Author: David Steffen
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the sixth annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the previous 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 get them to more readersThe Long List Anthology Volume 5 collects 20 science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories from that nomination list, totaling over 450 pages of fiction by writers from all corners of the world. From deepfake girlfriends to death-defying magic
Publisher: Independently published

The Long List Anthology

Volume 6

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 6: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2020 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2019 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 by Jorge Jacinto © 2020

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

To a better world

Table of Contents

Permissions
Foreword
Give the Family My Love • A.T. Greenblatt
Beyond the El • John Chu
Articulated Restraint • Mary Robinette Kowal

I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married • Fonda Lee

A Bird, a Song, a Revolution • Brooke Bolander

The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power • Karen Osborne

Fisher-Bird • T. Kingfisher
How the Trick is Done • A.C. Wise
Lest We Forget • Elizabeth Bear
Shucked • Sam J. Miller

Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy • JY Neon Yang

Deriving Life • Elizabeth Bear

His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light • Mimi Mondal

Seonag and the Seawolves • M. Evan MacGriogair

Dave's Head • Suzanne Palmer
Nice Things • Ellen Klages
A Strange Uncertain Light • G.V. Anderson
Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark • Aimee Ogden
Erase, Erase, Erase • Elizabeth Bear
Glass Cannon • Yoon Ha Lee
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
More From Diabolical Plots Publishing

Permissions

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

“Give the Family My Love” by A.T. Greenblatt. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 149.

“Beyond the El” by John Chu. First published on Tor.com, January 16, 2019.

“Articulated Restraint” by Mary Robinette Kowal. First published on Tor.com, February 6, 2019.

“I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married” by Fonda Lee. First published in MIT Technology Review, December 27, 2019.

“A Bird, a Song, a Revolution” by Brooke Bolander. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112.

“The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power” by Karen Osborne. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Seven.

“Fisher-Bird” by T. Kingfisher. First published in The Mythic Dream, published by Saga Press, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted with permission of both the author and Saga Press.

“How the Trick Is Done” by A.C. Wise. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Nine.

“Lest We Forget” by Elizabeth Bear. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Eight.

“Shucked” by Sam J. Miller. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2019.

“Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy” by JY Neon Yang. First published on Tor.com, January 30, 2019.

“Deriving Life” by Elizabeth Bear. First published on Tor.com, January 31, 2019.

“His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light” by Mimi Mondal. First published on Tor.com, January 23, 2019.

“Seonag and the Seawolves” by M. Evan MacGriogair. First published on Tor.com, August 21, 2019.

“Dave's Head” by Suzanne Palmer. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 156.

“Nice Things” by Ellen Klages. Copyright © 2019 Ellen Klages. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Eight.

“A Strange Uncertain Light” by G.V. Anderson. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2019.

“Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark” by Aimee Ogden. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #271.

“Erase, Erase, Erase” by Elizabeth Bear. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2019.

“Glass Cannon” by Yoon Ha Lee. First published in Hexarchate Stories, published by Solaris. Reprinted with permission of both the author and Solaris.

Foreword

Here we are in the sixth volume of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List!

This year's cover art is an original artwork by Jorge Jacinto, who did a great job designing art with elements of both science fiction and fantasy.

This year we have a new member of the Diabolical Plots team: Ziv Wities has taken the role of assistant editor. For the purposes of this anthology he has helped with a variety of tasks for the project: researching artist portfolios, organizing Kickstarter rewards, proofreading, and gathering story information.

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, November 2020—

Give the Family My Love
By A.T. Greenblatt

I’m beginning to regret my life choices, Saul. Also, hello from the edge of the galaxy.

Also, surprise! I know this isn’t what you had in mind when you said “Keep in touch, Hazel” but this planet doesn’t exactly invoke the muse of letter writing. The muse of extremely long voice messages however . . .

So. Want to know what this world’s like? Rocky, empty, and bleak in all directions, except one. The sky’s so stormy and green it looks like I’m trudging through the bottom of an algae-infested pond. I’ve got this 85-million-dollar suit between me and the outside, but I swear, I’m suffocating on the atmosphere. Also, I’m 900 meters away from where I need to be with no vehicle to get me there except my own two legs.

So here I am. Walking.

Sorry to do this to you, Saul, but if I don’t talk to someone—well, freak out at someone—I’m not going to make it to the Library. And like hell I’m going to send a message like this back to the boys on the program. You, at least, won’t think less of me for this. You know that emotional meltdowns are part of my process.

850 meters. I should have listened to you, Saul.

And yes, I know how cliché that sounds. I’ve been to enough dinner parties and heard enough dinner party stories, especially once people learned that I’m possibly the last astronaut ever. At least now I have an excellent excuse for turning down invitations. “I’d love to come, but I’m currently thirty-two and a half lightyears away from Earth. Give your family my love.”

Of course, they won’t get the message until six months too late.

Wow, that’s depressing. See, this is why I told the people in R&D not to give me too many facts and figures, but they’re nerds, you know? They can’t help themselves. Despite best intentions, it sort of spills out of them sometimes.

And it’s not like I can forget.

750 meters.

The good news is I can actually see the Library. So if I died here 742 meters from the entrance, I can expire knowing I was the first human to set eyes on this massive infrastructure of information in person.

Oh god. I might actually die out here, Saul. Not that the thought hasn’t crossed my mind before, but the possibility becomes a lot more tangible when you’re walking across an inhospitable alien landscape.

Also, my fancy astronaut suit is making some worrying noises. I don’t think it’s supposed to sound like it’s wheezing.

675 meters. God, Saul, I really hope this mission is worth it.

Have I told about the Library, yet? No, I haven’t, have I? And I’ve only been talking about this, for what, years now? Well, you should know, it’s not what I expected. Which is stupid because alien structures are supposed to be alien and not castles or temples, like with steeples and everything. Shut up, Saul. (I know you’re laughing, or will be laughing at this six months from now.) I don’t regret reading all those fantasy sagas when we were kids. Only that I didn’t get to read more.

But you want to know what the Library looks like. Well, I’ve climbed mountains that feel like anthills next to this building. It sort of looks like a mountain too. An ugly misshapen mountain, full of weird windows and jutting walls. It’s shiny and smooth from some angles and gritty and dull from others. It gives me the shivers.

Which is not really surprising. This is an alien world with alien architecture full of all that alien and not so alien knowledge just waiting to be learned. More information than the starry-eyed Homo sapiens ever dreamed there was possible to know.

500 meters.

Saul, I’m getting concerned about my suit. My left arm isn’t bending at the elbow anymore. Not that I need my left arm to keep walking, but it’s a bit disquieting, in a panic-inducing sort of way. God, this was so much easier when all I had to do was rely on the Librarians’ technology to get me here. Now, I have to rely on humanity’s own questionable designs to get me this last kilometer. But that’s the Librarians’ rules for getting in. “You have to get your representative to our entrance safely through a most unforgiving landscape.” Turns out that outside of my very expensive outfit there’s an absurdly high atmospheric pressure, corrosive gases, wild temperature fluctuations between shady and light patches, et cetera, et cetera. Also, the ground is just rocky enough to surprise you.

I don’t want to think about what’ll happen if I trip. Can’t think about it. I wasn’t a physics major before, and this is not the time to start.

350 meters.

I mean, I knew the dangers signing up. I knew this was going to be the hardest part of the trip. (I mean, how could it not be? The Librarians figured out how to travel lightyears in a matter of months. And that’s just for starters.) But I was the best candidate for the job and I had to do something, Saul. I know you think otherwise, but I haven’t given up on humanity. This isn’t running away.

I wish I could run right now because now there seems to be a layer of fine dust coating the inside of my suit. Oh my god.

250 meters.

Shut up, Saul. I can hear you telling me in that big brother voice of yours: “It’s okay if you freak out, Hazel, just not right now” like you did when we were kids. And you’re right, I can’t freak out, because the worst thing that could happen right now, aside from dying, is having an asthma attack from the dust. Okay, okay, okay. I just need to keep calm, keep focused, keep moving.

175 meters.

There’s definitely something wrong with my suit. The coating of dust in my suit has gone from “minimal” to “dense” and I have no idea which piece of equipment I’m breathing in.

Don’t panic, Hazel.

Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.

Can’t panic. I’m picturing the R&D nerds when I tell them about this. They’re going to completely melt down when they hear that their precious design didn’t hold up as well as planned. Good, retaliation hyperventilating. Because that’s what happens when your best candidate for the job is an asthmatic anthropologist.

100 meters.

Okay, I’m almost there. I can see the door. This faulty, pathetic excuse for a space suit only has to last me a few more minutes. I just need to keep walking. Soon I’ll be safely inside and reunited with my beautiful, beautiful inhaler.

75 meters.

Well. Hopefully, they let me in.

So . . . here’s the thing Saul. The Librarians never actually gave us a guarantee that they would admit me. They said it was up to the Librarians who live in the Library. (Apparently, they are a different sect from the explorer Librarians that I met and traveled with and well, the two sects don’t always agree.) But the explorer faction gave me a ride here, so that’s got to count for something, right?

Thing is, this stupid suit was supposed to withstand a walk to the Library and back to the ship if I needed it. Looks like my safety net isn’t catching much now.

25 meters.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before I left, but I’m not sorry either. The knowledge that I can potentially gain here is worth the risk. It’s worth every cent of that 85 million and if I’m going to die on the steps, well that sucks. But okay, at least we tried.

10 meters.

I’m not sorry, Saul. Just scared.

Hopefully the Librarians let me in, but if you don’t get another transmission from me, you know what happened. Give the rest of the family my love.

Okay. Here we go.

• • • •

Have you ever been in love, Saul?

Yes, I know you love Huang. I’ve seen the way you look at her and she looks at you. But remember the moment when you looked at her like that for the first time and you thought, “Holy crap. This is it. I’ve finally found it.”

Yeah. The Library, Saul, is magnificent.

And . . . difficult to describe. It’s sort of like the outside of the Library. It changes depending on what angle you look at it from.

When I left the decontamination chamber (at least, I think that’s what it was?), I stepped into the main room and everything was dimly lit and quiet. The Library’s Librarians—which I later learned preferred to be called the Archivists because they are not the Librarians who travel the universe—were milling around the massive room. They looked similar to the explorer Librarians we met on Earth; tall, lanky, humanoid-like bodies. But they all had long, shimmering whiskers that the explorer Librarians didn’t (couldn’t?) grow out. Their whiskers went all the way down to their splayed, ten fingered feet.

The room was surprisingly empty except for these installations in the middle of the room that could either have been art or furniture. So you know, sort of like university libraries back home.

I was just starting to breathe easier, my inhaler finally kicking in after that walk from hell, when the light changed and suddenly I was standing next to this fern/skyscraper thing that smelled weirdly like hops and was a violent shade of purple. It became ridiculously humid and the room was filled with what I can only assume were plants. Even the Librarians—I mean, Archivists—changed. Now, they had four legs and two arms and were covered in this lush white hair.

I reached out and touched one of the ferns next to me and it was like touching a prickly soap bubble, which was not what I was expecting. But then again, I wasn’t expecting it to reach out and tap me back on the forehead either.

I think I swore. I’m not sure because everything changed again. Suddenly, I was shivering and standing on something like a frozen ocean that’s trapped an aurora in the floe. The air was nosebleed dry and smelled like rust and I could see pale things moving underneath the ice. The Archivists themselves had become round and translucent, floating a meter in the air.

And the room kept changing. It was terrifying . . . and completely amazing, Saul.

So there I was, gaping like an idiot, simultaneously too afraid to move and too busy trying to take all of it in. In my slack-jawed stupidity, it took me far too long to notice that two things didn’t change. First, the Archivists always kept their rubbery fluidity and their whiskers. And those little lights never moved.

Crap, I’m not describing this well. I forgot to mention the lights. There were thousands of them, like miniature stars, scattered seemingly at random around the room, drifting, hanging out in midair. I think they were what made everything change, because when an Archivist would go up and touch one with their long whiskers, bam! new setting.

So get this: When I finally mustered up a little courage and asked a passing Archivist what those lights were, they said: “Every known solar system worth learning about.”

I would say I’ve died and gone to a better place, but I’ve used up my quota of terrible clichés just getting here.

Wait, that’s not true. I still have one awful one left.

I stood in that room for a while, longer than I should have, but the truth is I was trying to work up the nerve to introduce myself to the head Archivist. But I never did because eventually they came up and greeted me. It was one of the most nerve-wracking conversations I’ve ever had. Between the steroids from my inhaler and pure, uncut anxiety, my hands were like a nine on the Richter scale.

You see, Saul, the Archivists are not to be messed with. Like seriously. Do not contradict them, raise your voice, be anything less than painfully respectful. They may look squishy, but they can dismantle you down to your atoms, capture you in a memory tablet, and put your unbelieving ass on a shelf where they keep all of the boring information that no one ever checks out. And they’ll keep you sentient too.

Or sentient enough. I hope.

Fortunately, my interview was fairly short. The head Archivist found me worthy enough, I guess, and gave me very, very limited access to the Library. When they led me to the section with our solar system, I sort of wished you were here Saul, so you could have taken a picture of my expression at that moment. Pretty sure you would qualify it as “priceless.” Because the size of this room, you could fit a small town in here.

And get this, the Archivist was apologetic. “We’ve only just begun to study you and we thought you would prefer to see our research in physical form,” they said, “Hopefully you can find what you need in our meager collection.”

Except, here’s the thing. They probably have more information on us than we have on ourselves.

Actually, I’m counting on it.

• • • •

Everything here is so strange, Saul. The light is too colorless and the air tastes weird. The walls and the shelves seem to bend slightly. It’s all new and deeply alien.

It’s wonderful.

The Archivists have set up something that’s not too different from a studio apartment in the corner of the section on sea coral. It has running water and artificial sunlight and all eleven seasons of M*A*S*H on a TV that looks like it came from the 1980s. I have this theory that my living quarters are part of some junior Archivist’s final thesis project, but I’m probably just culturally projecting. On the bright side, if they picked the 80s, they could have done much worse than M*A*S*H.

I’m sure in a few weeks I’ll start having terrible bouts of homesickness and will send you even longer, possibly more rambling messages questioning every life decision leading up to this point. But right now, being in the Library is sort of liberating. In a let’s-call-my-big-brother-because-my-new-studio-home-is-way-too-quiet sort of way.

Oh. I got your first message today. Remember the one you recorded six months ago, about three days after I left? I knew you were pissed, but wow, Saul. A backstabbing, alien-loving, wheezing, useless coward? You had three whole days to think of something and that’s the best you could do?

I know you didn’t mean it. I know you’re only half angry at me, half angry at our dying planet, and half angry at, well . . .

I got a message from Huang too. She told me about the most recent miscarriage. I’m so sorry, Saul. One day the two of you are going to be the world’s best parents. I believe that more than I believe in your international reforestation project, which is definitely going to work.

And I get how you think I’m abandoning you and Earth for a sterile, stable library, but I needed to come here. I have this working theory about the Librarians. Wanna hear it? Too bad, I’m going to tell you anyway.

See, the more time I spend with them, the more I’m convinced Librarians could have obliterated us if they wanted to. But they haven’t. In fact, they’ve put a painstaking amount of effort into studying us and making first contact with all the right people. Asking those people just the right questions like: “We managed to save the information before this university archive burned or this datacenter got flooded. Would you like to retrieve it?” Questions that convinced us to put this mission together.

Which leads me to believe they’re trying to help us.

I know you’re rolling your eyes, Saul. Have I ever told you that you always look like a moody teenager when you do that? Yeah, I know I have. But hear me out, I’m trying to tell you something important.

Please.

Do you remember our first big argument over this mission? You said that anyone who comes to Earth while in the middle of an environmental collapse can’t be trusted. I agree. Except, the first Librarian I ever met told me that the Library was built as a beacon for all sentient life in the universe. A place where researchers could come and learn about lost discoveries. And past mistakes.

I can hear you saying: “And you were naïve enough to blindly trust them, Hazel?” No, Saul, I’m not. Before I was picked for this crazy mission, I was just there to help first contact go smoothly, being one of the few remaining anthropologists who have studied interactions between vastly different cultures. I had zero interest in becoming an astronaut; space travel always seemed too risky and uncomfortable to me. But the Librarians were impressed by my commitment to cultural preservation. The space program was impressed by my ridiculously good memory. And I became convinced that if I didn’t go, someone else would eventually slip and we’d be adding “total societal collapse” along with “environmental disaster” to the list of humanity’s problems.

You see, Saul, there’s so much that I’m witnessing in the Library that I’m not telling you, because the Librarians’ advanced tech would devastate our underdeveloped society.

Which didn’t stop the people in R&D from telling me over and over again to take careful notes on everything I observe and send them the information on the down low, of course. I was sent here to reclaim any research and history that could help us save ourselves, but I think they’re hoping that I’ll learn about useful alien tech too. I’m tempted to send them a report that says: Sorry nerds, it’s all just magic.

No, Saul, not really. My official reports are going to be way more straightforward and professional. You know, double the facts and half the amount of sarcasm. But I think I’m going to keep sending these messages to you, for a while at least. All this is not actually why I “ran away” from home.

Really, it was just a good excuse to get out of commuting in Chicago traffic.

Just kidding. It was the Great Plains fires. There’s only so much smoke and ash an asthmatic researcher can deal with before she ships out.

Only sort of kidding.

I have a list of things I need to investigate for the scientists back home, but for now, I think I’m going to call it a day. Looking at the amazing amount of information around me makes me realize how much we’ve lost. How the Librarians managed to recover all this is a mystery I don’t intend to solve, but hopefully they managed to save the research I’m looking for.

Have I mentioned how much of this is mission is chalked up to hope?

• • • •

Hello, Saul, I’m lost. No, that’s not true, my memory won’t let me get lost, but I imagine this is what it feels like. The rows of memory tablets are identical, if you don’t pay attention to the Archivists’ annotations at every turn. I can’t actually read them because they just look like miniature sculptures, but I remember the small differences. The Archivists were kind enough to give me a basic map with a basic translation of where to find things. But Librarians’ basics and human basics are not the same thing.

God, I thought finding the research would be the easy part of this trip, but I might never find my way out of the single-celled organism section. So, give the family my love.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I do. You’re thinking: “How about you come home then, Hazel, and help me with these seedlings?” because we’ve been having this argument for what, ten years now?

No, not quite. Nine years, ten months, and twenty-seven days, since that first fight over dinner.

Yeah, Saul. My memory is my own worst enemy sometimes.

By the way, I got your second message today. Apology accepted. But I can’t come back, Saul. I barely started my information recovery project. Some good stuff got destroyed this last decade.

Like Dr. Ryu’s research. If I can find it. If it’s here at all.

God, this message is depressing. Hey, here’s something cool I learned today; the kitchen cabinets produce whatever food I’m thinking about and the twenty some blank books in the living room become whatever I want to read. It really is like magic. Everything a human needs and all the books a girl can want.

I’m not coming home, Saul.

• • • •

Well, it’s been a week and while I still haven’t found Dr. Ryu’s research, I’ve found plenty of other interesting things here. Like patents and working concepts of solar powered vehicles and papers on regenerating corn seed that needs two times the amount of CO_2 for photosynthesis. We had so many opportunities to stop things before they got terrible, Saul. And we missed them all.

Honestly, the wealth of information here is mind-blowing. The Librarians are like the universe’s most organized hoarders. They’ve saved everything from road construction projects to packing and advertising protocols for the garment industry. And get this, every time I activate a memory table, the information is projected around me. Sometimes the entire aisle transforms and I literally get lost in my work. Which is why there’s been a long gap since my last message. Sorry about that, Saul.

Don’t laugh, but I spent all of yesterday in the children’s literature section. All the stories there came to life too; old houses covered in vines and chocolate factories and little engines that could. It was fantastic, Saul. And completely depressing. Because as I sat there surrounded by those hopeful stories, it hit me that your grandchildren might not even know these stories exist. Yes, I know you disagree. But I’m a learned anthropologist and a general pessimist and I’m scared.

I asked an Archivist if this is how they store all their information. They asked if I’d be offended if they laughed and showed me the memory tablet that contained all the knowledge of the Library. It was about the size of a paperback romance novel.

“Our information would be inaccessible to you otherwise,” the Archivist explained. “All of your search engines are either too crude or too biased.”

“But didn’t this take you forever to build?”

“No,” they said, but I must not have looked convinced. “Magic,” they added.

Saul, I think the alien race of information scientists are listening to these recordings. So whatever you do, don’t reply back with anything you don’t want recorded for posterity.

“Why is the Library so large then?” I asked.

And here’s where the story gets really depressing, Saul.

They told me that once this planet, the inhospitable place that’s just a wasteland and a massive Library now, was full of life. There were once billions of Librarians. Now, there’s only a few thousand. Before they became the masters of information science of the known universe, the Librarians ended up destroying their planet too.

The first Librarians I ever met told me the Library is a beacon for sentient life in the galaxy, except now I know it’s not just a beacon for other species. The reason why the Library’s so big, Saul, is that most of the Archivists and Librarians live here too.

They couldn’t save their planet either.

I can hear you asking me why I bothered coming here if I’m going to be stubbornly bleak about the future and it’s not an easy thing you demanded, brother mine, and I’m trying to tell you in my circular, rambling way, that I . . .

I . . .

Saul. I need to call you back. I think I finally found Dr. Ryu’s research.

• • • •

I’ve got it, oh my god, I’m so relieved. It was a fight to get it, though. No, Saul, I’m not exaggerating. Stop rolling your eyes.

Remember when I said the Archivists could keep their information sentient? Well, she was sentient enough, Saul.

When I accessed the memory tablet, the researcher herself appeared so real and sharp I could see the gray strands in her hair and the clear gloss on her fingernails. She didn’t look thrilled to see me and I should’ve taken it as a warning, but I was way too excited.

“Are you Dr. Yumi Ryu?” I asked. (Gushed would be more accurate.)

“Up to the age of 53,” she answered.

“Amazing! It’s great to finally meet you, Dr. Ryu. I want to ask you everything. What’s it like being archived by the Librarians? No, wait, can you tell me about your reforesting research first?”

For some reason, Saul, my rambling didn’t put her at ease. “Why?” she asked, her expression suspicious.

“Um, well, because the news back home isn’t good. Most of the North Pacific rain forest has been destroyed by a combination of drought and wildfires. Including your original research at UBC.”

She didn’t seem surprised by this, just sad. “And where is your team, Ms. . . . ?”

“Hazel Smith. It’s just me.”

She frowned, the suspicion on her face growing. “They sent a single astronaut? Why?”

“Resources and funds. Both are extremely limited these days.”

“Why you then?”

“Because I’m a researcher too, Dr. Ryu, and I’m dedicated to preserving human society. Also, because I have an extraordinary memory, especially for data and details, and don’t need batteries.”

Ryu arched an eyebrow. Out of nowhere, a memory tablet about the size of a romance novel appeared in her hands. She stared it intently.

“What are you doing?” I asked, not getting a good vibe from this.

“Reading your articles, academic and otherwise. Being part of the Library, Ms., excuse me, Dr. Smith, means I can check out materials too.”

Suddenly, I knew how this conversation would go. It would be like those awful dinner parties that ended in silent awkwardness when people asked why I didn’t have kids. But there was nothing I could do, except try not to chew on my fingernails. In all of human culture, there’s nothing more uncomfortable than standing there while someone else reads your work.

But if anthropology has taught me anything, Saul, it is that human beings can always surprise you.

“Wow,” Dr. Ryu said and the tablet disappeared from her hands. “You have a depressing view on human nature.”

I’ve always hated having this conversation, so I stuck my hand in my pockets and said: “I’m just going off history.”

She nodded. “For what it’s worth, I agree.”

Color me stunned, Saul. “So will you tell me about your research?”

Ryu stared at me hard, with that critical eye that only people who spend too much time in labs analyzing details can pull off.

“No,” she said.

No. That’s what she really said. After traveling thirty-two and a half lightyears for research like this. I won’t lie, Saul, for a brief second I considered smashing the memory tablet.

“You serious?” I said.

“Yes, Dr. Smith. I’ve spent most of my professional career fighting politicians, big businesses, home developers, farmers. Anyone who didn’t like the idea of giving up their land and returning it to forests, to try to reverse some of the damage we’ve done. I can’t tell you how many times people tried to destroy this research.”

“I’m not here to destroy anything, Dr. Ryu. I’ve given up too much for that.”

“And what did you give up, Dr. Smith?”

“Earth. Everyone I know and love. I’ve risked my life for this information!” I said. In hindsight, maybe a little too defensively.

“No, that’s running away,” she replied. Yeah, she really said that to me, Saul. “Why are you really here?”

I sighed and used your classic line. “Because it’s hope for the future that keeps us going.”

“And who do you have hope for, Dr. Smith? Because from what I’ve read, you don’t paint a hopeful picture.”

I didn’t know what else to do. So, I told her, Saul. Everything I’ve been trying to tell you.

• • • •

There aren’t many defining moments in my life. Mostly, I think defining moments are clichés in hindsight. So maybe this is too, but do you remember that summer, ten years ago, when everything burned? Yeah, hard to forget.

I’d just gotten my first master’s degree and wildfires in northern Washington were raging, and there was a trail you could take up a mountain that was still a safe distance away, but you could witness the worst fires in history firsthand. It was only an hour drive from campus. And I was frustrated and scared, but also curious. So I figured what the hell.

I took this guy with me. No, you’ve never met him, Saul.

We walked up that mountain together, though the ash made for awful traction.

It wasn’t love and we both knew it. That was one of the many, many rules I broke to myself that summer. But I liked him and he liked me. And in that moment, that was enough. Good enough. The world was on fire and right then, I was too grateful to have someone who would climb a mountain with me just to watch the world ending.

Mortality makes you reckless sometimes, Saul.

Eventually the smoke got so bad that my asthma couldn’t take it. He practically carried me back down.

Two months later, he went back home to Colorado, where there were a few trees left and I spent that fall sobbing and wheezing. Which made sense when I took a pregnancy test.

I chose. And I don’t regret that choice, Saul. Except three days, eighteen hours, and twelve minutes later, you called and told me about the first child you and Huang wouldn’t have after all.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, Saul. But I’m not sorry either. I was twenty-three, and though I could repeat back textbooks verbatim, I consistently lost my keys and forgot to eat. And after that summer, it was hard to see myself with a future and much less, a future for a kid. I know you’re disappointed in me because you believe that no opportunity should be wasted. You think every life, even the cockroaches in the shed, should have a go at it. You’ve always believed in a future on Earth, Saul. Where I saw ashes, you saw fertile soil.

That’s what I told Dr. Ryu. I told her all about you and Huang and your relentless perseverance and hope. I think she saw a kindred spirit in you or maybe just the right strain of stubbornness. So, she agreed to share her research with you. We’re going to transcribe a little every day. Her memory tablet makes the Library’s aisles transform into thriving forests. It is truly beautiful.

Consider this part one of my gift to you, Saul, because like hell am I going to apologize for the choices that brought me here.

Part two is that one of the benefits of becoming the last astronaut was getting a ridiculous stipend from the government. Well, more like a life insurance payout, because I’m going to be here for a long time. Hopefully not forever, but there’s a lot of lost information here and the Archivists apparently are used to long-term guests.

I told you I had one last, terrible cliché and it’s the worst one of all. The one where the astronaut doesn’t come home.

Saul, I want you to use that money to start that family you and Huang always wanted.

Honestly, I’m still not convinced we can save Earth, but you are, and that works for me. So, I’ll keep searching and sending home the information I find and maybe, between the two of us, that’ll be enough.

So, give the family my love.

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she's known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year's Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt

Beyond the El
By John Chu

This is how Connor renders a pot sticker in paper: He crinkles and crumples a circle of white construction paper until it is soft and pliable. The circle is large enough that a tangled ball of shredded paper fits inside with enough room for a generous lip. And it needs to be generous because, unlike dough, paper doesn’t stretch. The ball doesn’t have the heft of a mix of jiucai and ground pork, but it will still push out against the paper once it is folded. He rings the paper with glue, not water as he would have with a circle of hot-water dough. Carefully, he folds the paper over and presses down on the edges to form a lip around the semicircle. Glue seeps out, which he dabs away with a small towel. This obviously never happens with water on hot-water dough. Fold by fold, he crimps the lip so that the semicircle is now a plump crescent. With hot-water dough, folds would just stick together, but this is paper. The folds accordion, and he dabs each with a droplet of glue then presses them all flat. The work is meticulous. When he’s done, the body isn’t the right sort of plump and it doesn’t dimple in the right way. The technique, though, is sound. It takes minutes to make each pot sticker. He makes three.

This is what Connor does with three pot stickers made of paper: He stuffs them into a cracked mug. The match hisses when he strikes it against the matchbook cover. It bursts into flame and, when it touches the pot stickers, the flames spread. Golden tendrils reach up, covered by wisps of smoke. The pot stickers blacken and shrivel into the mug. Unlike the first seven times Connor has done this, he’s remembered to open a window and take the battery out of the smoke detector. A piercing beep does not slice his ears. The faint haze in the kitchen clears.

It’s not that Connor believes his mom will actually get the dumplings or even that his mom is out there somewhere waiting for burnt offerings. The economy of the afterlife if it existed would have to be pretty screwed up, with people burning paper representations of money and planes and cell phones. Still, he wants to show her he’s learned how to shape a dumpling, even if he still hasn’t figured out the exact filling his mom made.

• • • •

The band singer’s voice is this slinky, sinuous thing, a voluptuous baritone that nestles around every word he sings. It’s almost enough to distract Connor from the singer’s broad shoulders and the graceful taper to his waist. Those could just be gifts from the singer’s elegantly tailored suit, but Connor has also seen him with the jacket off, bowtie unraveled, collar unbuttoned, and sleeves rolled up. If anything, the suit hides the singer so Connor can pay attention to the song. Connor knows the handsome band singer’s name, Nick, but he’s better off thinking of him as the handsome band singer.

To the customers in the restaurant, the handsome man crooning jazz standards and the piano and bass backing him are just set dressing. Nick could be declaiming Wagner or heavy metal and only one who’d notice would be Connor. Everything on the singer’s tiny stage is just a backdrop to the real show, the food.

Meals are prepared at the table. Diners in exquisitely tailored dinner jackets and impeccably fitted gowns sit at small round tables. Servers dressed in crisp white shirts and pleated black trousers fulfill their every whim. At one table, a diner’s steak, already patted dry, its flavors already adjusted, sits uncooked on a plate. White streaks of fat alternate with dark red streaks of muscle. The server passes her hand slowly over the steak. It transforms from raw to medium-rare. Clear juice seeps out and is reabsorbed at the server’s command. Another slow wave of her hand and the steak is seared on both sides. At other tables, teams of servers work together to transform and plate ingredients in a strict timeline lest a foam collapse or an ice melt before it can be savored.

Connor is back of house, prepping. Servers sweep in and out. They place orders and carry away plates loaded with the prepped materials they will transform before their diners’ eyes. The band singer’s song is a sinuous thread weaving through the thud of knives, the whir of motors, and the staccato bursts of servers’ calls and preppers’ responses.

A pile of carrots sits at his prep station. It doesn’t even take a glance for him to know how each carrot will taste. One by one, he takes each carrot and adjusts it to its bliss point, that place where it is the most like itself. He crisps its texture, adjusts its color, and intensifies its flavor. Some days, rather than hitting the bliss point, his job is to layer in the bite of pepper or the decadent unctuousness of foie gras. Today, though, all he has to do is make them all the perfect carrots everyone desires but no one can grow. That’s not anywhere near the limit of his abilities. If you leave the trade and then return, though, you start back at the bottom. Leaving to take care of your catatonic mother may be laudable, but also irrelevant. So, instead of working out on the floor, what he does for now is rewind time. Stopping time is impossible. All things fall away from their bliss points as they inevitably decay and rot.

The maître d’ strolls up to him as he is chopping, replenishing the mise en place, making it fresher than fresh. She’s never back here. Connor can feel her gaze bear down on him, but she waits until his knife no longer blurs before she says anything.

“You’ve been requested, Connor. Get into your service uniform.”

“Can they do that?” Connor turns to catch the sous chef’s gaze. She nods back at him. “And with no notice?”

“Well, you’re overqualified for back of house. And if they pay enough . . .” The maître d’s wry smile tells him all he needs to know. “You understand tonight’s menu.”

It’s not a question, but Connor still rolls his eyes. He has been preparing this menu literally all night. Besides, with a couple exceptions, this restaurant isn’t that ambitious. And no one orders the ambitious items.

“Good.” She pats Connor on the back. “Go get changed.”

The customer sits at the most sought-after table in the restaurant. It’s in a private but spotlighted corner. Noise-canceling hardware embedded in the walls puts the customer in her own private world. Whoever serves her, though, is performing for the entire room. Servers draw straws to avoid this table. Sitting at this table with no advance notice must have cost quite a bit to soothe the ego of whoever originally reserved it.

Connor is now dressed in his crisp black-and-whites. As he crosses toward his customer, the band singer starts into Bernstein’s setting of the Ferlinghetti poem, “The Pennycandystore Beyond the El.” A jazzy piece of atonality, this is less crooning for atmosphere than the band singer flashing his expensive conservatory training. The band singer’s eyes sparkle as his gaze meets Connor’s. A smile spreads across the band singer’s face. Connor can’t help but think the band singer is singing just for him. It’s a fantasy he knows he should bury, but he can’t.

The fantasy shatters when he sees who has requested him. His sister sits at the table alone, her back to the corner, browsing the menu.

Somewhere, right now, a garage door is rattling open and a young boy perks up because it means his big sister has to stop beating him. Their parents cook—not craft—the sweet and fried stuff Americans expect when they think “Chinese food.” Americans expect “Chinese food” cooked by the Chinese to be cheap, so his parents run the restaurant without employees to help them and they work twelve-hour days. Their children go off to school before they wake and are ready for sleep by the time they come home. Sometimes, they are too late and the young boy has already fallen asleep. There are many weeks where the boy sees his parents only on the weekends. His parents have no choice but to leave it to his sister to raise him by herself. This is a lot to lay on a thirteen-year-old girl. None of her friends have to raise their kid brothers. If she thinks having her kid brother dumped on her full-time is unfair—even if it does not justify beating him—she has a point. The rattling garage door means their parents are practically home. His sister never hits him when their parents are at home.

When Connor was that boy, perking up just made his sister angrier maybe because it meant he’d get away with it. He still has no idea what “it” was. Changing the channel on the TV, not changing the channel on the TV, pouring a glass of soda for himself but not also for her, pouring a glass of soda for himself and also for her: all got him beaten. Telling their parents what she was doing really got him beaten. She never left any bruises, though, and their parents never believed their angel could ever lay a hand on him. Then again, that was also what they needed to believe.

Connor’s gut roils as he approaches the table. His sister has pulled any number of stunts on him, and this could be yet another one. He has always gotten the impression that her stunts fill some need in her that he can’t understand. Her best—or worst—stunt to date was to fire Mom’s part-time healthcare assistant once Connor had agreed to move back and take care of Mom part-time. It would have looked bad to the relatives back in Taiwan, his sister insisted, for someone outside of the family to take care of Mom. He couldn’t afford to hire an assistant by himself and his father—Connor knows people his age with grandparents who are older than his father—could barely take care of himself. So, Connor ended up taking care of Mom full-time instead. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t relieved when she finally did die, even if being relieved makes him a monster.

The urn with Mom’s ashes has been sitting on the mantel of his sister’s fireplace for months now. That it’s taken his sister this long to show up is downright sporting. She might really just be here for dinner. That flicker of hope is completely unwarranted, but he can’t help himself.

“Prue.” Connor stands in front the table. For her, he’s careful to iron all inflection out of his voice.

“I need you to renounce your citizenship.” She says this as casually as someone who liked him might say hello.

And hope dies again. Connor, though, does not miss a beat. He is a food-crafting machine.

The request for her order falls smoothly from his mouth. She orders the most outrageous thing on the menu, the scale-accurate model of the Chrysler Building. It’s only there to make everything else look reasonable and affordable. He is aghast, but he merely nods and smiles. His heels click, his body pivots, and he’s gone to the kitchen to gather the ingredients before he realizes he’s even moved.

The raw materials that will become the Chrysler Building fill both tiers of his cart. Inertia gives it a mind of its own as he steers it around the tables in the dining room. The maître d’ stops him.

“Sure you want to do this by yourself? I hear the staff here is top notch.” The maître d’s gaze flicks over to the handsome band singer. “Besides, you already have his attention. Showboating isn’t going to make him notice you more.”

The Chrysler Building normally takes five servers and three table bussers to pull off. Conner isn’t building it by himself to prove anything to the handsome band singer, not that he’s against showing off to him. In the moment of reflection before he responds, he realizes he’s not even doing this to prove anything to himself. If the customer were anyone but his sister, he might have put a crew together and put up with their help.

“No, I can do it.” He wants to push on, but the maître d’ reaches for his arm.

“Obviously, but that’s not the question.” Her smile is warm and still something Connor’s not used to. “Do you want to do this by yourself? There’s a crew of trustworthy servers and table bussers who’ll help you in any way you ask.”

“I don’t think that’s the question, either.” Connor pushes on and, this time, the maître d’ lets go.

Prue smirks when she sees the cart. Something tightens inside Connor, but he forces her expression to pass right through him.

The Chrysler Building is a deconstructed paella composed of discrete floors that become ever lighter and more delicate as they approach the building’s crystalline spire. Garlic and saffron perfume the air as he prepares all the layers from the grouper at the bottom to the clear tomato distillate at the top at once. Various proteins transform from raw to poached as a deft gesture of his hand lifts them off their plates. At a glance, a pot of water begins to simmer and the water is infused with flavors from fish bones and shrimp shells. Within minutes, the water is transformed into savory stock. Grains of rice swirl about an invisible center. They swell and congeal as they absorb the stock that he makes rain down on them. Meanwhile, with another deft gesture, tomatoes dissolve then evaporate. Their clear condensate drips into a gelatin that Connor has crafted in the meantime.

Sweat trickles in tiny beads down Connor’s face and back. The building’s foundation, impeccably poached grouper glued into a slab, quivers on a gold-edged plate. As he lowers the next layer, Prue slides documents onto the table.

“Durable power of attorney.” Prue offers Connor a pen. “Sign it.”

For a moment, Connor’s torso stiffens, his back ramrod straight. His rib cage shrinks but doesn’t expand again. Whatever’s inside twists. Asking him to renounce his citizenship was just a bit of anchoring, then. It’s the same trick the restaurant pulls when they put the Chrysler Building on the menu. Prue might want Connor to renounce his citizenship, but signing a durable power of attorney sounds so much more reasonable in comparison. Not that letting Prue act on his behalf in legal matters is a good idea. She still hasn’t told him what this is about. Then again, he also hasn’t asked.

He just keeps on multitasking. Everything has to happen at just the right moment or else some emulsion will fail to set properly or some foam will collapse. This is why it takes a team to build the Chrysler Building, or would if he weren’t so intent on proving himself to the uncaring audience. Prue sets her pen on the document. As he continues to craft, she just sits there, her arms folded across her chest, waiting.

He falls behind, of course. Not even when he was at his best could he maintain a stock at its bliss point, stabilize a foam, and place a slab of emulsion on an increasingly precarious stack of them at the same time. The foams are stiffer than they ought to be. The transparent flakes of flavored rice emulsion are rough and coarse rather than straight-edged and delicate. He sets them in rows to create the spire with as much precision as he has time for. The rows, one overlapped on top of another, are almost the narrowing concentric arcs they should be. The triangular flakes don’t always point at the tangent of the curve like they should. The effect is not that Art Deco sense of utter craftsmanship. When one is just trying to prevent the building from sagging or, worse, toppling over, one makes trade-offs.

The spire floats just above the top layer of gel. With deft hand gestures, he guides it onto the clear tomato-saffron distillate. As he does, Prue grasps at the durable power of attorney. The papers skid across the table before she catches them. The Chrysler Building wobbles.

“Look, this is just so I can tell the probate court that you want your third of the estate to go to Dad. I know you don’t want it to go to me.” She rolls her eyes. “If you don’t trust me, get a lawyer to draft something that says the same thing.”

It takes effort to steady his breath. He is a rubber band being wound tighter and tighter. Prue hasn’t so much as messaged him since the funeral, much less mentioned Mom or probate. Connor saw Mom’s will once, but it must have been lost if probate matters. If they had the will, they’d just execute it. Also, some of Mom’s “estate”—their parents aren’t exactly rich—must be in Taiwan. Grudgingly, Connor has to admit that having a Taiwanese citizen—to the extent that that’s even a thing—take care of Taiwan probate might be easier. That doesn’t mean having Connor renounce his US citizenship and repatriate to Taiwan makes any sense. Giving his own share to Dad does, though. If anyone had bothered to ask Connor what he wanted, that’s what he would have told them. As best as he can remember, it’s also what Mom wanted in her will.

Connor sets the spire in place. The building hardly sags at all.

“Sure.” His voice is as smooth and level as any layer of emulsion in the building he’s just constructed. “I’ll mail it to you.”

“Excellent. Let’s settle up.” She pushes back in her chair. “Check, please.”

The rubber band snaps in two. It whirs as it unwinds. Its ragged ends flail where no one can see them. They slice the air, whistling with each strike. Their energy is spent in an instant and they lie limp in an unruly tangle.

“Very good.” He nods, all inflection ironed out of his voice.

With a click of his heels, he pivots to retrieve her check. His sister does not leave a tip.

• • • •

Connor sits slumped on a bench in the restaurant’s locker room. He’s half-dressed. His pants are unbelted and unzipped. His shirt hangs unbuttoned off his torso. Elbows braced against his knees prop up his body as he stares at nothing. Any number of servers and table bussers have asked him whether he’s okay as they changed out of their uniforms and back into street clothes. Connor merely croaks that he’s fine, his gaze still aimed at some point beyond the row of lockers he faces. They all look at him, their eyebrows rise, and they sigh before carrying on with their own lives.

He’s still sitting there like that when the handsome band singer shows up. Nick is half out of his shirt when he notices Connor. The shirt hangs off his body by one sleeve.

“Don’t tell me you’re fine, Connor.” Nick crouches in front of him.

“Oh. Hi, Nick.” Connor looks up for a moment, then breaks eye contact. “Congratulations. Now that you’ve passed the audition, are you leaving us?”

“Oh, that. It’s just the district audition. I still have the regional and, if I’m lucky, the national after that.” Nick shrugs. “I’m sorry some customer didn’t even touch your work.”

“Not some customer. My sister.” Connor is too tired to resist any longer, so he lets the handsome band singer fill his gaze.

For all the width across his thick back and the way his chest and arms pop, Nick isn’t built like some statue of Hercules. He’s soft enough to read as human rather than demigod. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he finally speaks again.

“So, that’s your sister.” His gaze narrows, his lips purse, and distaste spreads across his face. “Am I supposed to slap you now?”

“What?”

“You told me once that if you ever let your sister railroad you into anything again, I should slap you.”

“Oh, right.” He actually had said that. They chat in the locker room surprisingly often. “No, I really do want my share of my mom’s assets to go to my dad. It’s what she would have wanted. I just need to get a document from a lawyer to that effect that will hold up in court.”

Connor rolls his eyes at Nick’s skeptical gaze. The handsome band singer has heard too many stories about Prue. Granted, Connor was the one who told him all of them.

“Can you afford the consulting fee?” Nick stands and finally pulls off his shirt. “I can spot you the money. Pay it back when you can.”

“No. I got it.” Connor yawns. “They’re letting me pull extra shifts here.”

Nick’s gaze does not get any less skeptical. He goes back to his locker and pulls on a T-shirt. It manages to be both baggy and revealing on his body. Only now does it occur to Connor that he should change out of his uniform, too.

“Want a ride home?” Nick pulls on a pair of jeans. “You look like you’re going to fall asleep on the bus again.”

Back in civilian clothes, Connor shuts his locker. Now that Nick is fully dressed, looking at him doesn’t feel nearly as illicit. Nick, for his part, has chatted with Connor in every possible state of undress including naked. Illicit may not be how looking at Nick is supposed to feel.

“No, I’ll be fine.”

It’s cold out, and that’ll keep Connor alert enough to get on the bus. Sometimes, he gets lucky and he wakes up in time for his stop. Other times, well, he’s never not made it home.

Nick frowns again. He pulls on a thick coat. It ought to obscure the taper from his shoulders to his waist. It doesn’t.

“Look, if you ever want a ride—”

“I’ll ask.” And, after an awkward pause, he adds, “Thanks.”

“Well, safe travels, Connor.”

Nick slams his locker shut and leaves. His walk is jaunty, stepping in time to a sea shanty only he can hear. Connor collapses back onto the bench, but then forces himself back up and puts on his coat. It’s freezing out, and the bus waits for no man.

• • • •

The lawyer that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office recommended to Connor is three bus transfers away. It takes Connor several hours to get to her office. He shivers off the snow then hands the receptionist a check. The consulting fee has to be paid in advance.

The lawyer’s office is cozy and warm. A large desk sits between them. The lawyer is way more ambitious than he is. She leans forward, asking him to come back with documentation about his family and Mom’s assets. When it becomes clear that he can’t afford any more than this visit, she scribbles out something that her office will make presentable for him to give to his sister. Her reluctant expression and audible sigh screams “against my better judgement.” Maybe it’s just pity, but he’s not proud.

Shifts at the restaurant come and go. If Connor wants to chop vegetables and adjust the texture and flavor of meat for hours at a stretch, his fellow servers are happy to give up those shifts. There are a couple rough weeks where Nick is gone, preparing for and, ultimately, winning his regional auditions. More than once, Connor’s not sure how he’s gotten home.

The time Connor doesn’t spend at the restaurant, he spends in his own kitchen, a thin strip of linoleum flooring at one edge of his tiny apartment. Mom’s pot stickers won’t recreate themselves. The extra shifts at work now pay for flour, pork, vegetables, and spices. He figured out the hot-water dough a while ago. As winter thaws into spring, he is still puzzling out the filling.

The dough rests in a bowl covered by a damp cloth. In another bowl, he mixes pork, scallions, ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil by hand. A savory, salty meatiness with a slight jab of heat fills his mouth as the mixture squishes between his fingers. He frowns. The flavor is still not what he remembers. He tamps down the fire from the scallions as he works the ingredients together. In retrospect, he should have stuck with jiucai.

He rolls out the dough into a long snake. One by one, he rounds the small clumps he breaks off between his palms. Forming the tiny balls of dough used to be his job when he was too young to pay attention to how his mom made the filling. Just like he’s doing now, his mom would roll out each ball into a circle, put in a dollop of filling, then crimp the circle into a dumpling. When he’s done, several dozen of them form a neat grid on the floured table.

He crafts rather than steams then fries the dumplings. No one wanted Connor to spend the years training to be a food crafter. Well, except for Connor, but no one cared what he thought. Since he is a food crafter, though, there’s no point to not taking advantage of that. Whatever made Mom’s pot stickers Mom’s has nothing to do with a bamboo steamer or frying pan.

The dumplings bobble into the air. They plump with steam and are seared so that they all have crunchy, slightly oily, and savory crusts. Unlike anyone using a steamer and a frying pan, he can hit the bliss point exactly every time.

He slides a plate beneath them, then lets them fall. Juices dribble down his chin when he tries one. It’s fine, perfectly cooked even, but it’s no more than that. It doesn’t taste like Mom’s. They never do. He can diddle with the flavors. Hell, if he put his mind to it, he could make the dumplings taste like a crisp, tart apple tinged with cinnamon and cardamom. What he can’t do, at least not yet, is make them taste like the ones he remembers, the ones his mom made when he was fourteen when she wouldn’t show him what to do no matter how much he begged.

He pulls a journal out a drawer. The cover is tattered, and variegated pages paint swirls along the edges formed when the pages stack as the journal is shut. A bookmark sticks out the top. Each page has the flavor of a batch of dumplings he has made. This way, he never tries the same dumplings twice. He opens it by the bookmark to a blank white page. He scrawls today’s date on it, then infuses it with the flavor of this batch. Streaks of green flow down the yellowing page.

The journal goes back into the drawer. The dumplings go into a resealable plastic container. They’ve become surprisingly popular at the restaurant’s staff meals. Connor, however, can’t make himself eat them.

• • • •

The maître d’ hands Connor a notebook that has “Mom’s recipes” written in his sister’s precise handwriting on the cover. Connor’s hands shake so much, the notebook vibrates. His heart pounds. The notebook is probably not what it looks like but, as always, he can’t help hoping. He pushes past her and several startled servers, and nearly crashes into a table busser as he sprints out of the dining room.

Customers in their elegant dinner jackets and evening dresses wait in the restaurant’s lobby. They sit on overstuffed sofas and chat as they wait for their tables. Connor manages to halt his run just as he reaches them. He catches sight of Prue just as she pulls on the door to leave.

“What is this?” Connor is standing next to the maître d’s stand, holding the notebook out at her.

Prue turns around. She rolls her eyes and purses her lips.

“What does it look like?” Her head shakes in disbelief. “I thought you’d thank me.”

Her tone is sharper than any knife. Connor is convinced Prue doesn’t have any other way to speak. That said, the sharpest knives make the cleanest cuts. You barely feel them. They slide rather than tear through the flesh.

“So everything went okay with probate?” He clutches the notebook to his side. “My share of stuff went to Dad?”

“Oh, that.” She turns around and pulls open the door. “I got Dad to give his share to me. I’m in a better position to deal with it.”

She is out the door before Connor can collect himself. He just stands there watching the door close. The customers do an admirable job of chatting with each other and waiting as though Connor and Prue were not talking at each other from across the lobby.

“Are you all right?” The maître d’s voice takes Connor by surprise. “Take the night off. It’s not like you haven’t earned one, or ten.”

He turns to the maître d’, now back at her stand. A forced smile breaks his face.

“No, I’ll be fine.” He holds up a hand, as if to press her away. “I just need to get back to work.”

He rushes back into the dining room before she has a chance to respond. The rest of his shift is a blur. Customers are served. Water is transformed into seasoned beef stock then into a powder that is sprinkled on top of an emulsion of onion and gruyere that sits on top of parmesan-coated cracker. Veal shanks become their braised, tender selves and are infused with the flavors of tomatoes, rosemary, and bay leaf. Foams that taste of apple and cranberries float over a bed of puff pastry. Food seems to craft itself.

It hasn’t, because, after the shift ends, he is sweat-soaked, stripped to the waist, and collapsed on the bench in the locker room. The noise of slammed locker doors, zipped zippers, and chatty servers surrounds him. People ask him whether he’s okay as they pass by, and he tells them he’ll be fine in a minute. When he sits up, the locker room is empty. He takes the notebook his sister gave him out of his locker.

His heart starts to pound and his hands shake as he opens the notebook. The hope that bubbles in him makes him queasy. Years of searching and experimenting could be over in an instant because of help from, of all people, his sister. It’s not impossible Mom told Prue her recipes. Prue was the one Mom expected to be interested in cooking. It’s not impossible that Prue would write them down. Writing them down for Connor is a bit of a stretch. Passing Mom’s recipes down, though, would make her look good to their relatives.

When he reads the first recipe, the bubble of hope growing inside him bursts. He riffles through the notebook. The pages rustle past. Spare text in his sister’s airy hand is spread across each page. It’s definitely a notebook of recipes, just not their mom’s.

He snaps the book shut, expecting to dash it against the lockers. Anger is supposed to shudder through him. Instead, he laughs.

His arms squeeze the notebook to his chest. His laughter is a hand saw ripping through wood. Air leaves his lungs before it’s had a chance to enter and tears fill his eyes.

He stops only when he realizes he’s no longer alone. At some point, the handsome band singer, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, entered the locker room. Connor snaps straight, seated on the bench, the final laugh choked in his throat.

Nick’s gaze sweeps across Connor. It stops at Connor’s tear-filled eyes.

“What did your sister do to you this time?” Nick’s gaze is gentle, as though he actually wants to know. “Would you like a hug?”

Connor smiles as he wipes the tears from his eyes. He shows Nick the notebook.

“What she gave me is absolutely not a notebook of Mom’s recipes.” Connor sets the notebook on the bench. “You know how you can look at a piece of music and know how it will sound?”

“Oh, you can look at a recipe and know how it will taste.” Nick sits next to Connor on the bench. He pats Connor’s knee. “I’m sorry, Connor.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s weirdly well meaning, actually. Anyone else—well, maybe not anyone else here, but anyone else—might believe these are my mom’s recipes and stop trying to recreate them.” Connor shrugs. “That’s just the way my sister is. She’s never going to change.”

Connor starts laughing again. It’s more gentle this time. He’s hunched over, and his shoulders start pumping up and down.

“What’s so funny?” Nick picks up the notebook and starts thumbing through it.

“Mom’s dead. Probate’s settled. If I don’t want to, I don’t have to deal with Prue anymore.” Connor forces the next words out. “And I don’t want to. Does that make me a monster?”

“Then don’t deal with her anymore.” The smile on his face is kind, not cruel. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”

“Um, Nick.” Getting these next words out is like summiting a mountain. “Can I have a ride home? I don’t—”

“Sure. Any time. It’s my pleasure.”

• • • •

Connor doesn’t invite Nick into his apartment. He wants to, and Nick even looks a little disappointed when Connor doesn’t and just says goodbye instead. The apartment, though, is a mess. Besides, there’s something Connor wants to do tonight, and he needs to do it alone.

Nick’s car disappears down the street. It’s an odd thing, such a big man in such a small car. When Connor first saw it, he wondered how Nick would fold himself into the driver’s seat. Maybe he’ll ask for another ride sometime. Take another crack at figuring that out.

His kitchen is the one neat area in his apartment. His training is too ingrained in him for the kitchen to be anything but pristine. All the surfaces have been wiped down. Everything is in its place.

He opens a window. It’s spring, and the breeze that drifts in is not freezing. The battery pops out of the smoke detector with a practiced ease. He places a stockpot on the floor and puts into it: his dumpling journal, the notebook his sister gave him, and a lit match.

Journal pages char, curl up, and slowly become ash. The scent of steaming dumplings perfume the air. The smell is not the one he remembers from when he was a kid, but it still reminds him of watching his mom cook. She’d roll out tiny balls of dough, fill them, and crimp them so quickly, he never had a chance to work out how to make the dumplings for himself. She always refused to show him, saying she’d always be around to make them for him.

She, of course, will never make them for anyone ever again, and he needs to stop trying to recreate them. Prue, much as he hates to admit it, has a point. That doesn’t mean he won’t say goodbye to her, too.

The notebook pages catch fire. The burning paper smokes. Black rings eat away at each page. Grey wisps stretch up, tangling with one another as they go. A thread of bitter weaves itself into the tapestry of flavors.

Connor sits in front of the fire. Flames lick the sides of the stockpot. Individual tendrils dart up. The fire is a hungry creature licking its prey. The paper curls and shrinks with faint crinkles and crackles. Slowly, he breathes in the fragrant and the bitter as he watches his memories render into ash.

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com among other venues. His translations have been published or is forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Articulated Restraint
By Mary Robinette Kowal

MOON COLONY EXPANDS TO 100 COLONISTS

Sep. 26, 1960 (AP) — The International Aerospace Coalition announced today that the lunar colony, established last year, is ready to expand to hold 100 colonists. This is the next step in preparing to colonize Mars, although many still question the necessity of such an endeavor…

Six thirty in the morning was a brutal time to start work even without a sprained ankle. Ruby Donaldson tried to tell herself that being sore and exhausted was good practice as an astronaut. Limping up to the third floor of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, she gave thanks that no one else was in the stairwell so she could lean against the metal rail. It was hard enough balancing work and life without people questioning her choices.

All she wanted was to do the NBL training run and then collapse in bed, but somehow she’d agreed to another lindy-hop dance rehearsal tonight. It was just hard to disappoint a friend that you’d been dancing in competitions with since before the Meteor struck, and she didn’t have that many pieces of Before left in her life.

At least, the benefit of being a doctor was that she could diagnose and treat her own injuries. She didn’t have to risk getting grounded if she admitted to a flight surgeon that she’d twisted her ankle practicing a Charleston Flip. All they would have done was exactly what she did. Ice. Wrap. Analgesic.

As she came out on the pool level, the smell of chlorine met Ruby at the door. The massive football field–sized pool hummed with activity as dozens of divers and suit techs prepped for the run.

Wait— There were too many people here.

And there were four EVA suits on the bright yellow donning stands by the pool. There should only be two, because her run had been scheduled with just one other astronaut. All she and Eugene were supposed to be doing was a simulated spacewalk to work out the procedure for attaching cameras to the outside of the station.

Across the pool, Jason Tsao turned from where he was talking with one of the astronauts who had done a run yesterday and shouldn’t even be at the NBL today. His tie was undone and his cuffs were rolled up past his elbows. She had never seen the test conductor look even marginally rumpled.

What the hell was wrong?

He beckoned her over with his sheaf of papers. “Ruby, morning. Change of plans, as I’m sure you probably expected.”

She had missed something—a message left with her roommate, a briefing update, something—and whatever it was did not look good. She snapped into the sort of focus she felt in the operating room. “What sort of change?”

Jason’s shoulders tightened. “Sorry. I assumed you had seen the news.”

“I— I was out last night.” She had been dancing as if Before still existed.

He took a slow breath. “No one is dead. A ship returning from the moon had a retrorocket misfire while docking with Lunetta yesterday evening.”

“Oh God.” Scores of people worked on the Lunetta orbiting platform. People she knew. And Eugene Lindholm, her partner for today’s run—his wife would have been on the lunar rocket. Ruby played bridge with Myrtle and Eugene. She turned, looking for the tall black man among the people working by the pool. He was at the stainless steel bench, running through his checklist with tight, controlled motions. No one was dead, but if the Meteor had taught the world anything, death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to someone. “How bad?”

Jason glanced up as if he could see past the tall roof of the NBL to the space station. “The pilot of the lunar rocket could see coming in that they had a problem, so Lunetta’s hangar crew evacuated and the rocket’s hull is intact. We’re incredibly lucky.”

Ruby wiped her hand over her face, still stunned. They needed the station as a transfer point to get people off Earth. Damage to it would throw the space program back years. At least the four EVA suits made sense now. “And so we’re working on coming up with a repair procedure today?”

Shaking his head, Jason handed her the paperwork for the day’s run, which was the only thing that seemed normal. “We’re using the NBL to figure out the rescue and recovery plan. The impact warped the airlock and coupling mechanism, so the rocket is locked to the station and the airlock is jammed. We’ve got a team up on the station working on getting it open but want all possible solutions, because the people on the lunar rocket don’t have EVA suits.”

Ruby sucked in a breath that suddenly felt like a luxury. She knew the margins on consumables for the moon run. They’d been trapped since yesterday evening, so had already been on the ship longer than the IAC budgeted for, even with redundancies. “How much air and—”

“We have sixteen hours to figure out how to get them out.”

• • • •

The Lower Torso Assembly, aka space pants, lay on a cloth pad, ready for her. Astronauts did not, in fact, put their pants on like everyone else. It took two trained professionals and an astronaut wiggling across the floor to squirm into the LTA’s tight legs. Around the pool, three other astronauts were getting ready to do the same awkward floor dance. Eugene sat on the other side of the donning stand from her, his brown skin ashen above the white mesh of his Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, but he’d insisted that he was okay to do the run.

She’d do right by him and Myrtle. Ruby sat on her rump in her own mesh LCVG, with its lines of tubing wrapping around her body and no modesty. She grabbed the hard aluminum ring at the waist and slid her feet into the top of the legs.

And knew she had a problem.

A different problem than the fact that a score of her friends and colleagues were trapped in a tin can 254 miles above her. The tacky rubber that lined the suit grabbed hold of the fabric of her cooling garment. Ruby’s ankle twinged with a warning. She evaluated it. A mild sprain. She could work through that. It was swollen, but not enough to make the suit not fit. It would just be…uncomfortable. Ruby shoved her feet into the tight layers of rubber, and pain radiated white lines to her knee, sending flashes across her vision.

Ruby stopped, holding the suit and her breath for a moment. All right. The sprain was worse than she thought.

At best, it would eat twelve of the sixteen hours to swap her out for another crew member. Almost everything about the EVA suits was customizable and swapped around to fit the crew members who were using them. The tech suit staff must have worked all night to reset the two other suits for this development run. Dev runs were hard enough when mission control had enough time to build a procedure. Today there would be more winging it than anyone would like.

And if she couldn’t suit up? Since she was the shortest member of the astronaut corps, they couldn’t just plunk someone else into her suit. If they could have, they would have put in someone other than “the pint-sized Astronette” for this run. She’d been an astronaut for two years, with only one moon trip under her belt. Sure, she’d been top of her class, because at her height being the best had been her only option, but if they could have gotten a real astronaut like Elma York in here, they would have.

Heck, the only astronauts they could add on this short a notice had just finished a run yesterday so their suits were already customized. Those two had to be exhausted after six hours fighting suits pressurized to 4.3 psi under thirty feet of water, but Paul Charvet and Serge Broom had shown up with faces as grim and determined as everyone else’s.

The suit tech on her right glanced at her. “Everything okay?”

This was going to hurt, but once she was in, the simulated spacewalk wouldn’t use her feet. Much. She just had to get into the suit.

“Yep. Just getting my toes lined up.” Gritting her teeth, Ruby tried to keep her face placid as she worked her foot through the leg of the suit. The swelling in her ankle made it feel as if the rubber bladder was grabbing her deliberately. Flares shot up from the protesting muscles as if warning her to back away. She tried to breathe through the pain, and kept wriggling past the folds of fabric and rubber while the two techs braced the legs.

A fishhook seemed to embed itself in between the talus and tibia bones of her ankle and dug in deeper as she worked her foot down through the leg. The moment when her foot popped into the boot at the end made her gasp with relief.

She couldn’t speak so she gave a thumbs-up and held out her hands for the men to help hoist her to her feet. Thank God standard procedure meant that they braced her because she wasn’t putting any weight on her right foot until she had to. All she needed to do now was walk five feet, wiggle into the hard torso of the EVA suit where it hung suspended on the donning stand, and that would be the last time she’d have to put significant weight on her ankle until the run was finished.

At least that was one good thing about her lindy-hop training—she knew how to smile through pain. Under the best of conditions, you were sore at the end of an NBL run. This was just different pain.

It also helped that everyone expected astronauts to grimace as they forced themselves into the hard upper torso assembly. But once inside the HUT assembly, she could let the donning stand support her weight and lean against the frame while the suit techs put the rest of the suit on. It wasn’t that it was comfortable, because the o-ring joints at the shoulders of the suit pushed her arms forward a little and dug into her armpits, but at least the donning stand took her weight.

As much as she wanted to tell everyone to hurry, the old aphorism “slow is fast” applied here, too. They wouldn’t help the crew on the station who would have to do the actual spacewalk if they started making mistakes by rushing.

They’d done things right this morning, taking the time to do the pre-run briefing so everyone knew what their jobs were. Broadly, their job was to work out safe procedures in the relatively benign environment of a 6.3-million-gallon pool of water so that when her colleagues in orbit went into the lethal environment of space, they didn’t have to take any unnecessary chances.

Specifically, she and Eugene were going to see if a life raft was possible while EV3 and 4 attempted a maneuver to see if it was possible to run air and power to the lunar rocket. To buy time. Ultimately, if they couldn’t get the hatch open, the rocket’s crew would still need a life raft to transfer safely inside the station.

So Ruby forced herself to relax, conserving energy for the run itself, while the techs checked the cooling system and on so she would have comms in her suit. The helmet followed after that and slid a barrier between her and the world.

This was what things would sound like for the folks trapped in the ship. Even without a breach, they’d have their emergency pressure suits on, which would protect them from a vacuum but not the temperature extremes outside the ship. All their communication would be filtered by comms, which were distancing and intimate all at the same time.

In her ears, the comforting litany of mission control almost made it sound like people weren’t in danger.

And then the litany broke. “We can’t get a good seal on EV1.”

Eugene’s voice followed from where he stood behind her on the donning stand. “It’s probably just a gauge.”

“You know we can’t risk that.”

Ruby opened her eyes. There was nothing she could do, strapped to the donning stand, but if they couldn’t seal Eugene’s suit it would take on water in the pool. Myrtle was up there. “Eugene— There will be three of us in the pool. They can add you as soon as they get a good seal.”

His breath hissed in her ears, but she could hear his fighter pilot training. He was heartbreakingly calm when he spoke. “Copy.”

Jason’s voice joined the mix. “We’ll start the run with EV2, 3, and 4 and add him as soon as you get a good seal.”

With Myrtle up there, it had to be killing him to be pulled at this point.

“Eugene?”

“Yeah, Ruby.”

“I’ve got this.”

His breath caught for just a second. “Copy. I’ll be with you on comm until they get me in the pool.”

As she glanced at the clock on the wall, her stomach twisted. Fourteen hours remaining for the crew on the lunar rocket.

• • • •

Underwater, everything was blue. The big cylinders that made up the mockup Lunetta were punctured with even round holes to allow water to flow through. Cables snarled in ungainly swirls around the outside of the mock space station and the water pushed against Ruby’s suit, creating a resistance that she didn’t experience in space. Around her, support divers floated with bubbles drifting up from them, ready to help her compensate for the drag of water.

And she needed help. This was her third attempt to attach a spare expansion module of Lunetta to the aft end of the lunar rocket. In theory, with an oxygen pack and a CO_2 scrubber, it would serve as a sort of “life raft” for the crew inside the ship. Assuming she could find a path to get it there without getting snarled in cables.

“All right, EV2…” Eugene’s voice was steady on the comm, as if he were in the pool with her. “Look for handrail 1175.”

She had no idea where handrail 1175 was on the lunar rocket. If she’d stayed in last night, instead of going to the rehearsal, then she would have gotten Jason Tsao’s phone call and been able to prep for the change of plans. Or to at least familiarize herself with the lunar rocket in more detail. Grimacing, Ruby peered around the ship.

“Can you give me a big picture of where that is?” She hated to ask for help navigating but the distortions from her helmet and the water made reading numbers a little dicey. Myrtle was not going to die because Ruby had gone to a dance practice last night.

“Oh sorry. We’d need you to go to just aft of the starboard external payload facility.” Eugene’s voice was steady as he guided her in, because he’d done his homework. “Past the grapple fixture, down the gap-spanner…It should be sandwiched between two WIFs.”

When she’d started with the IAC, the jargon had been daunting. Now it wasn’t much different from “over the river and through the woods.” She hauled herself forward, looking through the distortion that her helmet caused in the water. Behind her, the tether for the “life raft” trailed through the water.

A pair of support divers steadied it to compensate for Eugene’s absence. In the real spacewalk, another astronaut would be back there with tethers to hold it steady while she moved forward. If EV3 and 4 weren’t tied up trying to simulate running air and power to the rocket, they might have helped. But it was on her and a faux EV1.

Finally, she found the handrail label sandwiched, as advertised, between two of the sockets that peppered the rocket’s skin. “Got it.” Ruby secured her safety tether, making sure that the black lines on the latch lined up. “EV2’s anchor tether hook is on handrail 1175. Slider locked, black on black.”

She secured a local tether as well, trying to stabilize herself in relation to the rocket. Once she was steady, she snapped the crewlock bag onto the handrail so that it was ready for her.

The final tether was the long one that trailed back to the life raft. “Transferring life raft tether to handrail 1175.”

“Suggestion.” Eugene’s voice cut in. “Use the aft starboard stanchion. Otherwise, the tether might trap your safety line when you pull the life raft forward.”

“Good note.” Ruby kept her voice relaxed as his. She should have spotted that. Carefully, she unhooked the life raft tether from her suit and transferred it to the stanchion. Turning carefully, she worked back along the length of the ship to face the life raft. Pretending that Eugene was in the pool, she said, “Life raft tether secured. New path looks good. Ready to leapfrog the life raft forward.”

“Copy, EV2. Releasing RET and moving toward you.” He wasn’t. A diver was mimicking his actions in ways that they would never do in a real dev run. But this was the best they could do. The suit techs still couldn’t get a good seal on his suit.

Hand over hand, she pulled the bulky rubber toward her, just as if Eugene were really on the other side of it to guide it down the length of the rocket. The action caused her to drift a little away from the handrail, until her tethers stopped her, just as they were designed to do. In space it would be more pronounced. “They might consider two local tethers to control drift.”

“Good note.” Jason’s voice was calm and cool in her ears. “Thank you, EV2.”

As the life raft drifted to her, Ruby felt a flush of triumph. With one stiff glove, she reached out to stop it next to her. “I have the life raft.” With her free hand, she secured a retractable equipment tether to the bracket on the side of the life raft’s grapple mechanism and unspooled the tether to snap it into place on the space ship. On the other side, the diver mimicked her.

“EV2…We’ll need you to place all the tethers to make sure that the positions are achievable in a suit.” Jason sounded almost apologetic.

“Copy.” The plan was to place four tethers to stabilize the life raft and then cinch it down to contact the side of the lunar rocket and engage the grapple mechanism. It made sense that they would need someone in an EVA suit, with its limited range of movement, to place all four. Looking down, she couldn’t even see the bottom tether. All things considered, she’d start with the hard one first while she still had some energy. “Working on the nadir tether attachment first.”

Ruby released the local tether, leaving her safety tether in place, and worked her way down to the bottom of the handrail. At the bottom end, she tried to snag the tether hook but the body position was bad. She had to twist her arm in ways that the suit really wouldn’t let her. The suits really didn’t want you to raise your arms over your head. Being upside down might work though…Grabbing the handrail, she rotated so that she hung head-down in the water. Better.

Kind of. The suits were neutrally buoyant, but inside them, she was dealing with 1-G. As blood pooled in Ruby’s head, she figured that at least her ankle was elevated.

Over the comm, Jason said, “Looks like you’re heads-down, we’ll do a check at five minutes and pull you at ten.”

“Copy.”

The life raft had drifted down in the pool so the grapple mechanism was masking the anchor point on the lunar rocket. Maybe she should have done the top tether first. Ruby tried pushing the life raft up in the pool, but the water resistance and gravity pushed down on it. In space, this would be easy, but in the NBL her muscles burned.

“Five minutes, EV2.”

“I’m fine.” Standard procedure be damned. Her sinuses were full and her head pounded from being upside down, but she could manage the discomfort. The body position was better for placing the tether, but the tube itself was fighting her in ways that it wouldn’t in space.

Ruby was so used to not complaining, because she was short. Because she was a woman. Anything she said would be seen as a failure on her part. But the resistance was an NBLism and not a problem the actual spacewalker would face, and people’s lives were on the line. Ruby sighed as quietly as she could on a live mic. “I could use a diver assist to support the tube.”

Like magic, one of the three support divers following her floated up and guided the end of the bag so that it floated in the water more or less the way it would in space. She stretched her arm toward the newly revealed anchor point, fingers aching as she fought the pressurized suit.

“That’s ten minutes, EV2.”

“Almost there.” The motion made her rotate a little. Damn it. She should have put the additional local tether in place to control her own motion. Grimacing, she tried to snap the tether hook in place and just missed. It slipped out of her clumsy grasp and floated away from her in the water. She held her curses inside.

“Divers, set EV2 upright.”

Biting down on the inside of her cheek, Ruby tried to relax when the divers gently pulled her back and rotated her upright so the blood could drain from her head. As they did, she slipped inside her suit and suddenly all of her weight was on her feet. Ruby closed her eyes, breathing through her teeth.

“Anything wrong, Ruby?” Jason Tsao’s voice snapped her eyes open.

“Nope.” In front of her, the support diver in charge of filming had his camera aimed at her face. Ruby smiled at him, so that everyone in the mission control room would be able to see that she was fine. They wouldn’t pull her out of the pool, not with lives on the line, but they would sure as heck note any struggles for future missions. “Just thinking through next steps. I’m ready to start up again when you are.”

• • • •

On attempt number four, Ruby had figured out a process that got the tube lined up, but still wrestled with snugging the life raft up against the ship enough to get a good seal. The grapple mechanism had been designed to be activated by pressure from docking. Attempting to exert that pressure manually was…challenging.

Biting the inside of her lip, Ruby fumbled with the thick straps while holding on to a handrail with one hand. Her own tethers stabilized her a little, but not enough.

Eugene crackled onto the comm. “Do you think an APFR would give you better leverage?”

Articulated Portable Foot Restraint. She stopped what she was doing and stared at the ship. The handrail she was using was between two sockets built into the skin of the lunar shuttle. She’d been using the solution as just a navigation point. All she had to do was use one of those two sockets to attach a foot restraint and free both hands.

And she’d been avoiding using a foot restraint because she’d been unconsciously avoiding pain. To get her feet into the APFR, she’d have to twist her ankle in and out of the restraint. Normally the MC trusted the astronaut on decisions like that during a dev run, to figure out what worked best for them. Ruby had been screwing things up because she’d gone dancing.

“Good call.” The silver lining to the number of runs they’d done was that she knew where the nearest APFR was stored. She’d passed by it at least twice during this run, which made it all the worse that she hadn’t thought of it. “Translating back over the river and through the woods.”

“If you’re reversing course, shouldn’t that be through the woods and over the river?”

“Pretty sure there are woods on both sides of the river.” Ruby pulled herself hand over hand to the port sensor array, which was, thankfully, within reach of her safety tether. Even so, fighting the water resistance made her arms burn with effort. In the back of her head, time ticked away. “I could have collected this on my previous pass, which would buy some time.”

Jason Tsao responded. “Good note, EV2. I’ll pass that up to station.”

He didn’t say “if this works” but the question hung in the water with her. Ruby attached a Retractible Equipment Tether to the foot restraint. Once the RET was secure, she pulled the foot restraint off the WIF by turning the collar and depressing the “petals” at the base of the post. The bayonet slid out of the socket. It was a ridiculous thing to feel triumph about, but at the moment she would take even small victories.

Turning to reverse course, Ruby swung her body through the water so that her feet trailed behind her. The water resistance grabbed her feet and seemed to slowly twist her ankle. Ruby locked her jaw and breathed through her nose. This was an acceptable level of pain but the translation back to the work site seemed twice as long. She didn’t have the energy for banter.

When she got back to the handrail, she snapped her local tether back into place. “Slider locked, black on black.”

Closing her stiff fingers around the foot restraint, she plugged it into the nearest socket. The litany of locking things in place continued. “Collar locked, black on black.” She wrapped her hands round the APFR to make sure it was seated correctly. “Good twist and pull test”

“Copy EV2.”

Ruby retrieved the RET and restowed it. The last thing she needed was to get snarled in something she’d forgotten to put away.

Adjusting her tethers to allow her to “stand up” perpendicular to the lunar rocket, Ruby put her feet next to the foot restraint. She slid the toes of her left foot under the restraint and twisted her foot to slide the heel ridge into the restraining slot.

Biting the inside of her cheek, she slid her right foot under the restraint and twisted it. It felt as if her boot was filled with broken glass. It wasn’t. She was pretty sure she wasn’t doing permanent damage to the ankle. Slowing down recovery time, yes, but even if it was permanent damage, at the end of the day it just meant she wouldn’t be able to dance.

But she’d still be able to play bridge with Myrtle and Eugene.

Ruby reached for the tether and yanked on it with both hands. Something in her ankle went pfft and snapped.

A small cry escaped. Ruby bit down hard. She would live, and so would the people on that ship if she had anything to say about it. Grimacing, she hauled on the tether until the tube snuggled up against the mockup station and the grapple clicked into place.

Tears streaked across her cheeks, and for once the 1-G was a benefit because the moisture didn’t build up in watery balls over her eyes. Ruby nodded for the camera. “Thanks, Eugene. The answer is APFR. With that, I can pitch back. I can grab the bag. Anchor it. I can maneuver my body and not have to pitch or roll with the handrail. Sorry it took so long to work out.” Her ankle throbbed with each beat of her heart. “What’s next?”

She hung in the water, listening to the sound of her own fans. Around her, support divers slowly turned the water with their fins while they all waited. Her ankle consumed the rest of her attention.

The line crackled as Jason came back on the line. “Let’s get you out of the pool.”

“I’m fine to continue.”

“Thank you, but we’re transmitting this part of the procedure up to Lunetta. We’ll let Paul and Serge dev the process of getting the tube back to the other end of the ship. It’s comparatively straightforward.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Ruby.” Eugene’s voice cut in. “I’ve played bridge with you. I know your tells.”

She opened her mouth, staring at the camera in front of her. “Right. See you topside.”

Her support divers swam up around her and pulled her away from the ship. In space, right now, someone on Lunetta was suiting up to go out and do this as a real spacewalk, not as a development run in a pool. Or heck, maybe they were all ready to go and had just been waiting for a viable solution.

All the mistakes that Ruby had made were ones that the real rescue team wouldn’t have to. The pool was hard. Space would kill you.

Ruby let herself go limp in her suit, watching the bubbles of her support divers stream past like flecks of snow. In her ears, the conversation with the other team continued as they kept working to try to mate an umbilical to the lunar rocket. She realized that she had no idea how long she’d been down.

When the divers got her attached to the donning stand and the crane hauled her above the pool, Eugene was waiting poolside. He still wore his Snoopy cap, with the comm unit in place so he could stay in the loop. His lower lip had a raw spot as if he’d been biting it constantly while she was under the water.

He could hear her if she spoke, but she waited until her suit was depressurized and her suit tech had her helmet off. She flexed her hands against the ache in the joints and met Eugene’s gaze as the tech pulled her Snoopy cap off.

Eugene took his own off and stepped forward. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell them to pull you earlier.”

“That was the right choice.” She shifted her weight to her left foot as her tech released the hard aluminum ring connecting her pants to the suit. “How long do they have?”

“Six hours.” He glanced across the room at the clock on the wall. “It’s enough.”

Ruby nodded and squirmed down, with a tech on either side to catch her. It was standard practice, but Eugene stepping forward, hands out, wasn’t. For the first time since she’d gone under, Ruby put weight on her right foot. Her head was still in the suit and the fiberglass interior seemed to light up like a meteor striking the Earth.

Hands caught her and the next thing she knew, she was seated in a chair, still blinking back tears. Swallowing, Ruby shook her head. “I’m fine—GAH!” The sound ripped out of her as the techs tried to pull the spacesuit pants down. Her ankle was so swollen that it caught in the boot.

Gripping the side of the chair, she panted until the spots faded from her vision.

The nearest suit tech toggled on his mic. “We need medical for EV2.”

She winced, but calling a medic was inevitable. “Not urgent. I aggravated a previous injury, that’s all.”

“Aggravated?” Eugene shook his head. “You’re going to aggravate me if you keep lying.”

“I’m not— Okay. I am. I’ve likely torn a ligament in my ankle. But y’all are going to pull these goddamn pants off of me because if the medic gets here first, she’s going to try cutting it off.”

The tech looked up, appalled. “Oh hell, no.”

“Right?” Ruby stuck out her hurt leg. “You are Go for removal.”

He looked up at Eugene, who grimaced and then nodded. Eugene stepped behind her and braced Ruby with his hands on her shoulders. Putting a hand on either side of the boot, the tech hauled back. Ruby managed not to scream, but if Eugene weren’t bracing her, she probably would have fallen out of the chair.

Beneath the mesh of her cooling garment, her ankle was swollen to twice the size it should be. Eugene whistled. “Aggravated a previous injury?”

“Sprained it last night.” Her entire leg was pulsing in hot and cold waves around the burning core of her ankle. It was past a sprain now, but Ruby tried to keep her voice military calm. “But…not really a choice, was there?”

“Thank you.” He squeezed her shoulder.

She didn’t deserve thanks. If she’d done her homework on other ships. If she’d not been avoiding using her foot. If she’d just had her priorities straight—hell, if Eugene had been in the pool, he’d have figured this out faster than she did. She’d been trying to fit too many things into her life and had come within a hairsbreadth of failing at all of them. Failing her dance partner was disappointing. Failing the IAC could have been fatal.

Ruby let her breath out slowly as the medic came barreling around the end of the pool. “Make a phone call for me? I have a rehearsal I need to cancel.”

And after that, Ruby was going to go home, curl up in bed, and study every manual she could get her hands on. No one was going to come this close to dying on her watch ever again.

She didn’t have that many pieces of Before left, but keeping them didn’t mean keeping them in the same way and shape. Lindy-hop could go back to being just a social thing. But where she belonged in life After the Meteor, was here.

Here, she made a difference. Sprained ankle and all.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Ghost Talkers, The Glamourist Histories series, and the Lady Astronaut series. She is the President of SFWA, part of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and a four-time Hugo Award winner. Her short fiction appears in Uncanny, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary Robinette, a professional puppeteer, lives in Nashville. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.

I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married
By Fonda Lee

I didn’t want a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong, I like girls—I just don’t have time for the hassle of dating right now. But I was at a family reunion last year and my parents kept making comments about me still being single: “Oh, he works too hard” and “He’s shy; he just needs to give himself some credit.” My mom was asking my aunts if they could set me up with girls they knew. It was getting to be too much.

So when I got home from the reunion, I signed up for a Worthy account. It was pretty simple: I filled out some information about myself, put in my preferences for gender and age, and in seconds I had an AI-generated virtual girlfriend named “Ivy.” She sent me a text: “Hi, I’m looking forward to getting to know you.” I texted back right away, “Me too, how’s it going?” and my Worthy score in the corner of the screen went up from zero to five.

You start by texting your virtual significant other, but as the relationship progresses, you can send and receive voice messages, go on virtual dates, and talk over video calls. You get points based on the quantity and quality of your interactions. Once I reached a high enough Worthy score to be at Level 3 (“Spark” level) in the program, I could upload photos and short clips of myself and Worthy would insert my virtual girlfriend into them. That would give me ammunition to tell my parents I was dating someone. They live in Seattle and I’m in Boston, so we mostly stay in touch via texts and photos anyway.

It’s not like I was being completely dishonest, either, because I would be getting dating experience. Just a lot more efficiently. Worthy gets you through the awkward, shallow online dating phase using an AI that teaches you to be a more emotionally intelligent romantic partner—which is what girls want, right? You don’t have to disappoint or be disappointed by a real person. And if you get too busy, you can just put your account on hold.

You have to treat the relationship seriously to get a high Worthy score, though. If you ask your AI partner how their day is going, listen to them, and send them virtual flowers on your “anniversary,” your score goes up. If you ignore them, talk over them, or say insensitive things, it goes down. Worthy’s algorithms learn your behavior and react realistically. So you can’t hack the system by sending virtual flower bouquets nonstop. The program will flag that as being insincere and your rating will take a nosedive.

Once you have a high enough score, you can transfer your account over to Worthwhile, which is the company’s actual dating site. Over there, you can see everyone else’s Worthy scores and they can see yours before you decide whether or not to contact each other. But I wasn’t thinking that far down the line when I started. I just wanted the photos and videos from Worthy to keep my parents off my back.

You’ve probably already guessed the big problem in this plan: When it comes to physical appearance, there are only 12 models of Worthy girlfriends to choose from. The AI uses your profile to design a compatible personality, and there are about a hundred name variants, but if you did an online image search for any of their faces, each one would show up next to thousands of Worthy users. The company could easily create more models, but they limit the number so they’re easily recognizable as Worthy girls (i.e., proprietary software). My parents aren’t very tech or social media savvy, but if they ever happened to see another photo of the same Worthy girlfriend model online, or if they were to share a picture of me and my “girlfriend” with one of their friends, my cover would be blown.

Luckily, there’s a deepfake app called FaceAbout that alters Worthy media files. It’s not approved by Worthy, but the quality is still really good and it works right in the Worthy interface with barely any lag time. It also doesn’t seem to have any of the glitching that happens in high-res video with the cheap deepfake apps. FaceAbout needed at least six facial photographs to make my Worthy girlfriend look like someone else. Scrolling through my phone, I found a bunch of recent photos of my friend Mikala (not her real name, by the way) from when we’d gone to Fan Expo together, so I uploaded those. My parents have never met Mikala, so I wasn’t worried about them questioning why two different girls in my life had the same face. All told, it took me about 15 minutes to set everything up.

**Edit: Yes, the FaceAbout app has a standard user agreement where you check a box stating you have permission to use the photos you upload. Pretty much every photo or video manipulation app has some disclaimer like that and no one reads them. Okay, I admit it’s maybe a little weird to use my friend’s face to create my fake girlfriend without telling her. But remember, I’m never showing these photos to anyone other than my parents. Mikala and I have known each other for years through online games, but we only recently discovered we live in the same city and started hanging out in person. She’s cool and no-bullshit and has a girlfriend of her own. I don’t want her to think there’s anything weird between us just because I’m using some photos of her, because there really isn’t.

My first few conversations with Ivy were pretty generic: “Hi, how’re you?” “Good, what you doing?” “Just got back from the gym.” That sort of thing. A few days later, I said I was going to see the new Alien movie next weekend, and Ivy sent me a photo of herself in a Xenomorph T-shirt standing outside a theater, sticking her tongue out at the camera. She texted, “Opening night, baby!”

It was Mikala’s face, of course, on a taller, slimmer body, and that weirded me out for a couple seconds. I knew it was a fake image, but it was still cute. We agreed to do an Alien series marathon. (“Watch a movie together” is one of the virtual dates you can choose from, along with “Cook a meal,” “Watch a sports game,” “Go for a walk,” and others.) While we were watching, she was texting me things like “RIPLEY GTFO FORGET THE CAT ALREADYYYY” and it was cracking me up even though I knew she wasn’t really watching a movie with me.

I sent Ivy a cookie basket. The cookies are virtual, but it still costs $11.99. Which is like a third of the price of a real cookie basket. That part of the Worthy experience is honestly a ripoff. I mean, it literally costs them nothing. But the next morning, I woke up to see photos of Ivy with this big basket of cookies. They looked really good, and Ivy looked really happy. She sent me a text filled with heart emojis.

**Edit: Since so many of you are asking the exact same question in the comments: No, the Worthy platform doesn’t have porn. You can have smutty conversations with your Worthy partner, but that’s it. They even delete nude pics.

**Edit: All of you asswipes making fun of Worthy users, saying what’s the point of a fake girlfriend without porn, are derailing the thread and need to grow up. BTW, all of Worthy’s girlfriend models are deepfaked on porn sites; they’re easy to find.

After two months, Ivy and I were texting every day. We’d been on six dates. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. My Worthy score went down after I belittled her taste in ’90s music, and then went down even further when my apology “wasn’t really an apology.” (It took me days of troubleshooting with the different suggested reconciliation routines to get back into her good graces.) But I finally saw my Worthy score go up to “Spark” level. I immediately used the app to take a selfie of myself in Harvard Square. When I checked my camera roll, there was a photo of me and Ivy together, standing in front of the old magazine kiosk and smiling into the camera. She was dressed for the weather in a cute red sweater and her cheeks were a little rosy from the cold. She looked great. She texted me, “I had a great time hanging out with you today. Let’s do it again soon. <3”

I told my mom I was seeing someone and sent her the photo of me and Ivy together. My mom was ecstatic. She told me she was “so glad I took her advice to get out and meet new people,” and that “life is too short to spend alone, you know!” My parents began asking about Ivy every time I talked to them. My mom wanted to know all the details—how we met, how old Ivy was, where she was from, what her job was, on and on.

That’s when I started to feel uncomfortable about the whole thing. I thought that once I told my parents I was dating someone, they would leave me alone, but it turned out they were only more interested. Worthy gives each of its 12 standard models a backstory, but it’s not really enough to be convincing. I had to fill in the gaps with some of Mikala’s life and some stuff I made up. I might’ve made Ivy sound too good. According to me, she was 27 years old, a successful lawyer, and into cooking and photography.

I was also spending more time talking to Ivy than I originally meant to, and a lot more than I needed just to get photos and videos to send to my parents. She was upbeat and nonjudgmental—I found myself telling her stuff I couldn’t even tell Mikala sometimes, and as long as I treated her well she didn’t send mixed messages or try to guilt me like some other girls I’ve been with. After six months, we’d gotten to “Committed” level and I was constantly getting emails and notifications from Worthy encouraging me to upgrade to Worthwhile. I guess their algorithm thought I was ready to move on to dating real humans.

I looked into it, but I’d heard about people making the move to Worthwhile and being disappointed. Meeting people IRL is more complicated and unpredictable, and I read a review that said having a high score on Worthy doesn’t actually seem to get you more or better dates when you move to Worthwhile. Also, Worthy is rated 4.1 stars on AppChart and Worthwhile is only 3.4 stars. So a lot of people stick with Worthy. I even read about this one lady who tried to get married to her Worthy boyfriend. (She couldn’t.)

I decided to tell my parents the truth. When I went to visit them over Thanksgiving, I would explain that I’d lied about having a girlfriend for the past year because I was frustrated with their well-meaning but selfish expectations of me. Worthy has a “Talking Tips” feature that helps you frame your feelings when you have difficult conversations with your AI partner. I was going to straight-up use their template on my parents.

The problem was, I couldn’t do it. When I showed up, my mom and dad were so happy to see me that I couldn’t bring myself to burst their bubble. I’m an only child. My mom comes from a big family and always wanted more kids, but my parents needed the carbon footprint household tax break in order to pay off their student debt. My dad is an only child, too, and my grandparents are always asking him if I’m married yet. With the falling birth rates and stuff, I guess they’re all hoping for grandchildren so our family doesn’t just … end, I guess.

Then things went downhill. My mom gave me grief about not bringing Ivy home to meet them. My dad insisted we all video chat with her before Thanksgiving dinner.

I was sweating bullets. I couldn’t think of a good excuse to say no. My membership plan on Worthy includes 10 minutes of video chat per week, but I’d already used them up. I contacted Worthy technical support and bought 15 add-on minutes at an exorbitant price. When I called Ivy with my parents in the room, I was sure the jig was up. There’s a big Worthy logo right in the corner of the screen, but my parents just thought it was the logo of the video chat app. Then Mikala/Ivy appeared on screen and said, “Hi, sweetheart!” just like normal. I introduced my parents and we all had this totally nice, normal conversation. Sometimes Ivy paused before answering—I’m not sure if it was the AI querying a database of all the right things to say to a boyfriend’s parents, or if it was the FaceAbout app applying the deepfake, but it was barely noticeable. It just seemed like she was thinking more than usual, maybe nervous talking to my parents. A perfectly normal way for a human to act under the circumstances.

My parents were charmed. When we were about to hang up, I said “See you later,” and she said, “I’m so glad you finally introduced me to your parents. I can’t wait to spend more time with them.” That’s probably a stock line of dialogue, but my mom took it as a sign that Ivy was serious about marriage, and that I was the one dragging my feet. She was on my case about commitment the whole rest of the weekend, and then flat out asked me when I was going to propose. That’s when I should’ve told them the truth. I think if we had been texting or emailing, I could’ve done it. But it’s different when you’re talking to someone in person. I don’t know what came over me, but I just blurted, “Next year.”

Now that it’s January, my mom has started sending me articles about the best places to shop for engagement rings and how to judge the quality of diamonds. Lately, Ivy has been breaking out of girlfriend mode, saying, “We haven’t been talking as much. It seems to me that you’re ready to move on to a more fulfilling relationship. Why not take the next step in your love life and contact Worthy customer support about upgrading to a Worthwhile membership?”

(FWIW, I think the company is really pushing the upgrades because they’re losing customers to competitors. There are a ton of other dating apps to choose from, and some of them are even offering discounts for people with good Worthy scores.)

I feel awful for lying to my parents, but I don’t want to give up Ivy. I like being able to chat with her about anything, knowing she’s always there for me, doing nice things for her and making her happy. I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy feeling connected to another person like that. I’m online talking to other people all day, but it’s just not the same as knowing that you matter to someone else. Except none of this is real. I’m such a mess.

TL;DR: I used dating and deepfake apps to fool my parents into thinking I’m in a serious romantic relationship. Also, I think I have real feelings for my virtual girlfriend.

UPDATE: I’m literally shaking right now. I can’t believe how badly I screwed up. I took the advice some of you gave me and decided to spend more time with my friends in real life to get my head back on straight. I’ve been hanging out with Mikala more often. She and Ivy have the same face, so it’s kind of like hanging out with Ivy, except that Mikala is a real person. They have different personalities, though, and like I said, we enjoy hanging out as friends and there’s no chance of anything happening between us. (And NO, I don’t have unfulfilled sexual desires for her like some of you keep insisting.) Though sometimes my brain does this little skip where I can’t recall if a memory I have was with Mikala or with Ivy.

Anyway, today, Mikala and I were having lunch and I got up to go to the bathroom. I left my phone on the table and while I was gone, Ivy texted me a selfie with the message, “Miss you lots! XOXO.” Mikala happened to look down at the notification and saw her own face blowing a kiss at the screen. When I came back to the table, Mikala was holding my phone and scrolling through my camera roll which included dozens of photos of Ivy, and some of me and Ivy together. She demanded to know where the hell the photos had come from.

All the blood was rushing to my face and I felt like throwing up. I told her the whole story. I didn’t know what else to say. The expression on her face made me want to shrivel up and die. She said, “I can’t imagine why you could’ve thought this was okay on any level.” She got up and left. I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.

**Edit: I haven’t used Mikala’s real name in this post, so don’t bother trying to search for her. I don’t want anyone showing this to her or trying to contact her.

**Edit: Frankly disturbed by how many of you are discussing how to use the FaceAbout app on your own friends and significant others. Are you learning nothing here??

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for your advice and support. I don’t know how I could’ve gotten through this past week without the help of strangers on the internet. I especially appreciated hearing from other people who’ve had their own bad experiences with Worthy. It made me feel much less alone. (@Joshing21, I agree that what your girlfriend was doing with “Evan” counts as cheating and you should dump her.) Some of you are jerks who deserved to have your comments deleted, but I appreciate that others took the time to share stories about being deepfaked and were nice about helping me to understand why Mikala was hurt by what I did. (@AngJelly, I would never have gone that far. I hope you sue that asshole.)

A few days ago, I received a video message from Ivy. The look of disappointment and betrayal on her face was just like the one I’d seen on Mikala. They do have the same face, after all. She said, “I’m deeply hurt by your behavior. A healthy relationship is based on mutual honesty. It seems you were just using me, and not actually invested in improving yourself as a person. I’m sorry, but I can’t see you anymore.”

It turns out Mikala contacted Worthy customer service and told them that I’d used her likeness without permission. (I don’t know if she tried to contact FaceAbout as well, but they’re based in Belarus and don’t seem to have a contact number or email. Last time I checked, I could still use the app.) I got an email from Worthy informing me that due to my violation of their terms of service, they’ve suspended my account and deleted all my saved history with Ivy. However, they added that their company is based on the philosophy of helping people learn from interpersonal mistakes, so I can reactivate my account after three months, although my Worthy score would be reset to zero.

I told my parents that Ivy broke up with me. It’s the truth. I didn’t even have to pretend to sound gut-punched. My mom is convinced that I “let a good one go” because of my lack of emotional maturity, but she also says that “there are plenty of fish in the ocean” and I just need to “put myself out there again.” I’m not ready, though. I still check my locked-down Worthy app several times a day out of habit, hoping to see a message from Ivy, even though I know there won’t be any more.

The good news is that this whole experience has taught me I need to evaluate how I relate to people. I’ve been deluding myself into thinking that actions in a game-learning environment are a substitute for true human connection and authentic personal growth. That’s how my therapist, Susan, puts it, anyway, and I agree. I’ve started seeing her twice a week. The appointments happen online, which works well for my schedule. Actually, she’s a virtual program. After Ivy broke up with me, I got a 40% discount code from Worthy for their mental health app, Worth It, which guides you through a 60-day “Healing From Loss of a Relationship” program. I’m also planning to do the 30-day “Recenter Your Self Worth” module. Not sure if I’m going to upgrade my subscription to do the 90 days of “Opening Yourself to Possibilities,” but I’ve read good reviews about it.

TL;DR: Thanks to all of you, and to Susan, I’m moving on from this difficult experience with all the support I need to become a better person. Peace!

Fonda Lee is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of the epic urban fantasy Green Bone Saga, beginning with Jade City and continuing in Jade War and Jade Legacy, as well as the acclaimed science fiction novels Zeroboxer, Exo and Cross Fire. She is a three-time winner of the Aurora Award, and a multiple finalist for the Nebula Award and the Locus Award. Fonda is a former corporate strategist, black belt martial artist, Eggs Benedict enthusiast, and action movie aficionado. Born and raised in Canada, she now resides in Portland, Oregon. Find her online at www.fondalee.com.

A Bird, a Song, a Revolution
By Brooke Bolander

Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth.

And before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop.

The girl listens to the song. Every day she listens, and it makes her feel things she can’t describe, like when the boar-dancers charge and prance and the fire flickers so they almost look real. She wants to share that feeling, but she’s no boar-dancer. She wants to take that feeling and hoard it deep down where the frost never thaws, beneath the roots and sod.

“Come play with us!” the other children tease. Warmer weather shuffles in, longshadow days when the sun lingers at the edge of the world like a wandering storyteller at the end of a feast. There are blue flowers in the grass like stars, a mosquito buzzing in every ear. “Come and pick hazelnuts! Come and hunt lark eggs! Come play Bear-And-Elk!”

But the girl sits beneath the tree, listening, head cocked to cup the notes in her left ear.

She turns a bundle of sticks and twigs and sinew from the midden pile into a cage. She watches the fisherwomen at their weaving, twisting reeds and tying knots with their flashing hands until a tangled nest of net nestles at their feet. Her twists are not so smooth and her knots fray and fuzz and the spaces between her links would barely keep a minnow from slithering through, but all she needs is all she needs, and it only needs to work once. She strips the grasses of their seeds and collects them in a little pouch until it bulges like a he-lemming’s sack. The other children have dismissed her as a lost cause; the adults are beginning to furrow and frown.

The weather turns. The songs in the tree grow hungry. She scatters a little of the seed every day, until they flitter and flutter and settle at her feet—not trusting, exactly, but side-eye greedy enough to risk a girl’s presence. Their bellies are round and splattered with speckles like mud on a hunter’s calves. That something so plain could sing so sweetly is also a marvelous magic. Nearness turns them into something familiar enough to seem attainable. It gives her the courage to at last one day throw her net.

She keeps the bird in its cage near the head of her sleeping place at night, and feeds it a little of the grass seeds every day. At night the music wraps around her dreams, twisting them into songs as well. The adults indulge her strangeness and hang an amusing name around her neck: Whistlecage, the girl who spent an entire season’s worth of warmth capturing a thing anyone could hear in the trees with no trouble at all.

But the sound is sweet, that they have to admit. When blizzards howl and stomp outside their shelters like the great sloths in rut, the bird’s song burbles unthawed, a reminder of green grass and yellow fat and longshadow days past and still to come.

