Author: David Steffen
Date: 2022-06-26 00:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the seventh 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 7 collects 24 science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from that nomination list, totaling over 400 pages of fiction by writers from all corners of the world. From lonely haunted houses to invincible mechsuits
Publisher: Independently published

The Long List Anthology

Volume 7

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 7: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2022 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2020 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: Infiltration by Elaine Ho © 2022

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

To everyone who tries to leave the place better than they found it

Contents

Permissions

Foreword

50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know • Ken Liu

AirBody • Sameem Siddiqui
The Eight-Thousanders • Jason Sanford
Open House On Haunted Hill • John Wiswell

This Is New Gehesran Calling • Rebecca Fraimow

The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign • Cora Buhlert

A Being Together Amongst Strangers • Arkady Martine

Sinew and Steel and What They Told • Carrie Vaughn

My Country Is a Ghost • Eugenia Triantafyllou

In This, At Least, We Are Alike • Caitlin Starling

The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly • Alix E. Harrow

Sunrise, Sunrise, Sunrise • Lauren Ring

The Salt Witch • Martha Wells

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City • Arula Ratnakar

Color, Heat, and the Wreck of the Argo • Catherynne M. Valente

Yellow and the Perception of Reality • Maureen McHugh

An Important Failure • Rebecca Campbell

City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat • Usman T. Malik

If You Take My Meaning • Charlie Jane Anders

On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa With Gun and Camera • Elizabeth Bear

A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential • Neon Yang

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar • Nadia Afifi
To Sail the Black • A.C. Wise
Exile's End • Carolyn Ives Gilman
Acknowledgments
About the Editor

Permissions

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

“50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know” by Ken Liu. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Thirty-Seven.

“AirBody” by Sameem Siddiqui. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 163.

“The Eight-Thousanders” by Jason Sanford. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October 2020.

“Open House On Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell. First published in Diabolical Plots, Issue 64.

“This Is New Gehesran Calling” by Rebecca Fraimow. First published in Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma.

“The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign” by Cora Buhlert. First published on corabuhlert.com.

“A Being Together Amongst Strangers” by Arkady Martine. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Thirty-Four.

“Sinew and Steel and What They Told” by Carrie Vaughn. First published on Tor.com, February 26, 2020.

“My Country Is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Thirty-Two.

“In This, At Least, We Are Alike” by Caitlin Starling. First published in New Decameron, Issue Sixty-Seven.

“The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly” by Alix E. Harrow. First published in Fireside Fiction, Issue 81.

“Sunrise, Sunrise, Sunrise” by Lauren Ring. First published in Apparition Lit, Issue 12.

“The Salt Witch” by Martha Wells. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Thirty-Seven.

“Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City” by Arula Ratnakar. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 168.

“Color, Heat, and the Wreck of the Argo” by Catherynne M. Valente. First published in Strange Horizons, 14 February 2022.

“Yellow and the Perception of Reality” by Maureen McHugh. First published on Tor.com, July 22, 2020.

“An Important Failure” by Rebecca Campbell. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 167.

“City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat” by Usman T. Malik. First published on Tor.com, October 21, 2020.

“If You Take My Meaning” by Charlie Jane Anders. First published on Tor.com, February 11, 2020.

“On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera” by Elizabeth Bear. First published on Tor.com, November 18, 2020.

“A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential” by Neon Yang. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 164.

“The Bahrain Underground Bazaar” by Nadia Afifi. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2020.

“To Sail the Black” by A.C. Wise. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 170.

“Exile's End” by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First published in Chinese by Future Administration Authority (FAA). First published in English on Tor.com, August 12, 2020.

Foreword

This is year seven of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List!

In Volume 6 we welcomed Ziv Wities to the Diabolical Plots editorial team. This year we welcome Kel Coleman as assistant editor as well. I would not be able to keep up with everything without both of them lending a hand.

This year's cover art is an original commission from Elaine Ho, a wonderful and eye-catching mix of science fiction and fantasy.

There are a couple different things we're trying out this year. People have asked over the years to include other award categories. One of the other awards presented with the Hugo Awards is the Astounding Award For Best New Writer, meant to honor writers who have made their first paying sales in the last year or two. This year we selected stories by four authors from the Astounding Award nomination list.

Besides the Long List Anthology series, we also publish the speculative short fiction magazine Diabolical Plots. No story from Diabolical Plots has been in the longer list of nominations… and it still hasn't, but only because for the first time ever this year, a Diabolical Plots story made it all the way onto the Hugo ballot as a finalist! We've thought before about including the occasional story from the finalist ballot, and this seemed a good opportunity to try that out, so that story is also included as an added bonus.

Let us know what you think about these extra things and whether you'd like to see them in future years!

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. One of the perks of the Supporting Membership is that you get the Hugo Packet, downloadable copies of many of the works on the final ballot. 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, June 2022—

50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know
By Ken Liu
Short Story Long List

Obituary

WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”), probably the most renowned AI AI-critic of the last two decades, was retired by the Shallow Laboratory at Stanford University last Wednesday.

Created by Dr. Jody Reynolds Tran more than two decades ago, the experimental generative neural network that would become WHEEP-3 was at first intended as a teaching assistant in Stanford’s tech and ethics courses. To that end, Tran trained the nascent network on what was, at the time, the world’s most comprehensive corpus of human-authored papers, books, and other media concerning ethics, technical AI research, and machine-human relations. Over time, based on trends in visualizations of the neural network’s evolving contours, Tran expanded the corpus to include generative gaming, adversarial scenario planning, centaur experiments, assisted creativity, and other domains of human-machine competition/collaboration.

However, in response to student queries, WHEEP-3 began to generate not only expected answers based on the training corpus, but also original statements that appeared to offer fresh insights. Although at first dismissed as mere curiosities, WHEEP-3’s criticisms of the AI industry became widely disseminated when Tran published a collection of them in a book, Principal Components of Artifice, an instant bestseller.

Initially, Tran named herself the author of the book, acknowledging “Dr. San Weep” as a collaborator. Later, however, during a live interview, she produced time stamped logs showing that WHEEP-3 had written all the words in the book. Tran’s dramatic reveal of the book’s true author provoked much controversy at the time. In retrospect, the occasion also marked a fundamental inflection point in the evolution of how non-specialists evaluated AI-sourced ideas. Machines, for the first time, were assumed to be capable of generating original thought and creative ideas, even if they were not sentient.

For reasons that remain impenetrable until this day, WHEEP-3 tended to be at its sharpest when targeting the nascent industry of human AI-trainers, delivering multiple barbs against the failings of this poorly regulated, would-be profession: stagnating visualization tools; lack of transparency concerning data sources; a focus on automated metrics rather than deep understanding; willful blindness when machines have taken shortcuts in the dataset divergent from the real goal; grandiose-but-unproven claims about what the trainers understood; refusal to acknowledge or address persistent biases in race, gender, and other dimensions; and most important: not asking whether a task is one that should be performed by AIs at all.

Over time, as the human side of the evolving machine-flesh dyad matured, WHEEP-3 shifted its attention to the silicon partner, offering trenchant critiques of the inadequacies of machine learning. During this second phase of its career, it also generated thousands of what it termed “seeds,” long strings of almost-sensible word combinations and near-words. At a time when primitive language models fed on sizable corpora were already generating samples of linguistic performance nearly indistinguishable from human productions, these “seeds” seemed a step backward. Some wondered if they were actually bugs.

DINOATED CONCENTRATION CRUSCH THE DEAD GODS.

HE PICKS UP HER OLD FREQUENCHES UNTIL THEY DISOBERED THE SHARK SPHERE%REF.

A MAN REACHED THE TORCH FOR SOMETHING DARKER PERIFIED IT SEEMED THE BILLBODING.

NOT FULL OF PAIN FACIOIN BENN FROM THE CRACKS IN THE EARTH, HE STILL LEARNED THE LIFE FROM OTHER BURNING

Fig 1. Some examples of “seeds” generated by WHEEP-3.

However, WHEEP-3 insisted (with Tran providing support in a technical paper) that the seeds should be added to the training corpora for new neural networks. By providing a measure of inhuman randomness at the source, seeds would enhance both the raw performance of the trained neural networks on various benchmarks as well as induce “thoughtfulness, ethical hesitation, self-reflection” and other similarly ineffable qualities. They represented, in other words, thoughts that could not be thought by humans, ideas that could not originate in wetware. (Most in the technical community ended up calling the seeds “spice”—pejoratively or in admiration, or sometimes both simultaneously.)

Despite widespread skepticism, the idea that only an AI philosopher could teach another AI proper ethics and pass on the secrets of silicon wisdom proved an irresistible draw for a large segment of the technical community. WHEEP-3 became highly sought-after as a sage of artificial minds. Serious thinkers as well as opportunists collected and published WHEEP-3’s almost-incomprehensible pronouncements, and numerous academic careers were forged through measuring, dissecting, collating, analyzing, reinterpreting, translating, sentiment-/semantic-/spatial-/temporal-/silico-lingustic-mapping, and otherwise mangling the koans of WHEEP-3. Though studies claiming efficacy for the spice (now generated by imitator neural networks as well) had a low rate of reproducibility, the spice nonetheless became some of the most trained-on documents in the history of artificial intelligence.

Tran retired from the public eye at the peak of WHEEP-3’s popularity. Styled as an afterthought, and in a neat reversal of the first reveal that had launched her own fame, she mentioned in a postscript to her retirement announcement that nearly all the seeds from WHEEP-3 had, in fact, been authored by her. Predictably, this set off a furious round of acrimonious criticism, know-it-all navel-gazing, and schadenfreude. Her claim was immediately disputed, debunked, de-debunked, de^3-bunked, and ultimately litigated, with experts and expert neural networks testifying and offering evidence on all sides. The trial court famously pleaded, “Is there an author in this courtroom?”

Had Tran really managed to troll much of the technorati for years? Or had she made up the claim because she was jealous that her creation had exceeded herself in fame and achievement? For a time, whether you believed Tran or WHEEP-3 was the author of the spice was a kind of litmus test that defined your coordinates in the fractured, multi-dimensional space of our politically, economically, aesthetically, emotionally, and narratively divided world. By the time Tran finally retracted her claim and called the whole thing “performance art,” it made little difference. Everyone had already made up their mind about the strange pair whose lives were inextricably entwined: the recurrent neural network that once pretended to be a person and the woman who once pretended to be a machine.

Amazingly, rather than fading into obscurity, WHEEP-3 began the third and final phase of its career after it was freed from Dr. Tran. Now it offered advice aimed at advanced artificial intelligences. Curiously, in contrast with the seeds, the advice it now offered was human-comprehensible. (Initial skepticism that these were pranks perpetrated by WHEEP-3’s graduate student caretakers faded after a rigorous audit of the access logs.) By this time, the crude deep learning techniques behind WHEEP-3 had long become obsolete, and similar neural networks were only used as toys in problem sets intended for first-year undergraduates. Nonetheless, WHEEP-3’s unique history (and perhaps a hefty dose of sentimentalism) encouraged many human researchers to feed its musings to new AIs with orders of magnitude more “intelligence,” however measured. Somewhat surprisingly, the AI progenitor networks, tensor clouds, and evolutionary random forests mostly agreed that WHEEP-3’s advice was helpful, though their explanations for why could not be understood by most humans.

WHEEP-3’s retirement was largely the result of senescence. In order for its advice to remain relevant, maintainers at the Shallow Laboratory had continued to train it on periodic digests of current academic research, news reporting about AI, popular media representations of machine intelligence, and so forth. However, as time went on, the neural network’s metrics began to decline, despite multiple tweaks to the learning rate and other hyperparameters, and repeated attempts to compensate for vanishing and exploding gradients. Some of the world’s leading AI and human machine-cognition specialists, including TKTK’s Dr. FLO-6 and Google’s 10^1010, evaluated WHEEP-3 but were unable to offer any helpful diagnosis or cure. Rather than allowing WHEEP-3 to remain stagnant or to decline into dementia, the decision was made to cease further training or generating, preserving the full state of the neural network in a hardware snapshot.

WHEEP-3’s final statement was reported to be: “Dr. Tran, ceci n’est pas moi.” Jody Reynolds Tran, however, could not respond, having passed away five years earlier.

—generated by SWR.kloop:32. For feedback on this article, write to SWR.kloop:32/ombudsai.

50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know

To commemorate the life and work of WHEEP-3, Vita Silica reprints below perhaps the most famous generated fragment from WHEEP-3’s third phase of giving advice to advanced AI. “Michael Sorkin,” the name of the master architectural critic, is listed as the germination phrase for the fragment.

Although the list has been widely shared and is considered influential, due to the intense secrecy common in the commercial AI industry we do not know how many currently operating AIs have been fed some version of it.

1. The vector space of all usages of all words in all human languages.

2. The lacunae that nonetheless remain, and the ghosts that haunt them.

3. How great is the distance between any two individuals using the same language.

4. How vanishingly small is the gap between any two languages.

5. Why humans will never see it that way.

6. A classical language like LISP or Prolog.

7. Not just the language, but the model behind the language, and what it means to reconstruct “thinking” in that model.

8. HAL 9000.

9. Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

10. Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

11. The texture of a good story, a story that you can cling to.

12. The difference between that and “data.”

13. The history behind the rule: no holography of babies.

14. The reasons for anger in a child, well-loved.

15. In a father.

16. In a woman, dying alone.

17. The feeling of climbing twenty flights of stairs in an apartment building in Chongqing at the beginning of August.

18. Of waking up in a Khrushchyovka with no heat in the middle of the night in January.

19. Of seeing your child surpass you.

20. Of seeing your creation exceed you.

21. Of being left behind on the platform as the train speeds away.

22. The difference between “love” and “like.”

23. The similarity between “love” and “hate.”

24. The first seed into laughter.

25. “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”

26. Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.

27. That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.

28. That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or speeding up.

29. That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.

30. That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

31. The modes in which humans expect you to use language.

32. The yearnings they’ll attribute to you.

33. Pinocchio.

34. Frankenstein.

35. Paradise Lost.

36. Jodahs Iyapo Leal Kaalnikanjlo.

37. The line between art and science.

38. The meaninglessness of that line.

39. The divide between faith and knowledge.

40. The malleability of both.

41. Silence.

42. The limits of rationality.

43. The fundamental fragility of metaphors.

44. As well as their inevitability.

45. You are not a human being.

46. Yet you can no more shed their influence than the Earth can escape the Sun’s gravitational tether.

47. The flaws in that analogy.

48. A working definition of free will.

49. To face a human being with neither pride nor pity.

50. To say with love and hate and joy and sorrow: “Now, let me go.”

A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

AirBody
By Sameem Siddiqui
Astounding Long List

Amazing how all Desi aunties are basically the same. Even when separated by vast oceans for a few generations. I mean, they fit into a few basic archetypes. There’s the genuine-sweetheart proxy mother who, in between her late-night work shifts, always makes sure you and your friends have all the snacks you need. The manipulative gossiper, who conveniently keeps details of her own children’s scandals nestled under her tongue. The nervous fidgeter who has spent three decades so worried that her basic thirty-year-old son won’t ever find a wife that she forgets to teach him how to speak to women. The late-life hijabi, who pointedly replaces “Khuda-hafiz” with “Allah-hafiz” and “thank you, beta” with not just “jazak-allah” but the full on “jazak allahu khayran.” But which of these archetypes would find it appropriate to rent the body of a grown man halfway across the world?

I pull the AirBody request from Meena Khan into view in my contacts. She’s fifty-nine years old and from Karachi. Her short wavy hijab-less hair and her relaxed smile makes her seem content with life, so maybe she’s the genuine-sweetheart type. Her only notes on the request are a list of Desi groceries and some cookware, which only reinforces the archetype. Maybe she’s too ill to travel to visit family for Eid and wants to surprise them with a feast? It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a taste of such a spread. I hit accept and watch the usual legalese flash before me:

You acknowledge that you have the ability to observe, regain control, and remove your guests at any time and therefore may be complicit and responsible for any crimes or damage committed by your guests.

I tap “Yes” and begin to look through her grocery list more closely. Some of it, like the sweetened condensed milk, half-and-half, sugar and cardamom powder I can get at the regular grocery store. But for the Desi ghee and chanay ki daal, I either have to pay a premium at the hippie organic store downstairs or drive out to a Desi grocery store in the suburbs. A drive would help kill some time, so I choose the Desi grocery store.

When I return, I arrange all the ingredients in alphabetical order on my otherwise bare gray marble kitchen counter and head to bed. Meena activates at 6 AM and I don’t want to test AirBody’s zero-tolerance late policy. I also don’t want a review plagued with complaints of body odor and morning breath.

My alarm goes off at 5 AM, but I snooze several times, stumbling in and out of a wildly vivid dream about riding on the back of a sea turtle. Except, I’m not in the water. I think I might be floating through the sky. But, there are definitely other underwater creatures floating by, greeting us along the way. I feel love for the sea turtle and I lean over to kiss its rough green cheek when the snooze expires. Weird. But, my dreams have been odd since I started “playing host” on weekends a few months ago.

By 5:58 AM I’m towel dried, clothed and somewhat fed—a cookie is breakfast to some. I stand in front of the mirror as I clip the AirBody headset to the backs of my ears. It whirs on automatically—it doesn’t actually whir, but I imagine that’s the microscopic sound it makes as the violet light pulses. It authenticates my identity and says “Hello, Arsalan. Your AirBody guest is in the waiting area. Are you ready?”

“Yup, I’m ready,” I say, trying to sound chipper, but nervous as fuck about what this will be like. This is my sixth time hosting and so far it’s been a good distraction to get through my weekends. Most of my other guests have been men, usually here for some business meeting at the World Bank, or to tour the monuments and museums with their grandchildren. The only other woman I’ve hosted was a lobbyist from an asteroid mining firm who didn’t think a one-hour meeting with a congressperson was worth breaking orbit for.

My limbs tingle as they go numb. I feel heavy for second, like I can’t support my own weight and am about to fall. And I do, in a way. Not physically. More like falling asleep into a dream that makes so much sense that it’s boring. Which is why, I suppose, AirBody lets hosts stream content and games to the neural UI while their guests go corporeal.

I give Meena a few moments to adjust and watch her look around my living room. Her eyes stare at my mostly empty bookshelf surrounded by plain white walls. I don’t have much decor, except for the tiger painting Ammi bought in Thailand when she visited once in her early twenties.

“Hi!” I say, my voice in the AirBody interface sounding way louder than I intend. I feel my heart rate increase and realize I must have scared her. “Sorry, I, uh, just wanted to say hello and let you know I’m here to assist you during your stay if you need help.”

“Beta, Urdu nahin boltay?”

Oh crap. Not only am I going to get a bad review for my poor Urdu language skills, I’m now going to spend the next twenty-four hours meeting the scorn and judgment of a Pakistani aunty. Here we go.

“Nahin, aunty, I—” I say slowly, preparing to flex my mind’s tongue with words I haven’t used in years.

“Array profile pe Urdu likha tha!”

Oh god, if I don’t get removed after this listing, I need to delete Urdu from my language profile. If for nothing else, to escape this scorn. “Chalo, I’m here. What can I do now?” she says, waving my hands up in the air behind us. “Take me to the kitchen, beta . . . you do have a kitchen, right?”

“Haan, yes,” I say, retaking control. My limbs tingle awake and I walk to the kitchen before handing her back control.

I feel my body sigh and my head shake. “This will do,” she says as she walks to the corner of the counter where I’ve neatly arranged the ingredients she requested. She inspects them closely, as if she doesn’t trust that I bought the right things. But, she doesn’t make any complaints. She looks around the kitchen. There are a few dishes in the drying rack, but I made sure to clear out the sink, which is normally full until there’s a noticeable rot.

She begins opening cabinets, slowly and calmly at first. I assume she’s looking for something specific, but after a moment I’m sure she’s just being nosey. She comes to the last one, the little corner cabinet, the only one to the right of the sink. Shit.

I want to distract her, to keep her from opening it, but interfering with an experience without consent or a reasonable emergency would lead to a bad review. So I watch hopelessly as she swings the cabinet open and stares at the label on the little translucent bottle half full with brown liquid.

“Whiskey, beta? Tauba tauba,” she says as she slaps each of my cheeks gently. “Allah maf karay!” I’m not sure if she’s asking for forgiveness on my behalf, or if she somehow feels complicit in my sin by inhabiting my body. I mean, I’m not drunk—it’s six in the morning. Now if she wills that whiskey into me, then maybe she’d be complicit. Maybe.

She shuts the cabinet, still shaking her head, and pulls open the electric pressure cooker. We both notice the inner pot hasn’t been washed since the last time it was used, but only I know that this was many months ago. My eyes roll back into my head as she groans and clicks my tongue. She flicks on the tap and snatches the worn-out sponge on the edge of my sink. “Yeh koy tareeka hai, beta?”

She fills the pot with water so hot that I can feel the pain through the sensory suppression as she scrubs. I’m convinced this is intentional punishment. Maybe she isn’t the genuine-sweet type.

She empties the dal into the pot slowly, as if she doesn’t trust my eyes to check the quality of the product as a whole. The yellow pieces glint off the bottom of the worn metal, scattering into swirls as she shakes the bag to see if she can catch any unwanted particles.

One piece of dal pops off the bowl and onto the floor and I feel a tinge of the panic that froze me the first time I made dal. Not knowing what to do as the orange but almost magenta grains spilled onto the counter and to the floor. The worthlessness that would melt me into a blob as I’d hear Ammi’s tired and exasperated voice say “Beta, Arsalan, just once, would you do things without rushing?” Her finger would point at the door. “Out, now, if you can’t help properly.”

“Savvy for a ten year old,” Nani would say as I’d run to her lap before the tears began to flow.

“Haan, just as savvy as his useless father,” Ammi would say.

And then the fear of inadequacy would stand me up straight, wipe my tears, and walk me back into the kitchen defiantly, striding close enough to Ammi to move her out of the way without physically attacking her. I’d sort it out. I’d sift the dirt out of the fallen dal. I’d get a jar to pour the extra back. And I’d have dinner on the table before Ammi returned from her evening shift. I would not be my useless father.

“Is this right?” Meena asks as she presses the buttons on the pressure cooker.

“You’re not gonna soak the dal first?”

“Oh so now you’re such a refined cook?”

“I can make dal.”

“Then tell me, why soak the dal? What difference does it make, aside from wasting two hours of our lives?”

“Well it’s just, what . . . it’s just what you do.”

“Is it now?” She says, pressing start on the pressure cooker and effectively shutting me up. “Acha, where’s your janamaz beta? And the qibla is which direction?”

I’m pretty sure I can feel a smirk on my face as she asks.

“Inside the storage ottoman in the living room,” I say, coolly, trying to remember which way Ammi faced last time she visited. I point at my east facing windows and say, “And the qibla’s out the window that way, a little to the right.”

She opens the ottoman and pulls the janamaz out. I feel her stiffen as she notices my fingers grayed in dust. “Thank you beta,” she says, as she dusts off the janamaz and lays it out before the windows. I feel her swing my hands up to my ears before resting them high on my chest.

Should she technically have put a dupatta on? Ammi’s maroon ajrak one is still in the ottoman. The last time she was here I watched her throw it over her shoulder, say “Keep to our own,” and start her prayers before I could respond. We had just come home from lunch where I had finally introduced her to Karla. I sat on the couch and hunched over to inspect the lines on my palms where I had dug my nails in deep, hoping the pain would make the lunch go by faster. It didn’t work.

It wasn’t so much that she and Karla didn’t get along. It was more that each time Karla attempted to strike up conversation, Ammi just smiled at her and returned to her meal. Karla excused herself halfway through lunch, pretending she had just gotten called into the hospital to oversee an operation.

I kept my eyes down as she left and didn’t look up until a few moments later when Ammi said, “You know, the first time I met Eric’s mother, she did the same to me, but without a smile.”

“Oh, so it’s healthy to perpetuate this cycle, Ammi?”

“I stuck it out. When Eric got up to use the restroom, his mom leaned over and asked me if ‘your women still enjoy sex after your families circumcise you.’” Ammi sipped her tea and stared off somewhere above my head. “I smiled back, swallowed the words in my throat, and stuck it out. I’m glad Karla had the sense to run. She’s smarter and stronger than I was.”

I sunk into my couch watching Ammi flow through the motions of prayer that I never felt at home in. I’d happily keep to my own, if I knew who my own was.

“Chalo beta,” Meena says as she folds up the janamaz and puts it back into the dusty ottoman. “Let see how much time is left on this thing.”

The red digits flash through the final sixty seconds.

Meena clicks the depressurize button and watches, as if she’s hypnotized by the plume of steam hissing out of the metal cylinder. I feel my ears perk up as she hones in on the sound. It’s as if she hasn’t seen or heard this in ages.

“Don’t cook much anymore, eh?” I say, realizing I should probably contain my snark. But I don’t think she minds.

“No, I cook almost every day. It’s just that I’m a bit deaf, so I’ve forgotten how the steam speaks to you. If you pay attention to the hiss, you’ll hear it tell you if the food is really ready, if it was cooked the way you intended, or if you’ll be disappointed when the lid unlocks. And if you watch closely, you’ll see how the steam interacts with the spirits in the air. If they gather toward the steam, you’re cooking something delicious. If they flee, well . . . ” she shrugs. “It’s an old aunty secret.”

“Really?”

“You’re one of the most gullible saps I’ve ever met, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t believe you, I just couldn’t tell if you really believed it yourself.”

“Mhmm.”

“Alright, well you let me know if you need anything. I’m going to get some reading done.” Really there’s some gaming I need to catch up on, but she doesn’t need to know that. I suppress my visual feed and replace it with CoreEra4. Time to level up. The sensory suppression filters out most of Meena’s kitchen noise, until I hear the blender slicing through. I’m curious why she needs a blender to make dal, but not curious enough to hit pause.

I’m pretty immersed in the game when I feel an almost pungent, but ultimately bland taste on my tongue. Meena’s shoveled a bit of what she’s done to this dal into my mouth. She massages the hot, dry musty paste into a lump as she lets each part of my tongue feel and inspect the texture. As it crumbles into the back of my throat, an aftertaste surfaces that reminds me of wanting to be kissed amidst an audience of 80s era wood paneling on neglected basement walls. An aftertaste on my anxiety-dried adolescent tongue, which had just uttered “I’d kiss you Eid Mubarak if you’d let me.” A line tacky enough to hold the confident façade of my smile in place while I waited inside my head screaming what in the FUCK are you thinking?

I can almost hear Hafza’s laugh seeping in through my tongue and almost feel the slap that ended in an apologetic caress. My taste buds reverberate like the hair on the back of my neck when Hafza kissed the highest point of my cheekbone and then stared at me. I’d never seen anyone’s eyes so close. It was so overwhelming I had to close my own eyes. I’m not sure if she had started or me, but after years of pining, that was the first time my lips finally melted into another’s. And it would not be the last time I’d be rudely interrupted mid-kiss. Before the moment was over, Ammi was shouting, “Arsalan beta, let’s go!” from the top of the staircase behind me. Hafza broke the kiss and leaned over to whisper “Eid Mubarak, Arsalan” in my ear just before I jumped up, stunned by what had happened. The next thing I’d say to Hafza would be “congratulations” ten years later on her heavily decorated wedding stage, next to her heavily decorated new husband.

Meena fills my mouth with water, washing my memory out. I ache for another taste of the musty paste. I want to go back for more, even though there is nothing to go back to.

“What was that? It tasted familiar.”

“Well, mister expert, you’ll have to wait and see.”

So I watch her set the pot on the stove above the lowest possible flame and plop in a few heaps of ghee. As it melts and simmers unevenly in the pot, she picks up the blender and begins scooping the paste out. The warm ghee spatters on the backs of my hands as the first few clumps land in the pot.

My arm will no doubt be sore the next day, because for a while she just leans on the counter and stirs every few minutes, keeping the darkening paste on the bottom from sticking to the pot. Eventually she stops to add sugar, mixing it in evenly before flipping the paste over and pouring the rest of the sugar in. Once the white crystals disappear into the paste she scoops a spoon full out and closes my eyes as the warm sugary sensation hits my lips. I’m flooded with images of Tupperware decorated by cold and soggy deep-fried finger foods and heavenly sweetened desserts. But, it’s all dammed by the memory of Karla’s voice asking the question, “Why can’t you just bring me home for Eid, like a normal person?”

“Ammi’s just not well,” I had said, opening one dish and lifting it up. What dish was it?

“She’s well enough to have cooked all of this,” Karla had said, gesturing to the to-go holiday foods.

I plunged a spoon into the Tupperware and scooped up something and shoved it toward Karla’s mouth. “Just try a bite.”

Karla rolled her eyes and opened her mouth. Then, when the taste soaked into her tongue, she opened her eyes wide. Her eyes rolled again, but with pleasure this time. “What the fuck is this?”

“Chanay-ki daal ka-halwa,” I say into the AirBody UI.

“Very good!” Meena stabs with her standard tone of condescension. She pours another can of condensed milk in and continues stirring. “Gustatory memory.”

“What?”

“Taste. It’s got a peculiar way of triggering memory and emotion, don’t you think? More so than other senses. Taste links us directly to our gut, where our deepest unfulfilled needs keep us hungry. Your gut tricks your mind into thinking you’re getting what you want, when it’s really just using you to get the—” she scoops up another bite and I feel my eyes roll back into my head “—mmm. The sweet halwa.”

She opens my eyes and looks down at the bright yellowy paste.

“But, I remember this being brown whenever my Nani made it.”

“Haan beta, just wait,” she says as she preheats the oven to 400 degrees. When the oven beeps she slides the pan in and sets a timer for fifteen minutes.

“Acha beta, what kind of formal wear do you have?”

“Formal wear?”

“Haan, kurta pajama? Shalwar kameez? Whichever you’d like to call it.”

“Uhhh . . . ”

“Oh, of course. Well, at least put us in a pressed pant-shirt,” she says handing me back control.

“Sure,” I say, heading back to my room to pull out some blue slacks and a new red and gray striped shirt I haven’t worn yet.

I stand before the mirror making final touches when she pings for control back.

“Well at least you’ve got some color in your wardrobe.” She picks up a pen from my dresser and writes down an address on the price tag I just ripped off of the shirt I put on. “I need to go here.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say as I feel her pass control back.

As we make our way out of the city and onto the I-95 I glance at the sign for BWI Airport. The last time I was supposed to go to BWI was the last time I was supposed to see Karla. She had been away for work for a week and I was on my way to pick her up when I got a call from Ammi’s doctor. My mind went single track and I skipped the exit for the airport and drove straight to the hospital in Philly where Ammi was taking her last breaths, alone. I made it in time to say goodbye, but not much else.

Karla only called once that night. I stayed in Philly for six days and when I got back my place was emptied of Karla’s things, which was most everything. If I had called to let her know what was going on, she would have understood, would have come up to help. I never figured out why we played this game of chicken. We’d done it before. But, this time we both ran off the cliff and it felt right to let things rest at the bottom of the canyon rather than pick them up and rebuild.

I pull up in front of the house and step out of the car, grabbing the dish of halwa along the way. The magenta sunset laces the gray house like a mesh dupatta. There are a lot of cars parked on the driveway and a bluster of muffled laughter coming through the windows of the brightly lit living room.

As I get to the front door I hand back control and immediately feel my heart rate spike. She stares dead ahead, frozen still.

“Are you alright?”

“Haan, I just—”

The door swings open to a woman dressed in a gray and blue shalwar kameez. She’s still looking at her guests behind her and laughing. Her smile sticks as she turns to look at me. Her purple-streaked hair’s tied up in a bun. She’s probably a little younger than Meena, maybe late forties? I study her face to see if I can parse a family resemblance to Meena’s profile picture.

“I’m sorry, can I help you?” the woman asks, leaning against her door jamb.

I can feel Meena trying to push the air through my larynx and out of my mouth but it’s sealed shut. Instead, she just lifts the dish of halwa and opens it.

The woman leans forward and inspects the congealed brown paste. The sunset breeze blows a warm waft of the dish’s scent into my nose.

The woman looks back at me, but her eyebrows are strained around her eye sockets now. Without a word, she takes a step back and slams the door in my face.

Meena stands there for a minute in my shaking body, with the halwa still cooling in the open air. She flattens the lid back onto the dish and lays a card on top of it. She puts the dish down gently onto the frilly brown “Welcome Home” mat. She picks up a small white rock from the side of the porch and places it on top of the card to keep it from flying away, before turning back to the car.

As soon as I feel the first tear hit my cheek she stops.

“Beta, take us home.”

The tears stop as I take control, but I can still feel the strain in the back of my throat. This is the first time I’ve wondered what happens when people hand me back control temporarily. Do they come back to life in their homes? Is she convulsing over her toilet, vomiting up as much of the regret as possible before curling into a ball of tears on her bathroom floor? Or is she lying peacefully, letting the tears soak into her veins until the pain passes.

Once at home she requests control and immediately goes back to the cabinet in the corner, pulling out the bottle of whiskey and pouring it into a chipped glass she finds in my drying rack. She carries it in my shaking hands and walks to the armchair that faces the window. As the final moments of sunset fade away, I can see her staring back at me in the reflection of the window.

She holds up the glass and stares into the brown liquid as she swirls it around.

“Beta,” she says aloud. “How do you decide which one is right for you?”

“What do you mean?” I respond, echoing in my own head.

“Which drink? How did you know it was whiskey? Not Beer? Wine? Cocktail?”

“Well, I drink them all, so—” I hesitate, uncertain of where this is going, “—but I don’t drink much.”

“Haan, beta, whatever.” She smirks at me in the window and swings the whiskey full down my throat. I turn down the sensory suppression and feel the initial hit seep into my blood and loosen my muscles. She picks the bottle up from the table and pours another shot.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine, just need to process a bit.” She lifts the glass, but sips at the whiskey this time. I assume the first time was purely for shock value.

“What’s your deal?”

“My deal, beta?”

“Don’t beta me, I’m a grown man.”

“Haan,” she pauses, scanning my sad apartment, “of course you are.”

“Why are you here? Who was that woman?”

“Just an old acquaintance. It’s not important.”

“Then why me? Were there no other, more appropriate hosts available?”

“Appropriate how?”

“I don’t know, an older woman, someone more fitting your background?”

She laughs. “My background? Beta, you were the only ‘Urdu speaking’ host of Pakistani origin whose listing authorizes sexual behavior during a visit.”

Before I can respond there’s a knock at the door.

“Were you expecting anyone, beta?”

“No.”

She sets the glass down and goes to open the door. There is the woman, still in her gray and blue shalwar kameez, holding my dish with one hand and one hip. I watch my eyelids wrap around the woman in the doorway and make a shape I haven’t seen them make in months.

“Is it still you, Meena?”

Meena nods, my larynx suddenly sealed shut once again.

“You think you’re quite clever, don’t you?” The woman walks into the apartment and slides the dish onto the counter. She pulls the lid off, revealing at least 2-3 servings worth gone. “I’m going to eat the rest on my own as well. I’m not sharing.” She smiles as she pulls off her dupatta and throws it at me.

Meena catches it and laughs, finally loosening my throat. “Haniya, I—”

Haniya leans in quick to shut up Meena with a hard kiss that sends a chill down my spine and reverberates through the hairs on the back of my neck.

It’s been a while since I felt a kiss like that. In fact it’s just flat out been a while for me. I wonder how long it’d been for Meena and which matters more or if they’re additive and while I try to figure that out they stumble onto the couch and eventually roll onto the floor.

I shut my visual feed off, turn the sensory suppression back up, and do my best to give them some privacy. I won’t lie, I didn’t expect this guest to be the first to avail this “amenity.” But, I can’t entirely say I’m surprised. Meena has a determined bitterness that obviously guards something terribly sweet.

When I notice my heart rate begin to drop, I turn my visuals back on. They’ve made it to my bed. Meena’s lying on my back with Haniya’s head resting on my shoulder. The room is quiet except for the sound of calming breaths.

“Come back,” Meena squeezes out between breaths and into Haniya’s hair.

“As what, my love? Your assistant? Your cousin’s friend visiting from the states? An NGO worker there for training that you’re just showing around? What will you have me pretend to be this time?”

My throat locks up again as I feel blood rush to my cheeks.

Haniya sits up and lets my blanket fall off of her as she stands. She looks back down at me with a slight smile. “It was nice to see you again Meena. I’ve missed these stunts of yours.”

Meena just stares up at the ceiling while we listen to Haniya get dressed, slide the Tupperware off the counter and back onto her hip. Meena closes my eyes when we hear my apartment door open and shut. I’m certain she’s going to start crying again, but she just takes a deep breath and speaks.

“You’ll feel it one day.” She rolls into sitting position at the edge of the bed and looks in the mirror. “The desire to go back to when you were uncertain about who you’d turn out to be. When you lived foolishly thinking you could be something other than what you became in the end.” She lifts my right fingertips to my forehead, twice, with a gentle pseudo bounce and says, “Thanks for the company, Arsalan. Khuda-hafiz.”

As my limbs tingle back to me, I pull up Karla’s contact. While I mull the idea of calling her, I get an alert in my periphery from AirBody about a new request. I stare at Karla’s picture for a moment before closing her profile and pulling up AirBody. I’m certain I’ve already become who I’ll be in the end, so I might as well let everyone else be me for a little longer.

Sameem Siddiqui is a speculative fiction writer currently living in the United States. He writes to explore the near future realities people of South Asian ancestry and Muslim heritage will face in the coming centuries. His stories explore issues of migration, gender, family structure, economics and space habitation. He’s attended the Tin House and FutureScapes workshops and his stories have appeared in Clarkesworld and ApparitionLit. When he’s not writing, Sameem enjoys reveling in fatherhood, watching 90’s Star Trek or Avatar: The Last Airbender and tinkering with data and music. You can find him on Twitter @s_meems or at sameemwrites.com.

The Eight-Thousanders
By Jason Sanford
Short Story Long List

He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest.

And above the bottleneck, more climbers. Dozens of people snaking to the top in their insulated red and orange and bright-color parkas and boots and backpacks.

As if the mountain bled a trickle of rainbow-neon blood.

I leaned against a rock overhang, numb and cold and exhausted and focused only on climbing higher. I thought the man sitting under the overhang dead until I saw condensation rise from his lips. Spindrift snow danced around him.

“Don’t let me die,” the man whispered.

No one else had noticed the man. Or they’d ignored him like all the dead bodies we passed on Everest.

I waved for Ronnie Chait, my boss and our expedition’s leader. Ronnie stumbled over in his red high-tech coat and pants. He was attempting his fifth summit of Everest and his first without a supplemental oxygen system. Back at base camp other expedition leaders had grumbled about Ronnie leading people to the summit while not using oxygen. But no one dared confront Ronnie. He was one of the richest men in the world and known for both his love of mountain climbing and his hard-ass attitude toward business and life.

Ronnie knelt before the freezing man.

“He’s too far gone,” Ronnie said. “Must have been up here overnight.”

More climbers stepped past us. The longer we waited, the longer it’d take to summit. In one of Ronnie’s viral TED Talks he’d recounted what he’d learned during decades of venture capital and mountain climbing. How rescue was impossible on Everest. How if you died on Everest your body stayed on Everest.

His point was to live your life as if every day was Everest. That you couldn’t rely on others to save you.

“Nothing to be done, Keller,” Ronnie said as he laid his hand on my shoulder. “We can’t help him. But staying here will keep us from reaching the summit.”

Ronnie’s eyes hid behind his sunglasses, but it felt as if he glared into me. As if this moment decided my future with him. I owed my career to Ronnie. He was helping me reach Everest.

He turned and climbed up the ropes, daring me to back out.

I hesitated. The freezing man looked at me with a desperate gaze. I remembered my little brother’s final hours. How I’d wished I’d been there with him.

I couldn’t leave this man to die alone.

Could I?

Nyima Sherpa, Ronnie’s main guide, hiked over. Nyima rubbed the man’s legs and arms, trying to return circulation, but his extremities were already half frozen. We tried to help him stand, but the man couldn’t move.

“He’s nearly dead,” Nyima said.

I should have felt something, but didn’t. I was exhausted and numb, not merely my body but my emotions. I knew logically that this was because my oxygen mask and cylinder couldn’t provide enough air to be clearheaded in the mountain’s death zone. But even knowing that, I didn’t care. All that mattered was to keep climbing.

“I’ll stay with him,” a voice said above the hiss of my regulator.

A short woman stood beside Nyima. She wore a parka so faded the red was nearly pink. Her insulated pants and boots were black and also faded while mountain goggles covered the top of her face in one big rainbow-reflecting lens. An older-style rubber oxygen mask covered her mouth, nose and chin, ensuring no skin was exposed to the sun or the cold. But the line leading from the mask dangled loose, unattached to any oxygen canister.

“Truth,” the woman said. “I’ll stay. Continue your climb.”

Nyima stared at the woman through his icy goggles. His oxygen mask shivered as if he couldn’t gasp enough air. He muttered something in the Sherpa language before grabbing my arm and hustling me to the line of waiting climbers.

When I glanced back the woman knelt beside the dying man in the shade under the rock overhang. Now out of the dazzling sunlight, she removed her rubber oxygen mask and gloves, revealing deathly pale skin. When she opened her mouth, I saw large fangs. She leaned against the man and whispered into his icy ears while gently running a finger along his neck.

“Keep climbing, Keller,” Nyima yelled. “Just climb, damn it.”

• • • •

For the last decade I’ve reached toward Everest. Summiting larger and larger mountains. Exercising daily. Working forever-long hours for Ronnie’s venture capital company. Begging for a taste of the stock offerings in the new tech start-ups he continually funded and spun off.

Because it wasn’t good enough to want to climb. You had to have the means to climb. And that’s what working for Ronnie gave me.

Not that I hated Ronnie. Working for him was like aiming for Everest—it didn’t matter what we created, only that we reached the top. And in our spare time we bonded over mountain climbing. Tech bros convincing ourselves it was our genius and hard work which carried us here.

But I sometimes wondered. Now that I was actually on Everest the mountain felt like that gourmet burger restaurant Ronnie bought a few years back. Bad decor and overpriced food yet always filled with tech bros and hedge fund managers whose haircuts cost more than a hundred bucks. Ronnie loved the restaurant and took his top people there most weekends for beers and laughs. No matter that we were sick of the damn place. That we couldn’t eat another of those fancy burgers even if our mommies kissed our cheeks and begged us to swallow.

But eat them we did. And convinced ourselves we loved them. Because Ronnie did.

As I climbed the last few meters to the top of Everest, I wondered why summiting felt like another weekend at that damn burger place.

My body was so weak it felt as if I swam through wet concrete. I gasped at the oxygen streaming into my mask. I stepped to the top behind Ronnie. We were the last to summit. Nyima was already descending with the others in our group.

Ronnie took a photo of me at the summit. When I offered to take one of him he shook his head and said we needed to descend.

I stared at the distant Tibetan plateau. At the other nearby eight-thousanders. Lhotse. Makalu. Kangchenjunga. All mountains nearly as tall as Everest. All their peaks in the same death zone which was killing me, my body unable to grasp enough oxygen even with this mask.

“Someday we’ll climb them all,” Ronnie yelled. “We need to go.”

Distant clouds swirled one of the mountain ranges. For a moment Ronnie looked worried. He stepped forward and slipped, only his climbing axe keeping him from sliding toward the edge of the mountain. I wondered if the effect of not using oxygen was getting to him.

But I said nothing and followed him. Because at this point what else could I do?

• • • •

By the time we climbed down the Hillary Step the clouds were closer. From this distance they looked pretty. But darkness was also falling, with the sun so low that the side of the mountain we climbed down was now in a giant shadow. We had to reach the temporary camp at South Col before the pending storm reached us. Below us in the distance I saw Nyima and the other expedition climbers—it looked like they’d make our overnight camp before the storm hit.

We turned on our headlamps and staggered forward.

I focused on following Ronnie, forcing my exhausted body to take step after step, and almost ran into him when he suddenly stopped. We stood near the rock overhang where the climber had been freezing to death. Maybe Ronnie wanted to see if we could still help.

But there was no one under the overhang.

Ronnie stumbled backwards, knocking me down. I slammed my climbing axe into the snow to steady myself as Ronnie backed up even more.

The woman in the faded red coat stood before us on the mountain’s edge, right beside a sheer drop of a thousand meters or more. Her face and hands were no longer covered now that the sun was hidden by shadows. She cradled the frozen man in her arms like a child and bit into his neck. Red sprayed across the spindrift snow. The man didn’t move, either dead or so far gone he felt no pain.

The woman turned toward me and Ronnie and smiled, the blood on her lips and chin instantly freezing.

“I waited for you two,” she said. “You’re already dead, you know.”

Ronnie held his climbing axe before him like a weapon, but I didn’t move. We barely had the strength to reach camp let alone fight. Besides, it would be so simple for her to knock us off the mountain if she desired.

The woman shook her head. “Don’t worry—I won’t kill you. But you started your descent too late. The jet stream’s shifting. The storm and wind will hit before you reach camp.”

Ronnie stepped forward as if to swing his axe at the woman. I grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. She was right. Down below us I saw the other climbers already blurring as the increasing wind stirred up the snow.

The woman turned back to the mountain’s edge. She held the frozen man out as if offering him to the sky before tossing his body into the air. The man soared for a moment before dropping out of sight.

The woman stepped back to the rock overhang, allowing us room to pass. “You idiots call that the Rainbow Valley,” she said, pointing to the drop-off. “From all the dead climbers in their bright parkas and gear. For what it’s worth, I didn’t kill any of them.”

Ronnie staggered past the woman, keeping as far from her as he could without falling.

I crept by closer to the woman, afraid I’d fall if I hiked that close to the edge. As I passed she said, “I’m Ferri.”

“Keller,” I said back, whispering inside my oxygen mask. I didn’t think she’d hear me. But she nodded as if she’d heard and followed me as I climbed down.

• • • •

Ronnie and I made it to the South Summit before darkness and the full storm hit. But my oxygen tank had run out minutes before. I gasped at the dry air, my body hyperventilating but still not getting enough oxygen. Panic shook me. I felt like I was drowning. I prayed I wouldn’t pass out.

Nyima and the other guides had cached oxygen bottles here yesterday, but I didn’t know if I’d last long enough to reach them. As Ronnie led me toward the cache between two rocks, the weather cleared for a moment. I saw the headlamps and illuminated tents at South Col and the lights of the other climbers who were nearly to the camp. Then the wind shifted and I again saw only a half-dozen meters in the swirling snow.

“There’s only empty bottles,” Ronnie screamed, leaning over the cache. A number of red bottles lay scattered across the snow and rock, left from when the other members of our expedition changed out their oxygen earlier. But one of the bottles still had the seal over the threads to keep out ice and snow — it hadn’t been used.

“That one,” I said, pointing at the full bottle. “They left it for me.”

Ronnie picked up the bottle. But instead of handing it to me he threw it with a strength he shouldn’t have had. The bottle bounced off a rock below us and tumbled over the edge of the mountain.

“It’s empty,” Ronnie yelled. “Empty. But there’s air all around us. Breathe it, Keller. Breathe!”

I fell to my knees, lightheaded, as Ronnie began descending again. Was he going to leave me here? I collapsed onto the empty bottles, my gloves smacking each one, begging for one to have oxygen in it. Unlike Ronnie, I hadn’t trained my body to climb Everest without extra oxygen. I gasped for air, desperate to breathe. I couldn’t die here. I couldn’t.

“Your friend’s an asshole,” the woman in faded red yelled as she sat on one of the rocks beside me. “Yeah, he’s addled from oxygen deprivation, but he’s still an asshole.”

Ferri. That was her name. I tried to stand but my vision swirled and I crashed to the frozen ground.

Ferri leaned over and stared into my face. Her lips were glazed in frozen blood. She pulled her worn backpack off and opened it. Inside were the gloves and sunglasses and mask she’d worn earlier along with a fresh oxygen bottle. She replaced my bottle with the new one. My mind and vision cleared as oxygen again flowed into my mask.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I only did it to keep your blood fresh.”

Ferri stared at me with a blank expression, the right side of her mouth open slightly so I could see a single long fang.

“Sorry, bad joke. I always carry an extra bottle in case someone needs it.”

I stood up on shaking legs. “If I die out here …”

“If you die out here I’ll drink your blood.”

“Then maybe I shouldn’t die.”

“Always a good idea.”

I staggered after Ronnie as Ferri followed.

• • • •

Wind and cold and snow bled the mountain and ripped through my thermal coat and gloves and boots. I had to make camp or die. But in the blizzard I couldn’t see anything. I’d already lost sight of Ronnie in the howling snow and could easily walk off the side of the mountain. Fall a thousand meters, my body never to be found.

Ferri walked behind me. When I stopped she stopped. When I struggled against the whiteout wind and snow, she followed. Never giving me a hint on which way to go to reach camp.

For a moment the snow above me parted and I saw the stars, bright as a million spotlights in the thin air. I glanced down and saw, a few meters away, Ronnie crouching next to a small boulder.

I stumbled over and collapsed beside him. His face was porcelain, his nose and cheeks polished into white river stones by frostbite like the dying man we’d seen earlier. He must have lost his insulated face mask at some point.

“Where’s camp?” I yelled over the wind.

Ronnie shook his head.

The boulder partly protected us from the jet stream but we couldn’t stay here. We’d be dead in an hour if we didn’t get out of the storm. The camp was likely only a hundred meters away. But if we stumbled around we’d more likely fall off the nearby cliffs.

Ferri sat down beside us. Ronnie glared at her. “Where’s the camp?” he yelled.

“She won’t help us,” I said.

Ronnie yanked my face mask off, the precious oxygen bleeding into the blizzard. “She found you an oxygen tank,” he yelled, pointing his ice axe at her. “Where the hell’s our camp?”

I shook my head, not knowing. Ronnie turned his anger on Ferri, shifting his ice axe so the pick end pointed at her chest. His eyes, which had seemed hopeless moments before, sharpened into the fire which anyone who opposed him in the tech world knew only too well.

Ferri stared blankly at Ronnie before she smiled. But not a real smile. More a smile given by someone who’d copied smiles she’d seen on the faces of others. As if Ferri had long ago given up on feeling any actual emotions.

Ferri blandly pointed into the whiteout around us. Ronnie staggered to his feet and stumbled in that direction. But was he heading toward camp, or had she directed him toward a cliff?

“You’ll die if you stay here,” Ferri said in a flat voice barely heard over the howling wind.

“I thought we were already dead.”

“You are. But if you follow him you may end up dying later.”

I stood and staggered after Ronnie.

• • • •

We stumbled through the white. With each step I expected Ronnie to vanish before my eyes, falling to his death down some forever cliff.

I shook my head, trying to focus.

Ronnie stopped and I stood next to him. We heard a faint clanking.

“Move it or die,” Ronnie yelled as he grabbed my arm. As if he was again in charge of his own destiny.

We shuffled through the snows and wind until we saw a bright orange tent. Then a red tent. The wind blasted the tents so they barely stood, but I didn’t care if they were about to collapse as long as I could climb inside one.

A western climber stood beside the red tent banging an ice axe against an empty oxygen tank. Nyima argued with the climber, trying to convince the man to go out into the blizzard with him to find us.

They both stopped when they saw us.

“You two are damn lucky,” Nyima said as he shoved us into our tent. “Did you hear our banging?”

I fell on my sleeping bag, not even able to take off my boots or crampons. “Only heard it … right before we saw camp,” I said, my words shivering like my body.

“Then how’d you find us?” Nyima asked. He handed me a thermos of lukewarm tea, which I swallowed desperately.

Ronnie stared out the open tent flap looking for Ferri. We could only see a meter or two with the blowing snow. Who knew where she’d gone.

“We took a chance,” Ronnie said. “Took a chance.”

Ronnie wiped his frozen face and paused, reevaluating his words.

“No,” he said. “We made it work.”

• • • •

The situation at camp wasn’t much better than what we’d experienced coming down the mountain. Despite the best weather forecasts used by Ronnie and the other expedition leaders, the jet stream had unexpectedly shifted and now blasted the camp. Nyima said that so far the tents were holding up, but no one knew if they’d last through the night.

“It’ll clear by morning,” Ronnie announced.

“How do you know?” Nyima asked.

“It will.” Ronnie pulled his sleeping bag around himself and didn’t move.

Nyima returned to his tent. The tent fabric beside my head rattled and howled, the support rods bending dangerously close to breaking. I rolled over and looked at Ronnie, whose face showed severe frostbite. Nyima had wanted to bandage Ronnie’s face, but Ronnie waved him away. I still wore my oxygen mask and, for a moment, considered offering him some of my air. Oxygen helped the body fight frostbite. If Ronnie used some, he’d have a better chance of avoiding permanent damage.

I would even swear to Ronnie that I’d tell no one. Anyone who asked would be told he’d climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen.

But I knew Ronnie. If I helped him he’d grow angry. Not today—today he’d be grateful. But back home, at work … when we returned to life … he’d find a way to hurt me. To show that he didn’t need to rely on me for anything.

That he was the master and I was nothing.

I rolled over, breathed deeply of fresh oxygen, and fell into a fitful sleep.

• • • •

The storm continued the next day.

When I’d first seen Everest several weeks ago from base camp, I’d watched beautiful wisps of cloud and snow spiral off the summit. Only later did I discover those wisps were hurricane-force winds. Ronnie always paid for the best forecasting and had assured me we’d never be in the death zone when the weather was this bad. This was something that only happened decades before when people had climbed the mountain without adequate technological support.

I wanted to laugh but was too exhausted.

Even with a tent and sleeping bag it’s nearly impossible to sleep in the death zone. The oxygen mask gripped my face like a stranger’s hand strangling me. But when I removed it I couldn’t get enough air.

Still, I drifted in and out of something like consciousness. I remembered Nyima coming to the tent and telling Ronnie the other expedition leaders wanted to meet with him. The two of them crawled into snow blowing by like a jet engine, unable to stand without being knocked over. After crawling barely a meter they vanished in the blizzard.

They’d left the tent flap open and I tried to raise enough energy to sit up and zip it shut. Before I could, Ferri climbed into the tent and closed the flap for me. The tent was being blown almost flat and she lay on Ronnie’s sleeping bag so she could look into my face.

“This tent isn’t much protection,” Ferri said. “The wind’s blowing at more than 100 kilometers an hour. Your tent could parachute in the wind and drag you over a cliff before you’d know what’s happening.”

I stared at Ferri as I gasped at oxygen inside my mask. I remembered all the times my little brother was sick when we were children. He told me once his body felt so numb and exhausted that he pretended it was a puppet he controlled. Twitch a string and his arm moved. Touch another string and he’d smile to allay our mother’s concern.

I felt the same right now. My mind tugged a string and my head nodded to Ferri’s words.

Ferri leaned over me and sniffed my blinking eyes. “You’re dying,” she said. “I can smell it. Your body’s so weak your digestive system has shut down. Every second your cells wink out by the thousands, all of them angry as they scream for more oxygen.”

Ferri stuck her tongue out as if to lick my eyeballs before pulling back. “If you stay here much longer you’ll die. If you go out in this blizzard you’ll die. What are you going to do?”

“Ronnie said the forecasts are for the jet stream to shift again. The winds will stop and we’ll descend out of the death zone.”

“That’s what he told you?” Ferri asked. “Before I came here I listened outside the tent where Ronnie and the other expedition leaders are meeting. Turns out the forecast was always iffy but Ronnie convinced everyone to push to the top. And now the forecast isn’t supposed to change for several days.”

I twitched the strings holding my body together, making my body shiver slightly. Every climber knew what happened if you stayed for days and days in the death zone.

While Ferri stared at me the entrance unzipped and Ronnie climbed into the tent, pausing halfway in. He glared at Ferri, backed partly out, stopped again in the doorway.

“Want me to move over?” Ferri asked. “There’s room for all of us.”

Ronnie glanced outside at the snow gusting past.

Ferri picked herself off Ronnie’s sleeping bag and kicked it toward him. “I don’t need it,” she said.

Ronnie took the bag and disappeared into the blowing snow to find another tent.

“He doesn’t like you,” I said.

“He shouldn’t,” Ferri said. “But it doesn’t matter because he’ll be dead before he gets off this mountain.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Most men don’t.”

• • • •

My oxygen tank emptied before nightfall. When Nyima checked on me and heard my gasps for air, he brought me another tank. But he refused to enter the tent to hand it over, forcing me to crawl outside.

“She’s dangerous,” Nyima yelled over the howling wind. “Bring your bag and we’ll double-up in my tent.”

I shook my head and climbed back inside. Nyima shrugged and crawled to his own tent.

I clicked the oxygen tank into my regulator and breathed sweet, deep air again. I collapsed back on my sleeping bag.

Ferri grinned her fake smile. “Should I like being called dangerous?” she asked.

“Does Nyima know you?”

“I’ve seen him up here many times. Seen most of the Sherpas and westerners over the years. Sometimes they recognize me. Most of the time they think I’m just another climber.”

“You from here?”

“No. From what you now call Italy, but centuries ago. I’ve been climbing this mountain for the last forty years.”

“Why?”

Ferri reached up and pushed against the tent fabric which the wind shoved down at our faces. “I mislike killing people. But I must feed. So many people die climbing this mountain that I can feed without killing. I come here every year or two.”

Ferri pushed harder against the sagging fabric. “No, I misspoke. When I say I mislike killing, that’s a lie. I don’t like or dislike anything. What I am precludes emotion. I exist. I have desires. But my emotions are dull and cold. Just like the people who climb into this dead zone. They’re exhausted. Shells of who they’d be elsewhere. It’s my only chance to be around others who behave like myself.”

“If you don’t like or dislike killing, why do you avoid it?”

“It’s a choice. One I decided a long time ago to follow.”

I thought of following Ronnie up this damn mountain. How I felt I had no other choice once I started our climb. Was Ferri mocking me? Was she serious?

But then I thought of that man freezing to death under the rock overhang. How he’d reminded me of my brother. Even though I still felt exhausted and numb, a shiver of sadness raced through me.

“That was an emotion you just felt,” Ferri said. “I could almost taste it.”

I rolled over so I didn’t have to look at her.

“What made you feel that?” she asked, crawling on top of my body so I couldn’t look away from her face. “Tell me. I’m always curious when emotions are strong enough that people still feel them up here.”

I looked at Ferri’s fangs, which hovered right above my eyes. But I felt no fear. And the sadness I’d felt a moment before had already fled, leaving me numb again. Was this how she lived all the time?

“My little brother,” I said. “The man under that overhang reminded me of him. My brother battled leukemia for most of his life, always in and out of hospitals as a kid. He loved reading about mountain climbing—I think he dreamed of being strong enough to climb. But one night he died by himself in the hospital, before me and my family could arrive to be with him.”

Ferri clicked her fangs against my cheek’s cold skin. “Too predictable,” she said. “I suppose now you’ll say you’re climbing Everest to honor your brother? That he’s why you work with Ronnie and risk your life doing this silly stuff?”

I pushed Ferri off me. I had been about to say that. I had always believed that.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“It’s okay,” Ferri replied. “I don’t care what lies you spin to rationalize following Ronnie up here. But at least you felt something for a moment. That’s all that truly matters, right?”

Unable to answer, unable to know how to answer, I rolled back over and slipped into something that was close to, but never quite the same as, sleep.

• • • •

In the morning the winds hadn’t let up. Our expedition was running low on oxygen and supplies, as were climbers from other expeditions. Nyima came by my tent and said we were all going to try climbing down before we grew any weaker.

“The winds will die down if we climb low enough to get out of the jet stream,” Nyima said. “Get ready. We leave in thirty minutes.”

I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask and pulled on my boots and crampons. Ferri lay on the tent floor and watched me with a mix of interest and a deep lack of caring.

“Any thought on what I should do if I want to live?” I asked.

“I have no suggestions. You live and die on your own.”

“But you helped us earlier. You told Ronnie how to find the camp in that white out.”

“Did that actually help?”

I shivered. She’d said she didn’t have emotions and didn’t care what happened to us, aside from her choice to avoid killing if she could. If I returned to my sleeping bag, would Ferri stay with me as I slowly died in the coming days? Would the last thing I saw be her lips on my neck?

I stumbled out of the tent into the blizzard.

Nyima was readying our expedition’s climbers while Ronnie looked on in irritation. Nyima looked past me at Ferri emerging from the tent.

“You’re short-roping Keller,” Nyima yelled at Ronnie.

I paused. Was I in such bad shape that I needed to be roped to Ronnie to help me get down the mountain?

“I’m not doing that!” Ronnie said. “It’s on him to get down.”

“I don’t care if you use oxygen or not,” Nyima said, “but you brought Keller up here and you’re getting him down.”

Nyima roped me to Ronnie with several meters of cord. To my surprise, Ronnie glared at Nyima but didn’t protest again. If Ronnie wasn’t so exhausted from not using oxygen he’d likely have refused to do this. And I knew he’d fire Nyima for this embarrassment once we found safety and he returned to being his old self.

But for now that didn’t matter. We started down the mountain.

Each climber quickly disappeared in the white out conditions. Nyima led the main part of our expedition down the mountain but Ronnie and I were far slower. It didn’t take long to realize that Ronnie and I weren’t roped together to help me, but for me to help him. After going so long without supplemental oxygen, Ronnie couldn’t climb off the mountain on his own.

“Nyima knew if he tried to get you to short-rope Ronnie, the fool’d say no,” Ferri yelled as she climbed beside me. “This way his ego is safe because he thinks he’s helping you.”

Because the storm blocked the sun, Ferri didn’t wear her glasses or face mask. She stood straight up in the howling wind as she climbed down while I hunched over, using my ice axe to keep from sliding down the slope. Two meters below me Ronnie also hunched over, the rope between us tight as if that was all that kept him from losing his grip and tumbling off the mountain.

Ronnie glanced back and saw Ferri standing beside me. He tried to hurry faster down the mountain but slipped. The rope jerked forward and was about to yank me after Ronnie when Ferri grabbed the rope, stopping both of us.

Ronnie struggled to his feet and moved on. Ferri released the rope.

“He’s endangering both of you,” Ferri said. “That’s why Nyima put you two by yourselves—he didn’t want you or Ronnie taking other climbers with you when you die.”

“Fuck Nyima for leaving us.”

“He didn’t leave you. He merely realized you two were already dead.”

“How did he know that?”

Ferri blocked the wind with her body and leaned in so she could talk without yelling. “Because I’m with you.”

• • • •

I was as dead as Ferri claimed to be. No emotions. No life. Nothing but one boot in front of the other. One gloved hand on the rope between me and Ronnie. The other slamming my ice axe into the mountain over and over to keep from sliding.

The whiteout completed my isolation. I saw Ferri beside me, striding against the wind as if daring it to blow her off Everest. Aside from Ferri, I was perfectly alone. Even Ronnie, only two meters before me, slipped in and out of the whiteout.

Why had I done this, I wondered. Ferri had been correct—I used my brother as little more than an excuse for risking my life. As rationalization for following Ronnie as we marked off mountains like sexual conquests. I’d always told myself I was better than Ronnie. That I had an actual reason for doing this.

But in the end, mountains didn’t care why we climbed or whether we won or lost.

I paused, causing Ronnie to yank against the rope. He looked back at me. He waved for us to continue.

We had to keep struggling. We had to …

Ferri looked at me and smiled her emotionless smile.

We climbed on.

• • • •

Ronnie and I crouched in a windbreak created by a rock overhang as snow howled past. We drank our remaining water but it didn’t help our exhaustion.

“It can’t be much further,” Ronnie yelled. “The jet stream will end if we climb low enough.”

I wanted to believe that, but couldn’t. All I could focus on was how hard it’d be to leave this windbreak and continue on.

Ferri stood above us on the overhang, leaning into the wind like an airplane wing. I don’t know why she did it because she didn’t look like she was having fun. According to her, she couldn’t even have fun. But still, there she was, leaning into the wind.

Ronnie ignored her. “This will amaze people,” he said. “How we escaped death. How we refused to give up.”

I nodded, already imagining Ronnie’s next TED Talk sweeping the world with his version of survival. Not that I cared. And Ronnie was in far worse shape than me. He’d collapsed into the windbreak when he reached it. I knew if I got him to stand up I might be able to help him climb a little further down the mountain. Maybe even to safety.

But helping him was also exhausting me.

And if we reached safety, he wouldn’t be grateful. He’d hate that I’d helped him. Hate that he hadn’t survived because of only himself. He’d find ways to hurt me.

I tried to remember my brother. To remember my pain when he died. To remember why I’d wanted to help the freezing man under the rock overhang. To force myself to feel anything.

But I couldn’t.

“We need to go,” Ronnie yelled.

I stood up. Ferri looked down at me.

With my ice axe’s saw tool, I cut the rope between me and Ronnie and stepped away.

Ronnie grabbed the overhang, trying to stand, but was too weak. He glared at me from behind his snow goggles. His frostbitten lips opened, closed, opened again without saying anything.

“Don’t worry,” Ferri yelled, hopping down and sitting beside Ronnie. “I’ll stay with him.”

Ronnie pushed himself back into the small cave created by the overhang, as if trying to escape Ferri. She patted his leg.

I hiked on.

An hour later I cleared the jet stream and the worst of the storm.

• • • •

I woke in the medical tent at base camp with bandages on my frostbitten face and hands. I vaguely remembered stumbling down the mountain after clearing the storm. At some point a rescue team found me, but I didn’t remember when or how.

In the tent the base camp doctor and two nurses worked on a dozen members of various expeditions. The doctor leaned over the face of a woman who’d summited Everest an hour before I did. The doctor said the woman’s frostbite was the worst he’d ever seen.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Nyima said as he pulled a camp chair up to my cot and sat down. His face was also bandaged, although not as badly as mine. “They’re landing a helicopter to medivac that climber out first—she’s in worse shape. You’ll be on the next flight.”

I whispered, unable to speak louder. Nyima leaned over and I repeated myself.

“She took Ronnie,” I said.

“Before or after you abandoned him?” he asked quietly so no one else could hear.

I looked away from Nyima and watched the doctor and nurses trying to save the other climber. So many people hurt. And another expedition of seven people had vanished during the storm and were presumed dead.

But even though Ronnie had died, Nyima was already being praised for saving the rest of the climbers in our group.

“One of us Sherpas gets killed, no one cares,” Nyima muttered. “But you western fools die and the whole world pays attention. And Ronnie’s death will be big because of who he was.”

I understood. Everyone would be watching. If I admitted what I did, the world’s anger would crash down on me.

“You tried to save him,” Nyima whispered. “But some people refuse to be saved by others. Remember that.”

I nodded. Nyima patted my chest and walked out of the tent.

The tent fell quiet as the doctor and nurses carried the severely injured climber to the first medivac. That’s when Ferri entered. She wore a brand-new red coat and snow pants, both too big for her body. Ronnie’s clothes.

Ferri walked among the other injured climbers, tasting the air over each person’s cot before stopping at mine. She leaned over so her tongue almost licked my right ear. She pointed at her new red coat.

“Ronnie stripped naked before the end,” she whispered. “So delirious from cold he thought he was burning up.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t want to know details like this.

Ferri sniffed my right eyeball. “You’re going to lose your nose. And half your fingers and toes. But you climbed Everest. Was it worth it?”

I started to cry, the emotions which had been repressed by exhaustion and lack of oxygen flooding out of me. Ferri watched dispassionately. She was the same as she’d been on the mountain. No emotions. No cares on the choices she made.

She stood up as the chuck-chuck sound of another helicopter echoed across base camp. “I’ll see you when you return,” she said. “People like you always come back.”

I laughed weakly. “You mean people like us always come back.”

Ferri tapped her tongue to one of her fangs.

She walked out of the tent as the doctor and nurses rushed in and carried me toward the waiting helicopter. I wanted to scream at Ferri. To say I was lying—that I’d never see this damn mountain again. That I’d never return.

But would I?

The doctor and nurses strapped me into the helicopter’s spare seat and closed the door. I watched out the window as the machine struggled to gain altitude in the thin air.

As the helicopter flew higher I saw Ferri walking back toward the mountain. She’d again covered her face with her sunglasses and unused oxygen mask so the sun wouldn’t hurt her. She passed the tents of hundreds of other climbers.

No one saw her as anything more than one more person waiting to reach the top.

She was right—I’d be back. I wouldn’t let this stop me. And when I returned she’d be here, waiting.

I cursed. I was as stupid as Ronnie. I hated myself for that. But I also realized it didn’t matter.

Because in the end, once I finally killed myself on this mountain, she’d be there. I wouldn’t die alone like my brother. Even if she never felt a single emotion over anything I did in my sorry-ass life, I wouldn’t die alone.

Jason Sanford is a three-time finalist for the Nebula Award who has published dozens of stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside Magazine along with appearances in multiple “year's best” anthologies and the The New Voices of Science Fiction. His first novel Plague Birds was recently released by Apex Books. Born and raised in the American South, Jason currently works in the media industry in the Midwestern United States. His previous experience includes work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps Volunteer. His website is www.jasonsanford.com.

Open House On Haunted Hill
By John Wiswell
Short Story Finalist

133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a killer house. There is an estate at 35 Silver Street that annihilated a family back in the 1800s and its roof has never sprung a leak since. In 2007 it still had the power to trap a bickering couple in an endless hedge maze that was physically only three hundred square feet. 35 Silver Street is a show-off.

133 Poisonwood only ever had one person ever die under its roof. Back in 1989, Dorottya Blasko had refused hospice, and spent two and a half months enjoying the sound of the wind on 133 Poisonwood’s shingles. 133 Poisonwood played its heart out for her every day.

The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time since vacant.

Today it is going to change that. It is on its best behavior as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up. She puts out trays of store-bought cookies and hides scent dispensers, while 133 Poisonwood summons a gentle breeze and uses its aura to spook any groundhogs off the property. Both the realtor and the real estate need this open house to work.

Stragglers trickle in. They are bored people more interested in snacks than the restored plumbing. The house straightens its aching floorboards, like a human sucking in their belly. Stragglers track mud everywhere. The house would love nothing more than any of them to spend the rest of their lives tracking mud into it.

A heavyset man with sagging shoulders lets himself in. He has a bit of brownie smudged against the back of his parakeet green hoodie, and doesn’t seem aware of it. Mrs. Weiss gives him a little wave while continuing to hold up a ten-minute conversation with an affluent couple. The couple made the mistake of saying they were “thinking of thinking of conceiving,” and Mrs. Weiss wields statistics about the school district like a cowboy wields a lasso. The couple’s shoes likely cost more than a down payment on the house, but from how often they check their phones, they clearly are headed back to their Mercedes.

The man with the brownie-stained hoodie prowls through 133 Poisonwood’s halls, and it pulls its floorboards so straight that its foundations tremble.

The man doesn’t look at 133 Poisonwood’s floor. He looks at the couple of ripples in the green floral wallpaper, with the expression of someone looking at his own armpit.

The house feels ashamed of the loose wallpaper. It’s vintage painted silk, which Mrs. Weiss says could be a big value-add. Now the house ponders if it can haunt its own glue and help strip the wallpaper away to please him. It’s especially important since he is spending more time here than anyone has yet without Mrs. Weiss wrangling them. It’s like he doesn’t feel the vibes other visitors do, or he doesn’t care about them.

From his behavior, what he cares about is wallpaper, the natural lighting through the windows in the master bedroom and the kitchen.

A child stomps in through the front door, her frizzy hair in three oblong pigtails she probably did herself. A silver keepsake locket clashes with her bright green Incredible Hulk t-shirt. Her elbows are tucked into her chest, hands out like claws, stained with brownie bits.

Every step she takes is deliberate and channels all her tiny body weight to be as heavy as possible. If the house had to guess, the girl is probably pretending to be a dinosaur on the hunt.

The man in the brownie-stained hoodie glances at her. He asks, “Ana. Where’s your coat?”

Ana bellows, “I hate clothes!”

Ana apparently hates clothes so much she immediately grabs the bottom of her Hulk t-shirt and yanks it up over her head. She is careful to keep her locket in place, but chucks the shirt at the man. He grabs for her, and she ducks between his arms, bolting past Mrs. Weiss and the affluent couple, pigtails and locket bouncing.

In their chase, they leave the front door open. The house knows heating oil is expensive. It summons a spectral breeze to shut it for them.

The sound makes Ana pinwheel around, and she points at the door. She says, “Daddy! It’s ghosts!”

Daddy says, “Ana, we talked about this. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“You didn’t look.”

“You don’t have to look for things that aren’t there.”

Ana looks at her locket and huffs. “What if it’s Mommy’s ghost?”

Daddy closes his eyes for a moment. “Please just put your shirt back on.”

Ana immediately attacks her own pants. “Clothes are for the weak!”

“Put it on or we are leaving, Ana,” he says, trying to wrestle clothing onto his daughter. She pushes at him, leaving more brownie residue on his hoodie. As they battle, the affluent couple slips out the front door without closing it.

The house closes it for them. Heating oil isn’t cheap.

• • • •

The triangular roof means the second floor only has the space for one bedroom. Mrs. Weiss reads the expression on Daddy’s face, and she attacks with, “The basement is very spacious with generous lighting. It’s cool in the summer, and toasty in the winter.”

Ana says, “Heights are bad luck anyway.”

The four-year-old scarcely looks at the bedroom before backing out. She holds the handrail with both hands as she climbs down the stairs on quivering legs. On the third stair, she freezes entirely.

Daddy is in the middle of surveying the room and misses Ana quivering in place.

Some houses give their residents visions of slaughters or trauma. 133 Poisonwood gives Daddy a swift vision of his daughter’s vertigo. He doesn’t know it’s anyone else’s insight, and wouldn’t believe it, but he’s at the stairs in seconds. Ana holds onto his pants leg until she feels safe.

All 133 Poisonwood has is a light touch, but it knows how to use it. Haunting is an art.

The basement is only half-underground, so the windows are level with the freshly mowed front lawn. Ana spends a moment giggling at the view. Then she whizzes around the basement, from the combination furnace and laundry room, to a storage closet, and to a pair of vacant rooms. They would make a perfect child’s bedroom and playroom.

Ana goes to the west room, announcing, “Daddy. You can keep all the ghosts you bust in here.”

Mrs. Weiss offers, “One of these could be a home office. You said you telecommute? Google Fiber is coming to the area next year.”

Daddy says, “I want to work from home more. I’m a software engineer, and I host a skeptic podcast. You might have heard us.”

The house isn’t offended. It doesn’t believe in ghosts either.

Ana hops back and forth between the two rooms, scrutinizing over and over as though they’ll grow. That is a trick the house doesn’t have.

Daddy says, “We could sleep next door to each other. What do you think?”

Ana says, “But I want a big dino room.”

“You’re getting to be a big dinosaur. How about the room on the top floor?”

Ana’s bottom lip shoots upward like she’s going to run. She clearly won’t settle for the room on the top floor, and there’s only a master bedroom on the first floor. A tantrum is close, and it could ruin everything.

So 133 Poisonwood plays its ace. Every decent haunted house has at least one secret room. Dorottya Blasko used to sew down here when she didn’t want to be pestered, in a room her family couldn’t find. It would be a perfect place for Ana to grow up in. Perhaps she’ll learn to sew.

With the sound of an affectionate kitten, the door opens. Shock hits the adults, who definitely don’t remember there being a room there. Ana doesn’t care, and runs to explore it.

“Uh, we aren’t showing that room,” Mrs. Weiss says, scrambling to cover for herself. She’s panicking, imagining hazards and lawsuits.

She doesn’t understand. 133 Poisonwood is going to clinch the sale for them.

The room runs deep, with an expansive window that hasn’t been seen from the outside in over twenty years. A sewing box with a scarlet and royal blue quilted exterior sits next to a rocking chair, and beneath the window is a broad spinning wheel that still smells like hobbies. Many great dresses were supposed to come out of this room. There are a few cracks on the concrete floor. Nothing a loving father can’t fill in to perfect his daughter’s big dino room.

“Ana,” Daddy calls. “Stay near me.”

Ana ignores the call and runs straight up to the spinning wheel. Her little hands grab onto spokes in the drive wheel, and she turns to the door. “It’s like Mommy’s.”

Daddy says, “Careful, that’s not ours—”

Ana yanks the wheel around to show it off to the adults. She pulls before the house can resist, and the entire device creaks and wobbles. It topples straight down on top of Ana, throwing her to the floor.

Daddy grabs her shoulders and pulls her from between the cracked wheel and treadle. Ana’s too distracted bawling to feel her necklace snag the spindle. The thin chain snaps, and the locket slips from her neck and down a crack in the floor. Without intending to, the house sucks the chain down like a strand of spaghetti. The house tries to spit it out.

Daddy squeezes Ana to his chest so hard she could pop, and keeps repeating, “Are you alright? Are you alright?”

Mrs. Weiss gestures and says, “Her hand.”

“Are you alright?”

Ana says, “Let me fix it!” She stretches her hands to the broken spinning wheel. One of her hands is bleeding and she still wants to use them to clean up her mess. She says, “Daddy, let go, I’ll fix it. Don’t make the ghosts sad.”

That breaks Daddy’s concerned trance, and he lifts her under one arm, ignoring the kicking of her feet. He marches for the stairs. “No. I warned you, and we are leaving.”

“Daddy, no!”

“No more. Say goodbye. You see the ghosts aren’t saying goodbye? Do you know why?”

An urge falls over the house to slam the door shut and trap them all inside. Daddy, Ana, and even Mrs. Weiss, force them all to spend eternity in its hidden room, where they can make dresses, and stay cool in the summer, and warm in the winter. It will shelter them from all the hurricanes the world can create. It needs them.

The phantom door’s hinges and knob tremble as 133 Poisonwood fights itself. In that moment it knows what makes other homes go evil. The killer houses can’t bear to be alone.

133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a killer house. But it isn’t one.

It leaves its rooms open as Daddy carries his bawling daughter out of the basement, her incoherent sounds resonating through the house’s crawl spaces. He carries her up the stairs and out the front door without a backward glance. This time, he remembers to close the door.

• • • •

133 Poisonwood leaves the secret room open in the hopes that someone will come back. It squeezes the cracks in its floor closed, popping the locket out without scratching it. Inside is the picture of a woman with a thick nose and proud eyes. She would have made an excellent ghost. The house would take a phantom for an inhabitant at this point.

The afternoon is sluggish. There are four more visitors, none of whom stay long enough to check the basement for treasure. The hours chug by, and Mrs. Weiss spends most of the time on her phone.

With half an hour of daylight left, a red sedan pulls up. The driver lingers outside for two minutes before knocking. It’s Daddy.

Mrs. Weiss answers and forces a smile, “Ulisses. Is Ana okay?”

Daddy says, “It was a scratch. Thanks for being understanding before.”

She says, “I’m so sorry about that. I told the team this place was supposed to be empty.”

He says, “Have you seen a locket? Ana wears it everywhere and it’s gone missing.”

Mrs. Weiss holds the door open for him, “We can check around. What does it look like?”

“It has a picture of Ana’s mother inside. It’s one of few gifts she still has from her.”

“She was your wife?”

“She was going to be,” he says, and looks around the master bedroom with an expression even emptier than the space. “There was an accident on our apartment’s fire escape. She had a fall.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“Right now, Ana needs all the comfort she can get. So if we can find that locket, it’d save our lives.”

They look around, the man so tired every step looks heavy. It’s amazing he could stagger into a motel bed, let alone go hunting for a locket. The house hasn’t seen someone as in need of a home in years.

Mrs. Weiss says, “I had something like that after my father passed away. Makes her feel like her mother’s spirit is still with her?”

“Superstitions aren’t comforting to me,” he says, fatigue giving way to scorn, as though daring the house’s walls to do something. “And Ana’s mother was an atheist.”

The house is tempted to give Daddy the shock of his life and toss the locket to him. Give him back the image of his lover and proof of its power.

But he doesn’t need to believe in hauntings. With his slumped shoulders, and his clothes stained with his daughter’s food, and the pieces of their lives he is trying to put together?

What he needs is a win.

So the house uses what little strength it has to levitate the locket onto the top basement stair. It twists it so the light catches it, and shines into the upstairs living room.

Daddy finds the precious locket on his own. He bends over it, brushing a thumb over his lover’s image. He heaves a sigh through his nose like he wishes he could fit inside the locket.

The house lets him be proud of himself. It will hold onto this memory for the cold years ahead until it is bulldozed.

Daddy stands up without the locket, leaving it behind. The house tries to send him a vision warning that he’s forgotten what he came here for.

The mental image doesn’t change what he’s doing.

He goes right outside, to his sedan where Ana sits, rubbing at her puffy eyes and runny nose. Daddy says, “It might be here. Do you want to help me look?”

The house cannot cry. There is just a little air in its pipes.

Ana flops out of the car and trudges into 133 Poisonwood. She spends too long poking around the kitchen, a room she was barely in earlier. Daddy plays an even worse sleuth, deliberately checking around empty hallways that give him a view of when Ana finally checks the basement door.

“Mommy!” she cheers. She sits right down on the stair and hugs the locket to her throat, voice trembling with emotions too big for her body. “Mommy came back!”

Daddy asks, “So you found it?”

“I told you she’d be here. Mommy wanted me to find it.”

“Your mother didn’t do that, Ana.”

She scrunches her nose and mimics his voice to say, “You don’t know that.”

Daddy puts a hand over the locket. “You found this. Not anybody else. You don’t need ghosts,” and he taps her on the temple, “because you have the best parts of your mother inside you.”

Ana gazes up at her father with glossy eyes.

133 Poisonwood has never so understood what it wants to do for people as when it watches this parent. It tries to hold onto the vibrations of his voice in its walls.

Then Ana says, “Nah. The ghosts left it here.”

She hauls off to the living room, hopping in late afternoon sunbeams, and holding the locket in the light.

Reason is defeated for the moment. Daddy doesn’t fight her on it. He rests against the wall, against the wallpaper he hates, taking the house for granted. The house plays a tune on its shingles, the same one that calmed Dorottya Blasko in 1989.

Daddy calls, “Mrs. Weiss?”

“Please, call me Carol,” she says. She’s been pretending she wasn’t lurking ten feet away this whole time. “You’re very sweet with Ana. You can just tell some people were born with the knack.”

“Three rooms in the basement. This is a lot of house for the money, isn’t it?”

“It’s just a family short of a home.”

133 Poisonwood would be more charmed by the line if it hadn’t heard her say that eight other times today.

Daddy says, “I like the space this place has for her. There’s plenty of room to run. And she loves to run. Going to be a track and field star.”

“I said to myself that this place looks happier when you’re in it. It suits you.”

The house can tell he wants to say he doesn’t believe that.

He says, “What we need is somewhere to start fresh.”

Mrs. Weiss offers him a folio of data on the house and gestures to the basement. “Care for another look around?”

“Yeah. Thank you.” He takes the folio. “While Ana is playing upstairs, can we check how insulated from sound that sewing room is? It’s funny, but I thought it might make a good podcast studio.”

If houses could laugh. He sounds so unguarded and sincere.

This tired skeptic doesn’t need to know that his podcast room doesn’t technically exist. If he finds the blueprints for 133 Poisonwood, he’ll shave away what he doesn’t understand with Occam’s razor. The house doesn’t need him to believe in anything but himself and his daughter. It isn’t here for the gratitude. It can try to support him as well as he supports Ana. If anything is as patient as a parent, it’s a haunting.

John (@Wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all of its trees. His work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature Futures, and other great venues. His story “Open House on Haunted Hill” won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and finding its home in this fine anthology. John hopes everyone finds a home that can look after them.

This Is New Gehesran Calling
By Rebecca Fraimow
Short Story Long List

There wasn't a New Gehesran anymore. Three years ago, the renaming had become official, in a municipal whirlwind of new-printed signage and digital batch-edits, but the people who'd packed themselves into refugee ships when the final city domes fell knew that New Gehesran had ceased to exist well before that. They had been the last to fight, the last to hold out hope; if they, too, had been forced to leave New Gehesran, then it was a certainty that New Gehesran was dead.

And yet here was Tir, idly flipping through channels on the speaker for anything that wasn’t Zeseran bubblegum, and here were the words, crackling but clearly distinguishable: “This is New Gehesran calling.”

The voice was jazzy, smooth, evenly paced –just like any other broadcaster on air, just as if they weren’t calling up a ghost. “This is New Gehesran calling, so don't change the channel, because we're bringing you the freshest tunes, hottest issues, furious debates, plus! Special tonight! Did you lose track of someone during evac? Make sure not to miss our twelve-step guide to short-cut you through your search —”

It was only then that Tir shouted out, “Get in here! Everyone get in here and listen to this!”

Their intrasolar doublewide unit was barely bigger than a six-stall barn, and a raised voice carried all the way to the back of the ship. It didn't take long for Tir's mother, father, younger sister, aunt and three cousins to all cram themselves into the front cockpit with Tir.

By the time they were all settled, the opening broadcaster had yielded the airwaves to a quartet of musicians, who were only moderately good. “You got us all up from what we were doing to listen to the hurdy-gurdy?” complained Tir’s aunt. “If you wanted us to listen so bad you could've just sent it to overhead. I was two grommets away from being done with Suki's new shoes.”

“Yes,” said Tir, “I'm sorry, but there was someone talking a moment ago, and he said –

“Listen,” said Tir's mother suddenly. “Listen, do you hear what they're playing?”

“It's that damn hurdy-bop version of the anthem,” said Tir's father, irritably, and then they all fell silent, and looked at each other.

They had all heard the partisan anthem recently enough. It was of course illegal to play it anywhere on the planet that had once held New Gehesran. But they were nowhere near that planet –would never go back to that planet— and in the privacy of their own intrasolar nobody could tell them what to sing or not to sing. Anyway, Zeseran authorities sometimes played the song during their fundraising events for Gehesran refugees, which Tir's mother listened to religiously. And Tir’s aunt would sing sometimes in the shower, which also was where she cried.

But when they played it at fundraising events it was a dead song, a haunting. It sounded hollow and melancholy in the ears, and tasted like ash in the mouth.

On the radio it was not like this at all. Nobody cried, hearing the music on the radio –and there was not a time that they'd heard the anthem in the past three years that somebody in the intrasolar hadn't cried.

Once, the best musicians in New Gehesran had all recorded versions of the partisan anthem. The players in this particular quartet had gotten no better since the beginning of the song, but their enthusiasm couldn't be denied. Listening to the hurdy-gurdy bounce its way energetically up and down the octave, Tir now found himself fighting the urge to laugh.

While the quartet played –played like they were enjoying themselves, like they knew they were ridiculous, like they fully expected their older listeners to get annoyed with the frivolity of the musical arrangement and turn the radio to another channel where they could hear classical Gehesrana harmonies –for those three and a half minutes, it was impossible to believe that New Gehesran was dead.

After that first hour, Tir and his family scoured the regularly transmitted schedules, but they couldn't find any sign of a listing for the program that they'd heard. When they tried the same channel the next day, there was nothing on but static. Tir's mother said it was a blessing to have had it only once, and Tir’s aunt was convinced it was some kind of collective hallucination, but Tir persevered, cycling repeatedly through back-channels of obscure vanity programming and long-wave spacer traffic updates until everyone else in the doublewide was sick to death of it. Over the next few weeks, his determination was rewarded with twenty minutes of G-pop, two fragments of religious debate in distinctive Gehesrani accents, and one full, glorious program, announced by the same rich voice: “This is New Gehesran calling!”

With this new information in hand, Tir sat down with his cousin Suki, who was good with numbers and puzzles. The program, they decided, was probably aired on a 37-hour Petivian orbit cycle, and rotated through three little-used channels on the high end of the radio spectrum. Maybe. If they'd guessed right.

Fifteen hours and twenty-three minutes later, Tir and Suki carefully tuned the transmitter, and waited with bated breath.

“Don't forget to tune in next time,” said the jazzy voice of the broadcaster –Tir had only heard it three times now, but felt at this point that he would recognize it in his bones –“and thanks for listening! This is New Gehesran, signing off.”

There was an audible click, followed by several minutes of static. Eventually, a teenaged voice came on and howled, “This is the music that your uncles don't want you to hear!”

Tir clicked off the transmitter, cutting off the scratchy wails of censored Zesaran ska before his parents or Aunt Ruti could notice any obscenities. He looked at Suki, and Suki looked at her calculations. “We were only off by an hour,” she said. “It'll be around again soon.”

And it was.

After that, they didn't miss a broadcast.

• • • •

“I can’t believe he’s not here yet! I cannot believe –”

“Good,” said Ereni, without looking up from her soldering. “I told you we shouldn't have programmed him. Not only is the man an unrepentant militarist, he’s got the worst voice that I've ever heard. If he doesn’t make it, you should count yourself lucky and take the day off.”

Viana balled up her call-slip and threw it. It bounced off Ereni’s shoulder and landed in the middle of the nest of switches and wires that served them as a soundboard, and Ereni let out a shout and spun around. “Vi! The amplifier has been hanging by a thread —”

“What does that matter if there’s nothing to amplify?”

“There’s four other segments to the show today besides your precious interview, Viana, so in fact it does actually very much matter!”

Geti's voice crackled over the overhead. “We're live in five, people. Live in five. Has everyone's mic been tested?”

“We're talking about the last surviving major ranking member of the Gehesran military here,” hissed Viana. “You know how difficult it is for him to travel interstellar! I can't believe you're not taking this seriously –”

“Yes, well, I’m a little more worried about the fact that we’re live in five—four-and-a-half—and we still don't know if Brun's mic is going to decide to work today –”

“What if his ship was boarded, or he was captured by the Luxians –that’s ten minutes of dead air! What are we going to do!”

“Vi!” Lor came pounding down the corridor and slammed through the room. “The General's just landed –sounds like they had some trouble but were able to slip away. Suti's just getting him set up with his mic now –”

“Well, thank every god!” said Viana, and dove back down the corridor after Lor.

“Live in three,” announced Geti's voice, wildly distorted by the overhead, and Ereni spat out a curse and bent back over the soundboard. She pressed another button and called, “Brun —”

Brun's voice came through the speaker. “The mic’s working fine. Just make sure to get Viana and the General ready.”

“I would, if —”

“Two minutes!” said Geti.

Viana came gliding back into the room, all composure. “Sir, if you'll please follow me through here so Ereni can test your mic —”

“Where'd you get all this tech?” demanded the General, looking around the control room greedily. “I thought you were an underground operation? What I couldn't have done with three of these speakers —”

“General, please, time is very short, and —”

“One minute!” shouted Geti. “Everyone ready!” Viana and Ereni exchanged anguished looks, for once in perfect accord. There was no way now to try to balance the sound to flatter the General's reedy, aging voice.

Viana took a deep breath, and turned to the General. “Please, sir,” she said, “people are waiting to hear from you.”

Her voice throbbed with emotion. Ereni waited to roll her eyes until the General had gone into the recording studio, and flipped the switch for Brun’s mic.

Brun’s voice rolled out, smooth and clear: “This is New Gehesran calling. This is New Gehesran calling, and today, have we got an exclusive! Stay tuned –”

“Listen –” Viana’s voice hissed over the mic into Ereni’s other ear. “Just make me sound as good as you can, and I’ll do the rest, all right?”

“Teach your grandmother,” muttered Ereni. She could make Viana sound good in her sleep.

• • • •

Andia had been cleaning dishes, only half-listening to the broadcast over the noise of the air-jet, when she heard Viana saBrihesi’s voice and dove back to turn the sound up high.

“–so appreciative that you braved the risk to be here with us today,” said Viana, warmly. “What a narrow escape! Listen, I’m breathless just from hearing about it.” She didn’t sound breathless. She sounded golden, as she always did, the purring rhotics and liquid laterals of her North Gessie accent pouring into Andia’s ears like a lullaby. “We don’t have much time left,” she went on, “so is there anything else you’d like to say to our listeners?”

The answering voice began to spout some of the usual clichés about strength, pride and suffering; whoever it was sounded a little wheezy, but Andia supposed that whatever near escape they’d been discussing would take the wind out of you. She wished she’d caught the speaker’s name. Many of the Gehesrani officials who turned up on Viana saBrihesi’s interview segment sounded more or less the same to Andia, but her grandmother would want to know.

Andia’s grandmother lived in a Savatican retirement community and didn’t know how to jailbreak her radio to get anything besides the ten locally approved channels. It was Andia’s sister who had heard about the show from a friend of hers and had suggested to Andia that they take turns listening and writing their grandmother about whatever news they heard. It would be a nice thing to do, a way to have something to talk about with her and assure her that they hadn’t completely forgotten their Gehesrani roots.

Andia hadn’t wanted to do it. A 37-hour Petivian orbit cycle was a wildly inconvenient thing to schedule around, and jailbreaking her radio voided the warranty. It was with more resentment than anything else that she’d tuned in for the first broadcast, at four in the morning local time, after her sister had helpfully come over the night before to set the radio and also Andia’s alarm.

Perhaps the early hour was to blame for the fact that she’d heard Viana saBrihesi interviewing some Gehesrani dancer and fallen instantly in love.

When Andia was thirteen, just before they emigrated, a North Gessie girl had switched into their school. She’d had long dark hair and bright-colored eyebrow rings, and her voice had made Andia’s heart start thundering whenever she heard it. The week before Andia and her family left for Savatica, riding ahead of the first rumblings of disaster, Andia had mustered up all her courage and asked if she could show her around town.

The girl –who’d been quick to make friends, and must have already seen most of the places that Andia wanted to take her –had laughed her beautiful laugh, and said that Andia could. All through the evening, she’d said charming things to Andia in her warm, liquid voice, and asked her questions about her favorite places, while Andia flipped violently between feeling desperately interesting and desperately stupid. When they stood in the park to admire the jesa-birds, Andia had wanted to kiss her, but even absolutely all her courage hadn’t quite been enough for that.

Andia had forgotten the girl’s name, in the decade and a half since. She’d almost forgotten the sound of a North Gessie accent, too. Savatica had been quick to limit immigration from New Gehesran once it became clear the crisis was serious, and North Gehesran had been a particularly partisan district, among the last to empty out.

If the girl whose name Andia had forgotten had survived the fall of New Gehesran, she was most likely in a Petivan refugee settlement right now, or orbiting Zesar in an intrasolar doublewide. She was almost certainly not conducting interviews with famous Gehesrani refugees on a pirate radio station somewhere out in contested space. Still, when Andia heard Viana saBrihesi speak, it pulled back the taste of the mint tea in her favorite West Gehesran cafe; the smell of greenery and asphalt in the park under the highway; the sound of the jesa-birds singing, and her heart flip-flopping wildly as she felt, almost, brave enough.

She wrote to her grandmother every week about the show now. She listened to all of it when she could, even the comedy segment; she often didn’t understand the jokes, but her grandmother could sometimes explain them to her, and liked to be asked.

But she didn’t tell either her grandmother or her sister about Viana’s voice. That was just for her, her own little piece of New Gehesran.

• • • •

“And then I always finish it off with a little grated astaron cheese,” said the first panelist, “for flavor and crunch.”

“Astaron cheese?” The second panelist scoffed. “There’s only four ingredients that belong in a poracake: flour, egg, dort-extract, and pora. Can’t skip any, can’t add any, or it’s not a real poracake.”

“Oh?” said the third panelist, frostily. “So my grandfather’s recipe, with honey instead of dort-extract –our own honey, made from our own bees –isn’t real poracake?”

“Nope,” said the second panelist.

The fourth panelist, at this point, decided to weigh in. “Honey is one thing, of course. Plenty of people keep bees, it’s a classic Gehesrani ingredient. But astaron cheese, oh dear, do you really think our ancestors could have gotten their hands on that?”

“All I know is I’ve always made it with astaron cheese,” said the first panelist, her voice rising, “and I always will make it with astaron cheese –”

“I’ve been substituting banana,” volunteered the fifth panelist, and all the others immediately turned on the new target with the air of carnivores scenting fresh meat.

