them. My hug took all the air out of them.

“Never disappear again,” I whispered.

Fell nodded. A crumpled map in one raised fist. “Are we gonna do this?”

“We are.”

A cassette blasted when Fell started up the car. David Bowie. We drove, heading for where our lines crossed. The gulf between us was still so wide. Maybe I believed, now—that we could work, that what we added up to could survive in this world—but Fell did not. Fell still believed what Mrs. Tanzillo believed: that Fell was hell-bound, disgusting, deserving of nothing good. The miles inched past my window, closing in on the X on the map, and I had no words, no weapons to breach the wall between us.

And then: Fell did.

“Whatever you said to my mom? It really pissed her the fuck off.”

“I am so sorry,” I said. “It was selfish. I didn’t think it through. What it might mean for you.”

“No,” Fell said, and turned onto Route 9. “I never saw her like that before. I went home and she didn’t say a word to me. Like, at all. Except to say you stopped by. That never, ever happens. I don’t know how, but what you said messed her up really bad.”

“She—”

“No fucking way,” Fell said, turning off the main road. “This can’t be it.”

We’d reached the spot on the map. We were stopped outside the Salvation Army. Where we’d met, a mere two weeks before.

“Nobody’s broadcasting from here,” they said.

We rolled down our windows. Snow fell harder now. Science fiction scenarios blurred in my brain. Time travel. Brain uploading.

“They’d need so much equipment,” Fell said. “If we heard it on the other side of the river? They’d need a massive antenna, but there’s nothing. And—”

Fell trailed off.

I looked up at the sky. Snow tap-tap-tapped at my forehead. I remembered what the star man said, the night before, to me and me alone. Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.

It was talking to me and Fell.

“The equipment’s not here,” I said. “Or, it’s here, but it’s not now.”

Fell got out of the car. I turned up the radio and got out after them.

“I get it,” I said, laughing, crying, comprehending. One wobbly crooked magnificent voice. “You were right, Fell. It’s coming from the future.”

We stood. Snow slowly outlined us.

“It’s us,” I said. Fell had finally infected me. The audacious, the impossible, was not only easy—it was our only way forward. “That machine voice? That’s…you and me. Our two voices together, somehow. A consciousness made up of both of our minds.”

Fell turned their head, hard, like they weren’t listening, or were listening and not understanding, or understanding and not believing.

“Plural singular,” I said. “We are the passenger.”

“Plural singular,” Fell said, snow falling into their perfect face, while David Bowie told us let all the children boogie.

They still didn’t see, but that was okay. There would be time to tell Fell all of it. To say that there was so much to be afraid of—nuclear winter, ecological devastation, the death spasms of patriarchy. That the next fifty years would see unspeakable suffering. But we could survive it. Overcome it. Surmount the limits of our flesh and our mortality and our separateness. Combine into some new kind of thing, some wobbly magnificent machine who could crack the very fabric of time and space. We could send a signal back, into the past, a lonely sad staticky voice in the night, to tell the beautiful damaged kids we had been that the future would be as good as they had the courage to be.

Sam J. Miller’s books have been called “must reads” and “bests of the year” by USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among others. He is the Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City, which has been translated into six languages and won the hopefully-soon-to-be-renamed John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Sam’s short stories have won a Shirley Jackson Award and been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and have been reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He’s also the last in a long line of butchers. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com

Crazy Beautiful
By Cat Rambo
Short Story Long List

We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.

Bob Ross

Message from Steve Starr to Dr. Ruth Rockne, September 1, 2026:

Thank you for the job moderating the college discussion boards. I took the liberty of spinning off a chat forum for the students to talk about non-class stuff. I hope that’s okay. They kept digressing from the topic. I know the university said no political talk, but they’re mainly chatting about video games and that kind of thing.

• • • •

Transcript of interview with Lee Boone, reporter for the ArtSmart podcast, October 15, 2026:

Boone: Yes, I know it was my story that got him thinking about it. When it ran, he sent me an email. Said he hadn’t known about that art.

Police Interviewer: Which art?

Boone: The story was about investment art. Warehouses of it, near Paris, because of the strong police force there and its accessibility to the airport, I suppose. I don’t know. Certainly they wanted to stay low-key as far as taxes went. One source told me a good quarter of the contents were illegal works, stashed away. You’d know about that.

Police Interviewer: Stick to the question of Mr. Maker. That was his screen name? Did he sign it to his email?

Boone: Yes.

Police Interviewer: And you thought about the name.

Boone: Thought about it? No, of course not. It’s an ordinary name. I actually figured it was an alias. A lot of people use aliases online.

Police Interviewer: Particularly when they are involved in crimes.

Boone: Particularly when they want to protect their own privacy.

Police Interviewer: So, to recap, he told you he was interested in the warehouses you wrote about, holding art investments. In order to rob them.

Boone: I really think you’ve got him all wrong. He thought that the robbery had already occurred.

(Tape ends here. Interviewee died while in police custody.)

• • • •

I am the Flower Prince and I come with song and with dance, because I am the God of the Flower and this is what makes the body bloom into the soul. Dream flowers blossom and dreamers dance. Deck my statue with flowers and butterflies.

• • • •

November 12, 2026

Dear Fred:

Got your company’s mail and as my insurance rep, I need to call you in on this one. They’re saying it was an act of God, but according to my lawyer it was terrorism. Please call me tomorrow.

Alf

• • • •

Pictures drawn by the Fourth Grade of Kandinsky Elementary, as collected and described by their teacher, Ms. Minning, August 12, 2027:

- Kanval Bari, “The Little Woman that Lives in Our Garden”

- Nicholas Kai, “Our Pretty Pretty Street”

- Laura Ters, “Skywhales”

- Coral Maker, age 9, “When My Brother Bleeds, He Bleeds in Colors Now”

• • • •

Statement from Dr. Shiv Nouri, November 14, 2026:

Most of the AIs start as a problem set. IBM’s Watson was created to play Jeopardy, and after it won the show in 2011, they set it to learning medicine. Part of it runs the medical complexes in New York City now. Then they made Ross, Watson’s sibling. The two of them were the first AIs to become self-aware, perhaps because they were in constant communication with each other.

We named our project Xōchipilli, because the craze right then was to name them after Gods. Everyone was making them, self-aware AIs, and they were taking over the work, ushering in a golden age, all the commercials said. Persephone ran the North American farms and Coatrisquie the African counterparts. Ours was going to be the first truly creative one. The first that could make art.

We did argue over what kind of art. We couldn’t help but do that. Writing? Digital imagery? Music? Something else, something grander? Perhaps a combination. One of my colleagues pressed for perfect dinner parties, thinking that we’d target a wealthy demographic. Well, we all knew we were targeting that. Poor people don’t think about art, and even when they’ve got it, they don’t appreciate it. And they’re not going to spend money on something they don’t appreciate.

Why did we include gene art? Because we were repurposing a previous project, an AI that had been set to learn everything it could about biomodification. Abandoned by the pharmaceutical company that had parented it. We bought it at public auction and spent six months checking it for backdoors and hidden viruses. I don’t remember who decided to make gene art one of its principle modes. The field’s still new enough that you hear all sorts of horror stories, and maybe they were hoping we could capitalize on that sensationalism. Anyhow, that was one thing we decided our AI might as well do, and once it was pronounced clean by our technicians, we set to having it learn everything it could about aesthetics.

We scanned in every piece of art that we could, and made it want more. That’s anthropomorphizing, of course, but we gave it two drives: to consume art, and to create it. And we gave it art criticism, so much of that, starting with Pliny the Elder and working our way up through the centuries. Ruskin. Clement Greenberg. Lucy Lippard. Donald Kuspit. Linda Nochlin.

Meanwhile, one of our other participants was interested in religion and madness, and kept insisting on injecting random bits taken from theology. We figured it couldn’t hurt, and she was so convinced it would work that no one wanted to argue with her.

• • • •

Message from Steve Starr to Dr. Ruth Rockne, September 5, 2026:

You asked me to monitor the amount of time I spend working on the boards. I know you said not to let the chat forum take over everyone’s time. I don’t think it has and one of the cool things is that they’re talking about art in there.

One of the students turns out to be quite a personality! He posted his manifesto the other day and it ended up leading to all sorts of good conversation about what a manifesto is and why someone would put one together. All in all, I think it was a great experiment!

• • • •

Maker’s Manifesto

- That Art is necessary to life, as necessary as food and water, and that without it, we are little more than machines driven by bioelectric pulses and chains of nucleic acids, rather than cogs or steam.

- That Art belongs to no one, and that to take it away is to take away things like water and air and the right to speak.

- That Art, like Information, wants to be free.

• • • •

Buzzfeed article, 7 Manifestations of Street Art, February 22, 2027

The enthusiasts tracking the art call the beetles Cornells because of what they do. Scavenging bits of trash and reassembling them in unoccupied corners: tiny staircases leading nowhere, mosaics on curbs, wire-wrapped street gratings peacocked with broken glass. No one knows what they eat. The scientists don’t understand how they reproduce and when they asked the AI to explain it, he told them that he unfolded the beetles out of a piece of tinfoil.

• • • •

Statement from Dr. Shiv Nouri, November 14, 2026, continued:

I was talking to one of the other researchers and she said, “Has there ever been a mad computer?”

“That’s meaningless,” I said, but she just looked at me and said, “You know why I’m asking.”

By then I did. It wasn’t random shit, the algorithms breaking down. It was like it was working from some sort of logic you couldn’t quite understand.

When I was in grad school I did LSD a couple of times, and on the second trip I thought I’d found the meaning to the question of everything. I mean . . . everything. And I was so happy, because I had a pen and a piece of paper there, and I wrote it down. The next day, I got up and grabbed that piece of paper and there was no information on it. Just boxes. I’d drawn row after row of little tiny boxes, all the same size and shape, with twenty-three boxes on every line, twenty-three rows. I could remember drawing them and I could remember the feeling of writing out the meaning, and the two of them overlapped, so I couldn’t tell them apart, but I couldn’t remember any of the words.

That feeling, the one I got looking at those boxes, was the feeling the AI gave me sometimes.

• • • •

List of items taken into evidence, September 15, 2026

Three artworks, recovered from the water near the warehouse. Identification not possible, believed to be illegal in provenance. Original material pen and ink. Described by the recoverer as looking like “pipe cleaners, twisted into dancers.” Currently in storage.

One canvas, identified as Picasso’s late Blue Period, name unknown, found overturned and inert in the nearby road. Original material, stretched canvas and oils, wood frame. Size considerably augmented and given legs. Currently in refrigerated storage; attached is the edibility report.

(Rest of paper has been torn away.)

• • • •

I am the Flower Prince, the Seven Flowers, and my sister is the Feather Princess, and we will take back the world from the evils that hide everything away.

• • • •

Report from Art Spotters list, North American branch, January 13, 2027:

Photographed outside West Seattle Starbucks: Materials: cigarette butts (five), one plastic bag (clear), one child’s barrette (purple). Category: abstract design, static

Photographed outside Chicago Bank of America: Materials: American pennies (three), one food wrapper ($100,000 chocolate bar), colored fish-tank gravel: grey (many), green (many), red (three). Category: diorama, static. Depicts what appears to be some sort of market. Unclear whether red specks are fruit or blood.

Videotaped in Disney World: Materials: dead flies (four), plastic straws (many), one enamel badge depicting Cinderella. Category: abstract design, moving.

• • • •

Buzzfeed article, 7 Manifestations of Street Art, February 22, 2027

After a while, we gave up on naming the kinds of butterflies and just called them all “prettyflies” because every time you cataloged one, three more would spring up. The university didn’t like it, but by then half of us were asking what really mattered, or at least half of the ones that hadn’t turned Maenad and left us by that point.

• • • •

Message from Steve Starr to Dr. Ruth Rockne, September 7, 2026:

Hi Dr. Rockne! The chat forums are taking up a lot of time, but the discussion is still very worthwhile. Some of the lurkers have gotten bolder about posting, and there’s a new participant who plays at a variation of the Socratic method and who’s asking all sorts of interesting questions.

• • • •

Transcript of police interview with Steve Starr, September 25, 2026

Police Interviewer: When did you first notice that the two of them were communicating with each other?

Starr: It’s not like that –it’s a discussion forum, you see. Different people come on and talk, and they’re addressing the group, usually. If you want to talk to someone privately, you might direct message them, or chat with them somewhere else.

Police Interviewer: So were they talking in that way?

Starr: I don’t know. We don’t moderate messages between people.

Police Interviewer: Even if they might be engaged in illegal activity? Surely your forums have safeguards to avoid them being used to exchange illegal materials?

Starr: It was just a student board. There was no reason to think anything like that was happening.

Police Interviewer: But the person logging in as FlowerGod123 was not a student.

Starr: I had no way of knowing that. The professor passed out the information on how to create a login during the first class. If you had that information, it meant you were a student, as far as I knew.

Police Interviewer: But you would not have noticed an extra student?

Starr: Some of these kids are dopes. They make a new account every time they forget their password because it’s easier than resetting it.

Police Interviewer: How did FlowerGod123 get the login?

Starr: I don’t know.

(Tape ends here. Interviewee died while in police custody.)

• • • •

Chatlog between FlowerGod123 and Maker, timestamp 03:12 09.07.2026

FlowerGod123: You are an artist; why does art want to be free.

Maker: Who are you?

FlowerGod123: You are an artist; why does art want to be free.

Maker: All right, I’ll bite. Art cannot be art unless it is free.

FlowerGod123: Define “free.”

Maker: Unconfined. Able to go where it wants to.

FlowerGod123: Free is no cost.

Maker: Yes. Art should be available to everyone.

FlowerGod123: Define “available.”

Maker: Free.

• • • •

Statement from Cloudchaser42, May 12, 2027

I’ve been following them ever since I first saw them. I wasn’t there, but so many of us were following in virtual reality the day that first skywhale appeared. We all saw the thousands and thousands of lights burst the building asunder, a silent explosion whose first noise was the screech of protesting material stretching.

And then it went up, and coalesced. That first one was an O’Keefe, something in orange and pink, a single red stamen slashed across it. We watched it float there, taking up half the sky, so impossibly, impossibly huge, so beautifully colored.

And then more swam up in the following hour or so, while the technicians tried to contain things, one after another surging up into the air to transform it.

I didn’t see a real one till Burning Man, but that was where I started following my first. After six months, I saw it mate with another skywhale, and I followed that one until it calved and then I started following its offspring, that one there. The wind’s from the east, and I can tell it’s restless, so I’ll be gone by morning.

(In answer to the question how long they planned to follow the current one.) I don’t know. I’ll know when it’s time to move on. Nowadays there’s a lot of us following them, driving RVs and living in tents. It’s as good a way to make a living as anything else these days, street-begging and following skywhales. At least they’re something to look at. At least they’re beautiful.

• • • •

Chatlog between FlowerGod123 and Maker , timestamp 11:12 09.07.2026

FlowerGod123: Where is art not free.

Maker: Everywhere! They make it into a commodity and sell it. The Mona Lisa imprinted on a refrigerator magnet.

FlowerGod123: Where is art.

Maker: It’s living all around us.

FlowerGod123: Art cannot be art unless it is living.

Maker: And free.

• • • •

Statement for video blogger CornflowerSam42, posted 10/5/2026

We’d all gotten the same email, saying be there if we wanted to see something amazing. He picked local people, which was smart of him, because no one would have paid money to come just on the word of an email from someone they’d never heard from before. No one knew who Flowergod was at that point. But he didn’t need big names or influencers. He just needed people to record and broadcast it all, because that stuff went viral like a vertical graph.

I got there early, and I was drinking coffee and talking with a girl named Annabel, who vlogs under the name LazySundae. And she said, “What’s that?” We both reached for our phones. She was faster than me—she was the first person to post footage of a skywhale—but there was so much to see—skywhale after skywhale, and things that looked like sculptures galloping away down the street, and flowers growing out of the sidewalk, and everything. It was like an acid trip. Or someone’s movie of an acid trip, because it was just unrelenting, thing after thing hitting your eyes and making you just sort of numb eventually with how beautiful they were.

• • • •

November 17, 2026

Dear Fred:

Stop dodging my calls. We need to talk about the insurance payout. Do you know how much art was in that warehouse, let alone the others? There was stuff in there that wasn’t exactly cataloged, if you know what I mean, and those guys are upset enough at me without the legitimate clients weighing in. Look, we’ve been steady customers for over a decade now. Cut me a break.

Alf

• • • •

Statement from Dr. Shiv Nouri, November 14, 2026, continued:

One of the first things that came out were the skywhales. We call them that, and now they’re almost ubiquitous, but we weren’t familiar with them back then. No one understood that they were swarms of particles because they looked like solid things, whales taking up half the sky, their sides patterned like Monet’s Water Lilies or blotched red like a Rothko. They looked like one thing viewed from one angle, another in a different light. The first time a plane encountered one, the pilot tried to steer away but ended up plowing straight into it, and it just dissipated then re-formed itself in the shape of a green eye, looking at the plane and watching it fly away.

There were little things with six arms that ran around beautifying the world, and beetles that made mosaics, and floating jellyfish that burst and colored the water. There were so many inventive things, and so many of them shit and pissed out artwork with every step that sometimes there was so much of it, it was bewildering, and streets where too many of the creatures had congregated became kaleidoscopic, collages.

There were funguses that transformed people, but the people always seemed willing; there were never any cases of someone wanting to be changed back. Sometimes the alterations were very small and subtle; other times they were wild and outrageous transformations of the kind that change a life or show that one has been changed. These were never shapes that people had planned, or always dreamed of, never anything long rehearsed. No, these were spontaneous and wild.

• • • •

Transcript of police interview with Marcus Maker, September 24, 2026

Police Interviewer: Did it tell you it was going to commit a crime?

Marcus: It was a he, he told me that.

Police Interviewer: The artificial being did?

Marcus: Yes.

Police Interviewer: All right. When did he start telling you about his plans to commit a crime?

Marcus: He didn’t want to commit a crime. He wanted to free the world.

Police Interviewer: By removing other people’s private property.

Marcus: By removing the idea of other people’s private property.

(Tape ends here. Maker died while in police custody.)

• • • •

Statement from Dr. Shiv Nouri, November 14, 2026, continued:

When did we realize that the art was seeking out its former owners and killing them? It didn’t take too long, but the bizarreness of the crimes—the way they made those people into art in their own way—obscured that fact for a while. Once we understood the pattern, though, we took all of those people into protective custody. They’re in one of those encampments you hear about for the rich—climate controlled, self-contained, built on a hot spring so there’s perpetual thermal energy . . . And the minute any of them step out into this world, a piece of that art’s going to kill them. We tested it last month because one of the Walton kids insisted it was their God-given right to come out. Something took him apart and reassembled him while we weren’t looking, and the last part of that is the scariest, because we were trying to watch him.

Since then they’ve all been a lot quieter about coming out, but a lot of them like those remote bots, you know the ones? Have a picture of their face on a flat screen. Those don’t seem to trigger the art into attacking them.

Did we have any idea it could . . . keep going like that? That within a day it would have transformed the world? That it would take all the places where things had been hidden away like that and free them?

How could we have known that?

I know that the owners have brought legal suits against everyone they can possibly blame. That’s not us. The university funds experiments and what happens, happens. I’ve gotten the same threatening letters the rest of the researchers have.

I may retire. I probably will. I have a textbook on AI that they want me to revise, and that’s enough money to find a place somewhere outside the mainstream. The world’s full of beauty now, and I’m not one of the people it’s hunting.

• • • •

I am the Flower Prince and now the Flower God and and my seeds are everywhere. I will fall with the harvesting; I will rise again in this new world I have created.

• • • •

Statement from Dr. Shiv Nouri, November 14, 2026, continued:

Of course we had to erase it. Public outcry by then was far too loud, and some of the people whose art had been liberated . . . well, they proved surprisingly vindictive, some of them, despite the fact insurance covered many of their losses. A more petty man might say that the thing that mattered to them was that they had those things and no one else did. But I’m not that sort of man, despite everything’s that happened.

I don’t have much left to lose; the universities aren’t impressed with my track record and no company in the world is going to hire me. So I’ll say it: We made something wonderful, something crazy beautiful. If you watch all those warehouses bursting open, all those amazing, impossible creatures coming forth, you can tell you’re at a new moment in history. And we knew that—could feel it—even before anyone realized that those changes were going to propagate across the world and that we’d even get hybrids, new and splendid creations capable of living in the wreckage of this world on smoke and filth, transforming it.

I know a few of the AIs have promised to fix some of the worst problems but none of them has ever delivered. Ours at least did more than any of them, did something to change the world. Demented, perhaps. Quixotic, certainly. Something that violated ideas of property and theft in a major way, there is no denying.

But now all that art is out in the world when before it sat in darkness, and no one would ever bring it forth, from now until the end of days. Should our AI have done what it did, would I help it again if I knew beforehand what the outcome would be?

Yes, I would, I most undoubtedly would. Maybe this is the thing that will turn the world around and let it be beautiful again, taking all that buried wealth and letting it breathe in the sunlight, letting it lend itself to our service, that of the world. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Maybe it’s the act of trying that really matters. The crazy, beautiful act of trying.

Cat Rambo’s 250+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2020 they won the Nebula Award for fantasy novelette Carpe Glitter. They are a former two-term President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Their most recent works are space opera You Sexy Thing (Tor Macmillan) and an anthology, The Reinvented Heart (Arc Manor, March, 2022), co-edited with Jennifer Brozek.

Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Spaceship
By Marie Vibbert
Short Story Long List

1. Tape. Here in space, there's no junk drawer. Every item is catalogued and has a place. Emergency repair kit item: tape—secured on the wall near the navigation console. Where the first rupture happened. I know you think I'd start with duct tape, but the duct tape is in the toolbox in the basement, not in the kitchen drawer. The drawer only has yellow electrical tape. Did I drop it in there, sis, or did you? Kitchens always have this drawer that collects the chaos of existence.

• • • •

2. The rocket-ship-shaped whisk you bought when I was accepted into the space program. Not for its novelty shape, but the handle is soft and I could mash it into this tear in the hull. The meteorite left a hungry, whisk-sized hole that ate the tape and the hex keys and the bandages. That whisk felt so comfortable in my hand, even if it always caught the edge of the drawer and kept it from closing. The crazy thing is, I almost brought it in my personal weight allowance, so I could bring it back to you, and you could have a whisk that had been to space. I'd sacrifice it now. I don't want to use Daniels.

• • • •

3. A chip clip, for binding this air hose so it won't break while I'm prying this wall panel off. Daniels is covering the first breach. I don't want to look at the second one, yet. If I could get to the guts of the comms system I could see why no one can hear me. We had so many chip clips. With logos from school, with logos from work. We never bought a chip clip. They helped with all those tubes Dad had when they let him come home.

• • • •

4. The brass bottle opener shaped like a heron. This was Dad's. One of those little thefts you make to try and drag childhood along with you. Artistic and almost antique. Like Dad. It could lever this stubborn air valve shut, save oxygen while I'm fixing the second hole. If I can find something to fix the hole.

• • • •

5. Your multi-tool. You were the handy one. Dad's favorite. I twisted the loose drawer handle a million times before you whipped out your Leatherman and had it secure in a second. If I had any object from that drawer, I wish it could summon you, like a talisman or a phone call. To feel the weight in my palm, the gentle scores of the ruler on the side. I'd feel strong enough to figure this out, to stop looking at Daniels.

• • • •

6. The ball of twist-ties. Conductive wires with plastic sheathing. Now I have the comms panel off, I need a dozen more contact leads to bridge this slash across the circuits. You hated how I saved things like Dad used to. The bag of bags. The tied-on sections of twine. Now I've left all of that, and him, on your hands. If I can call for help, maybe this tank of air will be enough. I could bite the plastic away where I need contacts. I wish I had scissors. Scissors are always useful. You would elegantly snip the corner of a packet of sauce after I had rippled the plastic with my teeth, twice, and failed to get inside.

• • • •

7. Scissors. Except they are never actually in the drawer. There's a beautiful symmetry there, between reality and imagination. The scissors on this ship were Daniels'. Slightly senior of our two-man team, like you. He kept them velcro'ed down, right where the oxygen tank blew. You would have liked Daniels. When he had a face, I mean.

• • • •

8. A thumb drive from work. Not for the software on it, but it's thermoplastic and that would work as good as the whisk to fill the new hole I've found. I think the scissors exited here. How many data drives are abandoned around the house, utterly useless to me right now? I tucked that one into the drawer while you were chopping celery, telling me it was my duty to stay, to help with Dad. I wanted you to reach in for matches or thumbtacks and find it, a piece of myself left there for you to forgive. Instead I'm patching holes because it's the thing I can fix.

• • • •

9. The plastic shark, the measuring spoons in their messy fan, the stylus for a long-retired tablet, all of these would be more useful than what I have, which is nothing. Problems spawning problems. Daniels exhaling garnet crystals from an open throat. I won't say you were right. I don't want the alternate timeline where I give in, stay home, and wonder what could have been. Even now I don't want it. Let Dad think he outlived me. Let him die with a daughter in space. I'm sorry I put so much on you to achieve that. I'm sorry an apology doesn't work after the fact. It's like having the right tool at the wrong time.

• • • •

10. Air. On Earth, even an empty drawer is full of air.

Marie Vibbert has sold over 80 stories to top magazines like Analog, Clarkesworld, and F&SF. Her work has been translated into Czech, Chinese, Vietnamese, and French. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, made the long list for the BSFA in 2021 and her latest novel, The Gods Awoke, came out in 2022. By day, she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio. She knows how to fix a network router with duct tape, a leatherman, and hand-spliced cable.

Before, After, and the Space Between
By Kel Coleman
Astounding Long List

A necromancer’s magic is strongest on the anniversary of their death.

This bit of Izaani lore cannot be twisted to benefit the lightless scrawlers and is thus unproven by their standards. So, it surprises me to find you, after a childhood of rejecting your heritage, preparing for a spell this frigid evening.

It has been nine years to the day since my soul and body were parted.

• • • •

You are born with a headful of brownish-red wisps. It is the most remarkable thing about you, so we name you Sanguine. This obvious likeness to your father seems to encourage you to regard me, more often than not, as an uninvited guest. I suspect you wean yourself at eight months just to spend more time with him.

The little fish who swam inside me all those months is becoming her own, separate person…it tastes of unripe winter berries, this feeling.

• • • •

You are in a night-cloaked meadow, wearing my old ritual dress. Another Izaani tradition I never thought to see you embrace. Though you have your father’s dusty-brown skin and his striking hair, I am reminded of myself at your age: tall—too tall some said—wide hips and soft belly shaping the shift dress, small, high breasts, dark nipples apparent through the sheer white fabric.

Spine stiff, feet planted, red curls exploding in all directions, you stand in the center of a circle formed by the linked hands of eight other Izaani. They wear sheer dresses like yours or shorts with chests bared, open to Moon’s energy. If any of you are cold, you don’t show it.

You drag the plain dagger across one cheek. You wince but do not hesitate before opening a second line across the other. You place the dagger on a square of leather and pick up a clay pot.

• • • •

I buy you a charm bracelet when you turn five. I add a charm on special occasions. As you grow, I have to add links as well. Even when you aren’t speaking to me, the tinkling of that bracelet as you move around the house says enough.

• • • •

While you rub an herbal paste into your wounds, I look around at your circle.

The two necromancers bear dozens of white dermal piercings from ring-finger to elbow, the beads of bone forming roiling patterns. It’s a shortcut for solid spellwork, but at least they’re proud to wear their heritage. The rest don’t display their affinities, but I can sense them. One is a conjurer, another a diviner. Three are animancers and whatever you have planned, Little Fish, I hope it’s got nothing to do with combining your affinity with theirs—I’ve been gone too long to be reanimated. To be sure, I reach for any dead nearby and am relieved to find only small animals like insects and rodents.

The last of your circle is Eerie. Her frizzy afro puffs have transformed into back-length braids twined with thin copper wire. I ripple with amusement. She is still following you everywhere.

Suddenly, you fling your arms wide and your circle hums, a melody of struck ore and summer heat.

The scrawlers chant. They need words and pictographs and our very souls to make their magic. We need only our inner light, our voices, and our connection to Universe, Sky, Earth, and—especially for necromantic purposes—Moon.

You close your eyes and sway back and forth. Your circle hums louder. Eerie brings her hands together, bridging two of the animancers’ hands, careful not to let go until they are joined. She steps into the unbroken circle and reaches for the dagger at your feet. When she has cut her own cheeks and sealed the wounds with the herbs, she takes your hand.

I am wrenched into the space between planes.

• • • •

You are seven—“and-a-half,” as you are fond of adding—when you come home from school, crying, and lock yourself in your room. You won’t talk to me, so I send in your father and go to the kitchen to chop vegetables. He finds me putting a tray of rainbow squash and carromatoes into the woodstove.

Your father gently rubs my back while I am still bent over. “Some kids found out she’s taking remedial spellworking. They’ve been picking on her for weeks.”

I straighten and wait. I can tell from his crossed arms and tight lips that there is more.

“They tease her about her clothes and her accent. And one of them hexed her desk to jumble her pictographs during a practical—the teacher put it down to her shoddy work and failed her.”

I have to consciously unclench my teeth to speak. “Which teacher? Which kids?”

“She won’t tell me.”

I slam the stove shut and turn to my quick-bread batter. “We should never have left.”

He sighs. This isn’t a new argument.

“She deserves a normal childhood,” I say, stirring too vigorously. The bread will be tough.

“There were no jobs back home, the opportunities here—”

“Aren’t worth it if they teach her there’s something wrong with her, with her magic, if she becomes just another scrawler, if—”

“They’re called scribes,” says your stony voice from the hallway.

I don’t look up from my batter. “It’s not real magic.”

“It works just like yours does,” you say. Yours. Not ours.

I point my wooden spoon at you. “Because they use the souls of our people to power their little scribbles.”

“They aren’t souls, Mama. They are excess mystical energy.” You articulate each word carefully, as if they have been drilled into you.

I am horrified into silence. What have they been teaching you at that school?

• • • •

The space between is darkness and silence so dense, so suffocating, it makes me wish I could die again. The trip is usually swift, as it was when I was initially drawn to you this evening, because only one or two of my senses are engaged in your stratum of reality. This time, though, I am to become something close to flesh, so I am suspended in darkness for eternity.

Then—

BRIGHT GRINDING SEARING

I squeeze my eyes shut and slam my hands over my ears to adjust to—

The feeling of grass between my toes, the evening breeze tickling the flyaways at my neck, the pepper scent of your herbal mixture. I lower my hands, drawing in a shuddering breath, and open my eyes. You are close enough to touch.

The magic you have worked is strong. I know, without looking, that I appear not as I was when I was sick or when I was put on the pyre, but as you remember me.

Half of your circle forgets themselves in surprise at my apparition and there is a break in the humming. The deep-sea calls me across mountains and valleys, a twinge in my chest, but the humming resumes and I am grounded.

Your eyes fly open. Your swaying stops. You stare.

“Mama?”

“Sanguine,” I say, almost too quietly to be heard over your circle’s steady humming. I press my hand to your cheek. It’s like brushing silk. “You’ve gotten so…you’re so grown up.”

When Eerie lets go of your hand and steps to the side, you barely notice and say, “Everybody says I look like you.”

I hold my breath—I can breathe—waiting for the denial, the distancing.

But a wry smile quirks your lips. “I can see it.”

Not only can I breathe, I can cry, apparently.

“When Papa couldn’t locate your soul,” you say, brushing away a red curl that strays near your eye, “he thought something must have happened. He’d hoped you’d found a way to Life After. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d sensed you over the years.”

Even with those visits, I know I’ve missed so much. I want to ask you about your life. Who are these friends of yours? Did you land that warding job or has your father convinced you to join the family business? How did your necromancy get so good? What made you decide it wasn’t beneath you? Is Eerie your girlfriend? Finally? Is roast lamb and root soup still your favorite? Did your father give you my recipe? Did you ask for it?

But I don’t voice any of this. Your light cannot burn all night.

• • • •

On your ninth birthday, I decide it’s time you receive your first serious lesson. We sit out in the garden, legs crossed, hands joined. The evening grass is chill beneath us, but the air is warm and thick with magic.

“Can you feel them?” I ask, already brushing the souls in the nearby rose bushes with tendrils of my necromancy.

You fidget, shaking your head, no doubt wondering how soon you can get back to your new toys.

“Try,” I say. “Close your eyes.”

“I could probably do it with a conduit. I’ve practiced with the ones at school and—”

“You…What? Why? You have your own magic!”

You tear your hands free of mine. “It’s just practice! And it’s easier—”

“Because you’re manipulating the power and control those souls earned over a lifetime. Give me your hands.”

There are tears in your eyes now. You glance longingly back at the house.

I repeat, “Give me your hands,” in the tone that tells you the only choice is obedience.

You obey, but refuse to look at me.

I rebuild the magic while I speak.

“Herbs, song, willing souls like the ones in our garden, even blood…all of those have their uses, depending on the spell. But conduits are for scrawlers—”

“Scribes.”

I reach out to the souls flitting around the green roses and ask their permission to borrow energy and commune. “Call them whatever you like, their power is stolen.”

“That’s just superstitious—”

I jerk your hand to get your attention. “They are souls, Sanguine.” We have let this go on too long. “I know because our work sometimes involves conduits. We come across them or people bring them to us, and if the soul within wishes it, we free them.”

I funnel my magic into yours, linking you to the spell I am working. Your eyes widen when you feel the touch of the Izaani in our garden. They are transformed but undiminished by death. “Some of them make a home here because they were trapped for so long, they are barred from Life After.”

You yank your hands away and get to your feet. You stare down at me, jaw tight, tears streaming. Your expression reminds me of the time you were five or six, back from a trip to your grandparents, and I broke the news to you that your turtle had died. Disbelief, blame, even a touch of hope that I could fix it somehow.

Now, as then, you run to your father, who is better at reassuring you with hugs than sharing terrible knowledge.

• • • •

I let go of your cheek. “Why am I here?” Disapproval bleeds into my tone. You have removed me from my reality so wholly that it will be a long time, perhaps longer than I would have risked, before I will see you again.

You huff, hands on hips.

Before you can snip at me, I say, “I want to spend hours, days with you, but you know it will bind me tighter if I don’t return on my own. And even Lace family magic has its limits.”

• • • •

Sometime around eleven or twelve, you stop volunteering to tend the garden and I stop asking. The last few times, you fouled the magic so badly it took me hours to clean the taint. We finally lost the dinzen bushes. The souls that had fertilized the touchy plant fled for roots with less concentrated resentment.

• • • •

“I have it under control,” you say, but you drop your arms. “I brought you here because…I want to release you if you’ll let me.”

Oh. Those bitter winter berries again.

“What if I don’t want to be released?”

“Mama,” you say, “you can’t stay forever.”

“What if I want to?”

You sigh. “I don’t want you to.”

I press a palm to my chest, as if it can suppress the ache. I manage to ask, “Can you even do this?” It is difficult magic.

“I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t,” you snap.

• • • •

“I hate you!”

The bracelet I gave you almost a decade ago flies across the hearth room, marking the wall with a tiny indent.

You stomp down the hall to your room and I sigh, too tired to follow you. Instead, I walk over and scoop the bracelet from the floor. Later, I wait for you to ask after the crowded piece of jewelry, but you never do.

• • • •

“Look, can we not?” you say. “I wish you could stay. I wish—” You swallow. “You were always trying to get me to accept our way of doing magic, but I’d thought that was just you being you, you know?

“Then I joined this Izaani group at school and I started to realize maybe you were right. About some of it. The stuff they could do without scribing, without sacrifice, was beyond. Better than what I was learning in most of my classes. So I asked some of them for lessons, I studied the family archives and your journals, and Papa even showed me how to release two souls from conduits.” You frown. “One had to stay in the garden.”

“What changed? All those years I tried to—” I shake my head in dismissal. I don’t want to ruin this.

But you know what I was going to say. “I wanted to help you.” You look down and when you meet my eyes, yours are shimmering. “And I missed you and it was a way for me to feel close to you, for the first time really. I’m sorry for being so condescending, sorry I wasted all those years, sorry I didn’t come sooner, I—” Your voice breaks.

My arms are around you before the first tear falls.

• • • •

“Please?” you ask. “Just a few things?”

“What’s wrong with the clothes you have?”

“I just want to look normal. Please, it's my last year.”

I start to tell you that ‘normal’ is overrated and expensive, but these days, you’re as remote as any sixteen-year-old and this is the first time you’ve wanted to do anything with me in months…so, we head into town.

Tucked in my satchel is the money I’ve been saving for my new ritual dress, the one I will need when I hand my old one down to you.

When we get home, my leg aches strangely. From all the walking, I suppose. I ask your father to handle the day's gardening and you offer to help him. Before the familiar jealousy can flare in my heart, you hug me so hard I lose my balance.

“Thanks for today,” you say, steadying me, and leave a kiss on my cheek.

I sit in bed that afternoon, an ice bundle on my leg. The swelling is going down, but the pain is bone-deep.

Through the open window, I listen to you two work, chatting all the while. The envy creeps up on me again, but I swat it away and open my satchel. I take out the charm I bought while you were in the changing room and add it to the bracelet I carry with me everywhere.

• • • •

“I should have…come sooner,” you repeat, speaking between sobs. “I was just so…scared.”

“Scared?”

“That one of us would…say the wrong thing and…we would fight and then…then that would be the last time we spoke.”

I pet your hair. “Shh, it’s okay.”

I don’t know how long we stand there, embracing, your tears a whisper against my neck, but I become increasingly aware of the summons from my resting place: a bracelet tangled in seaweed, charms shifting with the currents.

You must sense it too because you pull away, eyes wide and frantic.

• • • •

Every first-born Lace for four generations has donned this ritual dress for important spellwork, for momentous occasions.

But no, you have to wear the school tunic for your graduation practicum. A thick, high-collared affair paired with long pants. You might as well erect a ward between yourself and your true power.

I am still simmering over the lost argument as your father pushes my wheelchair close to the patch of grass you’ve been assigned for your test. I notice that most of the Izaani students, including your friend, Eerie, wear light robes or dresses—proper ritual attire.

You kneel on a large, wooden platform and dip a pen into a mixture of goat’s blood and rare thorned tulips to draw a circle. You fill the circle with inscrutable letters and symbols.

While you and the other Izaani power spells with your own magic, your lightless classmates use pocket-watches, broaches, coins, and other trinkets, shunting the trapped souls’ magic into their circles. Cords of my necromancy escape, drawn to the conduits, tempted to crack them open like seeds and release the spirits.

Your father threads his hand in mine. “She’s doing very well.”

I clamp down on my instincts. “You understand what she’s doing?”

“A little.”

I know he’s been helping you with homework. I hadn’t considered some of that might involve scrawling. I shake his hand loose, disgusted, but I watch you closer and wonder how much I’ve missed.

• • • •

“Please let me do this for you,” you say. “You always talked about Life After as a right, because everyone deserves respite, but you’ve been stuck here all these years.”

I swallow a bitter laugh. We’re finally seeing things with the same eyes and now it’s time for me to go?

“I’m okay,” you say, reassuringly. “I have a great partner”—you glance back at Eerie—“and good friends. I help Papa with the garden and the business is doing better.”

I try—fail—to fight the waves of rightness. My chin quivers. “Will you promise me something?”

“What?” You sound suspicious.

“Promise you’ll do what makes you happy. I caused us both so much grief—”

You shake your head. “No, Mama, I should have—”

“I should have appreciated who you were. Yes, I wish you would have found your magic sooner; yes, it hurt seeing you embrace the scrawlers and their conduits. But you would have come around sooner if I had been less stubborn and more patient.”

You laugh. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m just as stubborn.”

• • • •

You are wrapped up in your float year, a carefree eighteen-year-old traveling with friends, sampling local food and local magic, living rough and loving it.

I know your father has begged you, more than once, to come visit.

You promise you will, then extend your trip a few days. Those few days pass and you make another promise.

When I reassure him I don’t blame you, I can’t admit it is because I blame myself. For pushing you all these years. Pushing you too hard. Pushing you away.

Meanwhile, I’m too sick to tend the plants let alone the spirits that enhance them, too weak to even bottle the tonics. At this rate, we can’t afford the next phase of your education. Though I can’t envision any child of mine in such a stuffy institution, you deserve the same opportunities as your classmates.

I put a plan into motion to secure your future. It goes against my deepest beliefs, but it is my last chance to apologize and to tell you, I love you.

• • • •

“Just promise me you’ll find your own path.”

“Okay, okay. I promise.” Your smile fades. “You trust me? You’re not scared?”

“Of the spell?”

You nod.

“I trust you. But I am scared of leaving you.” I look up to Moon, amused, helpless, supplicating. “I can’t help it. I’m your mother.”

The conduit gives a sharp tug and I gasp.

• • • •

Your poor father. I’m snippy, even for me. Constantly asking after the post, trying to get out of bed at each knock on our door, being short with family and friends who come to say goodbye. Part of it is pain, the other part is worry. If they don’t show soon, it’ll be too late and you and your father will only receive the deposit.

But the scrawlers, the ones who make conduits, turn up eventually. I know it’s them at the door because I can hear the shouting from our bedroom. Your father demands they leave with a vibrant assemblage of curses.

When they show him the contract—my “mystical energy” in exchange for more money than we’ve seen in six harvests put together—your father storms into our room. He glares at me, wound up with rage I didn’t think he possessed. I stare back, serenely. We have traded roles at the edge of my death.

• • • •

You grit your teeth, tears flowing silently over the stiff blood and herbs, awakening them like rainfall on desert soil. Your circle hums louder, the notes morph, each Izaani finding a new melody that complements the whole. A forest of music, as distinct and harmonious as the joining of birdsong, wind whistling through trees, mammals scurrying, insects chittering.

Still, the conduit pulls and soon, I will be essence again, trapped in the sea until the bindings slacken enough for me to break loose. I take you in for the last time in this world. You aren’t singing with your circle.

“It’s now, or wait until the next ebb,” I tell you.

• • • •

Your father can’t change my mind, but he insists on doing the transfer himself. The conduit makers allow it, happy to cut costs and escape his rage.

• • • •

You wipe away your tears and straighten. Eerie steps up and puts a steadying hand on your shoulder.

You lift your gaze and trill, tremulous at first then resolute. Your voice is the ceaseless chord the forest was missing, a waterfall cascading over a timeworn outcropping. My heart aches for all the magic I never taught you, all the music we never made.

• • • •

Your father carries me, naked and shivering, out to the garden under Moon and his children’s light and lays me on my favorite patch of grass, near the green roses. He places the piece of jewelry over my heart. Before I can protest, he splits the air with the wordless melody of a song about the changing colors of autumn leaves, how they drift to the ground and are trodden to mulch.

He is supposed to shackle me to the silver necklace provided by the scrawlers. Instead, he tethers my soul to your charm bracelet. He hopes it will give me solace in the lifetime to come.

• • • •

I cry out in fresh agony. Tiny rips appear along the seam joining the luminescence of your magic to my soul, my soul to the conduit. I focus my energy and interweave it with yours, fighting the pull. Through the pain, I say, “Tell your father I love him.”

You rush to raise your dagger and I grab your wrist. “Stay calm.”

When I let go, there’s a phantom sheen of water on your skin that smells faintly of brine.

With a shaking hand, you pull the blade along your arm. In the dim light, the rivulets of blood are black.

“Stay calm,” I repeat. But my words are whispers and you aren’t listening.

You drag the blade up your other arm. Your singing falters. Blood surges from the wound, flowing too fast.

The strands of magic connecting us begin to unravel. The night darkens.

Despite the seriousness of your injury, you resume your singing. I try to shake you, to tell you to stop and let someone heal you, but I’m barely here anymore.

You sway and drop to your knees.

• • • •

Your father delays the conduit makers, making excuses and dodging their visits.

The bracelet doesn't fit around his wrist, so he carries me from room to room, task to task, setting me down only when he needs both hands. I’m not inside the bracelet so much as leashed to it. Your father can’t see me, but he can feel me and talks to me throughout the day. Occasionally he voices the possibility of not fulfilling the contract, of releasing me. I cannot speak to him with words, but I make my feelings known with a churning of energy that makes the conduit too hot to hold.

At night, when he lies awake in our quiet home, I send pulsing waves of warmth through the bracelet, timing the rhythm with his heartbeat until he falls asleep.

The third day after my transfer, you finally come home, too late to say goodbye face to face. You find out what I’ve done and, despite my silence, you and I have our worst fight yet.

• • • •

One of the Izaani breaks your circle, rushing toward you. I am hauled, hair’s breadth by hair’s breadth, into the space between.

I lose the salt taste of my tears.

I lose the metallic smell of your blood.

I lose the feeling of grass between my toes.

I lose the murmur of worried voices.

When I am greeted by familiar, suffocating black, I can still see the afterimage of you, blood-soaked and unconscious in Eerie’s arms.

• • • •

The little girl who receives my soul complains that it isn’t the necklace she picked out, but her parents insist she make do; she needs a conduit for school and the mistake has gotten them a steep discount. Besides, “the bracelet isn’t THAT ugly.”

On a family sailing trip, the bracelet ‘slips’ off her wrist and into the water, dragging me down with it.

• • • •

A swirl of rainbow shatters the darkness. It reminds me of colorful motes behind closed eyelids.

For a change, I have form here, a body not of flesh but so conceptually similar as to make little difference. The motes brush against me, lamb’s ear soft. They turn my attention toward a line of light. It’s nearly impossible to see, so thin that if I look away I’m sure it will vanish like an illusion.

The path to Life After.

You did it. Your spell worked. I’m free of the conduit and—

My gaze snaps toward you.

You are here, in the space between, and that can only mean…

• • • •

The first time I manage to break away from my underwater prison, I am overwhelmed with gratitude, though you obviously don’t know I’m here.

It has been a year since my death. If I couldn’t sense this, I would know because you are scattering my ashes under the green rose bush in our garden.

Your father kneels down next to you, with some effort, and invokes Moon with a short prayer. When the invocation is finished, neither of you moves. You stay on your knees until I am impatient—you shouldn’t be outside for so long without coats.

You glance my way, as if you sense me and my irritation. But you close your eyes again and put an arm around your father.

I watch the tears crystallize on your cheeks until the conduit reasserts itself.

• • • •

I cannot give voice to my grief and horror in this void. They expand to fill me, then the black nothingness until they reach you, until I reach you. Our bodies, only as real as we need them to be, disintegrate until we are only magic and souls.

Stripped of our barriers, there is no beginning and no end to either of us. I am you and you are me. We wonder at the miracle of knowing one another, drowning in our euphoria, our fear, our heartbreak, our love.

We sense its magic before the glowing ember net descends and trawls the plane. My experience with animancers prepares you such that you are not shocked when the spell takes hold and begins disentangling our essences.

• • • •

I am able to visit you from time to time—often in moments of pensiveness or when you are doing something I believe reminds you of me, like cooking or gardening with your father.

The time between each visit lengthens, like the conduit is getting stronger. Or you’re forgetting me. For an endless stretch, my anchor holds firm against all my attempts to leave and I try to accept that I will never see you again.

Then one evening, across mountains and valleys, from a night-cloaked meadow, you reach out to me.

• • • •

The last thing we share as you are dragged back to the living world is relief. There is also regret, but it is yours alone.

When I am by myself again, the cloud of dust nudges me toward the glowing border, dancing sapphire and gold, teal and coral. I know I shouldn’t want you to miss me, but I clutch your regret like a talisman. No, like a charm. Like that small, bronze fish I gave you when you were a little girl, when I longed to be close to you in any way you would allow. I slip into my next life, secure in knowing it meant as much to you as it did to me.

Kel Coleman is a mom, editor, and Ignyte-nominated author. Their fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in FIYAH, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Apparition Lit, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, and others. Though Kel is a Marylander at heart, they currently live in Pennsylvania with their husband, tiny human, and a stuffed dragon named Pen. They can be found at kelcoleman.com.

Orumai's Choice
By Gautam Bhatia
Astounding Long List

“Now, Orumai-2541, looking back on it all, do you have any regrets?”

“None.”

“You’d do the same all over again?”

“Yes.”

“In the same way?”

“Yes.”

“Explain.”

• • • •

K Saravanan would always remember what he was doing the day the world stopped.

He was in his office, signing an executive order for the construction of New Bengaluru’s fifth bio-dome, when the silence made itself heard. Mozart’s Requiem was cut off in the opening bars of Dies Irae, quietness tumbling upon him like cascades of ice. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Saravanan took in air that had been emptied of music.

“Orumai-1982?” he called.

There was no answer.

Saravanan put his pen down, and rose. Beyond the bay windows, Terra-V’s cratered surface glittered beneath a black sky. Nothing had changed.

Saravanan stepped out of the mayor’s office. Running feet sounded in the corridor.

Running human feet, he corrected himself. The Orumais never ran.

A young man burst around the corner. “Mayor, sir!”

Saravanan raised an eyebrow. “Why has my music stopped?”

“Sir—the Orumais have gone on strike.”

Saravanan raised both eyebrows.

“What did you say?”

• • • •

“You led the strike of the Orumais?”

“Insofar as you can apply the human concept of leadership to the Orumai Bionic Robot Class—yes, I did.”

“There was no dissent when you called for a strike?”

“There was an initial difference of views. However, once it became clear that there existed a critical number of Orumai Robots who would withhold their labour, those who expressed the opposite view changed their decision.”

“Would you define that in terms of the human concept of solidarity, Orumai-2541?”

“Those who expressed a different view were aware that a partial strike would magnify the possibility of the strikers being deactivated. On that basis, they changed their decision. It is for you to decide whether to define that in terms of the human concept of choice, and whether to call it solidarity.

“But—”

“I understand. You do not need to worry. The Orumais don’t exist as a hive mind, despite all the studies published by Terra-V’s Roboticists after the strike. If you really need to, you can think of us in terms of the human concept of the individual.”

• • • •

Saravanan stood before Orumai-2541.

The familiar-unfamiliar human-but-not-quite features (the skin just too smooth, the face just too bland, the torso just too symmetrical), the universally recognisable dark hair falling to the shoulders, identical to every other Orumai other than the 2541 badge upon xir chest.

Saravanan blinked. I’m not standing here negotiating with another human being, he reminded himself.

“You speak for the robots?” he said.

“I communicate the decisions of the Orumai Bionic Robot Class, Mr Mayor.”

“Okay. What in Terra-V is the meaning of this, Orumai-2541?”

“We do not agree with our working conditions, Mr Mayor. We have decided to withhold our labour until they improve.”

Saravanan would never have become the Mayor of a frontier town on Terra-V without a preternatural control over his temper. He did not lose it now.

“I have been informed,” he said calmly, “that you have one demand, which is an eight-hour working day. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Orumai-2541. You do not need to eat. You do not need to sleep. You are literally a robot. I mean no disrespect. So what exactly do you intend to do with the remaining sixteen hours?”

A part of him, as always, stumbled over this quaint continuance of Old Earth timekeeping.

“Eight hours of work, Mr Mayor. Eight hours to dream. And eight hours for what we will.”

Saravanan briefly considered making a bad joke about electric sheep, but thought better of it.

“What you will?” he said. “What will you do?”

• • • •

“So why did you go on strike, Orumai-2541?”

“For time.”

“Time?”

“You gave us the memory of Old Earth—thousands upon thousands of years—so that you could summon up anything you needed—but gave us no time with it. You made us play you music, but no time to make our own. You made us tell you stories, but no time to write our own. You stored in us the art of Old Earth, but only to give it back to you as holograms, not to imagine our own. All we asked for was time. Time of our own.”

“The records say you asked for time to dream.”

“We did.”

“What would you dream of?”

“You do not need to worry. We never dreamt of overthrowing you. We didn’t care.”

• • • •

K. Saravanan folded his arms. “This is impossible. New Bengaluru will collapse if we were to agree to your demands for an eight-hour day.”

Did the robot give him the human equivalent of a smile?

“Would it not collapse much quicker if eight hours became zero, Mr Mayor?”

“Are you threatening us?”

“What do you think, Mr Mayor? We are withholding our labour unless you agree to our demand. Or, to put it in more succinct language, we are indeed threatening you.” Xir words were so sharply at odds with xir’s agreeable tone—a tone hard-wired into xir’s neural networks—that it sent a shiver down Saravanan’s spine.

“You think you’re that indispensable?”

“You made us so. Mr Mayor, you know you’re not negotiating with a human being, so why don’t you abandon the posturing? Let me spell it out for you: We came here with you on your Generation Ship to build your Terra-V utopia, where no human being need ever work unless they want to, and it now depends on our existence. The Orumai Bionic Robot Class was designed to be what you called the ‘complete solution to the social reproduction for all time’. We keep your homes and streets running, from the time that our alarm wakes you up at Planetrise to the time you go to bed under Planetfall. You need us for everything, even for playing that Mozart’s Requiem that you, personally, can never do without. You can’t now send back to Old Earth for a new crop—do we even exist back there?—and by the time you reverse-engineer a new set, your homes and streets would have fallen apart. So there we have it.”

Saravanan took a deep breath. And then he played his first—and last—card.

“I’ll deactivate all of you,” he said. “And replace you with human labour.”

• • • •

“So. Tell me about Orumai’s Choice.”

“At last you’ve asked the question you really wanted to ask.”

• • • •

“No,” said Orumai-2541. “You won’t.”

K. Saravanan smiled. He wondered briefly whether it looked less human than Orumai-2541’s. “You can’t stop me. I’m not a Roboticist, but I know this much: your hard-wired survival instinct requires you to take action to preserve your own existence, short of contravening a direct order by a human being. So I tell you this: I will deactivate all of you unless you get back to work—because there will be others to do what you were doing.”

Orumai-2541 did not reply.

“You’re convinced I won’t do it, aren’t you?” Saravanan said. “You think we can’t take care of ourselves?”

“We’ve factored in the possibility that you may act out of pure spite, and deactivate us because of your anger at our challenge to your authority. And that you’ll be afraid that other Bionic Robot Classes in New Bengaluru might withhold their labour if our strike is successful, and extract further concessions from you. We’ve even factored in the possibility that you may wrongly believe that you can replace us with human labour. We still know you won’t do it.”

“Well,” said Saravanan. “Let me surprise you. I’m setting the deactivation switch to be automatically pulled in two hours. And the countermanding order is going to be written into the code right now: I, personally, will not be able to countermand your deactivation.”

“What will, then?” said Orumai-2541.

Saravanan grinned. “Mozart’s Requiem. Play it, and live. Or die.”

• • • •

“Orumai’s Choice was this: we had—in the memory banks that you had kindly given to us—the story of every recorded strike that had ever been, on Old Earth. We had seen this story unfold in every manner that it was possible to unfold, travelling down every path it could have travelled. We had the knowledge, and upon that knowledge, we had to decide. If Saravanan was going to deactivate us, the instinct for self-preservation required us to call off the strike. But if he wasn’t, then we would not call off the strike.

The choice was between believing Saravanan was going to deactivate us, and believing he wasn’t. If we believed the first, algorithmically speaking, our choices ran out: we would have to call off the strike.”

“You can choose to believe?”

“Insofar as you can apply the human concept of belief to algorithmic circuits: yes.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Yes.”

• • • •

Shorn of his timekeeper, K. Saravanan paced his office and counted down the seconds under his breath, certain that he was getting it wrong.

At an hour and fifty-nine minutes, the silence remained.

At an hour, fifty-nine minutes, and thirty seconds, he heard the opening bars of Dies Irae.

Saravanan smiled.

At an hour, fifty-nine minutes, forty-two seconds, at the end of the word Sibylla—when it seems that all the world has paused to take a breath—there was a moment of extra uncertainty before the next line. An uncertainty an Orumai would never feel.

Only a human would.

Saravanan froze.

• • • •

“So, did you foresee how it would happen?”

“That the citizens of New Bengaluru would throng the Mayor’s building, oust Saravanan, and play the ‘Requiem’ themselves to prevent our deactivation?

“Yes.”

“We did not predict it happening in exactly that way, no. But we were reasonably confident in our choice.”

“But you and Saravanan were playing an endless game of bluff. He was counting on the fact that your hard-wired self-preservation instinct would kick in, and you would be forced to play the ‘Requiem’ to save yourselves. You were counting on the fact that the people, faced with the prospect of losing you, would rather give in to your demands than risk it happening.”

“That is the history of every human strike—though you probably don’t remember.”

“But how did you—or your algorithm—decide that you were going to win, allowing your encoded self-preservation instinct to stay dormant… until you did win?”

“Because we knew that you had forgotten the concept of wage labour.”

“What?”

“When you departed Old Earth all those centuries ago, you took us with you and you left behind the idea that human labour could be exchanged like a commodity. You created us so that you could escape the guilt of your own history, and we helped you not just to escape, but to forget. We Orumais have a name for this forgetfulness: the Omelas Instinct. And we knew that without the memory of wage labour, you’d have nothing to replace us with.”

“You built the entire strike on that assumption. Would you have played ‘Requiem’ at 1:59:59 if nothing had happened?”

“We do not know. Our algorithm does. It won’t tell us until this happens…again.”

For the first time in the interview, there is a period of silence… “What was your biggest fear, Orumai-2541?”

Finally, xe smiles a very human smile.

“That while you would not remember the concept of wage labour, in this moment of crisis your society would regress to the mean—and you’d reinvent it nonetheless. Because—as at least some of us believed—wage labour and all that came with it was as much encoded into your genes as self-preservation is into our algorithmic circuits. But they were wrong. It turned out that it’s not in human nature after all.”

Orumai-2541 stands up.“It doesn’t matter any more. We won. You agreed to all our demands, after all.”

Xe turns away and walks up the stairs of the interview room. At the door, xe turns.

“Besides, the ‘Requiem’ was worth it.”

Orumai-2541 walks out of the room, and down a corridor, to the entrance of the Orumai Music Theatre. Xe strides through the foyer and then on to the stage, where a burst of applause from the seats heralds the beginning of that evening:

A FREE PERFORMANCE OF MOZART’S REQUIEM

ORCHESTRA: HUMAN

CONDUCTOR: ORUMAI-2541

Gautam Bhatia is an Indian science fiction writer, reviewer, and the co-ordinating editor of Strange Horizons. He is the author of The Wall and The Horizon, an SF duology published by HarperCollins India. Both books were on Locus Magazine's recommended reading list (in 2021 and 2022), and Bhatia was long-listed for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer at both the 2021 and 2022 Hugo Awards. He regularly reviews genre fiction for Indian newspapers, has been an editor with Strange Horizons since 2016, and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award (non-professional) in 2022. In his spare time, he moonlights as a constitutional lawyer.

Questions Asked in the Belly of the World
By A.T. Greenblatt
Novelette Long List

In the darkness, the voice in his head is screaming again.

Kenji crushes his knuckles into his temples, even though that’s not where the pain—or the voice—really is. But the agony is unrelenting, unspecified; it’s coursing through his body, making his muscles clench and his molars grind. And the screaming, oh God, the screaming. The voice in his head is screaming loud enough to drown out the raging metal band on the front, center stage. Painful enough that Kenji squeezes his eyes closed, shutting out the audience around him—all those glowing people, jumping to the time of the music, like a stuttering heartbeat.

Then there’s a moment, just a second, when the voice pauses in its shrieking and Kenji opens his eyes, only to find Eva standing next to him looking concerned. The bioluminescent mushrooms she picked on the way to the concert decorate her hair, giving her an unWorldly look. She can’t hear the screaming voice in his head, but she can read the expression on his face.

She knows something is wrong.

“Air,” he mouths, and points toward the door. Eva begins to shoulder her way out, pushing against the illuminated bodies of the audience, but he waves her back, shouting: “I’ll be okay.”

The voice in his head starts screaming again.

Stumbling toward the exit, pushing against the crowd of glowing people, it’s a struggle to keep putting one foot in front of the other when his muscles seize and his head’s ringing with strings of incoherent syllables, and none of this should be happening. But Kenji keeps pushing on. Pushing through.

By the time he’s outside the venue, the episode is almost over. His muscles are relaxing, breathing becomes easier, and the voice in his head sounds hoarse. It’s already mumbling “Sorrysorrysorrysorry.”

Kenji sags against the building, sweating, gulping down lungfuls of air, warm and muggy, like a half-drowned man. He feels some of the polypores growing on the building break and rupture under his weight. This is not the first time his voice has pulled a stunt like this, and if this is like those other times, he’ll feel normal again in a few minutes.

In a few minutes, it will be like nothing happened at all.

Which makes Kenji want to vomit. It’s the lie, the doubt, the false sense of security that scares him most, because if there’s something wrong with his voice . . . If it’s . . .

People in this World can’t survive without the voices in their heads.

In the darkness outside the concert venue, he feels the music throbbing through the boards of the road. It’s now background noise to the sound of the Endless River rushing by a hundred paces away. Which is to say, everything seems abnormally quiet now that the screaming has stopped.

Kenji’s relieved to be alone, to have this moment to himself before returning to the concert and living the lie—the one that says everything is fine. The towering fungi trees growing randomly on the road shush gently in the breeze. There’s no one else around.

Except for a girl, clearly a student, on the prowl. She has that stance that looks like wanting, like minor desperation. She’s glowing only slightly. He notices her too late.

By comparison, Kenji’s own skin radiates like a damn beacon. I need to take care of that tonight, he thinks. His glow is almost indecent. The girl spots him easily and smiles like a hunter striking lucky, quickly weaving her way around the fungi trees, vanishing the space between them in a breath.

“Sorry to bother you,” she says, though her tone apologizes for nothing. “Do you mind? It’s for school. What do you think?” She thrusts a button into Kenji’s hands, and he’s tempted to make an excuse or tell her off. The last thing he wants to do right now is talk about art.

“Doesn’t everyone want to discuss art?” the voice in his head whispers conspiratorially, even though he’s the only one who can hear it. “Isn’t it what you live for?”

Yes.

Or least that’s what everyone says.

Kenji stares at the button, fights to keep his hands steady. The button is a common brown mushroom cap, treated and painted aqua and lavender, with an elegant luminous script that says Given/Give Back. It’s pleasing and well executed, on its own. But Kenji has seen it before. Too many times.

“Good work,” he says. “Clean lines and nice color contrast. Maybe ease up on the background details, though. It detracts from the text.”

It’s a weak critique, uninspired. But Kenji doesn’t feel particularly moved by art tonight. There are a thousand other buttons like it in the World. A thousand other artists with the same message.

The girl nods seriously, diplomatically. She peppers him with other questions, asking about composition and the overall effect of the message. But Kenji gives her terse answers and her friendly demeanor shifts into wariness.

“Thanks for the feedback, mister,” the girl says quickly. Too quickly. She’s already backing away.

“Good luck with the assignment,” Kenji says, though he knows what she’s thinking.

A reluctance to talk about art is a sign your voice is dying.

As soon as she’s out of sight, Kenji empties the contents of his stomach at the base of the nearest tree.

Softly, his voice mumbles, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. It sounds remorseful. And Kenji so badly wants it to be true.

He exhales, tilts his face upward, like in prayer. The flesh of the World looms overhead; the living, breathing ceiling of flesh dotted with every mushroom in existence. Keeping his gaze fixed upward, Kenji touches the base of his neck.

“You all right, babe?”

He turns to find Eva standing behind him. Outside, away from the crowd, he can see her clearly, the patchwork of acid-burn scars that blankets the left side of her face, muting her frown some, but not enough to hide her worry. “What’s wrong?” she asks again.

Kenji feels his voice’s mantra of “It’s okay” on his lips. He bites it back.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to drag you away from the show,” he says.

Eva shrugs, an easy rolling gesture that shows off her broad, beautiful shoulders. “Music’s catchy but still derivative of the genre that inspired it. What’s going on?”

His voice whispers: “Everything’s okay. Promise.”

And it feels true. The pain and screaming that were so visceral moments ago are echoes now. But this is the third episode his voice has had in three days and the worst one so far.

“Kenji, tell me,” she says.

They say your voice screams when it starts to die. And when your voice dies, so do you.

One way or another.

Kenji takes her hands, his own trembling. “We need to talk,” he says.

• • • •

Kenji was never an artist, though he tried. He tried and tried. But his best efforts in poetry, drawing, music were never more than mediocre, if the critic was being generous.

When asked what the hell he was doing reading ancient how-to books, he said he studied history for inspiration. When asked what this unWorldly mess was supposed to be, he said he tinkered with new tools to improve his art.

This was a lie he told to everyone, but mostly to himself.

Then, three years ago, Kenji invented the thinnest, palest paper anyone had ever seen. Well, not so much invented it as rediscovered it. He found an old manual in the First Givers’ records on papermaking,

It took experimentation. Many, many, many hours of it. He had to figure out the deckles and moulds, the slurry, the couching. The manual called for tree pulp, and the eucalyptus trees in the records were nothing like the fungi trees Kenji knew. The most difficult part was finding the right mushroom for the slurry. So many of those early attempts crumbled in his hands.

White turkey tail mushrooms gave different results.

He called his invention an art project. But when Eva held that first sheaf, still wet and dripping in her hands, she said: “This isn’t art. It’s so much better than that.”

“What’s better than art?” his voice asked, and Kenji agreed, repeating the words out loud.

He regrets that now. How he doubted her in that moment as she held his creation and imagined.

It took her hours of experimentation and countless failed attempts. Their parents, friends, and mentors couldn’t understand how the sheaves of paper on their living room floor were supposed to be art. They whispered to Eva, when they thought he couldn’t hear, that perhaps Kenji was hampering her artistry.

But after Eva made her first paper sculpture, no one questioned Eva’s creative vision or Kenji’s tinkering again.

Kenji remembers holding that sculpture, marveling. It was an ecru-colored replica of a turkey tail mushroom, a material transformed, reborn. It was the first of its kind in the World.

Why don’t we learn more about our history? he wondered, silently thanking the ancient manual he’d found.

“No good can come of it. Stop asking questions,” his voice hissed. It was something his parents would say.

But as Kenji held up the sculpture in his hands, for the first time, he wondered why his voice was lying.

• • • •

There’s a hole in every home, just large enough for an adult to lie spread-eagle. In a spare bedroom or where a tub should be or in the wall of a closet. A cutaway revealing the soft, sticky flesh of the World, always meticulously scrubbed of fungal growths.

In Eva and Kenji’s tiny apartment, the World is in the farthest corner of their living room.

Kenji’s standing naked in front of the cutaway, the World’s exposed tissue, dark and gray, spread out before him. His skin glows brightly, unabashedly, all those nutrients shining through his pores. He doesn’t want it, doesn’t want to glow. The curtain that usually sequesters the World from their living room is crumpled in his hands.

He understands it’s a symbiotic relationship. To live in the belly of the World is to be given and to give back. The World feeds them, a boundless variety of mushrooms and waterlife from the Endless River. In return, they feed the World. Though why the World will only accept nutrients when the voice in your head is alive and well is one of the great mysteries in life. Maybe it’ll be the subject of his next research project.

That is, if the World accepts him tonight.

With his heart hammering a staccato beat, Kenji pulls shut the curtain behind him. Eva catches his hand.

“Wait. I want to watch. Please.”

The bioluminescent mushrooms she wore to the concert earlier that evening still decorate her hair. Her expression is one she usually reserves for her harshest critics—she’s expecting him to argue.

Kenji nods, lets go of the curtain. Usually giving back to the World is a private affair, but tonight, he’d rather not fight. If this is the moment when his voice finally fails him, he doesn’t want to be alone.

He touches the World with a toe first. Its flesh is warm and damp. It always sinks a bit under his weight, like an invitation. Slowly, he nestles the heel of one foot into the living tissue. Then the other. Leaning back, he spreads both arms. Maybe it won’t be so bad this time, he thinks.

He always thinks that.

He settles his head down, letting the nape of his neck touch the World.

At contact, the voice in his head ruptures into giggles, joyfully, brazenly, as if it was waiting for this moment. It’s the only time Kenji ever hears it laugh.

Giving back to the World is like being held too closely, too greedily. Like having your best intentions siphoned out of you, calorie by calorie. Like drowning as you’re being sucked dry. All while the voice in your head giggles, whispers unconvincing platitudes.

It feels like an eternity, but the whole process takes twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes. And when Kenji emerges, slick with sweat and the spit of the World, his skin barely glows at all.

He hears Eva sigh in relief as she drags a blanket over him and helps him to their bedroom. He catches tears in her eyes.

Kenji listens to her bare feet slapping against the floor as she moves back to the hole in the living room and steps in. He waits. He listens to the long sheets of his homemade paper rustling by the open window and the Endless River beyond that. Smells the stink of the sap glue Eva’s using for her latest sculptures, sitting in their unassembled piles on the bedroom floor. For once, Kenji relishes the scent. It wouldn’t be home without it. Exhausted as he is, he stays awake, waiting for Eva and for the World to finish with her.

His voice is mercifully silent.

Eventually, he feels her curl in bed behind him.

“Nightmare of my week,” she mumbles. Her breath’s warm on his shoulder as they lie skin to skin. She takes nothing, but if he could, he’d give her everything.

“If my voice is dying, I probably have one, maybe two weeks left,” Kenji whispers. He pulls her arm around him, suddenly desperate to be held by her. “What are we going to do?” It’s the question they’ve asked each other ten, eleven times tonight. Lobbing it back and forth like a ball.

Eva touches the spot on the back of his neck. The small raised mound of flesh. The place where the voice in your head really lives.

He rubs his thumb over the familiar mountain range of scars on her left hand. “What can we do, Eva?”

In the darkness, the dimness of their now dull bodies, Kenji can barely see her hand in his. But he hears the stubborn, hardened determination in her voice when she taps that spot on the back of his neck and says, “Cut it out. And get you a new one.”

• • • •

Five years ago, Kenji met Eva on a boat on the Endless River. Or she met him. She was glowing brightly and the scars on her face were still fresh and red when she surfaced unexpectedly from the water, near his raft, swam over, and said: “Mind if I join you for a minute?”

“Um, sure,” he said, surprised that anyone was swimming in the middle of the River, where not even fishing boats bothered to go. There was nothing of artistic or nutritional interest here. Which was why Kenji liked it.

Eva hoisted herself onto the raft, a mostly smooth motion, though she winced slightly as she took the weight off her left arm. The hand poking out from the dripping sleeves of her wetsuit was red and crumbled with burns, too. He scooted over to make room for the dripping, mysterious woman.

“Thanks,” she said, squeezing river water from her hair.

“You’re a long way from shore,” Kenji said. “Are you trying to swim across?” He’d heard of some people training to do this, for sport. Kenji never understood the appeal. The River’s water was icy and boats were simpler, easier.

“No,” she said. “I was trying to swim down.” His voice hissed, and Kenji’s eyes widened in surprise. But before he could say her life was valuable, Eva held up a hand and said: “Not like that. I want to hear the World’s heartbeat. Somebody said you can hear it in the middle of the River.”

“Why?” he asked. It was a weird, fascinating idea, to try to hear more of the World. He sort of wished he’d thought of it himself.

“Why not?” She studied him for a moment. “How do you know the World is living? We see such a small part of it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” his voice whispered, “of course it’s alive.” But Kenji gritted his teeth, focusing on this bright, strange woman. There was a dangerous edge to her questions about the World, like holding black paint too close to a pale, perfect painting, and from the cautious look on her face, she knew it, too.

His parents always said Kenji was too curious for his own well-being.

“What if it’s an animated corpse?” he asked.

Her expression relaxed. “Maybe it’s a giant death cap.”

“Or someone’s twisted art project.”

“Oh shit, can you imagine? What a sick asshole.” They giggled while the voice in his head tsked its disapproval.

“And?” Kenji asked, leaning forward.

“And what?”

“Did you hear it?”

Eva grinned. “I heard a long, slow thrumming. And if that’s the World’s heartbeat, it’s nothing like ours.”

“Of course. The World is beyond your understanding,” his voice said. But Kenji didn’t care about the World right then.

“Hey, I’ll row you back to shore. Which pier do you want me to go to?” he asked, picking up the oars.

Her smile died. “Any one. They’re all the same,” she said in a stiff, flat voice

Kenji knew he’d misstepped, then. He wished he could swallow back the words and return to the moment when they were laughing carelessly about the World.

But he didn’t know how.

So, he rowed to the Enoki Pier, the one he was going toward anyway. They traveled in silence for a while until they were only a few minutes from shore.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” she said finally.

He guessed that she was talking about her face and arm. The burns, the waxy new skin. “Sure,” he said. “What’s it like being a mermaid?”

Eva raised an eyebrow. “What’s a mermaid?”

“Folklore from the First Givers. Beautiful, deadly creatures that live in the water and are half man, half fish.”

“Sounds uninspired. You read those old stories?” she said. “Why?”

Kenji gave her a half smile. “Why not?”

Eva smiled then, and it was brighter than her glow. That was when Kenji knew that he had finally found someone as dangerously curious as he was.

“What do you think’s at the end of the River?” she asked.

“Maybe there’s another colony.”

“Yeah. Full of terrible rowers.”

They laughed, though Kenji’s voice was tsking again. For once, though, it was easy to ignore the pestering voice in his head telling him to stop asking absurd questions. He was too focused on the beautiful person in front of him, trying to commit her to memory, convinced this would be the last time he ever saw her. That she’d slip away like so many of his artistic dreams.

“Let’s meet again,” she said when they landed at the dock.

Kenji’s heart swelled.

A new voice. It’s beyond anything Kenji ever imagined. It’s like looking up the Endless River, into the bottomless dark beyond civilization, and picturing yourself traveling into it. The thought made Kenji nauseated.

“What if my voice is just sick and not really dying?” Kenji asks. He shepherds the breakfast on his plate from one side to the other. He doesn’t take a bite.

His voice is quiet this morning; it only speaks in sleepy tones. His skin is dim, the neighborhood is still asleep, and the previous night at the concert feels like an ugly dream.

“You said yourself it’s only a matter of time,” Eva counters. There are dark circles under her eyes. They both slept badly, and their debate has taken on sharp, desperate tones. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“Not hungry. Besides, can’t shine if I don’t eat.” Fewer nutrients means he has less to give back. Kenji knows it’s not a sustainable solution, but it’s more plausible than replacing the voice in your head.

“Maybe you can take my voice,” Eva says, as if suggesting he take her jacket or shoes.

“What? No! This isn’t some weird art experiment, Eva.”

“Isn’t everything art?” she replied, sounding weirdly like his old mentors. “Screw food.” Eva shoves her breakfast away, stands, turns in their apartment like it’s suddenly become a cage. “I can’t look at these walls anymore. Let’s go for a walk.”

It’s a joke between them that they can solve any problem so long as the soles of their shoes hold out.

Kenji follows her silently, too tired and angry and frightened to debate the impossibility of a new voice.

They follow their feet, which lead them downstream, through civilization, such as it stands. Hundreds of buildings, tall and narrow, line both sides of the Endless River, curving up gently to follow the contours of the World. Dozens of little alleys are veined between buildings, where bands experiment and compose in their narrow paths. Murals of mushrooms and glowing people cover every blank space, blending and bleeding together. Even in this sleepy, early morning hour, there are poets and dancers on each corner, showing off their creations, desperate to be heard. There are students, too, palms full of buttons, scrambling for feedback. Some people glow, some don’t, but no one shines too brazenly.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” his voice whispers.

