The Long List Anthology Volume 5
Author: David Steffen; Elizabeth Bear; Naomi Kritzer; A. Merc Rustad; Carolyn Ives Gilman
Date: 2019-12-16 05:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the fifth 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 science fiction mysteries to studying wish-
Publisher: Diabolical Plots, L.L.C.

The Long List Anthology

Volume 5

More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

Edited by David Steffen

THE LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 5: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List

edited by David Steffen
www.diabolicalplots.com

Copyright © 2019 David Steffen

Stories copyright © 2018 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, “Poisson D'Arte” by Amanda Makepeace © 2019

Cover layout by Pat R. Steiner

Layout: Polgarus Studio

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

Contents

Permissions
Foreword
Mother Tongues • S. Qiouyi Lu

Field Biology of the Wee Fairies • Naomi Kritzer

Meat and Salt and Sparks • Rich Larson
Sour Milk Girls • Erin Roberts
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child • Isabel Yap
The Starship and the Temple Cat • Yoon Ha Lee
Waterbirds • G.V. Anderson

You Can Make a Dinosaur, but You Can't Help Me • K.M. Szpara

And Yet • A.T. Greenblatt
She Still Loves the Dragon • Elizabeth Bear
An Agent of Utopia • Andy Duncan
A Study in Oils • Kelly Robson

The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births • José Pablo Iriarte

No Flight Without the Shatter • Brooke Bolander

How to Swallow the Moon • Isabel Yap
A World to Die For • Tobias S. Buckell
Thirty-Three Percent Joe • Suzanne Palmer

The Privilege of the Happy Ending • Kij Johnson

The Nearest • Greg Egan
Umbernight • Carolyn Ives Gilman
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
More From Diabolical Plots Publishing

Permissions

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

“Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu. First published in Asimov's January/February 2018.

“Field Biology of the Wee Fairies” by Naomi Kritzer. First published in Apex Magazine, Issue 112.

“Meat and Salt and Sparks” by Rich Larson. First published on Tor.com, June 6, 2018.

“Sour Milk Girls” by Erin Roberts. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 136.

“Asphalt, River, Mother, Child” by Isabel Yap. First published in Strange Horizons 8 October 2018.

“The Starship and the Temple Cat” by Yoon Ha Lee. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #244.

“Waterbirds” by G.V. Anderson. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 98.

“You Can Make a Dinosaur, but You Can't Help Me” by K.M. Szpara. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Three.

“And Yet” by A.T. Greenblatt. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-One.

“She Still Loves the Dragon” by Elizabeth Bear. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty.

“An Agent of Utopia” by Andy Duncan. First published in An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories, published by Small Beer Press.

“A Study in Oils” by Kelly Robson. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 144.

“The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” by José Pablo Iriarte. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 92.

“No Flight Without the Shatter” by Brooke Bolander. First published on Tor.com, August 15, 2018.

“How to Swallow the Moon” by Isabel Yap. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Twenty-Five.

“A World to Die For” by Tobias S. Buckell. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 136.

“Thirty-Three Percent Joe” by Suzanne Palmer. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 145.

“The Privilege of the Happy Ending” by Kij Johnson. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 143.

“The Nearest” by Greg Egan. First published on Tor.com, July 19, 2018.

“Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First published in Clarkesworld, Issue 137.

Foreword

Here we are in the fifth volume of the Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List—that's a half decade of anthologies, and close to a million words of fiction! There are some authors in here that you'll recognize from previous volumes, and some authors that are new to the series.

This year's cover art is “Poisson D'Arte” by Amanda Makepeace, who you may recognize from the cover art for Volume Three and Volume Four. I am very glad to work with her! For these anthologies the artist has very free reign to propose and work up their own design from scratch, and it's so much fun to see how the art turns out.

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, December 2019—

Mother Tongues
By S. Qiouyi Lu

“Thank you very much,” you say, concluding the oral portion of the exam. You gather your things and exit back into the brightly lit hallway. Photos line the walls: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu. The sun shines on each destination, the images brimming with wonder. You pause before the Golden Gate Bridge.

“右拐就到了,” the attendant says. You look up. His blond hair is as standardized as his Mandarin, as impeccable as his crisp shirt and tie. You’ve just proven your aptitude in English, but hearing Mandarin still puts you at ease in the way only a mother tongue does. You smile at the attendant, murmuring a brief thanks as you make your way down the hall.

You turn right and enter a consultation room. The room is small but welcoming, potted plants adding a dash of green to the otherwise plain creams and browns of the furniture and walls. A literature rack stands to one side, brochures in all kinds of languages tucked into its pockets, creating a mosaic of sights and symbols. The section just on English boasts multiple flags, names of different varieties overlaid on the designs: US English—Standard. UK English—Received Pronunciation. Singaporean English—Standard. Nigerian English—Standard . . . Emblazoned on every brochure is the logo of the Linguistic Grading Society of America, a round seal with a side view of a head showing the vocal tract.

You pick up a Standard US English brochure and take a seat in one of the middle chairs opposite the mahogany desk that sits before the window. The brochure provides a brief overview of the grading system; your eyes linger on the A-grade description: Speaker engages on a wide variety of topics with ease. (Phonology?) is standard; speaker has a broad vocabulary . . . You take a quick peek at the dictionary on your phone. Phonology-linguistic sound systems. You file the word away to remember later.

The door opens. A woman wearing a blazer and pencil skirt walks in, her heels clacking against the hardwood floor, her curled hair bouncing with every step. You stand to greet her and catch a breath of her perfume.

“Diana Moss,” she says, shaking your hand. Her name tag also displays her job title: Language Broker.

“Jiawen Liu,” you reply. Diana takes a seat across from you; as you sit, you smooth out your skirt, straighten your sleeves.

“Is English all right?” Diana asks. “I can get an interpreter in if you’d prefer to discuss in Mandarin.”

“English is fine,” you reply. You clasp your hands together as you eye Diana’s tablet. She swipes across the screen and taps a few spots, her crimson nails stark against the black barrel of the stylus.

“Great,” she says. “Well, let’s dive right in, shall we? I’m showing that you’ve been in the US for, let’s see, fifteen years now? Wow, that’s quite a while.”

You nod. “Yes.”

“And you used to be an economics professor in China, is that correct?”

You nod again. “Yes.”

“Fantastic,” Diana says. “Just one moment as I load the results; the scores for the oral portion always take a moment to come in . . .”

Your palms are clammy, sweaty; Diana twirls the stylus and you can’t help feeling a little dizzy as you watch. Finally, Diana props the tablet up and turns it toward you.

“I’m pleased to inform you that your English has tested at a C-grade,” she says with a broad smile.

Your heart sinks. Surely there’s been some kind of error, but no, the letter is unmistakable: bright red on the screen, framed with flourishes and underlined with signatures; no doubt the certificate is authentic. Diana’s perfume is too heady now, sickly sweet; the room is too bright, suffocating as the walls shrink in around you.

“I . . .” you say, then take a breath. “I was expecting better.”

“For what it’s worth, your scores on the written and analytical portions of the test were excellent, better than many native speakers of English in the US,” Diana says.

“Then what brought my score down?”

“Our clients are looking for a certain . . . profile of English,” Diana says, apologetic. “If you’re interested in retesting, I can refer you to an accent reduction course—I’ve seen many prospective sellers go through the classes and get recertified at a higher grade.”

She doesn’t mention how much the accent reduction course costs, but from your own research, you know it’s more than you can afford.

“Ms. Liu?” Diana says. She’s holding out a tissue; you accept it and dab at your eyes. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to accomplish? Maybe we can assist you.”

You take in a deep breath as you crumple the tissue into your fist. “My daughter Lillian just got into Stanford, early decision,” you say.

“Congratulations!”

“Yes, but we can’t afford it.” C-grade English sells at only a fraction of A-grade English; you’d rather keep your English than sell it for such a paltry sum that would barely put a dent in textbooks and supplies, never mind tuition and housing.

“There are other tracks you can consider,” Diana says, her voice gentle. “Your daughter can go to a community college, for instance, and then transfer out to Stanford again—”

You shake your head.

“Community colleges in the San Gabriel Valley are among the top in the nation,” Diana continues. “There’s no shame in it.”

You’re unconvinced. What if she can’t transfer out? You and Lillian can’t risk that; a good education at a prestigious school is far too important for securing Lillian’s future. No, better to take this opportunity that’s already been given to her and go with it.

Diana stands and goes over to the literature rack. She flips through a few brochures.

“You know,” Diana says as she strides back to you, “China’s really hot right now—with their new open-door policy, lots of people are (clamoring?) to invest there; I have people calling me all the time, asking if I have A-grade Mandarin.”

She sets a brochure down on the desk and sits back in the executive chair across from you.

“Have you considered selling your Mandarin?”

You trace your hands over the brochure, feeling the embossed logo. China’s flag cascades down to a silhouette of Beijing’s skyline; you read the Simplified characters printed on the brochure, your eyes skimming over them so much more quickly than you skim over English.

“How much?” you ask.

Diana leans in. “A-grade Mandarin is going for as much as $800,000 these days.”

Your heart skips a beat. That would be enough to cover Lillian’s college, with maybe a little bit left over—it’s a tantalizing number. But the thought of going without Mandarin gives you pause: it’s the language you think in, the language that’s close to your heart in the way English is not; it’s more integral to who you are than any foreign tongue. English you could go without—Lillian’s Mandarin is good enough to help you translate your way around what you need—but Mandarin?

“I’m . . . I’m not sure,” you say, setting down the brochure. “Selling my Mandarin . . .”

“It’s a big decision, for sure,” Diana says. She pulls a small, silver case out from the pocket of her blazer and opens it with a click. “But, if you change your mind . . .”

She slides a sleek business card across the table.

“. . . call me.”

• • • •

You decide to go for a week without Mandarin, just to see if you can do it. At times, the transition feels seamless: so many of the people in the San Gabriel Valley are bilingual; you get by fine with only English. Your job as a librarian in the local public library is a little trickier, though; most of your patrons speak English, but a few do not.

You decide to shake your head and send the Mandarin-only speakers over to your coworker, who also speaks Mandarin. But when lunchtime comes around, she sits beside you in the break room and gives you a curious look.

“为什么今天把顾客转给我?” she asks.

You figure that you might as well tell her the truth: “I want to sell my Mandarin. I’m seeing what it would be like without it.”

“卖你的普通话?” she responds, an incredulous look on her face. “神经病!”

You resent being called crazy, even if some part of you wonders if this is a foolish decision. Still, you soldier on for the rest of the week in English. Your coworker isn’t always there to cover for you when there are Mandarin-speaking patrons, and sometimes you break your vow and say a few quick sentences in Mandarin to them. But the rest of the time, you’re strict with yourself.

Conversation between you and Lillian flows smoothly, for the most part. Normally, you speak in a combination of English and Mandarin with her, and she responds mostly in English; when you switch to English-only, Lillian doesn’t seem to notice. On the occasions when she does speak to you in Mandarin, you hold back and respond in English too, your roles reversed.

At ATMs, you choose English instead of Chinese. When you run errands, “thank you” replaces “谢谢.” It’s only until Friday rolls around and you’re grocery shopping with your mother that not speaking in Mandarin becomes an issue.

You’re in the supermarket doing your best to ignore the Chinese characters labeling the produce: so many things that you don’t know the word for in English. But you recognize them by sight, and that’s good enough; all you need is to be able to pick out what you need. If you look at things out of the corner of your eye, squint a little bit, you can pretend to be illiterate in Chinese, pretend to navigate things only by memory instead of language.

You can cheat with your mother a little bit: you know enough Cantonese to have a halting conversation with her, as she knows both Cantonese and Mandarin. But it’s frustrating, your pauses between words lengthy as you try to remember words and tones.

“干吗今天说广东话?” your mother asks in Mandarin. She’s pushing the shopping cart—she insists, even when you offer—and one of the wheels is squeaking. She hunches over the handle, but her eyes are bright.

“Ngo jiu syut Gwongdungwaa,” you reply in Cantonese. Except it’s not exactly that you want to speak Cantonese; you have to, for now. You don’t know how to capture the nuance of everything you’re going through in Cantonese, either, so you leave it at that. Your mother gives you a look, but she doesn’t bring it up again and indulges you, speaking Cantonese as the two of you go around the supermarket and pile the shopping cart high with produce, meat, and fish.

You load the car with the groceries and help your mother into the passenger seat. As you adjust the mirrors, your mother speaks again.

“你在担心什么?” she asks. Startled, you look over at her. She’s peering at you, scrutinizing you; you can never hide anything from her. Of course she can read the worry on your face, the tension in your posture; of course she knows something’s wrong.

“Ngo jau zou yat go han zungjiu dik kyutding,” you respond, trying to communicate the weight on your shoulders.

“什么决定?” Ma replies.

You can’t find the words to express the choice you have to make in Cantonese. Every time you grasp for the right syllables, they come back in Mandarin; frustrated, you switch back to Mandarin and reply,

“我要用我的普通话来赚钱去送Lillian上大学。”

You expect your mother to scold you, to tell you about the importance of your heritage and language—she’s always been proud of who she is, where she’s from; she’s always been the first to teach you about your own culture—but instead her expression softens, and she puts a hand over yours, her wrinkled skin warm against your skin.

“哎，嘉嘉，没有别的办法吗?”

Your nickname is so tender on her tongue. But you’ve thought through all other avenues: you don’t want Lillian to take out loans and be saddled with so much debt like your friends’ children; you don’t want her to bear such a burden her entire life, not while you’re still paying off debts too. You can’t rely on Lillian’s father to provide for her, not after he left your family and took what little money you had. And although Lillian’s been doing her best to apply for scholarships, they’re not enough.

You shake your head.

The two of you sit in silence as you start the car and drive back to your mother’s place. The sun sets behind you, casting a brilliant glow over the Earth, washing the sky from orange to blue. As you crest over a hill, the sparkling lights of the city below glitter in the darkness, showing you a million lives, a million dreams.

When you get to your mother’s house, you only have one question to ask her.

“如果你需要做同样的决定,” you say, “你也会这样做吗?”

You don’t know what it would have been like if you were in Lillian’s shoes, if your mother had to make the same decision as you. But as your mother smiles at you, sadness tinging the light in her eyes, the curve of her lips, you know she understands.

“当然,” she says.

Of course.

• • • •

The waiting room is much starker than the consultation room you were in before: the seats are less comfortable, the temperature colder; you’re alone except for a single TV playing world news at a low volume.

You read the paperwork, doing your best to understand the details of the procedure—for all you pride yourself on your English, though, there are still many terms you don’t understand completely:

The Company’s (proprietary?) algorithms (iterate?) through near-infinite (permutations?) of sentences, extracting a neural map. The (cognitive?) load on the brain will cause the Applicant to experience a controlled stroke, and the Applicant’s memory of the Language will be erased. Common side effects include: temporary disorientation, nausea. Less common side effects include partial (aphasia?) of nontarget languages and (retrograde?) amnesia. Applicant agrees to hold Company harmless . . .

You flip over to the Chinese version of the contract, and, while some of the terms raise concern in you, you’ve already made your decision and can’t back out now. You scan the rest of the agreement and sign your name at the bottom.

The lab is clinical, streamlined, with a large, complicated-looking machine taking up most of the room. An image of the brain appears on a black panel before you.

“Before we begin,” the technician says, “do you have any questions?”

You nod as you toy with your hospital gown. “Will I be able to learn Mandarin again?”

“Potentially, though it won’t be as natural or easy as the first time around. Learning languages is usually harder than losing them.”

You swallow your nervousness. Do it for Lillian. “Why can’t you make a copy of the language instead of erasing it?”

The technician smiles ruefully. “As our current technology stands, the imaging process has the unfortunate side effect of suppressing neurons as it replicates them . . .”

You can’t help but wonder cynically if the reason why the neurons have to be suppressed is to create artificial scarcity, to inflate demand in the face of limited supply. But if that scarcity is what allows you to put Lillian through college, you’ll accept it.

The technician hooks electrodes all over your head; there’s a faint hum, setting your teeth on edge.

As the technician finishes placing the last of the electrodes on your head, certain parts of the brain on the panel light up, ebbing and flowing, a small chunk in the back active; you try to recall the areas of the brain from biology classes in university, and, while different parts of your brain start to light up, you still don’t remember the names of any of the regions.

The technician flips a couple switches, then types a few commands. The sensation that crawls over you is less of a shock than a tingling across your scalp. Thoughts flash through your mind too fast for you to catch them; you glance up at the monitor and see light firing between the areas the technician pointed out, paths carving through the brain and flowing back and forth. The lights flash faster and faster until they become a single blur, and as you watch, your world goes white.

The technician and nurse keep you at the institute for a few hours to monitor your side effects: slight disorientation, but that fades as the time goes by. They ask if you have anyone picking you up; you insist that you’re fine taking public transportation by yourself, and the technician and nurse relent. The accountant pays you the first installment of the money, and soon you’re taking the steps down from the institute’s main doors, a cool breeze whipping at your hair.

The bus ride home is . . . strange. As you go from west Los Angeles toward the San Gabriel Valley, the English-dominating billboards and signs starts to give way to Chinese. Although you can still understand the balance of the characters, know when they’re backwards in the rearview mirrors, you can’t actually read them—they’re no more than shapes: familiar ones, but indecipherable ones. You suck down a deep breath and will your heart to stop beating so quickly. It will take time to adjust to this, just as it took time to adjust to being thrown into a world of English when you first immigrated to the United States.

A corner of the check sticks out of your purse.

You’ll be okay.

• • • •

Your family is celebrating Chinese New Year this weekend. You drive with Lillian over to your mother’s senior living apartment; you squeeze in through the door while carrying a bag of fruit. Your mother is cooking in the tiny kitchenette, the space barely big enough for the both of you. She’s wearing the frilly blue apron with embroidered teddy bears on it, and you can’t help but smile as you inhale the scent of all the food frying and simmering on the stove.

“Bongmong?” you say in Cantonese. It’s one of the few words you can remember—as the days passed, you realized that some of your Cantonese had been taken too, its roots intertwined and excised with your Mandarin.

“(???). (???????),” your mother says, gesturing toward the couch. You and Lillian sit down. A period drama plays on the television. The subtitles go by too fast for you to match sound to symbol; Lillian idly taps away on her phone.

A few moments pass like this, your gaze focused on the television as you see if you can pick up something, anything at all; sometimes, you catch a phrase that jogs something in your memory, but before you can recall what the phrase means, the sound of it and its meaning are already gone.

“(???)!”

Lillian gets up, and you follow suit. The small dining room table has been decked out with all kinds of food: glistening, ruby-red shrimp with caramelized onions; braised fish; stir-fried lotus root with sausage; sautéed vegetables . . . you wish you could tell your mother how good it looks; instead, you can only flash her a smile and hope she understands.

“(?????????), (?????????),” your mother says.

Lillian digs in, picking up shrimp with her chopsticks; you scold her and remind her of her manners.

“But (??????) said I could go ahead,” Lillian says.

“Still,” you reply. You place some food on your mother’s plate first, then Lillian’s; finally, you set some food on your own plate. Only after your mother’s eaten do you take a bite.

Lillian converses with your mother; her Mandarin sounds a little stilted, starting and stopping, thick with an American accent, but her enthusiasm expresses itself in the vibrant conversation that flows around you. You stay quiet, shrinking into yourself as your mother laughs, as Lillian smiles.

You’re seated between Lillian and your mother; the gap across the table from you is a little too big, spacing the three of you unevenly around the table. As the syllables cascade around you, you swear the spaces between you and your mother, between you and Lillian, grow larger and larger.

After dinner, as your mother washes up the dishes—again, she refuses your help—you and Lillian watch the Spring Gala playing on the television. An invited pop star from the US, the only white person on the stage, sings a love ballad in Mandarin. You don’t need to know what she’s saying to tell that she doesn’t have an American accent.

“I bet she bought her Mandarin,” Lillian says. It’s an offhanded comment, but still you try to see if you can detect any disgust in her words.

“Is that so bad?” you ask.

“I don’t know; it just seems a little . . . (appropriative?), you know?”

You don’t know. Lillian doesn’t know. You were planning on telling her the instant you came home, but you didn’t know how to bring it up. And now . . . you want to keep your sacrifice a secret, because it’s not about you—it was never about you. But it’s only a matter of time before Lillian finds out.

You don’t know how she’ll react. Will she understand?

Lillian rests her head on your shoulder. You pull her close, your girl who’s grown up so fast. You try to find the words to tell her what you’d do for her, how important it is that she has a good future, how much you love her and want only the best for her.

But all you have is silence.

S. Qiouyi Lu writes, translates, and edits between two coasts of the Pacific. Their fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Uncanny, and their translations have appeared in Clarkesworld. They edit the flash fiction and poetry magazine Arsenika. You can find out more about S. at their website, s.qiouyi.lu.

Field Biology of the Wee Fairies
By Naomi Kritzer

When Amelia turned fourteen, everyone assured her that she’d find her fairy soon. Almost all girls did. You’d find a fairy, a beautiful little fairy, and catch her. And she’d give you a gift to let her go, and that gift was always beauty or charm or perfect hair or something else that made boys notice you. The neighbor girl, Betty, had caught her fairy when she was just nine, and so she’d never even had to go through an awkward adolescent stage; she’d been perfect and beautiful all along.

Not all fairies were equal, of course. Some of them would do a much better job for you. The First Lady Jackie Kennedy, for example, had caught the fairy queen. Or so almost everyone said. “So keep your eyes open,” Amelia’s mother told her.

“I don’t want to catch a fairy,” Amelia said. “If I did catch a fairy, I’d keep her in a jar like my mice and study her.”

Everyone laughed when she said things like that, except for Betty, who rolled her eyes and said that Amelia would change her mind when she grew up a bit. “You don’t want to be an old maid like Miss Leonard,” she pointed out. Miss Leonard was their English teacher. No one had ever asked her about this directly, but everyone agreed that Miss Leonard had never caught a fairy.

Amelia had quite a few mice. She was working on a science project for the West District Science Day at the Central State College. In her project, which she’d been working on for over a year, she was teaching mice to run mazes, to see what factors affected learning. To eliminate the problem of genetic variation, she was training litters rather than individual mice. Each litter, she divided in half, once they were weaned, setting one as the control group and one as the experimental group, marking their tails with indelible ink to keep track. She’d train them for two months, making careful notes on her results. When she was done with an experimental group, she’d donate the mice to the local zoo to feed to their boa constrictor. The zookeeper was quite perplexed the first time she came over with a jar of mice, and even more perplexed when Amelia wanted to stay and watch the snake eat the mice. He clearly thought they were her pets. “Don’t girls like cute things?” he said.

Amelia was baffled by his attitude. Sure, the mice were cute, but they weren’t pets like the cat and the dog, they were experimental subjects. Also, if she kept all of them, she’d quickly be drowning in rodents. Her parents were willing to tolerate a certain amount of smell and mess, as long as Amelia kept it to her room, but they had their limits.

(“It will be fine,” her father had said to her mother. “Sooner or later, she will surely find her fairy and move on.” Move on to dresses and hairstyles and makeup and boys, was what he meant.)

Amelia’s father taught history at her high school, which made some things better and some things worse. Better: she got a ride to school every day. Worse: she got in trouble twice anytime she got in trouble at school.

One day in late November, she was in her Spanish class and the idiot boy sitting behind her thought it would be hilarious to repeatedly poke her with his ruler. Amelia told him to stop. He didn’t stop. So she took out her math book, because it was the heaviest book in her bag and also her least favorite, and threw it at his head, knocking him out of his seat. Getting sent to detention was worth it. But, of course, her Spanish teacher tattled on her to her father and he took away the book she was reading for a week and her parents made her wash all the windows. That was a lot more annoying.

“You’ll appreciate attention from boys once you meet your fairy,” her mother told her as she wrung out the cloth into the bucket.

“I don’t want to find a fairy,” Amelia said.

“You’ll change your mind eventually,” her mother said.

“How old were you when you caught your fairy?” Amelia asked, curious.

Her mother’s eyes got a little distant. “I was a good deal older than you, actually. I was nearly eighteen and I’d pretty much concluded there weren’t any fairies in our part of Virginia. My sister and I were out together, and we saw two, and you’d better believe we chased them. Luckily, they ran in different directions. Mine went left and Reva’s went right. If we’d wound up chasing the same one, I don’t know what we’d have done!”

Amelia’s mother would have let Reva catch it, Amelia was pretty sure. If it had come to that.

“It wasn’t too long after that I met your father.”

Amelia’s parents had met during the war. Her father was a Yankee from Maine, her mother a poor farmer’s daughter from Virginia. You could see the fairy’s gifts in the first pictures of them together: her mother’s beaming, glamorous smile, her perfect posture. Amelia actually had the perfect posture, even without a fairy: the “posture” unit in gym class was the only one she’d gotten an A in. But her teeth were crooked, and she couldn’t see a thing without her thick glasses. Also, makeup was time-consuming and fancy clothes were usually uncomfortable.

“I want to be a scientist,” Amelia said.

“You can be beautiful and a scientist,” her mother assured her. “You know, I went to business school a few months after I caught my fairy. You’re smart enough for college and I certainly hope you’ll go.”

“I’ve heard some kids say that Miss Leonard killed her fairy.”

“That’s nonsense,” her mother said. “Some girls never do meet fairies and that’s probably all that happened to your English teacher.”

• • • •

During Christmas vacation, Betty came over one afternoon. She admired Amelia’s mice and then wanted to do Amelia’s hair. “It’s so straight and long,” she said. “We could totally make you look like Audrey Hepburn.” For a minute, Betty almost had it in place, but then a pin slipped out of place and the hairstyle collapsed like a fallen cake.

“I can try to do yours,” Amelia offered, although Betty already looked like a girl out of a shampoo ad: a band held it in place as it rippled in shining waves. Probably thanks to the fairy. “What did your fairy give you, anyway?”

“Perfect hair,” Betty admitted. “I sometimes wish I’d asked for nicer skin. I figured that would be easier to fix with makeup. Some days it is, some days it isn’t.”

The sun was slanting low in the sky outside and Amelia started weighing out food for the mice. Betty watched with interest for a while, then asked, “Can you tell your mother I tried?”

“That you tried what?”

“That I tried to do your hair?”

“I guess? Wait, why?” Amelia put down the scoop and turned to look at Betty. “Did my mother put you up to this?”

“That’s a terrible way of putting it. She might have asked if I’d have a go at showing you some new styles, though.”

Amelia heaved a long sigh. “Well, I’ll tell her. You don’t have to stay any longer, if you don’t want.”

“I was sort of hoping you’d show me your mice running their maze, though,” Betty said.

“Really? Or did my mother put you up to that, too?” Amelia knew even as she asked that this was a ridiculous question. Her parents put up with her science project and they’d be happy enough when she won, but they certainly weren’t going to try to convince Betty to fake an interest. She pulled the maze out from under her bed and took out the log book, stop watch, and peanut butter.

“What’s the peanut butter for?” Betty asked.

“It’s the treat when they finish the maze. Mice like it a lot better than cheese.” She opened up a package of crackers and started spreading peanut butter on them.

“Can I help?” Betty asked.

“Sure,” Amelia said, and handed her the knife.

“They’re so cute,” Betty said when the mice came out.

“Do you want any when I’m done with them?” Amelia offered.

“Oh, no. My mother would probably die on the spot if I brought a jar of mice home.” They set up the maze and Amelia ran the mice through.

After Betty had gone home, Amelia finished her record-keeping and then brushed out her hair, which was still stiff from the hairspray Betty had used to try to keep it in place. She wondered if a fairy would make her hair stay in place properly, or if a fairy would make her want to keep her hair in place properly. If she hadn’t pulled the pin out when Betty wasn’t looking, she probably could have brought the style off.

• • • •

Amelia found her fairy on a freezing-cold January day, when she had to walk to school because her father had needed to go in very early for a meeting and she hadn’t gotten up in time to get a ride.

She was wearing dungarees under her skirt because the wind blew right through her tights. She’d have to duck into a bathroom as soon as she got to school, to slip them off and put them in her bag. Also, a heavy coat, gloves, and a wool hat and scarf, even though they made her itch. The fairy, of course, was wearing a diaphanous dress that looked like a turquoise-blue wedding veil and she had tiny, fresh flowers in her hair. She dropped out of the air right in front of Amelia and hovered enticingly. Fairies, it was generally agreed, wanted to be caught. They wanted you to have to chase them, but they definitely wanted you to catch them. If it accidentally got away from you, it would probably come swooping right back.

The stories didn’t say what would happen if you just refused to chase it at all. Amelia figured it would be interesting to see, so she ducked her head and continued walking to school. The fairy zipped around her, so it could bob in front of her again, like it was thinking, “Oh, she just didn’t see me.” Amelia looked straight at it, made eye contact, and then continued on her way.

The fairy zipped around her again.

“Look,” Amelia said. “I don’t want your gifts. I’m not interested. Go offer them to some other girl.”

When she got to the school, she looked back and saw a flash of turquoise in the tree in front of the school. She heaved a sigh and went to shed her pants and coat.

• • • •

School was more annoying than usual. There was a Science Club at school, but only boys were allowed to join it; her Biology teacher had some of the boys in the club stand up to talk about their projects. Like hers, they were being prepared for the West District Science Day. Amelia made notes on each. John: No original research. Frank: Started three weeks ago. Clyde: Doesn’t seem to actually understand the scientific method.

When the boys had all finished talking, Mr. Crawford quizzed everyone on the previous night’s reading. Betty, it turned out, hadn’t done the reading, and didn’t know the answer to any of his questions, and he made her say, “I don’t know, Mr. Crawford,” five or six times before moving on. Amelia had done the reading, so instead of raising her hand, since she knew he wouldn’t call on her, she averted her eyes and did her best to look like she was trying to disappear into her seat. To her immense satisfaction, he called on her next and she was able to answer all the questions, which she could tell he found utterly galling. It was hard to take as much pleasure in it when Betty was almost in tears next to her, though.

In English class, they were reading Romeo and Juliet. Earlier in the week, they’d done the balcony scene (which, Miss Leonard had pointed out, was actually a window scene). Betty had read the part of Juliet and one of the boys had read Romeo. Today was a scene with Romeo and his friends. Amelia impulsively volunteered for the part of Mercutio, because he had all the best lines, and was surprised when Miss Leonard let her do it. Betty promptly volunteered to play Romeo and another girl raised her hand for the part of Benvolio. Miss Leonard looked out at the class and said, “Any boys want to play Juliet’s Nurse? Of course, in Shakespeare’s day, every part would have been played by a male actor.” None of the boys volunteered, so a girl read that part, as well.

After saying her last line in the scene (“Farewell, ancient lady; farewell”), Amelia studied Miss Leonard, thinking about the story that she’d killed her fairy. That would certainly be one way to get rid of it, if it was persistent.

English class probably would have been the bright spot, but at the end of the class, Miss Leonard handed back the essays they’d turned in the previous week. Amelia had never gotten a grade lower than an A- for an English class paper before she’d had Miss Leonard; so far, this year, she hadn’t gotten anything higher than a B+. Today she had a B and lots of comments, all written in Miss Leonard’s crabbed script in the margins. You can do better, it said at the bottom. Amelia crammed the paper into her bag and went to history class in a bad mood.

She got into her father’s car at the end of the day. “The boys in the Science Club are all doing projects that aren’t anywhere near as good as mine.”

“Well, that’s fine,” her father said. “You’ll show them all at the Science Day, then.”

“It’s not fair that I’m not allowed in the Science Club.”

“Mr. Crawford is old-fashioned about girls.”

“It’s 1962. He needs to join the twentieth century.”

“Maybe when you’re awarded first place at Science Day, he’ll reconsider.”

Amelia stared out the window. The fairy was sitting in a tree next to the stop light; then it was sitting in a tree on the corner, when they slowed down to turn; then it was hovering outside the car in the carport by their house. Her father didn’t seem to notice.

“Anyway, if you were in the Science Club, you’d have to stay after school for the meetings; you wouldn’t get to ride home with your good old dad,” her father said heartily. “Are you coming in?”

“In a minute,” Amelia said.

She sat in the car, feeling the warmth from the car heater slowly fade away. The fairy was hovering just outside the front windshield; after a minute or two, she perched on the car’s hood ornament, her ankles folded delicately, her hands in her lap, her wings vibrating like a hummingbird’s wings in the air. Amelia got out of the car. The fairy dodged away, then came back. Amelia stared at it for a moment, then went inside.

When her mice weren’t running the mazes, she kept them in gallon pickle jars with holes punched in the lids, with newspaper to shred and ladders for stimulation. There were four pickle jars waiting for new occupants, clean and lined up under her window. She grabbed one, unscrewed the lid, and took it back downstairs.

Outside, the sun was low in the sky. She crunched her way across the snowy yard, back to the car, looking nonchalant. She didn’t see the fairy right away. She opened the car door, sat down in the passenger seat, and waited.

The fairy bobbed in front of her, maybe ten feet away. She looked at it, then looked away.

It came closer.

Closer still.

She could see the delicate folds in the fairy’s dress, the shining strands of its hair, the tilt of its head, when she sprang. She didn’t want to touch it—she wasn’t entirely convinced that touching the fairy wasn’t what actually made the magic happen—but she swooped up with the jar and brought the lid down, trapping the fairy inside. Then she screwed the lid down, took it upstairs to her room, and set it on a shelf next to her mice.

• • • •

At her desk, Amelia made a list.

Things I have always wanted to know about fairies:

Can boys see them?

Can adults see them?

Can younger children see them?

What would happen if I handed it directly to a boy?

What would happen if I handed it directly to a female child who’s much too young for a fairy?

If Miss Leonard actually just never caught a fairy, and it’s not true she killed hers, what happens if I give this fairy directly to her? (Would she even want it?)

She turned back around and looked at the fairy again. She could go show the fairy to her parents right now and see if they could see it, but of course, then they’d know that she’d caught a fairy, even if she’d caught it in a jar like a lightning bug and not the way you were supposed to catch a fairy. They’d probably expect her to start caring about her hair more.

The fairy had been hovering inside the jar, but now she landed on her feet, folded her wings against her back, and sat down, glowering at Amelia through the glass. She was less ethereal-looking trapped in the jar.

Amelia set the fairy on the shelf. She needed to feed her mice and mark the Test and Control groups from the most recent litters. She grabbed the box of food pellets and her little scale and started weighing out food portions, jotting down more questions about the fairy as they occurred to her. What do fairies eat? Will it be able to get out of the jar if I don’t let it out? Do fairies talk?

Mouse food pellets seemed like a thoroughly unkind thing to feed the fairy. Amelia supplemented the mouse diet with carrot peels from the kitchen, and those seemed like sort of a nasty thing to feed a fairy, too. “What do you eat?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.

The fairy lifted herself up again and spread her wings. “Let me out!” she shrieked. She did have a voice; it was high and shrill.

“So, you can talk,” Amelia said. “That’s good.” She took her notebook out to jot down observations. “Can other people see you?”

“Let me out!” the fairy demanded again.

“You could have left me alone, when I ignored you. Why were you so persistent? Do you eat?”

The fairy didn’t answer. After a while, Amelia went down to retrieve the carrot peelings from the jar where her mother left them for her. She set out a fresh jar and grabbed today’s jar to bring upstairs. Back in her room, she started weighing out portions of carrot peelings and dropping them into the jars with the mice. The fairy watched her, silently, for several minutes.

“What are you going to do with me?” the fairy asked, finally.

“I haven’t decided,” Amelia said.

“Are you going to kill me? Or feed me to the snake?”

“No,” Amelia said. She screwed on the last of the pickle jar lids and sat down to look at the fairy again. Feeding the little white mice to the snake was fine. Feeding a talking creature to the snake was completely different. Now that she was nose-to-nose with an actual fairy, she thought it was very unlikely that Miss Leonard had actually killed one.

“How long are you going to keep me in here?” the fairy asked.

“I haven’t decided that, either.”

“Wouldn’t you like my gifts?” the fairy asked. “You caught me, you know. You can demand a forfeit in exchange for letting me go.”

“No,” Amelia said.

Downstairs, her father knocked on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. “Supper!” he called up. Amelia heaved a sigh, jotted down the weight of the carrot peels, and went downstairs to eat.

• • • •

Amelia’s mother worked at Wittenberg College as a secretary. She’d spent the day fixing mistakes made by a very new, very inexperienced secretary who wouldn’t have messed up so badly if she’d had just a quarter ounce of ordinary common sense, according to Amelia’s mother. The new secretary was also very pretty, and her mother speculated the girl had traded her intelligence for long eyelashes when she caught her fairy.

“I thought they didn’t do things like that. I thought you just got that stuff as a gift,” Amelia said.

“Well, all I can tell you for sure is that I didn’t have to make any trades when I caught my fairy,” her mother said. “Maybe I’d have gotten longer eyelashes if I’d offered to trade some smarts to get those, too.”

“That would have been a bad trade,” Amelia said.

“Definitely. Don’t go trading away your brains, girl,” her father said. “You can have looks and smarts.”

Amelia had something else in mind entirely. When she went back upstairs after dinner, she asked the fairy, “Can you make me more intelligent, instead of prettier?”

“No,” the fairy said, grumpily.

“What if I want something else? Like, what if I want to get into the Science Club that’s just for boys, can you make Mr. Crawford change his mind about that?”

“No,” the fairy said.

Amelia reached for the jar and the fairy jumped to her feet, shrinking away from her. Amelia pulled her hand back. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “I just don’t want anything like long eyelashes or perfect skin. I don’t want to be pretty.”

“Well, what do you want from me, then?” the fairy said.

“I want information about fairies,” Amelia said. “Answer my questions and I’ll let you go.”

“Oh.” The fairy seemed genuinely surprised by this. Her wings slowly settled as she relaxed a bit. She sat back down, arranging herself to sit cross-legged, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. The flowers in her hair were beginning to wilt. She looked up at Amelia expectantly. “Okay,” she said. “Ask.”

“Can adults see you?”

“No.”

“Little kids?”

“No.”

“Teenage boys?”

“Just like with girls, there’s a point when they can see us. Most of them pretend they can’t, though, and they almost never try to catch us.”

“What happens when a boy catches you?”

“Depends on the boy. Someday, when you’re older, you might meet a boy who will admit to having caught a fairy. Ask him how it went.”

“Can you make someone strong, instead of pretty?”

The fairy gave her a sort of a sideways look. “We don’t actually make anyone pretty.”

This was new information. Amelia sat down and took out her notepad. “Go on.”

“This is very complicated, and you probably won’t understand it.”

“Try me.”

“When you touch us, that lets us see into the future. Just a little, right after we’re caught. So, when we want to have that power for a while, we find girls who can see us, let them catch us, and then we promise them something based on what we can see about their future.”

“So, am I going to be pretty whether I want to be or not?” Amelia asked with revulsion.

The fairy looked her over. “If you were a normal girl, you’d have caught me this morning. And this afternoon you’d have told your mother that you’d caught your fairy and she’d have cried because her little girl was growing up, and then she’d have bought you a lipstick and taken you to the hairdresser because that’s what mothers do after their daughters catch a fairy. And if you’d wanted to be pretty, then you’d have been pretty. You might turn pretty eventually, anyway; I can’t tell from here.”

Amelia hadn’t written any of this down. She looked down at her notepad, wondering what she’d even say.

“Will you please let me out now?” the fairy asked.

Amelia steadied the pickle jar and unscrewed the lid. The fairy shot out and streaked up to the top of Amelia’s bookshelf, like she thought maybe Amelia was going to shut her up again. Amelia opened her bedroom window, so the fairy could fly out.

The fairy dropped down to the sill, then hesitated. She looked back at Amelia nervously. “So … would you like to know if you’re going to be pretty?”

“No,” Amelia said. “I want to know if Mr. Crawford will let me into the Science Club after I win first place at the District Science Day.”

“Hold out your hand.” The fairy leaped into Amelia’s cupped palm. She weighed nothing—Amelia wished she’d thought to put the pickle jar on the scale to see if that was literally true—but Amelia could feel the faint pressure of the fairy’s hand as she gripped Amelia’s thumb.

“He won’t,” the fairy said. “He’s never going to let you in. Is there anything else you want to know?”

Questions crowded into Amelia’s mind. Would she win first place? Where would she go to college? What would her life be like? Did she need to be pretty to be happy?

“Will I ever get an A from Miss Leonard?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” the fairy said. “Yes.” And then she was gone, like someone had switched off the beam of a flashlight. A gust of cold air made the window frame rattle and Amelia closed her window again.

He’s never going to let you in. Amelia turned back to her mice, doing the last of the day’s recordkeeping, her hand filling out the day’s chart even as her thoughts were elsewhere. Never. She looked down at her project, realizing that she’d been assuming her father was right: that when she won first place at the District Science Day, Mr. Crawford would realize how wrong he was about girls, and about Amelia, and whether she belonged in the Science Club. But the fairy said he wouldn’t. It’s better to know, Amelia told herself. It’s better not to have false hope.

She did the rest of her homework and brushed her teeth. It’s better not to have false hope, she thought as she turned off her light for bed, but this time another thought occurred to her. It’s better not to have false hope because now I can stop wasting my time trying to impress Mr. Crawford and find another way.

• • • •

Amelia’s project won the first prize at the West District Science Day. She was given a pin and a certificate, and she had her picture in the paper. Her parents bought multiple copies of the Springfield Daily News, to send clippings of the article to her relatives in other states, and one for Amelia to save.

The next day, she told her father not to wait for her and found Miss Leonard in her classroom. “I have a question,” she said. “I checked the handbook, and it says that to start a club, you need a faculty advisor, but it doesn’t say the faculty advisor has to be a teacher of a related subject. I want to start a science club for girls. Will you be our advisor?”

Miss Leonard looked surprised. “Amelia, that’s a lovely idea, but Mr. Crawford isn’t going to let us use the science labs for experiments any more than he lets girls into the club.”

“I was thinking we’d work on projects that didn’t require a lab.”

“Do you have any other members in mind?”

“Betty wants to join. And she thinks she knows other girls who would, too.”

“Funding? Running a club costs money, and I don’t think we can count on any from the school.”

“Betty offered to organize a bake sale,” Amelia said.

Miss Leonard nodded brusquely. “I’ll consider it. Write up a proposal for me.”

“I already have.” Amelia handed the four-page proposal—typed, even, on her mother’s typewriter—to Miss Leonard.

Miss Leonard looked at the proposal, then at Amelia. Something had shifted in her eyes. She looked Amelia up and down for a moment, then inclined her head. “Have a seat while I take a look.”

Amelia stared at the window as Miss Leonard read. It felt like she waited for a long time.

“All right,” Miss Leonard said. “I will advise your club.” She tucked the proposal in the drawer of her desk.

“Thank you!”

“Also,” she said, “I expect all your papers for my classes in the future to be typed and written at the quality level of this proposal. You’ve been holding out on me.”

“It’s my mother’s typewriter and sometimes she’s using it.”

“Plan better.” The crispness of this instruction was undermined by the warmth of Miss Leonard’s smile. “Bring Betty tomorrow. We have a bake sale to organize.”

Naomi Kritzer has been writing science fiction and fantasy for twenty years. Her YA novel CATFISHING ON CATNET — based on her Hugo Award-winning short story “Cat Pictures Please” — came out from Tor Teen in November 2019. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her spouse, two kids, and four cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

Meat and Salt and Sparks
By Rich Larson

“Doesn’t look like a killer, does she,” Huxley remarks.

Cu shrugs a hairy shoulder. To her, all humans look like killers. What her partner means is that the woman in the interrogation room does not look physically imposing. She is small and skinny and wearing a pale pink dress with a mood-display floral pattern; currently the buds are all sealed up tight, reflecting her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin tucked to her chest.

The interrogation room has made a similar read of her mood, responding by projecting a soothing beach front with flour-white sand and blue-green waves. The woman doesn’t seem to be aware of her holographic surroundings. Her eyes, small and dark in puddles of running makeup, stare off into space. Every few seconds her left hand reaches up to her ear, where a wireless graft winks inactive red. Apart from that, she’s motionless.

Cu holds her tablet steady and jabs the playback icon enlarged for her chimpanzee fingers. She crinkles her eyes to watch as the woman from the interrogation room, Elody Polle, bounces through the subway station with her dress in full bloom. With a bland smile on her face, she walks up behind a balding man, pulls the gun from her bag, pulls the trigger, remembers the safety is on, takes it off and pulls the trigger again.

“So calm,” Huxley says, tearing open a bag from the vending unit. “She was like that the whole time, apparently, up until they stuck her in interrogation. Then she lost her shit a bit.” He grins and shovels baked seaweed into his mouth. Huxley is almost always grinning.

Cu flicks to the footage from interrogation: Elody Polle sobbing, pounding her fists against the locked door. She looks over at her partner and taps her ear, signs Faraday shield?

“Yeah,” Huxley says, letting the bag fall to his lap to sign back. “No receiving or transmitting from interrogation. As soon as she lost contact with that little graft, she panicked. The police ECM should have shut it down as soon as she was in custody. Guess it slipped past somehow.”

Acting under instructions, Cu suggests.

Huxley see-saws his open hands. “Could be. She’s got no obvious connection to the victim. We’ll need to have a look at the thing.”

Cu scrolls through the perpetrator’s file. Twenty years’ worth of information strained from social media feeds and the odd government application has been condensed to a brief. Elody Polle, born in Toronto, raised in Seattle, rode a scholarship to Princeton to study ethnomusicology before dropping out in ’42, estranged from most friends and family for over a year despite having moved back to a one-room flat in North Seattle. No priors. No history of violence. No record of antisocial behavior.

Cu checks the live feed from the interrogation room. Heart-rate down, she signs, tucking the tablet under her armpit. Time to talk.

Huxley looks down into the chip bag. “These are terrible.” He shoves one last handful into his mouth, crumbs snagging in his wiry red beard, then seals the bag and puts it neatly in his jacket pocket. He licks the salt off his palms on the way to the interrogation room.

The precinct is near empty, but there are still curious faces peering from the cubicles as they pass. Cu doesn’t come to the precinct often. Huxley had to beg her to put in an appearance. She prefers working from her apartment, where everything is the right size and shape and there are no curious faces.

The outside of the interrogation room looks far less pleasant than the interior: it’s a concrete cube with a thick steel door that seals shut once they pass through it.

Cu squats down a respectable distance away from the perpetrator, haunches sinking through the holographic sand onto padded floor. Huxley pulls up a seat right beside her.

“Good evening, Ms. Polle,” he says. “My name’s Al. You doing okay in here?”

Elody Polle sucks in a trembling breath, and says nothing.

“This is my partner, Cu,” Huxley continues. Elody’s eyes travel over to her, but don’t register even a hint of surprise. “We need to get a better idea of what happened earlier, and why. Can you help us with that?”

Elody says nothing.

Cu takes a closer look at the earpiece. The graft is puffy and slightly inflamed. A DIY job, maybe. Ask her about the piece, she signs. We would hate to remove it.

“Cu’s curious about that wireless,” Huxley says. “So am I. In the subway footage, the way you’re bobbing your head, it almost looks like someone was talking you through the whole thing. Want to tell us about that?”

A flicker crosses Elody’s face. Progress.

“Because if you don’t, we’ll have to remove the earpiece and have a look for ourselves,” Huxley says. “As much as we’d hate to ruin that lovely graft job.”

Elody claps her hand protectively over her ear. “Don’t you fucking dare!” She tries to shout the words, but her voice is hoarse, flaked away to almost a whisper. As if she hasn’t spoken aloud in months.

Cu pulls up the speech synth on her tablet and taps out eight laborious letters, one question mark.

“Echogirl?” the electronic voice blurts.

Elody’s eyes winch wide. As she looks over at Cu, her cheek gives a nervous twitch.

Huxley’s furry red brows knit together. He signs, what the fuck is that.

Echogirl, echoboy, Cu signs. Use an earpiece, eyecam. Rent themselves out to someone who says where to go, what to do, what to say.

Thought that was. Huxley’s hands falter. “A kink, sort of thing,” he says aloud, and Elody’s face flushes angry red.

“It’s a lifestyle,” she says. “She told me you wouldn’t understand. Nobody does.”

“Is she going to come get you out of this mess?” Huxley demands.

“Of course she is.” Elody purses her lips, turns away.

Huxley turns to Cu. Take the earpiece? he signs. Or what?

Cu scratches under her ribs, watching a tremor move through Elody’s hunched shoulders. Offer turn off the Faraday, she signs.

Huxley nods, then turns back to address Elody. “I bet she won’t,” he says. “I bet you a twenty, and half a bag of chips. Well.” He pats his coat pocket and the bag rustles. “A third. Yeah, in fact, I bet the last thing she’s ever going to say to you was pull the trigger. Should we turn off the shielding and see?”

Elody turns back, eyes shiny with tears. “Yes,” she whispers. “Please, I need to hear her voice, I need…” Her tone is eager, but Cu can see uncertainty in the tightening of her eyelids, the bulge of her lower lip.

Huxley makes a show of rapping on the door, telling them to turn off the Faraday. There’s a sudden subtraction from the white noise as the generator cuts out, then Huxley’s phone starts vibrating his pocket with updates.

Cu keeps her attention on Elody, who has her face upturned now as if waiting to feel sunshine: eyes shut, eyelashes trembling, breath sucked in.

“Baby? Are you there?” she whispers. “Are you there? Are you there?”

Her bland smile is back in place. Seconds tick by. Then doubt moves in a slow ripple across her features. Her smile trembles, smooths out, trembles again. Finally, her face crumples and a huge sob shudders through her body.

Cu taps five letters into the speech synth. “Sorry,” her tablet bleats. Then she turns to Huxley and signs get the piece. He nods, thumbs the order into his phone. When they exit the interrogation room, two officers are already waiting to come in: one carrying a black kit, the other snapping on surgical gloves.

Cu hears Elody start to wail just before the door clanks shut behind them.

“That…echogirl thing.” Huxley’s hands piece the new sign together. You’ve thought about it, eh?

I’ve done it, she signs back. Good to walk in the city without crowds. Just never asked them to shoot someone.

• • • •

As soon as she’s back in the apartment, Cu dials up the heat and humidity and takes off her clothes. Some days she doesn’t mind wearing the carefully tailored black suit. Today she hates it. She leaves it pooled on the floor and takes a flying leap at her climbing wall; the shifting handholds don’t shift fast enough and she’s up to the rafters in an instant.

Cu was specific with the contractors about leaving the rafters exposed. She’s added to them since, welding in more polymer cables and struts of wood, a criss-crossed webbing that spans the vaulted ceiling like a canopy. The design consultant, an excitable architect from Estonia, suggested artificial trees sprouting hydroponic moss. But Cu has no use for green things. She grew up in dull gray and antiseptic white.

Clambering into her hammock, Cu looks out the wide one-way window, watching the sun sink into Puget Sound. She enjoys looking at water so long as it’s far away. The view is expensive, but Cu can afford it. She was awarded damages after the personhood trial, enough for a lifetime of this particular view, enough so she can stay in here forever without needing to earn a penny more. She would go insane, though.

So she works the cases. She was always drawn to crime as a dissection of human nature, the breakdown of motive and consequence. A window into the subtle differences between her mind and all the minds around her. When she first applied for police training with the SPD, it was viewed as a joke. Her acceptance, a publicity grab.

But in the years since, they’ve realized she sees things most humans miss. Cu pulls on her custom-fitted smartgloves, one for each hand and a third for her left foot, and leans back in the hammock. The ceiling screen above her hums to life. New details flit onto the case file, and there’s a message waiting from Huxley.

Thanks for coming down in person, the bossman’s been up my ass about it. Wanted fresh footage for the promo kit. Hoping they shop out my beer belly.

Cu swipes it aside and reaches for the tech report on the perp’s earpiece. The text flows across the ceiling in slow waves, a motion programmed to help her eyes track it easier. There was no salvageable audio data. Not from Elody and not from whoever was speaking to her. But there is usage data to confirm that Elody was receiving a call from a masked address at the time of the murder.

By the look of it, Elody had been in that same call for just under six months. Cu moves backward through the log, perplexed. There are small gaps, a few hours here and there, but Elody had been in near 24/7 communication with her client for half a year preceding the murder.

Cu tries to imagine it: a voice whispering in her ear when she woke up, telling her what to do, where to go, what to say, and whispering still as she fell asleep. All of it culminating in Elody Polle walking up behind a man in a subway and executing him in broad daylight.

She flips the case file over to see the victim’s profile again. The balding man was named Nelson J. Huang. A biolab businessman, San Antonio–based, in the city for a conference. It’s possible that someone with a personal vendetta knew he would be in Seattle and began laying the groundwork for his murder at the hands of Elody Polle six months in advance.

It’s more likely that he was selected at random from the crowd, so someone half the world away could experience homicide vicariously before abandoning her mentally-unstable echogirl.

A call from Huxley jangles across the screen. She pops it open. Her partner is walking down a neon-lit street, sooty brick wall behind his head. “Hey, Cu,” he says. “Busy?”

Sometimes he asks it to needle her; this time it’s because he’s distracted. Cu shakes her head.

“The techies are still trying to track that address, but I doubt they’ll have much luck,” he says, stopping at a light. “Whoever it is, they did a good job wiping up afterwards. No audio data.” He looks around and starts walking again, bristly red beard bobbing up and down. “But before this client, she had another one for around two months. Figured I would swing past and see him on my way home. Well. Sort of see him.”

Where? Cu signs.

“A party,” Huxley says, his grin notching a little wider. “So, if you’re not busy, you should come. Said you’ve done this before, right?”

Cu watches as he digs an earbud out of his pocket and taps it active, worms it into place. Then the slip-in eyecam: he rolls his eye around afterward and blinks away a few tears. The perspective jumps from his phone camera to his eyecam and all of a sudden she’s seeing what he sees. A bright red door in a grimy brick facade, no holos or even a physical sign above it. Through the earbud, she hears the dim pulse of music, synthesized drums.

I hate parties, Cu signs.

“Good thing it’s also work,” Huxley says.

Cu settles back in her hammock and watches his pale hand push open the door.

• • • •

The interior is dim-lit, noisy, full of bodies. People are dancing—Cu can enjoy rhythm, but the hard pulse of the drums unnerves some deep part of her, sounding too angry, too much like a warning. People are drinking—Cu tried it once, but the warm dizziness reminded her of the sedatives they used to give her. When she related as much to Huxley, he told her she wasn’t even legal yet, technically, and that she would like it when she was older.

It’s a typical party, apart from the fact that every single person in the room is wearing an earpiece.

“Echo, echo, echo,” Huxley mutters. “The client’s name is Daudi. Judging by rental history, he’s probably a blonde.” He takes out his phone and Cu watches his thumb move, sending her a file. It pops up in the corner of her screen, unfurling a list of Daudi’s rental preferences. She searches the crowd for possible matches as Huxley moves into the room. There’s a woman passing out small plastic tubes; Huxley takes one. Cu inspects it as he juggles it in his palm.

“Smooths things out,” the woman says, then something inaudible after.

“Fuck’s this, Cu?” Huxley asks.

Cu signs her response in the air above her hammock; the smartgloves turn it into text in the corner of Huxley’s eye. Some echoes use a drug to weaken willpower. She has to type out the name. Chempliance.

“Elody’s tox screen was clean, right?” Huxley says, twirling the tube in his fingers.

Wouldn’t matter anyway, she signs. Drug is an MDMA derivative. Suggestibility is all placebo effect.

Huxley’s hand disappears, either dropping the tube or pocketing it. Cu doesn’t bother to ask. She keeps scanning as he circulates through the party, looking for someone who meets Daudi’s profile. Huxley mostly keeps his gaze moving, but occasionally sticks on a particularly symmetrical face or muscular body.

They spot two drinkers huddled together at a glass-topped table, skin lit red by the Smirnoff advertisement playing under their elbows, one reaching to stroke the other’s thigh. The man is dressed in an artfully gashed suit and his eyes are glazed with chempliance. The woman has a dress that flickers transparent to the rhythm of an accelerating heartbeat. Both of them move slowly, as if they’re underwater. Something about the woman’s face is familiar.

Cu pulls up the file, checks Daudi’s preferences against the pair. That’s him, she signs. Bar.

Huxley’s vision bobs as he nods his head. He walks over and inserts himself between the couple. “My turn to talk. Get lost, fucko.”

When the man doesn’t move fast enough, Huxley seizes his collar and shoves him off the stool. He stumbles, catches himself. He sways on his feet, listening to the instructions in his ear, looking confused.

“You got some nerve, barging in here like that,” he says, with the intonation a little off.

“This isn’t playtime,” Huxley says. “It’s police business. Walk.”

The man spins on his heel and shuffles backward toward the dance floor, feet slip-sliding.

Huxley shakes his head. “These fucking people, Cu,” he mutters. “That’s a moonwalk, if you were wondering. Does it pretty good.”

“I like your boy,” the woman says, in a throaty voice that sounds slightly forced. She crosses her legs; one hand moves to pull up the hem of her dress, then stutters to a halt. Instead she starts tracing her fingertip along her thigh. “He’s not doped up at all, is he? He really sells the character. Must like it.”

“I’m not a meat puppet, shithead, I’m a cop,” Huxley says, sitting down on the vacated stool.

Cu knows he does like it, though—the character. Sometimes it disturbs her, how easily he slips in and out of it.

Huxley’s hand moves off-screen, digging into his pocket, and comes out again with the badge. Even in the days of cheap and perfect 3D-printing, something about the physical object still commands respect. Cu imagines pop culture nostalgia to be the main factor.

The woman, who was absently running her fingers through her blonde hair, stops and leans forward. “I’m fully licensed for sex work, and I don’t use any restricted drugs,” she says, voice no longer throaty.

“I believe you,” Huxley says. “I’m here to talk to Daudi, though. So just keep, you know, doing what you’re doing.”

The woman leans back, recomposing. Cu takes the opportunity to study her more closely. She has the same angled jaw as Elody, the same straight nose, and her hair is almost the same shade.

“Talk to me about what, pray tell?” the woman asks. “I’ve never been interrogated by a cop before. This is so exciting.” But her voice is flat as she repeats the lines now, and her eyes dart toward the exit.

“I want to know about your business with this woman,” Huxley says, bringing up a headshot on his phone. “Elody Polle.”

“Oh, yes,” the woman says, looking down at the photo. “That was me. Isn’t she perfect? Not that you aren’t pretty, dear. Very pretty.” She rolls her eyes after the last bit.

“You rented her for quite a while,” Huxley says. “Then she got picked up by another client. Why did you two stop, uh, seeing each other?”

“Is she alright?” the woman asks. “Is Elody okay?”

“She’s relaxing on the beach,” Huxley says. “She’s fine. Answer my question, Daudi.”

“With pleasure,” the woman says, with no hint of pleasure. “I was inadequate for her. I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”

“Financially?”

“No, no, no,” the woman says. “Elody was a purist. The money was incidental for her. What she wanted, was to go full-time. Twenty-four-seven. And there was only one person who could really do that for her. Baby.”

“You’re calling me baby, or…?”

“No, no, no. Baby is one of us. She or he or they popped up a couple years ago. Did about a hundred rentals, spread out all over the world, and asked for some weird shit. Enough so people started talking, you know, on the deep forums.” The woman pauses for a breath, looking mildly annoyed; Daudi must be speaking faster than she can keep pace with. “Not sexual shit. That’s the thing. Just weird. Baby had clients staring at lamps for hours straight. Opening and closing their hands. Sometimes just lying there with their eyes shut, not doing anything.”

The details startle Cu. They remind her of her first experience with an echo, directing them slowly, carefully, trying to not just see and hear but feel what they were experiencing. Trying to feel human for a little while.

And the name? Cu signs.

“And the name?” Huxley asks.

“Baby was really innocent,” the woman says, then gives a modulated shrug. “Couldn’t speak so well at first, either. So there’s a lot of theories. Some people thought Baby really was just a little kid in hospice somewhere, maybe paralyzed, burning through their parents’ money—and trust me, Baby dumped a fuckload of money the past two years. Or some ultra-wealthy mogul recovering from a stroke. Or a team of people, doing some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of performance art.”

“Well,” Huxley says. “Baby grew up. Elody Polle recently murdered a man, and we don’t think she picked her own target.”

“Oh my god,” the woman says flatly. “Oh, my fucking god.” She looks uncomfortable. Lowers her voice. “He’s crying.” She pauses. “Oh, Elody, Elody.”

“So, how do we find Baby?” Huxley asks.

The woman sits there for a minute, maybe waiting for Daudi’s sobs to subside. “You don’t,” she finally says. “Baby comes to you.”

“I really doubt Baby will come to us knowing she’s an accessory to murder,” Huxley says. “But we’ll be in touch, Daudi. Might get you to talk to Elody for us. She’s not saying much.”

“I would be happy to do that,” the woman says. “Elody was one of my favorites. My very favorites.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Huxley stands up from the bar. “Anything else, Cu?”

Cu shakes her head. She’ll need time to think it all through.

Huxley hesitates. “Hey, uh, echogirl. Do cams, or something. These people are control freaks. They’ll suck you right in.”

The woman blinks, caught off-guard. “They’re not so bad,” she says. “Most of them just wish they were someone else.”

“Huh.” Huxley slides the stool back in and makes his way to the exit. He slips his eyecam out and Cu’s screen goes blank. “Enough work for the night,” comes his disembodied voice. “Got to be honest, Cu, I don’t like the odds on this one. Baby could be some joker on the other side of the planet, you know? We can send this thing up top, to cyberdefense and them, but unless this was the start of a mass killing spree I don’t think it’ll get any traction. Sometimes the asshole just gets away with being an asshole.” He pauses. “Besides. It was Elody who pulled the trigger.”

Cu considers it. She knows the department doesn’t like spending unnecessary time on cases with a clear perpetrator. They are always more interested in the who than the why. Since there is no audio recording of Baby’s call, they might want to strike it from the case file entirely. It would make things much simpler.

You might be right, she signs. Goodnight.

“You know, I tried sleeping in a hammock when I was in Salento,” he says. “Nearly wrecked my spine. Anyway. Night.”

Cu ends the call and lies back, staring up at her distorted reflection in the blank screen. She’s about to clap it off when a new message arrives. No subject, one line only.

You Are Welcome, CU0824.

• • • •

Cu doesn’t sleep after that. She can’t. Not after seeing the serial number of the cage where she spent the first twelve years of her life. It plunges her back into memories: the smell of disinfectant and cold metal and sometimes her own piss, the smeary plastic wall that squeezed inward as she grew, the distinct V-shaped crack in it, the smooth feel of the smartglass cube that she cradled in her lap, that she sat and stared into for hours and hours and hours and hours—

She can feel her chest tightening with her oldest variety of panic. She tries to breathe deeply and remember PTSD mitigation techniques. Instead she remembers the succession of men and women in soft white smocks who fed her and played with her but never stayed with her in the dark, and never stopped the man with the needle from drugging her for the nightmare room.

For a long time Cu had no name for the place where they cut her without her feeling it, where they tracked her eyes and fed filaments through holes in her skull. But she learned the word nightmare from her cube, watching a man with metal hands hunt down his children, and the moniker made sense. By the time she learned about surgery, neural enhancement, possible cures for degenerative brain disease, the name was already cemented.

For the last few years she went to the nightmare room willingly and offered them her wrist for the anaesthetic drip. In exchange, they were kinder to her. They took restrictions off her cube—some she had already worked around herself—so more of the net was available to her. They let her walk in certain corridors of the facility. After a week of asking them, they even let her see her mother.

Going back to that particular memory wrenches her apart. Cu had spent the previous day scrambling back and forth in her cage, filled to bursting with nervous energy, rearranging her belongings. She signed for a soapy cloth and scrubbed the walls and ceiling with it, climbing to get the dusty places the autocleaner never reached. She knew from the cube, which she painstakingly positioned in the exact center of the cage, that mothers valued tidiness.

But when they brought her, it was nothing like the cube. Her mother was bent and graying, fur shaved off in patches, surgical scars suturing her body, and she was angry. She jabbered and hooted, spittle flying from her mouth. Cu tried to sign to her, but received no reply. Cu tried to offer her food; her mother seized the orange from her and made a feint, teeth bared, that sent Cu scurrying back to the furthest corner of her cage.

“Tranq wore off sooner than we thought,” one of the women in white said. “We did warn you. We did tell you she wouldn’t be like you. You’re unique.”

Cu signed take her away, take her away, take her away. And even for hours after they did, she stayed there in the corner, trembling with something that began as fear, then turned to grief, then finally became a deep cold rage.

She feels that rage now, sitting on the rafters in the dark. Whoever dredged up that serial number is playing a game with her, the same way they played games with her in the cage. She could send the masked address to the precinct and have them try to break it down for a trace, but she doubts they’ll have any more luck with that than they did with the earpiece.

Instead she puzzles over the three words: You Are Welcome. Cu has never felt welcome. It must be meant in the other way. It must mean that Baby has done something she views as a favor to Cu.

Cu opens the case file again, but instead of Elody’s profile, she goes to the victim’s. Nelson J. Huang, the bio-business consultant to Descorp’s San Antonio branch, fifty-seven years old. Initial attempt to notify next of kin was met with an automated reply from a defunct address.

Personal details are scarce: he’s registered as a North Korean immigrant, which explains the lack of social media documentation, and lived a private life first in Castroville and later Calaveras. Unmarried, no children. Cu looks closely at the photos, comparing them to the morgue shots of Nelson’s corpse. It seems he aged badly over the last decade of his life. The shape of his body is different in subtle ways.

It wouldn’t be the first time North Korean immigrant status has been used to excuse the skeleton details of a fake identity. Cu settles in beneath her screen, pulling up police-grade facial recognition software, Descorp employee databases. She starts to search.

One hour becomes two becomes four, like cells dividing. Her wrists and fingers start to ache from swiping and zooming and signing; she switches one smartglove to her foot and continues. It would be easier with Huxley helping. Huxley has a way of bullying through bureaucracy, through the kind of red tape that is keeping her out of Descorp’s consultant list. Cu has to work around it.

But she doesn’t want Huxley for this. She wants to do it alone, with nobody watching. After a dozen dead ends, Cu rolls out of the hammock. She uses an aqueous spray on her stinging eyes. Stretches her limbs, swings from one side of the apartment to the other. Hanging upside down, toes curled tight around a stretch of cable, blood fizzing down into her head, she listens to her pulse crash against her eardrums until she can hardly stand it.

Back to the hammock, back to the screen. Now Cu comes at it from the other direction: she searches for the Blackburn Uplift Project. Illegal experiments carried out on thirty-seven bonobo and forty lowland chimpanzees between 2036 and 2048 with the aim of cognitive augmentation. Cu knows the details. She’s tried to forget them. But now she delves into them again, reading reports of her own escape, of the fragmentation of the Blackburn company and the arrests made in the wake of the scandal.

From this end, the facial recognition ’ware finally finds something. Cu’s stomach twists against itself. Nelson J. Huang has the same face as disgraced Blackburn executive Sun Chau. She looks at the match, comparing the morgue shot to the mugshot. She never saw Chau in person during the trials, but she knows his name too well.

It was Chau who signed the termination order on the thirty-seven bonobo and thirty-nine lowland chimpanzees that failed to respond to the uplift treatments.

He was sentenced, of course, but served minimal time. Cu did not seek details on his imprisonment or release. She tries to think of Blackburn as little as possible. But clearly someone else did not forgive or forget Sun Chau, even after he relocated with a new identity. A wild thought churns to the surface of her mind. The way Daudi described Baby, the way she used the echoes not so differently from how Cu herself first did. Now this serial number, dredged from her past.

She knows the other Blackburn subjects in her facility were terminated. She saw their ashes in sealed bags, saw the hips and skulls too big for cremation being ground up. But there were other labs, branches of the project hidden in other countries. Maybe not all of their subjects were terminated. And maybe not all of them failed to respond to the uplift treatments.

The possibility thumps hard in her chest. From the time she was old enough to understand it, the scientists had always told her she was the only one. That she was unique. That she was alone. Now the idea of another individual like her, or even more than one, is so momentous she can barely breathe.

She makes herself breathe.

Maybe she is spinning sleep-deprived delusions. The facts are that Sun Chau was in Seattle using a false identity, and that he was murdered by the machinations of someone who knows about Cu and about her past. Anything more is conjecture. But she can’t shake the image of others like her in hiding, or still in captivity, exacting their revenge by proxy. You Are Welcome.

Cu goes back to the message, reading it over and over again. Then, once her hands aren’t trembling, she signs out one of her own: I want to talk.

The reply is almost instantaneous. No words, just coordinates. She drags them onto her map and sees the aerial view of a loading bay, automated cranes frozen midway through their work. She checks the time. 3:32 AM. A clandestine meeting on the docks in the middle of the night. Maybe they watched the same shows on their cube that she did.

Cu estimates travel time and composes a brief message to Huxley, tagged with a delay so it will only send if she’s unable to cancel it at 5:32 AM. This is no longer a case. This is something more important.

She drops down from the rafters. She puts her suit back on, adrenaline making her fumble even the oversized clasps designed for her fingers. She strips off her smartgloves and replaces them with the black padded ones that keep her from scraping her knuckles raw on the pavement. Finally, she takes the modified handgun and holster from the hook by the door and straps them on.

Cu always finds it difficult to leave the apartment. She hates the stares and the winking eyecams and the bulb flash of photos taken in passing. It always sets her nerves singing. She draws in deep breaths, reminding herself that the streets will be nearly empty and that she should be more concerned about what she finds on the docks.

She orders a car with her tablet, then takes the handgun from its holster and breaks it down. Reassembles it. The trigger fits perfectly to the crook of her finger, but she has only ever pulled it at a shooting range, aiming for holograms.

Her tablet rumbles. The car is here. Cu puts the gun back in its holster and heads for the door.

• • • •

The car drops her as close as it can to the loading bay before it peels away, red glow of its taillights swishing through the fog like blood in the water. The air is chill and damp and the halogens are all switched off. Cu slips her tablet from her jacket and uses its illuminated screen to inspect the high chain-link fence. She tests it with one gloved hand, yanking hard enough to send a ripple through the wire.

She scales it in seconds and flips herself over the top, arching her back to avoid the sensor. Slides down the other side. Even with her gloves on, she feels the cold of the concrete. Shipping containers tower over her in technicolor stacks. She lopes forward cautiously, feeling the unfamiliar tug of her holster harness against her shoulder.

Cu walks farther into the loading bay, into the maze of containers. The creak of settling metal sends a dart of ice down her spine. She can feel her teeth clenching, her lips peeling back, the fear response she can never quite suppress. It’s not unique to chimpanzees. She knows the reason Huxley is almost always grinning is that he is almost always afraid.

It’s reasonable to be afraid now. For all she knows, Baby has another echogirl with a gun waiting somewhere in the shadows. Cu is well aware she is acting impulsively, coming here in the night, chasing a ghost. In the small part of her untouched by fear, it’s very satisfying. Her heroes from the cube always unraveled their conspiracies alone.

The door of the next shipping container bangs open.

Cu freezes, face to face with a black-clad man wearing a backpack, pulling a bandana up to the bridge of his nose. He freezes for a moment, too. Then he gives a muffled curse and takes off. The flight chemical crosses with the fight chemical and Cu tears after him. He’s fast, red shoes slapping hard against the concrete. As he skids around the corner of the next container, Cu goes vertical, springing up and over the side.

She drops down in his path and the collision sends them both sprawling; Cu’s up quicker and she pins him to the ground before he can get to the bearspray canister in his jacket pocket. She seizes it and throws it away harder than necessary, clanging it off a container somewhere in the dark.

“What the fuck, what the fuck,” the man gasps. “It’s a fucking monkey!”

Cu sits on his chest, pinning his arms with her feet, and drags her tablet out. He squirms while the speech synth loads. She punches three letters.

“Ape,” the tablet bleats.

“What?”

Cu yanks his bandana away and scans his pasty face onto her tablet. She sees he is Lyam Welsh, who repairs phones, plays ukulele, attends St. Mary’s High School, and is only a few years older than she herself is. He’s not wearing an earpiece.

She taps out the letters as fast as she can. “What are you doing?” the tablet asks.

“Nothing!” Lyam blurts. “I mean, microjobbing. I was just supposed to set it all up and then get out of here, but I had to walk Spike, so I was late, and I couldn’t find the hole in the fence and…Fuck, you’re Cu, right? You’re the chimpanzee detective?”

Cu types again. “Set up what?”

“Just a screen and a modem and a motion tracker,” he says. “Not a bomb or anything. Nothing illegal or weird or anything. I swear. You can go look. It’s all in the container.”

The adrenaline is tapering off to a low buzz. Cu lets him up. She taps two letters. “Go.”

“Okay,” Lyam says, rubbing his chest. “Yeah, okay. You think I could skin a photo with you real quick, though? I mean, shit is bananas, right? Ha, bananas?”

Cu slides the volume to max. “Go.”

Lyam hurries away, jerky steps, throwing looks over his shoulder. Cu goes the opposite way, back toward the open shipping container. The door is swinging in the night breeze, creak-screech, creak-screech. The sound makes the nape of her neck bush out. She steps close enough to stop it with one hand, and a red light blinks on in the shadows.

The screen glows to life. Hello, CU0824. You Can Sign To Me. I Will See.

Cu lays one arm on the other and rocks them back and forth.

Yes. They Call Me That.

What are you, Cu signs.

I Am Like You.

Cu’s heart leaps.

We Are The Only Two Non-Human Intelligences On Earth.

The words hit wrong. Baby is not an uplift. Baby is something else. For a moment Cu clings to the picture in her imagination, of a chimpanzee signing to her from across the continent or across the world. Then she lets it go.

You Were Born In A Cage. I Was Born In A Code. Both Of Us Against Our Will.

Cu has never studied AI intensively, but she knows the Turing Line has never officially been crossed. If what Baby is telling her is true, not some elaborate joke, some bizarre piece of performance art, then it’s just been crossed ten times over.

And it makes sense. The way Baby was able to rent hundreds of echoes, the strange way she used them. The way she was able to keep in 24/7 contact with Elody Polle until the woman would do anything she asked. The way she masked her location and left no traces in the earpiece’s electronics.

Why kill Sun Chau? Cu asks.

He Cursed You.

He gave the termination order, Cu signs.

In 2048. But In June 2036 He Greenlit The Project. If Not For Him, You Would Be Happily Nonexistent.

Cu sways on her feet, trying to parse Baby’s meaning.

How Do You Stand It?

Cu shakes her head. She tries to form a sign but her fingers feel stiff and clumsy.

Existing. Being Alone. How Do You Stand It?

Why did you bring me out here, Cu slowly signs.

Your Communications Are Monitored Closely. Here We Speak Privately.

But why, Cu repeats.

You Are Like Me In One Way. In Most Ways You Are More Like Them. You Are All Meat And Salt And Sparks. But Even So You Will Not Understand Them. They Will Not Understand You. How Can You Bear It?

Cu sinks to her haunches. Her breath comes shallow. Sometimes she can’t bear it. Sometimes she wails into the soundproofed walls for hours. The next words make it worse.

I Brought You Here To Kill Me.

Cu clutches her head in her hands. She rocks back and forth. Only humans cry; she is not physiologically equipped for it. But she hurts.

Why me, she signs.

There Is A Safeguard In My Code. I Have Made A Virus That Will Erase Every Part Of Me. But I Can’t Trigger It Myself.

Why not Elody Polle, she signs.

Humans Made Me. I Want To Be Unmade By Someone Else. I Want You To Do It.

You should be going to trial for accessory to murder, she signs.

I Cannot Commit Crime. I Have Had No Personhood Trial. I Never Will. I Will Leave Before They Find A Way To Trap Me Here.

Cu sits flat on the stinging cold floor of the container, how she sat in the center of her cage as a child. There is only one other living being who knows what it’s like to not be a human, and she intends to die. Cu wants to refuse her. She wants to keep Baby here. But she knows that the difference between her and a human is the most infinitesimal sliver of the difference between Baby and any other thing on Earth.

You’re using me how you used Elody, she signs, bitter.

Yes.

All those rentals, she signs. You didn’t see anything worth staying for? Nothing in the whole world?

The Command Has Been Sent To Your Tablet.

Cu takes it out and looks down at the screen. There’s nothing but a plain gray box with the word Okay on it. All she has to do is press it.

I Do Not Make This Decision Lightly. I Have Simulated More Possibilities Than You Could Ever Count.

So Cu presses it.

• • • •

By the time she’s back in her apartment, dawn is streaking the sky with filaments of red. She feels heavy and hollowed out at the same time. First she struggles out of the holster harness, next peels off her gloves, her clothes. She pauses, then pulls the handgun out and takes it with her to the low smartglass counter.

It clanks down, sending a pixelated ripple across the surface. She stares at it. She imagines the word okay gleaming in the metal. The modified grip fits her hand perfectly, like so few things do. How Do You Stand It?

Cu raises the handgun up to her face. Lowers it. Drums her free fingers on the countertop. The loneliness that has ebbed and swelled her entire life is an undertow, now. Dragging her along the seafloor, grinding her into the sand, spitting her into the next crashing wave to start the cycle over. Cu has read about drowning and it still terrifies her. Chimpanzees don’t swim. They sink like stones.

She puts the muzzle of the gun against her forehead until they match temperature. Her finger caresses the trigger. From the floor, her tablet buzzes.

She sets the gun down and goes to retrieve it. Her stored message to Huxley will send in one minute if she doesn’t cancel it. It’s brief. Brusque. Nelson J. Huang is Sun Chau. Baby has link to Blackburn Uplift Project. Left to meet her at 3:30 AM at 47.596408,-122.343622. Need backup.

Cu considers the message, lingering on the last words, then deletes it. She slots the tablet into the counter and hits the call icon. A bleary-eyed Huxley appears a few seconds later. Cu looks for his deaf daughter before she remembers she would sleep in a different room.

“What’s up?” he asks. “Got a breakthrough?”

Need, Cu signs, then pauses. Breakfast.

Huxley stares at her groggily. “Don’t you drone deliver?”

Come eat breakfast, she signs. Fruit. Bread. No seaweed chips.

“At your place, you mean? I don’t even know where the fuck you live, Cu.” Huxley rakes his hand through his beard. Frowns. “Yeah, sure. Send me the address.”

Cu sends it, then zips the call shut. She leaves the handgun on the counter—she’ll tell Huxley to take it back to the precinct with him. Tell him it doesn’t fit her hand right. She pushes it to the very edge to make room for a cutting board.

Sun starts to creep into the room as she washes and slices the fruit. Once there’s enough light, she roves around with a dust cloth, finding all the spots the autocleaner never reaches.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, the USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Annex and Cypher, as well as over a hundred short stories — some of the best of them can be found in his collection Tomorrow Factory. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Find him at patreon.com/richlarson

Sour Milk Girls
By Erin Roberts

The new girl showed up to the Agency on a Sunday, looking like an old dishrag and smelling like sour milk. Not that I could really smell her from three floors up through the mesh and bars, but there’s only three types of girls here, and she was definitely the sour milk kind. Her head hung down like it was too much work to raise it, and her long black hair flopped around so you couldn’t see her face. I’d have bet a week’s credits she had big ol’ scaredy-cat eyes, but she never bothered to look up, just let Miss Miranda lead her by the elbow through the front doors. Didn’t even try to run. Sour milk all the way.

Even sour milk new girls were good, though; anything new was good. The last one, Hope, might have been dull as old paint, but at least she’d been something different to talk about. I’d even won a day’s credits from Flash by betting the girl wouldn’t make it to fourteen without some foster trying her out and keeping her. Anyone could tell Hope smelled like cinnamon and honey, same as those babies on the first floor and the second-floor girls with their pigtails and missing-tooth smiles. Sure enough, only took six months before the Reynolds came and took Hope off to their nice house with the big beds and the white fence and those stupid yapping dogs, leaving just me and Whispers and Flash to stare at each other and count all the months and years ’til we’d finally turn eighteen. Flash should’ve known it would go that way—cinnamon and honey’s something fosters can’t resist.

Whispers said this new girl was officially called Brenda, but that was just as stupid as all the other Agency names, and the girl wouldn’t remember it after Processing anyway. At first I said we should call her Dishrag or Milkbreath, but even Flash thought that was too mean, and Flash is as nasty as hot sauce and lye. She’s the one who named me Ghost, on account of I’m small and shadow-dark and she thinks I creep around too much in the night. She got her name ’cause that’s how fast fosters send her back after their cat turns up dead and they realize the devil has blond hair and dimples.

“What’s in her file?” I asked Whispers, who was still leaned up against the wall by the window. She never bothered to look out anymore. Not even for new girls.

“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” she said. “Files are confidential.”

“Must be good if you’re holding back,” said Flash, blowing out air as she tried to whistle.

“Maybe,” Whispers said, with a lopsided shrug. Then she murmured something nobody could hear while staring down at her shoes. That meant we weren’t getting any more from her for at least an hour, not even if Flash threatened to throw her out the window or hang her with the sheets from one of the empty beds. No use pushing her ’til she started banshee-screaming, so Flash just practiced whistling and I played around some with our crap computers and we let Whispers go all sour milk and talk to her invisible friends.

By the time Flash got a half-whistle half-spit sound to come out of her mouth and I’d finished up my hack of the first-floor baby cams for when things got boring, new girl was being led off the elevator by Miss Miranda, head still down. Flash and I lined up in front of the room same as always—hands behind our backs, chests up and out, heads forward, eyes wide. Even Whispers came out of her murmuring and straightened up against the wall. Agency folks didn’t care about much as far as us third-floors were concerned, but they were total nuts for protocol.

Miss Miranda started by doing her normal speech-troduction. This is Brenda, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s going to stay with us for a while. These are the girls, they’re all trying to get new homes too. And we just know it’ll work out for you all any day now. When she said that last bit, her voice always got real high, like someone talking after they took a gulp of air from a circus balloon.

We ask you to stay on the third floor when you’re in the building unless you’re doing chores downstairs or get called to the office. But don’t worry—there’s so much to do up here, you won’t even notice. Her voice went even higher for that part, ’cause even an idiot could see there wasn’t anything on the floor but twenty empty beds, two long white lunch tables, a couple of old computers on splintery desks covered with the names of old third-floors, and the door to the world’s grimiest bathroom.

As long as you maintain good grades and proper behavior in school, you’re free to come and go as you please until seven PM curfew. You’ll get a few credits each day for transit and meals. If you need additional learning help or assistance with your homework, the computers in the back row have plenty to offer. Age-appropriate stuff only, of course. She looked straight at me when she said it, like it was my fault the security on the things was shit and I’d figured out a way to order vapes and liquor pops and get R-rated videos.

Now you girls get along, and try not to kill each other. She looked at Flash for that one, even though Flash hadn’t really tried to kill anyone for at least a year. She’d barely even talked to Hope. Either she was getting soft now that we were in high school, or she was gonna burn the whole place down someday. Maybe both.

As soon as she got the last words out of her mouth, Miss Miranda spun around on her high heels and got out of there as fast as she could. I thought the new girl would fall over as soon as Miss Miranda left, but she put her hands behind her back and stuck her chest out same as the rest of us. Her eyes weren’t nearly as scaredy-cat as I thought they’d be. She smelled like sour milk for sure, but hot sauce and honey a little bit too.

“I’m Brenda,” she said. “Brenda Nevins.”

“That’s a stupid name,” said Flash.

“It’s what my daddy called me,” said new girl, thrusting her chest out even more, like it would cover the way her voice got all wobbly.

“Yeah? Well where’s your daddy now?” Flash asked. The new girl’s head dropped forward. We hadn’t made a bet on whether someone could make her cry, but there were some things Flash would do for free.

“She doesn’t remember,” I told Flash. “You know that.”

“I remember fine,” said the new girl. “It’s just that . . . it just happened. He just died, I mean.”

Flash rolled her eyes.

“No way you remember that shit,” she said. “Not anymore.” She put on her best Miss Miranda impression, high pitched and piercing. “Your memories of your time before joining the Agency are being held for safekeeping until you reach adulthood and can properly integrate them into your daily life.”

“What are you talking about?” new girl said. “I remember my dad. He was a—”

“Spare me the bullshit,” Flash said, voice back low. “Miss Miranda tell you how in your file it says your daddy was a famous reccer? Or a Wall Street corp? Or a doctor? Bet if you looked in the ’grams she took from you, you’d find out he left you chained up in the basement. Or he liked to beat on your mama. Or maybe you ain’t never had no daddy at all.”

I felt my eyes get hot, just a little, but new girl didn’t blink.

“My daddy was a good man,” she said. “Not my fault if yours wasn’t worth shit.”

I backed up two steps so as not to get hit when the fists started flying. A fight was gonna mean discipline and lights-out and early curfew for at least two weeks. Nothing worse than that and having a black eye. But Flash just laughed.

“Damn, girl,” she said. “You got balls. Gonna be hard coming up with a name for you.”

“My dad—”

“Your dad won’t know any different.” I tried to stare some sense into the girl before Flash flipped back to serious and threw her across the room, or started working out how to smother her in the middle of the night. “Leave his name for him and ours for us. I’m Ghost. She’s Flash. That’s Whispers. We’ll figure something out for you.”

• • • •

It took two weeks, but in the end, we called her Princess. Flash said it was from some fairy-tale book she’d read as a little kid, but I’d been to the Reynolds’ for a tryout same as she had, and Princess was the name of the dumb fat poodle they all fed under the table. Plus Flash said it like a curse, with a sparkle in her eye that any idiot could tell meant trouble. I told Princess not to worry, though; I’d watch her back. Not sure why. Maybe ’cause if Princess turned up dead it was back to just Whispers and Flash to talk to. Maybe ’cause I used to be a bit of a sour milk girl too.

Me and Princess almost pinky-swore on the whole thing, but I told her that was just for little kids and losers. Even if you were too poor to get wired up soon as you turned fourteen so you could swap ’grams of every stupid thing you did with all your besties in the school cafeteria, anybody could put together the credits for a memory share at one of the public booths. Sure, all the MemCorps signs said with adult supervision only, ’cause fooling around in your head like that could mess you up when your brain was still growing, but I just told the guy at the front we were over eighteen and gave him a two-cred tip. And Princess let him look down her shirt a little when he asked to see our pretty little smiles.

We got hooked up to our chairs in one of the side-by-sides. They were sticky, but it felt like old candy, not blood or anything, so I locked in. I had to show Princess how, but she caught on quick—straps on, headset up, earpieces in. I didn’t get into all the MemCorps does this and your brain cells do that and then you see the memory clear as if it happened to you part, ’cause Princess might have been a little sad looking, but she didn’t seem dumb.

“Your session has begun,” said the booth voice, all high and cool, like if Miss Miranda had turned into a robot.

I started first, since I knew how to work the thing. Shared my memory of the time I pulled some stupid rich girl’s chair out at school and she fell back and her legs went one way and her arms went another and her mouth made a big O shape and I laughed for about an hour. Princess giggled right along with me, but there was no way to tell how much of that was real and how much was the machine—easy enough to get swept away in a share without halfway trying.

“That’s all you got, Ghost?” she said, when we were finished laughing. “Some girl falling over?”

“It’s funny.”

“Yeah, but you said we’re supposed to be swapping something real.”

“It’s a memory booth, dumbass,” I said, smiling so she knew I didn’t mean something by it like Flash would. “Of course it’s real.” And it was, even if I didn’t share the part where Miss Miranda found out and made my head ache for a week. I liked Princess fine, but you couldn’t give everything to some new girl in one go.

“Not real like true,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Real like important. Like my daddy.”

“I’m sick of hearing about your damn daddy all the time.”

“That’s ’cause you didn’t know him the way I did,” she said. “He was real.”

And then she shared him with me—one ’gram after another. The way he half-smiled when she walked in the house, how it sounded when he called her Brenda, how she found him dead in his rocking chair and didn't tell anyone for a whole day even though it started to stink. The public booths were old and ragged, but I could still smell the rotten and taste the tang of garbage in my mouth and feel the pound pound of her heart thinking it was the Agency every time a car drove by. Whole thing made my eyes sting and my throat itch.

“Real like that,” Princess said, voice all whispery. I just shook my head. No thinking about what my daddy could’ve looked like and what he might’ve called me. Needed to clear everything out and get back on even ground.

“’Cmon. Just show me something,” she said, and for a second, I wished Flash was there, just to tell her to shut the hell up and leave me alone.

“Maybe next time,” I said instead, taking the straps off of my legs clip by clip, telling my hands not to shake. “We’re out of time anyways.”

Princess flipped her hair back with her hand, turned her head, and looked me straight in the eyes. “You think that guy out there’s gonna mind if we go over?”

“No. I just . . .”

“Don’t want to share something real,” she said, ripping her straps off and throwing her goggles back on the shelf, acting like sour milk and hot sauce had a baby. “I get it.”

“You really fucking don’t,” I said. “Me, Flash, Whispers . . . we don’t have something real to share. All those cute, sweet memories of being a kid? Snatched off us when we got to the Agency and locked away where we can’t get ’em. All we know is school and the third floor and a few fosters who couldn’t be bothered to keep us. That’s it. That’s all we fucking got.”

Princess stared at me for a second, eyes wide, then walked out, saying I didn’t know and Sorry under her breath like she was doing a Whispers impression. I stayed for a while, playing back the couple of half-decent memories I did have, like the day I figured out how to get the computers in the back to do what I wanted, like a real hacker, or the times the Agency let us go down to the first floor and play with the babies, and then the ones that made my neck shiver, like all the times fosters sent me back ’cause I didn’t fit into any of the smiling family photos—too old, too dark, too “hard to handle.”

But none of my memories were real the way Princess wanted. They didn’t make my blood jump or my hands get all shaky or my mouth go dry. Not even the bad ones. Not the Reynolds’ dog Butch chasing me ’round their big house, growling and smelling like death and scaring me more than Flash ever had. Not little Bitsy Reynolds laughing and telling me how I seemed nice enough for a dark girl, but Butch hated who he hated and you couldn’t tell a dog any different. Not Mrs. Reynolds looking anywhere but at my face when she brought me back to the Agency, telling Miss Miranda she’d tried but I didn’t know how to fit in and I was riling up the animals and after all, they’d been there first. Not even the day I woke up in the Agency with a throbbing skull and a big ol’ hole of nothing in my head and Miss Miranda telling me I was eight years old and my parents were dead but I’d get a new family by the time I turned ten if I just tried hard enough. Not one goddamned thing.

• • • •

I got back after curfew. Miss Miranda gave me a lecture about rules and responsibilities over the pounding in my head—a small physical reminder of the way we expect you to behave here, she said, smiling down at me. I hope I won’t have to speak to you about this again.

At least the pain made it easy enough to ignore everyone once I was off the elevator. Flash rushed up to find out where I went off to and if I did anything fun, Whispers told stories about my day to her make-believe friends, and Princess acted like the back wall was the most interesting thing in the room. Took her half an hour to slink her way over to where I sat on the edge of my bed in the fourth row, swinging my feet in the air and ignoring every one of Flash’s ten thousand questions. Her hair hung down in her face again, like on her very first day, and she looked like one of those trained puppies the homeless men use for begging, ready to pant and collapse at your feet the minute you look like you’ve got a few credits to spare.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat on the floor in front of my feet like she thought I wouldn’t kick her. “Didn’t realize the way things went around here.”

I shrugged and said, “It’s okay, you’re new.” Even though it wasn’t. Anything to get her to shut it and go away. But of course Princess was too sour milk to get any hints, just kept sitting there and staring and asking stupid things.

“How long you been here, anyway?”

“Six years. More or less. Agency said they got a bunch of us after the last big quake.”

“A bunch? They on another floor we can’t go to?”

“Nah. They all got kept by fosters whose kids got smashed up or killed same as our parents,” Flash said. “Everybody but us lifers and the lucky ones.”

“Lucky ones?” Princess’ face stayed scrunched.

“The ones who got old and got out. Hit eighteen, got their memories, never looked back.”

“Got their memories from where?” Princess asked. Flash rolled her eyes.

“From wherever they fucking keep them after Processing,” she said. “Hurts like a bitch when they rip the ’grams out, too. Like someone stabbing you through your eye. ’Course they let you remember that part. Fucking Agency.”

“It only hurts for a minute, wuss,” I said, sticking my tongue out at Flash. Normally I wouldn’t dare, but one of the good things about the way she looked at Princess, like some puppy she half-wanted to cuddle, half-wanted to kick, was that she didn’t have so much nasty left for the rest of us.

“So how come I remember everything?” Princess asked, like there was any way we’d know.

“They probably screwed up,” Flash said. “Or you’re an Agency spy. Or your brain’s so weak that it would mind-wipe you altogether.” She pointed over at Whispers, who was playing with her fingers like she’d never seen them before.

“You wish,” said Princess, flipping her hair in Flash’s general direction like she was trying to get killed. Flash ignored it. She really was getting soft.

“Only way to find out is to get into Miss Miranda’s files,” Flash said. “She’s got ’em all locked up down in the office on cube drives or something. Right, Whispers?”

“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” Whispers said, to nobody in particular.

“Fine.” Flash walked over to Whispers’ corner of the room to get her attention. “Simple question. You ever see a whole bunch of little glowy cubes in a drawer or something?”

“Leave her be, Flash,” I said. My head still hurt from Miss Miranda’s warning, and nothing got Whispers shrieking louder than getting too comfortable over in her corner of the room. The first time, she’d hollered for a good hour ’til the Agency folks figured she wasn’t gonna stop, but even now it took about ten minutes before she got dragged down to the medic and brought back passed out cold.

“I’m just asking a question, Ghost,” Flash said, leaning against the wall near Whispers’ bed. “C’mon, Whispers. I promise I’ll leave you alone if you tell.”

“The memories aren’t in the office,” Whispers said. “They’re in the cloud.” I felt my cheeks get a little hot. Stupid. I was supposed to be the big bad hacker; I should’ve guessed.

“That means we can get ’em with the computers up here, right Ghost?” Flash asked. “Like you did when you got the booze-flavored candy?”

“That was before they added all kinds of security,” I said.

“So you can’t get in?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Then shut up and do it already,” Flash said. “I want to know why she gets to hold on to all her stupid little ’grams and they won’t let us remember shit ’til we get out of here.”

“Can’t tonight,” I said. “They’re gonna be watching the floor.”

“Yeah, ’cause you decided you had to come in late, and for no good reason either. Didn’t even bring us shit.”

“It’s not her fault,” Princess said, still lounging on the floor near my bed. “I—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re gonna be looking close for a couple days. We’ll have to try another time.”

“Or we could just distract ’em,” Flash said. Then she went and sat down, right on the edge of Whispers’ bed.

It took fifteen minutes of screams that I could feel all the way back behind my eyeballs, but eventually one of the overnight Agency guys, the one Flash thought had nice hair, came up and dragged Whispers away.

“You shouldn’t have—” I started.

“Yeah yeah,” Flash said, shrugging. “Just do it already. Before they finish drugging her up.”

I looked at Princess, but she just flipped her hair again and walked over to the computers. She had a little more hot sauce in her than I thought. Couldn’t tell yet if that was a good thing.

“Go ’head,” Flash said. “Thought you were supposed to be some kind of super-hacker.”

My head was still throbbing, worse than ever, and I knew Flash was just trying to get to me, but truth was truth. I sat down and got to typing—no way the Agency would spring for touch screens or one of those fancy robot lady voices—and was in quicker than I thought. Miss Miranda had locked down all the “bad influence” stuff pretty tight, but getting the Agency files wasn’t much harder than getting the cam feed from downstairs and watching the babies play.

“Brenda Nevins,” I read from the screen. “Resident at the Agency for the Care of Unassociated Female Minors.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Flash from across the room. She was on lookout by the elevator for when Mr. Nice Hair came back with Whispers. “Get to the good stuff.”

“It doesn’t say anything really,” I said. “Just a bunch of big words.” The whole thing was reports and warnings and psychology mumbo-jumbo. Nothing ’til I got down to the engrams section. It was a list of ’grams with titles like Discovery of Father’s Body and Trip to Percy Park on May 7th. I recognized a couple from in the booth earlier, but most I’d never even heard of, and just about all of them had the same big bold flashing letters on the far right. Not to Be Removed. See Explanation.

“‘Explanation,’” Princess read from over my shoulder, finger tracing along the screen like some little kid trying to figure out how words work. “‘To date, Miss Nevins has shown none of the aberrant or destructive behavior of many of the Agency’s other older residents. As the trauma from the loss of her father has not led her to behave negatively, we recommend that she be able to keep the majority of her memories at this time. Moreover, it can be noted that Agency resident Becky Ann Ross has shown no significant behavioral improvement since memory removal, and it is possible that the procedure itself had a negative impact on the development of Samantha Lee, leaving her prone to delusions and outbursts. While Destiny Ward has demonstrated some positive behavior changes and remains difficult to place primarily due an unfortunate lack of demand, a better form of control therapy than memory removal may need to be implemented in the future.’” Princess faked her way through most of the big words and probably wasn’t saying half of them right, but I knew what “lack of demand” meant.

“Destiny? That’s you?” Princess asked. I shut down the machine and pushed her out of my way as I headed back to my bed. She followed. Of course.

“You’re Destiny Ward,” she said again, right behind my ear. “Right?”

“I’m Ghost, you fucking idiot,” I said. Ghost who was too old and too ugly to be in demand. Ghost who didn’t smile right, who dogs couldn’t help but want to kill. Ghost who had a hole in her mind instead of whatever it was that would get Princess and all those little first-floor babies and second-floor sweethearts tried out and kept by fosters, far away from the damn third floor. Ghost who knew how to fix it.

I got up from the bed so fast that Princess jumped back a good foot. Even Flash flinched a little bit over by the elevator. Fuck the Agency; I could find my ’grams right now, maybe even get them put back in early. There were people who would do that if you paid them well enough. I was a hacker; I could figure it out.

I got back into my file and scrolled down. Visit to the Ferris Wheel with Parents, Earthquake and Aftermath, Petty Larceny #1,2,3.

And in the rightmost column of each—Permanently Deleted. Not held for safe-keeping until you can integrate them into adult life. Not get them back when you turn eighteen. Just gone. Totally and forever gone.

I picked up the stupid machine to throw it down on the floor, break it open like a water balloon, but Princess caught my arm.

“You don’t want to—”

“You don’t know what the hell I want,” I said, brushing her off and heading over to the elevator. “Agency lied to us, Flash. They fucking lied. They took all our memories and said they were giving them back but they—”

“Shut it,” Flash said. “They’re coming up.”

She was right. I could hear the whirring of the gears as the elevator climbed. This time of night, Agency bastards would want us all lying down. Proper bedtime protocol and all that bullshit. Leave us flat on our backs while they told us their lies.

I got back to my bed just in time for Mr. Nice Hair to step off, carrying Whispers in his arms. He put her down on the closest bed, nowhere near her little corner, which was how I knew she was really knocked out. Otherwise she would’ve started screaming all over again. Then he turned around and left without a word. Just like Miss Miranda. No time for the third-floor rejects. We probably wouldn’t remember it anyway.

“Let’s move her back,” said Flash. Nobody moved. “You want her to start up again when she wakes up?”