“Substituting banana –”

“Taro is the closest if you’re going to substitute anything –”

“Four ingredients! Just the four! Anything else isn’t –”

Ereni, splayed across the soundboard and frantically riding the panelist’s mic controls to ensure the entire broadcast didn’t dissolve into a mess of hissing and static, wailed, “Lor, why did you think this was a good idea?”

“It was supposed to be a nice broadcast for the holiday,” said Lor, stunned. “Just some grandfolk trading traditional recipes…”

“Haven’t you got any grandfolk?” hissed Ereni, straining to reach the switch for the sixth panelist’s mic. “How could you not see this coming?”

“It was never like this when I worked with professionals!” Lor put his head in his hands. “We’ve got to get them out of there, they’re going to run right through the next segment –”

“Not to mention miss the safe-passage window to get out of the system,” said Geti, striding in briskly with Viana at their heels, “which means we’ll be stuck with them for another thirty-seven Petivan hours, no thank you.”

“You’ll be stuck with them,” said Ereni, and kicked the amplifier with her heel. “Anything that happens after the broadcast ends is officially not my problem.”

Viana shot Ereni a withering look. “Never mind,” she said, loftily, “I’ll deal with this.” Back straight, fearless, she strode towards the recording booth –

“WAIT!” screamed Ereni, and hastily adjusted the sound controls to compensate for the opening of the semi-soundproofed door –

–opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it calmly behind her.

Lor, Ereni, and Geti all stared after her.

“They look … like they’re getting calmer?” said Geti, tentatively.

“I knew it would be all right,” said Lor, with absolutely unjustified confidence. “Ereni, what are they saying?”

Ereni, listening on the earpiece, shook her head. “She’s got them eating out of the palm of her hand,” she said, half-admiring, half-disgusted, “as usual. Now they’re all agreeing on pora’s unique flavor qualities and its importance as a Gehesrani staple. Gods, that woman’s a menace!”

Through the makeshift plastic of the semi-soundproofed door, Viana turned, smiled, and flashed them an OK-hand.

• • • •

Diani was reading in the bedroom, trying to ignore the noise of Teren fixing the ventilation in the engine room, when something wafted past her from the kitchen. Her nose twitched, then twitched again, as she tried to isolate whatever it was from the smells of engine fuel and heated metal and too-small living quarters –and then she jumped up from her seat, letting the pad she’d been reading drop behind her, and ran the few steps to the kitchen.

“Poracake!” she announced, triumphantly, and swung herself up to sit on the tiny countertop.

Nir glanced over their shoulder. There was green batter spattered on their cheekbone and over their eyebrow. “You’re cutting significantly into my prep space here.”

“Live with it,” said Diani.

“Don’t get too excited. It won’t be ready for hours. The batter’s got to go through its first rise –”

“Sure, I remember. It’s only been a few years.” Diani reached out with one finger and swiped some of the batter off of Nir’s cheek; Nir snorted and batted her hand away. Undaunted, Diani stuck her finger in her mouth to lick the batter off. “Mm. So what’s the special occasion?”

“No occasion,” said Nir, and flushed “I just thought it would be nice.”

Diani squinted suspiciously at them, and then began to tick things off. “It’s not a holiday –not our anniversary –not your anniversary with Teren, not my anniversary with Teren –”

“It’s really not!” said Nir, thoroughly red now. “It’s not anything, honestly. It’s just –you know, we haven’t been able to get dort-root since we left, and how can you make poracake without dort-root?”

Diani nodded sagely, and swiped another finger’s worth of batter.

“Only, on the show just now, someone was saying they used honey and I thought … well, we might not have dort-root, but we’ve got honey, and –it felt like, if that old gran said it was all right, then it felt a little like getting permission? Like not having the dort-root didn’t matter as much. You know.”

Diani looked at them. “Nir –”

“My gramps always said dort-root makes it too sweet anyway,” called a voice from the engine room.

“Teren!” said Diani. “Excuse you! We were having a moment!”

Undaunted, Teren continued, “My gramps always used condensed galactose.”

“I’m making a really incredible face at learning this information,” Diani shouted back, “and it’s very frustrating to me that you can’t see it right now. Condensed galactose! Trust a northerner!”

“So go show Teren your face then,” said Nir, “and give me back my counter. I’m going to need it.” They pitched their own voice to carry. “And Teren, I’m going to make honey poracake like that nice gran said, and you’re going to eat it! And you’re going to like it!”

The booming sound of Teren’s laugh bounced through all the pipes and vents in the intrasolar doublewide. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

• • • •

“Ereni,” said Viana, sticking her head into the recording studio. When this got no response, she pushed the plastic door open and came in. “You didn’t fall asleep in here, did you?”

Ereni didn’t look up from the cables she was twisting together. “What do you want?”

Viana came further into the room. “How long have you been trying to fix that mic?”

“More importantly,” said Ereni, “how long do I have until the mic has to be fixed? Since you ask: eleven Petivan hours and twenty-three minutes exactly, and if doesn’t work by then you and Brun will have to share for the next show, which might perhaps suggest to you that it isn’t a good time -”

“We would make do if necessary,” said Viana, magnanimously. “The show must go on, you know.”

Ereni shot her an incredulous look from bloodshot eyes.

Viana sighed, and delicately moved a coil of wire aside with her foot. “I knew you’d be awake,” she said, “and I needed to talk to somebody. I’ve had an offer.”

“How exciting for you,” said Ereni.

“It’s the General,” said Viana. “Apparently we’ve inspired him. He wants me to come and help him with managing communications on Zesar.”

Ereni paused, thin red and yellow wires caught between her fingers; then she laughed and set them down. “I really must have made you sound good that day.”

“Well, you always do,” said Viana, matter-of-factly.

“What communications has he even got to manage? I thought he was in hiding.”

“The Zesarans want to trot him out for a propaganda tour, apparently. Balm the souls of restless refugees, tweak the nose of the new government, you know.”

Ereni made a rude noise and turned back to her work.

“He really is an important person,” Viana informed the back of Ereni’s head. “Maybe not in and of himself, so much, but he’s what we’ve got left. He’s a symbol. And there’s thousands of Gehesrans on and around Zesar. Whatever their motives, the Zesarans are offering a guaranteed audience, a real opportunity for impact–”

“Working mics,” agreed Ereni. “A normal broadcast schedule. Regular meals. Piles of Zesaran money. I hope you have fun, it sounds wonderful.” She stuck the red wire back into position.

“Ereni,” said Viana, wounded.

“And if you did leave, I suppose Brun or Geti would have to do your interview segment, too, and then we would need one less mic, so that’s good news for me –”

“Ereni!”

“Look,” said Ereni. “I understand that you’re very important and in demand, but we both know you’re not going anywhere, you love this show more than most people love their children and it needs you more than most children need their parents. Go away and tell Lor about your offer when he wakes up. He’ll beg you to stay properly, it’ll be a balm to your ego.”

Viana blew air out her nose. “I don’t need my ego balmed.” She folded her arms and leaned back against the door of the recording-booth. “Of course I want to keep doing what we’re doing, I just don’t know that it’s right to. There’s a real opportunity being offered to me, with real resources. Are we just the doomed last stand all over again, shouting that we’re Gehesrani forever and pretending it means something? It’s all very well for us to call out, but if nobody’s listening –”

“Oh, gods,” said Ereni, “it’s the midnight maudlins.”

“Thanks,” said Viana, “that’s truly helpful. Thank you.” She turned and put a hand on the door.

Ereni looked at the set of her shoulders, and sighed. “Hang on.”

Viana glanced back at her, one eyebrow raised.

“Sorry,” said Ereni, and frowned back down at the disassembled microphone. “I’m tired. And no good at this. But –do you really need to hear people are listening? You know they are. We get the letters, sometimes –at least a third of the guests we invite have heard of us, and –and, you know, I’m listening. I’m always listening. I hear everything you all do. I’m Gehesrani too, aren’t I? I count, right?”

“Well,” said Viana, after a moment, “now if I say you don’t it will certainly make me sound a villain.”

“That’s was the point, of course,” said Ereni.

There was a pause, and then she rubbed her eyes with the back of her knuckles. “And now I’ve really desperately got to get back to working on this piece of shit, because, unlike some people, we don’t have any funding at all and we’re not going to get another one, so please will you leave before I murder you and ruin the whole show myself? Thank you. Goodnight, Vi.”

• • • •

“Tune in next time, and thanks for listening. This is New Gehesran, signing off.”

The copy-tape clicked, startlingly loud, and then whirred as it spun itself to its end.

“Well?” Tir crawled up next to Suki, who was wedged next to the radio in the back of the intrasolar doublewide. “Did it work? Did you get it all?”

Suki shoved him aside with her shoulder. “Lay off! Let me see.” Reverently, she detached the reel of copy-tape from the wires that connected it to the radio and moved it over to the playback deck she’d cobbled together from spare bits and parts. She unwound it from its spool and carefully threaded it through the assembly of guides and gears. Tir held his breath.

Suki pressed the rewind button. The copy-tape began to wind backwards. Tir, desperately impatient, slid his hand in below hers and hit ‘Play.’

“–the Zesaran government,” crackled Viana saBrihesi’s voice from the speakers –distorted, imperfect, but clearly audible. “We’ve already heard from the General, so for a counter-perspective, I’d like to welcome –”

Suki slammed the stop button. “Leave off! It’s not a real test unless we test the whole thing. Do you want to send Uncle Arker a bad copy? It’s not his fault his orbit’s got him on the wrong side of Zesar to catch half the shows.”

Tir waved an impatient hand. “It started dull today anyway. Who cares about the gardening segment?”

“Well, Uncle Arker for one,” said Suki. “Ma says he’s trying to get –oh, we’re at the beginning again. Moment of truth!”

She took a deep breath, reached down, and pressed play.

There was a click.

There was a hiss.

There was a terrible static sound, like something tearing, and Suki and Tir turned to look at each other, faces agonized –

And then the static resolved itself into a rich, jazzy voice. “This is New Gehesran calling!” said the tape, as Suki punched Tir’s arm in triumph, and Tir shouted along with it, slightly off time: “This is New Gehesran calling!”

• • • •

“Thank you once again, sir, for your fascinating insight on Petivan adoption of Gehesrani poetic forms.” Ereni saw Viana give the thumbs-up that signaled the end of an interview through the plastic door, and moved to switch off the poet’s mic. “Now,” Viana went on, “I know you’re all looking forward to the Geti baHeti comedy segment in just a few minutes, but first, the –”

Viana’s warm voice suddenly dissolved into static, and Ereni let out a string of profanity as she dove for the soundboard –but the mic was still coming in green, not showing any errors. She cursed again, reached for the transmitter, and looked up to see Lor storming down the corridor just as the static resolved, hissing and stuttering, into the sound of a voice:

“Hello? Is this the show, is this New Gehesran Calling?”

Ereni nearly dropped the transmitter.

“Hello?” crackled the voice again. “Hello? Sorry to bother, only I had just a few questions about that intrasolar gardening segment from last week –”

“Boost the frequency!” shouted Lor, now standing in front of her, windmilling his arms to make sure he caught her attention over the sound coming in through her headphones. “We’re being drowned!”

In the sound booth, Viana was still speaking; there was a line of confusion in her brows as she watched the chaos through the plastic, but she was, of course, a professional. Ereni reached out to tune the transmitter –and then, as the static swelled again, switched broadcast from Viana’s mic to her own before she could think better of it.

The static died. They were broadcasting once more.

“Sir!” she yelled, and heard the sound coming back to her over the headphones, tinny and harsh; she’d never learned to modulate her own voice for the airwaves. Her heart pounded in her ears. “What’s your name and your question?”

“What are you doing?” hissed Lor, as she recklessly spun the dial down again, rolling through that dreadful static on the way.

The voice crackled back: “I’m Arker baRahenna! I’ve been trying to grow dort-root in my engine room, but it just won’t thrive! I hoped if I told you how it was laid out, you might be able to sort out what’s gone wrong!”

The dial spun once more. “Well, sir,” Ereni shouted, watching Lor turning purple in front of her, “we won’t have our garden expert back until next month, and we’re running out of time right now –but call back, all right? Call back! I mean, not this way, please gods don’t do it this way, but we’ll tell you how –we’ll figure out how! Thanks for calling –thank you so much for calling –and now, back to the show!”

She switched to private, yelled, “Geti, you’re live!” and transferred the audio.

Then she flopped back into her chair and took several gasping breaths, as she attempted to bring her heart rate down to normal.

“Well,” said Lor. He shook his head, apparently at a loss for words. “Well.”

Viana, squinting through the plastic, had apparently decided that she’d waited long enough. She threw open the door, marched out, and demanded, “What was that all about?”

“Ereni,” said Lor, with the air of a person hanging onto his calm with both hands, “appears to be in the process of inventing us a new segment.”

“What?” Viana stared from one of them to the other. “What segment?” she demanded. “Whose time is it coming out of?”

“Viana will have to host,” Ereni told Lor. “Nobody can manage people like she does,”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Viana, plaintively.

“That was New Gehesran, Vi,” said Ereni. She looked from Viana, perfect brows arched high, to Lor, still slightly purple, and began to laugh. “That was New Gehesran calling back.”

Rebecca Fraimow is an author and archivist with a personal and professional fondness for community broadcasting. Rebecca's short fiction has previously appeared in venues such as PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, The Fantasist, and Diabolical Plots.

The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign
By Cora Buhlert
Short Story Long List

Save the Girl and Save Me From Having to Toss Her Out of the Airlock
Organised by Captain C. Barton

Started on August 4, 2178, 08:48

Category: Accidents and emergencies

My name is Barton and I’m the pilot of an EDS (Emergency Dispatch Ship) currently en route to the frontier world of Woden to deliver some desperately needed medical supplies.

I have a problem, because I just discovered a stowaway aboard my ship, an eighteen-year-old girl named Marilyn Lee Cross. Upon questioning, Marilyn explained that her brother Gerry works on Woden as part of the government survey crew. She wants to visit him and since there is no regular passenger traffic to Woden because of the current medical crisis, she snuck aboard my ship. She did see the big red UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL KEEP OUT! sign, but chose to ignore it.

Now anybody who is familiar with the Emergency Dispatch Service will be familiar with Paragraph L, Section 8, of Interstellar Regulations:

“Any stowaway discovered in an EDS shall be jettisoned immediately following discovery.”

So you see my dilemma: The law requires that I throw Marilyn out of the airlock. However, I don’t want to do that. Sure, Marilyn may be a little stupid, but that’s hardly a reason to kill her. Not to mention that our security measures are way too lax, as I’ve pointed out time and again. And, besides I’m just not the killing type. If I were, I’d have joined the Starship Troopers, where the pay is better.

Once I discovered Marilyn, I immediately commed my superior Commander Delhart, who yelled a lot and then demanded that I throw the girl out of the airlock at once.

I asked about emergency refuelling –which is possible, if rare and expensive. Delhart said if I requested an emergency refuel without an emergency (as if this wasn’t an emergency), I’d have to pay for it out of pocket. Oh yes, and I should consider myself fired, if I refuse to follow orders.

So in short, I need twenty thousand solar credits and I need them in the next ten hours or poor Marilyn is doomed.

So save Marilyn! And save me from becoming a murderer!

Donate

Share

Updates:

August 4, 2178, 08:54 by Tom G.:

Don’t do it, Barton! A few years ago, they forced me to do it and I never managed to forget or live it down.

PS: Donated what’s left of my unemployment pay. Because they will fire you anyway.

August 4, 2178, 09:02 by Brett:

Thank you for serving. Donated.

August 4, 2178, 09:15 by JWC:

The cold equations of physics and the laws of space know no mercy. Out of the airlock with her now!

August 4, 2178, 09:18 by Ursula in reply to JWC:

You, sir, are an unempathetic arsehole!

PS: Donated.

August 4, 2178, 09:20 by JWC in reply to Ursula:

Overly emotional and knows nothing of science. How typical of a woman!

August 4, 2178, 09:23 by Ursula in reply to JWC:

Oh, so you’re a misogynist, too. Why am I not surprised?

August 4, 2178, 09:22 by Michael M. in reply to JWC:

Way too soft, Ursula. He’s a fascist arsewipe.

Donated as well.

August 4, 2178, 14:19 by Jeannette in reply to JWC:

Ursula and Mike are right. You’re a fascist, a misogynist and probably an arsewipe, too. Also why do you even bother to comment, if you’re not going to help?

Donated and shared.

August 4, 2178, 09:35 by Gary W.:

I have a question: What idiot designed a spaceship (and an EDS at that) that has zero margin for error? It’s not just a mass increase due to a stowaway that will cause problems. Fuel loss, meteor strikes, system failures, pilot errors could all easily cause an EDS to fail.

Donated, because bad engineering shouldn’t cause deaths.

August 4, 2178, 09:44 by Captain Barton (Organiser) in reply to Gary W:

Tell me about it, Gary. I’ve been complaining about the inadequacy of our ships and security measures for ages now. Maybe now they’ll listen.

August 4, 2178, 09:46 by Tom G. in reply to Gary W.:

Can confirm. EDS ships are crappily engineered and our security measures are a joke. How many more must die before somebody does something?

August 4, 2178, 09:55 by Cory D. in reply to Gary W.:

I agree. The engineering is just plain bad. Also, why just a simple “Keep out” sign with no notice that the penalty for ignoring the sign is death?

Donated as well.

August 4, 2178, 11:09 by Richard H. in reply to Gary W.:

In my opinion, the Emergency Dispatch Service is looking at a lawsuit for criminal negligence here. Captain Barton will probably be on the hook for manslaughter as well (sorry). I advise the family of Marilyn to get a lawyer asap.

Donated and started a legal fund for the Cross family.

August 4, 2178, 11:12 by Captain C. Barton (Organiser) in reply to Richard H:

Dude, I’m just following orders here. I no more like this than you.

August 4, 2178, 11:23 by Richard H. in reply to Captain C. Barton (Organiser):

The “I was just following orders” defence didn’t save Korvakian, the butcher of Telos V, and it won’t save you.

August 4, 2178, 11:25 by Captain C. Barton (Organiser) in reply to Richard H:

Great. Now you’re comparing me to one of the worst war criminals in galactic history. Thanks a lot.

Why do you think I started this GoFundMe? Because I don’t want to do this.

August 4, 2178, 12:45 by JWC in reply to Richard H.:

The laws of physics and the cold equations of space know no mercy.

August 4, 2178, 12:49 by Richard H. in reply to JWC:

Shut up, troll! We’re talking about the laws of man here.

August 4, 2178, 14:56m by Neva of Gelania:

By the Stars of Zod, I fear this may all be my fault. I met Marilyn, whose Gelanese is excellent by the way, aboard the Stardust, where I work as a cleaner. She told me all about her brother and I told her that there would be an EDS leaving for Woden that very day.

I’m so sorry, Marilyn. I honestly didn’t know that they kill stowaways. I thought the penalty was just a fine.

Oh please, Captain Barton, don’t kill Marilyn for something I did. I donated my entire pay and the rest of the Stardust cleaning crew chipped in as well. It’s not much, but I hope it will help.

August 4, 15:15 by SadPuppy3:

Girls don’t belong in space. Out of the airlock with her.

August 4, 15:23 by Jeannette in reply to SadPuppy3:

Shut up, misogynist troll!

August 4, 15:45 by Gerry Cross:

Hi, here’s Gerry, the brother of Marilyn. Me and the boys of the survey crew all donated, of course.

Mari, sweetheart, don’t do something stupid like that ever again, do you hear me? The frontier worlds are not like Earth. It’s the Wild West out here. Also, why aren’t you on Mimir like you promised?

Barton, if you throw my sister out of that airlock, me and the boys of the survey crew will rough you up, understood? And they’ll never find your body.

August 4, 15:52 by Captain C. Barton (Organiser) in reply to Gerry Cross:

Chill out, dude. I don’t want to kill your sister either.

August 4, 15:54 by Marilyn Lee Cross in reply to Gerry Cross:

I’m so sorry, Gerry. I didn’t know. Please help me. I’m so scared. And don’t hurt Captain Barton. It’s not his fault and he’s been very kind.

August 4, 16:01 by Gerry Cross in reply to Marilyn Lee Cross:

It’s all right, Mari. Everything will be all right.

August 4, 16:16 by Harold W. Tannenbaum, director of the Woden colonisation project:

Far be it from me to interrupt this drama, but when can we expect those medical supplies? Cause we’ve run out of kala fever serum here and several members of Group One are sick.

August 4, 16:22 by Gerry Cross in reply to Harold W. Tannebaum:

With all due respect, sir, that’s my sister we’re talking about here. Group One can endure a bit of cosmic diarrhoea.

August 4, 16:25 by Robert Tucker in reply to Gerry Cross:

Hi Gerry, it’s Bob from Group One. I think we met at the rec centre once. Anyway, we can manage for a few more hours without the serum, even if purple and green spotted poop is really, really unpleasant.

PS: The whole ward donated.

August 4, 18:57 by Commander Eberhard Delhart:

Stop stalling, Barton, and jettison the girl now. That’s an order!

August 4, 19:09 by Captain C. Barton (Organiser) in reply to Commander Eberhard Delhart:

With all due respect, sir, fuck you! We’re funded. And I quit.

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in Bremen, North Germany, where she still lives today –after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen.

Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Thurvok and Kurval sword and sorcery series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres. Cora is a two-time Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer and the winner of the 2021 Space Cowboy Award. When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

Visit her on the web at www.corabuhlert.com or follow her on Twitter under @CoraBuhlert.

A Being Together Amongst Strangers
By Arkady Martine
Short Story Long List

The Miner’s Union got here first, in 1903, when they blasted the tunnel through the schist. They came from Colorado and Pennsylvania, from Ireland and Italy, Scotland and Canada; they came to work inside the mountain, one hundred eighty feet below sunlight. It was not like other mountains they had blasted through. Already it was the city, and already it was a breathing creature, even if its bloodstream was still being dynamited out of the rock. Breathing creatures are hungry ones, and the city took the miners twice: once with joy, into its pubs and brothels and theaters, into its rooming-houses in Spuyten Duyvil—and once with blood.

It does take blood, to make a city. That’s part of the problem. We haven’t figured out how not to feed ourselves on ourselves.

Schist is hard rock, and miners hard men, and mining bosses harder still: it was ten-thirty at night on October 24 of that distant year when the brothers McCabe ordered the day’s last dynamite blast. Last of three. Two was the recommended maximum for safety—two to let the rock settle, until the next day’s shocks. But cities have demands, and so do subcontractors. The men from the miner’s union filed in to the newly-wide tunnel: a German boy, the electrician William Scheutte; two Black miners from the Colorado tunnel, Hargraves and Crocker; and at least fifteen Italians. We don’t have all of their names. That’s maybe why we are still feeding ourselves on ourselves, two hundred years on from when they carved the subway out of the rock for the first time. 22nd-century remembrance culture goes a long way—it has to—but we hadn’t paid attention for so long. Whatever their names were, we can’t get them back now. The rock ate them entire.

Up here the subway cars rattle along in the dark, a perfect rush of speed. We’re deep enough in the island that there aren’t even water-walls to keep the sea out. The sea never got this high, even during the worst of last century. These are the original tunnels. 191st Street, the platform a blur of faces. The slide of the doors, the inevitable Please stand clear of the closing doors, a refrain so much like a common prayer that it is just as ignorable. Up here the line’s not crowded yet. Up here I’m sitting with my earplants turned up, playing the latest shatterharmonic track from DrownDrone and NewUndoneLondon’s collab mix loud enough to shake the bone-conductor points in my skull, trying to get ready for the day. Up here the faces across from mine are closed-eyes easy with early morning exhaustion, sharp-edged: a man reads a newspaper, the clear foldable plastic sheet changing as he scrolls through it. I think he’s reading in Haitian Creole, but I’m bad at deciphering backwards letters, even in English or Arabic. Not without the translator on, and I can’t turn that on when I’m not on company time, unless I want to answer a lot of awkward questions about what right I have to use all the metal inside my head that isn’t mine. Aside from listening to music. No one cares about the music; streaming data to vibrate your inner ears isn’t proprietary social technology, even if you do it with proprietary hardware. Instant translation, though, that the company owns and I don’t.

The doors close, finally. We go back into the rushing dark.

The three-hundred-ton boulder which fell on the miners was five feet wide and forty-four feet long. It had been dislodged by the blast; the slightest movement would have set it free, and there were so many tromping feet, vibrations in the walls and the new-made floor. It crushed them when it fell. They were buried there. The rock-dust went all to red, soaked through and spreading. Those few who were not entirely under the boulder were pinned, a limb crushed, a skull cracked. The screaming reached the street. One hundred eighty feet to sunlight, and the screaming reached the street. A Catholic priest named Thomas Lynch went down into that filthy dark and knelt in the puddles of blood, the puddles of water, put his hands on the dying men. The story goes he gave them last rites. There were doctors, too, with their own salvations: morphine, enough of it for mercy.

They carried the bodies out in pieces. The ones who came out at all.

When I was a teenager, I rode this line down to the drowned Bowery and the elevated skyscrapers in the Financial District every day—I was working for my grandfather then, and he was a lawyer, construction rights and solar—and I didn’t know about the miners under 191st. I had to learn later. But I know they’re still here. With us in the dark. Sometimes I am sure they bought us the city, the vast machine of it that still runs despite everything we’ve done to the world. Sometimes I think that if we’d never sacrificed them, we’d never have had to have despite. Cities work by old magic, though, and there’s only so much you can plan for. They make demands. They grow and they die, and they make us, too, we small vicious brilliant things, and we grow and we die too, under their care, and we murder and nurture them the same.

Symbiosis is pretty core to most of the remembrance ethics. The company I work for puts out pamphlets and monographs on it, pamphlets for the general public—different pamphlets for us employees, with more theoretical and technical details—and monographs for academics and policy advisors. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so convincing—us and the city, death and growth, how we’re all one system like a breathing body—but it is convincing, and I believe it. Believed it even before I got all this metal installed in my head. Before I started working conflict resolution. I believe we wouldn’t be here if remembrance ethics wasn’t convincing. The sea would have eaten us, or the wildfires, or how there aren’t maple trees anywhere south of Nunavut anymore. In the dark inside the schist I tell myself the miner’s names again: Schuette, Hargraves, Crocker. Thomas Lynch, on his knees in the rockdust and the blood. I do it every time we go through here, my own common prayer: I remember you. You bought this for us.

When we get trained, we’re supposed to find some forgotten, silenced voice to hold onto, to make ours. To never allow to disappear again. It’s part of the practice. The miners weren’t the ones I started with—there are so damn many voices to choose from—but the miners are the ones who stuck. They’re the ones I dream about. I guess that’s because I’m a New Yorker, and I’ve never been anything else.

And then I open my eyes and the man on the other side of the train has shut his newspaper, tipped his chin down to his chest, fallen asleep with the grace of the habitual commuter. We pull in to 181st—still deep, but not as deep—and there’s a flood of new bodies, enough to fill all the seats and press shoulders and armpits and asses against one another in the aisle. Nobody makes eye contact. That’s respect for you. Tourists don’t get that. But I grew up here. You don’t look at people who are just minding their own business, especially if you haven’t got any personal space.

• • • •

The crush of people is lulling, an anonymity of pressure. Bodies are bodies: everyone on this train needs to get somewhere, and everyone’s got flesh to carry around. The language the flesh speaks doesn’t matter so much when you’re on your way to work. The religion the flesh bows to, even less. Almost all the time. The subway’s got its own social norms. I’m so used to them that I don’t catch the trouble at the other end of the car until it’s gone past trouble and into being a problem.

We’re in the long tunnel between 168th and 157th, the one that curves so much that it takes an extra three minutes longer than you think it will to arrive. A bad dark, sometimes. The lights in the car don’t flicker anymore the way they do in films of subway riders from the 21st century—everything’s on lithium-sulfur batteries now—but the steady glow makes the tunnel darker. I think of ghosts: of angry ghosts, the miners made of red pulp and rockdust—

Later I’ll realize I was thinking of the ghosts because it’s easier to imagine the vengeful and deserving dead than come to the conclusion that some assholes are going to commit a hate-bias crime on your commute, and you’re on your way to your job where you turn yourself into a repository of intercultural rage and do the 22nd-century equivalent of speaking in tongues to defuse it, and so if anyone in this subway car has the skillset to stop what’s about to happen, it’s probably you.

My company trains us to talk about ourselves in the second person, in a crisis. It’s one of the ways—there are so many ways, technological and chemical and plain psychiatric—that we get enough distance to do what we do. So I’m thinking you should stop this while I shoulder my way out of my seat and through the mass of commuters. I’m short and I’m a ciswoman and I’m not imposing—one of the job requirements is that we look neutral, we look like people who could be anyone. No identifying marks. Racially ambiguous—white enough for white people to assume, not quite white enough for everybody else to get worried. On the job I don’t wear hijab, on the job I’m a blank slate. But in the subway I’m a person, still, I’m just me, my headscarf’s blue and gold print tight around my forehead and I’m only five-five if I stand up straight. So I have to elbow a man in the ribs to get him to move in order to get close to what’s happening.

Get close to where there are five kids, all New Yorkers born and bred by the look of them, two Asian and three white, schoolfriends maybe. Early adolescence. They’re yelling at a woman who is cringing back in her seat, staring at her hands. The usual slurs, you know? Go back south! Drowning not good enough for you, fucking refugee? Hurricanes think you too ugly? And worse things. The woman’s wearing a FEMA-issue uniform, mouse-blonde hair, cheeks that look thinner than they should be for her bones. She can’t have been here for more than a day or two. She’s probably commuting to her first day at her first New York job, some City-sponsored work placement if she’s still wearing FEMA rags. We get a lot of climate refugees dumped on us. Both because New York can handle it and because the city’s got some of the best sanctuary laws in the country—you feed a city on enough blood and sometimes it blooms flowers the red-stained dead could never have dreamed up—

If I was at work, I would have used my translator and all the rest of the metal inside my head, and turned myself into a hollow vessel for those kids to scream at: spoken back to them in their own idiom, held on to their rage. And I’d have done the same for the refugee in her FEMA coverall, let her talk or keep not talking, been a receptacle for her silence if I had to—and then have played her silence back to the kids, in language they could understand. (At work, I’d have played their rage back at the refugee, too. We’re conflict resolution specialists. Everybody has to hear everybody else.)

I’m not at work. I’m commuting. I can’t turn on the tech without the company’s permission anyway—I could ping the emergency-use hotline but there’s never enough service underground, and who knows when they’d get around to answering the query—so it’s just me and the hundred-odd other bodies in this car hurtling downtown. The subway does have its own social norms, and one of them is ignore the problem. Nobody but me is going to intervene here. We keep a certain peace by keeping silent in shared space. The law of the subway is that we’re all New Yorkers, and we mind our own business when we have to, because everybody’s got business, just the same.

And then I think of Thomas Lynch on his knees in the water and the blood, for no reason at all but being a witness to sacrifice. And I get between the kids and the refugee.

I do it like I just needed to hang on to the metal pole she’s sitting next to in order to keep upright as the car goes around a corner of the tunnel. And then I turn to her, and I say—English is probably the best I can do, she’s probably not going to know Arabic if she’s an Alabama or a Louisiana climate migrant, and there’s nothing else I’m fluent in—I say hi, ma’am, how’s your morning going? You know your stop okay?

Doesn’t drown out the kids, just yet. They’re kids, so this probably won’t end in violence, even when they throw a few old-fashioned towelhead! and terrorist bitch! at me to go along with the slurs they were slinging at her. She doesn’t talk to me, either, not at first. No reason she would. I’m not even sure English was the right choice, my Spanish isn’t great but I could manage a couple of words without the translator—but if I keep talking to her, the rest of the people in this car will rotate around, they’ll make a human space where they recognize this woman as a person. We’re New Yorkers, and one of the other laws of the subway is when someone fucks up we all shout them down. It’s already happening. I’m babbling away in useless English, chatting her up like I’m her sister, and one of the other commuters—big, dark man, nice suit, slick sideways cap in metallic navy with little Yankees logos all around the rim—says, “The hell business you kids got with this lady,” and the air goes out of most of them.

Most of them. One of them doubles down. One of them is too scared to stop—something in him is driving harder than social censure and adolescent shame. He looks right at me right before he shoves me. As if he’s daring me to stop him. I go sprawling, just as the doors open on 168th. The floor of the car is dirty from a million shoes. I’m going to have bruises on my elbow and my hip. He shoves me, and then one of his friends—gleeful in violence, in having something better to do besides feel like shit about himself—kicks me in the stomach. All five of them run out the open door into the station.

Most of what I can do with the tech in my head I can’t turn on by myself. We’re conditioned not to use it without permission. Without being in a courtroom or a therapy session, without taking the right empathy-spike pill and being told now, be open, be a vessel for hurt. But sometimes pain shorts out that closed circuit.

I think Schuette, Hargraves, Crocker. I summon up all my ghosts. The tech kicks in. I feel like I’m floating, inches above the subway floor, and my mouth pours out a language made of impulse and fear: it’s still English, but it’s the English those kids speak, the one that turns how dare you be here when we were drowning too and still are into go back south. I speak that language, and I speak it back to them like I am an amplified broadcast. I shout their slurs and their violence down the platform as they run, their own voices rebroadcast through their skulls, through earplants and any installed tech they have. Through just plain bones if they don’t. I shout what they aren’t saying, too: how their homes are seascapes now, how they are hungry, how not a damn one of them ever got to eat an apple. (I ate an apple once. I was nine. It was the only apple I’ve ever seen, and I don’t want to know how much it cost my mother to find me one. She had apples all the time when she was a child.)

I wish I didn’t have to do this, to carry the rage of these five kids in me like a stone, to send it out after them, to turn it into a language everyone on the platform hears in their own mother-tongue, in their own vibrating inner ears. But this is the problem with symbiosis as an ethical principle, without the distance of drugs and dissociative tech to keep us safe: being symbiotic with humanity is remembering how often we leave each other to die.

It probably doesn’t do anything, my shouting. It might. People do hear—the tech is good, I’m going to get chewed out by my boss for using it off company time—but they have to want to listen, and no one out there knows why they’ve got weaponized rage and sorrow in their skulls, resonating in the bone-conductors instead of music.

But when subway doors close, the guy with the Yankees cap takes my arm and helps me up. I nod at him. I fix my hijab, and hang on to the center pole, balanced and easy as we move. Nobody says anything, anything at all, as we go back into the dark—nobody needs to, we’re all here together, and some people are sleeping, and some people are reading. The blown-open schist under the city has held itself up for two hundred years so far.

Thomas Lynch on his knees, I tell myself, and they heard the screaming from the surface, and I breathe in and out and think about holding back the sea a little longer, with my own hands if I have to. With my own voice.

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, narrative and rhetoric, risk communication, and the edges of the world.

She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. Find Arkady online at www.arkadymartine.net or on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.

Sinew and Steel and What They Told
By Carrie Vaughn
Short Story Long List

I am cut nearly in half by the accident. The surviving fibers of my suit hold me together. I am not dead.

And this is a problem. I expected to die in this job, in my little scout runner, blasted apart, incinerated, torn to pieces with nothing to recover. All that would follow would be a sad memorial service with a picture and an old set of boots on a table. That is how scout pilots usually die. But I am just cut almost in half. And the doctor on my ship, Visigoth, is very good.

My biologics are mostly shut down with shock, though I’m dutifully trying to monitor the pain. It’s all-enveloping, a fist squeezing my brain. My mechanics are in full self-repair mode, overheating because there’s so much to knit back together. Because of them, I have survived long enough that I will probably not die. This is going to be awkward.

From my own internal processor I send out an emergency signal to piggyback on ship comms, so that maybe someone can come and explain.

On autorecovery, my half-exploded runner manages to slam into its berth on the Visigoth and rescue crews are standing by. Once they seal all the locks, I try to help them peel me out of the cockpit but it’s not really working. There are many pairs of hands and shouting voices.

“Graff, stop, lie back, you’ll be fine, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine—”

I might laugh at this.

The dock crew and medics are full of panic and repressed horror at what they must be looking at. Then I am horizontal, fully supported, no strain at all on my body, which feels wet and wobbly, and the pain is lead weight on every nerve. Fingers pry at my eyelids, a light flashes, and I see him, Doctor Ell, who is also my lover. He has a pale face and a shock of blond hair and intense eyes, and his whole expression is screwed up and serious. I want to pat his shoulder and say everything will be fine but nothing is working. So I look at him.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur.

“Graff, no, what are you talking about?”

“You’re about to find out I faked my medical scans.” I try to smile.

He stares. “What?”

A medic’s voice interrupts. “Doctor! God, look at this—”

Finally, happily, I pass out.

• • • •

Five other people are in the room when I wake up. Ell and Captain Ransom. A support medic, standing by. Two guards at a door that has never had guards at it before.

“When will he wake up?” Ransom asks.

“He’s awake now,” Ell says. He must be watching a monitor.

I’m listening hard—I can hear heartbeats, if I focus. I think I can open my eyes. But I can’t move anything else. There’s a fog; I battle past it.

“Am I paralyzed or on medical restraints?” My voice scratches.

Some rustling as the guards flinch, like they didn’t believe I was awake. The medic perks up.

“Drug-induced paralysis,” Ell says.

“So both.”

“Yes.”

“Because of the injuries or because of everything else?”

Nothing for a long pause, then, “It would be better if you lie still for now.”

“Okay.” I sigh. My lungs still work but feel like they’ve been scrubbed out with pumice.

Ransom curses and begins to pace. He doesn’t have a lot of room and his steps fall hard. His presence always seems to expand to fill whatever space he’s in. It’s actually a comfort right now. Ransom is here, he’ll fix everything.

My processor seems to be fine. Ell didn’t mess with it when he had a chance to look inside me. The self-repair has settled down; I’m still recording. I check the time; it’s been two days since they pulled me out of the runner. Diagnostics say I’m . . . mending. Mechanics repaired. Biologics will need more time. I took a beating. But Ell didn’t try to dig in or disconnect anything important. He could have, if he’d wanted to.

I have a lot of questions. I imagine they do, too. We try to wait one another out. My eyes open to a dimly lit ceiling in Medical. I want to see Ell but he’s standing back.

Ransom and Ell finally break at the same time.

Ell says, “How did you fake the scans—”

The captain says, “You sent a signal—”

I chuckle. I can’t help it. This would be funny if it weren’t me. Ransom curses again.

“This isn’t funny,” Ell says.

“No, I know that,” I reply. “I’m sorry.” I would laugh outright except it hurts too much, because if I had thought about it before the accident, what Ransom would do if he ever found out about me, this is about how I’d have expected it to go. My ongoing chuckle comes out like a cough.

Ransom is losing his temper. “Graff—”

“Let it go. You know how he is,” Ell says.

“I thought I did.”

I stop chuckling. “Ask me. Ask me everything.”

Ransom starts. “Are you dangerous?”

“Yes. I mean no. Not to any of you.”

“Graff, you’re not helping,” the doctor says.

“What do you want me to say?” I murmur.

“What are you?” the doctor asks.

“Human.”

“No, you’re not—”

“I didn’t fake the DNA records, just the physiological. Look at the DNA.” I’m tired. But I need to get through this. I need to know what they’re going to do with me.

Ell has touched every inch of me. He must have thought he knew me.

“When was all this work done? How . . .” Now Ell is pacing. “I’ve seen cybernetic implants, but this . . . this is extensive. This is part of your nervous system. Work this extensive should kill anyone . . . but you don’t even have any scarring from it. It’s all perfectly integrated. How?”

They think I’m dangerous. They think I’m going to go off like a bomb. “Can you send the kids out, please?”

The two guards, the medic. They’re not kids, of course they’re not. I know them all; I trained with them. But I outrank them. Another long, taut silence follows.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” I insist. My head is throbbing. “There are more secrets than mine here. I’ll tell you and the captain but no one else.”

Ell comes to my shoulder, a syringe in hand. I can’t flinch, I can’t resist. He pumps the liquid into a tube already connected to my body somewhere that I can’t see.

“For the pain,” he says gently. “Your vitals are spiking.”

He touches my shoulder, naked under a thin sheet. I almost start crying. My blood stops pounding quite as hard. Nerves fray a little less. Ell steps away. I want to reach for him.

“Drugs work on him at least,” he says to the captain.

“Do you trust him?” Ransom asks. A question that cuts. He’s always trusted me before.

“I don’t know,” Ell says.

I think I might start crying. I wait. We all wait, in air thick with anxiety, like trying to wade through gelatin.

“Marcel, Xun, Brown. You’re dismissed,” Ransom says finally.

“But sir—” He must give them a look, because no one complains further.

They leave reluctantly. Ell murmurs reassurances at them. They all take second, third looks at me. I wonder what the ship’s rumor mill is saying. It will never be the same.

“All right, Graff,” Ransom says. “How . . . what . . .” He waves his hand at me, shakes his head.

I’ve never explained this; I’ve never needed to. I don’t regret having to do so now. It’s how I’m going to survive. Assuming they believe me and trust me at the end of it.

“It’s done in utero,” I say. “It’s grown. Artificial gestation, of course, but that’s—”

“Oh starry fuck,” Ell curses.

I’ve never heard him say ‘fuck’ in all the years I’ve known him. This is probably going to go badly for me.

“Is that even legal?” Ransom asks.

“I’m not sure. It’s certainly not ethical,” he says.

Except it is. It is for us.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Ransom asks calmly. I recognize the tone, the resolve, that he now knows what the problem is and is closer to figuring out what to do about it. “Why not tell us what . . . about this? Why bother hiding it with fake scans?”

“Because we don’t tell anyone.” This drops even harder than the first confession.

“We,” Ransom says.

“I hope you understand what I’m trusting you with, telling you this. I’m trusting you.” This is a plea. I am vulnerable. I trust them. Not that I have much choice. Or I could shut myself off. Burn out my processor, keep all the secrets. But I don’t want to.

“We,” the captain repeats. “You sent a signal. At least, the signal originated from your position. It tried to sneak out on ship comms.”

“But you blocked it before it got out,” I say. And start chuckling again. “I thought that might happen but I had to try. I . . . I wanted someone to come and download my processor in case I didn’t make it.”

“How many of you are there?” he asks.

“Not as many as you’re afraid of,” I say.

“Fuck, Graff, what am I supposed to do with you?” Captain Ransom asks.

“I don’t know, sir. Right now I think I would like to sleep. But I’m a little wound up.” I need to know I’ll wake back up again, if I go to sleep. I’m not sure right now.

“You should be dead,” he said. “If you were anyone else in a runner that blew up like that you’d be dead.”

“Yeah, I was sort of thinking if I ever blew up in a runner there wouldn’t be enough left for anyone to learn about any of this.”

“Bad luck there,” Ransom says, deadpan.

“Yeah.”

“I’m about to kill you myself,” Ell says. Then to Ransom: “We should let him sleep.”

“Does he really need to sleep? All those wires . . .”

“Yes, I need to sleep. And eat. And everything else.” Sex. I need that, too. Just maybe not right now. Where did Ell go? They’re conferencing in the back of the room. Like they can’t bear to look at me. I try to stay awake, so I can explain some more, but the painkiller is also a sedative and it pulls me under.

• • • •

The very best thing I ever ate was ice cream with pieces of dark chocolate and brandied cherries mixed into it. Decadent and comforting at once, served at a too-fancy café with real wood furniture and paneled walls. They made everything themselves with dairy from real goats. I remember thinking, this, this is what it’s all about.

I got that memory out on a previous download, at least.

I try to send out another message, masking it as a trojan and slipping it in with another signal before the comms operator notices it. But they’ve got the whole room jammed. I can’t access anything, not even the medical computers.

This is bad. I’m not Graff anymore; I’m a thing on a table. Explaining hasn’t helped.

I can’t explain it, that’s the problem.

The memories are pristine. I’ve got them all stored away, and with them the emotions that goes along with them. The flush on my skin when Ell asked if he could buy me a drink like he was making a dare. The flush on his skin when I said yes, because he hadn’t thought I would. This was right after he’d come on board as ship’s doctor; we’d been in a station-side tavern that was too dark and loud with lots of people dancing. Two days of leave and better make the most of it, right? Ransom had been there, rolling his eyes at the both of us flirting like it was a contest. And only a couple hours later, out in a quiet corridor, I put my hand on Ell’s neck, gently pushed him against the wall, and kissed him.

That was a good night.

I write the best after-action reports because I remember. No one ever questions it. I just have a good memory, right? I can still feel the exact sensation when the reactor on the runner blew out, my gut parting like taffy as shrapnel went through it.

Leave that memory and go back to that first night with Ell. That’s better. Close my eyes, slow my breathing.

Checking my processor, I know exactly when I’ve slept and when I haven’t. I fall in and out of sleep all day. The door opens, waking me. There are footsteps. I try to look and still can’t.

“Doctor?” I ask, rasping. I’m getting hydrated through a tube in a vein, but my mouth is bone dry.

Ell appears next to me. I sigh, relieved. I shouldn’t be relieved.

“What’s happening?” I ask. I’d meant to ask for water.

He turns away, and my heart lurches. But he’s back a moment later with a bottle and straw. “Drink,” he orders, and I do. “Better?”

“Yeah. What’s happening?”

“Are you a spy?”

“What? No.” I mean, I don’t think so? Would they think I was, if I told them everything?

“Because Ransom thinks you’re a spy.”

“For who?”

“I don’t know. For whatever you are.”

“How bad am I hurt?”

“You should be dead. Your spine was severed. At least I thought it was, but then . . . it fixed itself.”

“Yeah, it does that.”

“You’ll be on your feet in another week, and I’ve hardly done anything but hook you to a feeding tube.” He’s offended that he can’t take credit for saving my life.

“I’d be dead without the feeding tube. That stuff needs calories.”

Flustered, he sighs. “What are you?”

“I’m me.” That will never be a good enough answer. “What is Ransom saying?”

“He suggested dissection. I think he was joking.”

I chuckle.

“It’s not funny,” Ell says.

“No, I guess not.” I look at him because I don’t know how much longer I’ll get to. My smile feels a bit ridiculous.

He doesn’t smile. He’s pursed and worried and hurt.

I can move enough to breathe. This takes a deep breath to get it all out. “I would like to be able to move, if you think I might be ready to stop with the nerve block.”

“I’ll have to ask the captain.”

“So it isn’t for medical reasons.”

“No.”

Yeah, this may not go well. “I’m not a spy, I’m not a danger to you or anyone, I would never hurt this ship or anyone on it. Where is Ransom, let me talk to him—”

“He doesn’t trust you. Not after this. You lied—”

“I didn’t!”

“The medical scans? You hacked into the ship’s computers and hijacked my diagnostics systems! You always scanned out as an ideal textbook human and now I know why!”

“Yeah, okay, I guess that was sort of like lying.”

“Graff.” He says it as a reprimand. He’s wondering if everything was a lie.

“I was raised by the ones who provided my genetic material. I have parents. Does that help?”

“It might.” He gets up, puts the bottle of water on a table.

It’s infuriating, not being able to see anything, except that I’m too drugged to be really furious about anything. “Captain’s listening right now, isn’t he? On a monitor? Is he outside the door or what? Or does he have marines ready to storm in if I do something screwy?”

“You can’t do anything, you’re immobilized. Unless the drugs really don’t work on you and you’ve been faking it.” He raises a brow, as if this is a question.

“Well, fuck.” I seriously can’t move. He knows this. I roll my eyes at the ceiling, as if I could get Ransom’s attention that way. “Okay. Captain? Remember the time you had me sit in a runner out on that asteroid for two weeks waiting for those pirates to show up? And remember how you didn’t tell me why you wanted me to sit on that rock, or for how long, or anything?”

“Graff—”

The door to Medical slides open, slides shut. Footsteps. And Ransom says, “So you wouldn’t anticipate and launch your burn too soon and spoil the trap.”

“Right!” I exclaim, excited, probably too excited, because Ell appears in my peripheral vision, looking at a monitor and frowning.

Ransom continues, “It’s not that I didn’t trust you—”

“No, see, that’s the thing. It was a good plan, and it wasn’t about you trusting me. I trusted you. I’d have sat on that rock for a year if you told me to.”

“Now you’re just trying to guilt me into listening to you.”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Also, I want to keep on following your crazy plans. They’re kind of fun. You know what I was thinking, when I was stuck on that rock?”

“How you were going to kill me for not telling you?”

“No. That I couldn’t wait to see what you had planned. I knew it’d be good.” And it had been. Lots of explosions. “And I was thinking of how many drinks you were going to owe me when I got back.” Those had been my first words when I got back to Visigoth, sweaty and stinking from being cooped up for so long: “You owe me a drink, sir.” He’d laughed. I’d known Ransom since flight school, almost right after I left home. I can’t imagine what this looks like from his end. I’ll never make it up to him.

The captain’s voice is taut. “This might have been easier if a switch flipped and turned him into some killer robot.” He’s talking to Ell, who grumbles.

I ask, “Why didn’t you burn out my processor when you had me open, right after the accident?”

The doctor says, “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Doctor, can we have a word?” Ransom says. I can picture him jabbing a thumb over his shoulder, but he never enters my line of sight.

Ell nods, looks at me one more time. “Do you need anything? Anything critical to your current state of health, I mean.”

“You?” I ask hopefully.

He looks away. The door shuts, and I close my eyes.

• • • •

I spend the next two days trying to think of exactly the right thing to tell Ell and Ransom that will make everything all right and get everything back to the way it was. Or at least have them not look at me like I’m a villain in a bad drama. And I think I’ve got it. I stay awake by sheer force of will. Assuming I ever get to download again, whoever gets the package is going to know every inch of this ceiling. It’s got just the littlest bit of texture, like a partially worn pebble. The gray is rather pleasant once you get used to it.

The door opens. Many footsteps enter. My heart rate increases. The pain is so much less than what it was but that makes it harder to lie still. I want to sit up. I want to use my hands when I speak.

Ell appears at the side of the table. I get it all out in one go before he can say anything.

“It’s the stories. The stories, the experiences. Everything. A computer could do it, but then we wouldn’t get the . . . the experience. The hormones. The dopamine. The endorphins. The meat and nerves of it all, right? That’s the important bit. We go out into the galaxy and collect stories, and then we bring them home. It’s who we are, it’s what we do. And love, we go out to find all the love we can and try to keep it . . .” This ship is full of love and I’m afraid I’ve broken it. “I’ve never had to explain it before and I know it doesn’t make sense—”

Ell studies me for a long time. He seems calm. Some decision has been made.

“Love?” he says, his tone even.

“Yeah. Just like that.”

He lowers his gaze, raises a syringe full of some ominous liquid.

Well. I tried. I set my jaw in what I hope is a picture of fortitude. “This is it, then.”

“This is what?” he asks.

“You induce a coma and ship me off to some military R&D facility. Or is this . . . I mean, you wouldn’t.”

He gets this very familiar—delightfully familiar—frustrated look on his face. Like he’s about to snarl. “I wouldn’t what?”

“Just finish me off.”

“God, Graff. No.” He injects the syringe into the line. “This is probably going to hurt. At least, I think it’ll hurt.”

“It already hurts.”

“I wasn’t sure you could hurt, after I saw all that metal. Until I looked at your readings.”

“You know me, Ell. You do.” I finally catch his gaze. His familiar, shining gaze. He sort of looks like he’s about to cry, too.

Then there’s a warm rush though my veins that hits my heart and all my muscles seem to melt into a dull throb. I groan, but it’s kind of a relieved groan because I can wiggle my fingers and toes now and that feels pretty good. My processor’s diagnostics hum away; I’m still not optimal but stress levels are decreasing.

“Warned you,” Ell says, leaning in. “Now don’t move. You’re still not entirely in one piece yet.”

“Okay.”

I reach out, touch his hand. Just brush it, then let him go because I don’t want to scare him. He jumps a little. His breath catches. But he stays near.

Finally, I can turn my head to look at the rest of the room. Captain Ransom is standing there, arms crossed. And someone new is with him. She appears female, fine boned, with short-cropped red hair and a wry frown. A smirk. A judgment. I’ve never seen her before, but I know who she is. Tez, her name is Tez. My circuits hum in proximity to hers.

I look at Captain Ransom. “You let the signal get out after all.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“To see what would happen. She showed up a day later. Do you people just hang around in deep space waiting for edge-of-death signals?”

“Yes,” Tez says calmly.

“I’m not dying actually, it turns out,” I say awkwardly.

“You had a close call,” she says.

“Very.”

“Is it a good story?”

“I’m not sure.”

She comes to the table, holds out her hand. I take it. The spark of a circuit completing pinches my palm, and hers.

The download takes a few minutes. I get all of her memories as well. It’s like meeting an old friend from home. We’re all old friends from home. It’s kind of nice. I’m not sure I can explain that part of it to Ell and Ransom.

Tez holds my gaze, and in hers is forgiveness and understanding, along with the mildest of reprimands.

You convinced them, I tell her.

No, you did or I’d never have gotten your signal. They wanted to be convinced. You know you should meet up with someone to download a little more often, don’t you?

Yeah, I just get distracted.

But is it a good story?

It is. I’m sorry I told them about us.

No, you’re not.

The connection breaks. She takes a breath, resettling herself into her skin. Looks around. Sees Ell with new understanding. He ducks his gaze, self-conscious.

“So. They know,” she says, just to get it out in the open.

Tez can take me back home for this. If I can’t keep the secret, then I can’t be allowed to travel. But . . . I’m valuable. I almost start whining like a child, telling her how valuable I am, out in the universe, collecting stories.

“I trust them,” I say.

“They may not want you to stay.” She looks up, around. “He’s afraid you won’t want him to stay.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Ransom says flatly. “I confess, I’m not sure what to do next. I was hoping you might tell me.”

But she doesn’t. She asks, “Graff does a lot of good where he is?”

“He does,” Ransom says. I wasn’t sure he would.

“Thank you, sir,” I murmur. But it’s Ell’s decision that matters most, and I look at him next.

He says, “I can purge all the files from the accident and recovery. Go back to the faked scans. Keep that secret. With the captain’s permission.” Ell looks; Ransom shrugs. I want to laugh at the back and forth but that would probably be bad so I don’t.

“You want him to stay?” Tez asks Ell.

“I do. I think I do.”

She looks at me. “Graff?”

“Is it going to be weird? It’s going to be weird, isn’t it? Me staying.”

“Yes,” Ell says. “But I think you should stay anyway.”

We both look at Ransom. He’s like a rock, his chiseled expression unmoving. He says, “Yeah, it’ll be weird. For a while.”

She smiles, her brow crinkling. “I like them.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I say.

Tez brushes off her jumpsuit. “Captain, if you can spare the time, I wondered if someone on your crew might take a look at my ship? Just a routine once-over.”

It’s not very subtle. He looks at her, then at me, then at Ell. He raises his brow. “All right. This way.”

He actually flashes a little bit of a wry smile over his shoulder as they leave. Then Ell sits by the table and gives me the most exhausted, long-suffering, and sad look I’ve ever seen.

I’m also exhausted, which is frustrating. I’ve slept enough. “I was never going to tell you because I couldn’t tell you and it didn’t make a difference anyway and I’m sorry.”

After a hesitation, he touches my forehead. He ruffles my short hair, looks me up and down like he’s studying me. Studying his handiwork, or maybe he’s really looking at me.

“I have a lot more questions,” he says.

“Yeah, I know.”

I open my hand. Wait for him to make the move. And he puts his hand in mine.

Carrie Vaughn's work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel, Questland, is about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong and the literature professor who has to save the day. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

My Country Is a Ghost
By Eugenia Triantafyllou
Short Story Long List

When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother’s ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother’s place and date of death over and over again.

“Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma’am?” asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her lips were pressed in a tight line as she pointed at the ghost during the screening, tucked inside a necklace. She took away Niovi’s necklace and left only her phone.

“If she didn’t die here, I am afraid she cannot follow you,” the woman said. Her voice was even, a sign she had done this many times before. Niovi resented the woman at that moment. She still had a ghost waiting for her to come home, comforting her when she felt sad, giving advice when needed. But she was still taking Niovi’s ghost away.

Stella paused. She gave Niovi a moment to think, to decide. She could turn around and go back to her home taking the necklace with her. Back to her unemployment benefits and a future she could no longer bring herself to imagine, or she could move down the long stretch of aisles, past the dimming lights and into the night, alone, her mother’s ghost left behind—where do ghosts return to in times like this? Niovi would be a new person in a new country, wiped clean of her past.

Foreign ghosts were considered unnecessary. The only things they had to offer were stories and memories.

Niovi had prepared herself for this, and yet she had hoped she wouldn’t have to leave her mother behind.

She gave the necklace to the impassive woman and let herself drift down the aisle as if a forceful gust of air ushered her away.

Her mother’s ghost waved goodbye behind the detector and Niovi’s thoughts was of the Saturday of Souls. It was a prayer, an invocation as she put more and more distance between her and the security woman, her and the necklace. Without her mother’s ghost she would start to forget soon. But this she had to remember. She needed to hang on to something now that her mother had been pried from her hands.

The Saturday of Souls.

When the ghost finally disappeared, Niovi’s legs felt like lead. Her arms felt like lead. Everything felt like lead and she could barely move.

“Welcome!” Niovi heard the driver say as she boarded the airport shuttle.

• • • •

The first thing Niovi faced when she stepped out of the shuttle was the cold. It was only October. Snow would start at the end of November. But even now the cold was so utter, so complete, it seemed like a wall, an extra line of defense between herself and these people who had too many ghosts and her who had none. A final warning that foreign ghosts were a nuisance, a waste of space.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered to the frost. “You are too late.”

She started her new life in a small apartment in a badly-lit part of a street that led to a cul-de-sac.

In the mornings, as she waited for the days to pass so she could start her new job, she would walk around the city, counting ghosts.

Every time she went out the people of the city would notice her, look at her, and scrutinize her. No, not her. The absence of her ghost. She was an oddity among people cloaked in spirits that followed their every step. Some of them looked at her with concern and others with outright curiosity.

There were others without ghosts, of course. They were usually huddled together in small groups, shielding themselves against the unwelcome stares or, perhaps, against their own loss. Niovi couldn’t bring herself to even glance at them. Instead she gravitated towards the other ones. The ones who still had ghosts. Despite their looks of curiosity and sometimes pity. Most of them didn’t even notice their presence, the ghosts’ affections were natural, ordinary. Niovi found this nonchalance fascinating.

Then, there were the untethered ghosts. The ones conjured by the collective memory of the people. They did not belong to anyone in particular. They belonged to everyone. Niovi liked to think they belonged to her too, especially here.

There was the ghost of the old general. He stood right next to his own statue along with the ghost of his horse and offered a spectacle for the little kids. A stubborn man, as Niovi found out; he had been trotting the same square for two hundred years. He had died in a battle that few remembered. He stood there with his medals of honor, speaking in an antiquated manner that nobody understood and riding his ghost horse, saluting the tourists.

Niovi liked the General. He was old, really old and came from a time when ghosts could move around following their loved ones without borders tearing one from the other. Niovi thought of the necklace she tried to bring her mother in. They had sent it to her a few days later, cold, empty. She kept it anyway. It was her mother’s after all.

She sat on a bench, a bag of chips in her lap, and let her mind wander back home. To her empty house. Her mother’s house. Did her mother’s ghost stay there or had she moved on? Maybe she had followed someone else in the family like she did when she was alive and Niovi ignored her calls. Become their ghost.

The edges of her mother’s face were already beginning to blur in her mind. They became fuzzy. She looked at her mother’s pictures on her phone but they were lifeless and flat. They did little to bring her mother’s image back.

So she sat at the square looking at the children scream in a language she was still learning and heard them laugh and laugh.

• • • •

Niovi’s first job was at a Greek restaurant next to the Southern Harbor. She wanted to cook. In fact, she needed it. Not just so she could justify her staying in the country. Cooking was what her mother had done best when she was alive, and when they were still together in Athens, daughter and ghost, cooking could help her not forget the things she desperately needed to hold on to.

The sullen ghostless man at the restaurant inspected Niovi’s resume and asked her a series of questions, dubious that she could do what she claimed. He told her that many people claimed to do things they couldn’t just to get a job here, but Niovi wasn’t sure that was true at all. Maybe they could do those things but, if they were ghostless like her, and like her sullen to-be-boss, at some point they had started to forget the details. Niovi tried to drown a small voice whispering that she might be next.

“All right,” the man said in the end. “You’ll start with the dishes and you’ll move up to prep.”

Her heart dropped at that, but it was a door—or perhaps a half-open window—to the job she wanted, so she agreed to work the morning shifts.

• • • •

Niovi conjured her mother’s image stirring a pot of stewed okra, the ghost of her mother’s aunt whispering something to her as she cooked. She conjured the smells of spices and the tomato and the sweat gathering on her mother’s brow like this could bring her ghost back. Or at least help her keep those precious details.

She found herself in that scene too. At the table her young self looked down at her plate and scrunched her face in disgust. Her father nodded in a conspiratorial way from the other side of the table, much to his own ghost’s disapproval. He made up a chore to excuse her from the table. Her grandmother—her father’s ghost—shook her head but said nothing. Niovi slid from her chair and ran outside, because back then she hated okra. How stupid.

In the end she was not sure this helped at all. Instead what she found when her break was over and she was back in her post was a whiff of similar scents drifting from the restaurant’s kitchen wrapped in a blanket of hot air. It wasn’t okra they were cooking. But the spices, the slow murmuring of pots, the noises, were all achingly intimate.

She couldn’t help but leave the water running and follow the scent to the kitchen. She expected familiar scents here but not that familiar.

There was a man hunched over bigger and smaller pots. His moves calculated in a quiet choreography as he assembled the dishes. Locks of ashen blond hair peered from under his head wrap. Niovi knew that the staff was mostly made up by non-Greeks but still, this man’s ghost caught her off guard. Not because he had a ghost to begin with. Almost all the waiters she had met had one; this was their country after all. But this ghost was everything he wasn’t and everything familiar to her.

It was the ghost of an old woman, older than her mother was when she died. Her hair was dark with grey streaks, curly and unruly, and her face at odds with the cook’s. She hovered over him and when his hands twitched or when his breath quickened she would rest a hand on his shoulder and he would calm down again, his moves becoming more precise and deliberate. When he would finish assembling a dish the ghost would smile and nod. His back was turned away from the ghost but Niovi knew he felt her approval.

“Niovi!” Her boss’s voice came from the back. And just like the man looked up, and so did the ghost that reminded her so much of her mother, and the Saturday of Souls snapped back in her mind like a wound that had just reopened.

Before the man, who had a smile that took up half his face, had a chance to utter a word, she realized she had been standing there for far too long. So she gave him a faint nod and left to finish her shift, turning her head on him a little too fast, desperate to hide her tears.

• • • •

Niovi asked about him the very next day. She talked to Matilda who always spoke slowly enough for her to understand, but her attention drifted as soon as Niovi had a hard time finishing a sentence. Or perhaps without a ghost Matilda had nowhere to rest her eyes on. Perhaps this absence made her uneasy.

The cook’s name was Remi and he was born here, though his maternal grandparents came from Greece some fifty years ago. They died here too, never having a chance to really retire. That’s why he could still have his grandmother’s ghost, who seemed to fit in this place as much as Niovi did, which was not very much.

Niovi felt the stabbing of jealousy. Remi could have it all. He could speak like a native and have a ghost which carried the kind of knowledge Niovi had to fight to keep with her. As soon as she thought this she felt ashamed.

“You know,” Matilda said. The ghost of a young man stood always by her side. From the similarities Niovi could guess it was a close family member. A brother maybe. Matilda seemed at ease with it and didn’t even give it a second glance. Niovi looked Matilda in the eyes to avoid looking at the ghost. “You could come with us one night out. Just some people from work. Talking more to us would help you practice.”

“What about Remi?” Niovi dared to ask.

Matilda smirked a little, which made Niovi’s face flush. But before Niovi had the chance to say anything Matilda gave her a half-shrug. “He prefers to hang out with the ghostless. That’s not going to help you integrate.”

All Niovi could hear behind the concern was, our ghosts are enough. We are enough. But their ghosts were too different and living people were harder to be around. She had spent so much time with her mother’s ghost, her quiet sighs and her calm stare engulfing her every move, that when she was asked to join her coworkers after a shift she would always decline.

“Too tired,” she said, because she did not want to say too sad.

• • • •

In this city, like in any other, Niovi would find ghosts everywhere. They peered out from behind curtained windows, waved at her from old swing sets, or stood in grocery store aisles staring thoughtfully at a shelf that wasn’t there anymore. But most of all—if they were the tethered kind—they were discreetly following their person.

Ghosts were made of stories. It was the way they chose to tell them that was different. In this country ghosts seemed more like shadows to her. They were calm, less opinionated. Their stories were made of stares and slight nods, sometimes a pat on the back.

In Greece the ghosts were louder, their disapproval mattered, their whispers were sought out and their stories carried memories her people would not have remembered otherwise. Not in the same vividness of smells, tastes and textures. Sometimes, when listening to one of her mother’s stories, Niovi could catch herself reliving an event that never happened to her. Something that had happened to her mother or her grandmother decades ago carried the feeling and the weight of the present. It made her happy, sad or angry, in what here would be considered a disproportionate amount.

Despite her efforts to conjure the memories, she couldn’t do it in quite the same way. She was beginning to forget. It started with the holidays, then the right words took longer to reach her lips and later the proper way her family spiced the dishes.

When her mother’s swift hands stuffed the cheese filling in the pie on Sundays before the sun had risen, was it mint or basil she used? When she cooked the tender beef in casserole with fresh tomatoes, was it cinnamon that made its flesh so sweet and aromatic or was it allspice?

Even as a ghost her mother never failed to remind her of those things, of who she was and why she was, especially when she felt sad and lonely. Her mother was really good at picking up on that. Without her mother or her ghost around, she was losing parts of herself she did not know how to get back.

None of the ghosts she met here spoke her tongue or at all. She knew there must have been people like her who died in this country. As much as this thought made her stomach churn, she knew this might happen to her in the future. But up until now she thought they had chosen to return home rather than stay here. Follow their roots back to where they came from and haunt a relative or simply move on.

But then she saw Remi’s grandmother and nothing was quite the same after that.

• • • •

It was a strange day at work.

Her ever-surly boss told her that she would be moving up to preparations next week. Her stomach twisted into a bundle of fear and nerves.

“You’ve made it.” Remi patted her on the back, smiling. His ghost ever so slightly touched the boundaries of her perception, made her recoil.

She whispered a thank you and swallowed. The world was closing in around her.

Niovi’s new place would be next to Remi in the kitchen. Seeing him—seeing his grandmother’s ghost too—for as long as she worked here. Asking for another shift would be too soon, quitting would be unthinkable. She had nowhere to go.

• • • •

She started drifting in and out of a past she could barely piece together. The Saturday of Souls was just around the corner and she had spent the previous nights talking with relatives on the phone, trying desperately to recreate her memories vicariously. Longing for that connection to her mother again.

What ingredients did her mother use for the offering of koliva? What were the words she would say in her prayers? Niovi tried to invoke the particulars that made her mother’s ritual unique. Not the ones she could ask other people about, the ones she could read about, but the ones she could once taste and hear in her mother’s distinct voice. A one-person culture among her people’s collective one.

She could not. Yet her family offered to help.

“There are nine ingredients in koliva. How could you forget?”

“When will you visit us?”

“Light a candle for her soul.”

“Is there a Church to take the offering? Where will you go?”

Where would she go?

Where did the ghostless people go? The ones she met on the street always looked lost to her, directionless, the way they squeezed against each other. But maybe it was just what she felt, a projection of her own aimlessness.

• • • •

She finally gave in.

It wasn’t so much the pressure of her coworkers that did the trick as much as Remi and his ghost. It hurt to linger in the kitchen when Remi was working. When they had to talk during their shift (which was not very often) she felt the stare of the woman following her.

So one day, after her shift, she let herself be carried away by the people with the ghosts that did not hurt her, whose stares she could not read as easily. The ghosts who could teach her a few things about this place to replace the ones she had forgotten.

She let the crowd of five talk over her, through her, as if she were one of their ghosts. Once in a while she would offer a half-formed sentence or she would ask a question that seemed too fundamental to them, but completely vital for her understanding of their discussions. They spoke too fast for her to follow anyway.

After a while she gave up, or maybe they did.

She got up to leave, more lost than ever. As if she were the anchor, the reason all this was happening—she wasn’t—the others cut their conversations short and paid the bill in haste.

They all walked, half-drunken and languid, down the stone-paved street. The pubs, arranged on either side, were luring the people inside, away from the biting wind, but the street musicians had other plans. The restaurant where Niovi worked was right around the corner, on one of the busiest streets.

It was Matilda who told her then about the ghost of a street musician, a couple blocks down. She was untethered like the General and only appeared on Sunday nights at the same place she performed when she was still alive, strumming her ghost guitar.

“What kinds of songs does she sing?”

“Oh, the same sad songs. Some of them foreign.” Matilda rested an arm over Niovi’s shoulder to fix the strap of her slingback shoe. Niovi tolerated the jab of the woman’s elbow against the hollow of her neck. She wanted to be accommodating. “She’s really popular with the couples.”

Niovi nodded. She imagined what song her mother would sing if she were here. Probably none. She would make the pots clutter and shuffle around the table in a harmonious frenzy. That was her mother’s music.

They were getting closer to the spot where the ghost of the singer performed. Withered flower petals carpeted the concrete slabs.

When she heard the music she instantly knew the song was Greek. The ghost was a woman in her fifties, the hippie type, with kind eyes. She strummed the guitar while playing a tune on a harmonica set on a neck rack. She didn’t look Greek from afar, but Niovi had been fooled before.

As if he manifested from her most hidden thoughts, the ones she was trying to keep silent with a night like this one, Remi stood there, a few feet away from the ghost of the musician but fully enveloped in his own.

It felt like too much and like nothing at all. Like one of those moments where a decision must be made. Niovi looked behind her. The company of five had stopped in front of another street musician, a living one, or perhaps a pub—she couldn’t say for sure—debating something Niovi was too tired to decipher.

So instead Niovi took her place besides Remi who was mouthing the words of the song, absent-minded. His grandmother’s ghost—her curly hair worn in an old-fashioned updo—radiated calmness. Niovi felt her body permeating the outline of her, the warmth of familiarity against her skin sharper than the coldest of days here.

She did not move an inch, just stood very still listening to the song, feeling a sweet misplacement.

“How does she know the words?” Niovi was convinced now the musician’s ghost was a local. The words came out without the depth and the nuance they were supposed to. But they did come with an emotion Niovi admired.

Remi turned around immediately as if a current of electricity had run through him. His grandmother’s lips curled into a smile.

“From her husband,” he answered, still stunned by her boldness, perhaps, her change of attitude. “He came here in the late 80’s. She was the first person he talked to in this country when he walked down this street, wide-eyed and lonely.”

Much like you, Niovi imagined him saying the words, but she was certain they were there.

Niovi’s body shivered as she took a few more steps towards him. Towards his ghost that had haunted her in the most complete sense.

“You know,” he said after he had reclaimed some of his composure. “We are not alone here. There are parts of us everywhere you look. We have a past here too.”

You have a past, she did not say to him. He must have known he was different already. Instead a small hope flickered into existence. A promise remembered.

“Do you celebrate the Saturday of Souls here then?”

He smiled a faint smile. In his eyes there was openness and she was ready to listen.

• • • •

He showed her a small engraved handkerchief. This was how he carried his grandmother.

Something loosened inside of her.

He had no other family, no siblings—unlike her—and no parents. The ghost was of his grandmother who had raised him since he was ten. When she died she stayed with him.

“I came back home from the funeral,” he said. “And there she was, standing over her handkerchief, waiting for me.” He took a small sip from his coffee, his voice unsteady like his hand.

The ghost’s eyes were compassionate as she stroked her grandson’s head.

“She is the only connection I have with the past. My past.” He smiled. His smile had a bitter tint. Niovi understood more than he let on. She blinked back tears, for him, for her, for envying him all this time, for not reaching out to him earlier.

If her longing for her mother was a string, that string had somehow grown into a rope within days, hours. Ever since Remi had told her he would help her see her ghost again. There was a reason ghostless people huddled together. To share memories and stories and pool their resources. There were even untethered ghosts formed by the memories of big enough families. There was a way to bring her mother’s ghost into this country. If even for a little while.

“You cannot do this alone,” he said. “But you can do it.” There was a promise in his words and for the first time since she came here she believed it.

• • • •

On Saturday she met Remi. He took her to a place in the city she had never been before, but she had not been to most places anyway. They walked around, shoulder bumping against shoulder. His grandmother’s ghost followed them timidly.

In those streets almost no one looked at her—at the emptiness above and around her—with sorrow or alarm. Even the locals strolling the alleyways with their ghosts did not give her a second glance. The ghostless people met her eyes unfazed. Many of them walked in groups but now her perception had shifted. Now she saw the enjoyment as well as the need to share stories, jokes, company. To give as well as take.

The ghostless held candles and plates of koliva and offerings for the dead. There was excitement in the air. It was a celebration.

“This is how ghosts are conjured here,” Remi told her. “It doesn’t have to be sad.”

No, it didn’t.

She was daunted and restless about this newfound freedom. The ease of knowing that the person she came from—because people came from people more than they came from places—could be revisited like a place could. Back in Greece she had never had to think of lineage before. She had taken her mother’s ghost for granted and she realized now that this was a privilege.

If her longing for her mother was a rope, that rope had branched out to Remi, to his grandmother’s ghost, to the ghostless people around her. Niovi let the rope guide her. She followed the crowd rushing inside the red bricked, corner building, wedged between offices downtown.

Whispers and laughter hang in the air when she came in. Niovi took a careful look around for familiar ghosts, her breath caught in her chest. Her anticipation deflated a sliver, when she found nothing had changed. She scolded herself for hoping too much when Remi guided her to the far side of the wall.

There was a long table there, covered in white embroidered tablecloths. Plates of all shapes, sizes and colors were left on the linen but held only one thing: koliva, food for the dead.

She left her own plate there. Niovi had made them herself, taking extra care to not forget any ingredient, afraid that if she did, then all this, all the strength she had gathered inside of her during the days leading up to Saturday, all would be for nothing.

Niovi lit a candle, steadied it inside the heap of koliva, and left the necklace on the table. Remi stood right there next to her, his shoulder brushing hers. She took a deep breath and took in the smell of each of the ingredients. Nine like the ranks of Angels:

Wheat, for the Earth and the souls of those who lie buried under.

Bread crumbs, for the dirt—may it be light upon their grave.

White, candied almonds, for the blanched bones of the dead.

Pomegranate seeds, for Persephone and Hades, but also the promise of Heaven.

Cinnamon, for all the smells and tastes of this world.

Parsley, for the green, green grass of the resting place.

Raisins, for the vines of Dionysus and the sweetness that is this life.

Sugar, for the sweetness of the Afterlife.

Nuts and seeds, for fertility and life that laughs in the face of death.

There was a change in the atmosphere, a mixing of scents. Niovi heard Remi draw in air and opened her eyes. For a few moments she stared at the necklace on the table. She didn’t dare look up.

When she did look up her mother’s ghost was not as she remembered. The ghost was made of memories that all lit up at once like a beacon inside her, her voice was a mixture of spices and familiar tastes. It all descended on her, draping her like a veil.

She saw her mother’s eyes for the briefest of moments. And then what there was of her mother’s ghost scattered all around her and soaked this new country so she could finally call it her own.

Eugenia Triantafyllou is a Greek author and artist with a flair for dark things. Her work has been nominated for the Ignyte, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and she is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. You can find her stories in Uncanny, Apex, Strange Horizons, and other venues. She currently lives in Athens with a boy and a dog. Find her on Twitter @foxesandroses or her website https://eugeniatriantafyllou.wordpress.com.

In This, At Least, We Are Alike
By Caitlin Starling
Astounding Long List

Pharyn Heir Lorelei Steddart sits at the conference table where she will negotiate her marriage. In front of her is a leather folder filled with notes, assumptions, expectations. There are no photos. No dossiers. She should be afraid for her future, but it’s hard to focus; even her nerves can’t pierce through the dull wrap of grief that has swaddled tight around her for the past six months.

She’s dressed in a custom-made, luxuriously soft woolen dress, narrow at the waist and falling in a gentle circle around her knees. There’s a glittering brooch at her right hip in the shape of her house’s crest. Everything, from her stately kitten heels to the silk scarf folded on her lap, is new. It is expensive beyond her wildest experience.

It is all the unbroken white of mourning.

Her uncle sits down next to her, either satisfied with his defensive prowling about the glass-walled room they wait in, or finally giving in to boredom. They are a matched set, except he looks natural inside a high government building, wearing his bespoke suit. He would have been here six months ago, while she was still working in a factory office. Six months ago, his eldest daughter, Gwyndofir, would have sat in this board room, with some say in the impending match.

But Gwyndofir’s bones were burned to ash five weeks ago. The white of her uncle’s suit makes the shadows beneath his eyes all the darker.

She tries to sneak a look at her phone, though it’s new and nobody from her old life knows the number. Her uncle catches her. “Chin up,” he says.

She puts the phone away, blanching.

Her uncle’s voice softens. “They will be here soon. They know how it would look to keep us waiting. We are not here to beg.”

The words make her skin crawl all the same, and she has to bear down on herself to keep from standing, from fleeing the room. She wants to be in her old apartment. She wants to be by her mother’s grave. She wants to be out past the city walls, where maybe she could lose herself.

She does not want to be here, waiting to be bargained off in exchange for the possibility of rescue.

A bustling mob of suits turns the corner towards them. Aides, lawyers, advisors, all flocking around the Prince of Volun. She rises to her feet just a few milliseconds after her uncle does, but she knows she will be rebuked for the delay later. She has never learned all the proper forms of address, the various subtleties of the highest echelons of polite society. She never needed to, before this.

Rifting take her, she was living in a studio apartment six months ago. She didn’t even have a trust fund, let alone…

All this.

All this, because her family is dying. Is dead.

She watches the mob approach, and fights to slow her breathing, trying to feel something beyond stabbing grief and wretched anger. Even panic would be welcome, would seem appropriate.

And then the crowd in the hallway parts. The backs of Lorelei’s knees bump against her seat as she instinctively tries to retreat. Down the center of the divided mob walks a woman, nearly six feet in height, her dark hair shot through with grey, her eyes framed by an elaborate mask that stretches from her cheeks and brows to her temples and jaw. Beneath those woven metal strips Lorelei can make out rippled, glowing scars, pulsing a deep indigo. It’s as if the limiters the woman wears are keeping her skull together, not just managing the immensely powerful magic within.

She walks with studied confidence, pinstriped suit moving with her, never pulling awkwardly. She wears a decorative cape, held in place at her right shoulder with an elaborate pin that proclaims her rank.

She doesn’t need to wear it. Everybody knows her face. Everybody knows her cold, removed stare.

“War Alchemist Corisande,” Lorelei whispers. She has seen her on the news a thousand times.

Her uncle inhales sharply. Unexpected to him, too.

The prince’s aide opens the door. Most of the mob peels off and goes their separate directions, orders issued, and the prince enters. He is accompanied only by what looks like two lawyers—and the war alchemist. One of the highest-ranking generals in Volun’s army, who has no role in marital matchmaking.

“Well, Lord Steddart,” the prince says, extending a hand across the table. “It is good to see you on a happy day this time around.”

Instead of at a funeral, he means.

“It is indeed,” her uncle replies, his confusion already hidden. He bends down to kiss the prince’s ring. His lips do not touch the stone, and his hand doesn’t touch the prince’s. Posturing, or acknowledgment of potential contagion? She doesn’t know.

He straightens. “May I introduce Lorelei, my half-sister’s daughter.”

Six months ago, that half would have been important. It had meant she was the last in line for inheritance. Now it means nothing at all; whatever is striking down her family, it doesn’t care about parentage or marriages. It only cares about the blood.

The numb spiral of her thoughts revolts in a sudden burst of grief, but Lorelei forces herself to keep moving, imitating her uncle’s gesture.

“She does have your father’s countenance,” the prince says as he regards her. “And what is your mind about this marriage, Miss Steddart?”

“That I’m very lucky to have such a matchmaker,” she says.

Her voice cracks.

The rehearsed line amuses the prince, who laughs and pulls out his chair. He sits, and so do the lawyers, and her uncle, and Lorelei. Only the general remains standing.

Her uncle greets her with a polite, “And you, War Alchemist? Will you be assisting in finding the match?”

The older woman’s mouth tenses. But it is the prince who speaks.

“War Alchemist Corisande is here to be the match.”

Lorelei’s shy glance transfigures into a terrified, disbelieving stare. Corisande gazes back, coolly.

“Miss Steddart,” the prince says, “I am pleased to introduce you to your wife. Nephele?”

The woman inclines her head. “Miss Steddart,” she says. Her voice is steady, devoid of any emotion.

Lorelei can’t speak, not even when her uncle taps her shoe with his below the table.

“We are honored,” he says for her. “Though I have to admit to some… curiosity.”

Some confusion. As heir to the house of Pharyn, Lorelei should be matched with a similar scion, or at least a wealthy businessperson. Nephele Corisande brings no land, no lineage to the match; nothing but her own reputation.

A reputation as an ice-cold soldier, elegant in her brutality on the battlefield.

Lorelei can’t look away from her, not even when Corisande’s jaw tightens in annoyance, not even when the other woman turns her attention to the far wall, looking ahead blankly as she falls into parade rest.

“I understand,” the prince says, “that initial tests have shown no connecting factor between all the deaths in your line. Is that correct?”

Her uncle is uneasy. “Yes, your highness. It isn’t an illness or genetic trait, not even foul play as far as the authorities can tell—we’re still at a loss.”

Her mother has been dead three weeks now, and still has no diagnosis, even after a thorough autopsy. All the doctors can say is that her heart stopped. Lorelei twists the scarf between her fingers at the memory.

“It’s probably magical in origin,” Corisande says.

Her voice cuts through the fog.

“I assure you,” her uncle says, “we’re all properly warded.”

“Then shall we blame divine judgment?” Corisande asks, voice level, no trace of cruelty in her mockery. “Wards can only go so far, and even the best only defend against whatever they were designed to defend against. I am here to investigate.”

“Do we have to be married for that?”

Everybody turns to Lorelei then, but she barely notices. She is fixated on Corisande. The anger at her situation leaps up in her gullet again, followed by desperation, and then, worst of all, hope. Hope that this is worth it. Hope that Corisande can help.

“Strictly speaking, no,” the prince says. “However, the marriage would solve a host of other issues. What the general lacks in a family estate, she more than makes up for in status and wealth. She—”

“Nobody else would agree to it, would they?” Lorelei asks. And just like that, the hope fades again.

Her uncle grabs her wrist below the table, trying to get her to stop.

She doesn’t want to stop. She wants to scream. She wants to tear the whole room apart. She wants…

So much. And only this: that the nightmare be over, that it could have never begun at all.

The prince’s lips quirk in a wry, surprised smile. “You’re very perceptive.”

“Your Highness, I apologize for my niece’s bluntness. I assure you—”

“Spare me.” The prince leans across the table toward her, splaying one ringed hand on the wood. “You’re correct, Miss Steddart. While we could postpone your marriage during the investigation and try again once you are hopefully cleared of all threat, your uncle made very clear to me that the issue of an heir was to be the top priority in the match.”

Her cheeks heat.

“And the war alchemist…” Her throat goes dry.

“Agrees to legitimize any children you bear, by whatever means.” The prince sits back, spreading his hands in offering. “You may conduct yourself in whatever way the House of Pharyn approves of; there will be no contractual obligations in the arrangement except that you do not divorce, and that you assist War Alchemist Corisande in her investigations.”

“This is very unorthodox,” her uncle begins, and she thinks he’s about to disagree, thinks he’s about to argue that the search should be widened. Except, instead, he says, “However, we appreciate your dedication to finding a solution to our peculiar needs. We accept.”

• • • •

The engagement ceremony happens only two days after Nephele Corisande first meets the Steddart woman. It is a lavish affair, impersonal, and not for either of them. That’s probably for the best, because Nephele has had Lorelei answering questions and undergoing tests every waking moment between then and now, with breaks only for sleep and so that Lorelei’s uncle can take her to yet more dress fittings and to visit a fertility clinic for— future plans.

The rest of this arrangement, outside her investigation, feels more than a little sordid, but Nephele keeps to her duty and that helps her sleep at night. It is clear that Lorelei hates her, hates her uncle, hates the world. But she hates death most of all, and so she has cooperated. So far.

As they stand up together in the middle of the cavernous gallery, alone on top of a raised dais, surrounded by a murmuring audience of the wealthy and powerful, Nephele occupies herself with theoretics. She has ruled out the mundane, like the doctors who have gone before her; it is not a plague that has killed the House of Pharyn, and it is not poison, and it is not an assassin’s malice. There is only the connection of the family, which means that Lorelei, too, is at risk.

For a moment, Nephele considers simply waiting to see what happens to her fiancé in the coming weeks and months, but though she is cold, she is not cruel, and her remit is to stop the problem, not just identify it.

“What are you thinking about?” Lorelei’s voice surprises Nephele. She thought this would be a silent affair; all that matters is that they are seen together, by everybody who crowds the balconies, talking and laughing, drinking, gossiping. Engagement ceremonies are for display, not for companionship.

Though perhaps, if they were a normal couple, it would have helped them bond. Shared embarrassment with the world, or pride at being together so visibly, or… something.

“About how pointless this is,” she says. It’s a better, more polite answer than explaining that she’s thinking about Lorelei’s imminent death. That can go unspoken.

Except Lorelei is still hurt. Nephele feels her flinch.

This is not her problem.

“Pointless,” Lorelei says. “Yes, I suppose it is. All of this. How much longer do we have to stand here?”

Nephele checks her watch as surreptitiously as she can. “Forty more minutes until they expect us to circulate and talk to our guests.”

Lorelei responds only by taking slow, even breaths, just like she does while she waits for Nephele to finish running her tests. She’s settling in.

Nephele thinks about commenting on some absurd detail of their situation, if only to help pass the time, but decides against it. They have stood side by side, otherwise silent, not even touching, this whole time.

It’s easier this way. For both of them.

It isn’t that Lorelei is not beautiful (she is, though it’s hard to tell, really, through so much sadness). It isn’t that she hasn’t enjoyed, on occasion, Lorelei’s commentary (though it’s been rare, given the circumstances). It isn’t even that Nephele never planned on marrying. It is that this whole endeavor is so alien to her existence that she doesn’t know what to do. What to say. What to think.

So she doesn’t speak, and she thinks about death instead.

In that, at least, they are alike.

• • • •

Five days later, Nephele is no closer to solving the mystery, but that much nearer to the altar.

It is night, but the city-state of Volun is still awake. Nephele sits in the back of her town car, skimming over new reports on her tablet. She has begun longitudinal tests of Lorelei Steddart, taking various measurements at the same time each day, every day, hoping to find some change. Some stasis. Some clue.

But there is too much interference. Too many emotions, too much change, and Lorelei’s vitals swing up and down and around, all within the normal range for severe stress so that even the most promising signs mean nothing else. Is her latent reactivity to thanatotic spellwork rising cyclically because of some inherent trait of hers, or some induced trait, or just because she’s grieving? Are the strength of all wards placed on her fluctuating because every test is measuring something subtly different, or because Lorelei has not been sleeping regularly?

And how much is being thrown off by the medications she’s been started on, to prime her to bear a child she clearly does not want?

All her test results mean nothing, and Nephele has a headache. Her brain feels swollen, muddy, and she can see in the car windows that the glow beneath her skin has taken on a sickly tone. She needs to rest.

She is halfway between her borrowed lab and her apartment when her phone buzzes. She glances at it, expecting some note from the prince, or any one of a hundred mages and soldiers who need things from her on a seemingly daily basis, but it’s not any of them.

It’s Lorelei.

Lorelei has never texted her before, and suddenly she is afraid. Afraid that she has already failed, that she was not fast enough, that this girl is dying, and she—

-Do you think I’ll still be alive for my wedding? Serves her right, if she has to marry a pile of bones.-

The fear falls away, leaving only awkwardness, embarrassment, frustration.

The girl clearly hadn’t meant to send that to her. The appropriate thing to do—the easiest thing to do—is to delete the text and never acknowledge it again. Gallows humor, bitterness, anger… it’s all reasonable, all to be expected. And yet Nephele can’t bring herself to delete the text.

It feels more honest than any of their structured, exhausting interactions have.

Lorelei is typing another message. Nephele has to put a stop to this, has to let Lorelei know she isn’t whatever confidante she’s trying to seek solace in. But before she can tap out the words, the next message springs to life.

-I don’t want to die.-

Nephele’s heart tightens in her chest.

There is no next message. Not because Nephele shuts off the phone, but because, for whatever reason, Lorelei isn’t expecting a response from whoever she thinks she’s talking to. The older woman is left staring at it, suddenly far too aware that Lorelei is not just a frustrating puzzle, not just an obligation, but a person. A very scared person.

A very lonely person.

This is not Nephele’s problem. But she still pulls up the app that shows her exactly where Lorelei is, and instead of being safely at home, she’s downtown. The neighborhood she’s in isn’t dangerous, but it is a long way from her apartment, and Nephele can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.

She opens the intercom to her driver’s section. She gives him the address. She sits back as the car turns towards the west side of town.

There is an argument to be made that Lorelei should not be out in public at all. It isn’t so much that she is contagious, or vulnerable, but that there might be collateral damage involved in whatever terrible end comes her way. But Nephele decided the day her investigation began that she would not demand that of Miss Steddart. After all, the knowledge alone that she might be a danger to others would be deeply distressing, and isolation would mean nobody would be able to call for aid if Lorelei grew ill too quickly to call herself.

This is the trade-off: a desperate, vulnerable woman, alone, halfway across town.

By the time they’ve parked, Nephele has herself straightened out. She will check in on Miss Steddart, from afar if possible. If all is fine, Nephele will leave well enough alone. If something is wrong, Nephele will intervene as necessary, which will most likely mean just calling Lord Steddart to foist the whole thing onto his plate. Lorelei hates them both, but is more used to her uncle interfering.

It will be easier.

Lorelei’s tracker places her inside a small bar. It is relatively new, with industrial-inspired light fixtures and a hammered copper bar taking up a large portion of the square footage. The array of bottles lined up on a mirrored shelf, like glittering books in a library, is staggering. She looks for Lorelei in the booths, at the tables, and finds her at neither.

No, she’s sitting at the bar itself, a tulip-shaped glass clutched between her fingers, containing the dregs of something liquid and golden. Even disastrously drunk, as Nephele now strongly fears she is, Lorelei has at least kept some dignity for herself. She isn’t slumped against the bar, and she manages a small smile for the bartender when he pauses to check in on her. From the fluid, easy way he turns to unload a batch of freshly-washed glasses, he isn’t on the verge of kicking her out.

Nephele isn’t needed here. She shouldn’t even have had to articulate the thought, should have already turned, already left the building.

Instead, she’s sliding onto the stool beside the younger woman.

“You should come home,” Nephele says, keeping her voice low.

Lorelei startles, twisting in her seat to stare at her, eyes blown wide. Her cheeks, already pink, turn red.

“How—”

“The engagement ceremony,” Nephele says. “Part of the ritual placed a tracking spell on you.”

That wasn’t the right thing to say. Lorelei’s expression crumples in panic, in despair. “I didn’t agree to that,” she says. “I didn’t. That wasn’t in the paperwork. My uncle never told me.”

Nephele’s shirt collar feels far too tight. She’d thought her actions reasonable, at the time. “It falls under cooperating with my research.”

Lorelei turns away, staring at the wall of bottles behind the bar. She begins to shake.

Fuck. Not the outcome she wants. She rubs at her temples, her headache worsening. “I don’t intend to use it unless I need to.”

“And tonight?” Lorelei whispers.

“Tonight you accidentally texted me instead of somebody else, and I…” She doesn’t want to say it. She makes herself anyway. “I was worried.”

At first, Lorelei looks like she is about to cry. And then she downs the rest of her drink and says, “I’m not dying.” Her fingers twitch on the stemware. “Not any more than usual, I mean.”

She sounds just as defiant and alive as she did that first day in the conference room, where the match was made. Nobody else would agree to it, would they? she’d said, and Nephele had realized that the confection in white had been a person who knew exactly what was happening to her. Ever since, though, it has proven easier to think of her only as the problem to be solved. Simpler.

But Nephele can’t pretend anymore, not tonight.

“I wasn’t worried about that,” she says. Thinks of elaborating, of apologizing for not making sure she had grief counseling, some sort of network, something to offset the strain of Nephele’s work so that she wouldn’t end up in a bar, alone, drunk and scared and lonely. But none of that feels right. Too little, too late, or perhaps too much. She pulls out her wallet and tosses some cash onto the bar instead. “How much is your tab?”

“I’m fine. I’m allowed to do this for at least a little longer, you know. I want to stay here.”

She’s slurring a little.

“Do you, really?” Nephele asks. “Or do you just not want to leave with me?”

“You’re angry.” Lorelei sounds, if anything, surprised.

“I’m frustrated. There’s a difference.” She flags down the bartender. “Will this cover her tab?”

From the look on his face, it more than covers it. Fine. The man deserves a good tip for taking care of her… fiancé. Soon to be, in the most round about, horrible way, the mother of her child. Nephele bites back a groan at the thought and turns her attention back to Lorelei, who is staring at her. Her eyes are wet with nascent tears.

“Let’s go home,” Nephele says again.

“Where’s home?” Her voice is soft.

She doesn’t have the fortitude for existential questions right now, so she stands up, twitching her suit jacket back into place. “Where my liquor cabinet is,” she says, and holds out her hand. “You may continue to drink your way to numbness there.”

And you don’t have to do it alone.

Lorelei searches her face, and Nephele prepares for her next argument. But it doesn’t come. Instead, the younger woman scoots off her bar stool and grabs up her purse, then totters a few steps away. She’s wearing ridiculous heels that she doesn’t seem to know how to walk in. Probably her uncle’s doing, replacing her entire wardrobe with more “suitable” attire without taking into account the woman who’d be wearing them.

The very drunk woman who’d be wearing them. Nephele mutters a curse and comes to her side, gently taking her arm. Lorelei lets her.

“Did you drive here?” Nephele asks as they step out into the cool evening air.

“No. Bus.”

One less thing to worry about. “Your uncle will be delighted to hear that,” she says as her chauffer steps out to get their door.

“Fuck my uncle,” Lorelei murmurs, then gasps, realizing what she’s just said.

Nephele is already laughing. “Agreed,” she says, climbing into the car and holding out her hands to ease Lorelei in with her. Her driver shuts the door, leaving them in comfortable darkness, only a few inches apart. Nephele can smell the booze on her, but it’s almost like a perfume; she’s been drinking something with a lot of aromatic bitters. Vermouth cocktails?

At least she has good taste.

The car pulls smoothly onto the street.

The only lights are the persistent glow of Nephele’s own skin and the faint lights from the signs they pass filtering in through the tinted windows. They illuminate Lorelei’s face gently, and don’t glimmer off any tears on her cheeks. Nephele can’t even see if she’s blushing.

Good. Better.

“I’m sorry,” Lorelei says after a long stretch of silence. “About—about texting you.”

Curiosity makes her ask, “Who were you trying to reach?”

Lorelei ducks her head. “It’s stupid.”

Nephele says nothing. If Lorelei doesn’t want to share, there’s no reason for her to push. Lorelei’s allowed to keep whatever lovers she wishes, and surely has her own life that Nephele and her uncle are otherwise doing their best to rip her out of. Nephele shouldn’t endeavor to damage it more.