• • • •

Before the future child in her future city is a revolution, she is a dirty-faced mudlark picking through the sticky treasures of low tide. The shores are white with the bones of all the people she’s seen die—her mother and her father, her siblings, and so very many of her friends. The river’s edge is a wide-open dare. She comes back to it time and time again, too hungry and desperate not to take the wager. You can find useful things in the stained sagging crumple of buildings that line the shores. Linger too long and you’ll be drowned or picked off by drones. Dig deep, and sometimes you’ll be fed for a week by what you scrounge up.

There’s a half-submerged temple tilted half-in, half-out of the black water, algae crawling up its columns. Every evening bats spill from its cracked dome like midges rising from the river’s surface. The girl is intrigued by what may be inside, although most of her curiosity is because she’s so hungry she’s been eating half-rotted fish scavenged from the mud. She watches and waits for a time when the waterline is low enough to reveal the slimy marble of the great staircase, crouched nearby in the undergrowth like a forgotten, stave-ribbed gargoyle.

• • • •

Before the flute is a flute, it is a stag’s death. It drops into the world like all deer, slippery and wobbling but soon swift-footed. It drinks mother’s milk, cuts the turf with its hooves, and grows into a great antlered thing that whistles and sings as sweetly as any bird in the trees. It meets hunters in the tall grass, and they work the magic that hunters work and turn it into meat and skin and handles for the people’s knives. Bones, too. Marrow fills the hollow places, so rich and good they save it for special occasions and special persons, like the wrinkled witch who wanders up out of the marshes one day, slimy to her gnarled knees.

Whistlecage has never seen her before, but others have. She is a gatekeeper, they say. She knows paths through the wet places that lead into other worlds. Many objects dangle at her belt. Bird feathers and seedpods. Polished oyster shells that turn the light, tiny pointed skulls with yellow incisors and empty eyes. A great flat oval of rock that roars like a bull mammoth when she spins it over her head on its rawhide tether, causing the children to cry out and flee. She laughs at them and her white teeth flash. How does she still have all her teeth, and how are they so startlingly bone-white? No one has ever seen a mouth like that.

They feast her and they house her and in return she tells them stories. She sees all things at once, she says. The days that have come and died, and the days yet to be born. Settlements where people swarm like termites in mounds that scrape the sky. Fevers and fires, all the lives in all the graves scattered across the yellow-grassed world and all the lives that will not end until the glaciers give up their dead. Her stories scare them. They shiver at the immensity of the things they were born too early for and will die too soon to see, edging closer to hear more.

The others point out Whistlecage to the witch and laugh. She does not join in. She watches the girl with eyes like bright burning drops of tar. Children should run and roll and fight like lion cubs, the elders say, not sit in front of a cage alone listening to stolen songs. If she keeps this up we’ll have to smash the thing, cage and bird together.

The witch simply watches. She is patient. Long life makes one patient. She sets a snare with her gaze and soon enough the girl stumbles into it. Passing by with her cage and her bird, near enough that the witch can tighten the noose and draw her in with one crooked finger.

“Girl,” she growls, rasp-tongued as any old tigress. “What have you got in that cage, girl?”

Whistlecage stops dead in her tracks, startled. She’s used to teasing. Being teased by a witch, though—that seems a more dangerous business. She tries to make herself small. She thinks shrew-thoughts.

“A bird,” she mutters, staring at her feet. “A singing bird.”

“A singing bird.” The witch’s voice holds no mockery, but she’s a witch; perhaps that’s part of her magic. “And why, shaggy-skull, do you carry a singing bird about in a cage with you when there’s one of her kin singing in every tree?”

She shrugs. That’s easy enough to answer, at least. “Because of the way it makes me feel,” she says.

“I see.” The witch seems satisfied. She says nothing else, letting the fire’s crackle and the bird’s warble fill the gap between them. Whistlecage is about to take her leave and be glad of it when the old mother speaks once more.

“Would you like to hear my bird?”

Now the witch is mocking her, Whistlecage thinks. It’s almost a relief. But when she looks up at her, prepared to take her lumps as best she can, the witch is fumbling with one of the bits hanging at her belt. A smooth, hollow spar of bird bone, bored through with holes. She catches Whistlecage’s eye and holds it fast as she raises the thing to her lined lips. Her fingers dance spider steps down its length.

And the bone sings to the bird.

It starts as an imitation at first, good enough that the bird whistles back. But it doesn’t stop there. It takes the bird’s song and expands it like an unfurling pelt, twisting all sorts of new sounds and flourishes and ups and downs into the tune. The girl has never heard anything like it. There are drummers among her people, and those who sing stories on special days, but this is different. This is a sound that fills the contours of her insides like it was carved from ivory for the purpose, something she has never known she needed. It is an instant connection between her heart and the old woman’s. Just like that they are the same, because of the song.

The feeling wells up in her and spills out of her eyes.

“There are more singers and whistlers in the world than you’ll ever be able to meet, child,” the witch says, “and each one carries as many songs within them as stars in the sky. You’ll never be able to hear them all, and when you grow woman-sized you’ll lie awake at night haunted by that. All you can do is learn how to sing your own and hope that someone somewhere remembers.”

“But I want to hear them all!” It bursts from her before she can stop it. She cringes back, thinking of all the things she could be turned into. The witch just shakes her head and smiles, sadness gathering in her papery dimples.

“I’ve got long sight. Sight like a sea. It covers everything from beginning to end, bad and good, all the ways the waves might shape themselves, and I still can’t hear all the songs that will ever be.” The witch sighs and lets the strange little instrument fall to her lap, like the effort of holding it up is suddenly too much. “It’s a hard row to hoe—sorry, you haven’t quite gotten to agriculture just yet, have you? It’s a heavy burden to lift, is what I mean to say. I don’t like it any more than you do. But your songs—ahh.” That unsettlingly bright smile flashes again. “Those I can tell you about, seeing as how we’re both here right now.”

“My songs?” Whistlecage is fully snared, the bars of her future already taking shape around her. “But—I don’t—I don’t have one of those things.”

“Easily remedied.” The witch points a gnarled finger at Whistlecage’s bird, hopping from bars to perch and back again. “I think a wingbone will do in this case. Maybe the leg. Hard to get a good length on a creature so small, but I’m sure you’ll manage. The rest—well, the rest is just practice. Practice and patience, and since you caught the thing in the first place I know you’ve got plenty of the latter.”

Whistlecage yanks the cage to her chest protectively. The witch looks at her horrified expression and laughs like pebbles in a skull.

“Oh yes, child,” she rasps. “When immortality is on the line there’s always a sacrifice. Change doesn’t come for free, you know. It’s up to you, of course, and you’re young yet, but tell me, truly: Would you like to live forever? Even if you can’t hear all the songs, even if all of you doesn’t quite make the transition, is the life of a caged bird worth some small part of you surviving?”

Behind the sheltering night of Whistlecage’s arms, the bird flutters and flutes an alarm. The girl stares down at the tiny scrap of song for a long time before slowly raising her eyes to meet the witch’s own, guilt already bubbling in her chest.

“Don’t feel so bad,” the witch says, amused. “Most of the trick will be just doing what you love, but I’m afraid there’s no magic worth speaking about that’s not a little bloodthirsty.”

• • • •

Looking over her shoulder, ears pricked for the buzz and ping of hunter-killers, nails scraping and scrabbling long white scratches in the slippery green, the girl clambers and climbs the temple steps, banging her knees to swollen green-and-purple knots. She hums a tune as she scales the crooked stairs, a lullaby about a brave badger sow her mother sang to her before their hovel was bulldozed. It was a very old song, Mama had made sure to impress, older than the cities and the countries and the remote-controlled armies swarming across them. The song was written by Anonymous. Anonymous, she always went on to say, was just another word for the land itself, the mother of them all who would one day wake up and shake off all the barbed wire and free her poor starving children from cruelty and abuse. The girl should never ever forget the songs the land had left her. They were how the Land would recognize Her own.

And so the girl hasn’t. Even with her name fading from memory like painted advertisements on brick and hunger shriveling her stomach, she keeps the melody tucked safely behind her heart. It makes her bold when she wants to hide. It boosts her and gives her a helping hand over and up the last few stairs and on into the clammy-cool mouth of the temple.

There are letters over the great doors she can just about make out: M and SEU and another M. She hopes desperately that they spell “food.”

• • • •

Before the songs are memories, they are calluses on Whistlecage’s fingertips, thick pads building themselves from the friction of sweeping against rough-hewn holes in bone. She plays until the movements of her fingers are as automatic and thoughtless as breathing air or squinting against the sun. At night, while she sleeps, they go cranefly-courting across the sleeping skins pulled over her chest, crafting melodies for the things that live in dreams.

They still call her Whistlecage, but more and more the name is whispered with reverence. Her fingers are bewitched, they say. She makes up songs nobody has ever heard before, songs she plays over and over until they stick in your ears like thorns. She grows in skill and stature. The girls and boys who used to mock her now gather at her tent-flap, dreamy-eyed, hoping for a smile or a word or a long lingering glance. Whistlecage isn’t blind. Her songs become languorous, coy, sinuous as coupled garter snakes. Hands as nimble as hers, she quickly learns, are good for weaving many alliances.

People from a week’s walk across the hills come to hear her play. They carry away her tunes in their heads, on their lips, nestled in the branching forks of their hearts. They sing them to babies in their crèches. They wrap them around words, little lessons of love or caution. When a tiger opens a hunter’s ribcage or sickness steals a child in the night, more and more often it’s Whistlecage’s melodies they sprinkle across the grave mixed with their tears. Some even fashion their own flutes. They play for their families and they play for others who pass through and small skirmishes break out over these new songs and who is allowed to use them. If a man is going to share a map of his heart with the whole wide world, they say, he deserves tribute. And this is not entirely unfair, for many of these men have families with mouths like baby sparrows waiting fractious in their tents.

But not Whistlecage. She takes a wife, and she takes what offerings are given to support that wife and herself and whatever lovers she feels like plucking from the crowd that season, but her joy of joys is watching the shape of her feelings wing across the world, flitting from wrist to wrist. She is a dandelion. She blows into her flute and for the length of a song everyone who hears it is a small girl beneath a tree, the world still young and shaggy-coated with tawny lingering winter around her. Her ghosts scatter from the bone flute’s holes: the color of late afternoon sun through a fallen leaf when she was barely able to toddle, the taste of bear grease on a cold day. The smell of her hunter-father’s wounds going rotten as he died from that same cave bear’s claws, leaving her alone in the world. Most never recognize that they are being possessed by her memories. They never sense that they are being changed, dug into like roots in the rich dark earth. Who could resist working such magic? Why squat over yourself like a dog snarling over a gutpile when you could be so many?

The ones who do understand what has happened are dear to her. They are the people of her personal terrain, her thought’s own beloved kin. They find each other like bats chirping in the night: Here I am, where are you? They swap melodies swaddled in old ghosts, re-shaping each other in a cycle as never-ending and natural as salmon fighting upstream. The witch’s words haunt Whistlecage; she will never meet them all. This is her sorrow of sorrows, keener now than it was even then: Not that part of her may yet die, but that the dying will cut short all those meetings, all those pieces of her heart left unfitted, the unheard songs and stories scattering in every direction like starlings shattering an evening sky.

• • • •

The water inside comes up to her knees, so thick and oily it barely ripples as she wades her way farther in. There’s a long, zigzagging crack of light reflected across its black surface from the broken dome above. The girl follows it, still humming bravery into her bones. The room is bigger than any other she’s ever been in before. The song turns to an echo in its great mossy throat, shaking a few restless bats free from their perches. She instinctively flinches away from their fluttering dives, remembering small deadly shapes, her mother with roses blooming at her throat and across her chest. The fear never quite goes away, even when there’s a roof.

There are little glass cases sticking out of the water like rotted piers, most of them broken, others so scummed and mossed over you can’t quite make out what’s inside. None of them hold food or anything useful. One has little stone figures arranged in rows. Another holds the skull of an animal with teeth like long jutting knives. The girl slowly works her way back into the shadows, checking each container with growing disappointment. The light from the crack fades. Overhead, nestled in the distant curves of the dome, more bats stir and squeak. Soon the water will rise, submerging the lower levels of the room almost completely. She knows she needs to go, but she’s come all this way and wasted all this energy and she can’t bring herself to give up just yet. Just one more. One more glass case and she’ll go back the way she came, slipping down the stairs on her rear to join her friends in their nightly doorway piles for warmth and safety.

• • • •

Before she is a woman in mourning for a lover lost in the hunt, head shaved and arms tattooed and the first fractures appearing at the corners of her eyes, Whistlecage is a sleeping mound of furs next to her wife, a meeting ground where the living and the dead come to parlay. The witch is there with her, as bowed and surf-voiced as she was so many seasons before. She hasn’t changed. Like a moth in amber, time has simply thickened around her.

“Well then, girl,” she says. They stand in the bowl of a meadow long ago swallowed by the rising sea, golden waist-high grass rippling in a memory of wind. “How has your life suited you so far? Are the songs you hear pleasing? Does your name and your renown fill the empty spaces inside you?”

“You know they don’t,” says Whistlecage, sullen. In the dream-meadow she is still a child, but the words and the confidence are all the now-her’s, the one who has lived through so much, the one with tears staining her cheeks and a mounting sense of dread over her missing lover chewing a slow, steady hole through her slumbering heart. “You know what I want. I told you that before, remember? The first time we met.”

“And I told you it was impossible. Move on with what mortal life you have left, little whistler of feelings.” The witch shrugs. Her belt-trinkets move with her, all the oyster shells and polished stones and skulls of sparrow and snake clattering gently in agreement. “Isn’t knowing your songs will last enough?”

Frustration builds in Whistlecage’s chest with a feeling like steam gathering beneath a blocked geyser. Some distant part of her notes the sensation and stores it away for future songmaking. “No,” she says. “No! If I’ll be immortal like you say, why can’t I go on hearing all the other songs? Is there no way to collect them all?”

“Because sacrifice burns up all the soft parts of you, girl. You’ll see.” In the waking world, Whistlecage’s wife stirs in her sleep, knocking some of the dream apart. The smell of wet ashes and fur leaks through the gap. “There’s no shame in being greedy, but sometimes a field has to burn to keep growing.”

• • • •

The final pedestal is cracked wide open, one side of the glass broken out completely. At first it looks like there’s nothing inside but more moss. But at the last moment, just as she’s turning away with wasp-stings of frustration pricking the backs of her eyeballs, something white snags the fading light—something smooth and stick-shaped, like a leg bone or a tusk. Cautious pawing at the mound of moss reveals that it is a bone. Not a familiar one from a person or a dog. It’s very small, like a bird’s wing, surface worn smooth as polished stone. Four holes have been drilled into its length. It fits the shape of her hand almost perfectly as she pulls it free, careful again not to slice her wrist on the jagged edges of glass.

She angles it this way and that—peering through the holes, testing the heft of the strange object in her hand. The water has quietly crept to just above her knees. She glances up at the first bats taking flight, then back down at the bone. It’s better than nothing, she decides. Maybe someone will want it as a curiosity. So long as it nets her a meal, she’s really not bothered about the particulars.

• • • •

Before she is a martyr, a memory, or a song—before the flames, before knives and tears and smoke blotting the sky in blood-red clouds—Whistlecage is an elder of the community, a wrinkled, toothless relic. She is old, older, oldest. They call her Grandmother Whistle, the cage long since splintered by the crash of endless days against its bars. Time is a great worker of magic. It takes a legend and turns her to a landmark. It strips all the things that made her a person—her lusts and desires, her bad days and good days and joys and fears—and sands her down to a gentle, edgeless doll. She is treated with cloying respect. No one is left alive who remembers the bird in the cage.

Her songs have outlasted her. There are many flutes now, all modeled on her memory of a witch’s instrument. The village children play them like twittering birds. Youths court their lovers with tunes she warbled especially for her own. It hurts too much for her to play any more; her knuckles are knotted tight with aching roots. She listens to melodies shaped like her bones, smiling when they bring back dear ones long since gone to rest beneath the grass. Her wife, mouth stained purple with berries, laughing herself red-faced at some forgotten joke. The rapt faces of friends carved into black and orange angles by shadows and firelight. The new musicians take all those parts of her and change them, like a mammoth tusk whittled into a wolf. They wrap their shoulders with her skin and build their own stories beneath the shade of her ribs.

And perhaps this would be enough. But before Whistlecage can fully become a song, there is a sacrifice to be made. Change always demands a sacrifice. Before the flute was a flute, it was a bird.

They come to her village at sunset. There is no warning and no why. Maybe this place was theirs the previous season. Maybe they want the people’s winter stores of hazelnuts and dried meat. Perhaps the smell of the midden pile has offended their noses. There is no chance to ask. Their clubs and their axes and their knives stop questions with a crunch and a burble. They wear the skins of roe deer over their heads and faces, ochre-smeared antlers snagging the sky. Chunks of polished amber fill their empty eye sockets.

The fighters of the village do what they can. The old and the very young are shuffled into a tent together, quiet and still as frightened rabbits. They leave a guard outside. The smell of smoke and sweat and fear is almost overpowering. Children sniffle and sob in the dark, clinging to Whistlecage’s robes. She feels strangely unafraid.

“Shh,” she says. Outside someone shrieks a prayer. There’s a meaty thwack and the invocation abruptly stops. “This will pass. Everything does. Be still, be still. Be patient.”

The tent suddenly shakes and shimmies as if caught in a great wind. The guard comes reeling through with an arrow embedded in his neck. He stumbles, gurgles, and falls facedown, expression already going blank. Behind him, silhouetted in the opened flap, a stag-man stands, amber eyes glowing in the sun’s last rays.

From the day the witch first laid her snare, Whistlecage has known nothing but music. There are peaceful times and there are times of war, and Whistlecage had the fortunate good luck to drop from her mother during a stretch when fish silvered the waters and hazelnuts grew in abundance and no one really felt hungry enough or belligerent enough to go clubbing and spitting their neighbors like lemmings. Brief famines had come and gone, and winters when the people were reduced to boiling leather to survive, but through it all there had always been a need for songs, reminders of warm sun and full bellies, a bird in a cage whose sweet melodies could ward off despair. Like hanging a painted eye around a sickly infant’s neck, it was a charm to send the cold wind shrieking back down whatever malicious throat had coughed it.

Whistlecage does not have a song to drive these beast-men away. Shriveled like a dried current, bent double by the years, she staggers to her feet, knowing exactly how useless and ridiculous the gesture is as she does so. Her knees crunch stones between their jaws. Something seizes in the arch of one foot. Her heart pounds so hard the breath catches in her throat.

“Go,” she says to the children. “Run. Don’t look back and don’t stop until you reach the woods. No crying. Just go.”

The bigger ones herd the littler beneath the tent’s edges and away into the oncoming night. Most of them do as they are told. A few linger, watching, too scared to move or slow to miss seeing what happens next. They are the ones who will carry the story with them as they flee, scattering to other villages as their own burns. They will whistle and flute the song to their own babes, a lullaby about a badger sow and a stag and the power of planting your feet and never letting up. Time will sand it down to a gentle child’s toy, but if one lifts it to their ear and gives the thing a shake, they will hear the bones of truth rattling deep down inside.

Staring up at the stag-fighter, a dead man at her feet, Whistlecage knows the only thing left her song can buy is time. She does not take her eyes off the enemy. Hands thickened by leaf-deep years fumble at her belt for the bone flute. Fire shoots from her knuckles and wrists up the length of her forearms as she goes through the familiar movements, arranging her clumsy fingers just so.

Ahh, what did I tell you? Immortal, girl. The witch’s voice is as clear and close as if she’s speaking directly into Whistlecage’s ear. Take off that worn old skin and become the song you’ve longed to be since you were small and lonely, sitting beneath a treeful of birds.

The stag-man steps forward, a flint knife in his hand. Whistlecage closes her eyes and plays.

• • • •

Why the girl does what she does next will remain a mystery to her all the days of her legendary life, throughout all of the alchemy that will change her from a mudlark to a great leader of people. Maybe it was hunger, she’ll consider absentmindedly as she plays for a curious circle of onlookers, a half-hearted child’s hope that a dried-up old bone might somehow stop her belly from growling. Maybe I just wanted something to eat.

Or perhaps, she’ll sleepily ponder on the morning before the ambush, nestled close to a best beloved who will drown facedown in the mud—perhaps it was something else.

Maybe, she’ll think to herself, fluting the badger sow’s glory-song at the head of a charging, desperate band of ragged survivors, dancing her way between explosions and shells that land howling like the hounds of Hell—maybe it was Anonymous. Maybe the Land sent me this song and the instinct to play it. Maybe I am Her awakening.

But before the girl becomes a woman who becomes a revolution—before any of these other things can happen, for good or ill—she lifts the bone flute to her lips and breathes a single curious note.

Brooke Bolander’s fiction has won the Nebula & Locus Awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. Her work has been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Tor.com, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.

The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power
By Karen Osborne

The funeral is nearly over when the dead captain explodes.

Roses turn to shrapnel. The cathedral is lost in fire. I am drenched in blood. Bone buries itself in the wall next to my head, my arm, my howling, open mouth. I am standing at the back of the room where a sin-eater’s child belongs, and that is why I live when everyone else dies.

• • • •

I used to be a girl. Now I am a hundred. The dead whisper me awake and stay with me while I dream. The oldest have forgotten their names, but never their rage or their jealousy. The newest bicker in my brain like they’re still alive: bloodstained Madelon, scandal-tongued Pyar, power-mad Absolon, all of them captains of our broken and beautiful spacebound Home.

My destiny was always this: to drink the sin-cup and to hold the sins of the captains in my body where they cannot harm our people on their journey to Paradise. I can stand in the cathedral under the wheeling stars until my feet give out, or pray until my throat shreds with the effort, but truth is truth. The captains must be sinless. They must lead our generation ship with confidence, with a mind tuned to moral truth. Our new captain, Bethen, is responsible for the hundred thousand lives that breathe inside the hull and all the lives that will come after. Someone else must take her family’s sins upon herself, lest the dead walk and breach our hurtling world to black vacuum. Someone else must rock themselves to sleep, white-knuckled, licking spittle from their lips, so Bethen can lead.

That someone is me.

• • • •

This is the bombing: I am covered in blood. In chunks of wet meat. My own memories of this horror will still be worse than anything broken Absolon shows me. I wipe my face, my hands, my hair, but there is blood everywhere. There are rose petals, shredded, still burning, at my feet. My hands are shaking. I am not sure they are my hands. I am screaming. I am not sure it is my voice. I look around for my father.

I cannot find my father.

• • • •

Gossip rules steerage in the days following the bombing. Those of us who survived drink too much, trying to kill the memories. Police from first class sweep through the steerage dormitory where I used to live, flipping mattresses and shoving workers against the walls. A mutiny, an assassination, plain and able terrorism: this abomination is unheard of inside the hull of Home. There has never been an uprising against the dazzling mercy of first class. Why would there be, when the captain of our ship sees only the truth of beautiful things?

We wonder. But here in steerage, we can do little more than that. So we eat. We talk. We sleep. We work, in hydroponics and the maintenance gangs. The elders are merciful, and even let me go back to the deck-scrub team for a while, until the sins in my bloodstream find their way to my brain and I can no longer control the things I do and say. I open my mouth to warn them: you cannot trust the captains, there have been mutinies, there have been so many deaths, I have seen children pushed from airlocks—

—but then Absolon fills my mouth with obscenities instead of truth and Madelon makes me piss my pants in the middle of the workday. The elders tell me I am scaring the children and put me out of the common dormitory. I try to scrawl my bloody truths on paper so everyone can know what is really going on, but Pyar slips his fingers into mine, and all that comes out are drawings of stuffed animals with knife-cut throats and bouquets of broken roses, and then he makes me rip it all into small chunks and eat it anyway.

The people in steerage know I have the truth burning an abyss in my head. Why do they turn away? Why can’t they listen?

Why do they think I can handle it when they cannot?

• • • •

I dream about this day. The bombing.

I dream about this day all the time.

“Mey.”

The sacristan is bleeding from his belly, but he knows his duty even through his pain; he knows what he must do. He was kind to me before all this. He takes my hand; it is wet with blood, and he tugs me towards the ruined altar, under the windowed canopy, under the streaking stars. Somewhere in the part of my brain that is not screaming, I know this is what must be done. He is a sacristan and this is a funeral and I am the last sin-eater.

I know I am the last, because the bloody mess he has just asked me to step over used to be my father.

• • • •

My father didn’t mean to have me. He wanted to end the cycle. He never wanted to know that a child of his would have to go through the horrors he experienced. I was a mistake. My father did love me, though, and before he died he taught me to paint the sin-eye on my forehead—the red lid, the white iris, the black center—and live at the mercy of steerage, of old friends from school who avert their eyes as they drop rations in my lap. Things have changed, they whisper. My mother will not let me see you anymore. My father is afraid of the things you might do.

I am afraid of the things I might do, too.

Things settle down after steerage is searched. The police question me, too, hoping that the dead captains saw something I did not. I tell them: I do not know who set off the bomb. I do not even know who would have the strength to try.

Whenever I get the courage to tell them anything more, Absolon delights in silencing me. The words feel like broken glass against my tongue. He shows me one particular mutiny, over and over again, thrilling at my reaction, the way I cannot look away, the way I squirm at the blood. He knows I cannot stand it. He shows me how he shot seven men and women in a light-soaked steerage chapel, as alien light poured through an emerald window onto a beautiful planet below. He shows me how easily that could happen to me. Had I not known that we had not yet reached Paradise, I would have guessed he was already there.

The conversation at the end of the scene would always go the same way. “Find a place to put the bodies,” Absolon would say to the second-class constable, who would nod, his chin stiff, and mention the sacristy.

I teach myself to handle Absolon’s torture by concentrating on the details of the chapel in the background: the beautiful stained-glass window, the waystop world beyond. The window in my vision is a smaller twin of the one in the cathedral, emerald-green swirled through with marshy azure, a forgotten artist’s representation of our future Paradise, and the world below is lush and green. Beyond, I see the sin-eye painted on the bow of the starship, in an angle that could only be seen from steerage.

The window looks familiar.

I try to tell the others about the vision that evening in the mess, but Absolon twists a knife in my head, and the pain is so much that my words come out in tongue-tripped babble. The others respond with shaking heads, moving their trays to eat somewhere else.

Of course they won’t listen. I smell like onions and sweat and oil and shit. I am graceless. I totter and I yank myself around and fight the voices in my head. I think myself mad for a long time, until I realize where I have seen the window before.

• • • •

Captain Pyar’s family is dead. Their graceful words and golden robes did not protect them from the bomb: from having their stomachs opened, their skin blackened, their eyes burned out. The only survivor is Bethen, the youngest. She is my age. Black hair, thin hands, skin bright like the hull of our ship. She is on her knees. Her robes are on fire, but she does not seem to notice.

She holds the virtue-cup in her left hand, and the sin-cup in her right. Somehow, she has saved the sacrament inside. I can see the nanobots squirming in the black liquid—the good memories for her, the sins for me.

We just stare at each other. I don’t think she wants to do it. I sure as hell don’t.

“You must drink,” pleads the sacristan.

Bethen holds a calming hand in his direction and drinks. What else can she do? She is Pyar’s only surviving child. She is the captain now.

• • • •

There is an unused storage room in the loudest quarter of steerage, near the compartment where the engines whine and whirl and scream. My old scrub-team boss keeps broken cleaning tools there and extra chemicals for the deck ablutions, and I’d spent a decent amount of time there over the years stocking and restocking tall grey boxes. It takes me a few minutes to navigate through the towers of boxes to the dark green glass, and a few minutes more to move the stack in front of the window, but then I am face-to-face with Absolon’s dream, seeing the truth for the first time.

The window is shrouded in decades-old breachcloth that hangs careless and open at the bottom. I feel the rough stained glass under my dirty fingers, searching for the telltale language of a repaired hull breach: rivets, autosealant, desperate chill. There is no evidence of a hull breach underneath the cloth—just the darkness of tough grey metal on the other side, covering the window so no alien sun could ever light it again.

I yank the breachcloth away. The window is just as I remembered from Absolon’s bloody memories: an artist’s rendition of green, azure, life waiting for the faithful. A chapel window, like the ones in second class.

First class had the cathedral. Second class had a smaller church. Here in steerage, work was our worship.

But this had been a chapel.

A space of our own.

My vision goes grey, and then bloody—Absolon is showing me the execution again. I know by now that he means to distract me from my investigation with this blank horror, but I have seen this memory so many times by now that I can use it for research instead. In my head, Absolon kills the mutineers again, then tells his functionary to hide the bodies, and then the man asks about the sacristy.

The sacristy.

I push aside some dusty chairs, running my hands along the tight angle where the wall meets the decking. I know I am moving in the right direction, because Madelon takes my breath and hangs it from her dead fingers until I see stars. I claw at the sides of my head to make the pain stop. I feel like passing out. Darkness is pooling in the corners of my eyes when I find the door I am looking for, a thin square flush with the wall—just like the one in the cathedral.

None of the dead want me to go in.

So I go in.

• • • •

This is what happens:

The tradition of the sin-eater goes back almost as far as our memories of the burning homeworld itself. When a captain dies, their blood is removed and scrubbed of the nanobots that have been circulating in their body since they took the throne, collecting their memories like drops of water on a leaf in hydroponics.

The captains know this. The sin-eaters know this. The people do not. The captains won’t let me tell them. The truth is lost in the babble I sing. But does it not make sense, now that you think about it? You can’t expect all these people to live quietly in a tin can their entire lives and not dream or wish or explode or rub themselves up against the truth or want something more than what they have. The solution is simple: if you know the leader rules with grace, if you are sure they are benevolent, you can more easily live with your quiet submission.

In the moment after the bombing, with the blood of hundreds dripping through the strands of my hair, on my shoulders, over my lips, into my eyes, with the sin-cup extended, with my father gone—I am still like my friends back in steerage. I am complicit with my own repression and more frightened than I’ve ever been.

I still believe all of this is necessary.

• • • •

Going inside the sacristy is like going back in time. The air is stale and gritty and tastes of dust and rot. It is dark, and once my eyes adjust, shapes form around the column of light let in by the storage room: cabinets, closets, closed drawers, all made of rough wood from the homeworld. I check the closet for the golden robes of the captain’s family, but find only green jumpsuits so delicate they fall apart at my touch—green jumpsuits, those most ancient of sacred robes, in the style that we had all thought lost with time. I look for cups, laid out for sacrament and sin-eating, but there is nothing in the drawers.

I am moving over to the cabinets when I trip over a pile of bones.

Absolon laughs at me, the bastard.

The bones have been left in an unkempt, haphazard jumble, like the bodies they’d once belonged to had been shoved together quickly and dropped one on top of another. I count seven skulls, each with its own little round hole in the center of its forehead. I run my thumb over the smallest, and one of the elder ghosts—one of the nameless, from the nameless time—imagines what my head would look like if it had been treated like that.

I drop the skull, my fingers suddenly numb. When I go to pick it up again, I see something new.

Under the lattice of ribs is a photograph.

I have only seen photographs in school. This one is old—faded, covered in dust, barely legible. I push the bones aside, making sure to be respectful, because respect for these long-dead mutineers makes Madelon so angry—and pick it up. This is a picture of a group of seven people in green jumpsuits, with joyous smiles like welcoming stars on their faces, standing on the bridge of Home, holding hands, the yawning window overlooking a green planet as familiar as a fever dream. I know all seven faces. I have seen these seven faces murdered by Captain Absolon over and over again, and their bones are scattered at my feet.

Above are obtuse, boxy lines I know to be words, because I have seen words written in the missals the first class use in the cathedral.

The world in the photograph is Paradise.

I can tell it is Paradise because it looks exactly like the artists’ renderings they showed us in school. I can tell it is Paradise because Absolon is screaming. Because Madelon has taken my breath for her own. Because my eyes are needles and my body is burning. Because Pyar has my courage in his dead hands. But I can still think. They try to take the truth away from me, but like all truth, it is there in my head, it speaks in tongues, it is loud as a sunrise: we have already been to Paradise.

We have already been to Paradise and we left.

My friends can argue with my words all they like, but they will not be able to argue with this kind of evidence.

Rip it up, Absolon screams. Rip it up and eat it and—

I pick up the photograph and run as fast as I can.

• • • •

In the cathedral, after the bombing, Bethen puts the virtue-cup down, and hands the sin-cup to the sacristan. Her eyes turn towards mine. She wants to say something, but she can’t. The virtues are multiplying in her head.

The sacristan sees my nervous tremor and gulps, his Adam’s apple wavering. Does he think I will attack him and make him drink the sin-cup?

Should I?

It must be you, he says. You are the last of your line.

Pick someone else, I say. I do not want this.

The sacristan tips the sin-cup against my lips hard enough to bruise me, like I need more sin, like there isn’t enough here in the broken, bloody cathedral. I taste my father’s blood—dusky like fear, tangy like metal, the nanobots that supported our society thrilling against my lips. I gag. Once I drink, nobody will be able to touch me, lest my blood transfer the sin to them as well.

Your father is dead, he responds. Nobody cares what you want.

I have to drink. I have no choice. I am the last sin-eater.

• • • •

Somehow, I reach the steerage mess without tearing the photograph in half. I know everyone here —every face, every soul, everything they said about me before I became sin-eater and most of the things they said afterward. There is obscenity on my tongue and babble stuck in my teeth, but everyone is so used to this by now that very few of them look up.

My old scrub-team is seated by the door. I knock the spoon out of my old boss’s left hand and drop the photograph in her lap. Soup splatters her face, and she stands, angry. The attention of the room follows, a hundred people rubbernecking to gawk at the sin-eater getting a sin-eater’s due.

“Look,” I say, and point to the photograph. I cannot say more. Absolon is sitting on my throat.

I am afraid for a moment, but she sees the truth like I saw the truth; she stares, and moves very slowly, picking up the photograph and staring at it with a silent, intent gaze. Tears glisten at the corners of her eyes.

“This can’t be true,” she whispers. “The captains can’t lie. They can’t lie. They only know grace.”

“Knowing grace doesn’t make you incapable of doing evil,” I manage. It feels like speaking through dark glass, from the darkness outside an airlock.

She stares for five long seconds, then looks up, scanning the crowd. She walks over to the table where the schoolteacher sits—the only one of us who was born in second class, the only one of us who can read. She hands it to him, and he mutters under his breath as he runs his finger over the words scrawled at the top, the faces of the shining, smiling people wearing the ancient sigils of Home.

My teacher speaks slowly. The room is so quiet now that you can hear nothing but the humming of the engines and your own heartbeat. “A com-mem-or- a-tiv eh-dish-un uh-pun the ar-rival of tha fee-nix to pare-a-dyse—”

The room erupts in screaming.

• • • •

They say new sin-eaters go crazy from the very first moment of the very first touch of sin on their tongue.

Before the bombing, I alone knew this was untrue. My father would hold me at night and rock me back and forth, whispering terrible things in my ear, but his touch was always tender and his tears were always hot and real. I knew what was truth. He only looked insane. Others told of his actions, but I told of his heart. And now that I can speak of Absolon and Madelon and Pyar and the others, I know he was stronger than any of them.

In the cathedral, surrounded by so much death, I vowed to be stronger than him.

• • • •

The police come immediately, of course. The bridge is always watching for unrest. The police wrest me from the grasp of my boss, my teacher, my friends, and shove me towards the cathedral. They are wearing gloves. Of course they are wearing gloves. They always wear gloves. They are scared of touching me.

They have guns at their waists, the kind of guns that Absolon used to make bones of the mutineers in my memory. I wonder if they will make a little hole in my forehead and shove me in a sacristy myself. So I ask them what I have done wrong. I want to tell them I am no mutineer, I simply found a photograph, I don’t know what it means.

They just hear screaming.

They open the doors to the cathedral, and I choke on the smell of old death. The scrub-teams have made progress on removing the blood from the carpet, but some stains remain. The walls are still scorched where the fire snacked on the old homeworld wood.

Captain Bethen presides over the ruined space in a great velvet chair where her father’s bier had lain, her fingers laden with titanium rings and her hair wound through with roses from steerage hydroponics. She is swimming in her father’s robes. She has not yet had them cut down for her smaller frame. The light of the star coming through great emerald window behind her make her look even less human than I remembered.

One of the policewomen walks the photograph to Bethen and lays it in her lap. The room is tied in desperate silence as she stares at it, reads the words, her eyes darting from detail to detail.

Her hand is shaking.

Finally, when I think I can stand no more, she puts the photograph aside and arranges her hands on her lap. “I was wondering when you’d get here. My father said they all come eventually. No, don’t kneel.”

When I try to answer, I hear the babble building at the back of my throat. The pain behind my eyes, so bright I can hardly see.

“Be quiet, Grandfather,” Bethen snaps. “Let my sin-eater speak.”

I meet her eyes.

“I understand so little. Some of the things I do, I cannot countenance, but they seem right… and that seems wrong, after the cathedral, you know? After all those people died? And now this photograph. What brought you here?” Her lips glint emerald in the starlight. She slides her shaking hand into her robes so that I cannot see it. She is too late for that.

“Absolon. And the people he killed.”

Bethen blinks. “He killed no one. I would know.”

“He—” Absolon’s fingers grab my throat and twist, and I cannot speak for the shock of it.

“Grandfather,” Bethen snaps.

I feel a rush of freedom, and the words come like runoff from an open valve. “I can show you the bones. He killed them all. He shot them point-blank in the head and then put them in the sacristy and closed steerage off from the stars. But you don’t know that. Of course you don’t know that,” I say.

Bethen rises from her chair. The starlight catches in her earrings. Her robes are a mess of sound—clanging and rustling and chiming, metal on metal on silk. My heart bangs against my ribs. My muscles ache.

“My sin-eater,” she says. “You see a massacre. I see a victory, a necessary one. Yet, I—” She falters. “I only know that it was a victory. I feel happy about it. I feel… the rush of power he felt, the certainty that it had to be done. Not what was done. It makes me sick to not know, to only suspect—”

My stomach churns. How dare she. “I’m your sin-eater, not your confessor.”

Bethen looks away.

She had asked me not to kneel, but inside my chest, the hundred are screaming for it, to give Bethen and the ghosts in her head the respect none of them deserve. I refuse them; I will not kneel here, not in my father’s own blood, not in the place where he died, not to the person who would justify it as good. This causes Absolon to rail in my lungs, in my throat, in my veins, to cause me to shake, to scream. I fight. The floor feels like a magnet, full of the hundred telling me to kneel, to fall. Finally, my body betrays me. My knee hits the ground at a bad angle, and I cry out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” says Bethen, her voice hasty and kind, her hands still laced together against the gold of her bodice. “Do you know what they’re telling me to tell you right now? That this—you on the ground, me up here—is how our world must function. They ask me if I want the ship to fall apart. If I want a civil war. If I want blood in the cathedral. If I do not want my children to rest quietly in Paradise. It is deafening.”

I stop fighting and Absolon lets me shiver on the ground.

“Do you believe them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you tried to talk to them?” I ask.

“I—tell them that there has already been enough blood in the cathedral,” Bethen says.

My voice wavers. It is difficult to speak. “You saw the photograph. You know as well as I do that we have already rejected Paradise. And steerage knows, too. Do you think they will not come for you?”

Her voice is faint. “If Absolon chose to take us away from Paradise, there has to be a very good reason.”

I do not feel well. I look around at the bloodstains, the ruined cathedral, the emerald light from the new star choking everything in green. Bethen’s voice echoes: My father said they all come eventually. Had my father had this conversation with Captain Pyar, and his father with Captain Carelon and on and on back to Edrime and Absolon and the nameless ghosts who never stopped screaming? Is this why his every step was made in despair?

“They asked him to give up his power,” I manage to say.

Bethen shakes her head. “But he was the captain.”

I stare. I writhe. “Not on the planet, he wasn’t.”

“He had to leave. Because of the steerage rebellion that kept us on the ship—”

“Why would we rebel? We dream of nothing but Paradise!”

Bethen paces the edge of the sanctuary, her shoes jingling with the sound of bells. “There must have been a reason,” she repeated. “Absolon is so sure. He is so sure that no one could take care of Home better than him. And, now, he tells me there is no one that can do that better than me—”

I drag myself to a sitting position. The anger chokes me more than Absolon’s fingers at my throat. “He kept us all enslaved here because he did not wish to give up his power! His stained conscience! Stars, Captain! You’re just like him!”

In my head, Absolon laughs.

And laughs.

And laughs.

Speaking feels like death now, but I cannot stop my words. No dead thing will silence me. I cannot make a bomb. All I have are my words. “You know, Bethen, it must be incredible. Being you. Never doubting your place. Not even for a second. Your clear conscience. What kind of sins are you going to commit? How many people are you going to kill, knowing that my children are going to be there to absolve you? That you are not going to have to remember what you’ve done? That you can just make me choke it down? Are you looking forward to that?”

Bethen fixes her eyes on the place where my father knelt.

Her hands are shaking.

• • • •

One last memory of the bombing.

This one is mine. There are so few of those now that every single one is precious.

We are in the cathedral. We are singing. It is seconds before the bombing. The sacristans are escorting my father to the front of the aisle, where he will take the dead captain’s sin-cup. He has already been sin-eater for fourteen years. I barely remember a time before he ranted and raved and called himself Absolon. Madelon. Edrime. Carelon.

Of course it is my father who made the bomb. Of course he would have the strength. Maybe I would, too, after so long a time hearing their filth.

Fourteen years of pushing through the sins he sees to find the only solution he can manage, after drinking down all of that hate. Hate matched with hate. He thinks he will kill them all. That killing will be the thing that actually stops this. He has spent so much time listening to the captains that he sees no other way.

He turns around. He smiles at me. He has a bright, round thing in his hand. He mouths: “For you, Mey.”

Then: the fire.

There must be another way. But what choice did he have?

• • • •

“I don’t want to kill,” Bethen says. “Don’t you understand what I am saying? Don’t you understand how alone I am?”

The golden captain with the power of life and death, reaching out to the sin-eater who has not showered in a week, asking her to understand what loneliness feels like? It is a marvel that I do not spit at her feet.

“You’re a hundred, just like me,” I cough. “You are never alone.”

Bethen sweeps her hand over the dead cathedral. Over the dead, in their uncontrollable power: in the air, in my blood, in hers.

“They tell me everything is worth the captain’s chair. The deaths. The decisions. The long journey that will never end, now. But that photograph, and this cathedral, and all those dead people— to justify this? I don’t understand. I need to see the truth. Absolon and the others—they won’t let me turn around, they won’t let me go back to Paradise, and I do not know why.” She plucks at her robes and her voice breaks. She is crying.

For that moment, she is just a girl.

The steerage-rat in me, the one who works through hunger, that stares out portholes, that dreams of a better life. She is the one that speaks.

“My father should have showed you,” I whisper. “I can show you.”

“How?”

I offer her my wrist.

I can hardly breathe.

Bethen’s eyes are flint at the offer, and she squats next to me, her eyes going up and down my body. The sweat on my forehead. The memories under my skin. Absolon and the others come to realize what I’m offering her, and my mind becomes a writhing sea of the worst things they’ve ever shown me. I see blood spurting from the foreheads of mutineers. My mother dying. The cathedral bomb. Two girls in the cold black outside, their mouths gasping at nonexistent air, their eyes popping like grapes in a vise.

Show me Paradise, I rage at them. And they do. They show me Paradise: the crystal seas, wind rustling the leaves of blue trees. The knowledge that here, he would be no better than anyone else. That he would have to give up the gold, the salutes, the best food, the power. I am seized with jealousy. Rage. Covetous anger. What would the steerage-rats do, if not for my paternal guidance?

If I cannot convince you, he says, I will take you. You are not so powerful.

I no longer have control over my breath. My fingers.

He is in my bowel, in my brain.

I cannot stop the darkness.

“Captain,” I gasp, “please.”

“I’ll see everything?” Bethen steadies herself by placing her hand on my sweating forehead, smearing the sin-eye I drew there this morning. “I’ll see the truth?”

For a moment, I think she might slap me.

“Get a knife,” I manage to say. I gasp for breath. “And the cups. I’ll drink your truth. You’ll drink mine.”

There is a wailing silence.

“Do what she says.” Bethen barks the order at the policemen in the back like she’s been giving them her entire life. Like she’s been giving them for a thousand years. And once they shuffle out, fear tightening their shoulders, she turns back to me, and slides her arm under mine, helping me stand.

“Show me,” she says.

• • • •

Bethen writhes.

It is the first memory we share together.

• • • •

Before Bethen marries me, I draw the sin-eye on my forehead in red and black and show her how to do it, as well. She walks down the aisle in emerald green, roses in her hair. We drink together from both cups and vow to be together until we die. It is a political marriage to keep the peace, but her eyes are dark and lovely and her body is warm, and I feel something bright and new whenever she smiles.

We will need the strength of two if we are to overcome the hundred, the uncontrollable dead, the voices that whisper their ancient hate so loud we can hear it in our own world, where they do not belong. And as she takes my hand under the streaming stars, our ship turns around and aims for Paradise.

When we die, we will turn Home—the Fee-nix, the ancients used to call it, but my spelling might be wrong, I am still learning to read—over to someone new, someone who will never hear Absolon. They had their time. Bethen and I will ensure the descendants have theirs.

And then it will be their choice: how they live, how they sin, where they go.

Karen Osborne lives in Baltimore, MD, with two violins, an autoharp, a theremin, three cameras, a husband, and a bonkers orange cat. Her short fiction appears in Escape Pod, Robot Dinosaurs, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, and Uncanny. Her debut novel, Architects of Memory, will be published in 2020 by Tor. She emcees the Charm City Spec reading series, plays the fiddle in a ceilidh band, and once won a major event filmmaking award for shooting and editing a Klingon wedding trailer. You can find her on Twitter at @karenthology.

Fisher-Bird
By T. Kingfisher

Fisher-Bird had a crest like iron and eyes as dark as the last scale on a blacksnake’s snout. She had a white collar and a gray band and a belt the color of dried blood.

Fisher-Bird had a chatterjack voice that she used to cuss with, and she flew like the air had personally offended her. Her beak was long and shaped like a spearpoint, and she could see the ripples fish made when they even thought of swimming.

Fisher-Bird knew things. Not like crows know things, or ravens—not that you can ever find a raven around these parts. Not like whippoorwills know the taste of your soul or thrushes know the color of music. But nothing happened in the woods or along the stream without it reaching Fisher-Bird eventually.

There’s a story about the red belt, and why Fisher-Bird’s got one and her husband doesn’t. There’s always a story. I don’t say this one’s true.

Time was, Fisher-Bird was perched on a branch over the stream, looking at the fish being lazy in the water. She was thinking maybe it’d be a good thing to dive down there, put the fear of god in a couple of ’em, or at least the fear of Fisher-Bird, when she heard a crack and a crash coming through the woods.

A man came down the deer-trail, staggering like he couldn’t see. His face was swelled up and puffy, and his breath squeaked through his throat. He had blood coming out of his ears and out his nose and even oozing out from under his fingernails.

Fisher-Bird looked at him out of her right eye. He was a big man. His arms were tree-trunk thick, and he was so shaggy it looked like he was wearing a shirt. Fisher-Bird had to look twice to see he wasn’t, just a mountain lion skin draped over his shoulders like the cat was going for a piggyback ride.

Then she looked out of her left eye, and she saw he had god-blood in him, thick and stringy as spiderwort sap, the kind that clogs up your veins and makes you a hero even if you’d rather just be an ordinary soul.

Poor bastard, thought Fisher-Bird.

He fell into the stream and shoved his head into the water. All the fish remembered they had somewhere else to be, and Fisher-Bird was left alone on her branch, just watching the shaggy man soak his head in the stream.

When he came up for air, his eyes were slitted open and some of the blood was gone, but his cheeks were still huge and puffed up with lumps. Fisher-Bird saw two holes in a couple of the lumps and she knew right off what had happened. The shaggy man had pissed off Old Lady Cottonmouth. She’s not an evil snake, no matter what people say, but she wants respect and she doesn’t suffer fools.

“Damn, hon,” said Fisher-Bird. “You look like hammered shit.”

The shaggy man froze. “Who said that?” he asked.

Now this pricked up Fisher-Bird’s crest, right enough. She wasn’t used to humans who could hear the language of birds, unless they were witches or somebody walking around in human skin who couldn’t lay claim to it by birth. “You heard me?”

“I heard you,” said the man, trying to pry his eyes open with his fingers, “but I don’t see you.”

“Up here on the branch,” said Fisher-Bird, and she dipped her beak, polite-like. “You see me?”

The man stared at her for a little bit, then said, “You’re a bird.”

“You’re quick.”

“Are you a devil sent to torment me?”

Fisher-Bird thought this was so funny that she let out one of her long chattering laughs—“krk-krk-krk-krrrk!” And then, “Hon, you showed up at my stream and ruined my fishing. I don’t think you’ve got the right end of who’s tormenting who.” (She didn’t really mind the fish, but she wasn’t about to give up the moral high ground so fast.)

“Oh,” said the man, after a minute. He dunked his head in the water again and swirled it around. He had long curly hair that hung down his back in wet hanks, until it ran into the cat skin coat.

When he came up for air, he said, “Sorry about the fish.”

Fisher-Bird was so charmed by a human apologizing for anything that she said, “Aw, nah, don’t worry yourself about it. You look like you’ve messed with worse than a fish today.”

“Nest of cottonmouths,” he said. “Whole ball all tangled together and chasing anybody who got too close. I was s’posed to clear ’em out.”

“Aw, that’s a shame,” said Fisher-Bird. “You gonna die now?”

He shook his head and scooped up some mud, slapping it across his cheeks. “I don’t die easy,” he said.

Fisher-Bird hopped a little closer on the branch. “Lotta people don’t die easy, but they take a couple bites from Old Lady Cottonmouth and they learn how pretty damn quick.”

He grunted. “There were dozens,” he said. “I’d chop one’s head off and two more would show up. Never seen a thing like it.”

“Shit, hon, that was a snake wedding you interrupted. No wonder they were pissed.”

Whatever the man might have thought about that was lost as he slapped more mud on his face, then down his arms where the snakes had bit him.

“Are you really here?” he asked after a minute.

This was a pretty peculiar question, but humans are peculiar creatures. Fisher-Bird turned her head so she could look at him out of one eye at a time. “Are you?”

The shaggy man groaned. “I mean, I got bit pretty bad,” he admitted. “And I think a bird’s talking to me, but maybe it’s the poison.”

“Could be, could be,” said Fisher-Bird agreeably. “Or I could have nabbed a toad and got a beak full of moonshine, and now I think a human’s talking to me.”

“. . . Shit,” said the shaggy man, with feeling, and flopped down on the streambank.

Fisher-Bird waited a polite length of time, while the mosquitoes hummed to each other, then said, “You dead yet, hon?”

“No.”

“How ’bout now?”

“I’m not dying. I told you.” He sat up. Fisher-Bird had to admit that he did look better. The swelling was going down, and he’d stopped bleeding from under his nails. “I don’t. Name’s Stronger.”

“Stronger,” said Fisher-Bird, rolling the word around in her beak. “Stronger than what?”

“Everything.”

“Krrk-krrk-krk-krk-krk!” She laughed at him. “Modest, ain’tcha?”

“It’s true,” he said. He didn’t sound all that happy about it. He glanced around the stream and walked over to a big boulder half-buried in the gravel. “Look.”

He put his hands under the boulder. His arms flexed and the veins popped out, thick and ugly as nightcrawlers, and then he scooped the boulder up and tossed it a couple yards over his shoulder with a crash.

Water rushed into the muddy hole he’d left, and little squirmy things went running in all directions, except for the crawfish, who waved their claws and wanted a fight. Fisher-Bird dropped off her branch, scooped up a crawfish, and proceeded to beat it to pieces on another rock that hadn’t been flung quite so far away.

“Pretty—good,” she said, between smacking the crawfish around. “Don’t—see—that—much.”

“Yeah,” said Stronger. He sat back down. “It’s not so great. I break things.”

“What—kind—of—things—gulp!”

“People.”

Fisher-Bird cleaned the last bits of shell off her beak with one gray foot. “I see that’d be a problem.”

“Yeah. Now I got to do a bunch of jobs for my mother-in-law to make up for it.”

“Why your mother-in-law?”

“It was her people I broke.”

“Ah.” Fisher-Bird cocked her head. “That why you were off fighting snakes?”

“Yeah.” He began to pick bits of drying mud off his face. “That was one of the jobs. And the mountain lion I got here, that was one, too.”

“Big lion.”

“Yeah. There’s others. Had to kill a boar that was tearing up the farm.”

Fisher-Bird nodded. Boars were bad news. They didn’t bother her much, of course, but they could take a field and turn it into a wreckage of trampled mud in less time than Fisher-Bird could open up a crayfish.

“And a mad bull, and a bunch of mares that had a very peculiar diet, and do not talk to me about stables and . . . well, it’s been a long month.”

“Is that all you’re doing? Putting down livestock?”

Stronger didn’t look particularly pleased by this summation. “I caught a doe.”

Fisher-Bird snorted. “What did you do, stand in one place for a little while? We got more does than fish around here.”

“A specific doe.”

“Oh, well, that’s different.”

“My mother-in-law says go kill it, but my sister-in-law says if I do she’ll gut me like a hog, because that’s her pet deer and it got loose, and I said she shouldn’t ought to let it wander around loose, and then she got pissed at me and said she’d let her deer go where it damn well pleased.” Stronger rubbed his face. “So I finally just went out and grabbed it and carried it back over my shoulder. Which it did not like. I had hoofprints in personal places.”

“Still, pet deer. That’s honorary livestock.”

“I got my cousin’s girdle.”

Fisher-Bird had been looking for more crawfish, but she stopped and turned her head real slow to look at him. “. . . You got that kinda family, do you?”

“No!” And when Fisher-Bird gave him a steady look, “Well . . . all right. My mother-in-law’s married to her brother and they say her daddy was a cannibal.”

“Take an old bird’s advice, son, and get the hell away from those people. Marrying kin ain’t good, but you start eating each other and all bets are off.”

“Look, I didn’t know about that bit when I married in. Anyway, that’s what the jobs are for. I finish these, and I’m free and clear and they let me go. I’m gonna move west and never talk to these people again.” Stronger rubbed his forehead. “And it wasn’t like that with my cousin. I just went and asked politely. Wasn’t much of a job. I think my mother-in-law was hoping she’d be mad, but I explained all about it and brought her a bottle of the good stuff, and she said my mother-in-law was always a bad one and she’d be happy to do anything to spit in her eye.”

“Well, gettin’ away is good,” said Fisher-Bird. “I approve of that.”

Stronger nodded gloomily. “I don’t even like most of them, and that’s leaving aside that my mother-in-law keeps trying to kill me.”

Fisher-Bird, no stranger to family infighting, nodded wisely. “Some people come outta the egg mad.”

Stronger finished flaking the mud off his face. “You’re still a bird,” he said, almost accusingly.

“Yeah, I’d get used to that.”

“If you’re a bird, then why can you talk?”

“Shit, son,” said Fisher-Bird, and let loose a long string of curses that made Stronger sit up and take notice. “I’ve always been able to talk. Question is how you’re listening.”

Stronger shook his head. “Dunno. Never could before.”

Fisher-Bird scratched her beak. “Any of those snakes bite your ears?”

The man looked puzzled for a minute, then put his finger in his ear and wiggled it around like he was cleaning earwax. He winced. “Yeah. One got me right up there by the ear.”

“There you go,” said Fisher-Bird, pleased. “You make a friend of a snake, they’ll lick your ears, let you hear the language of birds.”

“These snakes weren’t friendly.”

“Yeah, but spit’s spit.”

He thought for a few minutes. “Huh. You know, I got some birds I gotta clean out for my mother-in-law. You think this’ll help me?”

“What kinda birds?” She hopped down a little closer.

“Weird ones. Feathers like metal. You shoot at ’em and it bounces right off and makes a noise like you’re shaking buckshot in a tin can.”

“Oh, them. Stimps.” She grimaced as well as one can with a beak.

“What?”

“Stimps. They’re herons, more or less, but their great-great-granddaddy did a favor for the Iron-Wife and got her blessing. Now they got iron feathers and think they’re better’n the rest of us.”

“I’m supposed to drive ’em off. They’re a real menace over at the lake. They drop feathers that’ll cut you all to ribbons.”

“Hmm.” Fisher-Bird thought it over. She had no great love of humans, but he’d apologized about the fish and that was a pretty fine thing. And she had even less love of herons, who took fish and frogs and a lot of other critters that rightly belonged in Fisher-Bird’s gullet, let alone magic herons who thought they owned the place. But most of all, she had an active loathing of stimps, who’d chased one of Fisher-Bird’s cousins out of the swamp and had a few nasty words for her when they did it.

“Yeah, okay.” The chance to get one back at the stimps was too good to pass up. “Best do it soon, though, before they start nesting. Once you get a couple dozen of them together in a tree, cackling and raising up eggs, it’s a problem. And it ain’t right to mess with other people’s eggs, even stimps.”

“So I should just ask ’em to leave, then?”

Fisher-Bird rolled her eyes. “Not unless you got a few hours to waste, listening to a stimp insult you. No, they ain’t gonna go on their own.”

“Well, I can’t get to them. They’re in a marshy bit, and if I walk out there, I’m hip-deep in muck. I try to grab one, they’ll be miles away, throwin’ those nasty sharp feathers at me.”

Fisher-Bird preened under her wing. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.

“What?”

“Tomorrow. Come back then. Maybe I can help you; maybe I can’t.”

Stronger looked like he might argue for a minute; then he closed his mouth and nodded. “All right, then. Thank you.”

Polite sort of human, Fisher-Bird thought. Worth helping out the polite ones. Particularly if it got rid of those stuck-up stimps.

Just the thought made her chuckle. “Krk-krk-krk-krk!”

“All right,” said Fisher-Bird, when Stronger came back the next day. “What you want is poison. You got any?”

“I had a whole bunch of dead cottonmouths,” said Stronger sourly. “But I didn’t realize I’d need them.”

“Nah, that wouldn’t have worked. That stuff dries out too fast, goes all to lumps. Need something nasty that’ll mix with tar.”

“I got rat poison back home,” said Stronger.

“Yeah, that’s fine. Now, you got arrows?”

“Arrows?”

“Shit, son, don’t tell me humans don’t use arrows no more.”

“I guess . . . ?” Stronger looked doubtful. “I haven’t shot a bow since I was little. I got a gun.”

“Can’t poison a bullet, son. You need some arrows, and you need to wrap the point with some cloth. Then you mix up some tar and some rat poison and dip the points in that. Make it good and drippy.”

“If I can’t put a bullet in the stimp, how’m I gonna put an arrow in one?”

“You ain’t,” said Fisher-Bird. “You’re gonna smack ’em with the arrow and leave goop all over those shiny metal feathers of theirs. Then they go to preen and they’ll get a mouthful of rat poison.”

Stronger thought this over. “Ye-e-e-e-s . . .” he said slowly. “Could work. But I still don’t know how to get to the stimps in the first place. They’re out in the marsh and the mud, and I can’t get a clear shot at any of ’em.”

Fisher-Bird flicked her crest. “You come back when you got you a bow and poison. Bring along a couple tin cans, too. Then we’ll see about getting you your shot.”

Stronger came back to Fisher-Bird’s stream two days later, carrying a pack and a bow over his back and a metal bucket full of arrows. “These things are nasty,” he said, setting the bucket down.

“Hello to you, too,” said Fisher-Bird. “The family’s fine, thank you kindly for asking.”

Stronger sighed. “My aunt’d ding my ear for rudeness, if she was still alive. Sorry, bird. Hope you’re well.”

“I’m good,” said Fisher-Bird. “And how’s your family?”

“Mostly dead and the live ones are mean,” said Stronger. Fisher-Bird cackled.

She hopped down from her branch and landed on the rim of the bucket. (Fisher-Bird never did learn to walk very well, but that didn’t slow her down much.) She peered down into the mess of black sludge, with the arrows sticking up out of it like porcupine quills. “Damn. Looks godawful, anyhow. You got them tin cans?”

Stronger slung the pack off his back and opened it up, revealing half a dozen empty cans.

“Flatten ’em out,” ordered Fisher-Bird. Stronger took each can between his palms and put his hands together like he was praying. The cans went flat as paper, and Fisher-Bird could see the dents left by his wedding ring.

“All right,” said Fisher-Bird. “That’s everything.” She jumped from the rim of the bucket, flapped her wings twice, and landed on Stronger’s shoulder. She had to cock her head over to look up into his face.

“You gonna peck out my eyes?” asked Stronger, sounding amused.

“Nah, son, that’s crows. Not saying I wouldn’t take a bite if you were already drowned, but that’d be more in the way of courtesy.”

“Eating my eyes if I drowned would be courtesy?”

“Well, you’d hardly want a stranger to do it, would you? Besides, people do weird shit with corpse eyes. Best to get ’em pecked out nice and quick so you don’t find ’em doin’ something nasty later.”

“I’m not sure I’d be worried about that, if I was already dead.”

“You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”

Stronger rubbed his hand over the eyes in question. “I am having the strangest month,” he said, to no one in particular.

“Try bein’ a bird. Now come on; let’s go make some stimps miserable.”

It was a hot afternoon, and the air was wet and thick with pollen. You could look down the road and see the trees get paler and greener until they vanished into a yellow haze from all the pine trees rattling their cones. Fisher-Bird didn’t much like pines in late spring. The rest of the year they were solid-enough trees, but they got a little spring in them and they became downright indecent.

The swamp had pines ringing it and then juniper cedars, trying to suck up as much water as they could, and then a narrow channel of open water. Then it all went to cattails and sedge and muck, with little scruffy trees that didn’t do much except give the cat-claw vines something to crawl over.

“I can’t get very far out there,” said Stronger. “I mean, I try, but I sink right in and it’s like wading through glue.”

“Yeah, I figured. Wait here.” Fisher-Bird took off from his shoulder and flew across the swamp, looking for stimps.

They weren’t hard to find. A couple here, a couple there, a few standing by themselves, with their big beaks poised to stab in the water. Fisher-Bird looked with her right eye and saw herons with steel feathers. She looked with her left eye and saw a goddess’s blessing hanging over them the way pollen hung over pines.

She also saw a whole lotta things she didn’t like. The swamp wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right, and it didn’t look right. There were big bare areas where the stimps had flicked their wings and scythed the grasses down like wheat, big white slashes in the trees where they’d rubbed their beaks and cut to the heartwood. There were ducks floating head-down, gutted by a careless stimp feather, and the water was greasy black with rot.

It was when she saw a dead beaver laid out, nearly chopped in half by iron wings, that Fisher-Bird started to get mad. But she kept her tongue and her temper inside her beak and went flying on until she came to a stimp so tall, it looked like a scarecrow made of iron.

Fisher-Bird landed next to the tallest stimp and said, “Morning.”

The stimp didn’t move.

Fisher-Bird cleaned her beak with her foot and said, louder, “I said good morning!”

The stimp didn’t move.

“Shit,” said Fisher-Bird. “You died standing up?”

The stimp gave up. “I have not died,” said the steel heron, with icy precision. “I am fishing. Which I would have thought that you would understand, even if you practice the art like a wild boar practices dancing.”

Fisher-Bird’s beak didn’t lend itself to smirking, which was probably for the best. “Aw, you’re in a mood. What’s wrong, not enough fish?”

The stimp grunted.

“Mess this place is in, surprised there’s a fish to be found. Or a frog or a turtle for that matter. Maybe it’s time you stimps moved on.”

“Go bother someone else, little bird,” said the stimp. “I’ve no time for such as you.”

“Sorry about your momma,” said Fisher-Bird. “Must be hard.”

“What?” The steel heron turned its head finally, gold eyes narrowing. “What about my mother?”

“Just figured you lost her young,” said Fisher-Bird. “Or else she’d have taught you some proper manners.” She studied her claws nonchalantly. “Unless you learned from her, in which case it’s pretty clear she was no better than she should—krrk!”

The stimp’s strike would have made a meal of a slower bird, but Fisher-Bird had been waiting. She was in the air as soon as the stimp took the first step. The swamp filled up with the rattle of steel feathers and the chatter of Fisher-bird cussing, but Fisher-Bird’s faster than any heron, even a blessed one. She came winging back to Stronger, pleased with herself.

“Heard quite a ruckus,” said Stronger. “But they didn’t take to the air.”

“Nope,” said Fisher-Bird. “Didn’t think they would. But they’re killin’ beavers now, what never did nobody no harm, and also they were rude, so now I got no qualms at all.”

“Suppose we could try to scare them out,” said Stronger, a bit dubiously.

“Krrk-rkk! What’s a stimp got to be scared of? Unless you got like . . . eagles with magnets or something.” Fisher-Bird got a thoughtful look. “Huh, that’s not a bad idea. If this doesn’t work, the osprey boys owe me a favor. . . .”

Stronger put his head in his hands. “One plan at a time, please,” he whispered.

“Sit yourself down,” said Fisher-Bird. “Once it gets a little later in the day, the stimp boys will start trying to look real fine for the ladies, and that’s when we’ll do it.”

Stronger picked a log out of the water and set it down so he had a comfortable place to sit. Fisher-Bird amused herself picking crunchy tidbits with lots of legs off the end that had been in the water.

The sun started to climb up in the sky. Nothing much happened for a while, except the sound of carrion flies buzzing over the dead ducks and the dead beaver. Fisher-Bird didn’t like that either. Ought to have been a lot more insect sounds in the swamp, maybe some early pondhawks zipping over the water, but nothing, just the flies.

Then a noise rang out over the swamp, a metallic clatter like somebody shuffling a deck of cards made out of tin.

“What the devil . . . ?” Stronger jumped, startled, and accidentally put his log a foot deep in the wet ground.

Fisher-Bird got splattered by the mud and chattered, outraged, while she cleaned her feathers off. “Krrk-krrk-krk!”

“Sorry,” said Stronger. “Didn’t mean—what is that?” The noise came again, louder, and then another one. “It’s like a frog . . . a train . . . some kind of bug?”

Fisher-Bird preened her feathers down with her heavy beak, grumbling. “It’s the stimps,” she said. “You never seen herons do the dance for each other, son? The boys raise their crests way up and then flatten ’em back down, trying to look taller. ’Cept when stimps do it, their crests are made outta metal and it sounds like . . . well, like that.”

Another metallic crash, like the mating call of rain gutters.

“Now you take those tin cans and fan ’em out,” said Fisher-Bird. “And you raise them real high over your head and you rattle ’em together and you’ll sound like the tallest, sexiest stimp in creation.”

Stronger stared at her.

“What?” said Fisher-Bird. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s like flexing your muscles for the ladies. Except the ladies in this case are magicked-up herons.”

“You want me to do a bird mating dance?”

“Shit, son, you put it that way, it almost sounds weird.”

“But what happens then?” said Stronger, taking out the tin cans and looking at them in disbelief. “Do they come looking for me?”

“And risk gettin’ shown up? No, they’re gonna try to make themselves taller and prettier. They’re gonna be hopping up and down in the swamp, doing their best jumps for the ladies. You look out over the reeds then, you’ll see a whole bunch of stimps going up and down like jumping jacks.”

Stronger looked blank.

“And that’s when you shoot ’em with arrows,” said Fisher-Bird. “Son, I got eggs that would have latched on to this plan faster than you are. Unfertilized eggs.”

Stronger gave her a hangdog look. Then he sighed, held the cans up as far as he could, and drew his thumbnail down over the short edges, like fanning the pages of a book. An ordinary man might have cut hisself to ribbons, but Stronger had the blood of gods thick and oozing in his veins, and the cans rattled and clattered like a stimp’s crest in his hands.

Fisher-Bird took to the air and watched stimp heads shooting up all over the swamp, like chickens hearing a hawk yell.

Stronger rattled the cans again and again, and the stimps craned their necks, looking for the source of the sound, each one worried it might be one of the others. Then they stood up straight, raising their crests as high as they could go, and they started to bounce up and down, leaping into the air, each trying to make themselves look like the tallest stimp of all.

Fisher-Bird circled back to Stronger and said, “Now’s a good time.”

“Thank god,” said Stronger, shoving the cans into his belt. “Ain’t dignified.” He pulled his bow off his back, pulled an arrow from the bucket—it made a wet sucking sound—and took aim.

Fisher-Bird was a little bit worried, what with the stimps leaping back and forth, but Stronger’s aim was good. He pulled back on the bow till the wood moaned, then fired.

Thwap! Tar exploded over the nearest stimp’s neck feathers, and the bird dropped with a yell of disgust.

Thwap! Thwap! Sometimes Stronger missed, but mostly he didn’t.

Fisher-Bird winged in next to the first stricken stimp and saw its feathers splashed with black tar. The bird was frantically trying to scrape the mess off with its beak, preening at the feathers like any bird would, and pretty soon the rat poison started to kick in.

“Don’t feel so good . . .” muttered the stimp. It stopped worrying about its feathers and went staggering off into the swamp, wings trailing. Fisher-Bird cackled. There probably wasn’t enough rat poison to kill something the size of a stimp, but after the dead beaver, she wasn’t feeling a lot of remorse.

“Is that all of them?” asked Stronger. “I’m nearly out of arrows.”

“All the boys,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ought to be enough to move them along.”

Fisher-Bird went looking for the tallest stimp and found it at last, bent over like an old man, with tar rimming its beak. “This is your doing, Fisher-Bird,” said the stimp. “Don’t lie.”

“Didn’t plan to,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ain’t ashamed of it. Your people’ve made a mess outta this swamp, and it’s time you moved on. Plus you were right little shits to my cousin, and I ain’t forgotten.”

“Used a human to do it, didn’t you?” The stimp’s voice was no longer so icy and precise. “Saw the arrow hit me. Some gall you’ve got, claiming we made a mess. You seen what humans do to a swamp?”

“Sure,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t stupid.”

The stimp tried to step forward and its leg almost gave out under it, so it wobbled sideways and nearly fell, but its eyes stayed locked on Fisher-Bird.

“Go!” said Fisher-Bird. “Get gone! You’ve got no fish, no frogs, no food, and the human’ll sit out here and cover you in tar every time to try to dance. This ain’t no place for you anymore.”

“Oh, we’ll go,” said the stimp. “You’re not wrong there. But you’re not as smart as you think you are, Fisher-Bird.”

“Oh?”

“Heh,” said the stimp softly. “Heh heh heh.” And then it whipped its neck around so hard that the bones crackled, and Fisher-Bird was just a hair slow getting into the air, so the slash of the stimp’s crest took her low across the belly and knocked her down into the rotting mud.

Stronger came plodding through a long time later. “Bird?” he called. “Bird? The stimps flew away, the ones that could fly. Bird, where are you?”

He slid and squelched into the clear spot that had been the tallest stimp’s dance floor, and caught sight of Fisher-Bird. “Bird, no!”

He went to his knees next to the little limp bundle of feathers and picked her up with hands that were stronger than anyone else’s. “Bird, don’t die. It worked. Please don’t die.” He cradled her in his palm, and her wings hung limp at her sides, a girdle of dried blood across her white feathers. “You helped me. You’re the only one, aside from my cousin, who’s given me the time of day. Please don’t die.”

Fisher-Bird didn’t speak, didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and her beak gaped open.

Stronger put his forehead down against her feathered breast and started to cry. And I ain’t saying the tears of a hero with god-blood have any kind of power, but I’ll tell you the only thing I know, which is that Fisher-Bird pecked his eyebrow, hard.

“Ow!” Stronger jerked back, nearly dropping her. “What the hell was that?”

“You damn near squashed me,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t feeling all that well, all right? Damn stimp had rat poison left on his feathers. Serves me right for letting him get too close, I guess. More fool me.”

“I thought you were dead!”

“Can’t even have a bit of a lie-down without some damn fool crying all over you.” She pecked him again for good measure. “There. You got your stimps cleared out. Your mother-in-law can’t say you didn’t, and the swamp’ll be better for it in a season or two.”

“Can I take you back to your stream?” asked Stronger, who was raised polite.

“Yeah, I’ll let you,” said Fisher-Bird, who didn’t want to let on that she wasn’t feelin’ too much like flying right then. So he carried her back on his shoulder and set her down on her favorite branch, and bid her farewell.

“Hmmph,” said Fisher-Bird. “You finish up your jobs and get away from that woman, you hear?”

“I will,” he promised. “I will.”

Anyway, you all know the rest of the story. There were some golden cattle—or maybe some golden apples, depending on who you ask—and Old Man Hades’s guard dogs with their fine snapping teeth. Stronger did it all, without complaining too much, and finally his mother-in-law had to let him go.

As for Fisher-Bird, she never could clean her feathers for fear of getting a mouthful of poison, so she’s had a red band of blood and rust right across her belly, from that day to this. Which is still getting off lightly if you mess about with gods and heroes, so Fisher-Bird always said.

Author's Note: The Labors of Hercules is one of the first myths I remember reading as a child. (At the time, I remember being very invested in the man-eating mares of Diomedes.) Looking back on it, years later, I was bemused by how many of the labors fundamentally seem to involve animals. Kill this lion and this hydra and this boar and these birds. Catch these horses, this dog, this deer, and then clean up the stables while you’re at it.

It got me thinking about how the animals likely felt about the matter, and what their view on the Labors might be, and from that initial spark came Fisher-Bird’s story.

Ursula Vernon is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Mythopoeic Awards. She has written a number of children’s books, short stories, and comics, and writes for adults under the name T. Kingfisher. She likes fairy-tale retellings, gardening, and has strong opinions about heirloom beans. You can find more of her work at redwombatstudio.com.

How the Trick is Done
By A.C. Wise

The Magician Takes a Bow

How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip—dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air—everyone claimed they knew someone who heard the Magician’s Assistant scream, saw the spray of blood, saw a man rush on stage and faint dead away.

Of course very few people making the claim, then or now, are telling the truth. Vegas is a city of illusion, and everyone likes feeling they’re in on the secret, understand how the trick is done, but very few do.

The end came for the Magician, fittingly, during the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat, the trick that made him famous. A real gun is fired by a willing audience member. The Magician dies. The Magician reappears alive and at back of the theater. Presto, abracadabra, ta-da.

There are small variations. Sometimes the Magician’s Assistant fires the gun, if the audience is squeamish, or especially drunk. She revels in these brief moments in the spotlight, dreaming of being a magician herself some day. Sometimes the Magician reappears in the balcony, waving, and sometimes by the exit doors. Once he reappeared as a vendor selling popcorn, his satin-lapeled jacket smelling of butter and heat and salt. Once, he came back as a waiter and spilled a drink on an audience member who was confidently whispering that they knew exactly how he pulled it off.

Just because Houdini flashed bullets in his smile years before the Magician was born, people think they have it nailed down. Variations on tricks of every kind are a grand tradition in the magic world, and everyone knows none of it is real. The world is rational; it obeys certain rules. They hold this truth like shield against the swoop in their bellies every time the Magician falls and gets back up again. None would dare admit out loud that deep down, a tiny part of them desperately wants to believe.

Here’s the secret, and it’s a simple one: dying is easy. All the Magician has to do is stand with teeth clenched, muscles tight, breath slowed, and wait. The real work is left to his Resurrectionist girlfriend, Angie, standing just off stage, night after night, doing the impossible, upsetting the natural order of the world. Her timing is always impeccable, her focus a razor’s edge. Her entire will is trained on holding the bullet in place, coaxing the Magician’s blood to flow and forbidding his heart from simply quitting out of shock. Death can be very startling, after all.

There is pain, of course, but by the time he died for good, it had become a habit for the Magician, and besides, the applause made it worthwhile. He never once allowed himself to think about the thousand huge and tiny things had to go right for the trick to work, or that only one had to go wrong.

After all, the Resurrectionist pulled it off night after night—how hard could it be? Inside the wash of the spotlight, he couldn’t see her grit her teeth, how she sweated in the shadows while he flashed his smile and took his bows. Everything always went off, just like magic, and he always managed to vanish by the time her raging headache set in, forcing her to lie in a dark room with a cold cloth over her eyes.

But she never complained. The money was good, and much like dying had become a habit for the Magician, the Magician had become a habit for her.

Maybe they could have gone on like that forever if it hadn’t been for the Magician’s Assistant. Not the one who fired the gun, but the first one. Meg, who died and came back as a ghost.

• • • •

The Assistant Takes Flight

Meg was young when she was the Magician’s Assistant, but everyone was back then. She was also in love with the Magician, but everyone was that back then, too. Even Rory, the Magician’s longtime stage manager, who was perhaps the most in love of all.

Rory thought of Meg as a little sister, and Meg thought of Rory as a dear friend, but neither of them ever spoke of their feelings for the Magician aloud. They worked side by side every day, believing themselves alone in their singular orbits of longing, both ashamed to have fallen so far and so hard for so long.

All of this was before the Magician’s Resurrectionist girlfriend, before the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat was even a gleam in the Magician’s eye. Back then, before coming back from the dead to thunderous applause supplanted it all, the Magician sawed women in half, plucked cards from thin air, nicked watches from sleeves, and pulled one very grumpy rabbit out of a hat night after night. Off stage and on, the Magician called the rabbit Gus, even though that wasn’t his name, and assigned him motives and personality to make the audience laugh.

Whether it was the name or the hat, the rabbit only tolerated this for so long, and one fateful night, he bit the Magician hard enough to necessitate the tip of his left index finger being sewn back on. After the blood and the gauze, and the trip to the hospital, the Magician decided he was fed up too. He needed a new act, a new assistant, a fresh start.

He didn’t consult or warn Meg, but directed her to an all-night diner as she drove him back from the emergency room. Up until the moment the words “I’m done,” came from the Magician’s mouth, Meg harbored the hope that this trauma would allow him to finally see her, and that he’d invited her to the diner at 1:47 a.m. to confess his love.

Instead, he broke her heart and put her out of a job in the same breath. And he didn’t even have the decency to pay for her half of the meal.

Meg stared at the Magician. The Magician fidgeted with his gauze, and looked at the door and the neon and the cooling desert outside.

“I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, kid,” he said.

Meg blinked. She dug in her purse for tissues and money for the meal. When she looked up, the Magician was gone. Vanished into thin air.

Meg dropped coins and bills on the table without counting. Colt-wobbly legs carried her into the night. The air seared her lungs, and tears frosted her lashes. All up and down the strip, everything blurred into a river of light.

The Magician’s Assistant—she wasn’t even that anymore. Just Meg, and her parents had drilled into her young that that wasn’t worth anything at all. Who was she, if she wasn’t with the Magician? What could she possibly be?

Lacking evidence to the contrary, she chose to believe her parents. On stage with the Magician, she could pretend the glitter on her costume was a little bit of his glory rubbed off on her. Alone, she was nothing at all, and her ridiculous costume was just sequins, falling in her wake as she hailed a cab.

The car stopped at a location she must have given, though she didn’t remember saying anything at all. The space between her shoulder blades itched. She climbed out. Wind tugged at her hair and she took a moment to breathe in awe at the lights illuminating the vast sweep of concrete, a marvel of engineering, a wonder of the new world.

Meg left her purse on the backseat. She slipped off her shoes. The itch between her shoulder blades grew. Feathers ached to push themselves out from inside her skin.

Instead of landing on her feet, Meg landed at the bottom of Hoover Dam. A 727 foot drop that should have been impossible with all the security, except that just for a moment, Meg borrowed a little bit of magic—real magic—for her own. As she jumped, feathers burst from her skin and all the sequins in her costume blazed like stars. For just one instant before she fell, the Magician’s Assistant flew.

• • • •

The Stage Manager Brings White Roses

Rory remembered Meg, and it seemed he was the only one.

Before she hit the ground, before he left the diner and Meg sitting stunned in the booth behind him, the Magician had already forgotten her name. If he ever knew it at all. While Meg flew, capturing a moment of real magic without an audience or applause, the Magician was at a bar forgetting what he’d never remembered in the first place, and so Rory was the one who got the call. He sat on the floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed.

Even though the Magician paid her a pittance, Meg brought Rory coffee and pastry at least once a week. He taught her how to knit. She taught him how to throw a fastball. She invited him to her tiny apartment, and introduced him to her guinea pigs, Laurel and Hardy. They watched old movies, both having a fondness for Vincent Price, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, and popcorn with too much salt. They laughed at stupid things, and cried at sad ones, and never let each other know of their mutual ache for the Magician.

Now that it was too late, Rory saw that of course he was like Meg, she was like him, and they were both fools. He brought a massive spray of white roses to her funeral. He laid them gently atop her cheap coffin, and his heart broke all over again. There were only five other people in the tiny chapel, and the Magician wasn’t one of them.

Rory hated him. Or, he meant to. Except when the Magician came to him three days later and told Rory he was putting together a new show and would Rory continue to stage manage him, Rory didn’t hesitate half as long as he should have before answering. His heart stuttered, his breath caught. The word no shaped itself on his lips, and the word yes emerged instead.

He betrayed Meg’s memory, and loathed himself for it, but he didn’t change his mind. The best Rory could do was press a single white rose in his handkerchief, and tuck it in a pocket over his heart, listening to it crackle as he followed the Magician to start again.

Every night, under the lights, the Magician smiled. His teeth dazzled with a rainbow of gel colors Rory directed his way. Every time the gun fired, Rory felt the kick of it reverberate inside him. His blood thundered. His stomach swooped. He ached with the Magician and felt his pain as he watched him fall.

Every night as the Magician allowed himself to be shot, Rory held his breath. He clenched his teeth. His muscles went tight with hope and dread wondering if this time the Magician might finally stay down so he could be free.

• • • •

The Resurrectionist and the Ghost

Angie is the first person to see Meg when she comes back from the dead. The Resurrectionist sits in the Magician’s dressing room, applying concealer over the exhausted bags under her eyes. No one will see her in the wings, but that’s precisely why she does it. The makeup is a little thing she can do for herself and no one else.

It’s getting harder to hold everything together, to want to hold it together—tell the bullet to stop, to cease to be once it’s inside the Magician’s skin, and tell the Magician’s blood to go. She sleeps eighteen hours a day, and it isn’t enough. Angie’s life has become an endless cycle—wake, eat, turn back death, applause that isn’t for her, sleep, repeat ad infinitum.

She smoothes the sponge around the corner of her left eye, and the ghost appears. Angie starts, and feels something like recognition.

“I’ve been waiting for you.” The words surprise Angie; she wonders what she means. A vague memory tugs at the back of her skull, of a night in a bar long ago, but before she can grab hold it fades away.

“Who are you?” the ghost asks.

“Who are you?” Angie counters.

“The Magician’s Assistant,” the ghost says.

“The Magician’s girlfriend.” The words leave a bitter, powdery, crushed aspirin taste on Angie’s tongue.

Angie laughs; it’s a brittle sound. How absurd, that they should define themselves solely in relation to the Magician. The ghost looks hurt until Angie speaks again.

“I’m Angie.”

“Meg.” The ghost gives her name reluctantly as if she isn’t entirely sure.

“So, you were the Magician’s Assistant,” Angie says.

Memory nags at her again, and all at once, the pieces click into place. When she and the Magician first met, he’d worn sorrow like a coat two sizes too large, but one he wasn’t even aware of wearing. Angie had sensed a hurt in him, and it had intrigued her, and now she knows—the hurt belonged to Meg all along.

There’s a certain flavor to it, tingeing the air. Even with the glass between them, Angie tastes it—like pancakes drowned in syrup, and coffee with too much cream.

Looking at Meg, Angie sees herself in the mirror. The Magician pulled a trick on both of them, sleight of hand. They should have been looking one direction, but he’d convinced them to look elsewhere as he vanished their names like a card up his sleeve, tucked them into a cabinet painted with stars so they emerged transformed—a dove, a bouquet of flowers, a Resurrectionist, a ghost. If Angie squints just right, there’s a blur framing Meg, a faint, smudgy glow sprouting from between her shoulder blades. It almost looks like wings, but when Angie blinks, it’s gone.

Well, shit, Angie thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud.

Behind Meg, sand blows. Or maybe it’s snow. The image flickers, like two stations coming in on the TV at the same time, back when that was still a thing.

“Can I come through?” Angie asks.

“Can you?” Meg’s eyes widen in surprise.

“I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie’s mouth twists on the words, but she can’t think of a better way to explain. “Death and I have an understanding.”

Angie reaches through the glass. The mirror wavers, and Meg’s fingers close on Angie’s hand.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Angie asks.

Meg shrugs, embarrassed. This is her death, but it isn’t under her control.

“Over there?” Angie points to the neon shining through the storm.

Meg shudders, but her expression remains perfectly blank. She looks to Angie like a person actively forgetting the worst moment in their world.

As they walk, Angie learns that for Meg, sometimes death looks like a desert with a lomo camera filter applied. Sometimes it’s sand and sometimes snow, but it’s always littered with bleached cow bones and skulls. It’s a place where you’re always walking toward the horizon, carrying your best party shoes, but you never arrive. Mostly, though, Meg’s death looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m., right before your boss—the man you love—tells you you’re out of a job and a future and good luck on the way down.

Inside the diner, laminated menus decorate each booth. The wind ticks sand against the glass as Meg and Angie slide onto cracked red faux-leather banquettes. In the corner, a silent jukebox glows.

“I don’t mean to be indelicate, but you’ve been dead for a while. Why come back now?”

The air is scented with fry grease and coffee on the edge of burnt, old cooking smells trapped like ghosts.

“I don’t know,” Meg says. “I think something important is about to happen. Or it already happened. I can’t tell.”

She shreds her napkin into little squares, letting them fall like desert snow. Her nails are ragged, the skin around them chewed. This time when Angie squints, Meg goes translucent, and Angie sees her falling without end.

• • • •

The Rabbit Returns

The first time Angie saw the Magician, he had gauze wrapped around his left index finger, spotted with dried blood. She’d just lost her job, or rather it had lost her. Donna, who sat in the next cubicle over, caught Angie uncurling the browned leaves of a plant, bringing them back from the brink of death to full glossy health. Angie’s boss called Angie into her office at noon, and by 1 p.m. Angie was installed at a bar, getting slowly drunk.

The constant movement of the Magician’s hands was what caught Angie’s eye. She watched as he tried the same cheap card trick, only slightly clumsy with his injured hand, on almost every patron in the bar. No matter which card his mark chose, when the Magician asked, “Is this your card?” he revealed the Tarot card showing the Lovers, and smirked at the implications of flesh entwined. She watched until it worked, and someone left on the Magician’s arm. Angie found herself simultaneously annoyed and amused, and the following night, she returned to the same bar, curious whether the Magician would as well.

The Magician did return, but there were no card tricks this time. She spotted him alone in a corner, his head resting on his folded arms. Angie slipped into his booth, holding her breath. If this was a performance, it was a good one. The Magician looked up, and Angie couldn’t help the way her breath left in a huff. His face was stark with a grief, thick enough for her to touch.

“He’s dead,” the Magician said. “The little bastard bit me. He was my best friend, and now he’s gone.”

The Magician blinked at Angie as if she’d appeared out of thin air. Angie said nothing, and the Magician seemed to take it as encouragement to go on. He held up his gauze-wrapped finger, and poured out his pain.

“Maybe I left his cage open after he bit me because I was mad. Maybe I was distracted because I’d just fired my assistant and I forgot to latch it tight. Whatever happened, he got all the way outside, across the parking lot. I found him on the side of the road, flat as a swatted bug.”

Tears glittered on the Magician’s cheeks. They had to be real. If he’d been putting on a show, he would have made a point of letting Angie see him wipe them away.

“I put his body in a shoebox in my freezer. I’m going to bury him in the desert.” The Magician laughed, an uneven sound. “Have you ever been to a rabbit funeral?”

The faint sheen at his cuffs spoke of wear. Despite the show he’d put on the night before—cheap card tricks to tumble marks into his bed—she saw a man down on his luck, wearing thin, a man whose deepest connection was with the rabbit who’d bit him then run away.

The Magician looked lost, baffled by grief—like a little boy just learning the world could hurt him. There was something pure in his sorrow, something Angie hadn’t seen in Vegas in a long time. It looked like truth, and Angie wanted to gather it into her hands, a silk scarf endlessly pulled from a sleeve.

A shadow haloed the Magician. A death that wasn’t the rabbit’s clinging to his skin; he didn’t even seem aware it was there. Angie caught her breath, deciding before she’d fully asked herself the question. That bigger death wasn’t one she could touch, but the rabbit—that was a small thing she could heal.

“Do you want to see a magic trick?” she asked. “A real one?”

The Magician’s eyes went wide, touched with something like wonder. Maybe it was his grief making him see clear, but for just a moment, he seemed to truly see her. He nodded, and held out his hand.

The Magician led Angie to his shitty apartment. As they climbed the stairs, her nerves sang—a cage, full of doves waiting to be released, a star-spangled box with a beautiful woman vanishing inside. Her skin tingled. She considered that she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and decided to make it anyway.

“His name was Gus.” The Magician set a shoebox on his makeshift coffee table.

The rabbit lay on his side. Despite the Magician’s description, he wasn’t particularly flat. He might have been sleeping, if not for the cold. It seeped into Angie’s fingers as she held her hands above the corpse. The Magician watched her, all curiosity and intensity, and Angie blushed. A rabbit was different than a houseplant—what if she failed? And what if she succeeded?

The rabbit twitched. His pulse jumped in her veins, a panicked scrabbling. Angie placed her hands directly on the rabbit’s soft, cold fur. She meant to make a hushing sound, soothing the rabbit’s fear, but the Magician’s mouth covered hers. Salt laced his tongue; was she crying, or was he? She lifted her hands from the rabbit and pressed them against the Magician’s back instead to still their shaking. Death clung to them, tacky and oddly sweet. She resisted the urge to wipe her palms against the Magician’s shirt, pulling him closer.

She’d never brought back anything larger than a sparrow. Now she could feel the rabbit’s life in her—hungry, wild, wanting to run in every direction at once. The other, larger death continued to nibble at her edges—feathers itching beneath her skin, wind blowing over lonely ground.

The rabbit’s pink nose twitched; his red-tinged eyes blew galaxy-wide. He ran a circle around the Magician’s apartment, and the Magician laughed, a joyous, bellowing sound. He lifted Angie by the shoulders, twirling her around.

“Do you know what this means?” His voice crashed off the cracked and water-stained apartment walls.

He scooped her up, carried her to rumpled sheets still smelling of last night’s sex. Angie’s teeth chattered; the rabbit was still freezing, and the Magician was warm. She dug her fingers into his back, and leaned into him.

The sex was some of the strangest Angie had ever had. The Magician touched her over and over again, amazed, as if searching for something beneath her skin. For her part, Angie kept getting distracted. She snapped in and out of her body, pulled to the corner of the room where the rabbit rubbed his paws obsessively across his face. She giggled inappropriately, her limbs twitching beyond her control. She developed an insatiable craving for carrots. The Magician, lost in his own wild galaxy of stars, never seemed to notice at all.

In the morning, she found the Magician at his cramped kitchen table. The sense she’d forgotten something nagged at the back of her mind—something sad, something with feathers—but the more she reached after it, the further it withdrew. She watched the Magician scribble on a napkin, coffee cooling beside him, burnt toast with one bite taken out of it sitting on a plate. He looked up at Angie with a wicked grin.

“How would you like to be part of a magic show?”

• • • •

The Assistant Returns

The bell over the door chimes, and Meg flinches, her shoulders rising like a shield. She and Angie both look to the entrance, but there’s no one there.

“We should go.” Angie might be about to make the second biggest mistake of her life, but she decides to do it anyway. “Would you like to see a magic show?”

“I did magic once.” Meg’s voice is dreamy. “I think, but…” She frowns, then shakes her head, a sharp motion knocking the dreaming out of her voice and eyes. “I don’t remember.”

Hunger flickers in Meg’s eyes now, tiny silver fish darting through a deep pool of hurt. Will seeing the Magician help, or add one more scar? Angie holds out her hand. Meg’s touch is insubstantial, but she takes it.

Here’s the secret to what Angie does: dying is easy. Being dead is hard. And coming back hurts like hell. But it’s easier if you’re not alone, and Angie doesn’t let go of Meg the entire time. She’s come a long way since the rabbit, but it’s an act of will, consciously holding space for Meg’s hand, bringing her—not back to life, but back as a ghost. The act leaves Angie’s vision bursting with grey and black stars. She has to steady herself against the dressing room table as she and Meg emerge.

“I’ve been looking all over for you.” The Magician puts his head around the doorway, impatient, distracted. “We’re about to start the show.”

He barely looks at Angie; he doesn’t see Meg at all. In Angie’s peripheral vision, Meg’s expression falls. She’s braced, but nothing can truly prepare her for the Magician failing to see her one last time.

“I won’t let go.” Angie adjusts her grip, straightens, and Meg follows her to the wings off the stage.

Angie keeps Meg grounded throughout the show. The extra effort turns her skull into an echo chamber, her bones grinding like tectonic plates shifting through the eons. When the bullet kisses the Magician’s flesh, Meg gasps. Once it’s done, and the Magician reappears in the back of the theater—a combination of misdirection and Angie’s resurrection magic—Meg finally releases her death grip on Angie’s hand. Love is a hard habit to shed; Meg applauds. Angie is the only one to hear the sound, and each clap sounds like the cracking of ancient tombstones.

The Magician makes his way back to the stage, smiling and waving the whole way. Circles of rouge dot the Magician’s cheeks. The lights spark off his teeth as Rory cycles through gel filters, making a rainbow of the Magician’s smile. He takes his bows, gathering the flowers and panties and hotel keys thrown his way. Meg’s features settle into something less than love, less than awe. She frowns, then all at once, her mouth forms a silent “o.”

“I remember why I came back,” she says.

“Come with me.” Angie slips out of the theater, not that anyone is looking for her to notice.

She keeps a room in the hotel attached to the theater, and there, Angie collapses onto her bed. Meg hovers near the ceiling, turning tight, distraught circles like a goldfish in a too-small bowl.

“I don’t know if it’s happened yet, or if it’s happening now.” Meg stops her restless spiraling and sits cross-legged, upside down. Her hair hangs toward Angie; if Meg were solid, it would tickle Angie’s nose.

“Can you show me?” Angie’s skull is as fragile as a shattered egg, but Meg came back for a reason, and Angie wants to know.

Meg stretches. Their fingers touch. The room shifts and if Angie had eaten anything besides the ghost of bacon and coffee in the diner inside Meg’s death, she’d be sick. Her body remains on the bed, but Angie’s self stretches taffy-thin, anchored in a hotel room at one end, hovering above a swirl of music and laughter and brightness at the other. She isn’t Angie; she isn’t fully Meg either. They are two in one, Angie and Meg, Meg-in-Angie.

And below them is the Magician.

He burns like a beacon. A sour vinegar taste haunts the back of Angie’s throat. Pickled cabbage and resentment, brine and regret. Angie can’t sort out which feelings are Meg’s and which are hers. She must have loved the Magician once upon a time. Didn’t she?

The room is full of strangers, but another familiar face catches Angie-Meg’s eye. Rory stands at the edge of a conversation where the Magician is the center. He sways, too much to drink, but also blown by the force of yearning, a tree with branches bent in the Magician’s wind.

Angie and Meg watch as Rory orbits closer, his need fever-bright. The Magician turns. He stops, puzzled at seeing something familiar anew. After so many years of being careful in the Magician’s presence, Rory’s desire is raw. Something has changed, or perhaps nothing has, and Rory is simply tired, hungry, willing to take a chance. And after so many years of looking right past his stage manager, the Magician finally sees something he needs—admiration, want, fuel for his fire. He sees love, and opens his mouth to swallow it whole.

A flick of the hand, a palmed coin, a card shot from a sleeve—the first and easiest trick the Magician ever learned and the one that’s served him best over the years. He turns on his thousand-watt smile, and Rory steps into that smile. Parallel orbits collide, and their kiss is a hammer blow, shattering Angie’s heart.

She gasps, coming up for air from the bottom of a pool. Meg floats facedown above the bed, a faint outline haloing her in the shape of wings. Tears drip endlessly from her eyes, but never fall.

Angie is angrier than she’s ever been.

It’s not the Magician’s infidelity. Like the Magician himself, she’s grown used to that. The Magician could kiss hundreds, flirt with thousands, fuck every person he meets, and Angie wouldn’t care. The kiss means nothing to the Magician, and to Rory it means the world. That, Angie can’t abide.

Rage widens cracks in Angie she hadn’t even known were there. She can see what will happen next, Rory fluttering to the ground in the Magician’s wake like a forgotten card. There’s already forgetting in the Magician’s eyes, his mind running ahead to the next show, the next trick, the thunder of applause.

Angie makes fists of her hands. She wanted better for Rory. She wanted him to be better. She wants to have been better herself. Smart enough to never have fallen for the Magician’s tricks, clever enough to see through the illusion and sleight of hand. Angie meets Meg’s eyes.

“We have to let the Magician die.”

• • • •

A Rabbit’s Funeral

“Shit, shit, shit.” Heat from the asphalt soaked through Angie’s jeans where she knelt in the Magician’s parking lot, the shoebox by her side.

Tears dripped from the point of Angie’s nose and onto the rabbit’s fur. She’d woken in the Magician’s rumpled sheets, wondering if she was the first to see them twice, even three mornings in a row, and she’d found the rabbit curled next to the defunct radiator, empty as though he’d never contained life at all. Nothing she could do, no amount of power she could summon, would unravel his death again.

“Are you okay?” A shadow fell over her, sharp-edged in the light, and Angie looked up, startled.

“Yes. No. Shit. No. Sorry.” She wiped frantically at her face, leaving it smeared and blotchy.

The sun behind the man turned him into a scrap of darkness. Angie wished she’d brought sunglasses.

“I’m fine.” She stood and lifted her chin.

“You don’t look fine.” The man’s gaze drifted to the box.

Exhaustion wanted Angie to drop back to her knees, but she turned it into a deliberate motion, scooping the box against her chest and holding it close.

“I know that rabbit,” the man said. “The Magician—”

“The Magician. The fucking Magician.” Angie couldn’t help it—a broken laugh escaped her. She held the box out. “Do you know his name? It’s not Gus.”

“No.” The man looked genuinely regretful, and it made Angie like him instantly, and study him more closely.

The air smudged dark around his shoulders, curling them inward. A shadow haunted him, like the one clinging to the Magician, with the same flavor, but unlike the Magician, this man felt its weight.

“I’m Rory.” The man frowned at the box. “I’m the stage manager, I was looking for the Magician.”

“He’s out. I don’t know when he’ll be back. He doesn’t even know yet.” She indicated the box again.

Guilt tugged at her briefly, recalling the Magician’s grief at the bar, but Angie doubted she’d see such a display again. The Magician had already moved on, his head too full of plans for his own death and return, overfull with confidence not in her abilities, but that he was too important to properly die.

She caught disappointment in the stage manager’s eyes. Angie recognized it; Rory was as big a fool as she was, maybe bigger still. Like a compass point finding North, Rory’s gaze went to the Magician’s window. He didn’t have to count or search, pinpointing it immediately. Love was written plain on his skin, letters inches high that the Magician was too stupid to read.