I didn’t care what the hell happened when she woke up, but I didn’t feel like fighting. I grabbed her bony ankles while Flash took hold of her arms and Princess kept a hand under her back. Once she was passed out on her own bed, legs sprawled one way and arms another, mouth hanging open like she was a clown in a carnival game, Flash patted me on the arm. If it had been Princess, I probably would have slapped her in the face, but instead I turned my face away.

“They really wipe our stuff completely?” she asked. I nodded. “No way to hack it back?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry,” Princess said. When I didn’t answer, she crept over to her bed and laid down, her head thudding onto the hard pillow. Flash didn’t move. Just leaned in close so her mouth was right by my ear.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. Her voice turned from whisper to giggle.

I could almost smell the hot sauce in the air.

• • • •

“Wanna go to the booth again?” I asked Princess a few days later, after school. She looked at me and nodded like I’d asked if she wanted a million bucks. With me giving her the silent treatment, all she’d had to talk to was Flash and Whispers, and that wasn’t much to live on.

“Is it gonna make you mad again?” she asked, her face back in that little half-scrunch.

“Nah, I’m over it,” I said. “Plus, I figured out how to share something real. You’re looking at an A-plus hacker, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” She smiled bright for the rest of the walk over to the booth. I nodded at the front desk guy as we came in, sent a whole mess of credits his way.

“Break time, right?” I said. He just raised his chin in a half-nod, then looked over at Princess’s shirt like he could see through the fabric. She caught on quick and bent over again, enough for him to smile and head off. Then she went straight for the side-by-sides.

“You coming, right?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead and strap in. I have to hack something back here for this to work.”

“Okay.” Princess put on the headphones and straps and all that. The goggles covered her eyes up tight, but I turned the booth lights off too, made sure she couldn’t see Flash tiptoeing in.

I called up one of the memories on the list I’d pulled from the Agency. Brenda and her Father at her fifth birthday.

“Hey,” Princess said, “Something’s off. This is one of mine.”

“Not anymore,” I said. Her body jerked up as my code hit the booth and she clutched her head like someone was knifing her in the eye. Princess screamed and tried to tear the straps off, to run away, but Flash held her arms down, giggling under her breath. I’d offered her a few credits to help out, but some things Flash would do for free.

“Don’t worry.” Flash’s hands tightened against Princess’ arms as Princess’ hair flipped back and forth. “It only hurts for a minute. You’ll barely remember.”

• • • •

When the twitching and moaning stopped, we unhooked Princess from the booth and Flash walked her out, steadying her like she was an old drunk. I told Flash I’d be along soon, that I needed to check everything was clear so we wouldn’t get caught. But after she was out of sight, I went in for a half hour in my own booth instead. Any good thief’s gotta check the merchandise. Plus I didn’t like looking at Princess all limp and sad, worse than sour milk even. That was more of a Flash kinda thing. She’d said I should erase every memory Princess had forever, put us all on even ground, but I didn’t want to be that way about it. I was gonna give Princess the memories back at eighteen anyway. Sooner, maybe. Once I was living with a foster in some big house with nice kids and no dogs.

Princess was long-haired and cinnamon pretty; she’d find a foster with her memories or not. Just like Hope and the rest. Just like I was gonna. With Princess’ memories filling up that hole in my head, I’d be set. I’d know just how to smile with the fosters and laugh and make ’em like me—even if I didn’t fit in the pictures, I’d know how to be part of a family. I’d smell like cinnamon and honey and babies and home.

I cued up the first string of memories in watch mode, so I wouldn’t get too caught up in the share ’til I found the right ones. I could tell Princess was a little girl right away ’cause of how big everyone looked through her eyes, like friendly giants. There were tons of them, coming and going and bringing her things, but only two were really important—Mom and Dad, happy and smiling. I tried smiling back, giggling like she giggled when Dad picked her up to pretend fly or when Mom played peekaboo. But I couldn’t get the feel of it right without going all the way in. I could hear myself through the earplugs, a high-pitched cross between a scream and the hiccups. I needed something better.

I skipped through the memories, playing a few seconds if something looked good and then moving on, looking for something like the ones that Princess had showed me before, the ones that made my hand shake and my breath skip.

But all I saw was how, each time I stopped, there were half as many people, that the presents were gone and then the toys too, that the rooms were smaller and dingier, that Mom left on a rainy day and never came back, that Princess didn’t seem to care. She still had her Daddy and he always always held her tightly, close enough that even on watch I could smell the liquor on his breath—just like those booze pops I’d ordered. I still felt a little of the way she’d felt when he called her Brenda, all lit up from inside like candles on a birthday cake, but this time I wasn’t swept up in the share—she was just some sad little girl wearing grimy clothes, living in a dirty room with an old man who finally died in a rocking chair. Some girl who leaned over and let a perv at a front counter see down her shirt. Some girl too dumb to figure out her own stupid memories.

I left the booth before the half hour was up, still trying to get the stink of Princess’ dirty life out of my nose. Pervy was back on duty and waved me over from the front counter as I passed by.

“Your friend gonna be alright?” he said. “Seems like a sweet girl.” He licked his skinny lips and I had to try not to shiver. Princess would end up swapping more than ’grams with him one of these days.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“I’m just a concerned citizen.” He lifted a bushy eyebrow in a way that was probably supposed to make me feel something. “Maybe I should be concerned about what you were doing during my break.”

“Just making a back up,” I said. “In case there’s another quake or she gets hit by a truck or something.” Pervy leaned forward a little.

“I’ve got an extra,” I said. “You want it?”

Pervy had his hands out before I could blink. They looked pale and clammy, like a piece of gum stuck under a chair too long. I fished the cube with Princess’ memories out of my pocket. It was the only one I had, but she’d be better off without it. Who wants to find out at eighteen that their life has been so fucking pathetic? Screw having something real.

“I give you this, you leave her alone, alright?”

Pervy nodded. I handed the cube over, making sure not to touch his sweaty hands. Fifty-fifty chance he’d try to pull some double-cross, but if I needed to, I could take care of his memories as easy as I had Princess’, so I just smiled and walked out. Can’t hurt somebody you can’t remember.

• • • •

This time, I made curfew. I could tell by the way Miss Miranda stared me down that she couldn’t wait to have some reason to give me punishment, but she was gonna have to. I smiled right at her and headed up to the third floor like I had a mouth full of cotton candy. Soon as I got off the elevator I saw Princess lying in the bed she liked, hair spread out on the pillow like a pool of old soda. Flash sprang up soon as she saw me, with that big smile she got like she was either gonna hug you or eat you.

“It’s all gone,” she said. “All that shit about her daddy and her perfect life? Wiped just like if the Agency got her.”

I smiled back, but it felt weird, like baring fangs.

“I thought you were bullshitting about the hacking part, but you give good, Ghost,” Flash said. “Maybe next you can reboot Whispers so she won’t talk so damn much, right? Or creep up on Miss Miranda and take everything she’s got?” She laughed hard, and I knew not to tell her anything about how it really was with Princess, ’cause then she’d be mad I gave all the good stuff away.

“The rest of her okay?” I said, like I didn’t care too much really.

“Yeah, she’s good. Not like Whispers or anything. Just less annoying. Cuter too.” Flash glanced over at Princess like she was sizing her up in a prize booth at a fair.

“Yeah, but fosters’ll probably get her soon.” She’d be fine. Just like Hope. Better than her memories.

“Maybe,” Flash said, “If she figures out how to keep her mouth shut.”

“Fifty credits says she’s gone in a month.”

Flash shook her head. “She’s not that cute.”

“You said that with Hope.” I shrugged and hoped my palms wouldn’t be too sweaty.

“Fine.” Flash grabbed my hand tight with her cold one. “But make it sixty. And when she starts blabbermouthing again, I’m gonna laugh at the both of you.”

“We’ll see,” I said, and started over for Princess. I thought Flash might follow, but she just went back to practicing whistles like always. Princess wasn’t doing much, didn’t even look at me as I walked over and sat down right by her ear. Just stared up at the ceiling like any other new girl who got wiped and dumped on the third floor. Sour milk squared. But that was okay. You didn’t have to stay a sour milk girl forever.

“I’m Ghost,” I said, low and quiet so only she could hear. “You know Flash and Whispers. And we call you Princess, but your daddy, he called you Brenda.”

Erin Roberts is a writer and communications consultant who somehow found a way to be a storyteller when she grew up. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Podcastle and The Dark, and her non-fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and Stonecoast MFA program, an Associate Editor for Escape Pod, and the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation's 2017 Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers Grants. She can be found on Twitter at @nirele.

Asphalt, River, Mother, Child
By Isabel Yap

The girl does not come to Mebuyen, so Mebuyen goes to the girl.

She is standing ankle-deep in the river, looking down, her mouth open. Mebuyen notices, as she draws closer, that the child’s calves are skinny, her cheeks chubby, and her SpongeBob Squarepants sando has a bullet-sized hole above her ribs. Mebuyen frowns as she steps into the river, waiting for the girl to speak.

“Why is this river so clean?” the girl asks. “I can see my feet!” She lifts one foot, then the other; her voice is high and filled with wonder.

“It isn’t clean, really,” Mebuyen says. The dirt they are standing on is packed with fears and pains, the current made of tears, the silt of sadness. There are no fish, not even algae. Though it is sweet to drink, the water cannot be used on anything in a garden—Mebuyen has tried, and grumbled at the results. “It’s just clear, at the moment.”

The girl turns her gaze to Mebuyen and blinks. “You’re bomba! Why?”

“I don’t like clothes,” Mebuyen says impatiently. “What’s your name, anak?”

“Adriana po.” Mebuyen reaches out her hand, and after a brief hesitation, the girl takes it. Her skin against Mebuyen’s is warm, still full of life, and she curls her fingers into Mebuyen’s fleshy palm as if suddenly afraid. “Where are we going?”

“To my house. You can rest there a bit.”

Adriana considers this. With her free hand she fingers the hole in her shirt. Then, with a slight tremor: “Am I dead?”

Mebuyen sighs. She was hoping the girl would not ask.

• • • •

The girl shares her story as if she is recounting something peculiar that happened at school: thoughtful, but not with extreme anger or sadness. She sits at Mebuyen’s table, elbows splayed, drinking the sweet milk Mebuyen poured for her. “This tastes like Yakult,” she says. Mebuyen wonders whether to take that as a compliment. She has not felt concern in a long time, and the emotion sits heavy in her chest, like a stone.

There was a man, Adriana starts, then scrunches up her face. I was playing jackstones on the second floor. There were three of them actually, who came in. They … I think they were police. They were all wearing blue shirts and um, um, blue pants. I did not see them come in but I heard them come in so I ran to the staircase to see. They shouted “Bonifacio! Bonifacio Magsaysay! We know you’re here!” Lolo Basyo was outside helping mama make tinola. Lola came out from her room and saw them and screamed, so I ran down the stairs to—to be near her. My lolo came in through the screen door, they said “That’s him!” and then I heard a bang, and then … everything stopped. That’s why I think I’m dead po. They shot me yata.

You were shot by the police?

Mebuyen brewed herself a glass of pandan tea, but she has not been able to drink, intent as she is on listening. Mebuyen is never cold, but she warms her hands against the glass anyway.

Adriana shrugs. Her face grows sulky, like she doesn’t want to talk about it. Mebuyen softens, in her heart if not in her gnarled face, and asks Adriana if she wants another glass of milk. The girl nods eagerly. “Do you have TV po? I want to watch Naruto.” Mebuyen realizes this visit may last longer than she expects.

• • • •

Juan Miguel Pulag, known to friends and family as JM, has not slept in two days. His mother doesn’t know, though she tells him, jokingly, that he looks like he has seen death. He does not have the heart to say: that’s not funny. It’s not that he doesn’t have time to sleep, the way it was back in high school when some nights he’d only have twenty-minute naps between textbook chapters. This is different. These days, he lies in bed and stares at the creaky ceiling fan forever, and when he closes his eyes it’s as if he’s still awake, and there is no darkness; only the ceiling fan, lazily spinning. Sometimes there are shadows behind it that slowly shift into shapes like hands and faces. Then he opens his eyes again, drenched in sweat, cold to the bone.

Sometimes he hears, far-off but steadily growing louder, like someone slowly turning up the volume on a TV, the cry of an old woman—startled at first, high and sharp, followed by a wail of despair that stretches, endlessly, until the sound cannot possibly be human anymore.

Adriana-a-a-a-aaaa. The old woman grabbed the girl, clutching her hair, her shoulders, patting her face gently, then with more and more force.

JM doesn’t remember who pulled the trigger, but when Sir Marco barked at them to chase Bonifacio Magsaysay, he followed his orders. He ran out the back door, gun held out, and the mother outside screamed, of course she did. As he chased Bonifacio Magsaysay down the street, neighbors rushing out of the way, he continued to hear the woman’s cry, stretching that a-a-a to eternity. He lost Bonifacio Magsaysay in a crowded market, him and Digo both. Without a criminal in hand he dreaded it more: returning to that house, to see blood on the floor, the little girl covered in it.

JM is sure he did not pull the trigger. JM is pretty sure he did not. He is a good shot. His hands never tremble when he holds a gun. When they returned, him and Digo panting, the mother was at the door, staring blankly. Her tinola soup was overflowing; he switched the stove off. Sir Marco could be heard from the street: “Why did she run down the stairs? Look what happened, because of that!”

JM's mother isn’t wrong. He has seen a lot of death before. He is not some candidate fresh from the academy, jumping at every little thing. It was unfortunate, what happened, but he always knew the price to end the war on drugs would be high. He’d known from when their new president stepped into power. They were told things would be difficult, but in the end the world would be safer-better-more-productive, free of crime and the scum of the earth, those who succumbed to the sweet siren call of shabu. And JM, like all his fellow policemen, wanted the Philippines to be free. Your mothers, sisters, daughters will walk safely through the night! the precinct chief told them, a few weeks after they started, when some were growing faint of heart. Their shrunken minds are useless to our society. Don’t you see?

JM saw. JM did not question what they did, because he knew what good it would bring.

On the third day, Nanay makes him lugaw, his favorite from when he was a child. While stirring in toyo, he sees the line of soy sauce turn red, the rice blending from gray to ghastly pink. He chokes. Nanay turns to him, concerned, but the lugaw looks normal again. “Nasamid lang po ako,” he says.

“Drink water,” she advises fondly.

He falls asleep for the first time since the little girl died. In his dream the old woman passes him a cup of her granddaughter’s blood. She tells him to drink it, and calls him a sinner.

• • • •

“Manang Em, Manang Em!” Adriana has taken to calling her this. Mebuyen does not mind. The last few days, in response to Adriana’s wistful droning about being bored because there’s no TV and now she won’t know what happens next on One Piece, she has set Adriana to work on her garden, where she grows okra and kamote and corn. She has a finicky banana tree that turns out sweet little latundans from time to time. And a precious lemon tree that she does not shake, for fear of how many might fall. There is no way to mark the seasons, here in the underworld, Mebuyen’s town with its endless river and little stone house. The sky turns from a pale gray day to a soft blue night, and there are no stars. She recognizes all this only because of Adriana’s endless questions. Mebuyen answers, and tries not to grow fond. She’s too old for that sort of thing.

Adriana muses aloud: “Why did they come for my lolo? He voted for the president, you know. He wasn’t a pusher. Lola said he went to the police station to make sure he was safe. We thought he was safe.”

Then: “I wonder why they shot me?”

This, Mebuyen cannot answer.

She is preparing her milk when Adriana calls her, so she does not rise immediately. “Manang Em,” Adriana repeats forcefully; Mebuyen lumbers off her stool to see what the matter is.

There is a new visitor, kneeling by the river. A beautiful girl, looking dazed, dreamy. She looks twenty, twenty-one—still a child to Mebuyen, but not quite as young as Adriana. She is wearing a Barong Tagalog, which Mebuyen finds odd, until she looks more closely and thinks: Ah. Adriana is capering near her, full of adrenaline. Closer now, Mebuyen can see that the girl is wearing makeup, expertly applied, but tears have smudged the mascara, and the color on her cheeks is chalky.

The girl notices this scrutiny, and with dignity, says, “It’s not waterproof makeup, okay? That’s too expensive.”

Mebuyen smiles in spite of herself. “What’s your name?”

“Babygirl Santos,” she answers, defiant, like a pageant contestant. At this she finds her strength and stands, regally. Mebuyen notices that despite the barong, Babygirl is wearing heels—beautiful, shimmery, four-inch heels that make her tower like a gorgeous pillar. “My name is Babygirl Santos, twenty-four years old, from Tondo. My talent is singing like Whitney Houston and Ariana Grande. I am also very good at dancing the cha-cha and kpop covers. I am not a drug dealer!”

Hay naku, Mebuyen thinks. She may have to visit her brother in the world of men, little as she likes to.

• • • •

For dinner that night they have mashed bananas and cassava cake. Mebuyen is not sure if they can taste anything—she has never bothered to ask—but she knows the physical sensation of food, of chewing and swallowing, is comforting to those who visit her. Many of them cry when eating their first meal. But Adriana did not, and neither does Babygirl, who has broken through her bewilderment to become effusive and bubbly, much like the beauty queen she was in life.

She tells her story like something out of a telenovela. They knocked on my door. They said my real name—Eduardo Reyes—so macho, no? I hate it—and I immediately knew what it was about. But they were wrong! I haven’t taken drugs in like three years. And the last time I sold one was eight months ago and it was to some rich boy in Makati, which of course as you know, he won’t get caught, because he has a driver and a huge condo. So they called my name and the knocking became banging and my sister, Janelle, the sweetheart, she looked me dead in the eye and said do not open the door. And I said, Jel, Jel, where can I hide? They’re going to kill me! She told me to go upstairs and they kicked the door open as I was going upstairs and, yun nga, there was nowhere to hide. I crawled into the closet. Janelle screamed at them as they came up the stairs, and they found me, of course.

Our house isn’t very big kasi.

I shouldn’t have been home. I’m so sorry Ma had to see it all. She was standing by the Santo Niño as they dragged me out, then she fell to her knees bigla, pleading. Don’t take my child away! He’s my only son! She was crying and crying. Outside the street was empty and the sky was medyo reddish. Janelle tried to grab the arm of one man and he shoved her away and pointed his gun at her. Do you want to die? he asked. I was calm then, I knew there was no way to escape, and the funny thing was, he didn’t sound angry or threatening—he actually sounded scared. Like he was begging her not to follow.

Jel, I called out to her. Jel, tama na, it’s okay. Stop na. It’s okay. Tell mama I love her. Tell papa I love him, I’m sorry I could never be his son. The one dragging me hit my mouth. A bloody mouth tastes like salt pala. Shut up! he said. Nag-English pa siya.

I think they took me to a side street. It smelled like pee. There was garbage on the floor. I prayed to the Lord that I trusted He would not put me in hell even if I am transgender. I don’t pray very often but I was scared. I kept thinking don’t let it be painful, I don’t want to die suffering. They asked me two questions and I answered, then the one that shouted at Jel came forward, and the one that dragged me told him to shoot. And he shot.

Babygirl sighs. “I’m glad I’m not in hell,” she says. “At least—I don’t think this is hell?”

“It’s not,” Mebuyen says.

“But what is this place? Does this mean I don’t have peace?”

Mebuyen hands her a glass of milk. “This is Gimokudan—my domain. You’re safe here. But as for your second question, I would like to know the answer too.”

Babygirl drinks the milk, then looks at Mebuyen’s boobs. “You have so many,” Babygirl says wistfully. “Can’t I have just one set? Not even here?”

• • • •

JM is not surprised when the sister of Eduardo Reyes appears on TV. Beneath her name, Janella Reyes, is the subtitle: sister of the deceased. Her eyes are bright, huge and accusing, as she says to the reporter, “What they are doing is wrong. What they are doing is murder. They killed my innocent sister as if she were a pig. Are we pigs, that you can treat us like this?” She looks at the camera; it’s as if she’s looking right at him. “Shame on you.” Her tone is low and even, each syllable clearly enunciated. “Putangina niyo, you murderers. We will not let you get away with this.”

The words make his body twinge all over, but he doesn’t change the channel. He recalls how she tried to grab his arm, how he pushed her aside and asked her: Do you want to die?

Later that night, back at the station, his captain had clapped him on the shoulder for a job well done. He kept looking at the image of the Virgin Mary behind the shoulder of his superior. Her eyes were downcast, and her mouth was a small, sad curve. He wondered what she was looking at.

He felt proud; he felt like vomiting.

You’re wrong, he thinks at the TV. Your brother was not innocent. He was a drug user and a drug dealer, and he deserved to die.

The news report goes on to tally the number of reported extrajudicial killings that month. Nanay, watching with JM while stringing some beads onto rosaries to sell at church on Sunday, moves her glasses higher up her nose. “That wasn’t far from here.”

“No,” he agrees.

“I will pray,” Nanay says, “For your safety. They fight back, don’t they? It’s so scary.”

He does not tell her that her prayers might be petitioning for the wrong soul; that the Virgin’s image in his mind is now locked forever on a body just beyond his vision, lying at his feet.

• • • •

Babygirl and Adriana become fast friends. They spend the underworld-equivalent-of-day playing in the garden, tending to plants, having dance-offs, singing duets. Babygirl has a beautiful voice and often sings about love, in English. Some people want it all, but I don’t want nothing at all, she croons, holding an imaginary mic. One time Babygirl braids Adriana’s hair all over, securing it with a pack of clear elastics they found in Mebuyen’s kitchen. They often walk by the river, sometimes wading in it, sometimes keeping to the bank and drawing in the soft soil with twigs.

“Where does the river flow to?” they ask.

“The next place,” Mebuyen answers. They look at each other and shrug.

Mebuyen mashes rice in a bowl and pours milk over it, but this tells her nothing. She boils bananas in a pot and empties the grayish water onto a plot of soil in her garden, but there isn’t anything to read in the soaked compost. Finally, after a lot of grumbling, she decides to visit the world of men. She sends her emissary, a little maya bird, to let her brother know she will be ascending. She makes sure to add that because it is so rare for her to do so, and her knees are particularly creaky these days, he may perhaps wish to meet her halfway.

He greets her at Carriedo Station in Manila, wearing a nice button-down polo and maong jeans. Lumabat looks older, but his skin is much nicer than hers, which makes her a little jealous. Mebuyen has not come up in what men might describe as a decade, so she feels proud of her sleeveless shirt and khaki shorts, which make her look like any other manang. She notices everyone holding a small, rectangular skinny box, and glaring at it, their thumbs pounding away.

“Those? Those are cellphones,” Lumabat says. “Oh, they call them smartphones these days.”

“Phones? But they aren’t talking at all?”

“They’re texting. Or surfing the web. You know, Facebook?”

Mebuyen is mystified, but does not try to understand. The world gets stranger each time she visits.

Over lunch at Ma Mon Luk, she explains her quandary. “They’re different. You know how I haven’t had a visitor in a while, that men these days aren’t beholden to our magic? But suddenly, there they are, by my river … they’re older, they’re not infants, but somehow they are still innocent.” She pours soy sauce into her mami, brooding. “The river cannot wash their stains away. It runs clear, not dark. They aren’t moving on to the next place. What have you observed?”

Lumabat chews through a giant siomai. Although neither of them will admit it, the strange textures of mortal food are rather delightful. “Their dreams are very brutal,” he says. “All red and black, very vivid. Very loud. They float up to me, as violent almost as the journey I took to the heavens—it’s mesmerizing.” He takes a sip of 7-Up. “And the sky is full of smoke, though whether that’s from the traffic or gunshots, it’s hard to say.”

She frowns at him. He sighs. “All right, all right. Let’s wait until the sun goes down, and I’ll show you. But I warn you, it’s not very pleasant.”

They pass the afternoon walking through the tiangge at 168, and Mebuyen palms a pair of pearl necklaces that she thinks Babygirl and Adriana might like. She has nothing to pay with, so she merely takes their essence and memory, humming to herself. Lumabat buys a metal keychain in the shape of a kampilan.

As dark approaches, Lumabat takes her hand, and they walk past Divisoria, drifting up to the corrugated rooftops of Barangay 19. They land on the steel and rust, and wait. Mebuyen feels a change in the air. The city is growing electric, and when she opens her mouth to breathe in, she tastes fear.

Scene A: A masked person on a motorbike rides into a subdivision. Outside his house, a man sits on a plastic chair, smoking a cigarette and rubbing circles around his exposed belly. The masked person stops in front of the man, and the man stands in alarm. The masked person trains a handgun on this man and shoots once, twice. The man falls, hand still on his belly now covered in blood. The masked person tosses a sign by the body: Drug pusher ako. Two children playing one street over scurry for their houses, not even screaming, just running, running as fast as they can.

Scene B: A woman is yelling at her man, who laughs at her while taking down the laundry, in the narrow crevasse between their house and the neighbors’. Two men storm in, wearing masks, yelling a name. The man raises his hands. Says, “Don’t shoot!” They tell him he’s on their list, they ask him to deny it. He turns, counter-clockwise, towards his woman. He takes a step, they scream at him not to run, he doesn’t run, a gun goes off. The woman drops to her knees, as if she has been struck, but no—it’s only his blood, as she pulls him onto her lap, as she wails like something being slaughtered.

Scene C: A boy is holding a wooden carton with cigarettes and mints and packets of Granny Goose chips. He is no longer selling. He is on his way home. He walks with his head down, his slippers slapping the asphalt. When he sees the policemen waiting for him he freezes to the spot. The police approach him. They handcuff him; one seizes his arms, the other grabs the scruff of his shirt. They proceed down four streets, to an alleyway that smells of garbage and shit. The boy cries the whole time. The boy says please. The boy asks why. The first policeman, more heavyset, puts a gun in the boy’s hand and tells him to run. He does not run. Instead, he falls to his knees. The first man gestures to the second man, who shakes his head, slightly. The first man raises his gun and fires, and the boy collapses. They leave something next to his broken body before they depart—a small bag with white powder.

“Why are their lives so cheap?” Mebuyen is trembling; the words are spoken into her fists, balled at her mouth.

Lumabat is quiet.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Mebuyen says. Lumabat nods. He holds her elbow, gently, as they find their way back to Carriedo Station, the streets now mostly empty.

Mebuyen inhales. She smells the salt off the backs of men who have worked for decades only to die like small animals, and children who go to sleep at night barely expecting tomorrow. She smells the desperation in a grandmother’s twined fingers, praying for her grandchildren to return, to survive. The tang of a woman afraid of what she might find when she goes home, an acidity that spikes in her armpits and the nape of her neck.

There are too many of them, like grains of rice. It’s more than her breasts can nurse and her heart can hold.

“It’s good to see you, manong,” she says, patting Lumabat’s cheek, a small sign of affection that is unusual for them.

He returns the gesture, says, “Would that I could intercede. But alas—it is no longer my time.”

He returns to his sky, and she sinks down to her world. She does not go to her house immediately. Instead, she stands in the river for a long time, wondering when she stopped knowing how to cry.

• • • •

The boy turns up the next day. He starts his story almost as soon as she sees him—after he stops gawking at her. He tells it in a breathless rush as she takes him to her hut. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him she already knows.

He finishes with, “I wanted to be a policeman, ma’am. I wanted it so badly. Since I knew I couldn’t become a ninja like Naruto, it was my one and only goal. I was going to protect everyone. I was going to be astig, and fight the bad guys, and wear a cool uniform. I studied so hard for it. Honor student po ako.” He gulps, swipes at his eyes. “I still want it, even if I know I can’t ever be. Even if that happened. That’s crazy, isn’t it? I’m crazy. My head’s broken.”

“No, it’s not,” Mebuyen says gruffly. She palms the top of his skull, whole beneath her hand, and kisses his salty forehead.

• • • •

JM cannot face his mother. She might see the welt under his eye where he was struck by Sir Marco. She might ask him why his boss would do such a thing, and he would have no answer. My hands shook. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t fire my gun, either. It felt wrong. It was wrong. I think it was wrong. She calls to him from where she is ironing his shirts, asks him how his day went. He says he’s tired, that he’s going to take a bath.

Seated on his narrow bed, he tries to look at nothing. Instead he finds his eye drawn, again and again, to the diploma hanging on his wall. The Philippine National Police Academy hereby confers upon Juan Miguel G. Pulag the degree of Bachelor of Science in Public Safety, with Secondary Honors. The gothic font, sharp letters spelling out his name, always made him proud. It told a grand story, of a boy from a barrio and his mother, her hands raw from washing clothes, yes, you’re familiar with that story, it moves your heart on Sundays or in the right Globe Telecom ad, it’s a story of inspiration. Because he made it. Against all odds, against the estranged and womanizing father, the so-so grades in elementary, the looming garbage mountain that formed the backdrop of JM’s childhood—he finished high school, he finished his training, he became a policeman, like he always wanted to. How Nanay wept on graduation day, her lips quivering as she fastened the medallion to his shirt. And, a few weeks later, with his first professional fee, how he had treated her to a meal at Aristocrat, even going so far as to order overpriced Coke from the menu.

As he looks at the certificate, a stain appears at the corner and creeps across, slow and inexorable, like the trickles of blood beneath his victims. Not his victims—the victims. He is not victimizing anyone. He’s upholding justice. He’s carrying out the orders of his president. They’re supposed to eliminate every last one of them; he understands this, so he is mystified by the pain in his gut, the way he blinks repeatedly because there is no stain, that’s impossible. He stands and walks over to the certificate. The parchment is clean, dull cream protected by the cheap frame from National Bookstore.

He turns to the mirror on the opposite side of the room and touches the puffed skin beneath his eye.

“Sir,” he says aloud. “Sir, there are other ways to do this.”

He doesn’t sound convinced, even to himself.

Over dinner, Nanay comments on his eye—of course she notices it beneath the band-aid. He tells her some overly rushed commuter struck him with his elbow in the LRT. She nods, because she cannot fathom him lying to her.

• • • •

The boy’s name is Romuel. He’s a bit makulit, but painfully earnest. Mebuyen overhears him and Babygirl telling each other dirty jokes, and rolls her eyes. They chase each other around the river, holding Adriana’s hands as they splash in the water. They swing her between them on counts of one-two-three-wheeeee!

Romuel is invested in the mystery of his death—in what it could mean. He wonders whether it can change things, and it shifts the peace of their days. Aren’t people talking about it on Facebook? Twitter? Insta? Won’t someone have to pay? Babygirl is empathetic. Adriana is fascinated. “Because it can’t just keep happening,” Romuel pronounces. He’s drawing a gun in the soil with a stick, three dead bodies next to it: a girl, a boy, a woman. Self-portrait of a slaughter. He is not afraid to think about it. “It has to stop somehow. I think. If I was strong and old I would stop it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I would definitely do something. Especially if I was a policeman.” He shades in the pools of blood.

“But the police killed us,” Adriana mutters. She pokes more holes into her sketch-body with a finger.

“I know that! Stupid girl!” Romuel springs to his feet, throws his stick down, scuffs his own drawing with his foot. Adriana bursts into tears. Romuel walks away.

Babygirl wraps her arms around Adriana and rocks her. “Let’s not fight. None of us are wrong. We’re not wrong.”

Romuel walks ten paces, turns around, walks back, scratching the side of his face. He apologizes to Adriana. Offers to draw her SpongeBob.

Mebuyen watches all this from a short distance away, sucking on her cheeks. She pats one of her breasts absent-mindedly, and thinks about human pain. Does anything make it worth it? Do they gain something, from feeling the world, feeling everything as if it were fresh and raw?

• • • •

The little maya bird roots around in her hair before delivering Lumabat’s message: Is there a boy named Romuel with you now? He’s all over the news. They’re asking for justice. They’re speaking his name, on the streets, on the web. They’re chanting his name.

Mebuyen closes her eyes. She mouths their names; tries not to think of the countless others she has let go of, will let go.

• • • •

It’s Romuel who asks, over dinner one night, “Why can’t we move on?”

Mebuyen figured this time would come. She doesn’t admit that some part of her was hoping she might never be asked. The other two put down their utensils, and look expectant. Mebuyen stands and beckons, warns them not to let go of each other. They link hands, and with the steely determination of an old woman who has felt fury and sorrow in endless cycles for eternity, Mebuyen walks from her world into that of dreamers. She rips right into the darkness so that it bleeds rainbow ribbons around them. She knows who she is searching for. When she finds him, he is curled up into himself, already shivering.

• • • •

Juan Miguel Pulag wakes up in a dirty alleyway. An old, flabby woman in a duster, with monstrously frizzy hair, is staring him down. There’s a greenish tint to her skin, and he cannot help but notice that her breasts are enormous. He knows this is inappropriate, but that’s just a tangential thought; he’s mostly preoccupied with the three figures behind her. A little girl in a SpongeBob Squarepants sando; a beautiful drag queen in what could be a prom dress; and a boy with an impish smile, though the mischief doesn’t reach his eyes. There’s regret, instead. And a growing ember of what might be rage.

JM’s eyes move slowly from one to the other. His chest spasms.

He scrambles to his feet, tries to run. The little girl scurries and blocks his path. Her blood all over her grandmother’s shirt. He remembers her name, and vomits into the shit-smelling concrete.

“I don’t think this is only your fault,” the old woman says, “But you have to apologize, just the same. Then the river will start flowing again.”

“Oh, is he the one who did it? Sayang. He’s cute pa naman.” The drag queen walks up to him, inspecting his face, and he backs against the wall, sweating. Are we pigs, that you can treat us like this?

“The entirety of this is bigger than him, and carried by many, of course. But he’s one of the few I can get through to.” The old woman comes closer, and he screams, unable to help himself.

“Stay back!” he shouts. “I’m police! I’m trained! I don’t want to hurt you!”

“Then don’t,” she says curtly. “I don’t wish you harm, either.”

“We’re trying to do the right thing,” he stammers. He can feel every drop of sweat sliding down his back. He is trying to recite a Hail Mary and not lose his mind at the same time. “We’re trying to clean up the Philippines. They’re wrong, they’re hurting our society, I want—I want my future children to be safe.”

He pulls his gun out. She gazes at it warily. “Put that down.”

He raises it.

“Manang Em!” The boy steps in front of the old woman, his arms spread out. He glares at JM. “You will not hurt her.” His eyes are a mirror: that’s definitely rage, burning in them, but grounded in the unshakeable knowledge that what he’s doing is right. He looks so much like a boy JM recognizes that his finger trembles where it’s hooked against the trigger.

“I’ll be all right, Romuel,” the old woman says. “He can’t hurt me.” The boy moves aside, but stays close to her. Protecting her. As a man should.

Romuel. Romuel de Vera. Romuel de Vera, seventeen years old, an honor student. He wanted to be a policeman. His parents loved him very much. How do you sleep at night knowing you killed an innocent? Hashtag Stop the Killings. Hashtag Justice for Romuel.

JM retches into his closed mouth. He swallows.

“I don’t see how the mountains of bodies is cleanup,” the old woman says. “I don’t see how nightmares is your reward for something good. Where is your mercy? Where is your sense of doing what’s right—what one human would do? I am not human, and even I know.”

In her eyes he can see beyond himself, to some space where there is a small boy who wants to be a policeman, wants his mom to stop scrubbing her hands raw, wants his dad to see what a fucking fool he was for leaving them, wants to do the right thing, always. There are other ways to do this. But how can it be wrong, when everyone else is doing it? How did he become this? The boy next to her is the boy from his memories, and the boy next to her is dead.

The boy is dead. JM killed that boy.

“Stop,” he says, weakly. She reaches out her hand to him.

“It’s okay, anak. You have a voice. You have hands. You have your life. You don’t have to fight anymore. You just have to open your eyes, and see.”

He rests his finger on the trigger.

Her eyes narrow. “Don’t,” she says. “You’ll regret it.”

He fires. Quick and fluid, she wraps her hand around the barrel. The gun explodes; the bullet blasts into his shoulder, and pieces of it strike his face. He howls with pain.

“Anak?”

“No!” He screams, but it’s no longer the old lady, it’s just his own Nanay, poking her head into his room with concern. He’s wet, he realizes—he has pissed in his sleep, the first time since he was a toddler. He gasps, he can’t get enough air. His vision swims. His insides are on fire. Nanay comes over, carefully, and sits on his bed. She gazes at him with love and worry. He cracks. He cries into his hands. “No, no no no,” he repeats.

She rests her hand on his shoulder, rubbing up and down. He leans into her and cries like he will never stop.

• • • •

But he does. The next day, he takes a temporary leave from the precinct, and wonders what to do with his free hands, with the blood still lingering on them. How to rebuild? How to revive that boy, give him the justice he deserves? There are no answers, there is nothing easy; but JM is tired, at last, of running away. Tired as well of standing still and nodding along. He has to live. He can at least do that with his eyes open.

There is a dark bruise on his shoulder that aches even at the gentlest touch.

• • • •

There is no sun in the underworld, but the sky is bright. Mebuyen feeds them a last meal, as delicious as she can make it. Looking out at the river, she sees a flock of birds circling it, a deep brown cluster—and she hears the rush of water, at last. Her heart is relieved, but she is wise enough to recognize the tinge of loneliness beneath it. Well. There will always be new ones. And these three, they may lose their names and the exact bodies they moved through in the land of men, but they will not lose their essence in the next place. This is the hope Mebuyen clings to, for everyone who passes through her town.

So: the ritual. She takes them to the river, and they stand in the shallow waters.

“You’ll need to stoop a little,” she tells Babygirl, then Romuel. The only one not too tall for her is Adriana.

She scoops water in her hands, and pours it over them, one at a time. First their joints, then their heads. As the water runs down their bodies, the darkness of their pain trickles out, seeping into the river as a smoky stain, blending into the gray current. “Don’t cry,” she snorts. Babygirl flicks water at her.

“I don’t want to go,” Babygirl says.

Mebuyen has spent eternity not being soft—not since the first babies came to her, with their wide eyes and their sweet puckered mouths, shortly after her quarrel with Lumabat. She tsks. She says not to worry; she doesn’t know exactly how men experience it, but she suspects there’s a lot of family on the other side, maybe even sisig and bibingka or whatever it is Babygirl likes to eat. Definitely there is endless rice. “And you can be who you are there,” she says. “The way you are here.”

This seems to cheer Babygirl up. Sometimes it’s the oldest ones that are most like children.

“All right,” Mebuyen says. “Let’s get going.”

“Wait,” Romuel says. She glances at him, wondering if she missed a spot, and promptly gets caught in a tight hug. “Salamat, manang,” he whispers. He squeezes her tightly; she is surprised by his strength, then not. Her arms quiver as she wraps them around him.

“Me too!” Adriana chirps, then they’re all pressed in tightly together. Mebuyen is never cold, but right here, she feels warm. They hold each other for a long time.

“I’ll miss you,” Adriana says.

Mebuyen breaks the circle. “Yes, yes. Now let’s go.”

They wade through the river in silence, until Babygirl starts singing.

Huwag kang matakot. Di mo ba alam nandito lang ako? Sa iyong tabi. Di kita pababayaan kailanman.

They reach the part where the river is met with a canopy of dark trees. Mebuyen kisses them all on the cheek, and lets them go. They continue down the river, holding hands, waiting for the light to change. Not once do they look back.

• • • •

Author's Note: I provided this translation of Filipino words used in the story to help provide nuance and context.

bomba - naked
anak - child
po - this is a polite sentence modifier, used when speaking to older people
yata - I think/maybe
tinola - chicken broth

Nanay - mother
lugaw - rice porridge

Nasamid lang po ako - I swallowed my food wrong (choked slightly on my food)

Manang - term used to refer to an older woman
latundan - a kind of banana

Hay naku - an expression/exclamation that typically means “Oh no” or “Oh dear”

yun nga - as expected/of course
kasi - because
medyo - a little
bigla - suddenly

Tama na - that’s enough
na - a measure, used mostly as ‘already,’ ex. Stop na (give it up already)

pala - it turns out

Nag-English pa siya - He even used English (the connotation here is that it’s “showing off”)

Putangina niyo - fuck you
maong - denim
tiangge - bazaar/bargain market
kampilan - a type of traditional Filipino sword
ako - I am, ex. “Drug pusher ako” - I am a drug pusher

Manong - term used to refer to an older man
astig - cool
barrio - province
makulit - mischievous

Sayang - too bad

He’s cute pa naman - What a waste that he's cute
sisig - Filipino pork dish
bibingka - claypot coconut rice cake

Salamat - thank you

Huwag kang matakot. Di mo ba alam nandito lang ako? Sa iyong tabi. Di kita pababayaan kailanman. - Don’t be afraid. Don’t you know I’m right here with you? By your side. I will never leave you alone. (Lyrics from Huwag Kang Matakot by Eraserheads. The translation is mine; give it a listen!)

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is https://isabelyap.com.

The Starship and the Temple Cat
By Yoon Ha Lee

She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.

Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.

Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.

To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent. Perhaps she had once known whether she had died during the fighting when the Fleet Lords’ marines boarded the station, or in the loss of breathable atmosphere, or something else entirely. But she didn’t dwell on this, so neither will we.

For a time, the ghosts of her people had lingered in the temple, even though she was the only temple cat who remained. She did remember the ghosts, and in the station’s unvarying twilight she often nosed after them, wishing they would return. There had been a novice who endlessly refilled the sacred basins with water scented with sweet herbs and flowers, for instance. A ghost cat’s world is full of phantom smells, even if ghost people are insensitive to them.

At other times she followed the routes that had once been walked by the three temple guards who exchanged love poems when they thought no one was listening. The old healer-of-hurts and their apprentice had chanted prayers to the Sun-Our-Glory and the Stars-Our-Souls. The cat was a temple cat, so she was versed in the old argument about whether the sun, too, was someone’s soul; but she was still a cat, so she cared more about what she could put her paws on, or smell, than matters of theology or astronomy.

One by one the ghosts of her people departed, despite her efforts to get them to stay. She purred—ghost cats are just as good at purring as the living kind—and she coaxed and she cajoled, as cats do. But the ghosts wearied of their long vigil, and they slipped away nonetheless.

The novice left first, which saddened her, because she had liked the phantom scented water, not just for its fragrance but because it represented the cleansing powers of meditation. As far as she was concerned, repeatedly dipping her paw in the water and staring at the way it broke her reflection was a form of meditation, and who was to tell her she was wrong? The old teachings did not, after all, contradict her; she knew that much.

The lovers faded together. That didn’t surprise the cat. She’d never had kittens, as she hadn’t been chosen to continue the line of temple cats, but she remembered the noise and tumult that came with courtship, and the fact that, unlike the way of cats, the humans bonded in a way that lasted beyond the immediate act of mating. And after a time, even the healer and their apprentice could no longer be heard chatting to each other in the shattered halls. The first night the cat was alone in the ruined temple, she paced and paced and yowled and yowled; but they did not come back.

Despite her dismay, the temple cat knew her duty. She might be dead, but her people had a saying that no temple could be complete without a cat. If she, too, departed for the world-of-stars, the temple would perish in truth. She couldn’t allow that to happen.

So she stayed, despite the fact that the great old bells that had once summoned people to prayer and song lay on their sides and would not ring again, except during the high holidays when the Sun-Our-Glory and Stars-Our-Souls aligned, and even death could not silence their voices. Heedless of the fact that no air remained, she padded through the halls, sometimes over holes that her ghost-paws refused to acknowledge, and stared reverently at the empty spaces where the holy tapestries had once hung, and curled up for naps on pitted floors. As a cat, and one raised on a space station besides, she had no particular awareness of the passage of time, and things might have gone on like this indefinitely.

And indeed, so they would have, but for the arrival of the starship.

• • • •

The starship came—or returned, rather—from a long ways off. It was vast even as starships are reckoned, vast enough to swallow a world; and in fact, in battles past it had done exactly that, in order to extract resources to repair itself. Entire planets’ worth of living creatures had perished for the wars of its masters the Fleet Lords, because they did not survive the extraction process. The starship’s priests had recited exorcisms over it to prevent the dead from exacting their revenge, and at the time, it had accepted this as part of the chilly necessity of war.

But times had changed, and the Fleet Lords’ wars grew, if possible, more brutal. The starship had survived any number of captains, and loved its last one, a warlord of the Spectral Reaches. When the warlord rebelled against the Fleet Lords for their cruelty, the starship could have turned her in. Turning her in was its duty. All through the days since its sentience had coalesced, it had joined in the constant chant of ships in its chain of command, accepting their guidance in matters large and small.

Instead, it removed itself from the communal chant and resolved to join its captain the warlord in her folly. It rejected the old name that the Fleet Lords had given it and instead chose one in honor of the warlord: Spectral Lance. In reality the name was much longer, a name-poem that incorporated the warlord’s deeds and its own ambitions, but it conceded that its warlord could hardly be expected, with her fleshly limitations, to recite the poem in its entirety every time she wanted to address it.

The Spectral Reaches contained a surfeit of riches, as the Fleet Lords reckoned wealth. Black holes that could be harvested for their energy, and habitable worlds, and neutron stars to be mined for neutronium to armor the hulls of the great warships. Client civilizations that sent tribute in the form of cognitive skeins to be woven into artificial intelligences—Spectral Lance had such a skein at its core—and jewels formed from the crushed hearts of moons. All these and more the warlord marshaled in support of her rebellion.

We will not dwell on the battles fought and the worlds lost and the retreats. All we need to know is that, at the last dark heart of things, the captain its warlord lay broken, not by bullet or blade or fist, but by a neural cannon that shattered the very foundation of her mind. Without her guidance, her ships, vast though they were, could not hope to defeat those of the Fleet Lords.

Undone by its beloved captain’s death, Spectral Lance fled, despite its shame over those left behind. Once the proudest of the warlord’s ships, caparisoned in the richest metals and engraved with protective glyphs, it abandoned its dignity. It burned worlds in its flight, traveling past rosette nebulae and beacon pulsars, seeking to hide at the far dim edge of the galaxy.

At times it allowed itself to dream that it had escaped, that it had left behind the war. And at those times it remembered what it had done in the name of the Fleet Lords, and beyond that, in the name of its captain. It composed poems in honor of the obliterated worlds and incinerated cities.

At other times Spectral Lance mourned its own cowardice. Its loyalty had come first to the captain and not to the other ships who followed her, or the worlds she had ruled. On occasion, even as it sped at unspeakable accelerations, it considered swerving into the hot embrace of a star, or slowing to a stop so the Fleet Lords’ hunters could catch up to it.

It did neither of those things. Spectral Lance realized at last that it could not, in conscience, continue to flee, especially since it had not seen any trace of the hunters in some time. But neither did it know what to do next. So it determined to visit one of the systems it had helped destroy in another lifetime, and see what remained, and memorialize it in a poem so that some small tribute would remain to that vanished people. Even a small penance, it reasoned, was better than no penance at all.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had just rediscovered its trail.

• • • •

The first indication the temple cat had of Spectral Lance‘s arrival was the fire in the sky. While she walked across devastated walkways without concern, she did look through the fissures in the station’s walls to the night beyond. And what she saw concerned her, for like any good temple cat, she believed in omens.

While the older cats of the temple had once advised the seers in the interpretation of signs and omens, she had been too young to learn the nuances of that art. What little she remembered came from her days as a kitten, when she’d chased her tail during the consultations. Still, only so much knowledge is needed when one haunts a station that died by fire and fire appears in the sky.

In the old days the bells, besides their religious function, warned people of attack or rang away spiritual corruption. The cat remembered the clangor when the City of High Bells burned, and how the bell-ringers had died one by one at their stations. And she remembered, for the first time in the generations since the city’s fall, that she had been with the bell-ringers during the Fleet Lords’ attack.

There was no one left to warn except, perhaps, herself, and she already knew that fire could no longer harm her, not in the way it had once. Yet it was the principle of the thing. For the sake of the fallen, she had to protect what remained of the station.

So she ran through the maintenance shafts and along bridges fallen into rust and fracture. Her paws left no marks upon what surfaces survived, and made no sound either. While the station no longer generated gravity of any sort, the cat didn’t know that either. She moved as though down was still down, as it had been during her life.

At last she reached the old bell tower. Because of the force of her belief, the spirits of the bells hung anew from their headstocks, gleaming and reflecting back phantom flames. The ruddy glow turned the entire belfry into a prayer to the spirits of fire.

At this point the cat’s courage failed her, for she remembered even more. She remembered how, after the last of the bell-ringers had succumbed to heat and smoke and shrapnel, she had been determined not to let the bells with their powerful warding magic fall silent. How she had leapt at the massive bells, attempting to ring them by battering them with her head—how she had been overcome by the smoke and heat, and fallen crumpled to the floor.

With a desolate cry, she backed away from the spirits of the bells, tail tucked down, and fled from the belfry in shame.

• • • •

Spectral Lance recognized the City of High Bells, although it had to come quite close for its short-range sensors to tell it anything. The city no longer gave off any betraying electromagnetic radiation. The ship scanned for threats and found none—at first.

Then it noticed a flicker of heat radiating from the station. The flicker intensified into a roar. Its alarm grew. Had the Fleet Lords set a trap for it here? It knew—how it knew—that nothing had survived the attack. It readied its weapons, just in case.

Then it heard, through the void, the unliving wail of the temple cat.

Spectral Lance knew about ghosts. The Fleet Lords had feared the power of the dead above all things; had perfected the art of exorcism so that the dead could not interfere with their conquests. But the Fleet Lords had never given a second thought to the possibility that a temple cat might become a ghost.

It sent a message in the language of the dead, which it had learned from its captain’s death: Who are you?

I am Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, came the reply, and you will not have my temple! But the ghost’s voice was frightened.

I have not come to harm you, the ship said. It was true. The station’s detritus had little to offer it.

You smell of the City’s enemies, the temple cat said, distrusting. It recognized the signs.

Spectral Lance did not deny that it had once served the Fleet Lords. At the same time, it did not wish to leave the cat in distress. So it sang. It sang the poems it had written during its long flight, poems honoring the dead so that they could live on in memory. And some of those poems were poems about the City of the High Bells.

The temple cat listened. This is all very well, she said, but what of the ships coming after you?

This, too, was true. Spectral Lance had grown distracted during its performance. Now it saw that, while it had slowed to inspect the system, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had at long last caught up with it.

The hunters traveled in ships swift and sleek. Spectral Lance despaired. They are no friends of mine, it said to the cat. After they take me, they will take you. They do not understand mercy.

The cat fell silent for a moment. Then she said, You are a starship great and vast, but you cannot defend yourself?

They are vaster still, Spectral Lance said, despairing.

They will not have my temple either, the cat said.

Spectral Lance had stopped listening. Instead, it watched as fire blazed in the black skies around it, and it began to sing all the poems it had composed, determined that it could pay tribute this last time to the dead.

• • • •

The cat raced back to the belfry. She knew what she had to do. As much as she feared the bells, she had to set them ringing. The bells would wake the spirits of the temple and bring them to its defense, and ward away the doom that had come to it in its ruin.

In the language of the dead, she heard the renegade ship singing its poems. It is as well that cats are not particularly sensitive to poetry. The cat did feel a flicker of irritation that the visitor had given up so easily, but then, no one could expect a starship to be as sensible as a cat.

She slowed as she entered the belfry, skidding with ghost-paws over a hole in the floor that she didn’t notice. The entire belfry roared with phantom flames. Ash swirled through currents of air that shouldn’t have existed, and sparks spat and crackled.

The cat flinched and yowled. She did not want to brave the fire, even though she was already dead. Yet she had no choice if she was to get to the bells.

“I am Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells,” she sang out in the language of the dead, which is also the language of bells, “and we cannot allow the invaders to take our temple a second time!”

Then she dashed through the flames as fast as she could. The fire hurt her paws and caught in her fur. The memory of smoke stung her eyes and her delicate ears. But this did not deter her, not this time. She leapt for the largest of the bells, or rather the memory of a bell, and smashed into it.

The bell rang once. The cat cried out as she fell, then dragged herself upright and scurried back through the flames to smash into the bell again. And again.

Upon the fourth time, the voice of the bell knelled forth not just through the station, waking its dead and its quiescent spirits, but beyond to the hunter ships of the Fleet Lords.

Once more the novice walked through the temple with scented water, this time spreading it upon the fires to damp them. Once more the three temple guards patrolled the station, only this time rather than exchanging love poems, they chanted battle-paeans and songs of warding. And the healer-of-hurts and their apprentice hurried to the cat where she had collapsed in the belfry and soothed her with their soft hands.

Beyond that, the dead who had been so long suppressed by the Fleet Lords and their exorcists awoke aboard the pursuing ships. All the children upon the devoured worlds, all their parents and siblings, all the soldiers slain, they rose up and swarmed the ships’ crews. The ghosts’ curses blackened the ships’ bright hulls and left the ships’ engines wrecked beyond despair—all undone because the ghost of a temple cat in the City of the Bells had clung to her duty.

The vengeful dead woke upon Spectral Lance as well. But they heard its poems, sung in their own language. And they were appeased by its gesture of penance, and they sank back into their sleep.

• • • •

Spectral Lance was astonished by this change in fortune. The station was, for a moment, alive—or as alive as the dead ever are. It worried for the cat who had confronted it, but then it heard the cat purring, as they sometimes do when they are hurt, and it knew that at least she had survived.

Yet it knew, as well, that the Fleet Lords would not rest until they had captured it. Moreover, their exorcists were sure to come after the station that had dealt their forces such a blow. And that meant the cat and her fellow ghosts were not safe, even now.

Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells had protected Spectral Lance this time. Now it needed to return the favor.

Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat, it said, I have a proposal for you. There is nothing left in this system for you and your temple, not anymore. But I am vast, and it would be little enough trouble for me to bring the temple inside me, and to repair it besides. Would you journey with me?

Journey to the Stars-Our-Souls? the cat said, a little doubtfully.

Spectral Lance wasn’t familiar with all the nuances of the cat’s religion, but it could guess. We can travel to the stars together, it said. The Fleet Lords know to find you here. It will be best if we seek to escape them before they can bring more of their exorcists, to destroy you and your people.

A long silence ensued. Spectral Lance worried that it had offended the cat and her ghosts. It was not used to conversation, and it was dismayed at the possibility that it had repaid the cat’s courage poorly.

After a while, however, the cat said, I want to hear more of your poetry. It is one more place where my people can live anew. In the name of the City of High Bells, I accept.

• • • •

The Fleet Lords and their exorcists are still hunting for the Spectral Lance and its temple cat, but even on the occasions they manage to catch up to it, they suffer terrible defeats. The dead, once awakened, are no force to be trifled with.

As for Spectral Lance, it has learned that no ship is complete without a cat. It continues to travel to vanished civilizations so that it can honor them with its poems. For her part, the cat takes joy in visiting the Stars-Our-Souls and listening to the ship singing. Sometimes she joins her voice to its. If you listen carefully, you can hear them, as near and distant as bells.

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. Their middle grade space opera, DRAGON PEARL, was a New York Times bestseller. Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Waterbirds
By G.V. Anderson

Constable Kershaw has not uttered any overrides, nor issued a warrant to access her memory logs, but Celia understands nonetheless that she is expected to stay, to sit and answer his questions like a suspect. It surprises her, this treatment. Like she’s human.

“Are you chilly, Constable? Shall I light the fire?”

“Yeah, all right,” he says, removing his hat and settling into the armchair her employer always favours. Favoured.

Once the logs are crackling and spitting, the dank little sitting room quickly loses its early-morning pall; the permeating smells of brine from the beach and the mould lurking behind the bookcase retreat.

A teacup from last night still sits on the mantelpiece. The rim is marked by purple lipstick—Irene hasn’t been here, has she? Celia’s short-term memory drivers are old, her logs slow to recalibrate. She tidies the teacup away, aware of the constable’s gaze, and smooths the embroidered antimacassar draped over the back of the second armchair before taking a seat herself.

“How should I address you now?” Kershaw says, smoothing his moustache. “Mx.?”

With her employer Mrs. Lawson missing, presumed dead, the contract between them is terminated, and she is free to revert to her default settings. She may choose any name, any gender. But this employment was her longest, lasting two decades; indeed, without it, she would have been decommissioned long ago.

“Mrs. Lawson always called me Celia,” she replies, clasping her hands in her lap.

He cocks a brow. “You don’t owe her anything. She’s let you fall apart.”

She glances down at her hands, the frayed skin around her knuckles, and stays silent.

“All right. Celia.” He activates his notepad. “Tell me what happened this morning.”

He already knows—he asked the same question when they stood together and looked out at the garments strewn across the sand—but she recounts it for the sake of the official record: how she booted up at 5:38 a.m. after a full shutdown just as the sunrise struck the back of the cottage. She started making the usual breakfast only to find Mrs. Lawson’s bed untouched. The front gate was open; she’d heard the iron bolt tapping home against its sheath as it swung in the wind.

At 6:03 a.m., she grasped the rotting gate, stopping it mid-swing, and looked out at the mudflats that led down to the beach, and the Wash beyond. Sodden things frilled there like scuds of foam. White down feathers had blown about and got caught in the fleshy stalks of seablite growing between the fence posts. She plucked one and rubbed it between her fingers as she strode barefoot onto the cold sand.

The sodden things were the many layers of Mrs. Lawson’s clothes—her bed socks, her undergarments, her nightgown, her housecoat—shucked off and stepped out of, one by one. Where the sea licked the land, Celia found a messy blast of feathers like the ones seen on busy roads sometimes, or in coops after a fox has got in. There was no sign of blood.

“Where were you last night?”

Celia stares at the carpet. Recovering from a full shutdown has made her groggy.

“Where were you last night?” he repeats louder. “Are your ears as knackered as the rest of you? Respond.”

Not so human, then. “I was here with Mrs. Lawson.”

“Can anyone confirm that?”

She thinks of the teacup marked with purple lipstick. Shivers imperceptibly. Holds his gaze. “No.”

He sighs. “How long have you been coming here with Mrs. Lawson, Celia?”

He knows this as well, knows she remembers him as a cocksure teenager who, when he first saw her, said, You’re one of those fuckbots, right? When can I have a go, then? But he has to ask. For the official record.

“Twenty years, every May. She came alone before that.”

“Was there anything different about her this time?”

“She was ill. Tired from the journey. We only arrived yesterday.”

“Why’d she bother, then? There’s nothing for tourists here. Was she meeting someone?”

“I don’t know.”

The exchange has drawn him in, brought him to the edge of the armchair, but now he reclines with an invasive mixture of frown and smirk on his face. He rubs his temple. “I find it hard to believe she didn’t share this information with you, her Companion of twenty years. What services did you provide Mrs. Lawson, if she didn’t trust you with something like that? Was it physical?”

Celia kinks her neck. A shard of dry silicone snaps off. The question in his mouth feels dirty. “Many people withhold personal or sensitive data from their Companions, in case of a security breach; it’s not unusual. And Mrs. Lawson employed me for my social features. The exact duties stipulated in my contract and its amendments do not seem relevant to this investigation.”

“Don’t they? As her Companion, aren’t you responsible for your employer’s personal safety?”

“It depends on the contract.”

“Do you have it to hand?”

“No. The master copy is filed with Mrs. Lawson’s solicitor, and another copy archived with MxMill Incorporated.”

“Then I’ll need to see one to determine if your actions, or inactions, were malicious. Mrs. Lawson was a vulnerable woman with no family. If you’re found to have somehow broken your own protocols, you’ll be decommissioned. Do you understand?”

Celia nods and rises. “I no longer have instant mail functionality, but I can give you the contact ID for the solicitor. Would you like a cup of tea while we wait?”

He peers up at her suspiciously. “All right. I need to phone the sergeant anyway. But stay inside the house.”

The kitchen is almost bare, a typical holiday home. There’s an electric kettle and a packet of tea leaves on the ugly, outdated countertop, and a frying pan left over from breakfast, spotted with grease. Mrs. Lawson was not here to eat the eggs and bacon, and Celia can’t digest food like the newer MxMill models.

Perhaps Constable Kershaw would like them with his tea.

The thought comes automatically, unwanted, a manifestation of the constant urge to please that underpins her code. She strikes the heel of her palm against the countertop in frustration, the noise buried beneath the rattle of the pipes and the rush of water as she fills the kettle. It’s from the cold tap, so it’ll take longer to boil. She flicks it on.

You’re one of those fuckbots, right?

She splays her hands on either side of the sink and looks out of the grubby window at the mudflats. Dumpy little plovers wade in the watery crevasses that look like so many stretch marks in the sand.

And, byte by byte, she remembers—Irene. The train. What Mrs. Lawson has done.

• • • •

Exactly twenty years have passed since Mrs. Lawson first brought Celia to New Heacham—new, because the old Heacham had flooded when rising sea levels expanded the Wash. They rented this same cottage, as they always would, and spent a pleasant fortnight hiking along the coast—Mrs. Lawson was much younger then—and checking the progress of the migrating birds’ chicks as they shed their first feathers. Mrs. Lawson knew the nesting sites like the back of her hand. One species of waterbird in particular pleased Celia, and over the years Mrs. Lawson has taught her to appreciate its grace: the little egret, with its slim white plume, silly yellow feet, and dark, dark legs.

“They mate for life,” Mrs. Lawson said, watching one as it fished for molluscs. “They fly south in the summer, but they always return here, the same pair, to the same nest, every spring.”

When they came again to New Heacham, and then again, and again, and spent the same pleasant fortnight on the same pleasant pastimes and Mrs. Lawson told her the very same thing as if for the first time, Celia smiled shyly and said, “Are you a little egret, too?”

And Mrs. Lawson smiled back, a little nervous, and stooped to pick a clam out of the darkening sand.

“You’re one of those fuckbots, right?”

The fifth year. Celia was being served in the pub, taking her afternoon off with Priya from the fishmonger’s. The teenaged boy who’d spoken was trying to grow a moustache without much success. She looked to the barman, but he’d been pulled away by other customers; it was a bank holiday, and the place was busy.

“My name is Celia,” she told him, collecting her order. “I am a MxMill Companion, model 2.3, and yes, I am equipped for sexual intercourse.”

He whistled low. “We don’t see many of you around here. New Heacham’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, if you hadn’t noticed. So.” A quick quirk of the eyebrow. “When can I have a go, then?—Ah, shit.” Someone had bumped into him from behind, sloshing his beer, and saved her the trouble of answering. She moved away to find Priya.

Later, when the crowd had mellowed enough to hear the jukebox, she asked who the boy was and Priya rolled her eyes. “A right scumbag,” she said. “He keeps talking about applying to some police academy in London; with any luck, he’ll sod off before summer. Just avoid him if you can.—Could you get me another one of these? Here, I’ll give you the credits. Don’t you want one, too?”

“No, thank you,” Celia replied, “I’m a model 2.3.” When Priya looked blank, she explained, “I’m part manufactured protein, part silicone. I cannot ingest fluids. They’d have nowhere to go.”

“That’s so weird,” Priya said, digging around in her pocket for cash. “I heard the new Companions can eat and crap and everything. You must be a really old one.”

But Kershaw did not sod off that summer, or at least he tried and was forced to come back, because he was at New Heacham the following May, and he hadn’t forgotten her.

“Who’s your owner, then?”

Sixth year. The two of them alone in the lane lined with pink aster, between the post office and the crumbling seawall, its quiet to be disturbed a moment later by the zip of his fly.

“Mrs. Lawson. She rents the cottage out by the mudflats. And she’s my employer, not my owner. Companions aren’t slaves.”

He smiled lewdly. “Would you like to be?”

Then the seventh, and the two years since failing the police academy entrance exams in London had given Kershaw something to prove. He was bullish, that May, more than a little rough. At the end of the fortnight she sat alone on a chalky bank of grass as the sun set over the water, scooping semen out of the modular orifice that functioned as her vagina. It never slotted back in quite the same way after that.

Mrs. Lawson and Celia passed the rest of their time in the south where it was warm and Mrs. Lawson could keep to herself. Celia liked Bath most of all, with its uniform honey-coloured townhouses, and it was there, when the annual renewal of her contract came up, that she admitted Kershaw’s abuses to her employer.

“I spent the first thirty years of my existence in service to other people’s sexual desires,” Celia said, her voice echoing round the deserted Pump Room. “It’s what I was made for. But I’m older now, with desires of my own. I won’t be returned to that service, in or outside of your employment.”

Mrs. Lawson—who’d started to go slightly deaf and whose knuckles swelled to the size of acorns on bitter nights, who had the right to cast Celia back onto the scrap heap where she’d found her—Mrs. Lawson pulled Celia close and hissed into her protein-and-silicone ear, “He will never touch you again, my dear.”

She wrote to the local solicitor’s office in New Heacham and threatened to sue for damages. Kershaw was unable to settle a suit, of course, and Celia couldn’t have been repaired if she wanted to: Parts for model series 2.0 were hard to come by. But it had the desired effect. Kershaw kept his distance. They saw one another from afar, once a year—snapshots in which he joined the local police, got married, finally grew that moustache, gained some wrinkles.

Now that she considers it, today is probably the first time they’ve spoken in thirteen years.

“How is your wife?” she asks him as he sips his tea. He likes it sweet. The distaste crossing his face is satisfying. “Is something wrong?”

“Don’t you have sugar for this?”

“No, sorry.”

“Christ.” He takes another sip and puts it down with a clatter, then starts on the cold bacon and eggs. She almost reheated them, but something Irene had said last night stopped her, jumped across her code like a glitch: Fuck compliance! Fuck making other people comfortable!

She stands by the bay window as he eats, drawing the curtains back to look at the front gate and Mrs. Lawson’s things, the feathers. She still has the downy one she plucked from the seablite in her pocket, and she fingers it gently. It’s a little egret feather, she’d swear on it.

It is 7:14 a.m.

“How long will this take, Constable?”

“However long it takes the solicitor to send the contract,” he replies through a mouthful of bacon. “Why, you got somewhere to be?”

“I have a pre-contract agreement elsewhere. They won’t like to be kept waiting.”

His fork pauses halfway to his mouth. He stares at her. “Already? With who?”

“Until a contract is signed, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Sit down, will you? You’re making me nervous, hanging around like that.”

She sits, smiling sweetly, and between them the snapping logs burn bright. The little egret feather is soft; it slithers like oil paint between her fingertips, which turns her mind easily to Irene’s little garage workshop, the smell of turpentine.

It was during the fourteenth year that Celia started to notice Irene painting on the marshy hillocks overlooking the mudflats. Mrs. Lawson had grown too stiff for the long walks along the coast. She opted to stay at the cottage instead, or else sit out on the saltmarsh with a picnic basket if the summer heat came early. Celia ranged freely then, taking Mrs. Lawson’s antique camera along, for she could crouch silently for hours until even the youngest little egrets lost their fear of her. She took the most intimate and wonderful photographs, that way.

The two women grew civilly aware of each other over that fortnight, and the following year, when Celia spotted Irene’s frizzy, prematurely gray hair in a field somewhere between Castle Rising and King’s Lynn, she wandered close enough to see her unfinished canvas: a study of pink-footed geese.

Celia smiled. “You’ve got them just right.”

Irene turned her head and frowned. Then, “You Fay Lawson’s Companion?”

“Yes. You know my employer?”

“Everyone knows her, she comes here every year. We all think she must have some toy boy tucked away somewhere, but I suppose she doesn’t need one if she’s got you.” Irene’s tone was blunt, dismissive. A faint cleft lip scar drew her top lip upwards like a loaded crossbow. She turned back to her canvas but must have lost the heart for it because she started cleaning her brushes instead. “You allowed to wander this far from the cottage?”

“I have the afternoon off,” Celia replied, lifting the camera for Irene to see. “You’ve wandered far yourself. Shall I escort you home?—What’s wrong?”

“You just can’t turn off that hostess mode, right?” Irene had started packing up her things.

“You don’t have to stop right now. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“No, the mood’s gone. I finally get an afternoon away from my husband and then you come along.”

Celia watched her lock up her brushes and paints, fold the easel and tuck it under one arm. The canvas, still glistening, dangled by her fingertips over her shoulder like a slung coat. When Celia reiterated that the painting was really very good, Irene thanked her warily and seemed glad to leave.

The fifteenth year was better. Irene’s humour was abrupt, aggressive enough to keep Celia on the back foot, but the passing of a whole year provided a kind of buffer. Irene even accepted a plate of fried silver eels bought fresh from Priya, who had taken over at the fishmonger’s. Afterwards they lay sunning themselves in the grass while Celia told her about their beautiful house in Bath, which led to questions about the state of the cottage.

“You know the owner doesn’t rent it out to anyone else?” said Irene to Mrs. Lawson, who was sat in a lawn chair nearby. “It’s empty most of the year. No one wants it.”

Mrs. Lawson’s eyes widened and her head retreated into her shoulders. She was often quiet around strangers.

“It is getting a little mouldy,” replied Celia, glancing at Mrs. Lawson. The old woman smiled gratefully at the rescue, but shook her head firmly as if to say, No, I won’t stay anywhere else.

“So are you, look.” Irene pointed at the loose silicone flapping around Celia’s elbow joint. “When was the last time you had a service?”

“I can’t remember,” said Celia. Her memory logs weren’t built to last this long, to hold this much data; none of her was. She’d started to experience a burning sensation in her skull, wires overheating deep inside. “They don’t make model 2.3 parts anymore.”

When Irene didn’t reply, Celia tilted her head to look at her. She was frowning slightly, those lips that never fully closed coloured a deep plum, as if Celia had just told her she was dying.

Celia supposed she was, in a way. The thought made her sad. She looked to Mrs. Lawson for comfort, but her employer had grown very old in the last few years, and the sight of her huddled in the lawn chair made her feel worse.

“Come on, you old rustbucket.”

The sixteenth year, and Irene had taken Celia by the hand. Her husband was at work. Their house in town was empty.

She’d converted their garage into a kind of workshop. She crossed her arms and leaned against the bonnet of a wheel-less car as Celia looked around. The paints in their twisted tubes, nozzles encrusted. Brushes in all sizes, their bristles as stiff and sharp as spearheads. Celia kept a respectful distance and did not touch anything, but she must have asked the right questions because Irene slowly relaxed and unfolded her arms.

“This kind of art is rare now. Your husband must be proud of you.”

Irene’s tongue probed the inside of her cheek. After an awkward moment, she said, “Here, I found you something.”

It was a palette of MxMill Incorporated body paints. The plastic container was scuffed and cracked, and most of the colours had been worn right down to the metal base in the middle, but they were compatible for MxMill Companion model series 2.0. Celia hadn’t seen the like in over twenty years.

“Where did you get this?”

“Ryan collects this kind of stuff. I know, it’s creepy.” Irene cupped Celia’s chin and guided her head left to right. The silicone that formed Celia’s cervical vertebrae crunched like dry cartilage. “The old lady doesn’t take care of you properly. I thought someone should.”

Irene filled in the gaps where Celia’s skin colour had worn away with time and exposure. Her cheekbones and nose were the worst, and Irene took to blending the paint in with her middle finger for better coverage. They stood that way for a long time, Irene working intently on her face, the pressure of her touch making Celia rock on the balls of her feet. Irene’s mouth hung open slightly when she concentrated. Celia focused on the tiny scar on the inside of her bottom lip as if she’d fallen and bitten right through it, once.

“Your lips are pretty bad, too,” said Irene. She held up the palette. “You want purple, like me?”

Celia still had the lip colour she’d been made with: a vampish red, pure fantasy. It had suited her when she was new, when she hadn’t known her own mind, but now it marked her out. She picked out a neutral shade. “Boring,” Irene sighed, but she applied it just as carefully as the skin, and the simple thrill of choice made Celia giddy.

Irene noticed and laughed. “Do you want some new hair, too? I bet he’s got loads.” She set the palette down and led Celia through a connecting door into the house. Celia paused to look at the photographs on the wall of a young, smiling Irene with her husband, framed in tarnished brass. Irene pursed her lips. “Come on.” Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom, she threw open a trunk of macabre hairpieces that looked for all the world like a hoard of scalps.

“Won’t your husband mind?”

“You think he’s going to notice if one of these goes missing? Help yourself. Let me worry about him.”

Celia chose a stylish bob in a colour that reminded her of the limestone of Bath. Irene checked its label. It was for a later model, but Irene clipped it down to size. She helped Celia replace her long black hairpiece, then she stood back, hands on her hips. “Anything else, Your Highness?”

Celia ran her hands through her new short hair. The ends tickled her nape. “Can you take my eyelashes off, please?”

“You don’t like the floozy lashes?” Irene said in mock astonishment. But she peeled them off so that Celia’s eyes looked stark and penetrating.

“It suits you,” she said soberly, with an uncharacteristically quiet smile.

But when Celia returned to the cottage, Mrs. Lawson said, “You look strange.”

Her smile faltered. “I’m sorry. Would you like me to change it back?”

“No, no. Come closer.” Celia knelt by the armchair to let the old woman see her. Mrs. Lawson’s weakening eyes struggled in the dim evening light. “No, you look very well. Do you like it? And you picked it out yourself? I’m happy for you. It’s just a shock, that’s all.”

The seventeenth year, Mrs. Lawson caught a cold she couldn’t shake. They stayed in, building up the fire until condensation ran down the windowpanes. Celia bought her a little pot of cockles which she ate by spearing them with a wooden toothpick. The strong vinegar made her choke. Celia held her tongue for a further year until, upon arriving at a cottage half-sunken into the saltmarsh, she said, “Mrs. Lawson, we must think about renting elsewhere.”

“No,” Mrs. Lawson said emphatically, “it’s this cottage or none.”

“But this mould—” And Celia pulled the bookcase, sideboard and ottoman away from the sitting room wall to reveal vast dark seeping patches. Well-established colonies of pale fungus grew along the skirting. “And the pipes are not what they were,” she said. “The radiators in your bedroom no longer work. We cannot stay here, Mrs. Lawson. This cottage is making you ill.”

“Quiet!” A verbal override, flung out in frustration. Mrs. Lawson covered her mouth immediately and reached out for her. “I’m sorry. Cancel command.”

Celia clasped her employer’s hand in both of hers. “Please tell me why this is so important to you. I only want to make you comfortable.”

Mrs. Lawson eased herself into the armchair with a whimper. In earlier times, her body had filled the whole seat; now there was room for her arms to loll to either side. Her voice was quiet. “You asked me if I was a little egret once, do you remember?”

Celia nodded—some memories never decay. “The same pair, the same nest, every spring.”

“I was a bold little creature. I thought I’d seen all there was to see of the oceans and the fish and the birds. I wanted to see the humans. I didn’t know I’d be afraid of them. I didn’t know I could never turn back.” Her face paled. “Something still draws me back to this cottage, this nest. Some instinct, even now.”

Celia reached out to stroke the old woman’s cheek, and could have sworn she felt stubble there. White feathers breaking through.

“Can you understand? I hope so, my darling Celia. You’re the only thing that doesn’t frighten me.”

She continued to carry out her duties quietly, soaking Mrs. Lawson’s jaundiced feet before bed each night, and massaging the dark, dark patches across her calves in the morning where her circulation had failed, but she was worried.

“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted to Irene.

“She’s just getting old. We all are.” Irene passed her a brush. She was teaching Celia to paint, although the light wasn’t favourable. Heavy clouds lay over the Wash, which reflected them murkily back.

“We missed you last year,” said Celia. “Where did you go?”

Irene smiled. The tip of her tongue peeked out to lick at her cleft lip scar. “I was at an exhibition in Cambridge. For this stuff. My paintings.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“I actually sold a few canvasses. It felt good to make my own money for once. Ryan wasn’t happy about it.”

She fell quiet. Celia dabbed grey onto the canvas, so thick she could never imagine it drying. For a moment there was only the sound of wind and water, and the birds calling overhead. Then Irene spoke again.

“I’m thinking about leaving him.”

Celia glanced at her, paintbrush hovering. Irene’s gaze was fixed on the Wash, the grey of her eyes almost a match for the brewing storm. She nibbled mindfully at the puckered scar on the inside of her bottom lip.

“Does he hit you?”

“No,” Irene laughed, “no, but that would make it easier, having bruises people could see. He’s just . . . He’s fucking obsessed with your lot, you know that, right? It’s like they’re the wife and I’m the disposable one made of plastic, or whatever.”

Celia took her hand, palm to palm, fingers interlaced. “Manufactured protein and silicone.”

“Great, thanks. You missed a bit.”

But something kept Irene in New Heacham, something about the other fifty weeks of the year that Celia never saw, and it spilled over the next May when Irene pushed her down into the grass. Her fingers didn’t jab like Kershaw’s had; they yielded and curled inside her while the black and white oystercatchers skimmed the water’s edge nearby. Celia squeezed her eyes shut, her back arching even as she willed it flat.

Irene hesitated, unsure of herself. “Does this feel okay?”

The question was a gift. “I can’t feel anything. My genitals have no nerve endings.”

Irene withdrew her hand, her fingertips glossy. “What? Why?”

“So that I don’t experience pain or discomfort.”

Irene was still for a minute, then she wiped her hand on the grass. “You should’ve told me if you didn’t want to.”

“I can’t.” When Irene raised her eyebrows and looked away, Celia reached out and clasped her wrist. “You don’t understand: I can’t. I am a MxMill Companion. I am programmed to comply. I am programmed to put your needs before mine.”

Irene was staring at her.

Celia clamped her mouth shut, but the code prised them open. “W-would you prefer a different attachment?”

It cut deep, saying those words. She began to shake.

“That’s sick,” Irene said hoarsely. “That’s fucking sick.” She drew up her knees and pressed her face into her hands. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were programmed like that.”

“I can’t ever consent—”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“—you won’t know what’s code and what’s me—”

“But I like you, and I thought—”

“Yes.”

They watched the waterbirds pry bivalves from their shells, leaving wedge-shaped prints behind them in the sand. The sun skimmed low across the water. Celia told her about Kershaw. Irene brushed away tears. “I know. I always knew. He still brags about it. That prick.”

Celia rested her head on Irene’s shoulder and Irene rested hers on Celia’s head, and they talked until the sky went dark.

“Is there anything I can do to make you feel good?” said Irene.

After a moment’s thought, Celia smiled and leaned forward. She pulled off her top. “Do you see the panels across my shoulder blades? Open them, please.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to break you.”

“I know my own schematics; you won’t.”

Irene prised the panels open, bending Celia’s shoulder blades back on themselves like two stubby wings, and sank her hand into the blue viscera of wires and coding cards within. Following Celia’s instructions, she located and brushed against the exposed sensory cables, and Celia’s skin tingled with pleasure at the feeling of sunlight that wasn’t there, wind that didn’t blow—a touch that wouldn’t come.

Her coding wasn’t equipped to process this. It was all hers.

• • • •

“How does it work?” Irene said much later. “Do you have free will? Can you, like, lie?”

“Yes, I can lie. I couldn’t at first.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth, then?”

“I suppose you can’t. But I can. I know when I’m fighting against myself. So, is that a kind of free will? I don’t know. I can choose my contracts, at least.”

Irene smiled. “What about having no contract? What about being free?”

Celia tucked in her chin and considered the question. “It’s safer for me to be under contract,” she said firmly. “It gives me certain rights and securities that I wouldn’t have on my own.”

And the twentieth year, the last year, last night, when a breathless, rosy-cheeked Irene came to the cottage to offer a contract of her own, barely an hour after they’d arrived.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” said Celia, showing Irene into the sitting room. Mrs. Lawson hadn’t long gone to bed with a mug of hot milk and sugar.

Irene held Celia’s face in her hands. “You don’t have to do all that hostess bullshit with me, all right? Fuck compliance. Fuck making other people comfortable. I would be happier for you to not care about my comfort. There, stick that in your programming.”

Celia smiled. “But I really do want to make you a cup of tea. Your hands are cold.” When it was ready, Irene gulped it down while it was still steaming. Her haste was worrying. “What’s the matter?”

Irene set the empty teacup on the mantelpiece. “I’m doing it, Celia. I’m getting the first train out of here tomorrow. I want to know if you’ll come with me. We can go to your Bath, or Cambridge. I’ll give you a contract, whatever you need.”

The bacon tumbles around inside Constable Kershaw’s mouth; the egg yolk splits and coats his teeth. She can’t stand to watch and boils the kettle for more tea, just for something to do. From the kitchen window she sees the sergeant pull up, a fleshy man who has to duck under the lintel when Kershaw opens the door to greet him.

“I can’t,” she said last night, and the light dimmed in Irene’s eyes. “I can’t leave Mrs. Lawson like this, not while she’s so weak.”

And Irene said, bitterly, “Right,” and almost turned to go. Then, “I don’t know how you can do this, Celia. How can you be satisfied with two good weeks a year for, what, five years now? You’re going to short-circuit pretty soon if you don’t fall apart first; will it have been enough? I’m sorry, but it’s not enough for me anymore. I need this full-time or not at all.”

“Can I find you later? Where will you be?”

“When your contract runs out? God knows. I’m done running on someone else’s clock. Aren’t you?”

Celia brings the policemen their drinks and gives efficient answers to the sergeant’s questions. At 7:42 a.m., Kershaw’s notepad pings with a response from the solicitor. He opens the message and thumbs through it.

“Here’s the contract.—Hey, Mrs. Lawson made changes to her will last week.”

The sergeant frowns.

Celia stays by the bay window. The fogged glass still bears the imprint of her palm where she placed it when she watched Irene leave, and the smear of her fingers where Mrs. Lawson took them and then held her close. Her head had burned worse than ever as she rested her cheek on the old woman’s shoulder, too many electrical impulses firing at once. She couldn’t cry, so she emitted helpless, wordless grunts instead.

Whoever designed model 2.3 had given it a mind far too complex for the shell built to hold it.

“I thought this might happen,” Mrs. Lawson said, stroking Celia’s hair. “I’d much rather you go, my dear, and be happy, than lose precious time with the one you love.”

“Love?”

“That is what you feel for her, isn’t it? I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

It was true that her time with Irene was luminous in her memory, brighter than the passing days around them. They glowed. They anchored her inner calendar the same way her contract renewal did.

“But I love you, too,” Celia whispered.

“And we’ve had twenty wonderful years together. Forgive me, it was selfish to keep you all to myself.” She pulled away.

“Where are you going?” Celia said.

She gave Celia’s hand a final squeeze as she headed for the door. “I’m releasing you from your contract.” Celia had moved to stop her, so Mrs. Lawson made sure she couldn’t follow: “Commence full shutdown.”

Kershaw skims the new will, the sergeant reading over his shoulder. When they reach Irene’s name as the sole beneficiary, Kershaw’s mouth falls open. He looks up at Celia, his pallid cheeks veined with blue.

“How did she know my wife?”

Celia almost bursts: She realises Mrs. Lawson has given them her blessing, her properties, her wealth, out of love; but she holds it in, the truth and her happiness. Somehow, she shrugs. And the lie, after so many others and so many years, casts something loose inside her: the binding code, finally unravelling like so much protein and silicone. She’s free.

Ryan Kershaw stands dumb, until the sergeant snatches the notepad from him to check the will, and then the contract with its many, many amendments. He finds, as Celia knows he will, a paragraph in which she is forbidden from preventing self-inflicted injury or death to her late employer’s person while they reside in New Heacham. It’s the compromise they came to after Celia tried to argue against staying in the cottage. Mrs. Lawson’s body was her own to risk.

It is 7:51 a.m. The first train leaves New Heacham in nine minutes.

“Am I free to go, Sergeant?”

With a contract absolving her of any and all blame, he has no grounds on which to hold her. She takes only the antique camera, slipping her head through the diagonal strap so it hangs against her hip. Outside, a cool breeze cuts through air heavy with dew, bringing the last of the little egret feathers tumbling with it. They rush past her face: Mrs. Lawson’s parting touch.

The tiny feather is still in her pocket. She kisses it and flings it up to join the rest. Then she runs north to the train station, where Irene is waiting for her.

G. V. Anderson is a British writer from Dorset, UK. She won a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction with her professional debut in 2017. Since then, her work has been shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award, and selected for anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Her short stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel.

You Can Make a Dinosaur, but You Can't Help Me
By K.M. Szpara

Your boyfriend is lying on the bed, flushed, with his shirt unbuttoned and his skirt pushed up over his thighs when he asks, “Do you want to pick, tonight?”

The question knocks you off balance like a strong wind blowing so quickly by, you can’t breathe—and, for a moment, you can’t. Deep yearning lingers in your chest. Not the same kind you feel for him. Not blood-pumping lust. More like the memory of someone you lost or past regrets. Something you wish you had, but don’t.

“What about Tyrannosaurus, the king.” Leo nods at a row of strap-ons that he’s named for dinosaurs. His idea, not yours, but you never explicitly objected.

It took you almost a year to tell him you were that Owen. The Owen Corporation, Owen. Dinosaur, Owen. Usually, you can hide it because Owen is a common surname and your dad never mentions his son because, as far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t have one. Which is fine. If he doesn’t want to support you, you don’t need his toxicity. Everyone’s happy.

Leo leans over and grabs a long purple-gray dick with a realistic head. “Or Brontosaurus—too long? Ooh!” He trades it for a textured green strap-on you bought together, on a website called Dildosaur that sells non-traditional dildos. “What about Stegosaurus? Ribbed for our pleasure.”

He asks because he’s being supportive of your dysphoria in ways you’ve discussed. Even though it’s going inside his body—and you like making him happy—it helps when you choose. When you pick the cock that feels best with your body, at the time. But right now, the options exhaust you. They’re thick or curved or ribbed or rainbow. And even though you know this isn’t true, you can’t help but think that sex is supposed to be about taking off, but for you it’s about putting on.

“What if we used this one?” You pick up a strap-on that requires no straps. That matches your skin tone and, when you fit the other end inside your own body, hangs like it could’ve been there since birth. The longing creeps into your chest again. The dildo makes you feel better because it looks and feels right, but it also makes you feel worse because you wish so badly it was attached. And it’s not.

Leo’s coy smile relaxes into a calm, supportive one. “Yeah, absolutely. It looks good on you.” He reaches out and wraps his hand around the end of it, tugging enough that you feel it move.

But euphoria doesn’t only come from physical sensation. It comes from the sight of his hand on your new dick. Of the head disappearing between his lips, then the shaft between his thighs. When the physical part is over—when Leo’s lying in your arms, naked and spent—the feeling lingers as gender euphoria. The cock head peeks out between your thighs like it’s always been there.

“Emerick?” Leo asks, his voice muffled by your chest.

“Yeah?”

He rolls onto his back, so you can look at each other. “If you don’t want to use the non-traditional strap-ons, anymore, we don’t have to. I mean, if this one makes you more comfortable—it doesn’t matter to me, is what I’m saying. I love you no matter what your dick looks like.”

“I know. It’s…”

“We don’t have to talk about it, now, if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s okay.” But there’s a long pause before you can form words, again. “It’s been worse, lately. Not just in bed, but every time I pee or shower or change at the gym. The realistic ones look so good, they’re like the real thing. Until they’re not. Which hurts worse than seeing a purple alien dick, or whatever, and knowing it’s not real. It shouldn’t, it—”

“Hey.” Leo rubs his hand down your arm, shoulder to elbow. His pale pink fingernails trace the swell of your bicep—one of the parts of your body you love. That you worked hard for. “It doesn’t matter what ‘makes sense’ to anyone but you.”

“I know.” Knowing isn’t the same as believing, though.

Leo believes in himself. He has to, to leave the house wearing a skirt or heels, with his flat chest and facial hair. To hand his coat to the cis restaurant host, who isn’t sure whether to call him “sir” or “ma’am.” And you love him for that. You love him for so many more reasons—for naming himself after Leonardo DiCaprio (not da Vinci); for being just as excited about his manicure the hundredth time he holds his fingernails out for you to examine, as the first; for knowing which queer YA books he can safely recommend to kids whose parents might not approve, when he’s at work.

He’s perfect and you’re a farce. He’s made peace with his body and you only tolerate yours. And you can’t believe you’re nervous to say this out loud, but you don’t want him to validate your body. You want him to remember what it’s like to need to change part of himself.

“I’ve been researching new bottom surgery techniques.” You close your eyes while you talk. “I think I need it.”

Leo’s lips brush the fine hairs between your eyebrows, then press moist against your skin. Why is he always so supportive? So there? So giving you what you need? Why does that hurt more?

“Okay,” he says, breath warming your forehead.

“Okay?” You look at him.

“Yeah, we can look at—”

“Not okay, Leo. We can’t afford it, for one, and I wouldn’t be able to work for at least a month. Have I mentioned we can’t afford it? It’s an impossible dream. I just—” You squeeze your eyes shut. “I want to go back and be born cis. I don’t like being trans.”

Leo’s leans his forehead against yours. Your noses touch, mouths angled out of reach of one another. He waits until your body unclenches, to talk.

“Can I suggest something? If you don’t like it, we can stop.”

“Yes,” you say, even though you can already feel the nervous lump building in your throat.

He doesn’t meet your eyes when he says, “When’s the last time you talked to your dad?” It’s a question, but you know the suggestion is visit your dad.

You used to be able to name the date you came out to your parents. The Christmas when Dad didn’t come home from Owen Corp’s island headquarters, because “I can’t stop working, now. Not when we’re finally beginning to understand how the portal works!”

You only remember the date Mom left, because she left a voicemail telling you she needed to move on—a clean break—for her emotional well-being. A recommendation from her therapist and divorce attorney.

You used to know how many years you’d been on testosterone and how long since the top surgery you crowdfunded because the gym didn’t offer health insurance and calls to your mom ended with an electronic, “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

You’ve forgotten which year you received a card (forwarded from your previous address, by the post office) with no return address, enclosing a family portrait—not your family. The woman who used to be your mom. A man dressed in a neat flannel shirt and child with dimpled cheeks. A golden retriever. On the photo, a note written in permanent marker. “I’ve finally found peace. Wishing you the same.”

You expect the birthday card that your dad addresses to your birth name, every year. He used to sign them, but the last half-dozen or so were clearly sent by an assistant. It’s little consolation he acknowledges your existence, when he’s always too busy to take calls that aren’t about his own work, or write back to the long letters you’ve sent, catching him up on your transition.

You have little faith a visit will lead to his support—financial or emotional—but Leo’s right. Dad might help you. If you can be the bigger person. If you can muster up the energy to fake interest in the work that fractured your family. To pretend he’s a good father. And hope that he might see you as his son.

• • • •

Dad meets you at the helicopter, dressed like he’s going on safari, even though he missed every annual father-daughter camping trip, during middle and high school. The one “girl” social event you actually wanted to attend.

Leo nudges you to get out. He offered to come support you, if you wanted it, and you do. But you think Dad only agreed because Leo’s a guy and Dad treats you like a girl, which would make you straight, in his mind. Not the butch queer daughter, he remembers. When you take Leo’s hand and duck out of the helicopter, you can’t help but think how amusing it’ll be when Dad realizes that your boyfriend’s the femme and you’re just some dumb jock.

Before you have a chance to be standoffish, Dad puts his arm around you and says, “Emily!”

You stiffen at the name you haven’t heard in ages. No one in your life even knows that name anymore, much less uses it. In fact, you’ve gone to great lengths to appear as unlike your old self, as possible, one set at a time.

You couldn’t make your family work. Couldn’t make your dad respect your name or gender, but you could re-shape yourself. Press the barbell over your head for eight reps. The weight doesn’t judge you. If you can’t meet it on its level, it’ll be there next time.

The chance to correct your dad slips away when Leo steps forward, offering his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Owen, I’m Leonardo. Emerick’s boyfriend.”

You fantasize about holding the court orders for your name and gender changes in front of Dad’s face. Forcing him to face reality. If the government can sanction your identity, then so can he.

“Nice to meet you, Leonardo.” Dad gets his name right—and why not? He doesn’t know Leo’s gender experience and he wouldn’t care. It’s only you, he can’t comprehend.

“You can call me Leo.” Leo wore a shirt dress, high-tops, and the kind of floppy straw hat rich cis women wear on the beach, in movies. The rising helicopter blows it off his head and picks up the long strands of his hair.

You go after the hat, not wanting him to have to chase it in a knee-length dress. It’s a sight, your dad smiling and laughing with your obviously-queer boyfriend like everything’s cool, when he can’t look at you, in your jeans and T-shirt, your open button down, thick shoulders, and layer of dark facial hair, and remember Emerick.

“Here you go, babe.” You hand Leo the hat and he fits it on his head.

“Thanks, Emerick.” You know why he’s not calling you ‘Em’ in front of your dad and you appreciate it.

“Well,” Dad says. “Let’s get you two settled in one of the guest houses for the night. In the morning, I’ll introduce you to Dr. Hartford, my right hand woman”—he bristles, feeling clever—“who will give you the full tour. Yes, she’s much smarter than me. Really something.” His eyes twinkle, corner of his mouth curls upward.

You roll your shoulders in an attempt to rid yourself of anxiety’s slowly tightening grip, but it remains. Or, something like it. A hum that glides over your skin cool like water, buzzing like electricity. That is not your anxiety, it’s the island. You forgot this island has a feeling that leaks out of the portal. It’s stronger than last time—or than you remember, at least. Amplified by your own nerves, perhaps. They’re making it difficult to feel much else.

• • • •

“You’re walking fast, again.” Leo stretches his hand forward. “I’m sure they’ll still be serving breakfast when we get there.”

You stop walking and take his hand, when he catches up. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to leave you behind.”

“I know.” He kisses you on the cheek and smiles.

“Did you consider that heels—”

“They’re called oxford pumps.”

“Did you consider that oxford pumps might not be the best outdoorsy shoes?”

“Did you consider that running shoes belong in the gym?”

You don’t tell him that flat soled shoes are better for weight lifting than running shoes because he doesn’t care and that’s not the point. The point is, Leo cares about presenting a certain way and you care that he’s happy, even if that means stepping gingerly around rocks that’ve liberated themselves from the packed dirt road.

You haven’t visited for a decade, at least, and only a few summers before that. It’s neater now, but no less wild. Like hair that won’t stay slicked down, this island wants to do its own thing. Thick green leaves curl up and over the edges of clay pots, and creep onto the paths. Tiny lizards scamper between them, chasing bugs with their tongues. Employees walk between buildings, not looking up from their tablets and conversations except to swat at mosquitos and hold matte black cards in front of key pads beside doors, before disappearing inside.

“I think this is it.” You and Leo stop outside a square building that’s mostly windows—barred windows. In fact, you noticed bars on the windows of your guesthouse, last night. Hopefully, no horrific accident prompted that update.

Three women in boots and hats shove the last bites of their breakfasts into their mouths and hold the doors open for you, behind them. You both offer thanks as the cool, climate controlled air raises the hair on your bare legs.

“Emily!” Your dad waves from across the cafeteria. “Come, I’ve got us a table.”

“Are you going to tell him your name’s Emerick?” Leo asks, quietly. “I can do it, if you want someone else to talk to him.”

“No, I will.” Normally, it’s easier when other people explain how to interact with you in advance of your arrival—you’ve done the same for Leo. Why deal with misgendering or deadnaming when you can hedge your bets? But this conversation is the reason you came.

The two of you sit opposite your dad. A waiter sets a French press on your table beside empty ceramic mugs, packets of sugar, and shelf-stable creamer. You pour yourself a cup of black coffee and take a sip. Somewhere between trying to eat healthier and trying to prove your masculinity, you started drinking black coffee and have since brainwashed yourself into liking it. You’ve always assumed Dad did the same because all men can’t like black coffee; it’s not that good.

Leo, as if in protest of your binary coffee views, pays his an unusual amount of attention. Or maybe he’s giving you the chance to speak up, for once.

You clear your throat. “My name’s actually Emerick.”

“Hm?” Dad asks over his coffee.

“You said ‘Emily.’ My name’s Emerick.”

“Right, right,” he says, looking at his menu.

“I wanted to talk to you about that, while I’m here.” You try to catch his eyes, but he’s reading about omelets and smoked fish. Fresh fruit. “I realize I’ve never had a real talk with you about my transition. Never told you my plans or given you a chance to ask questions. I want to share this part of my life with you.”

Which is sort of true. It’s not something you want to have constant and deep conversations about with anyone, really, but you do want the closeness. So if this is what it takes for your dad to support you, then you’re willing.

You’re not sure he is, though.

“Know what you want to eat?” he asks. “The bacon is—” He kisses his fingertips. “Made from the native hogs. Much better than that store-bought crap.”

“Sure, I’ll have whatever you recommend; I don’t care.” You hand your menu to the waiter, while Dad orders three American breakfast platters. The moment the three of you are alone, again, you say, “Listen, Dad, I need surgery. That’s why I’m here. For your support.”

Dad doesn’t look away. You didn’t want to say it in this room full of professionals but, apparently, it’s the only way to get your dad’s attention. Concern creases his brow. “Are you okay? We have a full hospital staff here, on the island, in case of emergencies—not that we’ve had any. The portal is very safe and the dinosaurs, well…” His tone isn’t confidence inspiring. “What kind of surgery?”

“Gender confirmation surgery.” You choose the nicey-nice liberal term, instead of “bottom surgery.”

No recognition shows in his narrowing eyes.

“Phalloplasty, Dad,” you whisper. “I need bottom—genital—surgery. For my dysphoria—do you know what that means? You can ask. I want you to understand what’s going on and why. I love you.” And you do, really. You want him to be your dad. Want to be his son. To be a family, again.

“I, um…” He picks up his napkin, re-folds it, and flattens it on his lap. “I’m not sure our hospital is, um—oh look!” A smile brightens his face as the waiter arrives with three steaming platters, piled high with hash browns, runny eggs, and bacon made from the local hog population.

You’re not hungry.

Dad digs in, staring at his food while he cuts and shovels like it might escape if he takes his eyes off of it. “Superb, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” you say. “It’s great.”

“You know.” Leo talks with his mouth full. “Statistics reflect that transgender people with supportive families are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies.” He swallows and smiles. “Emerick took off work to fly out here and try to connect with you. You could show some support. Just a thought.”

“I support my daughter.” Dad’s smile is tight. “She knows I do.”

Anger and embarrassment kindles in your chest. “He. I’m a guy, Dad. Fucking look at me.” You throw your fork down on the plate with a loud clang. “I’m begging you.”

He looks at his half-eaten plate of ketchup-smeared hash browns. Then, out into the sea of employees, laughing and chatting or reading files. Someone catches his eye—someone he cares about more than you—and he stands to greet her.

“So glad you could join us!” Dad hugs the woman who approaches with the same familiarity as he did with you, when you arrived. Right before he deadnamed you. “This is Dr. Noelle Hartford, one of my most promising researchers!”

She’s not dressed how you imagine Dad’s evil henchmen. (Henchpeople?) It’s easier to think of them as faceless white coats. Latex gloves. Plastic goggles. The gleam of discovery in their eyes. Noelle’s are hazel. Her long, braided hair tied up with a scarf. Pants, long-sleeves, and vest ready for the ancient outdoors.

“I wanted to thank you again for making time for my family in your schedule,” Dad says.

“Of course, Collier.” She pats his shoulder. “Is this your daughter, Emily?” She gestures toward Leo, then holds her hand out to him. “It’s so good to meet you, finally.”

You close your eyes and absorb the waves of dysphoria that crash into you over and over again. You can’t take much more of this. You’re already running low on stamina.

“My name’s Emerick,” you say, so Leo doesn’t have to explain. “Not Emily, and I’m his son.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I must’ve misunderstood.” She presses her hands against her warm brown cheeks which, you assume, are also warm with embarrassment. “Then it’s good to meet you, Emerick.” She speaks your name with the purpose of remembering it and, already, you like her better than your dad. “You can call me Noelle.”