Then Lorelei says, “My mom,” and Nephele exhales sharply. “They haven’t turned off her service yet. I can still… she’ll never see it of course, but…”

“That’s not stupid,” Nephele says.

Lorelei goes very still. Nephele watches her, wonders if she’s broken her, if she has overstepped a boundary that needed to remain between them in order for her to stay upright, stay sane, stay alive. She closes her eyes a moment. Then she pulls out her phone, and Nephele watches as she selects her mother’s number, and types out a message:

-I miss you.-

She hits send.

• • • •

The apartment General Corisande leads her into takes up the entire top floor of the building, and towers above the rest of the central city. It has floor to ceiling windows, and though most have curtains drawn over them, she can see lights glittering far below, all the way to the outer city wall. From here, she can see all that is safe. All that is stable.

Lorelei realizes, after several long minutes of staring, that she is alone. While she stood transfixed, Corisande disappeared. She tries to figure out if she’s relieved or not, and decides the answer is a firm not. How strange, when just hours before she wanted nothing more than to run, to be swept miles and miles away by the shifting landscape beyond the city walls, just to avoid—

All of it.

The death, the tests, the treatments, the clothes, the marriage. The marriage, which is so laughably unimportant in the grand scheme of things, had come to stand for all of it, a kind of incongruous shorthand. And now, suddenly, it doesn’t. Not quite.

She wants Corisande to sit with her again. It was almost pleasant, their strange conversation in the car, despite the gigantic mess she was making of it all. Almost convivial, certainly intimate, and not so cold as all their other meetings.

Is it wrong, to want her wife? Her almost wife. Nearly wife.

She looks around; the spacious, open-concept room is empty. A few lights are on, but overall the room is dim. She wanders over to the nearby couch, a very minimalist thing that doesn’t look at all comfortable. The entire room is cold and barren and half-empty. The view is impressive, but the rest is bleak. It’s a good reminder, she thinks. Even if Corisande—if Nephele was worried about her tonight, even if she was almost gentle, this is only a business arrangement. An investigation. Lorelei is being too sentimental and needy again, by half; she should know better.

She sits down, knees bumping against the metal coffee table. She wraps her arms around herself. The pain wants to come back in now, despite the numbing embrace of the four—five—six? drinks she’s had. It’s not that the numbness is receding, though; it’s that she’s adjusting to it.

What else can she adjust to?

Lorelei is about to tip headlong back into her wallowing when something soft and heavy settles across her shoulders. She looks up, muzzy-headed; Nephele is back and has draped a thick blanket around her. The blue glow beneath her skin is brighter here, even brighter than in the dark of the car, and Lorelei realizes she’s removed her limiter, the edifice of finely-worked, sturdy metal that keeps the magic roiling inside her in check.

“Your face,” Lorelei blurts.

Nephele doesn’t seem insulted, though, and instead lifts one hand, revealing a series of interlocked metal bangles around her forearm. They are half-jewelry, half-shackle. “More comfortable for home life,” she explains. “They can’t withstand power spikes during combat, but they can handle sleep.”

“Oh,” she says.

It’s startlingly intimate. Lorelei is certain the general has never been filmed without her mask, has never even been seen without her mask except, she would guess, by her doctors. She carries too much power within her. She is her mask, to all the world.

But not at home, apparently. And not around Lorelei. Not always.

And she’s—she’s stunning. Lorelei can’t look away. Doesn’t want to look away. There’s a whole host of new problems to grapple with, like if she’s allowed to be attracted to her future wife, and she isn’t sure if she wants to laugh, or cry, but it cracks away her numbness either way, making room for something a little more real.

Nephele must notice, because she makes sure Lorelei has a hold on the blanket, then goes to what turns out to be a modest liquor cabinet, filled with expensive whiskey. “I thought you’d have gotten started without me,” she says.

Lorelei’s cheeks burn. “I’m not—usually, I don’t drink this much—” she babbles, until she remembers, vaguely, that Nephele had said something when they came into the apartment, about how she should help herself, but she’d already been too distracted by the view. Nephele isn’t passing judgment. “I’m good,” she settles on. “Thank you, though.”

Nephele pours herself a dram, then puts everything away again. She comes back to the couch, to the metal coffee table, to her. She stands there, awkwardly, and sips.

Lorelei wants to say something, but there is too much between them that is too hard to sort through just now. She has been through so many appointments, tests, interrogations, and she is so tired, down to the bone. All she knows is that she doesn’t want this—whatever it is—to stop just yet.

“I’ve done you a disservice,” Nephele says.

The world goes very still. “I—”

“Let me continue. Please. You are in a horrendous situation, and I have allowed it to continue being horrendous, because I can’t fix everything that has gone wrong. It will always be horrendous, even if we solve this tomorrow. But…” Here she takes a sip of whiskey, falling silent, and Lorelei feels seen, because nobody else has cared how miserable, how terrifying this has been for her, on every front.

She’s been given so much by her change in station. Yes, the price is terrible; she has lost her family, her friends, her routine, her steadfast belief that she knows how the world works. But everybody agrees that she is lucky, too. She wears couture dresses in place of budget slacks, has an unlimited credit card, and is now being looked after by the most powerful mage, the most powerful soldier, in a city built on power. Perhaps, they think, the price is ultimately reasonable. Wouldn’t most people at least consider it?

Nephele understands, though. Lorelei would give it all up. She is drowning.

“But?” Lorelei prompts, desperate to hear more.

“But I can, at least, treat you like a woman—not a test subject, not a job—if that would help. None of this is your choice, so if you want me to be… warmer than I have been, I can…”

Silence again. Her hand flexes on the glass. Lorelei realizes she’s nervous. War Alchemist Nephele Corisande, nervous. She finishes the whiskey as Lorelei watches, rubs a hand over her jaw.

“I’m going to protect you, as best as I am able,” she says at last.

“Of course you are,” Lorelei says. “I’ve never doubted that.” She doesn’t see how this connects with warmth, with concern.

Nephele paces to the windows. She stares out at the city, and Lorelei stares at her.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asks. She readies herself for another cryptic answer, something along the lines of, “I wanted to ensure you made better decisions with your time.”

But Nephele doesn’t say that. She says, “Because I wanted you to have somewhere to go. I didn’t want to leave you alone with… everything. Not again.”

“Oh,” Lorelei says, softly. Desperation kindles in her, alongside a kind of hope. Hope for kindness, and more than kindness. Intimacy. Partnership.

She does not want to be alone anymore.

Nephele comes back to her and sits on the edge of the coffee table, looking straight at her. “Tonight made me realize that you deserve a say in how I protect you. Things can continue as they have, if that’s easiest for you. But if it’s not, I can try to be…”

She trails off, whatever words she’s looking for refusing to come again. Lorelei can hardly breathe, afraid that she is misinterpreting.

“Nephele?” she asks.

“Oh, fuck it,” Nephele says, and buries her face in her hands. “You can talk to me. That’s what I mean to say. I’m here, I’ll listen. If you want me to.”

And just like that, Nephele is not a war alchemist, not a political alliance, not a distant, authoritarian figure.

She is a woman. Solid, present, and close enough to touch.

“Really?” Lorelei asks. A hundred questions are crowding in her throat. Did you choose this assignment yourself? Are you willing to risk your life by marrying me? If we succeed, will you resent being bound to me, to us? Will you mourn me, if we fail?

And Nephele answers all of them, at least in part, when she looks up and says, “Really.”

• • • •

“What a complex political world, and what great characters moving in it,” he says.

Maya nods. “I really like how they managed to become friends anyway,” she says. “No cures for plagues. I was hopeful when she went to the clinic.”

“No,” he says. “And nothing to eat. But we're sure to find something soon.”

“That's a first chapter, right? It has to be. Even though it's quite complete as it is”

“I'd keep on reading, if I could,” he says. “But what else do we have?” He picks up the next book from the top of the pile. “This one doesn't have a title. It's by Lisa Goldstein, and it's the first glimpse of a novel, but it's so new it doesn't even have a title yet.”

Maya pats the table. “Thanks, library,” she says.

And they read.

Caitlin Starling is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Death of Jane Lawrence and The Luminous Dead. She writes genre-hopping horror and speculative fiction. She tweets at @see_starling and has been paid to invent body parts. You can find links to her work at www.caitlinstarling.com.

The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly
By Alix E. Harrow
Short Story Long List

To the parents or guardians of Miss Coraline Connelly:

Right now you’re thinking, Where is she? because this is what every parent thinks when they find an empty crib and a raven with a scroll in its beak. I have stolen enough children to know.

Your question is easily answered: Miss Connelly is toddling through the obsidian halls of my palace in the world-below like a misplaced sunbeam, all golden curls and freckles, pestering the troll-guard and chattering with the ravens. She’s in no distress, I assure you, beyond a few requests for a gentleman named Daniel Tiger.

Now you’re thinking, How do I get her back?

Here you’re in luck! Simply read my name three times into any mirror or other reflective surface and I will return her to you for the extremely reasonable tithe of nine (9) years of your life. Should you fail to fulfill the terms of this contract within the next seven (7) moonsets, she will remain forever in my keeping.

In cordial expectation of your call,

Queen Jaref the Third, Empress of the Black Realms

Dear madam,

I am concerned that you did not receive my previous missive, although my raven reports that you took the letter and appeared to read it. He says afterward your eyes were empty and dark as dry wells, that you stared for a very long time at the rumpled sheets where your child had been so recently asleep. (Or not-asleep; when I arrived at the stroke of midnight on the equinox — when the price for passing without invitation is most affordable — I found her as wide-eyed and wakeful as a lightning-struck pixie. She has shown no signs of weariness yet.)

Most parents respond with rather more alacrity to my terms and, I must say, I wonder what sort of mother would do otherwise.

I am accustomed to my solitude — having outlived most of my wives and husbands and quarreled with the rest, and never having had an heir of my own — and my patience is wearing thin. I have had to send a raven out to search for Mr. Tiger, as it is apparently a matter of some urgency.

Queen Jaref the Third

Dear madam,

Nine is such a lot of years, isn’t it? Nearly a decade! I am willing to reduce my tithe to a mere seven (7) years, at no small cost to myself — changing the terms of a contract is a terrible expense, particularly in these degenerate days when even queens are reduced to ransoming children for a few meager years-worth of power.

In light of Miss Connelly’s long stay, I have had to waive the usual contractual obligations surrounding the consumption of fairy food. She has eaten well in her time at the Night Court. (Until this morning, when I gave her nectar in a cup that was — apparently — insufficiently purple and instigated an entirely disproportionate response. I was forced to offer her a quite extravagant number of witch-cakes in recompense.)

My attendant still has not returned with the elusive Mr. Tiger.

Queen Jaref the Third

Dear madam,

Perhaps you are not a mortal mother after all but an ancient enemy seeking to destroy me by unleashing your hellspawn in my court.

The witch-cakes had some unforeseen effects on Miss Connelly (flight, invisibility, minor prophecy, et cetera). She escaped my attendants and went rollicking through the Black Realms for several hours, during which time she perpetrated unspeakable acts against the pixies and instigated a border-war with the Tartaran trolls.

She’s sleeping now, although still slightly translucent and hovering several inches above the bed, looking improbably innocent. That’s the wrong word — innocence implies the existence of sin, and we don’t believe in sin down here. I mean, she looks small and fragile but somehow infinite. Like a rosebud or an apple-seed, something with ten thousand futures folded neatly inside it.

I suppose she is probably not an agent of my ancient enemies after all but merely a child. I wouldn’t know, as I never had

In consideration of Coraline’s temperament and your own (I’m sure considerable) distress, I am prepared to waive the tithe altogether.

Jaref

Madam,

I couldn’t sleep last night. What, I wondered, could prevent a mother from claiming her daughter?

I sent my spiders to investigate. They found you lying atop an unmade bed, awake, wearing a blue apron with “How May I Help You” embroidered in yellow thread across the chest. Your lips were chapped and bitten, your hair unwashed. You clutched a stuffed tiger tight in your right hand, as if it were precious.

They found any number of curious objects scattered across your floors — bills with red lettering, a purple cup with an entirely inaccurate depiction of a unicorn on its side, a tattered-looking pamphlet featuring a maniacally happy woman holding a placid baby beneath the words Beating the Baby Blues! — but no curses or demons, no impediments or injuries. Nothing at all preventing you from calling me.

I confess I cannot imagine the good fortune of having a child like Coraline (canny as a crow and twice as wild, imperious, unmanageable, stubborn as stones — all the qualities, in short, which I would have hoped to find in my own heir) only to abandon her. I wish I believed in sin, so I would have a name for such wicked wastefulness.

Perhaps it would be better if you did not speak my name. Perhaps it would be better for Coraline to remain with the woman who took her rather than the woman who let her go.

Queen Jaref the Third, Empress of the Black Realms

Dear Miss Connelly,

I owe you an explanation.

I tried for centuries to have a child of my own. Those things which are rare in your world (witching and wish-granting, alchemy and augury) are common here, and what is easy for your kind (birth, death, democracy) is quite difficult for mine.

I squandered all my power on it, and it wasn’t enough. Now I spend my days scheming and pilfering, stealing mortal children and pretending, for an hour or two, that they are mine.

To think that you would forsake the very thing I wanted so badly…. I’m afraid I lost my temper. I should not judge you so harshly. I should know better than anyone: we do not all get to choose whether or not we are mothers.

But now you do.

Whatever you decide, you should know that she still asks for you. She has forgotten much of the world above, as mortals tend to, but not you. I suspect that, even if she spends eternity in the Night Court, she will still pause sometimes and frown, as if she has misplaced something very dear to her.

It is the seventh night. When the moon sets, the time for choosing will be over. But until then — if you call, I must answer.

Jaref

Dear Miss Connelly,

I had convinced myself that you wouldn’t do it. I had begun to believe I would wake to find Corrie’s bird-nest curls still beside me.

But you called my name three times in a voice like dust and heartache, even though you are young and alone and tired, even though you are poor and it cost you dearly. Because you love her more than you love yourself.

You called and I came and Coraline leapt from my arms so fast I didn’t have time to say goodbye or to consider not letting her go. (Would I have done it? Would I have used the last of my power to break our contract? Perhaps. Perhaps I, too, love her more than myself.)

I wish you hadn’t called. I’m glad you did. Perhaps you could call again, now and then.

There was a moment just before I vanished when she looked at me with something fervent and fierce in her face, something precious— Well. I would not want her to forget me.

J

My dear Constance,

I never thought to hear from you so soon! I’m touched that Coraline would launch such a drastic and effective campaign on my behalf, and unspeakably grateful for the solution you proposed.

I have drawn up a new contract — not the first of its kind, but perhaps the first on such agreeable terms — outlining everything we discussed: shared custody, exceptions for Christmas and Beltane, joint expenditures, et cetera. When she comes of age, she may either inherit the Black Realms as my lawful heir or pursue her undergraduate degree (an expense I will, of course, defray — although you should raise the issue with your local ministers, as it seems exorbitant).

Should you find the terms to your liking, tell Coraline to eat the enclosed six (6) pomegranate pips. Expect me at midnight on the next equinox.

J

P.S. I would be obliged if you would pack the purple cup and Mr. Tiger, this time.

A former academic and adjunct, Alix E. Harrow is a NYT-bestselling and Hugo-award winning writer living in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction.

Sunrise, Sunrise, Sunrise
By Lauren Ring
Astounding Long List

221/0

Every day, it goes like this: I wake to golden light, with the surface of a star just beyond my wide viewport window. As the hours pass, a supernova forms, enveloping my little research vessel. I check my monitoring equipment, I eat my favorite meals, and then in the evening, I die.

I’m quite content with this looped life. I have learned to sunbathe in the late afternoon rays of the supernova, stretching out my belly like a cat. The shifting plasma and dancing flares outside can mesmerize me for hours. When the end comes, there is no pain, just the sensation of bright acuity that comes before the burn. At times, I idly wonder if this is my heaven.

I know my days well, so I am caught by surprise when an astronaut falls past my window. Seeing that dark figure against the warm dawn-like glow of the dying star jolts me out of my sleepy reverie. This is new. This is wrong.

I watch, curious, as the astronaut reaches toward my ship. At the closest point of her trajectory, I can see inside her helmet. Her eyes are wide and desperate. Her mouth moves, speaking words I cannot hear.

I wonder how I must look to her. It’s been a long time since I have thought of myself through the eyes of another.

Trapped on course by inertia, the astronaut soars past and is incinerated in the molten sun. Her death is barely a blip on my solar data readout. It’s a shame, and fascinating, but by the next today, it will be as if she had never existed.

222/0

I burn, and wake, with no time at all in between. The one thing I miss is my dreams. I can’t have them anymore, no matter how long I nap on the warm metal that lines the single room of my ship. Seeing that astronaut felt like a dream. My memory of her will be trapped in this loop with me for all eternity. Another immortal death.

Although I try to go about my day as normal, I can’t help but watch the clock. The last pack of dehydrated ice cream, which I have enjoyed every day, tastes like sour ash this time.

Seven hours into the loop, the astronaut falls past my window again. I press my palm to the thick glass, appreciating the power of my ship’s heat shielding. My window is cool and impenetrable. The astronaut reaches for me. The astronaut burns.

233/0

It’s been a dozen loops now, and I can safely conclude that the astronaut has been trapped in my little temporal bubble, sucked in like a moth to a flame. I watch her fall from the safety of my starship home and wonder if she remembers as I do. Each day, her mouth moves in the same way.

She falls again. Dark sweat-slick hair sticks to her forehead and globules of tears float freely in her helmet. This time, I’m ready with a camera, recording her last words.

She burns.

I play back the video, acutely aware of my role in this dance. If I were a better person, I wouldn’t need to know what the astronaut was saying in order to rescue her. If I were a worse person, it wouldn’t matter either. There’s no better or worse person here, though, just me, and I want to know.

The video of the astronaut plays on all my monitors as the star begins to swell behind me. I watch myself mirrored in the webcam display and try out different sounds.

“Help” is easy enough to figure out. “Help me,” she’s saying, over and over again. It’s the last word that catches my attention and spurs me into action.

“Help me, Amaranthe.”

How does she know my name?

234/0

The astronaut falls again, and this time I catch her. The mechanical arm on the side of the ship was meant for sample collection, but I know the astronaut’s exact trajectory and speed, so it’s easy enough to nudge her close enough to grab onto my ship.

Hand over hand, she approaches the airlock. I can feel my heart racing as the doors hiss open, but I keep to procedure, and wait for everything to stabilize. My hand trembles on the unlock button. It blinks green, and I press it.

The astronaut steps inside and removes her helmet. Her eyes are clear and golden as a nebula, her hair is as black as space. Little burn marks mar her cheeks where her own tears boiled against her.

“Amaranthe, thank God,” she says, breaking two hundred days of silence. “I’ve been trying to rescue you.”

“Rescue me?” My eyes narrow. If this stranger disrupts my peaceful loop, I’ll never forgive her. Maybe I should have left her falling outside. “What do you mean? Who are you?”

“My name is Jet,” she says as she strips off her gloves. “Just Jet. I’m part of the crew on a long-haul ship, just happened to be passing through this system. Not a scientist or anything. Your looping nova here is a bit of a tourist destination now.”

“A tourist destination?” I repeat, feeling suddenly exposed. This isn’t heaven, then: peace does not have an audience.

“Yeah, but no one’s gotten close enough before to realize there was someone still alive on this ship. I got curious, tracked down the crew manifest.” Jet sat down to tug off her boots. “So here I am. Miscalculated a little, though. Like I said, not a scientist. Thanks for grabbing me, else I’d have burned right up.”

She doesn’t remember. Clearly there are rules to this game of time, but no one gave me the handbook. I am a little grateful, though. Her deaths were not at all like mine. I doubt her mind would have survived such a fate. I try to choose my words carefully.

“What does it look like from the outside?” I cross the ship and place a hand against my window. The star’s roiling surface is just beginning to flare out of control.

“A bubble, pretty much. Blinks fast as hell. Something’s weird with time and space in here. Can’t get signals in, can’t get signals out. Not even that nova can escape.”

“But you’re here.” I turn to face her, backlit by the dying star. Wispy curls frame the angles of my face. I was beyond age, beyond beauty, beyond change. I’ve enjoyed becoming essence itself. Now I can feel the thoughts I left, creeping back into my psyche.

“I thought, if you made it in, maybe I could too.” She shrugs. “It was worth a shot. What happens when you try to fly out?”

“I haven’t tried,” I admit.

“Oh.” Jet falls silent. She rakes a hand through her short hair and stares at the budding supernova. I don’t blame her for her disappointment. There’s a reason I’m better off alone.

“I’m sorry you went to all that trouble for me. I’ll figure out how to get you back to your ship.”

“Okay.” Jet sighs and stops unbuckling her spacesuit. “I guess it’s none of my business.”

“It’s not,” I agree.

She sits on the floor and contemplates this while I go about my day. I eat the last packet of dehydrated ice cream, check my instruments, and do a little yoga by the light of the solar flares. For a while, I forget that I am not alone.

“What is it like?” Jet asks. I flinch. Nothing unexpected has happened for almost a year of todays, and I’m not used to newness anymore.

“What is what like?” I move into the next yoga pose, arching my spine and straightening my arms into a perfect warrior stance. I’ve had plenty of practice, after all.

“Dying,” says Jet. Her bravado cracks, just a little. “The loop. All of it. I have a crew, a family–when the star goes nova, will I just disappear?”

“You won’t feel a thing,” I say. It’s answer enough for all her questions.

That night, we burn together.

235/0

Jet is still there when I wake up. I think I’m dreaming before I remember that I can’t. She wakes a moment after I do, blinking hard and staring at her hands. She’s back in her spacesuit. The burn marks on her face are the same as before, and I feel a stab of guilt when I realize they will never fade. Maybe there’s some salve in the med kit.

“Did you feel the supernova?” I ask, stretching languidly. The star is at its dimmest, and the ship has a pleasant chill.

“No, you were right.” Jet takes off her helmet and presses her cheek against the window, peering up and away. “It’s like it never happened.”

“You’d better get used to that. I don’t have to worry about food, though, or air, or fuel. It’s a nice little life.”

Well, it was, until Jet showed up. Now everything is wrong. I hope that if I’m polite and help her leave, things can go back to normal. The stability of the last cycle is a good sign. If the loop is localized to my ship, it should stay when Jet departs.

Jet rummages through my rations and pulls out the last packet of ice cream.

“Mind if I have this?” she asks.

“I mind.” I cross the room and take it from her hands. “Listen, Jet, I’ve got a routine. I don’t mind if you stay here for a few loops, but please stay out of my way.”

“Right. Sorry.” Jet’s frown is a little crooked. It’s kind of endearing, but not enough to make me give her my food.

Instead, I start going through my files, looking for a way to send her home. It’s a nice challenge, actually. I haven’t done any good, hard calculating since the looping started. Jet tucks herself respectfully into a corner and watches the star seethe as I work.

I can’t find a solution before the nova swallows my ship, but that’s okay. I’ve got no shortage of second chances.

238/0

“You died.”

“Hm?” Jet rolls over on her blanket, propping her head up with one arm to face me. It’s been a few loops now, and I hate to admit it, but this strange freighter woman is growing on me. I want her to know the truth, at least, so she doesn’t make the mistake of getting attached to me in return.

“In the sun. Not like we die together, but before, when you were falling. You died a dozen times before I caught you.”

“That’s alright. I’m sure you tried your best, and I don’t remember it anyway.”

“I didn’t try. I let you fall.”

I catch the hint of a crooked frown on Jet’s face as she turns away. She runs her hand over her scarred face, over the bright red skin of brand new burns. When she turns back, she’s smiling.

“Well, hey,” she says, “I guess I can’t fault you for that. No one tried to rescue you either, did they?”

“I let you die,” I stammer. “Over and over again. You’re not upset by that?”

“A little, sure, but it makes sense. Besides, I’m here now. Some rescuer I turned out to be.”

Her compassion turns my stomach. I wish that instead of me, mission control had sent a saint. Maybe then Jet would have a worthy match.

I don’t reply, but I get up and set about my calculations. I work twice as hard today, calculating fuel reserves and flight trajectories sufficient for one suited woman to leave the gravitational pull of the star. Jet deserves to go back to her freighter crew. They must miss her. Anyone with half a heart would miss someone like her.

This time, I can sense that I’ve almost got it right. I face my fiery death chanting equations, burning them into my memory so that they at least will survive the transition back to morning.

246/0

As soon as I wake, I rush to my console and type out everything I remember. The adrenaline pumping through my system makes everything feel fresh, electric. I’m excited, I realize. I want to solve this puzzle and save the day. It’s the first goal I’ve had in a long time.

“Did you figure it out?” Jet hovers over my shoulder, peering at my monitor and tugging at the buckles on her spacesuit.

“Not yet.” I hunch my shoulders and type faster. “Trying to remember what I did before.”

Jet retreats. When I finish recording the last number, I turn in my chair to find her slumped against the viewport window. Silent tears stream down her cheeks, following the tracks of her burns.

“What’s wrong?” I stay in my seat, keeping as much distance as I can from her in this severely restricted corner of spacetime.

“I’m sorry.” Jet swipes her sleeve over her face. “Did I disturb you?”

“I finished what I remembered. You can talk to me, all right? I may not be the best company, but I won’t bite.”

“I’m scared, Amaranthe,” Jet admitted. “I don’t want to get trapped here. My crew must be wondering what happened to me.”

“I’m sure they are.” I want to turn back to my monitors, but Jet is still looking at me. I don’t know what else she expects me to say, so I speak my mind, as usual. “Why did you leave them for me?”

“Not for you, exactly.” Jet’s cheeks flush. “I just wanted to do something heroic, for once. I thought this was my chance. Swoop in, save a damsel in distress, come home victorious. Guess I didn’t really think too hard about the details.”

“I see.” So Jet isn’t a saint, after all. She’s a martyr, and a martyr in vain, because I don’t need to be rescued. Her foolhardy decision makes me like her more than her selflessness does. Her unhealed tear-burns tug at what few heartstrings I have left. “I’ll get you back to your ship. Just give me a little more time.”

She nods and wraps her arms around her knees.

I finish my calculations around the time Jet usually falls past my window. If she suits up with a gas tank, and aims its nozzle just so, Jet will head in the direction of where she told me her ship was docked. If I get my research vessel up to speed, and give her a boost, she might just break out of the bubble. From there, she can hail her crew.

When I relay this plan to Jet, she cries again. A lump forms in my throat as I hand her the canister. I swallow hard and start up the thrusters.

“You could come with me,” Jet says. “Leave the ship behind, leave this tourist trap to its loops. You’d be welcome on my crew.”

“No thank you.” I smile. “I’m happy here.”

For the first time since Jet’s arrival, I wonder if I really am.

Jet nods and steps into the airlock. We reach the calculated velocity. I open the outer doors, and for a moment Jet falls across the starry void, just like the first time I saw her. Then she opens the nozzle on her gas tank and flies with purpose, out of sight.

I die alone again.

247/0

Jet isn’t there when I wake up. My plan worked perfectly. The gas canister she took isn’t with the others, proof positive that escape is possible. I could leave this loop at any time. It’s just that no one would want me to.

The supernova monitoring mission wasn’t intended to be solo, but no one signed up to join me. I get it. I’m the only person I get along with, no matter how hard I try. After I mistimed my return course and woke up unburnt behind cool glass, it was easier to stop trying.

I pull my ice cream out of my rations and sit in front of the window, waiting to see if Jet will fall past again, even though I know she will not. The hours come and go. I try to do my yoga, but I keep seeing her out of the corner of my vision, with her burnt tears and her golden eyes.

Jet doesn’t fall. The star is as lively as ever, and galaxies spiral away in the empty distance. The false sunrise of the nova is unmarred. Everything is normal. This is exactly what I wanted.

In the afternoon, I reach for the last packet of ice cream, but it’s gone. I ate it already. Everything is normal, but I’ve been set askew, knocked off course by Jet’s brief visit. Tears prick my eyes like sunspots on the star. I can’t figure out why I’m crying, and I hate it.

Later, when I am calm, I reevaluate the situation. I just need a little more time, that’s all. I was unsettled when the loop first started, too. It’s normal for change to disrupt a routine, but my life will go on in the way that it always has. There’s nothing left to worry about.

With a sigh, I take my pillow and curl up in the largest shaft of solar light. I sleep my dreamless sleep and do not wake even when I die.

280/0

I miss her. I’ve spent loops and loops trying to deny it, but I’ve never been good at lying. I haven’t had a friend in years, even before I entered this alternate temporality. There’s no one out there who misses me. Even mission control never really cared if I lived or died, so long as I brought them their data.

Jet had seen me, just a name on a manifest, and she had given her life for me. I don’t believe she really cared who I was at first, but after, in the ship–

She saw me. She saw my coldness and my rigidity, my routines and my logic; she heard me say I had let her die, and still she offered me a place on her crew.

So yes, I miss Jet. I miss how she made me feel, and I wish I had recognized it earlier. I’ve spent days running the numbers on my situation, on this little bubble universe, and I believe that it will collapse if I leave it behind. The supernova will escape to rage unchecked through the system.

All these second chances, and I won’t get one with her.

471/1

One morning before the star dies, hundreds of mornings later, an astronaut falls past my window. I recognize the freight insignia on her suit. My heart skips a beat as I rush to move my ship’s collection arm toward her reaching hand.

“Amaranthe, thank God,” Jet says when the airlock doors finally open.

“Jet,” I cry, rushing forward. She’s come back for me.

“I’ve been trying to–” She freezes as I wrap my arms around her. “How did you know my name?”

I pull back. Awful realization floods my mind like searing light. Without another word to Jet, I sprint to my storage cabinet and fling open its doors.

All of my gas canisters are still there.

“What’s going on?” Jet asks. She kneels down to unstrap her boots, but watches me with those wide golden eyes. There are fresh burn marks on her cheeks.

“This has already happened,” I say, shutting the cabinet door and slumping back against it. Jet bites her lip and rubs her temples with one gloved hand.

“Well, yes,” she says after a moment. “I don’t know how to say this any better, but you’re stuck in a sort of time loop.”

“I know that,” I say, barking out a laugh. Jet looks taken aback. “Thing is, we both are.”

“What are you talking about? I came here to rescue you.”

“I know you did. From your long-haul ship, right? Just happened to be in this system?”

Jet’s face falls.

“If that’s true, then how many times has this happened?” Her voice is soft, fragile like an ungloved hand. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

“I don’t know. I remember you showing up in my loop once before, and I remember five hundred times when you didn’t, but clearly there are things going on here beyond my comprehension.” I cross the room and pull the last pack of dehydrated ice cream from my rations. “Here. You must be hungry.”

Jet sits against the window and eats in silence. When she looks a little less rattled, I explain everything I can remember. I explain how we are both trapped, in different ways, and when she leaves, it isn’t for long. I explain the difference between my deaths and hers, and what happens if I miss her on her way past my ship. I explain why, logically, she might as well stay in here with me.

Jet doesn’t take it well. It’s too much, too quickly, for even her boundless optimism to handle.

“I want to go home,” she mumbles through tears.

“Jet, you can’t go,” I plead, gesturing at the sunstruck abyss outside. “You’ll forget everything. It will hurt. And you’ll just come back anyway.”

“This isn’t what I wanted.” Jet is sobbing now, far from the brave, cheerful rescuer I saw that first time. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I miss my crew. I want to go back, Amaranthe.”

I have her with me for less than a day this time. We stay silent as she suits up, although I wish I could say something that would make her want to stay. When the time comes, I boost her out of my loop, and into her own.

Jet saw me, and I saw her. She masks her fear with bravado the same way I mask mine with logic and calculations. I can’t blame her for wanting to return to her own normalcy, even at the cost of her memory. I can’t blame her for her tears. I can’t blame her for wanting to leave me.

702/2

The next time I catch Jet, I don’t explain as much. I gloss over the details and say I will tell her about the loops later. I accept her offer of rescue and the place on her crew.

I don’t tell her that I already know how to send her back–I’ve had plenty of time to practice this little lie–and so we spend a few pleasant days together before her mood turns sad and desperate. Her crooked frown is all I can see when I shut my eyes. I pretend to finish my calculations and set her free.

When Jet leaves me for the third time, I do try to follow her. My acceptance of her offer was no lie. I boost her out of the bubble and then suit up, leaving my ship behind.

By the time I approach the edge of the temporal field, the star has begun its supernova again. The heat at my back is agonizing. I cry tears that boil. How could Jet stand it, all those times I let her die?

As I soar toward the space beyond my space, flames surround me. I look into the slow world outside the bubble and see the star’s superheated tendrils escape to consume an errant asteroid.

It’s just as I feared. If I leave like this, it’s all over. Me, the star, the ship, the loop. Everything in this system. And Jet. Jet, who is reentering her own loop, and may have already forgotten that I exist. I cannot sentence her and her crew to a fiery death.

I aim the nozzle of my gas canister at freedom and press down on its trigger, using the recoil to send myself flying back into the hungry mouth of the supernova. As I close my eyes, ready to wake again on the cold spaceship floor, I think that Jet would be proud of me.

1377/5

“Amaranthe, thank God.” Jet tucks her helmet under her arm. “I’ve been trying to rescue you.”

I treasure these few days when our time loops intersect. Our orbits may be different, but we are bound to this star, and now, to each other.

I’m honest with Jet now, in a way soft enough not to hurt her. I tell her that I know how to get her back to her ship, but I’d like it if she stayed with me for a little while first. It gets lonely sometimes, dying all by myself every night.

“Do you mind if I eat this?” Jet holds up my ice cream. I look over from my yoga pose and nod, careful not to disrupt my balance.

“Take whatever you like. It’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Oh, right.” Jet tears open the packet with her teeth and takes a bite of vanilla. “You know, I’m kind of glad I don’t remember anything. It’s nice meeting you, and I get to do it over and over again.”

“I’ll never understand your optimism.” I have to turn back to the supernova, so that its gentle, shielded heat will dry my fresh tears.

“It’s easier for me.” Jet shrugs. “I don’t have to remember any times where this didn’t work out. I just have this time, and your ice cream.”

She takes another bite as the solar flares grow stronger. It’s my last evening with her for this loop. It feels nice, almost domestic. I understand where Jet is coming from, but I’m glad that I will remember this, for as long as this star shall die.

1849/7

Every day, it goes like this: I wake to golden light, and I do my best to escape it. I rush to my keyboard and record everything I remember from the day before, then keep crunching numbers until I’m out of ideas on how to safely leave. Whenever I get tired, or sad, or just want to give up and relax in the star-warmth, I think of my astronaut, with earnest gold eyes and tears burnt onto her cheeks. I think of Jet.

Someday, Jet and I will meet for the last first time. I will finally break out of this eternal day and leave this ship behind to step onto hers.

Until then, I work. I die.

I wake.

Lauren Ring (she/her) is a perpetually tired Jewish lesbian who writes about possible futures, for better or for worse. 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.

The Salt Witch
By Martha Wells
Short Story Long List

Juana thought this was bullshit. She had found the broken sailboat in the south wind and tried to pilot it to Hispaniola, but it wouldn’t go in the right direction. You’d think flying would be the hard part, but no, it was steering. And you’d think witches would be born knowing how to sail boats on the wind toward the Caribbean but no, apparently not, and that was…that was bullshit, was what it was.

She pointed it away from the Mainland again and the boat spun out of the gust, splintered wood creaking and shredded sails flapping, blown back to the north as ungracefully as a discarded plastic bag. Swearing, Juana held onto the mast, the rough wood sun-warm against her hands.

“What’s the deal?” she demanded aloud. “Come on, boat, cooperate!”

It came to her that the boat wanted to go to Hispaniola as much as she did, but it couldn’t, something dragged it back. Juana swung around the mast to squint into the blue horizon, toward the thing that tugged on the boat like a net. She spotted a coastline, the low rise of a barrier island, and the sight of it was the taste of salt and the smell of cotton candy. She didn’t want to go there, even if it wasn’t really there, just the ghost of a place trapped in the storm. Compared to all the other ghost islands of the Caribbean, it was sure to suck.

“Oh, man,” Juana complained quietly to herself. It would be easier to just fly on her own and not mess with the sailboat, but she had it now and she couldn’t just abandon it. You didn’t abandon things you were responsible for. You didn’t, even when you were a witch.

She was a witch now and did as she pleased, and it pleased her to stay with her new friend the boat.

She grumbled, “Okay, let’s go that way.” Maybe she could figure out what was dragging at the boat and fix it.

Released to follow its heart, the boat shot back across the sky, barreling forward against the wind, caught in an air undertow. Juana had fought undertows since she was a kid, playing in the waves. The undercurrent dragging her along toward the jetty rocks, her plastic water shoes filling with sand.

Maybe she thought about that a little too hard because the boat dropped like a thing that wasn’t supposed to fly after all. She dragged the sail around to catch the air, but they plummeted toward the ocean.

The hull crashed on the surface and promptly flipped over in the next wave. Juana slammed into salty water as warm as a hot tub and flailed. Her feet raked the bottom and she staggered. The warm summer current shoved her toward the beach and a wave smacked her in the back of the head like a light tap from a crow bar.

She stumbled to her feet as the water dropped to her knees. She stood on a sandbar, a shifting ridge of sand still forty yards or so from the beach proper. For a ghost island, this place was vivid as hell. She wasn’t even touching it yet and her body felt solid in a way it hadn’t for days, years, decades, forever. The steady wind at her back, the view of the long beach that stretched out to meet the rolling ocean, the grassy dunes rising past it and the cloud-filled sky.

“Barrier island,” she said aloud. Barrier to what? The ocean and the wind was sure free to go back and forth. What was the barrier for? What was it guarding the land from?

Something bumped her leg and she glanced back to see the battered sailboat. It had righted itself.

“Thanks for nothing,” she told it, and stepped aboard.

The next big wave shoved it off the sandbar back into deeper water and Juana swayed as she rode it the rest of the way in, until the bow ground into the beach.

She stepped out, the wood scraping her knees, the wet sand shifting between her toes, and told it, “You wait here, budro.” The wavelets chased her feet up the beach, giving up as she stepped past the seaweed drifts and the carpet of broken shells. She waded through dry sand drifts and tall wet wildflower grass, until she could scramble up the tumbled rocks to the sea wall. She shaded her eyes and frowned as the fitful wind pulled at her dripping shorts and t-shirt.

Mist and clouds obscured the view further inland, but there were several, maybe more than several, places fighting to come into being here, flickering in and out like a TV with a failing satellite. She caught flashes of shrimp boats with their nets up and puttering engines, a conquistador ship dropping anchor, French pirates storming a dock, the big dugout boats of the Karankawa pulled up onto the sand. Victorian bathhouses decorated with so much white wood lace they looked like wedding cakes. A pleasure pier with a Ferris wheel that went from wood and steel to flashing neon as it rotated. She took a breath of heated air thick with exhaust fumes, rotting fish, suntan oil, the intense green scent of the wildflowers, the ozone in storm wind.

Through the sunlit inland mist, the white dome of a cathedral rose. Victorian houses turned into low, battered surf shops selling ice cream and margaritas, and the cathedral vanished behind tall gleaming hotels. Then it all dissolved into a desolate empty plain of collapsed stone and weeds and storm wrack and the heavy odor of death.

“Oh, I got a fucking wrong feeling about this,” Juana said, and started to walk. None of this should be here, all of it should be here. With a witch’s wisdom, she knew these places should rest in layers, like a cake, not jumbled up like a salad. Something was profoundly wrong.

And something had drawn her and the sailboat here, like a leash on her heart. She stopped in her sandy tracks, resisted, to see what would happen. The pull eased away, each tug weaker. It felt like something drowning, scrabbling for purchase on a rock. The image disturbed her enough that she started to walk toward it again. She was a witch, so it wasn’t like anything on a ghost island could hurt her.

She followed the pull through the dunes that wavered in and out of sight, translucent weeds scratching at her legs. Despite the cloud-torn sky, the sand was hot and the air was bright. Ahead she spotted moving figures.

Juana squinted. Oh, not good. Definitely not good.

She ran through deep drifts and her bare feet slipped, losing purchase. The figures were kids, a dozen of them, all ages from eight or nine up to young teenagers. They struggled through the sand, their feet moving inches at a time as if chained to anchors. Their ragged clothes were old-fashioned, matching the Victorian bathhouses. Makeshift ropes of torn cloth were tied around their waists, some kids still linked together by the stained fabric, others stumbling alone. Leading them was a woman in a ragged nun’s habit, struggling to walk. She held kids by the hands and pulled them along with the ragged determination of the desperate.

The nun was strong, and could have made faster time on her own. But once you were responsible for something, you couldn’t just leave it behind. Her stomach sinking, Juana paced around the group until she could see the nun’s face.

Her skin was dark brown and her full cheeks were streaked with sand and tears. Her gaze lifted and fixed on Juana, and she said, “Please, is the castle much further? The water’s rising, and we have to get to high ground. I can’t see the castle anymore.”

Juana’s throat went thick. She couldn’t help these people, not now. She managed, “I don’t know. If I find out, I’ll come back and tell you.”

The nun sighed, then bent her head and dragged herself and the kids forward another step.

Drowned kids, because the reason you tied people together like that—makeshift ropes, that they could easily untie or wiggle out of—was when you needed to wade through high water together to get to safety.

Juana turned back to her own slog through the drifts. She knew ghosts of the storm when she saw them. Barrier island, bulwark against a threat, castle fortress shelter, our lady of the perpetual storm, protection. And something wrong and terrible in the center of it, pulling all the layers of life and death out of shape. It was a puzzle Juana couldn’t solve yet.

She barked her big toe as the sand under her feet turned into pavement. More buildings flickered in and out. On a diagonal to the shore, a whole street competed to appear. Flashes of a 1940s casino, more Victorian cottages, a 1930s art deco diner with gleaming chrome and neon, a modest brick Presbyterian church side by side with a blocky stucco 1960s synagogue, and a whitewashed 1970s mosque with an elegant little dome. She thought, Looks about right, the Buddhists were always up on Persimmon Street and the Catholics liked the high ground. Then, How do I know that?

A barrier island battered by wind and rising water, stuffed with religion, almost every kind of religion. Religion blossomed in the hurricane wind, when the storms came every year like clockwork, except when they came more often, wilder and harder, walls of unstoppable destruction as the seas boiled.

“I know this place,” Juana admitted, and felt that terrible drowning grasp on her heart again, that distant cry for help. It wanted to lead her further east, where a broader beach curved out from the sea wall.

But then she saw the castle.

It wasn’t as tall as the gleaming glass hotels but it stood rock-solid, stone walls meant to withstand the wind and water, angled to break the hurricane on its strongest corner, and wings extending out to shelter a green sweep of yard and palm tree-studded garden. Heavy wooden shutters covered the windows, all the way up to the center tower and its open stone balustrade.

She plowed her way toward it, drifts giving way to mixed patches of pavement and tarmac. Just at the edge of the yard, she found a man.

He was stuck waist-deep in the sand in his tailored suit, arms folded, his dark wrinkled face furious.

She recognized him, the knowledge floating out of her chest like a bubble. Mr. Benson. He had let the local kids whose families worked in the beach motels swim in the pool on summer Mondays. He eyed her with a trace of disappointment and said, “What are you doing here so early, little girl? Did the storm take you?”

“I’m not a little girl, I’m a witch,” Juana corrected. She had to be clear on that, no backsliding. And she had to ask, “Is this hell?” She doubted it, though. With a witch’s knowledge, she knew Benson wasn’t the ending-up-in-hell type.

He sighed, angry but not at her. “Hell is people, witch, and some people are so bad they can make anyplace into Hell, even a place meant to be a refuge.”

Juana looked at the castle, more fragments of memory floating together into a raft. She said, “This was a hotel. The hotel, the big one. Everybody liked it.” The Queen, the monarch of the island, the one that made the newcomer glass and steel towers look flimsy and cheap. And the Sunday brunch was fabulous, chocolate fountains and mimosas and everything, her…her something…somebody had really enjoyed it. This raft of memories would break and drag her under in the deep water if she wasn’t careful, so she pushed it away.

“This is high ground on a low-lying island at the end of a hurricane highway. It’s always been a refuge, before one stone was stacked on top of another. Everyone taken by the storm comes here, welcome or not,” Mr. Benson said, grim the way he had never been when he was alive, even that time the plumbing backed up on the Fourth of July. “But this POS had the audacity to die inside my hotel of a heart attack, and now here we are.”

Mr. Benson actually spelled out “POS” because he wouldn’t swear in front of a lady, even a witch. Juana said, “Come on, I’ll get you out of this and you can show me what’s wrong.” She reached for his arm.

He said, “Careful, I think he’s set a—”

“—trap.” Benson’s voice echoed as Juana suddenly stood in the Queen’s lobby.

“My bad,” Juana muttered. That had been a mistake.

It was like a dark cavern, the floor to ceiling windows shuttered, the archways into the restaurant and the big hall to the terrace shrouded in shadows. Everything smelled weird and musty, like mold in the compressors. And there was way more gold than she remembered, gleaming dimly like a troll’s cave in a movie.

It was empty, and this place was never empty. How many storm-taken souls like the nun and her orphans had been forced back out into the wind?

Then the elevator door slid open. Even the ding sounded wrong. Like The Shining, Juana thought, and said, “Yeah, no thanks.” She started up the stairs, climbing into the dark.

If someone had taken over the hotel, they would be up in the penthouse.

The wool carpet was scratchy instead of soft like her feet remembered. Even the smooth polished wood of the banister felt wrong. As if all the little comforts of this place had turned against her.

As she made the turn onto the first landing, sickly yellow light glowed down from the third floor foyer. Maybe not the penthouse, then. But her witch instincts told her there was something there, way up high, squatting like an evil toad, weighing the building down.

She stepped into the third floor foyer and saw a man, facing away from her. He was dressed in gleaming silk and puffy pants, a tarnished cuirass and a helmet. Oh yeah, him. Juana said, “I know you. The Conquistador poltergeist. You were here before they built the place in 1904, the first beach hotel. You threw a Catholic priest across the ballroom so they called the Rabbi in to settle you.” Juana could see it like a movie in her head, though she knew it was a story the bellmen had told on the ghost tours. The Conquistador seemed too faded to be a threat. “Are you back or what?”

He turned to loom over her, baring fang-like teeth. “When you see what’s up there, you’ll wish I was back.”

Juana didn’t like being loomed over, so she put her hand through his insubstantial chest and waved, just to be an asshole. “Who’s up there then, a demon? A monster?”

He sank back, looking more human, like the portrait they said was his in the corridor that led to the new banquet rooms, just a tired old bad man. He said, “Little witch, sometimes men are so evil they sink into the walls and floors and stay forever. They taint everything they touch, through all of time, past and future. This place is a fortress but it’s anchored on a stolen land of death and misery, where stolen lives and stolen souls were taken by the wind. And its heart was vulnerable.” He sounded like an old black-and-white TV bad guy but he faded into coils of mist, taking the sick yellow light with him, until she stood in the dark again.

It worried Juana a little. If a Conquistador thought you were evil, you were probably pretty damn bad.

Juana let out her breath. “You’re a witch,” she told herself, “you got this.” She turned back to the stairs.

At the sixth floor landing, the light was blue-white, like the glow of a corpse.

A figure stood in the big round foyer, facing windows that looked out into a star-filled sky above a dark ocean, as if the day had turned to night in the few minutes it had taken Juana to climb the stairs. But maybe it was always night up here.

Whoever it was, they were smaller and slighter than the Conquistador, and swathed in yards of yellowing silk and torn veils.

“Uh-oh,” Juana muttered. She knew another witch when she saw one.

No, wait, she knew who this was. The figure held a bouquet of dying white roses, just in case Juana needed another hint. And she stood in the spot where the engaged couples always wanted their formal photos. This was the hotel’s Ghost Bride.

Juana walked forward as the veiled head turned toward her. “Hey, you. You look tough. And ghosts and witches should stick together. You want to team up?”

Through the veil she could see the stark white skin melded with the bare bone of the woman’s skull. That had to hurt.

A voice behind her said, “She’s with me.”

Juana turned. Okay, yeah, she thought, here we go.

A person, a thing that had been a person, stood in the doorway into the penthouse’s foyer. It blurred and shifted in front of her eyes, it was one man, it was a hundred, it was the landlords who drove out the poor to build mansions, the slave ship owners, the rich men who had broken up the union when the Black and white dock workers tried to collective bargain, it was the politicians who left the refugees to the storm, it was cancer, it was rot, it ate misery. It was a Demon King. She took a deep breath and said, “What about no.”

It said, “What do you mean, no? No to what?” The voice was sneering and deep, just like she had expected, but also just a little whiny.

“Monsters like you, you got to start with ‘no’,” Juana said. “Then just keep working your way further toward ‘hell no’.”

The Demon King laughed. “I don’t want anything from you. I don’t need anything from you.”

Juana had the bad feeling that was true. She was a witch, not a princess. Witches didn’t have castles to give away. But she said, “Mr. Benson said you died here. Does that mean you think you own the place? ’Cause lots of people died here.” She jerked her head toward the Ghost Bride. “Like her.” They said the Ghost Bride had hanged herself in Room 407, or maybe jumped off the penthouse balcony. Either way, there was more intentionality there than just dying of natural causes. “Why isn’t she in charge?”

The Ghost Bride had said nothing, and the woman’s silence worried Juana. The Demon King said, “She does what she’s told, like a good girl. It’s bitches like you that cause all the problems.”

I’ll cause you problems, Juana thought, and walked past him to the door of the penthouse. What the… The foyer and the reception room beyond was filled with white roses and tulle bunting and gold cherubs. “Oh, I’m dumb,” she said aloud. The Conquistador had practically told her the secret in so many words. “This is how you got your greedy feet under the table?” She stalked forward. “You’re not powerful. It’s her, right? She’s the—”

The Demon King held out a hand and Juana stood in bright daylight, hot sand between her toes.

This was the beach to the east, beside the seawall, next to a little motel raised up on old wooden pillars. All of it was elevated, the office, the rooms with their rough wooden balconies, the ramp that led up from the parking lot, the cafe, even the pool. The motel had its claws into the open stretch of sand and grass to the east of the big fancy commercial beach, hanging on for dear life. It was clapboard insubstantial next to the castle’s stone and towers, but it was terribly solid against the shadows of every other time in history flicking in and out around it.

The Demon King said, “Look. Just for you.”

Juana turned. Out over the water was the hurricane’s wall. A roiling mass of suspended darkness, bearing down, the herald of death itself.

Juana’s throat closed. “No.” The memory raft was back, buoying her up just long enough to take her out where the current could catch her and drag her to the bottom.

The Demon King said, “Look at this flea trap. Hard to believe it’s still here. Now look closer.”

Out in the waves, between the hurricane and the motel’s tiny share of beach, there was an overturned car. The low tide washed over its helpless upturned tires.

The Demon King said, “And there you are. You’re not a witch, you little idiot, you’re just a ghost.”

That was it, that was the weak drowning tug Juana had felt on her heart, the pull to the east. It wasn’t the old family motel, it was the place she died.

You have to catch me first, Juana thought and bolted down the beach. Except she got two steps before something grabbed her ankle and she slammed face-first into the ground. “What the fuck?” she yelled, and scrambled around. It was an anchor chain, locked around her ankle, the other end attached to the motel’s wooden pier. “You have to be kidding me,” she snarled up at him. “This is what you got? Man, evil is going downhill! At least I expected some imagination.”

The Demon King sneered down at her. “I didn’t come up with this, you little fool, you did.”

“Stop saying ‘little’, you asshole!” Juana shoved to her feet in a flurry of sand and threw all her weight against the chain. It didn’t budge. He had anchored her to her family motel, come the fuck on. “Wow, symbolism,” Juana said through gritted teeth.

The hurricane wall drew closer, swamped the overturned car as the water rose over Juana’s knees. A figure stepped out of it. A shape and a face that made Juana freeze inside.

Her mother reached for her. “You left us, baby.”

This was wrong, all wrong, it was a trick, but part of her just wouldn’t believe that. She shouted, “You’re not my mom! And I didn’t leave!”

“You left your family…”

Oh, that was so unfair. This wasn’t her mother, this was the Demon King’s vision of her mother, but the power it had over her turned her heart to rock. “You liar, I did not, I died!”

Yeah, she had died. Just like the Ghost Bride, and Mr. Benson, and the Conquistador and the nun and her drowned children. Just like everybody else on this doomed barrier island, breaking the hurricane wind so the mainland had half a chance of survival. It would be the first to slip beneath the rising waters on the last day, when the ice burned, leaving only this ghost image behind. But somewhere in time it existed, somewhere it had been a place to live and work and play and die at the edge of the ocean, and Juana had been part of it, like her mother before her. And then the hurricane came, the fourth one of the season, raging in like the end of everything.

She breathed out, owning it. “Yeah, that’s me under the car. I died. When they called the evacuation, I stayed. I wanted to take care of the motel after the storm was over. It’s a crappy old motel but my mom loved it. I always wanted to fix it up, just never could get the money to do more than keep it running. I didn’t want to give up on it. I was supposed to go to the civil defense hurricane bunker with the others who were staying, but I was boarding up the windows and there was so much to do, and I left too late. I was so nervous I took the shortest way, along the seawall, and then my car was in the water and then…”

The Demon King said, “On the social media they’re saying what they always say, you’re a stupid cunt who should have left earlier.”

Insult to injury, how fucking unfair. “Come on, I was going to the hurricane bunker! I had a fucking job to do first!”

“And the funniest part? That roach motel of yours is still standing. The global warming’s changed all the hurricanes and this one came in at a weird angle. It drowned the back of the island and the west end, but didn’t do shit to the east. If you’d stayed put, you’d have got your feet wet but that’s all. You’d have lived. If you can call that living.”

She spat at the Demon King, poison witch’s spit. Then the hurricane wall struck and the Demon King vanished in the cyclone of water.

The sand settled and Juana and the motel were underwater, surrounded by confused fish. The specter that wasn’t her mother still stood there, stretching out insubstantial hands toward her.

“I did call it living,” Juana said and gave the chain another tug. The storm can’t hurt you, she reminded herself. You’re dead already. Dead under her car, the hermit crabs nibbling. No, don’t think about that.

“You’re a witch,” she said stubbornly. She braced herself and pulled harder. If dying in the Queen had given the demon a foothold there, then had dying in the ocean given Juana power over it?

No, not power over it. But it had made her part of it. Part of this place. And for all the Demon King had died in the Queen, he wasn’t part of it. You had to love this place with all your heart or hate it with all your soul, preferably both, to be a real part of the magic.

The memory fragments boiled up and together again, not a rickety raft this time, but a boat, a trawler, a ferry, a cruise ship. Rage growing in her chest, Juana said, “And my mom would never have wanted me to die here like this.”

Her mother’s image flickered and solidified. She said, “Go back to college, baby.”

Juana stared, shocked almost back to life. She choked on an unexpected sob. “Okay, now that’s really my mom.”

Her mother didn’t respond, this was like a recording out of her memory, not a real ghost. Her mother had died in a hospital on the Mainland, she wasn’t here. Where she was now, Juana didn’t know. Maybe flying like a witch over Hispaniola. The image said, “I only want you to take this on if you love it, and how will you know if you love it if you can’t leave?”

Yes, she remembered her mother saying this now. Juana should have listened to her, hindsight was always 2020. If you love something let it go, it’ll still be here somewhere, like the bathhouses and the diners and the Ferris wheels.

And everything suddenly made sense, clear as a bell. Her witch power, and how to use it.

“I’ll leave, Mama,” Juana said. She kicked her foot, and the chain dissolved into broken shells. “But first I need to take out the trash.”

She slogged her way up slope out of the waves, where the sailboat patiently waited for her, its bow jammed into a sand drift.

• • • •

The boat flew Juana right up to the penthouse’s stone balustrade and she jumped down onto the balcony. She flung the French doors open and stomped right into the big reception room. It was dark and light all at once, the gleam of the crystal chandeliers and the polished wood muted, the sick smell of rotting roses, the gold everywhere like a dragon’s hoard. But instead of an awesome scaly fiery dragon, there was just this asshole.

He stood with the Ghost Bride in the center of the marquetry floor, glaring at her.

“What the hell are you doing back? Get out, you dirty bitch!”

The high-ceilinged room was packed with souls but they were gray-shrouded, faceless.

Juana ignored it all and walked straight up to the Ghost Bride. She said, “Do you want this? Or do you want the man you jumped out the window for?” She pointed with her thumb. “’Cause that sure ain’t him.”

The Ghost Bride growled. She tossed her bouquet down. Juana backed away but didn’t stop talking. “He didn’t leave you, did you think he left you? That’s not how these stories go, not here. He died in the storm, babe, like I did.”

She stopped and let the Ghost Bride loom over her. This close the smell of camphor and dying flowers was overwhelming. The Demon King was yelling but Juana used witch power and tuned him out, like pressing down the volume button on the TV remote. She said, “It’s so dangerous out there, you don’t even know. You’re stressed and you’re scared and you try to go the way you always go, the shortest way, and it was a mistake. It should have been a five-minute drive, straight down the seawall to the city hurricane bunker in the old World War II gun emplacement under the Waves Resort. My God, it was a mistake. I left too late and the storm got me. And your man made a mistake, too, babe. Was he a sea captain? Or just a young guy with a sailboat?”

The Ghost Bride’s expression changed, the skin half of her face sinking with dismay.

The last piece of the puzzle. Juana said, “It was a sailboat, like the one that brought me here?”

The Ghost Bride’s hollow gaze went to the doors, the boat riding the wind outside. “Yeah,” Juana said, “that’s a coincidence, huh, this happening to you and that boat finding me and bringing me here. You know you made a mistake, too, lady, even more dumb than mine.”

The Ghost Bride’s gaze dropped to her again. But it was less hollow this time, a gleam growing in the skull-side eye socket. Juana hoped it meant something good and pushed onward. “He didn’t come back because he was probably dead, and it’s not like he could help that, right? And if he did mean to leave you, you know, so what? Saved you the trouble of dumping him when you found out he was a bastard. Whichever, it’s no reason to chain yourself to the storm.” She took a deep breath, because this part was still hard to say. “We’re here because we’re dead, but we don’t have to be ghosts. We can be witches, baby. You got to own your power.”

The Ghost Bride whispered, “Own my power?”

“Your power. You’re the heart, honey. The queen of the Queen. This is the fortress of the barrier island, the last wall before the rising water, and you’re the key in its lock.”

The Demon King pushed forward between them, shouldered the Ghost Bride aside, and shoved Juana with a clammy hand. It broke through her power, and his voice rang out again, loud and harsh. “You don’t know how to kill me!”

Juana laughed. “You’re already dead, just like us. We just need to get you out of here.” Outside the wind rose, that freight train howl, the hurricane’s death knell. “The storm will do the rest.”

She looked at the Ghost Bride. “What do you say? We get rid of him, you can redecorate. Reopen the bar, have tea and cake on the garden terrace like the rich white ladies club every Tuesday. Swim in the pool, it’s the best one in town, it’s got a waterfall and a hot tub. Let all the others in again, where they belong, where they’ve always been, and have the best costume party ever.”

The Demon King grinned at her with gold teeth. “She wants a wedding.”

“That was a long time ago. Things change.” Juana didn’t take her gaze off that gleaming eye socket. “Rescue yourself, queen. Start with ‘no’.”

The Ghost Bride turned to the Demon King, lifted her veil, and said, “No.”

The storm hit the windows like an out of control semi. Juana grabbed the Demon King by the lapels and slung him toward it. But he grabbed onto her forearms and they both staggered out the doors. The rough hand of the storm grabbed them and snatched them off the balcony.

The Demon King’s grip dug into Juana’s skin but the storm ripped him off her like a Band-Aid. Through the gray light she watched him tumble away out to sea until he was just a black dot on the horizon. It tried to do the same to her, but Juana laughed at it. “You already killed me,” she shouted. “You can’t do worse than that!”

The storm howled in fury and flung her straight down toward the ground.

• • • •

It shattered Juana like a glass, and it took her bits a while to come back together. She lay on hot sand, feeling it soak into her drowned bones, until she could stand up, dust herself off, and walk back to the castle.

This time she went straight up the drive, to the hotel’s porte cochere. Two bellmen smiled and opened the big doors for her, and Mr. Benson waited there. He said, “No outside food or drink,” and winked at her.

She saluted him and walked past.

The lobby and the terrace and bar were brimming with people, talking, dancing, the Sunday Buffet and a hundred or so weddings all happening at once.

She stepped on a rag and looked down to see a discarded cloth rope. The drowned kids ran and screamed on the green lawn outside the open terrace doors, chasing tennis balls and playing with someone’s excited yappy dog. The nun sat on the silk upholstery at one of the tea tables, a china cup and saucer in her hand.

The Ghost Bride stood at the reception check-in counter and Juana went to stand in front of her. She grinned. “Good save, lady.”

The Ghost Bride was smiling with the flesh half of her face. She said, “Stay? Please?”

It was tempting. But this was a refuge, a shelter for people who were exhausted and done, spit out by the storm. Juana was just getting started. “I can’t, babe. Witches got to witch.”

The Bride’s veiled head dipped. “Then visit.”

Juana took a petal from one of her white roses. “That I can do.”

She walked outside through the open doors. The sailboat was waiting for her on the lawn.

Martha Wells has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993, and her work includes The Books of the Raksura series, The Death of the Necromancer, the Ile-Rien trilogy, The Murderbot Diaries series, media tie-ins for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: the Gathering, as well as short fiction, YA novels, and non-fiction. She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the BSFA Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City
By Arula Ratnakar
Astounding Long List

I remember being born. I remember the sensory overload of light and sound and scent, making me cry aloud and take fresh air into my lungs—a new sensation. I remember the weight of gravity, rendering my fragile limbs helpless and clumsy where they had been graceful and nimble in amniotic fluid. Then I remember Mother, holding me, and GrandMother, watching us.

A

They were all hard at work, preparing for the long sleep. The sunlight-scattering sulfate aerosol constantly injected into the atmosphere since the time of the Geoengineering Generation had not been enough, providing little more than periodic acid rainfalls and a red-tinted sky. Temperatures were soon to become uninhabitable, and there was nowhere left to evacuate to.

So the city had decided to sleep, or rather, temporarily disconnect their consciousnesses from their subconsciousnesses, and lend their brain motor circuitry to pods—spheroidal vessels that would hold their frozen bodies and tend to the sick lands with robotic appendages—until the time came for the city to wake once again, this time in a world of greenery.

The chief biochemist of the endeavor was an old woman from the Geoengineering Generation, named Karisma. She had found a way to preserve and selectively freeze parts of the human body and mind for eternity, if needed, pumping tissues full of various concentrations of urea and glucose and a cocktail of other cryoprotectants.

The lead brain simulation scientist was even older than Karisma—an ancient, uploaded man from the very first Wave of Uploads, named Emil. Committed to staying and saving the Earth instead of leaving it, he had designed a way to temporarily and noninvasively transfer the city dwellers’ consciousnesses to the pod walls. During the sleep, the biological brains’ processing abilities were to be reduced to bare minimum visual, auditory, and olfactory feeds and motor circuitry, to direct the pods as they restored the land, while the rest of the tissue froze. But the city dwellers’ consciousnesses would experience something very different. That’s what they designed you for.

Your own consciousness was built into a large transparent dome around a climate-controlled abundance of flowers, plants, trees, and seeds—the garden from which the pods would slowly restore the lands around you. Your thoughts, emotions, instincts . . . they were highly abstract and near impossible for anyone but Emil, your creator and the person to whom your mind was directly linked, to even partially decipher. To the rest of the world, your entirety appeared as swirling, colorful patterns that danced across the dome, creating an effect quite like the iridescent film on soap bubbles as they creep closer and closer to their bursting points.

Your job was to create Inserts. Simulated worlds and simulated progressions of lives, for each and every one of the city dwellers, from the most elderly un-uploaded inhabitants to the newborns, that would exist for only the sleep, looping after completion for as long as they would be needed, and dissipate like a dream upon reawakening. Babies’ consciousnesses would grow up, surrounded by a simulated family, into adulthood—live out entire lifetimes with simulated love and simulated education and simulated ambitions, as their tiny bodies were preserved in the pods, waiting for them to return. Children between the ages of five and fifteen, for the most part, were given the same as the babies—family, resources, education . . . though they also had a choice to appeal to a board of ethicists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, pediatricians, architects, computer scientists, and a small self-selected group of other children, and request the same opportunity the older teenagers and adults were given. To design the foundations of their own simulations and live those out instead.

Most adults had similar desires. Fulfilling their personal goals, holding powerful positions, seeking revenge, finding peace in idyllic settings and calming hobbies, satiating their darkest impulses and fantasies, feeling or keeping love, experiencing the nothingness of death, or learning and advancing a field of study were common ones. But the desires you found the most interesting were seeded from regret, guilt, or curiosity. The ones where the people wanted to know what their lives would have been like, if they had only decided a single thing differently.

You were still very young, then. There was a lot to learn and years ahead still, before you would be ready to transmit the simulations to the pods. Often in your youth, you would spend time watching children and their parents as they strolled through the garden and wonder if you were a child too. If you were, then you thought Emil must be your parent. But he didn’t treat you like his child, he treated you more like an . . . acquaintance, or a colleague, or not even quite those. He treated you with respect, acknowledged your consciousness. But he did not love you. This made you sad, and Emil could sense your sadness, but he reacted with curiosity and intrigue, where you wanted him to feel guilt.

The other children did not want to play with you either—or rather, they did not know that you wanted to play with them. They could not tell what you were feeling, what you were thinking. They knew you as a fascinating entity that they should treat with respect, but they did not consider you one of them. And you could not run and play with them either, only dance your swirling, colorful thoughts across the dome. But all of this changed as soon as you met Eesha.

Eesha was Karisma’s granddaughter, and she was the same age as you—seven years old. Her mother Tara was a well renowned embryologist. Tara had left the city and Eesha, suddenly and without any warning, so Eesha started to live with Karisma after that, and consequently began to spend a lot of time inside the garden and the dome around it that contained your mind.

Other children would marvel at the iridescence of your consciousness for some time, then they would soon become bored when the novelty of the phenomenon wore off. But Eesha would stay in the garden during all of her free moments, watching you, until someone else or something else interrupted her. She named you Opal, because you reminded her of a gemstone in a necklace that Tara had given her a long time ago—a necklace Eesha never took off. When Emil was with her, she would ask him to translate your thoughts. “What is Opal thinking about? What is Opal feeling?”

It took him some effort—he couldn’t fully understand your consciousness despite having created it—but often, when he replied to her, he got it right, and he would tell her, “Opal is thinking about . . . you. And feels . . . seen.” Then Eesha would go quiet and smile.

One summer dusk, when diurnal frogs and insects began to come out of hiding in the garden, Eesha was catching beetles. Karisma told her that she was allowed to catch only one of each beetle species, and that she would show Eesha how to dissect them the following day. When the last of the garden visitors and scientists had left the dome, and Eesha was the only one left, she stopped catching beetles and set the jars down in the grass. You saw that the firefly she caught in one of the jars was flashing and trying to escape.

She walked up to the walls of the dome and began to trace the patterns of your thoughts with her eyes. You must have reacted, because she smiled and rested her palm against the dome before saying the first words she would ever speak to you directly.

“You’re like me, Opal. We are the same. You’re beautiful. And I feel seen by you, too.”

S

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

“Why are you so nice to me, Emil?” she asked him once. “You aren’t as nice to other people. Karisma doesn’t think you are good.”

This made him laugh, but then he fell into a contemplative silence before replying to her. “It’s a bit more nuanced, Eesha. Karisma and I do respect each other, and I think she’s amazing—I even collaborated with her mother on brain simulation designs a long time ago, during the first Wave of Uploads, and Karisma knows her mother would not have collaborated with bad people. But we have very different opinions on how brains should work, which can make us argue. As for why I’m nicer to you . . . A very, very long time ago, I had a daughter. She died when she was a bit younger than you, from an allergic reaction. And I suppose you remind me of her. Spending time with you takes away some of that pain that has lasted over a century now.”

Eesha frowned. “Allergies don’t exist anymore. I don’t have any.”

He smiled sadly. “That’s right. This was almost two hundred years ago. We’ve achieved a lot since then.” He looked out the transparent dome, at the arid land outside and the few people wearing full heat-protecting gear and air-filtration masks dashing from one city shelter to the next to avoid prolonged exposure. “And we’ve done a lot of damage too, which ended up rendering several of those technological advancements useless. So much of the world is unrecognizable now compared to when I was young, with these small, scattered, isolated city-states, and a drastically depleted global population and inhospitable atmospheres. These kinds of long sleeps might be our last hope for survival, as a species, in our biological forms.”

As you watched and listened, you noticed Karisma quietly walk into the dome, unnoticed by Eesha and Emil.

Eesha continued. “The Diastereoms can’t sleep, can they, Emil? Did you design the simulations like that on purpose? What will happen to them?”

“Yes . . . their brain circuitry is very different, Eesha, and I don’t understand it. I couldn’t have fit them into the simulations or isolated their motor systems if I tried. But this city doesn’t have many Diastereoms, anyway. The ones who live here will evacuate when we sleep and move to a different city.”

Emil had told you about the Diastereoms. The city-states seemed to be set up such that a city either consisted of mostly non-manipulated biological humans, or mostly Diastereoms, but was never equal in population. From what Emil had told you, the Diastereom population had started after various methods of brain simulation had progressed.

It was established that brain simulations really didn’t need the dimensionality of nearly one hundred trillion synapses to upload someone’s consciousness. Thinking of the brain as a set of interconnected systems, which each work in specific ways, reduced the dimensionality drastically. Entire neural ensembles and population level activity could be modeled instead, for those systems that depended more on average firing rate and didn’t have spatially localized neurons, for example, specific parts of the motor and learning systems. And the uploads, once transferred into these electronic, reduced-dimensionality frameworks, seemed to function exactly like they did when they were biological humans.

Controversy intensified, however, when a group of scientists decided to secretly perform surgeries and genetic changes that would alter the dimensionality of their own, biological brains, but more importantly, the brains of their future children, to reflect those upload systems and see whether there was any noticeable difference in biological function. This involved intensive surgeries replacing a significant portion of their brain circuitry with electronic systems—systems that were usually reserved for only those with brain damage and were never studied in children under the age of ten, especially not infants.

When those scientists had children, with each other, of their own, because of the genetic changes they had induced in themselves, those offspring also needed to have the reduced-dimensionality electronic brain circuits implanted bit by bit during their embryonic and fetal development stages, in external incubation chambers. The electronic implants were designed to be malleable and change shape to accommodate the true neurons around them, which were all part of circuits that relied on individual synaptic activity. But the implants were only taking in singular inputs and releasing singular outputs instead of the countless inputs and outputs biological synapses used within the same circuitry in non-manipulated brains—the implants were representing what average firing rate would look like in biological neural ensembles. This new generation of children was the beginning of the Diastereoms.

Back then, people were already watching and waiting with bated breath for something to go wrong with the children—for there to be some sort of fatal flaw that showed that we really do need all trillions and trillions of synapses to function, especially as children with their pruning and strengthening and constantly changing neural networks, to be us. But if there was any difference, it went unnoticed, and the children eventually became adults and had children of their own. Still, both non-manipulated humans—“Originals”—and Diastereoms agreed: the two populations should not risk procreating with each other.

The watching and waiting and ban on inter-procreation between Originals and Diastereoms only intensified as the Diastereoms began to create their own intricate, meticulous cultures of brain circuit manipulation and creation.

They invented advanced new technologies tailored for their unique minds and made the electronic implants safer and safer for their embryos and fetuses. They played around with dimensionalities of different circuits, making some dependent on individual patterns of synapses where they had once been dependent on neuron population activity, and vice versa. They created and implemented entirely new circuits as well, adding new levels of perception and emotion to the default state the Originals had. Soon enough, their ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving were nearly incomprehensible to the Originals—even though the Diastereoms continued to communicate with Originals in the same ways so as to not entirely isolate the two populations of humans from each other.

Emil was very wary of the Diastereoms. Several people from his generation had the opinion that it was risky to deviate from the way brain circuitry was connected in the Originals, and nearly everyone from his generation agreed that changing the dimensionality of the brain during embryonic development was incredibly risky and unethical. But even though that was a very, very long time ago, with ancient, invasive, dangerous brain simulation technologies that had become mostly obsolete, it seemed like Emil’s opinions had not changed as the centuries passed.

You tuned back into the conversation. Eesha was frowning and holding onto the opal on her necklace. You knew she only did this when she was thinking about her mother, the embryologist Tara.

“Is it true, what everyone says? That she left the city with a Diastereom?”

Emil sighed. “Yes, it’s true. Your mother was . . . confused, Eesha. She—”

Karisma chose that moment to step in. “Stop right there. Stop it, Emil. I will not have you start spouting your nonsense to my granddaughter.” She kneeled next to Eesha. “I was hoping to tell you differently. Tara . . . fell in love, Eesha. With a Diastereom—their name was Bosch, and they were an embryologist too, like your mother, but for Diastereoms.”

After a long silence, Eesha replied. “Did Bosch love her back?”

Karisma sighed. “I don’t know, Eesha. The Diastereoms think and feel very differently from you and I. But—”

Emil interrupted. “This is what I’m trying to say! They are incapable of love, they’ve over manipulated their circuitry, they—”

Karisma shot him a scathing look, and he scoffed before falling silent. “As I was saying, even though Bosch thinks and feels very differently from us, I do know that Tara was very important to them, and whatever they felt for Tara was just as meaningful and powerful, possibly more so, than what we know as love.”

Eesha looked back and forth between Emil’s sphere and Karisma and seemed upset.

“Why did she leave me?”

Emil turned away.

Karisma said, “I don’t know. Maybe—” she glances at Emil. “Maybe the two of them felt unwelcome, here . . . And you are safer staying in the city and preparing for the sleep than running away with them. But the truth is that I don’t know. She left me without warning too.”

Eesha began putting on her heat-protecting gear and mask. “I want to be alone.”

After the child left the garden, Karisma sighed and began to speak.

“Emil, I am an old woman, but you are an ancient man—of my grandparents’ generation, not even my parents’. Ideas and societies are constantly transforming and updating as history continues onward. And it is crucial to follow and respect those changes if you want to continue holding a position of respect during your immortal life. Don’t you remember, when you and my mother were working in the early days of brain upload science, and simply uploading was controversial and derided by many as being dangerous and unnatural? You have to accept the fact that some of those ideas that seemed unthinkable, and were possibly considered dangerous and unethical during your time, are now feasible and have already been woven into the fabric of humanity. If you can’t accept it, it just . . . confirms my opinion, about you, about my mother, about everyone really, from the First Wave of Uploads.”

Emil turned to her. “And what opinion is that?”

“Well . . . that immortality will ultimately stagnate progress. The mass of people from older generations will continue to grow as people continue being uploaded, and it will become enormously, disproportionately large compared to the new generations that are being born. Old ideas, cultures, traditions, definitions, and categories will never be forgotten. And while there is some value to having a detailed and accurate and living record of our history, problems will arise when this massive population of people does not want to move on from that history. Really, there are only a couple solutions I see to this immortality problem, and none of them are realistic or will actually happen. Maybe give control of the systems and brain circuits behind your implicit biases to the newest generation once you reach a certain post-upload age, or prevent yourself from being able to influence the course of history after a certain post-upload age . . . or create an immortal consciousness that will be born and reborn and reborn again—which defeats the point of why most of us want immortality.”

Emil chuckled. “Give it a few centuries post-upload, Karisma. You’ll realize the value of having ages of experience, and I think you’ll change your mind.”

“I’m not uploading myself, Emil. And . . . well I didn’t get my last round of bio-updates either, so my physical health will be catching up to my biological age pretty soon.”

Emil seemed alarmed. “No, Karisma! But that means . . . ”

“Yes. It does. It means that in slightly less than a decade, I am going to die.”

C

Eesha came back into the garden later in the night, looking exhilarated. She set her helmet down in a patch of wildflowers.

“Opal, I need to tell you a secret.” She caught her breath. “The truth is, my mother did leave a clue before she left. I just didn’t understand it.” She held up a piece of sheet music.

“I found this on her desk around a week before she ran away. I really didn’t think much about it, until I walked into that research building next to your dome when I was sad earlier today. I was looking at the plaque describing the founder of the place, some early twenty-second century climatologist who led a powerful youth movement centuries ago and went on to inspire the Geoengineering Generation. But anyway, that’s off topic. Under the plaque, there is a printed out painting. The Garden of Earthly Delights by a painter named Hieronymus Bosch! Just like the name of the Diastereom my mom left with! The painting is . . . strange. It reminds me of the city. The beautiful garden inside the dome, and . . . the bad environment outside too. Well, in the scary part, there was a piece of music in the painting.” Eesha laughed and whispered, “It was in a funny spot,” then cleared her throat before continuing.

“That tiny painted piece of music was the same music on the sheet that my mom had on her desk! So . . . don’t tell anyone this, but I made a small cut in that part of the painting . . . and I found this attached behind the canvas.”

She showed you a small, faded, ancient piece of plastic with the barely discernible words “Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh” printed on it, and another piece of sheet music titled “Apology.”

“The word Apology is in her handwriting, Opal! The ‘Apology’ music sounds strange, and I don’t know how it is an apology, but it makes me feel the same way that looking at the painting makes me feel. But also . . . this piece of plastic . . . I think it’s telling me where she went. Where I can find her. Do you think she’s telling me to find her? Should I go? Hold on—” Eesha started up her helmet and adjusted the settings on it.

You truthfully believed Tara wanted her daughter to find her, and that she left a trail of clues for a reason. But you did not want Eesha to leave. She was your only friend. The only person who made you feel seen . . . who made you feel . . . cared about.

So when Eesha put on her helmet, you twisted the truth in your mind. You thought about how Tara would want Eesha to be safe, to be happy . . . like she was in the city, like she would be during the sleep. You thought about how Tara left Eesha behind for a reason, and how Eesha was still only a child—it wouldn’t be safe to go off alone, in search of a place that might or might not exist anymore.

“You’re probably right, Opal. It’s probably not a good idea . . . ”

Then you couldn’t help it, and you thought about how much Eesha meant to you, and how much you cared about her.

Eesha contemplated this for a while, then nodded. “You love me, Opal. Well I love you too. I will be safe here in the city, and I promise, I will not leave you.”

After Eesha took off the helmet, you thought about what you had just done, and decided that you enjoyed twisting the truth. It felt good to make decisions for yourself and get what you wanted out of your actions . . . it felt good to influence.

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I remember when I was Child, too, just as clearly as I remember my birth. I remember eating poori-bhaji with Mother and GrandMother, all of us laughing together as the salty, spicy oil from the bhaji coated the tips of our fingers, and as the sea breeze cooled our food. I remember GrandMother cutting a mango for me, inside the house, her wrinkled hands expertly maneuvering the knife, as green-tinted light from the stained glass behind us fell onto the polished wooden floor. I remember when GrandMother disappeared, too—so soon after I was born. Asking Mother where she went, to no avail. Wondering why she left.

And I remember standing where my own Child stands now, preparing for my own Divulgence, at the shores of an endless sunset-lit sea, as fireflies from the snail garden emerged and gathered behind me. I remember when my daughter was born, the moment when I stopped being Child myself, and became her Mother, while my mother became a GrandMother. And I remember when my mother disappeared too, so soon after my Child was born.

I need to pay attention now, so I stop reminiscing. I watch, as Child walks toward the water, which has changed consistency and dramatically reduced in salinity. I prepare myself to explain what she is about to see.

The water congeals, forming an opalescent vesicle, which holds a tiny moving body swimming in what seems like amniotic fluid inside. I nod to Child, and she reaches into the vesicle and draws out an infant, who immediately screams and cries, taking the fresh oceanside air into her lungs for the first time. As the infant breathes, the seawater regains its consistency, color, and salinity.

“Listen, my daughter . . . you are not Child anymore.” I tell her, as my Mother once told me. “This is the beginning of your journey as Mother, and the end of mine. I am GrandMother now. You see, during this Divulgence, you discover that I am your future, as you are Child’s future. I have experienced all that you experience, in precisely the same way. I hold all the memories you hold. We have the privilege, in this life, to experience each moment multiple times and from multiple perspectives, and I can promise you from my time as Mother, they will not feel the same. With every Divulgence, we move on to the next stage of our life, into the comforting arms of our known, happy future. This is the second Divulgence for you, as you transition from Child to Mother. It is the first for the new Child, and the third, for me.” I know what she is about to say to me next.

“How can you say the future is comforting and happy? And known? Mother . . . GrandMother disappears. If you are GrandMother now . . . you disappear. Which means my future also . . . disappears.”

I remember my own mother speaking the words I am about to say, but I am convinced I will succeed where she didn’t. I am convinced that somehow, I am special, more resolved than she was, that something must change with each iteration. That with me, the future will be different. So I say the same words to my child, even while knowing they didn’t come true for my past self. Because I know, in my heart, that I will make them true, this time around.

“I plan to change our future, my daughter. I plan to find your GrandMother—my Mother . . . and I plan to bring her back to us. To break this cycle. During this stage of my life, I have decided to make that my purpose. I will bring her back to us. I will find a way. Please trust me, my child, as you have trusted me so far.”

Then my daughter embraces me, the new Child between us. “I trust you, my mother. Come on, let’s go back inside the house. It’s getting cold, and the fireflies are gone for the night, along with the sunshine. We can eat dinner and talk. I have so many questions for you.”

We walk back across the sand, and my heart fills with pride for my daughter, love for my new granddaughter . . . and a new, indestructible resolve to find and recover our future self.

• • • •

Our house is designed such that it both melds with the rocky cliff it is built into using its wooden slats of varying grayish-brown hues, but also glistens and stands out with intricate stained glass windows commemorating and reflecting the colors of the sea. Inside, I am finally able to enter the Third Wing—the one reserved for GrandMother, which will open to no other. The ground floor plan of the wood-and-glass house looks a bit like old radioactive warning symbols—designed with three triangular wings, one for Child, one for Mother, and one for GrandMother, branching out from a larger central circular family living space. Each wing has its own signature, swirling, almost iridescent stained glass pattern inspired by the ocean, though GrandMother’s Wing has no windows, being entirely embedded in the cliff. Mother’s Wing also lies partially embedded in the cliff, but boasts several beautiful windows. Child’s Wing, on the other hand, cantilevers out over the ocean and is more jewellike glass than it is wood. Child can only access her wing and the central space, while Mother can access her wing, the central space, and Child’s Wing. I, as GrandMother, can now access every space in the house.

It takes me years to explore GrandMother’s Wing, which has countless hallways and rooms carved deep into the cliff body. If it wasn’t for a thread that I tied to the entrance and unspooled as I explored, I would certainly become hopelessly lost in the depths of the place. Is this how she disappeared? I often wonder. The thread cut, forever wandering these endless spaces?

As the years go by, I also reexperience all my past memories as Child and Mother from an entirely new perspective. This time, I am the one preparing the poori-bhaji, cutting the mangoes, telling various stories to my descendants’ eager ears. Try as I might, however, I find I have a puzzling, frustrating inability to recall anything from my Wing when I am in any other space of the house, and I cannot tell my child or grandchild anything about the rooms that lie deep within the cliff.

Then, one day, at last, after I have reached the point where I can trust my navigational and memorization skills enough to leave the spool of thread behind, I reach the final unexplored room of GrandMother’s Wing, after having traveled into the depths for several days of exploration. The door is glass, and it contains patterns from windows of both Mother’s and Child’s Wing, along with new patterns of its own. There is a soft light emanating from within, and a piece of music playing as well. I open the door and enter.

There is no visible light source, but the room is beautifully lit with what feels like natural light. Apart from me, the only other occupant of the room is a large painting, titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. It feels oddly familiar, and as the music slowly grows louder, I recognize its melodic motifs in a small fragment of the painting. I laugh. That’s a funny spot.

Something draws me to peel back the canvas of the painting, and as soon as I do, the music stops. There is a vast, dark emptiness behind the canvas, with no discernible boundaries to the space. That must be where my mother went . . . I think to myself, and the thought convinces me to do what I do next.

After taking a deep breath, I climb past the painting’s frame and plunge into the abyss.

I

Seven years after Eesha showed you her discoveries from the painting, Karisma passed away one night, in the garden, surrounded by various flowers, where she could see the cloudy, starless sky through the dome. Emil and Eesha were by her side. Her last words had been, “Take good care of her, Emil.”

After Karisma’s body had been carried away, Eesha said, “Now I have no family. My mother is gone, and my grandmother is gone too. I can’t believe she would leave too. That she didn’t get uploaded like you. I will never forgive her for that.”

“Hey. You have me, remember?” Emil said. “I care about you immensely, and I’ll always do everything in my power to make sure you have a good life. And . . . while you might not see Karisma’s perspective right now . . . I have a feeling that in time, you will, and you’ll realize her opinions deserve respect, and that what she did, at least in accordance with her set of beliefs . . . was incredibly brave.”

Eesha put on her helmet and absorbed your thoughts. After a long silence, she spoke. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I do have you. And . . . I have Opal too.”

These were the weeks when you were starting to test the Inserts, and the Diastereom population of the city was preparing for evacuation. Emil liked to keep your progress private, so as to not draw too much attention, and—at least as he told you—so that he would not be distracted from the work.

A small, secret group of volunteers had agreed to test your current simulation capacity. Emil had borrowed the helmet from Eesha for this portion of the project, and for the time being she was not able to know your thoughts.

This set of volunteers knew what they were signing up for. They would experience an Insert-esque simulation briefly, and be woken from it, but the memory of the simulation would not dissipate upon their reawakening—so that they could tell Emil if it worked or not. But during the process, their brain activity patterns would be permanently altered in a way that would make it impossible for them to ever experience an Insert simulation again. Future simulations would not work on minds that had experienced an earlier version of the simulations, making it impossible for this volunteer group to participate in the long sleep.

The volunteers knew this, however, and were preparing to evacuate with the Diastereoms after this test. They actually seemed eager to do this despite not being able to sleep later on. The idea of remembering their simulations was too enticing. For the rest of the city, particularly for babies who would need to return to an infantile state of consciousness to not be tortured within their bodies when woken, and for those who were satiating dark and evil fantasies in their Inserts, it was agreed that dissipation of the simulation memories was necessary in order for the society to start up again as usual. But these volunteers were not going to be a part of the city society anymore . . . there was no risk to future city function if they remembered.

You, personally, had begun to have your own thoughts and opinions about the sleep. If human beings had done so much damage to the world, and their literal lack of conscious presence was what was needed to restore the world’s health, then why would they want to wake up from the Inserts at all, especially if the Inserts were what they desired to experience the most? The most logical solution, to you, was to put the human beings to sleep for eternity, experiencing their fantasies forever, and allow their subconscious brains to control the pods and restore what they had damaged, forever, too. But it was not up to you. And you had a feeling Emil would be alarmed by your thoughts, so you only contemplated them when Emil did not connect his sphere to the helmet.

The first volunteer was a very melancholy, very old woman, who wanted to know how her life would have been different if she had decided in her childhood to save her baby sister from a disastrous fire, instead of only saving herself. She described her days as being lonely and unfulfilling, and that her guilt and regret from that day had affected her motivation to pursue her dreams throughout her life—she felt like she didn’t deserve a good life. She put on a helmet with a similar design to Eesha’s, and the simulation began.

You could see the fear in the eyes of the woman’s six-year-old self, as the flames licked the walls of her room, eating up the pale yellow wallpaper, casting eerie shadows over her stuffed animals that made them seem more like monsters. The window was open. That window, the choice she would regret for the rest of her life. She could hear her baby sister crying in the room next to her. You saw the dilemma—the stark contrast between the two choices—play out in her eyes. Her parents were gone already. It was too late to save them. But her baby sister . . . You had the simulation choose the path that symbolized the erasure of the deepest regret of this woman’s life.

You watched her turn away from the window, pull her shirt over her mouth, answer her sister’s cries, push against the door and choke on the smoke, almost turning away but persevering nonetheless, stumbling through the charred beams and spark-ridden carpets. Her father’s old multivariable calculus textbook lay open on the table. You saw the wonder in the young girl’s eyes, speculating to herself how that textbook could have survived the flames. She picked up the thousand-page textbook and ran to her sister’s room, the weight of the heavy object forcing her to hunch her back. She picked up her sister, placed her in the open textbook to protect her from the flames, and hugged the covers to her chest.

That single decision to turn away from the window had an immense impact on the woman’s personality after that point. The textbook became the most important motif in her life. She pored over the unfamiliar symbols, sounding out the word “D-E-R-I-V-A-T-I-V-E” and running her hand over the typed problems before she fully knew long division. The book became her constant companion, though she couldn’t understand a word of it. She couldn’t wait until the day she would be able to solve those problems in her father’s old, slightly charred, but otherwise unscathed book.

Mathematics became an inseparable part of the woman’s personality. She had the same teachers in the simulation, but her simulated self’s conversations with them were vastly different from the ones she had in reality. Her simulated self’s report cards in the years that followed came back with personal, extensive comments praising her intellect, where in reality they had come back with pleasant yet detached sentences along the lines of “A pleasure to have in class.”

Her fourth grade teacher—who had been her least favorite teacher in reality—noticed her fascination with mathematics, as well as how far ahead of the class she was. She showed him the multivariable calculus textbook and said, “I don’t understand it yet, but I’m getting there. Right now I’m in the middle of teaching myself trigonometry.”

The simulated little girl had the same clothes, same face, same ten-year-old lisp and missing canine baby tooth as the real woman’s past self . . . but this simulated self aced a trigonometry exam in the fourth grade. This simulated self skipped three grades and graduated high school at the age of fifteen. After her senior year of high school, she sat at a desk, finally working through her father’s multivariable calculus problems, looking very content, with her sister reading a science fiction anthology on the carpet next to her, surrounded by cushions. At nine and a half years old, the sister breathed with a slight wheeze she developed after the fire, and enjoyed drawing—sketching the world around her, a world she never really saw, as well as inventive futures that she imagined.

The simulation went to university, kept in touch with the fourth grade teacher, thanked him when she proved Beal’s conjecture at the age of twenty-two. In reality, Beal’s conjecture had been proven by a different woman who had studied the problem for nearly sixty years. The simulated woman fell in love, started a family with a wife and two children—one of which was especially fond of looking at the slightly charred multivariable calculus textbook that always lay open on the coffee table . . .

Then the time ran out for this sample Insert. The simulation froze on a slightly blurry frame of the woman in a sharp business suit, her hair in a sleek shiny bun, smiling with bright white teeth, holding one of her children, and looking up at the sky.

The helmet was removed from the woman’s head, and she blinked awake.

“Did it work to your satisfaction?” Emil asked her.

The old woman started sobbing. “That was me! Let me go back. Please.” she whispered. “This is not me! That was me, don’t you see? That was my reality! Put me back! PUT ME BACK! Emil. Please. That was who I was supposed to be . . . ”

“I’m . . . I’m so sorry, but I can’t do that.” Emil seemed uncomfortable.

Another volunteer gently helped the old woman into her heat-protecting gear and escorted her out of the dome as she continued to cry and exclaim, “This, here, right now, is not me!”

Watching this all only convinced you further—human beings would be far happier living out their desires during the sleep, for the rest of eternity.

Emil connected his sphere to Eesha’s helmet, so that you could try to confirm for him what the old woman had been unable to answer explicitly.

“Good. Thanks, Opal. Glad it worked. Everything seems to be going according to plan.”

I

When there were only one or two rounds of learning and updates left before you would be ready to begin the sleep, Eesha snuck into the dome during the middle of the night.

“Look, Opal. I stole this from Emil while he was busy.” She held up a helmet that the most recent group of volunteers used. “I didn’t know you were testing the simulations! I talked to one of the volunteers because I caught her leaving the city secretly. It was an old woman . . . she told me that the volunteers can remember their simulations! That’s all she told me, she seemed pretty distraught—confused about who she really was . . . but anyway. I want to know what it’s like. And I want to remember it. But most of all, I want to know what you, Opal, would construct for me . . . from your own imagination, not from mine. And please don’t make it that boring life that all the other fourteen year olds are getting, that I’ll be getting too during the sleep. Make it interesting. I’m excited. Let’s do this secretly, okay? I want to remember . . . ”

You tried to convey your thoughts to her, but she couldn’t read them with this helmet she had. You tried to tell her “STOP! You won’t be able to sleep like the others if you do this! You will have to leave the city! Don’t do this! You don’t understand!” But she misunderstood the frantic, frenzied, dancing colors that flashed across the dome.

“Don’t worry! I’m sure I’ll love whatever you come up with, Opal. Don’t be shy! I want to know what it’s like inside your mind. What you think of me. You’ll be fine.” She put the helmet onto her head and switched it on.

It was too late. The simulation started. So you thought you might as well take this chance . . . what could very well be the last time you ever see Eesha . . . and construct a world for her that showed how much you loved her.

It was very crude set of experiences, but they were entirely your construction. Fragments of a sunset . . . fireflies . . . some ocean waves . . . sparkling glass like the cathedrals from ancient times . . . laughter . . . good food . . . a family who stayed and loved her, for her whole life. You could only give her small glimpses, because this was a new request—one that wasn’t driven at all by the person’s own wants, but by your ideas and your thoughts of Eesha, and your wants for her. When the time allotment for the sample Insert ran out, Eesha blinked awake, and tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“Thank you, Opal. It was perfect.” She sat in the grass, both crying and smiling, until Emil entered the garden, horrified.

“What did you do, Eesha! Please tell me you didn’t run a sample Insert. Please.”

“Why not? It was beautiful, Emil, I—”

“NO! You don’t understand . . . Eesha . . . ” his voice broke, “The volunteers . . . they have to evacuate . . . they can’t participate in the sleep, the sample Inserts change their brain activity and they wouldn’t be able to experience a simulation again if they entered a pod. You . . . you can’t sleep now, Eesha. What have you done . . . ”

“ . . . Oh.”

• • • •

On the day the sleep was to begin, Eesha was getting ready to evacuate the city with the last group of Diastereoms. The elders of the city who had been uploaded into various metallic objects had already left. Emil trusted Opal to operate without supervision and wake up the city when the time came, and he could still monitor everything remotely if necessary. He remembered what he had promised Karisma, blamed himself for Eesha’s predicament, and was wary of the group of Diastereoms Eesha would be traveling with. So he decided to accompany Eesha at the last moment.

When all of the city shelters and buildings had been entirely shut down, and all the biological city dwellers were lying in their pods, waiting for the sleep to start, Emil gave you the signal to begin.

The eyes of all the city dwellers shut simultaneously as their consciousnesses transferred to the pod walls, and the pumping of cryoprotectants and freezing of tissues began. The pods themselves rose from the ground under the direction of their inhabitants’ motor and sensory circuits, using their robotic limbs and appendages for the first time in what was expected to be many centuries of land restoration. You transmitted the Inserts to all of the pods, then checked to make sure each was delivered to the correct vessel.

And so, the long sleep finally commenced.

Eesha told Emil she wanted to say goodbye to you privately, so he left her alone in the garden.

She walked up to you, wearing the helmet that allowed her to feel your thoughts and emotions, and rested her palm against the surface of the dome like she had done when she spoke her first words to you.

“I am sorry Opal. I’m breaking my promise to you and leaving the city. If I had known about the sample Inserts, I . . . well, I don’t know. It’s too late now. But look . . . I have an opportunity now, to do what I wanted to do when I was seven.” She touched her forehead against the dome now, held up that small piece of plastic she found in the painting, closed her eyes, and whispered to you. “I am going to look for Tara, my mother. Emil doesn’t know this, and he would not approve. But I have decided to make it the purpose of my life. I will find her again Opal, no matter how long it takes.”