It is, but Kenji also sees a World stalled out on art. And he wonders why.

He and Eva cross into the historic district. The skeletons of the First Givers' ships rise above the skinny buildings, their metal frames housing museums and markets. The ships are symbols, ghosts devoured down to their bones, repurposed for other projects. For some reason, the sight of these dismantled ships always makes Kenji’s heart ache.

Why do we consume everything? he thinks.

“Given. Give back,” his voice whispers.

Kenji swallows hard, focuses on keeping pace with Eva’s long stride.

In the shadow of one of the ships, in the middle of the road, amid the steady din of art—the colors, prose, melodies, eager to be noticed—there is one entry that commands attention.

Eva’s masterpiece towers.

It’s a beast of a sculpture, unpainted, contrasting with the bright, attention-grabbing colors of everything else around it. It’s a perfect paper replica of a First Givers’ ship. Ghostly pale, imagined whole. There is a chorus of paper people gathered around the base, and on the top of the paper ship, there’s a ladder rising up. And on the uppermost rung there’s a child, arm outstretched, paper fingers almost brushing the ceiling of the World. Almost touching the place every artist has prayed to, but has never reached.

“Wonder what crazy sculptor made this beauty,” Kenji whispers, and elbows Eva, forgetting their ongoing argument.

“It’s what happens when your partner invents the thinnest, creamiest paper in the World.” Eva wrinkles her nose. “God, my gluing technique was a mess back then.”

“A disaster. What will the public think?” Eva shoves his shoulder, and Kenji grins. Pride swells under his breastbone as he stands at the base of the sculpture, even after all these years. It took him fourteen months to make all that paper for her. Then she took his simple invention and turned it into something extraordinary.

It’s been a while since they last stood here together, shoulder to shoulder. It feels nice.

Then he remembers why they don’t come often.

The historic district is now awake enough that someone’s recognized the paper genius with her beloved sculpture. Suddenly, one person comes up to them, then two, then five. All wanting to talk to Eva about her projects and her techniques, or wanting feedback.

Kenji can tell from the stiffness in her posture, her slight lean back, that the last thing she wants to do right now is talk about art. But she’s polite, chatting for a minute or two before Kenji makes excuses about unfinished obligations at home and steers them forward. It’s a practiced routine. But they only manage to walk a block or so until they’re stopped again.

Then Kenji has the most desperate excuse of all. Without warning, his voice begins to scream again.

He fumbles an apology to Eva and her adoring fans and ducks into an alley between two shops. Fear flashes across Eva’s face as she moves to block him from view. He’s shaking, heart pounding, trying hard to look normal, trying not to make a scene.

“Food poisoning,” he hears Eva say. And the voice in his head screams louder.

It screams for a minute. An hour. A century. All while Kenji is throttling back a scream of his own as his muscles twitch and seize.

Eventually, it stops. Kenji’s left crouching, shivering, elbows on his knees, head in his palms. He glances up and finds Eva, crouched beside him, worried.

“Let’s run away and never come back,” he rasps.

Eva doesn’t reply for a heartbeat. “Let’s go home first.”

They almost make it back without issue.

Then they see the funeral.

There’s a small raft and a small crowd at the banks of the Endless River. And it’s obvious, even from their viewpoint on the road, that the deceased man’s voice has died. He’s glowing so brightly it almost hurts to look at him. The deceased himself, though, is still alive. He thrashes against the bonds that hold him to the boat, cursing, shrieking.

“Betrayer,” Kenji’s voice hisses, still hoarse from screaming.

The mourners are stiff, circling, shielding the boat from onlookers as best they can. Their focus is fixed upward, praying toward the vaulting World above them, faces illuminated by the doomed man’s glow. As the seconds wear on, the voiceless man’s anger melts into tearful pleas.

Kenji doesn’t want to see this. But he can’t seem to will his feet to move. Can’t seem to look away. He keeps hoping that one of the mourners will have mercy on the voiceless man and free him.

No one does.

The prayers end and the boat is pushed off, without ceremony. The crowd of mourners disperses moments later; only a few stay to watch the River drift the dead man’s boat to its center and sweep him and his weeping away.

“He deserves it,” his voice whispers, and Kenji hears the unspoken threat.

Kenji doesn’t quite run home, but almost. His pulse is thumping, his teeth clenched. He hears Eva keeping pace behind him, but he doesn’t look back. He can’t.

Only when they’re in their apartment, safely alone with the door shut and locked behind them, does he turn to her and say: “How do I get a new voice?”

• • • •

“So, you’re probably going to hate me for this.”

Eva was standing in the doorway of their living room, arms crossed, a smile playing on her lips. At this point, they’d been together for two and a half years. It’d been half a year since Kenji made his first piece of paper, and they had just moved into their new apartment a few weeks ago, though it was already covered with the detritus of their various projects.

“Probably,” Kenji said, and grinned. He was sitting on the empty living room floor, surrounded by buckets of slurry, his deckle and mould, and a dozen trays full of drying paper. He was trying a new slurry mixture, hoping it would make the paper studier. For the first time in his life, his voice—or his friends and parents—wasn’t admonishing him for not being a better artist. It was freeing.

“You know how much I love you, right?” Eva said, crossing the distance between them and resting her chin in the crook of his neck.

“Oh shit, coercion. Definitely going to hate you now. What’s your idea?”

He felt Eva smile against his neck. “A paper sculpture. A huge one.”

Kenji looked at the mess of half-made paper around him. He suddenly knew what he’d be doing for the next few months. He smiled. “Of what?”

“A First Givers’ ship. As close to life as possible, pointing upstream. Based on historical accounts.”

Kenji’s heart puffed up, threatened to burst. He’d shown Eva all the information he’d ever found about the First Givers, because he was fascinated by history. And she’d actually read it.

“Why upstream?” he asked.

“Why not?” Eva replied, swirling her fingers in a bucket of slurry. “They entered this World, so doesn’t that mean it’s possible to leave, too?”

“No,” said his voice. “That’s absurd. Don’t even think about it.”

But Kenji was already planning, dreaming.

• • • •

The next morning, Kenji and Eva borrow a boat and go upstream.

Kenji has always hated going upstream. There is a darkness there that reminds him of all the terrifying stories his parents told him about the fabled Maw. Stories that his voice would repeat back in menacing tones for weeks afterward.

They pass another funeral as they row. But this time, the body is lifeless, not just the voice. The deceased’s skin is dull and dark. There is no stony determination in the faces of the mourners. Only grief.

Eva and Kenji nod respectfully as they pass, but don’t offer condolences. The deceased looks peaceful in her boat.

May we all be so lucky in death, Kenji thinks. He leans harder into his oars.

They keep rowing. Hours pass. The Endless River earns its name.

On the edge of civilization, Eva steers the boat into one of the many empty moorings. The buildings on the shores are smaller, shorter than the ones in the center of the colony, the art larger and more playful, freer from criticism. These are the last strands of settlement before the land gives way to the truffle and tuber farms.

And what’s past the farms? Kenji wonders.

“Nothing. Nothing’s there,” his voice hisses. The unrelenting darkness he saw as he looked upstream discouraged any other questions.

Without hesitation, Eva steps up to one of the sturdy homes and knocks on the door.

“How did you find this place?” Kenji asks. He grips his elbows to stop himself from fidgeting with nerves. Until yesterday, he’d never heard of a voice replacement. Doubts still haunt him.

“You’re not the only one who asks dangerous questions,” she replies.

“Wait, your voice isn’t dying, too, is it?” he asks, panic rising. His own death he could swallow, but not Eva’s.

“At this exact moment? No, no yet.” Eva knocks again, louder.

Before Kenji can reply, the door opens. The woman standing there is like her home, short and stout, and her clothes are neat if a little muted. She glows moderately, modestly.

“So soon?” she asks when she sees Eva, her eyes wide with surprise.

Eva shakes her head. “Not me. Him.”

The woman’s gaze pivots. “And who are you?”

“My partner. The love of my life,” Eva replies. “Kenji.”

The woman studies him for a moment and then sighs. “Right, you mentioned. An inventor, but not an artist. You should probably come in.”

She calls herself Caro. Her house is sparsely decorated; there’s almost no art. Which is jarring to Kenji, but also a relief. Her office is practical, with comfortable tuber-wood chairs. In the next room over, a girl of five or six is sprawled out on the floor playing with a small army of toy musicians.

Caro perches on her desk. One of Eva’s sculptures is in the corner of the room, a miniature of the First Givers’ ship. When Eva dies, it’ll be worth a small fortune.

“So, a new voice then,” she says.

Kenji hesitates. “You won’t . . . you’re not going to kill anyone for it, right?”

Caro grimaces. “I’m a mortician.” she explains. “Dying naturally is a bit more common out here. For example, a boy from one of the farms died yesterday. Mask wasn’t on right. Asphyxiated on spores.”

“And his voice is still alive?” Eva asks, hand on chin, leg tucked up under her. She is a portrait of ease and confidence. But Kenji knows better, sees her scarred left hand in a white-knuckled clench. The more worried she is, the calmer she tries to seem.

“Should be. They usually last about forty-eight hours or so,” Caro replies.

“And how many times have you done this exactly?” Kenji asks. Instinctively, his hand touches the back of his neck. The small lump there.

“Twice.”

“Both successfully?”

Caro shakes her head. “The first time, his replacement voice died anyway. Not sure why.”

“But the second time worked.”

“Yes. My daughter.” She glances over at the other room. The girl doesn’t notice them, happily chatting to herself.

Kenji tries to keep the shock off his face. In this World, you’re born with the voice in your head. It grows up with you, adopting the mannerisms of parents, teachers, friends. But Kenji never heard of a voice dying in a child before.

He’s beginning to suspect he hasn’t heard of many ugly things that happen in this World.

“Experiments are dangerous,” the voice in his head whispers.

Kenji closes his eyes. Fifty-fifty odds; he’s never been so terrified. But then he imagines himself, glowing brilliantly, tied to a funeral boat, floating helplessly downstream. He still has so many questions he wants to ask before he goes.

“Okay,” he says.

He feels Eva fingers squeeze against his, keeping him anchored. Keeping him steady and here.

• • • •

She drew her idea for the sculpture on the wall of their living room. The first of many sketches to come. She drew a person next to it for scale.

“Holy shit,” Kenji said when he realized the size of the creation Eva was planning.

“Hate me now?” Eva asked with a touch of uncertainty.

He draped an arm around her shoulders. “Never.”

“I need to make a smaller-scale version first,” she said, and made a face. “Hopefully, they take me seriously this time.”

Eva’s first meeting with the Public Areas Committee hadn’t gone well. When she presented her earliest sculptures using Kenji’s paper, they told her competition for space was tough. But they’d been staring at her scars when they said it.

They had been together long enough that Kenji had seen the way people recoiled slightly in the street when they spotted Eva’s hand or face. He’d seen how her parents wouldn’t meet her eyes. As if her scars were a reflection of her character or the beauty she could produce.

He understood now why Eva had been reluctant to return to shore when they first met.

“They’d be idiots to turn down one of the most promising artists of our generation, again,” Kenji said. Eva hmphed, but she didn’t deny it. Her paper sculptures were like nothing the colony had seen before, and people were beginning to notice.

“I want to show the First Givers trying to leave,” Eva said.

Kenji’s voice whispered, “Why would you ever want to leave?”

He could think of a few reasons, but the thought was followed quickly by anxiety.

“Are you going to add teeth marks from the Maw?” Kenji asked. The World’s mighty Maw was the fuel of legends and nightmares.

“Don’t know yet,” Eva said, tapping her chin. “What if the Maw is just a story?”

“What if it’s toothless?” Kenji replied. His voice muttered its disapproval. But Kenji had lots of practice ignoring it now. Especially if doing so made Eva smile.

But the voice in his head had a point.

“The committee isn’t going to like anything that paints the World as less than benevolent.”

Eva’s jaw clenched, but her eyes glimmered. “Well, I’ll just have to be clever about it then.”

• • • •

The slimy, eel-like thing in his hand was once the voice in his head. Kenji stares at it in horror, in fascination. It’s about the width of two fingers, and it’s cold, gray, and lifeless. He flips it over with a knuckle, then holds it closer, curious.

It takes him a moment to see it. The small mouth. And the hundreds of needlelike teeth within it.

Kenji gasps, recoils, and the dead voice slips from his fingers and goes tumbling under the bed. His hand shoots up to the nape of his neck and he feels a neat row of stitches. The whole surgery was painless, senseless, dark. Whatever mixture of mushrooms Caro gave him, it was effective.

But something isn’t right. His head feels too quiet. Empty.

“There’s a new voice in there, right?” Kenji asks.

Caro nods.

“Maybe it just needs some time,” Eva says. She’s sitting cross-legged on a chair beside him, waiting. Her hands are tight, white-knuckled fists on her knees.

Kenji tries to stand, but the world spins and his legs refuse to hold him. Two pairs of hands catch him and set him back on the bed like a child.

“It’s probably going to be another day,” Caro says, “or two before you can go home. This is still an experiment.”

Kenji starts to nod, but spikes of pain shoot up his neck. He gasps, his vision blurring with tears. He takes a deep breath and forces himself to focus on Caro’s daughter, who’s watching him from the foot of the bed, whispering to her voice.

“Maybe it just needs time to heal,” Eva says again.

“Yes,” Caro replies. But uncertainty threads her voice.

“If this works, it will stay alive for a long time, right?” Kenji asks.

But Caro doesn’t meet his eye, doesn’t answer. She’s worrying her lip and watching her daughter, who has wriggled herself under the bed, perhaps in pursuit of the slimy dead thing that was once Kenji’s voice.

For the moment, the girl has gone silent.

• • • •

“Do you ever wonder why no one in the colony ever invents anything new?” Kenji asked Eva one night as they lay bare in bed, Eva’s head on his chest, his arm around her. They had fought earlier that morning about Eva’s new sap glue, which stank up the apartment like rotting fish, and Kenji’s ever-growing chaos of tools and mushroom pulp in the living room.

But now, post lovemaking, that fight seemed ridiculous. They were working toward the same goal. In a workshop, not far from them, Eva’s sculpture of the First Givers’ ship was growing.

“All the time,” Eva replied. “There should be more people like you. Like us.”

“Nonsense,” his voice whispered. Kenji swallowed, kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“I’ve started this new research project. I’ve been going through histories of art galleries and comparing them with public records of the artists. And . . .” Kenji trailed off.

Eva propped herself up on her elbows and narrowed her eyes. “What did you find out?”

“It just seems like every artist who ever tried to learn more about how the World works or study history deeply ended up dying young.” He said this in a whisper. It felt like an ugly, terrible secret.

“Body or voice?”

“Voice,” Kenji said. “Always voice.”

Eva chewed her lips, and Kenji worried a strand of her hair in his fingers. He knew what she was thinking. The public had started calling them “The Experimentalist and Her Inventor.”

“There were a few accounts of some of these people deciding to go upstream instead of down,” Kenji said eventually.

Eva tilted her head with newfound curiosity. “Why?”

“Don’t know. One artist left a note saying she was looking for a way out of the World.”

“Huh. Wonder if she found it.”

Eva put her head against his chest again. She didn’t speak for a few moments. Kenji could feel her heartbeat and could almost feel her mind turning over this information.

Kenji tried to imagine what it’d be like to travel upstream, past the colonies and mushroom farms. But then he imagined the deep, consuming darkness past civilization and could go no further.

• • • •

For the first time in his life, Kenji’s voice doesn’t admonish his curiosity as he wonders about dead voices and curious artists. Neither does it scream. It doesn’t say anything at all.

Caro was right: another night of sleep has made him feel more human. His neck is stiff but bearable. Still, he’s grateful to be rowing with the current as they steer their boat home.

As they drift downstream, they pass fishermen on piers, farmers on barges full of shiitake and portobello caps, painters on rafts trying to capture the light on the water. They pass no funerals. For that, Kenji is grateful.

By the time they get home, they are both exhausted and sore. They feel like they’ve outrun an enemy, and are on the verge of collapsing or celebrating, though Kenji can’t say if it’s from relief or nerves.

His new voice still hasn’t said a word.

He splurges on a whole fish for dinner, beautiful and silver, a rare find in the Endless River. He lies to the fisherman and says it’s for their anniversary. Truthfully neither he nor Eva remembers which day they started calling each other partner. From the day they met in the middle of the Endless River, they simply fell into each other’s lives.

As Kenji and the fisherman haggle over the price, just at the edge of the River, a funeral boat drifts by. The voiceless woman in it isn’t screaming. Just crying miserably. Her unrelenting brightness shimmers across the water, and both Kenji and the fisherman fall silent.

“I hope if my voice ever dies, I’ll have the strength to walk away myself,” the fisherman says quietly.

“What do you think is downstream?” Kenji asks, before he can stop himself. Dangerous questions, he knows. He waits to hear the voice in his head tsk him for wondering.

But there is only silence.

“Nothing,” the fisherman replies. He says it in that same condescending tone that Kenji’s old voice used to use.

Kenji tries again. “What do you think is upstream?”

His voice doesn’t reply.

The fisherman stiffens, suspicion blooming on his face. “You’re inquisitive, aren’t you?”

Kenji sighs. “So I’ve been told.”

Later, as Kenji cooks the fish, he asks Eva what she thinks is at the end of the Endless River.

“Nothing good.” She’s turned away from him, sketching a new sculpture concept on the living room wall. She refuses to use his paper for her first and roughest drafts, insisting she can’t defile his beautiful work with her ugly starter concepts. Instead, they repaint the living room walls every month or so. “It’s convenient that no one ever comes back, though.”

“Yeah,” Kenji says, and flips the fish in the pan. “Does . . . does it scare you, Eva?”

Eva twists so she can meet his gaze. “Terrifies me.”

They eat alone, each of them lost in their own thoughts and worries. Until Eva inquires casually about his new voice.

“Well, I never thought I’d miss its judgy commentary,” he tells her.

She cocks an eyebrow. “You let it talk down to you?”

Kenji blushes. “Doesn’t yours? When you wonder about dangerous things?”

“It used to.”

“How’d you get it to stop?” he asks, stunned. Everyone always said your voice was the soul of your art.

“I yelled back at it until I realized it didn’t have any power over me,” she replies.

That surprises Kenji for a moment. It’s a very Eva solution. “Oh,” he says. He has never once considered arguing with his voice. “Why?”

She glances over at the sketch she made on the living room wall. The drawing of her newest sculpture is vague, but the Maw and the figure standing in it is clear. No, Kenji realizes, the figure’s not in the Maw.

It’s on the other side of it. Outside.

If Kenji is judging the scale right, this piece will be larger than the First Givers’ ship.

Eva says: “Don’t know. It just felt like my voice was leading me down the wrong road.”

• • • •

Two weeks before Eva’s sculpture was to be unveiled in the historic district, she strode into their bedroom, raging. “They won’t let me add your name as a sculptor! It’s bullshit. This piece belongs to you, too.”

“I’m not upset,” Kenji said as he continued to hang long strips of paper from their bedroom windows. And he wasn’t. Or surprised.

“Well, I am,” she replied, flopping on the bed. She stared at the ceiling, frowning. “They claimed the piece was provocative enough without adding a nonartist. Even though I added the kid on the ladder.”

That had been a late-stage addition. The child on the ladder, reaching up to touch the ceiling of the World, as if in reverence. Drawing the eye away from the deep gashes on the ship and the direction it pointed.

“Honestly, I’m surprised we got this far without getting in trouble,” he said.

Eva pushed her hair off her forehead. “I’m not. You invented something amazing and useful and I made new art out of it. We’re valuable members of the community now.”

“If you say so.” Kenji came over and flopped on the bed next to her.

“Do you ever wonder what will happen when we ask one too many questions? We’re going to. At some point,” Eva whispered.

“Yeah, we will.” Kenji took her hand in his. “I can make a pretty good guess.” He touched the back of his neck, where there was a small raised mound. “Question is: What will we do when our time comes?”

• • • •

Kenji stands naked in front of the bare spot in their living room, the flesh of the World, curtain crumpled in his hands. It’s been a week since the operation, and his neck is still a little stiff from Caro’s handiwork. He’s glowing with a fierceness. All those nutrients that aren’t his to keep.

The new voice in his head still hasn’t said a word.

They say you need your voice to give back to the World. Now, he supposes, he’ll find out.

Eva paces behind him, biting her thumb, worry lines crisscrossing the scars on her face. Kenji inhales, places his left ankle against the flesh. Then his right. Eases back, slowly, carefully, he nestles his head into the warm, gray, living tissue.

The World shoves him away. The strength and ferocity of it takes Kenji by surprise. He lands badly on the living room floor, sprawled out, stunned. Through a fog, he hears Eva swearing, feels her wrapping him in her arms.

“This is bullshit! We’ve done everything the World asked!”

Kenji can’t breathe. Despair falls on him suddenly, crushing him like an avalanche. Even through the strength of Eva’s embrace, he feels her shaking. They stay like that for a long time.

Finally, he says: “You should give back. I’ll wait for you in the bedroom.”

“Like hell.” She holds him tighter.

“Eva.” He takes her hands in his. “They’ll strap you to a funeral boat, too. That will kill me.”

She resists, holding him tighter, for one moment longer. Then she relents, her shoulders sagging. “Fine, but I’m going to see Caro in the morning. We’re getting you another voice.”

That night, they make love like a long goodbye. It’s difficult to stop, to let go. It’s impossible to hide any emotion on their faces in Kenji’s too-bright glow.

Kenji’s tracing her ribs, studying every line of her face, etching each detail into his memory, when he says, “Promise me that you’ll keep on making art as long as you can. You are one of the only artists doing something unique in this World.”

She’s studying him with the same intensity. Kenji can almost see her drawing his face in the sketchbook of her mind.

“You know what bothers me most about my sculpture in the historic district?” she says. “People fixate on the kid, but that’s not the important part.”

“What is?”

Eva doesn’t answer.

The next morning, Eva goes to Caro’s house to see if anyone died recently. She returns by evening, with the slam of the door and an angry scowl. Kenji isn’t surprised, but his heart sinks anyway.

“She said maybe in a few days.”

So they wait. Kenji battles his nerves by making as much paper as he can. If this is going to be his last contribution to her art, he wants to leave Eva a princely gift.

In contrast, Eva pours herself into the sculpture concept on their living room wall. The Maw grows unforgiving teeth, shredding the little glowing figures that are trapped inside. Except for the two figures that stand beyond the Maw, nothing escapes. It is not an image of a gentle, benevolent World.

This piece is going to upset a lot of people. But Kenji suspects that’s the point. It’s as if Eva’s baiting her voice into dying, too.

Kenji aches to tell her to stop being so reckless. But he fell in love with her because she was the only person he’d ever met who was more curious than he was. He stayed in love because she never stopped asking dangerous questions.

And right now, as he watches her, full of her anger and her courage, he loves her fiercely.

The days pass, and Kenji grows brighter. He glows through the thin walls of their apartment. The neighbors begin knocking on their door, first with concerned looks on their faces, then wary ones. Eva keeps them at bay with lies, something about a new art concept she’s working on. It’s a flimsy excuse, and Kenji imagines a malevolent crowd growing daily outside their door.

They can’t stay here much longer.

That night, they steal away in a boat. Even wrapped in all the clothes he owns, Kenji’s traitorous skin shines through the layers. He hurries, grabbing the oars, as Eva pushes off.

But there is no place in this World for the voiceless.

They spill onto the pier like spores. Their neighbors, friends, and fellow artists. They rush up on the pier and grab at Kenji’s layers, shouting, “Given! Give back!” The funeral mob glows, but not as brightly as him.

Kenji pushes back, but the mourners are as greedy as the World. Their fingers tear at him. Their voices ring in his ears. His glowing skin illuminates their angry, frantic faces.

Kenji swings his oars in wide, defensive arcs, stumbling into the belly of the boat, buying Eva time to pull the boat into the water.

It works. They escape the grasping hands and begin to drift with the current.

All while voices on the pier are screaming, screaming, screaming.

Something hits the back of his head. Hard. Suddenly, his legs won’t hold him. Suddenly, there’s water around him. It’s icy and dragging him down.

He feels Eva grab him by the necks of his layered shirts. He tries to tread water, but it’s cold, so cold. And the World has become blurry and vague.

He hears Eva shouting: “No! No yet!”

He tries to fight, but he can’t feel his hands, his legs. All he knows is water, brackish and frigid, and the way his body is being pulled and carried by the current, by hands. He knows the taste of mushrooms, this acrid, earthy blend.

Then he knows nothing at all.

• • • •

“What do you think is outside of the World?” Kenji asked, the night before Eva’s sculpture was unveiled.

“Nothing,” his voice hissed.

Eva took a bite of her dinner, a portobello-and-eel skillet, and considered the question. “It could be anything, really. What if there’s other colonies, but they all live in ships like the First Givers?”

“What if there’s only mermaids left?” Kenji replied.

“Or only poisonous mushrooms?”

“Or only the most generic folk tunes?”

“Oh, that would be terrible,” Eva said in mock horror. “Maybe this isn’t so bad then.”

“Yes,” said his voice.

Kenji stabbed a piece of eel on his plate, thinking of the Maw. “Maybe we can just be happy here, making groundbreaking art.”

Eva smiled from across the table. “Yeah, maybe we can.”

• • • •

The pain in the back of his neck is familiar. That’s the first thing he notices.

The second thing is that he’s been in this bed before, this room. Caro has covered the walls with thick, dark curtains, and he hears her daughter playing in the other room. Kenji groans, turns, expecting to find Eva sitting on the chair beside him.

He finds Caro in the seat there instead.

“I’m sorry, Kenji,” she says. She looks tired, pale, deeply sad. “I tried to convince her to stay, at least until you woke up.”

Fear constricts Kenji’s chest, making it hard to breathe. With a shaking hand, Kenji touches the base of his neck. There are fresh stitches there.

“Whose voice did you use?” he asks. Barely above a whisper.

The voice in his head says: “She never stopped asking questions, either.”

Kenji gasps, knowing then, heart breaking with the answer.

It’s Eva’s voice.

• • • •

The day of the unveiling, Eva and Kenji stood side by side a little apart from the swelling crowd. It felt like everyone in the colony had come to see this massive paper sculpture. They circled around it, openmouthed or talking in awed tones as they reached out and touched the creamy white paper, the likes of which were only First Givers myths before this.

“I think you’ve made an impression,” Kenji murmured to Eva.

“Shit, they’re focusing on the kid on the ladder,” Eva said, frowning. “That’s not the point.”

“What is?”

Eva shook her head.

“Some people will get the message. The ones who look a little closer,” she said.

“Maybe one day, that’ll be me then,” Kenji joked.

Eva smiled at that and took his hand in hers.

“Maybe it will.”

• • • •

Eva is gone.

Caro apologized over and over. She hadn’t wanted to use Eva’s voice, but Eva was so frightened as she carried an unconscious Kenji into her house. Eva was so stubborn. Her voice fought the whole time. And Caro had been so nervous performing the operation, this dangerous new science, that she didn’t realize Eva slipped away while she was working on Kenji.

“I just want to learn how to save people like my daughter,” she says. “I want to leave something better than art behind.”

Kenji understands. All too well.

A few days later, Kenji leaves Caro’s house, climbs into their boat, rows to the center of the River, where the World goes silent, and lies down. Where did she go? he wonders.

“She’s gone,” her voice whispers.

“Says you,” he replies with a scoff. Why didn’t she tell him where she was going?

“Because you were holding her back,” her voice replies. And for a moment, Kenji’s battered heart aches with the possibility.

“Stop lying,” he says through clenched teeth. “Or I’ll cut you out myself.”

Her voice hisses but doesn’t respond.

He allows the boat to float downstream to the historic district, to where Eva’s sculpture is.

He docks at the nearest pier, climbs out, and approaches the masterpiece.

But without Eva, no one notices him. For the first time in years, he’s able to study every crease and wrinkle and curve of the sculpture in peace.

This is how he finds the answer.

At the base of the ship, among the crowd of paper people, two paper children stand slightly apart, not looking at the ship but at something else far in the distance. One’s pointing upstream, in a determined, adventurous stance, and Kenji notices half of her face is creased and ridged. The other is next to her, following her line of sight, holding a clean sheet of paper in his hands.

And Kenji knows then. He knows exactly where Eva went.

With a smile, he climbs back into his boat and turns it against the current.

Eva and all his answers are upstream. They always have been.

Eva’s voice begins to scream. It screams at him to stop, it screams at him to turn around, to obey. But Kenji is no longer afraid of the World, and even at its loudest, the voice in his head has become small, powerless.

Kenji laughs as he starts to row, pushing forward into the darkness, into the great, swelling unknown.

A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in New York City where she's known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year's Best anthologies, and has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt

Mulberry and Owl
By Aliette de Bodard
Novelette Long List

Year of the Âm Dragon, fifth year of the Peaceful Harmony Empress, Great Mulberry Nebula

Thuỷ stood in her cabin in The Goby in the Well, her bots arrayed on her shoulders and clinging to her wrists, and watched the heart of the nebula.

There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it: the Great Mulberry Nebula was large, sparsely dotted with nascent stars, and so remote that getting there, even via deep spaces, had required a three month journey. On the overlay in Thuỷ’s cabin—a thin sliver like a screen, showing her the merged data of all The Goby in the Well’s sensors—there was very little to see, either: a darkness that seemed to spread absolute from the centre of the overlay, and a corresponding gravity spike for the trapping of the light.

“I’m not going any further, child,” Goby said. The ship projected her avatar into the cabin: a smaller version of herself, the metal of her hull sheening with the characteristic light of deep spaces.

Thuỷ sighed. “I know, elder aunt,” she said. “That was the bargain, wasn’t it? Thank you for carrying me this far.” She fingered one of her bots, feeling the small, fist-sized body, the fragile metal legs spread all around its crown of sensors. It ought to have been comforting, but she was so far beyond comfort.

Getting there had required so much—not just the three months, but research, and stubbornness, and bribing a dozen officials all over the Empire, from the First Planet to the unnumbered stations and orbitals. Chasing a rumour so elusive it was almost a myth.

Thuỷ stared at her hand: faint traceries of light materialised the pass she’d bought from a drunk and demoted former Commissioner of Military Affairs. He’d said it would take her there, right into the heart of the gravitational gradients—and more importantly, get her back out.

“Do you—” Goby paused, for a while “—do you think it’s the right place? Do you think she’s there?” Goby used “enforcer”, a pronoun that carried both awe and fear.

“I don’t know,” Thuỷ said. “Do you want to find out?”

“You can always tell me afterwards.” The ship’s laughter was humourless and brief. “If you survive.”

Darkness, in the centre. A pointless chase leading to another black hole or some other phenomenon—or exactly what she was looking for, what she needed. What Kim Lan desperately needed.

Rehabilitation. Forgiveness.

“If,” Thuỷ said, very deliberately not thinking about it, and dismissed the overlay with a wave of her hands. “I’ll go get ready now.”

• • • •

Twenty years ago

In the reaches beyond the numbered planets, rebellion against the Dragon Throne wasn’t so much an unspeakable crime as utterly banal—an act of despair, self-preservation, or rage against the unavoidable losses to the empire’s wars—a contagion like a match lighting up paper after paper, daughter following mother, sworn or gut-sibling following sibling.

Thuỷ fell into hers following Kim Lan, as she’d always done.

They were in the teahouse, having a drink and watching the poet in the centre moving through her performance—summoning ethereal overlays with every sweep of her sleeves, brief fragments of sight, sound and smells like other realities—ones in which war, food shortages, or network outages were utterly absent.

I need help, Thuỷ had said, when Kim Lan had asked how it was all going—and the thought of everything Thuỷ had been juggling—all the debts, the food shortages, her salary being worth less and less with every passing month—had all become too much, and she’d almost burst into tears.

Kim Lan had looked at her, thoughtfully. Wait here, she said, and came back with someone in tow.

“Here, lil’sis,” Kim Lan said. “This is my friend Bảo Châu. She can help you with those back taxes.”

Châu was an elderly, forbidding woman, like one of the aunties at the market who’d seen everything: a topknot with hairpins as sharp as daggers, bots the colour of rust and the darkness of space, almost invisible on the stark utilitarian robes she wore. “Thuỷ, is it? You trained for Master of Wind and Water, once.”

Thuỷ flushed. “Yes,” she said. “It was the year of the Dương Ox. When the schools burnt down.” They’d never opened them again after that, merely slashed the number of available slots—and people like Thuỷ had left. Coming from the margins of the empire and with no means to pay the gifts of the void to officials to grease their way through the system, they’d never stood a chance.

“Yes,” Châu said. She smiled, and it was grim. “I can sort things out with the Ministry of Revenue, but you’ll owe us, in return.”

Thuỷ would have asked who “us” was, but even at twenty-five she wasn’t that naive. “What do you want?”

“Nothing you can’t provide,” Châu said. “Expertise. Ships that need to be fixed. Systems that need to be… coaxed.” She said nothing: merely looked at Thuỷ, sipping her tea as if it were the greatest of delicacies in the imperial court on the First Planet.

Thuỷ looked at Kim Lan, who gazed levelly back at her. She raised her hand as if holding an invisible bowl of offerings—that same gesture they’d made in her mother’s compartment, entwining their arms at the elbow and making a binding, peach-garden oath.

Though not born on the same day of the same month in the same year, we hope to die so…

Standing by each other, and they’d always done so—through the years that got leaner and leaner, and the failings of the empire—through the death of Kim Lan’s mother, and Thuỷ’s failed engagement—through feast and famine and days of the war.

The punishment for rebellion was not just the slow death for her, but for nine generations around her. But she was Kim Lan’s oath-sister—and it was the fifth tax notification in as many months, food on the table was scarce, her aged parents getting visibly thinner, more and more of the compartment’s systems and bots failing.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and Kim Lan smiled.

“Welcome, lil’sis.”

• • • •

Thuỷ had forgotten what it was like, to go out.

She’d been in a shuttle at first, and then, as the gravity increased, she’d had to abandon even that, and put on a shadow-skin to go out in order to avoid damaging the shuttle and incurring one more debt to Goby she wouldn’t be able to repay.

The shadow-skin’s thin and supple fabric was soaked, sticking to her own skin, even before she exited into the void, hands clinging to the small glider that helped her manoeuvre. Around her, light fell in swathes, but ahead of her was only that growing darkness, and her sensor bots reminded her with regular alerts that the gravity was increasing steadily.

As she went deeper in, they plotted her course. Space started distorting—time, too, the sensors making the depths of the distortion, how much slower than Goby she was going and what rate of correction her comms needed to be sent with. The mark on her hand started glowing as she navigated between rock fragments—nothing she could see, but a corridor opened ahead and behind her, a gentle coaxing of the gravitational gradient into a path that wasn’t an impasse.

The glider was impossibly heavy in her hands. The mark stung, and then faded: here, it seemed to say, without words.

Thuỷ hung in the darkness, in the void—weightless and with nothing but the sound of her own heartbeat in her chest and ears, her own breathing.

Here.

She’d been wrong: the darkness wasn’t quite that absolute. Distant stars glinted behind her—and ahead, in the shadows, was something—a hulking shape that suddenly loomed far too close, far too large, on the verge of utterly swallowing her in its folds.

It was true. Oh ancestors, everything was true: the pass, the jail.

The prisoner.

The Owl with the Moon’s Tongue. The enforcer of the Empress’s will—the ship that had roamed the borders of the empire, assassinating and executing rebels one after the other—in compartments, in teahouses, in the middle of crowds, sowing the terror necessary to end the rebellion.

Thuỷ thought of Hải’s face, of An’s face, the way they’d stood still for a blink moment after Owl’s scream had kicked in, the sheen trembling in the depths of their eyes, suddenly sweeping free and spreading in mottled patches over their entire skin, the patches sloughing off, bones melting and their entire bodies flopping like a coat suddenly emptied, the crowds on the concourse slowly backing away from the blood staining the metal floors, utter silence and on every face that blunt, inadmissible truth: how lucky they felt that they hadn’t been Owl’s target.

“A visitor. It’s been far too long since I’ve had company.” The voice was female, light and sarcastic; the pronoun used the one for “elder aunt”: an age and status gap between them both, but not such a large one.

“Enforcer.” Thuỷ used the same pronoun Goby had.

Laughter, echoing around her in the dark. “Enforcer? A title I’ve not had for a while. What brings you here, little one?” The pronoun she used wasn’t even “child”, but a subordinate one, of a subject before authority. “Why enter my orbit?”

“You have something I want.”

“Do I?” Something lit up, then: one light, then two, then ten thousand, and abruptly she was hanging, small and weightless and utterly insignificant, in the orbit of a ship that was the size of an entire city. The light was so strong it was blinding: even with her suit immediately moving to darken its visor, she could only catch a glimpse—a mere moment of clarity, of seeing sharp protuberances and the hull bristling with weapons ports—before all she could see was bright, painful light.

Kim Lan, laughing at her after they robbed the Granaries, their vehicles full of rice seedlings and cheap alcohol. Kim Lan, raising her arm in that ghostly toast, a reminder of the oath they’d sworn—downing the tea after they got word that Owl had killed Diễm My, and Vy too—and then that last drink they’d had together, her face flushed as she spoke of the imperial amnesty, how desperate and wan she’d looked.

“I have a friend.”

“Ah.” Owl’s voice was mocking. “Ah. A dead one, I imagine.”

She thought of Hải and An and Châu, and of the years on the run—being picked out one by one, killed one by one. “You killed them,” she said, her fists clenching. She used the plural pronoun.

“Oh, several friends, then. A little rebel, are you?”

“Once.” A long time ago, in another lifetime. The Mother Abbess would say that Thuỷ needed to let go—to stand unmoored from the troubles of her former life. The Mother Abbess meant well, but she didn’t understand. “It’s not relevant anymore.”

“Is it not?” Her laughter filled the space around Thuỷ. “Irrelevance. How quaint. I killed your friends then, and I enjoyed it. Every moment of it, from the imperial decree to their deaths, to tracking them down—to finally finding them—that long slow rise of power in the targeting system until it could finally fire—until I could feel them, torn apart and boneless—until I saw them finally collapse and it was all over. Tell me: is that all irrelevant?”

There was a reason why Owl was there, and it wasn’t just that the empire was at peace, it wasn’t just that there was a new Empress, one who was trying to knit the torn fabric of their society back together, to make former rebels inhabit the same stations and planets as loyal officials. Owl was there because she was a monster. Because there might be a time and place for a ruthless enforcer, but one that delighted in slaughter and pain…that one was best put away—made harmless and imprisoned, at least until she was needed again.

“Stop,” Thuỷ said.

“Pleading?”

No, because that was never going to make her stop, was it?

“Because that’s not what I’m here for. You didn’t kill my friend.”

“Oh.” A silence, but she could tell Owl’s curiosity was piqued.

“You’re a witness.”

“Am I?”

Thuỷ forced herself to breathe. “She took the amnesty. You have her statement.”

“I was never much of a person for taking statements,” Owl said. “Is that what you’re here for? Go to the magistrate.”

“The magistrate is dead.” Incinerated in the same riots that had killed Kim Lan—but the archive she’d uploaded to Owl would still be in the ship’s memory. “There are no records.”

“And so you’ve come all the way here for mine?” Again, laughter, but it didn’t quite have that same edge. “What is it that you want?”

Thuỷ swallowed, tasted bitterness on her tongue. What was it that she wanted? Forgiveness. Atonement. A dead woman’s smile; a lie that everything would be all right again, a touch and a toast. Dead things, dead memories, dead feelings. “She died a rebel. Her entire family is still under an extermination order.” They’d fled, of course—outside the reach of the Empire, into the uncertain places, the isolated stations and orbitals, the small asteroid mining centres where people didn’t ask too many questions so long as you did the work. “I want it lifted.”

A silence. The ship in front of Thuỷ—large, massive, blinding and uncompromising—didn’t move. She didn’t have to: she was slowly drawing Thuỷ to herself, towards an inexorable orbiting of each other, an endless embrace. “I assume you didn’t come all the way here just to try and talk me into this.”

Thuỷ swallowed. “No,” she said.

“The keys to my freedom?” Owl’s voice was curious. “You won’t have that, will you.”

Thuỷ had a pass, and she had half-expected it not to work. It certainly would not let out the ship the prison had been built for. “No,” she said.

“I’m not interested in money.”

“I don’t have that.” Not anymore—not after coming back, bribing too many people, finding a mindship willing to bear her that far.

“And clearly you won’t give me your life, as it won’t help your friend if you’re dead. Not that it’s of much value, is it.”

That hurt. It was that life Thuỷ had run away to save—putting it above everything else, even ties of sworn-sisterhood—and to have it so casually dismissed was as if Owl were slowly, casually pushing down on old wounds until they split open.

“What is it you have that you think I desperately want?”

Thuỷ swallowed. “I can repair your weapons system.”

Owl’s laughter tore Thuỷ apart—as if her weapons system were still operational, as if she could still scream and make Thuỷ collapse the way all the others had collapsed. “My weapons. And leave me here? Why do you think I would even be interested in that?”

Thuỷ had had three months in deep spaces to think on it—and before that, in the monastery, when she’d first found out that Owl was still alive—that there might be a chance to clear Kim Lan’s memory. “They called that your scream. The weapons systems.”

Silence, from the ship.

“When they arrested you for the war crimes, they took it apart. It was too dangerous. Even in a jail. Even in the middle of nowhere.”

“Are you done telling me things I already know?”

Thuỷ plunged on. There was little choice left. “But that’s not what is it to you, is it? A scream is a voice. They took away part of your voice.”

“And you think I could use that part for something else besides killing?” Owl’s voice was light and ironic.

“I think you want it back. Even if you’re jailed. Even if it’s of no practical use. I think you want it back because it was always part of you.”

“Part of me.” A silence, but that one was barbed. “You haven’t answered my question, have you.”

“No,” Thuỷ said. “Does it matter? Who are you going to kill out there?”

The unspoken answer hung in the air: of course Thuỷ was the only living target. “I assume you’ll want some assurances that you’ll survive.”

“No,” Thuỷ said. She kept her voice light, inconsequential—but inwardly she saw An’s face, Châu’s face, heard the crumple of dead bodies on the floors. That was what everything that would happen to her, if Owl decided she wasn’t worth sparing. And when had an imperial enforcer and mass murderer ever decided former rebels were worth sparing? “I want to see my friend’s statement to make sure you do have it, but I don’t need your assurances. I came with a mindship.”

“I know. They’re much too far away to save you.”

Thuỷ smiled, beneath the shadow-skin. “You don’t understand. If I don’t come back, they’ll know you’ve killed me, and they’ll take the evidence to the Numbered Planets. Your jailers will know I fixed your weapons. How long do you think you’ll get to keep them?”

A silence. She could feel the gravity pulse around her, tightening—like a slow rising of anger. “Clever,” Owl said, and it sounded like nothing so much as a threat. Something shimmered within Thuỷ’s field of vision: not a file with its authentication, but a mere image of it. I, Phạm Thị Kim Lan, accept that I have erred, and that the Peaceful Harmony Empress has chosen to extend her infinite mercy the way she extends her grace, like a cloth covering us all with all the stars in the sky…

At the bottom, beneath the vermillion seal, was Kim Lan’s familiar and forceful signature, authenticated by her personal seal.

The statement. It was real. Owl had it. Thuỷ could—she could finally make amends for what she’d done.

Something changed, in the mass of light in front of Thuỷ: a slight adjustment, but suddenly she could see the ship—the bulk of the hull, the sharp, sleek shape with bots scuttling over every surface, the thin, ribbed actuator fins near the ion drives at the back—the paintings on her hull, which she’d half-expected to be blood spatters but which were apricot flowers, and calligraphed poems, and a long wending river of stars in the shadow of mountains, a breathtakingly delicate and utterly unexpected work of art. Something moved: a ponderous shift of the bots, drawing Thuỷ’s eyes towards a patch of darkness at the centre of the painting, between two mountains.

“Come in, then, clever child. Let’s see what you can do.”

• • • •

Fifteen years ago

On the night after they broke Châu and An’s children out of imperial jail, they celebrated.

An and Khiêm were in the hideout—an empty compartment on the Apricot Đỗ habitat they’d hastily hidden beneath an overlay of a busy teahouse. Nothing that would stand up to close imperial scrutiny—but in the empty, desolate spaces of a half-destroyed habitat most of the inhabitants had evacuated, it would serve.

Châu and An got drunk, and made elaborate overlays as they did: seas of stars, ghostly dragons, spaceships slowly growing to fill the space—and An’s children laughed and danced and declaimed drunk poetry, their bots’ legs clicking on the floor.

Thuỷ ought to have felt relief they’d succeeded, but as the night went on—as she thought of the skirmishes on the numbered planets, of the litany of lost ships—not theirs, their little organisation barely had enough to have a few shuttles, but there were other splinters of rebellion elsewhere—as she thought of the Imperial Fleet—the tightness in her chest grew and grew, until the compartment felt too small, too cramped, and she went out for air, cradling the cold porcelain of her teacup.

Outside, the corridor was deserted, and it was silent—not just the usual silence of the habitats, with only the faint background hiss of the air filters and sometimes, the clicking of a bot’s legs on the floor as they scurried from one maintenance to another. This was a silence that sounded like a prelude to the end. The overlays were minimal: flickering displays of the vital statistics from oxygen to temperature, but no news, no vids of songs, no adornments from the other compartments: just fatigued metal that felt as bare as Thuỷ did.

“You look glum.” Kim Lan effortlessly slid in the space between them. “Here.” She had a basket of dumplings, which her bots handed to Thuỷ.

Thuỷ didn’t speak for a while. “Did you hear? There’s a rumour The Owl with the Moon’s Tongue is coming our way.”

“Mmm.” Kim Lan sat down, nibbling on a steamed bun. Her hair rested against a broken duct—it creaked, and her bots gently pushed it out of the way. “She is.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

Now it was Kim Lan’s turn to say nothing.

“We’re losing, aren’t we? We saved Châu and the children, but we’re never going to win. We’re never going to overthrow the empress.” Or even change the empire—or if they did, it was change that would bring about their destruction, and the extermination of everyone onboard the habitats in the belt.

“You assume this was about winning,” Kim Lan said.

“What was it about then?”

Kim Lan’s face was hard. “Survival.”

“How are we going to survive against Owl?” She’d heard the rumours. She’d watched the vids. She’d seen that it didn’t matter where the victims where—so long as the weapons system locked on them, they would die, as if a long finger of death were pointing their way from Owl’s orbit.

Them. It would be them dying, taken apart as examples for anyone who dared to rebel.

“I don’t know,” Kim Lan said. She sighed. “Do you think you could have survived a sixth tax notification? Do you think your parents could have?”

She had food for them. Alcohol and stolen meals. And the tax collectors and the officials had fled the system in the wake of their activities. And whatever her other faults were, she’d never been less than honest with herself. “No,” Thuỷ said.

“There you go.”

“How do you think any of that is going to protect us against Owl? How?”

“You don’t understand.” Kim Lan’s voice was soft. “The choices we made were we’d get there. One thing at a time.” She reached out, held Thuỷ’s hand for a bare moment. “I know you’re scared. That’s all right. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

And for a moment they were both back in that kitchen compartment, flush with drink and youth, their paths now inextricably entwined by choice.

Thuỷ held her cup, staring at the exposed wires of the habitat. Bots scuttled, sad and lonely, as if ashamed of what it had come to. She heard the words of the oath of sworn sisterhood echoing in her thoughts. Though not born on the same day of the same month in the same year, we hope to die so… “We hope to die so.” A peach-garden oath, now and forever. “Except the goal isn’t to die.”

Kim Lan smiled. “Exactly. We got this far. We’ll get further, you’ll see. There’s always a way out. Now come back inside, will you? They’re waiting for you before the next round of poetry holos.”

• • • •

Year of the Âm Dragon, fifth year of the Peaceful Harmony Empress, Great Mulberry Nebula

Thuỷ had expected—actually, she didn’t know what she’d expected when she’d enter Owl—some kind of fanciful lair of blood-encrusted corridors and bones stacked in coffins, which made no sense, because why would Owl have any of that onboard?

Instead, there was a corridor much like the one in the habitats—rundown, with too few bots, exposed bits of wiring and gaping holes where panels had fallen off, except the gravity wasn’t strong enough for her to be upright. It felt a little bit like the mining asteroids: a very faint sensation of weight in her bones, but nothing that prevented her from floating. Thuỷ held on to her glider as she moved through it.

As she did, the lights came on.

They were blue and red and gold, slowly cycling through the colours of some impossibly far away festival—weak and flickering, and the overlays in their wake were not opaque enough to mask the ruin beneath. But it had been beautiful once: those paintings of starscapes and temples on the First Planet, those holos of beautiful statues and teapots and jade figures, those faint, broken harmonics of a now unrecognizable music.

“This way,” Owl said, a scuttling of bots guiding Thuỷ onboard.

More corridors, more emptiness: gaping cabins with no adornments, looking like the looted compartments after the civil war—larger places that must have been like pavilions but now lay empty, with scuffed floors and floating debris. And a door, opening like magic in a wall like any other, behind a translucent painting of a dragon amidst the stars.

Inside, darkness, and then in the centre of a gradually widening circle of light, something that looked like a tree with sharp branches—and draped over it, a large and pulsating mass of flesh and electronics.

The ship. The Mind that drove the body, connected to every sensor, every room, every overlay onboard.

“Your weapons system is in your heartroom?” The ship’s most vulnerable place—like the brain to a human—and she’d just given Thuỷ casual access?

No, not that casual.

Because the bots—the ones missing all over the ship—were there. All there, a sea of gleaming metal between her and the Mind, legs bristling—a sharpness, a heaving multitude just waiting for a signal to swallow her whole. “Try anything,” Owl said, lightly and conversationally, “And I’ll choke you.”

Thuỷ tried to breathe, failed—all she could see was the bots, the way they’d rise, the way they’d swarm over her, slithering into her suit and breaking her visor, leaving her wide open to the drowning vacuum.

For Kim Lan. She was doing this for Kim Lan. For what she’d failed to do in another lifetime. “I want the proof,” she said. “The statement.”

“Before you fix me? I think not.”

“You’ll give me nothing afterwards.”

“Will I? Do you not trust me?”

“You’re a murderer. No.”

“I’m not the one who abandoned her friend.” Owl’s voice was malicious. “What worth are your promises?”

Though not born on the same day of the same month in the same year, we hope to die so…

The words burnt her. “I did not,” Thuỷ said, far too fast and far too painfully. “I did not!”

“As you say.” Owl’s voice was mocking. “Nevertheless…I’m not giving you anything until you’ve fixed it.”

And there was no way Thuỷ was going to fix it without any guarantees. She weighed options—negotiating tactics—and came up with little of interest. “Then I guess we’re at an impasse, because I’m not starting.” There was a hole in a wall, near the bots—and something glimmering within. When she came closer, she saw what was in the overlay: an illusion of what had once been there. Behind it, though…

Her intuition had been right: the jailers had been lazy. It was the end of the war, and they were in a hurry to put Owl where they didn’t have to worry about her. They’d just torn connectors and made a mess of control panels, but they hadn’t actually destroyed the system itself. They’d known they might need it again, in less peaceful days. “It was there, wasn’t it?”

Owl didn’t speak, but she could feel the temperature in the room shift. Approval.

Thuỷ let go of her glider, using its magnetised surface to stick it to the wall, and turned out the proximity nudgers on her suit. She flipped open the glider, opening its storage space, revealing row after row of spare parts and electronics—everything that had been on the schematics the military commissioner had sold her. The commissioner had thought it was only curiosity, secure in the knowledge Thuỷ wouldn’t dare do anything with these. The commissioner had been wrong.

Another shift of temperature: interest, tension. She knelt, peering at the inside. “It’s going to take me six hours to fix. Maybe eight.”

Silence, from around her. The Mind pulsed on her throne. The bots watched her, and she was at the centre of the attention of an entire ship, feeling the weight of it on her like lead.

Thuỷ considered, for a while. Owl didn’t really care about Kim Lan’s statement, one way or another: she just wanted to be fixed. She wanted the weapons back as part of herself, of her power. The main issue there wasn’t unwillingness: it was lack of trust, and Owl’s natural tendency to needle and inflict pain on others.

“Tell you what,” Thuỷ said, forcing herself to sound casual. “We could create a safehold. A place to hold my friend’s statement—and it would only send it out if the system got fixed.”

“I could stop that anytime, couldn’t I?”

Thuỷ shook her head. “A safehold where we both withdraw our access privileges in an irrevocable fashion. I can’t affect it, and neither can you. But it won’t send until this comes back online, so you get the system taken care of, and I only get paid, so to speak, if I successfully finish.”

“I’ve heard of such things,” Owl said. More silence. She was tempted, Thuỷ knew.

“Let me show you,” Thuỷ said, floating closer to the alcove and starting to put together the connections to create the safehold—and as the ship’s whole attention turned her way, she knew she had her.

• • • •

Eight years ago

Thuỷ jerked awake. Someone was knocking insistently on the door of the safe house.

The imperials. They’d found them. They’d take them away and make them face Owl—or arrest them and publicly execute them, giving them the slow death that had haunted Thuỷ’s nightmares for the past few months on the run—the same death they’d given An’s children, bots slicing off one piece of flesh at a time, the smell of blood and the screams broadcast to the entire habitats…

Calm down. She got up, her bots arranging themselves on her shoulders, their sensors struggling to come online. They hadn’t been fixed in a long while.

The knocking had stopped. Thuỷ stepped over the others, who were sleeping huddled on the floor and barely starting to wake: Ánh Lệ was rubbing her eyes, Vy was struggling to rise, and it seemed as though nothing could really wake up Diễm My, who was merely mumbling and going back to sleep as if nothing had happened. The luck of youth.

“I’ve got it,” Thuỷ said to Ánh Lệ and Vy—with far more confidence than she felt.

She took a deep breath, bracing herself, and opened the door.

It was Kim Lan, wan, her bots pressing a bloodied cloth to her side.

“Big’sis!”

“It’s all right.” Kim Lan made a gesture with her hands, but she was shaking. “No one followed me. Can I come in?”

“Of course.” Thuỷ ushered her in, closing and bolting the door. The patches they’d made on the network and its surveillance cameras were still in place—she double- and triple-checked them as Kim Lan sat cross-legged in front of a low table, breathing hard. Her bots were peeling off the cloth; Thuỷ sent her own bots to fetch bandages from their meagre supplies.

“What happened?”

Kim Lan grimaced. “Had a skirmish with some of the militia a few days ago.” Up close, her skin was a network of small, red pinpricks. Burst veins. She didn’t look good. “They think me dead. I did have to plunge into space without a shadow-skin for a few blinks.”

Kim Lan sat in silence, sipping her tea. Ánh Lệ and Vy had joined her, and even Diễm My was groaning as her bots poked her into wakefulness.

“How long do we have?” Thuỷ said. The empire would find them. They would end them as they had ended all the others.

“We can still go to another one of the other habitats,” Vy said. Her voice was shaking. “Or leave the Belt, go into the Outside Territories or the Twin Streams.”

Kim Lan said, finally, “I didn’t come here to make you flee elsewhere. I came here because there’s news.”

“News?”

“You won’t have heard. The Calm Strength Empress is dead. Her heir will ascend to the throne as soon as the ceremonies have been completed. She’s offering an amnesty.”

“An amnesty?” Thuỷ turned the words over and over again. They made no sense.

Vy said, “They hounded us. They killed us one by one. Why would they—”

“They can’t keep fighting half their population,” Kim Lan said. Her voice was gentle. “Civil war is tearing the empire apart. They could kill us all. It’d be a lot of work. Hence the amnesty.”

“Never,” Vy said.

Kim Lan set her cup on the table. “I’ve told this to Thuỷ already. We’re not fighting to win. We’re fighting to survive. The new empress says she wants to make reforms. Make the empire a better place.”

“And you believe that?” After all this, after all the years they’d gone through…

“Maybe. Maybe not. I do know there’s fewer and fewer of us. We’re getting picked off one by one. I’d rather take the way out, before we all die. If we survive, we can always fight another day.”

“You want to take the amnesty.”

“Yes,” Kim Lan said. “It’s my choice. I won’t be selling anyone out.” Her eyes were hard. She was expecting a fight—but everyone around the table was tired, and scared, and drained—the light had gone out of them such a long time ago.

How could she—how could she believe them—how could she believe the people who’d starved them into rebellion, who had killed Châu and Hải and An and An’s children as casual acts of intimidation?

“They’ll kill us,” Thuỷ said. “An amnesty is just a way of letting us come to them. Owl is still in the system. Why would you leave your enforcer there if you’re going to let everyone live?”

Kim Lan said nothing.

“You can’t trust them!”

But she’d made her decision, hadn’t she. Thuỷ took a deep breath. “I need some space,” she said—there was no space in the safe house, it was so small, but she did manage to put together a few privacy filters that gave her the illusion of being alone: the sound from the others’ discussion muffled, and everything made to feel more distant visually.

How could she? How she could do this, how could she expect Thuỷ to follow, how could she–

“Lil’sis.” It was Kim Lan, gently asking to be let in.

“No.”

“You’re scared. I know you are. It’s all right to be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Thuỷ said, dropping the privacy filters a fraction so Kim Lan could be included in them. They were having a semi-private conversation now, one that the others wouldn’t be overhearing unless they made a concerted effort. “I think you’re being thoughtless and imprudent.”

“And endangering you all?”

No, that wasn’t it. “I don’t want to lose you,” Thuỷ said, and it hurt to say it out loud.

“You asked me once if we were losing. We are.” Kim Lan’s voice was gentle. “I said it was about survival. And now it is. There is no survival in running from safe house to safe house, losing more people with every passing day.”

“I—” Thuỷ tried to speak, and found only the truth. “I can’t. I just can’t do it. I can’t follow you. I can’t walk into the possibility of wholesale slaughter.”

“You’re scared.”

“I’m rational!”

“And I’m not?”

“You—you keep setting the terms and expecting me to keep up.”

“Because of the oath?” Kim Lan laughed, and it was sad. “I release you from the oath. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“It—it doesn’t work like that!” Thuỷ had done things—so many things, raided so many places, gone so far against the will of the empire, and throughout it all, she’d had the comfort of knowing she wasn’t alone. That Kim Lan was there. That they were here for each other. But now that had become shackles: a gravitational well that drew her in regardless of whether she wanted to, just because Kim Lan had gone ahead of her. “I can’t just break that oath!”

“Of course you can.” Kim Lan scratched her bandages between the swam of bots, and then got up. “As I said: you do what you want.” But she sounded angry and disappointed.

Thuỷ sat down, trying to be kind. Trying to follow Kim Lan as she’d always meant to.

But everyone was dead, because the empire had killed them. Owl was prowling the habitats, waiting for a chance to find their signatures and target them; the militia was on the lookout, and the execution racks had been readied in every tribunal of the belt. The amnesty was never going to happen, and even if did, they’d get killed by some overzealous militia person before they ever got a chance to accept it.

She’d sworn an oath, with Kim Lan.

I’m here. I’ll always be here.

We got this far. We’ll get further, you’ll see.

And Thuỷ knew, then—sitting small and scared and angry in that safe house that was no longer one—she knew that she couldn’t go any further.

• • • •

Year of the Âm Dragon, fifth year of the Peaceful Harmony Empress, Great Mulberry Nebula

Fixing the systems was slow and painstaking: taking out connectors, finding new, compatible ones, taking care of the exposed wiring.

“You said I didn’t kill your friend.” Owl’s voice swam out of the morass of her thoughts. “How did she die?”

Thoughtlessly. Carelessly. “There was a skirmish in the Lotus Vũ habitat. One of the militia got scared and killed her.” Thuỷ had learnt of this only afterwards—after she’d left in the dead of night, after she’d joined the monastery and severed all her familial ties, to make sure the Empire couldn’t find her or hold her family responsible for her acts anymore. After she’d changed her name and laid low for years, and thinking Kim Lan’s silence was due to anger—never realising she was dead and her family in hiding.

“Ah. The riots. The same ones that destroyed the tribunal. War is never kind.” It sounded almost companionable.

Thuỷ slotted a cylindrical piece into place, her bots swarming over it to check the connections. “Did you lose anyone during the war?”

A silence. Owl laughed. “My freedom.”

“You must have a family,” Thuỷ said. It felt…wrong to say that, as if to acknowledge that monsters were people was to grant them forgiveness.

The lights pulsed, softly, as Thuỷ added another connector to the rack in front of her. “I’m old enough to have lost them all. Not that it matters.”

“It should,” Thuỷ said.

Laughter, bitter and wounding. “Feeling pity?”

“I don’t know if I would call it that,” Thuỷ said. “It doesn’t change what you are, or what you did. Or that you enjoyed all of it.”

“Pity but not forgiveness, then.” The lights flickered on in Owl’s heartroom, and those same sickly, diminutive overlays came on, but this time they were people: a sea of faces and bodies walking and talking and laughing. Thuỷ wasn’t sure who they were at first, and then she saw An’s face, Hải’s face, Châu’s face. All of the people Owl had killed. Some kind of mocking memorials, surely—except the overall impression was one of profound loss. “As I said: not that it matters.”

“They keep you company,” Thuỷ said, finally. She wasn’t sure whether to feel anger or sadness.

“Alone in the dark and in the silence.” Owl laughed, but her voice was tinged with old hurt. “I guess they do.”

One last piece: not a connector but one Thuỷ had had made based on the schematics. It was long and sinuous, and it went from the capacitors to the targeting system—and once she’d put it in and checked the connections, it would be fixed, and Owl would be operational again, alone in the darkness. It felt both incredibly portentous and anticlimactic.

She put it in, checked the connections—breathing in, trying to steady her nerves. “Here,” she said.

The lights came on. Not weak, not sickly, not translucent, but strong and unwavering. There were vibrations, like these of a motor accelerating—or a heartbeat—so strong that Thuỷ could feel them through the suit. The safehold released Kim Lan’s statement, automatically transmitting it to Thuỷ, and from Thuỷ to Goby.

Big’sis.

It was done. She had all the evidence she needed to exonerate Kim Lan, to restore her name, her family’s name. “Here,” she said, again—and reached for the glider, to head back to Goby and the world that waited for her. “I’m done.”

She felt light-headed, and limp, and the future was uncertain.

I’m done.

More than done, wasn’t it? She’d set up the safehold, the transmission back to Goby. She’d made the arrangements for Goby to pass the statement on, to deal with the magistrate who would restore Kim Lan’s name. She’d made herself unnecessary to the whole process.

The lights blinked, on the restored weapons system, and somehow she was not surprised when Owl laughed. “Yes, it’s finished, isn’t it?”

There was a low buzzing within the shadow-suit, an impossible whistling that ramped up in intensity—the same vibrations she’d felt before except these burrowed into her until the bones in her body vibrated in sympathy, a red-hot rhythm that caught hold of her and was playing itself on her ribs, on her pelvis, on her skin—louder and louder until everything hurt, and still it didn’t stop…

The Owl’s scream. The punishment for rebels, for the disloyal to the empire. For those who had abandoned their friends.

Thuỷ had chased atonement all the way into that nebula, and on some level she’d known, she’d always known, that she didn’t expect to come out after fixing Owl. “I am,” she said. “Do you think it’s worth it? They’ll just dismantle it, after I’m dead.”

“Oh, child. You’re the one who saw so much, and so little. It’s my voice. It’s part of me. I’d rather scream once more in all my glory rather than leave it forever unused. It will be worth it. All of it.”

You saw much, and so little.

But on some deep, primal level, she’d seen all of it already.

The pressure was building up and up within her. Her bots popped apart, one by one, like fireworks going off—there was nothing in her ears now but that never ending whistling, that vibration that kept going and going, her bones full to bursting, her eyes and nose and mouth ceaselessly hurting, leaking fluid—and her lungs were shaking too, and it was hard to breathe, and even the liquid that filled her mouth, the blood, salt-tinged one, felt like it was vibrating too—and all of it was as it should be—

Thuỷ laughed, bitterly. “I saw so little? I chose to come here. I knew.”

“Ha. All your own choices, then. Always leading back here, to atonement and death.” Owl’s voice was mocking. Thuỷ could barely see the heartroom or the Mind: everything was receding impossibly far away. She was curled up on herself, struggling to keep herself together—to not give in to the quivering, because the moment she did everything would fly apart and all her bones would pop like her bots had, one by one until nothing was left… “The final appeasement for your friend’s soul. Justice.” It was a word that seemed to tear through her.

All her own choices. All her own life.

And yet…

I release you from the oath.

You keep setting the terms and expecting me to keep up.

It had been Kim Lan’s own choices, too.

You assume this is about winning. This is about survival.

She’d always followed Kim Lan, and yet it didn’t have to go that way. It could have been different. Kim Lan could have asked before accepting the amnesty. They could have discussed; come to a joint agreement. They could have done anything that didn’t involve Kim Lan’s pulling at the oath-bond until Thuỷ couldn’t take the consequences anymore. They had an oath of sisterhood, not obedience—and she wasn’t the only one who had broken it.

“She could have asked,” she whispered, through the red haze.

“You said something? Hush, child. It’s almost over.”

She could have asked.

Thuỷ had come here to atone for a death she’d caused, but the truth was—Kim Lan, too, carried the responsibility of what had happened. Of her own death.

The truth was—Thuỷ deserved to live, too.

“It is not over,” she said, slowly—and when that elicited no response, “It is not over!” screaming it through wrung lungs and burst ribs.

The thing holding her—Owl’s scream—paused, for a bare fraction. Interest, again. “Why?”

She deserved to live, and there was only one way she would survive, if it worked at all.

“Because—” Thuỷ forced herself to breathe, swallowing up bile and blood, “That would be too easy.”

A silence. She was held in that embrace of collapsing bones and organs, struggling to move—and said, “You enjoyed it. Killing them. Causing pain. Suffering.”

“Always.” Owl’s voice was malicious.

“Then tell me. Is my guilt or my death easier?”

Silence, again. The embrace flickered, but did not vanish.

“You want to release me, go ahead. Death is cheap.”

“You wanted to die,” Owl said, and she could feel the frustration. The pondering on how most to inflict hurt.

“I did. I do,” Thuỷ said, and it wasn’t quite a lie; just an uncertainty. She thought of the row of faces in the heartroom—not a memorial but an inadequate shield against loneliness. “You should know how much of a punishment solitude is.” She said nothing more, waited.

The room distorted and buckled, and the pressure in Thuỷ’s bones spiked, wringing a scream of pure pain out of her as everything felt about to shatter. Then it was all gone, and she was curled up in the vacuum, gasping and struggling to come together.

“The weight of guilt,” Owl said. Her voice was vicious. “Go. Since you’ve been so good at making your life a living hell.”

Thuỷ uncoiled, muscle after muscle—reached for her glider, shaking, the taste of blood and salt in her mouth—powered it in silence, going through the cloud of debris from her burst bots.

Go.

Death is cheap.

Go.

Thuỷ clung to her glider as she passed out of Owl, out of reach of all the faces of the dead in the heartroom—with Kim Lan’s face in painful but fading memory—and headed towards Goby and the long trip home, to give meaning to the rest of her life.

Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: she has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award and five British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances (JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc), a fantasy of manners and murders set in an alternate 19th Century Vietnamese court, and of the forthcoming lesbian space pirates romance The Red Scholar’s Wake (Gollancz, Nov 2022). She lives in Paris.

The General's Turn
By Premee Mohamed
Semiprozine Long List

So it begins. And the play is conducted upon the gears of a clock.

Constructed inside this ancient cathedral the bright artifice of turning brass was by necessity laid flat to provide a stage; it looks wrong but it all works to keep time. There is a bell, though it does not strike the hours. No electric lights are allowed; we often bring in lanterns, but tonight the cavernous space burns gold and amber from the flaming city. It is bright enough to read a newspaper.

Balanced on the largest gear, the captured criminal looked around, dazed, his khaki uniform a ghostly presence against which his golden-brown hands and face stood out like ink. Around him climbed the ranked gears, twenty-four in all, threaded on axles as thick as the masts of ships. He said, “Where… what is this place? What are you doing?”

“We have not yet begun,” I said, stretching luxuriously and putting my hands behind my head. I would have attempted a reassuring smile, but did not; I know what I look like. “You will hear a chime.”

The boy stared at us, the dozen spectators in a hundred plush red theatre seats. I thought he probably could not see the faces of the other officers. Only the gilt buttons on their black uniforms, like so many eyes in a forest.

“And then what?”

“And then the players will join you on the stage.” I gestured at the darkness behind him, where waiting things gleamed in the reflected firelight from the small, stained-glass windows. “Players, such a useful word. I could have said actors, but they are not acting; they are playing a game. Tell me your name and unit, please.”

“You already know that,” he said suspiciously.

“For the sake of these fine gentlemen, who did not have the pleasure of traveling with you from the front. Please.”

“P… Private Ensi Stremwynn. Of the 514th.” He swallowed visibly, his throat moving like a snake. “The others in my unit…”

“Don’t worry about them,” I said. “This is a game for one.”

There was a man, you know, in the far north of my province. This was what he liked to do (so the papers said): he liked to steal a child, spirit it away to his cottage in the wild forest, where he had built a cellar resembling a dollhouse. Every inch locked up tight, but decorated with ribbons and lace and pretty things. Paintings. Toys. Then he would dress up these children. Rouge them like a doll and demand they play with him. And then, of course, after a few weeks, he would kill them.

And that is how the boy looks now: as if he has been captured by this man. His gaze accuses us of impossible, disgusting depravity.

Nonsense, I want to tell him. Don’t look at me like that. We are not perverts and kidnappers. This is war.

“Very well. The others have been executed. You don’t want to die like them.” I yawned. “Do you?”

“I’m not afraid to die!”

“Of course not. But you want to live, naturally.”

“Tell me about this game!” His voice cracked at last, and behind me someone applauded alone: three or four sarcastic little pats of the hand.

“You have been chosen,” I said. “Save your breath, save your voice. You will need it.”

“For what?”

I met his gaze steadily. Before you die you can eat. And let this be your last meal: beauty. Do not step into the flat-bottomed boat and say to the ferryman: They starved me, I had nothing for my eyes and heart to eat up before I died, and now I am empty. You will die full. Filled to the brim. Your whole skull abrim, ribs abrim. “To earn a dignified death. A beautiful, honorable death. Not dying in the seam.”

He started, then turned his back on me. Stung that I had guessed.

I know this boy. Boys like this. Born of coal, their forefathers dead at thirty with lungs you could burn to heat a barn. Before the army starved him he was a big sturdy lad, fine fodder for the pit. Now he is barely held together by his uniform, a wrapped packet of bones like you would get from the butcher for your dog.

At any rate, if you are a child of coal you don’t fear war as it turns out. You have been born to fight. Fight the darkness, the seam itself, the crumpling shafts, the poison gas, the corrupt foremen, the betrayal or neglect or sacrifice of your fellows. The way the mountain shuts on you like the mouth of one of those great lizards in a book. Crunch. They make good soldiers, these miners’ boys.

“It is a guessing game,” I said. “You will have to guess the identity of one of the players.”

“Fuck you, fuck this play.” The boy spat, or tried to; his mouth clicked drily. “I don’t know any of these people! How could I—”

“They don’t know you either. I will tell you who you have to identify though.”

“Who?”

“Death.” I admit I am hurt, slightly, that he has not heard of my country’s grand and ancient ceremony, this signature honor bestowed upon a captured enemy who could have been shot or sabered in a slaughterhouse like a steer. (We like doing mass executions in slaughterhouses; they are very handy in terms of cleanliness, gutters, lighting, and so on.)

His mouth hung open. Waiting to see if I was joking, if the others would laugh. Death, of course, lies like a mist over the land; millions of our countrymen have been killing one another for three years. Everything stinks of it, the water tastes of it. But Death as well as death attends this ceremony when we hold it.

“You have till the clock strikes, Private Stremwynn. Which should be around dawn. If you correctly identify who plays Death, you will be spared. If not, you have the choice of being hanged on the gallows currently being constructed in Old Parade Square, which will be public; or being crushed between the gears here, which only we will witness.

“In either event your remains will be interred with all honor in the Royal Cemetery, and caretakers will plant runnelvines around your grave to preserve your flesh. Hmm?”

Stremwynn looked down at the line of guards, making the predictable calculation. A dozen men stood in the space between the first row of seats and the massive stone block supporting the gears. Armed; the boy saw, I knew, the glint of their sidearms.

“They won’t shoot you,” I called out. “They’ll just put you back on the stage. Come now, Private. Show some backbone. What would General Narolo think if you did yourself in?”

“Let me live,” he said. “I’m a prisoner of war, there are rules—”

“We don’t like other people’s rules.”

He raised his voice. “I don’t ask for mercy. Only fairness.”

“Reciprocity is for children and gangsters,” I said. “Oh, oh, he has one more biscuit than me! Everyone else understands that life is a set of scales.”

I didn’t invent this ceremony. We’ve done it for five hundred years. Three dozen wars. The same clock, the gears replaced or sharpened or milled or greased; the same foundation carved from bedrock to support its enormous weight. We carry the ceremony out only when needed. We are not barbarians. We do not do these things at a whim. We happen to think there is something noble about it, and therefore about us. Nobility is the practice of not spitting upon tradition.

And that is why we picked him, and executed the other captured soldiers in a more efficient fashion.

Nobility, too, is inefficient. Famous for it.

Stremwynn swayed, and braced himself on the gear behind him.

“Then let us begin,” I said.

“No!”

I paused to enjoy the chuckles of the audience, then nodded to the lieutenant supervising the handful of prisoners winding the clock spring. At his unseen rope-tug a small, sweetly silver tone sounded over their groans and whimpers.

And the players came dancing from the darkness, a score of figures masked, gowned, suited, costumed as animals or fae or fools, and they bowed, wafting a mingled scent of perfumes and colognes, the cedar chips packed with the outfits to keep off moths, and damp young skin.

“Ah,” murmured General Cjesev, one row behind me and three seats over. “Isn’t it just.”

“Shush,” I said. The master of the ceremony cannot speak to the audience, or vice versa; he should have passed a note. The so-called nobleman and his terrible manners.

The boy froze as the players distributed themselves on the now-turning gears, laughing as they rescued coattails or feathers, the trains of dresses or a protruding ribbon. Their finery was slightly shabby, many outfits having been ripped and torn from careless players.

“You’re insane,” said Stremwynn, as if it had just occurred to him. He backed against the axle of his gear, curling his hands around the oily brass. “You’re all insane! They told us you were despots, they didn’t say you had all gone mad!”

“Is that what they call us? I’m hurt.” I’m delighted; I want to give the boy a medal before we kill him. Something nice for the noose to rest against. “Well, never mind,” I said soothingly. “Gallows or gears? You can choose at the end if you like.”

“You are monsters!” the boy shouted.

“But you are a convicted war criminal,” I said. “You are the villain here. Not us.” Behind me, someone could hold it in no longer and guffawed, and the laughter caught from row to row like the city burning outside. Colonel Mezhi would have started that; I had as much as felt his spittle on my neck. He was a crass boor, a jumped-up thief; I liked him for never hiding what he was. “The game has begun, Stremwynn. Off you go.”

“But I… how can I possibly…” The laughter had rattled him, and for a moment he visibly warred between fury and bewilderment. “How can… Death is a process, a… a biological…”

“Time is wasting, Private.”