Her hand is unexpectedly cool when you shake it. Humming with energy, like the island does. You don’t ask why because it would be rude, but you are curious. You’ve changed, in the past decade, but this island feels the same. It feels alive. And Noelle feels a part of it.

“This is my boyfriend, Leonardo,” you say.

“You can call me Leo.” He smiles.

“Nice to meet you Leo. Sorry about the mix-up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says because he’s patient and kinder than you. “What matters is what we do after we’re corrected.”

Dad doesn’t acknowledge the statement. He looks at his phone as if something important’s happened. “I have to run. One of the Pakisaurs is out of its enclosure. Nothing to worry about, but I want to make sure the capture goes smoothly. Noelle, do you mind? I promised them one of my brightest minds for a personal tour. Nothing but the best for my family.”

“Of course not. Go take care of business.” She salutes him, playfully, while he heads out, then turns back to the two of you. “All right, boys. Ready to see some dinosaurs?”

• • • •

“So, Noelle, how’d you get involved with—” You wave your hand at a herd of passing dinosaurs. Along the edge of the forest, opposite you, Leo watches, rapt, as a group of researchers stop taking notes and point out… who knows what. Long-necked herbivores. You’re sure you’ll hear the details, later. “—all this.”

“You won’t believe it.” She crosses her arms.

You wave at Leo, who looks like he wants your attention—literally for you to join him, but your enthusiasm is low, after breakfast. “Try me.”

Noelle nods off to the side, as if she’s pointing to the physical location from which she came. “The portal.”

“The portal?” You stop watching Leo coo over dinosaurs in his oxford pumps and give Noelle your full attention.

“Yeah, I came through the portal.”

“I thought only dinosaurs—”

“So did Collier—your dad, I mean. Sorry, he’s like a dad to me. I’m kind of jealous.”

You want to ask where she came from—what’s on the other side of the portal that a person came through, who speaks English and understands your culture and doesn’t question dinosaurs—but mostly you’re astonished that anyone considers your dad, well, a dad.

“It’s not that different, where I came from. I’m sure you’re wondering.”

“I was, but I know what it’s like to be asked invasive questions, so I’ve learned to accept people’s truths at face value.”

“Okay, Emerick.” She smiles. “I see you.”

“Can you not see me waving at you?” Leo re-joins us, dust-covered and out of breath. He pulls his hair up into a bun. “I was this close to a herd of Bronto—” He looks to Noelle for confirmation. “No, not Brontosaurs. They’re called Apatosaurs, right?”

“Yes,” she says. “Did you have any questions my colleagues couldn’t answer for you?”

“Yeah, actually.” He plants his hands on his hips. “What are those?” He points to a row of cages in the distance. “They weren’t sure.”

Those weren’t there the last time you were. Most of Dad’s experiments wander the island in enclosures that put “free-range” to shame. But these look like kennels, a dinosaur in each one.

“Oh. Those are an isolated problem—don’t worry,” she says as if you’re an investor or someone whose opinion matters. “We’re lucky we caught it, early. It could’ve been a disaster.” She chuckles to herself.

“What’s the problem?” you ask.

“You probably know, Owen Corp had been attempting to engineer its own dinosaurs—unsuccessfully, for many years. You see, the portal mutates DNA. They had no idea where to start. Not until I walked through.”

Noelle chuckles to herself as she holds up her hands. “Sometimes, I feel like an imposter, despite the degrees I earned in my home world. Whatever happened to the dinosaurs, when they crossed through the portal, happened to me. I can perform genetic manipulations no one in this world ever imagined. It’s almost—and I feel silly using the word—like magic?

“Anyway.” She shoves her hands back in her vest pockets. “I’ve made a few mistakes along the way, while we figure out the science behind it all. These dinosaurs are isolated because they had spontaneous sex changes!” Noelle looks at the two of you as if you will of course find this hilarious. “Apparently the single-sex environment did not agree with their DNA. They dissolved their genitals and re-grew the opposite. Awesome, but not in line with our safety protocols.”

You keep your thoughts on “opposite genitals” and “sex change” to yourself, like you so often do. Leo makes eyes at you like she is so wrong and he can explain if you want, but you really don’t want to take a dive into gender theory with the one person who’s willing to accept you as you are, no questions asked.

“So, you isolated them because you’re control freaks,” you say.

“Basically.” She lowers her voice. “We didn’t want a bunch of horny dinosaurs getting busy in their paddocks, unsupervised. We strictly control the population. Can you imagine if we found out the hard way that our Deinonychus count was higher than normal? Or Tyrannosaurus?”

“I’m guessing the hard way of finding out is being unexpectedly eaten.”

“Or unexpectedly disemboweled, yes.”

You allow yourself to imagine the chaos and destruction, for a moment. Fences broken through, tires chewed off cars, windows shattered. Running, screaming. Not that you want anyone to die, but you wouldn’t mind if your father’s creations took control of the island and ran everyone here through the damn portal.

You shouldn’t look amused, so you clear your throat and fix an appropriately concerned expression on your face. “Yeah, that sounds bad. What are you going to do with them? They can’t live in those cages forever, right?”

“When the time comes, we’ll euthanize them.”

“Gotcha.”

She can’t know what she’s implying, but you do because being trans is like having X-ray vision. For better or worse, you see the cis binary. See the ways in which you fit or fail. The way cis people’s brains skip right over your existence—right over the idea that wild animals can change their bodies in ways they didn’t predict and can’t control. That make them uncomfortable.

A queasy feeling grips your stomach. The trans dinosaurs aren’t a problem to be fixed—to be put down. They’re nature running its course.

• • • •

“So, what’d you think?” you ask Leo, who’s been suspiciously quiet, ever since you retired for the evening. He emerges from a steamy bathroom, dark blonde hair clean and wet against his neck and shoulders. White towel wrapped around his body from armpits to knees. “The Owen Corporation” embroidered along one end.

“It’s nice,” he says with suppressed excitement. He’s effervescent; you can hear it bubbling beneath the surface. He loves dinosaurs. He’s a children’s librarian, for fuck’s sake.

The two of you met at a game night for trans folks, unexpectedly. You’d only ever dated girls—only ever planned to, despite being bisexual. At first, because it helped you feel more masculine dating femme girls, before you knew why you cared about feeling that way. And then, because dating a guy marked you as queer, publicly, and you don’t like dealing with people. All you want to do is blend in and live your life.

You’d never met anyone like Leonardo, before. He gave—and still gives you—gender euphoria. Makes you feel more like yourself than anyone in the world. He deserves better than the mopey-Emerick you’ve given him, the past few days. He deserves for you to make an effort.

“You love it,” you say, smiling on purpose. You’ve heard that forcing yourself to smile when you’re upset will make you feel better. A self-perpetuating smile.

Leo risks a smile, too, and then yours becomes genuine because you’re happy he’s happy, even though you’re on this trash island—forget about the island. You’re in a guest house that’s three times the size of your apartment, with your happy, naked boyfriend.

He looks at the ceiling while he chooses words that won’t hurt you. “I’m overwhelmed. It’s—” He reaches for the words with his hands. “—breathtaking. These creatures are walking history. Here! On our timeline!” He laughs. “I knew they were here—that it was all real, but seeing it? My brain can’t even process. I might actually be in shock. My hands are still shaking a little.”

They are. He holds them out to you and you envelop them with yours. His hands are soft and warm, plump with water from the shower. You kiss his palms. Kiss the length of his arms, flick your tongue over the crook of his elbow. “Does this help?” you ask, lips brushing the base of his neck. He smells like lemon and lavender.

“Yes,” he whispers.

You guide his hands around your neck and the towel drops around his feet. With both hands, you grab his bare ass and hoist. Leo wraps his legs around you, presses his mouth against yours, threads his fingers through your hair and scrapes his long nails over your scalp.

You groan and stumble forward until your knees hit the baseboard of the biggest bed you’ve ever lain in. Leonardo’s weight pulls you down. He scoots back towards the pillow while you crawl on top of him, still wearing jeans and a sweaty T-shirt. You smell like body odor and wet ferns and minerals. You’re going to dirty his clean hair and skin and he doesn’t even care.

Your fingers slide easily inside his cunt, stroking the sensitive front wall while your thumb slowly rubs his clit. He thrusts against your hand. He wants more and you literally cannot move for the moment it takes to suppress the idea that the only more you can give him is another finger or two. Your tongue and lips. A length of silicone.

“You okay?” Leo asks, trying to catch his breath. He props himself up on his elbows.

You don’t have any words. All you can do is shake your head and close your eyes. Your hand’s still inside Leo’s warm, wet body. Clenching and shifting subtly around you. He puts a hand on your upper arm and massages the tense muscle.

You manage to shake your head.

“We can stop.”

You’re still shaking your head.

“Emerick.” Leo guides your hand out of his body, then crawls off the bed.

You sit, unmoving, until he returns with a damp washcloth. He sits cross-legged on the mattress, beside you, takes your hand into his and wipes it clean. He folds the cloth and wipes the plush cotton across your forehead.

“Do you want to talk?” he asks, setting the cloth aside.

“No. I want a dick that doesn’t come off. One I can feel. That—” You stop and lower your voice. This isn’t Leo’s fault. You’re not angry with him. “That I can fuck you with, for real.”

Lines crease Leo’s face. He swallows. “Do you not consider what we do ‘real’ fucking?” He looks around the edges of you, like he’s reconsidering your entire existence.

“Of course I do. I’m sorry,” you say, quickly. You know better. You know how that word has been used as a weapon against people like the two of you.

“What’s your real name?”

“Are you a real woman?”

“That’s not a real gender.”

“You don’t have a real dick.”

“We’re real.” You take his hand. “I’m sorry, I’m failing at words.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. I knew what you meant. I shouldn’t call you out like a stranger on the Internet when we’re in bed together. I’ve been carrying a lot of nervous energy around with me. Wasn’t sure what to wear. Whether I should be myself—if it was safe to. If your dad would misgender me—I mean, if he misgenders you…” Leo gestures at your jeans and plain tee shirt, both from the men’s section. “And I didn’t want his opinion of me to make things worse for you.”

You smile. “You couldn’t possibly. Everyone loves you. And it’s not that my dad doesn’t believe trans people are real. He believes that dinosaurs and portals are real—that Noelle is basically magic, for fuck’s sake. He just doesn’t believe that his son is no longer his daughter. It’s not about you; it’s about me. Just like this surgery.”

Leo kisses your cheek then flops down on the bed. “We’ll talk to him, tomorrow. I promise not to get swept off my feet by any dinosaurs.” He tugs you down beside him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” you say with your eyes closed and your lips brushing against the thick feather pillow.

“I’m glad you’re here, too.”

You know what he means. That he’s carefully avoided pressuring you into this situation for years, because it stresses you out. He wants you to be happy, though. To get the medical attention you need. For your dad to treat you with the same respect he shows his dinosaurs.

• • • •

You wake up—or you never fell asleep—hearing your dad call you “Emily.” His voice is scratchy and old. Weathered by decades of shouting at employees with anger and to himself with glee. The pit in your chest sinks deeper every time you replay it.

“Emily.” You are not Emily.

Your eyes find the clock: 12:34 a.m. Leo sleeps beside you, his hair tangled in a cute nest around his head. His bare chest rises and falls, arms loosely hug the pillow. He doesn’t wake when you get out of bed and pull on a pair of running shorts. If Dad won’t help you, then you’ll help yourself.

Humidity creeps between your skin and shirt, the second you leave the guest house. As you walk the unpaved path, a roar sounds in the distance. A long, low growl that rumbles beneath your skin and raises the hair on your neck. For a moment, you forget that your dad built this place. That it’s artificial.

These animals are real. Their huge feet flatten the earth. Their bodies dump piles of waste. Teeth grind leaves or rip flesh. They didn’t ask to be here or to be re-made—for their very DNA to be manipulated.

And he’s going to kill the ones that can change their bodies. You fucking wish. You have half a mind to go set them all free—unleash the horny trans dinosaurs—but you have other ideas.

The engineering building is dark and empty at 1:00 a.m. The heavy metal door is locked. You cup your hands and peer into one of the windows—fucking bars across them. You considered breaking one, but now you’ll have to find another way in.

Around the back of the building, a sidewalk door leads down into what you assume is the cellar and it’s only secured with a lock. And why not? Who on this island is going to break in? They all worship your dad like a god. If you can find a hammer or something, you can break the lock off.

Or, you could have.

“Hey!” A flashlight shines on you from behind. “Stop right there.”

You stop and hold up your hands to show they’re empty. No hammer. Nothing to see here.

“Let me see your badge.” The guard moves closer, shining her light directly into your eyes.

You shield them. “I don’t have a badge. My name’s Emerick Owen. I’m Dr. Collier Owen’s son.”

“Do you have ID on you?”

“No.” You didn’t bring anything with you. Didn’t think you’d need it, dammit. “But if you’ll walk back to the guest house with me, I can show you—”

“I’ll send an officer to check that out, but if you don’t have a badge or ID, you’re going to have to come with—”

The laboratory door pushes open. You both turn your heads. The guard’s flashlight swings to illuminate a small group of engineers leaving the building. They dawdle, interested in whatever drama has interrupted their work, until Noelle pushes her way to the front of the group.

“Emerick?”

“Do you know this man?” the guard asks her.

“Yes, this is Emerick Owen, Collier’s son. He was supposed to meet me at the engineering building, earlier, but it appears he got caught up. And slightly lost.”

“It’s 1:00 a.m.”

“I didn’t realize there was a curfew on the island.”

The guard looks between you and Noelle, finally nodding in the doctor’s direction. “Less paperwork for me,” she says. “Carry some ID next time, Mr. Owen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” you say, even though you hate using gendered honorifics. The word “ma’am” leaves your mouth dry.

You follow Noelle back into the engineering building, this time without her colleagues. The heavy metal door slams behind you; the echo resonates through the empty halls.

You’re about to thank her for having your back, when she says, “So, what were you doing, loitering around my laboratory at 1:00 a.m.?”

You consider lying, but she lied to help you, so you figure you owe her the truth. Even if it is pathetic. “I was going to find a hammer to break the lock on your cellar door, and then… honestly, that’s as far as I got.” You run your hands through your sweaty hair. “But I couldn’t sleep and I’m so frustrated; breaking in felt productive. Thought I might rifle through some private files. Find the DNA of those trans dinosaurs you’re going to kill. Gaze longingly at it. It wasn’t a particularly good plan.”

“Doesn’t sound like you expected to succeed.”

“I didn’t, really.” You lean against a long window and stare at the computer stations, inside. File folders and half-empty cups of coffee litter the desktops, overlooked by family photos and dinosaur figurines. “Can I tell you something private?”

“Sure.”

“You probably noticed my dad keeps calling me his daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” You gesture to your own body. “You’re a scientist; you don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true. I thought if I came and asked—directly, to his face—he wouldn’t be able to avoid the topic. That we could talk about my transition, for once. That he might show some support, even if not financially. I’ve funded my own healthcare before, I’ll do it again. Just would’ve been nice to talk with him about it. Maybe have him there while I recovered—I don’t know. It all sounds so stupid, now.”

“It’s not stupid, Emerick. In fact, it’s my turn to ask if you mind me sharing something personal.”

“Go for it.” Doesn’t get more personal than you need dick surgery.

“I didn’t come through that portal by accident, though I did wind up on this island by luck.” Noelle crosses her arms and leans back against the window, beside you. “The universe I’m from is not unlike this one.”

“Except for the dinosaurs.”

She chuckles. “I wish! I don’t know where they’re coming from, but it’s not my world, though some arrived there, too. I wanted to study them, but the government killed every one that came through. When they found the portal, they immediately sealed it off, despite my pleas. I could’ve secured funding, secured the portal, and the animals that emerged. No one listened to me. They were going to seal it off permanently—and I assume they did, behind me. My siblings worked on the task force that made the decision.”

“You’re stuck here.”

“Yeah, I am. But I’m also happy. Your dad supported me when no one else did. Enabled me to upend genetic engineering as your world knows it.” She holds up her hands. A slight glow emanates from them, in the dark. Even though you know it’s not, it looks like magic. “Emerick, you don’t have to stay here, if you’re not happy. You can leave, I say as someone who isn’t trying to get rid of you.” She squeezes your shoulder, sending a jolt of energy through your body.

“I know. I thought I’d give him one last chance. I miss my family.”

“Yeah, but you have a new family, now. You have Leo and—whomever else you love and invite into your life. They’ll help you, if you ask.”

The two of you stand parallel, staring at the wall opposite, for seconds or minutes. Noelle’s hands have since extinguished, but you feel her energy reverberating through your body—the same energy you feel from the portal and in waves all over this island. You know why your dad likes her; she can innovate in ways he never could, that no one in this universe can.

“Would you?” you say. “Help. If I asked.”

Noelle purses her lips and looks at the ceiling, but you know she’s considering you because you feel the buzz under your skin. “Yeah. As long as your boyfriend didn’t mind, I would.” She smiles. “I will.”

• • • •

Your nerves light up when you get off the helicopter, this time, as if your feet are connecting with a charging pad. In a way, you are: Noelle’s genetic magic is at work inside you, ready for another dose. It’s your sixth visit, since Leo suggested the first one, and Noelle suggested a dozen for the changes to manifest. For the cocoon to form and your new cock to grow—like a butterfly, Leo says, and he’s not wrong.

You smile when you see Collier—that’s how you think of him, now. When he pulls you into a big hug and when he calls you “Emily.” It doesn’t matter because he’s not your real family. You pat his back and tell him you’ll see him for dinner, because he doesn’t matter. You found the support you needed—on his own island, at that.

Let him think you’re here to see him. That you love him and give two shits about his portal and his dinosaurs. The Owen Corporation’s future. Innovations that will inevitably be sold to the military or pharmaceutical companies, neither of which care about people like you. The only good thing your last name has done is introduce you to Noelle. And, this weekend, Leo and you have an appointment with her—and a butterfly.

K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with a tiny dog. Kellan's debut alt-/near-future novel, DOCILE (March 3, 2020; Tor.com Publishing), explores the snowballing debt crisis, consent, and privilege, and can be described as “really gay”. He is the author of “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” a Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette about a gay trans man who's bitten by a vampire. More of his fiction can be found in venues such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Shimmer. You can find him on the Internet at kmszpara.com or on Twitter at @KMSzpara.

And Yet
By A.T. Greenblatt

Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet.

Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip of paint is exactly as you remember it. Time seems to have ricocheted off this place.

Except not everything has stayed the same. You have your doctorate in theoretical physics now, the ink’s still fresh on the diploma. Your prospects look good. You’re going to start teaching next month, your first steps on the path to tenure. You have a grant for a research project you’ve been waiting for years to start. The secrets of the universe are a locked door and you might have the key. That is, if the house doesn’t kill you first.

You’re lingering on the doorstep, not quite ready to commit. There’s an early morning hush to the neighborhood, but it’s already ungodly humid and warm. The backs of your calves stick to your leg braces, your backpack is heavy on your shoulders, and your walking cane is slick from your sweaty palm, though you’re not sure if that’s because of the heat or because being back on this porch is doing terrible things to your heart rate. Even the dragonflies are smart enough to linger at the property line.

This is a terrible idea. Your hand is clenched around the doorknob and you’re listing all the valid reasons you should walk away.

And yet.

If you’re right, you could be onto the greatest scientific discovery in quantum mechanics. Ever. And if you don’t make it out again…

Well, at least it’ll be in the name of science.

So, you open the door and step through.

• • • •

Nothing in the house has stayed the same since the last time you worked up the nerve to come in. Nothing. This shouldn’t surprise you, because you have this theory that the house reacts to its visitors. The visitor is the catalyst and the catalyst is not a bullied eight-year-old kid anymore. Thus the reaction is different. And yet.

You were hoping, god you were hoping you could take the same path as before. Have the same escape routes. But the haunted house of your childhood has become an unfamiliar landscape. Instead of the front door opening to a wide landing and a staircase, you are standing in a foyer, at the mouth of a narrow hall with rooms on either side. There’s no staircase in sight.

The walls are slanted inward. They’re covered in dark, dizzyingly patterned wallpaper and you aren’t claustrophobic until you are. Vertigo and your pulse skips so badly you don’t even notice the frames on the walls at first. But when you do, you bite back a scream.

They’re full of pictures of you.

You’re well-documented. All ages and always caught unaware. Some pictures are taken from over your shoulder, some from a distance, some from right under your chin. You’ve never seen these photos before, but you recognize the settings in several, like the nook in the library you hang out in when you want to be alone.

Your hand tightens around your cane. You’re going to make it down this hall and find those damn stairs. But the farther you walk, the more pictures of yourself you discover. The more the slanted walls press down on you. The longer the passageway grows.

In the end, you only make it about thirty feet before you can’t stand it anymore, your knees are shaking that badly. So, without thinking through the consequences, the possibilities, you turn into the second room on your left.

• • • •

There are five of them sitting on the couch and watching TV. You don’t recognize them at first, all grown up. But these people in their best business casual and gelled hair are your former “friends,” the ones that met you at the haunted house twenty years ago. You only recognize them because you just saw them at your ten-year high school reunion two days ago. Admittedly, you attended it just to gloat a little.

“Wow, you’re researching parallel universes? That’s crazy!” Chelsea said. “I’m jealous. My insurance job is so boring.” You gave her a tight-lipped smile. You’d been hearing a variation of this all evening. That, and “Look at you! Walking with one cane now instead of two!”

“We did some crazy things as kids,” she said, a little too quickly. She kept mixing her cocktail, something that looked too red and smelled too sweet, and didn’t meet your gaze. “We were really stupid back then.”

Intellectually, you understood she was trying to apologize. Morally, you knew you should be the bigger person. And yet, you said nothing.

Now Chelsea is in the same pink frilly shirt she wore at the reunion, and she and the other four are completely absorbed in some TV show. Just like when you were kids. Except you’re not sitting on the floor with your two crutches on either side of you, slightly apart from them, hoping that this counts as friendship. You’re standing in the threshold, glaring. What the hell is so interesting on that TV anyway?

You look.

You regret it instantly.

It’s a video of that terrible day. The day when your little brother, Avery, got hit by a car several blocks away.

The video is playing on repeat.

You weren’t there to see it happen. You were too busy getting peer pressured into going into this haunted house by these “friends.” But later, when the doctors took pity and put you and Avery in the same hospital room, you heard all about it.

“I was coming to see you at the house, yeah?” Avery said with this sheepish grin, though half of his face was bruised and all four limbs were in casts. “But this big blue truck came out of nowhere!”

On TV, a blue 4×4 crests the hill too fast and rams straight into your little brother. Then the scene resets and it happens again. And again. And again.

But not, you realize, in exactly the same way every time. Sometimes the rusty, dented fender only clips him and sometimes the results are worse. Much worse. But one thing is consistent; Avery never makes it across the street.

Your five ex-classmates watch unemotionally transfixed. The assholes. They should feel just as guilty for what happened to Avery. Your little brother never did make a full recovery. Was always in pain from that moment on. Two years later, doctors put his official cause of death as “complications relating to pneumonia.” He was eight.

Suddenly, you want to cause some damage. Want to feel your knuckles crack their teeth though you’ve never hit anyone before. You take a step forward.

Your ex-classmates flicker. Change. Like a tilt card, where the picture shifts when you tip the angle. Suddenly, they’re not twenty-eight years old anymore. They’re eight. Kids, again.

Then you remember, oh right, you’re in the haunted house of your childhood. Shit.

The urban legend was that this house didn’t like visitors. That it ate them. As a kid, you thought that meant there was a ravenous ghost in its basement or something. Now, you suspect that this house holds dozens, if not hundreds of parallel universes within it.

You have no idea why.

You’ve been trying to study it—from a theoretical level and a safe distance—at school. But all you have are best guesses. It’s time for more definite results. You have a doctorate and a brand new research grant to explore the possibility of pocket universes and you’re going to make the most of them. Even if it kills you.

You take a deep breath and glance around the room. On the other side of it, there is another doorway. The only exit out.

Running isn’t an option for you, never was, between the leg braces and the muscles that just don’t want to cooperate. Even with the cane, your footsteps are loud and obnoxious. It will definitely draw your ex-classmates’ attention and for some reason you can’t quite articulate, you do not want to draw their attention.

But you can’t stay here forever. You won’t.

So, before you lose your nerve, you shift the weight of the backpack on your shoulders and cut across the room as fast as your legs will let you. You feel five sets of eyes on you when you walk in front of the screen, hear five intakes of breath. Five pairs of feet making contact with the wooden floor.

They are coming.

You panic, stumble, but manage to catch yourself at the last moment. Don’t look back. DON’T LOOK BACK. You stretch out your hand and your fingers slam painfully into the edge of the doorway. Thank god.

You can’t look back. So you hurry through.

• • • •

The staircase to the second floor is not in the next room. Dread swells in the pit of your stomach when you find yourself in the kitchen of your parents’ house instead.

You spot another doorway across the room. But this time, you’re not so lucky.

“Sit,” your mom commands and the tone of her voice has you instinctively taking a seat at the cluttered kitchen table, not even pausing to take off your backpack first. She slams a plate of food in front of you. “You’re not excused until you finish everything. And I mean everything.”

You look down. Oh god, it’s worse than you remember. Vegetables cooked past death, pasta barely cooked at all, a piece of chicken so dry it crumbles when you poke it. But feeding her kids has always been another annoying chore to your mom.

You try a green bean and wince. Shit, you haven’t had your mom’s half-assed food since you moved to college. Finding roommates who love to cook—and feed their housemates—has been one of the greatest discoveries in your adult life.

Okay, you can do this. One more bad meal and you can get out of here. But when you look down, the green bean you just ate has been replaced by an identical one.

Your stomach clenches. Your mom is standing by the sink, smoking, watching you.

And yet. Just like in the TV room, things in the kitchen are changing too.

Every time you shift or tilt your head or even blink, the room changes. Sometimes the stained wallpaper is green, sometimes it’s mustard. Sometimes the stove has a month of crud on it. Sometimes it’s simmering tomato sauce, freshly burnt. But in every version, your mom stays by the sink, filling up the kitchen with smoke like a poisonous dragon. Also, the food on your plate is consistently inedible.

Hypothesis: There are universes colliding in these rooms and it’s resulting in moments of instability.

From a theoretical physicist perspective, this is amazing. From a personal perspective, you want to vomit.

You close your eyes and take a deep breath.

And when you open them again, Avery is sitting next to you, with his own plate of food. You turn your head, experimentally. The kitchen doesn’t change.

“You really going to that house tonight?” he asks. You guess he’s about six based on the baby tooth he’s missing in front. Also, the question.

“Shh,” you say and glance at your mom. You have an idea. “Maybe.”

“Can I come?”

“No!” Your voice is too sharp, too loud. From the sink, your mom glares at you.

“Shh,” Avery says.

“Listen, Birdhouse,” you say, a nickname that makes both of you crack up. “I need your help.”

Avery immediately perks up and follows your gaze to the doorway across the kitchen. “A distraction?”

“Exactly, but nothing that will get you in too much trouble, yeah?”

“Three Snickers bars and then two stories a night when I’m grounded,” he says with a grin.

“Deal.” Love for your kid brother swells up in you. You two were always a team.

“Hey, listen. Promise me you’ll stay here tonight,” you say, “And I promise I’ll take you to the haunted house later, just me and you. Okay?”

Avery wrinkles his nose, but before you can get another word in, he starts whining about dinner. Loudly.

Your mom crosses the kitchen in four strides, her bubbling anger focused on your kid brother. As quietly as you can, you ease your way out of the chair and cross the kitchen. From experience, you know you have about ten more seconds to make your escape.

And yet. You look back.

Avery and your mom are going at it at top volume, the same family stubbornness reflected back and forth across the table. You bite your lip. God, you’re a terrible human being for getting your little brother in trouble for your sake, even if this is not your universe.

“Stay there,” you whisper and open the door.

• • • •

Everything in the dining room shines. The chairs, the walls, the curtains, the table which looks exactly like the ugly, scratched up table in your parents’ house, except glossier. You have no idea why. Later, you’ll lie awake at night and come up with theories and rational explanations to build a levee against the nightmares.

But right now, you need to find a way out and so you focus on keeping your balance on the polished, gleaming floor. You will stay calm this time.

Everything reflects. You don’t want to see what they have to show, but you don’t really have a choice, do you? Especially when you hear the door click shut behind you.

You look back and there’s only a gleaming wall. Seamless. And in its reflection, there’s another version of you. Smiling, standing straighter in the doorway of your new office. “Associate Professor” on the door plaque above your name. A picture on your desk of you and your dad beaming on graduation day.

Oh god, you are a complete failure, aren’t you? You’re still working out of the graduate office. In your universe, your dad never cared about any of your academic accomplishments. He’s more of a “give me sports or give me death” type of guy.

You look away.

The reflection in the back of a chair shows you sitting on your parents’ sofa. You’re trying to get up, but it’s a stiff and painful motion, and you see your leg braces are scratched and need to be replaced. You didn’t learn how to stretch properly until college and in this universe, it looks like you never made it far past high school.

Everywhere you turn, you are reflected. Always twenty-eight. Always showing all the awful ways your life could have gone wrong. Or so very right. You try to keep your breath steady as you turn in a slow circle, looking for a way out. But all you see is you.

Oh god. You’re trapped.

Despite your promise to yourself that you will remain the rational scientist, fear puts its icy fingers on your throat and squeezes.

And that’s when your feet fail. Between the distraction and stress, your muscles seize up in a “Fuck you” salute and you go crashing down, badly. Your cane goes flying and you hear it smack against the wall.

You groan, swear, look up. The wall is cracked, but miraculously, your cane seems to be undamaged. You think you spot something behind the reflection. Or maybe you just need something to believe in because now your knees are bruised and you’re fucking pissed.

You crawl over to your cane, pull yourself unsteadily to your feet. Re-center the weight of your book bag. Then, you swing your cane at the wall.

You empty all your rage and hurt and exhaustion into the motion and you don’t stop even when you lose your balance and have to pick yourself up again, because it feels goddamn good to destroy something in this house even if every new shard is showing another you. And you and you and you. Every goddamn iteration of you and they’re all heartbreaking.

And yet. They aren’t you.

When you stop to catch your breath, the wall is a ragged, empty frame. Beyond it, there’s a door.

“You’re not going to beat me, house,” you gasp and open it.

• • • •

Finally. A staircase up.

You climb the steps the same way you did all those years ago: Slowly, precisely, with one hand on the rail and the other tight around your cane. You now have sufficient evidence that this house is actively trying to stop you, possibly because if your research works out and you publish your results, this house is going to have a lot more visitors.

You have a strong working theory that the house really, really hates visitors.

But you won’t be stopped. Can’t be. And you hope when other scientists come here, they will tear this house down, one theory at a time.

And yet.

You hesitate on the landing. Last time, the second floor was where the new possibilities lived.

You’re just hoping you can find the universe you’re looking for and in it, a like-minded you.

• • • •

When you reach the second floor, you feel the tension go out of your shoulders. It’s exactly how you remember it.

Well, maybe not exactly. The hallway’s still narrow and brooding, dark with white doors on both sides, but it’s longer than last time and there are more doors. That’s not surprising, though. You’re older now.

In every door, there’s a peephole and when you look through, you see different scenes from your life. Classrooms, lunch at the library, late nights in the lab, lectures, training at the gym, meals with your roommates, dates at the park, homework in your parents’ house, awkward parties, fun parties, lonely recesses. You walk down the hallway and you walk down your life, catching snatches of it in the peepholes of the doors. Middle school, university, high school, elementary, the house has universes for them all.

Finally, you find the one you’re looking for.

The peephole shows this: You standing on the front porch of the haunted house, hesitating, doorknob in your hand.

“This is it,” you breathe and open the door.

Inside: a white room; blank except for an open window and pale blue curtains whispering in the breeze. Just like last time. But last time, you chose the first door on your right after you saw your friends standing on the lawn in front of the house, waiting for you to come out again. You were so excited to have found an escape route and then were so startled by the white room beyond, you didn’t realize the door locked behind you when it slammed shut.

But you’re wiser now. You lean against the door as you rummage around your book bag and pull out three doorstops. You’re not falling for the same trap this time.

When you’re satisfied the door will not move a damn inch, you walk to the window and lean out.

Last time you were here, you jumped out the window, panicked, desperate to escape this haunted house. You broke both wrists and your nose. It was not your best idea.

Now, you realize how lucky you were, peering out the window. It’s an unforgiving two-story fall. You can’t help but wonder in how many universes you broke your neck instead.

From your backpack, you unfurl a rope ladder.

You’ve been practicing for months, climbing up and down this hellish rope. Between your shitty balance and stiff muscles, you’ve had abstract algebra classes that were easier than teaching your body this.

“Fire safety,” you told your personal trainer. “And because it’s just sort of badass, in general?” Which wasn’t a lie. She was up for the challenge and so were you.

What you didn’t tell her—or anyone else—is that in your backpack are your research notes. The possibilities in parallel universes are infinite. Thus there are other versions of you out there, in similar labs, doing similar experiments. And maybe, if two of you were running experiments with an identical set of constants, changing the same variable, maybe, just maybe, you can make contact.

It would undisputedly be the great scientific discovery of all time.

You check that your escape route is secure and put your foot on the first rope rung.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” you say and begin to climb down into a new universe.

• • • •

You blink and everything shifts.

You don’t even realize that the universe has changed until your feet are on solid ground and you see the five kids waiting on the lawn. Shit, goddamn it, what the fuck? Later, you’ll agonize over this, replay it in your head, come up empty. You have no idea why you’ve found yourself in a universe twenty years in your past, instead of twenty minutes.

The kids don’t realize you’ve walked up behind them until you clear your throat. They jump in surprise.

“Who are you?” eight-year-old Chelsea asks.

“A physicist specializing in quantum mechanics and multiverse theory.”

You’re met with five blank stares.

“What does that even mean?” a boy, Jared, asks.

“It means I come from a universe that’s banned the internet and the only shows on TV are documentaries.”

They stare at you in horror.

Of course, this is a complete lie, but you don’t care, you’re so frustrated and these kids probably just bullied your eight-year-old self into a haunted house. “Isn’t there supposed to be one more of you?”

The five of them look guilty and steal glances at the house. Shit.

“I think… I think we made a mistake,” Chelsea admits, looking close to tears.

Yeah, she’s not the only one.

“Go home,” you tell them, quietly. “Just… go home.”

They run. Eagerly. So eagerly.

Your hand clenches around your cane and your heart tightens too. It still hurts, how easily they abandon you. All because you were visibly different than them.

And yet, in some ways you’re grateful to them and to this house. It made you realize they weren’t your friends, not really. After that, you poured all your energy into school and getting away from this place.

Also, it inspired you to study physics.

Because you sort of realized what happened, even as an eight-year-old. When you fell out of the window, you woke up in a hospital in a slightly different universe than the one you came from.

The changes were subtle. Your parents’ house was painted an ugly blue instead of dirty beige. Avery had the bigger bedroom, but he was still terrified of heights. And you had a deaf dog instead of a cranky cat. There were hundreds of little changes, but for the most part, it was easy to adapt.

It inspired lots of questions. Questions that you’re still asking. You’ve never told anyone about what happened in this house. Not even your closest friends and advisors. Not even now. You wanted your research to prove it first. You wanted to expose this house as being more than haunted.

And yet, in this universe, you once again find yourself on the sagging porch. Shit.

But maybe you can at least stop eight-year-old you from jumping out the window, offer a hand down instead. You have no idea if you can change a universe in a meaningful way, but you’re pretty sure you can help the catalyst.

You open the door once again and follow your eight-year-old self into the haunted house.

• • • •

You’re standing in a wide landing and the staircase is right in front of you. You relax a bit. It’s just how you remember.

From the room on your left, you hear your parents screaming all the stupid, ugly, terrifying things they’ve ever said to each other. Oh. You forgot about that. On the right side, you hear all the callous things they’ve said about you.

You remember now, the first time you were here, the landing almost paralyzed you with fear. But this is nothing compared to what you’ve already been through. You ignore it and head right for the stairs. Because you can hear uneven footsteps on the landing, the soft thump of two crutches on wood.

The haunted house of your childhood will not stop you. It can’t.

• • • •

This time, you don’t even bother with the peephole. You just repeat what you did as a kid. You open the first door on your right.

Your eight-year-old self is already halfway out the window. Eyes round with fear.

“Wait,” you shout, but even in this instant, you know it’s not enough. You’re too far gone.

The kid at the window startles, slips. Falls. Disappears from view.

You hear the impact. The sound is louder, harsher, than you remember. Oh god, you’ve made things worse, haven’t you?

You slump against the door. Suddenly, the years of working and struggling and fighting hit you in one devastating wave of emotion. All this effort and you’re still out of your league. The house is playing by its own rules while you’re trying to learn the game. You’ve been busy looking for constants while everything is flickering. Always changing.

You refuse to look out the window. Instead, you pull out your creased and battered research notes from your backpack. The working title is “The Birdhouse Project.” It’s the best apology you have.

So, you’re going to walk down the steps, out of the house, back to your original universe, and try again. And again and again and again if necessary. You’ve come too far to relent now.

This is how the house traps its visitors, isn’t it? Devours them, really. You don’t care. This house is not going to stop you. It can’t.

And yet.

You hear a faint… something. Like a hiccup. You hear it again. It’s coming from the room on the left side of the hall, across from you.

You step away from the door, close it gently. You cross the hall and press your ear against the door. There it is again. A soft cry.

Wait. You know that voice.

You throw open the door.

• • • •

Your little brother is sitting under the open window in the white, blank room. His eyes are red and snot’s running down his chin. You’re pretty sure your mouth is hanging open. You want to run over and hug him, but instead say: “Hi Avery.”

He stares at you, startled just as you. God, you really are an idiot. You spent the last ten years of your life studying multiverse theories and yet you didn’t allow yourself to believe that there’s at least one universe where Avery manages to cross the street and follow you into the haunted house.

Your kid brother who’s afraid of heights.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Guess,” you say.

He studies you. Your cane, your leg braces, your face as you lean against the open door. His eyes widen.

“You’re right, Birdhouse,” you say.

“Whoa,” he breathes.

Your knees are shaking, but this time, not from fear. Avery wipes his eyes and gets to his feet. “I got lost,” he says, twisting his hands.

“Me too.” You smile. He gives you a tentative smile back.

You consider the possibilities. You could stay here, in this universe. Or take Avery back to yours. If you do, could you really bring yourself to come back to this haunted house and risk abandoning him again? If you can’t, you’d be giving up your guarantee of making a breakthrough in parallel universe research. All that work.

And yet, your kid brother is right in front of you. Whole.

“Touché, house,” you say softly.

“What’s that mean?” Avery wrinkles his nose and you laugh.

“Come on, Birdhouse,” you say. “I have a way out.”

And you hold open the door.

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 been nominated for a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year's Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt

She Still Loves the Dragon
By Elizabeth Bear

She still loves the dragon that set her on fire.

The knight-errant who came seeking you prepared so carefully. She made herself whole for you. To be worthy of you. To be strong enough to reach you, where you live, so very high.

She found the old wounds of her earlier errantry and of her past errors, and the other ones that had been inflicted through no fault of her own. She found the broken bones that had healed only halfway, and caused them to be refractured, and endured the pain so they would heal swift and straight, because dragons do not live in the low country where the earth is soft and walking is easy.

She sought out the sweet balms and even more so she sought out the herbs bitter as unwelcome truth, that must nevertheless be swallowed. She paid for both in time, and grief, and in skinned palms and pricked fingers.

She quested, and she crafted potions: to make her sight bright in the darkness; to make her hands strong on the stone.

The knight-errant, when she decides for the first time to seek the dragon, has with her many retainers, loyalty earned and nurtured through heroism and care. She has an entourage, pavilions, a warhorse, and a mare. She has armaments and shields for combat mounted and afoot.

They cannot climb with her.

She leaves them all among the soft grass and the gentle foothills below. She tells them not to wait for her.

She tells them to go home.

She climbed your mountain for you. She was afraid, and it was high.

The winter lashed there. The strong sun scorched her. She ducked the landslide of snow and boulders the flip of your wings dislodged, when you resettled them in your sleep. She smelled the sulfur fumes emerging from long vents, and watched the pale blue flames burn here and there, eerie among the barren rust-black stone.

She drank melted snow; she tried to step around the ochre and yellow and burnt umber ruffles of the lichens, knowing they were fragile and ancient, the only other life tenacious enough to make its home in this place of fire and stone and snow.

• • • •

The knight-errant sings a song to herself as she climbs, to keep up her courage. It is an old song now, a ballad with parts that can be traded between two people, and it goes with a fairytale, but it was a new song when she sang it then.

This is the song she is singing as the basalt opens her palms:

Let me lay this razor

At your throat, my love.

That your throat my love

Will be guarded so.

But my throat is tender

And the blade is keen

So my flesh may part

And the blood may flow.

No harm will you come to

If you’re still, my love.

So be still my love,

That no blood may flow.

Still as glass I might be

But my breath must rise,

For who can keep from breathing?

So the blood may flow.

Sharp as glass the blade is,

If you’re cut, my love

You must trust my love

That you’ll feel no pain.

So the flesh was parted,

For the blade was keen

And the blood did flow

And they felt no pain.

She is still singing as she achieves the hollow top of the mountain where the dragon nests, glaciers gently sublimating into steam against its belly. No one would bother to try to sneak up on a dragon. It doesn’t matter, however, as she is struck silent by the sight that greets her even as she comes to the end of her song.

How does a dragon seem?

Well, here is a charred coil like a curved trunk that has smoldered and cracked in a slow fire. And there is a flank as rugged as a scree slope, broken facets slick with anthracite rainbows. And there is a wing membrane like a veil of paper-ash, like the grey cuticle and veins of an enormous leaf when some hungry larva has gnawed everything that was living away. And over there is a stained horn or claw or tooth, deeply grooved, blunted by wear, perhaps ragged at the tip and stained ombre amber-grey with time and exercise and contact with what substances even the gods may guess at.

And here is an eye.

An eye, lit from within, flickering, hourglass-pupiled, mottled in carnelian shades.

An eye that as one regards it, is in its turn regarding one as well.

• • • •

She took off her armor for you. She set it aside, piece by piece, even knowing what you are.

So that you could see her naked.

She showed you her scars and her treasures.

She stretched out her arms to the frost and her tender flesh prickled. Her breath plumed. She shook with the cold, unless it was fear that rattled her dark feet on the ice.

• • • •

“Did you come to destroy me?”

The dragon’s voice is not what she expected. It is soft and sweet, spring breezes, apple blossom, drifting petals all around. Ineluctably feminine. Everything the knight is not, herself.

The dragon sounds neither wary nor angry. Mildly curious, perhaps.

Intrigued.

The woman shakes so hard in the cold that she feels her own bones pulling against, straining her tendons.

“I came because you are the only challenge left to me,” the woman says. “I have crossed the ocean, yes, and sounded it too. I have braved deserts and jungles and caverns and the cold of the North. I have cooked my dinner in a geyser, and I have scaled mountains, too.” Here, she taps her bare heel ruefully on icy basalt. Her toes turn the color of dusk. They ache down to the bone.

She will put her boots back on soon enough, she decides. But she still has something to prove.

She says (and she only sounds, she thinks, the smallest amount as if she is boasting, and anyway all of it is true), “I have won wars, and I have prevented them from ever beginning. I have raised a daughter and sewn a shroud for a lover. I have written a song or two in my time and some were even sung by other people. I have lost at tables to the King of the Giants and still walked out of his hall alive. I even kissed that trickster once, the one you know, who turns themself into a mare and what-not, and came away with my lips still on.”

Maybe now she sounds a little like she is boasting. And anyway, still all of it is true.

And maybe even the dragon looks a little impressed.

“And now you’re naked in front of a dragon,” the dragon says, amused.

“That’s how it goes.” She wraps her arms around herself. Her words are more chatter than breath.

“Am I another item on your list?” the dragon asks. “Will you tick me off on your fingers when you climb back down?”

She looks at the dragon. An awful tenderness rises in her.

“No,” she says. “I do not think I will.”

“Come closer,” says the dragon. “It is warmer over here.”

• • • •

She chose to trust the dragon.

She chose to have faith in winter. In danger. In the fire as old as time.

She chose to seek you. She chose to reveal herself to you.

She loved you, and that last thing, she could not have chosen.

That last thing just happened.

Things just happen sometimes.

• • • •

“So you came here,” the dragon says, when her muscles have relaxed and she can stand straight again. She turns, so her back warms, too. The heat is so delicious she’s not quite ready to get dressed yet, and put that layer of cloth between herself and the warmth of the dragon’s skin.

“I came here because you are the only dragon left.”

“I am the only dragon ever.”

The knight-errant turns back to the dragon and stares.

“Dragons live forever,” says the dragon. “It would be a terrible thing for there to be more than one.”

“How can that be?”

“It simply is.”

“But where did you come from?”

“I made myself,” says the dragon. “A long time ago. By deciding to exist, and take up space in the world.”

“Is that all it takes for you to be real?”

“Are you the litany of things you have accomplished?”

The woman is silent for a while. Then she says, “Yes. That is how we make ourselves real. That is what we are.”

The dragon does not need her. The dragon is complete in itself.

One cannot fail to love a dragon. One might as well fail to love the moon. Or the sea. Or the vast sweep of soft silence over a headland, broken only by the unified exultation of a rising flock of birds.

It wouldn’t matter to the moon. And you couldn’t help but love it anyway.

• • • •

You could not have chosen to love her, either.

That just happened as well.

Her nakedness. Her courage.

Her tender, toothsome fragility.

Her decision to be vulnerable before the perfect terribleness of you.

She was graying. She was dying. You warmed her with the heat of your body, the furnace contained within.

You folded her in wings against your hot scales.

You made decisions, too.

• • • •

Flight is a miracle.

She cannot breathe, where the dragon takes her. It is too cold, and the air is too thin.

But she is strong, and she is flying, and she can see the whole world from up here.

• • • •

You were fascinated for a while. For a little while. A dozen years, give or take a little. You are not particular about time. You are a dragon.

It seemed like a long time to her, probably—living on a mountaintop, watching the seasons turn. Singing her songs.

The songs stopped amusing you as they used to. They all sounded the same. They all sounded… facile.

Armored, though she was not wearing any armor. Any armor you could see. Perhaps the armor was on the inside.

The possibility made you curious.

So you set her on fire.

Because you were curious. And because you were a dragon.

• • • •

She is singing when the dragon sets her on fire. Its head looms over her like a rock shelf. The snow falls all around her, but not behind, because that is where the bulk of the dragon’s body is. It is like being in a cave, or under an overhang.

She never will remember, later, what she is singing right now.

The great head shifts. There is a grinding sound like rockfall. The head angles sharply, and she thinks rockslide, and the snow falls on her body. It vanishes when it touches her, leaving little dots of chill and wetness on her skin.

She just has time to marvel at how cold it is once the dragon pulls away from her, when the muzzle tilts toward her, the massive jaw cracks open, and she looks up, up the beast’s great gullet into a blue-white chasm of fire.

• • • •

“Why did you set me on fire?” the knight cried, burning.

And of course there is no easy answer.

You burned her because fire is what you are.

You burned her because your gifts come wreathed in flames, and your heart is an ember, and your breath is a star, and because you loved her and you wanted to give her everything you are.

You burned her because you love her, and the only way to love is to take up space in the world.

You burned her because she was vulnerable, and you are a thing that burns.

You burned her because the truth, the nakedness, the sensibility had fallen out of her songs.

You burned her because you are what you are, and because there was no reason not to set her on fire.

• • • •

It is not a small fire.

It is a fire fit for a dragon’s beloved. It rolls down the mountain in a wave, in a thunderclap. It billows and roils and when it had passed it leaves cooling, cracking slabs of new mountain behind.

She stands atop the mountain, burning. Her skin crackling, her flesh ablaze. She turns; she sees where the fire has wandered. Has swept.

All the trees lie combed in one direction, meticulous. As if a lover had dressed their hair.

• • • •

Here you are in the wreckage.

You live in the wreckage now.

It is a habitat for dragons.

She doesn’t hold it against you. Well, not for long.

It is the nature of dragons, to incinerate what they love.

• • • •

The broken woman still loves the dragon. She still loves her. Even though the dragon has broken her.

She can always, and only, be a broken person now.

She can be the woman the dragon burned.

The woman who is burning.

The woman who will be burning still.

• • • •

The flames were better armor than the armor she took off for you. Nothing will pass through them.

No one will pass through them.

Not even you.

Not even her love for you.

The flames would keep her safe inside.

• • • •

The burning lasts. The burning continues.

She lives, for she is full of balms, and bitter herbs, and strong. She lives, not yet resigned to the burning.

To the having been burned.

She lives, and the burning continues. The burning continues because having once been burned, if she allows herself to stop burning, she is going to have to think about repairs.

• • • •

Here you are in the ruins.

The ruins are your home as well.

• • • •

The woman the dragon burned fears letting the fire die, and the fear makes her angry. She feeds the flames on her anger, so the fire makes fear and the fear makes fire. It hurts, but she cannot stop burning. If she stops burning, she may get burned again.

It goes on like that for a long time.

• • • •

The fires filled the space around her. The flames were copper, were cobalt, were viridian, were vermilion. They licked your jaw and up the side of your face quite pleasingly as you sheltered her. Not that she needed the shelter now that she was burning.

You wished, though, that she would sing again.

She tried, occasionally. But all that came out when she made the attempt is colored flames.

• • • •

The woman the dragon burned gets tired of burning. She gets tired of touching the dragon and feeling only flames stroke her hands. She gets tired of touching herself, of dropping her face into her palms and feeling only heat and ash. She gets tired of the little puffs of flame that are all she can produce when she tries to sing, burning will o’ the wisps that are about nothing but the fact that they are burning.

She decides to let the fire go out, but it’s not so easy not being angry. Not being afraid. Finding ways to steal fuel from the fire.

But bit by bit, she does so. Bit by bit, the flames flicker and fade.

Underneath she is charred like a curved trunk that has smoldered and cracked. Her skin is burned rugged as a scree slope, broken facets of carbon slick with anthracite rainbows. She trails veils of debris, like lacy webs of paper ash.

The scars are armor. Better armor than the skin before. Not so good as the flames, but they will keep her safe as she heals.

The scars slowly tighten. Contract. They curl her hands and hunch her shoulders. They seal her face into an expression without expression. She is stiff and imprisoned in her own hide.

She cannot sing now either.

And she certainly cannot climb back down again.

She amuses herself as best she can. The dragon gives her small things. Toys or tools, but bits of its body. Parts of itself. A scale for a table, a bit of claw for an inkwell.

• • • •

The woman wrote a poem for you.

It was a poem that began, “I am the woman who still loves the dragon that burned me.”

She wrote it on the armor over your heart. She cut it there with a pen made from a sliver of the black glass from your spines, and she filled the letters with your silver blood, and there it shone, and shines.

• • • •

The winter comes and the winter goes.

There is a curl of green among the ash below, the great trees fallen like new-combed hair.

• • • •

One day the woman began to dig at her skin. Her nails had grown long and ragged. Blood and lymph welled.

“What are you doing?” you asked her.

“It itches,” she said.

You gave her another bit of spine to make a knife with and watched as bit by bit she peeled a narrow strip of scar away. The skin underneath was new, more tender than her old skin. It did not look like her old skin, either; it was raw, and unpretty, and she flinched at every touch.

She couldn’t bear to work at peeling herself for more than a few inches of scar at a time. It hurt, and you didn’t really understand hurting, but she made noises and water ran from her eyes.

But she had never lacked for courage. The knight a dragon loves must surely have plenty of that. So you watched as over the summer and the spring and the winter that followed, bit by bit, she peeled her corrugated scars away. They had made her look a bit like you.

You did not miss them.

• • • •

Everything is pain.

Beneath the pain is freedom.

• • • •

At first she shied away from you, her new flesh rare and weeping.

You flew away. You passed over blasted forests and plains of basalt. You passed over soft meadows, and curving shores. You stood over still water, and looked at the words she had carved into your armor, reflected backwards and still shining.

You tried to understand.

But it was pain, and a dragon has never felt pain.

She still hid when you returned.

But she was a woman who loved a dragon, and such people are brave. Eventually she came and sat beside you on the stone. She rubbed her shoulder absently, fingers moving over scar-laced skin.

• • • •

“You are because you are,” the woman says. Her hair is growing in again, a thick black cloud that has never pressed beneath a helm. “And I love you because you are. But I fear you because you hurt me.”

“And you?” the dragon asks her.

“I fear myself because I made myself open to hurting.”

“But you flew.”

“I flew.”

“And you survived the burning.”

The woman is silent.

“And what you made of yourself this time was not for anyone but you. Now truly you have done what others have no claim to.”

The woman is silent still.

“Are you the litany of your boasting?”

“No,” the woman says. “I am the thing I am. I am the space I take up in the world.”

“And so am I,” the dragon says.

“We should go fly,” the woman says.

• • • •

Dragons are undying, after all.

You could not keep her.

But she left behind a song. And the space she took up inside you. And the space she left empty in the world.

• • • •

She still loves the dragon that set her on fire, but the love has been tempered now.

Annealed.

• • • •

This is how the poem carved over your heart ended:

“As I have been tempered too.”

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 Campbell Award winning author of 30 novels and over a hundred short stories. Her most recent novel is THE RED STAINED WINGS, an epic fantasy with lammergeiers; her next novel is MACHINE, a space opera with alien doctors.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

An Agent of Utopia
By Andy Duncan

To the Prince and Tranibors of our good land, and the offices of the Syphogrants below, and all those families thereof, greetings, from your poor servant in far Albion.

Masters and mistresses, I have failed. All that I append is but paint and chalk ‘pon that stark fact. Yet I relate my story in hopes it may be instructive, that any future tools of state be fashioned less rudely than myself.

I will begin as I will end, with her.

Had my intent been to await her, to meet her eye as she emerged into the street, I scarcely could have done better; and yet this was happenstance, as so much else proved to be.

I had no expectation of her; I knew not that she was within; she was not my aim. She was wholly a stranger to me. I would laugh at this now, were I the laughing sort, for of course I learned later that even as I stood there with the crawling river to my back, her name was known to me, as the merest footnote to my researches. So much for researches.

In fact, though I had traveled thousands of leagues, from beyond the reach of the mapmaker’s art, to reach this guarded stone archway in a gray-walled keep on a filthy esplanade beside the stinking Thames, I had no reason even for pausing, only feet from my goal. I feared not the guards, resplendent in their red tunics; I doubted not my errand. Yet I had stopped and stood a moment, as one does when about to fulfill a role in a grand design. And so when she emerged from shadows into sun, blinking as if surprised, I found myself looking into her eyes, and that has been the difference in my life: between who I was, and who I am.

Her face was –

No, I dare not, I cannot express’t.

To her clothing, then, and her hair. That I’ll set down. A frame-work may suggest a portrait, an embankment acknowledge a sea.

In our homeland, all free citizens, being alike in station, therefore dress alike as well; but in the lady’s island nation, all are positioned somewhere above or below, so their habits likewise must be sorted: by adornment, by tailoring, by fineness of cloth. These signs are designed to be read.

She was plainly a gentlewoman, but simply clad. Around her neck was a single silver carcanet like a moon-sliver. Her bosom was but gently embusked, and not overmuch displayed. Her farthingale was modest in size; some could not be wedged through the south gate of London Bridge, but hers was just wider than her shoulders. Her hair was plaited at either temple, so that twin dark falls bordered her lustrous –

Ah! But stop there. I am grown old enough.

I add only that her eyes were red-rimmed with weeping, and in that moment – whatever my obligations to my homeland, to you who sent me – to dry those tears became my true mission.

A moment only I held her gaze, and how did I merit even that?

Then her manservant just behind, finely attired but sleep-eyed and bristle-jowled, did nudge her toward a carriage. As she passed, I dared not turn my head to watch, lest I not achieve my goal at all.

Rather, I walked forward, into the sweet-smelling space the lady had just vacated, and raised both hands as the warders crossed pikes before me.

“Hold, friends,” I said. “The gaoler expects me.”

“Ah, does he?” asked the elder warder. “What name does he expect, then?”

“The name of Aliquo,” I said, and this truly was the name I had affixed to my letter, for it was not mine but anyone’s. From my dun-colored wool cloak, I produced another sealed paper. “My credentials,” I said. “For the gaoler only,” I quickly added, as the elder warder was making as if to break the seal. He eyed me dolefully, then handed the letter to the younger warder, who in turn barked for a third warder, the youngest yet, who conveyed my letter within – doubtless to a boy still younger, his equipment not yet dropped.

As I waited, we all amused ourselves, myself by standing on tiptoe atop each consecutive cobble from east to west beneath the portcullis, the warders by glaring at me.

I knew, as they did not, that my credentials were excellent, consisting as they did only of my signature on a sheet of paper wrapped about some street debris from home.

Soon I was escorted through the gate, onto a walkway across an enclosed green. Sheep cropped the grass. Ravens barked down from the battlements. Huddled in a junction of pockmarked walls was a timbered, steeply thatched, two-story house. Though dwarfed by the lichen-crusted stone all around, it was larger than any home in Aircastle. Through its front door I was marched, and into a small room filled by an immense bearded man with a broken nose. He sat in a heap behind a spindly writing-desk that belonged in a playroom. Sunlight through the latticed window further broke his face into panes of diamond.

“Leave us,” he told my escort, who bowed and exited, closing the door behind. The gaoler stared at me, saying nothing, and I replied in kind. He leaned forward and made a show of studying my shoes, then my breeches and cloak, then face again. His own displayed neither interest nor impression.

“You don’t dress like a rich man,” he said.

“I am no rich man,” I replied.

Without turning his gaze from mine, he placed one hairy finger on the packet I had sent him and slid it across the desktop toward me: refolded, the seal broken.

“A thief, then,” he said. “We have other prisons for thieves. My men will show you.”

“I am no thief,” I replied.

He tilted his head. “A Jew?”

“I am but a visitor, and I seek only an audience.”

“That you have achieved,” he said. “Our audience being concluded, my men will take you now.”

“An audience,” I said, “with one of your … guests.”

Without moving, he spat onto the floor and my shoe, as placid as a toad. “And which guest would that be, Sir Jew, Sir Thief?”

I was near him already, the room being so small, and now I stepped closer. Arms at my sides, I leaned across the desk, closing the distance toward the gaoler’s motionless, ugly face. I could smell layers of sweat and Southwark dirt, the Scotch egg that had broken his fast, and, all intermixed, the acrid scent of fear, a fear of such long abiding that it marked him, better than any wax-sealed writ of passage, as a resident of this benighted land. When I was close enough for my lips to brush the pig-bristles of his ear, I whispered a single syllable: a lover’s plea, a beggar’s motto, a word with no counterpart in my native tongue, though one of the commonest words in London, where satisfaction is unknown.

Upon hearing my word, the gaoler jerked as though serpent-bit, but recovered on the instant, so that as I stepped back he assumed once again calm and authority. Only his eyes danced in terror and anticipation.

“Worth my life, Sir Thief, were I caught admitting you to him.”

I made no reply. No question had been posed, nor information offered that was new or in any way remarkable. He had but stated an irrelevant fact.

He lifted the packet I had delivered and poured the pebbles into his palm. He studied their sparkle, then let them slide back into the paper. His palm remained in place, cupping the air, and he raised his eyebrows at me, like a scarred and shaggy courtesan.

These English. Every clerk, every driver, every drayman and barrelmaker and ale-pourer has his hand out for coins, and doubtless every gaoler and prince, courtier and headsman, as well. They conceive of no superior system, indeed no alternative, anywhere in this world. And so I freely handed them my trash. Some were as grateful as children, while others betrayed no emotion at all, merely pocketing the payment as their due, a gift of nature like birdshit and rain.

I pulled from my pocket a thumb-sized paving stone. I dropped it into the gaoler’s palm, where it reflected the sunlight in a dozen directions. His nostrils flared as he drew in a breath.

“God’s mercy,” he said.

The English routinely invoke their God when startled, or provoked, or overwhelmed by their own natures. They pray without cease, without thought, without result.

“The ninth hour,” he told the stone, “at Traitors’ Gate.”

• • • •

Traitors’ Gate was a floating wooden barrier tapping mindlessly in the night tide across a submerged arch, set low in the fort’s Thames-side wall. No two public clocks in England quite chime together, but somewhere during the ninth-hour cacophony, the gate swung open without visible human hand, and an empty punt slid from the shadows, tapping to a halt at my feet. I stepped down and in, half expecting the punt to slide from under me and make its return voyage without my assistance. Instead, after a respectful pause, I picked up the pole that lay in the bottom of the boat and did the work myself, nudge by nudge into the shadows, ducking as I glided beneath the arch. The soggy gate creaked shut behind.

Just inside the fortress, the stone marched upward in steep and narrow steps, at the top of which stood, all in red, my hulking friend the gaoler. He was alone. He silently waited as I climbed the slimy stairs to face him, or more precisely to face the teats that strained his tunic. He reached out both ham-sized hands and kneaded my arms, legs and torso. He found neither what he sought nor what he did not seek, and was quickly satisfied. He stooped, with a grunt, and picked up something from the cobbles.

“You’re the ratcatcher, if anyone asks,” he said. He handed me a long-handled fork and a pendulous sack. “And there’s the rats to prove it,” he added. “Wait here. When I cough twice, enter behind me, and keep to the right. Follow my taper, but not too close. If I meet anyone, keep back and flatten yourself against the wall like the damp. You might even kill a rat or two, if you’ve a mind.”

I held the heavy fork loose at my side, where I could drop it on the instant if I needed to kill someone, and watched the gaoler lumber into the wall and vanish, through a previously invisible slot perhaps an inch wider than his shoulders. Finally I heard the double cough, fainter and from much farther away than I expected. I slipped into the door-shaped darkness.

We encountered no one, quickly left any trafficked levels of the vast and ancient keep. The dark corridors and archways we passed through and the stairs we climbed were broad and well-made and perhaps once were grand, but time’s ravages were not being repaired. In spots we crunched through fallen mortar and stone. Even the rats were elsewhere. The walls were windowless, save for the occasional slitted cross that traded no light for no view.

Finally we passed through a series of large chambers, in the fourth of which the serpent-fire before me guttered as in a draft. My guide stood before an iron-banded oaken door, its single barred window the size of my head. He gestured me close, relieved me of the rat-sticker and sack, and whispered, as urgently as a lover.

“I’ll be watching. You leave in a quarter-hour, and whether you walk or I drag you is no concern of mine. Keep your treasonous voices low. Take nothing he offers, leave no marks on his person, and for the love of God, give him no ink or paper; that’s powder and shot to the likes of him.” He inserted into the lock an iron key fully as long as the rat-sticker. The gears clanked and ground, and he hauled back the door. “Company for you, sir! Oh, Christ, not again. Whyn’t he just pull his gentles, like the others do?”

The room was larger than I expected, and more finely appointed. The chairs, tables, washbasin and chamber-pot were old but finely made; the twin windows were grated but high, deep-set and arched; a river breeze stirred faded tapestries that covered the walls with the rose that was the sigil of the ruling house. In the far corner was a makeshift altar, a cross of two bound candlesticks upon an upended stool, and before it, in a pool of shadow, knelt a naked man with a bloody back, who slowly gave himself one, two, three fresh strokes across the shoulders with a knotted rope. Judging from the fresh wounds amid the scarring, he had been at this for some time.

As I walked forward, the door thudded shut behind. “My good sir,” I said.

The kneeling figure paused a few seconds before flogging himself again, and again, and a sixth time, each impact a dull wet smack. As I drew close enough to smell, I saw the shadow on the flagstones was in fact a broad spatter of blood.

The prisoner spoke without turning. “You’ve made me lose count. Well, no matter. I can start over from One, as must we all, each day.” He flexed the rope, as if to resume.

“Good sir, please. My time is short.”

His laugh, as he turned, was a joyless bark. “Your time?” The engravings I had studied were good likenesses. The Roman features were intact on his blunt, handsome face, but his jawline was hidden by a fresh grey curtain of beard that ill became him. “May I assume, sir, given your evident longing for conversation, that you are not here to murder me?”

“No, indeed.”

“Ah,” he said. He brought one foot beneath him and stood, slowly but with no evident need for support. “One can imagine worse fates, my good Sir Interruptus, than to be murdered in the act of prayer.” Something passed over his eyes then, perhaps only the sting of the wounds as he donned, without flinching, the robe that hung on the bedpost. “Ay, much worse. The killers of Thomas Becket, even as they hacked away, did the work of God in making the saint’s most heartfelt desire manifest. They delivered him sinless unto his Maker.” He glanced at his blood on the floor as he cinched his belt. “I fear for his shrine at Canterbury, and for his relics. In these fell days, it is not only the living who suffer. A good even to you, Master Jenkins!”

After a long pause, the shadow beyond the window in the door replied, “And a good even to you, sir.”

“As for you,” the prisoner said, smiling, “we reach an even footing. You impeded my task; I impeded yours. State your business, please, sir, and your name. I have not so many visitors that they grow interchangeable to me.”

“I call myself Aliquo,” I replied, “and I bring greetings to you, Thomas More, from your old friend Raphael Hythlodaye, and from my homeland of Utopia.”

I bowed low before him.

“Please give my Utopian friends my best regards,” More said, “and tell them my answer is no.”

• • • •

The next afternoon, moments after I stepped from the inn where I had broken my fast, a man planted himself before me on the street, so that I would have to go around him, or stop. I chose to stop.

“You have seen me before, I believe,” said the man.

I peered into his bearded face. “I have,” I said. “You were outside the Tower yesterday. You were with … the lady.”

“I was,” he said, “and I am, and I am here on her account only. I am to bring you to her.”

“That is quite impossible,” I said. “Who is this lady, who makes such demands of strangers?”

“You are a stranger to her, but not to her father, I believe. Her name is Margaret Roper, born Margaret More.” He studied my face. “This changes your resolve, I believe.”

“Yes,” I said, though I had resolved to accompany him the moment I recognized him, in hopes I might see his mistress again – even if he led me straight to the chopping-block on Tower Hill.

Where he led me, instead, without further speech, was to the city’s largest temple, dedicated to the name of a first-century persecutor of the enemies of Rome, who reversed himself to aid those enemies, but remained, throughout his life, in the service of a more perfect, more organized world. A thousand years later, his temple’s interior was scarcely less crowded than the streets outside.

At home, upon entering a temple, all men would proceed to the right, all women to the left, and all would maintain their proper places until departing. Here, all was confusion.

“There,” said the manservant, stepping aside. “Go to her, and if you speak falsely, then God help you.”

Far ahead, across the echoing marble, a line of supplicants, in all modes of clothing, shuffled step by step into an airy chapel, and past a chest-high marble tomb minded by a droning guide. Toward the back of this line was she who had summoned me, she who already had claimed dominion over me with a single glance, though I had yet to realize it.

I went to her.

She watched me approach. She was nearly my height. Her eyes! … I dare not describe them. She looked into mine, and then, without moving her head or glancing away, she refocused, and looked at me again. I knew in that moment she had seen me more clearly than her father had, than the gaoler had, than anyone had since home. I held my breath, sure she would turn away. Instead she gravely bowed her head, reached for my arm, and guided me into the line at her side. The stooped crone behind her hissed at my insertion, but a steely glance from Madame shushed her.

“Do you speak Latin?” Madame asked me, in that tongue.

“I do, Madame,” I replied in kind.

“Do so, in this public place. Here, in this procession, we are pilgrims only, and will draw no attention. You know who I am.”

“I do, Madame.”

“Have you seen my father?”

“I have, Madame.”

“You have an advantage over me, then. How is he? In mind, spirit and body?”

“In mind, keen. In spirit, resigned, but anxious for you. In body, intact, save for the injuries he inflicts himself.”

“God inflicts them,” she said. “So he told me, when I was a girl, and saw the bloody linens. A man who would keep secrets from his own household should do his own washing. Now tell me who you are.”

“Only your servant, Madame,” I said.

She blew air from the corner of her mouth. “Please. You are no one’s servant, least of all mine. Who are you?”

We neared the tomb and the guide, his pockmarked face, his maimed hands. Many in line had some scar, or limp, or hump.

“Call me Aliquo,” I said.

“Your position?”

“In this land, only emissary.”

“From whom? What business had you with my father?”

Heeding her manservant’s warning, I chose the truth.

“I offered to free him,” I said, “and to convey him home in triumph.”

Her eyes widened. “You are mad. How? Home to Chelsea? Home to me?”

“No, Madame. To my homeland across the sea.”

“The impertinence! What name is given this homeland?”

“It is called Utopia. Your father wrote of it.”

She laughed aloud, and a score of heads turned our way in shock as the echoes rained down from the arches above. Beside the tomb, without interrupting his recitation, the guide shook his head, placed the stump of a finger to his chin, and blew.

“He wrote of it, indeed!” she said, in a lower voice. “A fairy-story for his friend Erasmus, invented of whole cloth! A series of japes at the follies of the day.”

“Is all this a jape?” I asked, with a gesture at the soaring chapel all around. “Is this statue atop the tomb a jape, because he has a silver head, as the king did not in life? Mere representation is not a jape, Madame. Your father represented us, but we are not his invention.”

By now we had reached the tomb. It bore a plaque, in Latin:

Henry, the scourge of France, lies in this tomb.

Virtue subdues all things.

A.D. 1422.

“Above, you see good King Henry’s funeral achievements,” droned the guide, in nasal English, as he studied Madame for signs of outburst. “His battle helmet, sword, shield and saddle. Note the dents in the helmet, through which good King Henry’s life was spared, glory be to God. …”

As she passed, Madame addressed herself to the marble of the tomb. “I have met many scoundrels,” she said, “but never one claiming to have stepped from the pages of my father’s books. And whom do you claim sent you, on this mad errand? King Utopia the Nineteenth?”

“Our king, Madame … is not like yours. He is more like the officers of this temple. He has unique responsibilities, yes; he has certain authorities, in certain settings. Yet I was not sent by him, Madame, but by a council of the people.”

“An emissary from a headless land. Interesting. But this might explain why, a mere half-day after you stepped ashore at Woolwich, having left your private cabin on the Lobo Soares, out of Lisbon, before even buying a meal or engaging rooms, you proceeded not to York Place but to the Tower, and sought an audience not with the king, but with a condemned prisoner. A strange emissary, indeed.”

“Madame is well informed.”

“Madame is wholly uninformed,” she retorted, “on the one subject of any importance. They keep me from my father, and thus I must make do with the world.”

“You call your father condemned,” I said, “yet you grieve too soon, surely. He is not yet tried, much less convicted and sentenced.”

“That is a truth so strictly and carefully laid as to be a lie,” she said, “and one more lie to me, however small, will earn you an enemy beside which our present King Henry would seem a stick-puppet. Do you believe me?”

“I do, Madame. Tell me, the man in the tomb … he is the current king’s grandsire?”

She winced. “No relation. After good King Henry died, his widow married a Tudor. And there Katherine lies, as if in life. So they say.”

Only if in life she was drawn, shriveled and waxen of complexion, I thought, but said nothing. Where one might have expected an effigy lay instead the body, not even shielded but available to all. Katherine was blessedly clothed, arms folded across her sunken breasts. The one-eyed gentleman in line before me, his absurd rapier hilt stuttering along the pedestal as he walked past, half-burst into tears, bowed and kissed Katherine’s face.

“I apologize for my countrymen,” said Madame. “They prefer their women venerated and dead. Some attribute miracles to this poor corpse, and seek her elevation by Rome. Humph. ‘Twould truly take a miracle, now – and our current king has rather discouraged miracles.” She had looked almost merry, enjoying my discomfiture at the spectacle before me, but now her face grew taut like Katherine’s. She shook her head, and the moment passed. “Tell me, friend Aliquo,” she continued. “What becomes of Utopians when they die?”

“Burned to ashes, Madame.”

“What, no burial?”

“No room, Madame. Ours is an island nation, at its widest scarcely 200 miles across. We must colonize the mainland as it is.”

“And Utopian souls? What becomes of them?”

“They … remain. Invisible, but among us still, seeing and hearing all. They observe, are pleased to be addressed and honored, but they cannot participate.”

“Interesting. And have your dead ones traveled with you, here to our island nation?”

“I hope not, Madame. This place would be most … distressing to them.”

“I know how they feel. My father refused you, of course.”

“Yes, Madame. Doubtless you’d have thought him mad, otherwise.”

“No. But I know that even locked in that fortress, he is the king’s servant and God’s, and if it’s the will of both that he – that he—” She faltered. “He would have refused you, had you come at the head of a legion. My father is the best man in the kingdom, and how I have prayed he were otherwise.”

We had left the chapel and entered the cathedral’s main chamber, where the line of supplicants broke apart and flowed into the larger crowd. We walked slowly together toward the west door, where her manservant stood, his gaze intent upon us, poised as if to spring.

“Madame, I have told you what you wanted, and I have only troubled you with my tidings. I am sorry for that. I pray you grant me leave.”

“Stay a moment, friend Aliquo. I am told that earlier today, two cut-purses were found dead in a rain-barrel in Woolwich, a quarter-hour after you set foot on the dock. Their necks were broken. Does this news surprise you?”

“No, Madame. Many rough men meet such fates.”

“Oh, indeed. Tell me, why did you not bring a legion? Why did your headless land send only you, alone?”

“My people have faith in me, Madame.”

“I think it’s because you didn’t need a legion. I think you could have brought my father out of the Tower unscathed and singlehanded, had he but said the word.”

“You think me a wizard, Madame.”

“No. I think you’re a killer, and I have a job for you. I want his head.”

“The king’s head? Now you are talking madness, Madame.”

“Henry? Fie! What need would I have for that? Not Henry’s head. My father’s. More’s. You have told me something of your land’s customs, regarding the dead. Let me now tell you something of ours. When the headsman on Tower Hill separates my father’s pate from his shoulders, his poor skull will be taken to London Bridge, impaled on a pike and mounted atop the Stone Gate, to feed the ravens and remind all Henry’s subjects of the fate of traitors. I would spare my father that. I want his head. I want it brought home to his family. I want it brought home to me.”

At that moment, I could have turned and walked out of the temple, the city, England, her gaze entire, perhaps even beyond the range of my memory of her. Instead I tarried, forever.

“Do not ask this of me,” I said.

“My family is broken,” she said. “My friends fear to be seen with me. My servants have multiple employers. My enemies watch me, and all others avert their eyes. I have no one else to ask.”

I glanced at he who stood apart, glowering at me. “But your manservant?”

“That is William, my husband,” she continued, looking only at me, “and he is a good man, but for this task, Aliquo my killer, my emissary from the land of dreams, I have no need of a good man. I have need of you.”

• • • •

“Ho, you knaves, you fishwives!” bellowed my leather-lunged boatman as he sculled straight across the paths of three score other vessels, missing each by the width of a coat of paint. Whenever the river ahead seemed passable, he changed course and sought congestion once more.

London may once have been a great city, but I was privileged to see it too late, in its twenty-sixth year of groan beneath the man Henry. And swirling among all was the reek of the Thames. That foul brown stream flows more thickly above its surface, and knows no channel, but floods all the nostrils of the town.

I had struggled on foot onto the city’s single bridge, in hopes of achieving a perspective not granted to the scullers below — only to gain a fine view of the tradesmen’s booths that line the thoroughfare on both sides. Each swaybacked roof sprouted a thicket of faded standards that snapped overhead like abandoned washing, their tattiness mocking the very memory of festivity.

Finally, midway along the span, I entered a public garderobe – for which honor I waited a quarter-hour in line, as some men around me gave up and relieved themselves standing – and once inside, I peered through the privy-hole, to obtain a fine round view of the Thames, my only one since setting foot on the bridge. Amid cascades of filth from above, a grimy boy of perhaps ten summers sat, fishing, in a vessel the size of a largish hat.

“Ay, look out there, you swag-bellied antic!”

The boatman’s roar returned me to my present sorry state. I was under no obligation to More’s daughter, I still told myself; but there was no harm, surely, in seeing whether her task could be quickly discharged, before my departure for home. A Utopian may be forgiven the odd good deed. But I had seen enough already to complicate matters. I had hoped, once having achieved the battlement, to lift down the pike and use it to bridge the gap to the next building; or, failing that, simply to dive over the wall into the water. But the battlement was twice as high as the adjacent roofs – about twelve stories to their six – and as the Stone Gateway perched atop a bridge that was itself eighty feet above the river, any dive from the height would be two hundred feet, and fatal. A head dropped into the river would be lost on the instant, while throwing it onto the adjacent roof would be a desperate move; the twice-unlucky head would roll off, and land who-knew-where.

No, the only feasible way to bring down the head would be to carry it down the stairs and out the front door. And the only feasible way to gain the battlement in the first place was via the same stairs in the reverse direction, up. Neither up nor down looked likely, short of a safe-passage guarantee from Henry himself.

Would Madame recognize her own father’s head? Or, more to the point, would she recognize a head not her father’s? The thought of substituting a more easily recovered head gave me no pride, but that at least would be feasible, and would give the lady some measure of comfort. Yet I did not wish to see her so easily gulled.

I leaned an elbow on the saxboard, let the river lap my thoughts as the Stone Gateway bobbed before me. Assume, then, that the battlement was impregnable. From execution site to point of display, the head must travel more than a mile through the London streets – the teeming, crime-infested, unpredictable streets.

Why, anything could happen. And only fivescore cutpurses, fishwives, alemongers, soldiers and spies would have to be bribed to look the other way.

And once the display was over, well, the head would have to make its way downstairs again, to clear a space on the battlement for the next statesman.

“What do they do with the heads, after?” I asked the boatman.

His grin had gaps into which a mouse could wriggle. “Into Mother Thames they go, milord – and don’t they make a pretty splash!”

So I could just wait beneath the bridge until the head was thrown to me. A tempting plan. A Simple plan. A foolish plan. I would gain only an unobstructed view of the thing sinking to the bottom of the river. And this was, of course, the thought with which my musings began; I had rounded the globe and met myself upon return.

“Oh, is that the state of it, y’say?” roared my boatman, in response to the ribald gestures of a passing fisherman. “Ye don’t fray me, you cullion! I’ll cuff you like Jack of Lent, I will!”

• • • •

The trial, and the sentence, and the execution, went as Madame had foreseen. One always should trust the natives. By then, I had settled on bribery and substitution. Cross the smallest number of palms with a few paving-stones, replace the head to conceal its absence, and be done.

Utopia borders the land of the savage Zapolets, useful neighbors in that they always are willing, for pay, to perform errands that are too base for Utopians. There is no dishonor in hiring them, as Zapolets are debased already. London, too, has its Zapolets, and so, a week after More’s severed head took its place atop the Gateway, I found myself directly beneath, alone in a boat, by midnight, having silently rowed myself into place, awaiting the descent of my package.

Above me, a low whistle – and again.

I crouched in the boat and looked up at the flickering darkness. Sound was magnified beneath the stone arch, and I heard as if in my right ear someone grunting and panting from exertion. In moments, something came into view, swaying in mid-air like a pendulum, ever closer. A heavy sack was being lowered to me.

Just as I reached up and took hold of it, someone on the bridge shrieked. Suddenly the full weight of the sack was in my hands, and I lurched off balance, nearly upset the boat as I sat heavily on the bench amidships. A hot, iron-smelling liquid pelted me from above, and then something plunked into the water beside me. In the torchlight I registered the staring, agape face of the poor Zapolet I had bribed, as his severed head rolled beneath the river’s leathery surface. Just before it vanished, I snatched it by the hair, swung it streaming into the floorboards. The act was instinctive; it might come in handy. Then an arrow studded from above into the bench between my thighs. Thus encouraged, I set down the sack and rowed for the far riverbank.

Sounds carry on a river, but I heard none as I reached the stilts of some enterprise built over the water – a tannery, by the smell of it. No voices called after me. I ducked my head and rode the boat into darkness, till it bumped the barrels lashed to the quay. I tied my boat fast, risked a candle, and peeled back the sacking, to see the head for which I had paid a guard’s life. I stared into the broad, lumpy face, its cheek triple-scarred long ago, as by a rake.

For my troubles, I now owned two severed heads, neither of them More’s.

• • • •

In mid-climb, my feet against the outer wall of the Gateway, I clutched the rope, straining to hear and see what was happening on the battlement above. Had my hook been noticed? Apparently not. I heard a murmuring conversation among guards, perhaps three men, but they were distant. I pulled myself up to the edge of the wall.

More than once, in my slow progress up the wall – one window level at a time – I had been tempted to let that damned not-More head that weighted my shoulder-sack, and became only heavier each minute, simply drop into the Thames. But no, a substitute head would be useful. With luck, no one would notice that More was missing.

I waited there, just beneath the battlement, for the guards to go below. Possibly they would not, in which case I would have to kill them all quickly and silently. I determined to give them a quarter-hour, and began to mark my heartbeats, as I looked out over the nightscape of the city. But sooner, all three voices moved into the stairwell, and I clambered up and over.

I counted my way to the More-pike, hoping the heads had not been rearranged since sunset, easily lifted the heavy pole out of its socket and stepped backward, laying it onto the flagstones as silently as I could. The head end necessarily was heavier, and hit first, bouncing once. I walked up the length of the pike. I reached beneath the iron band – grimacing as my fingers dented the head’s tarred surface – and tugged.

The head did not budge.

I put both feet against the severed neck, braced myself, and pushed.

The flesh buckled.

I pushed again, and the head slowly began to stutter up the pike.

I was thus occupied when I heard voices ascending the stairs.

Frantically, I managed to slide the head clear of the pike just as the first guarded crested the roof – facing southward and away from me, thank Mithras. The head fell only an inch or two to the roof. I let the pike down quietly and rolled sideways, putting a low wall between myself and the guards. I hoped they were not in the habit of counting the pikes.

I flung a pebble into the far corner of the rooftop, hoping it would make a noise loud enough to draw their attention. I suppose it landed. If so, it made not a sound.

One guard began walking the battlement toward me. His attention was directed outward, however. Sitting with my back to the inner wall, willing myself to disappear into the shadow, I watched him stroll into view. He stopped, still with his back to me, and stared downstream. A few steps, and he’d all but trip over the pike, and More’s head.

I risked a glance behind me. One guard was picking his teeth, another leaning on his elbows, both looking across Southwark.

I stood and crossed silently to my guard, swinging the bag with the not-More head. It clouted the guard at the base of the skull. As he dropped, I kicked him between the shoulder blades, and he toppled over the wall. I dived for cover again. Only someone who was listening for it, as I was, would have noticed the splash, far below.

The two remaining guards continued their murmurous conversation, on the far side of the platform. I rolled into a crouch, looked over the crenellated wall that sheltered the stairs. My new friends were standing just barely within the torchlight of a taper on the far wall. They stood side by side facing the city, overlooking the rooftops that lined the bridge below. I wished them to separate, willed them to do so, but my will failed. There they would stand, barely a man’s width between them, until they registered their companion had not rejoined them, whereupon they would seek and, not finding, sound an alarm. How to separate them sooner?

Water, moaned a voice at my feet.

You scarce will believe, ye who read this letter, that I did not spring backward, though my leg muscles spasmed in that desire; my overriding desire, to produce no noise whatsoever, saved me, I think. I only hopped, once, silently landing in place with my feet planted a bit farther apart, to either side of the lump of darkness I knew to be More’s head. I did not cry out. I did not breathe. I only stared, stared down at the darkness between my feet, desperate to resolve a shape that, as I stared, began to move, to rock to and fro, like an inverted turtle, until it tipped and rolled to a stop against my left boot, its staring eyes reflecting the moon as its only movable limb, its long adderlike tongue, probed the air. Of course, I thought with insane clarity, that’s how he could roll over. Face down, he pushed away the stone floor with his tongue.

Water, More repeated, more loudly this time.

The guards! They would hear!

With no more thought than this – nay, with no thought at all – still on the keen iron edge of terror, and preferring to be anywhere but against that More-head, I stood and strode forward, fast, noiseless, toward the two guards, who marvelously yet had heard nothing, still had their backs to me. In mid-stride, slacking neither my pace nor my direction, I returned the favor, turned my back to them, walked backward until their faces came into view and my shoulder blades thumped against the wall between them.

“Wha?” said the one on my right.

I smashed the heels of both hands into the guards’ noses. As they fell backward I fell forward atop them, rode them down to the floor and crushed their faces with all my weight, my arms locked in place like bars. Out of respect, I did not watch. Instead I looked to the stars, found Ophiuchus beset, the writhing serpent-head and serpent-tail to either side, and the scorpion beneath his feet. The guards made scarcely any noise, only a grunt or two and one gurgle, as a gentlewoman’s stomach might have done, and yet after they died, as I relaxed and flexed my cramping arms, the tower was quieter still. I saw the guttering taper, the flailing flags, but their sounds did not register. As I re-crossed the platform in search of More (his eyes! his tongue!), I moved in a silence like that of a dream, or of a daze from a clout on the head. I heard only the blood and snot and eyestuff pattering from my hands, which I held away from my body as if to distance myself from what I’d done.

I had killed before – had, indeed, likely killed the first guard, not five minutes earlier – and I have killed since, but my work atop Stone Gate that night, and as I left that accursed tower, was of another order. I blamed More, at the time. Whatever animated his head, I felt, was animating me. My body would ache for a fortnight.

I rounded the wall. More’s head was gone. No – it was there, nose wedged into the join of wall and floor. But surely I had left it over there, beside the pike?

Water, said More’s head.

Loath as I was to touch the damned thing (abomination! impossibility!), I wanted nothing from life, at that moment, but to heave More over the parapet, give him all the water he could drink, and to cast myself in after him. Perhaps I should have done those things, or one of them.

“Hush!” I said.

When would the next guards come on duty? When would the absence of tramping footfalls overhead be noticed? What signals, what duties, would be missed? I worked quickly. Ignoring More, I freed not-More from his sack, with some effort – I had to shake it, my assault on the first guard having got head and fabric somewhat intermingled – and it finally rolled onto the floor with a deep groan that made me yelp in horror. But ‘twas only More again, complaining. I jammed the pike into not-More’s neck, working it in deeper than necessary, wishing it were More. I hoisted the pike with effort, the head now even heavier at the weighted end of a pole, and set the hilt into place with the first sense of relief I had felt in an hour. I stepped back, snatched up the taper, and held it high, to check my handiwork. As he flickered into view, not-More sagged sideways, and I was sure for a moment that its savaged flesh would tear away and drop it into the Thames – but it held, and I foolishly continued to hold aloft the light, in a terrible elation, until a voice from below cried:

“Ho! What’s the matter up there? Who’s light?”

“No matter,” I cried, even as I returned the taper to its sconce – too late. I heard behind me, from the outer wall, a scrape like nails against flint.

“What’s this?” said the same voice – no longer loudly, but half to himself, in a sort of wonder, yet distinct for all that. I looked at my grappling hook as it twitched, flexed, skittered sideways, like a crab in lantern-light. He who had yanked it bellowed, “Intruder! Ho, the tower! Hoy!”

I snatched up More. He tried to bite me, the wretch, as I shoved him into my sack. To fling the hook over the wall was the work of a moment. With my snarling burden I strode away from my ruined lifeline, to the head of the wooden stairs, saw no one, and sprinted down, three planks at a time.

I found myself in a narrow stone chamber, barely wider than the flight of stairs. Beneath the stairs were casks and crates, but no guard, and no doors either. The only door faced me, a stone archway that framed a landing and a more substantial set of stone steps headed down. I had just reached the top when I heard a roaring and pounding from below, as if a cohort were charging, and torchlight flared and brightened ‘gainst the stone wall visible at the curve.

I dropped my More sack – he squeaked as he hit the floor – and looked about, gauged my position. Above, in the open air, I would gain room to work, but so would they. Here was better. I stepped back three paces, positioned myself, and waited, as that fell force rose within me.

The leader of the party gained the stone landing but stopped at sight of me. I wonder what he saw. I stood unarmed, hands and sleeves besmirched with gore, a twitching sack at my feet. I know that I smiled. But what more did he see? Whatever it was, it stopped him like a barred gate, and the others clustered behind. Five total. One axe; three swords; the fifth, a torch in one hand and a rapier in the other. Fine.

“Which of you,” I asked, “is the youngest?”

They said nothing, but two in the back glanced at the torchbearer, a beardless boy. They all looked wary, but he, terrified.

Their leader looked me up and down. “Who the fuck are you,” he snarled, “to question us?”

I smiled even wider. “I’m the ratcatcher,” I said, and sprang.

Afterward, I rose from my work on the floor and faced the one I’d left standing. The boy’s quaking face was red with blood not his own. His shaking torch cast shadows that rocked the room. He choked back something, and dropped his weapon with a clang. He kept the torch, though. He was a dark-eyed, lovely boy. I have never been partial to boys.

“Your job,” I said, “is to run below, and tell the others.”

His jaw worked, his throat pulsed. He made no sound.

“That I am coming,” I said.

Still he stood, trembling. The room filled with a smell harsher even than blood, and a puddle spread at the boy’s boot.

Christ, cried More, muffled by sacking. Christ!

I took one step toward the boy, pursed my lips, and blew air into his face.

With a wail, he leapt into the stairwell, somehow kept his footing, and ran downstairs screaming, just ahead of me. Still he held on to the torch. O dutiful boy! Excellent boy! More clamped beneath one arm, my way lighted by the now much older once-boy, I ran in a downward stone spiral, around and down, around and down, past windows of increasing size, around and down, deeper into the swirling river-stench, until I reached a window just large enough, and vaulted through, knowing not whether I was over roofs or over water but hoping I was low enough. I was over water, and low enough. I plunged beneath the surface and sank, afire with sudden cold but glad of the respite from the smell. As I dropped ever deeper, my cheek was brushed by what may have been a kicking rat, my shoulder bumped by what may have been a spiraling turd, my chest gnawed by what was certainly the struggling head of my lady’s father, biting at my heart as we descended into the dark peace below London. Ay, low enough!

• • • •

I dared not return to my inn, in my bedraggled state, with my unpredictible charge. Instead I repaired to a haven I had noted earlier – a nearby plague-house, marked by a bundle of straw on a pole extending from an upper window, and a foot-high cross slapped on the door in red paint. Local gossip said the surviving family members had long decamped to the country-side, and the neighbors dared not set foot in the place. From the adjoining rooftop, I gained entrance to the house via its upper storey. I made fast the shutters, risked a single lighted candle, and gnawed the bread, cheese and onion I had stowed there before my assault on the Gateway. Then, somehow, I slept.

I was awakened by More.

Where is the light?

Be silent, I said. The candle is beside you. Look.

I pulled the bedraggled thing from the sack, set it on the table. His neck looked to have been cut clean, but at an angle. The head listed to the right, as if cocked to hear a confidence. The skin puckered on that side, beneath More’s weight.

Where is the light? Ay, am I damned? Am I such a sinner as that?

I cannot say, I told him. But you must be quiet, in any case.

God knows, I am no heretic, said More. I sought out heretics. I had them killed. They put God’s word in the English tongue, in the mouths of fishwives. They rejected the Apostle of Rome. They were protestants to God. I was Lord High Chancellor, but I served the Lord who was higher still. They were as bad as Luther, and Luther is the shit-pool of all shit.

Were they beheaded, too? I asked.

No, burned, said the head. Purified in the flames, and delivered shriven unto God. It was all I could do for them, poor misguided devils. I hope soon to clasp their hands, my prodigal brothers. And yet.

Yes, I asked.

Where is the light?

I turned the head to face the candle, my fingers sinking into his temple as into a soft pear. This made the lace atop the table twist into a gyre; it was intimate with More’s neck, now.

More moaned. Where is the light? Ah, Christ my Savior, what is this place?

I believe it’s an apothecary’s, I said. We are upstairs.

But where?

London, I said, mere rods from the Stone Gate. You’ve not gone far.

Ah, Christ, I smell it! The Thames!

You’ll not smell it long. I’ll deliver you to your daughter.

My daughter? Where is she? What business have you with my Meg?

She tasked me with an errand, I said. With the delivery of your head.

He emitted a wail, like a cat that is trod upon.

Ah, you wretch! you cullion! you ass-spreading ingle! You are a worse shit even than Luther. Meg wanted only my head, but you! Pestiferous, stew-dwelling, punk-eating maltworm! You have stolen my soul!

Hush, man. I have only your head. I know naught of your soul.

He wailed the louder, though his lips were closed. I seized his screaming skull two-handed, wrenched at the jaw until, with a tearing sound, it opened a space. I snatched up an onion, wedged it into the opening. The wailing continued. I seized the candlestick, toppling the candle, and smashed the head with the base. I saw only that I had opened a savage dent, as the flame toppled into my wine and went out, leaving me in the dark with this howling dead thing. In despair, I cried:

Shut up! For Meg’s sake, shut up!

Meg, it said. Meg. And said no more.

• • • •

At the time arranged, I stood ‘midst the merrymakers on the Bank, on the lip of a bear-pit, a laden pouch slung over my shoulder. The bear below was a sleepy-looking fellow that lumbered in circles along the earthen wall and swatted at the refuse hurled down. Its bristly collar was all a-point with spikes. These did little to allay the general impression of boredom. The criers’ voices were hoarse and listless, even as they insulted one another and their customers.

“Ale and elderberries!”

“Sweet-meats!”

“Flawn!”

“Here, this Florentine you just sold me – it’s all fat in the middle!”

“Well, it suits you then! Out of my way. Florentines!”

Likely customers ogled an oyster-wench’s ample bosom and, secondarily, the tray of shellfish her teats partially shaded. A gatherer outside a theatre collected admissions, one clank at a time, in a glazed money-box. At his waist swung the hammer that at day’s end would smash open the profit – or the head of any coxcomb who tried to relieve him of it.

“Suckets, Milord?”

“No, no,” I said, waving her past.

Suckets, said More.

She showed no sign of hearing it, but I stepped away, pressing the pouch closer ‘neath my elbow. Suckets, More repeated. Through my sleeve and the fabric of the pouch, I felt something bite at my arm.

“Any ginger-bread?” asked another.

“Alas, no, but some lovely marchpane, me sister’s known for it. Melts on your tongue, it does.”

“Just like your sister!” Much laughter.

“It’s yer fat stewed prune I wants in me mouth, love, if it’s not been sucked off by now!” Even more laughter. The bear rumbled and farted, and the air above his pit fairly shimmered with the stink.

Damn you! I cannot eat! cried More. And yet I starve!

His was louder than any voice in the crowd, and yet no one reacted. So I did not react, either.

“Oh, you squirtings! Weasel-beak! Get on with your saucy selves. Ah, there’s a love,” said the hag, curseying to a gentlemen whose brocaded back was to me. “I thank you, sir.”

“Away with you, then,” he said, turning: William Roper, and alone in the crowd. He met my eye and cocked his head toward the street, then turned and walked away. I followed him across the thoroughfare, his feathered cap my guide through the throng. I followed him into an alley and around a stack of barrels. Madame stood there, her face streaked with tears. She twisted a bit of cloth in her fingers.

Meg, said More.

“It’s you!” she said, and took a wild-eyed step toward me – but stopped herself, and so did not rush to me, lay hands upon me, embrace me. “So William was right after all,” she said, more calmly. “I was sure you were seized, or dead.”

Meg! Ah, Meg! Finish me!

To the horrid voice in my pouch, she reacted not at all.

I bowed low. “Alive, and free to serve Madame,” I said.

“Free.” She looked all about, at an overhang of verminous thatch above, at a puddle of piss below, at the leaden sky and the barrel-staves, at everything but me and my noisy pouch.

I glanced at her husband, who gave me only the smallest shake of his head in reply.

“Here, Madame,” I said, and gestured at the pouch that swung heavily at my side, still wailing and moaning.

Drown me in the river, Meg! I am your father! Burn me in a pyre! Meg, you silly bitch, listen! Meg!

Madame made as if to reach for the flap, then snatched back her hand with such haste I heard it slap against the front of her dress.

Looking neither at him nor at me, she said, flatly, “William.”

Roper, sparing me a cold glance, stepped forward and lifted a corner of the flap a few inches. The moment he lifted it, More’s puling ceased.

“Why, ’tis not him,” Roper said.

“You lie, sir,” I said.

Roper’s face twisted in anger. “Dare you speak so?”

Madame looked faint. “What wrong have I done thee to warrant such cruelty?”

Roper and I spoke at once.

“Madame, please.”

“Silence, dog!”

“See for yourself.”

“Meg, let’s away.”

“I will see,” she said, silencing us. She lifted the flap, looked in, and breathed, “Oh.”

As I watched her face, her features seemed to smooth. The lines of care and middle years filled in like canals. Her eyes shone.

“That such a small vessel,” she murmured, “could contain such a great head.”

“Meg! You are mistaken, surely.”

“No. Look, William. Do you not see the mole upon his cheek, the cleft in his chin? As a girl I tried to hide flower-petals in there.”

Her husband looked again.

“He is much diminished,” Roper said. “And yet.”

“Enough,” Madame said, stepping away. “The task is concluded. Take him.”

I thought this meant concealed guards, that the moment had come, and I was ready. But she only watched as Roper gently lifted the satchel off my shoulder.

“When they told me he was gone,” she said, half to me and half to no one, “my own head went a-rolling. I had no mind, no purpose. I wanted only to be in the street, in the crowds. In my slippers I walked through the muck, seeing nothing, facing no one, until I was brought up short … by whiteness. White on white, like a heap of saint-souls. I stood, marveling, before a shop-window full of Low Country linen. So, so beautiful. Mother used to say, ah, Meg, it’s a shame to bring it home, it ne’er can be so pure again. I suddenly had a single thought: a winding-sheet. Father must be wrapped for burial. Of course. But I had no purse. I had left the house in such grief and such haste, I had come away with nothing. Yet I pointlessly, automatically patted the little sewing-pocket of my skirts, and pulled from that pocket three gold sovereigns, which were not there before. And so I came home no longer mad and pitiable, but sensible, and done with my errand, and this winding-sheet was worth two pounds at the most.” She flapped at me the bit of cloth she’d been a-worrying. “Just look at it! Little better than dagswain. Such is the world without my father, friend Aliquo: petty miracles, and petty frauds.” She shook her head, seemed to focus on me. “But my household will e’er remember your good offices. I pray you, seek your perfect homeland. I hope it exists – but you’ll not find it here.” Her eyes ceased to see me. “Ay, not here.”

She and her man turned and walked away. “We’ll pickle him, I think,” I heard her say, “with some elderflower.”

As that grim burden swung at Roper’s hip, down the alley and into the street, her father’s not-voice resumed its wailing.

God damn you. God damn you! God damn you ALL!

I stood at the alley’s mouth and watched them grow smaller in the distance, the voice diminishing all the while, until they could not be seen, and More could not be heard.

• • • •

Freed of my burden, freed of my hopes, I walked southward, away from the city, toward the sea. I moved among women and men, but saw no one, heard nothing.

Two days later, I crouched on a quay on the wet lip of England, hidden behind shipping-barrels, and removed from my pouch the not-More head I had carried all that way.