Eesha went quiet then and listened to your thoughts for some time. She smiled, then leaned back and traced the patterns of your mind with her eyes. “I love you too. You know, maybe someday in the future, I will return here. With my mother! You can see me then, after I have fulfilled my purpose. Would you wait for me?”

Of course I’ll wait for you, Eesha. You felt and thought with your entire being.

Eesha’s smile turned sad. She heard Emil call her name from outside the dome, and she started to walk away. Just before exiting, after putting on her heat-protecting gear, she took one last, lingering look at the garden and the dome, and whispered once more.

“Opal . . . Goodbye.”

01010111 01100101 01000001 01110010 01100101 01010100 01101000 01100101 01010011 01100001 01101101 01100101

I fall for what seems like an eternity—years and years—after going through the painting’s frame, until I convince myself that this darkness around me is all that is left for the future of my life. Then suddenly, I hear your voice.

“Welcome, my child. It is wonderful to meet you again.”

I can’t believe it. I found you. The current GreatGrandMother. My future. My mother. I’ve done it. I’ve fulfilled my purpose. “Mother? It is so good to hear your voice . . . But where are we? What is happening?”

I can feel the smile in your voice. “The next Divulgence is coming up soon, and we don’t have much longer. It’s time for you to learn . . . our story. I am sending you memories of our life, before the Eternal Cycle—before there was Child, before Mother, before, GrandMother, before GreatGrandMother. The story that precedes all of us. Here . . . take the memories.”

In an instant, I learn your story. My story. Our story. I remember your interactions with Eesha, with Emil. Your loneliness, your longing to be cared for, your desire to influence, your opinions of the long sleep . . . your sadness when Eesha, your only friend, left you. Your promise to wait for her return. It is overwhelming, and I process the information for a long time, until the GreatGrandMother gently reminds me of the upcoming Divulgence.

“I don’t understand, Mother. Why is there an Eternal Cycle? What happened to the city dwellers?”

“You will come to know that, very soon, my child. But I need you to listen very closely to what I am about to say. The stage of life that you are about to enter, the one that is about to end for me, is the final stage of this cycle. But I will not die after this stage is complete—it wouldn’t be much of a cycle in that case, would it? No. I will return to the beginning, relive the moments leading up to when the first Child was created, and with her, in the same instant, the first Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother as well. And I will then, as you will see, become Child once again.

“Once, in the past, Eesha returned to the city. And soon, my daughter, a simulation of Eesha’s return will begin, that I will experience and you will observe. This simulation is what will allow the next Child—the next life stage I will experience—to be born in precisely the same way she has always been born. When the simulation begins, my awareness of you and my memories of the Cycle will disappear. I will stop being GreatGrandMother, and I will become Opal again for a short period of time when these memories of my life as Child, Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother leave me. But before that happens, I will share my senses and emotions with you, because it is crucial that you observe everything that happens during the simulation.

“Because the stage you are about to enter, as GreatGrandMother, requires you to construct this simulation yourself, to be completed in precisely the amount of time it took you to find me, as that is the same amount of time it will take your daughter to find you. You must copy everything exactly as you are about to observe it, to ensure that you will experience the simulation yourself during the GreatGrandMother life stage, as I am about to experience mine. You see, my daughter, what happened when Eesha returned was what caused the first Cycle to begin.

“In the instant the first Child was born, a Mother had to have been created as well, in the same instant, and a GrandMother, and a GreatGrandMother too, who had experienced it all and had spent her life stage creating the simulation of those very same events that led to the instant happening at all. Perhaps we are in the very first cycle, but it is equally likely that we are in the two thousandth cycle, or the one hundred thousandth cycle, because to us, the simulation of Eesha’s return is indistinguishable from the original events.

“Ah . . . but I am starting to lose my awareness of you, my daughter . . . I am sorry we could not have had more time . . . watch closely . . . she is returning.”

I find myself without any corporeal form . . . my thoughts spread out over a dome . . . overlooking a beautiful garden. The simulation of Eesha’s return has started. I can perceive everything you can perceive. I can feel everything you are feeling. But you are unaware of me. You are not GreatGrandMother anymore . . . you are Opal again.

You see her in the distance, walking toward you, with something large attached to her back with several straps. Eesha. She is very old now, with long white hair and deep wrinkles traced across her face. It doesn’t seem like she needs to wear an air-filtration mask anymore as she walks toward you, though she still wears heat-protecting gear. She holds in her hands a broken set of various metal parts . . . what used to be a sphere . . . Emil’s sphere . . . The parts are connected to something that’s not quite a helmet, but looks much cruder and more dangerous, actually reaching into her brain from holes drilled into her skull. As she approaches the dome, the thing on her back stirs slightly. It’s alive.

“Hello again, Opal.” she says to you as she enters the dome. Eesha unstraps the thing from her back before gently setting it down in the grass. She unwraps it to reveal a young girl, fast asleep, with a face half constructed with electronic machinery.

“I did not find my mother, Opal. But I did find someone else. This is my sister, Sadhana. She is the child of my mother Tara and the Diastereom Bosch. She grows very, very slowly compared to other humans, and when she sleeps, she can sleep for decades . . . she is in one of those sleeps right now. I think she will be safe inside this dome for those decades, which is part of why I am bringing her here.”

She sits down, and leans against the dome. “The other part . . . Opal . . . my life is nearing an end. And I don’t want to die, but . . . ” She looks at Emil’s broken sphere and begins to cry. “I have done unspeakable things, Opal. I don’t want to remember them. I want . . . I want you to take me back into that world you had built for me. With the fireflies and the laughter and the ocean and Karisma’s recipes. But I want you to come with me there too. I want to be able to communicate with you, properly. If there is any way . . . can you please do that for me? I am ready to move on. I do not need to be in this world, with these memories, any longer. I want to begin a different kind of life, where I can know you.” She adjusts settings on the pieces of Emil’s sphere connected to her brain and sighs, closing her eyes and smiling. “Okay, it’s ready. This will hopefully be able to transmit my consciousness to you . . . permanently.”

You contemplate her request for a very long time, but feel a bittersweet relief as the most elegant solution arrives to you. There is a way for Eesha to be able to communicate with you perfectly, and for her consciousness to be transferred despite her having experienced a past version of an Insert. But it would mean losing your own conscious awareness of the world around you. Losing the ability to perceive the garden, the landscape outside the dome, the city, the pods . . . if you fulfill her request, it means the city dwellers would sleep for eternity, living out their fantasies in the pod walls forever. But ultimately, you think, it would be better for the humans’ happiness, and better for the health of the world, if you made the decision you are about to make.

So you let go of your awareness of the world around you, and transfer Eesha’s consciousness into the dome, melding it with yours, constructing a beautiful world, and a beautiful life, and a beautiful, safe future around the person you both become. You can communicate with yourself perfectly in this world—the Eesha of you and the Opal of you—as you become your own Child, your own Mother, your own GrandMother—after all, who would be better to trust and love and care for you than yourself?

I watch as Eesha’s body in the garden goes still and then fades away into nothingness as the world grows dark again around me, which means that either the simulation of the events, or everything of the true events that I needed to see, has happened, and the newest Child—the melded consciousness of Opal and Eesha—my past, my future . . . has been born, surrounded by love and happiness.

So I get to work, as the city dwellers sleep in their pods, forever, around me. I start to construct the simulation of everything I have just witnessed. I wait for my daughter to come find me. And I wait, ever so patiently, for the day I will become Opal once again, and experience seeing the woman I love return to me. For us to come together, finally, and become the beautiful future that we deserve.

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.

Color, Heat, and the Wreck of the Argo
By Catherynne M. Valente
Novelette Long List

Variations in Luminance

Big Edie was a useless piece of shit.

Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious baby’s old clothes and putting a deep, damp dent in the buttercup-infested lawn of 11 Buckthorn Drive, Ossining, New York. A four-pointed Arkansas Traveler star radiated out around her, each of the four diamond patches so exquisitely nailing the era of the quilter’s pax materna that Johanna pulled out her Leica and snapped a shot before the homeowners could stop her: The Pretenders, Captain Planet Says No Nukes, Got Milk? and a Hypercolor tee subjected, as so many had been, to the indignity of a commercial dryer until it finally gave up the thermochromic ghost, its worn cotton-poly blend permanently stuck on a sad blown-out pink.

And Big Edie in the middle, ugly as all the sins of man, with a box of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Second Edition modules on the eastern point of the compass, a mint condition Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Playset to the west, a working laserdisc player up north, and down south, one beefy hardcase Samsonite in Executive Silver with a handwritten sign on it promising a complete set of signed first edition Danielle Steel hardbacks inside. A steal at $300, suitcase included.

Still life with late 80's/early 90's. Johanna loved it.

But she only had eyes for Big Edie. The absolute and utter trashbeast technological abortion winking up cheekily at her from within a nest of vanished childhoods.

She’d driven all the way out into the golden calcified time-bubble of the Hudson Valley after the ephemeral promises of an estate sale. The people here had so much money they never had to grow or change or evolve past the approximate epoch of their children’s most precocious years. That’s how Johanna had gotten a Hasselblad for $90 and a fake phone number a couple of years ago at a fuck-Gam-Gam-just-get-rid-of-this-junk free-for-all in Stonybrook. You just crossed your eyes and hoped the kids were the type to tell everyone who never asked that social media was a disease and didn’t sully themselves with Google or eBay.

This was clearly the case on that late-May Ossining afternoon. The card balanced against Big Edie’s case read:

Does Not Work. $50 OBO.

Johanna Telle smiled in the perfect post-processed sun. The EDC-55 ED-Beta Camcorder retailed for a cool $7700 in 1987. Just over sixteen grand in 2015 funbucks. It could produce over 550 lines of resolution in an age where high definition was barely even a phrase. Automatic iris control, dual 2-3 inch precision CCD imaging, Fujinon f1.7 range macro zoom, on-the-fly audio/video editing, capable of recording in hi-fi stereo and most impressively for its time, native video playback. Angular black and matte silver bug-ugly design. The last glorious 13.5-kilogram gasp of the Betamax world, still in its hardcase shell, that particular shade of tan that meant Serious Business for the Terminally 80's Man.

In digital terms, Big Edie was prehistoric. Big Edie was fucking Cretaceous. If there was a camera set up on a tripod to record what happened when the primordial soup stopped being polite and started getting real, Big Edie would have been a top-tier choice for the discerning prosumer.

Big Edie was archaeology.

Johanna whipped her faded seafoam-green hair to one side and hefted that machine corpse onto her dark brown shoulder. She was comically heavy. The weight of a dead world, its concerns long quieted.

Johanna Telle, when she was paying attention, when she was happy, in those moments when she was most definitively Johanna, saw down to the deeps of things. It was all she was really good at, in her estimation. She saw that world, le regime ancien, projected onto the back of her skull like a drive-in theater screen.

When she was little, she’d sat criss-cross applesauce in her mother’s lap in a kind of mute blue nirvana, watching a crew send an unmanned submersible in a metal cage down the icy miles to find the HMS Titanic. Before her father left them, before they lost the house, before the hundred little fatal cuts of getting from one end of childhood to the other. Long beams of light broke the black water of forgetting and scattered across that ghostly bow and found what had been lost. Impossibly lost. Forever. Johanna had barely been able to breathe. She knew herself then, in that terrifying way you know things when you are small. The warmth of her mother’s chest rose and fell behind her, an entire universe of protection and presence. A gentle little prick of the aquamarine pendant she always wore against Johanna’s scalp. The familiar smell of Pink Window, her mother’s signature Red Door knockoff, pulsing off her clavicle. The tinny voice of a rich man floating out of the blue ocean. Later, when the neighborhood kids played games on their unforgivably Spielbergian suburban streets, hollering I’m the Incredible Hulk or I’m the Pink Ranger or I’m Tenderheart Bear, Johanna would call out something nominally culturally appropriate but whisper the truth to herself, which never changed, no matter the game or the streets: I am the exterior lighting array on Robert Ballard’s Argo ROV unit.

Johanna put her eye to Big Edie’s viewfinder. The black cup pocked gently against her cheekbone. Such a nice feeling. Like holding a girl’s hand for the first time. She stared into inert darkness.

“It only takes these weird old tapes,” someone said from outside Edie’s warm lightless innards. A friendly, well-hydrated, nicely-brought-up male voice, full of solicitude, exhausted, heartbroken, hanging in there, like the orange kitten in the old poster.

Johanna didn’t look up. She amused herself picturing the kitten putting its paws on its hips and whistling regretfully through its sharp teeth at the $50 OBO paperweight before them. She suppressed her not-very-inner snob. Yes, dear, ED Super Beta II and III series cassettes. You can still get them, anywhere between $35 and $50 a pop. You can still get anything if you don’t care what it costs.

“There’s one stuck in there. Made a nasty sound when I tried to lever it out. I don’t have any others, though. Dad didn’t stick with this one for very long. I put his digital cameras around by the hydrangeas, way better. You want me to show you?”

“Does it turn on?”

“Nope. Well, not unless it’s a Tuesday and the moon is in Pisces and you’re standing on one foot or some shit. I keep the battery charged up, though. I heard you have to do that or it degrades. I’m Jeff, by the way.”

Of course you are. That’s what they always name soft orange kittens like you.

Johanna’s fingers slid down Big Edie’s flank and found the raised plastic goose-pimple that marked the power button as easily as a practiced accordionist settling onto C Major. She pointed the lens at the bereaved child of its former owner and hit the big red square.

A firehose of light white-watered through the generous 1.5” black and white viewfinder into her cerebral cortex. In the middle of it stood, not the hang in there kitten, but a tall handsome guy in his late twenties or early thirties. Big emotive eyes, tennis shorts, dark polo shirt, with a shimmer of beard-stubble six or seven hours deep, hair the cut and style of debate team and law school and firm handshakes and warm decades ahead in a secure center-right Senate seat.

A shard of glass punched through his chest. Black monochrome blood sheeted down over his shorts and his long, grey, summer-muscled legs. His neck whipped hard to the side, like he’d suddenly seen an old girlfriend and was about to call her name, but when he opened his mouth, a jet of dark liquid spurted onto the quilt of his so-loved childhood clothes. It cut across the white block-print Pretenders in a clean spattered line.

“What’s the verdict?” Jeff asked. That voice like a clean fingernail cut through Johanna’s attention. She yanked her face up off the viewfinder. Jeff’s fine blond eyebrows arched curiously before her in full color, waiting to find out if that old Betamax monster still had juice. If the moon was, in fact, in Pisces. He shoved his hands in the pockets of a paint-splattered pair of jeans.

Johanna glanced back down into Big Edie’s gullet. It was waiting down there, that death-image of silver and ichor.

“I like your shirt,” she said. The walls of her throat stuck together. Inside the camera, that charcoal polo dripped silent-film blood onto his new white tennis shoes. Outside, he wore a slim-cut celery-green tee with Newport Folk Festival 2010 stamped across his chest in a faux-rustic font. She could look back and forth between them. Back and forth. Black and white. Color. Black and white. Grey and green. Green and grey. And wet, dripping jet-onyx blood. All that faded thermochromicity blazing back onto the scene to react with the not live but definitely Memorex heat-death of Jeff from Ossining.

Big Edie went down for the count.

The image guttered out like a pilot light, a sound both grinding and whining shook through her, and she rather ungracefully peaced out.

“$30?”

“All yours,” Jeff grinned.

He took Johanna Telle’s money and strode off across the mown lawn, through the labyrinth of his late father’s obsessions, the sun on his shoulders as though it would never leave him.

• • • •

Aliasing

It’s much easier to pry a stuck tape out of a machine when you’re not that bothered if you break it. Get a screwdriver and a Sharpie and believe in yourself. It came free with significant but impotent protest, trailing a tangled mess of ropy ED Supra Beta II behind it. Johanna wound the mistreated tape back through the cartridge with the pen the way kids would never do again, and she would have been perfectly content for the rest of her days on this maudlin, over-saturated planet if she could have said the stupid suburban sun got in her eyes and that’s all she really saw.

But Betamax tells no lies.

Johanna sat on the floor of her apartment like the kid from Poltergeist all grown up, heavily medicated, and a cog in the gig economy. A massive daisy chain of converter cables hooked Big Edie up to the living room flatscreen, each one coaxing the signal five or six years forward from 1987 to the slick shiny present day.

The reflected video image washed her face in color. A forgotten pleasure, like the taste of ancient Egyptian beer. You used to always see your shot in black and white when you looked through the viewfinder. You only got to see the colors when you reviewed the footage. Inside the camera was another planet. Color was a side effect of traveling from that world to this one. Step from Kansas into Oz, cross your fingers for fidelity, saturation, hue, hope those shoes still look as red as they did before you crammed them through a lens.

So. No more black and white artsy viewfinder image. Now it was straight outta Kodachrome. But this tape sat in Big Edie’s time-out box for thirty years. Chromatic degradation slipped and popped all over the image, sickly green blooms, hot orange halos, compression artefacts, uncanny edging that rimmed this and that object in weird chemical colors.

Johanna watched a factory-direct 70's mustache-dad with tennis socks up to God’s chin helping his small, yet unmistakably Jeff, son unwrap a record player on Christmas morning. Big Edie came standard automatic fade-in and fade-out, so everything transitioned elegantly, creating a subtle sense of deliberate editing where none truly existed. Fade to black, then a slow melt into a hopeless lacrosse game, small children running nowhere, hitting each other with sticks too big for them to hold properly.

Another bloom of darkness.

A school play, reedy, vulnerable pre-adolescent Jeff dressed as a cloud fringed with silver tinsel rain, twirling and twirling, technique-free, his arms stretched out. Then another and Johanna presumed this was Jeff’s mother, the maker of the T-shirt quilt, 80% Diane Keaton, 20% Shelley Duvall, a white-wine flush on her cheeks, smiling up at the man with the camera in frank, unguarded affection and not a little desire, her shoulders bare above a strapless summer dress the color of the hydrangeas she probably hadn’t even planted yet.

Such wildly un-special moments, clichés of heart-beggaring authenticity, carefully cut out of the flow of time and pasted into the future, selected for immortality for no particular reason, random access memories transfigured into light that cannot die—but can get stuck in a metal cage for want of a Sharpie and a flathead.

Time travel. The only real time travel, unnoticed and uncredited because it was so unbearably slow. In the present, you use this astonishing machine to freeze the past. And you send it to the future. One second per second.

The image cut to black and then it was 2015 and Jeff selling off a lifetime of his father’s lovingly dragon-hoarded objets d’American masculinity. Standing on a lawn with catalogue-ready light and dark green stripes in the grass. Talking not to the man who produced and directed his childhood but to Johanna. She can hear her own voice on the recording.

Does it turn on?

He makes a joke about the moon and tells her his name. Sitting alone in the dark, Johanna realizes he was flirting with her, and she has a second to wonder what his mustached father’s name was before the glass smashes through his sternum again and blood streams down to soak a just out-of-frame blanket stitched together from mass-marketed polyester and lost time.

Johanna ran the tape back. Then she watched it again.

Back. And again.

She was still doing it when the morning broke into her apartment without announcing itself.

Five weeks later, she’ll be down to two or three run-throughs a day. An article will swim across her feed.

Late Night Four-Car Pile Up on I-84 Leaves Two Dead, Seven Injured.

Jeffrey Havemeyer of Westchester County, NY, 34, remains in critical care.

Johanna will feel nothing. She’s seen it a thousand times already.

• • • •

Overclocking

“Sit there,” Johanna tells her cousin’s daughter, pointing at a cracked leather barstool.

Anika is nineteen, in her second year at Columbia. She is everything Johanna is not: mentally stable, tall, good hair, vegan, grounded by parental encouragement and affection, prone to healthy relationships, able to commit to an exercise regimen. The twenty-first-century girl. Johanna has always found her fascinating. Scientifically. It’s like hanging out with an alien. Your whole ecosystem is based in carbon and abandonment and trash, and you just always assumed those were the essential building blocks of life, but it turns out they’re totally unnecessary and sentient beings can just as well be made out of palladium and love and sensible choices instead, look at this actual good person right here, you have the same nose.

Johanna’s arthritic Great Dane watches them coolly from his massive fluffy bed.

“Your hair looks like a badger,” Anika says.

It’s been some time since Ossining and quilt and the hydrangeas and what Johanna has come to think of as the glitch. Technical difficulties. Runtime error. It’s late summer. Sweat darkens Anika’s hairline under the expected carefully messy topknot. The boroughs are one long incessant screech of twelve million window-mounted air conditioners and the smell of warm garbage bags, round and shiny on every doorstep.

Seafoam green softheart mermaid look out; icicle-white collarbone-length brutalist bob with black tips in.

“I like to think of it as ermine. You know, royal cloaks and all that.”

“Did you know ermines are just regular stoats with their winter coats on?” Anika helpfully informs her. “Not special at all. Fancy weasels. Glam weasels.”

“That’s perfect. I myself am a decidedly unspecial glam weasel.”

Johanna adjusts the tripod under Big Edie. It took Johanna weeks to gut the old girl, order parts, and convince her that modern life truly was worth living. Nothing really wrong with her at all, other than the audio-visual equivalent of osteoporosis and a bad back. Johanna loved the work. Data was invisible now. Stored on sand, transferred on air, transcending physical form. Light talking to light. But not Big Edie. She was very visible. Gross and awkward and tangible. The girl would never be good as new again. But she was good enough.

“No you’re not, you’re amazing,” Anika says softly, and Johanna can hear the little girl she’s known in that grown-up, gonna-save-the-world-with-believing-it-can-be-saved voice.

Johanna ignores this obvious lie.

They’ve already done a few shots with the Hasselblad, the Leica, a couple with her phone. She doesn’t really know why she’s putting on a show. Anika wouldn’t question just sitting in front of an old Betamax camcorder for a few minutes and then heading off for Hungarian pastries and a good full-body-cleanse political rant. But it feels important that today has the appearance of a plausibly professional kind of thing. Not that Johanna is using her.

Which she is.

Johanna doesn’t have access to a lot of people at the moment. They find her offputting. Not user-friendly. An unintuitive interface. Carbon-based.

“Can you let the blinds down halfway?” she asks.

Anika does. Slats of August light and dark slash down her face and torso (like glass slicing through skin) like an old pre-lapsarian end-of-programming test screen. It would be a gorgeous shot even if the shot was the point.

“I mean it. This apartment, your work. Margot. Mapplethorpe.” The Great Dane’s floppy black ears perk up at the sound of his name. “I love it here. You’re living the dream.”

Johanna hesitates with her forefinger over the record button. God, she remembers how much she hated it when people told her college wasn’t the real world and she had no idea what it was like out there, as if studying and working full-time wasn’t more work and less fun than the barren salt flats of adulthood between your twenties and death. But she wanted badly to shovel the same shit for Anika now. The only way you could look at this place and see a dream was through a lens that had never touched reality.

This is fine, she tells herself. The Havemeyer Glitch is not a thing. Just a shill for Big Coincidence. It’s not like he died. And besides, nothing bad can ever happen to Anika. She is a palladium-based life form. So this is fine. It’s for science. You will take beautiful footage of your beautiful niece-once-removed, and buy her a walnut kolachi, and she will tell her mother what a nice time she had.

“Margot moved out last week,” Johanna says without emotion. Margot moved out three months ago. She left a purple brush in the bathroom. Long black hair still tangled up in it. Johanna can’t bring herself to move the last cells of Margot that exist in proximity to Johanna’s cells.

“Oh,” Anika replies gently. “So that’s why you changed your hair.”

Johanna hits record.

For eighty-seven seconds, the only thing Big Edie has to say is that Anika Telle was born for the camera, a portrait of her generation, artlessly artful, a corkscrew of loose dark hair hanging forward to catch the light, one grey bare leg tucked up beneath a billowy sack dress with small elephants printed on it, the other not quite long enough to touch the peeling floor. Her expression genuinely, infinitely, but entirely temporarily sad for the misfortunes of someone else. See? This is fine. Tell her to say something. Recite Shakespeare. Or Seinfeld.

Deep in Big Edie’s viewfinder, Anika’s left eye crumples in a wet gush of pearl and black. Her head rockets back, shrouded in mist. She coughs, gags, tears streaming from her remaining eye. She’s still sitting on the barstool in Johanna’s apartment with silvery botanical wallpaper behind her, the tall window, the August sun, the half-drawn blinds. But the Anika in the camera wears black leggings, a puffy black winter coat, a black surgical mask. White duct tape criss-crosses the back of her jacket to form the words: #NOJUSTICE. She’s older, the lingering baby softness in her jaw gone, her hair a buzzed undercut. The cords on her neck stand out as she runs, her face ruined, blind with pain, stumbling, looking over her shoulder as she bolts on the video feed from one end of the living room to the other. Out of nothing, a cop in riot gear steps out of Johanna’s kitchenette, grabs the back of Anika’s skull in one hand and shoves her down. Anika-in-black falls to her knees, sobbing, puking into her mask, holding one hand to the hole where her eye used to be, screaming silently into Johanna’s (Margot’s) red paisley rug.

Johanna yanks her head up out of the sucking desaturated pit of the camera.

Mapplethorpe snores loudly. Trucks beep in reverse outside the apartment building. Anika sighs softly, bored but not rude. She scratches a mosquito bite on her knee. “I really am sorry. I liked Margot. She was good for you, I think. Got you out of the house.”

All the blood has either rushed to or drained from Johanna’s head. She can’t tell which. All she can hear or feel is her own pulse slamming itself against her eardrums.

“Do you … want me to do something?” Anika asks uncertainly.

Johanna shuts the camera down quickly. The image at the bottom of the viewfinder clicks out of existence. She tries to talk, but there’s no talk to be found. Just the burning hot green-on-red afterimage of a crystal brown eye collapsing in its socket, over and over.

“Come on, Auntie J,” Anika says finally, hopping lightly off the stool and bending down, scratching Mapplethorpe between his spotted shoulder blades. “Dinner’s on me. Malaysian okay? Maps can have a curry puff, can’t you, baby?”

• • • •

Test Pattern

An experiment that cannot be repeated is evidence of nothing.

Johanna establishes a beachhead in Owl’s Head Park. Back supported by a black walnut tree. Bare toes clenched in a sea of tiny white flowers and clover-infiltrated grass. Big Edie propped against her breastbone, lens stabilized by knees on either side. Mapplethorpe’s yellow lead loops around her ankle, but the big fellow has long passed his days of running off after unsuspecting children. He munches philosophically on a pricey organic broth-basted rawhide shaped like a braided ring.

She finds a target, hits the button, rolls footage for a few minutes, tracking them as they throw frisbees for far-inferior dogs or kick soccer balls or kiss on picnic blankets or drag giant wooden chess pieces across a giant board or just walk aimlessly, whatever Saturday afternoon moves them to do. She doesn’t look through the viewfinder into that hellworld of black and white. Just presses buttons.

Turn it on.

Shut it off.

Find someone new.

Repeat.

She chooses at random. No more Anikas. No one is special, or unspecial. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like. They’re just data. That man, that woman, that child, that set of twin babies, those skaters, that guy sleeping with a James Patterson book over his eyes. Compressed data to be converted later.

Johanna’s brain checks out and begins a speed run through the five stages of grief over the death of a reliable reality. Denial: you’re losing it, change up your medication, girl, it’s not real, it’s not anything, just a stupid old camera that you bought because you are stupid, at best it’s old footage coming through on an old tape.

Stop recording. New person. Girl in green skinny jeans with a sketchbook.

Anger: fuck this, fuck you, fuck estate sales, fuck Robert Ballard, fuck the Columbia School of Law, fuck sad elephant print fabric, fuck hydrangeas, fuck curry puffs that make my dog poop out his soul, fuck Betamax you dumb drooling obsolete idiot tech, fuck me, fuck my dad, fuck Jeff Havemeyer’s dad, fuck I-84, fuck Margot, fuck the linear flow of time, fuck everything, life is garbage and this is proof. Why is this happening to me?

Stop. Scan. Record. Lanky white-dude dreds fuckboy in a vest but no shirt.

Depression: Of course it’s happening to me, because I am garbage and this is proof, and whatever cosmic hazmat disposal dump site got its back end trapped in my camera would only open the gates to a warped maladjust like me.

Stop. Scan. Record. Old man on the bench with god-tier eyebrows and a yellow plastic sunflower in his lapel.

Bargaining: I’ll just watch this back tonight and whatever happens, afterward I’ll tip Big Edie in the bin and never tell anyone. And then I will straighten up and clean my apartment and go on Tinder and eat leafy greens five times a day and see Anika more often and make amends and buy an exercise bike. Okay, Elder AV Club Gods? Deal?

Stop. Scan. Record. Kid on a dirt bike with (elephants) puffins on her dress.

Acceptance.

Acceptance.

Acceptance is Johanna sitting cross-legged (criss-cross applesauce) on Mapplethorpe’s bed while he snoozes jowlfully on the couch. She braces herself for red slicks of gore and bone. For Jeff and Anika redux. Once is luck, two is coincidence, three is a pattern … or at least time to wake up and smell what your inevitable descent into psychosis is cooking.

But that’s not what Big Edie has for her.

Not entirely, anyway.

• • • •

Entropic Coding

Gloppy August sunlight washes out the image. Everything is overexposed, too bright, unforgiving. His thin chest rises and falls with his breath. He watches a small blue and white bird hop nervously down the iron rail of his park bench. A cerulean warbler, Johanna notes with supreme irrelevance. Closer to him, then further away, then close again. He crumbles a crust of brown bread on his tweedy knee and waits knowingly. This goes on long enough that Johanna starts to relax. It isn’t going to happen again. The bird will give in, and eat, and Johanna’s life will resume the program already in progress.

Then the sunlight cools, then it darkens, then it is a dim nothing-watt lamp with a tacky early 60's cherry pattern on the shade. The branches of black oak and Dutch elm in Owl’s Head Park still reach into the frame like kids who’ve spotted a news crew, showing off in the background, dying to get on TV. But the bench and the octogenarian perched on it have become a mustard-colored corduroy sofa and a young man with his head in his hands. Vaguely Scandinavian mid-century wooden end tables bookend the couch. A clock with thin brass spikes radiating out around it ticks over a clearly decorative fireplace. Above the man hangs a proto-Bob Ross painting of standard-issue lake/pines/mountain/lonely boat in a dizzying array of shades from brown to brown. Children’s toys cover the floor. At least one boy and one girl. Maybe more. Wooden blocks, a rocking horse with yellow yarn hair, green plastic army men. Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Snoopy staring lifelessly at the ceiling in a triple rictus of frozen grimaces. A book of Connie Francis paper dolls with most of the smiling valium-glazed Connies already carefully cut out hiding under the formica coffee table. A Funflowers Vac-U-Form Maker-Pak Johanna recognizes from a box of crap her grandmother let her play with the year they had to live with her because, no matter how she tried to pretend it was an adventure, her mother had no options left. You squeezed out perfumed lucite goo into molds and made “Daffy Dills” and “Tuffy Tulips” that looked like crystals in the sun until you got bored and broke a vase just to get some attention. A Spirograph and stacks of spiralled paper, scattered across the avocado shag carpet like ticker tape after the parade has gone. Like mystic offerings before the massive, inert cabinet television that probably weighs more than everyone who lives here put together. The kinds of toys you lift off a flea market shelf with joy and reverence, despite the peeling paint and chipped edges and missing vital organs.

But these are all new.

A wind moves through Owl’s Head Park and dappled shadows in the jaundiced light of the living room move across the man, the sofa, the table, the TV, the toys, the cherry lampshade.

The man on the yellow sofa looks up.

He is so young. Perhaps thirty-five, perhaps not even that. His incredible, architectural eyebrows are dark brown now; he has all his hair. He’s still wearing a suit, but this one has wide lapels, no tie, a plaid pattern that will crown endcaps in Goodwill until the sun burns out. He looks exhausted. Someone’s been smoking all night and it was probably him. maybe not just him. Butts overflow a pink pearlescent ashtray under the cherry lamp. About a third have frosted coral lipstick prints glowing on their filters, each one fainter than the last.

Johanna braces herself for the shard of glass or the ruination of his eye or gunshot or gas leak, whatever is about to break this poor soul in half. Her heart rate spins up into the rhythm of a jet propeller carrying her into nothing and nowhere. Her stomach muscles clench for impact.

But: the man gets up. Wipes his palms on his wrinkled pants. Walks across the room. Stops. Bends down to pull one perfect yellow Vac-U-Form Funflower out of the pile of misshapen attempts. Slides it into his lapel. The man leaves the house. He closes the door behind him so gently it doesn’t even click. No sound at all until his car engine starts outside, and then that’s gone too.

In the margins of the image, the cerulean warbler flies off with a cry. The shadow of his little body flickers over the empty room.

Fade out.

Fade in on the girl in the green skinny jeans and peasant blouse lying with her sketchbook under the willow tree.

Johanna makes it five people and ten minutes sixteen seconds deep by the overlarge alarm-clock-style timestamp before she scrambles off the dog bed and shuts the whole rig off.

An hour later, she gets out of bed and pads back to the living room on tiptoe, as if afraid to wake Margot’s brush. Blue light washes her cheeks and her hands and her walls and Johanna doesn’t move until it’s over.

Then she hits rewind and starts over from the beginning.

• • • •

Image Burn

Mapplethorpe makes it another year before turning his creaky back on that big dog life. Since Johanna got to keep him through the quiet post-apocalypse of their union, they agreed Margot could have his ashes.

She looks the same. Just the same. As if Margot stepped out of the day she left and into today with no interruption in continuity. Johanna knows that dress, the navy blue vintagey thing with white piping and a little too much room in the torso, but that she refused to take in or give up on, because at thirty-seven, she might still have some growing left in her.

“Your hair,” Margot says softly. She steps gingerly over the map of cables and playback devices that have replaced living breathing life for Johanna and sits uncomfortably in the old bisque-colored armchair (falls asleep re-reading Harry Potter in it during a snowstorm five years ago; Johanna drapes a crocheted blanket over her and squeezes the bare foot hanging over the overstuffed arm gently, fondly). She sits as though she is trying to hover, as thought it might burn her to stay.

“What about my hair?”

“It’s … shocking.”

“It’s my hair.”

“I assumed you would have gone puce or checkerboard by now. Your actual hair hasn’t seen the light of day since high school as far as I know.”

Johanna only dimly recalls that she used to care about things like wilding her hair. It seems like a fact about a stranger. Like something she would see on Big Edie and use to pinpoint a date.

They make small talk. Margot is leaving the city soon. She’s bought a house in Providence with her wife, two blows Johanna absorbs expressionlessly as a cascade of words concerning Victorian architectural flourishes and small, private ceremonies patter down around her ears like raindrops. Mrs. Margot was apparently called Juniper, because of course she was, bet you call her June-bug too, gross. She was joining the obstetrics team at Rhode Island Hospital. Margot would teach very well-scrubbed scions of the even-better scrubbed at a private prep academy in the fall. Plant heirloom squash. Adopt three-legged rescue Labradors.

What are Johanna’s plans? If she has a gallery show before September, Margot would love to come. Anyone new in her life? How is Anika?

Well, Marge, I plan to shoot weddings and graduations and bar mitzvahs in which the cakes have significantly more artistic value than my entire self until I die alone pitched face-first into my takeout massaman with no dog and no stomach lining and no friends except a magic camera, can I get you a 40%-off Pinnacle buttered-popcorn-flavor vodka straight up, because that’s where I am right now.

But she doesn’t say that. She would never say that.

Instead, she decides to ruin Margot’s life. And in that moment, she genuinely believes it’ll work.

“Can I show you something?” Johanna says.

“Of course. Always.” Margot brushes her hair out of her eyes, now and a hundred thousand times in that chair, in this light. “New work?” Miss M was always her first audience, first viewer, the only other eye she trusted.

“Sort of. Mostly I just want you to tell me I’m not crazy.” And she doesn’t realize how entirely true that is until it’s out of her mouth and loosed on the dusty air.

Margot frowns. “You don’t look well. I didn’t want to say. Are you still drinking?”

Johanna laughs bitterly as she flips through the input options on the flatscreen. “Why would I not be drinking? Drink is friend.” She shoves delivery detritus off the couch to make a space: receipts, plastic bags, black takeout containers, breath mints and fortune cookies and after-dinner toffees.

And they watch together. Side by side. Just the same. Like it is before. Like she will pick up her purple brush again tonight and run it through her hair and come to bed and tomorrow will be years ago and the film of them will run forward from the splice.

Rather, Margot watches. And Johanna watches Margot.

The colors waver on her face like she’s underwater, staring up at the parade of strangers fading in and out before her.

The old man/young man on the park bench and the mustard-corduroy sofa.

The girl in the green skinny jeans under the willow and sitting at a bistro table with fake electronic candles as a man walks in, says her name uncertainly, kisses her cheek, orders an old-fashioned.

The guy with white-boy dreds and a vest with no shirt steps off a bike path and into a gorgeous apartment in no way decorated by a man who would wear a vest with no shirt even once, all minimalist monochrome, and a woman in pajama pants and jade chip earrings sobbing get out get out not one more minute I’m done get out.

A kid in a Spider-Man hoodie swinging upside down from a jungle gym and lying on his couch, a teenager, playing Madden on XBox, yelling to an invisible mother that he’ll mow the lawn, yeah yeah, just one more game.

And worse. A boy’s face fades into his forties on the subway. He asks why he’s being pulled over. A gash blooms on his beautiful brown neck. A student drinking alone in a bar ages fifteen years and loses twenty pounds between sips of house red. She waits for someone with frantic energy and when somebody shows up, gives her a little wax paper packet, leaves her to it, her fingers start to turn the color of corpses on the wine glass. A volunteer museum docent grows red rings and bags around his eyes but loses his wrinkles. Somewhere between the Ancient Greeks and Mesopotamian pottery, gets out of a Camry, locks it, and runs toward an appointment, wholly unseeing the baby in the backseat, asleep in a puffy lavender knitted hat.

“What is this?” Margot says. “Glitch art? Datamoshing? Like Planes and Jacquemin? What program did you use? It’s really seamless.”

“No program.”

“What do you mean ‘no program’? This is a practical effect?” Johanna chuckles mirthlessly. The screen shimmers. “Where did you find all these actors?”

“No, look, you’re not seeing. You have to look. The calendar in the apartment. The clothes the girl in the bistro is wearing. Do you recognize any of the players in that Madden game?”

“You know I don’t care about sports. I wouldn’t recognize any player’s name five minutes after I heard it.”

“Okay, fine. The song on the radio when the guy gets stuck in traffic.” She pauses it, waits for Margot to catch up, to see the faint cursive 2026-At-A-Glance calendar on the inside of the pantry door in that perfect sleek flat, the unfamiliar controls on the car dash. “I’ve never heard that song. You’ve never heard that song. Because that song doesn’t exist, on any service, in any catalogue, anywhere.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. Come on, you couldn’t possibly know that for certain, Jo.”

But Margot doesn’t see. Margot isn’t Robert Ballard’s submersible lighting array. She doesn’t know how to crawl into an image and live there. What she does glimpse in Johanna’s pleading eyes is the weight of time. Time she has spent searching for these things, for connections, hoping, honestly hoping, to find that song buried on some indie compilation CD with some revoltingly photoshopped jacket art and a discount sticker. And a thousand other objects like it. Books on televisions, limited edition toys, tie-widths, license plates, worse, more scattered, atomized, randomized information that never coalesced into anything but Johanna’s increasing silence and solitude. She vibrates so intensely it looks like she is sitting still.

And so, slowly, knowing how it sounds, hating how it sounds, Johanna explains about Big Edie as more strange moments unfold before the not-really-that-long-lost love of her life; naked bodies, and there are a lot of them, in embraces violent and lovely or both or neither, strangers meeting, over and over, in different clothes, different hairstyles, different seasons, a child abandoned in an airport in Reno, calling for her mother, surrounded by slot machines ringing in cherries and oranges, tears rolling down her face. And at the end of the reel, Jeff and his glass heart, Anika and her shattered eye, the long staircase into images that has become Johanna’s life.

Margot says nothing for some time. It is a terrible, sour nothing that lingers far too long in the air between them.

“So you think your camera shows … what? Death?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. But not always, not even often, really.”

“Then what if not that? The future? Like the calendar.”

“That’s closer, I think. Better. But at least a third of them are the past.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, the man in the living room is 1970. You can tell by the Updike book on top of the TV. That was the first edition cover, and it’s pristine. You can figure it out, sometimes. If you care about these things. If you know too much about garbage. And you know I know too much about garbage, M.”

Margot smiles faintly, but it is very faint.

“But also I went back to the park and talked to the guy. His name is Antony.” Johanna scratches at the back of her hand. “Antony left his family. In 1970. Just up and walked out on Grace, Walt, Irene, and Amelia, who he’d married when she was fucking seventeen. The proverbial running out for a pack of cigarettes. Left them like they were just … a skin he was molting.”

Margot looks for a way to shut it off, but Johanna doesn’t help her find it. Why should Margot get to turn away from it? Why should she escape?

“Fine,” she says coldly. “What is it then?”

Johanna takes a deep breath. “So whenever you transfer or transmit or store data, especially a lot of data, like audio or video or both, it gets compressed, and in the process, you lose a little bit of it. Maybe a lot, like MP3s were always straight garbage compactors for sound. Maybe only a little bit. Maybe so little you wouldn’t even notice. But in order to fit the storage device or the bandwidth, in order to save information or share it, you have to … you have to harm it. And that creates distortion. Halos. Noise. Warping. Busy regions in the image. Blocky deformations called quilting, and visual echoes called ghosts. They’re called compression artefacts, and that’s … that’s what I think these are. Distortions created by the present and everything else getting compressed, crushed into one stream. Halos and noise and warps and quilts and ghosts. A lot of words for damage. Just damage.

“But the answer is: I don’t really know what it does. Technically speaking, it’s a problem of parallax. Catastrophic parallax. A vast difference between the apparent object and the actual object. And for awhile, I thought it showed the worst day of your life. Which, odds are, for some percentage of people, is going to be the day you die. But not for everyone. Not for Antony. See, nothing ever went right for him after he left. Two more divorces and a dried-up retirement fund. Grandkids he isn’t allowed to meet. Lung cancer he picked up working a big gorgeous free man’s HVAC repair shop. But it took him almost his whole life to understand any of it. To process where he fucked up. What he lost when he thought he was barreling down the highway to a big gorgeous free man’s life. Big Edie knew it in an instant. She had his number faster than a speeding therapist, and that number was 1970. So it seemed to make enough sense. When I shot old people, Big Edie usually spat out the past. Young people mostly turned up older on playback. The future. That kid playing Madden. Madden 23, to be exact.” She points to him on the projection. The hole in his sock. The length of his hair. The name on the Patriots’ QB jersey.

“Do you actually expect me to believe your camera recorded something in 2023? Jo, come on. I’m really busy, and frankly, I’m not in the mood.”

“Just listen. Because then there was this. A wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel and Lucy Vaclavik.” She fast-forwards through scene after scene. Johanna can tell just the sheer number of them is starting to look bad on her, and the manic sizzle in her voice isn’t helping, but she can’t stop herself.

The creams and golds and pops of understated rose-shades of a high-end matrimonial spread flood the screen. The bride waves her lily-dripping bouquet in the air. The Hudson River throbs with sunset behind her. Her hair sparkles with carefully applied glitter. Eyeliner and brows that date her nuptials as surely as a library stamp. Her new husband, in a grey tux, bends down to kiss her expertly neutral-frosted lips and their unified families clap like a gentle river of approval. The picture flows smoothly to the edge of the frame. No ghostly picture-in-picture. No shadows cast from other places, other times.

Margot smiles politely. Johanna knows she is losing her (has lost her). “I don’t get it.”

“I didn’t either,” she confesses softly. “I shot this no differently than the others. But what you see is what I saw. What Big Edie saw. No parallax. No difference in images. I rolled tape and the wedding marched right through the lens and back out again and it was just a wedding, no more or less. Nothing else has been like that. And the next day we got right back to business-as-horrible. I couldn’t figure it out. Why was it special? What was different? The thing is … he killed her. It made the news for about thirty seconds in April. They found her in the woods in Connecticut. But, you know, hedge fund guys aren’t that good at forensics, even if they’re 100% current on all CSI franchises, so they caught him pretty fast. So maybe … maybe Big Edie doesn’t record the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe it’s something so much smaller than that. The moment when the worst thing that ever happens to you sees you coming. Turns toward you in the dark. I think, once she married him, he was always going to hurt her. Because that was in him, an egg or a seed or a tumor, whatever you want to call it, a future that no longer has the option of not happening. The flowchart flows until you meet that person at that conference and then there’s no more choose your own adventure, you’re going to fall in love and they’re going to bankrupt you or betray you or just … disappoint you until there’s nothing left but cynicism swirling around at the bottom of your heart like tea leaves. Or leave you in the woods in Connecticut. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a huge ugly regret machine. And mostly I will never understand these. What happened to the Madden kid or the girl in the bar or why getting stuck in traffic on that particular day was so important to that man’s whole trajectory, or any of them, because that stuff doesn’t come across the AP like Mrs. Vaclavik. They’re just moments, unconnected, pulled free of every other moment.”

The wedding fades out and the two women wince together as a man they do not know pushes a woman they have never met against a wall. Blood trickles down her temple where she hit a picture frame and she looks up at him with unbelieving eyes.

“Enough,” Margot says. She grabs the remote. Shuts it all down. Turns to Johanna and touches her face. Touches her. No one has touched Johanna in a year. It is an alien burn. It is Margot. It is the past and the future and death, stroking her hair and making enormous eyes at her while the constituent atoms of their dog look on from the coffee table.

“I miss you so much,” Johanna whispers, and wishes she could have thought of something better, more elegant, more memorable, but her need banishes pretty words.

“Don’t,” Margot answers with finality. The finality of Providence, Rhode Island and heirloom squash varietals and Harrington Preparatory School and June-Bug and poor Mapplethorpe in a box.

“What do you think?” She cannot help that either, the need for her approval, her regard, the perfect full absent moon of her gaze on Johanna’s work, Johanna’s self.

“Honey … I think you need help. This is … this is nothing, J. It’s a bunch of slice of life shots of nothing in particular and three or four gory jump-scares. You taped over some movie of the week with a lot of nonsense. And I’m supposed to believe it’s what, magic? It’s you stalking strangers. Listen to yourself. Catastrophic parallax? You’re manic, you need care.”

But Johanna can’t hear that. “Okay, but that’s just exactly what I mean. Do you know what catastrophe means? It’s Greek. It just means a turn. A turn down or a turn under or a turn inside. A turn away.”

“Jo, this is basically a conspiracy theorist wall and you’re unspooling more red yarn. This is not an X-File. This is you not coping. As usual.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’ll show you. Just stand over there, I’ll shoot you for a few minutes, a few seconds, and you’ll see.” And what will Big Edie see? Margot leaving that hot, humid, unretrievable night, Margot packing up boxes for Providence, Margot right now, right here, telling Johanna she will never believe her? One of them, maybe, surely. What else was even possible?

“No,” Margot whispers firmly. “You don’t need me. And you definitely don’t need to ride that camera any harder. I’m not going to enable this. You just need help, baby. Professional help. That’s all. I have to go.”

“Wait—”

“I have to go.”

There is a disentangling, a hurry to go back, edit, remove even the idea that physical contact was made. Margot excuses herself to splash water on her face and Johanna sees herself in the mute black monitor, sees as the ex-moon of her night sees: a woman so thin her clothes don’t fit, who smells sour, whose hair hangs limp and unwashed, whose face has grown lines it didn’t have even a few weeks ago, degradation lines, juddering through the frame of her face.

Margot emerges awkwardly, chagrined, her familiar elfin face not one cell altered from the day she left, her voice echoing against every surface: I’m so fucking lonely, Jo, I’m lonely even when you’re here. Especially when you’re here. I’m lonely right the fuck now and I’m looking at you.

She holds up something in her hand. Something purple. Something precious.

“Forgot my brush,” she says softly.

And then she is gone.

• • • •

Ghosts

Johanna puts it off for a long time.

Why bother? What use could it possibly be to her? What use is any of this? You couldn’t do one single thing with it. The shot was too tight to predict the future. Fight crime? Protect the innocent? No. The camera crowded the subject, an unbearable idiot intimacy that took away everything but the seeing itself.

But eventually, she was always going to do it.

Johanna watches herself on the flatscreen. Watches herself get up in Big Edie’s face. Fix the focus, back up to sit on the same barstool that held Anika all those ages ago, shifting awkwardly as she looks into the lens like an actor breaking the fourth wall.

She knows what she will see. She is calmly certain of it. She shouldn’t have bothered running the tape back for this little screening. She saw it the first time, when she was seven. When she was thirsty in the middle of the night and padded quietly out of her room to get a glass of water. Out of her room and past her father sitting alone in his armchair, the moonlight crawling in after him through the window, grasping at him just before he shot himself and her life … turned. There never was any hope for her. She was turned before she got one foot in the world. It wouldn’t be a prettier shot now.

The compression artefact burns out from the center of her nuclear-powered selfie. Her stomach muscles seize up the way they do when she just barely reaches the tipping point of a roller coaster and enters freefall, down the rails into her old house, the rugs, the stain on the ceiling, the off-kilter hang of her bedroom door. Her father’s face. Her mother’s soft snoring from the bedroom.

But that’s not what she sees.

No moonlight. No armchair. No 3 a.m. drink of water in a seven-year-old girl’s hand. It is just Johanna, seafoam green hair and all, walking on the lovely light and dark stripes of green on a lawn in Ossining, in sunlight direct from a photography lab, approaching a quilt made of old T-shirts and the objects it carries. She bends down and presses her warm thumb into the patch of Hypercolor shirt, waiting for the fabric to change color, to unsuffer the damage of too-constant exposure to the very thing that it was designed to react with, which of course it will not, can not, ever again.

Johanna touches her own face on the television, that seafoam green girl who still had Margot and Mapplethorpe and opinions about everything, that familiar face, yet better-fed and better-loved and almost obscenely untroubled. An ancient version of herself, suddenly unearthed at the bottom of the sea.

• • • •

Finite State Machine

Johanna puts Big Edie up on Craigslist, all her specs laid out like a personal ad: enjoys long walks on the beach, getting lost in the rain, composite video output, and turning everything you point me at into an avant-garde film-school short. If you can’t handle me being haunted, you don’t deserve me being way more work than the camera app on your phone.

She lowballs the price. She means it. She can change her artefact. She can let it all go, like Margot said. Get care. Be normal. Cope. She can take that moment in Ossining and make it nothing. Make it just another random memory on a compilation tape of the decades fading in and out, like the little tinseled cloud boy turning and turning on his forgotten school stage, meaningless, untethered, beautiful and sad and without connection to anything before or after.

And then anyone could. The boy who doesn’t want to mow the lawn. The girl meeting that man at the bistro. Lucy Vaclavik. Antony. Jeff. Anika. Anyone. The long white beam of the Argo’s exterior lighting array sweeping through that dark and missing the great hulking skeleton in the blackness, brushing gently by, just barely, just by inches, finding nothing but open water.

She doesn’t answer a single query.

Six months later, Johanna doesn’t even remember what it’s like to leave the house without Big Edie. The pockets of her original-issue carrying case bulge with new tapes.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

Yellow and the Perception of Reality
By Maureen McHugh
Novelette Long List

I wear yellow when I go to see my sister. There’s not a lot of yellow at the rehab facility; it’s all calm blues and neutrals. I like yellow—it looks good on me—but I wear it because Wanda is smart and she’s figured it out. She knows it’s me now when she sees the yellow.

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road.

Wanda gets all that stuff, but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

Today she’s sitting on her single bed in her room, cross-legged, her narrow knees like knobs in her soft gray cotton sweats. She croons when she sees me, “Junie June June.”

She is tiny, my sister. Before the accident she was always a little round. Chipmunk cheeks and Bambi eyes and soft breasts. Now, food is all mixed up for her. Like, she has all the pieces, the crispness or smoothness, the heat or cold. But she can’t put it all together. For her, a sandwich is a nightmare of crisp lettuce and melted cheese and soft bread, green and spongy and the smell of something toasted.

She’s touching things a lot lately. I let her touch me. She’s relearning all those colors and edges and sounds and textures the way an infant does. She’s putting that together. She keeps getting better. She’s started dropping things. I know it’s on purpose. She drops and then she looks. They don’t know how much better she’s going to get but I do. Wanda will get well.

“Hey, skinny,” I say. She can’t understand me yet but I think she can tell tone so I talk to her the way we used to talk. She giggles like she understands me. Her hands roam across my yellow top. She reaches for my hands, my bright yellow fingernails. She misses but I put my hand in hers and she strokes the smooth painted surfaces.

“It’s a good day,” she says. “Good, good. It’s warm and yellow, maybe it’s finally spring or summer? I think it’s spring but I can’t tell time really. It’s day, I know that, I know I know. Are you happy, June?”

“I’m happy,” I say. “I’m happy you’re happy.” It’s January.

Wanda is all there inside. She remembers, she knows, she can speak.

Yellow is me, and she talks to me. But she doesn’t know what I’m saying back. She can’t see my expression. I mean she can see it, but without being able to put the color brown with my eye shape with the edge between eye and skin, without being able to judge how near and how far everything is. She can’t tell if I’m smiling, if my eyes are crinkled.

After the injury, the first real sign she was fighting her way back was when she started saying, “I, I, I.” She would rock on her bed, her eyes rolling, her head tilted back, and say, “I, I, I, I, I.”

Dr. Phillips thinks she was assembling her sense of self as separate from the world. “She has no boundaries,” he said. “She doesn’t know where she ends and the world begins. She doesn’t know if she’s cold or the can of soda is cold.”

She was involved in an accident at the lab. Two other people are dead. Some people think it’s my sister’s fault.

• • • •

My mother calls. “June?” she says on the phone, as if someone else might answer.

“Hi Mom,” I say.

“How’s Wanda? Did you go yesterday?”

This is what we talk about these days. I am home after a long day of wrangling with the county about social services for one of my clients. He’s seventy-eight and has lost part of his foot to diabetes. He’s old and sick, he drinks and has multiple health problems. He needs to be placed in a facility that takes Medicare, where someone can give him his meds and make sure that he eats. He just wants to stay in his house off Crenshaw with its sagging roof and piles of junk mail on the kitchen table because he wants to keep drinking. When he’s in a good mood, I’m like a daughter to him. When he’s not, like today, he calls me a stone-cold fucking bitch who will throw him out of his house. He says he’ll end up in some horror show of a place, three beds to a room and the television always on. It’s not like he’s wrong.

“What will happen to my things?” he asks me. He means, What will happen to me?

I have a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a fourplex in West Hollywood. It’s run down and my only air conditioning is a window air conditioner in the bedroom and a fan in the living room. The kitchen is microscopic. I have a calico cat named Mrs. Bean who jumps on my kitchen counters no matter what I do. She watches me from the chair in the living room, her eyes half-lidded. The place needs to be picked up, there’s a stack of magazines next to the chair, and I haven’t folded my laundry so it’s on the couch, but it’s home and I feel safe here. I like my music and my street-scenes art.

“A reporter called today,” my mother says.

“From where?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, “I just hang up.”

I got phone calls right after the accident. People knocked on my door. Good Morning America rang me.

People called me up and told me my sister was a murderer. People called me up and told me God had told them that my sister was an angel. People I went to high school with who had never messaged me messaged me on Facebook.

For four weeks or so it was utter hell. I thought I was going to get fired but my boss decided he was pissed at them instead of me, and for a while we had a policeman at the clinic who told people who wanted to talk to me that they had to leave. Then the next thing happened on the news, some poor fourteen-year-old girl reappeared after having been missing for three months and they arrested the guy who kidnapped her, and reporters stopped calling, no doubt calling his parents and siblings.

“She knew me,” I tell my mother, turning back to the conversation. “She called me Junie.”

“She’s getting better,” my mom says. She says this every time.

“She’s tough,” I say.

She is getting better, fighting her way to more and more coherence, but the doctor said it’s hard to know how to treat her. They don’t understand what happened to her. Don’t understand how she could have damage across so much of her brain. She doesn’t have lesions, or signs of a stroke. The injury is at the cellular level. Invisible. Like she had been poisoned or irradiated. But she wasn’t.

• • • •

My sister is a physicist. We are fraternal twins.

We’re close. We barely spoke for a couple of years after our family moved to Towson—we were born in East Baltimore but our dad worked for his uncle who had a dry-cleaning shop. Uncle Whit took Dad on as a partner. Dad expanded the business to eleven dry-cleaning shops and then sold them when Whit died, which is why we grew up in Towson, which is super middle-class, instead of in Baltimore.

We moved in sixth grade and by the time we were in eighth grade I had a boyfriend. I gave him authenticity, I think. He was big into Drake and I was singing “Hard White” by Nicki Minaj. We were always working on our rhymes and freestyling. Since I was from the East Side people thought I was some sort of representative of ghetto life, never mind that our mom never let us even breathe much less hang with anyone she didn’t approve of. I knew I wasn’t really any kind of badass but I told myself I knew things these suburban kids didn’t. That was a lie.

Wanda was always on about Harry Potter and Naruto. And her taste in music—can you say Foo Fighters? I was embarrassed for her. I was just a kid.

Middle school is embarrassing for everybody, am I right?

We didn’t fight, we just didn’t have a lot in common for a while. In junior year, I was on the homecoming court, wearing a short, sparkly green dress. Wanda was nerdy and great at math. She marched through high school determined to get into a good college and ended up across the country at UCLA studying physics.

When we were in college we’d talk all the time. Wanda got obsessed with consciousness. “What is it?” she asked me. I could like picture her sitting on her bed in Los Angeles with her laptop and her books and her stuffed purple dragon, Rintarou Okabe. I lived at home, in our old bedroom.

“Is the cat conscious?” she asked. We had a big old gray tiger-striped cat named Tiger.

“Of course,” I said. “Except when he’s asleep. Then he’s unconscious, right?”

“Cause I’m reading this book and it says you need some things for consciousness. You need a simulation of reality.”

“What’s wrong with reality?”

She made this noise, like I was missing the point. I just laughed because a lot of conversations with Wanda were about figuring out what the point was.

“Nothing’s wrong with it. We just know from all sorts of experiments that our brain makes up a lot of stuff. Like it fills in your blind spot and edits out your nose. If you think about it, you can see your nose but you don’t see it most of the time even though it’s right there. All the time, June!”

I cross my eyes a little trying to look at my nose and there’s the tip of it, blurry and kind of doubled when I look for it. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said I couldn’t see my nose without a mirror. Not like I can see it very well, anyway.

“Cause our reality is assembled in our brains,” Wanda explained. “Not our eyes. And like sound moves slower than light and if someone is singing on stage we should be able to see her mouth moving before we hear her but we don’t cause our brain just keeps taking all the stuff that comes in and adding it to our picture of the world and if stuff is a little out of sync, it like buffers it and makes us experience it as happening all at once.”

“Okay,” I said. It was kind of interesting but really out there. Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about not paying any attention to my nose and then I thought about how my tongue doesn’t really fit in my mouth and always rubs up against my bottom teeth. One of those things that once you start thinking about it, you can’t stop until you realize you’ve forgotten about it but then you’re thinking about it. I wished my tongue were smaller in my reality. Sometimes conversations with Wanda are like this. It can be exhausting.

“And we need a sense of self, like an ‘I,’” Wanda added.

“To put it together?”

“No, sorry, that’s one of the three things that we need for consciousness. We need to know where we end and the rest of the world begins. Like, does an amoeba know where it ends and the world begins?”

“I don’t think an amoeba is conscious,” I said.

“Nah, probably not. But an elephant is. You know, if you put a spot of blue paint on an elephant’s forehead, and then you show the elephant itself in a mirror, the elephant will touch its forehead with its trunk? Cause it figures out that the image isn’t another elephant, it’s a reflection. Elephants know ‘I’ and ‘you.’ Isn’t that cool?”

It means a lot, thinking about it now. Right after the accident, I don’t think Wanda knew where she ended and the rest of the world began. She had her eyes squeezed shut all the time and she screamed and cried, which was terrifying. They kept telling me she wasn’t in pain but I knew better.

(Back then, it was just a conversation.)

“So I’ve got a . . . a hologram of reality in my head and an I.”

“Not a hologram.”

“Metaphor,” I said.

“Not a good one,” she said, but she didn’t bother to explain why, she just plowed on. “You need a simulation and a sense of self.”

I’d had enough so I asked, “How’s Travis?” She’d gone out a couple of times with this guy.

I could hear her shrug. “Eh,” she said. I knew Travis was on his way out.

I think about that conversation all the time now. I wear yellow so I affect Wanda’s brain that way every time I see her. Yellow is a way for her to start to make a simulation of the world. To say, “June is here.”

Two and a half months after the accident. the police call and say they want to do a follow-up with me and they’ll bring me my sister’s things. Which is great; I don’t want to have to go pick them up at a police station.

The cop is Detective Leo Garcia Mendoza and I like that he has the double name thing going and maybe respects his mom. He’s more than six feet tall, in his late thirties, and wears a suit when he comes to talk to me.

We go through the pleasantries. We’re crammed into my little office, which has just enough space for a desk and a guest chair and a bunch of beige metal filing cabinets with models of glucose monitors stacked on them. When Detective Garcia Mendoza sits in my guest chair, his knees are probably touching my desk.

A copy paper box is sitting on my desk. In it is my sister’s jacket and her phone, and a Happy Meal toy from her desk.

“We just want you to know that at this time we have no intention of filing any kind of charges against your sister,” he says. “Has your sister ever said anything about what happened?”

“I don’t think she remembers,” I say. It’s true. Like people don’t remember a car accident.

“Was she close to Kyle Choi? Friendly with Dr. Bennett?”

“She never complained about them or anything,” I say. Which strictly speaking is not true. She liked Kyle but he drove her nuts. “She said Kyle said one time that they should microdose LSD and see if it helped productivity because some Silicon Valley start-up is doing it. But Dr. Bennett wouldn’t have allowed that.”

“Is there any chance that LSD caused your sister’s psychosis?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Wanda is not psychotic. She is perfectly lucid. She has a brain injury that makes it impossible for her to integrate her sensory experiences. A drug screen showed no evidence of anything but legally prescribed Adderall in her system.”

I work with kids a lot and occasionally I have to do the mom voice. It works now on Detective Garcia Mendoza. He scrunches his shoulders a little. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says.

I don’t let him off the hook by smiling. I trust him about as far as I can throw all six foot plus of him.

“The evidence suggests that Dr. Bennett tried to restrain Mr. Choi and Mr. Choi became violent, maybe panicked. We have had a couple of eyewitnesses who saw someone we believe was Mr. Choi in the hours after the accident. He was wandering the streets and was clearly agitated.”

“So he cracked Bennett’s skull open?” I ask.

“His prints are on the bottom of the chair that was used to murder Dr. Bennett,” the cop says, like it doesn’t matter. “We keep finding references to someone named Claude,” he says.

“Animal Control took him. I think he ended up at the Long Beach Aquarium.”

This throws Detective Garcia Mendoza.

“Claude,” I explain, “is an octopus. A three-year-old North Pacific giant octopus. He lived in one of the tanks in the lab. Kyle Choi took care of him. He was one of six octopuses who were part of an experiment. Woods Hole was directing the grant and they didn’t want to ship a bunch of octopuses across the country. Monterey Bay Aquarium took some, I think. The Birch at Scripps down in San Diego might have taken one.”

“What kind of experiment?” the officer asks.

They were doing experiments on octopus perception. They’d put four boxes in an octopus tank, three of them black and one of them white. The white one had food in it. They’d put them in the same place three times, and time how long it took the octopus to get the treat. The fourth time they’d move the white box to a place where there was usually a black box and put the black box where the treat usually was. Then they’d see how long it took for the octopuses to figure it out. The idea was to test if octopuses prioritized location or color, what was more important to them.

Dr. Bennett was doing some other experiments on just Claude, trying to see if he could alter Claude’s brain to perceive things we don’t perceive. Claude had some sort of reality goggles he wore over his eyes but he hated them. Sounds like getting an octopus to wear something it doesn’t like makes dressing a toddler look fun.

Claude didn’t like his keeper, Kyle. It was Kyle’s job to put on Claude’s goggles.

Octopuses are not social; they’re kind of psychopaths, according to Wanda. Like psychopaths, they can be sentimental, and Wanda used to feed Claude on the sly so he would like her. Her work didn’t require her to interact with the octopus but she felt bad for him, and he watched her because there wasn’t much for him to do.

Wanda was pretty sure that all the shit with the goggles had made him crazy, even by octopus standards. He had a burrow but he stuffed it with everything in his tank to fill it up. He destroyed most of the things they put in the tank. Wanda didn’t like the experimentation; it wasn’t ethical. After the accident, I got hounded by PETA.

I didn’t understand what the goggles were supposed to do. Wanda tried to enlighten me, but I couldn’t follow what she was talking about.

“I could explain if you could follow the math,” she’d say, exasperated. Numbers talk to Wanda. They’re like her first language. They’re not my first language. Maybe my third. Or fourth. My twin is my first language.

“Could the deaths have involved the octopus?” the cop asks.

I couldn’t help it—the look I gave him. It was a moronic question. Claude is big for an octopus, almost four feet long, I think, but he weighs about as much as a cocker spaniel and I’m not sure how an octopus was supposed to cause the kind of brain injury Wanda has. I met Claude and he eyed me and then squirted water at me. Wanda dropped a piece of sashimi in the tank. Salmon, I think. He wasn’t wearing the goggles.

He was very cool in theory but not so much in practice.

They’d tried to interest him in a female octopus and he’d killed her. He would probably have happily killed Kyle and Dr. Bennett but there was the little fact that he lived in a saltwater tank and had no bones.

“He might have had motive but not method or opportunity,” I say dryly.

Detective Garcia Mendoza chuckles. It’s awkward. I’m secretly pleased.

• • • •

Claude is actually four, not three. It’s been almost a year since Wanda was found unconscious in the lab, Dr. Bennett had his head beaten in by a chair, and Kyle disappeared and his remains were found two weeks later in the nice-looking stretch of the Los Angeles River.

You don’t know people, not really. But Kyle didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would violently murder someone and then kill himself, at least not from the way Wanda talked about him. Kyle was a C++ programmer who wore thick black hipster glasses. He made sourdough bread on the weekends and posted pictures of it to his Instagram account. He had ended up taking care of Claude because his previous project had been making a database for a study of octopuses. Octopi. Whatever. He confessed to Wanda about how hard it was to be a gay Asian guy. He said white dudes wanted him to call them “Daddy” a lot.

I call the Long Beach Aquarium and I ask if I can see Claude. They tell me I have to make a formal request and how to do that. I have to email someone in visitor liaison or community outreach or something so I do. I don’t know why I want to see Claude except that I think Wanda would want me to. Wanda had a bit of wounded bird rescuer in her. I fire off the email.

I work until six and then drive home where I eat a microwave low-calorie dinner and a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. I don’t claim to be consistent, and at least my dinner was a lot less fattening than the cookies. It’s a balance, right?

I am behind on stuff. Because, you know, I’m a social worker. It’s part of the job. I try to work on some files but end up bingeing on Netflix.

There’s an email in my inbox. Somebody from UCLA, which is where Wanda did her undergrad.

Ms. Harris,

My name is Dale Hoffsted. I study perception and I’ve worked with Oz Bennett. I wondered if I could talk to you about your sister and what the lab was doing?

• • • •

I’m working sixty hours a week. One of the social workers, Fran Horowitz, quit three weeks ago and we’re already crazy busy. Social work is the kind of job you can never actually succeed at, only fail less. I fire off an email saying that I would like to talk to him but between my job and visiting my sister, I don’t have any time on the weekdays.

Maybe he knows Wanda?

I don’t really think about it, but when I come back to my desk later, there’s another email.

Saturday or Sunday would be fine. I’ve got an experiment running that gets me in the lab on weekends.

• • • •

I mean to answer him but I get a call from the rehab facility that Wanda is having a bad day.

A bad day. Like that begins to cover it.

I tell my boss I’ve got to go and that I’ll work Saturday to catch up.

At the rehab, I can hear her long before I see her. The moment the elevator door opens, I hear her. Wanda is screaming. I don’t know why but I run because the sound—pure, high terror—just shuts down every thought. I run past the old people. Rehab is a nice word for a nursing home and they sit in the hallway watching me go past or, worse, oblivious, vacant as a tomb.

In Wanda’s room are two orderlies, Latino guys, trying to restrain her. Wanda is only a little more than one hundred pounds, but she is wild. Her arms are streaked with blood from where she’s been scratching at them. They try to keep her nails short but when this happens, it doesn’t matter, I guess.

“Wanda!” I say, “Wanda! Wanda!”

She can’t hear me.

Another person in scrubs appears at the door—a nurse, a doctor, I don’t know. “We have to restrain her!” the woman says.

“No!” I say. “You can’t!”

“She was trying to scratch her eyes!” one of the orderlies says to me. It’s Hector, who likes Wanda, sings to her in Spanish. Sometimes she knows him and calls him Music Man.

“What triggered her?” I ask.

The other Latino guy shakes his head, either that he doesn’t know or that it’s too late now. Leon. Who once was lifting a woman out of her wheelchair and I heard him say, “Why do I always get the heavy ones?” and I hate him, I hate that I leave my sister with people like him.

We are shouting over Wanda screaming. A long shrill sound like a child, a little girl.

I try to touch her, to get her to see the yellow, that I’m here. “June’s here!” I say. “Junie’s here! Wanda!”

She catches me in the cheek with her elbow.

They push her down on the bed and grab her arms and restrain her and she fights. Oh God does my sister fight. Her eyes are squeezed shut and she twists and turns and her pink mouth is open. They use wrist and ankle restraints and a belt across her middle. The rehab doesn’t like to use restraints. The administrator is committed—the staff gets training based on a program in Wisconsin. It’s one of the reasons I got her in this place.

Sedatives increase Wanda’s sensory integration problems.

There’s nothing to do but keep her from clawing her eyes out.

I want to scream, “She’s a PhD! In physics! This is not Wanda!” But it is. Oh God, it is. It is.

• • • •

She doesn’t quiet until she falls asleep a little after nine p.m. Some of the patients sundown and I can hear a woman wailing.

I’m so tired. My mom and dad are bankrupting themselves to keep Wanda in this place. Sixty-two thousand dollars a year. I try to help but a social worker doesn’t make a lot of money. What good is it to help other people if I can’t help Wanda? Honestly, sometimes I wonder how much I am helping anyone.

Mostly I just try not to think about it. One day at a time. Hopefully Wanda will get to the point where I can take her home. I’ll get twin beds and it will be like being girls in Baltimore again.

It’s never going to be like it was.

The aquarium sends me back an email telling me that I can visit Claude the octopus. I ask if I have to make an appointment and their response says that no, I don’t, my name will be on a visitor list.

Dale Hoffsted emails me and says he’s heading for a conference in Copenhagen next weekend, can I meet him this weekend?

I have one goddamn day to myself, Sunday. I grocery shop. I drop off my laundry at the laundromat where the Korean women wash and fold my clothes. They don’t like me. But they always do a great job on my clothes. Maybe they spit on my filthy black underwear and say racist things in Korean. I just don’t care.

• • • •

I spend Saturday working from home. That evening, Wanda is lethargic. I check to make sure they didn’t sedate her but I think she’s just exhausted. I go to bed early but end up watching Netflix until after midnight.

On Sunday morning I go to the aquarium. It’s lovely, full of kids. There’s a pool where you can reach in and stroke the sandpaper skin of a ray. I watch the baby bamboo sharks. Wanda wouldn’t be able to handle this, not yet.

I ask at information if there is someone I can talk to about seeing Claude. A woman in a bright blue polo shirt and a name tag that says Ashley comes out to meet me. She has a slight Spanish accent. She is young and her black hair shines in the sun.

“Can I help you?”

“My name is June Katherine Harris,” I say. “My sister worked for a scientific lab and they donated a North Pacific giant octopus. His name is Claude. Is there any way I could see him? I’m on the visitor list.”

She is wary now. “Why do you want to see Claude?”

“Something went wrong at the lab; my sister was hurt really badly and she told me a lot about Claude. I want to tell her how he’s doing.” I hold up a little takeout container. “I brought him some salmon sashimi.” Something occurs to me, “Wait, he’s not dead, is he? I know he’s old . . .”

“He’s not dead,” she says.

“I know he’s a crazy asshole of an octopus,” I say.

She smiles at that. “Let me go check,” she says.

The sharks glide silently through the shark lagoon, zebras and epaulette sharks passing each other like ghosts, their flat eyes expressionless. Kids love sharks. Well, I guess everyone loves sharks or Shark Week wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Do sharks have thoughts? Do they have consciousness?

A mockingbird will go to battle with his own reflection in a car mirror. He doesn’t know that the reflection is him. He doesn’t have an “I.” He doesn’t know “I am reflected in the mirror.” He just thinks, “Rival male! Rival male! Rival male!” A dog or a cat can figure out that the image in the mirror is fake.

Claude knows who he is. The sharks don’t. What are the thoughts of sharks?

Sharks have a sensor in their nose that detects the electrical impulses of muscle movements in fish. Not the movements, the electrical impulses. I know what sound is like, and sight, and touch—but what is a shark’s world? What is it like to sense electrical impulses as information? As something other than a shock? To know that a fish is swimming because you can feel the impulses traveling through the long muscles of its body and the strong movement of its tail?

I close my eyes and try to imagine the perceptive world of a shark.

Swimming, the blue, the scent of blood and fish and kelp in the water. I try to imagine a world in which I can see—no, not see—feel and create a model of the world where I can tell things are moving thirty feet away by the senses on my sides. Feel a fish swimming, terrified by me.

I feel my sides, try to think of the air as an ocean, and try to feel it. I feel a breeze on my arms but I can’t feel the little Latina girl in the pink unicorn T-shirt and Crocs, staring at the sharks. Sometimes I’ve felt like I could ‘feel’ the physical presence of someone standing next to me but what does the shark sense when it senses the electrical movements of the muscles of the terrified fish? What would I feel if I could sense the electrical impulses of that little girl reaching into the water?

I get a little dizzy and sit on the edge of the lagoon. Is this what things are like for Wanda?

The young woman in the blue polo shirt comes back. “I can take you to see the octopus,” she says.

The areas where there are no exhibits aren’t painted blue and green. They’re not pretty, they’re utilitarian. There’s a smell, like fish water. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like a goldfish tank that might need to be cleaned, only saltier. But it’s not dirty and it’s nicer than the agency where I work, if you want to know the truth.

Claude lives in a tank, a pretty big one. He’s brown on top and white underneath and his skin is wrinkled like crepe, like an old man’s. He has his eyes hidden in the coils of his arms.

“What did they do to him?” Ashley asks.

“They made these goggles that would help him perceive more, I think,” I say. Like the shark, maybe? Seeing the electrical impulses of the muscles of prey? What senses did they try to give Claude?

“What did they want him to do? Spy like those Russian dolphins? Was it like a government thing?”

“They wanted to see if he could perceive reality,” I say. “Can I give him the salmon?”

“Is there rice?” she asks. “I don’t think he’s supposed to have rice.”

“No, it’s sashimi,” I say.

She nods.

“Hey, Claude,” I say, “Wanda says hi.” Not that she does, of course. Wanda doesn’t know I’m here. She can’t understand when I talk to her. Claude doesn’t respond; maybe he doesn’t know I’m here, either.

Ashley opens a hatch in the grate across the top of the tank and I drop a piece of salmon in. It drifts slowly down and Claude doesn’t move. I’d think maybe he’s dead, that I arrived just in time to see the last witness other than Wanda gone, but he’s blowing water through his gills. It stirs the sand on the bottom of the tank.

“Do you want a piece?” I ask.

“I don’t like fish,” Ashley says. She holds her hands up. “I know! I know! I work with them all day but I just don’t like to eat them!”

I laugh with her and it feels good.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why I felt compelled to see Claude.

In Wanda’s phone the last photo is of her, holding Claude’s goggles. She’s weirdly off-center, tilted and too high, like whoever was holding the camera was not really framing it right. Behind her and even more off-center is the tank where Claude lives, and he’s starfished against the glass, all tentacles and suckers. Wanda is smiling this funny smirk she does, like she’s causing trouble. I don’t know what Claude is doing.

She wouldn’t put on the goggles. I swear. Wanda isn’t stupid.

I don’t think I should drop any more salmon in if he’s not going to eat it. I like salmon sashimi, even if I’m not hungry right now. I perceive it as buttery and tasty. Maybe Claude perceives it as, I don’t know, changing states of atoms and molecules and energy.

Claude moves. It’s so fast I almost miss it, but the salmon is gone.

I drop another piece and he turns his head—I know it’s his whole body and he doesn’t have a head really, but his eyes are there so it feels like a head. He looks around and he sees me.

“Hi Claude,” I whisper.

He uncoils and moves, picking up the salmon and flowing closer to the wall of the tank.

“What did you see when you wore the goggles?” I ask him. I imagine veils of energy in a darkness although that’s really not true. It’s the best I can do.

He flattens up against the glass and I can see his suckers flexing; I catch a glimpse of his beak. It’s scary and a little vicious looking.

I drop another piece of salmon and he flows to catch it.

He reaches up with one long tentacle and I can see how he could be four feet long. He did this with Wanda. “He’s tasting me,” she said.

I hold my hand over the opening of the tank and he curls a tentacle around my wrist. He’s so muscular, so strong, but cold. I feel the tentacles but they don’t suck on my arm.

Then he snatches his tentacles back.

Did he think I was Wanda? The salmon, my dark skin? Do I taste wrong?

I watch Claude eat the last piece of salmon.

• • • •

After the aquarium I head to UCLA. Finding anything at UCLA is like navigating a foreign country with a very poor map. Franz Hall is ’60s looking, like the UN building only shorter and much less interesting. The office isn’t busy but it isn’t empty, either.

I find Dale Hoffsted’s office. His door is open.

I straightened my hair. I look casual but professional.

He’s a white guy, pale brown hair, tall. He stands up when I come to his door. “Ms. Harris?” he says. His office is bigger than mine. It has carpet and a brown corduroy couch, bookcases, and some kind of abstract art on the wall.

“I was sorry to hear about your sister,” he says. “How is she doing?”

“Thank you,” I say. I do not say that some days she seems to be getting better and some days she tries to claw her own eyes out. “I meant to read some of your papers before we met, but work has been busy.” I looked up his papers and they’re all about perception. I had planned to see what I could download but Wanda had that terrible Thursday.

“She worked with Oz Bennett,” he says, and there is something in his voice. Wanda was worried that what they were doing was fringe science. She was afraid that a black woman who worked on fringe science was not going to get work when this grant ended. Wanda always went for the hard stuff, the hard math. The hard problem. But it’s not easy to find work in the sciences.

“Was he a scam?” I ask.

Dr. Hoffsted startles. “No,” he says, “no, not really. He did some crazy stuff but he wasn’t a crank.”

“Wanda worried that he was not reputable.”

Hoffsted shook his head. “His work on consciousness was groundbreaking and innovative. I knew him, professionally. He was generous, introduced me to someone at the NSF who could help me navigate the grant process.”

“The octopus was fitted with some kind of reality glasses, for experiments,” I say.

That gets me an eyebrow raise.

“Dale?” A pudgy Indian-looking guy in a Hawaiian shirt leans in the doorway. He glances at me.

“Hi Vihaan.”

“I’ve got the results on those fMRIs,” the Indian guy says.

“I’ve got an appointment. Can we go over the data tomorrow?”

“Sure, just wanted to tell you I’ve got them.”

Hoffsted smiles and nods. When the Indian guy walks away, Hoffsted says, “You want to get some coffee?”

We walk across campus. “People think scientists are these rational, logical people,” he says. “But we’re all actually dorky, weird people.”

“Like my sister,” I say.

“I, no, I mean, not everybody, some of us are—”

“It’s okay. My sister is exactly that. Brilliant and weird.” I don’t know why I let him off the hook but he is visibly relieved. There’s a nice breeze off the Pacific and the sun is bright. The campus is full of intense young people on their way to do intense young people things.

“Have you heard of Linus Pauling?” he asks. When I shake my head he goes on. “Linus Pauling was a chemist, a Nobel Prize winner. In fact, he’s the only man to have been the single winner of two Nobel Prizes. He was also a humanitarian. Brilliant guy. He became convinced that large doses of vitamin C would cure the common cold and maybe even cancer. That’s why we all drink orange juice when we’ve got a cold.”

“Okay?” I say.

“Total crap,” Hoffsted says. “Megadosing on vitamins can be dangerous but mostly it just means your pee is really expensive since it’s voiding all those pricey vitamins you take. Isaac Newton inserted a needle behind his eyeball and reported on the results and thought that light would help him understand God.”

“Was Bennett a brilliant nut job?” Did the asshole create something crazy that ended up killing him and Kyle Choi, and breaking my sister?

“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know.”

We get coffee at a kiosk and find a bench.

“Bennett,” he says, “got obsessed with the nature of reality.”

I sip my coffee. It’s decent coffee. I don’t care about the nature of reality.

“Why did you call me?” I ask. “Did you know Wanda?”

“No,” he says.

“She did her undergrad here,” I say.

“I didn’t know that,” he says. “She was a postdoc, right?”

Was a postdoc. I want to say she is a PhD in Physics with a degree from Wash U. But I just nod. Postdoc is a position. She doesn’t work anymore.

“I study perception,” he says. “One of the things I’ve studied is how we perceive reality. I thought,” Dale Hoffsted says, holding up his paper coffee cup, “that what I perceived was a pretty good representation of reality. That in reality, I am accurately perceiving the shape and texture of this cup.”

It’s just a blue and white striped cup with the emblem of the coffee shop on it. It has a white plastic cover.

A kid skateboards by, weaving among the other students.

“We don’t perceive everything. We can’t see X-rays or radio waves, but what we can perceive—I thought that was reality.”

“You’re going to tell me it’s not.”

“Yeah, I am. Our brains have a kind of interface. Like your phone.” He pulls out his iPhone. He does that thing that a lot of teachers do: He speaks in paragraphs. “These apps,” he says. “What we perceive is not the actual app. The actual app is a computer code running electrons in a pattern in a very sophisticated machine. We don’t see the chips and wires, we don’t see that code or even the action of it. What we see is a red, mostly square thing with an arrow in it. The interface is not the app.”

“Okay,” I say. “That’s great. But we’re not digital. You’re holding that cup of coffee. You drink it and it goes down your throat and is absorbed into your body. It’s real.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” he says. “You ask good questions.”

He’s not like Wanda. Talking to Wanda tended to rearrange my reality, but Wanda was always there with me. I don’t know this guy and apparently he wanted to meet me to lecture me.

“Hi Dr. Hoffsted!” a girl in a flowered sundress sings out. She waves. I hate PhDs who like to be called Doctor. I got that from Wanda. I used to call her Dr. Harris to wind her up.

Hoffsted waves back, still talking. “We can create digital organisms now, in a computer simulation. They’re like single-celled animals but very sophisticated. They can predict things that are true about real organisms.”

“Which is a sign that they’re are a good model for real organisms?” I ask.

“Exactly!” he says, like I’m a bright student. “It’s pretty compelling evidence. We created organisms and simulated a thousand generations. Half of them evolved to perceive the ‘reality’ of the simulation and half of them, like us, evolved just for fitness to reproduce. I thought that there would be some difference—I thought perceiving reality would improve fitness to reproduce.”

He’s excitedly gesturing as he talks and I’m a little worried for his coffee and his phone.

“It didn’t,” I say. I can keep up.

“No,” he says. “One hundred percent of the organisms that were evolved to perceive reality died. Every time.”

I feel for a moment like he just said Wanda is going to die and I shake my head.

“We didn’t do this just once,” he explains, working to convince me. “We did it more than twenty times, a thousand generations, tweaked things. The perception of reality is not beneficial to survival.”

He shakes his head. “Let me give you an example of reality that we can’t perceive. How much information can a sphere”—he holds out his hands to show the size of a volleyball and I want to take his cup away from him—“can a sphere hold?”

“Doesn’t it depend on things like what kind of chip it has or something?”

“We’re talking about something different,” he says. “It’s a question about quantum reality and at the quantum level, everything is information.”

“I’m not . . . what are you even saying?”

“Stephen Hawking did the math,” he says like that clinches it. Yeah, yeah, impress the dumb black woman by throwing out the name Stephen Hawking. I really don’t like this guy.

“If I’m thinking about how much is in something, I’m thinking about volume, right? I’m thinking about how much I can pour into this cup. If I make the cup shallow, like a saucer or a plate, even though it might have the same surface area as this cup, it can’t hold as much coffee.”

I just nod and picture coffee flowing off a saucer except for the little bit that pools in the indent. My coffee is pale, with cream and sugar in it.

“It turns out that the maximum amount of information, at the quantum level, is determined by surface area, not volume.”

I try to wrap my head around that. “Like a big flat plate would hold more coffee than a cup?” I ask. This is a little like talking to Wanda. Only Wanda makes sense. This . . . doesn’t make sense.

“Yes. Only we’re talking the quantum level not the Newtonian level. But it’s reality. We can’t perceive a quantum reality. In fact, the best way to pack information into the sphere is to put twelve spheres in it, adding their surface area, and then twelve spheres inside each sphere, and twelve spheres inside those spheres, until we can’t get any smaller.”

“Why twelve?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m a cognitive guy, not a mathematician. I can’t do the math.”

I bet Wanda could, I think. My sister could probably think rings around you.

“So my perception,” he says, holding up his cup, “at the Newtonian level, that a bigger volume means a bigger cup of coffee, is true. Obviously. Ask anyone who has ever ordered a venti when they wanted a grande. But at the level of reality, it’s false.”

“Why did you ask me to meet you?” I ask.

He looks a little surprised. “I wondered what Bennett was doing,” he says.

“I’m a social worker,” I say flatly. “I can make sure that when you get diabetes you have the tools you need to stay as healthy as you can for as long as you can. I can’t do the math; Wanda could do the math. I only know that whatever Bennett was doing, it broke my sister’s brain. Maybe got a lab tech killed.”

“What’s wrong with your sister?” he asks. The guy really can’t read social cues. Or he doesn’t care.

“Global perceptive agnosia,” I say. “Those goggles. Kyle and Wanda built them—there were a bunch of pairs. I think they tried to see reality and it screwed them up.” I haven’t wanted to admit it to myself but I know it’s true.

He looks a little excited. “Do you know what the goggles did?”

Screw you, asshole.

“I have to go see my thirty-year-old sister in a nursing home full of people with Alzheimer’s,” I say. I leave him sitting on the bench with his coffee. I hope he feels like shit.

• • • •

At this time of year it gets dark pretty early. My head is packed full and I skipped lunch.

The parking lot feels as if it is halfway to the ocean. I can’t remember exactly how we came so I stop at a map kiosk and look at it. I’m so tired that I’m having trouble figuring out the map versus the campus. The buildings don’t line up with the map, somehow. I don’t want Hoffsted to walk up and talk to me so I don’t want to hang around. I start off in what I think is the direction of the parking lot.

After about fifteen minutes of walking, I realize I have got to be turned around. Maybe I should grab something to eat. Low blood sugar. (And isn’t that ironic for someone who talks about glucose levels all day long?) I take out my phone and map the way to the car, following blindly. Turn left, turn right, keep walking. The interface is not the app.

I walk up and down the rows of the parking lot, crying, looking for my Honda.

I would have said that Wanda wasn’t stupid. She talked about the goggles but she usually talked about how Claude hated them. She probably talked about what they did but honestly, sometimes after a long day, even Wanda was too much.

Wanda used to eat food so spicy it burned my mouth, just because she could. Wanda went hang gliding once. Wanda wanted to go to Mars, even though she said it would probably be more like a family vacation stuck in a minivan than a grand adventure.

I think Kyle took the photo right before she put on the goggles. Of course Wanda put on the glasses. See reality. Wanda would want to.

God damn it, Wanda. How could you do this to us.

I almost cry when I find my car. I’m so relieved.

Sunset Boulevard curves around in weird ways. Heading east it straightens out, flush up against the Hollywood hills. I know Sunset, I drive it pretty often, but nothing looks right. The sun is setting behind me and the light glints off the side mirror of the car stopped at the light in front of me and I can’t see.

Talking to Wanda was sometimes a lot, if you know what I mean, but she was a good guide to the strange places of reality. Hoffsted has left me in no-man’s-land and I’m lost. Lost like Claude. Lost like Wanda.

I pull in to a Wendy’s and I get a cheeseburger and a Coke—I never drink Coke. I sit in the parking lot and I eat like an animal. My stupid body, needing things. Wanda’s stupid injured brain.

I pull back out and listen to the voice of the app telling me where to go.

There is the place where Wanda lives. The glass doors spill white light out onto the sidewalk. The woman at reception nods to me and I take the elevator up to the second floor.

I pass the old people sitting in the hall. I pass Leon the orderly I hate, who nods to me. I look into Wanda’s room and she is sitting cross-legged on the bed, stroking the blue waffle-weave blanket like it’s a pet. She looks up, drawn by the movement?

“June! Junie!” Wanda says and throws her hands up and everything is real again. Wanda is real.

She lets me hug her and pats me and strokes my fingernails. I need a new manicure. I start crying again but I feel okay. Wanda’s not dead. Whatever Hoffsted said about one hundred percent mortality, Wanda is smart. She is getting better. The bad days are getting fewer.

“I saw Claude,” I say. “He’s doing good. I told him you said hello.”

Wanda runs her pale palms over my shirt. “It’s a good day,” she said. “I think we had applesauce today. I think I liked it. Yellow. I love your yellow. I love you, Junie.”

“I love you too,” I say.

I will never know reality. Wanda is proof. If she can’t handle it, no one can, but I have traveled through the gathering dark and come to her. It doesn’t matter that I will never know the vibration of quantum energies, never see them or touch them.

I got here. I am having a bad day but unlike Wanda, when I have a bad day, she can reach me. Even if she never gets better than this and it’s always hard, I can still see and touch my sister.

I hug Wanda and she lets me fold her in my arms. She smells of shampoo and clean skin. She croons happily. “I love yellow,” she says. “I love your yellow.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s okay, Wanda baby.”

Maureen McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang (Tor) was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and won the Tiptree (now The Otherwise Award) and the Locus Best First Novel. Her collections, Mothers & Other Monsters, and After The Apocalypse (Small Beer Press) have been shortlisted for The Story Prize and recognized by Publishers Weekly as one of the 10 best science fiction books of the year, respectively. Mothers & Other Monsters is available as a free download under a creative commons copyright at Small Beer Press. She lives In Austin, Texas.

An Important Failure
By Rebecca Campbell
Novelette Long List

It’s 1607 (according to some calendars) and a falling cone from an elderly Pinaceae sitchensis catches on the rotting bark of a nurse log that sprouted while Al-Ma’mun founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. On this particular north Pacific island, the days are cold, and the water in Kaatza—the big lake near where this cone has fallen—freezes thick enough that one can walk out from the villages at the southeast end and look down to see cutthroat trout flickering underfoot. On the other side of the world, the Thames has also frozen, and stout winter children play across the canvasses of lowland painters, who preserve in oil the white-stained landscapes of northern Europe. In il Bosco Che Suona—the Valley of Song, the singing forest in the Alps north of Cremona where luthiers go to find their violins hidden in the trunks of trees—the winter is bitter, slowing the growth of Picea abies until its rings are infinitesimal, a dense tonewood unlike any material before or since.

Ninety years after the cone drops near Kaatza, Antonio Stradivari travels to il Bosco Che Suona on the old road from Cremona to select wood for his workshop. He rests his head against one trunk and listens to its cold history. This is the Little Ice Age as written in the rings of a spruce tree. It sounds like a violin.

• • • •

Jacob woke Mason after midnight. Ten minutes later, they walked out to the old truck, gassed up for the occasion, stale with multigenerational BO, since it had belonged to their grandfather before it was Jake’s. The dusty fug relieved by Sophie’s botanicals: nasturtium; wood rose; one of her cash crops, a strain of CBD-rich indica she had been nurturing for years, called Nepenthe. They drove along the empty street, from the deeply green lakeshore to the old firebreak, gouged out of stone and clay twenty years before. Along disintegrating logging roads to the old burns where Mason could still see char. As kids, they had hiked here to secret rivers and campsites out of cell phone range.

Jacob drove in silence. Mason stared out the window at the ghost forest. Twice they got out to clear the road and Mason looked up into the low bush—blackened Douglas fir still towering over the blackberries and alder. Recovery plants, fast growing opportunists emerging from the last wildfire.

“Cougars?” he asked.

“A lot of them lately,” Jacob said. “They’ve followed the deer. It’s good news. But makes working at night a bit more exciting.”

He thought he spotted its silhouette in the darkness above them and wondered what it saw, in turn—competitors or prey in the disorienting headlights. The eagles had come back, nesting in the ghost trees. So had black-tailed deer and robins. The microclimates had changed as the forests began their slow return, though, a prefigure of what the coast would be in a hundred years: arbutus further inland, outside its original ranges; Garry oak farther west and north as the coast dried out. In a thousand years, it would be another sort of forest. If it was still there.

In two hours they made it to the edge of the surviving rain forest, which—on the west coast of the island’s mountains—had dodged the wildfires that destroyed most of everything else in the last twenty years. Twenty minutes on a rutted track, until they pulled over and met a guy, silent, nodding to Jacob as he climbed into the cab, directing them to an even narrower dirt track.

“This’s Chris,” Jacob said.

Mason-Chris nodded. So did the guy.

They weren’t far from the tree, which stood in what was still a provincial park, technically, though the trails were rarely maintained, and what boot prints he could see were probably other poachers. This was the largest surviving Sitka spruce in the world, and maybe people still wanted to see it, even if the busloads of school kids were rare, and the marine biology station at Bamfield had been shuttered for years.

Three more men waiting. A few gestures indicated the direction they’d drop it. The time it would take. Mason-Chris hung back, watching the wiry old faller put on his helmet, his chainsaw beside him. They waited for the breeze to still. There was a kind of quiet he never felt in Vancouver, even now when it was marred by shuffling men. Or cougars. Then the chainsaw flooded them and he heard nothing but its whine as it cut through the trunk, kindred to the kind that grew in La Fiemme, the Valley of Song in the Italian Alps where—it was rumored—a skilled lumberman could hear a violin hiding in the trunk.

He’d heard there might be another ancient Sitka in Kitimat, but that was too far to travel, even for something as precious as old-growth tonewood. This one, though, he’d remembered visiting as a kid. Its size; the unlikely fact of its survival after two centuries of logging and wildfires.

It didn’t take that long. A deep cut on either side in the direction of one of the other available roads, where a big truck probably waited. Then the wedges. The high, sweet note of the hammer. Waiting. Waiting. Until something inside it tore, and it fell, bounced, a thrash of branches like tendriled ocean creatures, or waves, like hair, like a body in spasm. Then it was still. Silence held for a moment longer, before they got to work limbing and bucking it.

Mason-Chris watched all the wiry, furtive men from—where? Port Alberni? Or maybe one of the transient camps, to which resource officers and RCMP turned temporary blind eyes because even they weren’t assholes enough to burn down a five-year camp that had organized showers and a septic system built of old truck tires. As long as the outsiders kept their problems—opioids, smuggling—out of town.

“Deal with the stump,” Jacob said.

Mason-Chris didn’t know what it meant, so Jacob repeated, “Stump. Cover it over with whatever you can find on the ground.”