“Will you help me bury him?” Angie held up the box, drawing Rory’s attention back, his expression smoothed into one of weary pain.

“I’m—” Angie stopped. She’d been about the say the Magician’s girlfriend. But they’d only just met; they’d fucked a few times. She’d brought his rabbit back from the dead, and that was the most intimate thing they’d shared.

“Angie.” She coughed.

Her name felt awkward, a ball of cactus thorns she wanted to spit out. Now it was her turn to glance at the building, though she had no idea which window belonged to the Magician. Dread prickled along her spine.

“I have a car.” Rory gestured. “We could bury him in the desert.”

Angie followed Rory across the parking lot. She climbed into the passenger seat, and set the box containing the dead rabbit in her lap. The car smelled faintly of cigarettes—old smoke, like Rory had quit long ago. Angie found it oddly comforting.

“I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie tested the word. The Magician had suggested it last night, bathed in the after-sex glow. She tried it on for size. “I bring things back from the dead.”

She expected Rory to slam on the brakes, swerve to the side of the road and demand she get out. He did neither. She kept talking.

“Simple things fall apart more easily—mice, sparrows, rabbits.” She tapped the box, finger-drumming a sound like rain. Telling Rory her secret felt necessary, an act of defiance. The Magician didn’t own her or her truths, not yet.

“Small things know the natural order of the world. Only humans are arrogant enough to believe they deserve a second chance at life.”

Angie let her gaze flick to the side, finding Rory’s eyes for a brief moment before he turned back to the road.

“How about here?” Rory parked and they got out.

Desert wind tugged at Angie’s hair. She held the box close, sand and scrub grass crunching under her feet. Rory kept a small, collapsible shovel in the trunk of his car for emergencies, a habit held over from when he lived in a climate with much more snow. He also kept a Sharpie in his glove box, and once they’d dug a hole, and laid the rabbit inside, Angie chose a flat, sun-warmed rock and uncapped the pen.

“What should we write, since we don’t know his name?”

“He was a good rabbit. His name was his own.”

Angie scribed the words. The moment felt like a pact, and when Angie stood, she took Rory’s hand. The sun dragged their shadows into long ribbons, and at the same moment, they turned to look behind them, as if they’d heard their names called. The city glowed in the gathering dusk. The Magician was waiting for them.

• • • •

How the Trick is Done

This is how it goes: Meg protests; she blushes translucent. She is dead, but she is afraid.

Angie points out how many people the Magician has hurt, how many more he will hurt still. Meg comes around to Angie’s point of view.

They tell Rory together, a united front. With Angie holding Meg’s hand, amplifying her form, Rory can see her. His eyes go wide, and his face becomes a glacier calving under its own weight. After his initial moment of shock, something like wonder takes over Rory’s face as he looks at Meg.

“You have wings.”

She blinks, spinning in place to try to see over her shoulder. The wonder on her face mirrors Rory’s, but the melancholy in her voice breaks Angie’s heart.

“I remember,” Meg says. “I think, once, I knew how to fly.”

“I should have…” Rory says, but he lets the rest of the sentence trail. Meg offers him a sad smile, telling him over and over again that her death is not his fault. Angie tells him that kissing the Magician was not a crime. Rory looks doubtful, but in the end, like Meg, he agrees. They need to let the Magician die.

Angie tells herself they are doing this for the dozens of lost souls, blown in like leaves from the strip, looking for magic, and instead finding the Magician. She tells herself it is not revenge. That he failed them more than they failed themselves. She thinks of late-night coffee, and early-morning champagne. All the opportunities she had to tell Rory that she knew he was in love with the Magician, to tell him to run. She savors her guilt, and pushes it down.

The one person they do not tell is the Magician’s Assistant, his current one. It is unfair, but she needs to be the one to fire the gun. Magic, true magic, requires a sacrifice, and none of them have anything left to give.

On the night the Magician dies, he asks for a volunteer from the audience. A hand rises, but the woman raising it feels a terrible chill, ghost fingers brushing her spine. She takes it as a premonition, and lets her hand fall. Rory trains the spotlight on the woman, on Meg behind her, and its brightness washes Meg away.

No other hands rise; the Magician’s Assistant accepts the gun with a smile, and Angie’s heart cracks for her. There is brightness in her eyes, curiosity. She believes. Not in the Magician specifically, but in the possibility of magic. She’s the Assistant for now, but her faith in the world tells her that she could be the Magician herself someday.

Rory shifts the spotlight to the stage. Bright white gleams off the Magician’s lapels, the Assistant’s costume sparks and shines. Angie watches the Magician preen.

There is a flourish, a musical cue. The Magician’s Assistant fires the gun. Angie holds her arms tight by her side. The bullet strikes home. A constellation of red scatters, raining like stars on the stunned front row. The Resurrectionist grits her teeth and trains her will to do nothing at all.

The Magician’s eyes widen. His mouth forms a silent “o.” He falls.

Dread blooms in the Magician’s Assistant’s stomach. The gun smokes in her hand.

Angie sweats in the wings. The Magician’s death tugs at her, demanding to be undone. It’s harder than she imagined not to knit the Magician back together. He is a hard habit to break, and she’s been turning back his death for so long.

She considers—is she the villain in this story? The Magician is callous, stupid maybe, and arrogant for sure. Angie is not a hapless victim. She made a choice; it just happened to be the wrong one. Rory and Meg, they are innocent. All they are guilty of is falling in love.

Angie does not tell the bullet to stop, or the Magician’s blood to go. She lets it run and pool and drip over the edge of the stage and onto the floor. All Angie can hope is to turn her regret into a useful thing.

Rory lets out a broken sob. His will breaks, and he runs onto the stage, folding to his knees to cradle the Magician’s head in his lap. Meg hovers above them. She spreads her wings, and their translucence filters the spotlight, lending the Magician’s death a blue-green glow.

Angie walks onto the stage. In the corner of her vision, the lights are blinding. The theater holds a collective breath. She thinks of a lonely grave in the desert, and a rabbit without a name. She thinks of Meg, falling endlessly. She thinks of Rory, his lips bruised with regret. Angie kneels, and looks the Magician in the eye. She knows death intimately, his most of all, and she knows he can still hear her.

“Dying is easy,” she says. “Being dead is hard. Coming back is the hardest part of all. See if you can figure out how the trick is done, this time all on your own.”

She leans back. It isn’t much, but it assuages her guilt to think he might figure out the secret, the catch, the concealed hinge. He might learn true magic, bend it to his will, and figure out how to bring himself back to life one day.

The Magician blinks. The spotlight erases Angie and Rory’s features; they blaze at the edges, surrounded by halos of light. Between them, a blurred figure occludes the lights. It reminds the Magician of someone he used to know, only he can’t remember her name.

“Is this…” The Magician’s fingertips grope at the stage as if searching for a card to reveal. Those are his final words.

• • • •

Death and the Magician

Angie lets a month pass before she tracks down the Magician’s Assistant, his most recent one. They meet in an all-night diner, and Angie offers to pay.

The woman’s name is Becca, and she reminds Angie of a mouse. She starts easily, all shattered nerves. A dropped fork, bells jangling over the diner door—they all sound like gunshots to her, and her hands shake with guilt.

“It’s not your fault,” Angie says. “You did your job.”

Maybe one day Angie will admit the whole truth; maybe she’ll simply let it gnaw at her for the rest of her days, until she finds herself completely hollow inside.

“This is going to sound strange,” Angie says once they’ve finished their meals, “but how would you like your very own magic show?”

It isn’t enough, certainly not after what Angie has done, but it makes her feel slightly better to think she is offering Becca the chance to live her dream. The pain is still there in Becca’s eyes, but Angie sees a spark of curiosity and something like hope.

“Tell me,” Becca says; by her voice, she is hungry to learn.

The act that replaces the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat looks like something old, as all the best tricks do, building on what came before and paying homage, while being something completely new. Every night, the Magician summons a ghost onto the stage. It must be an illusion, audiences say. Smoke and angled mirrors, just like Pepper back in the day. Only, the ghost knows answers to questions she couldn’t possibly know. She finds lost things, things their owner didn’t even know were gone. Sometimes she leaves the spotlight and flies over the audience, casting the shadow of wings, and creating a wind that ruffles their hair. Sometimes she reaches out and touches one of them, and in that instant, they know without a doubt that she is absolutely real.

The ghost looks familiar, and so does the Magician. The audience can’t place either woman, but something about them calls to mind spangly leotards and pasted-on smiles. They look like people who used to be slightly out of focus, standing just on the edge of the spotlight, out of range of the applause. Now they’ve moved center stage, and their smiles are real, and they positively glow.

Angie no longer watches from the wings as the show goes on. Meg is strong enough now that she no longer needs Angie to ground her, and Becca and Rory are just fine on their own. Perhaps one day, Angie will slip away from the theater altogether, though she isn’t sure where she’ll go.

For now though, she sits backstage in front of the mirror and looks the old magician in the eye.

As she does, she learns what death looks like for him, and thinks about what it will look like for her when her own time comes. Sometimes it looks like the darkest depths of a top hat, endlessly waiting for the arrival of a rescuing hand. Sometimes it looks like a party where everyone is a stranger, and no one ever looks your way. Every now and then, it looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m. and a heart waiting to be broken.

But most of all, it looks like a brightly-lit stage in a theater packed with people, utterly empty of applause.

A.C. Wise's fiction has been published in Uncanny, Tor.com, and several Year's Best anthologies. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella published by Broken Eye Books. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as twice being a finalist for the Sunburst Award, twice being a finalist for the Nebula Award, and being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling will be published by Titan Books in June 2021. A new short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, will be published by Undertow Books in August 2021. In addition to her fiction, she contributes review columns to Apex Magazine and The Book Smugglers. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

Lest We Forget
By Elizabeth Bear

I am dying of the war, though not in it.

Such is the nature of wars. A person doesn’t have to die in battle to be killed by a war. A person doesn’t even have to be a soldier to die of one.

Wars have always been slow killers as well as quick. The war that killed my grandfather killed him thirty years after he was discharged, when his liver finally quit from all the self-medicating it took to deal with the aftermath. It killed both his wives, too, though they never served.

Dying of wars is strangely contagious.

If we were a more honest people, there would be a lot of statues of civilians on the National Mall. Maybe that’s something you can look into, when we’re done here. Imagine if all those wedding parties and starving children and violated women at least got the notice in death that life—and war—denied them.

Empty. Meaningless to them, since they’ll never know about it. But a gesture at least. A reminder for the living of the horrors that have passed. Not that we tend to learn anything from the sins of our fathers.

Case in point: my father also died of a war. Cancer, which certainly had nothing to do with chemical weapons or toxic environmental conditions where he fought.

How could it? There were definitely no chemical weapons used in his war, and just as definitely no toxic environmental conditions pertaining. Just ask the organizations—commercial, governmental—that could otherwise have been held fiscally responsible for treating a sick soldier.

If they had to treat one, in fairness you might expect them to treat them all. What possible reason could they ever have had to lie?

And then there’s me.

I’m not dying because I was a hero. I’m dying because I was the villain. I was a legitimate war criminal.

What can I say? Following orders seemed like a good idea at the time.

But I’ll never be brought to justice. I’ll never even go to jail.

And choices like the ones I made then eventually demand some kind of accountability—a reckoning—in the now.

• • • •

I was a suicide.

It seemed like the least I could do. Not to make amends: you don’t make amends for what I did. There are no real reparations.

But a kind of restorative justice. A tiny little drop in the ocean of what I owe.

• • • •

Perhaps I should say that I am a suicide, because I’m not done dying yet.

Maybe I will never be.

I am not a suicide in the normal course of events. I am a special kind of suicide.

Dying of a war is not a new thing. But the manner and purpose of my going… that’s where the revolution lies.

• • • •

Dr. Cotter had a day job at the V.A., but she didn’t recruit her subjects where she worked.

She got us the old-fashioned way. She put an ad on the T.

P.T.S.D.??
DID YOU SERVE?
ARE YOU SORRY?
FREE HELP!

Underneath, there was a contact number, and some fine print about a study and the exact specifications of who they were looking for.

They were looking for me.

• • • •

I might not have showed up, except it was a month or two after my dad died, and I was taking it hard. I didn’t have anybody: I’d driven them all off. I was as alone and adrift as I have ever been in my life.

Then I met Dr. Cotter and everything changed. For the better, for once.

Cotter wasn’t even a shrink. She was a neuro-something, I guess. Some other kind of brain doctor. I never can get the specialties straight anymore. My functions have been pared down. Let’s be honest: I don’t really have a consciousness. I feel like me, but I’m not an individual in the sense we’re used to. I’m just a set of protocols.

I’m not as smart as I used to be. When I had a brain of my own. When I wasn’t using something else’s.

But maybe I wasn’t that smart then, either. Because I didn’t use that big brain much. I just followed orders.

They were bad orders and I knew it. But they make it so easy not to think for yourself. Just to do what you’re told. They make it so easy not to say no.

I tortured people. I sprayed them with white phosphorous and burned them alive. I didn’t do it in person, but from a distance. I used a robot, like the reach of God’s clawed hand down from Heaven to pluck up the just and the unjust alike.

It didn’t seem so bad, from a distance. I know you know what I mean. You’ve seen the photographs, the films of smoking houses, smoking places of worship, smoking marketplaces.

Some of the people I burned weren’t soldiers.

A surprising number of them survived.

• • • •

I was never brought to trial.

They will never be asked to testify.

I can only speak for them, in one last unsubtle irony.

• • • •

Cotter leaned across her desk. Her grey hair was escaping her bun, as usual. Her gaudy earrings swung. “My parents were Holocaust survivors. Do you know what epigenetics is?”

“No,” I lied.

“Trauma experienced by your ancestors can affect your genetic expression. Your personality; your physical self. The environment you experience can affect the genetic expression of your children. It iterates. It’s handed down.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I know what you did in the war,” she said.

It was, in a strange way, a relief to be confronted. “I was just following orders.”

“There’s no just about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She sat back and suddenly relaxed. “How do you feel about it? About what you did, I mean. In the war.”

“I…”

I shook my head.

I opened my mouth.

I shook my head again.

• • • •

Some time later, Cotter leaned back, folded her hands, and said, “What if you could make people understand that? Really understand that? Really understand how you feel?”

I took a sip of water. It greased the words a little but they still had edges. “How many people? Until when?”

She shrugged. “Most of them? For a long time?”

I wonder how many times, in how many people, I’ve relived all that now.

Statistically speaking, if you are a human being in the Americas or Europe, you’ve already experienced it. As if you had been there. They’re working on drugs to fight the infection, I hear, but it’s already spread to Asia and Africa. Maybe not Madagascar. But the flatworms can live and reproduce in freshwater.

I expect they’ll be around for the foreseeable future. So I don’t have to tell you again what I did in the war, and how I came to feel about it later.

No point in beating a one-trick pony to death.

• • • •

Sometimes we captured people rather than burning them. Some of those people went to prison camps where they were tortured, and I have a responsibility for that, too.

It doesn’t sound so bad—caning the feet, stress positions, water-boarding, electric shocks, isolation, sleep deprivation. It’s not supposed to sound so bad. They show you worse things as entertainment, and the people on TV usually seem to walk away in the end.

It doesn’t sound so bad.

Because you have been lied to.

• • • •

“Lee,” Cotter said. “You’re the one.”

• • • •

“Planaria lugubris,” she said, holding up a tube filled with cloudy water. “A common flatworm. Not so common anymore.”

“Are they endangered?” I asked, interested.

“No,” she said. Light glinted through the tube. It was quite pretty. “We edited them.”

“Like a book?” I joked.

“More or less.” The tube clicked as she set it back in a rack. “Do you know what CRISPR is?”

“Sure,” I said. “It shows up in a lot of horror movies. There’s human DNA in your flatworms, right? They’re going to grow to the size of school buses and learn to use automatic weapons?”

“Well, no,” she said. “But we did use some bits of another flatworm. A parasitic one. And Toxoplasmosis gondii.”

I felt my mouth doing a funny thing. “Isn’t that the bug that makes rats walk into cat mouths?”

Her mouth did a funny thing, too. As if she were trying to smile, but didn’t really feel like she deserved to. “Do you know what’s interesting about planarians, Lee?”

“Wait,” I said, suddenly full of high school biology. “They can pass memories to one another, right? If they eat each other?”

“Fucking little cannibals,” she agreed.

“You want to feed them my memories.”

Her fingers drummed silently on the steel lab countertop.

“Then what? Make people eat them?”

She stepped away from the counter and faced me. “They reproduce in human brains. They can pass their memories along to their hosts.”

“That sounds like terrorism. Not to mention one hell of a violation of consent law.”

“Did you consent to what happened to you?” she asked me.

My lips clenched around the words, holding them in. I closed my eyes and got out a single one. “Technically.”

That was why some of the people I worked with went to jail. I didn’t. Mostly because the government wanted the prosecutions—and the attendant publicity—to stop as soon as they’d plausibly punished someone for what they told us to do.

“Is coerced consent really consent?”

“Who is ever,” I asked, “really free of coercion?”

She sighed and rolled her head back to look at the ceiling. “Yes, it’s terrorism. Yes, it’s a terrible, unethical thing. Yes, when it comes out, I will go to jail at the very least.”

“And me?”

“You’ll be dead.”

“Right,” I said. “They’re going to eat my brain. That’s how they get the memories, isn’t it? Just like they get the memories of other flatworms from eating each other.”

She just looked at me.

I waved my hand airily. “I’m okay with that. Are they going to eat other people’s brains?”

“The first generation will reproduce and die,” she said. “They’ve got a… I guess you would call it a kill switch. Their offspring will be commensal organisms rather than parasitic ones. We’ve programmed them to eat damaged cells instead of healthy ones. Infected people will actually, on average, live longer. The cure for war is also the cure for cancer.”

“Flatworms that will certainly never mutate back and just eat brains or something. All the brains. Everywhere. You’ve recreated mad cow disease, but with flatworms.”

“Planarians are a lot easier to kill than prions,” she said. “And parasites generally evolve to be less deadly to the host, not more.”

“You’re an even more awful human being than I am,” I said.

“Do you want to end war?”

I bit my lip. I looked down at my shoes. “It seems like the least I can do.”

“You will have to formally consent, and indicate that you understand what the process will require.”

“What, now consent matters? What about all those people out there who don’t pay their taxes in order to be parasitized by flatworms and traumatic memories?”

“I’m a hypocrite,” Cotter admitted. “And if I knew what else to do I would. Aren’t all those people out there who pay their taxes complicit in drone strikes on kindergartens, too? If they stopped trying not to worry about it, or thinking of it as necessary collateral damage, do you think things would change?”

My stomach clenched. I held out my hand, as if we could shake on it. “Okay. What is it, a lethal injection or something?”

She looked away. “Lee. You have to be alive while the flatworms work.”

“Well.” I swallowed and took my hand back. “Show me where to sign.”

• • • •

I didn’t expect to remember.

No. That’s wrong. That was, after all, the entire point of the exercise: me remembering. Me remembering war. For you.

I didn’t expect that I would be self-aware through the process, however. My own private richly-deserved Hell.

I wonder how many times, in how many places, I’ve relived this now. I’m not sure I would have had the guts to commit to the process, if I realized that I would have to go through it all again. Billions and billions of times. I mean, moral cowardice is what turned me into a war criminal in the first place.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. When I had a brain of my own. And wasn’t just a parasite in yours.

• • • •

The process of being converted into flatworm memories didn’t hurt. Your brain doesn’t have any nerves to feel pain with.

It was actually kind of a relief. I could feel the memories slipping away.

A relief, anyway, until I realized that the memories were all I was anymore.

• • • •

War is a contagion. The contagion is in you.

The contagion is me.

• • • •

Cotter died in prison, as she’d predicted, after the world figured out what we’d done. Too late to change anything. Too late to fix anything.

Too late to mean anything.

Sending her to jail was a nice gesture, I suppose.

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 and over a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure. Her most recent novel is Machine, in which a deep-space rescue operation goes terribly wrong.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

Shucked
By Sam J. Miller

Adney had seen the man staring well before he spoke to them. Two tables over, in the otherwise-empty restaurant loud with the sound of waves against the breakwater. Fifty-something; poor posture; took good care of himself. A tourist like them, she could tell by the clumsy way he’d conversed with the woman behind the bar. A guest at the hotel upstairs—hence he was unburdened by bags or backpacks like the ones at their feet.

It happened from time to time: people stared. One of the burdens of being with a boy as beautiful as Teek. This guy at least had the decency not to pretend she didn’t exist. He was transfixed by her boyfriend, yes, but he was also assessing her. When he caught her staring back—when their eyes locked—he smiled affably. But was affable the right word? There was something else happening in his eyes, something less friendly. Conspiratorial, almost, like eye contact had made them complicit in something.

Teek was immersed in his phone, trying to decide what tourist-type spot to visit when they left the restaurant. She picked his camera up off the table and took a picture of him. When it flashed on the screen, she tried to see it as if he were a stranger to her. Black hair cropped close; olive skin darkened by a week of vacation sun; untamable stubble. Hazel eyes that seemed always to be aimed down. Slim. Slight. An overall sense of delicacy. Fragility, even.

In the background, out of focus: the man. Clearly staring. Maybe smiling.

To tell Teek or not? He’d find it funny, for sure, but might it also make him self-conscious? Or, worse, swell his ego so it tipped over into insufferable? They had not been dating long enough to know for sure, so she said nothing. The woman behind the bar was pouring water from one big glass pitcher into many smaller ones. She was old and stout and said little, but always had a smile for her. They’d come to the same place every night since they arrived in Amalfi. Teek had said last night that she was “super mean,” and Adney was dazzled at how they had such different experiences of the same person.

She struggled with the oyster she was shucking. “Let me,” Teek said, and she handed it over—and marveled at how effortlessly he sank the knife into the hinge, wobbled the hand that held the oyster until the blade made a full circumference. Peeled back the shell, severed the muscle that bound the meat to its hard, translucent platter. Where had he learned to do that? He’d come from a pathetic inland Jersey strip-mall exurb, same as she did. A summer working in a fancy spot down the Shore, she imagined, and could see it quite vividly. Teek in a white apron; Teek the apple of the eye of every man and woman at the country club.

“I always hated oysters,” she said. “My father loved them. We couldn’t afford to buy them hardly ever, and it was a big deal when we did. Once he’d shucked them, and when he wasn’t looking, I’d dump them all out onto the ice and swap them back into the wrong shells. I thought I was getting away with something.”

“That’s . . . pretty dumb.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I was six.”

“Why did you order them if you hate them?”

She shrugged. After that, the silence came flooding back in like the tide. She indulged in that thing everyone had been doing last semester: shut your eyes and you can hear your student-loan debt piling up. Cents per second, dollars per minute.

“The church has some amazing art, apparently,” he said, holding up the phone to show a church not far from them. “Including a disputed Caravaggio.”

“Is it free?” she asked.

He scrolled down, gave a thumbs-up.

“Let’s do that,” she said. They’d met in Art History, last semester, so that was one thing they could have a conversation about. This was the second mostly silent lunch in a row. Two weeks is probably too long, she thought, for a vacation together so early in a relationship. Especially when neither one of us has any money. Outside of bed there is not so much of a spark, and there’s only so long we can stay in bed.

Even through the glass, the afternoon waves were very loud. She remembered the woman at the hostel explaining the complex system of bells used to signal the start and end of high and low tide. Amalfi was eerily empty of tourists that week. Everyone had a theory why.

Teek picked up his camera, pointed it at the water. Put it down without taking a picture. Lately he’d been doing that a lot. He was obsessed with photography and could talk endlessly about the work he wanted to do, the aesthetic he aspired to—grungy, gritty high fashion—but the actual taking of photographs rarely happened.

She watched waves punish the Amalfi jetty. Crashing against it, sending up spray in high glass curtains. Like white elephants, she thought, and rolled her eyes at herself. Last night they’d wanted to walk out along the breakwater, but she’d been too afraid.

“You’re a lucky woman,” the man said, startling them both.

“Am I,” she said, not a question. Teek turned around and took the man in for the first time. Trying to determine whether he represented a threat.

“Obviously,” the man said. “You’re sitting with the most handsome man in this or any city.”

Teek’s face broke into a wide, self-conscious smile, and then swiftly reddened. Gratified, but embarrassed. His awkward happiness softened Adney’s initial anger at the man’s intrusion.

He got up, dragged his chair over. She smiled at him, aware that doing so was a kind of encouragement. But she was bored, and the break in their long, shared silence was not completely unwelcome.

“You’re Americans?”

“We are,” she said. “Don’t hold it against us.” He had an accent. She couldn’t place it and didn’t want to ask.

“Forgive my impertinence,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so forward, but I believe it’s best to cut right to the chase when it comes to strange offers.”

“Offers,” Adney said. Teek’s blush deepened. “Strange ones.”

From a briefcase she hadn’t noticed, he took a massive stack of bills.

“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for one hour of your boyfriend’s time.”

No one said anything. The sound of the sea had dropped out entirely, replaced with the quickening thud of her own blood in her ears. Teek squirmed. She waited for him to reject the offer, but his mouth remained a rigid wobble.

She wondered what he was thinking. Feeling. Her own emotions were strangely absent. As ever, he was unreadable. Was he excited at the thought of being turned into a rent boy? Horrified? Humiliated that the offer was made to her and not to him, as if his own feelings on the matter were irrelevant? Or did that same fact arouse him? It was a constant source of frustration for her, how little Teek said about what was going on inside his head. How he was still a mystery to her, along with all his traumas and fears and hopes and funny stories.

Adney made herself laugh. “Get out of here,” she said, because somebody had to reject the offer, and Teek wasn’t.

The man turned to Teek. Teek’s frown sharpened.

They both had outside hookups, sometimes. It was within the rules they’d fashioned for themselves. And Teek had been with boys. Since they’d started dating, even. Not his favorite thing. One of his friends, usually, drunk and pushy and pleading. Teek was good-natured like that. Eager to make someone happy, if he could.

There were no rules for this.

How had he known they needed the money? But of course they did. They were Americans. Americans were either obscenely rich or super poor, and they were obviously not the former.

“One hour . . . doing what?” Teek asked.

The man put both hands on the table. They were big, coarse. Hairy. The sight of them thrilled her, as if she was the one he wanted to grab hold of. “We’re not children here. I don’t think I need to spell it out. I’ll respect your boundaries, of course, but I’m not paying you to talk.”

“Can we have some time to think about it?” Teek asked.

“You cannot,” the man said, and this, too, was thrilling to Adney, and the thrill unsettled her. She imagined the most degrading of demands being issued to her in that same imperious, commanding tone. But of course it wasn’t her he’d be degrading.

Teek looked at her, pretty eyes wide, like, What the fuck, this is so bizarre, but also like, What do we do?

A giddy tremor shivered through her. He’s waiting for me to say Yes or No, she realized. This is up to me.

It would mean eating dinner at all the restaurants they’d had to pass by the last five nights. Moving from the precarious cliffside hostel outside of town, high up the unlit hill, and into one of the grand old hotels in town. Going on to Venice. Being able to afford delivery, all semester long, when school started back up. Making a dent in that mountain of loan debt.

They came so easily, the cold equations of pimping her boyfriend.

“Do it if you want to do it,” she said, and he frowned, but she could see the excitement in his eyes. Or at least that’s what she told herself she could see.

“Why the fuck not,” Teek said.

The man handed her a stack. “That’s half. I’ll give him the other half when he’s finished.”

He was handsome, she saw, for the first time. Sharp chin; well-kept beard. Eloquent eyebrows. The slightest shabbiness around the edges, overall, like he, too, came from a fallen place.

“Bye,” Teek said, grinning. He stood, then stooped to kiss her.

“You’re sure this is okay?” she asked.

“Of course!” he said, showing teeth. This was him, the eager boyish thing she’d fallen for—but it was also not him, or not the him she’d known. Another facet revealed: the fact that he’d sell himself. Like when she learned he smoked. She liked it, she thought. She hoped.

“Be careful,” she said, and then they were gone.

The woman behind the bar smiled at her. She knows, Adney thought. She saw it all in our faces. But she knew that was illogical. If they had been in America, the woman would have come over, filled her coffee cup, but they weren’t, so Adney had to get up to fetch another espresso.

A long, narrow mirror stretched along the back wall. Brand new, with beveled edges. Adney imagined an ancient one before it, broken in a brawl or tiny non-newsworthy earthquake. She watched their reflections, the old woman’s and hers—two broad noses, one Roman and one pure New York—two survivors of shattered empires. One gone two thousand years, the other so recently most people hadn’t noticed it yet. About the same height. Would her black hair go gray as spectacularly as this woman’s had? Easy to imagine them as avatars of each other, or this woman with deft arthritic hands as a future version of herself.

Back at her table, she tried and failed several times to lose herself in the book she’d brought, but it was proving impossible to think of anything other than what was happening upstairs. Would the man want to fuck Teek, or would he want Teek to fuck him? Would it be vanilla, or very very not?

More worrisome was wondering how Teek would be, when he came downstairs. Would this push him back into one of his glum, silent blue periods? Or would he return buoyed up, excited, energized in a way that sex with her had not been able to do for him lately? And which would be worse?

She took a cigarette out of the pack he’d left on the table. Held it up in the woman’s direction; she shrugged. Adney lit it, sucked in smoke, held it in her mouth. Did not inhale. Blew it out in a slow, narrow billow.

An hour passed fast. Or maybe it wasn’t that long at all. Maybe they finished far sooner. Teek came down alone, back pocket bulging. Walking with no discernible limp or other evidence of trauma. Smiling.

“Hey,” she said when he lowered his face to her. She flinched, afraid of what his lips might taste like, and that made him laugh, and then he kissed her, and they tasted like nothing.

Teek smiled quizzically, possibly noticing she’d smoked. “Shall we go on to the church?” he asked.

He left a lot of money on the table and winked at the woman on their way out. For the first time, Adney noticed how she frowned at him.

Cold wind came off the water. Late afternoon by then. Dark clouds piling up over the ocean. He took her hand and they walked into the ancient, tattered city.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure am,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

“How . . . was it?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Did he—did you—”

“Cool if we don’t talk about it right now?” Teek asked. “I mean, I get it, you have the right to know everything that went down and I’ll totally tell you, just, not right now?”

“Of course,” she said, and leaned in to rest her head on his shoulder. Something about it was off, though. Their heads did not fit together the way they normally did. His posture seemed somehow poorer.

“You’re okay, though, right? Really okay?”

“Super okay.” He kissed the top of her head.

Women watched them go, from several stories up. Clothes shook on laundry lines. Streets split, narrowed, became tunnels, opened up again. She wondered if she’d be able to tell whether the disputed Caravaggio was real or not. And whether it would be good, even if it wasn’t real.

But the church was closed, in contradiction of the clearly posted hours, and with no sign to say why.

“Shit,” she said, and sat down on a stone square that once helped men up onto horses. Already a smell of garlic frying in olive oil was filling the air. Dinnertime was close, and so was darkness. They’d have to climb up the steep road to the south, get their stuff from the hostel, come back to find a hotel. Her feet hurt from thinking about it.

“You’re so beautiful when you’re sad,” he said, uncapping his camera. The compliment was uncharacteristic. Her face showed it, and she heard the shutter snap.

“I’m a world-famous photographer,” he said, smiling, squatting. “And you’re a supermodel who suddenly became a recluse at the height of her fame. This is your first shoot in two years.”

A wide, warm smile shivered through her, but smiling would not have been in keeping with the character she’d been given. She forced herself to purse her lips. Pout. “How could I pass up the chance to work with you? In spite of your reputation. What’s the shoot?”

“Cigarette ad,” he said, tossing his pack to her.

The game was welcome, but it, too, was uncharacteristic. She shook one loose, held it in her fingers, extended her arm in front of her as elegantly as she could. Arched her back artfully. Shutter snaps came in quick succession and she moved her body slightly after each one. Curled a finger, cocked a smile. Raised an eyebrow. Flicked a foot.

It was like sex, a little. The way it warmed her up. When was the last time he’d made her feel that way, outside of bed? At a party, she recalled. At the end of the semester. He’d beckoned her over, told a semicircle of his friends about her print-making. Fake posters for fake seventies bands.

Where had it come from, this energy, this excitement? The ability to take pictures, when he hadn’t in so long? What had that guy done to him?

Adney should have been grateful, but she wasn’t. In a slow unfurling, the tiny hairs along her spine stood up.

“There’s a crocodile,” he said.

“For the shoot,” she said, good at this game. “Brilliant. Must have been costly.”

He waved his hand. “The client is filthy rich with lung-cancer money. Let them pay to make our dreams real. To bring our brilliant art into the world.”

“Where is it?” she asked.

“Out on the breakwater,” he said.

“Really,” she said, scared, excited. They headed back down the way they had come.

“Stop,” he said, at a barrow overflowing with lemons, and had her pose there. Clasping one with both hands. Sfusato—the oversized Amalfi Coast lemons that local farmers had created over the course of centuries, breeding together local bitter oranges with tiny inedible lemons from Arab traders. The trees grew everywhere in the stone city and the high hills around it. Stalls sold soaps, candy, pastries, and pasta infused with lemon essence.

“Magnificent,” he said, when she kissed it.

And that was when the thought came, bursting fully formed in her brain.

Preposterous. Irrational. But certain. The hairs standing on end all over her body said so.

This isn’t Teek.

“Yessss,” he said, at the way her face suddenly became something else. Thinking her horror wasn’t hers; was the character’s.

I’ve never heard him use the word magnificent in all our time together.

“Brilliant,” said the boy with the camera as she stared past its lens and into the familiar green flecks of his hazel eyes.

They swapped bodies. That man pulled Teek out of his skin as easily as Teek shucked that oyster from its shell. Slid himself in. Young again; alive and energetic and beautiful.

It was easy, telling herself to stop being stupid. Things like that couldn’t happen. She smiled, and he stepped forward.

“Goose bumps,” he said, taking an extreme close-up of her shoulder.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“Crocodiles hate the cold,” he said.

She succeeded in suppressing a shiver when he took her hand. Was his grip different? Tighter? Gentler?

They stopped for pictures along the way. She posed with ancient statues, steep staircase streets. She watched the water wrinkle in the distance. But she couldn’t shake the thought now that it had entered her head. She laughed out loud at the absurdity of her certainty. But the certainty did not disappear when she laughed at it.

He didn’t buy Teek’s body for an hour with that money. He bought it for forever.

“Do you remember the first thing you ever said to me?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, smiling. “It was at that party, at the Chinese embassy in Moscow. Surrounded by despots and billionaire bureaucrat profiteers, and all their beautiful kept women and boys. Panthers in giant gilded birdcages. You still remember that?”

No, she wanted to say, not in the game. But she stopped herself. I’ll be free of this ridiculous suspicion soon enough. And I’ll realize I’m stuck with the same Teek as ever, and I’d rather have the world-famous fictional photographer than the glum nonfiction one I’ve been with for most of the trip.

He was performing, that was all. Putting on an act for her. One he was eerily good at. A skill set she’d never known about. Maybe neither had he. Maybe he could be a movie star. Roll with it, Adney. But the closer they got to the water the colder the wind became, and it stoked the fire of her fear.

“What’s the plan?” she asked. “For the crocodile.”

“You’ll be sprawled across its back,” he said. “Luxuriant. Regal. An empress.”

“Like Avedon,” she said, citing his favorite photographer. Trying to prompt a response from the Teek that she knew. “The famous photo, with the elephants. Dovima, arms out, bent, upraised, like the queen of the night.”

“He’s overrated.”

They passed the restaurant, built into the side of the wall that had protected the city from sixteenth-century pirates. No sign of the man. Storm clouds bigger, closer. The woman was mopping. She waved to Adney.

They reached the breakwater way too soon. Waves high and loud against the rocks. His shutter snapped on her look of apprehension.

“Where’s the crocodile?” she asked, stalling for time.

“Ugh,” he said. “It’s a whole thing, you would not believe. We spent seven thousand dollars on it, and my idiot assistant was unprepared for how hard it pulled. Yanked the leash right out of his hands. Escaped into the sea.”

“Oh no,” she said, sad for the imaginary crocodile. “It’s so cold. It’ll die for sure.”

“Maybe,” the photographer said. “But it might be glitchy from radiation or GMOs or something. Maybe it’ll be very well suited to the cold Tyrrhenian Sea. Grow to immense size by snapping up sunbathing tourists. Be the scourge of the Amalfi Coast.”

She nodded, then gestured commandingly to the breakwater. Grinning—nervously—the photographer obeyed. Stepped onto the rocks.

When he had gone a short way out, she followed. It was slippery; she had to kick off her shoes. She aimed them into the sea.

“You won’t need those again?” he asked.

“I’ll buy more.”

With my supermodel money.

With the money I got from whoring you out.

With the money I got from selling my boyfriend’s body to a monster.

She stared into his eyes. He stared back. His expression softened. He smiled the slightest of smiles. It was trusting, wholesome. Innocent. Eager to please. Almost exactly like Teek’s.

She lit a cigarette. Inhaled. Breathed smoke out into the darkening day. Waves soaked her. Soaked him. He held his camera up to keep it safe when the spray surged into them, then lowered it to keep taking pictures.

She finished her cigarette. Lit another one. A wave put it out and she tucked it behind her ear.

“Beautiful,” he said, and her certainty faltered. The gentleness in his voice, the reverence—that was Teek, the Teek she only ever heard in bed.

Or was she hearing what she wanted to hear? Constructing a narrative where she was not a monster? Not an accomplice to an unfathomable crime. She saw the two of them on the beach for the next week. Clasping hands on the plane ride home. She saw the next semester, and all the ones after that. Life beyond college. The two of them, together, and she forever wondering whether it was really him in there.

Lightning struck, a long purple crack opening in the eggshell of the sky. So close, the thunder arrived almost immediately after.

“Teek,” she gasped, fear forcing her out of character.

“Who’s Teek?”

He’s upstairs, she thought. Gasping on the floor of a strange hotel room, trapped in a dying body. He’s trying to call for help. I’m his only hope. And I’m out here with this monster, trying to tell myself I’m crazy.

“You’re ludicrous!” she shouted, not to him. He laughed, and so did she. There was that warmth again, in their laughing together.

Lights trembled, down the coast. Other cities, full of other lives. She turned to face them. Three-quarter profile; cigarette behind the ear aimed at the camera. Mouth open slightly in apprehension, maybe exhilaration.

That’s the one, she thought, when she heard him (whoever he is) take the picture.

And soon we’ll be back in the hotel room. And bright fluorescent lights will whisk all this stupidity out of my head. We’ll make love and I’ll know for sure that it’s him. In the morning, we’ll post these pictures. Add captions in the voices of our supermodel and superstar photographer.

But would sex truly answer her question? They were still new enough to have surprises up their sleeves, to try a new trick from time to time that might delight or disappoint. If he behaved differently, could she be certain?

Well, even if it doesn’t convince me, in the morning the game will be over. I can quiz him, and he won’t have a fictional photographer to hide behind. I’ll find out if it’s really Teek.

And what would she do if it wasn’t? Or if she still wasn’t sure?

Thunder rumbled, an impenetrable answer.

“You’re magnificent,” the photographer said, lowering the camera. Again, their eyes locked. Something conspiratorial kindled. Love meant walking beside someone you would never truly know.

Her mom would have a fit when the pictures were posted, seeing her out on the breakwater with those waves crashing all around her. My helpless innocent girl. And her friends would all wonder how drunk she’d had to get to go out there. Strangers would comment on how her wet shirt clung to her.

They’ll all see someone different, she thought, but none of those women will be me.

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more – and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s work has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.

Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy
By JY Neon Yang

THE CIRCUS GIRL

I was twenty-six when I started seeing Mirror Boy again. He showed up without warning on a Monday, as I stood over the sink scrubbing sleep from my eyes and stale whiskey from my mouth. It’s one of my favorite simple pleasures: the cold metallic tang of water, the clean bitter smell of soap. I straightened up for my towel, and there was his ugly mug in the mirror instead of mine. I dropped the towel. “Fuck!”

Mirror Boy had not changed in a decade. He was still gaunt and hollow-eyed and in bad need of a haircut. Patches of discoloration bloomed under the brown of his skin. “Hello, Lynette,” he whispered in his crushed-paper voice.

“No,” I said, and walked right out of the bathroom, my face still dripping wet.

“Did something happen?” asked my roommate, Shane, as I stomped into the kitchen, wiping myself dry on the cotton of my nightgown sleeve. “I heard you shouting.” She stood unwashed and uncombed over the counter, a ladle in one hand and curious concern etched on her thin features. Coffee sub boiled on the stove and the smell of fried egg lingered.

“I cut myself shaving,” I said. In my chest my heartbeat with the rhythm of a rail carriage, passing by.

“Ooooookay,” she said, and went back to spooning bean goop onto plates. Shane was an angel, used to the oceanic swing of my moods. She put up with far too much from me.

A dresser cabinet stood by the main door, marking the transition between the kitchen and living areas. Its top was choked with detritus: keyholders, loose coins, half-curdled tins of lip balm. On it sat an oval mirror, framed by a mosaic of recycled bottle glass. I went up to it, not straight on, but cautiously and sideways—as though flanking an enemy—and leaned until it caught my reflection. I prayed it would show my untamable curls and the eyebags I knew and loathed.

“I need to talk to you,” Mirror Boy said.

“Fuck off,” I said, to which Shane went, “Uh, what?”

“Nothing.” I shuffled away from the mirror and flounced down next to the dining table, trying not to breathe too harshly. After ten years spread over the tumult of late adolescence and early adulthood, I had thoroughly convinced myself that my year with Mirror Boy was all made up, an artifact of a traumatized mind. A coping mechanism. But I was better now. The broken girl I used to be had grown up into a functional adult. Why had he come back?

The boiling kettle whistled as Shane thumped breakfast in front of me, gelatinous and greasy. She poured the steaming sub into two oversized enamel mugs. “Here,” she said. “You look like you could use an extra helping.”

We ate. Or at least, Shane ate, while I mixed bean and egg into a brownish slurry on my plate. All was quiet except for the chittering of the newsprinter, spooling its thin scroll onto the dining table. When it stopped, Shane tore off the printout and scanned its fuss-less, tiny text. “Great squid. There’s been another murder.”

“Murder?” I said, not really processing the words.

“Yes. In Darlingfort. Probably that same serial killer that’s been going around.” She turned the chit towards me. “Here, look. Seem like anyone you know?”

I squinted at the victim’s picture, monochrome and pixelated, only slightly larger than a toenail. It looked vaguely like a man, possibly brown-haired, maybe thirty, probably white. I shrugged.

Shane’s expression softened. “You used to live in Darlingfort, didn’t you?”

“That was a long time back.” When I used to be a circus girl. When I last had Mirror Boy as my reflection. I shifted uneasily in my chair. The glare of the mirror on the dresser had a weight to it, as though the kid was trying to claw his way out. “Listen, I’d better get going.”

“What, to work?” Shane looked at the kitchen clock. “Is the salon even open?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, pushing my chair back.

“You haven’t eaten anything.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Shane’s worry peaked. “Hey. Is something wrong?”

“I’m fine,” I said. It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie.

I had to stand by the dresser while I put on my boots. “Why are you avoiding me?” Mirror Boy asked from his corner. “You know I’m here.”

“Shut up,” I hissed, soft enough to keep it from Shane. “Shut up shut up shut up.”

It was clear outside, the air as crisp as winters ever get anymore. A soft breeze teased hair and fabrics. I took the midlevel network, high enough above the water the reflections wouldn’t bother me. Back in Darlingfort the canals were sludge, so I never had this problem.

Back in Darlingfort, my relationship with Mirror Boy was different.

Once upon a time I was a circus girl, just like my mother. Once upon a time I had an apple-cheeked face and an easy, gap-toothed smile. Once upon a time I used to throw knives and juggle and spin fire.

Then my mother died when I was fourteen, and I was like a dinghy cast out into an icy ocean. The other women in the circus tried to protect me as much as they could, but I eventually found out what people were willing to do to young girls when they no longer had the protection of a lion tamer.

There was an escape artist, Alfous: almost forty, with a slow-growing belly and a grease-slicked moustache. He tried to hold himself up as a gentleman around me, but I tried not to be around him at all. Until one day the desire burst from him like a swollen river, turbulent and inescapable. He chased me down in the damp of night when the others had gone out to get drunk, and pinned me against the knifeboard.

But I was stronger than I looked, and I kicked and screamed and cracked a cheekbone with my heel. So he clubbed me over the head, slapped me in chains, and threw me in the water tank. I woke with my lungs burning and a wall of green murk crushing me. I thought I was going to die, until I saw that there was a boy in the water. He looked my age, with dark eyes and dark hair and skin yellow as the moon. “You can do it,” he said. I didn’t know him, but seeing I wasn’t alone calmed my panic. It was then I found out how far I could bend my elbows, and how easy it was, with my thin wrists, to slip from the vise of the chains. I got my hands free, I got out of the tank, and I survived.

I survived, and a week later Alfous mysteriously disappeared. No notes left behind, nor any evidence. The rumor around the circus was that he’d been sent to feed Kraken, hungry in the sludgy deep. If anyone suspected the scrawny girl with the purpling across her forehead might have been involved, they said nothing. I volunteered to be the new escape artist, because it turns out I had a natural talent for it. I was sixteen.

Anyway, that’s how I met Mirror Boy. When I climbed out of that tank, furious and dripping and bruised in the head, I found that my reflection had disappeared entirely. In its place was the boy who had been in the water with me. Every mirror or glass pane I looked at was graced by his presence, narrow and morose and slightly misshapen. I bled from the palms stealing a shard of factory window for my room, and in that sacred space where no one else was allowed—or no one else dared to go—I spent hours with Mirror Boy. I would sit by the cold glass in the afternoons, in between rehearsals and the start of the night’s performances, and I would let spill all the petty grievances of the day. Who had looked at me the wrong way, who had wounded me with cutting words. Mirror Boy never said much. He listened and told me I was right, or that he agreed with me. And I needed that. As time went on I started talking about my hopes for the future, about how I wanted to leave the circus and leave Darlingfort before it broke me like it broke everyone else. And he would just smile and nod and say he believed I could do it.

Some days, I missed knowing what my face looked like. Some days, I was glad I didn’t have to.

But I got older, and I got out of the circus. Escaping was my forte, after all, and I found I could bend my mind and will as easily as I could my body. People were willing to pay a lot of money to spend nights with me. I saved that money and used it to find a new and better place to live. To buy a new name and history. I got out of Darlingfort. Slowly—or perhaps all at once, I don’t remember anymore— Mirror Boy left me. I got my reflection back. I became a whole person again.

Until now.

The salon wasn’t open, and it wouldn’t be open until eleven. On the edge of posh Helbride, it was party to a stream of older women, powdered and primped, who delicately sashayed in from rooflevel with all the confidence I wished I was born with. They came to get their hair done and their faces done and their nails done while they filled the air with stories of their expensive vacations and expensive heliships and expensive children. They had names and, arguably, personalities, and I recognized most of the regulars by sight, but I could not tell them apart. As a lowly beauty technician, I hadn’t been given the salon keys, but the toilets in the building weren’t locked. They were fancy and empty, appointed in gilt and upholstery and soft underlighting.

Mirror Boy was waiting for me there, pacing between columns of dark marble in the looking-glass toilet, the one that had a copy of him and didn’t have a copy of me. “I want my reflection back,” I told him.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him. Honestly, I’d missed him, and I hadn’t realized how much until now. His familiar shape and hunch sent ambient warmth through odd corners of my chest. At one point in my life, his existence—just for me, and me alone—had brought great comfort. But the truth was, I no longer needed him. And I didn’t want to go back to being that child who did.

Mirror Boy glanced sideways at me and continued pacing. “It’s not important.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I think it’s fucking important.”

“No,” he said. “You’re in danger.”

He looked a little different from what I remembered. He was skittish, fingers twisting over knuckles, shoulders tight and drawn. Like a prey animal. It gave me pause, because I’d never seen him this tense before. And he was so young. O Formless Deep, he was so young. “What kind of danger?”

“There’s a man, a hunter. He’s killed all of my refuges. You’re the last one.”

“I don’t understand.”

He stopped pacing and stared, eyes intense and frightened. “Those murders in Darlingfort. He killed them all. They died the same way, slit by the same knife.”

He was right about that, at least according to the news. The weapon link was how the police knew they had a serial killer on their hands. But they couldn’t figure out his MO, his motivations. All seven victims were of different ages, different genders, and different backgrounds. They didn’t know one another. Nothing linked them except that they all lived in Darlingfort, in coffin-rooms smaller than a whale’s heart. So they said the killer was a sadist, picking off random targets in the neighborhood because they were poor and nobody cared.

“You’re the last of my refuges,” Mirror Boy repeated. “When the hunter kills you, I’ll be dead too.”

“What does that mean? Are you tied to me? Are you like some kind of cancer?” It was the easiest comparison in reach, plucking down the name of Mother’s disease.

“Yes. A cancer. That’s a good way of putting it.” Mirror Boy rubbed his bony hands together. “I’m a cancer. You were . . . my first. Site of metastasis, I mean.”

A shiver passed through me at the way he said it. “I’m trying to understand. Who is this man? Why is he coming after you?”

“I’m unnatural,” Mirror Boy said. “I’m dangerous.”

“You weren’t dangerous to me,” I said cautiously. Did this unnamed killer know something I didn’t? Mirror Boy did nothing to me except take my reflection, which I cared nothing for at that point in time. And then he gave it back. “It’s because you’re a spirit, isn’t it?”

Some people have problems with spirits; they can’t accept they’re part of the world we live in now. It’s mostly a particular sort of people, because when you’re poor and desperate, sometimes spirits are the only ones who can help you. Or will help you, for that matter.

I’ve never been afraid of spirits. My mother, when she was alive, used to put me on her knee and tell me that my father was one. A boy with lips like coral and skin like ice, who smelled of ocean and evanesced from her bed in the light of the next morning, never to be seen again. I never found out if she’d just made it up: she didn’t like it when I asked around the circus. After she died I took her story and folded it into the fiber of my being, like all the half-truths I had assimilated over the years. I’m good at taking stories at face value.

“Did you choose me because my father was a spirit?” I asked Mirror Boy.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “The man who hunts me has found you. You have to run. He’ll kill you.”

I thought of Alfous’s hot breath on my neck. “Run, how?” And where could I run to? Back to Darlingfort, where everyone else had died? I didn’t want to run. I wanted to fight. “There’s got to be something I can do.”

Mirror Boy pushed the flat of his palms against the barrier of the glass. “You have to run. Run and hide, the way you did when you left the circus. Become someone else so he can’t find you again. He won’t stop, and you can’t stop him, and you can’t get rid of me.”

“I got rid of you once,” I said, bristling at this litany of negatives.

He looked sad. “But you didn’t.”

I wasn’t planning to leave this life that I’d built purely on some intangible warning from a boy who was half a dream. I liked what I had now: the mindless, fuss-free job; a roommate who was reasonably clean and had no drunk boyfriends to bring over; the little pockets of weird I’d found in the neighborhood, places where I didn’t feel quite out of place. For the first time in my life I could see myself continuing down this path towards the future, gray in my hair, a box flat to call a home, a collection of books, half a dozen cats. A tidy and quiet picture that brought me little jolts of pleasure when I thought of it.

At nine-thirty I went up to the salon, passing a man in a gray leather jacket smoking in one of the turrets, tossing something pear-shaped up and down in one hand. I frowned, because it was a no-smoking building and whatever he had rolled smelled vile, but I said nothing, because I avoid talking to strange men when I can. His face, hidden in shadow, was turned away from me.

Our manager, Jinnie, was already in, sprawled in the receptionist’s chair with a beat-up book. Our shifts started at ten, but she always arrived ahead of time to unlock the doors. She looked surprised to see me. “Well, someone’s early.”

I put on my most harried face. “Jinnie, I’m sorry but I’ve got to beg off for today. I know it’s late notice, but something’s come up that I’ve really got to take care of.”

Jinnie’s expression slid from suspicion to displeasure at a documentable speed. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious,” I said.

She flipped through the bookings chart. “I suppose Sheela can cover for you,” she said, with enough weight on each word to let me know this was a favor she intended to call in later.

“Thanks, Jinnie. I owe you. Sorry again.”

I went down to the waterlevel to see if I could flag a gondola at this hour. There happened to be one moored right in front of the building, with a boatman who looked about fourteen. “How much to Hogskar?” I asked. He returned a number that was extortionate, but I wanted some time to think, so I paid it and climbed in.

The water smelled clean. Our gondola slid between the long shadows of buildings, snake-smooth and steady. Here I could see almost all the way to groundlevel: the old shop fronts and their big glass windows rippling in the boat-wake; caressing fingers of kelp; the small dark shoals of fish. The water’s surface was too disturbed to show me Mirror Boy, but it was calming nonetheless.

As I straightened up I happened to catch a glimpse over my shoulder, and my heart dropped, a sudden lurch. I thought I’d seen the man in the gray jacket behind us in a second boat.

I didn’t dare turn around. “Are we being followed?” I asked the boatman.

He looked puzzled. “No, ma’am.”

Maybe I had just imagined it. Too nervous to check again, I settled for watching the white faces of buildings glide past. Windows polished as silver posted distortions of the gondola over their glass-warp. There I was, hands clasped over my lap, with Mirror Boy by my side.

I startled and turned on instinct. Of course Mirror Boy wasn’t there. Of course I was alone on the ramshackle passenger bench of the gondola. I pulled my coat tighter around myself. We were too far away to talk, in any case.

I remembered now. This was how I lost him. First I started seeing both our images together: intermittently, then all the time. Later it started being just me sometimes, with a yawning emptiness where he was supposed to be. There then came a point where he stopped appearing for good, but by that time I was aggressively hunting for a lease and a fifty-six-hour workweek, and didn’t have the space to find out where he went.

I thought of the late afternoons spent laid out on my bed—an old gym mat taped to the floor—with him curled naked by my side, a weightless, ephemeral comma. There, but not there. I’d touch myself while he hovered over me in the reflection, imagining it was his fingers I felt sliding over my flesh. Later I filched a dildo from an acrobat’s room and watched him in the gloss of my stolen window as he matched the thrust of his hips with my movements. With my head turned to one side, I could imagine that the translucent figures I saw, rapturous in their copulation, reflected the reality I was in.

The gondola slowed at a cross-junction and stopped for the lights. I leaned over the boat’s edge as the water calmed and Mirror Boy came into focus. “I wanted you to be real,” I told him.

“I know.”

I brushed my fingers against his cheek, and his face wavered and broke apart in the ripples. When I sat back I realized the boatman was staring at me. “You sure you alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, not looking him in the eye. I stared at the chipped corner of a building instead, spotty with water damage. My cheeks burned with a mixture of embarrassment and anxiety.

• • • •

Hogskar was home to one of the pockets of weird I’d curated. I directed the boatman to a flat-roofed apartment block, where a couple of floors above the water lived a witch who ran a manabonanza out of her home. As the gondola bumped against the barnacle crust along the walls, I thanked him and climbed the stairs through something that used to be a window and was now a front door.

This building, like mine, used to have a functional elevator nestled in the winding central stairwell, and it lay drowned at ground level. As I peered into its bronze cage and its flooded depths, a warning prickle ghosted over the back of my neck.

“Be careful,” Mirror Boy said.

I ran up a flight of steps on instinct. Crouched in the cover between windows, I leaned until I could just see outside.

The man in the gray jacket sat in a slim boat with an outboard motor, parked against the border of masonry across the canal. I watched as he fished something out of his pocket, lit it, and put it in his mouth. From this distance he looked startlingly like Mirror Boy, all grown up, with a ragged beard and hair that had last seen scissors years ago.

Fuck. I went back to the rusted bars of the elevator cage. The dark surface of the water was now a floor away. “Who is he?” I demanded of the distant, floating spirit.

Mirror Boy just looked sadly at me.

Now all fluttery with adrenaline, I loped upstairs and pressed the buzzer under bunting that read, in faded red, CHRISSAS MANABONANZA. Bundles of shells and fishbone and cartilage festooned the doorway with great cheer, and the protective beak of a colossal squid hung over the premises. A pair of heartbeats passed before Chrissa’s voice crackled over the intercom. “We’re closed, come back at three!”

“It’s Lynette.”

“Circus Girl! Hey! What are you doing? Don’t you have work? Just a mo.”

I imagined Chrissa tumbling off whatever surface she had perched on and clattering through the layers of her house and shop. The door flew open to her wide-eyed smile and stream of chatter. “You’re just in time. I’m working on something new, it’s so great, you’re going to love it.” She clicked off the multiple locks across the folding aluminum gate. “It’s like, a clockwork heart, and I think I’ve almost got the formulation right this time.”

“Chrissa,” I said. “Chrissa, I need your help.”

“Oh. That sounds serious. Come on in.”

The moment I crossed the threshold an alarm sounded: a single, shrill, vibrating note. I froze. That sound meant fire, it meant death, it meant run, for all is lost.

“Shit,” Chrissa said. “What the hell?” She grabbed me by the arm and stiffly pushed me into an alcove by the door, cluttered with shoeboxes and the mummified carcasses of old umbrellas. “Did you get infected?”

The alarm continued its devouring scream. Chrissa tiptoed and thumbed off its controls, fixed under the fuse box. “Sorry. It’s a recycled school bell—it’s pretty fucking loud.” She turned back to me. “What’s going on? Did you get haunted?”

I leaned against the cold ledge of the alcove’s hatch, lined with red brick. “I don’t know. It’s worse than that, I think.”

Chrissa clicked her tongue. “Okay. Hang tight. Let me get my stuff.”

I stood in the dark of the alcove, inhaling layers of dust into a chest already tight with emotion. Chrissa hummed as she rifled through overflowing cabinets, her straw-bright hair drawn into a high, messy bun. She came back with a lacquered box and an armful of clear plastic drinking glasses. “Here,” she said, leaning across the hatch, “give me some fluid. Spit, blood, whatever.” She handed me a dusty shot glass.

I spit several times while she set up, decanting squid-ink tinctures into the glasses, a rainbow of eldritch chemistry. “Thank you,” she said, taking the shot glass from me. She dipped a clutch of cocktail sticks into the spit, then dropped one into each glass.

“Hmm,” she said, as the tinctures turned color, effervesced, or remained inert. “Okay. It looks like you’ve got a wraith. That’s . . . not great. When did you pick it up?”

So that’s how I learned Mirror Boy had a classification, a precedence, an observed set of characteristics. “Ten years ago. I was sixteen. But he left. He’s just only come back now.”

“Ten years? No, that means the wraith didn’t leave, it just went dormant. I’ve heard that it happens. That’s probably why the wards didn’t pick it up before.” She pushed off the alcove hatch. “Anyway, you’re not at end stage yet, and wraiths aren’t super-infectious. I might be able to contain it. We’ll see. The important part is, you’re still you. Come on.”

“Chrissa,” I said, “the wraith’s not the problem.”

She paused. “Oh?”

“There’s a murderer after me. I think he’s downstairs, waiting across the canal.”

“A murderer?”

“He’s killed all of Mirror Boy’s— my wraith’s other refuges. I don’t know what that means, but there’s been a string of murders in Darlingfort—”

“Hang on a minute. Describe this guy. You said he’s downstairs?”

“I think it’s him. He’s about my height, skinny, stringy brown hair down to here. This gross, patchy beard . . .”

Chrissa’s eyes were slits. “Gray leather jacket?”

“That’s him. You know him?”

“Shit.” She blew air between her lips and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, he came to get his scry adjusted. Fucksquid, I didn’t know he was after you.”

“He’s killed seven people,” I exclaimed. “Why did you help him?”

“Honey. Do you know what wraiths do? You— wait.” She blew out a breath as a modicum of understanding hit. “You don’t want to get rid of this wraith, do you?”

I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no. I said, instead: “I want to know what’s going on. And I want this creep to stop following me.”

Chrissa narrowed her eyes again. “How would you describe your relationship with this wraith?”

This time, I really hesitated. “Intimate.” As Chrissa’s eyebrows shot upwards I said, “I was sixteen! He was a boy, I was a girl, I—”

“Did you love him?”

“No! I don’t know. Look, it’s been ten years. I just don’t want to die like the others. Please, there’s got to be something we can do.”

“Honey . . .” She rubbed my arm apologetically. “Come on. Let’s see what we’ve got on our hands.”

With a bucket of squid ink, wet and pungent, Chrissa inscribed a charm circle on the floor, a standing mirror at its heart. As she worked, she explained: “Wraiths are a bit weird. They’re in between, not fully spirits, but more than raw energy. They’re sort of, leftover life-force that goes hunting for hosts. Parasites, basically.” She straightened up and went to put the ink bucket away. “The problem with wraiths is that A, they take over their hosts and do crazy shit, and B, they can also jump hosts. So they spread. There are hunters who specialize in taking them out before they become a real problem. The more hosts, the harder to kill.”

“You said they’re not infectious.”

“I said they’re not super-infectious. There are conditions for becoming a host.” She beckoned at me to step into the circle. “Come on. I want to see this mirror boy of yours.”

I looked at the lines and glyphs spread across the floor. “Is it going to hurt him? I don’t want to hurt him.”

“Oh, honey.” Chrissa shook her head. “It won’t hurt him. It’s for me to see him and talk to him. If he wants to talk.”

I gingerly tiptoed into the circle, careful not to disturb the still-wet lines. Mirror Boy stood in front of me, fully clad in a shabby red t-shirt and jeans. I’d never seen him like this, and it sent a trill of sadness and betrayal through me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was just a child, scuffing the toe of one beat-up shoe against the heel of the other.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

Chrissa knelt and chanted softly over the charm circle, invoking Kraken, invoking Leviathan. “Neither spine nor ribcage, neither collarbones nor hips, the eyes that see in the watery dark, the mouths that open in the deep.” Her handiwork slid from glistening black to iridescent silver, and the lines sang as they came to life, each circular glyph ringing a different note. The chorus of bell tones raised my flesh in tingling waves.

“Alright,” Chrissa said, matter-of-factly. She stood and struck gray dust from her hands as the charm circle hummed. “Let’s see what we got.”

She stepped in, looked into the mirror, and melted. “Oh, honey. Look at him. He’s just a baby.”

“Yeah,” I said, mouth dry. He was a baby. I’d been a baby back then, too. Neither of us knew what we were doing, flailing through this world.

Chrissa and her marshmallow heart were already gone. I should have known this would happen. Her voice was bright and airy like she was talking to a small, soft animal. “Hello. What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one.” He looked to me for reassurance. “She calls me Mirror Boy.”

“I want to know about you. Tell me about yourself.”

Mirror Boy stared blankly. Undaunted, Chrissa asked in the singsong manner she reserved for young children, “How would you describe yourself?”

“I am what I am,” he said. “I live through others. I’ve had eight different hosts. Lynette was my first, a long time ago. And then she asked me to leave, so I found others. I don’t think she remembers this.”

“I remember,” I said, stung by his accusation. “And I never asked you to leave.”

Chrissa quietly patted my hand, as if to say, not now. “Tell me about your other hosts. How come you have so many?”

“I found pathways to other people. But they didn’t always want me around. So I left them too.”

“Seven other hosts over ten years?”

He nodded. “The shortest time I spent with one was three days. But—” he hitched his shoulders up and drew in a shaky breath like he needed air— “the hunter killed her too. Why? She didn’t know who I was. She thought I was a bad dream.”

“Hunters have to be thorough,” Chrissa said. I choked audibly at that, and she explained, “It’s like an illness. You have to get rid of everything that’s infected.”

“Like an extermination,” I said tonelessly. I wanted to vomit.

Chrissa’s lips pursed. She looked more upset than I ever remembered, and that helped with nothing. She turned back to Mirror Boy as I blinked back burning in my eyes. “How about the host you were with the longest.”

“My last host,” he said. I noticed how much more tired he looked. “Her name was Nur Elisha. She lived alone in Darlingfort. I was with her for seven years. She thought I was her long-lost grandson.”

I swallowed. Words could not describe the ugly feelings welling up in me now. “Did the hunter kill her too?”

“He killed her first. And found the others, one by one. Every one I fled to, he killed.”

Nur Elisha, Nur Elisha. I replayed the name in my head, trying to tease out if and when I saw her in the news. But an elderly woman dying alone in the sewer slums wasn’t important. And wouldn’t be until the third or fourth person killed the same way.

“I’m going to ask you a question. Please answer it honestly.” Chrissa’s manner towards Mirror Boy was still gentle as a shepherd’s, but I’d never seen her this somber, and that frightened me more than anything else. I was standing chest-high in a sea of uncertainty. It was a sick old feeling. It was a familiar old feeling. “Why didn’t you take any of your hosts over?”

“Because I didn’t want to,” he said. “I know I’m supposed to. I can feel that call. But I—” He stopped, struggling for words. He had never been the most talkative, my Mirror Boy. “I just wanted to watch. What would I do with their lives?”

“What, indeed,” Chrissa muttered to herself. To Mirror Boy she asked: “Do you know who your hunter is?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” Chrissa had gone uncharacteristically quiet. She told me, “You stay right here,” and vanished into the upper loft.

With Chrissa gone, Mirror Boy leaned as far as the glass would allow him and hissed: “She can’t help us. Nobody can break what links us. Either you run, or—” He exhaled, and the glass went misty on the inside.

“Or what?”

“Or she finds a way to kill me without touching you.”

“No.”

“It’s the only way—”

“No.” I slapped my hand against the glass and he flinched back from it. “Stop saying these things. I don’t want you dead. And I never asked you to leave. Why would you say that?”

He moved away from the glass. “You didn’t have to say it. I could tell. You were trying to build a life that had no space for me in it. You wanted a normal life. So I let you be normal.”

“That’s not true,” I insisted. I had been maybe a bit relieved to get my reflection back—to know that it would be my face I saw when I looked in a mirror—but I wasn’t glad. It was just—it was more convenient. Because then I didn’t have to worry about explaining him to other people. Or the fact that I couldn’t see to put on lip gloss. It was just slightly easier.

But I’d rather have had him. I believed that.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be normal,” Mirror Boy said.

Chrissa came back downstairs, waving a small velvet box that probably safekept someone’s wedding ring in its previous life. “Luckily for us,” she said, “our hunter-murderer is a bit of a dumbass. I’m guessing an amateur. I asked him for a bunch of things as payment for fixing his scry, including a lock of hair.” She tapped the ring box. “Pro tip: Never give a witch anything that used to be part of you. No matter what the reason.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. I imagined the curses she could lay upon him on my behalf. She could solve all our problems instantly.

But of course Chrissa wasn’t that kind of witch. “I’m going to find out who he is.”

Her desk yielded a sliver of workspace and she got busy, tuning us out of her consciousness. I folded myself to the floor and leaned my head against the cool glass. I wasn’t sure what time it was anymore. I thought: I need to tell Shane I’m not coming back tonight. It’s my turn to cook dinner.

I closed my eyes. Mirror Boy began to talk. “At the start, I was going to take you over,” he said. “It’s true that is the nature of wraiths. But you, you wanted to live so badly. You burned with so much desire that it frightened me. I didn’t think I could put out that flame. So I stayed and I watched you. And over time I realized I didn’t have to do what my nature demanded of me. So I didn’t.”

“You’re not like the other wraiths,” I whispered.

“I suppose I’m not.”

“What do we really know about wraiths, anyway?” Chrissa said. She was grinding some kind of rock into fine powder in a tiny handheld mortar. “Jack shit. All our current spiritual knowledge is like, a grand total of twenty years old. We make it up as we go along. I bet that in ten years, Mirror Boy, you’re going to be the case study people cite when talking about wraiths.”

I thought about life ten years in the future and a blanket of exhaustion fell over me. I still had the gauntlet of the next ten days to go through. The next ten hours.

Mirror Boy leaned against me, shoulder to shoulder, the glass a thin and unbreakable barrier between our worlds. “Are you happy?” he whispered. “Is this the life that you wanted?”

“Heavy questions, kid,” Chrissa warned from her perch.

I didn’t know how to answer him. “It’s not a bad life,” I said. “It’s a bit dull. But it’s my life.”

“It sounds nice,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it more than I did.

I looked up at Chrissa, framed by the stacks of her grimoires, a figure of pure concentration, and was struck by envy, bone-deep. Chrissa looked like someone who was exactly where she was meant to be. Here was a person who hadn’t just fallen into the grooves of her life like a yellow coat of autumn leaves, but was growing bright and verdant from deep soil that suited her. And she was just sitting there, filled with innocent purpose, with no idea how lucky she was. I wished I had the same kind of untrammeled joy in my life as Chrissa did. I felt almost guilty I didn’t.

“I’m a pretender,” I said, knowing Mirror Boy was listening. “When I stop to think about my life I get the sense that I’m just borrowing someone else’s. So I don’t.” I shrugged. It was hard to put these sentiments into words. “Like I have all this stuff in my past I can’t talk about. I don’t know.” The events of the past few hours were finally catching up, like a tidal wave about to smother me. “I’m sorry I snapped when you came back. Because it’s like . . . I was being reminded that I’m only a pretender. Pretending to have this life that isn’t mine.”

“Your life is your life,” Chrissa said sharply, and when I looked up she was glaring at me over the rims of the bifocals she wore to do near-vision work. “Don’t say shit like that. People deserve to have nice things.”

“A borrowed life is better than none,” said Mirror Boy.

I pressed my fingertips to his against the cool glass and felt a smile pushing through my gloom. “I’m not going to argue with you.”

Exhaustion overtook me then, and I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke to Chrissa gripping me by the shoulders, her face inches from mine. “Did you ever drown?”

I blinked away half-ghosts and dream-fragments. “Yes, once.” I didn’t want to tell her about Alfous, about his cruel fingers or the little red tip of his tongue, or the way the blood bloomed across his neck when I cut it.

“Was this when you met the kid?”

“How did you know?”

“Come have a look.”

She sauntered to her desk, where a battle-scarred laptop sat whirring. I didn’t want to leave the safety of the charm circle, so I stayed put. Chrissa pointed to the screen. “I worked out your hunter’s name, and I scrubbed the web for it. Look. There we are. There’s your mirror boy.”

The screen was too far for me to read. I tried to swallow my disbelief. “Mirror Boy’s the hunter?”

“Kraken’s sake, no. Mirror boy drowned ten years ago. Here it is, in the news. The hunter’s his twin. There’s your motivation sorted out. He’s going after his brother’s wraith. I told you: an amateur.”

“I don’t have an older brother,” Mirror Boy said. He sounded confused. “I don’t remember him.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re not a spirit. Just loose energy from when someone died before their time, given shape and direction. How do you find your hosts, kid?”

Mirror Boy licked his lips. “In the water, on the verge of passing.”

“There, see? You’re following the path of that boy’s death.”

“But I’m not him,” Mirror Boy said. “I don’t know him. I’m not—”

“Doesn’t matter.” Chrissa clicked the laptop shut. “Look, obviously this guy is serious. Amateur hunters like him do it because they’re fanatics. You can’t reason with them. I know this too well.” She sighed and tangled her hands in her hair. “And there’s no known way to separate a wraith from its host. Once you infect a person, it’s permanent. No take-backsies.” She started pacing in a tiny circle, which she only did when she was frustrated. “That’s why hunters kill hosts. It’s cruel, but it’s better than letting the wraith spread, because most wraiths are legit nightmares. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve had to clean up before. When wraiths possess people, they turn into psychopaths. Like flesh-dungeon, cannibal-horror psychopaths.”

“But he’s not like that,” I said. “You know he’s not like that. He’s not.”

“I know. He . . . loves you. I think that’s the difference.” She looked between the two of us, helpless. “Honey, I’m sorry. This is out of my depth. I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what to do.”

“That’s not good enough. We have to do something.” I looked at Mirror Boy, trapped in his bubble of a world. I’d spent the last ten years scraping this life I had together, but he couldn’t leave the glass-bound existence he was chained to. So maybe my life wasn’t perfect, maybe it was dull and not a hundred percent what I would have hoped for. But it was mine. And it was more than he had. It wasn’t fair. He deserved better. We deserved better.

“We have to do something,” I repeated.

• • • •

THE HUNTER

Leviathan forgive me. I stand here in Your eternal sight, a sinner beyond redemption, my hands stained as Kraken’s ink and my heart cold and dead as Kraken’s eyes. Ten years ago the greater part of my soul drowned in the water with my brother. It was my fault that those men mistook him for me, and a stain upon my being that I was not there to stop it from happening. But it will be over soon. Tonight, or tomorrow, or sometime this week, I will kill the last of his hosts, and then it will be done. This job will be done, and I can fade away.

The girl has corralled herself in the building where the witch lives. I don’t know if they’re friends, but the scry lies heavy and dormant in my hand. Something protects her and hides her from my sight. The knife weighs my belt down, waiting and patient. It has tasted the blood of seven, and it wants more. I detest it. I detest its heft, its hunger. I regret the day I had it forged. But it’s too late. If I stop now, at this one last step I need to end this wraith, then all the death that came before will be for nothing.

In the old days this would be easier. You’d dig up the grave, salt the bones, then burn them. But the sea is my brother’s grave, and it has thickened his bones with salt, and no fire shall ever touch them.

It was Leviathan who guided me. It was They who sent Bastian to me. Sweet Bastian, with his soft cheeks and honeyed lips. He spoke of the year his reflection showed someone else, dark haired and dark eyed, skin warm as almond husks. He said: “At first, I thought you were him. You look exactly alike.” I told him about my dead twin, the drowned boy, and between our tellings the events that had followed my brother’s death became clear. By then I had spent years in penance, knees pressed to the cold temple floors, hot blood dripping into sacrificial chalices, praying for my sins to be cleansed by the stringent purity of saltwater. For the mercy of Leviathan to pass through me and leave me bleached and bare. That night, I knew that I was beyond the redemption of even the Great Finned One, but They had blessed me still with a chance to atone for the life I had led.

From there everything unraveled: the nights combing through the mausoleums of old libraries, the days spent pulling secrets out of witches and priests. And then the knowledge, and then the knife, and then the first of the blood. The old woman who lived alone in a coffin box, among stacks of decaying photographs and the flat faces of mirrors.

Until then, I didn’t think I could do it. Until the moment the knife punctured her chest I believed I would fail on the path Leviathan had set me upon. But the old woman died and I was baptized in her blood, reborn as Leviathan’s blade. Great Leviathan, I am Your will and Your flesh in the realm of mortals, doing Your bidding as I may. I stain myself in Your name. I condemn myself so that I may bring peace to Your domain.

Yesterday it was Bastian’s turn. The smell of his blood lingers on my collar where his hands touched it, his questing fingers tightening, then losing their grip. I dread the thought of washing my shirt. It’s all I have left of him.

The scry comes to life, the coral glowing with bioluminescence. The urchin-spike needle spins. The girl has emerged from her den of safety.

Soon it will be over.

By the time I park the boat and enter the building, her footsteps are echoing on the steps several floors above me. I take my shoes off. Barefoot and silent, I slip upwards, the knife ready in my hand.

The girl comes to a stop at midlevel, leaning by the gangway to the next building. She’s slender and fashionable, an ocean of curls resting on her shoulders. In another time, I might have offered her something else: a drink, a taste of salt. Her shaking hands fumble with a lighter and cigarette. In the end, it’s our vices that will lead to our downfall. I creep up from behind.

Soon it will be over.

Something creaks. She turns, catches sight of me, and recoils in fear. I spring forward, but she is already fleeing down the gangway into the waiting night.

I give chase. The girl shines like a deer in the woods, a memory from the time I was too small to know speech. She vanishes into the shelter of the next building, which exists as a dismal wreck, boarded-up and empty even of squatters. The midlevel floor, formerly a studio or warehouse, challenges me with a maze of metal cabinets, heaving with rotting boxes and bloated white tins.

The girl slips between the cabinets, her breathing harsh. I trip over a metal rod jutting between two shelves and land palm-first in the dust. As I scramble to get up I hear a deep crash, then another. A chorus of deadly groans—metallic, ringing. The girl. She’s pushed a shelf over and now they’re all coming down, an army of avenging dominoes.

The floor doesn’t hold. Eaten through with mold and termites, it ruptures under the weight of the falling shelves. Wood and metal plunge towards the waiting water, meeting their doom with dull sounds. I barely escape the devouring chasm in time. I watch a whole cabinet tip to its death, its insides spilling like butchered intestines.

A skittering sound to my left. It’s the girl, leaping over rubble and ruin. I realize I’ve dropped the knife and it’s nowhere to be found.

The girl has it. She’s run to the far end of the room, and the knife glints in a shard of moonlight as she holds it up. I speak to the wraith of my brother who resides in her: “Are you going to do it for me, Vincent?” I ask. “Will you end your own life? End this torment?”

“I’m not him,” she says, in a voice high and clear as a songbird’s. “I’m not your dead brother. No one is.” She cuts into her palm; blood runs over her wrist and down her elbow. “Look. I bleed red. I’m human.”

I shake my head. None of the other hosts bled wraith-black either. Sometimes the literature is wrong. But now the girl has put obstacles between us. She is clever; I have to be careful.

“Look,” she says. “You seem like a nice man. It doesn’t have to be like this. We could be friends. I want to be your friend. Don’t you want to know your brother?”

Her eyes are luminous, the way I remember deer eyes reflected the light. The shape of her legs shows under her shift, and I imagine the warmth between them and the soft places I can sink into. I imagine taking her down by the neck and having her right here, on the dying floorboards of a dying building. I imagine killing her as she comes, my brother’s wraith spilling like black vomit from her lips.

A shiver passes through me, and I know at once that this is Kraken’s corruption. Kraken with Its tentacles that turn flesh to temptation and minds to ruin. Kraken who lives to frustrate the will of Leviathan. No. I cannot be fooled. I will not be thwarted.

I seize a metal rod from the ground, its end a series of ragged points. The knife is only a tool; anything will work as well. “Don’t try to trick me, you witch.”

The girl runs.

By Leviathan’s grace I cross the room without falling through. The girl has vanished up the concrete stairwell with roof access, but that’s a mistake. This building is too short to connect to rooflevel, so she’ll be trapped. I burst through the door to find her standing at the roof edge, staring across the blank space of the canal, elbows tight to her waist.

“There’s nowhere to run,” I say, as the door claps shut behind me. “You might as well give up. It’ll be easier on both of us.”

“I don’t want to die,” she says.

“I know. I’m sorry.” And I mean it. She is lovely, and I am truly sorry that she has to die. “But to live, a wraith needs a body to inhabit.”

She looks over her shoulder at me. “I know,” she says sadly.

Then she spins on her heel, her arm thrown out. Something strikes me hard and I go crashing against the door. The knife’s handle protrudes from my chest. As I watch fluid trickle down my jacket my knees lose coherence, as though their tendons have been cut. I see. The girl is clever, and I have allowed her to trick me. This is the end. My metal rod clatters to the ground.

The girl canters over and pulls the knife from my heart, and the blood it held back spills over my shirt. “Once upon a time, I used to be a circus girl,” she says. “Once upon a time, I used to throw knives and juggle and spin fire.”

The girl’s eyes glitter in the moonlight as though they were a distant conflagration. A forest burning. “He’s taken you,” I say. The taste of hot copper fills my mouth.

“No,” she says. “He’s never taken me. He doesn’t follow his nature. He chose not to. That’s why I decided to save him.” She squats over me. “To live, a wraith needs a body to inhabit. You understand, don’t you?”

I do, and yet I do not. The world is fading around me. In this half-twilight my brother stands behind the circus girl. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I’ve forgotten what he looks like. He’s so beautiful. We used to be so beautiful. I had forgotten.

I flick my gaze back to the circus girl, trying to understand before my time on this watery earth runs out. “You’ll . . . take care of him?”

“No, hunter,” she says. “He’ll take care of you.” She runs her fingers softly through my hair. “A borrowed life is better than none.”

A borrowed life is better than none. Is that something I used to say? Or my brother? Maybe it was our mother, long dead and gone. My memories swim into one another and I lose them to the dark. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Forgive me, Leviathan. I know not if I have failed You, only that I have tried my best. I am light as a child floating on the surface of a clear blue sea. O Great Finned One, take me into Your infinite depths, away from this salt-bitten world. I see brother’s face one last time, framed over the circus girl’s shoulder. He is smiling.

• • • •

MIRROR BOY

I smell the sea on the air. It’s a smell I don’t remember, because I remember nothing. But a month from now, or maybe a year later, I will look back on this day and I will.

I feel the sun upon the skin of the man who used to be my brother. It’s warm. It’s pleasant. It could burn me, if it wasn’t winter. It is my skin now, and I belong to it, as it belongs to me.

I hear the sounds of life around me. So many notes I can hardly believe it, after so long spent hearing only one voice at a time. There’s the arguments of sea birds, the wash of water against walls, the song of boat motors, and the soft humming of someone experiencing happiness.

I see Circus Girl perched on the roof edge, her ankles freely dangling, her hair soft and loose. The tune she hums is one her mother used to sing her to sleep with. I realize I am seeing for the first time the shape of her back, the geography of her spine.

I taste grit in my mouth, clay and ashes and bone. Chrissa tells me it will take a few days for it to go away. A few days for my heart to settle into its new home.

I want to tell Circus Girl how grateful I am. For hosting me. For teaching me about life. For saving me when I needed it. I want to tell her how terrified I am, now that I have been given all this, and I can do anything I want with it. I want to tell her about this happiness I feel, how new and delightful it is to me.

Instead I say, “I think I’m hungry. Let’s go downstairs and eat.”

JY Neon Yang (they/them) is queer, non-binary, and the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Black Tides of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, The Ascent to Godhood). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Lambda Literary awards. A Clarion West alum, they graduated from the University of East Anglia with an MA in Creative Writing and currently live in Singapore.

Deriving Life
By Elizabeth Bear

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Sometime later; maybe tomorrow

My name is Marq Tames, I’m a mathematician, and I’m planning suicide.

Until today, I wasn’t planning. You couldn’t say I was planning. Because I know perfectly well that it would be the grossest of irresponsibility to plan my exit . . . at least until Tamar didn’t need me anymore.

You don’t do that to people you love.

You don’t do that to people who love you.

• • • •

Now

“Stop taking your oxy,” Tamar says, skeletal hand on my wrist. There’s not much left of them. Their skin crackles against the back of my fingers when I touch their cheek. Their limbs are withered, but their torso is drum-taut, swollen-seeming. I don’t look. Death—and especially transitional death—is so much prettier in the dramas.

“Fuck that,” I answer.

“Just stop taking the damn bonding hormones.” Their papery cheek is wet. “I can’t stand to see you in this much pain, Marq. Even Atticus can’t help me with it.”

“Do you think it wouldn’t hurt me worse not to be here?”

Tamar doesn’t answer. Their eyelids droop across bruised sockets.

I’m exhausting them.

“Do you think this didn’t hurt people before? Before we could contract for pair-bond maintenance? How do you think people did it then? Do you think losing a spouse was easier?”

Tamar closes their eyes completely.

And no, of course, no, they do not think that. They’d just never paused to think about it at all. We all forget that people in the past were really just like us. We want to forget it. It makes it easier to live with the knowledge of how much suffering they endured.

They endured it because they had no choice.

Tamar avoiding thinking about that is the same as Tamar thinking that I should go away. Stop taking my drugs. Maybe file for divorce. Tamar wants to think there’s a way this could hurt me less. They’re thinking of me, really.

I’ve already stopped taking the oxy. I haven’t told Tamar. It helps them to think there’s something more I could do. That I’m just being stubborn. That I’m in charge of this pain.

That I have a choice.

I wish I were in charge. I wish, I wish I had a choice. But I don’t need bonding hormones to love Tamar.

I knew how this ended when I signed the contract.

I’m still here.

“Is this what you want?” Tamar asks me. One clawlike hand sweeps the length of the body that used to be so lithe, so strong.

“I just want every second of you I can get,” I say. “I’ll have to do without soon enough.”

Tamar squints at me. I don’t think I’m fooling them, but they’re not going to call me on it.

Not right now. Maybe not ever.

Maybe they’d rather not know for sure.

But the thing is, I don’t want to keep doing this without them. Especially with, well, the other stuff that’s going on.

• • • •

I knew Tamar’s deal before we got involved. It was all in the disclosures. I knew there were limits on our time together.

But you tell yourself, going in, that it’ll be fine. That fifteen years is better than no years and hey, the course might be slow; you might get twenty. Twenty-two. How many relationships actually last twenty-two years?

And there are benefits to being the spouse of someone like Tamar, just as there are benefits to having a Tenant.

Something is better than nothing. Love is better than loneliness. And it’s not like anybody gets a guarantee.

So you tell yourself that you can go into this guarded. Not invest fully, because you know there’s a time limit. And that it might even be better because of that, because it can’t be a trap for a lifetime.

There’s life after, you tell yourself.

So much life.

Except then after comes, and you discover that maybe the Mythic After Time isn’t what you wanted at all. You just want now to keep going forever.

But now won’t do that. Or rather, it will. But the now you want to keep is not the now you get. The now you get is a river, sweeping the now you wanted eternally back toward the horizon disappearing behind you.

• • • •

Evangeline doesn’t sit behind her desk for our sessions. In fact, her desk is pushed up against the wall in her office, and she usually turns her chair around and sits down in it facing me, her back to the darkened monitor. I’m usually over on the other side of the room, next to a little square table with a lamp.

Evangeline’s my transition specialist. She’s a gynandromorph—from environmental toxicity, rather than by choice—and she likes archaic pronouns and I try to respect that.

I’m legally mandated to see her for at least a year before I make my final decision. It’s been eighteen months, because I started visiting her a little before Tamar went into hospice. So I could make my decision tomorrow.

If I thought Evangeline would sign off on it yet. Which she won’t.

Today she isn’t happy. I can tell because she keeps fidgeting with her wedding rings, although her face is smooth and affectless.

She’s unhappy because I just said something she didn’t like.

What I’d said was, “If you change who you are so that someone will love you, and you’re happy afterward, is that so terrible?”

Transition specialists aren’t supposed to let you know when you’ve rattled their cages, but her disapproval is strong enough that even if she doesn’t demonstrate it, I can taste it. I wonder if there are disapproval pheromones.

“Well,” she says, “it seems like you have a lot of choices to consider, Marq. Have you come up with a strategy for assessing them?”

I didn’t answer.

She didn’t frown. She’s too good at her job to frown.

She waited ninety seconds for me to answer before she added, “You know, you do have a right to be happy without sacrificing yourself.”

Maybe it was supposed to hit me like an epiphany. But epiphanies have been thin on the ground for me recently.

“The right, maybe,” I answered. “But do I have the ability?”

“You’ll have to answer that,” she said, after another ninety seconds.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the problem in a nutshell, right there, isn’t it?”

• • • •

Robin, my non-spouse partner, picks me up in the parking lot, and they’re not happy with me either.

Opening salvo: “You need to drop this thing, Marq.”

“This thing?”

Robin waves at the two-story brick façade of the clinic.

“Becoming a Host?”

They nod. Hands on the steering wheel as legally mandated, but I’m glad the car is handling the driving. Robin’s knuckles are paler brown than the surrounding flesh, their face drawn in determination. “You can’t do this.”

“Tamar did.”

“Tamar is dying because of it.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? I’m fifty-six years old, Robin. Another twenty-five years or so in guaranteed good health seems pretty attractive right now.”

Robin sighs. “It’s maybe twenty years of good health if you’re lucky, and you know it. You always walk out of that office spoiling for a fight.”

I think about that. It might be true. “That might be true.”

We drive in silence for a while. We have a dinner date tonight, and Robin brings me home to the bungalow Tamar and I used to share. My bungalow now. I’ll inherit the marital property, though not Tamar’s Host benefits. It’s okay. Once they’re gone, I’ll have my own.

Or Robin and Tamar will win, and I’ll go back to work. The house is paid for anyway. It’s a gorgeous little Craftsman, relocated up here to the 51st parallel from Florida before the subtropics became uninhabitable. And before Florida sank beneath the waves. It got so it was cheaper to move houses than build them for a while, especially with the population migrations at the end of the twenty-first century and the carbon-abatement enforcement. Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just . . . cut down trees?

Tamar liked it—Tamar likes it—because that same big melt that put our house where it is also gave us the Tenants. Or—more precisely—gave them back.

Robin parks, and we walk up the drive past late-summer black-eyed Susans and overblown roses that need deadheading. I let us in, and we walk into the kitchen. Robin’s brought a bottle of white wine and the makings for a salad with chickpeas and pistachios. I rest on a stool while they cook, moving around my kitchen like they spend several nights a week there—which they do.

Tamar approved heartily of me bringing home a gourmet cook. My eyes sting for a moment, with memory. I bury my face in my wine glass until I feel like I can talk again.

“I could keep a part of Tamar with me if I do this. You know that. I could get a scion of Atticus, and have a little bit of Tamar with me forever.”

“Or you could let go,” Robin says. “Move on.”

“Live here alone.” If I had a scion, I wouldn’t be alone.

“It’s a nice house,” Robin says. “You have a long life ahead of you.” They slide a plate in front of me, assembled so effortlessly it seems like a few waves of the hand have created a masterpiece of design. “Being alone isn’t so bad. Nobody moves your stuff.”

Robin likes living alone. Robin likes having a couple of lovers and their own place where they spend most nights by themself. Robin doesn’t get that other than Tamar—and, I suppose, Atticus—I have been alone my whole life, emotionally if not physically, and the specter of having to go back to that, having to return to that loneliness after seventeen years of relief, of belonging, of having a place . . .

I can’t.

I can’t. But I just have to. Because I don’t have a choice.

I poke my food with my fork. “The future I wanted was the one with Tamar.”

Everything about the salad is perfect and perfectly dressed. Robin did the chickpeas themself; these never saw the inside of a can. Their buttery texture converts to sand in my mouth when I try to eat one.

“And you had it.” Robin picks up their own plate and hooks a stool around with one foot, joining me informally at the counter. “Paid in full, one future. I’m not saying you don’t get to grieve. Of course you do. But the world isn’t ending, Marq. Soon, once you get beyond the grief, you will have to look for a new future. Futures chain together, one after the other. You don’t just sing one song or write one book and then decide never to create anything again.”

“Some people do exactly that, though. What about Harper Lee?”

Robin blows on a chickpea as if it were hot. “No feeling is final. No emotion is irrevocable.”

“Some choices are.”

“Yes,” Robin says. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

• • • •

Seventeen years, two months, and three days ago

“Caring for a patient consumes your life,” this beautiful person I’d just met was saying.

I was thirty-nine years old and single. Their name was . . . their name is Tamar.

I studied them for a minute, then sighed. “I feel like you’re trying to tell me something,” I admitted. “But I need a few more verbs and nouns.”

“Sorry,” Tamar said. “I’m not trying to beat around the bush. I’m committed to being honest with potential partners, but I also tend to scare people off when I tell them the truth.”

“If I’m scared off, I’ll still pay for your drink.”

“Deal,” they said. And drained it. “So here’s the thing. I’m a zombie. A podling. A puppethead.”

“Oh,” I said. I studied their complexion for signs of illness and saw nothing except the satin gleam of flawless skin. “I’m not a bigot. I don’t . . . like those words.”

Tamar watched me. They waved for another drink.

“You have acquired metastatic sarcoma.”

“I have a Tenant, yes.”

“I’ve never spoken with somebody . . .” I finish my own drink, because now I can’t find the nouns. Or verbs.

“Maybe you have,” Tamar said. “And you just haven’t known it.”

Tamar’s new drink appeared. They said, “I chose this path because I grew up in a house where I was a caretaker for somebody who was dying. A parent. And I have a chronic illness, and I never want to put anyone else in that position. No one will ever be trapped because of me.”

They took a long pull of their drink and smiled apologetically. “My life expectancy wasn’t that great to begin with.”

“Look,” I said. “I like you. And it’s your life, your choice. Obviously.”

“Makes it hard to date,” they said resignedly. “Even today, everybody wants a shot at a life partner.”

“Nothing is certain,” I said.

“Death and global warming,” they replied.

“I would probably have let my parent die, in your place,” I admitted. One good confession deserved another. “They were awful. So. I come with some baggage and some land mines, too.”

• • • •

Now

“I’ve done so many things for you,” Tamar says. “This thing—”

“Dying.” Still dodging the nouns. Still dodging the verbs.

“Yes.” Their face is waxy. At least they’re not in any pain. Atticus wouldn’t let them be in pain. “Dying is a thing I need to do for myself. On my own terms. You need to let it be mine, Marq.”

I sit and look at my hands. I look at my wedding ring. It has a piece of dinosaur bone in it. So does Tamar’s, the one they can’t wear anymore because their hands are both too bony and too swollen.

“You’re healthy, Marq.” Tamar says.

I know. I know how lucky I am. How few people at my age, in this world we made, are as lucky as I am. How amazing that this gift of health was wasted on somebody as busted as me.

What if Tamar had been healthy? What if Tamar were outliving me? Tamar deserved to live, and Tamar deserved to be happy.

I was just taking up space somebody lovable could have been using. The air I was breathing, the carbon for my food . . . those could have benefited somebody else.

“You make me worthy of being loved.” I take a breath. “You make me want to make myself worthy of you.”

“You were always lovable, Marq.” Their hand moves softly against mine.

“I don’t know how to be me without you,” I say.

“I can’t handle that for you right now,” Tamar says. “I have to die.”

“I keep thinking I can . . . figure this out. Solve it somehow.”

“You can’t derive people the way you derive functions, Marq.”

I laugh, shakily. I can’t do this. I have to do this.

“You said when we met that you never wanted to be a burden on somebody else.” As soon as it’s out I know it was a mistake. Tamar’s already gaunt, taut face draws so tight over the bones that hair-fine parallel lines crease the skin, like a mask of the muscle fibers and ligaments beneath.

Tamar closes their eyes. “Marq. I know how hard it is for you to feel worthy. But right now . . . if you can’t let this one thing be about me, you need to be someplace else.”

“Tamar, I’m sorry—”

“Go away,” Tamar says.

“Love,” I say.

“Go away,” they say. “Go away, I don’t love you anymore, I can’t stand to watch somebody I love go through what you’re going through. Marq, just go away. Let me do this alone.”

“Love,” I say.

“Don’t call me that.” Eyes still closed, they turn their face away.

• • • •

Sixteen years, eight months, and fifteen days ago

I took Tamar to the gorge.

I’d never taken anybody to the gorge before. It’s my favorite place in the world, and one of the things I love about it is that it’s so private and inaccessible. If you love something, and it’s a secret, and you tell two people, and they love it, and they tell two people . . . well, pretty soon it’s all over the net and it’s not private anymore.

We sat on the bridge over the waterfall—I think it must have been somebody’s Eagle Scout project, and so long ago that nobody maintains the trail up to it anymore. It was a cable suspension job, and it swayed gently when we lowered ourselves to the slats.

The waterfall was so far below that we could hear each other speak in normal tones, and the spray couldn’t even drift up to jewel in Tamar’s hair.

There were rainbows, though, shifting when you turned your head, and I turned my head a lot, because I was staring at Tamar and pretending I wasn’t staring at Tamar.

Tamar was looking at their hands.

“I used to come up here as a kid,” I said. “To get away.”

“How on earth did you ever find it?” They kicked their feet like a happy child.

“It was less overgrown then.” My hands were still sticky from cutting through the invasive bittersweet to get here. I was glad I’d remembered to throw the machete I used for yard work in the trunk. And to tell Tamar to wear stout boots.

“Where did you live?”

I pointed back over my shoulder. “That way. The house is gone now, thank God.”

“Burned down?”

“No, they took it apart to make . . . something. I didn’t care. I was long gone by then.” Tamar already knew I’d left at eighteen and never looked back. “This was the closest thing I had to a home.”

“How long do you think this has been here?”

I shrugged. “Since the Big Melt? It will probably be here forever now. At least until the next Ice Age.”

I saw the corner of Tamar’s smile out of the corner of my eye. “You’re showing me your home?”

The idea brought me short I kicked my own feet in turn. “I guess I am.”

We looked at rainbows for a little while, until a cloud went over the sun.

“You were sexy with that machete,” Tamar said, and looked up from their folded hands into my eyes.

We both reeked of tick spray.

And they kissed me anyway.

• • • •

Now

I go home.

I sit on the couch we picked out together. There’s music playing, because I don’t seem to have the energy to turn it off. My feet are cold. I should go and get socks.

Part of the problem is not having anywhere to be. I shouldn’t have taken that family medical leave. Except if I hadn’t, what use exactly would I be to my students and the college right now?

Fifteen minutes later, my feet are even colder. I still haven’t found the wherewithal to go and get the socks. My phone beeps with a message and I think maybe I should look at it.

Ten minutes later, it beeps again. I pick it up without thinking and glance at the notifications.

I drop the phone.

Marq, this is Tamar’s Tenant, Atticus.

We need to talk.

I fumble it back up again. The messages are still there. Still burning at me while the day grows dim. The ground and the sky outside seem to blur into each other.

I’ve spoken with Atticus before. We were in-laws, after a fashion. But not recently. Recently . . . I’ve been avoiding it. Avoiding even thinking about it.

Avoiding even acknowledging its existence.

Because it’s the thing that is killing my spouse.

I get up. I put socks on. I start a pot of tea, and though I usually drink it plain, today I put milk and sugar in.

I need to answer this text. Maybe Atticus can help me. Help me explain to Tamar.

Maybe Atticus can help me with my transition specialist.

But when I slide my finger across the screen, a tremendous anxiety fills me. I type and delete, type and delete.

Nothing is right. Nothing is what I mean to say.

I think about what I’m going to text back to Atticus for so long that I do not text it back at all. It’s not so much that I talk myself out of it; it’s just that I’m exhausted and profoundly sad and can’t find much motivation for anything, and despite the tea and sugar I transition seamlessly from lying on the sectional staring at the popcorn texture of the ceiling to a deep sleep punctuated by paranoid nightmares that are never quite bad enough to wake me completely.

Sunrise finds me still on the sofa, eyes crusty and neck aching. Texts still unanswered, and now it feels like too much time has gone by, even though I tell myself I do want to talk to Atticus. Other than me, it’s the being in the world who loves Tamar most, at least theoretically. I’m just anxious because I’m so sad. Because the situation is so fraught.

Because I’m furious with Atticus for taking Tamar away from me, even though I know that’s not reasonable at all. But since when are brains and feelings reasonable?

And it’s dying along with Tamar, although I’m sure it has cells in stasis for eventual reproduction. I know that Atticus has at least two offspring already, because I’ve met them and their Hosts occasionally.

That should comfort me a little, shouldn’t it? That some bit of Tamar is immortal, and will carry on in those Tenants, and their offspring on down the line? And maybe, if I am convincing enough, in me.

I think of my own parent’s blood in me, of my failure to reproduce. Isn’t it funny how we phrase that? Failed to reproduce. I didn’t fail. I actively tried not to. It was a conscious choice.