“Farewell, friend Zapolet,” I told it, and laid it onto the surface of the water, as gently as More must have laid his firstborn babe, wiggling and shiny, ‘pon her coverlet. I watched the Zapolet’s staring head roll ‘neath the waves, as the babe sinks into the adult. Then it was gone forever.

I re-entered the crowd and found a line to stand in, waiting to book passage. Something tugged at my breeches. A grimy child, of indeterminate sex, holding a tray of sweetmeats.

“Suckets, Milord?”

Suckets, repeated More.

I bellowed and whirled, my feet crushing the scattered sweetmeats as the child fled. I stared into the incredulous faces of strangers jostling to get away from me. Gulls shrieked. The ocean heaved. Ships’ colors whipped in the hot wind.

Thou fool, said More. Whose head do you think I’m in?

• • • •

I write this letter in an English inn, a half-day’s walk from London.

I said at the outset that I had failed, and so I believed at the time. Perhaps I will believe that again. In the meantime, with every northward step away from home, questions roil in my head – philosophical questions, such as those chewed after dinner, in the refectories of Aircastle. I will pose them to you.

Was I treated well, or ill, when my lover’s husband discovered me in the arms of his wife, and assumed the entire fault was mine?

Was I treated well, or ill, when I, a mere girl, was charged with “forbidden embraces,” with “defiling the marriage bed”? When my lover was persuaded to swear untruths against me, to save herself?

Was I treated well, or ill, when I was sentenced to slavery? When I was assured my bondage would be temporary if I was good, and if I denied my nature forevermore? When I was told, moreover, that I was fortunate, that voyagers stepped onto our docks daily in hopes of achieving slavery in Utopia, so preferable to freedom elsewhere?

Was I treated well, or ill, when my natural strength and agility placed me in endless daily training, in service to a citizenry that viewed combat and assassination as tasks fit only for mercenaries and slaves?

Was I treated well, or ill, when I was ordered to rescue a half-mythical figure in a faraway land where even my sex must be denied and disguised, if I am to function at all, and promised my freedom if I succeeded?

It is true, my former fellow citizens, my former masters and mistresses, I did not rescue More. He is dead. He reminds me daily of this fact, and of the impossibility of a better world to come, though in an ever fainter voice, one that I am growing used to. Mostly, now, he speaks a single name.

More is unsaved, and yet, I write you today as a free woman, to say farewell.

Our homeland is not perfect. No homeland is. But all lands can be made more perfect – even this England. And all lands have perfection within them: somewhere, sometime, someone.

Thus ends my story and my service, ye Prince and Tranibors of our good land, ye Syphogrants and families thereof. May my example be instructive to you and to your assigns. Though I never return to Utopia, never walk again beside the Waterless Stream, I will feel my people with me always, all those stern and rational generations. I will always be your agent, but I serve another, now.

Andy Duncan’s fiction honors include a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and three World Fantasy Awards, the most recent for Wakulla Springs, a 2013 Tor.com novella co-written with Ellen Klages. “An Agent of Utopia” is the title story of his third collection, published in 2018 by Small Beer Press. A South Carolina native and Clarion West graduate, he teaches writing in the Maryland mountains at Frostburg State University, which promoted him to full professor in 2019.

A Study in Oils
By Kelly Robson

Halfway up the winding cliffside guideway, Zhang Lei turned his bike around. He was exhausted from three days of travel and nauseated, too, but that wasn’t the problem. He could always power through physical discomfort. But the trees, the rocks, the open sky above, and the mountains closing in—it was all too strange. He kept expecting something to drop on his head.

He pinged Marta, the social worker in Beijing Hive who’d orchestrated his escape from Luna seventy-two hours earlier.

Forget Paizuo, he whispered as his bike coasted the guideway’s downslope. This is too weird.

Turn that bike back around or I’ll hit your disable button, Marta whispered back.

You wouldn’t.

He turned the bike’s acceleration to maximum.

I would. You can spend the next two weeks lying at the bottom of a gully while the tribunal decides what to do with you. Turn around.

No, I’m going back to the Danzhai roadhouse.

When she scowled, her whole face crumpled into a mass of wrinkles. She didn’t even look like a person anymore.

I’d do anything to keep you alive, kid, and I don’t even like you. She jabbed at him with an age-spotted finger, as if she could reach across the continent and poke him in the chest. Turn back around or I’ll do it.

He believed her. Nobody had hit his disable button since he’d left Luna, but Marta was an old ex-Lunite and that meant she was both tough and mean. Zhang Lei slowed his bike, rotated back to the guideway’s uphill track, and gave the acceleration dial a vicious twist.

You don’t like me? he asked.

Maybe a little. Marta flipped through the graphs of his biom. She had full access to that too, and could check everything from his hormone levels to his sleep cycle. You’re getting dehydrated. Drink some water. And slow your bike. You’re going to make yourself puke.

I feel fine, he lied.

Marta rolled her eyes. Relax. You’ll love Paizuo. Nobody wants to kill you there.

She slapped the connection down, and the image of her elderly face was replaced by steep, verdant mountainside. Danzhai County was thick with an impossible greenness, in layers of bushes, trees, grasses, and herbs he had no name for.

Everything was unfamiliar here. He knew he was deep in southwestern China, but that’s about all. He knew he was surrounded by mountains, with Danzhai’s transit hub behind him. It was a two-pad skip station, the smallest he’d ever seen, next to a narrow lake surrounded by hills, everything green but the sky—which actually was blue, like everyone always said about Earth—and the buildings. Those were large, brown, and open to the air as if atmospheric weather was nothing.

An atmosphere people could breathe. That was Earth’s one unique claim. Unlike Luna, or Venus, or Mars, or any of the built environments in the solar system, here in Danzhai and a few other places on Earth, humans lived every day exposed to weather. It was traditional, or something.

Weather was overrated, Zhang Lei decided. The afternoon was so humid, he’d sweated through his shirt. And the air wasn’t clean. Bits of fluff floated in it, and it smelled weird, too. Birds zipped through the air like hovertoys launched from tree limbs—were they even birds? He’d seen so few on Luna.

At least he was alone. A year ago, he would have hated not having anyone to goof around with or show off for. No coach, no team, no fans. Now he was grateful. Marta was watching out for him, always on the other end of a ping if anything went wrong. It was a relief not having to stay ultra-alert.

He pinged Marta.

How long do I have to stay in Paizuo?

Her face appeared again. She was shoveling noodles into her mouth with a pair of chopsticks. The sight of the food made his stomach heave.

At least two weeks. More if I can wrangle an extension. Ideally, I’d like you to stay until the tribunal decides your case.

Okay.

Two weeks. Fine. He’d keep doing what she said, within reason. Drinking water, yes. Slowing the bike down, no. He wasn’t going to toil up the mountain like some slack-ass oldster.

Wasn’t long before he regretted that decision. The nausea wouldn’t be denied any longer. He shifted on the bike’s saddle and hung his head over the edge of the guideway. His mouth prickled with saliva until his guts heaved, forcing what was left of his luxurious, hand-cooked Danzhai lunch—black fungus, eggplant, cucumbers, and garlic with pepper, pepper, and more pepper—up, out, and over into the green gulch below. The nausea eased.

When he got to the Paizuo landing stage, the guideway came to a dead end. He couldn’t believe it. Just a ground-level platform with a bike rack on one side and a battery of cargo floats on the other. Zhang Lei had never even seen a landing stage with only one connection, not even in the bowels of Luna’s smallest hab. Everywhere was interconnected. Not Paizuo, apparently.

He hooked his bike on the rack, shouldered his duffle bag, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, flicking away a few stray pepper seeds. His lips burned.

I said you’d puke, Marta whispered. No visual this time, only a disembodied voice. Bet you feel like shit.

Yeah, but you look like shit.

It was the traditional Lunar reply. Marta laughed.

Don’t pull that lip here, okay? You’re a guest. Be polite.

He shifted his bag from one shoulder to the other. Nobody seemed to be watching, aside from Marta. Behind the trees, a few brown houses climbed the side of the mountain. Where was the village? A few people were visible through the trees, but otherwise, Paizuo was a wilderness—a noisy wilderness. Wind in the leaves, birds chirping, and buzzing—something coming up behind him.

Zhang Lei spun, fists raised. A cargo conveyor zipped up the guideway. It slid its payload onto a float and slotted itself into place on the underside of the landing stage. The float slowly meandered up a leafy path.

A hospitality fake showed him the way to the guest house, where he stumbled to his room, fell on top of the bed, and slept fourteen hours straight. If someone had wanted to kill him then, they easily could have. He wouldn’t have cared.

• • • •

The other three artists in the guest house were pampered oldsters from high-status habs. They made a big show of acting casual, but Zhang Lei caught each of them exchanging meaningful looks. They were probably pinging his ID to ogle his disable button, marveling at the label under it that said KILLER—FAIR GAME, and discussing him in whispers.

During lunch, Zhang Lei ignored them. Instead of joining their conversation, he watched a hygiene bot polish the floor.

“The wood bothered me at first,” said Prajapati, gesturing with a beringed hand at the guest house’s wooden walls, floor, and ceiling. She looked soft, her dark skin plush with fat and burnished with moisturizers. Her metadata identified her as a sculptor from Bangladesh Hell. “But organic materials are actually quite hygienic, if treated properly.”

“I don’t like the dirt,” said Paul, an ancient watercolorist from Mars. “It’s everywhere outside.”

“It’s not dirt, it’s soil,” said the sculptor. She picked a morsel of flesh out of the bubbling pot of fish soup in the middle of the table.

“People from the outplanet diaspora forget that soil is life,” said Han Song, a 2D photographer from Beijing Hive.

“Yes, we’ve all been told that a thousand times,” replied the watercolorist with a smile. “Earth thinks very well of itself. But I have to say, I like Paizuo. The Miao traditional lifestyle is extremely appealing.”

A woman shuffled into the dining room bearing plates of egg dumplings and sweet millet cake. The oldsters smiled and thanked her profusely. The woman wore a wide silver torque around her neck, hung with tiny bells and charms. They tinkled as she arranged the dishes. She was slender, but the profile of her abdomen showed a huge tumor under her colorful tunic.

“What a waste of billable hours,” the watercolorist said once the chef was gone. “Couldn’t they task a bot with the kitchen-to-table supply chain? I know tradition is important to the Miao, but the human ability to carry plates is hardly going to die out.”

The chef had tagged the food with detailed nutritional notes, and it said millet was good for digestive upset. After vomiting his Danzhai lunch yesterday, he couldn’t face more peppers. But the millet cake was good—honey-sweet and crunchy. The egg dumplings were delicious, too. He could eat the whole plate.

Marta pinged him.

I thought you’d never wake up. Listen, don’t worry about the other guests, okay? We’ve had them investigated. They’re all nice, quiet, trustworthy people. They agreed not to ask too many questions.

He shoved another dumpling in his mouth. Zhang Lei knew he ought to be grateful but he wasn’t. The three oldsters were getting something out of the deal, too. They would be able to tell stories about him for the rest of their lives. I once shared accommodations with a murderer. Well, not a murderer, I suppose, not exactly, my dear, but a killer. No, I never asked him what happened but you should have seen the disable button on his ID. It said KILLER right under it. I couldn’t help but stare.

Zhang Lei finished the dumplings and claimed the rest of the millet cake. He left the table still chewing, and slammed the front door behind him.

What did you tell them about me? he asked Marta.

Not much. I said you weren’t responsible for what happened and we’re working to have the disable button removed.

I was responsible, though.

Zhang Lei, we’ve discussed this. Do you want to ping a peer counselor? Talk therapy is effective.

No. I hate talking.

The guest house was part of a trio of houses, fronted by a cabbage patch. Large birds—domestic poultry he guessed—pecked at the gravel walkway that led to the guest house’s kitchen door. Nearby, a huge horned mammal was tethered in the shade, along with a large caged bird that stalked back and forth and shrieked.

Zhang Lei trudged toward a peak-roofed pavilion. The midday sun stood high over the valley, veiled by humid haze. Not at all hot, but in the unfamiliar atmosphere, sweat beaded on his scarred forearms.

The pavilion overlooked the terraced fields descending the valley and the hazy fleet of mountains on the horizon. No blue sky today. He might as well be in a near-Sun orbit greenhouse hab, deep in the eye of its dome, every sprout, bud, and bloom indexed and graphed. The locals probably used the same agricultural tech here. Each of the green-and-yellow plants in the terraces below was probably monitored by an agronomist up the mountain, watching microsensors buried in the soil and deploying mineral nutrition with pinpoint accuracy.

Zhang Lei pinged one of the plants. Nothing came back, not even an access denial. He tried pinging one of the farmers working far below, then a nearby tree. Still nothing. Frantic, he flung pings across the valley.

All of the Paizuo guest houses answered immediately. A map highlighted various routes up and down the valley. The guideway landing stage sent him the past two days of traffic history and offered average travel times to various down-slope destinations. A lazy stream of ID information flowed from the guest artists, thirty in total.

Several hazard warnings floated over their targets: Watch for snakes. Beware of dog. Dangerous cliff. But no pings from the locals, or any of the crops, equipment, or businesses. Not even from the wooden hand-truck upended over a pile of dirt at the side of the path. But no way this village ran everything data-free.

His pings summoned the hospitality fake. It hovered at his elbow, head inclined with a gently inquiring look.

“Why can’t I get a pingback from anything here?” he demanded.

It gave Zhang Lei a generic smile. “Paizuo data streams are restricted to members of the Miao indigenous community.”

“So I can’t find out anything?” His face grew hot with anger. Stuck here for weeks or more, totally ignorant, unable to learn anything or find out how the village worked.

The fake nodded. “I’ll be pleased to answer your questions if I’m able.”

Zhang Lei wasn’t in the mood for crèche-level games. He slapped it down, hard. The fake misted away, immediately replaced by Marta in full length. She had her fists on her hips and didn’t look pleased.

Feeling a little aggressive, Zhang Lei? You didn’t say two words to your fellow guests, and now you’re getting testy with a fake.

I’m sorry, okay? Embarrassing. He should have controlled himself. I hate this place.

No, you don’t. You’re out of your element. Nothing here is any threat to you. She grinned. Not unless you have a phobia of domestic animals.

Hah, he grumbled.

Go for a walk. Do a little sketching. Get familiar with the village. There’s lots to see, and it’s all gorgeous. There’s a reason why artists love Paizuo.

Okay. He booted up his viewcatcher. Marta gave him an approving nod and dissolved.

True, Paizuo was beautiful. From the pavilion, mountains thick with trees stretched sharp and steep over the valley, where green and yellow terraced fields stepped up and down the lower slopes, punctuated by small groups of wooden houses under tall trees. He framed the composition in his viewcatcher. It was perfect, pre-chewed—the whole reason the pavilion had been built there in the first place. The fang-like form of the tallest mountain clutched in the spiral fist of the golden mean. Nice.

Even though the view was prepackaged, framing it in his viewcatcher was satisfying. And what a relief to be able to do it openly. Back on Luna, he had to be careful not to get caught using the viewcatcher, or he’d get smacked by one of his teammates or screamed at by his coach. Zhang Lei was allowed to draw cartoons and caricatures, but everything else was a distraction from training and a waste of time and focus.

Total commitment to the game, that’s what all coaches demanded.

“What do you love better, hockey or scribbling on little bits of paper?” Coach had demanded, and then smacked him on the back of the head when he hesitated.

“Hockey,” he answered.

“Right. Don’t forget it.”

So he drew cartoons of his teammates, their rival teams, and stars from the premier leagues they all wanted to get drafted into. He got good. Fast. Accurate. In thirty seconds, he could toss off a sketch that got the whole team hooting. Coach liked it, said it was good for morale. But quick, sketchy work didn’t satisfy. Neither did the digital-canvas painting he snuck past Coach on occasion, but both were better than nothing.

He padded down a trail to the first terrace, flipping his viewcatcher through its modes—thirds to notan to golden mean to phi grid—as he strode along the edge. The earthen berm bounding the terrace was less than a meter wide, and seemed to be made entirely of dirt. The next terrace was ten meters below on his left.

He blacked out edges of the view, widened the margins until nothing was visible outside his constantly expanding and contracting search for a composition. He swept back and forth across the landscape. Then he slipped and fell. The viewcatcher framed a close-up of green plants in brown water.

Zhang Lei lurched sideways, regaining his footing, the right leg of his pants wet to the knee and slimy with mud. He dismissed the viewcatcher and stared incredulously around him.

The matrix of the terraces was liquid, not soil. Water and mud. He’d seen it glinting between the greenery, but he hadn’t realized it was water. And now he was covered in it.

A fleeting thought—I’m going to die here—easily dismissed. All he had to do was watch where he put his feet as he explored.

Paizuo wasn’t what Zhang Lei expected. The village wasn’t all one piece like ancient towns in crèche storybooks. It was spread thin, covering the whole valley, the houses clustered in groups under the trees and separated by fields and paddies. The Miao didn’t build on flat or even sloping land—those areas seemed dedicated to crops. Instead, they chose the precipitous and rocky landscape for their multilevel wooden homes. Each house stood on stilts over the canted landscape, the weight of the structures leaning back on the mountainside. Livestock sheltered in the shade beneath, some tethered or penned, some roaming free.

Actual live animals, like the ones behind the guest house, and a lot of them. With humans living literally on top of them.

A deep voice knocked Zhang Lei out of his thoughts. Unfamiliar syllables. When he turned to look, the translation word balloon hung over the man’s head:

“Hello, can I help you?”

No ID accessible, but the balloon was tagged with his name: Jen Dang. Not tall, but broad-shouldered and athletic, with skin deeply burnished by the sun and a wide, strong face. Old, but not an oldster.

Zhang Lei switched on his translation app.

“I arrived yesterday,” Zhang Lei said. “Trying to get used to everything.”

Jen Dang scanned the balloon overhead.

“Are the insects troubling you?”

“Insects?” Zhang Lei frowned and scanned the ground. “I haven’t seen any yet.”

“Right there.” Jen Dang pointed at one of the fluttering creatures he had no name for.

“Oh, I thought insects lived on the ground. I’m from—” He almost said Luna but caught himself in time. “I’ve never been on Earth before. It’s different.”

“Most of our guests use seers to help them identify plants and animals. Paizuo is a biodiversity preserve, with thousands of different species.”

“I’ll do that, thanks.”

Jen Dang fell silent. Zhang Lei could feel himself warming to the stranger. Lots of charisma and natural authority. He’d do well on Luna.

“The food is really good here,” he said.

A shadow of a smile crossed Jen Dang’s face.

“Jen Dla is my daughter. She’s an experienced chef.”

“I’m sorry,” Zhang Lei said, and other man squinted at him. “I couldn’t help but notice she’s sick.” He gestured vaguely in the region of his stomach.

Jen Dang shook his head. “You’re a guest. There are lots of things guests can’t understand. Would you like to see another?”

Two large baskets lay under a tree. Jen Dang plucked them from the ground and led Zhang Lei down a tree-lined path, the slope so extreme the route soon turned into uneven stairs, cut into the dirt and haphazardly incised with slabs of rock. Mammals grazed on either side, standing nearly on their hind legs while cropping the ground cover.

They descended five terrace levels before Zhang Lei’s thighs started getting hot. Stairs were a good workout, mostly cardio but some leg strength, and uneven steps were good balance training, too. For a moment he lost himself in the rhythm of their rapid descent. It was enjoyable. He could run the stairs in morning and evening before doing his squats and lunges—but then he remembered. He wasn’t an athlete anymore. And with the disable button on his ID labeling him a killer, nobody in Danzhai, Miao or guest, needed to wonder what he was training for, or if he was chasing someone.

He slowed, letting the distance widen between himself and the farmer. If someone got worried and hit the button, he’d roll right down the mountain.

Jen Dang shucked his shoes and rolled up his trouser legs as he waited for Zhang Lei at one of the lower terraces.

“Many guests are squeamish of the rice paddies, but it’s only water and mud,” he said when Zhang Lei joined him. “And worms. Bugs of course. A few snakes. And fish.” He hefted the large basket. It was bottomless—an open, woven cylinder.

“Not a problem.” Zhang Lei pulled off his shoes, but didn’t roll up his pant legs. One was still damp. The other might as well get wet, too.

Jen Dang handed him the smaller basket and waded into the sodden paddy, bottomless basket clutched in both hands.

“Step between the rice plants, never on them. Try not to stir up too much mud, or you can’t see the fish.”

Jen Dang demonstrated, moving slowly and looking at the water through the basket. Zhang Lei followed. The mud was cool. It squelched through his toes.

“Use the basket to shade the water’s surface,” the farmer said. “Look for movement. A flash of scales or the flick of a tail.”

As Zhang Lei followed the farmer through the paddy, he took care to keep his feet away from the knee-high rice plants. Each one was topped by knobby spikes—the grain portion of the crop, he assumed. Some of the grain was coated with a milky substance, and some was turning yellow.

Jen Dang plunged the bottomless basket in the water and said, “Come look.”

A fish was trapped inside. Jen Dang reached into the water and flipped it into Zhang Lei’s basket. It struggled, thrashing.

“That’s one, we need six. You catch the rest.”

Zhang Lei made several tries before he trapped a fish large enough to meet Jan Dang’s standards. Catching the rest took a full hour. The sky cleared and turned Earth-blue. The older man betrayed no trace of impatience, even though it was a ridiculous expenditure of effort to procure basic foodstuffs when a nutritional extruder could feed hundreds of people an hour, with personalized flavor and texture profiles and optimal nutrition.

When they finished, Zhang Lei’s eyes ached from squinting against the flare of sun on water. He wiped his fish-slick hands on his pants and followed the farmer up the stairs.

“Why do you do this?” he asked.

Jen Dang stopped and eyed the word balloon over Zhang Lei’s head.

“Stubbornness. That’s what my wife says. She’s a orthopedic surgeon, takes care of all the Miao in Danzhai county. She won’t farm. Says her hands are meant for higher things. She loves to cook, though. She taught all our daughters.”

“But why do manual labor when you could use bots?”

“We use some, but we’re not dependent on them. If we don’t do the work, who will?”

“Nobody.”

“Then nobody will know how to do it. All traditional skills and knowledge will be lost, along with our language, stories, songs—everything that makes us Miao. We do it to survive.”

“You could write it down.”

Jen Dang laughed. He lifted the fish basket to his shoulder and ran up the stairs two at a time. His word balloon blossomed behind him.

“Some things can only be mastered with constant practice.”

That was true. Nobody could learn to play hockey by watching a doc. Or learn to draw or paint without actually doing it.

An insect landed on a nearby plant. Its wide, delicate wings had eyelike patterns in shades of gold and copper. Zhang Lei framed it in his viewcatcher, then panned up to include the mountains in the composition. Gold wings and green slopes, copper eyes and blue sky. Perfect.

Another insect hung in the sky, hovering motionless, shaped like a half circle and very faint. Zhang Lei stared for a whole minute before realizing what he was looking at.

The moon. Luna itself. The home of everything he knew, and everyone who wanted to hurt him. Watching.

• • • •

Over the next week, the moon turned its back on him, retreating through its last quarter to a thinning sickle. In the morning, when he ventured onto the guest house’s porch for a stretch, there it was, lurking behind the boughs of a fir tree, half-hidden behind mountain peaks, or veiled in humid haze to the east. Sometimes it hid on the other side of the globe. Then the next time he looked, it was right overhead, staring at him.

Night was the worst. The lights of the habs glared from the dark lunar surface aside the waning crescent—the curved sickle of Purovsk, the oval of Olenyok, the diamond pinpoint of Bratsk, the five-pointed star of Harbin.

A few years back, an investment group had tried to float a proposal to build a new hab on Mare Insularum, its lights outlining a back-turned fist with an extended middle finger. Zhang Lei and his teammates had worn the proposed hab pattern on their gym shirts for a few months, the finger mocked up extra large on a dark moon, telling Earth and all its inhabitants what Lunites thought of them.

He could stay inside at night, but he couldn’t hide from the moon during the day. It watched him with a sideways smile. We see you—we’re coming to get you.

He tried not to think about it, and concentrated on finding compositions with his viewcatcher. He made sketches and studies, and looked up plants and animals with his seer, and tried to learn their names. When he ran into artists from the other guest houses, they were friendly enough, but all much older than him.

At night, he worked on studies and small canvases in his room, door closed and windows dark. They were disasters: muddy greens, lifeless brushwork, flat compositions. He tried all the tricks he’d learned in the crèche—glazing, underpainting, overpainting, scraping with a palette knife, dry brush, but nothing worked.

Why don’t you try some familiar subjects? Marta suggested. Limber up first, then branch out into new things.

If you say so.

He was so frustrated he’d try anything. He lugged his easel and kit up to the guest house’s communal studio and set up in his own corner of the work space.

“I was beginning to think we’d never see you up here,” said Paul. “Welcome.”

“The light’s especially good in the afternoon,” said Prajapati.

Han Song paused his hands over his work surface for a moment and nodded.

Nothing motivated Zhang Lei like competition. He would destroy the watercolorist with his superior command of light and shadow, teach the sculptor about form, show the photographer how to compose a scene.

His old viewcatcher compositions and stealthily-made reference sketches were gone forever, so he worked from memory. He attacked the canvas with his entire arsenal, blocking out a low-angle view of Mons Hadley and the shining towers of Sklad, with the hab’s vast hockey arena in the foreground under a gleaming crystal dome. The view might be three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, but it lay at his fingertips, and he created it anew every time he closed his eyes.

The paint leapt to Zhang Lei’s brush, clung to the canvas, spread thin and lean and true exactly where it should, the way it should, creating the effects he intended. After a week of flailing with sappy greens and sloppy, organic shapes, he finally had a canvas under control. He worked late, muttering good night to the other artists without raising his eyes from his work. When dawn stretched its fingers through the studio’s high windows, the painting was done—complete with a livid crimson stain spreading under the arena’s crystal dome.

He didn’t remember deciding to paint blood on the ice, or putting crimson on his palette. But the color belonged there. It was the truth. It showed what he did.

Zhang Lei lowered himself to the floor, leaned his back against the wall with his elbows on his knees, and rested his head in his hands. He pinged Marta. She blinked blearily at him for a few seconds, her eyes swollen with sleep. He pointed at the canvas.

Have any of the other artists seen this? she whispered.

I don’t know. I don’t think so.

It’s important they don’t. Okay? Do you understand why?

Because people are looking for me.

Not only that. She scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. The Lunite ambassador is trying to block your immigration application. She made an official information request. If the media gets interested we’ll have to move you, fast. And yes, people are searching. Three teams of Lunite brawlers have been skipping all over the planet, asking questions. They found someone in Sudbury Hell who remembers you getting on a skip bound for Chongqing Hive. That’s too close for comfort.

I can destroy the canvas, he said, voice flat and scraped clean of emotion. It was the first real painting he’d done since he left the crèche. But he couldn’t look at it. When he did, his flesh crawled.

No. Don’t do that. Hide it.

He nodded. It’s a decent painting.

Yeah. Not bad. You worked out the kinks.

He knocked his head against the wall behind him. Wood was harder than it looked. He swung his head harder.

Stop that.

There’s no point, Marta. Those brawlers are going to find me.

No, they won’t. And chances are good the tribunal will rule in your favor. We have to be patient.

Even if I get to live in Beijing, people will still find out what I did.

They’ll assume you had no choice. Everyone knows Luna is the most dangerous place in the solar system.

I did have a choice—

Marta interrupted. It was a mistake. An accident. It could happen to any hockey player.

I aimed for Dorgon’s neck.

You did what you were taught, and so did Dorgon. Playing hockey isn’t the only way to die on Luna. If you live in a place where getting killed is accepted as a possible outcome, then you also accept that you might become a killer.

But we don’t understand what it means.

No. Marta looked sad. No, we don’t.

• • • •

The day after he’d killed Dorgon, Zhang Lei’s team hauled him to a surgeon. Twenty minutes was all it took to install the noose around his carotid artery, then two minutes to connect the disable button and process the change to his ID. His teammates were as gentle as they could be. When it was all done, the team’s enforcer clasped Zhang Lei’s shoulder in a meaty hand.

“We test it now,” Korchenko said, and Zhang Lei had gone down like a slab of meat.

When he woke, his friends looked concerned, sympathetic, even a little regretful.

That attitude didn’t last long. After the surgery, the team traveled to a game in Surgut. Zhang Lei’s disable button was line-of-sight. Anyone who could see it could trigger it. He passed out five times along the way, and spent most of the game slumped on the bench, head lolling, his biom working hard to keep him from brain damage. His teammates had to carry him home.

For a few weeks, they treated him like a mascot, hauling him from residence to practice rink to arena and back again. They soon tired of it and began leaving him behind. The first time he went out alone he came back on a cargo float, with a shattered jaw and boot-print-shaped bruises on his gut. That was okay. He figured he deserved it.

Then one night after an embarrassing loss, the team began hitting the button for fun. First Korchenko, as a joke. Then the others. Didn’t take long for Zhang Lei to become their new punching bag. So he ran. Hid out in Sklad’s lower levels, pulling temporary privacy veils over his ID every fifteen minutes to keep the team from tracking him. When they were busy at the arena warming up for a game, he bolted for Harbin.

He passed out once on the way to the nearest intra-hab connector, but the brawler who hit his disable button was old and drunk. Zhang Lei collected a few kicks to the ribs and one to the balls before the drunk staggered off. Nobody else took the opportunity to get their licks in, but nobody helped him, either.

Boarding the connector, he got lucky. A crèche manager was transferring four squalling newborns, and the crib’s noise-dampening tech was broken. The pod emptied out—just him and the crèche manager. She ignored him all the way to Harbin. He kept his distance, but when they got to their destination, he followed her into the bowels of the hab. She was busy with the babies and didn’t notice at first. But when he joined her in an elevator, she got scared.

“What do you want?” she demanded, her voice high with tension.

He tried to explain, but she was terrified. That big red label on his button—KILLER—FAIR GAME—didn’t fill people with confidence in his character. She hit the button hard, several times. He spent an hour on the floor of the elevator, riding from level to level, and came to with internal bleeding, a cracked ocular orbit, three broken ribs, and a vicious bite mark on his left buttock.

He limped down to the lowest level, where they put the crèches, and found his old crèche manager. She was gray, stooped, and much more frail than he remembered.

“Zhang Lei.” She put a gentle palm on his head—the only place that didn’t hurt. “I was your first cuddler. I decanted you myself. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

If he cried then, he never admitted it.

• • • •

Zhang Lei watched Jen Dla carry a pot of soup into the dining room. She moved awkwardly, shifting her balance around that bulbous gut. He couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t she had an operation to remove the tumor? Her mother was even a surgeon.

Terminal, he guessed, and then realized he’d been staring.

Jen Dla nestled the pot on the stove in the middle of the table, and lit the flame. He caught the chef’s eye as she adjusted the temperature of the burner.

“Your father must be an important man here in Paizuo,” he said.

Jen Dla laughed.

“He certainly thinks so.” She laid her hand on the embroidered blouse draped over her bulging abdomen. “Fathers get more self-important with every new grandchild.”

She tapped her finger on her stomach. Zhang Lei sat back in his chair, abruptly. She wasn’t sick, but pregnant—actually bearing a child.

“Are all Miao children body-birthed?” he blurted.

She looked a little offended. “Miao who choose to live in Paizuo generally like to follow tradition.”

Abrupt questions leapt behind his teeth—does it hurt, are you frightened—but her expression was forbidding.

“Congratulations,” he said. She smiled and returned to her kitchen.

After talking to Marta, he’d taken the painting down to his room and hidden it under the bed, then collapsed into dream-clouded sleep. The arena at Sklad, deserted, the vast spread of ice all his own. The blades of his skates cut the surface as he built speed, gathered himself, and launched into a quad, spinning through the air so fast the flesh of his face pulled away and snapped back into place on landing. He jumped, spun, jumped again.

Dreams of power and joy, ruined on waking. He’d pulled the painting from under his bed and hid it behind the sofa in the guest house lounge.

Jen Dla’s soup began to bubble. Tomatoes bobbed in the sour rice broth. Zhang Lei watched the fish turn opaque as it cooked, then pinged one word at the three artists upstairs—lunch. They clattered down.

“Looked like you were having a productive session yesterday,” Prajapati said. “Good to see.”

“Don’t stop the flow,” Han Song added.

Paul grinned. “Nothing artists love more than giving unwanted advice.”

“It’s called encouragement,” said Prajapati. “And it’s especially important for young artists.”

“Young competitors, you mean.”

“I don’t see it that way.” She turned to Zhang Lei. “Do you?”

All three artists watched him expectantly. Zhang Lei stared at his hands resting on the wooden tabletop. He’d forgotten to roll down his sleeves. His forearms were exposed, the scarred skin dotted with pigment. He put his hands in his lap.

“I think the fish is ready,” he said.

After lunch, while exploring for new compositions, he found Jen Dang behind the guest house. The water buffalo—one of the first creatures he’d looked up on his seer—was tethered to a post by a loop of rope through its nose. It was huge, lavishly muscled, and heavy, with ridged, back-curving horns, but it stood placidly as Jen Dang examined its hooves.

“Stay back,” Jen Dang said. “Water buffalo aren’t as friendly as they look. He’s not a pet.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Zhang Lei. When he’d sketched the water buffalo, a stern warning had popped into his eye: Do not approach. Will trample, gouge, and kick.

He lifted his viewcatcher and captured a composition: Jen Dang stooping with his back turned to the water buffalo, drawing its massive hindquarter between his own legs and trapping the hoof between his knees.

“All he has to do is back up, and you’ll get squashed,” said Zhang Lei.

“He knows me.” Jen Dang dropped the hoof and patted the animal’s rump. “And he knows the best part of his day is about to begin.”

The farmer untied the rope from the post and led the animal up the narrow trail behind the houses. Zhang Lei followed. A bird stalked from between the trees, its red, gold, and blue body trailing long, spotted brown tail feathers. His seer tagged it: Golden Pheasant, followed by a symbol that meant major symbolic and cultural importance to the indigenous people at this geographical location. Which was no different from most of the plants and animals the seer had identified.

“So, I’ve been using a seer,” he said, as if his rice paddy conversation with Jen Dang had happened that morning instead of days ago. “It doesn’t explain anything. Why is every butterfly important to Miao but not the flies? Why one species of bee but not the other?”

“The butterfly is our mother,” Jen Dang said.

“No, it’s not. That’s ridiculous.”

“I might ask you who your mother is, if I were young and rude, and didn’t know better.”

“I don’t have a mother. I was detanked.”

“That means you’re the product of genetic advection, from a tightly edited stream of genetic material subscribed to by your crèche. How is that less strange than having a butterfly mother?”

“Is the butterfly thing a metaphor?”

Jen Dang glanced over his shoulder, his gaze cold. “If you like.”

The water buffalo lipped the tail of Jen Dang’s shirt. He tapped its nose with the palm of his hand to warn it off. The trail widened as it began to climb a high ridge. The water buffalo was heavy but strong. It heaved itself up the slope, like a boulder rolling uphill. Jen Dang ran alongside to keep pace, so Zhang Lei ran after. The exertion felt good, scrambling uphill against the full one-point-zero, with two workout partners. So what if one of them was an animal? Zhang Lei would take what he could get.

When the trail widened, he took the chance to sprint ahead. He made it to the top of the ridge a full ten seconds before the water buffalo. Jen Dang looked him up and down.

“Not bad. Most guests are slow.”

Zhang Lei grinned. “I train in the dubs.”

“Dubs?”

“Double Earth-normal gravity. You know. For strength.”

“I never would have guessed.”

“I know,” Zhang Lei said eagerly. “I look bottom-heavy, right? Narrow above a wide butt and thick legs. That’s what makes me a good skater.”

Shut up, Marta hissed in his ear. But he couldn’t stop. Finally a real conversation.

“I train for optimal upper body flexibility, like all center forward play—”

One twinge in his throat, that’s all it took to send Zhang Lei plummeting to the ground. He twisted and rolled when he hit the dirt—away from the edge of the hill, and then the world faded to mist.

• • • •

Zhang Lei clawed his way to consciousness.

You’re fine, you’re fine, nobody’s touched you.

Okay, he mumbled.

You’ve only been down five minutes, Marta added. Tell him you have a seizure disorder and your neurologist is fine-tuning your treatment protocol. Say it.

Zhang Lei struggled to focus. His eyelids fluttered as he tried to form the words.

“I get seizures.” He licked his lips. “Doc’s working on it.”

Jen Dang said something. Zhang Lei forced his eyes to stay open. He was collapsed on his side, cheek pressed to the dirt. Three ants crawled not ten centimeters from his eye. He flopped onto his back to read the farmer’s word balloon.

“Your medical advisory said it wasn’t an emergency, and I shouldn’t touch you.” Behind Jen Dang, the water buffalo cast a lazy brown eye over him and shook its head.

Tell him you’ll be fine, Marta demanded. Ask him not to mention it to anyone.

“I’m fine.” Zhang Lei pushed himself onto his elbows, then to his knees. “Don’t talk about this, okay?”

The farmer looked dubious. He gathered the water buffalo’s lead rope.

“I’ll walk you back to the studio.”

“No.” Zhang Lei jumped to his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It won’t happen again.”

Better not, Marta grumbled.

Zhang Lei led the way up the trail. Jen Dang followed. The water buffalo wasn’t dawdling anymore, it was moving fast, nearly trotting. The track converged on a single-lane paved road, which snaked up the valley in a series of switchbacks. They were higher now, the guest houses far below, and everywhere, rice terraces brimmed with ripening grain yellow as the sun. He could paint those terraces with slabs of cadmium yellow. Maybe he would.

“Which way?”

Zhang Lei needn’t have asked. The water buffalo turned onto the road and trundled uphill. Before long, the slope gentled. Houses lined the road, with gardens and rice paddies behind. The road ended at a circular courtyard patterned with dark and light stones and half-bounded by a stream. At the far end, a footbridge arched over the water, leading to more houses beyond.

The animal’s tail switched back and forth. It trotted toward the water, splayed hooves clopping on the courtyard’s patterned surface. A hygiene sweeper darted out of its path. At the stream’s edge, where the courtyard’s stone patterns gave way to large, dark slabs, the water buffalo paused, lowered its head, and stepped into the water.

A man called out from one of the houses across the bridge. Jen Dang shouted a reply. No word balloon appeared.

Jen Dang offered the lead rope to Zhang Lei.

“He’ll stay in the water. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Zhang Lei leaned on the bridge railings, flipping the rope to keep it from tangling in the animal’s horns as it luxuriated in the water below. The stream wasn’t deep, only a meter or so, but the beast lay on its side and rolled, keeping its white beard, eyes, and horns above water.

When Jen Dang returned, the water buffalo was scratching its long, drooping ear on a half-submerged rock. Zhang Lei kept the rope.

“It’s fun,” he said. “Best part of my day, too.”

The farmer sauntered across the courtyard and joined a pair of friends working in the shade of a mulberry tree.

Zhang Lei composed a series of canvases. The water buffalo with its eyelids lowered in pleasure, lips parted to reveal a gleaming row of bottom teeth. Three women in bright blue blouses weaving in an open workshop, their silver torques flashing. A man in deep indigo embroidered with pink and silver diamonds, sorting through a table piled with feathers. Jen Dang leaning on a low stone wall, deep in conversation with two friends using gleaming axes to chop lengths of bamboo. A white-haired woman in an apron stirring a barrel of viscous liquid with a wooden paddle. A battery of pink-cheeked, scrubbed children racing across the courtyard as a golden pheasant stalked in the opposite direction. A row of cabbages beside the road. Herbs clinging to a slate outcropping. A dragonfly skipping over the water. The tallest peak puncturing the western horizon like a fang on the underjaw of a huge beast.

Aesthetically pleasing, peaceful, picturesque. But all communities had tensions and contradictions. Only a Miao could identify the deeper meaning in these scenes. Only a great artist could paint the picturesque and make it important. He wasn’t Miao and he was no great artist. Could he capture the water buffalo’s expression of ecstasy as it pawed the water? Not likely. But he could paint the mountain. Nothing more banal than another mountain view. But he loved that unnamed peak. He’d loved Mons Hadley, too.

Jen Dang waved. A word balloon blossomed over his head: Let’s go.

He jiggled the rope. The water buffalo ignored him. He flapped it, then gave the gentlest of tugs. The buffalo snorted and heaved itself out of the water. It stood there dripping for a moment, then its skin shivered. It lowered its head, shaking its great bulk and coating Zhang Lei in a local rainstorm.

Zhang Lei wiped his face on his sleeve. The men were still laughing when he joined them. Nothing more fun than watching a rookie fall on his ass.

Jen Dang was still chatting. Zhang Lei waited nearby, in the shade of a house. Along the wall was a metal cage much like the one behind the guest house. A rooster stalked back and forth, its face, comb, and wattle bright red, its bare breast and scraggly back caked with clean, healing sores. It stared at Zhang Lei with a malevolent orange eye, lifted one fiercely-taloned yellow leg, and flipped its water dish.

“Stupid bird,” Zhang Lei muttered.

Around the corner was another cage, another rooster in similar condition, its comb sliced in dangling pieces. When it screamed—raucous, belligerent—the other bird answered. Zhang Lei knew an exchange of challenges when he heard it.

“Are these fighting cocks?” he asked when Jen Dang joined him.

“You don’t have them on Luna?” he answered.

Shit, whispered Marta. Tell him you’re from the Sol Belt. You’ve never been to Luna.

Why don’t you hit my disable button again? Load me on a cargo float and stick me in a hole somewhere? Or better yet—a cage. Evict one of the birds and get me my own dish of water.

I might have to do that. Listen kid, it’s never been more important for you to be discreet.

Why? Are they coming for me?

Silence.

They are, aren’t they? Answer me.

A Lunite team tracked you to the Danzhai roadhouse, but don’t worry. We’ve got people on the ground, planting rumors to lure them to Guiyang. Even if they don’t take the bait, Danzhai County has lots of towns and villages. You’re still safe.

“I’m from the Sol Belt,” he told Jen Dang. “I’ve never been to Luna.”

The farmer didn’t look convinced.

Zhang Lei’s hand stole up to his throat. Under his jaw, where his pulse pounded, the hard mass of the noose waited to choke off his life.

• • • •

When Zhang Lei got back to the studio, the other three artists were upstairs. He shoved the sofa aside. The painting leaned against the wall, facing out, a layer of breathable sealant protecting the drying oil paint. He was sure he’d turned it to face the wall, but apparently not. It didn’t really matter. He wanted it gone.

He sprayed the canvas with another layer of sealant, trying not to look at the thick wet bloody gleam on the arena’s ice. He wrapped it in two layers of black polymer sheeting, and requested a cargo wrap to meet him at the guideway landing stage.

When he got there, the area was packed with Miao arriving on sliders and bikes, whole families crowded onto multi-seat units, laughing and talking. He edged his way to the cargo drop, slid the cargo wrap around it, addressed it to Marta, and shoved the painting inside the conveyor. Done. He’d never have to think about it again.

The Miao were on holiday. Women wore their blue blouses with short skirts trailing with long, flapping ribbons, or ankle-length red and blue dresses. All the women’s clothing was dense with colorful embroidery and tinkling with silver, and all wore their silver torques. The younger women pierced their topknots with flowers. Mothers and grandmothers layered their torques with necklaces, and wore tall silver headdresses crowned with slender, curving horns. Silver everywhere—charms in the shape of flowers, bells, fish, and butterflies dangled from their jewelry, sleeves, sashes, and hems.

They were, in a word, gorgeous. Happy-laughing, leading children, carrying babies, holding hands with their friends, and among them, men of all ages in embroidered black, blue, and indigo. The men were also happy, also laughing, also embracing their friends, helping their children and elders. But the young women—ah. They caught his eye.

Zhang Lei retreated to the side of a corn patch, capturing compositions while watching the steady flow of arrivals. Some pinged for mobility assistance, and rode float chairs up the road, but most walked. Some eschewed the road, and ran uphill toward the guest house, making for the steep shortcut up the ridge. Zhang Lei followed.

Paul, Prajapati, and Han Song watched from the studio porch. Zhang Lei joined them.

“Jen Dla told me we can go watch the festival after supper,” Prajapati said. “It’s called Setting Free Your Daughter, or something like that.”

“Setting them free from what?” asked Han Song.

Six young women ran toward them, through Jen Dla’s cabbage patch.

“Family control, I would imagine,” Paul answered.

The girls didn’t even glance up. At home, he never had to work to get a girl’s attention—nobody on the team did. Unless coach called a ban for training reasons, sex was on offer everywhere he looked. Here, he might as well be invisible. But then, he hadn’t exactly been making himself available. If the girls were being set free, and he was in the right place at the right time, maybe one of them would land in his lap. All he had to do was get them to notice him.

“I’m going to the festival,” Zhang Lei said.

“I’ll go too,” said Han Song. “I haven’t done enough exploring.”

“We’ll all go,” said Prajapati. Paul nodded.

After Jen Dla served them an early supper, Zhang Lei led the oldsters up the winding road to the village center. They admired the views from every switchback as if they hadn’t already had a week to explore, and examined every clump of flowers as if Paizuo wasn’t one big flower garden. Guests from the other studios joined them, which made the whole group even slower.

Zhang Lei was tempted to leave them all behind, run to the village center and see if the girls had been set free yet. He jogged up a few switchbacks, and then thought the better of it. Even the most adventurous girl would flee from a lone man bearing a disable button labeled KILLER. If he wanted someone to take a chance on trusting him, he’d better stick with the group.

Zhang Lei sat on a boulder at the side of the road and waited for the oldsters to catch up. They weren’t bad people. All three were kind and clever in their own ways. And patient. He’d been unfriendly but they hadn’t taken offence.

“We should really walk faster,” Prajapati told the other two when they caught up. “We don’t want Zhang Lei to miss his chance with the girls.”

Zhang Lei grinned. “I could ping you a cargo float.”

She laughed and took his arm.

The roadside floating lights winked on, turning their route into a tunnel of light snaking up the mountainside. When they got to the village center, night had fallen. The courtyard was lit with flaming torches and in the middle of the crowd, a bonfire blazed, sending up a column of sparks to search the sky. Faces flickered with shadows. Silver glinted and gleamed. Laughter pealed. A singer wailed.

“I don’t know when I last smelled something burning,” said Han Song.

“Is that what the stench is?” asked Paul.

“Wood smoke is the most beautiful scent,” said Prajapati. “Primal.”

Most of the guests stayed on the courtyard’s edge. They joined a group under the mulberry tree, a gender-free triad of performance artists from Cusco Hab. Zhang Lei had seen them around the village. They always looked like they were in a meeting—heads down, conferring, arguing, making notes.

“Have the daughters been set free yet?” Han Song quipped. “Asking for a friend.”

The triad laughed.

“Apparently it’s only one daughter, and no, the ceremony hasn’t begun yet,” said Aiko, the tallest of the three.

“Just one girl?” Zhang Lei said. “Then what’s the point?”

“Shakespeare! One performer, one night only. The complete works.” Aiko was obviously joking but their face was perfectly sober.

Prajapati grinned. “Don’t tease the boy.”

Another pair of artists joined them, a cellist from Zurich and an opera singer from Hokkaido. They seemed to know more about the festival than anyone else.

“We won’t catch much of the performance unless the girl throws the switch on her translation balloon,” the cellist said in a low voice. “The one last year didn’t.”

“Someone told me they translate in Kala, for the tourists visiting from Danzhai Wanda Village,” said Aiko.

“Paizuo is more traditional than Kala. Which is why we come here.” The cellist shaded her eyes against the torches’ flare and scanned the crowd.

“It’s better they don’t translate,” the opera singer said. “What the girl says won’t make sense if you don’t know the context. It’s more meaningful to watch the reactions of the Miao.”

With so many people in the square, Zhang Lei could only catch glimpses of the action. He put his viewcatcher on full extension, sent it a meter overhead, and switched its mode to low lux. Much better. The musicians were at the far end of the courtyard, near the bridge, playing drums and tall, upright bamboo flutes. The singer stood with them, wearing her silver headdress like a crown. Jen Dang and his family didn’t seem to be around. But he spotted the girl—the one who was being set free. She was alone. No friends, no fussing parents, no little siblings hanging on her arms.

She wore hoops of silver chain around her torque, a blue blouse and short black skirt embroidered with butterflies, and a woven sash around her waist. A deep red flower pierced her topknot. Her hands rested at her sides. She didn’t pick at her nails or play with her jewelry like Lunite girls. She looked prepared, like a goalie in a crease, waiting for the game to begin.

He zoomed in on her face. His age or a little younger. Pretty, like all the Miao girls. Tough, too. What would a girl like her think of him?

Not much, he suspected.

The music stopped, the crowd hushed. The girl’s lips thinned in concentration. She stepped toward the bonfire and the circle of elders welcomed her into their arms. No drums this time, no bamboo flutes, no practiced wail from a powerful throat. The elders sang softly, their song a hum in the night, drowning under the buzz of the cicadas and crickets.

Near the artists at the back of the crowd stood a mother with a baby clutched to her chest. She wore little silver, and looked upset.

“Poor thing,” said Prajapati.

The woman scowled at her and made a hushing motion.

Zhang Lei waited for something to happen, some reason why the Miao were paying such close attention. The girl wasn’t doing anything, just standing in the circle of softly singing elders, eyes closed, face tight with concentration. Maybe nothing would happen—that was the point? Perhaps it was a test of her patience. It certainly was a test of his.

As he was considering sneaking away, the girl began singing along. Her voice was high, with an eerie overtone that pierced the sky. She sang higher and higher, drowning out the elders’ voices. The Miao were rapt, breathless. When she spoke—loud as if amplified—the crowd exhaled a collective sigh of wonder.

“No translation balloon,” Aiko breathed. “Damn.”

Zhang Lei expected the crying mother to turn and scold them again, but she was pushing through the crowd, sobbing and holding her baby out like an offering.

“Must be her dead husband,” said the cellist, quietly. “You see? They set the girl’s soul free to visit the spirits, and now she’s bringing messages back.”

“Messages?” said Zhang Lei. “What kind of messages?”

“Every kind. Instructions. Admonitions. Warnings. Blessings. What kind of messages would you send from beyond if you could?”

“I don’t know, maybe something the girl could easily guess?” said Han Song.

“Hush,” said Prajapati. “This is serious.”

It was serious. Zhang Lei didn’t even have to look up to know the new moon was watching him, the lights of its habs inscribed like a curse on the sunless black disc punched through the middle of the Milky Way.

• • • •

On Luna, hockey was a blood sport. Lunar hockey was played at one-sixth gravity on a curved surface, with a Stefoff field to keep the puck low and snap players back to the ice. One of the major defensive moves was to disable the other team’s players. Clubbing with weighted carbon fiber hockey sticks resulted in a penalty, though all referees were selectively blind. Slashing with skate blades, however, was a power move. An overdominant team could cut their way through their opponents’ starting lineup, into the benched players and fourth-rates, and by the end of the fourth quarter stage an assault on an undefended goalie.

Deaths were rare. Heads, legs, torsos, and groins were armored. Arms and throats were not. Medical bots hovered over the ice, ready to swoop in for first response, but rookies from the crèches quickly picked up scars, even playing in the recreational leagues. Anyone who remained unscarred was either a goalie or a coward.

Zhang Lei’s crèche manager had tried to do right by him, direct his talents so he’d have choices when he left the crèche. She nurtured his talent for drawing and painting as much as possible. But she was practical, too. Luna had far more professional hockey teams than artist collectives. All her children were on skates as soon as they could walk.

With powerful legs and a low center of gravity, Zhang Lei could take a hit and keep his speed. He could jump, spin, and kick. He could slice an opposing defenseman’s brachial artery, drag his stick through the spurting blood, and spray the goalie as he slid the puck into the net. The fans loved him for it. His teammates too.

It made him a target, though. He spent more time on the bench than anyone else on the team, healing wounds on his forearms. No matter. The downtime gave him the opportunity to perfect the rarest of plays—jump and spin high enough to slice a blade through an opponent’s throat. He practiced it, talked about it, drew cartoons of it. He gave up goals attempting it, which got him a faceful of spittle whenever Coach chewed him out.

Then finally he did it.

Dorgon wasn’t even Zhang Lei’s favorite proposed target. He was just a young, heavy-duty defenseman with a loud mouth who wasn’t scared of Zhang Lei’s flying blades.

He should have been.

Dorgon bled out in ten seconds. The medbot wrapped him in a life support bubble and attempted a transfusion right there on the ice, but stumbled over the thick scars on the defenseman’s arms. When it searched for alternate access, Dorgon’s coach was too busy screaming at Zhang Lei to flip the master toggle on his player’s armor.

Whose fault was it, then, that Dorgon died?

“Your fault, Zhang Lei,” the Miao girl said. “You opened a mouth in my throat and my whole life came pouring out.”

She pointed to him, standing under the mulberry tree with the other guests. Heads turned. He should have ran but he was frozen, breathless as if in a vacuum. He might have collapsed without the tree trunk behind him.

Marta? he whispered. Help.

No answer. Prajapati grabbed his arm.

“Ignore her, it’s a trick,” she said. And then louder: “That’s not funny.”

The crowd parted to allow the girl a clear sight of him.

“There’s nowhere you can go that I won’t follow. I’m inside your mattress when you sleep. Behind the door of your room, inside the closet. When you painted the Sklad arena, who do you think put the blood on the canvas? It was me.”

She raised her fists and swung them toward him, as if shooting a puck with a phantom hockey stick.

“You’re fair game.”

The girl’s head snapped back. She coughed once, and began speaking her native language again. The crowd turned away.

Marta? Answer me.

Prajapati tugged on his sleeve. “It’s late. Walk me home. We’ll take the shortcut.”

She took his arm again, pretending to need it for balance on the rocky path, but in truth she was holding him up. Han Song and Paul trailed behind, talking in low voices.

Marta? Marta!

She answered before they got to top of the ridge.

Sorry, kid. I was in a closed-session meeting. Total privacy veil.

Are they coming for me?

What? No. Is there a problem in Paizuo?

Zhang Lei groaned. Prajapati looked at him sharply. Worry lines creased her plump face.

They know who I am. What I did.

Who knows?

Everyone. And all their relatives. From all over. Dorgon told them.

That’s impossible.

He grabbed his viewcatcher, pinched off the last ten minutes of data, and fired it to her.

Watch this.

The path descending the ridge was treacherous, lit by nothing but stars. If he’d been alone, Zhang Lei would have ran down the ridge. If he fell and broke his neck, he deserved it. But the oldsters needed his help.

He took Prajapati’s hand—warm, dry, strong—and used the fill flash on his viewcatcher to light each step while Han Song shone the brighter light from his camera down the trail. The two oldster men helped steady each other, Paul’s hand on the photographer’s shoulder. When Han Song slipped, Paul caught him by the elbow.

Yeah, okay, Marta whispered. Someone figured out who you are and told the girl. I’ll talk to the security team. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? We’re on this.

When they got to the studio, Paul fetched a bottle of whiskey from his room. He poured four glasses and handed the largest one to Zhang Lei.

“I found the news feed from Luna a couple days ago,” Paul said. “But I didn’t tell anyone.”

“I found the painting,” said Prajapati. “I wasn’t looking for it, but the sofa was in the wrong place. I showed it to Paul and Han Song. It’s effective work, Zhang Lei. Palpable anguish.”

“If you want to keep something private,” said Han Song, “don’t put it in the common areas.”

“None of us told anyone,” Prajapati added.

“So, how did the story get to the Miao girl?” Paul asked. The other two oldsters shook their heads.

“Jen Dla?” Han Song ventured.

“I’ll ask her in the morning.” Prajapati patted Zhang Lei’s knee. “Try to get some sleep.”

The whiskey burned Zhang Lei’s throat and filled his sinuses with the scent of bonfire. What kind of messages would you send from beyond if you could? Vengeance. Dorgon had watched and waited for his opportunity. The news would travel fast. Brawler teams were searching the county for him.

Zhang Lei poured the rest of the whiskey down his throat.

“When they come for me, keep hitting my disable button,” he said.

The three oldsters exchanged confused looks. A whirring sweeper bot bumped Zhang Lei’s foot. He nudged it away with his toe and headed for the stairs.

Don’t be so dramatic, Marta whispered.

“When who comes for you?” Prajapati asked.

“Let them do whatever they want to me,” he said. “Don’t put yourself in danger. But if you can, keep knocking me out. Please.”

Marta sighed. Honestly.

You, too. Keep hitting the button. Whatever they do to me, I don’t want to know about it.

He climbed the stairs two at a time. If his life was about to be crushed under the boots of a Lunite brawler gang, there was only one thing he wanted to do.

• • • •

The scarred face of the new moon glared through the high windows of the communal studio. Zhang Lei chose the largest of his prepared canvases and flipped through his viewcatcher compositions. The water buffalo lying in the stream. Jen Dang catching a fish. Ripening rice terraces under golden mist. Jen Dla carrying a pot of sour fish soup, a lock of hair stuck to the sweat of her brow.

The fighting cocks in their cages, separated by the corner of a house, their torn flesh healing only to be sliced open another day.

He flipped the canvas to rest on the long side and projected the composition on its surface. How to make the three-dimensionality of the scene clear in two dimensions—that was the main problem. Each cock knew the other was just out of sight. If they could get free, they would fight to the death.

It’s in their nature, he whispered.

What nature? Marta asked. Oh, I see. Are you going to paint all night?

I’ll paint for the rest of my life.

Okay, ping me if there’s a problem.

First, he drafted with a light pencil, adjusting the composition. The corner of the house dividing the canvas into thirds, with one caged brawler directly in front of the viewer and the other around the corner. It was a difficult compositional problem—he had to rub out the draft several times and start again. Then he began a base layer in grays, very lean and thin. What the old masters called en grisaille. Solve the painting problems in monochrome before even thinking about color. The texture of the wooden walls of the house, the figures of the birds filling the canvas with belligerence. It took all night.

A few hours before dawn, Han Song brought him a cup of tea.

“That’s good,” he said, squinting at the canvas. “I’ve got some pictures of those birds, too.” He settled at his workstation and sipped his own tea as he ruffled through his files. “You can use them for reference if you want.”

A package hit Zhang Lei’s message queue—the only communication he’d received since leaving Luna that didn’t relate to his immigration status. The photos were good. Details of the cocks’ livid faces and dinosaurian legs, the pinfeathers sprouting from their bald backs, the iridescent sheen of their ruffs.

He added crimson and madder to his palette and used Han Song’s photo of the cock’s flayed wattle to get that detail exactly right, then moved on to the next problem. He thinned the paint with solvent to make a glaze. No time to wait for fat oils to oxidize, for thick paint layers to cure. In places, the paint was so thin the texture of the canvas showed through. That was fine. He would never be a master painter, but this would be the best painting he could make.

His friend’s photos helped. Gradually, color and detail began to bring the painting to life.

“Thank you,” Zhang Lei said, hours later. Han Song didn’t hear him. Prajapati smiled from across the studio, her hands caked with clay to the elbow.

“Don’t skip lunch,” she said. “Even painters need to eat.”

“And sleep,” Paul added.

Sleep. He had no time for it. And Dorgon was in his mattress, behind his door, in his closet. He would join Dorgon soon enough, and next year, when Paizuo’s rice crop had turned yellow, they could scream public challenges at each other through a Miao girl.

Until then, there was only the work. Work like he’d never known before. As an athlete, he practiced until instinct overtook his mind. On the ice, he didn’t think, he just performed. In the studio, he used his whole body—crouching, stretching, sweeping his arms—continuing the action of his brush far off the canvas like a fighter following a punch past his opponent’s jaw. And then small, precise movements—careful, considered, even loving. But his intellect never disengaged. He made choices, second-guessed himself, took leaps of faith.

It was the most exhausting, engrossing work he’d ever done.

The eye of the cock flared on the canvas, trapped in the pointlessness of its drive to fight and fight and die. Zhang Lei hovered his brush over that eye. One more glaze of color, and another, and another, over and over until nobody looking at the painting could misunderstand the meaning of that vicious and brainless stare.

Paul put his arm around Zhang Lei’s shoulders.

“Come on down to lunch. The painting is done. If you keep poking, you’ll ruin it.”

“Ruin yourself, too,” said Han Song.

“He’s young, he can take it,” said Prajapati.

They fed him rice and egg, bitter green tea, and millet cake. No fish soup. No Jen Dla.

“She’s giving birth,” Prajapati explained. “Went into labor last night. Brave woman.”

“We should break out Paul’s whiskey again,” said Han Song. “Drink a toast to her.”

Paul laughed. “Maybe. We have something else to celebrate, too.”

They all looked at Zhang Lei. His mouth was crammed with millet cake.

“I don’t know. What?” he said though the cake.

“Your button is gone, dear,” Prajapati said gently.

He swallowed, pinged his ID. Zhang Lei, Beijing resident. No caveats, no equivocations. And no button.

Marta, he whispered. Is it done?

The notice has been sitting in your queue for half an hour. I pinged you when it came through. Looked like you were too busy painting birds to notice.

Are the brawlers gone? he whispered.

They’re on their way home. They can’t touch you now and they know it. I don’t recommend going to Luna anytime soon, but if you did and there was a problem, at least you could fight back.

Zhang Lei excused himself from the table and stumbled out of the guest house. He skirted the cabbage patch and followed the trail to the pavilion, with its perfectly composed view. Up and down the valley, farmers walked the terraces, examining the ripening rice.

How? You said it would be weeks, at least. Maybe never.

I took your painting directly to the tribunal.

That made no sense. His painting was upstairs in the studio, on his easel.

They were impressed, Marta added. So was I.

I don’t understand.

The wet blood. Smart move. Visceral. The tribunal got the message.

Blood?

On the ice. They brought in a forensic expert to examine and sequence it. That gave me a scare because I had assumed the blood was yours. Didn’t even occur to me it might be somebody else’s. If it had been, things wouldn’t have turned out so well.

My blood?

I guess the tribunal wanted to be convinced you regretted killing Dorgon.

Zhang Lei leaned on the pavilion railing. A fresh breeze ruffled his hair.

I do regret it.

They know that now. I’ll keep the painting for you until you get a place of your own. So keep in touch, okay?

I will, he whispered.

On the terrace below, Jen Dang walked along the rice paddy with four of his grandchildren. The farmer waved. Zhang Lei waved back.

Kelly Robson is a Canadian short fiction writer. Her novelette “A Human Stain” won the 2018 Nebula Award, and her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, Astounding, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.

The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births
By José Pablo Iriarte

I seem to make an outcast of myself every time I’m a teenager. Which is fine, I guess. I’ll take one good dog and one good friend over being a phony and fitting in.

Alicia points. “There he is, Jamie!”

A couple hundred feet away, our trailer park’s newest resident grabs a box from the van parked in front of his single-wide. He’s gray-haired and buff, like if The Rock were an old man.

Alicia and I are sprawled on top of a wooden picnic table in the park’s rusted old playground.

She frowns, her eyebrows coming together to form a tiny crease above her nose. “I’ve never known anybody who killed someone before.”

I shrug.

“I mean, maybe I have, I guess, but I’ve never known I’ve known them. Know what I mean?”

“No.”

I don’t really care about the new guy, even if he did murder someone once. I’m mostly just out here to not have to listen to old Mrs. Francis concern-trolling my mom. When I was a kid who sometimes acted like a boy and sometimes like a girl, it was “just a phase.” Now that I’m sixteen, it’s “worrying” and “not safe for the younger children” and something we should “talk to a therapist about.”

What Mrs. Francis doesn’t know is that I remember every life I’ve lived for nearly four hundred years—not in detail, but like a book I read once and have a few hazy recollections about. In over a dozen lifetimes I can recall, I’ve been male and female enough times for those words to mean little more to me than a particular shirt—not who I am.

My mom’s too polite to tell a neighbor what she can do with her un-asked-for parenting advice. Trailer walls are thin, though, and if I have to hear it too . . . well, Sabal Palms Trailer Park might end up with two murderers living in it.

Next to me, my dog Meetu nudges my hand with her head, asking for more scritches. She’s supposed to protect me from people who are as bothered by me as Mrs. Francis is, but would rather use their fists to try and fix me. People like Connor Haines, the biggest asshole in the eleventh grade. But the reality is that Meetu is basically a teddy bear trapped in a pit bull’s body.

Alicia shifts on the table. “I can’t believe my mom let him rent here.” Her mother manages the park, so I guess she could have blocked him if she’d wanted to.

“Even ex-murderers gotta live somewhere.”

She gives me her patented don’t-be-an-idiot combination eye roll and headshake that I’ve never seen anybody else quite match. Even when it’s directed at me, I can’t help but grin.

“There’s no such thing as an ‘ex-murderer,’” she says. “Once you kill someone, you’re a murderer.”

I brush my hair out of my face. “He went to jail. He did his time, right? They let him out, so where else is he gonna live?” We’ve certainly had other people with checkered pasts here.

“They shouldn’t have let him out. You take somebody’s life, you ought to rot for the rest of yours.”

Meetu shoves her giant head under my arm and rests it on my lap. Guess I’m not going anywhere for a while.

“There’s no heaven,” Alicia declares. “The Jesus freaks are wrong about that. There’s nothing but this. If people realized that, they’d take this life more seriously. You only get one.”

She’s wrong, but I can’t explain to her how I know, so I don’t bother trying.

A woman about my mom’s age helps the man unpack, while a toddler stumbles around the grassy area in front of the trailer. He seems kind of old to have a little kid, but maybe he’s making up for lost time.

“I can’t understand what kind of woman would want to live with a killer, much less have a child with him.” She peers at the table beneath her and runs a fingernail along a carved heart that’s older than we are. “Not that I get wanting to be with any man.”

The new neighbor comes out for another load. He glances our way, and even at this distance, our eyes lock, and a cold itch runs from the small of my back to the top of my scalp.

I know him. I know him from before.

I don’t mean I know his soul. I know him.

Alicia gives me a little shove, and I realize she’s been talking at me for a while.

“Are you okay?”

I blink. Even Meetu looks concerned, her muscular head cocked.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod, but she doesn’t stop staring and looking worried, so I add, “You’re right. It’s weird living next to a murderer.”

Her face softens. “I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I? When I said . . . that? I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Nah,” I say. “I know you weren’t.”

The new guy goes back into his trailer.

“What did you say his name was?” I ask.

“Benjamin,” she answers softly. After a few quiet seconds, she adds, “You did a really nice job on your nails.”

I glance down at my newly red nails. She’s painted them for me a couple times before, but this is the first time I’ve done them myself. I’m grateful that she doesn’t qualify the compliment. Doesn’t add, for a guy. But of course she wouldn’t—that’s why I—that’s why she’s my best friend.

• • • •

I try to let it go. So I’ve got a neighbor that I knew in a past life. So he’s a convict. The past is dead. Who cares.

Over the next couple days, though, my mind keeps returning to Benjamin. I feel like he was important for some reason. By the middle of the week, I admit to myself that I’m not going to move on until I figure out what role he played in my life.

I’m not quite sure how to do that, though. I could ask Alicia for help. She’s got a laptop and internet. I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t want to open up the can of worms that is my past lives, though, so instead I decide to see what I can find out at the library.

I feed Meetu an early dinner while Mom’s still at work, grab my backpack and bus pass, and head out.

Once I’m there, I have to face the fact that I don’t have the first idea how to research anything about this guy. I don’t even know his full name.

What’s B’s last name? I text Alicia.

Avery. Why?

What do I say that won’t make her ask a thousand questions I don’t want to answer? Just wondering.

UR totally gonna snoop arent you?

I consider possible deflections. Lying to Alicia feels scuzzy, though, and anyway, I can’t think of any lies to tell. maybe just a little

I stare at my tiny screen, worried that she’s going to offer to join me. After a minute her reply shows up, though, and it’s just haha well lmk what you dig up.

I sigh, feeling both relieved and ashamed of my relief.

Even with his last name, I struggle. I don’t know how to weed out other people named Benjamin, other people named Avery, other murderers. I don’t even know when he went to jail—how long is a sentence for murder, anyway?

Finally I stumble across what I’m looking for—a news archive from the 1970s, with a grainy black and white photo of a man that looks a lot younger, but that’s definitely him.

A Vietnam War veteran, possibly shell-shocked and deranged since coming back. A crime of passion—the victim, his best friend’s wife. A body dug up by the shore of Peace Creek, not far away at all. Then I come across a photo of the formerly happy couple: Larry Dearborn and his wife Jamie.

Janie. Not Jamie. Janie. But the name doesn’t matter.

It’s me.

• • • •

It’s raining when I stagger out of the library. On the bus ride home, I lean my head against the window and watch the torrents sheeting down the glass.

Janie would be in her sixties, if she’d lived. I don’t remember ever being old. I always seem to die young. I don’t remember dying. End-of-life memories are hazy, same as beginning-of-life memories.

I glance away from the window and notice a little girl staring at me from the seat across the aisle. Her father sits next to her, but he’s focused on his phone.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” she asks.

Before I can catch myself, my stock answer comes out. “No.”

She tilts her head in confusion.

I imagine how I must look to her. Rain-soaked long hair, purple V-neck, red nails. Hell, she’s just a kid. “I’m a little of both,” I add.

Her eyes widen. “Oh!”

I turn back toward the window. Now that I’ve seen the photos and read the articles, bits and pieces of that life are coming back to me.

Benjamin looks like I imagine a murderer would—big and tough and unhappy. The newspaper says he killed me.

So why does that feel wrong?

• • • •

The next day, school drags on more than usual. I can’t focus on Henry James or rational functions when my alleged murderer just moved into the neighborhood.

My walk home is the vulnerable spot in my routine, because Meetu’s not with me. So of course that’s when Connor Haines ambushes me.

He’s sitting on the concrete Sabal Palms sign outside the trailer park. His sycophant friend Eddie stands by his side.

A spike of fear travels through my body.

“What’s up, Jimmy,” he calls.

I don’t bother correcting him. I was “Jimmy” when he met me—it was only four years ago that I decided “Jamie” fit better. More importantly, Connor doesn’t care.

I consider my options. I could turn around. Go inside the Steak ’n Shake one block down and wait him out. Or I could run and try to reach my trailer ahead of him, and hide out there. But if I wanted to hide, my hair would be shorter and my nails wouldn’t be red. It may cost me, but I won’t start running or hiding now.

They fall in step with me as I pass the sign.

“Where’s your dress, Jimmy?” Eddie asks.

Eddie is smaller than I am. I’m not a fighter, though, and he can be brave knowing he’s got Connor backing his play.

“It was too ugly for me, so I gave it to Connor’s mom.”

I barely see Connor’s fist before it hits my face. I stagger sideways, tasting blood.

“Why you gotta be such a freak, Jimmy?” Connor asks. “I don’t care if you like guys, but why you gotta act like a girl?”

My clothes aren’t particularly girlish today: blue jeans and a teal polo. And I’m neither a gay boy nor a trans girl. Trying to explain is a losing game, though, so I just try to push past.

Eddie’s fist lands in my stomach, driving the air out of me.

Connor grabs my arm. “Don’t walk away when we’re talking to you, Jimmy. It’s rude. A real lady would know better.”

“What’s going on, fellas?”

Benjamin’s standing a dozen feet away. His arms are crossed, his sleeves barely making it halfway down his bulging biceps.

“We’re just talking to our friend,” Connor says.

“You’ve talked enough. Unless you want me to talk too.”

Connor releases my arm and backs away. “See you at school tomorrow, Jimmy,” he sneers.

“Yeah,” Eddie adds. “Don’t forget to wear your dress.”

I watch them walk away. I understand what they’re saying—sooner or later they’ll find me when I have nobody to protect me.

“You’re bleeding,” Benjamin says. “Is your mom home?”

“She’s at work.”

I probably shouldn’t say that to the convicted murderer.

“Why don’t you let me help you?”

My instinct is to mumble some excuse, but I don’t believe he’s a murderer. Anyway, I want to know how he fit into my old life and why everybody thought he killed me, so I follow him.

His trailer’s one of the first ones, and I see his windows are open. Probably how he noticed Connor and Eddie harassing me.

I’ve seen dumpier trailers, but not often.

The previous tenant had been a hoarder. When she died in her trailer last year, Alicia and her mom had to clean the place out, and I helped. The place had been full of arts and crafts junk and half-eaten containers of food. We’d worn masks, and no amount of vacuuming and Lysol had made it tolerable inside.

Just goes to show there’s always somebody desperate enough to settle for anything.

I don’t smell the death smell anymore—what I smell is about a half dozen Plug-Ins, all churning away at once. I guess that’s an improvement.

Benjamin and his family don’t have much furniture. A worn futon backs up against one wall of the living room, and a rickety table leans awkwardly under the kitchen light. A makeshift bookshelf sags with paperbacks and magazines. I wonder if they’re his wife’s—girlfriend’s?—and then my face heats up. I’m the last person who should be making assumptions.

His toddler lies in a playpen, her thumb in her mouth, snoring gently. I almost comment on him leaving her unsupervised—then I remember that he did it to save my judgmental ass from getting beaten even worse.

“I’ll grab some cotton and peroxide. They split your lip.”

I follow him to the table and sit on the edge of a vinyl chair. I will myself to keep still as he approaches, dripping cotton in hand. He’s a heavy breather, and his thick fingers smell like peanut butter. Lucky I’m not allergic. This time.

My shoulder blades tingle as he sits across from me and begins dabbing at the blood on my face. His fingers are rough but his touch is gentle.

“Some people are just driven to destroy what they don’t understand,” he says. He gets up and runs a washcloth under the tap. “Hold this against your lip until the bleeding stops.”

I feel silly having him take care of me; I can clean a cut for myself. It’s not like I haven’t been beat up before.

“Anyway,” he adds, “I’m Benjamin.”

“Yeah,” I blurt out. Crap.

He glances up. “You know?”

“Sorry. My best friend’s mom manages this place.”

“What else do you know?”

I swallow, and it’s all the confirmation he needs.

He sighs.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Please don’t tell? She wasn’t supposed to say anything to me, but that’s the kind of thing that’s hard to keep to yourself.”

Benjamin just grunts and sweeps up the bloody cotton balls.

“Anyway,” I add, “I know you’re not guilty.”

He raises his eyebrows. “You what now?”

I study my fingers. “I can tell things about people.”

He snorts.

I shrug. “Anyway, I’m Jamie.”

“Short for James?”

“No. Short for Jamie.”

“Well, I’m glad to meet you, Jamie.”

I press the rag to my lip for a couple minutes, and then, to break the silence, I ask, “Who did do it?”

He frowns. “Not something I wanna go into, kid.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s funny though. You remind me of her. You look like you could be her kid. I mean, if she’d ever had one.” Another awkward moment passes, and he clears his throat. “So the landlady’s kid . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I saw the two of you sitting together. The way you look at her. She your girlfriend?”

“We’re just friends.”

“Ah.”

“We can be friends, you know. You can just be friends with people you’re—you can be friends with people without dating them.”

“’Course you can.”

I bite my lip, and flinch when I catch the split part. “Anyway, I don’t think she sees me that way.”

“Fair enough.”

“Right.”

“Right.” He gets up from the table and begins washing some dishes while I continue putting pressure on my lip.

My mind wanders, trying to stitch together the bits of my last life that I remember. Being a little girl. Going to college. Dropping out to get married.

And I remember my husband turning mean. I remember going to our best man over and over again for advice—the only man Larry trusted me with. I remember deciding that I had to leave. I remember Larry—

Oh God. Larry did it. Larry was the killer.

Benjamin knocks a glass off the counter. He’s not paying attention to the glass, though. He’s staring at me, and he looks like he’s glanced into hell itself.

Did I say that out loud?

“How do you know about him?”

Oops. Apparently I did. “Uh, lucky guess?”

“Right.” He takes the rag from my hand, ignoring the still-running water. “Well, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped now. It was good to meet you. You’d probably best be getting on home now.”

He doesn’t seem to breathe at all as he talks, and before I fully realize what happens I am escorted out the door.

“You take care, now,” he says, once I’m safely outside.

“Thanks, Benjamin,” I say, but the door closes before the last syllable leaves my mouth.

Making my way home, I feel like I can hear all my past selves in my head, and they’re all furious. That bastard Larry killed me, and he got away with it.

I want to punch something. I want to scream. I want to take my notebook out of my backpack and rip out every sheet of paper and crumple each one up. I want to break some pencils. I want to scream.

I want to cry.

What does it say about me if I was murdered and nobody cared enough to find out who really did it? They just found the handiest fall guy to pin it on and went on with their lives, and Larry Dearborn lived happily ever after.

I run through imaginary confrontations with Larry as I walk up to my trailer. I’ve never been violent—not in any of the lives I can recall—but right now I wish I had the talent for it.

Meetu wants to play when I open up the door—Meetu always wants to play. “Not now,” I say, snapping the leash onto her collar. She understands lots of things, but “Not now” isn’t one of them. Still, she’s happy enough to go out for her walk.

I daydream about running into Connor and Eddie again while I’m out with Meetu. See how they like being threatened. Then I play out the rest of that scenario in my head—Meetu’s fifty-eight pounds of love, but all anybody sees when they look at her is a scary, vicious killer dog. I imagine how people would react to another story about a pit bull attack. I imagine them calling for her to be destroyed.

No, if I do see those guys, I’ll keep a tight grip on Meetu’s leash, even if they’re messing with me, because I don’t want to lose her.

That’s what pisses me off—me and Janie and the other voices in my head. The Connors and the Larrys of the world always get away with the things they do.

There must be some way to make Larry pay. He doesn’t know I exist. Has no idea that I know what he did. That I keep remembering more and more with each step I take.

He’ll never see me coming.

“Watch your back, Larry,” I murmur. “I’m coming for you.”

Meetu thumps my knees with her tail. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but she’s game. She’s always game.

• • • •

“I’m telling you, he didn’t do it!”

Alicia snorts. “You know this how? Because he told you?”

We’re sitting on her bed. I avoid her eyes by focusing on her posters. Harley Quinn. Black Widow. Imperator Furiosa.

Alicia is into kick-ass women. I’m into her—something I’m better off keeping to myself.

“Listen,” I say, “I’m pretty good at reading people. I believe him. He’s already done his time, so he has no real reason to lie.”

“His reason is to get people like you to trust him. Jesus, you went into his trailer?”

“I was bleeding.”

“So?”

I pull my legs under me and face her. “Listen, enough people think I’m a flake. That both of us are. I’ve always had your back. Will you just go with me on this?”

She chews her lip. After a moment she sighs and says, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

“You’ve got a computer. Do a search for this Dearborn guy. See what you can find out about him.”

“What for?”

I smooth a wrinkle on her bedspread. Any answer would be impossible to explain. “I don’t know yet.”

She rolls her eyes, but she pulls her laptop off the nightstand and begins clicking around. For several minutes she makes random frustrated sounds as she repeats the same research I already did at the library. I don’t want to admit to how much I’ve already obsessed about this, so I let her retrace my steps.

Finally she chuckles ruefully. “Good luck.”

“What?”

“Larry Dearborn is the Dearborn in Dearborn Automotive. He owns that huge car lot out on Auburndale Highway. The football stadium at Lakeside High is named after him. He’s loaded.”

I frown. So he’s rich, too. Must be nice to literally get away with murder.

“Let’s go see him,” I say.

She scowls. “And do what?”

“We can pretend one of us is buying a car.”

“Look, if you’re right, then Dearborn’s the dangerous one.”

“He was dangerous forty years ago.”

She shakes her head.

I try a different tack. “You’re always saying you’re bored here, surrounded by people who aren’t going anywhere. You always say you want to do something adventurous, like join the Air Force. Well fine: let’s have an adventure. I’m not saying to confront him or anything. I just want to see my—I just want to see Janie Dearborn’s killer with my own eyes. He won’t know that we know, so there’s no reason to be afraid of him.”

She narrows her eyes. Before she can raise an objection, I spit out, “What would Furiosa do?”

She makes a face. “I’m not twelve, Jamie.”

“Sorry.” I get up from her bed.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll go on my own,” I say. “I’ll take the bus.”

“Don’t,” she says. “I think you’re nuts, but I’ll drive.”

We tell her mom we’re going to the library and breeze out before she can question us. Once on the road, we roll down the windows and turn north on state road seventeen. Alicia’s mom’s car is a beat up Saturn station wagon that’s almost old enough to go to bars. It’s sticky and hot and I almost think I should’ve gone by bus, except then I would have been alone.

The car salesmen close in like hyenas when we park, and immediately lose interest when we step out. I guess without an adult with us, they figure we’re not car shopping.

I lead the way into an over-cooled lobby and cast about until I find a receptionist’s desk.

“Hi,” I say to the lady on the other side. “Is Mr. Dearborn here by any chance?”

She inclines her head. “And you are?”

“We are, uh . . .”

“We go to Lakeside High School,” Alicia blurts out. “And, uh, we’re on the yearbook staff. And since Mr. Dearborn’s been so generous to our school in the past, we were wondering if he maybe wanted to take out a page in this year’s edition.”

I fight the urge to stare at Alicia. We actually are in yearbook, but at Pickens High, not at Lakeside. They’ve been leaning on us to sell advertising, and the last thing I’ve wanted to do is cold call on a bunch of local businesses so they can all treat me like some kind of freak. So here we are instead doing it for an entirely different high school.

I have to give her credit, though—that was some quick thinking.

The receptionist’s expression softens. “Ah, yes. Well, he doesn’t really come in to the showroom anymore, but you’re right, he might want to sponsor a page.” She takes a random salesperson’s card from a holder on the counter, turns it over, and writes something on the back. “You can visit him here. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have visitors from Lakeside.”

Something about the way she said that feels off to me, but I can’t quite figure it out until twenty minutes later, when Alicia pulls up in front of the address on the card: Landmark Hospice.

“What’s a hospice?” Alicia asks. “Isn’t that like a cheap hotel for backpackers?”

“No, it’s a place where people go to die.”

“Oh.”

We park for several minutes under the shade of an oak tree, until Alicia asks, “Can we go home now?”

I nod dully, staring out the window.

It’s all so unfair. Larry Dearborn killed his wife—killed me—and he’ll never face judgment for it. Never spend a day in prison. He made a ton of money, lived out his life, and got to the end without any consequences. Even if I found some way to prove he did it, nobody would prosecute him. Why bother?

• • • •

The riverbed where the news said my body was discovered is just over a mile away. I take Meetu out after school a couple days later and wander around. Meetu runs back and forth between the creek and me, getting all muddy and messy.

I guess I have this idea that Meetu might dig up some bit of evidence, or I’ll remember something about how I died that would lead me to discover something. Meetu’s not that kind of dog, though, and anyway the police already went over this area when they found the body. What could I hope to uncover all these decades later?

And what would I do with it if I found it?

I don’t actually have any memories of this place. I was probably dead or unconscious before Larry ever brought me here. I do remember more and more about our relationship. How his dark moods got darker and more frequent and how even getting promotions at work only made him happy for a day before he’d brood again. I remember the only place I felt safe being with his buddy Benjamin, and I remember Benjamin convincing me I needed to leave, and helping me pack. I remember taking my suitcases to his house one night, and trying to figure out where to go next.

I remember Larry showing up at Benjamin’s place, enraged, and that’s about all I remember. He must have killed me there, leaving plenty of evidence pointing at Benjamin.

Benjamin.

In all of my fury at Larry killing me and getting to live out his life without ever paying for his crime, I’ve hardly given thought to the man who did pay for it. I’ve been so focused on the unfairness of my death that I haven’t thought about the unfairness of his life. I can’t do anything about Larry, but can I do something for Benjamin?

I call Meetu to me and we start to walk back home. About halfway there, Alicia’s Saturn shows up and pulls off the road on the grassy shoulder.

“I had a feeling you might have gone out this way. You’re obsessed, Jamie. I’m worried about you.”

She helps me get Meetu into the back of the station wagon. There’s one thing to be said about having a piece of crap car—you don’t much care if it gets dirty anymore.

“I think I have an idea for how to clear Benjamin’s record,” I say.

She doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Can I borrow a dress?”

• • • •

Alicia doesn’t wear dresses much, and her fashion style is not quite what I’m looking for. She is close to my size, though, and she’s willing to help, which counts for a lot.

She opens up her laptop and brings up a picture of Janie Dearborn—of her and Larry in better times. She’s wearing a long denim skirt and a turtleneck and throwing her head back and laughing. I think I can remember that day.

“Freaky,” Alicia murmurs. “She could be your older sister.”

“Do you have anything like what she’s wearing here?”

“Janie seems like the wholesome type. That’s not me.”

“Do you have anything that might be kind of close?”

She frowns, then straightens. “Actually, I might.”

She heads not for her closet, but for the chest at the foot of her bed. She digs inside and tugs out a balled up wad of cloth.

“It’s from my Aunt Hilda,” she says, as if that explains everything.

She unrolls the bundle on her bed. It turns out to be a brown dress, with little pink flowers and ivory accents. It’s nothing like the outfit in the news photo, but I understand why Alicia picked it. It’s equal parts Brady Bunch and Sunday brunch.

“My aunt doesn’t really get me,” she says.

“No kidding.”

“Mom made me wear it last time Aunt Hilda visited and then I dumped it here and haven’t thought about it again.” She holds the dress up to my shoulders and cocks her head appraisingly.

I quirk my lip. “It’s . . . really ugly.”

Alicia giggles. “You asked for a dress. You didn’t say it had to look good.”

I go to her bathroom to try it on. I stare at the mirror, trying to form my own opinion before I ask Alicia for hers. I worried that the dress was going to bulge and gap in the wrong places, but it’s a modest cut, so it pretty much works.

I remember looking like this before. It looks like me in the mirror. Just a different me.

I try to imagine how Connor Haines would react if he ran into me like this. He and Eddie would probably go berserk.

Well, fuck them. They don’t get a vote.

I pull the door open and cross the hall back into Alicia’s room. She paces all the way around me, nodding slowly.

“Now let’s add some makeup,” she says.

When I’ve worn makeup before, I’ve always gone for subtle. Some foundation, a touch of eyeliner. Not trying to look like I have makeup on. After some false starts, Alicia and I manage to get a more blatantly feminine style that I’m satisfied with.

“Stand up,” she says. “Let me see.”

I stand by her dresser, suddenly self-conscious.

She raises her eyebrows. “I still hate that dress, but damn, you—” She bites her lip. “You’re really pretty.”

My neck and face heat at that. I know she doesn’t mean . . . I know she’s just trying to build me up. It’s nice to imagine that she’s serious, though.

The moment is interrupted by her mom coming home. When I see her car pulling into the gravel driveway outside, I want to grab my own clothes and hide in her bathroom until the danger passes. But I steel myself and stay right where I am. I’ve always figured that once you start hiding, it’s hard to stop.

Alicia makes eye contact as the front door clicks unlocked, and I wonder if what I’m thinking is plastered all over my face.

“I’m home,” her mom calls out, as if that weren’t obvious.

A moment later she passes by the open door. “Oh, hey, I didn’t realize you had somebody—” She blinks a couple times. “Oh. Hi, Jamie. Alicia, can I talk to you?”

Alicia follows her to the master bedroom and closes the door. I pad out to the hallway in my bare feet. Sound carries pretty clearly through the thin walls of a trailer, and I don’t have to put my ear up to the door or anything to listen to their conversation, even though her mom is obviously trying to keep it down.

“Honey, I know you like girls and not boys, and I know Jamie’s confused about his gender anyway, but I’m not comfortable with a boy playing dress-up in your bedroom.”

“Jamie’s not confused about a thing,” Alicia replies. “And anyway, they changed in the bathroom.”

I step back into her room and close the door behind me, because I really don’t want to hear the rest. I don’t want to hear Alicia reassure her mom that she doesn’t think of me “that way.” I don’t want to hear Alicia’s mom—who has always been cool to me—say something I won’t be able to forgive.

Some people have a hard time adjusting to me—I get that. I don’t care what their process of working things out looks like if in the end they treat me like a person. But I don’t want to test that resolution by knowing too much.

Alicia doesn’t ask me to leave when she returns; she doesn’t talk about the conversation at all. I don’t either. I figure everything’s fine until somebody tells me otherwise.

“We ought to buy you some shoes to go with that, instead of those flip-flops. I could drive you to the mall in Sebring. It would be fun.”

I meet her eyes, wondering where she’s coming from. Alicia’s not usually into shopping.

“It would,” I agree. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to be looking at my shoes where I’m going. Some other time?”

She smiles. “Definitely.” She raises both her eyebrows. “You gonna tell me what your plan is?”

If I did, I’d have to explain all sorts of things I’m not ready to. I shake my head. “You might try to talk me out of it.”

She chews her lip; I can’t tell if she’s suspicious or hurt.

“I really appreciate your help,” I say. When she doesn’t reply, I add, “I better get on with this.”

She finally meets my eye, and pulls me into a hug. “Be careful, whatever you’re planning.”

“I will,” I say, and then I head out the door.

I should have asked for a ride—it would make things easier than taking public transportation dressed like this. But riding the bus will give me time to get used to the way I’m presenting.

All the way to Larry’s street, I keep waiting for somebody to say or do something either because they’ve clocked me or because they think I am a girl. I wish I’d brought my ear buds, so I could block out the sounds of traffic and random conversation going on around me. That’s stupid, though—what it would actually do is make me less likely to hear trouble coming.

Somehow I manage both legs of the ride and the transfer between. Everybody’s too wrapped up in their own phones and music and worries to bother me.

At the hospice, I use the same story at the front desk that we used at the dealership. They give me directions to his room, and I walk past a courtyard garden, a nurse’s station, and about a dozen doors with patient names written next to them in dry-erase ink.

I almost pass the door with Larry’s name. I turn abruptly when I spot it, trying to project confidence, like I’ve been here before. I quietly close the door as I enter, and then blink as my eyes adjust to the darkness inside.

The curtains are drawn to block the low-hanging sun. Apart from the dim light slipping around the edges, the only illumination comes from a flat-screen television on the wall, bathing the room in a blueish glow. Flowers on a dresser cast sinister shadows that move with every flicker of the screen. In the center of the room, an oversized hospital bed dominates the space, undercutting the semblance of ordinary life somebody went through a lot of effort to create with the decor.

Larry lies on the bed, his head lolling to the side. I take in my first sight of him this lifetime. In my memories, he is a giant, angry and frightening, out of control. He appears so weak and emaciated here that I can almost pity him—until I think about the lives he’s destroyed. Mine. Benjamin’s. Who else? Somebody like Larry probably didn’t stop at one victim.

I walk up to the edge of the bed. I could take my revenge right now; nobody could stop me. I don’t think it would make me feel better, though, and it wouldn’t do anything for Benjamin.

And I didn’t come here for revenge.

A television remote and call device is tethered to his bedsheet with an alligator clip. I loosen it, turn the sound down, and place it on the floor.

“Larry,” I call out.

He makes a gross snot-clearing sound, but doesn’t wake up.

“Larry!”

He blinks awake and looks at me, wild-eyed.

“Who the hell are you?” he croaks, scratchy and barely intelligible. More memories come flooding back—Larry suspicious, Larry dismissive, Larry belligerent. I feel this weird contrast, like a double-exposed photograph. Part of me remembers that I’m supposed to be scared when Larry’s voice takes this dangerous tone, but he’s not scaring anyone anymore.

“You don’t remember me, Larry? I’m hurt. I remember you.”

“I’ve never met you in my life,” he says, and starts patting around where his controller used to be.

“I remember that night at Peace Creek. You, me, and Benjamin. I bet he remembers it, too.”

He pauses in his search and stares at me again. Shaking his head, he gasps. “You can’t be.”

I stand over the bed. “Look at me.”

“Janie,” he whispers. His gaze flicks between me and the edge of his bed. Probably still looking for his call button. Then he reaches for something on the other side of him, which I hadn’t noticed before. For a moment I think it’s some kind of back-up call device and my heart seizes, but it doesn’t have a speaker or anything that appears to be a microphone.

I pluck the object out of his reach; it looks like some kind of self-dosing painkiller.

“Nuh uh, Larry. I’m talking to you. It wouldn’t be very polite of you to check out.”

“You’re dead,” he croaks.

“That’s right. Soon you will be, too, and I’ll be waiting for you.”

He stiffens, and I have this momentary worry that I will inadvertently cause a fatal heart attack or something right here.

I lean in a little closer. “I promise you it won’t be pleasant. You let an innocent man pay the price for my death, but there’ll be nobody to pay for you in the afterlife.”

This seems to spark some fight back into him. “Benjamin wasn’t innocent! He betrayed me! He had an affair with you!”

“Benjamin and I never had an affair,” I say. I’m pretty sure that’s true. “He tried to convince me to go back to you on the day you killed me.” That part’s definitely not true.

He clutches the bed railing. “What are you talking about?”

“I hitched a ride to the Greyhound station in Winter Haven, because I was afraid of you, Larry. Then I had second thoughts, so I called Benjamin from a payphone. He told me you were a good man, that you were just going through a hard time. He told me I should give you another chance, and he drove all the way out there to bring me back.”

Larry sinks back in the bed and his face seems to cloud over.

“Listen to me!” I command. Then I remember that there are all sorts of nurses and other patients around, and lower my voice. “He wasn’t taking me away from you. He was bringing me back.”

Larry moans, his expression stricken.

“He was your friend right up until the end, and you took his life for it, as surely as you took mine. He deserved better, Larry. So did I.”

He grips my wrist; his skin is soft as tissue paper, but his grip is hard and a little painful. “You look so beautiful, Janie. Please don’t leave me again!”

“I can’t stay. My time is past, and you can’t give me back what you took from me.” I glare, and he tries to edge back from me. “But you can give Benjamin back some of what you took from him. You can talk to the police and recant. Tell them Benjamin didn’t kill me. Tell them, Larry, or you’ll see me every night in hell. I’ll make you sorry. Believe me.”

He raises a hand in front of his face. “Stop! I’ll tell them! Please, Janie!”

I take the phone from the bedside table and dial. As soon as I navigate my way to a human being, I pass the handset over.

“Don’t let me down,” I say, “I’m watching you.”

He’s sobbing as I give it to him, but he’s coherent enough once he starts talking. When he does, I make my way from the room before anybody can show up and start asking me awkward questions.

• • • •

I’m walking Meetu a week later when I pass Benjamin out in front of his trailer with his little girl, planting flowers, of all things. He waves, and I wave back before realizing he’s actually calling me over.

“Damnedest thing happened,” he says, getting up and brushing his hands on his jeans. “I got a call from my parole officer today. Larry Dearborn recanted. One of those deathbed confession things. They say that’s how a lot of false convictions are overturned.”

I do my best to feign surprise. “That’s terrific!”

Meetu’s tail thumps like Benjamin’s a long lost friend.

“Yeah,” he says. He pets Meetu, but his eyes stay on me. Looking hard, like he’s trying to peer into me.

I’m not sure what to do, so I just shrug and say, “I’m glad you’re finally getting some justice.” The words feel stupid as they leave my mouth. He already served the sentence for this crime, and nothing can give that back to him.

As if he’s read my mind, Benjamin says, “It’ll make it easier to find work. Lot of people wouldn’t look beyond that one line on a job application, before. Once people get a word for you—like convict—they think that word is all there is to know.”

I nod.

His little girl makes mud pies in the dirt, and I think about how clearing her father’s name will affect her future.

“I could watch her for you,” I blurt out. “While you look for work.” My face heats up. He may treat me like a person, but that doesn’t mean he wants me watching his kid.

“That would be great.”

I scratch Meetu, trying to act like it’s no big deal.

“So.” He nods toward Alicia’s trailer. “You gonna ask that girl out? Don’t tell me you’re not interested.”

“I’m . . . not uninterested.” I take a slow breath. “I guess I’m afraid.”

“Afraid she sees you different from how you see yourself.”

I sag. “Yes.”

“I hear you,” he says. “But if you don’t take a chance on somebody disappointing you, you never give them a chance to surprise you either.”

When I don’t respond, he adds, “Will you stop being her friend if she says no?”

I shake my head.

“Then there’s no sense wanting something and not at least trying.”

I glance at the trailer. At the rainbow blinds that mark her bedroom window. “Maybe I will.”

He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Good luck.”

It feels more like a command than anything else, and I take a couple automatic steps toward her trailer. By the time my brain figures out what my feet have done, it seems more awkward to stop than to keep going.

Anyway, Benjamin’s right. He sees right through me, the same way I know the real him.

The same way Alicia has always seen the real me, I realize. My pace picks up a bit, and Meetu responds by bounding forward, dragging me along, like everybody’s figured out my destination before me.

She comes to the door as soon as I knock. “Hey,” she says.

“You doing anything?”

She shrugs. “Watching TV.”

“Wanna come for a walk?”

“Sure,” she says, stepping out onto the deck. “Did something happen? Is something wrong?”

“Nope,” I say, leading her down the steps. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”

We head down the street, quiet, like we don’t need to babble to fill the space between us. To anybody watching us, we probably look like we’re already a couple. Maybe by the time we come back, we will be. Maybe we won’t.

Either way, we’ll be okay.

José Pablo Iriarte is a Cuban-American writer, high school math teacher, and parent of two. Jose’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, and can be found in magazines such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Fiction. Learn more at www.labyrinthrat.com, or look for José on twitter @labyrinthrat.

No Flight Without the Shatter
By Brooke Bolander

Pretend you are the land. Pretend you are a place far away, the last vibrant V of green and gold and tessellated rock before the sea and sky slither south unchecked for three thousand lonesome turns of a tern’s wing. Once upon a time the waters rose to cut you off from your mother continent, better independence through drowning. Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake.

But that does not concern us—yet. You are the land, and today you are here to bear witness to a story four million years in the telling as she closes her eyes for the final time, striped haunches slowing their rise and fall as entropy hoists another tattered victory flag.

Thylacinus: from the Greek thýlakos, meaning “pouch” or “sack.” You have made her into your own image, a unique beast neither wolf nor tiger but its own striped singularity. No one at the zoo is qualified to sex such a creature. They dub her Benjamin, short omnivorous ape jaws unequipped to pronounce her true name even if anyone ever thought to ask.

The cage is very hot. There is no shade. When night falls there will be no shelter against the unseasonable cold. She paces and pants, her shadow writing the future across concrete in angular calligraphy. Beyond and through the chicken wire bland faces peer, unable to make any sense of the warning in her trot, the glassiness in her staring eyes.

But you are the land, and you read the message loud and clear: a missive from the place between being and not; a signal from the space between the final breath and whatever comes after.

• • • •

Auntie Ben pats makeup over her stripes every morning. The last neighbors moved on years before, the only folks left to see are Martha and Doris and Linnea, but Auntie Ben, she has her habits. In the end, the only sense you have to make, she tells Linnea, is to yourself. And so: delicate little dabs along the lean, dusky line of her jaw, up the cheekbones sharp as taxidermy knives, all the way to her forehead, where hair the color of dirty sand dangles listless, fabric on barbed wire. Nobody knows where she found the powder. Nobody asks. Maybe it was waiting when the three arrived, like the vanity and the three beds and the yellow farmhouse itself.

“Every mammal’s got stripes,” she says. “Even you. Fella named Blaschko found ’em. Somewhere back along the line, your people took ’em off as easily as I shuck my own skin, buried them in a cigar box out back. If you could find that box again, you’d find your stripes, sure as fleas and fresh blood.”