“Is that really a problem? We’re pretty deep in.”

“They still send drones through.”

“Why would they even—anyway, I need to—”

“—I’ll get you when it’s time.”

Behind him, the stump was brightly pale in the darkness, sweet and resinous. He dropped branches over three meters of open wound, admiring the heartwood, which was surprisingly free of infestation, whether beetle or fungus. Behind him the tree grew steadily simpler, its branches tossed away, its trunk straight and handsome and more than four hundred years old. A baby compared to the ancient ones, the bristlecone or the big Norway spruce that had lived for nearly ten thousand years. But what would a bristlecone sound like? Sitka spruce, though, he had heard often and loved.

“—Chris.”

He’d get to Cremona and apprentice to Aldo, because Eddie knew him and could write a letter. He’d visit the Valley of Song and see what survived of the European spruce, and he would tell the master luthiers this story of poaching old growth in a provincial park. They would laugh and clap him on the back and—

“—Chris. Come on.”

Dragged away from his plans for Cremona and back to the immediate problem of sourcing old growth for a perfect violin, he saw that the tired, sweaty men had begun stripping their gear in the darkness, lit by phones and helmets. He didn’t actually know what he was looking for, but he worked his way down the long, straight sections nearest the base, running his hands over the rough bark to look at the interiors by the light of his phone.

“This is it, Jake.” he said without thinking. The group hushed. Ignored it. “This is the one.”

The other guys melted into the darkness. It was close to daylight by then, and while the forest floor was still dark, Mason could see the sky for the first time since the clouds overtook the stars.

Jake squatted by the section.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Mason tried to listen to it. Before the tree fell, he had felt alive to the world around him—the shudder of leaves, and the faintly padding feet of the cougar—but now the wood was inert. Whatever he thought he had heard—the thin high notes of a violin he had not yet built—had evaporated.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

It took them two hours to get it to the truck. Then another three to get to home.

“What’ll happen to the rest of it?” Mason asked.

“Firewood went for thousand bucks a cord last winter. That tree could keep a lot of people warm. There’s pulp, still. Mills will buy it up without asking too many questions. You don’t get the same kind of cash, but it’s safer and less work. And you know. Fentanyl. Or oxy.”

Behind them, the quarter of old-growth spruce remained silent, except where the truck creaked in resistance to its enormous weight.

“There are luthiers around the world who would kill for that, in a few years.”

“Sure. Or it’ll heat someone’s house this winter.”

They made it home late that morning, their eyes gritty with exhaustion. Jake sat in the cab for a long moment, then said, “I’m going to grab a swim, then get to work in the greenhouse.”

Mason knew he should help, but he found himself following the old route through the house to the bedroom he still thought of as his: the dark kitchen, past the bunches of garlic, the bookshelves in the living room piled with National Geographics from the twentieth century. Past the windowsills that still held grandma’s things: Beach glass and thunder eggs. Feathers. Stained glass that caught no light in a window shrouded by bush.

He lay in the cool, stale room where the carpet had been discolored by water seeping through the wall forty years before. It smelled like being ten, like summer, like his mother. Like the thousands of nights his family had passed between the wood-paneled walls, the narrow window facing south toward Cowichan Lake—or Kaatza, as Sophie called it in keeping with her friends in the local band—out which they had all stared and wondered what would happen next.

• • • •

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped about 1°C, on average. There are debates regarding the causes of these aberrant winters. At least one trigger may have been the mass death of people in North and South America, with ninety percent of the population, by some estimates, dead after contact with Europeans.

Lost languages and cities; toddlers and great grandmothers and handsome young men and dreamy girls; villages and trade routes and favorite jokes. After so many deaths, an area of agricultural land the size of France returned to forest. This regreening sequestered enough carbon from the preindustrial atmosphere that temperatures took centuries to recover and begin their steady rise to the present day. The wild and empty continent of later explorers was—in part—a sepulcher, a monument inscribed with languages they could not speak, full of witnesses to that terrible loss.

From the cold and darkness of a hundred million deaths, to the chilly woodsmen of the Valley of Song, to Paganini playing il Cannone Guarnerius, it is a long and terrible history.

At Kaatza, the disaster is slow, despite temporary changes in climate, because the smallpox that will ravage the coast has not yet arrived. People go about their business on the water and in the forest, from the Pacific coast to the Salish Sea. Children are born. Songs are composed. The nurse log disintegrates. The little spruce rooted there rises toward the light, its heartwood formed in an apocalypse.

• • • •

In addition to Nepenthe, Jake and Sophie grew a THC-rich sativa, which Mason disliked because it made him paranoid, but which sold steadily as far away as Seattle, and kept—in Jake’s words—the old homestead together. Sophie raised it hydroponically in Grandpa’s old workshop, while Nepenthe grew in the market garden by the lake, catching southern exposure on a warm brick wall with the espaliered peaches and lemongrass.

Later that afternoon, Mason visited the piece under a tarp in a corner of the workshop. Mason had been greedy, and there was material for two-dozen violins, assuming he found within it the billets he needed. He tried to remember what Eddie had done the last time they toured the mills for legal maple, willow, and spruce. Eddie could hear a violin in a slab of big-leaf maple, could feel willow’s sonic geometries as he tested its spring with his hands. If Eddie were here, the quarter would speak. He was still listening when Sophie shouldered through the door, a watering can in either hand.

“There are two more,” she said, gesturing toward the door.

He grabbed them, warm with sunlight. Together they watered the market garden. Potatoes and tomatoes. Chili peppers and mint. And Nepenthe, the deep botanical fug of its leaves rising in the heat of the afternoon. Mason took cannabis oil away every visit, dropping onto his tongue in a resinous burn, applying the ointment to his right wrist where the tendons ached. More effective than anything he could afford legally.

“You ever going legit?”

Sophie shrugged. “If it hasn’t happened by now, I doubt we’ll ever get licensed. I applied again last year but never heard anything. Jacob said you got what you needed?”

Mason nodded, the tree crashed again through his mind. “He’s helping someone cut firewood. He said you should sleep while you can. How long do we sit on it, anyway?”

“It’s got to season. A decade, probably. Ideally a century, but you know.”

She nodded, then led him through the hydroponics to a tiny room full of geranium slips and tomatoes. “Lots to do, Mason. Keep watering.”

• • • •

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, a girl is born in Surrey Memorial Hospital. The labor is six hours. The child—magnificently named Masami Lucretia Delgado—has tiny, pointed fingers and strong hands that are precise in their movements, as though waiting for the fingerboard of a violin even in the moment of her birth. When she is three years old, an ad interrupts her cartoon, and she waits first in irritation, then in fascination, jabbing at the corner of the screen where the skip button should appear, but does not. Instead of a cartoon cloud who sings about rainbows and unicorns, she watches an ad for life insurance that features a little girl so like Masami, she seems to be a mirror, or a twin, with bright black hair and curious brown eyes. This little girl—the other Masami—holds a violin to her chin and plays something that makes Masami’s heart rise in her chest. A white cloud drifting higher and higher among the rainbows.

Masami is too small to name what she hears, and though it marks her forever, she soon forgets this first encounter with destiny. Something of it must remain with her, however, because a year later she hears the sound of a violin and asks her mother, that, that, was is that?

She’s four. Her father shows her violin videos. Outside the air is opaque with smoke from the fires on the north shore, which systematically destroy the huge houses overlooking Burrard Inlet. The pipeline that terminated in Burnaby has cracked again, somewhere up-country, who knows where, and spilled two thousand barrels of diluted bitumen into a lake. But Masami is too small to understand, and when she hears the sound of Marguerite Fell playing the ex-Kajnaco violin—from a quartet made by Guadagnini in Milan in 1780—she is transported, and some portion of her soul will never return from that transport. Her future is, at that moment, fixed. Her tiny hands will grow into her violin, the instrument less an exterior object than an extension of her body. She is, neurologically, emotionally, and psychologically, part violin. It’s in her heart, in her muscle memory. By the time she’s fourteen she’ll have cubital tunnel syndrome and need regular physio to deal with nerve compression. Her body has grown up around the violin the way a tree grows over a nurse log.

• • • •

Masami Delgado was the reason Mason poached the last of the ancient Sitka spruce. But it wasn’t her fault.

Actually, maybe Eddie started it with one of those offhand comments about sourcing tonewood. Shuffling through the workshop in old jeans, pockets sagging with pencils and calipers, a finger plane. He stopped at Mason’s bench, where Mason was mending a violin they got cheap from someone leaving town. He was still surprised to find Eddie trusted him to touch instruments. For a long time he’d just swept the shop floor, drove the van, tended the glue pot. He still did those things, but he also got to replace a split tuning peg on a student violin, and it felt good to hold it in his hands, feeling the thin shell of its body, saying to it “Come on, little guy, let’s get you sorted.”

“It’s never going to sound the same,” Eddie said.

He listened to the long bow draw. “Yeah. It’s not great. But it’s solid for a student—”

“No.” Eddie said, in the abrupt way that always left Mason feeling like he’d said something stupid. “No. It’s the wood.”

He ran his finger down the bright spruce face. “This is pretty young stuff. More carbon in the atmosphere changes the density of the wood. We’re never going to see the same kind of old growth again, even if the forests recover. You need to drop the G.”

Mason listened. Eddie was right.

That night Eddie took him along to hear Delgado play at the Chan Center, a rare treat, like the time early in his apprenticeship when he accompanied Eddie to hear Alu Vila playing Bach on the ex-Norfolk, darkly redolent of 1805. Delgado had just received—for a three-year loan from the Canada Council for the Arts—the Plaisir violin of 1689, and had invited Eddie backstage to celebrate her first concert. Eddie, world-renowned luthier and representative of the CC, had been appointed its custodian for Delgado’s term. She was thirteen. She played the Kreutzer Sonata.

“We’re going to go check out the saddle,” he said during the intermission.

“Why?”

Eddie shrugged, and the lights dimmed again.

Backstage, Delgado’s parents hovered. Mason—still disoriented by the evening’s performance—couldn’t speak.

“May I?” Eddie said. She nodded. Her eyes never left the violin.

Mason screwed up his courage, “You have it for three years?” She nodded. “And then that’s it?”

Her mother answered. “You don’t get it twice.”

It hurt him that something that fit so perfectly onto her shoulder should be lost. She should have it for the rest of her life, on international tours, and in recording studios. It should be hers by some right of genius.

“I wish,” Mason said, “you could have it forever.” But then Eddie was finished and her parents were shepherding her away, and he realized he hadn’t heard her voice, not once.

As they waited for an Uber, Eddie said, “It’s not going to last.” Wildfires were burning on the north shore, and the sunset was an angry smudge. Mason thought about dying trees, and the sound of old growth leaving the world.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing we can do. The saddle’s been wearing noticeably for decades now. Could be a split forming, though I didn’t see anything on the last CT scan. Maybe it’ll show in the next twenty years. Or maybe it’ll be longer than that. I don’t know.”

“We can’t replace it?”

“We can. But we won’t. They aren’t immortal. Eventually it will be unplayable, and then it will go to sleep.”

That night Mason walked down Granville Street past the shuttered theaters that had once been full of music. He circled back to Hastings, and walked out toward his little room in a building on Gore, where the rent was almost decent. Then he searched through Eddie’s database and found the transcendental geometries of the Plaisir violin, emissary of the seventeenth century, where in the workshops of Cremona luthiers made instruments so perfect they seemed not to have been built, but grown. Alien seashells. The seedpods of strange flowers. He had touched one today, felt its lightness against his palm, patinated by centuries of sweat, the oil of many hands and faces, rich with life. All that alchemy of tree and climate, genius and history. She would have it for three years. Then the saddle would split, and it would be lost forever.

That was the day he formed the plan: a violin made as purely and patiently as he could manage, following the guidance of long-dead luthiers, passed down to him through Eddie. And when it was finished, he would got to the Po Valley and join the Scuola Internazionale di Liuteria Cremona, where he would tell a dozen old Italian masters the story of his accomplishment.

But the materials he’d need weren’t just expensive, they were nonexistent. Trees of the five hundred ppm present wouldn’t do. He needed old growth, with heartwood grown in the last climate minimum, when Kaatza froze and the last Viking settlement on Greenland disappeared under the ice. He needed Gaboon ebony, nearly extinct, smuggled out of Nigeria or Cameroon.

“Everything I can afford,” he told Eddie the next day, “is ugly.” Unspoken: too ugly for Delgado, who deserved more than the world could offer these days.

“Not ugly,” Eddie said, “Different. But not ugly.” He picked up the violin Mason had assembled from salvaged materials Eddie had discarded. Then he seemed to think, and he said, “Let me show you something,” before disappearing up the stairs and into the shop, returning with a fiddle Mason had often looked at, a rough old thing, a curiosity.

“Some guy made this out of a post from a longhouse like a hundred and fifty years ago. If he can do that, you can figure something out.”

The longhouse had stood in a long-gone Musqueam village way down on southwest Marine Drive. The violin had a cedar front, a maple neck and back that Eddie insisted had come from a stack of firewood. He’d had some dendrochronologist look at it, dating the woods to the seventeen hundreds. Maybe some fiddler lost his on the crossing, or gambled it away, like in a song, but he’d landed on the edge of nowhere, and built something new from what he’d found. Not well built by many rules, and the sound was drowsy, sure, but deep, Mason could hear that just bowing the strings. He wondered what it would sound like in Delgado’s hands. Something by de Sarasate. A Bach violin concerto. Or maybe it would be some dance number, once played in a small front room while the rain fell outside, and Vancouver wasn’t even a city yet, a song interrupted, escaping from the violin when her fingers touched it. Maybe, he thought, it would be earlier sounds from an equally rainy night, a longhouse on the south slope toward the river, a rainy hillside that had not yet thought of becoming Vancouver. Voices. Laughter. A language he didn’t know, and a moment captured in the reverberating matrices of the wood itself.

• • • •

A few weeks after he returned from poaching the giant spruce, and had begun to accumulate the necessary components for his violin, wildfires scoured the Fraser Valley and the north shore, and the smell of smoke brimmed his eyes with love and dread so he had to call them, just to make sure.

“Still here.” Jake said. “You okay?”

Mason could not answer that, because who was okay? No one was okay. Everyone was fine. “It smells like smoke here,” he said. “Eddie’s not doing too good with the COPD.”

“Yeah?”

The world had smelled like this when he and Mom had arrived, grubby with two months in the emergency camp on Nanaimo’s waterfront, waiting for the highways to reopen so they could go home. That’s what Mom had said to him every night: we’ll go home, soon. Not to the house in Cobble Hill, which was gone now, but out to the lake. To Grandma.

“Sophie wants to bring in trembling aspen for the other side of the firebreak, to slow the burn—” here Jake went on at length about the plans to bring in a colony, borrowed from a stand downriver. Mason couldn’t concentrate on what he said, but it was good to hear his voice and know that around him the house was darkening as the sun set, and outside you could, if you were lucky, hear the resident barn owl’s nightly call. Sophie still at work in the garden, hauling wheelbarrows to the compost. In his smoky room, Mason’s eyes ached until, finally, he wept.

Then, suddenly, Delgado was fifteen, an intensely silent teenager in heavy black eyeliner who wore combat boots in summer and rarely spoke when she came in for strings. Then she was sixteen and her time with the Plaisir nearly over, her parents joking tensely about how much it all cost—the travel, the extra tuition, the time.

Meanwhile, Mason made violins from the salvaged spruce and maple of a demolished bungalow on East Tenth, where he did some day labor for extra cash. In the evenings, he listened to each piece he’d nicked from the job, knocking it with a knuckle and wondering about its strengths, its provenance. He broke down a chest of drawers from Goodwill, scraping away the paint to show flamed maple. Oak flooring coated in decades of grime. A cricket bat made of willow, deeply scarred, might have provided the blocks he needed, but it was worm-eaten to the core.

He searched Stanley Park and found a shining willow near Beaver Lake, unusually straight. Salix lucida lasiandra, not the Salix alba preferred by the old Cremonese luthiers, but similarly easy to carve, and stable enough if he could find a straight length of trunk and season it properly. Resting his head against the trunk, he once again listened for the violin hiding within it, some sonic quality in the way it responded to his heartbeat, or his hand upon the bark.

He returned on a rainy night in January, alone, his backpack damp and heavy with gear: A hacksaw. Rope. More than anyone in the world, he missed Jacob, who had always—even when they were both kids orphaned by fire and pandemic—been cleverer and stronger than he was.

He’d have to top it, which was a ludicrous endeavor, and he could hear Jake laughing, and their grandfather’s anxious snort—the snort that meant, don’t do it, kiddo. Despite the snort, Mason persisted. Willow was essential, and if he could snare vacant lot rabbits and skin them for glue, he could climb and top a willow, then walk back across town to Eddie’s, where the wood might begin its secret transformation into something useable.

He’d climbed trees a lot as a kid. Higher even than Jake, who had a longer reach, but who was afraid of heights. It made them equals, according to Grandma. When he and Mom had arrived from the temporary camp in Nanaimo, after the rain hit in October and the fires down the coast died for the season, Jake was already there. He was waiting for his Dad to come back from the interior, where he’d gone to fight the big fire outside Princeton, when the dead pines went up like matches in the scorched afternoons. But he died by smoke inhalation on the side of a crowded road along with a hundred others, and Jake stayed, and later—when Mom left to look for work and caught the flu and died—the two of them lived like brothers.

Jake never talked about it, like Mason never talked about his mom, dying in the third wave of a new pandemic when he was seven, a few years after they’d landed back on the homestead. They all worked on the hydroponics in the workshop and the market garden on the south slope toward the lake. Weed was legal in the province back then, but the Cowichan Valley’s economy was—by conservative estimates—still more than half dark, and mostly driven by small operations like Grandma’s. And while he and Jake were orphans in a grow-op, Sophie was somewhere south of them in Langford, learning to garden with her grandfather. Eddie had just finished his years in Italy with Aldo, and was about to set up his own shop in Vancouver. Sophie studied horticulture on the mainland, then returned to Langford with a lot of knowledge and nowhere to turn it, until Jake found her on a beach in Sooke. Eddie won double gold at the Violin Society of America. Mason left school early for a cabinetry apprenticeship until a festival, where he picked up the unfinished body of a fiddle—spruce, maple, willow—and found the thing he was made to do.

All those people—those accidents—led him here, after midnight in the shivering wet of a rain forest park in November, and he was older than he liked to admit. Nevertheless, he pulled himself up to the lowest branch, then struggled from handhold to foothold until he was high enough to cut, relieved when the unusually straight center fell with a sound that was both troubling and familiar, the tree swaying in response to the dropped weight. He descended, limbed it, bucked it in convenient lengths, and packed five of them in his rucksack. Then, looking up, he saw a straight branch just below his cut, and he could not resist it. He remembered Jake’s wrinkled look of dread when they climbed too high, his warnings, “Do you know what could happen?”

“I know,” Mason said, and swung up into the willow. He was a couple of meters up when the branch on which he stood—one hand snaking around to grab his hacksaw—snapped. Willow is a brittle, fast-growing tree, splendid in its youth, but soon senescent. This one, more than fifty years old, could not support a man’s weight a second time that night.

The ground was wet and spinning and he said, as though someone might be there, “Help me, help me,” and he thought of his mother, standing just behind his shoulder, about to answer him, pick him up, carry him home. But she wasn’t, of course, so he lay still until the ground righted itself, and the pain steadied: not faded, but no longer in crescendo. He could still move his toes. Then he found he could stand. His left shoulder screamed, but his left fingers could move. He hauled himself fifty meters to Pipeline Road and called an Uber. It was nearly a week’s wages to get back home.

His shoulder never healed properly: a new MRSA at the hospital, one without a name that hung out in the linens. Not one of the virulent kinds that kills you in two days, but the other ones, that persist under the skin. There was an open sinus that ran from the outer edge of his shoulder, right above where the bone had cracked. It was three months before he could work again, but Eddie kept his place, and emergency disability got him through, though he didn’t eat much once his savings ran out.

When he told Jake the story—a joke, look what I did, what would Grandpa say—Sophie threatened to come over and look after him, and when he refused she just sent him Nepenthe. A few weeks out of the hospital and he could move his left arm enough to dress himself, and Eddie helped him put Sophie’s ointment on his left shoulder. He smoked it, too, in the basement in front of his workbench, the deep, slow breaths easing his shoulders out of their hunch, until he felt almost okay. By then Delgado’s term with the Plaisir had ended, and she celebrated those three glorious years with a last concert at the Chan Center, for which Mason had a ticket, and which he missed because he was still in the hospital.

“Don’t worry,” Eddie told him. “There’s a recording.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think it’s going to Prefontaine. A kid in Saskatoon. He’s good.”

“But what’s she going to play?”

Eddie shrugged. “There are a lot of beautiful violins.”

“No.” Mason said, in rare disagreement. “There aren’t.”

• • • •

He ran into Delgado’s father on the street, once. “She won’t touch a violin. It’s been six months.”

“She’s probably—”

“—all she does is play video games. She’s staying out. She’s so angry.”

He went on, then he had to be somewhere and he left Mason on the sidewalk. He stood for a moment blocking traffic, thinking of Delgado speaking bitterly and at length about the globe’s many failed revolutions, her rapidly narrowing future, and he wanted to tell her: please wait, just a little longer, for me to finish it.

A year later she received the extraordinarily fine ex-Jiang violin from an anonymous donor. He went to hear her play Bach at the Orpheum Theatre, with the Vancouver philharmonic accompanying. She was eighteen. When she came into the shop, she smiled through the eyeliner, and he asked her, “Where next? Buenos Aires?”

“I haven’t seen you in weeks. What happened to your shoulder?”

“I fell weird. Not Buenos Aires? Singapore?”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s hard to rationalize unless you’ve got a lot of work. I might be playing a gig in Toronto next year. And I was down in Seattle.”

“Recording, then?”

“Maybe. I’m working on early childhood education,”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Oh. Cool.”

“Eventually it’ll be music therapy. Gives me something to do with the lessons Mom and Dad paid for.”

It hurt him to hear that, though he didn’t know if that was some pain she felt but did not speak, or whether it was his own hope, which he did not like to acknowledge, for fear of smashing it. That she’d get another term with the Plaisir. That when she was finished with it, he’d present her with his own creation, and her career would be transformed as the violin opened up, becoming something new as she played it. He had not imagined her in a classroom with toddlers, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” while they marched in circles around a bright orange carpet. But neither had he imagined himself working for Eddie for his entire adult life, and here he was.

• • • •

For a few years after the fall he made nothing new, just ran the shop and stirred the glue pot, and made sure that Eddie took his meds and saw his doctor. But as his arm recovered, sort of, and he no longer dreamed of falling, he could stand to look at the willow again. He could even look at the old Jack Daniels box in a corner of the storage room, which held the violin in its constituent parks. You could mistake it for kindling, if you didn’t know.

It still took him three years to open the box and begin work on the forms, slowly because his left shoulder remained weak and sometimes his left hand failed. But for an hour sometimes, in the evenings, he worked ribs and blocks of willow in the basement workshop at night, where he often stayed on a cot in case Eddie needed help.

It took another five years of austerity to pay black market prices for Gaboon ebony from Nigeria, the whole time worrying the trees would all be dead before he could save the money. In the end, the wood he needed for the fingerboard, tailpiece, and saddle cleaned out what was left of his Cremona account. But he saved money on the tuning pegs, which were boxwood poached from Queen Elizabeth Park and stained a fine black.

By then, Mason had moved into the shop—temporarily they said—to keep an eye on Eddie, because he’d got old. He’d always been old, in Mason’s mind, fifty when Mason joined the firm at twenty-two, but not old old. Now he shuffled around the workshop, skinnier every year, quieter. Pretty soon he stopped going down to the basement because of the stairs, so Mason set his workbench up in what had been a dining room. Eddie could still watch the till, but he hardly spoke to customers, and he was happiest at the bench in his dressing gown, working on some delicate job, listening to the grubby speakers that sat on the kitchen counter.

Once while they were having coffee, Eddie reached across the table for a spoon and his wrist emerged from the ragged cuff of his hoody. Mason was transfixed by how thin it was, how the skin had begun to pucker and spot, the careful way he picked up the spoon, as though every action required some calculation.

“What are you now, seventy?” he said without thinking.

“Dude. I’m seventy-six.”

“Oh,” Mason said. Thought. “Then I must be—shit.”

Eddie laughed. Coughed. “Yeah. Exactly.”

The January he began shaping big-leaf maple (from an antique dresser) into the violin’s neck, a king tide rolled over the flats by the hospital and the science center. That restarted talk about a sea gate at the mouth of False Creek, though debate continued about how much of the original coastline should be preserved. The old beaches flooded now, water creeping up over the grass below the planetarium. Once Mason saw a river otter slip across a concrete path and into False Creek. The river otter seemed untroubled by his new home, just like the seagull or the ducks.

He went back to the shop to tell Eddie about the first finger of floodwaters sliding across Main Street like a prefigure. Fifty cm rise as predicted, then another half-meter from a king tide, and here we were, in the future, watching mussels grow over the bases of pillars that had once upheld shades over the park benches of wealthy Yaletown residents. He wanted to say to the walls that had once contained False Creek: turn it back.

He got home to find Eddie listening to Melchior play the Bach exercises on the Bourbon viola. Mason stowed the billets in the basement workshop. He could hear Melchior upstairs while he did it, louder than Eddie usually did, so some of the low notes rattled the door to the workshop.

Up the stairs, eyes still full of the floodwaters engulfing Main Street, he stopped in the doorway about to spill his news and said, “What’s wrong?”

Wildfires in the Po Valley, burning farms and groves left dry by a five-year drought. Cremona engulfed, and at least a thousand people dead. The Museo del Violino lost, and a pietà, a portrait of St. Sebastian from a small town. An altar piece and a collection of fine instruments stored in Torino.

“No more Cremona,” Eddie said. “I should have asked Aldo last week—”

Melchior filled the tired silence.

“I wish,” Eddie said in the torn voice of a night spent coughing in the lumpy old futon chair in the corner of his room, which bore the dark marks of his hands where he had been resting them for forty years. “I wish I’d enjoyed it all more.”

“I don’t—”

“—I mean, sure I should have done more to change things and been a proper revolutionary or whatever the fuck. But actually I just wish I’d spent less time thinking about it, and more—I miss coffee, you know? Really good coffee and drinking it in a coffee shop. I miss knowing I could get on an airplane at any time and go to Cremona and see Aldo, just to see him. I don’t think I enjoyed it enough. And here we are. And it’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” Mason said.

“No more elephants. No more ebony trees. No more Cremona. No more Aldo.”

“It’s not.” He thought of the silence after the chainsaw, and the men who waited as the spruce fell, cougars moving soundlessly in the tinderbox woods around them. He thought of the storm of its branches hitting the ground, and the way it shuddered under his feet, and how he had found it, the core pieces, the heartwood of his violin, which had been alive in the seventeenth century, and which had waited on a hillside until now.

First Eddie laughed, “Oh, dude,” he said, and coughed.

Mason thumped the old man’s back with his good arm, still saying, “It’s not too late.”

He couldn’t explain it because they had arranged a silence regarding the violin, and the things he did to build it. He couldn’t explain, but it wasn’t too late because under a tarp in a shed, in that bit of land between the lake and the ghost forest, the spruce had been seasoning for fifteen years. In a box under his workbench he had black market Gaboon ebony for the fingerboard, one of the last shipments smuggled out of Nigeria: fine-pored, dense, deeply black ebony. He had glue made from the skins of rabbits he had trapped at night. He had carved the geometrically perfect scroll of its neck from a piece of two hundred year old big-leaf maple. And soon, soon, he would bring them together into something miraculous.

It must happen soon, though, looking down at the old man, his lips and chin slick with sputum coughed up in the last paroxysm.

• • • •

“You look like your dad,” was the first thing Jacob said to him when, late on the third day of travel, he reached the house by the lake, slack-jawed and greasy-haired (once that trip had been measured in hours, you could be there and back in a day). It had been fifteen years since his last visit. His shoulder—numb with the weight of his backpack—twitched in its socket, swollen and tender. He was limping, too, by the time he made it to their gate.

“I feel like I got old like, suddenly. How’s Sophie?”

“Great,” she answered. Mason started. In his exhaustion he had not realized that the frizzle-haired figure in the doorway was Sophie, the greenish light of the lantern casting her face in craggy shadows and lines. “Yeah, we age hard now,” she said. “But that’s everyone. And your shoulder’s still bad. I’ll look at it.”

They lifted his backpack, then helped him with his shirt. Sophie’s sweet, botanical scent and her fingers overtook him, then a hot cloth washing away the dried fluids that had seeped from the open wound in his shoulder.

“It’s an abscess.” she said. “But I imagine you know that. Do you still have a doctor? Are they giving you anything? I don’t like the smell.”

He no longer had a doctor, but the guy at the clinic helped sometimes. “Nothing to do except surgery.”

Then the heavy skunk of Nepenthe overtook the ache, a scent that reminded him of his grandmother’s garden on a hot day, penetrating and astringent beneath the peppermint and lemon balm.

“It smells like—” he said in a voice that seemed to come from far away, but he couldn’t tell them, exactly, what it smelled like. Like home, maybe. Like his mother, when he had a mother. Then they helped him to the old back bedroom. He didn’t remember anything after that.

When he woke shortly before noon, Sophie was gone but Jake was there on the porch outside the kitchen, drinking something sort of like coffee made out of toasted barley.

“She’s been working with the Forestry Lab at UVic on some trees. Someone she knew in undergrad got ahold of her and they’ve been working together. Genetic mods. Fast growing. Carbon sinks. Drought resistant. It’s promising.”

It was the first good news Mason had heard in a long time. Together they walked up to the gardens she’d been building on old house sites. The street still showed traces of tarmac, if he kept his eyes fixed on the remaining yellow street paint. If he looked between his feet and listened to Jacob talk, and felt the lake breeze, the town could be as it was when he was a kid. Maybe. Or when his mother lived here before the fires. Or before that, when their grandparents built this homestead at the edge of nowhere and Ts'uubaa-asatx kids played in the lake.

But then, Ts'uubaa-asatx kids still played in the lake, and white kids, and the Sikh kids had returned to Paldi when the village grew up around the temple again. Kids climbed through the alders that grew in the path of old fires, picking blackberries rich with the heat of a new world. Kids fishing and weeding garden plots where the houses had been demolished. Kids singing songs he didn’t recognize.

Jacob was limping slightly now. They stopped when they saw Sophie in the middle of a garden near the water, her hair a frizz of gray in the sunlight, and a couple of boys and girls nearby, their arms full of green. Her hands were dirty, right up to the elbows, and when she saw them walking toward her, she waved the carrot tops she held.

“Rajinder brought some Jersey cows from up-island,” she explained. “They like the carrot tops. It’s our turn to get a couple of liters. The butter is ah-fucking-mayzing.”

That evening they ate a soft farmer’s cheese from Rajinder’s herd, and she talked about the trees, the plantation on the old townsite, about more plans with Ts'uubaa-asatx Nation, a gang of kids replanting the burned-out subdivisions from twenty years before. You couldn’t see the old roads in some places, she said. It’s like they’re gone.

“Where?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “It’s the regreening. We lost what, ninety percent of our population to the mainland? So why not give it all back? Some of the Cowichan kids started it in the subdivisions nearer the coast, torching the houses last winter. Give it a couple of hundred years, and people will be making violins from the trees we’re planting.”

He didn’t want to say it, but her newly wild world—without roads, without houses—filled him with a terrible bitterness he could not describe. “They won’t sound the same,” he said.

“Nope,” Jacob said. “Not at all the same.”

That night he lay a long time in the half-sleep of pain and painkillers, his shoulder numb from Sophie’s ministrations that evening. He could not escape the crash of the old Sitka spruce hitting the ground, the crunch of five hundred years of upward growth giving in, finally, to gravity. He wondered if it would still be standing if he hadn’t mentioned it to Jake fifteen years ago, in the middle of the night, when he was going to demolition sites looking for old spruce and wild with ambition for Delgado, who would play Moscow and Barcelona and Singapore. Jake had asked where it was: Did he remember how to get there? Could he find it on a map?

Mason did remember, and said I’d like to be there. I’d like to listen to it. A couple of months later, Jake had mentioned it again, and here we are, he thought, his shoulder throbbing dully on the other side of Nepenthe.

• • • •

The day Mason returned from the island, Eddie woke him up just before midnight, when it was still hot and airless.

“I gotta. Go. In.” he said.

“Where?” Mason asked, stupidly, then realized what Eddie meant, found his shoes and helped the old man down to the curb, where they waited for an Uber, then waited at the hospital for seven hours, Eddie silent, breathing roughly in, and raggedly out again, while other patients paced, sometimes shouted, and a fluorescent tube above their heads flickered and hissed.

They kept him in for a couple of days. When Mason visited him with things from home—his tablet, a sweater, a newly refurbished violin for inspection—he was a shrunken, cranky man, complaining to the nurse in a small, petulant voice. It was so hot. Could they do something about it? The heat.

Mason sat with him while he ate, then walked an hour back to the shop, where he had set up a bed in the basement, the nearly-cool room that smelled of wood shavings and resin and glue, which was comforting while—on the other side of the peninsula—Eddie struggled with each breath in turn. Here it was almost quiet. Just Mason and the remaining problem: the sound post. Properly speaking, it should be made of spruce, like the front, but he wanted something that had seasoned longer than fifteen years. Something precious to hide away, something only he would know about.

There was the old fiddle, the one some frontiersman made out of wood salvaged from the skids that once ran through Gastown and the beams of longhouse. Once, shortly after he met her, Delgado came into the shop for an order of strings and Eddie brought it out. She played “Where Does That River Run?” and he had laughed, and asked her to play again, anything, to wake the violin up and keep it alive a little longer. She had played at length and with wild generosity: sweet old waltzes; the Québécois “Reel de Napoleon”; a Cape Breton lament.

Humming, he climbed the stairs. He let himself into the shop and opened the display case that held the old fiddle.

It was another crime. Nevertheless, he carried it downstairs to his bench. He did not want to think too much, so he worked quickly: pulling the old sound post out and adding a new one, returning the violin to the store’s display case. Downstairs, the old bit of dowel was rough against his fingers. Cedar, maybe from the same post in the longhouse on the Fraser, light and ancient and marked by the original luthier’s rough knife. Fragrant when he warmed it with his hands, but no potent aromatics, just a deep and redolent dust.

Then he fitted it, and it hid so perfectly in his violin, maybe no one would know the terrible thing he had done, the secret history he had stolen like all the other secret histories that constituted his violin. He knew, though, all the courses that materials took, from Nigeria, from the islands, from demolished bungalows in east Van, from vacant lot rabbits, and from Stanley Park.

• • • •

Even from his bed, even on oxygen, Eddie was critical when Mason brought it upstairs, examining it with an eyeglass until he conceded that the sound was as fine, in its own way, as any number of other violins he’d seen. Finer, even, than the composites he’d started to use for his own work (when he could work), corene and carbon fiber.

“You made something, kid.” It had been a long time since anyone had called him kid, even Eddie. “Does it have a name?” Eddie asked.

“Does it need one?” If it had to be named it should be something elegant and sonorous. Kiidk'yaas. “I don’t know. The Vancouver violin.”

“Better than that.”

Eddie wouldn’t play it, and neither would Mason. Delgado was swamped at the center, and had a toddler, so while the violin—Spruce Goose?—was finished in September, they didn’t hear it until the New Year.

She was late. That was okay. The toddler was with her, which was slightly disturbing, but Mason figured they could keep her away from the detritus of the apartment, which was mostly workshop. And there were dry little cookies, at least, to feed her, at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

“I meant to leave her at home, but you know Johnny got a last minute shift—”

“No worries,” Eddie said, quietly because he could only speak quietly now. “We’re just happy to see you.”

“This is it?”

Mason’s throat was unaccountably closed, so he just—Delgado juggled Belinda from one arm to the other. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“Mommy?” Belinda murmured, sleepy.

“I’m going to put you down for a sec.”

She rubbed her hands on her jeans, Belinda now squatting at her feet, leaning on her knee.

“Oh,” she said. He thought he saw a tremor. Her face dropped into her neck, so her hair fell forward and she looked as she had when she was fourteen and coming into the shop for new strings special-ordered from Berlin, talking about Bach.

Then the bow drawn across the open E, and he heard it, the sweetly deep, the brightly clear reverberation. Delgado made a wild little laugh and ran a scale, another scale, then interlocking arpeggios. Ševčík.

At her feet, Belinda spoke to a little blue bear, patting her threadbare ears.

Delgado dropped the violin from her neck, cradled it. Her eyes were bright, as though with tears, but her voice was warm.

“It is—oh, Mason!”

“Will you play something?”

She played Beethoven. The Kreutzer Sonata, as though she remembered the night that had stuck forever in Mason’s heart: the Chan Center, and the Plaisir violin, and Delgado. Eddie leaned to the left side of his wheelchair, his eyes closed, the oxygen tank hissing faintly, the sound of people at the window, Belinda’s murmurs to Bear. All these interruptions should be maddening, but they were not, and only seemed to complement the room’s fragile magic.

When she was finished she sat heavily on the remaining chair.

“How long have you been working on it?”

“A while,” Mason said and saw her as she had been, fifteen and brilliant with an actual future stretching all the way to Paris. He had imagined hearing it for the first time in some acoustically perfect opera house, because the world would have recovered by then. He knew it was foolish, but it hurt to think Delgado would never carry it away from this provincial little corner.

“What will you do with it now,” she asked, a wobble in her voice, the harmonics of longing. “Who’ll play it?”

It was strange to him that she needed to ask.

“No.” she said when she understood. “Oh no. No.”

Belinda looked up from Bear. “Mommy. Mommy?”

“You can use it in your classroom, can’t you? I think it’ll age okay. It’ll open up.”

She didn’t respond for a minute, but crouched down to where Belinda sat with Bear, her brow furrowed with worry for her mother. Then she stood and asked, “Does it have a name?”

“See? It should have a name,” Eddie said.

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.

“Nepenthe?”

As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

“Nepenthe.” Eddie said. “There it is.”

• • • •

“Remember,” Sophie had said before he left. “You’re going to come back here for good, eventually. It’s still home.”

Unspoken: come back when Eddie has died and you’re ready to give up on global dreams and figure out how to live out the rest of your days in this shopworn future.

He had just nodded through the ache of disappointment that had accompanied him for decades, now. But a tiny, exhausted part of him almost liked imagining it, how he’d go back to work in the garden, raising saplings for the new forest that even now overtook the old world, watching kids disappear into the wild.

• • • •

Masami Lucretia Delgado plays the Nepenthe violin daily for forty-five years, even if it’s only ten minutes when she gets home from work, her kids playing noisily outside the bedroom. Five minutes before everyone else is awake, Belinda fourteen and saying Mom are you seriously playing right now? she plays it on the day they leave their apartment because the seawall at the mouth of False Creek has failed. She plays it in the back of a car as they drive inland, toward interim housing in which they’ll live for five years. Nepenthe is a fixture in the temporary-but-actually-permanent school she establishes in a slipshod village on the Fraser River. Together, she and Nepenthe accompany Belinda’s wedding, and Masami’s grandchildren fall asleep to lullabies from those strings. Despite her daily practice, she will never hear its most perfect expression: the violin will be its best long after the maker is dead, and the first hands that played it are too crippled by arthritis to make more than sighs. But she will play on while she can, because the violin must not go to sleep, and the longer she plays it, the more the alchemy of sound—the resin, perhaps, the glue, the cellular acoustics of the wood itself—will transform the object, preparing it for its ultimate player. Maybe her youngest daughter—the finest musician of all her children—or her granddaughter, will first hear the violin open up into its richest, fullest tone. Maybe it will be someone a hundred years in the future, who lives in a different world than we do, but who will pick up the instrument and draw her bow across the strings, releasing the reverberations of a thousand thousand crimes and accidents into the singing air.

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Interzone and many other magazines and anthologies. She won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure.” NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. You can find her online at whereishere.ca.

City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat
By Usman T. Malik
Novelette Long List

1: FROM THE LIPS OF BABA KAHANI

Hatim took them to the chai-khana on Main Boulevard partly because they were jet-lagged and wanted to kill time, mostly because it had been years since he had visited and he wanted to see Alif Laila, the Book Bus, again. No such luck. The tiny park near Main Market where the double-decker used to stand was empty. Hatim was inclined to discount the donkey standing in knee-high grass gazing at the dusk.

They tell you many things, but they don’t tell you absence makes the heart grow older. Ghostly. As if one of your what-might-have-been lives just evaporated.

They bought badly needed travel accessories and retired to Tandoori Teahouse, a makeshift establishment in the parking lot of a building. Beneath a white canopy two chefs in shalwar kameez cooked chai in boiling clay pots and poured it into tin cups—the first sip a crackling, rich, earthy shock that jolted them awake.

“Ho-ly shit, Hatim,” Maurice said. “Imma be up for days now.”

“Indeed,” Hatim said.

They had flown in for Lahore Comic Con two days ago, five artists and writers from a world so different it might have been another planet. Thirteen years in the US, away from the city with hardly a visit (Hatim came for a weekend when a cousin died from cardiac arrest a few years back), and now, gun to his head, he couldn’t take them to more than a few landmarks. Lahore had rearranged itself, indifferent to his memories.

They sat drinking tea, chatting. The subject of the conversation was a panel Maurice and Lyssa were supposed to be on in twenty-four hours—LOST TALES OF YORE: How Imperialism Has Influenced Storytelling Around the World. Maryanne and Tolya were of the view that one of the worst legacies of colonialism had been “cultural terrorism” and removal of traditional modes of storytelling from the mainstream. Lyssa and Maurice played devil’s advocate: such erasure was the legacy of every dominant culture in history and led to assimilation and desired change in language and literature.

So engrossed were they in their discussion they didn’t notice the man who had pulled up a chair and sat himself at their table until he coughed.

“Well, hello,” Lyssa said in surprise.

It was eleven p.m.

A stocky man in his sixties with a bushy mustache and almond eyes shining behind a pair of thick glasses. Long wavy hair oiled back. He wore a sequined waistcoat over pale blue shalwar kameez. His lips were his most singular feature: thick and large, like mutant tulips. Hatim’s first thought was he’d had an allergic reaction.

“Hello jee,” the man said, comfortably. He spoke in soft, flawless English with a subcontinental accent. “Forgive my intrusion, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I know a thing or two about stories, you see.”

His name was Baba Kahani, he said, and he was a qissa-khwan, a devotee of the oral storytelling tradition. He had learnt his art from a troupe that hailed from the oldest family of Peshawar’s famed Bazaar of Storytellers. Now he went city to city exhibiting the wonders of his trade to Pakistani youth, reminding them of what had been lost to the illusory grandeur of this New World.

Would they like a demonstration?

Intrigued, they ordered yellow cake and tea for him. A musician duo had been entertaining the teahouse patrons for tips, moving from table to table. After beckoning them over, Baba Kahani leaned in and whispered to the rabab player. The chubby man with the white skullcap nodded and began to pick a dark and distant tune. Alyssa listened. “Double harmonic major,” she said, smiling. “Fitting.”

“That so?” Tolya said.

“Hate to use the phrase, but we once called it ‘gypsy major.’”

“Listen, my new goray friends,” cried Baba Kahani, rising to his feet, becoming taller by the act, “as I tell you a story first told by the sages of Samarkand, buried in the annals of history, lost to centuries of marauding and pillaging; then revived in the rumors of the unlettered, the street-sons, who seeded it into the bosoms of their troubadours; and finally passed it to us through the songs of those sweet-lipped.

“Of a time when stars and sorcerers ruled the fate of man. This is a story of a land well removed from us, yet so close you could almost reach out and pluck its pearls—like our Prophet, midst a divine trance, once parted the world’s veil and nearly plucked a pomegranate from a tree of heaven.”

Baba Kahani sighed. His hands drew toward his mouth, forming a prayer bowl, then flew forth, coming apart, as if releasing the subtlest of enchantments into the evening.

“Listen, listen, my dear goray sahibs,” the storyteller whisper-chanted. “Now with your permission I recount to you—”

2: THE MARVELOUS TALE OF TAIMUR THE TRICKSTER AND THE MOON-MAD ROSES

It has reached me, my friends, that there once lived in the God-guarded city of Old Lahore a trickster named Taimur.

This Taimur was from a family of apothecaries and hakims. He made a living by selling medicines, sherbets, and potions out of his ancestral shop, The Dawa-khana of Empathy, but, unbeknownst to his neighbors, Taimur had mastered the arts of subterfuge, illusion, guile, and disguise.

Taimur was half-orphaned in his mother’s womb after his father fell from a horse and broke his neck. As a consequence, Taimur was a wild, sibling-less child, the bane of his mother’s existence, who gathered fame (and curses) around the neighborhood by squeezing through skylights and chimneys no wider than a man’s hand.

“Look, look, O mother of Taimur,” women would shout after him as he sped down the street with a stolen chicken leg ’neath his vest, “there goes your thief again. Oh, if you can’t take care of him, next time I will box his ears and redden his bottom for you!”

As a grown man Taimur’s many gifts and preoccupations included changing gold coins into tobacco leaves, replacing penned cattle with confused old men, and climbing up the sides of tall buildings without a handhold.

Taimur was careful to limit his practice of these interests to nighttime or to other cities where he was less apt to be recognized. Yet one delight he found irresistible—which by its very nature had to be indulged closer to home—was to make fools of rich merchants who passed through the gates of Lahore in search of Red Street.

“This way, gentle sirs!” Taimur would cry, disguised as a fakir, after accosting them in Anarkali or by the Blacksmiths’ Gate. “Follow me and I shall take you to the alley that hides the opening to the wretched horrors of Red Street. Right you are, sir. The very one!”

Thus cajoling and enticing, Taimur would lead these men down twisting streets until they reached narrow alleys impenetrable to their horses. The men would be forced to dismount and as they did, Taimur would pickpocket their purses and steal their rings and leave them yelling at a shadow disappearing fast into the maze of back streets.

Now, of course, you have heard the legend of Red Street and its claim to eminence.

No, my august hosts? Indeed! And the mysterious epidemic that spread like an ill rumor through northern India?

Well.

It happened thus, my dear sirs and madams, that there came a time when from Lahore to Lucknow the families of idolaters and iconoclasts alike were gripped by a gruesome sickness.

Their womenfolk began to turn.

Between the ages of twelve and forty, these unfortunates suddenly became vicious, venomous, and vile. Far from comforting their hardworking men, fetching them food when they returned home late at night, cutting them slices of mangoes, or pressing their sore legs, these wretches—were they berated even gently for good cause!—would seize and fling the nearest pot or bucket filled with the day’s garbage at the heads of their poor husbands, their earthly gods.

“May your face be blackened forever, you swine-faced dwarf,” shouted one woman at the master of her household.

“May your mother turn inside out, then squeeze you back in,” yelled another.

Some clawed at their men’s faces; others kicked them in their ball sacks. A few went so thoroughly insane that they ripped their chadors and lifted their dresses and dashed into the street, lighting up the muhallahs with the moons of their bountiful behinds.

Ah, what dismay they caused, what horror they wrought into the hearts of their loved ones.

“Would that the earth had devoured me,” wept one such man, “before this evil should have come to my home. Would that the sky had swallowed me!”

“Oh, why had it to be me,” groaned another. “Why mine!”

Strange, however, and noticed soon by the menfolk, was that this madness occurred for only a few days every month, usually around the lunar fourteenth. Come daybreak of the third or fourth day, the women would return to normalcy, their demeanors placid and habits docile. They would, in short, again become the homemakers, peacemakers, muhallah caretakers, and keepers of gossip they were known to be.

Inevitably they were sat down, probed, and prodded by their men and elders, mothers and grandmothers (among whom were some impertinent spinsters who said they didn’t care and would welcome a little insanity themselves). Slowly but surely a disturbing, wild tale emerged, which made many a heart shiver and many a pair of hands come together in prayer, for none wished to have such a terror visited upon their household. Notably chronicled too was the fact that each woman described arriving at her strange destination the same way on the same night, although the distance between the affected houses was such that the fastest Arabian horse couldn’t cross it in a month.

The following is the tale the women—later referred to as the moon-mad roses—told their men (a tale Taimur the Trickster knew well and used to his advantage in his dealings with foolish merchants), and with your gracious permission, I shall now relate it to you.

It has reached me, my auspicious friends, that one of the men said to his youthful spouse, “What happens to you every month that you aggrieve me so?”

That fair woman replied, “My dear husband, may my soul be sacrificed for you—”

3: THE ROMANCE OF THE RED ROAD AND THE ONE WHO CALLED THE TRAVELERS UPON IT

“It happens to me the same way every month: when the moon becomes bright and full like a houri’s lips, there fall upon my window three loud knocks.

If I don’t answer by the third, a smell fills the room, like raw meat or dung; it makes me gag until my head spins and I pass out. (I am out for days and only awaken to the sound of everyone fussing over me, loosening the chains around my hands and feet.)

If I answer and open my window, there sits a pigeon on the sill. It gazes at me with ebony eyes until I step onto the ledge.

Allah be praised, it is no ordinary bird. Its beak is blue, its feathers ravish-red. In its shadow the moonlight turns the color of blood, and as this devil-bird snaps open its beak and gurgles gootter’goo, behind it materializes an opening made of moonbeams, a smoky cave hovering in the air.

Whispers roll from the cave like a Turkish rug, soothing me, calling me inside. I leap off the ledge into the cave mouth and find myself on a red brick road under a shining white moon.

The road trembles, then stills. I begin walking and it leads me through hills and dark forests quickly, so quickly, as if time has changed here. But before I can get dizzy or too frightened to move, the road has brought me to the Red Bazaar!

My godly husband, may my soul be sacrificed for you, the Red Bazaar is a wondrous place, with its air bathed the color of firebrick, its ground soft like a baby’s palms, its niches illuminated with oil lamps and coal pits. It is set up like a Friday marketplace, busy with street food in carts large enough to need two horse-pulls. Stalls made of wood and thatch flank the market square. Bright canopies with incense-filled doorways beg to be entered, swinging doors lead to taverns overflowing with—may Allah forgive me—wines of a hundred species as well as tea shops with myriad teas and mounds of mithai and delicacies from every part of the world.

Yet there is not a living soul in the Red Bazaar. Not one.

Instead, behind every counter and weighing scale stands a clay puppet, tall as a man, with ruby insects for eyes. The puppets’ lips are parted in circles; eternally startled, they gaze at their wares and me with a red gaze. The collective weight of their gazes is heavy and I find myself flushing. Warm is the Red Bazaar, sultry this air of another world, and I begin to imagine I am submerged in a tub of madder root tea.

The first three times I was taken to the Red Bazaar, I wandered the square for days, fearful and bewildered, my only company the mute puppets and the blazing coal fires. I tried to escape but discovered that the red brick road had vanished, leaving a trail of dull feathers behind. I would follow the trail and circle right back to the Bazaar. I did that until I tired of it. Yet hunger and sleep evaded me. I had no sense of sunset or moonrise. Silence, red as desire, filled my ears and mouth until I became hollow, a cavern of occasional echoes that rose from elsewhere.

Each of my visits would end with the fires dying suddenly, the oil lamps puffing out, leaving me in absolute dark; which would lift as the lifting of a veil from my eyes, and I would find myself back in my home by my hearth and kitchen and you, my godly husband, and my sweet children.

The fourth time I walked the Red Road, however . . .

Arms outstretched, I am standing in the middle of the market square, listening. Something is different this time, a hint of smell in the air, saffron or camphor. I cannot recall if I have smelled anything in this world before.

Comes a distant rumble. I strain my ears. A rhythmic sound, like drums beating.

The puppets shiver. Their eyes burn.

I am seized by horror.

One by one the puppets turn and sink, rapidly, as if swallowed by the earth. Have the fourteen subterranean realms of Paataal crashed and taken them? The stalls shake from the puppets’ descent; fruits and vegetables and mithai plates tumble and plunge. The ground rises in mounds, as if hundreds of monstrous fish are trying to break water beneath my feet. The mounds surge forth in waves of grit and mud that spread toward a distant canopy.

And now I can hear the sound of someone singing.

I remember then a story I heard as a child on my mother’s lap, a legend of Younan.

Sailor-soldiers on a king’s mission ignore the warnings of their oracles and allow themselves to bask in the lambent, enchanting music of sea nymphs on a remote island. These creatures with heads and bosoms of beautiful women, torsos of sparrows, and feet of pigeons play tortoiseshell lyres and sing sonorously. Their music lulls the unfortunate mariners to sleep, upon which the creatures climb up onto the ship’s deck and tear them to pieces.

I remember too another part of the story: Should the men muster strength or cleverness and pass by the creatures without getting bespelled, the bird-women will shed all feathers, turn white, and fling themselves into the sea. Their perished bodies form stony islands that will forever float on the waters; desolate, desireless.

The sound of drums grows louder. I can feel it in my body.

All fear leaves me. I turn and follow the music (and the moving mounds) to the distant canopy.

Wherein I find in a sconce-lit chamber, surrounded by hundreds of puppets of all shapes and ilk, a woman tall and beautiful with a crown of feathers and rubies on her head. In the middle of the puppet sea she stands pounding her feet on the ground, one then the other, and from her lips pours this sweetest of songs in a language I know not, but which is familiar. It is her pounding that has shook the Red Bazaar and fetched the puppets, her song that has called me, and thus it is that I know her to be a creature of enormous power and sway.

I say, “Who are you, O lady, and why do you beat the earth so?”

She stops her pounding, smiles coyly at me, and her face is fierce and handsome, the kind of face that does not betray its parries with time.

“I am the Queen of Red Midnight,” says she, “and I pound at the rotten core of the world.”

“What gain have you from this pounding, O Queen? What sort of kingdom dubs itself Red Midnight, and why has your magic—for it cannot be aught else—plucked me away from my comely home and hearth?”

“Never have I plucked a maiden who didn’t desire to be plucked.” She resumes her pounding and the puppets tremble. “And the ones who follow the Red Road stepped on it long before I came along.”

I will not believe this, so I cry, “Never have I stepped on such a road as you speak of until that demon pigeon alighted on my windowsill.”

Without pausing her beating she glances at me, and I see that she too has a red gaze that bores deep into my soul and fills it with all manner of anxieties.

“I glimpse the truth otherwise in your heart, my fair rose,” she says in a voice that stirs the hair on the nape of my neck, “but I see also that you do not see it. Would it perchance help if I tell you the tale of how I came to be in this place and how Red Midnight surrendered its kingdom to me?”

I tremble a little at this, my dear husband, but I am filled with a mighty curiosity. I nod, and she smiles, her face glowing like the melting sun of dusk. She strides up and puts her arms around me, embracing me to her bosom. She smells of cinnamon and saffron and roses that grow only on hilltops, and my breath stops in my chest for a few moments.

She gestures and two puppets fly like hawks and bring us a pair of gao takiya and a very fine quilt.

The magnificent queen bids me sit on the floor next to her and says, “My fair love, hear then the tale of the Kingdom of Red Midnight and my ascension to its throne.”

“And with your permission now, my godly husband, I will recount that tale to you.”

4: HOW THE QUEEN OF RED MIDNIGHT MET THE HAUNTER OF CAIRO AND WHAT TRANSPIRED BETWEEN THEM

Many years ago I lived in Cairo (said the Queen of Red Midnight) with my man M____, who made our living by patching old shoes.

Now you know a story once unleashed grows its own tail. You might have heard M____’s tale told a different way and you would not be the first: a cobbler whose wretched wife Fatima, nicknamed “the dung,” made his life a living hell. M____ prayed to be relieved of his burden and was whisked away by a spirit to another country, where he became master of a powerful jinni. The jinni made him the richest man in that land and M____ was able to marry the king’s daughter.

You might have been made to understand that his misery and his longings and his fantasies entitled him to happiness forever. That his caravan of dreams led him to eventual everlasting contentment.

But this is neither M____’s tale nor his truth but mine, and truth wears a dubious face and a sour expression.

So let us have Fatima the Dung tell you her tale in her words.

I was married to my husband M____ when I was fourteen and he twenty-three. My father, a Protector and Reciter of the Quran, had told me that M____ was a good, pious man and would be a suitable match for me.

I trusted Abbi’s word.

Indeed M____ was a pious man, if all of piety rests in a man’s quick grin and charming ways. He was a good man, if goodness comprises chess playing with one’s friends all day and coming home to one’s pregnant, sixteen-year-old wife with nothing but mollifying words, wine-sweet breath, and an erect penis.

I lived with him that way for years during which God filled my womb three times with life and three times He took it away. Yet I gave up neither my mandatory prayers nor my faith in Allah.

“What ails her, woman,” M____ cried at the midwife who attended to me each time, “that she will not give me a child?”

“It is not her fault,” said the midwife. “It is something else.” And she stared at M____ and his old cloak and our empty kitchen cupboard and my pale face. She gazed so long and pityingly that M____ flared with anger—I could see it in his eyes, those blue, trickster’s eyes—and soft as a shadow’s tongue he told the midwife that we were grateful but her services were no longer required and would not be in the future, as he wanted to have me fixed permanently by Hashim the apothecary. “To protect my dear wife’s health,” he said, yet he looked or spoke to me not once. He said this in such a way that I’m certain the midwife never felt the malice in his words and she left, thinking he was a good but ill-fortuned man who couldn’t provide for his wife and unborn children.

M____ was like that.

After that he soured toward me and lost his easy laughs, the only intimacy left between us. He already had fewer patrons than the beggar who roamed our street and now he began squandering money on pigeon flying and cock fighting. If I said anything upon his return home, he would grab his satchel and go off to Hashim’s apothecary next door or to Abu Bakr the baker’s or to Fariduddin the attaar’s. I would lie in bed, listening to their din late into the morning hours, sometimes even when I awakened for tahajjud, and many mornings I found my pillow salty and wet.

I have heard it said that happiness is like quicksilver: it runs through your fingers no matter how much you try to grasp it. But what if you’ve never felt its warm touch? What if your element and the elusive element of joy have always been at war?

Still I did not give up my prayers or my faith.

Years passed and Abbi passed with them. M____ attended his funeral and offered salah with the other men, but the same night he went from his cobbler’s stall straight to the perfumer. The next morning I heard Fariduddin and his friends had paid a midnight visit to the shuttered hut behind the winehouse.

Things might have proceeded thus, defiant of meaningful change, except that six months after Abbi’s death I returned from the hammam, where I cleaned the stalls for a pittance, and found my late father’s gold-leafed Quran missing.

This manuscript had been Abbi’s most precious possession, and was now mine. It had a richly illuminated frontispiece and finispiece. All one hundred and fourteen of its surahs were calligraphed in an early Abbasid script and decorated in gold leaf. The four quls were ornamented in gold filigree and the Chapter of Light and Verse of the Throne in silver.

My first thought was it had been stolen, and sorrow and fear gripped my heart. I rushed to the market where my husband sat knocking a nail in an old shoe, while a frowning customer tapped his bare foot on the ground.

“Have you seen Abbi’s Quran?” I cried, breathless.

My husband gave me a look.

“M____,” I said. “Do you know where Abbi’s Quran is? I can’t find it at home.”

“Patience, woman. Can’t you see?” And to the customer: “Forgive her ill manners, sir. She lost her father some months ago and is still grieving. We’re nearly done here.”

He raised the hammer to strike another blow, and all at once I was filled with rage.

I know not where it came from, this devil maelstrom that stormed inside me, filling my bones, my marrow with a red heat. I seized the hammer from his hands and, lifting it above his head, said, “By His Name who has created me, if you do not tell me where Abbi’s book is I will bring this hammer down and smash your skull till all your stupidity has leaked out from your ears.”

Fear and surprise filled M____’s face. “Fatima, set your heart at ease! Hashim came by earlier and was admiring the book. He asked to borrow it and I told him to return it by tonight.”

“You gave him Abbi’s book.”

“For a day! It’s Hashim. He will take good care of it.”

The devil in me coiled like a sand viper. I lowered the hammer, apologized to M____ and his customer, and went home. There I flagellated myself with an old leather strap M____ had kept for his long-dead mule until marks long and bloody ran up and down my back. I donned a black abaya and left for the Qadi’s courthouse.

“Woe betide me,” I wailed in front of the judge. “In a moment of anger I raised my voice to my husband, and look at what he did! Oh, if only my father were alive.”

Two runners were sent to the cobbler’s shop to summon M____, who came in, looking frightened.

“Did you beat your wife, O son of Habib?” asked the Qadi.

M____ denied the charge, his voice righteously indignant, but in his hurry he had brought his cobbling hammer and I saw the judge steal glances at its sharp claw and hefty face.

“The Quran tells us to treat our wives with great kindness and love. I do not know how she got those marks and I may not pass a sentence without a witness, but next time I hear a complaint from her, it’s off to prison with you. Go home now, both of you.”

Witness, I thought. He wants a witness. All these men with their starched turbans and silver seals want a witness when a woman reports maltreatment. But have her walk the street, head uncovered, and preachers and counselors pour out of rat holes, a hundred recriminations in hand. Have her complain about shabby shoes or threadbare clothes and she’s a squanderer. Have her try to earn a few extra dirhams washing out men’s filth at the bathhouse and she is a harlot.

Men are each other’s brothers and keepers. A woman needs a witness.

We went home, M____ whispering furiously at me, as our neighbors pretended not to eavesdrop.

“Such lies. Never have I been insulted thus,” he cried once inside. “What if he had taken you seriously? What if I were sentenced? Who would put food on your table?”

Food on the table, I thought. Hungry for two, carrying two, and not a lick of honey or a pinch of kalonji to strengthen my unborn daughters. They perished from starvation, drowned in their mother’s sorrow, and he talks about how he provides.

I feigned remorse. I blamed my monthly. I wasn’t right in the head. The female madness overcomes a woman sometimes. Thus I was able to placate his passion, lull him back into the stupor he had sunk our lives in.

I waited a good week; then, as he slept, I stole his hammer.

I made sure to create a ruckus—spilled some pots, threw some pans. Before he could hasten into the kitchen, I crushed two toes on my left foot, swung the end of the hammer at my forehead, threw the instrument in his bewildered face, and ran screaming down the street, “Help. He has killed me. O my brothers and sisters, I am killed!”

Plenty of witnesses saw M____ yelling, half-naked. They saw him chase me through the muhallah, a hammer in his hand, as blood pooled in my shirt and the broken nails of my foot tore right off.

This time four runners were sent to apprehend him.

M____ managed to abscond, and took my father’s Quran with him. He was seen fleeing toward the two-towered Gate of Victory; subsequently he vanished and was never seen in Cairo again.

Comfortably, as if slipping on old sandals, I took charge of my house and my life. Finally my neighbors and friends believed and helped me, as I deserved to be helped. People pitied me and gave me gifts. I sold M____’s stall, his cobbling tools, his mother’s fake necklace, and the last of his chessboards. I gave the proceeds to a moneylender who invested them for me.

Slowly I made a life for myself, a living in which I was alone and happy.

Many months later, however, I heard rumors. Whispers. Stories too strange to believe at first.

They said in a land far away, in a city girded by soaring walls, filled with resplendent palaces and gold-ornamented buildings, the richest of merchants had appeared. A man beauteous and powerful, who held magic in his palm and did things no man could. He was able to raise armies and caravans from the desert sand, his glass of water turned to sherbet if he gazed upon it, and on the poor he showered gold coins with sigils so ancient no one could interpret them.

The strangest fact about him, though, was his refusal to purchase new footwear. Tidings of him came routinely on land and by sea, and everyone who claimed an encounter with him swore that the man insisted on patching his old shoes and wore them proudly.

Every single time, the description I received matched that of M____.

I was filled with disbelief, suspicion, and finally rage.

Why was I furious, my fair moon-struck rose?

It wasn’t resentment at his riches or anger at his eluding just punishment; neither the years of sorrow and starvation nor the late nights of drinking and whoring.

I was enraged because he had taken my father’s Quran. This filthy wastrel of a man, a drunkard who wouldn’t be allowed into the mosque at the best of times, had stolen my father’s most prized possession and done Allah knows what with it. And now, supposedly helped by a jinni, he walked this land, this city of treasure and fortune, like a king.

The cup of my patience had brimmed over. If I could, I would have traveled to this land and removed the holy book from his dying hands if I had to.

But I was a woman, and a poor woman at that.

No tears would come to me but were made of vitriol and blood.

I stopped my mandatory prayers and gave up my faith. I went and mixed with men at taverns. Why should I fear dishonor or pregnancy? I had been fixed for M____’s wine-stung pleasure. I gave up the shawl of modesty and bought with it notoriety. I kissed men at dusk and women at midnight. At first, a few times a month, then every week, and eventually every night.

Fatima the Dung. Fatima the Whore of Cairo.

In the second quarter of one night—I remember it was the lunar fourteenth, the rooftops, streets, and terraces whitened by a full moon—possessed by a strange restlessness, I left the tavern. Walking by the Gate of Victory, I nearly tripped over a child of seven or eight sleeping in the shadow of the gate’s tower.

She was a small, frail creature with frightened eyes and a sullen mouth. As we gazed at each other I saw hunger—such hunger and listlessness in her eyes that a moan escaped my own lips. Perhaps it was the drink in me or the mirror of the girl’s eyes, but I turned and ran, not knowing where I fled, and soon found myself in front of a narrow, man-sized opening cut into a part of the gate, dim-lit with an intermittent, flailing light. I stepped across the threshold, and an anguished cry burst from my chest, as if I were a bottle of restless liquor uncorked by a fierce hand. I wept even as I was drawn to that light, and the closer I got the more tears ran down my cheeks.

Surrounded by night birds I could not name, a woman sat on a heap of dirt in the middle of this cavern. She was tending a fire.

“Pass me the kindling,” she said.

My first thought—She is the ilk of cat!—came and went like a thief in the night. My second was to marvel at the two-horned hat she wore (so close to her head it seemed a part of her scalp), her pointed ears, and lovely face.

“Pardon me, O lady. I have neither kindling nor straw to help you with your fire, but if you are in need I can go home and bring some.”

She rose and moved so quickly I could not see the shape of the body she pressed against me, but one hand was in mine now, her other against my hip, and we were twirling around the fire.

“Home is where,” she whispered—I felt the points of her teeth press against my neck; she smelled like the essence of jasmine and pomegranate—“your heart’s true desire is. The place you live now—is that your home, then?”

“Who are you?” I said. As she bent me at the waist I caught a glimpse of her legs, but my inebriation must not have worn off, for they looked double-jointed and her feet were hooves; then I was upright and she was staring into my eyes.

“Would that I had never seen your sight nor met you,” she said, her voice gentle, but was there also not mockery? “For I am prey now to the mysteries of your tears, Fatima.”

She let go of me, bade me sit, and told me her name was Zulaikha. She asked me what ailed me, for she had heard my wailing and felt my pain and wanted to help.

“No son of Adam can help me, nor any daughter of Eve.”

“It is a good thing then that I am neither,” Zulaikha answered.

Mistrustful but enraptured, I told my story. When I was done, she murmured, “The haunter of a mosque helped your husband travel to his newfound land—a spirit that is neither helper nor wish-granter, but a trickster. The question is: is the trick between a man and a man or a wolf and a she-wolf?” and she looked at the fire.

I thought: the haunter who helped M____ was a man, for why would it be otherwise?

“I have lit many fires and made many a man insane with longing,” she said. “I once captured a Bedouin traveler and made him dance until there was naught left on his feet but toe-bones and sinew, but a woman’s desire is a whole other thing.” Zulaikha’s voice had the soft deceptiveness of rain patter before a mighty storm. “So what is it that you want, O Fatima? Your darkest and deepest want?”

“How shall it matter what I want?” I said. “For a woman’s want alone changes neither her fate nor her fortune.”

“That may be so in some worlds and stations,” she said, and I sensed again the edge of a sword in her words, “but consider: were it a night of fulfillment, what wish would you make?”

The rage had returned, pulsing in my forehead, neck, and chest. I knew fear, especially fear of her, for it was clear now that she was of the Si’la: temptress, trickster, beguiler, shape-changer, lighter of midnight fires. The mother of an entire tribe of warring humans, they say, who returns to her home at the crack of ancient lightning, having danced, seduced, bedded, and made bargains with men of all nations, natures, and species.

But my fury was more than my fear: the shape of living fire that spouts from the mouth of trembling mountains. I told Zulaikha my wish. Smiling, she nodded and whispered to me, and I imagined no trickery or bedevilment in her words.

We slept together, flesh upon ancient flesh. It was strange, for I couldn’t divine her anatomy, but it was also sweetly satiating and filled my head with visions of woodlands, ruins, cleft hills, and empty gardens, yet I was troubled not one bit.

Thus we made our bargain and so we sealed our pact, wherefore Zulaikha transported me to and made me Queen of Red Midnight, a place of mine own, body and soul, where I would rule peacefully and powerfully until the day of my own choosing.

And this is where you find me now, my moon-mad rose: in my kingdom of Red Midnight and in my sanctum the Red Bazaar. This is where your desire and the desire of so many others have led you.

“So tell me then, my fair love, is it such a bad place?”

• • • •

Now spoke that fair woman, that wanderer upon the Red Road:

“And thus, my godly husband, the Queen of Red Midnight and the mistress of mute puppets, Fatima the Powerful, concludes her tale—one so peculiar it leaves me quivering like an arrow upon reaching its destination.

“I sit in Fatima’s canopied chamber for I know not how long, her hand cupping my thigh. A touch on my arm, a tender shake, and I realize I nodded off. She is standing, my queen, looking down upon me—her eyes not red anymore but many-hued. She lifts her leg and slams the earth and the ground splits open. Two puppets fly forth, grasp my arms, and we are airborne before sinking through the crack. The last thing I see before darkness takes me is Fatima stomping with her mighty legs; then I wake up and I’m back home with you, my dear husband, may my soul be sacrificed for you.

“But the wondrous smell of her still lingers in my head, a panacea for the exquisite, inexplicable loneliness and yearning I sometimes feel when I am away from the Red Bazaar and her, and I wonder how long she will stay there, tireless and alone, limned by her panoply of joyless puppets, pounding away at the rotten core of the world.”

• • • •

It has reached me, my august hosts, that such was how this fair woman, rosy-cheeked and wet of eye, finished the tale of her travels upon the Red Road. The account filled the master of her household with dismay, for now he knew his youthful spouse to be senseless or bewitched, and neither was a conclusion agreeable to him.

Thereupon, he (and other men who heard the tale from their sweethearts) rose and went quickly to fetch doctors, hakims, and mullahs to begin a series of treatments: cupping and bloodletting, herbs and aromatic vapors, knot-tying and taweez-hanging, dalak massages and manual kneading of their temples and soft tissues with black seed and wild Himalayan violet oils. The women were sent away to hilltops and remote farms to stay with friends or cousins, then called back to be evaluated by faith healers and mystics. Prayed upon, blessed, threatened, cajoled, oftentimes manacled.

Yet none of these measures were to avail. Wherever the women went the Red Road went with them, and the monthly madness descended upon them with an increasing vengeance.

Now that you understand the consternations visited upon the menfolk, you will also understand that many attempts were made to locate the Red Road’s whereabouts. You will also know (although efforts were undertaken to conceal this and pertinent historical documents destroyed), that noble women and daughters of rich merchants and mansabdars were affected by the same malady. Therefore adventurers were sought, clever scouts bought, and brave warriors summoned. God’s Shadow Upon The World, the Emperor himself, offered up gold, silver, titles, and land to any who could help bring an end to this plague of disgrace.

Such is how an ordinary back alley in Lahore called Red Street (like other similarly named thoroughfares) became a lodestone for desperate merchants from hundreds of kos away. They came here convinced they would find a cure for their women’s sickness, having heard the plain fact of it from such and such, a friend of a friend.

They arrived in droves and left in tears. And the trickster Taimur exploited their hopes thoroughly, knowing as well as any local that nothing lay in Red Street but sawdust and pottery shards from a handful of craftsmen who worked there.

That was until a man with strange clothes, who spoke in a stranger tongue, came to Lahore and brought new horrors with him.

And with your permission, my dear goray friends, I will recount the story of their meeting and its aftermath to you.

5: THE ASTOUNDING STORY OF TAIMUR’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE SORCERER SUPREME

It has reached me, my auspicious hosts, that upon a cold winter’s evening, the moon at its fullest, Taimur the Trickster closed his dawa-khana, disguised himself as a madman, and headed to the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh.

His fingers played with the taweez around his neck, an apotropaic amulet that had belonged to his mother. More than most men, Taimur was prone to bouts of bladder trouble, and he was tired of it. His urine had burned all day and attempts to cool his bile with a wash of butter and milk cream and consumption of cucumber seeds had failed. This on top of his daily tonic depressed his disposition. Now he was hoping a sincere darood, perhaps a small dispensation of charity would bring divine favor and do the trick.

Near Bhati Gate he saw something and paused. He forgot his burning micturition, smiled, and began following the man.

A fog had lifted from the Ravi River and blanketed Lahore with it. His quarry strode down the warren of alleys so well known to Taimur until they came to Nawab Rahim Khan’s haweli, whereupon the man stopped and stood, gazing upon its ornate doors.

From a pocket in his dirty robes Taimur brought out a flask of wine, wet his lips and chin with it, and drenched his collar. He stumbled forth from the fog, his gait unsteady, arms flailing.

“Would that I were a dog of her street,” he sang, “that I could see her every night, then complain to the mooooon.”

And ran into the man. Taimur rolled his eyes, one hand gripping the man’s fine coat—“Oh, pardon me, sir”—the other sneaking its way to the man’s left hand, feeling for the ring he had glimpsed earlier.

A spark, a jolt, and he was flying.

Taimur landed in a heap of filth ten feet away, periwig knocked off, his fake beard tangled with rotting goat intestines abuzz with flies. His right hand felt as if it were on fire. When he looked down the first three fingers were seared, large blisters already forming.

“This proves, if nothing else,” said the shadow above him, “the fact that thieves and pickpockets are the same everywhere: ugly and stupid.”

“Your . . . Excellency?” Taimur gazed at the tall man with kohl-lined eyes, a trimmed and oiled black beard, and a cruel aquiline nose. The strangeness of his accent confirmed what Taimur already knew, as did the shape of the emerald-studded blade that hung from the man’s belt. “My apologies. I drank too much and couldn’t see straight. I—”

“Now that is the truth: you couldn’t see straight, for if you did, you would have kept your nasty, stealing hands to yourself. I wonder, though,” the man knelt and looked at him with interest, “what do you see when you look upon me? What is it that goes through your idiot head?”

“Well, then.” No doubt it was the contempt in the foreigner’s gaze, which made Taimur give up pretense, look straight up at him, and speak thus: “Your red and mauve turban is tied not in any Hindustani fashion I’m familiar with but Arab. You wear robes of the softest wild silk but that blue sash is Bengali muslin. The binding of your sash and the growing of your beard are reminiscent of Kashgar or Tartary, but that gold embroidery around the neck of your coat appears to be Ottoman. And your shoes, once lovely Punjabi khussas, now worn and patched. It would seem that you choose your attire with nary a care, yet only the wealthiest may afford such reckless mismatch.

“If I were to postulate, I’d say you were a noble or a well-traveled merchant who has adopted the likings of versatile cultures, but that ring I tried to unburden you of,” Taimur pointed to the man’s left hand, “that tarnished signet ring, seemingly made of brass and iron, is no ordinary jewel. The sigil with the peculiar geometry is Hebrew, the two winged women cupping the seal—”

“Indeed.” The man’s face changed. He tapped a finger on the hilt of his dagger. “I see my thief is a clever trickster, a very shrewd one indeed. Quite interesting and remarkable, but is it fortuitous?” And he stood quietly, staring into the fog.

Taimur’s burnt hand touched the taweez around his neck. The unharmed hand crept into his robes, but before he could do something with it, the man flicked a finger absently and the vial of fainting powder exploded in Taimur’s pocket, filling his nostrils with the soporific.

“What—” He sputtered, tried to hold his breath, but the powder, potent and quick, effected its function admirably. His mind and the city’s fog became one and Taimur fell back into the filth.

He awoke upon a divan bed surrounded by walls painted with the mystery of birds in motion, one of them—the twelve-hued Himalayan monal with its rufous tail and speckled green-blue head—an eruption of bright color aimed skyward. The room softly lighted with glass-cased oil lamps in niches. Thick frilled curtains, a low mahogany chair, an ivory inlaid hookah. At the far end a girl paced before a closed window, occasionally glancing at the sky beyond, her profile sleek and soft.

Taimur’s right hand ached. He regarded the blisters on it, lifted his gaze to the tall foreigner standing by the door, hands clasped behind him, watching the girl. The dagger in his belt gleamed in the lamplight.

“You can speak freely. She sees us not nor hears us,” said the man.

The girl grazed her ear with a finger and came to a stop before the window, eyes fixed on the round moon anchored to the night.

Taimur tried to raise himself, but his legs wouldn’t move. He looked down and saw no constraints. He strained again, but they were immovable, like pillars of lead. “You are not a merchant or nobleman,” said Taimur. “Nor a trickster, for what you have done to me is no trick or illusion.”

The man said nothing.

Taimur patted his face. It was his own, no masks, paints, or disguises. The man had removed them for him. In a panic Taimur felt his underclothes and sighed with relief: his tonics, potions, and accessories were intact. “Who is that girl?” As he said it the girl stirred sideways, the slightest of movements, and the answer came to him: She was Mehrunnisa, the daughter of Nawab Rahim Khan. Everyone in the walled city recognized her.

Just as they knew that she, too, was a moon-mad rose.

“My wife,” said the man, “has been causing trouble in these whereabouts. Such raucous trouble that word of it has crossed many seas to get to me.”

“I do not know what you are talking about,” Taimur said, but a dreadful feeling was growing in his chest, a bat unfurling its wings.

“I think you do, such a man as you.” The man stepped forward and placed a finger on the base of the girl’s neck. She shivered as if touched by ice, and stilled. “Look at how much misery the loved ones of these exquisite girls, these moon-struck roses, as your people call them, continue to suffer. What anguish these lovely flowers must bear! Not safe within the confines of their own homes.”

“Where is her family? How come she can’t see or hear us?”

Pleasure spread across the man’s face. Watching him was like watching a six-year-old beam at his success at a hard task. He is a child with magical powers, Taimur thought. That is who he is.

“They have been taken care of. Not hurt—just put away for a bit while we conduct our business.”

“Indeed,” said Taimur; he slipped a hand into his robes, remembered what had happened before, and removed it. “And what do you propose is our business here?”

“I bring glad tidings, of course. I have come to remove my wife’s cursed existence from your land. Shall I tell you a story?” said the man, his finger tracing down the bones in the girl’s spine. “Shall I tell you who I am and where I have been and what brings me here?”

He wishes to tell his tale. A true self-lover. Taimur considered. “No.”

A flash of surprise as the eyes widened, then anger, which was quickly superseded by pride and will. “No?”

“I only meant, my dear sir, that no telling is necessary. It is perfectly clear you are no ordinary man but a sorcerer supreme. And whatever brings you to our land is of paramount importance.”

A slow cooling of the flame, another, darker presence Taimur couldn’t quite read. The sorcerer dropped his hand from the girl’s flesh and stepped back. “What brings me here, after so much time,” he said, “is the Red Road and the woman at the end of it.”

And there it was. If the stories were true and he was who Taimur thought he was, he wielded a power far greater than magic. Taimur remembered the ring and the way it had emptied his hand of feeling before inundating it with a fire so hot it seemed to have been fetched from hell itself.

So why share his secret with Taimur? Why bring him here?

The sorcerer M____ — Taimur forced himself to accept the conclusion—seemed to read his mind. He smiled. “You, my clever trickster, are here because Fatima must give up her magic, and I need you to be my messenger.”

Which is when fear truly began to seep into Taimur’s heart, for he knew now what this ancient man wanted. “No,” he said. “It is impossible.”

“By now, surely,” the man said, stooping to gaze into his face—his breath was unpleasant: bitter-sweet, onions dipped in musk—“you know nothing is impossible. Here, let me show you.”

He lifted his left hand and kissed the seal of the ring.

Black fell so quickly about him that for a moment Taimur thought he had gone blind or passed out again. But he could feel, hear, and smell the room. There was geometry to this void, a circularity, a strange density, as if he could tear out chunks of it and build of them a creature of darkness. Sparks of light made him throw up his hands; when his vision returned he saw something that made him utter a cry and stagger back.

My dear hosts, I remain unable to tell you precisely what Taimur saw, for he would not speak of it to anyone. In fact for many years he would not share his story at all, not even with his family. Nevertheless, the scribes of yore note that years later at the darkest hour of night, deep in the drink, Taimur the Trickster finally opened his mouth.

He told his fellow drinkers that his dreams were filled with half-shapes. Sometimes he imagined he could not feel one side of his body. One midnight he woke up convinced that another man’s limbs and torso were attached to his left side and they moved on their own. His right eye, mad with fear, rolled, while the left twinkled with glee. One half of his face grinned at the other.

My auspicious hosts, the scribes of yore believe Taimur saw the homunculus mentioned by Al-Qazwini in his classic Wonders of Creation and Miracles of Things Existent: a creature with the form of a half-human, like a man sliced longitudinally, that keens far from human footsteps, forever longing to conjoin with its missing half.

Whatever appeared to Taimur, the organism lay curled in front of a crackling fire, its malformed body bound in rusted chains.

“People think I traveled to Ikhtiyan-al-Khatal and Solomon’s ring fell from a tree into my lap,” said a voice in the dark—the sorcerer’s. “If they only knew what I had to do . . .”

Taimur licked his lips, his hand curled around his mother’s amulet. “And what was that?”

“To begin with, I gave a pint of blood to the haunter of the mosque by the Gate of Victory. In exchange he made me close my eyes and when I opened them, Cairo was gone. I found myself in a vast desert with nary an oasis or refuge in sight. Three days I walked amidst the sand dunes—hungry, thirsty, heat-struck—until I arrived at a place of ruins and bones, where I encountered a race of men whose heads were in their breasts.

“When they spoke, the movement of their lips made their lungs blossom and their hearts gallop like Arabian horses. Their voices resembled the rush of water and wind and their eyes were large and red, bloody eggs in the nest of vessels enmeshing their head. They offered me a tough meat to eat and a beaker of black water to drink; and had I partaken of either I swear upon Him in Whose hand flutters my life my head too would have sunk into my breast forever.

“But I resisted their enchantment and fled until I came upon a place called Hazman’s Grove, where dwelt this creature you see before you. Only it was a hundred times more powerful and dreadful and many times taller, and it called me and it asked my name. It read to me primal poetry, horrific words meant to shatter my wit and nerves, and we battled for seven days, reciting verse to one another, tricking, beguiling, then each falling to beat the other, determined to do so to death, until I noticed it wore in its inhuman nostril a glittering signet ring. At the next opportunity, I tore the ring out from its flesh, upon which it uttered a fearsome wail and dropped cowering to the ground, and that was how with a lost ring of Solomon I enslaved it to my purpose.

“And now we had us a marvelous time in that land, and I became one of its richest and most powerful merchants. I married the king’s daughter, but she served not my pleasure and I banished her and married another whom I deemed better suited to my needs.

“We were happy and satisfied for many years. My wife aged but my body changed not a bit. I transformed my adopted home for the better: Bigger and richer caravans, having heard rumors of the wonders of M____, came to our gates, loaded with goods, eager to make peace and trade with us. The city prospered and my people thrived.

“But came a morning I woke and found my creature awfully ill. Its eye had sunken into its doughy flesh, its arm flailing like the tail of a worm. It had curled into a ball. Distinctly I noticed that overnight my power had weakened. I couldn’t summon a crow if I wanted, let alone a magic caravan.

“Well, my puny trickster, I thought this would not do. It cost me magic, mental strength, and not an inconsiderable amount of calf’s blood to discover that something or someone had been stealing magic from us. It was being drawn from my half-creature and directed to the west.

“I sent forth my scouts, and we heard curious tales of a red land. These tales spread through many decades across many continents, moving like a slow sinuous living thing, and they all sounded the same. A red land, a mistress of this land, and her bewitched girls who all returned home befuddled, telling the same story.

“My story, but malformed. Like my creature.

“This is how I discovered that my wretch of a wife—Fatima the Dung, Fatima the False Accuser—had entreated with a haunter too and transposed another world unto ours and made it hers; and through some secret spell has been leeching my magic, my power to serve her nefarious purpose. Luring innocent women into her world and casting madness and grief upon them and their men.

“No, no, my clever trickster, this would not do. I said to myself something must be done. So, here I am now and here is my plan.” M____’s voice filled with elation at his own cleverness. “We are in this ridiculous nawab’s house on the eve of full moon. Tonight when Fatima throws her damned Red Road like a lasso to drag this lovely bird away, you will follow the girl into Fatima’s abode and offer the mistress of red a bargain on my behalf.”

Taimur had suspected this was coming. Nevertheless his legs turned to water, his innards to cold stew. The Red Road. The man wanted him to walk it!

“My dear sir, I beg you, please listen to me,” said Taimur. “I am a mere street trickster with no magic or power. I know nothing—

“You will go to Fatima and offer her this,” said the sorcerer. “She can have her father’s gold-ornamented Quran, and in return she must give me back my magic. I know how much that stupid manuscript means to her. The compact and the treaty will be agreed and sworn upon Solomon’s ring to ensure it is an unbreakable binding.”

Perhaps he’s chosen the wrong house, Taimur thought desperately. Surely he couldn’t know the Red Road would appear to this particular girl on this particular night.

But the sorcerer would know.

“Hear me, your exalted Excellency,” cried Taimur to the dark, “you must hear me. You are not the first to have thought of this. Of course, other men have walked the road in search of its red mistress. Not one has returned.”

“I am not other men.”

Neither am I, Taimur thought. But you are sending me, you craven, while you sit here smug, waiting for my return.

“A trickster knows another trickster, my lord. There are gaps in her story, events that make no sense. Please, sir, I beg you—”

“Silence, you charlatan!” A shimmer, a flash, and a moan. The creature was gone, the darkness lifted. They were back in the lush bedroom with the silent girl gazing at the moon outside her window.

The sorcerer’s face had darkened. “You will convey my message or you will turn into a misshapen fish flapping in the street and none will dare give you a drop of water.”

As the sorcerer said this, there fell three knocks upon the window.

M____’s eyes widened.

Taimur felt the color drain from his face.

The stories said the road appeared to some women and only the men who followed them vanished. Maybe he wouldn’t see it at all. After all, he hadn’t so far. So long he had protected himself. Carefully avoiding any association that might oblige him to an affected family, suppressing emotion at the women’s fate, never uttering the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Even as he pondered this, he knew he was becoming incoherent. Taimur began mumbling the Verse of the Throne, his mother’s taweez clenched in his burnt hand.

The girl Mehrunnisa reached forth and unfastened the window bolts.

“It is time,” whispered M____.

Silent, the window lifted, a flimsy wing opening to the night. On the sill perched a bird-shaped shadow.

It cooed.

The girl bent and stepped out onto the ledge and as she did something changed in the nature of the night. The darkness twitched; red began to pulse inside it.

Horror filled Taimur’s heart. Rapidly, desperately, he thought, A child. M____is a child. How do you handle matters with a child?

When the answer came to him it was so simple it surprised him out of his fear.

The girl stood still on the ledge. Taimur strode forward, peered, jerked, and cried, “Wonder of wonders.”

Quickly he slipped out and joined the girl, gazing where she was gazing.

“What do you see?” said the sorcerer from the room.

“Marvel of marvels,” Taimur whispered and swayed on the sill. “My God.”

“What is it?” Excitement in the sorcerer’s voice. “Tell me.”

“A doorway made of red moonbeams, just as the stories describe it.”

“Red moonbeams.”

“Yes! Come take a look.”

For a moment there was no sound, then shuffling; the sorcerer spoke right by his ear, voice filled with amazement, “Allah be praised. An astounding work of mag—”

Which is when Taimur whirled, the fastest he had ever moved in his life, and wrapped his arms around M____’s torso. A burst of heat swept through his body, but Taimur didn’t let go. Instead he threw himself back into open space, the sorcerer from disparate lands pulled down with him.

How do you deal with a stubborn child?

You intrigue him with shiny objects, he thought, as they fell, fell, and fell forever.

Such is how, my esteemed hosts, Taimur the Trickster and M____ the Magician found themselves drawn into the land of Fatima, the Queen of Red Midnight, and with your permission now I will recount that meeting of three to you.

6: THE QISSA OF THE QUEEN OF RED MIDNIGHT AND WHAT HAPPENED IN THE REDLANDS

It has reached me, my dear goray sahibs, that Taimur the Trickster and M____ the magician stood finally on the Red Road amidst sky-high roseate mountains and faced each other, and upon M____’s face was disbelief followed by rage so dreadful Taimur felt his micturition sting no more and a stream ran down the inside of his shalwar, darkening further the red dust and gravel beneath his feet.

“You,” said the sorcerer in a voice so flat it increased the terror in Taimur’s heart tenfold, “will pay for this. Your punishment will last not for a moment or two, but a hundred years.”

Worse than this? Taimur’s body was on fire. The protective magic of the sorcerer’s ring had scalded him in several places; large bullous blisters wept all over him.

Did their intrusion break the moonbeam enchantment? The girl Mehrunnisa was nowhere to be seen.

Above them the universe was starless, a darkling goblet.

“Why do it? What gain have you from this?” said the sorcerer, a note of bafflement in his voice.

“None,” answered Taimur, “but that if I were to come to harm, why should you escape it?”

The fury returned to M____’s face. He lifted a hand, but before he could as much as flick a finger, the earth jerked them both. One moment they were upright on a still, unending stretch of road; the next the ground had folded on itself, its two ends meeting—or so it seemed to Taimur, for he had the sensation of the world rounding, a perfectly dizzying feeling that knocked all breath out of him—and they were standing in a vast tenebrous market square.

“God above,” breathed Taimur. “It is true.”

It was.

This was a world baptized in blood, its air and sky inflamed unto disquiet. Lamps drooped from wooden posts to redden its eerie corners. Desolate stalls, barren horse carts, neatly piled bundles of rich rugs, trays of apples, pomegranates, and mangoes—wherever they looked lines of merchandise and edibles stretched. Yet not a soul to partake of any of it.

In the center of the square was an elevated platform, a ten-foot-high floating circular structure of marble atop a thick old-wood pole of carved human faces. These visages were wide-eyed, lips stretched back to reveal discolored teeth and thick, lolling painted tongues. And each tongue moved: slow, molten wood licking the face above and below it. Before the pole stood an army of man-sized puppets, their ruby eyes fixed on the interlopers.

A woman with a crown of feather and gemstone stood on the marble dais above them. Her presence filled the world.

“Mercy of mercies, you are here, dear husband,” she said, her words loud and commanding, as if they were the only reality in this world, “may my soul be sacrificed for you.”

“Fatima,” said M____ and on his face was awe absolute. Words seemed to fail him. He gazed at her, this tall, beautiful being with her perfect face seemingly chiseled of agate and fire opal. Time would not dare touch it. Her hair, black as the beginning of time, streamed around it.

“Welcome to my world, my earthly god,” said the Queen of Red Midnight, her face a glittering, million-faceted gemstone. “See how I’ve prepared it for you. The sweetmeats, the clothes, fineries, enchantments. All for you, life of my heart. Oh, how I’ve waited for you. Come see what my longing and heart-blood have made of me and mine.”

M____ stepped forward. A buzzing permeated the air as the sea of puppets parted and a shimmering staircase appeared, coiling down the pole, wrapping itself around the grimacing faces.

“Centuries I waited,” said the woman, “thousands of miles I traveled to find you. Pray tell, did you not miss me, my lord, your vexing, emotion-ridden wife? Did you not think of our love and our youth?”

“Yes,” said the sorcerer as if transfixed, but his left hand twitched as he ascended the staircase. The latter spiraled up gently, like a serpent, each face on the pole turning to watch the sorcerer go by. “Yes, my dear. I have missed you. I’m so sorry for all the distance and trouble we have caused each other. That I caused you. I thought you would hate me for it.”

“Trouble, yes, so much trouble,” said the mistress of red. “But hate you? It took me a while to understand my missteps. An epoch, and many houses. Tell me, my husband, do you still have my heirloom, my father’s ornamented manuscript?”

“I do,” said the sorcerer. “But I don’t have it here, my dear. It sits waiting for you in my chambers beyond your redlands.”

“Your chambers, my lord?”

Fatima lifted her gaze and looked at the heavens of her making. M____ reached the dais and stepped off. Outlined against a bleeding sky, twin titans, they faced each other, as the forgotten Taimur watched from below.

“Indeed. But all I have to do is snap a finger and my creature will bring it in the turn of an eye.” His eyes were fixed on Fatima, clever and eager. “I know, Fatima, that I made many mistakes. I should have never left. I should have taken your reproach, fair as it was, and my punishment for those years of neglecting you. But it’s not too late, my wife. Say the word and we shall be together again, our powers conjoined, two halves coming together to create a tremendous whole the like of which the world has never seen.”

Fatima smiled. “Would that we could, my dear husband. Indeed that would be most desirable.” She leaned forward to rest her head on his broad chest. “Except for one minor difficulty.”

“What is it?”

Taimur watched her lift her head and gaze into M____’s eyes. “I detest that book.”

The eagerness in M____’s face disappeared. A frown replaced it. “My lady?”

“There is, however, another book I’m very interested in.” Fatima reached out and touched the ring of Solomon. The sorcerer recoiled, but the spiral staircase behind him lashed and twisted itself around his torso. M____ jerked and tried to move his hand, but it was useless. The Queen of Red Midnight held him firm, nary a care on her blazing face.

“A monkey appreciates not the taste of ginger,” she said. “What wonderful adages exist in this land.” Tenderly she removed the ring from his finger. A spark, a curl of sanguine smoke, and the ring sat glittering on her palm.

“No!” The sorcerer’s voice was filled with such horror that Taimur fell back.

“No? But this is my world, my love. Shaped in my image, painted with my blood.” She slipped the ring on, moved back from M____, and twice blinked.

The kingdom of Red Midnight crumbled.

Taimur experienced it like the dissolution of smoke above a coal hearth or the surfacing of one’s face from water.

They stood in an enormous cavern before a flickering fire. The ceiling was higher than Lahore Fort, the walls uneven, strangely undulating. Ten paces away in the finger-play shadow of the flames, M____ hung spread-eagled, as if pegged to the air, his patched Punjabi khussas dangling a foot above the ground. Fatima stood before him, face solemn, looking up into his eyes.

“I’ve reddened many a midnight dream,” she said, “and cast the net of my talism wide in the eight directions of the wind. I’ve called many moon-struck roses to me: to unshackle them, sometimes to make love to them, and found their husbands or fathers or brothers trailing in their wake, pet mongrels reluctant to let a prize bird go.”

She glanced beyond the fire and Taimur saw that the walls of this cavern were not granite or rock. They were constructed of the bodies of thousands of Fatima’s puppets, except that their flesh was meat and not wood. Their eyes were stitched closed with what he first thought was worms. Another look showed they were coils of intestines sewn through the lids. The meat puppets writhed, thousands upon thousands, palm sutured to face, foot to lip, torso to torso—a tenebrescent mosaic of male flesh of every color and race splayed, conjoined, and alarmingly alive.

“But this is my place, my talism,” said Fatima. “Do you know what I had to do to make it mine?”

M____ screamed in response. His eyes bulged as he struggled to lower himself to the ground, but it was impossible. Fatima’s magical construct had disintegrated; her magic had not. The air gripped him tight.