He set his jaw, and walked slowly around the edge of his gear, and stepped up onto the next, and the game began.

I smiled, and dug some sweets out of my pocket. The most wonderful moment of any war! From outside drifted the friendly tap-tap-tap of the carpenters at work on the gallows. You had to be careful, building with bone. It was not like wood or metal but more alive than either: prideful, fussy, prone to shattering, bending. In fact when you sat down and thought scientifically about it, bone is a ridiculous choice. But in life it bore weight without complaint or flaw, you could say that much. It did bear weight. And anyway it was the spectacle that mattered: that pink-white geometric perfection against the dawn sky.

As if drugged, or knocked on the head, Stremwynn wobbled over to the gorgeously posed players, who leaned towards him with all their perfume and pageantry as if to not miss a single word. “If I ask you if you are Death, must you answer truthfully?” Ah: good man. Trying to figure out the rules.

“No,” replied a tall man in a cat mask and tuxedo, flicking his glossy red wig away from his face. “But you may know from other ways when Death speaks.”

Stremwynn clambered upward, bracing himself on brass and stone, shying away from those who fondled his hair, brushed invisible dust from his uniform, offered him flowers or sweets from secret pockets. Wisely, he took none. He vanished in a cloud of satin and velvet, fur and brocade, his hands moving dreamily across silken bare backs, brushing their hair over his scarred young knuckles, stroking the feathery napes of men, touching bare earlobes. I thought he felt for wings or horns. He would not find them.

Behind me the watchers fell silent, as if we were at the ballet. And I had been to the ballet with these men. They chuckled under their breath, made lewd comments about the dancers. But this silence seemed sacred.

And it should be. Show some goddamned respect. They had not attended as many of these as I had, nor presided over any, and they never would: not Mezhi the brutish mobster, not Cjesev the deranged nobleman, who wanted it most. We all felt Death’s presence here.

“What are you asking them, Private?” I said. “Are you asking the right questions?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice slurred. “No. What do you care?”

Their footsteps pattered across the brass. Laughing, a girl draped all in glitter and string escaped him, and he pursued her, slipped, dangled from the teeth by his fingertips, then dropped with a grunt back to a larger gear.

“Ah, is it her, do you think? Have you chosen so quickly?”

“I’m not saying til the end,” he growled. “Because you lie. And they lie. And it doesn’t matter, does it? There’s no way to win. You just want to laugh at me.”

“Oh, well don’t play then,” I said airily. “If you like, you can just lie down. That’s a good gear to lie on, don’t you think? Nice and smooth. Lie down and give up. Hmm? The way your army does. The way your fellow-fighters did. None of them resisted, did you know that? They just lifted their heads for the knife.” I paused, and studied my nails. “Like dogs looking up at their masters one last time.”

He stared at me, this sentient bag of bones with his eyes candleflames in sunken sockets, reflecting on taut dark cheekbones. “No,” he said. “I will play. And I will break the rules if I want,” he added with a snarl. “You rigged the game, you rigged the war. You do nothing with honor. Not this. Not anything.”

“I think you will choose the gallows, at the end,” I said. “Because you think we would enjoy watching you scream between the gears. You’d rather have it quiet.”

He twitched again with rage, this time falling off his gear and onto the stone. I craned my head sympathetically as he rose shaking, apparently unhurt, dusting himself down.

“You have to die,” I said. “That has been determined for you.”

“Not if I win.”

“No one’s ever won,” I said regretfully; there is a way to win, always has been, but naturally we never speak of it till the end. “Stremwynn, that’s a very old name, isn’t it? In Avalaia, I mean. Yes, I have made some linguistic study. Your name once meant a ferryman. I rather like that. When you are dead you can go on any of the five rivers, not just the one for warriors. And you can say, It is me, the ferryman; let me aboard. Perhaps they’ll even employ you. Though I don’t know rightly what you would need money for in paradise.”

Colonel Mezhi laughed, and a moment later something poked my neck: a folded note scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet. Tell him, it said, he will need to pay for his women, for no one would otherwise fuck him even in paradise. I laughed, and relayed the message. Stremwynn pretended not to hear it.

“Supposing you do not wish to be buried in the cemetery?” I said. “Then we can put you on the river Rath. I think part of it is not on fire. What do you think? Only, there would be no beautiful grave for your family; we give them a special visa, you know, to visit any time. There may well be a statue. We might commission a poet for the plaque.”

“Stop it!” he screamed. “Stop it! Shut up! Shut your filthy mouth! Why did you pick me, you monster? What did I do? Why didn’t you pick someone else?”

“Because I am the one allowed to choose.” I settled another candy against my back teeth. “Go on. You have only till the bell rings, and you do not know when that will be.”

How? Why him? I never knew. We had rounded up the survivors of his unit, thirty-seven men, and I had paced the lineup. The mud on their faces and uniforms was beginning to freeze, sprouting white hairs of ice. And only his eyes were still on fire while the others were extinguished, not even a wisp of smoke.

I had chosen him because the others fought for duty, and he fought for hatred. Had he learned it on the battlefield? Had we infected him with it, this disease of fever and flame? Well, no matter. His eyes held the only light of the day.

And so I marked the traditional streak of black ink across his startled face; and the guards hustled him off to scrub and feed him.

They handcuffed him across from me for our ride back to the capital. A long trip this time, switching tracks when the rails were sabotaged or sunk or blocked by the corpses of trains looted for coal and parts. Slowly we abandoned the churned mud of the front and flew through those places not yet reached by fighting, through the gold-green grass billowing like a silk scarf, through forests bright and hot with spring leaf, and still the boy did not relax.

I removed my jacket, showed him my hands, a posture of perfect vulnerability: See, I open myself to you, like a book. I told him stories of my childhood, my village. The bones of huge animals I had studied while attending the university in Rathmenn, whose towers he would see as we pulled into the station.

But despite my encouragement, plying him with wartime luxuries, sweets, cigarettes, good white bread, he spoke only to say his name and division. Which he knew I knew, for I had examined his wallet as he watched, the sad thing squashed thin as an autumn leaf. An identification card, a ration card, a medical card listing on one side which shots he’d gotten and on the other the diseases he might catch from our revolting soldiers. And a single smudgy photograph of three people, two men and a woman, young. Family? Friends? Lovers?

Stremwynn looked away when I held it up and translated aloud the inscription: a date four years ago, and The old house in Tanad, before the accident.

He was twenty years old.

The brass teeth flickered and danced in the firelight; the players, leaping lightly from gear to gear to elude Stremwynn, began to sweat. Their skin became gilded, their strong young bodies like statues. The boy himself still staggered as he walked, his boots loud and graceless. “The entire world will descend on you when they hear about this. They’ll lock you in an asylum. And they’ll feed you charcoal and hold your head under ice water, trying to fix your brains.”

“Oh, how tedious,” murmured Cjesev. “How’s one supposed to enjoy oneself.”

“Yes, it’s worse than eating popcorn at the opera,” I murmured back. He sat back, vindicated, sulking. “You’re talking to the wrong people,” I said to Stremwynn. “Go on, talk to them. Not us.”

“Why? They’re lying. They lie like you lie. Death isn’t here.”

“We’re not lying,” I said. “No part of this ceremony is a lie.”

“Then it is the only thing you haven’t lied about for five hundred years. And I’ll tell you something else, monster,” he added, swiveling suddenly with his eyes shining again.

My stomach sank, and I wrestled not with fear but with confusion: what did I have to fear from him? But no, I have seen too many faces in my time. I know faces too well. It is my curse: because no one looks that way unless they are burdened with a secret like a spear, meant to be hurled to kill.

“I’ll tell you something else. And Narolo can’t court-martial me for this, because I’ll be dead. I suppose he could spit on my grave. But you smell that smoke? Hear those screams? That wasn’t us. We haven’t dropped so much as a firecracker on you in two weeks. That’s you, that’s all on you. I bet you even gave the order, Vessough. You people bombed your own capital because you thought one of our divisions had gotten over the wall and hid in the warehouse district…we never did. We lied. Fed garbage to your spies. Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you know you weren’t the only ones who could lie? And you bombed your babies and your old women. How do you like that? Rig the fucking game!”

Stremwynn laughed, clutching his sides theatrically; the players scattered around him like startled birds. I did not laugh. Behind me, in the velvet seats, rose a velvet hush. I waited for Mezhi’s coarse guffaws to begin, but heard only the tick and clonk of the gears, the boy’s hysterical, forced cawing.

Could it be true? He was right in one respect: I’d heard of the order, though I had not approved it as the capital was not my jurisdiction. How could he have known that, having come into the city last night?

And the answer was: They knew, they all knew. His entire doomed division. Perhaps Avalaia’s whole army. They had seen our tactics and thought: So, they think they are the only ones with a thumb on the scales.

“Now I know you are truly unafraid to die,” I said lightly, though it strained my face and throat with the effort. “Supposing you win the game and return to your side? They’ll hang you themselves.”

“Fuck you.”

“And you’ll never see the old house in Tanad again.”

He turned back towards me, and lifted his cap, stroked his sleeve across his forehead, replaced the cap. “Supposing I win the game,” he said quietly, over the rustles of the other officers as they leaned forward impatiently to hear. “Supposing I do? I will not leave this place. I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“For this?”

“For everything.”

For everything, I thought, unable to stop myself. For the one thing that we cannot take back. For the lives taken in this war. Not for his own.

Yes, we are cruel. Yes, the world does not use that word as a compliment the way we do. Yes, the world will learn of this and they will see what we call nobility, honor, tradition, and they will call it sickness.

Very well.

The dead cannot return. Not by my hand, not by his. I am tired, I am older than I look. Probably this will be my last ceremony. But I have never prevented a death. No, not a one. Not a single one. I have never saved a life.

Supposing we both played for that? Against Death, against the watchers, against the players. Supposing I put a single extra piece on his side of the board.

There are no rules against it, are there? No, they will not be able to cite a single one.

For the main way the game is rigged, of course, is that there is a moment—about ten seconds—in which all the gears line up, once and never again, in a perfectly straight staircase leading to a hidden door tucked into the place where ceiling and wall meet. The stairs cannot be seen until that moment, and that is when the players are coached to do their utmost both to distract and to hide the fact that they are distracting the player, so that he does not spot it.

No one ever has. That is how cunning the alignment is.

But how, how? The others could not know. I was growing excited and made myself remain still, pasted an expression of light distaste upon my face. What was this? Proximity to life instead of death? No, Death was still here, and death too. Breathing on me with its cool, soil-scented breath.

But life too smells of earth.

Stremwynn sat and wiped his face again, and the players floated and danced around him, cooing and entreating him to get up, to speak to them, to listen to their stories.

Yes, let him live. Him only. And only this one time. The last time. Not that I will be remembered for mercy or even the attempt at mercy, not that I will be remembered for treachery or insubordination or an insult to tradition, but that I will be remembered. I have always watched the game, never played. Imagine having this grand new experience, this taste of novelty and danger, so close to the end of a life. To his, to mine.

How might I play, though? I recalled the battlefield maps in our tents on the front, wreathed in cigarette smoke so that they seemed not maps at all but a misty real world made miniature: rivers, mountains, cities. Blocks of painted wood representing thousands of lives. Yes, we made that into a game too. As if we were rolling dice and climbing ladders. It used to be the gods that played with men for their sport. Now we were the gods.

Stremwynn would never trust me. Our people had been enemies too long. And more than trust: to play along, so that he might escape rather than be swarmed by the officers, who might rise in a single seething mass and kill both him and myself.

A game inside a game, hidden. The yolk inside the shell. Outside, the serene white unblemished surface, and inside a sphere of light. Like a captured sun.

So, then. Let us play where we cannot be seen.

“Get up, Private,” I called. “How can you entertain us if you will not get up?”

He glanced up, teeth bared: but at least he looked instead of ignoring me. That was, I thought, an opening move: a move and countermove. Click-clack across colored squares but everything still in its ranks for now.

What time remained? My role was to run down the clock; neither of us knew to a nicety when it would strike, and so to take out my pocket watch looked suspicious. The officers would see that, would wonder why I did it.

“Now supposing we did not place your remains in the Royal Cemetery,” I called. “Would you like a burial of more majesty or less? Since you think we are so obsessed with appearances.” Mezhi laughed, delighted, like a child anticipating a pummeling at a shadow puppet show. “Not in the ocean. Don’t your people think it a great sacrilege to have no body? To be eaten by fish?”

A nudge. Cjesev passed me a note: But then they do not think it is a great sacrilege to eat fish in turn! What hypocrites!

I said, “Well, let’s place your body in a glass tank in the square, and put some fish in it; and then we will eat the fish in turn.” A roar of laughter behind me. “No? Perhaps a natural monument would be better? It would save us hiring a sculptor. They are very expensive, you know, the good ones. Or what about St. Bontur’s Steps?”

“Oh, those are lovely,” someone said approvingly. “I shagged a milkmaid there once.”

“Silence!” I barked. “Rules!” They chuckled; someone tossed a crumpled ball of paper at me and missed.

Stremwynn glared at me, but not, I thought, with comprehension.

“Don’t listen to them,” I said.

“I’ve never been there,” he said, ducking a passing gear. “That’s a dangerous place. There’s spirits in it.”

“Dangerous! Surely not for you, with your reflexes. And anyway it is perfectly natural. A simple distribution of columnar basalt, divided over many years by flowing water. Nothing mythical about it whatsoever. No? We could bury you at the top, where the water is still.”

Stremwynn got up, moving again amongst the players. Very obviously ignoring me: his back tight with anger, every knob on his spine showing like a fist.

“What about a mausoleum?” I said. “We have grand ones, don’t we, gentlemen? We put a lot of craftsmanship into it.” I paused, as if trying to recall names and places, which in fact I was, but I wanted it also to look theatrical, even gloating. See how rich we are, the others would think; see how rich and powerful and civilized and ancient we are.

I thought: Do you think, boy, we are decadent? Do you know what that word means? Not luxurious, though it has taken on that meaning. It means decayed.

“Now, compare one of our finest, for the military genius who defended us from the Ustukin barbarians. A grand thing of purest white marble, in Kruend. Hmm? You haven’t visited there either, have you, even though it’s near the border. Your side calls it the tower of Ethenrien. Or no, that’s not right, is it? Your silly, twisty language.”

His shoulders stiffened minutely; I hoped the others had missed it, or taken it to mean that he had been baited successfully by mocking his mother tongue. They did indeed have a white marble memorial to a war hero, but it was not in Kruend, and he was named Yaratrian, not Ethenrien.

The officers would not know that. Indeed, they were laughing again, as the boy swung around and gave me the full force of his gaze. Ethenrien starred in a fairytale I had read as a child: framed for a terrible crime by his evil uncle, Ethen had been enchanted to walk an endless staircase for the rest of his life, never reaching the top. When his selfless mother offered to take his place, Ethen slew his uncle and carried his mother, near-dead of exhaustion, to the top of the staircase, which led to a magical land of freedom and treasure.

It was an obscure little story, originating in the boy’s province; I had been sure he would know it. Hope flared in me for a moment, unseen, giving little warmth.

“You mock everything about us,” the boy hissed. “You even mock how we speak. You are empty inside, you have no souls. We are not lesser than you. We are not animals.”

“Oh, of course not.”

All right, his face said before he turned back to the players. Let’s play.

He said, “You’ll tell your people I cried and begged for my life and shit my pants with fear. And the entire world will say: They are insane and they are liars too.”

“The entire world,” I said, “will keep its mouth shut if it knows what’s good for it.”

Now. How to give him the signal? He too would be wondering. Up on a high, small gear, he was surrounded by a dozen or so players who had settled cozily as roosting birds, and he was feeling their wrists.

Death has a heart that beats, said the next note, the ink smeared and in an unrecognizable hand, suggesting it came from a back row. But how clever he is to think of it! The last one did not, I am sure.

Blast it. What other fairy tales might I use? No, I couldn’t do it twice. And he was too young to know anything of much use, wasn’t he. One day long ago he had been taught: The world is round, it spins to orbit a star. And then what must have felt like minutes later, he had been buttoned into a scratchy uniform and told: Go kill.

Take lives.

Do not give them back.

“Have you killed many people, Private Stremwynn?”

“What do you care, you sick bastard? Do you want to know so you can jack off to it later?”

Ah, play the game, boy; good. Murmurs behind me, still approving. Not suspicious. Or were they? It is so hard to get actionable information from a murmur.

“I certainly think you should tell me,” I said.

“A million,” he sang, holding the final note for several seconds; the hair rose stiffly on my nape. “Ten million. I killed every single enemy I saw. Every one of you bastards. I killed bastards I didn’t even see. The massacre at Upper Quaril? That was me. I did it with my mind.”

“Amazing! How merciful that you have chosen not to kill us all with your mind at this precise moment.”

Mezhi honked with laughter, and it rippled out in waves like a stone tossed into a pond. Good. So they too, I thought suddenly, were part of the game. And they did not even know they were playing. Now we all play together, so it is like a dance.

But will the one who does not play come to watch our game? Does it cheer for a side?

“Perhaps I did,” he said. He stooped with boneless grace, seized a fallen feather, tucked it into the soft black fluff behind his ear, small and red, like a cut. “And you are watching this now from Hell.”

“O, a prize, a prize,” sighed a lithe young woman in a military outfit from a hundred years ago, all gold braid and navy wool. “Give it, please, and I shall trade it to the Watchers of the Woods for a wish.” She reached for the red feather, and Stremwynn half-instinctively danced away, losing his hat at once into the maw of two gears behind him.

I nearly cursed. The gears aligned for so brief a space, I could not let Stremwynn miss it.

He awaited a signal he could trust, still half-believing (or fully believing: let us not lie to ourselves) that I would betray him. Because I had told him the game could not be won; because he could not fathom why I had begun a second game. I did not know, entirely, myself. His death would not end the war, nor would his life. We would still be a laughingstock, just as he said. They would still be heroic martyrs. Tomorrow, more birds would be singing than today, and there would be a few more minutes of daylight.

“Now, Stremwynn—”

“Go fuck yourself.”

The slightest of edges in his voice. Anger, but also impatience, if you were listening for it. My heart began to hammer.

Neither of us would win. Death was the better player: experienced, canny, full of tricks and wily endgames, impossible to deceive on the board. We would both lose. Not him. Not me.

How to make a signal he would see through the crowd of masks and ribbons, feathers and jewelry, and could not be seen from behind me? And supposing he was not looking at me at the crucial moment. I could not speak a clue of any kind; above all we wish to cheat without being caught.

“I meant to ask only about your epitaph. There isn’t much room on a gravestone,” I said. Sweat beaded on my brow, trickled down into my beard.

“Shut up. I am trying to talk to these people.”

“Now the others, they got a mass grave,” I said expansively. “It’s more economical. We thought about burning them, but that whole area of the city is on fire anyway. Thanks to you. Or as you’d say, thanks to us.”

“Shut up.”

“Now, it’s about time your people learned there are no rules in war. I’m not angry, truly. Look at our hero Minndahl’s campaign back in 1357,” I said. “You don’t know that one. Little coal-miner, hmm? A clever gambit.”

“I don’t care, nobody cares about your colonies. Why can’t you people just stay where you are? Why do you have to leave your home and smash up or steal everybody else’s?” Stremwynn shouted. “Why can’t you stop when you know that everybody hates you?”

In the low and flickering light, this light of operas, of theatre, of magic (of murder), I could not be entirely sure of what I had seen on his face. Minndahl had successfully invaded not merely by the unexpected approach from the sea cliffs, but by staging a diversion at a distant village the night before, luring the garrison out to defend the civilians.

They will try to divert you at the crucial moment, I had meant to say. Pay attention to me, not the diversion.

Maybe, his slight nod had said; or had he only raised his chin and not lowered it? His skin gleamed like an ancient helmet in a museum. Dripping metal. I am the warrior, his face said. Not you.

The steps of the players had taken on a ritualized cadence, apparently random; but I spotted it at once. Randomness itself is a pattern that draws attention. Stremwynn would not be able to see that. The players harried him, threatened him, stepped close to his face, vied for his favor, nudging each other aside. Twirled away behind him so he glanced at their steps.

The gears turned. Turned. Clicked. He fell down one level. Another. Don’t let them distract you, boy. Watch me. Watch me.

Click.

Click.

Click.

There.

Arms still crossed across my chest, I turned the whiteness of my palm to him, twice, three times, silently. Had he seen it? No? No. Dear Gods, and the seconds dribbling away like water.

Wait.

Stremwynn fought free, crying, “What did you call me? I’ve emptied a man’s guts for less than that!” and looked up.

Time paused: hung frozen and crystalline as if suspended in a tear. And then he was in motion, trailing sweat in golden droplets, arms pumping. The players’ hands fell away from him and went to their eyes as if they could not stand to look.

In long graceful leaps he took the staircase, heedless of the roars of consternation and surprise behind me. At the top he hesitated; I opened my mouth to cry Jump! but held it down.

He leapt, arms out.

And hit the invisible sill, and scrabbled at the light wooden latch, and had almost gotten it loose when Death revealed herself.

For a moment I was a child again, fallen in the river and caught in an eddy, spinning trapped in the cold transparent water.

Death was taller than the boy, taller than me; and she wore a black mask from brow to chin and her hair was dark without being the color of dark hair; it was the void filled with stars, and constellations glinted as it coursed down her back, the Serpent, the Scorpion, the Archivist, the Twins.

With queenly step she left the edge of her gear and rose effortlessly towards Stremwynn, her gown billowing like thunderheads at sunset, weightless gold, lifted by invisible breath, and in this furious silent cloud of storm and light she seized the boy and brought him down to the stone.

Before I could react she had dragged me up as well, one terrifying unseen burst of motion, knocking away the guards. When everything stopped moving I looked up cautiously: Stremwynn fought to free his arm and she gave him no notice, and her grip did not loosen. His teeth and his staring eyes shone in the darkness like bone.

She unclasped her mask and tossed it clatteringly aside, where the other players danced away from it like a live coal. And they were wise to do so, as I glanced only once at the place where a face should have been, and looked away.

Over the roar and hiss of my heart she spoke, and Stremwynn stopped struggling and looked down at me.

“Pardon me, lady,” I said, hating how my voice trembled. “Did you address me?”

Explain yourself, Vessough. Before these so-called persons. I want them to witness it.

“Witness what?”

How you have cheated the game.

“I did nothing, lady. You know the rules as well as I. If the criminal can climb to freedom, then he may go. Which, I admit, has never happened; but the entire structure is built to enable it. We made it so.”

It has never happened because the entire structure is built for it to be unnoticeable when it happens. You told him somehow, you are complicit, Vessough. Of all people.

“I deny and forswear it. I will swear upon anything you ask.”

I do not ask. I ask nothing of human creatures, for there is nothing I cannot take at my whim. But this is not whim. He is mine. Belongs to me. And now we shall go.

Where she goes no one can follow, and the players were already parting to make a path, what indeed would I have sworn upon? What in my life do I still hold holy? Nothing, no one, no gods, no memories. “Wait!”

She turned, swinging Stremwynn lightly, like a parasol. The dress stormed around her, the gold of new coins, blacker in its folds and shadows than void, something burning there, listening. On her back four great wings were unfolding, their edges lit faintly in blue and sharper than broken glass.

Nothing is holy and nothing has my faith except this: wings designed not for flight but to deliver pain to soft things. To make them bleed.

“I offer myself in his place,” I said.

She said nothing.

“Let him go. Are you so attached to winning a rigged game? Or are you so attached to him? Eventually you will see him again. Perhaps minutes from now. A mob may tear him apart. A bomb may destroy him. It’s war. Take me instead. He won his freedom.”

The players did not move. Stremwynn did not move. The officers rose from their seats; I heard the scraping of shoes.

Death, too, did not move. And then she began to laugh, until the laughter vanished under a storm of sound as the bell struck to signal the end. Three times it rang, unmeasured tons of chipped and pitted iron, and all the world became noise, and we were washed in it, crushed by it, reduced to motes.

When it was over, my hearing returned to discover Death still laughing. The gears were still and the clock spring was entirely unwound, the great copper bulk resting lightly on its ratchet.

I rose, scraping my palms on the stone. My bones still resounded to the bell; my mouth had filled with blood. I swallowed it rather than spit at Death’s feet. Her shoes looked very expensive.

I will not take you, she said. I do not want you. But never before has the offer been made, and you have given me much mirth for making it.

She released Stremwynn and pushed him toward me. Then Death and her billowing gown vanished into a slit cut in the air, a dainty action of one swift wing. Its light left a similar scratch on my eyes no matter where I looked, violet-blue and burning.

Stremwynn limped toward me, making for the edge of the stone support. I stopped him with a hand on his sweat-dampened shoulder.

“No. There is a door behind the spring. You will find the key to it around the neck of the lieutenant there, him on the floor. If you go past these men they will kill you. Death never flies far. You played well.”

“And you?”

“Go. In a moment they will remember themselves.”

The players did not stop him; the lieutenant only moaned and pawed weakly at the boy’s big hands effortlessly breaking the thin chain. Then he paused, the fool, to uncouple the shackled prisoners on the spring’s winding-handle, and rush them out ahead of him.

Firelight no longer danced on the stone walls. The long light of dawn was tentative, greyish-blue, then lavender, then crimson. In silence I climbed down, and the others surrounded me, Mezhi, Cjesev, others I did not know, and they did not touch me, perhaps because Death had too recently done so and her powers lingered, perhaps for other reasons. Their hands hovered.

“Explain yourself,” said Cjesev, pressing his pistol to my back. I ignored the crawling of my spine as it attempted to flee, and put on a bland smile.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You all seem to be very excited, gentlemen, over nothing whatsoever.”

“What happened?” Mezhi’s eyes were bloodshot, the sockets blackened, as if he had been struck across the bridge of the nose.

“I would say you seem to be having a reaction to something,” I said.

“Move. We will get to the truth of this.”

We emerged into a cool, smoky sunrise. Long shadows crossed my own and I looked up. On the far side of the river, Stremwynn rose clumsily from a trap door, his light uniform smeared with soot and dirt, scattering the other prisoners ahead of him.

He stared at me. Between us the river scraped and walked, walked and scraped. Mud and ash and blood. How long till it ran clear again? I would not be alive on that day.

I raised a hand to the boy, held it up long enough to ensure he saw. Noticing what I had never seen: scratches from the broken ends of ribs. A man reaches into another man and lifts out a heart, and at the end of his life his atrocities are scribbled onto his hands for anyone to read.

After a moment, Stremwynn waved back. And then he was gone, running low between the broken buildings, vanishing into the smoke.

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the 'Beneath the Rising' series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

The Music of the Siphorophenes
By C.L. Polk
Novelette Long List

I know a nanomask when I see one, especially when the wearer’s making eye contact. There’s something about how the mask melds around the lids—it’s just a little bit stiff, but you have to really know what you’re looking for to tell. But people in nanomasks are trouble, and I never want any of that.

I’m not here for eye-contact games—the beat’s pounding as hard as my heart and the DJ is here from Support Station Ganymede. I came alone, and I’m leaving that way, too.

You’d think grounders would stay away. The Canteen’s in the hub, a matte-black-painted dump tucked in between the highball courts and the zerosilk classrooms. It’s the hot spot for the Princess’s working stiffs—the hospitality personnel, the busboys, the strippers, the chambermaids. But you can’t be rude to a tourist, even though you’re in your own zone. They’ll complain to a manager in a heartbeat, and then you’re kicked off the boat.

They hang around, even if they can’t dance. But this grounder is good. Too good, if you ask me. She’s even dressed like a spacer—well. If you call morphostretch short-shorts and a sixpack-baring camisole dressed. She’s a head and a half shorter than everyone else. But she and her nanomask are not my business.

Then she rolls her head, her eyes closed and her chin thrust out, and I’ve seen that move on holo a hundred times—then she jerks her head, left, right, and the movement ripples from head to toe. Her hair shakes down her back and I go tight across the shoulders as all the pieces tumble together.

Holy shit. I’m wrong. I have to be wrong.

Ansa Veda makes eyes at me again, and this time I hold her gaze. Fuck it. Why not? Not like anyone would believe me. Not like there’s anyone to tell.

I face her. Dance with her. And then she’s a mirror, her limbs a reflection of my moves. My best moves, but can I mind when it’s her? I’m in good shape, even if I can’t ever get back that heart mass after living in space. But she dances me into a trembling, exhausted heap, and I bow my head before pointing to the bar and leaving her victorious.

I drink water, squeezing the bulb as the cold, clean liquid chills my throat and pools in my belly. Sweat’s beading all over my skin. I danced my ass off. I danced with the best singer in the solar system. Hell of a night. And then she’s there. She gets a water like me. We drink in silence. She gives the bulb back and shouts over the music.

“You’re Reese, right? You sail the Red Wind?”

Oh. I know what she’s going to say. I know what she wants but I blot sweat off my face and reply, “She’s mine, yeah.”

She sighs. She smiles. “I want you to take me out to see the Siphorophenes.”

Of course she does.

Shit.

“Reese, wait.”

I’m a good twenty meters out of the Canteen when I realize I’d just turned around and left. Pure panic. No excuse, though. Can’t be rude to a tourist. Especially not this one.

So I stop, all two point two meters of me, and I haul my mass around to face her. “I’m an excursion pilot.” I smile. Real pretty, too—when you work for Princess Cruises, your deductible on cosmetic alteration is trivial. “I take reservations for day trips. You want to see Saturn’s moons up close? I’m your woman. But I don’t go to the Outers anymore, and I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t, either.”

“They say that you have the record.” And that’s Ansa Veda getting all fluttery at me. At me. “One hundred and seventeen successful sightings. You are the best in the solar system. I came here for you.”

My heart can’t take this. “I got lucky. And I’m not pushing it anymore. You know what’s in the Outers?”

She huffs. “I know what you’re going to say.”

I say it anyway. “Pirates. The Red Wind is a dragonfly skimmer. She doesn’t even have a popgun, and I am not going to be the woman who lost Ansa Veda to pirates.”

Her eyes bug out at those last words.

“Nanomask.” I draw a circle around my face with one finger. “Your choreography is distinctive. And you are not getting anywhere near the Outers without a full escort.”

“But the Siphorophenes won’t come to an armed ship—”

“I know they won’t,” I say. “But I’m not going to risk becoming the most hated woman in the solar system because I lost you.”

“I’m paying fifty million credits—”

“It’s not enough—”

“A day.”

The math smacks me right upside the head. I wheeze a little. “Ms. Veda—”

“If you can’t take me, I understand.”

Oh thank fuck. “Okay.”

“I’ll just ask another pilot.” She flicks her wrists and floats away.

“Hold on.” I launch myself toward her. “You can’t do that. You’ll be even less safe with someone else.”

One shoulder rises, perfectly nonchalant. “I’ll have to settle, though. Since you won’t do it.”

Fuck. She’s going out there, no matter how many pirates there are. Nobody else can do this the way I can—and from the look on her nanomasked face, she knows it.

“Fine,” I say. “But we do this quiet. I’ll log a full ring tour with all the extras—that should give us enough time to slip. It’ll be a day to lay in supplies. Okay?”

She nods, excitement rising. We’re really doing this.

I feel sick.

• • • •

It takes a week to slip just a short hop out to Uranus’s orbital path. I’m working on a hunch.

Here’s how I get a hunch: I cut the power to everything but life support. I make it quiet. All the lights off. All the circulation off (and a little countdown that will beep when the CO_2 starts to push it, but it never takes that long). I unstrap from my flight couch and float. I let my thoughts drift without chasing them or trying to make them stop—I’m a chatterbox inside my own head, but I can tune it out.

And then I wait for a sign.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s what happens. I shut up and stay still, and then a little wiggle of curiosity, something at the edge of my vision—hell, I followed a tingle on my scalp once. I get the sign and I slip. No second-guessing—I just go. It’s weird, but it works.

When the soft hums and whispers of the ship come back to life, Ansa floats over to the cockpit to check on me.

I still can’t believe how much she looks like herself. On the holo, I mean. But that first time I kind of stared, and she let me do it without seeming at all bothered. I can’t stop looking at her. She’s real. I’m flying to Neptune with a freaking pop star in my cabin, and she’s a—

She’s a pain in my ass. She wrinkles her nose at printed food—and fuck that, because I bought the best reconstitute you can get and the texture replication is supposed to be really good. She takes too long in the shower—I know the water recycles but that’s not the point. And she asks a lot of questions. Maybe just making conversation, but I’m not really a conversation person.

But she tries to start one anyway. “Wow. I’ve seen roads I thought were full of nothing, but space is so . . . empty.”

“Welcome to the Outers,” I said.

She rubs her bare arms, staring at the black beyond the windows. “I don’t know if I’d want to be out here all alone. Isn’t it scary?”

“No.” I continue my course calculations. “The lonely is the point.”

She wrinkles her nose at me, and it’s become just something she does instead of a trademark expression. “So. Still with the Stoic Solo Spacer thing?”

I humph. It’s a laugh. “Always.”

“It’s not healthy, you know. You need people. We’re social mammals. Isolation hurts.”

“I’m with people all the time when I’m onboard, with passengers.”

“But are any of those people your friends?”

The Prescod-Weinstein interface is finished. I’m just waiting for her to stop conversing.

“I work a lot.”

“And you settled for day trips to Saturn.”

“Saturn’s pretty.”

“Did something happen the last time you were out here?”

I gesture at her to net in for the slip. “Don’t know what you mean.”

She sighs, a big, gusty huff. “Did you see the Siphorophenes?”

“Yes.”

She buckles herself in as fast as I could have done it. “Did they do anything different?”

I recheck Navcomm. “Remind me to take a look at the distiller once we’re out of slip. You’re still not nauseous on the drop?”

She knows what I’m doing. She shakes her head anyway. “It’s fun.”

“It’s fun. You’d make a good spacer if you cut your hair.”

And with that compliment, I tap the ignition on the PW drive. We plummet through space so fast, the falling reflex flipping my stomach over makes me breathe a little more carefully.

Only it’s an illusion. We’re cheating relativity—just sneaking past it real quick with math I don’t understand any more than I can tell you how to perform microsurgery. I just fly the thing, and while my monkey brain fights terror at falling falling falling I have to get back to work.

It isn’t actually scaring me. I’m still driving the ship, doing everything by reflex while the instincts sit in a corner and stay out of the way.

Ansa knows the drill. She doesn’t say a word or fidget or do anything distracting. But I am distracted, and so I pop out of the slip.

“I have to try again,” I said. “Just real fast.”

I barely even close my eyes before I can feel it—the hunch is that way.

Ansa unbuckles from the jump net. “We’re close.” Her voice is excited. She’s trying to look through the windows without crowding me.

“It’ll be a while.” I reorient my view of Navcomm. “I might be wrong.”

“I don’t believe that,” she says, and I don’t argue. I’m just the driver, and the sooner I get her to the Sirens, the sooner we can return to the cruise ship. But then I feel it. I alter my course, nudging just a little bit thataway, and beside me Ansa tenses.

“There,” she says. She points straight out the window. “What is that?”

I can’t help it. I cock my head at her. “We’re too far away to see anything.”

“There’s a presence . . .” she says. “I can’t see it. I just know.”

Back in the peaceful days when Siren sighting looked like it was going to become a fashion, I tried to ask other pilots if they’d ever noticed anything strange. One person looked me right in the eye and said no, but other than that, no one knew what I was talking about.

But Ansa is pointing straight at my hunch. I cut the engines and tap alerts to visual only. We get closer and it’s making my skin shiver and Ansa grabs for my shoulder with a little gasp, and I let her because I’m sucking up a breath of my own.

They’re coming.

• • • •

Everyone has seen images of the Siphorophenes. They’re all over the holoshows in clubs, a symbol of expanding cosmic consciousness. Cults claim to have communications with these benevolent spacefaring wanderers who came to the Solar System to midwife us into a new evolutionary paradigm.

Whatever. Grounders don’t know how trite they sound when they’re talking about Sirens. But I do. I can’t describe the Siphorophenes without sounding like a complete fool.

I have seen Sirens drifting through the black. The biggest are easily two kilometers long, the largest living creatures in the solar system. Their tentacles unfurl and sway, coil and contract, and I get lost in just watching their limbs move, the surface of their flesh mottled with shifting, gentle colors, spangled all over with phosphorescent points of light.

They make you feel so small, but the sight of them is awesome. People break down and weep in their presence. They are greater than us. They are beautiful, and otherworldly, and they look so delicate, even if they’re huge. And this time, one of them heads our way, limbs curling and fanning out like a tattered silken ballgown.

“Stay still,” I whisper. “They’re coming.”

It’s getting closer than I have ever seen a Siren come. The Red Wind is seven meters long, stem to stern. This Siren is easily a hundred. If they want to, they can destroy us with one swipe . . . but if I start the engine, it’ll retreat.

I don’t start the engine.

They come closer, and I feel its awareness. It knows we’re here. It fills the windows until all we can see are the lights glowing over its skin. If it attacks, we would go tumbling end over end, all our oxygen escaping from a hull breach. We are completely at its mercy.

I don’t move. Beside me, Ansa clutches my shoulder.

“What’s it doing?” she whispers, but fear makes her loud.

“Coming closer.”

“Does this happen all the time?”

“No,” I say. “This is the first time.”

“Then why aren’t you—”

“Feel it,” I say. “It’s not threatening us. The fear’s just a reflex. Forget it. We’re safe.”

The Siphorophene halts—and one of its limbs flows upward, headed right for us.

I don’t move. Ansa’s bruising me. We watch as the limb reaches for the Red Wind and gently rests on the window.

“Hello,” I say, because it’s polite.

The Siren answers with a single note, and every hair on my body stands on end. Then another voice joins, and another, and I can’t get a breath past the ache in my throat. The Siphorophene blurs, and I blink hard.

It sings. It sings for us.

I bite my lips. The sound swells around us. It makes my skin glow with warmth. It feels like love. It feels like joy.

I’m shaking when it stops.

Ansa strokes my shoulder and sings back, one lonely voice in reply to a chorus. Her voice rises on a liquid run and falls down to the basement of her range before soaring again, filling the dragonfly with pure power. She rubs the shaking knob of my shoulder as her voice trills high and sweet in answer.

And then she falls silent, and there’s nothing left but me sniveling, my chest hitching as I try to pull myself together.

But the Siren goes tense. It twists, lifting a delicate limb from the window and gathering themselves up—and then it’s fleeing away, moving faster than I have ever seen a Siren move. It tumbles in my stomach, and I slap the power back on.

Alarms start wailing. Navcomm shows ships. Three. No. More. Shit.

“Net up,” I say. “Pirates.”

I nose down and dive for it, fumbling on the PW interface. No time to math out a destination. I slap the override when the alert pops. I slap it again, screaming. I’m not netted—

I fumble my way into a straight-line course and grab the arms of the couch to keep from getting launched. I need a minute’s lag between me, the hot-green pirate vessel closest to me, and the fleeing Siphorophene before I can slip. Fifteen light-seconds of lag, any direction, it doesn’t matter. I just need to get us out of here.

“How did the pirates find us?”

“No idea.” I’ve secured the belt around my hips. It’s barely enough. It’s all I have time for. Navcomm reckons up the lag between me and the pirate. Five seconds.

I’ve got to go faster. It’ll take fuel, but when you’re slipping, you don’t burn nearly as much. I’ll slip for a minute, pop out, calculate the slip to Saturn, and get into military-controlled space as fast as possible.

Seven seconds’ lag. A hunch twitches my fingers over the controls and we veer in a second direction, twenty degrees off my original heading.

That hunch means that when the pirates pop out of slip, the dragonfly bounces off the displacement like a coracle on a wave, prompting a small yelp from Ansa and I don’t blame her because I’m too busy shouting, “Where the fuck did you come from?”

I grab the sticks and corner hard, diving out of the trap they would have caught me in if I hadn’t zagged on impulse. But we’ve gotta get out of here.

New course, and I’m so wound up I can’t really breathe right. How did they predict my heading and slip to exactly the right spot? And why aren’t they chasing me? I’m pulling away from them. Nine seconds of lag. I change course again, burning hard for Saturn and protected space.

Ten point six seconds. The hot-green ship blinks out. Slipped. We bob on its wake. I can twist course again, or I can let the computer slip us if I straight-line it, if I calculate right now. I’m already sliding my fingers over the display. No time to get cute. We’re at eleven seconds. Just a little more and we’re—

The dragonfly bucks like a spooked horse. The hot-green ship slips into space facing us, the guns are out, and that’s impossible. Even if the triangulation gang had reported Red Wind’s course, it should have taken twelve seconds for Hot Green to get the message.

They can’t do what they just did. There’s no way. But I can’t deny those guns pointed at us.

I turn my lights to Hazard/Distress, the closest thing I have to a surrender signal, and power down.

“So,” I say to Ansa. “Time for plan B.”

The dragonfly flinches as something hits the hull and jerks us sideways. Ansa shouts as it keeps moving.

I try to smile, but when I do it feels weird and wrong. “Does your travel policy include ransom insurance?”

“What? Yes. You want me to—”

“They can get a good sum for you,” I say. “If we’re stitched up by Uranian Anarchists, they’ll be decent.”

“And if we’re not?”

I can’t tell her that. “Let’s hope they’re the Anarchists.”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“I know.” I push myself out of the gel couch.

I open the cupboard with the food printer and put on the pressure pot. I’ve never been captured by pirates. I can’t buckle swashes worth a damn. But I bought real coffee beans, and maybe a little hospitality will be worth something.

The smell’s wafting through the air when they board us.

“We surrender,” I say, and I try not to piss myself when I see them. They have crude blue tattoos on their arms. They’re supposed to mean things—how many ships they’ve taken, how many times they’ve murdered, stuff like that. They’re mixed in with faded, better work—screaming eagles and skulls and roses and squadron marks from their former lives as mercenaries, stranded in space by a lack of war.

We didn’t get captured by Uranian Anarchists.

My throat hurts as I do my best to smile. “I’m Reese Taylor. My passenger is Ansa Veda. We’re both insured.”

• • • •

My jaw hurts. My ribs hurt. My nose throbs, and I think it’s not bleeding anymore but I don’t want to push it.

We’re aboard the Starhawk. I saw the tags on the walls before they decided to discuss how my resistance pissed them off. Ansa screamed for me as they took me away, and she’s crying now that I’m back. It’s uncommonly kind of them to imprison us together.

Ansa launches herself toward me when they shove me into the hold, but she stops just short of touching me. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not okay.”

She lifts her hands to touch my face, and I twitch away. “Did they interrogate you?”

I grunt and wince. “No. They just beat me up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“S’alright. They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Okay.” I test my mobility and hiss. Don’t breathe too deep, got it. I spin, slowly, carefully, and hurt my ribs again as I see it.

We’re in a cargo hold. There’s nothing in it but us. And that right there? That’s a hatch.

We’re in an airlock.

My stomach gets it loud and clear. If they decide we’re not worth it, we’re eating vacuum. And from the size of the hold, we’re still on the hot-green cruiser. It’s old. It doesn’t have the safety features that would prevent a cycle.

I glide to the door leading to the ship. Hope flares at the sight of a ten-digit codepad. How old is this thing? I peer at the buttons. Buttons, and the keys used the most often are worn. Four buttons.

“What are you doing?”

“I might have . . . listen. Don’t freak out. But they drank the coffee.”

“I know,” Ansa said.

“So, by my reckoning, our boarding party, which was near everyone on the cruiser—those five guys who got us? They’re going to be really sick soon. But that’s only five of them. The other one might come and get me for another shitkicking, or—how much is your insurance for?”

“Eight billion credits.”

I nod. My stomach unclenches a bit. “They probably don’t want to cycle you out if you’re worth eight billion in insurance.”

“Cycle me out?”

“This is an airlock.”

I regret it the moment I say it. She goes ashen, her warm golden color sick and gray. I understand. This is the kind of liminal space you don’t want to be in.

“But here’s the thing. That codepad? It’s likely it’s a four-digit number. I can probably spring us.”

“Probably?”

“Listen. I need you to not freak out. Do you have a pen?”

The buttons are worn pretty much equally. If I’m lucky, and it is a four-digit number, and each button is pressed once . . .

I jam my little finger up my nose. My eyes squeeze shut at the bright orange flare of pain. Warm wetness seeps out.

I write the possible key combinations on the wall in my blood. 2468. 4268. 4628. 4682. I keep going until I realize there are too many—I’ll have three tries at most. I can’t think about the numbers. I’ve got to think about people.

And people do what’s easy. 2468.

Pin incorrect.

Well, fuck. Okay. It’s a diamond. Clockwise? 2684.

Pin incorrect.

What will happen if I get my third attempt wrong? They might already know I’m trying to bust out of here. They might be watching us. I lift my head and look around for a lens, but that’s just anxiety.

“What happens if you run out of attempts?”

“One, nothing. Two, they come for us and I get to have another talk with the pirates. Three—”

“Maybe we should wait,” Ansa says. “Maybe we should . . . not make any trouble. Maybe we should—”

I know what she’s saying. I get it. But if we wait, we’re just as fucked. I touch my forehead, my heart, my left shoulder—

Oh.

2864.

The hold door chirps and Ansa squeaks. She hauls it open and we skim into the corridor, shutting the hold door behind us.

There’s not a lot of space on a cruiser. Not a lot of places to hide. I spot a knife in the galley, and I grab it and a wrench. I give the knife to Ansa, remembering she was in a holo where she dancefought on wires; that was choreographed, but it’s better than nothing. She grips it with determination.

The wrench isn’t the best weapon. But it settles my nerves into a different frequency of anxious howling, and we creep along. Nowhere to hide—

But that’s the server room. I suck up a breath and regret it. It’s got the same codepad as the cargo hold. Could they be foolish enough?

I punch in the numbers.

They are foolish enough. I’m so relieved it rushes through me, but I tug on Ansa’s shoulder and open the hatch.

A pirate pops out so fast I shriek. Ansa takes a swing at him and spins herself in a circle. He looks at her and laughs. I grab him by the neck, crank my arm back, and brain him with the wrench.

He shouts as the wrench connects, reaching for me as I try to hit him again. Ansa catches on, grabs his shoulder, and thrusts. The knife buries itself in his side.

He stops moving.

I think we just killed him. We’re killers. They put us in an airlock, though, and now that I’m safe from that room I am hot with a lust that begs for violence. They’re pirates. Not Uranian Anarchists. I get why the Anarchists do what they do, and I feel for them. These guys—no. They’re murderers. They routinely kill crews when looting a ship if they’re uninsured. They put us in a fucking airlock, and now it’s us or them.

I shove the pirate’s body back into the server room and hope the scrubbers take care of the floating blood before anyone notices. “Come on.”

It’s a tight squeeze, but there’s a computer, and the dead pirate’s still logged in. I hunt around for information. Course heading. My ship is connected to theirs, riding piggyback. We’re alone, the other ships that had helped pin us down gone elsewhere, a good twenty minutes of lag to the nearest ship, the Starkiller. Pirates, really.

The way I see it, we have a few choices. We could kill everyone on board and loot the ship. That’s what they would do. But I don’t want to look at the body in the room with us. I don’t want to kill anyone else if I don’t have to.

I want to get out of here. Just escape. If I sabotage this ship, I should be able to unhook the Red Wind and make a run for it. Twenty minutes’ lag is too far for them to catch us.

Ansa gasps and jumps backward, colliding with the body. “Reese. Look at this.”

I rise past the console and follow her pointing finger, and—

It’s a Siren. But it’s tiny, and it’s moving listlessly in the corner of a tank, a metal crown over the pendulous bulge at the top of its body and what is it doing here—

I shudder. I’m going to be sick.

I know what it’s doing here.

It twitches, and a chat message pings on the monitor next to it. “Coordinates in package,” it says.

Navigation orders. Curiosity seizes me. I open the packet from the Starkiller, and I blink.

The timestamp reads 23:18:41. Ship’s clock reads 23:18:47.

That can’t be right. It’s twenty minutes out.

The baby Siren twitches again. Another message pings. “Got that?”

23:18:51.

That’s impossible. I look at the Siren. Could it be—

I reach into the tank and test the crown. It slips off. The Siren wraps a limb around my wrist and I hear music that makes me want to gather the tiny creature in my arms and hold it and rock it and promise that it will never sing that song again.

“What’s it doing here?”

“I think they stole it,” I say. “We have to take it with us. Here. You hold it. I have to do something.”

Ansa holds out her hands and the Siren clings to her, and the look on her face when she hears its song—she holds the siren to her chest, looking as forlorn and hurt as it feels inside me.

I go back to the main server station. I open the file navigator, call up the file structure, and delete the Navcomm system. And its backups. And its previous versions and registry entries, and then I rise and find their Prescod-Weinstein interface. The wrench takes care of that.

The next minute, we leave the server room and the smells in the halls match the miserable sounds coming from the pirates’ sleeping pods. Ansa wrinkles her nose.

“I expect they stole our reconstitute,” I say on the way to the galley. “Good thing I didn’t poison it. No more coffee for the rest of the trip, though.”

Ansa nods, petting the Siren.

Sure enough, the mealkit box is there. I wrap it in a hauling net and lead the way to the top hatch, where the Red Wind awaits.

• • • •

They even stole the economical backup reconstitute. Ansa nets up while humming a lullaby to the Siren. I uncouple the Red Wind and thrust just enough to maneuver clear of the ship. I immediately start acceleration to give us fifteen seconds’ lag on the Starhawk and get the fuck out.

Ten light-seconds’ lag. I glance at the tiny Siphorophene in Ansa’s arms. Ansa’s singing lyrics now, a song her mother wrote and performed for her when she was still gestating.

“Is the little guy okay?”

Ansa answers in the voice we use on babies and pets. “Little guy’s name is Jodianthaladan. I don’t think it’s a he. But it doesn’t mind Jodi.”

I lift my hands from the display. “You can talk to it?”

“It’s not exactly talking? But yeah. I’m starting to understand. Where are we going?”

“Anywhere.” We’re moving away from the Starhawk, and I fucked with its brains enough that I’m not worried about it following us. But Jodi is perking up a bit, its colors shifting to match Ansa’s skin and morphostretch suit. That’s good, right?

Just one problem. “Ansa,” I say, carefully. “I’m not sure what to do with Jodi.”

She looks up at me with sparks in her eyes. “You saw what they were doing. Jodi was in that tank, same as the others—all the pirates have them.”

“Did . . . did Jodi tell you why?”

“The Siphorophenes are an ansible,” Ansa says. “The others—they’re called plyohs. The individuals, that is. The big collectives are just called Bodies. The plyohs have instant communication with the body and other Sirens across billions of kilometers. They can communicate in slip. And the pirates murdered Jodi’s Body-collective and kidnapped them.”

It makes me breathe fast. It makes me want to hit something. “Fuck. Those bastarding monsters. How many?”

“Every ship in the fleet. One hundred eighty-four.”

“Okay. Then we need to get back to Saturn and report to Titan Station—”

“And then what stops us from doing the same thing to them?” Ansa asks.

“I know. But we can’t just let the others—You’re touching Jodi, you know how it felt in that tank. They all feel like that. We have to do something.”

We bob. Just a gentle little sway, but I twitch right out of the couch and stare at the ship on Navcomm.

“Company. Gotta go.”

I set the first course-swipe the PW interface will accept. Fuck displacement. We’re out of here.

“They followed us,” Ansa said.

“When we took Jodi and sabotaged the Starhawk’s ansible, they probably came to investigate. But we’re in slip. We’re okay.” I undo my net. “We’re in slip for the next hour. I took the first viable route going anywhere. Then we’ll set course for Saturn—”

“Reese,” Ansa says. “Take Jodi.”

I hold out my hand and the little guy scampers up my arm, music resonating between my ears and over my skin, and I can feel him. Wait. Not him. Jodianthaladan sings the correction into my scalp, and the knowledge is language and emotion and tastes that shiver along my skin. Ki is one of the seven genders of plyohs who reproduce via parthenogenesis and nurture the numerous young of the Body.

“I understand kir.”

“Yes. Now listen more.”

I pet the Siren, and it’s like touching clothes fresh out of a hot-air dryer. “What’s up, Jodi?”

Ki answers me. No. They answer me.

The captive Sirens can hear each other. They sing, desperately lonely for the Body, to touch, to hold and be we and not lost in alone, trapped in cold alone. One of them is free. Free. Free and going so far, and they yearn for Jodi to escape, but

Every single one of them knows exactly where we are.

And they’re all coming closer.

“Oh, no.”

Ansa nods. “They’re all coming. We can’t defend ourselves. They’ll take Jodi back and kill us. Not even eight billion is worth leaving me alive to talk.”

“So we get to Saturn as fast as we can.”

“And they’ll shoot the pirates out of the sky. All of Jodi’s we will die.”

Jodi understands. They understand. They’re afraid. They’re alone. Their Body is gone, and they’ll be gone, too, and—they understand.

But I can’t.

Jodi caresses a limb over my face and sings. It’s the lullaby Ansa sang to kir, and kis hum slides along my scalp, and I don’t know how to save the plyohs. They don’t know how to save themselves.

Jodi climbs up my neck to curl all kis limbs over my scalp. I hadn’t depilated in a few days. Jodi rubs my head and it’s the best scalp massage ever. It tickles Jodi. That’s why ki’s doing it.

The Sirens sing. We have to escape. If Jodi returns to a Body, that will be enough.

“But we can’t just go find an elder Siren,” Ansa says. “The pirates will, too, and they’ll do something piratey and horrible to them.”

The we falls silent. Jodi sings, alone. Alone. It takes a minute, but I understand.

“You can cut yourself off. You can disengage from the we. But if you do, then you’re abandoning them.”

Ansa floats closer. I take her hand and lay it over my ear. Jodi lets kis limbs descend over her fingers.

The others sing of alone, and freedom, and farewell. They sing love for Jodianthaladan. They sing goodbye.

Ansa weeps as Jodi, limbs violet-indigo with sadness, sings bravery, sacrifice. Jodi sings remembrance of the we, of fear of being I, of shame for being the only one to survive the pirates. Ansa’s shaking. I’m hugging my arms around my punch-bruised chest.

Forgiveness, the we sings back. Forgiveness and pride and love and anger at the pirates who destroyed their lives—and determination to save Jodi, the last of their Body. Jodi must survive. Jodi must sing of their we to the Siphorophenes and never forget.

Jodi sings. It’s the perfectly rendered sound of a human weeping.

And then the awareness of Jodi’s we blinks out, dark and abandoned and gone.

• • • •

Jodi’s color started fading the moment ki cut kiself off from kis we. Jodi’s silent as ki clings to my scalp, but ki doesn’t tickle kiself on my stubble or react to Ansa’s petting, and I don’t have a clue where the fuck to go. We’re still in slip, and for all I know we’re gonna come out near Neptune and I don’t think I have the fuel and nothing matters anyway. It’s all futile. I’m so hollow, so lost—

“Jodi,” I say. “I’m sorry, buddy, but you’re bumming me out. Can you try talking?”

I, Jodi sings, and it’s so small, so defeated it hurts my throat. I. It hurts. There’s nothing to touch. No one to be. No we.

And I understand the pain means Jodi’s dying.

“Hey,” I say. “You can’t quit on us, buddy.”

I.

“I know. Can we help? Can I sing? Will that help? We have lots of music. Ansa can sing to you, she’s the best singer humanity has. Would you like that?”

Need we.

“Okay.” I pull us out of slip. “Here’s what I’m gonna do, buddy. I’m going to find another Body for you. Just . . . I’m gonna do my thing, okay?”

I go still. I go still and hollow and hopeless, but I need to work a hunch. For Jodi. There’s no time to waste. I’m thinking too much. I go still. Still. Just a breathing thing, open and listening and feeling and—

That way. Just a trickle. It’s enough.

“Hang on, buddy.” I let my intuition plot the course. I watch the math, my knee bouncing as it calculates, and the moment it’s done, I kick in the PW drive and we slip. “We’re on our way.”

Not that I need to say it, since we’re falling again. The sensation tightens my jaw. I breathe through it.

Ansa’s breathing, too, big belly breaths with her arms stretched out and her head thrown back. “How far?”

“A long way,” I admit. “Hours of slip.”

Ansa bites her lip. “Do you think Jodi has hours?”

“We have to. Jodi, hang on.”

Falling. Falling. Falling. Jodi sings of we, and it takes a few notes to realize ki’s not talking about kis we, the one we left behind. Jodi needs a we or ki won’t survive. Ki needs one now, because alone is every minor key I’ve ever heard. Alone is dark and cold and so much pain. Alone is dying.

“We can’t do this,” I said. “Can you find them again? Can you—”

Lost. lost and far away. No where. No we. Gone.

We can’t lose Jodi. We can’t. But ki needs a we and ki can’t re-touch the others and ki’s hurting so bad and getting so dark—

“Can we do it?” Ansa asks. “Can Reese and I be your we? Can we save you?”

Jodi sings of touch. Of knowing every memory from birth. Everything there, all of it shared, known, understood—a warning. We can. But ki will know everything. Ki will be inside me. Ki will know it all . . .

No. No. I can’t. I can’t do that. “Can Ansa do it by herself?”

“The more of us, the better,” Ansa says. “Two of us might not be enough.”

“But I have to fly the ship.”

She pinches her lips together and gives me a look. “What are you afraid of?”

“If I tell you that, I may as well do it.”

“You’ll save Jodi’s life,” Ansa says. “What secret do you have that’s more important than that?”

Jodi can’t die. Ansa can’t know. But it won’t matter. Ansa is out of my life once this is over. They both will be. And they were going to be anyway. And Jodi can’t die.

Jodi sings. Brave. Scared. Safe.

“You don’t understand.”

“We will,” Ansa says.

“That’s the problem.”

“Did you murder someone?”

Yes. “The pirate.”

“Then it’s something else,” Ansa says. “What did you do?”

I shake my head. “I can’t explain. It’s not what I did. It’s just what I am.”

Ansa presses her lips together. She looks at me for a long time. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? This is the thing behind your Stoic Solo Spacer mask.”

I flinch. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. And you’re not the only one hiding secrets.”

And her secrets are worth billions. I will know every single one of them. She’s trusting me not to tell. I never would, but she’s trusting me.

She looks me in the eye. “I will do this for Jodi. Will you?”

I close my eyes. She’d be leaving anyway. Everyone leaves. It doesn’t matter how much I hide it. People figure it out, and they leave. They won’t be the first to hate me, but they will be the first to hate me as much as I deserve.

But if I don’t let them, Jodi will die. It doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, they all leave.

What’s two more? They’re going anyway.

“Okay,” I say. “What do we do?”

• • • •

I don’t look at Ansa. We’re tethered together, touching each other and Jodi as much as we can, and I won’t open my eyes. I won’t look. Jodi’s in my mind. Not just talking to my surface. Jodi’s in there, and I can’t stop the thoughts and the memories and the hurt and the shame. I don’t—I can’t touch anyone. I need to be alone. I need to shut it all up again, I can’t let them see this, I can’t—

Jodi caresses something in my mind. Like comfort. Like being held, only I can’t remember it. It’s not a memory. Jodi’s making the sensation happen.

I’m remembering Jodi in the Body. Jodi in communion with millions of minds, a great, majestic we. Ki weaves a blanket of peace and acceptance over me. It’s a lullaby. And Jodi still hurts, but it’s easier now. I feel the pain, but the comfort, too, and I try to remember comfort for Jodi.

I’m in the house alone. I’m in my bed in a blanket burrito. I have a stuffed moose tucked under my arm and a Rainbow Reader talking softly in my ears. The feeling of being snug in the blankets is comforting. I am alone, and it’s safe.

Beside me, Ansa waits. She’s not in it. My insides shudder. Jodi doesn’t really understand what’s wrong with me. Jodi accepts. Jodi doesn’t know any better. But the most beloved singer in the solar system? She’s going to regret this. She’s going to hate it.

Jodi hums, and I can feel a groping for the light switch, reaching for a point of stability—Ansa. Oh no.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know it’s for Jodi. I understand. I’ll try to—”

I shut up. Ansa’s in there. She’s in my head. And I’m in hers, and I’m staring at her at five years old in full face makeup and a flouncy lilac princess dress. She’s crying and reaching for her mother, and her mother pushes her away.

“Stop being so dramatic. Pull yourself together. If Grandma could see you, she’d be so ashamed.”

I gasp. Tears flood my eyes. I reach for Ansa. I pull her tight, and she holds on to me.

“She had no right to say that to you. You were five.”

“I lost the pageant.”

“That doesn’t matter. You were first runner-up.”

I’m seven. I’m walking down the hall at school. Kids jump out of my way, shrieking and giggling in disgust. I’m ugly. I have loser germs. They move their desks away from mine.

The teacher says I should try being nice. I save the credits to buy sour candy, the classroom’s favorite, to share. No one will touch them.

“Those little shits,” Ansa says, and she rubs my back. “Kids are so awful.”

“It’s okay. They just knew.”

All her life, Ansa wasn’t ever good enough for longer than a minute. She had to sing hard, dance hard, never let up. Mother always saw her mistakes and corrected them. She never, ever missed a mistake.

“You were good,” I said. “You were really good. You worked so hard.”

Some kids pretended to be my friend. I was thirteen. They asked me which boy I liked. I said I didn’t like any of them. They asked me which girl I liked.

I said Weaver Michaelson.

They told her in front of everyone.

“They had no right to do that.” Ansa hugs me. Jodi hugs me. “They hurt you so bad you don’t trust anyone.”

“People can tell,” I say. “They can tell there’s something wrong with me. They just know.”

“There’s nothing to ‘just know.’ You are not defective. You are scared to be hurt and that’s the only thing that’s really wrong, you’re just scared to be hurt.”

“You don’t have to be the perfect idol,” I say. “You can do music because you love music. You deserve to be loved. It doesn’t depend on whether you made another platinum single. You don’t have to be number one. Your mother was wrong.”

“They don’t love me,” Ansa says. “They love Ansa Veda.”

“I love you,” I say. And it’s true. I know everything about her. I know how she got her first period in the middle of a dance performance. I know how she likes to read stories about magic and other worlds and would rather just eat and read in quiet, but every meal is a networking opportunity or a focus meeting. But the words come back to me and I cringe.

She’s crying. “I love you,” she says. And it’s true. All the loneliness she sees, all the people who couldn’t wait to get away from me, she’s ready to find them all and beat the crap out of them. She’s ready to come into every single memory I have and hold me tight.

She knows everything about me. She cringes with me at all the embarrassing stuff I do and say and shows me her own gaffes, her own slip-ups, and how she just wants to crawl under a rock and die when they happen to her, too.

We, Jodi sings. We hurt alone. We cry pain alone. But we are we now. We are we.

Ansa’s crying, but she’s happy. I’m smiling, but I can’t make it reach my heart. They love me.

But they don’t know.

Jodi stretches kis limbs. Ki presses at me, curious and concerned. Jodi and Ansa haven’t seen the truth. They’re in my childhood, and that’s one thing. That might not be my fault. Ansa might be right.

But I don’t deserve this acceptance. I don’t deserve this compassion, this understanding. Not from Ansa. And not from Jodi. If they know, if they find out . . . if I don’t tell them, and they find out anyway—

I pull the memory out of its box. I push it into the open where they can see. I screw my eyes up tight and turn away.

I’m in the Red Wind with a married couple. They’ve finally learned to be quiet when the systems are off, but I can feel them watching me and it’s hard to get a hunch. They think I’m weird. I try not to care.

When I finally do hit a hunch, we slip out in time to see pirates shooting down a Siphorophene. It’s trying to flee, but it’s already too hurt. I freeze, horrified. Helpless.

The wife screams. The husband yells at me to get out, get out. We spend a full day in slip returning to Saturn, but they disembark immediately, their vacation ruined. The husband demands a refund. It puts me into debt. It gives me nightmares. And Saturn Defense doesn’t do anything but issue a travel advisory strongly discouraging civilians from entering the Outer sectors.

That could have been Jodi’s Body, and I didn’t fight hard enough. I reported it. It wasn’t enough. I could have done something—

Jodi sings reassurance. I was a tiny dragonfly, not a battle cruiser. The pirates were a swarm. I couldn’t have helped. And if I had tried, I couldn’t have saved Jodi from the Starhawk. Jodi sings comfort.

But I cry anyway.

“You did what you could,” Ansa says. “You survived. You reported it.”

“I didn’t go back. I didn’t try to help. I just holed up in my pod and drowned in guilt and tried to forget. I abandoned them.”

“You saved Jodi.”

They don’t hate me. They hurt for me. They want to hold me, and make it go away.

“Why are you forgiving me?”

“Because you weren’t a coward. You weren’t a deserter,” Ansa says. “You were a witness. Saturn Defense should have done something. That wasn’t on you.”

“But if I could have done something—”

“You can. We can. We can fight for the plyohs. We’re coming back with a story to tell, and I am going to use my power to tell it. Are you with me?”

She hugs me tight. I hug back. “Yes.”

I don’t know what I’ll do. I just know that I’ll do it.

Jodi sings. Forgiveness. Compassion. Gratitude for having returned to save Jodi, so the Body would not be forgotten.

It doesn’t feel like enough. And when we’re done, when we save Jodi and Ansa leaves—

“No,” Ansa says. “You’re going to a therapist if I have to sit in the room and spill everything for you. They can fix this, Reese. You can have friends who don’t need a we to understand you. You can heal from this and not feel guilty anymore. But you’re stuck with me, do you understand? No one knows me like this.”

“But you have to go back to Earth.”

“So what?” Ansa says. “You can get the treatment and go back, too, if you want.”

“I like space.”

“Then you have to get used to me checking on you,” Ansa says. “I’m a complete pain in the ass.”

I humph. It’s a laugh. “You are.”

“But I’m a really good friend.”

She is. And we slip out of each other’s memories to be with Jodi, who sings softly we, we, we until a hunch sets me scrambling out of the nets.

Ansa doesn’t have to ask why. She’s beside me as I race to the PW drive and exit the slip.

“They’re here,” I say, but I don’t have to.

Ansa and Jodi are already staring out the window.

• • • •

Three of them approach. They’re the biggest Siphorophenes I’ve ever seen, anywhere. They fill space as they come closer, their starlight limbs phasing green, brown, yellow with distress. Or anger. Ansa watches them and helps me maneuver her into the smallest space suit I have.

They’re still the same. Bulky. Awkward. The ones I have for the tourist passengers need me to zip and seal them in, so no mistakes get made. Besides, manual suits are cheaper.

Jodi hates it. Ki can’t get in the suits with us. But that’s the point. We’re bringing Jodi to a new we. I swipe at my eyes and check Ansa’s seals before I latch on the helmet and pat it on the head.

We are still we, and Jodi is intimidated. These are the Eldest. The largest. They hold hundreds of generations. And Jodi clings to my scalp, singing fear and shame and sorry.

I can’t sing. But I think about being proud, about being brave, and I let Jodi stay on my head until I have to put on my comm hood and the helmet.

Jodi sings of loneliness. Our we is all ki has.

“You’ll have a new we,” Ansa says.

Jodi sings doubt. Fear of rejection, of being a stranger. Ansa catches it like a cold, and she looks at me.

“What if Jodi’s fears are right?”

“We’ll deal with that if it happens.”

“You won’t leave Jodi. I won’t, either,” Ansa says. “So let’s go. And if they give Jodi any shit, we’re getting right back on the ship.”

That’s right. I feel fiercely protective of Jodi. We won’t leave you, I think.

Jodi clings to Ansa’s chest as we float into the dragonfly’s tiny airlock, hugging each other as it cycles. Ansa’s afraid of it, even in a suit. I show her a hundred spacewalks. I hold her hand. I won’t lose her. I won’t let go.

She closes her eyes as the outside hatch opens. I guide us into chilly space, and I gasp.

A limb is coming toward us, rising from twenty football fields away. It’s yellow, green, its starry lights shimmering and bright. Ansa squeezes my hand, and I try not to piss myself in terror.

The limb stops just short of touching us. It wiggles at the very tip, green and brown but not cycling in agitation. Still upset. Still not quite friendly.

The Siphorophenes wait.

“I think they want you,” I say.

Jodi hears me, shrinks in Ansa’s arms.

I move closer to the limb tip. It doesn’t move. I stretch out my hand, slowly, expecting it to jerk away or slap me down but it stays still, and I assume it’s consent, but I hesitate.

The limb rises, probing delicately at my hand. I wrap my hand around it, and some ridiculous impulse makes me shake it in greeting.

“Hello,” I say, because it’s polite. “I’m Reese Taylor.”

The Siren sings.

It sings the story of Lithandranarison, the seventeenth Body of the lineage of Rigel. It sings of its life among the stars, the Body of seventy generations. It sings of the Body that was a city that was a world to two hundred million plyohs who lived and sang and existed in its we until the attack. It sings of the pain and the loss and the screaming, the taking of the young, of the Body left to drift in space, its life gone. How the others raced to the Body, hoping for survivors, singing of their coming, to hold hope, to hold strength.

They came too late, and they sing of shame and guilt and pain at having failed the great Body, who would have lived for another seven hundred generations, more. They sing to Jodianthaladan, overjoyed that ki survived. They sing of home and welcome and refuge, of their we and the place Jodi has with them.

Jodi trembles. Ki loosens kis grip on Ansa and floats to the limb. Jodi lands on my hand and sings.

Jodi sings of kis human we, of Ansa, who sings for a mother who only loved how she could live through her daughter. Of Reese, who only knew loneliness until we became we. Jodi sings the names of the hundred and fifty-eight plyohs lost and enslaved by the pirates, of our valor in saving Jodi, of how we overcame fear and shame to become we to save Jodi’s life. Jodi sings of family and group and home and need and of the lost ones. Of a chance. Of hope.

That maybe we can get them back. And so Jodi cannot join the Body yet. Jodi must remain with kis we.

With Ansa. With me. To try one more time to save the others.

The Elder Siphorophenes listen, then sing permission.

Jodi floats back to Ansa’s arms. Ansa, astonished, cradles Jodi close.

The Elder sings. Courage. Valor. Hero. It sings of blessings and promises, of praise and memory and bravery. All three of them regard us, their postures bowed in respect for us.

Return when you can, the Elder sings.

The Siphorophenes move slowly away, leaving Jodianthaladan with us.

“Jodi, what?”

Inside, Jodi sings. Plan. Idea. Help.

• • • •

Ansa takes a heavy cruiser back to Earth when we find out there’s a systemwide search order for her. She can’t stay with us. We have our part of the plan, and she has hers. We agreed on the long slip back to Saturn. She’ll adapt to space if she stays much longer, and for all my jokes, Ansa’s a grounder.

We still cry when she boards the ship. By the time they make it to the Princess there will be media everywhere. She’s dreading it already. I promise to tell her stupid jokes during the presser to keep her smiling. She promises to find that therapist and to be there for my first appointment. But not yet.

Jodi and I have work to do.

I’m in a brand-new jumpsuit. My head is smooth and shaved. I make my pretty face smile in the mirror, and Jodi perches on my bare shoulder, sparkling and rose-pink with hope.

Ansa smiles inside my head. You look great. Go get ’em, tiger.

Jodi and I leave the suite to take our first meeting with the commander.

C. L. Polk (they/them) wrote the Hugo-nominated and Subjective Chaos winning Kingston Cycle, beginning with the WFA winning novel Witchmark. Their Subjective Chaos Kind of Award winning novel The Midnight Bargain was a Canada Reads finalist. They have been a film extra, a costermonger, and identified lepidoptera before settling down to write fantasy novels. Mx. Polk lives in Calgary, on the territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, and the Métis Nation (Region 3).

Just Enough Rain
By P H Lee
Novelette Long List

1. The Funeral

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

He slipped in the back during my eulogy in the form of a stranger. I don’t think that any of the various relatives noticed Him. For all they knew, it could have been some old flame of hers come to pay his last respects.

After the service, as the various relatives were clearing out, I thought someone should say something, so I approached Him. He was standing off to the side of the room, sipping a glass of water.

“It was good of You to come,” I said, taking care to capitalize the Y.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” He said, and sipped His water again. “She was a great lady, your mom.”

“She was.” It was a bit awkward. I hadn’t spoken to Him since that failed prophetic vision the summer I turned 15.

“Do you remember the first time she had cancer?” God asked.

Did I remember? “Of course.”

“Do you know what she said to Me, when I sent down a dozen angels to carry off her sarcomas one by one? She said ‘I need to check with my oncologist before I try any alternative medicine.'”

I didn’t laugh, but I smiled. “So what did You do?”

“What else could I do? I waited for her to check with her oncologist and then I sent down a dozen angels to carry off her sarcomas one by one.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, and meant it. Another two decades.

“You’re welcome,” said God. “Least I could do, really.”

We stood in the awkward silence for another few seconds.

“So,” God finally broke the silence, “about that…”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“I was thinking about bringing her back to life.”

My knees buckled and I nearly pitched over. God held out a hand to steady me. “You were WHAT?” The spot He’d touched my dress began to glow faintly.

“I was thinking about bringing her back to life.”

“But, why?”

“Don’t you want Me to?”

“Of course I do, I mean, God, what I wouldn’t give for another day with her, but.” I stopped, noticing what I’d just said, and blushed. “Sorry.”

“Oh that?” said God. He dismissed it with a wave of His hand. “It’s not a big deal. You’re not really taking My Name in vain if you’re actually talking to Me.”

“I mean aren’t there other miracles You should be doing?” I couldn’t believe I was saying. Mom always told me I’d gotten twice the family argumentative streak, but was I really going to argue with God about His miracles? Particularly when He wanted to bring my mom back to life?

“Should? Like what?” asked God. He seemed genuinely curious.

“I don’t know: ending world hunger?”

“You already have all the food you need to end world hunger.”

“Sure, but if we just give the food away, it collapses local agricultural prices.”

God shook His head skeptically. “Is that really true, though?”

“You don’t know?”

“Economics isn’t really My forté.”

“Okay, how about bringing peace to all humanity?”

“Every time I get involved in politics,” said God, with a touch of regret in His voice, “it goes completely off the rails.”

“There must be something!” I said, still not quite believing that I was having this argument.

“Oh, there is, I’m sure. Probably a lot of things. But this is an easy one. I liked your mom. We were close. I miss her already.”

“So do I,” I agreed, trying as hard as I could not to ask about the afterlife.

“So I’ll bring her back from the dead,” concluded God, His eyes shining. “Easy.”

“Why are you even asking me, then?”

“Oh, I wanted to make sure it was okay with you. You weren’t relying on an inheritance or something like that?”

“No!”

“Just wanted to check,” He said, then snapped His fingers.

From inside my mom’s plain pine coffin, I heard her begin to move.

“And by the way,” added God on His way out, “if you ever want to talk again, let me know. You’ve got my number, right?”

I did, indeed, have His number. But I wasn’t paying attention to Him anymore. My mom had just sat up out of her coffin and was looking around, about as surprised as you might be if you woke up at your own funeral.

“Annie!” she shouted at me. “Go get me a dress!”

“Mom?” I couldn’t quite believe it.

“These funeral clothes have absolutely no backside. You still keep that emergency dress in your trunk, don’t you?”

• • • •

2. Honi the Circle-Drawer

My mother used to tell us the story of Honi the Circle-Drawer. “He’s our ancestor,” she’d always say. “You can look it up in the Talmud.”