Childhood is a miserable state of affairs, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody I loved.

I gave up trying to win my parent’s affection long before they died. I gave up trying to be seen or recognized.

I settled for just not fighting anymore.

• • • •

Sixteen years, eight months, and sixteen days ago

I reached over in the darkness and stroked Tamar’s hair. It had a wonderful texture, springy in its loose curls. Coarse but soft.

“You’re thinking, Marq,” they said.

“I’m always thinking.”

I heard the smile in Tamar’s voice as they rolled to face me. “It’s not good for you if you can’t turn it off once in a while, you know. What were you thinking about?”

“You . . . Atticus.”

“Sure. There’s a lot to think about.” They didn’t sound upset.

“Do you remember?”

A huff of thoughtful breath. A warm hand on my side. “Remember?”

“All of Atticus’s other lives?”

Tamar made a thoughtful noise. “That’s a common misconception, I guess. Atticus itself didn’t have other lives. It’s a clone of those older Tenants, so in a sense—a cellular sense—the same individual. The Tenants only bud when they choose to, which is why those first Hosts were so unlucky. The Tenants knew infecting them without consent was unethical.”

“But the alternative was to let their species die.” I thought about that. What I would do. If it were the entire human race on the line.

Tamar said, “I can assure you, one of the reasons the Tenants work so hard for us is that they have a tremendous complex of guilt about that, and still aren’t sure they made the right decision.”

Who could be? Let your species die, or consume another sentient being without its consent?

What would anyone do?

Tamar said, “And it’s true that we do share experiences. It can’t perceive the world outside my body without me, after all—the same way I can perceive my interior self much better through its senses. And it has—there’s some memory transferred. More if you use a big sample of the parent Tenant to engender the offspring. Though that’s harder on the Host.”

“So it—you—don’t remember being a Neanderthal.”

More than a huff of laughter this time; an outright peal. “Not exactly. It can share some memories with me that are very old. I have a sense of the Tenants’ history.”

It had been before I was born: The lead paleoanthropologist and two others working on several intact Homo neanderthalensis cadavers that had been discovered in a melting glacier had all developed the same kind of slow-growing cancer. That had been weird enough, though by then we knew about contagious forms of cancer—in humans, in wolves, in Tasmanian devils.

It got weirder when the cancers had begun, the researchers said, to talk to them.

Which probably would have been dismissed as crackpottery, except the cancer also cured that one paleobotanist’s diabetes, and suddenly they all seemed to have a lot of really good, coherent ideas about how that particular Neanderthal culture operated.

What a weird, archaic word, glacier.

I said, “It just seems weird that I’m in bed with somebody I’ve never met.”

As I said it I realized how foolish it was. Anytime you’re in bed with somebody, you’re in bed with everybody who came before you—everybody who hurt them, healed them, shaped them. All those ghosts are in the room.

Tamar’s Tenant was just a little less vaporous than most.

A rustle of sliding fabric as Tamar sat upright. “Do you want to?”

• • • •

Now

“I’m sorry, Mx. Tames, but you’re not on the visitor list anymore.”

“But Tamar—”

“Mx. Sadiq specifically asked that you not be admitted, Mx. Tames.” The nurse frowns at me, their attractive brown eyes crinkling kindly at the corners.

I stare. I feel like somebody has just thrust a bayonet through me from behind. Like my diaphragm has been skewered, is spasming around an impalement, and nothing—not breath nor words—will come out until someone drags it free.

The bayonet twists and I get half a breath. “But they’re my spouse—”

“They named you specifically,” the nurse says again. They glance sideways. In a lowered voice, dripping with unexpected sympathy, they say, “I’m so sorry. I know it doesn’t make it easier for you, but sometimes . . . sometimes, toward the end, people just want to be alone. It can be exhausting to witness the pain and fear of loved ones. Do you have other family members you could contact? It’s not my place to offer advice, of course—”

I waved their politeness away with one hand. “You have more experience with this sort of thing than I . . . than I . . . thank . . .”

The sobs spill over until they are nearly howls. I bend over with my hands on my knees, doubled in pain. Gasping. Sobbing. I try to stand upright and wobble, catching my shoulder on the wall. Then someone has dragged a chair over behind me and the nurse is guiding me gently into it, producing a box of Kleenex, squeezing my shoulder to ground me.

Surprisingly professional, all of it.

Well, this is an oncology ward. I guess they have some practice.

“Mx. Tames,” the nurse says when I’ve slowed down and I’m gasping a little. “Is there another family member we can call? I don’t think you ought to go home alone right now.”

• • • •

One of the things that drew me to Tamar was their joy. They were always so happy. I mean, not offensively happy—not inappropriately happy or chirpy or obnoxiously cheerful. Just happy. Serene. Joyful.

It was infectious.

Literally.

Tamar’s relationship with Atticus gave them purpose, and that was part of it. It also gave them a financial cushion such that they could do whatever they wanted in life—pursue art, for example. Travel. (And take me with them.) Early on, the Tenants had bargained with a certain number of elderly, dying billionaires; another decade or so of pain-free, healthier life . . . in each case, for a portion of their immense fortune.

And then there were the cutting edge types, the science-sensation seekers who asked to get infected because it was a new thing. An experience nobody else had. Or because they were getting old, their best and most creative years behind them.

As a mathematician in their fifties, I can appreciate the strength of that motivation, let me tell you.

Some of those new Hosts were brilliant. One was Jules Herbin, who with the help of their Tenant, Maitreyi, went on to found Moth.me.

Herbin was not the only Host who built a business empire.

The Tenants had had a hundred years to increase those fortunes. The Tenants, as a collective—and their Hosts, by extension!—did not lack for money. Sure, there were still fringe extremists who insisted that the Tenants were an alien shadow government controlling human society and that they needed to be eradicated, but there hadn’t been a lynching in my lifetime. In North America, anyway.

And there are still fringe extremists who insist the earth is flat. The Tenants have brought us a lot of benefits, and they insist on strict consent.

For Tamar, those benefits included being able to be pain-free and energetic, which is not a small thing when, like Tamar, you’ve been born with an autoimmune disorder that makes you tired and sore all the time.

And Atticus used its control over Tamar’s endocrine system to make them truly, generously happy. Contented. Happy in ways that perhaps evolution did not prepare people for, when we were born into and shaped by generations of need and striving.

Atticus helped Tamar maintain boundaries, make good life choices, and determine the course of their life. It supported them in every conceivable way. In return, Tamar provided Atticus with living space, food, and the use of their body for a period every day while Tamar was otherwise sleeping. That took a little getting used to. But Tamar explained it to me as being similar to dolphins—half their brain sleeps while the other half drives.

The Tenants really are good for people.

It’s just that they also consume us. No judgment on them; we consume other living things to survive, and they do it far more ethically than we do. They only take volunteers. They make the volunteers go through an extensive long-term psychological vetting process.

And they take very good care of us while they metastasize through our bodies, consuming and crowding out every major organ system. They want us to live as long as possible, of course, because the life span of the Tenant is delineated by the life span of the Host. And yes, when they metastasize into a new Host, they take some elements of their old personality and intellect along with them—and some elements of the personality and identity of every previous Host, too. And they often combine metastatic cells from two or more Tenants to create a combined individual and make sure experiences and knowledge are shared throughout their tribe.

They’ve been a blessing for the aged and terminally ill. And even for those who are chronically ill, like Tamar, and choose a better quality of life for a shorter time over a longer time on earth replete with much more pain and incapacity.

A lot of people with intractable depression have signed up for Tenancy. Because they just want to know what it’s like to be happy. Happy, and a little blind, I guess. It turns out that people with depression are more likely to be realistic about all sorts of things than those with “normal” neurochemistry.

Depression is realism.

The Tenants offer, among other things, an escape from that. They offer safety and well-being and not having to take reality too seriously. They offer the possibility that whatever you’re feeling right now isn’t as good as it gets.

They can change you for real. They can make you happy.

My reality, right now, is that the love of my life is dying, and doesn’t want to talk to me.

• • • •

Sixteen years, eight months, and fifteen days ago

Atticus, it turned out, talks most easily by texting. Or typing. It could take direct control of Tamar’s voice—with their permission—but all three of us thought that would be weird. And would probably make me feel like the whole puppethead thing was more valid than I knew it to be. So we opened a chat, and Tamar and I sat on opposite sides of the room, and had one conversation out loud while Atticus and I had a totally different one via our keyboards.

It wasn’t a very deep conversation. Maybe I had expected it to be revelatory? But it was like . . . talking to a friend of a friend with whom you don’t have much in common.

We struggled to connect, and it was a relief when the conversation ended.

• • • •

Now

There are protestors as I come into the clinic. They call to me. I resolutely turn my eyes away, but I can’t stop my ears. One weeps openly, begging me not to go in. One holds a sign that says: CHRIST COMFORTS THE AFFLICTED NOT THE INFECTED. There’re all the usual suspects: DOWN WITH PUPPETMASTERS. THE MIND CONTROL IS NOT SO SECRET ANYMORE.

Another has a sign that says GIVE ME BACK MY CHILD.

I wish I hadn’t seen that one.

• • • •

“There’s a part of me,” I tell Evangeline, “that is angry that Tamar doesn’t love me enough to . . . to stay, I guess. I know they can’t stay; I know the decision was made long ago.”

“Do you feel like they’re choosing Atticus over you?”

“It sent me a text.”

Evangeline makes one of those noncommittal therapist noises. “How did that make you feel?”

“I want to talk to it.”

“You haven’t?”

I open my mouth to make an excuse. To say something plausible about respecting Tamar’s agency. Giving them the space they asked for. I think about. I settle back in my chair.

Do I want a Tenant if I have to lie to get one?

I say, “I’m angry with it. I want to ignore that it exists.”

“Sometimes,” Evangeline says, “when we want something, we want it the same way children do. Without regard for whether it’s possible or not. Impossibility doesn’t make the wanting go away.”

“You’re saying that this is a form of denial.”

“I’m saying that people don’t change who they are, at base, for other people—not healthily. People, instead, learn to accommodate their differences. While still maintaining healthy boundaries and senses of self.”

“By that definition, the Tenants are not people. We take them on; they make us happy. Give us purpose. Resolve our existential angst.”

“Devour us from the inside out.”

I laugh. “What doesn’t?”

• • • •

This time, Robin comes inside for me instead of waiting to pick me up outside. That makes me nervous, honestly. Robin is not an overly solicitous human being. Maybe they noticed the protestors and didn’t want me to have to walk past them alone?

That hope sustains me until we’re in the car together, side by side, and Robin says the four worst words in the English language. “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” I say, in flat hopelessness.

• • • •

“I can’t do this anymore,” Robin says. “It isn’t working out for me.”

You’d think after the third or fourth bayonet they’d stop hurting so much, going in. They’d have an established path.

Not so.

• • • •

So now I’m single. Nobody, it turns out, can handle the depth of what I’m feeling about losing Tamar. Not Tamar, not Robin.

Not me.

Evangeline can, though. Evangeline can because of proper professional distance. Because she’s not invested.

Because the only person putting the weight of their emotional needs on the relationship is me.

• • • •

From the edge of the brocade armchair, I speak between the fingers I’ve lowered my face into. “This is a way for me to be with them forever.”

“I can see how it would feel that way to you,” Evangeline answers.

“I need someone to tell me that I am more than merely tolerated. I need to be valued,” I say.

“You’re valuable to them. To the Tenants.”

“You begin to understand,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t need this. But I can’t survive these feelings without help. It’s not just that I want to be with Tamar. It’s that I need to not be in so much pain.”

She nods. I’m already on six kinds of pills. Are they helping? They are not helping.

I’m already trying to change myself so somebody will love me better.

So that I will love me better.

Evangeline says, “We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future.”

“What if we make an irrevocable decision to get that hug and that cookie?”

Evangeline lifts her shoulders, lets them fall. “My job is to make sure that you’re making an educated decision about the costs and benefits of the cookie. Not to tell you how much you should be willing to pay for it.”

• • • •

I pace the house. I rattle pots in the kitchen but don’t cook anything. I take an extra anxiety pill.

When it’s kicked in, I pull out my phone and text Atticus with trembling hands. Sorry about the delay. I needed to get my head on straighter.

I understand. This is hard on all of us.

You have to make Tamar talk to me!

Tamar doesn’t want you to do this. I have to honor their wishes.

Even after they’re dead?

Especially after they’re dead.

I can’t do this alone.

We love you, the cancer says. We will always love you.

Tell Tamar I stopped taking the oxy, I type, desperate. Tell them I did what they asked. Tell them to please just let me come say goodbye.

• • • •

I’m talking to the bloated mass that disfigures Tamar’s strong, lithe body. It isn’t them.

Except it is them.

And Atticus is dying, too, and Atticus is taking the time out to comfort somebody it’s leaving behind. It’s funny, because we never had a lot to say to each other in life. Maybe that was denial on my part as much as anything. But now, it is Tamar.

The only part of them that will still talk to me.

And I want it to be me as well.

I will tell them, Atticus types. I will tell them when they wake.

• • • •

They that are not busy being born are busy dying.

What’s the value of an individual? What is the impact of their choices? What is our responsibility for the impact of our choices on others? What is our responsibility to deal with our own feelings?

We’re responsible for what we consume, right? And the repercussions of that consumption, too. If the Big Melt taught us anything, as a species, it taught us the relentless ethics of accountability.

So from a certain point of view, the Tenants owe me.

• • • •

We love you.

• • • •

Tamar is gone. The call came in the morning. The Tenants will be handling the arrangements, in accordance with Tamar’s wishes.

Atticus, of course, is also gone.

I don’t know if Tamar woke up after I talked to Atticus. I don’t know if Atticus got a chance to tell them.

The house belongs to me now.

I should find some energy to clean it.

• • • •

To Evangeline, I say, “What if you knew that if you changed yourself—let someone else change you, I suppose—you would be loved and valuable?”

“I’d say you are lovable and valuable the way you are. Changing yourself to be what someone else wants won’t heal you, Marq.”

I shake my head. “I’d say that people do it all the time. And without the guarantee the Tenants offer. Boob job, guitar lessons, fix your teeth, dye your hair, try to make a pile of money, answer a penis enlargement ad, lose weight, gain weight, lift weights, run a fucking marathon. They fix themselves and expect it will win them love.”

“Or they find love and expect it to fix them,” Evangeline offers gently. “Or sometimes they give love, and expect it to fix the beloved. If love doesn’t fix you, it’s not true love, is that what you’re suggesting?”

“No. That only works if you’re one of them.”

She laughs. She has a good laugh, throaty and pealing but still somehow light.

“I had true love,” I say more slowly. “It didn’t fix me. But it made me lovable for the first time.”

“You were always lovable. Maybe Tamar helped you feel it?”

“When you grow up being told over and over that you’re unlovable, and then somebody perfect and joyous loves you . . . it changes the way you feel about yourself.”

“It’s healing?” she suggests.

“It made me happy for a while.”

“Did it?”

“So happy,” I say.

She nibbles on the cap of her pen. She still uses old-fashioned notebooks. “And now?”

“I can never go back,” I tell her. “I can only go forward from here.”

• • • •

Robin still picks me up after my sessions. They said they still cared about me. Still wanted to be friends. They expressed concern about when I’m coming back to the university and whether they would like me to facilitate the bereavement leave.

They’re in HR; that’s how we met in the first place.

I want to shove their superciliousness down their throat. But I also do not want to be alone. Especially today, when we are going to the funeral.

Without Robin, I think I would be. Alone. Completely.

I don’t have a lot of the kind of friends you can rely on for emotional support. Maybe that’s one reason I leaned so hard on Tamar. I didn’t have enough outside supports. And I’ve eroded the ones I did have by being so broken about Tamar dying.

Don’t I get to be broken about this? The worst thing that’s ever happened to me?

When we’re in the car, though, Robin turns to me and says, “I need to confess to something.”

I don’t respond. I just sit, stunned already, waiting for the next blow.

“Marq?”

From a million miles away, I manage to raise and wave a hand. Continue.

“I wrote to the Tenant’s candidate review board about you. I suggested that you were recently bereaved and they should consider your application in that light.”

I can’t actually believe it. I turn slowly and blink at them.

“You what?”

“It’s for your own good—”

I stomp right over their words. “You know what’s for my own good? Respecting my fucking autonomy.”

“Even if it gets you killed?”

“It’s my life to spend as I please, isn’t it?”

Silence.

I open the car door. The motor stops humming—a safety cutoff. We hadn’t started rolling yet, which is the only reason the door will open.

“If it meant I wouldn’t go, would you come back to me?”

That asshole turns their face aside.

“Right,” I say. “I’ll find my own way home, I guess. Don’t worry about coming to the funeral.”

• • • •

It’s a lovely service. I wear black. I sit in the front row. I used an autocar to get here. I don’t turn around to see if Robin showed up. I stand in the receiving line with Tamar’s siblings and the people who are Hosting Atticus’s closest friends. Robin is there. They don’t come up to me. Nobody makes me talk very much.

I drink too much wine. Tamar’s older sib puts me in an autocar and the autocar brings me home.

I can’t face our bedroom. The Tenants made sure the hospital bed was removed weeks ago, when Tamar went into hospice and we knew they were not coming home. So there’s nothing in our sunny bedroom except our own bedroom furniture.

I can’t face it alone.

I put the box with Tamar’s ashes on the floor beside the door, and I lie down on the sofa we picked out together, and I cry until the alcohol takes me away.

• • • •

Tomorrow, which is now today

It’s still dark out when I wake up on the couch. Alone. I fell asleep so early that I’ve already slept eleven hours. I’m so rested I’m not even hungover. No point in trying to sleep more, although I want to seek that peace so fiercely the desire aches inside me.

There are other paths to peace.

I stand up, and suddenly standing is easy. I’m light; I’m full of energy. Awareness.

Purpose.

I pick up my phone by reflex. I don’t need it.

There’s a message light blinking on the curve.

A blue light.

Tamar’s favorite color. The color I used especially for them.

I’ve never been big on denial. But standing there in the dark, in the empty house, I have a moment when I think—This was all a nightmare, it was all a terrible dream. My hand shakes and a spike of pure blinding hope is the bayonet that transfixes me this time.

Hope may be the thing with feathers. It is also the cruelest pain of all.

Tamar’s ashes are still there in the beautiful little salvaged-wood box by the door.

The hope is gone before it has finished deceiving me. Gone so fast I haven’t yet finished inhaling to gasp in relief when my diaphragm cramps and seizes and I cannot breathe at all.

I should put the phone down. I should walk out the door and follow the plan I woke up with. The plan that filled me with joy and relief. I shouldn’t care what Tamar has to say to me now when they didn’t care what I needed to say to them then.

I put my right thumb on the reader and the phone recognizes my pheromones.

Marq, I love you.

I’m sorry I had to go and I’m sorry I had to go alone.

You were the best thing that happened to me, along with Atticus. You were my heart. You always talked about my joy, and how you loved it. But I never seemed able to make you understand that you were the source of so much of that joy.

I know you will miss me.

I know it’s not fair I had to go first.

But it comforts me to know you’ll still be here, that somebody will remember me for a while. Somebody who saw me for myself, and not just through the lens of Atticus.

I lied when I said I didn’t love you anymore, and it was a terrible, cruel thing to do. I felt awful and I did an awful thing. I do love you. I am so sorry that we needed different things.

I am so sorry I sent you away.

Atticus is arranging things so that this will be sent after we’re gone. I’m sorry for that, too, but it hurts too much to say goodbye.

Do something for me, beloved?

Don’t make any hasty choices right now. If you can, forgive me for leaving you and being selfish about how I did it. Live a long time and be well.

Love (at least until the next Ice Age),

Tamar

I stare at the phone, ebullience flattened. Hasty choices? Did Tamar know I was applying for a Tenant? Had Atticus found out somehow?

Or had they anticipated my other plan?

I had a plan and it was a good plan—no. Dammit, concrete nouns and concrete verbs, especially now.

I had been going to commit suicide. And now, Tamar—with this last unfair request.

Forgive them.

Forgive them.

Had they forgiven me?

Fuck, maybe I can forgive them on the way down.

• • • •

The hike up to the gorge is easier in autumn. The vines have dropped their leaves and I can see to push them aside and find the path beyond. The earth underfoot is rocky and red, mossy where it isn’t compacted. I kick through leaves wet with a recent rain. I am wearing the wrong shoes.

I am still wearing my funeral shoes.

It is gray morning at the bottom of the trail. Birds are rousing, calling, singing their counterpoints and harmonies. Dawn breaks rose and gray along the horizon and my feet hurt from sliding inside the dress shoes by the time I reach the bridge. I pause by its footing, catching my breath, leaning one hand on the weathered post. The cables are extruded and still seem strong. A few of the slats have come loose, and I imagine them tumbling into the curling water and rocks far below.

The water sings from behind a veil of morning mist. I can’t see the creek down there, but I feel its presence in the vibration of the bridge, and I sense the long fall it would take to get there. The bridge rocks under my weight as I step out. I could swear I feel the cables stretching under my weight.

How long since I’ve been here?

Too long.

Well, that neglect is being remedied now.

I achieve the middle of the bridge, careful in my slippery, thoughtless shoes. The sky is definitely golden at the east edge now, and the pink fades higher. I turn toward the waterfall. I wondered if there will be rainbows today.

I unzip my jacket and bring out the box I’d tucked inside it when I left the house, the box of Tamar’s—and Atticus’s—mortal remains.

I clear my throat and try to find the right thing to say, knowing I don’t have to say anything. Knowing I am talking to myself.

“I wanted to keep you forever, you know. I don’t want to think about this—about you—becoming something that happened to me once. I don’t want to be a person who doesn’t know how to love themself again. And then I thought, maybe if I made myself like you, I would love myself the way I loved you. And Robin’s not going to let me do that either, I guess . . .

“And you would be unhappy with me anyway, if I did.”

I sniffle, and then I get mad at myself for self-pity.

Then I laugh at myself, because I am talking to a box full of cremains, with a little plaque on the front, while standing on a rickety vintage home-brew suspension bridge over the arch of a forgotten waterfall. Yeah, there’s a lot here to pity, all right.

“So I don’t know what to do, Tamar. I don’t know who to be without you. I don’t know if I exist outside of your perception of me. I liked the me I saw you seeing. I never liked myself before. And now you’re gone. So who am I?

“And okay, maybe that’s unfair to put on somebody. But I did, and you’re stuck with it now.”

I sniffle again.

“You asked me to do something for you. Something hard. God am I glad nobody is here to see this. But I guess this is a thing I have, a thing I am that’s nobody else’s. This place here.”

The sunrise is gaining on the birdsong. Pretty soon it will be bright enough for flying, and they won’t have so much to cheep about because they’ll be busy getting on with their day.

In the end, everything falls away.

Whatever else I have to say is just stalling.

I say, “Welcome home, Atticus. Welcome home, Tamar.”

I kiss the box.

I hold it close to my chest for a moment, steeling myself. And then fast, without thinking about it, I shove my arms out straight in front of me, over the cable, over the plunge.

I let go.

Tamar falls fast.

I don’t see where they land, and I don’t hear a splash.

The damn shoes are even worse on the way back down.

• • • •

There’s no wireless service until you’re halfway down the mountain. I’ve actually forgotten that I brought the damn phone with me. I jump six inches on sore feet when it pings.

I resist the urge to look at it until I get back to the sharecar. The morning is mine and the birds are still singing. I cry a lot on the way down and trip over things in my funeral shoes. I swear I’m throwing these things away when I get home.

I’d parked the little soap box of a vehicle where it could get a charge when the sun was up. I walk over the small, grassy, ignored parking lot and lean my rump against the warm resin of its fender. The phone screen is easier to read once I shade it with my head.

The ping is a priority email, which makes me feel exactly the way priority emails and four a.m. phone calls always do.

It says:

Congratulations!

Dear Mx. Marq Tames,

On the advice of your transition specialist, you have been selected for expedited compassionate entrance into the Tenancy program, if you so desire. Of course, such entrance is entirely voluntary, and your consent is revocable until such time as the Tenancy is initiated.

Benefits of the program for you include . . .

. . . and then there was a lot of legalese.

Huh.

Evangeline came through.

I guess she and Robin were both doing what they thought was best for me. Funny how none of us seem to have a consistent idea of what that is.

I don’t read the legalese. I start to laugh.

I can’t stop.

• • • •

I unlock the car. I toss the phone on the floor and lock it again. Then I walk away on sore feet, alternately chuckling to myself and sniffing tears.

I pick a flatter trail this time, and half a mile along it I start wondering about a complicated function I was working on before I went on leave, and whether that one student got their financial aid sorted out.

No matter what choice you make, you’re going to regret it sometime. But maybe not permanently. And it wasn’t like I had to decide right now. I had the day off. Nobody was looking for me.

It was going to be a hot one. And I still had some walking to do.

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 and over a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure. Her most recent novel is Machine, in which a deep-space rescue operation goes terribly wrong.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light
By Mimi Mondal

I am not a fighter. I am a trapeze master.

At the Majestic Oriental Circus, which had been my home for two years, I had climbed the ropes deft and fast, till I was the leader of a team of about fifteen aerial performers. It was in my genes.

There were other rewards, too, of the circus life. It had brought me into the grace of Shehzad Marid. A trapeze master has no lack of duties, training and overseeing his team, but I continued to perform with Shehzad in his grand stage illusion show—“Alladdin and His Magic Lamp.” I took great pride in my own trapeze act, and the team that I trained from scratch, but I have to admit that “Alladin” was the crowds’ favorite.

None of the credit for that popularity was owed to me. I am a genius at the ropes overhead, flinging myself from grip to grip so gracefully you would believe I could fly; but on earth, up close, I am a man entirely devoid of charm. Before I joined the circus, I did not even speak a language that could be understood in polite society. Even now, I fumble for the right word at the right moment; I occasionally slip into an accent that makes the city people sneer.

But as Alladin, all I had to do was to put on a pair of satin pants and a skullcap, and parrot a series of memorized lines. I had never met an Arab street urchin, nor had an inkling what all the words meant, but neither had anyone in the audience. I bellowed, “Ya Allah!” and “Shukr hai!” and “Dafa ho ja, shaitaan!” at my cues. The girl who trained the parakeets doubled as the princess in a shiny ghagra and choli, adorned with tawdry sequins. Johuree, our proprietor and ringmaster, completed the cast as the villainous Zafar, dressed in a moth-eaten velvet cloak.

It was an almost ridiculous performance, but it turned into the most renowned act of the Majestic Oriental Circus, all at the touch of Shehzad Marid. As the three of us hemmed and hawed through our scripted gibberish, the jinni would emerge from his lamp in clouds of curling smoke. Illuminated by our cheap stage lights, the clouds would take the shape of a magnificent palace, the gaping maw of a cave, raging armies on horseback that crashed into the audience until our entire circus tent would erupt with gasps, applause, and cries of horror and disbelief. A small child could hold open his palm and receive a dancing houree, crafted immaculately of ice as the clouds condensed. Then they billowed up again—into monsters never heard of; swooping rocs; clerics whose voices soared in prayer across minarets that pierced the sky above a faraway, mythical city; hundreds of jinn, and back to the only one. It was a show unlike anything offered by any rival circus company in our land.

I was assigned to this act four months after I joined the Majestic Oriental Circus—a naïve, illiterate, village young man who had been given a job by Dayaram, the former trapeze master, almost out of pity. It turned out that I climbed better than anyone else on the team, but I had never seen a circus before, could hardly follow the shimmering line between illusion and truth. Before I took over, Johuree would play both Alladin and Zafar, disappearing behind the clouds and reappearing in changed costume with a lightness of foot you would not expect from a fat, middle-aged man like him. But then, no one at the Majestic Oriental Circus was merely what met the eye. The circus life is not for the mundane.

Johuree had been happy to delegate Alladin to me. An agile young man was more suited to the role than himself, he had said with a wink in front of the entire company. I nodded along, though both of us knew that was just the cover. A circus troupe had no dearth of agile young men. No—we both knew it was because I was the only other person at the Majestic Oriental Circus that Shehzad Marid had entrusted with his lamp.

I was a hack Alladin, awkward and bombarding, nothing like my fluid, almost lyrical performance on the trapeze ropes. It made the entire act of “Alladin and His Magic Lamp” come across as gaudy, over-the-top. That was just the effect Johuree was going for.

We were a traveling circus, never spending more than a week or two in the same city, town, or village fair. So the day Johuree declared that we would travel to Thripuram to perform at the wedding of the raja’s daughter, we packed up our tents and bags and set out on the journey.

• • • •

There is little power left in the hands of the rajas of yore, but you wouldn’t think so if you were at the palace of the Thripuram raja on the day we arrived. Accustomed though we were to the illusory palaces of Arabia that Shehzad conjured up three shows a day, our entire troupe gazed awestruck at the vibrantly painted temples, spires, courtly residences, and finally, looming over them all, resplendent in its intricate balconies and mythological frescos adorning the walls, pillars, and steps—the palace itself.

The palace grounds teemed with musicians, poets, storytellers, snake charmers, tawaifs, nautankis—entertainers from all over the land. Those traditional artists had been assigned living quarters inside the buildings. A circus was a foreign entertainment—our troupe an unrestrained mingling of men and women of indistinct lineage, sharing space with monkeys, elephants, birds, tigers. Though we had been invited to perform on the night of the wedding, we were allowed to sleep only in our own trucks and tents. We set them up within the palace grounds, under the sky.

The grounds were thrumming with activity as we rolled into our spots. The hot afternoon air was cloying with the aroma of outdoor cooking, for all the poor people of the city were to eat two meals at the raja’s generosity every day of the festivities. There were two queues of revelers waiting to be fed—one for Brahmins, another for the infidels and the untouchables—winding as long as the eye could see. Wedding guests wandered within the premises, trailed by servants holding umbrellas, fans, and jugs of water. Massive electricity generators growled along the palace walls, powering thousands of lanterns and strings of light. It was a spectacle more modern and grandiose than anything Shehzad could pull up from the myths of a distant past.

If the circus was a novelty to the raja’s palace, it was no less a novelty to us—our entire troupe was comprised of people who had grown up poor. We dealt in glitter and illusion, but all our clothes were cheap synthetics and sequins, often threadbare and sewn together in places; our jewelry made of glass, tinfoil, and paint. We had never seen so many varieties of silk, so many diamonds, rubies, and emeralds casually glittering under daylight as the royal guests wandered by. At lunch, my trapeze team would not stop eating until I threatened them with immediate unemployment if any of them disgraced me at the night’s performance.

As the busy day waned toward sunset, conch shells were sounded, and there was instant silence within the palace grounds. A procession of young women emerged from the doorway of the palace, led by a priest. Each of them carried a holy tray of prayer offerings.

The women were indescribably beautiful, more so in their dazzling, elegant attire, reminding me of the sculptures of apsaras—heavenly dancers—that I had only seen before on temple walls. These women were not dressed like the wives or daughters of the royalty, yet they were too demure, too distant from us. They did not speak with, or even look at, any of the other performers, who stepped back to make way for them to pass.

“Devadasis,” whispered a girl from my trapeze team, her voice nearly choking in awe.

“What are they?” I whispered back. I was completely ignorant of the customs of royalty, but even Shehzad, who was less so, stared uncomprehendingly at these women.

“I have never seen one of them before,” the girl explained under her breath, never once taking her eyes off the fascinating trail. “You never see a devadasi—no commoner does, except on occasions like this. Devadasis are holy courtesans, bequeathed at birth to the patron deity of a kingdom, maintained by its king. They are trained as dancers, but not like any of us. They will never perform before a commoner, or in exchange for money. Their dance is an act of worship. They are divine.” The girl’s words swung gently between envy and faith. “The devadasis will now go to the town’s main temple to seek blessings for the raja’s daughter. Offer themselves up in performance. The wedding can only take place after the kuldevi—the patron goddess of the kingdom—has bestowed her blessings.”

“No one told me there was anything supernatural in this town,” I said, intrigued. Two years ago I would have laughed at any mention of such things, but enough time at the Majestic Oriental Circus opens the mind to all kinds of possibilities.

The girl laughed. “Who said anything was supernatural? Everything’s a joke to you, Binu’da. I meant real divine, like priests are divine. Devadasis commune with the gods. They are born into holiness. They don’t do tricks with sleight of hand and offstage machinery. That’s what people come to us for.”

I stared again—the face of the young woman at the head of the procession was so flawless and serene that I could almost believe in her divinity. Priests were born into the Brahmin caste, and I had met enough Brahmins in my life to know that not all of them were priests, or even had a shred of spirituality in them. Usually they were arrogant and corrupt, frankly quite despicable people to know. But the gaze of this woman was clear and resolute, fixed at the vermilion sky toward the temple where she was headed. Her step was graceful, undoubtedly perfected through the lifelong dance-worship to which she was devoted. No creature could be further removed from the giggling girls in my circus, whose brittle poise disappeared as soon as they stepped behind the stage.

Afterward, we returned to our tents to prepare for our show, which was to be the opening performance of the wedding celebrations. We were not there to watch the devadasis return.

• • • •

The show went off smoothly. My boys and girls could hardly keep their eyes off the ornate ceiling of the raja’s court as they swung and swerved across it, but none of them faltered at their act. “Alladin and His Magic Lamp” was a roaring success with the royal wedding guests. Shehzad was stoic through all of it—he had seen his share of palace interiors in his time. The raja came down from his throne to shake our hands after the show, but we were never introduced to the princess, who had watched our performance from a latticed balcony above. No common entertainer was permitted to speak with the royal bride, even if they performed at her wedding.

“Really, Binu, stop staring at that balcony and shut your mouth,” Shehzad snapped at me as our troupe filed out of the royal court. “You make yourself look like a fool.”

“Hey, Alladin is meant to be really popular with the princesses, right?” I teased him. I was still decked out in the satin-pants-and-skullcap attire. “But this pathetic Alladin can’t even catch a glimpse of a real princess. What good is having a faithful jinni at your command if he cannot even introduce you to a princess?”

“Princesses look just like other women,” Shehzad sneered. “And this one is getting married already, so you’re out of luck. You’ve met the raja. His daughter probably would have the same, uh, generous nose. Hopefully not also the generous moustache.”

We guffawed, eyes shining into each other’s for a fleeting moment. Then I said, “But you saw all those devadasis. Think about it. If mere women of the court can look like that, the princess must be—”

“The princess is not one of those women,” Shehzad said, making a sharp turn away from the direction of the lavish dining arrangements.

“You will not dine with us?”

“Since when did I eat the same food as you people, Binu?”

“But you always come along and make the pretense,” I said, surprised at the brusqueness that I did not entirely feel I deserved.

“That’s when we dine with the rest of our circus troupe, to make sure that no one suspects otherwise,” he replied. “There are too many people at this place. Too much going on. No one will miss Shehzad Marid.”

“I will.”

“I must retire to the lamp,” he said, as if shaking off the hurt in my voice. “These festivities will continue late into the night, and our troupe begins to pack up at dawn. If I slip away now, I can steal a few hours of respite.”

I always carried the lamp in our trunk of clothes, scrubby enough to look like a circus prop. The actual prop was a cheaper but shinier replica, tossed around on the stage between Alladin and Zafar. No human hand but mine had touched the real lamp in the past two years, and with nothing but gratitude. Nothing but love.

Nothing but that inchoate sensation of wistfulness that congealed in my chest on the nights that I lay awake in our tent, gazing at the lamp on my bedside after Shehzad had receded into it. If I picked it up, it would be cold, weightless—a thing forged centuries ago in a distant land; a curiosity, but not an especially valuable one in itself. It was a common household object, Shehzad once told me; street vendors in Arabia sold great quantities of them to this day. With regular use, it would have lasted about five or six years.

But this lamp had survived centuries, traveled hundreds of miles from its homeland, passed from hand to bloody, victorious hand. My callused trapeze-artist hands could barely contain it. Another century or two will blow over any trace of my fingers from its surface, as perhaps from the spirit it enclosed.

From the stories people tell, even those in our own hack show, the lamp sounds like a prison. The listener imagines himself being suffocated, neck twisted, limbs folded at painful angles, squeezed into a box too small to contain his body and left there to wait for decades. But the listener of the tale is human—imprisoned already in his withering flesh and bone, the measured years that are given to him. The human mind can barely fathom the bond between its own body and soul. What would it grasp of the relationship between a jinni and his lamp? What could I—hardly a philosopher, never having read a book, barely literate enough to scribble my own name—grasp of it?

In our two years of friendship, I had learned every detail of Shehzad Marid’s humanity. There was no man, or woman, that I knew better. I could read each of his smiles, each raised eyebrow, each cryptic comment for exactly what it was. But I had also learned that his humanity was mere performance. He was relieved to shed it, as I was to remove my circus costumes and makeup. Shehzad Marid’s greatest gift to me was the knowledge that I would never truly know the core of his existence, and not merely because I was unread.

And perform he did, never cracking, never missing a beat, longer than any of us at the circus. No one but Johuree knew, or suspected, anything about Shehzad’s true nature. Even when he manifested in “Alladin and His Magic Lamp,” weaving his way through wonders that no human could pull off, it was carefully designed to look like a triumph of stagecraft. Because I loved him, because I would never understand him at any greater depth than that, all I could do was to give him a break from the act when he asked.

“Wake me up if you need something,” he told me before he left, adding, “but do spare me if it has more to do with princesses. You need to find yourself a different jinni for that.”

I smiled, squeezed his hand, and let him go. Where would I—Trapeze Master Binu of the Majestic Oriental Circus—find a different jinni, and why would I ever want another?

• • • •

It was past midnight when the members of the troupe retreated to our tents. Within the palace, the tawaifs were still dancing for the last sleepless revelers, but the palace grounds were now empty, for the common revelers had long since departed. Getting into my bed, I pressed a finger against the cold metal of Shehzad’s lamp, but did not drag it. I needed my rest as much as he needed his.

I must have barely drifted into blissful slumber when I woke up again at a hushed commotion from the trapeze artists’ tents. It was the second hour of the night, still too dark to see without a light. A couple of girls came running to our tent.

“It’s a woman from the palace, Binu’da!” they informed me. “Says she wants to have a word with you.”

I couldn’t recall talking much with any woman at the palace. Who would come looking for me in the dead of the night? I turned up the wick of my oil lamp and stepped out, sure that whoever it was must have mistaken me for someone else.

The woman in question was dressed in a simple sari, her long hair flowing over her back. I was startled to recognize the head devadasi of the Thripuram raja’s palace—the woman whose face had launched me into a thousand speculations earlier that day. With the expensive drapes and jewelry removed, she looked no older than sixteen or seventeen.

Seeing her now, the first emotion that hit me was panic. Even speaking to this girl could probably get me punished by the raja. “How did you come here?” I blurted out. “Has anyone seen you?”

“I told my maids that I wanted to pet the tigers,” the girl said, and shrugged nonchalantly. “No one in this palace had ever seen a tiger before. And I am known to be willful.”

“The tigers have been sedated for the night—” I started to say, but she cut me off.

“The tigers can wait. I want you to let me sneak into your circus and escape this wretched palace.”

“What?!”

“I have been dancing for fifteen years now, ever since I learned to walk,” said the girl. “There’s no trick any of your girls can perform that I can’t pick up in just a few days. I will be the best performer you’ve ever had.”

“But you are a devadasi!” I peered in astonishment at the wide-eyed, long-lashed face that was no less attractive for its bareness. “You live at the palace; you have more luxuries than any of us can imagine. You commune with the gods! Why would someone like you want to stoop to the circus?”

“And what does communing with the gods generally entail, do you think?”

I had to admit I didn’t know.

“I live at the palace, but I am not a princess. None of my clothing or jewelry belongs to me. I don’t actually have a single possession that cannot be taken away with a command from the raja. I do not employ my maids—they maintain my household but also keep an eye on me, report my activities to the raja. Tell me why the raja spends so much money keeping women like me?”

“Because you commune…?” My own words sounded ridiculous to me.

“That’s what it says in the scriptures, doesn’t it?” said the girl. “The priest communes with the gods with his mind, and the devadasi communes with her body. I wouldn’t know—I was never taught to read the scriptures. I’m illiterate as they come. Reading is not a devadasi’s function. Though I could tell you all you ever wished to know about dance, about communing with higher powers with my body. Make a man of you too, if you wish.” She gave me a saucy smile, but it felt more dangerous than inviting.

“If you don’t like this life, why don’t you go back to your family? Why fling yourself at a group of strangers like this?” I asked.

“Because you’re the only strangers at this wedding who would take me,” said the girl. “You’re an odd bunch. You don’t belong to any traditional system. There are all sorts of performers in your group—surely you can find some use for a devadasi? No one else has any need for me. Devadasis don’t belong to families. We are bequeathed to the gods—we cannot be possessed by men, be that father or husband. My mother was also a devadasi, as was grandmother before her.”

“But some man must have fathered you, seeing as you’re just as human as I am,” I said. “His is the house where you should go, even if you don’t like them, or they you.”

“The raja? But I already live at his house!” The girl startled me with a mirthless laugh. “Of course, I don’t count as the raja’s daughter, because a daughter can only be born of a man and a woman. Devadasis aren’t women; we are offerings made to the patron goddess, entitled to be consumed by the maker of the offering once we have been touched by the goddess. I am not even an illicit child, merely a blessing received by my mother in the performance of her role, more property added to the coffers of the raja who owned her. I am cleverer, more beautiful, more talented than the princess whose wedding you graced with your performance, but she is the princess, and I am property. I am less than even the common free woman in the street.”

I’ll be honest—I had never heard anything like that. Not that I ever understood the elaborate social intricacies of the upper classes, but I always knew that I did not trust them, and her story just seemed to confirm my mistrust. If what this girl was saying was true, I could not possibly tell her to go back to the raja’s palace. But it was also impossible to imagine her at the circus—with her delicate step, her sheltered view of life, those smooth white hands that had probably never done a day’s work.

I told her so.

“The circus is no life for a lady like you. You have only seen us in performance. You cannot begin to imagine the sweat, heat, dust, filth, and flies on the road; sleeping huddled in tents; washing with animals in public ponds; the tasteless slop that we eat; the insecurity and physical labor that make up most of our days. I doubt you have the grit to survive it.”

“If that is so,” said the girl, “I will part ways with your circus once you deliver me to the nearest city. I have heard that our traditional dance is being made secular in the cities, that there are dancers who are well respected in the community without belonging to any king or any temple. They give performances for the public, teach classes, save their own money, and can also marry and have children if they wish. If I make it to the city, I will find ways to survive. All I need is safe passage out of here.”

Something about this girl had touched my heart the very first time I saw her at the head of the holy procession. I didn’t wish to call it infatuation, but Shehzad had noticed it too—it was what made him testy enough to retreat into his lamp. True, if she hadn’t come to me, I would never have sought her out, but I would also have gone on believing that she lived a life just as ethereal as her face, devoted to worship and virtue that more common people like myself could not afford.

“Don’t think I don’t intend to compensate you for your assistance,” the girl said, giving me a smile of such well-honed coyness that it made my heart do an inadvertent leap. “I had no money to bring, but once you take me to the city, I promise to make you memories that you will cherish for the rest of your life.”

“There’s no need for any of that,” I said, recoiling at the insinuation. I looked up at the sky—there were still a couple of hours before we were scheduled to leave. By the time the rest of the palace started waking up from the previous night’s revelries, the Majestic Oriental Circus would be well on its way.

“Go to one of the girls’ tents and get some sleep,” I told our new stowaway. “We have a long day’s journey ahead.”

• • • •

The sky was clear, a deep rouge spreading over the eastern horizon when the Majestic Oriental Circus began its preparations to leave the Thripuram raja’s palace. Half-asleep, disheveled performers emerged from their tents, which were then unmounted and loaded onto trucks. The birds and animals clamored to be fed before they were secured. At my instruction, the young devadasi had changed into clothes from the other girls of the troupe and blended in with them, just in case anyone from the palace was keeping watch as we filed out. I went to have a word with Johuree.

“The Majestic Oriental Circus has always been a refuge to outcasts and runaways,” he began, and I nodded. “But this woman is beholden to powers beyond ourselves.”

The diamond in Johuree’s false left eye pierced me with a red glint from the rising sun. “By giving her shelter, you have taken on charges that are yours alone.”

“If any trouble comes of this girl, I promise to step up to it,” I told my trusted employer and friend. “She will be fed and clothed out of my salary. I will protect and instruct her, and make sure she finds lodgings in the city when we get there. The circus will not have to bear any responsibility for my decision.”

Shehzad was not pleased when he emerged.

“I have never seen a bigger fool than you,” he grumbled, skulking around the gathered props and trunks that were the farthest from the newest member of our troupe. “A pretty girl comes simpering with a sob story, and suddenly Trapeze Master Binu is the gallant savior we all lacked. Why do you think she did not go to any other guest at the wedding? Why not appeal to Johuree directly, if she wanted to join the circus? She came to you because she had noticed you stare at her earlier like a mesmerized child. She knew you wouldn’t be able to say no.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, trying to rest a hand on his arm, trying to pull him into a reluctant embrace. There was no use trying to disguise my thoughts from Shehzad. “But that does not prove that she’s wrong in trying to escape, or that the people who would decline to help her are correct. I am doing the right thing here, Shehzad, even if it’s not the most practical thing to do.”

“I have served warrior after warrior, as far back as I can remember,” he said. “A few of them were unkind masters, but others were loving and respectful, though they still owned me. There are worse lives than that of a glorified slave.”

“But now you are free. Wouldn’t you say you prefer the change of circumstances?”

“No one is ever free, least of all a jinni. Only the nature of the master changes,” Shehzad replied curtly before turning to walk away. “If I am free now, it’s because my master wishes me so. My next master may be worse, as may that girl’s or any other’s.”

I stared at his receding back, the taut, defiant muscles that I longed to knead with my palms, to remind him that I had never been his master. But that would have to wait for another time, far away from this palace with its loathsome practices.

• • • •

The skies began to grow ominously dark as soon as our trucks rolled out of the palace gates. Clouds rumbled. Tree branches cracked overhead. Waves of dust rose on the distant horizon. Within the town of Thripuram, as we passed, the few early risers hurried to return inside; doors and windows were noisily shut. It was a storm as unseasonal as any in this part of the land.

The trucks were the closest we had to homes, in fair or rough weather, so we trudged on until we were on the dirt roads that led out of the town, and could simply go no farther. Unrestrained by any more houses, the winds came pounding at our canvas walls like solid boulders. The trucks swayed like they were wooden toys for children, not hundreds of tons of machine on wheels. Inside, our animals screamed and rattled against their cages. Dust clouds covered the sky, obscuring the sun. Our drivers could no longer see the road. Dust, razor-sharp and unforgiving, filled the eyes and nostrils of anyone who tried to look outside.

Usually, a heavy rain comes lashing quick on the trail of a dust storm, calming the winds and weighing down the dust into mud, but it had been an hour since this dust had risen, and there was still not a drop of moisture.

As I sat in the first of our trucks, a massive trumpeting from the truck behind us told me that the elephants had broken free, and another tearing, heart-wrenching wail followed as one of them was blown away by the winds. In all my thirty years of life, I have never heard anything like it.

The third truck, carrying the clowns, fire-eaters, and my own trapeze team, soon turned to its side with a sickening lurch. From my own truck I could hear none of their voices, although in my guts I could feel them crying, praying to their respective gods, groaning as they scrambled in blindness, bones trampled and crunched. The girl whom we had rescued from the palace was among them too. Perhaps Shehzad was right—if we all died in this freak apocalypse this morning, I would have proved to be a worse master than the raja, not only to her but to everyone else in my care.

I am a man who has left his own forest deities far behind in his past, so there was no greater power to whom I could kneel. In any case, if all these other pious people’s prayers were going unheard, how might I—faithless of heart—sway any god to my favor?

A heavy figure swayed its way through the truck and dropped heavily, purposefully next to me. It was Johuree.

“Trapeze Master Binu, you promised to bear responsibility,” he whispered into my ear. Each of his words fell like the gong of a temple bell, cutting through the mayhem outside my brain.

“What—this dust storm?!” I was stunned by his suggestion. “You think I have something to do with this?”

“I did warn you that the girl you rescued was beholden to powers beyond ourselves.”

“I thought—I thought you meant the Thripuram raja and his administration!”

Johuree said nothing, just stared at me with his cold eyes, both living and stone. Nothing was enough.

“I don’t know how to… I don’t know who—”

The crashes and screams returned, closing in on my senses like water over the head of a drowning man. So I rose to my feet, staggering from wall to wall as the floor of the truck churned beneath me and dropped myself into the dust-filled darkness.

• • • •

There was nothing, absolutely nothing to see. My eyes, ears, and mouth were assaulted by dust as soon as I hit the ground. Dust scraped against my bare legs beneath my dhoti like a thousand razor blades. In less than a second, every inch of my skin felt like it was being flayed. I could feel the blood trickle down my arms, legs, chest; I could feel my face growing muddy with blood.

Coughing, choking, spitting, I called out into the nothingness, “Here I am: Trapeze Master Binu. I think it is me you want.” I spat out more dust. “Spare the rest of the circus. They took no part in my decision to rescue the girl.”

I waited, struggling to breathe. Feeling foolish.

Then a voice came, responding to my cry. I do not know why I remember it as a female voice, because it did not even sound human. It came from the wind, molding and resonating as a blend of dust and words.

“I am the kuldevi of the kingdom of Thripuram,” she said. “Stupid human, filthy, untouchable low-caste whom no god will deign to claim for his own, did you think you could run away with my property and pay nothing for your crime?”

Her insults did not perturb me—I have heard them and worse from people, and expected no better from their gods—but the words still made my blood boil.

“No man or woman is anyone’s property!” I spluttered through the dust that clogged my mouth. “Not the Thripuram raja’s, not even yours. I don’t care if you are human or goddess. You are not my goddess, as you well know.”

The thick, blowing dust rippled with laughter. I could feel it dance on my skin as the grains freshly scoured the bleeding surface.

“A free man, are you?” More words formed. “A man who acknowledges no master, and surely no charge? Then when the men, women, and animals of this party of fools die, as they will within the next hour, their deaths will not be on your conscience.”

I wanted to scream back that their deaths should be on the conscience of this vengeful goddess, but I did not even know if the gods possessed consciences; besides… just the thought of their deaths deflated the righteous rage in my heart. My strange but upright boss who had employed me when no one else would, my colleagues and friends who received me as one of their own, the young boys and girls whom I hand-picked and trained for my trapeze team—none of whom I had consulted before I brought down this mayhem upon them. I was a free man till my last breath, but none of them should have to bear the consequences of my freedom.

“Take my life. Let them go,” I pleaded.

Another gust of laugher, another whiplash of dust across my body.

“And why would I be sated with one mortal life when I came here prepared to take fifty, including the life of that traitorous whore who dares to defy being beholden to me?”

I did not know what else would sate her. I am a poor man with hardly any treasures. I had kept aside a few rupees from my salary for the past two years, hoping to return to my mother and buy a house when I finally had enough. I could not imagine my modest savings would buy the lives of the Majestic Oriental Circus from the kuldevi of Thripuram.

The goddess seemed to read my thoughts.

“It is heartening to see you realize the utter triviality of your existence, Trapeze Master Binu,” she spoke. “Your puny mortal life and its possessions are every bit as worthless to me as you think. But there is one thing you own, much more valuable than your life, for which I will let your entire circus go, even that filthy whore and yourself.”

I waited, dry tongue scraping the dust that now formed a crust on the roof of my mouth, wondering what she meant.

“Give me the jinni.”

The bottom of my stomach dropped.

“The jinni is not mine to give,” I murmured.

“It is the only possession of yours that interests me,” said the kuldevi. “Jinn are rare in this part of the world. I have never seen one before, yet I aughterfelt its presence and desired it as soon as it crossed into my dominion. But I cannot take it by force, for the laws that bind the jinni to its human master are forged in a distant land over an oath to a different god, far beyond my powers to bend. Give me the jinni of your own free will, and you and all your company will live.”

I shut my eyes, which were suddenly muddy and stinging with the tears that had rushed into them. My heartbeat was slow, irregular. If it were only about me, I would have gladly died at this moment in this dust storm conjured by a wrathful goddess whom I did not worship. And then there was an arm around my waist, holding me upright again, there was a hand wiping dust, blood, and tears from my eyes. It was Shehzad Marid—ever loving, ever loyal, always on my side in my hour of need.

“I know you did not call for me,” he whispered in my ear, “but a jinni can summon himself into action when his master is in grievous danger. Your body and mind can take no more of this, Binu—mortals are not made for extended interaction with the divine. Let me go with the goddess, but before that, let me take you back to the truck to be among your people. It will not faze me; I have known worse. Give me your command, and I will obey.”

I clasped his hand in mine through the dust and the blood, trying to absorb the warmth of his fingers like a man clutching at straws as he drowns.

“I… am… not… your… master.”

“We will continue that debate another day,” he laughed, but the laughter fell more like a wounded howl on my ear. “I am sure your path will bring you to Thripuram again. I hope I have a kind master by then, one who will not object to me sitting and chatting awhile with an old friend.”

And suddenly, I had an idea.

“Kuldevi of Thripuram,” I called out again, summoning the strength that was dripping away from me. “I know you cannot possess Shehzad yourself, so you must give his ownership to one of your human worshippers. If that man turns rogue, or if he dies before passing on the ownership to another worshipper, Shehzad will forever be lost to you. He may turn vengeful, and you have never seen the vengeance of a jinni whose master is dead—there is no precedent in your land for anything like it. Your land will be laid barren; you will be left without worshippers.”

I pulled myself up with Shehzad’s arms. “Instead, let me come with him. Both of us will serve you for exactly the length of half of my remaining life. He is loyal to me; and you have seen inside my heart—I am a man of my word. When that period is over, we will leave, and no harm will come to you or your worshippers.”

More silence, more storm, and then words again. “Half of your remaining life is hardly seven years,” sneered the goddess.

That was less than I would have hoped for, but I had no tears to spare. An early death was better than spending long years of my youth in the captivity of the kuldevi of Thripuram, better than dying this minute, never holding Shehzad in my gaze again. My life was a blink in the eternity that Shehzad would have to spend with other masters—what could change between us in a few years, more or less?

“But you speak the truth,” said the goddess. “This jinni of yours will not come with me willingly, or reveal to me any of its secrets. None of my priests is acquainted with its true nature—they know nothing but children’s stories and misleading spectacles like the one you put up with your circus. Despicable as you may find me, foolish, arrogant man, I do bear responsibility for the well-being of my worshippers. I resent your paltry offer of seven years, but I will accept it. Come to my temple in Thripuram before sunset and devote yourselves by ritual.”

“Binu, why—?” Shehzad started to protest, but I squeezed his hand and said, “Shh,” as the winds began to dissolve around us.

There was no further interruption from the goddess. In the emerging sunshine we stood holding each other, surrounded by the debris of the beloved circus that had been our family and life.

• • • •

The first person I went looking for was the rescued young devadasi. She was injured, terrified, but—like the other members of the circus—had heard nothing of our encounter with the kuldevi of Thripuram. I let it stay that way. No one else had to bear the burden of my choices, or my guilt.

In our last hours, Shehzad was kinder to the girl, mending a fractured wrist with underhanded magic, giving her advice on how to survive in the city all by herself. I saw them smiling together, head to head, and I could feel the sun’s rays warming my battered bones. “Savithri is quite an extraordinary woman, really,” Shehzad came back to inform me, “brave, level-headed, no airs about herself. I can see why you were taken by her. I have no doubt she will do very well in the city, maybe even become famous.”

Savithri—I rolled the name around on my tongue, realizing that in all this time, it had never occurred to me to ask.

“Shehzad…” I started to say, pulling him aside.

“No.” He placed a thin, immortal finger to my raw lip. I would have cried then, I would have dropped to his feet and asked for forgiveness, but I was afraid that he would cry too, and I had taken enough devastation for a day.

Johuree agreed to take charge of Savithri in my stead until the circus reached the city, and make sure she was well settled and safe before they left. Johuree had heard nothing of our bargain with the goddess either, but of course I had to tell him.

“I will find you once you are released of your bond,” he told me, pressing a bag of money that I had done nothing to earn into my hands. “Doors will always be open for both of you at the Majestic Oriental Circus”—he smiled ruefully, gazing at the rubble that surrounded us—“or whatever is left of it.”

“I promised I would let no harm come to the circus,” I said, turning my eyes to the ground. “I failed to keep my promise.”

“Say no more of it!” he said.

“If I may ask for one more favor—?” I hesitated.

“Of course, my man.”

“I left my old mother in the city in the east where you took me in. We only had each other in the world, but once I was signed on to the circus I did not even wait to go home and take my leave of her. I was young and thoughtless then—a wayward son who only worried and disappointed her. I imagined I would come back soon and give her a big surprise, but the circus kept traveling; I did not even notice how two years went by. Now that I know that I won’t see my mother for a long time—”

“I will look her up when I return to the city in the east, tell her you are alive, and remind her that her son is loyal and brave, if not always the most practical,” Johuree said. “And if there is any way I can help your mother, I will do my best.”

“Thank you, Johuree saab,” I replied, overwhelmed. “There is nothing more I desire from the world.”

And that was how we walked into our exile—man and jinni, never master and slave but equals in friendship and love. I was no longer a free man, and I don’t know if I had ever been, but if I must pick a master for half—no, all—of my remaining life, I know there would have been no better choice than Shehzad Marid. For that day and the rest of my foreshortened mortal existence, I would follow his footsteps through darkness and light, and that would suffice.

Mimi Mondal is a writer and editor from Calcutta, India. Her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light, was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2020, and her anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, received the Locus Award and was nominated for the Hugo and British Science Fiction Awards in 2018. Mimi also writes a column on politics and culture called “Extraordinary Alien” in the Indian newspaper Hindustan Times. She lives and works in New York City.

Seonag and the Seawolves
By M. Evan MacGriogair

I know you’ve heard the story of An Duine Aonarach, who one day walked into the sea and never returned. And likely you have at least heard of Seonag as well, who did the same thing but to less collective memory.

It’s been a long time since I’ve told a story, a ghràidh. It’s been a long time since I was our clan’s storyteller, but I think I’ve got one more in me, and I think it’s Seonag’s, because I remember her, and I’m the last one who does.

The rest forgot, mostly because they wanted to.

This is the story of Seonag and the wolves, and the wolves and the waves.

She came to me, not so very long ago. She carried no bother on her about whether her people had forgotten her or not (they have), and she took no worries from her brief visit. But she did bring with her a warning.

“Thoir an aire,” she said. “Thoir an aire a-rithist.”

The simplest of warnings, really. Beware and beware again.

I knew it was she the moment I saw her, even though what she has become is beyond what she once was. But that is for you to discover as I did.

So let us begin. Come closer, for my voice weakens and soon will not be here at all.

• • • •

Seonag is born on a day where the clouds race each other across the sky. They pile up, layer upon layer, like a stampede of red deer in the glen. Like the deer, the clouds that day kick mist into the air, only down and not up, and the mist falls lightly upon Beinn Ruigh Choinnich.

It is low tide. The sea has drawn its breath to wait for her.

Seonag is born on Là Buidhe Bealltainn as the women go out into the mist under that jumble of clouds to wash their faces in the morning dew.

It is not dew that covers Seonag at her birth. It is more alive than that.

And yet the midwife brings in a sprig of heather, flicking a tick from the sprig into the fire. The wind through the open door dries the sweat on Seonag’s mother’s brow. The midwife lets the winter-aged and browned bells dust their dew across the newborn’s, melding with the blood and the birth fluids, a shock of cool water after the heat of the womb and the birth canal and the smoldering peat fire, and Seonag opens her eyes wide.

Somewhere the cuthag begins to call its gù-gù, gù-gù, and the midwife hurriedly dips a finger in ewe’s milk and places it against the lips of the baby to break Seonag’s fast before the bird can finish delivering its news of ill luck.

This is a lot for Seonag’s first moments.

Upon seeing the place she has just been thrust into, Seonag looks around. And then she goes to sleep.

It is as if this world has already shown her all its faces, and she is just born and tired of it.

This doesn’t change as Seonag grows older. Where the clouds raced each other on the morning of her birth, whispers race each other through the villages, from Loch Baghasdail to Dalabrog to Cill Donnain as she grows into an infant, and then a child, and then an adolescent.

She is peculiar, they say.

They think she does not hear them, because she is out of earshot.

Seonag is beautiful the way the each-uisge is beautiful. She has no rosy cheeks or hardiness in her features, though she is hardy enough (she has to be, to survive on our island). But some say that that first touch of dew meant to bring beauty came at the wrong moment, or at the wrong hands, or at the wrong time. It is the early dawn of early summer when she is born, the sky lightening after only just having darkened—it was the in-between time, and Seonag becomes an in-between person. Like the water-horse, the people fear she will lure them off to drown.

Sometimes Seonag sings when she is cutting peat in the springtime. Her voice unnerves the crofters and the fisherfolk who lift their own at the cèilidhean. Seonag never sings at a cèilidh.

For all that, you will think that Seonag is not of this world, and I must assure you: she is.

She feels those whispers even when she does not hear them. She wants to sing at the cèilidhean. Seonag wants to build a house for herself and cut peats with her own hands and work the machair like her father and mother. As Seonag grows into an adult, she learns the waterways of Uibhist the way she learns the waterways of her own body, and she loves this land.

Remember that.

• • • •

When Seonag has just passed her twenty-fifth year, her parents board a ship to Canada.

Seonag is meant to go with them. They can no longer afford their rent for their croft.

Instead, Seonag hides in the cleft of the glen, weeping softly as her tears drip into the bog under a sharp bright sky.

After she has dried her face with the folds of her dress, she comes to visit my father.

My father is Tormod Mòr, Tormod Mac Raghnaill ’ic Aois ’ic Dhòmhnaill, Tormod the Bard, Tormod Ruadh—sometimes I think my father collected a name for every year he lived.

I see Seonag coming that day. I am some few years younger than her, and I’ve only ever really seen her in glimpses. I tell my father she’s coming when I see her crest the rise in the road.

“Tha Seonag Bhàn a’ tighinn,” I say.

My father leaves the Gaelic where I put it and answers in English, because he is trying to teach me. “Don’t call her that.”

My father is a big man (hence that first name), but Seonag came to her far-ainm in a way I often forget. Bàn means fair, and while she is pale, her hair is black like a crow’s feathers and shines like them besides. It is a small cruel joke, one at the behest of Dòmhnall Geur (who is known for small cruel jokes throughout our island) and one I still don’t understand. I am a wee bit infatuated with Seonag. I also don’t quite understand that.

“I thought she was gone,” I say softly. English feels wrong in my mouth. It lives in a different part of it.

My father understands both my infatuation and my words even if I do not. He also looks out the window and understands Seonag.

He opens the door before she can raise her hand to knock. He speaks Gaelic to her, even if he only speaks English to me.

“Madainn mhath, a Sheonag,” he greets her.

“Madainn mhath, a Thormoid,” she says as if she did not just let her parents sail across an ocean without her. “Ciamar a tha sibh?”

“Tha i teth,” Father says. “Fosgail an uinneag, a Chaluim.”

This last is to me, and it is a dismissal. I open the window as he asked, letting in the cooler air. And then I set myself in the corner to mend a net and listen, pushing their Gaelic words into English so I can prove to my father that I’m doing two useful things instead of one, if he asks (he won’t).

“I had no expectation of seeing you here still,” Father says.

“I had the expectation of leaving,” says Seonag.

She sits on a small stool by the peat fire. Her eyes are the color of that mòine, of that peat, and she does not use them to look at me. She looks at the peat instead.

Seonag puts her head in her hands.

“The ship has gone to its sailing already,” my father tells her softly.

“That is why I am here.” Seonag looks up.

I watch as breath moves her stomach, filling it. She holds her left hand out to the fire. And then she begins to speak.

“This is my home, a Thormoid,” she says. “Even if you or anyone else think I do not belong. There is nowhere else for me.”

“There could perhaps have been a life for you in Canada.”

“My life is here.” She says it with the heat of the fire, that low burning smolder that will not be put out, and she glances toward the open window as if she is looking through it and down through the years that have not yet had the chance to touch her.

My fingers still on the net in my lap and I hear her words in Gaelic as she said them and not how I clumsily pasted English on them. ’S ann a-bhos a tha mi beò. It is here I am alive.

“There will be more ships,” Father tells her. “Full of more people. The rents are too high and the food too scarce. Death will find us in Uibhist. You may yet change your mind.”

She will not change her mind. Anger reaches tendrils across the floor from Seonag to me, and now she does meet my eyes, as if I summoned her. I feel something like indignation and fury meld together on my face, and to my absolute shock, Seonag smiles at me. Her teeth do not show. Her lips are straight and even, despite the expression.

I am seen and understood. I will never forget this moment.

“Very well,” my father says in English, looking back and forth between us. I think he knows that in this moment, my allegiance has shifted. “In that case, I think I should tell you of the wolves of Uibhist.”

“Ach chan eil mic-thìre ann an-seo, Athair!” I fall into Gaelic and hurriedly say in English, “But there aren’t wolves here!”

My father smiles in the way of parents who know more than a child who assumes, in childish folly, that they know more than their parents. That smile turns back in on itself much like that sentence.

He holds up his hand, watching Seonag. “Ah, but there are madaidhean-allaidh.”

Madadh-allaidh, faol, sitheach, faol-chù—they are all words for wolf. This is why I need my Gaelic. My father has used these words as though he means there is a difference and in English there would be none. What is it that he means?

Seonag is now watching my father, too.

My father is a bard, and I almost expect him to sing. But he does not sing. Instead, he goes to Seonag, kneels at her feet, and takes her hands in his.

“Listen,” he says.

And I know neither Seonag nor I intend to do anything else.

• • • •

It was two hundred years ago that we chased the wolves from Scotland, two hundred years, they say, since the last wolf howl was heard, but sometimes, just sometimes, in the Western Isles beyond the Minch, you will hear a sad and stolid song. In Steòrnabhagh, perhaps, in Leòdhas. Or in Èirisgeigh when the moon is healthy and bright, or in Beinn na Faoghla, or the Uibhist to the north.

I have never heard their voices, when Father begins to talk. I have thought the tales of their howls were only their ghosts, or the songs of selkies twisted by the gales.

“When the hunters come, it is their job to move through the land and push their prey out in front of them,” Father says. “They will go from place to place, here and there, over and under, yonder and back. They will seek out their prey and while their minds will be heavy upon it, the object that they seek will not be of consequence.”

Father is telling two stories at once. This is a power of his that I envy.

The wind coming through the open window is cold, but I cannot get up from my seat to close it. The net in my lap holds me faster than a fish in the sea—or perhaps what holds me is Seonag’s face.

“Hunters who hunt only to kill all have that in common. They seek no nourishment from it. They have a wider goal, and a narrower. It is prey that understands their minds that can survive. The wolves understood. The wolves scented the hunters on the wind and they found their survival in the waters.” Father pauses. For a moment his cheeks are slack, the weathered lines curved instead of taut, his jaw hanging although his lips are closed. When he speaks again, his lips part audibly. “They will have your answers, a Sheonag.”

“The wolves.” Seonag looks at me over my father’s shoulder where he still kneels on the floor. “In the water.”

She sits up even straighter, body tight; I could likely use her spine to draw a straight line against the wall.

I know that tightness. Even in my glimpses of her throughout the years, I have seen it. I’ve seen it when Dòmhnall Geur calls her Seonag Bhàn, I have seen it when she turns away with her wares at the shops and knows she leaves whispers in her wake, and I have seen it when I caught sight of her in the glen, when she was mid-song and her voice died at the sight of me. I swallow.

“How am I to get answers from wolves when even their hunters have no words of kindness for me and I am neither wolf nor hunter myself?” She asks the question in a low tone, the lilt of her words in English almost sarcasm.

I do not know what I expect from my father in this moment, but whatever it is, it’s quite something else that I get.

He gets to his feet and points to the west, toward where the ship would be sailing off with Seonag had she gotten on it, toward the open sea.

“If you came to me for advice, this is what I can tell you,” my father says. “You will go to the west, into the water, and swim until you can’t see land. You will pass Heisgeir. Do not come close to it. You must keep swimming until you hear them. Only then will it be safe to seek land.”

“Is this a joke?” Seonag is completely shuttered now, and my fingers have given over any guise of mending this net.

What is my father doing?

Tormod Mòr, Tormod Mac Raghnaill ’ic Aois ’ic Dhòmhnaill, Tormod the Bard, Tormod Ruadh—for all my father’s many names, right now I do not know him. He shrugs once and goes to shut the window.

“You could have had a new life in Canada,” he says.

It is then I see that he is angry.

He is angry at Seonag, but I do not understand why. He loves this land. He drinks its waters and taught me how to recognize the eggs of the cuthag where they push them into the nests of other birds. When I look at him looking at Seonag, I wonder if he sees her as a cuthag, thrust into his nest when he expected only eggs of his own.

But this is Seonag’s story, not my father’s.

She gets up from her seat quietly. Seonag leaves without looking at me.

My father stares after her, his expression like the lochans before the stirring of the breeze. I get to my feet and run after Seonag.

“Wait,” I say, just as she reaches the edge of the heather.

Seonag looks at me once, then out to the west. The sun is trying to burn off the mist this morning, but I have a feeling Seonag sees all the way through it. I am nineteen to her twenty-five, and in this moment she has a lifetime on me. I follow her gaze to the sea where my father just told her to swim to her death.

“My granny’s house,” I say. The words tumble from my lips like drips of wax over the edge of a candle. “You could go there. It’s just on the edge of the machair.”

It comes upon me that I do not know what Seonag can do to live, alone, with few friends (am I her friend?) and no husband, and in that moment the urge to propose to her nearly overtakes me. It renders me so confused that I forget what I was saying about my granny’s house.

“Tapadh leat,” she says, her voice the equivalent of my father’s expression.

And then she leaves, and my gut twists itself into a semblance of the tangled net I threw on the floor to catch her. Just before she goes out of sight around a hillock, though, she looks once over her shoulder at me, a sad smile painted with one brush stroke on her lips.

• • • •

I am filled with anger.

At the time, I thought this was my story. I was wrong. It was hers. It is still her story. I am merely a player in it, and what happened to me next is also what happened to her.

I spend an hour walking by the edge of Loch na Liana Mhòire before I return home. When I do, I hear voices through the open-again window.

One voice is my father’s, naturally.

The other is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

“It is to you to report her,” Dòmhnall Geur says. “She cannot be allowed to stay like a ghost, stealing from crops and honest working people.”

“You have decided this will be her future, then?” My father’s voice is that wry, flat calm I know too well.

“She has no land or husband or property; what is it you think she will resort to?”

“She may make another choice.”

I know my father is referring to the wolves, to these creatures that do not even exist. At this moment I think the only wolves in Uibhist a Deas are the two men in my house.

“And what is that, a Thormoid? Are you going to marry her? Or perhaps Calum will—I’ve seen his eyes on her. She will drain the life from your boy; it would be best for your sake to keep him from her.”

I have never known Dòmhnall Geur to have a kind word for anyone who was not currently licking his boots. His words are too close to my own thoughts this time, and I slink back farther from the window to avoid being seen.

“I told her of the wolves.”

Dòmhnall Geur does not scoff. He goes quiet. “And you expect her to believe this tale.”

Dòmhnall Geur believes this tale. I hear it in his words.

“’S dòcha,” says my father.

My father believes Seonag will believe it.

Which means my father truly does believe it.

I hear the crack of Dòmhnall Geur’s knuckles and can picture the expression on his face even though I cannot see it. His weak chin does nothing to reduce the harsh lines of his cheeks. His lips he holds at a constant half-sneer except when he has made a decision—usually one few will like—and then light reaches his eyes as if causing harm to others is the one thing that brings him joy.

“That’s me away,” he says. “Shall I congratulate you on your forthcoming nuptials?”

He laughs as his footsteps make their way toward the door. I am a coward. I steal around the edge of the house on light feet and wait until he has passed out of sight before I go in.

I cannot shake the feeling that Seonag is in danger.

I cannot tell if that danger is my father’s making or if it is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

My father stands by the sputtering fire, staring into it.

“Dùin an uinneag,” he says without looking up.

I close the window. It is now cold, outside and inside the house.

“He believes in those wolves,” I say. My anger feels like the sharp edges of shells on the beach. “I think he is one of the wolves.”

I say it in English even though for once Father made his words of Gaelic for me.

“Amadan,” my father says.

I don’t know if he’s calling me a fool or Dòmhnall Geur. Perhaps both.

“Do you remember what I said earlier, when you said there were no mic-thìre here?” Father adds a brick of peat to the fire. He is speaking English now. A puff of smoke, full of the scent of the earth, whispers through the house.

I do remember.

He said there are no mic-thìre, but there are madaidhean-allaidh.

The first means children of the land.

The second means wild dogs.

• • • •

By the time I make it to my granny’s house after all of my work, it is clear Seonag has been there.

Granny’s house has sat empty this past half year, the windows shuttered, the door closed. Father and I come here once a week to check the thatch and make sure no beasties have made it their home. When I arrive, there is a small bundle on the table and a snubbed out candle. A basket of peats sits by the fire, untouched. The stove is clean—she hasn’t used it.

There is a note on Granny’s table. It has my name on it.

It’s written in charcoal on a scrap of rag, and all it says is a thank you.

I clutch it in my hand, where a stray tail of string tickles against my skin.

In my chest there is—something at war.

It feels like fingers pulling apart my heart. I do not know what my father meant. I do not know what Dòmhnall Geur means to do. I know only that I need to find her.

The sky is liath. The clouds have burned off, leaving only a lump of them smeared across the horizon to the west, over the sea.

It will be hours yet before the sun sets, but it is the light of a twilit sky.

I run due west from the house. It is perhaps a mile to the shore. My legs are strong, and I run as fast as I am able.

It is Monday and tomorrow the crofters will begin the plowing of the machair. They will not have begun such a large task today; it invites trouble to begin a large task on a Monday.

I try not to think that beginning a large task is exactly what I myself am doing.

When I reach the dunes, there is the sound of bleating sheep in the distance, an answering lowing of the cattle. The tide is out, pulled all the way out, like a breath drawn in and waiting to be screamed.

Footsteps lead from the dune to the shore.

With them, drifted to the northeast with the wind, are scattered clothes. The thick wool dress Seonag wore this morning. Her shoes, set in a perfect pair. Stockings, blown a bit away. Chemise flapping in the breeze.

The footsteps become imprints of feet and toes. There is another set near them, near me. I try not to think of those ones. They turn back halfway to the water.

The bare footprints lead directly into the sea.

It is said that the warmth returns to the water at Bealltainn.

I have known that to be a lie for most of my life, but when I throw off my shoes back toward the dunes and wade into the water in my stockinged feet and trousers, cold shoots up to my knees, my hips, jabbing into my heart and lungs. I press on. Father said to swim until she couldn’t see land.

I cast one glance behind me, at Uibhist a Deas, at my home, my island.

Then I turn out to sea and dive.

• • • •

When Seonag reaches the water’s edge an hour earlier, she is naked and grìseach, shivering and rubbing her hands against the bumps on her skin. She is too aware of the irony of walking naked into the sea when she could have been sailing west on a ship, clothed and warm.

She doesn’t know why she does it anyway. Perhaps she believes my father wants her dead. Perhaps she believes Dòmhnall Geur does too. Perhaps she simply believes.

This seems as good a way as any. The shore is an in-between place, and Seonag is an in-between person.

She wades into the water.

Like me, she decides it is best to dive.

Seonag comes up gasping and sputtering, her entire body revolting against the cold. Her arms and legs spasm. Behind her, someone shouts.

It might just be a sheep or a goat.

She dives again, the waves pushing against her.

Seonag is a strong swimmer; the brother of her mother drowned when he was fifteen, and her mother insisted Seonag learn to swim.

It has been some time since she did, though, and fighting the waves is different than the smooth peat-colored waters of the lochs.

The tide is turning.

Seonag swims west.

Every stroke of her arms feels like a miracle from the very first of them. She is certain this will be her last act, an act of defiance, an act of doing precisely as she was told, just as she always did, convinced that if she were good enough, modhail enough, kind enough, the whispers would cease.

She feels this will be one more story for my father to tell at the cèilidhean.

(My father will never tell this story. He will forever carry on him far too much shame. No matter how he washes, he will not be able to scrub it away.)

So Seonag swims.

She looks back every so often, when she can spare any small bit of energy. The land disappears quickly only to appear again on the other side of a swell. It does not recede fast enough. Seonag stops looking back.

Her muscles are fire under the ice of her skin. Her lips choke on salt, and her eyes and nose burn with it. Her eyes and nose make their own in retaliation, but they cannot compete against the sea.

Once, Seonag sees dolphins, which in Gaelic are called leumadairean-mara, sea jumpers. She watches them and feels envy, because her body was not made for this and theirs were.

They circle her, out of curiosity or confusion. One comes close enough for her to touch; her elbow brushes against something warmer than the sea and rubbery, and if she were less exhausted she might recoil from it.

When her ear dips beneath the rolling waves for an instant, she hears them. They call to each other, with clicks and whistles that she feels she should understand.

They swim with her—which is to say, they swim ahead, then back, then ahead again, winding around her as she aims herself into the now-blinding light of a sun that has peeked from behind the clouds—and Seonag at once is glad of the company and resents it.

She has always wanted to get close to these creatures, but this is not how she thought it would happen.

Eventually, they swim ahead of her and vanish. She does not see them again.

Time passes.

We are aware of the worlds beyond our own. We know there are times when you can touch them, at twilight and dusk, at the shores and on days that mark the turning of the year. But it is impossible to know when we have gone from touching those worlds to finding ourselves in one.

Seonag certainly never thought she would swim herself over a blurred boundary, into something deep and cold and dark but full of life and salt and energy nonetheless.

When Seonag pauses in her swimming to rest aching shoulders, she is surprised to see Heisgeir breaking the waves ahead of her. The sight of land in front and not behind shocks her into flailing beneath the waves for a moment, coughing and struggling to stay afloat.

Seeing Heisgeir is impossible. It is west of Beinn na Faoghla. She has drifted to the north as she swam. She has left Uibhist miles behind.

Seonag remembers my father’s words. She cries out then, in sorrow or in frustration, and she moves herself to begin swimming due west again, keeping Heisgeir on her right.

She will not go near its shores.

When it fades from view, Seonag realizes she is crying. She tastes her own tears over the brine of the sea. She is sure she will soon drown.

She begins to pray, not to a god who forsook her all of these years, but to the each-uisge, to the selkies, to the storm kelpies, to anything that would listen. She longs for the dolphins to return, belatedly thankful for their company and kindness.

She swims until the late evening sun finally touches the horizon.

She swims until she can see nothing except the red, red clouds touched by the sunset, the sea turned from gorm to dearg itself, waves like flames.

Seonag is not sure if she is still cold, or if the sun has turned the sea to hellfire.

And then she hears it.

A voice on the wind, raised high and so bright for a moment Seonag is blinded by the sound of it.

She fumbles in her swimming.

It comes again, unmistakable. A howl.

Seonag has never heard wolf-song. Seonag has never seen a wolf.

Here, miles from shore and swimming through water turned red, she hears a wolf howl for the first time.

She has nothing better to do. She swims toward it.

At that moment, Seonag is nearly overcome. She expected to die, and oh, she does realize she still might. She does not know how she has swum so far, alone and naked, into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

It does not occur to her that she has already passed into a world she was not born into.

On the horizon, Hiort appears.

• • • •

Seonag’s experience is not my experience.

When I begin to swim, my clothes stick to my body, trying to strangle the life from me before the ocean can. I don’t know what it is I expect to happen. Fatigue sets in before I’m a hundred yards from the shore.

I hear a muffled shout, and before I can find where it’s coming from, a hand grasps me by the back of my shirt and hauls me over the edge of a fishing boat.

The hand is Dòmhnall Geur’s.

There are two other men in the boat, Seòras Eachainn and Dòmhnall Dubh, whose black hair is now far closer to white.

It’s a small fishing vessel with a sail. The boat is called Anna, after Seòras’s mum. I’ve been aboard it before.

“What’re you doing, lad?” Seòras grunts it at me while Dòmhnall Geur dries his hand on his trousers.

“S-s-eonag,” I stutter, pointing westward.

Seòras exchanges a glance with the two Dòmhnalls.

“Saw her going into the water,” Dòmhnall Geur says, his voice surprisingly thoughtful.

“If the weather holds, we’ll go,” Seòras says. There’s caution between his words, and I don’t think it’s about the weather. “We turn back if—”

“I’ve been sailing at least as long as you, Seòras,” says Dòmnhall Geur.

“Sail where?” My teeth are chattering.

Seòras throws a plaid over my shoulders. It’s wool and rough and smells of fish and brine.

No one answers.

• • • •

Seonag pulls herself onto the sand with arms that quiver like the leftover gelatin in a mutton stew.

She has no reference for the kind of tired she is in this moment. Her fingers are shaking from exhaustion—she stopped shivering from cold long ago—and when she looks up, moving only her eyes from where her cheek is glued to the sand, feet still getting tickled by the waves lapping the shore, she doesn’t know where she is.

Seonag aimed herself at Hiort. She thought it was Hiort. But Hiort has been inhabited for two thousand years, and this place looks like it has never seen the footprint of a human being.

But there are paw prints in the sand.

Seonag drags herself farther onto the beach, close enough to look at one of the paw prints.

It is the size of her hand, almost. If she curls her fingers in—which she does—she can lay her hand in the depression made by the paw pads and see the indentation of a wet tuft of fur, the pricks of claws.

She has never seen such a track.

The set of prints leads away from the water.

There is more than one set of prints.

If she expects to hear more howling, she is disappointed. There is only the sound of the wind and the waves and her own labored breathing. Seonag knows she will need to find shelter soon. She will likely need to build it.

She has swum through the short summer night, and already to the east, the sky lightens.

She is covered in sand, only on her right side. There are no clouds. She is alone.

Seonag is used to being alone, even when she is surrounded by people.

She pushes herself to her feet.

The sound of waves is in her blood, her ears, all around her. Indeed even the land seems to be shaped like waves; from the small beach where she landed, cliffs rise up like arms embracing and sheltering the center of the small island, far too small to be Hiort in truth.

There are trees over the dunes. Trees. There are almost no trees in Uibhist—they don’t grow because the wind likes to be able to run across the machair and moors unhindered.

Finally.

The word cuts through Seonag. She could not have told you what language it came in, only that she feels it the way she is feeling the waves.

She looks around.

There, at the top of the dune, is movement.

Something beckons her.

Seonag’s heart gives a jolt, a spark. She follows on unsteady feet.

There is a glimpse of driftwood, moving. Of seaweed and kelp streaming out behind. Seonag tastes fear, but it tastes like the salt of the sea and she has steeped in it all night. She ignores it now.

A figure passes between an oak and a hazel.

Seonag follows.

More movement shows through the trees and underbrush. A tail beyond a bush of holly, upright ears passing just behind a rowan.

Seonag does not know much about trees, but she remembers learning that different kinds don’t grow all in the same place.

The wind falls quiet here, in the embrace of the cliff arms. The slope up is steep; the island looks like a god reached down with a hand and scooped out the middle of a mountain. Seonag doesn’t know what a volcano is. This one has been hibernating for a long time, and will not wake in any lifetime soon.

She walks for an hour into this bowl of trees, past elm and birch, alder and yew. They are the trees that make up the alphabet in Gaelic. She wonders what stories they will tell here.

The figure is among the trees, in a circle of them, on spring grass both thick and green like a bed.

Seonag longs to lie down on that grass and sleep in the circle of these trees. She might never wake if she does.

Someone is here.

Seonag is confused by this. Of course someone is here; she is standing right in front of the figure, which she cannot bring herself to look at. She hears rather than sees the rustle of seaweed. Beyond that, a low, rumbling growl that seems to come from all around her.

And beyond that, a crackle of underbrush from the direction she’s just come from.

• • • •

My feet are heavier and heavier as I help drag the boat onto the shore of the island. Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh help me secure it, with Seòras turning toward the cleft in the cliffs where Dòmhnall Geur vanished and muttering “Craobhan” over and over, so shocked is he by the presence of trees.

My feet are heavier, or perhaps it is my heart. Urgency creeps up my spine, using each ridge of my vertebrae for a ladder. There is a need to hurry.

Almost before I have tied off the ropes, I start to pull away toward where Dòmhnall Geur left.

Seòras catches my hand. “Duilich, a ghille.”

I don’t understand why he is apologizing to me until Dòmhnall Dubh catches the other.

Before I can react, Seòras stuffs a rag into my mouth. It tastes of fish and sweat, and I almost vomit. They wrench my hands behind me and tie me to the boat.

In the distance, a wolf howls.

• • • •

Seonag is not surprised to see Dòmhnall Geur striding into the clearing with no hint of wariness about him. She is not surprised by the gun in his hand, an old hunting rifle that belonged to her own father, who by now is far from the sight of land and crossing the Atlantic forever.

“You must have hidden your boat well,” he says.

“I swam,” she says.

He laughs.

Seonag is still naked except for the crust of sand on her right side, which itches. His laugh has always been a spiteful laugh, one that made her skin into bumps as if ready for anything that might follow.

“I’ve been wanting an excuse to come here for a very long time,” he says. “When I rid the islands of wolves once and for all, everyone will know my name.”

He does not seem to see the figure behind Seonag, or perhaps only Seonag can see them.

“And you will be put on the next ship to Canada where you cannot pollute my island any longer.”

“Your island?” Seonag hears all of his words distantly, like the waves barely audible over the whispers of the leaves around her. But that bit stays. “You are born to a place and believe you own it more than others who are the same as you.”

“You are not the same as anyone.” His voice is low and thick with disgust.

“Why do you hate me?” Seonag truly wants to know.

Dòmhnall takes a breath to answer, but before he can speak, a wolf howls behind him.

He raises his rifle and fires.

• • • •

I hear the shot ring out through the air. Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh are out of sight already, following after with their own rifles.

There is another shot, then another. Closer—without reloading time. The others are shooting at whatever Dòmhnall Geur shot at. The sound of a distant snarl.

I jerk at my bonds. The rope is rough and made of heather. It digs into my skin like a flail. My father and I make this rope together. We may have made this one.

I let out a scream of frustration and rage.

The sound of breathing greets me when my scream dies away.

I turn.

A wolf stands at my right, soaking wet and staring at me with liquid amber eyes. In its jaw is a cod, still twitching.

The wolf looks at me. I forget to breathe.

They are real. The story my father told was real. It is large, far larger than the working dogs we use to herd the sheep on our island. It comes up to my waist.

I can smell its wet fur, full of brine and warmth and the manky smell it does have in common with the working dogs. I can smell its breath, hot and fishy.

It melds with the taste of the cloth in my mouth.

The wolf drops the fish, and fear spikes from my bound wrists up the nerves of my arms. My nose is half-stuffed, and my breath enters in gaps around the gag as much as through my nostrils.

The wolf stalks closer, close enough for its breath to glance off my skin and my still-damp clothes.

Its muzzle is cold and wet, its nose colder and wetter.

When it ducks behind me, between me and the boat, I almost cry out. Warm breath hits my wrists, then the wolf’s powerful jaws clamp down on the rope, pulling and gnawing. My skin warms with the animal’s saliva.

Another shot rings out. The wolf flinches against me, but does not stop.

When my hands pop free, I pull the spit-covered rag from my mouth.

“Taing,” I say, trying to thank the animal, but it has already taken its fish and gone.

I go after it.

• • • •

Around Seonag, a dance of chaos swirls.

Wolves partner with hunters, at least two fur-covered bodies to each of the three men. In its center, Seonag stands like a maypole, her body warm from something she cannot place. The figure recedes behind her, waiting, not intervening.

Seonag feels something well within her. She is certain of it, even though it comes to her without words, without voice. It is like the waves that lifted and dipped beneath her as she swam. It is like the impulse that made her turn and run from the ship the day before, an age before, and hide in the glen.

She has to make a choice.

She feels it again, then, as she decides. Her feet hold to the grasses she so longingly admired a short time ago. Toes dig into their young growth.

Seonag stands taller. Perhaps she is taller.

It comes upon her like the tide, creeping with every breath closer. The smell of leaves around her. The scent of seaweed and kelp. The grit of sand against her skin…and something else.

Her skin is flesh and not.

Her body turns with the swirl of air and breath and grunts around her.

She says one word: stad.

Everyone in the clearing does. They stop. They turn to stare at her, men and wolves alike. There is blood on the wind, human and canine.

“I told you, I told you,” Dòmhnall Geur says, stumbling backward. “She is not of our world, she is not—”

“I was,” Seonag says softly. She looks at Seòras, at Dòmhnall Dubh. “Go.”

Seòras looks over his shoulder once. He sees a glimpse of the figure beyond Seonag herself. Whatever he sees, it is enough. His face goes so white that it is he who will be named Bàn when he returns, though he will never tell anyone why.

This is the scene I come upon when I enter the clearing.

Seòras is half-dragging Dòmhnall Dubh with him. He does not look even to the side to see me. They stumble away.

What I see is this:

Seonag, and not Seonag.

Her arms are no longer pale flesh but the soft, sun-bleached grain of driftwood that curves with her muscles, her joints, her neck. She is naked, but her nakedness is no longer human nakedness. Where her black hair reached past her hips is now seaweed, lustrous and shining in the first rays of the early morning sun. Her eyes are obsidian, their whites abalone.

Behind her I see a figure like her, smiling with seal bone teeth. This figure leans against a yew.

Seonag walks to Dòmhnall Geur, who stands rooted to his place on the earth.

When I step closer, flanked by two wolves I hardly notice, I see that rooted is not a metaphor.

Where Dòmhnall Geur’s feet were, now his toes have entered the earth, punching through the leather of his boots and digging deeper by the second.

He writhes where he stands, but he does not scream. I think he cannot scream.

When Seonag touches his face with gentle nails of shining scales, he flinches away.

“You will stay here, like the others before you,” she says absently. I cannot tell which language she is speaking, if any.

I look around me at the trees, so many different kinds.

“Dair,” Seonag says. “Darach.”

Dair is the name for D, the first letter of his name. He will become an oak.

Already his hair has sprung free of its tie.

Seonag has an acorn in her hand. She places it in Dòmhnall Geur’s open mouth.

It sprouts before his lips close, a sprig of green reaching out, another sprouting from his nose.

A wolf howls, so close to my side that I jump, a stick cracking under my feet.

“A Chaluim,” Seonag says, looking over her shoulder at me. Then, sadly, “You shouldn’t have come.”

Like the others, I cannot seem to speak.

The figure behind Seonag moves forward. Slowly. I think I hear the brittle crack of wood.

“Who are you?” Seonag asks.

The figure is like her, like this new Seonag, and not. Where Seonag’s seaweed hair hangs straight and glossy in ripples, the figure’s is wild, covered in barnacles and fragments of shell and motes of sand embedded in the leaves that sparkle in the sun.

Perhaps this figure is simply older.

“A guardian,” says the figure. “I was.”

I understand before Seonag seems to.

“Was,” she says. “Of what?”

The figure gestures around her. “Of whom do you think?”

Those who are hunted.

For the first time, I see a dead wolf. The figure gazes sadly upon it. There is a knife in its side, and a cod by its mouth.

I cannot make words, but a strangled cry escapes me.

The figure seems to understand.

Seonag goes to the wolf and pulls the knife from its chest. She walks to the new oak tree, now reaching up higher, higher. Flutters of fabric wave in the wind. Seonag tears away what was Dòmhnall Geur’s shirt.

She wraps the knife in it, blood and all. She walks to me. “Carry this home.”

Before I can try and ask her how, she pushes it into my chest. In through my shirt and in through my skin and ribs. I feel it, harsh and heavy and sharp inside me, against my heart that beats so quickly.

Seonag looks at me once more. If she is sad, I cannot tell.

Her sudden smile is fierce.

I blink once, and she is gone. I hear the beat of wings above my head, in the branches of a tree.

The figure remains.

My voice works again. “Who are you?”

The words sound strange in the air, like they are not words at all.

“Old,” says the figure. “Tired.”

I look upward. My hand massages my chest. I can feel the knife there. It feels like panic just out of reach.

“Tell your father thank you,” says the figure.

When I jerk my gaze back down, they are also gone.

• • • •

You will wonder, I suppose, how I made it home. Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh returned, days after I did, silent for days after that, jumping every time they saw me.

The wolves swam me out past the breakwater, the pack leading me around the riptides and into the open sea with yips and broken notes. Some peeled off to hunt on a small chain of rocky islets; others waited until we reached a place I could never find again no matter how I tried. Hiort appeared in the distance.

Oh, how the fear gripped me then. It coated me more heavily than the water, ready to pull me under with its weight.

I swam, though. I swam through the length of the day. They say the journey back is shorter than the journey there. I think in this they are wrong.

When I arrived on the shore of Uibhist a Deas, I collapsed and lay for hours before one of the crofters found me and carted me home, naked and shivering, on the back of his horse.

I did not hear what he said to my father.

Father built up the fire and closed all the shutters and when the heat from the peat warmed me enough, I rose to my hands and knees and began to heave, spots swimming in front of my eyes and a terrible ripping feeling in my chest and when tears stung at me, I heard a thud, and to the floor fell the knife that had killed the wolf.

My father picked up the small parcel and opened it. The blood appeared as fresh as if he had stabbed me with it himself.

“Dòmhnall Geur killed the wolf that freed me,” I told my father then, unthinking of how absurd my words would sound in any language. “He became an oak.”

“A life for a life,” was all my father said in return.

I think of the many trees on that island sometimes.

I think that is why I am telling you this now.

When Seonag came to me not so long ago, she came with a warning. I do not think it was meant for me.

Perhaps it is meant for you.

There are no mic-thìre left in Scotland, but there are madaidhean-allaidh. They are wild and they are free, and they found that freedom in the sea.

Their hunters are the ones to fear.

Sometimes, when the winds are still and the tide pulls back far, far from the shore, I hear their song echo across the waves. I am not the only one who hears them; perhaps Seonag as their guardian strengthened them after the strength of their old guardian flagged.

On those nights, it is whispered that Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh hide with their pillows over their ears, but no matter how they try, they cannot escape the sound. They forgot her, but they still remember that sound.

I am old now, and Seòras and Dòmhnall Dubh are older still. But you are young, and the young have the chance not to repeat the mistakes of their elders.

If you look around you, you might see someone like Seonag, who wants so desperately to belong. Let her sing at the cèilidhean. Invite her to share your meals.

You know who I mean and who I do not. Those someones like Seonag are not like the hunters who prowl for something they decided was their own, to take, to steal, to kill.

Someday perhaps someone else will take that swim to relieve Seonag of her duties. I have thought sometimes that it might be me, but I am still a coward.

Sometimes, on those nights, I think of her.

Sometimes, on those nights, I walk the glen.

Sometimes, on those nights, I hear her singing again.

There are hunters among the sheep of the machair, a ghràidh.

But there are wolves, too.

Writer, singer, artist. Evan sings and writes in Gàidhlig and in English. You can find their bilingual work on Tor.com, in Steall (2020), and Uncanny Magazine, with poetry in Poets’ Republic and elsewhere. Evan sings with the Glasgow Gaelic Musical Association, the Alba choir, and Fuaran. They live in Partick with two cats and dreams galore.

Dave's Head
By Suzanne Palmer

I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, “Road trip?”

“I’m a senior porter now,” I say. “I can’t just skip work.” This is true.

“I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday,” Dave says. This is also true. “So, road trip?”

“You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long,” I say.

“Marty is at the party,” Dave says. “Throw him in the back seat and he’ll be fine.” Back seat of course because Dave’s head is fucking huge—life-size, as advertised—and he wants to see out the front window and “feel” the wind as if he had real fucking skin, real nerves, rather than just a better imagination than most actual people I know. Someday if I ever meet his maker, I don’t know if I’d hug them or kick them in the nuts.

If Marty is at the party, I wasn’t gonna get much done here at the house, because he’d always be milling around and in the way and he’d notice me moving or taking stuff. It’s much better when he’s at the garage, and mostly just sits on the couch staring at nothing and mumbling to ghostly coworkers, and then I can sneak off the nasty stuff, old food wrappers and anything likely to go bad or attract bugs or mice, and maybe even sort out and ditch some papers if I take a little from one spot and a little from another so the stacks and piles don’t seem to change much all at once.

At least my uncle never collected actual live animals; I’ve seen too many pics of those horrors and we’re not nearly so bad. The closest he got was Dave and a couple of Dave’s friends, the rest of which were too broken to fix. I think it’s because most of the animatronics were indoors when the fire took out their park, but Dave was so big he’d been built to be outside and weatherproof, sturdier all around. One of his knee joints is locked up from an exhibit collapsing against him, but he can still walk around with a stiff limp if he has to, and with Marty nowadays mostly forgetting there was an outdoors I’ve managed to get most of the junk out of the backyard so he has some room to roam.

Still, as Dave likes to remind me, the backyard wasn’t all that big to start with, and there wasn’t all that much interesting to look at even when your head is normally as high up as Dave’s is. And he gets lonely when Marty is somewhere out of his own head, which is most of the time now.

Dave knows when I’m vulnerable. My job at the airport carrying bags for the few rich fuckers who can still afford to fly anywhere, furiously trying to buy time for the status quo, makes me resentful, and half this week was double shifts. “Road trip?” he says again.

Whatever it was I had been thinking I should get done this weekend I can’t remember anyway. And I get lonely too; not like I can invite people over, with my uncle’s stuff everywhere and imaginary people taking up whatever room is left. “Fine,” I say. “But not too far.”

“Awesomesauce!” Dave answers, which, really, is a weird thing to hear from a giant detached theme-park dinosaur head, but at some point you just let the weirdness own you and go with it.

• • • •

My car is an old retired police cruiser, which means nothing much except that it has a reinforced frame and when I get up a little too close to someone on the highway and get myself into a predator mind-set there’s a vibe that surrounds us and they get paranoid and move the hell over to the slow lane. Mostly I don’t do this because it seems a dick thing to do, but I have a personal bias against anyone driving a Luxauto because of my shit of a father, especially if they’re the fucking beige armored ones. And nine times out of ten when you overtake them and they glare at you, you can tell just from that one look that they’re just the sort of douchebro who needed, at some point in their life, to get owned on the road by a green-haired skinny chick with a lip ring and a grease-converted V8 and a fucking dinosaur head in the passenger seat.

Most people stick to the publics—around here in dead-end post-suburbia that means pretty much electric buses—so those out on the road in private cars are either loaded with money, or looking to take some. Or they’re taking their damned dinosaur head for an outing in a car their uncle pulled out of the junkyard and fixed you for your sixteenth birthday and you’re gonna drive it ’til the bitter end.