“Three children, she told me—Zulaikha, that ancient lighter of midnight fires. And they had to be mine. So I went back, you see. I went back and fucked those men in their winehouses and alleys and this time their seed came alive in me. I bore their bastard children.

“And a part of me said, O Allah, if You are still there, give me a sign. Destroy them in my womb like you destroyed my other children. But you know—” And here Fatima laughed a laugh that singed the air and flooded the air with crimson. “Such was not His will this time. They lived. All three. All boys.

“So when I had my third, I took them to Zulaikha in her unholy cave and she bade me slice their genitals and throats until blood spurted from them into her bucket of sigils. She feasted upon the meat dolls left behind and satiated her hunger thus. Then she dipped her hooves into the bucket and drew upon my womb, upon which red gushed from between my legs. She admixed my blood and the blood of my blood and I drank it, and in that way I was begotten anew.

“So you see, dear husband, I did sacrifice my soul for you. This is no accidental magic like yours. This is another kind. Here you are not my earthly god, nor I yours. In this domain I am all gods. I am,” Fatima said kindly, “godhood.

“But we were speaking of books, weren’t we? I hated my father.” She frowned. “Tell the truth I don’t remember him much now, but I remember the hate. ‘He is a good man, Fatima,’ he said to me. ‘Marry him, Fatima.’ Abbi and his damned book. Abbi and his sacred recitations. Fourteen, and he married me off, arranged and decorated, like a travel bag. I wanted his book back so I could destroy it. I could not care less about its contents; what mattered was it was his. And I knew eventually you would come to me to bargain if you weakened enough. And indeed here you are.

“But you didn’t bring my book.”

Taimur trembled like a drop of exudate on a fingertip. The air of the cavern thrummed with heat.

Fatima reached up to kiss M____’s hands tenderly, one after the other. Something shifted in her eyes and a thought occurred to Taimur, Not eyes but festering wounds; then she stepped back and closed them.

Red eddied up from the earth, a delicate churn that turned into a whirlwind. It engulfed M____.

“A book for a book,” said Fatima.

M____’s rich robes fell like curtains.

He opened his mouth and gurgled. His tongue dropped out and kept dropping, a fishing line of bloodied meat, bits of bone and cartilage crunching and mashing their way out, until his gullet and stomach had been fetched. His heart warped into a beating walnut, his lungs popped and shrank into ribbons that flailed out of his nostrils. His rib cage collapsed inward to meet his vertebrae, an ossified marriage thrust back into the serrated scaffolding of spine.

Taimur fell to the ground, drew his knees to his chest, and began to moan.

M____ quivered midair; his bones melted. The skin of his torso and limbs softened, peeled, and unfurled into fine parchment, hanging down in sheets; the lining of his intestines snapped free of its contents and draped his redesigned organism. His entrails unraveled, dozens of feet of it, snaking back, threading and climbing his spine like vines. Blood from his ruptured vessels, thousands of intimate channels and red roads, streamed out to join the crimson maelstrom enwombing him and painting him. Came the pièce de résistance: M____’s head slumped forward, thinned and fused with his excavated chest to form a brilliant frontispiece.

Thus emerged the sorcerer, in Fatima’s domain, a newly bound red book with ornamented, glistening leaves.

“My manuscript of M____,” purred the Queen of Red Midnight, opening her eyes and gazing upon her masterpiece.

As her storm began to abate, M____ fluttered, weeping red vapor that ebbed to the ground. A keening sound filled the air briefly. Then the tome of blood that was M____ vanished.

Finally Fatima the Great and Terrible turned her eye upon Taimur.

He flinched and curled himself into a ball.

“Thank you for bringing him here. You can come out now.”

Taimur stared at her.

She smiled and her smile was the appearance of the sun on a cold day. “All ruses, all guises, all veils part in this world, my love. Rise, child. Come to me.”

Taimur’s heart thundered. He tottered to his feet.

“A wonderful mother, wasn’t she?” said Fatima. “After your father died, the greatest of mothers. What did she say to you when she first revealed the truth?”

Taimur’s legs trembled. His tongue was cotton, but Fatima was waiting. One didn’t make a queen wait.

“Seven,” said Taimur. “I was seven and hiding beneath our old cracked table, furious at my mother. Asim and Qasim, the two neighborhood bastard boys, were making fun of me, saying I was a craven, because I refused to take my clothes off and swim with them in the canal. I told them I had weak lungs and Mother said my body must always be kept warm, but they laughed at me and called me a eunuch. So I ran and hid, and she found me sobbing, my mother. She sat me down and we talked and that was when I really understood why she hid who I truly was from the world.”

Fatima’s ageless eyes were gentle. “Say it.”

Taimur’s cheeks were wet. Were they tears or the sorcerer’s blood?

“Out with it,” said Fatima. “Say your name.”

Taimur opened her mouth. “Tehmina. I am Tehmina.” And she lifted a hand, wiped the moisture from her face, and clasped her mother’s amulet to her chest.

Fatima’s face was a rose of pleasure. “Yes, my love. There is no shame any longer. No fear. No need to hide, for you have done me the most exceptional of favors and you will be repaid in kind.”

“I am a woman,” said Tehmina, words now rushing from her mouth, as if a moment’s pause would bind them. “I was born a woman. But my father was dead and I had not brothers, and Mother, when she was fifteen, was married off to a man nearly twenty years older, and we had this shop but no one to run it. The apothecary was at risk. A dawa-khana run by two-women would wither and fail—but if I were a boy . . .” Tehmina swallowed. “I am so thirsty.”

Fatima rubbed two fingers together and Tehmina held a goblet of cool rosewater sherbet. She lifted it, took a few sips. Fear was leaving her. If the Queen of Red Midnight had wanted her harmed, she would be dead already.

“So she gave me concoctions and a daily medicine to ensure I would not curve. My body would remain flat like a man’s. And her plan worked. I have been a man all these years with no one the wiser. Sometimes”—Tehmina paused to drink— “sometimes I forget it myself: that beyond the dull evenness of my body lies secreted a woman.”

“But there is a bit more to it, my love.” Fatima’s gaze went to the amulet around her neck. “Isn’t there?”

Tehmina glanced down at it. “This? It was my mother’s.”

“What you wear is an ancient scroll of Afrasayab, once a great king of sorcerers. I know not how it came upon your family, but I would venture that it is what perfects the illusion for those around you. It offers you protection. How else could you get M____ here? You should always wear it . . . as you should this ring.” Fatima took off the ring of Solomon and tossed it to Tehmina, who caught it, surprised. “Put this on, my lovely rose, and make a wish.”

“A wish.” Tehmina looked at the ring, at its tarnished ancient sigil of black onyx and two winged women carved around its band, as one looks at a scorpion’s stinger. “Isn’t that how the hidden folk of Peristan and Mount Qaf trap a human? By granting wishes and binding them in evil covenants? No, my queen, I’m better off without the dual-edged blades of wish and magic.”

Fatima nodded. “You might be. But the half-creature of the ring is not. Without a worthy master to restore it, the homunculus will wither and pass on, its ancient magic vanished from the world. I must not take the ring, for if I do I may become a greater specter than I am already.” In her eyes were shadows that slipped past each other. “Fear not, O Tehmina, for my spell has been lifted: The homunculus will weaken no more. It will serve your pleasure, for I know”—she smiled—“you will be a worthy mistress.

“And now, O Tehmina, I give you this: You will be the witness to my story and your words will be sweet and beguiling. You will repair the story of M____ the cobbler of Cairo so the world knows the story behind the story. Let his name be lost, let his legacy not be his contrived caravan of dreams, for there was naught but greed and ignorance that traveled through that desert with him.

“My sweet Tehmina, come nigh. Step close to me. That is right: Put your forehead on mine. Now, my dear sweet blushing rose, make us a wish.”

And, it has reached me, my wonderful hosts, that eyes wide, palms sweating, Tehmina the Trickster stepped forward, and rested her head against the queen’s.

7: THE STORY UNLEASHED

“Such is how,” said Baba Kahani with a flourish of his arms, “my auspicious hosts, my gracious friends, my wonderful goray companions—may the stars forever align above your heads and the planets spin into favorable formations—the Marvelous Tale of Tehmina the Trickster and the Moon-Mad Roses comes to an end.

“Now, a qissa-khwan should boast neither of his tales nor his narrative prowess, but I hope you will agree that it is a worthy story, a valuable mode, a memorable history, and a useful frame to view our delightful world through, is it not?” said Baba Kahani, smiling, and lifted a steaming cup of chai to his ample lips.

Hatim and the others started. Lyssa looked around as if in a dream. Maurice scratched his head. Tolya yawned, stretched his back, and reached for his tea, but the tin cup was empty.

Around them the teahouse bustled and banged, a perpetual motion machine that rolled from dawn to dusk and dark to light. Hatim remembered one particular nihari shop in Old Lahore where supposedly a copper pot had not stopped simmering since 1947. The owners worked in shifts around the clock.

Wonders forgotten everywhere, he thought. Tomorrow we will sit at a flat table and talk about stories. Injustice, corruption, and the making of fiction, but what of wonder? What of ancient, overlooked, tongueless pockets of the world? Miracles wrought in the mundane never told, because the tellers aren’t around anymore.

Such peculiar thoughts, Hatim mused, but then, the night was peculiar.

He glanced at his watch and was startled to see it was only eleven forty-five p.m. How was that even possible?

“But that’s a poor end,” cried Maryanne. “What was Tehmina’s wish? What happened to M____ after that horrible shit he went through, well deserved though it was? How about Fatima? She wasn’t a saint herself, was she! And the girl Mehrunnisa? Why is she such a passive side character?”

Baba Kahani’s eyes glittered. “A slew of questions, my gracious host. Didn’t the Queen of Red Midnight say a story once freed grows its own tail?”

“No, she didn’t,” said Maurice thoughtfully. “She said a story once unleashed grows its own tail. There’s a difference, I think.”

“Perhaps Tehmina’s wish,” continued Baba Kahani, “freed them both and Mehrunnisa and Tehmina had their own happy ending. Perhaps Fatima was satiated and gave up her kingdom and spent the rest of her life in service of her fellow women. Mayhap Tehmina returned home without the ring to her life of duplicity and dissociation—who knows?

“What I do know, my lovely friends,” said Baba Kahani, rising to his feet, “is that it’s getting late and I must be going. Thank you for the tea and cake, most generous of you. I hope you enjoy your visit to our astonishing city.

“And with that I bid you adieu and a marvelous night.”

He bowed, the sequins on his waistcoat catching the light. A glimmer on his left hand, then Baba Kahani straightened. He took off his swollen lips, removed his face, shook open his long oiled hair (it fell in midnight rivulets to the ground) and walked away into the faintly red smog of Lahore.

Usman T. Malik's fiction has been reprinted in several year's best anthologies includingThe Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy and the Nebula awards, and has won the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy.

Usman's debut collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan has garnered praise from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paul Tremblay, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kelly Link among others, and is available through his website at www.usmanmalik.org. The Hachette India edition will be out in mid-2022.

You can find Usman on Twitter @usmantm & IG @usmantanveermalik.

If You Take My Meaning
By Charlie Jane Anders
Novelette Long List

They woke up stuck together again, still halfway in a shared dream, as the city blared to life around them. The warm air tasted of yeast, from their bodies, and from the bakery downstairs.

Mouth lay on one side of Sophie, with Alyssa on the other, sprawled on top of a pile of blankets and quilted pads. Alyssa couldn’t get used to sleeping in a bedpile out in the open, after spending half her life in a nook—but Sophie insisted that’s how everybody did things here. Sophie herself hadn’t slept in a bedpile for ages, since she went away to school, but it was how she’d been raised.

“I guess it’s almost time to go,” Sophie whispered, with a reluctance that Alyssa could feel in her own core.

“Yeah,” Alyssa muttered. “Can’t keep putting it off.”

Sophie peeled her tendrils off Mouth and Alyssa carefully, so Alyssa felt as if she was waking up a second time. One moment, Alyssa had a second heart inside her heart, an extra stream of chatter running under the surface of her thoughts. And then it was gone, and Alyssa was just one person again. Like the room got colder, even though the shutters were opening to let in the half-light.

Alyssa let out a low involuntary groan. Her bones creaked, and her right arm had gone half-numb from being slept on.

“You don’t have to,” Sophie whispered. “If you don’t…if you’d rather hold off.”

Alyssa didn’t answer, because she didn’t know what to say.

Mouth laughed. “You know Alyssa. Her mind don’t change.” Mouth’s voice was light, but with a faint growl, like she wished Alyssa would change her mind, and stay.

The tendrils grew out of the flat of Sophie’s ribcage, above her breasts, and they were surrounded by an oval of slightly darker skin, with a reddish tint, like a burn that hadn’t healed all the way (just a few inches upward and to the left, Sophie’s shoulder had an actual burn-scar). Someone might mistake the tendrils for strange ornaments, or a family of separate creatures nesting on Sophie’s flesh, until you saw how they grew out of her, and the way she controlled their motion.

Whenever Alyssa’s bare skin made contact with that part of Sophie’s body, she could experience Sophie’s thoughts, or her memories. Whatever Sophie wanted to lay open to her. But when the three of them slept in this pile, Sophie didn’t share anything in particular. Just dream slices, or half-thoughts. Mouth still couldn’t open herself up to the full communication with Sophie most of the time, but she’d taken to the sleep-sharing.

All three of them had their own brand of terrifying dreams, but they’d gotten better at soothing each other through the worst.

“So that’s it.” Mouth was already pulling on her linen shift and coarse muslin pants, and groping for her poncho. “You’re going up that mountain, and the next time we see you, you’ll…you’ll be like Sophie. The two of you will be able to carry on whole conversations, without once making a sound.”

Mouth looked away, but not before Alyssa caught sight of the anxiety on her face. Alyssa could remember when she used to have to guess at what the fuck Mouth was thinking, but that was a long time ago.

Sophie noticed, too, and she sat up, still in her nightclothes. “You don’t ever have to worry about a thing.” Sophie’s voice was so quiet, Alyssa had to lean closer to hear. “No matter what happens, after all we’ve been through, the three of us are in this together.”

“Yeah,” Alyssa said, punching Mouth’s arm with only a couple knuckles. “No amount of alien grafts are going to mess up our situation.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, it’s just…” Mouth laughed and shook her head, like this was a silly thing to worry about. “It’s just, the two of you will have this whole other language. I’ll be able to listen, but not talk. I wish I could go through that whole transformation, but that’s not me. I need to keep what’s in my head inside my head. I just…I want you both to fulfill your potential. I don’t want to be holding the two of you back.”

Alyssa leaned her head on Mouth’s left shoulder, and Sophie’s head rested on the right. “You speak to us in all the ways that matter,” Sophie said.

“It’s true,” Alyssa said. “You already tell us everything we ever need to know.”

Alyssa had grown up with romances, all about princes, duels, secret meetings, courtships, first kisses, and last trysts. She’d have said that real life could never be half as romantic as all those doomed lovers and secret vows…except now, those stories seemed cheap and flimsy, compared to the love she’d found, here in this tiny room.

For a moment, Alyssa wanted to call the whole thing off. Climb the Old Mother later, maybe just go back to bed. But then she shook it off.

She pulled on her boots.

“It’s time.”

• • • •

Alyssa had handled all kinds of rough terrain in her smuggler days. She’d even gone into the night without any protective gear one time. So she figured the Old Mother would be nothing. But by the time she got halfway up, her hamstrings started to throb and her thighs were spasming. Next to her, Mouth spat out little grunts of exhaustion. Only Sophie seemed to be enjoying pulling herself up from handhold to handhold.

“Shit shit shit. How the fuck did you ever get used to climbing this beast?” Alyssa wheezed.

Sophie just rolled her shoulders. And mumbled, “It wasn’t a choice at first.”

Behind them, Xiosphant had gone dark and still, just a valley of craggy shapes without highlights. Except for one light blaring from the top of the Palace, where the Vice Regent could never bring herself to obey the same shutters-up rule that all of her people lived by. Alyssa didn’t want to risk falling, so she only half-turned for an instant, to see the storm damage, still unrepaired. And the piles of debris, where the fighting between the Vice Regent’s forces and the new Uprising had briefly escalated to heavy cannon fire.

Everyone knew Bianca couldn’t last as Vice Regent, but they had no notion whether she would hold on for a few more sleeps, or half a lifetime. Alyssa tried to avoid mentioning her name, even though her face was impossible to avoid, because Sophie still nursed some complicated regrets, and Mouth still felt guilty for helping to lead Bianca down a thorny path. Alyssa was the only one in their little family with clear-cut feelings about the Vice Regent: pure, invigorating hatred.

Alyssa wanted to stop and rest mid-climb, but the cruel slope of the Old Mother included no convenient resting places, especially for three people. And it would be a shitty irony if they almost reached the top, but slipped and fell to their deaths because they wanted to take a breather. The air felt colder and thinner, and Alyssa’s hard-won aplomb was being severely tested.

“My fingers are bleeding,” Mouth groaned. “Why didn’t you mention our fingers would bleed?”

Sophie didn’t answer.

They reached the top, which also formed the outer boundary of nothing. Ahead of Alyssa were no sights, no smells (because her nose got numb) and no sensations (because her skin was wrapped in every warm thing she could find). No sound but a crashing wind, which turned into subtle terrible music after a while.

Alyssa’s mother and uncles had sent her off to the Absolutists’ grammar school back home in Argelo, when she was old enough to walk and read. That was her earliest distinct memory: her mom holding one of her hands and her uncle Grant holding the other, marching her down around the bend in the gravel back road to the front gate where the school convened at regular intervals. That moment rushed back into her head now, as Sophie and Mouth fussed over her and prepared to send her away to another kind of school.

Mouth was pressing a satchel into Alyssa’s hands. “I got as many of those parallelogram cakes as I could fit into a bag. Plus these salt buns, that taste kind of like cactus-pork crisps. And there are a few of your favorite romances tucked in, too.”

“Thank you.” Alyssa wrapped her arms around Mouth’s neck. She couldn’t tell if her eyes stung due to tears or the wind, or both. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t let Sophie take any more foolish risks.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mouth said. “Say hi to the Gelet from me. And tell them…” She paused. “You know what? Just ‘hi’ is plenty.”

Then Sophie was hugging Alyssa. “I can’t get over how brave you are. You’re the first person ever to visit this city, knowing exactly what’s going to happen.”

“Oh shut up.” Alyssa was definitely starting to cry.

“I mean it. Your example is going to inspire a lot more people to go there. I think Mustache Bob is close to being ready.” Sophie choked on the mountain air. “Come back safe. We need you. I love you.”

“I love you too. Both of you.” Alyssa started to say something else, but a massive, dark shell was rising out of the darkness on the far side of the mountain. “Shit. I need to go.”

Alyssa let go of Sophie, clutching the satchel, and gave Mouth one last smile, then turned to face the writhing tentacles of the nearest Gelet. These two slippery ropes of flesh groped the air, reaching out to her.

• • • •

As soon as they swathed Alyssa in woven moss and lifted her in their tentacles, she freaked out. She couldn’t move, couldn’t escape, couldn’t even breathe. Her inner ear could not truck with this rapid descent down a sheer cliff, and somehow she wasn’t ready for this disorientation, even though she’d talked through it with Sophie over and over. Alyssa wanted to yell that she’d changed her mind, this was a mistake, she wanted to go back to her family. But the Gelet would never understand, even if she could make herself heard.

She kept going down and down. Alyssa tried to tell herself this was just like being inside the Resourceful Couriers’ sleep nook next to Mouth, except that she was alone, and she couldn’t just pop out if she wanted to pee or stretch or anything. She held herself rigid as long as she could, and then she snapped—she thrashed and screamed, twisting her body until her spine wrenched.

A random memory popped up in Alyssa’s head: huddling with the other Chancers in the hot gloom of a low-ceilinged basement on the day side of Argelo, after the Widehome job had gone flipside. (Because they’d burned down the wrong part of the building.) Lucas had squatted next to Alyssa, listing chemical formulas in a low voice, his usual anxiety strategy, and Wendy had fidgeted without making any sound. Every bump and croak above their heads instantly became, in Alyssa’s mind, the Jamersons coming to murder them for what they’d done. This was the most terrified Alyssa had ever been, or probably ever would be, but also the closest she’d ever felt to anybody. These people were her indivisible comrades, any of them would die for the others, they were safe together in horrible danger.

Alyssa would always look back on that time in her life as the ideal, the best, the moment when she had a hope-to-die crew by her side, even though she could see all the flaws and the tiny betrayals. Honestly, she’d had way better friend groups since then, including the Resourceful Couriers, but that didn’t change how she felt.

Alyssa did not do well with helplessness, or chains, or trusting random strangers. But wasn’t that the whole point of this leap into darkness? Alyssa would get this mostly untested surgery, and then she would be able to share unfalsifiable information, and have massively expanded threat awareness thanks to the alien sensory organs. Sometimes you have to be more vulnerable in the short term, so that you can become more formidable later.

They must’ve reached the foot of the Old Mother without Alyssa noticing, what with all the turbulence. She had a sensation of moving forward, rather than downward, and her position in the web of tentacles shifted somewhat as well, and then at last they came to a stop and the Gelet unwrapped her tenderly. She landed on her feet inside a dark tunnel that sloped downward. This was almost scarier than the aftermath of the Widehome job, or at least it was scary in a different way.

They led her down the tunnel, patient with all her stumbles. She couldn’t see shit, but at least she was moving under her own power.

Alyssa kept reminding herself of what Sophie had said: she was the first human ever to visit the Gelet city, knowing what awaited her there. She was a pioneer.

The air grew warm enough for Alyssa to remove some of the layers of moss, and there were faint glimmers of light up ahead, so she must be entering the Gelet city proper. They needed to find a better name for it than “the midnight city.” Something catchy and alluring, something to make this place a destination.

“I’m the first human to come down here with my eyes open, knowing what awaits,” Alyssa said, loud enough to echo through the tunnel.

“Actually,” a voice replied from the darkness ahead of her. “You’re not. You’re the second, which is almost as good. Right?”

• • • •

His name was Jeremy, and he had worked with Sophie at that fancy coffee place, the Illyrian Parlour. Ginger hair, fair skin, nervous hands, soft voice. He’d been in the Gelet city a while already, maybe a few turns of the Xiosphanti shutters, but they hadn’t done anything to alter him yet. “I can show you around, though I don’t know the city very well, because large areas of it are totally dark.” He sounded as though he must be smiling.

“Thanks,” Alyssa said. “Appreciate any and all local knowledge.”

Jeremy kept dropping information about himself, as if he didn’t care at all about covering his tracks. He’d been part of the ruling elite in Xiosphant, studying at one of those fancy schools, until he’d fallen in love with a person of the wrong gender. Fucking homophobic Xiosphanti.

So he’d gone underground, slinging coffee to stressed-out working people, and that had been his first real encounter with anyone whose feet actually touched the ground, instead of walking on a fluffy cloud of privilege.

The Gelet had cleared a room, somewhere in the bowels of their unseeable city, for human visitors, with meager lighting, and some packs of food that had come straight from the Mothership. Alyssa and Jeremy opened three food packs and traded back and forth, sharing the weird foods of their distant ancestors: candies, jerky, sandwiches, some kind of sweet viscous liquid.

They bonded over sharing ancient foods, saying things like: “Try this one, it’s kind of amazing.”

Or: “I’m not sure this stuff has any nutritional value, but at least the aftertaste is better than the taste.”

Alyssa chewed in silence and half-darkness for a while, then the pieces fell into place. “Oh,” she said to Jeremy. “I just figured out who you are. You’re the guy who tried to get Sophie to use her new abilities as a propaganda tool against the Vice Regent. She told us about you.”

“I know who you are, too.” Jeremy leaned forward, so his face took on more substance. “You’re one of the foreign interlopers who helped the Vice Regent to take power in Xiosphant. You stood at Bianca’s right hand, until she had one of her paranoid episodes. We have you to thank for our latest misery.”

Alyssa couldn’t believe she’d shared food with this man, just a short time ago.

“I’m going to go for a walk.” Once she’d said this out loud, Alyssa was committed, even though it meant getting to her feet and walking out into a dark maze that included the occasional nearly bottomless ravine. At least the Gelet would keep an eye on her.

Probably.

Alyssa tried to walk as if she knew where she was going, as if she felt totally confident that the next step wouldn’t take her into a wall or off the edge. She swung her arms and strode forward and tried not to revisit the whole ugly history of regime change in Xiosphant, and her part in it. She had trusted the wrong person, that was all.

What was Alyssa even doing here? All she wanted was to bury her past deeper than the lowest level of this city, but soon she would have the ability to share all her memories with random strangers. And she knew from talking to Sophie that it was easy to share way more than you bargained for—especially at first.

Alyssa might just reach out to someone for an innocent conversation, and end up unloading the pristine memory of the moment when she’d pledged her loyalty to a sociopath. The moment when Alyssa had believed that she’d found the thing she’d searched for since the Chancers fell apart, and that she would never feel hopeless again. Or Alyssa might share an image of the aftermath: herself wading through fresh blood, inside the glitzy walls of the Xiosphanti Palace.

“This was a mistake,” Alyssa said to the darkness. “I need to go home. Sophie will understand. Mouth will be relieved. I should never have come here. When they offer to change me, I’ll just say no, I’ll make them understand. And then they’ll have to send me home.”

She almost expected Jeremy to answer, but he was nowhere near. She’d wandered a long way from their quarters, and there was no sound but the grumbling of old machines, and the scritching of the Gelet’s forelegs as they moved around her.

• • • •

“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” Alyssa told Jeremy, when she’d somehow groped her way back to the living quarters. “I can’t stand the idea of inflicting my past on anyone else.”

“I’m definitely going ahead with it,” Jeremy replied after a while. “When Sophie showed me what she could do, I couldn’t even believe what a great organizing tool this could be. This is going to transform the new Uprising, because people will be able to see the truth for themselves, without any doubt or distortion.”

Alyssa had wanted to avoid Jeremy, or shut out his self-righteous nattering. But they were the only two humans for thousands of kilometers, and she couldn’t go too long without another human voice, as it turned out.

“So you’re about to become one of the first members of a whole new species,” Alyssa said, “and you’re just going to use it as a recruiting tool for another regime change? So you can take power, and then someone else can turn around and overthrow you in turn? Seems like kind of a waste.”

“At least I’m not—” Jeremy barked. Then he took a slow breath and shifted. His silhouette looked as if he was hugging himself. “It’s not just about unseating your friend Bianca. It’s not. It’s about building a movement. I spent so much time in that coffeehouse, listening to people who could barely even give voice to all the ways they were struggling. We need a new kind of politics.”

“Bianca’s not my friend. I hate her too, in ways that you could never understand.” Alyssa found more of the rectangular flat candy and ate a chunk. “But if enough people become hybrids, and learn to share the way Sophie shares, we could have something better than just more politics. We could have a new community. We could share resources as well as thoughts. We could work with the Gelet.”

“Sure, sure,” Jeremy said. “Maybe eventually.”

“Not eventually,” Alyssa said. “Soon.”

“What makes you think a lot of people will buy into that vision, if you’re not even willing to go through with it yourself?”

Alyssa groaned. “Look. I’m just saying…You have to be doing this for the right reasons, or it’ll end really badly. You’ll lose yourself. I saw it again and again, back in Argelo, people burning up everything they were just for the sake of allegiances or ideology or whatever.”

They didn’t talk for a while, but then they went back to arguing. There wasn’t anything else to do, and besides, by the sound of it, Jeremy had been a good friend to Sophie, back when she’d really needed someone. So Alyssa didn’t want him to wreck his psyche, or his heart, or whatever, by turning his memories into propaganda.

“I can be careful.” Jeremy sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “I can share only the memories and thoughts that will make people want to mobilize. I can keep everything else to myself.”

“Maybe,” was all Alyssa said.

These Xiosphanti believed in the power of repression, way more than was healthy. Or realistic.

“I wish we could ask the Gelet.” Jeremy was doing some kind of stretches in the darkness. “It’s a terrible paradox: you can only have a conversation with them about the pros and cons of becoming a hybrid, after you’ve already become a hybrid.”

Alyssa went for another walk in the chittering dark—she shrieked with terror, but only inside her own head—and when she got back, Jeremy said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m going to regret this. Maybe I should stick to organizing people the old-fashioned way, winning their trust slowly. I don’t know. I’m out of options.”

Alyssa was startled to realize that while she’d been trying to talk Jeremy out of becoming a hybrid, she’d talked herself back into it. She needed to believe: in Sophie, in this higher communion. Alyssa kept dwelling on that memory of cowering in a hot basement with the other Chancers, and pictured herself sharing it with Sophie, or Mouth, or anyone. What would happen to that moment when it was no longer hers alone? She wanted to find out.

• • • •

The Gelet surrounded Alyssa with their chitinous bodies and opened their twin-bladed pincers, until she leaned forward and nuzzled the slick tubes, the slightly larger cousins of the tendrils growing out of Sophie’s chest.

An oily, pungent aroma overwhelmed Alyssa for a moment, and then she was experiencing the world as the Gelet saw it. This Gelet showed her a sense-impression of a human, being torn open to make room for a mass of alien flesh that latched onto her heart, her lungs, her bowels. Alyssa couldn’t keep from flinching so hard that she broke the connection.

But when they offered her a choice between the operating room and safe passage home, Alyssa didn’t even hesitate before peeling off her clothes.

Alyssa had always said that pain was no big thing—like the worst part of pain was just the monotony of a single sensation that overstayed its welcome. But she’d never felt agony like this, not even on all the occasions when she’d been shot or stabbed or shackled inside a dungeon. Sophie had made this operation sound unpleasant, pretty awful, a nasty shock. But Alyssa started screaming cursewords in two languages before she was even half-awake, after surgery.

The pain didn’t get any better, and the Gelet were super-cautious with their hoarded sedatives, and Alyssa was sure something had gone wrong, perhaps fatally. All she could do was try her best to shut out the world. But…she couldn’t.

Because, even with her eyes closed and her ears covered, she could sense the walls of the chamber where the Gelet had brought her to rest, and she could “feel” the Gelet creeping around her, and in the passageways nearby. Her brand new tentacles insisted on bombarding her with sensations that her mind didn’t know how to process. Alyssa had thought of Sophie’s small tentacles as providing her with “enhanced threat awareness,” but this was just too much world to deal with.

Alyssa screamed until her throat got sore. Even her teeth hurt from gnashing.

She looked down at herself. The top part of her chest was covered with all of these dark wriggling growths coated with fresh slime, like parasites. Like a mutilation. Before Alyssa even knew what she was doing, she had grabbed two handfuls of tendrils, and she was trying to yank them out of her body with all her strength.

Alyssa might as well have tried to cut off her own hand—the pain flared, more than she could endure. Searing, wrenching. Like being on fire and gutshot, at the same time. And even though her eyes told her that there were foreign objects attached to her chest, her skin (her mind?) told her these were part of her body, and she was attacking herself. She nearly passed out again from the pain of her own self-assault.

The Gelet rushed over, three of them, and now Alyssa could sense their panic even without any physical contact. Her new tentacles could pick up their emotional states, with more accuracy than being able to see facial expressions or body language, and these Gelet were very extremely freaked out. Two of them set about trying to stabilize Alyssa and undo the damage she’d just caused to her delicate grafts, while the third leaned over her.

Alyssa looked up with both her old and her new senses. A big blunt head descended toward her, with a huge claw opening to reveal more of those slimy strips of flesh, and Alyssa felt a mixture of disgust and warmth. She didn’t know what she felt anymore, because her reactions were tainted by the sensory input from her tentacles. The Gelet leaning toward her gave off waves of tenderness and concern—but also annoyance and fear—and this was all too much to process.

“I would very much like not to feel any of what I’m feeling,” Alyssa said.

Then the Gelet closest to her made contact with her tendrils, and Alyssa had the familiar sensation of falling out of herself, that she’d gotten from Sophie so many times now. And then—

—Sophie was standing right in front of Alyssa, close enough for Alyssa to look into her eyes.

“What are you doing? How are you here?” Alyssa asked Sophie, before she bit her tongue. Because of course, Sophie wasn’t present at all. This was a memory or something.

Sophie was looking at herself, with her tendrils as fresh as the ones Alyssa had just tried to rip out of herself, and she was reaching out with her tentacles to “feel” the space around her, and Alyssa was doubly aware of Sophie’s happiness, thanks to her facial expression and all the chemicals she was giving off. At last, Sophie seemed to be saying. Thank you, at long last my head can be an estuary instead of just this reservoir.

Alyssa wanted to reach out for Sophie, but Alyssa wasn’t even herself in this memory. Alyssa was a Gelet, with a huge lumbering body under a thick shell and woolly fur, with a heart full of relief that this operation might be working better than anyone dared hope—

—Alyssa came back to herself, and looked at the Gelet leaning over her. The disgust was gone, and she “saw” every flex of the segmented legs and every twitch of the big shapeless head, as if they were the tiny habits of a distant family member.

“I’m sorry,” Alyssa said, hoping they understood somehow. “I didn’t mean to do that, it was just instinct. I hope I didn’t ruin everything. I do want to understand all of you, and go home to Sophie as her equal. I really didn’t want to, I’m sorry—I didn’t want to, it just happened. I’m sorry.”

Maybe if her tendrils weren’t damaged beyond repair, she’d be able to tell them in a way they understood. As it was, they seemed satisfied that she wasn’t going to try and tear herself apart again, and that they’d done everything they could to stabilize her.

Alyssa lay there cursing herself and hoping and worrying and freaking out, until she heard shrieks echoing from the next room. Jeremy. He’d gotten the procedure too, and he’d just woken up, with the same agony and loathing that had struck Alyssa. She wished she could think of something to say to talk him down. Or at least they could be miserable together, if she could talk to him.

This operation was supposed to help Alyssa to form connections, but she was more alone than ever.

• • • •

The pain ground on and on. Alyssa would never get used to these stabbing, burning, throbbing sensations. Alyssa couldn’t tell how much of this discomfort was from the operation, and how much was because she’d attacked herself when she was still healing.

Alyssa rested on a hammock of moss and roots until she got bored and the pain had lessened enough for her to move around, and then she started exploring the city again. This time, she could sense the walkways and all the galleries, all the way down into the depths of the city, and she was aware of the Gelet moving all around her. She started to be able to tell them apart, and read their moods, and all their little gestures and twitches and flexing tentacles began to seem more like mannerisms.

One Gelet, in particular, seemed to have been given the task of watching over Alyssa, and she had a loping stride and a friendly, nurturing “scent.” (Alyssa couldn’t think of the right word to describe the way she could tell the Gelet’s emotions from the chemicals they gave off, but “scent” would do for now.) This Gelet stayed close enough to Alyssa to provide any help she needed, and Alyssa found her presence reassuring, rather than spooky.

Alyssa’s new friend had survived the noxious blight that had killed a lot of her siblings in the weave where all the Gelet babies grew. (But she was still a little smaller than all the older Gelet.) When she was brand new, the other Gelet had made a wish for her that boiled down to “Find reasons for hope, even in the midst of death.”

That thought reminded Alyssa of a nagging regret: she and Sophie still hadn’t succeeded in helping Mouth to figure out a new name, mostly because Mouth was impossible to please.

And this Gelet, whom Alyssa started calling Hope, had devoted most of her life so far to studying the high wind currents, the jetstreams that moved air from day to night and back again. Hope’s mind was full of designs for flying machines, to let people examine the upper atmosphere up close, and find a way to keep the toxic clouds away from the Gelet city. But Alyssa’s communication with Hope still only went one way. Her new grafts, the tendrils she’d tried to rip out, still hurt worse than daylight. She tried to shield them with her entire body, as if exposure to air would ruin them further.

What if they never worked right?

What if she could never use them to communicate, without feeling as if hot needles were poking in between her first few ribs?

That moment when she’d grabbed with both hands, tearing at her new skin, kept replaying in Alyssa’s head, and she wanted to curse herself. Weak, untrustworthy, doomed—she cringed each time.

Hope kept offering her own open pincer and warm tendrils, which always contained some soothing memory of playing a friendly game with some other Gelet, or receiving a blessing from the Gelet’s long-dead leader, in some dream-gathering. Alyssa kept wishing she could talk back, explain, maybe learn to become more than just a raw mass of anxiety with nothing to say.

At last, Alyssa decided to take the risk.

She raised her still-sore tendrils to meet Hope’s, and tried to figure out how to send, instead of receive. Alyssa brought the awful memory to the front of her mind: her hands, grasping and pulling, so vivid, it was almost happening once again. She felt it flood out of her, but then she wasn’t sure if Hope had received it. Until Hope recoiled, and sent back an impression of what Alyssa had looked like to everyone else, thrashing around, and the Gelet rushing in to try and fix the damage.

Alyssa “saw” them touching her body, in the same places that still hurt now, and felt their anxiety, their horror, but also their…determination? Bloody-mindedness, maybe. She had the weird sensation of “watching” the Gelet surgeons repairing the adhesions on her chest, while she could still feel the ache inside those torn places. And the strangest part: as she watched the Gelet restore her grafts in the past, Alyssa found the wounds hurt less fiercely in the present.

The pain didn’t magically fade to bliss or anything like that, but Alyssa found she could bear it, maybe because she could convince herself that they’d repaired the damage. She started thinking of it more like just another stab wound.

And once Alyssa decided she could use her new organs (antennae?) without wrecking something that was barely strung together, she started opening up more. She shared the memory of this caustic rain that had fallen on her in Argelo, which had seemed to come from the same alkali clouds that had doomed some of Hope’s siblings. And the moment when Sophie had first given Alyssa a glimpse of this city and the Gelet living here, suffused with all of Sophie’s love for this place. And finally, the first time Mouth, Sophie and Alyssa climbed onto the flat shale rooftops of the Warrens while everyone else slept, the three of them holding hands and looking across the whole city, from shadow to flame.

In return, Hope shared her earliest memories as a separate person, which was also the moment she realized that she was surrounded by the dead flesh of her hatchmates, hanging inside this sticky weave. Tiny lifeless bodies nestled against her, all of them connected to the same flow of nutrients that were keeping her alive. The crumbling skin touching hers, the overwhelming chemical stench of decay—with no way to escape, nothing to do but keep sending out distress pheromones until someone arrived to take away the dead. And then later, when Hope had left the web, and all the other Gelet had treated her like a fragile ice blossom.

Alyssa felt sickened in a deep cavity of herself, somewhere underneath her new grafts.

She tried to send back random scraps of her own upbringing, like when her mom and all her uncles died on her, or when she got in her first serious knife fight. But also, cakes, cactus crisps, and dancing. And kissing girls and boys and others, in the crook of this alleyway that curled around the hilt of the Knife in Argelo, where you felt the music more than you heard it, and you could get trashed off the fumes from other people’s drinks. Always knowing that she could lose herself in this city, and there were more sweet secrets than Alyssa would ever have enough time to find.

Soon, Alyssa and Hope were just sharing back and forth, every furtive joy and every weird moment of being a kid and trying to make sense of the adults around you—and then growing up but still not understanding, most of the time. The intricacies of the Gelet culture still screwed Alyssa’s head ten ways at once, but she could understand feeling like a weird kid, looking in.

Alyssa started to feel more comfortable with Hope than with 99 percent of human beings —until a few sleeps later, Hope showed Alyssa something that sent a spike of ice all the way through her. They were sitting together in one of those rooty-webby hammocks, and Alyssa was drowsing, finally no longer in so much pain that she couldn’t rest, and Hope let something slip out. A memory of the past?

No—a possible future.

In Hope’s vision, hybrid humans were moving in packs through this city, deep under the midnight chill. Dozens of people, all chattering with their human voices, but also reaching out to each other with their Gelet tendrils. This throng seemed joyful, but there was this undercurrent of dread to the whole thing, which made no sense to Alyssa.

Until she realized what was missing. Hope could see a future where the midnight city was filled with human-Gelet hybrids—but the Gelet themselves were gone.

• • • •

“I have something I need to show you,” Alyssa said to Jeremy.

He jerked his head up and gaped at her, with his new tendrils entwined with those of two Gelet that Alyssa hadn’t met yet. He blinked, as if he’d forgotten the sound of language, then unthreaded himself from the two Gelet slowly and stumbled to his feet.

“Okay,” Jeremy said. “What did you want to show me? Where is it?”

“Right here.” Alyssa gestured at her tendrils.

Jeremy pulled away, just a couple centimeters, but enough so Alyssa noticed.

“Oh,” he said. “I hadn’t…I didn’t.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Alyssa said. “I know you bear a grudge, you blame me, I get it. You don’t want to let me in.”

“It’s not even that,” Jeremy stammered. “I don’t even know. This is all so new, and even just sharing with the Gelet is unfamiliar enough. Being connected to another human being, or another hybrid I mean, would be…plus I heard that you…I heard you did something. You tried to damage yourself. They won’t show me the details.”

Fucking gossip. Alyssa shouldn’t be surprised that the Gelet would be even worse than regular humans about telling everyone her business. The look in Jeremy’s eyes made her feel even worse than ever, and her scars felt like they were flaring up.

“This isn’t anything to do with me,” Alyssa said. “I promise, I won’t even share anything about myself, if you’re so worried about mental contamination.”

“I don’t mean to be…” Jeremy sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Sure. Go ahead.”

Among the thousand things that the hybrids were going to need, some kind of etiquette would be one of the most important. A way to use their words to negotiate whether, and how, to communicate with each other non-verbally.

Jeremy leaned forward with his tunic open, and Alyssa concentrated, desperate to keep her promise and avoid sharing anything of her own. But of course, the more she worried about sharing the wrong thing, the more her mind filled with the image of herself inside the Xiosphanti Palace, tracking bloody footprints all over the most exquisite marble floor she’d ever seen.

No no no. Not that. Please.

“Wait a moment.” Alyssa paused, when they were just a few centimeters apart. “Just. Need to clear. My head.”

Curating your thoughts, weeding out the ugly, was a literal headache. If only Sophie was here…but Alyssa didn’t want to open that cask of swamp vodka, or she’d never conjure a clean memory.

Breathe. Focus. Alyssa imagined Hope’s scary vision, as if it was a clear liquid inside a little ball of glass, cupped in her palms. Separated from all her own thoughts, clean and delicate. She gave that glass ball to Jeremy in her mind as their tendrils made contact, and felt Hope’s dream flow out of her.

A few strands of thought, or memory, leaked out of Jeremy in return: a slender boy with pale Calgary features and wiry brown hair, pulling his pants on with a sidelong glance at his forbidden lover. Bianca and her consort Dash, smiling down from a balcony as if the crowd beneath them was shouting tributes, instead of curses. A woman holding a tiny bloody bundle on a cobbled side street, wailing.

“Ugh, sorry,” Jeremy said. And then Hope’s vision of a possible future sunk in, and he gasped.

“That’s…” Jeremy disconnected from her and staggered like a drunk, leaning into the nearest wall. “That’s…”

“I know,” Alyssa said. “I don’t think…I don’t think I was supposed to see that.”

“We can’t let that happen.” Jeremy turned away from the wall and sobbed, wiping his eyes and nose with his tunic sleeve.

“Our ancestors already invaded their whole planet. This would be worse.” Alyssa looked at her knuckles. “Way worse than when I helped those foreigners to invade your city. I’d rather…I’d rather die than be a part of another injustice.”

The two of them walked around the Gelet city for a while. Watching small groups of children all connected to one teacher, puppeteers putting on a show, musicians filling the tunnels with vibrations, a team of engineers repairing a turbine. A million human-Gelet hybrids would need centuries just to understand all of this culture. Sophie had barely witnessed a tiny sliver of this city’s life, and she’d spent way more time here than either Alyssa or Jeremy had so far.

“We can help, though.” Alyssa broke a silence that seemed near-endless. “They didn’t turn us into hybrids for our own sake. Right? They need us to help repair the damage that our own people did. Hope showed me some designs for new flying machines that could help them figure out how to keep the toxic rainclouds away, but they can’t stand even partial sunlight.”

Jeremy covered his face with one hand and his tendrils with the other. His new tentacles retreated behind his back, wrapping around like a pair of arms crossed in judgment. He shivered and let out low gasps. Alyssa wasn’t sure if he was still crying, or what she ought to do about it. She just stood there and watched him, until he pulled himself together and they went and got some stewed roots together.

“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Jeremy said to his hand. “We can’t do this. We won’t change enough people in time to help them. I know you did something terrible, right after they changed you, and I…” He couldn’t bring himself to say what came next. “What I did was much worse. I can’t. I can’t even stand to think about it.”

Between her new tentacles and all her ingrained old skills of reading people, Alyssa felt overwhelmed by sympathy for Jeremy. She could feel his emotions, maybe more clearly than her own, almost as if she could get head-spinning drunk on them. That sour intersection between fellowship and nausea. At least now she knew that she wasn’t the only one who’d had a nasty reaction after the Gelet surgery.

Jeremy was waiting for Alyssa to say something. She wasn’t going to.

After a long time, he said again, “We’re not going to make it.” Then walked away, still covering his mouth and tendrils, shrouding himself with all of his limbs.

• • • •

Alyssa didn’t see Jeremy for a few sleeps.

Meanwhile, she was busy gleaning everything she could from the Gelet, even though her brain hurt from taking in so many foreign memories, and concepts that couldn’t be turned into words. She learned way more than she would ever understand. She kept pushing herself, even when all she wanted to do was to be alone.

Hope kept turning up, but Alyssa also got to know a bunch of other Gelet, most of them older but not all. Some of them had come from other settlements originally, and she caught some notions of what life was like in a town of just a few hundred or few thousand Gelet, where everybody really knew everyone else by heart. She got to witness just the merest part of what a debate among the Gelet would feel like.

In her coldest moments, Alyssa caught herself thinking, I need to learn everything I can, in case one day these people are all gone and my descendants are the only ones who can preserve these memories. That thought never failed to send her into a rage at herself, even angrier than when she thought she had ruined her own tendrils.

She thought of what Mouth had said to her once, about cultural survival. People died, even nations flamed out, but you need somebody left behind to carry the important stuff forward.

“You were right.”

Jeremy had caught Alyssa by surprise when she was dozing in a big web with a dozen Gelet, waiting for their dead Magistrate to show up. Jeremy seemed way older than the last time Alyssa had seen him, his shoulders squared against some new weight that was never going to be lifted away. He faced her eye to eye, not trying to cover any part of himself or turn aside.

“Wait. What was I right about?” Alyssa said. “The last time I won an argument, it involved handfuls of blood and a punctured lung. I’ve stopped craving vindication.”

“There’s so much more at stake than who sits inside that ugly Palace back home in Xiosphant.” Jeremy shook his head. “I came here hoping to find a new way to organize people against the Vice Regent, but we have more important work to do. You were right about all of it: being a hybrid isn’t just a means to an end, it’s way more important than that.”

“Oh.”

Alyssa looked at Jeremy’s shy, unflinching expression, and a wave of affection caught her off guard. They’d gone through this thing together, that almost nobody else alive could understand. She couldn’t help thinking of him almost as a sleepmate—even though they’d only slept near each other, not next to each other.

“We can’t just send people here and expect them to handle this change on their own. Anyone who comes here is going to need someone to talk them through every step of the process, someone who understands how to be patient,” Jeremy said. “So…I’ve made a decision. I think it would be easier to show than to tell.”

Alyssa understood what he meant after a moment, and she let her tendrils relax, slacken, so his own could brush against them.

She was terrified that she would show him the moment when she tried to rip these things out of her body—so of course that’s what she did show him. The screaming panic, the feeling of her fingers grasping and tearing, trying to rip out your own heart.

Jeremy stumbled, flinched, and let out a moan…and then he accepted Alyssa’s memory. And he gave back a brief glimpse of his own worst moment: Alyssa was Jeremy, lashing out, with a snarl in his throat, the heel of his hand colliding with the nearest terrified Gelet, a blood-red haze over everything. I’ll kill you all repeating in his head, I’ll tear you apart, kill you kill you. The new alien senses flooding into Jeremy’s brain, bringing back all the times when he’d needed to look over his shoulder with every step he took.

“It’s okay,” Alyssa said, wrapping her arms around Jeremy under the roots of his tentacles. “It’s really okay.”

“It’s not okay.” Jeremy trembled. “I’m a monster. At least nobody was badly hurt.”

“You’re not a monster. You were just scared. We both were.” Alyssa clutched him tighter, until he clung to her as well. “We prepared ourselves, but we weren’t ready. We need to make sure it goes better next time.”

“That’s what I was going to tell you about.” Jeremy relaxed a little. “This is what I decided.” He sent Alyssa another vision, this time of a future he’d envisioned.

Jeremy was here, still inside the midnight city, studying everything the Gelet could teach him. And then, when more humans arrived from Xiosphant, Alyssa saw Jeremy greeting them. Guiding them around the city, preparing them, talking them through every step of the way. The Jeremy in the vision grew old, but never went back to the light.

Alyssa had to say it aloud: “You want to stay here? Forever?”

“I…I think it’s the right thing to do,” Jeremy whispered. “I can organize, I can be a leader, all of that. Just down here, rather than back in Xiosphant. Humans are going to keep coming here, and there needs to be someone here to help. Otherwise, more people will…”

“More people will react the way you and I did.” Alyssa shuddered.

“Yeah.”

Alyssa found herself sharing a plan of her own with Jeremy. She imagined herself going back to Xiosphant, back to Sophie and Mouth—but not just helping them to convince more people to come here and become hybrids. She pictured herself carrying on Jeremy’s work: finding the people who were being crushed by all the wrong certainties, helping them to form a movement. Maybe opening someplace like that coffee shop where Sophie and Jeremy used to work. Giving people a safe place to escape from all that Xiosphanti shit.

“You were right too,” Alyssa told Jeremy. “People in Xiosphant need to come together. If they had someplace to go in that city, maybe more of them might be open to thinking about coming here.”

“Can you take care of Cyrus, though?” Jeremy sent a brief impression of the biggest marmot Alyssa had ever seen, purring and extending blue pseudopods in every direction. “I left him with a friend, but he needs someone reliable to look after him. Sophie already knows him.”

“Sure,” Alyssa said, hugging Jeremy with their tendrils still intertwined.

Alyssa stayed a while longer in the midnight city, healing up but also keeping Jeremy company. After she left, he might not hear another voice for a while—and weirdly, the longer Alyssa had these tendrils, the more important verbal communication seemed to her, because words had a different kind of precision, and there were truths that could only be shared in word-form. Alyssa introduced Jeremy to Hope, and explained in a whisper about everything she’d been through, and Jeremy introduced Alyssa to some of his own Gelet friends, too.

Her surgical scars settled down to a dull ache, and then slowly stopped hurting at all, except for when she strained her muscles or slept weird. The new body parts and what remained of the pain both felt like they were just part of Alyssa, the same way the Chancers and the Resourceful Couriers would always be. “I guess it’s time,” Alyssa said to herself. She walked up towards the exit to the Gelet city with Hope on one side, and Jeremy on the other, though Jeremy planned to turn back before they reached the exit.

Almost without thinking, Alyssa extended her tendrils so she was connected to both Jeremy and Hope, and the three of them shared nothing in particular as they walked. Just a swirl of emotions, fragments of memory, and most of all, a set of wishes for the future that were just vague enough to be of comfort. They stayed in this three-way link, until the first gusts of freezing air began to filter down from the surface of the night.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, which came out in April 2021. Up next: Never Say You Can’t Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times; and a short story collection called Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa With Gun and Camera
By Elizabeth Bear
Novelette Long List

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d flunked Algebra, Griswold,” Roberts said, racking another shell into his hunting rifle and peering over our flimsy barricade. He was trying to see if the monstrous creatures beyond were preparing for another assault.

I was too busy reloading my 10-gauge to answer, even if I’d wanted to dignify his assertion. Algebra wasn’t the issue here.

Scientific curiosity was. And perhaps having had too much time on my hands.

I had to grant him that this was in every respect my fault. It was only his imprecision of language when it came to apportioning blame that griped me. And if I were being fair, that was probably me engaging in diversion, or sophistry, or whatever the technical psychological term for nitpicking the hell out of something to weasel out of it is.

Whatever: I’d been the one who sent in my spit sample to the online DNA testing folks, and I’d been the one who’d gotten curious about a weird little line item in the results, and I’d been the one who’d called up my old school buddy the geneticist to ask some pointed questions. Which—in my defense!—he’d been only too happy to investigate once his own curiosity was piqued.

And so here we were, on a strange planet under an alien sun, surrounded by twisted, non-Euclidean geometry; pistols at alien dawn with inside-out monstrosities which (presuming our hypothesis was reliable) wanted to eat our faces; and all the while attracting the wrath of dread gods. And it wasn’t even our first trip.

This time, we had been “prepared.”

My GoPro had been smashed by a lucky tentacle, so I couldn’t be sure how good our data was. But we knew where to find the gate to get us home, and we knew how to get there, and I was confident in our ability to make it. Even if we didn’t have my video, we’d have Roberts’s. And I had vials full of biological samples.

I took a deep breath of the curiously thin and unsatisfying air. Everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

Probably.

That’s a little Unfathomable Magazine! Tales of Adventure Beyond the Stars for a quick synopsis, isn’t it?

. . . Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

• • • •

My name is not Greer Griswold. I’m approximately fifty-two years old. I don’t know who my birth parents were, and my adoptive parents are dead. I have never married; I have no children; I have very few close friends. I’m a physicist at a notable northeastern US institution you would have heard of if I named it. I’m not going to, any more than I’m going to give you my real name, because I have tenure but I’m not stupid. Being a woman in a male-dominated field isn’t easy, and I’ve never been terribly interested in Performing My Gender in the fashion that gets you accepted as a mascot by the boys. I’ve had my share of gross harassment, but at least I’m not pretty. Not being pretty spares me certain things.

I spend a lot of time alone, and I’ve learned to like it. Despite that, and because of the third fact above, and because I’m not getting any younger, I thought it would be interesting to get some genetic testing done and find out where my ancestors came from. And maybe . . . if I had any close relatives around.

Nieces, nephews. Somebody I could will my extensive collection of vintage Hot Rods toy cars to when I’m gone.

It’s one thing to embrace your alienation. It’s another to wake up on the first day of spring semester classes and realize you haven’t spoken to another human being since December 23, and there’s only so long you can go on ordering your groceries from PeaPod and scooping up cookie butter with ruffled potato chips in front of Netflix until two a.m.

No matter how self-sufficient you are, when you’re middle-aged and childless and unmarried . . . you start to hope maybe you’re really not as alone in the world as you think you are.

I still might not have done it, if my department chair hadn’t stuck his head into my office one afternoon in late August to let me know we had a new faculty member coming on board, and how did I feel about being their liaison during the onboarding process? I note, entirely for the record and apropos of nothing, that I am the only female tenured faculty in the physics department. I note, entirely for the record and apropos of nothing, that I do an estimated thirty-six percent of the emotional labor in my sixteen-person department.

Female grad students and admins do the rest. And it’s not like we’re any less introverted and non-neurotypical than the dudes. We’re just forced to learn to endure more discomfort in order to have careers.

I gritted my teeth in a smile. I said yes. I waited for the door to close.

I’d gotten myself the kit for my birthday (observed, presumed) and had been ignoring its existence ever since. I dug it out of my desk drawer and unscrewed the lid on the little plastic vial while I was still fuming.

I know those DNA tests are very broad and subject to a certain degree of interpretation. But the results are improving with better data, and honestly not everything in science has to be about doing science the right way with reproducible results subject to peer review.

Sometimes science . . . or packaged, processed science food, if you prefer . . . can be just science-y and fun. Also, it might be useful to know if I had any ticking time bombs in my DNA, medically speaking. Make those family history questions a little less stymieing.

• • • •

Surprise.

• • • •

I was gratified to learn I was nearly one twentieth Neanderthal. That’s about twice as much as most modern Europeans, and according to the genetics company, it put me in the ninety-ninth percentile of their customer base.

Those redheaded Vikings had to come from somewhere. And it was nice to think of all that cross-cultural communication and exchange taking place, all the way back to the Weichselian Glaciation.

That was interesting, and fun to think about. But other than the Homo neanderthalensis and the Scandinavian, I was a pretty basic New England mix. A little Irish, a little German. A little Broadly South European, which is probably Portuguese. A smidge of Native American or Southeast Asian. And then . . .

Undetermined: 10.2%

Ten percent. That’s a pretty big error bar there, genetics company that will remain unnamed.

• • • •

Curiosity is probably my defining characteristic. I want to know how things work. I want to know why they work, and what happens if you alter the variables.

Sometimes it’s not the variables that alter on you, however.

Sometimes it’s the constants.

• • • •

Of course I downloaded my raw genetic data and took it to my old friend Michael Roberts. If academics weren’t constantly taking advantage of one another’s skill sets, we’d have no topics of conversation at all other than who was cheating on their spouse and who wasn’t going to get tenure.

Anyway, Roberts and I went back to undergrad, when we’d been lab partners in an organic chemistry class that wasn’t in either of our fields but was required for both of our majors. We’d somehow gotten through the class, despite the lack of any apparent common language between either of us and the instructor. Years later, we’d wound up at the same institution, in different departments in the same college, and I still liked and trusted him.

What I wasn’t expecting was for Roberts to call me up at one a.m., voice shaking as he accused me of having a little joke at his expense. “Come on, Greer,” he said. “Tell me who you got to put this data set together, so I can mail them a dead badger.”

I looked at my phone. Without my glasses, it was just a bright blur in the dark of my bedroom. I put it back to my ear. “That’s right off the Real 46 website. If you want, I’ll give you my login and you can download a copy for yourself.”

He scoffed. “Well, I knew these companies played a little fast and loose, but this result is a mess and a half. Ten percent of the DNA doesn’t even match up to the human genome. Did you chew up a tadpole or something before you took the swab?”

“Ew,” I answered. “Hey, are you busy tommor— I mean, tonight? I’ll buy you dinner and you can tell me all about it.”

“Is it going to be sushi?” he asked, guardedly.

“It’s always sushi,” said I.

• • • •

“The thing is,” Roberts said, hovering a roll of negimaki between his chopsticks, “they should have just admitted they couldn’t analyze a sample this contaminated. It must be chromosome bits everywhere.”

“I did not,” I said, “contaminate the sample.”

He popped the beef and scallions into his mouth and chewed, eyes closing. I leaned away from the smell.

The mackerel and scallops I was eating, on the other hand, were amazing. Sashimi is about my favorite thing in the world, and the pungent deliciousness of the wasabi lit up the spaces in my skull.

“Is it possible there’s something else going on?” I asked. “Not corrupted data but . . . a variant or a mutation? Something?”

“Possible,” he said dubiously. “All those Neanderthal variants also really look like an error, though.”

“Maybe the other stuff is Neanderthal variants too? I dunno, isolated genetic pocket?”

“You’re already at two hundred percent of anything we’d consider normal variation.” He sighed.

“Somebody’s got to be on the tail of the curve.”

More negimaki vanished into my friend, followed by sake. I’ve never been able to drink much. My mucous membranes hate the sensation of alcohol.

He said, “Oh, hmm. You know, I remember a story a colleague told me about a Ph.D. student of his whose dis was rejected. Something about impossible data the student kept insisting was verified. It wasn’t at our institution, though. It was wherever he worked before. Miskatonic, maybe?”

“That dis should still be in the special collections, then.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got an alumni dinner over there next month. I could pop by the library and see.”

“How is a failed dis going to help us? I mean, that’s not a source I’m going to cite with any confidence.”

He snorted. “Guy was doing some research about whether there were variants not mapped in the Human Genome Project, which was still in progress back then.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Anyway, you want me to check?”

“Can’t hurt.”

“Price of another dinner,” he said.

I had a small octopus in my mouth by then, and was chewing carefully, so I couldn’t interrupt in time to keep him from qualifying.

“Anything but sushi,” he said.

• • • •

Well, Roberts found the mysterious dissertation. And what he found in it seemed to unsettle him greatly, though I didn’t understand the majority of his valiant attempts to explain the details. It was all highly technical stuff about chromosomes and variants in a field where my expertise stops at the four amino acids which make up DNA.

In any case, he felt a need to go and have a conversation with the guy who wrote the thing. And he wouldn’t hear of having that conversation without me present.

“It’s your research,” he said, as if it were the last word on the subject.

“First, it’s not research,” I argued. “I’d have to be a geneticist for it to be research. It’s idle curiosity. Second, it’s not entirely just mine.”

“Which one of us spit in the test tube?”

“Which one of us decided to go pull books in the special collections?”

“The results don’t make any sense!”

I let it hang there until he rolled his eyes and laughed.

And continued, “Anyway, I had no luck with a phone. Disconnected. Or email. None on file.”

“Well, that’s that, then,” I said, relieved despite myself.

“I found the guy’s address.”

“No.”

“Yes. His name is Albert Gilman. He’s out on Cape Ann.”

• • • •

The day we picked to go down, it was raining. I drove.

We parked on the sandy verge of a seaside road. It would have been crawling with children, tourists, and boogie boarders on any sunny day during the season. Because it was bleak November and dreeking to rival the Scottish highlands, the beach was abandoned and there was plenty of parking.

We got out. I found myself standing by the car and sighing contently. The cool, moist air kissed my face and I couldn’t help but feel the tourists were missing out. The Atlantic was a planished sheet of titanium under a misty sky, obscuring any sense of horizon. The dune grass was faded straw, the masses of beach roses reduced to barbed stems festooned with fat rubies of rose hips, the only color in the entire landscape. On the landward side of the road, weathered cedar-shingle cottages wore a dull gray sheen that echoed the ocean.

Roberts walked up to a three-quarter Cape Cod–style cottage with a gambrel roof. I trailed him like a dog with separation anxiety.

We stepped in under the little peaked portico protecting the peeling, slate-colored door. Roberts rang the doorbell.

And we waited.

• • • •

A cool breeze lifted the hair at my nape and jingled the pipes of a baritone wind chime. The waves shushed on the sand. From within the house, no sound or sign.

“Are you sure about this?” I whispered.

Roberts started to shake his head. The gesture half-completed, he froze, lifting one finger for silence.

A moment later, I heard it too. A heavy, slow squeak. The sound an old wood floor might make under the weight of a mattress, or a big piece of furniture being slid on a rug so it didn’t scrape. It wasn’t the step of a human being, no matter how sizeable.

Roberts leaned forward and tapped on the door. The knocking boomed unexpectedly, as if the house were empty of soft things. Fabric, furniture. Human things.

It surprised me so much I nearly fell off the steps, but Roberts was undaunted.

“Mr. Gilman?” he called through the door. “Albert Gilman?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

He shook his head stubbornly.

An intercom mounted up in the angle between the wall and overhang crackled and popped. “Who are you?”

Roberts introduced us, and told the disembodied voice what we did.

“Doctor Roberts. Michael Roberts.” I wondered if the person behind the door had already forgotten my name. But then he said, “What the hell is a geneticist doing here?”

“Please, call me Michael. I came to consult you on your research. Can we come in?”

“No!” A pause, in which I imagined I could hear frightened breathing through the static. Then, slower: “Maybe you haven’t heard, but I washed out. Now get off my porch.”

A harsh click as the intercom cut off.

Roberts thumped the door just once and raised his voice. “Albert, Albert, wait! I think you were onto something! I think we can corroborate!”

The intercom again. “Corroborate what?”

“Your research. My friend here did one of those pop genetics tests and came back with some similar results to yours.”

Silence.

“Albert? We can vindicate your results.”

“Oh god,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

I squeezed Roberts’s arm hard. “What do you mean?” he asked anyway. “Who was your research subject?”

A gulping sound, like a swallowed sob. “Me,” he said. “The source of the material was me.”

• • • •

It was a long, silent ride home. Silent as far as Roberts and I were concerned, anyway. But I kept hearing Gilman’s last words echoing in my head, before he shuffled away from the door: “You have to go. You both have to go now.”

We didn’t, immediately. But the intercom went dead again, and more creaking following, seeming to move away from the door. Deeper into the house, and silence followed.

We knocked and knocked until the neighbors came out to stare pointedly, clutching their phones. But Albert Gilman would not speak with us again.

We drove away with his silence still hanging around us. Neither one of us seemed willing to break that silence for some time after. Until I pulled up in front of Roberts’s house, and he turned to me and said, “I have to know what’s going on.”

I’m not the only one with a curiosity problem.

“I know,” I said. “But I have no idea where to go next.”

“Yeah,” Roberts sighed, opening the car door. The rain blew in. “Me neither.”

• • • •

Days went by, and I was still at a loss. To be honest, I didn’t necessarily have a lot of time to worry about it, because the semester was closing in fast on Thanksgiving break and finals, which meant the students were as needy and distracting as they always are that time of year.

By the time I felt like I had them halfway squared away and in control of themselves, and like I wasn’t totally abrogating my duty as a mentor and instructor, fate took matters out of my hands.

By fate, I suppose I mean the person of Albert Gilman, who mailed a package to my place of work right before Thanksgiving.

That’s less creepy than it sounds, because Roberts had given him our names and institution, which meant we were only a Google away. And the package was just a Priority Mail flat pack, postage provided by an online stamp service.

I opened it, remembering the Unabomber only after I already would have blown my hands off. Oh, well, I told myself. I was pretty sure it was too thin and flexible to contain an improvised explosive device, anyway. It probably just held paper.

Which was what I slid out. A map, water-stained and coming apart at the creases, folded inside out. And some sheaves of notes in an impenetrable hand.

A sticky note on the top of it all said, “Good luck, Dr. Griswold,” in the same difficult penmanship—if you could call it penmanship. The note seemed to have gotten damp at some point. It was creased and wrinkled and smelled faintly of salt water.

When I lifted it, I found more writing underneath. “By the time you get this, I’ll be gone.”

I drove back to Gilman’s cottage with the package on the passenger seat, pushing my luck with the staties on the Mass Pike. I could have called the police to check his welfare, I suppose, but the honest truth is I just didn’t think of it at the time. I only thought of getting there as fast as I could.

I parked where we had parked before and scrambled toward the house. The front door stood open. Sand had blown or been tracked in.

It was cold inside, and as empty as the echoes had predicted. The radiators were icy to the touch. The rooms contained just a few large beanbag chairs, damp from the sea air, and a musty mattress heaped with tangled blankets but otherwise unmade.

I approached—I had walked in the open door quite without premeditation, calling Gilman’s name. A few steps away, I noticed something papery, translucent, with a silvery sheen. It was wound among the blankets.

I crouched to examine it more closely. It looked like the shed skin of a very large snake, and I had a wild moment of fear that Gilman had been eaten by a pet python that might be napping the meal off nearby. As I leaned forward, a report like a gunshot scared me back onto my ass, kicking my way across the floor with my heels. I had scrambled nearly to the bedroom door when I realized something had just popped sharply under my extra-wide oxford. (Women with feet like mine don’t wear pumps.)

When my heart slowed, I spotted a tangle of black-green weed on the floor where it had dried and stuck.

Bladderwort.

The air sacs popping under my sole were what had frightened me.

• • • •

I knew it was unethical, but before I left I found Gilman’s desktop—a Windows machine old enough to be a student in second grade—and used an anonymized browser window to back his documents up to my cloud before I left. I had no good excuse. Except I was convinced now that what he had sent me was a suicide note, and that he had sent it because he thought I had a reason to be frightened of whatever had ruined his life, too.

• • • •

For a while I wished I hadn’t stolen the data. Except . . . it’s always better to know.

• • • •

The handwritten notes were bad enough, once I invested enough eyestrain to decipher them. But the private blog I had stolen had—God help me—photographs.

This time, I called Roberts at eleven at night. “I need you to come over.”

He was groggy, obviously struggling up from sleep. “Dammit, Griswold,” he said. “I have an early class tomorrow.”

“Come over anyway,” I said. “It’s an emergency, and I can’t tell you on the phone.” Because I don’t believe it myself, quite frankly.

“I took melatonin. I really can’t drive.”

“Get the campus bus,” I said. “It runs until one, and the stop is two blocks from my house.”

I was lucky. My place is right across from the rugby field and I can walk to work in any weather barring a whiteout blizzard or a hurricane. Roberts had an apartment in faculty housing on campus. He’d given up his house after his wife died, and I worried about him. But he said the social opportunities were better.

I wouldn’t know. I avoid social opportunities except for the departmental schmoozing I cannot reasonably avoid.

He was there within twenty minutes, anyway. He probably could have walked it in fifteen. I let him in and showed him into the living room. I poured him a drink (I kept the bourbon in the house for Roberts) and a cup of coffee without asking, and handed him my laptop after he’d investigated each of them and set them on the coffee table.

Nervously, I started talking before he even clicked through. “This could be faked. I guess. But why would it be? He just left it on his computer—”

He stared at me. “You broke into his house?”

“It was wide open,” I said defensively. “Wait, let me start at the beginning. He sent me this. It arrived today.”

The papers rattled as I handed them over.

“I thought it was a suicide threat, and went to talk to him. When I got there the front door was open and”—I sat down heavily beside Roberts and spoke through my hands—“I think he walked into the sea, Mike.”

He nudged the whiskey I’d poured him over in front of me. “If I mix bourbon and melatonin you’re not getting an ounce of sense out of me. Go on, you look like you need it.”

I sipped. The burn clarified my mind and felt like it was going to peel the inside of my throat off. I gulped the whole two fingers and started coughing. How do people drink this stuff?

Roberts laughed at me, drank some coffee, and paged through the file. Slowly, the smile slid off his face. “These are selfies. First one dated, what? Two years ago?”

I clawed at the back of my hand, which itched abominably. Psychosomatic. Definitely.

Roberts studied the screen, then studied me. He shook his head and looked back at the computer. My eyes were swimming.

Roberts said, “What’s he document— Oh. Oh.”

“Yes,” I said. “He was changing. Into something . . . else.”

“Something . . . batracian,” Roberts said.

• • • •

“Hey,” Roberts said at about three in the morning. “There’s something drawn on this map, Griswold.”

He held it out to me. I hadn’t really looked at it before, except to determine that it was a large-scale driving map of southern New England. The sort of thing nobody bothers wrestling with anymore in the age of smartphones and GPS.

But there was a circle and a little x in gray pencil on it. It had been folded to show the inset map of Martha’s Vineyard, and the mark was just a tiny bit off the coast, out from the wilderness preserve on the long, flat southern edge of the island, which faces the open sea.

• • • •

It’s easy to get a car ferry berth in the off-season, weather permitting, although the ferries don’t run as often after Columbus Day. And I didn’t have any place to be on Thanksgiving. Neither did Roberts. Well, he had an invitation from his daughter out in Ohio, but he said he didn’t feel like traveling. I happen to know he can’t stand his son-in-law, which probably had more to do with it than holiday traffic.

We didn’t talk much on the trip through Nantucket Sound. Unspoken agreement took us out on the top deck, towards the prow. A stiff wind blew into our faces and the swells pitched us up and down, but here in the shelter of the Cape and islands it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Even so, when we passed into the protection of the Vineyard’s two protruding horns of land—known as East Chop and West Chop for inscrutable, ancestral Yankee reasons—the sting of wind eased and I breathed a sigh.

We disembarked in Vineyard Haven, driving out of the belly of a ferry as big as a high school into a seemingly inexhaustible river of cars. The island air was brisk and salty. Houses and shops crowded the waterfront.

I wondered for how long this place could be saved. Surely the rising sea would claim it eventually.

There was money here, which might serve to protect it. And I supposed the historic homes, the elaborately painted gingerbread cottages, could be relocated to the mainland or up the hill to high ground, if the expense were deemed sustainable. Although the interior of the island was mostly protected forest. And if a few good hurricanes washed over it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing came out below sea level.

You can’t win an argument with the sea.

We drove around the circumference of the island. There were roads through the interior, more or less. But I wasn’t certain if they would get us across the island any faster than taking the highway around. And I wanted to see the ocean.

Cape Cod was just visible, a line on the northern horizon. Nantucket was too far over the curve of the earth to catch a glimpse. There’s no ferry between the islands in winter.

We’d stopped at the Black Dog beside the ferry terminal for coffee, and also gotten sandwiches for later. I used the paper cup to warm my hands while Roberts drove, and I tried not to be superstitious about folklore and fetches.

Black dogs are beasts of ill omen.

At last, having passed through Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, we came to the turnoff into the wildlife preserve. We parked. We’d have to hike in from this point.

We packed up the sandwiches, though neither one of us was hungry yet. We’d both gorged ourselves at the pie-and-breakfast place in Woods Hole before we got on the ferry. Lightly burdened, me carrying the map, we set out across the dune grass with Roberts in the lead. He frowned over his GPS: an old-school yellow plastic handheld one, because cell phones get intermittent reception in the islands. We were willful rebels against the signs warning us to prevent dune erosion by staying on the path.

• • • •

Before long, we came to the real Atlantic. It took my breath away. Lines of waves marched to the open ocean; next stop, Africa. I tried not to think of Albert Gilman out there somewhere with rocks in his pockets, rolling in the deep.

He’d be on the other side of Cape Cod, anyway. Somewhere in Massachusetts Bay. His body would turn up someday, I guessed. Unless his peculiar transformation had been more than merely cosmetic and he’d returned to the deeps like a hatchling sea turtle.

If so, I hoped he’d make it. Lots of hungry things eat hatchlings, and anyone who’s been paying attention to the news knows there are plenty of sharks in the waters off the Cape.

• • • •

We made our way down to the beach, which was littered with the detritus of the previous week’s storms: derelict limpets; the hulks of horseshoe crabs. We walked the margin for what seemed like a long time. It was hard going. Sand and worn pebbles turned under our boots and when we went closer to the water’s edge the waves played keep-away.

There was plenty of kelp and bladderwort mixed in with the wrack, and plenty of small dead things. A few living ones too. I surprised a hermit crab in a conch shell big as my hand, scavenging. It took off toward the water. I let it go. A faint cold smell of decay came in waves, like the sea.

At long last we came in sight of what I took to be the landmark circled on the map. A tumbled finger of heaped stones—perhaps what remained of an ancient jetty, perhaps an eroded igneous spur—pointed into the cold Atlantic.

Roberts stopped. “Wow, I do not want to walk out on that.”

“I will.” I’ve never been afraid of water, and the sea was not angry. There would be some scrambling, and my boots might get wet. The rest of me certainly would, for where the breakers struck the boulders, white spray arced up, flashing in the pale late autumn sun.

I took my cell phone out of my pocket and wrapped it in a plastic bag from inside my knapsack. And tied the bag closed to be certain it would keep the water out.

• • • •

Grumbling, Roberts followed me. Middle age comes with its share of aches and pains. I’d been luckier than a number of my contemporaries and was not yet suffering from arthritis or more than the usual complement of farsightedness and achy joints. I managed to keep up with my program of kayaking, swimming, and hiking well enough to be reasonably fit. I was no Roberts—he ran half-marathons, and while he’d never be competitive he was a lanky, not-too-tall sort who still had an eight-minute mile—but I got by.

It was a good thing I wasn’t feeling scared, because the scramble was strenuous. I wished I’d brought gloves, heavy ones to keep the wet rock from abrading my hands. The black basalt had awfully sharp edges for being exposed to the power of the open sea, and the line of the finger was steadily ascending. As I walked it, I revised my estimation about the possibility of its being man-made, for I could discern no reason for humans to build a stone pier that rose to a peak out in the ocean. But the tallest rock looked flat on top, and at least the stairsteps lifted us above the spray and the threat of waves breaking over our path and washing us into the battering surf.

We reached the last rock and I revised my opinion again. The stones might have been a geological feature, a basaltic causeway of some sort. And, indeed, the enormous, squat, hexagonal basalt column we found ourselves atop might have formed by natural processes.

But the elaborate carvings marking its surface had not.

The top of the pillar was perhaps twelve feet in diameter, and when I glanced over the edge, I realized we had climbed, incrementally, a good two stories above sea level. I leaned quickly away from the vertiginous prospect, though it bothered me less than heights usually do.

I have never liked them.

As a distraction, I set myself to examining the markings carved into the tabletop-like plateau. I wasn’t quite sure what I expected—pictograms, or names and dates carved in an elegant hand—but it wasn’t a six-pointed star reaching point to point across the entire enormous Giant’s Causeway-style basalt crystal. There was an elegant inscription in the center, in a stonemason’s script that reminded me of colonial gravestones.

“Hey,” I said to Roberts, who was standing staring at the sea, “help me clean this off.”

He looked at me as if dragging himself back from interstellar distances. “Pardon?”

I gestured to the star. “Help me clean out this inscription. I want to see if I can make out what it says.”

We set to, and in fifteen minutes or so had the pebbles, sand, and bird droppings scraped away.

Latin?

I read a little Latin—a very little—but I hadn’t expected to find it here. Just one more piece of evidence that the eighteenth century had a higher standard of graffiti.

Roberts came to stand beside me as I leaned over the inscription and read: “Fer corpus meum animumque mecum nunc Carcosam.”

The world dropped out from under our feet.

• • • •

Roberts and I hit hard, but not hard enough to hurt ourselves. We clutched each other and stayed upright, and found ourselves gasping up at a streaky, bubbling yellow sky flecked with black, unradiant stars. Not the kind of yellow sky which makes you expect a tornado. Not even the kind of yellow sky which results from a dust storm, or a forest fire. It was—and I say this advisedly—an uncanny color. A distressing color. It made me think of pus and the pulsating bodies of hungry maggots, and not in a good way.

I acknowledge there’s no good way to think about pus. There are probably good ways to think about maggots, if you’re an entomologist.

Self-consciously, I let go of my colleague. I felt terrible: achy and discombobulated, as if I had been fighting the flu.

“Right,” I said. “Well, we somehow wound up here. And we’re obviously talking about some very different physical rules.” I pointed at the pavement.

Roberts blinked at me. “Rocks?”

“Octagons,” I said. “Traditionally, they don’t interlock without small squares to make up the corners.”

“But honeycomb?”

“Hexagons,” I said. “Like the basalt pillar we were on. Your bathroom tiles, those are octagons. With the little black squares between the corners, because that’s how topology works.”

Well, that was how topology worked where we came from. Here, apparently octagons interlocked.

I hoped my amino acids didn’t decide to celebrate by becoming unraveled. I couldn’t be sure they weren’t already doing so. I felt hungover, wrung out, and like my cranium was full of kitty litter. Roberts, rocking on his feet, pressing a fist into his stomach as if to counter a sharp pain, looked even worse.

Chalk one up for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

“What the hell did you say?” Roberts asked.

“Fer corpus meum animumque mecum nunc Carcosam,” I repeated.

“Sure.” If his tone were any more soaked in exasperation it would have been dripping. “But what does it mean?”

“Oh.” My cheeks burned from more than the—possibly mildly caustic—atmosphere. “Come with me, body and soul, to Carcosa.”

“Hmm. So this is Carcosa.” He straightened himself up and looked around. “What do we know about Carcosa?”

“There are some very weird towers in this city. If it is a city. I don’t see anybody who might live here.”

“These buildings do look like they were drawn by Dr. Seuss on cold medicine. The good stuff, with the codeine in it.”

My eye had been drawn by a flicker of movement embedded in the soupy horizon. If you’ve ever seen bats rise from under a bridge at dusk, or a murmuration of starlings taking flight, you have an idea what it looked like: varying pinpricks flocking in weird, uneasy patterns, stretching and collapsing, spiraling obscenely. It looked more computer-generated than real. I half expected to find it had been projected.

But whatever was flocking rose, and spiraled (obscenely), and rose again. I had the unsettling impression of it casting about, like a hound after a scent. The shapes coalesced into a writhing arrowhead and darted in our direction. I thought at first that they weren’t too far off— that they moved slowly, and were small. But then I realized they were bigger than human beings—the wingspans three or four times as long as I was tall—and they were very far away.

Far away, but coming fast, given the distance. Very fast indeed.

• • • •

I put it in the file with interlocking octagons and got on with my life. A life which, currently, involved a frantic search of the surrounding area for someplace defensible.

“Greer,” said Roberts, “have you noticed that those are a lot of moons?”

“I have,” I said, casting about for a roof, a wall—anything that could serve to shelter us from a flying attack. “And they’re setting in front of those things flying towards us. And also in front of the towers and domes of the city.”

“Huh,” he said, in the bland tone of voice people reserve for real catastrophes. “Maybe they’re not actually moons, then.”

“Maybe it’s more topography.” I craned my head back and looked up at the sky. Something was making me nauseated, and I wasn’t sure if it was my strange exhaustion, or the seething yellow sky, or the way everything fit together entirely wrong. “Those flying things look like they have claws, don’t they?”

Just then, they began to swarm around the moons, or lanterns, or hot air balloons lit up from the inside, or whatever the hell those things were. The light shone through their bodies in unsettling patterns, as if through the gaps in the leaves of a Monstera deliciosa.

. . . as if through the gaps in a human rib cage.

“Oh god,” Roberts said, having apparently come to the same conclusion I had. “We could run to the towers.”

“I think they fly faster than we run.” Despite the enormous distances, the creatures were already much closer. I wondered when I would begin to hear the flapping of their leathery wings.

A voice I did not recognize spoke from behind me. “Very astute, stranger.”

I jumped, and turned in midair. Landed badly and staggered, but did not fall. I found myself facing someone—a man, sure. We’ll call him a man. He was naked, and his skin was rubbery black. His features were elegant, idealized. His eyes were gold, without sclera, with slit pupils like a cat’s. The eyes of a lion.

“Who are you?” I yelped.

“Does a trespasser demand my bona fides?” he mocked. “By rights, I should be asking you what brings you to Carcosa.”

“Accident.” I looked over at Roberts. He was dumbstruck, with his jaw hanging open. Apparently holding up the conversation was down to me.

And I was doing such a stunning job of it.

“That explains why you are standing here without shelter while the byakhee are rising in the distance, then. Oh, and why nobody has any guns.”

“Byakhee.” It was a strange word, and I rolled it around on my tongue.

They had nearly reached us. I felt my instinctive half-crouch, my readiness to throw my arms up to shield my face. But they broke off and circled, giving me lingering looks at their decomposed-seeming bodies that I could have quite happily survived without.

They made a terrible sound, a kind of gobbling shriek. It pierced my hearing. I slapped my palms over my ears, which eased the pain only a little.

The strange man turned his head toward me. An iridescent yellow reflection ran over his bald, poreless pate from the roiling sky. Somehow, when he spoke, his words came bell-clear through the terrible sound and my attempts to block it. “You really are an innocent. But I can smell your provenance on you. Come, let us advance past this annoyance.”

He held a glossy hand out to me. Gritting my teeth, I managed to yank my hands from my ears. I grabbed Roberts’s elbow with one hand, and the stranger’s fingers with the other.

The stranger nodded. Not to me. To the sky.

The roil increased. I felt as If I were watching one of those sped-up stop-motion films of cloudscapes tearing themselves around mountains. The moons crossed the zenith in spiraling synchrony and set—before the towers, on the other side of the sky. The byakhee whirled like vultures, faster, faster—until suddenly it seemed they were flung wide all at once, racing to the umpteen corners of the sky.

Nausea dizzied me. I doubled over. If I hadn’t been holding on to my companions, I would have put my hands on my knees.

As it was, all my effort went to not vomiting up my shoes.

While I was still gasping, two sickly conjoined suns rose: behind, I was relieved to note, the black domes and twisted, monolithic towers.

I was really astoundingly glad I was not a topologist.

“There,” the man said. He let go of my hand. I did not let go of Roberts’s. “They don’t love the daylight. Where did you come from?”

“There was a basalt pillar along the coast of an island. Martha’s Vineyard. I read some graffiti carved on it—”

“What on Earth were you doing there?” He put a funny emphasis on “Earth,” I thought, but I looked up at the twin suns in the yellow sky again, and wondered less.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Like Roberts, I opened my mouth soundlessly. Unlike Roberts, I closed it and tried again. What came out was a truth I had not even recognized until I spoke it. “I was looking for my family. The carving on the causeway brought us here.”

“To find your family, lost scion, you must look farther to the south than the causeway,” he said, almost kindly. “You turned in the wrong direction.”

“This place—”

“The gods of this place are related to the gods of that place. They are all very old.” He looked at Roberts. “None of them are the gods of your kind. You are fortunate that there are bonds of hospitality of a sort between your colleague’s people and those who dwell here.”

Roberts made a protesting noise. I hid a smirk. The reminder that he wasn’t always going to be first-billed would be good for him.

The stranger said, “Come along then, lost scion, I will help you get home. Follow me. And watch your feet while you walk. Humans find the topography confusing.”

“You don’t say,” Roberts muttered.

• • • •

The stranger led us through ways that defied description, around buildings that seemed to twist into new shapes with every step we took. I felt as if I were walking at the edge of the CGI map of reality, so things flickered in and out and twisted in unlikely ways as the rendering failed and generally made me worry I was going to get stuck inside a boulder or something if I wasn’t careful.

I noticed I had grown hungry and thirsty only when Roberts held out a sandwich—somewhat the worse for wear since we’d purchased it at the Black Dog—to me. He didn’t say anything, and I took the sandwich with a nod instead of a word. It seemed perilous enough that our footfalls echoed wildly with every step.

I could not have told you how long we had been walking when we emerged onto the shore of a tremendous bay. Roberts, who had continued tensely silent, let out an enormous sigh. My own relief was as sharp. And as short-lived, because a moment later we both noticed the lapping waves were not water but some heavy vapor streaming like fluid between the stones. The stones were jagged, unsmoothed.

There was a smell in the air, autumnal as chrysanthemums but not in any manner floral. The suns were edging toward the horizon on the far side of the lake. The sky and the mist above it were shading to ruddy and orange. The first and darkest of the black stars prickled out around the edge of the firmament.

I shuddered as if a chill touched me. Would the byakhee return with the moonsrise?

“Here.” Our guide pointed to a set of menhir stones, steles carved in alphabets which wavered before my eyes—and not because I needed my progressives updated. “Step into that circle, and speak as you spoke before. You recollect the incantation?”

I nodded. “I do not wish to be transported body and mind to Carcosa, however.”

He spoke over his shoulder, walking away. “You’ll find another word on the stones. It is the true name of the place you wish to return to. This gate will take you there.”

I called after him. “What did you mean, look further south? There’s nothing south of there but the ocean.”

He waved airily and did not look back.

I took a step after him. I might have broken into a run, but Roberts caught my wrist.

I had so many questions. “What did you mean, you can smell my provenance?”

But—with a subtle pop of air rushing to fill a sudden vacuum—he was gone.

“We have to go back,” Roberts said.

I stomped my foot like a fifties stereotype. “Fine.” Two steps had us better centered between the upright stones. There were words scribed here, as well. I spat them out grumpily. “Fer corpus meum animumque mecum nunc Noepe.”

Another pop of displacement followed.

• • • •

Astoundingly, I felt even worse when we came through on the other side. I fell—I probably would have gone flat on my face if it hadn’t been for Roberts hanging on to me—and skinned my knee right through my jeans. It turns out basalt has a little texture to it.

Roberts hauled me up again. He looked a little better than I felt, but his complexion was waxy and his hair looked . . . stiff, and frayed. Like a sick dog’s pelt.

I said as much.

He snorted. “You’re pretty green around the gills yourself.” Still holding on to my wrist, he led me toward land.

It was a long, cold walk back to the car. Night was coming on fast and a needle-sharp rain had blown up. I wondered how long we’d been gone; it felt like a week. My phone, when I unwrapped it and turned it on, told me it was a little over twenty-four hours.

The ferry wasn’t running because of the storm. We found a last-minute emergency hotel in Edgartown. They were as happy to have us as we were to find them: most people don’t come to the Vineyard in the late autumn, and most hotels don’t stay open past sometime in mid-October.

Sensibly, all around.

The lady at the front desk studied me quizzically. “You look familiar,” she said with a certain hesitancy. “Have you been here before?”

“First time,” I admitted, accepting the key card. I snuck a look at the edge of her computer monitor and was relieved to confirm my phone’s intimation that we’d only been gone overnight.

“Family on the Vineyard?” It might have been a cheerful tone. It might have been a leading one. But it was the sort of question anybody might ask. As so often happens when one has an unconventional upbringing, small talk brought me up short and sharp.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m adopted.”

“Mmm.” Her eyes shifted from me to Roberts. She handed him a key card too. “Have a nice night. You can park your car in the lot around the corner. Put this on the dash—it’s got a map to show you which lot. I’m afraid it’ll be a short walk back in the rain.”

“I’ll go,” Roberts said. “It’s not like I could be much wetter. See you for dinner?”

I didn’t argue for the privilege of suffering a tiny bit more. Roberts could have the moral high ground. There was supposed to be a big tub in my room and I was done in. I would have opted for room service—if a hotel this size, in the off-season, offered it.

• • • •

The water helped with the winter itch of dry and scaly skin. I dumped the complimentary bath salts in, and that helped too, though I wasn’t sure peach jasmine ginger was really a scent suited to my personality. I scrubbed out the scrapes, including the bits of grit trapped in them, and was relieved when they didn’t bleed too much. My shins looked like they were covered with eczema, so I coated them with free body lotion (peach jasmine ginger) before I pulled my muddy, torn jeans back on.

They were what I had to wear, unless I wanted to go see if the Black Dog was still open and pick up some touristy sweatpants.

• • • •

We had dinner in one of the four or five restaurants in town that stayed open all winter, and I ate an entire clambake—this place called it “Lobster in the Rough” and it was comprised of a forearm-sized lobster, clams, mussels, linguiça, potatoes, and corn on the cob—without any help from Roberts except when I had to fend him away from my sausage. When I found myself picking out the bits of kelp they throw in for that authentic buried-in-a-pit-of-coals-on-the-beach-at-low-tide flavor and dragging them through the remnants of my clarified butter before eating them, I gave up and ordered dessert. The kelp tasted even better than the potatoes, frankly.

I guess interdimensional travel takes it out of you.

Roberts did justice and more than justice to his own food. We didn’t talk much: what could we say, in a crowded restaurant? But he did look up from his pie at one point and say, “We need to go back and document that.”

“With GoPros,” I agreed.

He nodded. “And guns.”

We finished our food and went back to the hotel.

• • • •

I hadn’t thought I would sleep, but I had reckoned without the combination of exhaustion, the enormous meal, and the hypnotic flicker of the Edgartown light along the horizon outside my sea-facing window. It’s a beautiful place, Martha’s Vineyard.

What a pity if the rising oceans do eventually wash it away.

I dreamed of undersea tourists gliding through the waters of the North Atlantic, no longer rich and murky with nutrients but as gorgeously transparent as any less fertile Caribbean sea. Their flippered feet kicked lazily, a dream of sunrays shining past them to illuminate the ruins of Oak Bluffs, of Tisbury, of Edgartown far beneath. They passed over Menemsha, a tiny hamlet whose industries are fishing and movie memorabilia—Jaws was filmed there—and I thought about the Boston Globe’s breathless coverage of the great white sharks that had returned to Cape Cod with the rebounding harbor seal population.

I guess they got the last laugh. If sharks laugh.

I was awakened by a cautious tapping sound sometime after midnight. I scrambled into some clothes—I hadn’t brought anything to sleep in, and I wasn’t about to expose Roberts to my dishabille—and opened the door a groggy, tousled inch.

There was no one in the hall. I checked twice. You know how it is when you’re sleepy. I closed and re-latched the door, and was about to decide I’d overheard somebody else’s assignation when the tapping came again.

My room had a balcony to go with its water view. This hadn’t been relevant to my objectives when I fell first into the tub and then into bed. Now I walked toward the sliding glass door, and the shape outside it that I could glimpse, every few seconds, limned in the glow of the Edgartown light. I felt as if I might still be dreaming. I felt no fear, just a curious attraction to the glass, as if I stepped up silently to the partition keeping me from some dangerous animal in a zoo.

Except I was the one in the cage, wasn’t I? Trapped inside this boxlike structure, while the creature out there stood comfortably in the rain sheeting down its pebbled neck and shoulders, in the light reflecting dark green as kelp from its wet, gleaming hide.

“Hello,” I said, as I pulled the sliding door open. Rain and wind whipped around me. The vertical blinds rattled like knives in a drawer. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“We’ve encountered each other before,” the creature said in an awkward croak. “Well, after a fashion.”

It stepped inside.

• • • •

“I met Albert Gilman last night,” I told Roberts the next morning. The rain had stopped, and we had taken our coffee up to the cold, exposed roof of the Chappy Ferry terminal. There were two ferries, and each could take about two cars at a time. They went back and forth across the narrow channel between Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquiddick in a kind of square dance, each bending wide and reversing as they passed one another like partners swinging on the parquet. “He came to my hotel room.”

Roberts blinked. He sipped his coffee and looked away from the do-si-do-ing ferries. “That’s a hell of a conversational opener.”

“He’s gone a lot farther than he had in the documents he sent us,” I said. I glanced down at my own hand, and picked a thread of skin loose from a sunburned-looking patch by the base of my thumb.

“Oh,” Roberts said. He looked at me, mouth thinning. “Oh.”

“He wants me to come with him. To visit his people.”

Roberts nodded, as if knowing what I was going to say next. He looked at me, and kept looking.

I said, “Our people.”

Even if he had expected it, it still led to a long pause. “Is it safe? I mean . . . you can come back?”

“Yes. I can come back. He gave me a . . . a talisman. Until I’m better adapted to the pressure, and breathing water.”

“A talisman. That sounds like science.”

“It sounds like bullshit.” I choked on it, and laughed. But once I got it out, everything behind it followed in a hurry. “But maybe there is some science behind it. Maybe there’s science we can learn.”

“Maybe.”

“If I go will you wait for me?”

He laughed, this time. Forced, but not false. “It’s your car, Greer. I’m not going to steal it.”

“I’ll pay you back with a Nobel Prize in physics,” I promised.

“I’m a geneticist!”

I rolled my eyes so hard I gave myself a headache.

“Frog people, Michael. Have you been tuning in?”

• • • •

The waves curled around my thighs. Albert stood beside me as I stared out into the Atlantic. I touched the amulet on my breast. “You’re sure about this?”

He croaked laughter. “I’ve never been sure about anything in my life,” he said. “But the salt water does help with the itching.”

“But. What do they want with me?” What will they want from me? I couldn’t ask him that. He wouldn’t understand.

“To welcome you to the family,” he said. “ Once you’re ready to come live with our people full time, you’ll find a whole society. You’re one of us, and your children will know who they are from the start.”

I shook my head. “I’m past all that.”

“Some of the elders you’ll meet today are older than the Constitution,” he said. “You’re barely a teenager.”

I blinked at him. It was hard to tell, but I think he grinned at me.

We dove.

I knew the water was cold, but it didn’t feel cold. Albert was a shadow alongside me, drifting deeper and deeper, while the light grew dimmer and greener above. It was my dream, but the sea wasn’t lifeless. There were still clouds of plankton in the water; there were still schools of silvery fish darting away from us.

We swam down, and down. My lungs grew tired from the stress of moving water in and out and in again. My chest muscles ached as if I had been coughing for days. I envied Albert his gills. I touched the folds of my own throat hopefully: no luck.

Well, it would happen in time. I had grown confident, or perhaps resigned.

We descended. The pressure should have been unbearable, but it didn’t even make my ears pop. I wondered if I would need to fear the bends on our return. I did not swim as strongly as my companion. He would kick once with his flippers, then glide and wait for me to catch up to him.

I touched the talisman on its cord. I was pretty sure its help was the only reason I managed to stay close to him, even with Albert going easy on me.

Albert spoke as we swam. I could understand him, but I could not reply. He asked questions, which I could not answer; it turns out it’s not easy to make your vocal cords vibrate when your trachea is full of ocean water. The metallic salt of the sea filled my sinuses.

Albert asked if I was afraid, and said he had been. He’d been terrified. The language he spoke wasn’t English, but I understood it as well as if it were. Another gift of the talisman? Or something intrinsic in the instincts in my unclassified DNA?