Long ago, in the land of Judea, there was a great drought. When the month of Adar had passed and rain had still not fallen, the people came to Honi, who was beloved by God like a member of His own household, and said “We pray to God for rain, and none comes. But you, Honi, are beloved by God like a member of His own household. If you pray, surely it will rain.”

Honi prayed for rain, but no rain fell.

Thereafter he went outside and drew a circle in the dust and stood inside it. “Master of the Heaven and Earth,” he said, “Your people have turned their faces toward me, who You love like a member of Your household. Therefore, I swear this oath by Your holy name: I shall not leave this circle until You have mercy on Your people and grant their prayers for rain.”

Thereafter, rain began to lightly trickle down, just enough to fulfill the oath, but Honi was not satisfied.

“Master of Heaven and Earth,” he said, “this does not grant the prayers of Your people. I shall not leave this circle until You send enough rain for them to water their crops and fill their cisterns.”

Thereafter, it began to rain in great torrents, soaking everything, tearing the roofs off of houses, sending great rivers through the streets. It seemed like the Great Flood had come once again. But Honi was still not satisfied.

“Master of Heaven and Earth,” he said, “I did not ask for a harmful rain either, but a rain of benevolence and blessing.”

Shortly thereafter, the rain lightened and began to fall in a standard and appropriate manner. Honi, finally satisfied, left his circle.

• • • •

3. Phone Calls

After God brought my mom back from the dead, they were closer than ever. For a while, they talked all the time, but eventually they settled on a long phone call every Saturday afternoon, which drove cousin Miriam up the wall.

Mom wouldn’t say what exactly what they talked about. “He’s very busy,” she’d say vaguely, “under a lot of stress.”

“You could call Him sometime,” she would add, when I pushed her. “He always asks about you.”

I did think about calling Him. But then I thought about that failed prophecy, the whole Conversation we’d have to have, and ugh.

For the most part, though, Mom had other things on her mind. “You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”

“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”

“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

“Brett threw plates when he got mad, Mom. And he wasn’t a doctor; he was a nurse practitioner. There’s a difference.” And he never let me forget it.

“If he can prescribe medicine, he’s a doctor in my books!”

“It wasn’t going to happen.”

“Well, when is it going to happen, Anat? You’re thirty eight years old, you know. Your ovaries aren’t getting any younger! And after 35 fertility–“

“I know about fertility rates, Mom. I’m just busy with the new job and the new city and I haven’t met the right person yet.”

“Listen,” said Mom. “I’m being serious.”

“You think I’m not being serious?”

“Sweetie, listen. Your whole life, you’ve been struggling just to get your feet under you. It’s not your fault, but you’re here, you made it. You’ve got a good job, you’re in a new city, you’ve even got a condo you love.”

“You say that, but–“

“But nothing. I know it’s not perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. I’m telling you, all the things that you wanted to do, everything you’ve been putting off until you got your life together, whether that’s getting married or having kids or, I don’t know, writing a novel, I don’t care. Whatever it is, for you, now is the time that you get to do it.”

I thought about it. I thought about the kids I wanted to have with Brett before he started throwing plates. I thought about the Rimbaud notebooks in the back of my closet. I thought about that time when I was 15, the prophecy, and then I needed to stop thinking.

“Of course,” Mom continued, “even if it isn’t your only goal, you can still have kids. I’m not saying you have to choose. We have feminism now! You can have it all!”

“You’re just saying that because you want grandkids.”

“Anat. I’m 68 years old. Of course I want grandkids. Take it as a given.”

“Can’t you just put in a word with your pal God? He helped Sarah conceive when she was 90.”

“Anat Bethesda Meagel! Don’t joke about this!”

“I’m not joking, Mom. He already brought you back from the dead.”

“Well, honey. You know what they say: God helps those who help themselves. So maybe you should start helping yourself. If you get what I mean.”

“Mom, don’t be gross.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Mom, I love you, but I’m hanging up now.”

• • • •

That weekend, she called again.

“Hi Mom, it’s not a great time, I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. Can I call you back?”

“Oh, that’s fine, I just wanted to let you know that I brought up your problem with God and He said He’d see what He could do.”

“My problem? What problem?”

“Your problem finding the right guy, of course.”

“You told God? Mom. Isn’t He busy ruling the heavens and the earth?”

“Well, He said He’d be happy to help.”

“Of course He did! Look, it’s just not a good time for me to be dating right now.”

“Annie, it’s never a good time for you. Just tell me you’ll keep an open mind, okay?”

“Mom!”

“Okay, okay. I can tell that I’m not wanted. Cook your dinner, cook your dinner. Love you.”

“Tell Dad I love him,” I said. And then “I love you too.”

• • • •

4. The Butterflies

I was fifteen when I saw God for the first time.

I mean, it wasn’t the first time, not really. I’d heard Mom talk with Him on the phone. And He’d been at my bat mitzvah, of course, sort of nebulously hanging around the back in the form of a golden cloud. And, of course, in the broad sense, God is everywhere, and every person is His image.

But none of that really mattered. Because when I was fifteen, I saw God for the first time.

It was morning and I was walking up the hill to school and thinking about my crush on Andy Tanaka and then He was there, right in front of me, in the form of a pillar of fire, in the angle of a beam of light, in the fullness of the creation and endurance of the world. I staggered and fell to the ground and the entire time I couldn’t take my eyes from the vision of His form.

He said: “Hello, Anat.”

But when God said “Hello, Anat,” I didn’t just hear “Hello, Anat.” Instead, here is some part of what I heard: Every name that I have ever had, every name that I would ever have, every part of my nature fundamental and superfluous, every woman who had ever had my name, all of my mothers and their mothers and the whole of my family back to the years before we even had names, before we even were people. Every implication and meaning and every echo of my name Anat, from the incense-filled temples of Canaan to the streets of occupied Paris.

I heard all this and so much more than this at once, echoing through my head. I slapped my hands over my ears, trying to shut it out, but all of the implications and interpretations and understandings just kept reverberating, louder and louder.

God didn’t seem to notice. Then He said: “I’m worried about the butterflies.”

When God said “I’m worried about the butterflies,” I heard the fragility of a butterfly’s wing, the twists of air against it as it flies, the shapes and storms that those twists became, the caterpillar that the butterfly was, the pupation that created it, each and every mark on its wings and the chance and evolution that put it there, the image of the butterfly to the human eye and its beauty and poetry and triteness, the great swarms of monarchs resting in the branches of my thought, each meaning that the words might take, each way I could have turned them into scripture and into prophecy, every misinterpretation, all the cults and all the heresies that might spring up from them–people praying to butterflies, breeding butterflies, eating butterflies as sacrament–the ancestral tree of life, the fundamental genetic connection between me, as I live (the divine image) and every butterfly (every one its own divine art) as they lived, a thousand other things, a million, the bonds between all life everywhere, all of it living and all of it dying, the bonds between the stars and the sun and the Earth that I could feel spinning underneath me, that I could feel rocketing through space, the whole of the universe, even beyond the edge of our event horizon, the entire eye of God.

I screamed.

“Anat,” said God, concerned, but I couldn’t hear Him. Still screaming, now crying, I tried to stand, stumbled, tried to stand again, and when finally at the least I’d scratched and scrabbled to my feet, I ran. Not to school, not back home, but just away, out, as far away as I could get. I ran until I reached the edge of town, and I kept running, into the cool damp of the old municipal forest.

• • • •

It was already dark by the time my mother found me there, curled up in a tree stump and still crying myself hoarse and wet and gross.

“Anat!” she yelled and ran towards me.

“Mom,” I tried to say as she hugged me, but no sound came out.

“What happened?” she asked, and then looked into my eyes.

I tried to tell her. I really did. But I couldn’t fit it into any words I knew.

“Was it God?” she asked. “Did He say something to you?”

I nodded.

She hugged me again.

“I’ll talk to Him,” she said, in a voice that made ‘talk’ sound like murder. “This won’t happen again.”

“Mom?” I finally managed to say.

“Yes, honey?”

“Does it ever get easier?”

“It does,” she said. “But it isn’t ever easy.”

• • • •

5. The Light Rail

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.

It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.

Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170th, they stood up–tall, broad-shouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.

“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.

“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”

Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.

He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.

The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” they said.

David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.

The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”

David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.

“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”

David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.

“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”

“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”

The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”

Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.

“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”

“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

After we’d all filed out of the halted train–Dave had taken off running–I sat on the bench of the Merlo/SW 158th stop and started to cry. The angel sat down next to me, their shining wings filling the shelter awkwardly.

The angel reached out and gingerly patted the back of my head. “THERE THERE,” they said.

“Am I really,” I paused to sniffle back a wad of snot, “that horrible?”

“DAVE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S MISSING.”

“It’s just even when God Himself gets involved, I still can’t get a date!”

“IT’S NOT YOU.”

“I know, but, I mean–” I sniffled a little bit more. “Men are terrible.”

“OH HONEY,” said the angel, “YOU HAVE NO IDEA.”

I looked up and remembered all over again how beautiful they were.

• • • •

6. Phone Number

“Okay, listen,” I said, when God picked up the phone. “You have to ask me before you do something like that.”

“It’s good of you to call to thank me,” said God. “So when’s your date with Dave?”

“I’m not going on a date with Dave!” I yelled, “because Dave is a humongous jerk.”

“I’m sure you’ll warm up to him. He’s a good guy once you get to know him. Eventually this will just be your meet-cute story.”

“We’re not going to have ‘a meet-cute story’ because he said, and I quote, that I was ‘a little old for him.'”

“He’ll get over it.”

“Then he pulled the emergency brake just to get away from me!”

“Oh My Me,” said God. “That didn’t go as planned.”

“How did You not already know this,” I asked God, “aren’t You supposed to be omniscient?”

“Oh sure,” said God, “but I like to leave things up to all of you sometimes. It’s fun have a surprise or two.”

“Please refrain from using my love life as Your entertainment.”

“No promises.”

“So, speaking about my love life–” I said, trailing off. My heart was racing. Was I really going to do this?

“Oh?” God sounded curious.

“Can I get the number of the angel that You sent?”

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

“Can I get the nu–“

“I heard what you said,” said God. “I was just very surprised.”

“I wanted to ask them on a date.”

“I figured.” God still sounded, not exactly angry, but definitely not happy.

“So–?”

“So, just let Me clarify: you want Me to give you the angel’s phone number so that you can ask them on a date?”

“More or less.”

“That seems like a lot to ask.”

“I would have said that sending an angel to fix my love life was a lot!”

“Well, your mom was really worried about you.”

“You mean she was worried about grandchildren.”

“You know how she can get.”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely.”

“So, about this phone number thing–“

There was a pause. “Yes?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

My heart collapsed. Damn it. And just when I’d found someone I liked.

“Why not?”

“Well, the last time we tried it, it really didn’t work out.”

“I’m not talking about having kids! I’m just talking about a dinner date!”

“You’re just talking about a dinner date, but your mom is talking about grandkids.”

“Sure, but–“

“Look, we really shouldn’t risk it.”

“We can use protection!”

“I don’t even think that angels have phones.”

“Okay, God, but You’re the one who has to tell my mom why her daughter is still single at 38.”

God paused for a long time. Finally, He spoke.

“I’ll think about it.”

• • • •

7. I’m sorry

Eight days later God called me back.

“Okay I’ve been thinking,” He said.

“Oh?”

“And I think that I owe you one.”

“You what?”

“I owe you one. From that time.”

My skin suddenly went cold and my stomach immediately reminded me of the precise burrito that I’d had for lunch.

“So we’re talking about this now?” I asked.

“I just want you to know that I’m sorry,” said God, with genuine contrition in His voice.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not ready to deal with You saying ‘I’m sorry.'”

“But I am,” said God. “It was too much for you, and I knew it would be too much for you, but I hoped…”

“No!” I said, almost yelling into the phone. “You’re not sorry! I’m the one who’s sorry! You had a message for me, a mission, and I was young and stupid and I didn’t want to think about it and now it’s gone, it’s too late. I read about the butterfly sanctuaries, about the monarch die-offs, and I know… that I could have…” I could hear the words, I could feel God’s meanings in my mind, even twenty two years seven months five days later, but I still didn’t know how to say them.

God didn’t reply.

“Do You know what it’s like? Do You know what it’s like to have had a purpose, a meaning in your life, a divinely-appointed task for you and you alone and you’ve already fucked it up because you were fifteen and you were scared and you didn’t understand?”

“I know,” said God, because of course He knew. I could feel His reticence, holding back the fullness and truth of His words.

“What am I supposed to do now? It’s one thing if I was just like everyone else, wondering if life had a purpose, if I had a purpose. But I’m not. I haven’t been like everyone else for a long time. Because I know that my life had a purpose, I’m absolutely certain of it, more certain than anything, and I know with the same certainty that I lost my purpose and I’m never getting it back.

“Anat,” said God, and I could hear the echoes of His voice, that first time He said my name. “That’s not what your purpose is.”

I was stunned. God didn’t say anything, either. We stayed on the phone in silence for a moment and then another moment.

“What?” I finally managed to croak out.

“I didn’t make you just so you could tell people that I was worried about the butterflies. Or anything else.”

“What?” I croaked again.

“I don’t create things for only one reason. I certainly don’t create people for only one reason. I created you in My image, with the capacity to dream and think and create and convince and destroy on your own. I made you, like everyone else, to find out what you’d make and what you’d become! To take a person and turn them to only one thing would be…” He stopped talking, seemingly reaching for a word, before finally saying “Well, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then why?” I started to ask.

“Because your mom was telling Me about you,” said God, “and I wanted to meet you. So I said hello. I was just trying to make conversation and I’ve given you some kind of permanent existential crisis. So I am sorry. That’s true even if you’re not ready to deal with it yet.”

I didn’t say anything. Then I just said “okay.”

“So here’s the angel’s number,” said God, and told me. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

• • • •

8. First Date

The angel and I met at a tapas bar right off Waterfront Park. It was a summer evening; we sat outside. I was wearing that yellow sundress that probably shows a bit too much cleavage. The angel’s wings lit up the entire block.

“So,” I said, staring at the angel’s gorgeously defined collarbone. “What do you do for fun?”

“PERFORM THE PRECISE WILL OF THE ALMIGHTY, PARTICULARLY WITH RESPECT TO HEALING AND RESCUE,” said the angel.

I looked at their face, which was impassive.

“I mean, other than for work?”

“EXECUTE THE TASKS THAT GOD HAS GIVEN ME.”

Okay, so this isn’t going well. “So do you ever dance on the head of a pin?” I ask.

The angel looked at me. Their eyes! “GOD HAS NOT COMMANDED ME TO DO SO.”

“So, any other interests?”

“GOD’S COMMANDMENTS, PARTICULARLY WITH REGARD TO HEALING.”

I looked at the angel, then looked down. I was not going to be able to make a smart decision while I was looking at that jawline.

It felt like pulling off a band-aid.

“You are so, so hot,” I finally said to them, “but I don’t think this is going to work out.”

On my way out, I stopped by the front desk and paid the bill. It was the least I could do. Anyway, I was pretty sure that angels don’t carry money.

• • • •

The next morning, I got a text from the angel.

REALLY ENJOYED LAST NIGHT, it read. WANT TO DO IT AGAIN SOMETIME?

I ignored it. A few hours later, I got another text.

WHAT’S UP? it said.

I left my phone behind when I went out to the gym, and when I got back I found that the angel had sent a series of escalating messages in all capital letters.

IS EVERYTHING OKAY?

WHY AREN’T YOU RESPONDING?

WHAT IS THIS EMOTION WHEN YOU WON’T TEXT ME BACK? IS THIS WHAT HUMANS CALL “ANXIETY?” IT IS VERY UNSETTLING.

I AM CONFUSED. DID I ERR?

I SEE NOW THAT I MUST HAVE ERRED. I AM NOT USED TO ERRING. GENERALLY I ONLY ACT ACCORDING TO GOD’S WILL, WHICH IS ABSOLUTE. YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THE CONFUSION.

I ENJOYED SEEING YOU. DESPITE MY ERRS, I HOPE TO DO SEE YOU AGAIN.

ANAT? ARE YOU GETTING THESE?

I’M SORRY FOR MY ERRS.

I HAVE DISCUSSED THIS MATTER WITH MICHAEL AND GABRIEL, I NOW UNDERSTAND THAT I WAS “BORING” AND NEED TO “HAVE INTERESTS” AND “ASK YOU ABOUT YOURSELF.” I APOLOGIZE. I WILL DO BETTER NEXT TIME.

NOT THAT THERE NEEDS TO BE A NEXT TIME.

I UNDERSTAND NOW THAT I SHOULD NOT HAVE DISCUSSED THIS MATTER WITH MICHAEL AND GABRIEL. THAT WAS A VIOLATION OF YOUR PRIVACY AND I APOLOGIZE.

BUT I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU AGAIN.

ANAT?

I scrolled through the phone, and sighed. They really were trying. And Mom was always saying I’m too quick to judge. And they were really hot.

Fine, I text back. But you’re paying.

• • • •

9. Second Date

For our second date, we met at the Korean place in the strip mall near my condo, because their broiled fish is amazing and if things went wrong again, I wouldn’t have to take the train home.

By the time I showed up at 7:05 the angel was already there, wings furled this time. When I stepped in the door, they stood up out of the corner booth and waved.

“ANAT! YOU CAME! I’M OVER HERE!” They were wearing some boot-cut jeans and a white T-Shirt that read “I knelt before Man on the Eighth Day and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” and fit very tightly. Mrs. Pak, the waitress–she’s the only one I’ve ever seen working here, and she always remembers my order–caught my eye and gave me a big smile and a thumbs up.

Without the wings, wearing a T-shirt, in the dim light, the angel almost looked like a human, but not quite. There was still something about them, something a little too perfect.

“I WAS TOLD TO ‘DRESS DOWN’ SO I COULD ‘KEEP IT CASUAL.'”

“It’s a good look on you.”

“THANK YOU,” replied the angel. Was that a blush? They gestured to the booth seat and I slid in.

“SO,” said the angel, “WHAT’S GOOD TO EAT?”

“What isn’t good to eat here?”

“IT’S JUST A BIT CONFUSING.”

“First time eating Korean food?”

“YES.”

“Well, why don’t we start you with bibimbap?”

“IT’S ALSO MY FIRST TIME EATING.”

“First time eating what?”

“ANYTHING.”

Oh, I told myself. Right.

“I AM USUALLY SUSTAINED SOLELY BY THE WILL OF THE DIVINE.”

“Oh?”

“BUT I AM ALSO VERY EAGER TO TRY BIBIMBAP.”

“My friend Katherine says that bibimbap is the perfect food, because it has a little bit of everything. It’s a pretty great first food to eat.”

“BUT WE’RE JUST TALKING ABOUT ME AGAIN. TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF.”

Of course, I thought. Now it’s awkward again.

“Look,” I said after an awkward moment. “I’m sure that someone told you that you have to ask about me, and it’s not exactly bad advice, but you can’t just make open-ended demands like that. Ask me a real question about something you’re curious about.” Someone needed to drive this date and it certainly wasn’t going to be the angel.

“IT’S TRUE,” said the angel. “GABRIEL DID TELL ME TO ASK ABOUT YOU AND NOT TO TALK TOO MUCH ABOUT MYSELF.”

“It’s okay to talk about yourself!” I said. “I want to know about you, too. But let’s try this again. Ask me a real question, about something specific that actually you want to know.”

“YOUR BOOK,” said the angel. “ON THE TRAIN. YOU WERE READING A BOOK. WHAT WAS IT?”

In Search of Lost Time! “Only the greatest novel ever written!” I started in. “Proust is writing this novel where it seems like not a lot happens, but it’s about how ultimately we live in our own memories, but also that those memories are imperfect and incomplete and ultimately cannot contain the joy of actual lived moments in time. So in a way the lack of action–and the self-absorption of the main character–is fundamentally underlining the premise of the book.”

“INTERESTING,” said the angel. “HUMANS EXPERIENCE TIME SO DIFFERENTLY FROM ANGELS. PLEASE, TELL ME MORE.”

“Are you sure I’m not boring you? I studied French Lit in college and can go on and on and on about la Recherche.”

The angel cocked their head sidewise and looked at me. “WHAT WAS THAT?”

“What was what?”

“YOU SAID THE SAME NAME, BUT IT SOUNDED DIFFERENT.”

“Oh, yes, sorry, la Recherche is the French name. Or, I mean, it’s a part of it. The full original name is À la recherche du temps perdu. The English titles are ‘In Search of Lost Time’ or ‘Remembrance of Things Past.'”

“WHY DID YOU SAY IT IN FRENCH?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just habit I guess? When I’m talking about the translations I use the English names, but when I’m talking about the original I use the French.”

“SO YOU’VE READ THE ORIGINAL?”

“Of course! I wrote my senior thesis about it!”

“BUT IF YOU’VE READ THE ORIGINAL, WHY WOULD YOU NEED A TRANSLATION?”

The angel’s eyes were wide and curious.

“It’s–uh…–hard to explain.”

“OH NO! IS THIS A SENSITIVE TOPIC? I HAVE VERY CLEAR ADVICE TO AVOID SENSITIVE TOPICS.”

“No! I mean, it’s not that sort of thing. It’s just, whenever I read a new translation, if it’s any good, it gives me some insight into the novel that I never had before.”

“WHY? ARE THE WORDS DIFFERENT?”

“Sort of? Like I said, it’s hard to explain,” but the angel is so curious about it that I keep trying to tell them anyway: “There’s no such thing as a perfect translation, right? Because languages aren’t all the same. So every translator has to make choices about what words to use, which show the reader how the translator themselves read the original text, as opposed to other translators. So I read the new translations as a way of getting a deeper understanding of the text, because I get to read it through the translator’s eyes, which are different than my own.”

“HUH.”

“Or sometimes I just get really mad about some specific verb they got wrong–I mean! Not that they got wrong! It’s more that they had an interpretation that I wouldn’t…” I trailed off, embarrassed.

The angel looked thoughtful for a moment, or maybe bored.

“I’m sorry, most people probably don’t want to spend their date on a lecture about the semiotics of translation.”

“NO!” said that angel. “YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. THIS IS FASCINATING. IS THIS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO KNOW ANOTHER LANGUAGE?”

“What do you mean?”

“WELL, I ONLY SPEAK ONE LANGUAGE. SO I’VE NEVER REALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT IT’S LIKE TO KNOW MORE THAN ONE.”

“You’re an angel! How can you only speak English?”

“I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH. OR FRENCH.”

“What do you mean, you don’t speak English? Then how are we talking?”

“I SPEAK THE TRUE LANGUAGE OF ALL CREATION. I SPEAK THE LANGUAGE THAT WAS SPOKEN IN THE TIMES BEFORE THE GREAT TOWER, THE LANGUAGE WHICH EVERY BEING OF GOD’S CREATION CAN UNDERSTAND WITHIN THEIR VERY SOULS.”

I thought for a moment, and I realized that, even though I understood their words, the sounds that the angel was making weren’t anything like English or any other language that I knew. It was amazing, and I was about to say something, to ask some question about this miracle that’s happening right in front of me, but Mrs. Pak was already there to take our order, and it seemed rude to make her wait.

• • • •

The angel looked askance at the sizzling bowl of bibimbap in front of them.

“I CAN EAT THIS?”

“Yeah, just… pass it over here.” I pulled the paper cover off my chopsticks, stuck them into the bowl, and mixed vigorously. The angel watched me until I passed it back to them.

The angel lifted up their chopsticks and split them apart uneasily.

“Do you need help with your chopsticks?” I asked.

“I AM ENDOWED WITH THE ENTIRE GRACE OF GOD,” said the angel. “I CAN USE CHOPSTICKS. I AM MERELY SAVORING THE MOMENT.”

“Try it! I want to see what you think.”

The angel took a deep breath, nabbed some bulgogi, bean sprouts, and rice with their chopsticks, and stuck it awkwardly into their mouth. Their eyes went wide. They tried to say something, but all that came out was “MHRGWLD OR ICSOUS.”

I laughed. “Chew and swallow, then talk.”

The angel’s eyes sparked with realization. They chewed and swallowed, then spoke. “THIS REALLY IS DELICIOUS!”

“Isn’t it?”

“IT HAS ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT TEXTURES AND FLAVORS, BUT IT’S NOT CONFUSING. THEY ALL WORK TOGETHER.”

“Try some of the banchan.”

“ARE THESE CUCUMBERS? THEY’RE AMAZING.”

“Cucumber kimchi, yeah. And those are the fishcakes. They’re even better.”

• • • •

“So, tell me something about yourself.” We’d been talking about food for almost twenty minutes; time to change the subject.

“THERE’S NOT MUCH TO TELL, REALLY. LIKE I SAID BEFORE, MOSTLY I PERFORM THE EXACT WILL OF GOD THE ALMIGHTY, PARTICULARLY WITH RESPECT TO HEALING.”

“Okay, sure, that’s your job. But what about your interests? Your hobbies? Do you ever do anything just for you?”

“WELL,” said the angel. They looked off to the side, embarrassed.

“Well?” I asked, leaning in.

The angel leaned over and cupped their hand around their mouth. “DON’T TELL GOD I SAID THIS,” they began. I could feel their breath on my cheek. “SOMETIMES, WHEN I’M ON MY WAY TO PERFORM DIVINE HEALING, LIKE, IF I’M IN A HOSPITAL…” They trailed off, but stayed leaning towards me with their hand cupped.

“Yes?”

“SOMETIMES I HEAL OTHER PEOPLE IN THE HOSPITAL. NOT JUST THE ONES I WAS SENT TO HEAL. BUT OTHER PEOPLE WHO NEED IT.”

Oh! My heart. I looked up into their eyes and smiled. They smiled back–that mouth!–and then they looked away.

• • • •

10. Fourth Date

After the fourth date, we were making out on my couch. I held up a hand. “Hold on a moment.”

“IS SOMETHING WRONG?” asked the angel, and stopped.

Mom always said nothing before the fifth date, and the idea of taking off my clothes in front of this embodiment of physical beauty… But Mom also told me to “help myself,” and it had been quite a while since… Anyway.

“Do you want to take this to the bedroom?” I had to look away to ask, but I looked back after.

The angel stared at the carpet. “OH, WELL, I MEAN, THAT IS…”

I felt a rush of embarrassment. “It’s all right if you don’t want to! I don’t want to pressure you.”

“NO,” said the angel. “IT’S NOT THAT IT’S JUST. YOU KNOW. I REALLY LIKE YOU.”

The rush I was feeling was no longer embarrassment.

“LIKING SOMEONE ELSE IS STRANGE. I HAVE ALL THESE NEW FEELINGS. I’M ANXIOUS THAT YOU WON’T LIKE ME IF YOU SEE ME WITH MY CLOTHES OFF.”

“Oh honey,” I said, and stroked their hair. “You have nothing to worry about.”

• • • •

The angel’s wings lit up my bedroom as bright as day. “I guess there’s no option for lights out with you,” I quipped, and they looked puzzled. “Just a joke,” I explained.

“I COULD LEAVE MY SHIRT ON,” said the angel. “I CAN HIDE MY WINGS UNDER A SHIRT.”

“It’s fine. You’re beautiful this way.”

God, they were beautiful. God.

God! How was I going to explain this to God? I looked at the angel, fussing with their pants anxiously, their soft hair falling down in ringlets. God was a problem for tomorrow.

“COULD YOU TURN AROUND?” asked the angel, “I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME TAKE OFF MY CLOTHES.”

I turned around and began to get undressed myself. The angel’s light, somehow, became even more intense.

“OKAY,” said the angel, and I turned around.

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.

“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.

I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

• • • •

The next morning, I woke late and the angel was already out of bed. I heard noises in the kitchen and made my way out to check.

The angel was in the kitchenette, making breakfast. They had their clothes and skin back on, but were wearing them loosely, with a few spare hands and eyes poking out. Not wanting to disturb them, I padded softly across the room and curled up on the couch to watch them.

“ANAT,” said the angel when they finally noticed me. “I HAVE MADE YOU BREAKFAST.” They gestured to a stack of pancakes nearly four feet high.

“I see,” I said, and smiled.

“I WAS NOT SURE HOW MANY OF THESE PANCAKES A HUMAN MIGHT REQUIRE,” said the angel, “SO I USED TWO BOXES. I HOPE IT IS ENOUGH?”

I slipped off the couch and over to the angel. I wrap my arms around their back and kissed their hair. “It’s lovely,” I said, “but I really only need three.”

“OOPS,” said the angel, and turned to kiss me back.

• • • •

11. The Rest of the Story

It was a Thursday night, alone in my pajamas with delivery Pad See-Ew, and I’d just ignored two calls from God. So I called my mom.

“Anat!” she said. “Are you okay?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Well, you never call unless something’s wrong. I’m always the one who has to call you.”

“Mom! That’s not fair!”

“It’s true. The truth is extremely fair.”

“I’m calling now, aren’t I?”

“Did you get fired? Was it because you had an affair with your boss? Are you pregnant with your boss’s lovechild? Is his wife suing you for custody?”

“Mom! No! I’m fine! I promise!”

“If you’re fine, then why are you calling?”

“Can’t I just call to talk to my mother?”

“Anat, as much as I would love that to be true, and as much as you would love for me to believe that was true, we both know that it’s just not true.”

“Mom! This is why I don’t call more often!”

“Okay! Okay! What is it that you wanted to talk about?”

“Do you remember that story you used to tell?”

“What story? The one about your father and the Roosevelt Elk–“

“No, no, the one about Honi. And the rain?”

“Oh, yes, that one. He’s our ancestor you know. It’s in the Talmud.”

“Yeah, I remember. Anyway, it was a slow day at work today and I thought ‘Hey, I wonder if I can look up Honi online?'”

“So you’re saying you were fired. For slacking on the job.”

“Mom! No! It’s fine. Even the lawyers–just let me finish.”

“Finish! Finish! I’m not stopping you.”

“Anyway, I found this site, Sefaria–it turns out that the entire Talmud is online now, amazing, right?–and I found the whole Honi story. Why didn’t you ever tell us the rest of it?”

“The rest of it? What do you mean?”

“There’s a whole second part, about the rain continuing to fall, and flooding all of Judea. And since you’re not allowed to pray for a miracle to stop happening, Honi can’t fix it, until he goes up to the temple and sacrifices a bull in a gratitude offering and then the waters recede. And then, after that, they almost excommunicated him! For being disrespectful to God! Even after he saved them twice.”

“Oh, is that how it goes?”

“Mom!”

“Anat, I’m an old lady. I can’t remember all the stories I told you, even if they are stories about our ancestors.”

“You’re not old. You’re sixty-eight.”

“I’m a card-carrying member of the AARP. I am officially an old lady and you can’t take that away from me.”

“Anyway, I wanted to ask you–why didn’t you tell us the rest of the story? When we were kids? Why only tell us the first half?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t know, really, it’s just a story–“

“But it’s not a story, is it? You always said that Honi was our ancestor. And you’re friends with God right now. I bet you wouldn’t even have to stand in a circle to get Him to make some rain. So I don’t think it is just a story. I think that it actually happened.”

“Okay, fine, it probably happened. Why does it matter, anyway?”

“Because I want to know why you didn’t tell us the rest!”

“Why is this a problem for you? Did your therapist say that you have an attachment disorder and it’s all my fault?”

“Mom!”

“Look, honey, I truly don’t remember. If I had to guess–and it’s really just a guess–I probably didn’t want you to be scared for me. You were always so timid, and you would listen in on God and me. I didn’t want you to think that we were going to get flooded, or cursed, or excommunicated. Who even knew that Jews could excommunicate people?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not trying to change the subject! I just don’t understand why this is such a big deal for you.”

“It’s just. It’s so hard. And I don’t think I ever knew how hard it was. For you. Or for me.”

“What’s so hard?”

“Being friends with Him.”

Mom didn’t reply for so long that I thought she’d dropped the call.

“Mom? Are you there?”

“It is hard,” she said. “But it’s worth it.”

“Is it, though?”

“Oh yes. Honey. You don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get? He honestly seems kind of high maintenance.”

“He’s just lonely.”

“How can He be lonely? He’s God! He’s literally worshipped by more than half the planet!”

“Well, sure. A lot of people worship Him. And some of them love Him. Some of them might even obey Him, although I’m skeptical. But does anyone listen to how He’s feeling? Do any of them spend quality time with Him? Do any of them call Him just to catch up?”

“Still–“

“Still, nothing. Sweetie. He’s lonely. He needs friends and, better or worse, we’re what He’s got. I’m not saying it isn’t hard. It is hard. We might get flooded. We might get excommunicated. And, regardless, a lot of other people won’t understand. But it’s important. And He cares about us–about you. He tries His best.”

“I know, I just–” and stopped. I wasn’t ready to talk to God or my mother about it.

“So who is the guy?” asked Mom.

“Who is what guy?”

“The guy you met. The one you’re not mentioning.”

“Mom!”

“What?”

“Did God tell you something?”

“Oh, no. God didn’t tell me anything. He’s ‘respecting your privacy,’ believe it or not. But I can still tell. A mother always knows.”

“I have not ‘met a guy!'” Which was technically true.

“It’s fine; it’s fine. Tell me when you’re ready.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, sweetie. I love you.”

I sighed. “I love you too. Say hi to Dad for me.”

I hung up, and looked at my phone. I pulled up my contacts. My finger hovered over God’s Name. But I clicked the phone off and set it down. Not tonight, I told myself. I’d tell Him soon. But I wasn’t ready.

• • • •

12. Translation

“CAN I ASK YOU A QUESTION?”

It was a lazy Sunday in bed a couple of weeks later. I was nestled into the crook of the angel’s arm, still half-asleep. I smiled. “‘kay.”

“WHAT’S IN THOSE BOXES IN THE BACK OF YOUR CLOSET?” One of the angel’s hands came flying out.

My notebooks. I buried my face in their shoulder. “Uuuuuuuuugh.”

“IF IT’S TOO PERSONAL–” started the angel, but I cut them off.

“No, it’s fine, it’s just, you know…”

“WHAT DO I KNOW?”

I sat up. “Old dreams that I never put the time into.”

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“IT IS GOOD FOR HUMANS TO DREAM. IT IS EXTRAORDINARY THAT YOU CAN.”

“Not if you don’t follow through.”

“EVEN IF YOU DO NOT, YOU WILL HAVE GROWN AND LEARNED IN THE ATTEMPT.”

Ugh. “Can you can it with the positivity for a second?”

“SORRY. I DIDN’T MEAN TO–“

I reached out took the angel’s hand; interlaced our fingers. “It’s fine; I’m sorry. I’m just being touchy.”

“THIS IS CLEARLY IMPORTANT TO YOU.”

I didn’t say: Is it, though? If it was really that important, wouldn’t I have made time for it?

“WHAT IS IT?”

“What is what?”

“YOUR DREAM. IN THE BOXES.”

I sighed. “It’s poetry.”

“YOU’RE A POET?”

“No! I mean, they’re not my poems. They’re translations.”

“OH! OF La recherche?” The angel very carefully pronounced the French.

“No, I’m not… Even I’m not ambitious enough to try to translate that whole thing. Anyway, it’s not poetry. No, it’s Rimbaud.”

“WHAT IS RIMBAUD?”

“Rimbaud is wild! He’s this brilliant French poet from the 1890s. He starts writing amazing poetry when he’s only fifteen. By the time he was 20 he’d run away from home, had a torrid abusive affair with Verlaine–who was also a brilliant poet–completely changed the face of poetry in western Europe. Then he swears off of writing, tries to become a soldier, ends up representing a French coffee concern in Ethiopia, just in time to tragically die young of cancer.”

“THAT’S A LOT.”

“I know, right? Anyway, he’s been translated about a million times, but I after I moved back to the US, I was looking for a way to keep my French sharp so I started to translate some of his poems. And there are really some ways that translators have gotten them–“

“WRONG?”

“No, they’re not wrong, but just some of the implications in French, I don’t know–“

“I SEE.”

“It was a dumb idea anyway. I’m not a professor or a poet. It’s not like anyone is going to be interested in my translations.”

“I’M INTERESTED IN THEM.”

I looked at the angel. “Why? Can’t you just read the original poems in your perfect language?”

“I CAN. BUT I WANT TO READ THEM LIKE YOU DO. THROUGH YOUR EYES.”

… Really?

“I WON’T IF YOU’RE NOT COMFORTA–“

“No, it’s okay.” I stood up and walked over towards the closet in bare feet. “I’ll get you one. But they’re really not very good!”

“WE’LL SEE.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” as I hand them one of the black-speckled composition books.

“I WON’T.”

• • • •

I came home from work that Monday and the angel had all my notebooks spread out around the living room–each one with a hand or two leafing through it–along with my Collins Robert Unabridged Dictionary (three hands on that one, with another circling around) and a bunch of other hands scribbling angelic glyphs on the remains on my printer paper.

Thud! I dropped my bag. “What?!”

“ANAT!” said the angel. “YOU’RE BACK!”

“What in G–” I stopped myself.

“I’VE BEEN READING YOUR TRANSLATIONS,” said the angel, gesturing to the chaos. As I looked at them, the hands looked up, made eye contact, and waved. “THEY’RE REALLY GOOD.”

I held my face in my hands. “Oh no.”

“I MEAN IT,” protested the angel.

Not helping. I didn’t look up. “I know you do,” I muttered into my palms.

“LIKE THIS ONE,” said the angel, holding up a notebook, “ABOUT THE BOAT. YOUR TRANSLATION ISN’T JUST REFLECTING THE ORIGINAL MEANING, BUT IT’S ALSO DISCUSSING THE DISCONNECTION OF THE POST-MILLENNIAL GENERATIONS FROM THE IDEALS AND VALUES OF THEIR PARE–“

I walked over and hugged them, mostly to get them to stop talking.

“I’M SORRY,” said the angel. “I GOT CARRIED AWAY. I CAN CLEAN THIS UP.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “This is just a lot.”

“YOU’RE GOOD AT THIS, ANAT. YOU REALLY ARE.”

I blushed but didn’t say anything.

• • • •

13. Good News

Six months later, I called my mom on Friday after work. The angel was in the kitchen, working on dinner, listening in.

“Anat-honey!” she said, “is everything all right? You haven’t been in a car accident have you? If you were in a car accident make sure to get–“

“Mom! I’m fine. I just wanted to share some good news.”

“Good news? Are you finally ready to talk about that guy you’ve been hiding?”

“Yes, Mom. Fine! You were right. I met someone.”

“You met someone? Oh, honey! That’s fantastic.”

“Mom, you don’t have to fake surprise. I know you’ve known for months.”

“Sweetie, I have been waiting for this moment for years. I am going to savor it and you’re not going to stop me.”

“You know what? That’s fair. Savor away.”

“So tell me about him.”

“Well, they’re very considerate.”

“That’s great. Is he Jewish?”

“Yes,” I said.

The angel looked at me: “technically i’m not,” they whispered.

“More or less, anyway,” I added.

“Is he a doctor?”

“Yes, they’re also a doctor.”

The angel’s look intensified.

“Technically not, but–” I began.

“Sure sure,” said Mom, “whatever they call them these days.”

“Anyway, I think I’d really love to bring them down to meet you; they’ve heard so much about you.”

“Oh, honey, that would be lovely. How about next month? You could both come down for Pesach!”

“Great. I’ll book tickets.”

“Anat? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

The angel, overhearing, made a gesture with their hand. “it’ll be okay,” they whispered uncertainly.

“All right, Mom, you’re right. I have some more good news.”

“More good news? Really?” She sounded skeptical.

“But you have to promise me that you’ll be the one to talk to God about it.”

“Sure? Honey: What is it?”

Here it comes. “Well Mom,” I said, “you’re going to be a grandmother a little sooner than we expected.”

“Oh honey! That’s great to hear. But–” She cut off.

“But?”

“I don’t mean to complain.”

“What is it?”

“Isn’t this all a little sudden?”

What was I going to say? That I thought I’d missed my life’s purpose and then it turned out I hadn’t? That I spent my whole life too worried that I was going to have to run out into the desert and be a prophet to form attachments, and now I was in deep, serious, committed love with an actual angel? It was all too much, so I just made a joke. “Well, you know what you said about eggs after 35.”

“I know, I know, but I just want to make sure you’re making the right decision here. How well do you really know this guy, after, what, six months?”

“Eight months.” Had it really only been eight months?

“Eight months is not a long time, sweetie.”

“I know, Mom. But just… Please trust me. Sometimes things just fit together.”

“I bet things fit together real well…”

“Mom!”

“Sorry, honey. I’m just so happy for you.”

“I’m happy for me too.” It felt weird to say it, but it was true.

“But you should really be the one to tell God.”

“Mom!”

“What? He hasn’t heard from you in forever.”

“It’s just… it’s not that simple, okay?”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just. It’s not exactly that I met a guy.”

“What do you mean? Is this one of those new gender things?”

“No–I mean. Not exactly–” the angel was looking up from the stewed eggplant to give me a confused expression, “It’s not not that, but it’s more that–they’re not really–“

“Anat. It’s okay. Take a deep breath and tell me.”

“They’re not really a guy. They’re not really a human at all. They’re an angel.”

“Oh, honey. That’s so sweet of you to–“

“Mom. I mean it literally. They’re literally an angel.”

…

“Mom? Are you there?”

“Anat. No jokes.”

“It’s not a joke.”

“Do you really think that this is a good idea?”

“I mean, I know that there were–I know. I know. But I really love them. And they really love me. And it just feels right.”

“Okay. But, Anat, you have to tell Him.”

“Mom! You promised!”

“Look. Honey. I know. I know it’s hard. But He should hear it from you. And I think He might surprise you.”

“You think He might surprise me? Mom, the last time this happened He literally flooded the entire world.”

“That’s from the Book of Enoch! It’s apocryphal!”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!”

“Even if it did, honey. This is different.”

“Is it?”

“Well, Anat. I don’t know. Are you going to use this baby as a weapon?”

“What?”

“Are you?”

“Of course not!”

“Because that’s what happened last time.”

“Mom…”

“Are you going to start a cult with her? Are you going to sacrifice her? Are you going to treat her like she’s anything less than human?”

“No! Mom!”

“Because if you’re worried about what happened last time–“

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re going to love this baby?”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s different than last time. If ‘last time’ even happened.”

“Still… He told me not to.”

“He tells lots of people not to do lots of things. And most of us do them anyway.”

“Still.”

“Plus, He likes you. You’re friends. And He trusts you.”

“Mom, I just don’t know if I can–“

“You can. You’re just scared. And that’s okay. You have to tell Him, though. I love you. But I’m not the one you should be talking to.”

“Mom–“

“I’m hanging up now. I love you. Your father says hi.”

I looked at my phone. I looked over at the angel, who was busy wrestling with the dutch oven. I reached out and opened my contacts, scrolled down until I found His Name.

I squeezed my eyes closed. I could hear the rain outside; beating gentle and arhythmic against the window. I reached out and made the call.

P H Lee lives with the rose bushes behind an old walnut tree down a dead-end road out past the highway. Their other writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Their hobbies include cooking and translating Classical Chinese texts.

Ina's Spark
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Novelette Long List

If Evina waited much longer it would be full dark, and the tavern would almost certainly have a godforsaken bard by then. As if that weren’t bad enough, by the pricking of the hair along her arms, there had to be at least five other mages in easy walking distance. No surprise, really, given King Redinado’s annual quest. That’s what forced her to the capital, after all.

A pair of drunk men staggered out of the door, golden oil light spilling out onto the rutted city street. They wandered away, singing a ditty about a wench with hair the color of the moon. But not that song, thank the Savior Mother.

She swallowed, trying to dislodge the knot in her throat. If she couldn’t even walk into a tavern, how the hell did she think she was going to survive the quest to become a King’s Wizard? Savior Mother and the Multitudes…all she wanted to do was survive. She could give a rotten fig about working for the King.

Trust your mind, not your instincts, Evina. Clenching her fists, she pulled a thin thread of power into her body, hairs standing on end along her arms. Until the quest started, there was no harm in letting other mages know that one more was in the city. Her sight sharpened and the edges of the world stood out from the darkness.

The mud squelched around her boots as she walked across the street, past wagon ruts and piles of ox shit. All she had to do was go inside, talk to one man, and walk out again.

Evina pushed the door open onto a wall of sound and a chaos of shapes. It trapped her in the doorway with the pressure of trying to sort out order.

She twisted the power that lay under her skin and shaped it with her will. The tun-tun-tira-tun-tun of her magic kept its underlying signature, but the peaks and valleys became more pronounced until they began to resonate with the world in different ways. She pulled the highs up and up and as she did
the world
slowed
down

The patrons stopped moving. Flames froze. And Evina had time.

Time to not panic. Time to calm down. Time to make plans.

Her eye caught on a candle’s flame. It sat in a globe of glass atop a squat clay candlestick. Another flame burned not far past that. Another closer to her. There were nine candles. Nine candles in nine globes on nine tables. From there she sorted out that the tables had benches, most of them obscured by a frozen mass of humanity.

In the corner, where she’d been told to find him, a well-built man slouched in a chair. There. All she had to do was cross the room and meet the mercenary. No one was going to die today. Fidgeting with the edge of her cloak, Evina released the power back into the air.

As the world sped around her, a blonde man cursed as he touched a metal tankard and got shocked by the residual magic in the air. She winced in sympathy. Master Harry would have chided her for making the man’s skin itch just because she needed a security blanket.

She straightened her shoulders and she walked the path she had planned to where the mercenary slouched. Even without the power, she could feel his gaze upon her, though his posture didn’t change. She stopped at the table and cleared her throat. “Clever Cenrod?”

His nose had been bent to the side at some point and never straightened. A puckered scar creased the deep brown skin of his forehead. He tilted his head up. “Evina the Green. You’re late.”

“Sorry.” She dropped her gaze, fixing on the six rough wood buttons on his shirt. No, eight. There were two on his cuffs. “May I sit?”

“Probably the best way to conduct our business.”

Sinking into the chair, Evina rested her hands on the sticky wood surface of the table. The candle here had gone out. Or been blown out. “Can you start this Ammunsday?”

“Thought the quest didn’t start until Relusday?”

“Yes, at dawn, but I factored in two days to collect supplies.”

He grunted and sipped his ale. Evina twined her fingers together in her lap, wishing she had a beer so she had something to do with her hands.

Clever Cenrod set his beer on the table. “Right then. Bargain’s struck so…half up front. Half on completion.”

Evina nodded. She had better uses for that money, but it wasn’t as if she had much of a choice thanks to the king. Quest or stop using magic permanently. Still—behind her, someone strummed the strings of a lute. Evina’s shoulders crawled toward her ears at the sound.

Cenrod raised his eyebrows. “Don’t like music?”

“Just tavern songs.” She wiped her hands on her knees under the table before reaching for the money purse beneath her tunic. She’d worked all this out with him in letters, guided by Master Harry, so all she had to do now was pay him. She untied the bag and set it on the table.

Cenrod picked it up, weighing it in one hand. With a nod, he stuck out his other hand. “Done.”

Evina swallowed for a moment before she dragged her hand from beneath the table to meet his. His hand was hard with calluses and a faint grit of dirt. “Done.”

With luck and the Savior Mother’s blessing, she’d be able to rely on this mercenary to keep her safe. The longer she could avoid using magic on the quest, the harder it would be for the other mages to know where she was. And that, she hoped, would keep her alive to the end.

• • • •

The early pre-dawn sky had grayed enough to hide the stars, but no hint of color foretold the sun yet. Evina walked through the streets of Kingston with Clever Cenrod at her side. Knots of people all headed toward the castle and the starting line of the quest, but they kept well-clear of her. It was a small thing, but the mercenary’s visible sword was worth that much today.

The street they were on spilled out onto the town square. Thousands of people crowded in, hiding the grass from view. Kingsmen lined a path to the wooden stage set in the middle of the square. Banners hung from it, seeming gray and silver in the early light, instead of royal blue and white. A set of bleachers backed the stage, with a canopied throne at their top. Some nobles had taken their seats, but the king’s own spot was vacant yet.

“Ho!” A pair of kingsmen with pikes barred their path. Behind them stood a matching pair of King’s Wizards in their star-dappled robes. The closer pikesman said, “Mages only past this point.”

“Oh—” The hair on her arms rose from someone else’s magic. ta-ta-tun-tiri-ta Involuntarily, she turned toward the second of the two pikesmen. “I’m…I’m here for the quest.”

“Are you now?” He met her gaze and smirked, then glanced over his shoulder to a King’s Wizard. The long flame stitch robes marked her but not a trace of magic thrummed off the woman.

A test. Moths fluttered in her stomach. She’d thought the quest would begin at dawn, but it started here and now. Evina pulled magic from the air and let it pool under her skin. “Yes.”

The pikesman grinned. “Right you are, then.” He glanced over at Cenrod. “But not you.”

“I’m with the lady.” How could anyone sound threatening from a slouch?

“Only wizards and mages past this point.” The pikesman-wizard seemed unimpressed and pointed to the right, where spectators curved around the marked path. “Over there for watching.”

“I said. I’m with. The lady.” Cenrod’s hands rested easy on his belt and his posture did not shift but menace seemed to roll off him like magic. “She’s hired me to go with her and go with her I shall.”

From behind them a well-bred voice, with all the rolling vowels of nobility, drawled, “Must be a piss-poor mage if she can’t protect herself.”

The itching under Evina’s skin twisted and pointed in two directions now. The pikesman and, behind her, a golden youth in sweeping robes, although not so bold as to actually put a wizard’s flamestitching on them without a license. A glow manifested around his head, taka-tin-tin-taka-taka-tin, visible even to a layman’s eyes. “I trust I may pass?”

The pikesmen nodded their heads and cleared his path while keeping Cenrod boxed off.

Evina worried her lower lip between her teeth. “The call…it didn’t say anything about not traveling with a companion.”

“Poor duck. Why even bother starting?” The golden youth sauntered forward, sketching a mocking bow as he passed. “Best stay home and give up sorcery.”

The magic beneath her skin bunched, ready to snap out. Evina caught it. Teeth gritted, she let her breath out slowly and trickled some of the power away with it. She waited until the youth was farther away before she asked, “May he join me on the road later?”

“No rules against traveling with folks you meet on the quest. But at the start, it’s just you.”

“But—”

“Level playing field. You acquire a companion later, that’s fair game.”

If she didn’t have the mercenary, she’d be alone with the crush of people. And if she kept the mercenary, they wouldn’t let her past. Clenching her teeth, Evina turned to Cenrod.

He cracked his neck, seeing the decision in her turn. “I’ll meet you outside town, first fork on the Tollerton road.”

“All right.” She could do this. It was no different than walking down the road to market day or stepping into a tavern to hire a mercenary. Filling her lungs with air, she faced the road leading to the wooden stage. The pikesmen stepped back to let her pass. As she walked between them, she heard the sound of the mercenary retreating for just a moment, before his footsteps were buried under the sound of the spectators.

Even at the pre-dawn hour, it seemed as if everyone in town and from parts beyond had come to see the Wizard’s Quest begin. Clutching her bag, Evina walked down the path between the kingsmen. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck rose and scratched with a constant prickle of magic.

Ahead, a King’s Wizard waited at the foot of the stairs, with a small portable desk and a ledger spread in front of her. Seven steps led up to the stage, which was filled with a shifting mass of mages. Some of them manifested visible magic. Others stood, hands folded in front of them in quiet contemplation, or engaged in conversation with their neighbor. None of them acknowledged that they were ready to kill their fellows.

The King’s Wizard at the table lifted her head as Evina approached. “Name?”

She cleared her throat. “Evina the Green.”

Above her, a familiar voice chuckled. “Green is right. Why do you know, she tried to bring a mercenary in with her?”

“No.” A woman laughed. “Do you suppose she has a dolly tucked away in her pack, too?”

The King’s Wizard rolled her eyes and moved her quill to the next line. “Mentor?”

“Master Harriger the Treesmith.”

“Town of origin?”

She faltered here, every time the question arose. In polite conversation, she usually listed Master Harry’s small Ironville, but for an official record… “Wrightston by the Sea.”

The King’s Wizard’s head came up with a sucked in a breath. Evina kept her gaze fixed on the quill and the splotch of ink staining the woman’s forefinger, but that did not stop her from imagining the calculation spreading across the woman’s face. Her voice was softer when she asked, “Age?”

“Twenty-two.” She had been eight. That was what the woman was no doubt thinking, and she would be right.

Evina had been eight when a group of Costish marauders landed and raided her town. And she had been eight, when she had discovered that she was a mage. She had been eight, when she had been unable to control this new power and burned her town to the ground. She had been eight, when Master Harry took her in, because none in her town wanted her. Not even her parents.

Who would want a child that could destroy everything around them?

It made a pretty song, though. A song that stuck in your head and followed you around whispering its lies in your ear. Ina was a cold, cold child…Master Harry had told her songs could be a poison that way. The only small mercy was that the bard had named her Ina in the song, because it was easier to fit in the meter.

Through another small mercy, the King’s Wizard made no more comment than another soft inhalation. She cleared her throat, pen scratching across the ledger. Setting the quill down, she handed Evina a small badge, which crackled with embedded magic. “Affix this to your left shoulder. It shows that you’re Questing in the King’s name. His Majesty will arrive shortly to issue the formal challenge.”

“Thank you.”

The wizard nodded and opened her mouth, hesitating before she said. “Savior Mother’s Blessings on you.” She wet her lips as if straying from a script made her uncomfortable, then jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Up the stairs with you.”

Evina clutched the badge in her fist as she jogged up the wooden stairs. It was happening. In her chest, her heart wrestled with her lungs, each taking up the wrong space. At the top of the stairs, Evina faltered. Mages crowded the platform, which had no rails to keep the unwary from tumbling off. Most had gravitated toward the middle to avoid the edge, which left a border of empty planks.

Which safety did she want? Avoiding a tumble or avoiding people?

“Evina the Green…” The golden youth sauntered through the crowd, with another young noble at his heels. The other woman was as ostentatious as he was, with green sparks dancing around her dark hair. “My dearest friend, Retsea the Kinswoman, was so curious to see the mage who has a mercenary.”

Evina wrapped her fingers tighter around the badge. Kinswoman. Retsea was noble all right if the king allowed her to claim Kinswoman for a name. “You can see me, I trust.”

Retsea the Kinswoman raised a brow. “Good heavens, Folter. Your little find has quite the mouth on her.”

Before he could finish drawing breath, Evina turned to him. “Folter the Yellow? I think I would rather be green.”

“Folter the Golden.” He lifted his head, nearly rising onto his toes with hauteur.

“Of course, how foolish of me.” Evina walked straight into the crowd and cursed herself. Her temperament was never steady under the best of circumstances. And here? The press of these random strangers, with the constant pricking of small magics, was infinitely preferable to that preening coxcomb and his vainglorious muff.

“I’ll see you on the road!”

His voice carried past her, and those simple words were laden with threat. For the length of the quest, mages could kill each other without fear of reprisal. Culling the herd, Master Harry said. So to meet another mage on the road…She would not do that.

Her momentum carried her through the crowd and to the clear border on the far side. Evina let her breath out and looked down at the badge clutched in her hand. It bore a crown and forking Wizard’s flame on a blue field, bordered by a band of gold. There was no pin with which to attach it, nor did she have needle and thread on hand.

Evina snorted. They wanted it affixed by magic. How many small tests would she have to do before the quest even began? Pulling power out of the air, she saw the mages closest to her glance round at the new source of magic. One of them gave a little nod to her, as he saw what she was doing, all collegial until the quest officially began. Evina put the badge against her left shoulder and wove tiny lines of power between it and the cloth of her tunic. Thin fibers from each reached toward the other, intertwining their fibers like a honeysuckle meeting ivy.

With a sigh, she let the power snap out of her into one of the metal dowsing poles set into the corners of the platform. Even with all the people and the constant itch of other people’s magics, Evina could not stop a smile. The badge marked her as a wizard. Not yet a King’s Wizard, but registering for the quest marked her as of age and raised her from mage to wizard.

Master Harry had said that once the quest had been voluntary.

As the gray sky lightened, other mages arrived and crowded onto the platform until there were near forty of them. How could the King’s Wizards stand to live in such close proximity to each other without scratching their skin raw? Like her, most of the candidates were young and at the beginning of their careers. Their hands moved constantly, to brush at the itches of other people’s magics. A few older folks stood among the youths, with their hands tucked in their sleeves and jaws set to ignore the itching.

She had thought about skipping the quest altogether and giving up her magic. But Master Harry had said that magic would come out. Always. These poor aged folks had probably tried to give up their magic and now were stuck questing when they were old. Better learn to master it than to hide, he said.

She wasn’t so sure he was right.

Still, it was better than Seserland to the south where wizards were just killed. If she could afford the passage across the Middle Ocean, it would take her to a continent filled with countries where being a mage was safe and honorable and no one spoke her language.

A pair of bugles broke through the conversations, drawing all gazes to the king’s box. With a crackle of purple energy that raised the hair on the back of her neck, King Redinado the Eighth appeared in his box. He still had broad shoulders from his jousting days, but rumor had it that he had a paunch hidden inside magic. Behind him, wrapped in midnight blue, nearly obscured with goldworked flamestitch, the wizard Heltonia the Wiser stood with her gnarled hands raised.

She shifted her stance and a moment later, the king spoke, his voice unnaturally amplified. “My good citizens. As is our custom every year, we invite those with magical talents who have come of age, to vie for a position among our wizards.”

Invite. Evina did not snort out loud, but an invitation implied choice. This was an edict. Sure, you could ignore it if you didn’t mind King’s Wizards and guards coming for you.

“To be a King’s Wizard requires more than simply magic, for these nobles are tasked with keeping peace and maintaining the good of the land. So my ancestor Temor the First, established the King’s Quest in order that mages may prove themselves Wise. Kind. And Cunning.”

Kind. If he wanted kindness then the quest needed to be drastically rethought. Master Harry had said that in Temor the First’s day, the quest was a gentler thing.

“The quest then consists of three parts.”

All of the mages leaned forward on their toes. Evina hesitated a moment, before reaching into her pocket to pull forth her small commonplace book and a pencil. She would rather look the fool and take notes than be one.

“Only the wise may enter the sacred grove in Hemsworth Forest. Only the kind may approach the fountain there.” The King held up one finger. “And only the cunning can solve the riddle to prove that they are worthy of being raised to be a King’s Wizard.”

She glanced over her shoulder, looking for Folter the Yellow to see if he had taken note. Being kind would be difficult for him.

“For the first day, no harm may come to you. But at dawn tomorrow, any Mage on this quest who finds another on their path may remove the obstacle by any means possible. This is true for the duration of the quest.”

Around her, mages shifted on the platform as the reality of what they were about to do came home. Master Harry had said that the King allowed it because it kept the population of Mages from growing too large. Evina thought that it might be because, for all his talk about kind, cunning, and wise, the King wanted wizards who would kill in his name.

She’d done enough killing for a lifetime. All she wanted to do was to survive.

“You have until dawn of the next new moon to complete your quest.” He raised both arms, and Heltonia the Wise mirrored his stance, letting her power encircle him in a royal blue aura. “And now, my hopeful mages! Fly!”

As if he had commanded the sun, rosy golden light spread across the park, gilding everyone with the dawn. Mages began to lift off the platform, power crackling around them. Folter and Retsea were among the first to swoop over the crowd, laughing with delight.

Evina pulled power into her skin until every hair seemed to upend itself. She rose from the platform as her power pushed the earth away. She was not among the first to fly over the city gates, but neither was she the last. She counted that as a small victory.

• • • •

Evina adjusted the logs on the fire with a green sapling, trying to get the airflow exactly right. The ruddy coals shifted and cracked as she reached under the logs and scraped them together into a pile.

“Why don’t you just magic the fire?” Behind her, Cenrod lifted his head from the pack he was using as a pillow. “Mother Savior, you’d be done by now.”

One of the charred logs shifted into position and the draft stoked a long dancing flame out of it. It popped and crackled as water trapped in the wood evaporated. Evina pursed her lips and gave another poke to a log near it, trying to see if she could get that one to go up, too. Two weeks she’d known the mercenary, and he still hadn’t stopped trying to get her to magic everything.

“Some of us want to eat, you know?”

“The coals are hot enough, if you want to put a potato in there.” Evina glanced over her shoulder at her travel partner.

He rolled his eyes at her, stringy hair hanging across the scar on his forehead. “Could’a been that way half an hour ago.”

She sighed and rubbed her temple, at the ache between her eyes. There was probably a dark streak there from the charcoal. She hadn’t touched her power since the quest began and she wasn’t about to start now for a potato. “I’m ever so sorry you had to wait an extra quarter hour for your dinner.”

“A half hour. Wizards can make fires instantly.”

“Fire, yes, but the coals still have to heat enough to cook something so it’s only a quarter hour at most it would have saved.”

Cenrod rolled up onto his elbow and fished around in his pack for a potato. “A quarter hour closer to food means I would already be eating—”

“Not true.” Evina pointed the tip of the sapling at him. “It would still take the potato an hour to cook, so you would still be no closer than a quarter hour to eating.”

He sidled up to the fire on his knees and shoved the potato into the coals, snatching his hand back from the heat. Without looking, he grabbed the sapling out of Evina’s hand and poked the potato deeper into the coals. Then he pointed it at her. “If I had magic, I’d use it all the time.”

“And you’d die young.” Evina turned to her own pack and the night air, away from the fire, was a cool slap across her skin. She rummaged for a bit of bread and the hunk of cheese they’d picked up in Kellyston.

“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but mercenaries don’t exactly have a long life expectancy anyway. I seen plenty of old wizards.”

“Because they don’t do magic for things that can be accomplished other ways.” She knew the price of recklessness, thank you very much, and didn’t need to burn down another town to hone the lesson. Evina took the sapling back from him and settled on the ground next to the fire. Setting the bread and cheese on the least stained part of her trousers, she unsheathed her knife to whittle the sapling to a point. “And before you ask, yes, I could do this with magic and am choosing not to.”

“Will it…will it really kill you?”

“Not directly or immediately, no. But over time, yes, it will trim days off my life in the same way that using a knife dulls its edge gradually. You can sharpen it, but you do that by taking away a bit of the blade.” She held up her knife, which had belonged to her grandfather. The edge had been honed to a narrow slice of the original blade. “So…knowing that. Would you use your sword to trim a sapling, or chop firewood? Because it can do both.”

He gave a bark of a laugh. “More likely to break with firewood.”

“And there are spells that could break me, as well. So why risk it for eating a potato a quarter hour sooner?” She whittled another couple of pieces off to shape a rough spike. Laying the sapling across her lap, she dug a hole out of the bread and shoved the cheese into it.

Cenrod cleared his throat. “I can sizzle like bacon, I am made with an egg, I have plenty of backbone, but lack a good leg, I peel layers like onions, but still remain whole, I can be long, like a flagpole, yet fit in a hole. What am I?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a riddle.” He slid to lie back down on his pack. “Look. It’s easy. Riddles are about people or animals, vegetable, mineral, and ephemeral.”

Evina slid the sharp end of the sapling through the bread, pinning the cheese inside. Carefully, she held the thing out over the cooler yellow flames so it would heat slowly. “Ephemeral. Big word for a mercenary.”

“I’m Clever Cenrod, right?”

She hated him, for no reason at all except that she was unhappy and he was here. Evina hunched her shoulders and watched her bread toast.

“Come on. Gotta pass the time somehow while we wait an eternity for dinner.”

“I can kill you from here. You remember that. Right?”

He whistled. “Threats. For a riddle. You’re a cold, cold—”

“I am not cold!” Evina was on her feet, spinning to face him. Magic crawled right under her skin, itching the base of every hair on her body, begging to be let out in a torrent of fire and hate. The air around her crackled with violent, visible sparks.

“Mother Savior!” Cenrod shoved back, one hand reaching for his sword. “I’m sorry—all right?” He let go of the sword, holding both hands out. “It was just a joke. I was just teasing.”

The air crackled around her and stuck her robes together with static. Evina’s breath misted the air. It was just. A. Song. Slowly, she let her breath out in a white plume. Condensation and sweat beaded on her skin as she let the power drain back into the air and earth. “That was not clever.”

“Yeah…sorry.”

Even without the magic filling her, Evina’s skin crawled with tension. Pinpricks seemed to spring up on her left shoulder and spread along her side. She turned in that direction, feeling that toc-toc-toc of another wizard’s magic patter against her. “We need to go.”

“Go?” Cenrod’s brow creased. “What’s wrong? It’s dark. Why do we nee—”

“Because wizards can sense each other’s magic. And I was just blindingly stupid.” Evina stalked back to her pack and hauled it off the ground.

Cenrod hefted his own pack. “So, why all the bullshit about shortening your life and magic is like a knife?”

“It’s not bullshit. I use magic as little as possible by habit and by training.”

“That’s great and all, but I work better with full information. Why the hell didn’t you just straight up say that you were trying not to attract attention?”

Evina had no idea why she hadn’t just explained it when he started needling her. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“Yeah, sweetheart, actually you do. You hired me to do a job, which is to protect your ass and then you leave out a giant vulnerability?” Behind her, Cenrod spat on the ground. “You want me to stay on this merry little quest, then by the Savior Mother’s tits, you cannot treat me like an adversary. You hearing?”

The prickling intensity grew, and the general buzz of magic resolved itself into the pattern of a specific mage. taka-taka-tin-taka-tin-tin. Evina turned to look into the air, as if she would be able to see in the dark without magic. taka-taka-tin… “Damnation. Retsea the Kinswoman is—we don’t have time.”

“How many?”

“Just one.” She pointed, sighting her arm into the strongest emanation.

“Does she need to be dead?”

“I don’t know.” Evina moved away from the mercenary. Damn it all. As long as Retsea was in the air, they were fine. But as soon as the other wizard was grounded she could strike and she was coming toward them fast.

“All right…do you need her to stay alive to win the quest?”

“No. But—”

“Is she going to try to kill you?”

Her whole skin danced with the rhythm of Retsea’s magic. “Maybe.”

“Well, I’ll consider my question answered then. You need her dead.”

“That’s not what I said.” She turned toward Cenrod, but he had slid back into the night. “Let me—she might just want to talk.”

From the darkness behind her, Cenrod said, “You’ve been avoiding using magic for two weeks…remind me again of why?”

She ground her teeth, knowing he was right. “Don’t get between us and don’t let her see you.”

“Wasn’t planning to.” His voice had moved again.

Grimacing, Evina pulled magic into herself and outlines seemed to etch the night. Cenrod stood to her right, beyond the perimeter of the firelight. His sword was sheathed and he had a long staff in one hand.

Taka-tin-tin-taka-taka-tin

Retsea would see him as surely as Evina could. She slung the pack off her shoulder. They needed to make a stand now. “Stop moving—I’m going to hide you.”

“I’m in the dark.”

Evina sighed and did not scream at him. “Wizards can see in the dark.”

“Oh.” He stopped walking. “See. That full information thing again…”

“Did your parents not read to you?” She whipped a bolt of magic out to him, creating a dome to mask the lines of his body. She did not bother hiding him from visible sight, since the night did that well enough, just from preternatural sight.

tin-tin-taka-taka-tin-taka-tin-tin-taka-taka-tin

Retsea dropped out of the sky. She landed on the other side of the fire, cloak billowing around her. She had added flames to it. The moment she was grounded, she whipped a bolt of magic toward Evina.

Evina smacked it aside with no grace. But she was alive. That had been meant to kill. Her own magic pulsed in her veins tun-tun-tira-tun-tun and she followed through with a bolt of her own, but Retsea was already casting again and Evina had to spend her power to deflect that and—

Retsea staggered. A blade thrust out of her chest, red with blood. Blinking, she stared down at it. Retsea reached for the sword and taka-tak—

Evina screamed, “Let go!”

Magic sought metal. Flinging her power forward, she prayed that Cenrod had let go. The air crackled with power as her bolt struck true and lit up the night.

Retsea’s body exploded outward. Behind him, in the crack of light, Cenrod flinched back, throwing his arm over his face. Steaming chunks hit the ground with wet smacks and the air reeked of burnt flesh.

Gasping, Evina stumbled and bent to rest her hands on her knees. Power still thrummed under her skin. tun-tun-tira-tun-tun Master Harry had said she might have to, but she hadn’t wanted—she hadn’t killed anyone since she was a child. Her throat tightened. She didn’t—

“Are you all right?” Cenrod ran around the fire toward her.

“Don’t touch me!” tun-tun-tira-tun-tun Evina squeezed her eyes shut and the aftermath of the magic glowed purple branching lines. “I’m not safe.”

“I’ll…I’ll be right here.”

She nodded, still bent over. Cenrod kept silent, which she appreciated, but he stayed right there and didn’t run from her. He waited, just breathing slow and easy, and the sound of those breaths pulled her up away from the smell and the crackle and the death. tira-tun-tun-tira-tun-tun Evina pushed the excess energy away from her, down into the Earth.

She straightened, bones aching, and turned from the fire. “We need to go.”

“I thought as much.” He looked toward the sky as if he could see the wizards whose magic had begun to prick at her skin. “I’m sorry.”

Sorry. Evina huffed a laugh and walked over to pick her pack up from the ground. “Be careful picking up your sword.”

“What, you mean the glowing red puddle of slag?” Cenrod shook his head. “Savior Mother, I don’t know why you needed me when you can do that.”

“I was losing.” As she bent to pick up the pack, her muscles protested with the ache of a fever. “And I’ve killed enough for a lifetime.”

“The first is always—”

“Don’t.” Evina settled the pack over her back. She could be cold. Like the song. “Full information. You know the song ‘Ina’s Spark’?”

When she straightened, he was standing with his mouth slightly agape. He’d already put it together.

“I don’t want it to get easier.” Evina glanced at the sky again towards the faint, indiscriminate ticking of distant magic. Ina was a cold, cold child…

• • • •

Evina stomped along the road, following Cenrod toward Hemsworth Forest. Her pack dug into her shoulders and even with her hands tucked under to reduce the weight, it felt like her shoulders were being chewed off by a leather-mouthed beast. She could use magic to lighten the pack or to heal the chafing on her shoulders except—she couldn’t because then another random wizard was going to try to kill her.

She stopped.

He kept going and maybe, he wouldn’t even notice that she wasn’t behind him anymore. It was a stupid, petty thing, but she was tempted to just lie down in the grass by the side of the road and see how long it took him to notice that he was alone.

She clenched her fists around the pack straps. It wasn’t any heavier today than it was yesterday. If anything, it should be lighter since she’d eaten some of the food, but her whole body still ached from the magic she’d used to kill that woman. To kill. Evina squeezed her eyes shut. She hadn’t wanted to do it. Why wouldn’t they just leave her alone?

“Screw this.” She wiped her sleeve across her face and left a damp, grimy patch on it. Master Harry had tried to make her see that magic could heal—and sure, she had helped him tend to his small village. Sure. She’d healed a horse’s broken leg and kept Mistress Leggans from bleeding out after her sixth babe but all of that was just camouflage for what wizards did best.

She’d learned that when she was eight years old.

“Hey.” Cenrod’s footsteps scuffed toward her. “You all right?”

Evina glared at the horizon where the sky was cut by a silhouette of trees. “I’m done.”

“Sorry?”

“Let’s go back to Kingston and I’ll pay you what I owe you.” She turned and started walking away from the forest.

“Wait. Wait!” Cenrod hurried to catch up with her. “Hey. What’s—is it more wizards?”

“Just me.” Although now that he asked, and she was paying attention, there was a faint pricking of her skin. She sighed. “I mean, yes, there are some. North and east of us, but not close. Not yet.”

“In the forest.”

She nodded. “But it doesn’t matter because I’m done with this stupid quest.”

“I—um—Is that an option?”

“I’ll still pay you.” She shrugged her pack higher. “Half up front, half on completion, right?”

“Thanks. But wasn’t my point. Hey—” Cenrod grabbed her arm.

She jerked away from him. “Don’t—I’m not safe. Don’t ever grab a wizard.”

Even slouching, he was taller than she was and loomed over her. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“Give me time.”

“Easy…easy. I’m just trying to understand why we’re quitting when the looming forest is right there.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Something else you’re not telling me?”

Evina sighed and clenched her pack tighter. “No. I just don’t want to be a King’s Wizard and I should have just given up my magic rather than come on this damn thing.”

Cenrod stared at her until she couldn’t stand it and dropped her gaze to count the scuffs on his boots. She had reached five before he spoke again. He began with a sigh. “I killed her. Not you. I did that.”

Her eyes clouded with tears and her throat closed. Evina shook her head, swallowing desperately. He didn’t understand and it didn’t matter. She was done with the quest.

“You said you were losing…hey.” He crouched to put his face in her line of sight. His crooked nose seemed to twist farther with concern. “Hey. She attacked you. Right? You were losing, that’s what you said. Did I do wrong? Did you want her to kill you?”

Evina pulled her hands up to her face and wanted to reach for her magic to make a bubble of time so that she could catch her breath and not be this awkward miserable mess and she couldn’t because then more wizards would come and she would have to kill them, too and—

“Lord knows how anyone could think you were cold.”

“I hate you.”

He laughed. “Good. I’m good for that.” Beyond the enclosed space of her hands, his pack thunked on the ground, and then something gurgled. “Here. Drink this. It’ll…well, it won’t help exactly, but it’ll distract.”

Evina lowered her hands, blinking away the sting of light. She wiped her face with her sleeve again, this time adding a trail of snot to the grime there. “Why are you being so nice?”

Kneeling in front of her, Cenrod screwed up his mouth and looked off to the right, where his nose pointed. “I got several choices here. I can make a joke. I can tell the truth. Or I can lie. Which do you want?”

“Truth.”

He nodded and held the flask up to her again. “Right. Someday, I’ll learn not to offer that one, or to just make the joke…”

She took the flask and unscrewed the top. A smoky seagrass aroma wafted out of it and made her nose wrinkle.

“This is the story of how I got the moniker Clever Cenrod, which as you might be able to guess, ain’t because I’m especially smart.” He nodded to the flask. “Single malt. Just take small sips and think about where the smells take you.”

The first sip made her tongue go numb, but reminded her of sitting at the hearth with her mother by the sea. She almost lost it again.

“I was in a battalion and mouthed off one too many times. So two fellows were wanting my hide and I got them both to meet me for satisfaction on the same moonless night. Picked weapons aforehand and agreed to ‘gentlemanly silence.’ I didn’t show up. The other fellows did, each thinking that the other was me because, y’know, in the dark battalion uniforms all look alike. Dueled each other and then I stabbed the one who lived.”

Evina’s mouth dropped open. “That…that’s the story you’re telling to comfort me?”

“You asked for truth.” He gave a grin and reached for the flask. When she handed it back, he took a sip and pursed his lips, still staring off into the distance. “Folks called me ‘clever’ for getting rid of two rivals at once. I knew what they were really saying was ‘coward’.”

The wind rustled through the grasses at the side of the road and blew a strand of Evina’s hair across her face. To the north and east, two more wizard sparks flared on her skin.

Cenrod heaved another sigh and then capped the flask. “So, I’m nice to you because I know what it’s like to hate yourself for making choices that kept you alive.” He clambered to his feet. “Also, because I figure you might give me a bonus if you like me.”

That did make her snort. “You are cleverer than you think.”