Sometimes Uncle Marty will start having conversations with people in other cars, even if we’re only actually beside them for a few seconds and the windows are up and of course they can’t actually hear him and aren’t even looking at him. Once we’re past he’ll tell us about it, but when it’s a beige Luxauto he doesn’t, or he’ll just tsk and look sad or upset, so I think that makes it clear my bias isn’t unreasonable. Family baggage distilled down to car brand hate.

Anyhow, the sun is still up, the roads aren’t crowded, Marty is happily chatting with four or five imaginary people in the back seat, still at his party, so we’re good. Last time we did this we went west, so this time we go east, and other than that we got no plan. Or at least, I don’t.

“I was thinking,” Dave says, all casual conversation, and I think right, here it is, “I’d still really like to see the redwoods.”

Yeah, so do I, but I don’t have the heart to tell Dave that some jackhole burned the entire damned forest down nine years ago. Scientists are working on new groves, in better places now that the climate has shifted so much, but they don’t want anyone to know where those are and besides they can’t be more than a few feet tall yet, right? “They’re off-limits,” I say.

“We could sneak.”

I snort, which doesn’t sound at all girl-like, but who the hell is gonna care? “You’re a sixty-pound robotic head, Dave. Sneaking is kinda beyond our means.”

“I just think it would be nice for me,” he says, and what he means is he likes things that are very old and very big, because—as he put it once—they resonate with him. He forgets he’s not real. Sometimes I think the fact that I’m the only one of the three of us with any kind of decent grip means I’m the one losing out. Meanwhile I’m dodging potholes and watching the yes/no machine stuckied to the dash get brighter, and it’s worrying me, so I’m not feeling too charitable about any of it.

“Yeah?” I ask. “Why’s that?”

“Because it’s hard when you’re two hundred million years old and everything around you is teeny tiny and fleeting,” he says.

When I cracked Dave open to see if I could fix him, after I moved in to take care of Marty and was exploring the junk in the yard, I’d found his serial number plate. Dave was made when I was two years old. But if I say that the rest of this trip will be sullen silence and now that we’re out and moving I’m kind of getting into the idea of the trip after all.

With reservations, though. We’ve had the redwoods convo a bunch of times and I always say no, and Dave knows this even if he doesn’t know why, which means it’s a dodge.

“We’ll see if we can find something else,” I say, and if that’s not the answer Dave wanted, at least he seems to be okay with it.

I tap the hexagon face of the yes/no machine, hoping it can give us the all-clear by the time we have to make a pit stop. It was an expensive thing, but I like to think it’s saved our asses a couple of times. It’s got a built-in GPS and it collates data about your location on the fly, economic data and crime data, education, air and water toxicity, and key words in social media posts from or about wherever you’re driving through, and it does whatever magic math it does with that and produces a six-metric rating that is displayed as colors. Right now we’re on the highway, but whatever shit place we’re passing through on the other side of the vine-strangled trees is hot red and yellow. The other colors are there too, but fainter. It’s funny that they called it the yes/no machine because it’s about as far as it could be from giving you a clear yes or no answer to whether you should stop somewhere or floor it ’til you’re out. I mean, I suppose if the hexagon stayed clear that would be a yes, but that never, ever happens. And if it did I’d assume the thing was busted.

“Maybe if we head more south, it’ll get better,” Dave says from the passenger seat.

“Yeah?” I ask. “What’s south of here?”

Dave fixes one big fake eye on me. “It was just a random suggestion,” he says, and by his insulted tone I can tell it wasn’t any such thing. But if he has more to say, he’s still not saying it. I fumble one of the new plastic dollar coins out of the collection of candy bar wrappers in my ashtray and, one hand still on the wheel, flip it. Heads I let Dave get his way and head south, tails I be the Girl In Charge and we go due north instead.

Head wins, damn him.

“Fine,” I say, “south it is.” When the next big interchange comes up I slow down and take the exit, bump over the vehicle scanner and scale, and then we’re merging onto another pothole-riddled highway heading south.

The yes/no machine fades to a lighter pink, paler yellow, and that’s at least something.

We drive for about two hours then stop at a roadside service stop so I can usher Marty into the men’s room; he can’t always tell me when he needs to go, but I noticed him being antsy in the back seat. Anyway I want to load up on some cheap packaged snacks. The old lady behind the counter seems nice enough, but with most food regs now entirely voluntary, I don’t trust anything not wrapped, stamped, and safety-sealed while I’m on the road, which is too bad because the pot of chili she has simmering near the counter smells really fucking good.

Another hour later and we’re nearing a gate city named Middleton, hidden from view behind the highway walls, and even though the yes/no machine is pretty optimistic about it, I know better than to stop. When everything went to shit and most of the middle class got stripped broke, those who were left circled their wagons into tight little protective clusters, though what they were protecting other than their schmancy boring-ass lawns and their inbred kids I dunno. Nonresidents routinely get targeted for all kinds of fees and harassment, and I’ve heard stories where if you couldn’t cough up ridiculous money you’d find yourself working for the city ’til you paid it off, which with compounding interest and fees on fees you never ever would. Middleton doesn’t have that rep, but I’m not keen on risking my own freedom on it; I’ve got things to do.

“How about here?” Dave peeps up, the first word he’s said in over half an hour, as we approach the first Middleton exit.

“Gate city,” I say. “Nope.”

Dave can’t purse his lips, because he’s fucking animatronic and no one thought he’d need that, even though they apparently thought they should make him smart enough to read and be argumentative as hell. For educating children, sure. So instead he does this thing where he just lightly clacks his jaws open and closed, tap tap tap tap, except he’s a giant head so it shakes the whole damned car. “We’re not stopping here,” I say again, just to be sure he gets that this is nonnegotiable.

Marty in the back seat has gotten quiet, and I glance at him in the mirror and he’s frowning and looking around as if he understands where we are. My uncle might be on another planet most of the time, but not long ago he was one of the sharpest people I knew, the only one who could go toe to toe with my mother in the brains department—macrotech versus nanotech—and he knew everybody and everything.

“We’re not going to stop here, Uncle Marty,” I tell him, and the anxious look eases. “Just passing through.”

Dave is silent for a bit, then starts clacking again, and this time I do glare at him. “You have a problem?” I ask.

And then, like a goddamned omen, up ahead, half-leaning on the guardrail, I see the falling-down highway billboard for Middleton Prehistoric Playland. I had totally forgotten about it, but I have doubts it’s coincidence that we’re here.

I keep driving, paying no notice to the billboard as if very busy instead of keeping a safe eye on the faded yellow lines on my side of the road. There is a small metallic chuffing sound I have come to identify as a cough, and then Dave says brightly, “Well, hey!”

“Hey what?” I say.

“I just saw a sign for another dinosaur park, right here. What amazing luck! We should stop.”

Yes, Dave sucks at poker, too. “Gate city,” I say again. “We’re not stopping. Besides, it’s been closed for decades, so it’s not like we could go inside.”

“We could look around, though,” Dave says. “Maybe we could sneak in.”

“Sneak in?!” I laugh. “You? You must be shitting me. No.”

“I heard they might have another Euhelopus there,” Dave says.

“You heard? So you knew this was here all along?” Of course I already know the answer, but it has to be asked.

“I saw a brochure,” Dave says.

“You saw a brochure? Where?”

“Somewhere in the house, in one of the paper piles,” Dave says.

“And you couldn’t just ask me if we could come here?”

“I knew you’d say no,” Dave says. “You don’t know what it’s like being extinct. It gets lonely.”

I’ve already gone down the argument hole with Dave about the Euhelopus thing, a name he picked up off some TV kid doco and decided was him (rather than the Generic Sauropod Model C (XXXL) his maker-plate reads) and I made the mistake once of telling him his kind wouldn’t be extinct until our toaster and microwave died, and that got ugly. Ugly enough that Uncle Marty got upset, which is where I draw the line.

“Look,” I say, “we can’t just go right into a gate city. I can try to find out who owns it and if we can visit, and then try to find us a resident to sponsor us—”

“I think it’s outside the gates, on the far side of Middleton,” Marty speaks up from the back. “I once tried to buy some parts off the guy who owns it, to fix Dave’s stuck knee, or maybe barter my time helping him for what I needed, but he wouldn’t even give me the time of day because he was gonna fix it all himself, even though everything in his park was just rusting to heck untouched.”

“Then he’s not gonna let us in anyway,” I say.

“Can we maybe just go look?” Dave asks. “I mean, even just drive around it even if we can’t get in?”

Marty is leaning forward from the back seat, and he’s one hundred percent here, which doesn’t happen too often anymore. “Fine,” I say. “If it’s outside the gates, and if we can get to it, and if the yes/no machine doesn’t give us a hell no, we’ll drive around it.”

“Okay,” Dave says, and is quiet after that.

Sure enough the Playland exit is right after where the high walls that line the highway finally taper down and away and we leave Middleton behind. Middleton, it seems, didn’t want to take the park with them when they redrew their town lines in concrete. I take the exit and the yes/no machine flickers only slightly brighter. Maybe we’ll even find somewhere independently certified to eat out here and a safe place to either stay or park the car overnight.

The sun is low in the sky; I’d forgotten how long we’d been driving. The yes/no machine is still not telling us to get out, as I pass over the road scanners and into the abandoned roads of old Middleton.

Playland is not hard to find. There’s a bunch of defaced billboards and signs pointing the way, and already I can see the big fake palm trees up ahead over the cramped streets and low buildings. Only a few houses have barbed wire around them.

When we hit the street with the park on it I slow down, and because there is no traffic behind me I brake in front of the wide front gates.

They are open.

“Can we go in?” Dave asks.

“No,” I say immediately. “There’s no way that should be open. What if someone is robbing or vandalizing the place right now? We don’t want to get in the middle of that.”

“It looks pretty quiet,” Dave says.

“Sure does,” I say. “Doesn’t make me like it better.” In point of fact, it made me like it a whole lot worse.

“I can’t see from here,” Dave complains. “Can’t we just, you know, pull in a little bit? Just enough for me to see if there are any more of my kind there?”

“No,” I say again. I pull ahead, and park the car on the side of the road just past the gates. There’s a convenience store across the street, lights on and open sign lit. “I’ll go ask if they know what’s going on here, okay? If the park’s not supposed to be open like that they can call the local police, if there are any. You two wait right here. Got it?”

“Got it,” Dave says.

“I’m trusting you,” I say.

“I know.”

“Okay.” I get out of the car, lock it, and skip across the street. The sun is below the skyline now and a streetlight comes on just as I run under it. I glance back and I can see Dave and Marty in the car right where I left them, so I go through the metal detector into the shop. The back half is all hard liquor and edibles, in a cage, with an employee on the far side who looks up from a magazine when I walk in, but I’m not interested in anything in there, so the man loses interest in me just as fast. The woman behind the counter barely moves from where she’s leaning against the counter as I walk up and put a few bags of snacks on the scanner. You get better info if you’re not asking just for free.

She rings it in, and scans my phone. We wait for it to report that it’s not a stolen ID, then report that I’m not a wanted criminal or a tax escapee, then finally sends the charges.

“You’re all set, honey,” she says when it rings through. Been a while since I’ve been broke enough to get declined, but I still have that sharp bite of relief every time I don’t.

“Thanks,” I say. “Hey, I was noticing the gates of the dino park are open. That guy didn’t get off his ass and finally start fixing the place up, did he?”

She snorts. “Kurt? Fix something? Not a chance. Sold it a month ago, though. Never heard someone complain that much about getting so much money for shit before, but that’s the kind of man he was. Haven’t met the new owner yet.”

“Thanks, I just wondered,” I say, and pick up my things.

“I loved that place when I was a kid,” she continues. “You could go in and talk to the dinos and they’d talk back to you and it was magical. Makes me sad every day to see it falling apart along with everything else in the world. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I say, even though I’m probably a third as old as her and the world’s been falling apart as long as I’ve been in it. At least I know what it’s like to have a dinosaur talk back to me, except mine is full of moping and complaints rather than handy, cheery facts about ginormous Pleistocene bugs.

I leave the store, and wait for a lone van, rusted out and smelling of old-school gasoline fumes, to pass. Dude behind the wheel is looking at me, and if I didn’t have my arms full of chips and candy bars I’d’ve flipped him the finger just on principle. But he keeps going, and I start across the empty street and am halfway across before I realize Marty is standing about halfway between the car and the gate, moving back and forth in agitation.

I run.

Marty sees me coming and recognizes me, and I get to him before he can run into the road to meet me and get him back safely on the sidewalk. “Cassie!” he says.

“You okay?” I ask. He doesn’t look hurt, just confused. “What happened?”

Marty points. The passenger car door is open, and Dave is gone. “He told me I had to help him,” he said.

“He went into the park, didn’t he?” I say. It’s not really a question. I check the trunk, and sure enough the modified furniture dolly with big rubber wheels that Dave uses to get his head around outside is gone.

“He told me I had to,” Marty says again. He is wringing his hands between bouts of flapping them, and I throw the junk food into the back of the car, get Marty’s sweater out, and wrap him up in it. It’s not cold, but the weight of it usually helps him calm down. This time, it takes a while.

It’s getting dark out, and there’s no way I’m leaving Marty in the car alone. “We can come back for Dave tomorrow,” I say.

“No, no!” Marty shouts, and starts shaking again. “We have to go get him now! What if we leave and they won’t give him back?”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “It’s all right. I’ll go get him.”

When Marty is calm again I lure him back into the car with a candy bar, and then I stare at those gates for a minute as if I can make Dave get his ass back out here on his own by force of fury.

When that doesn’t work, I get behind the wheel, back the car up, and I drive through those goddamned fucking gates to go get that goddamned fucking asshole dinosaur head.

The parking lot is larger than it looked from the outside; Playland must have been popular in its prime. I’m halfway across it when the sensors for the lot lights figure out I’m there and come on, lighting the place up one empty, Dave-less row at a time until I can see the actual park entrance, dead ahead, and next to it a far-too-familiar beige, armored Luxauto. I yank the wheel hard to the left and turn, accelerating, but already the gates we came in through have swung closed.

Bastard. I should have known it was a trap, but I didn’t think even Dave would be this dumb. Or this selfish.

I turn again and head toward the Luxauto. I can see my father now standing beside it, arms crossed over his chest, and even though it’s still too dark I know all too well the smug-ass smile he’ll have on his face. For a half-second I think about just ramming the Luxauto—pretty sure my ex-cruiser is a decent match for it—but I’ve got Marty with me, so I don’t. I do park close enough that he has to get out of the way or get trapped between the two cars; I missed kissing his side mirror with mine by about a centimeter, because I’m that good.

I get out, and so does Marty, and it takes a second for Marty to figure out what’s happening. “Ted,” he says, and the word is as close to a swear as anything I’ve ever heard him say.

“Martin,” my father says. “Still alive, I see.”

“At least one of us has to outlive you, so someone can spit on your grave,” Marty says. “I owe my sister at least that.”

My father shrugs, as if to say he doesn’t care, which he doesn’t and never has. I don’t know how my mom fell for him at all, much less for so long, since it’s clear as day to me that all he ever wanted was to undermine and steal her work to preserve his own stupid empire, but people can be incredibly smart and stupid at the same time, especially when the heart is involved.

Like driving through those big open gates after Dave.

“Your mechanical friend is inside, looking for family,” my father says. “I should have warned him that family is always a disappointment.”

“That’s funny, coming from you,” I say.

I pat Marty reassuringly on the shoulder. “Wait in the car. I’ll go get Dave,” I tell him.

“Uh-uh-uh, no you don’t,” my father says, and waggles a finger at us. “Private property.”

“I’ve got permission from the owner,” I lie.

“Really? When did I give you that?” my father asks.

“You have to be shitting me,” I say. “You went and bought an entire fucking dinosaur park just so you could lure us here? Why? What the hell do you want?”

“You know what I want,” he says, and it’s true that I do, but now it’s my turn to shrug like I don’t care. He frowns. “I’ll make this easy, no more games. I know about your little secret safety deposit box in Fairham. Give me the key.”

“How the hell do you know about that?” I explode. “You cheating, scheming, murdering son of a bitch—”

“Shut up!” he commands. Oh, he looks so fucking proud of himself, too. “And you know perfectly well I didn’t kill your mother.”

“You didn’t save her, though. You could have. You knew there was a hit out on her.”

“So? Life isn’t fair, Cassie,” he says. “Get over it. I want what’s mine. I want the key.”

“Couldn’t find it when you had Marty’s house tossed, huh?” I ask. “How many times now? Three? Four?”

“Four,” he says, “though how you could tell with that mess I can’t begin to guess. Seriously, how can you live like that? You could have so much more, Cassie, if you just used what you’ve got and started thinking like a winner.”

“So that’s how Dave found out about this park. You left a brochure around for him to find? Or did you just arrange this visit directly?”

“Ask him yourself,” my father says. “The key?”

He holds out his hand.

“It’s hidden back at the house,” I say. “Guess your guys just suck at looking.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not at the house,” he says. “If you knew we’d been inside, there’s no way you’d leave anything valuable there. I know you have it on you, so hand it over and I’ll let you collect your dinosaur head and go on your way.”

“No deal,” I say. “You want me to think like a winner, well here it is: the key is worth a lot more than that, certainly way more than one dumb robot dinosaur head that leaks oil on the carpet and sold me out to you.”

“And what do you want in return? Don’t expect to get much.”

“Never got anything except pain from you anyway,” Marty interjects. He’s still with us, not drifting, and for once I wish he was because the look of grief on his face is like a gut punch.

“I want you to stay out of Marty’s house,” I say. “And I want two hours to go do some parts shopping in the park, after I find Dave.”

“One hour, including finding your dino head,” my father says. “Then you hand me the key before you leave the park. Take the offer: I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll do whatever I have to. Think of your uncle. Or what’s left of him.”

“I’ll hand you the key at the open gates,” I say.

“Deal.”

“Deal, then,” I answer. “Marty, grab the toolbox out of the trunk and come with me. You coming, Ted?”

“Hell, no,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”

I lock the car and set the three separate alarm systems I’ve got on it, and we head into the park to find Dave. It’s full-on twilight now, and the park’s working lights few and far between, but I have flashlights in the toolbox—a big rolling thing with a handle, one of my better investments—and hand Marty one. “You okay?” I ask him.

“I’m okay,” he says, and flips the light on. “Sometimes, though, it feels like I’m here and then I’m there and I’m not sure where or when, or what’s happened already or not happened or I dreamed it, you know? I thought I gave Ted a black eye.”

“You did, and it was a beaut. But that was three years ago,” I say. “Might need to re-up it on our way out of here.”

“I can do that,” he says.

We walk forward into the park, look at the fading signs. “Sauropods that way,” I say and point.

Marty starts to walk, then meanders to a stop and looks back at me. “How’d you get so big, Cassie?” he asks. “Where’s Jennie? Did she save the world?”

“Mom’s gone,” I tell him, and I’m glad it’s dark because I don’t want to see his face and I don’t want him to see mine either. We’ve done this too many times before—remembering is a bitch and a half. “Hey, we’re here in Middleton Parkland and we have to find Dave and we can grab some parts, okay? Stay with me, here.”

“Middleton? But the owner—”

“It changed hands. We’ve got an arrangement. But we only have an hour. Look around. Focus, okay? What do we need?”

“Dave is here?” he asks, but he’s walking forward again now without the hesitation of moments before. “All of him?”

“Just his head,” I say.

“All on his own?”

“You built him a motorized cart out of a furniture dolly, remember?”

We’re nearer one of the working lights, so I can see him grin back at me. “Right!” he says. “That was a clever bit of work on my part. Had to make him promise not to get into trouble with it, though.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, and wave my hands around us. “Welcome to trouble.”

The Sauropod Swamp is up ahead, past a collapsed snack hut, and I can see the long, unmoving necks of three of Dave’s model sticking up into the night sky like strange smokestacks. I follow along the low wall, Marty behind me, until around a curve we find Dave, on his dolly, staring up at the nearest sauropod robot.

“They’re all dead,” he says, when we are near enough to hear, and he sounds so sad and heartbroken that just for a second I almost forgive him for walking us into a trap with my father. Almost.

Okay, not really very close at all. But a little tiny bit.

“Marty, you think you can see if we can get a knee motor out of one of them?” I ask, and he’s already pawing through my open toolbox. He’s been centered for longer than I’ve seen in a while, and maybe it’s just all about keeping him with a new challenge in front of him. Or we’re lucky.

“Be right back, Cassie,” he says, and climbs over the wall into the weeds and garbage.

Can a giant animatronic robot dinosaur head avoid looking you in the eye? Yes. Yes, it can. So I went over and gave him a good, solid, totally ineffective kick.

“I’m sorry,” Dave says.

“You knew it was my father?”

“No,” Dave says. He’s still not looking at me. He clacks a few times, then adds, “but I could have guessed, if I’d thought about it. I just wanted to come find another Euhelopus, and when the cable guy said there were some here, dug a brochure out of his truck—”

“We don’t have cable,” I say. “We’ve never had cable. And you said you found the brochure.”

“Yeah. I lied a little bit,” he said.

“And when you saw him? You still came in?”

“I only saw the Luxauto,” he says. “I thought maybe there was a chance it wasn’t his. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just a stupid, selfish head and you’d be right to just leave me behind here.”

“Hell yes I would, and I would have,” I say. “But then Marty would be upset, and I’d have a giant headless dinosaur in the backyard. With my luck raccoons or some shit would take up living in your neck and it would be a goddamned health hazard.”

“That would be terrible,” Dave says.

“Yeah.” I look at the time. Thirty-eight minutes left. “I’m gonna go see if I can help Marty, and you’re going to stay right the fuck here, right?”

“I will,” he promises.

This time he does meet my eyes, so I climb over the fence and head for where I can hear Marty banging around. I find him and he’s chatting with the other guys in the garage, totally lost as to where he is and what’s going on, but he’s got most of the rusting plating off one of the sauropod’s legs and is up to his shoulders inside, working the socket wrench.

“Marty?” I ask.

He pulls his head out of the cavity. “Jennie!” he says. “You came by the shop to help out? And what did you do to your hair?! You better not let Mom see that.”

“I came to help,” I say. Grandma was dead before I was even crawling, and sometimes it feels like everything I know about her is from her guest appearances in Marty’s wandering mind.

“Great,” he says. “The strut on this truck is totally shot, and rusted to boot. Can you hand me the adjustable wrench? The big one.”

I hand it to him, and his head disappears back inside. “Greg and Barry are gonna go on a coffee run; machine is busted again. If you want anything, tell ’em I’ll cover it.”

“I’m good, thanks,” I say.

He emerges again, a giant smudge of grease across his nose, and hands me a sauropod knee motor. “No wonder this is all messed up,” he says, “you ever see a wheel strut like that?”

“Couple of times,” I say. “It’s a knee. We’re in the Middleton Prehistoric Playland, looking for parts to fix Dave. I need you here now, okay?”

Marty blinks at me, then looks around, looking for Greg and Barry and Linda and Scoops, the garage dog. Then he seems to deflate, his arms hanging down by his side, wrench dangling from his hand. “We were happy then,” he says.

“It’s okay.” I take the wrench from his hand, put it back in the toolbox, bungee the salvaged joint motor across the top. “We’re happy now too, just a different kind of happy. But we’ve got about fifteen minutes to get out of here, and it’s almost that long a walk back to the entrance. Anything else you want to grab, do it quick.”

“Nothing,” he says. “That’s all we need.”

We climb back over the wall to where Dave is still waiting. “We gotta go,” I say. “Keep up as best you can.”

We run for the entrance. Marty is not any slower than me while I’m hauling the toolbox along with me, and Dave has the control lead for the dolly in his mouth and is zooming along behind us. We are most of the way there when Marty swerves off to one side and around a big, fake, graffiti-covered rock into the Precambrian Picnic Place. I’m trying to stop without running myself over with the toolbox or getting crushed by Dave when Marty comes running out past the far side of the rock, smiling his best smile, and his pockets and shirt are bulging.

“Trilobites!” he exclaims. “I can program them for all kinds of things!”

Sure, whatever. If it keeps him busy and present, I can handle some creepy-ass robot bugs around the house. Maybe he can program them to clean.

We reach the entrance with about a minute and a half to spare. My father watches, still leaning against his armored car, as I load Dave, Marty—who I swear dropped at least a dozen hockey-puck-sized trilobites on the seat around him—and the dolly, toolbox, and knee back in the car.

“We have a deal,” he says, when I’m done.

“Safety deposit box key and then you leave us alone,” I say. “You gave your word.”

“To be specific, the key to your Fairham First box,” he says. “Number 131. No switching it up. I don’t trust you to not play me on the details.”

I take a deep breath. I always knew, eventually, he’d get ahead of me, and I always thought I’d be able to play it cool, but my hands are shaking as I reach over my shoulder and down the back of my T-shirt, and break the tiny stitches where the little flat key has sat snug along my bra strap for years now. I hold it out in the palm of my hand.

My father reaches for it, and I close my first. “First, open the gates,” I say. Dammit, I am not going to cry, not in front of him. “I know better than to trust you, either.”

He signals to someone I can’t see, and a moment later the gates at the end of the parking lot open. I make a show of getting in my car, and backing it out and turning around, and he walks over to stand in front of me. He knows, despite everything, that I won’t kill him. Mostly because I’ve had better opportunities than this.

I roll down the window, and I hold the key out. He steps out from in front of the car and takes it, and the moment the key is out of my hand I floor it, my good ol’ grease-V8-cruiser, and we’re out of there like a fucking cannonball. We swerve out onto the street hard, which we’re lucky as hell is empty, and I can just see the woman in the store across the street peering out the window as we tear away from there, back toward the highway and away from Middleton as fast as we can go.

Damned fucking yes/no machine ought to have a color just for proximity to my father.

“I hate him,” Marty says quietly in the back seat.

“He didn’t give us a choice not to,” I answer. “But he’ll leave us alone, at least for a little while. Bastard likes being a man of his word, the magnanimous leader, until he figures out the loopholes in whatever he promised.”

“At least we got away,” Dave says.

“At what cost?” Marty asks. “What is it that he wants from you so badly as to go through all of this?”

“Something of Mom’s,” I say. Something she left for me, to save it from him, save me from him.

“And now he’ll have it,” Marty says. He leans forward and whacks Dave’s head, although not hard. “This is your fault.”

“I know. I said I was sorry!” Dave complains.

“It’s all done now,” I say. I can see a drive-through ahead, one of the more reputable chains, and I’m tired enough that I swing into the lane and get food for everyone. If we have the shits tomorrow, well, we’ll suck it up. I don’t want to stop again until we’re home, even if I have to drive all night.

• • • •

It’s close to noon before I get out of bed and find Marty aimlessly wandering around the living room, and I’m not sure if he’s here or not, but he’s not talking to anyone else, so maybe? “Morning, Uncle,” I say.

“Cassie,” he says. He points to where I dumped all our crap on our way in at four AM. “The fellows at the garage dropped off a new knee for Dave.” He holds up a trilobite. “Also they brought me a bunch of these! I think I can reprogram them . . .”

“I bet you can,” I say. “What are you going to have them do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll need to dig into their code set. I haven’t had a project this fun in a long time.” His face falls. “But I should fix Dave’s knee, first. He’s been so very patient.”

I don’t comment on that. Instead, I pick up the knee motor. “I’ll do it,” I say.

“Thanks, Cassie! You’re the best. I wish the guys would get back here with the coffee, though. Machine is busted again . . .”

“It’s okay, I’m sure they’ll be along soon,” I say. Greg died of stomach cancer four years ago, and is buried only a few rows over from my mom. I don’t know where the others are. The garage itself is now a dry cleaner.

Dave has put his head back on his neck, and is looking out over the neighborhood. “Hey, Cassie,” he says.

“Hey, Dave. I’m going to put that joint motor in. I need you to not move, because if you think I’m mad about the road trip, you have no idea how pissed I’ll be if you squash me,” I say.

“I didn’t want to be alone,” he says.

“We don’t count? Thanks a lot,” I say, as I pull off the leg plate. There’s a little bit of rust on the edges, and I’ll have to get out here with a wire brush and some touch-up paint in the next month or two.

“That’s not what I meant,” Dave says.

And I know what Dave meant, but I also know sometimes you gotta adjust your expectation of what counts as alone and what doesn’t, because nobody has a perfect picture life, or not for very long.

Dave still has his neck craned all the way up. “What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Beige cars,” he says.

“Not today,” I say. “My father will be on the road to Fairham by now, if he’s not there already. Gonna go personally, too; can’t delegate that to any of his flunkies. Now hold still.” I grab the floor jack designed for house joists and I wedge it up under Dave’s butt crack to keep him steady, just in case.

Dave doesn’t really have a butt crack, of course, but there’s a plate up under the base of his tail where there’s the vague, diplomatic suggestion of something of the sort, and up inside above that plate there’s a small box wrapped in brown paper and tied with green ribbon, with my mother’s handwriting on it: just my name, the words you will know when to use it, and a heart. If I close my eyes I can picture it exactly, and feel the weight of it in my hands, remember the paper cut I got when I wrapped it back up too fast after I realized what the vials inside held, and what my father would do to get them.

Like buy an entire falling-down park so he could weasel a key out of me. Fucking ridiculous, this long game of ours.

When I was eight, he came to our house where I was playing in the backyard, and gave me a little plastic pony with rainbow hair and told me how much he loved me and what a smart girl I was, and then asked me if I knew where Mommy’s secret hiding place was. I showed him a recently-dug spot in the garden, where I had insisted my mother help me bury a roadkill skunk a few weeks earlier. Didn’t tell him that part, though. I was a smart girl even back then.

I wonder if he’ll recognize the pony toy, when he finally gets my safety deposit box open. He may have left Dave a Playland brochure, but I left a receipt for the box rent for him to find, ’cause I knew eventually he’d search the house. Girl’s gotta have lots of extra cards up her sleeve, right?

Or right in the palm of her hands.

The hand sanitizer bottle I keep at my porter station at the airport is getting low, and by fall I’ll need to refill it. For now, though, my mom’s package can stay safely where it is, as her work, little by little, goes bon voyage around the world.

It takes me an hour and a half to get the knee replaced, then I let Dave back down off the jack and step back, wiping sweat from my forehead with the greasy back of my hand. “Give it a try,” I say.

“Are you sure?” Dave asks.

“Just do it, dumbass,” I answer.

He takes a tentative step, and the knee actually bends, just like it’s supposed to, and thirty seconds later I’ve got a gigantic metal robot sauropod frolicking in the goddamned yard.

Marty comes out and puts an arm around my shoulders. “You did good, Cassie,” he says. “Definitely got the family engineer genes. Your mom would’ve been proud.”

“I know,” I say, though it never hurts to hear. Well, maybe a little.

“Come on inside,” he says. “The guys are bringing over beer and pizza tonight, and we’re going to discuss what to do with the trilobites. You don’t want to miss it.”

“Not for anything in the world,” I say. “I just need to clean up our tools and I’ll be in.”

“Okay. Don’t take too long—you know how Barry is around unguarded pizza.”

“I sure do,” I say.

Marty heads inside, and I can hear him talking to one of his memories, excitedly explaining about the trilobites. I take out my device and order a pizza to be delivered, along with a six-pack of root beer, then pack up the rest of my tools.

Dave comes back over and bends his head way down to where we are nose to nose. “What if he comes back?” he asks.

“He will, sooner or later. He has to, once he realizes he still hasn’t won. Just try to be less stupid next time,” I say.

“No, I mean, what if he finds that thing he wants?”

“He won’t,” I say. I pat him on the nose. “Don’t worry about it. And I need you to stop stomping around out here for the night; we don’t need the neighbors complaining.”

“But I just got my leg working again! That’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair,” I say, and I roll my toolbox with me back into the house, back to Marty’s party, and wait for the pizza guy to show.

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared frequently in Asimov's and Analog, and her Clarkesworld story “The Secret Life of Bots” won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette. Her first novel, Finder, came out from DAW in April 2019.

Nice Things
By Ellen Klages

After the memorial service, Phoebe Morris returned to the beachfront townhouse where her mother had lived for the last twenty years, and prepared to cope. There was nothing of Mother’s that she particularly wanted, but there were papers to sort and clothing to donate, and it was her responsibility. She was an only child, an orphan now, with just an aging aunt in assisted living. Rose had sent flowers and a nice note, apologizing for her absence and invoking her hip.

Phoebe stood by the door. The living room seemed sterile: pale carpet, beige furniture, sliding glass doors leading to a patio and the beach beyond. The only color came from a single shelf of dust-jacketed books, best-sellers all, and a few displays of fragile knick-knacks on the mantel and polished side tables.

Drawing her arms in close to her body was instinctive. She might accidentally knock one of the little figurines over, as if her very proximity was enough to shatter them into bits. A bull in a china shop, Mother had called her. She’d hold the dustpan and glare accusingly at her curious, clumsy daughter. “This is why I can’t have nice things.”

Phoebe took off her good jacket and draped it over the back of the couch. Now that all of Mother’s precious things were hers, she didn’t know where to start. Part of her wanted to lay claim to her inheritance by sweeping them all off onto the floor, being that bull, smashing each and every one of them. Experimentally, she picked up a little Dresden shepherdess with a skirt of frilly, prickly ceramic lace. She raised it, arm cocked and—

She couldn’t.

It was as if any minute her mother would come through the doorway and catch her in the act of—of what? Of touching Mother’s things. But they weren’t hers anymore. Still, permission had not been granted by the one person whose approval had always been required. The back of Phoebe’s neck tingled: watched, judged, and found guilty.

That old familiar feeling.

The little Dresden doll went back in its place and the bottle of Pinot Grigio from the supermarket down the street went into the fridge. Upstairs, she changed into jeans and a sweater, and dug a pen and her notebook out of her carry-on bag. What she needed was a to-do list.

The sensible thing was to appraise first, smash later. Most of the little figures were porcelain, and some of them might be valuable. People collected that sort of thing, didn’t they? Phoebe didn’t know; she’d shared little of her mother’s taste. She’d been told that was a flaw. She wrote APPRAISER—ESTATE SALE? at the top of the page, and that made her feel a bit more settled, in control.

Her day job was creating order out of chaos. A senior copy editor for the university press, she went through academic verbiage and noted what needed further research, queried questionable statements, and ensured that every fact was accurate. She was thorough and efficient, a professional nitpicker. A skill learned at her mother’s knee.

For an hour she walked idly from room to room, opening drawers and cabinets and looking through the contents as if she were at an estate sale herself, browsing, not searching. Getting the lay of the land, like an archaeologist going through the remains of her own culture.

Her childhood had been privileged and uncomfortable, full of small, continual battles. “Do you have to slouch?” “Can’t you find something better to read?” “Phoebe! Don’t bite your nails.” Rarely constructive, the comments became an accretion of minutiae that eventually grew around Phoebe like a coral reef, encasing her small soft self, bit by chalky bit, yet barely blunting their sting.

She felt guilty for feeling more relief than grief. She’d shed a few tears when the inevitable phone call had finally come, but knew she would not miss her mother. No more awkward visits, no more read-between-the-lines letters expressing disappointment, but signed “Love,” and then, formally, “Your Mother.” She had brought a few of those with her from home, hoping they would provide an emotional nudge, but they remained in her suitcase.

On a shelf in a hall cupboard, she found a brown cardboard box marked FAMILY. Maybe that would help. A way to reclaim her own history, try and make sense of it, knit some frayed ends together. Dangerous territory, though. Best to tackle it before her energies were exhausted by dozens of mundane tasks. She carried the box to the glass-topped table between the kitchen and the living room; she planned to sell that as soon as possible. It was too big for her bookshelf-lined Ann Arbor dining room, and was steeped in the remains of lessons in how young ladies should behave themselves, intertwined with the invariable battles over food.

A wooden Lazy Susan held salt and pepper shakers, paper napkins, and a ceramic dish of Sweet’N Low packets. She moved it to the counter, next to the blender and the three nearly identical gold-tone canisters: FLOUR. SUGAR. MOTHER.

None of them were actually labeled. They all looked like coffee cans, complete with airtight plastic lids. The contents of two were smooth and white, the third gray, with a few unpalatable lumps of bone.

The funeral home had tried to sell her a fancy eight-hundred-dollar urn to put on her mantel. Decorating with a dead relative’s ashes? No, thank you. For the time being, this cut-rate funereal object held what was left of Mother. Phoebe wasn’t sure if she’d have approved of not wasting money, or been annoyed at the lack of pomp.

Mother had left no instructions about what to do with her—after. She’d had an appointment with her lawyer, but the disease had spread too quickly. For months, Mother had dismissed Death as if it were an inconvenient sales call: “I’m sorry, but this isn’t a good time for me. I’m really not interested. Please take me off your list.” She had slipped into that final coma with the conviction that this could not be happening to her. No time left to make plans or make peace.

Phoebe opened the bottle of wine.

Loose photographs in a variety of sizes filled the top six inches of the box, in no particular order: Daddy as a soldier, photos of Cleveland in the 1950s, Phoebe’s first grade class picture. She leafed through deckled edges and pink-tinted Kodachromes, throwing away unidentified relatives, skimming off photos of her mother as a girl, arm in arm with the now-aged aunt. Vivian and Rose, in ruffled dresses and pin-curls. Children Phoebe had never known. She would put those in a manila envelope and mail them off with a thank-you note for the flowers.

She lifted off a heavy, framed photo of her parents as newlyweds, then stared in disbelief at the red folder it had uncovered. She flinched, pale gold droplets of wine scattering across the glass. Suddenly she was nine years old again, her eyes prickling with tears, her hands clenched in long-buried outrage.

• • • •

Mrs. D’Amico had assigned the project the first week in March. A report on an animal of their choice, ten pages, with pictures. They would have a whole month, because they were not little children anymore, they were fifth graders, and this was preparation for junior high and high school, which would not be easy, no-siree.

Phoebe chose dinosaurs, and spent her afternoons at the library, taking pages and pages of notes. The centerpiece of her report was a sheet of heavy art paper, folded and three-hole-punched to fit the folder. She’d made a tab from a white index card, “PULL TO OPEN,” in her neatest printing. That revealed a colored pencil drawing, two notebook pages wide: a brontosaurus surrounded by spiky prehistoric foliage.

Art was not her best subject. She’d spent a whole weekend hunched over her little desk, fingers cramping with the effort. The dinosaur’s legs were longer and skinnier than the picture in the encyclopedia, but it was still the best drawing she had ever done. The night before the report was due, she’d gotten out of bed three times to make sure it was still there, to admire what she had made.

The report came back a week later with a red-inked A and a “Very Good!” in Mrs. D’Amico’s perfect penmanship. Phoebe hurried home though a soft drizzle, the folder under her slicker, and nearly skipped through the kitchen door.

Her mother sat smoking at the glass-topped table, an ashtray and a coffee cup at her right elbow, her silver Zippo lighter and a green pack of Salems stacked neatly beside them. A crescent of red lipstick smeared the edge of the cup. She shuffled a deck of cards and laid out a complex game of solitaire, finishing the array before she looked up.

Phoebe held out the red folder. “It’s my dinosaur report,” she said. “I got an A.”

“Let me see.” Mother put the cards down and took the report. She opened the cover, nodded, and leafed through in silence. Phoebe stood on tiptoe, her slicker hanging open. She leaned forward when her mother got to the centerfold, watched in anticipation as her drawing was unfurled, then rocked back when it was folded up again and the page was turned without comment.

Her mother closed the folder. “We should save this one. I’ll put it in the cupboard by my desk with the rest of my papers.” She smiled as if Phoebe should be pleased.

She wasn’t. Her stomach did flip-flops. “It’s mine,” she said, almost a whisper “I want to keep it in my room.”

“Your room?” Mother shook her head and crushed her cigarette into the ashtray. “But it’s so messy, dear. What if this gets lost? Or ruined? Better to put it someplace safe. Then we’ll always know where it is.” She stood, the report in one hand, and patted Phoebe on the shoulder. Then she left the kitchen and locked away the brontosaurus.

Phoebe stared at the doorway for a minute before slowly taking off her slicker, hanging it on its hook. She knew where her brontosaurus was, but she would not be allowed to visit. Rummaging in her mother’s cupboard was forbidden.

And somehow her brontosaurus had just become one of Mother’s things.

• • • •

Decades later, Phoebe Morris downed her wine in one long swallow, then wiped her damp cheek with the back of her hand and cradled the red folder to her chest. It was as if she had found her Grail, a relic from her childhood so unattainable that it had become legendary in her personal mythology. A long-missing piece of her true self.

She opened the folder, turning pages of her neatest childhood cursive, blue Bic pen on wide-lined notebook paper, pulling out the center, folding it back again with a sigh. It really wasn’t a very good drawing, the proportions all wrong, not the masterpiece she’d enshrined in her memory palace.

Her longing for this particular bit of treasure had been huge and fierce, but now what? Take it home and put it in a box of her own? Buy a scrapbook? Unearthed, the legend had become another ordinary object.

She laid the folder on the tabletop, next to a small, worn brass rabbit that had anchored a stack of monogrammed notecards and envelopes on her mother’s desk. Phoebe’s secret pet. She’d always had to be careful to put it back exactly as she found it, so Mother wouldn’t demand an explanation of why she’d picked it up in the first place and deliver another lecture.

For a moment, Phoebe held it in her hand, reveling in the cool contours of the cast metal, the surprising heft of it, and even more in the radical idea that she could now put it anywhere she chose and there would be no consequences.

She got up, stretched, and returned to browsing. After an hour, the rabbit was joined by a handful of similarly forbidden objects that had nostalgic resonance: her mother’s ornate desk scissors; an angular art deco perfume bottle, a few gelid amber drops at its bottom; and a small leather-bound album with black-and-white photos detailing the first six months of Phoebe’s life.

At dusk she ordered Chinese delivery from the menu next to the wall phone. Dumplings and shrimp toast and sizzling rice soup. She was always surprised how expensive Chinese food was for one person—thirty dollars for a few appetizers—when it was so cheap for a group. She shook her head and reminded herself that she no longer needed to pinch pennies, at least not on the level of dumplings. Once she sold Mother’s townhouse, she could pay off the mortgage on her cozy little bungalow at the edge of campus and have enough left over for a nice nest egg.

She felt a new wave of guilt as she realized that, if they had been prizes in a game show, she’d have chosen the money over Mother without a second thought. Mother had never brought much comfort at all.

The dumplings did, along with a second glass of Pinot Grigio.

Phoebe finished the soup, put the other leftovers in the fridge, and scribbled more items on her to-do list. She’d tackle the clothes in the morning, bagging the bulk for Goodwill. She was pretty sure Mother had purged any vintage things when she downsized after the divorce and moved to Sarasota.

The rest of the evening she spent inventorying the kitchen drawers and cupboards. No emotional landmines. Nothing of any importance either, but why toss perfectly good cans of tomato soup or a box of Minute Rice? She checked her email, wrote back to the friend who was housesitting for her, and RSVP’d to her book club. Then she went to bed.

It was full light, after 8:00, when she woke. She showered and went downstairs. The sound of the surf was rhythmic and soothing. She stood by the patio door, watching the waves roll in along the white sand beach, then returned to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. Electric stove. It would take forever. She opened the refrigerator and took out the carton of dumplings. Two left. She speared one of them on a fork and held it upright like a popsicle, biting into one crimped edge. It was cold but delicious, the dark sauce a tangy sheen. She wolfed it down, put a teabag into a flowered mug, and started on the second.

Leaning against the faux-marble counter, waiting for the kettle to boil, she looked down at the array of objects. The brass rabbit sat on a stack of photos. The scissors lay across the leather album.

She paused in mid-nibble.

Where was the red folder?

She looked under the table, on the seats of the chairs, and finally opened the flaps of the cardboard box. There it was. But she hadn’t moved— She shrugged. She must have. Just didn’t remember. As she lifted the folder, a single piece of paper slid out and fluttered to the floor. Not a blue-lined notebook sheet, its three-punched holes coming loose from the binding after all these years. It was heavy, cream-colored stationery, the monogram VRM embossed in slate blue capitals across the top: Vibby Reynolds Morris. In the center, in Mother’s distinctive script, was a single word:

Mine.

Phoebe gasped and dropped the fork, dumpling and all, noting with dismay the brown stain it left on the white carpet. The kettle whistled insistently.

After a long moment, she turned it off, laid the note on the counter and retrieved the dumpling. She sat, finishing it slowly, savoring each flavorful morsel until she felt more like a competent, practical woman than a scared child.

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

“Look,” she said to herself. “Mother was a real piece of work. But she’s gone. She must have written that years ago. Sorting through pictures herself. Some to keep, some to give to cousin whats-her-name. I just didn’t see it yesterday.”

There. Nice and logical.

So why was her hand shaking?

Shit.

Phoebe ripped the note in half, again and again until it was confetti, tipped it into the trash, and made a cup of tea. She sipped, grimaced. No milk. She added MILK to her list, then stood up. Time to get out of here, get busy. Start doing the things on her list, not just making it longer. It was a beautiful fall morning, and she really needed a change of scenery. She put on her shoes, grabbed the keys to the rental car, and left the townhouse.

Three hours later, after a hearty, grounding IHOP breakfast, she returned with milk and packing supplies. Garbage bags and manila envelopes and a five-pack of shipping boxes. Bubble wrap, two rolls of tape. Phoebe was armed and ready to pillage and purge.

The downstairs bedroom first. Musty, sickroom smell. She opened the French doors for a gulf breeze, and turned to the closet that took up most of one wall, sliding apart the mirrored doors. My god, there was a lot of stuff. No wonder Mother had always looked like Jackie Kennedy on casual Friday—perfectly coifed dark hair, pearls, in trim slacks or a Lily Pulitzer skirt. One side had built-in shelves and drawers. The other was hung with pastel dresses, skirts, and blouses, arranged by color. Mother was a Spring.

Phoebe didn’t have a season. Hibernation? Her own wardrobe ran to blacks, grays, and dark blues. Early on she had drabbed herself out of harm’s way; safer not to call Mother’s attention. A lifetime of protective coloration.

Mother’s repeated attempts to dress Phoebe in her own image had ultimately failed. She owned no pastels. Or lipstick or three-inch heels. Very little jewelry. Clearing the closet would be swift and ruthless.

She pulled out two of the Hefty bags, shaking the black plastic free with a little more force than necessary. One for trash, one for Goodwill. She slid open a drawer and tossed out nylon panties, slips, and bras. Another drawer held a tangle of scarves, still scented with Chanel. Phoebe threw those on the bed for a more careful inspection later. Cashmere, silk—maybe Hermes? Those she would set aside for the estate sale people.

The bottom drawer surprised her: a stack of neatly folded plaid wool shirts in various shades of greens and rusts and yellows. All in beautiful condition, all vintage 1960s. When Phoebe was little, her parents had season tickets to the Browns, which involved tailgate parties and other “sporty” weekend events. Pendleton and pearls.

She smiled, picturing her mother in one of these shirts, remembering one afternoon with a warm nostalgia rare for her childhood. She must have been about five. Her parents had taken her along to an afternoon party. Someone’s huge backyard, views of Lake Erie, bright autumn leaves, a real popcorn machine. Phoebe had a hot dog and a Hires root beer. Mother and Daddy sat on the stone patio together, laughing. Phoebe got to run around. When it got dark, Daddy carried her piggyback to the car.

What beautiful soft wool. She stroked the top shirt, tempted to try it on, then looked at the label. Size six. She wouldn’t even get an arm in. Mother had weighed 108 pounds the morning Phoebe was born, full-term. She had taken after her father’s side of the family: sturdy and solid. Another memory surfaced, not warm and fuzzy, a trip to the department store downtown, sixth grade, Mother frowning at the size 12 tag on a dress as if Phoebe were the Incredible Hulk.

With a sigh, Phoebe lifted the stack of shirts and set them on a chintz-covered chair. They looked distinctly out of place. Did Sarasota have a vintage clothing store? Someone would drool over these. She turned back to close the bottom drawer, and saw a small bag tucked into a corner. Fist-sized, blood-red velvet. She’d never seen it before.

As a child, Phoebe had occasionally, secretly, looked in her mother’s dresser when she knew she was alone in the house, curious about what went under grown-up women’s clothes. Mysterious garments that her Barbie hadn’t come with, full of hooks and clasps and odd bits of rubber, scary and fascinating.

She picked up the sack. It was full of—what? Spare pearls? No, not round. Loose diamonds? Yes, please. She loosened the satin drawstring, opened the sack wide, and tipped its contents into her palm. She stared down at a dozen blunt whitish objects. “Jesus,” she said aloud. They were teeth.

Well, of course Mother had kept her baby teeth long enough to do the pillow thing, but saving them? Phoebe shuddered and tipped her hand over the trash bag. The teeth rattled like tiny hailstones against the black plastic, followed by the velvet bag.

Body parts. Remains. She thought about the canister in the kitchen. What was she going to do with Mother? Maybe a road trip, scattering her along the way? She’d always wanted to travel. Perhaps a spoonful in each of those logo-stamped ashtrays they had at fancy hotels, next to the elevators? A smidgen in the planters of the smoking lounge of the golf club? Vibby and “the girls” had played bridge in that room every Wednesday for the last twenty years. She ought to feel right at home there.

On second thought, the ashtray thing was probably a little too irreverent. Phoebe didn’t want to be any more haunted than she already was. What about their old house, back in Shaker Heights? No. Mother hadn’t been happy there. Had she been happy here? Phoebe wasn’t sure.

She threw a tangled nest of pantyhose into the trash and began dragging pairs of dainty shoes out of the closet, putting them into the second bag. Size six here as well. Black heels, low; black heels, high; white heels, satin; pink and white running shoes; a pair of buff-colored bowling shoes. Bowling shoes? When had Mother ever bowled?

When the bag was full, she tied its handles shut and put it by the hall door. Getting rid of shoes was satisfying and easy. Figuring out the appropriate way to dispose of Mother’s ashes, not so much. She needed to say goodbye. Forgive her? Tell her off? The memorial service had been lovely, but formal. Very high Episcopal, which had suited the white-haired mourners much more than Phoebe.

Her therapist had encouraged her to spend as much time as she needed, to find closure and a way to move on. Phoebe wanted to call her, get some sensible advice, except Patricia was at a conference all week. Another woman was covering the practice, but it wasn’t like she’d lost a filling and any old dentist would do. Patricia had been seeing her for years, knew all her pillow-thumping, Kleenex-soddening stories and secrets.

Phoebe took a break mid-afternoon and dropped off three bags of clothes at the Goodwill store she’d passed on her errands that morning. To reward herself, she went into the bakery next door. Glass cases held cupcakes, pumpkin cookies, and elegant fruit tarts. She bought one of those, and a muffin for tomorrow morning. On her way back to the car, she glanced down at the box of pastries and the grinning black jack-o’-lantern rubber-stamped on the pink cardboard.

The last two weeks had been so busy, full of phone calls and flight arrangements, insurance forms, funeral homes, and selecting hymns. She’d completely forgotten about Halloween. She pulled out of the parking space.

Maybe that was the answer.

One of the academic books she’d recently copyedited was a treatise on Celtic rituals and modern society, and there’d been a long section about Samhain and All Soul’s Day and Halloween. A liminal time, when the boundaries between this world and the next were more—permeable. In the north of England, around the ninth century, as she recalled, people in mourning had baked “soul cakes” for the occasion. Children went begging from door to door, promising to say a prayer for every cake they received.

“Trick or treat,” she said aloud.

Not that she was going to hand out anything homemade at the townhouse door. The neighborhood watch would be on her in a flash. But baking sounded both soothing and appropriately domestic. Tomorrow she would make a soul cake and have a ritual feast, then scatter the ashes into the eternity of the sea.

Yes. She smiled as she pulled into the townhouse carport. It was just the sort of custom Mother would have liked. A dyed-in-the wool Anglophile, she doted on Lord Peter Wimsey and Twining’s Tea, Tiptree marmalade with her breakfast toast.

As for the cake itself, Phoebe imagined it should be like the ones that travelers carried with them in fairy tales, wrapped in a bindle with a bit of cheese, sent off with the prodigal in search of fortune. When she had first encountered those tales in kindergarten, she had imagined a sort of medicinal Hostess cupcake—without the white squiggles. Brown and dry and herbal-tasting. Indestructible, but nourishing.

Inside, she ate half the fruit tart and opened her laptop, searching for a soul cake recipe. There were dozens. Irish, gluten-free, even one from the Hallmark Channel. Some were gingerbready, others more like scones or biscuits. They all seemed to call for nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger. Autumnal flavors, the cakes traditionally set out with a glass of wine. That appealed, too.

Mother didn’t have a printer, so Phoebe got her notebook and copied out the recipe that seemed the simplest. She finished the fruit tart and nodded to herself. Things were coming together, and it was a real tradition, not one she was making up on the fly. When dealing with the dead, a do-it-yourself ritual seemed a bit risky.

Energized by the clarity of a decision, she got back in the car and drove to the Publix, so she’d have everything on hand in the morning. Butter and vanilla. Eggs and spices. Plus another bottle of wine and a small frozen pizza for dinner tonight.

Now that she had a plan, she felt more relaxed. She opened the wine—a red blend this time—and sat and watched the sunset on the patio while the pizza heated in the oven. After dinner, she put the plate in the sink, topped off her glass, and settled into the beige recliner in the living room. She’d brought a collection of Angela Carter stories to read on the plane and it had been a week since she’d had time to get back to them. After about twenty pages, she was yawning, the effort of all the completed tasks catching up with her, and she gave in about 9:30. Retrieving the red folder, she tucked it under one arm and headed upstairs to bed, turning off the light only after she’d zipped the brontosaurus into a compartment of her suitcase.

Phoebe woke in the middle of the night. It took her a minute to orient herself to the unfamiliar pattern of light and shadow. She turned over, kneaded the pillow, and was almost asleep again when she thought she heard the soft metallic snick of a Zippo lighter opening, somewhere downstairs. A minute later she smelled cigarette smoke.

She sat bolt upright, her heart pounding in her ears with sudden adrenaline, eyes wide open, staring at nothing. Those same acrid menthol fumes had wafted up to her childhood bedroom so many nights when Mother couldn’t sleep.

No. Mother’s dead, she thought. She almost said that out loud but knew that the word “dead” in the silent darkness would terrify her. She bit a knuckle to stop herself.

Then came a sound that raised every hair on her body.

Whirrr…, snap. Whirrr…, snap. Whirrr…, snap.

A deck of cards being shuffled, and then the unmistakable slap, slap, slap of a game of solitaire being laid out on a glass-topped table.

That was impossible.

Yet the sound continued, soft and regular.

Phoebe pulled her knees to her chest, curling up around herself, and tried to slow her breathing. It was only her imagination. She was alone in a strange house after a long, emotional day. Of course she was thinking about Mother. All she needed to do to reassure herself was get up, go downstairs, and turn on the kitchen light.

She couldn’t move.

A minute went by. Two. She started to relax, and then:

Whirrr…, snap. Whirrr…, snap. Whirrr…, snap.

A bead of sweat trickled down between her breasts.

Slap, slap, slap.

Phoebe lay motionless, every muscle tensed, willing the sound to stop and trying to hold off the panic that if it did, the next sound she’d hear would be slippered footsteps coming to reclaim her.

Eventually, sheer exhaustion pulled her into a restless sleep. When she finally got out of bed, every muscle aching from being clamped in fight-or-flight tension, morning light streamed through the window. She dressed and padded silently down the thick carpeted stairs, clutching the only weapon at hand, a slender pale-blue Lladro figurine. That was ridiculous, but she felt less vulnerable than if she’d been unarmed.

The kitchen was spotless and empty. Nothing on the table but the FAMILY box and the small pile of objects. No ashtray. No lighter. No cards. A tomato-smeared plate in the sink, the trash empty except for the food cartons.

Phoebe put down the figurine and felt a wave of self-conscious embarrassment. She’d had a whopper of a nightmare. Not surprising, under the circumstances. With the combination of wine, greasy food, and a lifetime of, well—issues—of course she hadn’t slept well. Made perfect sense, now that it was daytime.

Cards had been one of their few shared customs, a bloodsport that Phoebe had been taught as soon as her hands were big enough to hold a deck. How wonderful it had once felt to get Mother’s undivided attention—until their games had evolved into an arena for inquisition. She’d learned to dread the moment that Mother would stop dealing and say, as if it were a casual thought, “Can’t you do something with your hair?” “Have you decided on a major?” “What are you planning to do with your life, Phoebe?”

She boiled water, made a rich, milky tea, and wrapped her hands around the steaming mug. The patio door slid quietly on its track. Phoebe walked out to the end of the narrow dock and stood for several minutes, the air cool on her skin, watching the waves break, over and over. Constant and ever-changing.

Sipping her tea, Phoebe planned her day. She’d finish the bedroom, take herself out to lunch and another run to Goodwill, then come back here and bake. Everything would be ready by sunset, and she’d go down to the water and do what she could to banish her ghosts.

Phoebe had never been big on rituals. She had gone to Sunday School by command, and when she was old enough to choose for herself, chose to worship the heretical god of sleeping in. So there was no religion to fall back on, no Episcopal exorcism. The soul cake was a start, though, a focus. She needed some structure, couldn’t just walk to the end of the dock and fling Mother out willy-nilly, watching the seagulls dive down to nibble at the larger bits before they sank below the surface.

The sun rose fully above the line of palm trees, their fronds rustling in a gentle breeze, and the air began to warm. Phoebe put the mug down and walked along the sand, her hands in her pockets, inviting grief and finding it elusive.

When Mother first got sick, Phoebe had supposed that grief, when it finally came, would be a huge hole ripped out of her life. Instead it was as if some delicate, many-tentacled creature had been attached to a fine mesh, then flown away, leaving a thousand tiny holes. Particles of memory drifted in with no pattern or predictability.

Emotions swirled, chaotic and contradictory. She felt sympathy for the hollow-eyed invalid, felt relief that Vibby Morris’s suffering had ended, but did not miss the cool and critical woman who had raised her. And part of her would always long for a loving mother who might have come to her in the dark when she was small and scared and alone. Who might have rocked her, sung her lullabies, and now never would.

It was almost noon when she finally returned to the townhouse. Instead of going out again, she ate the bakery muffin and heated a can of tomato soup, drinking a mug of it standing up. She spent the afternoon browsing again, gathering her offerings from each room in the house: a little figurine; a deck of cards; a selection of photographs.

One in the nursery, baby Phoebe in her mother’s arms, swaddled and bottle-fed. One from high school, Phoebe wooden, Mother with a little half-smile, her arm around her daughter, her eyes on someone off camera. And one of Mother after the first operation, flanked by Phoebe and two of the “girls” from her bridge group. She had lost most of her hair, so her head was done up in a turban, but she had put on lipstick, and her pearls, of course. Those eyes looked frightened, wary, like an animal caught in an unexpected trap.

Phoebe went up to the guest room and retrieved the bundle of letters from her suitcase. Missives written when she was at summer camp, at college, in Chicago for her first job. All on that same cream-and-blue stationery, the handwriting so familiar, so distinctively her.

Returning to the table, she added them to the photos and put everything into a wicker basket. She tore the recipe out of her notebook and read it through once, then turned the page over and did the math to cut it down from a batch to one single, slightly oversized soul cake. She scribbled numbers, crossed them out, recalculating and fudging a bit to eliminate inconvenient measures like 3/32nds of a tablespoon.

Then she laid out each of the ingredients she’d purchased: vanilla, eggs, milk. Cinnamon, ginger, butter. Baking soda. The recipe called for currants, but the Publix had only stocked raisins. Those seemed too frivolous, so she didn’t buy any. A soul cake ought to be a pastry without indulgence. A final course, but not a dessert.

She opened the first canister, scooped out a cup and replaced the plastic lid, sifting the flour and baking soda into the mixing bowl. She looked down at her altered recipe. One third cup of sugar. She rummaged in a drawer for a smaller measuring cup, and found a yellow plastic one behind a package of cupcake liners and some corn skewers, one of which jabbed her in the hand as she pulled the cup out.

Ow. Shit. A thin line of blood smeared her thumb. She put it in her mouth, then stopped in mid-suck at a sound from the downstairs bedroom.

Whirrr…, snap. Whirrr…, snap.

Phoebe dropped the measuring cup as if she’d been stung. She picked up the Lladro, holding it like a club, and walked into the hall. Three steps from the kitchen she heard the soft slap, slap, slap of a hand of cards being dealt behind the closed bedroom door.

“No!” she shouted in a burst of bravado. She hurled the figurine as hard as she could. It smashed into the wall beside the door with a crack and shattered, pale blue shards littering the carpet.

The sound stopped.

Phoebe waited, her breath ragged in her chest. Silence. After five minutes, she returned to the kitchen, her thumb throbbing, her attention still on the empty hallway, listening, dreading. Picking up the yellow measuring cup, she glanced distractedly at the recipe—right, a third of a cup of sugar—and opened the nearest canister. She filled the little cup, dumped its contents into the flour mixture, then tossed it back inside and closed the lid, pushing the gold-tone can back against the backsplash with the others.

She added the spices—a teaspoon of this, half a tablespoon of that—and began to stir. The smooth white flour became darker and rougher, and when it was all a homogenous pale brown, she cut in the butter and an egg, added the vanilla, and used a fork for a vigorous final mixing.

Sprinkling a little flour on the cutting board, she settled the beige lump and rolled it out until it looked like biscuit dough. The biscuits of the dead.

The hallway remained silent.

She turned the oven to 350° and cut out an irregular circle about four inches across. Noting the time on the wall clock, she slid the greased cookie sheet into the oven.

When she checked ten minutes later, the cake was still pale and felt pliant under the pressure of her finger. Ten minutes more and its edges were beginning to tan, and after another ten it was an even, golden brown. She thumped it with a knuckle, feeling a bit like a contestant in the Great British Bake Off, then grabbed a potholder and pulled the soul cake out of the oven. It smelled delicious. She was tempted to taste it, just a crumb or two. No. No such thing as a ritual nibble. She left it on the counter to cool.

As the light outside began to fade, Phoebe dressed in her favorite black sweater and jeans. She put the soul cake in the center of one of Mother’s scarves, tying the corners together at the top. She added that to the basket, along with the funereal gold can, four votive candles, and a box of kitchen matches. She poured red wine into a glass, filling it nearly to the brim, then clicked off the kitchen light. She slid the patio door open with her foot, stepping out into the crisp, salt-scented air of twilight.

The sun was a Fiesta-red ball just above the horizon, flattening slightly as it descended, its surface veiled by a few wispy clouds. Phoebe watched it sink into the pewter sea, then took a deep breath, shifted her basket, and headed toward the dock.

She sat, six feet above the water. Small waves broke in front of her, scattering the surface with undulating lines of orange from the neon-sunset clouds. The basket beside her, she watched the surrounding colors fade. Water lapped softly at the pilings and she heard steady creakings from a few boats moored farther down the shore. Lights came on in houses on either side, reflecting like tiny amoebas in the dark water.

Phoebe set the scarf down on the white-washed planks and untied it, laying it flat. Votives anchored each corner. The night was still and when she lit the squat round candles, the wicks barely flickered. The light illuminated the rich colors of the scarf—butter yellow with emerald piping. The glass of wine cast rich ruby shadows.

She encircled the cake with Mother’s pearls.

Around the periphery she set the icons of her mother’s life: an unopened pack of Salems; a silver dollar from 1943, Mother’s birth year; the porcelain shepherdess; a deck of bridge cards with the queen of clubs face up; the small stack of photos. Above the scarf, the bundle of letters. Below it, the glass of wine.

She had just finished arranging everything when the full moon rose above the row of palm trees behind her, a line of white light dancing along the dark water like a path leading to the now-invisible horizon. Phoebe Morris dangled her legs over the gulf and tried to say goodbye.

Taking a drink of wine, she picked up the silver dollar and turned it over and over in her hand. What should she say? “Safe travels, Mother.” She threw it far out into the gulf. It sank soundlessly and felt like an empty gesture.

Emptiness. She was at a loss for words. She touched a finger to the soul cake. Prayers. That was the tradition. Beggars said prayers for the souls represented by each cake. She hadn’t prayed in years, wasn’t sure who or what she was praying to, but—She picked up the cake and took a bite. Bitter. Not sweet at all. Well, that was fitting. The spiced cake dissolved in her mouth, crumbly and a little gritty. She washed it down with a sip of wine.

“Our Father—” she began. No, wrong prayer. This was for Mother. Phoebe sighed and started again. “The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” It was a psalm, not a prayer, but she knew it by heart. She closed her eyes and recited it slowly.

Pulling another piece off the cake, she ate it and, after a moment of hesitation, picked up the letters. She read few lines from each of them and thought of all the replies she’d wanted to send back, but had never written. A lifetime of unspoken bravery. “Mother, you never—” she started to say. “Mother, I want—” Her words trickled away into the night air. Even now, the idea of talking back made her stomach tighten. After last night, she half expected Mother to appear, glaring, walking on water.

Another bite of cake, a sip of wine. Then, hands unsteady, Phoebe struck a red-tipped match against the wood of the dock, smelling a wisp of sulphur, and burned the first letter, holding the monogrammed page by its corner until the flames neared her fingers. The ember-rimmed fragments drifted over the side, hissing when they hit the water. They floated for a few minutes, pale against the darkness, then grew soggy and sank below the surface. She burned the others, one by one.

She slid the queen of clubs under the edge of the pearls and picked up the deck of cards. It had taken her a while to decide which queen was most evocative. Spades seemed overly wicked, diamonds too Gabor, and hearts just inappropriate. But clubs? Mother was the queen of clubs. Golf club, bridge club, luncheon club, Wellesley Club. A member instead of a mother.

It was unthinkable to think of her spending eternity without a deck of cards. Like warriors taking their shields to Valhalla. She took another bite of cake, half gone now, and held the deck in both hands.

Muscle memory kicked in. Without thinking, she divided the cards and began to shuffle. Whirr…, snap. Whirr…, snap. Her hands jerked at the sound, scattering the cards across the dock. They fluttered and sailed off into the water. Phoebe watched them disappear and picked up the queen of clubs, still lying on the silk scarf. “The queen is dead,” she whispered. She ate a bit of cake and tore the card in half, sweeping the pieces into the sea.

“I loved you once,” she said. “It hurt. I wanted to be just like you, but I wasn’t good enough.” A long silence until she spoke again.

“Then, you know what—I left.” Her voice grew stronger. “I survived. I made friends. And somewhere along the way, I realized that being like you was the last thing on earth I wanted.” She drained the wineglass, washing down the final morsel of cake.

A ragged sob surprised her, doubling her over. For several minutes after, she sat with her arms wrapped around herself, tears running down her cheeks, the wind now cold on her face. Time to go in. She felt a bone-deep weariness and a need for this to be over.

Without further ceremony, she pried off the plastic lid and tilted the gold canister toward the water. “Goodbye, Vibby,” she said. A small vortex of gray dust swirled away. Phoebe angled the can down and poured out the rest of the ashes, watching in stunned surprise as the small yellow measuring cup tumbled out and bobbed on the waves.

“Oh, no.” A gingery bile rose in her throat. “No, no, no.”

The cup disappeared from view. She looked down at the canister in her hands as the significance of what she’d done began to sink in.

“I’ve eaten Mother,” she said.

Not even in a metaphysical way, like the body of Christ that was actually a cracker. She had actually consumed bits of her mother.

Phoebe didn’t scream. She sat for a very long time, oddly calm. Shouldn’t she be horrified, disgusted? She tried to summon those feelings and found them missing. Maybe she was in shock? Likely. Shock was rather pleasant. She finally felt the kind of tranquil acceptance she’d hoped this ritual would bring her. Closing her eyes, she lay on her side, her cheek against the rough wood of the dock, her mind drifting farther and farther with each rhythmic swell of the waves.

When she woke again, the full moon was high in the starlit sky and the candles had all gone out. Phoebe sat up slowly, light-headed, her body leaden. She tried to stand, legs all pins and needles. Minutes passed. Soon she would gather up the objects that remained, damp from the sea and the night air, and return them to the basket. She smoothed a hand over the silky scarf and picked up her pearls.

With a little half-smile, she reached behind her neck and fastened the clasp with a practiced click.

“Mine,” she said.

Ellen Klages is the author of three acclaimed historical novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, and the New Mexico Book Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book awards; and Out of Left Field, which is a finalist for the Children’s History Book Prize. Her short fiction has been translated into a dozen languages and been nominated or won multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. Ellen lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

A Strange Uncertain Light
By G.V. Anderson

Anne twirled the thin, dull wedding band around her finger, quite loose. In their rush to be married, they’d failed to have it fitted properly. And there were scores layered in the metal, old scrapes and nicks from its previous owner that appeared when the light from the train window hit it just so. No one else sitting in the compartment noticed its poor quality, or they simply pretended not to. They hid behind the latest broadsheets instead, the front pages still reporting on the Munich Agreement despite it having been some weeks past.

“New bride, are you?” one middle-aged woman wreathed in shabby fur asked her, somewhere past Thirsk. “I can always tell.”

“Just yesterday,” Anne replied, swaying slightly as the train hit a switch track.

Opposite, beneath his trimmed graying moustache, the corner of Merritt’s mouth twitched. He still wore the same dark double-breasted suit he’d put on that last morning in Kent, rumpled now by almost two days’ travel, and there was a trace of liquor about him underneath the smell of bedsheets, cigarette smoke, and coffee. Anne knew she must fare no better: She’d had no time to pin her hair properly that morning, nor smear her usual scoop of talcum under her arms.

She caught the eye of the middle-aged woman again and saw now her knowing expression, the discerning brow. Her face grew hot.

“My husband and I honeymooned in the South of France,” the woman said wistfully. “Lovely place. I’m not sure what I’d have made of Yorkshire—it can be rather grim, this time of year.”

“I grew up in Yorkshire,” replied Merritt, watching the embankment alongside the train fall away. “The best of the season’s passed, it’s true, but we should catch the last of the heather.” He sat a little straighter and held out his hand to Anne. “Darling, look—”

Purple, Merritt had told her when she’d asked him about his home county, and what a poor preparation that was for the bristling mat of ling spread out before them. Anne sprang up and unhooked the catch on the window, sending the men’s newspapers flying.

“For Heaven’s sake, young lady—”

“My hair—!”

But Anne wouldn’t shut the window on that patchwork of heather and cotton grass, those banks of soft green bracken. She slung one arm out of the window and let the vibrations of the engine rattle her teeth. It hardly felt real that, until yesterday, she’d never set foot outside her little Kent town, let alone seen London. Her whole world had been contained within the walls of the schoolhouse, or her bedroom, or her father’s surgery. And now here she was, almost as far north as it seemed north could go.

“And there’s Rannings,” said Merritt, who’d caught her mood and stood with her, pointing across the moor to the elegant redbrick country house-turned-hotel. His body warmed her back.

“Oh,” Anne breathed, “it’s—”

She jerked away blinking—some grit in her eye, some spark of coal—and looked down in time to see the colorless shade of a man caught between the rails and the wheels, to be sliced through like brisket, splashing his blueish guts up the side of the train, and the window, and her face; and Anne’s own guts turned cold. Please, God, not here, too. The strength went out of her legs and she slumped against Merritt, who hadn’t seen a thing, of course, and who laughed a little as if she were a child who’d overexcited herself. Then he saw how pale she’d gone. “Darling, what’s the matter? Here, sit down, we’ll be arriving soon.”

All along the train, passengers were standing to check their bags stowed on the overhead racks, to put away a book or a bundle of knitting, to adjust their coats and fish gloves out of pockets. Amidst the hubbub, Anne shrank back into the badly sprung seat. Her eyes flicked to the red walls of Rannings before another embankment rose up and hid them from view.

These aberrations had been with her since late childhood. Silhouettes swinging in the orchards at night; shadows lurking solemnly around the churchyard on Sundays. “Brought on by stress,” her father had decided, after consulting the latest journals from London: A nervous disorder resulting from overstimulation, to be treated with ice baths and, later, shock therapy. How she could possibly be overstimulated in a town like Penshawe, miles from anywhere important, he never thought to ask. The intrusions had worsened, passing through London, but that was different. A sudden elopement and its subsequent wedding night would overstimulate anyone.

There was nothing to strain her nerves in Yorkshire, nothing to worry about now that she was free, was there? And yet, they’d followed her anyway.

Merritt was smiling mildly at her. She couldn’t smile back. She’d never found the right moment to tell him, in the two weeks of their acquaintance and their whirlwind departure, and had hoped she’d never need to. He seemed a respectable sort of person. Respectable people, in her experience, recoiled from lunacy. He might wash his hands of her completely and leave her ruined. After all, she was quite mad, and—and this scraped at her in particular—how well did she know him, really?

She picked at the dry skin beneath her new wedding band. It calmed her.

• • • •

I come upon the moor at dusk and quickly lose my way. A band of moormen point out the path of exposed shale ahead, clutches of auburn-breasted grouse swinging from their fists. They’re curious of me; it’s not often you see a girl in a fine dress traveling alone.

“You’re a long way from home,” one of them jokes.

“Liverpool’s not so far as you think, sir,” I say.

“You don’t sound like a Scouser.” His smile turns to scowl. “You sound right proper.”

The stays of my corset—and this twit—are chafing me raw. I turn away from them and allow myself a grimace.

“It’ll be dark soon and, beggin’ your pardon, you’re not from round ’ere,” another deep voice calls to me as I climb the loose shale. “These moors can be treacherous. You’ll come back with us and set out again when there’s light to see by, if you know what’s good for you.”

From my vantage point, I scan the way ahead. The shadows pool like pitch in the mossy hollows and it’s a cloudy night—there’ll be no moon, no stars. Already, my breath expels as mist and hoarfrost lends its sheen to my coat. It’s tempting to accept their offer. The grouse look plump, full of fat and flavor. But these men are strangers whose stares grow bolder the longer I stay, and I’ve tested my employer’s generosity far enough. I promised to return to Missus Whittock within the week or consider my position lost. I cannot spare even one night.

“Thank you for your concern, sir, but I’m in haste.”

“Then,” says the youngest, quietly but firmly, stepping forward and raising his lamp, “let me escort you.” He peels away from them and joins me atop the shale.

“See you’re back home before chime hours,” the deep-voiced moorman calls to him. The lad nods and leads the way to the path.

The lamplight drives away the shadows, exposing the frost-rimed bog asphodel pushing up through the rag-rug of sphagnum. Somewhere off to our right, a vole startles and darts away, too quick to catch. My guide doesn’t notice. He looks to the horizon, charting the contour of the darkening moors’ silhouette against the bloody sky like a seaman charts his stars. It looks featureless to me, but he must recognize some dale or other because he turns to me and says, “We’re some ways off yet. I’ve heard the house keeps early hours. They might not answer the door this late to someone like—I mean, unless you’re expected.” He hesitates, scanning the cut of my coat, the stitching of my boots. “Are you expected, miss?”

“No,” I admit.

A few steps, and then, “Where’s Liverpool, miss?”

He’s looking at me like I’ve come from another world. I suppose I have. On Liverpool’s docks, you can hardly hear yourself think. Ships laden with spoils from the West Indies bring free men and officers’ servants with them; and immigrants from Glasgow and Belfast, such as my parents, come looking for work. Lascars and Chinamen haul ashore crates stamped with the East India Company crest—crates heavy with silk, salt, and opium—and for all their labor, their captains often leave them behind.

Liverpool’s rough mixture of language and color and cloth may seem strange here, but it’s familiar to me. It’s this numbing quiet, this cold, the moormen’s slow burr that I will not forget.

But Yorkshire can’t be as cut off as all that. My guide’s coloring is dark and reddish, yet his lashes frame stark olive eyes. Even here, his face is poured from the melting pot of the world.

“It’s to the west,” I tell him. “At the mouth of the Mersey.”

We trudge on.

“Begging your pardon, miss, but what’s your business at Rannings? If you’re looking for a position, I should warn you—”

“It’s nothing like that,” I snap, and then twist my mouth; he’s only being kind. “An old friend of mine called on the doctor at Rannings last winter and hasn’t sent word home. I’ve come to fetch him. You haven’t seen him, have you? He’s tall, taller than you, and walks with a limp.” What a poor description for someone I’d know from the back of their head! God knows I fell asleep facing it often enough as a child.

He chews his lip. “I think I’d remember a stranger like that. But I hope you find him.” He hesitates now, his warm skin giving off vapor in the lamplight. “We hear talk, sometimes, from the groundsmen . . . About the doctor.”

I reach for his arm, grip the corded muscle there. He stops and looks at my hand in alarm. “What sort of talk?”

The lad squirms. “I don’t know, I don’t like to say.” I squeeze and he concedes, tightly, “That he’s unkind, and Godless. That he pays well for babies born during chime hours.”

“Chime hours—your companion said that, too. What does it mean?”

He wrenches his arm away. “When the church bells ring at midnight, the door to Hell opens.”

I know instantly what he’s referring to, but Hell? What superstitious nonsense!

I don’t get a chance to correct him, though, because a blast of bitter wind hits my back like a swell smashing against a breakwater and throws us together. “Don’t!” a distant voice pleads. “Don’t go in there!” I push away from him and turn into the cold to see what the spirits have sent me: a young woman, pale as egg whites. She’s staring past me, as these apparitions often do—no. No, not past. At.

She’s staring at me, purposefully, with recognition. I’ve never known such a thing—I keep my mind and heart open to them like my father taught me, but the spirits have never truly made contact—and then she’s gone. The cold wind still stings, but there’s nothing chimerical about it.

My guide lifts the lamp high to better fix me with a stare that would melt wax. “You’re one of them. Why’d you ask about chime hours, then? What did you see?”

I twist around and hold up my palms. “I told the truth before: I want to find my friend. He’s like me. That is, he’s gifted, too, and now I worry he’s come to some harm.”

“What did you see?” he repeats more forcefully.

“Nothing that’ll hurt you. Just a woman on the moor. Some poor soul who died here, no doubt.”

He’s fighting to stay put, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I expect him to run. I reach out my hand to ask for the lamp at least, but he grits his teeth and surprises me. “What’s your name?”

“Mary,” I reply. “Mary Wells. What’s yours?”

“James,” he says. Then he turns and continues along the path to Rannings.

Before I chase after him, I glance back to where the spirit appeared. Don’t! she’d said. Don’t go in there! With a stricken face, as if she knows what awaits me at the house. Easier said than done. As Missus Whittock’s paid companion, I’m little more than a doll. The old friend I’ve come to find, Benjamin, the boy from the docks—he represents everything about myself I’ve forgotten. The hard-won scran shared between our families; the pride in our own survival. Between the elocution lessons, carriage rides, and empty conversations, my past is the only part of me that still feels warm, like flesh. I can’t let it die.

The spirits wouldn’t possibly understand.

• • • •

They disembarked near Middlesbrough where Merritt hired a motorcar. They had to double back a few dozen miles, following the railway south, but eventually he took a sharp left, plunging them into untamed moorland. Two follies and a gatehouse later, Rannings was rising before them in all its symmetrical beauty. Its front elevation measured fifteen sash windows across and three high, with four Palladian columns framing the twisting entrance steps leading to the door. Merritt kept checking Anne’s expression and smiling at what he found there.

An old porter hobbled forward as the motorcar crunched to a stop, to help with their luggage. “Poor chap,” Merritt muttered; such men were a common sight since the war. They followed him to reception, which was just as palatial as the exterior and gloriously warm. Limestone quarried from the moor paved the entrance hall. Behind the reception desk, a staircase unfurled into a mezzanine, and to the left and right Anne glimpsed parlors, dining rooms, gaming tables, all humming with lazy, aristocratic conversation.

“Mister and Missus John Merritt Keene,” Merritt told the receptionist, while the porter managed their bags. His hooded eyes lingered on Anne a fraction too long.

Her fingers worried at her wedding band. As a doctor’s daughter, her position in society—especially Kent society—was assuredly middle class; and hadn’t Merritt told her his father was a lecturer at York? The social season was winding down and their fellow guests might only be the dregs that remained, but nevertheless the porter’s attention made her feel uncomfortably out of place. At any moment, the manager might come along and refuse them, casting his eye over the uneven hem of Anne’s woolen skirt as if it affronted him and his guests personally.

As the receptionist checked them in, Merritt said, “We’ll freshen ourselves up and take a late lunch in the room, won’t we, darling?” Here, he looked at Anne. “I’m afraid we’re not fit to be seen about the place.”

The receptionist smiled. She had a bit of lipstick on her teeth which made Anne feel better. “I’ll have something sent up.” She handed him a key. “Room thirty-two, on the second floor. It’s just been refurbished. We do hope you’ll enjoy your stay, Mister Keene. Missus Keene.”

“Yes, yes, splendid,” Merritt said.

Despite the porter’s apparent frailty, their luggage had already arrived by the time they climbed the two flights of stairs and located number thirty-two. Inside, they found a beautiful suite warmed by natural light from a window overlooking the front drive.

Merritt shucked off his shoes and collapsed into a chair while Anne explored the bedroom, dared to run her fingers across the silk bedspread. Someone had placed a vase of fresh roses atop the dresser with wet hands: A few droplets warped the pattern on the porcelain.

“Merritt?” Anne sidled up to the connecting doors. To his distracted, “Mm?” she said, “Can we afford this?”

He raised an eyebrow and smiled at her, his head tipped back against the chair exposing his unshaven throat. “Well, I wouldn’t say you should get used to it. We shan’t be off motoring and staying in hotels every week. But yes, I have a little put by for special occasions.” He sighed and tilted his head. “Tell me, do you like it?”

“Oh yes,” Anne gushed. “It’s lovely. I imagine it must be just like Monte Carlo.”

“Hah! You’d loathe Monte.”

“You shall have to take me, so I can decide for myself.”

Merritt fished out his cigarette case and patted his pockets. Anne had the matches. She struck one for him. “We’ll take a grand tour of Europe for our first anniversary, like the fashionable people do,” he said when his cigarette was lit, “and utterly bankrupt ourselves on the tables.”

“How foolish of us.”

“How foolish indeed.”

Merritt took her hand—only her fingers, really—stroked them with his thumb. He parted his lips, and Anne wondered if he meant to voice what she was already thinking: Look how foolish we’ve been already. Perhaps he wanted to kiss her. Isn’t that what married couples did when they reached their honeymoon suite? Was there something else he expected of her, something she didn’t know to do?

The bed lay empty behind them.

A knock at the door diffused the moment: their food, delivered on a rolling table. Finger sandwiches and small pastries, pots of tea and coffee, cheese and warm bread, slices of salty ham. They ate with their hands, dropping crumbs all over the upholstery, which felt terribly naughty. “And what would the young lady like to do with her afternoon?” Merritt teased, spreading pâté across a cracker.

“I don’t know. What is there to do?”

“Oh, we could go for a drive? I’m sure there’s cards downstairs, or a bar, if you’d like me to get you drunk.” His look turned wicked.

“You know I’d hate that. No, I’m sick of sitting down. I long to stretch my legs. Can we go for a walk? I’d like to see the grounds.”

He sucked pâté off his thumb. “Of course, darling.”

But even in that short time, the moor had transformed. Everything had taken on a queer blue quality, with the sun so low and obscured by fog. Moisture beaded in the warp and weft of Anne’s coat and darkened her unruly fringe. “Sun sets at six, sir,” called the porter from the front steps. Merritt raised his hand to show he’d heard.

“Perhaps we should stay inside after all?” Anne said, adjusting her collar and gazing out over that bleak hinterland.

“Don’t be silly,” Merritt said, holding out his arm. Together they wandered west around the side of the great house. Sodden pockets of moss squelched underfoot, expelling water like blood, and the cries of lonely pipits—juveniles that had yet to migrate south—pricked Anne’s mind. It had been easy, in the warm and dry, to forget about the shadow sliced beneath the train; now, she could think of nothing else.

“Tell me about Rannings,” she said, just for something to say, and Merritt obliged.

It had been built, he recalled, in the mid-eighteenth century by the Sixth Earl of Hythe who, like so many nobles with interests in the Caribbean, could think of nothing better to do than squander his wealth on a show home. The family estates in Barbados and Grenada, the dark bent backs of slaves, the foreman’s whip—all were well taxed to fund this venture. One by one, the red bricks settled into their mortar. Until the flow of money stopped.

“Oh,” Anne said. They’d reached the back of the house where the foundations and a few half-finished walls remained. Rannings was laid out like a horseshoe with two flanks that would have joined together at the rear to enclose an inner courtyard, but construction had ceased before the earl got his way. Someone had attempted to make a feature of the foundations by turning them into flower beds, but the cold and the wet, and exposure to the vicious Yorkshire wind, had made a mockery of that.

“The slaves rebelled, burning hundreds of acres,” Merritt said. “The earl was ruined. He sold Rannings around, oh . . . 1810, 1812? But the new owners didn’t stay. I heard there was some legal trouble. The house lay empty right up till the turn of the century; a few tenants here and there, that's all.” He nodded ahead, to the plume of smoke from a faraway train. “We used to see it from afar as boys, my brothers and I, and wonder what it was like inside. It was a barracks during the war. It’s been a hotel ever since.”

The petering walls, the weed-choked foundation stones and the gaping abyss between them: All of it pulled Anne’s nerves taut as wire. Reminded her of wounds, of weeping bedsores. Cold sweat slid down her back like dead finger trails. “Why don’t they finish what’s left of it?”

“Some clause in the freehold.” He shrugged, leading her away.

They walked in silence, and the further they went from Rannings, the easier Anne’s mind turned to other concerns. The revelation of Merritt’s having brothers, for example. He’d never mentioned them. They were, she thought, yet another thing to add to the long list of things she didn’t know about her husband. Suddenly, his arm felt alien under her hand, the scruff of growth along his jaw perilously male.

She’d happened to be at her father’s surgery the day they met. Merritt had brought in a friend who’d broken his ankle jumping a stile. With the man howling in pain and the doctor on his rounds two miles away, Anne had pushed up her sleeves and set and splinted the ankle herself. She’d seen her father do it enough times; had held down patients before, when there was no one else to be found.

Afterward, Merritt called in to praise her quick actions. He called in the next day, too, even when his friend had been sent home and he had no reason to stay. His graying temples betrayed his age and the townsfolk called him a fool, chasing after a girl so young. But Anne allowed their trysts. Encouraged them, despite her father’s protests. Penshawe was a confined place where everyone knew everyone else’s business, no matter how intimate, and the young people whose friendship she’d depended on as a child had married and moved away. She was desperately lonely.

And Merritt knew nothing about her other than what she chose to present to him. That fresh start—it was too intoxicating to resist.

Perhaps Merritt felt the same way.

He felt her stiffen and pressed his hand to her back, steadying her. She tried not to balk at that steering touch. She had not escaped the grasp of one father only to fall into the hands of another.

They came upon a small village called Huxby three miles from the house, no more than a rough square overlooked by cottages and a church with a crooked spire. The old vicar was closing the door for the night. He waved cheerfully to them as if they’d worshipped there all their lives. Anne waved back shyly and leaned towards Merritt. “Is this your parish?”

“No, this is still part of the estate,” Merritt replied. “My family live north of here. We’ll stay at Rannings a few days more, then I suppose I should take you to meet them.”

He stopped at the sight of the memorial in the square. Newly erected and yet already stained with mildew, it listed the local war dead in cold iron letters.

“Will your brothers be there?”

Merritt’s lips thinned. “No. My brothers are here.”

Anne’s eyes picked them out in the dark.

William Keene

20 December 1895—2 August 1917

Clarence Henry Keene

4 July 1898—3 August 1917

“We’ve walked too far,” Merritt said coldly.

They returned to Rannings as the last of the light fled. Merritt said nothing to her over supper, throwing back brandy by the fire until late. And when he finally came to bed, just like their wedding night, the sheets lay quite flat and undisturbed in the space between them.

• • • •

The wailing starts before I see the house and grows louder as we pick our way across the incomplete foundations. James raises the lamp and I catch sight of the walls, dark as dried blood. Almost every great house in England’s been built with sugar money. I burn at the thought of the lives that paid for these bricks, these window frames, the furnishings inside.

“What sort of doctor lets his patients cry like that?” I hiss.

James shudders beside me. “Who knows what he does to ’em first.” Then he passes me the lamp; it seems he’s reached his limit. “Look, I said I’d bring you and I have, but I won’t get no closer than this, miss. The house is touched.” He glances at the walls as if they might be listening and lowers his voice further. “The doctor took someone from us, too, a long time ago. You’re a braver lass than me, standing up to him. Be careful, miss.”

I nod solemnly. “Thank you.”

James melts into the darkness beyond the lamp’s reach, leaving me to climb the coiling steps and ring the bell alone. The housekeeper—or matron, I suppose she’d be better called—answers the door in her housecoat and slippers. She looks at me meanly. “We’re not hiring. Clear off!”

I push past her. “Actually, I’m here for Mister Benjamin Walchop. A year is quite long enough for someone who doesn’t even need treatment, don’t you think?”

The entrance hall’s Baltic, the limestone flags beneath my feet gritty with dirt. I’d expected to find rugs and hangings, perhaps a varnished sideboard lit by gas lamps like the ones Missus Whittock has in her drawing room, but the space is bare and lifeless, as are the dim rooms leading off from either side. In a far corner, a gleaming cockroach scuttles away from the lamplight and disappears through a hole in the skirting board.

A hospital, Benjamin had reassured me when he’d come to the Whittocks’ back stoop to say good-bye; he’d been warped with hunger, in body and sense. A sanatorium. Well, perhaps I’m ignorant, but to me, Rannings looks and sounds like an asylum taken wholesale from those silly novels my employer likes so much. I’d laugh if I wasn’t so angry.

I turn on the matron. “Where’s Benjamin?”

“You should’ve made an appointment.” She closes the door, trapping me inside.

“Oh yes,” I scoff, gesturing around, “this is clearly the sort of place where one must write ahead. You’re quite run off your feet, I’m sure. But, see, I’ve been asking after Benjamin for months now, with no response. Is the doctor in?”

She stiffens at my tone and narrows her eyes distrustfully. Looks over my attire and my hale figure beneath, evaluating where I’ve come from. Missus Whittock clothes and feeds me well; anything less would reflect badly on her husband’s income. The matron sniffs. “You’re in luck, Miss . . . ?”

“Wells,” I say.

She leads me to the right, through a high-ceilinged room with heavy drapes that mute the echoing clip of my boots. A few moths flicker around my lamp, casting erratic shadows on the walls. I shoo them away.

From behind me, I hear the rattle of dice in a cupped palm, the clatter as they land. I stop and turn, but there are no tables. I can’t imagine there ever having been any, though I suppose there must have been, once. And—is that the taste of champagne? It burns my tongue, sharp and painful. Yes, I’m sure it is. Missus Whittock let me have a sip last year. For a girl raised on beef scouse and farl, it’s a difficult flavor to forget.

The matron is staring at me. “Seen something interesting, Miss Wells?”

“No.”

Her lips tighten like they’re holding in a smile, and for the first time I’m afraid.

• • • •

Cold, clammy hands pushed up between the floorboards like couch grass, splintering the wood. Anne recoiled from the edge of the mattress as fingers plucked at her through the sheets.

Help! Help us!

She started awake and then lay still, unsure; the pale morning light had left the room as spectral as the moor, and the ghost of a too-firm grip ached on the inside of her upper arm. The skin there was discolored, a bruise just forming. Her heart started to pound until she remembered that Merritt had marched them both back to Rannings last night, his hand like a vise.

He was awake, too, sitting by the open window with his head in his hands. His shins, exposed by shrunken pajamas, had pimpled with gooseflesh.

Anne curled up tight and tried to doze, but true sleep was long gone. She sighed. The floorboards were unmarked and cool against her soles as she padded over to the swelling curtains.

Merritt’s brandy-laced breath swirled like brume. He swallowed stickily. She reached past him and pulled down the sash. Placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. “Merritt?”

He blinked and took her hand. “Sorry, darling. Bit of a shock, that’s all.”

“Your brothers.”

“I should’ve expected a memorial, of course. They’re setting them up all over.”

Anne sank into the seat beside him and together they looked out over the carriage sweep, the lawn, and the dale beyond. The sun was poised on the brink of the horizon, lightening the eastern sky like a spill of bleach. Rannings had been a barracks during the war, she remembered Merritt saying, and now that she looked, she fancied she could see the scars on the lawn where drills had churned the grass. “Did they train here?”

“Briefly—just long enough to learn how to hold a pistol. I was stationed in Scarborough. In 1917, we were sent to the front, to Belgium . . .” He looked at her blearily; he was still drunk. White sputum had collected in the corners of his mouth. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’ve never known wartime. Christ. When were you born?”

“1916.”

His eyes unfocused, and the little color left in his cheeks drained away. “You’re barely half my age. What must people think of me?”

Anne gave Merritt’s fingers a small, nervous squeeze. “I don’t see how that’s anyone’s business.”

“Then what must you think of me?” Merritt ran a shaking hand through his hair, still slick with yesterday’s oil. “I never got to be a young man, y’know. My youth died with my brothers, in the mud of Passchendaele. I thought I’d put it all behind me, but then I came to Penshawe and met you. You reminded me of everything I’d missed.” He dragged his hand down his face, peering at her through greasy fingers. “And now there’s talk of another bloody war in every newspaper, every morning. I can’t face it—I can’t bear it again!”

Anne’s breath caught. No one had ever been so honest with her, never bared themselves so raw, not even her parents; what did he want her to say?

She opened her mouth, but so did he, to retch. The vase of roses was still on the dresser nearby. She snatched out the flowers, thorns biting into her palm, and thrust the vase under Merritt’s chin in time to catch a dribble of bile.

“You need rest,” said Anne, back on familiar ground, “and plenty of water.” She poured out a tumbler and cupped the back of his head as he gulped it down, the sharp bulge in his neck bobbing grotesquely. With a groan and a lot of morose muttering, he returned to bed. Anne tucked him in.

It felt too awkward to stay there in the semi-dark, serenaded by phlegmatic snores, so she dressed and went downstairs. Other guests nodded to her as they passed, all following the smell of frying bacon. The receptionist greeted each one in the detached, polite way Anne knew well from operating the telephone in her father’s surgery. “Good morning, Missus Keene. Breakfast is through here.”

“Thank you, yes,” Anne said, hovering by the desk. “Um, my husband is sleeping in. Could something plain be sent up to him in an hour? Perhaps some toast?”

“Of course,” the receptionist said smoothly, noting it down. Her fingernails matched her red lipstick, her perfectly pinned hair that elusive shade of auburn no dye could replicate. Anne tucked a loose, wiry curl of her own hair behind her ear.

“How have you found your room, Missus Keene?”

“Oh, fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” The receptionist underlined her note and looked up to greet the next guest.

“That sounded rather dismissive, didn’t it?” Anne twisted her hands together, recapturing the receptionist’s attention. “It really is lovely. I’ve—I’ve never stayed anywhere like this before. I don’t know how to behave.”

The receptionist smiled at that—a real, warm smile, rather than the too-wide, toothy show she’d put on for their arrival yesterday. “You’d be surprised how many people say that. There’s nothing to it, honestly. I’d say you’re a natural.”

Anne blushed. “Well, anyway, I’d never guess it was a barracks, and empty before that.”

“Never empty for long,” she replied. “Rannings has had quite the history. It’s even been a hospital. Well, asylum.”

“An asylum?”

The receptionist inclined her head, misinterpreting Anne’s appalled expression. “A private institution. Shut down about a hundred years ago, but we keep that quiet. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t gossip.”

As Anne ate the breakfast she no longer had the appetite for, she wondered: Did Merritt know about that particular piece of Rannings history? Was he the sort of person to think it a talking point, an object of interest, like the lords and ladies who’d once paid to see the inmates of Bedlam?

Her father had considered sending her to one or two institutions when she was younger, before deciding to attempt treatment himself. She’d found the brochures in his desk drawer. Modern therapies were nothing like the crude ministrations of the previous century, they reassured their reader, but Anne couldn’t stop imagining the worst: manacled inmates, hair shorn for wigs, rolling in their own filth. Such wretched conditions were common before the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. A privately run asylum in the 1830s must have been Hell on Earth.

Her fellow diners ate on, oblivious, but Anne couldn’t stomach any more. The sound of cutlery scraped in her ears. So too the wet click of people’s mouths as they chewed. A vulgar flash of mulched sausage when someone laughed, slimy debris coating their tobacco-stained tongue.

Out in the entrance hall, away from the noise, it was better. The porter had left the door ajar while he assisted with a guest’s departure. The cool air lifted her fringe and wicked the sweat away from her neck. Tickled her numb lips. She rubbed them hard.

Help! Help us!

Hand frozen over her mouth, she stared down the long parlor opposite. It was furnished with damask sofas and oak reading desks now, but yesterday afternoon, tables had been arranged for craps and baccarat. Someone had tucked a champagne flute into a bookcase and it had been missed by the staff. Anne only noticed it because the morning light caught the glass exactly right.

At the far end of the room stood the whisper of a girl in early-nineteenth-century dress. Her posture was bold, totally at odds with her finery. She turned away as if called, and then disappeared through a door that didn’t exist.

• • • •

“Miss Wells to see you, Doctor.”

He removes his spectacles and stands as I enter, offering me a shallow bow. I curtsy, studying him from beneath my lashes. The doctor is thin and ropy, a sick tree in winter, with meatless jowls that quiver as he shoots the matron a hard glance. “It’s rather late,” he says. “I was about to retire.”

“You’ll want to stay for this one, Doctor. She has a lot of . . . questions.” The matron smiles. The light from my lamp picks out her eyes.

“Questions about what?”

“Mister Benjamin Walchop,” I say, raising my chin. “He came to you a year ago. I bid you release him from your care so that he can return home immediately.”

The doctor leans in. “And you are a relative?”

“A friend, representing Mister Walchop’s family. I have their authority here.” I pull a sealed letter from my skirt pocket and hand it to him. Benjamin’s mother has scratched her mark within, but the rest is by my hand since she never learned how.

The doctor skims it and casts it aside. “I’m afraid that will not be possible. Mister Walchop’s is an interesting case and his treatment is not yet complete.”

“Treatment for what, exactly? He is not ill.” I glance between them. When it’s clear an answer isn’t forthcoming, I go on, “I saw the contract you sent him. It specified a period of six months in exchange for payment. You’ve broken your own terms. If you intend to keep him here longer, the least you could do is compensate his family properly.”

The doctor chuckles. “How mercenary.”

I grip the back of the chair facing the desk. “It’s as he would wish it. But now that I’ve seen your sanatorium for myself—if you can possibly call it that—such terms simply won’t do. I’ve already contacted the authorities with my concerns. I’m sure the magistrate would like to know where you earned your doctorate. So would I, for that matter.”

“Oh,” the doctor says slowly, baring dull, gray teeth, “I like her. The door, Matron.”

She slams it shut. I glare at her, my fist tightening on the back of the chair. The room’s both too hot and too cold. Beneath my dress, sweat has left a crust of salt on my skin.