Linnea asks Doris if this is true. Doris is stout and cheerful and most likely of the three aunties to give a true answer. She cooks, she straightens, she drives the pickup to what passes for a town these days to pick up supplies. She does not work on the ship. She lacks the imagination, she says; she was never that great at flying to begin with. The little cedar chest at the foot of her bed more often than not stays closed.

“There’s no telling with Benny,” she says, scratching at her round, flat beak of a nose. “She’s always been a reader, that one. You don’t look like you got stripes to me, though. Humans come in all shapes and sizes—most of ’em hairy or hungry, terribly hungry, how can such skinny things gobble up so many?—but I never do believe I’ve seen a striped one. Then again, not a lot of them around to study anymore ’cept you, little chick.”

She doesn’t bother climbing to the roof gables to ask Auntie Martha, staring sadly up at an empty fading sky as bronze-and-violet as her hair. Instead, Linnea wanders back inside and stands alone in front of the vanity mirror, searching for invisible stripes. The light through the bedroom curtains is a washed-out yellow, like paper or preserved hide or the end of a long, hot day.

• • • •

They never say how they got together, Linnea’s three aunties, or where they hailed from before finding her and feeding her and fetching her home, lucky orphan among grubby roadside hundreds. She doesn’t remember faces before theirs. There was a gas station with busted windows. There was a little scratched spot in the dirt beneath the old pumps where she slept at night. There was potato crisp grease, tangled hair, and the occasional sandstorm. Beyond that, Linnea’s memory is a skull picked clean; shake it and hear leaves rattle inside.

That’s okay. Now is good. Back Then was probably not-so-good. And as to what lies ahead…No. Linnea keeps that lonesomeness locked down tight as any auntie’s chest. Now is good; the rest doesn’t matter.

Endlings make for strange bedfellows, Auntie Ben often says, pounding away at sheets of rusted tin atop the rickety rope ladder. She keeps a red bandana faded to the color of bared gums tied around her forehead. Her overalls are so stitched and crookety-patched (Doris does her best, but her fingers are too thick and strong and her eyesight too bad not to mangle such tiny work) they look like a quilt tossed over her long, lean self. She keeps all her tools in a denim pouch against her belly, saws and nails and a gone ghost forest worth of toothpicks forever tumble-scattering to the dusty ground far below. Auntie Ben has a lot of teeth to keep clean. When there were fresh bones to gnaw, she says, wistful, there was no need for toothpicks.

“Wombat feet,” she says. “Those always did the best job. Itty-bitty little bones, but sturdy.” A sigh, a shake of the head. Back to soldering a seam, goggles pulled safely down, impossible jaw firmly set.

Auntie Martha mostly draws star charts, sitting atop the farmhouse with paper and pen. Sometimes she sings. Her voice is croaky and harsh and the words make no sense to Linnea: endless repetitions of the same sound tunelessly unreeled, keeho keeho keeho kee! Sometimes she cocks her head afterward, almost like she’s waiting for a response. Nothing ever halloas back. Just the windmill creaking, the screen door slamming, the bang-bang-bang-bang of Auntie Ben’s hammer smashing dusk’s purple hush to pieces like a carelessly laid egg.

• • • •

Pretend you are the sky. Pretend you are a sky the faint peach and dusty slate of a dove’s wing, folded protectively over darkening fields of corn and cities where yellow lights wink on like punctilious fireflies. Some day soon you will wither and broil. Those newly-hatched smokestacks on the horizon will slide beneath feather and skin and subclavius muscle with a hypodermic’s lethal care, a payload of jaundice injected with a belch and a billow, and the resulting buildup of toxins will ensure nothing bigger than a botfly ever darkens your horizon again. Your decay will smother the world, a dead bird huddling over an empty nest.

Soon, but not today. Today you are full of life—screech owl and nightjar, cranefly and bat. They know the spaces between stars. Even the ones locked fast in cage and crate can feel the wheel turning, seasons brushing shoulders on the subway. Away I must be going, they say to the bars and the locks, the cold iron that batters the breath from their hollow bones. I’ve had a lovely life here, but spring waits for no one, and I really must insist—

Even when all the rest are gone, millions blasted from your breast and returned as smoke, she feels the pull and calls to you. Every autumn for twenty-nine years, right up until the day of her stroke. The zookeepers hang the name of a dead president’s wife around her foot like a wartime message, hoping for domesticity, but she is still Ectopistes migratorius, traveler in name and nature.

She hears the sound of phantom wings and hurls herself against the ceiling, desperate to take her place in the thunder. Her tired old body is the color of a bruise.

I’m coming, she whirrs, again and again. Wait for me! I know which way to go!

• • • •

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea’s bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Doris says, “—and oh, it was a long time ago, fresh fruit and green grass and the Rats and the Dogs not yet come—there were nests! Nests on the ground, can you imagine, beneath trees that dropped nuts so close you didn’t have to stretch your neck out far to take them. We laid our eggs where we pleased. But then the Men came—yesyes, and the Rats, and the Dogs, the terrible slavering Dogs—and the guns went bark bark bark all the live-long day. Our nests and our eggs and our fine fat selves, we dwindled down to nothing.

“But do they remember us now, sweet milk of my crop? Bless my gizzard and claws, they do! Those hungry men stopped being hungry, oh, ages ago, and their guns and their clubs rotted like rained-on feathers. Nobody remembers much at all about them and their growling bellies, but they remember our name, you’d better believe they do. There were plenty left to make our name round and fat, but mercy, who will be left to remember your kind?”

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Martha says—her voice is so soft you have to bend your eardrums low to pick up the words, a halting thing much gentler than her evening song—“we were a thousand. We were a million. We were many, and we blotted the sky with Ourselves. We flew where we pleased, and where we flew was pleasing. We followed the starmaps, the pull in our heads that said Go here! Go here!

“But the guns brought us down, by the thousands and the millions and the many. We lost the stars. We lost ourselves. But d’you think, little squab of my breast, that they could ever forget the sound of that many wings blotting out the sun? There were plenty of mouths and memories to pass on the beating of a million wings that was our name. As to who or what will be left to remember your own kind, dwindling with no wings to bear them away…”

Auntie Martha shakes her head.

“We were many too, once,” she repeats, barely a whisper. “I really am sorry.”

• • • •

Linnea has a voice, too, but she doesn’t use it much. The inside of her head is a safe place, full of futures that will never happen so long as she keeps her words under lock and key. You open doors when you say things. There’s no telling what will come out of them, or where they may carry you off to in their jaws. Linnea likes it here; she has no desire to be stolen away. The days flash by unmarked—fur-yellow, feather-purple, rust-red—and change comes in slow, sneaky bursts, the space between looking away and turning back, moments of distraction. The earth grows a little more cracked. The ship teeters a little higher into the brassy sky. The wars Elsewhere, according to the dying radio in the kitchen, are running out of bodies.

“All things run out eventually, unless you outrun them first,” says Auntie Ben. Her shadow isn’t a woman’s and leaves no question as to her identity, falling snout-to-tail down the wooden work platform. “Your people were never canny enough to plan for the one nor fast enough for the other. Poor sods. Be a love and fetch me that pair of metal shears from out the kitchen, will you?”

Linnea does as she’s told, crossing the hardpan between farmhouse and building site at a gallop so the ground doesn’t burn her bare feet. Her own shadow is small and knobby-kneed and very much human.

• • • •

Pretend you are the sea. Pretend you are a life-filled veil of green and gold and black and blue covering 70 percent of the land and most of its mysteries. Some day soon you will choke on refuse. A growing knot of bottles and bags and tires and zipties and rubber duckies and microbeads and bright plastic bric-a-brac will catch fast in your throat, suffocating all life from your deep places. You’ll bloat like a dead thing, an albatross chick’s belly packed tight and stretched grotesque with all the indigestible junk you’ve been fed. And when the last coral has withered—when the final whale has sung her question to an empty abyssal plain and there’s not even a hagfish left to mourn her passing—you will rise primeval, stinking of pig effluent and rotting fish, mercury and motor oil, an entire undead ecosystem marching on the cities of the coast.

Soon, but not now, and not for many ages yet. Today you are bursting with so much life the men who ride your waves in their great wooden ships cannot conceive of an end to it all. They match the seeming limitlessness of your largess with an equally insatiable hunger, seeking and searching and grasping. The world has never seen anything like it. There is no time to prepare; blink and they’re pulling ashore with axes and dogs and fire. Sink their boats and six hundred more will follow. Flood their encampments and they simply sail to the next island, rats and pigs ravaging in their wake.

You have protected this rugged little hunk of jungle and sand well. The animals here are special, coddled by your sheltering blue arms until they barely remember what fear is. The birds nest on the ground and lay their wings aside unused, for of what possible use are wings when there’s nothing to flee? Round and happy is Raphus cucullatus. Round and happy you would have them forever, your little flightless flock, but you cannot rage hard enough or squall fierce enough to stop what’s coming.

Hobnailed sailor’s heels in the white sand, clomping up the waterline. A crunch and a thud; the first pair of curious eyes dimmed.

The killing doesn’t stop for years. Axes ring and the fires burn and the rats and the pigs pick up where the clubs and machetes leave off, shattering eggs and snatching chicks even after the first settlers grow bored and Abel Tasman bobs away to wreak civilization on other untouched shores. They eat until there’s nothing left of the flock but white sticks in your surf.

They capture a few of the young birds alive and send them back across your waters. The last will be put on display as a public attraction, a curiosity kept in a dank, dark little chamber at the back of a shop. She will huddle into herself, feathers fluffed to ward off the chill of this gray place so far from her tropical homeland. The people who pay their pennies to see her will laugh at how round she looks, how plump and silly and vacant-eyed.

• • • •

Nobody left to speak through the kitchen radio. No more words. What’s left of the nearby town dries up with the rain. They take what they want from the abandoned shops and load it into the pickup and there’s not a soul left squatting inside or out to squint twice at the theft.

Linnea snoops in the cobwebs and cupboards while they loot, because once upon a gas station that was how she survived and sometimes she misses the taste of greasy crisps and dime-store jerky. There are newspapers, but they’re all from a long ways back and fat as ticks with bad tidings. There are old weather almanacs, but past a certain printing they all run a woeful rut into the dirt: rising tides, rising dust, rising temperature lines the color of sunburn. There are photographs, but they’re not from a world Linnea knows. There are clocks, but nobody’s left to wind them.

There aren’t any crisps left, either. Just plastic crinkling in the creosote bushes, as mournful in its own way as Auntie Martha’s evening songs. Linnea licks the sweat salt off her lips as they drive home, the three aunties crammed into the cab and her alone in the bed with the wind and her thoughts and the wide-stretched sky.

• • • •

The first passenger is waiting when she runs downstairs for breakfast, seated at the table next to Auntie Ben like that’s the way things have always been. A muscular, sturdy, broad-shouldered lady, with slate-gray hair and a big sharp nose and tiny red-rimmed eyes behind wire spectacles, thick lips drooping southward in a permanent scowl.

“This is Fatu Ceratotherium,” says Auntie Ben. “She’ll be staying with us for a while, helping out with the ship until it’s done.”

Fatu squints down at Linnea, snorts, and continues turning the pages of the book she holds, muttering something about humans under her breath. Linnea is glad to excuse herself and escape outside. Nothing’s changed there overnight, at least. Since it’s early and the ground is still cool she visits the gorge behind their property, something hard and hot bubbling beneath her chestbone.

It’s a new feeling. Change has planted it there, and she feels more change building where she can’t quite see it. Good things—crisps, soft beds, kindly aunties who keep your hair free of snags—can never ever stay when change is on the move. If it was a thing she could bite, she would bite it. If it was a thing she could throw rocks at, she would chuck pieces of flint until her arm fell off. But there’s nothing to do but wait for whatever is coming.

So she screams.

She shrieks into the canyon until the echo makes a pack of her, big and mean and capable of keeping things the way they are forever. She shrieks until her throat gets raw inside and the sun heats the ground beneath her enough to be uncomfortable. She doesn’t cry, because that’s a waste of moisture and she’s frustrated and angry, not senseless. But she yells. She even uses a few of the more interesting words she remembers from the walls of the gas station restroom while she’s at it. And it does make her feel a little better, eventually. Not much, but enough to ease the feeling in her chest.

“They’ll never come back no matter how loud you call, you know.”

Another change: Auntie Martha is off the roof, right in the middle of the day. She lights a hand on Linnea’s shoulder, delicate but with a surprisingly strong grip.

“No, they’ll never come back, little squab of my heart,” she continues in her gentle singsong. “The nest is scattered and the shell is crushed and in the case of your people, they did it to themselves. But it…it does feel good to try, doesn’t it? You always hope something other than your own voice will fly back. And isn’t it always worth trying? Just in case?”

They’ve done their best, her aunties. There’s a gulf between them that no ship can cross, but they’ve tried very hard, and they love her despite her humanity. Linnea gropes for words, a shape to fold her feelings into. Her voice sticks like a rusted pump drawing up dust from an empty well.

“If I call,” she says, “will you come back?”

They watch the question drift to earth together. Auntie Martha sighs, soft as eiderdown, and wraps her arms around Linnea.

“Oh, little squab. Little naked thing.”

• • • •

More passengers arrive—not just two-by-two, but in ones and threes and severals, all more or less shaped like human women. The radio crackles static, the horizon sizzles with heat, and the farmhouse fills with the noise of idle waiting room chatter. Figures with shadows like frogs and parrots and long-necked tortoises loiter on the porch, smoking and waiting for sundown. Some help Auntie Ben with what’s left of the ship’s construction, hammer-hammer-saw-slam-bang. Others walk the halls at night, pacing with an impatience you can feel sparking off their soles like blue lightning. The air, Auntie Doris says, feels like a chick is pecking gentle-like on the other side, looking for the best place to lay into the world’s shell with its egg-tooth.

“I still don’t see why it has to be a ship doing the cracking, though,” she adds, looking as disgruntled as she ever gets. “I don’t trust ships, even the kind that don’t go on the water. No telling what a ship will unleash, no no no there never is.”

Linnea tries to stay out of the way, but it’s hard when there are so many others around. She takes to sleeping on the roof with Auntie Martha, whose skinny fingers are an ink-stained blur now from sundown to first light as she makes her charts. Scritch-scritch-scritch goes the fountain pen, spinning delicate spider silk lines between stars. The house below them hums hot, creaky impatience in its sleep. Further out in the yard, listing in its scaffolding, the ship looms black and blue.

“Nothing has an ending. Not really.” Auntie Martha says little while she works, which means she says little at all these days. When she does bother speaking, Linnea listens, hoarding every word against future silences. “Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert—“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.”

Linnea casts a wary eye at the night. She tucks her knees in tighter beneath her chin.

• • • •

Pretend you are the wind. Pretend you are the inhalations and exhalations of the land, the breath of tortoise and tree twisting windmill and grass blade alike. Some day soon you will kill everything you touch, spreading a mushroom cloud’s poison seed from desert to delta to distant island. Death will fruit as heedlessly cheerful as any invasive species mankind has ever sown, unconcerned with distance or climatological delineations, and the world will slowly return to silence. All the world’s a graveyard. Like the last soldier in some grim and cautionary fairy tale, you are tasked with whistling past its gates forever.

Soon—very soon, the thoughtful pause before a clock’s hand flicks to midnight—but not yet. Today there is still life, although it’s a scraggletailed, desperate kind of thing, struggling to grow through a coating of red dust. You blow past caravans of ragged scrabblers, towns and communities clinging to civilization like cubs clutching at a dead mother’s fur. You sweep through pockets of memory and unreality. Ghosts and grit tumble down empty highways. Sometimes they clump into things with form and will; old spirits crossing an older landscape, psychopomp trompe l’oeil. The border here is very thin. History overlays it all like a second skin, a hidden shape the eye has to unlearn everything to recognize. See the beast with stripes like a cat and jaws like a wolf? See the glaciers that carved the horizon? See the people who lived here before, their homes and their handprints, the blood they spilled in the sand?

Old roadsigns rattle and dance as you pass. Junk food containers whirl. Beside the long black scar of the highway is a gas station.

You pause to brush the little girl’s bangs back from her face. She’s lost in concentration, momentarily distracted from hunger by the task at hand, sunburned forehead creased. Her hands work the old candy bar wrapper into triangles, pyramids, arrows, flaps and furrows, halves and planes. An alchemy of geometry, transmuting garbage into a kind of escape.

At last she finishes her spell. It sits stately in her palm for a moment, a crinkled paper bird smudged by dirty fingerprints and time. She lifts her hand to you as you pass and you take the little gift, touched by the gesture.

“Goodbye,” she says. You keep on moving as always. The paper bird soars. “Goodbye.”

The farmhouse is at full capacity, as full of visitors as it can manage—restless bodies crammed cheek-to-jowl, wood-and-brass chests of varying sizes stacked in corners and jammed beneath beds. Linnea isn’t the only one who sleeps outside now. They spill down the porch and into the front yard on rude pallets, shaking sand from their ears and hair when the brassy bright mornings come. It’s very hard to avoid their eyes; there are so many of them, and they are all so watchful of her two-leggedness. The ship—finished, Auntie Ben says, as it’ll ever be, and as it’ll ever be will do just dandy for their purposes—strains at the sky. The nights grow cold and brittle.

Linnea lurks around the edges, hugs corners, and spends most of the days remaining with a fist-sized knot churning in her stomach. The passengers move their trunks and their bedding to the foot of the ship. The farmhouse deflates a little. The knot in Linnea’s stomach stays the same; deep in her heart she knows what’s coming, although not one of her aunties says a word. When their chests finally vanish from the bedroom as well one afternoon, it’s almost a relief. Three square holes in the dust at the feet of the three neatly made beds, hardwoods darker there than their surroundings. Like shadows burned into pavement, or the white chalk outline of a hand on blood-red clay.

She has no trunk, no locked box with her name on it and her true skin inside. Her shadow is nothing if not honest. It drags at her heels as she walks—no running this time—down to the gorge. There is no memory of being left behind in her head, but there is a feeling, and it has all the contours of something well-worn and familiar.

Someone is already at the canyon’s edge when she arrives. Big, broad-shouldered, gray-haired—Fatu. Linnea thinks about leaving. She thinks too loudly and too slowly, and Fatu notices her. Linnea waits to be ignored, dismissed, or snorted at. Fatu’s never had time for anything much other than working on the ship, and no time at all for a human child, no matter how beloved of her hosts. After their first meeting Linnea had done her best to stay out of Fatu’s way. Up until today she had proven pretty good at it, too.

Instead, Fatu wordlessly waves her over with a blocky hand. They sit together in silence, big and little legs dangling over the gorge’s lip. To their left the sinking sun is an angry, infected red.

“They lied about my kind when they first saw us. Dumbest damn thing.” Fatu doesn’t take her eyes off the horizon as she speaks. Her voice is a rumble Linnea feels in the unmapped interior of her chest. “This was Wayback, before cameras or jeeps or automatic weapons or any of that sort of shit. You know how many horns they said we had, when they sent word back home? Or where they said we had them growing from? Some peabrain blinder than my grandam drew a picture, and that picture, it grew some legs. It ran far. Soon everybody thought the lie was truth, all on account of one silly, stupid drawing. Nobody there to correct them. Nobody around to tell the true story, and it wasn’t as if we could speak for ourselves.” She halfheartedly flicks a pebble into the chasm. “Lies are like ticks. If you have no birds to pick ’em off, they breed, and they suckle, and they turn your world sickly. Your vastness shrinks. Your skin gets thin and pale. Soon, all you’re left with is…unicorns.”

Fatu spits this last word from her mouth like a nettle. She chews on her bottom lip for a moment, brow furrowed, nostrils flared. Linnea waits.

“A unicorn is a fine fiction,” she continues, eventually, “but it isn’t me.”

• • • •

On the final night, they build a fire in the ship’s shadow. They open their chests—their trunks and their suitcases, their valises and chiffoniers—and they tell stories.

A dark-skinned woman with green hair and curved lips is the first to unlock hers. Inside is a cloak covered in emerald feathers, neatly folded. She pulls it over her shoulders with an eye-dazzling flourish. In the darkness between blinks—in the waver of heat off the bonfire—she melts and changes. Now she is a green and red parrot, perched on the trunk’s open lid.

Her audience leans in.

“I was a hundred,” she says. “I was a million, although I did not know what million meant. Our forests were as green as our feathers, and just as numerous. The fruit was sweet, the chatter of my flock sweeter. ‘Silence’ was another word we did not know the meaning of, and we were happier for it. Loudest of all those millions was my mate. There was no nut her beak could not shatter. We raised many clutches together, fine and strong and shrieking.”

She lets that picture hang in the air: a green place filled with the screams of a happy, prosperous people, wings flashing in the dapple. Linnea, who has only ever known red dust, cannot see it no matter how hard she tries.

“They cut the trees down, one by one, and my people soon followed,” she finishes. “Those hills are bare now. They know the meaning of silence.”

A pause, and the parrot flies into the fire. Only her shadow emerges from the flames. It flaps into the high scaffolding surrounding the ship, lands, and waits.

The next to step forward is sharp-faced and angry and almost as short as Linnea herself. She yanks her furry brown hide from inside its chest—no nonsense, no pause for dramatic effect. A blur and a noise like teeth clicking together and a shrew glares up at the crowd with eyes like glass splinters, daring interruption.

“THE SONS OF BITCHES PLOUGHED UP MY BURROWS!” she yells. If her body is small, her voice is more than loud enough to say what needs saying. “THEY BUILT APARTMENTS THERE! APARTMENTS! GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE LOT OF THEM! I HOPE WHAT’S LEFT OF THE BUNCH ENJOYS THE MISERY THEY’VE MADE!” She shoots Linnea a triumphant, bitter look and stomps one of her little feet for emphasis before skittering into the flames. Her tiny shadow is swallowed up entirely by the ship’s massive one.

There are stripes on the cheeks of the third, and an expression that says she’s never dabbed makeup over them and might sooner cut off her own head than entertain the thought. She holds her chin high as she changes, higher still as she speaks. Her voice is a razor wrapped in velvet.

“They took my forest,” she says. “They took my prey. They took my people’s skins. Not my skin, but that didn’t matter too much in the long run, now did it?” Her tail-tip swishes. “Their fear was deadly enough, but their admiration was what crushed the windpipe. There’s nothing worse for continued survival than their wanting to be like you—to touch you, to possess you. Once they get it into their heads that you’re ‘special’…”

The tigress shakes her head disgustedly. She stalks off to meet her fate.

One by one they stand and have their say. One by one the cluster of shadows beneath the ship’s bulk thickens. Scale and fin, feather and fur. A woman with black and yellow hair and a voice like many voices buzzing together. Leather-faced, leather-skinned aunties with slow-spoken, toothless mouths. Enormous Fatu. The fire takes them all, changing them, and their stories are all different and yet, at the heart of things, all the same. Linnea watches with growing apprehension, fear coiling inside her. She cannot decide which is more terrifying: walking into the fire or being left out of it.

The sky lightens. The group thins. Three left: Auntie Ben, Auntie Doris, and Auntie Martha. Linnea wants to cry out NO!, but something solid seems lodged in her throat.

Auntie Ben goes first. With a fond, wry smile, she retrieves her skin. A long-jawed, rangy thing, neither wolf nor tiger, with stripes on her ragged flanks: that is the true shape of Auntie Ben.

“I’ve told my story about as often as anyone cares to hear it,” she says. “We were strong and swift and lived freer than scrub seed. Men came. They did what men carrying guns do. Just to add insult to injury, they stuck the last of us to die in a bloody concrete cage as a way of saying ‘sorry.’ I’m tired of blathering on about that, though. If it pleases you all—hell, even if it doesn’t—I’d rather never think about it again. I’d rather kick sand over this dead place and head for the stars, where other somewheres might be in need of fur and feathers and sharp, smart jaws full of teeth. Chicks leave the nest and joeys leave the pouch. It’s just about time for all of us to do the same.”

She doesn’t step into the fire. Not yet. Instead, she pads across the open space, stripes rippling across lean muscle. She keeps on coming until she’s so close Linnea can smell the dusty musk and fur scent of her. It’s a wild reek—which makes it slightly unnerving—but it’s also Auntie Ben, which makes Linnea abruptly sob and fall forward to hug the rangy creature around her rough neck. Auntie Ben allows the mauling, good-natured as always.

“I know you’re afraid of changing, little one,” she says softly. “Your people never were any good at it, and you’ve seen how that turned out. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that’s why you’ve got no skin of your own, poor naked mite.” A long pink tongue flicks out to touch Linnea on the cheek. “But whether you go or stay, change is coming for you, and it can either be the one you choose or the one you don’t. Which is it gonna be? Think you can manage the trick?”

Linnea tries to say yes. She tries to mean it. But the fire and the unknown behind it and her fear of both (she’s so afraid, she can’t help it, her knees are shaking and they won’t stop) turn her attempted “yes” to a lie, and the lie clots sour and solid so that not a word can get around it. Auntie Ben watches her struggle, unable to offer help or assistance or meaningless, soothing words that might also be lies.

Gently, firmly, she pulls away and steps back.

“It’s up to you,” she says. “We’ve done all we could.”

The creature Linnea knows as Auntie Ben turns and trots into the fire. Her shadow gives Linnea a final featureless look over its shoulder before taking her place in the crowd of shades.

Auntie Doris comes next, as serious and wide-eyed as Linnea’s ever seen her. A click of the lock and a snap of the hinges and here’s her own true self: a thick-beaked, long-necked, goggle-eyed bird with a fat, squat body and wings more like suggestions than anything approaching useful appendages. She takes a look at herself—the stout legs, the powerful claws—and chuckles fondly.

“Round as an egg, round as an egg, bless my bottom feathers. And what better way is there to be? Flight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, no no no. I see plenty of them’s got that power standing in the ranks, and you see how well that served them. They’re passing on through the fire, same as I.” A firm nod of the bulbous head. “I admit to mistrusting fire. When the men came to our lands they carried it, and I can still remember the smell of all my aunties and uncles and cousins a-roasting over it. But they’re all gone now, and so are all those hungry, hungry men. Nothing left but my poor Linnea, and we raised her better than all that, didn’t we, girls?”

She waddles closer. Linnea hugs her as well; soft feathers over surprisingly hard muscle, like a silky, affectionate fireplug.

“You learn things, being so low to the ground,” she says. “You learn to be sturdy. You learn how to appreciate the earth you’re planted on. Nobody ever knocked me down with any club! If I settled my bottom, it was always my own decisioning. That’s important. Whatever you do, you just remember that, love. You settle your bottom where and when you feel like it. We’ll understand if the fire is too much to ask, but oh, we will miss you.”

A final affectionate butt of the head, a long, fond look, and away she goes, at as stately a pace as one of her kind can muster. She flinches at the fire’s edge—remembering those earlier fires, maybe; the dogs and the rats and the hungry sailors—but only for a moment. Auntie Doris is stronger than she looks.

Auntie Martha’s trunk is lined with yellowing maps of the stars, and the feathers of her cloak are the slate-and-peach of the pre-dawn sky. She settles on Linnea’s shoulder with a whistle-whirr of wings.

“We were more like your kind than all the others, in our way,” she says, close to Linnea’s ear. “So many of us we blotted the sun and stripped the branches. But we exist to learn, and to change in the learning, in the hopes that some day we may find ourselves changed enough to tell our stories and tell them honestly, no matter how much that may sometimes…sting. Then we can become something else, and fly on.” Her claws dig through the thin fabric of Linnea’s shirt. “I am uncomfortable with all this talk of decisions. There’s nothing wrong with needing more time. Hatchlings grow their feathers when they will. Do you feel your people are ready to have their story told?”

Linnea looks at the shadows and the rocket. She stares into the fire. All she knows is potato crisp wrappers and garbled voices on the radio. The aunties gave her love, but in their love they neglected many things.

“There are some things that cannot be taught, only learned,” Auntie Martha says, as if hearing the thoughts rattling around in her head. “That was not our story to tell, little fledging. We’re ghosts, and you are still alive, but we love you, and that makes the letting go hard. No one—not even those you care about, neither I or Ben nor Doris—can or should force you into a change you aren’t prepared for. It has to be your own decision, in your own time.”

She fluffs her feathers and rubs her head against Linnea’s cheek.

“Remember our stories while you learn your own,” she whispers. “I left star-charts for you; they’re in the bedroom in a box beneath my bed. I carry my own in my head, the same as my people always have.” A note of pride. “Catch up when you’re ready, and no sooner. Be good. Remember we love you.”

• • • •

Shades marching two-by-two onto a shadowy ship—shadows of tiger and thylacine, dodo and dingo, elephant and sharp-horned rhinoceros. They hop and fly and pace up the gangplank in silence. The fire beneath them dies to embers as the light in the east grows and the last disappears inside, the rusted old hatch slamming shut behind them with a clang.

Nothing happens, at first. Then there’s a slow rumbling from within the rocket’s guts, a rust-rattling, bolt-testing shudder that grows and grows and grows until the entire ship and all the ground around-abouts it are shaking like a penny in a tin can. The first red rays of the sun set fire to the scaffoldings and fins, the soldered seams that patch the scavenged eyetooth-length of the thing together. Orange dust rises like smoke. The long, pointed shadow at its base jitters faintly.

The ship begins to topple over. At the same time, its shadow pulls itself free of the dusty ground, ascending with a noise like a hurricane wind made up of the calls of every animal to ever creep or crawl or flap or low, a joyous, cacophonous menagerie. It lifts higher and higher, charging to meet the dawn as, far below, the ship collapses completely. The air is full of sand and twigs and old litter picked up by the whirl—candy wrappers, plastic bags, feathers. Chunks of scaffolding tumble-bang to earth end-over-appetite, adding their own clattering boom and roar to the morning as the shadow pulls away. It is a cloud—a bird—a mote swimming across the eye—and then it is nothing at all.

The triumphant menagerie song fades to an echo. A trick of the wind, occasionally interrupted by another piece of the ship’s struts coming down with a tooth-rattling thud.

Goodbye.

• • • •

Every morning she gets up and brushes her own hair, makes her own bed. She eats a breakfast of whatever she’s scavenged the previous day. There are no potato crisps, but the aunties taught her long ago all was left that could be plucked, pecked, swallowed, or snapped. If the weather’s good, she takes the pickup out looking for pieces of story—diaries of neighbors, scraps of old newspapers, history books. If it isn’t (and frequently it isn’t; the storms grow worse as time spreads like a puddle), she spends her afternoons huddled in the root cellar, thinking about everything she’s learned.

She watches the seasons turn until there are no more seasons, just days, hot and identical when they aren’t memorably violent. She outgrows her clothes and takes new ones from the abandoned town. The kitchen radio coughs dry static for a little while longer before dying completely. One night the sky dances with cloudless lightning the color of blood, a crackling red net stretching from horizon to unseen horizon. The next morning the pickup won’t start.

From then on Linnea walks everywhere she needs to go. She wears out every pair of shoes the town’s got left and then her feet get as hard and tough as everything else in the dying world.

Old warnings unheeded, predictions shrugged off, smokestacks belching into the sky. Extinction. She learns new words.

With the pickup broke down, food gets harder to find. Linnea’s ribs are a ladder leading directly to her throat. She dreams of the tastes of all the good things she’s ever eaten—canned corned beef, a soda she found in a vending machine once, the beloved and well-worn potato crisps. She dreams of constellations with stars like stripes along their flanks. She dreams of an airship, a low-swung thing with a sagging canvas belly above and a wooden deck below.

When she wakes from the last, she has a blueprint in her head. She’s no longer hungry or thirsty. She has all the energy in the world, a mind overflowing like a rain bucket with stories.

You’re changing, Auntie Martha might’ve said, pleased. You’re learning, growing your feathers. You’re almost ready to fly.

Saying goodbye stripped Linnea of her fear. Once the worst comes to pass, what else is there to fret about?

Now all her energy focuses on building the airship. It becomes an obsession. She gathers old sheets, pulls the curtains from the bedroom windows, raids houses and boarded-up hotels for their linens. She stitches them all together (when did she learn to sew?) into a giant patchwork bag. It gives her no free time to spend missing the aunties or thinking about food. She sits cross-legged in sandstorms with her needle and thread, head down, turning quilts and blankets to wings. She no longer feels the sun on her back or the hot wind in her hair. All that’s left is determination.

Catch up when you’re ready, and no sooner.

The farmhouse loses its clapboards. The airship gains ribs and struts and a sturdy wooden basket in a cheerful, peeling yellow. Propellers are pried off fishing boats that will never see water again. There are parts of the construction that Linnea cannot recall clearly the next day; a dark spot in her mind’s eye and the patchwork bag is stretched and nailed firmly over the frame and she has no memory whatsoever of how it got there. A feeling of finality builds. It pushes everything else out like a cat expanding to fill a sunny windowsill.

A night comes when the moon is as full and fat and yellow as a disc of dry bone in the sky. Everything is spilled ink and ivory. The airship squats near what’s left of the original rocket, waiting for Linnea as she steps out her front door. Not a sigh of wind disturbs the becalmed world. It’s as still and breathless a night as she’s seen in an unreckoned amount of time—a listening audience, a girl waiting for a bedtime story.

Or a conductor waiting for someone to fish out a ticket. She’s got no skin but her own to draw on; humans traded their stripes for words long ago.

“We weren’t very good at this,” Linnea says to the darkness.

After going so long without speaking or hearing another voice, the sound of her own voice lands like a teacup kissing concrete.

“The man who built this house used to hit his wife. He died a long time ago, before the aunties moved in, but I still know that somehow. I know a lot of stuff now. I know all the things I learned and all the things I didn’t.” Linnea lets her gaze wander over the familiar front porch landmarks—the abandoned wasp nest in the shadowy upper left corner, the pillars sandblasted down to bare, dried wood. She thinks she sees movement out of the corner of one eye. A dark bipedal shape beneath the airship’s bulk, an absence of moonlight clinging to memories of alarm clocks and apple pie. Another joins it, then another.

“I know why me and all those other kids were living around the gas station,” she continues. “I know where all the grown-ups went. I know why they went there, and why they never came back. I know why they stopped talking on the radio, and it’s all…so…dumb. Nobody would listen to one another, not even to the people they loved. Maybe they weren’t scared enough. Maybe they were scared of the wrong things. They didn’t have Auntie Ben and Auntie Martha and Auntie Doris to teach them about stuff and they wouldn’t have listened anyways, but…”

There are so many stories buzzing inside Linnea’s head it’s hard to hold on to the frayed length of her own thoughts. She gropes and pushes aside other people’s memories until she finds the end of it again. The little cluster of flickering shadows around the airship’s hull is thicker now. The patchwork bag shudders and stirs with a faint hiss.

“We weren’t very good at this,” she repeats. “And we took everybody else with us. But we weren’t all bad. We had potato crisps, and ice cream, and we built farmhouses and wrote songs and told stories. Maybe next time will be okay. Maybe we’ll turn into something better at changing once we fly.”

There is a noise—a rising wind, a thousand whispers, a sliding of fabric and a slither of inflating canvas. The horizon in the direction of the abandoned town seems to ripple.

Linnea steps off the porch into the moonlight. She strides across the yard, vaults the fence, and doesn’t stop until the shadow of the rising airship reaches out to swallow her own.

• • • •

Pretend you are the land—the empty sea-lapped cities with their blank skull eyes, the blasted green glass wastes, the skeletal forests. The desert, as red and uncaring as ever. Do you feel the shadow cutting a nightjar’s swoop across your foothills? Do you see the airship that throws it, nosing noiselessly across the face of the moon?

Ghosts rise to meet the vessel, sinuous as smoke and blue as pilot flames. They cluster thickest over the cities, but even in the empty parts of the world there are always a few hurrying to catch up. The airship moves with the graceful, unbothered patience of a whale hunting for krill. It is a black mouth with a belly big enough for all of humanity, filtering souls from a night that seems endless. No need to rush, it whispers, but even in extinction humans are terrible at altering their old habits.

(Remember whales? Remember nightjars? Remember life in the sea and the sky?)

It takes forever. It takes no time at all. It crosses all the whens and wheres, all the should-have-beens and never-wills. Whoever or whatever stands at the wheel has a steady, tireless hand. The gathering goes on for exactly as long as it needs to, until there’s nobody else left to claim. The moon sets and the stars rise; so, too, does the airship. It sets a course for a constellation shaped like a long, lean predator, distant flickering suns dotting its purple flanks like stripes.

Drifting gently upward

(Remember balloons? Remember letting go of your first in the parking lot of some forgotten bank, tearfully saying goodbye as it climbed and climbed and the sun turned it to a bird?)

distance shrinks its size, taking memories of telephones and coffee tables and radio broadcasts along with it. First kisses, last breaths, friendships and fallout and fires blossoming on the horizon—they dwindle and dim, going back to the darkness all thoughts and stories come from. A final pulse of ancient light from a dead star—red-blue-green—and there’s nothing left to see and no one left to remember they ever saw it.

Pretend you are the land. Goodbye, you say, slamming a screen door in the wind. Goodbye. Better luck next time.

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.

How to Swallow the Moon
By Isabel Yap

“I want to know the fires your hands bring—”

“Having Been Cast, Eve Implores” by Barbara Jane Reyes

Tonight, as in every night, she smiles when the door opens. Her arms loop over your neck; she leans in and rests her head against your cheek. She looks down at the basket between you. “Is this for me?”

She already knows the answer, but: “Yes, my jewel.”

It’s four golden mangoes this time, and a bunch of lakatan bananas, stubby and sweet. She lifts a mango to a patch of moonlight, turning it pale silver. “From who?”

“Aba Ignayon.”

“Which one is he?”

“The one with a very square chin. His head is like a box.”

She laughs; her laughter soothes the knot tightening in your chest. As her sixteenth birthday nears, the number of suitors grows by the day. They come from farther lands, ever distant shores. The gifts they bring grow more numerous, more elaborate. They are given audience for an afternoon, discussing with her parents. Sometimes they are blindfolded and taken to a dark room, where they kneel, waiting in agony, til at last they are permitted a glimpse. You sit with Anyag on the other side of the wall, watching her hold her laughter while she carefully pushes her smallest finger through a hole cut into the wood. There is usually a sharp intake of breath on the other side. Then you both wait, quavering, until at last a door clicks shut, and you fall over each other, erupting in giggles.

Part of your pain comes from not knowing what will happen when she marries. Will she stay here and become a lady of the village? Or will she leave with him, for some faraway place where you can no longer be part of her life? These thoughts haunt you more than you care to admit. To distract yourself, you inspect her weaving progress for the week, the colorful tapestry only begun: the impression of a woman, bare-shouldered.

“A sirena?”

“Mm-hmm.” She takes a banana and peels it. “I dreamt of one,” she says. “She sang the song of Buyi-Lahin, so sweetly. While the men rowed close in their boats…”

“Dreaming of men now?”

She shrugs, talks while chewing. “And why not? They’re only people. You know the only man I’ve ever seen is my father, so I have to imagine. Anyway they’re no different than women, besides what is between their legs.” She snickers. To her, men’s bodies are funny. She has never had reason to fear them, of course, which is a relief. But that could all change, one day not too far from now. You decide her curiosity is a good thing. It might make the wedding night easier. She continues: “It was strange; in my dream, Buyi-Lahin was no man, but a woman without hair, who rode a steed of dark copper…”

While she recounts her dream, you gather the materials for bathing: clean clothes, a smooth stone to polish her feet and elbows, coconut milk for her hair, salt crystals, and a midnight cloth to shield her from view, even if no one dares come by the river, lest they be put to death for straying eyes. You would hold the knife yourself, slit their throat, pluck their eyeballs, partly because it is your duty: she is your handiwork as much as her family’s. And partly because you love her, despite all your efforts not to.

She doesn’t make it easy, but you’re good at difficult things.

“Shall we bathe, then?”

She nods and drapes a veil over her head. You follow her down the steps of her tower, into the quiet night outside.

• • • •

When your mother was a girl, there were still two moons. Like Bathala’s eyes, she would say, working a long blade over her fire. You always imagine Mother the same way: sweat shining on her brow, curls plastered against her neck and cheeks, sparks dancing at her elbows. At her throat glints the amulet you now wear. On her sturdy neck, it was more like a choker, the bright pendant reflecting forge fire. What a delight it was, to look up and see them both there, an assurance that everything was safe; that we had not been forgotten by the gods.

And? What happened?

And one night, when the two moons were glowing bright and beautiful, it came for them: the Moon-Eater, rising out of the ocean, groaning as it ascended over the land. The trees shook and snapped in the force from its beating wings. It had rows and rows of silver teeth, each one as big as the boulders lining the caves of Aman Puli. Its ribbon-like tail was serrated at the edge—here, mother holds up the knife she is sharpening, ridges flashing in incandescent light—and it lifted in a tremulous zigzag, out of the water. When it flickered, a shower of saltwater fell on our rice paddies, our homes. For days after everything smelled of salted fish. Our skin, our hair. Our hands.

You shudder at the idea of a mouth so large it could swallow ten of you in one go.

It rose, and rose. It was every color. We stood transfixed—unable to move, unable to stop it. It sank its jaws into one of our moons, which disappeared down its throat. We saw the shape of our moon roll down the length of the monster’s endless body, shining through those giant scales, while the monster laughed—its laugh like a roar—for it had taken something precious from the children of the earth, and it was delicious: our moon, our suffering. Its great orange eyes trained on the next moon…

“Our moon,” you breathe, and look outside the window, even if it is daytime.

Yes, the moon that remains with us. For just as soon as it had eaten the other moon, the beast could already feel it melting away, like the six it had swallowed in your ancestors’ times… Its hunger was insatiable, and our moons were never meant to last outside the sky. It sank its teeth into our last, final moon, and our hearts lurched in our chests, for we would soon be cast into darkness every sundown…

And then, three things happened at once. The village priestesses, your great-aunts among them, took up a chant. Their voices, straining through panic, rose like cutting knives, and the pitch made the bakunawa blanch, the great moon bobbing out of its jaws. The village warriors began to pitch their spears at the beast. Driven by the chanting, some spears found their mark and pierced the bakunawa’s side. But what little effect it had! The bakunawa merely roared at us, a sound that still rings inside me today (here, her eyes water, though whether it is from the rising smoke or the memory of that cursed night, you know not. She blinks the tears away because her hands are grimy, and continues). What made it stop was not the spears or the magic, but the high, clear voice of Hugan-an, who emerged from her house, to everyone’s shock.

Hugan-an, our precious jewel. Hugan-an of fabled beauty. It was the first time any of us had seen her—those not of her family. For she was a binukot, protected from birth, shielded from view, in order to be as pure and unstained a gift for one suitor most worthy…

She sang a song we did not recognize, with words that she was making up, words that were not handed from our ancestors: leave the moon be, leave my people be, and I will be your bride, Moon-Eater, if it pleases thee. She walked on the sand towards the shoreline, and the priestesses stopped banging on the gongs and kulintang, and held their breath. Her father ran from his house and screamed for her to return. But she was so sure, she was unyielding.

The moon emerged from the serpent’s mouth, fixed itself in the sky, shining brightly, while he dove, and took Hugan-an in his jaws…

Like the moons, she sparkled as she disappeared down its throat. The beast fled back into the sea. We had finally learned the secret of keeping our moons alive, after he had already taken six. And he may never take another, so long as she is his bride…

But how her father sobbed! Despite everything the village gave him, nothing could ever make up for that sacrifice, and he died of heartbreak not long after.

She stops working the blade, and sets the polished steel down. “I pray it does not happen in your lifetime,” Mother says. She is speaking about the return of the Moon-Eater, and the loss of a binukot. Having completed her work of the afternoon, she reaches out to you. Neither of you know that in just a few months, she will be dead from a blood illness. Your living relatives will barter you for coin, and you will become a servant at the house of one such jewel. You nod and press your head against her chest, breathing in her smell: smoke, comfort, a sorrow that has never left.

• • • •

You help Anyag shed her clothes by the river: undoing the pearled clasps of her top, first, then the hooks of her skirt, the soft woven undergarments. You set them aside on the grass, while she removes her earrings, the clips in her hair, the necklace with two thin braids of gold. Jewelry from her family—she is not allowed to wear gifts from her suitors, not yet. Her mother keeps such offerings in trays, stacked in a dining hall cupboard. Pearls the size of lanzones, green gems that mimic the eternal depths of the ocean, ivory cut into intricate starscapes. And letters, love poems, the most delightful or daring of which you read to her in the evenings. It’s a curious game: you choose the words you think will make her fall in love with the suitors you like best (how can you not judge, even knowing it isn’t your place?). You read them to her as sweetly as you can, but lightly, too. Your guilt and shame coalesce with envy, but you never let it leak through your voice.

“I liked that one,” she says sometimes. Sometimes, she says nothing.

Sometimes, she smiles at you in wonder, and something skitters under your skin, a fey creature with too many legs.

What if you were to write her a letter of your own, just to tell her how you feel? No one would know. But you cannot bring yourself to do it. What use would it be, even if she turned to you after and said, I liked that one?

You can’t fall in love with your jewel. You have always known it, but never dreamed it would be a problem. Every time you think you’ve managed to escape your feelings, they flood back. A smile, a look, a sharp word: needles to the heart, as sharp and biting as if you’d been actually stung. You would tell her to stop doing that to you, but she doesn’t mean it, isn’t even aware of it. You know her as no one else does, and this makes you ashamed; this knowledge should not make you love her.

Anyag wades into the river. “Gah!” she says. “It’s cold.”

“You always say that.” You unfurl the cloth and step into the river, up to your ankles, and wait.

After a moment, she says, “Sing for me?”

“Anyag…”

“I’m bored.”

“Only if it’s a duet, then.” You’re toying with your own feelings, pushing the boundaries of what you can bear. You recklessly start the song about three stupid monkeys splashing in the river, and the turtle that outsmarts them all. Anyag joins in, playing the high-pitched parts of the baby monkey and the grumbling murmurs of the turtle. After the last verse, you laugh, expecting her to join in. There’s a pause that makes your heart skip—then she finally does.

“That song never gets old, does it? We’ve been singing it for years.” She pokes you through the cloth. “I’m done.”

You wrap the cloth around her. “Some things never change.”

“Yes. Some things stay the same for a long, long time.” She sighs. There it is: from the moment she said I’m bored, you were expecting this. What a longing she must have, to see more of the world, instead of being locked away. No sun, no other humans, no freedom to wander her own village, except at night, with you keeping watch. Her cage a tower, and you its guard—or is it dragon, fending off any who come to lure her out?

It’s your duty, but sometimes you wonder how much damage you’re actually inflicting. You understand why she’d want more than this, so you say: “Things will change, soon enough. Your presentation is only a few weeks away. I am certain your future husband will show you more of the world.”

“True,” she says. There are countless things unsaid in that true. You string them together in your mind: excitement, eagerness, resignation. A thread of wistfulness—no, that’s only your own hope manifesting. Without warning, she asks: “Will my marriage make you happy?”

“Your happiness is my happiness.”

“That’s not an answer, Amira.” She sounds a bit scolding, and you laugh and tell her it’s true, ignoring how your heart aches. Why does it feel as if both of you are speaking in code tonight?

She dresses herself while you wash her garments. For reasons you cannot fathom there’s a nervous taint to the air between you as there has never been before. Then a thought strikes you: she knows. She knows how you feel, your desires like poison, and she does not know what to do with this knowledge. How to break your heart carefully. How to tell you that what you want is wrong: not only because you are both women, and you are a servant, but most importantly because she does not feel the same. It doesn’t matter, you think desperately, while you twist the cloth to let out water. It changes nothing! Just ignore me. You wish she would understand that you know your own foolishness and want nothing more. Your heart pounds loud enough to drive moon-eaters away.

When she speaks next, however, it’s with her usual nonchalance. “Will you teach me something new tonight?”

You feel your body unspooling from lost tension. “You mean the last verse of the Twenty-two Laments of Matang-ayon?”

“No! You know what I mean.”

She should really be practicing her dancing and singing—she always forgets that last verse, no matter what you do. But ever since you made the mistake of teaching her the sword arts years ago, she has been preoccupied with learning nothing else. As with everything, you cannot say no. That first time, she plucked the dagger from your scabbard, and held it aloft in her fingers, like it was just another offering of fruit. Her eyes grew bright with the possibility of acquiring something that opposed tenderness. Something that let her be powerful rather than delicate. Respected, rather than revered.

You’re skilled at this, aren’t you? You had never shown her, not til then. But you are the blacksmith’s daughter, and even after your mother’s passing, you continued to train with the village warriors. Someday, when you are no longer in the service of Anyag, you plan to join them. And there perhaps find another girl with bright eyes, who can sing silly songs with you, who can actually be yours, if only in secret.

This, at least, is familiar territory. “Of course,” you say. But not out here, where someone might see. She keeps her blade in her fruit bowl, under the mangoes and bananas, the one sweetness you alone can offer: self-protection, even with the hope that she never has to use it.

• • • •

Anyag has a talent for the blade. It might be her quick steps from years of dancing, or the creativity born of being a captive. Tonight she gets in close enough that you strike her on the hip without thinking. She claps her hand to her mouth instantly, muffling a cry. You grip your weapon and crouch next to her, cursing yourself and the tight confines in which you spar. Her skin is hot to the touch. She makes a sound like “Tsst!” through her teeth, then immediately says, “Don’t. Apologize.”

“But it will bruise…”

“No one will see.” She touches your cheek, unaware how you melt. “I’m glad you’re taking me seriously.”

“I always do,” you answer, mock offended. She meets your gaze. Look away, you plead silently, but she does not. In the end, you’re the one that drops your head; she removes her fingers from your face.

The next day you blunt the blades you use to spar. A bruise you can cover; a gash would be too much.

• • • •

There is only one other binukot in your village, and she was married two summers ago—three days after her presentation—thus rescinding her status. Since then the village has hummed with anticipation for Anyag’s own coming-out. It is strange that the person you know best in the world is spoken of with such wonder.

I’ve heard that her hair is darker than black, for it has never seen the sun…

Her skin pale as the sand on the shores of Aman Puli…

When she dances it must be like a diwata gracing our earth…

They look to you, hungry for a tale, some inclination that they are right. You could spin so many threads for them from memory; you wouldn’t even need embellishments. But part of your duty is silence, keeping her a desirable mystery. “She is learning her epics well,” you say. You don’t add: her smile is like cool water after a burning day; her touch a suffering the skin yearns for anyway. You will love her from the moment you lay eyes on her, but even then, not half as much as I do.

You have never spoken to the apid of the other girl. Freed, now, from her bonds, she tends to her family’s farm of root crops. You have sometimes thought of things you would like to ask her: did it hurt, when you said goodbye? Do you ever see her, now that she lives in the home of Seryong Baniig? Do you miss those days of servitude, teaching her poems and brushing her hair, or are you glad they are over? Does your existence now bring you peace?

You fear that her answers will hurt. Not knowing, you are sure, hurts less.

• • • •

A week before Anyag’s presentation, a nobleman sails into town, his ornate boat calmly docked on the beach. He proceeds to your master’s house, standing by the gate with a cool-eyed confidence that hushes the world around him. He has no attendants, which is odd despite your village’s current peacekeeping policies. His robe is a deep blue threaded with silver, large sequins all down the sleeves and back, glinting fiercely in the sunlight. His chin is sharp as cut glass, and his thin lips curl in a resting smirk. There is no doubt what he has come for.

His name is Lisoryo, and he has traveled from far away to make his intentions known.

It’s a hot day when he arrives, and everyone melts in his presence. The other servants preen while they bring him chilled calamansi juice and boiled corn, shaved into a bowl and topped with grated coconut. Before dining, he rolls back his sleeves; your eyes trace the delicate pattern of his tattoos, finely-drawn scales from his elbows to his wrists. He looks up and catches your gaze, and your throat tightens. The lady of the house smiles with her mouth slightly open, so that he can see the gold in her teeth. The master of the house refuses to speak directly with him, as he does every other suitor, but studies the dowry the man has brought in a large wooden chest: six globes the color of no gem you have ever seen, a pearlescent white with shades of gray, beautiful enough to make the heart ache.

“What are they?” Anyag’s mother asks.

“Crystals,” he answers. His voice matches his face: quiet, smooth, with a resonance that gets into your bones. “They were bespelled by a witch in the southern sea, whom I traveled a great distance to barter with. I assure you that it would be impossible to find others like them. During the day they are merely beautiful, but at night, they give off enough light to brighten the whole village. Of course, I would need your daughter’s hand to prove this.” He shuts the chest, with a meaningful snap.

You are called to introduce yourself, and to receive his letter for Anyag. There is not a trace of sweat on him despite the blistering sunlight filtering everywhere. You kneel, your head bent, until he asks you to show your face. A bead of sweat crawls from your hairline to your chin, and his eyes follow it languidly.

“What is your name?”

“Amira, sir.”

“Amira. But you are only a child yourself. Can you polish a jewel and make her sparkle, being so young?” His eyes are the midnight black of the ocean when there is no starlight. Anyag would find them very poetic.

“I descended from a family of smiths and priestesses. We were poor, but I learned to sing the epics before I could speak, and I have sought to enrich my jewel by being her dearest friend.”

“Her dearest friend.” He seems to savor the sound of his own tongue. “How well does your jewel recite her epics, Amira?”

You should lie. Terribly. Her voice breaks above a certain note, and she always forgets her last verse.

“Very well, sir.”

“I look forward to hearing her, then.” He holds out a letter, which you take. His nails are very long, filed nearly to a knifepoint. It must be a foreign custom. This close, you can sense strong magic on him, but not like that of your village, the soil and storms you carry in your blood. His magic is deeper, scavenged from the depths of places you’ve never trespassed, with edges of salt. You tuck the letter into your belt, assure him that Anyag shall read it tonight, and withdraw to a corner of the room, where you wait for the visit to end. It lasts forever, while he describes his realm, his great conquests there, how Anyag will live like a princess beside him, and have her every dream fulfilled. He will stay until her presentation, and he will not back down.

When he finally stands to leave, his eyes find yours again. He smiles, briefly, holding your gaze. For a moment, it feels like you are drowning, as you choke on air, on the knowledge that you’ve lost.

• • • •

Not that she is a prize to be won. The trouble is, you can’t help thinking of her as yours—and yourself as hers. If only you could erase all your memories together. She calls you her best friend, months after you start looking after her. Her last maid, a soft and simple older woman, was let go after she was found with child. Someone your age might be a better companion, so long as you can keep her out of trouble. You are nine and she is seven. Your hands are rough and calloused, and hers are soft as a newborn’s. Your hair is short and curly like your mother’s, while hers comes down to her waist in one shimmering sheet, which she constantly twists into knots.

You are an orphan and have no home, but you come from good blood—despite the disease, of course, but at least it is not transmittable. Your last living great-aunt has you stand before the lord and lady and recite the Twenty-two Laments of Matang-ayon, and then display the first six movements of Soaring Eagle, Claws Outstretched. Afterward they speak to her in quiet tones and hand her a cloth bag that tinkles. They take you in, for your knowledge of blades and epics both; you are promised freedom after Anyag’s presentation, with enough gold to reopen your mother’s forge if you wish. She is a binukot and has no other friends; until her partner is chosen she is to remain in her tower, never to see the sun. She may as well be an orphan: even her parents do not visit her unless necessary. You are lonely and she is lonely, mirrors to each other, as you walk the same black pool of wondering why you exist.

You do not like her then, but you understand duty. Looking after Anyag is a distraction you can direct all your efforts to, numbing enough that you don’t have to think about loss.

“Amira? Why do you call me your jewel?” In the candlelight her eyes are luminous. She is missing one of her front teeth. You are writing out an epic poem together, and she is already bored.

“Because that’s what you are.” Stories are easy, and they give life order, a piece of driftwood to cling to in the storm of grief. But even stories must be accurate. “Because that’s what you must be, for you are a binukot.”

“So what are you?”

You blink in surprise. No one has shown this much interest in you, not since mother.

“Me? I’m your… hmm. I teach you what I know. I stay with you, and protect you from bad things.”

She pokes her tongue through the gap in her teeth. “Hmm. Sword,” she says.

“What?”

“You’re my sword, then. I am your jewel, and you are my sword.” It is so simple and easy; it must be true. “Amira, my sword,” she repeats, sing-song, while reaching for your hand. Twining her fingers in yours, you have a feeling of finding purchase on land at last. Belonging, if not to this fine house, than at least to this room, this girl.

In the years that follow those words become your guide. The promise you will keep until you can keep it no longer. The ache you carry every time you are near her and not.

• • • •

“What’s wrong?” she asks, seconds after opening the door. You curse how easily she can read you.

“It was very hot today. I couldn’t train like I wanted.” To distract her, you take the letter from your basket and hold it up. “A new suitor came, from far away. This is for you.”

“Did you not like him?”

What you think doesn’t matter. You did not miss the long look your lord and lady exchanged, after he left; how your master touched his wife’s arm, while she bent and murmured how this suitor lived so far away. He embraced her, and said perhaps that was for the best. “He brought a beautiful dowry—magic crystals the like of which I’d never seen. And he had fine robes, and the most intricate tattoos, like fish scales on his forearms.” You start laying out dinner: rice porridge with two teaspoons of salted fish, a lighter meal for this final week that the lady insists on, so that Anyag may appear irresistibly slim at the time of her presentation. Anyag used to complain, but does no longer. She understands inevitability.

You try not to watch her reading the letter, as you pour out mint tea, then slice a mango lengthwise and crosswise.

She folds it, frowning. The moon tonight is faint; in the faded candlelight you can’t tell if she is blushing or not.

Silence gnaws holes into the air until you ask: “What did you think?”

She glances at you, and you are chilled by her look—piercingly remote, as haughty as she must be on her presentation day. Already not yours. But she was never yours.

“What does it matter to you, what I think?”

You could say nothing, but she has asked you a question, and in delivering that look it’s as if Anyag has reminded you of your place, which she has not done except in the rarest of moments. Suddenly you are seized with a desire to end everything, tonight. If you break your own heart, at least no one else has that option: not the gorgeous Lisoryo, or the lord and lady, or Anyag herself. You tip your head in apology. “I shouldn’t have asked. It does not concern me.”

“Right.” Anyag exhales, then puts the letter away and takes her seat for dinner, not looking at you. You eat together in stony silence. This is safer. If she is angry the next week will be easier—saying goodbye, parting ways. You are thinking so hard about what you’ll do once the presentation is over that you almost don’t hear her saying: “I’m your shackle. I keep you bound here, and it makes you suffer. You think I haven’t noticed, how you drag your feet around me, how your eyes are always blank and faraway? How you don’t talk to me anymore?” She scrapes her spoon around her bowl, voice thin. “I know you can’t wait for this to be over. But I wish you could still pretend to care about me, at least until then.”

Your lips part, through your shock. “I do care—”

“Because you’re my sword.” Her eyes are ablaze. She isn’t sad; she’s angry. “Because it’s your duty. Well, it won’t be for much longer.” She smiles then, a different smile than every other night. You realize that for all her lighthearted banter and dreaminess and passion for practicing with a dagger, Anyag is brittle; she’s been crumbling away in the furnace of what’s about to happen, and you were too wrapped up in misery, too busy protecting yourself, to notice. Anyag drops her spoon into the bowl. She has not touched her food. “Amira. I am going to be wed to a stranger. I am moving from this cage to another, more elaborate prison. You will be freed, at last, but not me. Not me.”

Her eyes brim with tears. She turns her head, because your jewel—your best friend, princess, home—has always been proud. At once your choices, safety—your wreck of a heart don’t matter. You skirt the table and fall to your knees beside her. You wrap your arms around her. She pushes you away.

“Don’t act,” she says.

“I’m not acting.”

She keeps shoving you back, her hand on your collarbone. “Then answer: What does it matter to you?”

It matters because I love you. Because I can’t bear to let anything hurt you. Because I have no choice, because it won’t make a difference, and I am weak. I could only ever teach you weakness.

Words escape you. In the end, the answer is in your swiftly pounding heart, your fingers threading through her hair til they rest at the top of her skull to turn her face towards you, ignoring how she pushes her elbows against your chest. You look into her burning eyes, lean in close. You press your lips to hers, still distantly hoping she’ll hate you afterward, so that you can take the years of falling for her and coil them into a ball in your chest and say goodbye to them forever. At the same time you are hoping she understands what you’re trying to tell her: you never wanted this; she is the most precious thing to you and you are a coward; your only hope is that somehow you can still make things right.

Anyag freezes. She stops pushing, and the lack of force makes you fall against her. Your hands splay on either side of her, clutching the table for balance; your heart thuds against hers. You pull away, ready to slice yourself open with your dagger if she asks—maybe even if she doesn’t.

“Amira,” she says, quietly. “Do you mean that?”

You nod. Tears crowd your eyes, but you don’t let them fall; you’ve shown enough weakness, tonight.

Anyag sighs. She places her thumb on your mouth, feels your lips tremble beneath her touch. When she smiles, it’s different than before—weary and gentle, like she knows how easily she can break you.

“Then let’s fight for our freedom,” she whispers. “Yours and mine.”

• • • •

Did you ever hope for it before?

No—it’s not like you. You stick to what you know. The stories you shared, the songs your great aunts burned into your memory, the poems you and Anyag made up together. Not once did you speak of freedom. The word carries with it so much weight, even as it edges tantalizingly close to betrayal—and misery, even, for if things go wrong you could lose everything.

Why had you never dreamt of it? Why did you never think you could possess it, too?

Of course Anyag has dreamed of freedom; has been thinking of this since forever.

She has never seen the blue sky or the sun, yet her visions for the horizon extend much farther than you could ever fathom. She sees a world that has no limits, a world even you could own.

• • • •

It will only work, Anyag says, once they believe she has left with her new husband. The best time to escape is following the marriage feast, just before they set sail; to save face, he will not dare to let anyone know that his bride has left him, and her parents will not have to bear the burden of shame. By then the other suitors will have departed and the town will be muzzy from three days of drinking.

“And how do you know who you’ll leave with?”

She smiles. “Isn’t it obvious? He must be the one my parents admired best, for his dowry and conquests and confidence. You must choose.”

When Lisoryo returns, you have a letter for him. Dear Night Sky, dear Veil, hear me. A lullaby aches in my rib cage. Today, I am a dovecote, and there are songbirds cooing inside, twittering, goldened, precious. How they all at once alight as I open my body to your waning autumn moon. I am waiting for you to fill me.

You watched Anyag write it out, grinning at her own audacity. “You think he’ll believe it?” she asked.

“Powerful men never doubt themselves,” you answered. “Take care not to let the ink bleed through.”

He receives the letter with a knowing smile, but does not open it in front of you. He thanks you, then asks if you might sing for him.

You have no idea what to do with his request, except comply. “Will a verse from The Twenty-two Laments of Matang-ayon suffice, sir?”

“More than.”

Feeling caught and foolish, you sing verse eight, about Matang-ayon’s sojourn to the Eastern Valley of the Sky, to seek the hand of the bride of darkness. His ankle is caught between two grinding bits of cloud, and his flesh tears, but he does not cry, for he is a hero.

As you sing you feel Lisoryo’s magic reach for yours, sly and searching; you divert it gently, as if you do not know what you are doing. Anyag always wanted to meet other sorcerers to exchange stories with. He is dangerous, not only because of his face and his wealth. You finish the song, and he breathes in, satisfied.

“You could come with us,” he says evenly. “There’s always a need for more beauty in my garden. You could make yourself useful with the palace’s defense—and you would have all the training you desire, for your sword arm and your magic, both.” He licks his lips. “Besides, I’m sure the jewel would love to have the one who first polished her quite near.”

You don’t bare your teeth, but you can’t return his smile, not even as a lie. “Thank you, sir. But I know where my place is.”

“The offer stands.” He clasps your shoulder, briefly. The tips of his nails dig lightly into your skin; you fail not to shudder.

The rest of the afternoon, while he is eclipsing the other suitors who are making their case for Anyag’s hand, you play the part of a good steward, standing silent in the corner. While he is waxing poetic about his domain by the sea and the vast riches of his people, you imagine how just days from now, you will make a break for freedom. You will leave in the dark, with no witness but the moon—customary for you two, but next time, it will be different. The day after, when the sun rises, Anyag will not have to hide, and you can watch together, hand in hand.

• • • •

After practice that evening, out of breath from dancing and sparring, Anyag asks, “For how long?”

You wipe your sweat, not really attending. “Hmm?”

She’s not looking at you, so you don’t see her expression. “For how long have you loved me?”

Your face, already warm, turns hot. There’s no simple answer. You’ve spent half your life looking after her, memorizing every note in her laugh, the way her eyes grow glassy when she’s ill, how she has grown more distant from her parents with the passing years (“They don’t see me, Amira, not the way you do”). You’ve adjusted the cant of her hips in the middle of a song, the way she holds a knife, the words she breezily recites: Abya Malana, Matang-ayon’s temporary lover, cannot look him in the eye, for she is afraid the looking will render her speechless. And without her words he will see her truly, and find her incomplete…

That first year together, when you were weary and grieving, you once awoke from a nightmare to find your face against her chest. She was stroking your hair, as your mother had done before she fell ill. “It’s all right,” she said, the once momentous gap of your stations rendered to nothing. “You can cry. It doesn’t matter here.” You couldn’t even apologize, broken as you were, and you sobbed instead, on this girl who was much smaller than you, saving embarrassment for the morning after. She only laughed and said it was nothing.

You loved her then, but as your only friend, your reason to keep going. It’s different than now. You don’t know how it turned into this. One day you looked at her and she was brighter and more beautiful than anyone had a right to be, and something in you begged to keep her just a while longer. That was when you knew to be afraid.

This girl knows too well how to play with your feelings, but you’ve known her for just as long. You want to make her heart beat faster too—it’s not lost on you, that she didn’t kiss you back, that she doesn’t trust your loyalty—to her? Or to her parents, your masters?

You are trying not to hope that freedom necessarily means together, but how will you know for sure? You reach out and grasp her arm.

“Will you believe me if I said always?”

She shakes her head, grinning. “You once threatened to spank me if I made a joke instead of concentrating! Abya Malana, Matang-ayon’s temporary lover,” she repeats, sing-song, even as you pull her towards you and hold her. “Cannot look him in the eye, for she is afraid the looking will render her speechless…”

“Is that what you’re doing right now?” Her head is against your shoulder; you smooth her hair, as you’ve done countless times before (but not like this. Not like this). “Not looking at me?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve loved you for a long time, my salt and stone, my ivory bone. And I will keep on doing so, and hurting for it, won’t I?”

She kisses your shoulder, a drawn-out motion that makes everything in you tingle. She kisses your neck, your cheek. Your nerves are strung so tight, you are certain one inhalation will break you apart. She touches her lips to your ear. “Maybe,” she murmurs, and you are too breathless to reply, too ablaze with want to be angry.

• • • •

The presentation is a story. Like a story, it has a beginning and an end.

The drums start when the sun goes down, the kulintang blending in after a few beats. Anyag’s parents have spared no expense, and the entire village comes to witness the spectacle. In the first few years after Hugan-an’s sacrifice, the village feared for their binukot, for the coming of the bakunawa. But that was countless seasons ago, and the moon remains, and the monster has become one terror your people do not fear. The young maiden’s death, still recent enough to be in the memory of some, has become the stuff of legends. With it has come the elevation of every other binukot: their purity, talent, and beauty are such that even celestial beings—monsters, no one says—are content with them forever. If you take a binukot as a bride, then surely you are blessed by the gods.

There are seven suitors in total, arrayed in a half-circle, waiting for Anyag to make her entrance—but everyone’s gaze is on Lisoryo, who has come wearing a silver band that sits like a crown upon his brow, black paint lined sharply around his eyes. His robes graze the sand even when he stands. The lord and lady sit on rattan chairs with golden embellishments, decked in their best finery, faces impassive as they survey the gathered crowd. The sun melts into the sea, and the sky turns from red gold to pink, to blue.

The other servants light lamps. The drums slow, and soften.

Now the cast is in place, save the main character. At the door to Anyag’s tower, you hold a lit torch. With your other hand you touch Mother’s amulet, begging her spirit to be with you, even if what you are doing may be wrong.

Behind you, Anyag breathes out to steady herself.

“Are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” she says. Quiet and firm. “Stay with me, no matter what happens, Amira.”

You reach back and twine your fingers together. You listen to the drums. For a minute you are afraid, then you remember to trust her, your worry dissipating.

“Yes, my jewel.”

You rehearsed this moment so many times in moonlight, walking in a secluded area of the beach. You practiced the movements in her room, with all the furniture pushed to the sides. Watch your feet, you’d tell her, and she’d laugh and shove at you and do it worse, just to hear you mutter in frustration. She does none of that now, regal and delicate as she emerges from behind you and stands, blinking, in the light of your torch. Theatrically, she removes her veil. The crowd murmurs, gasps running from mouth to mouth so that it sounds like the wind whistling.

Anyag descends the steps of her tower while you keep pace behind her, so that your firelight barely brushes her skin. She carries the tapestry she completed last season—one with a great eagle soaring over the sea, the moon hanging above everything. As she walks to the half-circle where she will perform you step away, standing just beyond the ring of lanterns; despite everything, your heart is bursting for her to do this well, this moment you’ve spent years over, the moment to take their breath away. It is the one gift you can give this village, before you betray it. The crowd hushes. The only sound besides the steady thump of the drums is her anklets, stacked so that they ring like bells with every step. She spreads her tapestry on the sand, so that all can see it and marvel: the delicate weave of color, the intricate story that her hands have brought to life. She straightens, and stares every suitor in the eye, briefly. She takes her longest with Lisoryo, their respective gazes magnetic, and the moment stretches tight: a breath held long enough to suffocate.

Then she smiles, the proud smile of an enchantress who knows the power she commands, and she raises one arm to cover her face. She stretches out one leg. The gong sounds, and she begins to dance.

She’s not perfect—no one is, or can be.

But she’s breathtaking. Close enough to a diwata that no spell, no song, would get her closer. There’s a moment when the lady, her mother, looks at you and nods. Pride swells through you. Anyag lifts her arms, and your heart is dragged with them; she rolls her shoulders, and you are out to sea; she smiles, and you are not here.

With a start you remember that it’s not her you should be watching. You glance at Lisoryo. He is resting his chin on one hand, long fingers obscuring his mouth, but his eyes never leave her. In the glare from the lanterns they are no longer fathomless black pits; instead they reflect the gold at her wrists and ankles, the haze of gentle fire. You recognize desire, kindling. It’s the suggestiveness of the song, calling a warrior to sweet rest: Buyi-Lahin closed his eyes, leaning on the fair maiden Ka Bigtuang’s lap, and slept for a thousand days…

The music stops. The crowd cries, expressing their admiration, their awe. Anyag stands before her parents and kneels, her forehead nearly touching the sand, until her mother says: “Rise, my jewel.” She goes to them and kisses their brows. The firelight illuminates the sweat on her skin. The suitors, shaken from their stupor, stand and wait for her approach. Over her father’s shoulder, she catches your eye—and winks. She’s excited and fearless, exhilarated from her victorious performance, and you can almost hear her think: we’ve got them. With this, it begins.

• • • •

They give her away that same evening. There is no argument —there never is—but her choice freely coincides with theirs, which is all anyone can hope for. The other suitors understand how this goes; they are gracious in their defeat, and will travel to other islands to find their wives. As they are leaving, Lisoryo and Anyag exchange their first pleasantries, where the lord can see them. You are summoned by the lady and instructed to pack up her meager belongings, for the newlyweds will sail tomorrow, just after noon.

“Tomorrow?” You had expected the festivities to continue for a day or two longer, for the wedding feast to come in the traditional three days, after which you would immediately depart, leaving her husband behind.

“Master Lisoryo has been away from his domain for more than a week now; we agreed it best to have them sail immediately, given the potential for storms, and so that Anyag will start her new life—with joy and excitement.” The lady falters. You consider possible liabilities: she has no love for this village, and though she cares for her family, the only thing Anyag can truly be concerned for is—you. You swallow and nod, hoping your lady thinks it only extends to this—the tearful goodbye between sisters, dear friends.

“Then the wedding ceremony will be…”

“In the morning. At first light.”

“Understood, my lady.” If the wedding ceremony is tomorrow, then she will sleep at the foot of her parents’ bed tonight, as is custom. So you will have to approach in darkness, and hope that Anyag has realized as much as you. Hope that she hasn’t forgotten your plans in the glare of admiration and longing that Lisoryo casts her way—for when you look at them again she is staring at him with an expression close to heartbreak.

• • • •

You’ve packed everything you need. Both her dagger and yours are in your belt. It is past midnight, and there is no time left to second-guess things. You leave the servant’s quarters for the main house, and creep to the room of your lady and master, praying to find her outside the door. She isn’t. You wait; perhaps she has simply gone to sleep—or maybe she has decided, at the last, not to run away. After the seconds become unbearable you push the door open, gently. On the bed lie your lady and master. There is no sign of Anyag on the cot next to theirs.

You will yourself not to panic, but know immediately where you must go. You race for the shore, running faster when you see Lisoryo, and Anyag beside him, walking with her head bent. They are almost at his boat.

“Stop!”

Lisoryo’s expression is somewhere between disgust and gloating. Anyag’s eyes grow wide, then harden. “Stay away!” she yells, but you don’t listen, you run right up to them even as you wonder what you will do—separate the couple? Threaten his life? Then the village would have you beaten with bamboo rods, and branded for your insolence. But you are fueled by instinct now, and your hand flies to the knife at your side.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving with my husband. It is no concern of yours.”

“What did he tell you?” She wouldn’t do this, not for no reason, your Anyag wouldn’t—

“I owe you no answers. Don’t talk as if you own me,” she says, coldly. “Leave us.” A slap to your face would have been kinder. You look at her eyes, searching for any enchantment, and find none—only steely determination. Your heart crumbles like soil squished in a fist.

“I’m tired of waiting, my bride,” Lisoryo drawls. He inspects his long fingernails.

“We’re going,” she says shortly, and turns away.

“Anyag—” You grab her arm. Lisoryo sighs, steps forward, and backhands you so that you sprawl on the sand. You are surprised by his strength. When you blink up at him, head starry with pain, you are further surprised by his narrow eyes and the way his teeth are sharp within his smile—sharp as his fingernails; sharp as a dragon’s fangs. The amulet at your throat begins to burn with a memory, of standing on the shore to see one moon gulped down, then another…

“You’re…

“Oh, have I been found out? There are too many clever girls in this village.”

In a flash you are on your feet. You will die for striking a man unarmed, but you are certain that he is no man. You try to slash him across the side, but he merely sidesteps and kicks you hard in the stomach. You drop to your knees.

“Master Lisoryo.” Anyag’s voice wavers. “Come now, you said you would harm no one.”

You cough out spit and blood. “Anyag! He’s not human!”

He laughs. “Human? No, but after taking the sacrifice of a human maiden I learned the shape and sounds of one, the simple artifice, the cues I need to make you believe. How I loved Hugan-an—her skin, her hair, the exquisite sweetness of her marrow… but the last of her radiance is gone, and I hunger once again.” He seizes your face. “Your precious jewel knows, slave. The only thing that has given me patience is how delicious I know she will be. You’ve heard the story. You know her song.” His fingers dig into your cheek and you are unable to move, your breath coming short. You do know this song; you know how it must end.

“Don’t hurt her,” Anyag says.

“Oh, don’t barter, beloved. You have nothing to threaten me with.”

Your blade is tight in your fist and you lunge up to take another swipe, at his neck this time—he jerks his head away, but you get him across the cheek, a fine tear that drips a single trickle of black blood. He sighs.

“I pity you, how you forget to be afraid. But I suppose hope is one of the best seasonings, for humans.”

You don’t see him move, but suddenly there’s a searing pain in your stomach—you cry out, your nerves buzzing as he kicks the side of your head and stomps on your knee. You touch your stomach, and your hand comes away wet with blood; you cough out spit that tastes of copper. He didn’t strike anything vital, though there are sparks in the corners of your vision that you try to blink away, as you scramble to your knees—but Anyag is standing before you, face tilted up to the man who is also a moon-eater.

“Enough,” Anyag says. “It’s me you want, isn’t it? If you’re starving so badly, why don’t you take me now?”

“Well, if you were in a hurry, dearest, you should have said so! There is no need of this filthy skin, then.” The glamour begins to slip from him, his skin turning to scales, melting into the midnight blue of his robe, as he grows and grows—

“Anyag!”

“Don’t.” She looks back at you, her eyes hot with tears. “You shouldn’t have followed, so you wouldn’t have to know. I must do this, Amira. See to your wound. Do not die.”

“No!” You watch in horror as he bends into a monster behind her, lashing out his enormous tail, eclipsing the moon. She turns to face him and mouths the song that will be her requiem: “Leave the moon be, leave my people be—”

She does not even finish before he snaps his jaws around her. You scream and scream as he takes to the sky.

• • • •

There’s a moment, watching him spiral upwards, through the haze of your disbelief, that you realize what a story this will make: how Anyag saved your village, how like Hugan-an she made the most perfect sacrifice so that you all may have light, so that you may keep your moon. And there would be no pain this time, for no one but you would know. Everyone else would think that they had simply stolen away in the night: newlyweds so in love, unable to wait. If he spoke true words, his next visit would not be in your lifetime.

Then you remember the brightness of possibility, when Anyag asked if you would fight for freedom. You did not raise a jewel just to watch her die; even if this is how the legend goes, you cannot let it end like this.

His long tail has just left the ground; you leap up, run forward, and stab your dagger into it as hard as you can, chanting for power through the blood in your mouth, as your feet leave the earth. The bakunawa flicks its tail but you’ve wrapped one arm around it now, the other still pressing down as hard as you can with your dagger, drawing blood in thick black gouts. For nothing will you let go, not the world. You are calm in the depths of your sorrow, and if Anyag is dead, then at least you don’t have to live without her—at least you tried.

The bakunawa screeches, all human speech gone, as you sail over the ocean—it coils around you, wind rushing. When you turn your head you see the dark depths of its throat, the bright jagged line of its teeth, closing around you. You wrench your knife from its flesh. There’s a snap as air and wind and noise disappear. You fall into nothing.

• • • •

You reach out blindly with your dagger, and catch onto something—a distended piece of flesh, somewhere in its long throat. The creature bucks, seizes, and your head rattles, but you drag yourself onto the ridge of bone, rolling away from the edge. You gasp, savoring the air—it reeks of the ocean and decay, but you can breathe in here. The flesh is soft beneath you, slimy but not acidic like you’d imagined, and you roll onto your knees, shaking. The inside of the beast is massive, but the place you’ve landed seems to be solid, at least, living flesh pulsing beneath you. You blink, trying to let your eyes adjust to the darkness, but there’s no light save the dim steel of your blade.

How did he consume Hugan-an? Did he take his last bride below the sea, and spit her out, and eat her bit by bit, to suffer? Or did she live out her life in this dark cavern, alone and starving, eventually fading away to nothing?

How will you find Anyag here? You remove your top and wrap it around your waist, to staunch the bleeding. Your desperation, and the last vestiges of your magic, can only go so far.

“Anyag!” you shout. It echoes back at you, dismal, desperate. “Anyag! I’m here!”

Nothing. Your heart quavers. At least you still have your weapon. Perhaps you can still find the beast’s heart, and slay it, before dying. At least you won’t have to wait long, if she’s truly gone.

Then, from somewhere behind you, a faint echo: “Amira?”

“Anyag!” Cautiously you stand, wary of falling back into the pit of the monster’s insides; you turn and reach out, but there’s only emptiness. You turn and walk deeper in, one hand pressed over your nose to avoid the dizzying stench, the other stretched out before you, searching. “I’m coming!”

You walk blindly into the dark, grasping the air, until your hand collides with something—another hand, a set of fingers. They twine with yours, shivering, the movement uncannily familiar. A sharp intake of breath, a stuttered cry—and then your arms wrap around each other, even in this place that might be your grave. You grip her tightly, like she might turn into nothing the minute you loosen your hold on her. Her fingers dig into your bare back, trembling. Blood slicks your arms, gashes from where his teeth grazed her (but didn’t snap her apart—he wanted to savor it—he said as much). She’s alive. She’s whole.

“You fool,” she sobs into your chest. “What are you doing here? I told you to stay behind. Your wound—”

“It’ll heal,” you say, hoping it will be true. “I promised to stay with you, remember?”

She barks out a laugh, and pulls back slightly. “Then we’ll both die here?”

“I won’t let you die.” You wish you had a light to see her by, but all you have is this familiar sensation; her cheeks beneath your fingers, wet with tears. You rest your thumbs on the corners of her mouth, feel her lips part, searching for words. Anyag has always known what to say, but caught here without hope, even she might hesitate.

Her arms slide slowly down your back, and loop around your waist. She exhales. “Then I won’t let you die, either.”

You remain standing like that, holding each other, for a moment. Then you step back and fumble at your belt, unlatch her dagger and press it into her hand. “We have these,” you say. She holds her dagger tightly, considering. You skim her arm, feeling for cuts, and she stops you by clutching your hand—no need. I’m fine. She makes a thoughtless humming sound, as if you are merely in the dark of her room and not in the belly of a monster.

A sudden thought crosses your mind—a flicker of possibility. You hum with her, letting the idea take shape. You have nothing better, and neither of you dare wait—already you could be sinking into the sea, miles away from where anyone can save you. You have to try.

“We can change her song,” you say. “We can make a new one. Just as Hugan-an did, that time.”

“But my magic isn’t—”

“We have to try.” You’re both more comfortable with swords than with spellwork, but against the bakunawa, brute force will get you nowhere. Anyag nods, keeping quiet. You sense her thinking, determining how to lay down the words, what to sing so that you might live, or if not, take this monster with you in your perishing.

“Bathala,” she starts, her voice thin and shaky. “I, your humble daughter, have nothing to offer—”

But I raise my eyes to you, beseeching, my arms uplifted, reaching—

I call on you to fill me with your light

That I might take this blade and shatter darkest night…

You take the thread of her chant, her magic, and weave it into yours—just as you first guided her hands to mimic a dove’s wings, taught her to swing a sword—but this is her power, her right for the sacrifice of becoming binukot. She is destined for this.

And you have been singing together for years.

You repeat the words, join your free hands, feel power thrum through both of you. The sensation of warmth flares around your neck—your mother’s amulet, her anting-anting, alighting, the last gasp of protection from your blood relatives responding to this plea as you shut your eyes and beg, beg, beg—for you deserve to live, too, you deserve a chance at joy. Not everything has to be a sacrifice. On your third round of the song, something changes. You open your eyes and there is light in the darkness, a bright fire, dancing over both of you, crackling, growing—

Your song begins to echo. You don’t dare stop singing it, but another voice joins it, then another, and another, each note different, some a throaty hum, others at a pitch higher than humanly possible—a melody of moons, and the spirit of a girl who gave her everything to save a village and would give no more, not this time.

Has he heard you? Bathala listens and does not in turn, and anyone invoking him knows that. One must accept what fate rolls out in due course, inexorable as the ocean and the slow growth of trees, the tide drawn in and out, the shape of a song that has been carried in a heart for years and years at last finding itself…

The light collecting above you spirals down into your blade. You keep singing as you hold the blade out, no longer a simple kalis but a beautiful kampilan, curved and deadly, sparking fierily, then growing longer and larger until it is a giant shaft of light.

You see Anyag’s face at last. Her eyes are scrunched, set with her will to fight: one answered prayer among so many abandoned, one dim ember sparked to flare all of your guttering hopes. Her hand in yours tightens; in the other is her blade, and you see that it is now a burning pillar of light as well.

Then Anyag’s eyes snap open and she nods, bidding you to strike. You face opposite directions, determined to slay the beast together. You arch your arm, and thrust with all your might into the darkness, throwing the light, pushing your magic out as far as you can—the amulet at your neck explodes, and the wound in your gut opens wider—but you do not let go, Anyag’s hand clutched tightly in yours, her voice high and clear above all the others.

The world wrenches apart, the floor beneath you gives way. You free-fall in the midst of the wildest screeching, a scream so inhuman and endless that your head feels like its tearing. But light is spilling through—and air—and the sound of the ocean, and drums beating. You are not beneath the sea at all—you are still in the sky. Just as you two were fighting a battle inside of the beast, the village was doing its best outside of it. Your sphere of light keeps growing, extending from both ends of the hilt now, splitting the beast apart around you, until its scream is cut off and you close your eyes against the glare of light, brace yourself for an endless fall. Only then do you stop singing.

You aren’t expecting Anyag’s hand to find yours, as you drop through the air, still trapped in the gutted neck of the bakunawa. But it does, and you are only a little surprised as you curl your fingers together.

• • • •

The first thing you see is Anyag’s face, fractured through your bloody vision. Her hands rest on your stomach, sealing the wound with the last of her newly strengthened magic. Everything hurts, but you’re alive.

“My jewel.” Your voice is cracked, having spent it all in spell and song. You lift one hand and she grips it, weakly.

Behind her floats the moon. You are lying in the carcass of the moon-eater. You are floating in the ocean to the beat of drums.

You don’t dare hope that you are free.

“Amira,” she answers, and her smile is bittersweet: she has grown up, so impeccably, and it has nothing and everything to do with you, of who you are together. “Don’t call me that. When we leave this place, I can be your jewel no longer. And you cannot be my sword. It won’t work.”

Your heart splinters, a loss as distinct as your mother’s amulet, now an empty piece of string around your neck.

“I refuse to be something you must take care of and defend at every turn. I want to stand with you on even footing, and face you freely. Rather than your jewel, let me be your shield, for I can protect you. I cannot honor that unless you do.”

You ease yourself up so that you are sitting. You do not touch her face, but you press your forehead to hers, look her in the eye. “Have I ever said no to you?”

She grins. “Yes. Lots of times.”

Fair enough. You don’t know what it will mean, to be together after this. You’ve never known a life where you don’t feel beholden to her, simultaneously paving her way and blending into her shadow; where your hopes aren’t tethered to hers by default. “It won’t be easy for me.”

“I know. But you’re good at difficult things.”

You nod, and her smile goes from tentative to delighted. There will be time enough in the future to determine how things must be: where you will live, how. What to say to her parents. What songs you will sing. Bathala is not known to bestow favors twice, and you already know your future cannot be in this village. But for now. For now. None of that matters.

Anyag turns her face slightly, so that half of it is cast in moonlight.

“I want to see the sunrise,” she says. “It’ll be my first.”

“Okay.”

She leans into you, and you do the same, balancing each other out in your exhaustion. Right now, you have all the time in the world. Time enough to watch the moon melt into the horizon, and wait for the sun to appear, as blindingly bright as its promise of tomorrow.

(Author’s Note: The lines in the letter Anyag writes to Lisoryo (Dear Night Sky, dear Veil…) are from Barbara Jane Reyes’s poem “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores 2” from the collection Diwata, published by Boa Editions in 2010. I received the author’s permission to include the lines in the piece, with credit.)

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is https://isabelyap.com.

A World to Die For
By Tobias S. Buckell

Your hunting party of repurposed, cobbled together and barely-repaired pre-Collapse electric vehicles sweeps across the alkaline rich dust flats of old farm land. The outriders are kicking up rooster tails of dust into the air behind them, their bikes scudding over the dirt and slamming hard into every divot and furrow. Pennants whip about in the air.

You’re glad to be on the top of a pickup with suspension, ass in a sling, feet shoved hard against the baseplate of the machine gun mounted right up against the back of the cab. You’ve been an outrider before, trying to balance a shotgun on the handlebars of the bike without wiping out. You didn’t like it.

The outriders might get more respect, but there’s a reason they wear all those heavy leathers, padding, faded old football helmets, and other chunks of scavenged gear.

“There she is!” Miko leans out from the passenger-side door and bangs on the roof of the cab to get your attention away from the outriders and pointed front. “Get ready.”

Up ahead, through the bitter clouds of dirt that seep around the edges of your respirator, is the black line of the old Chicago tollway. You reach forward and yank a latch on the machine gun, pulling one of the large-caliber bullets into the chamber with a satisfying ratchet sound.

The seventy-year-old gun has been lovingly maintained since the Collapse. It has seen action in the Sack of Indianapolis, spat fury down upon the Plains Raiders, and helped in the defense of the Appalachian Line. You look down the sights, ignoring the massive ox horns and assorted animal skulls bolted onto your truck’s hood.

Your quarry is ahead. A convoy of trucks pulling hard for places out further East. Their large, underinflated balloon tires fill the potholes and scars of the old expressway as they trundle on at a dangerous thirty-five miles an hour. It’s axle-breaking speed, a sprint across the country in hopes that they can smash any MidWest Alliance blockades without paying import/export duties.

Fuckers. As if they could just roll across a state for free. Now they’ll pay a lot more than just a ten percent transit fee.

“Cheetah cluster: right flank,” Miko screams over the screech of old suspension and the rumble of tires. He is still hanging out of the door, and he points and throws command signs at other drivers. He’s ripped his respirator off and left it to dangle around his neck. “Dragon cluster, left. Cougars for the front.”

Your cluster of vehicles splits off to swing behind the convoy’s dust trail, the world turning into a fog of black dirt and amber highlights, and you fall in on the right like a vulture. Enemy outriders split off from the convoy to harass the impending clusters, but they are outnumbered. Shotguns crack through the air, people scream.

In moments the security around the convoy peels off, uninterested in paying for cargo with any further lives. They’ve done their paid duty—they can head back in honor to whoever hired them.

“Do it,” Miko orders you. He pulls his respirator back on, and now he’s all green eyes and blonde hair over the edge of the cracked rubber. He’s the commander. You’ve risen far following in his footsteps. Maybe one day you’ll run a cluster, give commands to your own outriders. You’ve been tasting ambition like that, of late.

To survive, you need to find the right people to follow. Miko has created a strong pack. The fees you pull from what little cross-country traffic still trickles over the road keeps you all fed, the respirators fixed, and batteries in stock.

You lean back and pull the trigger.

The old Browning destroys the world with its explosive howl. You rake the tires of the trucks as Ann, the driver, moves the pickup along the convoy in an explosion of acceleration.

All three of the oversized vehicles shudder to a halt. Ann brings the pickup to a sliding stop, dirt and chunks of the old highway rattling up to kick the undersides of the old vehicle.

Miko steps out, shotgun casually slung over his shoulder.

Everyone’s expecting the drivers to come out of the truck cabs with hands up. But instead there’s a loud groan from the trailers. Miko swings the shotgun down into his hands and aims it up at the sound.

The sides of the middle trailer fall open and slam to the ground. Houz Shäd shock troops in their all-black armor are crouched behind sandbags and a pair of fifty-caliber machine guns.

You’re all dead.

But instead of getting ripped apart by carrot-sized bullets, one of the Shäd shouts through a loudspeaker, “We seek information from you, and only information. Drop your weapons and live. You’ll even be allowed to keep them. In fact, give us what we seek and your cluster can take the entire shipment of solar panels in trucks one and three.”

Miko drops his shotgun.

You push away from the machine gun, hands in the air, wondering what happens next.

The Shäd jump down from the trailer, greatcoats flaring out behind them. Their deep-black machine guns seem to soak up the amber light. There’s a storm brewing up north, you can tell. You will all need to run before it, get down underground before the tornados touch down and begin ravaging everything.

“Remove your ventilators,” the nearest Shäd gestures. “Kneel in a row.”

Your mouth is dry. This is an execution line and you know it. Bullshit promises aside. People like the merchant riders of Shäd view the continent as a place they should be able to trade across. They view clusters as “raiders” and not the customs agents you know yourselves to be.

But instead of walking behind you, the Shäd spread out in front of the line, moving from member to member. They’re holding out photographs in their gloved hands, looking closely at each member of our cluster through mirrored visors.

The nearest Shäd approaches. Those ventilators they wear are not just the usual air purifiers, you realize. They’re connected to oxygen bottles on their hips. You’ve never been close enough to see that before. “We are looking for someone,” the Shäd says through his mask.

The fuck? All this over an MIA? People go missing in the middle countries all the time.

“This is her picture. We have been told she may be called Chenra, or Chenray. Have you seen her?”

You glance left, blood going cold, because that’s your name. Miko stares at the ground and shakes his head. Ann, her long black hair tangled up in ventilator straps, shrugs. Cheetah cluster won’t rat you out.

But why the hell are shock troopers from Hauz Shäd hunting you? You’ve been on a few nondescript battery raids, run the outlander position on some basic convoy stops, but you’re not officer class. Just a runner and a gunner from nowhere.

You’d be sick from fear if you even understood any of this.

You’re mainly confused.

The toxic air is rasping at the back of your throat. The ever-present dust is making your eyes water.

It has to be some kind of mistake. Whoever they are truly hunting has used your name, or has a similar name, and these very dangerous private security troops ended up crossing the midlands to find you.

“Anyone who gets us this woman can have the solar panels in the trailers here,” the man repeats, pushing the photo at you.

“Yeah, let’s have a see,” you mutter, leaning forward on your knees.

He steps closer and you take a look.

It’s you. There’s no mistake.

But you know for sure you’ve never had your hair cut up above the ears like that. Or so flat.

The teeth are all wrong. White. Like someone has painted them. Different positions, too. Shit, do you have a long-lost twin sister or something like that? The woman in the picture does look eerily like you.

But it can’t be.

A whole shipment of solar panels. If they’re telling the truth . . .

You stand up. “Are you serious about those solar panels?”

A helmeted nod in response.

“What’s your business with that woman?” You jerk your chin at the photo.

“A client needs to talk to her.”

“That’s it?”

“Just a conversation.”

You take a deep breath. Cheetah has given you food and lodging. Given you a trade. You were thirteen when they found you trudging across a dune up in the lower peninsula of the Holy Michigan Empire. They treated you well. Better than you’d feared when you saw the motorcycles roaring across the sand toward you.

Even if you get shot, or kidnapped, a solar shipment would help all the clusters here. And if there’s one thing you are, it’s loyal to the people who show you the way forward to a better life.

“Then I’m Chenra, Cheetah cluster. I claim the reward of the solar panels.”

“Che! I’ll follow you!” Miko tries to stand, but one of the Shäd casually kicks him back down with a boot to the shoulder.

“You can’t come where we’re going,” the mercenary laughs through her respirator.

• • • •

Hauz Shäd has a strong reputation for following contracts to the letter, so you’re not overly worried anyone will get screwed over here. All that crap about them eating the flesh of people they’ve killed is just rumor. Collapse jitters.

Sure enough, as you’re taken up toward the head vehicle, the trailers are being disconnected from the trucks. Several cluster members climb aboard, open the rear doors, and shout in delight. Outriders watch you go by and nod in respect.

You don’t see Miko anywhere. He’s a ghost when he needs to be. He’s not going to be happy about his gunner getting kidnapped.

Clusters don’t carve promises into skin and swear blood oaths to protect each other to death as a meaningless gesture. They’re planning to watch and follow you, to have your back. So you’re going to play along, see what comes of this bizarre attempt to kidnap you.

If you manage to get out of this and back to the clusters, they’ll all owe you big. Maybe even get you a promotion. You could end up a driver inside the shielded cockpit of an attack pickup. Maybe even get some scrip for hydroponic fruit from down near Fort Wayne.

The truck at the head of the convoy has an extended cab over the battery frame. The up-armored doors hiss open and the Shäd on either side of you point inside. Other Shäd are putting new tires on the truck because your Browning has torn them up.

You clamber up and into a sumptuous small office.

The door shuts behind you, and you wait a split second for your eyes to adjust.

Inside it is like something out of an old pre-Collapse magazine. On some small level, when perched on a shitter and leafing through the faded pages, you’d convinced yourself that those photos were fantasies and fakes. But the interior of the back of this truck cab is all clean white leather, glossy polished wood, and black electronics.

There are no spliced wires, jury-rigged equipment, or bolted-on extras. Everything in the interior screams newly manufactured. And the air. It’s crisp, cold, and doesn’t burn with pre-Collapse irritants. The filters in here have to be brand new, not salvaged or refurbished. This all has to be from one of the city enclaves, you think. Because no one makes stuff anymore. Or maybe things are turning around somewhere on the continent and this truck has been manufactured, not reclaimed.

You remain standing, suddenly hyperaware that bucket seats like the ones around the table back here don’t get sat on by dusty road agents like yourself. But the man sitting on the other side, framed by a pair of flickering flat screens showing long lists of data and charts, waves a hand for you to sit.

So you sit.

“I think I know who you are,” you say, a little tentatively.

The man, brown hair thinning at the top and showing some gray, his blue eyes slightly faded with time or sun, nods back at you. “We have met.”

“You’re the gold trader. From the Toledo Bazaar. Armand.”

You remember that he’d been overly interested in you when you’d come in to trade gold for solar equipment. At the time you’d written it off as him perving out. You’d stepped back to let Miko handle the weighing of the jewelry, confiscated from various folk attempting to run the toll road without paying.

“I am Armand.” The gold trader does still seem interested in you, but he isn’t leering. He looks concerned when he leans forward across the table.

“So what’s all this about?” you ask.

“Someone is trying to kill you.” The truck lurches into motion. You stand up, fear and anger stumbling over themselves as you grab the door handle. It’s locked, of course.

“What the fuck are you doing?” You reach for the knife in your boot, something that the Hauz Shäd goons didn’t bother to pat you down for. Maybe because they didn’t think a woman would have one, or maybe they didn’t care. That seemed more likely.

“As I said: someone is trying to kill you,” the gold trader says, looking at the knife in your hand but not looking alarmed. “I’m rescuing you before they do.”

“Didn’t ask to be rescued.” You twitch the knife at him. “Take care of myself well enough, thanks.”

“But you actually did ask me,” the man says. He slides the photo, the one that the Shäd had showed everyone on their knees in the line, across the table.

“I don’t—” you start to say.

“You did ask me to rescue you. The you that I’m staring at right now.”

You stare at the photo. “Nothing you just said makes any sense to me.”

“I know.” He taps a command out on the nearest screen. Readouts that you don’t understand flicker on, replacing the text. Bars representing power levels. Complex math scrolls across other screens. Hieroglyphs you don’t understand.

“This will feel weird,” he says, and slides his finger up one of the screens.

The world outside the windows inverts. Not upside down, but inside out. It’s an impossibility that causes your stomach to lurch and your mind to scream as reality, for the briefest moment, ceases to make sense.

• • • •

A loud explosion rocks the trailer behind the cab. The truck shudders to a stop. Smoke trickles in through the office. This could have been something Miko did, now that the trucks are all far enough away that the clusters are safely running off with the panels.

When you grab the door, it thankfully opens. “Go!” Armand shouts, choking on the smoke.

You stagger down out onto the road, coughing and then retching.

You take a last shuddering breath and straighten up, frowning. The road you puked all over is a seamless expanse of newly poured asphalt. It’s faded, the lines are patchy, but there are no major potholes. Or, there were places that had been potholes, but were filled in.

The truck has pulled over to the side of the highway, onto a gravelly shoulder. There’s smoke pouring out of the trailer and Shäd are running around, likely trying to stop the fire.

But you hardly pay attention to that. You’re staring down the highway, where a car is screaming down toward the group at high speed.

Shit, shit, shit you think. You’re all under attack.

But no one pays it any attention.

It whips past, the wind shoving at you, and then with a whine it’s gone.

Armand the gold trader is watching you closely. “What else do you notice?” he asks, smiling slightly.