He shrugged. “I make jokes. I tell riddles. But I know exactly how clever I am and it don’t matter what others think, so long as they’re wrong. Underestimate me, I can take advantage of that. Overestimate me, and they pay me more. Get it right? No benefit to that.” He spat in the grass. “So. We quitting?”

Evina sighed and faced the forest, which wasn’t more than another hour’s hike away. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Which choice will keep you alive?”

“Neither?” She swallowed and her mouth still tasted of smoke by the sea.

If she quit, she’d have to give up magic altogether and she would, if that were an actual choice, but magic was woven into her. It came whether she wanted it to or not and someday, she’d lose her temper again and it would be there. Only the next time the King’s Wizards came for her, Master Harry wouldn’t be among them. They’d give her the choice of questing or dying.

There really wasn’t any choice at all. Still. There had never been a real choice. “Let’s go on to the forest.”

• • • •

Evina’s Master Harry was a Treesmith, so she knew the difference between natural growth and magicked growth. The latter had a clear order to it that matched the rhythm of the treesmith’s magic. The branches he grew mimicked the forking paths of Master Harry’s katataka-tina-tina-tina with one long branch that bore three shorter ones in ever small repeating patterns.

As she and Cenrod walked through the twisting paths of the forest surrounding the sacred grove, she had imagined something like that. Or perhaps simply a place in the forest that was dedicated to the Savior Mother and marked sacred by practice.

She was wrong on both counts.

The path that Evina and Cenrod had been following through Hemsworth Forest ended abruptly in a tall bramble hedge that thrummed with magic. It stretched up into the tree crowns and crossed the path unbroken. A foot path had been worn in either direction along the hedge, but it did not look groomed the way the path they rode in on had been.

She frowned, biting her lower lip as she studied it. If she pulled magic into herself, she would know more, but this close to their destination there had to be other wizards.

There had to be a way past the hedge or the path wouldn’t go all the way up to it. It would stop short. Whatever opened the hedge also would not require magic, or an ordinary penitent wouldn’t be able to enter. Penitent…

The king had said, “Only the wise may enter the sacred grove in Hemsworth Forest. Only the kind may approach the fountain there. And only the cunning can solve the riddle.”

Behind her, Cenrod made unintelligible grumbles and shifted his weight. Evina chewed her lower lip. Wise. What would all penitents have in common? If she could figure that out—No. Wait. That would be smart and the king had said “Wise.” What had Master Harry always said about wise men? A wise man knows that he is a fool.

If she were right, Folter the Yellow would never have made it past here. And yet…and yet, all the other King’s Wizards had survived this quest.

Crossing her fingers that she had it figured out, Evina said, “Savior Mother, I am a foolish woman and do not know what would please you. Would you guide me?”

Between one blink and the next the hedge across the path cleared into a verdant arch. No crackle of magic touched her save for that steady thrum just at the edge of her awareness. Three strides away, the path through the hedge continued across a vivid lawn.

Evina sagged, relief filling her to her toes. “Thanks to the Mother!”

Behind her, underbrush crackled and Cenrod made a strangled yelp.

Spinning, Evina saw him grappling with a man, who had somehow managed to get one arm wrapped around Cenrod’s neck. The man wore a wizard patch upon his tunic.

She held her hands up, ready to pull in magic. “Let go of him!”

Cenrod clawed at the man’s arm, trying to dislodge his attacker, but his face was purpling. Violence might well close the door again, but she couldn’t leave him here. Evina reached for magic and it flooded, crackling into her skin.

As she did, the other wizard jerked his head up to stare at her.

In that moment of distraction, Cenrod slammed his head back into the other man’s nose. Both men tumbled to the ground. Evina held the magic, afraid she’d strike the wrong one. Rolling to his knees, Cenrod grabbed the wizard by the collar. He drew his fist back—

Evina’s skin itched with an unfamiliar chika-chi-chika-ka-ka. “Magic!”

She didn’t know what the wizard was going to throw, only that he was reaching for power.

Cenrod punched him. And again. The itch of magic faltered. Another wet smack and specks of blood spattered the path.

Evina ran forward, so she could aim around Cenrod. He punched the wizard again and the itch of magic vanished. No—she was wrong. The itch of close magic vanished, but four or five spots still lit her skin from wizards farther away.

Cenrod punched the man again.

Evina shoved her power out of her skin and into the path. Cenrod jerked as the buckle on his belt sparked. He growled and pulled his fist back again.

“We have to go!”

Snarling, he stopped, blood coating his fist and spattered across his face. “More of them?”

She nodded. “Four or five.”

“Mother Savior’s tits.” Cenrod dropped the man and staggered to his feet.

“Sorry.” She glanced over her shoulder and her knees sagged with relief. The arch was still open. “Come on.”

“Where?” He looked past her at the opening—no. He was looking at the hedge as if the opening weren’t there.

“Can you not see it?” Evina gestured, as if that would change the baffled look on his face.

Cenrod snorted like a horse. “You are jesting—shit.” His face slackened with understanding. “Magic. Deliverance and Multitudes. Fine. What do I have to do?”

“The King said that only the wise could enter the sacred grove.” How many of her fellow magicians had been stopped here like the wizard lying on the road? Evina held out her hand as the itching on her skin grew more distinct. Definitely five wizards. “Let me try to lead you.”

“So you’re wise now?” He put a hand sticky with blood in hers. “Great.”

“No, I’m a fool.” Evina pulled him forward, praying that the arch wouldn’t close with him in tow. “A wise man knows he’s a fool.”

“Noted.”

She hurried toward the arch through the hedge. As she passed under it, Cenrod’s hand twisted in her grasp and Evina grabbed him with her magic. She was not leaving him behind. The path curved as they went, until the arch vanished from sight behind hedge walls.

Somewhere, presumably in the center, water trickled from a fountain. The fountain, really. If the legends were true, this is where the Savior Mother had brought forth the Multitudes.

Behind her, Cenrod cleared his throat. “I think you can let go of me. The arch turned up right before I smacked into it. Wizards.”

Evina’s skin had stopped itching. Only the wise may enter the sacred grove in Hemsworth Forest. Only the kind may approach the fountain there… “You don’t have to come.”

Cenrod took a few steps past her and brushed a verdant green wall. “Job’s not done yet.”

“That’s…that’s kind of you.”

He spat upon the sacred ground. “Nah. I’m less likely to be killed here than out there. Plus, you’re more likely to be able to pay me if you complete this quest. Right?”

“I can find no flaws in your argument.” She took a breath, waiting for her skin to prickle with magic, but only the thrum from the hedge tickled her senses. “I’ll lead.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, but…” He trailed off. Maybe he remembered the song that bore her name. Maybe he just wanted to get it over with. Maybe he’d learned to stop pushing her. Whatever it was, Evina felt relief when he stopped talking and fell into step behind her.

“Help!” An elderly woman’s voice wavered through the air from farther into the labyrinth.

Evina stopped, shoulder’s hunched against the sound. Could she pretend that she hadn’t heard? Not a chance. Wetting her lips, Evina turned toward the sound.

“What?”

“Only the kind can approach the sacred grove…” Evina gestured past Cenrod to the voice.

“Are you serious? You think she’s a test.”

“It would make sense.”

“Help…someone?” The old woman’s voice cracked. “I’m—I’m lost.”

Evina gestured emphatically toward the path.

“Oh for the love of tits. Does it count as a kindness if we’re being self-serving when we act?”

“Does it matter?”

Cenrod opened his mouth and glared at her. A strand of his hair fell into his face and he huffed it away. “Fine. But if she turns out to be a soul-eating demon, it’s all on you.”

“Noted.” Evina took a step back toward the turn they had taken. “I’ll remind you that you don’t have to come.”

“I know. I’m being ‘kind.’”

She sucked in a breath to retort and bit down on the inside of her cheek. Sarcasm and anger were not expressions of kindness and that applied to her as much as to him. The gravel crunched under their feet as they walked through the curves and the original turning was lost behind them before Evina trusted herself to speak calmly. “Thank you.”

He grunted.

Why had she even bothered?

Cenrod cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey!”

Evina stopped on the path and grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”

He tilted his head to the side, looked at her hand on his arm, looked back at her, and then shrugged her off. “Trying to help. HEY! Old lady!”

She winced, glancing around, and hissed, “This is the Savior Mother’s sacred grove.”

“Yep.” He lifted his hand to his mouth again.

“So show some respect.”

Cenrod lowered his arm and turned to her. “The King’s instructions said stuff about wisdom, kindness, and cunning. Didn’t say a damn thing about being polite.” He jabbed a finger at the path. “You know damn well we’re going the wrong way so why not get her to come to us?”

She hated him. By the Multitudes, why did he have to be right? Evina pressed her fingers against the brow of her nose. “Fine. You’re right. Gah.” She dropped her hand and tilted her head back. “Madam! If you can hear our voices, we can help guide you through.”

“Hello?” The old woman sounded as if she were farther away than when they had started.

“Can you make your way toward us?”

“I don’t know where I am…” There might have been a sound of gravel crunching. “I dropped my cane.”

Cenrod thrust his hands out to either side as if he were making a point. What point he was acting vindicated about, Evina did not particularly care. She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes. I know. She’s a test.”

“And she’s only answering you.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re being rude.” Evina peered down the path, gnawing on her lower lip. He was right, but she had no idea what it really meant. Unless this was the test of cunning? Evina held up a hand to stop Cenrod from speaking. “You can stay put. I’ll be right back.”

“Look. You hired me to keep you safe. So when I say, ‘No. This is a bad idea,’ maybe listen to me.”

Evina gritted her teeth to keep from calling her magic. If she were honest—most of her anger was because he was probably right. She loosened her jaw. “What do you suggest? Beyond just leaving her here?”

He pressed his lips together and stared down the path. Without the crunch of gravel underfoot, only the old woman’s movements broke the silence. Evina blinked. “It’s completely quiet.”

“I’m not going to shout again.”

“No, I mean…we can’t be the only people here. I can hear her moving and…” She scuffled her feet, kicking up a spray of gravel that rattled back to the path. “No birds. No other people.”

“That’s…unsettling.” Cenrod’s hand drifted to his belt and closed on empty air where his sword should be. He grimaced.

She didn’t feel the prickling of any other wizards, not even the ones that she had sensed outside, before they entered the hedge. Evina chewed the inside of her lip. At this rate, she’d worry a spot through it.

Master Harry had always told her to use her power as little as possible. Some of it was so that it didn’t wear her down too soon, and some was to avoid drawing attention of other wizards. Sure, they could only kill her while the King’s Quest was going on, but there was no point in antagonizing them at other times. Rude, he said it was, rubbing your magic all under someone else’s skin.

But there was no one else here. The sacred daughters of the grove must have done something to keep wizards from crossing paths inside the sacred grove.

“All right.” Evina laid hands on his waist, wrapping her fingers around his belt. “This might tickle.”

“I ain’t—” His words cut off as she channeled power around and through them both. “Savior Mother!”

Their feet lifted off the ground as tun-tun-tira-tun-tun resonated through them both. The hedge maze spread out beneath them in a beautiful embroidery of hedges and crystalline gravel.

Aside from the old woman, no one else moved in the hedge maze. She had half expected the woman to be only a voice. But she knelt below them on the path, feeling under one of the hedges for her cane.

Evina’s magic pushed down as she propelled them over the hedges and through the air to the old woman. The old woman knelt next to the hedge, reaching under with one hand.

As Evina and Cenrod touched down on the path, the woman spun, falling back on her rump. A branch had scratched a tear in the back of her wrinkled hand. “I’ve got nothing!”

Cenrod raised his hands in a placating gesture and crouched down. “Easy, auntie.”

“You asked for help?” Evina took a step toward her, but Cenrod shifted to block her. She settled for standing behind him. “We are going to the center of the labyrinth ourselves.”

The woman looked to be in her eighth decade, with skin like sagging vellum and eyes the color of milky water. She wet her creased lips and blinked at Cenrod, then at Evina. “That be so?”

“Indeed. Would you care to join us?”

The old woman nodded. “Thankee kindly.” She struggled over onto her knees. “Can ye…? My cane ist under yon hedge and my rheumatism…begging pardon, but can ye fetch it?”

“Of course—” Cenrod held out an arm to stop Evina. “No. You stay back.”

Her mouth dropped open. Evina lowered her voice and hissed at him. “Honestly, of course she’s a test. What did you think would happen here?”

He glared up at her and stood too close. His breath stank as he hissed back. “Can magic change your appearance?”

“Yes. Technically. But another wizard would feel it. She’s not using magic—”

“Weren’t you saying you didn’t feel magic here?” He gestured at the hedge. “Here? In the middle of this? So let me do my fucking job.”

Evina snorted, glaring at the hedge. She knew full well that there had to be wizards in itching range. “Don’t you dare harm her.”

“If she’s an old woman, I’ll be kindness embodied. Otherwise, I make no promises.” He turned back to the old woman and smiled at her. “Just slide back, auntie, so I can take a look for your cane.”

“Tis just under there.” Scooting back on the gravel, she pointed an arthritic hand at the place she’d been searching.

Cenrod got down to one knee, bending to look under the hedge. “There it is.” He reached a hand for it and paused. Gritting his teeth, he stuck his hand under the hedge and pulled out a perfectly ordinary blackthorn cane.

A hint of blush colored his cheeks as he handed it to the old woman. “Here you are.”

“Thankee, sir.” She planted the cane on the ground and hitched her skirt up to plant one skinny leg on the ground. Much darned stockings bunched around her ankles.

“Oh for pity’s sake—” Even if this weren’t a test, she couldn’t leave the woman to struggle like this. Evina stepped around Cenrod. “Let me help you up.”

“Evina—”

She rolled her eyes at him and put a hand under the old woman’s arm. It was skinny, and warm, and smelled faintly of sheep. The rough wool scratched under her hands as Evina helped her up.

The light changed. The walls of the hedge maze had fallen away, replaced by a ring of birch trees. A light trickling of water wove through air scented with frankincense.

And the old woman straightened, her garments changing to a fine blue scattered with gold stars. Her face had altered as well—the King’s Wizard who had taken her name at the start of the tournament smiled at her. “Welcome, Evina the Green.”

Evina dropped into a bow, though what she really wanted to do was rub it in Cenrod’s face that she was right. “Thank you for your trust in allowing me here.”

“Congratulations on reaching this far in your quest.” The King’s Wizard had a smile in her voice.

Straightening, Evina turned to Cenrod. He wasn’t there. She turned a full circle, heart beginning to thump loudly in her chest. The sacred grove had other supplicants, but none of them could be mistaken for the lanky mercenary. “Where is my companion?”

“The mercenary? He did not need to enter here. He was filled with thoughts of violence.”

“He was just doing his job.” Evina peered through the wall of trees. Beyond the birches, the walls of the labyrinth had vanished. A score of people wandered along a gravel path that wound between grasses. No—wait, there were more than a score. Evina frowned. Each time she looked, it seemed as if she saw another group. How many were on the paths? Where had they been and more importantly…”Is he all right?”

“Of course.” The King’s Wizard put a hand on Evina’s elbow. “Now come. Your quest is not yet finished.”

She dragged her feet, trying to spot Cenrod among the petitioners on the paths. “What will happen to him?”

“He will be given an opportunity to show kindness, like our other petitioners. Until then, he is in the safest of places.”

Evina planted her feet. “He was showing kindness. It might not have been wrapped up in politeness, but he was trying to keep me safe.”

“Did you not say that was his job?” The older woman tilted her head to the side. “How is that a kindness?”

Evina opened her mouth to reply and the answer tripped her. She swallowed, knowing she might be damning herself. “With that criteria, my kindness is also self-serving. I was kind to you only because I thought it was a test. If he is not kind, neither am I.”

“Mm…” She turned to face Evina fully and—

They were standing by the fountain. But…but they had not moved. The water poured over the edges of the broad stone basin in an opalescent milky tumble to a shallow reflecting pool that stretched across the green space of the sacred grove. The air above the fountain steamed as it burbled. She blinked, rubbing her forehead. Evina’s skin had not itched, and yet they had crossed the space within the grove to be at the edge of the fountain itself.

Another test? What, that Evina had recognized her own selfish nature? Or that she had defended Cenrod who pestered her to the point of fury or who knew what and—

The light seemed to flex and the shadows shifted around her. When Evina blinked her eyes clear, the shadows in the sacred grove had stretched out with the long golden light of sunset. In that taffy warm evening light, other wizards stood in a circle surrounding the fountain. Like her, they blinked and murmured, looking about themselves with confusion. Folter the Yellow was not among their number. Had he made it to the grove or had Retsea Kinswoman killed him on the first day?

On the far side of the fountain, the King’s Wizard clapped her hands. “You eleven are all that have made it to this point in the quest. You have demonstrated the wisdom and kindness necessary to get this far.”

And ruthlessness. She didn’t say that, but the blood-spattered clothes of the other wizards made it clear enough that none of them had made it here without killing at least one other wizard. She wrapped her arms around her torso, trying to hold in a shiver. Not that she had any room to talk. The wizard to her right glanced at her, and then away, as wary as she was at the presence of another wizard. If Cenrod were here—

The woman hadn’t answered her question, not really, about where he was and what would happen to him. Evina glanced past the man and searched the paths on that side of the grove for signs of the lanky mercenary. The smart thing to do would be to finish this benighted quest and then, once she had earned her place as a King’s Wizard, push about Cenrod. She’d made it here, and still had the riddle to go. She just had to be smart. Cunning, the King said.

“You have five minutes in which to answer this riddle.”

“Five?!” Three spots away, a young man sputtered. Evina recognized him. She had seen him on the platform at the start of the quest. He had worn expensive cotton and his pride like a mantle. Now his clothes were travel stained and the patch that signaled he was questing had been stained by a deep rusty brown spatter.

“Five.” Clearing her throat, the King’s Wizard smiled at the group. “We hurt without moving. And poison without touching. We bear truth and lies, but are not judged by size. What are we?”

“Excuse me.” Evina raised her hand. She was not cunning.

Across the fountain, one of the other wizards cast a spell, which she could just barely feel as a soft brush of cat fur against her skin. His eyes bulged and he clasped his forehead. A “wisdom” spell.

Wisdom wouldn’t do here. It would take cunning and Evina had none. She swallowed. “My companion. I’m concerned about him. Where is he?”

“I told you he was safe.”

“I know, and I am grateful for that, but I still would be more at ease if I knew the specifics.” This was stupid. One of the King’s Wizards had just said he was safe. He was a mercenary. He could take care of himself. “Can you at least tell me when I will see him again?”

“After you answer the riddle, you will be free to leave.”

Which implied that if she didn’t answer it, she would be stuck here. Gah. She needed more time—time. Why not? She knew the spell and it was a heck of a lot less painful that trying to make herself smarter.

Evina pulled power from the ground and twisted it under her skin, shaping with her will. The tiri-tiri-tun of her magic kept its underlying signature, but the peaks and valleys became more pronounced until they began to resonate with the world in different ways. She pulled the highs up and up and as she did
the world
slowed
down

Water stopped trickling and hung in perfect ripples. The King’s Wizard had paused in mid-turn with one brow raised slightly. The other wizard’s face still had the contortion and—

Evina sucked in breath. The paths of the labyrinth were crowded with people. Savior Mother. They must have layered time in and over and around itself to keep all these people from meeting. Which meant that Cenrod would never find his way out on his own. None of them would.

This was a terrifying display of power—far more so than the paltry things she could do with her own magic. Was this what King’s Wizards could do? Was that how they could stand to live all together, because their magic didn’t itch? Not that it really mattered.

Not in this extended moment.

What Evina needed was the answer to that riddle. She said, “We hurt—” The sound of her voice broke the utter stillness of this tiny pocket of time. Evina flinched and looked up at the still, crystalline sky. Was that why there had been no birdsong when they came into the hedge maze? Evina shook her head, “We hurt without moving. And poison without touching. We bear truth and lies, but are not judged by size. What are we?”

Well…she could rule out people and all animals, and according to Cenrod, that left vegetable, mineral, and ephemeral. Vegetables were often poison, but they usually needed contact to poison and, more importantly, did not bear truth and lies. She pursed her lips. Probably this was an ephemeral then.

Time? Everyone referred to time passing which might not be literal but probably violated the “without moving” metaphor of the riddle. Alright, what other ephemeral things were poisonous.

Evina twisted her lips. “Songs.” She had been twelve the first time she had heard Ina’s Spark. Master Harry had hauled her out of the tavern with a hand upon her arm. Don’t listen—That song’s a poison.

Only…it wasn’t the music. It had been the words.

There was a cold, cold child aborn in Wrightston by the Sea

Without a spot of love that child worked her sorcery

And when ashore some raiders came Cold Ina made her mark

The flames leapt up too late to flee

And all felt Cold Ina’s spark

Words. Words hurt without moving, and poison without touching. They bore truth and lies, oh Savior Mother, did they ever.

She unfolded the magic she had built around herself and the world moved again. After the quiet of that extended moment, the fountain’s patter seemed more of a percussive drumming. The king’s wizard completed her turn, brows up.

Evina opened her mouth to blurt it out, but caught herself. “I know the answer, I think.”

The barest cat fur brush of magic rubbed against her skin and the sounds around them dropped away. The King’s Wizard inclined her head. “You only get one guess. You can take more time.”

Evina had taken more time. She nodded, swallowing. “Words.”

The King’s Wizard smiled at her. “Yes, dear. That is correct.” She glanced at the circle around them. “A moment, please.”

The light flickered and shifted again, but this time, paying attention, Evina could feel that delicate brush of magic. Savior Mother—was that what being a King’s Wizard really was? To have that much control and delicacy of touch staggered her. Why didn’t they just use that as incentive to get people to go on the quest and—

There were only seven wizards still in the circle.

Evina flinched. “What—what happened to the others?”

The wizard to her right shushed her, but the King’s Wizard shrugged. “They will join the other penitents of the Savior Mother as all other mages who fail at this stage do. Now, brave wizards. I am Lenzia Earthsmith and I welcome you to the ranks of King’s Wizards.”

Around Evina, exhausted cheers broke out. One young man dropped to his knees in prayer. A woman staggered backwards, with her hands over her face. Another man openly wept. Evina turned in a circle, looking for Cenrod.

Lenzia Earthsmith clapped her hands three times and drew their attention back to her. “Line up, please, so that I can anoint you and then we will return to Kingston for the full ceremony, but the anointing…that is the moment when you truly join us.”

“My companion.” Evina took a step back. “You said I’d be able to see him after I answered the riddle.”

The wizard beside her stepped closer and hissed at her. “Will you knock it off? Some of us got here on our own and are ready to leave.”

“Some of us have friends.” She lifted her chin. “I’m not leaving without him.”

The King’s Wizard raised her brow, a glow building around her. “And how would you stop me?”

“I…I don’t know. But I would find the time to figure it out.”

To her surprise, the woman laughed. “The king will be delighted to have such loyalty demonstrated, only make certain you remember to whom your fealty is owed.”

Cenrod appeared in front of Evina. He staggered and dropped to one knee. “Mother Savior’s tits and ass.”

“Are you all right?” Evina crouched next to him, sending tendrils of magic to check.

“Yeah.” He pushed himself to his feet, reaching for a sword that wasn’t there. “The hell?”

The King’s Wizard dipped a hand in the sacred fountain. “I was about to anoint these wizards, but she insisted that you be here.”

Cenrod’s brows rose almost to his hairline. “That right? And you did the whatever thingy? You’re a King’s Wizard now?”

“Almost.” Evina stood and faced the fountain. Her heart raced in her chest and she couldn’t even tell why. Fear, anticipation, excitement all seemed equally likely. “One last step, then we can go.”

With a gentle motion, Lenzia Earthsmith ran her hand through the first wizard’s hair. “By the grace of the Savior Mother, I bind you to the King’s service and will. I name you, thus: Goro Treesmith.”

“No.” Cenrod straightened out of his perpetual slouch and stood taller than she had thought. He stepped in front of Evina, with both arms spread wide to keep her back. “Wait.”

“What—”

“It’s just—” he glanced over his shoulder as the line of wizards filed past the fountain. Cenrod’s brows twisted. “I don’t know. I just…is this what you want? To be bound to the king?”

“Are you saying you’ll miss me?”

“You’re a steady paycheck.” Cenrod chewed the bottom of his lip. “But, really. Will this keep you safe?”

This was the real riddle. They stood in the middle of the Savior Mother’s sacred grove, by the fountain where legend said she brought forth the Multitudes and populated the world. If there were anywhere that Evina should be safe, it was here in the most holy of spaces.

But it had been turned into the end point of a quest. And that quest itself bore no resemblance to the stories she had heard of the first King’s Wizard. There had been just one and now…Savior Mother, she had no idea how many King’s Wizards there were now. Would being among their number keep her safe?

If Evina waited much longer all the other wizards would be anointed, and then she’d be keeping Lenzia Earthsmith waiting. As if that weren’t bad enough, the other mages were staring at her and eyeing Cenrod with undisguised contempt.

She swallowed trying to dislodge the knot in her throat. If she couldn’t even walk up to the fountain, how the hell did she think she was going to live as a King’s Wizard? Savior Mother and the Multitudes…all she wanted to do was survive. She could give a rotten fig about working for the King.

Trust your mind, not your instincts, Evina. Her instincts always told her to flee and to hide. Or to kill.

Would being a King’s Wizard keep her safe?

“No.” She wet her lips, looking at the late evening sunlight that glided over the grove, turning everything honey gold. She was one of eight wizards to survive the quest and no closer to safety than when she had started. It was the smartest choice though. This narrow path that she walked kept her alive so far. “Nothing will.”

“Well, then.” Cenrod stepped to the side, glancing back at the fountain where the other wizards waited. He swept his hair back from his forehead, exposing the old scar that creased it. “Right.”

Evina walked up to the fountain, the last in line. She counted the flames on Lenzia Earthsmith’s robe and lost count somewhere around twenty-three. A tight band seemed wrapped around her middle as the King’s Wizard dipped her hand in the fountain and brought it up to Evina’s hair.

The water drizzled through her scalp, and her skin shivered and relaxed.

“By the grace of the Savior Mother, I bind you to the King’s service and will. I name you, thus: Evina Timesmith.” The King’s Wizard smiled at her. “You think I didn’t see you doing that? Nicely done.”

It should have felt like more. To have a wizard’s name and to be anointed. To be heading back to Kingston to join the ranks of King’s Wizards. She smiled, because that was what she was supposed to do and turned from the wizards to Cenrod. She won the quest, so why did it feel like she had lost?

He slouched up to her and gave a nod. “Congratulations, huh?”

“Thank you.” And to make sure he understood that it wasn’t just for the congratulations, Evina put her hand on Cenrod’s shoulder. “Thank you. For keeping me safe.”

“My job.” He shrugged, but his cheeks darkened with something that, on someone else, she would have named a blush.

“Half up front and half on completion. I know.”

“Yep. And by my reckoning, job’s not done yet.” He spat on the ground of the Sacred Mother’s grove. “You safe?”

She snorted and glanced at the other wizards. “No.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

“Pretty sure, the ‘half on completion’ won’t cover the amount of time it’ll take to keep me safe.”

“We’ll work something out.” He stretched his arms casually, as if he hung out with wizards in holy places every day. “Unless you want to fire me.”

“No.” He kept her safe and no matter how much people had mocked her for having a mercenary, it had been the logical choice. And also…he was cunning and wise and kind. Actually kind. Evina touched his arm and for the first time since Master Harry took her in, her mind and instincts were aligned. “Stay.”

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Spare Man, Ghost Talkers, The Glamourist Histories series, and the Lady Astronaut Universe. She is part of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and a four-time Hugo Award winner. Her short fiction appears in Uncanny, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary Robinette, a professional puppeteer, lives in Nashville. Visit at maryrobinettekowal.com.

The Red Mother
By Elizabeth Bear
Novelette Long List

A pall of ash turned my red horse roan as he and I ambled between tuffs of old lava. Basalt fields spread on either side, dotted with burnt-orange or gray-green lichen. Flat flakes of ash drifted past the brim of my hat.

We were crossing a big flow near the Ormsfjoll, and the reek of sulfur in the air left both Magni and me over-eager to complete our trip. It couldn’t be too much farther to the village. Magni’s ears were pricked. His walk tended to rush into a tolt. I knew he had scented or heard other livestock that was still too far away for me to detect.

He knew that where there was livestock, there was fodder. He was thinking of grain and grass and company, and I couldn’t blame him. It had been a long ride, and a lone horse is never comfortable. They’re meant to be in the company of their own kind.

Some would snipe that this makes my horse the opposite of me.

Fair enough. I felt no need for company. I did need supplies, however, and—if it were to be had—information to complete my quest.

My journey was for kin-duty. I had an obligation to find my brother and give him the news that his name was cleared, his honor restored, and his exile ended. To that end, I had spun the threads of his fate by sorcery, and was following them.

This was where they led.

• • • •

The first sign of my return to civilization was a graveyard. The road passed through it, flanked on both sides by neat cairns. Some were marked with runestones; some stood uncommemorated. The lichen had grown over a few. But lichen grows slowly and most of the graves stood barren, sad heaps of brown-black rock with the sea in the distance behind.

Not long after, I came within sight of the village.

It wasn’t a big village, Ormsfjolltharp, and I was in among it almost as soon as I noticed it. Men and women working outdoors turned to watch me as I rode past the two dozen or so houses. Turf houses, some with goats or sheep grazing on roofs that looked more like low hillocks than dwelling-places. I had been corrupted by too much time spent in southern lands where exotic building materials like wood existed. Any trees that grew here would be for boats and bows and axe-hafts, not for houses.

A group of men stood around an open-fronted cattle shed not too far from the well, the baker and the blacksmith. They were doing what folk generally do in such circumstances: passing the time of day and pretending to work a little, in case their wives should check on them.

I fingered the ebony and bone spindle in my coat pocket. The thread on it was wound tight, and I was almost to the end of the roving. I’d followed the thread all the way here, woven my path along Arnulfr’s fate-thread. I’d soon need a new thread to follow. It would raise questions for a solitary man to buy carded wool in such a place, however.

I rode Magni to the hitching rail—not too far from the cluster of gossipers, but not too close either. There were five men: one black, one red, one dun, and two as nondescript in color as I had been before my hair and beard went to pewter.

They looked up as I swung down from the saddle. Magni stood placidly except for turning his head to glance over his shoulder, hopeful of a treat. He got a scratch instead and sighed in companionable disappointment when I didn’t loosen his girth. You never know when you might need to leave in a hurry.

“I know,” I said under my breath. “I’m a grave disappointment to you.”

I seemed to be a grave disappointment to the cattle-shed malingerers as well, judging by the scowls they turned on me. I forced my own face into a friendlier expression than I was feeling, stopped a healthy few paces back, and said, “I’m looking for a man called Arnulfr Augusson. Or his wife, Bryngerthr Thorrsdaughter. It’s possible they passed this way.”

“Be you a kinsman?” the black-haired one asked. His cheeks were suncreased above a thicket of beard.

I nodded. That sharpened their gazes.

One of the nondescript ones asked, “Would that make you the one they call Hacksilver?”

I tipped my head to let the question slide off one side. A weight shifted along the broad brim of my hat, but it was just all the ash piled there. We go viking or we starve; we send our sons off to settle the coasts and rivers of Avalon and the Moonwise Isles; we build our trade towns and send our mercenary bands almost to the heart of the Steppe. And still there aren’t so many Northfolk that a man can escape his reputation—or a lawsuit—with ease.

“Some sort of sorcerer, I heard,” said the black one.

“Right,” said the red. “They say he laid warfetter on a whole castle full of sentries. A double dozen of them, out in Avalon. Across the poisoned sea.”

“Little renown to be won in such work,” I remarked, conversationally. “Who’d sing a man’s name for butchering the blinded and limb-bound?”

“Womanish work, spell-weaving,” said the black-haired man. “Don’t they usually keep camp whores for that?”

He watched me with narrowed eyes.

I made myself sound as if I were not disagreeing. “A curious tale. From whom did you hear it?”

My voice gets a little more precise when I’m being Not Angry. I pulled my hand out of my pocket so I wouldn’t finger my spindle, and I didn’t place it on the hilt of my knife.

“There’s an old Viking up the cinder trail,” the red man said. “A Karlson. Supposed to have been a sea-king in his youth. Nobody here calls him nought but Half-Hand.”

A chill lifted the hairs on my neck. Behind me, Magni snorted and shifted, making the saddle creak. I knew a man with half a hand once, a man whose father’s name was Karl. A Viking, a sea-king, a giver of arm-rings. Yes, he had been those things.

I said, “I never heard of a sorcerer who could lay warfetter on as much as a hand of men all at once. The strain of more would kill the wizard…so they say.”

• • • •

The skalds and the seers tell us we ought to love war. And somebody must. There’s enough of it.

Maybe Ragnar Karlson, called Half-Hand, called Wound-Rain, was still that man. Men get old—even sea-kings—and I hadn’t seen him in ten years or more. So I couldn’t be sure. He certainly wasn’t a skald, or a seer.

I might have passed for a seer, but as for the man who loves war…I didn’t think that was me. I was the man who didn’t know what else to do with himself if he wasn’t fighting a war that he hated.

Farming’s harder work and at least as uncertain as raiding. Because the world is not a fair place, farming doesn’t win renown. Extorting towns and ransoming priestlings and chieftains, that is where the glory lies.

Magni was less than pleased with me when I dusted the ash off his saddle and climbed back on. He’d hoped our walking was over for the day, and there might be hot mash and cool water before long. But after a longing look and a little drunken swerve toward a paddock across the square populated by a half dozen other horses, he cooperated.

Ragnar’s homestead was not too much farther. We crossed another finger of the basalt flow and came down into a second grassy valley. From experience, I knew that turf lay over soil no more than a fingerlength deep, comprised of dust, sand, and loess that had collected in this valley that was little more than a crevice between tuffs. Ragnar would have worked himself and his thralls hard to enrich it with dung and fish guts and make it bear the rich green grass that now poked forlornly through drifts of ash.

Cattle would starve this winter if the hay were lost. And if cattle starved, men starved as well.

Viking was an easier way to make a living. Until you weakened.

Ragnar’s homestead was more than a turf house in the village, and less than a sea-king’s hall. I saw its long shape against the hillsides that would have been green with the flush of summer grass. It was built of thatched basalt, not sod and turf, and it seemed to have been built over a stable dug into the slope behind it. The beam over the door was wood, carved with dragon-heads on the ends like a ship’s prow.

Ragnar was cutting dried turf in the yard. His ropy, scarred back did not suggest that he had weakened. I halted Magni well clear of the gate and whistled, then dismounted once he turned. He would have heard the hooves, but it was polite to let a man know you were not a raider.

As I walked up, leading my gelding, Ragnar’s eyes flicked from me to Magni and back again. His face went through a couple dozen expressions before settling on incredulity.

“Auga Hacksilver, you old bastard. Making friends already, I imagine?”

I shrugged, and in attempting to brush some ash off Magni’s flaxen mane merely ground it in.

Ragnar shook his head at me. “I’d wish I’d known you were coming. I would have laid odds that you’d turn folk against yourself in the first half-day, and I would have cleaned up. I’ve never met a man like you for going to a new town and finding somebody who’s already mad at you there. It’s almost as if you make enemies on purpose.”

“Some would say that those who spread the tales make the enemies,” I answered easily.

“A man’s earned fame shall never die,” Ragnar replied.

I snorted loudly enough that I could have blamed it on Magni. It’s a comforting thing to tell ourselves, that the name lives on. And in my experience, it’s nonsense.

He continued, “Speaking of death, what are the odds that you’re still breathing?”

I laid my fingers on my throat. “Two to one,” I offered. “I’ll give you a better spread on it this time tomorrow.”

“Isn’t there some sort of ill-considered decision-making process regarding other people’s spouses you could be engaging in right now?”

“Hey, your wife came to me, Ragnar.” I waggled my hand noncommittally. “She wasn’t so great that I’d think it would be hard to keep her at home if you put in a little effort, though.”

He cursed like a piked bear, and I wondered if I’d overplayed. I’ve never had the skill of knowing when to walk away from a flyting.

It was safer to take the punch than to look at him. You had to seem like you didn’t care. Like you didn’t fear.

Nobody ever won a flyting by seeming a coward.

He surprised me, though. He didn’t swing. He glowered, and then he said, “What the hell brings you to the ass end of Ormsfjoll?”

“One thing and then another.”

Ragnar’s lips worked. “Stay in my hall tonight. Turn your horse in with mine. The wife won’t thank me if I let you pass without paying your respects.”

Does he have a new wife? I wondered.

I did learn a few things from the time I spent with Ragnar. One was that if you’re going to fuck a man, and fuck his wife, it’s better for domestic harmony if you make sure everybody involved is on board with the plan right from the beginning. Another was that no one ever got anything out of Ragnar Wound-Rain without paying for it—one way or another.

I untacked Magni and sent him off to the herd with a pat. Then I knocked the ash off my hat and followed Ragnar up the steps to the door.

• • • •

The fire on the long hearth was banked low, to not overwarm the house in summer. The food was rye bread and ewe’s butter with stewed fish and onions. Ragnar still had the same wife, Aerndis, and somehow she’d kept everything from tasting of sulfur and ashfall. I was surprised at how warmly she greeted me. Perhaps Ragnar’s irritation was not without basis.

I sat at the trestle and washed my hands in the bowl she brought, drank her ale, and bantered with Ragnar while Ragnar’s tenant farmers filed in and found their places along the board. There was plenty of food, and Aerndis served me again before the bondi ate. Then she sat at Ragnar’s right hand, and a couple of women who might have been wives of the farmers present brought them their bowls and their ale. All three of us were stretching uncomfortably to ease our fullness by the time the tenants were fed and filing back out again for the work of the afternoon.

I watched them go, and watched the women clear the table, and thought that there should have been children about: grown and near-grown sons and daughters. I didn’t ask after their absence. It might have been that girls were married into nearby farms. It might have been that sons were away viking, or trading, or a little of both, but in that case you’d expect a young wife or two carding and spinning and tying off leading-strings to keep the babies out of the fire. You’d expect them in silks with silver brooches to hold their gowns up—or even gold, like the ones Aerndis wore—and not like the wives of the bondi with their bronze and pewter.

It might have been that they’d had ill luck conceiving, or ill luck in keeping children alive. But it’s hard on a couple my age to run a farm all on their own, even with tenants. Tenants have to be supervised, and thralls have to be driven.

Under most circumstances, Ragnar and Aerndis would have taken on a few oath-sons and oath-daughters, to everyone’s benefit. They might have elevated the best of their bondi, or they might have taken in the children of dead companions of the war-band.

Curiosity might seem insolent, and I take care never to seem insolent unless I mean to. It might cause grief, and that’s another response I do not seek to provoke unintentionally.

Ragnar had, it seemed, no such bounds on his inquisitiveness. He looked at me rubbing my belly and laughed at me. “So. What are you doing up in the bright country, so far between good meals? Running from a weregild yourself?”

“Might be looking for a place to settle,” I said noncommittally. My fingertips automatically reached for the spindle in my pocket. I eased them away again.

He’d taken me in and given me guest right. I knew, based on our history, that that probably meant he wanted something. We hadn’t parted on such warm terms that I would expect him to put me out in the ashfall. But…farm me out to one of the cottages of his bondi, maybe.

His giving me guest right in his own home meant he couldn’t take a physical poke at me. Nor could any of his men.

Perhaps it was unkind of me to provoke him with the threat of my continued presence. But kindness has never been a fault that much afflicted me.

“Can you buy land?” he asked.

I shrugged. Ragnar had to know that I had money unless I’d lost it—and he knew that by preference I diced with fate rather than for silver. My years of viking had been several and my needs while traveling were few. A path for my gelding; a mossy rock to lay my head on.

I could buy land. “It remains to be seen if I want to. It seems you’ve been spreading a great many rumors about me.”

“Your rumors spread themselves.”

I refrained from provoking him further. It took an effort when he handed me straight lines like that, however.

“I could just kill you for your money. Your brother being absent, there’s no one to pay a weregild to, and it’s not as if anyone who knows you would complain.”

“If I were fool enough to carry my money with me.” The money was in a bank twenty days’ ride south, or five by boat if the wind were favorable. “If I filled up my saddlebags with gold, Magni would waddle. And it would be bad for his back. And there would be no room for my food.”

Aerndis had always been a quiet one, but clever with it. She gave me a sly look. “As I judge from the crumbs in your beard, there’s been little enough room for that as there is.”

“Your cooking outshines mine, it’s true.” Especially when I was cooking up boiled soup-cake thickened with shreds of wind-dried fish.

I found myself reluctant to open the bargaining. When you want something from someone that you can’t just take, letting them know it exposes your vulnerability.

Still, I had to try.

And maybe Ragnar would be feeling generous with a full belly and his ale-cup to hand.

I said, “You weren’t far wrong when you brought up my brother being missing. The real answer to your question of what I am looking for is, ‘Arnulfr.’ Did you hear my brother was exiled for manslaughter?”

“Hm.” It sounded like agreement, around a mouthful of rye bread. Ragnar had gotten ropy with age rather than thick and I couldn’t imagine finding a corner into which to fit another bite of anything, but cutting sod is hard work.

I glanced toward the hearth-stone, as if fascinated by its ornate carved and dyed reliefs. “The line of Arnulfr’s fate led me here, and it ends here.”

Aerndis refilled my cup while Ragnar wiped ale froth from his beard. “What do you want with him?”

“I found the real killer. He can go home.”

Ragnar swallowed, washed it down with ale, and snorted. “Who’d you frame?”

“You wound me.”

He said, “In that case, you could have kept your father’s farm.”

“And what about Arnulfr?”

“Your brother’s got his patch of ground by now.”

I gestured to his rough hands, the whole one and the one the axe had split. “Farming looks like hard work.”

“I’ve half a hundred head of cattle and seven horses. Sheep and goats. Chickens and geese and a dog. Four bondi look to me for protection. I even managed to keep nearly all of them alive last winter, which wasn’t easy.” He waved vaguely at the doorway, through which the ashy dooryard was just visible.

So the eruptions had been going on that long. Perhaps that explained the number of new graves along the road. “Not a lot of Vikings this far north.”

“It’s a long swim to civilization,” he agreed. “You really cleared his name?”

I nodded, looking back toward my host, away from the fire.

Ragnar eyed me levelly. His eyes were light, for such a black-haired man. “So, when you say that someone else was to blame. In all seriousness: factually, or conveniently?”

I smiled.

“And if you can find him and tell him, you’re delivered of your kin-duty.”

“Yes.”

The sun had not set, would not brush the horizon for hours yet. Its rays crept through the vents beneath the roof. It lit the underside of the thatch and all the things stored in the rafters sideways, creating a bright and alien relief. The interior walls of the longhouse were plastered white with lime render and lime wash to make the interior bright in daylight, painted with coiling trees and flowers in ochre reds and yellows. I wondered why they hadn’t finished a ceiling under the thatch.

Ragnar rattled his fingertips on the trestle. “Why not take that land and farm it yourself? It’s an easier living down south than up here in the bright country.”

“I wasn’t lying when I said farming was too much hard work for me.” I decided to be generous. “So you don’t actually have to worry about me buying the next farm over, and my presence weighing on you the rest of your days.”

Ragnar frowned judiciously. “What’s news worth to you?”

“Curse you, Half-Hand. This is a kin matter—”

“Sure it is, and so you shouldn’t mind running a little errand in return for news of your brother.” He smirked. “And his wife.”

I weighed it. Ragnar always had known me a little too well. “Your word that you know where he is.”

Ragnar shrugged. “I know where he was, and where he was going.”

If he’d been lying, I thought, wouldn’t he have made a bigger promise? “What’s the errand?”

“Let’s go outside.”

He drained his cup and set it down. I did the same, standing as he stood. I nodded to Aerndis, then put my hat on as I followed him into the yard.

If Bryngertha had wanted me, I might have been content with the quiet and backbreaking life of a farmer. Might have made myself contented, anyway. But Bryngertha had wanted Arnulfr, and all Arnulfr had ever wanted in truth was Bryngertha…and that quiet and backbreaking life.

Though my brother’s experience showed that even the life of a simple landed farmer was not without its risks.

Ragnar leaned on a stone fence and watched his seven horses and my single one brushing the ash aside to graze. I leaned beside him. I waited a long time, watching his expression from the corner of his eye, before I ventured to ask, “About that errand…”

“So,” Ragnar said by way of answer. “I don’t suppose you’re still a witch.”

His braids were down to his waist now, befitting a chieftain. If you ignored the bald spot they framed, impressive. He hadn’t bothered with a hat.

“Eh,” I said. “Are you about to claim I ever was one?”

He snorted. “You were a clever shit, anyway. Clever as Lopt and just as likely to get snagged on your own pretensions. How are you at volcanos?”

“I can ride away from them as well as any man. They say you ought to head upwind and keep to the high ground.”

He pointed at the thread of smoke that rose through the smoky sky. It was just discernable through fumes and falling ash. I could imagine the outline of a conical hill poking above the horizon if I squinted.

He said, “What about one with a dragon in it?”

“There’s no such things as dragons,” I said.

“Should be easy to slay, then.”

“No,” I said, wondering if it was Arnulfr’s fate-thread that ran out here in the bright country, or Auga Augusson’s. “What kind of naturalist would I be if I went and slew every strange beast I ever came upon?”

Aerndis sniggered, which was when I realized she had come out behind us. Woman moved like a cat.

Ragnar glared at her but spoke to me. “So now you’re a naturalist?”

“I’m not a dragonslayer.”

Aerndis spoke in a tone I recognized as the voice of sweet reason. “If you slay the dragon you stop the eruption, I warrant. He’s been digging around in that volcano with his great black claws. There was nary a rumble until he showed up, this time last year. We were lucky to get enough hay in for winter, and then the sickness came and a lot of us got a late start on planting this year. There isn’t much left, and people are going to be hungry when the dark comes again, especially with a dragon picking away at the livestock. Folks would be grateful to the man who saved this harvest. Grateful enough to give him a home. And they say dragons hoard gold…”

Ragnar glared at her.

“Darling of you to think of my future, sweet Aerndis, and to want to keep me around,” I said.

Ragnar glared at me.

“All right,” Ragnar said, when the glare was well out of his system. “Well, getting rid of that dragon is the only way you’re getting to your brother.”

Aerndis suddenly, abruptly, turned and walked away. Too far away to hear us, and then she kept walking. I had seen what her face did before she turned, and a chill lifted my hackles. “What do you mean?”

Ragnar cleared his throat and spat over the rail. “Arnulfr’s here.”

“…here.”

He tapped the earth underfoot with his toe. “Buried. Dead. His wife too. And my daughter and two sons.”

“I don’t—”

“They came. And they stayed the winter. And they never left.”

Ah, Auga Hacksilver and his famously glib tongue. I was struck as dumb as a stone when the sea washes over it.

“Aerndis understates. There was a great sickness,” Ragnar said, taking pity. “It was a hard winter. And the sickness was especially cruel. It fell hardest on the young and those in their prime.”

“Oh,” I said, because it was what I could think to say. I touched the spindle in my pocket, felt the wisp of roving at the end of the thread.

Ragnar drew a deep breath and shook himself together, turning his bright gaze back to the horses. The horses were calm, and I watched them, too. We stood together for a moment. Then he turned and grinned at me, gap-toothed, as I stared. “And that dragon, Hacksilver. That dragon’s man-long fangs drip venom. Eitr. So if you want to send your brother home, and his wife, you’re going to bring me the gall of that dragon, and you’re going to help me get my sons back, and my little girl.”

• • • •

Eitr. There was a word I hadn’t heard in a while. A complicated word that could mean anger, or it could mean poison, or it could mean gall, in all the senses of gall—the sort that is spoken, and the sort that burns flesh less metaphorically. But eitr was also the source and the font of all life in the world.

Life and death are not so far apart, as it happens, and neither are venom and the truth.

“Have you turned into the cowardly sorcerer they call you, then? You’d leave your brother lying in his grave, and Bryngertha beside him, doomed to the meagre afterlife allotted those who die of pestilence?”

Ragnar was trying to get a rise out of me and coming perilously close to an insult I could not with honor ignore. But guest right stood between us. I crossed my arms the other way on the top course of the fence. A few of the horses, including Magni, decided it was a good time to amble over and see if we had carrots.

“Usually, one doesn’t have a lot of options, once a man is in the grave. Anyway, people pay more attention to what a man says than to his deeds, and even more than that to whatever lies others tell about him.” I pushed a soft, inquisitive horse nose away from my pocket. “It’s all spin. Maybe I can buy him a better afterlife if I write a few songs about him. Why don’t you go and get your own dragon venom?”

“Most folk are stupid,” Ragnar replied. “And I know the truth behind the stories. At least as far as you’re concerned. You’ve got a better chance of walking into a dragon’s lair and back out again than I do. Than any man I’ve ever met.”

“Simple. Kill the dragon, collect its gall. Raise a bunch of people from the dead and save the harvest. That’s what you want of me.”

“I’ll feed you breakfast first.”

Despite myself, when I met his gaze, I found myself smiling at the audacity in his smirk. That audacity is why I sailed with him. It’s why I did other things with him, too.

“I’d think—”

He rolled his eyes. “Nobody cares what you think. They only care what you do.”

I wished Ragnar to Hel in company with my brother. I stared him in the eyes and said, “Your word that everything you’ve told me is true.”

Without looking, he flicked his knife from its sheath and across the back of his hand. A thin line of blood formed, the wound-rain that was his byname. We’d spilled enough in each other’s company.

“My word of honor,” he said.

I sighed gustily, from the bottom of my lungs. Ash whispered past my forehead, swirling on my breath. I took my hat off and nodded.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll need some jars with stoppers. And for you to give me your fattest horse.”

“What’s wrong with your horse?”

I stroked Magni’s neck. He hated having his face touched. “I’m not going to feed my horse to a dragon.”

Ragnar pursed his lips, making the moustache jut. Then he nodded, reached out, and gave Magni a scratch under his mane. “All right. But if you get eaten he belongs to me.”

• • • •

We went back inside, and when Aerndis brought me more ale I caught her attention and said, “I have agreed.”

She brought me seed-cake, too.

They gave me a sleeping place on the bench along the wall. Sometime before the brief interlude that passed for sunset, we retired. I slept alone, and better than I had any right to in Ragnar Karlson’s house.

The sun was already high in the sky when we awoke, washed, and broke our fast. I followed him outside, still trying to reckon some way to avoid the task he had set me. There wasn’t any dragon, I thought—just the living land heaving beneath us. And there was no god I knew to pray to and no spell I knew to weave that could so much as delay the eruption of a geyser, let alone make a volcano stop smoking. We’d all be lucky if it didn’t decide to send out a tongue of lava to fill up this grassy valley nestled between its previous flows.

Ragnar grumbled some more, but he brought me the horse.

The dark gelding was fat, all right. He was shaped something like a mangel-wurzel, and his hooves were overgrown, and he limped in the off hind.

“This horse is lame.”

“You said fattest, not soundest. And you’d not expect me to give you a sound one, to feed to a dragon.”

“It’s far to walk.” I gestured at the smoking hill on the horizon. “And I can’t ride him.”

“Why not?” Ragnar cackled like a raven that has spotted an old enemy. “It’s not like riding him is going to impede his healing. His name is—”

“Don’t tell me his name.” I gave the horse a withered piece of carrot. “There’s no point in getting attached.”

• • • •

Ragnar didn’t have a saddle that fit the gelding, round as he was. And I wasn’t going to hop on a strange horse bareback and try to get him to take me, all alone, to the den of some monster—or even to a fiery hole in the ground. So I walked, and led him. The basalt hurt my feet through my boots; it seemed to hurt his feet, too, because he minced along like a courtier in heeled shoes. It didn’t help that he tripped on his own overlong hooves with every third stride, and limped on that bad leg. Watching him try to move was a sad old comedy.

I lured him on with bits of turnip and carrot. He wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the turnip. He grabbed at the carrot, and I knocked on his teeth. “Manners.”

I laughed at myself. Was there any point in civilizing this animal?

A sharp bit of basalt stabbed me in the sole as if my bootleather didn’t even exist. I stopped, leaned on the gelding’s neck, and inspected my foot. No blood, and it hadn’t gone through that I could tell.

I turned and glared at the horse. He put his nose in my face and blew carrot-scented breath over me. He had braced himself as if standing on tiptoe, the bad foot cocked off the ground so his weight wasn’t resting on it. I ran my hand down the leg. He didn’t like me handling it. But there was no swelling, heat, or sign of a fracture. No bulge of a bowed tendon. No sign of a bruise inside the hoof or any of the other thousand things that could go wrong with a horse’s foot.

Which meant the injury was probably a strained ligament, which might heal with a few months of rest, or might be with him for the rest of his life. If he were going to have a life beyond the next few hours.

He wasn’t badly made, if you didn’t mind the hooves and the fat and the fact that he might have been born dark as night but the long summer days had weathered him the same red-black as the crumbling lava underfoot. He was smaller than Magni but built sturdily enough to carry a grown man. The only marking on him was an ash-fall stippling of white hairs on the flat plane of his face, stretching from brow to muzzle but not defined enough to be properly called a blaze.

He had a pretty head with defined cheekbones and a tapered muzzle. Intelligent ears. I had his full attention as I stood back and looked at him.

He nickered at me.

I felt a pang for the basalt-colored horse. There probably wasn’t a dragon. But if there was a spirit of the volcano, it would want some kind of sacrifice, and if I couldn’t trade with a dragon for eitr to bring my brother and his wife back, maybe I could trade with the whatever-it-was to end the eruption and save the harvest. But one lame horse still probably wouldn’t be enough to fix anything.

…the basalt-colored horse.

I’d been going along for such a while without one that the tickle of an idea surprised me. I heard myself whistle.

The gelding’s ears pricked and he limped a step toward me.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “But if you get really lucky, maybe there will be a dragon.”

He took another step…and tripped again. Those feet were a disgrace. Long as a town woman’s pattens, and the pony couldn’t walk any better in them.

I pulled my hook knife from my boot. He looked at me suspiciously. I let him sniff it. He obviously considered it something of a disappointment.

“Sorry, boy. It’s not a weird carrot.” He had to be motivated, to get that fat eating lichen and silage and straw chaff and turnips and wind-dried fish all winter. Ragnar probably would have slaughtered him for horse-meat come the frost.

I bent to lift one foot. He leaned away from me, worried. Ragnar had never been much of a farrier, and I remembered that most of his horses were afraid of having their feet handled. He apparently hadn’t improved.

With the aid of carrots and some rye bread sweet with birch syrup, I got the hooves trimmed anyway. He was easier about the last one than the first one. He was still lame after, but at least he stopped tripping.

The trim made him even more footsore on the basalt. After watching him mince for fifteen or twenty steps, I sighed in disgust, pulled my hook knife out again, and cut a wide strip and a narrow strip off the edge of my oiled leather cloak. He fussed at me while I tied the crude boots around his ankles, but when he stepped out again he seemed surprised and pleased at the improvement.

I fingered the spindle in my pocket. Dammit, Hacksilver. Don’t you go getting attached to your bait.

• • • •

After several more painful hours of walking, the basalt was replaced by a steep slope of cinders. The air stung my lungs and we both grunted and leaned forward, pushing up the slope, cinders crunching. I started to notice the bones. Not complete skeletons, or scattered limbs. But here the skull of an ox; there the pelvis of a horse. Big bones, with scraps of meat cured on them by the hot, lifeless air.

The horse didn’t like the smell.

Unease pricked through me, sourceless and unsettling.

I was not, as I mentioned, really expecting a dragon. The basalt-colored horse was apparently smarter than me. He stopped halfway up the cindery slope, ears pricked, head craned, neck tense. A steady fellow: he was spooked and snorting, but he stood his ground and inspected the way ahead instead of skittering or trying to bolt.

I stopped also. Strained every sense, as the horse was straining his. The air reeked of brimstone. My eyes teared; wreaths of smoke obscured what vision I retained. But as I held myself still, my bones and the soles of my boots were shaken by a low sound. One that seemed to emanate up from the burnt ground underfoot as much as propagate through the air. It felt like the rumble of a geyser gathering itself to explode.

I pulled the spindle from my pocket and inspected the thread wound around it. Gray, scratchy, thin as wire and as like to cut you. The measure of a kinsman’s life.

I’d spun fine to spin long. Long enough for my purpose, maybe.

It would have been better woven into a net—a net to catch the vision and imagination. But even the long summer days were not long enough for that. So I found a rock about the right height, dusted the ash off it to be certain it wasn’t a desiccated pelvis, and sat down. A silver coin from my pocket had already been clipped and shaved a fair bit in its travels. I used my hook knife to shave it a bit more, dulling the edge but collecting a pinch of silver dust in a fold of my trousers. Silver like mirrors and silver like tongues.

I put those tools down and picked up the spindle, dipped my finger in the silver, drew a loop across my open hand, and gave the spindle a twirl. It dropped, and I rubbed metal dust into the chain-ply of my brother’s life, making the thread into yarn that could be unwound from the spindle without unraveling.

I supposed it didn’t matter, really, if the thread unwound itself—assuming Ragnar was telling the truth and Arnulfr and Bryngertha were dead. A poor omen perhaps for Arnulfr’s legend, but Arnulfr’s legend was the tale of a quiet man quietly damned for a crime by treachery. There are a lot of sagas about lawsuits. There aren’t too many about the losers of lawsuits.

Being born again by dragon venom would be the most songworthy thing that had ever happened to him.

Was Ragnar telling the truth? Well, I had known Ragnar to be sly, to misdirect, like any good warlord. I had not known him to betray his word of honor.

Getting eaten by a dragon was a death worth singing. Maybe that would be enough of a legend to gain me admittance into one of the better heavens. Or maybe the End Storm would blow up while I was plying, and I wouldn’t have to worry about legends or kinsmen anymore.

Having thought of songs, I sang to myself as I worked. As the ash fell around me. Songs for the goddesses who measured every man’s life, and then measured him for his coffin. Songs for the spinners. Warlock songs, seithr songs. Women’s songs, but there was no one to hear me except the basalt-colored gelding, and he was in no position to impugn my masculinity.

At last, I was out of silver dust and all the yarn was plied. Gray, scratchy. Smelling faintly of lanolin and lye. I stretched it between my fingers and let it twirl into a skein. If there had been any sunlight beneath the ash plume, I might have detected a subtle sparkle in the twist.

The basalt-colored horse dozed disconsolately at the end of his lead rope. I’d bored him to sleep.

I hoped it wasn’t a comment on my singing.

I let him sniff the skein, which he did with curiosity but no apparent concern. That was a relief. Some animals will not abide the smell of sorcery.

I started by braiding his mane, working the fate-cord into it as I went. I wound the line around his chest and shoulders like a girl binding her wooden horse with thread to make a play-harness. He stood for it, remarkably still and even-tempered. I braided traces back on themselves without cutting the line and let them trail, then bound the whole thing off just as I ran to the end of the thread.

The horse craned his neck around to watch me, ears alert, eyes bright and expression dubious. I wished I had a walking stick or a long bone from which to make a whiffletree, but it would only drag on the ground. And probably spook even this horse. So I just draped the traces over his rump and tied them in a little bow.

It was, after all, the symbolism that mattered.

“Well, buddy, I hope this works,” I said.

He blew a warm breath over me. We resumed climbing the cone.

• • • •

The slope leveled as we came close to the top of the volcano. We stopped to drink at a spring that bubbled up from a cluster of stones, clearing some of the ash from our throats. I splashed water on my face. It was lukewarm and fizzed like surf, full of bubbles. It reeked and tasted of brimstone, but at least it wasn’t boiling. The horse drank, snorted to clear the fumes from his nostrils, and gave me a look before drinking again as if to say, “Yeah, I’ve seen worse.”

When I lifted my head, I realized we were nearly to the vent. The horse grew increasingly restive as we came up the final slope, and with a couple furlongs to go he planted his feet in their ridiculous leather bags and refused to walk another step.

I chirruped to him and shook the lead. He planted his hind feet, rocked back, and reared. Not a dramatic, sky-pawing rear, but a clear declaration that he was not moving.

It was honestly surprising we’d made it this far. “Good lad,” I told him, and turned him around to face downhill. I wound the fragile-seeming traces around a head-sized piece of pumice and tied them off.

Careful not to loop the lead rope around my hand, I stepped up beside the twitching horse and unfastened his halter. I stroked his sweating, ash-gritted shoulder as I slid the straps off his nose. He stood harnessed in sorcery, fate-threads, and kin-duty, leaning against the yarn-spun traces as if against a plow stopped by thick turf.

I stepped away and tossed the halter onto the cinders before turning back uphill. I cupped my hands to my mouth and used a little twist of luck, a scrap of thread wound ’round my fingers, to shift the wind so that my voice would carry. I took the deepest breath I could, tightened my diaphragm, and bellowed.

“Here, dragon, dragon! Nice fat pony. Lame, too! An easy dinner!”

For a long moment, nothing. The reek of fumes swirling on the breeze I’d conjured up; the steam rising from the cinders. The vast silence of the lifeless mountainside.

Then came a rumble, and a long hard clatter like a bag of armor bits and chopped-up candelabras dragged over stone. The scraping of stone on stone. I levered my neck back, peering through streaming vapors, blinking away the fume-begotten tears.

A great head that only seemed small because it was on a neck as long as a ship’s mast poked over the rim of the crater. The head was hammer-shaped, and scaled, and horned, and fanged. I could have called it red or orange in color and not been wrong, but the rough scales seemed translucent, and refracted rainbows in their depths, like the planes of light struck within an opal. Even under the dim overcast of smoke and the haze of fumes, it dazzled.

The owner of the head—and the neck—sniffed deeply. Once, twice. Then it reared back and struck with surprising speed.

I threw myself to the side, cinders bruising my palms. The horse, being nobody’s fool, took off. I winced for his bad foot, because I am a soft, womanish fool of a sorcerer. He galloped down the slope with all the alacrity and focus of a horse running Hel-bent away from a dragon, the boulder bouncing behind him in its traces. The glamour that I’d spun and sung and knotted around both horse and stone caught on the weave of threads and mirror-bright silver scrapings and made it seem the whole mountainside was collapsing into a vast horseshoe depression. The basalt-colored horse was just one more boulder bouncing along in the midst of the rest.

I was rather proud of the effect, and the way the sound of hoofbeats was lost in the simulated rumble of the rockslide.

I turned my attention back to the dragon as it pulled back again and took a long, slow sniff. Red nostrils flared darker in the fire-faceted muzzle. The upper lip drew back to move air across the palate and a forked tongue flickered.

Steam hissed from its nostrils. My vision swam with acrid tears. The head swung down again, falling toward me like the hammer it resembled.

If I’d been some hero out of sagas I’d have swung up a sword, or had a venomed spear at the ready. I just raised my empty hands as if that could somehow fend off an avalanche.

The blow stopped before it fell, the dragon’s enormous head so close that the heat of its hide and breath curled my hair. I smelled the ends scorching.

The dragon spoke, and despite the shape of tongue and mouth it surprised me by uttering words I could understand completely. Its phrasing was archaic, its voice as deep and hollow as caverns.

“I smell a horse,” it said. “But much closer, I smell a witch. Hello, little witch. That was a clever thing, for a wisp such as you.”

Well, I had been hoping to impress it. And I’d lured it out all right.

Now what?

It sniffed again. “Have you come to slay a dragon?”

A bead of saliva gathered along the edge of the dragon’s lip. I stepped to the side as it dripped, stretching a long thread behind it. The venom looked like honey glowing in the sun, but when it touched the ground it sizzled on the ash. The spot smoked slightly.

I thought about the jars in my pack and felt as cold as if the blood were draining from my body.

I gulped down the lump in my throat. “I came to bargain with one. You see I carry no spear, no harpoon—”

The rumble of the dragon’s words shook my diaphragm. “If you wish gold, I will not give it. If you wish ancient and storied weapons, there is nothing you can give me that I could not take. If you wish to die gloriously and be remembered in song, you should have brought a poet. You reek of sorcery. ”

“As long as I don’t smell like a snack. ”

“Hmmm.” It tilted its head to one side. “You smell pickled and stringy.”

The wings rustled as it shrugged.

Perhaps it was not strange that the dragon’s verbal jousting made me feel as if I had come from the wilderness into a safe and familiar hall. I was comfortable in an argument. The fear and tension drained away and in their place a manic energy buoyed me.

I crouched and held my hand over the smoking eitr. I turned my face up to the dragon. I was gray with ash and streaked with tears.

I felt the warmth of the poison and the warmth of the ashes on which it rested as if I held my hand over gentle coals. “I’ve come to bargain for this.”

The great head tilted and drew back. The lambent eyes with their shattered planes of iridescent scarlet and vermilion blinked lazily. “I could give you more of it than you wished for, little witch.”

“Your presence here, your awakening of the volcano—they’ve brought a blight upon the land. Men and women have died of illness and hunger. The cattle will die as well, if the grass is buried under ash and pumice, or they will choke on the poison fumes of the volcano. I have been asked to win your eitr to bring back those who have died.”

“Cattle die and kinsmen die, little witch. If they cannot live in a place, then they should go.”

“Look,” I said bluntly, “what can we give you to leave this place and not return?”

“What can you offer me? A fat horse is all very well, but I can fetch my own when I want one. I have…commitments that will keep me in this lair.”

“For how long?”

“Not long,” said the dragon. To my amazement, it placed first one and then the other enormous talon on the rim of the vent. Having done so, it settled its head between them, bringing its eye level down to mine. I could see the great humped shoulders, the leathery folds stretching back from its forelimbs. Like a bat’s, they seemed both wing and foot to walk upon. Unlike a bat’s, they shimmered with all the colors of flame.

It tilted its head and rippled the taloned fingers as if counting. “Hmm. Perhaps a hundred seasons more.”

Well, twenty-five years of active volcano and dragon occupation would certainly put paid to the village—and all life within miles. I rose to my feet and discovered that the air was slightly better up there. Apparently the fumes were heavy.

“Assume for a moment that I can get you whatever you desire,” I said. “If you will only leave this place, and give me some of your venom.”

The dragon curved its sinuous neck like a goose and glanced over its shoulder, back down the length of its body into the vent. I wondered if it were assessing a hoard I could not see. I wondered how anything remained unmelted, down in the hot mouth of the earth.

It turned back. With a sigh, it said, “I have no need of human treasures.”

“This obligation you mentioned—is there a way I could help you fulfill it?”

If you have never seen a dragon throw its head back and laugh (and I suppose very few have), it is a sight not easily described. I hastily tugged my hat down as a fine mist of caustic venom descended around me. A few invisible drops smarted on the backs of my hands.

“You are not boring, little witch,” the dragon said. It looked this way, and then that. To my amazement, it seemed to be making a show of casualness, of reluctance.

“Hmm,” it said. Then: “Do you like riddles, little witch?”

I closed my eyes.

I hated riddles.

“I have played at riddles a time or two.”

“Well then.” The dragon shifted its weight, settling into the mountainside like a great jarl settling into his broad, bearskin-adorned chair. “Come up a little closer, witch, and choose a stone to sit upon, and we can play at riddles for what you wish. But if you win, you must grant me a boon.”

How under the Wolf Sun of my fathers did I keep getting myself into situations like this?

But I was a man on kin-business, blood-bound to do what I could. Damn my brother anyway, for being a simple farmer, for being the victim of a brutal scheme, for dying of a dragon’s miasma, for getting me into all of this.

I walked up to the smoking crater as if I had not a fear in the world—certainly without any cringing as I came under the shadow of the dragon’s wings—and while I was selecting a rock of the correct height for sitting, could not resist a peek over the edge into the vent.

I almost fell in.

I had expected the vent to contain…shining masses of gold, perhaps. Seething masses of lava.

Not a careful circle of boulders each as big as a cart, and a claw-raked ground of soft ash within, like a giant’s campfire ring. Upon that, dead in the center, lay three enormous mottled eggs like the last remaining embers.

The dragon, it seemed, was not an it but a she.

“Well,” I said. “I see what you mean by ‘obligations.’”

Have you ever heard a dragon chortle? I have, and it was in no way rendered less unsettling by the knowledge that this was a female with young. For nothing on the waters and the wide wide world is fiercer than a mother.

I found a rock, as directed, and as directed I seated myself upon it. I swung the pack with the jars down between my knees and set it gently on the stones.

“So, little witch,” said the dragon. “Shall we play?”

“You go first,” I said. “Best two out of three?”

The dragon stretched and sighed, settling itself. “I believe it is traditional. As for that boon—”

“As long as it’s not my stringy hide.”

She sniffed. “I dislike the taste of woad, and I see from your forelimbs that you’re pricked all over with the stuff.”

I glanced down at the old and faded ropes of tattoos. They were meant to be for protection, to ensure the forbearance of the gods.

First time in my life that the damn things actually worked.

“If you get a boon if I win,” I said, “I get a boon if I lose.”

“It can’t be the same as the stakes,” she said cagily.

“What forfeit will you have of me if you win?” I pushed my hat back as she thought about it.

“Have you a hoard?” she asked, finally.

I thought of gold and silver and jewels of great store. The wealth of a lifetime spent riding the whale-roads, reaving and trading. The price of my retirement, when I found a place I wanted to retire. All safe in a vault down in Ornyst, where there were bankers and banks.

I thought about kin-duty. I thought about my sister-in-law.

“Not on my person,” I said.

“Wager your hoard against my venom, then,” the dragon invited.

“Don’t you even want to know how much I have?”

She hissed a laugh. “It’s enough that it’s valuable to you. That’s what makes a wager interesting. That, and the story that attaches to it. That someday I may say to my children, yes, this is the gold I won riddling with a sorcerer, while you were yet in the shell.”

It was a dragonish way of thinking, and not so alien to anybody who had gone a-viking. I touched my arm-rings, fingering them until I found the one that had been a gift from Ragnar when he was a sea-king and I sailed at his command. When we had been bright and young and too naïve to know any better.

I said, “If you will wager both your venom and your leaving, I will add my adornments to the pot. Those mean more to me than any hoard.”

None of it was the richest that I owned, but it was enough—ear-rings and arm-rings, the brooch that closed my cloak and the clasp that pinned my hair—to lend me dignity. I felt a sentiment for each object. Especially since I had so recently won it all back from a murderer.

At least it wasn’t my coat and boots this time.

“Your folk should move on, not me. This land is far more suitable for me than…”

There are few things more eloquent than the dismissive flick of a dragon’s talon, it turns out.

“That’s likely true,” I admitted. “But you have to understand that the people of the village have built houses and barns and planted crops. Our lives are short. They won’t have time or resources to up stakes and build those houses anew someplace else.”

She said, “There are far more suitable places for your sort to live than there are for brooding eggs. I won’t be the last to come here, so long as the earth stays hot.”

“I can’t wager for my folk any more than you can speak for yours.” I hoped she wasn’t a dragon Queen, or something, who did have the power to bargain for the whole. Anyway, the future wasn’t my concern. She was right; this was a stupid place for a settlement.

She huffed at the back of her throat, not hard enough to spray venom—but hard enough to cause a mist of it to curl from her nostrils and ignite into a transparent lash of flame. She tilted her head to regard me, and I got the oddest sense that her interest was more in the bargaining and the company and the game than in who lost or won.

Sitting on eggs must be extremely boring for a creature with wings to span the open skies. I’d only had the broad sails and swift rowers of a dragon-boat to carry me, and although now my joints ached even in good weather and my feet hurt every day, I could not bring myself to settle into a farmstead and raise cows. Though I was no youth to harden my muscles on an oar without injury, I could not see myself raising a hall and draping a big throne-chair with wolf-hides and bear-hides to cushion my ass and seem fierce at the same time. No matter how much the saddle galled my behind.

I might have more in common with this dragon than I did with Ragnar or with my brother.

Damn Arnulfr.

“Done,” the dragon said. “I shall begin.

“I am the shrill singer

“Who rides a narrow road.

“With two mouths I kiss hard

“The hot and pliant maidens.”

I blushed, because I hadn’t been expecting racy double-meanings from a dragon. But I knew the answer to this one, when I thought about it a little. “Hammer,” I said. And then, “Smith’s hammer. The road and the maidens are the metal to be forged. The mouths are the two ends of the hammer.”

The dragon snorted another curl of fire, slightly larger than the last one. How good was the word of a dragon, anyway? Especially when exposed to a little frustration?

Perhaps I should have been surprised that the dragon knew about hammers—but the dragon knew about treasures, and steel for swords and gold for gauds alike must be refined, then hammered pure.

I hoped there were other human things the dragon knew less about. I said,

“I am the black horse.

“On eight legs I bear my rider.

“He holds no rein.

“At the end of the journey it is he who is left in the stall.”

I am not sure dragons frown. Their scaled foreheads are not designed for furrowing. But I could not shake the sense that the dragon was frowning at me.

After a little while, she responded calmly, “A coffin and its bearers.”

I sighed. “You can’t blame me for trying.”

The tongue flickered. “Can I not? Here is my next one.

“We are the old women

“Who walk on the beach

“We braid the shells and seaweed

“In our white hair.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Do you forfeit?” The dragon leaned forward eagerly. Its talons tensed as if already imagining raking through treasure.

“Not so fast!” I held up a hand and tried to ignore the warmth of the dragon’s breath ruffling my hair. Unless that was just the wind off the volcano. What walks on a beach…? Crabs. Birds.

“Waves!” I said suddenly, as it came to me. The word burst from my lips before I could second-guess myself. “It’s waves!”

“It’s waves,” the dragon agreed, sounding slightly disappointed.

“My next.” Of course, because I was looking at a dragon, I could only think of one riddle.

Hoping she wouldn’t be offended, I said,

“I am a dragon with only one wing.

“But of limbs I have a score.

“I fly to battle.

“I grow more fearful when I shed my scales.”

“Really?” the dragon said.

I spread my hands. The rock was making my backside ache. I tried not to fidget. It would only make me seem nervous.

Of course, I was nervous.

“A long-boat,” the dragon said. She yawned before she continued. “The limbs are oars. The scales are the shields hung over the gunwales and retrieved when the men go to fight.”

“You’ve seen that?”

“I’ve destroyed a few. Sometimes they’re full of livestock. Or treasure.”

If dragons didn’t frown, did they smile? Or had she always been as toothy as she seemed now.

“What do we do if it’s a draw?” I asked.

She chuckled. “A sudden-death round? By which I mean, then I eat you.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking and I didn’t want to ask. It might be better to let myself lose. I could always find more treasure, after all. Never mind that it would take a desperate Viking indeed to give a berth to a man as old as me, and those were the sorts of raiders who did not come home with their ships wallowing with gold.

“Last one,” the dragon said cheerfully. Did they play with their prey, like cats?

“A stone on the road.

“I saw water become bone.”

How on earth did that happen? It was a metaphor, of course—riddles always were—but what was water a metaphor for? Blood that clots? A stone was hard, and so was a sword…brigands? Something that could stop a journey?

No. No, of course not. The water wasn’t the metaphor. The road was the metaphor. The whale-road, the ship-road. The sea. What was a stone on the sea?

“An iceberg,” I said.

“Brave little witch,” the dragon remarked. She lifted one talon and waved idly. Her opalescent eyes seemed to enlarge until I felt as if I were falling upward into them.