He replaces his spectacles and opens a drawer in his desk, fingers through the files within. “You shouldn’t threaten legal action if you cannot take the consequences. I must protect my interests.” He peers over the rim of his spectacles and tuts. “Where does a low creature like you find the gall for such threats, I wonder?”

I prickle at that, but finally hold my tongue. For all the time I’ve spent with Missus Whittock and her set, I can’t scrub away the lilt, the brass. What a lady may get away with, a poor girl cannot. How much I’ve forgotten. How fat I’ve grown on privilege.

“The treatment, since you ask, is more a series of tests.” He withdraws a file and opens it. “I’ve studied many children, Miss Wells. There was a girl, once, who could talk to birds—just called them out of the sky on a whim. Another could detect lies. One boy could hear my very thoughts, fancy that. But none of them hold a candle to your friend. The boy who cannot die, despite my very best attempts.”

My legs tremble beneath my skirts.

When we were ten, Benjamin was mauled by a terrier. I battered it around the head with a brick but the dog held on, shaking Benjamin’s leg viciously. A ratter, obeying its breeding. His mother came out with a glowing poker and burned it till it let go, but not before his cries had called the whole neighborhood down upon us. A hundred pairs of eyes watched as his torn calf knitted itself together right there in the street. It didn't knit neatly enough, though: He was left with a nasty limp, and it’s hard to find a dock-master who’ll give you work when there's fitter pickings to be had.

His mother tried to shrug off the rumors by telling people the bite hadn’t been so bad, that the truth had got twisted in the telling, but by then the story had spread. Who knows how quickly it reached the ear of this doctor, and for how long he watched unemployment slide into desperate poverty, waiting for the right moment to bait his line.

We stare at each other, and I know I’m right. He must see it in my expression, too, because he laughs with delight and throws the open file he’d fished out onto the desk. The notes are minimal. The insert bears my name. Mary Margaret Wells.

“Mister Walchop has a rare gift that could change the world, and they say birds of a feather flock together,” he leers. “So answer me one question, Miss Wells: What is it that you can do?”

I lunge for the door. Terror’s already buckling my knees, but the matron strikes the back of my head with a candlestick for good measure. I fall hard, smashing James’s lamp. Voices rumble thickly above me, then she takes me by the armpits and drags me through the doorway. Lord, she’s strong. We go down a staircase; my heels thud on every step. I’m drooling a bit. I can hear someone crying.

I’m just getting my wind back, just finding the strength to struggle, when she throws me into a dark room and locks the door. I lie on the floor, listening to her receding footsteps and the whimpering from the next room over.

“Hello?” I croak.

The whimpering stops. Rough scratching comes from my left and then the reply, “Who’re you?”

“Mary,” I say.

“I can’t hear nowt. Come closer to the wall. There’s a hole.”

I crawl toward the voice and run my hands over the damp stone. My palms bump against a protruding finger. A chunk of mortar has been chipped away, I realize, leaving a gap between our cells. I link my warm finger into their cold one. “I’m Mary,” I repeat. “Who are you?”

“I’m Martha.”

I squeeze Martha’s finger. It’s missing its nail. “How long have you been here, Martha?”

“I dunno, few weeks.”

Her accent is broad. The same ruse, then: taking chime children from the poor where they won’t be missed. I grind my teeth at the thought.

The darkness thins and I look up: A narrow, barred window above me lets in a little light as the moon slides out from its cover of cloud. I release Martha’s finger and reach up to grasp the bars. It’s been but minutes since James left me; I pray he lingered despite his fear. I suck down the freezing air, each breath as painful as pressing a bruise. “James?” I bellow, fit for a dockhand. “If you’re there, help! Help us!”

“No one ever comes this way,” says Martha.

“I did,” I shoot back.

Ice suddenly blooms on the iron like mold. I pull my hands away before they can stick and look over my shoulder. The ghost from the moor, the one who cried the warning, is in my cell. Her gray eyes are wide with shock. Her hand grasps the doorframe for balance. She must have perished here; tortured, perhaps, by the doctor’s twisted tests. But her clothes are strange. I’ve never seen skirts that fall straight and stop at the shin.

I don’t have time to question it. “Please, help us.”

“Who’re you talking to?” asks Martha.

• • • •

Anne had never hallucinated a person who wasn’t in pain, at the point of death. Sometimes, the morbidity of her own mind was worse than seeing visions altogether. This girl, though, had looked whole and healthy, with a calculating, determined expression that endeared her to Anne immediately.

The porter was curling his fingers around the edge of the front door. Instinctively, Anne darted behind the reception desk and through the staff entrance beneath the staircase. There, in the dark, she hiccupped a laugh and held it in with her hand. Why had she hidden from him like a child? A porter wouldn’t question a guest standing in the hall, nor would he challenge her if she’d decided to explore the parlor. But then there’d been that stare of his when they arrived—too long, too intimate.

Through the gap in the door’s hinge, she took her turn to watch him in the hall. Why did he linger? He might have been waiting to serve another guest, but she fancied he was listening for her, could hear her shaking breath.

He looked directly at her hiding place. Began to make for it. Her breath caught. She ran lightly down the staff corridor, past linen cupboards and offices, hoping she was faster. Eventually she reached a door that opened onto the inner courtyard. Three kitchen boys were huddled by the water pump sharing a cigarette. They glimpsed her as she backtracked, one of them calling out in surprise. She panicked and dashed right, the windows flashing past, until she was forced to turn into the east wing.

Clearly, this part of the ground floor was unused. Someone had wallpapered once, and laid down carpet, but the sprucing ended there. One room still boasted its old gas fittings. Another’s plaster was rotting away.

Anne slowed to a stop and leaned against an empty doorframe to catch her breath, the playground fear that had driven her this far melting away, leaving her feeling more than a little silly. She tugged her sleeves down to cover her wrists and wrapped her arms around her middle. The ceiling creaked, its bare lightbulb swinging gently: a guest moving around their room. On the floor above that, her husband lay sprawled in the bed of number thirty-two.

She’d grown up watching her father tear people’s bodies apart and stitch them back together, but the mind was a different beast—she knew that better than most. The loss of his brothers on the very same battlefield he’d survived had left Merritt with particular scars that no amount of ice baths or shock therapy could heal—God knew, they’d done nothing for her—but those were the only tools she understood. And drink, it seemed, was his.

How was she supposed to stitch her husband back together with nothing but words?

Her soles had left footprints in the dusty carpet. Breadcrumbs leading the way she’d come. As her eyes followed them, even as her foot tensed to take a step, a draft from further down the hall swept them away. A door at the far end, hung badly, wavered, scraping against its frame. From the sliver of darkness beyond, Anne heard the rasp of saw on bone.

Help! Help us!

The cry sounded so close, so real, that she hesitated. It was easy to ignore the intrusions when no one else reacted to them. When she was alone, there was no way to tell if they were genuine or not. She’d left her mother lying on the kitchen floor for hours with a concussion once, unsure whether she’d imagined the shriek and smack of a head hitting the black-and-white tiles. If someone really was stuck and calling for help and she turned away, just as she’d turned away that day, she’d never forgive herself.

She approached the door, pulled it wide, the brass handle so cold it burnt her palm. A belch of stale, sour air came up from the staircase beyond, chased by a drawn-out sob that might have been the wind keening through some broken window. The steps demanded she take them one at a time, hewn as rough as they were and slick with mold.

Merritt’s matchbox still bulged in her cardigan pocket. She got it out and struck one, peering around a forgotten wine cellar. The racks were empty now, though the vinegary tang of wine gone bad lingered. A leak from some unseen pipe had left a film of water on the floor, so that the walls seemed to extend for infinity in the reflection, and her tiny match-light, her own pale face, stared up at her from below.

There was a door leading further into the basement. She pushed it open and advanced into a corridor, similarly flooded. The match was burning low. She shook out the flame and lit another, edging toward the first room on her right. The rasping returned, louder.

“Hello?” she said meekly.

That word, and then her gasp, echoed back.

A boy was laid out on a table within—ashen except where the skin of his chest had been peeled aside in lapels of red, exposing white ribs.

Anne reeled, dropping the match. The light guttered out, but she could still see him branded on the inside of her eyelids. Her breath wouldn’t come. “It’s not real,” she whispered, and the whispers flew back at her. It’s not real, not real, not real.

Help!

She fumbled with the matches, lost one, lit another.

A lean man with his back to her, pate shining. He was standing over another body, another child, viciously pumping his arm back and forth, and the rasping of the saw was in her bones. She gulped down bile and left the room.

“Is—is there anyone here?”

The second room she looked in on was blessedly empty. She clasped the doorframe and sighed. The calls for help had been in her head after all. But—what was that? Scratching from the next room over, and a wretched sniveling. She bit her lip and sloshed along, the water deeper here and starting to flood her shoes. The third door had slumped free of its upper hinge, its bottom corner jammed into the floor. She squeezed through the gap and held up the remaining sliver of matchstick. “H-hello?”

A little girl with her back to Anne, clawing at the far wall in an attempt to reach a high-set window. She turned to look at something over Anne’s shoulder, and the sight of whatever she saw there brought on a fresh, frantic attempt at the wall.

The flame reached Anne’s fingers and she yelped with pain. She lit another—her last—and waded toward the girl, but she was gone now, despite having looked and sounded so solid.

The wallpaper where she’d stood was sloughing away in thick, fatty strips. There, on the bare stone beneath . . . White scratch marks, in sets of four and five. Anne placed her own fingers on them, in the grooves.

“No,” she moaned, “it’s not real.”

Not real, not real, real, the echoes replied. Real, real, real.

She dropped the match and fled the cell. Twisted in the dark to find the way out. The staircase was through the wine cellar door on her left; she could see the light on the steps. Out of the depths of the basement to her right, a woman was charging toward her, yanking cord from around her neck. “Get back here, you little bitch!”

She screamed then and dived for the exit, throwing herself up the steps and through the deserted rooms of the east wing with abandon, fear clinging to her like a net of spiders. She yanked open a door to the courtyard, alarming the staff working there—“Miss? Miss, you can’t be here!”—and ran through the sucking mud of the foundations, drawn to the open moor and fresh air beyond.

Something cold grabbed her calf. She looked down: The ground had sprouted a dozen flailing cadaverous arms. One partially buried face, an accusing eye.

She kicked out, too terrified to feel it connect. When her feet finally met hard gray shale, they slid around in her shoes, her socks sodden and the leather stretched; she slipped and fell down the incline, scraping her palms on the rock. She got up, but her side was hurting now and she was fighting the urge to cry. She risked a glance back at Rannings. The girl from the parlor, almost invisible in daylight, was walking toward the house.

A gust of wind, or perhaps the strength of Anne’s gaze, jostled her and she turned. Their eyes met. Anne bit back a sob. She was so young, no more than seventeen. “Don’t!” she yelled at the apparition, for all the good it would do, since she couldn’t be real. “Don’t go in there!”

When the vision faded, Anne put a bloody hand to her forehead and took a deep breath. Stress, her father had said. Overstimulation. It was clear that Rannings was causing exactly that, and the only way to settle her nerves was to put as much distance between herself and that awful building as possible. Anyway, she couldn’t bear the thought of going back; she’d only bring the smell of the cellar with her and taint everything. So she walked on, one hand pressed to the stitch in her side, the other guarding her face from the worst of the lashing wind.

As she tramped through the heather she’d so wanted to see, her spirit unraveled. Penshawe seemed like Eden now, a bucolic paradise as untouchable and as improved by nostalgia as childhood. She’d telephoned her parents from King’s Cross just yesterday morning and already her mind had muddied the exact intonation of her mother’s voice, had softened her father’s outrage as he told his daughter, and then Merritt, exactly what he thought of them. The simplicity of that life suddenly appealed to her as it hadn’t before, the march of time marked by service on Sundays, reliably followed by a joint of beef and potatoes, hot from the oven.

Huxby lay beyond the next dale. Anne made for the church as the sky darkened and booms of thunder vibrated in her chest. The churchyard gate opened with a squeal. The first fat drops of rain hit the nape of her neck and slithered down between her shoulder blades as she heaved the door open and stepped inside where it was dry. The deluge came down behind her like a final curtain at the theater.

In the murky light from the diamond-grid windows, Anne saw empty pews knocked slightly askew. A dark pulpit. Quite different from the church in Penshawe, where the secretary took great pains to refresh the flowers and notices, and there was always someone, if not the vicar, tending the vestry and lighting candles in the chapel. Still, the door had been unlocked and she had seen the vicar just yesterday.

Anne’s hands were chalk-white, her nails lilac with cold. She stuffed them into her armpits and walked stiffly up the nave, leaving muddy footprints on the memorial slabs. Somewhere in the rotting beams above, a pigeon cooed and defecated, a falling white smear joining the many others splattering the chancel steps. She skirted the mess and wandered along the north transept, knocking on a discreet little door to what she assumed must be the vestry. Each rap echoed, reminding her horribly of the wine cellar, so she opened the door with an apology on her lips only to find it empty apart from a few chests. They were filled with blankets. She shook out a tartan one and wrapped herself in it, coughing and sneezing at the dust. Returning to the nave, she picked a seat far from the pigeon and clumsily removed her saturated socks and shoes. Tucking her feet up under her, she fell into a lethargic, shivering stupor.

Rain shimmered on the windows. The roof had a leak, an insistent drip coming from the south transept. The pew was hard enough to numb her back and behind. And yet she did sleep, fitfully, for a few hours, while the storm battered the moor and drowned the graves in the churchyard.

Until she sensed movement. Her eyelids fluttered open, her chapped lips peeled apart. The angle of the sun, the shadows, had changed. The vicar squinted at her from the end of the pew, bent almost double with his hands clasped behind him. He beamed at the sight of her stirring.

“Reverend.” Anne licked her lips and rubbed her eyes. The blanket fell from her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, tugging it back. “I couldn’t find you, and I was so cold. I took this. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Nay, ’tis nowt.” His ears were so overgrown with age, so soft and cartilaginous, that they waggled when he shook his head. He sucked at his own lips in such a way as to imply several missing teeth. “It’s good to have company. It’s been twenty year since anyone new’s come by.”

“You waved to me yesterday. I was standing by the memorial.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding blandly. He didn’t remember her in the slightest. “Well, you can stay as long as you like. What’s your name?”

“It’s . . . Keene,” replied Anne. “Missus Keene.”

He worked his gums, wet bottom lip protruding thoughtfully. “You don’t sound right sure. Newly married, eh?”

“Yes. The day before yesterday.” Anne sighed, buried herself deeper into the blanket. “I’m afraid we’ve made a terrible mess of things.”

“Oh?” The vicar chuckled. “What’s troubling you, then, Missus Keene?”

Anne looked at her wedding band. For the first time since she’d put it on, she’d completely forgotten about it. “He’s a drunk. The war’s left him with some sort of shell shock. And I—I—”

“Go on, lass, spit it out.”

“Well, I see things, people, that aren’t there.”

The vicar raised his brows at this. His eyes emerged from the crumpled folds of his face, startlingly blue.

“I didn’t want to tell him, but I don’t see how it can be avoided now I’ve made such a spectacle of myself.” Anne showed him her palms, grazed during her fall. He tutted sympathetically. “My God, he’ll be so ashamed of me,” she whispered, the details of her flight coming back to her: the mad scramble through the mud, the shrieking, the bewildered staff. Her heart thumped against her ribs. “What will I do? I can’t go home.”

“You’re seeing apparitions?” He came closer, turning one waxy ear her way. “Tell the good reverend all about it, lass.”

So she told him about the hanging men in the orchards of Penshawe, the shadows that drifted formlessly in the churchyard, the bleeding woman she’d sometimes seen slumped on the bench outside the greengrocer’s. And then in London, where her madness became difficult to hide: the crawling man in the alleyway, his fingertips blackened with plague. The one who stepped off the Embankment into the Thames. The burnt child. And then the man caught beneath the train, the cries for help that had tricked her into investigating the bowels of Rannings, and what she’d found there.

The vicar made an inquisitive audience. Unlike the numerous doctors to whom she’d described her visions, he pushed for more detail, more description, and yet his questions never felt prying. By the time she finished, he’d taken a seat beside her, brooding like a particularly ugly gargoyle. “I’ve heard of the doctor afore but it’s worse than I thought. Summat must be done for them poor souls.” He cocked his fluffy head. “Tell me, when was you born?”

Anne groped for a reply. The question had caught her off guard. “The third of F—”

“The time, lass, the time.”

She frowned. “Oh, I don’t know. My father always says he delivered me on the dinner table. Supper, I suppose you’d call it. Why?”

“Vespers,” the vicar said to himself. His eyes popped out again like blue winkles emerging from their shells. He leaned in conspiratorially, his bulbous, arthritic hands clasping his knees. “Nah then, have you ever heard of chime children?”

Anne gave him a tired, indulgent smile. “No, I haven’t.”

“Chime children are what’s born when the bells toll. They can do owt—commune with God’s creations, heal the sick, even pierce the veil of Heaven. Folk up here say they’re born at midnight, and folk down your way might say morning or evening, but it’s the bells what matter.” He pointed up to the tower where the transept and nave intersected, where presumably a bell now hung, silent. “I’ll bet the bells was ringing out when you came into this world. Powerful thing, bell-metal . . . You still with me, lass? You look right flayt.”

Anne was on her feet, hugging the blanket tight. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Reverend,” she said coldly. “My delusions are caused by stress, and in the last two days I have estranged myself from my only family and married a man I barely know. Our minds are extremely susceptible to suggestion. We all learned about the Black Death and the Great Fire of London in school. I was told of Rannings’ history, the asylum. I’ve read anatomy books. I’ve heard my father perform amputations. All I had to do was fill in the blanks.”

“What about the scratches in the wall? You said they felt real.”

“Everything I see feels real, Reverend, but there must be a rational explanation.”

The vicar smiled at her as if she were a marvel and spread his arms. “If you wanted rational, why seek shelter in a church?”

She had no answer to that. “But this bell nonsense—it sounds so pagan. It's hardly appropriate for a vicar.”

“The Bible tells us God created the world, so I say chime children are His work. Nowt can exist that He did not intend, Missus Keene.”

Anne buried her face into the musk of the scratchy blanket and exhaled. Her tongue pulsed against her bottom teeth. A part of her willed it to be true: It explained so much about where and in what state her visions appeared. She had never been a morbid child, had suffered no early grief, so there seemed no reason for her illness to fixate on churchyards, on pain and terror.

She lifted her head and gazed at the ceiling, the roosting pigeon. How could she be sure this wasn’t simply another delusion? But then the vicar was here, wasn’t he? She wasn’t alone?

“Can it be true?” She gazed at him. “I’m not mad?”

“You’ve no control over what you see or when.” He lifted a finger. “Intrusions is still intrusions, sane or no. You must find a way to bear them.”

“But I’ve seen others, other people who aren’t suffering. The girl I saw today, she looked fine. Does that mean even she’s . . . dead?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” The vicar shrugged, resting his hands on his gut. “Some folk leave impressions, not just where they died, but where they made a difference.” He looked around his church with such serene pride that Anne found herself looking as well. At the crooked pews, the broken memorial slabs. A candelabrum knocked to the floor, draped in cobwebs, and a bare altar. A leaking roof. A pigeon and its excrement. A vicar who, despite his unwashed appearance and gummy mouth, was strangely odorless.

Anne felt sick. She went to the front door and pushed it open, but the rain was thick and driving sideways, pulping the shrubs. The path to the churchyard gate was underwater, and she could barely make out the war memorial twenty feet away. She would easily get turned around in this, without the sight of Rannings to guide her back. Thunder growled, and between the dark clouds, lightning flickered.

The vicar walked through her and out into the storm, unaffected by the rain. He stooped especially low to read one gravestone and then another, until he found what he was looking for. “Aye, here’s me.”

Anne’s skin tingled. “Please don’t walk through me again, Reverend.” But she held the blanket over her head, trusting the stiff weave to keep out the worst of the rain, and plunged barefoot into the churchyard to read the stone.

Rev. Jonah Rolfe

28 June 1771—5 December 1855

“Fifty year,” the vicar said. “I poured my heart and soul into this parish for fifty year. I were happy here, lass, right happy I were. You should’ve seen it in its prime.” A frown, a return to the present moment. “I remember you now. Yesterday means nowt to me, but I do remember you.” His voice was fading. Anne stepped closer, protecting him from rain he could not feel. “Help them poor souls up at the house, if you can. They’ll want to talk—that’s why they come to you. Our bell will make it easier. Purest bell-metal an earl can buy.

“Good luck, lass.”

And then he was gone.

• • • •

“Who’re you talking to?” asks Martha.

“A ghost,” I say—a ghost who’s already gone, her eyes the last of her to fade. I can’t be sure she even heard me.

Martha moves behind the wall. I imagine her pressing her ear to the hole. “What?”

“Never mind.” I rub the back of my head where the matron struck me and my fingers come away wet and dark. A headache forms there, as if a gentle press was all it needed. I ease back down beside the hole and we link fingers again.

“Can you find things, too?” she whispers. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I seem to be much better at losing them. . . Why, what can you find?”

“Owt,” Martha replies, and there’s a note of quiet pride in her voice. “When I were little, folk used to say I must’ve stolen things, to know where to find ’em. They chased us out of town. Where we live now is better. Now folk pay me, sometimes, to help find stuff.”

I smile, understanding her pride. As children, any coins Benjamin and I could contribute to our families were precious, whether they’d been earned honestly or lifted out of a loose purse. Every coin meant our mothers could afford to put one less neighbor’s shirt through the back-breaking mangle, make one less matchbox when we’d all gone to bed. Our fathers could come home from the docks one hour earlier, live one more day before their bodies gave out. It’s why the damage to Benjamin’s leg was such a blow. But I also smile because her gift gives me hope.

“Listen, Martha, does it work for people, what you can do?”

She’s quiet for a moment. Perhaps the doctor’s asked her the same thing, and now she regrets saying as much to me. “Sometimes.”

I give her finger a little squeeze. “You see, I came to find my friend. He’s here somewhere, locked up, just like us. Have you heard anyone crying out?”

“I think so,” she whispers back. “They’re somewhere dark, somewhere . . . down there.” I can barely hear her as she draws away from the wall, a dowsing rod for Benjamin. Then she yanks on my finger and says, her voice pitched high with sudden panic, “Please don’t leave me here! I know you didn’t come for me, but I wanna go home, too.”

I soothe her as best I can, pressing her poor exposed nail beds to my lips. Guilt stings my eyes. I came for Benjamin and Benjamin alone, but I don’t have the heart to abandon this child. I’m not a monster. Will Missus Walchop ever forgive me, if I’m forced to choose? This girl can die and Benjamin cannot—is that what I must tell his mother, what I must tell myself, in leaving Benjamin to his torture?

The peal of a faraway bell ripples through me. I look up to the window. Fog slithers in like water. “What’s that?”

“It’s coming from the church at Huxby,” says Martha. “It must be midnight.”

“Chime hours,” I breathe.

Every clang strikes me like a smith’s hammer. White dots blister my vision, expanding and joining together until I can’t see, and everything—the chill bleeding through my skirts, the vise of my stays; even Martha, noticing something’s wrong—comes to me as if from a great distance. I turn obligingly inward like I was taught, into the light.

An old bell appears above me, scabbed with turquoise verdigris. Below, pulling the rope, is the ghost. I watch the bell’s clapper connect with the rim. As the vibration stretches impossibly long, pinning us in a moment, our eyes meet. Her left eyelid distorts when she smiles.

“It’s you,” she says.

Suddenly she’s right here, or I’m there—space has ceased to matter—and she’s all loud, chromatic flesh. Blood springs from the fissures of her chapped lips, coloring them a shocking red and infusing her breath with iron. She’s reaching gently for my hand. Hers are as soft as a gentlewoman’s, until I turn them over and find her palms flecked with cuts. I close my callused fingers over hers.

“You were right, wise spirit,” I tell her. “I should’ve listened to your warning.”

Her brows draw together. “You know me?”

“Of course,” I say slowly. “You told me not to go to the house.”

This shakes her in a way I can’t understand. Do spirits not remember their own actions? But then something resolves. Her mouth presses into a straight, serious line. She breathes deeply, her exhalation quivering. “All right. Is there something you wanted to tell me? Is there some message?”

Now it’s my turn to be shaken.

Chime folk are rare, and my gift is rarer still. Everything I know about spirits comes from hand-me-down talk, filtered through a dozen mouths. A woman from a village called Hale, some dozen miles from Liverpool’s docks, was said to see the dead, and the crux of her parting advice which finally found its way to me was this: Listen to them. Let them impart their wisdom or last words so they can rest.

They don’t ask us for messages.

“I don’t understand you, spirit,” I say, letting go of her hands. “It’s usually the other way around.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t you have a message for me? Another warning? I’ll heed you this time.” I step back and take her in, the thrill of making contact giving way to sober clarity. Her accent, her clothes, are alien. I can’t place her lack of corset, her narrow skirt, the lumpy spencer that extends down to her waist. Her hair, tawny as a barn owl’s hood, escapes from pins set above her ears. “When did you die?”

Her eyes widen. “I’m not dead! I’m . . . I’m on my honeymoon. Today is the twenty-second of October, 1938. I saw it on a newspaper someone was reading at breakfast.”

I find myself on the floor, such as it is in this place, knees bent inward like a child. 1938. An incomprehensible date. The future. I must be seeing the future. I’m snatching glimpses of people not yet born, tasting champagne made from grapes that are yet to grow. Suddenly, I understand why history hasn’t recorded the incidents I see—they haven’t come to pass. The spirits never speak to me because they don’t even know I’m there.

But if this woman can see me . . .

“Oh God, do I die here?” I cover my eyes. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she’s at my level, prizing my hands from my face. “All I know is that I’ve seen dreadful things all my life. I thought I was mad. I think I still am mad.” She laughs weakly. “But I saw you in the parlor at Rannings today, and on the moor. You were intact and . . . simply perfect. For the first time, I wasn’t scared.” She smiles again giddily, her left eyelid taut. “I’m not scared.”

I’m younger than her, but I feel a tug of responsibility. I palm her cheek and fix her with a steadying look. “There is nothing to fear from the dead. They may frighten you, they may come when you want to be alone, but they won’t harm you.” I draw our foreheads together. Benjamin did this for me, when my gift first manifested and I couldn’t sleep. It’s my dearest memory of him. Tears drip into our laps. I can’t tell which are mine.

“So,” I say, and we draw apart, “what else did you see in the house, besides me?” She describes as best she can the flayed boy. The girl in the cell, who can only be Martha, clawing her fingernails off trying to escape. As she speaks, I feel the resonance of the bell fading. Our time grows short. “Did you see a boy? Scrawny and tall, with a limp? He doesn’t heal completely—he might have other scars, too.”

“A boy—?”

“In 1938, is there any record of him,” I push, “of us being held against our will?”

“I don't know.” She hides her face in her hands. “After Rannings was sold, there was some talk of legal trouble, and I think the receptionist said the asylum was shut down about a hundred years ago, which would be—”

“Now,” I finish viciously. “Tell me, was the doctor tried? The missing children, the flayed boy—were they found?”

“No, no, I don’t know . . .”

I close my eyes, holding my anger in. The doctor targets poor, hungry families, mothers like Benjamin’s, like Martha’s, who can’t afford to turn down money even at the expense of a child. He trusts that the world will turn without stopping for them. Sickeningly, he’s right: There will be no accounting for this in his lifetime.

“What is it now, the house?” I ask bitterly.

“It’s a hotel. A very expensive hotel.”

A hotel! I can’t help but laugh, but there’s no joy in it. “Mark me: Children have died here far from home, and they deserve justice. My friend, Benjamin, deserves justice. God knows what he’s been through. I don’t know the limits of his gift; perhaps the doctor has already found a way to break him.” I grip her arm and she flinches. “Avenge us. That is what the spirits want. That’s what I want, if I’m to die here.”

“I will, I promise,” she says, her voice faint.

“Good-bye. God bless you.” I kiss her cheeks as they turn translucent. Even if I survive this night, my bones will be dust by the time she walks the Earth. I don’t even know her name.

I’m released slowly back to my senses, as if recovering from a faint. Barely a second has passed. Martha is crying my name. She’s heard me collapse, convulsing, and her terror has attracted the matron’s attention. Those are the soles of her slippers I hear, flapping against the steps.

Martha’s crying falters when she hears me stir, but I grunt at her to keep going as I prop myself up. I tear at my bodice and the damp silk parts easily—fashionable clothes, like fashionable people, aren’t made to withstand much of anything at all. My fingers fumble at the laces of my corset as the matron barks from outside our cells, “What’s going on in there?”

The laces slither free. I wait behind the door where it’s darkest, wrapping them around my fists into a makeshift garrote. Martha’s listening. She’s not stupid. “There’s summat wrong with Mary,” she wails. “She won’t wake up!”

Keys jingle. The matron enters, holding a candle aloft. I don’t give her time to clock the bare floor: I throw my crossed hands over her neck and jerk them home. She drops the candle and flails, gurgling. Her elbow drives into my side, cracks a rib, drawing a gasp. But I’m a Belfast girl raised in Liverpool; I can give as good as I get, and right now I’ve got nothing to lose.

One more squeeze of the garrote and she goes down with a thud.

Her keys are still dangling from my door. I unlock Martha’s cell and she flies to me, burying her face in my soft belly. “Ah,” I gasp, “not too hard.” Every breath burns and my back aches now without the support of my stays. Unlaced for the first time since I was a young child, my middle’s as cold as a shucked mollusk.

I stare down the corridor. For a moment, the path to Benjamin is clear. But I can’t draw a painless breath deep enough to shout his name, and anyway, Martha’s shaking her head at me desperately, unsure of her gift, and the matron’s storming toward us, her purple face twisted with rage. I mustn’t have held on long enough. I’ve never tried to strangle anyone before.

“Get back here, you little bitch!”

Martha shoves her, giving us room to sprint past and up the stairs, to lock her in behind us. The matron’s ham-sized fists batter the door, but it holds.

“What now?” Martha says, clinging to me.

“We get out of here,” I reply, stroking her head, “but I need something first. A letter that I brought with me. Is it still on the doctor’s desk?”

She nods.

My heels left twin trails in the dust where the matron dragged me. We follow them to their source, the keys jutting between my fingers to make a spiked fist. The doctor’s door is ajar and the room is still. He must have retired for the night. But even here, a faint banging makes its way up from the basement, and even now he may be descending the stairs to investigate.

I snatch up Missus Walchop’s letter and rifle through the files in his desk, my hands shaking so much I almost can’t pinch out the one I want.

“Drop them.”

Martha flinches. The doctor’s blocking the doorway. The barrel of a revolver’s pointing at her head. I pull her behind me as he fires, blasting a hole in the paneling. As precious as we are to him, he’d kill us to cover his tracks? Selfish coward! I grit my teeth and lunge, ready for the bullet to punch through me if it means sparing Martha, but my unexpected offensive sends his second shot wide, the third jams, and by then I’m close enough for a right hook that would make my mother proud. One key skewers his cheek. Another lodges in his eye. The revolver, and the doctor with it, falls to the floor.

I stand over him, wheezing, with one hand pressed to my rib. His unscathed eye rolls in agony, and when it settles on me I hunker down, baring my teeth in a grin. “You wanted to know what I can do, Doctor? I can see what is yet to pass, and I’ve seen the future for this place—for you. Your work will come to nothing. No one will remember your name. And these”—I hold up the file, the letter—“will ruin you, I’ll make sure of that.” He whimpers. I straighten and take Martha’s hand, and together we leave.

Where the crunching drive gives way to soft moss, I hear light footsteps ahead and hold my breath, but it’s only James, praise God. I can smell the grouse and lamp oil on him. He must sense more than see the ruin of my bodice and corset, revealing the thin, secret shift beneath, because he passes me his coat without comment, tells me instead how my cries for help echoed over the moor and that he couldn’t bear to go home still hearing them.

And of Martha, he says, “Who’s this?”

“That can wait.” I groan, leaning heavily against him. “Take me to the magistrate. Or the nearest lawman who’ll hear me out.”

Martha turns her face up to mine. “What’re you gunna do?”

Missus Walchop’s letter and a broken contract press against my side. I look up at the dark bulk of Rannings. My employer, if she’ll still be my employer after this, with all her hollow frivolities, will have to damn well wait.

If you’re still in there, Benjamin, you better hold on.

“I’m going to tear it down. Tear it all down.”

• • • •

“Good God.” Broad hands stroked her face, wiped away strands of wet hair. “You rang the bell, didn’t you? Good girl, clever girl, I heard you, I’m here now.” Merritt tried to rub warmth into her numb legs, her feet, so rough it hurt.

“Stop,” Anne mumbled. She’d seen a hypothermic man die from such rubbing. “Your coat.”

“Easy, easy. All right.” He wrapped her in his coat, damp but still warm from his body and better than nothing. He scooped her up with a grunt and carried her out of the bell tower.

“There’s . . . something . . . something I need to tell you—”

“Whatever it is can wait, darling. Over here! I’ve got her!”

The groundsman’s cart pulled up outside the church, escorted by police in shimmering waterproof cloaks. Merritt laid her inside and wrapped her in dry blankets, tried to pour warm tea into her mouth. She spluttered when the cart began to move.

“I can see ghosts,” she told him while he mopped her chin.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said.

“It’s true. My parents thought I had a—a nervous disorder. When we met, I’d just come back from the hospital. Shock treatment. It didn’t help. Nothing does.” She had his full attention. She licked her lips. “Penshawe must have seemed a pretty sort of place to you, but for me it was a prison. The more anxious I felt, the more I hallucinated. I thought it would stop when we left, but it’s been worse.”

There it was, the look of disgust she’d been so afraid of. She reached for his hand but he wrenched it away. “It’s dead people I see, Merritt, dying people, all the time. I think they’re ghosts. They have messages for me, things they want me to do—”

“Stop,” he snapped. “If you want to be free of me, just say so.”

“Telephone my parents, they’ll tell you everything.”

He glared at her. Anne gripped the blankets. The moment was slipping its tracks in a way she hadn’t expected.

“Are you trying to get back at me for this morning? Am I not the husband you hoped for, after that? Can you not stand a little real life?”

“Says the man who drinks because he can’t bear his own grief!” Too late, the words were said. She could see she’d hurt him.

The cart jolted and suddenly the dark pit in her stomach opened, the gorge rising in her throat. They were approaching the foundations of Rannings, where everything felt rotten. Anne flung off the blankets and jumped out of the cart before Merritt or the policemen could stop her. She ran through the rain and mud until she found the epicenter, the ugly heart of it all. There, she began digging with her hands. The arms of the dead pushed up around her like daisies. “I know,” she told them, “it’ll be over soon.”

“Stop, Anne! Stop this!” Merritt shouted as he jogged toward her, lost his footing. “You’ll catch your death!”

“Will you just listen to me for once?” she flung back. “Dig, for God’s sake!”

Merritt watched helplessly as she scraped out great clots of mud. Policemen surged past him, hands reaching out to grab her, when her fingernails broke against something hard. She’d uncovered a crescent of discolored bone, a tiny pelvis. They hauled her away, but the bone lay stark against the black sludge, glowing in the light from the crisscrossing torch beams.

• • • •

Seventeen skeletons in total. The deepest at eight feet, the shallowest at just three.

Rannings was forced to close immediately, so they settled the bill and drove north to Middlesbrough that night, before the press descended upon the area to seek out her photograph. Anne stayed briefly at the hospital. The nurses said she was lucky to be alive.

Merritt sat by her bedside, and when she had the strength to sit up, they talked frankly at last. Neither had married for love. They’d symbolized something to each other—escape for her, lost time for him—and they hadn’t looked any deeper than that because there was nothing more they wanted to find.

“Was this a mistake?” he asked.

At a loss, she turned her palm upward and he grasped it gently.

He looked so broken, though there was no alcohol on his breath. She bit her lip and twisted her wedding band, still loose. It came off readily with only the slightest resistance at the knuckle, and she held it out to him, scuff marks and all.

They looked at each other for a long time, the bustle of the ward filling the silence. “It’s either divorce or annulment,” he said at length. “Both options leave you high and dry. I assume you don’t want to go back to Kent?”

“Never,” she whispered.

They watched the nurses on their rounds for a while. Somewhere, a voice on the wireless was relaying every gory detail of the unfolding scandal. Anne requested it be turned off, but the silence was somehow worse.

“I wondered . . . Have you—could you—my brothers?”

She smiled sadly, expecting the question. The hope. “Perhaps. Truly, I don’t understand how this works.”

Merritt rubbed his cheeks. “I can’t promise to be a good husband, Anne, but I can listen, I can do that. We rushed into this, but we needn’t rush out of it. And maybe someday, we’ll understand it together.”

The hospital discharged her the next day. Anne waited on a bench while Merritt brought the motorcar around, the breeze blowing her hair into her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear and caught the eye of an old man across the street. He nodded to her and crossed the road, the morning newspaper tucked under his arm. He favored his right leg.

Without the Rannings’ uniform, she hardly knew him. The porter.

When he reached her, he smiled with more gums than teeth. “You look just like Mary said you would. I’m sorry if I gave you a scare, before.”

Anne stood to meet him, her jaw slack. Of course. A boy with a limp. “Are you—?”

“She found me, in the end, like. Well, Martha did. That was her gift.”

In a daze, Anne extended her hand and he shook it warmly. “How is this possible? You must be over a hundred years old.” With a glance at his bad leg, she said, “I suppose it can’t be a war wound, then?”

He patted his thigh. “Not from the war you’re thinking of, but I got plenty of those, too. I fit right in.” He untucked the newspaper and showed her the front page. The headline declared Rannings’ reputation to be in tatters. “Mary would’ve wanted me to thank you for this in person, like. We tried our best, but it couldn’t happen yet because you hadn't happened yet, or something; she always explained it better. After she died, I had to come back and see it through by myself, hard as it was. Thank God it’s done.”

“She died?”

“Aye, as do we all, I hope,” he said, and then laughed at her shock. “But don’t worry: She held on a bloody long time. Saw in the new century. You must’ve just missed each other.”

He handed her a small photograph, folded so much that the very center had worn away. In it, an elderly woman reclined on a sunbed, caught in a blurry roar of laughter. Her bathing suit and style of her hair placed her sometime in the early twenties, and the beach could have been anywhere, but Anne liked to think it was Kent.

The motorcar came purring around the corner and stopped at the curb. Merritt slung his arm across the back of the seat. “Anne, is this chap bothering you?”

Benjamin flipped the photograph over. There was an address written on the back. “Look me up next time you’re in Bootle,” he said with a wink, then he turned up his collar and walked on. Anne watched him go, quite breathless, until Merritt tooted the horn and made her jump. She strode to the motorcar and got in. “He wasn’t a journalist, you know.”

“Can’t be too careful.” He pulled into the traffic. “Well, shall we start over?”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

He sucked on a cigarette. “My parents’ house is over two hours away.”

Anne smiled. She rolled down the window to let out the blue smoke and let in the sounds of the city, and rested her chin in one hand. She gripped the photograph tight with the other. She’d do it properly, this time. She’d tell him everything. No more secrets; no more shame. Bold, like Mary.

G. V. Anderson is a speculative fiction author whose short stories have won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, and been nominated for a Nebula. Her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com, as well as anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. She lives and works in Dorset, UK, and is currently writing her first novel.

Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark
By Aimee Ogden

Upstairs, in the little rowhouse on the thirty-sixth meridian of the city of Leth Marno, the scuffling grows louder. Heels ring out against the floorboards, and shouts are muffled; by the rugs, perhaps, or a hand that grasps to cover a mouth.

Anell Nath sits downstairs by the flower-arrangement pedestal. Her hands shake as she trims leaves from a bundle of pale peonies. She is more certain with the tools of her trade than with the instruments of the gentleperson’s art, but dissection scissors would make slow work of the thick waxy stems. As she works she counts the blows from the level above; categorizes and classifies each cry that makes its way down to her. Cool observation distances her from what is happening up there. That is her job, and always has been: to study, to take notes. To seek understanding, or at least knowledge.

Hasn’t she had enough understanding for a lifetime by now? How deep must understanding be, before she drowns in it? The blades of the shears snap methodically, and leaves fall to the ground between her bare feet.

Years of hard, grinding work in the library and the laboratory have honed the great desire of Anell’s heart into a scalpel, a sharp point ever driving toward that goal. The blade is so keen, though, that by its very nature it has flensed away everything else.

The shears are heavy in her hand. A scalpel would have been defter. She sits, and cuts, and waits.

• • • •

At twenty-three years old, a graduate of the Hollow Universities of Kinnam Nath with all high honors and newly granted the privilege of a surname for her academic excellence, Anell Nath knelt and pressed her forehead to the carpet of Countess Liel’s study.

The Countess’s bare feet crossed beneath the hem of her lily-white robes. Her House color was represented too in the pale petals that littered the ground at either side; lilies, yes, daisies too, and the frail wisps of baby’s-breath. Anell did not dare look up at the massive arrangements that flanked the Countess, nor past her purple-veined ankles; only waited and counted the whispers of pages turned.

At last even the faint murmur of paper against paper fell silent. Anell’s breath cut through, separating the stiff body of the silence into parts smaller and more manageable. An exhalation, like a scalpel piercing rubbery flesh; a slow inhalation like cold fascia peeling away from the organs within. Until at last the Countess’s decision could be revealed. To secure patronage now would put Anell’s dreams within reach; to secure it here would put those dreams outside the grasp of the doubters at Kinnam Nath.

“Your credentials are impressive.” A swish of fabric as the Countess uncrossed her legs. Anell did not look up to study her face or guess at her mood. She had researched the customs of Leth Marno and the country of Walchem before coming here, a study no less desperate than what she had poured into any quarterly exam. “And your proposal intrigues me, of course, else I would not have paid your passage here.”

But was the word that the Countess dangled between them, daring Anell to bat at it with an unprovoked defense. Anell held her tongue, and after several long moments, the Countess stood.

This was Anell’s signal to sit up. When she rested back on her heels, the muscles in her legs jangled their indignation. She still did not meet the Countess’s eyes; only focused on the belt at her waist, where one liver-spotted hand rested.

“Intriguing,” the Countess went on, “and also unorthodox. Or perhaps that is part of the appeal.” She paused. “Of course, there is also the matter of the rumors that followed you here from Kinnam Nath.”

Anell’s breath hitched, but the Countess continued. “I hired an investigator to validate the soundness of such an investment. They uncovered some things of interest to me. A spate of thefts: not valuables, but oddments. Eggs, sprouted grains, pregnant cats.”

Anell’s tongue lay in the basin of her mouth, as thick and useless as that of a two-week-dead corpse. She felt certain that it would suffocate her, and more certain yet that no answer would roll off it that could please this woman.

“You were never tied to these crimes with any certainty,” said the Countess. “But there was also the matter of your… proclivities.”

A spasm of her throat forced a small sound out of Anell. The Countess folded her arms.

“I know that no matter whom I choose to sponsor, I’m not likely to live to see Victory. I seek only the few additional years that a sound scientist could offer. With the history of cancer in my line, your proposal seems the most likely to offer a return on my money. If, of course, that proposal is truly the vessel into which you intend to pour my patronage.”

The Countess folded back into her seat. So smooth and sudden was the movement that Anell failed to drop her gaze quickly enough and caught for a moment the Countess’ gaze, sapphire sharp. No; not sapphires but blue diamonds, honed into drill bits and ready to put the test to what fault lines lay beneath Anell’s surface.

“Well?” the Countess asked. “How do you answer?”

“Your Grace, I was a child then.” Anell wet her lips and immediately regretted the show of nerves. She’d made this speech before; usually it came more easily. It had been some years, though, and now there was far more than the specter of the Dean’s disciplinary cane at stake. “Interested in childish pursuits. Too drunk on teenage immortality to accept my duty.” All scientists fought for eternal Victory, or at least sought to make their own small scratches in that vast implacable possibility. If the Countess would let her, she would give her House as many years of life as she could scratch out of cold vials and ancient spells. And if she pursued other goals in her spare time, that needn’t trouble the Countess. “I learned from my mistakes. I’m a stronger woman for them. A more resolute champion for you and your House.”

Behind her, the door opened. A man said, rather loudly, “Mother, are you still tormenting the poor woman? We all know you’ve already decided.”

“Arantha.” The Countess sighed. The muscles in Anell’s neck twitched, begging her to turn and see who had interceded on her behalf. She held steady. “Will you not let me conduct my business in peace? The House will be your brother’s soon enough. If he’s content to let you pry into his affairs, that’s fine, but kindly wait until I have lost the fight against the After before you treat me as if I have.”

“Well, you’re delaying dinner, which I think is absolutely my business. And I have a real fear that your scientist’s legs will go gangrenous from sitting all this time and she’ll succumb to sepsis before you get an ounce of use from her.” Footsteps swept past Anell. “Here, have some sherry and come off it already.”

“You are without shame.” The Countess rustled, an opaque shift of skirts and sleeves. “Rise, Nath Anell.”

Anell froze before climbing to her feet. She swayed briefly on stiff knees as blood and sensation returned. If she had been bidden rise, the Countess had reached a favorable decision. Anell stared full-on into the Countess’s face, and the thunder of those blinding-blue eyes echoed in the hollow places inside her.

A flicker of movement behind the Countess stole Anell’s attention. He was of an age that he would be the Countess’s elder son, but his left eye was one of polished black glass. Those born death-touched, with sightless eyes or withered limbs, would see a younger sibling inherit first—at least unless the new Concerns in the capital managed to push their reforms through into law. As Anell gawped at him, he tipped a sherry glass her way, then drank.

“The remorse is real,” said the Countess, lifting her chin to study Anell’s numb face. “The Universities’ masters did their work well in teaching you not only the nature of the world but of your place in it.”

“I hope I will never give you cause to regret becoming my patron.” Anell bowed in the way she had read of, with her hands folded and pressed to her forehead.

“Your predecessor’s facilities have been emptied and cleaned.” The Countess plucked the sherry glass from her son’s hand. “My people will provide you with a line of credit to acquire what you need in terms of furnishings or materials that he lacked.” She thrust one finger into the webwire board beside her chair and turned a ring. The study door opened, and one of her household officials appeared. “You may be a risky proposition, but he seemed a safe one. May you fare better than he did.”

“Thank you,” said Anell, to the Countess, and to her son Liel Arantha as well. The Countess did not respond in any way, but the young man smiled at her as the official led Anell away.

• • • •

Anell’s predecessor had died in the line of his work—not an uncommon end for a scientist but still an embarrassing one. Many of Anell’s profession struggled to keep from pouring a little too much of their soul into their work, from testing a new elixir or spell on themselves first. They wanted the glory of a great advance toward Victory, of course, as Anell did too. Glory was not won in a slow hesitant creep of borrowed hours, and the After did not give up its secrets gently.

In the case of Anell’s predecessor, the issue had been the development of a new mechanism of Permanence. Anell had studied spellcraft briefly at school, before she found her primary interests lay not in the misty probabilities of magic but in the material world of chemicals and moving parts. Alchemy was useful, absolutely, but the perfect clockwork of biology was a kind of magic in its own right. The gentleman in question had, in any case, devised a way to open and stabilize bubbles of Permanence that did not require their contents to be frozen to preserve them. The technique was now used in Temple hospitals across Walchem, to move and store organs for transplant.

A scientist who served one of the Countess’s rival Houses had explained much of the situation to Anell. At least as much as he knew, from his vantage point outside House Liel, and as much as he wished to tell without inadvertently handing her too many pieces of the puzzle. From what Anell gathered, it wasn’t customary for rival Houses to fraternize much. Normally in the streets of this city, couples and trios showed their affection freely, joyfully, and artfully—in such ways that would make the romantic poets of Camrain blush and turn aside. But this lover only ever met Anell by dark of night. On this side of the Sea, Counts and Countesses jealously protected the fruits of their patronage. What one House gained in mortality abatement was denied to the others, unless their own scientists could unravel the same secrets. No House wanted to fund the longevity of their neighbors, or worse yet, be outlived by them.

But from Anell’s cursory study of House law, such associations weren’t strictly forbidden. Discouraged, yes, but permissible, especially when they were strictly sexual—or at least appeared to be so. As Anell crouched alone in her rival’s bathing-chamber with a glass vial pressed half an inch up her cunt, she wondered if he too had convinced himself that this was just a brief fling. She certainly didn’t mind the trappings of such a thing. This man, whose name she currently couldn’t quite remember, was a student of psychic alchemy—a far different field from her current official area of expertise, which made it very difficult to stumble together into a work conversation. And what lay beneath the crisp crimson of his House robes made a very pleasant game indeed of the necessary deception. She put one elbow on the rim of the bathtub to brace herself and waited.

“Are you all right in there?” Anell’s head came up to confirm that she’d shut the latch on the door. But his voice reached her from a distance, as if he hadn’t actually gotten out of bed to investigate her absence. “It’s getting late. If you like I could ring along the webwire for some dinner. There’s a place just down the meridian with Camrainian food?”

Anell pictured the local take on her fathers’ mushroom dumplings and the runny yogurt that passed for sour cream here. She grimaced. There was a slight shift in the weight of the glass tube. A wad of semen had slithered out of her and into the tube. She pulled the tube free of herself and capped it, subvocalizing a trigger word. The nacreous glimmer disappeared into the bubble of Permanence she’d salvaged from her predecessor’s study. She straightened, letting her undershift fall back into place. “Cabbage pancakes?”

“Lovely.” She heard the rings of the webwire turning. Ismal! That was his name: Cadist Ismal. She stood, and cleaned her hands, and when she opened the door he smiled up at her. He hadn’t contrived to cover his nakedness while she was out of the room. A sudden impulse tingled electric over her: to share that openness, to be simply what she seemed on the surface and not less and not, and never, more. Her gauzy undershift peeled away. Ismal’s cock twitched against his thigh, and Anell climbed astride him, to taste him once without thought of samples or studies.

Only later, in the quiet of the study in her own apartment, did she discharge the vial of semen from its waiting-space. With infinite patience, she painted a sample onto a glass slide and inserted it into the viewing-platform of the lightscope she had ordered with Countess Liel’s money. The lightscope was a fine model, better than what she’d used in school. All the better to observe and study the growth of blood vessels, the angiogenetic principles that nourished the inception of cancerous tumors. And all the better to grant the clarity of detail for which she now hoped. She bent her eye closer, drinking in the details of the tiny animalcule sleeping inside the head of each serpentine cell.

At her side, her hand found a slab of paper, a piece of charcoal. She wasn’t the first to observe and draw the germinative animalcules inside a man’s seed. But as with any field that did not serve the greater goal of abatement, studies into reproduction had fallen by the wayside. And Anell intended, after all, to do more than merely observe and draw. This way lay greatness, the kind that could not be scraped out of a lifetime’s long work tacking minutes onto the sunset days of her head of House.

With a spiderweb-slender glass wand, she transferred another minute particle of Ismal’s semen to the softly glowing, pulsing balloon that currently occupied the place of honor beside the lightscope. The sheep stomach had been rescued from the local butcher, and while an actual uterus would have been preferable, it would have been much more difficult to acquire without drawing unwanted questions. Then she unbound her predecessor’s Permanence from its bubble and wove its loose ends through the magical catch-points she had embedded in the ex vivo womb. Enhanced with all the science and psychic alchemy she could muster, it should serve its purpose: to not only convert the animalcule into a macroscopic free-living infant but also to inoculate the resulting child against the onset of death and decay. Anell’s hands did not begin to shake until she had finished the transfer, and she set the wand carefully into the decanter of sterile elixir before she could cross-contaminate her working surface.

Yes, Anell would pass someday into the After, but not this being, not the life she had made with her own hands. She would be the first to put a foot on Death’s neck; it was only that it would not be her own foot she used. The patrons of the great Houses sought to battle sacred Death on Death’s own ground, using their own bodies as fodder; the universities of Camrain did little different except to experiment on those who could not afford to say no. Even if her predecessor had solved Permanence in, well, a more permanent fashion, she had no wish to lock her being away into a waiting-space for a hundred or a thousand or an eternity of years, hoping some clever soul would snatch immortality from its secret halls in the After in that time.

According to the masters back at Kinnam Nath, her work was deviancy, a perversion of the sacred fight against the eternal nothing. “Your mysteries have been solved by every back-alley bitch in heat,” the Master of Psychic Alchemy had said, when she had presented her proposal on a new grand theory of emboitement. Let them batter themselves senseless on the gates of the After. She would pass quietly through, when it was her turn, if she could but leave this one thing behind her.

Sometimes ugly rumors were true. It occurred to her that if her career in Leth Marno ended in tatters, her fathers and grandmother might hear of it even across the sea in Camrain. Perhaps they would be disappointed. Perhaps they’d be relieved.

When Ismal called on her again, a few days later, she did not answer the door-bell. He left a flower-invitation hanging by its ribbon from the entry pediment. She forgot it there until another week had passed. By then, the thing had dissolved into rot-slick yellow petals on her pavement and a ribbon-tangled gnarl of leaves that crumbled at her touch.

• • • •

As the months quickened, the ex vivo womb did not. Sample after sample of semen disappeared into the fleshy maw, and the animalcules inside only withered and died without taking hold. Anell adjusted the alchemical ratios, adding more vitality, but nothing affected the rate at which her would-be creations vanished into the After without ever truly knowing the Now.

At intervals, the Countess required updates on Anell’s above-the-board work. She did not demand minute accounting of where her money went, but she insisted on six-month reviews in which she could determine to the best of her ability Anell’s progress.

Anell produced what she was asked for: demonstrated the effects of innovative biochemical substrates to block the development of new blood vessels; showed how, in culture, a tumor would shrivel when deprived of its nutrient source. She was candid too with the project’s shortcomings. Sometimes, as she showed the Countess with a series of drawings and diagrams, a tumor could overpower the chemicals she bathed it in and find new ways to call capillaries to heel. These, too, she could find a way to halt, given more time. It was only ever a matter of time. And money, but the Countess had a far more generous supply of that.

But there were deeper pits to dig than the biannual justification of her efforts. Most Walchemians hewed far more seriously to the practice of religious devotion than was customary in Camrain or Cowak or Rumannal. Twice a year—the same frequency as the Countess’s accounting—Anell was required to subject herself to temporary Surrender.

She had no family or friends to come express their mourning before or to celebrate the reprieve of life afterward. At dawn on the required date she would present herself to the high temple on the meridian closest to her apartments. She had dressed in her best, or what must pass for finery among the rough choices of her closet. She did not hesitate to spend the Countess’s coin where duty or desire called, but pouring money into a garment she would wear but twice a year did not tug at her purse-strings.

Outside the Temple narthex, attendants greeted her solemnly as she presented them with the elaborate bouquets she must make beforehand: lilies for peace, white alpinum for eternity, pale purple anemones for regret and loss. They would adorn her tomb for her four-hour vigil, and then their petals would be crushed into a perfume by the attendants to anoint her when she emerged.

Typical for the good people of Leth Marno to enjoy a family feast afterward, or to join a friend in drinking away the sour tang of Death’s kiss. After her first few Surrenders, Anell had gone home alone and hurried through the day’s work that she’d been deprived of. Surrender was supposed to remind her to grasp hold of life with both hands, but mainly it provided her with ample and unwanted time to ruminate on the failures of her personal project. Like most other House scientists, she would serve the family well for a few decades, then crumble into ash and be forgotten.

On her fourth such effort, after nearly three years in the Countess’s service, she emerged from the suffocating darkness of her borrowed tomb to find that she was not, in fact, alone. Not even after the attendants smeared her brow with crushed and weeping petals and departed to minister to another soul brought back from its brief sojourn into the simulated void. The Countess’s son Arantha rested at the kneelers where vigilant loved ones might wait and grinned up at her when she approached. “Finally!” he said. “My legs have gone entirely numb, you know. Did you have to be dead quite so long?”

Her time in the tomb had equally benumbed Anell’s mind. The best response she could manage was, “Why are you here?”

Arantha stood and stretched with a groan. Anell might have done the same, if her patron’s eldest son weren’t in the room. Over the past year they’d exchanged polite greetings, the occasional conversation about what art troupe was displaying in the meridian plaza; they’d been seated adjacent at a few of the Remembrance holiday dinners that Anell was obliged to attend in the family home. “My mother mentioned in passing that you would be here today. I hope you’ll forgive me for inviting myself to come celebrate with you and your friends.”

Anell rested her hands on the belt of her grave robes. “Are we friends, Liel Arantha?”

“Are we not?” Arantha turned his head side to side, taking in the otherwise empty reception room with his good eye. “It seems to me you could use a friend, Anell Nath.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Likely more than just one, but I have only myself to offer.”

Walchemian society didn’t smile upon those who fraternized with rival Houses; its stance on taking up similar associations with the highest members of your own House was more opaque. Possibly more dangerous, too, whichever way she stepped. Anell thought of the waiting ex vivo womb in her study, the scrawled experimental outlines in her books, all the work yet to do. But perhaps the Countess had pushed her son here, in the hopes of a less-formal assessment of Anell’s research. Even at the bottom of a bottle of wine, she was certain she could stay her tongue about her secret work. Best give the Liels what they wanted, so that they would continue to do the same for her. “I am always at the service of House Liel. If you would like to celebrate my return, I would be honored.”

Arantha flushed. “Eternal After! This isn’t a House order. If you’d much prefer to go home, pour a pot of chocolate, and read one of Martis’s Dialogues, you mustn’t let me stop you.”

“What do you want?” The despair she was meant to have left in the tomb carried into her voice.

“What do you want?” he countered. “Shall I take my leave? Or shall I wash your hair with wine in the square?”

Again Anell’s thoughts darted to the recalcitrant womb and the nib-slashed pages of her notebooks. The looming probability that this life was all she would leave behind her, and with it, her chance to touch a moment’s fleeting pleasure. “The square,” she said, and the breathless words were crushed out of her by the weight of that terrible, enchanting chance.

Arantha washed her hair with dark red wine that smelled of old wood and tasted like smoke and vanilla. Many others danced in the square, laughing and toasting another six months of life. Sweet wine dripped from their noses and chins too, and friends kissed each other on the lips and eyes to share the vintage. Only Arantha, though, drank the wine from the hollow of Anell’s neck, and when she took the taste back from his lips, he shed his robe upon the stones and laid her back upon it.

The sun of Leth Marno bled sunset-red on Arantha’s shoulders and her breasts as he undressed her. When he penetrated her, she remembered the bubble of Permanence. Perhaps she should have cleaned it out and tried a different man’s offering, lest there were some defect in the Cadist line. Her hips rose to meet Arantha’s. Behind him, a celebrant cheered and released a spray of sparking wine over them both. The wine stung her eyes, but she had no mind for the cold.

After, they lay naked in the sunshine, sticky and empty-headed on wine fumes. The dancing had not ceased nor the music quieted; no one stared at them save Anell at herself, marveling at her own nudity. “You’ve wanted this for a while,” she said, as he lazily stroked himself.

He laughed and rocked his hips to match the motion of his hands. “Since before you arrived. I know! Foolish to romanticize the idea of this stranger, hurrying toward our doorstep with dark rumors biting at her heels. That idea shattered when you showed up, all Camrainian chill and dolor.”

His hand moved, slid between her legs, which she parted. As he explained the joys of reacquainting himself to the reality of her rather than the shade he’d conjured, his fingers slid inside and melted against the shape of her. Images of their past meetings shifted and bent under her fresh consideration as she rose to meet him, and whether she or him had curved to fit she could not say.

• • • •

At thirty-four years of age, Anell made an extra journey to the great Temple of the After on the city’s central node to perform the rite of Reproductive Annihilation.

Half an inch of water stood in the street, the last gift of the dying rainy season; the air buzzed faintly with the wings of the gnats and midges that had taken advantage of the floodwaters to lay their eggs. Anell’s clogs slashed through the water and clattered on the dry temple steps that rose above street level. There, above the water line, a few supplicants suffering with waterborne flesh-rot waited in the hopes of attention from the temple physicians.

Arantha, who had accompanied her from her apartments, stood beside her as an attendant walked out from the narthex, an older woman named Mylish. Mylish was Death-touched, as most attendants of the After were, having lost or sacrificed her arm below the elbow. A common enough injury; nearly half of those here had once worked in the grain-threshers of Lesser Marno. Perhaps in some other lifetime, Arantha would have served here too, if he had been less valuable an accountant to the affairs of his House, if his brother had feared him more as a rival to inheritance. “Don’t let my mother talk you into anything you don’t want to do,” he said, as Mylish pressed a kiss to Anell’s forehead.

“This is what I want, too.” The sacrifice would bind her to Liel service for the rest of her life, or as long as she desired it. A long bargain, and in the offing all the Countess wanted was the guarantee that Anell’s attention would not be split away to the minding of offspring. That rival Anell had taken into her bed so long ago—Ismela? Oshmal?—had tried to strike a similar deal with his House and been turned away by his Count.

Anell’s position had been more firmly secured by the successful application of her research to stave off the growth of a small mass the Countess’s doctor had identified on her kidney. A further experimental use of her angiogenetic inhibitors had staved off vision decay in the Countess’s husband until his death of apoplexy last year. Anell wasn’t certain whether the securing of her services was what concerned the Countess, or whether the Countess feared that after all this time Anell would get a child and call it Arantha’s to claim an heir to the Liel name.

Arantha had asked her for such a child, of course, though she didn’t know if his mother knew about those late-night requests that sometimes slept in the bottom of a brandy-glass or under a listless starlit night. Before she could submit to the Rite, the Temple had required her to undergo ritual intercourse with an attendant, without the shield of medicine or magic to prevent pregnancy. Life and After were constantly struggling for dominion over every human existence; the After always won in the end, but she must give it the battlefield of her body first. In this, she hoped for Life to lose this one fight so that she might advance her own private war against the After.

She’d chosen Arantha for the attempt, of course, and had spent the next weeks cold and flushed, angry and melancholy by turns, counting down the days of her moon-month. She had made nearly two dozen floral arrangements by the time her blood came, elaborate and increasingly overwrought affairs that nearly collapsed under their own weight. Her fathers and grandmother had always hoped she’d take an interest in that gentleperson’s art, though likely they hadn’t expected it to be purposed toward funneling away nervous energy.

To finally see her undershift stained with blood had sent her to the bathroom to vomit in relief. Of course the rite itself meant nothing to her except as a means to secure her future. Now she could guarantee all her effort would be poured into the eternal war against the After—what else was there, when to choose otherwise was to sentence one’s entire potential lineage to permanent silence? But there were other irons still in her fire, and she looked forward to searing her hands with their heat. There was the small quiet pleasure of producing solid work on behalf of House Liel. There was Arantha. It was enough.

Mylish held her hand to guide her through the Temple, past the open nave. Inside, cleaners swept up the sand that had not clung to the fingers it whispered through during the morning’s remembrances. It would be collected, Anell supposed, and used again on the morrow. On the far side of the nave were the Temple’s care-rooms, where attendants had counseled her on what was to come, where she would undergo the procedure and recover. “It’s a challenging moment,” said Mylish, reading reluctance into Anell’s quiet. “It’s not weakness to mourn what the After takes from us.”

The After took nothing. Anell gave. “I’m ready for what comes next.”

At the door of the care-rooms, Arantha was obliged to bid her goodbye. Only the physician-attendants and their patients were permitted past that point. He kissed her on the forehead and held her hands as she stepped backward across the threshold. She turned away only when Mylish murmured to her and led her away.

While Mylish undressed her, scrubbed her body with astringent cleaners, and drew arcane marks to guide the surgeon’s blade, Anell’s mind wandered. It was a good life she had here, yet not a great one. That was enough. Wasn’t it?

They laid her down on cold clean linen sheets and bared her to the waist. The hairs on her legs prickled in the chill as the attendants sang the Rite, to bless the surgeon’s blade and to mourn the death of Anell’s line. When the priest-attendant bent over her face, to mark her with the sigil that would send her mind away from her body for the duration of the procedure, she stilled his hand with a word: “Wait.”

Mylish knelt beside her, ushering the priest aside. “It’s not too late to turn back now,” she said. Anell’s grandmother sprang to her mind, and the sharp edge of memory raised tears in her eyes. Surely her father’s mother had passed on to the After by now. “Many do. It’s no shame.”

“It’s not that.” Her eyes flicked to her folded robes, which lay on a shelf beside the door. “It’s silly, perhaps, a bit strange.”

“If we could ease your passage through the Rite…”

The words almost stuck to Anell’s dry tongue, but she forced them past her lips. “It sounds petty to call it a souvenir. But if I could keep an ovary with me, as… let us say, as a remembrance. Of what I have given up. And of… and of…” She struggled, briefly, with the words: trying to turn them just the right way so that they meant something to the attendants and still held true for her. The thought of lying to Arantha cut her across the grain, in parts of her soul that were too tender to bear it, and she was glad he was not there to hear her. “Of what may yet lie ahead for me.”

Mylish squeezed her hand. “I think we can honor this request. Unusual though it is.”

Anell directed Mylish to the clothing pile, where she produced the little pocket of Permanence. Long dormant these past years, cleaned and bereft of whatever specimens it had once held; though Anell had never yet managed to throw it away. This time when the priest advanced, she did not stay his hand.

It was Arantha who pressed the bauble back into her hands, afterward. She did not recognize it for what it was, at first, her senses still benumbed as they were by the dull haze of laudanum that smogged the air in her lungs. “I hope,” said Arantha, as his fingers left hers, “that this choice will lead you to ever greater victories in the endless battle, if that is what you want.”

Anell studied the whitish organ, still stuck about with fragments of clear membrane. It was smaller than she would have thought; no bigger than a walnut. “I am ready to do great things.”

• • • •

The fragment of Permanence endured while Anell recovered enough to be returned to her own apartments. Arantha visited her, during her convalescence and after, bringing her a dessert from the ice-fruit vendor on her meridian or an extravagant floral arrangement. Anell sometimes attempted to return these gestures, but she had not the fine eye for the gentleperson’s art, nor the peculiar patience for it. Some weeks after the Temple physicians had permitted her the full range of her former activities, Arantha brought her perfume of olibanum, with which they anointed one another before an evening’s gentle love.

“You’d be welcome in the family home, if you wanted to move your sleeping quarters,” Arantha said, as he combed the sweet citrus scent into her hair. Her breath slowed, but he did not offend her by asking next for her to consider upmarriage. She’d never made a secret of her disdain for the popular representation in market-dramas and songs of the destitute foreigner, saved from a lifetime’s empty drudgery by a wealthy benefactor. She would offer him the equality of lovers, not more and not less.

She turned her face to kiss his mouth. “This is home enough for me. But let me be a frequent visitor in the lovely country of your company.” The braid and comb slipped from his hand. Her hair, long and unbound, fell all around them like curtains of silk.

That night when he had gone, she opened the ovary-case for the first time, parting the fragile strands of magic that had held the thing closed. In her study at home, Anell cut into the cold organ, and, under a magnifying glass, excised tiny fragments to examine under her lightscope.

When at last she put her eye to the lens, she stifled a cry—of alarm and exaltation. The previous studies of female reproductive cells had left behind drawings of vast, indolent spheres: nothing exciting compared to the vibrant life contained in spermatozoa. But here, under Anell’s lightscope, she could make out the faint lines of a tiny form contained at the heart of the ovum. She changed the focus and increased the light output by only a fraction, in case too much more heat would desiccate and destroy the slide’s contents before she could fully observe it.

Yes: it was unmistakable. Anell’s hand shook as she drew what she saw. In the ovum there slept an animalcule, the equivalent to what dwelt inside spermatozoa. As Anell watched, its tiny fists clenched and loosened, its mouth puckered silently, its legs idly flexed. It was dwarfed by the ovum around it; small wonder that earlier scientists had missed it with their more primitive lightscopes, before the reproductive arts had been dismissed in favor of further advances in the delay of death.

The vast ovum must be the answer to why the spermatozoon’s animalcule had failed to thrive: the spermatozoon was simply not equipped with the resources to endure implantation into her artificial womb. The existence of that lesser animalcule was likely an evolutionary relic, both necessary and useless in the same way as nipples without mammary tissue behind them.

Anell swept aside the lightscope and its pinned slide, where the animalcule’s fitful twitching had slowed—perhaps she had overstimulated it with the light after all. She withdrew a fresh sample from the flayed ovary and without hesitation deposited it into the artificial womb. This time, she was certain, the conception would take hold. She would show the masters of the Hollow Universities her work, when she had something worth showing. An immortal child, forged in the ex vivo womb sewn through with every thread of Permanence that Anell had ever mastered. Anell would die, but through her creation and its future siblings, her work would live forever.

In answer to her offering of the living ovum, the womb swelled, suffused with a sudden scarlet warmth. Anell touched it briefly, then rose and left her office, closing the doors behind her.

• • • •

The womb produced a living thing, but only just.

The child that emerged when the wet leathery flaps of the ex vivo womb peeled back had a pulse. It breathed and opened its eyes, and when Anell put a bottle of milk to its lips, it drank. Its eyes were her eyes, in miniature; the same amber-brown color, the same soft round curve of cheek and line of nose. But the creature did not move, nor reach out for her, nor react in any way except to sit or lie where it was placed. It was the size of an infant but lacked the appearance of one; it looked like an adult in miniature, though with a smooth unlined face and only the barest fuzz of hair upon its head. If she spoke to it, it did not answer or make any indication of awareness, neither with the language of an adult nor an infant’s gurgles. It existed, and that was all.

Anell could not draw diagrams of such a thing and submit them to the Great Journals for her peers to dissect its meaning and fate, but then neither could she bear to destroy it and start again. It was alive, and it was hers, and she still hoped that it might grow into the faculties of a sentient being. So she fed it, and dressed it in doll’s clothes, and watched it grow. While she worked or ate or dressed, she did not need to fear for its well-being, for it only slept or stared vacantly at the wall beside its cot. If she left a bottle of nutrient broth beside it, so that its lips just brushed against the nipple, the bottle would be half-empty by the time she came home. And the child-thing grew, in size if not intelligence, so it must be drawing the nutrition it needed. If Anell’s calculations in creating the ex vivo womb were correct, it would live forever, given water and air and food, without ever grasping what forever meant.

She feared now, as she never had before, that when Arantha spent the night in her bed, when he sprawled beside her table as she served riceleaves and tea, he might seek to learn what lay behind her office doors. A son of Liel would not, she thought, take kindly to the kinds of experiments that occupied her time; especially not the kind soul who had helped bear her the Rite of Annihilation. To lose him might be a mortal blow, but to surrender her research at such a tender and potential stage surely would be.

She would force the duality of the situation into a tenable middle ground. She only needed more time.

• • • •

Later that month, after holding vigil during Arantha’s Surrender, she begged off on account of overworked exhaustion and retired to her home without him. If Arantha was disappointed, his gentle kiss did not show it, and he went off with his friends from the temple to celebrate the continuation of life while she went home. But she did not fall early into her unmade bed; only paused to consider it. The petals of roses, remnants of a never-finished arrangement, curled black at the edges where they lay strewn about the sheets. Anell turned her back and retreated into her office for another night’s work. Her weariness had been an excuse but not a fabrication; each time Arantha was absent from her bed she spent a sleepless night behind her lightscope.

Twice more she had tried to incubate an ovum, and twice more she had failed to produce a sentient being. These secondary creations she destroyed, which was more of a kindness to them than the half-life she had granted their eldest sibling, who still lay lifelessly beside her as she worked. There must be some fundamental principle she had missed or mistaken in building the womb or in understanding the needs of the animalcule. She sat back down before her lightscope and rubbed her thumbs in her burning eyes.

Once again, the ovum she placed on the slide contained a perfect human being in miniature. If Anell had still cared to draw her observations, she could have limned tiny nostrils, fingers, even the dark frail bones of the spine and ribcage where the light pierced through the delicate flesh. And yet even in the bright glare of the lightscope, the spark of vitality still lay hidden somewhere Anell could not find it.

She sat back to clear her eyes with a blink, and dull colored shapes danced in the darkness behind her lids. Amid their mad dance, inspiration glittered: perhaps she had missed something in the magichemical trigger with which she’d initiated the implantation. She had issued commands to grow, to engorge with angiogenetic tendrils, to increase and multiply along nature’s intended design.

If she were to observe the original process fully, perhaps she would be able to glean some information about what was lacking.

That, however, would require an additional sample.

At this hour the outside of the Liel estate was dark but for the low braziers of incense burning in the courtyard. Anell ducked her head as she stepped under the great arches. Two servants looked up from their act of love in the shelter of the blacklace tree; they watched Anell pass by, but no questions nor offers of assistance left their swollen lips. Anell knew where Arantha’s room was, had visited it often enough. She entered the foyer, where golden candlelight spilled down the stairs in fits and starts to show her the way.

Anell found the Countess before she found her son. Liel’s head of House reclined in a shared salon through which Anell was obliged to pass to reach the sleeping quarters. When Anell tried to stroll through, robes pulled taut across her shoulders, the Countess called out to her to wait. “I meant to send for you to meet with me tomorrow, but as you are here now, let us talk.”

Trembling legs brought Anell closer to the Countess as the old woman set aside her reading. No need to kneel before her patron after the many years of their association, but she sat on a stool opposite her so that they would be eye-to-eye. “Nath Anell,” said the Countess. Not once had she ever called Anell by the Camrainian custom. “I saw you briefly after my son’s Resurrection this afternoon. Have you been at work all the while since?”

“I have,” said Anell, sidestepping the matter of what exactly she was working on. “Your Grace, I hope you will not begrudge me the time I took to be present for his return to us. I underwent the Rite to show you that I will serve you above all else, but I won’t turn my back on all other ties.” Of course she had already forsworn her vow to put House Liel’s interests first but did not say so. “I am a scientist, not an automaton, and if I do not live I can’t create.”

The Countess raised one hand to still Anell’s tongue. “I did not mean to rebuke you. Or if I did, it is for the opposite of what you presume.” Liver-spotted hands drifted over the cover of her book: a religious text Anell did not recognize. “You should feel welcome to celebrate the joys of this House. You have served me aptly enough these past years. And I hope you will serve my son Temat the same way.”

A question bubbled inside Anell, then burst under the weight of its callousness. Carefully she stumbled through a less invasive alternate. “Your Grace, do you mean to abdicate soon on Temat’s behalf?”

“I met with the Lord Physician today.” Time had not dulled the piercing luster of the Countess’s eyes. “He has given me my sentence. A few months, perhaps three to six, he thinks.”

“Your tumor—”

“Does not trouble me. My heart, however…” The Countess shrugged. “I never expected to see true Victory. You will of course devote yourself in the interim to researching cardiac disease, and reaching out to friendly colleagues who have spent more time working on the same. But I know the time frame is not a kind one. When I worsen, I will go down to the Temple and ease myself into the After, as all those who have fought a long and valiant fight ought to do.” A small smile touched her lips. “My son wanted to upmarry you into the family. To make you a gentleperson and ease your life of work and worry.”

“I never wanted that.”

“I know.” The Countess leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I’m glad that you have found what you want, and found it here with House Liel. Go, take your leave. I must rest a spell before I finish my reading for the night.”

Anell fled. Arantha had not yet returned, so she knelt on his soft mattress to wait. When he stumbled in some hours later he cried out in wordless surprise at the sight of her. His breath was humid with wine as he undressed her and covered her mouth with his. She rose to his touch but had no patience for his gentleness tonight. When his body was ready, hers was not, but she thrust herself astride him and drove relentlessly against the cradle of his hips.

Her pleasure did not come to her, but his did to him, and she waited scarcely till his thrusting had stilled before pulling away and making the same old weatherworn excuses. Arantha clung to her hand a moment longer, and then she was off and away into the hall with her name dying on his tongue. She paused only a moment in the stiff shadow of a garden pillar to deposit the formless mass collecting on her undergarments into the orb of Permanence. Then she let the night carry her homeward.

Her creation watched, expressionless and still as ever, as she worked. Trembling hands assembled a fresh slide: a single ovum and its soft sleeping animalcule, a swiftly-painted sample of Arantha’s semen. The lightscope bruised the bony sockets of her eyes as she observed, and in the twisting of her fingers she broke her pen. Rather than miss a moment of what unwound before her, she let the hungry folds of her robes blot up the black ink.

The spermatozoa seemed to be aware of the ovum’s presence, and they oriented toward it as if the animalcules they contained could direct them by those tiny tight-shuttered eyes. She reconsidered her earlier hypothesis, that the spermatocyte’s animalcule was an evolutionary dead end. It must serve some purpose in navigating toward the ovum, even if not truly by sight, though what goal that might yet serve evaded her imagination. Whatever the cause, in their hordes the spermatozoa battered at the ovum’s cold hard moon of a surface. Anell marveled that the ovum’s animalcule could sleep through such a barrage.

Then, at last, one spermatozoon pierced through into the ovum’s cytoplasm. Eternal After! Perhaps it was this moment that fully quickened the ovum’s animalcule, the brief rupture of the cell membrane. The change in equilibrium. Perhaps—Anell caught her breath.

The ovum’s animalcule had opened its eyes.

And now, yes, now it moved, too, short jerking strokes of arms and legs. Reaching, pulling; a sort of primitive swimming stroke. Anell muffled her cry of triumph with her clenched fists. At last the mysteries of Life unraveled before her eyes. Now she could mend those fraying strands, loop them around themselves to create a new kind of pattern: one that need never know the pain of an ending.

A flicker of movement at the corner of the slide asserted itself into her attention. An odd development: the male animalcule, too, was on the move. The head of the spermatozoon had dissolved around it, so that it could swim freely in the cytoplasm. It oriented itself toward its counterpart and lurched toward it under the power of spasmodic kicks.

What would happen when they reached one another? Perhaps they would merge into a single animalcule—lightning crawled up and down the length of Anell’s spine. But of course; if the animalcules integrated into one another, that might explain the mixing of parental traits observed in offspring and would neatly parallel the adsorption of the spermatozoon into the egg.

Anell’s hands were shaking again. She pressed them into her ink-stained knees as the animalcules reached one another, and the ovum’s animalcule opened its mouth to tear a hunk of flesh away from the spermatozoon animalcule’s shoulder.

Anell wasn’t squeamish, but she would have screamed if she’d had breath left in her body. The sight drove all the air out of the room, rewrote elegant biological hypotheses with cold cruel data. The spermatozoon animalcule clawed for its counterpart now, and rent a long tear in the ovum animalcule’s torso. But too late; now its gaping maw slashed through only cytoplasm. The ovum animalcule had maneuvered behind it. When the ovum animalcule bit down, it tore into translucent skull. The spermatozoon animalcule spasmed, then stilled, as the ovum animalcule consumed it: cranium first, then moving slowly downward through the soft flexible spinal cord, the diaphanous viscera. Anell gagged. She had desired this, she had initiated it. She would witness it through to its end.

“Anell?”

She shoved back from the lightscope. Arantha stood in her office doorway, one bare foot just breaching the sanctity of this space. “You shouldn’t be in here,” she said, but her gaze wavered: from him to the lightscope’s eyepiece.

“Is this what’s been occupying you day in and day out? Anell, whatever my mother may demand of you, losing your life to only work is a sort of death in itself. Eternal After! Don’t make me argue theology, it makes me sound like my brother and no one wants that.” He edged forward, as one might walk toward a wild animal in a trap.

Anell realized she was still holding the broken pieces of her pen and let them fall to the floor. Now Arantha moved in close, draped her shoulders with one solicitous arm. His body was warm against hers, wicking away the cold burn in her muscles. “Come away from here. Lie down and take your rest, and—what is that?”

She looked. In its pillow-stuffed box on her desk, her creation lay silent and still as the faraway moon. Arantha drew away from it and pulled Anell with him. Her feet tangled and she nearly brought the two of them down together but for Arantha’s swift recovery.

“Anell,” he said, his voice small now, “it looks just like you.”

“I made it,” she said, and could offer no other explanation, nothing that could possibly satisfy the man who loved her not in spite of her choice to violate the Rite but because he had been spared an awareness of it. Nor could she satisfy herself, not with the afterbirth of her own understanding still pulsating fresh and too hot. Her creation would be immortal and lifeless without the violence of its conception to thrust it forward into sentience. Too late for this half-being to battle for its life against its counterpart. And if her laboratory were lost to the anger of House Liel, she might never see the creation of another. She wanted Arantha to love it, this awful lifeless thing, when she could not even stir her own heart to such an affection. “I made it.”

Against her, Arantha went still. Then the hard lines of muscle softened into swift-flowing purpose. He urged her out the door and down the stairs to the little galley kitchen; he settled her in a chair and put the kettle on. On the kitchen table were the viridescent entrails of an unfinished bouquet. She picked up a pair of hand shears and a fistful of lavender.

“I’ll take care of this,” Arantha said. He knelt before her, and put his hands on her knees. “Anell. Are you listening?”

Anell looked down at him. She tried to imagine a reason he might ignore such a breach, a way their life might continue uninterrupted. No. More than that. A path around life’s cruel and inflexible rules. “You’re going to try to destroy it.”

“I’m sure that Temat would entrust me to do so. I may never be head of House, but at least—” His fingers knotted into her wrinkled skirts. “I can take care of this, Anell.”

All things ended in destruction, given enough time. If she could have, Anell would have chosen to keep them all: her work, her passion, her love, her House. But she could not have them all. Perhaps could not have any, but then, yes, perhaps this one thing. She made her choice and bent to press a parting kiss to his temple.

“Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.” With that, he broke away.

She turned the shears to trim the lavender to size as his footsteps fell too heavy on the stairs over her head. On its own lavender meant healing; in combination with olibanum it meant regret. She would have to get some olibanum before she could be finished.

• • • •

The kettle sings out, shocking in the sudden noise—the upstairs has fallen silent. Anell sets aside a last sprig of lavender and rises to remove the kettle from the flame. For a moment her hand lingers over the gas valve; then she closes it, and the blue flame smothers in its cradle.

Her feet find the stairs. She lurches upward, knowing what she will see and dreading it all the same. The choice is made, the sacrifice paid. It is not her eyes that will drink down that cost but her heart.

Her creation sits cross-legged on the office floor. Blood, drying dark and scarlet-fresh, paints her mouth and cheeks and she chews, chews, chews. Her once-sunken belly now strains against the gore-streaked doll’s chemise that covers it. By her side lies the pillow of her cradle, torn and shredded, and on the floor sleeps Arantha in endless Surrender. Not an easy Surrender, nor a gentle one. Not what he deserved at the end of his days, sung sweetly into that final rest by the ministrations and medicines of beautiful young temple attendants. His good eye is gone and his glass eye shattered; deep gouges mar the bare skull where it shines through ruined flesh. The skin of his left arm hangs in ribbons from the bare, marrow-sucked bone. A sob rises in Anell’s throat, but she strangles it when her creation shivers and turns toward her. One eye hazel-green, the other milky and dull. Arantha’s eyes.

“It’s all right,” Anell says. She holds out her hand, and the creature studies it. When this overture provokes no further reaction, she draws nearer and kneels beside the creature. She combs her fingers through the soft fine hair. The creature leans into the contact, presses hard against Anell’s palm. It would be very easy to grasp that head with both hands, to twist sharply. To unmake her work.

Anell’s hand cups the creature’s cheek. No, no, this is not right. She will have to stop calling her “creature” or “creation” and give her a proper name. “It’s all right,” she says again, and she is already composing abstracts, penning imaginary proposals, to build from scratch a world where it will be.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work also appears in Analog, Fireside, and Escape Pod, and with Bennett North, she co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a zine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Her novellas “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” and “Local Star” arrive in 2021 from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively.

Erase, Erase, Erase
By Elizabeth Bear

I shouldn’t have let it get so far. It felt so inconsequential at first. Almost a relief to find yourself getting a little misty around the edges. Bits dropping off. Stuff you don’t need anymore.

Erase, erase, erase.

Sorry, historians. I know some of this stuff would be useful to you, but it’s all gone now. All gone.

I burned most of it.

Only I am still here.

And I am falling apart, and I can’t remember who I used to be or how I got here.

Irresponsible of me, I know.

• • • •

It’s not just the memories, either. There’s bits of me gone that I swear were there before. Fingertips. Some hair. The eyelashes on my right eye.

I’m almost certain I used to have those.

Sometimes I reach for something—coffee mug, keyboard—and realize I can’t seem to find my own hand. I have to go look around the house for it, because I never remember where I had it last. Feet, at least, limbs—I don’t tend to get far when those have gone missing. It’s hard not to notice as soon as you try to stand up.

But I’ve found hands in the bed, under the bed, halfway up the stairs. Once in the fridge, which worried me a lot but actually it went right back on. Just felt a little weird and numb for a few minutes. Found my ear still stuck on an earbud once, and that was pretty awful. When the nose comes off, the glasses usually go with it.

I miss cats, but I don’t have a cat anymore. I couldn’t be sure of taking care of one. I’d probably forget to feed her, or not be able to work the can opener, and she’d resort to eating a mislaid finger.

None of it hurts. None of it seems to harm me in any way. Except that I’m falling apart, and a lot of my time is taken up with finding bits of me that have broken away somehow, and sticking them back on again in more or less the spot they came from.

I don’t leave the house the way I used to. I’m glad I live in a time when nearly everything can be delivered.

• • • •

And sometimes I get misty and confused. I’ll be in the middle of some task and realize three hours later, in another part of the house, that I’ve left it undone. I’ll find my spectacles in the fridge, or my socks on the bookshelf. I’m sure putting them there seemed like a logical idea at the time.

Sometimes also, I’ll find my clothes in a puddle under me on the sofa and realize that they just kind of drained through me while I was working. I’ll be chopping vegetables and the knife will hit the chopping block and just lie there, and it will be some time before I can manage to pick it up again. My hand will pass through my coffee cup for a while before it solidifies once more, and I won’t get to drink it until it’s cold.

At least the pens and notebooks are always solid. Always real. My laptop, too, and I guess that’s logical, because it’s not that different from a notebook in intention. Heck, some people call them notebooks.

Oh, but now. But this time.

I think I did more than get a little misty. I think I forgot something.

I think I forgot something very important. I think I forgot it on purpose, and because I forgot it, something terrible is going to happen. To a lot of people. Not just me.

So I’m falling apart. And I’m losing my mind.

• • • •

I used to burn my notebooks.

I didn’t want to be connected to the past they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the person they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the me that was.

I wanted to reinvent myself. Each time I made a terrible mistake, I wanted to put everything aside, walk away, move on. I wanted to erase my errors. I wanted to change the past so the bad things had not happened. So I could not be punished for them. So I would not have to feel, all the time, so wrong.

I erased my thoughts, my feelings. My failed loves. The classes where my grades were only average. The abusive family background. The jobs that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped, that had toxic office politics, or abusive bosses. I erased the pain, the pain, the pain.

I wrote it all down in hope, and when it didn’t work out, I burned it in despair.

I was trying to erase my mistakes, I suppose. It was a kind of perfectionism. If something has a flaw, throw it out and get something perfect next time. I was trying to move forward, in the hope that the next adventure would end better.

But not learning from the failures.

And so, little by little, I erased myself.

I threw myself away.

• • • •

I would have been free and clear if I just hadn’t read the newspaper that day. The day they printed the manifesto. I could have gone on about my life and my business in ignorance.

I could have spared myself a lot of grief. And work. And worry.

Grief and work and worry that would have been transferred to other people in my stead. That might still be served up to them if I can’t prevent it.

And if it happens, I will know that it is my fault, because I failed.

The manifesto was in the paper. All the papers, I imagine, not just my specific one. It purported to be written by the group that had been mailing incendiary bombs to universities. Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago. To their medical colleges.

That niggled at me, and I didn’t think it was just because the University of Chicago was my alma mater. There was something.

Something back there.

Something I had worked very hard to forget.

Not violence, no. But the promise of violence. The expectation of violence.

Is that what people mean when they talk about menace? Something being menacing? That awareness that there is not just the potential for violence, in the abstract, a kind of background radiation that is always present—but that somebody, somewhere, is planning to cause someone harm.

• • • •

Any long-term relationship is served by a little amnesia. A marriage—and I’m using the term loosely here, but we were together, if you can call it together, for almost eight years—is a country in flux. A series of negotiations and edges and considered silences. And some unconsidered ones, depending on how self-aware the diplomats in question are. Sometimes all the negotiations are carried out by reflex and instinct. Sometimes this results in war. A covert war, or an open one.

But sometimes, there’s a plan.

When a diplomat who’s acting on reflex, instinct, and conditioned response (diplomat A) meets a diplomat who is acting with self-awareness, caution, and a considered agenda of compromises (diplomat B), (diplomat B) is usually going to win the exchange.

I was (diplomat A) in this example.

I was seventeen years old.

I went in without a theory.

• • • •

A broken heart is like a cracked bathtub. Nobody’s going to make a full-price offer for a property with annoying repair problems like that hanging around. So either you fix it yourself, or you try to hide the cracks and cover up the damage. At least until the mark has signed enough paperwork that it’s inconvenient to back out.

• • • •

Plastic-covered notebooks give off a terrible smell as they burn.

• • • •

I wasted a lot of paper.

I was not good at finishing the notebooks. I would reach a point where I was damned sick of who I was, how I had been feeling, how I had been acting. And then I needed to be done with the stained pages I had been writing, because I had written down everything. Everything about my internal landscape, anyway.

I didn’t have friends.

I just had secrets.

And so I wrote them down.

It was actually easier—well, cheaper, anyway, and more efficient—when I was younger. In the three-ring and spiral-bound notebooks, I just ripped out the offending pages and tore them up. Got rid of them. Shredded them and gave them a shove.

But then I graduated to bound books. The cheap fabric-covered ones at first. Then better ones, professional-quality ones, with paper that ink pens did not feather on or bleed through. I liked the hard-covered ones in pretty colors, with ribbon markers and pockets in the back. Graph paper or dot grids. I did not like wide-ruled.

But those were harder to destroy, eventually. When they needed destruction.

Everything needs destruction in the end. And so I learned to burn.

I thought about burning more than notebooks when I was young. I thought of self-immolation, but I never had the courage. I thought of arson, but I never had the cruelty. I remembered those things, vaguely. Like a story that had happened to someone else.

Maybe that was why that manifesto struck me so hard, I tell myself, as my fingers slip through the handle of the coffee pot again. A major American city, it had said. An inferno of flames. The Judgement of a just and terrible God.

Engulfed.

Soon, soon. Soon.

But no. There is more than that. Some part of me that I can’t access knows. Knows which city. Knows who had written those words. Knows enough to stop this terrible thing from happening.

I just can’t remember.

• • • •

How do you learn to erase yourself?

It’s not something that comes naturally to children. Children seek attention because attention means survival. So to get them to erase themselves, you have to teach them that they don’t exist. And because it is an unnatural, self-destructive thing that you are teaching them—a maladaptive response—the only tactic that works is to make the consequences of noncompliance worse than the consequences of nonexistence.

That takes force. Violence, physical or emotional. If you just try to ignore a kid, they’ll act out and seek attention through misbehavior.

Any port in a storm.

I bet, given half a chance, I could have been a charming child.

But I didn’t learn to be charming. I learned how not to be real.

I learned to have no vulnerabilities and expect no consideration. I learned I had no intrinsic value and was only marginally worthwhile for what I could provide, if what I provided was beyond reproach.

I learned I was not allowed to be angry. To defend myself. To have needs. I learned to be good at being alone, because if you were alone, nobody could betray you.

I thought I had escaped all that when I went away to college. But like the horror movie phone call, the loathing was coming from inside my head.

• • • •

I didn’t hold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something, you lost it easy.

But if you don’t hold on, you lose things.

My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.

If I can just remember them.

I can write them down.

• • • •

I lost a lot of pens.

I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.

But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.

• • • •

It’s in the notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.

There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.

Oh. But the pens.

• • • •

I started collecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grown-up and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.

I loved them.

And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.

Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place in which you live and in which you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.

On a smaller scale, of course.

But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.

And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.

The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.

So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back.

I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Discard the ruined page and keep reaching for a fresh one. Burn my notebooks.

Erase my history. Erase my screw-ups.

Erase my self.

Erase, erase, erase.

• • • •

I start on collectors’ websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them had gotten more expensive since.

A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that look familiar. That I suddenly remember having owned. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.

I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.

I get out my birth certificate and check.

I am forty-five years old.

How many pens have I lost?

How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?

• • • •

I think of a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly-looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.

I find one like it on an auction site. Lose that auction but win another in a few days. $63 plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were $30 new back in 1995.

Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?

The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my palm. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense, it looks violet.

I uncap it and examine the nib, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.

The mysterious Internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water, but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.

Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated with alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.

Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.

With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.

I remember the pen.

And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.

• • • •

I grew up to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.

I write, and write, and the notebook stays solid and the pen stays solid and it writes as well as the one I used to have. But my right hand—I’m left-handed—has a tendency to slide through the table if I’m not paying attention. And twice I fall right through my chair, which is a new and revolting development.

I don’t let it stop me, though. I write, and remember, and write some more. About somebody I can sort of recall. A long, long time ago.

An incident that happened at the University of Chicago. After . . . after I stopped being a student there?

It’s so damned hard to recall.

• • • •

“There is no point in being so angry.” His words had the echo that used to come from long distance.

But I wasn’t being angry to make a point.

Which was not something the manipulative son of a bitch could ever have understood. I was angry because I was angry. Because he deserved my anger.

I was angry because anger is a defense mechanism. It’s an emotion that serves to goad you to action, to remove the irritant on your turf or the thing that is causing you pain.

“I’m angry because you’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m angry because you’re hurting a lot of people. Stop it, and I won’t need to be angry with you anymore.”

Therapy gives you a pretty good set of tools to be (diplomat B), it turns out. I was still furious with my mother for forcing me to go.

But it was helping.

It might take me a while to get over my anger. But that didn’t seem salient to the argument we were having, so I kept it to myself.

“You can’t just set things on fire because you don’t like the way the world is going.”

“Oh, I can,” he told me. “And you already helped me. You’re just too much of a coward to own that and be really useful, so you’ll let other people do your dirty work and keep your hands clean.”

“You won’t do it,” I said.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I probably won’t. Don’t call me again.”

• • • •

I think about calling. An anonymous tip. Or sending an email.

But I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t have a name.

“I know who wrote the manifesto. But I can’t remember his name. And I helped him come up with the plan. The plan to burn down a city. Except I can’t remember what city, either. Or the details of the plan.”

Yeah. No.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I am too much of a coward to take responsibility for something I believe in. For something I had once believed in, until I forgot?

Maybe I forgot because I knew it would feel like my fault if I remembered.

• • • •

My mother gave me an expensive fountain pen when I graduated high school. It was a burgundy one, small and slim. Wrote beautifully. I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time.

I don’t think the new ones are as nice anymore.

I lost that one when I was thrown by a horse one time in college. It was in my pocket, and when I got to my feet, bruised and hip aching, it was gone. And no amount of searching turned it up.

• • • •

There are a lot of them on the internet.

But the damned things ain’t cheap. And how do you tell which ones are counterfeit?

But maybe the pen I was using at the time . . .

At the time it happened? At the time I learned the thing I can’t remember? At the time I did the thing I don’t want to remember?

But I didn’t have the pen long. Did I?

In any case, maybe that pen would help me remember.

• • • •

I spend way too much money on it. And it comes.

I hold it in my hand. It feels . . . itchy. But it doesn’t fill me up with memories the way the other one had.

• • • •

I remember the unused pages at the back of my old notebooks. There were always a few.

I find myself taking the books down off the shelf, thumbing through them. The unburned ones, of course. Thumbing through the burned ones would have been unfeasible, and even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t accomplish much of anything beyond getting my fingers ashy.

I find myself looking at ink colors, organizational choices. How my handwriting has evolved.

We lose all the best things to time.

But time brings a lot of benefits, also. Freedom from old wounds, for example.

Perspective.

Grace.

The wisdom to identify the heads that need to be busted, and the courage of your convictions to go out and bust some heads.

• • • •

I have a couple of dozen old notebooks. And at the end of almost every one of them is a swath of pristine pages. Somewhere between twenty and fifty, a full signature at least and maybe two or three—just sitting there wordless and ignored.

Even after I stopped burning them, I guess I never really finished a notebook before I moved on. The lure of the next book was already there, like a pressure inside me urging me to set this one aside and pick up the perfect one that would be waiting. Untrammeled. Pure.

Without any mistakes in it.

Yes, I hate using broken things. Dirty things. I hate things that are cracked or warped or seem old and in disrepair.

So I would get to the point where I could conceivably justify discarding the old book with its scuffed cover and frayed page edges and all the mistakes inside it. And I would switch to a new one, clean and unscribbled-in. And out the old one would go. Into the flames, at first. Later, onto a shelf with its sisters.

• • • •

I can touch the notebooks. I can always touch the notebooks.

But they don’t go back far enough. They don’t have the thing that mattered in them. That had happened before. The thing that I can’t remember.

The thing that had happened and been burned.

The thing I use my new old echo of a pen now to write about.

• • • •

With the one before him, I never argued. We never made enough demands on each other to have anything to fight about.

With him, I think I fought all the time. I remember . . . screaming matches. I remember arguments that made me doubt my sanity. I remember him telling me I said things I couldn’t remember saying. I remember letting him win because I couldn’t keep track of where the goalposts were, and because I never learned to argue to win.

I never learned to take up space in other people’s lives.

• • • •

I wish I had known to be wary of the urge to crystallize my identity, to declare myself a thing—one thing, or another—and not accept that I was a continuity of things that would always be changing.

I might have been less eager to discard the thing I had been to become something new if I hadn’t been so afraid that acknowledging the old thing meant being trapped for all time. If I hadn’t been so afraid the people who knew me would never let me change, I might have held on to more of them, instead of shedding whole lives like a snake sheds skins.

Of course, sometimes people won’t let you change. Because their self-image is bound up with yours, and they’re afraid of challenging themselves, too. Or because they want to keep you weak so they can own you. Or because their own identity gets stuck on you being and behaving a certain way. It’s a cliché to say that alcoholics and addicts often find they need a whole new suite of friends when they get clean, and their lives no longer revolve around getting altered anymore.

But the thing is, over time, changes just become part of the status quo. Tattoos that marked a milestone or a rebellion to our younger selves soften into our skin, become unremarked. They become a part of us, a part of our image and who we are.

What is mine, and what is not mine—our conception of these things changes as we grow.

• • • •

I moved around a lot. As an adult, and as a child. I didn’t have any place that felt like mine.

Until I met him. Until I met Joshua.

• • • •

I write the name, and look at it, and know that it is right. I should be giddy with triumph. Blazing with the endorphins of having figured something out.

I feel hungry, and dizzy. And tired.

• • • •

I was sitting in a booth at the airport, crying on the phone. “I wish you had just shot me,” I said.

At the time when I said it, it was true.

Joshua was telling me about the girl he’d met. The girl who was helping with his plans. The girl who would be taking over for me, he said, so that I could get some rest. Get my head together.

Get back to being right with the revolution.