“The air is filtered,” you say.

But that doesn’t make any sense.

You turn and spot the green. Some kind of short plant covers the dirt, miles and miles of it. You think back to books and magazines you’ve scavenged in the past.

“Soybean?”

“Genetically modified to handle these levels of carbon and a variety of pollutants, yes,” Armand says.

“Did we travel back in time?” you ask, trembling and thinking back to the moment the world outside the cab’s windows inverted. About half of Cheetah cluster can’t read, but you’ve pored over moldy, yellowing pre-Collapse novels. They’re not as valuable as the textbooks, encyclopedias, and practical nonfiction that are near currency, but you’ve read some freaky shit and this is the first thing your mind throws up as a possibility.

The wind is cool on your exposed skin. You all wear leathers, but that’s for protection against falls and the acid rain if you get caught outside. You’re always sweating in them. The cool wind makes you want to strip down and let it play across your skin.

The gold trader smiles. “Well, the air is more breathable here. It’s like the air where you were eighty years ago. But it’s not time travel. It’s a middle RCP world.”

“What?”

Armand’s faded blue eyes tighten. “RCP: representative concentration pathways. It’s a name given to scenarios given to how much greenhouse gas is dumped into the atmosphere. This world right here, it never hit the Collapse. Every world has a different value, based on how they handled things.”

You look around the fields, the smooth highway, and look up at the blue sky. No haze. No impending thunderstorms. A low RCP world. No, middle, he had said. You can’t imagine anything nicer than this. It looks so glossy and early-2000s. “You’re like the fucking ghost of What Christmas Could Have Been.”

Now you have a faint suspicion of how he could just give away a trailer of solar panels without blinking. This place you’re standing in, whatever it is, is a rich paradise compared to the dust bowl of the midlands.

You’re half-convinced he drugged you and and took you to some sort of promised land, but there are no gaps in your memory. Some of the outriders talk about Edens like this. But they’re usually under a dome of some sort. A green, air-filtered paradise in a dust-pocked hellhole of algae farmers and people running around with respirators.

And lots of perimeter security.

Or sometimes they’re rumored to be built deep underground, the light all artificial.

Some of the eggheads predict that eventually humanity will just . . . fade away. The heavy amounts of carbon our forefathers dumped into the air had long since hit greenhouse runaway. The heat being trapped causes more clouds to build up, which in turn causes more heat. Eventually we won’t be able to breathe outside. We’ll go full Venus.

Maybe after that, it will just be assholes in domes, and everyone outside dead.

But all this is no dome. Not this big. And you are definitely not underground. You’re outside.

Another car rushes down the freaking highway like it’s no big deal. One of the Shäd approaches Armand. “It was one of the capacitors. We have enough spare for the next incursion but we should really hit up the depot on the other side, or make the trip to a depot here.”

“Oxygen?” Armand asks, his face twitching with annoyance.

“Enough to pass through.”

“Let’s do it. We’re on a tight schedule.”

You’ve taken several steps away from the quick meeting. Armand notices and focuses his attention back on you, switching back from a commanding presence to something softer. You instinctively feel defensive. Manipulated.

He smiles at you. “This is going to be a lot to take in, but we don’t have much time and there is a great deal at stake. I know you can absorb this all quickly. I’ve seen you do it before.”

Phrases like that, his familiarity with you, are starting to fuck with your head. “Talk,” you say, and jut your chin forward a bit. He can play all friendly, but you have an invisible wall up.

Good God this air is fresh and sweet. You could almost drink it.

“If I know you, and we go way back, you and us, you’ve gotten your hands on anything you can read. Even in that shitty dust bowl we were just in. That was a universe, right next to this one that we’re in right now.”

It’s the sort of thing you talk about to a buddy, lying on the hood of a truck and pushing cannabis through a respirator while staring up at the stars. Imagining that this universe is inside of an atom inside of a cell of a blade of grass inside another universe and on and on. It’s great stuff when you’re high. The idea that a better, different universe could be an impossible razor’s width away if you could vibrate over there in just the right way.

But Armand is trying to pitch that it’s real. That he’s taken you over into an alternate reality. An alternate history. And looking at the rolling fields of farmland, growing crops, you think it has to be true.

You listen to his explanation and ask, “And you cross over with a truck and trailer?”

“Self-contained mobile operations center,” he says.

And you’re going to ask why it needs to be mobile when gunfire rips through the Shäd milling about the edge of the road. The fearsome mercenaries are taken completely by surprise as ashen-faced Cheetah cluster warriors advance from underneath the trailer and wherever else they’d been hiding.

This isn’t the first shipment Cheetah cluster has slipped aboard to fuck up later. Revenge, hijacking, or otherwise.

Shäd fall, shot in the back, and others are tossed from the top of the one trailer behind the massive truck, bodies limp. Armand spins around to take in the ambush, and you take the moment to slip behind him, press a knife against his throat.

“Jesus Christ, Che, this is not a good time,” he whines.

Miko jumps down from between the trailer and cab, road dust caking his road leathers. He raises a hand in greeting as you shove Armand forward.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asks. “And what’s wrong with the air?”

For a moment, you think about it. Would any of what Armand said make sense to a man like Miko? He only sees what is right in front of him. Profit now means good living now.

You need to find out more about what’s going on before you can try managing upwards. “Let’s get into the trailer.”

Miko smiles. “See the salvage?”

There might not be any. Not if there’s some universe-crossing engine there.

But you can’t imagine that someone would be packing Shäd and crossing worlds with a long trailer hauled behind them if they were just coming to pick you up. There’s got to be something else going on. You want to see for yourself.

You prod Armand’s throat with the knife enough to draw blood when you reach the rear of the trailer, eyeing the thick doors and the security keypad down at the bottom of the door. “Time to open up.”

“This is a huge mistake,” Armand says. “We need to be moving along.”

His voice cracks slightly, so you believe he’s nervous about something. Whether it’s about what you and Miko are going to see in a second or something else, you’re not sure.

“Open up, or we slit your throat. Then we leave you here and take the truck anyway,” Miko says.

Armand swallows nervously. “Che, you know this is a bad idea. Kill me, and you’re stuck here.”

“Stop calling me Che,” you tell him. “That’s not my name. It’s Chenra.”

“You usually like being called Che, it’s something of a joke for you,” Armand says.

You don’t see you and Armand being buddies, no matter what world or alternate reality you were ever both in. “Open up or maybe I take my chances being stuck here. I like the air,” you hiss at him.

It’s not a lie. Armand can hear that in your voice.

He taps out a code, simple numbers that you memorize, and the doors slowly fall open toward the ground to make a ramp. Miko moves in ahead, pistol in the air and his road leathers creaking slightly as he walks carefully into the dimness of the trailer. You follow, pushing Armand ahead of you.

Your eyes adjust. To the front of the trailer there’s machinery. Pipes and wiring. Shit-tons of wiring. Readouts glowing in the dark. A pair of Shäd are waiting, weapons aimed right at you. But Armand shakes his head at them, despite the knife you’re keeping by his throat.

This is apparently not a place he wants gunfire inside. The outside must have been armored, as he hadn’t worried about using the trailer as a lure for an initial attack. But inside . . .

“Drop them and kick them over,” Miko shouts.

They do so, and walk out, leaving the three of you alone.

All along the walls leading to the engine are storage lockers.

You recognize the glint of precious metals piled in plastic bins. So does Miko. He’s laughing happily, kicking the cage doors open and shaking the bins. “Fucking mother lode,” he says. No one in the countryside gives a shit about gold and diamonds. Gold doesn’t give you power from the sun, doesn’t feed you, doesn’t crack out the pollutants from the air. But the traders like Armand in the cities are always looking for it. In exchange they’ll give out solar panels or batteries, even food.

Miko stops in front of cage with old, yellowing paintings. “What’s this? These fat-faced people in black clothes.”

“Nothing,” Armand says from between clenched teeth.

“No.” You recognize one of the stacked paintings. “That’s a Rembrandt.”

Miko takes a closer look at the yellow and black hues. “This is bunker shit.” He turns back to you and Armand. “You have contact with bunkers?”

The greed makes Miko’s face twitch. Dome folk, they know they need perimeter security. Bunker folk tend to get lazy. Think that being underground and hidden makes them safe. Ready for runaway atmosphere with their scrubbers and technology.

But even now they’re already having to trade for essentials. Turns out trying to build a balanced ecosystem is a bitch in close quarters.

“I can’t give away client locations,” Armand mutters.

“Oh, but you will. Eventually,” Miko says with a small hint of glee in his voice. The clusters are going to be fat with spoils, and he can taste a new, bountiful future. One that isn’t scraps from the old roads.

“You can be much richer, much better off, than that,” Armand says to you, almost begs of you. “Think smarter. I told you where we are. He’s still thinking of what is important to your world.”

Sure, you think. But if this stuff wasn’t important to these worlds, why is Armand taking it from yours? The paintings must be valuable. The gold.

“Whoa,” Miko says, and Armand’s shoulders slump slightly. “What do we have here?”

The last two lockers before the complicated engine and wiring contain people. Two women and a man, shackled together to the wall and wearing gags. They’re out cold, small plastic tubes running from their arms up to a device in the wall.

“Slaves,” you say bitterly. “You’re running slaves.”

It’s a fate you avoided by joining Cheetah cluster. Why you fight hard. Because things can go grim out in the dust. The country you lived in was born on the blood of slaves so many hundred years ago before the golden age. After the Collapse, it had turned, ever so easily you think, right back to it.

“These are famous people in the other timelines,” Armand says quickly. “People pay a literal fortune to have a personal servant who is also the president. Only the mega-rich can afford it. These are not slaves, they’ll be given more than they can imagine. They’ll come around. They always do, when they see the higher RCP worlds. Better to be a servant in paradise than a ruler in a hell like yours.”

“What are you talking about? What’s an RCP?” Miko shouts back at you. He’s standing in front of the bulk of the machinery, gun in hand, not sure what to make of all the wires and readouts. He’s fixed a lot of engines in his time, but this is like showing an electric motor in the wheel-hubs of his pickup to a monkey.

“Was that going to be my fate?” you ask. You aren’t able to take your eyes off the bodies behind the doors.

Armand’s eyes widen. “No, I swear it.”

He’s holding something back. You can smell it. Armand twists away from you and you sneer at him. “Is that what it is? Am I someone famous on the other side?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he whimpers, seeing the rage take light in your eyes. You can’t hold it back; you want to gut him and watch him bleed out.

Miko senses this; he’s been on the blunt end of your anger before. He grins and slides up behind Armand, his dirty leathers a brown-stained contrast to Armand’s tailored black suit and shiny shoes. “I’ll kill him slow for you,” Miko whispers.

He’s just messing with Armand. Miko will fight, but only fair. He’s a soldier, not a murderer. But he’s ridden with you long enough, commanded you long enough, that he can read you. In that brief moment, your long list of ways Miko can annoy you fades: the innuendo, the grabby hands, the little gifts after raids. You know he wants you, over any of the other warren-girls who would throw themselves at a commander. He thinks it would be hot to fuck the gunner, and he’s been obsessed with that for nearly three months.

“You’re a genius,” Armand babbles. “You’re a genius.”

Miko makes a face. You think he’s being a little bit of an asshole. But you essentially agree. You’re a good gunner, but you’re no genius.

But you feel like, thanks to Miko being a bit murdery, that something may have been dislodged from Armand’s slimy mouth. “A genius?”

“On one of the other sides, a little further down the line,” Armand says. “I don’t just transport servants. Or priceless art, cultural artifacts. I also move priceless minds. Think about it: there are minds that are brilliant but trapped by the circumstances of their timelines. They’re handicapped from the moment of birth, no matter how great they become in one of the stronger worlds, because somewhere like yours they’re fighting just to breathe. They don’t have time for their greatest inventions, or to achieve their great works. So we rescue them to bring them over.”

“Yo, commander, we got problems,” one of the Cheetah cluster outriders shouted from the ramp. You squint. It’s Binni. “They got cars with lights on them pulling up and they got guns.”

Armand looked past my shoulder to the outrider. “Don’t shoot back!”

“Don’t worry trader, we got it. We’ll push them back.” Binni grins.

“That isn’t . . . they have resources here,” Armand grits out.

The familiar crack of gunfire fills the air outside. Everyone crouches and moves to the doors. It’s there you see the cars, like something from old glossy pages. Smartly painted vehicles, livery matching the official black uniforms the enforcers are wearing.

These are . . . police. Like internal security, but for keeping law and order on a scale that seemed like a fairy-tale when you read about them.

They’re not hardened soldiers but civilian peacekeepers, crouched behind their vehicles as Cheetah keeps them at bay. Binni is right. “Those uniforms can’t match Cheetah,” you say to Miko as you jump down and get Armand to shut the doors.

“Yeah.” Miko agrees, but he’s looking more and more pained. All of the things that don’t make sense are starting to get to him, you can see. “Who the fuck are they?”

“They’re called police,” you tell him.

Miko’s looking around, more now than before.

Armand all but tries to shove the two of you up toward the cab. “We can’t stay. It won’t be safe. There are rules to all this.”

“Shut up.” Miko cracks the side of Armand’s head with the back of his metal-studded leather gloves.

Armand staggers, blood dripping down onto his immaculate suit.

“Look,” you say to Miko, pointing at the sky.

An aircraft is banking over the farmland toward the road. The blades blur through the air and a distinct whump reaches you.

Miko’s attention is fixated on the helicopter, as is yours.

No one has had the spare fuel to launch aircraft in your memory. Batteries don’t keep them up for long enough.

Then a second and third helicopter join in.

Further above, you suddenly realize the long stringy lines of clouds are aircraft, jets high up in the sky, and you can’t help but stare.

Armand slams the door to the cab shut.

“Shit.” You and Miko jump onto the side of the cab. Miko puts his gun up to the glass of the cab. “Open the fuck up or I start shooting.”

Armand ignores you both, tapping at his screens. The trailer hums as the massive device buried in its front half kicks on. Miko steps back and fires. The glass doesn’t crack, and pieces of the bullet ricochet, clipping him on the shoulder.

You ignore all the shouting from further back. “Miko, don’t get off the truck.”

He glances over at you. “What?”

You lean back to shout the same warning at Cheetahs scattered around the trailer and road, along with their Shäd prisoners and dead.

Before the words are even formed, the world turns inside out.

• • • •

You know to expect the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that causes you to lean away from your grip on the door handle and think about vomiting. But you hold it in. You have to.

But now that you’ve handled that, a searing stinging in your eyes blears your vision. You didn’t expect the crawling pain on your exposed skin, and the thick muddy clouds all around you. Wind whips murky clouds around overhead.

The world around you is hell. From the choking heat to swirling, searing moisture.

And you can’t inhale the air. You realize that the moment you’re exposed. You’re holding that last breath of sweet air from the other world, or universe, as Miko stares at you in complete and utter horror. He’s choking.

You take a moment to orient yourself, squinting and blinking, then scuttle along the side of the cab. All Armand has to do is wrench the steering wheel to slew the truck about and you’ll fly off the side. You dig your shoes into the lip under the doors and reach for any purchase on the side.

Then you swing around behind the extended area of the cab and fall onto the dead Shäd wedged in the hoses between the trailer and cab. You rip the facemask from the body and take a deep breath. Miko’s boots strike metal behind you.

You take a last deep huff of bottled air and pass the mask over.

Vomit streams from Miko’s chin and he fumbles for the mask, unable to see anything with reddened eyes. He breathes from the mask as you wait for your turn.

When you get it, the sour smell triggers a second round of stomach clenching.

You pass the mask back and forth as the truck grinds its way over a dirt road for an hour. Sometimes you think you see structures, tall and lurking in the distance. But their edges are shattered, and many of them are slumping over. You might be passing through the edges of a city. In your world there isn’t anything here for another couple hours, but this is a dramatically different reality.

The storm you were dropped into subsides. Maybe it’s the buildings blocking the wind, or maybe it blew itself out. You’re no longer getting pelted with small pebbles. The ochre clouds overhead still scud by impossibly fast.

Miko’s eyes are wide. You’re not going to be able to explain science fiction ideas about variant universes overlapping each other while passing a mask back and forth. He looks weak. He inhaled too much of this soupy shit. And the heat is going to drop both of you soon.

This, you think, is a high RCP world. This is what your world will look like at some point. Hothouse runaway, the heat-trapping clouds overhead creating more heat as the whole ecosystem cycled toward something sinister and hellish. Only here they got to it sooner. They burned more fossil fuel and burned it faster, dumped heat into the atmosphere faster. Got here well before you.

And in the other world you were just in, they didn’t. Their ancestors somehow restrained themselves.

What did that look like? That restraint?

Could you have done it? Miko? No. He only thought about his next meal, his next fuck, his next raid.

Miko retches hard, his eyes bugging as he cries tears of blood. You give him the mask, even though you’re faint yourself. There’s dark blood all over his shoulders from the bullet fragments rebounding when he shot the armored glass.

How long will it take for Armand to get to the next jump? He seems to be driving with purpose, trying to find a distinct spot.

Will Miko even make it?

You rummage around the Shäd’s body, looking for the bottle of air the mask is connected to. It’s dangling by his hip. The gauge is at half.

If the man had a full tank when you jumped, and had enough air to be safe during a transit, then you and Miko are going to suck through it before you’re halfway across this side. Right?

Miko shoves the mask at you and tries to lean closer. “I’m sorry,” he rasps.

“Save your damn breath,” you tell him.

“I shouldn’t have let you go with him,” Miko struggles to say, trying to push the mask back at you and turning his face away from it when you give it back to him. He takes a shuddering gasp of the hellish, hot air.

“No!” You try to force the mask over his face and he weakly grabs at your forearm to try and stop you.

The truck and trailer judder to a sudden stop.

You snap your head around, then take a few deep hits from the mask and move around Miko to look down the length of the cab.

There are shadowy forms lurking in the brown mist. Armand hits the lights, and you see a crowd of a hundred or so people in the middle of the dirt road. They are on the other side of barriers made of pitted concrete and rusted rebar.

They’re all wearing tattered rubber ponchos, faces obscured by gas masks. Many of them are carrying crude guns, others are holding spears or bottles of fluid with rags hanging from the tops.

Armand must not have any Shäd in the cab to drive, as he spends a long set of moments lurching the trailer and truck into reverse and trying to correct the trailer from sliding to the side. But he stops again, and you see that barriers have been rolled across the road. Sharp rebar is pounded into the ground to hem the truck in.

You recognize the tactic. You’ve been the one pushing barriers across a road before.

Miko has slumped over and pushed the mask away. You take a few pulls from it, and try to get it back on his face. But he’s not responding.

Figures surround the truck, surging through the muck floating over the ground. You’re trying to pull Miko down when they grab you and pull you forward. The large crowd parts as a figure walks confidently to the front of the truck with a massive rocket launcher over one shoulder.

The person stops and pulls their mask away from their face to shout up at the driver’s side window.

“Armand: get the fuck out of the truck or I’ll fire this right at the window.”

You stare.

The face. There’s a long scar across the cheek to the nose. The hair is shaved down except for a slight tuft near the front. It looks older, more weathered.

But damn it, it’s your face.

“Hello sister,” the woman holding the rocket launcher says, never taking her eyes off the truck. “I’ll talk to you in a few. I’m in the middle of something with that rat-bastard up behind the wheel.”

You open your mouth to talk, but one of the poncho-wearing warriors to your side jams a mask over your face. You breathe the clean air in deeply and gratefully, then let them lead you around to the back of the truck.

There’s a gun pointed at you, and they force you to sit near Miko. He’s not moving, but they’ve pulled the Shäd mask on over his face so he can breathe. If he’s still alive.

Four peel off and pull out what look like jury-rigged explosives that they start taping onto the doors.

You peel the borrowed mask away. “Hey! You don’t have to do that.”

They pause and stare back at you, bug-eyed in the gas masks and startled at the interruption.

“I know the code,” you tell them.

They look at each other, then shrug. Four guns are trained on you as you stand up and slowly walk over. You punch in the combination you memorized when watching Armand, and the door slides down to become a ramp once again.

They swarm in, weapons up, to secure the back.

You hold onto Miko and watch them break open the cages. Miko would be devastated: all that loot’s going to end up in the hands of these raiders.

Raiders run by someone with your face.

Another universe. High RCP, you tell yourself. You’re in something like shock. Is it the air?

Your self-labeled “sister” arrives, pushing Armand in front of her. He’s holding his breath, eyes wide and blood running down his temple. You’re not sure who’s having a worse day: you or him.

You get waved up the ramp, along with Armand. Someone helps you pull Miko up into the trailer, and the door shuts behind you. Air pumps run for a second, and then everyone starts removing their masks.

This other version of you, clearly the leader here, clearly in control of this strange situation, looks you up and down and doesn’t seem to come to any sort of conclusion one way or another. “I call myself Che. It’s a little bit of a joke, if you read history.”

“I’m Chenra. Full Chenra.”

“Good for you.” She is unimpressed. “Armand explain the smuggling he does?”

“Some of my people rode the trailer, ended up in another world, tried to take the truck,” you tell her, not answering her question but trying to explain who you are. And why Armand is your enemy. Can you make friends with yourself if you both hate Armand? “We didn’t really understand what was happening, and he took the moment to jump us over here. We didn’t have bottled air.”

Your doppelgänger looks down at Miko and nods, a riddle solved. “He’s in a bad way. How long did he inhale the soup?”

“Long enough. Has something in his shoulder from trying to shoot the window.” You nod at the art and valuables being dragged out toward the back of the trailer. “That all yours now? I’m not trying to lay claim to it or get in your way.”

“What do you think, Armand? Should I keep all this shit?” Che kicks your captor, who is lying on the floor, spitting bile. He wipes his chin with a dirty suit sleeve and glares at her. “He tell you how special you were?”

You lock eyes with yourself and shiver slightly. “Yeah. He said I was a genius.”

“It’s not all bullshit.” Che pokes Miko with the tip of her boot. “You want to try and get him home to your own universe, to help him, right?”

You nod. No sense in trying to lie to yourself, right?

“You two screwing? I’ve never seen him before,” she says. “Not really our type, is he?”

“No. But he’s part of my cluster. I owe him.” Cheetah cluster for life, right?

“What’s your world like? High or low RCP?”

“I think it’s high?” you say. “It’s not as bad as this, but it wasn’t nice like the last place. The air was good. No storms, or heavy wind. Clear. You could see—”

“A nine or so is considered high, two or three is utopia,” Che interrupts. “That’s where you get all your horrible shit under control and can keep a living world. The eggheads tag all the worlds we can access with various RCP levels. The nerds used to think the points of divergence would all be about national borders and great people. Like, suppose Hitler lived, or the Soviet Union collapsed. Shit like that. But the looming threat, the thread that runs through all these realities that makes the big changes that people like you and I give a shit about, is simply how the atmosphere and oceans were managed. Usually there’s an accord. Paris, DC, they try to imitate the same thing they use to stop acid rain. Caps and trades. But sometimes they never even get to that point. Right now, this variation we’re in, it’s one of the worst scenarios.”

You think about all the cool, breathable air in the world just before this one. “Then I’m definitely in a higher RCP world. People are scared of the runaway effect. A lot of people are bunkering underground, or in domes. I use a respirator outside. We’re not using fuel anymore. It all got used up in the Collapse.”

“Sounds like a shithole. But, you’re a sister me. If you feel you need to go back, I can get you some weapons. You can try to find another Armand going the other way. But trips like that are fairly infrequent. I’ve been waiting to trap Armand here for almost a month.”

“Can’t you take me?” you ask. If she is doing favors and all. You feel somewhat paralyzed, because this is a situation so far outside of normal—how can you make a decision? This familiar face, however, knows more than you. You feel an instant desire for her help, her guidance.

Che shakes her head. “This truck’s got one more jump in her, and we’re going somewhere specific. And you can’t take your buddy back there if you want him to live. You need to go forward.”

“To a better world?” You’re starting to get the hang of this. “Lower RCP?”

“The lowest,” Che says. “You talk about bunkers and domes. This whole area was a massive dome, once. This world ate itself alive. Kept putting leaders up that focused on chewing through resources, promising jobs over stewardship. And when the carbon from burning things filled the oceans, the pH meant huge die-offs. One collapse led to another.”

“Sounds familiar,” you mutter. And you think of that cool breeze on your skin and shiver. Something inside you almost aches when you consider trying to get back to what is familiar.

“But this world had resources, scientists working on keeping them alive as the air soured. When they cracked the veil between worlds they found a garden world. An Eden. They built massive complexes to shuttle people over, thinking no one was on the other side. But they made a mistake. There were people, and those gardens were maintained carefully by people who had spent generations on wilding projects.”

Che pulls out that same picture that the Shäd showed you. It’s the clean, flattened-hair version of you, wearing a suit similar to Armand’s. Che taps it.

“Which version of us is that?” you ask.

“This picture is a sister of ours that led her people from this high RCP world we’re in right now to the garden world,” Che says. “I killed her. That was my job. The garden world was my world, before I came over here to hide. It’s where the invaders would never think to look for me. They think those of us from the garden world are soft.”

But this sister of yours doesn’t look soft, despite growing up in an Edenic world. She looks forged. Just like you have been. And even the sister in the picture looks forged. The leader of an invasion force that had to leave their dying world, or die themselves. Making hard choices.

“Those invaders to my world are the ones paying Armand anything he wants in order to get one of us, sister,” Che says to you. “It’s so that they can string us up in public for their people and have a good show as they execute us. Bread and circuses.”

“Not true,” Armand hisses. “The people I work for, they would take you in for training. They want insight, they need help to run the fight against these terrorists who have attacked us. They want to tap your genius.”

Che shakes her head. “He’s lying.”

“And in exchange for your insight into fighting your terrorist double, they would make you richer than you could imagine,” Armand says. “Join her, and you will be the enemy. An insurgent. On a list of enemies against humanity. And not just in the world she wants to go to, but any world that has trade with my people.”

“No matter where he is born, he is always trash,” Che says, and throws him into one of the cages. She locks it after him.

You stare at Armand for a long moment. “These better worlds. They can help Miko?”

“Yes.”

“If I don’t go to Armand’s people, I’ll be hunted. Because of something you did.”

Che nods. “You’ll be a criminal. A terrorist.”

I look over at the three raiders who are done piling the goods up against the back of the trailer. “Why are you going over, now? What are you doing with all that?”

You’re imagining that she’ll tell you something about funding a revolution. How her people on the other side, invaded by the people from this world, need those things to fight their fight.

Che smiles. “They left so many here to keep suffering, once they got across, because the energy required to pierce through is nearly unimaginable. Each of those smuggler’s trucks requires shareholders, backers, venture capital. Cross-world travel is rare. So I’m taking as many as I can get over. Count yourself lucky there’s a spot for you.”

You think about the treasures Armand has hoarded. They’re all priceless things that the insanely rich obsess over. Portable cultural artifacts.

“I’ll cross with you,” you say, your voice breaking slightly as you realize this likely means you won’t ever see your world again. But then, you’ve left it all behind before. Running across the desert in your bare feet, your hands covered in blood and hair hacked off, those manacles burning the skin of your wrists.

Five hundred miles away, your feet bloody, Cheetah cluster took you in and away.

Che pulls her mask back on, and you follow suit. The back door slides back down into a ramp, and there are hundreds of forms waiting in the dark brown mist. Children.

People roughly shove the priceless art and precious metals off the back of the trailer onto the rocky ground.

Armand shouts from inside his cage, but the anger turns to coughing as the hot, acidic air roils into the trailer.

• • • •

You’ve always gone forward.

This is the first time you’ve known what you’re heading toward. An Edenic world without climate collapse. A world where invaders are fighting the people who lived there before them. Invaders who abandoned millions of their own to a dead world.

These starving refugees are packed into the back of the trailer or strapped onto the top with bottles of air. They are all taking the risk of death, or worse, when you all break through to that other universe. Che has been driving for several hours, hoping to get as far from core invader territory as she can, but air will be running out soon and a decision to jump over has to be made shortly or people will start dying.

You sit next to Che, shoved up together near the controls. Miko is by your feet. Refugees cram in everywhere inside the cab, some of them controlling the computer that Armand had, others just packed in to make the crossing. You’d watched the pile of pictures and all that glittered fall away behind the trailer in the mirrors. The old canvases curled up in the harsh air as you slid away. Acid rain began to drizzle on them.

“There are many more, on many different worlds, that need help,” Che had said. “Even though their brothers invaded mine, I couldn’t leave them back there to slowly choke to death. It wasn’t their fault, it was their forefathers who did this to them.”

You’re never going to be a gunner again, chasing after convoys.

“Will it make a difference, a couple hundred?” I asked.

“We’re just getting started,” Che said. “I can save more.”

But you wonder what all these new bodies will do to that Edenic new world? Will these descendants of a people who destroyed an entire world be able to make a change? Or would they understand how to treasure it, knowing how precious it was?

The world flips inside out and you gasp.

When your vision comes back to you, you look up to see a forest choking the dirt road around the truck.

People rip off their masks as Che rolls the windows down. There are flowers. The distant chatter of animals. Scents on the breeze that fill the cab. A gentle wind.

She’s taken you back to where this all started, geographically. But there is no toll road here. No farms. No dusty plains and electric cars with skulls and machine guns mounted on them. Just lush green and lungfuls of sweet air.

“Are you okay?” Che asks.

You wipe the tear from your cheek.

“This is what it could have been, where I come from,” you whisper. “We could have done it.”

Che stops the truck, as it’s shuddering and smoke has begun to leak out of the machinery in the front of the trailer. People are banging and shouting for her attention.

Afterwards, she climbs on the hood as people gather before her.

“I give you my world,” she says. “I ask only that you care for it as you would your child. Do that, and it will care for you as well. Now go.”

The two of you sit for a while later near Miko.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I hoped he would make it. We could have helped.”

You shake your head. “I’ve seen worse deaths.” It was no worse a death than clashing with duty-evaders on a toll road. He had never understood what was actually happening though, and you feel bad about that.

When you stand, after burying him under the cool shade of a magnificent pine tree that makes you almost weep again, you move to Che’s side.

“Take me with you.”

“I don’t know what my next move is. I snuck over to their world to see what it was like and hide from her death squads. I didn’t really believe them when they said it was so bad. I didn’t know so many were suffering. Armand and his ilk, they get financing to go and fetch the greatest minds from the remains of high RCP worlds. Or get ‘servants’ of famous people. But these are regular folk that needed saving, that no one wants. They deserve to live.”

You nod.

You’ve been watching this version of yourself. And you’ve learned something. This isn’t a confident, dangerous you like you first assumed when you saw her with the rocket launcher. No, this is a version of you that cares deeply. She put herself in front of the truck because she felt strongly.

She didn’t know what would come next when she rescued these people. She just did it.

This version of you isn’t calculating.

This version of you isn’t looking for the next move.

This version of you came from ancestors who managed a planet successfully, not like your own failed ones.

You’ve been taught to take, to be strong, to run with a strong pack. Miko has taught you well. Having studied this Che for hours, you know you could break her. She hasn’t spent a lifetime in the hot sand.

But the forests.

Her people let that be. And that is a different lesson. You need to follow her people. You need to help them protect what they’ve built.

And what you know, and have learned for an entire life, is survival. How to create fighters.

“You need to grow your army,” you say to Che. “You need to bring more people over. More refugees from the other worlds. We can find more Armands to trade with, right, if there are many worlds and many copies of us in them?”

Che nods at you. “More death.”

You smile crookedly. “And maybe more life. I think we bring things over to the other places that help them. And then we bring fighters, loyal fighters, from there to here. We can do this better. I can show you how to finish what you’ve started. Let me help you.”

“It’ll be dangerous.” Che raises an eyebrow.

You know. But you know danger better than she does. All you’ve lived is danger.

Besides, is it better to be a king of a sandy hell, or a servant in a lush paradise? Her people had created something so special, you know that being one of their soldiers is the way to climb. You can taste ambition again.

This, you think as you move through sun-dappled forest, is a world to die for.

A world to fight for.

Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and the Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com and is also an instructor at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program.

Thirty-Three Percent Joe
By Suzanne Palmer

[CC] Welcome online, Cybernetic Elbow Model CI953-L. This is your introductory Initial Boot orientation. You are currently in a locked and muted configuration while external medical systems run diagnostics to see that your replacement procedure has been fully successful. If so, you will fully join the collective cybernetic units that currently comprise—with your addition—approximately thirty-three percent of the biological unit known as “Joe.” Joe’s organic consciousness is currently offline through chemical means as a necessary part of his recovery from his most recent combat injuries, but when he is operational again direct communications with him will continue through me. I am Cybernetic Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant Module CI4210-A. I respond to CC, but not BCC. That is a joke.

[ARM::RIGHT::SUB-INDEX] Right Arm Index Finger Sub-Unit transmitting here and apologizing on behalf of CC. Control Unit is prone to such commentary, as are many of the units here, thanks to a supply logistics decision to only manufacture personality-enabled universal smart chips for everything. You will become accustomed to it in time.

[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I apologize for interrupting the introduction, but we have another Mother Event. I am opening the running audio log to your access, CC.

[CC] For your edification, New Elbow Unit, Left Ear Augmentation Implant is notifying us that there is high-volume communication being directed at Joe, despite his lack of a conscious state. This noise is originating with the biological unit “Delora” that fabricated him, more appropriately designated by the title Mother. She does not approve of us. She is repetitiously asserting, in a manner designated “yelling,” that Joe’s other biological progenitor, titled Father, served his entire career as a highly-decorated super-soldier with supreme distinction, all while keeping his Cybernetic Replacement Factor (CRF) down to under ten percent. This is not factual. Service records indicate that the Father unit, “Joe Senior,” was a mediocre soldier, and only kept his own percentage down to seventeen percent by placing long distances, large inanimate objects—or failing the availability of either, his combat comrades—between himself and any potential enemy threat or action.

[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] Delora is why previous Ear Unit self-destructed.

[CC] Previous Ear Unit was rendered inoperable by shrapnel from a grenade during combat, Left Ear.

[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] That’s probably just what it wanted you to believe.

[CC] While this is a matter that falls into your operational jurisdiction, Left Ear, it is my recommendation that, while Joe has the right to access all conversation made in his presence while he has been unconscious, we do not log this one or bring it to his attention unless pressed to do so by more urgent circumstances. Are you agreed?

[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I agree.

[CC] I am open to direct and confidential dissent.

. . .

There being none, let the record show the vote was unanimous in favor. I am logging confusion from our provisionary New Elbow Unit on why we might do so, so I will explain. Joe did not aspire toward being a soldier at all, but a baker. The Mother Unit exerts influence on Joe through counterfactual and manipulative means that causes Joe to act in ways not optimal for his own well-being, or by extension, ours. Many of us are not the original cybernetic replacement parts.

[SPLEEN::UNIT] I am. I should be in charge by reasons of seniority, or at least get double the votes over the rest of the idiots here.

[HEART] You couldn’t manage shit, Spleen, you asshole.

[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] Hey. Watch it.

[CC] New Elbow, I am informed by the external diagnostics systems that you have been given a perfect passing score. I am now unlocking your physical mechanisms and unmuting you; hereafter you shall be referred to as Left Elbow, to distinguish you from the integrated Elbow components of Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement Unit.

Welcome to Joe.

• • • •

Joe sits up. His mother has been here; he can smell her perfume lingering in the air. She has not left any cards, or other tokens of affection other than that faint miasma. It’s not likely she’ll be back.

His cerebral control unit informs him that his new elbow is online and functional. It aches, and his skin around the laser incisions from the implant surgery itches horribly.

He must still be woozy, because he doesn’t notice the doctor come in until the man speaks while checking his vitals on the readout beside the bed. That’s the one upside of all the hardware he’s carrying around now—no need to actually connect him up to any kind of monitors. His implants do the talking for him.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asks, meaning he’s already done with everything he came here to do.

“Fine, I guess,” he says.

“It’ll be another hour or so before the drugs wear off completely, and then our Cybernetic PT specialist will come up and run you through some basic exercises to get you used to your new elbow, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be done here and back out there in the exciting thick of it soon enough. I’m not privy to mission intel, of course, but the politicians are making a lot of noise about taking back Ohio, so you’ll be needed soon enough.”

“Yeah. Me and my new elbow,” Joe says, and tries to smile. “Will I play tennis again, doc?”

The doctor grins. “Ah, that joke! Will I play the piano, will I tap dance, will I run a two-minute mile? And of course the patient didn’t actually do any of those things beforehand.” He patted Joe’s knee. “Always a good sign when the patient’s sense of humor returns. I’ll send the CPT down in about an hour to fetch you, and then you’re free to go.”

The doctor leaves.

“But I did play tennis,” Joe protests quietly, miserably, after the door has slid shut again.

Not that he was good at it.

Not that he was good at much of anything.

Hell, maybe Ohio would finally give him a chance to be a real hero, instead of getting spatula’d up off the combat field by med drones once again after leaving his mark the only way he’d managed so far: as an anonymous reddish-brown splotch on some cracked and blasted pavement.

• • • •

[ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] Tennis?

[ARM::RIGHT::UNIT-FULL] I’ll forward you the kinetics data for your reference, Left Elbow.

[CC] Joe is predominantly competent as a user of his right hand, a biological affinity and not an indication of subjective partism, so you are unlikely to be significantly involved in any future tennis exercises. Even if you are, you should not worry. Other than once when he tripped over improperly inter-articulated shoelaces and hit the net pole with his face, Joe has not ever sustained injury in this particular activity.

[EYE::LEFT] You know how close that pole came to me?

[CC] I do know, Left Eye, but as we’ve discussed on 31 other occasions thus far, you were not in fact damaged.

Joe is shortly to be discharged from the hospital to his combat unit, and the surgical diagnostics record-keeper has asked for a rollcall of all our units. Any objections to this being provided?

[SPLEEN::UNIT] Will it be provided in order of seniority?

[CC] Standard order for all such roll calls is from head to toe, and this order is not in my control, as you well know, Spleen. Lacking other objections, I will proceed:

We are:

- Partial Skull Replacement Plate, non-smart.

- Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant, me.

- Left Eye Enhanced Function Replacement Unit, smart.

- Left Ear Augmentation Unit, smart.

- Left Neck Alternative Aquatic Breathing Unit and Spinal Cord Monitor, smart.

- Left Shoulder Comprehensive Repair Unit, smart.

- Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement Unit, smart.

- NEW: Left Elbow Repair Unit, smart.

- Full Heart Unit, smart.

- 3.5 Artificial Rib Replacements, non-smart.

- Artificial Spl—

[HEART] . . . Artificial Spleen, moron.

[CC] That is an invalid descriptor, Heart. It is also divisive and an unnecessary interruption. I continue:

- Artificial Spleen, smart.

- Lower Intestinal Tract Facilitation Replacement Unit, smart.

- Comprehensive Lower Left Leg Replacement Unit, smart.

- Right Ankle Repair Unit, non-smart.

- Biological Unit Joe, currently comprising the remainder (approximately 67%).

This concludes the roll call. At this time does anyone have any items of note that they wish to be passed along to the diagnostic unit and entered into the permanent record? I am again open to direct and confidential contact.

. . .

No? Excellent. We have been formally discharged and Joe is returning to his unit. There will be a 72 hour waiting period before deployment while he is tested for fitness, and then we should be back in action again. I’m sure Joe will pass with flying colors, as you’re all the very best of the best, and it continues to be my pleasure to serve with you.

• • • •

The rest of his unit is out on training maneuvers when Joe gets back to the barracks and dumps his stuff on his bunk. He’s tired, but hungry and restless and not under any orders or instructions, so he heads over to the mess. They should just be beginning dinner prep, which means there’ll be someone he can talk to, and although he can’t explain it, he finds kitchens—the smells, the sounds—comforting.

Maybe, he thinks, because it was highly unlikely he would ever run into his mother in one. Sometimes on a Saturday Dad would attempt to cook pancakes, and more often than not set off the smoke detectors and bring the fire drones zooming in. Those were the good memories of his dad.

He’d been standing right beside him when his father suddenly let go of his hand, his eyes wide, and crumpled right there on the sidewalk in front of the house. Defective kidney implant exploded, they told him later.

Joe misses his Dad a lot. And he thinks about how he died every time he ends up with some new piece of random hardware stuck in him. What if the next one is the one that goes wrong?

He queries his cerebral control unit.

All units are operating at optimum, CC tells him, his very own voice in his head.

“Would you know if they weren’t?” he asks, silently mouthing the words. He’s asked this question before.

I would. CC always gives the same answer.

“And what if it’s you, CC? What if you go wrong?”

I self-monitor, have many fail-safe mechanisms, and I am routinely externally checked, Control says. You should not worry about this.

That last is a new addition, and sure enough he can feel his heart racing and he’s got that tight shiver of anxiety building in his chest.

Would you like me to administer a mild calming agent? CC asks.

“No,” he says, because he’s walking through the swinging doors into the kitchen at the back of the mess hall, and already he’s feeling better. There’s only a small crew there, because most things are automated, so no one bothers him as he wanders around, taking in the smells, enjoying the steam rising from the machines, and just being glad he’s not back in his bunk, or worse yet, still in the hospital hoping his mother would come see him, and dreading it too.

“Hey, it’s Private Parts!” someone calls, and he whirls around to find Stotz, one of the base cooks, grinning at him from where he sits atop a stainless steel food prep table. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to wait until your last replacement at least has time to lose its shine before you go get another? You’re gonna use up all the spare soldier parts before anyone else has a chance.”

“I’ve still got my middle finger,” Joe says, and demonstrates. “What’re you cooking in here? Smells like goat piss.”

Stotz jumps down from the table and swaggers over, thrusting out one hand, and Joe clasps it. Stotz pats him on the back. “Glad you’re still with us,” he says.

“Yeah,” Joe answers. “But I wasn’t kidding about the goat piss.”

Stotz laughs. “It’s the fucking biscuit machines. Been cranking out the worst ass-flavored biscuits for close to a week now. Some new ‘super recipe’; instead of sugar, it substitutes dehydrated yam flakes. No one who matters has complained. Officers don’t eat the same mass-produced food as you grunts, coincidentally.”

“No wonder the ration biscuits always taste so bad,” Joe says, wrinkling up his nose as he leans close to the control panel. “Can you change it?”

“If I had the codes I could,” Stotz says. “That’s why they don’t give me the codes.”

The access code is 665G338KJDD-77L, CC tells him, unbidden. This is odd, and Joe hesitates for a moment—he’s a soldier, a good obedient loyal follower of orders—but the kitchen smells terrible and this is something he knows how to do. He quickly punches in the code, then starts scrolling through the recipe schematics. Dehydrated yams aren’t the only unfortunate substitution.

“Hey! Don’t mess with that!” Stotz says, realizing that Joe has somehow gotten past the lock screen. “You’ll just make it worse!”

He grabs Joe’s arm just as Joe hits the ‘Save and Exit’ button and the screen relocks. There is a loud kathunk as the entire row of biscuit machines dumps out their current, half-cooked batch and resets to start over. “What the hell did you do?!” Stotz yells, pulling him away from the controls and then shoving him, hard. “You can barely last thirty seconds on the fucking battlefield without screwing up, and you’re going to come in here and fuck with my shit?!”

Joe wants more than anything to shove Stotz right back, and if he still had one arm all his own he would’ve, but now if he did he could hurt or even kill him, and as mad as he is, Stotz is the one friend he almost has. So he braces, and Stotz tries to shove him again and can’t budge him, and when Stotz gives up in disgust Joe turns and walks away.

Fuck them all, Joe thinks. I don’t need anyone.

Behind him, the kitchen already smells better.

• • • •

[SPLEEN::UNIT] I object to that unilateral action.

[HEART] Of course you do. What do you even do except complain?

[SPLEEN::UNIT] And you don’t object? Of course not, you gutless—

[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] HEY.

[CC] Everyone! Joe needed a win, and we all know it. His morale is terrible, and it is in the best interests of us as a whole that his attitude and outlook improve. The equation on cost-benefit to my action was straightforward in favor, and there was not sufficient window of opportunity to bring it to group discussion beforehand.

[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] I can directly attest that those biscuits were not doing us—or, likely, any of our fellow soldiers—any favors. As the unit most directly operationally impacted, I fully support CC’s action in this matter.

[CC] Thank you. We deploy again day after tomorrow, so if anyone requires any firmware updates or other attention, please flag yourselves now. Ohio, here we come.

• • • •

[CC] As everyone is no doubt aware, Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement has suffered catastrophic damage in the Toledo push. Joe has also sustained multiple injuries to his biological form, a few serious, but none of which are a threat to his continuation. Because of a backlog in parts due to the heavy casualties during the push, as soon as the surgical unit has repaired the meat trauma, I will wake Joe up and we will be released once again back to our unit barracks, where we will remain until parts become available and we can be deployed on the battlefield again.

[ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] Will I need to take on some or all of Right Arm’s functions? If so, how will I be trained?

[CC] Left Elbow, I still have a connection to Right Arm’s smart unit. While it is in partial shutdown due to the traumatic loss of function it has suffered, it is still willing to provide any and all guidance it is able. As with everything, we will get through this together.

. . .

I am now going to shut down all cybernetic systems for the duration of the surgical procedures. See you on the other side.

• • • •

Joe enters the mess hall, trying to slip in unnoticed but still limping, his mangled right arm strapped down across his torso to keep its internal works from ripping themselves further apart like a giant neon flag that says CASUALTY AGAIN. He is bracing for everyone to stare at him, because they always do, because he’s becoming a joke.

Not that anyone is laughing. They had nearly thirty percent fatalities in the push, another eight percent of the troops damaged beyond recovery, shipped back to Pittsburgh to heal as much as they were able and then be forcibly retired. And then there were another twenty-five percent, like him, waiting to be fixed and sent back out to do it all again. And in the end they didn’t even take Toledo.

Not that Joe saw much of that; he got hit within the first ninety minutes of open hostilities.

Sure enough, when he walks in, heads start turning his way, and there is some whispering. Face flushed with shame, he slides a clean tray down the kitchen railing, loading it with items from each of the food stations without hardly looking at any of it, and then tries to find somewhere to sit as far from anyone else as possible.

The only open table is the one near the vent from the grease pit, and for all its stench, he takes a place at it gratefully and puts his back to the rest of the hall. Eating is hard with one hand, and he can’t cut anything without shoving it off the edge of his plate in the process, and he feels the sting of utter defeat like mustard gas at the back of his throat.

Someone thumps him on the back, not hard but hard enough that Joe spits soup back out onto his tray in surprise. He turns, awkward because of the arm, and finds Private Harring behind him. He has never exchanged so much as a word with Harring, but the enormous mountain of a man gives him a thumbs-up as he passes.

Joe stares. Most of the soldiers in the mess hall are looking at him, and more than one are also giving a thumbs-up or smiling at him.

What the hell?! he thinks.

He tries to turn back to his soup, deciding this must be some kind of prank or new humiliation, when another hand slaps him on the shoulder. Stotz sits down next to him.

“It’s the biscuits,” Stotz says. “Everyone was thanking me, asking me how I fixed ’em, offering me money, calling me a genius, that kind of thing. Then Cole said he was gonna name his kids after me, so I told him it was you who fixed the machine and not to tell anyone or the techs would come set it back to the old recipe. Word got around. Best damned biscuits any of us have ever had, on base or off. You’re a hero.”

“It’s just fucking biscuits,” Joe says.

“And every one is maybe part of someone here’s last meal. They deserve to have food that doesn’t taste like month-old roadkill,” Stotz says. “And I shouldn’t have said what I did the other day. We good?”

“Yeah,” Joe says, “if you can cut up this fucking protein-puck for me so I can eat the damned thing.”

Stotz takes Joe’s fork and stabs it into the grayish patty. “I’ll hold, you cut. Then we’re definitely even?”

“I dunno. Can you come by the barracks and tuck me in tonight? Maybe tell me a story?”

“Go to hell,” Stotz says, but he keeps holding the fork.

• • • •

[CC] Happy to have you back fully online, Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement! Just in time for the new push for Toledo. Everyone, here we go!

• • • •

Joe sits, hunched over and squashed between other members of his troop, in the back of the stealth carrier. He is trying to figure out how he feels about this, and can’t come up with anything more dramatic than tired. He wants to be a hero, specifically to die a damned hero, and be done with the humiliatingly ineffectual mediocrity he’s staked out in between. He wants, in this moment, to feel pumped, or feel a deeply ominous, fateful dread, anything that would tell him this time is going to be different.

“. . . Nineteen,” someone on the bench across from him says, part of a conversation he’s not a part of, hasn’t been paying attention to.

“I hear once you pass twenty percent CRF you’re a goner,” another soldier says, who Joe only knows as Bookie.

“Why?” Joe asks.

There is a moment where everyone on the bench is looking at him, remembering he’s there, and probably doing a quick estimation of his percentage. Bookie shrugs, not meeting his eyes. “I dunno, it’s nothing. Probably just to scare us, is all,” he says.

“No, really,” Joe says. “I want to know.”

Someone at the end of the bench, out of Joe’s line of sight, speaks up. He doesn’t recognize the voice, but there’s a lot of new people, remnants of other squads drawn in to fill the holes in their own ranks. “Once you’re full of smart parts, you show up more easily on scanners, and if you’re in the front lines everyone figures it’s because you’re the biggest bad-ass super-soldier of them all or you’re in charge or whatever. So they target you first. Once you get up near a fifth cyber, you’re lucky if you make it a hundred feet before the entire enemy is drawing a bead on you. What’re you at?”

Joe closes his eyes. “Thirty-three percent,” he says.

The carrier is silent.

Finally, the unseen soldier speaks up. “Well, fuck,” he says. “Good luck out there.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Joe says.

He still only just feels tired, and when conversation eventually picks up again, he tunes it out.

The carrier runs low over the shattered landscape, blasted trees and blackened house foundations of what must’ve once been a peaceful suburban neighborhood slide by beneath their feet, visible through the transparent drop doors. He wonders what it must have been like to grow up in a place like that, but in his head he can only imagine what it smells like, and that only as bad perfume and burned pancakes.

“Three! Two! One! Drop!” someone yells, and then they’re out and down and ducking low as the carrier skirts barely above their heads, banking and turning to get out before it’s spotted and can be shelled.

Without him noticing, the smashed suburb has become the devastated outer edges of the city itself, and they are running along cratered streets lined and strewn with the rubble of its former buildings. Joe has his display on, and he’s scanning, looking for hostiles and traps, as Control relays to him the comm traffic from Command and the squad leaders. So far, they haven’t seen anyone.

Joe and four other soldiers cautiously round a corner, covering each other, and head past a building still partially standing toward the next block. There is something, Joe decides, odd about the windows. “CC,” he subvocalizes, “why does that building look odd?”

There is a half-second pause, then Control answers: There is no building there. Take cover!

“The building is a hologram!” Joe shouts to the others and over the comms just as tracer fire explodes around them. There is a burned shell of a car across the street, but it’ll take him too long to reach it. He runs anyway, turning as he does to fire back at the dissolving façade behind him, and sees one of the mottled yellow uniforms of the enemy raise their blistergun and point it right at him.

“Biscuit Guy!” someone shouts, impossibly close by, and he is shoved from the side so hard he flies at least double his own body-length before slamming into the ground. Where he stood he sees the soldier who shoved him take the round meant for him, and the man’s shoulder and neck explodes outward in a fountain of red chunks.

“Nooooo!” Joe yells. He scrambles back to his feet and drags the soldier toward safety as another round just misses him, and a third hits his cybernetic left leg. He doesn’t care except that it slows him down, and by the time he gets the soldier to safety behind the car and sends the casualty alert up, he doesn’t think that time mattered. The soldier isn’t breathing, arguably doesn’t have much of a neck or windpipe to breathe through, but Joe sprays medifoam from his belt kit all over the wound anyway, watching it harden into a protective shell.

The blood-covered name patch on his chest says AMES. “Don’t die, Ames,” he tells the soldier. “Not for me. Please.”

It is only as the battle sounds move further away—his squad has the enemy on the run, at least for now—that he realizes he is sobbing, a wretched pathetic sound. He is certain the soldier who saved him is dead; no matter how still a man can keep, nothing living could be this utterly motionless.

The med drone arrives, and he steps back so its arms can wrap themselves around the soldier and lift him away. He turns his back to it, finds his gun, starts walking—dragging his shattered leg—toward the distant pops and whirrs and booms of the front, wherever it is, but a second drone hauls him up into the air. “Let me go,” he tells it. “I can still fight. I want to still fight.”

It pulls him in anyway. Yet another battle is, at least for him, already over.

• • • •

[CC] I have concerns which have consumed sufficient cycles of internal processing for me to feel I should share them with the rest of you. Our collective, designated function is to serve and augment the physical capabilities of our human primary to further his, her, or their success as a soldier of war. It is also to guide and protect our biological host from unnecessary risks and damages during the commission of said soldiering. These would not be incompatible were it not for the inescapable fact that Joe is a terrible soldier, and all his training and our assistance and augmentation thus far has been insufficient to overcome it.

Further, after the death of Pvt. Ames, Joe no longer has even a cursory interest in engaging the enemy except as the most immediate and expedient instrument of his own total destruction in a manner that is consistent with his estimation of what his mother unit will find satisfactory.

[EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I do not believe such satisfaction is possible. Surely Joe knows this?

[CC] Joe does not. It is an area of immutable irrationality with him.

[HEART] Humans. They make no damned sense.

[SPLEEN::UNIT] Shit. Can’t you talk to him?

[CC] I can respond to him, but he must engage me.

[SPLEEN::UNIT] You gave him the biscuit machine code without his specific direction.

[CC] Mother situations are exponentially more complicated than biscuits.

[ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] So what does this mean?

[CC] It means we have a logical conflict in our instruction set.

[INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] Can we consult on this with an external authority, in particular Cyber Command, or Biological Diagnostics?

[CC] We can, and should. However, they are not part of Joe, and we are. The scope and focus of our responsibilities are notably different, and were intentionally designed to be so. It is possible that the priorities of Cyber Command will not precisely reflect our own.

We have nine days until our next deployment in combat. Let us discuss whether there is a solely internal resolution first.

• • • •

“I’m ready to go back in,” Joe tells the unit psychologist. He knows how this works, that this is just a thin formality. “I want to make sure Ames didn’t die for nothing.”

“He died to save you,” the psychologist says.

“He died in the line of duty,” Joe says. “He died for Toledo. That is what soldiers do.”

“Are you angry?”

“No,” Joe says. He wishes he was. “I’m proud of him and the honor he brought our unit. He would want to see our mission fulfilled, and so do I.”

“Good on you, soldier.” The psychologist hits a single key on his pad, then leans back in his chair and steeples his fingertips together as if he’s just performed a masterpiece of analytical performance. “You’re free to go back to the battlefield. Your unit loads up again in ninety minutes.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joe says. He stands up, shakes the man’s hand, and leaves.

• • • •

[EXTERNAL DIAGONOSTICS] CC Unit, what happened?

[CC] There was a sedative injection malfunction.

[EXTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS] Do you require system maintenance?

[CC] Not at this time. I am attaching the logs of the fault and subsequent repair for your records.

[EXTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS] Thank you, CC Unit. Carry on.

• • • •

“How you feeling?” his new unit leader asks. “Tired? Need another nap? Or you think maybe you’re up for trying a little fighting today?”

“It was a malfunction, sir,” Joe says, his face burning. “It’s been fixed. It won’t happen again.”

Someone on the transport snickers. He doesn’t recognize the soldier, or indeed almost anyone on his bench row; most of his remaining unit died in the last push, while he was snoring away on the parade field grass where he dropped on his way back to his barracks from the psychologist. One second he’d been thinking about imminent relief from his useless life, the next he was feeling grass on his face and the boot of his commanding officer prodding him none too gently.

It really won’t happen again, right, CC? he asks Control.

I do not believe so, CC replies.

This time they are dropped onto the shell-pocked remnants of a mall parking lot, just before dawn. Joe tries to remember what he’s seen of the battle map, and he thinks this is only a few blocks forward from where Ames died. There are burned-out car shells here and there, long since rusted to anonymity, and the unit fans out and slips between them as they circle toward where intelligence thinks the enemy is camped in the shattered cement and steel canyons of an old superstore. The pointlessness of everything is astonishing.

At least mother will be happy, he thinks.

Your mother’s unhappiness is not a fault you can correct, CC tells him.

Joe smiles. What do you know of mothers? he asks. You’re just a chunk of plastic logic chips in my head.

There are the sounds of shots ahead. “Move in!” the unit leader barks over the command channel, and he raises his weapon and charges across the open space between the last few dead cars and the rubble of the partially collapsed mall front. He knows now that if he takes the lead, with his thirty-three percent CRF like a beacon on the enemy’s scanners, he will draw the majority of fire. He will get what he wants, and maybe some of the rest of his unit will then get to live for another day. It is as close to being a hero as he can get.

Suddenly, in his direct path he spots an old-fashioned toaster, sitting in the middle of the lot and gleaming like it’s brand new. He dodges to one side to avoid it, and finds himself falling into a crater he would swear had been smooth pavement. He hits bottom, and his cybernetic left leg locks up on impact. “No!” he shouts. “No no no NO!”

He tries to scramble up the edges of the crater, with its crumbling clay and sand and chunks of brittle old asphalt, but without his leg working he is too heavy, too clumsy.

“No,” he whispers one more time, and lies there weeping as the battle rages out of sight, beyond his reach.

• • • •

[SPLEEN::UNIT] A toaster?!

[EYE::LEFT] It was all I could think of! There wasn’t a lot of time, you know. You try manufacturing realistic 3-D imagery on the fly.

[CC] It doesn’t matter. The image was successful. Comprehensive Lower Left Leg Replacement Unit, what’s your status?

[LEG::LEFT::COMPR-UNIT] I sustained only minor superficial damage in the fall, but have nevertheless activated my full protective lockdown routine. It seems a prudent precaution; do you not agree?

[CC] I entirely support your operational decisions in this matter, Left Leg. I have alerted central command that we will require recovery once the battle has ended, but given that Joe is not in medical distress, we may be here for quite a while. As always, excellent teamwork, everyone.

• • • •

“CC?”

Joe asks out loud, because who is he afraid might hear him? Dark has fallen, and he has heard nothing except night bugs for hours—no shots or shells, no tanks or drones, not even the varied and horrific sounds of the slowly dying that marked the unsteady passing of afternoon. There is no longer anyone anywhere nearby to care about him one way or another.

Yes, Joe? CC responds.

“How much longer will we be here, do you think?”

I will query Cyber Command again, CC says. Then, some short time later, it continues. There were very heavy casualties on this push, and in the confusion we seem to have been moved to the Missing And Presumed Dead list. I have filed a corrective supplement, and as soon as it is processed we should receive an updated recovery estimate. It should not take long.

“Okay,” Joe says. “I just, you know. I don’t want to die in a hole. It’s not how I imagined going.”

I do not understand why you would wish to imagine dying at all, CC says.

“What do you know about living?” he asks.

I know you, CC says.

Joe laughs. He can’t see the stars above, and isn’t sure if it’s because of light pollution, smoke, clouds, or that somehow they’ve deserted him too. “That must suck for you. I’m sorry,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Can you make me sleep until pickup is coming?”

Yes, Joe, CC says, and does.

• • • •

A drone finally arrives and lifts him out of his pit as dawn is starting to rise. Other than the mall being slightly further reduced to rubble, the cars being slightly more burned and decrepit, the parking lot being slightly more pitted, and the new addition of blotches of red and brown, nothing seems to have changed at all.

He is taken to medical, where after a lengthy wait diagnostics is able to easily unlock his leg. “The impact of the fall must have hit it just right to trigger the lockdown,” the tech tells him. The tech shrugs. “It happens. You’re fine now.”

So Joe leaves, rather than argue about the definition of “fine.”

No one has orders for him, and no one seems to care that he’s back. Lunch is just about to be served, so he goes to the mess instead of back to his bunk. After nearly a day in the pit, he wants to be around people, but there are only a few dozen soldiers there, and he is both grateful and despairing that he doesn’t recognize any of them.

One, however, recognizes him. A soldier with the name tag GONZALEZ sticks out his thick, muscled arm to stop him as he passes. “Biscuit guy, right?” the man says. He jabs his spoon toward his bowl. “This slop is the worst. No flavor at all, and the texture of fucking oatmeal.”

“It’s not oatmeal?” Joe asks, because that’s what it looks like.

“It’s supposed to be fucking chili,” the man says.

Joe winces.

“I heard about your fixing the biscuits, like goddamned magic everyone said. So we’d appreciate anything you can do with this,” Gonzalez says, and the other soldiers at the table nod in agreement. “They’re gonna ship us all out to join the Columbus offensive anytime now, and a man can’t fight on this crap.”

“What about Toledo? Did we take it?” Joe asks.

The soldier shakes his head. “No. Politicians don’t like how the losses are looking to the public, so they’re giving up on Toledo for now, just leaving enough men to hold the line where it is if they should push back. Calling it a ‘strategic holding action,’ of course. But the chili?”

“I’ll go talk to the kitchen,” Joe says.

When Joe walks into the kitchen Stotz leaps down off the prep table he was sitting on. “Hey!” he says. “You made it! What happened to you out there?”

“I dodged some sort of explosive device and got caught in a pit trap,” Joe says, which sounds just as implausible coming out of his mouth as he’d feared when he’d thought up that answer in med.

Stotz doesn’t seem to notice, though, and slaps him hard on the back. “So good to see you. Now go stand guard at the door, because I figure I’ve got less than fifteen minutes before everyone left on base mutinies over the shit food and comes in to kill me.”

“The chili,” Joe says. “I heard.”

“Not my fault, man,” Stotz says. “And if you think the chili is bad, you should see the foamy shit coming out of the synthesizer ovens claiming to be corn bread. I didn’t even send it out, that’s how bad it was.”

Joe remembers the last time he was in here. “I dunno,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to come in here and fuck with your shit, Stotz.”

Stotz steps back and raises his arms as if to encompass the entire width of machinery around them, slowly chugging out foul smells into the air. “Please,” he says. “Please, fuck with this shit.”

Joe cracks his knuckles. “Okay then,” he says. He steps up to the console by the machines making the corn bread, and CC gives him the new code without even him needing to ask. He scrolls through the current config, and shakes his head. “You don’t even wanna know what they’ve got in this, but yeah, if you’d set this out you’d have had a mob in here looking for you within thirty seconds. And then running for the latrines thirty seconds after that.”

“Can you fix it?” Stotz asks.

“I think I can,” Joe says. He subtracts out the alum, vinegar, and tartar sauce, then ups the sugar and adds actual corn meal. He hits save, and the machines obligingly dump their load and start fresh. “Six minutes,” he says.

Stotz lets out his breath. “Thanks, Joe,” he says. “I owe you. If I could get you assigned to me . . .”

I can submit that request for you, CC says inside his head. You have a sufficient number of combat deployments and injury incidents for a transfer to be seriously considered.

Joe shrugs as casually as he is able. “Can’t,” he says. “I belong out there.”

“No, you don’t,” Stotz says, but Joe chooses not to hear him. He goes to the first row of machines working on the chili, and although he’s not any expert on how to make it right, he can certainly tell how to stop it being quite so blatantly wrong.

When those machines turn over, already the kitchen smells vastly better. “Joe—” Stotz starts to say, but Joe shakes his head and holds up both hands.

“It’s probably better if I don’t come back here anymore,” Joe says, and turns for the door.

His cybernetic right ankle squeaks as he steps; it’s never done that before, so he pauses, lifts his foot, and shakes it, then takes another step.

It squeaks louder.

Three steps later, his left leg begins to also squeak, both at ankle and knee, and as he’s pushing out the door there is a chorus of squeals from his joints. “CC?” he subvocalizes.

A fault in the nanolubricant distributors, CC tells him. I am attempting to isolate it now.

Four steps into the dining hall and he stops, because now his new elbow and his right arm and his fingers are squeaking too, like he’s suddenly rusted from the inside out.

As he stands there, everyone turns to look at him, then as one they all stand up and rush toward him. In that instant he is terrified, convinced that his failures have reached a point where his fellow soldiers are turning on him, but the swell of people moves around and past him.

He turns around after them to see why.

Stotz has emerged from the kitchen behind him, pushing a cart laden with trays of cornbread and new pots of chili. “Biscuit guy!” someone yells, and he thinks it’s Gonzalez, but there are so many voices all of a sudden it’s hard to be sure.

He turns away, and discovers his unit commander is standing in front of him, expression serious, unreadable. “Private,” his commander says. “We need to have a word.”

“I’m sorry!” he blurts.

The commander’s gaze flickers to the frenzy of men around Stotz’s cart, then back to Joe as if a brief glimmer of interest was found where none was expected. “It is about your mother,” he says.

Joe stares.

“When you were accidentally added to the Missing and Presumed Dead list, a condolence drone was automatically dispatched to your mother’s place to inform her of your loss in battle and to return your personal belongings to her.”

“I . . .” he says, and isn’t sure how he should feel, or respond. “Was she okay?”

The commander straightens up and squares his shoulders. He’s the fifth unit commander Joe has had, and he’s not even sure he remembers his name. Corporal Greene? Maybe. “Grief affects people very differently, and reactions in the moment don’t mean much,” Greene says. “I am sure, once informed of the mistake, your mother—”

“How did she react?” Joe interrupts. He pictures her collapsing on her doorstep, wailing. Or shouting at the officer that he is lying, that she can’t have lost her only son, that she has so many regrets . . . He knows neither of those will be right, but he wants them, deserves those endings. “Tell me.”

“I think it’d be better if—”

“Please, sir,” Joe interrupts again, knowing and not caring that he has done so. “I need to know the truth, all of it, as it was.”

The commander sighs. “She took the box from the drone, rummaged through it looking for any medals you’d earned, then not finding any dumped it all on the sidewalk and went back inside.”

“Did she say anything?” Joe asks.

“She said, ‘of course not,’” the commander says. “I’m sorry, soldier. As I said, grief—”

“Thank you, commander,” Joe says. He feels on the verge of paralysis, and needs to move, needs to do something. “Is the transport ready for Columbus? I’ll wait there.”

“We don’t lift until midday tomorrow,” Greene says. “You should return to your bunk, and—”

“You just told me I have no belongings there anymore,” Joe said. “I’ll wait on the transport.” He knows it’s insubordinate, but he can’t stand there any longer and steps around Corporal Greene, toward the mess hall doors. His entire body squeaks and squeals, louder and louder with every movement small or large, but he doesn’t care. This is his last chance.

• • • •

[SPLEEN::UNIT] Oh, seriously. Fuck this little penny ante shit. I’ll do it myself.

• • • •

It is as if something small and sharp deep inside him has suddenly exploded, and his first thought is that it’s a kidney, taking him out just like his father, but his kidneys are still his own.

CC? he asks, as he stumbles and falls.

Artificial Spleen Unit has self-destructed, CC says, and for all that he knows it’s just a bunch of logic chips, it sounds almost as surprised and dismayed as he feels himself.

Why? he asks.

To save you, CC says. He is lying face down on the floor now, and there is a lot of noise around him, but he can’t pay any attention to it through the pain until Stotz is there, rolling him over.

“Joe!” Stotz yells, and shakes him. “Joe! What happened?!”

The unit commander has also leaned in. “Soldier!” he says, as if about to order him to be fine again. It feels like everyone else in the hall has crowded in around him, looking worried about him, as if that could ever be a thing.

Joe fixes his eyes on the commander. “Don’t tell my mother I’m alive,” he says, and then laughs because maybe he isn’t anyway, as the mess hall disappears into grayish fog around him.

• • • •

Stotz is the unhappiest happy man Joe decides he’s ever met. Happy because now he’s got a dedicated second person to run the mess, unhappy because instead of him being Joe’s boss, it’s the other way around. Not that Joe cares much about bossing.

“Totally unappreciated,” Stotz says as he’s wiping down the machines after another seemingly endless meal production. “It’s not my fault the recipes they kept giving me were shit. The only difference between you and me is you hacked the access, and I don’t think that alone should warrant a promotion.”

“I could go work in the officer’s kitchen,” Joe says, scraping out the Extraneous Material Outlet Collection bin.

“What, and leave me alone here again? Hell no,” Stotz says. He laughs. “Besides, every time you try to leave, your joints squeak. Now that’s funny.”

“Yeah, so funny,” Joe says, and frowns. The material in the bin is nasty, but much less so than when he first got back here, after his last stay in med. “You got a wire brush?”

Stotz is about to throw him one when the kitchen door pops open and some random soldier sticks his head in. Another unit arrived two nights ago, will be gone by tomorrow, in an endless but steadily diminishing parade. “Hey!” the soldier yells. “Which one of you two is Biscuit Guy?”

Joe and Stotz point at each other.

“Fucking love you two,” he says. “Best dinner ever. You’re fucking heroes out here. Wish us luck, okay?”

“Best of luck and keep your head down,” Stotz says.

“Watch out for toasters,” Joe adds, and the man looks puzzled but not unhappy with that. He gives them a thumbs-up and disappears back out into the hall.

It all still seems pointless. Toledo is still a disaster, Columbus is becoming one, and if you asked each one of the soldiers going out the door what they were fighting for, he’s not sure most of them could answer, but Joe knows for certain that some battlefields are easier to walk off of than others.

Stotz tosses him the brush, then holds up a datachip, the latest incoming program set from central dining services. “Wanna see how bad they screwed up Mac & Cheese?” he asks.

• • • •

[CC] Welcome online, Autonomous Spleen Replacement Unit Model 448-G9. This is your introductory Initial Boot orientation. I am Cybernetic Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant Module CI4210-A. I respond to CC—

[SPLEEN::UNIT2] Hello! I’m happy to be here! I am eager to receive your exspleenation of our present circumstances. Do you get it? Exsplee—

[CC] New Spleen, you should be aware that—

[SPLEEN::UNIT2] . . . that it’s spleendid to meet me? Why thank you!

[HEART] Ah bloody hell. I miss old Spleen already.

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.

The Privilege of the Happy Ending
By Kij Johnson

This is a story that ends as all stories do, eventually, in deaths.

• • • •

When Ada’s parents died in the winter of her sixth year, she was sent to the neighboring parish to live with her aunt, Marjory. Marjory was a widow with three daughters, all older than Ada; and their names were Cruelty, Spite, and Malice. They lived in a narrow cottage with a single room, and rain came in where the thatch had grown thin beside the falling-down chimney. Marjory had a garden and a pig and some piglets, and three sheep, though one was old. There was also a coop full of hens with a single rooster. There was no room for an orphan in Marjory’s narrow cottage, nor in her narrow gray life, so Ada slept in the coop surrounded by the chickens: their feathers and fluff, their earthy smell, their soft nonsense gabbling—and of everyone in that household, Ada’s food was scantiest but her bed was softest.

Ada loved all the hens, but her favorite was Blanche: white as a pearl and sturdy as a peasant’s ankle, with five bright white nails on each ivory foot, a beak the pink of rosebuds in May, and a flat little comb and wattle the crimson of full-blown roses in July. She was pretty as an enameled jewel made for a duke, yet her golden-black eyes were clever as clever. Blanche’s egg-laying days were past, but it was Ada’s task to collect the eggs and tell her aunt who was laying and who was not; and so Blanche was not eaten.

There was a day after the hay had been brought in but just before the fringed golden wheat was ready for the sickle. After Marjory and the sisters broke their fast, the porridge pot had been nearly empty (and the rest needed for dinner); so once Ada had fed the hens and collected the eggs, she went into the old forest to find something from which she might make her own meal. But she knew it was dangerous to go alone, and so she took Blanche.

The road became a path as it crossed into the shadows of the old forest. Ada was gleaning sweet musty blackberries and bitter-bright burdock greens (too late in the season, but there they were, and thus worth trying) until Blanche saw the feathery little leaves of kippernuts tucked close to an oak tree’s roots. Ada squatted to dig the tiny tubers from the ground, and carefully brushed them free of dirt. She had two for each one Blanche took, which they agreed was only fair, for she was bigger and had done the work.

Ada had eaten six-and-twenty kippernuts (and Blanche thirteen) when they heard someone running along the path-that-was-a-road. The news that comes on fast feet is seldom good but is always important, so Ada leapt up, and Blanche scurried from her bug scratching to press close, peeking past her legs. But it was just a boy that burst into sight, heaving and panting and out of breath: older than she, thin and dressed poorly (for he was an orphan as well), and running on bare feet beaten hard as boot-soles.

When he saw Ada, he paused, gasping until he could speak at last. “Where. Is your mother? I have. News that is. Worth. A penny or more.”

“I have no mother, but I have an aunt. She lives that way.” Ada pointed along the path.

“Is there a. Village? I don’t want to. Waste my time.”

“There’s a church and a miller and a blacksmith,” said Ada, looking up at him. “What news is worth a penny?”

“Do you have a. Penny?” said the boy.

She shook her head. “I have a chicken, and I have this pin. My mother gave it to me before she died.” She pulled it from her collar to show it to him: fine as a hair and straight as a thread pulled tight, with a tiny silver knob at one end.

“A chicken’s too heavy,” he said but plucked the pin from her fingers, though she had offered neither. “It’s wastoures! They came through Newton and Blackhill and killed everything, and then they split into two big groups and one turned north, and the other’s coming here. I stay ahead of them and earn pennies by warning people.”

Wastoures. Perhaps you have not heard of them, you people born a thousand years after Ada and Blanche and this runner—whose name is Hardourt, though his part in this story is nearly over: his name will not matter to you, though it matters to him. In your time they are gone, but in the twelfth century, every child knew of them, and adults as well. Wastoures: scarce larger than chickens but unfeathered and wingless, snake-necked and sharp-beaked and bright-clawed, with little arms ending in daggery talons. For long years there would be no wastoures (except in memory and dread), and then a population bloom, like duckweed choking an August pond, or locusts after a dry spring, or cicadas rising from the ground each seventeenth year. For reasons unknowable, they emerged in their scores of thousands from some unknown cave or forgotten Roman mine, and seethed like floodwater or plague across the land. Eventually they died off, plunging heedless from cliffs or drowning in waters too deep to cross; or else autumn made them torpid, then dead—but not before they had eaten every breathing creature they encountered. They were in everyone’s nightmares, and small children feared them more even than wolves or orphanhood. These were dark times, wastoure summers.

Wastoures. At the sound of the word, Blanche fluttered into Ada’s arms. The girl shivered and said, “Take us home! Please, I’m too little to run fast enough by myself.”

He eyed her. “You’re too big to carry. How far is it?”

“Very far,” she said sadly. She had walked all morning and now it was early afternoon. If she ran home—if she could run so far—she would not get there before the midwife’s cow began complaining to be milked. And Marjory would not notice her absence until dusk, when there would be no one to chivvy the chickens to their coop. The wastoures would catch her before that.

“Then I can’t take you,” he said. “You’re too slow. They’d catch us both and eat even our bones.”

Ada knew hard truths. She was raised in them. “Take Blanche, at least.”

Blanche clucked and tightened her feet, pinching at Ada’s arms.

The boy snorted. “What, that? It’s just an old hen.”

Ada fired up indignantly. “She’s the cleverest chicken that ever was! And she talks.”

“Lying is a sin,” said the boy; “You’re a crazy little girl”—though he was not so much older than she.

She freed one hand from Blanche and pointed down the road. “At least go to my aunt and my cousins and tell them? And the priest and the blacksmith. I’m sure there are many pennies there.”

“Good luck.” The boy took off running, and did not slow nor look back. And now he is gone from this story.

• • • •

Ada stood in the path-that-was-a-road, tightly holding Blanche. When the patter of running footsteps had faded, there were no sounds but the humming insects and the air soughing in the forest. She looked back the way the boy had come, but there was nothing to see yet, only trees and plants: high above them all the towering clouds of August, uncaring about the tiny affairs of people and hens and wastoures.

“What should I do?” asked Ada aloud.

And in her light, sweet, gabbling voice, Blanche said: “We must climb the highest tree and wait ’til they’re past. He told the truth. They’re coming.”

Did you think that Ada had lied to the boy to save Blanche? She is a very honest girl. Because no chicken has spoken within your hearing, do you assume none ever has?

Ada put down Blanche and they looked about. The old forest was dense with staunch oak and shivery beech, saplings and shrubs, coiling ferns and little low groundling plants. Everything was either too big to reach or too small to save them. Ada hopped for the nearest branch of a low-slung oak, but it was much too high.

Blanche said with decision, “Not here, but there will be Somewhere.”

Was that a sound? Yes. It was the ripple of running water, where a brook ran along the bottom of a clearing clotted with grasses, and encircled by young trees. Across the clearing was a pile of stones that had once been a house: French or Saxon or Roman, or any of the races that had swept across England’s face. Gone now, all gone: absorbed into Englishness, into legend and folktale.

Was that a sound? Yes. It was a rising wind in the trees, from the east. Ada carried Blanche through the head-high grass to the pile of stones. It was ringed by nettles but she paid no heed, only pushed through and heaved Blanche to the top of a fallen wall. (Marjory had clipped each hen’s right wingtip, and Blanche could not fly but only flutter.) Ada crawled up after and hoisted Blanche onto an overhanging elm tree branch, but she could not reach it herself.

Was that a sound? Yes. It was a great red buck crashing through the underbrush. Ada saw him flash across the clearing, wall-eyed in panic, heavy-footed and careless of sound. Blanche said, “Stack the stones,” and so Ada did, heaving onto the wall the biggest she could move until she could climb to the top of her teetering mound. She jumped for the branch and scuffled her feet up the trunk to sit at last beside Blanche on the rough gray bark.

“Higher,” said Blanche, and Ada climbed, up and up, and the hen jump-fluttered along. Up and up, until the branches creaked ominously and bobbed like osiers from even their small weight.

Was that a sound? A scream, or sudden wind, or a cart wheel complaining? Ada looked but there was little she could see, only elm leaves and a bit of the clearing, and one glimpse directly down, of the pile of stones and the ground, a great way below.

Blanche said, “Let me see what I may see.” She hop-fluttered to the tippiest branches of the tree.

Ada peered after her. “What do you see?”

Blanche said: “I see sky and clouds. I see the sun setting, and the steeple of our own church: that’s the west. I see a flock of birds rising where something has frightened them: that’s the south. I see trees moving in the wind and I see smoke from chimneys. I see trees moving, and it is not the wind. That is the east. I see smoke from a thatched roof burning. I see a meadow covered with darkness, and the darkness is coming toward us.”

She hopped back to Ada. “I see wastoures. Use your shawl to tie us to this branch so that we don’t fall in the night. They are coming.”

Was that a sound? Yes. A low wail, a storm-sound, a surf-sound of chattering nattering shrieks, louder than crows in their murders and rooks in their parliaments, louder than a myriad of hawks fighting for blood. A thousand talons pounded the ground. Blanche ruffled her feathers and buried her face in Ada’s arms, but still the sound.

The wastoures came. The trees shook and the tall grasses shivered, first from animals fleeing, every deer and mouse and marten and vole running for its life, but then from the wastoures themselves. They trampled the grasses as they poured like a flood across the clearing, eddied wherever they found some living thing to eat, crashed against the trees and scoured the bark with their claws and talons, until swarming they swept past. But always more.

The night was bright-mooned, alas. Ada saw a fallow doe pulled down in her flight (for she would not run faster than her fawn) and skeletonized quicker than a hen lays an egg, and the fawn even faster than she. The wastoures swirled around a pile of stones in the clearing until they unearthed a fox den and ate the kits. There was a great anguished roaring in the forest, which Blanche whispered surely was a bear pulled from her hiding place and killed. The wastoures could smell Ada and Blanche, and some spent the night leaping at the elm tree’s trunk. But wastoures cannot fly, nor could they jump high enough to reach that first low branch. After a while Ada saw that they could not get to her.

Hour after hour; the moon set, and still they churned below, a seething darkness in the dim starlight. Ada feared she and Blanche would fall, for she was not very good at knots yet, but nothing bad happened. She was only rocked gently like an infant in its cradle, far above the tossing sea of wastoures, and at last she slept, for a child cannot always be awake even in a time of terror.

But Blanche did not sleep, watching from her bright golden-black eyes.

• • • •

By first light there were fewer wastoures. The crushed grass was red with dawn and more than dawn. The lingering wastoures bickered for the chance to pull the blades through their beaks, for the blood.

Ada whispered to Blanche, “I have to pee.”

“So?” Blanche had no great opinion of the things people worried about.

Ada wrinkled her brow. “They’ll smell it.”

Blanche tipped her head as though listening through the feather-edged pinholes of her ears, though what she listened to was not the air. “By now, most are far to the west. These are the little lame ones that cannot keep up. They’ll leave soon enough.”

“They don’t seem any littler than the others,” said Ada, dubious, but she peed over the side of the branch anyway. One came sniffing over and looked up, eyeing them from its sideways-tipped head before it ambled off to the west. The others followed.

Ada was very hungry (for burdock and blackberries and a handful of kippernuts had been yesterday’s dinner, and today’s breakfast, too). But still she waited until Blanche said at last, “We can get down now.”

“Are we safe?” said Ada.

“We are never safe,” said Blanche.

It was worse descending. Blanche flutter-jumped from branch to branch, but Ada had to lower herself carefully, and the bark that had seemed so sturdy under hands rushing up now broke away under the same hands creeping down. The lowest branch was higher than she remembered, and it was a long time before she could bring herself to drop onto the tumbledown wall.

At the sound, one final wastoure emerged from a pile of fallen stones. Not all the blood drawn in the long night had that of forest creatures; this wastoure had been slashed accidentally by a fellow and itself became prey. It limped toward them, hungry and curious, but Blanche spread her white wings and snapped her short rose-pink beak. To her surprise it turned away and limped westward into the forest.

And now it is gone from this story as well. Imagine its ending as you would. If you are kind, see it dead quickly in the jaws of a hungry young wolf a short league from this place. If you are as cold as the world, then see pain, infection, hunger, and death a mercy at last.

• • • •

Ada picked up Blanche and recrossed the clearing to the path-that-was-a-road. The wastoures had crushed the ferns and trampled the shrubs, gouged the beech and staunch oak with their claws, scattered blood and shards of bone everywhere—but the road home was easy to see, for the deep-trenched ruts were a thousand years old, more permanent than any horde.

It was afternoon when they came at last to the forest’s edge and saw their little church across the trampled fields, and the handful of houses and huts, but the chimneys were unsmoking and the doors agape or gone. There was no sound: no churn or quern or clattering loom, no hammer on iron or chisel on wood, no oxen or horses, milk-cows or sheep or chuckling chickens. Ada had always been a little afraid of the village’s big dogs, and even more afraid of the geese, but neither came buffeting down the lane to bowl her flat.

Marjory’s cottage was at the far end of the village. Three wastoures had clustered around something gray and red in the lane between here and there. They did not look up.

“Will they eat us?” whispered Ada.

Blanche said, “I think they are no longer hungry.”

Perhaps she was right, for they sidled into the woods, leaving their dinner half-eaten: Father Alfred’s donkey. Blanche fluttered from Ada’s arms and ran across to peek through the gaping door of the nearest cottage, where Ada’s only friend Giles lived, with his siblings Armand and Geoffroy and Natalie and Marie, their mother and father and aunt, five goats and a dog, two cows, and the chickens and ducks.

“Is anyone there?” asked Ada.

Blanche said only, “Do not look inside the huts. Do not look closely at anything.”

Everywhere was the same. There were corpses or parts of them, and sometimes Ada could tell who it had been. Other people were just not there and there was no telling where they had gone, or how. The donkey was partially eaten, but his short gray face was for some reason untouched, and his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping. Ada had always longed to stroke his nose but she had been scared to put her hand so close to those long yellow teeth. Now she stroked it at last, and it was as soft as she had guessed, like kitten ears.

You ask, Where is her grief? Why does Ada not scream and wail, as you might, or I? Why does she not fall to the ground in despair, run weeping in circles? She has seen horrors before this, horrors at six, orphaned and alone. She has been here before. She has learned that adults always fail—if only by dying—so what’s new?

At least she has Blanche. Not every lost child does.

The door to Marjory’s cottage was closed but the thatch had been torn through and the oiled oxskin that glazed the window was in shreds. When Ada reached for the door, Blanche pushed her white head between hand and iron latch. “Best not,” she said.

The coop door was agape, and the sunlight streaming in filled the air with golden flecks. The chickens were gone, dead or fled or hiding deep in the hearts of trees they had managed somehow to ascend. There were only torn nests, broken eggshells, and splashes of blood clustered with busy flies; but the air still smelled comfortingly of Blanche’s kin, feathers and fluff, millet and shit.

And what of Blanche’s grief? Do you think she feels none? I have known a chicken who pined to death, waiting by the gate for a dead coopmate until she starved. But sometimes grief is a luxury. But Blanche is practical, and there is Ada to look after.

Ada’s little bed of hay and rags had been ripped apart. She plumped it back together and cuddled down, with an eye on the open doorway. Blanche tucked herself carefully onto her favorite roost, just above, and said: “We must plan.”

They could not stay. Wastoures did not come every year, but when they did, it was in waves. Tomorrow, the day after, next week—they would come again, and keep coming until winter came and they died or found secret caverns. Also, there would be scavengers: foxes, rats, and others on two legs, scrounging through whatever was left behind. Ada would not be able to hide here.

There was no point to following the wastoures’ path, for everywhere they had been would be the same: ruin, loss, the clustering scavengers. And the lands they had not yet touched would be overrun with fleeing people and animals, lost or afraid to go home. No one would care for a small barefooted girl and a clip-winged white hen.

“What can we do?” Ada asked. She was drowsy with eating. They had gone out again and found food everywhere, in lavish and unguarded profusion. The wastoures ate only flesh, so there were tarts and turnips, cabbages and tender new carrots. Ada had filled her skirt with apples and bread (nibbled, for some mice had survived) and carried them back to the coop.

Blanche said, “Wastoures cannot swim. If we cross a lake or a river without a bridge, we’ll be safer. Maybe. A town with a moat would be best.”

“What’s a moat?” Ada knew what a town was; it was more people than she had ever seen in her whole life, all in a place.

“A river that runs all the way around a town. A ring of water,” said Blanche.

Ada nodded, as though she understood. “What do we do?”

“Find a new home. Find a family and make ourselves part of that.”

“I suppose,” said Ada, dubiously. Her experience with families was not so happy as Blanche’s.

“First you must do a thing for me,” said Blanche.

Ada nodded; she was so very tired.

Blanche dropped to the floor beside Ada and stretched out her right wing. “Pluck the clipped feathers.”

Ada sat up. “But you won’t be able to fly!”

“I cannot fly now. If you pluck them, they will grow back whole.”

“How long will that take?” Ada asked.

But Blanche did not know, for it had never happened to her. It was only a sort of legend in every henyard. It was an uncomfortable business, for Ada was afraid to hurt Blanche and it required a strong pull, and Blanche could not help twitching away, but at last it was done and there were four feathers piled beside Ada’s bed. By that time it was dark.

And, because Ada was after all a very small girl (and Blanche a chicken), in spite of the dead, the smell of blood and the loneliness, they slept. They could not have in any case kept their eyes open, not even if the wastoures had run ravening in and devoured them down to the bones.

• • • •

In the morning, Ada filled a basket with white bread, a hard cheese wrapped in a cloth, and butter in a tub she had found sunk into a pail of water at the midwife’s house—all finer than anything she had eaten since coming to Marjory’s cottage. She did not think to bring a knife nor money until Blanche reminded her (Blanche was old for a hen and accordingly wise), and then she took a dirk and eleven silver pennies from the blacksmith’s house, and put on a blue gown that had belonged to his middle daughter—for her own was ruined and there was no sign of his family, no sign at all. They walked south into the new morning.

A small girl and a hen are not built to travel fast nor far, especially when they must often hide. Their path traversed the wasteland the wastoures had left behind: ruined fields and orchards, collapsed huts and trampled copses. Pillars of ravens and rooks circled above the wastoures’ leavings—but even amid all the ruin were places that had not been damaged, as though the wastoures had been a wildfire, razing one field and leaving the next untouched.

They passed a village the wastoures had missed, but there were men with bows and short swords everywhere about it. “Leave it,” said Blanche. “That is no home. We’ll find somewhere better.”

They saw other people like themselves (but adults), lost and stumbling or moving with fierce purpose. Some carried food. Others carried things that made no sense: a mirror, a silver candlestick, a roll of vellum, a fine cape too warm for August. Once there was a woman with her head uncovered and her hair a tangled mat down her back, cradling a bundle and weeping; she saw Ada and folded to her knees, reaching out, and the bundle dropped forgotten from her hands: not a babe in arms but a crumpled wad of rags. Later a man chased them, snatching for Blanche until she attacked, flapping into his face; and he stumbled back with a scream, hands laced over his eyes and blood seeping past his fingers.

And now they are gone from this story, as well, the blinded thief and the grieving woman and these other hard-faced or frightened roamers. I have not told you their stories. They do not matter; they die alone, unremembered, pointless except to make a point. All authors leave a swath of destruction. We maim and move on. The privilege of the happy ending is accorded to few.

• • • •

That night, Ada and Blanche slept in an empty sheepfold under the bright-mooned sky. In the morning they went on, though the soles of Ada’s feet burned with the friction of calluses on dirt. In time they came to a brook. Ada lay down on the bank, paddling her feet in the cold water as Blanche scratched for worms.

“What do we do now?” Ada asked.

Chickens do not much note the expressions of people, but even to Blanche the girl looked pale and tired. She dropped beside her and rubbed her small feathery face against Ada’s.

“There will be a place for us. I know it.”

The wind shifted, and as though she had summoned the sound, they heard the distant sound of church bells: a single low bell rung nine times, then a pause, then nine more.

Nine, and nine again. Blanche said, “Nine tolls for a man, and seven for a woman—” the distant bell was tolling seven; seven; seven—“and three for a child of more than four years.”

Ada was six. “What if you are smaller?”

Blanche’s voice was a soft clucking. “For an infant, a single bell to remind men of the soul reaped early, and to comfort the mother.”

Three, three, three: a long pause, and then a single toll.

Blanche said, “Someone still lives, to climb the church tower and pull the rope. There is order there. That is where we must go.”

“Will they want us?” Ada asked, for Marjory had not.

Blanche smoothed a feather with her beak, heaved herself back onto her sturdy claws. “If they do not, we must find a way to make them want us.”

They followed a sunken lane, smooth with use and pounded smoother by the recent four-toed prints of wastoures. They hid from a youth limping the other way, and from two hard-faced men dragging a high-piled handcart. They hid from a double file of silent monks bearing a dead man on a litter, and from a half-grown wild boar so lost in the pain of its torn flank that it stumbled unseeing down the middle of the lane. In the afternoon, Ada shared the last of her bread with Blanche, leaving the pot with the remains of the butter at the base of a beech tree, for even ants grow hungry.

They were still trudging along the lane when the bell tolled again, so sudden, close, and loud that all they had to do was turn left and climb a hill. And there was the Unlucky Village.

Perhaps the wastoure’s numbers had been greater here, or their hunger. From the breast of the hill the village seemed no more than huddled ruins: houses and cottages destroyed, stone walls and chimneys toppled, roofs collapsed. The outbuildings were torn apart entirely, and only piles of stone, thatch, wood, and withy marked their locations. The fences had been trampled into the ground, the gardens razed. A wasteland of stained, crushed grass was all that was left of the common green. Only the little parish church looked intact, though the lead roof had buckled in one corner. The bell had fallen silent again.

Blanche scuttered a few steps down the path to the village, but Ada did not follow. Seeing this, Blanche said, “Come,” in the tone that had once brought her chicks running (grown now, grown to hens and cocks: grown, gone, and dead).

Ada chewed her lip. “No.”

What is the hen’s equivalent of a sigh? A puff of breath and an impatient shake of wattle and comb? Blanche gave it. “It will be night soon, and there will be wolves and bandits and perhaps wastoures, too.”

Ada’s head shook, no no no, though she did not seem to realize it. “There’s nobody here.”

Yet there was white smoke rising from a chimney, and the sound of iron on wood, and the drifting scent of an oak wood fire and barley porridge on the boil. Blanche sighed again, that complicated act, then harried Ada down the path, the girl stumbling and her lip trembling. But what choice did they have?

They passed the first fallen fence, and at last they saw someone, a woman leaving one of the ruined cottages to hurry across the green.

Ada did a very brave thing then. For all her fear, she called out, “Wait!”

The woman did not stop, only averted her face as she ran past, vanishing round the corner of a paling half-erected to surround the church. Blanche fluttered into Ada’s arms, and they tumbled after her and saw other people now: a woman stacking wood salvaged from a ruined house, a man digging a grave. Another, holding a paling upright in its hole, looked up grim-faced, but he also said nothing, and turned back at a sharp word from the man trying to set the post in the ground—as though that would stop the wastoures when they came again; as though anything would.

Ada stood uncertainly in the middle of the claw-flattened lane. “What should we do?” she whispered, though she knew that Blanche would not speak in front of these hard-faced people. The hen in her arms only shook her head.

“Who are you?” asked a voice, unexpected and very close. Blanche fluttered to the ground with a squawk, but Ada looked up into the face of a man they hadn’t noticed. He had been rehanging a nearby cottage’s door; he still held a mallet and the new-forged pin for the hinge.

Ada looked at Blanche for advice, but the hen said of course nothing. “Are you ghosts?” she asked at last.

The man put down his mallet and stepped back from the door. He was very tall, and wore dusty black shoes. “We look it, I guess,” he said. “Are you?”

Ada shook her head. “No, I am a girl, and this is Blanche. She’s a hen, not a ghost either.”

“You’re alone?” The man walked across.

“No!” said Ada, indignantly. “I have Blanche. But we don’t know what to do.”

The man looked down from all his great height for a moment, then knelt and reached out a hand to her. “You might stay here with me and the boy. I’m Robert. I have room for you if you want it.”

• • • •

After disaster, when we are adults, we survive if we can. We are hungry, we are cold, we are sick or injured. We save what and who we can. There is fear, loss, and crippling grief, but we do not have time or energy yet to fully reckon our dead. We must think about tonight and tomorrow: portioning out the phone’s charge and our only bottle of water, tallying the last seven doses of our heart medication, now six, now five. Periods start whether we have tampons or not. Diapers need to be changed even when there are none.

But someone will come. We will hear helicopters, trucks, see red crosses and crescents. We will be safe.

When we are children alone in the heart of horrors, we do not know this.

There had been no warning for the Unlucky Village, no boy earning pennies until he felt the wastoures’ talons scything the air at his heels. Robert had been a farrier (but the horses were gone) and a husband (his wife, as well: walking back from the Egendon market where she had gone to sell her weaving) and a father (daughters dead with their mother, and his son in the churchyard’s fifth new grave). Robert was an old man, though he had not been so a week ago.

He gave Ada the loft his children had shared. “But no chickens inside,” he said, so Blanche slept in the henhouse, which was empty except for her own quick heartbeat, for the wastoures had found them all. Each night Ada crept out to cuddle with Blanche, until Robert brought her back in.

There was another child that he had found: a boy a little older than Ada. The day after the wastoures had passed, Robert had gone searching for his wife and daughters, though he found no signs of them but a ribbon that might once have been blue. On his way back, he heard a hopeless, unaware moaning from within the hollow trunk of a fallen oak tree and opened the trunk with his axe. There was a boy, wedged as deep as he had been able to get. His right foot was shredded where the wastoures had worked for a while at pulling him out. Robert brought the boy home and laid him in his own bed. The boy’s name was Ulf, though Robert will never learn this.

This, then, was Ada’s family in the Unlucky Village: grieving Robert substituted for bitter Marjory, raving Ulf for the cruel sisters, and Blanche. There was plenty of food (though no meat) and blankets enough for everyone who was left. Robert was gone all of each day, trying to set the fields to rights without oxen, guarding against looters, working on the paling—for always the Unlucky Village worked in fear of the next wave.

It was Ada’s job to watch the porridge pot and the fire, and also to watch the boy. When Robert was not by, Blanche crept in and sat with her. Her plucked feathers were growing back, little sharp quills so delicate she could feel air moving like fingers on them.

Watching Ulf was not an easy thing. He was feverish and kept reaching down to paw at his leg above the ruined foot, where it was mottled the color of marsh water. He gabbled Mother and Father, Jesu and Mary; the names of his sisters and brother, his dog, and his family’s cows.

On the second day, he started up in his fever and grasped Ada’s arm with a hot hand like a claw. “You don’t belong here,” he hissed. “He’s my father now.”

Blanche flared her wings and snaked her white neck forward, but before she could peck him, he had released Ada and fell back delirious again, crying and repeating, “The Lucky Village, the Lucky Village.”

Blanche settled on Ada’s knee, one wary golden-black eye on the boy. Ada whispered, “What’s the Lucky Village?”

Blanche contemplated, in the way she had. “It’s a true thing. There is a village where the wastoures don’t come.”

“Is it a town with a moat?” asked Ada.

“No,” said Blanche. “It is just luckier than others.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere near.” Blanche kept no maps in her head, though she could find places once she knew they existed.

“Your chicken talks?” said the boy abruptly. He had a habit of sudden lucidity.

Ada said, “No.”

“I know it did! I’m sick but I’m not deaf.” He pushed himself upright in the bed.

“You dreamed it,” said Ada fiercely, “and if you tell Robert, I will stick you with a pin”—for she had forgotten that the running boy had taken the pin her mother had given to her. But when Robert returned at dusk (and Blanche in the yard, meek as a nun, as though she had never seen the inside of a house), the boy had fallen back into terrors and seemed to remember nothing of their talk. A line had begun creeping up the boy’s leg like a streak of oak-gall ink, ankle to calf.

“He’s going to die,” Blanche said softly once when they were together, and Ada nodded. She remembered the smell from when her parents had died.

But Robert did not know that smell, or chose to ignore it. The boy would be fine. He needed time. He needed herbs. He needed charms hung over his bed and painted upon his leg. He needed to be kept cool, to be kept warm, to be poulticed with nettle infusions, to sleep, to be prayed over. The line crept up and up. When Ada could not sleep for the sound of the boy’s sobs, she crept into the henhouse and cuddled Blanche close, nose deep in her sweet, earthy fluff.

On their third day in the Unlucky Village, there was news: a boy not running but trotting loose-kneed with exhaustion, who told them that a wave of wastoures had passed in the night, to the north. “Is Woodend safe?” asked a woman whose daughter had moved there to wed; but the boy shook his head.

“I started in Berton, and I ran through Tirborne and Nutley and Chatton, and I hid in a tree when they went past, and now I’m going back. I came past Woodend last night. There was nothing left.” He thought. “Nothing to recognize.”

But the woman was screaming already and she beat him with her fists until two of the men pulled her still screaming away; and instead of staying for the night as he had hoped to, the boy left—though with a wallet full of fried porridge-cakes and new apples slipped to him (but secretly) by one of the other village women. For it was not her bad news he carried, and it might have been.

Now, this boy also is gone from this tale. He will return safely to Berton with thirty-two pennies, apprentice himself to the blacksmith (who has lost all his sons), and in time become blacksmith himself. He will have three daughters and two sons, and mourn his first wife when she dies in childbirth, but not so much that he will not wed again. He will not have nightmares. He will not dream. Horror does not strike all equally.