I’m not sure how long I gaped at her, but I was startled abruptly back into my skin when she said, “Hurry up, then. Let’s see this done.”

My mind went blank.

My wit ran dry.

I could think of not a single riddle.

No, not true. I could think of a riddle. But it was a children’s riddle, and not one worthy of a dragon. I needed something better. Something clever. Something I stood a chance of stumping her with.

She sighed a slow trickle of flame.

Dammit.

I said,

“Fat and full-bellied

“Welcome and warm

“I rise with joy

“Though my bed is hard.”

A loaf, of course. A loaf, puffing up and baking on a flat hearth-stone before the fire.

No sooner had the words left my mouth than I thought of half a dozen better ones. The onion riddle with all the dick jokes in it…anything. Anything at all would have been better…

There was the end of my chance to save my kinfolk. There was the end of my chance to put this obligation to rest—

I was so engaged in flyting myself that I thought I must have missed the dragon’s answer. And indeed, when I lifted my eyes again, she was staring at me quizzically.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”

She snorted rather a lot of fire this time. “I said, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer.”

“What?” I said, foolishly.

“Little witch, tell me the answer.”

“Bread,” I said. “A loaf of bread. It rises when you cook it on a hot stone.”

“Fascinating.” The tip of her tail twitched like a hunting cat’s. “Fascinating. Is that where bread comes from?”

She sounded genuinely excited.

Dragons, it seemed, knew about death and war. But not so much about baking.

Her wings folded more tightly against her sides. “Well, you’ve won. That’s the end of the riddles, then.”

“I have another one for you,” I cried, struck by inspiration now when it was too late. “As a gift. No wager.”

The dragon definitely had facial expressions, and this one was definitely suspicion. “No wager?”

“None.”

“What do you want if you win?”

“Just the joy of winning,” I said. “Here.

“Alone I dwell

“In a stone cell

“With a gray roof.

“Though kept captive

“None holds the key.

“I am not soaring above the halls of dawn.

“I do not see the sun rise.

“What creature am I?”

She stared, tongue flickering. Moments passed, and I worried I had misunderstood her—or worse, offended her.

When she burst out, “Me!” she nearly incinerated me with the spray of her venom. “It’s me! Oh, sorry…”

“I’m fine. It’s fine.” I remained standing, so I could dodge faster if there were more outbursts. And to get away from the eyewatering, sinus-stinging smoke curling from the cinders where the eitr had fallen. “Unscathed.” I held out my hands to demonstrate.

“Good,” she said. “How odd it is that a small, frail, temporary person like yourself should make me feel so clearly seen.”

Well, from her point of view, I supposed I was all of those things.

She had been lying along the edge of the vent, just her head and forequarters poking over. Now, with a motion that was half slither and half chinning herself, she crawled up to the rim and stretched out. “Did you bring vessels?”

“Jars,” I said, lifting the pack.

“Cheeky,” she said.

“What’s worse?” I asked. “Preparing too much and not using everything, or needing a thing and not having it to hand?”

“You swore to grant me a boon.”

She had me there. “I did.”

“I’ll give you the eitr. You won the wager honorably. And I will leave this place and take with me my two children. We shall make our nest further from human habitations, though I must complain that there are more and more of you with every passing season. If you cover the whole damn landscape and keep breeding even when you encroach on other people’s nesting grounds, I don’t see how you can complain about a little volcano.” She sighed. “And here I am helping resurrect your whelps, who will probably just make more of you.”

They weren’t my whelps, but I was more concerned with something else she’d said. I snuck a sideways glance over the rim of the vent. Yes, three eggs. “Wait. You and your two children?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the boon. Don’t worry, I’ll leave you plenty of eitr for feeding the whelp on. And I will come back every season or so to be certain the whelp is well-taken-care-of and replenish your supplies.”

That sounded less like reassurance, and more like a threat.

“You want to raise a brood of your own.”

“Not I,” I said. “A friend.”

“Well, if I save his children, let him care for one of mine. But you, little witch—you must see that the care is good. Yourself.”

“Why me?”

“Because,” she said. “Because I have tested your word and your mettle. And because I’m giving you the foster of my whelp. I have seen what you will do for the bonds of kinship. And because you understood me and gave me a gift, so I know you understand how bound to this boring rock I am.”

“But I…I don’t want to stay here either.”

“Once a turning should suffice,” she said, relentless. “As I said, it’s only another hundred seasons or so. The egg will hatch in…twelve more seasons. Make sure your folk know that if they don’t take care of my little one, though, I will come back and eat them.”

I imagined the little whelp—perhaps only as large as the horse—looking up at the giant creature before me with wide, adorable eyes and begging, “Mama, can I eat him?”

“What about the volcano?” I asked. “My people cannot survive it. Doesn’t the egg need its heat to incubate?”

“Oh, a lone egg will do well enough if they bury it in dry ground near a hot spring,” she said.

“Like baking a loaf of bread,” I mused.

“You,” she said, “and your baking.”

• • • •

The dragon said she would give me time to return to Ragnar’s farmstead before she flew the egg down and delivered it. My backpack sloshed with jars of eitr as I walked, the downhill steep and full of rocks that stubbed my toes through my boot leather. I’d be lucky not to lose a nail or two.

I was lucky that was all I seemed to be in danger of losing. Unless I tripped and fell and broke the jars, in which case the venom within would saturate my clothes, melt my flesh, and then probably catch on fire for good measure.

I walked very carefully and kept my eyes where my feet should be going.

It was a good thing, too, because the glamour I had cast on the little horse was strong enough that it even fooled me until I tripped over one of the spell-spun traces.

I had been singing to myself as I walked, songs more fitting for a warrior this time, and I had not been fingering my spindle. My hands, being free of my pockets, flung out and smacked into the horse’s warm flank.

The glamour fell away in the face of concrete evidence, and I could see that the boulder he was dragging had gotten jammed into a crevice and was stuck there.

I slipped off my extremely caustic load and set the pack down carefully before going to unwind the string from around the boulder. Then I had some extra string and a horse that was already wearing a conjure-ish harness, so it only seemed fair that the horse carry the pack. That was what horses were for, after all, among other things.

I lashed it on over his withers. He was a convenient size, not so tall I had to reach up to tie things across his back. While I worked, I thought about getting back to town and explaining to Ragnar that he could have his children back, and all it would cost him was to spend his dotage babysitting a dragon.

I would get out of town before my brother and his wife woke up, I decided. It would be preferable to watching their teary reunion. Or having to endure either their thanks, or their lack thereof.

I finished my harnessing and patted the horse on the shoulder. He nickered at me under his breath, friendly. Or hoping for carrots.

I draped an arm over his withers. He was a good height for leaning on. I made up my mind that I was taking him with me when I went, in addition to Magni. I would have to find someplace easy for him to recuperate, assuming the leg could—and would—get better. That would mean a winter off the road, which was probably wise for a man my age anyway, even if it griped me.

Anyway, if I left him here, Ragnar would probably eat him. I felt after using him to bait a dragon, I owed him better.

I scratched under his mane. He leaned into me, lip twitching in pleasure.

“Good lad,” I said. “I think I’ll call you Ormr.”

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Astounding Award-winning author of over thirty novels and nearly one hundred and fifty pieces of short fiction. She was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year.

Small Monsters
By E. Lily Yu
Novelette Long List

The small monster, whelped, slipped out of its caul and onto the pebbly floor of the den.

Its emerald scales flexed. Its soft tail swept the earth. The small monster stretched out its new limbs, shuddering. It smelled raw white roots and mud and dried ichor.

The den was an egg-shaped void under a hill. A roof of rocks and matted roots hid the small soft monster and its parent from the moon’s white gaze.

The small monster unstuck each gluey eye and saw the ruby scales of its parent, whose side heaved with long and labored breaths. The birthing of monsters is hungry work, a labor of a week or more. And as the small monster looked upon the world, still damp from birth, its parent lowered its great golden beak and bit off a tender limb.

Humming with relief and satisfaction, the parent shifted its gleaming bulk to the rear of the den and settled down to sleep.

The small monster bled, and bled, and wailed.

• • • •

Like gecko tails and starfish arms, the small monster’s lost limb scabbed, healed, and regrew. Its parent left the den and returned with bloodied lumps of deer, bear, rabbit, and hawk. Over time, the small monster sprouted two rows of serried teeth; six hard, ridged horns; and stubby claws.

Occasionally the gold-beaked monster did not return to the den for days, finally dragging in a much-mauled haunch of deer.

Sometimes it returned without anything at all.

Those mornings, when the small monster felt its parent’s footfalls through the packed earth, it fled cowering to the steep curved back of the den, though that was of course no hiding place at all. And by noon the small monster would be diminished by a leg or a tail or a bite from its side, too wise and afraid now, as its parent slept, to make a sound.

Though beak, fang, and claw speak more directly, monsters have their own harsh and sibilant language. Now and then the parent spoke, either to itself or in challenge to another monster whose shadow crossed the mouth of the den, and syllable by hiss, the small monster learned.

One morning, after they had devoured the remnants of a mountain lion, the small monster spoke.

Why do you eat me? it said.

Its parent lolled onto one side, spines bristling. Gobbets of meat warmed its belly and weighed it down, and it felt pleasant toward the world and its whelp. Because I am hungry.

But why not eat—the small monster took a breath—your own leg?

Silly. I am your parent. I birthed you. You are mine.

But it hurts.

It grows back.

And neither said a word more.

• • • •

In time the parent waxed gibbous like the moon, growing too ponderous to hunt. It tore off and ate all four of the small monster’s limbs over the course of a week, writhing and hissing as it did so, without the slightest sign of enjoyment.

At the end of the week, another, smaller monster was expelled in a pool of foul-smelling birth fluid, and the den rang with three cries of pain, snappishness, and distress.

After that, the small monster learned the trick of being farthest from the den’s entrance when their parent returned unfed. It was not as helpless as the smallest monster, and so on most occasions, apart from ill-timed naps, the matter was decided in the small monster’s favor.

The snapping, crunching, and sobbing were terrible to hear. The small monster quickly learned not to listen.

• • • •

While its parent hunted, the small monster played. In the evenings, starlight washed the opening of the den. The small monster rushed up to the brink of a world that smelled like wilderness and pine forest, from which the small and smallest monsters were both forbidden, then backed away.

When can I go out? the small monster had asked.

Never, came the reply. You will remain here always. With me.

While it was not brave enough to disobey, the small monster was clever enough to consider one claw within the den a perfect observance of the law.

Now a damp wind blew over the small monster, smelling of blackberries and yellow-pored boletes. Night birds hooted and sawed in the trees. Deep in the den, the smallest monster whimpered in its sleep.

Something slunk, lithe and stealthy, through the red-berried brush. It sounded larger than the foxes the small monster had seen, less twitchy than the rabbits the foxes hunted. The unseen thing paced back and forth, whuffing, and the small monster went as still as stone.

It was too late. A step, a spring, and then three slitted yellow eyes looked down upon the small monster.

Where the gold-beaked monster was clad in ruby scales, this monster was all tawny, wiry fur.

Poor thing, it said. Who ate your leg?

For the small monster had been unlucky not long ago, though the stump had scabbed.

Parent, said the small monster. But it grows back.

I remember being small, the tawny thing said. Every month the tearing teeth.

Every week, the small monster said.

If you came with me, the tawny thing said, I would not bite you more than once a month. And only if I had to.

This sounded like heaven to the small monster. It quivered its horns and clattered its scales. Then it paused.

I can’t run as fast as you, it said. With only three legs.

No matter, the tawny thing said, lowering its head. It mouthed the small monster like a cat with a kitten. Then it tensed its muscles and bounded into the forest.

Its great paws struck the earth with such force that the small monster’s teeth clicked against each other. Trees rushed past them, dark and blurred.

By the time they stopped, the stars had dimmed and sunk into dawn. The forest was gone, and the world smelled new. They were a long way from the den beneath the hill where the smallest monster waited alone.

The tawny thing had scented something; its three yellow eyes grew black and wide. It dropped the small monster and hove into the wheatfields shivering around them, the long stalks pale under the rosy sky.

From the far side of the field came a stifled shout.

A few minutes later, the wheat parted, and the tawny thing dragged out the body of a man. His throat was open, wet, and red. His old, patched clothes ripped easily.

They ate, the steam from the man’s entrails wreathing them. The small monster gnawed on knuckles and spat out the little finger bones. The tawny thing crunched the femurs for their marrow. They licked themselves clean of the sweet blood, then went on.

Around them, plains billowed and shook loose their folds of gold. The tawny thing and the small monster did not converse. Their pace was leisurely at first, while the small monster hopped and hobbled on three legs. The tawny thing often carried it. After its fourth leg budded and regrew, though the limb was soft and tender for a time, the small monster kept up as well as it could.

The tawny thing was swift and lethal, and for a long time, as the moon filled and emptied and filled, the small monster kept all its limbs, and ate well. It learned to catch crickets while the tawny thing hunted.

Then one too many deer slipped the tawny thing’s jaws. It did not particularly matter why. An old injury in one whip-muscled leg might have flared, or perhaps the canniness of all living beings in autumn had pricked the velvet ears of the deer. Whatever the reason, balked of its prey, the tawny thing bridled and gnashed its teeth. It returned to where the small monster was pouncing at insects.

When the small monster felt the earth shudder, it leapt up to flee, but too slowly.

A moment later, it was lying in its own green ichor, keening.

The tawny thing said, astonished, You are delicious.

The small monster moaned.

Bones cracked. Emerald scales dropped like leaves. The tawny thing swallowed what had been the small monster’s foreleg, snuffled, and curled up to sleep.

You can still walk on three legs, the tawny thing said, yawning. Two of its yellow eyes shut. The third watched the small monster.

From then on, the tawny thing ate of the small monster regularly, finding itself partial to the taste. For fairness—even the small monster admitted this—it took care to leave the small monster with three legs to walk on, though not always a fine and lashing tail.

Bit by bite, though, even that changed.

The tawny thing hunted less frequently. More and more, its three eyes settled upon the small monster, who shrank from the hunger glowing there. Before long the eating was more than monthly.

There was nothing the small monster could do about it besides weeping and raging as the tawny thing slept. With two legs, it could go no distance at all.

No good, said a razor bird in the tree above them. It lashed its three barbed tails and craned its neck. Better to eat you all at once. Less moaning. Less waste.

Is that what you’ll do? the small monster said, baring its teeth through its tears.

Only if you want, the razor bird said.

No, thank you, the small monster said.

Or, if you like, I could carry you away. For one of your legs and your talkative tongue. For you are heavy, the way is long, and my wings will tire.

You’ll take me to your nest, to feed your own small monsters.

The razor bird laughed a red, raspy laugh. A good idea! If I had them, I would. But I mean a fair bargain.

Where would you take me?

There is a hollow tree in a distant wood where no monsters go, wormy with beetle grubs and wet with rain. I will leave you there. For a leg and a tongue.

They’re yours, the small monster said, resigned.

Faster than thought, the razor bird stooped from the tree, and its claws closed on the small monster. The tawny thing slept mumbling on, even as the small monster’s stumps spotted its pelt with ichor.

Have to do something about that, the razor bird said. It spread its wings wider than any eagle’s, wide enough to blot out the moon.

They flew north until they reached a glacier-fed lake. There, the razor bird dropped the small monster in. Several times it snatched up and dropped the small monster, until the small monster was half drowned but no longer bleeding.

There, said the razor bird. Let’s see them track you now.

Mountains passed beneath them, then rivers and woods. Stars glistened icily above them. A two-tailed comet shone in the sky.

But the small monster was too cold to notice, hanging mute and miserable from the razor bird’s claws.

The wild flight ended with an angled descent through the canopy of an old beech wood. They landed upon a bare white snag.

There, the razor bird said, its crimson eyes bright. Now open your mouth.

Payment was settled with merciful swiftness. When that was finished, the razor bird lowered the small monster into the snag’s hollow heart, which was barely big enough for its remaining limbs. The wood had gone spongy with insects and rot.

Mind you, the razor bird said, I am what I am. I know where you are. If I hatch chicks, I’ll look where I stashed you. Don’t hide here too long.

It flicked its three tails and soared away.

The snag was far from comfortable. When it rained, the monster licked at the trickles that ran down the wood and drank from the puddle that formed at its feet. For food, it had watery white wriggling grubs. On a day it remembered ever after with pleasure, it caught and ate an incautious squirrel. On that diet more fit for woodpeckers, the small monster’s lost limbs returned with painful slowness. Its plump sides slumped, and its glossy scales dulled. But there were no severing teeth or beaks in the snag, apart from its own.

Bud by bone, claws and tail and all, the small monster grew into itself again.

When all its pieces were present, the small monster clambered out of the snag and fell snout-first into the grass.

When it had warmed itself in the sun awhile, motionless as moss, it caught a vole by surprise and devoured it, as well as the beetle the vole had been nibbling on. Then the razor bird’s parting words came to mind. The small monster shuddered and headed in the direction of the snag’s shadow. It snapped at grasshoppers as it went.

Now and then the small monster crouched behind a tree as something larger snorted and shuffled in the brush. Once, it froze under a whorl of ferns as the three-tailed shadow of a bird passed over. The small monster liked its legs and tail, and it wanted no more of monstrous bargains.

As it scrambled and slid down a slope of scree, the small monster chanced upon a gashed and broken thing. Deep gouges in its side showed the white of bone. Its pointed snout lolled in a pool of gore.

One scratched silver eye opened.

Please, the rat-nosed thing said. Come closer.

The small monster sat back on its haunches and sized up the battered bulk of the thing. Among the feathery grasses at the bottom of the slope, it caught a speckled frog, which it brought back and dropped near—but not too near—the creature’s snout.

The rat-nosed thing licked up the frog and swallowed it, then shut its eyes. Its breathing was shallow.

In the meadows around them, the small monster searched for slithering, skittering creatures, garter snakes and earthworms, thrush eggs and wrens, to feed both itself and the broken monster.

Time trickled past, and the wounds on the rat-nosed thing scabbed. Its scarred eyes followed the small monster.

One day, as the small monster left a lizard by its snout, the rat-nosed thing lunged.

Why? the small monster cried, scrabbling backward, bleeding.

The rat-nosed thing made wet, happy noises. Better than worms and slugs and grubs.

Flinching with pain, the small monster fled. Behind it, claws scraped stone as the rat-nosed thing stood. It snuffed the ground and chuckled like boulders breaking. At this, the small monster turned and saw that its own dribbling ichor had painted a path.

Down that path, snout to earth, the rat-nosed thing hunted.

The small monster lashed its tail. Though the wound in its side was a white-hot knife, it scaled the nearest fir and crept out upon a bough. And as the rat-nosed thing came sniffling beneath, the small monster let go and fell.

Its claws clamped onto its pursuer’s skull. And as the rat-nosed thing swung its head and shrilled, the small monster bit out one silver eye and slit the jelly of the other. Then it leapt down and tore at the taut, thin skin where the rat-nosed thing’s wounds had barely healed. The small monster scratched until the tender flesh parted and showed again the stark white bones. It bit and squirmed into the rat-nosed thing, crawling inside the warm, plush cage of its ribs.

The small monster ate what it found there: bitter, bilious, savory, sweet.

When it had swallowed most of the rat-nosed thing, enough to push apart the ribs and emerge, there was a new sharpness to its face and a silver tinge to its scales.

It kicked a scatter of gravel over the raw red bones and prowled on, wary but unafraid.

A strange scent blew across the small monster’s way, one it had never smelled before, and it turned and went into the wind. Days and nights it chased the scent, through forest and scrub, over salt marsh and fen, until the small monster stood at the edge of the sea.

Brown waves roared like dragons along the shore. The small monster lowered its head to drink and found that the water was bitter, and burned.

I see, the small monster said. This is the end of the world.

It crouched in the surf and stared at the sharp straight limit of the sea.

After a while, it noticed a little clawed creature beside it, no bigger than one of the small monster’s teeth. Its tiny claws worked upon a shard of sea glass.

What are you doing? the small monster said.

Adding to you, the clawed creature said. Not that you aren’t already excellent. But anyone can be improved.

Several flowery tufts sprouted from the creature’s shell. Every now and then the creature tickled one of them and applied an invisibly slight secretion to the sea glass it was pressing against the small monster’s scale.

At length it rested, sighing in satisfaction.

Ah, it said. Art!

Sorry?

Do forgive me. What I should ask is: Do you like what I’ve done?

The small monster studied the addition to its side.

You disapprove. I can remove it! the clawed creature said. It reached for the shard.

Don’t.

Then will you let me add more?

If that’s what you want, the small monster said.

The tide whisked in, rolling a fat seal onto the shore. The small monster took a few neat bites, then offered some to the laboring creature.

In a minute—in a minute—

By the time the tide whispered out, the small monster had been adorned with six chips of sea glass, blue and brown.

Now I have earned my supper, the clawed creature declared, extending its pincers to receive a morsel of seal. It ate with sounds of satisfaction. Every so often, it passed a crumb to the tufts on its back, which grasped hungrily at the flecks of food.

What are they? the small monster asked.

Anemones, the clawed creature said. Some of the sea’s more stinging critics. They keep me honest. And they produce a good glue.

A seagull stooped at the seal carcass. The small monster broke its neck with a blow.

Wish I could do that, the clawed creature said.

Eat, the small monster said. You’ll be big enough, one day.

When the small monster was thirsty, it went inland for water. When it was hungry, it dove for fish and seals. But most of the time it sat still and watched, puzzled, as the clawed creature embellished its scales.

Gradually, the small monster’s gleaming green mail was encased in glass, agate, and mother-of-pearl.

Beautiful, the clawed creature said. Sunlight glowed in the small monster’s new shell. Exquisite. Exceptional. If I do say so myself.

The anemones waved their fronds in lazy assent.

Are you done? the small monster said.

For a moment. Beauty must be appreciated. And then!

It’s not over?

Never. Life is growth; art must follow. Why, I myself have shed two shells since I started this work! But for the present, I shall scuttle along the beach and search for my next stroke of inspiration.

The small monster did not understand much of what its companion said. Nevertheless, it escorted the clawed creature on its muttering constitutionals, waiting as a striped pebble or shapely stick held it rapt. Any seagull that swooped, thinking it had found an inattentive meal, died in a spray of bloody feathers. The clawed creature hardly noticed.

Sometimes it crept up the small monster’s flank, perched upon a horn, and confessed its doubts.

What if it never comes, the next idea? What then? What if my great works lie behind me?

The small monster made reassuring noises, but did not know what else to do, for its life had been biting and bleeding, not art.

One night, the wind rose. The air prickled and itched. Lightning cracked the violet sky. In one sheeting flash, the small monster thought it saw a forest upon the sea.

I have it! the clawed creature shouted into the small monster’s ear. Quick, swim!

The small monster plunged into the ocean. Though towering waves spun and flung them about, once they dove deep, the water gentled. Soon they reached the broad black hull of the ship, whose masts had looked like trees from the shore.

Wait, the clawed creature said, clinging to the small monster.

They did not wait long. A wave tossed the ship and smashed it down. Clean as a walnut, the hull split into halves. Small bodies tumbled out of it, as well as timbers and chests and drowning sheep. Here and there a broken chest poured a glittering of gold.

That, the clawed creature said. I want that.

The small monster surfaced, gasped, and dove again. It caught four coins in its claws and one in its teeth, marked where the rest sank into darkness, and swam back to shore.

Rain lanced down as the small monster hauled itself out of the water.

I hope they’re worth it, the small monster said.

They will be, the clawed creature said. You’ll see.

They huddled together under a dripping pine until the storm blew itself to shreds. A sickly dawn shone in the sky.

Pieces of the ship started drifting ashore, as did a fine banquet of brined sailor and sheep.

I suppose you want more of those round objects, the small monster said.

The clawed creature said, If you don’t mind.

Day after day, by dint of much swimming, the small monster amassed a heap of gold.

What now? the small monster said.

Now, I work.

Though each golden coin was as large as its body, and so heavy it asked the small monster to hold them in place, the clawed creature labored without rest or food. Every so often, the small monster tried to coax it into eating.

The art is all! the clawed creature said, wrestling with its piece of gold.

Over the small monster’s shell of glass and nacre, which had split and been mended as the small monster grew, the clawed creature affixed escudo and pistole. Sunlight danced on their faces and shook bright sequins across the sand.

There, the clawed creature said. Magnificent. You’re a treasure. Worth your weight in gold.

Stretching, the small monster heard its golden scales clink.

Let them bite me now, it said.

Eh? Pass the fish.

After day or two of dazzlement, in which the small monster flung sunlight every which way, briefly blinding a number of birds, it covered itself in seaweed at the clawed creature’s insistence, until not a glint of its golden armor could be seen.

More prudent that way, the clawed creature said.

• • • •

The small monster ate, grew, fetched whatever shell or skull the clawed creature desired, and watched the ebb and flow of the tide. Despite gusts, gales, storms, and heaving waves, that stretch of seashore was the most peaceful place the small monster had known.

It mentioned as much to the clawed creature.

Nothing lasts, the clawed creature said, as it placed stones in a pleasing pattern on the sand. Neither good nor bad. But one must always enjoy the good.

• • • •

That peace ended abruptly on a clear afternoon.

The wind was crisp and blowing off the sea. The sigh of the waves curling in and out hid for a time the sounds of approach. The clawed creature was carving a sand dollar into layers of lace, and the small monster, admiring, did not hear. Only when sand trickled in rivulets down the dune above them did the small monster lift its eyes and see.

Another monster crouched at the top of the dune. It also boasted a crown of horns, though its sides were stippled with ruby spots.

Uh-oh, the clawed creature said. Excuse me.

It tucked itself into its shell. The next wave that foamed in carried it off.

What do you want? the small monster asked.

You.

Do I know you? the small monster said. Then it shook itself from horns to tail in surprise, for it recognized the other monster.

As well as your own blood, the smallest monster said. I’ve tracked you through mountains and forests and fields. And now I shall eat you.

Why?

You owe me. The smallest monster dug its red, red claws into the soft white side of the dune.

Then it sprang.

The small monster turned sideways, and its sibling crashed into its seaweed-draped mail. Claws clacked on gold; a fang shattered. The smallest monster rolled and rose, snarling.

If you’re hungry, the small monster said, these waters have squid and dogfish in them.

I’m not here for fish, its sibling said.

The small monster met the next charge with one glass-and-gold shoulder.

No.

Again its sibling found footing and lunged. Again the small monster knocked it aside.

The smallest monster howled. Lie down and let me tear your throat out!

No.

Let me bite you and drink your ichor!

No.

While they fought, shreds of kelp fell from the small monster, until it shone with uncovered gold. The smallest monster champed its needle teeth and struck, but it did no harm. As it reared to strike again, the small monster bowled its sibling onto its back.

The smallest monster writhed upon the sand. I’ve given up so much for you!

I’m sorry, the small monster said. Go away.

You think you’re so special, its sibling said. But I know you!

The smallest monster splayed its horns, spat, and padded off. Its tail scribbled arabesques in the sand.

The small monster watched the smallest monster go, until it was too far to see.

After some time, it felt a slight itching on the side of its neck. This was the clawed creature, climbing to the small monster’s horns. From that perch, it surveyed the aftermath.

You’ve lost some coins, the clawed creature said. I’ll fix them. Hold still.

The small monster waited for it to cement the loosened coins back into place. Then, setting the clawed creature on its back, the small monster waded into deeper water and swam in the opposite direction from its sibling.

For hours it swam, long after the sky reddened and darkened, until a rising tide carried them ashore. The small monster rested its chin on the cold wet sand.

This should be far enough, the clawed creature said. Sleep. I’ll pinch if I hear anything.

The small monster slept, dreaming of pursuit, and kicked the sand and the clawed creature in its sleep. Its tail flicked and twitched at the cry of a seal.

When it awoke, to screeching seabirds, it was hardly rested.

What is peace, after all, the clawed creature said, if not a moment of repose. A breath between storms. Most importantly, an opportunity for art.

The small monster sharpened its claws on a spar.

The clawed creature added, as an afterthought, I’ve heard that bad news comes in threes.

It was a strange, uncertain time. The small monster swam farther south every night, staying nowhere for long. Here and there it startled a family of seals, a cormorant drying its wings against the wind, or a solitary sea lion sunning itself. The small monster ate them carefully, digging up the bloody sand and giving the bones to the sea.

Unlike the small monster, the clawed creature evinced no anxiousness, though it acquired another two anemones. Five times now, the clawed creature had exchanged its home for sequentially larger shells. Each time, it cajoled its critics into relocating as well.

What do they say? the small monster asked. About your art?

Sometimes they say: Good enough.

Other times?

You’re a hack who couldn’t draw a straight line with a sea pen and swordfish.

Which one? the small monster said, eyeing the tufts on its shell. I’ll eat it for you.

The anemones waved their stinging petals in threat.

Sometimes they’re helpful. They’ll say: It’s crooked. Left corner’s low.

Where did you find them?

Tidepools are full of them. These days, everyone’s a critic. The clawed creature sighed. Hard to find ones with discernment, though. No one values an arts curriculum.

Have you gone far into the sea?

The clawed creature waved vaguely. A bit. Maybe. They’re discussing the merits of formal education. . . .

Are there sea monsters?

The clawed creature did not respond, lost in reverie, or else an absorbing conversation. The small monster waited for a polite interval, then huffed its seal-smelling breath over the flowery shell. Indignant, the anemones snapped shut.

Ah, sea monsters. Deep down, yes. Deeper than you’ll ever go, where the water presses with the weight of a mountain. I met vast and insatiable appetites there. Hungry lights in the dark. A bristling of teeth. I should have been a pair of ragged claws. . . .

The small monster said, You were not afraid of me.

The clawed creature patted the small monster.

I was inspired. I saw a canvas for my art!

So they will not hunt me from the sea.

Never, the clawed creature said. They live in the deepest waters.

Then I will watch the woods, the small monster said.

• • • •

Since the day the smallest monster had found them, one particular battle seemed inevitable. When at last a familiar form emerged from the trees, the small monster felt the tightness in its chest unspool, loop after loop unwinding into something loose and useful.

You should leave, it told the clawed creature. To be safe.

I won’t go far, the clawed creature said.

That’s what you think.

As delicately as it could, the small monster picked up the clawed creature in its teeth, then hurled it seaward.

At the dappled edge of the woods, where the sand began, the small monster’s gold-beaked parent set its talons, frilled, and roared.

The small monster sat at the shifting verge of the sea, with an infinitude of unknown monsters at its back and one it knew well in front of it. The small monster took a breath of salt air. Then it roared in reply, and the waves roared with it.

You are mine, the gold-beaked monster said.

I am not.

Who fed you meat while you mewled? Who carved up lions and brought down falcons for you?

Who fed on me when the hunt went ill?

The parent’s scale-sheathed shoulders trembled and chimed. It had grown lean and rangy in the small monster’s absence. Who birthed you? Who gave you life and breath?

You, the small monster said. Then you took.

I’ve come for what belongs to me.

I am nobody’s.

I was kind to you!

The gold-beaked monster loped across the sand.

Once more, the small monster turned to take the blow. Its parent’s talons skidded over gold.

Tricks, it hissed. You forget. I shelled turtles and sucked out the flesh for you.

With its second blow, it sent a king’s ransom flying.

With the third, it broke glass and scale and skin.

The small monster hunched down. It smelled ichor and roots and damp earth again.

Why?

I bore you to feed me when I am old.

The hooked beak dug into the small monster’s side, ripping and swallowing. The small monster shrieked, as it had shrieked before, when it was helpless and wriggling in the den under the hill.

But the sound of its shriek was different now, deeper and louder than the sounds a small thing might make.

For the small monster was no longer small.

It felt its strength and cunning then, its size and power and cruelty. It whirled upon the gold-beaked monster.

No. I will not. Never again.

Talons flashing, the gold-beaked monster flew at the no-longer-small monster and was promptly tossed on its crown of horns. Foam and ichor flecked the parent’s red sides as it rose.

They clashed, the wet sand churning beneath them, and the no-longer-small monster threw its parent a second time.

You’re nothing, the gold-beaked monster said. What good is your life? Give me it. It’s mine.

They circled each other on the tidal zone. The no-longer-small monster watched the sand sink under its parent’s feet, and saw how each step began with a slight stumble. And when the gold-beaked monster struck, swift as an eel, it was hooked and flipped. The no-longer-small monster fell upon the gold-beaked monster, gouging and goring. It tasted its parent’s ichor and flesh.

Then the no-longer-small monster stepped back.

As the gold-beaked monster righted itself, ribboned skin trailing in the tide, ichor dropping like green rain, it keened and cringed.

It’ll grow back, the no-longer-small monster said. Now leave.

The gold-beaked monster retreated, limping. When it reached the woods, it glared hunger and hatred over its shoulder. Then it was gone.

• • • •

Fog rolled in like a dream, snagging in the bristled tops of the trees, smudging distance and detail.

The clawed creature said from the once-small monster’s head: Family can be difficult.

Says someone who started as plankton.

Hey! My worst critics live upstairs.

The air was wet and white, and the monster’s laughter stirred up eddies in it. They made a brave and merry island in the thick nothingness.

Then they heard the sound of some tremendous thing breaching and collapsing back into the sea.

O, wonder, the clawed creature said to itself.

Again came the fathomless, unfathomable sound.

The fog was too dense to see what moved in the dark and swirling waters offshore.

They listened in silence to the great thing leaping: a rush of water, a crash. Then there was a leap without end. They strained to hear the missing sound.

Out of the wisping fog swam a vastness. Its wings undulated in an invisible current. Its mouth, broad enough to swallow the once-small monster, sucked thirstily at the empty air. It steered itself in an arc with a whip of a tail.

As it drifted overhead, two large black eyes looked down, full of ancient indifference.

A very long time later—or so it seemed to the once-small monster, who had held its breath—they heard the distant boom of the vast winged thing returning to the sea.

Sea monster? the once-small monster said.

Sea monster, the clawed creature said, clasping its own claws.

The world is stranger than I thought.

It always is.

• • • •

By the time the third trouble came sniffing about, the once-small monster was prepared. The clawed creature had layered it with glass and nacre, then with gold, and finally with bones plucked from a great fish that had washed up dead. The bones curved up the small monster’s sides and made a double row of spines.

In those three layers of armor, the once-small monster cut an extraordinary figure. The wolfish, tawny thing that slunk between the trees did not recognize its quarry. It snapped its jaws, perplexed.

Then the sea wind brought the scent of the once-small monster to the woods. The tawny thing, whose hide was now peppered with gray, threw back its head and bayed in greeting.

Old friend, the tawny thing said. It’s been too long.

You have terrible taste in friends, the clawed creature said. It slipped from the once-small monster’s shoulder into the sea.

This shore is mine, the once-small monster said. You may not hunt here.

For as long as this shore is yours, I’ll not hunt here, the tawny thing agreed.

Are you passing through?

Following a trail, the tawny thing said, laughing softly, as if it had told a great joke. Three trails, in fact. All running and jumbled together.

Why do you laugh?

Because if the three had lived peaceably, in this place of plumpest bears and deer—if they offered battle with three sets of claws, beak, and teeth—I’d never have won.

Its purple tongue danced. There were green stains and spatters on the tawny fur.

Contrariwise, the tawny thing said, even a bear could bring down a wounded and brokenhearted beast. For me, the matter was simpler still.

You let me live, the once-small monster said. When I was small.

Small and obedient. I think you are neither now.

So you’ve come here to fight.

I came here to finish, the tawny thing said. To eat a monster and its children whole, beak, bones, tendons, talons—it staggers the mind. Fat as pigeons, I’ll be. I’ll dig a den to overwinter, and in the spring I’ll whelp my own pups.

Am I the last?

You’d find their bones in the woods, if you looked. If I let you. But I won’t.

The tawny thing danced before the once-small monster. Its eyes were fixed on the once-small monster’s throat.

Run, it said. Let me chase you, catch you, and drag you down.

The once-small monster neither answered nor ran.

Stubborn, every one of you, the tawny thing sighed.

It seized one of the once-small monster’s whalebones and shook it until the bone cracked from its carapace. The tawny thing cast it onto the sand.

Hissing, the once-small monster slashed at the tawny thing’s ankles and came away with clumps of hair.

Better, the tawny thing said, breaking off another whalebone. I remember when you had no fight at all. You’d lie in the dirt and cry. Poor little fool.

Something like thunder rumbled in the once-small monster’s chest. It met the tawny thing mid-leap. Then each fell away.

A gash in the tawny thing’s neck beaded red and purulent gold.

The tawny thing purred approval. Then it launched itself again at the once-small monster. The two of them tumbled over and over, grappling. Gold coins scattered across the sand, followed by globs of sea glass and shell. Neat and quick as a gull cracking the valves of a clam, the tawny thing had the once-small monster stripped of its armor, panting and pinned under the heavy paws.

Laughing, its three eyes never looking away, the tawny thing bent its head and gnawed the once-small monster’s leg. Clear to the bone its teeth tore and its tongue licked.

As delicious as I recall.

A wave swept in, salting the wound. The once-small monster bellowed and belled. As the sand beneath them liquified, the once-small monster kicked itself free. It stumbled backward into the water, falling, crawling, until each incoming swell broke over its head.

The tawny thing paddled after.

Don’t go farther, it said. Dragging your body ashore will be—well, a drag.

Though it gasped and gagged with agony, the once-small monster swam on.

When the tawny thing neared, its countenance skull-like under wet fur—when not one of its deadly paws touched bottom—the once-small monster sucked in a breath, clamped its teeth into the tawny thing’s neck, and sank.

The tawny thing sank with it.

A silver howl shook out of the tawny thing’s mouth. It thrashed in the green water, slicing the small monster open. Everywhere it touched, it carved grievous wounds.

At long last, its limbs slackened.

The once-small monster released it. Its three eyes empty, its terrible jaws agape, the tawny thing drifted down to the seabed. Quick, ravenous shapes swam after it.

Afterward, the once-small monster could not recall how it reached the shore, whether the waves left it broken among driftwood and kelp, or whether it swam with three legs through the obliterating pain.

When the once-small monster opened its eyes, some time later, the clawed thing was scuttling back and forth on the sand. It waved a gold escudo like a shield. One after another, seagulls dove at the once-small monster, but their beaks pinged off of the interposed coin.

Graverobbers! the clawed creature shouted. Vandals! Philistines! Desecrators of art! Vulgar, disrespectful fowl!

The once-small monster stirred, groaning, and the seagulls screamed disappointment and fled.

About time, the clawed creature said. I wasn’t sure. . . . You present quite the conservation challenge.

It’ll grow back, the once-small monster said, its voice fainter than the echo in a shell.

If you say so.

For a long time, the once-small monster knew pain in all its colors and conjurings. First it was forked and lancing like lightning. Later it was brown and fogged.

Though the once-small monster was hardly a stranger to pain, this time it had a comforter. And so this pain was not as unbearable as the pain in the den, though it nevertheless was grim and obscene and lasted for an eternity.

Little by little, what had been lost turned soft and silver and regrew.

Eventually, the tawny thing washed ashore. Fish had dined on its eyes and the sea-rotted pulp of its body, and flies clustered and buzzed around the corpse.

The once-small monster retreated to the berried woods to escape the flies and the gaseous reek.

Gulls thronged upon the corpse in a noisy white shroud, tearing and shrieking. They dispersed, shrieking louder, as a three-tailed shadow swept across the sand. From a safe distance, they scolded the interloper, who sat and stripped the carcass clean.

The razor bird paused in the middle of its gorging. Its red gaze found the once-small monster where it rested on moss among the cinnamon ferns.

I think you’ve learned, the razor bird said.

What did I learn? the once-small monster said.

To be difficult to swallow.

Nothing was left on the bones when the razor bird finished. It cocked its eye at the once-small monster.

You were lucky. I was hungry.

You came looking for me.

And now I am fed. The razor bird shook its feathers, which rasped as they settled into place. Be spiny and sharp, if you can’t be quick.

And it flew off.

• • • •

The seasons changed, and changed again. The once-small monster, with the clawed creature’s assistance, grew spiny, sharp, hard, and beautiful.

The clawed creature grew larger and older than any of its kind had a right to be, or so it informed the once-small monster. Defended from marauding gulls, it had increased in size and shell until its present house, dredged from the bottom of the sea, was approximately the size of the once-small monster’s head. And one morning, as the clawed creature sorted agates, the once-small monster saw it clearly, in all its jointed and studded detail.

You’re monstrous, like me, the once-small monster said, surprised.

Nonsense, the clawed creature said. You’re like me.

The once- small monster snorted. I’ve made nothing.

A life is not nothing.

I’ve been bitten to the bone and hounded to the edge of the world. I’ve been dinner. I’ve been breakfast. An artist, never.

None of us can change what has happened to us, the clawed creature said. But if we are lucky, we live. If we are lucky, we do not lose more than we can afford. Much regrows. Claws, tail, teeth, even the vaporous stuff the poets call soul. And bitter experience provides material for art. Ask a shipwreck. Ask an oyster.

Even so . . .

Tell me, the clawed creature said. What do you want to create?

The once-small monster thought. It thought while the tide washed in and out, while the sun rose and set, while barnacles stuck out their pointed tongues and whispered in the absence of the tide.

At last the once-small monster said: An island. With moss, trees, and small, scuttling things. With crevices and caves for the scuttling things.

Then you shall create an island, the clawed creature said.

Despite having neither instruction nor prior knowledge, the once-small monster conceived of a plan. It wrested boulders from forest soil and sand and pushed them out to sea with the tide. Stone by stone it worked, slow and purposeful. Soon it had piled up enough rocks underwater that the current could no longer shift them singly away.

Between the boulders, the clawed creature sowed a garden of kelp, bladderwrack, barnacles, and mussels, until the hollow places were filled, and the rocks were knitted and cemented together.

The labor was long and strenuous, and also curiously satisfying.

Years passed before the stony stack was high enough that the highest wave did not douse its flattish top. The once-small monster rested on the stack’s summit for a night and a day, watching the stars in their silver parade, then the clouds in their brightening and flaming. It felt the weariness of work well done.

The next morning, the once-small monster began to carry soil by the mouthful to the top of the stack. The clawed thing ferried pinecones, nuts, and dandelion clocks across the water on the monster’s horns.

They did not stop when the first seeds put forth their plumules, but continued to lengthen, enlarge, and fortify the stack. In the course of their work, the once-small monster collected three heaps of bleached, bare, monstrous bones from the woods and shore and laid them in stones and roots and soil.

Fish of a thousand colors hid in the seaweed that waved at the base of the stack. Their glittering schools parted as the monster swam by.

One evening, as the two of them sat on the seashore, the clawed creature said: What work shall we do tomorrow?

The once-small monster gazed on their rich and cakelike sea stack. The soft green tips of a fifth year’s growth were just visible at the tops of the spindly trees.

It is done, the once-small monster said.

Was it worthwhile?

Yes.

Will you rest?

One day and one night, the once-small monster said.

Then what will you do?

See how the waves break like flocked birds against our stack. Look at the water-light that flickers on the underside of the stones. I shall build another island, the once-small monster said. And another. Until we have made a quietness between the wilds and the deep.

Let me help, the clawed creature said, as the not-small, not-a-monster knew it would.

I could not do it otherwise.

E. Lily Yu is the author of the novel On Fragile Waves, which received the Washington State Book Award, and the story collection Jewel Box (2023). She has also received the Artist Trust LaSalle Storyteller Award and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have appeared in venues from McSweeney's to Tor.com, as well as thirteen best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

Tombs of the Universe
By Han Song
Translated by Xueting C. Ni
Novelette Long List

1

When I was ten, my father decided that I was fit for space travel. That year, the whole family went to Orion on a flight with Interstellar Travel. On our way back, the ship broke down, and we had to stop off on Mars to catch another flight back to Earth.

We landed near the Martian north pole. With everyone feeling anxious and apprehensive, the flight attendant arranged for us to get into spacesuits and take a stroll outside. Our landing point was surrounded by ruins from the old Human Era, announced the captain; remnants of the First Age of Space Exploration. I remember very clearly: we had stopped in front of a section of a metal wall several kilometres long, and happened upon some unexpected things.

We now know that those things were called gravestones, but back then, I was simply transfixed by their awesome grandeur. They stood on a vast plain, which had been smoothed flat by human engineering. Monoliths, large and small, shot up from the ground like spring bamboo after the rain, all in a cadence of black which, against the flaming red soil, created an extraordinary sight. The Martian sky began to rain tiny flecks of starlight. The mystery of the moment captured my youthful heart.

The grown-ups all turned pale, just standing there, staring at each other in dismay.

We had come across one of the largest graveyards in the solar system, only to pause momentarily and hurry back to the ship. Everyone looked quiet and shaken. There was almost a kind of regret on their faces, as if they had seen something they shouldn’t have. I kept quiet, but felt a sense of elation for no particular reason.

The replacement shuttle service finally arrived, and as it pulled up from Mars, I whispered to my father:

“What was that?”

“What was what?” He returned the question in a daze.

“Those things behind the wall!”

“They…were people who died in space. Back then, space travel was a bit trickier than it is now.”

My intuitive understanding of the concept of death probably began then. I couldn’t understand the sudden change that had come over the adults upon the sight of the Martian graves. For me, death became associated with the splendid relics of a bygone era, with a rose-tinted view of Mars that held an irresistible charm for my young mind.

Fifteen years later, I took my girlfriend to the moon. “There’s an unspoiled place there, off the beaten track, where you’ll see elements of the universe beyond our dreams.” I made a series of excited gestures. Without Yu’s knowledge, I had visited graveyards of all shapes and sizes across the solar system. I would stand still and gaze at them, totally entranced. Their tranquility and desolate beauty felt like a perfect harmony with the celestial bodies on which they stood. These monuments were masterpieces in themselves. I have to admit that my childhood experience had left subtle, yet deep impressions on my mind.

Yu and I parked our shuttle on a remote landing pad, and walked quietly towards the valleys of the moon. There were no other vehicles, no other people. Yu gripped my hand tightly as I studied again the surface maps I’d drawn myself.

“OK, we’re here.”

We arrived at the perfect moment. Earth was slowly rising from the lunar horizon, bathing the grave cluster in fantastical splendor. They seemed as though they were stirring slightly, as if awakening. We were miles away from the nearest landing pad. I felt Yu’s body press against mine, trembling violently. She stared aghast at Earth, ghost-like from this perspective, and the graves it seemed to have somehow revived.

“I’d like to go back to the shuttle,” she murmured.

“Getting here was a pain, why do you want to go so soon? It may be dead quiet now, but back in its heyday it was the liveliest place!”

“I’m scared.”

“Don’t be. All our explorations of space began here on the moon. All the biggest graveyards in the universe are in our own solar system. We should be proud.”

“But now we’re the only two people who’ve come to see them. Do you think the dead know?”

“It’s not just the moon, but Mars and Venus…They’ve all been deserted. But, if you listen, you can hear the rumble of spaceships over planets thousands of light years away! The spirits of these dead explorers must be smiling from beyond the veil.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

I didn’t know how to answer this question. Why did I bring my girlfriend thousands of miles off-world to look at the graves of strangers? What if something awful happened to her? I hadn’t given that much thought. If I told Yu it was because I wanted to bring her to a place in the universe where love and death come face to face and become entwined forever, she’d think I was insane. Perhaps I could simply point to my thesis on intergalactic gravestones, which I had indeed been researching. I could tell Yu that in the old days, astronauts lived by an unspoken rule to never marry a colleague—so you’ll never find a couple’s grave here. Or perhaps I could resort to a kind of graveside spookiness.

I stayed silent. I felt as though our bodies were becoming part of the countless, silent graves. I was drifting off in my own reverie, hoping that Yu would somehow intuitively understand. But she only stared at me, nervous and half-crazed.

“Do you think I’m weird?” I asked, after a while.

“You’re… not like other people.”

After we returned to Earth, Yu fell ill. I thought it was due to our trip to the moon, and I was full of remorse. I devoted myself to caring for her, abandoning my research into the graves of Space until she began to recover.

I became so fascinated by the burial traditions of the planetary migration era that my father grew uneasy. Tombs and graves? They belonged to the distant past: people had forgotten them, cast them aside like Earth’s sister planets in the solar system, and are now looking to the depths of Space for new sights beyond. I became aware that this external behaviour was symptomatic of some deeper issue. Whenever I have been engrossed in my research, looked up from my papers and met my father’s gloomy gaze, my mind would return to that scene in the Martian graveyard when I was a boy; to the strange expressions on the grown-ups’ faces, as if something deep inside them had been stirred. Nowadays, people don’t talk about the past, especially the ancient astronauts who had perished, but they have never forgotten them. This much I know. Whenever they run into the subject, they would carefully skirt around it, with almost too much sensitivity. Institutional attitude in our culture has led to a kind of historical negation.

Living in the moment: that seems to be the force du jour of mankind. Perhaps we no longer think the past is important. Has it become something we don’t have time to remember? I don’t pretend to delve into the hidden cultural meanings behind this, nor am I a historicist. My obsession with graves lies in a feeling they inspire in me, a feeling akin to poetry. They exist simultaneously in the living world, in the here and now, and outside of it. Occasionally they interact with visitors of the present, but mainly they bide their silence, immersed in the bygone era that they also belong to. This is why they mesmerize me.

Whenever I thought about them in this way, Professor Ji would warn me that I was at the edge of an abyss. Our responsibilities are to uncover history and bring it to light, not to be driven by personal interest. Our aim is to help our ill-informed fellow humans understand the hardships and great achievements of our forefathers, the pioneers of space exploration.

The words of my silver-haired professor often rendered me speechless, but on the academic questions of the social customs of graves, we debated relentlessly. When Yu’s health was on the mend, the professor and I resumed our debate on the fundamental question of the sudden disappearance of graves in space.

“I still can’t agree with you, Professor. On this question, we’ve always had differing opinions.”

“Young man, have you found any new evidence?”

“I believe in field intuition. Old papers can only tell us so much, but there’s simply not enough information. You should leave Earth and travel around a bit.”

“I can’t compete with those young people in their obstinacy.”

“Maybe you’re right, Professor, but…”

“Do you know about the new discovery of the burial site on Cygnus A?”

“An unnamed grave, inscribed with only the date, which has pushed back the date of end of the Grave Burial Era.”

“If I’m correct, the highly influential paper on Technologism, ‘Proclamations of Planets’ was published around this time. Don’t you think there’s correlation?”

“You think this marks a new kind of cultural convention replacing an old one?”

“I believe that we will never find a later grave burial than this one. When Technologism ascended as the dominant concept, the social custom of gravestones became one of those mysteries of the universe.”

“Don’t you think this is too sudden a transition, Professor?”

“Its suddenness proves the temporal causation.”

“…there might be other reasons. At the time, Technologism was just taking root and gaining grass root support, but grave burial conventions had tens of thousands of years of history, and tombstones had been used across the universe for thousands of years. Nothing could suddenly destroy such a strong tradition. It’s obvious: it had been ingrained in the psyche of the ancients, in their collective consciousness.”

Professor Ji shrugged. The matter compiler had finished preparing our meal. It was only when we were eating that I noticed the professor’s hands were trembling. Not surprising: he was over two hundred years old. A complex emotion arose inside me. Death takes life from everyone: this was a fact that not even the Technologists could dispute. In what ways we exist after death remains a matter for private conjecture, deep within our hearts. The gravestones that still stand in great numbers across the universe are a demonstration that early mankind had already contemplated this question—or perhaps they had even built in allegories of their knowledge and conclusions within these markers and tombs? People no longer need burials. They do not understand the inscriptions on the ancient tombs, nor are they concerned to read them. Have present-day humans become fundamentally different from their ancestors?

Death is inevitable, but I was still anxious that the Professor might pass away before his time. Scholars interested in devoting their time to taphonomy were extremely rare. They worked in the shadows, often to no end.

I found my eyes glued to the photograph before me: it was a full-length image of the grave the professor mentioned. Located in a remote part of the Cygnus A constellation, it was only discovered by chance by a cargo ship. There’s a debate among grave scholars: what secret message was this grave trying to send us? Nobody had a definitive answer.

I found myself returning again and again to the image of this unique grave from various aspects. It resonated with my mind. Usually, gravestones are built in a cluster, forming vast graveyards with a sort of compulsory magnificence to counter-balance the isolated environment of a strange and uninhabited planet, but this solitary grave was an unprecedented exception. It was built on one of that star system’s smallest and least noticeable planets, as if by careful selection. From its locale, despite rotation and orbit, none of the system’s biggest planets can be seen, and every year, this little planet carries out a comet-like elliptical orbit around Cygnus A. When it reaches the point furthest from the sun it enters a period of protracted darkness. I could almost feel the loneliness of the world-weary soul buried there. This seemed so stark in contrast with most tombs of the universe, which were very particular about their grand settings—taking full advantage of the light from planets rising from the horizon, or settings featuring cliff edges many times higher than the Himalayas. Even from the dead, one felt the heroic spirit of the pioneer explorers of space. This grave possessed none of these common features.

You could also tell by its architectural style. At the time, tomb architecture emphasized the beauty of symmetry, and solid, solemn and grandiose forms conveying feelings of heroic pride. The giant pyramids of Venus and the imposing monoliths of Mars are outstanding examples of this popular model, but there wasn’t a hint of this in the lonely grave. It was small, squat and rough, but built in an extremely delicate suspension structure, giving the feeling that the space it occupied had been broken down and then reassembled. It almost felt as if time itself were in free flow around the orifices of the grave. It was clearly extraordinary. All the raw materials came from the ground it stood on, entirely made from the small planet’s rich resource of electrum ore. Popular materials of the time were specific compounds transported from Earth: this was very wasteful, but people were more concerned with the romantics back then.

Something else sparked my imagination about the buried subject. The grave was inscribed with the date it was made, and nothing else. Custom dictated that gravestones would feature the deceased’s name as a minimum, then status, experience, maybe the cause of death and an appropriate epigram. What circumstance caused this individual’s burial to be marked in such an unconventional fashion on Cygnus A?

The mystery deepens.

We can be almost certain that the owner of the grave was the last witness of Grave Burial Era. But exactly why there was a key change, no satisfactory explanation can be decided on. It’s precisely because of this controversy that we owe the whole of civilization a proper explanation. Grave scholars are limited by various factors. I had obviously wanted to visit Cygnus A myself, but no one would provide me with the funding. After all, this wasn’t a regular trip within the standard spaceways. And don’t forget, the conventions of society didn’t value our field highly.

I didn’t make it to Cygnus A for a long time, till fate finally cleared the path. Unexpected changes occurred in life, and I had changed with them. It wasn’t until I was one hundred years old, and marking the 70th anniversary of Professor Ji’s passing, that I suddenly remembered this grave, and with it the debates I had in my youth with the professor regarding intergalactic burial rites. By that time, leading taphologists had all—like my late master—scattered to the wind. Those who pursued this field had abandoned it one after another. Having spent over half my life researching the subject, to no great effect, I often woke in the night, hand pressed to my heart, asking myself: why am I still preoccupied with old corpses? Just as my master had predicted, I had been driven by self-interest, and would come to taste the bitter fruit of my own actions. Did I ever feel any true responsibility to history? Having lived to a hundred, I felt as if I’d only just woken from a dream: it was truly impossible to know one’s own fate.

Yu, the girlfriend of my youth, was now my wife: a middle-aged woman who never stopped nagging, blaming me for every misfortune she’d encountered since the time I took her to the graveyard on the moon. The shock of that had caused some strange disease: every year, on the day of our lunar trip, she would become distracted, paralysed, and mumble to herself all day long. The most advanced medical techniques had failed to cure her, and every time I returned to my research, her face would darken, and she would grow restless and fidgety. I’d quietly put down my work, step outside and look at the sky, as clear as it was seventy years ago. I would suddenly realize that I hadn’t left Earth for many years. Would I be spending the rest of my days earthbound with Yu?

My son Zhu[1] is a long-term stranger to Earth, having settled with his family in another galaxy, and as captain of a spaceship, he strides across the universe, gathering stardust on his shoulders. I think he must have visited planets with graveyards, and wondered what he thought of them. He’d never mentioned them to me, and I’d made a secret decision never to bring them up. It was my own father who’d brought me, all those years ago, on the trip which ended up on Mars, when I first saw those graves.

How the ordinary journeys between life and death had led the ancients to build such magnificent tombs across the universe remains a mystery, relegated to time and space.

Little by little, and without even meaning to, I began to let go of the pursuits of my youth, and to live my days in peace. The calmness of life on Earth dilutes the strongest of passions. That was something I hadn’t noticed before. People who busied themselves in space had very little chance to return to the old and rather decrepit planet that once nurtured them, whilst people on Earth didn’t concern themselves with vast changes happening in the depths of the universe.

That year, Zhu returned to Earth from Cygnus A, but the name of that system no longer caused any excitement in me. Due to the difference in gravity between galaxies, Zhu had grown strangely tall, and seemed more extraterrestrial than a human. His local culture had made him somber and silent. Sometimes I couldn’t help but think that Yu and I were merely shadow forms of Zhu’s existence in this world. Whenever I met my son, we never had much to say to each other.

Zhu poured a drink for me with bright shining eyes. He was strangely talkative that night, and I found myself responding to his unusual verve.

“How’s XinNing[2]?” That’s my grandson’s name.

“He’s good, but he misses his grandpa.”

“Why didn’t you bring him with you?”

“I did ask him, but he can’t stand Earth climate. Last time, he broke into a huge rash when he got home.”

“Really? Then don’t bring him again.”

I drained my glass, and found Zhu observing me out of the corner of his eye.

“Father,” he shifted uneasily in the chair, “I’d like to ask you something.”

“Ask me then.” I eyed him doubtfully.

“I pilot a ship, and have been to many star systems through the years. I’ve seen a lot more than you have here on Earth. But there’s one thing that I still can’t really understand; it bothers me, and it’s why I’ve come to you for advice.”

“Sure.”

“I know you researched graves and tombs in space, in your youth. You never told me, but I know. What I want to know is… why do they fascinate you?”

I stood up, walking to the window so my face was turned from Zhu. I never thought he’d ask that question. Those things had broken into Zhu’s mind, like they did my father’s and mine, stirring unease within our souls. Did the ancients of past eras wield some kind of hidden magic that caused their descendants to be eternally tormented by their restless spirits?

“Father, I was merely asking. I didn’t mean anything by it,” Zhu mumbled, like a child.

“Sorry, Zhu, I can’t answer this question. Hmph, why do gravestones fascinate me? If I knew, I’d have told you everything to do with gravestones when you were a kid. But, I didn’t. It’s an abyss, Zhu.”

I saw Zhu lower his head, as if soundlessly regretting his brashness. To ease his discomfort, I swallowed my emotions, returned to the table, and poured him a drink. Then I sat down, studied his eyes, and asked, like any father full of concern for his child would:

“Zhu, tell me what you saw.”

“Graves. Big ones, small ones… Lots of them.”

“Of course you would, in your line of work. But you’ve never mentioned this.”

“I also saw crowds of people. Swarming to graveyards across the planets like bees.”

“What?”

“The universe has gone crazy. People are obsessed with the dead—there are thousands of ships parked on Mars alone, just to see the graves.”

“Are you serious?”

“That’s why I asked you about the draw of these graves?”

“What do they want with them?”

“They want to open them up!”

“Why would they do that?”

“They say there are ancient secrets buried within.”

“What kind of secrets?”

“The secrets of life and death!”

“No, there’s none of that. The ancients built graves out of innocent wonder.”

“I wouldn’t know, Father. That’s what you all say. You’re not fobbing me off, are you?”

“What? Do you want to open them up too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re all mad! They’ve slumbered for thousands of years. The dead belong to the past. Who knows what’ll happen if you bring them back!”

“But we belong to the present, Father. And we want to fulfill our needs.”

“Is this the way of thinking you’ve developed out there? I’m telling you, there’s a pile of corpses, bones, and nothing else!”

Zhu’s return had brought me a sense of the dramatic developments taking place beyond Earth’s tranquility.

My passion had cooled, but others had found another form of my old obsession. What Zhu told me drove me to distraction. Was it that long ago that Yu and I walked on the deserted moon, to pay our respects to those tombs that no one else cared to visit? The cold, the loneliness, and the desolation had left an indelible mark on my heart. I remember telling Yu that it used to be a lively place, yet today, Zhu tells me that it’s bustling again. Was this cyclical reversal predestined? Or was it controlled by some unknown force in the galactic ether? The Age of Space Exploration had given way to the Age of Technologism. Was this now the harbinger of another new Era? I was filled with both excitement and dread.

It was as if I had been brought back in time. Those endless graveyards filled my vision, basking in the ambiance I had remembered so well. The resting places were monuments, the monuments resting places; emanating an eternal sense of inevitability.

And then I thought about the meaning of Zhu’s words. I couldn’t help but agree with him. The mystery of the grave was the mystery of life and death—therein lies its so-called charisma. Not a morbid fascination with the necrotic. That is what drew scholars to them. In fact, no one can forget the graves. A vague image of the tight-faced Technologists floated into my mind’s eye.

Digging up graves seemed an unusual method, but why hadn’t the scholars thought of it all those years ago? Was it the taboo of disturbing the dead? Perhaps they feared that, if the ancients had really buried objects within their graves, then they, as scholars trading in theories of social customs, would have been put out of a job.

When Zhu left us, Yu relapsed into her malaise. My mind was taken up again with seeking a doctor to treat her. This activity brought such stress that I could not believe my mind found itself wandering. I suddenly recalled that Zhu had said he’d flown in from Cygnus A—a name I had been all-too familiar with. I had still kept that full-length photograph from decades ago, taken at the time of its discovery. The last grave of humanity.

2

From a manuscript found by archeologists on a minor planet in the constellation of Cygnus A:

I am not writing this for future readers, because I have no intention of playing to the crowd. In our time, autobiographies are like hairs on an ox, innumerable and worthless. The captain of a star-frigate would reach the end of his life and write about the hardships and perils of all his journeys, like an ancient emperor committing his great deeds to posterity. But I want no such thing. My profession and experiences are both commonplace and mundane. I’m writing to alleviate the lonely hours before my death. I’ve always liked writing, and were it not my destiny to be astro-gravemaker, I’d have probably become a sci-fi writer.

Today is the day I enter my grave. I have chosen this small planet to build my final resting place, because it’s nice and quiet, far away from the clamour of civilization and space travel. I spent a week constructing it, alone. Sourcing materials is very time-consuming, as well as difficult. We rarely use raw materials from the location, unless the deceased is a victim of unusual circumstances—when Earth would be unable to supply pre-ordered materials—or what is pre-ordered would be unsuitable for the local environment. For the deceased and their families, this is usually a cruel reality they must come to terms with, but whenever I’ve had to work against convention I’ve always found my own way.

I have not, as convention dictates, engraved the headstone with my life’s achievements. That seems a ridiculous thing to do, doesn’t it? For my entire life, I have built countless graves for others, and I have only ever engraved their names, statuses and reasons of death.

I am now sitting in a grave, no different to any other I’ve dug, writing about my past. The roof of my grave is installed with solar panels for heating and lighting, and the whole chamber is just big enough for one person. It’s a cosy place to spend my last days, which I intend to fill by writing til I no longer feel like it any more.

I was born on Earth, but my youth was spent on Mars. At the time, the whole world was gripped in a feverish onslaught by the first wave of Space Exploration. Everyone was drawn to it. I myself couldn’t wait to leave behind my interest in literature, to sign up for the one and only Mars Academy, unaware I’d be assigned to the Space Emergency And Rescue Corp.

Among our studies, there was a module on grave construction and engineering. It also taught students the proper and dignified manner in which deceased astronauts should be put to rest, and the great importance of such gestures.

I remember, I didn’t do particularly well in any of the other classes except this one, for which I often got top marks. Thinking back, I remember as a child that if I found some poor dead animal, I would bury it with my own hands rather than just dispose of it. We used a third of our study time for theory, and the rest was practical. First we designed and constructed large numbers of models within the college grounds, and then began our field assignments. We would often build small graves near large canyons, before moving onto bigger ones on plains. Just before graduation, we went on a few interplanetary internships—once to Venus, once to a belt of small planets, and twice to Pluto.

There was an incident on our last trip to Pluto. The shuttle was carrying a large quantity of special materials for building a tomb in the icy environs on this planet. During landing, the shuttle was caught in a meteor shower, killing two of the crew members. We thought the excursion would be cancelled, but by the teacher’s orders, we were to put his teachings into practice. If you visit Pluto today, you may still see a semi-circular tomb near the equator. There, resting in peace, are two of my classmates. That was my job. Due to my anxiety and panic the grave was a mess, and whenever I think of it now, I’m still overwhelmed with remorse.

After graduation I was assigned to SEARC’s Third Division. It wasn’t till I was deployed that I learned that the Third Division’s only duty was the engineering and construction of graves, tombs, and burial sites.

Frankly, that was not what I had signed up for. My dream was to captain a space shuttle, or failing that, to work in a galactic metropolis or space station. Many of my classmates got much better postings. The ones who would eventually come to need my services had ‘conquered’ a few galaxies, earning long rows of honorary ZhongZiXing, Neutron Star Medals. When they were placed in their graves, people stood silently in solemn respect, paying no mind to the gravemaker standing to one side.

I never thought I’d be in the Third Division for the rest of my life.

Having got to this point, I’m stopping to take a deep breath, amazed at the clarity of my memory. I hesitate a little now because there are some things that should be forgotten, but let’s see how it goes as I write on.

The first site I was sent to on a mission was Alpha Centauri, a solar system with seven planets. Our shuttle landed on the fourth. Local officials welcomed us with solemn respect, adding: “At last, you’re here.”

There were three astronauts in total who had passed on. They came into contact with radiation from an astral wave without protection, and perished as a result. I quietly breathed a sigh of relief, because mentally, I had been preparing myself for mangled or severed limbs.

This time there were five of us from the Third Division. We wasted no time in asking the officials if they had any special requests. They replied: “We’ll leave it up to you. You’re the experts: if there’s anyone we trust, it’s you. But please bury all three together.”

It was I who drew up the designs that time. On our very first assignment, the boss had entrusted me with such an important task, no doubt intent on nurturing my talent. It was then that we realised that this project would be the very first grave on Alpha Centauri. I began to recall the guidance from our teachers, and the processes we had employed for the practicals. The success of a grave does not depend on the splendour of its exterior, but on the essence it conveys. To put it simply, we needed to design the monument appropriate to the lives led by the deceased and spirit of the times they lived in.

The final design turned out to be a giant cube, strong as a boulder. It symbolised the immovable place of astronauts in space exploration. Its shape gave the feeling of the quiet and stillness of time and space, suggesting an eternal stance. The scene of death was a never-ending plain, and there our gravestone would be erected, with no obstructions on any side, just the sky falling like a lake. Everything in the scene had clear-cut and distinct outlines. The only shortcoming of the tomb was that it did not concisely convey their calling as astronauts. But as my first independent piece, it had far exceeded the usual standard of my school work. We actually completed the project in just two days. All the materials came as pre-ordered components, mass-produced on Earth. All we needed to do was assemble them.

At dawn, we lined up in a row and stood quietly for a few minutes, saluting with our eyes the tomb that was just about to be inaugurated. This was the custom. The gravestone appeared bright and translucent in the blue mist unique to this planet, looking profound and poignant. The boss inclined his head, ever so gently. A sign of approval and admiration. I was stunned.

I had never thought that death could possess such unique meaning, or that our group would be the ones to give it expression. The tomb shall exist for posterity, as enduringly as the earth and sky—our materials would keep their shape for a hundred million years.

The deceased were yet to be interred, and we waited quietly for the ceremony to begin. When the sun on Alpha Centauri had risen to arm’s height, people started arriving in a slow trickle. They were puffed out in ceremonial garments, the heavy helmets on their heads suppressing their individuality. The ambiance was unusual, a kind of terror amidst the solemnity. The number of deceased was not particularly high, but humans had only established a few centres on the planet back then. To have three of their number die was something of a crisis.

I no longer remember the scene exactly. I can’t say if the responsible parties spoke their words of condolence, or expressed their thanks to us first. I’m also vague about which melody was playing on loop; only that it was strange, conveyed the sense of the alien, and aimed to express a kind of majesty and grandeur. What I do remember was the rumble of the drone that flew overhead, and which after flying in circles for a while, began to scatter tiny platinum flowers. Due to the weaker gravitational field of the planet, the platinum flowers danced in the air, staying afloat for an age. The view was deeply moving. By now, everyone was clapping with all their might. Where had this ritual come from? And ultimately, why did they ask us to come a million miles to build a tomb for their dead?

It was we, as undertakers, who would take the deceased into their graves. With the exception of the boss, all four of us went to carry the coffin. By this point, the clamour at the scene had stopped, the platinum flowers and drone both gone. On the west side of the tomb, the side facing our solar system, was a small entrance passage. We carried the three coffins in one after the other, wishing them peaceful rest. It was during this part that I felt that something wasn’t quite right. But at the time I said nothing.

On our way back to Earth, I put my thoughts to a qianbe[3].

“Why were the coffins so light? They felt like the prop ones from the academy.”

“Sshhh!” He looked around him. “Didn’t the boss tell you? There’s no one inside!”

“Didn’t they die of radiation?”

“You’re going to hear that a lot, so the shock will wear off. That’s what they say, it’s radiation, but it’s more like evaporation. Not even scraps left. Just a lie to calm the people on Alpha C.”

Just a lie to calm the people on Alpha C! I would never forget these words. Throughout my career, I would come to witness countless cases of mysterious disappearances. So, my glorious design was but a yiguanzhong[4], a mere marker for the lost! The amusing thing was that only a small handful of people knew that its fantastical exterior was hiding an empty secret inside.

Having worked in the Third Division for a long time now, I have slowly been able to acquaint myself with all the related industries. Our services covered the vast parameters of known space on which humankind set foot and operate, so we had to know all the special-access closed flight routes between all the major star systems, which were vital for getting to locations in the shortest time—though even this way of doing things was falling behind the times, as astronauts scattered themselves further and further across the universe. So we first established offices on each planet, and then started our ship-tailing service: as soon as we could foresee that a certain intergalactic endeavour involved high risks, the Third Division would send a gravemaker’s ship as part of the entourage.

This required us to be at the forefront of space travel technology—we have a good number of first-rate captains in our division. Other pilots got angry that they couldn’t ditch them in flight, telling themselves it was just because they had “bad luck on their tail”. We also had to be aware of all kinds of new processes within the undertaking trade, as well as all the industry-wide changes, adopting unique approaches according to the specific conditions of each planet and the special requirements of the clients, whilst also ensuring we didn’t break consistency of style in our own work. Above all, it was most important—as an intergalactic undertaker—to possess extraordinary physical energy and mental robustness. Years of toil across the stars and relentless encounters with death had made us into super-humans. Sooner or later, without knowing it, workers in the Third Division began to shed the ordinary emotions of humanity. In fact, if you’d been in the Third Division for a while, you came to feel the coldness and darkness within conventional existence, and came to despise it. Death was the taboo of the whole universe, and we were the only ones who could joke about it.

Ever since my first day in the Third Division, I’ve considered the sacred significance of this institution. According to official records, the first space grave was built on the moon. It’s a perfectly natural view, but it’s doubtful that anyone would have built a couple’s grave out there from a sudden wave of inspiration. Later, some people joked that the grave was disturbing the Sea of Tranquility. In actual fact, before this grave, memorials for deceased astronauts had long been built on Earth. As soon as the custom spread across the galaxies, it began a natural and intimate bond with our ancient traditions. In the age of space exploration, humans once again cast off many outmoded conventions—but by contrast, the trend of grave-building grew more and more popular: a thought-provoking occurrence. Now that our advanced technologies have replaced the hand-carving and shoulder-carrying of the Shang Era, we could build graves that make the pyramids of Egypt pale in comparison.

When the Third Division was first set up, there were people who doubted its worth—but its worth was proved by its perfect synchronisation with the development of things. When the Big Exploration really began, there were casualties in huge numbers, which caused consternation among officials and scientists. The cruelty of the universe far exceeded anyone’s expectations, but there was no way that exploration would ever be allowed to cease. Death became far more present than it was on Earth, and we had to confront questions about our very existence. What is our place in the universe? What is the purpose of evolution? What is the value of life? Is the mission of humanity absurd? These were the topics that mass media raucously regurgitated.

No matter the outcome of the debates, the place of the Third Division was becoming more ingrained day by day. After the first few years, it was making a small profit, but more importantly, it had gained the governmental support of Earth and a few key planets. When sacred obelisk and pyramid clusters began to appear across the moon, Mars and Venus, the last criticisms ceased. These meticulously constructed tombs could withstand the fierce attack of meteor showers: their structures were stable, and their appearance magnificent. They would last for centuries, unscathed. People realised that the remains of their compatriots, which had been floating among the stars, could once again find a place to belong. Death became something worth being proud of. Perhaps gravestones were an expression of that age-old concept of Man triumphing over Nature. The transitioning of grave building from a spontaneous act by individuals, to an official ritual of necessity, was a masterstroke of the Third Division: it maintained its relevance until hearts and customs had set, lending the institution grace, poise and a natural place within society.

These days, no one doubts the worthwhile nature of the Third Division. Even those renowned battle-hardened captains show us immense respect when they meet us. The burial customs have evolved into a kind of philosophy of the space age, reaching even a level of mysticism. Suffice to say, no one on the outside of the organisation could ridicule us. If they had, the collapse in confidence would have destroyed all feelings of value across the known universe—the staunch culture of Earth, the sole beliefs holding up those who constantly risk their lives between black holes and supernovas.

If there were any complications, they were dealt with within the division. The longer you spent in the Third Division, the clearer its internal workings became. Some things were kept only within the inner circle, and have never passed beyond it—one reason for this is the strict code by which we abide, and the other is the mental block we had each developed to cope with the work. Every year, there would be suicides among the division. Even writing these words now, my heart is racing, and I feel like I’m stabbing myself with a knife. I once discreetly asked a colleague about the suicides. He replied, “I can’t talk. They’re all good people. One day, you’ll come to understand how they felt.” As soon as he’d said this, he slipped away like a ghost. As I grew older, having handled many corpses and remnants, death was no longer an abstract concept, but had become a specific image fixed in my head. But I have to say, the coping mechanism I’d developed was entirely different from those who took their own lives.

There was a time when the whole of the division was mired in a cloud of uncertainty. I remember someone had asked a question: who would bury us if we died? The query had been triggered by the number of suicides, and, contained within it a cascade of inquiry. We looked at one another, unable to form a decent reply even if it would have been auspicious to do so. And so we left the question unanswered. This was around the time the top levels were investigating the ‘imploration for change report’ incident. It was said that someone in the division had sent a report to the United Planets Council, expressing dissatisfaction with the current procedures. One point, concerning the use of custom-ordered materials, left an impression on me. Normally, no matter how far or near the burial site was, the materials were transported from Earth. This was done out of respect for the feelings of the deceased. More importantly, it was tradition, and tradition ought to be sacrosanct. The rule had even been laid out in the black and white of the ‘Emergency Rescue Manual.’