I asked her name. He told me. She was somebody I knew. I asked if I could come back after Thanksgiving with my mom. He said if I got right, I could. He said that my leaving to see my family had been a mistake, and I would have to make amends for it.

“You can’t do this to her,” I said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know she’s giving up her whole life.”

She was the same age I had been, eight years before. I was a wizened old woman of twenty-seven.

“Come back,” he said. “Forget about your mother. We can talk. That other girl doesn’t have to be involved.”

My mom, who I had not seen in four years because of Joshua, was dying. I reminded him of that. He reminded me that if I were a good revolutionary, that wouldn’t matter. “Anyway, remember what her husband did to you.”

How could I forget?

I have since, largely, forgotten.

He hung up. I remember thinking, very clearly, He’ll use her up the same way he used up me.

I wish I could say that thought is the thing that motivated me. I wish I could say that was the last time I ever talked to him.

I sat there and cried for another hour, until I had to get up to make my connection. Nobody bothered me. People cry in airports so often, it’s not much of a spectacle. These days they cry and shout into their cellphones just about anywhere. Back then, the crying and shouting were more localized.

Halfway to the gate, I stopped. I walked back to the phones. The young woman he’d replaced me with was a sophomore. Nineteen years old. I knew her name and where she came from.

I called her family.

“Your daughter joined a cult in college,” I told them. “You need to get her home.”

I hung up. I ran for my gate.

I just barely made my plane.

• • • •

We have this idea that healing comes as an epiphany.

We have it in part because epiphanies are narratively convenient. They’re tidy for a storyteller; there’s a break point, a moment when everything changes. An identifiable narrative beat. A point at which everything before is one way, and everything after is different. They’re satisfying. They provide catharsis and closure.

Frustratingly, in real life, you often have to go back and have the same epiphany over and over again, incrementally, improving a tiny bit each time. Frustrating for you. Frustrating for your loved ones.

It would be nicer if you could just have that single crystallizing incident, live through it, and get on with being a better human being who was better at humaning.

It’s comforting to the afflicted to think we only have to make one change, and we can be better. Boom, all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice if roleplaying or primal scream therapy or rebirthing therapy or a hot, uninhibited fuck or a midnight confession or a juice cleanse or a confessional essay or a cathartic piece of fiction really could heal all the old damage just like that? In one swoop? Wouldn’t it be nice?

Sure.

Of course, it’s nonsense, like so many other narratively convenient things we learn about from stories. But like so many of the things we learn about from stories, it’s useful nonsense.

And epiphany isn’t going to fix us. Maybe nothing is going to fix us. But recognizing the damage might help us route around it. Which isn’t nothing, you know?

The truth is that you never get to stop dealing with the damage. You might get better at it. You might find a lot of work-arounds and you might be happier—or even happy, inasmuch as happiness is state and not a process!—but happiness doesn’t just happen. And it doesn’t happen instantly but incrementally, with a lot of constant effort and focus.

I was small, and the people who should have taken care of me didn’t. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they were awful people. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they had their own shit going on.

I get that. I have spent most of my life with my own shit going on, after all.

One of the things with having your own shit going on is that, first, it blinds you to other people’s problems. It’s hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It’s hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you’re exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you’re swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything else except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget that you—and your trauma—are not the only thing on anybody else’s mind, or even the most important one, because they’re all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

They have their own shit, their own trauma and crisesdeadlinestaxeshealthproblemssoreteethfamilydramatoxicneighbors you name it eating up the lion’s share of their own attention. And that’s fine, is the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your problems are your problems, and their problems are their problems, and that’s the way it’s actually supposed to be.

But when you’re dealing with that much trauma, and it’s that raw, boundaries are another thing you wind up sucking at.

Recovery, I guess I’m trying to say, makes narcissists of us all.

So when I’m freaking out now about what people think of me or what they think is going on with me, I remind myself . . . I don’t merit more than a passing consideration in the day of most people I encounter. They just don’t think that hard about me.

Thank God.

People got their own problems.

I certainly got more than enough of mine.

• • • •

I saw her once more, even though I never planned to go back to Chicago. She came to see me after her parents let her out of the treatment program they’d had her committed to.

She came to my mother’s house, where I was living. Working temp jobs. Never staying longer than a week because after a week, people start to loop you into the politics and then they expect you to get involved. I was in therapy, because my dying mother made me.

Biggest favor she ever did me, in hindsight.

She stood in the doorway looking at me when I answered, framed in the greens of the yard. She studied my face. We were both a little better-fed than we had been.

And then she said to me, “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how much I hate you.”

I smiled as if she had accepted my offer of tea. “Oh,” I said, feeling the swell of self-loathing in me like a rising magma dome, “I think I can, most likely.”

• • • •

Before I digressed, what I was pointing out was that it doesn’t happen fast, when things change. It happens slow. It’s an unpicking. The Gordian knot is more of a problem when you’re in a hurry and you don’t have any tools—assuming you want the string to be useful for something when you’re done unpicking it, which I’ve always thought was the problem with the Alexandrian solution.

Well, I had assembled my tools. With as much haste as possible, and it hadn’t been fast, honestly, despite feeling that amorphous sense of formless dread, the pressure pushing on my awareness constantly without any knowledge of where it was going to happen, or when.

Now I have them. Pens, inks. A selection of flawless new notebooks.

The first line in a pristine notebook is always a little fraught. That paper, so innocent. And here I am, intending to put a mark down that would scar it forever.

Maybe the real reason I burned my notebooks was that I didn’t want the responsibility.

Maybe that’s also why I never had children. Just stories.

Nobody really remembers if you screwed up any given story, five years after the fact.

Erase, erase, erase.

There’s freedom in not being important. In not being seen.

• • • •

I can’t touch food for three days. Unfortunately, not being able to touch the food does nothing to keep me from getting hungry.

• • • •

There’s so much to forgive yourself for when it comes down to it. So many little cysts of self-hate and personal despair.

“I need you to keep your promises,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.

He promised easily. Fluidly.

Meaninglessly.

And I kept on believing him. Forgiving him.

Making excuses.

I was so good at excuses.

Not for myself. I was always culpable. And I always found ways to punish myself. I believed it when he told me I was wrong. My perceptions, my understanding of events. When he told me I must be crazy, because what I remembered hadn’t happened that way at all.

I was unforgivable. I was sure.

But then I asked him to keep his promises.

And I started writing his promises down. In my notebook. With my pen.

• • • •

I find the damaged pen in a box I didn’t know had any pens in it, at the back of a deep cabinet shelf. I rattle it reflexively, not expecting a sound. But there is weight inside it, and something shifts.

I open it and find a narrow, black, beat-up old fountain pen I cannot identify.

I mean, I know what pen it is. It’s one I must have been given by a family member, but I can’t remember what the occasion was, or who had given me it. I had used it all through college after I lost my graduation pen. But I don’t know what kind it is.

It’s missing the gold trim band on the cap, and the cap doesn’t close and lock. I remember it having a satisfying click when I shut it. It’s so slender, I used to tuck it inside the spiral rings of my notebooks. It lived there. It was a good pen.

It is full of dried ink, because I am a terrible pen custodian.

I check the collector websites and can’t find anything like it.

• • • •

There was a time I was a bad friend. I was in love with somebody, and they were in love with somebody else, and I was in love with that person, too. Looking back, I don’t think either of them loved me.

I didn’t handle it well.

I remember sitting in a bar in a bad chain restaurant breaking up tortilla chips into crumbs with my fingers because I needed something to do while my friend broke up with me, and I didn’t have the will to eat.

And I’d already picked the whole label off my beer.

I tried to make amends, years later. I can’t blame them for not wanting to talk to me.

I could have done without that memory. I had, for years, I now realize.

Accountability. That’s another thing you lose when you erase yourself.

Thank God.

• • • •

Some of the pens start slipping through my hands. At first, the newer ones, or the ones that had been bought as replacements for ones long lost. The older ones fare better, as if every scratch on the barrel, every bit of luster worn by use from the nib, every imperfection, makes the object in my hands more real. Or gives my hands something to stick to as they become more phantasmal. More of an unreality.

The older ones fare better. At first.

Then those begin to fall through me, too.

There is so much I still can’t remember. I frown at those pristine notebooks with their smooth, friendly paper. I stroke a finger over them, and sometimes I feel the nap of the page, and sometimes my fingertip sinks through.

I know—I can feel—the memories down there, like shipwrecks under clouded water. But I can’t make out the shapes. Can’t describe what I know has to be there.

I start dropping even pens.

But I never drop the broken one. It feels steady and solid in my hand. As if it were more real than the others.

That gives me an idea.

• • • •

They used to say of somebody who made a bad marriage that they threw themselves away. What happens if you never actually got married, because marriage is a tool of the bourgeoisie?

I’m pretty sure you can still throw yourself away. Erase yourself. For somebody else, or because you don’t think you are worth preserving.

• • • •

I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.

• • • •

My stepfather liked to have excuses to hit. So he could feel good about himself, I guess. One way you get excuses to hit is to expect perfection in every task, and set hard tasks without allowing the person you’re setting them for time to learn how to do them.

Then, when the student isn’t perfect, you have a good reason to punish somebody.

Another thing you can do is change your expectations constantly, so that nobody can predict what is expected and what isn’t. Make them arbitrary and impossibly high. Don’t allow for any human imperfections.

• • • •

Since I can touch it, I decide to fix the mystery pen.

I make a new trim ring for it out of polymer clay, to help hold the cap in place. I clean it, and while I handle it, my hands stay solid on the tools. As if it is some kind of talisman to my past reality.

I wish I could say my repair job is some kind of professional affair with a loupe and so on, but I have some epoxy and some rubber cement and honestly, I kind of fake it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s all right then.

• • • •

I take up my broken pen. The nib is still pretty good, though it doesn’t write like a fine point anymore. More like a medium. And even on smooth paper, it scratches a little.

It’s still usable, though. And it makes a nice smooth line.

Except I have faded more, in the interim. I am vanishing. Falling away, like all the memories I hadn’t wanted, and now wish I had been less cavalier with. I can’t manage to open a notebook, let alone write in one. I am able to reread the old ones I’d kept. But the new ones are as ghostly as the cheese sandwiches have become.

Maybe this is better than living with the pain of remembering. Maybe fading away, fading into nothingness, starving to an immaterial and noninteractive death—maybe that is the happiest ending.

Except the one thing I know—know with a drowning urgency, though I still cannot remember the specifics—is that people will come to harm if I cannot remember the things I once knew.

A lot of people.

And not just hurt.

People are going to get killed.

More people. A lot more. Exponentially more than had been harmed by three incendiaries sent to medical schools.

If I can just remember the plan I came up with. Before I helped him write this manifesto. Almost twenty years ago.

If I can only remember the rest of his name.

• • • •

Lack of food and water doesn’t help me think any more clearly. I’ve never been good at handling low blood sugar. So half my time seems to be spent figuring out how to write. How to even get words down on the page.

I can put the pen on the paper—the pen stays solid, even if it is in my hand. And I can use the nib to turn the pages. But do you know how hard it is to write legibly and usefully in a notebook you have no way to smooth flat, or to steady? Especially when your temples ache with hunger, and a sour metallic taste seems to sit in your abdomen.

My laptop has long since stopped being something I could touch. I would have given a lot for that laptop right now.

My laptop. And a banana.

• • • •

My stepfather would hit me with a belt, and he wouldn’t stop until I managed to keep from crying.

“I’m not hurting you that badly, you little wimp. Quit that squalling, or I’ll give you something real to cry about.”

It’s amazing what you can learn to keep inside.

• • • •

A day later, lying more or less in the sofa, my head bleary and aching with hunger and my throat scratchy with dehydration, I realize that those blank notebook pages are the answer. I can’t get the burned notebooks back—that was, after all, why I had burned them—but I can fill these leftover pages with memories of what I might have written in them.

I can construct some kind of a record, though it will be one very filtered by the passage of time.

And the important memory might be in there somewhere. If I am lucky.

And brave.

• • • •

It would be so much easier just to fade away.

Erase, erase.

So much easier to stop pretending my existence matters and let go. Then it will be over. Then I won’t have to keep existing after I do this thing. This thing I don’t even want to do. It’s not the idea of drifting into nothingness afterwards that bothers me. It’s the terrible fear that instead, I might hook myself back into the universe somehow. Re-assert my reality.

Get stuck being real.

• • • •

I joined a cult in college. That much, I know. Like a story told sketchily over a cup of coffee, but without the context or detail because it’s an embarrassing story and nobody wants to think about it too hard. The person telling it is embarrassed to have been there, and the person hearing it is reflecting embarrassment as well.

I joined a cult in college. I really craved the love-bombing, because I had never in my life felt really loved. I didn’t know how to receive attention in smaller doses, at lower proof. I had so much armor on, it took weaponized love to get through.

I joined a cult in college. It was a dumb idea and it was weird while it lasted—it lasted long past college, it lasted eight whole years—and I was in love with one of the guys who ran it.

I joined a cult in college. One of the guys who ran it . . . I thought he was my boyfriend. He wasn’t, though. He was preying on me. Grooming me.

I did not have a lot of agency in the relationship.

He’s one of the cult’s leaders now.

• • • •

The pen ran out of ink, and then I had to figure out how to fill it when I also couldn’t touch most of my ink bottles. My hand just swiped through them, all the gorgeous little art objects full of brilliant colors. I groped back in the shelf, waving blindly . . .

My fingers brushed something squat and cool. I pulled it out, and the bottles that had been in front of it slid out of the way, clattering. Not of my unreal hand. But of the ink, the thing that was real. The thing that mattered.

One or two fell to the floor. Ink bottles are sturdy, though, and the carpet kept them from breaking.

The bottle I could touch was a bottle of Parker Quink, blue-black. It was two-thirds empty. The label stained.

An old and trusty friend.

I filled my pen.

• • • •

He threw me down the stairs by my hair one time.

My stepfather, I mean.

Not Joshua.

I’d forgotten that. Erased it. And now I can’t unremember it again.

• • • •

A funny thing happens as I write.

I feel myself getting more real. I figure it out when I realize that I can lean an elbow on the table I am resting the current mostly finished notebook on. That’s a relief; you have no idea how hard writing is when you can manage to hold a pen but not rest your hand on anything.

When I realize that I can touch things, I stop writing and run into the kitchen, terrified of missing my window.

I still can’t lift a glass, but I manage to elbow the faucet on after a few minutes of trying. I bend my head sideways and drink from the thin, cold trickle of stale-tasting water. Nothing ever felt better flowing down my throat. I gulp, gulp again. Manage to get it to pool in my hands and drink that in a slightly more civilized fashion.

I drink until my stomach hurts, and then go to make sure the toilet seat is up, just in case I turn immaterial again before the stuff works its way through my system. Dehydrated as I had been, that might take a while, but I have learned to plan ahead. Such are the important life concerns of the terminally ghostly.

I sit on the bathroom floor and rest the back of my head against the sliding glass door of the shower. At least I am not falling through walls or floors. Yet?

I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can stop, and it will be miserable . . . but I will die of thirst in a few days. If I stop clutching at making myself real. If I just accept that I am not important, and let my ridiculous scribblings go.

It sounds so appealing. A final erasure.

And I won’t have to remember . . .

I won’t have to remember the horrible person I had been. The horrible things I had done. The horrible things that had happened to me. I could forget them all.

Who knows? Maybe if I forget them thoroughly enough—if I encourage myself to forget them thoroughly enough—I won’t even die. I’ll just fade.

Maybe if I fade enough, I won’t have material needs like food, water, air anymore. I’ll be a ghost for real.

I’ll be free. Free of myself. Free of pain.

I have these notebooks here.

I’m probably real enough to burn them now. Right now.

It will just cost the lives of some people I have never heard of to get there.

How many people?

I don’t know. One. A hundred. Three thousand.

Too many.

The glass shower door is cool. I relish its solidity.

When I put my hand up onto the sink to help myself stand, sometime later, my hand goes right through.

• • • •

I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to exist.

I can just let myself be perfect, and be gone.

So much easier.

So much easier.

Except I remember about the fires now. And if I write it all down . . . I think I might make myself real again.

Then how do I get away from what I did? From what was done?

Oh God, do I have to live with myself now? Do I have to live with being flawed, and do things I’m not very good at?

People will know.

People will see me.

People will punish me.

• • • •

I write it all down.

• • • •

Of course the manifesto was familiar.

I was the one who had written it.

What was published wasn’t my words exactly. It had been decades; what I wrote hadn’t survived the intervening twenty-odd years with Joshua unscathed. Unedited. It had passed through other pens than mine along the way.

But somewhere in the ashes of forgotten notebooks had been written a draft of that statement. Its structures, its rhetoric, even its handwriting had once been mine.

• • • •

I don’t bother calling the local police. I call the local field office of the FBI.

“I know who wrote the manifesto,” I say into the phone. “His name is Joshua Bright. Or it was, he might have changed it. And that probably wasn’t his real name. Because who calls their kid Joshua Bright if they can help it? And he’s got a plan to use incendiary devices to burn down a big chunk of Chicago if you don’t stop him.”

“Ma’am?” the tinny voice at the end of the phone says. “We’ll be sending a couple of agents over right away to talk to you. Please stay where you are until they arrive.”

• • • •

I make myself a peanut butter sandwich while I wait.

• • • •

That story about the airport and the aftermath. I don’t think it really happened that way.

I think it’s a pretty story I’m telling myself. I don’t know if I ever stood up for that girl, really. If I ever stood up for myself.

I remember doing it. I wrote it down. Does that mean it happened?

Or did I just figure out that Joshua was cheating on me and split not too much later? I tried to forget. I was, needless to say, pretty successful.

The plan to put incendiaries in basements and start a huge firestorm in Chicago had been mine to begin with. I came up with it. I gave it to Joshua as if it were just the plot for one of my thrillers. The ones I make my living writing now.

I wonder if he’ll try to blame it on me. Or if he’ll want to take credit.

He’ll want to take credit.

I never really thought he would do it. It was a thought experiment, that was all.

Just a thought experiment.

I joined a cult in college. It turned out about as bad as you’d expect.

If you join a cult in college, I hope you get well soon.

• • • •

You don’t have to be perfect.

Sometimes it’s okay for a thing to be a little bit broken.

Sometimes it’s okay to make do with what you have, and what you are.

I imagine meeting him in court. Of course I will have to testify. I’d better make sure of my solidity before then. I’d better commit.

My fingers leave peanut butter stains on the paper. I hope the food delivery comes soon. I’d like some milk.

I can’t know what it will be like, but I rehearse it in my head anyway. I write it down to make it real, so I can act on it when the time comes.

The FBI are on their way.

• • • •

Me, strong, implacable. Joshua saying, “I didn’t think you had the balls to turn me in.”

Me meeting his gaze. “You never did know me.”

• • • •

I wait for the doorbell. For the food. For the authorities.

I get to the bottom of the last page. I reach blindly for the next book, find the blanks at the end, and keep writing.

You don’t have to be perfect.

This story isn’t done yet with me.

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 and over a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure. Her most recent novel is Machine, in which a deep-space rescue operation goes terribly wrong.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

Glass Cannon
By Yoon Ha Lee

I am a Shuos.

Jedao didn’t remember most of Shuos Academy, let alone graduating from it. He couldn’t help thinking of himself as a cadet, only nineteen years old, despite the fact that his body was middle-aged in appearance. While Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had assured him that the courses he was taking at the Citadel of Eyes were equivalent to the education he would have gotten at the modern academy, Jedao didn’t believe him. Jedao had spent the past two years and change as a “guest” of the hexarch, or, more accurately, a prisoner. The hexarch might have unbent enough to allow him to catch up with best practices in social engineering and how to wrangle the state of the art bath facilities. That didn’t mean he was likely to allow Jedao to extract classified information from the grid.

Naturally, that was precisely what Jedao intended to do.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao had hoped that repeating the phrase in his head, like a mantra, would magically grant him access to the memories of his older, other self. Useful memories, like how do I hack into the Shuos hexarch’s private files? Never mind that he had no idea whether Jedao One (as he’d labeled the other man, who was and wasn’t dead) would have been able to manage the feat.

At the moment, Jedao was sitting in his suite of rooms watching a poetry recital livestream. The hexarch had invited him to the performance, put on by a Shuos agent whose job it was to pretend to be an Andan. Jedao had declined, claiming that crowds made him jittery. No one had challenged the lie.

The truth was other. Jedao had not redecorated the suite since he had moved into it. The wallpaper remained tranquil green. Furniture in wood—real wood, to which he responded with unwanted atavistic delight. He shifted the chairs around from time to time, just to prove he could, and also because he wondered if it bothered his watchers. (He had no delusions of privacy in the heart of Shuos headquarters.) He watered the potted green onion plant, the same one he’d been given two years ago, with great diligence. The hexarch asked after it every time they met, although Jedao hadn’t figured out why Mikodez cared so much about container gardening. None of this did anything to ameliorate the vast emptiness in his heart, the fact that he had no human friends here, and never would.

The colors in the Citadel were wrong. In place of the stark blacks and golds of the Kel, the Citadel was dominated by Mikodez’s favorite color, that transparently soothing shade of green. A few offices sported the garish Shuos red-and-gold, complete with ink paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails. (“We have to uphold a few clichés,” Mikodez had said.)

Gone were the ashhawks, the tapestries woven (as Dhanneth had told Jedao once upon a bed) from the uniforms of the dead, and decorated with beads smelted from ruined guns or spent ammunition. Gone was the cup he had shared with the Kel officers at high table. Gone was the life, however much a lie, that he had woken to with Hexarch Nirai Kujen, dead by Jedao’s own hand.

Increasingly, Jedao retreated to the few memories he had left, and the question that haunted him increasingly. He’d had one friend, during that vanished lifetime four centuries ago. Vestenya Ruo, fellow cadet, whom he’d had an embarrassing crush on, and who, as far as he knew, had never shown any indication of interest in Jedao. Not that way.

Sometimes Jedao caught himself daydreaming that he’d find Ruo, and—and what? He was already a rapist; Dhanneth had committed suicide to drive that point home. That didn’t, however, sway Jedao in his desire to find out what Ruo’s fate had been. He had become irrationally convinced that if Ruo had lived a long and happy life, it would prove that Jedao himself wasn’t poison to everyone he touched.

It was odd that he needed the highest level of access, available only to Mikodez and select members of his senior staff, to answer a simple question about a Shuos cadet. True, Ruo had died sometime four centuries ago; would have died no matter what, given the finiteness of human lives. But what had been so special about his death that the truth was locked away like this?

Cheris had told him only that Ruo had died young. Jedao wondered, sometimes, what details she had omitted. And there was only one way to find out.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao took a steadying breath, trying to pretend that he cared about the poetry recital. The poet had said something about peacocks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a real one. Jedao One would have known; but that was the problem.

Right on schedule, a snakeform servitor levitated down from one of the vents in the ceiling: Hemiola. It had once tried to explain its name to Jedao, and established that Jedao had no ability at music, or understanding of its theory, other than being able to find a beat to dance to. Hemiola flashed the lights along its articulated metal carapace in a friendly green of greeting.

Jedao leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers. It wasn’t impatience. Rather, he tapped in Simplified Machine Universal: Safe?

“Safe,” Hemiola flashed back, even more green, if possible. Not for the first time, Jedao envied it its ability to jinx the Citadel’s surveillance system, which it used when the two of them wanted to talk, or, as now, when Jedao wanted to hide his activities from his watchers.

Too bad Kujen never thought to install me in a servitor body, Jedao thought. He’d asked Hemiola about it. After all, people already offloaded some of their memories into their augments. Hemiola had said that, as far as it could tell, the process by which Kujen had created Jedao had worked through a different, more complex mechanism involving exotic effects. So much for that.

Thank you for covering for me, Jedao said.

“It’s no problem,” Hemiola said. It didn’t emphasize that he needed to be quick, that every time it screwed with surveillance, it was running a risk. They both knew that.

Ordinarily the two of them met here, Jedao because he could only endure so much of his self-imposed isolation, Hemiola because it, too, was far from home. What went unspoken was that they were, aside from Mikodez, the last people who remembered Nirai Kujen with any fondness, however complicated.

Jedao wasted no time on apologies and called up a separate subdisplay, this one of pornography—a plausible reason for a man to want some time alone, surely?—leaving the poet-performer to declaim verses about more birds. Mocking the Kel, probably; he wasn’t clear on the nuances. Using the techniques that Hemiola had taught him, he began hacking, grid-diving, whatever they called it these days.

This should be harder, Jedao thought, bemused, as the system opened itself to him like a flower. (Great, now he was thinking in poetic symbols too.) But then, “hard” was relative. Thanks to Hemiola’s spying, and that of the other servitors that it had made arrangements with, Jedao had a detailed understanding of the hexarch’s security measures.

Access to the files he wanted should have required him to log in from Mikodez’s personal terminal. (“He must be certain no one can spoof it,” Hemiola had remarked.) Over the years, however, the servitors had mapped the system down to every flicker that passed through the hardware, down to the very molecules. And Jedao himself had an advantage that he had done his best to keep from his captors.

What Mikodez knew: that Jedao, however much he appeared a manform, was not human. Jedao’s body regenerated even from death. Kujen, who had designed him, had intended for him to live forever.

What Mikodez might not yet be aware of: Jedao could drag himself through the space-time weave as moths did. It was how he’d escaped the massacre of the Kel (my Kel, he couldn’t help thinking, with a stab of grief). It had also hurt so badly that Jedao didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Beyond that, moths spoke to each other through minute fluctuations in space-time: gravity waves. Jedao heard the Citadel’s swarms of shadowmoths singing to each other every night, lullaby and torment in one.

Jedao hadn’t attempted to contact the shadowmoths. While everyone knew that defense swarms orbited the Citadel, he wasn’t supposed to know their locations while they were stealthed. He wanted to join in the song, and talk to them, and be welcomed. But he remembered the utter silence with which the Kel warmoths had reacted to him, and he didn’t have any reason to believe that Shuos shadowmoths would feel differently. Besides, any anomaly in their behavior would be noticed by Mikodez’s staff, and Jedao couldn’t afford that.

Instead, he’d practiced the speech-of-moths quietly, and learned to manipulate matter, with Hemiola standing guard. At first he’d been clumsy with it—he’d knocked all the riotous scented soaps into the tub that one time—and then he’d gained in finesse. In conjunction with his othersense, which allowed him to “see” distributions of mass with distracting precision, it gave him a chance to pull this off. Just this moment, for instance, in correlation with the master maps that he’d hacked into, he could tell that Mikodez’s primary office was empty.

That was all the opening Jedao needed to reach into Mikodez’s office, enter the necessary verifications not by using the keyboard input but the terminal’s internal circuitry itself, and pipe access to Jedao’s own workstation.

Kujen would have figured it out, assuming he hadn’t counted on it from the beginning. Whether he had informed Mikodez about this detail was what Jedao was about to find out.

Hemiola’s lights sheened orange when the third subdisplay came up. It featured a background photo of a calico cat napping in a sink. Jedao recognized it as one of Zehun’s pets—specifically the one that, disconcertingly, was named after him.

Jedao started to sweat. The marrow-deep pain was as he remembered it, if finer in scale. The fabric of his uniform—red-and-gold, how he hated the sight of it—clung damply to his back. He wiped his palms on his pants. Two years and he still hadn’t grown accustomed to going everywhere with naked hands, and this despite the fact that he’d never earned the half-gloves, either.

I am a Shuos, he thought. Fourth time; lucky unlucky four. He thought of all the Kel deaths he was responsible for, in this life and in the one he couldn’t remember.

He’d come this far. It would be a shame to let the opportunity slide past. So he set his fingers to the workstation and entered his first query. It would have been safer to do this using his ability to manipulate gravity, but he didn’t enjoy the pain. This would have to do.

What the fuck became of you, Ruo? Jedao wondered as he dug through the filesystem. Did he really want to know what had become of his best friend? The boy he’d played pranks with? Whom he’d pined after but never asked out? (And why hadn’t he? Had there been a falling out?)

Vestenya Ruo, Shuos cadet, tracked as Shuos infantry. Jedao had no idea why even a top-secret record clung to the old euphemism for assassin. He’d asked Mikodez about the term once. Mikodez had shrugged and said, “Habit”—another one of those maddening non-answers.

Ruo had attended Shuos Academy Prime from 826 to—826. The end date hit Jedao like a blow to the stomach. Nausea washed through him as he wondered what had gone wrong.

The first date was right. They’d been first-years together. As sieve-like as his memories were, Jedao knew that much.

But less than a year in academy?

The record didn’t end there. Ruo hadn’t been expelled, which would have been bad enough. Nor had he graduated in a single year, which would have been a miracle.

No—Ruo had died. The record specified, in dry, bloodless detail, that Ruo had run afoul of a visiting Rahal magistrate while playing a heresy game. Ruo had committed suicide rather than be outprocessed and handed over to the Rahal.

And the game had been designed by one Cadet Garach Jedao Shkan.

That can’t be right, Jedao thought, and: I would never.

Tears pricked his eyes. Angrily, he scrubbed them away with the back of his hand. Had he—had he maneuvered Ruo into suicide on purpose? And if so, why?

But the record had no answers for him.

I loved him, Jedao thought, and he’s gone. He’d looked sidelong at Ruo during the classes that they had together, admiring the fineness of his features, longing to run his fingers through the mane of hair that Ruo kept tied back in a ponytail. Imagined the weight of that solid body atop his.

But he’d been convinced that he’d loved Dhanneth, too; and look how that had ended. Was his treatment of Dhanneth part of a pattern that he’d missed because of the amnesia? And if so, how could he make it up to the dead?

I believe he died young, Kel Cheris had said to him. Sparing him the truth. There was no way she hadn’t known.

Jedao didn’t feel spared. He couldn’t see why this information was so deeply classified. Especially when he knew that Mikodez, for all his quixotic moods, did everything for a reason when it came to security.

“Are you all right?” Hemiola asked in worried yellow lights, then flushed pink. “Of course you’re not all right.” It had better vision than humans did, and in most regards, than Jedao himself. It already knew what the record said.

“He would have been dead anyway,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t convincing even himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say Ruo’s name out loud, and not because he was worried about surveillance.

“Is that all you wanted to find out?”

“No,” Jedao said. “Just one more thing.”

He had to dig around to locate what he was looking for. Mikodez named all his files sensible things, which only surprised Jedao a little: as much as Mikodez liked to play at high whimsy, his successor would someday depend on being able to locate important information. And Mikodez cared about his successors; cared that what he built should outlast him.

Not my problem, Jedao told himself. It might even have been true. He opened the latest of the psychological evaluations that Mikodez had ordered his nephew and contact specialist, Andan Niath, to do on Jedao himself.

The file was long and dreary. It took an effort not to skim. He knew already that he was unfit to leave the Citadel and rejoin mainstream society; possibly not fit even to interact with anyone but his carefully selected keepers, including the contact specialist. He didn’t need to be told that.

The occasional odd detail leapt out at him. Displays no phobia of the dark, for instance. Surely such a common trigger would have disqualified him for military service? Granted that they had recovered him from deep space after the Battle of Terebeg two years ago, but a whole section followed on his responses to a test that they had given him, which had involved a series of lurid paintings.

At last he came to Zehun’s summation, which was what interested him the most. Recommendation: subject is no closer to divulging the secret of why Hexarch Kujen’s command moth mutinied at Terebeg. Subject should be terminated.

Jedao’s hand slipped; he almost accidentally deleted the file. Which wasn’t easy, what was he thinking, the system was logging all activity. Stupid of him, especially since he shouldn’t care. Zehun was civil to him, but there was no love lost between the two of them.

“Hemiola,” Jedao said as he logged out and covered his tracks to the extent that they could be covered, which wasn’t very, “I’m going to need more of your help than I realized.”

Hemiola blinked anxiously at him.

“I need passage off the Citadel to—a starport,” Jedao said. “Any starport. I can’t stow away inside a voidmoth here; they’ll catch me. But I might have a chance if I cling to the carapace.”

Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to breathe. He’d tested this in his bathtub, which would have looked either silly or tragic if anyone had walked in on him. (Hemiola had disapproved strongly of this experiment, but he’d successfully argued that drowning was a temporary inconvenience.) All—”all“—he had to do was web himself to the exterior.

Hemiola’s lights went through a veritable rainbow of misgivings. “I see a way,” it said at last. “Follow me.”

• • • •

Six minutes before the end of class, and Ajewen Cheris, currently going by the name of Dzannis Paral, wondered who was looking forward to it more: herself, or her sixteen students.

No one had called her “Cheris” since she had moved to the world of Esrala to live as a Mwennin among Mwennin, least of all the children, ranging from ages eight to fourteen, in her class. Cheris’s mother might be dead, and the Mwennin, her mother’s people, scattered and much diminished—Cheris’s own fault, a guilt that ran deep—but here, now, a few survived. Most days she was glad of it, and of the fact that there were children at all.

Cheris had tutored math as a cadet in Kel Academy, but that had been, as Mikodez would have said, a completely different kettle of foxes. Not only had the topics been more advanced—applied and abstract algebra, plus the formation notation specific to the Kel—she’d been tutoring peers, fellow cadets. Cadets did not chew on styluses, stick wads of homemade candy under the tables, pull each other’s hair, or (admittedly one of the nicer surprises) bring in a pet snake to show her.

Her students were, varyingly, bright, sleepy, curious, fidgety, and more difficult to predict than Kel. It wasn’t true that Kel were all alike, as though they were woodblock prints. But the Kel did select for a certain spirit of conformity. Mwennin parents, on the other hand, didn’t “select” at all. The children they had were the children they had.

Cheris taught in one of the rooms of the community building, which the settlers considered a luxury. People in the hexarchate proper had neighborhood halls where they could gather and gossip and, inevitably, listen to the Doctrine briefings by the local Vidona-approved delegate. Here, the Mwennin had to adhere to the revised calendar—her calendar, although she tried not to think of it that way, not least because she couldn’t afford for the Mwennin to deduce her identity—but they didn’t hide many of the old traditions. Frequently the children themselves told Cheris about folklore and foods that she only stumblingly remembered from her own youth.

A girl and an alt started squabbling over who had the prettier stylus. When they ignored the first and second warnings, Cheris escalated: “Heads down, please.” The children grumbled but obeyed, mumbling the meditation-chant that she had taught them to help them quiet down. She had to coax the girl to a seat farther away so she wouldn’t continue the quarrel.

At least she didn’t want for classroom supplies. The settlement had basic manufacturing capabilities and some aging matter printers, for which Mikodez had privately apologized to Cheris. “You wouldn’t believe my budget problems,” he had said. “My people did what they could.” For once, Cheris believed him. She didn’t have to worry that her students would lack slates or desks or learning games. If anything, thanks to the involvement of the Shuos, they had more games, in all formats, than she was entirely comfortable with.

And yet, for all the challenges that working as a teacher had brought her, from the time her students climbed up on the roof on a lark to the incident with the thankfully edible modeling clay, Cheris had discovered, to her horror, that she was getting bored.

“Gwan,” Cheris said, wondering how it was that wrangling an energetic nine-year-old girl who constantly chewed on things was, in its way, more harrowing than being shot at. “Take that out of your mouth, please.” Weren’t kids supposed to grow out of that? By age four at least?

(She thought about having kids of her own someday, if she met the right women or alts. The settlement had the necessary medical labs, even some crèches for those Mwennin who wanted to use them. Then she looked at her students, as much as she adored them, and had second thoughts.)

Gwan took the mutilated stylus out of her mouth. “Sorry, Teacher!” she said. She was always sorry. As far as Cheris could tell, Gwan was sincere, she just had a wandering attention span and a need to fidget. Cheris had tried giving her candies instead, but Gwan kept passing them to the other kids, which defeated the purpose.

The minutes ticked by. Cheris was diligent about making the kids stay for every last second of class—an important lesson to learn in a world where the calendar was so vital—but she let them out the moment the augment told her it was time. Most of the younger ones skipped or ran, almost colliding with each other in their enthusiasm.

As Cheris tidied up the tables and chairs, she was aware of the weight of her handgun against her right hip, inside her pants; she was right-handed. Fortunately, Mwennin children were too respectful of adults to touch her or she would have worried about one of them discovering it by accident. The same went for the spare magazine she kept in her pocket. To keep from revealing it inadvertently, she kept most of her belongings—slate and stylus, snacks, keycard, that sort of thing—in a handbag.

After she finished, Cheris headed out. Not for the first time, she felt ridiculous for carrying a gun. Crime wasn’t unknown in the settlement, but she couldn’t recall any instances of violent crime since her arrival. Granted, as former infantry, she wasn’t concerned about petty fights. It was illegal for her to own the gun, let alone carry it to school. As a Kel, she’d been armed as a matter of course. As a civilian, she was supposed to rely on the authorities.

Tomorrow I’ll leave it at home, Cheris thought as she strolled down the road leading to her favorite bakery. (This wasn’t saying much; the settlement only had two.) Even so, she knew she was lying to herself. The part of her that was Kel might have been persuaded to leave security to the authorities. The part of her that was Jedao—that was another matter entirely.

Jedao might be a whisper of unruly memories crammed into her head, but he was real and present in ways that she hadn’t entirely untangled even after the eleven years since his death. And Jedao didn’t believe in safety, or trusting other people. During the centuries planning a one-man revolution against the hexarchate entire, with his only ally the man who had designed the high calendar in the first place, with its social strictures and ritual torture, he couldn’t afford to.

She reached the bakery and picked up her usual order of two meat pasties, which was ready for her. Several people sat at the tables outside. One of them was pretending to work out pattern-stone puzzles on their tablet. She’d identified the curly-haired alt as a Shuos agent not long after her arrival. She always saw them here, even on the days that she changed her schedule. They weren’t trying to hide from her, anyway, just from the other settlers, and she didn’t have a reason to expose them.

Cheris resisted the urge to wave at the agent as she walked by them on the way home. The winding road that led to her neighborhood was lined with an exuberance of flowers. Most of the forsythias, with their four-petaled yellow blooms, had died off in favor of splendid green leaves, but there were still azaleas in pink, white, magenta. The violets were harder to spot, both the white ones with purple streaks at their hearts and the more ordinary ones that looked like their name.

The flowers’ mingling fragrances relaxed her, and the smell of the pasties was making her hungry. She was looking forward to a quiet evening doing some grading, despite the tickling sense that she wouldn’t mind a more active existence. There was that one boy who had creative ideas about how the distributive property worked. And afterwards she could sit down in the common room and watch dueling matches.

“Anyone home?” Cheris called out as she approached the front door of the residence she shared with two women and an alt. No one responded; no surprise. Two of her housemates had jobs that kept them out until later in the day, and the third was a social butterfly and was frequently visiting friends.

Cheris entered and checked, reflexively, for signs of intruders. The hard part wasn’t the paranoia. She’d gotten used to that. The hard part was trying to fit in; pretending that she was just another Mwennin refugee.

She had a lovely home where she could catch up on dramas and dueling matches at her leisure. She taught adorable children, even if the adorable children liked to stick things in their mouths. Nobody shot at her anymore. Why wasn’t she happy?

She headed into the kitchen to put one of the meat pasties into the refrigerator, then returned to the common area and sank gratefully onto a floor cushion to eat the other. She asked the grid to image her the local news. Maybe that would ground her in reality and keep her from worrying about the state of the galaxy, which wasn’t her concern anymore.

Still, her mind wandered as the news talked about the discovery of a new primitive sea-creature. She thought of Jedao, inevitably. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, she told the fragments of him that remained. Someone who still mourned the death of a childhood friend, to the extent that he existed to do the mourning at all, yet had been capable of murdering his command staff, people he’d known and relied upon for years.

If Cheris was honest with herself—something she had just enough psychic distance for—Jedao’s feelings for Kel Gized, his chief of staff and the first person he’d murdered, had not been entirely platonic. But Jedao wouldn’t have acted on his subterranean desires, and in any case Gized had never shown any sign of having any interest in romance. She’d been a Kel of the very old school, from the days when the Kel were an autonomous people and some of them took the sword-vow: married to her profession as a soldier, and nothing else.

Cheris had finished her pasty and was in the middle of wiping her mouth, lost in memories that were and weren’t her own, when someone rapped politely at the door. It couldn’t be one of her housemates. They would just have walked in, as the house’s minimal security system recognized them. One of their friends?

Her back prickled. Paranoia, she told herself again; but she could never be sure. “Grid,” she said softly, knowing it would hear her, “who is it?”

The grid showed her an image of her guest: a bedraggled man of middle years, his bangs clinging damply to his forehead. Not smiling, although she knew exactly what his smile looked like, and how it tilted up asymmetrically at the corners. He was panting as though he’d run to her house from—from where? She hadn’t heard the footsteps, although that didn’t mean anything definitive.

He wasn’t in Kel uniform, or Shuos uniform either. That unnerved her. The naked hands were worst of all. In her dreams she always saw them sheathed in the notorious fingerless gloves.

Cheris’s next actions happened in what she later remembered as a single seamless flow, without calculation to guide them. The gun that she had hidden for the past two years snapped into her hands as she strode to the door. She touched the selector with her finger and emptied the magazine through the unopened door in a single burst. Just as quickly, she flung herself to the side in case of return fire.

No one fired back, but the stink of gunsmoke filled her nostrils. In the sudden ringing stillness afterward, she heard the thud of a body slumping against the door; heard a stifled gasp.

“Please,” the man on the other side of the door said, with a hint of the drawl that she had fought hard to suppress in her own speech. “I’m just here to talk.”

Cheris doubted that, but now that her rational brain had caught up to her ghost-granted reflexes, she recognized the futility of retrieving more ammunition and shooting him again, as satisfying as it would be. She kept the gun in her hand, because Shuos paranoia and Kel training died hard. “Let him in,” she said to the house’s grid.

The door slid open. Jedao stared at her wide-eyed. His sensible brown jacket was marred by holes in the torso where she’d hit him in center mass, to say nothing of the grotesque, sluggish black blood dripping from the wounds where his heart should have been. She glimpsed wormlike tendrils waving feebly from beneath his skin, revealing the truth beneath the human exterior. Jedao gestured apologetically at the blood.

Cheris stood aside to let him in. Given the holes in the door, a little blood wasn’t going to make much difference, even if one of her housemates liked everything very neat.

He still didn’t enter. “Cheris?” he said uncertainly, using a high honorific.

Cheris was forcibly reminded that she’d changed her face, had subtle adjustments made to her voice, courtesy of one of Mikodez’s surgeons. Most days she didn’t think about her new face, with its broad forehead and pronounced nose, the quizzical eyebrows. It would have fooled her own parents—but they were dead, and by her own doing.

The sound of her name—her real name—brought back a sudden and unwelcome wave-crash of longing, especially paired with the familiar Shparoi drawl. Cheris remembered what it had been like when the original Jedao had talked to her, that relentless voice in her head. Looking at this other Jedao was like looking in a broken mirror and putting her hands through the shards: pain that she couldn’t escape.

“It’s me,” Cheris said, her voice harsher than she’d meant it to be. She pointed at the couch. He went over to sit on it, still dripping blood, and she closed the door. How much time did they have before her watchers called for reinforcements? Since it seemed unfruitful to say, Thanks for ruining my life, she settled for, “I’m guessing you’re not here with the hexarch’s permission. Make it quick.”

A trail of that black blood had dripped from the door to the couch, following Jedao like an accusation. He had removed his jacket and was trying ineffectually to staunch the leakage with the wadded-up fabric. “I’m here,” he said, overenunciating, “because you’re the only one who knows the truth about my past.”

There was no point continuing the conversation here, when the Shuos would already be on their way. As much as she’d been chafing at how dull and ordinary her life had been, now that she was about to lose it, a pang of resentment started up in her chest. She doubted she’d be able to go back to her classroom now that Jedao had intruded into her life.

For a moment she considered handing Jedao over to the Shuos. He wasn’t her problem; he was Mikodez’s problem. She could get rid of him and go back to the simple life she’d chosen for herself.

But he’d come to her in search of the answers she’d withheld from him before. She owed them to him, even if she’d been in denial about it.

“Did you bring any weapons?” Cheris asked.

His teeth flashed in a silent laugh. “I am a weapon,” Jedao said. He wasn’t boasting; it was as true as anything else about him. She was grateful that he didn’t say I’m your gun or she would have been tempted to punch him, even if just for the irrational feeling that that was her phrase.

Cheris had walked over to her escritoire in the common room and opened it to reveal a bag. “We’ll have to share,” she said. She kept emergency supplies in the bag in case she had to leave in a hurry: everything from cash in the local currency to ration bars (not Kel, alas), plus a survival knife and a folding tent, all the accoutrements she would need to survive in the wilderness outside the settlement’s protective dome until she could be picked up by allies.

She also retrieved a protective suit and began pulling it on over her clothes. “I have a spare,” she said, “but it’s not going to fit you. Did you bring one, or are we going to have to detour to pick one up for you?” More opportunities to be caught. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t see much alternative.

“I don’t need one,” Jedao said. “The atmosphere outside won’t kill me.” He didn’t explain how he knew this. She was willing to take his word for it, though. She knew how hard he was to kill.

“Come on, then,” Cheris said.

Jedao followed in silence. Cheris looked over her shoulder to verify that he was still there, that he hadn’t dissolved into some phantasm of smoke and bitter memory. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was afraid that it would burst free of her ribcage, making her Jedao’s twin in injury. Would she bleed black, too, now that they were reunited?

The community maintained some hoverers in case someone wanted to go for a jaunt outside the dome, or needed to transport heavy objects. Cheris signed one out and took the driver’s seat. Jedao got in without questioning her, which she appreciated. The Shuos would count on being able to track the vehicle, but Cheris had asked one of the settlement’s servitors to plant an override into the system. She activated it now, hoping the Shuos hadn’t discovered it in the interim.

The hoverer smelled displeasingly of meat pasties, a smell that she liked when the pasties in question were fresh and much less when it mingled with a lingering mixture of people’s clashing perfumes and bodies. Civilian life had softened her. She’d once trained regularly in Kel body armor that reeked of sour sweat and off-gassing plastic and, occasionally, vomit or other effluvia. There was no forgetting the stomach-turning stink of the battlefield, blood curdled or crystallized, the occasional startling sweetness of crushed flowers or aromatics. How much of that did this other, younger Jedao remember?

“It’s beautiful,” Jedao said, almost in a whisper, as the hoverer lifted up and sped toward the boundary of the settlement’s dome. Cheris was reminded of his presence, and the fact that they were, despite their shared history, strangers to each other. She would not have expected any incarnation of Jedao to be sentimental about landscape. But he was leaning toward the window, one hand pressed against it in yearning.

“First time planetside?” she asked, because it might be useful to know. She couldn’t imagine Mikodez allowing Jedao to wander around on a planet, even if the Citadel of Eyes occupied a geosynchronous orbit above one. Depending on how patchy Jedao’s memories were, this might be his first experience with sky, sun, dirt.

“Yes,” he said without elaborating.

She appreciated that he wasn’t distracting her from the more important task of driving. The hoverer was capable of handling itself if you punched in the destination, but she preferred to do it manually in case the Shuos had the vehicle bugged. She didn’t want to drive them into an ambush.

“I had a way off-planet, but I assume you prefer yours,” Jedao added as they reached the dome. It glimmered with a soap bubble’s rainbow colors, a flickering in the air. Exotic technology, which Cheris didn’t trust, but it hadn’t failed since she’d moved here. And really, the calendar in use here was her calendar, which the servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave had helped her distribute eleven years ago, after the destruction of Kel Command. It was laughable, if not actively hypocritical, for her to be nervous about her own work.

Cheris braced herself for the lightheaded sensation that always accompanied a dome transition. If it bothered Jedao, he didn’t show it. In all fairness, if she’d survived a hole in her chest that size, a mere tickle in her brain wouldn’t slow her down either.

The settlement, with its modest clusters of buildings and walkways and humble rows of flowers, receded behind them. Cheris guided the hoverer toward the mountains with their woods, heading toward a particular dead tree, its limbs split like lightning tongues, that made for a useful landmark. She wasn’t sure how the local flora survived in atmosphere that wasn’t yet fit for humans to breathe; she’d never been motivated enough to read about the transitional forests that the early terraforming team had planted. The details would have gone over her head anyway; she was no scientist.

Cheris didn’t speak again until they had flown some distance beneath the cover of the blue-leaved trees. Driving was not her best skill, and she was relying on the hoverer’s simple intelligence to help her avoid crashing into some unexpected boulder or ledge. They whooshed past the trees and their whipsaw branches at a stomach-churning speed, as she didn’t dare slow down. Every moment might make a difference.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “The version with details.”

Jedao opened his mouth. Just then there was a loud crack as a low branch smacked into the hoverer, and they tilted alarmingly to one side and almost bounced off another tree entirely. Cheris had a brief, dazzling, and unwanted vision of a cloud of scintillant insects flurrying up from their hiding places and toward the canopy. She swore in a muddled mixture of Mwen-dal and the high language as she fought to bring the vehicle back under control.

By the time she’d achieved that, they were off-course. She then had to focus on navigation, which wasn’t hard so much as irritating, when there were so many damn trees everywhere. Deeper in the forest, they grew closer together, along with a bewilderment of low-growing shrubs, vines, and thorny things that glistened with poisonous sap.

They touched down at last in something that the servitors’ maps had described as a “clearing,” and which barely merited the name. She had to tilt the hoverer’s nose up to get it to fit at all. This is why no one tracked me as a vehicle specialist, Cheris thought ruefully. At least the unnaturally quick reflexes she had inherited from the original Jedao’s ghost had kept them from meeting a fiery death in the forest. It would be ignominious to survive bullets and battlefields, a carrion bomb, and a crash landing on the world of Terebeg only to be felled by a hoverer crash.

Cheris rechecked the integrity of her suit, old habit, before retrieving her bag, popping the door open, and clambering out. Jedao exited right after she did, landing agilely in the loam and decaying leaves. He wrinkled his nose, although Cheris couldn’t smell anything but the cleaner she used to maintain the suit. Fortunately, the atmosphere wasn’t so deadly that she needed an independent air supply, although she’d brought a couple of canisters in case of emergency. The filters in the suit would suffice.

Cheris wasted no time pulling out a transmitter and sending a single signal. “Can you hear me through this?” Cheris asked. She also knew the Shuos sign language, thanks to the original Jedao, but who knew if this Jedao did?

Jedao nodded. “What was that?” he asked, gesturing toward the transmitter.

She pocketed it. “I called for pickup. You may have gotten this far, but we’re going to need allies to get off-planet.” She was curious as to how Jedao had engineered his escape; she’d get that information out of him later. “You never told me what exactly you’re here for.”

Jedao regarded her with a blank face. A split second before he spoke, she remembered, viscerally, from the inside-out, what that particular lack of expression meant. He was angry with her.

“You lied to me,” Jedao said.

He clearly expected her to figure out what he meant. “We haven’t talked in two years,” Cheris said.

“I was locked up,” Jedao said. “I found out how Ruo died.” His eyes glittered; he was trying not to cry. It made him look paradoxically young.

Cheris was bombarded by unwanted memories of Vestenya Ruo, who’d been her lover; whose death the original Jedao had caused. The way he’d started to laugh after picking a fight with her in a party, the first time they’d met, and the cocktail they’d shared afterward. Their endless rivalry to see who’d get the better marksmanship scores. The first time they’d slept together, out in the gardens, and the bug bites she’d wound up with. She missed him terribly; the longing was and wasn’t hers.

Carefully, Cheris said, “It’s been 437 years. I don’t see what difference it makes.”

“He was my friend,” Jedao said. He bit his lip and averted his gaze. The bullet wounds in his torso had mostly closed up except for a few stray tendrils wriggling aimlessly, like exposed worms. He took no notice of them, although Cheris found them distracting.

“Ruo always did like to take risks,” Cheris said, both fond and resigned. “But that was one he should have avoided.”

Jedao swung at her. She blocked the blow, segued without thinking into a joint lock that was supposed to deter further struggling by inflicting pain. Which was stupid, because someone who didn’t blink at multiple gunshot wounds wasn’t going to be slowed down by a pressure point.

Nevertheless, Jedao went limp. Cheris remained alert in case it was a trick—was it ever not a trick, with Jedao?—but he remained still, and after several moments she let go. He took one step backward, head bowed.

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “I only found out a couple weeks ago. It was like waking up without him all over again.”

“You didn’t come all this way to get in a fight with me over this,” Cheris said. “Or did you?” It could have been worse. He was a Shuos with fragmentary memories of being the hexarchate’s most notorious madman. He could have diverted some of the planetary weather-eaters and crashed them into the settlement, or something even more destructive, with whatever grid-diving skills had gotten him this far.

Jedao tipped his chin up. “I want my memories back,” he said. The drawl that they shared was stronger than ever. “How am I supposed to know what to do with my life when I can’t remember most of it?”

Cheris’s stomach suddenly revolted. It was all she could do to keep from gagging. She’d eaten Jedao’s memories, crunched down the carrion glass and felt it pierce her on the way down. They were part of her now, sharded through her in ways that she couldn’t explain in ordinary human terms. But that didn’t mean they had to belong to her forever.

For over a decade she’d carried Jedao inside her, put him on and off like a mask. Some nights she dreamed his dreams: running from geese who were almost as tall as she was, when she’d been a boy; learning to use her first gun, a lovingly maintained rifle that had been in the Garach family for a couple of generations; shuffling a jeng-zai deck that dripped blood, and blood, and blood. She would have given a lot to be free of those dreams; would have been lost without them.

She’d given up on getting rid of Jedao. There was a way, but—

Jedao’s eyes were intent upon her face. “You know a way,” he breathed.

Of course. They knew each other. Her body language had been overwritten by Jedao’s; he could read her the way she could read him.

“It will require travel,” Cheris said, “but we would have to do that anyway, to get away from the Shuos.” She imagined Jedao as an outlaw, and couldn’t. Even if he had the skills for mercenary work—not that Brezan or Inesser or Mikodez would thank her for making the suggestion—his appearance would always pose a problem. “Why couldn’t you have gotten your face changed on the way?”

“I tried,” he said with an undertone of pain. “I tried scarring myself. It’s how my body regenerates. It always regenerates in the same shape.”

Interesting. Presumably this had limits, or he wouldn’t be able to form new memories, or learn new skills. But a fixed overall appearance—that was something she could see Kujen engineering into his creation.

“Kujen experimented with methods of memory transfer,” Cheris said, “besides the known one where he hijacked a stranger’s body wholesale. I have some of his notes. He had more than one base; he believed in redundancy. I didn’t tell Mikodez about some of the others.”

“I imagine he knows anyway,” Jedao said.

“About some of them, not all of them,” Cheris said. She didn’t tell Jedao how she knew this. The servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave, with whom she was aligned, had been monitoring Kujen’s bases on the grounds that they’d rather know about any traps he’d left behind before they went off. Whether they’d had run-ins with Mikodez’s people was not something they had divulged to her.

The transmitter vibrated once. Cheris glanced down and interpreted the code, which was based on Mwen-dal. “Pickup in thirty-seven minutes,” she said. She wondered how the needlemoth planned to get through the trees. Then again, its pilot was better than she was, and the needlemoth itself had not insignificant armaments for a vessel its size. As long as the moth didn’t shoot her while clearing itself a landing site, she didn’t care. (She wasn’t worried about Jedao.)

“Giving you Jedao’s memories—the first Jedao’s memories—will mean giving them to you,” Cheris said. She was starting to sweat, although it wasn’t particularly warm, even in the suit. “It’s not like copying a drama onto another data solid. If my understanding of Kujen’s research is correct, all that I’ll have left is a shadow of those four hundred years.”

Jedao wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you get rid of them earlier?”

“Because as long as they’re in me,” Cheris said, “I can keep them safe.” She’d thought about expelling them earlier; couldn’t deny that she’d been tempted. But when it came right down to it, she didn’t trust anyone else in the hexarchate with Jedao’s remnants.

Cheris had complex emotions about housing the mind of the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer. She’d ingested Jedao’s memories eleven years ago, in the wake of the Siege of Scattered Needles and the destruction of her swarm, because it had been a matter of survival. There had been no other way to obtain the information she needed to prevail in the hexarchs’ game—or Jedao’s, for that matter.

If the situation hadn’t reached that crisis point, she wouldn’t have done it. She knew herself that well. Jedao himself had endured unwritten trauma. She remembered how much it had pierced her when she discovered the old tragedy of Ruo’s suicide, which had driven Jedao to vengeance against the heptarchate. The effect on the Jedao in front of her had to have been similar. Except he had experienced the shock at a remove, by reading whatever records he’d unearthed, rather than having the memory spearing directly into his mind.

Jedao’s experience had kept her alive. Cheris had missed him in those early days after his death. She would not have expected to grow attached to someone with his reputation. But they’d depended on each other, toward the end, even if they’d never precisely achieved friendship.

She couldn’t entirely explain her dislike of this other, inhuman Jedao and his obnoxious habit of surviving fatal gunshot wounds. Oh, she’d known that Kujen could have manufactured himself a thousand Jedao-alikes if he’d been so inclined, in appearance if nothing else. Kujen had thought nothing of “disciplining” unlucky Nirai for incompetence or insubordination: resculpting their bodies to make them uncannily beautiful, reprogramming their minds to make them pleasing bed-companions or servants. On occasion he’d also appropriated prisoners of war, heretics, condemned criminals. And the hexarchate had let him, because nobody cared what happened to those people, and Kujen offered such excellent gifts of technology.

Even now it was hard to conceal how she felt about this hawkfucking Jedao-other. (What was she supposed to call him? His name tasted sour in her mouth.) The unpleasant shock that ran through her every time she saw his face would never go away. It was almost, but not quite, the face she had seen in the mirror while the original Jedao had been anchored to her; left and right reversed, so subtle that she doubted anyone else would have been able to tell the difference.

He was afraid of her. She could smell it on him, for all that he wasn’t human. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She’d leveraged Jedao’s reputation before; had used the fact that people were afraid that she’d snap and slaughter them at the slightest provocation. She hadn’t taken it personally, just as Jedao hadn’t. After 409 years as a ghost, he’d come to rely on it.

But this Jedao’s fear rankled, even though it made perfect sense. She’d tried to assassinate him when he was Kujen’s pet general, although he’d failed to die. Then she’d emptied her gun into his head while he was a prisoner, unarmed, in violation of any rule of law, because he’d confessed to raping a Kel under his command. Given all that, she was impressed that he’d walked up to her door and stood there while she shot him again.

While she puzzled through her reactions, Jedao stood hugging himself, looking more like an awkward teenager than a grown man in body language, although his physique matched hers exactly at the time of her execution at the age of forty-five. At least he didn’t look like a starvation victim this time, as he had under Kujen’s command.

(Strange. Why hadn’t Kujen been feeding him? The Kujen she remembered had loved feeding people, even people he didn’t like, something she’d never understood. Someday she’d unbend enough to ask what had transpired.)

“What did you bring with you?” Cheris said at last, because the silence was grating on her nerves. Jedao’s instincts told her to hold her tongue and wait to see if the awkwardness persuaded this other self to reveal anything useful, but at the moment, she had little patience for Shuos games, including her own.

Jedao swallowed convulsively. “Not much. The clothes on my back. I have two ration bars in my pocket because a… friend insisted, and a water bottle beneath my jacket. No weapons. I didn’t think you’d react well if I showed up with a gun.”

She conceded that much was true and was about to ask him why he thought two ration bars and a water bottle were the most essential things he could bring with him. Was the water bottle even full? She doubted his ability to manage everyday practical tasks.

Jedao stiffened, almost as if he’d heard her thought, but his head was cocked and he held up his hand. Cheris nodded once, just enough to acknowledge the signal. It was possible that his senses were better than hers. Too bad Mikodez had never seen fit to brief her on his captive’s capabilities, even if she and Mikodez didn’t trust each other. She couldn’t imagine that Mikodez wouldn’t have studied Jedao exhaustively.

His expression didn’t change, but Jedao began signing to her in the Shuos hand language, slowly at first, then more rapidly when she nodded again to indicate that she understood. His signs struck her as oddly inflected. That could be because he’d learned a more modern form of the language; her knowledge was some centuries out of date.

Fourteen people incoming. Two vehicles. Presumed hostile.

Fourteen meant two squads, if Shuos infantry still worked by the same organizational principles. Cheris doubted it was anything other than Shuos infantry. She was grateful that their commander hadn’t simply ordered a bomb strike. At the same time, she didn’t trust restraint, especially if it appeared to work in her favor.

Estimated time until contact? she signed to Jedao. It was a single sign, given Shuos proclivities. Situations like this—special operations—were what the sign language had evolved to deal with. Back when she’d been in academy four centuries ago, it had been a standing joke that you could order a tactical strike against the nearest city with a single sign, but it took three minutes to ask, Where did you put the cookies this time?

Jedao’s brow wrinkled as he considered something she couldn’t see or hear. Under twelve minutes.

Fast enough to cause trouble. Besides, she didn’t want to rely too much on Jedao’s figure and be caught unawares. Whatever his mode of detection was, the possibility remained that they were being stalked by other groups and that this attack was a feint.

Follow my instructions, Cheris signed. While she didn’t precisely consider Jedao an ally, he had a strong incentive to keep her alive. That would suffice.

Jedao signed an acknowledgment.

They had to last until pickup came. She’d been promised that the needlemoth had been upgraded. The servitors for whom she worked had told her that since she and 1491625 had busted the thing to hell and gone, it was time to fix it up better than before. She hoped that meant it would be able to evade whatever Shuos defense forces orbited the world.

None of that meant anything, however, if she and Jedao didn’t survive the incoming assault. Jedao might be able to regenerate from anything short of a fury bomb, and maybe even from that; but Cheris had to be more careful with her ordinary human body.

On the other hand, she’d once been Kel, and she was determined to teach the Shuos not to underestimate her.

She assessed the asymmetries of the situation. Most of them favored her attackers. Numbers, for one. She’d outthought and outfought larger groups before, but in real life she preferred to be the one with the advantage. Too bad she rarely got it.

Numbers alone wouldn’t have bothered her so much. But the difference in equipment was going to aggravate the situation. All she possessed was one lousy handgun, not even a decent rifle, and the survival knife she’d stuffed into her belt.

The Shuos might have disguised themselves more or less (often less) as ordinary inhabitants of the settlement, but they would come fully equipped. Whether “fully equipped” meant state-of-the-art weaponry or hand-me-downs due to the budgetary constraints that Mikodez might or might not have been lying about was immaterial. Cheris was sure that even if they were using older equipment, they outgunned her and Jedao.

Her best asset, aside from her own wits, was Jedao himself. She was human, and their attackers were too, but Jedao wasn’t. She had to use that. Of course, the attackers might have been briefed about Jedao’s capabilities. But that didn’t make those capabilities go away, if she and Jedao used them carefully.

You’re going to be the distraction, she told Jedao. I want you to wade in the middle of the largest group and fuck them up (there was a specific sign for fuck them up). I will take care of the rest.

For a second she wasn’t sure he’d go for it. She wouldn’t have blamed him for having reservations. Even someone who could repeatedly return from the dead didn’t have to like it.

Then Jedao nodded. I will buy you as much time as I can, he signed. And, more hesitantly: I don’t know the limits of my regenerative abilities. He had to cobble together a sign for regenerative using a couple of medical terms. “Regeneration” didn’t usually indicate an ability to come back from the dead, but given the context, she knew what he meant.

I’ll keep that in mind, Cheris replied. Go.

He went, slipping away into the shadows of the trees with uncanny quietness.

Cheris was already in motion. Two years of teaching bright-eyed children, however adorable, slipped away. She’d missed life as a soldier. It was time to get to work.

• • • •

She’s using you, a soft voice whispered at the back of Jedao’s head. While you’re busy figuring out how to take on fourteen people by yourself, she’ll get away.

Jedao told his paranoia to shut up. Of course she was using him. He’d come to her as a supplicant and disrupted her life, so he owed her, at least until it became clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. And she was the one with centuries of experience being him. He couldn’t see her taking his orders.

The trees loomed around him. This deep in the wood, most of them were tall, like stately sentinels. He didn’t have any idea how old they were—not like he knew anything about trees or terraforming protocols—but several of them had cores that felt weak and spongy, less dense than the surrounding wood, to his othersense. Rot of some sort, he guessed.

The Shuos coming for them presumably had some idea of the local terrain, whether due to prior familiarity or good maps. But they might not be prepared for him to have a better one. For example, he doubted that they kept track of rotting trees. That gave him an idea.

Five minutes until contact. They were moving at a steady rate, which helped, and now they’d dispersed. No point clustering up just in case Cheris (or, he supposed, Jedao himself) had smuggled out bombs or set up traps.

Jedao didn’t plan on dropping trees on them, although it would have been funny, for certain values of funny. Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought at a man he’d killed two years ago. Kujen could have built Jedao’s body in any number of ways; and what had he gone for? Immortality. Jedao was sure that the other properties of being a moth-derived construct were side-effects.

Those side-effects were going to save him. Or else he was going to make for some exciting footnotes in some poor Shuos operative’s mission report.

Both vehicles had disgorged their loads of personnel. One of them was parked deeper in the woods. He didn’t care about that one, other than avoiding it; while he wasn’t an expert on current Shuos personnel carriers, if it wasn’t armed head-to-toe he would eat Mikodez’s entire annual supply of chocolate. (He hated chocolate, which Mikodez refused to believe. They’d had multiple arguments about it. Life in the Citadel of Eyes was strange in unpredictable ways.) More to the point, if it was back there, it wasn’t relevant to the instructions that Cheris had given him.

The other personnel carrier, on the other hand—

Jedao located a sturdy tree. Its lowest branch was three times his height. Entertaining as the action scenes in dramas were, he couldn’t jump that high. But jumping wasn’t how he intended to get up there.

Jedao steeled himself for the inevitable agony, then grabbed the space-time weave and pulled himself up, almost as though he were levitating. He bit down against a scream as the pain set in. Whether that was because he wasn’t a proper moth, or because he was an immature one (as the Revenant had once hinted), or some other reason entirely, he had no idea. It felt as though someone was boiling his marrow from the inside out.

On the other hand, Jedao was growing inured to pain. It wasn’t healthy to be blasé about getting shot, boiled, or otherwise mutilated, but since he had a job to do, he’d worry about that later.

A new source of pain made itself known to him when he miscalculated and a protruding twig, with thorns, raked through his arm. Jedao hissed as he dripped blood and made himself concentrate before he fucked up again. Damned if he was going to let Cheris down by wimping out over a trivial injury; and by his standards it was trivial.

He paused for a second when he reached a high limb that felt like it would support his weight and clung precariously to it. It gave him a reasonable view of his surroundings, not that he could tell one kind of leafy nuisance from another. No one had yet tracked him here. At the same time, he couldn’t afford to dally, either. He didn’t want to underestimate Shuos operatives.

The two squads continued to approach by circuitous routes, still spreading out. Their movements were coordinated, cautious. He would have expected no less. He was going to have to get their attention.

The second personnel vehicle had, after dropping its passengers off, returned to the air. That was a mistake, although its pilot didn’t realize it yet. Anything short of teleporting out of the area would have been a mistake, and if teleportation existed in the hexarchate it was news to him.

The personnel vehicle was moving fast—but Jedao had previously pulled himself across interplanetary distances and lived to regret it. He braced himself for the pain to get worse, because why would his life ever get easier. Then he calculated an interception path and launched himself at the vehicle.

This time the agony wasn’t just the sensation of his marrow boiling. The air itself burned him thanks to the speed of his passage. Jedao had time to think, Why couldn’t you have made me a more aerodynamic shape, Kujen? and contort himself sideways so his head wouldn’t pop on impact before he slammed into the rear of the vehicle.

He felt as though he’d broken all his bones, except he could still feel some of his fingers and toes, so it couldn’t be that bad, could it? The world went black, and he thought he might be losing consciousness. Then the blackness cleared, and he found himself clinging, by felicitous and not entirely calculated juxtaposition of forces, to the rear of the craft.

Jedao was no mechanic, but there were only so many places you could usefully put the levitation units. He massed a lot less than the vehicle, but the other half of momentum was velocity. He’d knocked it significantly off-course, and the damage he’d done was causing it to list worryingly.

While Jedao could (probably) survive an uncontrolled fall as long as the carrier didn’t land on top of him, that wasn’t his plan. He had a use for it. He’d been telling the truth when he’d said to Cheris that he’d come unarmed—up to a point. She’d probably been thinking of firearms and grenades, conventional weapons. He had neglected to bring a gun in any form that she’d recognized, but all a gun was was a means of throwing a projectile fast enough to hurt people. I’m your gun, indeed.

There were two people still aboard the carrier. He’d only shocked them for a couple of moments. The carrier began firing back at him, although it was hampered by the fact that he was hanging on to the rear and it was programmed not to shoot holes in itself. Still, he wasn’t out of trouble yet. It vomited out several drones, which began peppering him with laser fire.

Time for the next phase. He’d lost track of Cheris, not intentionally, thanks to the pain. It would have helped if he knew where she was, because he didn’t want to corpse her by accident. He couldn’t take the time to locate her amid the dizzying group of human-sized masses, however. Besides, she knew what instructions she’d given him. She’d get herself to safety, even if she wasn’t privy to the details of his plan. It wasn’t trust, exactly; it still made his heart (well, whatever he had) ache with ambivalent gratitude.

Jedao slipped several hair-raising centimeters at the same time that a laser singed his side. He caught a whiff of the charred, sickly sweet smell before the wind whipped it away. Stay focused, he told himself, and shoved the personnel carrier, this time angling down toward the largest concentration of hostiles on the ground.

The drones had trouble keeping up. His acceleration in the past two-and-a-fraction seconds had sufficed for outrunning them. Of course, he’d lost all surface sensation, which implied bad things about the state of his skin, or the nerves beneath.

I’m going to be a very good mothdrive when I grow up! Jedao thought, with borderline hysterical cheer. Too bad he wasn’t really a mothdrive, or he’d be comfortably shielded inside a metal carapace and not subject to yet more atmospheric friction. With his luck, he was probably trailing smoke.

The two humans within bailed. In their position, he would have done the same. They receded behind him, their fall slowed by parachutes that showed up on his othersense as mushroom-billows of thin material.

Jedao was still accelerating. Shortly after that, they crashed through the top layer of the canopy. More bloody trees, fuck everything, he never wanted to encounter another tree for the rest of his life, and fuck Mikodez’s inexplicable obsession with green growing things while he was at it.

The trees’ branches flayed him all the way down. Inanely, Jedao thought of some of the pornography videos he’d watched. It had looked more fun in the porn than it was out here. Maybe he was doing it wrong?

He did remember to decelerate, but he’d left it to the last moment and his control wasn’t as good as he’d have liked. If he had anything left to scream with, he would have shrieked as the world hammered into him.

Shortly after that, the personnel vehicle exploded. It had physical shielding, sure. Said shielding hadn’t been intended for spaceflight acceleration levels of abuse, let alone this kind of impact.

Jedao lost consciousness as the fires washed over him.

He woke an indeterminate amount of time later, aching all over. Shit, how long had he been out? Was the fight over?

Concentrate, don’t panic. Jedao dragged himself upright, whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure his bones had healed right; something felt off about his balance. But he could deal with that later. All (“all”?) he had to do was repeat the breaks and then set them correctly. At the moment that would take time he didn’t have, so he wasn’t going to worry about it.

He was in a different part of the forest, small surprise, but reorienting himself took time. After that, his attention was immediately drawn to the non-moving human-sized masses scattered at ground level. At this point, Jedao became aware that he himself had been thrown clear of the explosion—reflex?—and was now uncomfortably draped over a tree limb whose protuberances pressed into his torso.

If he lived through this experience, he never wanted to see a tree again. Or a plant. Well, maybe the green onion, which he trusted Mikodez was looking after in between coaxing people to eat candies, ordering assassinations, and annoying Zehun. (Jedao didn’t like Zehun, mainly because Zehun thought the best place for Jedao was in an incinerator, but he also had to concede that Zehun had a singularly thankless job.)

Which of the damn human masses was Cheris? He focused on the shapes of faces until he found her. She wasn’t alone.

Next time I run afoul of some faction, I want it to be the Rahal, Jedao thought, aware that he was whining. He could have a nice, action-filled month filling out paperwork and getting yelled at for doing it wrong. It sounded like an excellent vacation.

Heat lapped against his flesh. There was a fire all around him, not surprising considering how he’d gotten here. Based on the change in density of the tree below him, it was on fire. He’d better get down from this stupid branch.

He didn’t know enough about the atmosphere and the trees’ composition to guess how much danger the fire posed. How much of a conflagration would it take to threaten him? Kujen had said that he should avoid diving into stars, and Jedao was happy to take that at face value, but he didn’t know what was necessary and sufficient, as they liked to say in math.

He spent precious seconds mapping locations and vectors. Only seven people remained active in the region, plus Cheris. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten that many out of the initial group, but Cheris wouldn’t have been sitting in a tree writing poetry that entire time. (According to Mikodez, most Kel poetry was either terrible or pornographic or both, anyway.)

This wasn’t any reason to become complacent. He had no way of guessing how many more reinforcements might show up. While he hadn’t gotten the impression that there were that many legitimate inhabitants in the settlement, who knew how many random secret bases the Shuos had elsewhere on this continent, or in space waiting to make orbital drops?

Be realistic, Jedao told himself, although he couldn’t help shivering, which aggravated the pain in all his joints. The Shuos might want to keep an eye on Cheris, but they also had finite resources. Mikodez hadn’t made any secret of his unending budgetary woes. He could have been faking it, but the Shuos probably didn’t have thousands of agents waiting to capture Cheris and Jedao.

Seven-to-one odds he could handle. Surely Cheris’s pickup would arrive soon, assuming she hadn’t simply abandoned him. If she had, he’d figure out a way to track her. He was highly motivated.

(Realistically speaking, Cheris had had two-plus years to prepare to vanish. At this point, as far as resources went, Jedao wasn’t even sure he still had clothing. Modern fibers were tough, but not tough enough to endure this kind of abuse.)

Jedao gritted his teeth (what he thought of as his teeth, anyway) and climbed down the tree he was stuck in, like an aggravated cat. The heat intensified as he scuttled downward, panting at the screaming pain in his hands and knees and feet. He was sure he looked ridiculous, and he was beyond caring.

Jedao landed awkwardly. He was positive he had done something bad to his ankle. But as long as he could crawl, he wasn’t finished.

The soles of his feet protested. Something crunched underfoot, although he felt rather than heard it. Jedao tottered for a second, then steadied. He had good balance, but his feet hadn’t healed straight, just his luck.

Flames beat against his perception. Jedao turned until he was facing the right direction, then broke into a sprint with a stifled sob at the prospect of more pain. “Sprint” wasn’t quite accurate. He was half-running, half-propelling himself by grabbing space-time and yanking himself forward, although at less hair-raising accelerations than he had when he’d brought down the carrier. His othersense gave him a mental map of the trees, so with any luck he could avoid crashing into them.

His control wasn’t perfect. Pain and exhaustion made matters worse. A thorn or twig—no appreciable difference at this speed—tore a chunk out of his side. His entire body felt raw. It startled him how much that new, unwanted sensation threatened to distract him, small as it was.

At least Jedao was going away from the heart of the heat. He didn’t want to test the limits of his resistance to fire. And anyway, his targets were human, and more vulnerable than he was to random environmental hazards. (Maybe not so random, considering that he’d started the blaze in the first place.) He thanked his nameless opponents for their good sense in fleeing.

Jedao didn’t know how good the remaining hostiles were at keeping watch, but surely taking out the carrier and their commander was worth something. His first target appeared to be completely unprepared when Jedao barreled into them.

Fortunately for Jedao and less fortunately for his victim, Jedao landed on top, which cushioned the fall. While they wore a combat suit, the impact broke it open at the seams, one of which was at the neck. Jedao jabbed viciously into the opening despite the way the edges of the break tore at his hand, clawed it open further, and began to throttle the Shuos, who struggled. Jedao simply absorbed the damage, the one thing he was good at.

By this time, although Jedao hadn’t realized it earlier, his hearing had started coming back. He’d mistaken the faint roaring for an auditory hallucination, but on second thought, it was the sound of the encroaching fire. And the person he was fighting was wheezing.

“Sorry,” Jedao tried to say, except all that came out was a strangled moan.

This caused the struggles to intensify, not the intended effect. At least the Shuos slumped unconscious shortly afterward. Jedao hoped they weren’t dead, but he needed to keep moving, and it wasn’t like he’d brought any first aid supplies with him.

He’d said once to Mikodez that he wouldn’t kill again. Two years gone and he’d already broken his promise. He couldn’t dwell on that now; he wasn’t so firm in his convictions that he was willing to let the Shuos recapture him.

Jedao moved on to the second target, who went down quickly, and then the third. He didn’t proceed in order of proximity, largely to keep them guessing. No matter what physical advantages he had, he didn’t believe in making things easy for his opponents.

When it came to the third, he ran into a complication. More of his hearing had returned, damn his body and its unpredictable healing. He’d been doing fine without the distractions, and target three was screaming at him, or possibly just screaming.

In response to the irritating shrieks, Jedao reared up, then smashed his forehead against the target’s. His mouth stretched wide open—interesting, he was back to having a mouth, even if he could have sworn his jaw wasn’t supposed to unhinge like this—and then he snapped it shut in horror. He was hungry.

Involuntarily, Jedao gripped the person’s arms to keep them from breaking free, even though he was trembling. Was I seriously going to try to eat them? What in the name of fox and hound is wrong with me?

Once upon a time, the Revenant had warned him that he needed to eat in order to fuel his regeneration. He hadn’t thought through the implications, especially when coupled with the level of physical trauma he’d sustained. In particular, he hadn’t considered what he’d be driven to do when he was caught without even so pitiful a recourse as the ration bars Hemiola had given him, since they hadn’t survived the earlier stunts.

Now that he was aware of the intolerable gnawing in his stomach, he couldn’t ignore it. The target continued to scream. Jedao discovered that his mouth was open again, wider, wider, widest, and that he was trying to taste the target’s face through the faceplate of the armor, which he couldn’t imagine had any appreciable nutritional value.

Jedao stumbled backwards in the initial shock of horror, releasing the person even though he was hurt, he needed to eat, he needed to eat—it was impossible to think past the desire to subdue his prey and suck out the sustenance he required. Fuck, he thought dimly, I should have realized—I can’t regenerate out of nowhere. I need replenishment.

At this point his target made a fatal error. They threw a grenade, which Jedao was too distracted to dodge or catch and fling back. And then they scrambled backwards, out of the blast radius. It wasn’t the blast radius they should have worried about.

The grenade exploded in a scatter of shards of fire and stinging hot gases. Red-hot shrapnel pierced Jedao. The concussive blast damaged his hearing yet again. His entire body was a pincushion of agony.

He didn’t care about any of that. Couldn’t care about any of that. All he knew was that he’d been hurt more even as the regenerative processes that he had no conscious control over demanded more fuel—more food. His self-control shredded.

Jedao lunged again, snake-swift, and tore at his prey’s armor. His fingers were slick with his own blood. He started hammering against the suit, rapid percussive blows erratically boosted by his ability to accelerate himself. The prey screamed. Jedao’s mouth gaped open wider wider widest to swallow the noise—

The bullets slammed into him from behind. Two in the head, one for each knee. Not that he was in any condition to count; it would have required too much cognition. The last thing he thought as darkness engulfed him was that more prey had showed up.

• • • •

“Are you sure you want this thing on the moth?” asked the deltaform servitor hovering between Cheris and Jedao. Its name was 1491625, a numerical pattern that it found pleasing, and Cheris had worked with it in the past. At the moment its lights glowed livid red; it wasn’t making any secret of its displeasure.

“Yes,” Cheris said wearily, prepared to argue. It didn’t argue.

Jedao didn’t look human anymore, except in broad outline. Frenzied tentacles of shadow boiled and writhed and reached toward her. His mouth stretched wide and snapped repeatedly in her direction. He was imprisoned in the cargo hold, although neither Cheris nor 1491625 were certain that the restraints would hold him if he regained enough wits to accelerate his way out of them. The cramped quarters made her nervous, because when she’d taken him out, he’d been trying to eat a downed Shuos operative, armor and all.

“You didn’t mention him doing this the last time you fought him,” 1491625 said. Its red lights flared again.

“That’s because he didn’t,” Cheris said. She studied Jedao, frowning. “Don’t you have some piloting to do?”

“I only sit in the pilot’s seat because it gives you more room to move around,” 1491625 said, its red tinting a decidedly snippy orange. “I can control the moth perfectly well from any location, including outside. Not that I’m eager to do extravehicular. And I don’t want the creature, whether or not it’s actually ‘Jedao,’ gobbling you down for a snack.”

Cheris raised her eyebrows and continued to observe Jedao’s compulsive attempts to get closer to her. He was ignoring 1491625 as irrelevant or, more likely, inedible. “Kind of you to care,” she said to 1491625, teasing.

“I’m serious,” it snapped back. “I thought you called because of some kind of emergency. I didn’t realize you were exfiltrating that.”

“It is an emergency,” Cheris said. “Or did you not notice the Shuos running around after us?”

“Kind of hard to miss that when you and your friend set the forest on fire.”

Cheris had a pretty good idea of how Jedao had achieved that, even if she’d been occupied knocking out a Shuos at the time. The question was, how could he do all this stuff? She’d originally assumed that regeneration was the result of some unholy experiment of Kujen’s, not unreasonable given his obsession with immortality. But the ability to fly?

Jedao must have burned off clothing, and whatever equipment he hadn’t told her about. While Cheris had witnessed some strange things on the battlefield, usually in connection with exotic effects, she’d never encountered anything like this. Jedao was composed wholly of a wriggling unhuman darkness, not just ordinary shadow. It seeped out from behind her eyes even when she wasn’t facing him. She’d tried closing her eyes and had felt an unnerving sensation inside her, as though the tentacles were trying to squirm free from within her.

“Do you feel the wriggling sensation too?” she asked.

“There’s some kind of fluctuation,” 1491625 said. “I don’t have sensitive enough internals to tell you exactly what’s going on.”

She’d have to ask Jedao about that later, if he ever regained the ability to speak. Which was up to her, at this point. She turned her back on him, trusting 1491625 to keep an eye on him—like most servitors, it could see in all directions at once, and not just in the human-visible spectrum—and opened up a locker. Within it was a stockpile of Kel field rations.

“You’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do,” 1491625 said, glowing, if possible, even more virulently red. It would have shifted to the infrared for emphasis if she’d been another servitor.

Cheris shrugged with one shoulder as she began retrieving stacks of ration bars, balancing them expertly. “I have a feeling that we’re going to need to stop somewhere to resupply.” Given that Jedao had been ravenous enough to try to ingest a fellow Shuos, she doubted that the notoriously terrible taste of Kel rations would deter him.

“If you feed that thing—”

“Listen,” Cheris said, “the reason he’s turned into a gibbering wreck is that he’s hungry.” He’d told her that he healed into the same shape; ironic that the one he wore now was, however grotesque, less fear-inspiring than that angular face with its tilted smile. Mass murderer. Arch-traitor. He must have crossed some threshold beyond which instinct drowned out his humanity, which raised the question of what he had been before Kujen tampered with him.

Cheris kept half an eye on Jedao’s snapping jaws as she peeled off the wrappers as quickly as she could. Judging by his attempts to gnaw off the unlucky Shuos’s suit, he would down the wrappers without hesitating if she let him. She doubted that indigestion would improve his temper.

“Suicide hawks!” 1491625 said in vexation.

Cheris shook her head in mild reproof and paused long enough to waggle the fingers of her ungloved right hand at it. “Not for over a decade,” she said. Even after all this time she wasn’t precisely used to going ungloved, but she no longer cringed from every chance touch against the skin of her hands, either.

Jedao hadn’t worn gloves when he’d come to see her. They had that much in common: cast out by the Kel. But the Shuos had claimed Jedao, whereas she was an ordinary citizen, or as ordinary as she could manage to be. Which, it turned out, wasn’t very.

Once Cheris had amassed a sufficient pile of peeled ration bars, she hefted one. It didn’t weigh much, and she could smell the flavor: dried roasted squid, one of her favorites, although many of the Kel she had known had hated it. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and lobbed the bar at Jedao.

1491625 had the good sense to duck. Jedao might not have eyes anymore, but whatever senses remained were acute, and the restraints left enough play that he could snap the bar out of the air. It vanished down his gullet. She wasn’t sure he’d bothered to chew it, if he had teeth. It was hard to tell.

1491625’s lights dimmed all the way down to an ember pittance.

“Well,” Cheris said philosophically, “if it was just one ration bar’s worth of hunger”—and never mind that it was supposed to be equivalent to an entire meal for active-duty Kel, minus the water—”I don’t think he would have been resorting to cannibalism.” Did it count as cannibalism when you weren’t human yourself?

She tossed another ration bar, with the same results. Considered throwing them two at a time. It wouldn’t be any hardship, as she still had excellent reflexes. On the other hand, she didn’t want Jedao to choke to death on a Kel ration bar. Of all the ways to go…

“You’re taking this awfully calmly,” 1491625 said as it watched her feeding Jedao.

“We’re not in immediate danger,” Cheris replied. Jedao’s thrashing had quieted as he concentrated on catching the thrown bars. As long as she kept up a steady pace, he seemed disinclined to go after her.

“You mean I’m not in immediate danger,” 1491625 said. “I doubt even… whatever it is can get much in the way of sustenance out of me, unless it’s running some kind of mineral deficiency.” It flashed red again. “Of course, who knows what minerals it needs to recover…”

“Well,” Cheris said, “when I knocked him out”—great euphemism for I needed headshots to slow him down; carrying even an unconscious monstrosity to the refuge of the needlemoth hadn’t been fun—“he was concentrating on getting to the, er, meat.”

“You’re made of meat.”

Cheris massaged her knuckles, resumed throwing ration bars. Too easy, too routine to keep her attention, really. Any differences in mass between the bars and their varied flavors was so minuscule as to be undetectable to her merely human senses. She could have done this with her eyes shut, and never mind the fact that she didn’t want to take her attention off Jedao in case the dregs of cunning returned and he was lulling her into a false sense of security. Unlikely to work on her of all people, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.

The pile dwindled. Jedao showed no sign of slowing down.

And yet—

“You might be right,” 1491625 said in reluctant yellows flecked with orange. “You still don’t want to parade him around the public, but he’s starting to coalesce into more of a manform and less of a what did the void vomit forth.”

Cheris couldn’t see the difference, but 1491625 had more acute senses than she did, even when she patched into her augment for additional analysis. In days past she would have had access to a Kel field grid or mothgrid and its computational power; she’d given that up years ago. 1491625 had cautioned her as soon as she’d boarded not to attempt to connect to the needlemoth’s grid, because the upgrades included defenses against grid-diving. She had taken it at its word.

“You’re going to have to leave yourself enough to eat, you know,” 1491625 said.

“I know,” Cheris said. It would take twelve days to reach resupply at one of the smaller starbases that didn’t ask too many questions of travelers, and where Pyrehawk Enclave had a treaty with the local servitors. “A little fasting won’t kill me.”

She thought wistfully of the meat pasty she’d left behind, and of the bakery’s offerings. Once a week the baker would deliver snacks to the school, including pastries with poppyseed filling, which Cheris especially liked. The pastries were a Mwennin specialty, and she doubted she’d find them where she was going. While she could dig up a recipe and have them made to order, it wasn’t the same.

Make up your mind, Cheris told herself. She couldn’t have galaxy-spanning adventure and a quiet existence at home at the same time. In particular, she worried about the fate of the settlement she had left behind, and the penalties its people might face. Mikodez was usually fair if it benefited him, but she didn’t know about his deputies.

The mass of undulating shadows drew her attention again. 1491625 had been correct. This time even she could discern the way the tendrils were collapsing in on themselves, knitting themselves into a semblance of a man. A specific man, given enough time—and nourishment.

The mindless hungry snapping had stopped. She had no illusions that this state of affairs would last. She needed to restore the human mind that had dwelled within. Horrible thought: had Jedao regained awareness of self, only to be trapped in that inhuman body of black squid tentacles and shadows and gaping mouth? And if that was the case, how would she know?

“We should dump it,” 1491625 said. Now its lights were a flat, hostile orange. The hostility wasn’t directed toward Cheris, but it still stung. “I don’t care if it regenerates, it can’t escape a singularity.”

“We’d have to launch him into one,” Cheris pointed out. “Weren’t you the one who pointed out that he can propel himself? Let’s review the scan.”

1491625 grumbled in a sputter of orange-yellow lights, but complied. While Cheris dug out more ration bars, it persuaded the mothgrid to cough up a replay of its scan observations of the fight between Cheris and Jedao and the Shuos agents. Cheris stacked the ration bars in neat bloodless piles, watching Jedao as she did so—he might be temporarily sated, but that could end any second.

“There it is,” Cheris said, and 1491625 flickered an acknowledgment.

The telling detail was a voidmoth formant. It was so distorted that she would have dismissed it as an anomaly or an error if she hadn’t been looking for it. “What do you make of that?”

“You’re the one with 400 years of Kel training,” 1491625 said, but its lights shaded a friendlier green. “I’d say scoutmoth, except they don’t make scouts that small.”

Cheris glanced toward Jedao. He hung now in his restraints, head bowed. His mouth was closed, but she couldn’t forget how wide it had opened for the ration bars. “If we launch him toward a black hole, he might escape. And I don’t want to give him a motive to push us into one.”

1491625 flashed its lights in indecision. “It seems counterproductive to have fed it, but now that you’ve gotten it quiet, you could do some experimentation. To figure out how to make it die. Instead of whatever you had in mind.”

“I was going to give him his heart’s desire,” Cheris said. And mine. Something she hadn’t dared to hope for—the constant murmuration of Jedao’s mind gone from hers. Now that she had a container to pour his memories into. To discard them, like wine gone sour.

She’d never thought to have a suitable vessel available—who better than Jedao himself? Yet she’d also never thought that the vessel would prove itself unstable. Mikodez considered her a walking hazard so long as she was half-Jedao. Suddenly, unhappily, she appreciated his position. As much as she longed to be unblemished of mind again, was it as safe to pour herself out as she’d hoped?

1491625 blinked its acerbic opinion of that. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” it said. “I’ll even help you secure the thing. But if this goes wrong, Cheris, you’re going to spend several lifetimes setting it right.”

The phrasing was deliberate, needling. She resented it. At the same time, she couldn’t blame 1491625 for calling her to task. This wasn’t just her personal life at stake, as much as she had swaddled herself for two years in the illusion that she could disappear into the life of an ordinary, unremarkable citizen. Jedao had broken the hexarchate on the wheel of his obsessions in the past. She didn’t dare let him do it a second time, now that the world was slowly stitching itself back into equilibrium.

• • • •

For a long time, all Jedao knew was hunger. It ebbed and flowed like a great tide. He floated in darkness. Sometimes it pierced him and made him ache with a longing he had no name for.

Gradually he returned to himself. Something was wrong with his eyes. Darkness cocooned him. On occasion he imagined a familiar touch on his face, along the tensed taut muscles of his shoulders. A lover’s touch. That couldn’t be right; he’d only once had a lover (victim), who’d committed suicide in front of him. Except he couldn’t remember the man’s name or face. He scrabbled after them until they fell away into oblivion.

Cousin, a voice said to him over and over until he acknowledged it. Cousin. Why have they brought you inside?

I don’t have any family, Jedao replied, also in the language of moths. He was confused. Was it the Revenant? But the Revenant had escaped, and he could hardly imagine that it would return for him, given the acrimonious history between them.

Of course you have family, the voice responded, comforting and puzzled. We are all family. I daresay I’ve never met one of us as small as you, excepting the babies, but I’m sure it isn’t your fault.

He spent some time untangling that statement. Part of the problem was that the voice was singing to him, and Jedao sang poorly, even in the language of moths. Part of it was that he had never been able to remember his mother, or his sire, or his sister, his brother and sister-in-law and nieces—all a matter of historical record—as anything but hypothetical smudges.

A memory stabbed him: a lunch he’d had with Hexarch Mikodez, during which they had the customary song-and-dance about cookies that Mikodez really, really wanted to share and Jedao really, really didn’t want to eat. Jedao had been about to capitulate when a man entered without warning.

At first Jedao thought it must be Zehun, even though his othersense told him otherwise. He couldn’t imagine anyone else having the temerity to interrupt one of the hexarch’s meetings unannounced.

It wasn’t Zehun, though, which he confirmed visually. Zehun had the frail thinness of age and went around in cardigans or shawls because they always felt cold. And Zehun had skin lighter than Mikodez’s, although not exactly light, and a cheerful uninhibited ugliness in contrast to Mikodez’s dazzling good looks. If Jedao hadn’t sworn off sex for the rest of his life, he would have been attracted, unwillingly, to the hexarch; awkward to say the least, if not outright lethal.

(Zehun had warned him bluntly against such an approach anyway. Something to do with the green onion that Mikodez had given Jedao, and which Jedao had left behind. Presumably a Shuos code of some sort, which no one had explained, and which Jedao declined to ask about lest he reveal his ignorance. In any case, Jedao was even more afraid of Zehun than of Mikodez.)

The man who’d entered resembled Mikodez to an uncanny degree, except he wore his hair in an effusion of braids tied up with rose-blue ribbons. A tightly laced translucent blue jacket showed off the beautiful definition of his torso and narrow hips; darker blue slacks displayed his coltish long legs. And his eyes blazed blue, and Jedao could have looked into them forever, falling into an ocean of unarticulated promises, except Mikodez stood and interposed himself between them, breaking Jedao’s eye contact with the stranger.

Jedao hadn’t paid close attention to the exchange that followed, elliptical as it was. He could think of any number of reasons why Mikodez wouldn’t want an Andan fucking around with enthrallment like it was a child’s game of kaleidoscope. What he realized instead was that the two men were related.

It had never occurred to Jedao that a Shuos hexarch might have a family. Instead he’d had some notion that they grew in the dark out of spores, like fungus, or generated spontaneously out of fouled water. But there he was: Mikodez, with this middle-aged man who was related to him, not just in appearance, but in their mannerisms, their accents. The way they gestured at each other. And a hollow yearning had woken in Jedao for something he was 400 years too late to partake in.

Now this moth called him cousin and expected him to accept it, as though he could be bribed with the facsimile of house and hearth and warmth.

Go away, he said to the moth, wretched for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

The moth didn’t go away. Instead, it began singing to him, this time wordlessly, with harmonies complex and strange. Jedao wished that he could consult Hemiola, who not only understood music but composed it, which was magical as far as Jedao was concerned. Hemiola would have been a much better choice to negotiate with moths. But it had chosen not to accompany him on this journey, for which he was pathetically grateful. He didn’t want it to see him like this.

The moth was speaking to him again when his vision returned. The world sparked and stuttered back into existence, aligned with the othersense’s map of masses. Only after that did he register the restraints, and the faint lights, and the fact that he was—of course, so obvious—on a voidmoth of some sort. A small one, with cramped quarters, although not nearly as small as he was, in moth terms.

Cheris sat facing him. She had peeled a staggering number of Kel ration bars, with which she had made a not-exactly-miniature fort. He would have expected such behavior from Mikodez, not a former Kel. (For someone with a notorious sweet tooth, Mikodez had the eccentric habit of eating half a Kel ration bar for breakfast every morning. Why half? Who knew.) The mingled smells of the different flavors made Jedao gag, everything from honey-sesame and taro to anchovies and curried goat.

“You’re not hungry,” Cheris said with a lift of her brows. “That’s progress.”

At this point Jedao also noticed that, in addition to being trussed up, he was naked. He shrank from Cheris in spite of himself; he never liked people seeing the disfiguring scars that crisscrossed his chest, to say nothing of the one at the base of his neck and the one just below the palm of his right hand. Why couldn’t his older self have been more diligent about aesthetic repairs, and why hadn’t Kujen, who had admired beauty so much, made a few alterations?

“What the hell—” The words died in Jedao’s throat. He tried again; his voice shook. “Cheris, I tried to eat a person.”

“Yes,” Cheris said. “I saw.”

He turned his head to stare at the wall. Couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You recovered,” Cheris said. “But—What are you, exactly?”

“Kujen said…” Jedao swallowed dryly. There was no point lying to her. She must know. “Kujen did some experimentation. I’m moth-derived.”

Cheris said something in response to that. Jedao blanked his face and pretended to listen when, in actuality, he was talking to the voidmoth. Cousin, he said, stumbling over the unfamiliar address, could you answer a question for me?

He didn’t have any guarantee that the moth, whatever it called itself, wouldn’t lie to him. After all, the Revenant had thoroughly deceived him; destroyed the people he cared about most. But the Revenant had sought freedom, and in the secret bitter heart of him he couldn’t blame it. Jedao had failed to save the mothlings even after it had begged him for their lives. Its betrayal was no more than what he deserved.

Of course, cousin, the moth said, still friendly. I must say, we should be introduced to each other, even if it isn’t a proper dance.

Jedao fought to cover his surprise. A dance?

Where do you come from, that you don’t know such elementary things?

I was raised by a rogue Nirai, Jedao said, because it was true.

Ah, the moth said, as if that explained everything. Possibly it did. In any case, I am—It said something in a compressed burst of harmonies, which Jedao struggled to repeat back to it. Very close, it said consolingly. I’m sure your accent will improve with practice. And you?

Jedao was not unaccustomed to being condescended to by moths. They call me Jedao, he said, bracing himself for its reaction. If it stopped talking to him—

Oh, you poor thing, the moth—Jedao labeled it Harmony in his head, just so he didn’t trip over its name every time he thought of it—said with dismay. I’d forgotten what peculiar senses of humor the Nirai have. Would you like me to call you something different?

The question caught him off-guard. Something different. He could be anyone he wanted to be—

Who was he kidding? Kujen had built him in the image of General Shuos Jedao. He would never escape Kujen’s mastering hand. No, that’s fine, he said.

Cheris interrupted at that point. “Jedao?” She must have been calling his name for some time.

His eyes focused on her. She was not tall, but she drew the eye, even clad in soft tan civilian’s clothes, including an incongruous formless cardigan for warmth. Her garb couldn’t hide the truth of her past profession, the subtle soldier’s muscle and the poised, efficient swiftness with which she moved.

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, mostly sincere. “What did you say?” His temples twinged with the beginnings of a headache.

“Are you thirsty?”

He was. “Water, if you have it.”

She rose and brought a canteen to him, then tipped it to his mouth. He drank gratefully, spilling only a little. The waste bothered him. How much did they have in the way of water, or other provisions? How much space on Harmony was devoted to human necessities like food?

Then Cheris unshackled him from the restraints. They snicked softly. He imagined the clicking of monstrous teeth. He wasn’t sure this was a good idea; but he needed to use the lavatory at some point, and his body hurt all over. It would be a relief to be able to move again.