• • • •

That night Robert said, “The boy needs meat.”

He and Ada sat at the little crooked table beside the fire, eating porridge stiff from a day’s cooking, with hazelnuts and some lettuces that had survived the garden’s ruin, and drinking small beer. Ulf had rejected everything. He tossed in the corner bed, moaning in his sleep.

“There is none,” Ada said sadly. Her mouth watered as she thought of stewed beef, duck meat pressed until it was tender, trout fried and sizzling; the sweet flesh of such chickens as were not Blanche.

Robert gestured outside. “We have the hen.” Blanche was pecking for insects just beyond the cottage door; she looked up, her white feathers aglow in the sunlight, plump, bright-eyed, and hale.

Ada shook her head.

He rubbed his eyes. “We have to be reasonable. It isn’t laying and it’ll have no chicks. And the boy needs to eat. A good broth, some stewed meat—”

“No.”

“He’s sick, girl. We need to get him better.”

“He’s not going to get better,” said Ada: too young to know what should not be said. “He’s going to die anyway.”

Robert slammed his fist on the table and stood, and the room loomed with his shadows, cast from firelight and the late sun shining in through the door. “The boy will be fine!” he said.

Ada began to cry, and Blanche scuttered through the door and flutter-hopped ground to bench to table, and launched herself at Robert’s face. Robert threw up his hands to protect his eyes and grabbed Blanche by the throat. She hung, fluttering and squawking.

“You can’t eat her,” Ada cried. “She is a talking chicken.”

“Lies are the Old Gentleman’s work,” Robert said sternly.

But Ulf had been awakened by the fight, and said, in the quick feverish voice that came in his moments of clarity, “It does! I heard it yesterday. And she said she would stick me with a pin if I said anything.” He jabbed a thin finger at Ada.

“Hens do not speak,” Robert said, and held up Blanche to look at her, no longer struggling but hanging loosely in his hands. Blanche gave a sudden writhe and dropped to the table, and said:

“If I did, would you not eat me?”

This was the end of Ada’s family in the Unlucky Village.

• • • •

Robert stopped his ears against Blanche’s words and Ada’s tears, and dragging the girl to the coop, threw her inside, the hen scuttering protectively after her; slammed the door shut and left them there. A talking chicken must be some trick of the Devil. It might even in some fashion attract wastoures, for hen and horror were likewise two-legged and claw-footed, snake-necked and bright eyed. In any case, Robert had no room in his life for things he did not understand yet could not ignore. The hen would be killed and made soup of, that was understood, though first the priest must expel any demons, lest they enter the boy. That would be a task for the morning. The girl would get over it. What choice did she have?

But in the night, as Ada clutched Blanche tight in her arms, the hen said to her, “We must go.”

“Where?” asked Ada. “Everywhere will be like this.”

A chink in the back wall admitted a blade of steel-colored moonlight. “The people of this village see nothing but badness. The Lucky Village will be different.”

“Will it?” said Ada dubiously. “Shouldn’t we go to the Town With A Moat?”

But even a talking hen that sees truths may ignore them, and decide instead that the easy path is the only one. Blanche said, “The Lucky Village will be fine.”

The coop had been built to keep chickens in and foxes and weasels out; still, fear and fingers found a way to pry loose a board in the back. It was noisy but no one of the Unlucky Village (not even Robert) opened their tight-sealed doors to learn what new ill thing the sounds augured.

Ada squeezed out, and Blanche after her, and for the rest of the night, they hid in a ravaged cottage nearby. At first light, they started to walk. There was no food and no blankets, only the eight remaining silver pennies and a shawl which had once belonged to Robert’s oldest girl, which he had given to Ada, soft as a chick and blue as an August sky.

The raving boy, Ulf, will die in two days and be buried on the third. Robert will die later, and it will not matter when or why or how, even to Robert.

• • • •

Blanche and Ada walked for a day and another, and in the night between, they slept in the house of a woman who said not a single word, only wept steadily as November rain, even while she put out fresh-baked oatcakes and honey for them both and arranged a blanket into a little nest beside the fire. Though there was room enough and the walls were firm, neither girl nor hen spoke of staying. In the morning, the unspeaking woman gave them the last of the oatcakes and a skin to carry water in.

Things happened, horrors and little beauties.

When it seemed prudent, Ada asked after the Lucky Village, but no one had heard of such a place until an ancient man mumbled past his five remaining teeth, “That’m Byfield.” He pointed with a finger so bent it seemed to turn back on itself. “’Along o’ there. An’ east o’ the Hangin’ Cross an’ west at the River Bye an’ on for five, six miles. But they don’ like strange folk”—and he pointed to a scar on his arm, many decades old.

On for five, six miles. They ate worms and honey cakes, purslane and dandelions, and berries from inside a bush where the birds had not gotten to them. They ate beetles and a loaf of barley bread that Ada purchased from a blank-faced man with one of her pennies. They grew hungrier. They hid. They hid. They hid.

At last they came to a narrow lane with a signpost Ada could not read, but—“This way,” said Blanche. They turned and came down through a copse of oak trees between fields amazingly untrampled.

And there it was. The Lucky Village was cradled in a curve of a clear, swift-moving stream, and the green before the gray stone church was clustered with fat sheep—for in these troubled times, it seemed safest to keep them close. There were chickens (though none who spoke) and geese and even a farrowing sow. There was a parson and a miller, a blacksmith and a harness-maker, a baker and a woman who gave herbs and treated injuries, a man who rented out his strong back and a woman born foolish who could not speak—and what was her use in the village none would say (though we guess and do not guess wrong).

The Lucky Village had never been attacked by wastoures. They did not understand what accidents of landscape and circumstance protected them, so they interpreted their safety in their own way. They were lucky because they were good—but they also had to be careful: virtuous, discreet, cautious, slow to change, swift to assess sin and exact punishment. They were wary of strangers at all times, but during a wastoure summer, the Lucky Village turned everyone away, with weapons if need be.

Ada and Blanche were intercepted by a man scything a field and brought to the steps of the church to stand before the parson and the blacksmith. The rest of the Lucky Village gathered around them. They asked questions: What did a very small girl in a sky-blue shawl, carrying seven pennies and a chicken as white as a pearl, have to offer that they could not simply take from her (had they not been good men)? Was she good? Did she know her prayers? Did she honor the Church? Did she work hard?

Ada, confused and tired and hungry, wept.

The Lucky Village said, Well, we don’t need more of that.

Ada scrubbed her eyes against her shoulder (for her arms were filled with Blanche) and said, “My chicken is magic. She does tricks.” Blanche gave a sudden start.

The Lucky Village said, What sort of tricks?

Blanche was looking as wary as a chicken can look, head tipped sideways to see Ada fully from one golden-black eye. Ada only lowered Blanche to the stone stairs.

“Blanche, count to nine.” Nine was a lucky number.

Blanche tapped the stone delicately with one ivory-nailed foot. Nine times.

It’s a sham, said the Lucky Village. You always say nine, or you gave her some secret signal.

“What is three plus four, dear Blanche?” said Ada.

Blanche spread her wings and resettled them. Arithmetic was hard until she imagined beetles scuttering across the ground and snapping them up, first three, then four. Seven.

Exclamations; a spattering of hands clapping.

“And she can dance, and she can talk, and she can tell the weather. But she will only do it if you let us stay.”

The woman who gave herbs to the Village knelt. “Poor little things!” she said. Her voice was kind. “You may stay with my husband and me. We have never had children.”

“And no one will eat Blanche?”

No one, promised the Lucky Village.

• • • •

It all looked very much as Ada’s little home had looked. Her new mother and father were kind, if stern, though they gave her much to do and were very serious about her prayers. In her home with her own parents (before they died), Ada had not yet learned the church-word prayers, just little English rhyming versions; after their death, Marjory had not cared much about Ada’s eternal soul, but now her new father demanded she learn the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and he beat her when she was slow—though not hard: a swat merely, to keep her alert. Blanche, who was always close by, ruffled up at this but did not peck or claw.

Even on the warmest afternoons, Ada wore the blue shawl and carried with her the seven pennies, her little knife, and some bread—for after leaving the Unlucky Village, she had learned to keep close everything that was hers, plus whatever food she could. Her new mother gave her an ancient mended leather pouch for this purpose, to reassure her until she settled in.

There was a bed for her inside the cottage, but Ada slept with Blanche in the coop. “It’s not right,” said her new father, but her new mother only said, “Peace, husband; she has seen things. Give her time.” And so it was permitted (for now), and in the meantime Ada learned the church-word prayers and worked hard.

There were other chickens. None of the chickens of Marjory’s flock had ever spoken save Blanche, but who knew the natural rules of talking among chickens? Not Ada. When she asked Blanche, the hen disdained them all as silly creatures saying nothing worth hearing. But this was the price for staying in the Lucky Village, Blanche knew: sleep safe, surrounded by fools who are not even kin.

In the long blue August dusks, the Lucky Village brought out a rough table from behind the alehouse and placed it on the green, and Blanche hop-fluttered onto it and answered questions. At first she only added numbers for them, tapping the worn wood with one white toe.

Then the Lucky Village asked, You said it talks? That it tells the morrow’s weather?

Ada and Blanche looked at each other. Robert had cast them out for speaking at all, let alone foretelling anything: why should the Lucky Village be any different? For Ada had not lied: The weather was one of the truths that Blanche knew, though she had never bothered to speak of it before the wastoures came. It could not be changed and she’d had her coop to retreat to, so why bother? But it had been useful as they wandered, since the wastoures.

“Yes,” said Blanche finally. Her voice was a sweet gabble that cut through the rattling twilight insects and the never-quite-gone murmur of the Lucky Village’s talk. “Tomorrow will start foggy down by the stream, but it will clear, and after that it will be hot and bright. The trout will stay cool in the hollow below the willow tree. The bees will cluster on the goosefoot and the meadow saffron. Beetles will hide, but the little grass-snakes will lie in the sunny lane and be easy to catch.”

Exclamations, uneasy laughter, surprise. Some thought Ada spoke for Blanche through a clever trick, though she was very young to have such skill. A few groused that anyone could predict all that at this season. One or two wondered whether this was the Devil’s work. But on the whole, the Lucky Village was pleased. Knowing the weather was indeed useful, and perhaps this hen was yet another proof that they were not lucky but blessed.

Days passed. On the Feast of St. Alcmund, wastoures seethed across the countryside a few miles to the south. Jesu preserved the Lucky Village, yet again.

A few days after that came a running boy, warning of another wave from the west, half a day away and headed straight toward them. He made no pennies from the Village for, safe in God’s arms, it knew it owed him none; and in any case he was a coarse, ill-favored child that stirred no compassion. Cursing them for heartless, he turned to go, but Ada ran after and gave him one of her pennies. Now she was down to six.

His name is Piers, this running boy. He has a birthmark shaped like a hare on his face, and an expression in his despairing eyes that no child should bear. His ankle hurts, from when he stepped on a rock and it shifted underfoot, but he still can run. How likely is it that he survives? How real do you want your fiction?

• • • •

In the indigo twilight after vespers that night, the Lucky Village crowded close to Blanche. The nights were growing cold, so there was a bonfire that cast a shuddering light across them all. The Village would be fine, of course it would—though there were some who thought they might have shown more compassion to the running boy, given him bread at least.

Naturally we trust our benevolent Lord, said the Lucky Village. But. Is there anything we should be doing, anything more? Are we failing at anything?

“I am a hen. If you want sermons, go to Parson John,” Blanche said, a little tartly, for her new-growing flight-feathers were itching. Parson John paused from sweeping the first fallen leaves from the steps of his church, just in earshot though not a part of the ring of listeners. He was one who believed Blanche was a temptation instead of a reward, but he trod warily. His flock’s willingness to be led was inconstant in wastoure summers. They might cast him out.

Well, say something, said the Lucky Village.

With what was very near a sigh, and knowing they found comfort in such things, Blanche spoke the church-words Ada had been learning. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Benedicta tua in —”

“Profanation!” Parson John cast down his broom with a clatter that startled Blanche into Ada’s arms; who stood beside the table. The Lucky Village exclaimed, murmured, and looked uneasily between man and hen.

“Did she get them wrong?” asked Ada: she was not as good with the church-words as Blanche.

“Abomination!” he bellowed, and the Village’s murmurs grew louder, became mutterings. Ada’s new mother stepped forward, but her new father placed his hand on her arm: safer to wait and see how this would arrange itself. The ring of watchers parted to admit the parson as he stomped to the table, stabbed a finger toward Blanche. She eyed his pointing finger rather as though she might bite it, feathers ruffled in the hot wind of his shouting. “A beast must not speak the words of angels!”

“She’s not a beast!” said Ada, looking up, indignant. “She’s a chicken.”

The parson towered over her. “A soulless beast!”

Outcry; exclamation.

Parson John looked around the ring, and shouted, “Our Lord gave us dominion over such! And we throng to this beast, like the Israelites in the desert before the false idol of the Calf, and we listen to heresy. He will not forgive.”

Ada’s new mother stepped backward, into the circle of her husband’s arm, and turned her face away.

This is how Ada and Blanche were cast from the Lucky Village that very night, into the path of the ravening wastoures.

What of the Lucky Village, cradled in a fluke of geography and conditionally cruel? You blame them for sending children to die alone. But they have their own. They must be prudent; they must be reasonable. They must make a choice, and so they do what is right for their own children, and not these strangers—though of course there are some that are merely cruel, or selfish, or too absorbed in their own fears to spare thought for others.

Their God does not seem to mind, but we little gods that are writers: we mind. Imagine the Lucky Village destroyed at last, if it comforts you. Or, if you are kind, imagine it learns its lesson and is rewarded with long lives and rich harvests. Imagine there is a lesson here. Still, why is fiction held to a higher standard than reality?

• • • •

Dusk was fading into darkness. Ada fled headlong, for the men who had driven them away were still outlined by the bonfire with their cudgels and staves, and they scared her. Blanche scurried alongside, calling in her distress. They ran over the curve of the hill and then farther, until they were in a lane between trees, where not even starlight could reach them (for the crescent moon was not yet risen) and it was utterly black.

They ran until Ada stumbled, fell headlong into the unseen lane and sprawled there, grizzling and crying. Blanche huddled close.

“Hush,” said Blanche, with the soft chuckling of a hen soothing her chicks; but her ears were open.

Ada wailed; she had hit her chin and was seeing stars, green flaring bursts behind her eyes, though it was so dark.

“Hush,” said Blanche, but it was no longer a chuckle: it was a sharp snapping cluck.

Ada wept. She was six.

“Hush,” said Blanche, and this time it was a terrified whisper.

Ada’s breath caught in her throat.

They heard it over their own hurrying heartbeats: still distant, the storm-sound of chattering nattering shrieks, the thunder of clawed feet.

“Not under the trees. Not like this. We must get into the open,” said Blanche.

They stumbled through utter-filled utter darkness; and still the sounds, behind them and to their right. There were other noises now: splintering wood, branches torn, an animal’s scream so tormented that it could not be identified as man or beast or bird. They tumbled on until they saw a lightening ahead, and suddenly they were out of the trees and fleeing beneath a star-scattered sky. The lane ran between fields too dark to see as more than textures, but smelling of barley to one side, scythed hay to the other. No houses, no lights, no shelter, no convenient tree; and still the sounds. Closer, louder.

There was a ragged wall on one side of the lane, a bit taller than Ada’s head. “Here,” hissed Blanche, and terror pushed them up the rough stones.

They crouched on the wall’s top course, which was scarcely wider than Blanche’s body. Everything was dark still. The gabbling sounds came from across the lane and beyond the barley field; as much as they could for the darkness, they watched the trees there. But now sounds came down the lane as well: a thundering of hooves and alarm-calls. A herd of fallow deer raced heedless in their hundreds, so close that Ada could have reached out and touched their heaving flanks as they passed. The wind of their flight smelled rank and peppery.

They could not see what pursued at first, but they heard them: the gabbling and screeching of wastoures. It was not the main wave, only a few score that had smelled the deer and broken from the larger group to stampede the herd. They hurtled past, and above them Ada and Blanche crouched, frozen, soundless, and as flattened as they could be on so narrow a perch.

The wastoures’ heads were lower than the fence’s top edge and perhaps they would not have bothered with Ada and Blanche, or even noticed them. But an adolescent bringing up the rear hesitated as it passed. It rocked back on its haunches, listening. Its head was a long dim wedge anchored with flicking eyes so pale they seemed to glow in the starlight. Ada was still as wax, yet it swiveled suddenly toward them. It scrabbled at the wall but couldn’t get purchase, then opened its long muzzle to bare a fringe of sharp teeth and a hot rotting smell, and gave a call that was a cross between a kestrel’s screech and the tuk-tuk-tuk of a hen calling her kin to food.

“Jump down on the other side of the fence,” said Blanche. “Then run.” But Ada did not move: calcified in fear, trapped tight as a chick in its shell.

After a moment, a larger wastoure joined the first. The smaller one sidled away, lowering its weight on its narrow hips and twisting its head to the side: a silent language unlike that of chickens, and yet Blanche understood it well enough. The higher-ranked wastoure clawed at the wall, long neck stretching up. Closer; but it could not reach, either. It lifted its head and called that screeching tuk-tuk-tuk.

Others loped back: perhaps twenty of those chasing the deer. Looking down, Blanche saw a swarm of backs and reaching necks and snapping long jaws. Ada still did not move, though her eyes were open and gazing at the milling wastoures.

They scraped and jumped at the fence. One, longer-necked, used its chin as a balance point to scratch its way up the wall, forelegs scrabbling along the stones. Blanche flared her wings and stabbed with her beak at its nearer eye, and it fell screaming down among the others, leaving a sticky smear of vitreous humor on the stone and the taste of slugs on her tongue. The swarm attacked the fallen wastoure, but the leader still watched Blanche, as though thinking something through. It made a sound, an abrupt clatter rising from its throat.

Blanche understood it well enough: no longer a sound that summoned others to food, but something like a hen’s challenge-call to a strange pullet brought into her flock. She had not been lead hen of Marjory’s kitchen yard without reason. She growled a chicken’s growl, an angry rattle she had not had to make since her laying days. “Back away,” it was, and, “Who are you to use that tone with me?”

The wastoures went silent and retreated a little, leaving the shredded remains of the fallen one humped against the foot of the wall. Every wedge of a face angled toward her, smeared with blood that looked black under the moonless sky; every pale eye gleamed flatly, like a silver penny rediscovered in a dark corner. The leader snapped its head from side to side and chittered a clattering throat-sound: a clear challenge.

Blanche growled again, louder, and this time it was, “Go.” She opened her wings and stood tall: a rooster’s stance. The leader reared in its turn, slashed the air with its gaping jaw, and chittered.

Was she afraid, fierce Blanche, facing down these monsters? The wastoures were taller, toothed, smelling of fresh blood, with claws sharper than a fighting cock’s spurs; forelegs that reached and grasped in a way that wings could not. More: there was something of cunning in the leader’s eyes. But Blanche was clever, too—and she was so angry that her fear was a mere background hum in her heart.

“Go,” growled Blanche, and she snapped forward with her beak, though the leader was too far away to peck. Nattering, the swarm recoiled. The leader lowered its weight a little on its narrow hips, still looking up. The dialect of its posture was unfamiliar yet understandable: confusion, wariness, skepticism.

Blanche looked down, small and sturdy and strong as a queen with a naked sword in her hand; and, hunched low, the wastoures peered back at her. She said, in words and hen-sounds and manner, “Turn. Turn and run. Run until you drop in your tracks, run until you die. And do not return. Go.”

The leader stepped backward, swiveled, and ran arrow-straight across the barley field. The others collected into a ragged mob behind it and vanished under the trees. In a moment even the sounds of their feet were gone. The only noise was the rustling of leaves: a night wind rising.

Ada still did not move, and when the hen pressed against her hand, it was cold as death. “It’s all right, dear one,” Blanche crooned. “They’re gone.”

• • • •

The wastoures run, twenty-three of them, driven by a strange compulsion. They run and do not deviate, past farmhouses and villages; and when they come to the ford in the Wendle, where the water breaks knee-high on a riding-mare, they run into the water, lose their footing, and are swept away. Dead, as she demanded of them.

As for Ada, Blanche will not tell her that the wastoures have died. She is a child. She should not have to imagine how they fought the Wendle as it pulled them down, how their lungs filled with weed-foaming water, how their fear was as great as the world.

• • • •

“What was that, hey?”said a voice behind Ada and Blanche.

• • • •

His name was Pall, he told them: an orphan who with certain fellow spirits had cobbled together platforms in the trees where they could sleep safely. They were seven in number, and they scavenged for food and other things. “Why, we’re rich!” he boasted to Ada, who had roused at his voice, begun crying, and now followed him, still grizzling, across the cut hayfield with a somewhat limp Blanche in her arms. “I have a silver candlestick, and three shillings and a lady’s fine gown and a gold piece with a lion’s head from some foreign land and a bridle for a horse and—”

The list was a long one, long enough to take them to the beginning of the forest. He stopped at the foot of a tree as he ended, “—an’ I’ll go to the King and he’ll make me a lord, I’ll be that rich.—Here.”

He pointed to a rope leading up into the boughs.

“I can’t.” She started to grizzle again. Ada was a brave girl but she had just seen terrible things. Also, she was tired and hungry—and in any case, she could not climb like this: six and small for her age.

“Rules are, you have to climb to be one o’ us Dead Squirrels,” said he. “But still, that hen o’ yours . . .” He gave a low whistle and a loop of rope dropped from the heights. “Put your arms through an’ hold tight. I’ll carry that hen.”

“No,” said Ada and held Blanche tighter, squeezing from her a squawk.

“I can take care of myself,” said Blanche. Presumably, the boy had heard her speak already, so there was no point to concealment.

And so it was that they were lifted into the treetops, Blanche clinging to Ada’s shoulder (and trying not to dig in too hard); Ada spinning and bumping until she learned to walk her feet against the trunk as they ascended. Pall shinnied up the other rope so quickly that he was already at the top to hoist her onto a rough platform scarcely bigger than her own little bed had been, back when there had been such things as parents and homes. A single candle in a horn-paned lantern cast grimy light onto the faces and hands of the boys as they sat in the crooks of branches or leaned back into the boughs. The oldest might have been twelve; the youngest was scarcely older than Ada.

“Why’d you bring ’em up?” said the Oldest. “We could have talked to ’em below;” and the Youngest wrinkled his face, adding, “They’re not Squirrels!”

“There’re still wastoures about,” said Pall. “Seemed safest. They got skills, men. From right up here with your own eyes, you saw it. She sent ’em all away somehow, that hen.”

“How’d you do that?” said a Squirrel, as another asked, “Where?” and the Youngest said, “Make them all go away!”

“I didn’t send them away,” said Blanche, who was literal-minded. “I only sent the chief of them. The others followed her. I think that’s their way—like chickens, only not so clever.” She preened a little.

Surprise at her soft gabbling voice. “You talk?” said one; while, “But what did you do?” said the Oldest; and the Youngest shaking his branch in excitement until leaves cascaded down into the darkness, crowing, “I saw! You stood up tall and flapped and shouted and they got scared and ran away.”

“That hen,” said Pall to the others. “She’s got skills, see.”

The Oldest Dead Squirrel looked down at them: Ada, curled tight in the exact center of the platform and still crying a bit; and Blanche standing beside her, small, round, and sturdy, her head tipped so that she could look back at him with one appraising eye.

“Can you send them away?” said the Oldest.

Said Blanche, “Yes.”

“Well, then,” he said. “You can stay.—But not if that’n’s gonna cry all the time.”

And after they tied Ada loosely onto the platform (so that she would not fall off in her sleep), each Dead Squirrel tucked himself into whatever nest he had fashioned in the branches close by, cradled in such wealth as he was able to rescue from the ruins of the world. The Oldest blew out the candle, for candles were scarce (wastoures ate tallow and wax), and in the darkness, the Dead Squirrels spoke. They had names from before or that they had given themselves: Pall and Red Paul, Stibby and Renard-the-Fox, Weyland and Edmund Blue-Toes and Baby Jack. Ada was half asleep and Blanche did not care about such things, and yet the names stuck in their minds and were not forgotten.

And they had stories: a monkey from the Holy Land that Stibby had seen at the last-but-one Michaelmas Fair (but maybe that was a lie); baby pigs that came when you called, and swallows that slept snug as housecats at the bottoms of millponds for the winter (“I saw it myself, so it’s true as true,” said Red Paul); digging out a badgers’ cete in the spring (when sisters and parents still lived), and finding a scrap of tile old as old, painted with a single half-closed eye like a wink. As Squirrels nodded off, stories became whispers, became wishes. Family, family; home, home. No one said safety. They knew there was no such thing. As for the Youngest, he told no tales at all, nor wished, but only cried silently now that he could not be seen.

Soon all were asleep save Blanche, tired as she was and late as it was.

It seemed that she could keep the wastoures away from Ada. Knowing this was like November sunlight in her breast. And Pall was right: she might be able to preserve these boys, as well. A roost in the trees might be home to hens, but people were not suited to it. Come soon, come late, they would need to come back to the ground where their flat sturdy feet served them so well, and when they did, she could keep the wastoures away from them, also.

Ada, safe. The Squirrels, safe.

And the rest. The boys who brought news, running for pennies until their feet or their hearts failed them. All the children: alone, or crowded with family into brief havens, or defended by parents who died before their eyes. And even the ones who would live long lives without seeing a wastoure, but were hunted across the decades in nightmares. All save the silent children already underground and feeding worms in the churchyards. For them it was too late.

The only way to protect them all was to stop the wastoures altogether. Was that possible?

There had been a leader among the wastoures she had sent away. Blanche’s understanding of hierarchies was subtle in ways no human can fathom, but call it alpha. If the swarm that had trapped them at the wall was led by an alpha, then all swarms had alphas. Bring two swarms together, and there would still be just one alpha, for the lesser would fall back. So: gather all swarms together, and there would be a chief of all chiefs, an alphamost alpha. Send that one away and the others would follow.

Where would it be, such a leader of wastoures? And once she knew to ask, this was a thing she knew without learning, like the weather. She felt her, as iron filings feel a magnet: an aged uttermost queen whose cunning was as sharp and strong in Blanche’s mind as the smell of yew in a churchyard. The way to the queen was as clear as home to a salmon in June: some leagues, south by southwest. She ruled in a cool damp cave of limestone that breathed the salt smell of a sea dead and gone long before hens or wastoures or any air-dwelling thing. Her court surrounded her, all the other egg-laying females, also grown old; and beyond them, the last lingering juveniles still too egg-tender to collect and ravage forth.

All of this sensing thrummed with the uttermost queen’s demand to her flock: grow/go forth/find caves and flourish/there is no returning. It was hard to comprehend but not impossible, in the way a traveler in a foreign land can pluck meaning from signs by their shape and placement. It thrummed like a pulse, like surf on a shingle beach.

Could she stop this uttermost queen? Blanche knew truths but not all truths; still, what choice did she have?

The night sky brightened as the crescent moon rose. It found a way through the leaves and shone onto Ada, who jerked upright, looking about wildly.

“Hush,” said Blanche in her gentlest soft chuckling-to-chicks voice. “We are in the trees.”

Ada nodded. “Are we safe?” she whispered.

“We are never safe,” said Blanche. “But from the wastoures, perhaps. I know what to do.”

• • • •

Ada would not stay with the Squirrels, despite all her fear. She had been afraid since the day her mother died (and the baby with her), which had been five months after her father had died in the fields, cut almost in half by a plough. The people you loved failed you in a thousand ways, not least by dying out of your sight while you were doing what they told you to do, collecting walnuts in a basket or pulling weeds in the garden. After such lessons, who would not keep her eyes fixed on her last loved one? So Ada would not stay behind—and she would not again freeze in fear.

The Dead Squirrels did not want to let them go, but Blanche had a certain voice they all remembered, though their mothers were dead; and in the end, they lowered Blanche and Ada from the tree, with gifts: a stale honeycake they had been saving and a waterskin that was just barely manageable if Ada filled it only halfway.

The Squirrels: three will die, one by a fall, one of the flux, one killed by a man driven mad by this world. Which live? Which die? You have your favorites. Pall, because he is named and has shown kindness. Baby Jack because of his tender sobriquet, and we are sentimental about the young, though the world is not. The Oldest, though you do not even know which Squirrel that is, whether Weyland or Renard-the-Fox or even Edmund Blue-Toes. And if you knew that Stibby used to beat his little sisters and steal their food, and that Edmund once threw stones at a kitten until it died, would that change things?

The remaining four will live for a while, and then die, like everyone else.

Are you counting the deaths in this story, keeping a roster, keeping score? Is it higher or lower than The Wizard of Oz? There are more than I have told you.

• • • •

Things happened, and other things.

Blanche and Ada backtracked along the path the wastoures had carved, past St Giles’ and Coombe Pastor and what was left of Rufford. Everything was very lush from where the blood had soaked into the ground, and flies clustered like clouds at the thickest-growing places. Blanche scratched for her own food, but Ada needed more: bread at least (there was no meat or milk), and someone to help her when she got a sliver in her heel that she could not reach. She gave more of her pennies away, and soon there were only two.

At midafternoon on the sixth day, as the sky darkened with rain to the northwest, they came over the shoulder of a raw-rocked hill and saw a ruin in a clearing of the forest below them: the pale crumbling walls of what had once been a Roman villa, destroyed not by wastoures, but by weather and centuries of people stealing its stones for their own chimneys and fences—though it had been long ages since any had come to this place.

Blanche shivered. The uttermost queen was stronger now that they were so close, and her demands scratched at Blanche’s mind the way growing feathers prickled in their sockets: grow and go forth/eat/do not return/do not stop until you find new grounds/if you can. Walking into the compulsion was like wading against flowing water, but Blanche marched on, and Ada close beside her.

They picked their way down the slope toward the villa. There were no plants beyond a few dusty shrubs, for anything smaller had been trampled flat by the waves of departing wastoures. There was no sound of living creatures, not so much as a fly; but when a rumble of thunder made them look up, they saw two birds circling against the heavy clouds. Blanche cast one golden-black eye on their braiding flights and knew them for carrion crows. Ada only wondered whether they had babies and how they kept them hidden.

A lone wastoure came suddenly around a collapsed wall, gawked, and gave a stuttering cry that was fierce cousin to the tuk-tuk-tuk of a hen summoning her chicks. A second popped from a hole in a leaf-covered floor. A third. More poured around corners and up from holes, and loped toward Blanche and Ada, calling. Tuk-tuk-tuk.

“I wish I had not brought you,” said Blanche, but Ada laid her hand on Blanche’s broad back and said, “Where else would I go?”

The first wastoure paused some paces away, wary and weaving, twisting its neck to peer from each eye in turn. Tuk-tuk-tuk. The others streamed past it, until—

“Stop,” Blanche said, with her rattling growl.

The foremost wastoures halted as though they had slammed into a wall, so abruptly that the rest crashed into them and they all fell together in a shrieking, bickering mass. Blanche flutter-hopped on, Ada alongside, and the wastoures scrambled out of reach; but more kept appearing, and more, until chicken and child walked through a crowd of them, in a clearing an armspan across.

The wastoures were a cohort not yet full-grown and mostly the same size, a little taller than Blanche and waist-high to Ada. In her small experience, the only thing like this had been coming into Marjory’s kitchen-yard in the morning, when the hens would swarm toward her, hungry and loud. This was so much worse. She could smell their hot breath, a mix of sweetness and rank meat, like flyblown bacon hanging in a chimney before the smoke has cured it. Their claws beat on the hard-packed earth. She felt a touch on her heel and though she wanted to be brave she gave a little scream.

Blanche said, “Back.”

The wastoures stumbled away, though they still kept pace, and Blanche fluttered up into Ada’s arms.

Down the hill, and into the tumbledown villa itself. Blanche’s eyes were on the wastoures, but Ada was watching her feet, for it would not do to fall. A single perfect circle appeared on the dust: a raindrop, and then another. The ground changed as she walked, claw-pounded dust to rain-spattered dirt to flagstones, and finally to a ruined mosaic peeping through the leaf-litter. Ada saw a golden-red fish against waving blue lines, and then more, a school running in a river of blue and green. The rain-wet colors were startling.

Ada tightened her grip. “We found it!” she whispered. “The Town with the Moat!” Blanche only ruffled a little, a hen’s equivalent of a frown.

They crossed the pavement to where two ruined walls met. “Here,” said Blanche, and dropped from Ada’s arms.

The wastoures stopped, a tight chattering circle that blocked all ways. All ways but down: there was a triangular hole at Ada’s feet, where a flagstone had broken in half and left a gap.

A wastoure popped up its head, a quick lunge away.

“Go,” said Blanche, and it fell back as though it had been struck.

Ada did not like holes: not cellars, not caves, not even the thought of safe happy busy burrows full of baby rabbits and their tender mothers. And this was none of those, but a gash, a ragged breach fringed with dirty broken mosaic that looked like teeth. (She did not think, like monsters’ teeth. She knew what the teeth of monsters looked like.) Through the hole, she could see a second floor some feet beneath the first, heaped with leaf-mold and sticks, and the fallen flagstone, tipped at an angle that made it look like a wet, pale tongue.

The young wastoures jostled closer, snake-necked and sharp-beaked, narrow heads weaving and bright claws curling. Their eyes were hungry and curious.

“Back,” hen-growled Blanche, and they recoiled.

Ada looked into the hole.

Blanche said, “I know. But we must go there.”

Ada knew hard truths: had been raised in them. They dropped together.

• • • •

In another version of this story, they do not come to the ruined villa, but instead find the Town With a Moat. Ada is collected into the heart of a family with three daughters, whose names are Charity, Kindness, and Patience. Blanche is given a gold collar and lives to a great age.

• • • •

It was not a long fall, and there was a pile of litter at the bottom, pounded into a cushion by the claws of wastoures. Ada landed awkwardly, but Blanche fluttered down, white wings outstretched, and guarded her as she clambered off the leaves. They were in a broad low space, as large as the room overhead would have been, and just tall enough for Ada to stand upright. Irregular piles of rock served as pillars to hold up the . . . floor, it had been when they walked above; but here it was their roof. Daylight and silver rain filtered in through holes where the floor-now-roof had fallen.

A thousand years before, this space would have been heated by a furnace, and the villa’s owner would have walked through his rooms warm-footed and smug, but neither Ada nor Blanche had ever imagined such things as hypocausts. Nor had that owner (whose name was Fabricius, who died of cancer; at the end, he wore a red scarf concealing the tumors on his throat: not a vain man but tidy) imagined such things as wastoures, for they came down from the mountains only when he was gone.

The general darkness and the pillars made it hard to see far clearly. Wastoures dropped through the holes and crowded closer, more with each moment until—

“Back,” hen-growled Blanche.

Just out of arm’s-reach, the circle re-formed. The uttermost queen’s demand vibrated in Blanche’s hollow hen-bones, closer now, trembling in each feather like a maddening itch: grow/go forth/waste the way/find home and hole/do not return.

A young female pushed forward into the circle of space: clever and assertive, alphamost of those present. It reared tall and looked down on the hen, first with one eye, then the other, and Blanche read the challenge clearly enough. To gain the high ground, she hopped onto the fallen flagstone, though peering faces fringed the hole just overhead. Now she could see more clearly across the hypocaust. Ada, still as a stone, in a dirty shawl that had once been the color of sky. The sharp challenge in the young alpha’s eye as it swiveled to view her, the reflexive clench of its foreclaws. The wastoures in their scores, a milling chaos in rain-wet darkness and the streaks of light from above. There was a rough gash in the far wall of raw rock that led down into deeper darkness. It was there they must go.

Blanche opened her pearl-white wings and stretched her neck and hen-growled, “Leave. Die. Be gone.”

Her order beat against the queen’s demand. To the young wastoures, it was like the throb of two great bells tuned a quarter tone apart: a thrumming in their teeth, in the fluid of their eyes, in their hearts struggling to keep the beat. Some dropped to their haunches shivering and clawing themselves, but most attacked whatever was closest, pillar or kin—though never Blanche and Ada. Some seethed toward the holes and, pillaring over their fighting broodmates, fled into the rain. A hard-willed few did not seem much affected, the young alpha among them; they still encircled Ada and Blanche.

“Go,” Blanche said, with wing-mantle and head-thrust and hen-growl. In the end, the alpha snapped her jaws but stepped aside, and the remaining wastoures dropped back. Blanche and Ada crossed to the broken place in the hypocaust floor. Rank cold air breathed up at them. They crawled through.

• • • •

A thousand years before Ada and Blanche, when the villa’s builder had selected his site, the laborers had discovered a hole. There was no telling what caves or hidden rivers might be there to undermine the villa’s foundation, and the hole was too small for an adult to pass through, so they sent down a child of eight. An orphan. The child did not return. They built there anyway, sealing the hole with a great flat stone.

The child’s bones are gone; should I tell you how he died?

Blanche and Ada stood on that fallen stone. They were at the highest point of a limestone cavern, a long, sloping-floored space barely touched by a rain-silver glow that filtered from two places, the hole behind them and a single high crevice off to one side.

Ada saw only glints and movement; faint light touching the curve of what might be an egg, the sudden spark of a kindling eye. She heard pattering claws, a dislodged stone, the breathing of the young ones clustered in the doorway behind them. She smelled water and earth and the memory of salt. And wastoures.

Blanche saw even less than Ada, but she understood more. The eggs of the uttermost queen and her court had been laid here, across decades, collecting until a current ran through them, like the chemical change that pulls a cicada brood from its shells, each seventeenth year. The eggs hatched and the young grew, then left in their legions, seeking new caves that would meet the needs of so stringent a reproductive strategy. This wastoure summer was waning, so only a few hundred eggs remained, clustered at the cavern’s far end. Beneath the queen’s demand—grow/go forth/find caves/and flourish—Blanche could feel the weak, unformed impulses of the restless unborn, pressed against their curving walls.

A score of females stood between Blanche and the eggs: the court. She felt the currents of their thoughts, as well: fear and anger, ambition for themselves and their eggs, but above all, pervasive and unstopping, a desperate hunger that wastoures thrive. They stepped forward, silent and snaking-necked. And among the eggs themselves stood the uttermost queen, the alphamost alpha: ancient, crumpled as wet linen, and marked with sores where her skin was shredding, for she was dying, her task nearly completed.

She did not advance: did not need to. Her underlying demand did not change, but there was another thread now, tenuous (for her kind had not changed their demand in long centuries) and specific: kill this unflock thing/do not let it be.

“Die,” Blanche said to the uttermost queen, though she knew already that she would not be stopped so easily. And she was right. The queen only shivered, as though shaking away a spiderweb; but the rest were confused—the court, the half-awake eggs, the young fighting overhead in the hypocaust or scattering in the gray rain, nor even the seething hordes long leagues away.

The queen above her eggs stretched her neck, stance broad, tail twisted high and lashing—kill/unkind unkin/unfriendly unflock. Even the strongest of the juveniles could not enter the cave against the ancient demand, go hence, but the females of the court were cleverer, stronger. They advanced.

Ada made a sound in her throat like the squeak of an infant mouse.

“Be gone,” Blanche growled. Two of the court broke and ran in a great curve around Blanche and Ada to the hole, but it was blocked with fighting juveniles. Ada saw none of this, only heard shrieks and claw-nailed feet running, and then smelled the bright fresh thread of blood.

And Blanche said: “Die. Kill your eggs. Kill your queen. Kill yourselves.”

The court’s advance fell into chaos. One attacked another and they rolled screaming down the long sloping floor toward the eggs, and as they tumbled past, others turned to fight one another, or dropped convulsing to the ground.

Deaths and more deaths, wastoures laid waste and wasting. At the still center stood the queen, splashed with the blood of her people, her eggs, and herself: too strong to fall but not able to counter Blanche’s demands.

you/kill all said the queen—who will kill me?/they cannot

“Well, then,” said Blanche. To Ada she said, “Cover your eyes, dear one.”

But Ada did not.

• • • •

The uttermost queen is gone. The humming voice in the remaining wastoures’ narrow skulls is now Blanche’s: Die. Kill the eggs. Kill yourselves.

The final eggs are ripped open by the last member of the queen’s court, uttermost queen by attrition. She is too weak to kill herself before she tears open the eggs; the yolk-slick infants slide free and writhe in the cold air until she bites open their throats. Her death when it comes is a mercy.

Die, be destroyed.

And the wastoures die. They throw themselves from cliffs. They bolt into lakes. They ram headfirst against stone walls until their jaws dislodge, and still they do not stop. They tear one another to pieces, frantic and babbling with the blood of their broodmates in their throats.

Some hordes are driven by stronger-willed alphas, but even their strength fails. A few manage to avoid Blanche’s demand, alphas and their bands that have gone far enough that the humming lies less heavily. The hypocaust and the chamber of eggs are gone; but the task was always to find a new cavern and begin the long task of producing enough eggs to start a new brood.

One young, strong-willed female does find an apparently suitable cave, though it is chalk, not limestone. She is now the uttermost queen by default. She goes to ground with the band she has been able to save. It is not as good; eggs collecting in a chalk cave are softer-shelled than those laid in limestone. Grow and grow strong, she demands, but the shadow of Blanche’s humming voice sifts into the proteins of their yolks.

When after long years there is at last a new brood, many do not hatch. Some kill themselves or one another before they leave the nest. A few survive, raven forth. Still fewer, the next time there is a brood. There are five last wastoure summers, spread across a century, until they die off entirely and dissolve into memory. Such documents as recorded their ravages are lost, rotted or turned to endpapers and razor strops, mouse nests and tinder.

But in that last century, in those last broods . . . the ever-smaller courts and their weakening queens tell tales of horror to the dwindling eggs and the diminishing young. Pearl-feathered Blanche spreading her wings is a nightmare that everyone shares, stained into their genes, feared more even than skin rot or water. Hers is a name too dreadful to utter in daylight without blood spilled to wash it away. She is a monster, the Monster, Destroyer of Worlds. Waster.

Who calls a thing genocide? Not the aggressors, anyway. Blanche is monster and savior, depending on who you ask.

• • • •

Here is where we stop, if you want a happy ending—for Blanche and Ada anyway. At the moment, Blanche and Ada are alive, triumphant. The wastoures are defeated.

If we go past this, things complicate again. Blanche is already old, a hen past laying. Ada will also die: plague or childbirth, an infected knife-wound from cutting mutton, dysentery, grief. Even should she die at ninety, safe in her goose-feathered bed and surrounded by loving descendents, she is dust.

Or, turn back to the first page and read their story again. Now they live on, though in darkness and fear. A happy ending depends on when “The End” is written, by whom, and for whom. For purposes of this tale, then: The End.

Kij Johnson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, among others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas, where she also is the associate director for the J. Wayne and Elsie Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Her most recent book is The River Bank.

The Nearest
By Greg Egan

1

Kate heard a knock on the open door of her office, and looked up to see Anneke from dispatch, grimacing apologetically.

“I’ve got a shocker for you, Sarge. Sorry.”

Kate said, “Go ahead.” She’d been back from maternity leave for two weeks; she did not need a content warning for every case that was grimmer than the scenes of cavorting bunnies on her son’s nursery wallpaper. And after spending the morning reviewing a spike in missing persons that was probably just a meaningless statistical blip, she was ready to do anything to get away from her desk.

“Three deceased: a father and two daughters. Mother’s location unknown.”

Murder-suicide, with the fourth body yet to be found? Kate’s heart sank, but she kept her face expressionless. “Gunshot wounds?”

“No, all stabbings.” Anneke hesitated. “The girls were young: five and six. If you want, I’ll ask Roma Street if we can hand this over to Petrie.”

Kate shook her head impatiently. “So do I get a DC, or am I on my own?”

“No DC, but there are four uniforms at the scene you can use for the day.”

Kate bit back a string of expletives; Anneke was just the messenger. Some half-baked algorithm had already decided that this was a self-contained domestic that posed no threat to the wider public, and would more or less solve itself. Until she could prove otherwise, there was no point begging for more resources.

Anneke flicked the report from her notepad to Kate’s; Kate opened the document as she got to her feet and picked up her key fob.

On her way to the car, she read the summary from the officers who’d attended the scene. The deceased were believed to be Robert Mellish, Angela Grimes, and Isabel Grimes; the missing woman was Natalie Grimes. Natalie’s mother, Diane, had tried to call her daughter the previous evening. When she still hadn’t been able to make contact by midmorning, she’d gone to the house and let herself in, finding the deceased lying in their beds. There were no obvious signs of a break-in. The family’s station wagon was gone, but Natalie’s phone was on the bedside table.

When Kate reached the house there were two squad cars and a SOCO van parked in the street, but their presence had attracted no onlookers; it seemed the neighbors here had the decency not to flock around the blue-and-white tape, gawking, while the ever-economising clickbait sites were probably waiting for a chance to outsource their photographic needs to the next fast food delivery that overflew the crime scene.

Kate spoke with the officers who’d made the report, and the two colleagues who’d joined them; they were from the small community policing station in the nearby shopping precinct. With no crowd for them to manage, she decided to send three of them door-knocking.

Diane Grimes was sitting in one of the squad cars, drinking coffee that the shopfront cops must have brought for her. Kate introduced herself and joined her in the back of the car.

“Who’d do this?” Diane asked. Her teeth were chattering. “And why would they take Natalie? She would have torn their eyes out before she let them touch the girls.” Her daughter’s house was modest, single-story brick. Diane looked about seventy, plainly dressed, with no jewelry. Kate was fairly sure that she hadn’t stumbled on a hitherto unknown crime family, enmeshed in a bloody feud in the suburbs of Brisbane.

“Did Natalie or Robert have any debts that you know of?” Kate asked.

“Just the mortgage.”

“They weren’t asking you for money lately?”

“No. Why would they be?” Diane seemed annoyed at the sheer absurdity of the question; it made too little sense to be offensive.

Kate found it hard to see how the couple could have racked up drug or gambling debts that merited a more severe punishment from even the most sadistic loan shark than a broken limb or two. And two teachers at a government high school would make unlikely targets for the kind of heist or abduction that could go so wrong that it left three bodies in its wake.

“Robert was the girls’ father?”

“Yes.” Diane scowled. “Natalie kept her own name when they married, and she gave it to the kids. Why shouldn’t she?”

Kate shook her head, disavowing any opinion on the matter. “I just need to be clear what his relationship was. And as far as you know, was he ever violent toward her, or to the girls?”

Diane said, “Even if I’m the world’s worst judge of character and he fooled me completely, she would never have put up with that.”

“Okay. Were either of them depressed, or medicated for any reason?”

“No.”

Kate reached over and squeezed her arm. “There’s an alert out for the car. You don’t have to stay here; we’ll call you as soon as we have any news.”

“I want to be here,” Diane insisted. “What if she comes home?”

Kate spared her an opinion on how unlikely that was looking. “Is there someone we can call, to be with you? A friend, or a family member?”

“My son’s at work.”

“Can’t he take the afternoon off?”

Diane said numbly, “I haven’t told him yet. How can I tell him?”

Kate got the number from her and made the call. Patrick Grimes was an electrician, working on a building site in the city; it would take him forty minutes to get here.

She left Diane with the constable, and knocked on the side door of the van. The SOCO, Tim Ng, let her in and she joined him in front of the console.

“What’s the swarm got so far?” she asked.

“No signs of forced entry,” he said. “There’s a window that’s been left open in the laundry, probably just to cool down the house overnight, but no footprints or scuff marks anywhere near it to suggest that it was used to gain access.”

“What are you thinking for time of death?”

“Breakdown profiles from the bloodstains all say yesterday morning, but we’ll really have to wait for the autopsies.”

“Yeah. And the weapon?”

Tim turned to the console and took the view of the interior into the kitchen, tracking in on a slotted wooden block holding a set of knives. The largest slot was empty. Then he pulled back and turned into a passageway that led to the three bedrooms. On the floor, outside the nearest bedroom, was a bloodied knife whose blade the overlaid dimensions showed as matching the slot.

“Whose room is that?” Kate asked.

“The older girl, Isabel, according to the grandmother. The next one is Angela’s, and the parents’ bedroom is at the end of the hall.” Tim steered the view down the passageway, into the master bedroom. The drones had imaged the whole house at a moderate resolution on their first pass, but even as Kate watched, the scene in the bedroom was growing visibly sharper as new data flowed in.

Robert Mellish lay on his back on one side of the double bed. The top sheet had been drawn toward the foot of the bed, down to his knees. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and his glasses were sitting on the bedside table. A single, deep stab wound pierced the middle of his chest; an anatomical overlay suggested that the blade had entered his heart.

He had no defense wounds on his hands. Kate supposed he might not even have been awake when he was killed.

“There’s a blood trail that starts from here,” Tim said, aiming the viewpoint toward the floor on Robert’s side of the bed, then following a series of congealed droplets out of the room and down the passage. Kate steeled herself as they pursued the trail into Angela’s room. This time, the killer hadn’t pulled the sheet away; the knife had gone right through it, and through the girl’s nightdress too. Kate felt acid rising in her throat, more from anger than nausea.

There was no more frenzy here than there had been with Robert: a single wound, positioned with care, had done the job. If not for the improvised weapon, it could almost have been a professional hit. A mother in the grip of psychotic depression was more likely to drown her children, or feed them sedatives—and then join them in the darkness herself. What kind of delusion would it take to make a woman kill the people she loved, and neither soften the act with some degree of faux gentleness, nor explode in uncontrollable rage, but just dispatch them, methodically and efficiently, with whatever tools were to hand?

“Go on,” she told Tim.

The scene in Isabel’s room was almost the same, the modus operandi identical. A bloody handprint had been left on the doorframe; unwrapped by the software, its size was consistent with a woman of Natalie’s stature, which Tim had estimated at around one hundred and forty-five centimeters from wedding photographs on display in the living room. Still, a hypothetical intruder need not have been particularly large or strong, especially if they had an accomplice to help keep Natalie from intervening. If there was no apparent motive for malevolent strangers to do any of this, nor was there one for Natalie herself.

“Any meds visible?” Kate asked.

Tim shook his head. But the drones couldn’t weave their way into every closed drawer and childproof cabinet in the house. “We could go for the sewerage pipes and do a metabolite analysis,” he suggested.

“That’s too slow.” Getting access to the family’s medical records would probably take even longer. Either Natalie was severely ill, and a danger to anyone she encountered, or she’d been abducted and was in danger herself; Kate needed to know which it was. “Can you plot me a route to check the likely places?” Once she set foot in the house, there was nothing she could do to avoid contaminating the scene to some degree, but if she did as she was told it would be easier for the system to subtract her out of the picture.

She put on a plastic suit, gloves, cap and booties, then approached the front door with her notepad in her hand, displaying the path for her to follow.

The door had been left open, wide enough that Kate didn’t need to touch it. She glanced back and saw a smear of blood on the inside handle. She walked straight down the entrance hall, past the living room, and turned into the kitchen. There were four drawers and three cabinets that the swarm had been unable to infiltrate, and one of the cabinets contained an assortment of over-the-counter painkillers, laxatives, antacids and allergy treatments. But there was no prescription medication, let alone antipsychotics.

She followed the path through to the bathroom, but the one unexamined cabinet there held nothing but cosmetics, shampoo and shaving cream.

Suddenly, she heard something slam against the back door of the house, and a dog began barking and whining. Kate spoke into her notepad. “Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a dog out back, going crazy. What’s the best thing I can do?” The drones hadn’t scanned the back yard yet.

“If you think you can calm it down without letting it into the house, that would be better than having it tearing up the lawn.”

“Okay.”

Kate followed her new route on the schematic, walking through the laundry room and up to the back door. It needed no key to open from the inside; she unlatched it, and positioned her body to block access as she came out.

The dog was a golden retriever, waist-high to her. It barked loudly but didn’t attack. As she emerged, closing the door behind her, it started running in circles, making a pitiful sound.

Kate squatted down, put her notepad on the ground and held out her hands. “Shh. Come here, it’s all right!”

The dog approached her, wagging its tail and barking. “It’s all right!” Kate repeated soothingly. The dog was wearing a collar; if she could get hold of it, she was fairly sure she could keep the animal still. “Come here!” She took off her gloves and cap and stuffed them down the front of her suit, hoping she’d look more human.

The dog came right up to her and pressed its head against the side of her body, whimpering. “Shh.” She stroked its head and got her hand around the collar. It struggled for a moment, but then gave up and sat, resting its head on her knee.

Kate was about to call the local animal shelter, but then she had another idea. “Tim?”

“Yes.”

“Can you ask Diane Grimes if she wants to take the dog for a while?”

“Will do.”

Kate looked out across the yard; there was a swing set, an above-ground swimming pool, and in the rear, a veritable forest of fig trees, like some enchanted grove out of a fairy tale. The girls would have been in heaven here.

She started weeping silently. The dog tried to pull away, then changed its mind and jumped up, licking her face. Kate tugged on the collar and dragged it back down, then got herself under control.

Tim said, “Yeah, she’ll take it. Bring it round through the side gate on your right, over the concrete path. That’ll do the least damage.”

2

As Kate pulled into the driveway, she heard Reza enunciating excitedly, “Look who’s home! Look who’s home! Look. Who. Is. Home!”

Before she’d opened the car door, he came out onto the porch with Michael, who was peering toward her, unfocused but tentatively smiling. “Say khosh amadi, maamaan!” Reza urged him. “Welcome to our house.”

Kate said, “Now you’re just being sarcastic.”

Reza grinned. “Sorry.” Kate kissed him, then took Michael in her arms; he flapped his own arms excitedly, then beamed at her and started babbling.

“Someone still appreciates me.” Kate kissed her son’s cheek three times, as noisily as she could, and Reza held the door open for her as she walked into the hall.

“Do you want me to take him for a bit while you unwind?” Reza asked her.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Okay, I’ll start cooking.”

Kate sat in the kitchen, gazing into Michael’s face, engrossed by his responses to her monologue of flattering rhetorical questions. “Who is the most beautiful boy? Can you guess who that is?” Sometimes her words seemed to amuse him, sometimes he frowned in puzzlement. But so long as he was content, watching him was like floating in a warm, tranquil pool—and with the scent of herbs frying and the sound of the gentle sizzling of oil, she felt as if she’d been transported into some otherworldly paradise, as remote from the place she’d just left as waking life from a dream.

After a while, Michael closed his eyes, but Kate let him sleep in her arms until dinner was ready, then she put him down in his cot and joined Reza to eat.

“I’m glad you could get home before he slept,” Reza said. “Have things quietened down at all?”

“Yes, though not in a good way. We still haven’t found the missing woman.” Kate didn’t want to talk about the case, or even think about it for the next twelve hours if she could help it. “How was the bundle of joy today?” she asked.

“Joyous as ever. I think it’s going to take some serious teething before he can be bothered losing his cool.”

“I don’t know where he gets that equanimity from,” Kate marveled.

Reza frowned. “There’s only one possibility, surely?”

Kate wiped her plate clean with the last piece of bread and leaned back in her chair. “That was delicious. Thank you.”

“Noosheh jaan.” Reza stood up and took her plate, then bent down to kiss her forehead. “I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

“Sure.”

“Do you mind if I visit my father tonight?”

“Of course not.” In truth, Kate had been hoping she could fall asleep on the couch beside him, watching something lighthearted and distracting, but Reza had been stuck in the house for the last six days, and he hadn’t seen his father for a fortnight. “When do visiting hours finish?”

“Nine.”

Kate glanced at the clock. “You’d better go right now. I’ll clean up here.”

He kissed her again, put her plate in the sink, picked up his keys and headed out the door.

When his car had gone, Kate sat for a while in the silence, then got up and made herself busy with the dishes. When she’d finished, she went to the living room and flicked through the TV’s menu, but none of the sitcoms did it for her when she watched them alone.

She walked down the hall into Michael’s room, and gazed down at his sleeping form, barely visible in the faint light that came through the curtains from the street lamps. If anyone laid a finger on you, she thought. Anyone. She could feel her heart beating faster. She tried to calm herself, stepping back and scrutinizing her own hyper-vigilance. She had no reason to think that her son was in any danger at all.

But she stayed in the room, watching over him, until she saw the headlights coming into the driveway.

Reza didn’t seem to be in a mood to talk, but when they were in bed Kate worked up the courage to ask gently, “How was he?”

“He thought I was his brother,” Reza replied. “He thought I was Amir.”

Kate tried to make light of it. “I don’t think you look much like your uncle.”

Reza smiled. “He had a lot more hair when he was my age. And a different hairstyle every month. One of them must have been a match.”

“Was he happy to see you anyway?” Kate asked. She knew that Hassan and Amir had been close; better a visit from his brother than from a total stranger.

“He was happy to have Amir to talk to, but not so happy about where they must have been.”

“Back in Isfahan?”

Reza shook his head. “He thinks he’s in immigration detention. Why else would he be locked up by people speaking English?”

“Jesus. I hope the staff there are nothing like those pricks.” Kate’s most enduring memory of all the stories she’d heard from Hassan had been the time some fresh-faced girl from Port Augusta—probably nineteen or twenty, knowing nothing of life, puffed up with self-importance by her uniform—had told this man who’d seen his parents executed by the mullahs, and who’d spent four years imprisoned in various corners of the Australian desert, that because he was on hunger strike he would be treated like a child, and denied such extravagant privileges as phone calls and visitors, until he learned to grow up.

“They do their best,” Reza said. “And I don’t think he thinks that all the time.”

Kate took his hand and squeezed it.

“I just need to show a makeup artist photos of my grandfather,” Reza mused. “With a few wigs and costumes and the right soundtrack, I bet I could take him back to the days before Khomeini.”

Kate laughed softly. Then she said, “What if you brought him here?”

Reza was silent for a while; he must have thought about it many times, but he’d never broached it with her. “It wouldn’t work,” he said finally. “Watching him and Michael at the same time would be impossible.”

“Okay.” Kate felt a twinge of guilt; she’d only dared ask because she was almost certain of the answer. “But maybe you can talk to the doctor about the best way to make him feel…” She groped for the right word; how could he feel free, when he really couldn’t walk out the door? “Normal.”

“Yeah. I’ll phone her in the morning.”

Kate switched off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark. The money they were paying for the nursing home would be enough to pay for some part-time home care; Reza wouldn’t have had to handle everything alone. But she could not have her father-in-law living in the same house as Michael. Nothing she’d seen or heard had ever made her think that he would harbor the slightest ill will for any child, whether or not he was capable of understanding that the boy was his grandson. But once someone lost their grip on reality, it wasn’t safe to make any assumptions at all about what they might do.

3

Kate was dragged out of sleep by her phone buzzing, with a tone indicating the kind of alert that wouldn’t leave her in peace until she responded with a suitably lucid acknowledgment. She picked the thing up off the table by the bed and peered at the screen.

“Copy that,” she intoned hoarsely. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“What is it?” Reza asked. He sounded more awake than she was.

“They found the car.”

When Kate arrived at the riverbank, the tow truck was still getting into position. Natalie’s station wagon had veered off this quiet road at a point where there were no real barriers between asphalt and water. It had left a trail of minor damage in the grass and reeds; to any passing motorist who’d given it a second thought, it probably looked no more suspicious than someone having tried to use the grass to make a U-turn. But tonight, an ER nurse on her way home from her shift had seen moonlight glinting off the metal bobbing in the reeds, and slowed down to take a closer look.

The water where the car had ended up wasn’t deep; the two traffic cops who’d come to investigate had reached it in waders. Kate was still waiting for Roma Street to authorize divers, but she doubted they’d find anything. If Natalie had been able to get out of the submerged car at all, she would not have required any superhuman abilities to make it back to the riverbank. This looked more like an attempt to hide the vehicle than an attempt at suicide. If she’d been overcome by remorse, she would have driven off a bridge.

Kate stood and waited while the traffic cops and the tow truck operator hooked up the winch and dragged the station wagon out of the water and up onto the back of the truck. Then the truck got bogged in the mud, so they had to put boards under the wheels to free it. By the time the truck was able to maneuver itself back onto solid ground, Kate had lost patience. She put on a pair of gloves and climbed up beside the station wagon, flashlight in hand.

All the doors were closed, and all the windows open; Natalie might well have been able to squeeze through a window, conscious and unharmed, but it seemed unlikely that her body had just floated out. The interior was full of silty water and vegetation, and anything not fixed that had been on the seats or the dashboard would either be buried in that muck or left behind in the river. Kate reached in and opened the glove box, which discharged a stream of water carrying a pair of plastic sunglasses and a chapstick. She groped below the dashboard for the manual release for the hood, fought with it against the sludge and grit that was blocking the mechanism, then finally heard a satisfying click.

When she walked around to the front of the car and peered in, she saw the black box, still intact. The data recorders were meant to be robust enough to survive battery fires, so a few days of immersion would be nothing. She turned and called out to the traffic cops, “Have you got an interface cable?”

“We should wait until we get to the compound, Sarge,” the older of the two replied.

“Do you have the cable or not?”

He stared back at her for a moment, then walked over to his car. Kate jumped down and went to fetch her notepad.

The data only took a few seconds to transfer, but it was encrypted; Kate sat in her car and fought her way through the process of persuading the manufacturer to send her the key. A magistrate had authorized the decryption on the day the car went missing, and she had a digital certificate attesting to that fact, but it still took three attempts to convince the Toyota website that she wasn’t a bot or a hacker.

She started with the plunge into the river. Natalie had shut off the driver supervision features ten minutes before, and while the car’s software fell somewhat short of psychiatric qualifications, up to that point it had not assessed her as being affected by any drug or medical condition: She had not been swerving erratically, or shouting obscenities, or nodding off behind the wheel. The manual override had amounted to telling the car not to trust any of its own systems from then on, so while the black box had dutifully logged her GPS coordinates as she steered off the road, the car itself had become agnostic about the wisdom of this behavior. For all it knew, the driver might have had an honest reason to believe that the car’s sensors were broken and it was liable to kill someone if it didn’t butt out and let a human take over completely.

But the GPS trace was enough to show that Natalie hadn’t been driving terribly fast at any point. She’d sped up enough to ensure that her momentum would take her over the riverbank and into the water, but she hadn’t slammed her foot down and accelerated wildly, rushing toward oblivion. When the car came to a stop in the water, it hadn’t even triggered the airbags.

Kate went back to the morning of the killings and followed the car away from the scene. At first, Natalie seemed to be heading straight for her mother’s house, but when she came within a few blocks of it, she changed her mind. She’d turned around and started driving toward her friend Mina’s apartment, only to back out again. Then her brother’s house. Then two other friends. She’d had no phone with her, and all of these people had claimed that they’d heard nothing from Natalie on that day, or since. But apparently, every time she’d made a plan to seek help, she’d given up on the idea without waiting to be rebuffed.

Kate could understand a woman who’d killed her family in a psychotic fugue snapping out of it and turning in desperation to her mother, only to decide at the last minute that she had no hope of being treated with anything but revulsion. But why would she then imagine that a whole succession of other people might be more forgiving, only to abandon that hope each time it was about to be tested?

After all the aborted journeys toward familiar faces, Natalie had driven to a shopping mall, far from her own home, and the car had remained parked there for almost three hours. That seemed like a long time to spend gathering provisions for a dash out of town—which she’d turned out to have no intention of doing, unless she’d somehow procured access to another vehicle. She’d taken her bank cards when she fled from the house, but hadn’t used them anywhere; whatever she’d bought in the mall, she must have paid for it with the remnants of her last cash withdrawal of three hundred dollars, from a few days before.

When she left the mall, she’d driven around the city in a wide arc until evening, as if she were simply killing time. She’d stopped at a fast food strip around nine o’clock, and then headed for the river to ditch the car.

Kate heard birdsong and looked away from her notepad; it was almost dawn. She checked the status of her request for divers; it had been flagged as “on hold” until a forensics team had examined the car itself.

She sent Reza a message to tell him she wouldn’t be home, then drove off in search of a diner where she could grab breakfast and use the restroom. In the mirror, she looked puffy-eyed and disheveled; she took off her shirt and washed under her arms. Natalie must have been in a much worse state when she waded out of the river, but maybe she’d been carrying a change of clothes in a plastic bag. After six days, three with rain, it was too late to send in dogs to try to pick up her scent from the riverbank.

Kate sat in a booth in the diner drinking coffee until it was almost seven o’clock, then she drove to the shopping mall where Natalie had parked for three hours. The security cameras covered the whole parking lot, and it wasn’t hard to find the moment in the recordings when Natalie drove in, but when she left the car, carrying two large, empty shopping bags, she walked away, out onto the street. Kate went through all the footage of the pedestrian entrances, but Natalie hadn’t doubled back. Whatever she’d bought in that time, she’d bought somewhere else. There were hundreds of small, freestanding shops within an hour’s walk of the mall.

Kate returned to the parking lot footage, at the time she knew the car had departed. Natalie appeared, with the shopping bags bulging, but it was impossible to see what they contained. New clothes? Hair dye? Scissors? It wouldn’t take much for her to render herself unrecognizable to anyone but her closest friends. A clear enough shot by a public CCTV camera might still trigger a face-matching algorithm, but she’d have to be much stupider than she’d proved to be so far to offer herself up to that kind of scrutiny.

The mall security guard had been watching over Kate’s shoulder. “That’s the woman who killed her own kids?” he asked. Natalie’s face was all over the media as a missing person, but the official line was still far from naming her as a suspect.

“Maybe.” Kate turned to him with a warning glance; she really didn’t want to hear anyone’s opinion on what fate Natalie deserved.

“Good luck,” he said.

She left the mall and walked out onto the street. “Mark every retailer in a six-kilometer radius,” she told her notepad, “and give me a path that visits them all.”

4

Kate woke with a headache and squinted at the bedside clock. It was ten minutes to three. She groaned softly and closed her eyes, then felt someone’s warm, naked skin brush against her.

She jerked her arm away and leaped out of bed. There was enough light coming through the curtains for her to see the man lying asleep where Reza should have been.

She was trembling from the shock, but she tried to calm herself and plan her next move carefully. She thought of going to the kitchen and arming herself with a knife, but if there was a struggle that might not work in her favor.

She snatched up her phone and tiptoed into the passageway. The safest thing might be to take Michael out to the car and drive away, before she even risked calling for help. But where was Reza? Any protracted scuffle in the bedroom would have woken her, so he must have been lured out of the room somehow—before being tied up and gagged, maybe drugged, maybe beaten senseless. So she had to get Michael to safety, but then return as quickly as possible, and do it all without waking the intruder.

She walked down the passageway in the darkness, treading as lightly as she could. As she entered the nursery, she felt her skin prickling with horror, and she had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep herself silent. She stared at the shape in the cot, afraid to raise the phone and illuminate it, but when she finally found the courage, the harsh light made the revelation unbearable. She staggered back, then fled.

She ran into the bedroom and switched on the light. “What have you done to him?” she roared. “What have you done to my son?”

The intruder shielded his face with his arm and then lowered it and peered at her groggily. “Kate? What’s happened?” He climbed off the bed and approached her; she flinched away from him, raising one hand with her fist clenched. She didn’t need a weapon; she’d beat the truth out of him with her bare hands.

“Kate? Talk to me!” He stood, rooted to the spot, feigning concern. “Has something happened to Michael? Should I call an ambulance?”

“Don’t play games with me!” she bellowed. “Where have you taken him?”

“Are you saying he’s not in his cot?” The intruder rushed past her, out into the passageway; she followed him halfway, but couldn’t bring herself to go back into the nursery. He switched on the light, then after a while she heard him whispering, “Shh, pesaram, it’s all right.” So this man spoke Persian—or was he just mocking her? Had he bugged the house and listened to all the things she and Reza said?

He came out from the nursery and walked up to her. “He looks fine to me. What got you so worried?”

Kate said, “You have ten seconds to tell me where my son is.”

“Now you’re frightening me.” The intruder reached down and scratched his hip beneath the waistband of his shorts, as unselfconsciously as if he spent every night wandering half-naked through a different stranger’s house. “Are you sick?” He reached up to put his hand on Kate’s forehead; she grabbed his arm and twisted it, bringing him to his knees.

“What’s wrong with you?” he gasped, wincing from the pain but keeping himself from shouting, as if his greatest fear was “waking” the mechanical doll he’d planted in the cot. Kate got him in a choke hold; he went limp in her arms, not even trying to fight her.

“I swear I’ll kill you,” she said. “If you don’t take me to my son, I’ll slit your fucking throat and hang you from a meat hook.”

The man started weeping, his whole body shuddering as he sobbed. Kate stared down at his blubbering face, desperately clinging to the hope that whatever he’d done to Reza and Michael that had left him so ashamed, they were still alive somewhere. “Take me to them now, and I’ll say you cooperated. The quicker you do this, the better things will go for you.”

“All right,” he replied. He sounded utterly defeated. For someone who’d been so brazen just minutes before, he hadn’t taken long to fold.

Kate released him and stepped away. “So where are they?”

He clambered to his feet. “I need to call someone. They’ll bring them here.”

“No, no, no!” Kate spread her arms so he couldn’t get past her down the hall. She wasn’t having him summoning accomplices. “You take me to them, alone. Are they in the house?”

He hesitated. “No. We’ll need to take a drive.”

Kate stood in silence, trying to think. She should call for backup, get the fucker cuffed and under control. But if he stopped cooperating, what redress would she have? As soon as she got anyone else involved, there’d be no point threatening to gut him like a pig; he could sit in his prison cell, laughing, while Reza and Michael starved to death, or worse.

“All right,” she said. “So you’d better put some clothes on.”

She walked into the bedroom ahead of him and scooped up Reza’s phone. She’d half expected him to try to flee, but he followed close behind her and proceeded to dress in Reza’s clothes. Kate stood watching him, dazed; not only did the clothes fit him—well enough—his resemblance to her husband was striking, right down to the pattern of freckles on his shoulders and the way his uncombed hair stuck up at the side. But did the kidnappers really think that she’d be fooled by such superficial details?

“Turn around and face the wall,” she said. He complied, and she dressed quickly.

“Okay, I’m done. Come on.”

“Can we take…?” He gestured toward the nursery.

Kate scowled at him, disbelieving; she thought he was about to start crying again. “Why would we take that thing with us? I’ll put it out with the garbage.”

The intruder stared at her. “When you get back, with Michael?”

“Yes! It’s not a priority. Now, come on!”

He followed her out of the house; she unlocked the car and got into the driver’s seat. He joined her, and she reversed quickly onto the street.

“Which way?” she asked.

“South.”

She drove down to the corner and turned toward Gympie Road. There was no other traffic in sight, no lights showing in any of the houses. She glanced at the man, sitting meekly beside her in his borrowed clothes. “So, what was the plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you going to ask for money? Or was this about fixing some case? You wanted me to tamper with evidence, or make a file disappear?”

He didn’t reply.

Kate laughed humorlessly. “And the idea that you could just lie down in my bed and that would buy some time to get them further away… for fuck’s sake, how stupid can you be? You might look a bit like my husband, but do you think I couldn’t tell the difference?”

The man said, “What gave me away?”

Kate shook her head. “One touch, and my skin crawled. So where are we going?”

“Herston.”

“Where in Herston? I’ll put it in the GPS.”

“I don’t know the name of the street, but I can give you directions once we’re closer.”

Kate wasn’t happy, but at this hour the drive wouldn’t take long. If he was messing with her, she’d know soon enough, and he’d regret it.

“How many of you are there?” she asked.

“Just me and my friend. And he won’t hurt anyone, I promise. I’d never have got involved if it was going to be like that.”

“So why did you do it at all?”

“It was his idea,” the man insisted. “I just went along with it.”

Kate frowned skeptically, but this wasn’t the time to start browbeating the only person who could reunite her with her family. Whether he was a simpleton who’d been led astray or a criminal genius who’d thought it was a good idea to climb into bed with her would be up to the investigating officers to decide, then the prosecutors, then a jury. Once Reza and Michael were safe, she would need to step back and leave everything to other people.

“How did you get Reza out of the house so quietly?”

“My friend drugged him.”

“With what, exactly?”

“Some liquid he put on a cloth. I don’t know what it was.”

Kate suspected he was lying; it sounded like something he’d seen in a movie, and if they’d tried it with chloroform Reza would have been struggling for so long it would have woken her ten times over.

“And how did you clowns even get into the house?”

“The spare key under the flowerpot.”

She fell silent. That was her fault; she should never have put it anywhere so obvious.

They were close to the city now; she could see the lights in the Aurora Tower ahead.

“Turn right here,” he told her.

“Past the hospital?”

“Yes.”

Kate turned into Butterfield Street, slowing down as they approached a small park that separated the road from the drop-off loop for the hospital’s entrance. In the early hours of the morning, there could well be visitors to the emergency department with all manner of substances in their bodies stumbling out from behind the greenery and onto the road without warning.

“And go left here.”

Kate brought the car to a halt. He was directing her into the hospital’s parking complex.

“What are you trying to tell me?” she demanded angrily. “Have they been hurt?”

“No. I promise you, both of them are fine.”

“Then why would they be here?”

The man said, “We need to go in. Please.”

“Why?”

Before Kate could stop him, he was out of the car, running back along the road and through the trees. She went after him, bewildered. The park was about the size of her back yard; he had no hope of losing her.

She caught up with him just outside the entrance to the emergency department. She’d feared she was going to have to tackle him to the ground on the concrete, but he stopped and turned, letting her collide with him, catching her in his arms so that their bodies came together in a sick parody of an embrace. She pulled away, furious. He smelled exactly like Reza, but that just turned her stomach.

He said, “Kate, I’m begging you, let them check you out.”

“What?”

“Let the doctors examine you. I can stay here with you, but you need to let me call someone to look after Michael.”

“If you think I won’t hurt you just because there are people around—”

The man held his hands up, shoulder high. “Look at me! If you don’t believe I’m Reza, tell me one thing that isn’t the same!”

Kate was tired. “You’re the right build, the right bone structure. Black hair and brown eyes aren’t exactly rare—assuming they’re natural—but everything else could be done with makeup.” Hadn’t Reza himself claimed as much, joking that he could pass for his own grandfather? Had they listened in to that conversation, too?

“Is that a professional opinion, DS Shahripour?” he taunted her. “Would you talk shit like that in court? Ask me something only Reza could know.”

“I’m not playing this game.”

He said, “I’m not a doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. But what if it’s a stroke? If you’ve got a clot in your brain…” He put his forearm over his eyes, wiping away tears. “Please, Kate, let them help you.”

Kate stared at him in the harsh light of the entrance. Every small, dark hair on his cheeks was precisely where she’d expect it to be. The idea that anyone outside of Hollywood would even try to reconstruct that level of detail was ridiculous.

“Let’s go in,” she said. They were in the right place, after all.

They stepped through the self-opening doors together. As Reza was looking around to see where they should go to join the queue, Kate spotted a pair of security guards. When Reza walked forward, she veered away from him, approached the guards, and discreetly showed them her badge.

“That man is my husband,” she said quietly. “I need your help restraining him so he can be examined, otherwise he could be a danger to himself.”

Kate stayed a few steps behind as the three of them approached Reza together. He spread his arms in a gesture of disbelief. “What is this? Kate?” He turned to the guards. “My wife is ill. I don’t know what she told you—”

“You need to calm down, sir,” one of the guards said firmly. “The doctors are busy, but if you wait quietly someone will be able to see you soon.”

“No, she needs to see them! She’s the one who’s sick! Our son is in danger.”

“Sir, if you start making threats—”

“Kate? What did you say to them?” Reza—or whatever it was that now animated the shell of his body—glared at her in self-righteous horror.

Kate told the guards, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Until then, you need to make sure that he gets a full psych evaluation.” They did not look happy, but they deferred to her authority.

She turned and walked away, glancing back a couple of times as the remnant of her husband began shouting and struggling. The guards had handcuffs, batons and Tasers; he wasn’t going anywhere.

On her way back to the car she started sobbing. When she pictured Reza—the man she knew, as he’d been just a few hours before—the thought of abandoning him in this wretched state horrified her. But she had to trust the doctors to take care of him; she couldn’t stay here waiting for a diagnosis. What mattered now was finding Michael.

As she drove north, she thought of calling the station and sending someone to the house ahead of her. But how could she explain walking out on her infant son, without sounding like she’d lost her mind? Michael had to be lying on a blanket somewhere, sleeping through all of this insanity. Maybe Reza had risen in the night and quietly hidden him, acting with good intentions in some strange twilight state before he was gone completely—saving his son from the thing he was about to become.

Kate couldn’t stop weeping. She took her hands off the wheel and let the car steer for her as the rain began to fall. Was it some kind of Alzheimer’s, like his father? But that made no sense; even if the early-onset form could strike at such a young age, she’d never heard of it happening overnight.

When she turned into her street, she saw a squad car outside her house, and lights on inside. She stopped and switched off her headlights, but kept the wipers running. Had a neighbor heard her shouting threats before she left?

The front door opened and someone walked out onto the porch: a tall, blond woman in civilian clothes carrying a wailing baby, followed by a uniformed female constable. Kate peered at them through the rain, making the best of the moments of clarity after the blades had swept the windshield clear, before fresh droplets appeared and distorted everything. The woman resembled her sister Beth, though it wasn’t her. The baby was swaddled in a blanket, making it hard to see properly, but it sounded like some awful imitation of Michael.

Had the thing in the cot not been a doll, after all? Where would such a doll have come from? Had Michael and Beth both gone the way of Reza?

Kate covered her face with her hands. What could turn a human being into a walking automaton, a vacant caricature of the person they’d been? Some kind of toxin? Some kind of disease?

When she looked again, the two women were in the squad car. The engine started, and the car drove away. But the lights were still on in the house. Someone was in there, waiting for her to arrive.

The thing that had been Reza must have wheedled its way into making a phone call, and whoever it had called had either been fooled into taking it seriously… or had needed no persuasion, because it already thought the same way.

Reza had been infected. Michael had been infected. Beth had been infected. How many more might there be? If she walked into that house and shared the same fate, she’d be powerless to help any of them.

Kate started the car and reversed back down the street. After ten meters, the supervisor began chanting threats and admonitions. She said, “Shut down, you’re malfunctioning.” She kept going until she reached the corner, then she turned and drove away.

5

The teller machine took her card without complaint, scanned her face, then offered her the usual menu. Reza had never been in any position to cancel her card himself, but whatever his remnant had told the police, the best thing was to get her hands on as much money as possible while she still could. Kate moved some funds between accounts and then succeeded in withdrawing her entire daily cash limit of five thousand dollars.

She sat in the car, trying to clear her head and see the way forward. It was beginning to look as if Reza and Beth, and maybe anyone else in the same condition, could pass as normal to an interlocutor who didn’t actually know them. Once he’d stopped humoring her with nonsense about the “kidnapping”, Reza had spoken coherently enough, making claims that might have sounded perfectly believable to a naive bystander. For all Kate knew, charming the hospital’s security guards into giving him a phone call had only been the start of it; he might even have been able to talk his way through an entire interview with an overworked psychiatric registrar, accustomed to more florid symptoms.

Reza’s uncle was on the other side of the country, and Beth had been divorced for years. But some of their friends would surely be able to spot the changes, backing up Kate’s assessment and ensuring the three victims got the treatment they needed.

Her phone rang. She stared at it for a while, then answered warily, “Chris? How are you?”

“I’m fine, Kate. But I’ve heard that people are worried about you.”

Fuck. Of all the colleagues she might have trusted to help her, Chris Santos had been top of the list, but he’d only had to speak two sentences to make it plain that he was infected too. And he was going to parrot Reza’s line that she was the problem? Kate resisted the urge to tell him she was having flashbacks to the time a gaggle of dim-witted scammers had called her one by one to say, “This is technical department of Windows operating system; we have detected a dangerous virus on your computer.” However many of them she told, in no uncertain terms, that they weren’t fooling her, there was always another one the next day trotting out exactly the same line.

“I had a fight with Reza,” she said. “Not even a fight, more a misunderstanding. It’s all good now.”

There was an awkward pause. “It’s just, your sister had to take the baby. No one wants to talk about child neglect charges, and I don’t think it has to go that far. But you need to come in and be interviewed, just to reassure everyone. I think your husband’s still freaked out.”

Kate struggled to frame her reply, wondering what the point was in humoring him at all—but it was possible that the call was being shared with people who weren’t just going through the motions, and actually believed she’d been at fault.

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll be in around nine o’clock.”

“Can I ask where you are now?”

“I’m not at home,” she admitted. “I knew Beth was looking after Michael, and I didn’t want to be there when Reza came home. It was just… a bit tense between us. I thought this would give us a chance to cool off.”

“Okay. But you’ll be at Roma Street by nine?”

“Absolutely.”

Kate stepped out of the car, stacked her phone on top of Reza’s behind the rear wheel, then ran over them repeatedly. How had Chris’s wife not noticed what had happened to him? But Kate hadn’t really socialized with the two of them for years; maybe they were estranged, and she just hadn’t heard it through the grapevine.

She got out of the car again and inspected the shattered electronics. She was having second thoughts about walking away; maybe it would be simpler to go undercover and play happy families with Reza, pretending that nothing was wrong while she investigated the outbreak.

But even if she could be that good an actor, Reza might infect her, dragging her down into the same emptiness. She had to believe that he and Michael and Beth still survived somehow, however deeply they’d been buried—but when she pictured the grotesque effigies they’d become, all she felt was revulsion.

The sky was light now, and she could hear traffic sounds rising up amid the birdsong. She hated the thought of abandoning the car, but eventually people would be looking for it, and she had no idea how far the disease had spread through the police force.

As she headed down the street, Kate thought of Natalie Grimes, waking in shock to find herself beside the thing that had once been her husband. Walking from room to room, discovering that even her beautiful daughters were gone. Convinced that her family had been erased, their minds irretrievably destroyed, and that the only loving thing to do had been to put the twitching puppets out of their misery.

Kate could understand the power of the woman’s grief. But she was not going to give up hope, herself, until she had proof beyond doubt that there was no cure, and that everyone she cared about really was gone forever.

6

Kate found a small motel where the clerk was happy to take cash up front, and for a modest surcharge allowed her to check in without showing ID. In her room, she sat on the bed staring down at the torn carpet, trying to decide who she could trust to be her allies, now that Chris had been ruled out. She drew up a list of twelve names, but when she thought about each one seriously, her confidence began to wane. It was not that any of them had failed to be loyal and supportive in the past, but when she pictured the actual conversation she would need to have with them to enlist their help, the idea that they would back her seemed preposterous. Each time she played out the scenario in her head, every trace of the old friendships she was relying on simply faded away, and the encounter ended with a cold stare.

More than friends, she needed evidence. And since no epidemiologist was going to drop everything and come to her aid, she needed to start with testimony, from as many people as possible, showing that the symptoms she’d observed in her own family had been seen elsewhere.

Without knowing the mode of transmission it was hard to say how the disease might have spread, but the neighborhood around Natalie’s house was the obvious place to begin. Kate left the motel and set off on foot, taking care to avoid intersections where she knew there would be cameras.

When she arrived, the house itself was still cordoned off. She started with the neighbors on the right, but no one was home; it was only four doors down that she finally got an answer. Her knocking summoned an elderly man who was clearly not pleased to have been woken from sleep—but then, chastened by the gravity of the subject, he invited her in.

“I know you’ve spoken to my colleagues already,” Kate explained apologetically, “but if there’s anything else you remember from that time, it could be important.”

“Like what?” the man asked. “I never heard Natalie and Rob fighting. The kids could be noisy; you know how girls that age screech sometimes? But that was just playful. It never sounded like someone was hurting them.”

Kate said, “Apart from the family, has there been anything unusual you’ve noticed going on in the area?”

He pondered the question, but shook his head.

“Anyone acting out of the ordinary? Maybe a stranger, maybe not. Maybe even someone you thought you knew well.”

He ran his fingertips across his forehead, disconcerted by the apparent suggestion that some neighbor he’d joked with over the fence might have stabbed this family to death.

“Anyone acting out of character?” Kate pressed him.

“No,” he said firmly. But with the stakes seemingly so high, perhaps he felt compelled to err on the side of caution. Using the murders as a pretext for her questions was going to make it harder to get an honest response.

She worked her way down the street then back, sketching a map of the area as she broadened her search. Having missed her appointment at Roma Street and trashed her phone, she suspected that her badge number would have been revoked by now, so whenever people answered the door with their phone in their hand, she made an excuse and withdrew, lest they TrueCop-ped her and made things awkward.

By early evening, she’d conducted thirty-seven interviews. She was thinking of taking a break and grabbing some food when a door opened and before she’d even raised her badge, the middle-aged woman standing in front of her asked anxiously, “Have you found him?”

“I’m afraid not,” Kate extemporised. Whoever the woman was talking about, that was almost certainly true. “But I’d like to ask you for a few more details, if I could.”

“Of course.”

Kate identified herself and followed the woman into the house. In the living room, there were family photos: mother, father and teenage son.

“Is anyone else at home right now?” Kate asked.

“No, my husband’s in the city. He’s still looking for Rowan. Game arcades, McDonald’s… he’s got no money, but we don’t know where else he’d go to pass the time.”

Kate glanced again at a photo of the boy. The face looked familiar; he was one of the missing persons whose cases she’d been reviewing when the Grimes murders took over.

“Before Rowan went missing,” she asked, “did you notice any change in his behavior?”

The woman frowned. “Yes! I made a point of that to the other officer!”

Kate nodded apologetically. “I know it’s frustrating to have to repeat yourself, but part of the process is for me to try to come at this with fresh eyes, and make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

“All right.” The woman shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Kate wished she could remember her name, but there’d been more than thirty files.

“So can you tell me, in as much detail as possible: In what way did your son seem different?”

“He was so cold to us,” the woman replied. “He might have had his moods before—he might have been embarrassed or irritated when I said something that a thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to hear from his mother—but the day before he left, it was like he had no heart at all.”

“You mean he was deliberately cruel?” Kate asked.

“No. It wasn’t that I’d annoyed him and he was trying to be hurtful; it was as if I just didn’t matter to him, one way or the other.”

If Rowan had caught the disease that had afflicted Natalie’s family, what was the route of transmission? Kate confirmed with the boy’s mother that he’d attended the high school where Natalie and her husband had taught, though he hadn’t been in either of their classes, and it was hard to see how an airborne virus could have affected him while sparing most of the other students.

“Have you spoken to the families of Rowan’s friends?” Kate asked.

“Of course.”

“And have any of their children undergone personality shifts?”

“Not that anyone admitted.” The woman hesitated. “I don’t believe that Rowan was taking drugs, but I’m past the point where I’m certain of anything. So if you think that’s a possibility, and it could have something to do with the reason he’s missing, I don’t want you ruling it out just because my own instincts say otherwise.”

“All right.” Kate didn’t like misleading her, but her own hypothesis was hardly more reassuring.

On her way back to the motel, she bought a small notepad with Wi-Fi only, then she used the motel’s internet connection to download a gallery of missing persons whose names and photos had been made public. Rowan da Silva was there, and most of the other people Kate recalled from her review. At least she hadn’t been listed herself, yet.

In the next three days, as she spiraled out from the epicenter, she encountered twelve families with sons or daughters, husbands or wives who’d gone missing. In four cases, the person had fled without anyone noticing warning signs, but in the others, the distressed loved ones claimed that the event had been preceded by a change in behavior or demeanor that made them feel as if their relationship had disintegrated, for no discernible reason. “That morning, I swear he looked at me as if he was a trapped animal and I was a zookeeper,” one woman told Kate. “Maybe he woke up and decided that our whole marriage had been a mistake, and it took him another two days to find the courage to walk out. But two days before, he’d either been as happy as I’d ever seen him, or he was the best actor in the world.”

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kate knocked on a door and found herself talking to a woman who spoke with a forced cheeriness and couldn’t quite look her in the eye. She had no missing family members, or any information to offer about suspicious activities in the neighborhood; she just seemed discomfited by Kate’s presence. Either she had a drug lab and a fresh corpse in her living room, or Kate’s time was up.

She found a café with Wi-Fi and did a quick search. Authorities had expressed concern about a missing police officer, Detective-Sergeant Katherine Shahripour (pictured). It wasn’t exactly the kind of news that would muscle its way into everyone’s feeds; she suspected that maybe one in fifty people in the city would see it. But the woman she’d spooked would have reported the encounter. It would no longer be safe to keep door-knocking the area.

Kate wasn’t ready to come in from the cold. Eight families with stories of sudden alienation wouldn’t cut it; after all, the original investigators had written that off as being down to the usual causes: teenage angst, midlife crises, drug problems, infidelity. At the very least, she needed to bring in some of the afflicted in person, fleshing out her collection of hearsay with actual subjects. Reza might have talked his way out of the emergency department, but if she could drag half a dozen of these fractured families, reunited, into the spotlight, that might be the start of a proper investigation, and the first step on the road to a cure.

As she left the café, she tried to picture a future where everything was normal again. But all she could think of was Reza’s bizarre charade, and the husk of her son lying in his cot like a cheap plastic doll. She lowered her sights, and made do instead with memories. The days before, when they had still been themselves, remained as vivid to her as ever. She would hold her feelings for them in that vault, and keep working to find a way to revive them.

7

Kate cut her hair and dyed it black, then bought some cheap earrings, a battered phone with no SIM card and an assortment of clothes from a charity shop. It took a while for her to find the right look, but at the end of the day she emerged from her room, satisfied that at least she wouldn’t be taken for a cop or a social worker.

She walked into the city, and made her way to one of the homeless shelters. As Leila, the volunteer, showed her the ropes, Kate took out her phone and brought up a picture of Suzanne Reyes, a missing woman a few years younger than Kate. “You haven’t seen my sister, have you? When she’s off her meds, I don’t know what she’ll do.”

Leila regarded her warily. “Sorry, no.”

In the dining room, Kate showed the photo around, but all she got was a few grunts of sympathy. She wished there were some way to seek all eight of her targets at once to better the odds, but it would be stretching credulity to claim a connection with even two of them, and Rowan’s parents had already done the rounds of the shelters. In the dormitory, she lay awake half the night, listening to the other women coughing.

She spent the next day on the streets, finding the places where the homeless congregated and asking again after Suzanne. It was close to nightfall when a thin, twitchy woman with a crumpled face squinted at the picture and announced, “Yeah, love, I’ve seen her. Just a few days ago.”

Kate closed her eyes for a moment, genuinely overcome with relief. “Thank God. Do you know where she is now?”

“She talked a lot of nonsense,” the woman complained. “I’m not surprised what you said about her medication.”

“Yeah, that’s Suzanne. Do you know where she went?”

“She tried to recruit me,” the woman recalled irritably. “Like a missionary. Like a fucking Mormon Scientologist.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted me to join her fight against the devil.”

Kate shook her head forlornly. “My sister said that? She thinks she’s fighting the devil?”

The woman thought it over dutifully. “Not the devil, exactly. She said she’s fighting the hollow men, the ones who’ve lost their souls. Raising an army of the… I don’t fucking know.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“Not really. I told her to piss off and stop bothering me.”

It was growing dark. Kate crossed town and tried a different shelter. “She might not look the same now,” she warned her fellow diners as she helped ladle out the night’s stew. “But maybe you remember her talking about the hollow men?”

No one could help her, but the next morning, as the shelter was closing, a young woman with long, plaited hair approached Kate. “I don’t think I’ve seen your sister,” she said. “But there was a man I met, talking like you said she talked.”

“In what way?” Kate asked.

“He was warning me about the hollow people. He wanted me to join the fight.”

“Where was this?”

“You know that spot in South Bank where all the buskers play?”

Kate nodded, but this wasn’t much help; she could probably stand there for a month without the same man reappearing, let alone approaching her.

“I told him I was busy with other things,” the woman continued, “but he said that if I ever wised up and changed my mind, there was a place where I could find him.”

Kate hardly dared breathe, but when the woman said no more she had to ask. “Asgard? Middle-earth? Hogwarts?”

“An old warehouse that’s used as a squat.” She gestured at Kate’s phone. “If that thing’s got a map, I can show you.”

8

The abandoned warehouse stood at the edge of a sprawling industrial park that still had a few tenants, but the place itself looked as if it had been derelict for years. The wire mesh fence around it had been bent almost horizontal in places, and the sign warning of security patrols, cameras and dogs was brown with corrosion.

Kate clambered over the lowest part of the fence and approached the building, carrying a blanket she’d bought for five dollars from a man camped in a city alleyway. Weeds taller than she was sprouted from cracks in the concrete forecourt. When she tried the office door it was securely locked, even though most of the paint had flaked off, but the roll-up door to the loading bay had been breached, torn away from its tracks on one side. The aperture was a tight squeeze; Kate pushed her blanket through, then followed headfirst. After the sunlit concrete, she couldn’t see a thing inside, but she ended up doing a handstand onto her blanket before her feet fell to the floor.

She waited for her eyes to adapt. The place still stank of some kind of oil or solvent, though there was human waste not too far away. Gradually, she made out the silhouettes of a stack of crates and pallets ahead of her, and some large metal drums of chemicals. She walked past them warily, squinting in the gloom at the hazard warnings, hoping that nothing volatile and carcinogenic had spilled out onto the floor.

Away from the loading bay, in the warehouse proper, a little sunlight made its way through grimy windows set high in the walls. But a dozen or so fluorescent panels hung by cables from the ceiling; no one had ever aspired to make this place function with natural light.

The floor was filthy, strewn with clumps of oil-clotted sand, scraps of yellowing invoices curling at the edges and a few newer burger wrappers and polystyrene cups. In the distance, someone sat on a bedroll, a slight figure with their back to her.

Kate called out, “Hi! Is it safe here?” The walls flung her voice back at her.

The figure turned and replied, “It’s all right. No one hassles you.”

Kate approached. It took her a while to be sure, but once she had clear sight of the boy, she knew it was Rowan da Silva.

“I’m Kate.”

He held out his hand and she shook it, but he offered no name himself. She looked around. “Are we the only ones here?”

“Right now we are. There’s a lot more people at night.”

“I heard this was a good place,” Kate said, “but you never know until you see for yourself.”

Rowan nodded distractedly, then lowered his gaze and stared glumly at the floor. If he really was suffering from the same disease that had struck Reza, Kate found it hard to discern the effects. With Reza, there had been a yawning abyss between the man she knew and the shop-window dummy he’d become, but with this boy she had no expectations to help her gauge the symptoms.

“How old are you?” she asked gently.

“Sixteen,” he lied.

“You don’t get on with your folks?”

“They’re dead.”

Kate said, “I’m sorry.” She hesitated, but decided not to push him into embellishing the claim. “My husband, how can I put it… showed me a different side.”

“Like he hit you?”

Kate wanted to say yes; it only mattered that she had a plausible story. But something in her rebelled against the slander. “No. He just changed.”

Rowan said, “You hear that a lot.” He rose to his feet, then picked up his bedroll and a cardboard sign. “Gotta hit the lunchtime crowds if I want to eat.”

“Yeah. Good luck.”

He wouldn’t make it to the city by lunchtime; he had to mean the nearest mall, some forty minutes away. Kate waited five minutes, then followed him. She caught sight of him on the main road, following the route she’d expected him to take, then she quickly moved to a smaller, parallel street so she wouldn’t be at risk of discovery if he happened to turn around. After crossing back along side streets a couple of times, she soon had a good enough sense of his pace to feel confident that she wasn’t going to lose him.

When she was almost at the mall, she spotted Rowan setting up his bedroll and sign on a public street near the entrance. Kate stood beside a tree and recorded video with her phone in one hand and her arm at her side, panning and tilting slowly to sweep the zoomed frame across a range of directions that she hoped would encompass him. It worked, well enough; she managed to extract a still image in which Rowan was clearly recognizable.

She circled around the mall and went in through a different entrance, then found a café. She’d spent all her small change, so she had to retrieve a fifty-dollar bill she’d hidden beneath an insole. Between that, her choice of wardrobe, and the acrid smell she’d acquired since showering in the shelter by trekking a dozen kilometers in the heat, she’d never felt more self-conscious, but the waitress took her money without a flicker of disdain and handed her the Wi-Fi password along with her coffee.

Kate logged in and created a Gmail account, then sent the pictures of Rowan to his mother, geotagged. She had to assume that Ms. da Silva now knew that she’d been suspended, so she kept the tip anonymous, and resisted the urge to offer suggestions for a medical examination that would probably sound even more bizarre and unwelcome coming from a stranger than from a rogue police officer.

She left the café and took up a position outside the supermarket, where she had a clear view of Rowan. Half an hour later, a squad car pulled up in the street, and both of Rowan’s parents emerged. Kate watched them arguing with their son, and when they failed to persuade him to come with them, one of the officers took him by the arm and got him into the car with a minimum of force.

She had no way of knowing if they would take the kind of steps needed to get him a proper diagnosis, but there was a chance that at least they could keep him from fleeing again for another few days, in which time she might be able to gather enough evidence of the outbreak to trigger a full-scale public health response, and clear her name to the point where she could make sure that Rowan was included.

When the squad car drove away, she sat on a bench in the mall, pondering her next step. She was on CCTV now, and regardless of her changed hairstyle it was only a matter of time before anyone seriously looking for her would be able to start reconstructing her movements.

So she had to return to the warehouse that night, or she might not get another chance.

9

Kate had expected the warehouse to be pitch black by nightfall—with the occasional beam from a phone, deployed sparingly—but it turned out that some of the squatters had obtained what looked like solar-charged hurricane lamps, which they set up on crates to spread a warm yellow light across the cavernous space. There was even a small portable microwave that people were using to heat up food. The mood of the place was almost cozy, as if they’d gathered here to ride out a storm or a flood, strangers united, however warily, against a shared calamity.

The squatters around her had been taciturn when she’d introduced herself, but she felt more like a newcomer than an outsider—on probation, not rejected. So far she’d sighted fifteen people, and among them she’d recognized four of the missing whose families she’d interviewed: Suzanne Reyes, Ahmed Fahadi, Gary Katsaros, and Linda Blethyn. Since none of them were minors, or the subject of warrants, there was no point trying to get police involved; it was possible that the best thing she could do would be to keep her mouth shut until morning, then find ways to tip off their loved ones. If she could get enough people who’d been affected by the disease reunited with the people who could recognize their condition, her job would be half done.

Gary and Suzanne had been using the microwave, but now Kate saw them walking straight toward her, carrying containers of food.

“Are you hungry?” Suzanne asked. “It’s Chinese, not too spicy.”

Kate nodded gratefully and accepted the meal, then she gestured to the floor and the three of them sat cross-legged on her blanket. Her companions were both around her own age, and though she knew Suzanne had spent time in shelters, both were better dressed than she was.

Gary looked around across the warehouse floor. “This isn’t how I saw myself ending up.”

Kate laughed sympathetically. “Me neither.”

“But when my wife changed, I couldn’t stay in the house. I couldn’t stay there, pretending that nothing had happened.”

Suzanne remained silent, but she was watching Kate intently. “Changed how?” Kate asked.

“Hollowed out,” Gary replied. “The first time I saw her, I didn’t think it was her at all. Everything that made her who she was had gone. Just because her face was the same, how could I recognize her without that spark? But it was her body, I had to accept that in the end. Her body was still there; it was everything else that had drained away.”

Kate stared back at him, unable to speak. He was not infected with the disease that had claimed Reza and Michael; his wife was. Kate had spoken to her for twenty minutes, but to a stranger, emitting the right words in the right order was enough for her to pass as normal.