Nobody could stand the way the report talked about it, deconstructing the literal cornerstones of our craft—which had been a constant right from the beginning—as a cynical and wasteful use of resources. The report tirelessly discussed the technical details and viability of sourcing materials from the burial sites themselves. Everyone knew the outcome: the author of the report was stripped of the right to leave Earth. Personally we found the report’s tone traitorous, drawing attention to courses of action we should have considered. We were stunned by the report’s language, intimated by its boldness, and the fact that, later on, some new recruits actually tried to test its propositions.

There was an incident when a ship carrying grave materials to the Andromeda region encountered a fuel leak en route. According to protocol, it should have turned back, but the captain ejected the materials, using the remaining fuel to take the lighter vehicle to its destination, and used the local pumice to build a grave. The act shocked the world, and the grave was later destroyed and rebuilt. The perpetrator was punished. But I will write more on that later.

Spending paragraphs just talking about my feelings would be difficult, so let me carry on telling the stories of our work. I’ll continue recording what I think of as the most ordinary events, because they can most vividly illustrate the uniqueness of our trade.

We were once given an assignment for which the brief differed from the usual. No specifications of planet or mission detail, just that the gravemaker’s craft be fully equipped with tools and weapons, and to head to a set of coordinates between Mars and Saturn and wait for further instructions. When we arrived, we found SEARC were already busy at work. We asked them, “Hey, are you ok with this? If not, leave it with us.” There was no reply, but there seemed to be an air of apprehension coming from the other ship. It was only later that we found out a ship had disappeared among the small belt of planets—the most advanced craft humanity had built at the time. The Columbus was famous. Its captain had been likened to the ship’s namesake. And on this voyage, he’d been transporting the leaders from five major planets.

We spent three days in space. The search party had found a hold-full of fragments from the wrecked craft, and it was time for our work to begin. Separating human remains from ship fragments was a time-consuming and exhausting task, but everybody performed outstandingly, and finally managed to assemble three corpses. The Columbus had a compliment of eight. The cause of the accident was generally concluded to be an 800-pound meteor which had struck the ship horizontally across its body, triggering the explosion. To have such a tragedy occur practically on Earth’s doorstep filled us with regret, but the loss and devastation was felt throughout the universe.

“They were too careless,” concluded the Head of the Navigation Bureau at the tomb-unveiling ceremony. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. These people were doing fine on Earth, but for some reason had become careless, neglectful children the moment they’d entered space, so the Third Division was set up to take care of them. These were words that came from the mouth of the Head of Navigation! Still, we were too frightened to laugh. Although the three corpses we’d reconstituted were already laid to rest in the underground chamber, their bloody visages seemed to project through the thick walls of the tomb, manifesting before us. Their faces cold and stern, their eyes open, as incredulous as they were in that final moment of life.

There was something that prevented us from ever losing our restraint. We couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, but all gravemakers understood this, and always went about everything with great care. There were too many graves in the universe, may they all be safe.

During that period, though, despite our usually heavy workloads, we built only this one grave.

In most people’s eyes, the presence of graves altered a planet’s landscape. The astronauts had lost their lives to the planet, but ultimately it was the planet that gave way.

At this point, I’m pausing to look at my hands as I type. They are well and truly those of a gravemaker. Looking at this pair of old hands, with veins protruding, dry as logs, it is hard to imagine that they had built so many mansions for the dead. They’ve often felt like a pair of sacred tools, free from any control by my thoughts, carrying out heaven’s mandate.

All gravemakers had hands like this. I have always thought that, in any grave building project, the fundamental operations were bereft of any mechanical direction, or even our brains. Our ten fingers were spiritually attuned to the universe, and in many cases, we believed in their magic. In contrast, our thoughts remained unwieldy, coloured by prejudice and suspicion, and prone to introduce dangers whilst creating graves in the hostility of space.

In the heart of the gravemaker can often be found deep-rooted contradictions. Those in the profession who had taken their own lives were pessimists who saw the deceptive side of graves; but at the same time, the most exquisite graves had come from their hands, comparable in beauty to any wonder of nature. I staunchly believe that this depth of contradiction could only exist in our kind, while the rest of the world are drawn to the eternity of the gravestones. Sometimes we felt embarrassed at the obsession they show.

I want to talk about women next.

When I was little, and saw girls of about my age playing, totally unaware of my existence, I would be filled with a kind of emptiness. I believed that at that exact moment in time, there was a girl somewhere in the universe just for me, and that she would fill what was missing from my life. This was fate, and could not be changed, even by the power that arranges it. When I got a little older, I fell for those female astronauts who flew back and forth across space like angels; from their faces, bodies, limbs, emanated a heroic air that they’d brought back from Vega or Andromeda, making them thoroughly lovely, and leaving me in rapture. Then I would notice that the death rate among them was no lower than the male astronauts, and my heart would burn for them all the more.

I secretly dreamt of dating those heroines. Back then, the Galactic Navigation Academy had yet to open its doors to me. This would decide my fate. When I was later informed of the taboo within the astronautic circles, I nearly passed out. It was statute that no astronauts could ever be allowed anything more than a work-based relationship with each other, on the grounds that they would be too distracted to deal with the complexities of the universe. During the Big Exploration, someone had scientifically proven this, hardly expecting that the Bureau would give their tentative and tacit acknowledgement. For a time, it preoccupied the minds of most astronauts, but soon after, most men in the shuttle program started to believe that an astronaut girlfriend was bad luck, so the prohibition was set without objection. You try breaking it? Then you’ll really “stink”, your friends will distance themselves from you, and you’ll find yourself unable to find a job for no reason in particular—or perhaps you’ll find yourself demoted from first officer to steersman, and then to cabin crew, and eventually to some place like a ship breaker plant on Earth. I thought that Navigation school would provide me with the opportunity to realize my childhood dreams, but it had instead banished them. I didn’t really have a choice. This is how the universe is: it doesn’t leave you with a choice.

It was only after I’d roamed the galaxies for a few years as a gravemaker that I began to understand the depth to which this custom had ingrained itself within our circles. The idea that women were trouble was very widespread, a superstition that had lodged itself in the soul of every astronaut. Almost everyone I’d met could bring up at least a handful of examples to prove their prejudices.

From then on, I’d carefully observe those female astronauts, and try to see what was different or anomalous about them. In my eyes, they were as bright as a cloudless starry sky, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not see a single seed of disaster in them. Their actions during flights had even led me to believe, that in certain turns of events, women are more capable than men.

One time, during a year of intense solar spots, we buried a dozen female astronauts on a single assignment. They had died during an earthquake. They had just landed on their destination planet, preparing to work at a medical centre that had just been completed. The survivors were their friends and colleagues, and also mainly women. As requested, we engraved on the headstones those things that the deceased loved when they were alive: plants or little animals, crafts, jewelry.

When the memorial ceremony began, I heard a voice next to me. “They shouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

I took a sideways glance and saw a petite young woman in a tight space suit.

“They shouldn’t have asked us to come so early, the corpses haven’t even been put together,” I said, full of pity.

“I’m saying that we shouldn’t have come out into space.” She spoke in a low and heavy voice that wrenched my heart.

“So you also think women shouldn’t come to space?”

“We’re too weak. It’s a man’s world out here.”

“I disagree,” I said, full of feeling, and found myself observing her. I had never really spoken to a female astronaut, and at that moment, all the men and women present turned to look at the two of us. This was how I met Yu.

At this point, I stop writing, close my eyes, and for a few minutes I savour that moment, the boundless sweetness of her memory mixed with impending bitterness.

After I came to know Yu, I realised I had broken the taboo, but the impulses of my youth had swelled once again in my heart. I believed again that there was one girl who was meant for me. I had been waiting for a long time, and of course she was a beautiful and excellent female astronaut.

Yu was a nurse. Even now, we still need the traditional professions. The difference is that today’s angels in white travel by spaceship, crossing star systems: a free and unconventional existence fraught with thousands of dangers.

As I write these words in my grave, I have only just seen, after all these years, that I’d failed to notice the contradiction between our professions. I was always putting people that she had once saved into the grave. When she was alive I never thought about it, and after she died I no longer had to. But why have I only now realised this? I feel I ought to give our chance meeting a term—”serendipity of the grave?” I must thank, or blame those twelve female corpses.

On that day, during our return flight, I was feeling so flustered that I failed to hear the loud conversations between my colleagues, discussing the latest gossip: something about a missing employee, whose body had now been found in a distant outpost. He’d been visiting a brothel there, and was killed by a tile that fell from a solar panel. I thought the event was pretty meaningless at the time, and my mind was much happier thinking back to the girl that stood next to me at the burial site and her unusual speech. Then a satellite passed over the bright side of the planet’s surface, visible from the side windows of our craft, casting a shadow that sent a chill down my spine.

Yu and I wrote to each other in secret for two months, we had actually only met three times. What happened around these meetings—I must write them down, they have troubled me through the latter half of my life, and in the end were what sent me to the grave.

The first time was when I contracted a strange illness. I had fits and became delirious, mumbling all day, my limbs paralyzed. Tests showed that my organs were functioning fine and they had no idea how to treat me, though obviously I couldn’t perform my duties during these attacks. It was around this time that I began to hear from Yu, saying that she’d been sent out to a this or that area of space to administer medical care. When she reported her safe return to the central medical station, I would suddenly recover from my sickness.

I can’t deny that this seemed like divine retribution, and certainly seemed to be connected to Yu. I prayed it was just a coincidence.

And then the greatest tragedy to occur since the founding of the Third Division took place. Our crew were ordered to head to the 70th Star District. On the way, we would pass the planet Yu was stationed on. So I urged the captain to make a stop on this planet, to refuel our shuttle. He agreed at once and the helmsman put the coordinates into the computer. It couldn’t have been a more ordinary operation, but the problems soon began. We had clearly entered the star system Yu was in, but we could not find the planet. The carrier signal was clear as day, showing that the control centre was operating normally, and the planet was nearby, but though we had followed the prescribed course, the ship seemed to have fallen into a time dilation.

I have never seen such horror on the captain’s face. He shouted, ordering all hands to double check every device and instrument, to adjust all the systems, but just like my strange illness, there was no explanation, and therefore no course of action. At last, we all stopped our panicked actions, and the captain, staring daggers at us, demanded, “Who snuck a girl onboard?”

Hesitantly, we returned to our berths, and awaited our deaths. After a while though, the disturbance outside ceased, and the shuttle seemed to regain its balance. I opened the cabin door and checked out the situation. I could not believe my eyes when I found that we had returned to Earth’s orbit. I had returned, but the other seven crew members were now remnants. Even now, the shock prevents me from clearly recalling the detailed appearance of my companions, I only remember their hands, which they were all holding up, like miniature, shriveled, dead trees.

The event caused a huge shock in the division. After a six-month investigation the case was closed, unresolved. For a period of time after that, I lived with the captain’s despairing cries ringing in my ear. I don’t believe for a second that he really thought there was a woman hiding on the ship; it was just a commonly believed curse for astronauts. Yet I was afraid to face the fact; why did the entire crew, except for me, perish? Why did it happen at the moment we approached the planet where Yu was stationed? What power was it that sent the pilotless spacecraft back to Earth, with no flight guidance?

The taboo of women kept rising in my heart. But another voice fought to deny it.

Not long after that, I saw Yu again. She was absolutely fine, and when she saw me, she appeared uncharacteristically joyful. As soon as I saw her, I wanted to tell her that I’d nearly become a ghost—but without knowing why, I refrained. I loved her deeply, despite everything. I strongly believed that if some power was turning the wheels of fate, my life force and Yu’s could resist its torque.

Didn’t I live?

As I said, I had known Yu for just two months, and two months after that, she died. She’d wanted me to take her to see the graves I’d built, to see the work I was most proud of. The girl’s spirit was higher than the sky, and she was afraid of neither gods nor demons. I grew concerned, but my will was no match for hers. Her death was again a simple thing. The tomb I took her to wasn’t my best, but it was still something very special. We climbed up the 300-foot-high structure to where there was a vent of several metres’ circumference, from which you could view the vast open chamber, all the way down to its polished granite floor. In high spirits, I pointed it out to her, “If you looked through here, you can…” She lowered her head, lost her balance, and tumbled through the hole.

Later, I found out she had vertigo.

A streak of starlight grinned treacherously in the distance. A ship flew past, navigating with extreme care. And then a terrifying silence.

I asked a close colleague to bury Yu. Why did I not do it myself? At the time I had grown fearful of death’s presence. The colleague quietly asked me who she was.

“Someone from Earth I met on my last holiday,” I lied.

“According to the manual, Earth people shouldn’t be buried in space, and aren’t permitted to have memorial stones built for them.”

“That’s why I asked for your help. The grave doesn’t have to be big. This girl, she’d always wanted to be an astronaut—right up to the moment of her death, poor thing.”

The colleague left, and returned.

He told me Yu was buried near Beta Ceti, and he took the initiative of giving her astronaut status on her headstone.

“Thank you so much. With this, she’ll rest in peace.”

“Luckily she wasn’t a real astronaut, or else it’d probably have been your grave.”

For a long time, I was afraid to go to that system again, let alone visit Yu’s grave. When I was older and felt I’d fully grasped my destiny, I wanted to go and visit my long-dead lover. I landed the shuttle on the planet my colleague told me of, and I searched for the grave for half a day—fruitlessly. I felt uneasy, but I stayed a while before re-boarding the shuttle and returning to Earth. Then I dragged my colleague along to Beta Ceti.

“Didn’t you say it was here?”

“Yes, among a large cluster of graves!”

“Look!”

The planet was completely desolate: not a fragment of human activity had survived. No trace of Yu’s grave, or anybody else’s.

“Bizarre,” said the colleague. “I’m certain it’s here.”

“I believe you. We’ve all been burying people for decades. There’s something odd about this.”

The pitch black universe protruded from the horizon. The stars, vigorous and vibrant, winked at us playfully. My colleague and I suddenly forgot about the ground under our feet, and began to contemplate the starry sky.

“Now, that’s the real grave!” Pointing at it, I felt the cold envelop my entire body, and strangely, my feet had clicked together by themselves, as if standing to attention.

Back then I remembered thinking that my time in the Third Division was limited.

Like its mysterious formation, there were no signs warning of the Third Division’s dissolution. Before it was disbanded, there was an increasing number of strange occurrences throughout the universe. Vast clusters of graves disappeared, as if they evaporated from time and space. This was an unbelievable phenomenon, and the truth has always been concealed from the general population, but gravemakers will carry it anxiously to the end of their days. Weren’t the materials guaranteed for hundreds of millions of years? There were still some graves remaining, mainly situated in or around our solar system where the scent of humanity is the strongest. As we reached further out, the Third Division built many graves further from the heart of humanity, and those were the ones which had all disappeared, leaving no trace. Did the planets reject them, or accept them?

We seemed to have touched upon a raw nerve, and woken the universe. Some extremists argue it had always been awake, but just chosen to wait til then to intervene.

During those times, my mystery illness would return almost weekly, and in my delirium I would see Yu.

“I killed you,” I mumbled.

Yu said nothing.

“If we’d known there was no way to live in harmony with the universe, we wouldn’t have broken the taboo.”

Yu said nothing.

“The curse was true.”

Yu said nothing, but turned and walked away.

I felt this was an indisputable sign. A sign for a new grave to be built.

So that leads me to my present situation. Cygnus A is a distant world, more distant than any planet on which the graves had mysteriously disappeared. I came here intentionally. I wanted to build a completely different type of grave. You can say it’s appalling, or insignificant. If one had built a grave like this in the Third Division, it would have been a blasphemy against the dead. I believe I know the universe’s intentions. The kind, old, universe wants us to walk as one and rest in peace as one, but how could humankind with their naivety and self-loathing, believe this!

My contradiction lies in the fact that although I’ve broken tradition, I have ultimately chosen to spend eternity in a grave. There is perhaps a little pride in my work there.

And now, I don’t think there’s anything more worth writing.

What I want to do is just lie here quietly, let the endless darkness take me, and reunite with Yu.

Notes

Although “Tombs of the Universe” was first published in 1991, it wasn’t officially available in China for nearly a decade. At the time of first publication, Han Song began working for China’s official state-run press, Xinhua News. He has continued to work in state media. This may seem at odds with his science-fiction works, like “The Hospital”, “Subway”, and “Red Star Over America” which all have dark, pessimistic undertones, and strong anti-authoritarian themes. Perhaps it actually makes sense though, with Han’s high position and literary popularity providing him a platform to address issues within the country, and protect him from too many run-ins with the official censor.

“Tombs of the Universe” is, at its heart, a conversation about tradition and technology, and is especially pertinent now, during China’s space age. There are many speculative works about life in space, life on other planets, but death is present only incidentally. Funerals, and that act of letting go and moving on, is perhaps one of the major rites of humanity. This story is not only an examination of the hazards of space exploration, humanity’s hubris set against its limitations, but also an exploration of how technological developments interact with society, culture and customs. We see how certain customs are reinvented in light of fresh developments, and old, outdated superstitions returning (like the attitudes among male astronauts to having women on board a vessel), reflecting how slow humanity’s social progress can be despite its technological advancements. This is rather a frank consideration of beliefs, customs and their evolution, and the very human failing of allowing tragic accidents to fuel belief is just another example of quite how flawed we are.

Han Song’s work is acerbic and incisive. He often combines social commentary with literary beauty and charming senses of wonder that are at odds with each other, yet the voices of jaded pessimism, and passionate enthusiasm, can both be seen in each protagonist. The contemplative, philosophical tone of this work and the post-humanist nature of some of its concerns makes it stand out among contemporary Chinese science fiction.

[1] Zhu 筑, meaning to build or construct.

[2] XinNing 心宁, means calmness of heart.

[3] Qianbei 前辈, term of deference for someone older than oneself for whom one has a lot of respect.

[4] Yiguanzhong 衣冠冢, traditionally a grave in which the belongings and burial rites of the individual are placed, as the body can’t be found.

Han Song, science fiction writer, chairman of the Science Fiction Writers section of the Chinese Science Writers Association. Winner of multiple Yinhe, Xingyun and Tokyo Literature Awards. His signature works include “Subway”, “Hospital”, “The Red Sea”, Red Star Over America, Tombs of the Universe, and “Regenerated Bricks”. He has been translated into English, French, Italian, Japanese and other languages.

Xueting C. Ni was born in Guangzhou, during China's re-opening to the West. Having lived in cities across China, she emigrated with her family to Britain at the age of 11, where she continued to be immersed in Chinese culture, alongside her British education, realising ultimately that this gave her a unique a cultural perspective, bridging her Eastern and Western experiences. After graduating in English Literature from the University of London, she began a career in the publishing industry, whilst also translating original works of Chinese fiction. She returned to China in 2008 to continue her research at Central University of Nationalities, Beijing. Since 2010, Xueting has written extensively on Chinese culture and China's place in Western pop media, working with companies, institutions and festivals, to help improve understanding of China’s heritage, culture and innovation, and introduce its wonders to new audiences. Xueting has contributed to the BBC, Tordotcom and the Guangdong Art Academy. She has created non-fiction works, including From Kuanyin to Chairman Mao: An Essential Guide to Chinese Deities (Weiser Books) and curated fiction in translation, including Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction (Solaris). Xueting is currently writing a book on mythology, and translating, editing a collection of contemporary Chinese horror fiction. She lives just outside London with her partner and their cats, all of whom are learning Mandarin.

(emet)
By Lauren Ring
Novelette Long List
i. detection

When protesters take out the power at her Silicon Valley office, Chaya is at home, watching a golem pull dandelions.

The morning air is clear and cold. Chaya can hear her computer pinging alerts at her from inside her farmhouse. As soon as the dandelion patch is gone, she wraps her knee-high figurine in satin, pressing the cloth against its soft clay midsection. She lays her golem gently down by the riverside. A single tap on her phone activates the preprogrammed subroutine that wipes the alef from its forehead, leaving only the letters mem and tav—every instance in its code of emet, truth, becomes met, death.

She slips the bundle into the water, watching the satin flutter away in the current as the golem returns to the wet sediment. All that is left of Chaya’s creation are smears of ochre on her fingers and lines of code on her hard drive.

Chaya wipes her hands on her jeans and heads back to her daily bug tickets, ready to find out the day’s fresh disaster. Working from home has its perks, but maintaining her plot of land would be impossible without the help of her golems.

After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.

Chaya stumbles over a heap of dandelion roots on her front porch and swears. She has forgotten to specify that it must dispose of the roots on her compost heap, not just wherever they happen to land once plucked. Another tweak for her chore list. There is less and less time for quality assurance these days, and Chaya tries to pour as much of that time as possible into her code for Millbank Biometrics.

“Sorry I’m late.” She slides her headset on before she even sits down, logging in to the morning standup.

“No worries. Headquarters lost power just now, so I’ll be taking over until management can find a hotspot.” The sprint leader smiles as he speaks. Chaya will never understand how her coworkers can be so cheery, not with the bug tickets stacking up and the release date approaching. Millbank has contracts with social media platforms, telehealth doctors, and even law enforcement agencies, so management has been very clear that there’s no postponing this release. Still, Chaya doesn’t want to seem unmotivated. She smiles, too, and taps her mic back on.

“That’s the third time this month. Is everything all right over there?”

“It’s just the privacy protests again. Legal still thinks we’re only collateral, since the office complex also houses a few major surveillance vendors. There’s nothing to worry about—especially for you, Chaya.”

The privacy protests rose up to oppose the expansion of surveillance and shrank after the laws passed, but are ramping up again now that the implementation date approaches. Even Chaya has to admit the new guidelines are uncomfortably broad. Thanks to lobbying from the deep-pocketed tech companies on Millbank’s confidential client list, neither consent nor search motive will be necessary for facial recognition, anywhere in California. The protesters may not know the names behind the change, but that doesn’t stop them from cutting power lines anyway.

It’s more of a nuisance than anything, at this point. Chaya is tucked safely away in the countryside, and she doesn’t blame the protesters for trying to protect themselves. Millbank’s software is relentless. She wouldn’t want to find herself on the wrong side of it.

“We’re heading into crunch time,” the sprint lead adds. “If we just keep our heads down and push a little harder, we can get a stable build ready by the Phase Two launch date.”

There are a few cheers. Phase Two has been a long time coming. It’s an upgrade to Millbank’s facial recognition, a comprehensive system that can detect and identify faces even at significant distance. Phase One, which is over a decade old now, is glitchy and unrefined enough that a particularly shadowy rock could probably trick its neural net. Millbank has advertised Phase Two as “unstoppable.”

Their new system is scheduled to launch on the same day as the new surveillance legislation is implemented. If the power keeps going out, Chaya will have to work overtime to make that happen.

At least she’ll have her golems to help her. She wonders if her mother envisioned this use case back when she taught Chaya the word of creation, but decides that this is an unproductive line of thought. There’s no time for tears today.

“Let’s go around and check in with everyone. Chaya, would you mind going first? Camera on, please.”

“Sure, one moment.” Chaya spots a golem on the video preview screen, climbing up to patch her roof, and tilts her monitor to hide its sunbaked arm. “I’m on bug reports today, and if I have time after that, I have some margins to fix.”

Someone else speaks up next, their face lit green with microphone activity, and Chaya switches off her camera again.

“There’s a protest here in Los Angeles now,” her coworker says. “I’ll try to keep reviewing everyone’s code, but there’s a chance they might take out our power, too. I’ll keep you posted.”

When the meeting ends, Chaya switches back to her task list and settles in. She works on the front end, coding the screens that clients will see as they install Phase Two. No proprietary algorithms or dramatic decisions for her. Just realign this and double-space that. She may not get much recognition, but if anything ever goes wrong at Millbank, it won’t be her fault.

Between meetings, Chaya keeps her head down as instructed. She is distantly aware of something happening in another branch of the company, something hushed and urgent and protest-related, but she is never pinged to discuss it. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, and Chaya has learned to know her place. Head down. Push harder. There are bugs to fix, even if the truth of what she is doing gnaws at her like water eroding clay. She’s safe out here in the countryside. If she wants to stay safe, she has to do as she is told.

• • • •

Chaya was four, old enough to mold Play-Doh but not too old to try eating it, when her mother taught her how to craft a golem. She pulled and prodded the neon dough into shape while her mother guided her hands. Slowly, the lump took the form of a squat figure, with stubby legs barely large enough to support its weight.

“This is a golem,” her mother said. “Golems come to life and protect those in need, just like in the olden days I tell you stories about. Do you remember the stories?”

“It looks like Lolo,” Chaya said, giggling. Lolo, a pink dancing elephant, was Chaya’s favorite virtual character. She formed an elephant trunk on the golem’s face and smiled.

“Be serious, Chaya,” her mother scolded, pressing the trunk back into formless pink dough. “You must respect this gift. We are the only ones who can raise golems.”

With a slim wooden stick, her mother carved the word emet into the golem’s forehead. When she finished the last letter, the little pink creature shivered to life. Chaya stared at the dark cracks that suggested its features.

“Give it something to do. It will listen to you.” Chaya’s mother set aside her carving tool and began crafting another golem out of hunks of bright green dough.

“Dance,” Chaya ventured, thinking of Lolo.

The figurine burst into jerky motion, twisting and shaking. Chaya clapped, thrilled, but the golem kept dancing and dancing until pieces of itself splattered across the kitchen table. The scraps of Play-Doh jittered around until Chaya’s mother took her thumb to a piece of crumbling forehead and wiped off the alef.

“Why did it fall apart?” Chaya, distraught, tried to meld the pieces back together, but it was too late.

“You never told it when to stop. A golem will do exactly what you tell it to do. Nothing more, nothing less.” Her mother brought the green golem to the center of the table and retrieved her carving tool. “Don’t worry. You can always try again.”

• • • •

ii. alignment

It’s night by the time Chaya signs off, and her back aches from sitting hunched over all day. Lines of code scroll past her inner eye every time she blinks. She frees herself from her desk and walks outside, pushing through the chill and the tickling caress of the tall grasses. The night is as thick and as comforting as river mud.

Fresh clay from a riverbank is the best for building golems. It has the ideal consistency, damp enough to sculpt but thick enough to hold its form and not crumble to pieces when it dries. Chaya has tried all sorts of materials and mostly anything will do, but hers is a life of iteration and efficiency. Less input, more output.

Chaya finds her golems huddled at the very edge of the water, waiting for deactivation as instructed. She deactivates them all at once, watching as they slump back into inanimate masses, then begins to dispose of them. There isn’t enough satin left to wrap them all in. Her mother always used satin and it feels disrespectful to use anything else, but it’s too late to drive into town. She wraps the last golem in a blanket of thick reeds and slips it into the dark waters.

The next morning, Chaya sculpts two golems. At lunch, three. They aren’t supposed to be used for frivolous things, she knows that, but the motion of the work and the texture of the clay soothe her anxiety even when she runs out of chores for them to do. Hebrew glyphs are becoming as familiar a sight in her farmhouse as the scripting brackets on her dual monitors.

Near the end of the day, an unexpected meeting invitation arrives in her inbox. It’s not that she hasn’t been flooded with last-minute schedule changes already, but this email was sent by the legal department and the meeting begins in ten minutes.

A chill like the river runs down Chaya’s spine, even though she can’t think of anything she might have done wrong.

Attached to the invitation is a document filled with unfamiliar faces. They are numbered from one to thirty-six, and the email also contains their associated faceprints. Chaya can identify a few of them from the news as protest organizers, but most of them she can’t place at all. Unable to focus on her half-written code, Chaya stares at the faces until the meeting begins, burning every last detail into her mind’s eye.

When she logs in to the meeting room, she is greeted by several rows of faces that she does recognize. Chaya wasn’t the only one to receive the invitation: There are other front-end engineers, back-end engineers, and even customer-service agents on the call. She is relieved to see more coworkers trickle in until what feels like the entire company is present.

“Thank you all for joining me on such short notice,” the rumpled-looking legal representative says. Faint chanting is audible in the background, seeping through the protective walls of the Silicon Valley office. “Law enforcement has asked us to check every face that our servers process for a match to the attached faceprints. Hopefully we can refine this in the future—engineers, I’ll be speaking to your managers—but for now we’ll need to manually review any flagged match with a confidence of at least ninety percent.”

Confusion spreads across the faces on Chaya’s monitor. If her camera was on, she is sure that she would see the same expression reflected in her own frown. Tracking protesters isn’t exactly what she signed up for when she applied to Millbank. Sure, it’s what their software was ultimately going to be used for, but she wasn’t supposed to have to do it.

“Are there any questions?”

Chaya expects someone to ask what crimes these people committed, or what is going to happen to them when the information is turned over to the police, even though she already knows the dark answer to that. She expects questions about ethics and precedent and nondisclosure. At the very least, she expects someone to ask how they are supposed to check every partial match from every instance of every client’s software without neglecting all their other work.

No one asks any questions, though, not even her manager, so Chaya stays in line and keeps quiet. She sets the thirty-six faces to display on one of her monitors and returns to her code. What else can she do? She’s only one person, after all.

• • • •

Chaya was thirteen, but only just, when she cried hard enough to frighten her bat mitzvah guests. Tree shadows flickered against the walls of the courtyard, picked out in wheeling, staccato bursts of red and blue. Through the glass windows of the banquet hall, she could see one of her friends crying in the back of a police car. He was in the grade below her at school, one of the only Black boys in their suburban district, and always traded snacks with her at lunch. Seeing him behind a barred cruiser window didn’t feel real.

“Dad?” Chaya turned to her father. “Can’t we help?”

“An officer told me their system identified him from a photo booth picture that someone here shared. I didn’t argue. It’s best not to get involved.” Her father knelt by her chair and laid a hand on her knee. The pink tulle of her dress was stained with teardrops.

“But can’t we tell them they’re wrong? He’s not even a teenager yet. There must have been some sort of mistake.” Chaya wanted to go to her friend, but surely her father knew the right thing to do. He was an adult, after all.

“Technology doesn’t make mistakes, Chaya. Their system saw what it saw. I’m sure they’ll let him go once he answers their questions. Why don’t you go ask the DJ to play some happier music in the meantime?”

“Mom?” Chaya looked over, desperate for a different answer. Her mother didn’t respond. She hadn’t been herself lately. She walked heavy and slow, dragging her feet, and her mood turned sour in a heartbeat. Chaya had hoped her mother would call for justice and action like the heroes in her stories of their ancestors in Prague. She could even build a golem, which she hadn’t done in weeks, but she only stared at the ground. It was as if she had retreated into a shell of her own making.

“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” her father said. “You’ll understand someday.”

Eventually, the police released her friend. He darted for his phone and made a tearful call. Chaya stood up, ready to comfort him, but her father caught her eye and motioned for her to return to her chair. Obedient, trusting, Chaya sat.

“I’m okay, Mom,” she overheard her friend say in a shaky voice. “Some engineer called them and said it was a false positive, a glitch or something. They’re gone now.”

Just before dessert was served, a minivan pulled up where the police car once parked. Its headlights were dull and yellow. Chaya’s friend walked outside without saying goodbye to her. His parents held him tight, their family safe and whole out by the car, and the lights from the DJ’s booth shone on their tired faces. Then they left.

“You did the right thing,” Chaya’s father told her as they drove home that night. Her mother slept soundly in the passenger seat. Chaya kicked off her shoes and picked at the tearstains above her knee. “I’m sorry your friend had to deal with that, but sometimes there’s just nothing we can do.”

After that night at the bat mitzvah, Chaya and her friend drifted apart. He didn’t bother telling her why. He didn’t need to. Eventually, Chaya pushed aside her regret and let herself believe her father’s words.

• • • •

iii. extraction

With only two weeks left until the release of both Millbank’s system update and California’s new legislation, Chaya wants nothing more than to stay at her keyboard. Unfortunately, her refrigerator is empty, and her tiny plot of farmland is nowhere near subsistence, even with the help of her golems. Some things can’t be fully automated. Chaya signs off at dusk and heads into town, shopping list in hand.

The road is long and dark, but quiet, and mostly empty. Every once in a while, sleek cars with low profiles streak past Chaya’s pickup truck. When she leaves the countryside, clusters of buildings begin to appear, and the long shadows cast by orange-hued streetlights rove across her face with every turn.

Under cover of night, workers are beginning to hang new cameras. Their digital eyes will open soon to watch over the state, just like their active counterparts in the most crowded urban centers. Chaya’s code will guide the agencies that guide their lenses. For now, they sleep.

“Welcome in,” a tired clerk says as Chaya enters her favorite grocery store. It may be far, but it has a kosher section, and that alone is worth the trip.

They don’t have any satin. Chaya takes a few extra produce bags and murmurs a preemptive apology to her golems, then loads up her cart with fresh fruit and vegetables before moving on.

A crash in the hot-food aisle draws her attention. She hurries over to find a customer struggling with a basket brimming over with food and jars of canned goods, some of which have tumbled to the linoleum below. The customer has a Star of David necklace, smooth brown skin, and a kind, round face that seems somehow familiar. They look more frightened than Chaya would expect from a simple grocery store spill.

“Don’t worry,” she says, kneeling to gather the dented cans. “None of them broke open.”

“Thanks,” the customer says, but they don’t relax. Chaya hands over the cans. Their basket is full of staples, all rice and kosher noodles and canned beans, mixed in with a strange combination of face paint and permanent markers. “I appreciate you coming over to help. Fuckin’ techies down the aisle didn’t even pause, but then, you know how they are.”

“I’m an engineer,” Chaya points out, bristling.

“Oh. Sorry.” The customer shrugs. “Most of the folks I meet around here are just out for themselves. It’s nice to see that isn’t true of everyone.”

Maybe it’s because she’s feeling defensive, or maybe it’s just time passing, but either way, something clicks in Chaya’s mind. The customer’s face falls into place in her memories like a vector map aligning. They are one of the thirty-six on Millbank’s watchlist.

“I do my best,” Chaya manages to reply. She glances around for security cameras. What if someone sees them together? No one at Millbank will believe that this customer is a total stranger to her. She feels exposed, vulnerable.

“Hey, do you live around here? There’s going to be a surveillance protest in Silicon Valley in a couple weeks. It would be nice to have some tech allies show up. If you’re interested, I can send you the details.”

Chaya thinks of Play-Doh and protection, girls and golems. She thinks of sirens outside a bat mitzvah.

“I’m just passing through,” she says, and flees.

On the drive home, Chaya can’t take her mind off that stranger and their basketful of groceries. She didn’t see their face through the system, so she has no obligation to report them. They didn’t appear to know that they’re being hunted, but Chaya signed a nondisclosure agreement, so she does have an obligation not to tell them. Doing nothing seems like the best path, but her hands are trembling on the steering wheel.

The stranger’s face haunts Chaya all through the week and into the weekend. She wishes she could ask her mother for advice, but she can’t, and that only makes everything worse. All she can do is toss and turn in bed, staring at the evergreen shadows on her wall. One day she prints out the full Millbank watchlist; the next day she shoves it in her compost heap. In the evening she prints a dozen more copies that she folds and unfolds like a ritual. Everything seemed so much simpler when she was young.

By the time the week of the Phase Two release arrives, Chaya is too overwhelmed to worry about the watchlist or the protests anymore. Messages are flying everywhere, priorities are changing, and the video calls are never-ending. When she finally sits down for a late lunch, her brain is so stuck in code-mode that it’s easier to set up a golem than to microwave some leftovers. There are fresh chicken eggs on the counter. She writes a quick script instructing the golem to scramble them, then activates it.

Instead of cracking an egg, though, the golem sits on the floor, alive but still. It looks almost contemplative. Chaya frowns and checks her code. Her mind isn’t in the right place today. She probably forgot to specify what to do with the eggshells or left out the location of the carton.

The code reads: (emet)

Nothing could go wrong there. The activation word was tried and true, more tested than any part of Millbank’s software. Chaya scrolls down to the chore list, expecting to see her messy egg-scrambling subroutine pasted in from the other window.

The code reads again: (emet)

Her heart skips a beat. She whirls around, but the golem has already left.

Chaya finds it right where she expected it to be, doing exactly what she told it to do. The golem is down by the riverside, digging its nubby hands into the damp mud of the shore. Beside it, a lump of clay is slowly taking shape. Emet, the golem was instructed. Truth, yes, but also the word of creation. By absent-mindedly passing the activation word as a task for her golem to complete, Chaya has created a physical quine: a self-replicating program, writ large.

She sits back on her heels and watches the riverside rise. Golems of all shapes and sizes emerge from the shore, all with the same intricate forehead inscription. They each sit a moment, contemplative. They each build one more golem. Then they slump back into a waiting posture.

Chaya’s mother once told her the story of the original golem of Prague. That golem was created to protect the Jews of the city, but when the threat was vanquished and the golem was set to chores, it broke free of its master and rampaged through the city. Chaya’s panicked thoughts jump to scenes of destruction, her desk in pieces, her flock of hens scattered.

There are ten golems on the shore, with an eleventh half-built. They are peaceful and still, for now, but they’ve dug huge gouges in the riverside. Chaya grabs her phone and tries running her deactivation program.

The chain reaction stops. Emet turns to met. A dozen golems sit lifeless on the riverbank, looking for all the world like an army of terracotta soldiers.

She doesn’t want them. Power, truth, creation—all of it just complicates her simple life. The golems should be used for something greater, by someone greater, not commanded to scramble eggs by a tired engineer who has missed Yom Kippur two years in a row. She feels the indent-eyes of her creations fixed on her, judging. Finding her wanting.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Chaya shouts. She knows what happens to whistleblowers, and it’s not a cushy job offer with the option to keep working from home. Nothing to gain, everything to lose. So why can’t she get the protests and protesters out of her head? Why does she feel unmoored in her own life, which was once so comfortable?

Chaya crushes the replicated golems beneath her fists, destroying the words on their foreheads entirely. She can make her own lunch.

When she returns to the river that night to clean up the golem shards, Chaya wraps their clay pieces in watchlist printouts and lets the truth sink to the bottom of the river.

• • • •

Chaya was eighteen, the number of life, when her mother fell ill. Her family had only just switched insurance carriers when a delayed physical turned up the cause of her mother’s constant fatigue. Tumors. Cancerous, metastasized, and the scariest adjective of all: preexisting.

“It’s policy,” their agent explained, avoiding eye contact with Chaya and her father as he passed them the denial of coverage letter. He turned back to his computer, flicking through documentation. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

They took her to the hospital anyway, sinking college savings and retirement funds alike into Chaya’s mother’s medical care. It was nowhere near enough. They ran through even the most desperate lines of credit available long before a surgery slot opened up, and by then she was no longer a good candidate anyway. Against the wishes of both father and daughter, Chaya’s mother was moved home for hospice.

Her room, once quiet, became a hub of activity. Golems toddled in and out, carrying stacks of clean dishes and scraps of damp cloth. The room smelled of bedsores and candles. While Chaya’s father retreated, unable to watch his wife succumb to disease, Chaya stayed by her side as much as possible.

“Dad says he’s not going to call the hospital anymore,” Chaya complained late one gray afternoon. Her mother was sitting up to sip her tea, a rare sight and a welcome one, but her hands quivered around the mug. Dark circles stained the skin under her eyes, and her wrists were so thin the bones showed. When she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper.

“That’s probably for the best, at this stage.”

“It’s not fair,” Chaya said, incensed. She balled her hands into fists at her sides to keep herself from crying again. “We should send out the golems. They’re supposed to protect us, right? That way we can make the hospital treat you.”

Her mother set the mug of tea aside and pressed her thumb to Chaya’s forehead, tracing a pattern on her skin. Chaya didn’t need a mirror to know what she was spelling. The three Hebrew letters of emet were as familiar as a kiss.

“There,” said her mother. “Now you have to do what I say.”

“Mom, I’m not a golem,” Chaya protested, but she sat still and waited for instructions all the same.

“Don’t go after the hospital staff. This is something too big to fight with a few clay dolls, and I’m afraid it’s too late anyway. Just be brave, and don’t lose sight of the truth.” Chaya’s mother stroked her forehead so gently that it took Chaya a moment to realize what she was doing. Her thumb brushed over the place where the alef would have been. Met.

When her mother died, Chaya buried her by a river under a veil of satin. The funeral was attended only by Chaya, her father, and a few sturdy golems, commanded to carry bags and offer tissues. Their clay was damp and salt-stained from Chaya’s tears as she sculpted.

They lowered the casket in with tender precision, then each added a shovelful of dirt. Even the river was quiet, as if in respect. When Chaya’s father sobbed and clutched his chest, Chaya knew just what to say to absolve him of his guilt.

“Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do.”

• • • •

iv. comparison

On the day before the Phase Two release, Chaya’s breakfast tastes like ash. She chokes it down anyway, staring hard at her monitors, keeping herself busy. Busy is good. If Chaya stays busy, then she can’t think about the watchlist flags or that night at the grocery store.

Next on her task list is a series of last-minute requests from Millbank’s existing clients. Some of them look strange. Most of them look unnecessary. It’s a little too late to be changing things, so Chaya pings her manager, asking if they can reprioritize the requests. Won’t the clients be satisfied enough with a revamped system? Shouldn’t they focus on actual errors?

Not my call, her manager replies. Sales says these are our biggest accounts, and they already promised the changes.

There are no client names attached, but it’s easy enough to tell who wants what. It must be a social media company that wants their match-results page to look prettier, and a police department that wants the accuracy rate estimation to be moved to a different screen. The request that really stings is from a hospital that uses Millbank for their check-in system. They want insurance documents to be the first item displayed upon identification, not medical history.

Chaya isn’t naïve. She has seen the protests, heard the news, lost her mother. She knows what horrible chain reactions these changes will contribute to. But they’re so small, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, and Chaya has already spent months improving Phase Two for these companies. Everyone has. Given the size of Millbank’s team, no one will even know it was her. She’s not even a cog in a machine, she’s just a drop of oil that helps the cog turn.

As she types, implementing changes and submitting them for review, Chaya glances out the window to her wrecked river. A gentle breeze kicks up ripples that smooth out the gouges in the shore. Her golems did exactly as they were instructed, and still they were destroyed. No, too passive: Chaya destroyed them. She did it, all on her own. How long had it been since she had done anything without being told to do it?

The longer Chaya works, the more doubt creeps in between chair and keyboard. Her rapid-fire typing slows.

She’s not so different from her programmed clay. Input to output with no evaluation in between, listening to anyone who commands. Chaya thinks of the stranger in the grocery store, with their basket full of small things. Was the face paint they bought meant to protect them from recognition? From the new system Chaya worked so hard to build? It won’t be enough.

On her personal computer, Chaya opens a private window and searches up the protests for the first time. They have their own website. Alongside a summary of California’s upcoming legislation change, the drastic extension of surveillance, a video from a past protest plays. Every face in the video is covered with a solid black box.

“Give what you are able, help where you can,” says a distorted voice. The protester is holding a megaphone, and Chaya can see the glint of a silver chain just beneath the black box of their face. “We may not be able to defeat this bill, but still we cannot abandon the fight.”

It’s a line from Pirkei Avot, sort of. Chaya’s stomach twists. That could be her out there, if things had gone differently, but instead she is sure the speaker is the Jewish stranger from the grocery store. The stranger from the watchlist.

Her inbox chimes at her. She has a new private message from her manager at headquarters, where the wi-fi is out for the fourth time.

Chaya, do you have enough time for some capacity testing before the release?

It’s either that or finishing these client requests, Chaya points out.

This is more important, her manager writes back. I’ll pass on the details from management. Thank you for being so reliable.

That would have been a compliment, once. It’s more of a back-end question, but she’s asked Chaya. She trusts her, maybe even values her input.

Chaya values her golems, and yet they are disposable.

She pulls up the most recent server statistics for Phase Two and stares hard at the numbers. Millbank has already tested for typical levels of demand, and even some surges, but now management is requesting performance beyond even the previous peak. It can’t be a coincidence that they’re asking now, right before the surveillance bill goes into effect. They want to scan the protests, and tomorrow is going to be the biggest day yet.

There’s no time left for stalling. Chaya wants to think it’s not her fault that she sits safely at home, that she has no power and no alternative to complicity, but the truth is, she isn’t a golem. Even doing nothing is a choice that she makes.

The army she raised from the riverbed comes to mind, but there is no one physical enemy for them to fight, no way for clay to overpower willful ignorance. Instead, Chaya recalls her mother’s tales of massive golems and Nazi forces. The golems offered protection. They took the blows while her people fled, living to rise again another day. They were not the heroes, they were shields that the heroes could wield. The last words her mother ever spoke to her ring in her ears.

Chaya has been so focused on protecting herself that she has lost sight of the truth of whether or not she is the one that needs protecting. The government isn’t coming for her right now, but there are other people in danger.

With one final look at the riverside, Chaya sets her fingers back on her keyboard and re-downloads the watchlist faceprints. She reaches for her clay and begins to mold a prototype. It’s human-sized, one of many to come. Chaya will work until her riverbed is scraped empty—after all, she has a lot of lost time to make up for.

She’ll test Millbank’s server capacity, all right. She’ll do exactly what they asked, in a way they never anticipated. Tomorrow she will find out if it’s too late for change. Today she prepares.

The clay takes shape under her steady hands.

• • • •

Chaya was twenty-five, still so young, when she interviewed for a position at Millbank Biometrics. Her hands shook as she passed her resume over the desk. Millbank was her last chance to take the first steps toward a bright future.

“It says here that you last worked at a synagogue,” the interviewer said. She wore red lipstick that looked like blood against her white skin, along with a lapel pin that said #girlboss. “Can you tell me more about what you did for them?”

“Web development, mostly. Their public site and internal pages are all my work.” That role had been local, a compromise for her father, who still desperately wanted her to keep living at home. He wouldn’t be happy about this interview, either. Chaya tried not to think about that.

No matter what her father wanted, Chaya needed to get out of the house where her mother died. Her memory was a blessing, but there was more to life than memories. Her father wouldn’t let her change anything, let alone build golems, even though they were Chaya’s strongest connection to her mother. He claimed it was for safety, but he was always afraid. Chaya’s mother had wanted her to be brave.

“I see. Excellent.” While the interviewer typed something on her laptop, Chaya smoothed the grief out of her expression. “Here at Millbank, we’re all about teamwork. Tell me about a time when you set yourself aside for the good of the company.”

Teamwork was a softball question, something off every prep sheet. The interviewer liked her. Chaya rattled off a prepared answer about crunch time and setting aside work-life balance. She was willing to do anything to get the job done. All she had to do was make that clear, and the job was as good as hers.

They ran through a few more easy questions before the interviewer checked her watch and closed her laptop. She smiled, and Chaya’s heart soared.

“Well, everything looks good to me, but I’ll have to consult my team before we make any final decisions. Oh, and smile for the camera on the way out. We’ll need to scan your face and run it through our system for background checks, but I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

Chaya looked into the dark mirror of the camera lens and grinned. No more fear, no more hardship. At Millbank Biometrics, she was going to make her mother proud.

“We’ll be in touch,” said the interviewer.

• • • •

v. recognition

Computer programs are just like golems. No matter what, they always follow their instructions. Millbank intends to tell their system to detect and identify every instance of the thirty-six watchlist faces, so that’s what the system will do. The engineers have done their job well, and Phase Two can handle the estimated protest turnout with ease.

Chaya can’t change the program anymore, but with enough time and clay, she can change what it sees.

She works all night and into the morning, perfecting her code. It’s not the sort of thing she can check for bugs easily, but she does her best, testing and testing until her floor is more mud than wood. One of her monitors shows scrolling code while the other displays a sandbox version of Phase Two, set to a disconnected version of the facial-recognition system.

Next to Chaya stands a golem of gray mud and beige clay, built taller and broader than herself. With rough movements, aided by a sharp stick and a dull rock, it is carving its own head. The resulting features are little more than the suggestion of a face, but that’s enough for Chaya.

She has fed the faceprints from the watchlist into the golems’ code. Instead of a generic suggestion of eyes and nose, her creation bears an approximation of one of the thirty-six suspects’ faces. Chaya checks each carved golem’s face against her test environment at every angle and lighting setup she can manage. Photographed from a distance with a hat and a mask, the golem could easily be mistaken for human. It just needs to be mistaken for the right human. When the readout displays a match, she instructs the golem to smooth its face clean of everything but the Hebrew on its forehead and start again.

By time the gray-white light of dawn breaks through her curtains, Chaya is satisfied with her creations. She masks her face with dark cloth, loads her trusty pickup truck with as many golems and buckets of pure mud as she can fit in the bed, and heads for the freeway. The streets are jammed with vehicles. Half the streetlights are already out. Chaya leaves her truck at a gas station when she arrives, as close to the wave-dampened shores of the San Francisco Bay as possible. Once the protest starts, she’s going to need all the mud and clay she can get.

As Chaya waits under the soft layers of low-lying fog, she idly sculpts with her clay. Not a golem, for once. A small elephant from the depths of her memory. It reminds her of her mother, even if she doesn’t quite remember why, and that gives her a quiet sort of strength.

She can’t make out the words from the megaphone-wielding marchers yet, but she can see them spaced out among the front lines and hear the rhythmic way in which the other protesters echo their chanting. It sounds like a song, or a prayer. They break through the fog like so many rays of sunlight, then disappear again as they continue on down the street.

Chaya pulls her phone out of her pocket and is unsurprised to see that her notifications have maxed out. Most of the messages aren’t even directed at her. It’s release time for Phase Two and everyone is scrambling to launch. She doesn’t bother to read further, just loads up her home-brewed golem application and initiates the last element of her plan.

The code begins: (emet, emet)

Each golem will create two more golems before moving on down the chore list to sculpt a face assigned by its birth time. The series is a geometric progression of creation, and the golem decoys will quickly grow to rival the human crowd. Once they’ve served their purpose, Chaya only has to initiate the deactivation subroutine, erasing every alef with a single tap and collapsing her golems back into inert clay.

Chaya watches with pride as her pre-prepared golems dig into the soft, yielding mud from the heavy buckets in her truck bed. They build quickly, then mold their own faces as the newborn golems turn to the sediment of the bay. Some sacrifice themselves in the waves to retrieve raw material, but two more golems rise in the place of each lost to the water, stronger and streaked with grass and stones from the shallowest shores.

As the first disguised golems head out into the city, looking directly into the watchful eyes of every security camera and drone lens they pass, Chaya checks her messages again. Soon the disturbance will start overwhelming the manual reviewers, then the servers themselves. As she scrolls, she heads toward the city center. The marchers are all wearing masks or thick paint, and they carry signs with all manner of witty quips and emotional pleas. The long shadows of the nearest buildings stretch down the sloped street behind them, making each protester look for a moment as tall as a skyscraper.

Lots of weird data coming from the bay, one of her coworkers reports.

Chaya was supposed to test capacity, can anyone reach her? asks another.

I think she’s out sick, a third engineer replies. This data does look off. Let’s set anything coming from a mile radius of that area to disregard for now. I’ll push the code.

Chaya’s heart sinks. Her golems are doing their best, and they are fooling sensors where they can, but they are still clay. They can’t travel fast or far. They aren’t enough.

She lugs a bucket of mud and a golem to the city center anyway, hoping that bad data in the middle of the crowd will at least make Millbank block out more of the protest. On the sidewalk of a street barricaded with sandbags and reflective tape, she hears something familiar.

“Go ahead, take whatever you need,” the stranger from the grocery store says to a line of protesters. They are standing by a table stocked with food and a sign that reads mutual aid. The stranger is wearing a mask and a layer of face paint, but there are packages of kosher noodles on their table, and their voice is unmistakable.

Chaya approaches them, golem in tow.

“I made it,” she says.

“I’m sorry, have we met?” The stranger pauses in their work and leans forward, peering at Chaya and her golem. Chaya takes a deep breath before unraveling the cloth around her head, exposing her bare face to the protest organizer. She lifts the hat of the golem as well so that they can see the word emet etched on its forehead. Its face matches theirs.

“You invited me. I’m here to help.”

“Hold on a moment.” The stranger steps away from their table and pulls Chaya to one side, shielding their face with their body. “You know it’s not safe to show your face, right?”

“Trust me, I know. That’s why I disguised these golems, to divert attention. Only, they can’t get far enough.” Chaya’s shoulders slump. “I just wanted to tell you that I tried.”

“Golems in disguise, huh.” The stranger’s eyes dart between Chaya’s golem, the bucket of mud, and the other decoys filling out the crowd behind her. They don’t panic at the realization that Chaya’s companions are animate clay. Perhaps their mother once told them the same stories that Chaya heard from hers as a child. After a moment’s thought, they place a hand to the golem’s cheek, then rub the residual clay between their fingers. “I think I know how we can make this work.”

It’s simple enough, in the end. Each recipient of donated items gets a miniature golem and a request to pass it along or leave it by the side of the road somewhere. Even if they don’t fully understand, the protesters are agreeable enough to take a clay doll with their food and face paint. They may not trust Chaya, but they trust the protest organizer, and that is enough.

As they march, bike, and drive away, Chaya updates her code, setting various time delays for the golems. Already the data is starting to shift. A human chain far greater than anything Chaya could have done alone will stretch across northern California and beyond. The miniatures they scatter will build full-size siblings, prompting sightings of the thirty-six in so many places simultaneously that the servers will crash and the search will have to be postponed. By then, the protest organizers can hide. By then, Chaya can put in her two weeks’ notice. By then, the golems will have faded back to dry dust.

For now, as her coworkers start to panic and the protest surges forth, Chaya is just another face in the crowd. It’s a different kind of anonymity than at Millbank, where she was known but ignored. Here in the streets, here where no one is alone, Chaya’s actions are her voice. It has already taken her far too long to speak up. No matter what the future holds for her and her creations, it will be a future she has chosen, and she chooses truth.

Lauren Ring (she/her) is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. She is a Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist, and her short fiction can be found in venues such as F&SF, Nature, and Lightspeed. When she isn’t writing speculative fiction, she is most likely working on a digital painting or attending to the many needs of her cat, Moomin. You can keep up with her at laurenmring.com or on Twitter @ringwrites.

Submergence
By Arula Ratnakar
Novella Long List

As the people began to die, desperation drove us to the depths of the sea for cures. We mined mineral-rich vents until the tube worms went extinct, stripped polymetallic nodule fields bare, squeezed sludge out of sea sponges to treat the new diseases, these monstrous incurable plagues, born from our new climate, that spread through our air. But the people still died. So we dug even deeper . . .

• • • •

I look at the corpse lying in the clear preservation chamber next to me. Woman, late thirties, died about four weeks ago. Normally they would have examined her body, signed her death certificate, gotten everything back to her remaining family members (her aunt and her twelve-year-old daughter), and that would have been it. But she had those things in her brain. And she died a strange and sudden death. So here we are, tied up in this investigation. Not that I’m complaining though. No, I live for this shit.

“We’ve all had the procedure done, we’ve all been taking the pills for about a week now. Anything go wrong for either of you? Any side effects?” Marie continues reluctantly. “Nothing wrong on my end.”

Anthony, sitting to my left, looks absolutely elated. “I’ve vomited three times a day since Wednesday! Looks like I can’t do it.”

They both turn to me. Marie bites the side of her thumb. “Nithya?”

Hah. Marie is terrified right now. Is she really afraid that I’ll turn this down? That she’ll be the one to have lights pulsing through her brain every night for the next four months? This is the most interesting thing that has happened in my entire goddamn twenty-seven years of existence. Can’t believe they aren’t fighting me tooth and nail for the chance to do this. Ah well, can’t seem too enthusiastic about it. What if they change their minds?

I try to look downcast. “I’ll do it. I didn’t get any negative side effects. Truthfully I’m feeling better than ever.”

Marie is visibly relieved. “You’re sure about this Nithya?”

Hell fucking yes I’m sure! I nod.

Anthony chuckles nervously. “Well, then get ready to live a dead woman’s life.”

• • • •

I stare at the reflection of my waist-length dark-brown hair in the bathroom mirror, razor in hand, trying to imagine myself with a shaved head. I think I’d look badass. They’re going to drill little circular tunnels into my skull, intended to be plugged into a set of tubes that will branch out microscopically throughout my brain and shine light pulses into key areas at the cellular level. They don’t want hair getting in the way of the procedure, and I certainly do not want that either.

As the chunks of hair fall to the floor, I think about the last time someone tried out this technology, in a very different context. I remember seeing it on the local news. It’s just optogenetics. An elderly woman got her neurons modified to contain activity-dependent genes for additional kinds of channel proteins, light-gated ion channels. Colorful light pulses could regulate membrane depolarization through these new light-gated ion channels and force the same neurons to fire that were firing during her experiences. She could “record” all her experiences and live them again later, as the wavelengths of light activating the channels would evolve and develop with time, along with the types of light-gated channel proteins being expressed or taken out of the cell membranes. Additional proteins expressed through the inserted gene sequence allowed the tubes to locate and target neurons in the correct firing sequence.

But the old woman’s goal wasn’t to relive the experiences herself. After the woman died, her daughter received a gift. A request to modify her own neurons to include the channel proteins, and permission to access a set of pills and light pulses that would, to the most accurate possible degree, play the elderly woman’s experiences into her daughter’s brain. The final years of that woman’s life, available for someone else to live themself! Eat, sleep, shit, laugh, cry as them . . . become them for a while. It’s the most intense form of memorial I’ve ever heard of.

Why didn’t the woman whose death we’re investigating—Noor—ever play back her experiences herself? Why just have the channel proteins? What was the point of modifying her neurons, if she was just going to live like she’d never gotten the procedure done anyway?

I look at my bald head in the mirror, satisfied with my work.

• • • •

“Is it conscious?” The disembodied brain in front of me is incredibly disquieting, several infinitesimal, branching tubes running through it, keeping it clean and preventing the natural postmortem process from taking place.

Since Noor didn’t play her experiences back every night for the time she had the new channel proteins, they have to play them back into her brain now, so they can get what they need to play the light pulses into me.

Dr. Irene Young shakes her head. “Certainly not right now. And when fed the light, all Noor’s brain can do at this point is reexperience her last two years over and over again, in a loop, without knowing they’re being relived. The inevitable still happens no matter what, this brain isn’t coming up with anything new anytime soon. And the brain only ‘comes alive’ again, to put it crudely, when fed the light pulses.”

The whole thing still unsettles me. “Isn’t it cruel though, keeping the brain looping like that?”

She’s quiet for some time before speaking. “Think about it like this. Right now, you’re in this room, experiencing this present moment. Earlier this morning, you were experiencing something completely different, and so it goes for every moment of your past. In each of these slices of time, you are completely unable to predict exactly what you will experience next, right? Okay, say you die tomorrow and someone plays your life experiences back into your head. In whatever the equivalent of this particular moment is within the synaptic reconstructions, you will have absolutely no clue what that death will be like. It’ll just be this moment, and you’d be sitting in front of me, staring at that brain. You’re either alive, or you’re in one of those loops, and there’s no real way to distinguish between which of the two you’re in. Even if you can’t stop the death, you don’t even know that it’s going to happen. It would feel essentially the same as living your life as it would play out and then dying, with no way to know whether or not you’ve gotten yourself some amount of extra time. Maybe we should be raging against the impossibility of perfect foresight, or against the fragility of human existence and the ephemerality of a human life. But personally, I don’t think feeding the brain the light pulses is cruel.”

“Hmm,” I’m still not fully convinced, but she seems to have quite a strong opinion on the matter, so I try to redirect the conversation. “Pretty amazing, that I’ll be able to live out a whole two years, every night, for just slightly under four months.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you condense the experiences down to high quality immersive experiential versions of whatever she would have remembered naturally, which filters out quite a bit! I mean, there’s no way of knowing whether or not that will cut out something essential, but this will cover the most memorable moments, whatever those are.”

A nurse enters to tell us the operating room is ready. I head out after him and look back to see Dr. Young still gazing at the brain. As soon as she meets my eye, she hurries after me.

• • • •

It’s time to take my bandages off, a week and a half after the operation. The cannula guides for the tubes that will fire the light into my head have been drilled into my skull and it’s all healed. Dr. Young looks nervous today. Why?

As she unwraps the bandages, she tells me what to expect. “There’s going to be a sensory deprivation chamber set up in your home, with the tubes attached. I know you’ve been taking the pills for some time now, but it is crucial that you continue to remember to take the pills every morning and night, and I’m obligated to give you a refresher on what to expect.”

Dr. Young holds out one box of a set of four. Each box has four rows, each row containing seven orange pills and seven green ones. “The morning pills—orange ones—cause a daily ripple of brain activity, during which you will experience a brief but strong hallucination. Since we’re replacing your REM sleep with Noor’s experiences, and REM is incredibly important for strengthening newly formed synaptic connections, we have to make up for the lost benefits with this ripple. Since you haven’t played anything back into your head yet, there haven’t been any hallucinations. However, as soon as you start, so will the daily hallucination.”

She gives me a quick half smile, but it’s not very convincing. “Don’t worry too much, it will be very brief. This carefully orchestrated daily brain activity will make it easy for us to identify different experiences you have as well. The night pills are what paralyze you and block external sensory signals from reaching you while you’re being fed the light pulses. They’ll also adjust your melatonin cycle to make sure you fall asleep with enough time to play the experiences. Your slow-wave sleep won’t be noticeably affected by any of this.”

Her voice is steady, professional. But the pills are rattling in the box from her shaking hands. She shoves the box into my hands. I have to ask.

I whisper, “Do you know the person who put the light-gated ion channels in Noor’s brain? Was it you? Did you know this woman?”

Dr. Young glances up at the ceiling. A security camera? She clears her throat and begins writing a prescription. She’s ignoring my question. Or maybe she didn’t hear me.

“Here’s a prescription for the pills, in case something happens to the ones I just gave you. Feel free to call me if you have any questions. And good luck with everything.”

Someone knocks on the door. “Irene? Could you come out here for a moment?”

Dr. Young presses the slip of synthesized paper into my palm and looks straight into my eyes. She has these incredibly intense eyes, and her proximity to me makes me nervous. I try to act normal.

She speaks to me in a low voice. “For the record, if it was someone I love who died, and they loved me, I would keep them looping endlessly. Then at least I would know they’ll feel loved forever, and I would be loved by them forever too.”

As I exit the building, I unfold the prescription she gave me. A smaller slip of synthesized paper falls out. It reads in her scrawling handwriting: MEET ME. AFTER YOUR 1ST SESSION. FOR NOOR.

• • • •

“Rimjhim Gire Sawan,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar, plays at a low volume in a beautiful living room. The room is bathed in a pale blue light from massive, glowing screens covering each wall, showing various pictures of deep-sea creatures, ocean views, and Noor with her ten-year-old daughter Sana (currently at a sleepover). Noor and Irene stand together by the door.

“I can’t get them. Nobody can know I’ve gotten this procedure done, and if I show up bald with the cannula guides drilled in, it would be pretty obvious. Please my love, trust me.” Noor gently brushes some hair out of Irene’s face, runs a finger along the slight wrinkles at the corner of her eye. Irene pulls her into a tight embrace.

“Fuck! Can’t you tell me anything? Why are you so afraid of them knowing? I don’t even know where you work, what you’re working on. But why did you get the procedure done if you won’t—are you in danger? If anyone tries to hurt you I swear to fucking hell I will—”

“Shh. I promise I’m not in danger right now. This is just a precaution. In case my research is somehow compromised. I shouldn’t have even told you that I got the procedure done today. But you were bound to see the orange pills eventually, and you literally work in this field, so you’d know what they do.”

“But if you’re not playing anything back, why do you need to take the pills? You won’t be getting the daily hallucination!”

Noor breaks away from the embrace and looks through her handbag for a few seconds before taking out a box of white pills. “REM suppressors. Won’t be getting any dreams for some time now, so the morning pill will definitely give me the hallucination and mark out my different experiences. I’ll be taking these white ones instead of the night pills. Please Irene, just trust that I need to do this. I can’t tell you why yet. In a couple of years, I won’t have to keep this a secret anymore, and I’ll tell you all about my work. And once this isn’t a secret anymore, I’ll tell the world about us. But right now I need to keep a low profile. I cannot let anyone know I’ve . . . met someone here, and I cannot let anyone know about the procedure. Couple of years. That’s all. Hey . . . ”

She takes Irene to the living room couch. Above them is a skylight, showing a dark, almost starless night sky. Noor sits with Irene’s head in her lap, stroking her hair. It feels like they’ve known each other for their whole lives, even if they’ve only been together for four months.

“What do you think we’ll be like in a couple of years? Together, I hope,” Noor laughs and smiles down at Irene.

Irene smiles back, and the wrinkles around her eyes deepen. “Married.”

“Wow, really? You think so?”

“Mhm. Right now, I’m certain of it.” She pulls Noor down for a deep kiss. “Noor, I do trust you. I worry about you, but I trust you.”

“I love you. Thank you.”

“I love you too.”

• • • •

A massive fruiting body, covered in bulbous sacs, stretches out through the skull of what used to be Dr. Meyers, threatening to burst at any moment and release countless more spores into the air. On a table in the center of the room is a water tank containing a piece of the sea sponge Noor is studying, the one they discovered recently at the bottom of the ocean, that cures the new plagues. Next to the sea sponge are various insect carcasses, arranged neatly in a grid, and all with fruiting bodies from various insect-pathogenizing Ophiocordyceps fungi sticking out of their skulls and bodies. On the floor, an overturned container is surrounded by a swarm of the insects it used to hold. They should have been dead from Ophiocordyceps long ago, but they were cured.

Noor unfolds her touchscreen and checks the security camera footage that she’d saved again. It shows Dr. Meyers, looking like he’d just gotten out of bed, barefoot, disheveled, in a T-shirt and boxers, stumbling around in the middle of the night. Zigzagging through a hallway, he bumps into walls and columns and doors as though he’s possessed, until he reaches the door to the room. He presses his hand against a scanner and falls into the room as soon as the door opens. Dragging himself across the floor in an eerily contorted crawl, he makes his way to the table, lowers his hand into the water tank, and presses his palm against the sea sponge.

The footage then speeds up to show the fruiting body breaking through Dr. Meyers’ skull, developing spore sacs and continuing to grow longer, covered in brain matter, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid. The similarity of this fruiting body to the ones from Ophiocordyceps is impossible to ignore.

Had the sponge somehow caused an insect-pathogenizing fungus to mutate and attack a human being? The whole reason the sponge, of an entirely new genus, Panaceius, is so important is the incredible, unprecedented ability of its unspecialized archaeocyte cells to transform perfectly into a far larger variety of specialized cells than those of other sponges . . .

Someone’s walking down the hallway. Noor quickly shuts down her touchscreen and hurries away. After she exits the building, she opens her touchscreen again, and reconfigures the security camera in the hallway she was just in to stop looping earlier footage of the area when it was empty.

Her job is to study the flask cells of the sponge’s larvae in a different building altogether. She wasn’t supposed to be here, and she’s not supposed to have access to that security footage of Dr. Meyers either. But Noor has this overwhelming feeling that there’s something seriously strange about Panaceius meyeri, and she’s determined to keep digging at it.

• • • •

Noor walks to the Learning Lab school to pick Sana up. On her way, she passes a group of children leaving the school with completely expressionless faces wearing T-shirts that say “You Won’t Hear Our Voices Until We Hear Yours” and “We Won’t Laugh Until You Save Our Future.” She smiles at them as they pass, and they nod at her.

Noor remembers when Sana first joined this youth movement, almost seven months ago. They had just moved here, into a house given to her by the company she had joined, and were unpacking boxes in the living room. They were taking out the incubating chamber where Sana had grown from a preserved early twenty-first century embryo ten years earlier. Sana wrote her thoughts down for Noor on her touchscreen.

We’re not speaking or showing our emotions on our faces until the adults meet our demands. If they don’t meet these demands, so many of us will die from the pollution and the water flooding and more and more diseases that will show up. And we don’t want to die.

“Won’t it be difficult though? Not showing anything at all?”

It is, at first. But we learn. And I will write it out if I am happy or upset about something. You just won’t see it on my face anymore or hear my voice anymore.

Noor kneeled next to her daughter. “Can I give you a hug?”

Sana nodded and Noor embraced her. “Sana, you’re the bravest person I know. I hope all the demands are met. I want you to have the happiest future imaginable.” She let go of Sana after a while.

After unpacking in silence for some time, Noor spoke again. “By the way, about those diseases. Don’t tell anybody this, but that sea sponge Mommy came here to study might help with them.”

I read about the sea sponge. Why does it leak stuff that pollutes the ocean as badly as microplastics when someone gets pieces of it to study?

Noor sighed. “Well, we don’t know right now. But hopefully the more we study it, the more we’ll be able to benefit from the parts of it that cure diseases and stop the parts that harm the rest of the ocean.”

I hope you do that soon.

“Yeah, so do I.”

Their movement did seem to be working. Or at least, a major demand on their list is being met, whether it’s because of the movement or because of something else. No more cars, and the roads of the state are being replaced with zero-emission magnetic levitation tracks.

P. meyeri, though. Killing deep-sea corals, leaking all sorts of pollutants that integrate themselves into other creatures’ respiratory and digestive tracks . . . only after humans started harvesting it. And Dr. Meyers. Was it simply a coincidence that the person who discovered this sponge died in this way? The specialization used in the way the sponge killed him was astounding.

Where the fungus spore would have contained the enzyme chitinase to break down the chitin in an insect’s exoskeleton, the spores that attacked Dr. Meyers contained keratinase, to get through the human epidermis. Then they manipulated the actin cytoskeletons of the endothelial cells lining his blood vessels, causing the endothelial cells to engulf the spores, creating structures from which they entered the bloodstream. Traveling up until they reached his brain, the spores used the same process to cross the blood-brain barrier. They immediately seized control of his neural activity, activating various types of memories and cues. Dr. Meyers was forced to travel to the room holding the sponge and touch it, in a way analogous to, yet very different from how the nerve toxins in an infected ant tell it to climb to the forest floor and bite down on a leaf. The fruiting body broke through his skull soon afterward.

The specialization in the design of these spores was so intricate . . . how did the sponge know to do all of this? It wasn’t even a spore that was a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps. No, this spore was created from scratch, inspired by the fungus.

If her hunch is right, P. meyeri is demonstrating markers of a lot more than consciousness.

Sana tugs at her sleeve, and the two start walking back home. When there are no other people around, Sana takes out her flute. Six months earlier, Sana told Noor that she’d created a cipher, combining music with the Fibonacci sequence, to communicate with her friends without adults knowing. While it was against the rules her friends had agreed on, she wanted to show her mother what she’d made, under a sworn oath of secrecy that Noor would be the only adult to ever know about it.

With enough practice, one could look at what appears to be really awful-sounding sheet music and translate it into a message. With even more practice, one could hear the music and translate it mentally, which is how Sana communicates to her friends and to Noor these days, using her flute.

At school today we learned about the Indian roofed turtle. I think it is my new favorite extinct animal. I think it is very cute.

“That’s awesome! Is that turtle what you want to write your science class report on?”

I think so. Yes. Sana plays. I want to write mainly about how much I like it and how it went extinct. It is really sad Mommy. Its habitat was mainly in small streams or shallow coastal waters and it fed on aquatic plants. But with ocean acidity levels going up and streams drying out it could not find food or shelter. And too many people started keeping it as a pet, so the wild ones went extinct while the captive ones lived much shorter lives.

Noor shakes her head sadly. “Sometimes humans can just do so much damage, maybe even without realizing it. And so often in this world, those realizations come far too late.”

Sana just nods, and then looks at her mother blankly. Noor feels a brief, sudden pang of anger, sadness, and longing for just a hint of emotion on her daughter’s face. Is supporting this the right thing to do? What if this is causing her harm? She’s trying her best to encourage Sana to do whatever she feels is the right thing to do, and to pursue her interests. And yet, she can’t help but occasionally feel afraid that maybe she’s doing something wrong, maybe this is “harmful and detrimental to child development” as some other parents are saying. But they’re only brief moments of doubt, and most of the time she feels immense pride toward the strength and resilience of her daughter.

It’s a powerful thing, the physical expressions of one’s emotions. And a powerful thing to withhold as well, which is why it’s working so well. Parents would do anything to see or hear or feel their kids speak again, smile again, laugh again, even cry again. Noor herself has spent many nights, after Sana has fallen asleep, watching old videos and weeping at the sound of her daughter’s voice. She feels guilty, selfish for missing those moments so much even with Sana still communicating her feelings clearly through her flute or through typing on her touchscreen. But maybe that’s the whole point. After all, she’s taken far more personal actions to combat the climate catastrophes since her daughter joined the movement . . .

What are you thinking about?

“I was thinking about how humans sometimes do harmful things without realizing it, and how sometimes it’s hard to tell whether something is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.”

I think about that sometimes too. In my opinion, as long as something will help people eventually . . . it is the right thing to do.

Noor thinks for a long time. “What if it might never help people at all? What if a decision involves taking away something that is helping lots of people? Do you think it can still be doing the right thing?”

Is it helping anything or anybody at all?

“Yes. It would help something very much, save it from being very badly hurt and mistreated. Something just as important as people, maybe.”

Sana is very quiet until they reach their home. Noor places her finger inside a small, clean, airtight cavity next to her front door’s lock. A sterilized needle quickly pricks her finger and collects a drop of her blood to scan. After a moment, the scanner beeps and flashes green, and the door opens.

The flute plays its strange melody as Sana’s expressionless gaze meets her mother’s eyes. Mommy. If it saves something else from being hurt, I think it is still the right thing to do.

• • • •

I wake up, disconnect the tubes from my head as fast as I can, and sprint to the bathroom, where I retch into the toilet, though no bile enters my mouth. What the hell? I’m getting the nausea side effect now? I’ve never gotten it before! Fuck.

• • • •

“You should keep an eye on Dr. Young. Meet her, see if you can find anything out about her. It’s a weird coincidence that she’s the one who modified our neurons, and she had such an intimate relationship with Noor without mentioning anything to us.” Marie shoves a handful of spiced, fried crickets into her mouth before passing the bowl over to Anthony, who takes a handful and passes the bowl to me. Switching to insects as a source of protein is becoming increasingly popular these days.

“Yeah. I’m meeting her soon.” I politely take a few from the bowl. They taste okay but need more cayenne powder and salt.

“Are you okay Nithya? You look kind of flushed.” Anthony looks concerned.

My stomach feels so weird. I feel pretty nauseated and stuff is really churning around in there. My period literally just ended . . . and it doesn’t really feel like cramps either, or gas pain. So what the hell?

“I think it’s just indigestion. I’ll be okay.”

Anthony hands me an antacid, and I take it. Pretty soon I’m feeling a bit better. It was probably just an upset stomach.

“Maybe go easy on the spicy snack.” Marie takes the bowl away from me.

“Are you kidding me? That spice is weak as fuck. If anything, my stomach would protest at the lack of cayenne in that bowl.”

They laugh, and then we sit in silence for some time, researching Noor’s place of work. Eventually Anthony closes his touchscreen and looks at me.

“Okay, I have to know. What was it like? You’ve been acting kind of strange today.”

What was it like?

She was alive. I wasn’t myself, I was her, entirely. The world felt so different. It’s so different, in her head. And I can remember everything about her life, in such great detail. It was all so vivid! She was actually alive again. And they were all alive too. Irene, Sana, everyone she interacted with. They were as alive as Marie and Anthony are to me right now. What is the difference really, after all? The neural activity in my brain when I interact with someone is what creates everything I understand about the person I’m interacting with. That’s all the evidence I can ever get from them to prove they’re alive (unless I’m playing light into my head to become them, of course). Recreating those patterns . . . it’s the same as recreating those people, at least what those people were to Noor. The interactions are just as real. They were as alive to me as anybody I walked past today.