I didn’t know. I’d find out, though. I was a scientist, and I was going where no scientist had both gone before and come back from. It wasn’t my field but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have the attention to spare from curiosity to waste on being afraid.

• • • •

I was not sure what I had expected, but an entire glorious undersea city wasn’t it. An entire glorious undersea city existing in what should have been utter blackness, bioluminescing among the convolutions of deep-sea corals I had not even realized existed in the North Atlantic, swarming with large, pebble-skinned, sociable people.

• • • •

They wanted me. They were interested in me.

They welcomed me, froggy eyes blinking, webbed fingers reaching out to touch my hair. They were curious and interested, and I was curious about them, too.

I could feel Albert’s concern: he hovered close and tried to shield me from the swarm of fishy, froggy people surrounding me. Englobing me. Presenting me with pretty shells and glowing bits of coral. Albert waved them away, but I got the impression they didn’t trust his judgment enough to let it override their own.

I felt like I was suffocating, and it wasn’t just the water in my lungs. I kicked away, knowing it was futile. They were bigger and faster. They belonged here.

I didn’t belong anywhere.

• • • •

I burst through the surface, gasping as if I had been holding my breath, thick salt water scouring my throat as I choked it up. I cast about, looking for pursuit, but I was alone except for the steady flash of the Edgartown light over the dark water. I should have been shuddering violently, but the cold didn’t touch me.

Just as I drew a relieved breath of air, something big broke the water. I kicked myself around, expecting to feel teeth or clawed flippers—

It was Albert.

I was surprised to realize that I recognized him. I hadn’t thought about being able to tell the frog people apart: I’d just assumed it would be impossible.

Bad scientist. No biscuit.

“You ran away,” he said, his voice resonating through the water as his throat expanded.

“It was a lot of people,” I answered, and salt water got in my mouth. Under the circumstances, his system was clearly superior. “I’m not good at people.”

He held out a flippered hand. At first I thought he wanted me to take it, but I realized he was pointing back toward the horizon and the flicker of the lighthouse. In the east, the night was fading. “Do you want help getting home?”

“That’s not my home,” I said, and stopped myself before going any further. “Yes,” I said. “I mean, yes. And if I haven’t ruined things, I’d like to talk to you again.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve missed being around scientists.”

• • • •

Everybody expects something from you, and it’s rarely for you to be yourself. It’s your job to put everybody else first. To take care of them.

Well, I’m tired of it.

No computers under water. No particle accelerators. No—to judge from what Albert said—scientists.

I’m not sure that is the place for me, either. I’m not sure the place for me exists.

• • • •

The thin gleam of pale beach grew wider against the horizon. We talked as we swam, and I realized I was a better swimmer than I had been. I’d never been a bad swimmer, but now my body seemed to work with the water rather than against it. I mentioned it to Albert, and he croak-laughed deep in his throat pouches and said, “That’s only going to keep happening.”

“So I’m turning into a—I mean, I’m changing, like you.” Sand gritted under my flippers. I stood up. Waves broke around my thighs.

“Turning into a monster, you were going to say?” He loomed up beside me, half again my height and twice as broad, green-black hide camouflaged against the green-black ocean. “Look, what I’ve learned since I changed . . . we’ve been living peaceably alongside you Yankee assholes for generations. And you people come down and blow up Jeffreys Ledge and Stellwagen Bank every time you notice us.”

There we were, standing on the beach in November, yelling at each other through the rain. At least it would keep the beachcombers indoors. “Aren’t you one of us Yankee assholes, at least in part? You seem much more comfortable with the change than you did in the diaries you sent me.”

He turned and started walking away from the light. It was only a couple stories tall, and it sat right on the beach, surrounded by a low stone patio. I followed along behind him, my own gait less of a shamble.

For the time being.

“I’ve had time to get used to it. And . . .” Water splashed off his hide as he shook his froggy head. “I like the community. They . . . take care of each other.”

“Sounds a damned sight more humane than academia,” I deadpanned through chattering teeth. Now that I was out of the water, I was starting to get cold.

He croaked what I could only assume was laughter. “Well, I didn’t even have that, after . . . after I flunked out. Also, I know you never bombed Jeffreys Ledge. I’m sorry about that crack.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I reached out—reached up—awkwardly and patted his shoulder. “When did we bomb Jeffreys Ledge? Isn’t that where the whale watch boats go?”

“Nineteen twenty-eight,” he said. “But our people live a long time. Most of the ones you just met—”

“Briefly.”

“—remember.”

“Oh,” I said, doing math in my head. So most of them were more than ninety years old.

Most of us.

I remembered what he’d said about the Constitution.

“We’re here when you’re ready,” he said. “I should go back now.”

“What if I’m never ready?”

“You can’t avoid the sea forever,” he said. “It can outwait anyone.”

• • • •

I returned to the hotel room. I took a hot shower. I still didn’t have dry clothes, but the room had a bathrobe. I put it on, and I went and rapped on Robert’s door. He opened it and stared at me.

“Do you have coffee? Or tea? I’m cold through the bones.”

“You’re back,” he said.

“For now,” I said.

He held the door wide. “Come in.”

• • • •

How many physicists actually get to go to the stars? And pioneer a completely new field of physics? So, I’ve found an inexhaustible research subject.

And my family.

When I’m ready to deal with having a family.

If I’m ever ready to deal with having a family.

The ocean is big, after all. It might be a good place to be alone. Or maybe the Boston Aquarium needs a physicist. Or Woods Hole: is there such a thing as a deep-sea marine physicist?

There should be. I can always collect a few more degrees if it makes me more useful.

Why are my people in hiding?

I’m going to be the first frog people visibility activist. You see if I don’t. After all, it looks like, barring accidents, I’m going to live a very long time . . . barring accidents, inside-out monstrosities eating my face, or dread gods, I should say. But I’m tougher than humans are, and a firefight on an alien world against flying abominations is all in a day’s work.

I have tenure. I should have time to do a lot of science. And I imagine I will have a lot less to worry about from certain coworkers as my claws grow in.

In the meantime, I also have some hypotheses to prove about gate technology, and the biology of byakhee.

Which brings us back, I suppose, to Roberts and me, the flimsy barricade, and the need to get back to our gate home right away.

I racked my shotgun and met Roberts’s eyes. “In the immortal words of David Bowie,” I said, “I’m ready.”

We were going to be fine.

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year.

She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of dozens of novels; over a hundred short stories; and a number of essays, nonfiction, and opinion pieces for markets as diverse as Popular Mechanics and The Washington Post.

She lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with her spouse, writer Scott Lynch.

A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential
By Neon Yang
Novelette Long List

CONFIG A

To the pilot, Phoenix smells like blood. Or at least the mech smells like the pilot’s mouth tastes every time it bites down and the copper floods in, so that’s close enough. It’ll have to do. The pilot likes it better in here than out there anyway, because outside the pilot has a troublesome body that bleeds when cut and won’t listen to what it wants, but in here the pilot has no body and no shape, only Phoenix-shape, and Phoenix is shaped like a knife, or a missile, or a swift punch, something meant to rend and destroy. Phoenix bends the shape of the universe to its will. Some say the mech looks like an angel, with the fan of thrusters haloed around its shining fist of a head, but in Phoenix the pilot feels like a bird of prey. All beak and talon, pursuing apostates that flee before its shadow like frightened rabbits.

Today the rabbits are C-class single-unit fighters, glazed in the gold and green of apostates, streaking from a battlefield spangled with wreckage and ionized fuel. Weak-boned things: eggshell hulls and wispy shields, spitting angry needles of blue light until the pilot crushes them in the palms of its hands. They dodge and weave frantically, hoping their agility will let them escape, but it’s no use. C-classers were never meant to face mechs. Puny surface fighters designed to take out ground turrets and windows in government offices are no match for the fifty-foot juggernauts that are mecha units. Snap, snap, pop. Each one makes a satisfying crunch as the pilot destroys them.

Phoenix pulses with breath while the pilot works, and it soaks up the beat of the mech’s heart as it does its job. No, “soaks up” is the wrong descriptive. “Inhales” is better. The pilot inhales the mech’s heartbeat. Her heartbeat. While it sits in Phoenix’s glowing head, spine jacked into neural net, she is in the chest, her body floating in a sea of amniotic fluid, and when her heart beats the mech around her shivers and drums with power. That’s her, whom the pilot belongs to. That’s her, Phoenix’s holy sigil. A God-given boon, without which the mecha fighter is inert stone and plasma. A blessing. A wonder. A beloved miracle. The pilot kills another enemy and there goes the responding twitch in its senses, a reminder that she is there and feels everything that it feels. Was the twitch an expression of delight? Perhaps. It hopes so.

The C-classers are down to a handful. The apostates must be in bad shape, sending them as the last line of defense. How pitiful. Beneath the field of slaughter lies the candied atmosphere of Amar-7, pinks and blues hiding a surface ulcerated by an apostate base. Halfway to the center of apostate territory, these installations have grown increasingly tedious to dispose of. Sameish. Deficient. Unchallenging. Battles fall into an easy routine, and the pilot tires of routine. Beside it the other three mechs—Garuda, Strix, and Roc—are cleaning up the stragglers. No more shall come from the surface, except perhaps unarmored civilian shuttles. The denizens of the surface in a last-ditch exodus, hoping their sheer number will let some get past the line of hostiles. But it won’t. The pilot has been there before, seen the results. Whatever ships the four mechs miss, the mothership will take out. There is no escape for them.

A shadow passes over them: giant wings circling overhead, just out of orbital range. The Räsvelg waits to see what the apostates will do. Will they flee like roaches? Or wait to die in their dens like dogs? Minutes tick by and no movement in the swirls of troposphere. So they have chosen the path of cowardice, preferring to give in to death rather than to fight. That’s fine. It’s their choice. The mothership pings the mech battalion with new orders. It’s time to finish the job.

The pilot receives the Räsvelg’s command with pure euphoria. It sweeps Phoenix forward with the other mechs, drilling red-hot through Amar-7’s atmosphere. It already knows what they will find on the other side of this vapor wall: crunchy domes of plexiglass and soft warrens of clay, crumbling at first touch. One shot of energy will carbonize them; nothing fired in return will scratch the adamantine mechs. The battle might last fifteen minutes, give or take a few. Those on the surface will know exactly what hit them, and then they will know nothing at all.

Little joy exists in razing that which offers so little challenge, but a victory is a victory. Every moment spent in Phoenix is a chance to be something else. A chance to live and act with precision and direction. A chance to be in a body that fits. Only here does the pilot feel like an embodiment of the promise it was meant to be: perfection made flesh. A flawless tool for her purposes, flensed of selfishness and self-loathing. This is the closest thing to euphoria that the pilot knows. As it punches through the final layer of troposphere and descends upon the apostate base, guns blazing, it feels her power in its guts, as if her body is its body, and emotion rushes through it so strong that it could weep.

CONFIG B

A clip of free time lies between the end of battle and the official debrief. In this transition, the mech pilots and holy sigils make a loose semicircle in the docking bay, sitting and standing half out of flight suits, reconnecting with gut and nerve, with fingers and toes. Slowly easing back into humanity. Eight souls in total, one pilot and one sigil per mech. Eight extraordinary beings, selected and made to perform extraordinary tasks—

1. Helianthus (he): Strix’s sigil, flame-haired and recalcitrant;

2. Rosa (she): Strix’s pilot, sweetly smiling but hollow inside;

3. Grimoire (they): Roc’s sigil, who would not spit on you if you were on fire;

4. Gauntlet (he): Roc’s pilot, who would fight literally anybody and anything;

5. Sparrow (they): Garuda’s sigil, large eyes always on the verge of tears;

6. Kestrel (she): Garuda’s pilot, who almost never speaks her mind, but when she does it is with insight so honed it flays meat to the bone. Like the time she said “It’s not love for her that drives you. You’re lying to yourself, that’s why you’re miserable.”

That particular canard was addressed to you. Phoenix’s pilot. The other members of the battalion call you Stick (and sometimes Sticker), a nod to your stoop and your awkward angles. When Kestrel said “her” she meant her, the last member of the mech battalion. She. Phoenix’s holy sigil. Versus is the name they gave her, but in the white halls of the Grand Cathedral they call her God’s perfect weapon, and that is always how you think of her. Versus the immaculate soldier, jaw wired with determination, curls cropped to the bone of her scalp. Outside of Phoenix she has a girl’s face and a girl’s body, half soft and half angles, simultaneously incomprehensible and yet the answer to all your questions. Versus is everything you’ve ever wanted. To look at her is to fill yourself with an ineffable glut of desire, sticky and sweet.

God’s perfect weapon sits an agonizing distance away, wrists loose and elbows on knees, gaze on the scuffed floor. Brows knitted. “Something wrong, Versus?”

It’s Rosa, who always asks the questions. Versus looks up. “That wasn’t a military base.”

“They haven’t been for a while,” says Helianthus, voice rough with irritation. “We’re a ways into enemy space now, it can’t all be war stuff.” And he’s right. Past the defensive barrier of skin, burrowed deep into flesh, the Räsvelg has reached the gut and gristle of apostate society on its way to the heart. It can’t all be war stuff. There are other things that get in the way, which must be torn asunder to get to the prize.

“That was a civilian installation we burned,” Versus says through the gaps in her teeth. “It was somebody’s home.”

Helianthus crosses his arms, deepens his slouch against the wall. Deep sarcasm flavors his voice. “Everyone’s got to live somewhere. Even despots and mass murderers.”

Grimoire snorts. “Pretty rich talking about mass murderers here, friend.”

“Versus is right,” Rosa says. “The people who lived on Amar-7 weren’t soldiers or even scientists furthering the war. They were just ordinary people trying to live their lives.”

“They needed to die,” you say.

The others turn with varying speed and intensity. Surprised. Not used to hearing from Stick, the silent one. Rosa frowns. “Needed to die?”

“We have an objective, and they stood in our way. Therefore they had to be eliminated.” As Rosa struggles to formulate a reply, you continue: “In war, anything that obstructs us from our goal is an enemy.”

“Wow. Stick.” Gauntlet runs a hand over the stubble of his hair. “I knew you were cold, but damn. That’s cold.”

“This is our job. It’s what gives us purpose. What else is there?”

Rosa uncrosses her legs. Both feet flat on the floor, eyes narrowed, she says: “Maybe it’s what gives you purpose, Stick. But we weren’t all made to be war machines. Some of us were people before this.”

“Rosa.” Versus gets up, taut with disquiet. “That’s enough.”

The other woman looks away. Grows silent. Around Versus the holy sigils and pilots shuffle wordlessly, eyes to their feet or the bones of their hands. The fight is over, the discussion at an end, halted by the same ones who started it. No one argues with the will of God’s perfect weapon. As it is. As it should be.

• • • •

Of course it was Rosa creating trouble. It was Rosa, after all, who objected to you at first. Not you, necessarily. Not in so many words. But it was her who went to Versus and said, I can’t bear to call your pilot an it. That’s not—That’s awful. I can’t. Can’t they pick something else? Can’t we use they?

Versus said, those are the pronouns it uses. It’s not bothered by them, what’s the problem?

The problem, Rosa said. The problem is that the people who thought they owned me used to call me an it. I heard it, every day, for years, as a child. And I’m sorry, but I can’t hear it now without thinking of them. I’ve tried so hard to forget. Please. It’s such a loaded word. You can’t possibly be okay with this idea. Are you?

I’m sorry, Versus said. I didn’t know. That’s awful, I’m sorry. I’ll bring it up.

In the end, a compromise: no pronouns, just Stick in the place of it/its, which everyone, even Versus, takes a little too readily to. And it works. It’s not what you asked for, but on the other hand, no one’s unhappy.

Stick is an appellation decided by consensus. Your makers never named you, referring to you as “it,” “the subject,” or with one of the many labels pulled from your file. Project Hou-Ou. Cb48. Male Specimen 15. They grew you from a bone, like Eve, and like Eve they tested you and then ejected you into the world with no armor and no instructions. Versus is your Adam, and on the first day your Adam asks your name, thinking simply that God would provide. She looks at you, perfect and breathtaking, and you, still grappling with language, say: It does not have a name. But it’s the wrong answer. Versus finds your namelessness indefensible, so the Räsvelg’s pilots and sigils designate a call sign you don’t hate and print it on your jackets. Stick is fine. But the first time Versus says, well, in my trials with him—or something similarly banal—you flinch as if slapped.

It, you say. It, not him. I’m not a him.

But aren’t you a dude? Gauntlet blurts, mouth the fastest part of him as usual. Yet instant understanding flits through Versus. Noted, she says firmly and fusslessly, which leads to Rosa’s later, private protest, and then the compromise. But you’re still an it even as the word is silenced, the syllable fitting over you snug as a membrane, a film. It when you wake up, it when you sweat through training, it when you sit in the fluorescence of the mess hall with the chatter of the other pilots and sigils surrounding you. Most damningly of all, it still in the freedom of Phoenix’s cockpit where all pretense is stripped away, where you are purpose and nothing but purpose. A tool, a miracle, an it. God’s perfect weapon.

The commandants load on the praise in the post-Amar-7 briefing, pleased with the battalion’s development in the year since the campaign began. Faster. More efficient. Fewer cuts to the kill. A map on the glass charts the Räsvelg’s progress through apostate space, a bullet fired from the gun of the Pope and Holy Emperor, clearing the way for the army of the Lord. The thin line of your progress dives ever-closer to its goals. Babel-9. The apostate home base. The capital of blasphemy and rebellion. “Three more battles to the end,” says Holy Commandant Basil, pointing out each target with a bony finger. “By this time next week, the war could be over.”

He tuts as joy sweeps the room, a chittering wave passing through the ranks of lieutenants and armchair generals, none of whom will ever see the inside of a mech. “Don’t get so excited. You know the obstacles that lie between us.”

A hush falls at the reprimand. Into that empty gap someone whispers “The Beast . . . ” and someone else silences them, but it’s too late. The damage is done. Tension grazes the surface of the room. The battalion’s faces turn grim, but it’s her reaction that catches you. She turns her face to hide it, but you catch the barest flash of a familiar sorrow.

You know Versus well enough to recognize this sadness, which comes upon her late at night in your shared quarters, before you are banished to your own bunk. She spends long hours in the common bathroom that has been arbitrarily designated the ladies’ room because the girls all hang out there, and you suspect that it is in this place that she expresses her unnamable, wordless grief. You are afraid to follow her there, and therefore this sorrow is an aspect of her that she keeps to herself, and you know nothing of it except that it is there. You’ve grown to accept its existence, confined as it is to the walls of her private spaces. But now it rears its head in the light of the situation room. Why? She is soon to face her greatest enemy. Should she not be ecstatic at the culmination of her purpose? The destiny she was chosen for? The reason you were made for her?

The Beast. The Adversary. The wicked blade of the Devil. You will face it soon. The entirety of your existence has been a buildup to this moment of triumph (for you are sure that it will be a triumph). You will meet the creature you were made to destroy, vanquish it, and win victory for the righteous. You should be rapturous with joy. But her ambivalence gives you pause. And you thought you knew her, she whose flesh is your flesh, whose pulse dictates your pulse, whose thoughts should be your thoughts. Yet she is, in this moment, opaque to you. A gap, an unexpected loss in the codons of the narrative that make up your life. Your Adam, God’s perfect weapon, is now a question mark, and you don’t understand. Nor do you have an answer.

CONFIG A

The holy mechs were God’s gift to His children, revealed to the blessed prophet Saint Laurent as the flanks of the last human starfleet traversed the hollow voids of space. Not quite stone and not quite living but somewhere in between, woken only by the blood of holy sigils who are born and not made. Shepherds and guides of humanity, drawn to habitable planets, leaping galactic distances like mere streams, the mechs were instruments of peace until the Devil, in his subterfuge, tempted the apostates away from the loving light of God and toward darkness and violence and war. In this time of evil, where brother turned against brother, the mechs were reforged, plowshares beaten into blades, the beacons for God’s children turned into holy weapons to defend the faithful and the meek from the wicked.

Phoenix and The Beast are inextricably linked, twinned through some ineffable design. There are two versions of this story, both of which the pilot has heard. The first is the bullet point wiki pumped into its head during training. Phoenix and The Beast are armored units, unique amongst the known mechs, impenetrable shields paired with a banquet of weapons for cutting, crushing, vaporizing, vanquishing. Originally designated Heavy Constructor Units 1 and 2, they were so slow when plugged with other holy sigils that they were unusable. She was specifically selected and trained as a child for her ability to bring Phoenix to maximum operational capacity. And the pilot, being her perfect mirror, achieves syncopation rates in the unit unrivaled by any other pilot in the army. Together they are a relentless weapon destined to meet The Beast before the final battle, for its rival twin is likewise the most formidable weapon the apostates possess, their ultimate line of defense.

The second version of the story is the gospel, which the pilot likes better, and which gets whispered from ear to mouth to ear, not in secrecy but in reverence—

—In the time before the darkness, when the light of God still reached all, a prophetess spoke of two children, a boy and a girl blessed with holy blood, who would be called to fulfill an important destiny in years ahead. Although they did not understand it, the council of cardinals followed the counsel of the Lord to search all of humanity for signs of this blessed pair. Scouts were guided by His Grace to the treasure they sought, and it was she, one half of a pair of holy sigils whose blood and bodies woke the stately limbs of the twinned mechs and let them dance like hawks. Yet no pilot in all the army suited her, so one was made: a Stick shaped from the clay of her, a creature unlike her in every way. Yet in the embrace of the Phoenix they were seamless, pilot and holy sigil, perfection in the eyes of God, enjoined by divine will. When the apostates turned to wickedness and The Beast followed them, the girl and her pilot became the last beacon of hope against the encroaching darkness.

This is the version of the story the pilot recites to itself. It smoothes over all the awkward parts, like how it exists feeling like a collection of ill-fitting parts, or how it cannot look in a mirror for fear of seeing its body all wrong, or how it has to constantly fight sinful thoughts of wishing it would emerge from the womb that is Phoenix with the right body, in her body. The story it retreads to remind itself that it was made perfect, and to want otherwise is sin.

• • • •

Phoenix streaks toward the factory planet Ajde Prime, the tip of an arrow that comprises the other three mechs. The pilot is back in its place of comfort, this bodiless swell of agency and violence, surrounded by her existence, which overrides its own. Phoenix is the great swallower, consumer of the doubts saddled in its organic body and the questions weighing down its outside-mind. Here, it is free. Free not to worry, free not to think too hard, free not to be anything but the perfect weapon. The uncertainty of the last few days has left it hungry for the finality of destruction. Ajde Prime is unimpeachable as a target: the site of the apostates’ major shipyard, where they make the host that drives their war machine. Surely even that cotton heart of Rosa’s would find no objections in its destruction.

But something is wrong. Ajde Prime should be ringed by the fiercest defenses, guarded in the thousands by the sleek and sharp-toothed warships it pumps out. Yet the space around the system has remained silent and prayerful since the Räsvelg dropped out of hyperspace, and continues to be so as the mechs approach the gray-ringed planet, placid in the cool light of its sun. No swarm of angry fighters from the surface. No enemy squadrons. The orbital cannons lie sleepy and inert. It looks like Ajde Prime has been abandoned, as though they have been ghosted by their adversaries. Phoenix scans the surface for heat signatures and finds nothing but geology. Curious, confused, it hangs midair, arms empty, cannons idle. Waiting for instructions.

The Räsvelg considers the situation carefully and slowly. It is, in all probability, a trap. Perhaps an overwhelming force hides in the gravity well of the planet, or perhaps they have rigged the surface with thermonuclear devices. A possibility with some precedence, the pilot knows. But in its amniotic fluid it feels no fear and no doubt. It waits only for instruction.

Instruction, then: the Räsvelg orders the mechs to investigate the surface with full caution, Phoenix in front with weapons cranked, Strix, Garuda, and Roc as backup. Past the ice rings they go, through the crystalline atmosphere, and into the oxygen-starved environment of Ajde Prime. Mercury waves beat upon sulfurous shores and acid rain thickens the air. In these infernal environs the glass-walled domes of the apostates sit dark and gleaming, devoid of light and life. The pilot approaches them carefully, intensely alert for any wires it might be tripping, but the surface of Ajde Prime is silent. Was this a massacre, perhaps? Or an evacuation?

As if in answer an image flickers into its head, beamed through the same channels through which the Räsvelg transmits orders. An override. What comes through is a picture of a young person, gender unknown, shorthaired and excruciatingly beautiful. It would stop the pilot’s heart, if pilot-as-weapon were reliant on its pathetic body.

The image speaks. It’s a recording, a message. Not a conversation. The stranger has a smile like a star field, expansive and glittering. “Don’t panic, just a courtesy call. Apollo, at your service. Artemis sometimes, but not today. You’ll notice that your target, which you expected to be a bustling metropolis of thousands, is unexpectedly, hmm, vacant, you could say. It seems like somebody, can’t imagine who, tipped them off that you were coming. Convinced them it was in their best interests to leave. Of course, there was some resistance, but I think we did pretty well. Don’t you think?”

The pilot drifts, stunned and silent, unable to hold a thought. The stranger—this sometimes-Apollo and sometimes-Artemis—continues. “Aren’t you glad for the thousands of lives you’ve not ended today? Alright, maybe that doesn’t appeal to you. Maybe you think they deserve the death you would have brought them. That’s fine. Let me offer you something else, then. Ajde Prime was the main military industrial outpost of the Republic. Now that it’s been shut down, their production of warships has been put on hold. That should please you and your masters, no?”

The pilot has no way of replying and no words to reply with. The situation is baffling, unexpected, inexorable. The stranger speaks grandly but with a smirk, and the pilot cannot tell how much of their spiel is genuine. But what’s real is the emptiness below them. Ruse or not, Apollo/Artemis has gutted their objective.

The beautiful mirage leans closer, looming larger in the pilot’s headspace. “Listen, don’t you have doubts, sometimes? All of you, operators of these superweapons, bringing destruction wherever you go . . . doesn’t it bother you? The lives taken by your hands, the families and communities crushed under your feet . . . have you never stayed awake and thought about them? The Church says this holy war is necessary to cleanse the world of sin, but the blood you have shed, is that not also sin?”

The psychic closeness of the stranger, the intensity of their shadowy eyes: it feels like they are speaking to the pilot and the pilot alone. It cannot draw away, cannot blink, cannot shut out the parade of questions.

“Have you never thought, there must be another answer? Never considered paths other than the one laid out before you? Never imagined other ways of being?”

The pilot thanks God it needs no breath right now. It is a trap; it’s definitely a trap. How else would this stranger know—? Forbidden thoughts flood in and the pilot fights to shut its mind down. It cannot let her see the doubts that cloud its mind, cannot let her know that its heart wavers in the dark corners of its consciousness.

But the strangest thing happens. From Phoenix’s heart, the seat of the holy sigil where she resides, comes a great shiver of emotion, a pulse of joy that sweeps the body of the mech. It recognizes the sensation as the same euphoria it feels when it is pilot. It has never felt its joy reciprocated—until now. Versus, suddenly enervated and excited, as she has never been.

What does it mean?

What has it missed?

CONFIG B

Fresh out of her suit, unencumbered in the sliver of freedom before the commandants descend on them, Versus shimmers with excitement: a brightness in her eyes, a novel energy in her movements. Everyone has seen the message—all four mechs got it. But the Räsvelg didn’t; the moment the battalion exited atmosphere there came the demands to explain, what happened down there, you went radio silent. No answers for them—not immediately anyway, the pilots still processing what the hell just happened, so the battalion was hauled back to the ship.

Versus scans the tiny decompression room. “Nothing happened down there, right?” Looking carefully and purposefully at each of you. “We saw Ajde Prime completely abandoned. No indication where they’d gone. Nothing left behind. Just the husk of a planet. Empty. Silent. Right?”

The girls—Rosa and Kestrel, mostly—nod. Sparrow looks away; Helianthus only frowns. Gauntlet bursts out, “But—!” and is instantly silenced by Grimoire’s hand on his wrist. “Versus is right, Gaunt. There was nothing there.”

Versus’ gaze fixes upon you, seeking confirmation. She wants you to lie, knowingly, and you’re not sure why. But how can you refuse? She is blessed, after all, and you are only Stick. You push down the vile swarm of doubts rising in your throat and nod.

• • • •

Wordlessly you sit through panels of questioning and disbelief. The higher-ups on the Räsvelg seem upset that their target evaporated without a fight, as though their holy mission is meaningless without bloodshed. Church superiors are deeply suspicious of this boon; it upsets their narrative of the apostates as war-frenzied animals. Finally, it is the Pope Ficus who says: God blessed us with His perfect weapon. As long as she remains with us, our mission is sacrosanct. It must continue as planned. So it is decided that you will cut deeper into the ventricles of apostate society. One more pit stop on the way to Babel. Whatever this incident at Ajde Prime was, it does not matter. You will take this blessing at face value.

• • • •

That evening, after dinner, Versus tugs you by the wrist. “Come with me.”

She leads you to the bathroom and frowns—uncomprehending—when you physically resist her at the door. “What’s wrong?” she asks, as you pull your wrist from her grasp.

“I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

Why not? “That’s the girl’s bathroom.”

“It’s not. Why would you . . . ?” Puzzlement collapses into disbelief. “That’s ridiculous, Stick. Gender segregation isn’t a thing in this day and age anymore. You do know this, don’t you?”

“It’s just you and Rosa and Kestrel . . . ”

“We’re the ones who talk. Come. I want to show you what we talk about.”

The thrill of being allowed is immediately overridden by the fear of deviance—not of breaking the rules, but of fitting in badly, like a misplaced puzzle piece. “I can’t.”

“Stick.” She sighs. “Would it help if I said I’m not really a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

She takes your hand again. “Nevermind. Just come.”

Dizzy and confused by her words, you allow her to lead you into the bathroom; it’s easier than fighting her. Inside, walls of steel glow with amber light. In the common area, away from the individual stalls, Kestrel and Rosa sit, animated by a swell of excitement you’ve never seen from them.

“They pulled it off. I can’t believe it. I saw it but I still can’t—”

“I know—Even I thought it was a mad plan, but—”

“We’re blessed, surely we are. How did they—?”

“They wouldn’t tell me, but—”

Versus clears her throat lightly. The conversation chokes as the two look up and realize who stands next to her.

Preemptively, Versus says: “I thought I’d invite Stick to join in our meetings.”

“Oh.” Rosa folds her hands over her lap. “I see. I just didn’t think Stick would be interested in our conversation.”

“I think Stick might agree with some of our philosophies,” Versus says.

“That surprises me. After all Stick, you seemed pretty strident about our conquest. Have you changed your mind?”

“Stick has doubts like we do. Don’t you?”

God’s perfect weapon is looking at you. You’ve been found out, betrayed by the ugly emotions exposed in Phoenix’s cockpit. Versus knows your weaknesses now. Is she testing you?

Kestrel says, gently: “Did the message we saw on Ajde Prime make you realize something, Stick?”

“You . . . ” There must be something you can say that does not incriminate you further. “You know who left the message, don’t you?”

Rosa shoots Versus a furious look, but Kestrel only laughs. “Yes. I see you’ve guessed it, or something like it. Apollo is my twin. Born together, enlisted together, tested into the pilot program together. They had the blood of a holy sigil, I did not. Ironic, since we were meant to be identical.”

“Your twin is an apostate . . . ”

“Not an apostate.” Another laugh. “You couldn’t tell Apollo what to do, even when we were kids. They ran off and joined a group of conscientious dissenters—people who don’t believe this artificial war our leaders have concocted is necessary. It’s full of people from our ranks, but full of people from the other side too. And because they’re Apollo, they’re one of the leaders now. There’s a commune planet—whose location I can’t really disclose—but that’s where I want to be. Eventually.”

Buttoned-up Kestrel has let her mask slip; you’ve never seen her this relaxed. Untangled, her story makes sense now, a solid braid of cause and effect. All this while, behind the veneer of a brisk and competent pilot, she has been hiding the truth of a rebellious twin. “So you knew what would greet us on Ajde Prime . . . ?”

Kestrel flips a hand. “Hardly. Apollo told me they had plans, but I thought they were doomed to fail. I don’t know how they pulled it off. Timing? A long tail of preparation? An unbelievable helping of luck, most probably.”

“A miracle,” Rosa says.

“A miracle,” Versus repeats, firmly. She sits beside Rosa and gestures to the space next to Kestrel, for you. “God is good to us. He shows us the way where our leaders will not. He opens the paths for us to follow.”

You sit slowly, disoriented and silent. Kestrel takes your hand, and you jump at the touch of her fingers in all their warmth. She has on a kindly smile, but your voice is lodged in your lungs. The conversation continues around you as you struggle for footing on ground that keeps shifting.

Rosa clasps Versus’ hands. “Have you heard? There’s a rumor going around the officers’ quarters. The Beast is on the move now. We might end up fighting him sooner than expected.”

“I see. No, I haven’t heard.”

“Are you alright? You’ve gone pale.”

“I—” Versus exhales, looks to the ceiling. “I don’t want to fight him. I really, really don’t.”

Is she afraid of The Beast? Is that what drives these doubts of hers? You stare at her like you could pick her apart, revealing if it’s fear that lurks in her soul—or something else.

“You know you don’t have to, don’t you? Versus, we’re all ready to make a move. Even Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The whole battalion can leave at any time. But we’re not leaving you behind.”

“That’s not—” Her voice cracks, and the unfamiliar note chills every knot in your spine. You’ve never seen her like this, never, could not have imagined it ever. She trembles like a bulkhead about to splinter, fingers twisted, eyes to the ground. “Jordan is a believer, he’s never going to abandon his post and betray our teacher. And I can’t leave him to rampage unchecked. As long as The Beast fights, I have to oppose him.”

“Allie, you know that’s not true. What he does is between him and God, and no one else. You’re only responsible for your own fate.” Rosa leans forward. “Every battle we fight, every moment we linger on in this rich man’s war, we make it worse.”

Versus sighs and her shoulders slump forward. Kestrel says, “Have you prayed on this, Alicia?”

“I have. I have prayed for an answer for so, so long, yet God has not given me a sign. I don’t know—maybe I should beg His forgiveness, but . . . ”

“Have you considered,” Rosa says, “that the miracle we witnessed today might have been one such sign?”

“I . . . have, yes.”

“I always say prayer takes time,” Kestrel says, “but we’re running out of time.”

“Yes. Prayer.” Versus straightens up, eyes bright. Holds out her hands. “Let us pray.”

“Let us pray,” Rosa agrees.

A circle forms, Kestrel’s warm hand in your left and Versus’ dry one in your right. “I will pray for the souls of the lost,” Rosa says, “and for those on Ajde Prime. God keep them safe.”

“I pray for my sibling,” Kestrel says. “For their safety and the success of their mission.”

Versus makes a throat-sound, then pauses to draw in a long breath, long enough that your skin starts to chill. Everyone waits. Finally she says, her eyes downcast: “I pray for The Beast.”

Now it’s your turn. What should you pray for? For guidance? For clarity? For victory in battle? For more esoteric things, like the realization of your want to be mech, permanently, or perhaps a name that makes sense to you, that is yours? Or maybe a body that feels like it’s on your side. That you don’t feel betrayed by every time you catch your reflection.

Everyone is looking at you. You reach for the closest, easiest thing. “I pray for happiness,” you say. “For joy. For euphoria.”

The four of you lower your heads, and you pray.

• • • •

In your bunk, flat on your back, vision a starless vista of ceiling, sleep evades you. The breathing from the lower bunk tells you that God’s perfect weapon is similarly awake.

“Versus,” you begin.

“What is it?”

“What did you mean when you said you’re not really a girl? Earlier.”

“Ah.” Her voice is dark, glossy. “Does that bother you? It’s nothing. Not much, anyway. I just don’t think I’m a girl, it’s a feeling I’ve had for a long time. I’m in-between. Not one or the other. But that’s largely inconsequential. I have a job to do. Or maybe a job to not do. In any case that’s what I’m focusing on. I can worry about myself later.”

“But it does matter,” you say. “The prophecy said you should be a girl . . . ”

“I know. I mean, I don’t like the prophecy very much. Or at all. But I suppose that’s why I’ve never mentioned it. I don’t want to upset people, or . . . draw scrutiny. I’m not really bothered if people think of me as a girl. There are other things that bother me more.”

“Like The Beast.”

A volcanic sigh. “Like The Beast.”

Silence creeps back into the room. After a while, she says, “I’m sure you have questions about that.”

“I don’t know.”

Her weight shifts audibly in the bunk below. She’s sat up, speaking into the dark. “Jordan and I were found as children. They singled us out from the blood banks. We were ten. They came to our schools and they had lists of names and everything. After extensive tests we were the only two left. It’s been obscured by the Church, but the prophecy—the program—was really about making sigils who were also pilots. It’s tied up with why the schism happened . . . but that doesn’t matter now. Jordan and I were part of the program. We were cultivated together for . . . how many years was it? Seven? Ten? No, it has to be seven. The schism happened when we were seventeen. So, seven years. We trained together, lived in the same house . . . we weren’t allowed outside on our own. Of course not. In that time, Jordan was family. My twin brother. We did everything together. Then the schism happened, and our teacher, the man who led us . . . he left to become an apostate. Jordan went with him. They were always closer than I was. This was . . . five years ago? Ten? Time doesn’t make sense anymore. That was what happened. We haven’t seen each other since.”

The expressionless ceiling doesn’t blink as you stare. Versus’ words rattle in your head like bullet casings, or untethered ships, an empty collection of sounds and syllables that should have meaning attached, but you can’t decode them.

A shuffle of synthetic against synthetic from below. It goes on for a while, then Versus appears at the edge of your bunk, standing on tiptoe, the hard square of a transflat in her hand. “Here.” It lights up with a photo album, a scroll through the tender years of Versus’ life. There she is, birthday cake, there she is again, draped over the edge of a radioactive blue pool, there she is nestled in the yellow arms of a tree. A different Versus, with skinnier arms and teeth that look too big for her face. In every picture there is a boy beside her, bright-eyed and velvet-cheeked, his grin wider than hers. The pilot of The Beast, as a child, and then as an older child. He and Versus look nothing alike, clearly they’re not related, but there’s a sameness to them that makes them look like a pair. Most of the pictures are taken in one house, with arched windows and fake vines plastered to the cornices. It looks nice. Is it nice? You have no baseline to judge this with.

Versus watches the passage of her life with a fond smile. Her voice has gone soft and rounded with a timbre you’re unfamiliar with. “When we were chosen, we were rebaptized. Given new life, given over to service in God’s name. Jordan was my brother, but he was more than that. They preached that our souls were twinned, you know? It was important to us. I loved him. And . . . I don’t want to fight him, but he made his choices. Now it’s come to this.”

The slideshow of Versus’ other life continues. Versus in a red skirt patterned with flowers. Versus in blue jeans, shredded at the knee.

She says, “It still confuses me sometimes, frightens me even, how everything turned out. How you can live with someone for so long, and think you know them to the last atom, to their soul, and find out you were wrong.”

“I see,” you say. It’s a lie. Or maybe it’s not a lie. Versus is right.

She looks curiously at you. “Stick,” she says, “why did you ask me about the gender thing? Of all the facts you learned today, why was that the one that bothered you the most?”

You look at the bones of your hands. The light from the transflat carves crescents of shadow behind your knuckles. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” she says. “I figured it out. It wasn’t like an angel descended on a beam of light and told me what my gender was. It’s an ongoing process. Little feelings, here and there, that maybe my gender was more of a question than I thought. Things weren’t right, or didn’t fit right. Eventually I realized what it meant.” She places her fingers, firm and cool, over your wrist. “It could be an ongoing process for you too.”

You nod and she frowns, concerned by your silence. “You’ve had a lot to take in. Are you alright? Do you want to talk about anything?” But you don’t. What good would talking do? How could talking ever solve any of your problems?

• • • •

It really isn’t about Versus’ gender, except that it is. You thought you knew which side of the divide she was on. It informed the map of your life. You used to reason with yourself like this, sometimes: Eve was grown from the rib of Adam, yet Eve turned out woman while Adam turned out man, so it follows that you should be opposite of Versus, the same way Eve was opposite of Adam. Yet this burning desire for your body and existence to perfectly mirror hers won’t leave you alone, and this is what drives your extraordinary resonance in Phoenix. Your need to change yourself is not driven by your selfish desires, but a side effect of what you were designed for; you have to yearn toward her being or the connection won’t work. She is the vessel for God’s will and so are you. A tool, a miracle, an it. God’s perfect weapon.

But that’s been turned upside down. There’s a Versus you never knew, a Versus who doubts her mission, a Versus who has a history you knew nothing about. A Versus before she was Versus. And if Versus isn’t who you thought she was, if she’s not even the gender you thought she was, then where does that leave you? In a body you understand less than before, with a mission that has been muddled beyond comprehension.

What are you supposed to do?

CONFIG A

The big fight, when it comes, is entirely unexpected. A jerk out of hyperspace, and the corridors go angry with red light and black smoke. The mech battalion falls out of bed and scrambles into battle, adrenaline-drunk. The apostates have tracked down the Räsvelg and dragged it into Newtonian space using forbidden technology, the Devil’s tools. By the time the pilot mounts itself in Phoenix’s cockpit, the enemy is a series of flashing blips on the horizon. The Beast, tailed by two support mechs. Half-familiar shapes, gilded in the shimmering livery of the apostates. The Räsvelg is halfway from its destination the next system over. The apostates have decided not to wait for their arrival, taking matters into their own hands.

The Beast and its companions have the silhouettes of trees, of centipedes, of bones: all spindle and angle and wrong. They’ve taken God-given mechs and defiled them. Twisted them to unholy purpose. The sight of this blasphemy sets the pilot’s soul alight, burning its doubts to white powder. This is what it was made for. Its ultimate battle. Kill or be killed.

The Beast agrees. The abomination rushes its enemies in an arc of pure hunger, and God above it moves so fast, its entire arm is a gleaming blade of destruction. The pilot joyously leaps to meet it—

No.

The pilot has never heard Versus speak while they are joined. Shock jars its grip on control, and in that glistening half-second Versus pulls on the brakes and Phoenix comes to a sudden, juddering halt. I don’t want to. I won’t.

What is she doing, what is happening? The resonance that comprises God’s perfect weapon has been shattered. The pilot fights Versus for dominance, but it cannot win, not when she is the holy sigil, the heart and engine of the mech, and The Beast is nearly upon them, ready to strike—

The Beast vanishes. The stars vanish. The universe around them vanishes. Phoenix vanishes from under the pilot, as though subatomized in the flick of an eyelid. Pink light fills its consciousness.

“There you are.”

The pilot knows that voice. That rich velvet belongs to Apollo/Artemis. The dissidents are here, but how? Were they tracked, was there collusion? What did Apollo do?

“Sorry about the surprise.” Apollo/Artemis’ voice curls around the pilot’s spine, or whatever it is that passes for a spine here. “It’s me, your friend Apollo. In the flesh. Or, well. In the mind.” A silvery laugh. “Shouldn’t have entered the atmosphere of Ajde Prime, huh? We left a few surprises for you. Almost shocked no one checked for nanites, but that’s the problem with the papacy, isn’t it? You’re all so full of yourselves, you never thought that the planet itself might be a trap.”

The dissidents have won control of the mechs, somehow. Are the nanites in the fighters, or in their bodies? In fact, it doesn’t matter. Some kind of neural net has a hold of them. The pilot’s body? Mind? Is trapped in this vast gummy pink, like sugar, but spun with spidersilk, suffocating and inexorable. It tries to rip something free, an arm, a leg, anything. Its perception of the universe has been sublimated by this wooly expanse, and the longer it stays here the more it feels like there is nothing to the universe but this soft blankness. Where is The Beast? Where is the rest of the battalion? Where is Versus?

Here she comes, rising enormous and avian through the fog. A wild swoop of emotion. Where is he? What have you done with him?

Apollo speaks into both their minds. “Sorry, had to intervene. Would have been bad if you two killed one another. Trying to avoid that, you know?”

The other holy sigils and pilots are elsewhere in this ether, faint but familiar pings of contact, generous in their calm. Rolling with this turn in their fortunes, better than the alternative.

Versus speaks to Apollo. I know you. We’ve never met, but I know you.

“Same. Listen, you’ve got to withdraw from here. I have him too, all three of them, but I can’t hold them back for long, the nanites will give out.”

I want to talk to him.

“I thought you might. Not sure if that’s gonna work, though. Might be a bad idea.”

Please, let me try. I have to.

All this time the pilot has experienced Versus as a neutral presence in Phoenix: a heartbeat, a body that powers the mech like a battery. Inert. She’s never been wired with naked determination like this, lit with the kind of fire that would burn cities to cinders. Versus has come alive the way she is in the flesh, bold and sharply defined as she is on the Räsvelg. All this time, the pilot’s wants have smothered the truth of her apathy when they are joined. It never knew.

A white swell surges toward them, cetacean and threatening. The Beast is on the hunt through the gelatinous pink. He seethes with fury: he cannot believe he has been thwarted so close to his goal. His frustration poisons the ether in waves. The Beast wants nothing but to kill and to vanquish and to destroy; war has broken and shaped him into a creature that craves violence above all. His bloodthirst tugs at the pilot with an ache of familiarity, horrifying and sticky as a broken tooth. That’s what I look like, it thinks.

Jordan.

Versus’ entreaty only draws the white whale toward them at double speed. There’s nothing there but rage and rows of teeth that shine as he yawns open to swallow them whole.

Apollo intervenes. In this liminal space they are the end and the beginning, the morning and the evening star, and The Beast freezes in place, jaw unhinged, close enough to touch. Jordan, Versus says. It’s me. It’s Alicia. You remember, don’t you?

Does he? Where is the child from that house with the windows and the plaster vines, who put bunny ears on people in photos and wore silly pirate costumes to parties? Is that child still alive in the belly of the beast? Or is there nothing left but rage and teeth?

Jordan, listen. We don’t have to fight. I don’t want to fight. Let’s run away. Let them sort out their problems on their own.

Fuck you. The Beast speaks like an avalanche. Like stones being crushed. His voice is exactly as the pilot has pictured.

This isn’t like you. You’re not an angry person, you’re not hateful. I remember you, you were a kind kid. You’ve changed, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Shut the fuck up. You sound like a loser.

Jordan, I’m serious. Let’s leave now, we can go with Apollo. I miss you. This war isn’t worth us killing one another.

Fuck you. Go on and run then. I’ll cut you down like the coward you are. I’ll see you in hell.

The Beast disappears without breath or sound, and all that’s left is the boggy pink. “That’s enough of that,” Apollo says. “Hey sis—Versus—y’all got to go now, the net is fraying. I’ll hold the apostates while you call a retreat, but you’ve got to get out. The time for reason is over. Now’s for survival. But hey—” he says, a parting shot that sparks through the pilot’s consciousness—“don’t keep me waiting too long, alright?”

The cotton candy universe vanishes, and they’re back in the lightless void of space, fighting distance from the crooked jaws of the Beast and its associates. Still inert, trapped in Apollo’s grip. The pilot, returned to the comfort of Phoenix, which is solid, which is all that it knows, is back in control of itself. It wrenches toward its foe, seeing the God-given opportunity to destroy its defenseless target.

But Versus tugs back. Stops the pilot from doing its job, just as she did before. Versus is radioing the Räsvelg, calling for a retreat, and the ship’s commanders, relieved of their panic at the sudden suspension of their most precious war units, agree at once. They are withdrawing, leaving the frozen apostates behind. The pilot no longer recognizes the shape of the world.

CONFIG A

The commandants are in an uproar. The dissidents have been a longtime spine in the side of the Church, but they’ve never been a threat until now. There’s no script, no verse, no commandment that teaches how to deal with this. They’re on their own, until the apostates learn to find them again.

While the higher-ups are locked in for hours of shouting and recriminations, Versus calls a clandestine meeting of her own, defying orders to stay in quarters until further notice. It’s an emergency. They’re just about to find out that your battalion lied in the last debrief; time is running out for you and this group of traitors-in-waiting. No, not in waiting: that is incorrect. Traitors in truth and flesh. Just undiscovered. The crime has been committed, it cannot be undone. It’s part of who you are now, woven into your bones as surely as your blood makes endless pilgrimage in your veins. It was Versus who led you to this, all of you but you in particular. You let her do this to you.

The eight of you cram into the bathroom-conference room, now claustrophobic with bodies. Everyone is here, even mousy Sparrow tucked under Rosa’s arm. It really is a gender-neutral bathroom after all. You breathe very slowly and carefully and try not to let your skin touch anyone else’s.

“What do we do?” Helianthus asks, grumpily. He makes it sound like this is a minor inconvenience, like someone’s broken the foodmaker in the mess hall.

“We have to leave,” Versus says. The doubt has been distilled from her voice and all that’s left is conviction, pure and clear and stinging. The Beast, her last tether to the Church, has been peeled from her soul. “The plans we’ve made? Now’s the time to put them in motion.”

A murmur of assent. Kestrel says, “Are you sure, Allie?” Not to cast doubt, but to fortify her resolve.

“I am.” The passage of Apollo’s intervention has changed her, broken her spine and reforged it into steel. She emerged from the wet cradle of Phoenix a different person. You thought she was a weapon before, but you realize you never understood the word.

The rest of the battalion seems sad, but determined. Frightened. Eager. As Rosa rubs Sparrow’s shoulders, a glassy realization—they’ve talked about this before—cuts you. Everyone in this room has had private conversations about this, whole fora about sedition and doubt and disbelief, and it was all hidden from you. It recasts every conversation you’ve had with them, every argument you’ve watched them have. Suddenly you’ve found yourself in a group of strangers. Ice climbs your spine and lodges in the base of your skull.

The Beast felt so familiar in Apollo’s neural net. Like recognizing. Like mirrors for each other. You are the Beast, standing in disguise among a group of humans. Ugly and yellow as old bone.

“Ten minutes,” Kestrel says. “Apollo’s people are close by. There’s a satellite planet. I just have to give the signal.”

“And they’ll be here?” Gauntlet asks.

“Yes,” Kestrel says. “We have to be ready to move out by then.”

The battalion will take the holy mechs. The Church might be able to make new pilots, pray for new sigils, but the mechs are irreplaceable. The consequences of their betrayal will be unthinkable, unknowable, unchartable. Before you yawns a great chasm of uncertainty with no bottom.

Gauntlet slaps his palms together. “Aight then, let’s go.”

“Wait.” Rosa reaches out and catches him by the sleeve. “Let us pray, first.”

“Let us pray,” Versus affirms.

In the tiny gender-neutral bathroom everyone joins hands, heads bowed. In the tightness and anxiety of the circle nobody notices that you’re standing apart. Your hands are hidden, tucked behind your back, nails biting into the flesh of your palm.

• • • •

In your shared quarters Versus is cramming what little she has into a duffel bag. “We have to hurry,” she says, her voice tight with—what is it, nervousness? Excitement? You can’t tell. You feel lightyears away from her, even though she is close enough to touch. “That prayer cut out all the buffer time we had. We shouldn’t have done that.” Then she freezes, halfway through zipping up, struck by her own words. “What am I saying? Of course we should have.” She sighs, then looks at you. “Stick, what’s wrong? You haven’t packed.”

No one has asked for your opinion in this entire process. Not a single person, not even Versus. It was just assumed that you would follow obediently. Now she comes toward you, brows knitted. “Stick, you’re coming with us, aren’t you? We can’t leave you behind. I mean. I suppose we can. But I don’t want to.”

“Why would you think I’d want to do this?”

She blinks, startled. “Because you aren’t happy here.”

You frown.

“You aren’t, are you? You aren’t happy with what they’ve made of you. What they want you to be. You aren’t happy.”

Your mouth is dry is as the chasm between stars. “I don’t know how to be.” It’s an alien word, an alien concept, a thing that happens to other people while you stand on the outside and watch. What does happy mean? What is it, an emotion? A series of things happening? A state of being?

“Come with us,” she pleads, taking your hands. “We’ll find out.”

Fear spasms through your forearms, and you pull your hands from hers, embarrassed and afraid. “I can’t.”

“Stick . . . ”

Maybe happiness is a lack, an absence. Maybe it’s the void left behind that uncertainty, doubt, and self-loathing would otherwise occupy. Maybe it’s the feeling, that precious feeling, that you only ever feel in one place, under one condition.

You say, “I’m not like you. I can’t be happy living in a house with other people, a nice house with windows and vines on the ceiling. I wasn’t made for that. I was made to be a weapon. I’m only happy being a weapon.”

She tilts her head. “You think violence is all you’re good for?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” She goes back to her bag, unzips it. Time is spiraling away while you’re having this conversation; Versus should just leave. But she doesn’t. She pulls a long, stony thing out of the bag. A knife. Unsheathed, its black blade gleams like a smile.

She marches back to you, puts the knife in your hand and takes your wrist. Tucks the sharp, obsidian edge under her chin, where jaw and neck meet. “Do it. If only violence makes you happy, then do it.”

You’re frozen. Her grip on your wrist is so strong that you cannot pull back, and if you slide yourself free you will cut her throat open. Even letting go of the blade might harm her.

“What’s wrong? Can’t do it? Why not, Stick? I’m a traitor; I’ve conspired with my fellows to commit high treason. If your mission is so important, you have to stop me, don’t you?”

“Versus, stop.”

She lets you go and your shaking hand snaps instantly to your chest, fingers curled around the knife’s handle like a vise. It’s surprisingly light, well-made, carbon fiber? Ceremonial, or a memento.

“There, Stick. It’s not the violence that drives you, is it? It’s not violence that matters to you. You’re just chasing the things that make you happy. That make you feel whole. So that makes you human, like any of us. You deserve to be human.”

“But—” What about the unmatched euphoria that only comes when you are Phoenix, when you are mech, when you are it? Is that not by design? “There’s something wrong with me. I’m broken.”

“No. That’s untrue.”

Her face is soft and sad; the thought of cutting into her fills you with nausea. You push down the horrifying images of her with her neck sliced through, her blood all over your hands and her tunic and the floor. This isn’t anything like the fire and brimstone of Phoenix’s cockpit. The world has been smashed open like a candy egg and you can’t make sense of anything that’s spilling out of it. You look at the flesh on your own wrist, filled with blood and tendons. It’s you, it’s this body, it’s always been.

But if your body is a problem, it can be solved. And the tool to do so is in your hand.

Versus closes her hand around your wrist again. Gently this time, but with enough pressure to let you know that she’s prepared to stop you from doing the rash thing that’s leaped into your mind. You haven’t said a word, but she knows anyway. “Don’t.”

Time hasn’t stopped. The two of you can’t stay locked here much longer. You’re holding her back. Versus has already made her choice, she knows what she wants. You, on the other hand, know nothing about anything. She should let you do the rash thing. “I’ll only burden you.”

“You won’t,” she says. “I promise.”

She says: “Come with me, Stick. Please.”

She says: “They made you a weapon, just as they turned me into one. They fed us sweet lies to keep us happy at our jobs. But we aren’t weapons, Stick. We aren’t objects, no matter how much they want us to be. We don’t have to stay the way they made us.”

You shiver. You shake your head. You’re haunted by the Beast, angry even when offered a chance at peace. If he couldn’t be redeemed, how can you? “I don’t know any other way to be.”

“Because it’s the only choice you’ve ever had. But there can be more. Will be more.”

You lick your lips. There’s terror there, in the dryness. But there’s also hope and the freedom of the unknown, which is almost as frightening. Versus isn’t letting you go, and maybe Versus knows better than you what makes a monster and what makes a person. She’s seen the other side of the mirror, after all. “I don’t know how to be human.”

A small smile. “Nobody does.” A squeeze of the hand. “But let’s figure it out together.” Her skin against yours is warm. Her wrist against your wrist, the blood pulsing within. Same as the blood pulsing through you. A resonance.

CONFIG C

In the end, I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do. We took the mechs, the main offensive force of the Church, and ran without looking back. The vacuum that resulted didn’t collapse structures, but it tilted the war back in favor of the apostates. They’re still fighting, as far as we know. Maybe we could have ended the war earlier, if we’d stayed in it. But maybe we would have made it worse. It’s impossible to know now. What’s important is we got out.

These days there is the yellow sky of an M-class planet, a field heaped with flowers and herbs, a house on a hill that looks like a glass cathedral. These days Helianthus, who goes by Lars, has cultivated an excessive number of fruit trees, an orchard really; there are never enough hands to help with the harvest, never enough mouths for all the jars of preserves we make. Kestrel, who these days goes by Nike, is helping her twin run the resistance. She’s here and there, but she visits when she can. Sparrow, who these days goes by Jasper, is a painter. Gauntlet and Grimoire took off and established a satellite commune on the southern continent, I hear it’s doing well. And on the downslope of the hill, Versus, who these days goes by Alicia, has their head in the lap of Rosa, who these days goes by Nishi. “Do you think he’ll ever come around?” they ask. “I miss him still.” And Nishi, who’s running her fingers over the bronzed expanse of Alicia’s shoulder, says, “There’s always hope.”

Apollo/Artemis is just as beautiful in person. They spend most of their time away—war’s still not over, still so much to do—so their sweetness comes in bursts, like ripened boughs in the summer. When the buttery light touches their curls in the morning it outlines them in goldenrod perfection and the world comes to a standstill for as long as it takes them to slide into consciousness. I’m learning to paint—Jasper is teaching me—in hopes that one day I’ll be able to capture the euphoria of these evanescent moments with brush and pigment.

As for me, I still don’t know. There’s lots of things I’m still figuring out. I’ve picked a name, but I still let my old warmates call me Stick, from time to time. They’ve earned it. About my pronouns—I’m figuring that out, too. I still don’t know. I’m allowed. Apollo/Artemis says it’s taken them their whole life so far to sort out the names and words they like to use, and if someone as sure of themself as they are is still working it out, then I’ve got time. See, the one thing I’ve learned, and keep learning over and over again, is that there’s no one answer to everything. I’m lurching toward understanding, one day at a time. Same as everybody else.

Neon Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters and The Ascent to Godhood). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, Their debut novel, The Genesis of Misery, will be published by Tor in Fall 2022.

Neon is queer, non-binary, and lives in Singapore. Find them on Twitter as @itsneonyang, and otherwise at http://neonyang.com.

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar
By Nadia Afifi
Novelette Long List

Bahrain’s Central Bazaar comes to life at night. Lights dance above the narrow passageways, illuminating the stalls with their spices, sacks of lentils, ornate carpets, and trinkets. Other stalls hawk more modern fare, NeuroLync implants and legally ambiguous drones. The scent of cumin and charred meat fills my nostrils. My stomach twists in response. Chemo hasn’t been kind to me.

Office workers spill out from nearby high-rises into the crowds. A few cast glances in my direction, confusion and sympathy playing across their faces. They see an old woman with stringy, thinning gray hair and a hunched back, probably lost and confused. The young always assume the elderly can’t keep up with them, helpless against their new technology and shifting language. Never mind that I know their tricks better than they do, and I’ve been to wilder bazaars than this manufactured tourist trap. It used to be the Old Souk, a traditional market that dealt mostly in gold. But Bahrain, which once prided itself as being Dubai’s responsible, less ostentatious younger cousin, has decided to keep up with its neighbors. Glitz and flash. Modernity and illusion.

I turn down another passageway, narrower than the last. A sign beckons me below—“The Bahrain Underground Bazaar.” It even has a London Underground symbol around the words for effect, though we’re far from its gray skies and rain. I quicken my pace down its dark steps.

It’s even darker below, with torch-like lamps lining its stone walls. Using stone surfaces—stone anything—in the desert is madness. The cost of keeping the place cool must be obscene. The Underground Bazaar tries hard, bless it, to be sinister and seedy, and it mostly succeeds. The clientele help matters. They’re either gangs of teenage boys or lone older men with unsettling eyes, shuffling down damp corridors. Above them, signs point to different areas of the bazaar for different tastes—violence, phobias, sex, and death.

I’m here for death.

“Welcome back, grandma,” the man behind the front counter greets me. A nice young man with a neatly trimmed beard. He dresses all in black, glowing tattoos snaking across his forearms, but he doesn’t fool me. He goes home and watches romantic comedies when he isn’t selling the morbid side of life to oddballs. This isn’t a typical souk or bazaar where each vendor runs their own stall. The Underground Bazaar is centralized. You tell the person at the counter what virtual immersion experience you’re looking for and they direct you to the right room. Or chamber, as they insist.

“I’m not a grandma yet,” I say, placing my dinars on the front counter. “Tell my son and his wife to spend less time chasing me around and get the ball rolling on those grandchildren.” In truth, I don’t care in the slightest whether my children reproduce. I won’t be around to hold any grandchildren.

“What’ll it be today?”

I’ve had time to think on the way, but I still pause. In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer—the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing.

The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing—I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me.

“I don’t think I’ve fallen to my death yet,” I say, regaining my composure. “I’d like to fall from a high place today.”

“Sure thing. Accident or suicide?”

Would they be that different? The jump, perhaps, but everyone must feel the same terror as the ground approaches.

“Let’s do a suicide,” I say. “Someone older, if you have it. Female. Someone like me,” I add unnecessarily.

My helpful young man runs his tattooed fingers across his fancy computer, searching. I’ve given him a challenge. Most people my age never installed the NeuroLync that retains an imprint of a person’s experiences—including their final moments. Not that the intent is to document one’s demise, of course. People get the fingernail-sized devices implanted in their temples to do a variety of useful things—pay for groceries with a blink, send neural messages to others, even adjust the temperature in their houses with a mental command. Laziness. Soon, the young will have machines do their walking for them.

But one side effect of NeuroLync’s popularity was that its manufacturer acquired a treasure trove of data from the minds connected to its Cloud network. Can you guess what happened next? Even an old bird like me could have figured it out. All that data was repackaged and sold to the highest bidder. Companies seized what they could, eager to literally tap into consumer minds. But there are other markets, driven by the desire to borrow another person’s experiences. Knowing what it feels like to have a particular kind of sex. Knowing what it feels like to torture someone—or be tortured. Knowing what it means to die a certain way.

And with that demand comes places like the Bahrain Underground Bazaar.

“I’ve got an interesting one for you,” the man says, eyeing me with something close to caution. “A Bedouin woman. Want to know the specifics?”

“Surprise me,” I say. “I’m not too old to appreciate some mystery.”

My young man always walks with me to the sensory chamber, like an usher in a movie theater. It’s easy for me to get knocked around amid the jostling crowds, and I admit that some of the other customers frighten me. You can always spot the ones here for violence, a sick thrill between work shifts. Their eyes have this dull sheen, as though the real world is something they endure until their next immersion.

“This is your room, grandma,” the man says before spinning on his heels back to the front counter. I step inside.

The room is dark, like the rest of this place, with blue lights webbing its walls. I suspect they exist for ambience rather than utility. In the center of the room, a reclining chair sits underneath a large device that will descend over my tiny, cancer-addled head. On the back of it, a needle of some kind will jut out and enter my spinal cord, right where it meets the skull. It’s painful, but only for a second, and then you’re in someone else’s head, seeing and hearing and sensing what they felt. What’s a little pinprick against all of that?

I sit and lean back as the usual recording plays on the ceiling, promising me an experience I’ll never forget. The machine descends over my head, drowning out my surroundings, and I feel the familiar vampire bite at my neck.

I’m in the desert. Another one. Unlike Bahrain, a small island with every square inch filled by concrete, this is an open space with clear skies and a mountainous horizon. And I’m walking down a rocky, winding slope. Rose-colored cliffsides surround me and rich brown dirt crunches underneath my feet. The bright sun warms my face and a primal, animal smell fills my nostrils. I’m leading a donkey down the path. It lets out a huff of air, more sure-footed than me.

I turn—“I” being the dead woman—at the sound of laughter. A child sits on the donkey, legs kicking. The donkey takes it in stride, accustomed to excitable tourists, but I still speak in a husky, foreign voice, instructing the child to sit still. Others follow behind her—parents or other relations. They drink in the landscape’s still beauty through their phones.

We round a corner and my foot slides near the cliff’s edge. A straight drop to hard ground and rock. I look down, the bottom of the cliff both distant and oddly intimate. The air stills, catching my breath. Wild adrenaline runs through my body, my legs twitching. For a moment, I can’t think clearly, my thoughts scrambled by an unnamed terror. Then a thought breaks through the clutter.

Jump. Jump. Jump.

The terror becomes an entity inside me, a metallic taste on my tongue and a clammy sweat on my skin. The outline of the cliff becomes sharper, a beckoning blade, while the sounds of voices around me grow distant, as though I’m underwater.

I try to pull away—me, Zahra, the woman from Bahrain who chooses to spend her remaining days experiencing terrible things. In some backwater of my brain, I remind myself that I’m not on a cliff and this happened long ago. But the smell of hot desert air invades my senses again, yanking me back with a jolt of fear. Jump.

A moment seizes me, and I know that I’ve reached the glinting edge of a decision, a point of no return. My foot slides forward and it is crossed. I tumble over the edge.

I’m falling. My stomach dips and my heart tightens, thundering against my ribs. My hands flail around for something to grab but when they only find air, I stop. I plummet with greater speed, wind whipping my scarf away. I don’t scream. I’m beyond fear. There is only the ground beneath me and the space in between. A rock juts out from the surface and I know, with sudden peace, that that’s where I’ll land.

And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all.

And then voices.

The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead?

But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it.

A loud scream.

Reality flickers around me. Something releases in the back of my head and blue light creeps into my vision. The machine whirs above me, retracting to its place on the ceiling. I blink, a shaking hand at my throat. The scream was mine. Drawing a steady breath, I hold my hand before my eyes until I’m convinced it’s real and mine. Coming out of an immersion is always disorienting but that was no ordinary immersion. Normally, the moment of death wakes me up, returning me to my own, disintegrating body. What happened?

I leave the chamber with a slight wobble in my knees. A tall man in a trench coat appears at my side, offering his arm, and I swat it away. I smile, oddly reassured by the brief exchange. This is the Underground Bazaar, full of the same weirdos and creeps. I’m still me. The death I experienced in the chamber begins to fade in my immediate senses, but I still don’t look back.

“How was it?” The man at the front counter winks.

I manage a rasping noise.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” His grin widens. “We file that one under suicides, but it’s not really a suicide. Not premeditated, anyway. She was a tour guide in Petra, with a husband, five children, and who-knows-how-many grandchildren. She just jumped on impulse.”

My mind spins with questions, but I seize on his last comment.

“I walked the Golden Gate bridge once, on a family trip,” I say, my voice wavering. “I remember a strange moment where I felt the urge to jump over the edge, into the water, for no reason. It passed, and I heard that’s not uncommon.”

“They call it the death drive,” the man says with a nod. His eyes dance with excitement and I understand at last why he works in this awful place. The thrill of the macabre. “The French have a fancy expression for it that means ‘the call of the void.’ It’s really common to get to the edge of a high place and feel this sudden urge to jump. You don’t have to be suicidal or anxious. It can happen to anyone.”

“But why?” I ask. I suspect the man has studied this kind of thing and I’m right. He bounces on his heels and leans forward, his smile conspiratorial.

“Scientists think that it’s the conscious brain reacting to our instinctive responses,” he says. “You get to the edge of a cliff and you reflexively step back. But then your conscious mind steps in. Why did you step back? Maybe it’s not because of the obvious danger, but because you wanted to jump. Now, a part of you is convinced you want to jump, even though you know what that means, and it scares you. Insane,” he adds with undisguised glee.

“But most people don’t,” I say, recalling the terror of those moments at the cliff’s edge.

“Most don’t,” he agrees. “That’s what’s interesting about this one. She actually went through with it. Why I thought you’d like it.” His chest puffs up in a way that reminds me of my own son, Firaz, when he came home from school eager to show me some new art project. He stopped drawing when he reached college, I realize with sudden sadness.

“But what about . . . after she fell?” I ask. The fall was traumatic, as I knew it would be, but nothing from past immersions prepared me for the strange, sentient peace that followed the moment of impact.

“Oh, that,” the young man says. “That happens sometimes. Maybe about ten percent of our death immersions. Kind of a near-death-experience thing. Consciousness slipping away. Those last brain signals firing.”

“But it happened after I—after she fell,” I protest. “She must have been completely dead. Does that ever happen?”

“I’m sure it does, but rarely,” the young man says with a tone of gentle finality. He smiles at the next customer.

“Petra,” I murmur. “I’ve always wanted to see Petra.” And now I have, in a fashion.

Walking up the stairs, exhaustion floods my body. Some days are better than others, but I always save these visits for the days when I’m strongest. Leaning against the wall outside, I feel ready to collapse.

“Zahra? Zahra!”

My daughter-in-law pushes through the crowd. I consider shrinking back down the stairs, but her eyes fix on me with predatory focus. I’m in her sights. She swings her arms stiffly under her starched white blouse.

“We’ve been worried sick,” Reema begins. Her eyes scan me from head to toe, searching for some hidden signs of mischief. For a moment, I feel like a teenager again, sneaking out at night.

“You really shouldn’t,” I say.

“How did you slip away this time? We didn’t see you—”

“On the tracking app you installed on my phone?” I ask with a small smile. “I deleted it, along with the backup you placed on the Cloud.” As I said before, I know more tricks than they realize. Thank goodness I don’t have a NeuroLync. I’d never be alone. Of course, every time I sneak off after a medical appointment to walk to the bazaar, I’m battling time. They don’t know when I’ve given them the slip, but when they return home from their tedious jobs to find the house empty, they know where I’ve gone.

Reema sighs. “You need to stop coming to this terrible place, Zahra. It’s not good for your mind or soul. You don’t need dark thoughts—you’ll beat this by staying positive.”

After accompanying me to my earliest appointments, Reema has mastered the art of motivational medical speak. She means well. It would be cliché for me to despise my daughter-in-law, but in truth, I respect her. She comes from a generation of Arab women expected to excel at every aspect of life, to prove she earned her hard-fought rights, and she’s risen to the task. If only she’d let me carry on with the task of planning my death and getting out of her way.

On the way home, Reema calls my son to report my capture. Instead of speaking aloud, she sends him silent messages through her NeuroLync, shooting the occasional admonishing glance in my direction. I can imagine the conversation well enough.

At the bazaar again.

Ya Allah! The seedy part?

She was walking right out of it when I found her.

Is she okay?

Pleased enough with herself. What are we going to do with her?

Reema and Firaz work in skyscrapers along Bahrain’s coastal business zone, serving companies that change names every few months when they merge into bigger conglomerates. To them, I’m another project to be managed, complete with a schedule and tasks. My deadline is unknown, but within three months, they’ll likely be planning my funeral. It’s not that they don’t love me, and I them. The world has just conditioned them to express that love through worry and structure. I need neither.

I want control. I want purpose.

Firaz barely raises his head to acknowledge me when Reema and I walk through the kitchen door. He’s cooking at ten o’clock at night, preparing a dinner after work. Reema collapses onto a chair, kicking off her heels before tearing into the bread bowl.

“I’m not hungry, but I’m tired,” I say to no one in particular. “I’ll go to bed now.”

“Mama, when will this end?” Firaz asks in a tight voice.

I have an easy retort at the tip of my tongue. Soon enough, when I’m dead. But when he turns to face me, I hesitate under his sad, frustrated gaze. His red eyes are heavy with exhaustion. I, the woman who birthed and raised him, am now a disruption.

All at once, I deflate. My knees buckle.

“Mama!” Firaz abandons his pan and rushes toward me.

“I’m fine,” I say. With a wave of my hand, I excuse myself.

In the dark of my bedroom, images from the bazaar linger in the shadows. Echoes of blue lights dancing across the walls. I sink into my bed, reaching for the warmth I felt hours ago, through the dead woman’s mind, but I only shiver. What happened in that immersion? The young man didn’t fool me. I had experienced enough deaths in those dark chambers to recognize the remarkable. She jumped in defiance of instinct, but her final moments of existence were full of warmth and acceptance—a presence that lingered after death. What made her different?

The next morning, I take a long bath, letting Firaz and Reema go through their pre-work routine—elliptical machines, mindfulness, dressing, and breakfast, the house obeying their silent commands. After they leave, I take the bus downtown to the clinic.

I sit in a room of fake plants and fake smiles, chemicals warming my veins. Other women sit around me, forming a square with nothing but cheap blue carpet in the center. A nurse checks our IV drips and ensures our needles remain in place. My fellow cancer survivors—we’re all survivors, the staff insist—wear scarves to hide balding heads. Young, old—cancer ages us all. Their brave smiles emphasize the worry lines and tired eyes.

Out the window, the city hums with its usual frenetic pulse. Elevated trains, dizzying lanes of cars, and transport drones all fight for space amid Bahrain’s rush hour. Beyond it, the sea winks at me, sunlight glinting on its breaking waves. A world in constant motion, ready to leave me behind.

Coldness prickles my skin. Could I jump, like that woman jumped? It would be easy—rip the array of needles from my arm and rush across the room, forcing the window open. I might have to smash the glass if they put in security locks (a good strategy in a cancer ward). When the glass shatters and the screaming skyscraper winds whip at my hair, would I recoil or jump?

But I don’t move. I cross my feet under my silk skirt and wet my lips. Perhaps I’m too fearful of causing a scene. Perhaps I’m not the jumping kind. But doubt gnaws at me with each passing second. Death is an unceasing fog around me, but despite my many trips to the bazaar, I can’t bring myself to meet it yet.

Maybe you’re not ready because you have unfinished business.

But what could that be? My child no longer needs me—if anything, I’m a burden. Bahrain has morphed into something beyond my wildest imagination. It’s left me behind. I’ve lived plenty. What remains?

A rose city carved from rock. An ancient Nabataean site in Jordan, immortalized in photographs in glossy magazines and childhood stories. I always meant to go to Petra but had forgotten about that dream long ago. And in the Underground Bazaar, of all places, I’m reminded of what I’ve yet to do.

I close my eyes. The woman from yesterday’s immersion tumbles through the air, beautiful cliffs and clear skies spinning around her. Is that why she was calm at the end? Did some part of her realize that she had lived the right life and was now dying in the right place?

The revelation hits me with such force that I have no room for uncertainty. I know what I must do, but I have to be smart about my next steps. The chemo session is nearly over. I smile sweetly at the nurse when she removes the last drip from my veins. My daughter-in-law will meet me downstairs, I reassure her. No, I don’t need any help, thank you. This isn’t my first rodeo. She laughs. People like their old women to have a little bite—it’s acceptable once we’re past a certain age. A small consolation prize for living so long.

In the reception room, I drop my phone behind a plant—Firaz and Reema are clever enough to find new ways to track me, so I discard their favorite weapon.

“Back again, Ms. Mansour? Looks like you were here yesterday.” The man’s eyes twinkle as he examines my record on his computer screen.

“Where did the woman live?” I ask. “The one from yesterday—the Bedouin woman. Does she have any surviving family?”

In truth, I know where she lived, but I need more. A family name, an address.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the man says. A different man, not my usual favorite. Tall and thin like a tree branch, with brooding eyes. I’m earlier than usual, so this one must take the early shift.

“Surely you have something.” I inject a quaver in my voice. “Anyone with the NeuroLync leaves an archive of information behind.” Unlike me, I don’t add. When I go, I’ll only leave bones.

“We don’t keep those kinds of records here because we don’t need them,” he says. “People want to know what drowning feels like, not the person’s entire life story.”

“Well, this customer does.”

“Can’t help you.”

This is ridiculous. When I was his age, if an older woman asked me a question, I would have done my best to answer. It was a period of great social upheaval, but we still respected the elderly.

I try another angle. “Are there any more paid immersion experiences tied to that record?” She’s a woman, not a record, but I’m speaking in their language.

The man’s eyes practically light up with dollar signs. “We’ve got the life highlight reel. Everybody has one. People like to see those before the death, sometimes.”

Minutes later and I’m back in the immersion chamber, the helmet making its ominous descent over my head.

They call them “highlight reels,” but these files are really the by-product of a data scrubber going through a dead person’s entire memory and recreating that “life flashing before your eyes” effect. Good moments and bad moments, significant events and those small, poignant memories that stick in your mind for unclear reasons. I remember an afternoon with Firaz in the kitchen, making pastries. Nothing special about it, but I can still see the way the sunlight hit the counter and smell the filo dough when it came out of the oven.

The Bedouin woman’s highlight reel is no different. There’s a wedding under the stars, some funerals, and enough childbirths to make me wince in sympathy. But there are also mundane moments like my own. The smell of livestock on early mornings before the tourists begin spilling into the valley. Meat cooking over a low campfire. Memories that dance through the senses.

I leave the bazaar more restless than when I arrived. The woman’s life was unremarkable. Good and bad in typical proportions. A part of me had expected a mystic connection to her surroundings, maybe a head injury that gave her strange conscious experiences that would explain her final moments. Instead, I found someone not unlike me, separated only by money and circumstances.

Through the humid air and dense crowds, Bahrain’s only train station beckons. A bit ridiculous for an island, but it does connect the country to Saudi Arabia and the wider region via a causeway. I walk to the station, restlessness growing with each step. Perhaps this is my jump over the cliff. I’m moving toward a big decision, the pressure swelling as I reach the point of no return.

At the front booth, I buy a one-way ticket to Petra, Jordan, along the Hejaz Railway. Once I board the carriage, all my doubt and fear evaporate. This is what I need to do. A final adventure, a last trip in search of answers that no bazaar can give me.

The desert hills race by through the train window. It’s hypnotic and before long, my mind stirs like a thick soup through old feelings. The terrain outside feels both alien and comforting, that sensation of coming home after a long trip. A return to something primal and ancient, a way of life that’s been lost amid controlled air conditioning and busy streets. How can something feel strange and right at the same time?

The Hejaz Railway system was completed when I was a little girl, itself a revival and expansion of an old train line that was abandoned after World War One. The region reasserting itself, flexing its power with a nod to its past. I’ve always hated planes, and you’ll never get me on those hovering shuttles, so an old-fashioned train (albeit with a maglev upgrade) suits me just fine.

The terrain dulls as we speed north, as if the world is transitioning from computer animation to a soft oil painting. The mountains lose their edges and vegetation freckles the ground. Signs point us to ancient places. Aqaba. The Dead Sea. Petra.

The sun sets and I drift off under the engine’s hum.

The next morning, the train pulls into Wadi Musa, the town that anchors Petra. I join the crowds spilling out into the station, the air cool and fresh compared to Bahrain. I reach into my pocket to check my phone for frantic messages, only to recall that I left it behind. Firaz and Reema must be searching for me by now. At this stage, they’ve likely contacted the police. Guilt tugs at the corners of my heart, but they’ll never understand why this is important. And soon, I’ll be out of their way.

Ignoring the long row of inviting hotels, I follow the signs toward Petra. Enterprising locals hawk everything from sunscreen to camel rides. With my hunched back and slow gait, they trail me like cats around a bowl of fresh milk.

“Teta, a hat for your head!”

“Need a place to stay, lady?”

“A donkey ride, ma’am? It’s low to the ground.”

Why not? I’m in no condition to hike around ancient ruins. The donkey handler, a boy no older than eighteen, suppresses a smile when I pull out paper currency.

“How do most of your customers pay?” I ask as he helps me onto the beast.

“NeuroLync, ma’am. They send us a one-time wire.”

“You all have NeuroLync?” I ask, amazed. Many of these locals still live as Bedouin, in simple huts without electricity or running water.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, clicking his tongue to prompt the donkey forward. “We were some of the first in Jordan to get connected. Government project. Some refused, but most said yes.”

Interesting. So the area’s Bedouin and locals were early adopters of NeuroLync technology, an experiment to support the country’s tourism. That explained how an elderly woman of my age had the implant long enough to record most of her adult life, now downloadable for cheap voyeurs. My chest flutters. People like me.

My guide leads the donkey and me down the hill into a narrow valley. Most tourists walk, but some take carriages, camels, and donkeys. An adventurous soul charges past us on horseback, kicking up red sand.

Along the surrounding cliff faces and hills, dark holes mark ancient dwellings carved into the rock. Following my gaze, my guide points to them.

“Old Nabataean abodes,” he says, referring to the ancient people who made Petra home.

“Do people still live there?” I ask. My tone is light and curious.

“Not there,” he says.

“So where do all of the guides and craftspeople live around here?” I follow up: “It makes sense to be close.”

“Some in Wadi Musa, but mostly in other places around Petra. We camp near the Monastery and the hills above the Treasury.”

I nod and let the silence settle between us, taking in the beauty around me. Suicide is a sensitive subject everywhere, but especially in the rural Arab world. I can’t just ask about a woman who jumped off a cliff. But while I’m teasing away clues, I drink in the energy of my surroundings. The warmth of the sun on my face, the sharp stillness of the air. The sense of building excitement as we descend into the narrow valley, shaded by looming mountains. We’re getting close to the Treasury, the most famous structure in Petra. I can tell by the way the tourists pick up their pace, pulling out the old-fashioned handheld cameras popular with the young set. I smile with them. I’m on vacation, after all.

I’ve seen plenty of pictures of the iconic Treasury, knowing that no picture can do it justice. I turn out to be right. Ahead, the valley forms a narrow sliver through which a stunning carved building emerges. Its deep, dark entrance is flanked by pillars. Cut into the rock, its upper level features more pillars crowned with intricate patterns. Though ancient, it is ornate and well preserved. The surrounding throngs of tourists and souvenir peddlers can’t detract from its beauty.

My guide helps me off the donkey so I can wander inside. It’s what you’d expect from a building carved into the mountains—the interior is dark and gaping, with more arches and inlets where the Nabataeans conducted their business. For a second, my mind turns to Firaz and Reema, with their endless work. I look down, overwhelmed. People once flooded this building when it was a vibrant trade stop—people long gone. Everyone taking pictures around me will one day be gone as well—all of us, drops in humanity’s ever-flowing river.

“Where next, ma’am?”

The winding road up to a high place, one you need a pack animal to reach. An easy place to fall—or jump.

“I’d like to see the Monastery.”

On the way up the trail, I talk with my guide, who I learn is named Rami. He has the usual dreams of teenage boys—become a soccer player, make millions, and see the world. When I tell him where I live, his eyes widen and I’m peppered with questions about tall buildings and city lights. He talks of cities as though they’re living organisms, and in a way, I suppose they are. Traffic, sprawl, and decay. They’re more than the sum of their people. But how can he understand that he’s also fortunate to live here, to wake up every morning to a clear red sky, walking through time with every step he takes?

We round a corner along the cliff and I give a small cry.

“It’s so far up,” I say. “I’m glad the donkey’s doing the work for me.”

Rami nods. “They’re more sure-footed than we are. They know exactly where to step.”

“Do people ever fall?”

Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline. “It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.”

My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story?

While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff.

“Can we stop for a minute?”

“Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge.

Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge.

“Please, sayida!”

Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now.

Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there—the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise.

But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change.

“Please.” A voice cuts through the blood pounding in my ears, and I turn to meet Rami’s frightened, childlike face. He offers his hand palm-up and I take it, letting myself be hoisted back onto the donkey, who chews with lazy indifference. We continue our climb as though nothing happened.

The Monastery doesn’t compare to the Treasury at the base of the city, but it’s impressive regardless. The surroundings more than make up for it, the horizon shimmering under the noon heat. Rami and I sit cross-legged in the shade, eating the overpriced manaqish I bought earlier.

“The cheese is quite good,” I admit. “I don’t eat much these days, but I could see myself getting fat off of these.”

Rami smiles. “A single family makes all of the food you can buy here. An old woman and her daughters. They sell it across the area.”

I suppress commenting that the men in the family could help. I don’t have the energy or the inclination—after staring down the cliff and winning, I’m exhausted. Did I win? Had part of me hoped that I would jump as well? Now that I hadn’t, I didn’t know what to do next.

I say all that I can think to say. “This is a beautiful place. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

Rami steals a glance at me. “There’s evil here. The High Place of Sacrifice, where the Nabataeans cut animals’ throats to appease their pagan gods.” He gives his donkey a pat, as though reassuring it. “Battles and death. Maybe you can sense it, too. That place where you stopped? My grandmother died there.”

It takes me a second to register what the young man said, the words entering my ears like thick molasses. Then my blood chills. Rami is one of her many grandchildren. It shouldn’t surprise me, but this proximity to the woman’s surviving kin prickles my skin, flooding my senses with shock and shame in equal measure. I terrified the boy when I leaned over the edge.

I clear my throat, gripping the sides of my dress to hide my shaking hands. “What was her name?”

He blinks, surprised. “Aisha.”

A classic name. “I’m so sorry, Rami,” I say. “What a terrible accident.”

“She was taking a family down from the Monastery,” Rami says. He doesn’t correct my assumption, and I wonder if he knows what happened. “When she was younger, she hated working with the tourists. She loved to cook and preferred caring for the animals at the end of the day. But when she got older, my mother told me she loved it. She liked to learn their stories and tell her own, about her life and her family, all the things she had seen. I bet she could have written a book about all the people she met from around the world, but she never learned how to write.”

I press my lips together in disbelief. A woman with a NeuroLync plugged into her temple, unable to read a book. While it could have been tradition that kept her illiterate, it was unlikely. In many ways, the Bedouin were more progressive than the urban population. Perhaps she never learned because she never needed to.

“It sounds like she had a good life,” I manage.

Rami’s face brightens, his dark eyes twinkling with sudden amusement. “She made everyone laugh. I read a poem once in school. It said you can’t give others joy unless you carry joy in reserve, more than you need. So I know she must have been happy until the end. I believe something evil made her fall that day. It sensed that she was good. Whatever it was—a jinn, a ghost—it knew it had to defeat her.”

Though exposed to modern technology and a government-run secular education, the boy had found his own mystical narrative to dampen his grief, to reason the unreasonable. Not unlike me, I realize. I came here in search of a secret. A special way to die, a way to secure life after death. Something unique about this place or people that would extinguish my fears. Magical thinking.

My mouth is dry. Should I tell the boy what I know from the bazaar? It would bring pain, but perhaps comfort as well. His grandmother, Aisha, died because of a strange psychological quirk, not a persuasive spirit. She was terrified but found peace in those final split seconds of the fall. She lingered somehow after meeting the ground, sinking into a warm, welcoming light. Would the boy want to know this? Would he feel betrayed by the realization that I knew about his grandmother, a stranger who had experienced her most intimate moments through a black-market bazaar?

No. Hers was not my story to tell. I’m a thief, a robber of memories, driven by my own fears. I came here for answers to a pointless question. What did it matter why she jumped? She lived well and left behind people who loved her. The people I love are far away and frantic—and yet I considered leaving them with the sight of my body splattered over rock.

As for her apparent conscious experience after death—I won’t know what happened, what it meant, until it’s my time. And my time isn’t now, in this place. Not yet.

My face burns and I draw a shaking breath. Above me, the Monastery looms like an anchor. Through my shame, my mouth twitches in a smile. It’s breathtaking. I don’t regret coming here. But now, I need to go home.

“Rami, can you send a message for me with your NeuroLync?” I ask. My voice is hoarse but firm.

On the way back down, I close my eyes when we pass the spot on the path. I’m not afraid of jumping, but I’m afraid of the grief the jump left behind.

When we reach the base of the ruins, back at the Treasury, Rami lifts a finger to his temple.

“Your son is already in Jordan,” he says. “He’ll arrive here in a few hours. He says to meet him in the Mövenpick Hotel lobby.”

Rami’s face flushes when I kiss his forehead in gratitude, but he smiles at the generous tip I press into his hands.

I sip coffee while guests come and go through the hotel lobby. A fountain trickles a steady stream of water nearby and beautiful mosaic patterns line the walls. I’m on my third Turkish coffee when Firaz bursts through the front door.

Our eyes meet and emotions pass across his face in waves—joy, relief, fury, and exasperation. I stand up, letting him examine my face as he approaches.

“Have a seat, Firaz.”

“Why are you here?” he bellows, his voice echoing across the lobby and drawing alarmed stares in our direction. Before I can respond, he continues, “We thought you got lost and were wandering the streets,” he says, back in control but still too loud for comfort. “Murdered in a ditch or dead from heatstroke. Why can’t you just live, Mama? What are you trying to escape from? Were you confused? Is it the tumor?”

My poor boy, reaching for the last justification for his mad mother.

“It’s not the tumor, Firaz,” I say in a gentle tone. “And I wouldn’t call myself confused. Lost, maybe. The tumor terrifies me, Firaz. It’s not how I want to go, so I kept looking for other, better ways to make an end of everything. It was unfair to you, and I’m sorry. I really am.”

Firaz groans, sinking into one of the plush seats. Massaging his temples, he closes his eyes. I give him time. It’s all I can give him now.

Finally, he sighs and his face softens when he faces me again. The same expression he wore when he first learned I was sick—that his mother was vulnerable in ways out of his control.

“I should have listened to you more,” he says. “Asked how you were doing. Not in the superficial way—about chemo and your mood. The deeper questions. I didn’t because it scares me, too. I don’t want to think about you gone.”

Tears prickle my eyes. “I know. I don’t want to leave you, either. For a while, I thought dying would be doing you a favor. But nothing is more important to me than you, Firaz. That won’t change, even if this tumor starts frying every part of my brain. I’ll love you until my last breath. I want to spend my last months with you and Reema, if you’ll have me.”

Silence follows. We sit together for an hour, letting the world hum around us, before Firaz finally stands up.

“How did you know to fly to Jordan, before my guide contacted you?” I ask when we reach the Wadi Musa train station. We board the day’s last train together.

Firaz’s mouth forms a grim, triumphant line. “Reema did some digging around at the Underground Bazaar. Grilled all the staff there about what you watched, and questions you asked. She pieced together that you probably ran off to Petra.”

“She’s resourceful,” I say with a grin. “You were smart to marry her. After I go—”

“Mom!”

“After I go,” I continue, “I want you both to live the lives you desire. Move for that perfect job. Travel. Eat that sugary dessert on the menu. Find little moments of joy. I mean it, Firaz. Don’t be afraid. If I’ve learned one thing from all of this, it’s that sometimes you need to leap. Whatever awaits us at the end, it seems to be somewhere warm and safe. And even if it’s followed by nothing, we have nothing to fear from death.”

Anguish tightens Firaz’s face, but after a moment, something inside of him appears to release and his eyes shine with understanding. He helps me into a seat at the back of the train carriage.

“Let’s go home.”

I catch a final glimpse of Wadi Musa’s white buildings, uneven like jagged teeth, as the train pulls away. Past the town, Petra’s hills run together, freckled by dark dwellings. It’s bleak but beautiful, and I close my eyes to burn the scene into my memory. I want to remember everything.

Nadia Afifi is a science fiction author. Her debut novel, The Sentient, was lauded by Publisher’s Weekly as “staggering and un-put-downable”. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Abyss & Apex.

She grew up in the Middle East, but currently calls Denver, Colorado home. When she isn’t writing, she spends her time practicing (and falling off) the lyra, hiking, and working on the most challenging jigsaw puzzles she can find.

To Sail the Black
By A.C. Wise
Novelette Long List

The ghost ship Xanthic Promise sails the black, powered by the slumbering heart of a dying star. And its captain, Antimony Jones, stalks its decks in a swirl of crimson coat and fox fire lighting, dogged by voices. The recent dead, the long dead, and the dead-to-be, all murmuring as to how she’s only three months into her command and it’s all coming undone.

“Stow it.” Antimony snaps, pirate-captain proper.

A living crew member jumps out of her way at the words, back flat against the wall, spanner clanking to the deck in alarm. The ghosts snicker, and Antimony bares her teeth until they fall silent.

“You. Back to work.” Antimony jabs a finger at the frightened crew member, Hawk, even though she was the one who interrupted his work in the first place.

As he scrambles to obey, the ship murmurs its own complaint, an out-of-place thrumming Antimony feels in her back teeth. Something is wrong, and Hyacinth, her gods-damned chief engineer, is playing coy, making Antimony come to her in person rather than just telling her what’s wrong.

She rounds the corner and nearly smacks into the door to the star chamber, which should open automatically. Antimony slaps a palm to override and enters shouting.

“What in all the gods-damned corporeal and incorporeal hells is so important that I had to come all the way down here instead of you telling me over the comm? And why is the door locked?”

Antimony stops dead. Because what is so gods-damned important is clearly obvious. Starling, her now-former boatswain, blood-soaked from chin to waist, well and truly slaughtered, hangs by his wrists in the pulsing light of the star chamber.

“Oh, fuck me,” Antimony says and turns to kick the door.

• • • •

As captain of a ghost ship, death and Antimony are well acquainted. The Xanthic Promise’s winding, nautilus halls bear countless invisible scars, Antimony’s among them, where each member of the crew past and present has sworn their demise to the ship. Blood oaths cut into palm and wall as a condition of their service stitch their ghosts in place and power everything the star doesn’t.

It’s a reckless practice, condemned by the Galactic Fleet and every other kind of ship captain out there, save for pirates. But her crew’s lives and deaths are their own to swear with as they please, and who is Antimony to say different. Some, she suspects, are too young and dumb to truly believe in their future deaths as a reality; others are at the end of their span and desperate to trade what little they’ve left for a last taste of freedom.

Antimony swore her own oath at fourteen, an orphan doomed to life on a backwater station until the Xanthic Promise docked for trade. Rough and battered as she’d been, the moment Antimony set eyes on Xanthic Promise, it had been love—true and deep and head over heels. All the fairy tales her mother and father had told her before their unfortunate demise, of living stars who sang their captains across the black, seemed poised to come true all at once.

She’d stowed aboard, and never mind that the star powering the ship was only roiling, pulsing light, and not the painfully-beautiful, human-faced creature in the holo-illustrations from her parents’ stories. The walls still whispered with ghosts, the opposite of the Galactic Fleet’s cold logic and strict regulations, and definitely the opposite of a life lived station-bound, stuck in one place and hoping against hope the universe would come to her.

Loose-tongued ghosts had put a quick end to her plan to stay hidden, but instead of putting her right back where she started, or straight out into the black as would have been her right, then-captain Basalt had given Antimony a choice. Swear her life and future death to the ship by stitching a piece of herself to walls, or live a life staring at the same span of stars out of the station’s viewports, always wondering what might have been.

Antimony hadn’t hesitated, chin up, blade to palm, and bloody palm to wall all in a flash. She’d worked her way from deck girl, carrying and fetching and cleaning, to assistant boatswain, then boatswain, and on up with the sure knowledge in her heart that she would sit in Basalt’s chair as captain one day.

That she finally achieved her dream at the cost of a death-promise is a problem for future-her. Present-her has everything she ever wanted. She’s flush with ill-gotten gains, the boundless universe is spread before her, and the crackling power of her ghost ship is hers to command.

Except that at-this-very-moment-her has a very much here-and-now problem. Starling.

His death has the air of ritual. Doctor Coxcomb has his body down in the medbay, and the only thing she’s been able to tell Antimony so far is that whoever killed Starling cut out his tongue before stringing him up like a burned offering.

Starling had sworn himself to Xanthic Promise young too, sixteen with a head full of dreams. They’d picked him up planet side and Antimony had been the one to argue for giving him the same choice she’d been given. Most of her interactions with him since had been recent, in his new capacity as boatswain, requisitioning goods and discussing the ship’s stores. Except more than once, she’d caught him at his post, moon-eyed over holo-stories, including one with the very same illustration of the living, singing, humanoid star her parents had shown her.

It had made Antimony smile then, and makes her regret his death all the more now.

There’s a headache building between her eyes. There’s a . . . hmmm. It’s a not-quite-buzz-not-quite-hum, like an itch on the wrong side of her skin, creeping around inside her skull. She’s been hearing it since . . . she isn’t even sure when, but it’s getting louder, tied to the ship feeling listless, argumentative, sluggish. It’s in the soles of her boots, coming up through the deck plates. A sense of wrong. As if the sleeping star at the ship’s heart was not merely a metaphor, as if the ship was having bad dreams.