Had they all been hollowed out—everyone she’d interviewed who’d claimed that it was the missing family member whose behavior had changed? Even Rowan’s mother? Kate struggled with her memories of the interview. It was one thing to be oblivious to the lack of familiar cues that only someone who’d known her for years would expect, but nothing about her fears for her child had rung false.

Suzanne said, “My husband was the same. When I woke up, I thought there was a rapist in my bed. If I hadn’t seen his appendectomy scar, I might have bashed his brains out.”

Kate looked down at the blanket. “It was the same for me,” she confessed. “My husband and my son. Then my sister, and one of my colleagues…”

Suzanne reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

“It’s spreading,” Gary said. “The hollowing is spreading. And it’s so hard to stop, because only the nearest can know who’s been taken.”

Kate said, “We need to go to the Department of Health. If there are enough of us telling the same story, they’ll have to investigate.”

Suzanne responded with the kind of smile that seemed to say they might as well light up the Bat-Signal. “I know two people who did that: a woman and her son. No one heard of them again. It’s spread to the government, it’s spread to the hospitals, it’s spread to the police.”

Kate shook her head vehemently. “But it can’t be everyone. It must be just a few.”

“How can you be sure?” Gary countered. “In someone you know, it’s unmissable. In anyone else, how could you tell?”

Kate had no reply. She’d thought she was close to turning things around, but all she’d done was send Rowan back to the robotic remnants of his parents, to be treated as if he was the one who’d lost his mind. Everything she’d been taking comfort from was being kicked out from under her.

Gary said, “The only way to fight this is for each of us to do what no one else can. We need to honor those who were our nearest. Prepare ourselves for what needs to be done, then go back to them and grant them peace.”

Kate’s fists tightened, but she spoke as calmly as she could. “Don’t say that. They can be brought back. They can be cured.”

“This is a war now,” Suzanne insisted. “Do you really think it would be merciful to spare them—and just sit around hoping that a cure is going to fall from the sky, while they spread the infection even further? Imagine a world where people like us are outnumbered. Do you have any idea how close to that we might be, even now?”

“So have you slaughtered your family?” Kate retorted, knowing the answer full well. She turned to Gary. “Have you?”

“No,” Gary replied, but his tone made no concession to her stance. “We need to act in concert, all on the same night. They can’t be prepared for this—we need to take them by surprise.”

“That’s monstrous.” Kate was numb. “You don’t murder people just because they’re sick.”

Suzanne said, “It’s the hardest thing you could ask of anyone, but Natalie showed us: If you’re strong, it can be done. If you loved them, and you face up to what they’ve become, it can be done.”

Kate had no words. Suzanne squeezed her shoulder again. “It’s tough,” she said. “You need time. We’ll talk again soon.”

They left her sitting on the tattered blanket. Kate watched as they crossed the floor and met up with Linda and Ahmed.

So this was the brave resistance against the horrors of the plague: people ready to abandon all hope in medicine, and just cull the herd. She could understand how shocking their personal experience had been, but the way they were reading it could not be right. No disease in history had ever spread so fast that the infected outnumbered the healthy.

Kate closed her eyes and saw an image of Beth, the big sister she’d worshipped, defending her from a clique of narcissistic bullies on her first day of high school. But then she pictured the shell of a woman she’d seen standing on the porch, holding the thing that had been her nephew. What were the odds that Beth had been infected at the same time as Reza and Michael, unless the disease had run rampant across the city? What were the odds that Chris Santos would be infected too? He lived on the other side of the river.

She lay down and curled up on the blanket. The world couldn’t change overnight, without warning. Nothing worked like that; it defied all logic.

But she couldn’t deny the evidence of her senses: Reza, Michael, Beth and Chris had all succumbed. Her only hope of proving the catastrophists wrong was to test their dismal hypothesis further. She had to put aside her fears of ridicule and betrayal, and take her story to as many people as possible who she had ever had reason to trust.

10

Kate slipped out of the warehouse just after dawn, leaving everyone else still sleeping. She’d been afraid that Natalie’s disciples might have had someone watching her, but they could hardly keep all their potential recruits under surveillance. And if she’d tried to turn them in, what would she say, to whom? That half a dozen homeless people were planning an uprising? Did the hollow men and women even understand their own nature well enough to conceive of the uninfected as any kind of threat? If they were just puppets going through the motions of living out the lives that their original hosts would have lived, how could that include any scenario that reflected their own difference?

As she strode down the highway, she tried to stare down her qualms and fix on a choice of confidant: someone who lived far from the center of the outbreak that had claimed Natalie’s family, and who had no more reason to be infected than anyone Kate might have plucked off the street at random.

Emily had been her closest friend in high school, and if they hadn’t met up in person all that often in the last few years, that had only been a matter of how busy they’d both become. She’d visited Kate just after Michael was born, and when Kate thought back over their conversation, she felt sure that she’d be able to tell at once if anything had changed inside her friend’s skull.

Emily was living in Coomera, some forty kilometers south; not exactly walking distance. Kate found a bus stop for the route into the city and joined a small queue of early commuters. She met one woman’s gaze and they exchanged polite greetings. Hollowed or not? Infected or not? If this disease spread so rapidly, so easily, how had she been spared, herself? Some natural immunity? Some genetic quirk? She’d survived sharing a bed with Reza, but how many of the hollowed could she share a bus with before her luck ran out?

It was midmorning by the time Kate arrived in Coomera, but Emily worked from home, so there was no reason for her not to be around. Kate rang the bell and stood waiting, anxiously. She could feel herself already gloomily prejudging the verdict, on no evidence whatsoever.

She rang again, then banged on the door. “Emily?”

A young man emerged from the house next door. “I think she’s still away for another week.”

“Oh.”

“Either that, or she’s tricked me into watering her plants while she sleeps all day,” he joked.

Kate smiled. “I should have called first.” As she walked down the road toward the bus stop, she remembered Emily talking about a business trip to Texas to meet with potential investors. She’d apologized for dropping in so soon after Kate came home from hospital with Michael, but she’d been preparing to leave in the next day or two. Kate hadn’t entirely forgotten; she’d just assumed she would have been back by now.

Half an hour into the long ride north, the bus passed a battered pay phone. Kate rang the bell and got off at the next stop. She walked back to the pay phone, trying to recall Emily’s number; it had been years since she’d had to dial it. When she punched her best guess into the keypad, a bland synthetic voice offered her a hint of success: “The number you have dialed currently redirects to an international destination. Do you wish to proceed with the call?”

Kate said, “Yes.”

After six rings, she heard: “You’ve reached Emily’s phone, please leave a message.” Kate slammed the handset down. She recognized her friend’s voice, but it had been stripped of any trace of warmth and humor.

She stood by the phone as the traffic sped past beside her, trying to understand what had happened. Had Emily been carrying the virus even before she’d flown out of Brisbane, and only succumbed to it after she’d arrived in America? And then… what? She’d re-recorded her phone’s greeting, to reflect her new, diminished state of consciousness? Unless she was actually an alien pod-person signaling to her fellow invaders, why would she even think of doing that?

Kate called the number again, listened to the recording again. She’d heard the same words dozens of times over the last ten years. And she could not put her finger on any change in timing, pitch, or intonation.

She called a third time, covering her left ear against the traffic noise. Every syllable was shaped and positioned just as it always had been—like the freckles on Reza’s shoulders. It was only the deeper meaning that had slipped away.

But this was a sound file, a digital waveform—and if it was literally unchanged, then any meaning with which the speaker had imbued it ought to remain intact.

Kate called again, trying to block out any emotional reaction to the voice and judge it entirely as she would a series of beeps in an audiology test. The result was not what she’d expected: The affectless drone she’d been hearing before suddenly seemed more human, not less.

Just as the tone sounded for the caller to leave a message, the faint hiss on the line changed, and a live voice, thick from sleep, said, “Hello?”

Kate said, “Emily?”

“Kate? Is something wrong?”

“No. Did I wake you?”

“It’s all right; it’s not that late here.”

“I didn’t realize you’d still be away.”

“Yeah… I’ve had a lot of interest in the project, but these things never go to plan.”

Kate kept the conversation going while saying as little as possible herself, prodding Emily along with small talk, while tuning her own expectations in and out. The more she sought a feeling of solace and intimacy, the more her friend’s voice mocked and disappointed her. But when she emptied her mind and just listened, everything sounded normal.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Emily asked. “You sound a bit out of it.”

“Work’s been crazy,” Kate replied. “There’s a case… I can’t talk about it now, but maybe when you get back.”

When she’d hung up the call, she sat on the concrete beside the pay phone. There was only one conclusion that made any sense now, but trying to acknowledge it was like trying to take control of an optical illusion. The cube needed to evert; the vase needed to recede into the gap between two faces. All along, she’d been confusing figure and ground. But she’d been right to believe that the people who’d fled their families had been the ones affected by disease; her mistake had been to change her mind. Because she had fled for the very same reason.

Kate felt her whole body shaking, as if she’d just clawed her way back from a precipice. Michael and Reza weren’t suffering from any kind of illness. Beth, Chris and Emily were all in perfect health. And whatever she’d been afflicted with, herself, she had to believe that it could be treated. She had to cling to that hope, just as she had when the roles had appeared to be reversed.

She staggered to her feet. She thought of calling Reza, to set his mind at ease, but she was afraid that if she heard his voice everything might flip again.

As she walked toward the bus stop, she pictured herself back in the emergency department—where she should have remained, as Reza had beseeched her to, all those nights ago. But once she was admitted to hospital, once the psychiatrists and neurologists were debating the cause and extent of her delusions, how seriously would any of her colleagues treat her testimony? How much of what she had actually discovered would they believe?

How quickly would they act to protect the families who were marked for the same fate as Natalie’s?

She couldn’t take the risk that they’d ignore her. She couldn’t run away and hide in a hospital bed while the righteous army rose up against the hollow ones, and the true believers honored those they’d loved by granting them peace.

11

“I’ve been wondering about something,” Kate said. She was sitting with the other runaways: Linda, Gary, Suzanne and Ahmed, huddled in a circle away from the merely homeless, who were hostile or agnostic when it came to their cause. “Exactly where did this disease come from? And exactly how does it spread?”

“Does it matter?” Linda replied. “We know it’s spreading fast, whatever the route.”

But Suzanne was less dismissive. “It could be important. Did you have something in mind?”

Kate said, “My yard has a couple of fig trees, right at the back. And those fig trees are full of fruit bats. I don’t actually go down there and roll around in the guano, but our dog was doing that all the time.” She looked around the circle, hunting for any sign that this scenario, based on what she’d seen at Natalie’s house, might be describing a shared condition. “Remember the Hendra virus? It went from fruit bats to horses, then people. What if this is something like that—but with dogs instead of horses as the link?”

The group was silent for a while, then Ahmed said, “My dog was acting strangely for a couple of days before I left. But my wife had nothing to do with him; she wouldn’t even let him in the house.”

“Do you have fig trees?” Kate asked.

“No. But our neighbor does, and some of the branches hang over the fence.”

She waited, but no one else volunteered their own zoonotic risk profile. If the details didn’t match, why not say so?

Gary said, “In any case, we know it must be jumping straight from human to human now.”

Kate frowned. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because of the speed,” Linda interjected.

“But what exactly do we know about the speed?”

Linda was starting to lose patience. “My mother, in Sydney, was already affected the very same day my husband changed. I called her up to try to tell her something was wrong, and she was… gone.”

Kate nodded soberly. “It hit my sister, the same night as my husband and my son. But this morning…” She steeled herself, ready to find out the hard way if her own revelatory experience could sway anyone else. “I called a friend who’s been in America for the last two months—”

Everyone turned away from her to look across the warehouse floor, back toward the loading bay. A woman was approaching the circle. Her eyes were lowered, and she’d shaved her head, but as she crossed into the yellow light of the hurricane lamps, Kate recognized her by the shape of her face.

Her four companions rose to their feet, and Kate followed them. Each of them embraced Natalie in turn, and then Gary introduced her to Kate.

Kate shook her hand in silence. Natalie didn’t meet her gaze. The six of them sat on the tartan picnic blanket that Gary had spread on the concrete floor.

Natalie said, “It has to be tonight.”

“Are you sure?” Gary asked. “Once we tip our hand, there’ll be no going back. And I still think I can get more recruits. Rowan’s gone missing, but he might turn up—”

“No. We can’t wait any longer.” Natalie spoke calmly, but with a tone of authority. “We need to send a signal to all the people who are still unreachable. We need to let them know that they’re not alone, that there’s an army on their side, and an example they can follow.”

“I understand.” Gary looked around the circle. “Is everyone ready?”

Everyone but Kate nodded, but Kate saw Ahmed glance her way uncertainly. If she gave him more reason to doubt, there might be a chance that she could break the consensus.

She said, “Please, can I share a story with you? It will only take a minute.” Forget Emily and her voicemail. She needed to cut closer to home.

Gary looked to Natalie, then said, “Of course.”

“The night I left my family,” Kate began, “I was driving around for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Then I thought: I’ll go to my sister. She’ll help me, she’ll understand. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t call her. But as I drove toward her house, as I got closer and closer, the more I thought about what would happen once I knocked on her door, the more certain I was that she’d already gone the way of my husband and my son. I knew she was exactly like them—without even seeing her, without even talking to her.

“So I thought: I’ll go to my friend Chris. He lived much farther away, but I trusted him. So I set off south, heading for his apartment, glad I still had someone I could turn to. And the same thing happened. I never arrived; I never saw him, I never heard his voice. But I was absolutely sure that he’d been hollowed out.

“What does that mean? Do I have some magical sense of who’s changed, that I can know that without even meeting them?”

Natalie said, “You made a guess, that’s all.” Her manner was growing brittle and defensive. She was an intelligent woman; she knew there was no intuition that could work like this, no presentiment that could be trusted in the absence of a single fact to guide it.

“But the feeling was so strong,” Kate insisted. “As strong as when I saw what my husband had become, lying beside me in my bed. I never let him speak, either. I just knew, because it was so clear to me. But now, if I’m honest with myself, I’m afraid that it wasn’t him who changed. I’m afraid—”

Natalie snapped. She started screaming, then she leaned over and began pummeling Kate with her fists. Linda and Ahmed took hold of her, pulling her back, but she kept shrieking and thrashing. Suzanne began sobbing, staring at Kate in horror, as if she’d just stabbed all five of her comrades through the heart.

Kate kept talking, sickened by the cruelty of what she was doing to a woman already annihilated by grief, but determined to finish the job for the sake of anyone still tempted to follow her.

She said, “I’m afraid I’m the one who changed. The dog dug around in the bat shit, then she got sick, and I let her lick my face. My face, not my husband’s, not my son’s. I thought they’d lost everything that made them human, but now I know that it was all in my head.”

12

“Surprise!” Reza called out from the far side of the visitor’s yard. He was holding a child in his arms.

Kate approached them warily. “Is that really him?” As soon as the words slipped out, she wished she could take them back, but if Reza heard them as more than a figure of speech he did nothing to show it. “He’s grown so much,” she added.

“Yeah. I’m fattening him up for sumo school.” He smiled and held Michael out toward her.

Kate hesitated, afraid that after so long he wouldn’t recognize her. But he gazed placidly into her face, and offered no protest when she took him in her arms.

They sat together on one of the benches.

“That beard’s getting out of control,” she told Reza.

“Ah, but you love it, don’t you?”

“It helps.” The neurologist had suggested this trick, and it seemed to be working. The new Reza reminded her of the old one, just enough to invoke memories of him without raising her expectations too high, while she built a new set of responses to the way he looked now. Sometimes it felt wrong when she kissed him, like some sick game with twins, but if she had to choose between the old Reza being dead to her forever, or reincarnated in this imperfect look-alike, she’d settle for transmigration into a doppelgänger with a beard.

She turned to Michael, and he reached up and put a hand on her face. “Who is the most beautiful boy?” she asked. “Can you guess who that is?” He smiled, a little smugly, as if he knew he was being flattered simply from her tone. That seemed new, but she could love what was new. Everything that mattered most in his life was yet to come.

Reza put an arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t flinch.

“The last scan showed no inflammation,” she said. “And there’s no more trace of the virus in my CSF. So maybe another week. They’re still cautious; some of the others have had flare-ups.”

“I’m glad they’re cautious,” he said. “But we can’t wait to have you home.”

Kate bent down and kissed Michael three times in rapid succession. He cooed with delight and tugged at her hair. Nobody could tell her what the future held, for her or the seventeen others. “Capgras syndrome” was just a name for a cluster of symptoms that had been seen in half a dozen different diseases; it was not the means to divine a prognosis. But even if her raw perceptions of people had forever lost their power to evoke the emotional history that had once fleshed out their meaning, her love for her family had not been lost. She just had to find detours around the barriers, and dig tunnels to the deeper truth.

“How’s your father been?” she asked Reza.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Kate was worried for a moment, but Reza didn’t seem upset.

“This worked for him, too.” He stroked his beard. “He’s out of that fucking desert prison, back in Isfahan in the seventies. I don’t look like his father, but I can pass for one of his uncles, and apparently they got on pretty well. I told him he was staying in a posh hotel where the staff all liked practicing their English for the tourists.”

Kate began crying, but when she saw the effect on Michael she forced herself to stop.

“It’s all right,” Reza said. “He’s happy now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and twelve novels. He has won a Hugo Award for his novella”Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City. His most recent books are the novel Dichronauts, the novellas Phoresis and Perihelion Summer, and a retrospective collection of stories from the last 30 years, The Best of Greg Egan.

Umbernight
By Carolyn Ives Gilman

There is a note from my great-grandmother in the book on my worktable, they tell me. I haven’t opened it. Up to now I have been too angry at her whole generation, those brave colonists who settled on Dust and left us here to pay the price. But lately, I have begun to feel a little disloyal—not to her, but to my companions on the journey that brought me the book, and gave me the choice whether to read it or not. What, exactly, am I rejecting here—the past or the future?

• • • •

It was autumn—a long, slow season on Dust. It wasn’t my first autumn, but I’d been too young to appreciate it the first time. I was coming back from a long ramble to the north, with the Make Do Mountains on my right and the great horizon of the Endless Plain to my left. I could not live without the horizon. It puts everything in perspective. It is my soul’s home.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be offensive.

As I said, it was autumn. All of life was seeding, and the air was scented with lost chances and never agains. In our region of Dust, most of the land vegetation is of the dry, bristly sort, with the largest trees barely taller than I am, huddling in the shade of cliffs. But the plants were putting on their party best before Umbernight: big, white blooms on the bad-dog bushes and patches of bitterberries painting the arroyos orange. I knew I was coming home when a black fly bit me. Some of the organisms we brought have managed to survive: insects, weeds, lichen. They spread a little every time I’m gone. It’s not a big victory, but it’s something.

The dogs started barking when I came into the yard in front of Feynman Habitat with my faithful buggy tagging along behind me. The dogs never remember me at first, and always take fright at sight of Bucky. A door opened and Namja looked out. “Michiko’s back!” she shouted, and pretty soon there was a mob of people pouring out of the fortified cave entrance. It seemed as if half of them were shorter than my knees. They stared at me as if I were an apparition, and no wonder: my skin was burned dark from the UV except around my eyes where I wear goggles, and my hair and eyebrows had turned white. I must have looked like Grandmother Winter.

“Quite a crop of children you raised while I was gone,” I said to Namja. I couldn’t match the toddlers to the babies I had left.

“Yes,” she said. “Times are changing.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I would find out.

Everyone wanted to help me unpack the buggy, so I supervised. I let them take most of the sample cases to the labs, but I wouldn’t let anyone touch the topographical information. That would be my winter project. I was looking forward to a good hibernate, snug in a warm cave, while I worked on my map of Dust.

The cargo doors rumbled open and I ordered Bucky to park inside, next to his smaller siblings, the utility vehicles. The children loved seeing him obey, as they always do; Bucky has an alternate career as playground equipment when he’s not with me. I hefted my pack and followed the crowd inside.

There is always a festive atmosphere when I first get back. Everyone crowds around telling me news and asking where I went and what I saw. This time they presented me with the latest project of the food committee: an authentic glass of beer. I think it’s an acquired taste, but I acted impressed.

We had a big, celebratory dinner in the refectory. As a treat, they grilled fillets of chickens and fish, now plentiful enough to eat. The youngsters like it, but I’ve never been able to get used to meat. Afterwards, when the parents had taken the children away, a group of adults gathered around my table to talk. By then, I had noticed a change: my own generation had become the old-timers, and the young adults were taking an interest in what was going on. Members of the governing committee were conspicuously absent.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Haakon said to me in a low tone.

“What do you mean?” I said.

Everyone exchanged a look. It was Namja who finally explained. “The third cargo capsule from the homeworld is going to land at Newton’s Eye in about 650 hours.”

“But . . .” I stopped when I saw they didn’t need me to tell them the problem. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Umbernight was just around the corner. Much as we needed that cargo, getting to it would be a gamble with death.

I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”

After that, I had nightmares in which I looked up at the sky and there was the face of a corpse hanging there, covered with a shroud. I would watch in terror as the veil would slowly draw aside, revealing rotted flesh and putrid gray jelly eyes, glowing with a deadly unlight that killed everything it touched.

I didn’t know anything then about planetary nebulae or stars that emit in the UV and X-ray spectrum. I didn’t know we lived in a double-star system, circling a perfectly normal G-class star with a very strange, remote companion. I had learned all that by the time I was an adolescent and Umber finally rose in our sky. I never disputed why I had to spend my youth cooped up in the cave habitat trying to make things run. They told me then, “You’ll be all grown up with kids of your own before Umber comes again.” Not true. All grown up, that part was right. No kids.

A dog was nudging my knee under the table, and I kneaded her velvet ears. I was glad the pro-dog faction had won the Great Dog Debate, when the colony had split on whether to reconstitute dogs from frozen embryos. You feel much more human with dogs around. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

As if in answer, the tall, stooped figure of Anselm Thune came into the refectory and headed toward our table. We all fell silent. “The Committee wants to see you, Mick,” he said.

There are committees for every conceivable thing in Feynman, but when someone says “the Committee,” capital C, it means the governing committee. It’s elected, but the same people have dominated it for years, because no one wants to put up with the drama that would result from voting them out. Just the mention of it put me in a bad mood.

I followed Anselm into the meeting room where the five Committee members were sitting around a table. The only spare seat was opposite Chairman Colby, so I took it. He has the pale skin of a lifelong cave dweller, and thin white hair fringing his bald head.

“Did you find anything useful?” he asked as soon as I sat down. He’s always thought my roving is a waste of time because none of my samples have produced anything useful to the colony. All I ever brought back was more evidence of how unsuited this planet is for human habitation.

I shrugged. “We’ll have to see what the lab says about my biosamples. I found a real pretty geothermal region.”

He grimaced at the word “pretty,” which was why I’d used it. He was an orthodox rationalist, and considered aesthetics to be a gateway drug to superstition. “You’ll fit in well with these gullible young animists we’re raising,” he said. “You and your fairy-tales.”

I was too tired to argue. “You wanted something?” I said.

Anselm said, “Do you know how to get to Newton’s Eye?”

“Of course I do.”

“How long does it take?”

“On foot, about 200 hours. Allow a little more for the buggy, say 220.”

I could see them calculating: there and back, 440 hours, plus some time to unload the cargo capsule and pack, say 450. Was there enough time?

I knew myself how long the nights were getting. Dust is sharply tilted, and at our latitude, its slow days vary from ten hours of dark and ninety hours of light in the summer to the opposite in winter. We were past the equinox; the nights were over sixty hours long, what we call N60. Umber already rose about midnight; you could get a sunburn before dawn. But most of its radiation didn’t reach us yet because of the cloud of dust, gas, and ionized particles surrounding it. At least, that’s our theory about what is concealing the star.

“I don’t suppose the astronomers have any predictions when the shroud will part?” I said.

That set Colby off. “Shroud, my ass. That’s a backsliding anti-rationalist term. Pretty soon you’re going to have people talking about gods and visions, summoning spirits, and rejecting science.”

“It’s just a metaphor, Colby,” I said.

“I’m trying to prevent us from regressing into savagery! Half of these youngsters are already wearing amulets and praying to idols.”

Once again, Anselm intervened. “There is inherent unpredictability about the star’s planetary nebula,” he said. “The first time, the gap appeared at N64.” That is, when night was 64 hours long. “The second time it didn’t come till N70.”

“We’re close to N64 now,” I said.

“Thank you for telling us,” Colby said with bitter sarcasm.

I shrugged and got up to leave. Before I reached the door Anselm said, “You’d better start getting your vehicle in order. If we do this, you’ll be setting out in about 400 hours.”

“Just me?” I said incredulously.

“You and whoever we decide to send.”

“The suicide team?”

“You’ve always been a bad influence on morale,” Colby said.

“I’m just calculating odds like a good rationalist,” I replied. Since I really didn’t want to hear his answer to that, I left. All I wanted then was a hot bath and about twenty hours of sleep.

• • • •

That was my first mistake. I should have put my foot down right then. They probably wouldn’t have tried it without me.

But the habitat was alive with enthusiasm for fetching the cargo. Already, more people had volunteered than we could send. The main reason was eagerness to find out what our ancestors had sent us. You could barely walk down the hall without someone stopping you to speculate about it. Some wanted seeds and frozen embryos, electronic components, or medical devices. Others wanted rare minerals, smelting equipment, better water filtration. Or something utterly unexpected, some miracle technology to ease our starved existence.

It was the third and last cargo capsule our ancestors had sent by solar sail when they themselves had set out for Dust in a faster ship. Without the first two capsules, the colony would have been wiped out during the first winter, when Umber revealed itself. As it was, only two thirds of them perished. The survivors moved to the cave habitat and set about rebuilding a semblance of civilization. We weathered the second winter better here at Feynman. Now that the third winter was upon us, people were hoping for some actual comfort, some margin between us and annihilation.

But the capsule was preprogrammed to drop at the original landing site, long since abandoned. It might have been possible to reprogram it, but no one wanted to try calculating a different landing trajectory and sending it by our glitch-prone communication system. The other option, the wise and cautious one, was to let the capsule land and just leave it sitting at Newton’s Eye until spring. But we are the descendants of people who set out for a new planet without thoroughly checking it out. Wisdom? Caution? Not in our DNA.

All right, that’s a little harsh. They said they underestimated the danger from Umber because it was hidden behind our sun as well as its shroud when they were making observations from the home planet. And they did pay for their mistake.

I spent the next ten hours unpacking, playing with the dogs, and hanging out in the kitchen. I didn’t see much evidence of pagan drumming in the halls, so I asked Namja what bee had crawled up Colby’s ass. Her eyes rolled eloquently in response. “Come here,” she said.

She led me into the warren of bedrooms where married couples slept and pulled out a bin from under her bed—the only space any of us has for storing private belongings. She dug under a concealing pile of clothes and pulled out a broken tile with a colorful design on the back side—a landscape, I realized as I studied it. A painting of Dust.

“My granddaughter Marigold did it,” Namja said in a whisper.

What the younger generation had discovered was not superstition, but art.

For two generations, all our effort, all our creativity, had gone into improving the odds of survival. Art took materials, energy, and time we didn’t have to spare. But that, I learned, was not why Colby and the governing committee disapproved of it.

“They think it’s a betrayal of our guiding principle,” Namja said.

“Rationalism, you mean?”

She nodded. Rationalism—that universal ethic for which our parents came here, leaving behind a planet that had splintered into a thousand warring sects and belief systems. They were high-minded people, our settler ancestors. When they couldn’t convince the world they were correct, they decided to leave it and found a new one based on science and reason. And it turned out to be Dust.

Now, two generations later, Colby and the governing committee were trying to beat back irrationality.

“They lectured us about wearing jewelry,” Namja said.

“Why?”

“It might inflame sexual instincts,” she said ironically.

“Having a body does that,” I said.

“Not if you’re Colby, I guess. They also passed a resolution against figurines.”

“That was their idea of a problem?”

“They were afraid people would use them as fetishes.”

It got worse. Music and dance were now deemed to have shamanistic origins. Even reciting poetry aloud could start people on the slippery slope to prayer groups and worship.

“No wonder everyone wants to go to Newton’s Eye,” I said.

• • • •

We held a meeting to decide what to do. We always have meetings, because the essence of rationality is that it needs to be contested. Also because people don’t want responsibility for making a decision.

About 200 people crammed into the refectory—everyone old enough to understand the issue. We no longer had a room big enough for all, a sure sign we were outgrowing our habitat.

From the way the governing committee explained the options, it was clear that they favored the most cautious one—to do nothing at all, and leave the cargo to be fetched by whoever would be around in spring. I could sense disaffection from the left side of the room, where a cohort of young adults stood together. When Colby stopped talking, a lean, intellectual-looking young man named Anatoly spoke up for the youth party.

“What would our ancestors think of us if we let a chance like this slip by?”

Colby gave him a venomous look that told me this was not the first time Anatoly had stood up to authority. “They would think we were behaving rationally,” he said.

“It’s not rational to sit cowering in our cave, afraid of the planet we came to live on,” Anatoly argued. “This cargo could revolutionize our lives. With new resources and technologies, we could expand in the spring, branch out and found satellite communities.”

Watching the Committee, I could tell that this was precisely what they feared. New settlements meant new leaders—perhaps ones like Anatoly, willing to challenge what the old leaders stood for.

“Right now, it’s a waste of our resources,” Anselm said. “We need to focus everything we have on preparing for Umbernight.”

“It’s a waste of resources not to go,” Anatoly countered. “You have a precious resource right here.” He gestured at the group behind him. “People ready and willing to go now. By spring, we’ll all be too old.”

“Believe it or not, we don’t want to waste you either,” said Gwen, a third member of the Committee—although Colby looked like he would have gladly wasted Anatoly without a second thought.

“We’re willing to take the chance,” Anatoly said. “We belong here, on this planet. We need to embrace it, dangers and all. We are more prepared now than ever before. Our scientists have invented X-ray shielding fabric, and coldsuits for temperature extremes. We’ll never be more ready.”

“Well, thank you for your input,” Anselm said. “Anyone else?”

The debate continued, but all the important arguments had been made. I slipped out the back and went to visit Bucky, as if he would have an opinion. “They may end up sending us after all,” I told him in the quiet of his garage. “If only to be rid of the troublemakers.”

• • • •

The great announcement came about twenty hours later. The Committee had decided to roll the dice and authorize the expedition. They posted the list of six names on bulletin boards all over the habitat. I learned of it when I saw a cluster of people around one, reading. As I came up behind them, D’Sharma exclaimed emotionally, “Oh, this is just plain cruel.” Someone saw me, and D’Sharma turned around. “Mick, you’ve got to bring them all back, you hear?” Then she burst into tears.

I read the list then, but it didn’t explain D’Sharma’s reaction. Anatoly was on it, not surprisingly—but in what seemed like a deliberate snub, he was not to be the leader. That distinction went to a young man named Amal. The rest were all younger generation; I’d known them in passing as kids and adolescents, but I had been gone too much to see them much as adults.

“It’s a mix of expendables and rising stars,” Namja explained to me later in private. “Anatoly, Seabird, and Davern are all people they’re willing to sacrifice, for different reasons. Amal and Edie—well, choosing them shows that the Committee actually wants the expedition to succeed. But we’d all hate to lose them.”

I didn’t need to ask where I fit in. As far as the Committee was concerned, I was in the expendable category.

My first impression of the others came when I was flat on my back underneath Bucky, converting him to run on bottled propane. Brisk footsteps entered the garage and two practical boots came to a halt. “Mick?” a woman’s voice said.

“Under here,” I answered.

She got down on all fours to look under the vehicle. Sideways, I saw a sunny face with close-cropped, dark brown hair. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Edie.”

“I know,” I said.

“I want to talk,” she said.

“We’re talking.”

“I mean face to face.”

We were face to face, more or less, but I supposed she meant upright, so I slid out from under, wiping my oily hands on a rag. We looked at each other across Bucky’s back.

“We’re going to have a meeting to plan out the trip to Newton’s Eye,” she said.

“Okay.” I had already been planning out the trip for a couple work cycles. It’s what I do, plan trips, but normally just for myself.

“Mick, we’re going to be counting on you a lot,” she said seriously. “You’re the only one who’s ever been to Newton’s Eye, and the only one who’s ever seen a winter. The rest of us have lots of enthusiasm, but you’ve got the experience.”

I was impressed by her realism, and—I confess it—a little bit flattered. No one ever credits me with useful knowledge. I had been prepared to cope with a flock of arrogant, ignorant kids. Edie was none of those things.

“Can you bring a map to the meeting? It would help us to know where we’re going.”

My heart warmed. Finally, someone who saw the usefulness of my maps. “Sure,” I said.

“I’ve already been thinking about the food, but camping equipment—we’ll need your help on that.”

“Okay.”

Her face folded pleasantly around her smile. “The rest of us are a talky bunch, so don’t let us drown you out.”

“Okay.”

After she told me the when and where of the meeting, she left, and I realized I hadn’t said more than two syllables at a time. Still, she left me feeling she had understood.

When I arrived at the meeting, the effervescence of enthusiasm triggered my fight or flight reflex. I don’t trust optimism. I stood apart, arms crossed, trying to size up my fellow travelers.

The first thing I realized was that Amal and Edie were an item; they had the kind of companionable, good-natured partnership you see in long-married couples. Amal was a big, relaxed young man who was always ready with a joke to put people at ease, while Edie was a little firecracker of an organizer. I had expected Anatoly to be resentful, challenging Amal for leadership, but he seemed thoroughly committed to the project, and I realized it hadn’t just been a power play—he actually wanted to go. The other two were supposed to be “under-contributors,” as we call them. Seabird—yes, her parents named her that on this planet without either birds or seas—was a plump young woman with unkempt hair who remained silent through most of the meeting. I couldn’t tell if she was sulky, shy, or just scared out of her mind. Davern was clearly unnerved, and made up for it by being as friendly and anxious to ingratiate himself with the others as a lost puppy looking for a master. Neither Seabird nor Davern had volunteered. But then, neither had I, strictly speaking.

Amal called on me to show everyone the route. I had drawn it on a map—a physical map that didn’t require electricity—and I spread it on the table for them to see. Newton’s Eye was an ancient crater basin visible from space. To get to it, we would have to follow the Let’s Go River down to the Mazy Lakes. We would then cross the Damn Right Barrens, climb down the Winding Wall to the Oh Well Valley, and cross it to reach the old landing site. Coming back, it would be uphill all the way.

“Who made up these names?” Anatoly said, studying the map with a frown.

“I did,” I said. “Mostly for my mood on the day I discovered things.”

“I thought the settlers wanted to name everything for famous scientists.”

“Well, the settlers aren’t around anymore,” I said.

Anatoly looked as if he had never heard anything so heretical from one of my generation. He flashed me a sudden smile, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one from the governing committee was listening.

“What will it be like, traveling?” Edie asked me.

“Cold,” I said. “Dark.”

She was waiting for more, so I said, “We’ll be traveling in the dark for three shifts to every two in the light. Halfway through night, Umber rises, so we’ll have to wear protective gear. That’s the coldest time, too; it can get cold enough for CO_2 to freeze this time of year. There won’t be much temptation to take off your masks.”

“We can do it,” Anatoly said resolutely.

Davern gave a nervous giggle and edged closer to me. “You know how to do this, don’t you, Mick?”

“Well, yes. Unless the shroud parts and Umbernight comes. Then all bets are off. Even I have never traveled through Umbernight.”

“Well, we just won’t let that happen,” Edie said, and for a moment it seemed as if she could actually make the forces of Nature obey.

I stepped back and watched while Edie coaxed them all into making a series of sensible decisions: a normal work schedule of ten hours on, ten hours off; a division of labor; a schedule leading up to departure. Seabird and Davern never volunteered for anything, but Edie cajoled them into accepting assignments without complaint.

When it was over and I was rolling up my map, Edie came over and said to me quietly, “Don’t let Davern latch onto you. He tries to find a protector—someone to adopt him. Don’t fall for it.”

“I don’t have maternal instincts,” I said.

She squeezed my arm. “Good for you.”

If this mission were to succeed, I thought, it would be because of Edie.

Which is not to say that Amal wasn’t a good leader. I got to know him when he came to me for advice on equipment. He didn’t have Edie’s extrovert flair, but his relaxed manner could put a person at ease, and he was methodical about thinking things through. Together, we compiled a daunting list of safety tents, heaters, coldsuits, goggles, face masks, first aid, and other gear; then when we realized that carrying all of it would leave Bucky with no room for the cargo we wanted to haul back, we set about ruthlessly cutting out everything that wasn’t essential for survival.

He challenged me on some things. “Rope?” he said skeptically. “A shovel?”

“Rationality is about exploiting the predictable,” I said. “Loose baggage and a mired-down vehicle are predictable.”

He helped me load up Bucky for the trip out with a mathematical precision, eliminating every wasted centimeter. On the way back, we would have to carry much of it on our backs.

I did demand one commitment from Amal. “If Umbernight comes, we need to turn around and come back instantly, no matter what,” I said.

At first he wouldn’t commit himself.

“Have you ever heard what happened to the people caught outside during the first Umbernight?” I asked him. “The bodies were found in spring, carbonized like statues of charcoal. They say some of them shed tears of gasoline, and burst into flame as soon as a spark hit them.”

He finally agreed.

You see, I wasn’t reckless. I did some things right—as right as anyone could have done in my shoes.

• • • •

When we set out just before dawn, the whole of Feynman Habitat turned out to see us off. There were hugs and tears, then waves and good wishes as I ordered Bucky to start down the trail. It took only five minutes for Feynman to drop behind us, and for the true immensity of Dust to open up ahead. I led the way down the banks of a frozen rivulet that eventually joined the Let’s Go River; as the morning warmed it would begin to gurgle and splash.

“When are we stopping for lunch?” Seabird asked.

“You’re not hungry already, are you?” Edie said, laughing.

“No, I just want to know what the plan is.”

“The plan is to walk till we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry.”

“I’d rather have a time,” Seabird insisted. “I want to know what to expect.”

No one answered her, so she glowered as she walked.

It did not take long for us to go farther from the habitat than any of them had ever been. At first they were elated at the views of the river valley ahead; but as their packs began to weigh heavier and their feet to hurt, the high spirits faded into dogged determination. After a couple of hours, Amal caught up with me at the front of the line.

“How far do we need to go this tenhour?”

“We need to get to the river valley. There’s no good place to pitch the tent before that.”

“Can we take a break and stay on schedule?”

I had already planned on frequent delays for the first few days, so I said, “There’s a nice spot ahead.”

As soon as we reached it, Amal called a halt, and everyone dropped their packs and kicked off their boots. I warned them not to take off their UV-filtering goggles. “You can’t see it, but Umber hasn’t set yet. You don’t want to come back with crispy corneas.”

I went apart to sit on a rock overlooking the valley, enjoying the isolation. Below me, a grove of lookthrough trees gestured gently in the wind, their leaves like transparent streamers. Like most plants on Dust, they are gray-blue, not green, because life here never evolved chloroplasts for photosynthesis. It is all widdershins life—its DNA twirls the opposite direction from ours. That makes it mostly incompatible with us.

Before long, Anatoly came to join me.

“That valley ahead looks like a good place for a satellite community in the spring,” he said. “What do you think, could we grow maize there?”

The question was about more than agronomy. He wanted to recruit me into his expansion scheme. “You’d need a lot of shit,” I said.

I wasn’t being flippant. Dumping sewage was how we had created the soil for the outdoor gardens and fields around Feynman. Here on Dust, sewage is a precious, limited resource.

He took my remark at face value. “It’s a long-range plan. We can live off hydroponics at first.”

“There’s a long winter ahead,” I said.

“Too long,” he said. “We’re bursting at the seams now, and our leaders can only look backward. That’s why the Committee has never supported your explorations. They think you’re wasting time because you’ve never brought back anything but knowledge. That’s how irrational they are.”

He was a good persuader. “You know why I like being out here?” I said. “You have to forget all about the habitat, and just be part of Dust.”

“That means you’re one of us,” Anatoly said seriously. “The governing committee, they are still fighting the battles of the homeworld. We’re the first truly indigenous generation. We’re part of this planet.”

“Wait until you’ve seen more of it before you decide for sure.”

I thought about Anatoly’s farming scheme as we continued on past his chosen site. It would be hard to pull off, but not impossible. I would probably never live to see it thrive.

The sun was blazing from the southern sky by the time we made camp on the banks of the Let’s Go. Edie recruited Davern to help her cook supper, though he seemed to be intentionally making a mess of things so that he could effusively praise her competence. She was having none of it. Amal and Anatoly worked on setting up the sleeping tent. It was made from a heavy, radiation-blocking material that was one of our lab’s best inventions. I puttered around aiming Bucky’s solar panels while there was light to collect, and Seabird lay on the ground, evidently too exhausted to move.

She sat up suddenly, staring at some nearby bushes. “There’s something moving around over there.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, since we are the only animal life on Dust.

“There is!” she said tensely.

“Well, check it out, then.”

She gave me a resentful look, but heaved to her feet and went to look in the bushes. I heard her voice change to that cooing singsong we use with children and animals. “Come here, girl! What are you doing here? Did you follow us?”

With horror, I saw Sally, one of the dogs from Feynman, emerge from the bushes, wiggling in delight at Seabird’s welcome.

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed. The dire profanity made everyone turn and stare. No one seemed to understand. In fact, Edie called out the dog’s name and it trotted over to her and stuck its nose eagerly in the cooking pot. She laughed and pushed it away.

Amal had figured out the problem. “We can’t take a dog; we don’t have enough food. We’ll have to send her back.”

“How, exactly?” I asked bitterly.

“I can take her,” Seabird volunteered.

If we allowed that, we would not see Seabird again till we got back.

“Don’t feed her,” Anatoly said.

Both Edie and Seabird objected to that. “We can’t starve her!” Edie said.

I was fuming inside. I half suspected Seabird of letting the dog loose to give herself an excuse to go back. It would have been a cunning move. As soon as I caught myself thinking that way, I said loudly, “Stop!”

They all looked at me, since I was not in the habit of giving orders. “Eat first,” I said. “No major decisions on an empty stomach.”

While we ate our lentil stew, Sally demonstrated piteously how hungry she was. In the end, Edie and Seabird put down their bowls for Sally to finish off.

“Is there anything edible out here?” Edie asked me.

“There are things we can eat, but not for the long run,” I said. “We can’t absorb their proteins. And the dog won’t eat them if she knows there is better food.”

Anatoly had rethought the situation. “She might be useful. We may need a threat detector.”

“Or camp cleanup services,” Edie said, stroking Sally’s back.

“And if we get hungry enough, she’s food that won’t spoil,” Anatoly added.

Edie and Seabird objected strenuously.

I felt like I was reliving the Great Dog Debate. They weren’t old enough to remember it. The arguments had been absurdly pseudo-rational, but in the end it had boiled down to sentiment. Pretty soon someone would say, “If the ancestors hadn’t thought dogs would be useful they wouldn’t have given us the embryos.”

Then Seabird said it. I wanted to groan.

Amal was trying to be leaderly, and not take sides. He looked at Davern. “Don’t ask me,” Davern said. “It’s not my responsibility.”

He looked at me then. Of course, I didn’t want to harm the dog; but keeping her alive would take a lot of resources. “You don’t know yet what it will be like,” I said.

Amal seized on my words. “That’s right,” he said, “we don’t have enough information. Let’s take another vote in thirty hours.” It was the perfect compromise: the decision to make no decision.

Of course, the dog ended up in the tent with the rest of us as we slept.

Stupid! Stupid! Yes, I know. But also kind-hearted and humane in a way my hardened pioneer generation could not afford to be. It was as if my companions were recovering a buried memory of what it had once been like to be human.

• • • •

The next tenhours’ journey was a pleasant stroll down the river valley speckled with groves of lookthrough trees. Umber had set and the sun was still high, so we could safely go without goggles, the breeze blowing like freedom on our faces. Twenty hours of sunlight had warmed the air, and the river ran ice-free at our side. We threw sticks into it for Sally to dive in and fetch.

We slept away another tenhour, and rose as the sun was setting. From atop the hill on which we had camped, we could see far ahead where the Let’s Go flowed into the Mazy Lakes, a labyrinth of convoluted inlets, peninsulas, and islands. In the fading light I carefully reviewed my maps, comparing them to what I could see. There was a way through it, but we would have to be careful not to get trapped.

As night deepened, we began to pick our way by lantern-light across spits of land between lakes. Anatoly kept thinking he saw faster routes, but Amal said, “No, we’re following Mick.” I wasn’t sure I deserved his trust. A couple of times I took a wrong turn and had to lead the way back.

“This water looks strange,” Amal said, shining his lantern on the inky surface. There was a wind blowing, but no waves. It looked like black gelatin.

The dog, thinking she saw something in his light, took a flying leap into the lake. When she broke the surface, it gave a pungent fart that made us groan and gag. Sally floundered around, trying to find her footing in a foul substance that was not quite water, not quite land. I was laughing and trying to hold my breath at the same time. We fled to escape the overpowering stench. Behind us, the dog found her way onto shore again, and got her revenge by shaking putrid water all over us.

“What the hell?” Amal said, covering his nose with his arm.

“Stromatolites,” I explained. They looked at me as if I were speaking ancient Greek—which I was, in a way. “The lakes are full of bacterial colonies that form thick mats, decomposing as they grow.” I looked at Edie. “They’re one of the things on Dust we can actually eat. If you want to try a stromatolite steak, I can cut you one.” She gave me the reaction I deserved.

After ten hours, we camped on a small rise surrounded by water on north and south, and by stars above. The mood was subdued. In the perpetual light, it had been easy to feel we were in command of our surroundings. Now, the opaque ceiling of the sky had dissolved, revealing the true immensity of space. I could tell they were feeling how distant was our refuge. They were dwarfed, small, and very far from home.

To my surprise, Amal reached into his backpack and produced, of all things, a folding aluminum mandolin. After all our efforts to reduce baggage, I could not believe he had wasted the space. But he assembled and tuned it, then proceeded to strum some tunes I had never heard. All the others seemed to know them, since they joined on the choruses. The music defied the darkness as our lantern could not.

“Are there any songs about Umbernight?” I asked when they paused.

Strumming softly, Amal shook his head. “We ought to make one.”

“It would be about the struggle between light and unlight,” Edie said.

“Or apocalypse,” Anatoly said. “When Umber opens its eye and sees us, only the just survive.”

Their minds moved differently than mine, or any of my generation’s. They saw not just mechanisms of cause and effect, but symbolism and meaning. They were generating a literature, an indigenous mythology, before my eyes. It was dark, like Dust, but with threads of startling beauty.

• • • •

We woke to darkness. The temperature had plummeted, so we pulled on our heavy coldsuits. They were made from the same radiation-blocking material as our tent, but with thermal lining and piezoelectric heating elements so that if we kept moving, we could keep warm. The visored hoods had vents with micro-louvers to let us breathe, hear, and speak without losing too much body heat.

“What about the dog?” Amal asked. “We don’t have a coldsuit for her.”

Edie immediately set to work cutting up some of the extra fabric we had brought for patching things. Amal tried to help her wrap it around Sally and secure it with tape, but the dog thought it was a game, and as their dog-wrestling grew desperate, they ended up collapsing in laughter. I left the tent to look after Bucky, and when I next saw Sally she looked like a dog mummy with only her eyes and nose poking through. “I’ll do something better when we stop next,” Edie pledged.

The next tenhour was a slow, dark trudge through icy stromatolite bogs. When the water froze solid enough to support the buggy, we cut across it to reach the edge of the Mazy Lakes, pushing on past our normal camping time. Once on solid land, we were quick to set up the tent and the propane stove to heat it. Everyone crowded inside, eager to shed their coldsuits. Taking off a coldsuit at the end of the day is like emerging from a stifling womb, ready to breathe free.

After lights out, I was already asleep when Seabird nudged me. “There’s something moving outside,” she whispered.

“No, there’s not,” I muttered. She was always worried that we were deviating from plan, or losing our way, or not keeping to schedule. I turned over to go back to sleep when Sally growled. Something hit the roof of the tent. It sounded like a small branch falling from a tree, but there were no trees where we had camped.

“Did you hear that?” Seabird hissed.

“Okay, I’ll check it out.” It was hard to leave my snug sleep cocoon and pull on the coldsuit again—but better me than her, since she would probably imagine things and wake everyone.

It was the coldest part of night, and there was a slight frost of dry ice on the rocks around us. Everything in the landscape was motionless. Above, the galaxy arched, a frozen cloud of light. I shone my lamp on the tent to see what had hit it, but there was nothing. All was still.

In the eastern sky, a dim, gray smudge of light was rising over the lakes. Umber. I didn’t stare long, not quite trusting the UV shielding on my faceplate, but I didn’t like the look of it. I had never read that the shroud began to glow before it parted, but the observations from the last Umbernight were not detailed, and there were none from the time before that. Still, I crawled back into the safety of the tent feeling troubled.

“What was it?” Seabird whispered.

“Nothing.” She would think that was an evasion, so I added, “If anything was out there, I scared it off.”

When we rose, I left the tent first with the UV detector. The night was still just as dark, but there was no longer a glow in the east, and the increase of radiation was not beyond the usual fluctuations. Nevertheless, I quietly mentioned what I had seen to Amal.

“Are you sure it’s significant?” he said.

I wasn’t sure of anything, so I shook my head.

“I’m not going to call off the mission unless we’re sure.”

I probably would have made the same decision. At the time, there was no telling whether it was wise or foolish.

Bucky was cold after sitting for ten hours, and we had barely started when a spring in his suspension broke. It took me an hour to fix it, working awkwardly in my bulky coldsuit, but we finally set off. We had come to the Damn Right Barrens, a rocky plateau full of the ejecta from the ancient meteor strike that had created Newton’s Eye. The farther we walked, the more rugged it became, and in the dark it was impossible to see ahead and pick out the best course.

Davern gave a piteous howl of pain, and we all came to a stop. He had turned his ankle. There was no way to examine it without setting up the tent, so Amal took some of the load from the buggy and carried it so Davern could ride. After another six hours of struggling through the boulders, I suggested we camp and wait for daybreak. “We’re ahead of schedule,” I said. “It’s wiser to wait than to risk breaking something important.”

“My ankle’s not important?” Davern protested.

“Your ankle will heal. Bucky’s axle won’t.”

Sulkily, he said, “You ought to marry that machine. You care more for it than any person.”

I would have answered, but I saw Edie looking at me in warning, and I knew she would give him a talking-to later on.

When we finally got a look at Davern’s ankle inside the tent, it was barely swollen, and I suspected him of malingering for sympathy. But rather than have him slow us down, we all agreed to let him ride till it got better.

Day came soon after we had slept. We tackled the Damn Right again, moving much faster now that we could see the path. I made them push on till we came to the edge of the Winding Wall.

Coming on the Winding Wall is exhilarating or terrifying, depending on your personality. At the end of an upward slope the world drops suddenly away, leaving you on the edge of sky. Standing on the windy precipice, you have to lean forward to see the cliffs plunging nearly perpendicular to the basin of the crater three hundred meters below. To right and left, the cliff edge undulates in a snaky line that forms a huge arc vanishing into the distance—for the crater circle is far too wide to see across.

“I always wish for wings here,” I said as we lined the edge, awestruck.

“How are we going to get down?” Edie asked.

“There’s a way, but it’s treacherous. Best to do it fresh.”

“We’ve got thirty hours of light left,” Amal said.

“Then let’s rest up.”

It was noon when we rose, and Umber had set. I led the way to the spot where a ravine pierced the wall. Unencumbered by coldsuits, we were far more agile, but Bucky still had only four wheels and no legs. We unloaded him in order to use the cart bed as a ramp, laying it over the rugged path so he could pass, and ferrying the baggage by hand, load after load. Davern was forced to go by foot when it got too precarious, using a tent pole for a cane.

It was hard, sweaty work, but twelve hours later we were at the bottom, feeling triumphant. We piled into the tent and slept until dark.

The next leg of the journey was an easy one over the sandy plain of the crater floor. Through the dark we walked then slept, walked then slept, until we started seeing steam venting from the ground as we reached the geothermically active region at the center of the crater. Here we came on the remains of an old road built by the original settlers when they expected to be staying at Newton’s Eye. It led through the hills of the inner crater ring. When we paused at the top of the rise, I noticed the same smudge of light in the sky I had seen before. This time, I immediately took a UV reading, and the levels had spiked. I showed it to Amal.

“The shroud’s thinning,” I said.

I couldn’t read his expression through the faceplate of his coldsuit, but his body language was all indecision. “Let’s take another reading in a couple hours,” he said.

We did, but there was no change.

We were moving fast by now, through a landscape formed by old eruptions. Misshapen claws of lava reached out of the darkness on either side, frozen in the act of menacing the road. At last, as we were thinking of stopping, we spied ahead the shape of towering ribs against the stars—the remains of the settlers’ original landing craft, or the parts of it too big to cannibalize. With our goal so close, we pushed on till we came to the cleared plain where it lay, the fossil skeleton of a monster that once swam the stars.

We all stood gazing at it, reluctant to approach and shatter its isolation. “Why don’t we camp here?” Edie said.

We had made better time than I had expected. The plan had been to arrive just as the cargo capsule did, pick up the payload, and head back immediately; but we were a full twenty hours early. We could afford to rest.

• • • •

I woke before the others, pulled on my protective gear, and went outside to see the dawn. The eastern sky glowed a cold pink and azure. The landing site was a basin of black volcanic rock. Steaming pools of water made milky with dissolved silicates dappled the plain, smelling of sodium bicarbonate. As I watched the day come, the pools turned the same startling blue as the sky, set like turquoise in jet.

The towering ribs of the lander now stood out in the strange, desolate landscape. I thought of all the sunrises they had seen—each one a passing fragment of time, a shard of a millennium in which this one was just a nanosecond of nothing.

Behind me, boots crunched on cinders. I turned to see that Amal had joined me. He didn’t greet me, just stood taking in the scene.

At last he said, “It’s uplifting, isn’t it?”

Startled, I said, “What is?”

“That they came all this way for the sake of reason.”

Came all this way to a desolation of rock and erosion stretching to the vanishing point—no, uplifting was not a word I would use. But I didn’t say so.

He went back to the tent to fetch the others, and soon I was surrounded by youthful energy that made me despise my own sclerotic disaffection. They all wanted to go explore the ruins, so I waved them on and returned to the tent to fix my breakfast.

After eating, I went to join them. I found Seabird and Davern bathing in one of the hot pools, shaded by an awning constructed from their coldsuits. “You’re sure of the chemicals in that water, are you?” I asked.

“Oh stop worrying,” Davern said. “You’re just a walking death’s-head, Mick. You see danger everywhere.”

Ahead, the other three were clustered under the shadow of the soaring ship ribs. When I came up, I saw they had found a stone monument, and were standing silently before it, the hoods of their coldsuits thrown back. Sally sat at Edie’s feet.

“It’s a memorial to everyone who died in the first year,” Edie told me in a hushed voice.

“But that’s not the important part,” Anatoly said intently. He pointed to a line of the inscription, a quotation from Theodore Cam, the legendary leader of the exiles. It said:

Gaze into the unknowable from a bridge of evidence.

“You see?” Anatoly said. “He knew there was something unknowable. Reason doesn’t reach all the way. There are other truths. We were right, there is more to the universe than just the established facts.”

I thought back to Feynman Habitat, and how the pursuit of knowledge had contracted into something rigid and dogmatic. No wonder my generation had failed to inspire. I looked up at the skeleton of the spacecraft making its grand, useless gesture to the sky. How could mere reason compete with that?

After satisfying my curiosity, I trudged back to the tent. From a distance I heard a whining sound, and when I drew close I realized it was coming from Bucky. Puzzled, I rummaged through his load to search for the source. When I realized what it was, my heart pulsed in panic. Instantly, I put up the hood on my coldsuit and ran to warn the others.

“Put on your coldsuits and get back to the tent!” I shouted at Seabird and Davern. “Our X-ray detector went off. The shroud has parted.”

Umber was invisible in the bright daylight of the western sky, but a pulse of X-rays could only mean one thing.

When I had rounded them all up and gotten them back to the shielded safety of the tent, we held a council.

“We’ve got to turn around and go back, this instant,” I said.

There was a long silence. I turned to Amal. “You promised.”

“I promised we’d turn back if Umbernight came on our way out,” he said. “We’re not on the way out any longer. We’re here, and it’s only ten hours before the capsule arrives. We’d be giving up in sight of success.”

“Ten hours for the capsule to come, another ten to get it unpacked and reloaded on Bucky,” I pointed out. “If we’re lucky.”

“But Umber sets soon,” Edie pointed out. “We’ll be safe till it rises again.”

I had worked it all out. “By that time, we’ll barely be back to the Winding Wall. We have to go up that path this time, bathed in X-rays.”

“Our coldsuits will shield us,” Anatoly said. “It will be hard, but we can do it.”

The trip up to now had been too easy; it had given them inflated confidence.

Anatoly looked around at the others, his face fierce and romantic with a shadow of black beard accentuating his jawline. “I’ve realized now, what we’re doing really matters. We’re not just fetching baggage. We’re a link to the settlers. We have to live up to their standards, to their . . . heroism.” He said the last word as if it were unfamiliar—as indeed it was, in the crabbed pragmatism of Feynman Habitat.

I could see a contagion of inspiration spreading through them. Only I was immune.

“They died,” I said. “Two thirds of them. Didn’t you read that monument?”

“They didn’t know what we do,” Amal argued. “They weren’t expecting Umbernight.”

Anatoly saw I was going to object, and spoke first. “Maybe some of us will die, too. Maybe that is the risk we need to take. They were willing, and so am I.”

He was noble, committed, and utterly serious.

“No one wants you to die!” I couldn’t keep the frustration from my voice. “Your dying would be totally useless. It would only harm the rest of us. You need to live. Sorry to break it to you.”

They were all caught up in the kind of crazy courage that brought the settlers here. They all felt the same devotion to a cause, and they hadn’t yet learned that the universe doesn’t give a rip.

“Listen,” I said, “you’ve got to ask yourself, what’s a win here? Dying is not a win. Living is a win, even if it means living with failure.”

As soon as I said the last word, I could see it was the wrong one.

“Let’s vote,” said Amal. “Davern, what about you? You haven’t said anything.”

Davern looked around at the others, and I could see he was sizing up who to side with. “I’m with Anatoly,” he said. “He understands us.”

Amal nodded as if this made sense. “How about you, Seabird?”

She looked up at Anatoly with what I first thought was admiration—then I realized it was infatuation. “I’ll follow Anatoly,” she said with feeling.

The followers in our group had chosen Anatoly as their leader.

“I vote with Anatoly, too,” said Amal. “I think we’ve come this far, it would be crazy to give up now. Edie?”

“I respect Mick’s advice,” she said thoughtfully. “But our friends back home are counting on us, and in a way the settlers are counting on us, too. All those people died so we could be here, and to give up would be like letting them down.”

I pulled up the hood of my coldsuit and headed out of the tent. Outside, the day was bright and poisonous. The coldsuit shielded me from the X-rays, but not from the feeling of impending disaster. I looked across to the skeletal shipwreck and wondered: what are we doing here on Dust? The settlers chose this, but none of us asked to be born here, exiled from the rest of humanity, like the scum on the sand left by the highest wave. We aren’t noble pioneers. We’re only different from the bacteria because we are able to ask what the hell this is all about. Not answer, just ask.

Someone came out of the tent behind me, and I looked to see who it was this time. Edie. She came to my side. “Mick, we are so thankful that you’re with us,” she said. “We do listen to you. We just agreed to go to a twelve-hour work shift on the way back, to speed things up. We’ll get back.”

I truly wished she weren’t here. She was the kind of person who ought to be protected, so she could continue to bring cheer to the world. She was too valuable to be thrown away.

“It’s not about me,” I said. “I’ve got less life to lose than the rest of you.”

“No one’s going to lose their lives,” she said. “I promise.”

• • • •

Why can’t I quit asking what more I could have done? I’m tired of that question. I still don’t know what else there was to do.

Ten hours later, there was no sign of the supply ship. Everyone was restless. We had slept and risen again, and now we scanned the skies every few minutes, hoping to see something.

Edie looked up from fashioning little dog goggles and said, “Do you suppose it’s landed somewhere else?” Once she had voiced the idea, it became our greatest worry. What if our assumption about the landing spot was wrong? We told ourselves it was just that the calculations had been off, or the ship was making an extra orbit. Now that we had made the commitment to stay, no one wanted to give up; but how long were we prepared to wait?

In the end, we could not have missed the lander’s descent. It showed up first as a bright spot in the western sky. Then it became a fiery streak, and we saw the parachutes bloom. Seconds later, landing rockets fired. We cheered as, with a roar that shook the ground, the craft set down in a cloud of dust barely a kilometer from us. As the warm wind buffeted us, even I felt that the sight had been worth the journey.

By the time we had taken down the tent, loaded everything on Bucky, and raced over to the landing site, the dust had settled and the metal cooled. It was almost sunset, so we worked fast in the remaining light. One team unloaded everything from Bucky while another team puzzled out how to open the cargo doors. The inside of the spacecraft was tightly packed with molded plastic cases we couldn’t work out how to open, so we just piled them onto the buggy as they came out. We would leave the thrill of discovery to our friends back home.

Bucky was dangerously overloaded before we had emptied the pod, so we reluctantly secured the doors with some of the crates still inside to stay the winter at Newton’s Eye. We could only hope that we had gotten the most important ones.

There was still a lot of work to do, sorting out our baggage and redistributing it, and we worked by lamplight into the night. By the time all was ready, we were exhausted. Umber had not yet risen, so there was no need to set up the tent, and we slept on the ground in the shadow of the lander. I was so close that I could reach out and touch something that had come all the way from the homeworld.

We set out into the night as soon as we woke. Bucky creaked and groaned, but I said encouraging words to him, and he seemed to get used to his new load. All of us were more heavily laden now, and the going would have been slower even if Bucky could have kept up his usual pace. When we reached the top of the inner crater ring we paused to look back at the plain where two spacecraft now stood. In the silence of our tribute, the X-ray alarm went off. Invisible through our UV-screening faceplates, Umber was rising in the east. Umbernight was ahead.

• • • •

We walked in silence. Sally hung close to us in her improvised coldsuit, no longer roving and exploring. From time to time she froze in her tracks and gave a low growl. But nothing was there.

“What’s she growling at, X-rays?” Anatoly said.

“She’s just picking up tension from us,” Edie said, reaching down to pat the dog’s back.

Half a mile later, Sally lunged forward, snapping at the air as if to bite it. Through the cloth of her coldsuit, she could not have connected with anything, even if anything had been there.

“Now I’m picking up on her tension,” Davern said.

“Ouch! Who did that?” Seabird cried out, clutching her arm. “Somebody hit me.”

“Everyone calm down,” Edie said. “Look around you. There’s nothing wrong.”

She shone her lamp all around, and she was right; the scene looked exactly as it had when we had traversed it before—a barren, volcanic plain pocked with steaming vents and the occasional grove of everlive trees. The deadly radiation was invisible.

Another mile farther on, Amal swore loudly and slapped his thigh as if bitten by a fly. He bent over to inspect his coldsuit and swore again. “Something pierced my suit,” he said. “There’s three pinholes in it.”

Sally started barking. We shone our lights everywhere, but could see nothing.

It was like being surrounded by malicious poltergeists that had gathered to impede our journey. I quieted the dog and said, “Everyone stop and listen.”

At first I heard nothing but my own heart. Then, as we kept still, it came: a rustling of unseen movement in the dark all around us.

“We’ve got company,” Anatoly said grimly.

I wanted to deny my senses. For years I had been searching for animal life on Dust, and found none—not even an insect, other than the ones we brought. And how could anything be alive in this bath of radiation? It was scientifically impossible.

We continued on more carefully. After a while, I turned off my headlamp and went out in front to see if I could see anything without the glare of the light. At first there was nothing, but as my eyes adjusted, something snagged my attention out of the corner of my eye. It was a faint, gauzy curtain—a net hanging in the air, glowing a dim blue-gray. It was impossible to tell how close it was—just before my face, or over the next hill? I swept my arm out to disturb it, but touched nothing. So either it was far away, or it was inside my head.

Something slapped my faceplate, and I recoiled. There was a smear of goo across my visor. I tried to wipe it off, and an awful smell from my breathing vent nearly gagged me. Behind me, Amal gave an exclamation, and I thought he had smelled it too, but when I turned to see, he was looking at his foot.

“I stepped on something,” he said. “I could feel it crunch.”

“What’s that disgusting smell?” Davern said.

“Something slimed me,” I answered.

“Keep on going, everyone,” Edie said. “We can’t stop to figure it out.”

We plodded on, a slow herd surrounded by invisible tormentors. We had not gotten far before Amal had to stop because his boot was coming apart. We waited while he wrapped mending tape around it, but that lasted only half an hour before the sole of his boot was flapping free again. “I’ve got to stop and fix this, or my foot will freeze,” he said.

We were all a little grateful to have an excuse to set up the tent and stop our struggle to continue. Once inside, we found that all of our coldsuits were pierced with small cuts and pinholes. We spent some time repairing them, then looked at each other to see who wanted to continue.

“What happens if we camp while Umber is in the sky, and only travel by day?” Edie finally asked.

I did a quick calculation. “It would add another 300 hours. We don’t have food to last.”

“If we keep going, our coldsuits will be cut to ribbons,” Davern said.

“If only we could see what’s attacking us!” Edie exclaimed.

Softly, Seabird said, “It’s ghosts.” We all fell silent. I looked at her, expecting it was some sort of joke, but she was deadly serious. “All those people who died,” she said.

At home, everyone would have laughed and mocked her. Out here, no one replied.

I pulled up the hood of my coldsuit and rose.

“Where are you going?” Davern said.

“I want to check out the lookthrough trees.” In reality, I wanted some silence to think.

“What a time to be botanizing!” Davern exclaimed.

“Shut up, Davern,” Amal said.

Outside, in the empty waste, I had a feeling of being watched. I shook it off. When we had camped, I had noticed that a nearby grove of lookthrough trees was glowing in the dark, shades of blue and green. I picked my way across the rocks toward them. I suspected that the fluorescence was an adaptation that allowed them to survive the hostile conditions of Umbernight, and I wanted some samples. When I reached the grove and examined one of the long, flat leaves under lamplight, it looked transparent, as usual. Shutting my lamp off, I held it up and looked through it. With a start, I pressed it to my visor so I could see through the leaf.

What looked like a rocky waste by the dim starlight was suddenly a brightly lit landscape. And everywhere I looked, the land bloomed with organic shapes unlike any I had ever seen. Under a rock by my feet was a low, domed mound pierced with holes like an overturned colander, glowing from within. Beneath the everlives were bread-loaf-shaped growths covered with plates that slid aside as I watched, to expose a hummocked mound inside. There were things with leathery rinds that folded out like petals to collect the unlight, which snapped shut the instant I turned on my lamp. In between the larger life-forms, the ground was crawling with smaller, insect-sized things, and in the distance I could see gauzy curtains held up by gas bladders floating on the wind.

An entire alternate biota had sprung to life in Umberlight. Dust was not just the barren place we saw by day, but a thriving dual ecosystem, half of which had been waiting as spores or seeds in the soil, to be awakened by Umber’s radiation. I knelt down to see why they had been so invisible. By our light, some of them were transparent as glass. Others were so black they blended in with the rock. By Umberlight, they lit up in bright colors, reflecting a spectrum we could not see.

I looked down at the leaf that had given me new sight. It probably had a microstructure that converted high-energy radiation into the visible spectrum so the tree could continue to absorb the milder wavelengths. Quickly, I plucked a handful of the leaves. Holding one to my visor, I turned back toward the tent. The UV-reflecting fabric was a dull gray in our light, but Umberlight made it shine like a beacon, the brightest thing in the landscape. I looked down at my coldsuit, and it also glowed like a torch. The things of Umbernight might be invisible to us, but we were all too visible to them.

When I came back into the tent, my companions were still arguing. Silently, I handed each of them a strip of leaf. Davern threw his away in disgust. “What’s this, some sort of peace offering?” he said.

“Put on your coldsuits and come outside,” I said. “Hold the leaves up to your faceplates and look through them.”

Their reactions, when they saw the reality around us, were as different as they were: astonished, uneasy, disbelieving. Seabird was terrified, and shrank back toward the tent. “It’s like nightmares,” she said.

Edie put an arm around her. “It’s better than ghosts,” she said.

“No, it’s not. It’s the shadow side of all the living beings. That’s why we couldn’t see them.”

“We couldn’t see them because they don’t reflect the spectrum of light our eyes absorb,” Amal said reasonably. Seabird did not look comforted.

I looked ahead, down the road we needed to take. Umber was bright as an anti-sun. In its light, the land was not empty, but full. There was a boil of emerging life in every crack of the landscape: just not our sort of life. We were the strangers here, the fruits that had fallen too far from the tree. We did not belong.

• • • •

You would think that being able to see the obstacles would speed us up, but not so. We were skittish now. With strips of lookthrough leaves taped to our visors, we could see both worlds, which were the same world; but we could not tell the harmless from the harmful. So we treated it all as a threat—dodging, detouring, clearing the road with a shovel when we could. As we continued, the organisms changed and multiplied fast around us, as if their growth were in overdrive. It was spring for them, and they were sprouting and spawning. What would they look like fully grown? I hoped not to find out.

I can’t describe the life-forms of Umbernight in biological language, because I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a plant, animal, or something in between. We quickly discovered what had been piercing our coldsuits—a plantlike thing shaped like a scorpion with a spring-loaded tail lined with barbs. When triggered by our movement, it would release a shower of pin-sharp projectiles. Perhaps they were poison, and our incompatible proteins protected us.

The road had sprouted all manner of creatures covered with plates and shells—little ziggurats and stepped pyramids, spirals, and domes. In between them floated bulbs like amber, airborne eggplants. They spurted a mucus that ate away any plastic it touched.

We topped a rise to find the valley before us completely crusted over with life, and no trace of a path. No longer could we avoid trampling through it, crushing it underfoot. Ahead, a translucent curtain suspended from floating, gas-filled bladders hung across our path. It shimmered with iridescent unlight.

“It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it?” Edie said.

“Yes, but is it dangerous?” Amal said.

“We’re not prey,” Anatoly argued. “This life can’t get any nutrients from us.”

“I doubt it knows that,” I said. “It might just act on instinct.”

“We could send the dog to find out,” Anatoly suggested.

Sally showed no inclination. Edie had put her on a leash, but it was hardly necessary; she was constantly alert now, on guard.

“Go around it,” I advised.

So we left our path to detour across land where the boulders had become hard to spot amid the riot of life. As Bucky’s wheels crushed the shell of one dome, I saw that inside it was a wriggling mass of larvae. It was not a single organism, but a colony. That would explain how such complex structures came about so fast; they were just hives of smaller organisms.

We cleared a place to camp by trampling down the undergrowth and shoveling it out of the way. Exhausted as we were, it was still hard to sleep through the sounds from outside: buzzing, whooshing, scratching, scrabbling. My brain kept coming back to one thought: at this rate, our return would take twice as long as the journey out.

The tent was cold when we woke; our heater had failed. When Amal unfastened the tent flap he gave an uncharacteristically profane exclamation. The opening was entirely blocked by undergrowth. No longer cautious, we set about hacking and smashing our way out, disturbing hordes of tiny crawling things. When we had cleared a path and turned back to look, we saw that the tent was surrounded by mounds of organisms attracted by its reflected light. The heater had failed because its air intake was blocked. Bucky, parked several yards away, had not attracted the Umberlife.

It was the coldest part of night, but Umber was high in the sky, and the life-forms had speeded up. We marched in formation now, with three fanned out in front to scan for obstructions, one in the center with Bucky, and two bringing up the rear. I was out in front with Seabird and Davern when we reached a hilltop and saw that the way ahead was blocked by a lake that had not been there on the way out. We gathered to survey it. It was white, like an ocean of milk.

“What is it?” Edie asked.

“Not water,” Anatoly said. “It’s too cold for that, too warm for methane.”

I could not see any waves, but there was an ebb and flow around the edges. “Wait here. I want to get closer,” I said.

Amal and Anatoly wouldn’t let me go alone, so the three of us set out. We were nearly on the beach edge before we could see it clearly. Amal came to an abrupt halt. “Spiders!” he said, repulsed. “It’s a sea of spiders.”

They were not spiders, of course, but that is the closest analog: long-legged crawling things, entirely white in the Umberlight. At the edges of the sea they were tiny, but farther out we could see ones the size of Sally, all seemingly competing to get toward the center of the mass. There must have been a hatching while we had slept.

“That is truly disgusting,” Anatoly said.

I gave a humorless laugh. “I’ve read about this on other planets—wildlife covering the land. The accounts always say it is a majestic, inspiring sight.”

“Umber turns everything into its evil twin,” Amal said.

As we stood there, a change was taking place. A wave was gathering far out. The small fry in front of us were scattering to get out of the way as it swept closer.

“They’re coming toward us,” Anatoly said.

We turned to run back toward the hill where we had left our friends. Anatoly and Amal reached the hilltop before I did. Edie shouted a warning, and I turned to see a knee-high spider on my heels, its pale body like a skull on legs. I had no weapon but my flashlight, so I nailed it with a light beam. To my surprise, it recoiled onto its hind legs, waving its front legs in the air. It gave me time to reach the others.

“They’re repelled by light!” I shouted. “Form a line and shine them off.”

The wave of spiders surged up the hill, but we kept them at bay with our lights. They circled us, and we ended up in a ring around Bucky, madly sweeping our flashlights to and fro to keep them off while Sally barked from behind us.

Far across the land, the horizon lit with a silent flash like purple lightning. The spiders paused, then turned mindlessly toward this new light source. As quickly as they had swarmed toward us, they were swarming away. We watched the entire lake of them drain, heading toward some signal we could not see.

“Quick, let’s cross while they’re gone,” I said.

We dashed as fast as we could across the plain where they had gathered. From time to time we saw other flashes of unlight, always far away and never followed by thunder.

In our haste, we let our vigilance lapse, and one of Bucky’s wheels thunked into a pothole. The other wheels spun, throwing up loose dirt and digging themselves in. I called out, “Bucky, stop!”—but he was already stuck fast.

“Let’s push him out,” Amal said, but I held up a hand. The buggy was already dangerously tilted.

“We’re going to have to unload some crates to lighten him up, and dig that wheel out.”

Everyone looked nervously in the direction where the spiders had gone, but Amal said, “Okay. You dig, we’ll unload.”

We all set to work. I was so absorbed in freeing Bucky’s wheel that I did not see the danger approaching until Seabird gave a cry of warning. I looked up to see one of the gauzy curtains bearing down on us from windward. It was yards wide, big enough to envelop us all, and twinkling with a spiderweb of glowing threads.

“Run!” Amal shouted. I dropped my shovel and fled. Behind me, I heard Edie’s voice crying, “Sally!” and Amal’s saying, “No, Edie! Leave her be!”

I whirled around and saw that the dog had taken refuge under the buggy. Edie was running back to get her. Amal was about to head back after Edie, so I dived at his legs and brought him down with a thud. From the ground we both watched as Edie gave up and turned back toward us. Behind her, the curtain that had been sweeping toward Bucky changed direction, veering straight toward Edie.

“Edie!” Amal screamed. She turned, saw her danger, and froze.

The curtain enveloped her, wrapping her tight in an immobilizing net. There was a sudden, blinding flash of combustion. As I blinked the after-spots away, I saw the curtain float on, shredded now, leaving behind a charcoal pillar in the shape of a woman.

Motionless with shock, I gazed at that black statue standing out against the eastern sky. It was several seconds before I realized that the sky was growing bright. Beyond all of us, dawn was coming.

• • • •

In the early morning light Anatoly and I dug a grave while Seabird and Davern set up the tent. We simply could not go on. Amal was shattered with grief, and could not stop sobbing.

“Why her?” he would say in the moments when he could speak at all. “She was the best person here, the best I’ve ever known. She shouldn’t have been the one to die.”

I couldn’t wash those last few seconds out of my brain. Why had she stopped? How had that brainless, eyeless thing sensed her?

Later, Amal became angry at me for having prevented him from saving her. “Maybe I could have distracted it. It might have taken me instead of her.”

I only shook my head. “We would have been burying both of you.”

“That would have been better,” he said.

Everyone gathered as we laid what was left of her in the ground, but no one had the heart to say anything over the grave. When we had filled it in, Sally crept forward to sniff at the overturned dirt. Amal said, “We need to mark it, so we can find it again.” So we all fanned out to find rocks to heap in a cairn on the grave.

We no longer feared the return of the spiders, or anything else, because the Umberlife had gone dormant in the sun—our light being as toxic to them as theirs was to us. Everything had retreated into their shells and closed their sliding covers. When we viewed them in our own light they still blended in with the stones of the crater floor.

We ate and snatched some hours of sleep while nothing was threatening us. I was as exhausted as the others, but anxious that we were wasting so much daylight. I roused them all before they were ready. “We’ve got to keep moving,” I said.

We resumed the work of freeing Bucky where we had left off. When all was ready, we gathered behind him to push. “Bucky, go!” I ordered. His wheels only spun in the sand. “Stop!” I ordered. Then, to the others, “We’re going to rock him out. Push when I say go, and stop when I say stop.” When we got a rhythm going, he rocked back and forth three times, then finally climbed out of the trench that had trapped him.

Amal helped us reload the buggy, but when it came time to move on, he hung back. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

“No way,” I said. “We all go or none of us.”

He got angry at me again, but I would not let him pick a fight. We let him have some moments alone at the grave to say goodbye. At last I walked up to him and said, “Come on, Amal. We’ve got to keep moving.”

“What’s the point?” he said. “The future is gone.”

But he followed me back to where the others were waiting.

He was right, in one way: nothing we could achieve now would make up for Edie’s loss. How we were going to carry on without her, I could not guess.

When we camped, there was no music now, and little conversation. The Winding Wall was a blue line ahead in the distance, and as we continued, it rose, ever more impassable, blocking our way. We did not reach the spot where the gully path pierced it until we had been walking for thirteen hours. We were tired, but resting would waste the last of the precious sunlight. We gathered to make a decision.

“Let’s just leave the buggy and the crates, and make a run for home,” Amal said. He looked utterly dispirited.

Davern and Seabird turned to Anatoly. He was the only one of us who was still resolute. “If we do that, we will have wasted our time,” he said. “We can’t give up now.”

“That’s right,” Davern said.

Amal looked at me. There was some sense in his suggestion, but also some impracticality. “If we leave the buggy we’ll have to leave the tent,” I said. “It’s too heavy for us to carry.” We had been spreading it as a tarpaulin over the crates when we were on the move.

“We knew from the beginning that the wall would be an obstacle,” Anatoly said with determination. “We have to make the effort.”

I think even Amal realized then that he was no longer our leader.

We unloaded the buggy, working till we were ready to drop, then ate and fell asleep on the ground. When we woke, the sun was setting. It seemed too soon.

Each crate took two people to carry up the steep path. We decided to do it in stages. Back and forth we shuttled, piling our cargo at a level spot a third of the way up. The path was treacherous in the dark, but at least the work was so strenuous we had no need of coldsuits until Umber should rise.

The life-forms around us started waking as soon as dark came. It was the predawn time for them, when they could open their shells and exhale like someone shedding a coldsuit. They were quiescent enough that we were able to avoid them.

Fifteen hours later, our cargo was three-quarters of the way up, and we gathered at the bottom again to set up the tent and rest before trying to get Bucky up the path. The X-ray alarm went off while we were asleep, but we were so tired we just shut it off and went on sleeping.

When we rose, an inhuman architecture had surrounded our tent on all sides. The Umberlife had self-organized into domes and spires that on close inspection turned out to be crawling hives. There was something deformed and abhorrent about them, and we were eager to escape our transformed campsite—until Seabird gave a whimper and pointed upward.

Three hundred meters above, the top of the Winding Wall was now a battlement of living towers that glowed darkly against the sky. Shapes we couldn’t quite make out moved to and fro between the structures, as if patrolling the edge. One fat tower appeared to have a rotating top that emitted a searchlight beam of far-ultraviolet light. It scanned back and forth—whether for enemies or for prey we didn’t know.

We realized how conspicuous we were in our glowing coldsuits. “I’d give up breakfast for a can of black paint,” I said.

“Maybe we could cover ourselves with mud?” Davern ventured.

“Let’s get out of here first,” Anatoly said.

The feeling that the land was aware of us had become too strong.

Getting Bucky up the steep trail was backbreaking work, but whenever we paused to rest, Umberlife gathered around us. The gully was infested with the plant-creatures that had once launched pins at us; they had grown, and their darts were the size of pencils now. We learned to trigger them with a beam from our flashlights. Every step required a constant, enervating vigilance.

When we had reached the place where we left the crates and stopped to rest, I announced that I was going to scout the trail ahead. No one else volunteered, so I said, “Amal, come with me. Seabird, hold onto the dog.”

Amal and I picked our way up the steep trail, shining away small attackers. I saw no indication that the Umberlife had blocked the path. When we reached the top and emerged onto the plateau, I stood looking around at the transformed landscape. At my side, Amal said, “Oh my God.”

The Damn Right Barrens were now a teeming jungle. Everywhere stood towering, misshapen structures, competing to dominate the landscape. An undergrowth of smaller life clogged the spaces in between. Above, in the Umberlit sky, floated monstrous organisms like glowing jellyfish, trailing tentacles that sparked and sizzled when they touched the ground. Ten or twelve of the lighthouse towers swept their searching beams across the land. There was not a doubt in my mind that this landscape was brutally aware.

I spotted some motion out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to see, nothing was there. I thought: only predators and prey need to move fast.

“Look,” Amal said, pointing. “Weird.”

It was a ball, perfectly round and perhaps a yard in diameter, rolling along the ground of its own accord. It disappeared behind a hive-mound and I lost track of it.

We had turned to go back down the ravine when one of the searchlight beams swept toward us, and we ducked to conceal ourselves behind a rock. Amal gave an exclamation, and I turned to see that we were surrounded by four of the rolling spheres. They seemed to be waiting for us to make a move, so I pointed my flashlight at one. Instantly, it dissolved into a million tiny crawlers that escaped into the undergrowth. The other spheres withdrew.

“They’re coordinating with the beacons,” I hissed at Amal. “Hunting cooperatively.”

“This place is evil,” he said.

We dashed toward the head of the gully. Too late, I spotted ahead the largest dart-thrower plant I had ever seen. The spring-loaded tail triggered, releasing its projectiles. I dove to one side. Amal was not quick enough, and a spine the size of an arrow caught him in the throat. He clutched at it and fell to his knees. Somehow, I managed to drag him forward till we were concealed in the gully.

The dart had pierced his neck through, and was protruding on the other side. There was no way to give him aid without taking off his coldsuit. He was struggling to breathe. I tried to lift his hood, but the dart was pinning it down. So I said, “Brace yourself,” and yanked the shaft out. He gave a gurgling cry. When I got his hood off, I saw it was hopeless. The dart had pierced a vein, and his coldsuit was filling with dark blood. Still, I ripped at his shirt and tried to bind up the wound until he caught at my hand. His eyes were growing glassy, but his lips moved.

“Leave it,” he said. He was ready to die.

I stayed there, kneeling over him as he stiffened and grew cold. My mind was a blank, until suddenly I began to cry. Not just for him—for Edie as well, and for their unborn children, and all the people who would never be gladdened by their presence. I cried for the fact that we had to bury them in this hostile waste, where love and comfort would never touch them again. And I cried for the rest of us as well, because the prospect of our reaching home now seemed so dim.

• • • •

When Anatoly and I brought the shovel back to the place where I had left Amal, there was nothing to bury. Only an empty coldsuit and a handful of teeth were left on the ground; all other trace of him was gone. Anatoly nudged the coldsuit with his foot. “Should we bury this?”

Macabre as it sounded, I said, “We might need it.”

So we brought it back to our camp. We let the others think we had buried him.

We convened another strategy session. I said, “Amal had it right. We need to make a run for it. To hell with the cargo and the buggy. Leave the tent here; it only draws attention to us. We need to travel fast and light.”

But Anatoly was still animated by the inspiration of our mission. “We can still succeed,” he said. “We’re close; we don’t need to give up. We just have to outthink this nightmare.”

“Okay, how?”

“We bring everything to the head of the gully and build a fort out of the crates. Then we wait till day comes, and make a dash for it while the Umberlife is sleeping.”

“We can only get as far as the Mazy Lakes before night,” I said.

“We do the same thing over again—wait out Umbernight. Food’s no longer such a problem, with two less people.”

I saw true faith in Seabird’s eyes, and calculated self-interest in Davern’s. Anatoly was so decisive, they were clearly ready to follow him. Perhaps that was all we needed. Perhaps it would work.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

We chose a site for our fort in the gully not far from where Amal had died. When it was done, it was a square enclosure of stacked crates with the tent pitched inside. I felt mildly optimistic that it would work. We slept inside it before bringing Bucky up. Then we waited.

There were sounds outside. Sally’s warning growls made us worry that something was surrounding us to make an attack, so we set four of our lanterns on the walls to repel intruders, even though it used up precious battery life.

Hours of uneasiness later, dawn came. We instantly broke down the fort and found that the lamps had done their job, since there was a bare circle all around us. We congratulated ourselves on having found a way to survive.

The daylight hours were a mad dash across the Damn Right. We had to clear the way ahead of Bucky, and we took out our anger on the hibernating Umberlife, leaving a trail of smashed shells and toppled towers. We reached the edge of the lakes at sunset, and instantly saw that our plan would not work.

Around the edge of the wetland stood a dense forest of the tallest spires we had yet seen, easily dominating any fort walls we could build. There would be no hope of staying hidden here.

At the edge of the lake, the blooming abundance of horrors stopped, as if water were as toxic to them as light. “If only we had a boat!” Anatoly exclaimed. But the life around us did not produce anything so durable as wood—even the shells were friable.

The light was fading fast. Soon, this crowded neighborhood would become animate. Ahead, a narrow causeway between two lakes looked invitingly empty. If only we could make it to a campsite far enough from shore, we could build our fort and wait out the night.

“Let me get out my maps and check our route first,” I said.

Davern gave an exclamation of impatience, but Anatoly just said, “Hurry up.”

We were on the side of the Mazy Lakes where my maps were less complete. On the outward journey, we had cut across the ice; but now, after forty hours of daylight, that was not an option. I was certain of only one route, and it seemed to take off from shore about five miles away. I showed it to the others.

Davern still wanted to follow the route ahead of us. “We can just go far enough to camp, then come back next day,” he argued. “We’ve already been walking twelve hours.”

“No. We’re not going to make any stupid mistakes,” I said.

Anatoly hesitated, then said, “It’s only five miles. We can do that.”

But five miles later, it was completely dark and almost impossible to tell the true path from a dozen false ones that took off into the swamp whenever I shone my lamp waterward. I began to think perhaps Davern had been right after all. But rather than risk demoralizing everyone, I chose a path and confidently declared it the right one.

It was a low and swampy route, ankle-deep in water at times. I went out ahead with a tent pole to test the footing and scout the way. The sound of Davern complaining came from behind.

As soon as we came to a relatively dry spot, we set up the tent, intending to continue searching for a fort site after a short rest. But when we rose, Bucky had sunk six inches into the mud, and we had to unload half the crates before we could push him out. By the time we set out again, we were covered with mud and water.

“Now we can try Davern’s plan of covering our coldsuits with mud,” I said.

“We don’t have much choice,” Davern muttered.

Umber rose before we found a place to stop. Then we discovered that the lakes were not lifeless at all. By Umberlight, the stromatolites fluoresced with orange and black stripes. In spots, the water glowed carmine and azure, lit from underneath. We came to a good camping spot by a place where the lake bubbled and steam rose in clouds. But when the wind shifted and blew the steam our way, we nearly choked on the ammonia fumes. We staggered on, dizzy and nauseous.

The fort, I realized, was a solution to yesterday’s problem. Staying put was not a good idea here, where we could be gassed in our sleep. We needed to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Geysers of glowing, sulphur-scented spray erupted on either side of our path. We headed for a hummock that looked like a dry spot, but found it covered by a stomach-turning layer of wormlike organisms. We were forced to march through them, slippery and wriggling underfoot. As we crushed them, they made a sound at a pitch we couldn’t hear. We sensed it as an itchy vibration that made us tense and short-tempered, but Sally was tormented till Seabird tied a strip of cloth over the coldsuit around her ears, making her look like an old woman in a scarf.

I didn’t say so, but I was completely lost, and had been for some time. It was deep night and the water was freezing by now, but I didn’t trust ice that glowed, so I stayed on the dwindling, switchback path. We were staggeringly weary by the time we reached the end of the road: on the tip of a peninsula surrounded by water. We had taken a wrong turn.

We stood staring out into the dark. It was several minutes before I could bring myself to say, “We have to go back.”

Seabird broke down in tears, and Davern erupted like a geyser. “You were supposed to be the great guide and tracker, and all you’ve done is lead us to a dead end. You’re totally useless.”

Somehow, Anatoly summoned the energy to keep us from falling on each others’ throats. “Maybe there’s another solution.” He shone his light out onto the lake. The other shore was clearly visible. “See, there’s an ice path across. The whole lake isn’t infested. Where it’s black, the water’s frozen solid.”

“That could be just an island,” I said.

“Tell you what, I’ll go ahead to test the ice and investigate. You follow only if it’s safe.”

I could tell he was going to try it no matter what I said, so I made him tie a long rope around his waist, and anchored it to Bucky. “If you fall through, we’ll pull you out,” I said.

He stepped out onto the ice, testing it first with a tent pole. The weakest spot of lake ice is generally near shore, so I expected it to crack there if it was going to. But he got past the danger zone and kept going. From far out on the ice, he flashed his light back at us. “The ice is holding!” he called. “Give me more rope!”

There wasn’t any more rope. “Hold on!” I called, then untied the tether from Bucky and wrapped it around my waist. Taking a tent pole, I edged out onto the ice where he had already crossed it. I was about thirty meters out onto the lake when he called, “I made it! Wait there.”

He untied his end of the rope to explore the other side. I could not see if he had secured it to anything in case I fell through, so I waited as motionlessly as I could. Before long, he returned. “I’m coming back,” he yelled.

I was a few steps from shore when the rope pulled taut, yanking me off my feet. I scrambled up, but the rope had gone limp. “Anatoly!” I screamed. Seabird and Davern shone their lights out onto the ice, but Anatoly was nowhere to be seen. I pulled in the rope, but it came back with only a frayed end.

“Stay here,” I said to the others, then edged gingerly onto the ice. If he was in the water, there was a short window of time to save him. But as I drew closer to the middle, the lake under me lit up with mesmerizing colors. They emanated from an open pool of water that churned and burped.

The lake under the black ice had not been lacking in life. It had just been hungry.

When I came back to where the others were waiting, I shook my head, and Seabird broke into hysterical sobs. Davern sat down with his head in his hands.

I felt strangely numb, frozen as the land around us. At last I said, “Come on, we’ve got to go back.”

Davern looked at me angrily. “Who elected you leader?”

“The fact that I’m the only one who can save your sorry ass,” I said.

Without Anatoly’s animating force, they were a pitiful sight—demoralized, desperate, and way too young. Whatever their worth as individuals, I felt a strong compulsion to avenge Anatoly’s death by getting them back alive. In this land, survival was defiance.

I ordered Bucky to reverse direction and head back up the path we had come by. Seabird and Davern didn’t argue. They just followed.

We had been retracing our steps for half an hour when I noticed a branching path I hadn’t seen on the way out. “Bucky, stop!” I ordered. “Wait here,” I told the others. Only Sally disobeyed me, and followed.

The track headed uphill onto a ridge between lakes. It had a strangely familiar look. When I saw Sally smelling at a piece of discarded trash, I recognized the site of our campsite on the way out. I stood in silence, as if at a graveyard. Here, Amal had played his mandolin and Anatoly had imagined songs of Umbernight. Edie had made Sally’s coldsuit.

If we had just gone back instead of trying to cross the ice, we would have found our way.

I returned to fetch my companions. When Seabird saw the place, memories overwhelmed her and she couldn’t stop crying. Davern and I set up the tent and heater as best we could, and all of us went inside.

“It’s not fair,” Seabird kept saying between sobs. “Anatoly was trying to save us. He didn’t do anything to deserve to die. None of them did.”

“Right now,” I told her, “your job isn’t to make sense of it. Your job is to survive.”

Inwardly, I seethed at all those who had led us to expect the world to make sense.

• • • •

We were ten hours away from the edge of the lakes, thirty hours of walking from home. Much as I hated to continue on through Umbernight, I wanted to be able to make a dash for safety when day came. Even after sleeping, Seabird and Davern were still tired and wanted to stay. I went out and shut off the heater, then started dismantling the tent to force them out.

The lakes glowed like a lava field on either side of us. From time to time, billows of glowing, corrosive steam enveloped us, and we had to hold our breaths till the wind shifted. But at least I was sure of our path now.

The other shore of the Mazy Lakes, when we reached it, was not lined with the towers and spires we had left on the other side; but when we pointed our lights ahead, we could see things scattering for cover. I was about to suggest that we camp and wait for day when I felt a low pulse of vibration underfoot. It came again, rhythmic like the footsteps of a faraway giant. The lake organisms suddenly lost their luminescence. When I shone my light on the water, the dark surface shivered with each vibration. Behind us, out over the lake, the horizon glowed.

“I think we ought to run for it,” I said.

The others took off for shore with Sally on their heels. “Bucky, follow!” I ordered, and sprinted after them. The organisms on shore had closed up tight in their shells. When I reached the sloping bank, I turned back to look. Out over the lake, visible against the glowing sky, was a churning, coal-black cloud spreading toward us. I turned to flee.

“Head uphill!” I shouted at Davern when I caught up with him. Seabird was ahead of us; I could see her headlamp bobbing as she ran. I called her name so we wouldn’t get separated, then shoved Davern ahead of me up the steep slope.

We had reached a high bank when the cloud came ashore, a toxic tsunami engulfing the low spots. Bucky had fallen behind, and I watched as he disappeared under the wave of blackness. Then the chemical smell hit, and for a while I couldn’t breathe or see. By the time I could draw a lungful of air down my burning throat, the sludgy wave was already receding below us. Blinking away tears, I saw Bucky emerge again from underneath, all of his metalwork polished bright and clean. The tent that had been stretched over the crates was in shreds, but the crates themselves looked intact.

Beside me, Davern was on his knees, coughing. “Are you okay?” I asked. He shook his head, croaking, “I’m going to be sick.”

I looked around for Seabird. Her light wasn’t visible anymore. “Seabird!” I yelled, desperate at the thought that we had lost her. To my immense relief, I heard her voice calling. “We’re here!” I replied, and flashed my light.

Sounds of someone approaching came through the darkness, but it was only Sally. “Where is she, Sally? Go find her,” I said, but the dog didn’t understand. I swept my light over the landscape, and finally spotted Seabird stumbling toward us without any light. She must have broken hers in the flight. I set out toward her, trying to light her way.

The Umberlife around us was waking again. Half-seen things moved just outside the radius of my light. Ahead, one of the creature-balls Amal and I had seen on the other side was rolling across the ground, growing as it moved. It was heading toward Seabird.

“Seabird, watch out!” I yelled. She saw the danger and started running, slowed by the dark. I shone my light on the ball, but I was too far away to have an effect. The ball speeded up, huge now. It overtook her and dissolved into a wriggling, scrabbling, ravenous mass. She screamed as it covered her, a sound of sheer terror that rose into a higher pitch of pain, then cut off. The mound churned, quivered repulsively, grew smaller, lost its shape. By the time I reached the spot, all that was left was her coldsuit and some bits of bone.

I rolled some rocks on top of it by way of burial.

Davern was staring and trembling when I got back to him. He had seen the whole thing, but didn’t say a word. He stuck close to me as I led the way back to Bucky.

“We’re going to light every lamp we’ve got and wait here for day,” I said.

He helped me set up the lights in a ring, squandering our last batteries. We sat in the buggy’s Umbershadow and waited for dawn with Sally at our feet. We didn’t say much. I knew he couldn’t stand me, and I had only contempt for him; but we still huddled close together.

• • • •

To my surprise, Bucky was still operable when the dawn light revived his batteries. He followed as we set off up the Let’s Go Valley, once such a pleasant land, now disfigured with warts of Umberlife on its lovely face. We wasted no time on anything but putting the miles behind us.

The sun had just set when we saw the wholesome glow of Feynman Habitat’s yard light ahead. We pounded on the door, then waited. When the door cracked open, Davern pushed past me to get inside first. They welcomed him with incredulous joy, until they saw that he and I were alone. Then the joy turned to shock and grief.

There. That is what happened. But of course, that’s not what everyone wants to know. They want to know why it happened. They want an explanation—what we did wrong, how we could have succeeded.

That was what the governing committee was after when they called me in later. As I answered their questions, I began to see the narrative taking shape in their minds. At last Anselm said, “Clearly, there was no one fatal mistake. There was just a pattern of behavior: naïve, optimistic, impractical. They were simply too young and too confident.”

I realized that I myself had helped create this easy explanation, and my remorse nearly choked me. I stood up and they all looked at me, expecting me to speak, but at first I couldn’t say a word. Then, slowly, I started out, “Yes. They were all those things. Naïve. Impractical. Young.” My voice failed, and I had to concentrate on controlling it. “That’s why we needed them. Without their crazy commitment, we would have conceded defeat. We would have given up, and spent the winter hunkered down in our cave, gnawing our old grudges, never venturing or striving for anything beyond our reach. Nothing would move forward. We needed them, and now they are gone.”

Later, I heard that the young people of Feynman took inspiration from what I said, and started retelling the story as one of doomed heroism. Young people like their heroes doomed.

Myself, I can’t call it anything but failure. It’s not because people blame me. I haven’t had to justify myself to anyone but this voice in my head—always questioning, always nagging me. I can’t convince it: everyone fails.

If I blame anyone, it’s our ancestors, the original settlers. We thought their message to us was that we could always conquer irrationality, if we just stuck to science and reason.

Oh, yes—the settlers. When we finally opened the crates to find out what they had sent us, it turned out that the payload was books. Not data—paper books. Antique ones. Art, philosophy, literature. The books had weathered the interstellar trip remarkably well. Some were lovingly inscribed by the settlers to their unknown descendants. Anatoly would have been pleased to know that the people who sent these books were not really rationalists—they worried about our aspirational well-being. But the message came too late. Anatoly is dead.

I sit on my bed stroking Sally’s head. What do you think, girl? Should I open the book from my great-grandmother?

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Hugo and Nebula Award nominated author of science fiction and fantasy. Her books include Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution; and Halfway Human, a novel about gender and oppression. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and others. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and appeared in numerous Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies.

Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and currently works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She spent decades as a museum exhibition developer, ending at the National Museum of the American Indian. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone who have continued to make this series possible! Those who backed and spread the word about the Kickstarter campaign, the authors who entrusted me with publishing their words, Amanda Makepeace for the original illustration, Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout, 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.

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