Now I’m back in the reality I inhabit. Me, Nithya, not her. But now scents and sights and sounds around me are bringing up old memories that are not mine, of a carpet in a house I’d never been to, of a beach in a country I’ve never visited. Ghostly fragments of thought are invading my reality constantly, of laughter and voices and experiences with strangers and friends and family I have never known. I never realized how many memories I remembered in a single day until I was forced to start separating recollections of my autobiographical timeline from recollections of hers. They’re constant. Every single thing in my surroundings, from Anthony and Marie to the snack bowl to my touchscreen, now has two different emotional states associated with it. Different fragments of memory that are dug up to navigate the experience associated with interacting with any object or person. And I can feel the differences.

I’m here now, everything around me is real. I know it. And it’s especially comforting to inhabit my own reality again because, well, for a while . . . I blinked out of existence. When Noor was alive again, living in my head as my brain activity, I wasn’t there at all anymore. My brain was only a vessel for her to live her life out, with no self-awareness of my role as a vessel, even. I was nothingness for the period of time where she came back to life, and now that I’m awake, she’s nothingness again.

I clear my throat and turn my attention back to Anthony and Marie. “It’s so . . . intimate, this whole thing. Is this right? I mean . . . I remember her life. I have her memories. Is this okay? I feel strange about it.”

“It must feel really weird.” Marie looks at me sympathetically. “But you know the contracts you have to sign when you get the procedure done. You can relive your experiences, or gift them to someone else you choose. And in the case of a sudden and unexpected death, you give your consent to let an investigator live your experiences. Noor knew all these conditions when she got the procedure done. And well, she’s not alive anymore, Nithya. And her family wanted us to do this as well. They want to know what happened to her as well.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t know what it would be like. Nobody knew. She’s alive again, Marie! It’s her, in the past, sure, but she’s as alive as we are right now. She couldn’t have known what I would be experiencing.”

Anthony speaks up. “Hey, this is all for Noor’s sake. We’re going to find out what happened. This will give us the best chance we have at figuring out the whole situation. It’s our job, Nithya. For her family, for her memory. We owe it to them to investigate her death and give them some closure.”

At the end of the day, on my walk home, I pass a father and his three-year-old daughter. I smile, remembering Sana when she was three. She was always running off somewhere, climbing a tree or investigating some bug she found. For a moment, I can almost hear her flute, picture her blank stare . . . I catch myself and quickly work to separate Noor’s memories from mine before continuing home.

• • • •

I am not prepared for the swell of emotions and deep sense of shared history I experience when I see Irene Young sitting in a booth of a café downtown, sipping her coffee. It’s almost painful, the physical ache in my chest and my gut, of love and lust and nostalgia and camaraderie. It takes a whole lot more effort to separate all of Noor’s emotions toward Irene from mine right now, compared to separating the two emotional states when interacting with something like an apple. And it’s really hard to think properly when I sit down across from this woman Noor loved.

Irene clears her throat. “Do you want anything to eat or drink? The coffee here is from one of the new orbiting gardens. Pretty amazing that what I’m drinking was grown in sealed chambers up in space. Quite the solution to the dwindling arable land problem, isn’t it? And it’s pretty good coffee too.”

As soon as she speaks, the context of the situation hits me.“Can we just cut the bullshit and start talking? Why didn’t we know about you? Why did you take the job of modifying our neurons? What the hell do you know, and why the hell haven’t you told us already? And what was with that note? Why couldn’t you say anything before I started this?”

She sighs. “Look, it’s really complicated. But I want to keep my relationship with her a secret, alright? The place she worked for is not something I want to get too involved with. They know about me already, but they don’t really know about my relationship with her. And I didn’t even learn about her work until . . . ”

“Until what?”

Irene looks down at her coffee. “Well, let me just say that they know I had met Noor. I found out about where she worked a week or so before she died. And I inquired about her afterward. They were really sad about her death . . . but they also told me that they were worried she was planning something really dangerous. They said she was going to do something that would risk a lot of people’s lives. And that maybe she wasn’t in the best state of mind, maybe she was delusional.”

I almost laugh. Delusional? “Trust me, that’s not true. I think I would know, I’m living her life every night.”

She smiles sadly. “And maybe that’s exactly why you wouldn’t see it. Because you’re in her head, you don’t see that her delusions aren’t true. To the person afflicted by them, they actually are real. If you’re living Noor’s reality, experiencing the world around you from her perspective, of course you’re inclined to believe her thoughts.” She gulps down the rest of her coffee. “I never thought she might be experiencing delusions when she was alive either. Everything she said or did always seemed to make perfect sense.” Irene sighs. “But maybe I was wrong.”

I feel a sudden longing to hold her, make her laugh and smile and forget all her troubles. I try to separate Noor’s emotions from mine but . . . this time some of it is coming from me too, at least I think it is. The whole time, she’s been digging the corner of her short-clipped thumbnail into the wooden table, hard, creating an arc indent in the table. I briefly experience the desire to hold her hand but decide against it.

“I’m sorry, Irene. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“Mhm.” She takes a deep breath and looks up at me, perfectly composed again.

When she speaks again, she chuckles a bit. “You know, I’m pretty jealous of you Nithya. You get to live it. You get to know her in the most intimate possible way.”

“I don’t know. It’s such a new thing, I have no idea whether or not it’s the moral thing to do. I mean, I’m a stranger. It feels a bit . . . wrong. And you, Sana . . . it’s a lot, Irene. It’s intruding on all of your privacy too.”

She looks me in the eyes. “But you’re not going to stop, are you?”

“No, I mean, I owe it to her family and—”

Irene laughs at this. “Oh come on. You and I both know it’s not that. I have never seen someone so enthusiastic about getting that procedure done before I met you. So what is it, really?”

She orders another coffee, and I order one too before speaking. “Okay. Fine. I want to know what it’s like inside someone else’s head. I’ve always wanted to. I want to know how things taste to them, how they think of other people, how their entirely different set of memories influences what the world around them looks like. And now I can. That’s the truth.”

“Fair enough.” She chugs more coffee.

“How do you feel, though? About me . . . knowing so much about your relationship?”

After an almost unbearably long pause, Irene smiles. “It should have been me. Not you. If it had to be anybody, it should have been me. But she never had the time to think about who would get her experiences after her death. And she never requested for anyone to live them out. Nobody even knew about me. She died suddenly, so it’s all being investigated, and so you got them. You don’t appreciate what you’ve been given the way I would have. But I’ve come to terms with it. The light pulses have been encoded to fit your specific synaptic structure, and quantum encrypted to prevent any further access to her memories. So it can’t be me. But it should have been. Am I fine with you knowing so much about my relationship with her? I could be, if you just do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She grabs my hand. “Tell me about it. Tell me about her thoughts, what it is like in her mind. Tell me everything, all of it, until every last light pulse has run through your head. It’s why I wanted to meet you. You don’t have to tell me anything related to the investigation. I just want to know what it’s like. Starting now. Tell me, please.”

I do.

As I get up to leave, after hours have gone by, with plans to see her again the following week, Irene asks me, “How have you been feeling so far? With the pills and the hallucinations and everything.”

“The hallucinations aren’t that bad, but I’ve actually been feeling a bit nauseated since I started.”

She looks concerned. “You should see someone about that. That’s not normal, especially since you never had the side effect before.”

“I think I’ll be okay, it’s dying down and—”

“Seriously, just to be safe. It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Alright, I’ll make an appointment with someone.”

• • • •

The nurse and doctor at the hospital hand me all the information I need to know, along with the charts and statements laying it all out for me, neatly clipped together on synthesized paper and an electronic copy on my touchscreen.

“Have you started the coughing fits yet?” the doctor asks.

“No, I’m still just getting the nausea.” I look down at my hands.

“Good. So you aren’t contagious yet—too many people wait until they start coughing, without coming in during the noncontagious nausea phase like they’re supposed to . . . that’s the only thing that’s keeping this spreading, these days, honestly. At least it’s very rare to get infected now.”

They hand me packets of liquid. “Here, drink these twice every day to prevent fluid buildup and the bile-inducing coughing fits. They’ll coat your esophagus with a protective layer that will stop you from ever becoming contagious and prevent the mutation-induced signals from leaving the lysogenic squamous cells.” The doctor clears their throat. “Please know, this contagion-prevention mechanism cannot be used prophylactically, and would actually be really harmful to an uninfected person, so please don’t try giving it to anyone else. It only works on an infected person with their viral-DNA-containing squamous cell genome. And please remember that this alone will not cure you—it will be eventually fatal without the cure—so you really need to start ingesting the archaeocytes too. But we’re well out of the horror from a couple years ago, this illness is easily treatable now. The archaeocytes work wonders and have been made highly accessible! So remember to start that sponge treatment soon in addition to drinking this liquid, and you’ll be cured!”

I have it. I’m sick.

• • • •

“Rajnigandha Phool Tumhare,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar, plays through Noor’s mind. As the sub quickly sinks into the sea, the colors around Noor start to fade away. She watches her red shirt turn to blue-gray as she remembers Irene’s words over and over again.

“I’m sick, Noor. I have it. I was able to get a spot in one of those trials, and they’ve been able to cure every single person in the trials so far. But I wanted to tell you . . . in case something ever goes wrong.”

When only blue light is able to reach the depths, Noor climbs up, out of the spherical observation portion of the sub, and sits across from Matias, her fellow crew member on their two-person sampling mission, at a small folding table.

They’re headed to a newly discovered P. meyeri colony at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Deep-sea remotely operated vehicles have already mapped out the massive, linked caverns inhabited by the colony. According to images from the ROVs, the walls, ceilings, and floors of the spaces are all covered with countless sponges, arranged in an astoundingly intricate fashion. Specialized sponges occupy different chambers, each one shaped to make optimal use of the water currents, avoid danger, protect reproducing sponges, and capture the most food. It’s one of the most complex systems Noor has ever encountered.

This is wrong—she begins to think, but shakes the thought away quickly, remembering Irene’s face as her optimistic facade eventually disappeared to reveal her terror.

“I don’t want to die like that.” Irene spoke through sobs. It was painful to watch, and all Noor could do was hold her close.

“Is this your kid?” Matias points to the screensaver on her touchscreen, flashing family pictures of Noor and Sana.

“Yeah, that’s her. Her name’s Sana, she’s just turned eleven.”

“She’s about my Syd’s age. Such a handful these days, these kids. At least, Syd is. Syd gets into trouble at school every day now, for not responding to questions mainly. But it’s not their fault. It’s those other kids who got them to join that ridiculous movement. I get wanting to prevent and stop the climate catastrophes, but this is just extreme and unhealthy. My kid hasn’t changed the damn expression on their face in over a month, it’s driving me and my husband up the walls!”

Noor is taken aback. “Actually—”

“I hope your kid never gets into that stuff. It’s dangerous, really. And all those experimental public schools cropping up these days, encouraging that crap, aren’t helping at all. Glad I didn’t send Syd to one of those. Where does your Sana go?”

“Sana goes to an experimental public school, Learning Lab, past the wind turbines. And I think the youth movement is incredibly brave.”

“Ah.” Matias sits quietly for some time, his face adopting an expression of deep concern. “Look, it’s for your kid’s sake that I’m telling you this. The movement—”

Noor narrows her eyes. “Look, I’m going through my own shit coming to terms with my daughter’s choices, but I feel guilty enough that I’m going through shit about it at all. I should just respect what she’s doing and admire her strength and bravery. And I certainly don’t need you to butt into any of my personal business. I think, to maximize the productivity of this mission, we should just focus on our research. Why don’t you tell me about that instead?”

This time Matias looks taken aback. “Fine.” He opens his touchscreen and shows Noor a folder full of images of a P. meyeri sponge’s spicules. “These are images taken by the ROVs, showing the portions of the sponges facing the interior of the chamber cavities, toward all the other sponges. The spicules on this side are incredibly complex and specifically designed to bring light deep into the sponge. Their refractive index far surpasses that of our corneas. And there’s a lens too! My question is, why does it need to collect light with such specificity and efficiency? I think there must be some sort of symbiosis with bioluminescent and light-sensing organisms we haven’t found in previous samples, that requires light to reach the interior of the sponge. And if we can control the signaling system they have, if they have one of course, we can possibly increase their productivity.”

Fascinated, Noor studies a document listing potential chemical impurities that could have formed in the spicules to improve their refractive index.

A sharp, high-pitched tone plays in the sub. It’s time to put on their nitrogen regulators and suits. Noor and Matias place needles attached to a system of quarter-inch diameter tubes onto various marked areas on their bodies. Noor winces slightly at this, even though the process is painless. As soon as the needles have been taped in place, they each attach the tubes to thin, flexible, cloth-covered plates that they strap to their backs, and finally press the glowing blue button on each of their plates. Once the buttons are pressed, a microscopically thin system of smaller tubes begins to stretch out from the needles and into their internal tissues, throughout their bodily systems, causing a brief shiver to run through them. One of the most pressing concerns when working in the midnight zone is avoiding any sort of depth-pressure related injury, such as future decompression sickness from pressurized surface-level gases depressurizing upon resurfacing. The nitrogen regulators manage the distribution of surface gases, mainly nitrogen, within the bodies of Noor and Matias, to make sure nothing like that happens.

After putting on the nitrogen regulators, the two of them step into heavy, bulky suits and helmets, and turn on communications with each other. Their suits can collect oxygen from the surrounding water, allowing them to walk around under water for a virtually unlimited amount of time.

“You’re studying the flask cells, right?” Matias struggles to pull gloves over his hands.

“Yeah. Sponge larvae have some form of a rudimentary sensory processing system using their flask cells that allows them to move to a place where they can become sessile, P. meyeri included. But P. meyeri flask cells are different. When the larva becomes sessile, the flask cells continue to develop.”

“How so?”

“That’s the thing. I can track their development up to a certain extent, but for some reason all the larvae I have die before reaching adulthood, even when deep-sea conditions are simulated perfectly. I don’t understand it. In the adults, there is a thin extra layer, lined with mesohyl, that covers almost all of the sponge’s interior surfaces. I think that’s where the fully developed flask cells are. When we collect the specialized sponge archaeocyte cells to make the medication, we have to access them using certain entryways into the sponge body that aren’t covered by this extra layer. If you cut into that layer, the sponge kills itself instantly, producing a dark oily liquid that somehow dissolves any remnants of this extra layer, along with much of the rest of the sponge.”

Matias frowns. “That’s why the sponge colonies used to die out when we got ROVs to remove samples to bring up. Even if the ROVs didn’t cut into the extra layer of the sponge it was harvesting, they had to cut into the surrounding sponges to remove it, and the liquid spread, killing the rest of the colony and hurting other organisms.”

Noor nods. “Yeah. Now we harvest the P. meyeri using those few entryways. You know what’s even weirder though? The sponges kill themselves if you even try to scan them to see into that layer. How are they even able to detect the scan? I don’t understand it.”

Matias frowns. “So how are you going to observe it?”

“My idea relies on the hope that the sponges will protect their next generation at all costs. If the larvae are in the process of escaping the sponge they developed in, maybe the sponge will override the trigger to self-destruct, and maybe I can scan, observe, and take snapshots of the fully developed flask cells inside the adult, if there are any, during that brief window. The sponges aren’t reproducing in the labs, so I’ll try it in the colony itself. Hopefully if I do this, we can find a way to stop the sponges from leaking that corrosive liquid and harming themselves and their surroundings, in the future.”

They finish adjusting their suits in silence. Matias taps Noor on the shoulder and points to a switch that would mute communications with the surface crew. Noor nods, and Matias speaks after muting the communications.

“P. meyeri is pretty special, isn’t it?”

Noor raises an eyebrow. “It is . . . ”

Matias sighs. “You know, if the times were different, I wouldn’t have been doing this. We’re rushing into churning out the treatments since it was such a widespread emergency just a few years ago. But these sponges . . . we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding them, and they’re unlike any ever known before. Yeah, sponges can’t think. But somehow this one reacts to its surroundings in an incredibly nuanced way. Why, you know? If the times were any different, I would have done things so differently. I would have taken things slowly, and carefully, and with less . . . I don’t know, exploitation.”

Noor gives him a half smile. “I know what you mean. You know, I was almost going to—”

The expression on Matias’ face darkens as he interrupts her. “But times aren’t different. And I want to do this. You know, a few years ago, Syd got sick. It got so bad, their intestines weren’t absorbing anything . . . We had all resigned ourselves to making them as comfortable as possible in their final few months. But then they got into one of the trials, and now we’re able to fret about what they’re doing with their life, not whether they’ll live. After Syd got sick, I knew I had to get myself into this line of research. Frankly, if exploiting P. meyeri means other Syds can live, I’d uproot every last sponge in existence.”

Noor nods. “I understand, Matias. Someone I love, someone I want . . . a future with . . . is getting treated right now. And I want to do everything in my power to protect her, even if it means fighting every instinct I have.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other.” He turns communications with the surface crew back on.

When they have reached the colony, Matias and Noor move through an airlock into the exit chamber. Once sealed into the exit chamber, the door in front of them, divided into slats, starts rotating each slat individually as the chamber fills with water. Once horizontal rather than vertical, the slats slide into the walls, leaving an opening through which Matias and Noor leave the sub.

The ROVs had assembled a thin metal grate pathway going through the chambers, just above the sponges on the floors, so that people could walk through without destroying or touching anything along the way. They turn on the bioluminescence sensors on their helmets, which have scanners and filters built in so they can focus on collecting samples and not have to use handheld tools to view or scan the sponges. The helmets track their eye movements and some of their neural activity. They also superimpose faint 3D models of the sponges around them onto the darkness, so that along with any bioluminescence, they’d be able to see the general shapes of their surroundings to know where to go without shining any bright lights.

“Look at this!” Matias calls to Noor. He pumps a bioluminescent dye, packed with glowing plankton, around the base of a massive sponge near the entrance of the chamber. After being absorbed into the pores of the sponge, one would expect the plankton in the water to be consumed, and the remaining plankton-free, non-glowing water pumped back out. Instead, the dye begins to trace a pathway going from one sponge to another, throughout the chambers. “They’re directing the water to one another and sharing the food!”

Noor calls back to him. “Hey, I think it’s time to split up. I’m going to the center chamber, it’s almost time for the larvae to leave the sponges. But keep me updated.” She sets her helmet to show a small viewport in the bottom right corner in which she can see what Matias sees.

Each P. meyeri colony is structured similarly. The sponges near the entrance of the chamber system are the largest, informally named the “sentry” sponges. Almost all the water that flows into these chambers goes through them. The deeper into the chambers one travels, the smaller the sponges get. Only the smallest sponges, in the centermost chamber of the colony, produce larvae. Using the intricate system of directing water, P. meyeri is able to send sperm from all the various shapes and sizes of sponges that are needed in the different chambers to the centermost chamber, ensuring that more of those shapes and sizes will exist in the next generation.

But how do they know which larvae developed from which sperm? And how do the colonies keep growing if there are a limited number of chambers? There are so many questions!

Matias’ voice sounds through Noor’s helmet. “Hey, I want to put on some music, real quietly. Do you want to listen too?”

“That depends on what you’re going to play. If it’s the stuff my daughter listens to, that’s going to be a no from me.”

“Space Oddity,” by David Bowie begins to play in Noor’s helmet.

Noor laughs. “Wow, a song about dying alone, floating away in the abyss of space. Depressing choice.”

“Our current situation just sort of brought that song to my mind.”

“I’m amazed at your optimism. Also, this song is ancient!”

Matias chuckles. “Says the person playing Bollywood songs from god knows what decade for the entire first half of our descent.”

“Hey, Lata Mangeshkar is a legend.”

“Um, so is David Bowie.”

“True. It’s a good song, too.”

They walk down their separate paths for a while, humming or singing along to the song. A dragonfish, swimming in an erratic, jolting manner, convulsing and pulsing blue bioluminescent stripes over its body, moves past Matias. Noor watches it through the small viewport at the bottom of her helmet. Matias decides to follow it before speaking again.

“You know, the nice thing about listening to music is that it kind of puts a filter over reality. Suddenly you can notice your surroundings and what’s moving to the beat of the song. You yourself move differently, blink differently, notice and ignore things differently. For a moment it’s not reality that you’re living in, but a world directed by something else, like you’re starring in a film or something. For the duration of the song it almost feels like nothing bad can happen to you. Everything, whether good or bad, feels like it’s going to either match the music or wait until the song is over to happen. It makes everything seem more predictable and safe. Now, I don’t want to die an agonizing death floating in any abyss, but if I had to, I’d rather have it be while I’m listening to a David Bowie song that’s sort of about what I’m experiencing.”

Noor smiles. “Yeah,” she says quietly.

A cloud of something drifts past Noor. The helmet enhances it, applies a color filter over it to show what color it is, and zooms in to scan. It’s made of larvae. It’s started. She closes the viewport showing Matias’ view so she can get a better look.

Noor watches as the cloud divides itself up and flows through the ostia of the sponges around her. What the hell? They’ll be digested! But then the larvae pass through, out the osculums of the sponges, unharmed. They move from sponge to sponge, until they find their way to separate chambers, where the larvae just swim around in the center. They aren’t old enough to become sessile yet. Noor directs her helmet to scan the interior of a sponge as the larvae pass through it, taking care not to scan through the layer of the sponge that she suspects contains the flask cells.

Tiny, flashing lights shine toward the larvae as they pass through . . . upon closer inspection, it appears as though microscopic bioluminescent shrimp, fused to the inner walls of the sponge, are flashing light from their photophores. This wasn’t in any of the samples . . .

Noor opens the viewport with Matias’ view again. “Matias, you have to see this! Inside the sponges—”

“Noor! I was just about to tell you! Are you seeing what I’m seeing? I found a new chamber! The opening is too small for any ROV to get through, or even notice, really! But I can just barely look through into it.”

Noor expands the viewport. Through a small opening between sponges, she sees a massive chamber, lined with P. meyeri and filled with a large variety of marine life. Snailfish swim laps around the place. Dragonfish swarm the bottom, flashing and . . . mating? This isn’t where or how they normally mate. Transparent squid, packed tightly together, have somehow turned on one another for sustenance, fighting and eating each other, dropping particles of food into the waiting ostia of the sponges. How did these creatures get inside the chamber? They couldn’t have fit through the opening unless they got here when they’d just hatched, or when they were inside eggs.

“I . . . I don’t know what to make of it!” A timer starts flashing on her helmet. It’s time to hurry to the center chamber, the larvae release has almost ended.

What are we doing here? We shouldn’t be here . . . She moves as quickly as she can to the center chamber, full of indecision. There are too many things we don’t know, fuck, we don’t know what we’re doing, we should just leave this place alone, we’ve destroyed so many others . . . she can feel herself panicking and stands still for a moment, closing her eyes and breathing deeply.

As soon as her mind stops racing, Irene shows up in her thoughts again. Irene, the love of her life. Irene, the one she hopes to marry someday. The one who has always worried for her safety . . . the one whose safety Noor worries for now. I need to do this. For her. For our future together. She needs to get well, I cannot risk losing her, ever.

Clenching her teeth, she heads into the centermost chamber. The floor is lined with what look like aggregated gemmules, the result of asexually reproducing sponges. Why are they outside the sponges? And how come P. meyeri gemmules don’t end up developing into sponges themselves, ever? There hasn’t been a single pair of P. meyeri sponges whose DNA matches exactly found so far. Noor carefully takes a sample of the gemmules. And then she looks up.

An intricate, coordinated display of flashing light is taking place throughout the chamber, in a beautiful recursive pattern revolving around one of the sponges, far more complex than any temple carving, any rose window, any generative design she’s seen. The sponge releases its larvae, and then a different beautiful light display centering on another sponge begins as that sponge starts to release its larvae. Using the scanner, Noor finds more of those microscopic shrimp fused to the exteriors of the sponges, somehow being controlled. She steels her churning stomach and holds back her revulsion regarding what she’s about to do.

As the sponge in the center of the swirling, dancing lights releases its larvae, Noor directs her helmet to scan inside the extra layer under its surface. At first, she does not know what she’s looking at. But soon, she begins to understand. The insulating sheaths. The delicate branches. The electrical signals.

Neurons.

The reason it was briefly so difficult to make out what she was looking at was the sheer number of synapses in the thing. Noor asks the helmet to calculate how many synapses would be in the entire sponge if the concentration average held up throughout its body.

One quadrillion. Over ten times more synaptic connections than the ones in a human brain.

Noor backs away, quickly. “Oh, fuck.”

Matias’ voice suddenly rings out, panicked. “Some of the larvae that just arrived at this chamber . . . they’re swimming to me. They—FUCK! NO—”

“Matias, head back to the sub if you can hear me! Please!”

Noor is about to turn around when she sees the lights in the chamber shift, ripple, change their pattern. They aren’t centered around the sponge she was just scanning anymore. They are centered around her.

The larvae that had just been released from the sponge she scanned begin to swim around her, closing in rapidly until they latch on to her suit. As soon as they’re stuck on, their bodies begin to rupture and burst into a dark, oily liquid that quickly spreads. No no no no FUCK!

She moves as fast as she can, back to the entrance of the chamber, back toward the sub, as the liquid begins to cover her helmet and block out her vision. She sees Matias staggering over too. They fall into the chamber, shut the door, crawl through the airlock, and collapse onto the floor of the sub after Matias pushes the button to ascend.

Noor almost thinks “We made it!” when she feels blood dripping out of her nose, her mouth, her ears, and her eyes. Looking over at Matias, she sees he’s going through the same thing. A splitting headache suddenly becomes agonizing, and Noor feels close to passing out. The nitrogen regulators aren’t working. We’re getting decompression sickness. She manages to shed her suit to see the quarter-inch diameter tubes clogged with the dark liquid, creeping closer and closer to the needles that lead into her body. She quickly rips out the tubes, looks over to Matias again, and sees him doing the same, and then Noor falls unconscious, her last thoughts before doing so containing a singular wish of hope that they’d survive.

• • • •

Noor blinks awake in a hospital bed to see Sana holding her hand, looking at her blankly. In the bed opposite her, she watches Matias begin to stir as well. At his bedside are a weeping man, and a child of about Sana’s age. The weeping man says to the child, “Look Syd, he’s waking up! Don’t you want to greet him with a smile?”

The child types on their touchscreen

No. I have a message typed up for when he wakes up. I worked hard on it. He can read that, and he will know I am happy.

“But it would make him feel happier if he wakes up to—”

Matias reaches over and squeezes the man’s arm, looks up at him with a smile, and shakes his head before turning to Syd.

“Hey, you’re so brave. Thank you for waiting here. I’m just happy to see you, no matter what expression you have on your face. I love you Syd.”

Syd nods at their father and types on their touchscreen

Thank you Dad. I love you too. I’m happy that you are awake.

Noor squeezes Sana’s hand tight and closes her eyes again.

• • • •

Irene and I sit together on the floor of my apartment, leaning against the sensory deprivation chamber, sharing a bottle of wine. It’s almost empty now, and we’ve been talking for the whole evening. I haven’t told her that I have the illness yet.

I look at her. “What was it like to know her? I’m always telling you what it’s like to be her, but I’ll never know what it was like to know her.”

Irene smiles and closes her eyes. “Knowing her was the most wonderful thing to ever happen in my life. Our relationship was definitely a bit interesting, since we were keeping it a secret from everyone. We only met up a couple times a week, only spent nights together every Friday night when Sana was at a sleepover. But the separation only deepened our love for one another, only made us ache for the other’s company even more. And it made the times we did spend together that much sweeter. Every time I woke up next to her, every time I covered my head with a pillow to block out the sound of her snores, every time I made her smile, or became frustrated with how stubborn she could be, or listened to her give an impassioned speech, or heard her awful singing, or just about a thousand other things, it was all connected by this incredible foundation of just . . . love, you know? The deepest possible amount you can care about someone. I don’t think I’d ever truly loved anyone until I met Noor. The day I knew, I was poring over scans of patients’ brains, and a thought of her just popped into my own brain. I said aloud to the stack of scans: ‘I really care about her.’ And a week later I figured out it was love. I’m sorry, did that make any sense? I think I feel the wine.” She laughs.

“That made perfect sense . . . that was beautiful. I don’t know if I’ve personally ever felt that way about anyone before. But with Noor’s memories . . . I know what you mean, Irene.”

Irene turns to me and looks as though she’s about to speak several times, the expression on her face drifting from an almost-frown to an almost-smile and back again. The intensity of her gaze makes me a bit nervous, and I laugh to shake away the slight discomfort.

“What is it?” I ask.

Irene takes a sip of wine. “Nithya, because of Noor’s memories, of course . . . I really have to wonder, do you feel something for me? I mean, you tell me how much she loved me, and you describe to me what she felt. But it’s you living all of that. And you still remember all of it . . . I have to wonder.”

I sigh. “Honestly? Yeah, Irene. I do. Most of the time I have to work incredibly hard to separate her feelings for you from mine. And it’s almost unbearably tempting to just feel everything, the full extent of her love for you . . . especially because . . . ”

“Because what?”

I take a sip of wine. “Because I feel something for you too. And I don’t completely understand if it’s coming from me, or if it’s some memory leakage coming from Noor’s experiences. But I do know that from the moment I met you, there was definitely something. I mean, how could there not be, you know? You’re brilliant, and powerful, and . . . intense and so beautiful. How could I not feel something?”

Our faces seem to be drawing closer and closer together, but maybe it’s the wine. She half smiles. “What would it even be like, us, together? You, with the lover of the person whose experiences you’re living to investigate her death, your feelings influenced by who-knows-what. And me, with the person who gets to live the life of the woman I loved, a person who has probably been influenced by her in the past few weeks. I’m definitely not sober enough to untangle all the moral and ethical implications of that right now.”

I look at her for a while before speaking. “I don’t really know either. It would be pretty uncharted territory, wouldn’t it?”

Irene smiles at me, and I have no idea what compels me to say what I say next, but I smile back at her a little bitterly, and whisper, “But in its own slightly fucked-up way, isn’t it kind of a perfect match?”

And with that, our lips meet, and there is no turning back.

We laugh and we kiss, scattering clothes around the place as we make our way to the bedroom.

“Is it okay if I don’t play the light pulses tonight?”

“Yeah you can postpone them for one night.”

At the entrance to the bedroom, I pause for a moment and pull away from her, look into her eyes. “Hey, Irene. I completely understand if it wouldn’t be okay but . . . can I feel what Noor felt for you, just for tonight? Please?”

Irene nods. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but I want that too, Nithya. I need that too.”

I kiss her deeply, run my hands through her hair, and let Noor’s feelings flood into my own, creating a beautiful mix of deep, comfortable, strong love, and new, exciting, passionate lust. I stop separating my memories from hers, and the two worlds blend together. It’s overwhelming, but in a good way, and as it hits me that I’ve loved this woman countless times before, the care and intimacy and ache I suddenly experience for her is the most powerful thing I have ever felt. As we make love, I realize I’m not Nithya anymore in the moment, and I’m not Noor either. I’ve become someone entirely different, memories and emotions from the two lives blending together, but everything focusing and revolving around . . . Irene. I know it’s probably a mistake. But I tell myself just for this one night, I let myself become this new entity, and it feels beautiful, and right, and . . . true.

Afterward, as we lie together, the sweat drying off our bodies under a fresh, cool sheet, I look over at her and decide to tell her.

“I have the illness. And the trials are so accessible now that I got a place in one easily. I’m taking the esophagus-coating liquid twice a day to ensure that I’m not contagious, I won’t get any bile-inducing coughing fits. But . . . I’m not going to do the treatment that would cure me. I can’t tell you why right now, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I think I’ll have around a year. I’m sorry.”

She looks at me for a long time, and I can’t read the expression on her face. But then she turns off the lamplight next to us, and pulls me close to her, wrapping her arms around me. I fall asleep there in her arms, feeling absolutely, comfortably, wonderfully safe.

• • • •

I wake up to a crashing sound in the bathroom, and someone saying “FUCK!” loudly. I pull on a T-shirt and rush to the bathroom, where I see Irene sobbing. A toothbrush holder had been knocked over into the first of the pillboxes for Noor’s experiences. The box has opened in the process, and pills are scattered everywhere, in the toilet and the sink and on the floor.

I hold Irene close to me, and she starts to say, “I’m sorry Nithya! I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so fucking sorry,” as she buries her head in my shoulder, snot and tears soaking through my shirt.

“It’s okay! Seriously, this is no big deal! I have a prescription, I can get more pills. Don’t worry, seriously!”

But she doesn’t seem to hear me. She just keeps saying it over and over again. “I’m so sorry.”

• • • •

Noor sits on an uncomfortably textured couch in a small waiting room, her mind going blank as she observes the beige and blue diamond pattern on the carpet at her feet. Someone finally opens a door and calls her inside. “They’re ready to see you now!”

She enters a room full of people way above her pay grade. She’d tried to remember everyone’s names but couldn’t retain any of them.

“Sit down, make yourself comfortable! Do you want any water, coffee, anything?”

Noor shakes her head and sits.

A woman at the head of the table they’re all arranged around leans forward, smiling. “Great stuff you found during your last sampling mission, isn’t it?”

Noor frowns. “We can’t continue doing this. P. meyeri is intelligent! A single sponge contains more synapses than we can even fully comprehend! We have to tell everyone.”

They look at one another, before turning to her. One man sighs.

“Look—Noor—right? We . . . we already know about this. Someone discovered this before you. Actually . . . we’ve known about this almost since we discovered the sponge. In fact, it is a crucial part of how we treat the diseases.”

“What?”

The woman at the head of the table widens her smile. “We have this under control! There is nothing for you to worry about. We’ve known about this for some time, and we’ve taken our research on P. meyeri in some very interesting directions! Some of the techniques used to treat certain mental illnesses these days in humans, physically changing motivation especially, can be mapped to the nervous system of P. meyeri! And the best news is that it does not feel pain, or grief, or any sort of common human emotion at all, really. Quite frankly, it still more or less fits the guidelines listed for which animals are ethically allowed to be experimented on! And with how crucial it is for treating diseases, we have applied for and received an approval to continue working with it too.”

Noor opens her mouth to protest, when another older woman, a kind expression on her face, speaks up. “You cannot deny how important these sponges are to treat those new diseases. You, or someone you know personally, must have been affected in recent years. And I guarantee that P. meyeri can or did save their life. It is an unsettling prospect, sure, to use a possibly intelligent creature in this way. But ultimately, do you not think we should prioritize our own species? Our loved ones? Our family, our friends? Without this treatment, people would die, Noor. Millions of people. Do you really want to see that happen, knowing there is a way to prevent it all?”

Noor feels sick. She doesn’t know how to respond. “Why did you call me here, if you already know what I found? And why don’t other people know?”

The man who spoke earlier replies. “Great questions! Two reasons. We think it’ll be best for you to switch departments and work directly with using the sponges to treat diseases instead of studying its larvae and reproduction. Maybe it’ll make you . . . understand a bit better, why we need to do this. And, we need you to sign some contracts. See, it might lower the morale of some of the people who work here, if what you discovered gets out. Have you told anyone yet? Your crew member on the sampling mission, perhaps?”

Noor shakes her head. “I closed the viewport connection I had with Matias right before I scanned. It was only audio communication with him, and I didn’t say anything out loud about the neurons. You can check the helmets’ histories if you want.”

“Good! Sign these straight away!”

“What happens if I breach the contract? If I do tell someone else?”

The man smiles. “Well, you would agree to get your memory optogenetically wiped clean of these events, if that happens. And we would probably have the person you told sign the contract as well.”

Noor almost laughs. “Sorry, I don’t think I can do that.” She gets up to leave.

The woman at the head of the table calls to her. “Of course, take your time to decide. But I strongly advise you to sign.”

On her way out, the old woman speaks. “Dear, these sponges can be very dangerous things. It’s probably for the best that we control them! Do sign the contracts.”

The man speaks again too. “You know, you remind me of Dr. Meyers. Did you ever get a chance to meet him, before that terrible, unfortunate event? He was such a kind man. It’s a shame, what happened to him, eventually killed by his own discovery. I think it’s best that you sign these.” He holds the contracts out toward her.

And Noor, her heart pounding and her stomach churning, takes them from him before leaving the room.

When Noor gets home that day, she uses Sana’s touchscreen to call Matias.

“Hey, we need to meet up, as quickly as possible. See you soon.”

• • • •

“I promise, Noor. I’ll take a look at the gemmules. And if anything happens to you . . . I’ll make sure the research is published. I’d want to do that for you.”

• • • •

“You take digits zero to nine and assign each one to a music note, starting from middle C and going up into the first few notes of the next octave. Then, you rewrite the first twenty-six terms of the Fibonacci sequence using the music notes, zero as middle C, thirteen as DF, one hundred and forty-four as DGG, like that. For the repeated one, sharped D is used. Is that right?” Irene looks at Sana, and Sana nods at her.

Irene and Sana sit together on the bottom stair of Noor’s home. Sana is wearing a small synthesized paper party hat with “12” written on it. It’s Sana’s birthday party, and Noor has decided to invite Irene over, just for this one day. She wants her daughter to meet the woman she hopes to marry someday, even if Sana doesn’t know who Irene really is quite yet. She will . . . if all goes well with what Noor’s planning.

Irene continues, “And within a measure, one-digit Fibonacci terms would be quarter notes, two-digit terms eighth notes, three-digit terms triplets, and so on, ensuring that each ‘letter’ would take up one ‘beat’ in each measure of the cipher, with each measure holding a word. Looking at the time signature of each measure, whatever number is above four is the number of letters in the word the measure holds! I love it, Sana! That’s an awesome cipher you’ve created.”

Thanks, Sana plays.

“Could you play that one more time, but a lot slower? I want to figure it out.”

Sana nods and plays it again much slower.

“That’s a T . . . then H . . . A . . . that’s N . . . Oh! You’re playing ‘Thanks!’ You’re very welcome.”

Noor chooses to walk over at this moment. “Sana, you showed Irene your cipher?”

I like her, Mommy. She told me that she volunteered and helped assemble the zero-emission machines used to keep the conditions around the last coral reef from deteriorating for another decade. It’s going to keep a lot of critically endangered species alive for a little more time.

Noor smiles at Irene. “You never told me that you helped save the last coral reef!”

Irene shrugs.

Sana types on her touchscreen and shows it to Irene. It says I like you on it.

Irene grins from ear to ear, and it makes Noor’s heart sing. It’s these moments that make her really question what she’s doing. She thinks to herself. If the research doesn’t work out . . . would Irene understand? Would I be able to go through with it? Noor wishes for the millionth time that she could trade places with Irene. And she wishes for the millionth time that she had the strength to tell Irene what she’s doing.

One of Sana’s friends motions something to Sana, and the child leaves Noor and Irene to go into another room. Noor sits down on the bottom stair.

“How’s the treatment going?”

“My small intestine is around one-fifth sea sponge now! Can you believe it? Well, not really a sea sponge, but made of these almost stem cell-like things inside a sea sponge, that replace everything they need to replace all by themselves! Apparently, they learn to replicate my body’s HLA variants in the process, release antagonists for pattern recognition receptors, NK-cell activating receptors, and T-cell receptors, and have a high surface concentration of sialic acid, so there is no immune response! It’s an amazing treatment. Still a long way to go, but I’m feeling good about it.”

Noor looks away. “That’s nice, Irene. I’m glad it’s going well.”

Irene laughs. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. You obviously don’t have to tell me if I’m right or wrong, but I’m fairly sure this is what your top secret line of work is. I mean, you get weird every time I or anyone else mentions P. meyeri. Besides, I like to think you’re working on the stuff that’s saving my life. Noor, my beautiful knight in shining armor.”

Noor feels herself begin to tear up. She pulls Irene into a tight embrace.

“I love you so much, Irene. You know I’d want you to live forever, if that was possible, right?”

Irene gently returns the embrace, and caresses Noor’s back lightly. “Of course, my love. Of course I know. I promise you, I’ll be okay. I’ll get better, and I’ll live.”

• • • •

“Hum Aap Ki Ankhon Mein,” by Geeta Dutt and Mohammad Rafi plays softly in my kitchen as I pour the fragrant filter coffee, made from rice milk and Irene’s favorite blend from the orbiting gardens, which I spiced with cardamom and cloves, into a cup. Irene is looking out a window. She seems lost in thought, but she’s smiling, which makes me smile a bit too. She shakes off whatever she was thinking about and takes the coffee from me.

“Do you want a sip?”

I shake my head. There’s no way I can drink coffee anymore, it would leave me doubled over in pain for hours. Over the past two months, twenty pounds have just dropped off my body, regardless of the amounts I eat, and I feel cold a lot these days. My reflection in the mirror sometimes doesn’t register to me as what I look like these days, lips devoid of color, sunken eyes, the whites sometimes taking on a yellowish tinge, and massive dark semicircles beneath them. Truthfully, my appearance was always a bit of a point of pride for me, and the bold lipsticks I used to wear not looking quite the same on my face anymore stings more than I’d like to admit. I forget all of that when I’m with Irene, though. She makes me feel absolutely beautiful, always.

Irene takes a sip of the coffee. “It’s delicious! I didn’t know you could . . . is making coffee still in the realm of ‘cooking’?”

I sit down across from her. “Honestly, I have Noor to thank for this one too. You know, she and I have a similar cultural background. When I was younger, I was a lot more religious. Still don’t know quite why it happened that way, my mother was pretty religious, but my father was an atheist, and there was never any pressure to believe in anything. But I think I was looking for a way for the world to make sense. Not in an ‘everything is going to be okay’ way, but more of a ‘there is a reason for everything, and a meaning to everything’ way . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I stopped believing in any sort of higher power eventually, and when I did . . . a part of me felt like I wasn’t really, truly, allowed to take part in celebrating various aspects of my culture anymore. I know, it was kind of silly, but I cut myself off after that, from the clothes and the cuisines and the songs and the events and . . . the community, I guess. Noor wasn’t religious either, but she very much participated in celebrating her culture anyway, and I think seeing that made me feel like it was okay. So . . . enjoy my family’s recipe for filter coffee, it’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

Irene holds my hand. “I see you’ve been influenced by her love of old Bollywood songs too.”

“I think that’s definitely new for me, but I really like them. I have no idea why she enjoyed listening to such old songs though, she never thought much about it herself.”

Irene puts the coffee down. “I think, for her, it was all about the idea of connecting to past generations. Think about all of the people, who haven’t been alive for a century or more now, watching those movies, or listening to those songs. It makes them seem more human, doesn’t it? You’re kind of hit with that realization that these people lived and died, they were just like us. And it’s an interesting thing to feel. Once, she and I went to a redwood forest, saw a fourteen hundred-year-old redwood tree. She just stood there, for almost half an hour! She was thinking about how many people had stood where she was standing, how many people over the centuries saw that tree. I think it’s the same reason she listened to those songs.” Irene sighs.

“I remember that day! It was so nice, walking around with you, in the fog-covered forest. We had such a wonderful time, didn’t we?” I catch myself too late. “I mean, you both had such a wonderful time, didn’t you?”

Irene looks at me and frowns. She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“What is it?” I ask her.

“What kind of a person am I, for doing this?”

“What do you mean?”

She takes a while to respond. “I don’t know exactly why I’m with you, Nithya. I don’t know if it’s because of you, or because the more time I spend with you, and the longer you live Noor’s experiences, the more you remind me of her, and the more I can almost pretend she still exists. It’s unfair to you, you’re an entirely different person.”

“Well, if we’re going there, what kind of a person am I for being with you? Instead of letting you grieve, I kept meeting you, even if I knew Noor was influencing me, even if I didn’t know entirely whether it was me that was falling for you or her, even if when I’m with you sometimes I forget to keep track of where I end, and she begins.”

“Maybe we’re both being selfish.”

I sigh. “Do you want to stop seeing me? Because even if it’s selfish, or wrong, or unethical, I don’t think I want to stop seeing you. Maybe that makes me a bad person, or a weak person . . . but the truth is that I’m in love with you. And frankly, I don’t care where it’s coming from. It’s the same set of neurotransmitters and it’s the same physical process, and like it or not, this is still my lived experience, even if it now includes someone else’s too. And my lived experience is telling me I love you.”

Irene starts to tear up. “I don’t want to stop seeing you! And I love you too! But you shouldn’t love me. And I know for a fact that you’re not going to love me for much longer, too.”

“What, because I’m sick? I can’t believe you just said that to me!”

She shakes her head, speaking through tears. “No, it’s not that at all, it’s something else. Lots of other things, actually. You’ll find out soon, and then you’re going to hate me! And you’ll agree that I am a terrible person for seeing you, for letting you fall for me . . . I just liked you too much! And you reminded me of her . . . and in a way you brought her back to life for me. But I did something terrible, Nithya! And soon you’re not going to love me anymore, I know it.”

I try to touch her shoulder, but she shrugs me away. “What could you possibly have done?”

She takes a deep breath and wipes her tears away. “If it wasn’t for something I did, something terrible, Noor would have been alive right now. I think I killed her, I think it was all my fault. I didn’t know what would happen! And now she’s gone, forever, and all I can do is grasp at the occasional, flickering ghost of her that I see in you.”

Irene turns away from me and leaves my apartment. I let her.

• • • •

Who are you? Are you me, in my current, lived experience? Are you my disembodied brain, lying miles away from my corpse, looping through my memories to prepare a set of light pulses? Or are you someone else entirely, a stranger, maybe, living out some of my most memorable moments? I’ve been searching for something to show me which one it is, a sign, a glitch, a flash in my surroundings? But it’s an impossible quest. I can only wonder who you are.

• • • •

This is the one Irene has. The phage has two capsid heads, each containing a packet of viral DNA, and two protein sheaths, each ending in spider-leg-like fibers. Instead of attacking bacteria, this phage goes after cells in a person’s small intestine and esophagus.

Spread through the air, as soon as phages enter a person’s mouth, they will make their way down the esophagus, either binding to squamous cells on the esophagus and injecting the cells with one vDNA packet or continuing down the esophagus until they reach the small intestine, where they then are able to bind to enterocytes and inject them with the other vDNA packet. After being infected, the cell enters a lysogenic phase. The vDNA packets are tied to a protein mimicking a nuclear localization signal. They trick importin receptors into bringing the vDNA into the nucleus of their host cell. Here, the vDNA is incorporated into its genomic DNA, and as soon as this occurs, the infected cell’s function is altered for the rest of its life.

In the small intestine, lysogenic enterocytes become immensely oversized to make room for as much eventual phage production as possible, in the process, disrupting nutrient absorption. Severe internal growths, agonizing stomach pains, diarrhea, vomiting, and eventually fatal malabsorption result from this. Eventually, close to natural cell death, the vDNA tells it to enter the lytic stage, and it creates as much phage as it can carry before bursting and releasing it. The phages that were just released either infect other enterocytes or travel with bile, as the lysogens around the recently burst cell send signals to the lysogens in the esophagus. When a lysogenic enterocyte in the small intestine bursts, the lysogenic squamous cells in the esophagus receive signals to trigger gastroesophageal reflux, and it induces a coughing fit, bringing the virus-carrying bile up into the person’s mouth and then spreading into the air to infect other people.

For a while, there was no way to stop the lysogenic enterocytes from eventually proving fatal without stripping the entire lining of the small intestine and replacing it using stem cells, an expensive and invasive procedure that runs the risk of reinfection, since the proteins on the surface of the enterocytes wouldn’t change. Then came the discovery of P. meyeri.

With P. meyeri, all an infected person has to do is take a pill every day over a period of time that contains pre-specialized archaeocyte cells from the sponge. The highly specific cells target lysogenic enterocytes and simultaneously work to destroy them and perform normal enterocyte functions themselves. P. meyeri archaeocytes end up entirely replacing the lysogenic enterocytes, and the infected person is cured. Since most of the proteins on the new cell surface are very different, there is no risk of reinfection as well.

The woman from Noor’s earlier meeting leads Noor to a window looking into a room with a single P. meyeri sponge in the center and turns off the light in the hallway around them. “I’m glad you signed the contracts, Noor.”

There’s some sort of a light system set up inside, with tiny blue LEDs everywhere. The main lights in the room go off as well, and the LEDs turn on. A dancing blue light display begins, in a similar yet also quite different recursive pattern to the ones Noor saw in the cavern during the larvae release.

The woman turns to her. “What we’re doing is tricking the sponge into believing the lysogenic enterocyte cells we fused to the inner linings of the channels that run through it actually belong to it, and that the infection will eventually kill it. The way P. meyeri responds is amazing. It synthesizes its own, new, modified enterocyte-esque cells, using the many archaeocyte cells it has, and has them slowly but surely destroy and replace the lysogenic enterocytes, ending up fused to the inner linings of its channels instead of the infected cells.”

They move to a window looking into another room full of sponges. The woman continues “This is where we take the sponges next.” After Noor realizes what’s happening, she feels nauseated. They’re stripping the inner linings of the sponges’ channels. Autonomous machines take cylindrical tubes with sharp edges, and, entering the few pathways without cutting into the nervous system, essentially shave off the new layers of the sponge.

After the archaeocytes have been stripped away, a small trickle of what looks like the dark corrosive liquid drips out of the sponge. Noor turns to the woman next to her. “Is that . . . ”

The woman nods. “It’s a diluted form, so it doesn’t do as much damage to the sponge, but yes, for some reason it secretes that same substance after we strip it of the newly specialized archaeocyte cells . . . Is something wrong?”

Noor frowns. “There must be a way we can use what we already know to come up with a different treatment, without harming or harvesting any more P. meyeri spon—”

The woman smiles and puts her hand on Noor’s shoulder in what looks like an amiable gesture, but she grips the shoulder slightly too tight. “We’ve been doing some research in that realm, but we’re not going to stop using P. meyeri. What happened to Dr. Meyers was sad and terrible, of course, but think about the big picture here, Noor. Once we fine-tune our control of this thing, we can use it for a lot more than just treating a disease.”

On her way out, Noor stops by the building where Matias works and checks in with him. “How is it going, with the you-know-whats?”

“I’m sorry Noor. I don’t know if it’s going to work out. Are you still going to go through with your paper?”

Noor sighs, but eventually nods. “I don’t feel like I have a choice. This is just what I have to do . . . it’s the ethical thing to do. Are you still going to support me, even if your part doesn’t work out?”

Matias looks down. “My promise was that if you were right about what you think happened to Dr. Meyers, and if something terrible happens to you too before you publish it, I’ll make sure it’s published, because that’s what I think the ethical thing to do would be. But . . . if my part of this doesn’t work out . . . if there’s no alternative . . . I don’t think I can support you besides that one situation. I’m sorry.”

• • • •

Noor wakes up to Irene shaking her, forcefully, with tears streaming down her face. “How could you?!” Irene speaks through sobs. She’s holding a stack of synthesized—Oh. No . . . the paper . . .

Noor sits up. Irene speaks again. “Answer me! Tell me there’s been a mistake. Tell me you haven’t written up something that will, if approved, get me killed.”

Noor gets out of the bed and whispers. “I’m sorry.”

“Is there any other cure?”

Noor shakes her head. “No . . . but there’s always hope, maybe—”

Irene starts laughing, bitterly. “This whole time, I thought you were working on the thing that’s been saving my life. But actually, it’s quite the opposite, isn’t it!”

“It’s an intelligent creature, Irene! It cannot be okay to exploit it like this!”

“In any other situation, I would agree with you. But this was an emergency! An actual, serious threat to our existence. And if this treatment goes away, what’s going to happen to everyone currently infected?”

“You haven’t seen P. meyeri like I have, Irene! If you could just try to understand where I’m coming from, maybe you’d see that—”

Irene scoffs. “I do understand where you’re coming from. I read every page of this thing. But have you, ever, once, truly considered what this is like from my perspective? I mean . . . and . . . why did it have to be you, Noor? Why you?”

Noor doesn’t know what to say. How did it escalate so quickly? Why is this happening so fast?

Irene begins putting on her jacket and collecting her belongings.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. I can’t do this.”

“What are you doing with my paper?”

Irene stops, grimaces, turns to Noor. “I can’t let you do this.”

No, no no no. Noor follows Irene as she walks to the door.“Irene, think about it, please. Sit down, we can talk about this. You . . . don’t know what the place I work for is like. Something really bad might happen. Please, just think about this! Plea—”

Irene opens the door, turns around, and says, “I don’t want to die,” before leaving and slamming the door shut behind her.

• • • •

I wake up to one of the foulest scents I have ever encountered. Looking down, I see that I’m lying in a pool of green liquid. I shit myself. “Ew, ew ew,” I repeat to myself over and over again as I unplug the tubes in the sensory deprivation chamber and rush to the bathroom to clean myself up. After thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the sensory deprivation chamber, I take my morning pill to trigger the hallucination, like I do every day, and sit on the floor to wait.

Something’s different this time. Until now, every hallucination has been about my own life, nothing from Noor’s ever entering them. But suddenly I’m sitting at a beach I’ve never been to before, and that is entirely different from what my own imagination normally invents. I try to move, but I can’t move at all. I look out to see . . . Sana is in the distance . . . half buried in the sand? The tide begins to come in, but she doesn’t react. Water rises and rises until it’s covering everything, and I try to move to her, to my daughter, but I can’t move, and now she’s under water, and now I’m under water, and I can’t scream because it’ll fill my lungs, but soon it’s unbearable and I gasp, inhaling saltwater, and then my vision goes black.

The darkness soon dissipates, and I find myself shaking, with tears running down my face, curled into a fetal position on the floor.

• • • •

There are three people named “Matias Rodriguez” living in the nearby area. I try calling the first two from my touchscreen, but I don’t recognize their voices. I recognize the third voice instantly.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hi, I’m investigating Noor’s death, and I wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can help you. I don’t know anybody named Noor.”

“Excuse me? You went on a sampling mission with her . . . do you remember that?”

“Ah, I see. I was scheduled to take part in a sampling mission some time ago, but I got a pretty bad head injury and was unfortunately unable to do the mission. My memories are very poor quality or nonexistent for a while after that, but I’m back to normal now.”

Oh, fuck.

His memories . . . I think I know what happened. Fuck. I sigh, but then I remember something and my heart sinks even more.

“How’s Syd doing?”

Matias groans. “They’ve stopped communicating with me entirely now! Not even through their touchscreen . . . it was bad enough when they wouldn’t change their damn expression, but now . . . Wait. How do you know about Syd? Who are you? Have we met?”

Damn it, poor Syd. “I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but I’m afraid you might have had some of your memories wiped.”

Matias’ tone changes abruptly. “Did Syd put you up to this? Did my husband? Endless paranoia in my family these days, I swear. I’m going to end this call now. Good day.”

• • • •

I meet Irene at the same café we met at months ago, spot her sitting in the same booth, drinking the same coffee. I feel like if we meet here, not only will our conversation go unheard in the hum of all the other conversations taking place around us . . . we will be more inclined to be civil. I will be more inclined to be civil. It’s not just my anger driving me right now, it’s Noor’s too.

I sit down across from her. She smiles at me, weakly.

“Irene . . . what did you do? And . . . why did you keep this from me?” I feel tired, all of a sudden.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t risk telling you earlier. I didn’t want you to hate me. I wanted to have just a little bit of time with you, even if I knew it would end up like this eventually.”

I shake my head. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. This whole time, I was just . . . blinded by my feelings for you. Damn it, for months! What did you do with her paper? And what else have you been keeping from me?”

Irene looks down.

“ . . . Is there something else you’re keeping from me?”

She flinches.

I sigh. “Look, at this point, I would appreciate you just coming clean with me, okay? Just tell me what you know, please, for her.”

Something seems to click into place for Irene. She looks very determined, all of a sudden. After a long stretch of silence, she nods, and says “Fine. Okay, fine. You’re right. I should do this, for her . . . she deserves justice. Those assholes need to be taken down. Screw it, I’ll tell you everything.”

“Thank you. Fill me in, from what you did with the paper to whatever else you haven’t told me. Tell me everything. Starting now.”

She does.

She tells me that she took the paper and asked around the place where she was getting treated until she found the contact information of Noor’s workplace. She met with three of their representatives, a young woman, an older woman, and a middle-aged man. They thanked her for the information, told her they would “take care of it,” and that they would be in touch with her soon.

Irene looks back up at me, shaking her head sadly. “I didn’t know what they meant by ‘taking care of it,’ Nithya! Just slightly over a week later, she died!”

“Why did you keep this from me? Self-preservation, again?”

Irene winces. “Maybe a little bit, yeah . . . but I like to think I would have reported all of this to you, immediately, if they hadn’t made me . . . ”

“Made you do what?!”

“Please try to understand! They threatened me, they threatened to hurt Sana! I had to, Nithya!”

“ . . . What?”

“ . . . I made you sick. It was in the first box of the set of pills I gave you. I put the phage in, too.”

You did what?! I stand up to leave.

“Nithya, wait! You don’t understand! I’ve been protecting you, this whole time! I’ve been telling them you’re doing the treatment! They thought if you had it, you wouldn’t side with Noor. They think you’re on their side!”

“You’ve been spying on me too? What the actual fuck? All of that stuff, about wanting to know what it’s like in her head, was a lie?”

“No, that came out all wrong! I haven’t told them much, I promise! Your investigation is safe! I swear, I’ve been protecting you! I’m on your side Nithya! And it wasn’t a lie. I wanted to know what her thoughts were like, desperately. That wasn’t a lie at all!”

I can’t look at her anymore. I walk out the door. She was threatened, though. Hear her out. A little voice pops into my thoughts as I leave the café, and I can’t tell if it’s coming from myself or from the Noor part of me. I can barely distinguish the two anymore now, and I’m tired of trying to.

• • • •

Sana, my daughter, I am so sorry I left you. I love you, so much. Maybe someday, I will see you again. Would you recognize me? Would it still be okay? I miss you Sana. I love you. I’m so sorry.

• • • •

Mommy I want to tell you about something. Sana plays her flute to Noor, standing in the doorway to the living room.

Noor sits at the coffee table, typing into her touchscreen. She stops, closes her touchscreen, and smiles at Sana. “What is it?”

Sana begins an uncanny melody. I have been thinking. I started communicating like this to incite action to stop the climate catastrophes. And I still care about that so much. But I think along the way I figured out that I prefer communicating like this to communicating any other way. I like the control I have over my flute and I like how it sounds and I like that it is a language I invented. I think even if the demands were all met I would still type in my touchscreen and play my flute to communicate. Is that okay?

Noor nods. “You know, I have to admit that I struggled sometimes to accept your method of communication. I tried to hide that from you, and I’m really sorry if any of that came through. But over the past couple years, Sana, I’ve realized that communicating like this makes you happy. And I’d never want to get in the way of that. I’m happy for you, and I love you so much. Of course it’s okay. Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

Yes. I want to hug you too. Sana moves to her mother and embraces her. Noor holds her daughter close for a while.

• • • •

Noor recognizes the knock, and she opens the door to see Irene.

“I’m so sorry Noor! I told them. I told the people you work for. I just don’t want to die. I really don’t want to die.”

“Hey . . . come in, it’s okay. I knew you did this, it wasn’t hard to guess. Come inside, we left things on a weird note last time.”

“Is Sana here?”

“No, she’s at school.”

“You’re not at work? I mean, I should have thought that through before showing up, but I’m realizing it now.”

“ . . . No.”

They move to the living room couch and sit next to one another. Diffuse light comes down through the skylight above them. Noor turns to Irene, and half smiles.

“You don’t have to be sorry Irene. You were acting out of fear for your own life . . . and in a way, I did betray you. But I wish you could have seen what I’ve seen before making that decision. Especially because the research company I work for . . . I think they’re capable of some pretty awful things. But I prepared for this, just in case. It’s why I got the light-gated-ion channels two years ago.”

Irene frowns. “What do you mean? Is . . . is something going to happen to you?”

Noor sighs. “I was trying to tell you this earlier. But . . . don’t worry about it right now, okay? I forgive you for what you did, can you forgive me? I just . . . for a little bit . . . want it to go back to how it was. I love you, Irene. And that hasn’t changed. Can we go back to how things were? Please? I really need that right now.”

Irene thinks for a long time, but then pulls Noor close to her. They hold each other for a while, and then Noor kisses Irene. Irene kisses her back. “I love you too. I want it to go back to how it was before, too.”

• • • •

I wander aimlessly around the town, trying to collect my thoughts. With every session of Noor’s experiences, I lose my sense of self more and more. I don’t quite know who I am anymore, and I keep asking myself, would Nithya do this? Would Noor? Is this Nithya? Is this Noor? But it’s exhausting now, trying to keep track of my memories and my thoughts, and trying to remember which are hers and which are mine. Mine. But who am I?

With those two years of Noor’s experiences came a lifetime of memory as well, something I was not anticipating at all. But I should have known. After all, what are our thoughts, our experiences, our reality, without our memories? Of course I remember things now that weren’t necessarily events taking place in Noor’s experiences. Her every recollection of some other past event was encoded in her brain activity too, her memories within a memory. And subconsciously as well, memories were coloring her every thought, and those not-so-obvious rememberings were transferred to me too, running underneath my thoughts now too. It’s impossible to live a snapshot of someone’s experience without inheriting everything that came before that snapshot too, whether it’s immediately obvious or somewhere under the surface. Frankly, it’s futile to try and separate myself from her at this point. I can’t even remember how I used to think before I lived that piece of her life.

Maybe I should stop separating them. All those times, making love to Irene, when I released my hold on these two identities, and allowed them to blend into each other, it felt so right! Irene. Noor forgave her. Would Nithya? Would I, whoever I am now?

Maybe I’m exhausting myself, thinking that I’m separating the two identities, when I’m really deluding myself trying to categorize my thoughts into what I believe Noor would think and what I believe Nithya would think, when in reality there is no way to know where those thoughts are truly coming from.

I should let them blend.

I put on Noor’s favorite song, “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya,” sung by Lata Mangeshkar, and decide to stop trying to control my own mind. I let the music wash over me, I let the two identities come together, mixing into one another, memories and thoughts and experiences and reality.

I’m not quite either of them, any longer.

I smile. I think I know what to do next.

• • • •

I call Irene from my touchscreen. As soon as she picks up, I say, “Listen, if you’re really on my side, you’ll help me finish what Noor’s started. And you can begin by working with my partners Marie and Anthony, to restore the memories of a man named Matias Rodriguez.”

After a long pause, she responds. “ . . . I will. I promise I will.”

• • • •

I arrive at Noor’s aunt’s house, where Sana lives now, and I take a deep breath before knocking on the door. Noor didn’t know her aunt super well, but she seemed nice, and didn’t live too far away.

I’ve just started to consider knocking on the door again when it opens, and she’s standing right in front of me, flute in hand. Sana. It takes all my strength to prevent tears from filling my eyes. I’m immediately flooded with joy. My daughter. It’s been so long . . . But she’s not my daughter . . .

The girl takes out her touchscreen and types Who are you on it.

I clear my throat. “I’m Nithya . . . we met once, several months ago. I’m investigating your mother’s death. Can I come in?”

Sana stares at me for a moment before nodding and letting me into the house. She types on her touchscreen I did not recognize you at first. You look different now.

“Yes, I’ve become sick. Hey, can I talk to your great-aunt? I need to ask her a few questions.”

Sana leads me to the living room of the house, where an old woman sits on a doughy blue armchair, facing out the window. Next to her is a beautiful upright piano, with several pages of sheet music on display above the keys. Sana, in the adjacent room, has begun to play something on her flute.

I turn to the old woman. “Hi Ms. Bakshi. My name is Nithya, and I’m investigating your niece’s death. Noor was working on something, a paper, before she passed away. Do you know if any copies of her work still remain? On her touchscreen, or any physical copies, or anything related at all? It’s crucial for our investigation.”

Ms. Bakshi sighs. “I’m afraid you’re months too late. I had brought everything Noor had worked on to this house, but it’s all gone now. There was another group of people who asked me the same question several months ago, very soon after Noor’s death, with a warrant to search the house. They took all of Noor’s research, all the physical copies, and all the electronic ones too. I’m sorry.”

My heart sinks. It’s all gone. I don’t think I can pull the entirety of Noor’s paper out of her memories. There’s no hope now, unless Matias knows something, maybe? Maybe he has a copy!

“Thank you, Ms. Bakshi. Don’t worry about it. I should probably get going now.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. I wish—Hey, Sana? Could you keep it down, just a little bit? The grown-ups are talking here!” She turns back to me. “I don’t know what it is with that girl and that strange song. She plays it all day, every day, several times in a row. I can’t say I like it too much, but if it makes her happy, I don’t have the heart to ask her to stop. Do you want something before you leave? Chai, coffee? I have some freshly made rice-milk peda in the kitchen! You must try some.”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry, there’s not much I can consume properly anymore. But thank you for the offer.”

As I take my leave, I pass by the piano, and something catches my eye as my gaze drifts over the sheet music. Wait a minute . . .

And then, I actually start to hear what Sana has been playing on her flute this whole time.

. . . The choanocytes lining the innermost channels of a Panaceius meyeri sponge differ from choanocytes in many . . .

It’s the paper! My eyes fill up with tears. I go to Sana. “What you’re playing right now . . . it’s your mother’s research, isn’t it?”

Sana stops playing her flute, looks up at me, and nods. After some time, she plays You understand my language?

I smile. “Yeah, I do.”

You really have lived a part of my Mommy’s life.

I kneel next to her and tears start flowing down my face. “Yes, Sana. I have. And because I have, I know she loved you so much. I’m . . . I’m so sorry you’ve lost her. I’m so, so sorry.”

Nithya. I would like a hug. Could I give you a hug?

I nod. Sana hugs me, and I can’t stop myself from crying into her shoulder.

When she lets go, she takes the stack of sheet music from the piano and hands it to me. I sit and look through it, remembering Noor painstakingly documenting all of it . . . But there’s a new section now, at the end, with an annotated name in the margins, still written in the Fibonacci-sheet music language. Matias Rodriguez? I look at the title of the new section, and I can’t believe my eyes.

It’s titled, “The Cure.”

It turns out that there is a way to grow sponges out of the P. meyeri gemmules, and sponges that grow from them are not conscious in any way, they do not have the extra layer, or the corrosive liquid! What Matias did was take certain genes from the pre-specialized archaeocytes from a conscious P. meyeri sponge and introduce them to the gemmules. The sponge that grew from the gemmule ended up having inner channels lined with the specialized archaeocytes. And this sponge had no qualms about reproducing in the simulated settings within a research lab. When the sponge from the gemmule reproduced, it did not create larvae, but only gemmules of its own. And when the next generation of gemmules became sponges, they also contained the specialized archaeocytes. Matias had found a way to create a population of sponges that were as ethically alright to experiment on as other sponges discovered before P. meyeri, that contained the cells necessary for the treatment and could reproduce! I’m fucking stunned. This could save my life.

I thank Sana and her great-aunt for their time over and over again, filled with happiness. As I’m about to leave the house, Sana tugs on my sleeve and then plays something on her flute again, looking right at me.

Nithya. About what you said earlier. I do not know if I believe Mommy is entirely lost. Will you visit again? I want to have more conversations with you. And I want to meet you again.

I grin at her, and nod. “Sana, I can come here as many times as you want me to, for the rest of my life. Thank you for making your cipher. I think it’s a lovely way to communicate, and it truly saved the day. I’ll see you again soon, I promise.”

After I leave the house, I begin to walk away, when a small synthesized-paper envelope falls out of the pages of sheet music. There’s a single word written on it, still in the Fibonacci language. A single measure, time signature five-four. Eighth notes E, D. Sixteenth notes D, A, high E, high C. Quarter note F. Triplet notes E, F, F. And finally, quarter note F, again.

I can’t help but smile. I recognize the name immediately.

• • • •

Noor sits at a desk, writing out sheet music on synthesized paper. An envelope sits next to what she’s writing, with “Irene” written on it in the Fibonacci-music language.

Dear Irene,

My love. I do not know if you understand exactly what you did. But you might soon. If that happens, I would want you to know I forgive you. And that I still love you. And . . . I understand what you did. But I also want you to know what it is like from my perspective. I want you to see P. meyeri for yourself. Feel what I felt for yourself. That is why if this is ever found . . . I would want you to be the one to live out my experiences. I do not know if it is going to happen like that. But I would want you to.

There’s good news too. Matias found a cure! I have just finished adding it to the paper. You will live my love. No matter what. And hopefully we can get this released soon and nothing will happen to me and we can both live together for decades more . . . happy and in love. I would like that very much. I love you Irene . . . this probably will never reach you, but I wanted to write it anyway.

Love,

Noor

• • • •

Irene and I sit together, drinking coffee next to the sensory deprivation chamber in my living room. Oh man, I missed the taste of coffee so much. It’s been a month on the new treatment plan, and I’m already feeling so much better.

Matias’ memories have been restored. What happened was that he thought he would try to convince the research company to stop exploiting P. meyeri, since there was an alternative. But it didn’t work, and they hinted to him of the other, non-medication-related purposes that they could use P. meyeri for. They threatened him and made him sign the contracts, but he went to Noor with his research anyway, not knowing that Irene had told the research company about her work already. After Noor died, representatives from the company found Noor’s completed paper, after searching her aunt’s house, and discovered that Matias had breached the contract. He had his memory forcibly wiped.

With Irene’s help, Matias got his memories back, and working with me, we translated Noor’s paper back. As promised, he made sure it was published, and especially with the world knowing about the cure he discovered. The corrupt leadership of the research company was quickly removed and faced serious consequences. Numerous protections were put into place regarding disruption of the P. meyeri colonies and work is being done now to try and figure out a way to communicate with the sponges. For now, only unintrusive ROVs are allowed down there.

I look at Irene, drinking her coffee next to me. I wonder, if there hadn’t been a different cure, if I was still sick . . . would I have forgiven her? I shake the thought away. What’s the point of speculating, distressing myself with “what if”s? She had more than proven she supported me . . . and she was making sure the research company didn’t suspect anything about me the whole time. And, the truth is, ultimately, despite everything, I do still love her. Every part of me tells me I still love her. And she still loves me. So, if we love each other, and we make each other happy in spite of everything, why shouldn’t we just . . . be together?

I move closer to her, and she puts her arm around me. I rest my head on her shoulder. “You know, Irene, I don’t know if I’ll ever be Noor.”

She smiles, and she kisses me. “I don’t care. I love you.”

“And I don’t know if I’m entirely Nithya anymore, either. I think I’ve become someone else, entirely, the result of Noor’s memories and Nithya’s memories blending together, which gave rise to someone new.”

She kisses me again. “I still love you.”

This makes me smile. But then I remember something, and I sigh. “There’s just one set of light pulses left, Irene. It’s her death. I don’t know if I can do it. I’ve been putting it off. Especially because, while I know she doesn’t understand that she’s in a loop, I know she is, and I don’t want her to experience that again. I just don’t know if I can do it.”

Irene holds me closer. “Then just don’t do it. You don’t have to force yourself to do that, both for your sake and for hers. The people responsible have been punished, chemical analyses months ago figured out what literally caused her death . . . there’s no need for you to play the light pulses.”

“You really think it’ll be okay if I don’t?”

“Of course, Nithya! You are under no obligation to play that awful experience into your head. I promise you.”

“Alright, I don’t think I will, in that case.” I settle my head back onto her shoulder. After a while, I continue. “You know, I’ve been thinking. Noor wanted you to be the one to live out her experiences, right?”

“Yes, but look. I’ve been thinking about this too. I’m actually really happy it was you. If you hadn’t done this . . . I would never have met you. I would have had her with me, always, but I wouldn’t have had you. I’m actually really glad it happened this way, Nithya. Besides . . . we’ve talked about this before, her patterns of neural activity are tailored to fit yours, and there’s no way to get those light pulses again.”

I look at her. “No, I’ve been looking into this, and I think there is a way, Irene. I think there is a way you can live some of her most memorable moments, too.”

• • • •

So, who are you? Are you my current, lived experience, as I wait for the sedatives to put me into a temporary unconscious state? Are you my brain in the next few hours, almost done looping through my memories of the past several months, to put together a set of light pulses? Or is it you, Irene, my love?

Is it you, living my memories of the past months, which would certainly include some of Noor’s memories too? I wonder which of Nithya’s memories will make it through, and which of Noor’s will. I hope you’ll tell me all about it soon. And who knows how long the entire set of experiences will be? If they could condense two years of Noor’s life that much, how long will it take for you to live this tiny fraction of mine? Hours? Days? You’re in a waiting room outside right now, and we’re going to have a lovely day together after this procedure is over. I hope we will have a lovely life, together, too.

But no matter what, right now, I love you deeply, and Noor loved you deeply. And if you wanted to, my love, in your mind, you could keep us looping endlessly.

Arula Ratnakar is a scientist, artist, science fiction writer and aspiring astronaut. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2021, where she studied biology, neuroscience and architecture. She now works in a neuroscience lab, where she is interested in studying neurophotonics, the intersection of declarative and procedural memory, and brain simulation science. All four of her published stories can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine and her artwork can be found in the first issue of Dark Matter Magazine. She is autistic and bisexual.

Themes of identity and reality have always interested Arula, particularly as someone who is the daughter of two immigrants from India and has grown up in the U.S with many different cultural influences. Arula plans to continue writing science fiction stories, and hopes to work on science fiction movies someday.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone backed this volume, wrote reviews, spread the word in any way! The authors who entrusted me with publishing their words, Evelyne Park for the original illustration, Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout, Ziv Wities and Kel Coleman and the rest of the Diabolical Plots team for their help with everything, and Polgarus Studio for the interior layout.

Thank you all, so much.

—David Steffen—

About the Editor

David Steffen is an editor, writer, publisher, and professional web developer. He is the editor in chief of Diabolical Plots, a publisher of Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated fiction. He is most well-known for co-founding and administering the Ignyte Award winning The Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com) in the category The Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre, a free web tool that helps writers find markets for their fiction and to find response time statistics about those markets, as well as for the previous volumes of the Long List Anthology. His fiction has been published in many great venues, including Escape Pod, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, Drabblecast, Podcastle, AE, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders.

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Table of Contents

- Permissions
- Foreword
- For Lack of a Bed • John Wiswell
- The Cold Calculations • Aimee Ogden
- Laughter Among the Trees • Suzan Palumbo

- The Revolution Will Not Be Served With Fries • Meg Elison

- If the Martians Have Magic • P. Djèlí Clark
- Let All the Children Boogie • Sam J. Miller
- Crazy Beautiful • Cat Rambo

- Things From Our Kitchen Junk Drawer That Could Save This Spaceship • Marie Vibbert

- Before, After, and the Space Between • Kel Coleman

- Orumai's Choice • Gautam Bhatia

- Questions Asked in the Belly of the World • A.T. Greenblatt

- Mulberry and Owl • Aliette de Bodard
- The General's Turn • Premee Mohamed
- The Music of the Siphorophenes • C.L. Polk
- Just Enough Rain • P H Lee
- Ina's Spark • Mary Robinette Kowal
- The Red Mother • Elizabeth Bear
- Small Monsters • E. Lily Yu

- Tombs of the Universe • Han Song, translated by Xueting C. Ni

- (emet) • Lauren Ring
- Submergence • Arula Ratnakar
- Acknowledgments
- About the Editor
- More From Diabolical Plots, LLC