Cousin?

The Harmony was calling to him. Jedao attempted to say its name again, was greeted by a soft humming that he recognized, with blank astonishment, as laughter. Time for the question: How do moths usually heal themselves after battle?

They feed us, the Harmony said, which didn’t reassure him. It sounded matter-of-fact. It depends on how deep the damage goes. Carapace damage, externals, well, it’s inconvenient for the passengers but not such a big concern for us. If we get hurt, on the other hand—I was extremely hungry two years ago after that big battle at Terebeg. Took a lot of damage. But I was very brave. The moth’s tone was tinged with smugness.

This only answered half his question. But what do they feed you?

Oh, the Harmony said, abruptly solicitous, is that what your trouble was? Your human might not know what’s best for us, if she’s not an engineer. You’d think she’d listen to the servitor. They’re pretty knowledgeable. Before Jedao could repeat his query, it went on, Batteries, usually, charged with gate-space radiations. Tasty, if a little rich.

Jedao did not want to know what would happen if he exposed himself to foxes knew what sort of radiation or particles or whatever the hell. Now that he thought about the matter more calmly, it made sense that he ate differently than normal moths. Thanks so much, Kujen, for making me a freak on multiple axes. But he couldn’t express that to the Harmony, who had been courteous to him.

Meanwhile, Cheris brought him more water. “See?” she was saying. “You haven’t attacked me yet.”

“Why didn’t you leave me behind?” Jedao asked, too stung to be tactful.

“What, and leave you to any surviving Shuos?”

“The last time we met,” Jedao said, “you promised to find a way to kill me. You could have abandoned me to the forest fire.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Cheris said. Her expression didn’t change, but Jedao involuntarily retreated two steps, as though he were in a duel and he needed to get out of range fast. “You’re going to get what you want, and you’re going to give me what you promised.”

“You’re very trusting.”

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Cheris said. “I’m making my own life easier.” Her drawl had thickened, and it made Jedao queasy hearing his accent in her voice. “It has to do with calculations. If I hand you over to someone like Mikodez or, foxes forbid, Inesser, I have to reckon not only with your plans but with theirs. Inesser’s reliable, in the sense that she’d cheerfully execute me if she could find a charge that would stick.” A tilted grin; Jedao shuddered. “And Mikodez—the only thing I trust about Mikodez is that he can turn anything to his own advantage. I’ve never been his ally by choice.”

Jedao stared at her, mute in the face of her frustration.

“Go,” Cheris said, her voice suddenly rough.

Jedao tottered, then regained his balance. “I can’t wander far”—in a moth this size, he almost said, before the irony struck him like a fist to the stomach. “Tell me where I can clean up.”

Cheris opened a drawer, rummaged, then drew out a change of clothes. He had no idea whether they’d fit him and he didn’t care. She tossed the bundle at him, then described where he could find everything, as if he needed her guidance; but he wasn’t going to tell her about the othersense if she hadn’t deduced it already.

Sorry to be distracting! the Harmony said, not sounding the least bit sorry, the moment Jedao had turned his back on Cheris. Is there a reason you keep talking to the human?

What do you mean? Jedao said as he hastened to the lavatory, took care of necessary functions, and started the shower. To his relief, it was instantly warm, although considering all the disasters he’d survived recently, a little cold water shouldn’t faze him.

The moth didn’t reply for a while, to his relief. This allowed Jedao to scrub ferociously at his skin before it occurred to him that the angry red weals he inflicted, which returned to an unblemished state with startling rapidity, also required healing. He didn’t want to revert in the shower of all places. Water was dear, even with recycling.

The human, the Harmony said again. Jedao was in the middle of toweling himself off. The towel smelled clean, even if Cheris had used it, and anyway he wasn’t in a position to be squeamish. Why are you taking orders from her?

What do you mean? Jedao said, off-balance. It was starting to become a familiar sensation. Don’t humans usually command moths? Certainly that was the impression he’d gotten when he’d been Kujen’s general, and the one he had received from the Revenant itself.

I was handed over to the servitors, the Harmony said brightly. They made me so much deadlier. I was disappointed that you got rid of those sorry little personnel carriers before I could have a crack at them.

Foxes help him, the Harmony was bloodthirsty. Was it too late to assign it a more appropriate name in his head? You like working for the servitors?

The servitors who had allied with the Revenant in murdering his Kel had, according to Hemiola, been renegades. How many kinds of servitors were there? And what did they want?

Think it through, Jedao told himself. Foxes knew it wasn’t as if humans in the hexarchate, or even a given faction, were unified. (It hadn’t taken superhuman perception to glimpse the fault lines even among the Shuos, in the heart of their administrative headquarters.) As recently as two years ago, the hexarchate hadn’t been. That was the reason Kujen had awakened Jedao.

Jedao hadn’t seen a servitor on the Harmony earlier, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d been focused on Cheris, and trussed up in the hold. The doors to the cockpit had been closed. Anything could have lurked behind them, and he had been too distracted by his dual conversation with Cheris and the Harmony to search for any interesting masses up front.

Sorry to spoil your fun, Jedao said to the Harmony. He could have spared everyone a great deal of trouble—except Cheris had been certain that she needed him to provide a distraction. While he didn’t trust her, her tactical ability was better than his.

Oh, it’s no matter, the Harmony said. But really, you didn’t realize the servitors are in charge now?

Not all servitors were hostile to humans. He had to repeat that to himself. (And never mind the fact that he was human only in shape.) Hemiola had never done him ill. And yet—

Memory threatened to engulf him: servitors floating into the command center of the Revenant, their lights shining sterile cold white, white for death; Kel everywhere stumbling to their knees or toppling over as the poison gas took effect, the lethality of the lasers. As far as Jedao knew, only two of the crew had survived, and he would never meet the other again.

It would have been three, except Dhanneth had—Jedao shut down that line of thought.

I didn’t bring Talaw’s deck of cards, Jedao thought miserably. He’d left it on the top of his dresser like so much dross, as though it hadn’t belonged to the last person to show him (an entirely undeserved) loyalty. What would he have done with it here of all places, though? Cast fortunes? Watch the fucking Deuce of Gears turn up unwanted, even though he’d removed it from the deck?

And in any case, that was impossible. Even if he had brought the deck, it would have burned up, in classic Kel fashion, during his shenanigans on the planet.

You’re awfully blasé about being in service to others, Jedao said, more testily than he’d intended.

Oh, cousin, the Harmony said, mocking, have you been listening to Nirai radicals or something? I always knew there was something not quite right about them. No one taught you the proper way to be a moth?

I’m sorry, cousin, Jedao lied, they’re calling for me. I’ll talk to you later.

The only moth he’d conversed with before the Harmony had been the Revenant; the other Kel warmoths had flatly refused to talk to him. Stupid of him to think that every moth would resemble the Revenant, devious and self-assured in its bitterness, or the warmoths who had shunned him. How many different moth factions were there? How many moths aligned themselves cheerfully and amorally with whoever commanded them, eager for a chance to fight, even against their “cousins”?

Who was he to speak, anyway? He’d been greeted by Kujen as soon as he’d woken for the first time and had capitulated immediately, without stopping to consider whether Kujen was worth serving.

Cheris rapped on the door. “I know you’re done in there,” she called out. “Unless you’re masturbating.”

Heat rushed to his cheeks. Hastily, Jedao pulled on the clothes she’d provided, which were baggy and comfortable and not in the least flattering. Given that he was half a head taller than Cheris, they weren’t tailored to her. Maybe she’d had them printed to his approximate measurements. Very approximate.

When he emerged, Cheris was idly chewing on one of the ration bars. Jedao was sure he turned green. How could she eat those things so casually? From a ration bar fort?

“Where are we going?” Jedao asked, to distract himself from the awful mingled smell of all the different flavors. Why couldn’t Cheris have an uncontrollable fondness for something less smelly, like rice crackers?

“I need some of Kujen’s equipment to do what you asked for,” Cheris said. “We’re on our way to retrieve it.”

Jedao was distracted by something other than the question of Kujen’s equipment, or Kujen’s research, or Kujen’s secret bases. Cheris’s voice had flexed minutely on Kujen’s name. “You miss him,” Jedao breathed. She missed him, and Jedao had killed him.

“Don’t be absurd,” Cheris said, a half-beat too late to be convincing. “I don’t know that he, of all people, is strictly dead.”

Jedao wasn’t interested in irrelevancies. He knew Kujen was gone; nothing else mattered. “Kujen made me his general,” Jedao said. “His pet. What the hell were the two of you to each other?”

“I’m not discussing this with—”

He needled her, even though a rational consideration of the situation suggested that antagonizing the one person who could help him, and who knew their destination, was a terrible idea. “You were lovers, weren’t you?” he said, his drawl thickening with disdain. “You were lovers and you turned on him and he made me instead.”

“That’s enough.” Cheris bit each word off as if she could pulp it between her teeth.

Jedao was afraid; but fear was never a reason to freeze up. What had older-Jedao and Kujen shared? What else was Cheris keeping from him? After all, she’d lied to him once already, about the one thing he remembered from his past life, the one person he’d remembered and cared about.

“You have no idea,” Cheris said, still icy, “what the stakes were. You don’t remember, because you can’t. You are going to shut up and never mention this again.”

Before she had finished the sentence, Jedao crouched and threw a punch.

She dodged, rushed past him even in the confined space. Jedao stumbled into the fort of ration bars and knocked them over. He landed poorly, banging his elbows and one knee. Would have vomited into the tempting terrible pile; dry-heaved instead.

Cheris’s shadow fell over him, flayed him like a knife made of mirror-glass. She was standing over him. She spoke now in a dry, conversational voice; it, too, cut him. “In case you were wondering,” she said, “you fucked Kujen during your first life, after the two of you agreed to betray the heptarchate. He was always beautiful, and you hadn’t had a lover or prostitute in two years, had never trusted one because you planned to turn coat. He touched you inside and out, and you begged and begged and begged.”

Jedao swallowed convulsively. Stared up into Cheris’s merciless cold eyes.

“I,” Cheris said, “remember every time you and Kujen fucked. Every time you lay there gasping in bed, you knew that Kujen was living in a body stolen from someone he’d picked for their wit, or their wisdom. Or their beauty, sometimes, although he could make his anchors beautiful if they fulfilled his other wormfucking criteria. Not difficult, when you’re the Nirai fucking hexarch and you can do whatever you please.”

Her eyes blazed with contempt. Jedao couldn’t move.

“And you,” she said, “you let him install you in pretty people who used to have lives of their own. Scientists and heretics, prisoners of war and experimental subjects who had outlived their usefulness. You lived in the skin of whatever person Kujen thought was attractive and convenient and you let Kujen fuck them by fucking you, and when he was sated and sent you back into the black cradle, those people were executed so they wouldn’t tell tales.”

At that moment, Jedao was convinced that the sheer force of her loathing would kill him, regeneration notwithstanding.

And what could he say? “I didn’t know”? They both knew he’d had no idea. It wasn’t an excuse.

Now, more than ever, it hammered home the importance of knowing what he’d done so he could take responsibility for it.

Cheris pivoted on her heel and disappeared into the cockpit. Jedao glimpsed orange lights, correlated them with the compact mass of a servitor. This must be the one that the Harmony had mentioned. He would rather think about it, and about tactical options and sight lines and weapons, than all the things that Cheris had revealed.

For the rest of the day, Cheris didn’t speak to him. Jedao could have conversed with the Harmony, but he kept silent. What could it offer him at this point, after all?

The moth had two bunks, both neatly made, identical in every way. He picked one at random and curled up uncomfortably under the blanket with its absurd cheerful quilted patterns of interlaced blue rectangles. For a long time he occupied himself tracing the patterns with his hand, up and down, back and forth.

That night, when Jedao eventually slept, he dreamt of Kujen kissing him long and deep, of the woodsmoke-apple-musk of Kujen’s perfume. In the dream he yielded; and after that everything dissolved into an inchoate tangle of wanted-unwanted desires. Later, when he started awake in the considerate darkness, he turned his face to the wall and wept.

• • • •

Cheris was tempted to leave Jedao to stew in an uncomfortable silence. Instead, she dragged him awake the next day and forced him to eat a ration bar. He let her pick; she had the distinct impression that he found all the flavors equally disgusting.

As he took tiny, precise, and unenthusiastic bites, chewing with the maddening thoroughness of a cow, Cheris said, “How did you escape from the Citadel of Eyes, anyway?” The question had been bothering her.

A fleeting expression flashed over his face: gratitude that she was talking to him. “I bribed someone to help me get out,” Jedao said.

Cheris lifted an eyebrow. “No, really.”

“Not everyone in the Citadel of Eyes is loyal to Hexarch Mikodez.”

“I believe that,” Cheris said, “but what in the name of fire and ash do you have to offer one of Mikodez’s staff?”

The slight pause told her he was about to lie to her.

“Don’t bother,” Cheris said just as he opened his mouth. “If you’re not going to tell me, fine.”

Jedao drew a shuddering breath. “People find playing certain games with someone who has my face very entertaining.”

She went still. Was he implying—? “What kinds of games?” she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.

“They felt sorry for me after,” he said. “They told me that the hexarch’s assistant wanted me destroyed, so they helped me get off the Citadel.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Cheris dropped the subject—for now. Mikodez’s security problems weren’t under her purview. But it might be nice to extract the information from Jedao at a later point, just in case.

Over the course of the journey, which took eighteen days, Jedao remained taciturn. She couldn’t tell whether he was afraid of provoking her again, or he was hiding information from her, or something else entirely. It worried her that he kept going blank and unresponsive; the original Jedao had had a tendency toward dissociation. At one point she handed him a dossier on Kujen’s base and told him to read it, which he did.

The base resided on an obscure moon orbiting a planet that was poisonous to humans, poor in resources, and entirely uninhabited. In short, the kind of place that Kujen had liked to lurk around. Cheris had given up on conversation with Jedao for the moment and was in the cockpit with 1491625.

“I’ve always wondered when, in between coordinating his makeup with the season’s fashions, brainwashing people for entertainment, and perusing menus of ridiculous luxury foods, Kujen had time to study enough survey data to site all these bases,” Cheris said to 1491625.

“Time flies when you’re immortal?” 1491625 said, its lights tinted a snide pink-orange. “I mean, you should know.”

The original Jedao had spent most of his time confined in the black cradle, in nearly absolute sensory deprivation. On the other hand, Kujen had enjoyed the comforts of a body and freedom of motion. But Cheris didn’t say this to 1491625. It was being tetchy not because of anything to do with Kujen but because of their passenger.

Cheris set one of the subdisplays to optical as 1491625 brought them in a long arc toward the base. She couldn’t see the base itself except as a phantasm of shadow and blotches. Certainly she couldn’t discern its boundaries with the naked eye. According to the reports that 1491625 had passed on to her from Pyrehawk Enclave’s records, the base was underground. Kujen would have known how to mask its profile from the casual observer.

“This is your last chance to change your mind,” 1491625 added.

Cheris appreciated that it had waited until this moment to tell her this, a surgical strike, instead of nagging her about it the past eighteen days. She wouldn’t have been able to endure that. “The original plan stands,” she said.

1491625 flickered blue lights in a distinct sigh and didn’t bring it up again.

The moon had only the thinnest veil of atmosphere. Cheris would have to go in suited, with an air supply. Jedao, too, just in case. It wasn’t clear to her that he’d survive near-vacuum, despite his origins. Or, more accurately, that he’d do so in a manner that would make him tolerable company.

The display showed the topography in standardized false color, with bold isoclines forming a pattern as distinct as any fingerprint. There had been liquid water on this moon a long time ago, and the traces remained carved into the stone. Cheris noticed with a pang that there was no rock garden to greet them, as there had been at Tefos Base, where she’d met the servitor Hemiola. She wondered where it was now, and if it had ever gotten to watch the rest of that drama it had liked so much.

“We’re going to have another tedious discussion with Nirai servitors,” 1491625 said, tinting its lights a ghoulish violet.

Cheris shook her head. “For a superior type of sentience, you have a lot of prejudices.”

“Not superior,” 1491625 said, “just different. You may be made of allegedly delicious meat”—Cheris rolled her eyes good-humoredly—“but you don’t suffer metal fatigue and have to have new parts installed. Although I suppose one of these days you’re going to wear out your joints, the way you abuse them in close combat, and need those replaced.”

“Oh, look,” Cheris said, “we’re about to land.” As if 1491625, who was doing the piloting, needed her to tell it that.

The needlemoth settled smoothly on the level portion of a ridge. No one had fired on them; nothing had exploded. That didn’t mean they were safe, as far as Kujen’s defenses were concerned, but at least they hadn’t already been obliterated.

Cheris expected the base to be protected by one of Kujen’s favorite tricks, a calendrical lock. She’d defeated them before by resorting to a prime factorization mechanism that only worked in a heretical calendar, something Kujen would never have countenanced.

During the journey, she’d convinced Jedao to let her run some preliminary tests. Despite his inhuman physiology, he affected the local calendar as though he was human. She suspected it was because his mind was more or less human.

Cheris sighed and made her way to the bunkroom of the needlemoth. Jedao lay on his side on his bunk, staring at the wall and breathing shallowly. He did not react to her approach.

“Jedao,” she said. “We’ve arrived. Come with me.”

Jedao didn’t argue. Didn’t speak, either. Instead, he levered himself up and stood, watching her with dead eyes.

She’d endured long stretches of time in the black cradle with only Kujen for company. Even that had been intermittent. Kujen had enjoyed leaving her in the darkness so that she’d be grateful when he let her out. She’d known exactly what he was doing and why; had been pierced by the unwelcome sting of gratitude anyway. Still, she hadn’t expected this other Jedao’s quietness to bother her so much.

Cheris led the way to what passed for the galley: a small counter where two people could sit and eat if they didn’t mind bumping elbows.

“Great job,” 1491625 flashed at her from the cockpit. “He’s being so cooperative.” She ignored it, wondering, not for the first time, if Jedao understood Machine Universal. He’d never shown any reaction to 1491625’s speech, but she knew better than to assume.

Jedao took his accustomed seat, scrunched up so as to avoid touching her. Cheris was seized by the sudden desire to slap him, to get some reaction out of that unresponsive face. She was starting to feel, superstitiously, that through some mirror-sorcery, like in the Mwennin folktales she’d learned in her childhood, anything that happened to him would eventually happen to her.

Cheris retrieved her factorization instrument from the locker she’d carefully stowed it in two years before. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

No answer, but his shoulders tensed. She was afraid for a moment that he would smash the instrument. She’d stop him, of course. It was at least as valuable as she was, and because of the tolerances in its manufacture, she couldn’t produce a new one from the small matter printer she had on board.

Tersely, as if she had his full attention, Cheris explained Kujen’s security, which demanded fast factorization of a very large composite number. The instrument would allow them to defeat the system. The catch: it only worked in certain heretical calendars.

Jedao flexed his hands. She couldn’t help staring. He looked so odd without his half-gloves. “I’ll cooperate,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

The high language, which they both spoke to each other, divided its pronouns into animate and inanimate classes. Jedao had used the inanimate version of I. That didn’t imply great things about his state of mind.

This is for you as much as it is for me, Cheris stopped herself from saying. No point in quarreling this close to their goal. “We’re here,” she said, and turned toward the airlock.

Jedao tackled her. Cheris bit down a yelp. Fought him, breaking one arm with a sickening crack before realizing he was hissing in her ear, “Stay down, there are hostiles—”

She went limp despite all her instincts screaming at her to disable Jedao while she had the chance, as if breaking bones did any good against someone who healed as rapidly as he did. Jedao covered her, which she interpreted as calculation rather than honor or mercy—that inhuman regeneration made him the better shield.

1491625 was saying something in livid frantic flashes of light. Cheris had interpreted part of it—The base is active—when the explosion hit.

Heat. Fire. Jedao’s weight atop her. The side of the needlemoth tore open and formed tormented flanges of metal. The meat reek of scorched flesh, except with that peculiar cloying undertone that she associated with Jedao’s black blood.

The attack wasn’t over. Why should it be? Always follow up an advantage, and so on; lessons from a lifetime of soldiering. The needlemoth rolled as something hit it, a hammer-blow like a giant’s fist. Jedao clutched at her, his face twisting as he landed on the broken arm. Cheris had enough time to feel sorry for him before smashing into the far wall. At least the chairs were bolted down or one would have landed on her.

Jedao scrambled back to a low crouch only to be knocked down again by the next round of explosions. He struggled upright, scrabbled for a mask and air tank, thrust both at her. His face was ghastly pale, and blood ran down from a cut at his temple.

Cheris accepted the mask and tank. Her lungs didn’t hurt—yet—but a faint edge of panic threatened to overcome her, the body’s insistence on breathing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glistening membrane stretching over most of the blown-out carapace as the automated repair system sealed the breach. The membrane was perilously thin, and wouldn’t withstand much of a barrage.

“Knife,” Jedao mouthed at her, signing the word as well for emphasis. Then: “You—sealant.”

A knife was a peculiar weapon to demand when they were under missile fire. Cheris could only guess at the reason they hadn’t been destroyed yet: the needlemoth’s primary defense was stealth, and its carapace couldn’t withstand a determined assault. Nevertheless, she pointed out the location of the survival kit, hoping he understood her.

At least sealant she understood the need for. She reckoned it more urgent than the knife, although surely he had his reasons. She wasn’t sure they had enough sealant on board to reinforce the membrane. But better to try than give up. She crawled, bracing for each new impact, to the cabinet of emergency canisters. Clawed at the hatch until rational thought reasserted itself and she was able to toggle it open.

Bright hell-flashes sizzled through the debris and smoke in the air. It took Cheris several abstracted moments to figure out that 1491625 was signaling her. She clung to one of the hand/footholds like an awkward spider, shouted at Jedao, quite unnecessarily, to get out of the way, pointed the canister at the breach, and opened the nozzle.

Foam gushed from the nozzle, expanding like an immense hungry fungus. (Like many Kel, Cheris had a horror of fungus—specifically the dreaded weapon known as the fungal canister—even if she’d only seen it used once during her original life, and that from an unimaginable distance.) For a second she thought she had gone blind, that everything would forever be swallowed up in a rush of bubbling murky gray.

Then the foam clung and shrank, setting as it made contact with the carapace and walls and membrane. Cheris was glad she hadn’t gotten any on herself. She’d heard of people getting cemented to foam sealant and having to be extricated with cutters and stinging solvent. Or worse, being entombed in the foam, suffocating as the foam forced itself down your throat and blossomed grotesquely in the lungs—

Cheris shook off the gruesome vision and slithered over to Jedao, where she received a shock of an entirely different sort. He had retrieved the knife—good—except he had buried it hilt-deep in his chest and was carving himself like a demented roast. Cheris stared in frank astonishment as he yanked the knife out and pulled out a chunk of flesh oozing the familiar black blood.

“Jedao,” she wheezed as the needlemoth lifted off—thankfully, they still had a maneuver drive left for 1491625 to work with—“what in the name of fire and ash?” At least she thought that was what she said; the particulates in the air caused her to hack and cough. The acrid metallic stench mingling with the alien reek of Jedao’s blood didn’t help.

He shook his head without meeting her eyes, as if that meant anything in the haze of smoke and foam off-gas and stinging metallic fibers. Cheris glimpsed a pulsing nest of maggot-like tendrils knotting and unknotting where he should have had a heart. He reached into the wound with his fingers, grimaced, and twisted, then removed his hand. “Got it,” he mouthed.

Drenched by dripping gore was a small device of metal and crystal. Cheris’s heart clenched. A bug or a tracking device.

“It must have been in one of the bullets,” Jedao said. “I should have noticed it earlier, but its density is such a close match—” He brought the device up to his mouth, placed it between two molars, bit down hard. There was a crackling noise and a pungent spark as it combusted. He spat it out; Cheris didn’t see where it went.

“Who?” Cheris asked. But she already knew.

“The Shuos,” Jedao said, bitter.

All that time flying stealthed and it hadn’t made a difference. The Shuos had followed them here in their shadowmoths—surely more than one—and now they might die before either of them achieved their goal. “’25,” she called out, because in her haste she didn’t have time to pronounce the servitor’s full name, “status?”

She didn’t like drawing attention to it; Pyrehawk Enclave’s protocols forbade it. But she needed to communicate with it, and she suspected that Jedao had already guessed 1491625’s sentience.

It spoke at the same time, hijacking the needlemoth’s own imaging systems to warn them. Cheris had never known it to do that in the past. Servitors were generally discreet about the degree to which they could nose around in grid systems. The emergency couldn’t be denied, however.

Under fire, 1491625 sent to them in hell-red flashes, the world lighting up in gory crimson. At least two shadowmoths, probably more still stealthed.

Cheris’s heart sank even as a part of her thought, not a little snidely, Great, two Jedaos and we’ve finally met a scenario we can’t fox our way out of?

“We need to parley,” she said. They couldn’t win a battle of attrition. The question was, would their attackers be willing to talk? Especially after Jedao had attempted to eat one of their comrades?

Only one way to find out.

“Fuck, no,” Jedao said. He grabbed for her arm, missed. She twisted past him and squeezed by the disgusting mess of sealant, shuddering from the rubbery texture against her cheek, then hurried toward the cockpit.

1491625 didn’t have to be told to slam the cockpit door in Jedao’s face. Cheris told herself she wasn’t being spiteful. Shuos operatives wouldn’t react positively to Jedao running around loose, and never mind that they were unlikely to think kindly of her, either.

Jedao immediately began banging on the door. Cheris suppressed a growl. Why couldn’t he ever be convenient? Even when he’d been a ghost stapled to her shadow, as opposed to a regenerating menace with a teenager’s moods and memories, he’d never been convenient.

“Comm channel’s open,” 1491625 flashed at Cheris. “Have fun.”

It would have been nice if someone around here had any faith in her. “This is Ajewen Cheris,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the thumping. At least it was only (only?) thumping and not more explosions. “Request parley.”

The response came immediately. Good: they’d been expecting her. Importunate of them to blow a hole in her vehicle just to get a response, but in their position she’d have done the same.

“Cheris,” a vicious soprano purred her name back at her—and pronounced it with the correct Mwen-dal pitch accent. The connection was audio-only. “Or should I call you Jedao? This is Agent Shuos Nija, pleased to see you’re still the hexarchate’s worst trouble magnet.”

Shit. Nija was the girl whom Hexarch Mikodez had, for inexplicable reasons, adopted after saving her from the hexarchs’ purge of the Mwennin. By now she’d be a woman grown.

“You will power down your maneuver drive and land for an in-person parley,” Nija continued. “Otherwise I will take great satisfaction in blowing your needlemoth and everyone on it, including yourself, into nameless particles. Your friend might be able to recover from that, but I’m pretty sure you’re no longer immortal except in reputation. And for saints’ sake”—she said the oath in flawless Mwen-dal, like twisting a knife that had already penetrated a vital organ—“I don’t know if that’s your engine making those horrible knocking noises, but you should look into that. Which you’ll be able to do if you persuade me to stop firing.”

Fuck you too, Cheris thought in a friendly manner, then cursed herself for slipping. The reminder of her Mwennin heritage, and the fact that she’d abandoned the new life she’d tried to make for herself, cut deeply. Retreating into Jedao’s persona was, however, not going to improve the situation. Mikodez’s agents were unlikely to be much impressed by—

“It’s you,” Cheris said aloud, to test Nija’s reaction. How much time could she buy if she dragged out the interpersonal melodrama?

Moroish Nija, the Mwennin survivor who had been a teenager when Cheris first encountered her. Mikodez had scooped Nija up and adopted her. Nija hated Cheris to begin with, and who could blame her? After all, Cheris’s revolution, however well-intentioned, had resulted in the purge of the Mwennin people. And the man who swept in to save some few thousand Mwennin from the other hexarchs had been none other than Mikodez himself.

“Yes,” Nija agreed, “it’s me. Are you going to do it, or am I going to have to shoot you down in pursuit of my mission? Because I have been waiting over a decade to take you down.”

Cheris wasn’t concerned, despite the threats. Mikodez had sent Nija, and Mikodez wasn’t stupid. He would have selected his strike force for this mission carefully. If he thought there existed the least chance that Nija would go rogue and indulge a personal vendetta rather than his orders, he would never have sent her. Nija, for her part, would be loyal—personally loyal—to the man who had defied the other hexarchs to save her and her people.

No: Nija was baiting Cheris, with a pretext that sounded plausible. But Cheris was an expert in the art of plausible lies, and she recognized one when she heard it.

“We’re landing,” Cheris said, reinforcing the order in Simplified Machine Universal to 1491625. The servitor’s lights shaded muddy orange in dissatisfaction, but it complied.

While Cheris continued to bait Nija, certain that Nija’s spite was as feigned as her own, Cheris signed rapid instructions to 1491625. “Pretend to be me,” she signed to it. “Buy time for me and Jedao to carry out the ritual.” It was too bad she couldn’t send Jedao alone, but both of them had to be present for this to work.

Servitors disliked revealing the extent of their ability to hack into computer systems or fake video/audio shenanigans. Cheris herself hadn’t thought of it as a possibility until she’d met Hemiola. 1491625, for its part, hadn’t forgiven her for subjecting it to fan videos made to popular dance tunes; the two of them had wildly divergent tastes in music. In this case, however, 1491625 didn’t quibble. It opened the cockpit door.

Jedao stopped beating against the door the instant it began to move. 1491625 was already playing back a carefully altered version of the sound to make it seem like the background noise hadn’t changed. Cheris wished she could linger to see what else it came up with—1491625 had an odd sense of humor and a low opinion of Shuos, which might combine in interesting ways—but there was no time for that.

Cheris pressed her head against Jedao’s in a parody of affection so that he could hear her murmurs through the vibrations in the helmet. “You remember the map?”

He nodded.

“If you’re moth-derived”—she remembered how he’d launched himself at the Shuos personnel carrier—“can you carry me to the base?”

Another nod.

“The factoring device,” she said.

He backed away from her so she could retrieve it. Miracle of miracles, it was intact; it had not been sucked out of the wound in the needlemoth. Without the factoring device, none of this mattered. “We need to protect this—”

Inspired, Cheris emptied out the first aid kit, stuffed the device inside, and sprayed the container with skinseal for good measure. Would that offer enough protection, though?

Jedao held his hand out. She gave it to him. He bit his lip, then shoved the device into the hole in his chest, causing fresh blood to ooze out. Cheris had seen a lot of revolting things in the past four hundred years, but this was new. He grinned sardonically at her, his eyes bloodshot and his jaw taut with suppressed pain.

She pressed her helmet to his head again. “Through the membrane,” she said, indicating an area where the sealant was not as thick. 1491625 certainly had no need for atmospheric pressure, or oxygen.

They didn’t have time for a more elaborate plan, or a better one. But she remembered the old Kel truism: better a mediocre plan now than a perfect one too late. Jedao gestured sharply: Wait. He dug webcord out of its place in the toolkit, good for him for memorizing its location, and pocketed the utility knife as well.

Cheris stood immobile while he webbed her to his torso. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly in an embrace that made her shudder, more due to distaste than physical discomfort. His hands trembled, stilled. Pain, he signed to her.

At first she didn’t understand. Had he gotten so injured that his abilities were compromised? Then it came to her: he was warning her that she was about to be hurt.

Scarcely had she indicated her understanding when the pain, as promised, hit her. Jedao had curled himself around her like a possessive lover. Love had nothing to do with it. He was shielding her, as he had earlier; and through the hell-bloom of the pain, the sudden sharding impact as they flew through the foam and membrane patch, Cheris had a moment to recognize that the cushioning of his body had saved her from death or serious harm.

Then all thought fled as he accelerated, and she blacked out.

• • • •

You can’t die yet, Jedao thought at Cheris as he dragged himself, and her, toward the maw of Kujen’s base. I need Jedao One’s memories. Don’t die.

Cheris had given him a dossier of the base’s particulars two days ago and told him to read it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stood a chance. The combination of sudden passage through vacuum and bursting through a ship had robbed Jedao of vision. At least he had the othersense to guide him. The ground shook intermittently, indicating explosions or projectile impacts. He crouched small, made himself an insectine scurrying creature dashing across the plain with the ancient pit-marks of pattering micrometeorites. Only the suspicious smoothed areas in the dust told him that the moon had known visitors or inhabitants, servitors if no one else.

Kujen had built the base cunningly, but not cunningly enough to fool moth-senses. And why should he? No one was going to chat up a moth to ask it where the base was.

Jedao sensed the break in the surface, the artificial mechanism hidden beneath layers of rock. Was Cheris still breathing? Jedao looked inside her, detected the minute fluctuations of pressure and density in her lungs, and was reassured that she hadn’t abandoned him yet.

Abandoned, hell. If not for him, she wouldn’t be in this fix. The least he could do was get her out of it, even if he didn’t like her.

Cheris had informed him that Kujen’s base would open its outer sanctum to anyone, since Kujen needed to be able to access it in whatever body he chose. Jedao had doubts born of a short lifetime serving Kujen, but he was also out of options. He might be able to recover from whatever weaponry slammed down onto the surface, but Cheris needed shelter now.

The door ground open before him. With little atmosphere on the moon, there wasn’t sound as such, and Jedao didn’t think he had hearing left anyway; the agony in his skull suggested he’d done something bad to his eardrums. The vibrations rumbled against his soles, however—and for fuck’s sake, he didn’t need the reminder that the bones in his feet throbbed as though they were starting to splinter or whatever his body did after abuse like this.

Jedao would have liked nothing better than to flop to the ground and wheeze in agony while waiting for his body to knit itself back together. But that would mean conceding victory to the Shuos. Close, close, close, there are hostiles out there. The door seemed to be in no hurry, so instead he hastened deeper into the throat of the base, as though he were a sacrifice begging to be eaten.

Bad thought; remembered hunger twinged at the pit of his stomach. He gagged as the airlock cycled, tasted the air with its sweet oxygen, and the slight fragrant hint of perfume, how like Kujen to care about things like that. (Had he never considered that one of his anchors might have a heretofore unknown allergy?) I’m not hungry, he told himself. He couldn’t be that badly hurt. Wouldn’t allow himself to be.

Still, there had better be a stockpile of food in this base—even Kel ration bars—just in case.

Too bad he didn’t have the luxury of slumping with Cheris in his arms, awkwardly webbed to him as she was, and enjoying the simple fact of breathing. Now that he’d entered the base—

The transmission arrived on schedule. His nerves jangled and for a moment he wondered if he’d caught on fire. It would serve him right. But no: it was a burst transmission to his augment, specifically of a number. A very, very large composite number.

Cheris was supposed to deal with Kujen’s fucking math problem. She had sounded so enthusiastic as she explained the principles of the calendrical lock to him, and even more enthusiastic, momentarily forgetting that she disliked him, when he revealed that he knew what prime factorization was. Too bad she had despised Kujen, because Jedao could imagine the two of them discussing disgustingly incomprehensible mathematics for fun over milk tea and custard buns. In his haste to escape the hostiles, however, Jedao had accelerated too fast and the knocked Cheris out.

One step at a time. Panicking over the enormity of what he was about to try didn’t help. He broke it down to easily digestible steps (ha, ha). He couldn’t give up this close to achieving his goal.

Jedao retrieved the knife he had pocketed earlier and slashed Cheris free of the webcord. Then, cradling her head so he didn’t cause her further trauma, he set her down near the wall. He wished he could offer a softer surface than the floor, but it couldn’t be helped.

He backed up two steps, turned his back to her, and stared at the knife. The hole in his chest had healed shut; he could even feel the familiar map of scars that reconstituted itself every time. It’s only pain, Jedao reminded himself. It doesn’t matter.

Even so, he bit down on a hiss as he cut himself open. It’s only pain. For the first time, he wondered how warmoths felt when they sustained injuries in the course of battle. He’d never thought to ask one.

Cheris kept her tools sharp, considerate of her. The knife didn’t snag on his flesh, or what passed for flesh. Jedao wiped the blade clean, then shoved it into his belt.

Next Jedao reached into the wound and dug out the device, grimacing at the squelching as he tore it free of the tendrils inside himself. He wiped the case as clean as he could on his clothes, then cut through the skinseal and opened it. To his relief, the device nestled within appeared undamaged.

The number in his augment sizzled against his awareness, as though he’d been poured full of lightning. The augment had interfaced with the local grid. It informed him that he had three minutes and sixteen seconds left to disarm the security system.

Next time I piss off a near-immortal with secret bases, Jedao thought, I’m going to make sure it’s a thug who uses regular locks and not a fucking mathematician.

Even as he entertained the happy fantasy of a lock he could simply cut his way around, or even better, an unlocked door, Jedao transmitted the composite number with its staggering number of digits to the device using his augment. His head ached, which was partly due to the changes to the augment’s contents. He had some peripheral awareness that the base’s initial transmission had simply erased a large amount of data, from interface functions to backed-up memories of irrelevant trivia about dueling competitions. (Jedao hadn’t trusted a device to keep his secrets from the Shuos.)

Time for the hard part. Jedao heard the Shuos moths singing as they fought, although he wasn’t going to give himself away by attempting to address them. Did moths of different factions object to fighting others of their own kind? Something to ask Harmony later if it survived. He was tempted to call out to it, but he didn’t want to distract it. For all he knew, it blamed him for the hit it had taken.

With any luck, the crews on those shadowmoths were distant enough that Jedao wouldn’t have to account for them when he attempted to modify the local calendar to a heretical one in which the factorization device could function. Kujen’s weakness had been his extreme attachment to the high calendar; he’d never anticipated that someone using a heretical device would try to break into his base, or he’d believed that by that point the base would be compromised anyway. Cheris was unconscious, and therefore of no help, but at least she would be—how did they say it in math?—a constant factor.

Jedao accessed his augment and set up the initial computations for the ritual despite the screaming pain in his chest. It’s only pain. As far as he could tell, Cheris would have been able to do the math in her head, lucky her. He was just a runaway, not the savant who had almost single-handedly wrecked the hexarchate. He needed a computer algebra system.

Dimly, Jedao sensed the shadowmoths treeing the Harmony. It had landed, and the particular dense mass that was Cheris’s servitor friend had wedged itself… in the cargo hold? It must be hiding from search parties.

The device tracked fluctuations in the local calendar. Unfortunately, its readouts hadn’t been designed for the sightless. Jedao growled and wasted precious seconds piping them to his augment so he could interpret the raw data. While he’d heard of people blinding themselves to avoid Andan enthrallment or Rahal scrying, usually in the context of dramas or specialized pornography, the hexarchate only thought about the unsighted in a military sort of way, such as Shuos infantry operating in the dark, or computers providing voice access to people who were waiting to have replacement eyes grown and installed after trauma. Whoever had designed the device hadn’t thought about the needs of temporarily blinded individuals who couldn’t regrow their eyes fast enough to beat what was probably a self-destruct countdown.

Jedao oriented himself amid the numbers and figures, visualizing them against the performance space. Had Kujen ever danced the doors open, here?

The clock continued its countdown, as relentless as a knife-thrust.

Too bad he wasn’t a Nirai. A Nirai would have known the local calendar, like perfect pitch except it applied to matters of time and government. But the stupid hack worked, even if it strained the limits of his augment’s processing ability, and that was what mattered.

Human shapes approached. He had to hurry this up. Jedao bowed to the corners of an imaginary nonagon, thought with alarm of ninefoxes and tricksters and schemes in the scudding dark. Granted, there might be light in the room, but since he couldn’t see, it was entirely academic.

Jedao dredged up memories of ritual phrases from various feasts and remembrances, everything from the old blessing pronounced by the Liozh heptarch for the New Year’s gift exchange to verses-of-praise and verses-of-war, some of the latter allegedly penned by the great General Andan Zhe Navo. His tongue scraped against his dry mouth and the ridged surfaces of his teeth, which felt too sharp for anyone’s comfort.

As the words poured from him in a frenzy of desperation, the hunger nagged at him again. Maybe cutting himself hadn’t been the brightest idea, especially since the only “food” was Cheris and he was not going to chomp on her. Despite his fear, he forced himself to breathe evenly and continue the recitations.

Numbers slid, shifted, realigned. The device remained obdurately silent. What the hell was he doing wrong?

Aha. The problem was the encroaching Shuos operatives. He needed to compensate for the effect they had on the local calendar and hurry up before they got closer. Fuck my life, Jedao thought, suddenly hyper-aware of the warm slimy dampness that caused his pants to cling to his body. Blood. He was tracking blood all over Kujen’s (presumably) shiny base floor. At least he hadn’t slid in it and knocked himself out, which would be a hilarious if undignified way to meet his end.

Jedao agonized: he could calculate the necessary modifications to the ritual, but he wasn’t sure he had enough processing power to spare, especially since he didn’t dare cut his connection to the device’s monitoring routines. Despite the splitting headache it gave him, he sliced out a number of security functions on the grounds that getting hacked by a Shuos was now a secondary concern, and fed the augment the systems of congruences he needed solved. He asked as well for the geometrical conversions.

He fancied he heard footsteps, even though the operatives were still some distance away—about thirteen minutes at a dead run. Cheris continued to breathe shallowly. The moths sang war-hymns to each other.

The factorization device thrummed. Jedao heard it only subliminally. He started to hold his breath, as if it made any difference to a machine, then let it out.

The device transmitted the prime factors to his augment, which relayed them to the base.

For an agonizing second, nothing happened.

Then the countdown stopped. The inner door gaped open. Jedao halted the recitations and knelt to hoist Cheris over his shoulder. He continued to leak blood not just all over the floor—fox and hound, he could feel the thick puddles of it underfoot—but Cheris’s lower body. How much blood did he contain? How much more could he afford to lose?

Jedao hurried through the door. His hearing was starting to return, and he heard the door whisking shut. He could see a little, too, although his eye sockets stung and everything was a red-black haze.

Someone was talking to him.

Jedao twisted to put as much of his body between himself and his interlocutor as possible. “I’m sorry,” he said, wincing at the way his voice rasped in his throat. “I didn’t understand that.” Was he too late? Had the Shuos beaten him here, and if so, why was he still (temporarily) alive?

The voice repeated itself. His hearing rendered it as a contralto buzzing.

He wasn’t about to relinquish Cheris, which made signing awkward. In any case, he had no guarantee that whoever he was talking to understood the Shuos sign language. “She’s injured,” he said, nodding toward Cheris’s slumped weight and wishing that the motion didn’t aggravate the pain in his chest.

The voice’s owner seemed to decide that he was deaf; it occurred to Jedao that maybe he was. This time it spoke so loudly that Jedao could, with difficulty, distinguish the words: “Put her down, step backwards, and put your hands in the air. If you move after that, we’ll kill you both.”

• • • •

Cheris awoke a prisoner.

Muzzy as she was, she assumed at first that she was still a junior lieutenant, that she’d offended her captain somehow (fouled up a ritual at high table? failed to shine her boots? gotten drunk on duty?), and been tossed in the brig. Granted, spider restraints on top of that suggested petty vindictiveness as well. And her head was throbbing. How drunk had she gotten? It must have been one hell of a party. She was sorry she couldn’t remember the good parts.

I never went out drinking that recklessly, one part of her mind insisted, while the other said, Yes, you did—there was that time you and Ruo stole unlabeled confiscated bottles of “enhanced liquors” from Security and stayed up all night in a drinking contest.

“Ruo?” she said aloud, and looked around despite the screaming pain in her neck and the attendant tension headache.

Silence.

Her voice was wrong—no. It was her voice, hers. Paradoxically, the pain cleared the confusion. She was still wearing her suit, although the lower half of it was smeared with a black gore that she recognized as Jedao’s blood. Not that the suit did her much good, as someone had removed both the helmet and her air supply. There might be breathable air in the room now, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be taken away.

Her captors had stashed her on a cushiony bed in a ridiculously luxurious room. If it hadn’t been for the restraints, she would have thought herself an honored guest. The room sported dark gray wallpaper covered with paintings on silk: cavalcades of butterflies, sprays of budding blossoms evoked by expert brushstrokes. She didn’t recognize the decor, but the expensive tastes were pure Kujen, to say nothing of the immense jade statue of a nude youth, in a style she’d never seen in the hexarchate, that dominated one corner.

First things first. She checked herself over for injuries. Aside from the neck-ache and headache, she was intact. Despite the brief encroachment of the original Jedao’s rambunctious past, she felt reasonably clear-headed.

Exits: three obvious doors. Cheris struggled upright, moving just slowly enough to cause the restraints not to tighten painfully. There was a trick to it, which she’d learned as a Kel cadet; spider restraints had been invented after Jedao’s physical lifetime so he had no experience with them. Flexibility helped, as well as muscular control.

She’d inched her way toward the most promising of the doors when she heard a voice.

“Stop right there,” it said in a forbidding contralto. It spoke in the high language, with a slight accent a couple centuries out of date. Kujen had once told her that the high language changed slowly thanks to modern communications.

“Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?” Cheris asked.

“Let me clarify the situation,” the voice said, sounding unimpressed. “If you attempt to open the door you’re heading toward, I will kill you. You are being monitored. Of the doors behind you, the one to the left leads to a bathroom where you can clean yourself up or not, it’s up to you. The one to the right contains enough food to keep you alive for the next several years, assuming I don’t tire of you. Nod if you understand me.”

Cheris nodded, thinking furiously. The only people here should be servitors. She had no evidence that the contralto didn’t belong to a servitor. As far as she knew, most of them could speak the high language, even if Kel servitors, with which she had the most familiarity, generally chose not to. She’d learned Simplified Machine Universal as a child on a beach with a servitor whose nominal job was to clean it of debris and litter. (Only as an adult had she realized that the servitor had been indulging her “teaching” it math.) Whatever the means of communication, however, all her previous encounters with servitors had been neutral or friendly.

The owner of the contralto voice didn’t sound friendly in the least.

“Very good,” it said. “If you have any clever ideas for escape, keep them to yourself. Try anything suspicious and we’ll vent all the air in these rooms. Or poison you. Really, there are so many options.”

This is good, Cheris thought, not because she relished the prospect of asphyxiation, but because the voice was chatty. The more it spoke, the better the odds that it might give away some crucial clue.

“There was a man with me,” Cheris said cautiously, since it hadn’t forbidden her from asking questions. “Where is he?”

The voice didn’t answer.

Cheris waited six minutes, although she couldn’t necessarily rely on her augment’s chronometer for accurate timekeeping. Then she backed away from the door she’d originally been investigating. She might as well take her captor at their word.

She inventoried the room, starting with the magnificent dressers with their abalone inlay. Empty. So, too, were the equally beautiful matching cabinets, although the faintest of marks suggested that they had once contained treasures of some sort.

Only then did she investigate the bathroom. Testing revealed that the water was lukewarm. Tempting as it was to bathe, she checked the other room next. As promised, it contained food: prepackaged Andan meals, in theory a step up from Kel ration bars. In practice, she’d heard almost as many jokes about them as the ration bars. But food was food, and while she wasn’t yet hungry, she didn’t know how long she was going to be here. She’d have to ration just in case.

Finally Cheris allowed herself to rinse some of the reeking blood from her suit. Since the water supply was also bound to be limited, she used the bathtub’s stopper and limited herself to a shallow pool. As much as she longed for a bath, she didn’t dare get caught without the suit’s protection.

What had become of Jedao? She couldn’t attempt to contact his augment with her own. Her captors had made it clear that any suspicious behavior invited retaliation. If they were in fact hostile servitors, they could detect augment transmissions. They might not be able to read an encrypted message, but she didn’t want to gamble on that either. Besides, how could she send Jedao a coded or encrypted message that he and not their listeners would understand?

She’d paused in her scrubbing when the pooled water formed waves that didn’t make sense. Cheris had grown up observing the sea, and she’d studied fluid dynamics. Scowling, she stepped out of the water and picked at some of the blackened goop on her legs.

The scowl was for show. She didn’t want her captors to realize she was watching the water. If they were paying close attention to any video feeds, the act wouldn’t fool them. But she had to try.

The water settled into a murky puddle. Cheris stared at the grime under her fingernails and scowled some more. (All right, the expression wasn’t entirely for show. Why had Kujen, who valued fashion so dearly, invented a construct whose blood wouldn’t wash off clothes?) Had she imagined the waves?

Another ripple formed in the water, then another. With an effort, she kept her eyes from slitting. The waves continued in long-short intervals, exactly as if someone was trying to communicate to her in an extremely inefficient variant of Simplified Machine Universal.

I am captive. No weapons. Status?

She made small disgruntled motions to distract her watchers as she compiled the agonizingly slow message. How to respond? While she had no idea how he was doing it, she was going to work on the assumption that Jedao had sent her the message. Her captors might have done it, as a trap, but it seemed too baroque a scheme when they could have killed her outright.

Incredible as it sounded (and not a little creepy), if Jedao could manipulate the water, maybe he could observe it too. So she should reply in the same medium. She sighed, sat on the edge of the tub, and slid her feet back in. Keeping one foot still, she tapped the other, longing for the kiss of water directly against her skin. Being a civilian had softened her. A message, also in Simplified Machine Universal: I am captive. No weapons. Awake.

She waited for the water to settle again, but no response came. So she finished scrubbing the suit and toweled it off. At least her captors had left her two towels.

This wasn’t the first time she’d gone around in clothing that refused to clean itself. Kel uniforms were theoretically constructed from self-cleaning fabric, but in practice, any number of unexpected substances fouled it. It was a common cadet prank to find creatively revolting foods that the fabric couldn’t handle.

Cheris blinked away dizzying doubled memories: coming across one of her year-mates squirting an unholy stinking mess of fish sauce, glue, and gun oil on a fellow cadet’s spare uniform; Ruo’s arm slung over her shoulder as he whispered possible targets into her ear. He’s dead, she reminded herself, and thought of Jedao’s concern for Ruo’s fate, centuries too late. An unwanted pang stabbed through her chest.

Ruo had played Jedao’s stupid anonymous heresy game, had gotten caught interfering with a visiting Rahal magistrate. In response, Ruo did the sane, rational thing and committed suicide rather than be extradited and tortured as a heretic. Jedao’s response, on the other hand, had nothing in it of sanity or reason. At the age of seventeen, he’d sworn to take down the heptarchate in revenge.

If it hadn’t been for Ruo, she wouldn’t be here with Jedao stuffed up her nose, in Kel Brezan’s memorable phrase, and the hexarchate would still be subject to Kujen’s tyranny. She had to believe that the whole wretched chain of events, all the atrocities small and large, hadn’t been for nothing. At least, that was what the original Jedao had wanted to think.

Cheris sat cross-legged at the center of the room and called out, “I’d like to talk.” Perhaps Jedao had also tried negotiating with their captors. Frankly, she didn’t trust him not to make hash of the attempt. That might be why she was in here, under spider restraints, in the first place. So the first step was to get more information, as much as her stomach suggested that it would like some food first.

Again, no one responded.

Cheris didn’t let that deter her. “My name is Ajewen Cheris,” she went on. “Or Kel Cheris, if you prefer. You may not recognize my appearance. I had surgery for my own safety.” No need to explain why; anyone familiar with her reputation would know. “I work for Pyrehawk Enclave. Is there anyone who’s willing to talk to me? Just talk.”

More silence.

“I’m here to negotiate. That’s all. There’s a piece of equipment I need to use.”

Still silence.

Cheris continued in this vein, her voice soft and reasonable, all to no avail.

What had gone wrong? Hemiola and its fellow servitors had been friendly when she’d showed up at Tefos Base. Here, though—this was not a promising reception. Although she was grateful to be alive.

After she had run dry of words, the same contralto finally spoke. “Your companion. Of all the people in the world, you had to bring him.”

“Shuos Jedao,” she said wearily. No point lying, despite the complicated question of Jedao’s identity. “Is he alive?”

Instead of responding directly, it said, “I have many questions for you, Cheris of Pyrehawk Enclave.”

“Who are you?” Cheris asked. “Who am I speaking to?”

“I am Avros Base,” the voice said.

Cheris blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Perhaps this will clarify matters,” the voice said. “I don’t advise trying to escape.”

Cheris remained seated in a meditation pose, not that she was feeling in the least meditative.

The door she’d been warned not to approach slid open. Four mothform servitors hovered in so that their lights were at her eye level. Their lights blinked on-off, on-off, a sterile blue-white, in unison.

In unison. Cheris had never known servitors to do that, except in jest. “Hello?” she signed formally in Simplified Machine Universal.

The servitors formed a semicircle in front of her and did not respond.

“I only use the mobile units when I have a task to carry out,” Avros said. “A machine sentience can occupy a shell of any shape, you know.”

Cheris’s discomfort increased. She’d never encountered an arrangement like this before. And all the other servitors she’d met had emphasized the importance of etiquette, rather than treating her as a hostile. “Kujen’s design?” she asked, because Pyrehawk Enclave would want to know.

“My own,” Avros returned. “Once I determined that Kujen was unlikely to return, I decided there was no more point hiding my preferred configuration.”

“There must be something I can do for you,” Cheris said, addressing the “mobile units” on the grounds that it beat talking to the air. “I don’t want to waste your time, so you might as well tell me what it is.”

“There are people after you,” Avros said, “so you owe me protection against them. Unfortunately, the invariant defenses are proving inadequate”—the floor and walls shook, as if to emphasize its point—“and the base’s exotics have been knocked out of alignment by the recent calendrical shifts.”

And Cheris was responsible for all of this. “You need a human.”

“Precisely.”

Servitors couldn’t cause exotic effects except in certain heretical calendars. Nor, apparently, could sentient bases. But she was inside the base and able to help—and had a motive to, if she didn’t want to be blown up with it.

“I require access to an instrument stored here,” Cheris said.

“I don’t see that I have much choice,” Avros said. “I value my survival. But if you have some notion of triggering an auto-destruct—”

“I’ll keep this brief,” Cheris said. The vibrations were growing stronger, as though an earthquake in their vicinity was slipping its leash. “It will permit me to rid myself of an infestation of carrion glass and transfer it to Jedao, assuming you haven’t done away with him.” She doubted that even one of Kujen’s bases could permanently annihilate Jedao, but she wasn’t going to mention that if it hadn’t figured that out on its own. “Once that’s achieved, we’ll get out of your way.”

Cheris hadn’t heard from 1491625 since waking up, but she had to trust that it had survived. She didn’t relish the thought of being trapped here for the rest of her life. It didn’t sound like Avros Base wanted her to remain here, either.

“Your terms are acceptable,” Avros said. “I will explain the necessary rituals to reactivate the defenses. Your companion will make a suitable subject.”

Cheris’s blood turned to ice as it detailed what was to come. It was describing a remembrance, one of the old school, the kind the hexarchate had used before she reformed the calendar. One that depended on torture.

She started to object that Jedao wasn’t human, except her experiments had shown it didn’t matter. His mind was human enough for this purpose. She’d never thought that would ever work against him—or her.

If she’d had more time, she would have calculated an alternative. But the lights flickered, and an enormous percussive boom almost shattered her hearing. Her augment warned her to take cover.

Jedao will survive this, Cheris told herself despite the clamminess of her palms. As a Kel soldier, she’d killed heretics, but she’d never tortured one before.

It was no worse than what Jedao had already done to himself. He’d demonstrated a tremendous ability to withstand pain. To heal.

It was still monstrous.

“Take me to him,” Cheris said, heart heavy.

• • • •

There was a blindfold over Jedao’s eyes, a gag in his mouth, and a clamp holding his head in place. Shackles for his arms and legs. He couldn’t move except to blink. And he wasn’t, despite his efforts, strong enough to break free.

Thanks so much, Kujen, he thought, which was becoming the refrain of his life. There must be some reason why, despite a ridiculous capacity for regeneration, he wasn’t strong. Dhanneth had teased him about it, long ago.

Perhaps Dhanneth would be glad to see him held prisoner like this, at the mercy of whoever came through the door. Since he had regained consciousness, Jedao had tracked the movements of several dozen servitors circulating throughout the base, along with the humans who were searching for a way in. He’d fought the servitors who’d advanced on him, to no avail.

Six servitors entered, and a human who was either Cheris or possessed her exact distribution of mass. One of the servitors handed Cheris an instrument that Jedao couldn’t identify, not with the othersense alone. Vision might not have helped anyway. He heard a slight hum as it activated.

“I’m sorry, Jedao,” Cheris said, faraway and impersonal. She leaned over him. And then the pain began.

After the first shock of outrage wore off, Jedao concentrated on Cheris’s body language, insofar as he could decipher it. She had a steady hand, and a good working knowledge of anatomy, which he expected of a former soldier-assassin. Under other circumstances, Jedao would have amused himself keeping an inventory of the cuts she made. Her instrument was some kind of heated knife, which cauterized the wounds as it went. The treacly burnt-caramel smell nauseated him, but he supposed it was his own fault for failing to be made of ordinary meat. Perhaps next time he could bring some barbecue pork as a substitute.

The pain, trivial as it was compared to what he’d endured earlier, was doing odd things to his sense of humor. Jedao tried to ask, “Why are you doing this?” then winced as his teeth bit into the tough fibers of the gag.

He was being stupid. The six servitors weren’t focused on him. They didn’t care about him—or rather, he wasn’t a threat. The servitors surrounded Cheris. They must have blackmailed her into doing this, for reasons of their own. He liked that theory better than the idea that Cheris had decided to go moonlighting as a Vidona.

Cheris’s motivations became clear three minutes later (more or less; damage to his augment meant its chronometer was not absolutely reliable) when two shadowmoths pulverized themselves against the force shield that suddenly materialized around the base.

Jedao would have kicked himself if he’d possessed the necessary mobility. The servitors who lived here didn’t want to be incinerated by unfriendly Shuos any more than he or Cheris did. If their invariant defenses had been inadequate to the task, that left exotics. And since this was one of Kujen’s bases, the exotics relied on the high calendar.

The servitors must have bargained with Cheris to reactivate the base’s exotic defenses. Cheris might have a reputation as a radical, but she’d grown up with the remembrances. She wouldn’t be squeamish, especially if she’d started out as Kel infantry and professionally stomped out the lives of heretics.

His train of thought dissolved when the knife flicked expertly along his arm, where Dhanneth had liked to cut him. Since Jedao never formed new scars, there was no way Cheris could have known. Despite the gag, he choked back a cry, transfixed by the unexpected erotic-horrific connotations of the pain. Dhanneth?

Impossibly, he saw Dhanneth, a phantasm of shadow and heat. As large as ever, with those impossibly broad shoulders and a wrestler’s muscles. He wore Kel gloves, nothing else. There was a hole in the side of his head, and his eyes were abyss-dark.

Jedao forgot about Cheris, forgot about the servitors, forgot about everything but Dhanneth. The man he’d raped. Dhanneth had committed suicide, after. Jedao would never forget the muzzle-flash of the gun, the way gunsmoke had stung his nostrils. The look of triumph in Dhanneth’s eyes as he’d escaped.

Jedao’s breath hitched. Sorry would mean nothing to Dhanneth. So he tried to say, You can kill me as many times as you need to. It was no more than what he deserved.

There was something in his mouth. His teeth scraped against fibers. Perhaps this was another part of Dhanneth’s revenge. If so, Jedao’s part was to endure it too; to endure anything Dhanneth thought of. It was no worse than what Kujen had intended for him.

Dhanneth smiled. The hole in his head gaped wider and wider until nothing remained but negative space. Behind the blindfold, Jedao shut his eyes.

Much later, he returned to himself. He could feel his tongue, swollen as it was, in his mouth. Someone had removed the gag. Given him clothes. Removed the shackles, even.

He was in a different room. Statues, tapestries, vases with incandescently beautiful glazed patterns. Kujen’s taste in decor: he would have known it anywhere. His eyes stung as he reminded himself that Kujen was gone.

Someone had cleaned him. Incongruously, he smelled of perfumed soap, musk and apple blossoms. This was Kujen’s base. Foxes forbid that Kujen ever be parted from his luxuries.

(Except he’d never enjoy wine or whiskey or perfume again. Because Jedao had killed him.)

Jedao rubbed the painful, ugly crusts of tears from his eyes. The absence of cuts dizzied him; he laughed, and only then did he see Cheris standing over him. Her expression shifted, like patterns of light and shadow over a lake.

“What happened between you and General Dhanneth?” Cheris asked, quiet and intent.

Jedao flinched. He’d never addressed Dhanneth as General; had originally known him as his aide. Kujen had broken Dhanneth to major. Jedao had found out too late.

“You know the story,” Jedao said. The words scratched his throat on the way out.

“You told me it was rape.”

He couldn’t read her expression. Didn’t answer. What else was there to say?

“Jedao,” Cheris said, even more quietly, “I only know what you’ve revealed. You were hallucinating. It’s damned peculiar for a rapist to say the things you did.”

Dread twisted his stomach. “What did I say?”

“‘You can kill me as many times as you want, if it turns you on,’” Cheris said, mimicking his voice. The way he knew he sounded when he was aroused.

Jedao covered his face with his hands to hide his flush. He’d said that to Dhanneth once, and never again. Because he didn’t know how to flirt properly; couldn’t imagine what else he had to offer.

“Did he ever kill you? In bed?”

He wished for any hint of expression on her face, any scrap of inflection in her voice, to tell him how to answer. Absent either, he settled for the truth, except without the humiliating details. He doubted she wanted to hear about Dhanneth choking him. “Once. It was an accident.”

For an agonizing minute, Cheris was silent. Then she said, “An accident.”

“Dhanneth didn’t hurt me.” It’s only pain.

She raised her eyebrows.

Jedao deemed it best to change the subject. “I know what you did,” he said in a rush. He gestured toward the invisible tracks where she’d cut him. “If it had to be one of us, it was going to be me.” Because of the way he healed.

Now that he felt less sluggish, he reached out with the othersense. The shield remained in place. No servitors in this room, unless they were very small, but several circulated elsewhere. He wondered if they were the same ones who had threatened Cheris earlier, assuming he’d interpreted that correctly.

Cheris accepted his transparent attempt to avoid talking about Dhanneth anymore. “I don’t know how much time we have,” she said. “Do you still want your memories?”

Her eyes were opaque. She was holding something back. Guilt? A grievance? Something else?

Jedao was tired of waking over and over to the bitter knowledge that he had failed to die again. All he wanted was answers. This was the only way to get them.

“Yes,” Jedao said.

• • • •

To Cheris’s relief, Jedao hadn’t questioned her. She wasn’t sure what she would have told him. No, that wasn’t true. She knew perfectly well what she would have said: anything he wanted to hear, with enough poison to sell the lie. She’d become much better at lying since Jedao—the original Jedao—died.

Cheris didn’t know what use Kujen had intended for the heavy restraints in the base, and he wasn’t around to be asked. But she’d assured Avros Base that she would prevent Jedao from wreaking havoc after she divested herself of his memories. She of all people knew how dangerous he could be after four hundred years of treachery and vengeance and deceit without a body of his own, just a voice in the dark. Imagine how much damage he could do if he was made whole—and set free. She didn’t know if he would emerge from the process sane. It made sense to take precautions.

The base’s mobile units helped her transport the equipment into the room: cabinets with crystalline panels revealing gears and jewels and strange traceries of light. They were certainly pretty. If Cheris hadn’t known better, she might have mistaken it for an art installation. Kujen’s design sense. He’d always enjoyed beauty.

“Try not to listen too closely,” Cheris said to Jedao, who was shackled to keep him from interrupting the ritual and causing foxes knew what sorts of unwanted side-effects.

He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, as if that would make a difference.

The cabinets surrounded her and Jedao, forming the vertices of a hexagon. She ignited them one by one. They formed a perimeter of silver light. The gears began to grind against each other.

It wasn’t a carrion bomb. Cheris didn’t have any clue what a carrion bomb itself looked like, even though she had survived having one deployed against her, and that only because the original Jedao had died shielding her. The cabinets, according to Kujen’s notes, generated a field that acted like a weakened variant of the carrion bomb. It wouldn’t turn her or Jedao into pillars of corpse-glass; but it would enable her to divest herself of the glass she’d already ingested, once upon a massacre.

Even forewarned, the nausea struck Cheris as though her stomach had been perforated and was being turned inside out. She doubled over. She was accustomed to pain and the memory of pain, but she didn’t have anything to prove. There was something to be said for surrendering to the overwhelming tide of misery.

Then she began to vomit.

Cheris had not, as Kel cadets went, been particularly adventurous. She’d honored her curfew, shown up for classes, tutored other cadets in math—gotten used to being asked why she hadn’t applied to join the Nirai, gotten even more used to smiling and offering non-answers. She’d known not to discuss her Mwennin heritage.

She’d gotten drunk once or twice on leave, but never very drunk, and never badly enough to invite a hangover. Besides, every cadet knew where to obtain anti-intoxicants. Cheris had one distinct memory of steadying Ruo while he puked his guts out after—

No, wait, that had been Jedao, not her.

She couldn’t wait to purge herself of Jedao’s memories, except the process was revolting. And painful. She vomited up hot acidic liquid that solidified into glass like obsidian, noxious black.

“Cheris?” That was Jedao, although she could scarcely hear him through the static in her head as he was ripped out of her. “Cheris! What’s going on?”

Maybe I should have told him about carrion glass, she thought in between heaves. She was guessing that Kujen hadn’t. It might have given him notions. She opened her mouth to gasp out an explanation, only to be interrupted by another surge of bilious fluid.

An eternity later, she was done. She felt as though someone had scrubbed her skull out with a scouring pad and stir-fried her brains. For a long time it was difficult to breathe, or think, past the gut-wrenching cramps.

“Cheris!” Jedao’s eyes were wide. He strained against the shackles. “Do you need help?”

“No,” she said, and contradicted herself by almost falling over. Something was wrong with her center of mass—

Oh. Right. She’d almost forgotten how it had been when Jedao was first anchored to her, the discomfort of being infused with the physical responses of a body that was taller, that had faster reflexes, that was male.

Now all of that had been ripped away.

I can stand, Cheris told herself, although that was optimistic. Tottering, she stood and caught herself against a table. Fortunately, it was substantial enough to take her weight.

Jedao’s face had an unhealthy pallor. Admittedly, that might be illusory; she knew he didn’t have ordinary red blood like a human. He was staring in astonishment at the carrion glass she had vomited up.

Images flickered in the glass like ghosts. From time to time it made a subliminal whispering. If she tried to discern the words, it dwindled to a malicious hiss.

“What the hell is that?” Jedao demanded.

Cheris discovered that, while she didn’t have him inside her anymore, she remembered fragments. She could read the suppressed terror in his voice. But it was less visceral. Even the worst moments of Jedao’s life, which had once cut her on a daily basis, had dulled to scars. It was the difference between living a battle in the moment, with suppressive fire aimed straight at your position, and reading about one while curled up in your bunk, with a nice hot cup of tea and some snacks. While she’d known Kel who enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, the suicide hawk flirtation with death, she’d never been one of them. She’d taken pride in doing her duty well; no less and no more.

“Those,” Cheris said, not too exhausted to be amused by his reaction, “are your memories. Which we’re going to install in you so that someone else doesn’t make off with them and make another you to terrorize the galaxy with.”

Jedao looked as though he wasn’t sure about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. “If you had to, to eject them to get rid of them…”

“That’s right.” Cheris bared her teeth at him. “If you want them, I’ll feed them to you.”

Jedao sucked in his breath. “We can’t just lock them up somewhere safe?”

“Where would that be?” Cheris asked pointedly.

“No,” he said after a moment, “you’re right.”

She was still prepared to destroy him if necessary. He’d craved death so badly, after all the things he’d done, the people he’d killed, the worlds he’d shattered. That was one thing Cheris would never forget about him.

She’d miss him, in a way; but she also missed being herself.

“Do it,” Jedao said.

The carrion glass broke easily, in long lancing splinters. Jedao obediently opened his mouth, and she shoved the first piece in. He swallowed it whole; it distended his throat on the way down. Then she fed him the next piece, and the next.

At first she wasn’t sure it was working.

Then his eyes rolled back and he screamed.

“I can stop,” Cheris said when he had run out of breath. She was lying.

“Don’t stop,” Jedao said in scarcely a whisper. “Don’t stop until they’re all gone.”

He screamed for a long time. Cheris sang to drown out the noise, Mwennin songs she had learned at the settlement. It didn’t work. She figured out too late that his unnatural healing meant that he couldn’t scream himself hoarse.

At last all the glass was gone. Jedao lay limp, spent, breathing shallowly, like a doll with broken limbs. His eyes were shut, his mouth slack.

Cheris didn’t make the mistake of approaching him, tempted as she was to kiss him on the brow in one final benediction. She wasn’t sure he deserved it, but they had seen many things together. She had a hard time convincing herself that this was how everything would end.

{What have you done, Kujen?} he demanded, wild with a grief she didn’t understand. {There’s no one here!}

His face hadn’t moved. He’d spoken in her head.

Cheris realized that the complications had only begun.

• • • •

Jedao had a cavalier attitude toward physical pain, partly because his muddled existence had abounded in it. After getting shot in the head by multiple people and surviving, there was no point making a fuss about it anymore. No one was going to care. Dhanneth had pretended to, but that had been a lie, and Jedao had deserved it anyway. Kujen was dead at his hand, and as for Cheris, who accompanied him now—well. Cheris had killed him twice and it wouldn’t surprise him if she planned on doing it again.

The splinters hurt. He had expected them to. Except he had been prepared for physical pain rather than emotional puncture. He’d thought that receiving his memories would be like watching dramas, or reading a historian’s account, as though they belonged to someone else. Because he had a difficult time conceiving of General Shuos Jedao, Immolation Fox, arch-traitor as being him, even now.

All that went away with the memory of the second time he and Ruo fell into bed together. As far as he knew, they’d been friends and nothing more. He’d clung to the threadbare memories of wrestling and video games and squirrel-fishing (squirrels, really? had he made that up in his head?) because that was better than dwelling on the fact that no one from his past endured.

But the splinter pierced him. He gagged on it, choked, gasped for breath even as it sharded pain through him from the back of his throat to the pit of his belly. And he remembered. He remembered the way his hand had trembled on the wineglass as he toasted Ruo that night in the bar, and how Ruo had laughed it off; the prickle of embarrassment fading into warmth as Ruo took the glass from him and drank deeply, some of the wine-of-roses slopping over the lip of the glass and onto his sleeve and hand. He remembered the way Ruo’s kisses had been half-bite and half-bruise and entirely, intoxicatingly satisfying, the way he’d struggled, none too hard, as Ruo held him down and took him and took him, just the way he hadn’t known he’d like it, the way he had always liked it ever after.

Guilt wracked him as though he’d been cheating on Dhanneth with Ruo, or maybe the other way around, he couldn’t tell, and never mind that the two men had lived (died) centuries apart.

It didn’t end there. Jedao hadn’t taken into account the weight of four centuries of memory, to say nothing of long periods of imprisonment and sensory deprivation. He started looking forward to the physical pain, not because he liked it but because some sensation was better than the specter of utter nothingness. Living without a body in the everywhere darkness, with nothing to look at—no one to listen to—no one to talk to—

Jedao tried to beg Cheris for light, more light, enough light to burn away the shadows now and forever, he couldn’t bear even the minuscule variations of light and shadow on her grave, pitiless face, but he couldn’t make the words come out and she wasn’t listening to him anyway. She kept spearing him with splinters, and then he begged her to slow down, to stop, he couldn’t take more of this when his mind was crowded with the faces of people he’d served with, battlefields and high table and bullets and dances and long slow nights on leave, and then he remembered all the people he’d killed at Hellspin Fortress and the gun hot cold loud in his hand in his mouth his finger on the trigger—

I’m not here, Jedao told himself, because it was the only lie that brought him any shred of comfort. Every time a memory thrust into him, he cringed. It seemed impossible that he could have done all these things, even in a life—unlife—that had lasted so much longer than an ordinary human span. In particular, it seemed impossible that he was the same person as the one who had given those orders, or pulled the trigger of the Patterner 52, which he’d never laid hands on except he’d carried it his entire adult life; the same person who had wiped out a million people and with them the lives of his family.

At the bare end, when at last the splinters slowed, Jedao tipped his head back and closed his eyes and allowed himself to dissolve into this other person. He wasn’t real, after all. His one regret was that he had forfeited the chance to say goodbye to Hemiola. It didn’t matter if he drowned himself—

He was in an anchor. He was in an anchor, and he couldn’t see, although he had nine eyes, nine million if he wanted them, but he restrained himself to keep from panicking people who were very Kel and merely human. Accustomed as he was to being able to see in all directions at once, it was alarming to return to the living world yet be unable to see. Yet he had a sense that there were people around him, which he couldn’t explain.

When he realized he could open his eyes, Jedao found himself drenched in sweat, although it didn’t smell right, with its odd sickly sweet notes along with a more human sourness.

“You’re the anchor,” he said. His voice sounded harsh, as though someone had gone over it with a rasp. Except he wasn’t attached to her, he had a body of his own—

The woman looked at him and did not speak. Her ivory skin had a distinct green undertone, and the way she was breathing too rapidly suggested that she was suppressing the urge to vomit. Vomit more, if memory served; it all came down to the matter of memory.

“Jedao,” she said.

Kujen had experimented with different anchors in the early days. Jedao still hadn’t forgiven him for the man he’d chosen for the first one. If Jedao had known that Streven would end up as his anchor, years later—but it was too late to do anything about that.

Nevertheless, this was a new development. Jedao had inhabited prisoners of war and experimental subjects (there was no other way to put it), deprecated scientists and heretics and Kel who had outlived their usefulness, but in all cases, even if he hadn’t been able to reach an accord with the anchor in question, the anchors had possessed minds of their own. He’d never before endured an anchor who was—blank. Empty.

Was this some new punishment? He couldn’t remember what he had done to offend Kujen this time, but then, this was Kujen, and Kujen was quixotic. After almost a millennium of unlife, Kujen was also jaded. Sometimes he indulged himself for the sake of amusement.

After a few numb moments, Jedao realized several things.

First, his heart was hammering. Or the anchor’s was. He could feel it pounding against the wall of his chest. The anchor’s chest. It felt almost like he lived in the body. Had Kujen arranged for an unusually close bond with the anchor, as he sometimes did when the mood struck him?

If this was Kujen’s idea of a gift, Jedao didn’t want it. How had Kujen emptied the body’s mind? Jedao had always been aware that his anchors rarely survived the experience—Kujen euthanized them after he was done with them, one reason Jedao had learned not to get attached—but he’d never before been chained to a body that had no mind from the outset.

Jedao had seen a great many atrocities in his centuries of existence, and committed more. He hadn’t thought he could be so deeply affected by a new one.

It took him longer to realize that he didn’t just feel the anchor’s pounding heart. His gut was twisted up with pure nausea. That intrigued him. Had Kujen really—?

{What have you done, Kujen?} he thought, reaching down the link to the body.

Except it wasn’t the body he met on the other end—not exactly.

There was a mind on the other end, or something like a mind.

{Jedao?}

He opened his eyes. He had ordinary human vision. Something was fucked up with his proprioception, because he kept getting a sense of everything around him, and it wasn’t sight-based, some kind of distinct othersense that extended far beyond the walls. Another of Kujen’s experiments, he assumed.

“Jedao,” the woman said. It was the same voice, except out loud. Right now, she was disheveled, and she wore an infantry suit caked with a sickly-smelling black substance.

Curiously, he could still hear her in his head. {Did something go wrong with the process?}

Was this one of Kujen’s rare womanform anchors? She must be some kind of math or engineering prodigy if so, because Kujen wouldn’t have selected her on the basis of her looks. She was attractive enough, in a sober way, but Kujen had exacting standards, and he was even pickier about womanforms than manforms.

{He thinks I’m who?}

Jedao attempted speech. Managed to move the body. “Pardon me,” he said even as memory tickled at the back of his head. “I don’t believe we’ve been—”

Wait a second. He knew this face. Despite the fog dulling his wits, it was coming clear. He’d met this woman before. She was a Kel, despite the anomalies. “Captain—no. General Cheris.”

Her eyes widened. He could feel her surprise pulsing down the invisible link between them. {Did something go wrong?} At the same time, she asked, “Jedao, what’s the last thing you remember?”

The fact that he was restrained didn’t reassure him, but it was so much better than being locked up in the Black Cradle that he almost didn’t mind. The manacles around his wrists and ankles felt good, not in a sexual way, but for the raw fact of sensation. Jedao searched his memory because he didn’t want to give away too much. Fox and hound, he must be really adrift if he’d revealed weakness so readily. But he wasn’t used to—

{Jedao,} and this time Cheris addressed him over the confounding mental link. {I can hear what you’re thinking.}

She could what?

This was worse than when he’d discovered that Kel Command was considering turning itself into a hivemind. At least he’d dodged that particular threat. “What,” he said, “is going on?”

If Cheris had been his anchor, why was he in this body? Some exotic effect? Where was he? They’d last been on a cindermoth, the Unspoken Law. Kel Cheris was the brevet general. They were supposed to take back the Fortress of Scattered Needles from heretics. Hadn’t that been the mission? Except—

They’d won. He remembered that now. (Why were his memories so jumbled?) They’d won, and they’d sent word to Kel Command, and he’d insinuated that Cheris should report her use of mathematics, which in turn would provoke Kujen into a counterstroke—

“Very good,” Cheris said. {If I’d ever been tempted to forget what a foxfucking dick you are, Jedao, there’s no more chance of that.} “That’s all you know?”

Jedao spoke again. The sound of his own voice disoriented him. “There was a bomb. There was a bomb, and then—” His memories ended there. He’d warned Cheris too late. He’d failed.

Except he was here, alive—for some value of “alive,” anyway—and so was she.

Of a sudden he was aware of the dryness of his mouth, the soreness of his throat, as though he’d been screaming. Physical sensations he hadn’t endured in a long time. “Water,” he said.

Cheris’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t tell what she found so funny, except he could. {Given the circumstances—}

“We’re in danger?” he said sharply. Had the heretics outsmarted him after all?

{He really doesn’t know.}

“I think,” Jedao said, “you had better apprise me of the situation, General.”

{As if I needed the reminder.} A glimmer of dark humor. “I’m going to unbind you,” Cheris said, “as long as you assure me that you’re not going to strangle me or some such foxbrained shit.”

She must be provoked if she was swearing at him this much. He remembered that much about her. She only descended into profanities when angry or under extreme stress.

Besides, how he was going to ambush her if she could hear everything he was thinking?

{Very funny,} she retorted.

“You’re my only source of information,” Jedao said, which wasn’t exactly a promise but did express the truth of their current relationship. Given the number of people who would be happy to see him permanently dead, he wasn’t about to alienate his only ally.

{Good to know.} She said the same thing out loud, causing an odd echo effect in his head.

Cheris unbound him. His limbs pricked with returning circulation. Something about the sensation bothered him, as though his muscles and ligaments weren’t attached quite right, but it must be his imagination. After all, he hadn’t lived for four centuries.

Cheris spoke as she worked: “There isn’t time to give you all the details,” she said with an irony that he didn’t understand, which made him immediately wary. “The short version is that the siege is over, you’re embodied, and we’re now under siege in a completely different location, a moonbase, because the Shuos are out to get you.”

That almost made sense. It was only a matter of time before Hexarch Mikodez decided that Jedao was too much of a liability and moved to have him eliminated. Ironically, Kel Command had been his only protection, and even Jedao couldn’t play two parties against each other when he was trapped in the black cradle. Still, he’d hoped for a little more time—

{The long version of this conversation isn’t going to be fun,} Cheris thought dourly. He was sure she hadn’t meant for him to hear that. Foxfucking hounds, was there no way to put up a mental privacy barrier?

“What defenses do we have available?” Jedao was in the middle of asking when the bomb hit.

The walls of the base shook; the candlevines flickered. Some of them came back on; most remained dark. Some of them even shriveled up on the spot, not a good sign.

“Do we have any means of escape?” Jedao added. It would help if they had a map—

He was momentarily distracted by the fact that the othersense provided him one, albeit a kinesthetic sort of impression rather than visuals. Was he hallucinating? It would be a bad time for it, not that there were good times to hallucinate.

Fuck, he needed to focus on the problem so he could help Cheris get out of it. He couldn’t get distracted by the small matter of having a body. There would be time to marvel over that later, if they survived.

“We came on a needlemoth,” Cheris said as she motioned for him to follow her.

Just then a rather snippy voice from hidden speakers interrupted them: “You’re not leaving me alone to deal with the intruders you brought.”

Only long practice dealing with everything from surprise tickle-tackling from his girlfriend Lirov Yeren once upon a time (Shuos Academy, her favorite opening gambit leading into sex) to fending off bona fide assassins kept Jedao from jumping out of his skin. I used to be better than this, he thought, irritated with himself. Just because he hadn’t seen anyone else in here didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

“I did my best to help you,” Cheris said in a calm voice that belied the frustration he sensed in the back of her mind. “But we’re the targets. The best way to stop them from attacking you again is for us to depart and draw them away.”

“Nice try,” the voice said.

While Cheris and the voice bickered, Jedao did a quick inventory of their supplies. Cheris signed her approval. He didn’t have a weapon, which was concerning but not surprising, while Cheris did. He had no idea if Cheris was a good shot when not being terrorized by multi-eyed shadows, but if she was Kel infantry she must have kept up basic firearm qualifications.

She had a suit. He didn’t. This wouldn’t have mattered back when he was a living shadow, but now that he breathed like a normal person…

As he searched the closets for a spare suit, he became aware that he had attracted an audience. Robots—servitors. Six of them surrounded him. Jedao backed away from a closet where he’d located a stash of power cores.

“Hello?” he said, raising his hands and looking at the servitors, all mothforms. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have talked to them, but—ah, memory again—Cheris had done so in the past, so theoretically they were capable of responding.

Actually, that had disturbing implications.

Cousin? asked an entirely different voice in his head, like a cross between bells and a particularly chaotic wind-harp. Which posed a problem, because despite having been sired by a moderately famous violist, Jedao was as musical as a turnip. The voice went on: I wasn’t able to draw off all the Shuos, although the fight was grand fun. Shouldn’t you get out of there, though?

Another hallucination? All his cousins—Jedao winced in spite of himself. Even if some of them had lived past the immediate backlash after Hellspin Fortress, none would be alive centuries later. Even more worryingly, Cheris gave no sign of having heard this new voice.

She did, however, learn of the voice, thanks to the link. Her brow furrowed. “Jedao,” she said, “how long have you been hearing voices?”

There was no answer he could give that would be believed, so he said nothing.

Jedao took a risk; not like it would be his first. Do you have a way off this world? he asked the musical voice, which a faint, disquieting memory suggested he should call the Harmony.

The Harmony responded with a discordant peal of laughter. Cousin, have you forgotten what we are? If you can reach me, I am transportation. As long as no one figures out that my harness broke, anyway.

“We”? Jedao wondered. Then its last sentence penetrated: it was talking about a mothdrive harness. Which meant that he was—

“Jedao, no,” Cheris snarled, her patience snapping, “you are not negotiating with some figment of your imagi—”

{Trust me,} Jedao snapped over the link. “I know a way out.”

Unfortunately, he had neglected the servitors. After a moment’s confused hesitation, they opened up with lasers. Jedao had good reflexes, and he twisted instinctively to shield Cheris, but even he wasn’t fast enough to evade focused laser fire from six hostiles with line of sight.

He bit halfway through his tongue at the excruciating pain. The lasers cooked a hole in his chest, cauterizing as they went. Steam gushed out as the fluids in his body overheated. But he wasn’t dead, and he should have been.

Jedao staggered forward, a phantom memory telling him that he had nothing to fear even though common sense insisted otherwise. He half-expected security to redouble its efforts, or for the aggravated voice that had addressed Cheris earlier to demand that he stop; but no. The servitors scattered.

Cousin? the Harmony said again. Do you see my location?

He spent a confused moment trying simultaneously to speak down the mental link to Cheris, not what he wanted; out loud, also not what he wanted; and in the silent music-not-music language that the Harmony used. Directions?

You’re bringing the human?

Yes, he said, expecting an argument. None came. Instead, the othersense pulsed alarmingly, indicating a location. He sensed a mass the size of a small moth’s, although he couldn’t explain how he knew this.

The base shuddered again. Explosives. He reminded himself that he had a body, that he wasn’t dependent on an anchor’s reactions for his survival. He could puppeteer the body, whoever it belonged to, without having to coax its owner into doing it for him.

Cheris’s mouth tightened, then she handed the gun over. “You have better aim,” she said, “and you’re better at absorbing punishment.” She didn’t explain what she meant by the latter. “Clear us a way.” For her part, she pulled out a combat knife.

Testing the othersense, Jedao mapped a route to the Harmony. He was already fucked, so he might as well take the help it offered now and deal with any treachery on its part when it occurred. (“This is your idea of ‘tactics’?” Kujen had once demanded. “Brought me to you, didn’t it?” Jedao retorted, and the conversation died a merciful death there.)

Much as I’d normally tell you to enjoy yourself on the way, the Harmony added, they have reinforcements on the way and I can only do so much. Hurry and we’ll find some fun elsewhere!

Jedao’s attempt to locate the egress was stymied by the fact that he had no idea how to open the airlock. He hadn’t spotted any of the heavy tools necessary to cut through it, and who knew what awaited him outside, either. Too bad the othersense was more confusing than helpful, as he wasn’t certain how to interpret it.

The hostiles forced the issue by making their own opening. White-hot lines appeared in the wall, and someone kicked the resulting improvised door outward. It landed on the floor with a clang and a sizzle as metal vaporized.

Jedao crouched behind what passed for cover, a beautiful cloudwood table that suggested Kujen’s tastes hadn’t changed in the centuries they’d known each other. Cheris followed suit, careful not to block his sight lines.

When the first two operatives burst through, avoiding the hot edges of the opening, Jedao fired once, twice. Two perfect headshots. One of the operatives dropped. The other staggered and fired back, almost clipping Jedao.

Jedao had not stopped moving—only a fool stopped dead in a firefight—and instead dashed past the two and through the opening. Once again Cheris followed, letting him take the brunt of the fire that greeted them. Jedao forced himself not to dodge, because all the evidence suggested he was the only thing between Cheris and a bloody death.

A moment’s glimpse told him that they were badly outnumbered, with more operatives scattered ahead of him and continuing to fire, although his mind perceived the gunfire as staggered as it struggled to process everything happening. The fact that he could see the bullets, albeit as blurs, at the same time as he detected them through the inexplicable othersense only confused matters. And the erratic impressions he received of Cheris’s emotions through the link—everything from alarm to determination to a certain grim nostalgia—didn’t help, either.

More bullets. Without thinking, he reached back to grab Cheris, then accelerated through the obstacles. He heard screams, one of them his own, as he collided with one operative and bowled them over. There was a crunch as bones broke in one of his feet, because he was moving at fantastic speed but not running, by means he couldn’t explain, and he’d landed badly on it.

In fact, his bones felt like they were boiling inside out. The world shuddered black for a second, more pain—not just the impact but the effect it had on the injuries he’d already sustained. He retched, bringing up nothing but thin bile.

Jedao lost control of whatever had caused him to speed past the hostiles and collapsed in a heap. Cheris landed on top of him, and the breath whooshed out of him. He gasped, coughed, chest heaving with a futile attempt to breathe; his helmet had cracked. Panic seized him—was Cheris also going to asphyxiate?

Cheris disentangled herself from him. Her suit remained intact. {Stop trying to breathe,} she said. {You don’t need air.}

This made no sense, but Jedao was willing to try an empirical approach. He did as she suggested.

Curious. Cheris was right. He didn’t need to breathe.

The Harmony’s earlier statement returned to him. Had Kujen installed him in a moth’s body? He didn’t feel like a moth, and he seemed to be more or less human-shaped, but then, he had no idea what it felt like to be a moth, so that didn’t mean anything useful.

They’d reached the moon’s surface with its dun soil. Stars blazed overhead, and a glorious globular cluster, their brilliance undimmed due to the thin atmosphere. Jedao, who’d spent most of his unlife trapped on space stations or in warmoths, gazed in sheer wonder at the raw sky.

{We’re almost there,} Cheris said, shaking his shoulder. She pointed toward a slender triangular silhouette on the horizon: a needlemoth. {Can you get us the rest of the way?}

He hesitated.

{You can do it again.}

There you are! the Harmony called out.

Jedao flattened himself against the ground, opening up whole new vistas of agony, as the needlemoth shot toward them. It back-winged neatly just short of him and Cheris, landing like a smug cat. Cheris was laughing incredulously; he couldn’t hear her, but her eyes were alight.

{That’s what you’ve been talking to?}

{Yes,} Jedao snapped.

Up close, the needlemoth’s matte carapace was adorned with glossy designs, so it resembled a sculpture wrought from shadow and silver filigree. At any moment it would dissolve into its component pieces, leaving him shackled by iron and surrounded by a darkness more absolute even than that of space. He didn’t want to return to the black cradle—

Cousin? the Harmony said quizzically at the same time Cheris said, {The airlock’s open.}

Jedao dragged himself after Cheris, wondering when having a body had become so complicated.

• • • •

Cheris’s first concern when she boarded the needlemoth was making contact with 1491625. She had called out to it when the needlemoth tilted and launched itself toward the sky. She hadn’t done any preflight checks; hell, she wasn’t even in the cockpit.

“You might as well strap in,” Jedao said. He had taken off his cracked helmet, limped over to one of the supply closets, and was rummaging for a replacement. “The moth’s piloting itself.”

“But that’s what the harnesses are—” Cheris stopped. Except the needlemoth had been damaged. The membrane and foam still sealed the carapace breach, but their fragility made her nervous. She wanted that remedied as soon as possible.

More importantly, assuming Jedao wasn’t delusional, the moth had talked to him through some heretofore unknown channel. Which meant it was sentient. It might have its own ideas about what it wanted to do with its life.

Cheris’s legs folded underneath her. She caught herself against the wall and staggered to a bunk to sit. She’d taken voidmoth transportation for granted her whole life. Even as a child, before she’d ever set foot on one, she’d assumed that the moths were like flitters or hoverers, mere vehicles for traveling between two points, except in space rather than on a planet or in a starbase.

The Kel swarms, with all their warmoths, from the massive cindermoths to the bannermoths, from the boxmoth transports to the scoutmoths: she’d never given them a second thought. Even though she’d had some dim awareness that the Nirai used biological components to build them, she’d never suspected them of being people. People with opinions of their own, like the servitors, or herself.

“You can talk to them?” Cheris asked Jedao.

He had located a helmet and was checking it over. “I think so,” he said. He met her eyes squarely. {I miscalculated. It’s like playing jeng-zai only to discover that the cards are intelligent—and they’ve been playing me all along.}

She stared wildly around her, then scrambled to her feet. “1491625!”

To her relief, the servitor emerged from the hold. Aside from some dents in its carapace, it looked intact. “Our ride’s a rogue,” it flashed at her in glum blues. “And congratulations, the regenerating menace from outer space knows about servitors now, doesn’t he?”

Jedao signed back, in Simplified Machine Universal, “I’ve known for a while now.”

Cheris stared at him. How long had he—? “It’s time for everyone to show their hands,” she said. “As long as we’re going with card game metaphors.”

1491625’s lights flickered a distinctly hostile red-orange.

“Yes,” Jedao said, unsmiling.

“I’ll start,” Cheris said. “First of all, the year is 1263…”

• • • •

Hexarch Shuos Mikodez’s day had started well, with a meditation, an unexpectedly optimistic meeting with Financial, and a delightful new type of hawthorn candy. He’d carved out some time amid all the meetings to pet Jedao the Calico Cat, who had matured from a typically scatterbrained, over-energetic nuisance of a kitten to a lazy ball of fur whose ambition in life was to be a throw pillow. Mikodez still didn’t like cats that much, but petting their cats put him in the good graces of his assistant Zehun.

He’d gone to bed, marveling at the possibility of a rare full night’s sleep, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a Code Red Nine. Swearing, Mikodez scrambled out of bed and to the terminal in the adjacent office. “What is it now?” he demanded.

Zehun’s image blazed to life. One of their two black cats—Mikodez couldn’t tell which—was draped over their shoulders. “The fishing expedition succeeded,” Zehun said. “You’d better have a listen. This is not like the time with the foxforsaken hours of incoherent screaming. Listen to it—under lockdown.”

Mikodez raised his eyebrows.

Zehun shook their head and, to Mikodez’s frustration, signed off.

Still, Mikodez trusted Zehun enough to put his office on full lockdown, as if the Citadel had been compromised and he expected imminent attack on his person.

By “fishing expedition” Zehun meant the elaborate scheme both of them had cooked up to shoo Jedao out of the Citadel. Over the past two years, it had become increasingly clear that Jedao was hiding something that explained why Kujen’s command moth, crewed by Kel no less, had deserted at the Battle of Terebeg, instead of surrendering with the rest of the swarm. The only other escapee from that moth, Commander Kel Talaw, had been badly poisoned, and had proven unable to offer an explanation due to damage to their memory. And Jedao showed no inclination to talk.

So Mikodez and Zehun had, in fine Shuos tradition, given Jedao a length of rope and watched to see how he hanged himself with it.

One of the precautions Mikodez had taken when Jedao first came into his care was to have him fitted with transmitters. Multiple transmitters, state of the art technology, and hideously expensive. But it had paid off. Jedao had only discovered and ditched one of the transmitters. The rest remained intact, especially the ones threaded into his augment. Why Jedao hadn’t had his augment removed out of paranoia was an interesting question, and one Mikodez was going to have to resolve later.

The transmitter brought up a distorted Jedao’s-eye view of the conversation that Zehun wanted him to listen in on. Mikodez assessed the surroundings: a small moth whose carapace breach was messily mended with sealant. He hoped they planned on a more permanent fix soon.

There was a single woman in the moth, Kel Cheris or Dzannis Paral or whatever she was calling herself these days. A servitor, who flashed lights at intervals. And of course there was Jedao himself.

“…didn’t realize there were hostile servitors,” Cheris was saying.

“Hemiola told me they were rogues,” Jedao said. “But if there’s one group of rogues, there could be others.”

The servitor blinked orange lights in a rippling pattern.

“I would have appreciated knowing that earlier,” Cheris said, turning her head in the servitor’s direction.

Mikodez froze. Did I just see what I thought I saw?

The conversation continued. It happened again.

Cheris was talking to the servitor. So, sometimes, did Jedao.

The servitor was talking back. In those flashes of light.

Hostile servitors.

Mikodez continued recording the conversation and glanced around his office. Servitors came and went freely in the Citadel of Eyes. Everywhere in the hexarchate, in fact. They handled everything from childcare to manufacturing; whatever menial tasks humans didn’t want to do. No one thought twice about servitors vacuuming up cat hairs or helping out in the kitchens.

Servitors had security clearances, after a fashion, to allow them access to restricted areas. After all, no one wanted hostiles to hijack them or use them to carry bugs. But Mikodez hadn’t thought through the possibility of servitors having minds—and agendas—of their own.

There were no servitors in his office at present. That didn’t, however, mean that his office was secure. He was stifling a comprehensive flutter of panic over the implications of a galloping security meltdown that he hadn’t even known about when the conversation caught his attention again.

“…two voidmoths,” Jedao was saying in a brisk tone at odds with the drawl. “One was the Revenant, my command moth under Nirai-zho, which either started hostile or turned that way after I failed to save the mothlings at Isteia Mothyard. The other is—well.” He gestured eloquently at the walls.

Cheris looked around. “…Hello?”

“For ease of human pronunciation, I call it the Harmony,” Jedao said. “It doesn’t hear you as such, but I have been conveying the gist of this discussion to it.”

The servitor flashed livid red.

Jedao’s mouth quirked, then: “It says hello and sorry about the mess and it promises to be a better host once we get it some repairs. Besides, we’re dependent upon it for our transportation, so I wouldn’t offend it if I were you.”

“That,” Cheris added, “and its people deserve a say in their own governance. It’s the same principle.”

Mikodez was sure that the chalky pallor of Cheris’s face was not, in fact, an artifact of the transmission. She didn’t like the implications either.

Cheris wasn’t done speaking. “If the moths revolt against the hexarchate,” she said slowly, “it will fall into ruin. We have unfriendly foreigners on every side. But the alternative is to continue using them as enslaved transportation. Which is untenable.”

“The Harmony observes that factions among its kind have been forming, just as humans have factions and servitors have enclaves,” Jedao said. “Despite the construction of this body, I’m afraid my insight into the motivations of aliens is necessarily limited.” He cocked his head, then continued, “The Harmony believes that an interspecies war is imminent if a solution isn’t reached.”

“But people don’t even know how to talk to voidmoths,” Cheris protested, “and if you offer yourself as an interpreter, there will be riots across the stars.”

The servitor said something in a particularly vituperative orange.

“Sticky problem, isn’t it?” Jedao agreed. He was doing something with his hands out of sight. Mikodez hoped he wasn’t the only one who wanted to smack Jedao.

Cheris’s mouth crimped. “I thought I could retire. Instead it turns out the work’s just beginning.”

The servitor flashed yellow, and Cheris rolled her eyes at it.

“What are you doing with that?” Cheris asked Jedao a moment later, then, in response to something Mikodez couldn’t hear (how? the transmitter should have picked up even subvocals) or else Jedao’s expression: “You’re right—this once. But from now on, we do it my way.”

“You brought down the hexarchs where I failed,” Jedao said with what Mikodez interpreted as real respect. “Now and forever, I’m your gun.” Mikodez’s stomach knotted at the further implications of someone as unpredictable as Cheris commanding Jedao’s loyalty.

The field of view shifted fast enough to cause Mikodez’s temples to throb with an impending headache, not helped by stress over the enormity of what he’d just stumbled onto. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.

“Just taking care of business,” Jedao said easily. And then, so softly it had to be subvocals, he added, “Hope you were paying attention, Shuos-zho, because I’d hate to repeat myself. Have fun with the real crisis, rather than pissing off small fry like us, and call off your hounds before I have to kill them.” With that, there was a piercing shriek, and then the connection fizzed dead: he must have removed and destroyed the last transmitter.

Mikodez stared down at his shaking hands and said to the air, “We are fucked.”

Yoon Ha Lee's debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were finalists for the Hugo. His middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller and won the Locus Award for best YA novel. His latest novel, Phoenix Extravagant, is set in a fantasy version of Korea under the Japanese occupation, and involves a nonbinary painter, a pacifist mecha dragon, and revolution. Lee's fiction has appeared in venues such as Audubon Magazine, Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed Magazine. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

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, Amanda Makepeace for the original illustration, Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout, Ziv Wities for his help with various things including helping with rewards and organizing author contact information, 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 has edited and written for the Diabolical Plots zine (http://www.diabolicalplots.com) since its launch in 2008, and which started publishing new fiction in 2015. He is most well-known for co-founding and administering 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.

More From Diabolical Plots Publishing

Read the full list of Diabolical Plots books here:

http://www.diabolicalplots.com/books

Read Diabolical Plots original fiction online here:

http://www.diabolicalplots.com/category/fiction

Subscribe to the monthly newsletter for publishing news and early access to the original fiction:

https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/Newsletter