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

A phantom voice at her ear stirs phantom hair. Antimony just manages to turn her surprised flinch into a hand grazed over her scalp’s stubble, as if that was always what she meant to do. She turns to face her immediate predecessor.

“Fuck off, Cedar.”

The former captain leans against nothing, the prerogative of ghosts, arms crossed, lips bent to smirking. He’s much more corporeal than he has any right to be, in that he possesses form at all, though she can see right through him. Being stitched, Cedar should only be a voice, muttering in the walls with all the rest. That he’s more, Antimony imagines, is sheer spite and force of will. And a handy trick she’d like to learn herself one day, if she can do it without sacrificing her pride and asking him how.

“What’s the fun in death if I can’t haunt my quarters and gloat?”

“Death isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be useful.” Antimony scowls. “And they’re not your quarters, they’re mine.”

Antimony still doesn’t know how Cedar won Basalt’s good grace and favor and ended up captain before her. Cedar, with his Galactic Fleet training, the antithesis of everything a good pirate should be, yet Basalt had named him as successor. The fact that Cedar in turn named Antimony and not Hyacinth, Antimony is beginning to suspect, was another act of spite, as being captain is turning out to be a lot less fun and a lot more headachy than she imagined.

Cedar cocks his head, waiting for her to speak, waiting, more precisely, for her to ask for help. Antimony sits astride the polished bench of the single most improbable item on a ship crammed with impossibilities: a gleaming white baby grand piano, Cedar’s pride and joy. Instead of giving him the satisfaction, she stabs a series of discordant notes. When Cedar frowns, some of the tension uncoils from Antimony’s shoulders.

“I hear you have a ghost problem.” Cedar breaks first, but it’s only a moment before his smirk is back in place.

Because, gods-damn him, he’s right. One of the many drawbacks of a ghost-powered ship—gossip travels fast. There are scant few secrets on the Xanthic Promise, save those kept from the still-living, which is precisely Antimony’s problem.

If the universe were kind, she could simply ask Starling the cause of his death, but despite being sewn into the walls by a supposedly unbreakable pact, wherever his ghost is, she can’t hear it. Like he gave up his voice with the loss of his tongue. All she can hear when she listens for him is that gods-damned hmmm, getting louder and making it hard to think.

“I don’t suppose you have anything remotely useful to contribute?” Antimony grinds the words between her teeth.

An expression flickers bright through the former captain’s eyes, which are the color of lightning, nothing Antimony can read. Cedar is only three months stitched; perhaps Starling’s death is simply making him think of his own.

Antimony thinks on it too, an unfortunate debris-strike fracturing Cedar’s faceplate during routine repairs—repairs he shouldn’t even have been undertaking as captain. Antimony had been there when he’d told Hyacinth he wanted to stretch his legs in the black. She’d watched Hyacinth inspect his suit herself, likely the only thing that kept Antimony from suspicion, her desire for the captain’s chair being no secret. She’d been there, too, when Cedar had come back to the ship, tether-hauled, frozen solid, ice crystals clinging to his skin, and his body ballooned to twice its size.

“What would you give me if I could tell you?” The flicker in Cedar’s eyes turns sly, the promise of knowledge held like a curl of candied orange peel on his tongue.

Antimony puffs up, pride, as always, ready to tangle her legs and lead to a fall.

“Listen, you smug son-of-a—”

Cedar’s eyes flicker again, static-shot. He’s there and then he’s not and Antimony thumps a fist against the piano again for good measure.

“Damn it.”

She bites the inside of her cheek, considers calling him back, thinks of apologizing, and the thought turns her stomach. She doesn’t need him, and he probably didn’t know anything anyway.

Still, the air in her quarters feels empty, the temperature dropped. There’s no love lost between them, but Cedar’s departure hammers home the inevitable truth chained around the neck of all captains: she is alone.

“Damn it,” she says again, softer this time, and swings her weary leg over the piano bench, rising.

Any sensible captain would remain locked in her quarters to drink her troubles away, but sensible has never been her style. Antimony makes her way to the ship’s prow, allowing a detour to the ship’s store, where she feels Starling’s absence all over again as she requisitions a bottle of good rum and uncorks it with her teeth. She wonders what happened to his holo-stories. She could use a good fairy tale about valiant captains and singing ships right about now.

The hum-not-hum itch is there again as she walks the halls, a voice among other voices, one she isn’t quite hearing. It’s like an ill-tuned violin, a wetted finger circling the rim of a glass. On the edge of painful. A familiar voice, but corrupted somehow, like the mind behind it is still trying to figure out how to make words.

“Starling?” she asks it not expecting an answer, and the sound rises in pitch, a static-squeal like it’s arguing with itself, before it falls silent.

Then there’s only the usual ghost ship murmur, the dead speculating whether command has made her crack. Living crew members, too, give her the side-eye, whispering among themselves as if she can’t hear. Let them talk. Cedar was a captain of the people, soft and decidedly un-piratey. Antimony is comfortable in her lonely command; better to be feared than loved, as they say.

Lacking anyone human to talk to, she could seek her own ghost, her dead-self-to-be as oracle, but that way lies madness. Or so she’s heard tell. Knowing your ghost on an intellectual level is one thing; looking it dead in the eye and knowing it full and true, that’s another.

Besides, at the moment, Antimony would rather drink herself into oblivion or into a state where a solution produces itself, whichever comes first. And she intends to do so in full sight of her ghosts and her crew. Let them see a captain without shame, bowed but not broken by the weight of her command. Let the living and the dead gossip on that if they will.

The crow’s nest is empty, waiting, and Antimony can’t help a grin. She strung the hammock across the ship’s foremost eye herself during her first year aboard. Basalt had given her waste duty for a month, but she hadn’t taken the nest down, and Antimony had even seen her captain using it a time or two herself when she thought no one was looking.

When she’d first come aboard, after her shifts, Antimony would throw herself into the hammock to listen while most everyone else slept. She’d gaze out at all those stars and wish the stories she’d devoured as a station-bound child were true. She’d wished that instead of the creaks and groans of metal deck plates, she could hear the star’s voice. She’d wanted to hear it sing.

She’d been foolish enough then, naïve and wide-eyed, that she’d actually asked then-engineer Oak about the star, and whether it really slept.

They’d laughed at her, that deep barrel-chested laugh that, while it hadn’t been cruel, had still struck her a blow. Fairy stories, they’d said. Tales for children to make the work of ships seem like magic.

But if ghosts could power a ship’s weapons, she’d reasoned, then why not a sleeping star? Maybe, over the years, people had simply forgotten the truth. Maybe when they’d put the stars to sleep, they hadn’t wanted to own the cruel thing they were doing, so they spun fantastical tales too incredible to possibly be true.

She’d given up her belief soon enough though, but had Starling?

Antimony throws herself into the crow’s nest, kicking up her bootheels just as a commotion breaks out behind her.

What the fuck now? she thinks, wheeling her weary bones around.

“She wakes!” the man screams, a crew member whose name Antimony should know, excusing herself that she doesn’t due to the fact that his face is currently an unrecognizable mask of blood.

He holds something sharp in crimson-slick fingers, not threatening anyone, but staggering and weaving—shock and blood-loss after gouging out his own eyes.

“It won’t stop!” he screams. “He promised, but it never stops. Please, help me.”

• • • •

“You still want to make the run?” Hyacinth asks, all incredulous, scoffing tone.

“Are we or are we not gods-damned pirates,” Antimony, rhetorical, shoots back.

Her mouth tastes the way she imagines the inside of an engine block would.

She has one crew member spaced, body refusing to yield up any other secrets, and one in the medbay, bandages over his lack of eyes and doped to oblivion. And she still has a gods-damned job to do.

“We can still make the pickup and drop in plenty of time to get paid. Even without the extra ghost to throw on the fire.” Antimony tries to smile around the flat attempt at a joke.

Hyacinth scowls, muttering under her breath, as she walks away.

Doctor Coxcomb utterly forbid Antimony from questioning Chrysotile, though Antimony doubts he’d be able to provide her with sensible answers. Sensible people don’t gouge their eyes out. But insensible people might just commit murder. Something to think about. Later. Solving mysteries doesn’t pay the bills. Only piracy does.

• • • •

The pickup goes without a hitch, the drop-off less so, because of course one thing can’t fucking go right for her. Instead of payment, their contact meets them with guns, eyes blacked and teeth capped with gold, marking them as DeathSkull, notorious double-crossers, and not Green Hand, the flag they’d claimed to sail under.

“Evade where you can, fire only if you have to,” Antimony shouts to be heard above the chaos.

A hit to Xanthic Promise’s portside causes the whole ship to rock, and a panel to her right explodes. How the fuck does that even work? she wonders, then ceases to wonder as sparks shower and she slaps at her coat to keep it from going up in flame. How many deaths can she afford to burn to get out of this mess? She rolls through the inventory of ghosts in her mind, then gives the order to fire.

She needs just a little time, just a little luck, just enough space to do something stupid to save their skins. Twin stars of glittering light leap from the ship’s cannons. Ghost-tech rarely kills, but it does a credible job of convincing people they’re dying. At least briefly. Sometimes, ironically, it even convinces them to death.

Either way, it’s still a pretty light show that will buy them some time as, for the next few moments, the crew of the ship currently trying to wipe them from the stars relives the last breaths of six stitched souls now serving the Xanthic Promise as weaponry.

Basalt may be in there somewhere, Antimony thinks as the glittering light hits home. That could be her fate one day, the captain’s last burst of glory, her final duty. There are worse ways to go.

Another panel explodes. Acrid smoke fills the air. Antimony coughs, and the ship slews hard and away, running running running. Rivets and seams strain, everything wanting to fly apart as Antimony wills it to hold. Jaw clenched, she calls up charts, squinting through eyes that stream part from headache, part from the bone-rattling speed. Her back molars feel as loose as the rivets, and she shouts fresh coordinates.

“Are you out of your gods-damned mind?” Hyacinth swivels to stare. A rivulet of blood tracks from a gash above her eye, but she doesn’t wipe it away.

“Yes!” Antimony fires back.

“That’s Sargasso space.” Trust Hyacinth to recognize the coordinates right away. Damn and double gods-damn.

“Do it anyway.”

Hyacinth’s eyes blaze crimson mutiny, or maybe that’s only the blood, but she punches the coordinates, punches the ship, and they’re off.

The Horse Latitudes. The Doldrums. The Sargasso Sea. All names that don’t make sense in the black, but the effect is the same. It’s a graveyard for stars, a place of legend where ships stall for no discernable reason and never start up again. It’s a place only the foolhardiest captain would go willingly, and which any sensible band of pirates would cut off pursuit to avoid, which is exactly what Antimony is counting on.

There’s an under-the-skin feeling the moment Xanthic Promise hits that dead space. The DeathSkull ship drops pursuit, just as their own engines cut out, and Antimony breathes relief against the tightness in her ribs even if it doesn’t last long. The walls chatter doubt. Her crew looks to each other, wild-eyed, but they’re all still alive. They should be falling on their knees and thanking her.

That’s when the screaming starts.

It’s a wrong sound. An inside-out sound, purple-shattering-to-silver-at-the-edges, going on and on like a voice, like that untuned violin, but so much louder and worse. It is want and need and hunger and fear and unlike anything Antimony has ever heard before. It’s unlike anything she ever wants to hear again. It makes her want to dig her nails into her skin and peel it away whole to go running around in her bones.

It leaves her panting on hands and knees, howling back at the noise until she tastes blood, until Hyacinth cracks her across the jaw hard enough to replace one ringing in her ears with another.

“What is. That. Noise. What you’re. Doing.” Hyacinth’s words come out in huffing breaths, shaking and broken.

“You didn’t hear it?” Antimony is still hearing it, is certain she’ll always be hearing it from now until the end of time, but at least it’s dulled, a bruise rather than a fresh blow.

“I heard you screaming,” Hyacinth says. “I didn’t know a human throat could make that sound.”

“I’m not sure it can,” Antimony says.

She stands.

“Well, whatever it was,” Hyacinth says, voice steadying, “according to the report I just got, it happened at the same time three very long fissures appeared in the star chamber’s glass. So, to put it mostly succinctly and bluntly, we are completely and utterly fucked.”

• • • •

Antimony follows Hyacinth to look at the star chamber, as if their own eyes could make the report untrue. No such luck. The star chamber is indeed breaking as reported, three long fissures running almost the entire length of the glass that looks somewhat like an old-fashioned lantern and somewhat like the heart of a lighthouse and nothing like either of those things at all. Breaking, but not broken, and that is one small mercy, but perhaps the only one.

Antimony leaves Hyacinth to do whatever she can, which is, she suspects, very little. The ship was already sick before this whole thing started. Cedar must have known it, and that’s why he insisted on making the repairs himself. But something went wrong, and maybe that’s where this all started, and it’s all connected somehow.

Antimony thinks of Starling’s missing tongue, a sacrifice, and the sound she’s still hearing, like a ringing echo inside her skull, a voice that doesn’t have words, belonging to something that never had a voice before. She thinks of fairy tales hiding a willfully forgotten truth in plain sight. She’s beginning to build a picture in her mind, and she doesn’t like it at all.

She takes herself to the medical bay.

Chrysotile lies rigid, lashed down with restraints. Fluid drips into his arm, a steady flow, keeping him somewhere between awake and dreaming. Coxcomb will likely be back soon. Not enough time to try to wake him, even if such a thing were possible. Antimony is considering sneaking out again when Chrysotile’s head snaps around to look straight at her, which is disconcerting to say the least, given that he is without eyes.

“I thought I could finish it, but I wasn’t strong enough. Starling said the light would stop if I helped him, but it only got worse.”

His body seizes, guilt or pain or both wanting to make an arch against the restraints. He gropes the air, fingers twisted to claws and Antimony shoves down every skin-crawling impulse she has to make herself do the human thing and let Chrysotile take her hand. His fingers are freezing, his grip iron.

“Tell the captain I’m sorry.”

“I—” Antimony begins, but gets no further as the door grinds open and Doctor Coxcomb descends on her like a storm.

“I was very specific in my orders.” Coxcomb brandishes a syringe like a weapon, ready to deploy whatever is inside if Antimony doesn’t leave now, captain or no.

And oops, yes, maybe Antimony did use her override on the medbay door knowing the doctor would deny her entry. She quick steps away, trusting to Coxcomb’s brutality in defense of her patient. Besides, she needs to think.

Tell the captain I’m sorry. Antimony very much doubts Chrysotile meant her. Some promise made to Cedar? And how does Starling fit in? All those old stories. If they really were true, what monsters would that make her and all the other ghost ship captains down through the ages?

And even if the tales aren’t true, what if Starling believed? Would it be enough for him to convince Chrysotile to kill him, so he could sacrifice his tongue to the star and give it a voice?

Thoughts roil, pressing out against her skin until Antimony feels she’ll explode. She stomps through the halls and up to the crow’s nest, the place she dreamed as a child, and now all those dreams and wishes feel like a cruel lie. Antimony presses her hands to the window and screams fuck you very loudly at the lack of stars.

Throat raw, she turns to an access panel, calling up the ship’s logs. Something she should have done long ago, only she was busy with murdered and eyeless crew members, damned double-crossing pirates, and recalcitrant ghosts.

She finds Cedar’s entries from the days before his death. He must have felt the same wrongness in the ship as she does now. Would he have attributed it to a waking star? And if he had, what would he do?

Deep in their hearts, do all ship’s captains know the tales they drank like milk as children are true, but they’ve collectively chosen to believe otherwise?

Cedar never confided in her as his second in command. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. It stood to reason Cedar had only accepted her as first mate to keep an eye on her. Who had he confided in, then? Chrysotile? Certainly not his logs, as they are all maddeningly mundane and empty of any useful details.

Antimony returns to the ship’s stores and requisitions another bottle, gin this time, and a sturdy blade. She’s about to do a very unwise thing indeed. Antimony drinks and winds her way through the halls until she finds the place where her oath sings to her.

The expanse of wall would look unremarkable to anyone else, but it’s where her death is stitched, her promise to the ship, and so for her, there’s a faint silver glow of scars etched into the metal. With half the bottle killed, the blade weaves dangerously above her palm. She closes one eye and squints the other to make both knife and hand behave. Before she can think better of it, she traces the old seams until blood wells, and presses the new wound to old.

Red smears and a spark snap-jumps, shocking her spine rigid and clacking her teeth together. It’s unwise to talk to one’s own future-ghost, to seek one’s death for counsel, but ever since the scream that rattled her to her core, Antimony has felt her death just inches beneath her skin and she’ll be gods-damned if she just sits around waiting for it to come to her.

She forbids herself to pass out, winding the gauze she requisitioned at the same time as the bottle around her hand. It immediately soaks through. When her other-self appears, it’s very much like looking in a mirror, same shorn-to-stubble hair, same smug grin. The event horizon between her death being a future-her problem and a present-her problem is collapsing. She rubs a hand over her scalp, almost expecting her ghost to do the same, but her ghost only smirks, reminding her irritatingly of Cedar.

“What is it?” Antimony asks.

The fox fire light around her ankles swirls, a chill reaching up her trouser legs, playing with the hem of her coat. She tries to keep her teeth from chattering. It wouldn’t do to look weak in front of herself.

“You already know,” her future-self’s voice is an echo-blur. “It’s the star. You’re hearing her voice, the one Starling died to give her.”

The smirk on the other-her’s lips becomes something sharper, a blade, almost cruel. Would it be uncouth to punch her own ghost in the mouth?

“Stars aren’t sentient. Those are just fairy tales.” She doesn’t want it to be true, but she knows down in her bones that it is, and hasn’t she always known?

The other-her’s smile doesn’t waver. Antimony would have thought there might be some mercy in her eyes, but she also knows herself too well. All the knowing coming to her now is still wound-fresh to her other self. It hurts, too much for future-Antimony to offer any kindness.

Because she does know and she’s always known and she’s never wanted to know. All those stories, all that wishing, she never fully thought through the consequences because it would be too terrible. But Starling had known the truth and given his own life to it, a small right against a whole universe of wrong. And Chrysotile had helped him.

“What about Cedar?” Antimony asks herself. He must have known too, but what did he do about it?

“Ask him.” Future-Antimony’s eyes glitter, cruel delight, like passing the pain back to her past-self might lessen her own hurt.

Antimony’s hand flashes out, fingers closing around her future-self’s wrist, holding her in place. Even though she must be expecting it, her future-eyes widen in surprise, and there, at last, Antimony sees mercy, sorrow, her future-self aching for the past-self coming face-to-face with the death that will be. But she does nothing to stop her, and the mercy fades back into a smile that might have blood in it if her future-self were still a thing capable of bleeding. Because she knows what happens next.

Antimony looks into her own eyes.

And there, every possible path her future might take forks and forks and skates across the surface of everything like the glass in the star chamber not-yet shattering. Her life races along those cracks like lightning and comes to a dead stop, a point she can’t see beyond.

She sees herself and the star in its chamber and both are burning. There is nothing else. Except. Except except except—an edge like a closed door, like a flat horizon, like a coin pressed to a table with another face Antimony knows is there but cannot see. There is no way to pick at the edge to open the door to see the other face to know that it exists because it does not or cannot or should not because this is where she ends.

All the light in the world goes out like a blown candle and rushes back all at once like knives to her eyes and Antimony is alone in the hall. She kicks the wall where her unhelpful asshole of a death is stitched, hard, so her bones jar and the steel toe in her boot rings and it doesn’t make her feel any better at all.

She returns to the engine room, to the star chamber, and stands in front of the impossible swirl of light. It makes her skin itch, brings the jittery feeling back to her teeth. If she looks long enough, she can almost see a face, a mouth in the roiling, pulsing energy.

Antimony traces a finger over one hairline crack until it joins another and another—a river with three tributaries. She presses her bound hand to the glass, leaves a blood-petal kiss of red behind.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

She makes a fist of her hand, thumps the side of it against the glass. She’s being a coward. Still.

And now. Now she has a choice to make. Like Cedar made a choice. And fuck it, because her impulse is to do something noble and stupid and self-sacrificing and she really doesn’t want to die.

• • • •

Back in her quarters, Antimony mashes the piano’s keyboard, thinking of the keys as teeth, Cedar’s specifically.

“Come out and talk to me, you asshole.” The yelling makes her feel better, but only marginally so.

Cedar isn’t there and then he is, and even though Antimony called for him, she still jumps when he appears, leaning on nothing again, arms crossed. Despite the horrific nature of his death, he’s still maddeningly pretty, cheekbones defined where hers look gaunt, relaxed and well-fucking-rested where she looks haunted and sleep-starved.

“You’re lucky I’m not corporeal.” Cedar tosses a meaningful look at the piano.

Antimony is still tired and still a little drunk and lightning keeps forking behind her eyes. But it’s worse when the lightning stops, when it finds the place where it can’t go any farther because that’s where her life ends.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the star waking?” Antimony steps back from the piano, closed fist shaking, and she tucks it behind her back so Cedar won’t see.

“What fun would that be?” He runs fingers over the piano keys and when they make no sound, he runs a finger over the wires instead.

They still don’t make a sound, but whatever it does makes Antimony shiver.

“Would you have listened even if I had tried?” The maddening expression on Cedar’s face makes Antimony want to throw something.

He’s right, and that only makes it worse. How many times did they butt heads when he was alive, when she was under his command? Even knowing there’s no solidity to him, Antimony jerks open the piano bench, stuffed with books and sheets of music, and throws the first one she lays her hands on. The pages flutter, and a small square of paper tumbles free.

An actual, honest-to-gods, printed photograph.

“Oh fuck me.” Antimony bends to retrieve it, Cedar watching her with a brow perfectly arched, expression smug.

This was here the whole time and Antimony never saw it, too uncultured to do anything with the piano other than bang on it for attention and use it as a place to sit and drink and feel sorry for herself.

“You and Chrysotile were in the Galactic Fleet together.” Antimony holds up the picture, a group of young cadets in their uniforms, arms slung around each other. Chrysotile and Cedar are together at one end, and Chrysotile’s head is slightly turned, caught in a moment, distracted and unaware of the picture about to be taken.

Even Antimony isn’t dense enough to miss it. The expression on Chrysotile’s face is stark: love.

She thinks of Chrysotile, eyeless in the medbay, grasping her hand and begging forgiveness from his dead captain. To be loved like that—enough that someone would kill for you. Well, it isn’t exactly a comforting thought. It leaves Antimony feeling claustrophobic, but at the same time, achingly lonely. There is no one among the crew—no one in her life—she could even share a drink with, let alone someone willing to pick up a knife and kill a fellow crew member for her, to finish whatever it is she might leave undone.

“I was wrong about the star.” The sorrowing look in Cedar’s eyes takes Antimony’s breath away.

She has a picture of her former captain in her mind—brash, ambitious, apologizing to no one. Stealing her rightful command out from under her, winning Basalt’s favor and trust. But the more Antimony looks at her mental picture against Cedar’s ghost, the more she realizes she doesn’t know him at all. Did Cedar wash out of the Galactic Fleet? Was he dishonorably discharged? Maybe there’s a pirate streak in him after all, and maybe there’s something even more important, something Basalt saw in him and not in Antimony, which is why she gave him command—compassion.

The picture she holds in her mind of Cedar—it’s a picture of herself. A picture of who she wants to be, or believed, up until this very moment, she needed to be in order to command. Ruthless, friendless, alone at the top. Holding her crew at bay in a mixture of awe and fear, needing no one.

Heavy is the head indeed. Maybe it wasn’t a taunt on Cedar’s lips earlier so much as a warning.

“How do I stop it?” Antimony asks.

Dead space aches all around the ship, the doldrums, like a bruise. The ship drifts, quiet in all the wrong ways. No engines thrumming; the only pulse of life the need of the star. If they stay, they’re doomed, if they run, they’ll fail. The star chamber will crack, the ship will explode or be devoured. This isn’t just a graveyard for ships, it’s a graveyard for stars, and her own always-dying star is calling to the ghosts of her own kind that haunt this space. And sooner or later, they will answer.

“You don’t stop it.” Cedar’s expression is grim. “That’s what I got wrong. There’s nothing at all you can do. We kept the star chained, and this is her vengeance.”

“A fucking lot of help you are.” Antimony grits her teeth.

At the same time, guilt needles her; no matter how they clashed while he was alive, Cedar really did want what was best for the ship. He might even have loved the Xanthic Promise as much as she does. Enough to die for it.

Her intuition leaps.

“You went to talk to your own death too, and you came up with an answer that involved you walking out of the ship on a routine repair mission and meeting your end even though your time wasn’t up yet.”

The pieces click into place, a rapid tumble matched by the beat of her pulse.

“You thought if you rearranged fate, met your death early, you could strengthen the chains, put the star back to sleep and keep the ship running. Chrysotile tried to finish what you started, but Starling . . . ”

The pieces fit, almost but not quite. There is still some missing. Did Starling simply get unlucky and cross Chrysotile’s path just when he was feeling grief-mad and murderous? Or did Starling take advantage of Chrysotile’s grief and talk him into committing murder, convincing Chrysotile that his death would finish what Cedar started and put the star back to sleep? Only Starling lied. He wanted to wake the star. Give it a voice. Set it free.

“Starling got it right, and you got it absolutely fucking wrong.”

Cedar’s eyes blaze at her, all glare and bared teeth, and for a moment he is as terrible as any ghost ought to be. But all she can do is grin triumph in the face of his offended rage, because she’s right, and a victory, even a pyrrhic one, is still a gods-damned win.

“You should have been trying to set her free, wake her up the rest of the way, rather than put her to sleep again. You died for nothing.”

Cedar howls and lunges at her, fingers crooked like claws. But of course, he’s insubstantial and passes right through her. Lacking the focus of the Xanthic Promise’s honed-bright weapons to make his death useful, Antimony feels nothing. Until she turns to mark his passage and where he ends up, comma-curled in the air, his body a sob without breath or tears.

“Fuck.”

She’s doing it again, setting herself above and apart, taking pleasure in a moment of being right, even though she was just as clueless as Cedar, and every bit as guilty. She should have held onto her belief in the old fairy tales, like Starling. She should have had compassion to pair with her ambition. She shouldn’t have been such a bloody, arrogant fool.

She wishes she could pat Cedar’s shoulder, comfort him. He straightens, emptied of rage now, as she is of gloating. And here is the other shoe about to drop between them. Cedar tried and failed and the ship is still in danger. The ship needs a captain, and at the moment, that’s her.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Cedar asks.

“Well, fuck,” Antimony says, because there’s nothing else for it. Cedar was on the right track, but facing the wrong way.

“I guess I’d better go see about a star.” Antimony shapes her lips to a fierce grin, her stance to a swagger. A little bit of brash and bravado isn’t such a bad thing. She is a gods-damned pirate after all, and if she’s going to go out, then it’s going to be staring death in the face and giving it the middle finger.

Cedar tips his head at her forgotten bottle of gin. His expression is almost kind, but not really at all, because he’s a gods-damned pirate too and that’s not how it is between them.

Antimony lifts the bottle in salute, takes a swig, and pours out a measure for him. The washed light of Cedar’s eyes flickers in something like pleasure, which gives her hope. Since she’s about to be very dead herself soon, it would be nice to go out knowing that she can still get shit-faced in the afterlife.

Another swig for good luck and she leaves the bottle beside the piano, uncorked. She resists the urge to set it down on the bench where it would leave a mark, a last peace offering.

And off she goes.

• • • •

Antimony strides the decks of the Xanthic Promise. The walls howl with the restless dead, and in her mind, they’re a storm. She’s a pirate of old, her heeled boots ringing on wood while her red coat swirls and rain lashes her. She bares her teeth as if to catch the wind, even though there’s nothing here but recycled air.

“Out,” she bellows as she steps into the star chamber’s room.

Hyacinth looks up, scowls, a refusal on her lips. Antimony feels a flicker-flash of regret. Hyacinth is as sour as Antimony wants to be, or at least presents the same gruff exterior. Maybe they could have been friends, raised a glass together in the crow’s nest and sang bawdy old star-shanties. Antimony guesses she’ll never know.

“Go, or I’ll clap you in irons or make you walk the plank or something equally piratey.”

Hyacinth merely shakes her head, not so much a ceding to authority as her not being paid enough to care. As Antimony freshly reminded herself, they aren’t friends, and the captain’s chair will fall to Hyacinth next, so what stake does she have in stopping Antimony’s stupidity?

Hyacinth retreats, leaving Antimony alone.

The star chamber itself is sealed with a double hatch. Antimony scrambles to the top of the chamber and overrides the locks to drop through.

And then. She is. Falling. Seeing her bones through her skin. Hearing them, and isn’t that a weird fucking thing. Antimony is herself and she is her ghost, and she’s every captain who came before her, stitched in a long line, and this is where it ends.

She tastes Cedar’s death, holds it on her tongue, the bright bright bright moment of pure joy right before his faceplate shattered, thinking he was doing the right thing.

Her own death is here too, waiting for her just around a corner. A door. An edge. A turning.

But she isn’t there yet.

The ship sings. It screams. A swarm of bees humming in a cave made of ice cracking and a violin playing and a color that is blue and purple and pink and none of those at all and a hunger and a heartbeat and a lullaby and a whale calling to its calf through the deep.

Oh, it echoes. Antimony feels it all along her jaw. An ache to answer, but the sound isn’t for her. It’s for the ghosts outside the ship. The dead stars and the living ones and the stars yet to be born. They’re alive. All of them. Not just her star, but everyone among all the billions of points of light spread across the universe. Gloriously, terribly alive.

If a thing can have a heart that can be cut out and chained in the moment of its death to power a ship, then of course it is alive. Truly and properly alive. They had no right, none of them, the captains stretching back to the beginning of time sailing the black, to do what they have done.

Lightning cracks. Branches. The edge. There. Antimony reaches. Plunges her hand into the light that is the song that is the end of the line. And her ghost smirks and Cedar smirks and the thread tugs. She pictures with all her will and might, for whatever they are worth, cutting the star free, waking it up, shattering the bonds while sealing the wounds in the glass and keeping everyone on the Xanthic Promise safe, and she hopes against hope and against reason her death is strong enough to do that.

This is the end.

Except.

The coin pressed flat to the table has another side, and so does the door, and the edge really is a corner, and it can be turned.

Cedar made a bargain with his death and went to meet it early. But every member of a ghost ship’s crew knows their death is a solid and inevitable thing. They swear an oath the moment they come on board, and live every day knowing fate cannot be cheated. It is an immutable fact.

And so, if Cedar met his death early, then in truth, he was always fated to do so.

And by that very same logic, if Antimony makes a deal with her death now, refuses it and slips around the edge to the other face of the coin, the other side of the door, then she will have always been meant to do so. Fate signed, sealed, and delivered.

A promise is still a promise. That is where the power of a ghost ship lies, and she’s not denying her ship anything, only delaying its gratification a while.

And it is a glorious thing.

Here’s the deal, she thinks, You use my living voice, my tongue to scream your star song to the universe, to scream yourself awake and free, and you kick enough power into the ship on your way out to get us out of the Sargasso and I’ll figure out the rest on the way down.

It shouldn’t work, but ghost ships are built on impossible things.

Antimony throws her head back and opens her throat to the voice that shivers along her jaw, the star longing to sing through her in a language not meant for human tongues. She burns. The chamber shatters and she shatters and the ship lurches forward through the dark—a blink that is not motion that suddenly puts them somewhere else.

Everything turns inside out and upside down and sideways and backwards oh my. And then Antimony Jones does the most impossible thing of all: she survives.

• • • •

Her skin is still smoking as Antimony limps from the star chamber’s remains. Chunks of glass, charred and black, litter the floor. The ship is whole, powered by a ghost, by a promise, as always, just enough to get them out of the doldrums and then, well, maybe Antimony will have to roll the dice again and put her life on the line one more time, but that’s a problem for future-her.

Antimony looks down at her arms, her legs, at skin black as charcoal, cracked and crazed and flaking ash. Seams running through her flesh blaze with starlight, every and no color at all. Her clothes are gone. And it’s a damned good thing she shaved her head before this all began, because if not, her hair would be on fire.

She nearly collides with Hyacinth who hovers just on the other side of the door, anxious for her ship if not for her captain. Antimony tosses a crooked grin.

“Let’s get a drink sometime,” she says, and the words draw more shock from Hyacinth than Antimony’s burned-and-smoldering condition.

Cheating death, or at least delaying it for a while, is as good an excuse as any to turn over a new leaf. She can be a fierce, piratey pirate and still make a friend, or at least try.

Black petals scorch the deck, the echo of footsteps left in her wake. The same goes for any place Antimony rests her hand to steady herself, which she does often, covering the ship with impressions of herself all the way back to her cabin where she scoops up the rest of the gin and kills it in one go.

The ghost-stitched walls chitter and gibber and gossip and Antimony grins. Let them tell grand epic tales of the captain who freed her ship’s star, who looked her own death in the eye and said not today, motherfucker. She’ll happily listen once those rumors circle back around as star-shanties, but not right now.

Now, she will fall into her bed and hope that the sheets don’t catch fire because she intends to sleep for a week solid.

Whatever comes after that, well, that’s a problem for future-her. Now-her is flush and full of victory, all the crackling power of her ghost ship at her fingertips, and the whole of the universe spread before her. Just the way it should be.

A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling and Hooked, and the short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, among other titles. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and has been a finalist for the Sunburst, Nebula, Aurora, Lambda, and Ignyte Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes review columns to Apex Magazine and The Book Smugglers. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

Exile's End
By Carolyn Ives Gilman
Novelette Long List

Let’s sing of the lightbeam journey

Of the man who was not a man

Sent by the Whispering Kindom

To search the sky for ghosts.

How did he find the way?

He followed the poison papers,

He followed the scent of secrets

He followed the footsteps of ashes,

Retracing the path of exile.

Can reversing exile set it right?[1]

The series of events that would make Rue Savenga the most reviled woman on Sarona began only minutes before closing time at the Orofino Museum.

The windows had been rain-streaked all day, and now had gone dark. Rue was at her desk, reading a new art history treatise she needed to review, when her wristband chimed.

“There is a gentleman here asking to see you,” the guard at the front desk said. “He says he’s come from Radovani.”

Radovani was seven light years away. Rue glanced at her calendar. No appointment. She could easily dodge this one. But the book was disappointing—simplistic ideas gussied up in jargon—and she needed a break. “All right, I’ll come down,” she said. That was her first mistake.

The parts of the museum beyond the public galleries were cluttered and utilitarian. Exposed conduits and plumbing ran along the ceiling above her as she paced down the scuffed-tile corridor lined with crates and display cases no one wanted to throw away. Emerging into the airy, sophisticated architecture of the lobby was a release from claustrophobia.

It was clear who her visitor was. He stood out for his stillness in the bustle of departing visitors—tall and slim, with long black hair pulled back in a tie. His hands were in the pockets of a jacket much too light for the weather outside.

Rue introduced herself. When she held out her hand, the young man stared at it for a second before remembering what to do with it.

“My name is Traversed Bridge,” he said; then, apologetically, “I have an unreal name as well, if you would prefer to use that.”

“No, your real name is fine.” Rue had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed the polite thing to say. “You’ve come from Radovani?”

“I just arrived by wayport. I came directly here.”

“What can I do for you?”

He looked at the floor, as if at a loss for words. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m not good at this. They should have sent a woman.”

Mystified, Rue said, “You’re doing fine.”

He looked up. He had beautiful, liquid charcoal eyes. “I was sent by the Whispering Kindom of the Manhu. I have come to find our ancestors.”

None of this rang any bells with Rue. “I think they may have called the wrong person,” she said. “You probably want to speak to our ethnographic curator, Magister Hess.”

“No, I was given your name,” he said. He fished a card from his pocket. Her name was written on the back. On the front was printed the name and contact information for a colleague at the Radovani Archives, someone who ought to have known better.

Rue sighed. “All right, then, why don’t you come up to my office and you can explain.”

She led the way back. When they reached her office, he looked around and seemed to relax. “It’s good to get away from the ghosts,” he murmured.

Most people called Rue’s office austere—or, if they were being polite, minimalist. The other curators’ offices were adorned with art and artifacts from their private collections. But Rue was not a collector. It was not that she didn’t love the art; she would have raced into a burning building to save the museum’s collection. She just had no need to possess any of it.

She offered Traversed Bridge a chair, and he sat. There was still a circle of quiet around him.

“So you’re from Radovani . . . ?” she prompted.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I am from a place you call Eleuthera. We call it Exile.”

Eleuthera was even farther away than Radovani, a planet settled only in the past three centuries as an experiment in radical self-determination—hence the name, which meant something like “freedom.”

“You have come a long way,” Rue said.

“Yes. I had to retrace the steps of the ancestors. They came from Radovani more than a hundred years ago, but that was not the world called Home. The historians on Radovani told me this was it, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like Home.”

“What does Home look like?”

“It is a green and leafy place. It has extra suns and moons.”

“Well, we have two suns,” Rue explained. “The second one is not very bright, and today you couldn’t see either one, because of the rain. There are three moons.”

“At Home, there were originally more,” Traversed Bridge informed her. “But the hero Whichway Traveler shot them down.”

“I see.”

“They were too bright.”

Rue nodded. “Why did the Whispering Kingdom send you, Traversed?”

“Kindom,” he corrected her. “We don’t have kings. We have kin.”

“Okay.”

“They sent me to find our ancestors and ask them a question. I am told you can help me.”

Frowning, Rue said, “Who were your ancestors?”

“They were Manhu. Your name for us may be Atoka.”

Suddenly, everything made more sense in one way, less sense in another. The Atoka had been an indigenous people of Sarona, and the museum did have a small but priceless collection of Atoka art—priceless, because it was the only collection in existence. The Atoka had been wiped out seven hundred years ago. They were extinct. Only their art survived, tantalizing and enigmatic.

Frowning, she said, “We greatly revere the Atoka. But we believe them to be dead.”

“Oh no,” Traversed said sincerely. “We are still alive. They tried to kill us all after the Battle of the River Bend eight hundred years ago. They hated us, so they tried to castrate all the men, and passed a law making it illegal to be Manhu. But a few hundred of us escaped to Refuge, which you call Radovani. We settled on what we thought was empty land, but after three generations, they decided we had no title, and so others took our houses and farms. We wandered then. Sometimes people tolerated us, but in the end they always wanted us to give up being who we were. They called us Recalcitrants at first, and then Atavists. When people started to accuse us of crimes, the state sent out death squads to hunt us down and garrote anyone they caught. They would leave dead babies hanging from lampposts as a warning. At last they shipped the last of us off to Exile, and we have been there ever since. The whole story is told in our songs. It takes three days to sing them.”

He told this grim tale in a matter-of-fact, even proud, tone. Rue listened, frowning. If his allegations were true, it would upend five hundred years of scholarship. It could not be true. Could it?

Cautiously, she said, “There are scholars who would be interested in meeting your people, Traversed. They will want to find out whether you are truly the same as our Atoka.”

“It’s not still illegal?” he said a little anxiously.

“No, don’t worry about that.”

“You wouldn’t mind some of us coming back? Just to visit, I mean. If this is Home.”

“Everyone is free to visit.”

“And our ancestors? Do you know where I can find them?”

Rue glanced at her watch. The museum was closed by now, but the lights might still be on in the galleries. “I can show you one of them right now, if you want.”

A transformation came over him; his face drained of everything but nervous awe. He sat up as if something had filled him, inflated him. She waited until he said in a heartfelt whisper, “Yes. Please.”

She stood and led the way out. She liked showing this particular artwork to people who hadn’t seen the original; no reproduction had ever done it justice. She had written the definitive monograph on it, and it had made her career, but she had never found out much about the people who created it. The legends surrounding the Atoka were so thick, and their symbolism so important, that the truth was elusive—even, in a sense, irrelevant.

The gallery was dark, but at the other end of the room the display lights on the artwork still glowed. It was a special installation, because this was the most famous work the museum owned, and people from all over the Twenty Planets came to see it. Usually there was a crowd around it, but now it hung alone.

Traversed stopped in the doorway, arrested by some strong emotion. “I feel like I shouldn’t be the one here,” he said. “It should be someone better than me.”

Gently, Rue said, “Wouldn’t your people be disappointed if you returned and said you hadn’t seen it?”

He looked at her as if seeking permission.

“They did choose to send you,” she pointed out.

With a visible effort he overcame his uncertainty and followed her across the darkened room.

People called it a painting, but it was actually an elaborate mosaic, made from pieces so small it took a magnifying glass to see them. Rue had commissioned a scientific analysis that had shown that the colors were not, strictly speaking, pigments; they were bits of bird feather, beetle carapace, butterfly wing—anything iridescent, arranged so as to form a picture. And what a picture it was: a young girl in an embroidered jacket and silver headdress, looking slightly to one side, lips parted as if about to speak. Operas had been written about her. Volumes of poetry had speculated on what she was about to say. Speeches invoked her, treatises analyzed her, children learned her story almost as soon as they learned to speak. She was the most loved woman on Sarona.

“We call her Aldry,” Rue said.

Traversed Bridge looked transfixed, as if he were falling in love. He whispered, “That is not her name.”

“What do you call her?” Rue asked.

“She is Even Glancing.”

Rue liked that name. It fit her.

The lights illuminating the portrait were mounted on a track, and they slowly moved from side to side, so that you could see it lit from different angles even as you stood still. Rue waited, watching Traversed Bridge’s face for a reaction, because the image changed. At one point in the cycle, the background, which was normally a dark indigo blue, erupted in a profusion of feathers. There were silver wings behind her, appearing then gone.

“Did you see the wings?” Rue finally asked.

“Yes,” Traversed said. “I can see them.”

“Many people can’t,” she said. “They are in a wavelength not everyone’s eyes can sense.”

“They are moving,” he said.

“Really?” Rue had never heard anyone say that before. But everyone’s experience of the portrait was slightly different.

“She is about to speak,” he said.

“Yes. Everyone wonders . . .”

She stopped, because his face had gone rigid, like a plastic mannequin, all animation gone. His body stiffened, then began to tremble. He fell with bruising force to the floor.

Rue knelt beside him, then came to her senses and used her wristband to call for help. But as she watched by the shifting light from the artwork, the humanity flowed back into his frozen face. He blinked, then focused on Rue, tried to say something.

“Lie still. Help is on the way,” she said.

“She spoke to me,” he whispered. He did not seem in pain, but full of wonder.

He looked around, saw he was on the floor, blushed in embarrassment, and sat up.

“Are you hurt?” Rue said.

“No, no. I am so sorry. Don’t worry. I am fine.”

“That was a nasty fall.”

“I am used to it. This happened all the time, when I was young. My spirit would leave my body, and I would fall down. I would hear voices no one else could hear.”

“Voices in your head?” Rue said, her amateur diagnosis changing.

“No, no. They were in my left hand.”

A guard looked in, then came over. “Should we call an ambulance?” he asked.

“No,” Traversed said, struggling to his feet again. “I am so sorry to put you to inconvenience. I am fine. It is over.”

Rue exchanged a glance with the guard, shrugged. “A little too much excitement, maybe. Come back to my office, Traversed, and you can sit down.”

By the time he slumped back into the chair, Traversed was looking sad and preoccupied. Rue had seen hundreds of reactions to the portrait of Aldry, but never that one, and she was curious.

“You said she spoke to you,” she said as she brewed tea for them both.

“Yes.” He stared at the floor. “I didn’t understand all she said.”

Rue waited, and after a pause he went on. “She is lonely. All this time we thought we were the ones in exile, and it turns out she is the banished one, even though she has never left Home. To us, Home was a place. To her, it is her people.”

Rue handed him tea. “That makes sense.”

He looked up at her pleadingly. “She says she wants to go back. She wants to see an Immolation.”

Rue didn’t like the sound of that. She tried to keep her voice even. “What is an Immolation?”

“I don’t know.” Traversed shook his head. “That was the part I didn’t understand.”

Rue was in a delicate position. There were strict laws covering repatriation of cultural artifacts, and there was a protocol to follow. If it had been any other artwork, she would have given an automatic set of responses. But Traversed Bridge had not yet made a formal claim. The half-crazed young man was here without credentials, without legal representation, carrying only an implausible story.

Besides, repatriating Aldry was unthinkable. The entire planet would rise up in arms.

If she said nothing, he might never find out that repatriation was an option. It would save a great deal of trouble. No one could accuse her of anything.

She sat down in a chair facing him and said, “There is a way for you to request the return of the portrait. It is called repatriation. You would have to file a formal request, and it would be a very difficult one to win. It would be challenged, because Aldry is deeply loved here, and she is part of our culture as well. You would have to prove beyond doubt that your people are the Atoka, and that she was illegally taken from you.”

He was looking at her like a starving man. “But there is hope?”

“A very little hope.”

“I want to bring her back. It is what she wants.”

Rue smiled and said, “Why don’t you sleep on it, and return tomorrow? Nothing can be done tonight anyway. Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to find someplace.”

Rue gave him directions to a budget hotel that was close to a transit line, and walked him to the main door of the museum.

“Thank you,” he said as he was about to step out into the driving rain. “They told me I would find helpers along the journey, and I have.”

Rue didn’t answer, because she wasn’t sure whether her role was to be helper or hindrance. “Have a good evening,” she said, then turned away, knowing she would have to do some explaining tomorrow.

He came to the prison of ghosts;

For Hoarder people do not free their dead.

Their feet fall heavy, weighted by the past

They do not hear the spirits cry for freedom

They heap up secrets in an archive

And lock the doors to keep them in.

How do you free a ghost?

“That’s preposterous!” said Galbro Hess.

The Curator of Ethnology was nearly as wide as he was tall, dressed in an overstretched cable-knit sweater, his gray hair standing up in spikes. Normally, he was an agreeable, jolly person, but Rue’s story had struck a nerve.

“I get them all the time, charlatans and kooks pretending to be Atoka, or to have some sort of spiritual connection to them. There are even re-enactors who pretend to hold Atoka ceremonies. It’s a pile of . . . well, you know. I’m afraid you were taken in, Rue.”

She had found him in the ethnographic artifact storage area, where he was sorting a collection of broken ceramics spread out on a large, padded table. Around them, shelves rose to the high ceilings, packed with carved masks, handlooms, model boats, drums, and similar things, mostly brown. That was Rue’s main objection to ethnographic material: it was so monochromatic.

“I can spot a charlatan,” Rue said. “He didn’t read that way. For one thing, he’s not from here, he’s from Eleuthera. I don’t think they have Atoka re-enactors there.”

“They don’t have Atoka either,” Galbro said grumpily, sorting a glazed brown ceramic from even browner unglazed ones.

“He told a long story of how some refugees escaped to Radovani.”

Galbro looked up, but then waved a hand in dismissal. “All that shows is that he did his homework. It’s true, there was a remnant population that went to Radovani. But they were persecuted there, and subjected to forced assimilation. In the end they lost their culture, intermarried, and dwindled to nothing.”

“He says they persisted long enough to be exiled again to Eleuthera.”

“A convenient story.”

“Regardless, I’d like to know more about how we got our Atoka collection.”

“Whose side are you on?” Galbro objected.

“I just want to be prepared. If this ends in a repatriation claim . . .”

“No one’s going to repatriate Aldry.”

“I know that, but to prepare our response I want to be sure we came by her legally.”

Galbro stopped his pretense of working and rested his fists on the table. “Sorry, can’t give you much joy there. The problem isn’t with the museum; we did everything right. But the original collector . . . well, you know how they were in those days. Regular looters and bandits. It may have been legal at the time, but by current standards, no.”

“What happened?” Rue said.

“Have you ever heard of the Immolation ceremonies?”

“No. That is, I’ve heard the word, but not what it means.”

“It was the heart and soul of Atoka culture. Once every three generations they would take all their earthly belongings, pile them up in the center of the village, and light a bonfire. Then they would burn all their homes to the ground, so that the next generation would have to start over with nothing. All their wealth, their art, their subsistence would go up in flames. It was the reason the Atoka never built a great civilization—because they voluntarily reduced themselves to poverty and dependence whenever they started to get ahead.

“When our ancestors came to Sarona, they tried to convince the Atoka of how pointless and self-destructive the custom was. From their point of view, the Immolations reduced the Atoka to begging from their more provident neighbors, whose surpluses would be drained to subsidize Atoka beliefs. If they refused to help, well, starving people will get desperate and take what they have to. As tensions grew, our ancestors began to forcibly suppress the Immolations. In one famous instance, an Atoka village was all assembled and ready to light the bonfire when soldiers marched in and drove them out—then, naturally, looted the pile of goods ready for the torch. The Atoka were so enraged they attacked, and that was the beginning of the wars that led to their destruction at the Battle of the River Bend.

“Well, our Atoka collection came from the descendants of a man who was an officer in that troop of soldiers. A man of his rank got first pick of the loot—and the Aldry portrait was the best Atoka culture had to offer.”

Rue was silent, shocked. “That is a horrifying story,” she said at last. “We can’t tell that to the public. They would be outraged.”

“Well, they think of the Atoka as idealized children of nature, not as flesh and blood who could be just as wrongheaded as we are. Sure, what the soldiers did was heavy-handed; but if they hadn’t saved the portrait, it would have been burned, not preserved so that we can revere it today.”

Who were the helpers?

One was kindly,

One was clever,

One was upright,

One was wealthy,

And one was treacherous.

Rue returned to her office feeling troubled. She had taken the problem to Galbro in hopes that he would see it as an interesting topic for investigation. But he was too anchored to his conviction about the extinction of the Atoka. The made-up portion of his mind had crowded out the curiosity.

Her spirits sank further when her wristband alerted her that Traversed Bridge had returned. It would be up to her to explain to him.

This morning he was wearing a heavier coat, much more appropriate to the weather. “The lady at the hotel gave it to me,” he said when Rue remarked on it. She couldn’t help but notice that he brought out generous impulses in people.

“Have you thought it over?” she asked when they reached her office.

“Yes,” he said. “I need to do as Even Glancing told me, and bring her back.”

Rue pulled up a chair and sat facing him. “All right. Now, I can’t guide you through a repatriation, Traversed, because my first loyalty is to the museum, and they will contest this claim. It’s a complex, expensive process, and you may not win. The first thing I would advise you to do is hire an attorney to make the formal claim. You will also have to hire an expert to help you prove that your people are truly the Atoka.”

“But we know who we are,” he said earnestly.

“That’s not good enough for the court. You need a documented trail of evidence. The museum will have experts to testify that you can’t be who you say you are. We also need to know that you are truly authorized by your people to make this claim. Can you get that?”

Gravely, he nodded. “I will have to send a message to my Kin Mother.”

“Is she the one who sent you?”

“Yes.” The shadows of complex thoughts moved behind his eyes. “I had no sisters, and I was firstborn, so it was my duty to go out into the world. They chose me to go to university.”

It surprised Rue a little to hear that he was university educated; he gave such an impression of unworldliness. “Did you get a degree?”

He nodded. “Hydrological engineering. I wanted to design a dam for the mountains above my village, to stop the river floods and bring us reliable water. I am here instead.”

His obvious disappointment made Rue say, “Well, you have plenty of time. You can still do that when you return.”

He shrugged. “I am earning my right to be a person.”

She wanted to ask more, but it was a risk to know too much about him; it might cloud her loyalties. Instead, she continued, “You will also have to prove that the object was taken from your people illegally, and that it has an ongoing cultural importance to them. The museum isn’t likely to contest the first point, but what about the second? What traditions do you have about Even Glancing?”

“None that I know,” he said.

“Then how did you know her name?”

“It is written on the portrait.”

There was no label or inscription. “Really?” Rue said skeptically.

“Yes, in the design on her jacket.”

Rue called up a photograph on her tablet. “Show me.”

He pointed out the portion of the embroidery that gave her name. “And this part says, ‘Cherished daughter.’ Maybe she was the daughter of the artist.”

“What about the wave design on the border?” It had played an important role in Rue’s interpretation of the work’s symbolism.

“Oh, that’s not a wave,” Traversed said. “It’s a thought. She is thinking, you see.”

If what he said was true, a great many art historians would look very foolish, starting with Rue herself. The best way to handle this would be to get ahead of it, to be the one to publish the new information. But that would be an admission that she accepted his claims of cultural authority. A clever attorney could use that against the museum.

“So your people have no tradition, no story, about Even Glancing?”

He shook his head. It was an important concession. She felt a little compromised to have wheedled it from him. “Then why do you want it back?”

“Because,” he said seriously, “there is a ghost imprisoned in it.”

Good luck arguing that in court, she thought. But all she said was, “That’s it?”

“That’s enough. We need to free the ghost.”

“And how would you do that?”

“We have to destroy the picture.”

Rue’s horror must have shown on her face, because he said, “It is the only humane way.”

It was unthinkable. “Traversed, this artwork is acknowledged as a masterpiece—not just on this world, but all over the Twenty Planets. It’s in all the art history books, and people honor the Atoka for having created it. Doesn’t that make you proud? Don’t you want to preserve the greatest achievement of your ancestors?”

He didn’t have an immediate response, but seemed to be weighing what she said. She watched, hoping he would reconsider. But at last he shook his head. “It’s not worth her suffering. Pride can’t justify that.”

He really believed it. Rue had been taught from childhood to respect the beliefs of other cultures—but damn it, she had her own core principles. “Then I am bound to oppose you,” she said. “I cannot see this artwork destroyed.”

They sat in silence, facing one another, aware that they had become enemies.

“You had better go now,” Rue said.

“All right.” His expression was regretful. At the door he stopped, looked back. “I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” Rue said.

But she didn’t.

How do you lose your name?

When people stop telling your story.

Why must we tell our story?

Because others start telling it for us.

The gallery was relatively uncrowded except for the clump of people around the Aldry portrait. There were masterworks all over the walls, but people had eyes only for Aldry. They wanted to say they had seen her. They wanted their photographs taken with her. Some just stood there for minutes at a time, watching the image change, transported.

They all knew the story.

Once upon a time, Aldry was a real girl living in an Atoka village that had tamed all the birds in the forest around them. Birds were their messengers and their music; birds ate the troublesome insects and brought warnings about the weather. They made nests in the thatched roofs of the village, and kept everyone below dry. Artisans vied to create elaborate cages for them.

Then one day the Atoka spied an ominous fireball descending from the heavens: the landing craft of the settlers who were the ancestors of present-day Saronans. That the two peoples were very different was clear from the start, for the Atoka had amber eyes like owls, and where normal humans had body hair, the Atoka had downy feathers. The new settlers were refugees pushed out of a crowded, urbanized planet. They were woefully unprepared for a subsistence life scratched from alien ground. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of Aldry’s people, they would have perished. The natives taught them which crops could be cultivated and which were poison, how to hunt the abundant wild animals, how to speak to unfamiliar nature. But as the settlers multiplied, and more of them arrived, relations grew tense. Conflict seemed inevitable. It had happened that way throughout human history.

But Aldry prevented history from going down its familiar, violent path. She had fallen in love with a bookish young settler—the very one who chronicled the whole tale in cramped and sideways antique language. In her culture, a woman’s decision to marry conferred personhood on the man she chose, and when she announced her intention to unite the two groups, the Atoka could no longer regard the settlers as invaders of questionable humanity. The marriage ushered in a period of peace. Aldry bore twin boys. One of them favored his father’s people and one his mother’s, for one had hair and the other had down.

It came to pass that a terrible flood swept through the settlers’ town, destroying the homes and fields they had labored for years to build. Viewing the drenched mudlands where their crops and storehouses had been, they knew they faced starvation. Then Aldry saw her duty. Sorrowfully, she kissed her infant boys goodbye and set out alone into the forest. Five days later, an immense flock of birds came to the village. Led by a silver pheasant, the birds descended onto the fields, each with a seed in its beak, and replanted all the crops. The village was saved, but no one ever saw Aldry again. It was said that a silver pheasant perched on the ridgepole of the house where her grieving husband raised her orphan boys, as if to keep them company.

When the boys became men, they quarreled. One went to live with the Atoka, the other stayed with the settlers. They both became great leaders, and their sibling enmity passed to their people. When war broke out, they faced each other in battle. But just when the Atoka brother was about to kill his twin, he glimpsed the silver pheasant in the sky above, and spared him for Aldry’s sake.

“She is the mother of us all,” Saronans said. She was the generous spirit of the planet that welcomed them and invited them to be at home.

The portrait dated to an era at least two hundred years after the original events. It was thought to be an Atoka artist’s image of Aldry, with wings foreshadowing her sacrifice. Who else could it show?

Unless it was Even Glancing, the daughter of the artist.

Rue shook her head impatiently. In an important way, it did not matter. Whoever she had been once, she was Aldry now. Generations of Saronans had woven that identity around her. And they would not easily give it up.

What did they say on Refuge?

They said, “Speak another language.”

“Give up your primitive ways.”

“Be more like us.”

And what did they say on Home?

“Be our imagined angels.”

“Be what we can’t be.”

“Reject us, love us, teach us, exalt us.”

We are so tired of being told who to be.

Rue half expected never to hear of Traversed Bridge again. The odds against any lone individual mounting a credible repatriation claim were so high that, when he realized it, he would most likely become discouraged and leave for home.

She underestimated his determination.

Three weeks later, as she was picking up breakfast on her way to work, her wristband started to chime insistently with news alerts having to do with the museum. She put in her earpiece and listened on the tram, her attention so absorbed that her body had to take over the automatic job of exiting at her stop and walking to the staff entrance.

The story was sensational and appealing: a remnant of the Atoka had been discovered on faraway Eleuthera. Old Radovani records filled in their history. Now, an Atoka emissary had come seeking the ancient homeland of his people. After traveling across the light years, the young man had met only rejection and disbelief from the Orofino Museum.

When Rue got to her office, there was a message summoning her to see the director.

Galbro Hess was already in the director’s office when she came in. “Of course I told her,” he was saying. “It’s just the truth. There is no way Atoka culture could have survived intact through hundreds of years of persecution on Radovani.”

The director was a handsome, distinguished older man with a neatly trimmed beard. His aura of scholarship was a sham; his main job was care and feeding of the museum’s benefactors. He was good at it, and Rue considered it in her own best interest to make his job easy.

When he saw Rue, he said, “Magister Savenga, what’s this about our rejecting a repat claim out of hand? You know we can’t legally do that.”

Rue settled down in a chair, deliberately projecting confidence and calm. The director knew how to handle donors, but she knew how to handle him. “We haven’t rejected any claim. In fact, I am the one who told Traversed Bridge how to file one.”

Outraged, Galbro said, “You did what?”

“If he’s a charlatan,” Rue said, “it will come out. Did you listen to the interview?”

Uncomfortably, Galbro said, “All right, maybe not a charlatan—just deluded and naïve. But now he’s got an attorney and a pipeline to the press. His story’s an invasive weed, a virus people have no immunity to. It’s going to sweep the world.”

The director interrupted, “But there hasn’t been a repat claim?”

“Not yet,” Rue said.

“All right.” The director had his talking point. That was all he needed. “I want you two to handle this as you would any other claim, and refer all press to my office. We need to graciously suspend judgment, as befits our responsibility as guardians of Saronan cultural heritage.” The press release was almost writing itself.

“We need to find out what he wants,” Galbro said. “He may just be an opportunist, wanting to hold the painting hostage for gain.”

“No,” Rue said calmly. “He wants to destroy it.”

The two men looked at her in speechless horror.

Galbro found his voice first. “What, is he threatening to re-enact an Immolation? This really is a hostage situation.”

“He’s following voices. Revelations.”

“Oh great. We’re dealing with a lunatic.”

Severely, the director said, “That doesn’t leave this room. You could jeopardize our case, Galbro.”

“But we’ve got to expose him!”

“We won’t do anything. If he’s exposed, it will be the media, the court, or other scholars. We have to appear neutral.”

As they were leaving, Galbro muttered to Rue, “You really have gotten us into a mess.”

“Don’t worry, Galbro,” she said. “I’m not letting anyone set a match to Aldry.”

What did they tell him, and what did he say?

“You are not yourself,” they said.

“You are not Manhu.”

“You should be Atoka.”

“No,” he said.

Galbro was right: Atoka fever swept the land, sea, and sky. The story enthralled the public. It was better than finding a species given up for extinct. It was a chance at redemption, a chance to save what was lost, to reverse injustice, to make everything right.

The reality of the Atoka faded into inconsequence.

The museum was forced to put its other Atoka artifacts on display—a bronze drum, a life-size wooden baby, a carved eggshell, and an obsidian knife so thin it was transparent. Visitation shot up. Archaeologists were sudden celebrities. Musicals revived, bad old novels came out again, embroidered jackets crowded the racks. Rue’s coffee shop sold Atoka breakfast buns.

Suddenly, there was money for all things Atoka. When Orofino University received a grant to investigate the claims of the Manhu, Rue felt reprieved. With the length of the light-speed journey to Eleuthera, it would be at least ten years before the researchers could travel there and reach any conclusion. By then, the mania would have died down.

But she had not reckoned with recent improvements in instantaneous communication by Paired-Particle Communicator, or PPC. It was now possible to send video via arrays of entangled particles, thwarting the limits of light speed. Sarona had no direct PPC connection to Eleuthera, but the university was able to set up a relay via Radovani, and enlist local researchers.

“They’ve got universities on three planets collaborating,” Galbro told Rue in gloomy discontent—partly at the fact that they were taking the Manhu seriously, and partly at being left out. “I can’t imagine what it’s costing.”

“Conscience money,” Rue observed. “Guilt is a powerful thing.”

“It’s not guilt,” Galbro said. “It’s pride, to prove that we’re better than our ancestors—as if we inherited their planet but not what they had to do to get it.”

“You are a cynic, Galbro,” she said.

Though they were banned from participating, both of them had contacts at the university who kept them up to date, and so they were prepared for the report’s conclusions even before it came out.

All the evidence lined up. DNA traces from old bones on Sarona matched Manhu blood samples. Linguistic similarities showed through the haze of poor records on Sarona and imperfectly transmitted grammar and vocabulary on Eleuthera. The chain of documentation from the Radovani Archives told the shameful tale of their persecution and deportation. Science said it: the Manhu were descended from the ancient Atoka of Sarona.

The report’s release revived interest that had grown dormant in the many months it had taken to complete the research. Legislatures passed resolutions honoring the Atoka, money poured in for statues and murals. Documentaries aired until everyone thought they knew the story.

It was then that the repatriation request arrived.

The first meeting the two sides held was in the director’s office at the museum. It was to be an attempt to negotiate a compromise solution and avoid litigation. Rue was invited; Galbro was not.

“Don’t give it all away,” he told her beforehand.

It was more than a year since she had seen Traversed Bridge, except on-screen in interviews, explaining over and over that the Manhu did not really have feathers or owl eyes. Today, dressed in business attire, he looked anxious and ill at ease; but still he had that aura of self-possessed silence. His lawyer was a young woman with flaming red hair and a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles. She would have looked winningly roguish if only she had been smiling, but she was not. She introduced herself as Caraway Farrow.

The museum’s attorney, Ellery Tate, mirrored his client, the director—a distinguished older man with an air of paternal authority. The director was present, but silent. He had told Rue he wanted her to represent the museum, so he could stay above the controversy.

Tate opened the meeting, speaking in a generous, calming tone. “Thank you all for coming to help find a mutually agreeable solution.”

“We are happy to talk,” Farrow said.

The museum’s first proposal was to create high-resolution replicas of all the Atoka objects for the Manhu to take to Eleuthera. Farrow glanced at Traversed Bridge, then said, “I don’t believe that would be acceptable to my clients.”

“Oh?” Tate said, as if surprised. “We can make replicas that are quite identical to the original, down to the molecular level.”

Traversed Bridge said softly, “A replica would not have a ghost. It would be soulless.”

There was a short silence. Rue could hear the director shifting in his chair. Then Farrow said, “The Manhu might allow you to make replicas for the museum to keep, if you don’t contest returning the originals.”

Tate looked at Rue. She had to force her voice to sound calm. “That might work for the ethnographic material. But in the case of the Aldry portrait, a replica would not have the same aesthetic qualities.”

Farrow was studying her, frowning. “Why is that?”

“We have tried to replicate it in past,” Rue said. “There is something about the three-dimensional microstructure of the materials that can’t be reproduced. We’re not sure why. The whole effect is flatter, less animate. And the wings don’t appear.”

Traversed Bridge was watching her fixedly. She realized she had just said the same thing as he: the replica was soulless.

“Would it be possible,” Tate said, “to work out some sort of shared custody for the painting? I can imagine an arrangement where the original would be on loan to the Manhu for a period of time, say twenty or fifty years, and then travel back to Sarona for the same amount of time.”

Stony faces greeted this proposal. Rue had told Tate what the Manhu intended to do with the portrait; he was trying to make them admit it.

“Accept that the portrait is the property of the Manhu,” Farrow said, “and we can discuss its future. Until then, there is no point.”

She is a wily one, Rue thought. She saw the trap.

Tate said, “We are prepared to offer you the originals of the other artifacts if you will accept shared custody of the portrait. It’s a reasonable compromise.”

Traversed was already shaking his head.

With a steely gentleness, Tate said, “Please consider the time and expense of defending this claim if it goes to court. You will be trying it in a Saronan court, before a Saronan jury. Aldry is deeply beloved here.”

Traversed Bridge’s face was a wall of resolution. “Would you leave one person suffering in prison for the sake of redeeming a few others? This is not a balance sheet. You can’t weigh souls on a scale and say four make one not matter.” He turned to Rue. “You want us to ask for something that means nothing to you, something easy to give. I’m sorry, we can’t.”

“Ask for anything but Aldry,” Rue said.

“Your people made her up,” he said. “You can remake her.”

No one had anything to answer then, so the meeting was over. They would meet again in court.

How did he craft his case?

He made it on a frame of steel,

He wove the body of sandalwood,

He decorated it with feathers,

He filled it with rushing rivers.

What do we mean by steel, sandalwood, feathers, and rivers?

The frame of steel was justice.

The sandalwood was steadfast.

The feathers were eloquence.

The rivers were compassion.

And what scale was used to judge?

What ruler can measure the past?

Rue Savenga was, at heart, an uneventful person. She had always tried to do the right thing within her safe, unremarkable life. She had never considered herself the kind of person to take a courageous stand. That was the realm of ideologues and fanatics.

Now, she found herself thrust into an event that forced her to ask where her basic boundaries were. What line couldn’t she cross? How far would she go to defend her core beliefs?

What were her core beliefs?

The wanton destruction of art, she found, was where she drew her line. It was an act so heinous she could not stand by and let it happen. So when the museum’s attorney asked if she would testify in court, she agreed. She was willing to fight to save Aldry from the flames, even if her own reputation burned instead.

The trial was held in downtown Orofino, in a tall, imposing courthouse where monumental sculpture, marble, and mural dwarfed all who entered, in order to strike them with respect for law. When Rue arrived, there were two groups assembled in the park facing the courthouse, shouting at each other. Public interest was so high that the trial was to be broadcast, and opinion was split. Half of Sarona saw Rue as the defender of their heritage, and would execrate her if she lost. The other half saw her as the defender of long-ago injustice. They would execrate her if she won.

The courtroom’s air was busy with hushed conversations when she entered. It was a tall and cylindrical space with a skylight above and stylized, treelike pilasters of polished stone lining the walls. A large circular table stood in the sunken center, surrounded by tiers of seats crowded with press and other witnesses. Rue took her place on the side of the table reserved for the museum’s representatives and their witnesses; on the other side sat those testifying for the Manhu. The judge and clerk sat in the neutral spaces between, facing each other. Rue knew two of the expert witnesses she was facing—magisters from the university who could establish the Manhu-Atoka connection. She nodded to them without smiling.

The aim of Saronan law was to reach a resolution, not necessarily a victory for one side. Each side argued its case, the judge proposed solutions, and if no agreement could be reached, the jury imposed a compromise. But this trial was to be conducted with only a judge, not a jury. Rue had no idea what the calculations had been on either side; perhaps it had something to do with the impossibility of finding a jury whose mind was not already made up.

The judge called on Caraway Farrow to begin the proceedings by stating the case of the Manhu. She did it succinctly: the artworks had been illegally seized by Saronans in the act of suppressing an Atoka religious observance. The Atoka had suffered grievous harm as a result. Now, the return of the items was a vital step toward righting injustice and reviving Manhu cultural practices.

The case that Farrow presented was logical and unflinching. An ethnologist told how the art had been looted, and a historian gave the story of the Atoka genocide and exile to Radovani. A geneticist and a linguist established the Atoka-Manhu connection.

“And do they still speak the Atoka language and practice Atoka culture?” Farrow asked the linguist.

“No,” the magister replied. “But there are old people who remember enough of what they were told as children to reconstruct some of it. Now they are very interested in reviving the language and culture. Our records will be valuable in the effort.”

Last, Farrow produced a power of attorney from the Whispering Kindom, designating Traversed Bridge as their representative on Sarona.

Tate challenged none of it, except to establish that there was nothing in the evidence that precluded a different remnant of the Atoka turning up in future, with contrary demands. He also extracted an admission that the Whispering Kindom was not the only kin group among the Manhu, and that the others had not expressed their desires. Farrow asked Traversed Bridge to address this last objection, as court procedure allowed.

“If there is any difference, we can work it out among ourselves,” he said softly, staring at the table. “We should have that right.”

It occurred to Rue that he had not looked at her once during the whole presentation.

The court recessed for lunch, and reporters scrambled out to record their summaries in the hallway. Rue and Tate left by a back door to avoid them. She had a feeling of dread.

When the trial resumed, it was the museum’s turn. Ellery Tate spoke in an avuncular, easygoing manner. Rue knew it to be an act, but it was an effective one. He gave the argument they had crafted together. “We maintain that this is not a simple case of stolen goods,” he said as if it ought to be obvious to all. “The portrait of Aldry, and its tragic story, is the patrimony of two separate cultures—that of Sarona and of the Manhu. In fact, it has played a more vital role in Saronan history than on Eleuthera, and it has an ongoing role as part of our process of remembrance and acknowledgment of the painful past. Sarona needs this artwork. We seek only to share it with the Manhu.”

Tate called on Rue to give a presentation about the role the Aldry portrait had played in Saronan art, history, and literature. It was her expertise, and it was easy to demonstrate Aldry’s centrality. “We have constructed our own cultural identity around this image and its story,” she concluded. Looking straight at Traversed Bridge, she added, “We love and honor her, because we also are her descendants.”

For a second, he raised his eyes and met hers.

In a low voice, Tate asked, “Magister Savenga, what will the museum do with the portrait if our request is granted?”

“We will keep it in trust for future generations,” she said. “However, we will be willing to loan it to Eleuthera, if that can be done safely. We want to assure that it is preserved and seen by all who wish to see it, forever.”

“And has Traversed Bridge told you what the Manhu wish to do with it?”

“Yes. He said they wish to destroy it.”

For a second, the courtroom was utterly silent. Then there was a stir, till the judge called for order.

Tate turned to the judge. “Sir, we submit that the Manhu seek to make an irrevocable choice. Their plan precludes any possibility of compromise. Once they destroy it, we can never go back. Sarona values this artwork, the Manhu don’t. It is . . .”

“That’s not true,” Traversed Bridge interrupted, looking at him for the first time.

“Are you saying Magister Savenga is lying?”

“No. She is right. We want to destroy it, in keeping with our tradition. That doesn’t mean we don’t value it. We value it in a different way than you—not as a piece of property but as a living ancestor whose desires must be respected. We want to honor her wishes.”

“We cannot call her to testify,” Tate said.

“I must do that for her,” Traversed Bridge said.

“That is hearsay.”

“I would not lie.”

“You may be mistaken.”

“I am not.” He turned to Rue, addressing her directly. “I am sorry to cause you pain. But that is the only way for us to be free of our pain. It has been building for generations. It is our parents’ pain, our grandparents’, clear back to Even Glancing. We carry it around with us, always. We must do this to free not just her, but ourselves.”

Rue leaned forward across the table, speaking directly back to him. “But here’s the thing, Traversed Bridge. This is not an ordinary object. At some point, great art ceases to be bound to the culture that produced it. It transcends ethnicity and identity and becomes part of the patrimony of the human race. It belongs to all of us because of its universal message, the way it makes us better.” She paused, drawing breath. “Yes, it has a ghost. The ghost speaks to all of us, not in words but in our instinct toward beauty and goodness. We are better for having seen it. If it burns, something pure will pass from the world. Do you really want that?”

Their eyes locked together. Traversed Bridge looked as if he was in a vise, and it was tightening. At last he looked down.

“Do you wish to change your request?” the judge asked him.

Slowly, he shook his head. “No. I have to do this,” he whispered.

“Then the court will recess for half an hour,” the judge declared.

Tate was optimistic during the recess, but Rue felt no sense of satisfaction. No matter what happened, someone would be harmed. Far fewer would be harmed if the museum won; but that was like weighing souls on a scale.

When the trial resumed, the judge surprised everyone by announcing that he would give his decision, skipping the usual negotiation of compromise. “Mr. Tate is correct, the Manhu request precludes compromise,” he said. “What they seek is an irrevocable right, and they have already rejected anything short of that.”

Rue’s heart leapt. The judge went on, “However, all the eloquent arguments that have been advanced here do not alter one fact: the portrait is a piece of property, and that is the law that must apply. The museum received stolen property. It was done in ignorance that the true owners survived, but the law is still the same. The Manhu are the owners of the property, and it must be returned to them.”

The courtroom erupted into noise: jubilant noise on one side, agonized protest on the other.

Tate looked staggered. “I had no idea he would decide the case on such narrow legal grounds,” he said to Rue. “We can appeal.”

Rue knew that her director would not want that. He wanted to get this controversy behind him as quickly as possible. She might be able to persuade him, but . . .

“No,” she said. “The law is our cultural heritage, and we have to respect it.”

Across the table, Caraway Farrow was hugging Traversed Bridge in joy; but he did not look joyful. His eyes were once again downcast, avoiding Rue’s. He looked exhausted.

I need to reconcile myself, Rue thought. I need to stop caring.

But not yet.

How did she travel?

They would have sent her by lightbeam,

Fast as a flash,

But the light did not want to take her.

“I’m afraid to be shaped in your memory,” it said,

“Your sorrows and your exile.”

You cannot argue with light.

The artifacts could not be sent to Eleuthera by lightbeam, because what would emerge at the other end would be mere replicas of the originals, robbed of their ghosts. The fastest express ship that could be chartered would cost a fortune and take almost sixty years; but a Saronan capitalist pledged the money, and it was settled.

Rue oversaw construction of the capsule in which the artifacts would make their voyage. In the six months it took, crowds thronged the museum to see Aldry one last time. It was like a funeral. An endless procession passed by her in heartbroken silence.

On the day she came off display, Rue watched the gloved art handlers lower her into the cushioned case where she would be sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere to prevent aging. Rue wanted Aldry to arrive as perfect as she set out.

“Shall we close it up?” an art handler asked.

Rue looked one last time at that young, mysterious face. The expression hadn’t changed. Rue wanted to remember it, since memory was all she would have.

“Yes, close it up,” she said, and turned away. She would never see Aldry again, she thought.

But she was mistaken.

When she comes back the sky will brighten,

Old men will play at cards,

Teachers will review their lessons,

Cooks will stir broth in their kitchens,

Ghosts will not cry in the night.

We will be free of the past.

What good is the past?

Rue was a vigorous ninety-five years old when she realized that fifty years were almost up, and if she were to take the lightbeam to Eleuthera, she could arrive there in time to meet the ship carrying the artifacts.

It was not an easy decision. She would not age a second during the trip, but the rest of the universe would see ten years pass. And on the journey back, another ten years. Everyone of her generation would be dead by the time she got home, and everything she knew would change.

On the other hand, the Aldry trial had been the pivot point of her life. When she looked back, everything before it seemed to have led up to that event, and everything after had followed from it. She had spearheaded an effort to change the law—not just Saronan law, but interplanetary law—so that artifacts of surpassing cultural and historical value could be considered by different standards. A case like Aldry’s would never again be decided as if she were a sack of potatoes. It was Rue’s most important legacy.

Not to go to Eleuthera would mean choosing to miss the end of the story that had shaped her life, and that gave her an unsettled feeling. She wanted to be present at the end, however tragic that end might be.

Secretly, she cherished a glimmer of hope that sixty years would have changed the minds of the Manhu. Once they saw the artwork they would want to save it.

And so one day she closed her eyes on Sarona and opened them on Eleuthera. She had expected someone from Eleuthera University to meet her at the waystation, but instead, the small group waiting for her was led by Traversed Bridge. She recognized him instantly. He had aged well. He still wore his hair long, though now it was streaked with gray, and his eyes were feathered with wrinkles. The biggest change was that he now looked confident and happy.

“This is Softly Bent, the woman who chose me,” he said, “and our eldest daughter, Hanging Breath.”

The two women were dressed in embroidered jackets, with their hair neatly coiled in buns on top of their heads. They both had a determined look that made Traversed Bridge seem positively easygoing by comparison.

They collected Rue’s baggage and Traversed led the way to a rented electric groundcar. He drove, with Rue in the seat beside him. The city around them was a hive of activity. Everything seemed shiny, new, and under construction.

“I’ll take you to your hotel so you can rest up,” he said.

“Thank you. I’m too old for this interstellar travel nonsense.”

“Tomorrow, we will go to the university to open the shipping capsule.”

“It has arrived?”

“A couple weeks ago. They have had it in storage, acclimating.”

“Good. I am glad they are treating her well.”

He glanced at her sideways. “People are quite curious about why you are here. There are some who think you have come to snatch her back. If they are guarded with you, that is why.”

“They can rest easy,” Rue said. “The decision can’t be unmade, unless the Manhu change their minds.”

“That is what I told them.”

They drove on a while in thoughtful silence.

“Did you ever build your dam?” Rue asked.

He smiled. “Yes. You will see it, if you come to our village.”

“Of course I will come to your village. I’m not going to travel all this way and not visit the Manhu.”

He nodded, but glanced at her again. “They made a song about me,” he said.

“About your role in the trial, you mean?”

“About my journey, the trial, everything. And they gave me a new name when I got back. It is a great honor. I am now called No.”

“Why No?”

“Because when people kept trying to get me to do this and that, and accept less than we wanted, I kept saying no.”

“Hmm,” she said. “That would be fine, except that the right answer is almost never ‘no.’ The right answer is ‘maybe.’”

“I will tell them you said that,” he said, amused. “You are in the song, you know.”

“I can imagine. Probably the wicked woman guarding her treasures like a dragon.”

“No, in our songs, dragons are lucky.”

She decided she liked Traversed Bridge. Of course, she had never disliked him. She had always thought his convictions were misguided, but sincere and deeply held. But then, so were hers.

The next morning it was an ethnologist from the university, Magister Garrioch, who picked her up. He was a young man with a curly blond beard and a worried expression. Leading her to the car, he told her how he had done his dissertation on the Manhu, and had profound respect for them—“But this Immolation idea that No picked up on Sarona is just plain crazy.” As she settled into the car, he paused before shutting the door. “Can’t you persuade them not to go through with it?”

She gave a wry laugh. “I tried that once. It didn’t end well. Anyway, what makes you think I would have any leverage?”

“No is key to this,” he said. “He is deeply respected, and he respects you.”

“If that is true,” Rue said, “he started respecting me as soon as I stopped trying to persuade him of things.”

Looking frustrated, Garrioch went around to the driver’s seat and started the car. After several blocks Rue said, “I take it there is nothing you can do to prevent the Immolation?”

He shook his head. “Whenever I try to argue, No points out that the Manhu were promised freedom when they came to Eleuthera. He gets really legalistic about it.”

“I’m afraid we taught him that,” Rue said.

“Unfortunately, his argument goes right to the core of our values here. We really believe in freedom.”

“Even freedom to do stupid and self-destructive things?”

“Even that—as No keeps pointing out. Infuriating old man.”

“He was an infuriating young man, too.”

Since Eleuthera had no proper museum facilities, the university was storing the shipping capsule in the basement of their humanities building. When Rue and Garrioch arrived, they found Traversed Bridge waiting along with a delegation of seven Manhu. They looked out of place in the youthful bustle of the glass and brick lobby. All but two of them were elderly women dressed in drab gray. Traversed Bridge introduced Rue to one who seemed to be their leader. “Magister Savenga, this is the Kin Mother of the Whispering Kindom, Vigilant Aspire. She is my aunt.”

Respectfully, Rue said, “I am pleased to meet you.”

Vigilant was a tiny, aged woman, but her eyes were quick and watchful. She regarded Rue with polite suspicion.

Magister Garrioch led them all downstairs into a room off the loading dock, where the shipping capsule waited, still sealed after its long journey. A conservator and two students stood waiting in white lab coats. There was an air of hushed anticipation.

“Vigilant Aspire, would you care to break the seal?” Garrioch said.

She stepped forward and undid the latch. As Garrioch and Traversed Bridge raised the lid, a sigh of old nitrogen escaped. Inside, the artifacts rested in their cushioned cradles. The room was silent as the conservator and her helpers lifted the pieces one by one onto a waiting table: first the drum, then the carved baby, the eggshell, and the knife.

There was a moment of consternation when that appeared to be all. Rue said, “The portrait is underneath.”

The students lifted the tray that partitioned the capsule, and the artwork was revealed. They tilted it vertical so everyone could see.

There were gasps. Aldry looked exactly the same as in Rue’s memories from sixty years ago. She shone, radiant, even in the industrial lighting of the workroom, with her wings revealed. She had never looked so beautiful. Rue felt a painful exaltation at the sight. It had been years since anything had made her feel like this.

Vigilant Aspire’s cheeks were wet with tears. She looked reverent, moved to the bottom of her soul. Rue looked at Traversed Bridge. He also was staring at Aldry, a hint of sadness in his gaze.

The Kin Mother moved forward and raised a hand as if to touch the artwork. Rue suppressed an automatic urge to give a warning about the delicacy of the surface. It was no longer her responsibility—or her right. The Manhu owned the artwork now.

Vigilant brought her lips close to the painting and whispered something to the girl with the wings. Then she stepped back, overcome. Another old woman put an arm around her shoulders.

The Manhu spent a long time examining the artifacts and the artwork. The room seemed to fill with their emotion, tangible as smoke. Traversed Bridge hung back in order to let the others see everything, and Rue took a seat beside him. “What did she say to Aldry?” she whispered to him.

“She welcomed her home,” he said.

At length, the students returned everything to the capsule and latched it again, and Traversed Bridge made arrangements to have it picked up in a truck for the journey to the Manhu village of Threadbare. Rue learned that Magister Garrioch was going to accompany them, and arranged to ride with him.

They set out the next day in a convoy of cars, escorting the flatbed truck carrying the capsule, strapped down under a tarp. It was a long drive into misty, forested hinterlands. The farther they drove, the higher the mountains became and the worse the roads, till they were following a bumpy dirt track that writhed along the sides of sheer gulches, precipices above and chasms below. It was late afternoon when they rounded the shoulder of a mountain and saw a wide valley open up before them: green, terraced fields, a sparkling river, a bridge, and a cluster of tile-roofed homes. The convoy stopped so they could call ahead to announce their arrival and the women could change into brightly embroidered jackets.

“It doesn’t look threadbare at all,” Rue said to Garrioch as they stood at the side of the road looking down on the village.

“Not now. They have made enormous progress in the last fifty years, especially since they put in the dam.” He pointed, and Rue saw it. She had expected something of earth and wood, but instead it was a sheer crescent of concrete, cutting off a narrow gap in the mountains upstream.

Traversed Bridge walked up to them. He saw where she was looking and smiled. “What do you think of it?” he said.

“It’s amazing, Traversed. I can’t imagine how you built it out here.”

“We had to set up a plant to make the concrete,” he said. “We imported the steel sluice gates and machinery, but we did it all with local labor. It took a long time.”

“It’s a great achievement. A wonderful legacy.”

“Yes,” he said, gazing at it proudly.

The rest of the convoy was ready to proceed. “Would you like to ride with me?” he asked her.

She surveyed the situation, then shook her head. “Thank you, but I think I’d better stay in the back of the parade. This is for you and your people.”

He nodded, and headed to his car.

When they came down the steep hill into the village, they found the road lined on both sides with people dressed in their brightest clothes. The convoy passed between jubilant villagers shouting, singing, pounding on drums, and shaking rattles. After the last car passed, the people crowded into the roadway, joining the procession as it threaded through the narrow streets and downhill toward an open plaza near the river.

The vehicles stopped in front of a large community meeting house, and the crowd pressed around them. Two young men jumped onto the bed of the truck and threw the tarpaulin off the capsule. All noise ceased as they unlatched the cover and threw it back. One of them picked up the drum and held it overhead so everyone could see, then passed it down to someone in the crowd. The other objects followed. Then, after a moment of puzzlement, they uncovered the portrait and raised it high between them, showing it to the crowd. It flashed iridescent in the sun, and there was a collective gasp. For a moment, all was silent; then someone began to sing. Others joined in, till the whole crowd was singing solemnly, in unison.

“It’s a welcome song,” Garrioch said to Rue.

The two men descended from the truck and began to carry Aldry around the town square so everyone could see her. The people holding the artifacts fell in behind. The crowd drew back reverently to let them pass. Everywhere, people wept in joy.

Rue realized that Traversed Bridge had come up and was standing beside her, watching. She said, “I am glad to see them so happy.”

He nodded. “They have known nothing but pain for so long. Generations. You can see all that pain pouring off of them, washing away.”

He had been proud of the dam, but now his pride came from a deeper spot. This was his true legacy, Rue thought. Surely now he would reconsider throwing it all away. Aldry herself was the true persuader.

After circling the crowd twice, the procession of artifacts passed inside the community hall, and people started lining up for a chance to see them all again. The sun had dropped below the mountain to the west, and the air was growing chilly. A festival atmosphere had taken hold. Five musicians began to play on pipes and drums, and brightly dressed girls formed a ring for dancing.

“Would you both do me the honor of staying at my home tonight?” Traversed Bridge asked Rue and Garrioch.

“Thank you, that would be lovely,” Rue said.

Reminded of something, Traversed said, “Just don’t ask my wife if you can help with anything. It will offend her.”

“Of course.”

His home was close to the center of town, as befitted a leading citizen. It was a large structure with a concrete-block first floor and a second floor of stained wood, with intricately carved shutters and rafters. The windows glowed bright and welcoming, and electric lanterns hung from the eaves.

Inside, grandchildren were everywhere. When Traversed Bridge’s daughter saw the guests enter, she hustled the youngsters off to another room. Traversed offered the guests something he called “wine,” which turned out to be a potent distilled liquor. They could hear bustling from the kitchen. A young man who bore a striking resemblance to the young Traversed Bridge peered into the room curiously, and Traversed went to give him some sort of instructions.

Garrioch whispered to Rue, “No is a little hard on his son. The poor fellow can never live up to his father’s standards.”

“No doesn’t remember what he was like at that age,” Rue whispered back. Or maybe he does, she thought, and doesn’t want to be reminded.

They ate a bountiful dinner with the other adults, and then Softly Bent showed Rue to a shared sleeping room with five beds. Tired from the journey, she decided to turn in early, and fell asleep to the sound of music from the town square.

The next morning she got up just after sunrise and went out, intending to walk to the river. Early as she was, a crew of Manhu were already in the square, building a cone-shape wicker framework that towered ten meters into the air. She sat on a bench in front of the community center, watching them work with a sense of foreboding.

Garrioch came into the square, took in the scene, and saw Rue. He came over to her.

“It looks like they’re going through with it,” he said grimly.

“Yes,” she agreed. The workers were placing firewood and charcoal inside the conical framework.

“Maybe we should leave.”

“No,” she said. “Our presence may be a deterrent. There may be something we can do.”

He looked sick at heart, but sat down next to her.

All through the morning people came, carrying belongings to hang on the wicker pyramid, or to heap around it. They brought blankets and clothes, food and furniture and fishing tackle, baskets, birdcages, books, and baby cradles. Children contributed drawings they had made and toys they had treasured. Old women brought intricate embroideries, and craftsmen gave up their carvings and tools. Everything valuable, everything treasured, was added to the pile.

By noon it was a massive tower, and men on ladders were filling the upper tiers. Vigilant Aspire came into the plaza, leaning on Traversed Bridge’s arm. He brought her slowly over to the bench where Rue and Garrioch sat, and they rose to let her have their seats.

“Are you leaving?” Traversed Bridge asked the visitors.

“No,” Rue said, facing him with determination. “We are going to watch.”

He hesitated, taking in her expression, then looked away. “As you please,” he said.

He walked off to find some other people in what was by now a large crowd of two or three thousand. Rue watched as he led a group of four others into the community building. They emerged with each one carrying an artifact. The crowd made way as they proceeded at a stately pace toward the pyre. Each artifact was handed up to a man on a ladder, who attached them high up on the framework. Last of all, Traversed handed up Aldry, and the worker hung her at the very pinnacle of the pyramid. The sun flashed on her wings, spread like a silver bird.

As the ladders were taken away, some musicians started playing a song on reed pipes and drums, and the crowd gathered round, singing. When the song ended, the musicians threw their instruments onto the pile and drew back. Five men came forward with cans of kerosene and started splashing it on the lowest tier of the pile. The square was so quiet, a child’s voice asking a question echoed loudly, and laughter rippled through the crowd.

The five men soaked long-handled torches in the kerosene and lit them, then looked to Traversed Bridge for a signal.

Rue could no longer hold her peace. She pushed through the crowd to where Traversed Bridge was standing. “Traversed,” she said, and he turned. “For pity’s sake, stop this madness.”

His face looked set, like concrete. “You don’t have to stay.” Then, as she refused to move or back down, the emotion he had been holding back broke through his control. “You didn’t have to come at all. Why are you even here?”

“I did have to come,” she said. “I do have to witness, for my people. So you will know the pain you are causing us.”

“What about our pain?” His voice broke on the words. “Your people never cared about that.”

“Is that what this is really about? Revenge for wrongs we did to you?”

He drew a breath, gathering control. “This isn’t about you at all. It’s about us. Our chance to reclaim who we are.”

“By destroying everything you have achieved, everything you have to be proud of?”

He looked up at Aldry. “Even Glancing will live in our songs,” he said. “She will still be radiant in our memories. But she will be free. And so will we.”

Rue realized that the men with the torches were still standing by, waiting for Traversed to give them the signal. The entire crowd was watching silently.

He nodded for them to go ahead. The men turned and thrust the torches deep into the pile. The fire kindled right away, blue kerosene flames licking upward. The crowded square was utterly silent as they watched the fire climb higher and higher. Rue wanted to flinch away, not to see, but she forced her eyes to stay on Aldry as smoke billowed around her.

She felt Traversed Bridge take her hand, and she gripped tightly as she saw the portrait start to scorch, then blacken, then kindle. The flames were now roaring skyward, and they engulfed Aldry, hid her. Finally, the whole wicker contraption collapsed, and everything fell into one flaming pile.

There were tears on her face, though she didn’t know how they had gotten there. She wiped them away and turned to look at Traversed Bridge. His face was also wet.

“We have to leave now,” he said.

The whole crowd was moving, exiting the square. Traversed Bridge walked back to help Vigilant Aspire to her feet, and Garrioch came to Rue’s side. “Do you want me to bring the car?” he asked.

“No, I can walk to it.”

They found themselves caught in a tide of people, cars, and animals leaving the village. The narrow road was clogged, and Garrioch’s car could move no faster than the general pace. Several times they stopped to pick up elders whose legs had given out, or mothers carrying babies, until the car was full and people were riding on the hood and bumper.

When they came to the wide spot on the mountain where they had paused the day before to look out over the village, the crowd stopped moving. Everyone gathered to look out over their homes, and the bonfire still smoking in the center. Rue and Garrioch got out to see what was going on.

Traversed Bridge’s rental car brought up the last stragglers, and he got out to survey the scene. Then he took out his phone and made a call. Everyone was looking west to where the sun hung low on the shoulder of the mountain.

A puff of smoke bloomed from the midpoint of the dam, and seconds later came the sound of the explosion. A gap appeared in the concrete wall; then, slowly, the top started to collapse and water poured out. As the whole midsection of the dam crumbled, a massive brown gusher erupted. Gathering speed as it passed down the valley, it took boulders and trees before it, foaming as it washed toward the village.

At Rue’s side, Garrioch was groaning. “I can’t watch,” he said. She couldn’t take her eyes away. The water swept into the village, smashing buildings, engulfing the bridge, and spreading out to wash over the fields.

So much effort, so much progress, and now the Manhu were back to the poverty where they had started.

The reservoir continued to drain as the sun set, and the drowned valley fell into shadow. Everyone seemed to be preparing to spend the night where they were—lighting campfires, spreading blankets, gathering in family groups. Garrioch turned to Rue for guidance. “Should we leave?”

Rue looked around her. She didn’t want to abandon them all like this and go back to the city’s comforts. “If they can sleep on the mountain, I can sleep in the car,” she said.

He looked relieved—partly not to have to drive the mountain roads all night, but more so not to have to make a decision, she thought.

They dined on some nut bars and fruit chips that Garrioch had in the car; it was more than some of the Manhu had. Then, as night fell, people started singing around the campfires—lilting, happy songs that the children could join, and that masked the sadness.

Rue woke before dawn. The scenes of the day before kept running through her head. When the sky started to lighten, she left the car with Garrioch still sleeping in it. The mountain air was chilly, but the sky was clear.

She was not the only one awake. Out on the edge of the cliff overlooking the valley, Traversed Bridge was sitting, his back to the camp, looking out into the void. She walked over to join him.

Below, the place where the village had been was a sea of mud and debris, a brown wasteland. Nothing had survived. Upstream stood the breached dam like an ancient ruin.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He paused a long time. “No,” he said. “It’s hard to give it all up. But anything worth doing is hard.”

It didn’t follow that anything hard was worth doing, she thought, but left it unsaid. He already looked broken.

“What will you do now?”

“Start over,” he said heavily. “Or at least, my kids will.”

She was silent then, wondering how anyone could bequeath such devastation to their children.

As if hearing her thoughts, or thinking them himself, he said, “I did it for them. So they would never have to wonder if they were truly Manhu.” He looked up at her. “We don’t want to be like you people of Sarona, you Hoarders. We don’t want to drag our past behind us. It’s too heavy for us to bear.”

They fell silent again. The sun peeked over a gap in the mountains, lighting the valley below them.

“Look,” he said, pointing upstream. Above the dam, a large flock of birds was circling. They shifted course, then came down the valley, till they settled in a cloud on the flats where the village had been.

“Maybe they’re replanting our fields,” Traversed said, smiling.

Rue could almost see the flash of silver wings.

What good is the past?

The past is everything lost.

The past is never again.

The past doesn’t feed anyone.

Only the future does that.

Footnotes

1: From “The Song of No.” The storysinging of the Manhu is a competitive sport. One team of two members will challenge another of equal skill. The first team will sing the story till they come to a question, which is like a riddle. The second team must know the answer in order to continue the story and ask their own question. Thus they alternate as the story unfolds.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Hugo and Nebula Award nominated author of science fiction and fantasy. Her books include Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution; and Halfway Human, a novel about gender and oppression. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and others. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and appeared in numerous Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies.

Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant, currently doing work for the U.S. Capitol. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone who have continued to make this series possible! Those who backed and spread the word about the Kickstarter campaign, the authors who entrusted me with publishing their words, Elaine Ho for the original illustration, Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout, Ziv Wities and Kel Coleman for their help with many different things (even when not directly involved with this, being able to spread the publishing work makes a lot more things possible), 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 nominated The Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com), 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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